Alex Burger | Author, Screenwriter, Playwright
Author, Screenwriter, Playwright
Drove through Selma this am. Shocked at the state of downtown – this was always a magical place to me and now it’s a ghost town. What has happened to one of the birth places of the civil rights movement?
With my dear friends Christine (shown) and Ola (behind the camera).
Traveling again, writing as inspiration hits me on the London subway.
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:
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)
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.
Gone with a friend to find his father he has never met. Instead we find a gravesite and ghosts of the past.
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.
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.