Pauline Oliveros is celebrating her 80th birthday Thursday night with a concert at EMPAC at Renssalaer Polytechnic in Troy New York.   If there is any way for you to be there, do it.  It should be a brilliant celebration of an iconic artist.  The concert starts at 7:30 and is free, so get there early.

I have known Pauline for 22 years.  We first collaborated in 1990 on a dance performance called Skin.  For Skin, Pauline performed live with us using her Expanded Instrument System, an electronic signal processing system she designed.  That was followed by the international project (Mexico and Russia) Ghostdance, for which she created the score. Our last project was Antigone’s Dream. More recently, I have been a part of her AUMI project:  an improvisational, adaptive use computer music system for profoundly disabled children that allows them to create sound and participate in music-making with other children.

Pauline is the fiercest artist I know.  At 80, she is gathering momentum when many are settling. She was recently awarded the John Cage Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.  For decades, Pauline’s music has lived deep within the worlds of digital and electronic possibility.  She pushes boundaries, challenges assumptions, and is an untiring, uncompromising advocate for the improvisational arts and the under-served.  Pauline’s music is not for the faint of heart.  She will take you down the slot, into the wild heart of the moment.

See you there!

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for sale:  “Body Mine # 7”

Original framed photograph with charcoal and pencil and text.

This week’s price only   $97 plus shipping.

You can purchase by contacting me HERE, or with Paypal.

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for sale:  “Tintoretta”

Signed, limited edition print of a toned photograph by Pam White. 

This print from Highland Studios is 16 x 20 on acid free archival paper, and mounted on foam core, ready for framing.

Cost is $87 + $7 shipping.

Sale price (usually $2500) for the original one-of-a-kind framed photograph:  $1700.  (Price includes shipping.)

You can purchase by contacting me HERE, or with Paypal.

This print is available this week only.

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for sale:  “Shadow”

Signed, limited edition print of a toned photograph by Pam White. 

This print from Highland Studios is 16 x 20 on acid free archival paper, and mounted on foam core, ready for framing.

Cost is $150 + $7 shipping.

Original one-of-a-kind framed photograph:  $2000.  (Price includes shipping.)

You can purchase by contacting me HERE, or with Paypal.

This print is available this week only.

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I was drawn to this image because its intimacy, the quiet focus of the artist who is also the art.  One of the themes that I will be exploring in January is the way that art and life intersect.  It will also be a big part of the focus of Breaking into Blossom, the online course on moving into an improvisational life that begins on January 23.

Many years ago, I took a workshop with the brilliant Eiko & Koma.  I remember Eiko saying that she and Koma do not commute between their art and life.  For them it is a seamless whole.

I am a householder.  I have animals, a lot of them.  They are a beautiful, essential part of every day. But their presence means that there are a million little moments in every day that are not art.  Scooping poops, feeding dogs, cats, cleaning up vomit and pee.  Brushing, walking, touching.  As I said, not art.  Or what can feel like a lot of little, niggly commutes.

Having said that, there is a way to be with those necessities that is a rhythm, a practice, a yoga even. And there is a direct path from all of that ritual to my work, my writing, and definitely my choreography, which is full of beasts – hooved, pawed, winged.

Are you commuting?

postscript:  This week, The Journal (the little ragged memoir) is about the ways that I have taken art art into and onto my body.  The how and the why of that, including the elaborate mapping of tattoos.

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The churning of the Sea of Milk or the Milky Way is an interesting Hindu creation myth.  It involves a serpent and a mountain.

In the story, the gods held the tail of the snake, while the demons held its head, and they pulled on it alternately causing the mountain to rotate, which in turn churned the ocean. The mountain began to sink and so the god Vishnu in the form of a turtle came to the rescue and supported the mountain on his back.

I got to thinking about this story as I was reading The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.  He says that the demon is resistance – the thing that gets in the way of our fulfilling our goals.

As I read, I kept thinking, “Resistance to the resistance is still resistance.”  This troubled me.  Later in the book, Pressfield speaks of angels, muses, allies.  They are, he tells us, forces counter-poised against the resistance.

“More resistance,” I thought.

So my question is:  Is all this churning (effort, battle, resisting resistance, etc.) necessary to create a sparkling Milky Way?  To create at all?  Is war really how to make art?

Then I thought about riding, and how all the resistance in the world is useless.  How it is by aligning, opening – finding the onward, flowing, shaping, guiding quality in the riding – I become part of that glorious movement.  The “join-up” as Monty Roberts says.

Abraham teaches that resistance is just tethers us to what we don’t want. That when I say “no” to something, I bring it to me – special delivery.  Because no is just the other end of the stick from “yes,” the tails side of the coin.

What are you resisting?  And what is the opposite of resistance?

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