1 post tagged “handmade”

Photo of Ali wearing her costume for my choreography, "Left Bank," while I was in the process of adapting and fitting the clothes for all the dancers.  This photo shows a close-up of her unitard before the skirt and removable train were added.

20 years ago, I opened a magazine and read a story.  Probably I was doing one of my favorite companion activities:  reading and eating or reading and knitting.  By the end of the story, all I was doing was reading and weeping.  

That was Ann Packer's short story "Mendocino" that I was reading.  There was a gentleness and faith in humanity that came across like a specific, forgiving force.  People are human.  They have ways of surprising you by becoming more touchingly vulnerable than their irritating outer selves may let you notice.  That's what the story seemed to tell beneath the outer story about a sister, a beloved brother, and his off-putting new girlfriend.

Over the years, I ran across Packer's writing.  She seems to be a full-time mother, so her output is small.  A collection of short stories.  The Dive from Clausen's Pier.  Songs without Words.

Very appealing to me in quiet ways.  The stories of course featured "Mendocino."  I read the story after finding the collection in a bargain bin and sat still.  I'd read it before.  It came back to me.  Then at the library, years later, I browsed the new books and noticed "Ann Packer" -- hadn't I read and loved something by her?  So I picked it up and despite the irritating set-up -- characters whose lives and concerns are so terribly gringo, so terribly different from mine and not very interesting if I came across it as a movie or a blog entry -- I fell in love with her writing again.  The characters I came to care about despite myself.  The main character, Carrie, my god, how I came to live and breathe by her.  She heals herself by gently, numbly sewing something absolutely beautiful.  This unitard took me several hours to construct.  Just to create and the mount the lace, beads, and handcrafted ribbon roses and leaves took me well over 30 hours.  And there was more to the costume.  I was motivated by a need to make something beautiful.  Much of the time, there's a dreariness to making ends meet, to living in an irascible city full of narcissists equally challenged to make ends meet as myself, to living with life and its lovely or numbing surprises.  All that goes away when constructing something slowly by hand and by machine.  Packer captures that in "Dive."

Songs without Words was more difficult for me to like.  On first glance, it was easy to like.  Songs without words is also a name for "vocalise" or a vocal exercise that classical composers used to write (maybe they do still?) and the most famous of which is probably the hauntingly beautiful one remade for cello (or other stringed instrument) and mouth musician-singer Bobby McFerrin -- the one by Rachmaninoff.  The main characters are hard to like -- the kind of people that if I were to meet them on the street, I'd enjoy them as clients but I wouldn't want to become their friends, I wouldn't want to sit there and listen to their inner musings because I wouldn't have the patience for them.  And again, this is why Packer is a good writer:  I come to care for her characters.  They are not just what they seem to be, and perhaps the people that I, as I have gotten older, no longer bother getting to know have an inner richness that while not being the inner world that appeals to me, is still full of a quiet human value that is really no different from  my own or from that of my friends'.  (Yes, I know:  who's the narcissist here?)  And that to me is good writing:  when you come to care about a person that doesn't immediately suit your taste in people.

Sidenote:  sometimes people wonder why I barely watch movies and why I treat them with such disrespect -- considering them background noise to cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, tallying up the monthly bills, mending the sheets, etc.  (More on that later, I actually respect craft even if I don't respect the plot, the dialogue, the direction, the acting, etc.)  And it's usually because most movies don't have characters that I care about at all.  This is not to say that I'm a sociopath.  This is to say that the way people are presented on tv and in movies, they are to me implausible as real people or they're so consumed with some pathetic, contrived, manipulative drama constructed by a bunch of CEO's in some studio or development company that I have no interest in listening to their message.  There are plenty worthier messages to read/watch/hear out there.