Word Blur

The Welcome Table

I’ll be the first to admit it; I’m flailing around with this middle-aged stuff (I’m 39). There's not much new in that.  I’ve been flailing around for so long that it should feel like second nature, but the constant state of uncertainty is beginning to wear thin; its frenetic charms seems less and less honorable. I’ve lost the tenuous swagger and confidence of my youth, but the ambition lingers, a little like gasoline fumes (not that I can afford to buy gasoline!).

So here I am trying to learn how to write fiction, trying to make performance work that splits your heart in two and puts it back together again, trying to figure out how to raise two girls in a way that will save them from eating disorders and self-loathing, trying to move from assistant library professor to associate library professor, trying to feed my family real food grown and raised by real people on a very real budget, trying to keep my possibly splurging disc (I’m talking about you, L5-S1) from re-impinging on nerve endings so that I can remain upright, and I have to tell you, I’m not having fun, I’m not having much luck cheering myself on to leap these inconsequential hurdles in these splintered races towards distant finish lines, when any progress I make can only be measured with the smaller increments of the metric system.

And I realize, most of the time, what a great life I have, and that I probably sound like a whiner or an ingrate, and I’m sorry, but, you know, if the brain worked like that so many, many things would be different (e.g. David Foster Wallace would probably be alive).

Perhaps you’ve had days like this, where the bigness of everything you are trying to accomplish gets laid out against the reality of whatever it is you’ve actually accomplished and it makes your stomach hurt. I think I have the reading material for you.

Spend a few hours with Margaret Hollenbach’s Lost and Found: My Life in a Group Marriage Commune and your perspective will be restored. You’ll be so glad you didn’t join a commune in New Mexico that called itself The Family. You’ll be so relieved you weren’t forced to call your fellow communards Lord and Lady, or Mistress and Sir, depending on their length of stay. You’ll be ready to jump for joy that you weren’t expected to sleep with the barely charismatic, clearly messianic ‘Lord Byron’ more or less on command. You’ll be downright enthusiastic that the people you live with don’t have the authority to call a group gestalt session to critique and process your behavior at any time, day or night. You’ll be grateful that you aren’t constantly expected to bow to plans that are clearly misogynistic.  You'll be over the moon when no one greets you with the observation that it would be nice to get you pregnant. In short, you’ll feel a lot better.

 If I sound exceptionally hard on this particular iteration of family, who were probably just trying to find a way to make a better life, just as we all are, I’m taking my tone in part from Hollenbach, whose story fails to conform to the standard arc of communard memoir. She never seems to have experienced the elation and devotion that fueled the golden years of so many commune dwellers; she describes a deep and constant uneasiness with the events and practices she witnessed. It’s fascinating stuff and it’s interesting to note that she, like Laffan, was trained as an anthropologist and wrote a thesis (or dissertation?) about her experience with The Family, but because I’ve become so well versed on the aforementioned narrative, it feels as if the heart of the work is missing. I’m a sucker for dew-eyed optimism and it’s a little harder to swallow the story of someone who willingly admits she was just lost.  Because therefore before the grace of...

Guerilla farming

Arriving in my farm share tonight: grass fed beef, raised by Meg, now 15, who started her Craftsbury-based business when she was 11. How could I live anywhere else but here?

Guerillas

I like this back-of-the-book quote from Alex Cox’s X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker:

“Today an independent filmmaker is a revolutionary fighter, in a prolonged popular war. This is the same war that Free Software and GNU/Linux activists fight against Microsoft; that the Slow Food movement fights against McDonald’s; that independent musicians fight against the RIAA and Apple Music Store; that Fair Trade activists fight against WalMart and the WTO; that the Zapatistas fight against patriarchal systems of control in Mexico. There are no spoils to be had on this battlefield, and no prospect of a quick and easy victory. Yet, buoyed by belief, and by the lack of a sustainable or sane alternative, the guerrilla soldiers on. In the case of feature films, the battle for an independent, personal art form is already won (thanks to the mini DV tape and the DVD), lost (thanks to the studios and their admirers), and irrelevant, anyway. Irrelevant, because the feature film was the original art form of the twentieth century. It can’t be the original art form of the twenty-first, as well.”

