Brief: The Fourth

Sketchbook week. Take inspiration from what's here or go your own route. Fill as many or as few pages as you like. Coloring. Doodling. Writing. Manic optimism. Cutting despair. Let it all in.

Nat

Yes peculiar and yes precious: Natalie. She is consistent and mysterious, I spend all day with her and often the evenings these days and I know her and I do not. I read that Penn and Teller do not ever socialize and if they didn't have the act they would not be friends. I don't know if that's so here. She is my partner, she is my opposite number.

I tried to write down the things that make her peculiar and precious. When I went to scan it in the precious parts didn't make it in fully. These don't seem specific:

I think she's most precious because for all the ways in which we differ, we are partners. She is reality in days filled with cross purposes, confusing signals, mixed messages. I wish I could draw and I'd draw her. I wish I could tell her what she means to me but we're not at that place.

Peculiar

 

 

I sometimes prefer my doodles to my writing.

I hold no illusion that they are good but they are different from the writing, which is more expected, more like a relative you love but can only take in small, lethal doses.

I often begin writing by coloring in a doodle.

I used to feel terrible about this.

It seemed very unprofessional, not the sort of a thing a real writer does, color-in like a toddler.

Well, this writer does.

Anyway seems a strange thing to be professional at--writing.

It's what I look at in my old notebooks.

 The play of colors and shapes are more interesting to me than the manic optimism or cutting despair that belongs to journals.

I can only force myself to write a to do list if there is some drawing involved.

Most things on the list are not done, even if they are colored in.

This is the human condition, it seems and I am just a little happier since I accepted this.

This is not a poem.

Please don't think it is a poem about doodles in notebooks, on scripts, in datebooks and post its.

Sometimes I wonder if I could make a career of this doodling?

It seems more likely that I can make a career of being a playwright or telescope designer.

I think careers are for the birds and artists should not try to "have" them.

You'll be "had" if you try too hard.

My husband often shows me the handwriting in his journals--it is perfectly rounded and even, 

unlike my own scribbling which a friend one likened to the EKG of someone dying.

Sometimes he writes with a fountain pen in green ink.

He shows me his penmanship, I show him my doodles.

We are stuck at the same age,

somewhere between seven and nine.

I think that is part of the reason we've lasted.

We can muster up excitement about anything, morning coffee,  a TV special about Lemurs, the prospect of lunch.

We are becoming more peculiar with age. 

It happens. 

The trick is to perhaps find the precious in the peculiar. 

Otherwise, you could be angry all the time.

And then there would be less time for coloring.

Brief: The Third

Describe, display, invent, draw, or channel something or someone that is "peculiar and precious" to you. So specific and yet so complicated but so present in life, these two things. Live in the contradiction. And do it fast. Spend no more than an hour on this brief. And that is an order from HQ.

Anatomy of a Dinner Party

First Course 
On a rainy day, we say: At home, there is soup.
In the evening I went home and had a little consommé.

In shallow bowls with wide lips we serve soup.
Carrot or squash? No one knows. Slightly sweet in the spoon.

Second Course 
This is the lighting we wanted. We look, we love. We love
How we look. The crystal goblets so thin you could bite right through.

I am no longer young the young man says and he laughs.
Every time we laugh in unison the battery of the night recharges.

Main Course 
We have turned off the lights and clutch hands around the table.
Eyes squished tight we send a squeeze around the circle, me to you to her.

If you asked them later about the menu they would say: Bolognese.
But it was not the food for which they came it was the benediction.

Dessert 
Tomorrow there will be a stack of dishes but tonight!
There is a stain the size and shape of Africa on the tablecloth.

The door to the yard is open. Inside, there is a peculiar and precious weather.

Cafe Brasserie, 1977

I am ten, my mother is 49 and we are out to lunch.

I order: escargots please with extra bread for the sauce please and a Shirley temple with an extra cherry, thank you.

Mum orders a bottle of champagne and the pate.

And then for seconds, it is steak au poivre with frites for both of us and the steak very well done, please. Mum wants hers almost burnt please. She will send the steak back once. I beg her not to send it back a second time. She laughs at me and then tells the waiter the pate is too cold and the champagne is not cold enough. She orders more bread. We eat bread and butter as if it is the last day for bread and butter on earth.

Something about her fur coat sliding off the banquette as she pours the champagne makes me think that everything should be toasted and that I can't wait until I can drink champagne and pull it out of it's silver ice house and make clinking and banging sounds for emphasis.

Certain hands are meant to be wrapped around bottles. Manicured hands, long fingered and freckled. Pale hands with red varnish as she liked to call it.

Over mousse au chocolat, we talk and talk. I am never bored at lunch, just the two of us. It's about friends and and a new party dress, and what sonnet I should memorize for acting acting class.
She recites this line: "Being your slave what should I do but tend upon the hours and times of your desires." Her eyes fill with tears and she says Sonnet 57 is her favorite. She cries a little more, so I tell her about the A I got on my geography report on the Panama Canal. I explain the canal's complicated system of locks to her.

