What shoud I do?

Sorry for being absent from rehearsals for past few weeks. I've been away for the West coast tour with Estradasphere and for the past week I've been working for a production of Japanese TV documentary show.

So, here's my recent problem...
I have been asked by Estradasphere to go on tour again starting March 28th to April 21st. This time they are paying me! But that means we will have only 6 days to rehearse visuals with you guys for 28th performance.
The performance is short program so it shouldn't take too much time and with blog and emails, I should be able to keep up with most of what's going on. I feel, with this rate of progress, we can achieve a lot before I leave.

I haven't said "yes" to Estradasphere, just yet.
Let me know what you think.
Nao

Can I get an Image?

Yo...so I've been thinking of images (specifically for displaying on our-er-my costume at the beginning)...I keep coming back to a baby in the womb (go girl)...if this is too much I'm also interested in a decaying flower (but projected where the process is rapidly sped up...what's this called?? I'm conveniently forgetting the technical term) I suppose I am stuck on this idea of the apolcolypse-the end being the beginning of something new...and how this cycle is symbolized in nature...yada...feedback?

I'm so psyched out of my mind for counterpulse...

Posting for Dennis (until he's up and running on blog)

Heyall,


Sorry I’ve not been so present on blog, w/ideas, and lately at rehearsals. I’m sure I’m not any busier than yall, just much more disorganized. I haven’t felt I’ve had too much to say or write on “the end” as I would like and I believe my drawn out process of moving as well as other personal endings/commencements are filling any space I might have to generate ideas and text.

That written, I do have a few things brewing:
--images/film of mushroom clouds and time lapse photography of mushrooms juxtaposed or overlaid on each other.

--from Paul Stamets “How Mushrooms Can Save the World” Stamets documents(photos included) of a oil-soaked lot and how growing oyster mushrooms on the site transformed the place from toxic to usable once again. And on top of that, when the mushrooms were done with the toxin, they in turn we r e nder e d ible. Just about brough t ears to my eyes when I first heard him speak on the radio about this potentiality.

--a question and this can be rephrased but something to the effect of “Do you have time?
For the end of the world?

--use epigraphs/quotes from expert/scientific etc. sources about where we’re headed (or even example of hope?) as sound or visual bites read by the audience/painted on the wall/projected on screen/dancers as sound bite is sampled, etc. etc. These things feel easier on the audience (and my aesthetic) than overt visual images of the end. Prompts/reminders of the environmental/diplomatic(or un…as the case may be right now)/foreign policy posturing quotes should pretty effectively scare any audience. I’ll bet there are some in today’s news. Maybe overlay thes e pigraphs on the video/images of thend that might counter the overtness of the visuals. Oh and to lessen the overtness even more or reveal the palimpsests in our own minds/consciousness the images and quotes could/should probably not be coordinated. The quotes could have their own order and length of time to be read as this usually takes longer to absorb and the images are much easier to pick up visually so could be flashed rather quickly almost subliminally.

--overt breat h olding strategically placed as an example as th e nd of an exhalation or inhalation to begin anothe r ound if we allow for the outward/inward of the breath to be meta phor the universal expansion-contraction.

--possible visual cliché alert: but clocks on walls as in newsroom but instead of cities we label each clock with differen t imes for th e nd: nuclear, global warming, peak oil, etc.

--I don’t have all the resources in front of me, namely a friend of mine who participates in these things called “peak oil” meetings that checkout when oil will run out, what are the results, what can be done/attempted to curb our use of the gooey stuff.

--this friend projects before thend of the century when we runout of oil we will not have the sustainable farming largenough in urban areas to feed the masses so the masses will revolt bringing the beginning of thend. I think he’s written an article on this so I will get to yall when I get it.



“are you okay?
w/the end of the world?

--couple more things my friend told me about: that an example of our karmaround thenvironment is that in the post 911 no flyzone the lack of planes and emissions (measured by balloons) actually allowed the earth’s temperature to rise—that is, we need to the pollution to act as a screen/shade to replace the ozone we’ve depleted;
that in cutting down rainforest we’ re leasing deadly virus’ we have no way to deal with; finally, that the act of creation has it’s downside as exemplified by the lava cooling in the ocean and the microscopic particles of glass and sulfuric acid that if ingested are deadly.

