new dog

adopted 3.27.09

portland/$

Portland on the front page of today's ny times.
the economy, what else?

blazers v suns 3.26.09

ridiculous game last night. rudy fernandez in particular. [went w/ my mom and dad, the former who only agreed to come after I provided her w/ earplugs. these came in handy as the fellow sitting immediately behind her was the guy who has no compunction about sharing his estimation of every single posession, foul, movement at full-throated volume. Sampling: "Shaquille's ass just made that shot!", "That's called a walk ref! You suck ref! That's called a walk!!!"].

here's the last few seconds of the 3rd quarter:

haircut, image

dana jenning's remarkable essay in today's nyt about the power of self-image in the face of oblivion has stayed w/ me all day. [No I did not cut my hair to that extent during my radiation treatment but the underlying idea of rebranding the self, of reclamation resonates through my bones].

I found this video on-line and I keep recognizing my own self, mirrored and refracted, each shard humming with deference, gratitude, awe. This thread we dangle by. This air coming in, going out.



bonus: his cancer playlist

before/after

loss, sadness

ingress/egress

briefest of visits to southern calif this wknd. the 'why' is difficult to answer succinctly but involves attending a play (twice in 20 hrs!) as well as the good fortune of some jet-blue vouchers which made it even remotely possible.

as w/ our last visit - in mid-december - being there was a strange collision of past/future; a seemingly contradictory interplay of who we are and who we were for 7 yrs there, but this time in a highly-compacted short amount of time.

we landed in LB, drove to LA, had dinner and went to play. afterward, by the sheerest of coincidences c was in town (playing w/ viva voce) at the freshly reopened regent theater [which was directly across from a vacant lot that i happened to be in some 10 years earlier setting up tents for a film during the stretch that m and i refer to as "peanut butter summer" as due to horrid $ situation we subsisted on nothing but pb. what gorgeous memories those are].
next day we had coffee and went for a hike w/ A & I. The canyons were actually green the sun was un-oppressive. back to home-base and then to the play again, this time w/ different cast in key roles, which changed the entire timbre and tone of play but not harmfully. Then dinner, then home-base w/ too much champagne and script notes and war stories. next morning millies w/ E, walking around the grove and pan pacific park w/ S and then back to LB.

LA is fixed in amber, a pulsing flow of ambition/desire held in a small untranslate-able box. Living there - for us anyhow - required a tacit agreement to peer past the unpleasantness. Probably this is common in any metropolitan area but in this case the trade off is housed in the abstract ("this will all pay off when i sell my script sells...") rather than some definite or absolute benefit. It is the ambition that pulls you through, makes the compromises, allows you to let yourself do things you wouldn't normally do. There are multiple personal components to this for me that I won't get into about screenwriting and directing so these reflections are all informed by that. Which is all a tortured way of saying: we are glad to be home...

movie

two fridays

two of the more profound cinema-going experience of recent memory occurred across the last two fridays, both left me full of ache and stupefaction, in no small measure b/c each is by a first-time director. the films - synedoche new york and I've loved you so long - could not be more distinct in approach, in intent, in execution but both resonated so deeply and profoundly in my bones that I don't really know what to say beyond that. they are both dark, liquid dreams working at opposite ends of the pool (in terms of narrative) but they end up, somehow, in the same staggering and transcendent spot: the icy blue waters of true art.

together again

untitled

stray dog

m was doing something for work yesterday and found a wandering dog in sellwood. no microchip, no collar (the collar in the pic comes from a generous pet store). she stayed w/ us last night. real sweet-heart. m's boss seems to recognize this dog as belonging to some homeless youth in sellwood so today we'll attempt to reunite them...

the silence