She says we really must go to Panama sooner or later but we better get moving or we'll miss the double feature and the Carnegie Hall Cinema. It's two Fred Astaire movies. Fred Astaire is the first man I have ever deeply loved.

In the cab, close and hot, she smells of brandy and sweet  Fleur de Rocaille perfume. I nestle into her fox coat, like an animal. I like to wrap myself around her. I know where she is if I am holding her tight and I know she can't be sad if I am close. She pets my head me and whispers I am like a cat but I kno the truth.

I miss that meal the most.

I also miss the daughter I will not have because I would have given her long lunches and matinees and big celebrations for small victories and she would miss them when I was gone and fill the ache by passing on some small echo of a lunch long ago to her daughter.

Everyone should have a daughter for at least one lunch and a double feature circa 1977.

Brief the Second: That Missed Dinner

I miss that missed dinner.

As a child, Mr. Mizrahi said, he dreamed of being a raconteur: the über-dinner guest sprinkling bon mots over red wine and beef Bolognese. "My biggest goal and biggest ambition in life was to be a great conversationalist," he said. "I care about clothes and design, but more than anything I care about being this unscripted personality." (NYT 2007)

The subject is dinner. Memorable dinners. Dinner with invited guests. Create a plan or depiction, a program or a representation, a paean or a proposal or painting, a recipe or actual meal for a dinner it would be criminal to miss.

Unmanipulated Images

I do not understand grace in the religious sense, the concept of a divine virtue bestowed by God.
I don't find it problematic because I don't believe but because the words are decontextualized. The language is ethereal and my efforts to understand grace in a religious sense result in sentences lacking rigor, lacking meaning. What is grace? What is virtue in this sense? I don't know how to use the word in speech properly.

Grace is a word that people use at the end of a long complicated often subjective description. "That is grace" or "And that is something approaching grace." So it is an ultimate to be attained, or reached, or recognized, but what is it? I hear it religiously and it sounds like something wonderful. Anne Lamott writes about Grace. Did she write a book called "Grace, Eventually"? Or "Grace (Eventually)"? Grace? Eventually!

Sometimes people say something like, "I felt a sense of grace," and I well up but I don't know why. Talking intimately about grace creates vulnerability.

I think of grace in terms of ballet dancers, which is a really literal way to know a word. Simple elegance. Easy. Appropriate.

I have been avoiding social media. I'm always a wallflower at the cocktail mingle of Facebook, but I was a casual peruser and lazy contributor to Instagram. Now the manipulated images feel like fake art to me. I find them precious, processed, phony. The contained creativity within boundaries excites me but the accrual of artistic currency based on machinery and shortcuts seems inelegant. Graceless.

Last weekend Lynn came over for dinner. I made my mother's meat loaf recipe. I bought some ranunculus from Union Market. I never stop marveling at them. Last summer I tried to grow them from bulbs. I ordered the bulbs online from Sears of all places. They look like little tiny brown bunches of bananas.

You don't plant ranuculus bulbs in summer. They got shoots but never bloomed.

I bought some ranunculus. I always buy them when I see them. They don't live long usually but I find them so breathtaking I don't care. Every time I looked at them that evening over dinner I felt so ridiculously proud. Moved, even! By flowers in a vase! I felt like my apartment was so lovely with these flowers in it.

They've lived for a while. They're still alive and it's Wednesday, I bought them on Saturday. This is a long time for ranunculus. They're losing their petals and getting bigger and more cabbagey and still beautiful.

I'm not a great photographer. People say it's impossible to take a bad photo with the iPhone. I don't think my photos are bad, I think they're the pictures I've always taken: snapshots. Instagram filters don't really do much for them, which means they're really very ordinary. I think these flowers in their simple elegance, snapped without pretension with both the iPhone and even the iPad on different days are the closest thing to grace in my life this week.

Closely conspiring,
M.

Three

I  came upon this photo in my late night I-pad ramblings and it embodies grace to me, more the quote than the picture. It just goes to show you that grace lives in unlikely places--even behind a smudged and finger-printed screen. I first wrote a finger printed "scream." Not sure it lives there, but you never know. I've come to think of grace as something elusive and unpredictable, like one of those viruses that hides and then kills you. It's like hepatitis but the good kind. It is not like hepatitis at all, except  that it is dormant and then it isn't. The surprise of it is what makes it different from kindness or compassion. 

Someone I know from college had the very bad kind of hepatitis and he posted about his experimental treatment on Facebook. I was riveted, even though I had not seen him in decades. and never really knew him that well.  He had to struggle through his treatment alone. It was heartbreaking. I never posted a word to him, though I thought about him and even went to his blog when he was going through a rough patch. At some point we were even living very near each other in LA and I thought about asking him if there was anything I could do for him, bring him some magazines or soup, or some cream for the terrible rash on his legs. But I didn't. I think I did press the like button when he was cured. There is very little grace on Facebook. 

