US to Sarah Palin

I got the idea for this Sarah Palin poster about a week ago (click on image for larger one). This morning, email popped into my box about the Palin Political Poster Project. With 48 hours to prepare for the next leg of the film tour, I had no business designing this poster - but as John McCain likes to say, country first.

Chicago, IL: critical mass

Lots to catch up on since leaving SF Sept. 24th - successful, sartorially triumphant and emotionally twisted days in Dallas, incomparable week in Tennessee, and a so-far terrific time in Chicago with the exception of being cornered last night in my in-laws' suburban garage by a baseball-bat-wielding gangsta teen (I froze, James saved us). More about all that later! For now, the reviews are in, and Chicago likes my film:

"Stunning...Perhaps the finest film ever made on how people experience music, and one of the best-crafted and moving documentaries in a very long time."
- The Chicago Sun-Times

"Fascinating."
- The Chicago Tribune

"A remarkable film...highly, highly recommended."

- 98.7WFMT

Back east, they still like it:

"Intensely personal...nothing can quite prepare you for the experience."
- New Yorker critic Alex Ross

I don't think I mentioned that the film won a prize at the Rome International Film Festival (one of the finest regional film festivals in the southeastern United States) a few weeks ago:

Best Experimental Film

Most fun in Chicago so far was the morning I spent with Andrew Patner at WFMT. The interview was fluid and lively and Andrew did a great job segueing in and out of the musical selections, which included Messiaen playing "God Among Us" from the Nativity Suite, Albert Fuller playing the first movement of the Rameau Suite in A (Allemande), and Olivier Latry playing the Apparition. Favorite part was rummaging around the station's huge CD and LP collection to come up with those three tracks - when have I felt like such a kid in a candy shop? Oh yeah - Tennessee.

The interview with Andrew aired last night between 11 and midnight and I didn't get to listen. But it should be available as a podcast soon here.

If you're in Chicago or know someone who is - two more screenings of the film this week, including tomorrow's big show at the gaudily gorgeous (English rococo?) St. James Cathedral downtown:

• Saint James Cathedral, Chicago
Screening accompanied by Bruce Barber, organ
Q&A/reading/remarks
Wabash and Huron
Chicago
Wednesday, October 8, 2008, 7 p.m.
Free admission

• Loyola University Museum of Art

820 North Michigan Avenue
Chicago
Sunday, October 12, 2008, 1 p.m.

***UPDATE***

The WFMT interview is posted here:

10-06-08: Paul Festa (Filmmaker)

And a blog called "The Listening Sessions" just posted this write-up:

Thursday, October 9, 2008
... Paul Festa's "Apparition of the Eternal Church" ...

***SECOND UPDATE***
Another blog posting on the event:
Sunday, October 12, 2008
"All of this has happened before"
Apparition of the Eternal Church

"A fascinating portrait of how people experience music."


***THIRD UPDATE***
Chicago is apparently teeming with bloggers - more posts from the St. James show than in the last two years of screenings combined. Modesty prevents me from quoting this one, but secretly I'm pleased someone noticed the outfit.

Monday, October 13, 2008
The Year of Musical Thinking
Ghost Light Monday -- Apparition of the Eternal Church documentary film

Degenerate Art - in Berkeley! October 5th!

My friend Susan Waterfall - brilliant pianist - is presenting an evening of "Degenerate Art" - music, film and photos from Weimar. I'm very sorry to be out of town for this, which was a hit at this summer's Mendocino Music Festival. The details, from Susan:

“Degenerate Music!”: The Music of Weimar Berlin
Berkeley-Richmond Jewish Community Center Sunday October 5

Susan Waterfall, pianist and narrator, Erin Neff, mezzo soprano, and the Mendocino Music Festival Chamber Players, present an evening of music, film, and photographs.

After World War I, Weimar Berlin was a cauldron of artistic ferment as avant-garde artists and intellectuals, most of them Jewish, struggled to create a modern German culture. Exuberant freedom and hectic experimentation masked a sense of impending doom. After 1933, Hitler denounced them all as “degenerate” and their forced exile carried Weimar modernity to the rest of the world. The evening includes Joris Ivens’ twelve minute 1929 art film, "Rain," with an extraordinary score by Eisler, cabaret songs of Weill and Schoenberg, Weill’s String Quartet, and pieces from Three Penny Opera.

The Berkeley Richmond JCC’s newly restored theatre is at 1414 Walnut Street, at the corner of Walnut and Rose in North Berkeley. Concert begins at 7:30. 510-848-0237.
$15 Member, Senior, Student; $20 General.

Presented in association with the Goethe-Institut San Francisco and the Mendocino Music Festival.

art and dance in SF this weekend

My friend Jombi Supastar is having an art opening tomorrow night in the heart of the Castro.

