Spell for Reclamation

Get in the car and bring him back from the bottom of the world.
Knit a sweater, but not while driving.
When you arrive, that’s the time for knitting–
Real-time knitting, around and around his protesting form.

Close the door before he attempts to head out for a hike.
But, oh.
You hold the yarn; you’ll know where to find him.

On the trail where together you once saw rabbits,
On the trail where together you witnessed the fog strangle the sunset,
And you agreed, “Don’t tell anyone.”

Keep knitting the collar, high, higher, up to his chin, over his mouth.
Now he’ll never tell.
Finish the knit and fold him neatly into the passenger seat.
Then get in the car and drive back to the surface of the world.

Send rosemary with no return address to the witch you stole him back from.

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The Pinecone

I.

Grief knocks the pinecones from my limbs. I can’t pick them up, which makes me wonder if grief is really to blame, or did I deliberately let them loose to lose you, to claim good riddance and then bemoan: I can’t pick them up.

More than four seasons pass. I was always a late bloomer. Yet, here they all are again. Fifteen, sixteen, so many months to remind me of you.

I twist like a child in elementary school, attempting to whittle my waist. “Helicopters!” shouts the long ago gym teacher. My swaying does not dislodge you. It takes grief, sweeping through like a storm, to knock the pinecones from my limbs.

II.

I leapt. I left. And you were free. I told you when we first met: Love was easier when I was hidden. I handed you that secret the way other men offer flowers, not anticipating you would turn invisible, too; not anticipating the disguise you’d borrow to move thorough graduate programs and grocery markets, unnoticed.

I leapt. I left. And then heard you stooping with grief. You changed the pitch of the forest, creating space for a different key. But music would not bring me back. I hid in the ground covering the arrogance of my act. I’d leapt.

III.

Years before I became a tree, I picked pinecones from the summer lawn. Mom doled out chores, and I filled plastic gallon buckets, hands turning sticky with sap. I spread my arms wide, palms open, hoping to catch love the way flypaper catches flies. “I like things to be easy!”

I picked pinecones from the lawn, saving them from the pulverizing blades of the lawnmower. I thought philosophically: This is pointless. Because, from pulverized pinecones, new trees might grow. Years later, I would learn it takes fire to scare the cones into releasing their seeds.

I held my hands to my nose and inhaled.

My therapist said, “Put your shame in the palm of your hand.” Oh, yes. I could feel it, soft and harmless in one direction, sharp and cutting in the other. The sap on my fingertips made it hard to let go. I flinched and felt myself pulled up like a puppet on a string. The key changed, and once again, I became a tree. Free.

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Love Stories

Let me tell you a story. A love story.
It’s about sharing.
Making room. (Move over.)

It’s general admission.
You don’t get to claim your seat.
There’s never enough room.

Yes, it’s a love story.
You. Me. Your ego. My id.
There was never going to be enough room.

(Give a girl a seat!)
I told you: This is a love story.
It’s about sharing.

~Text for performance; Premiere August 2019 at The MilkBar in Richmond, CA.

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On Love

Sometime one summer when I was almost or maybe ten, I found a bird under one of the lilacs behind the house. I watched it gasp a few last breaths and knew it would die. I kept watching. My little brother swooped in, hollering, and scooped the bird into the bowl of his hands. It’s what I had wanted to do but wouldn’t allow myself.

My brother and I examined the bird, from the flutter of the smallest feathers around its neck, soft as love, to its round eye, hardening like spilled ink. I stared into it, and the eye seemed to expand. I observed the point of its beak and was tempted to see if it might pierce my fingertip. Instead, I slid my finger under a claw, hoping it would grasp back, but nothing happened. I strummed the minor talons, limp and lifeless.

This will be my love, I thought. I’ll find it under something like a lilac, still and quiet, and our eyes will know each other. Our days together will flutter against each other, soft as the fluttering neck feathers, with nights parting to reveal an even softer down underneath. This will be love, I thought, as my brother marched into the house to offer the bird to my mother. I will not be able to hold it myself, but I’ll follow behind like a believer at the Easter Vigil, certain in love’s capacity to find me and save me.

