Storytelling and Television

we live in screenworld

clipped from www.netvibes.com As TV, landing on the moon is boring Conversely, the adventures of the Star Ship Enterprise, also a video-driven space adventure, is far more compelling. The fact that Star Trek is fiction and the moon landings are real is, for all intents and purposes, immaterial. In Screenworld, does ‘reality’ matter any more? For us, Iraq has become just a bad movie, a kind of Waterworld that simply has no plot (like the original) and no end (also like the original). What must we now do? adapt the ‘rules’ of visual story-telling, but marry them to real life. characters, an arc of story and a sense of adventure.

Garden Coming To Life

Oregano and sage wintered over nicely. Today's our first hot day; our thermometer's under the mailbox out of the sun, but above our sidewalk so it reads high in the morning--but it says over 90. On the way to church this morning there were lots of women jogging, families bicycling, and men walking.

I've got some garden projects on the agenda:
mixing our fertilizer,
constructing the potato condominium,
buying straw, and
stringing up our bean netting.

Our Other Daughter

Rolly, though there is some contention about how to spell her name: my daughter prefers Rollie. The pronunciation is (rock and) roll-ee.

Planting Pumpkins

Very helpful guide.

clipped from greengardenwashington.blogspot.com How I plant a pumpkin plant Step 1a: Look at seedling: Step 9: Done!

City Art on Rooftop: open hand or closed fist

This article presents a new way of seeing the city, and a way of consciously participating in art with an open hand. The choice is so often one of open hand or closed fist. Last night we watched an episode of the Mentalist where one was encouraged to grab hold tightly of love, when it appears. A sure way of squeezing the life out of it; love blossoms on the support of an open hand. Walking into a cold, stiff breeze on a winter's morning leaves one with a choice: clamp down tense and tight, or open up and let the coldness flow past. The picture of the monks at the bottom of the post working on a sand picture is another example of opening one's self to the present.

clipped from bldgblog.blogspot.com joked that someday he should bring a laser pointer up there to the roof deck and give a new lecture, pointing out specific offices visible around us in the nighttime sky. you could narrate a kind of local micro-history of nighttime spaces in LA. It wouldn't be giving a lecture so much as becoming a planetarium. perhaps it could be a new form of immersive storytelling: local novelists stop by every third Friday of the summer months and, in the darkness, using laser pointers, they invent family dramas, murder mysteries, political thrillers, and end-of-the-world catastrophes, all the while pointing to specific rooms and halls within which the action takes place – even the specific computer monitor, visible in someone's unblinded window, where plot-defining government secrets are thought to be stored... Alternative fictions of the city. the brilliant Access Restricted program a "free nomadic lecture series that opens rarely visited and often prohibited spaces a microphone and a laser pointer the mandala will continue to be on display through June 8, 2001. On that day, the monks will dismantle the mandala and deposit the sand in a body of water. This process symbolizes the transience of life and the ideal of nonattachment to the material world.

Gratitude

I am living with this prayer, and loving it.

Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of all creation,
Through your goodness we have bread from the earth.
Blessed are you, God,
Of your abundance we have eaten, and
By your goodness we live.
We thank you for:
Land, and life, and love,
For food, and family, and friends.
For all these, oh Lord our God,
We thank and bless you.

Welcome

Welcome! Thanks for taking some time to visit this conversation.