my lists upon lists upon lists of words condensed at great length into the following:
innocence
puberty
mistakes
separation
homecoming
union
amalgam
attachment
relinquishment
i had not yet acquired a jamie seal of approval on the last two, but i do think that they convey really well the sense of being such an everyday necessary part of somebody's life and then gracefully letting go of them when they want to set out on their own lifestory.
my previous list of titles came directly from the text i wrote for the piece, so for this list i tried to be much more straightforward.
new title list:
hometown
circle memoirs (circlememoirs ?)
coming full circle
generations
Friday, September 10, 2010
belated quality vs quanity
with practice comes ease of motion, and ease of process.
with studied focus comes quality, but rarely on the first try.
in the most ideal of circumstances i think you might have the opportunity to repeat, and repeat, and repeat, and then when the time comes to present a final work, you could focus exclusively on the quality, by which point the generation of your object should come so easily that you can work on the subtlety and finesse.
i can see in my own work that the more familiar i become with what i am doing, the greater strides i can take towards improvement. it's very hard to build off nothing into something of excellence, or even of better-than-mediocrity.
with studied focus comes quality, but rarely on the first try.
in the most ideal of circumstances i think you might have the opportunity to repeat, and repeat, and repeat, and then when the time comes to present a final work, you could focus exclusively on the quality, by which point the generation of your object should come so easily that you can work on the subtlety and finesse.
i can see in my own work that the more familiar i become with what i am doing, the greater strides i can take towards improvement. it's very hard to build off nothing into something of excellence, or even of better-than-mediocrity.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
the narrative, emergent
because i was so uneasy with my mindmap process, i didn't trust myself to pull my narrative words just from that experience. on the other hand, i certainly didn't want to simply pull them from the air and hope that they lined up with what i was trying to say, particularly because after the concept critique the scope of my story had changed from what i was originally working with. i decided that what would help me the most with deriving these words would be to truly just write the narrative i had wanted to, and then distill that into twelve crucial words that i hope can convey the sense of story and passage of time.
this is obviously populated with details from my own life, but i hope that because of or despite that, it is easy enough to find some universality in it. i also understand that it was not necessarily a designated part of the process, but it made my intentions so much clearer in my head that i thought it could be valuable to share it regardless.
also i will freely admit that it's a bit lengthy & personal, so i would not be offended if it turns out never read.
-----
hometown is where your skinned knees got bandaided and where your dad teased you until you cried. it's where you had that first friend, the one you barely remember, that you had nothing in common with except that you were in the same place at the same time in your front yard playing hide and seek. where you found grass stains and easter eggs and quick little lizards and muddy feet in new rainy puddles. it's crying so hard on the first day of kindergarten that your mom has to run out and let the teacher hold onto you so you don't come after her and she sits in her car in the parking lot and cries just as hard and just doesn't ever tell you. hometown is where you play losing baseball games in the rain and dance in soft pink shoes on a stage that swallows you in its proscenium mouth.
hometown is where your legs get longer and you touch yourself without knowing anything about it and kids get mean in subtler ways. and your body turns into something else, and you look stupid and you hate everything and you start high school all alone. and when escapism turns from imagination to bodies and chemicals nobody holds it against you. and when you have those nights when you're sure you've fucked everything up, that it's all over, you wake up and nothing has changed. and after building and building and building you can press your mouth into your best friend's and feel like everything is going to be okay. and your bodies are like one thing cut in two, and you fit back together as though you've never been apart. and your futures start in different cities.
hometown is that place from which you uproot yourself with all the preparation and no ceremony, where you tear up the landscape and alter the ecosystem and try to transplant someplace else because for whatever reason there's something you've got to do there that you couldn't do where you were. hometown is that place whose streets you can drive asleep, the beaten paths in your bones from your house to their houses, and you put it all in a time capsule and get on a highway to meet streets you've never heard of, whose sigils don't mean anything to you. you cut yourself out of your house and everyone pretends like it's good and it's right and it doesn't hurt, and those eighteen years you sucked out of your parents' lives you just take with you, leaving them empty handed to answer your weekly phone calls. you pack up the parts of you you want to keep and leave the rest like a shrine. and maybe your parents can finally reunite without holding you in the middle.
hometown is what you sometimes visit, coming back for holidays and filling the kitchen with good smells and pie dough, continually bumping into your mother in such a sweet familiar normalcy that your eyes fill up and you salt what you're stirring. you're outside it, a guest, and your room is clean like a hotel with dimly remembered decor. hometown is where you and your longlostlove can be in the same town for more than a visit, racking up across-town miles daily rather than cross-country maybe monthly. where you can talk about the future while you're distantly cradled by the past.
