As of tomorrow, Bridge Songs: Faerie will be just one week away. Thus, today’s Friday Feature is kicking off a “Faerie Frenzy”. Each day between now and the event, there will be a new Faerie or Bridge Songs related post. Booyah!
Today’s post brings you the long promised full interview with Jeffrey Overstreet, film critic and author or Through a Screen Darkly and The Auralia Thread, a four part faerie story in its own right.
The interview is just over an hour long and presented here in an only slightly edited version. Some ums and ahs were taken out, as well as some bad joke rambling rabit trails and weather-talk on my part. I thought you’d be better spared the extra 15 minutes of that.
The rest contains a lot of great insights. Jeffrey and I had a long, deep discussion about fearie, faith, childlike wonder and the state of the Christian imagination. We also talked about The Imaginarium of Dr.Parnassus, so catch that near the end.
I hope you enjoy hearing the conversation as much as I enjoyed having it. It is a good reminder of what is so pertinent about this year’s Bridge Songs theme.
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So April had finally arrived, the month presenting my pilgrimage to New York City, wrapped in layers of anticipation and promise. April hds finally arrived, the first two weeks feeling like obstacles in the way of destination. Now those weeks had passed and I was here, with my wife and my little Yellow Peace camera, on the other side of our continent, in another nation. It was the end of our waiting.
Or perhaps it was just the beginning.
Truth is, we had more waiting to do before we even made it through New York’s gates. We had come all this way to spend one more night outside the doors, just across the river in Newark, New Jersey. To save money, we flew into that third New York airport late. The sunlight waking through windows, we gathered our things to find the train station and … wait. It seemed almost too much, to be so close and still at the mercy of a train’s arrival. To almost smell New York but not yet be able to taste. An elastic band stretched near snapping, I could not remember such acute anticipation since childhood Christmas mornings. That’s how I knew this was the moment to capture my April photo for “The Art of Waiting” project. Each month I’ve been capturing one or two images to epitomize waiting. This particular shot, looking upwards at the massive unlit New Jersey sign from down in the depths of our train platform, seemed the most appropriate yet. To know that the waiting is almost over, but it is not over yet. This, perhaps, is the hardest waiting at all. This, perhaps, is where hope stops helping and begins to choke out your last calm breaths as you feel your insides racing to the finish line but sense your feet stuck steps away. This is New Jersey waiting.
But New Jersey waiting’s got nothing on New York waiting.
For a city as fast and frenzied as New York, there’s a whole lot of waiting going on. It is as if Gotham’s people are so rushed that the city herself feels the need to step in and press pause, pull the reins and create room to breathe. Perhaps with waiting she will force upon her citizens lessons of patience and of peace. Or perhaps it’s just frustrating. Either way, the waiting is not welcomed, but avoided whenever possible. Lunch hour sprints toward falafel stands or hot dog stands or soup stores with little to no seating begin eating that is brisk and sometimes done in motion. There are nearly no public washrooms to provide, at least, some place to sit. But New York is moving. Traffic is moving. Not quickly, but constantly. Yellow cab and yellow cab and SUV and yellow cab and sedan and yellow cab. Walk lights are ignored. To wait for the light to change seems an incredible insult on these swift streets. So people do not wait. They watch and plot and eek out a labyrinthine path through cars that never completely stop, even inches away. They creep, to tell you that they are not really waiting, either. That is, perhaps, the privilege earned by living in a metropolis. You leave waiting behind.
But of course you do not leave waiting behind. It is a mirage. The rush and flow pushes toward bottlenecks and one starts to see why waiting is loathed. The waiting done here is the worst kind, foisted upon you as a reminder that this system doesn’t really work as well as we’d all like to believe. It’s the kind of waiting that shows us there are limits. It’s an admission New York does not make easily, I’d wager. Walking up Broadway through 42nd street towards 49th street and beyond, you must wait. Times Square multiplies pedestrians and sights and sounds. The crowds are intense, pushing in from every side. You fight for your right to sidewalk. Construction throws detours upon the walkways here and there and everywhere, as you bob and weave and wait. Take in a Broadway show and you wait. Walk in the morning and you face the crowds. Walk in the night and they have not left. One must learn to factor in waiting for travel. A trip from the airport, my inflight magazine tells me, can take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour and a half by taxi. It depends on the wait. Waiting for the single public washroom we found one afternoon took 20 minutes or more. Sometimes, I was told, it takes 45. Visit MoMA, on a random Wednesday morning in April, and you may wait to get inside once it opens, as we did. I would have had to wait 4 more hours to view the feature exhibit from Tim Burton. Each floor and each room sardines citizens and tourists into chambers filled with clouded beauty. You wait your turn to spend five seconds with Van Gogh’s Starry Night. You wait for the smoke to clear to catch a glimpse. You wait to view a massive Warhol because someone is taking a photo in front of it. It was here, in MoMA, that I took my own photograph – the second portrait of waiting in April for the project. The photo takes in a massive inflatable Tim Burton character, displayed in the lobby. It was only part of that exhibit I could even see because I just couldn’t wait around long enough for the rest. It seems such a waste to rush beauty. I have a feeling she is slow by nature.
