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“I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers”
— Tennessee Williams from A Streetcar Named Desire
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Sign of the Times: South Africa
Monday I start my new life – no job, just writing, art, friends, meditation, exploring, resting, recuperating. I read the signs as I move through Joburg:
Father Death Blues
1988. My sister Rachael and I drove north to Lowell, Massachusetts for a tribute to the late Jack Kerouac. That night Ginsberg sang this song, and twenty five years later we still remember: the old mill town, Ginsberg’s broken voice filling the hall, the power of poetry to awaken . . .
Rachael singing Allen Ginsberg’s “Father Death Blues” (it takes a minute to start)
Demonic Children on the Run
We adopted three children who now it appears may be demonic.
Their other dad is gone for a couple days and they keep acting up. Today I caught them trying to run away.
Our ghosts
Gone with a friend to find his father he has never met. Instead we find a gravesite and ghosts of the past.
FESPACO
3 glorious, and somewhat disorienting days in the 115 degree heat in Ouagadougou, watching film after film at Africa’s largest film festival — FESPACO. I saw films on forced marriage in Mali, men who flee from Senegal towards Spain in giant canoes, prostitutes being “rehabilitated” in post-independent Mozambique, some strange homo-erotic ode to Marlon Brando in Tunisia (actually I walked out of this one.) It was inspiring, kind of lonely (I felt out of place in this new film world), and mind opening to see these stories. I’ll go back . . . hopefully with my own film.
Family Song: On the Occasion of my Grandma’s 90th Birthday
A full family chorus on the occasion of my Grandmother Burger’s 90th birthday (written by my sister Rachael and I, annotated by my cousin Laurel). Performed here by Rachael, but eventually by all 50+ of us. Some artistic differences in the making – I wanted more “drunken Irish pub song” and Rachael more “Indian classical music fused with 1950’s melodicism” but I think we got it.
House Warming Party
Worlds coming together, if for a moment . . .
Mashoga (my wife): 18-20 October, 2012 Glasgow, Scotland
A 10 minute play performed as part of the Glasgay “Any Objections” Festival. A Congolese woman flees her village at night and runs into a young man. Both have something to learn about where the enemy lies.
133 Word Play
My Southside 133 word play is now on the Royal Court Website: Song of the Hungry Grocer