My mother scolded my brother, “Take that outside!” But then she bent to inspect it, too. My brother stretched out his arms, lording in the moment.

I watched my mother and wondered if she saw love. Maybe her love was different. Maybe she saw my love and approved. I kept watching.

She and my brother shrieked at the same time. Yes, I nodded. My love will be a lot to behold. You will be amazed that such a still and quiet beauty will someday be mine. You never expected so much, for me, did you?

But then, I saw it: A maggot wriggling out from between feathers of the bird’s wing. My brother dropped the bird and we all stared. Martin Luther, my mom’s cat, ran through the open kitchen door and snatched the bird in its mouth before turning and running away.

This will be my love: A bird I could not hold myself and a maggot, both stolen away.

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Monster's Coffin

When I was half as high as the door between the kitchen and the garage, I caught a fever for the world between the real and the imaginary. Each side of the threshold was familiar: On one side, in the kitchen, everything was clean and tidy, matching and spotless, useful and practical. ’Twas the pride of an A+ homemaker. On the other side was the garage, poorly lit from one small eastern-facing window, everything shadow and suspect, grime and dirt, mysterious and unknown.

I hovered on the threshold, comforted by the orderly precision of my mother’s kitchen but attracted to the objects in the garage that could be whatever I told them to be. The woodpile, the deep freeze, the wicker laundry basket full of dirty rags. I imagined them otherwise: A forest of splinter people, a monster’s coffin, the collected cotton storm clouds of one gloomy Saturday. In the corner towered a custom cabinet of small drawers, each containing bits of hardware or some handy tool. After mentally pulling out the small drawers, each staggered just so, I clambered up the staircase to the princess’s bedroom.

I hovered on the threshold, bracing against indecision, two feet and two palms pressed against the doorjambs. Splitting worlds through superpowers, I wondered which way I would fall. At some point my mother would scold, “Quit standing there with the door open!” before nudging me out into the garage. She knew what was best for me.

My dad used more colorful language, “Shit or get off the pot!” He, too, would boot me into the garage, gently, with his unlaced Red Wing.

There I’d prowl, murmuring to myself like a madwoman, “I’m off the pot now! Off the pot! Off the pot!” Where to begin? Host a dance party on the monster’s coffin? Embark on an epic journey through the splinter forest? Or peer out the eastern window with my best forlorn face, curious if anyone on the other side might see me and think I was a ghost.

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Danses Naturelles (2015)

Danses Naturelles | Natural Dances marks my continued exploration of live video performance, this time using acoustic piano to control the video mix. A computer software program monitors the level of sound generated by my piano playing, and renders the video in relationship to those levels. The piano is situated at the edge of an enveloping projection, where images from the natural world—leaves, grass, shadow and sunlight—combine with vintage film sequences of a young woman performing a modest striptease in a nightclub.

In some ways, the piece is a whimsical footnote to the many years I spent as a ballet class accompanist. The familiar relationships between pianist and dancer, music and movement here intersect in wry commentary. Like a snake charmer, I conjure the dancer, seducing her from the shadows. She insists, however, on dancing to her own tune. Danses Naturelles is dance class accompaniment imagined by a pianist who has been compliant for too long.

The piece received its premiere at Djerassi Resident Artists Program in March 2015.

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Literary Audio

In 2014, I tried my hand at audio journalism, editing several pieces on music and new media. Highlights included one-on-one interviews with impresarios, composers, and music directors:

— A profile with Chris Rountree, artistic director of wildUp
— Behind the scenes at REDCAT, including a post-performance interview with David Rosenboom
— Looking back on Invisible Cities with Yuval Sharon, artistic director of The Industry
— Contemplating astronomy, data visualization, and music composition at Pasadena’s AxS Festival

These pieces reflect my passion for investigating the praxes of media arts on the West Coast.

