Crystal Lupa, "horse Of Candlelight & Grass Of Nightingale," 2023, Oil And Gold Foil On Linen

catch 22 by joseph heller // mash (peace on us)

Don't make me find pleasure in the little things

Yes, I almost cried feeling cold air on my face in the morning

It made me so happy when I bought three different spices for my tea yesterday.

But please, don't make me find pleasure in the little things. I need those adventures.

I need love, and life. I need big moments with dresses on fire. I need to know that life is big magic, too. I need real tears of joy and explosions.

I know, you're talking of awe. But it feels like you're extending an aiding hand to stroke my hair.

To make a pastel colour not look so muted.

I want it all

I want the princess blue and the nutcracker red

Is that okay? I'd take both, thank you. Here's the change.

It touches me that this touched something in you

Normal is a memory

Normal is a memory, but time moves so slow, so much like it always has, that no one notices.

No one notices that we don't talk about jam anymore, or how beautiful your dress is.

Because have you seen the news? There are war crimes, beloved.

Your dress? The price of weeks of food thirty years ago

And it tastes like small hands working sowing machines.

The jam? No one has time for home mades anymore, my dear. There are tears to be swallowed.

I wonder if there ever was a normalcy, with Sunday brunches and sadness, not depression. Or if it was always a memory.

Always just a few generations out of our reach.

See, I was wrong.

We do notice.

Details: Anguish, August Friedrich Schenck - 1876/1880

The older I get the more I admire people who are earnestly, genuinely into whatever their thing is. I know it sounds like an annoying cliche but unless you're being cruel or hurtful there is really no need to be normal about things. The dude with the bad fake accent at the renaissance faire is having the time of his life. The people having photoshoots with their fashion dolls are loving it. The old lady with a yard unreasonably full of tacky ass lawn ornaments is having a blast, HOA be damned.

Don't waste your time being too cool to have fun, y'know?

Motivational things to send in the group chat

What I love about theater — something one cannot get with movies — is the singularity of the experience and the absence of a final product. The "same" play can never be performed twice. Even if the actors follow the script word for word, letter by letter — even if they enter and exit the stage at precisely the same moment as before — a single breath taken differently will alter the performance.

And what about the audience? You can’t expect to have the same audience for different performances of the "same" play, and you certainly can’t expect everyone to behave exactly as they did in a previous one. A cough, a whisper, or even the disruptive ring of a phone — all of these ripple through the space, shaping not only the audience’s experience, but also the actors’ performance itself. The theater is an exchange, a living, breathing dialogue between those who perform and those who witness. As such, even if you watch the “same” play five times, you are, in truth, watching five distinct performances — five unique creations that will never exist again.

This singularity is not the only wonder of theater. There is also its lack of a fixed, final product. Each play leaves an impression, an aftertaste, a mark, so to speak, on the spectator, but that’s all you are left with. With cinema, the final product is the movie. With theater, there is no such thing. With plays, every minute is the product of itself. Its finality lies in its continuity.

Of course, some might argue that this notion collapses once a performance is recorded. But trying to record a theatrical performance is a futile pursuit; it’s like attempting to capture the moon and its light with an average phone camera. The essence slips through your grasp. The beauty of theater is that every second counts. There is no final creation because each second is a creation, constantly metamorphosing into the next, and the next, until the whole experience dissolves into memory, an aftertaste, a mark. The beauty of theater lies in its immediacy. Every second matters, for every second is a creation in its own right, an act of becoming that dissolves as it unfolds. In this way, theater mirrors life itself.

Both theater and life resist finality. Their "product" is their continuity. This is why theater so often serves as a metaphor for life. Both in theater and in life, every second matters because, at the end of it all, there is no final product. In the end, all that remains is a memory, an aftertaste, a mark left on those we have touched.

Man, don’t I love theater!

musings on theater

thinking about when i was small, how my mom told me that pipe cleaners were just a tool until people started idly shaping things with them and it grew so popular that they were marketed as crafting materials. and that story about how the original frisbees were disposable pie plates that students flattened to throw. and how when i was a child i had a wooden mancala set with shiny, colorful stones, but on invention it was played with rocks and grooves dug into the dirt. and middle school, paper football and tic-tac-toe and mash and mad libs, games that just need pen and paper. and before that, games of pretend with pirates and princes and masked marauders. how at slumber parties after lights out, we used to whisper storytelling games, i say one sentence and you say the next. and shadow puppets. and the way all the kids in the neighborhood used to divide into teams and throw fallen pine cones at one another. and the floor is lava game, and the quiet game, and the games i play with my coworkers that are just words and retention. and "put a finger down" on the high school bus. and little girls clapping together, and how the first jump-rope was undoubtedly just a length of rope who knows how long ago, and how natural it is to play, how we seek play at every age and with any resources we have and with whatever time we can squeeze it into in a day. i'm not an anthropologist or a psychologist but i think after food and shelter and water and air what comes next is games and stories and laughter. i think that there is nothing -- not sex or fighting or forming unlikely bonds with animals -- there is nothing more human than to play.

how’s that house that raised you?