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14 posts tagged life

“and, far away, the blue
Of ocean fades upon him; then, anew,
He sinks adown a solitary glen,
Where there was never sound of mortal men,
Saving, perhaps, some snow-light cadences
Melting to silence,”

John Keats

Life is but a day:

A fragile dewdrop on its perilious way

From a trees summit.

-John Keats

napoli kids playing street ball under a saint, naples, italy, 2012 (digital)

Listening to the Ulysses by James Joyce podcast series… Re:Joyce by Irish writer Frank Delaney http://blog.frankdelaney.com/2010/06/re-joyce-episode-0-introduction-to-james-joyces-ulysses.html (great stuff, really brings each page to life and in a humorous and interesting way he breaks down all the obscure references in five minute podcasts). Watched the Irish films “Bloom” (based on Ulysses) and “Nora” (about James Joyce and Nora Barnacle’s romance). Also watched a travel film by the Joyce museum of Dublin on a “Ulysses Tour of Dublin” chapter by chapter. So many of the spots detailed in the novel are still to be found and visited, especially on Bloomsday.

In school I was greatly influenced by Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dubliners. I read Ulysses but probably only understood less than half of it, for I didn’t understand all the fin de siecle or Irish catholic or political references richly woven through Joyce’s prose. The free podcasts and films are adding a deeper and more relatable layer to the beloved but difficult book.

Over the last couple of years my husband and I have been having little “Irish film festivals” at home but really they are more of a home made cultural exploration all year long - listening to Irish music on Boston radio and internet podcasts and international radios online, attending Irish music and dance performances, and Irish plays, renting old Irish films and keeping an eye out for new Irish cinema, reading history books about Ireland and it’s politics and people or fiction by Irish and Irish Americans. There’s a certain joy in immersing yourself in another culture, especially one you have some mysterious, opaque connection to.

I love things like iTunes University and free podcasts and lecture series offered in many different formats online for anyone to listen to for free. We’re free to self educate, free to expand ourselves in some small inner way, free to see something new - or see something old in a new way.

I often find myself wasting time on silly things which make me feel empty rather than filled up with something that changes my worldview just a little bit enough to brighten things for me when I’m down. When I refocus myself on learning something (that interests me, mind you) I don’t feel like I am wasting my youth or time or life anymore. After a long day of work or a particularly trying time I love to luxuriate in trash tv or something frivolous and funny. Without those pursuits life would be colorless for me. But when I balance my pursuits in the favor of self education and mental expansion I find I am happier in the long run. Perhaps, at brighter moments, even fulfilled. Like when I’m behind a camera. That kind of feeling. We all have something which makes us feel more … us. That different thing which sets us apart in which we can disappear into.

When I think about all this free knowledge out there if you have access to a computer or a library - especially now with all these podcasts lecture series, university classes, documentaries, etc I feel happy to be alive in 2013. I feel very lucky. And it reminds me to pick this up more often, search, research, investigate, listen, write, ask question, pour over old books and digital texts, listen to professors and amateurs and students and professional and unprofessional enthusiasts and open myself up more to seeing, ingesting, understanding more about history and life and books. There’s so much information offered to us if we allow it in. And unlike with news or propaganda we can choose the subjects we want to better acquaint ourselves with, especially as adults out of school. And there is no prior educational requirement: it is much like the british system of “open university”.

There’s the world there, right at our fingertips. Turn the page. Turn it on, tune in, drop in. The revolution will be recorded and replayed.

napoli alleyway, “viale delle purgatorio”, naples, italy, 2012 (digital)

“My youth was but a tempest, dark and savage, Through which, at times, a dazzling sun would shoot.”

Charles Baudelaire

neapolitan soldiers, esercito italiano, napoli, italy, october 2012 (digital).

the look he gave me & i still shot it because i knew this one would be good. it might even be great.

satellite dishes and rooftops, rome, italy, 2012 (digital)

I open one door to close another.

Bernini fountain, piazza navona, Rome, b&w film, 2008

to never be satisfied is an uneasy thing.

Naples, Italy, b&w, film, 2008

Looking over some old candids I took in various Roman, Florentine and Neapolitan neighborhoods over the last few years. This Trastevere girl was probably an American tourist like myself. I was in love with the moment and had already taken too many pictures of Italy’s version of Cillian Murphy. A sun soaked afternoon after a couple glasses of Sicilian white wine and a frightfully large slice of Roman apple bread from La Renella I stood against a dirty old stone wall and followed the passersby with my lens. This was taken with my Canon film camera.