A big city, it turns out, is just that. Big. In four days, it can overwhelm you. Even with it’s line ups, New York does not compel you to stop and wait with intention. And that intentional waiting, that wandering and meandering, is perhaps what I missed most about my own small life in my own small city back in Alberta. My art gallery is quiet. My river valley parks are solitary. I can wait when I choose to wait, and wander when I choose to wander, and not feel like I am stopping the flow of some massive stream. Should I choose not to wait, I most often don’t need to. Except, of course, at our walk lights. They actually mean something here.
I now find myself waiting to return to that big city. I feel more prepared for another round in the ring. But until that day, whenever it may be, I think I like it this way.
Bridge Songs: Faerie is less than two months away, and submission deadlines have been released (they’d be May 17 for the Main Gallery, and May 3 for the Feature Gallery). The musicians have nearly finished recording the album and it has begun to be mixed. Faerie dust clouds my mind most days lately.
With all of this talk of Faerie, I’ve discovered many an online gem, so in old Friday Five form, here are five sites to see, each somehow tied in to Faerie, our theme for this year’s Bridge Songs event.
1) Jeffrey Overstreet’s Favorite Faerie Stories
I’ve posted some clips from the end of my Skype interview with author and film reviewer Jeffrey Overstreet, but none yet from the beginning. Here is the question we started off with; “What are your favorite Faerie stories?”
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2) The Child Who Never Grew: Young Me Now Me
I’ve mentioned before how much I love narrow concept blogs. And how much I love concept-driven community photo projects. I think I’ve also mentioned how much I love to think about how we are called to remain childlike and, at the same time, to grow up. As Bridge Songs: Faerie approaches, I’ve discovered a little website that explores all three of those things, and adds nicely to our growing list of Faerie-finds.
Young Me Now Me is a collection of paired photographs submitted by users where the first image is a childhood photo, and the second image is the same person grown up, and most often attempting to recreate the childhood image. It’s a lot of fun, and it’s uncanny to see the same person divided by 20, 30, 50 or more years, yet so obviously the same. To top it all of, a lot of these images made me laugh out loud.
I will warn you however, once you start clicking “next” to view one more image, it’s tough to stop.
After reading The Invention of Hugo Cabret, I became fascinated with Automata. These are essentially old-fashioned robots. Some can write out whole poens or draw pictures stored in their memory. Some perform a dance or magic trick. Others laugh hysterically (and creepily). All are intricately made and pull of a real sense of “magic” through their mechanisms.
I was excited to discover Automatamania, “the UK’s only specialist automata restoration company”, and the images and videos of working automata they house on their website.
It’s not often that the worlds of faerie and technology intertwine, but I think this may be an exception.
Here’s an excerpt from the intro to their site,
“Automata” are mechanical objects endowed with life. They exist in ancient legend and persist into science fiction. Most of the best that are still with us are the product of a Parisian golden age, 1860 to 1910.
4) Fantasy Photographs from the American Museum of Photography
One of the ideas I’m exploring for Bridge Songs: Faerie is primitive trick photography. I’m fascinated by the attempt to capture something magical or fantastical on a media that, at the time, would have been taken as proof. There was, back then, an unquestionable authenticity to a photograph. Trick photography, back then, was much more than a gimmick. It was, I think, a real magic trick. And it sometimes fooled people.
William H. “Dad” Martin had fun with trick photography in the early 1900′s, creating scenes of giant animals pulling cars, giant farm produce and more. Apparently his postcards of these images made him a fast fortune.
You can see many of Martins images, still impressive today (especially in a world without computers, never mind Photoshop), online via the American Museum of Photography. Here’s the link …
It turns out my best waiting is done on foot. I get antsy sitting in one spot for too long, and prefer to get up, peek, poke and prod my surroundings. So, not surprisingly, this is the second month where my waiting involves walking.