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On Xenakis

I remember how I held my breath as my dad pounded each nail halfway into the square piece of wood we’d covered in black felt. I watched as two nails became three, then five, then eight, until the last completed a perfect circle. Dad handed me the board and I returned to my desk to consult my math book, which described how to wind string from nail to nail at measured intervals around the circle. The lines of string began to create a web around the perimeter of an inchoate circle, this one hovering magically in the center of the board over the black felt. I repeated the process twice more, using different colors of string to mark intervals of greater distance between the nails, forming two larger, colorful circles around the first one. The resulting design was beautiful. I kept my fourth-grade foray into parabolic string art on prominent display in my room until the day I moved to college, never outgrowing the wonder and satisfaction of seeing the straight lines yield to a curve.

Iannis Xenakis certainly understood the beauty and perfection of the parabola. Of Greek heritage, he studied engineering in his home country during the political upheavals of the 1940s; eventually, his leftist political sympathies drove him away from Greece, to Paris, where he worked for more than a decade for Le Corbusier. Xenakis nurtured an extracurricular interest in musical composition and began to merge his two passions. Metastaseis (1953-54), for orchestra, attempts to realize—musically—the sweeping parabolic shapes of an architectural sketch: in the opening minute, the string section divides into entirely separate parts, and each player’s taut glissando threads itself into a mass of sound that in turn wraps around the listener. The music revels in seductive and spacious arcs, even though it is built on the principles of linear algebra, that is, of straight lines.

Xenakis explored the relationship of math and musical composition throughout his career: Jonchaies, written almost 25 years after Metastaseis, sounds like a refined, grown-up version of the earlier work. The orchestra comprises over one hundred players who slither into and out of dense rhythmic chaos through Xenakis’s hallmark glissandi. In one particularly effective passage, brass players bend pitches as if caught between a jazz club and the fires of hell. Where Metastaseis envelops, Jonchaies consumes.

His investigation of architecture, mathematics, and music consistently produced music of extreme density, and an exclusively aural experience of Xenakis’s works can be overwhelming. The early tape piece Concret PH (1958) is as astonishing in its three minutes of obsessive sonic manipulations as the later Persepolis (1971) and La Légende d’Eer (1977) are in their explorations of extramusical worlds. Concret PH puts a single sound source—burning charcoal—through the technological blender to create an uncomfortable symphony, something akin to stepping into a cold shower of hungry insects or walking through a blizzard of broken glass. The metallic scrapyard of Persepolis is no more fun, suggesting, as it does, the shrieking and wailing of tortured souls. And La Légende—which begins and ends quite beautifully, with high-pitched bell-like tones bouncing from channel to channel—spends a solid seven minutes making burbling 70s computer noises reminiscent of Dr. Who’s T.A.R.D.I.S. Here, the ethereal meets the absurd.

The music is visual, visceral, and almost invariably begs to be included with other media. In fact, Xenakis composed Concret PH for the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World Expo in 1958, and he conceived La Légende as accompaniment to a light and laser show for the opening of the Centre Pompidou. Did other media—architecture, light, or imagery—temper the aural fever of Xenakis’s compositions? I can only imagine.

Certainly, the percussion works invite an appreciation of instrumentation and technique regardless of a mediated experience. In these pieces (Persephassa, Psappha, and Pléiades) one can hear the counterpoint of skins, wood, and metal and appreciate the musical parts form a dynamic whole. And yet Persephassa, the first significant percussion piece (1969), calls for the six players to be dispersed around the audience. Xenakis’s consideration for sound in space is ever present.

Mathematical formulas, musical composition, spatialization, and multimedia. I remember my piece of parabolic string art, and why I prized it for so many years. From across the room, the impact of the design—three colorful circles around an omniscient black eye—pleased me with its grace and simplicity; up close, I could witness the hundreds of steps—the process—it took to craft it. Like nature, the bones of architectural renderings remind us of the beauty derived from mathematical models: both the nautilus shell and the blueprint for a spiral staircase reveal a theoretical system to which Xenakis gave sound. It is a musical system where nothing is superfluous, where every part relates precisely to the whole.

