from Ted. . .

JK Rowling:

...many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all...they chose to remain comfortably in the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to feel how it would be to be born someone other than who they are. they can refuse to hear screams or peer inside cages, they can close their minds and hearts to people that don't touch them personally, they can refuse to know. i might be tempted to envy people who can live that way except I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. 

choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agrobphobia, and that brings its own terror. those that are willfully unimaginative see more terrors. Plutark said: what we achieve inwardly will change outer reality. 

even your nationality sets you apart. [as americans] the great majority of you belong to the world's only superpower. the way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressures you put on your government has an impact way beyond your borders. that is your privilege and your burden. 

we do not need magic to change our realities. we have it all already inside of us. all we have to do is imagine something better. 

Dan Gilbert:

yes, somethings are better than others. we should have preferences that lead us into one future over another. but when those preferences drive us too hard and too fast because we have overrated the difference of these futures, we are at risk.  when our ambition is bounded, it leads us to work joyfully, when our ambition is unbounded, it leads us to lie, to cheat, to steal, to hurt others, to sacrifice things of real value.  when our fears are bounded, we're prudent, we're cautious, we're thoughtful. when our fears are unbounded and overblown, we're reckless and we're cowardly.  the lesson i want to leave you with is that our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing when we chose experience. 

i found myself in wonderland. . .

at the fair

When I was 5, he said, my family forgot & left me at the fair. I wandered around in the bright sounds & smells of hot sawdust & cotton candy for hours. It was already too late by the time my parents found me. I haven't been fit for decent society since.

getting ready to jump as high as she can just because there's only so long you can sit politely & listen while people talk about any old stuff that comes into their heads

Tallyho!

Do you know what we used to call you before you leapt into the jungles of time and space, Andrew? 

"Gutsy."

Do you know what we call you now? 

"An example." 

Do you know what we'll call you when you return? 

"Teacher."

Tallyho,
    The Universe

Andrew, the trick is learning to maintain an unwavering focus upon your desired end result, your completed dream, the "finish line," without insisting upon, or even contemplating, its means of attainment, no matter how logical, obvious, or tempting it may seem. Tallyho,     The Universe

“Sometimes one journeyis the beginning of a hundred journeyseach journey irreversibleleading to other little journeyseach journey entailing a hundred possibilitiesa hundred departures.No journey is understood in all its aspects.”

Love, listen - we exist to surpass ourselves,To break the boundaries of our cells, to cancel -to transcend! Nothing in nature tells usWho we are. Consider the music of the spheres -Random blips, distant howls, inhuman blurs.Planets collide… Huge stars explode…Black holes devour matter… Quasars implode.Nature’s a terrorist who enters fast. She decreesThe law of entropy to every part,Scrubs clean the archives of the brain, with no heart,For no purpose, for no God, for no justifying art - Blots out memory, annuls the past.So who are we in all of this? Small, dazzlingJewels of consciousness - against the dark.

Person-to-Person

It is well not to content yourself with a demand for attention, to know out of your personal lyricism, your sidewalk histrionics, something has to be created that will not only attract observers but participants in the performance. 

I try very hard to do that. 

I still find it somehow easier to 'level with' crowds of strangers in the hushed twilight of orchestra and balcony sections of theatre then with individuals across a table from me. Their being strangers somehow makes them more familiar and more approachable, easier to talk to. 

Of course I know that I have sometimes presumed too much upon corresponding sympathies and interest in those to whom I talk boldly, and this had led to rejections that were painful and costly enough to inspire more prudence. But when I weigh one thing against another, an easy liking against a hard respect, that balance always tips the same way, and whatever the risk of being turned a cold shoulder, I still don't want to talk to people only about the surface aspects of their lives, the sort of things that acquaintances laugh and chatter about on ordinary social occasions. 

I feel they get plenty of that, and heaven knows so do I, before and after the littler interval of time in which I have their attention to say what I have to say to them. 

