in and out of noo yawk ceedeh

[this is a section of an originally longer post]

The surf on Long Beach Island is usually placid, but this week was different. I’m not sure if there was a storm off the coast or what, but the waves were enormous. One of my great pleasures in life is swimming in high surf, so I was hooked. I wound up spending almost a full week at Barnegat Light, swimming in the ocean and stealing wireless off the beach houses to update the blog. The first few days were sunny, but towards the end of the week a thick mist rolled in, blanketing the coast with white for the rest of the week. It was the very beginning of the off-season, which is apparently the deadest part of the year. All the restaurants were closed and most of the houses vacated, and I had almost the entire beach to myself. The surf, however, continued at full force throughout the week. It was a tricky sort of surf, smaller waves leading you far out only to be crushed beneath the pulverizing masses of water that crashed beyond the first breakers. Intermittently, the big ones would come in close, tricking event the more cautious swimmer. The day before I left, a woman was led from the water stunned, bleeding from the lip and sporting a big bump on the back of her neck.

Soon it was time for me to move again so I could catch the video shoot in New York. With no intention of navigating the van through Manhattan traffic, I made plans to visit Princeton and take a train the rest of the way. It was my first visit back after graduation, and I arrived with my foot firmly in my mouth. I had never taken me long to become impatient with my older friends when they made a big deal about the strangeness of returning as a graduate. Finally doing it myself, I had only one thought: gawd, this is so weeeird!

...


Mary Anthony is a sort of grande damme of the city’s modern dance scene, and my sister had been one of her students in the late nineties. Now, Mary is 92 and still teaching full-time, her eyes still sharp and bright with an exacting command. She does not often dance like she once did on the great stages of New York, but now moves with slow grace and unbelievable dignity, still stepping with a cultivated, deadeye precision. When she is motionless, she stands strictly erect and radiates a nobly unselfconscious pride. She is universally beloved by her students, and she loves them back, so when my sister asked her to choreograph and dance to one of my pieces, she quickly agreed.

Enso is the piece that comes up when you open this blog; those of you who have listened closely or read its description already know that it’s all about circles. Mary caught onto this quickly, and used a system of improvisation based upon circles for her performance. However many steps out she took, usually with a specific gesture, she would then take back, answering those gestures. The morning sunlight was streaming through the tall windows in her seventh story Manhattan studio, and as she floated about, she moved intermittently in front of them, creating moving eclipses, shifting between dancing woman and burning silhouette. It was stunningly beautiful. My presence was pretty much extraneous; my sister was giving all the direction, Chris Scarafile, a talented filmmaker, was taking care of the actual shooting, and Mary was of course working her magic. That left me free to sit back and watch this magnificent old creative force moving, slowly, in circles across the floor of her studio.

The shoot took only a few hours, and afterwards I thanked Mary profusely and went out for lunch with my sister and Chris. Reflecting on the morning, it occurred to me that Mary had her own reasons beyond kindness to perform for us. She lived, worked, and slept in her studio, and her interaction was almost exclusively with her students, some of whom were serious and committed, and others who simply showed up for the exercise. Whatever the merits of the project itself, dancing for Enso also gave her a chance to catch up with a close student who had moved away, meet two other young people pursuing entirely different art forms, and of course, perform in a short film. I hope she enjoyed it, and I also hope she can make it to the film’s first screening, where she could hobnob about with a whole host of other young, artistic people.

...

Princeton was only a few stops later, and I debarked neatly just before 10. I looked out over the motionless parking lot and happily saw the familiar site of my van, as yet untowed. Others poured out of the cabin, dispersing to taxis, a bus, finding their cars and generally disappearing into the night like the fractious sparks of a firecracker. I turned on the platform as the train began to chug away and another hurtled through the station in the opposite direction. I was leaving the city, where trains run and connections are made, where people zip past and into each other, colliding, missing, getting married, losing touch, hurting each other, saving each other, desperately searching for or escaping each other or maybe just glancing off each other in a pinball machine of human interaction, until they grew to old to move, and then simply drew circles whose gravity could maybe draw others in. I was about to drive all the way to Maine, where I knew nobody, trading in the urban marketplace for whatever treasures could be found in solitude. Behind me, the steel rails hummed busily, while up ahead, the highway silently beckoned into a cool, fragrant night.

enso video!

