In brief:

Here's what I've been up to lately, and some stuff that's coming up.

1) Still no job, so don't ask.

2) Still no idea where I'll be living in November, so don't ask that either.

3) This week I've been stage managing an R&D process for a relatively young company that seems to be a fan of the site-specific genre. My friend Max was brought on as designer for the show by the co-director/writer Poppy, who went to Central with us. There are several other Centralites knocking about in the cast of this show as well. Overwhelmed with boredom by lack of a job/daily routine, I asked Max if I could sit in on rehearsals. He mentioned it to the director, and I was offered this job. I snatched it up, I was so desperate for a purpose.

Anyway, one of the company members works for the Lyric Hammersmith, and so they're using the studio there as rehearsal/performance space. They show for potential backers and producing bodies three times on this Friday. I say "stage managing," but at the moment I'm just an extra pair of hands. The showing has not been completed (probably today they'll have the sequence of their lines down, and the staging refined), so there isn't anything that really needs stage managing as of yet. So I've just been around, kind of listening, acting as a sounding board, and being put to task when needed. Yesterday, I painted this table top:


I also painted a door and a chair. I suspect today there will be a bit more work closer to the heading of my job, but just in case I'll be bringing the spare pants I got paint on yesterday.

4) My friend Jen is in town this week in preliminary meetings for an opera she's designing the lighting for at ENO. I don't like to name drop, but Jen is awesome and I'm super proud of her. If you're in London come June-time, 2010, go see Bizet's The Pearl Fishers! The production will be great, and the lighting will be AMAZING, I just know it.

5) I've started doing work exchange at a yoga studio. It's not a real job in that it doesn't equate to £££, but I do get free classes, which I am in dire need of right now (physically, mentally, and emotionally). It's nothing new: straighten the props, check the flyers, light the incense. I like it though: it's really humbling work, and meditative in its way. I actually always enjoyed folding the blankets at my other studio during the down time we had there. So it's nice in that way. And that wall of props was fucking *stellar* when I was done with it, no doubt.

6) Handbag returns! Yes, the performance event I took part in May is being done again at the BAC on the 19th. I'm not wearing white this time, though--no way. And frankly: I need a new handbag. Mine does not work for this season. A trip to Primark seems in order. (Though, if I do purchase one there, it shall be a wonder if it lasts till the performance. Hmmmm...)

Well, that was a noble try a best I think to throw something up here. I feel like other stuff has happened, and I've thought, "I should blog that," but I have forgotten it now. Alas. Perhaps another time.

Mankind is No Island

My friend Mauro shared with me this video today. It's a short film (another favorite cinematic genre), an award winner, and was made for a total budget of $57, using camera phones as the only means of shooting. Pretty much a brilliant and affective piece of art, and if I don't someday have that song on my iPod, I may be a lesser woman for it.

Mauro thought of me after seeing it, having remembered my fascination with the homeless. The word "fascination" doesn't sit right with me, but I struggle with an appropriate adjective to really capture how I feel about this section of society. Being "fascinated by the homeless" leaves one with the mental image of a person walking down the street, coming across a someone begging, pointing at them and yelling, "OOOOooooohhhh! A homeless person! Look! Look! How fascinating!"

That's not it.

When I lived in New York, I saw my fair share of homeless people. Anyone who's visited that city can tell you, it's pretty much part of the experience of the place. There they were, every day: on the train platform headed to work, in the subway car I sat in, in the station that I changed at, at the corner before I got to my building. I once had to step over a man passed out on the ground to get where I was going, and to this day I still wonder if maybe he was dead. All of these bodies, littering the streets: in New York, you sometimes stop thinking you are surrounded by people, and start only seeing bodies. (And when you start seeing the bodies as sheep, then maybe you need to quit your job as an MTA employee.)

I used to journal every day on the subway, mostly during my near-hour commute each way, to and from work. Several of my entries mention, touch-on, or solely occupy themselves with the homeless person I happened the encounter during that ride. Sometimes I sketched them, taking pains to note how their spines were shaped in a seat, or how their facial features were laid out. Sometimes what struck me were their voices. I watched one man over a period of about three months totally alter. He had a voice like a sideshow barker, and his clothing went from a wrinkled-but-tailored suit, to sweats. He would ask for food or money, and would end several of these calls for assistance with, "even a penny!" One day near Christmas in 2006, I remember seeing him on the train I was riding, when someone offered him a candy bar. He yelled (barked) at the person for giving him a "piece of crap," complaining how he needed a piece of fruit or something healthy. It was our fault he didn't have a proper diet. He still took the candy bar.

What struck me most of the time, and what I have most frequently recorded, is dialogue. Things you'd never imagine could come out of a human's mouth--certainly not out of your mouth--you hear from the homeless and desperate. Once a woman (high or coming down, or something) came onto the train I was riding and was near tears begging for help, for money, and she just kept repeating, "It's all my fault. I know it's all my fault." It felt like she was pleading with us while she confessed this, but we couldn't save her, not in the way she really needed to be saved anyway.