Tennessee Williams

i think im on to something...

sea creature

“Poetry is a diary kept by a sea creature who lives on land and wishes he could fly.”

butterflies

He told me that the night his mother died, there were storms & far away he saw purple lightning & someone left the window open & the room filled with a swirl of butterflies & she slipped out quietly without anyone noticing & I'm sure the grief was softer because of that.

But that's perfectly all right, Andrew, because under the current system everyone eventually discovers truth... either through manifesting so much chaos they're forced to ask the hard questions, or through just plain asking the hard questions from the get-go.

the history of a play

Up and down the aisles the ladies and gentleman began to converse with each other in sibilant whispers. Subdued hissings and chucking were punctuated now and then by the banging up of a seat and the regal swish of silken garments drawn hurriedly over projecting knees as here and there it became impossible for some spectator to countenance further infractions of standards. 

The nature of this phenomenon, the fashionable first night audience, become shockingly plain to me all at once. What interests them is themselves, their dignity, their prestige and pretenses. What they want is a flattering mirror, a picture that does the opposite of Dorian Gray's, one that takes off all their blemishes in its reflection. After the play had closed a Brookline dowager wrote the Theatre Guild-- I saw this letter-- to say that when she went to the theatre she wanted to see cultivated people, people who talked, acted and dressed as she and her friends. Pictures of other milieux were not acceptable to her. I am afraid that she expressed a fairly widespread attitude among what is know as the "carriage trade" on which our theatre is still financially dependent. Hence the failure of the theatre really to explore the many levels of society except in the superficial and sensational ways of "Tobacco Road" and its prototypes, which pleases the carriage trade inversely to polite drawing-room comedy by representing their social inferiors as laughable grotesques. 

Returning to the performance... When the curtain at last came down, as curtains eventually must, I had come to that point where one must laugh or go crazy. I laughed. There was a little joy in it, but knowing I had to laugh, I found that I could. The curtain bobs foolishly up and down to a patter of hands in the balcony that goes on after the lower floor is emptied. The failure of a play!

I have never written a play that I thought was completed and I don't think I ever will. There is too much to say and not enough time to say it. Nor is their power enough. I am not a good writer. Sometimes I am a very bad writer indeed. There is hardly a successful writer in the field who cannot write circles around me and I am the first to admit it. But I think of writing as something more organic than words, something closer to being and action. I want to work more and more with a more plastic theatre than the one that I have so far. I have never for one moment doubted that there are people-- millions!-- to say things to. We come to each other, gradually, but with love. It is the short reach of my arms that hinders, not the length and multiplicity of theirs. With love and with honesty, the embrace is inevitable. 

Tennessee Williams

Manhattan, March 1944

How to Speak

Whenever conferring with another, Andrew, either face to face or across the miles, whether a human being, departed spirit, or sentient tree, always speak to the highest within them. 

Makes such a difference.

Amen,
    The Universe

storms

 “And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. when you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”

the scorpion, the gemini and the aries

There once was a scorpion, a pair of twins and a ram who were the best of friends. They're favorite hobby was to gossip, and every so often they talked dirty to each other, but in a cute way. "I want to suck you like a lollipop."

blueberry cereal

There was an American woman living in north western India who liked blueberry cereal. They didn't have blueberry cereal in India. She missed it, among many other things. But this American woman knew so much. She knew Hindi and Italian and German, she knew how to play the cello, she understood politics, she knew the routes of the Venetian gondolas, and she could construct and deconstruct a whole entire house, & she did these things. She did so many amazing, amazing things. 

the algerian and the american

One day the Algerian woman and the American man who lived on Brick Lane sat on the veranda for a cigarette. After about ten minutes they decided they should become more receptive; more open to life's twisted, secret, jubilant opportunities. He also decided that he wasn't going to care any more about what other people thought and she also decided to live more in a state of gratitude. And so they put out their smokes, closed the screen door, removed their shoes, took a breath, and jumped. 