--if we deal with the threat of nuclear war (the current TIME magazine cover w/Iranian leader and Bush warning of dangerous miscommunication), then it makes sense to me that we go back to where this threat was realized, where atomic bombs were dropped (u.s. on japan of course) and use borrow pay homage to the culture that came out of “th e nd of the world” for a people. What I’m getting to is that it seems to make sense to me that we use (even a lil bit) the art, dance form, butoh, that (sorry if yalready know thistuff):

…emerged in the late 1950’s in post-atomic bomb japan. It was created by two dancers, Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata, who sought to create a new uniquely Japanese form of expression that completely rebelled against the Establishment, and both Eastern tradition and Western styles.

I suggest this as a writer who likes to embody the structure of that which I’m writing about at times as well as writing about something topically or thematically. The writing that Dillon and I (correct me if I’m wrong Dillon and I’ll speak/write for myself) through Mills College and otherwise: L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E (anguish) poetry came out in the early late 60’s and early 70’s [And I’m not writing tha t he piece should become butoh, because that is not what you do (at least what I’ve seen). Again, “homage” is the word that feels best to me. Homage to culture(s){Japanese, art, dance) that comes from just what we are trying to understand/comprehend through our writing/dancing/researching. If we are looking for a hypothetical, butoh is the organic thing that came from a real end. It feels right for any of us who’ve had exposure (of course, better some real training or due to time constraints at least one workshop w/a butoh dancer/teacher) to butoh to find a place in the piece (the nuclear/nucleic tic tick tick boom) for ankoku butoh “the dance of darkness” to enter and show us through the form and then in our own bodies what we’ve been looking for outside us. Again just a suggestion.

And I know that Cara you want the piece highly translatable for the audience. And maybe butoh can be too slow or too abstract for a lot of people but if we place the butoh section well in the piece--like just having one dancer/walker(I’d love to try) do a slo w alk/movement acro s stage or the all the dancers drop into again the nuclear/nucleic part that harkens back to an end and attempts to look to another one—then it can be contextualized by everything else yall/we are doing.

--the butoh influence could be used like Cara’s writhing rise from the mucky muck minimizing the use of limbs, what if the dancers as birds began to fall out from the group and began dropping and losing the ability to use limbs/body parts, then moving from this (a limp is an obvious example) until immobilized or ground into the ground. I see a body losing use of its/arm/wing and trying to rise w/out it’s use until it’ s ucked into the mucky muck; loss of leg; head; hip; etc.

again, sorry th is all so late.

Save the Date

Yesterday we had our first production meeting for MAP at counterpulse. I'm really excited about the bill and it looks like it's going to be a great weekend for us.
Right now we need to focus on getting some press images, so start brainstorming.
Also in the timeline is our "showing" for MAP:

Sat., April 28th 12-2pm

Yes I am aware that this is the same day as our Pilot performance; consider it our very own dress rehearsal.I've asked that we go at 12oon so that you can all go home a rest before our 6:00pm call that night.

Also, we need ti start thinking about specific technical needs, especially ones that might influence how we set up the space. (ie. black curtains vs. white walls, marely vs. wood, mounted projectors etc.)

c

PS: REMINDER: Rehearsal this weekend is SAt from 3-6pm at CP and Sunday 9-12 at ODC Theater on 17th

free science lectures this weekend

http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2007/0212am_free_events.shtml

could be some good research....
let me know if any of you plan on going

more H2 videOs

Just been doing some research.
Just posting these as a point of refrence for the work we'll be doing on Sunday:



and wierdness:


I didnt actually see this movie did any of you?

Short Film Idea

I have an idea for a short film that might be relevant for this show. The film is about fear and has four segments, and require one female dancer, and a male dancer for one of the segment. Each segment depicts different kinds of fear: fear of self, others, loneliness and death.

The shoot will take two full day or four half day. One of the segment will be shot early morning like 2 or 3 in the morning.

Each segment is at deferent locations. First segment "fear of self" will be in the evening right by my house by the chain linked fence.

Second segment "fear of others" will be shot near by 6th St. and Embercadero in Oakland. This segment will have a male dancer who will be "the others."

The third segment will be shot at SF airport in early morning when it's empty. Basically, the dancer will be in the automated shuttle train that goes around the airport. I've been there around that time and was creepy.