Magnet, 4122 18th Street
Opening reception, Friday, 6 July, 8-10 p.m.
Normal hours: Tue 11 - 6pm Wed 2 - 9pm Thu 2 - 9pm Fri 2 - 9pm Sat 11 - 6pm

I'll see the show but miss the opening party because it conflicts with the second night of the Stephen Pelton Dance Theater show at Dance Mission, in which I'm playing the snappy number from the Ravel sonata for violin and cello. But you can do both! Our show is tonight, Friday and Saturday at 8, and Sunday at 7. Remember that no one is turned away for lack of funds.


June 5-8
Thursday - Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 7 p.m.
Dance Mission Theater
3316 24th St
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 826-4441

Two radio interviews Thursday

By chance, I am on two radio shows tomorrow and they're both on 91.7 listener-supported public radio KALW.

The first show, Artery ("cultural coverage that pumps blood to your brain"), airs about ten minutes before the 9 a.m. Terry Gross. It's a terrific piece, I think, with nicely integrated clips from Albert Fuller, Ana Matronic, Marga Gomez, and Harold Bloom. (Here's the mp3 if you missed it on the air.) I could nitpick at a few things - I didn't describe Christianity per se as repulsive, but its martyrdom art. And for my taste the introduction's use of the terms "liberal" and "conservative" - not to mention "bigotry" to characterize Messiaen's religion - is far too reductive. As always, you miss some things that wound up on the cutting room floor along with your stuttering, malapropisms and retractions, and on this issue of Messiaen's amalgam of theological orthodoxy and musical radicalism, I argued in a missing part of the conversation that some of Messiaen's theology - especially concerning the manifestation of God's voice in birdsong, and the unvarnished eroticism of his love of Christ - hardly qualifies as reactionary. Still, the reporter, Nathanael Johnson, got to the heart of things - he illuminated meaningful themes about belief and aesthetic bliss that I wanted the film to sound. It was gratifying to listen to his synthesis.

Bonus: on the Web page, Artery bestows upon OH MY GOD its first quotable criticism (actually the first thing pretty much anybody has said about it beyond "cool idea"):

"a beautiful and insightful book."

FYI - the text-only edition (no pictures, and only $15 as opposed to $40 for the fully illustrated version) is now available.

The second radio show I'm on tomorrow is Out In The Bay. It airs at today at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday April 13th at 2:00 p.m., with simultaneous streams at kalw.org. After that, you have 3 months to get the podcast or on-demand version out of the outinthebay.com archive.

Nine days until 4/18! Between now and then I have to get through two fundraisers, a number of rehearsals, a panel discussion at Grace Cathedral Sunday the 13th at 9:30 a.m. and several thousand more logistical details that need to be resolved by next week.

Also, if anyone knows how to get the print media to return my calls, let me buy you a beer

Southern Circuit 7: Paul Festa's last gasp

I hate to intrude on Socheata's tour, but I couldn't bear the thought of just vanishing from the blog without saying goodbye, as though some horrible disease had come and carried me off midsentence. That was only part of the problem.

Albert Fuller onscreen in Mobile, AL

In fact, the conspiracy against my blog was joined by several agents, disease being just one of them, and if I may say so it was overkill.

Justin Bond as Kiki DuRane onscreen in Mobile, AL

Even if I hadn't been denied Internet access at every turn, and even if I hadn't fallen prey to a numbing demoralization and loss of will facing down my Oh My God deadline, it was certainly enough to have gotten that nasty bug that left me, from Beaufort to Orangeburg to Montgomery through New Orleans (canceling my Mardi Gras) to Baton Rouge to Palm Beach to Mobile, writhing in bed with fevers in a sea of mucus, praying, in my secular-humanist way, for death.

John Cameron Mitchell onscreen in Mobile, AL

So now here I am, midway through someone else's tour, and I've just filed the final draft for the first edition of the book, and the mucus has dried up, and I'm preparing to head to New York for the screening there at St. Bart's, which will double as the book launch and triple as the New York premiere performance of Messiaen's Fantaisie for violin and piano, with my Yale and Juilliard classmate Melvin Chen tinkling the ivories.

Shanti Carson onscreen in Mobile, AL

I can't express how luxurious--almost irresponsible--it feels to be blogging after the nasty, brutish and short deadline of putting that book together, conception Thanksgiving to first edition Feb. 27th.

Ned Stresen-Reuter onscreen in Mobile, AL

And so I hate to waste my last Southern Circuit blog entry complaining about all the things that went wrong on my tour--they were acts of God, for the most part, and clearly she did NOT like my movie.

