Blew Up My Head

I'm feeling grateful for this class, without which, I would have never blogged or created a website.

I'm thinking beyond this week that I'll remove the homework posts and keep the ghost ones and try to encourage people to send me ghost stories to post or to comment on these stories with their own similarly archetypal experience.

Ever seen a ghost?

The Dead Wife Returns

Here's another bit o' rocking good ghost folklore from Dredging the Choptank:

A magnificent bit of flood folklore from the southern end of Dorchester County in Hoopersville, a town on the southern chain of Dorchester islands, tells the wild tale of a very wet internment right before the storm surge of Hurricane Hazel.

An old fisherman had just buried his wife of many years in the family plot next to their house by a creek. As a fast and violent hurricane whipped the storm surge up over the family plot and to the steps of his groaning house, the grieving fisherman was convinced that his friends would come to rescue him, and, indeed, in middle of the howling wind, he heard a knocking at the door. He opened the door and there was his wife’s coffin, floating on the rising floodwaters, its lid loose and the water holding her up in a seated position. The water fanned out her hair and lifted one arm out to the fisherman. She had found her way back home. Feeling the house rock on its foundation, the old fisherman grabbed onto the coffin as his home sunk under the waves, and he rode the flood in the coffin with his dead wife until morning when he landed on high ground several miles away.

In [Thomas] Flowers’ version, the old man ditched his wife’s body and rode the coffin alone. In the Chesapeake Book of the Dead, the old fisherman is an old woman.


Dead deer at Blackwater Refuge, Dorchester County.  Hoopersville is just south of there.

The Legend of Big Liz

Here's my favorite Dorchester County legend from Dredging the Choptank:


During the Civil War, Big Liz’s plantation owner, John Austin, forced her to bury some ill-gotten, Confederate booty in the densely-thicketed Green Briar Swamp. After she dug the treasure’s watery hole, he decapitated her, and she still haunts the marsh and guards his abandoned gold. According to local legend, the treasure’s still buried in the swamp. If you drive to the DeCoursey bridge, honk your horn and flash your headlights, then the wind will blow, and you’ll soon hear her shuffling step. The car engine will stall as she limps into view, shoulders stooped, cradling her head in her arms, her eyes glowing. You’re trapped, frozen, and can’t move as she draws closer and closer.
"A swamp monster. That’s more like it," I said.

Blackwater Refuge that backs up against the Green Briar Swamp, Dorchester County, Maryland

Different POV Rules

Hey writers!
So, here's another rumination:  why can POV switch in film but not in short story?  I was watching The Quiet Man (and I love that film) but the priest Ward Bond kicks off the story with a voiceover but when Shawn Thorton (John Wayne) sees Mary Kate Danaher for the first time, the camera switches to his perspective.
Is it because film has the great asset of the visual?  It's easier for a viewer to understand a perspective jump in film than reading it in story?

Blog Directionals

Hey bloggers!  What directionals we use in language is a reflection of how a culture orients itself in the world.  When referring in one post to an older post on the same blog, does one say the older post is below?  Underneath?
I did figure out how to internally link between posts but it's an interesting thought.  Is this post above the Thanksgiving post?

Thanksgiving

Feeling thankful that:

• I'm sentient -- I wake up with a brain and know that I have a brain
• it rains here and there's oxygen and gravity
• I hear music in the SC Performing Arts Theater
• I program arts
• my parents are alive
• we will eat well today
• we all have homes and I can do laundry inside mine and there's running water and electricity
• we use language and it pours out of me
• I lived once with my great grandmother
• I can sing and walk
• I have awesome friends -- see http://mysuperartfriends.blogspot.com/
• I stand up
• I express
• I vote
• I can drive to Pennsylvania and don't need a passport -- I am free to move about the country
• I am published
• I don't have the flu

I'm sure there's more . . .

Night Mirror

After I read a section of Dredging the Choptank to UB honor students, I asked the group about their ghost experiences.  Adjunct Christina Ralls told a story of seeing a man in her bathroom mirror at night when she was a child.  She’s been afraid to look in the night mirror since then. 

Two nights ago, I was surprised in my darkened bedroom by a pale blue triangle of light that was centered on the altar between the window and the vanity.  The light had no obvious source.  I stood in front of the oval vanity mirror, rooted, puzzled. No beams slanted in from the dim backyard.  The altar seemed lit from underneath by a gentle indigo light.  Then I noticed my own image in front of me.  I was me but the room and its furniture were not behind me.  Surrounding my image was black, black, black velvety darkness.  My image was brightly lit, again with no obvious source, and that white light didn’t bleed into the blackness around it.

Startled, I moved aside.  I couldn’t look again.

When I was five, when we moved into the house in Lutherville, I had a game with the mirror on the back of my parents’ bedroom door.  I told my mother that the girl in the mirror was a different girl than me.  I think the girl in the mirror broke away and moved differently than my body at least once.  It’s blurry.