The fourth segment, I think will be at Albany Bulb. I'm still thinking about what to do here, but I want a dancer to run away from something that cannot be seen.

In each location, the dancer will improvise for five to ten minutes. I will chose the best part of the dance and edit it together.
The whole piece could be five minutes or 10. The length can be flexible since I can change how much of the dancing I show.

So who want to be in this movie. Or do anyone know someone who might be interested in this project.

If you think this isn't relevant to "the end" project, let me know. I still would like to go ahead with this idea sometime soon.

Nao

Projection technical facts

So here's some technical facts on projection:

800 X 600 Pixel

From 6ft in distance, it will project 3 feet 4 inch X 2f 5in
From 10ft, 5f 4in X 4f

So if you could come up to the front of the stage, like on the edge, and I may be close enough to project clear image to your costumes.

The problem with this is for the rest of the show, I will have to raise the projector high so that I can project over dancer's head. I I don't know how I would do that without seeing both places for Pilot and Streamfest. But here's something else, if I project to bigger screen behind the dancers from the same spot where I projected onto the costume, the dancers will be between projection lights and the screen, and creates shadows onto the screen. This may or may not be a good thing depending on what you want. I think we could possibly take an advantage of this. It may be really cool.

I told Dillon about this, but for Abby's bird segment or anybody's, we could project simply colors. Even when we don't use projector for projecting images and movies, we could use it as a lighting device.

tsunami

slightly unrelated, but interesteing none-the-less (statistics)

If we could shrink the earth's population to village of precisely 100
people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would
look something like the following.

There would be:

57 Asians
21 Europeans
14 From the Western Hemisphere, both north and south
8 would be Africans

52 would be female
48 would be male

70 would be non-white
30 would be white

70 would be non-Christian
30 would be Christian

89 would be heterosexual
11 would be homosexual

6 people would possess 59% of the entire world's wealth and all 6 would be from the United States.

80 would live in substandard housing
70 would be unable to read
50 would suffer from malnutrition

1 would be near death;

1 would be near birth;

1 (yes, only 1) would have a college education;

1 (yes, only 1) would own computer.

don't drink the water

So the lack of potable water in China and my obsession with tidal waves AND agent Ava's recent post have led me to this:
I will be working on a shiva/tsunami/rising water levels/environmental racism in regards to water supply segment.
and I would like something like this to be reflected in my projected image for the first sequence. I think a tsunami and or magnified microbes in some water would do the trick.

Thanks to all our blog contributors..... it really helps to bring fresh perspectives into the conversation.

Reflections from Friday

Sorry, having trouble organizing all the thoughts I want to get down, so I had to resort to another post. The overlap from what people wrote on Friday was really interesting, as was the discussion that came out of it. My instinct is to make general use of the things that we all arrived at independently as fearful or indicative of our worries about the end, on the chance that the same kinds of things are likely to resonate with our audience. My list is:

dryness/draught
suffering through one's own death/living through armageddon
having to sustain life from depleted resources
a grotesque world or a grotesque self
misplaced objects or events (fish hanging in trees, an umbrella in the desert)
sudden disappearance of people without explanation
disturbing sound sources, ranging from high ringing to low booming- especially in environments where you'd expect no sound (the desert, the middle of a lake)

Sarah had the insight that a lot of this, especially the disappearance, is tied to a fear of irrational events in general- a fear of possibilities which don't get anticipated by our normal orders of thinking. Because people don't just disappear without cause, the notion that they would unsettles us.

I also have notes from just the images or events in people's writings that stuck to me, such as:

babies being continuously born in an enclosed space in which there is no room for them
our own body destroyed slowly and sensibly from the outside
opening books to find blurred/unreadable text
a red umbrella
cells imploding from vibrations created by sonic waves

All right, that's all for a bit.

Team Huddle

Good to hear form Agent Ava... our woman in India. New assignment contained herein- for everyone that is.

We are going to try to move ahead with projecting images on to people. The notion we discussed in workshop on Friday was to have individuals "embody" or "represent" different versions of, or apprehensions about, the big ending. I want to turn the question we're asking of our audience back on us and work out from there towards an image. This image will identify and embody our own apprehensions (or predictions, or premonitions) and will then be projected on to us during the opening sequence. If you made it to workshop Friday, you may have already generated some material useful for this(remember to blog it, also), otherwise, start by considering the following prompts. Also, Cara's dance/choreography exercise from two weeks ago, where we each imagined the end and expressed it in movement, could be very useful to think about. I've posted my answer to these questions below, so you can get a sense of what an answer might be (though obviously my answer won't be your answer):

Think of a fearful ending- what exactly in it is fearful.