 

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Art Is

You could park a big ol’ Cadillac inside Grandma’s walk-in pantry. To a child, the great windowless room stocked with jams and sauces and pickles and puddings was nothing less than a theater. The rows of metal shelving parsed the space into my very own backstage, wings, proscenium, and house. And on a shelf at the back, below the neatly indexed cake mixes, rested a simple cardboard box— the costume box.

The pantry became an escape from chores—from pulling weeds, picking green beans, and hanging laundry on the line. Grandma, perhaps knowing the futility of wringing work out of a girl on Christmas or spring break, would allow me to spend hours playing dress-up. I made tiaras out of tinfoil and cast spells with a pair of twirling batons. I built worlds and stories—lies to live with, get lost in, argue and fall in love over. The costumes were my willing accomplices as I discovered the art of performance.

In the brown tweed skirt and chevron-striped blouse, with grandma’s white scarf wrapped around my head, I sublimated my country girl life and became an international spy. I discovered the power of sound effects—the snap of the clasp as I opened the black vinyl purse—and of deliberate gestures—my hand reaching into the purse’s depth to pull out a tube of dried-up lipstick or a pair of cat-eye sunglasses. With these props I would save the world.

I did not differentiate between art and art making. Art was the world I created and the objects in it, as well as the physical actions used to articulate a story. Nothing was truth, yet everything became a strategy for dealing with the truth of the world.

Sometimes I sat outside on the porch bench, tucking the too-big crepe-de-chine dress under my bum so I looked more elegant. Turning my knees to the east, and looking over my shoulder to the west, I mentally snapped my black and white photograph. I could even imagine some soldier overseas looking at it with affection.

At the thought, my body would flush in a fever and I’d run back into the pantry and press the side of my face against a row of glass jars. This was art: the drama of the unspoken, the bodily reaction, the saving grace of a quart of canned peaches.

Eventually I outgrew playing dress-up, and grandma took the costume box to the annual town yard sale. But by then the box had served its purpose, teaching me the benevolent deception of art and performance.

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Family Portraits (2014)

The vignettes that comprise Family Portraits are etudes, that is, virtuosic compositions designed to improve and demonstrate my techniques as composer and performer.

Instead of shooting my own video with a predetermined story in mind,

I used found footage, not knowing what narratives I would later compose.

I chose a dozen or so old films from the Prelinger Archives—grainy, artifact-laden newsreels and earnest educational shorts—and created a catalog of short clips. These clips, looped, let the viewer have a moment of reality, albeit briefly and without circumstance. I mix the video clips live in performance, inventing narratives and speaking text that threads the images together. Whether I reveal the truth of the matter, or not, is up to the audience.

In 2014, I presented “National Champion” at the Roski School of Fine Arts and showed “Darling” at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

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Brahms Ballade, Op. 10 No. 4

The middle section of this piano piece conjures a moment from one of my past lives. An early morning. Mist thick as cobwebs. I’ve wandered from the small stone house to the water’s edge, and in spite of the blindfold of vapor, I see it. A lake monster, moving as an alto voice in a murk of harmonies. It swims and sings against the current, toward me.

The A section returns, resting an invitation on my shoulder, and I go back to it, leaving an outline of myself at the water’s edge, watched and watching. A long time ago.

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Mahler 9, Not to Be?

 

I wrote this piece two weeks ago in anticipation of tomorrow’s SFSymphony performance of Mahler’s 9th Symphony at Davies Hall. The orchestra musicians went on strike yesterday, and I half expect that Friday’s concert will be cancelled. All is not lost if it is, however, as I’ll be able to join my fellow Grotto writers at the Book Passage in the Ferry Building for an evening of three minute readings.

Mahler in March reminds me of Mahler in September and the last time anyone wanted to see the symphony with me. In all honesty, the symphony is best à seule. No one talking through the warmup. No one asking pressing questions at intermission.