One of the rules of Feng shui is don’t position your bed so you can see yourself sleep.  The house at night can be scary and mirrors are portals.

Mystery of the Flip

I've been filming the Y-Art interviews with three Flip video cameras.  They're easy to manipulate and interviewees are not intimidated by their slight handheld case but they suffer from a paucity of consistency.  One new one is driven by double A batteries; one by triple A.  Supposed to hold an hour of video, after I emptied my HD Flip of its first interviews its status read:  18 minutes left.  And during the next interview it flashed low battery and shut down, not saving the video shot up to that point.  The older Flip imports AVI files to my PC at home but won't at the Mac in lab.  My newer HD Flip only imported audio files on my home PC so I can only access those at the lab. 
I need a flow chart.

!?Y-Art?! is Up!

My final project/blog focusing on the justification of art is up, and I posted 4 interviews so far:  Jimi Kinstle, Gregg Wilhelm, Kendra Kopelke and Peter Toran.  Three more to edit:  Simon Fong, Joe Dennison and Todd Mion.  Interviewing and filming nine more on Friday:  Joan Weber, Marianne Angelella, Lisa Mion, Christine Demuth, Anthony Scimonelli, Raine Bode, John Wilson and Robert Hitz.  Phew.

Take a look !?Y-Art?! and discuss.

Jimi of all Trades

It took a half an hour to upload and the quality might be grainy but here's the Jimi Kinstle !?Y-Art?! interview.  Jimi is the artistic director of Pumpkin Theatre, the president of the Baltimore Theatre Alliance, an actor, director, dancer, choreographer, founding member of the Flying Tongues improv group, the list goes on . . .

Technical challenges

Are we not learning in grad school that mistakes are part of the process and the learning experience?

Tried to upload the Jimi Kinstle interview on this blog yesterday and received an error message.  It's a 6:43 minute interview in M4V format.  I created that file in iMovies from the Flip AVI re-formatted in mp4.  Could it be a format issue?  A PC (at home) vs. Mac issue? 
My Flipcam imports differently with PC than with Mac.  In PC land, it'll only transfer audio files.  In Mac, a whole different screen comes up and I can grab the video files but they're harder to name.  Argh.
Will try today to upload Jimi interview from Mac.
Might also be a size issue.  Is 6:43 minutes too long for the web anyway?

Haunted Cable

From Dredging the Choptank:

I was working tech theatre at Essex Community College in Baltimore and standing at the fly rail backstage during a performance of Camelot. A thick, black, lighting cable had slipped and hung in a long heavy loop, blocking the offstage exit of one of the castle units. The tech crew waited in the wings to roll the castle units offstage in a complicated scene change, and Beck, our beloved production manager, stood beside me.

“Go tell Eric that we’re going to have dress that cable before we can clear the castle,” he said. Then he slowly put his hand on my arm. ”No, wait, you don’t have to.”

Rumor in the tech staff was that Beck was a warlock; maybe because he sported a long ponytail and could rip through lumber like butter. I don’t know about his religious leanings, but he saw the darkness coming before I did, a moving darkness darker than offstage, gathering around the cable, not really lifting it, but pushing it up, up over the edge of the castle. All the crew techs saw it, and shook their heads, as if their eyes would work better after the shaking.

“There could be a logical explanation,” said Joe.

“Maybe, but what?” I asked. “No one was up in the fly area. We all saw the darkness lift the cable up. What could that be?”

“Precisely,” he said finally. “I said could.”

“Maybe we want to believe the illogical because we want to believe the illogical,” I rambled. “But all of us together, having a group halluncination?”

“Isn’t there a hospital right next to Essex?” Joe asked.

Essex Community College is adjacent to Franklin Square Hospital, and some of its theatre department folklore recounts the recently hospitalized dead visiting the stage. A good percentage of the theatrical family believes in ghosts. We’re open to that sort of thing. In one theory, that belief is the reason that ghosts reveal themselves to us.

Gustave Dore's illustration of Lord Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King, 1868

Thanks for all the Fish

Tomorrow I adopt a betta fish that’s been in the Earth Project art installation since September.  This fish’s other option is the Patapsco.  I’m oddly looking forward to its silent, circling company.  I might call it Aggie after Agatha Christie since the art installation was a little like her Ten Little Indians.

I’m an omnivore.  Can I still eat swordfish in the house with a betta swimming in the living room?

There’re betta blogs where betta art is posted.  How far am I from that?

11/1/10 Freewriting on What do you express?

What comes out of us as art?  Is it emotion somehow transferred, memory, ideas, projections?

I wrote a screenplay for Simon in exchange for his website work and software loading help.  He had filmed footage of two friends walking through Mount Royal.  He told me what he had filmed and the key words that he had in mind for the male voiceover.  Then we watched the footage as I wrote on a pad.  I couldn’t hear Simon although he sat right behind me.  He seemed far away.  He stopped talking.  I typed up my notes, printed it and watched the footage with it, speaking it.  I made one more revision the following day but basically it was done.  I felt dizzied as if I had returned from a great distance.