Think of a earful recurrence- what moment in the fearful ending would be most disturbing if it returned.

Which is your clock? How far are you from midnight?

Out of all this try to generate an image or images and translate it into some language. Nao, our intrepid video artist, is going to create this image for projection onto our chests. If you have any images (as in digital images) you want to reference, you can point us towards those as well.

In the current state of our discussion, we're proceeding something like this. Abby's opening sequence, with the pedestrian movement, the pulsing hands, etc. is going to open both shows. From there, we are trying to build sequences which address or correspond to questions (as in the list of questions). Eventually, there may be ten or so sequences. For the Pilot and StreamFest showings, we're going to select some smaller set of sequences, like three or four, and stitch them together. To keep it interesting, we might choose a different set for StreamFest from the sequence we do for Pilot. In the meantime, we're going to continue building any and every bit of material that illuminates our problem, only narrowing down our focus when it's absolutely necessary.

Cara and Abby are after some more text or more starting points as they build more choreography, so what I wanted to do here is post a few aspects of the big problem I feel like we haven't addressed, or at least could use more thinking about, in the work so far, to see if we can get started thinking about them together. These would be:

Skepticism about the apocalypse- including the fact that it's been predicted many times and hasn't happened yet. Also the shady and chance nature of scientific prediction to begin with.

Rising water levels- if true, we're talking about up to 20 feet by the end of the century.

Environmental racism, or the fact that class and race (reading nationality and locality into this- i.e. Black residents of the 9th Ward somehow magically got the brunt of the damage to New Orleans) will have a huge impact on who is effected by these catastrophic changes first and hardest.

Other religious apocalyi besides the Rapture.

Nuclear war, militarism in general

That's all I can think of right now- will add more later.

Here's notes from Friday, followed by the image I feel like I'm arriving at.

as summer stretches over Fall months, creeks dry, then rivers dry, themn basins, shores of lakes inch up like skirts, as winter wanes, temperatures climb, tomatoes plumping in the grass in February in Vermont, as fish get up and walk to their graves on shore, on trees the signs of heat stroke, parched they dip into empty lakes until suddenly, torrentially, black and soot-grey rain seeps into cracked concrete, wells up in culverts, where, gangrenous the bodies rot, the survivors made sick by the water finally, filtering through broken city’s systems contracting

the recurrence of entropy, systems failing/falling apart, faster than we can rebuild them, and faster they we can adapt to their absence.

while water scarcity probably scares me in the most immediate way, my image is of this broader notion of entropy. As I see it, the Earth is a planet based solely on an intense energy: pulling it into its core, keeping it spinning in orbit, keeping its oceans from sloshing over into space, etc. Like every system, and I think it's fair to call the Earth a system, the energy keeping it together has to someday dissipate, and in both a real and metaphoric sense, break down. The image:

a spinning, spherical object which gradually gets more eccentric in its motion, like a dreidel running out of steam, until instead of spinning in on itself, it is spinning out of control, tossing off bits of itself like kids off a merry-go-round, until the increasing violence of this motion tears the entire thing apart.

a whole lotta wondering...

yo.
i'm in India.
it's fucking crazy here.
this will be a long rambling email, later more cohesion (maybe ;) and more on India.
for now...

righteo so,
in a country where intense population (and I mean there are a LOT of fucking people here), limited water, limited resources, limited space etc. are already hugely prevalent - are the issues of global warming, environmental collapse, and the impending end of the world being discussed?
well, i've only been here a few days, but from those i've talked to so far....
i've gotten a pretty straigtforward "NO" - across the board
really?
really.
tonight the circle i was with explained that Hindus are primarily concerned with Salvation.
Personal salvation.
and further more.... with so many concerned primarily with where the next meal is coming from, they can't bother to think or care about other things such as global warming, and so on.

Is it actually a Priviledge to consider and discuss these issues?
because we have Time (ah! that elusive substance, we think we don't have enough of, and is ticking steadily away...and yet some of us have too much time, or enough time at least to devote to these ponderings)
Because providing for our basic necessities do not consume our every moment, we are able to consider what it might be like when we lack them, when we are exclusively concerned with what small patch of stable land will hold our feet and what water will not infect us if we drink it.