"If you stare at it long enough/the mountain becomes unclimbable./Tally it up. How much time have you spent/waiting for the soup to cool?/ Icicles hang from January gutters/ only as long as they can./ Fingers pause above piano keys for the chord/that will not form. Slam them down/I say. Make music of what you can. "Against Hesitation" Charles Rafferty

geography

I like Geography best, he said, because your mountains and rivers know the secret. Pay no attention to boundaries.

Tim Burton

One man who constantly inspires me. His films are ingrained in my mind. They are my childhood mythology. Legitimately obsessed since a toddler. I will NOT miss his exhibit at the MoMa in NYC. Goal is to get there before the end of April!! 

Burton deals primarily with the isolation of being disconnected from the world at large and the search for true identity. Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns (batman, catwoman and penguin battle not only with each other but the fact that they must maintain dual identities), Nightmare Before Xmas, Planet of the Apes, Big Fish...

His films unfold in visually complex ways. 

to his critics? "Candy doesn't have to have a point. That's why it's candy"

He invited audiences to sense them on an emotional level rather than rationally digest them. favoring instinct and intuition versus strictly following words on a page. 

The director values the immediacy and intimacy of working out scenes with actors on set, and in doing so, he has developed his own way of communicating with actors. 

" [about BATMAN] I don't believe in cinema verite. You should create your own reality. We ended up with this rather interesting idea of canyons, with structured cantilevered forward and bridges over them. We even took things like prison architecture and streched it into skyscrapers."

Sleepy Hallow  Burton suggests worlds of "otherness". dutch colonial setting of 1799 upstate NY and made their own expressionistic Sleepy Hallow in Lime Tree Valley, England-- a form of "stylized naturalism." the "tree of dead" = "agony captured in wood sculpture."

Atmospheric Dichotomy. Two distinct worlds exist simultaneously. Normal vs. Topsy-Turvy. Big Fish, Corpse Bride, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Duality of Childhood and Adulthood...unbridled imaginative possibilities of youth and the knowing, world-weary, and saturine attitudes that come with age, Burton's films operate on multiple layers. They appeal to children, but contain a sensibility only adults can truly grasp. Beetlejuice, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure

The presence of comedy amid the macabre. Mars Attacks!. Burton's playful humor counterbalances the shocking and frees the audience to revel in the grotesque. 

Burton's work is his embrace of character. Burton's projects are all intimate affairs, inhabited by elaborately developed characters who provide the emotional depth to the films. "I love extreme characters who totally believe themselves."

The flawed father and the misunderstood outcast. Ed Wood. And yet, armed with pure optimism in the face of humiliation and rejection, Burton's Ed Wood is not as naive or out of touch as he may appear. He is the embodiment of hope, Burton's nod to the merits of not compromising. Draw a parallel between Burton's own fortitude and Wood's brave attempts to pursue his own distinctive vision. 

Burton injects an aura of optimism in a film that documents Wood's relentless string of unquestionable failures. 

"Ed, visions are worth fighting for. Why spend your life making someone else's dreams?"

Burton has been able to maintain his uncompromised aesthetic by working often with the same creative team- Danny Elfman, Collen Atwood, Chris Lebenzon. Burton's rapport with the same actors and crew is integral to the unique texture of his films, allowing him to cultivate and develop the consistent look, sound and style of his films with the confidence and ease that comes from trust and connection with his collaborators. 

"I feel a strong connection with Tim and trust him completely. It's amazing to be invited into his world." - Johnny Depp

don't limit her options

Expecting "end results" - such as wealth and abundance, health and harmony, friends and laughter - in broad brush strokes, is part of the secret formula, Andrew, for manifesting the life of your dreams.  Expecting your path to follow a certain route - such as writing a bestseller to accumulate wealth, having a particular someone fall in love with you, or insisting upon this idea, that diet, or the other invention to be your deliverance - is just plain messing with the cursed hows and severely limits my options... (I hate when that happens.) Cool?     The Universe

Why do you want to violate me?

Because I need to violate you now. 

& we're definitely going to hell