I will wear blue silk and the olive green heels and a vintage bracelet Friday night. In the half hour before the concert, I will climb the grand staircase, prowl the red carpet, and likely run into people I know: the old people, my surrogate grandparents. They always want to know what’s new, and I pull colorful stories from the past few weeks of my life. The bonus at work. The afternoon playing Gershwin in Piedmont. A recent day trip to Los Angeles.

But my favorite part of the symphony is the illicit act of watching the musicians onstage as they prepare for the concert. The wind players blow air through their instruments and tones escape like runaways. The string players fiddle lightly through tricky passages. Some musicians lean toward each other, chatting about their day, their students, the hike they took in Marin, or the great new coffee house over on 7th Street. Bass players navigate the forest of music stands like cows among saplings.

I scan the hall, amazed that no one else seems aware of this private prelude. Watching the musicians warming up is like watching a woman in the bath from an adjacent room through a door not quite closed. I view fractured phrases of her body: unclothed, then cloaked in a towel, then unwrapped again. With the oboe’s long “A,” the door shuts, and when it opens, she stands there confident and whole in a silk robe.

Under the conductor’s baton, the symphony musicians transform from individuals with specialized interests into a singular body moving in purposeful, choreographed motion. The string section’s bows ripple back and forth like a lace fan, stage right. The horn section, so long at rest, casts a unison sunrise as they finally bring their golden instruments to their lips. My eyes seem to compose the music.

At the end of the concert, the old people and I will applaud and fill the hall with the sound of rain and kissing. I will stop for a Sazerac in Hayes Valley and sit alone at the bar, reconciling my life, aware of slowly being returned to my own stage. I am again a lone individual player, sometimes warming up, noodling virtuosically, and sometimes enthusing about yesterday’s lunch to the person sitting beside me. But I am always waiting, in some regard, for the oboe’s long “A” to signal that I might soon be made whole.

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Slip 2

My memories of performing are always from the piano bench. The gaze is outward, framed by the length and curve of the piano case in front of me. I can’t leave myself. I see my fingers reflected in the glossy black fallboard. They move over the keys in a slow-shutter blur that obscures the name of the piano manufacturer embossed in gold behind them. I can make out certain letters, but the names merge in the way the names of past lovers do: Steinway, Baldwin, Yamaha.

In the composers’ names, though, I find focus. Bartok is the day I pinched my brother in church. Bach is winning the playoff for first prize on account of “just having style.” Schubert is my college entrance audition. And Beethoven— a pianist’s past always includes Beethoven.

I spend the first ten weeks as an undergraduate at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music learning the second Beethoven piano concerto. I am slated to play in the concerto competition the Sunday after Thanksgiving. As the only pianist playing Beethoven—early, “unimportant” Beethoven—I enjoy a low profile around school. The halls resound with Rachmaninoff Firsts and Thirds, the Schumann, and the Brahms d minor. I am a mouse among lions.

There is a passage in the Adagio that consists of simple, broken-chord figurations shared between left and right hands: the piano soloist accompanies the melody played by oboes and French horns. This trade-off between soloist and orchestra illustrates the good manners of the classical style: the piano concedes to the orchestra and the orchestra steps in with confidence. We are dance partners straight out of a Jane Austen novel, defining the invisible with our polished shoes and pretty skirts. The characters come to life onstage, in such contrast—my mind observes—to the silent black void of the concert hall to my right.

In an instant, that darkness reaches up and right around me, blotting Beethoven from my mind. I am adrift, unable to remember the progression of harmonies across the measure. My fingers make motions as if playing, but I hear the wrong notes. One beat passes by, then two, then three. Then my mind surfaces and I return to the performance like a soloist should, playing beautifully, unnerved.