(that's another one i've been thinking a lot about, along with global warming, nuclear holocaust, all that lovely stuff, but about what's IN the water. the fragile balance of our health and 'control' of disease through vaccination, the way this could all crumble down, which makes me think now - should look at the black plague, for statistics on how many died in what amount of time and what that hell-on-earth pandemonium death-in-your-face world was like. there's a GREAT intro to Bocaccio's Decameron on the plague (as it set the stage for the book he wrote))


okay, some very interesting tid bits from Hindu mythology...
cycle of 4 ages
the first, #1 - peace and harmony, people are simple and kind, 2 - people start developing aspirations and desires, 3 - age of prosperity (material wealth) and # 4 - the one many say we're IN NOW, the Kali Yuga, the age of destruction.
Shiva will destroy the world when it gets too full of sin and evil ways.
Check it, Shiva is the lord of the DANCE, he is always depicted with one foot raised, in an attitude of dance, he will destroy the world with his Cosmic Dance
When the second foot (his raised foot) touches the ground, the world will end.
Some say it will be from the ferocity of his dance, another widely described scenario is his dance brings a great FLOOD, and the world ends in deluge - isn't THAT interesting?
also - this cycle of the four ages CONTINUES. it is a cycle. it repeats.
right.

jumping to the notes i took the one day i came to your rehearsal, (probably this is all redundant, skim away )

if time is considered as circular, rather than linear, the Beginning and the End are actually the closest to each other. many cultures recognize creation and destructive energy as stemming from the same source. ie: the Hindu goddess Kali

propaganda. how about some serious GREEN propaganda? go spray paint, stickers and stencils!

do the neo-religious-conservatives actually want to HASTEN destruction/the End?
i mean, if they believe they are Chosen and will be saved when it all goes up in flames, um some motivation to bring it on?
"I wanna get my kicks before the whole shit-house goes up in flames" - jim morrison

oooo I want to share a few aaaawesome hiphop songs, is there any way to upload music?
(mos def, variable unit - two songs in particular)

myth /image clips: (book of revelations) dragon in the sky, rain of fire, release the beast, who wages extended war on earth, ta-da! "the rapture" !

some websites:beliefwatch.com, apocalypsesoon.com

Time Watch.:what the fuck is up with the gregorian calendar? check out for more on lunar calendar (and mayan astrology)

other creatures in nature KNOW about things...their internal thermometers are still rigged to the pulse of the planet. note all the shit, namely concrete, et al non-responsive materials, inhibiting human connection to earth rythyms.
are you surprised with delight when you catch the moon in the sky?
or do you 'keep track' of where she's at?
or DO we know on some ancient cellular level, cause we're still animals after all, but we just don't respond? (and what's up with that?)
(intuition is a muscle that needs to be exercised and allowed to breathe)

images from nature:
fish swallow rocks when storm is brewing.
the universe breathing (expansion and contraction) - you know, they say that OM is the sound of the universe breathing
'sacred geometry'

Movies: Children of Men, Inconvenient Truth (this one is CRUCIAL homework, full of all kinds of statistics and graphs and facts), Donnie Darko (parrallel worlds/time)

Statistic List:
(could cull some pretty cool images from this and play around with juxtaposition and speed)
china builds manhattan every month
every 48 (or maybe it's 72 hours) a new home depot is built
loads from Inconvenient Truth
Sun will go supernova. Limit of fuel.


other stuff:

the ultimate arbitrariness of time keeping and yet Obsession with finite Time. Why?
it's how we know ourselves. how we place ourselves in all THIS.

with this emergent theme of multiple clocks and their relativity, really interested in idea of simultaneous multiple planes of reality a la choose your own adventure – could audience members have different journeys through the performance/performance space and arrive at drastically different conclusions, based on their answers to the questions prompted throughout the show – ie: if different clocks hit midnight at different times and follow different paths leading up to midnight, could audience 'finish' the show at different times based on which clock they align with? (some of my ideas, like these, are pretty spatially specific and concerned with interactivity – these might be elements to develop in future incarnations of the project, in say a large venue that lends itself to audience mobility more than a small-ish dance space.

