Invitation to improvised chorus workshop / recording session: Rime of the Ancient Mariner (RSVP)

When: Saturday, July 3rd, from 2-4 PM in the afternoon.
Who: Actors & musicians (bring your instruments)
Where: In Los Angeles, near Sunset and Gardner (RSVP for address and parking info)
What: Recording session, incorporating improvisation

As you probably all know by now, my name’s Dara, (I used to direct in LA in 2006-2007, including at NOTE and the Met) and these days, I direct a Baltimore-based group of actors and musicians called The Parallel Octave (http://paralleloctave.wordpress.com). We work on choruses — poems read and sung by multiple voices, and performed to improvised music. I would like to try to have a parallel Parallel Octave session in Los Angeles.

We will spend some time discussing the text, experimenting with techniques, and then make an improvised recording of a small part of the text. ***Please note: you must be comfortable with having this session recorded and the results shared online in order to attend.***

Nothing about what we do is set: not the order or number of voices or the style of music. Depending on the group of artists who comes together for each session, the result is different. You can hear some of those results at http://paralleloctave.wordpress.com.

RSVP (daraweinberg A T gmail) for more information.

A novel is something you can live inside, like a house. It has lots of rooms that serve different purposes. You build it with your own two hands, and although it’s never perfect, and things are always breaking or need fixing, the dimensions are such that you can pass years of your life there. You can feel at home in it. You eat, you sleep, you have sex, you open your mail. A poem, I suppose, is more like a room. The word stanza actually means "room" in Italian. If you work hard enough on arranging the furniture, you might actually be able to make that room perfect. I think there’s the possibility for perfection in a poem that I’m not sure there is with a novel. But as lovely as that room might be, with just the right light and view, eventually you have to leave it. You get hungry or tired, or you have to go to the bathroom. And in the end, as you walk out, you realize you’ve closed that door behind you forever. Heraclitus said you can’t step into the same river twice. Well, when a poem or a novel is finished, you can’t ever go back in the same way. It’s just that a novel you live in for longer. And I like that. Wandering around in that house and making a life there.

– Nicole Krauss, in an old interview

“Like his contemporaries in land art Andy Goldsworthy and Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Polissky takes photos of his wprks before they melt or are blown away, then sells them in galleries. But unlike those artists, he and his team build the pieces without detailed drawings or plans. “Materials usually suggest the form,” he says.”

– from Nicolay Polissky’s web site, from a Readymade article.
I came across him this morning because of this NYT article. (Via.) Lots of pictures. They’re extraordinary. Fields of snowmen, towers of wood…He has a piece called "The Large Hadron Collider."

“Feeling a touch more provincial lately? You should. With the cancellation of UCLA Live’s International Theatre Festival, Los Angeles’ status as a cultural world capital has suffered a serious blow. The fall program that brought cutting-edge theater from across the globe to the Westwood campus has been officially put on ice.

It’s a depressing though not unexpected development. In May, UCLA Live executive and artistic director David Sefton resigned in response to the cost-savings edicts coming down from above that put a big scary “X” on the theater program he began in 2002 and curated throughout with a connoisseur’s fearlessness.

The words “rethinking and restructuring” — those rhetorical piranhas infesting our recessionary waters — circled ominously. It doesn’t take a psychic to tell you that a limb is about to be torn off.”

– Charles McNulty, L.A. Times

“apposition

Etymology
* From Latin appositio > appositum, past participle of apponere (“‘to put near’”).

Noun
apposition (plural appositions)
1. (grammar) a construction in which one noun or noun phrase is placed with another as an explanatory equivalent, both having the same syntactic function in the sentence.

For example, in the phrase “my friend Alice” the name “Alice” is in apposition to “my friend”.

2. The relationship between such nouns or noun phrases.
3. The quality of being side-by-side, apposed instead of being opposed, not being front-to-front but next to each other.
4. A placing of two things side by side, or the fitting together of two things.
5. In biology, the growth of successive layers of a cell wall.”

– Wiktionary

PS. I really need to figure out how to do that thing where you put the quoted text on a different color background square.

Yusef Komunyakaa has one in the New Yorker now. Great issue. Really great issue for writers writing about writing and art. James Wood, John Clare, Oliver Sacks…Anthony Lane on Eurovision, Schjeldahl on Klein…and a fabulous Huckabee profile too. But I really like this poem. It’s called “Orpheus at the Second Gate of Hades.” I don’t want to post the whole thing here but do go read it.

“…I don’t remember
exactly what I said at the ticket office
my first visit here, but I do know it grew
ugly. The classical allusions didn’t
make it any easier…”

right.