hometown is hundreds of miles away from the home you're trying to make, with your futures realigned, clicking into place like magnets. home is a place with the smell that's the both of you mixed together, half for half, and it's familiar and new and exhilarating and common. and you dance the acquisition of furniture, of shared experiences, of beginnings and beginnings of middles and middles. hometown is dusty and far away, your mom's photo albums, but home is fresh and vivid and stomach-clenching, the newest normal, until it becomes the regular normal, and comfortable and well-lived, full of shared space and day to day eye contact.
hometown is what this is to them when you make somebody new, create a blank person to teach about the world, or to teach you about the world. it's where you bandaid skinned knees and hide easter eggs and cry in the parking lot of kindergarten. and watch as they get all torn up inside, and their bodies explode into something different, and hold them when they think they've fucked everything up. and after eighteen or so years have been torn out of you, too, you can pretend it doesn't hurt and that it's right and that it's good and let them pack up who they want to be to take with them. and they can leave you a shrine. and with your empty hands, you can answer their phone calls. and maybe your parents can still answer yours.
this is obviously populated with details from my own life, but i hope that because of or despite that, it is easy enough to find some universality in it. i also understand that it was not necessarily a designated part of the process, but it made my intentions so much clearer in my head that i thought it could be valuable to share it regardless.
also i will freely admit that it's a bit lengthy & personal, so i would not be offended if it turns out never read.
-----
hometown is where your skinned knees got bandaided and where your dad teased you until you cried. it's where you had that first friend, the one you barely remember, that you had nothing in common with except that you were in the same place at the same time in your front yard playing hide and seek. where you found grass stains and easter eggs and quick little lizards and muddy feet in new rainy puddles. it's crying so hard on the first day of kindergarten that your mom has to run out and let the teacher hold onto you so you don't come after her and she sits in her car in the parking lot and cries just as hard and just doesn't ever tell you. hometown is where you play losing baseball games in the rain and dance in soft pink shoes on a stage that swallows you in its proscenium mouth.
hometown is where your legs get longer and you touch yourself without knowing anything about it and kids get mean in subtler ways. and your body turns into something else, and you look stupid and you hate everything and you start high school all alone. and when escapism turns from imagination to bodies and chemicals nobody holds it against you. and when you have those nights when you're sure you've fucked everything up, that it's all over, you wake up and nothing has changed. and after building and building and building you can press your mouth into your best friend's and feel like everything is going to be okay. and your bodies are like one thing cut in two, and you fit back together as though you've never been apart. and your futures start in different cities.
hometown is that place from which you uproot yourself with all the preparation and no ceremony, where you tear up the landscape and alter the ecosystem and try to transplant someplace else because for whatever reason there's something you've got to do there that you couldn't do where you were. hometown is that place whose streets you can drive asleep, the beaten paths in your bones from your house to their houses, and you put it all in a time capsule and get on a highway to meet streets you've never heard of, whose sigils don't mean anything to you. you cut yourself out of your house and everyone pretends like it's good and it's right and it doesn't hurt, and those eighteen years you sucked out of your parents' lives you just take with you, leaving them empty handed to answer your weekly phone calls. you pack up the parts of you you want to keep and leave the rest like a shrine. and maybe your parents can finally reunite without holding you in the middle.
hometown is what you sometimes visit, coming back for holidays and filling the kitchen with good smells and pie dough, continually bumping into your mother in such a sweet familiar normalcy that your eyes fill up and you salt what you're stirring. you're outside it, a guest, and your room is clean like a hotel with dimly remembered decor. hometown is where you and your longlostlove can be in the same town for more than a visit, racking up across-town miles daily rather than cross-country maybe monthly. where you can talk about the future while you're distantly cradled by the past.
hometown is hundreds of miles away from the home you're trying to make, with your futures realigned, clicking into place like magnets. home is a place with the smell that's the both of you mixed together, half for half, and it's familiar and new and exhilarating and common. and you dance the acquisition of furniture, of shared experiences, of beginnings and beginnings of middles and middles. hometown is dusty and far away, your mom's photo albums, but home is fresh and vivid and stomach-clenching, the newest normal, until it becomes the regular normal, and comfortable and well-lived, full of shared space and day to day eye contact.
hometown is what this is to them when you make somebody new, create a blank person to teach about the world, or to teach you about the world. it's where you bandaid skinned knees and hide easter eggs and cry in the parking lot of kindergarten. and watch as they get all torn up inside, and their bodies explode into something different, and hold them when they think they've fucked everything up. and after eighteen or so years have been torn out of you, too, you can pretend it doesn't hurt and that it's right and that it's good and let them pack up who they want to be to take with them. and they can leave you a shrine. and with your empty hands, you can answer their phone calls. and maybe your parents can still answer yours.
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