I am of course referring to that intentional waiting I have committed to at least once a month over 2010. That intentional waiting, and watching, with my Yellow Peace plastic camera at the ready. Ready to snap just the right image for The Art of Waiting project. I have yet to be disappointed.
It is a Thursday morning and I am to host a group at The Carrot Community Arts Coffeehouse. The raucous hour of 9 AM has been chosen, by others, and so I know I cannot afford to schedule my time in the usual way, showing up at 9:10 after sweating out good intentions to be there 15 minutes early. The speedy car, that temptress who offers me the illusion of “5 minutes more”, has other errands. I am on foot, so I decide to head out even earlier than need be, and when I arrive, to do some serious waiting.
The waiting is serious because it’s brisk on this Thursday morning. The spring sunshine has yet to penetrate the cloud dome, and I need to walk with my hood up to ward off cold-air earaches. The waiting is serious because the coffee shop doesn’t open until 9 AM, and I may arrive a whole half hour early, locked out in the cold with no way to weasel out of my waiting plans. This built in accountability proves unnecessary, because I don’t make it to the coffee shop before my image grabs me in its talons.
I’ve walked to The Carrot Community Arts Coffeehouse countless times, and I could swear I’ve taken this exact route. Regardless, this cold march morning must have me jolted into a heightened state or alert because, just blocks from my destination, I stumble upon a large house absolutely covered in birds.
It’s not quite like that final, terrifying still scene from Hitchcock’s The Birds, where every surface has become a standing, staring bird. It’s not like that, but only because these birds aren’t alive. They are tin and plastic and who knows what else. And they are everywhere. And they are mostly roosters. And for that reason, every neighbor can thank God that they are not alive. Mornings would be hell next to Rooster Manor.
I survey the entire yard and see more and more birds. I could sit and stare for an hour with birds still left to find. Caught inside a giant “seek and find” picture book, I discover birds peeking out from second story windows. The covered porch houses several birds within. Two tin roosters press up to the window panes and I wonder, if I were to open the door, if I’d be engulfed in a deluge of faux poultry.
It’s at this moment that I think again of myself, there in the wee hours of morning decked out in a dark hoodie, alone. I realize how creepy I must look, stopping and staring, mouth and eyes agape. But surely they are used to this? I take my picture, angling to squeeze as many birds into the frame as possible with a radiant red cardinal in the foreground, right of center. I have what I came for. A gift from the bird house. A reward for my waiting and walking.
I continue on towards coffee and conversation, mulling in my mind the metaphor in my rear view mirror. Anything strange as a house overflowing with birds must, after all, be a metaphor. Birds are often omens or portents or heralds. And spring is in the air.
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
I have told you everything that happened after I left the house on this Thursday morning, but nothing before. I’m in the habit of waking early to write and on this Thursday, I write a short piece on hope, and how it is a theme that has swallowed me whole this year (a theme that waiting has played a part in). My piece, written for iloveartists.ca, declares this “the year of Hope”, in fact. An audacious claim indeed, needing some sort of validation.
And then I see the birds.
And then I remember the Dickenson poem.
And then I offer a prayer of thanks.
It is long past sunrise yet these roosters, without a sound, have awakened me. I wonder to myself what purpose forged Rooster Manor. Did its owners set out to have the most artificial birds of any yard in this city (and do they)? Or, more likely, did they begin placing birds in the yard, one bird by one, as they caught their eye on vacations and at gift stores and bursting from within wrapped packages from friends who’d caught on to a trend? Was this planned, or did the birds slowly take over? Did they choose this yard to roost? Is this a monument for the owners, for the birds themselves, or, perhaps, for the neighborhood? For passers-by like myself? Do they know something that few seem to understand; that the appearance of silliness often hides great wisdom? That the foolish joy of this yard is what this rough and tumble, all-too-serious inner-city street may need the most. To laugh.
How does one keep imagination alive? How does one grow up, without growing out of the best qualities of childhood? Wonder, imagination, curiosity and awe pour from the wide eyes of a child, but seem an anomaly in the tired orbs of the adult. One of the Bridge Songs songwriters petitions Peter Pan, “don’t stop flying, but please don’t fly away”. It’s a tenuous balance, but there are ways to maintain it. Today I want to focus on seven of those ways. The Seven Lively Sparks of creativity and imagination. But before we go there, let us open with some words from Jeffery Overstreet, fantasy author and film reviewer.