“It was just, like, bleh,” Simon said, making a barfing motion.  “That just flowed out of you.”

It did.  It was unstoppable.

?!Y-Art?! Blog Content Thoughts

I’ll interview six super art friends on Tuesday and one on Wednesday.  I’ve been wondering if I should ask them to sign a release that states:  the interview will be posted on YouTube and on a blog.  I asked super art friend Todd that question and he reminded me that I write contracts for friends who are designing or directing at UB. 

Once I have some video content, I can create the blog.

I’ll definitely use a different blogspot template than this one.  Maybe the one Kari used. 

Maybe one of the Baltimore City murals should be the header photo but I’d have to give artist credit and find their name.

I have to compose the introduction:  something, like, Jenny made me do this or grad school is a great excuse for crazy projects with one’s super art friends.

I suppose I could migrate some freewriting posts from this blog to the ?!Y-Art?! blog.

I’m going to post video on the blog so I thought I’d test below.  I shot this video of a kid dancing in front of the Penn Station sculpture on a windy day.

Phantom phone

In June of this year, I was trimming the bushes by the garage with the garage door open and the phone rang.  I had removed the old rotary phone from the garage to put it in inside the house in the upstairs hall when the old one there had broke. 

I stood next to the shelf, staring at the telephone wire, hearing the absent old phone ring its ancient clang.  It wasn’t physically possible what I was experiencing.  Focused and straining to listen, I tried to place the sound.  It seemed to be coming from the connector box but there’s no bell in that little box and certainly not a ringer that sounds like a rotary phone.

Was the ringing leftover energy?  Does the beginning have no end?  Is old dead Tom the previous owner who installed the line giving me a call?  How do I answer?

Phantom perfumes

In the last two hours of my grandmother’s life, I discovered that she was drenched in sweat and so I powdered her.  It was a Avon floral powder that she kept by her chair.  I smelled that powder on my hands off and on for years, sometimes when I needed her but not always.

Haunted scents lace folklore.  I know a man who lives in a house that used to belong to a smoker.  He has sealed the walls and cleaned the rugs and years have gone by but every once in a while at night he smells cigarette smoke on the way back from the bathroom.

Freewriting on How Does Art Change the World?

10/29/10, 5 minutes

I have seen theatre change the world, change little pieces of the world, little pieces of lives.  I’ve seen that confidence in facing a challenge make a person stand taller.  My docu-play One Particular Saturday told high school students and college students the stories of the Baltimore Race Riots in 1968.  The student actors returned to rehearsal the second night and said my mother or my grandmother or my aunt remembers tanks rolling down Harford Road and they had never told me.  Art tells history and heals wounds by opening up dialogue.  The Laramie Project will begin a dialogue about hate crimes.  Laramie will remind the audience of its empathy.  Studies prove that theatre develops empathy.  Perhaps because we feel along with the characters.  Perhaps because we’re in the middle of group art and have to rely upon each other.  Don’t we daily have to rely upon each other?

10/31/10 1 minute

I know Victorian London because of Oliver and Charles Dickens.  I know World War II because of the Sound of Music.  I know the Russian Revolution because of Dr. Zhavigo.

I want to spell check Zhavago.

Do you edit blog content or freewrite like above?

!?Y-Art?! Questions

I've been brainstorming on questions to ask my super art friends in the video interviews of my final project.  Here's the ones I have so far.  Please, feel free to wrestle with one of them.  They're big and rolling around the circuits of my brain.  I'm going to start freewriting on them. 

Why art?

Why not art?

How does it make you feel?

How does it change the world?

Does it change the world?

What is social justice theater?

What do colors feel like?

What does sound smell like?

How do you express?

What do you express?

What does it mean to express?

How do all your expressions feel outside your body?

What do they become then?

Do words have legs?

Can dancers paint?

Do we have one best means of expression?

Can everyone express?

Is everyone an artist?

Is everyone a story?

What does theater do?

What does playing an instrument do?

Why do we strive?

What is the difference between a sculptor and a pianist?

Is there a difference between a sculptor and a pianist?

Is the gift inherent?

Me in Babes in Toyland in Baltimore Actors Theatre in the late1970s. When we all tap danced together, that was art.

Story boarding

I story-boarded the !?What is Art?! video project on sketch paper to track flow, write text and determine which images I needed to load on the flash drive.  I drove around town, filming and photographing on Saturday and will definitely use this image:

I hope I can access the video footage -- I emailed the Sony HD file to myself and burnt two others on DVD+R.  I can plug in the Flipcam in the lab to access those files but they're AVI and I'm a little baffled on how to convert those all to MPeg4 for IMovies.
I tried to upload some Flipcam AVI footage here and after Blogspot thought about it for 20 minutes, I got a message saying there was an error.  What format should it be in?