Swift

Here's the tiniest dance I did at Shelburne Farms over the weekend, with my youngest daughter sleeping nearby in her stroller.  Everything was moving so slowly...I had eaten a grass-fed hamburger not long before at the Shelburne Farmer's market, while my kids gorged on ham and cheese crepes and late raspberries.  Maybe these are the ideal conditions for dancing.  Maybe more dances should be thirteen seconds long.

Before and after

Before:

After:

The Amazing Lida Winfield

A Vermont dance performance that's not to be missed:

September 16, 2008

7:00pm

McCarthy Art Center

Saint Michael’s College -

Free Admission

 

PANTYHOSE, COMBAT BOOTS

and the Search for the right Tool

 

This hour and fifteen minute one woman performance is an interesting mixture of theater, movement and storytelling. With two chairs, a large amount of white fabric and layers and layers of black clothing, this performance is artistically creative, funny and poignant. Performed and written by Lida Winfield with the co-direction of Matt Wohl, Winfield tells personal stories about growing up. “Let’s be honest, it is hard to navigate through the adult world when your tool set is still incomplete.” The show is broken into clips of flashbacks from age five to the present day with movement and music linking them together. Though the stories are personal, the themes are universal. Winfield invites the audience in as she hunts for of the perfect “hair-do.”  The show is very funny on top of being insightful, as Winfield takes the audience back to her need for lipstick and direction. Pantyhose, Combat boots and the Search for the right Tool is not only a performance about coming of age but about the human experience of finding one’s spot…place…home. The challenge of what we want and hope for verses what actually happens. “Sometimes life gets in the way of what we imagine it should be.” This performance is about being in touch with the painfulness of growing, becoming and surviving things one could never have imagined. “We want to think that we know, but you have to live your way into life, and often that is something one can’t prepare for.”

 

The visual beauty of the performance is equally as captivating as the stories themselves. Winfield is a dancer who uses movement to complement her words. Her unusual style pours through the performance and is very welcoming to both the dancer and the non-dancer eye. Winfield explores the bridge between personal story-telling and movement. She is an unusual and vibrant performer, using both her voice and her body to connect and convey poignant and funny stories.

Lida Winfield is a Vermont native who recently returned to the area. She has been performing and teaching professionally for over the past ten years. Pantyhose, Combat Boots and the Search for the right Tool was created by Winfield several years ago. With the help of Matt Wohl the show has been revamped.

Lida Winfield has studied traditional modern dance, ballet, African, yoga, authentic movement, improvisation, theater, sculpture, painting and anatomy. For eight years, Winfield was a member of Hannah Dennison’s multi-generational, improvisational dance theater company, Working Ground in Burlington. Winfield attended The School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam, Netherland focusing on improvisation. At both Landmark College in Vermont and Lewis & Clark College in Oregon, Winfield choreographed, produced and performed.

Winfield opened her own Performance Art Studio in Gloucester Massachusetts, where she not only taught but managed eleven teachers. The Performance Art Studio offered a wide variety of classes/workshops and camps to both children and adults. In the past few years Winfield has developed more of her own work, focusing on solo performance. Since returning to VT a few years ago Winfield has taught at the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts. She is also a full time student at Goddard College in Plainfield, VT.

Tasting the end of summer

Someone with a firmer hold on the finer things in life would probably describe the taste of the end of summer by referencing roasted tomatoes, ears of corn, lamb sausage (thank you to Bonneview Farm's slaughterhouse!), or the return of greens.

Me?  I ate a corn dog at the fair, once my daughter lost interest.

This awesome picture was taken by Jeffrey Beal and appears in his Flickr stream.  I use it in accordance with Creative Commons.