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American Wizard Schools

Jul 7, ’16 10:23 AM

This morning I’m reading a new short story by JK Rowling about the American wizarding school: Ilvermorny! It’s pretty fun as far as it goes. Did you know the American school was founded by the Irish? But there are some problems.

wizard

Native American wizards didn’t have wands before the school started?

Two more magical boys from the Wampanoag tribe had been joined by a mother and two daughters from the Narragansett, all interested in learning the techniques of wandwork in exchange for sharing their own magical learning.

Phooey.

Also the school is in Massachusetts which I suppose is OK, but come on, a wild west wizard school would be better.

Think about it:

  • Santa Fe
  • Pueblo wizards build a school into a cliff face
  • Wands are bird wings, turtle rattles
  • Spanish wizards are beautiful but gold hungry
  • Cowboy wizards want to leave it all behind, sing beautiful songs and move cows
  • Rattlesnake Parseltongue
  • Ghost Riders in the Sky

Maybe I should get into writing fan fiction. I think I’m on to something here.

 

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The Lost Wheels of Time

Jul 3, ’16 1:06 PM

Funny isn’t it how things work out?

Just a few days ago I was in a kind of panic that strikes the artistically self-employed. Nothing is coming, I’m broke, there’s no way forward. But within hours of voicing these sensible thoughts I got a call.

The background

My friend Justin was filling in for a street show in the Ljubljana street theater festival. They had lost an actor and were panicked looking for an emergency replacement for five shows. They got his number through the grapevine, he rehearsed for a few days, and boom! he was in the show. Unfortunately during the first performance he cracked his toe mighty hard on a set piece and after he got home he noticed it was swollen and purple.

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I took him to the hospital. (That’s where I found out about the animation Pat & Mat.) And we waited for hours for him to be seen, x-rayed and reported back to. It wasn’t broken, that was the good news. But the nurse told him to stay off it. The show he was hired for is violently active so he was faced with a problem, limp through and risk worse injury or take a pass on the rest of the performances.

The next morning I got a phone call from the street show saying they were an actor down and would I possibly have the time to learn the show and perform. Justin was out and he gave them my number.

I showed up Thursday at noon and paced through the show as best I could. Piece by piece under the summer sun it started to come together. By 9:30 there were about 200 people waiting, the music came on and I jumped out on stage.

So, how was it?

You know in some movies how people are in a boxcar racing down the tracks, they throw their bag and then leap from the moving car, pumping their legs as fast as possible in the air then they hit the ground and try to keep enough speed to avoid falling flat on their face? It went a little like that.

During the show I had a few moments of fear that I was about to fall headlong into a clock, and I did kick over the wind machine. But I survived, and I tell ya, my weekend is a lot more exciting than I had planned for.

Rabit_Bojan Okorn

We’ll play it once more, today at 7.30 in Nova Gorica, Slovenia. Then Adam and Spiros will pack their van and travel to Poland where I suppose they will be on the look-out for another rabbit. Another energetic and game actor to don the latex rabbit mask and leap from the train.

These photos were taken by Bojan Okorn and were published on the Ana Desetnica Flickr account.

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Bureautory

Jun 28, ’16 1:17 PM

Now I live in Ljubljana, a city I’ve been a visitor to for a few years going. As a visitor I visit friends, drink some coffees, teach workshop on masks, talk about the workshop on masks, walk through night time streets guided by intuition alone. But now that I live here, I’m a lot less active.

Dore_02

What happened?

When I moved here in April I was ready to work. I had three months worth of visa waiver to rest on until I got a long term visa and could start working. Three months felt like more than enough time to get my long-term, it felt like an eternity. Unfortunately it was the purgatory kind of eternity.

You see, my application for a visa has been held up for two and a half months in the some ministry office waiting for who knows what kind of approval before they can pass it on to me and I’ll get to pass on to the next echelon of the process. It’s given me a lot of time to freak out about plan B, plan B. Because when you’re in visa approval purgatory there’s no chance of working. Not legally or even illegally. Who is going to take some one on who ends their pseudo-interview chat with, “it’s funny you should ask but no, my visa application is still in process.”

styx

So what are you going to do?

I’m not making any money yet, but I’ve got a few projects to keep me busy. Casey and Barbara, two good friends from Helikos will be here in a few weeks and we’ll get working on a show they want to make. It will have something to do with birds.

As I was setting this site back up I looked back through the archives a bit to check that all the photos are showing up OK. I came across two posts that caught my eye as references in one way or another to this nebulous idea kicking around in my head about a bird show.

The first one is this cool dude. I was in Chicago when I posted this but I don’t know how I found it.

The second I found when I was at Helikos and thinking more specifically about masks. That’s these animal illustrations on human faces by Charlotte Caron. Seeing them again I think they’re an excellent scale for the human face.

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Junk Boats, River Pirates

Oct 6, ’13 12:30 PM

These photos are from an excellent photo essay my mother sent me months ago. It’s too good to have been sitting in my unpublished posts que for too long. This project touches so many of my interests these days, street performance, building forts, sailing, traveling the world, river pirates. It’s magic!

Wired featured the same photos with more information on the main artist, who calls herself Swoon. It’s worth a look.

Tod Seelie, a friend of Swoon’s, has been on all the trips so far as a crew member and brought his camera to document the creativity and chaos.

“I can only really speak for me,” Seelie says, “And really it’s a combination of things, but I’d say the main point [of the trips] is inspiration. It’s the inspiration we feel and the inspiration other people feel when they come across us.”

They built this ships out of New York City trash and in 2009 sailed them, uninvited, from Slovenia to Venice for the Venice Biennale. Really, my timing is just right. By the time you read this I’ll be sailing down from Slovenia on the A4 autostrada, blasting past Venice to Florence for another seven months of school at Helikos.

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Camping in Bannack

Oct 5, ’13 12:29 PM

Bannack turned four last Sunday, and I’ve been missing him extra hard lately. Here are some photos from a roll of film I took in Montana this summer. These photos are from two trips, a camping trip to Bannack, Mont. with Becca and Ben and a multi-family trip to Revenue Flats, near Norris Hot Springs.

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