i was a youth hungry for life

I had a weekend in the city, enjoying the first very tardy peek of spring the Public Garden of Boston, attending the theater (Educating Rita @ the Huntington which was completely lovely), cashing in a certificate for a free hotel room on Tremont Street. I’ve been fighting a wicked cold since last week, which hits me hardest upon waking up and as soon as night falls. I feel very weak in the lungs, cough too much and have an irritable disposition to accompany my off and on sore throat. We re-joined the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum within the last week and have visited them a few times. In my adolescence I spent nearly every free afternoon and every morning or early evening before or after school, commuting and work, to wander around the museum rooms and sit in the gorgeous Venetian garden courtyard. I scraped together my membership fees every year, would borrow a sketching stool and would spend hours with my little sketch pads and “literary” journal, at 17, 18, 19, 20… wiling away the time before I owned a mobile phone or had an email address. I remember I would use the computers at university and I instantly loved the global and digital world (even the web 1.0 version for it’s wider anonymity and creativity) but I felt less tied into social networking and forever connecting with everyone, all the time. I used pay phones. I wrote letters. I mailed them. I received them. I took film photographs, I delighted in real photo booths. I had afternoon tea every day at three o’clock. I wrote down new, big, unusual words in my journal and looked them up, copying in my notebook their meanings. I scribbled quotes picked up in coffee houses and on the subway. I took hours long walks every day. I was never ever bored. And I read two books, mostly literature or british mysteries, every week. And I wrote every day. I also stopped watching television for a year - all of 1995. I allowed the (taped) showing of masterpiece theatre or the odd period or art film. I slept less, I ate far less, I never drank, I was in love with nature, learning, I was hungry for life and experience and romance in all the capital meanings of the word.

Tell me, what am I now these days?

ANAÏS: AN EROTIC EVENING WITH ANAÏS NIN

ANAÏS: AN EROTIC EVENING WITH ANAÏS NIN The famously candid diaries of Anaïs Ninavoid one weekend in the ’50s, when she left L.A. for a weekend in Arizona, purpose unknown.Sonia Maslovskaya’s one-woman show — written and directed by Michael Phillips — imagines that Nin secretly visited a sanitarium housing June Miller, the calculating beauty who anchored one end of Nin’s love triangle with author Henry Miller. (Nin’s own cuckolded husband, Hugo, was a bystander.) The lithe Maslovskaya vamps in vintage dress as she accounts Nin’s sexual awakening — and humbling — in 1930s Paris at the hands of the two Millers in imagined conversations with June’s therapist, Henry and, later, June herself. Anaïs is a tale of love dangled just out of reach and a florid, earnest feat of memorization by Maslovskaya, but it’s a little too self-conscious to seduce the audience. The one-sided dialogue cripples the play as performed alone: Nin seems less like a besotted, swayed suitor and more like a narcissistic chatterbox. Tellingly, this unflappable eroticist is most taken aback when the therapist says he’s never heard of her. Sherry Theatre, 11052 Magnolia Blvd., N.Hlywd.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; thru Oct. 15. (818) 506-9863Secrets, seduction and betrayal take center stage in the World Premiere of ANAIS: an Erotic Evening with Anais Nin, written and directed by Michael Phillips, produced by Larry Minion, and starring Sonia Maslovskaya. The play runs Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, September 10 through October 16, at the Sherry Theatre located in the NoHo Arts District of North Hollywood.

By L.A. Weekly Theater Critics Thursday, Sep 16 2010

Anais Nin lived a very public life. But one weekend in the early 1950’s, while Anaïs was living in Los Angeles, she secretly traveled to Arizona. No one, not even her closest of friends, ever knew why she went there.

The play takes place on that missing weekend, at a mental institution, where June Miller (wife of the legendary author, Henry Miller) is a patient after attempting suicide. Anaïs, through conversations with June, a doctor and Henry, the Henry Miller she knew in the early 1930’s, tries to work out why June asked for her and no one else. Anais also questions how she feels about Henry and how she feels about June, and if June is still in love with her. It is an emotional, shattering journey of secrets, seduction and betrayal.

Adults Only - - Provocative Text - - No Nudity

Fridays & Saturdays at 8pm

September 10 - October 16, 2010

Sherry Theatre 11052 Magnolia Boulevard NoHo 91601

Gala Opening: $30 General Admission: $20 Seniors & Students: $15 (Promo Code 007)

Purchase Tickets: www.plays411.com/anais

Information: (818) 506-9863

Website: www.reelalchemyproductions.com

article from Broadway World

Photo by Ron Yungul

ANAÏS: AN EROTIC EVENING WITH ANAÏS NIN

The famously candid diaries of Anaïs Nin avoid one weekend in the ’50s, when she left L.A. for a weekend in Arizona, purpose unknown. Sonia Maslovskaya’s one-woman show — written and directed by Michael Phillips — imagines that Nin secretly visited a sanitarium housing June Miller, the calculating beauty who anchored one end of Nin’s love triangle with author Henry Miller. (Nin’s own cuckolded husband, Hugo, was a bystander.) The lithe Maslovskaya vamps in vintage dress as she accounts Nin’s sexual awakening — and humbling — in 1930s Paris at the hands of the two Millers in imagined conversations with June’s therapist, Henry, and later, June herself. Anaïs is a tale of love dangled just out of reach and a florid, earnest feat of memorization by Maslovskaya, but it’s a little too self-conscious to seduce the audience. The one-sided dialogue cripples the play as performed alone: Nin seems less like a besotted, swayed suitor and more like a narcissistic chatterbox. Tellingly, this unflappable eroticist is most taken aback when the therapist says he’s never heard of her. Sherry Theatre, 11052 Magnolia Blvd., N.Hlywd.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; through October 15. (818) 506-9863. (Amy Nicholson)

article from LAWEEKLY

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