now is blessed the rest remembered

"Keep the channel open.
No artist is ever pleased.
There is no satisfaction whatever at any time.
There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction;
a blessed unrest that keeps us marching
and makes us more alive than the others."

— martha graham

"Talking to other people helps. Reading helps. And heroes People you want to honor, not exactly trying to emulate them, but by living according to the same principles they did. Sandino, Martin Luther King, Malcom X, Vanessa Redgrave, willing to jeopardize her career. There are a lot of people who inspire you. My family helps; my wife thinks the same way I do. And friends.
Also, you’ve got to think of the consequences if nobody does talk. You’ve got people driving this machine who are going to drive it right off the cliff. If you care anything about the planet and the people on it, you’ve got to keep out there.
I think it’s important to continue to be vocal. Sometimes it seems like nobody’s listening, but people are listening What it eventually gets down to, though, is just living with yourself. If you don’t live by the principles you believe in, then you become this hollow person."

— Kris Kristofferson

"Come away, o human child:
To the waters and the wild
With a fairy, hand in hand,
For the world’s more
Full of weeping than you
Can understand."

— william butler yeats

"The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case."

"i was full of jack london and jack kerouac"

"I sometimes think I'm so boring. I'll read an article about how Bob Dylan manipulated his image, put on these false personas, pretended he was like Woody Guthrie, and I think, what's the obligation in an interview to play into some mystique? But if you do, I think you end up dead."
"Acting was something that came very easily to me. It fell in my lap. But the people I admired the most were not really movie stars. I was full of Jack London and Jack Kerouac."

Twice during his 20s he took a two-year leave of absence, once to go to NYU and study English (he dropped out when a part came up), and then to write a novel. In each case he says he was testing himself to see if acting was just a phase, and in each case he returned to it with modified expectations.

emma brockes. the gaurdian, december 2000

Some times are good, some times are bad It's all a part of life -george harrison

Moment of inner freedom
when the mind is opened & the
infinite universe revealed
& the soul is left to wander
dazed & confus’d searching
here & there for teachers & friends.

jim morrison
"You need to resign yourself to the awkwardness of life. Only if you find peace within yourself will you find true connection with others." before sunrise

“Whatever relationships you have attracted in your life at this moment, are precisely the ones you need in your life at this moment. There is a hidden meaning behind all events, and this hidden meaning is serving your own evolution.” Deepak Chopra

“I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard. I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more. I want to develop even more original and more unconventional traits.” Anaïs Nin

“Getting away from it all,” many people want that, and of course ultimately the only way to get away from it all is to go within, now.” Eckhart Tolle

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.
A bird will fall frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself. d.h. lawrence

“Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend - or a meaningful day.” Dalai Lama

When I was young, younger than before
I never saw the truth hanging from the door
And now I’m older—see it face to face
And now I’m older—gotta get up clean the place

nick drake

Van Gogh: A Self-Portrait; Letters Revealing His Life as a Painter

page 162

I so hope everything will come out right, but her future as well as my own looks gloomy. I am inclined to believe there is some latent good in her still, but the trouble is, it ought to have been roused already. Now, as she has nobody to rely on it will be more difficuly for her to follow her good impulses.

page 170

I shall find things to paint everywhere. It is spelendid here, and I think I learn to paint somewhat better while painting. And my heart is in it, I need not tell you that.

page 172

One's real life begins at thirty, infact, that is to say, it's most active part.

page 174

Zola says, "Moi artiste, je veux vivre tout haut-veux vivre" [I, as an artist, want to live as vigorously as possible-want to live]

How fundamentally wrong is the man who doesn't feel himself small, who doesn't realize he is but an atom.

What shall I do now? The common phrase is, "What is your aim, what are your aspirations?" Oh, I shall do as I think best - how? I can't say that before hand - you who ask me that pretentious question, do you know what YOUR aim is, what YOUR intentions are?

page 175

Now they tell me, "You are unprincipled when you have no aim, no aspirations." My answer is, I didn't tell you I had no aim, no aspirations, I said it is the height of coneceit to try to force one to define what is indefinable.

These are my thoughts about certain questions. All that arguing about it is one of the things of which I say "embêtera"

There are certain things that replay themselves in my subconscious without my asking them to be there

I admire and adore Michelle Williams. I love reading her interviews and she always makes literary references to poets and writers that I love. I have alot of respect for her and how she has had to deal with loss in such a publicized way, and  does respectable work and often off-beat roles. Last month I saw an interview she did with Nightline, she was describing how she felt when she was filming a scene for Brokeback Mountain and said, ‎"water, water. I want to be like water, strong enough to hold up a ship but able to slip through your fingers". I just love that line...

She goes on to talk about Heath .... and in this interview with Kevin Sessumus she talks about how "re-contextualized" they made that interview and it makes her want to close up even more.

Quotes from Kevin Sessums' interview with Michelle, January 4, 2011

"This has been in my mind so much recently. There it is. This is a poem that ... well... helped me heal. And I couldn’t remember where I had found it or who wrote it or what the name of it was even. I only remembered its effect on me. I just could remember its first four lines:

As a torn paper might seal up its side,

Or a streak of water stitch itself to silk,

And disappear, my wound has been my healing,

And I am made more beautiful by losses.

(Howard Moss, The Pruned Tree)

I have been looking for this poem for so long.