When it is over, I am dazed but pleased. My accompanist tells me I was great. At the end of the day, all the pianists return to the lobby, hungry to hear the names of the four finalists. One of the judges hovers near my elbow. “Your name would be on that list,” he says. I hardly expect a debrief, yet he gestures for me to sit. He is direct. My Beethoven is “lovely” and “exquisite,” and the panel appreciated how I’d chosen a piece that suited me so well. “No costume for you!” He gestures and I flinch. “Your name would be on that list,” he repeats. “But the memory slip in the Adagio. It’s unacceptable.” “I know,” I say. “Well, next time.”

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Memory Slip

After the concerto competition, I fell in love. “Finally!” clicked my heels as I paced the Conservatory hallways looking for an empty practice room. Hearing a clarinet, I’d stop and peer through a small window to see Pi, his back to the door, practicing long tones. I’d tap our secret knock and he’d smile in the mirror at me. Then I’d return to my hunt for an empty room. Practicing took priority, even if I was in love.

Those were the days of the 4th Chopin Ballade, a work said to contain “the experience of a lifetime.” Throughout the piece, Chopin evades expected tonalities yet always, eventually, surrenders to them. He hides melodies he later reveals. The opening measures of the Ballade, for example, are like the sighs that yield to the unlacing of the corset. The theme that follows is simple and meandering, unaware that transformation lies ahead.

My work on the Ballade culminated in a master class the week before Valentine’s Day. I was prepared. I was confident. I was in love. And that night, I was nervous.

My right hand began, but my left hand—poised to play the opening melody—hesitated, and forgot what it was supposed to do. I forced through it, but the performance was marred. I stumbled in the upper-register filigree leading into the second theme, smudged chords I’d never given second thought to, and botched the sweeping D-flat major arpeggios at the climax. Surprisingly, I played the fiendish, contrapuntal coda better than I ever would again. But the damage was done.

The pianist Charles Rosen has written that, “the finest pianists, when they are not in their best form, do not give a mediocre or moderately good performance, but tend to produce a disaster or an outrage.” I fled the hall after the class and found Pi in his practice room whittling reeds. Holding my head in his arms, he consoled my grief as he always would. “Oh, my dear head.” The next day he drove me to the ocean, where the white noise of the sea erased it all: Chopin, Beethoven, and the dream of becoming a concert pianist.

Ten months later, I left formal music training at the Conservatory to study poetry, literature, and writing. In the summers, Pi and I road tripped across the country to chamber music camp. I’d arrive without caring that I hadn’t touched a piano in three weeks. The memory slip still haunts me, but I may have learned more from forgetting in that moment, than if I’d performed flawlessly, by heart.

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Slip 1

The first time it happens, I am playing Bartok in the sanctuary of the Presbyterian Church on Main Street.

The finale of Bartok’s Sonatina is a reeling gypsy dance, and I play it fast and straight, with zip. I slip on four little measures right before the B section, repeating a phrase where there is no repeat written. Like slick cassette tape, my mind folds backwards to the precise spot where a musical loop would be imperceptible. I continue on to the end of the piece without reacting to what is the best of all possible errors. I smile, bow, and return to the pew where my family sits applauding.

“Mistake!” my little brother hisses. “Mistake!” I pinch his arm because even though he is a brat, he won’t yell in church. No one else suspects a thing. Bartok sounds modern and angular; it’s spirited but hard to hum along with. The mistake of four little measures is a secret between me and my brother. No harm done.

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Time, Alla Breve

Growing up on a farm meant growing up with chores. Plant the garden. Pull weeds. Pick up rocks, “—but just the ones bigger than a doll’s head; they make it hard for things to grow.” The rhythm of any given day was constant yet varied, and my dad knew it so well that he didn’t even need a watch to measure the passing hours.

I remember standing on the tops of his boots, my fingers hooked in his belt-loops. “What time is it,” I asked. He turned his face to the sky, and my personal slice of shadow shifted left. “What time is it!” “It’s 11:30.” With an exasperated half scream, I might then let go, falling fast to the dirt and crumpling into myself like a shot rubber band. “I don’t believe you! You don’t know.” So he’d pull a worn wrist-strap from the pocket of his jeans, and we’d look at it together. 11:30. I stared long and hard, as if memorizing the position of the hands on that old Timex was the secret to telling time my dad’s way.

