artistic families

[rm]

I just auditioned for this play abotu Frank O'hHra thanks to the good graces of a friend who hooked me up with the opportunity. Lord knows if anything will come of it, but it has me all excited and frenetic, because oh my god, you _can_ write about this shit. I tend to have this (rather studied and ineffectual) aversion to making art about art and towards articulating why I want to, but this pleasant little audition in this unbelieveable apartment just sort of shook me out of it.

Which leads me to a quasi-related question:

Talk to me about the artistic families you know about/admire/find interesting/hate/are afraid of. And talk to me about what artistic family means to you -- genetic or constructed? love or friendship? Clear-cut or murky? What are the plausible geometric permutations? Enabling the product or part of it? Is it stuff like the emergence of Sofia Coppola? Bohemian cliques like the Frank O'Hara mess? Francis Bacon and his troubled relationships with his muses? Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh? Baz Luhrmann's Iona, etc.? Talk to me about how other people do it and why you care. And talk to me about how you do it if this pertains to you (and I can think of at least two instances on my friendslist that I think qualify).

My brain is al buzzy. Please feed me.

Comments

[schpahky.livejournal.com]

I just wrote you this long comment and realized it was largely based on my life before school. Here, I'll give you a slightly different version:

The father-son comment came purely from instinct. I think you're right, it's the conflict, and in many ways I've tried to be the son my father wanted as well as the daughter who pleases everyone. My dad shoved his artistic gifts under to be Mr. Businessman, and so I believe much of his pleasure in my literary aspirations stems from his unlived life. This is fine, and normal, but, there it is. I have had to sort out a lot of what I do to please him and what on earth might please me. I err on the former side more often than I'd like, even though he has little idea of what I "do" now.

Regarding structure that keeps me from getting subsumed in the lives of other artists: I think I have mentioned before a tendency to step back from a hobby as soon as someone else picks it up. Be it cooking a certain something, crafting a certain way, dressing a certain way, whatever, I will shy away bowing and scraping rather than beg, borrow or steal my own right to take up equal space. I get irrationally worried about someone thinking I'm imitating (perhaps because I have a history of being criticized for this). Therefore a little sanctum sanctorum delights me, where I have the space to fully form some ideas and actions before other people start dipping in. This is also why I am a good group facilitator and a lousy team member.

At 23 my model of a good relationship meant the man with the steel guitar came over, cooked with me, played some records, slept over, and left the next day. Or, I go to his place. Enough overlap to rejuice me but not so much I'd disappear. Obviously this is some time ago and my boundaries are better now. At school there was a lot of talk of creative partnership. Donald Hall read about his marriage to Jane Kenyon, and oh, it was so workable! She got up and wrote, and then she walked the dog while he got up and wrote, and then they had breakfast together, and then they did more writing in their opposite ends of the hall, then lunch together, then a nap, then...etc. I heard this the first night and it felt like news to me. Yet I heard similar stories from my colleagues, Also, I learned that living among writers was quite different from living among a pack of 20 year old drama majors near New York City. And I remember how fired up my friends and I were in the junior year English exchange program in our little flat in England, having big Talks about Literature in the kitchen over tea and then storming back to our rooms to do more reading. This felt very alive to me, and I've forgotten it.

As far as living it, or creating it, I feel a large quiet transition happening. I believe I can get what I want now. I believe it is okay to want it and almost to ask for it. My own work habits have been so disorganized in the past though that, in a way, the issue is whether I think I am an artist, whether I have a right to take up space, and whether I have a right to enlist anyone to do anything for me. The obvious answer is that I have a right to all of it, but the bones are slow to learn this and are getting a big transfusion this week even. Talk to me in two months; who knows where I will be, but I imagine in a very different place.

I am curious to hear what feeds your writing process. I find spasms of social activity followed by stretches of solitude work well. Too often though I forget about the social/fun aspect and then wonder why I feel mired. How can going to the movies count as research? Yet, it does, and it feels good, too.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I think the two biggest problems writers face is bieng witty in social groups as a substitute for writing and cultivating a misanthropic lifestyle as a substitute for actual writing. I've fallen in to both traps.

Actors seem to have a narrower trap -- it's this idea that you must be around peopel and social all the time -- I'm not sure what it comes from, but it's a pressure I feel. And it doesn't work for me. It harms my work and my ability to get work done.

I've yet to find a similar trap in directing, I think because I have to be on top of so much shit at once.

Going to the movies is everything for me, for every art that I do. I never walk out of a theater without being different than I came in, even if just for five minute.

[schpahky.livejournal.com]

See, when I write the book called The Dangers of Being Witty, it will be arguing in favor of the Gazebo theory. If I have to walk half a mile I'm more likely to sit down at the damn kitchen table and write, than I am if Steph is in the room nextdoor sorting tchotchkes. And when you write Misanthropic Lifestyle as a Substitute for Actual Writing, I hope you will interview me, because the last three years are about the best embodiment I've seen. No suicide, no hospitalization, but ongoing malaise will kill you.

If I am in charge of something I get tons done. I am a lousy team member. If I am expected to morph into a group for very long I get contentious and sad.

This weekend I'm going to see March of the Penguins.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I hear that March of the Penguins is weirdly good.

[schpahky.livejournal.com]

The preview nearly made me cry. This worries me.

[rm.livejournal.com]

It worries all the reviewers too. They're like "why am I fucking crying at penguins?!?!?!"

[schpahky.livejournal.com]

The section of the Boston Globe where reviewers screen movies for parents note, "Seal attacks penguin and presumably kills it; penguin parents appear to grieve over a cracked egg or lost chick." I will be prepared with tissues.

I managed to avoid The Parrots of Telegraph Hill although that had a nerdy guy to distract you from the birds.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Somewhere in this is a joke about the penguins' artistic families, but I'm too fucking tired.