I don’t believe that life is linear. I think of it as circles—concentric circles that connect. This just proves it to me. There are certain things that replay themselves in my subconscious without my asking them to be there and those lines from that poem are an example. Especially “my wound has been my healing and I have been made more beautiful by losses.” Thank you so much for these books. I needed some new ones. I’ve been living too much in the world of Mary Oliver and Frank O’Hara. Not that there is anything wrong with their worlds, but I needed a couple of new ones. I love those lines from Mark Strand: Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry."

"How do I talk about this? I experienced a lot of loss after his death. I lost my city because of all the paparazzi descending upon us. I actually lost my journal during that time, oddly enough. I literally couldn’t hold on to anything. It felt as if things were literally slipping through my fingers. Things were just streaming away from me. I lost my sense of humor. I’m still sort of looking for that."

Nightline interview, December 2010:

choose understanding over comfort

“When troubled, we have our choice of either surface comfort or psychic understanding. If the choice is for comfort, such as associating with those who sympathize, we cannot have understanding. The demand for comfort blocks psychic insight. But if the choice is for understanding, which forces you to stand all alone without comfort, understanding breaks through. Every time we choose understanding over comfort, we walk a greater distance away from troubles, for such are caused by misunderstanding.”

— Vernon Howard

“When you are deluded and full of doubt, even a thousand books of scripture are not enough. When you have realized understanding, even one word is too much.”

— Fen-Yang

“Once I began a book, I couldn’t put it down. It was like an addiction; I read while I ate, on the train, in bed until late at night, in school, where I’d keep the book hidden so I could read during class. But I had almost no desire to talk with anyone about the experience I gained through books and music. I felt happy just being me and no one else.”

— Haruki Murakami 

“Don’t feel stupid if you do not like what everyone else pretends to love.”

— Patrick Mimran 

Theater vs. Film

Blood From A Stone opened January 12th and will run til February 19th in NYC

It's a big surprise to me that theatre is my first love. I didn't know that when I was young. I loved theatre, but, as technology explodes more and more, I'm learning to love it even more.

There's a beautiful Milan Kundera quote in his new book where he talks about the birth of a new art form called cinema. It was completely usurped by big business. Basically, now, it's big business. It's not cinema as art. What qualifies as an art picture is not what qualifies as literary fiction — and what a shame that is.

As people start watching "The Godfather" on an iPhone on the subway, the theatre becomes more and more relevant, and you realize that this ancient art form is going to survive all of this. It's funny, with rock music, music is cheaper and cheaper…but a live Bruce Springsteen concert is still priceless. A great work of theatre is priceless. It can't be repeated.

There's a great Meryl Streep quote I heard recently. When she was younger and really into theatre, they were saying, "Movies are immortal." Now that she's older, she realizes, "God, all the movies are dated." The only thing that's immortal is her production of The Cherry Orchard 33 years ago. The people who saw it love it and remember it. That hasn't dated, whereas even "Silkwood" is dated. Theatre lives. When I meet somebody who says to me, "I saw you in Jack's Henry IV," the first thing that comes to my mind is "What night?" They say, "Oh, Christmas," and I say, "Was my voice hurting?" "Yeah, your voice was really ragged." "I know. I was having such trouble." It hasn't aged a day. That's the beauty of theatre. You can't buy it on your iPod. You can't download it on iTunes. That makes it more special now.

 - Ethan Hawke

Brief Encounter With Ethan Hawke. Harry Haun. January 2011

"I'm just trying to figure out how I'm gonna live my life now that I don't have a future that I can see... or feel."

"Just because it'll never be the same again, doesn't mean it won't get better." 

– Kris Kristofferson

-Sylvia Plath

“Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.”

— Anaïs Nin

“Now if you’re sad and you’re feeling blue
Go out and buy a brand new pair of shoes”

"Maggie M’Gill" - The Doors

“And you can’t feel alone if it’s all you’ve ever known.”

— A Song About an Anglerfish, Hank Green

"The first study for a man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of his entire self. He searches his soul, inspects it, he tests it, he learns it. As soon as he knows it, he cultivates it….But the soul has to be made monstrous. Imagine a man planting and cultivating warts on his face.” 

- Arthur Rimbaud

“I can’t stand the rain against my window bringing back sweet memories. I can’t stand the rain against my window because he’s not here for me..”

"I Can’t Stand the Rain" - Janis Joplin

“‎You only lose that which you cling to.”

“You take your life and make of it what you can. Open up your mind, stop thinkin’ ‘bout all of the things you will never show.” Silverchair

“I am still so naïve; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don’t ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?”  Sylvia Plath

“She was like a forest, like the dark interlacing of the oakwood, humming inaudibly with myriad unfolding buds. Meanwhile the birds of desire were asleep in the vast interlaced intricacy of her body.” D. H. Lawrence

“You can be very wild and still be very wise.”  Yoko Ono

“Self awakening enables you to see the human scene as it is, not as it appears to be, which frees you of its chaos.”   Vernon Howard

"And I tried to be a girl who likes to be used, I’m too good for that! There’s a mind under this hat.”  Laura Marling

“Your state of mind’s improved, but we’re still apart.” Silverchair

"another time or place, another civilization
would really make this life feel so complete"  Neil Young



“Well, I’m not the same person I was yesterday, so how could you know me? How could I know you? I’m trying still to figure out who I was ten years ago.”   Ethan Hawke