Elizabeth Povinelli onscreen in Mobile, AL

But amid the viruses and tornadoes there were incomparable moments of human error, such as scheduling my movie to coincide with both the Superbowl (Orangeburg) and Ash Wednesday (uber-Catholic Baton Rouge), and screening my movie at a South Carolina high school for 10th graders without bothering to look at it beforehand (Wayne Koestenbaum: "It also sounds--this is obscene--like being fucked by light. Fucked by light!" "OK THAT'S ENOUGH, THIS SCREENING IS OVER AND NOW WE'RE GOING TO SPEND THE REST OF THE CLASS PERIOD TALKING ABOUT CENSORSHIP.").

Wayne Koestenbaum onscreen in Mobile, AL

Since I know full well you get what you pay for, should I have been surprised that there was a dead pizza in my fridge at the Montgomery airport Motel 6? And I got so much great press that it would be absolutely churlish to point out that the Mobile Vanguard chose to alternate spellings of my name between Festa and Zesta.

Justin Bond as Kiki DuRane onscreen in Mobile, AL

The abovementioned conspiracy against this blog and its author had so many layers of redundancy built into it, so that before long an elaborately choreographed dance of fuck-ups began to emerge from the ruins of my Columbia happiness, and I saw that I could literally set my watch to the pace of disasters.

John Cameron Mitchell onscreen in Mobile, AL

Something went wrong approximately every 12 and a half minutes. I missed my flight out of Columbia after Orangeburg. I left a Thin Man book-on-CD disc in the rental car and my computer lock on the keychain. In Montgomery, I had to rent an SUV. I continued getting hate mail from Athens. The wheel on my suitcase broke. The Motel 6 WiFi in Palm Beach was broken. The Motel 6 WiFi in Baton Rouge didn't exist. I cannot blog under these conditions!

Michael Warner onscreen in Mobile, AL

My movie played to audiences of a dozen people. In Beaufort it played to fewer than that in the back of an office.

a sold-out screening of Apparition of the Eternal Church in Beaufort, SC

In Montgomery, my name on the marquee of the Art Deco Capri Theater brought in a total of 13 people.

"Control Paul Festa"

I am box office poison!

I have seen my name in lights, and it isn't pretty

In Baton Rouge, in the most beautiful modern theater I've ever seen, much less screened in, I forgot to give them the new DVD and the one they had tiled up and froze halfway through, eliciting a panic attack by the director.

In Baton Rouge they didn't know I was box office poison and gave me a star dressing room.

In Florida the movie screened at the Palm Beach Community College to an audience of 11 undergraduates who made NOT ONE SOUND from the moment they entered the theater to the moment they fled from it. A perfectly silent Q&A, which calls into question my use of the letter Q.

Harold Bloom onscreen in Mobile, AL

And then--Mobile. Closing night. In a jewelbox theater at the public library, following blanket press coverage--two stories in the Mobile Press-Register and ads and write-ups in every tabloid and posters around town--a full house!

wrap that blanket press coverage around me

More people saw the film in Mobile than the rest of the tour combined--including Greenville.

Squeaky Blonde onscreen in Montgomery, AL

Great questions afterwards, good sales at the Bar Nothing Boutique. And then, after sushi with the delightful and miraculously competent Charlie Smoke of the Mobile Arts Council (on whose Website is posted the unedited transcript of the Mobile Press-Register interview), a celebratory Oreo McFlurry at the downtown MacDonalds and a glorious, complimentary night's rest at the Holiday Inn, with a 14th-floor view of Mobile and a bed with a 1000-thread-count sheets and a pillow menu.

Manoel Felciano onscreen in Mobile, AL

At the Motel 6 I'm not 100 percent sure those things on the bed were pillows.

Ilan Greenberg onscreen in Mobile, AL

And the next day, feeling like Jack Bauer speeding down the highway on a mission of harrowing consequence, I drove my PT Cruiser into the French Quarter, parked it, and staged a commando raid on the Cafe du Monde, where I slammed down a plate of beignets and a cafe au lait before I ran back to the car, returned it, and got my flight out of Louis Armstrong International with minutes to spare and powdered sugar all over my shirt.

Jackie Beat onscreen in Mobile, AL

Socheata, back to you.

Oh My God: Messiaen in the Ear of the Unbeliever

I haven't updated this blog in three weeks because I've been obsessed with a new project: turning my movie, Apparition of the Eternal Church, into a book: "Oh My God: Messiaen in the Ear of the Unbeliever." I started this project over Thanksgiving, sneaking hours while visiting James's family in Aurora, IL, to prepare the transcript of the movie, and now I'm jamming to get it finished and self-published and delivered in time for January screenings of the film. So I am under some deadline pressure.

Here are a few of my favorite pages from the book so far. They are incomplete--the white space at the bottom will hold a sort of "director's commentary," possibly in my illegible handwriting. At this point I have no idea what it will say. In any case, this is a work in progress, so whether or not you know the movie, feedback is welcome! Share your thoughts in the blog comments or email me (paulfesta at gmail dot com).