I left the farm to master time through music, moving to San Francisco to study piano at the Conservatory, where for two years, my list of daily chores rivaled those I had grown up with. Practice with the metronome. Play while counting aloud. Conduct while singing solfège. In the practice room, I could check the accuracy, mark the differences, and measure the changes of time. Check, double check, check. There is logic in rhythm and meter, of that I became sure.

Like my dad, I learned how to make a little magic out of my endeavors. With Bach, I keep time the way a Formula 1 engine keeps time, smooth and precise. With Brahms, I might let the meter and phrasings run away in romantic contradiction together. I know the time signature and the number of beats per minute, of course, but in performance, I would never hold up the score or consult the metronome to prove it. The best ruse I have is, simply, to play, conjuring the spell as if from the sky.

Several summers ago, while home for a visit, I overheard my dad talking with a neighbor as they came out of the small town bank. “Yes, she’s been in California more than ten years now. Still doing piano. She’s always been very independent.” He climbed in the truck and we headed home. “What time is it?” I asked. My dad leaned forward as if attempting to see beyond the frame of the windshield. “It’s 11:30. Almost time for lunch.” I closed my eyes to the sun and felt myself letting go, falling fast backwards.

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Mary, out of the Ordinary (2010)

I created Mary, out of the Ordinary in 2010.

The stop motion video is a collage of Russian nesting dolls, shadowy card games, and the slowly turning pages of a modern prayer book.

I composed the soundtrack separately, using sampled sounds and field recordings, some of which I’d made at Mission Dolores Basilica. These two highly edited elements define the theatrical environment and support the unscripted component of the live performance: me, sitting in a chair onstage, reading, reciting, and stumbling between the Hail Mary and a children’s nursery rhyme. The end result is something like a trio performed by one. The piece received its premiere at the Sunshine Biscuit Factory and was reprised for two performances at The Marsh, San Francisco.

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Cat's Cradle (2009)

Witches Broom.
Cat Whiskers.
Jacob’s Ladder.

 

 

 

 

 

 

String games have been played for centuries, mainly for amusement, but also, I like to think, to ward off ghosts. In this piece, performance itself is a game. I play at mixing the video, navigating between distinct images of a young girl making string figures and ice cream color abstractions à la Piet Mondrian.

Accompanied by an original soundtrack that journeys from an elementary school classroom to the comforting hum of industry, Cat’s Cradle is about the search, by one, to play as two again. Any ghosts being warded off just might be my own.

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Butterflies

I am working on a piece of visual/audio that uses butterflies as the subject. The audio is a subtle and sometimes shocking imagining: "if butterflies could talk, and if we could hear their wings." Little beeps and snippies. Nothing revolutionary here. The piece does not pretend to have the grandeur of a 9th symphony. It's purely fun and play for me.

I think about it constantly, however, and woke at four this morning wanting to work on the piece. So I did. Then, at nine, I switched to practicing piano. And in the midst of trying to disentangle my fingers as they played an endless trill, I thought, "just pretend it's a butterfly!" And it worked. Trills have always been a thorn in my side; I never seem to access the right muscle for the fast, limp shake that they require, particularly when they go on and on for several measures. But imagining my fingers as colorful little wings, and hearing the sound take fluttering flight...it worked!

So maybe a little fun and play (at four in the morning) never hurts! That's my tutorial for the day. Happy May Day!

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Ladybug (2007)

Ladybug was created, concept to finish, in the course of a single sun-drenched week in March 2007.

The video, edited into a three-minute short, is of a game of ball and jacks played on a picnic table in Tilden Park. From audio recordings of the same ball and jacks game (with the additional “instrument” of a glass bowl) I compiled a selection of sound files. I fed these into a Max patch that processed the sounds randomly (per my pre-determined “musical” parameters) so that sample rates and structural crossfades were a surprise, every time. Later that summer, Anne Hege and I incorporated Ladybug into our show, The Children’s Hour.

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