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Secret Festival #1
was good. and long.

i spent the midsection of the day at Folklife (and only slightly regretfully dropped my planned last film from my schedule so that i could get C from the airport). yay! beautiful weather. i sang part of the Vivaldi Gloria with a pickup group, among the other usual pleasures. my favorite performers today were buskers - a six-person tap and rhythm performance group who danced, drummed on 5 gallon buckets, and did an elaborate beat by stamping down mop handles. i hope they made good money. i got henna done (pics if i remember before it fades) and got bargains from the sale bucket at Island Tribe and met my apple dumpling needs for the summer. it was just one of those stunning Seattle days, all sparkling blue skies and low humidity.
( four more features and two shorts )

(your moment of Zen:) i walked out of the documentary about Hair and into Folklife, pretty close to a drum circle.

the Bag'n'Pipe Hoppers were back this year and had attached a tribal bellydancer. redhead in a bangled top, red plaid kilt, bangled scarf...and step dancing shoes. shortly thereafter i saw a little crowd of steampunk goths complete with goggles. i love this town.

Sita Sings the Blues
this film is made of awesome. it breaks my heart that this film doesn't have distribution yet. (i'm thinking about sending Nina Paley some money. she animated every frame herself, and wrote an extremely clever script.) it's an animated retelling of the story of Sita and Rama, and of Nina Paley's marriage falling apart. it is beautiful and funny and poignant and a joy. sections of the story are set to blues songs by Annette Hanshaw: the audience broke into spontaneous applause after this one. one of the other elements is the audio from three Indian friends of Paley talking about what they know about the Ramayana with visual accompaniment, which is freaking hysterical. the speakers are rendered as shadow puppets laid over the visualizations. (OMG Ravana playing the veena with his intestines! everything about Sita is beautiful like the lotus! Hanuman was a monkey, well part-man, well...) i can't recommend this film highly enough. the experience of discovery when watching a film like this is why i go to the festival.

i decided to skip Mermaid in favor of sleep before going back to work today. and even though Mermaid has good buzz, i wanted to savor the high from Sita.

was good, and by a director i like. that's all i can say.
i'm glad that C appears to be better today; he was running a fever when i came home last night, and slept unusually late this morning, which delayed my departure and put me farther back in the secret festival line than i like. it rained through the entire wait, but i now have a spiffy compact umbrella. (thanks, Sundance Channel!) Buddy the greyhound was there in his raincoat, and had a good lean on me while i scratched his ears until he twigged the people down the line with a McDonald's bag. i don't know if the series has undersold or if people didn't want to deal with the rain - i couldn't get my favorite seats, but i still pretty much had a row to myself.
we had a damp day at Folklife with mimerki. i had more festival and less music than i might have liked, but the Cuban dancing was great fun (C and M had to drag me away), and i have a new little red dress.

i slept in and then hit folklife with C. he wasn't feeling great, so it was mostly food and browsing. (we knew we would be back with mimerki.) in classic fashion, we heard bagpipes and followed the sound to find a bagpiper playing with an excellent hip-hop drumbeat. the drummer was playing a full kit plus glass bottles, five gallon buckets, and djembe. the piper spotted a girl in a highland dancers sweatshirt and invited her to dance with them. kinda brilliant to see her jamming with them, highstepping in jeans and sneakers. CD, $5 donation. yay folklife! (their myspace page, and a video of them playing downtown with impromptu breakdancing.) the big find of the day was the story cloth mentioned in the previous post. we split up at the bus stop and i headed up to the Egyptian.
( Expiration Date )
( This Film is Not Yet Rated )
This Film is Not Yet Rated was my first five of the festival. as long as you can sit through wall-to-wall sex clips and a smattering of violence, i think anyone who cares about movies should see it.

in what feels like another lifetime, i co-wrote and directed a play for children about immigration to the United States. my partner and i were committed to creating something that explored more than Ellis Island. we had found a story from the Ellis Island era that we loved: people leaving Europe paying out balls of yarn between ship and shore until the ship had pulled to far away and the threads were left fluttering in the wind. when i discovered Dia's Story Cloth, i knew i had something special to share with the kids in PA. the Hmong people had no written language until recently; oral history and story cloths are their cultural records. modern people, tying up their lives in embroidered thread. i remember sitting down to work on that section of the script, and the words tumbling out in a rush, fully formed, like i was just remembering them. the first draft was essentially intact in the final draft of the play.
while we did a great deal of research, i wasn't able to do my own interviews or see any samples of the needlework at the time. Seattle has an annual Hmong New Year celebration at Seattle Center, where i got my first geometric embroidery piece (from a lovely woman with very little english) and a beanie lizard. it turns out that those beanie animals are their bread and butter; when you see a stand full of those brightly colored lizards, snakes and dragons, it's likely a Hmong business. i often see a few handbags or small squares of embroidery, but this year's folklife was the first time i found a full-sized story cloth. the woman selling it was pretty thrilled that i knew what it was. i was completely floored at how cheap. i never imagined that i could have one. i guess i assumed that they would be some kind of art gallery object. what the hell. now i get to figure out where to hang it. i wish the tanks didn't look so cute.
the big picture, and other detail shots at flickr.

SIFF tickets go on sale to the general public this Sunday. i'll definitely be at Secret Festival; i'll post the rest of the hitlist when the tickets are in my grubby little hands. they have this handy function called "My Festival" where i can create my own programming grid. i did a lot of squealing last night over Carmen in Khaylitsha and Leonard Cohen I'm Your Man.

of course, i have to schedule around Folklife.

now if the trees would stop fucking so i could breathe enough to sleep, life would be almost perfect.