In my recent discussion with Jeffrey, we chatted about how one keeps the spirit of Faerie alive throughout life. Jeffery shared some great insights on how he does it, which you can hear in this clip;
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I appreciated the words Jeffrey shared so much that I got thinking a lot about what turns my own creative crank. Those thoughts led me to what I’m calling the Seven Lively Sparks. As opposed to the Seven Deadly Sins, which you should avoid to every extent possible, these seven things are worth pursuing fervently. These are areas covered by many thinkers on creativity, and certainly are not unique to me. They are not exhaustive, though I think they offer a large enough umbrella to cover much of what inspires us. As I cover each one, I’ll fuse them with some great content, resources and experiences I’ve discovered in recent days. These Seven Lively Sparks that keep me dreaming are Good Time, Good Art, Good Words, Good Walks, Good Friends, New Tools and Good Play. Let’s dive deeper into each.
Spark 1: Good Time
Any set of strategies only works if you create time to use them. That is why I want to mention Good Time right off the bat. In a world constantly wrestling for your attention with television, billboards, and now even television billboards, keeping an imagination alive takes work. And it takes time.
Just like you need to schedule time to work on your physical fitness, you need to make time to exercise creative muscles. Daily time is ideal. You can choose to wake up a half hour early in the morning for creative time. You can choose to leave the office at lunch for creative time in the middle of your day. You can stay up after the family is in bed for this time. Or, if your time pressures are not great, you can simply make this time part of the flow of your regular day. But committing this time is critical. If you don’t make the time, the time will vanish.
Perhaps daily is too often to be realistic. Even a good block of time once a week is valuable. The point is that you make a regular effort to engage activities that keep your creative juices flowing and your imagination young and spry.
So what do we do with all of this dedicated time? We fill it with Good Art, for starters.
Today is a big day for iloveartists. Today the website for Bridge Songs:Faerie has officially launched!
Bridge Songs is an annual collaborative concert, art show and album centered around a theme and held at the Avenue Theater.
This year’s event takes place on June 5th, and our theme will be Faerie. In the broadest terms, this is an exploration of childlike imagination, wonder and faith as well as the worlds of myth, story and fairy tale. You can read more about the theme, about submitting your art to the event or about attending on the website here.
As a little launch treat, I’d like to share with you a small piece of a long conversation I had last night with film reviewer and storyteller Jeffrey Overstreet. In this clip, Jeffrey reflects on the difference between “childish” and “childlike”, just one of the many themes I’m waiting to see explored at Bridge Songs: Faerie. More clips, as well as the full interview, will arrive on the site in coming weeks.
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I’ve been to the new Art Gallery of Alberta, and I have not been disappointed. But how to sum up the experience? I could shout at you to simply GO! My descriptions will, I fear, make it smaller and not larger in your mind. There is so much lost between words. There is so much my soul saw that speech cannot satisfy. I could tell you about each exhibit and what I learned there and how each has inspired me. Perhaps one day I will. But for today, what seems right is to “criticize by creating”, as Michelangelo has entreated. I will respond to art with art. My own poem. My son’s drawing. My daughter’s photograph. For what is a gallery if not a place that inspires more creation, pouring forth beyond it’s own walls into the waiting world?
TO SAY I WAS THERE
to say I was there
climbing moonlight stairs
blue illumination of
name after name
builders and blocks
delighted by details
My son Jack's drawing of the Art Gallery of Alberta (click to view full size)
to say I was there
stealing the children from school
playing hookey and playing
ascending secret stairs in long lines
all of us waiting as
years’ worth of waiting boil down to
one more line
all of us waiting
as young as my two children
mouths and eyes agape,
looking up
taking this in for the very first time
seeing
My daughter and I attempt a Karsh potrait
this new thing that will be that old thing
this one moment that will settle back into flat timelines
this loud and boisterous “yop!” waiting to fade
and echo
and fade
but not today
not yet today
to say I was there today
somehow different than tomorrow will be
somehow other than yesterday was
today was
carbonated anticipation
and we all drank deep
to say I was there
beneath the borealis
swooping and diving like a whooping crane
a ski slope past gliding through present
on towards future
we were
in the belly of a burgeoning behemoth
in the laugh of a generous giant
in the glimmer of a city’s hopeful eyes
widening
reflecting on glass
held up on steel
skyward
reaching
to say I was there
and it was different than I thought
and it is really something
and I can keep the memory