I am deathly afraid of becoming homeless someday. It's one of my top anxieties about life, alongside being completely alone and pissing away my potential. And both of those fears somehow correspond to the fear of homelessness in my mind: piss away your potential and fail at life, and you'll become homeless; a large part of being homeless is being completely isolated and alone, sometimes even from yourself. And I think the number one reason people turn away when they see someone on the street, or turn up their iPod, or pretends to be asleep, or is thankful that their sunglasses are dark enough that their eyes don't show through them when someone comes by with a paper cup on the subway, is because the homeless serve as a reminder to us that yes: this does happen; and yes: it could happen to you.

There are less homeless people to be found in London. I won't make the claim that there are less homeless, but there are less to be found--you don't see them nearly as frequently as you do in New York. London comes off, by and large, as a "cleaner" city, even if at times you can't find a trash bin if your life depended on it. Consequently, none of my journals since October mention any homeless people at all. Yet still the fear remains: I was walking to the tube from school the other day and passed a girl seated on the sidewalk, coat over her legs, holding a paper cup. She was had my color hair, my hair length, and looked about my age. And it shook me. I always figured I'd get around to making some piece of art about all of it someday--that I'd write a play about a homeless man, or that I'd play a homeless woman, that I would somehow examine that way of life that terrifies me. It hasn't happened yet.

I'm not an activist. I'm just an artist. While some people identify themselves as both, or feel it's part of their responsibility by identifying with the latter to fulfil some promise of the former, I have never really felt morally obligated to make people feel one way or the other about anything. To me it was just always more important to try to present something as honest as possible, and to just get people to feel, period, which can sometimes be a hard enough job in it of itself. As a society, we tend to dull ourselves a little bit (or more than a little bit) just to get by. I don't want to make up some one's mind about something, but I would like them to think. This film affected me that way. I don't believe I'll go out and help out a soup kitchen, but I may. In the meanwhile, I'm thinking again. That has to count for something.

I want to be a part of it.

Stepping off NJ transit last night, out into the flurries, out into the cold, the noise, the crisp winter air, the lights, the traffic, the tourists mucking up maneuverability on the sidewalks, the ease with which profanity left my lips when my bag would stall in a crack or someone got in my way or said something obnoxious, standing in line for a taxi and then my driver hitting on me, telling me not to let anyone else drive me up to Connecticut this weekend (I am not going to Connecticut this weekend), spending the night in some body's loft, I had to ask myself:

Why did I ever leave New York?

I went to yoga this morning (one of the perks of being home is actually subbing at my old work, which is great as I need monies and some peace of mind indeed) and someone came in right before class started and asked me to move my mat so they could fit. Instantly I was full of resentment--"Why didn't you get here earlier? Why don't you ask somebody else to move? Don't you understand the nature of New York real estate, bitch?" I'm a volatile yogini, I know. Of course I moved, but having that moment of spite for something as simple as that reiterated for me the fact that people don't change. They really don't. I'm still the same hyper-competitive, driven, incredibly susceptible to stress girl that I was when I left. I still have the same prejudices (Seriously: I hate it when people ask me to move my mat. HATE. IT.), still enjoy the same things, the same company, and still miss the same people I seem to have misplaced. You can take the girl out of New York, but...

I haven't adjusted to England yet. There are too many parts of myself that I'm not certain what to do with in terms of that city. The truth is, there I will always be an outside: an American with a different urban sensibility who talks funny. And here, well, I'm exactly what makes up this place.

Still, New York doesn't feel like home anymore. Events have happened in my friends' lives that I haven't been around for, and other things (people included) have simply moved on without me. And it's not like I actually have a home here. The biggest "Huh" moment I had leaving London was looking at my empty key ring. My parents had just moved (again) and I didn't have a key to their new home, and there were of course no apartment keys resting there, having waited months for use again. I had already turned in my halls keys to the front desk when I checked out, in an effort to get reimbursed for the days I would not be staying there. So there I was, without any ties to any place. And it was strange. New York feels familiar--like some old lover we can pick up the dance right where we left off. But it's not home. And neither is England--not yet, anyway.

And where is the art in this discussion? Non-existent it seems. Except that your surroundings influence your output, and having a place to rest is the first step to being able to think clearly. And thinking clearly helps you see, and create, and all that good stuff. I left New York because I felt stifled, artistically and in life generally. In England I feel mostly lost and alone, but on the brink of something great that I can only discover by myself (for some reason, this last bit seems to be the most true thing I know), though in part aided by others. So how do you make art that is grounded in anything, when you yourself are not? And what changes that?

I guess we'll find out.