Rates of Change that we can predict
maybe more importantly - Rates of Change that we CAN'T predict

to do:
GATHER -
(all underway! yay!)
list of questions
lyrics/songs
poems
text exerpts
myths/stories – creation & destruction in different cultures
statistics

use statistics to arrange and rearrange audience – spreading out, corralling in – dancers can also stack and bury?

other shit:
mushroom cloud / mushroom activity (transformation into positive) – mushroom 'community' (it's all ONE. love it)
science or religion – which is your clock?
underground world? (when land is limited will we build up or burrow in? didn't some persecuted christians build some elaborate underground city to hide? where else are there ancient catacombs?)

types of ignorance ('primary ignorance' - you don't know that you don't know, so you can't do shit about it (and mabye it's rather peaceful and pleasant this way), 'secondary ignorance' - you know you're fucking ignorant, so what's it gonna be? denial and refusal or responsbility and action?


Probability vs. Inevitability



well, maybe there's few grains in there worth sorting out.
wish i could join you in a sweet spacious clean luscious dance studio.
did i mention it's FUCKING CRAZY here?

peace

*
ava

just a thought on time

In the philosophies that involve the end coming at a definite time, in minutes and seconds with hands upon the midnight clock, does the hand of doom strike in greenwich standard time? Obviously we have created the minutes and seconds to hold time in its orbital container, but Who gets the hierarchy of midnight, as it were? Tonga? Or those who in their hearts watch the clock and place a puctuation upon it?

schedule of rehearsals and such

Sundays from 2-4 (Primary Rehearsal) at ODC
Thursdays from 12-2 (secondary dance rehearsal) either ODC loft or CP

additional rehearsals:
Sat 2/24, 3-6 pm CP
Wed 4/4, 8-10 pm CP
Wed 5/9 8-10 pm, CP
Wed 5/16 8-10 pm, CP

Tech and Shows:
Sunday Feb 25th 9-12 am (pilot Showing at ODC)
Sunday April 1 9-12 am (Pilot Showing)
*plan on tech either the 25th or 26th of April

Saturday April 28 PILOT!!!!

May 17&18 MAP (StreamFest) at CounterPULSE!!!!!
*plan on tech May 16th(ish)

August(ish) ???? Evening length performance at CP and 418 in Santa Cruz??? y mas?????

Cycles?

This is just a quick thought, but I've been reading a lot of WW1 poetry and letters from soldiers and they seem really relevant to today. Take away the date and they could be about the world today. So I was thinking, what does that imply about cycles of impending death? Because of war and, basically, humanity, people have thought the end of the world was at hand for over the past 100 years. It might be interesting to juxtapose some of this text with more modern text.

Here is one that really got me

Anthem for a Doomed Youth
Wilfred Owen

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
-Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering riffles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them, no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mouring save the choirs-
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

sept.-oct. 1917

even maybe just taking certain images or lines from older poems to use. The last line especially calls into mind the cycle of hate and destruction that exists - a kind of end each day only to face it again the next.

I also like this couplet from a Robert Graves Poem from 1938 - Recalling War

When learnedly the future we devote
To yet more boastful visions of despair.

Questions to Date

Here are all the questions I've collected so far. Some are closer to how they might be phrased in the text for the piece than others. Some may be redundant. Use the edit function or comments windows to add or delete as you see fit:

How do you believe the world will end (i.e. in what way)?
How do you believe the world will end (i.e. with conviction, as a physical necessity, as an article of your faith, in what percentage of certitude- this could possibly be the same)?

Opening question (on mic) If the world were to end tomorrow, how would you act today (or I would)?- at the end of the piece, a variation on this which is more poignant, less innocent.
How many of you can swim?
How many of you take a shower today (as in economies)?
Do people pray (also with picture prompts)?

Other questions (which will, in retrospect, implicate the audience): do you leave water running when brushing teeth, do you toss cigarette butts out the car window, do you drive more than 50 miles a week, more than 150? Did you drive here tonight?
Do you know who Ganesh is? The Mahdi?
Would it frighten you if someone bled water? If a voice told you to put oil on the door, would you?
Do you fear: global warming, nuclear Armageddon, etc?
Do you think time is gone forever? Or is time always present. Linear or Cyclical?

