Saturday, October 31, 2015

THE PLACE WHERE KARMA ORIGINATED
















The sign outside the monastery reads:
“Near this spot, karma first entered the world.”
Beside it, a small slot in a wooden box
painted white with “DONATIONS”
scrawled across the top in red letters.

The cobbled track between the stalls & shops
is treacherous & steep, 
a maze of muddy potholes & cliffs,
karma’s answer to ‘tourist traps’ –
a holy obstacle course 

for the pressed & dressed 
& impeccably plain,  coming & going
outside the money exchange,
where dogs & beggars compete
with American Express in 15 languages,
& lunch is a handful of flies
next to an old woman working her fan,
frowning over a brazier whose coals are eyes.

When they’ve discovered I’ve been
to the edge,
to the place where karma originated,
they’ll want to know why
what it was like,  so I’ll tell them:
as payment for my crime,
of ignorance & desire,  of time –
a memory of footprints,
in my village of heads & hands
grasping for change,  like all those other places
where karma originated:
a street corner, a familiar smell,
a fall from grace,  
every beggar an answer,  meting out
an earned revenge.
All places are recognisable in time.

Outside the place where karma originated,
I ask someone if they’ll take my picture
as a kind of souvenir, something to see,
evidence I was here,
or there,  or anywhere.
They hold my camera upside-down
as if to dare the logic from its cage.
No smile. No cheese.
The shutter shudders,
the light burns in
& the smallest part of me escapes
into the prison through which
we all must pass in order to be free.

Sunday, October 18, 2015

ATTENTION SYDNEYSIDERS


A DOCUMENTARY FILM THAT WILL CHANGE THE WAY YOU THINK AND FEEL ABOUT WHAT DOCUMENTARY FILM-MAKING MEANS AND WHAT IT CAN DO.
"Once, again, you have shaken my core. You've reminded me of how honored I always felt to absorb your being. You are definitely the truest artist-creature I have ever known. There was not a single second of this film in which I was able to "relax." I didn't want to miss a word or an image. Congrats to all involved in the making of this masterpiece (especially the STAR). Seeing you, hearing you, reuniting with your art and remembering a grand moment from my past has been an exhilarating experience for me. Thank you, thank you, thank you!"
- Lenny Kislin, Artist, Bearsville, NY

Saturday, October 17, 2015

THE AUDIENCE vs THE PUBLIC


There is a difference between 'the public' and 'the audience'. The public is the passive realm of the removed spectator that will, on any whim, hang you one day and resurrect you the next. To believe in the public and their mutable tastes out of some misguided effort to enlist their approval is to surrender your power as a writer, to surrender your integrity and the suppleness necessary for nourishing your best dreams.
'Audience', on the other hand, is an act of the imagination, a creative act in which the writer/artist temporarily sets aside, or steps away from, his/her egocentric needs and anxieties to take up another vantage point from which to view what he/she is writing. It is not a demographic so much as a contrasting perspective that is fundamentally in conflict with the sentiment of the story. Audience must always play adversary/antagonist to the writer's protagonist, not the protagonist IN the story but the writer-as-protagonist. Audience is the necessary goad that assiduously asks for more evidence, more proof, for what the writer is asking it to feel.

Sunday, October 11, 2015

SEEING THE ELEPHANT

SEEING THE ELEPHANT - Official Trailer





A multi-plot coming-of-age story in which seven culturally diverse individuals, striving to realize their dreams, discover that the road to 'the good life' is paved with detours, pitfalls and unexpected revelations.