So, in the relatively long interval since my last post, I've bounced up to Maine and taken the opportunity to get some serious recording done; hence the lack of prose appearing recently. Soon, however, my attention will return to the blog, so just sit tight.

In the meantime, check out this sweetness! Mary Anthony, matriarch of New York modern dance, agreed to choreograph a piece to Enso. My sister Katy, filmmaker Chris Scarafile and myself all met her a few weekends ago in her Manhattan studio to film, and this video is an early result of that work. Mary is now 92 years young, still teaching full time, and still as strong and beautiful as ever! It was an extraordinary blessing to work with such an illustrious figure, and I'm very excited about the product. The quality of the web version is necessarily god-awful, but it gives you a sense of things. The real deal will be premiered at the Cornelia Street Cafe in Manhattan at 6pm on Tuesday, Nov. 27, so if you're in the area, be sure to drop by; it's a great chance to see a truly great figure in modern art do her thing.

You can see the online version here.

running in circles and loving every step

So, having finally figured out how to get music on this blog, I thought I'd post something. This recording of Enso is still a working file; it's pretty rough in places, is missing a cello part, and occasionally clips a syllable off voices. Nevertheless, it's the first song I've written specifically for this project, so I thought I'd put it up so you could see what I've been up to. A more complete file should be up soon.

My mom has this theory that everybody eventually loops back to who they were when they were 10 years old. This summer, I found myself reconnecting to various former selves as college became less of a year-by-year culmination of what came before it, and more a coherent four-year section of a larger continuum, a discrete period included in and contextualized by a continuing story. This led me to suspect that not only did mom know best, but that our lives may in fact be marked by all sorts of interior circles and loops of various sorts and sizes, and that the horizontal through-line of living is punctuated by other stranger geometries as new events inform old ones, old friends reappear, and new appearances echo memory.

All this circling seemed kind of grand, and also very reminiscent of a topic covered in the incomparable Thomas Hare's course on Zen in Performance. Enso is a Zen performance art like archery, shakuhachi, or tea ceremony, except that it's a form of calligraphy. It involves drawing circles - in fact, that's pretty much all it is. Drawing circles as a form of self-knowledge, self-effacement, religious exercise, spiritual diary, and who knows what else. Point is, for practitioners of Enso, all the various heavens and hells of Buddhist cosmology could be expressed within a single, cyclical stroke of a brush.

Thinking of life circles and the art of Enso led me to consider all the various similar shapes that help me fall asleep at night. There were of course all those darker orbs with which I was already well acquainted; the downward spiral of urban poverty, the escalating vortex of the security dilemma. In the face of these, however, were other deeper circles like breathing, aging, and Enso. They were refreshingly new to me, and also, surprise surprise, largely once-familiar wisdom from younger days. They would make, I thought, good music.

Thus, Enso, the song. It's written for cello quartet, guitar, and voices. The voices are of the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh (who talks a lot about breathing), Beatrice Wyatt (who mostly tells us to move along), myself (who talks some repeating blather about Rzewski's Attica), my father (who discusses ring composition in the Iliad and the Odyssey), and my mother (who talks about the things she has forgotten and remembers). The piece is constructed in two opposing circles of fifths; we start in A, then go down the circle of fifths till we arrive back at A, and then we go back up again. Each key area gets a set amount of measures, and every three key areas, the time signature gains an eighth note. We start in 4/8, then go to 5/8, 6/8, 7/8, until finally, at the same time the key arrives in A, the time arrives in 4/4 (8/8): double or, with a little theoretical scoojing, roughly the same as where we started. Once this 4/4 A Major section has played itself out, Beatrice Wyatt tells us to come along, and the process rolls back, the eighth notes steadily vanishing at the same rate they appeared.

Various textural details also suggest circles; the pizzicato cello's cyclic arpeggios are in concentric opposition to one of the arco cello's slurred figures (not yet recorded), which together literally make graphic circles upon the score. Similarly, the guitar ostinato goes down chromatically and returns up throughout the piece. The only bump in this regularity is at the very middle of everything, when we arrive back at A in 4/4. Here, although all the structural restrictions are maintained, the allotted measures are spent in a brief, quiet, groovy little song that is wholly unique to this single, interior segment. At the heart of all these circles, Thich Nhat Hanh suggests, we may find peace, and pleasure.



Enso was first performed at the Crimson Frog Coffeehouse in Camp Hill on Aug. 7.