But there is grace in the artist going back to the beginning, doing the same thing over and over, trying obsessively to reach some ache or lost dream. I know nothing about Isadora except that she died a horrible death. She was strangled by her scarf. Did it get caught in the wheel of a carriage? Was she alone?  If someone was with her, what they could have done? 

My mother was in a workshop of a play called,  "Isadora Duncan Sleeps with the Russian Navy." She played Isadora's mother and had to give birth to a young Meryl Streep. It's an odd thing to watch your mother give birth to a grownup blond lady on stage. I think I was 7, nearly 8 and had just learned to ride a bike. I tuned out my mother's fake labor pains and thought about coasting down a hill and how free and fine one feels with wind on your face and summer all around you. 

I have been thinking and reading about this woman this week. 

She is in Stamford New York, which is much further away than Stamford Connecticut. She's refusing to eat. She is dying of Alzheimer's. She is a secret saint, an artistic lighthouse, so completely herself. Her plays are grace personified to me. Honest, searching, singular. Her name is Maria Irene Fornes. Most people don't know about her. I never met her but acted in her plays in college, not really understanding them but then, coming to love them through learning that some things are understood after the fact. I got to kiss a very beautiful girl in one of her plays. I wonder about that beautiful girl, she was from Tennessee and spent her junior year in Africa. She spoke french really well and was the kind of pretty that makes you laugh too loud and check your eyeliner in the bathroom. I think she went into the Peace Corps and was a Development Studies major. I sometimes wish I had the foresight to have been a Development Studies major. I have been myopic in my devotion to this ancient dying form. I've never wanted to do anything else. I thought for the first time last night, not in a collapsed way but in an honest, calm way, "perhaps I have had enough of plays." There is space around that thought. It's not a plea.

One interesting thing I learned about Maria Irene Fornes is that she was Susan Sontag's lover. It was complicated too. Her first girlfriend, who she moved to Paris with, left her for Sontag and then Maria ended up with her. I cannot imagine what dinner was like at their house. Two dark haired, beautiful women full up with ideas and schemes. I miss that missed dinner. I have a read some bits and pieces of Susan Sontag's diaries of late. All her plans and schedules for writing are so familiar..."I will get up every morning no later than eight. (Can break this rule once a week.)" She must have followed her rules, at least some of the time. That Susan was no slouch. 

Isadora, Irene and Susan: Three Graces.

                          

Brief: The First

Ponder this word in all its complications and variants: Grace.
It is the name of a beloved movie star, what some people do before a meal, and sometimes those who are not klutzes are considered full of the stuff. You can have it or you can lack it.
Do you think you have grace?
Have you you experienced grace?
Is grace a feeling?
An experience?
Does it belong to religion?
Does it look a certain way?
Are there people who seem grace-full? And others who are grace-less?
Do animals possess it?
Can a piece of art be full of grace?
Do you want to make grace-full art? Do you care? Does the word irk you?
Go forth. Respond as you will. There is no right answer only exploration and the task of making something from the questions. Anything is the goal.

Manifesto

A Close Conspiracy is a creative correspondence. It is a weekly epistolary creative game of tag. Like all conspiracies, it is characterized by: intrigue, collaboration, goal-oriented scheming, secrecy and subversion. While there is subterfuge and cunning in all true conspiracies, there is also an element openness between those involved. Participants are encouraged to share and mine their latest obsessions and desires. Your hidden thoughts and musings could spur a fellow conspirator to make something they had never imagined. The overreaching goal of this clandestine and curated correspondence it to spark, ignite, and  keep the creative flames of fellow conspirators burning brightly and fiercely.

Begun in January 2013, it consists of weekly "briefs" created alternatively by each conspirator. The content of these briefs is purposely vague from the outset: the goal of each brief is to turn curiosity from a passive activity into a creatively active one. The brief is considered a success when both parties fulfill it. Each brief should and must build on previous briefs: The Conspiracy requires a dialectic in order to maximize inspiration and create a cumulative creative conversation whose textures deepen as the weeks progress. 

Conspirators can respond to a brief in any way they see fit and fitting. A sentence, a poem, a haiku, a photograph, a collage, a rant, a list, a fully rendered oil painting, or a video of an interpretive dance (dancing and filming of dancing is deeply encouraged) or in a more familiar territory of the included conspirators---with some kind of story or narrative. 

Plumbing and mining unchartered territories is what true conspirators do. Close Conspirators have an invisible tattoo on their inner arms which says, (most likely in Mandarin): GET OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE. In Madarin it looks like this: :走出自己的安乐窝

A Close Conspiracy is not to be confused with the used furniture store "Yesterday's Muse," nor with the arts quarterly "Drop Shot," which, while worthy concerns in their own rite, are neither the subject nor the content of this endeavor. Neither do we have any affiliation with the Swedish eco toy shop, "aMUSEments" or the famed Dumbo pantyhose joint, "Blue Stockings." By all means shop where you will. Conspirators may or may not have partaken of these companies wares.