They say a clock is ticking- ticking on the life of the sun, ticking on the timers of bombs, ticking on an elliptical universe, ticking on the arrival of the Messiah, ticking in soot-darkened sky and I want to know, if you’re even listening, which clock do you hear ticking?

If you’re worried about tomorrow, face forward.

If you count the gallons going into your gas tank, turn left.

If you count the seconds until the Second coming, look up.

In flight, the land disappears under water, and where then do birds land?

What do animals know that we ignore?

What is everyone so worriedworried about(sic)?

Is your universe getting bigger or smaller?

Draft of Text for Opening

Here is the text of the 'guided meditation'. Also, I've pasted one of the questions in front, which I'm proposing for use in the pedestrian sequence that proceeds the lights-out moment (sorry if that doesn't make sense). Let me know what you all think:

They say a clock is ticking- ticking on the life of the sun, ticking on the timers of bombs, ticking on an elliptical universe, ticking on the arrival of the Messiah, ticking in soot-darkened sky and I want to know, if you’re even listening, which clock do you hear ticking?



close your eyes

darkness is the repose of the universe.
the twitching bit of light
where your eyelids are trying
not meet is all there is of light
in the entire universe
in the vast, cool space between
the violence of stars rests the real.
darkness within darkness.

open your eyes

this is how the story goes:
a series of accidents
or
a divine fiat
or
an endless cycle
sets spinning a concentric mass
of water and tears, congregated
on debris from
an invisible beginning
(predicting)

this is how the story ends:
a series of accidents
or
a divine fiat
or
an endless cycle
returns, bringing darkness
debris and tears
all congregated on a concentric mass of water

Taiwan

Everything is kind of... chinesey over here, so bear with me on the typing and lack of spell check.

Hope all is well stateside, and while I have not had the opportunity to do any field research in terms of actual human perspective from theis side of the world, Taiwan has proved very inspiring in other ways.

For one thing, people wear masks here. You know, face masks as they work, these wierd, trendy scooter masks made form Hello Kitty cloth. Anyways, it's all very apocolyptic looking and we should consider thier use.
Also, the streets are LOUD; lots of scooters, lots of horns, and many of these mini bases with loudspeakers blasting advertisments as they slowly creep by.
I definatly want to use recorded and/or live megaphone sounds.
Lastly, thier billboards here are nearly ALL text. no pictures. barely any graphics. It's interesting, and I like the idea of projected text more and more.

On a more personal note, this shit is crazy. We are working 12 hour days, and making a bussiness deal means being able to eat my way through 2, ten course emals a day. It's exhausting.

I'd appreciate a debrief on the blog after rehearsal tomorrow from anyone who has a moment.

Zai Jian!
c

Wow, so many more options when you use firefox instead of safari (mmm... check out them tasty links).

Gretchen's link put me on a little web research kick, found some interesting sites. The Doomsday Clock folks, officially called the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have indeed moved up the clock, as of January 17th, to 5 minutes to midnight (three minutes short of the all-time closest, 2 minutes to midnight in 1953), and have also begun to factor in climate change. Here was their accompanying statement on 1/17/07:

We stand at the brink of a second nuclear age. Not since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has the world faced such perilous choices. North Korea’s recent test of a nuclear weapon, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, a renewed U.S. emphasis on the military utility of nuclear weapons, the failure to adequately secure nuclear materials, and the continued presence of some 26,000 nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia are symptomatic of a larger failure to solve the problems posed by the most destructive technology on Earth.

As in past deliberations, we have examined other human-made threats to civilization. We have concluded that the dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons. The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, but over the next three to four decades climate change could cause drastic harm to the habitats upon which human societies depend for survival.

Even more disturbing, however, is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report coming out any minute now, which basically says we're fucked and there's nothing we can do about it. I'm going to download the full text as soon as it becomes available and try to sift through it, but in the meantime, they have their 2001 report, the one Bush ignored, in .pdf as well as all kinds of other cheerful shit.

Another interesting project on the clock tip is the Long Now Foundation who are, I think, trying to be a countervailing force to the kind accelerated panic many of us are prone to. I'm trying to force myself to think about the ethics of alarmism versus complacency in my own reactions to the big GW (global warming, that is)- what are the dangers and inherent fallacies of equating GW with "the end" and, on the flip side, what becomes of activism if you orient yourself away from apocalyptic thinking and towards... what? Sustainability? Quietism? Bicycling to work?