Also--remember to click on the images for bigger versions (important when there's 10-pt font to read!).

Jackie Beat

Albert Fuller

Harold Bloom

Ron Gallman

Sandi Dubowski

Karen Hartman

Wayne Koestenbaum

Justin Bond as "Kiki"

Squeaky Blonde

John Cameron Mitchell

SAD reading list

Whenever I remove myself from human society in order to get some serious writing done, I expect my mood to nosedive. In this instance, shut in a small cabin with the dog and the novel and a woodstove, I have not helped myself with my choice of reading material--Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close and, read by the author on CD, Beloved. This is my first exposure to Foer, and while, 230 pages into the book, Oskar Schell is irresistible, Foer's stylistic and typographical experiments are not (he might find this funny--my copy from the San Francisco Public Library has a handwritten note indicating that there is "writing on pp. 208-216"). Toni Morrison's mostly whispered performance of Beloved is devastating when it isn't totally inaudible. Toni, speak up! Don't you know everyone's listening to this in the car?

Between American slavery, 9/11 and the firebombing of Dresden, who needs Seasonal Affective Disorder? I am counterbalancing all of the above with five-hour pool-playing sessions with Pierrot across the valley, every other night, and, on alternate nights, practicing the Tchaikovsky violin concerto, whose first movement is the happiest music written after the death of Schubert. Ludicrous piling on of intense, throbbing, cherry-popping, Ecstasy-fueled happiness! If Tchaikovsky were alive today he'd be writing music for circuit parties.

Which is such a good segue to the other thing I read today--Steve Martin's personal essay in the New Yorker about his first regular comedy gig, at Knott's Berry Farm in the 60s. It includes this vignette:

Working on a college project about Charles Ives, (college roommate) Phil (Carey) landed an interview with Aaron Copland...Three days after we left Los Angeles, Phil and I arrived at Copland's house, a low-slung A-frame with floor-to-ceiling windows, in a dappled forest by the road. We knocked on the door, Copland answered, and over his shoulder we saw a group of men sitting in the living room wearing what looked like skimpy black thongs. He escorted us back to a flagstone patio, where I had the demanding job of turning the tape recorder on and off while Phil asked questions about Copland's creative process. We emerged a half hour later with the coveted interview and got in the car, never mentioning the men in skimpy black thongs, because, like trigonometry, we couldn't quite comprehend it.

I know next to nothing about Copland's life, but in my imagination he was the nerdy bookish side-kick to Lenny's high-living, dry-fucking, student-molesting sot. It really warmed my heart to learn that Copland was getting his share of scandal and thong.

The other lovely thing from the Martin essay:

Through the years, I have learned that there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration.

I will take comfort in this while both are in short supply.

Emily Litella lives

Anyone who watched the original cast of Saturday Night Live, and many people who didn't, are familiar with Gilda Radner's persnickety and hard-of-hearing heroine Emily Litella, who appeared regularly as a commentator on Weekend Update and complained about contemporary outrages such as "busting schoolchildren" and "the deaf penalty" until Chevy Chase or Jane Curtin set her straight. (Wikipedia lists her other aural misprisions in an informative entry.)

Nothing she did on television is half as hilarious as this segment from her 1979 off-Broadway show Gilda Live, which I discovered courtesy of YouTube:



A year ago, not having seen the Radner act since adolescence, James and I put together this Emily L. tribute, set to the Lovermakers' tune "Shake That Ass," for Trannyshack's Hairisson Street Fair celebration Hair Ball.

Dance review: Donna Uchizono's Thin Air

Yesterday, since I wasn't going to a second showing of Appommatox, I was free to accept comps, from my old Youth Orchestra pal Rob Bailis, for a showing of Donna Uchizono's "Thin Air," which plays twice more at ODC Dance Theater (which Rob directs), tonight and Saturday.

"Thin Air" was the perfect antidote to my night at the opera, though at first I didn't recognize it as such. The piece started out with three dancers perched on ladders, bobbing their heads. They bobbed, then they kept bobbing, and when they were through with that they bobbed some more. I didn't think to check my watch but experientially it was about a quarter hour of bobbing. Then, very slowly, someone raised an arm. I thought Oh no. This.

Oh no quickly turned to oh my god. Somewhere early in the unfolding of her ideas (in my case, after the bobbing) Uchizono got our attention and she did not relinquish it until the house lights came up. She has a virtuoso sense of scale, zeroing in on riveting miniatures in one scene and zooming back out to big stark pictures in the next. Her use of video projection was actually poignant. I could try to describe some of her devices but choose not to, because there's so much pleasure in the surprise of watching them emerge.

That said, I'm going to go again Saturday and bring James. For the sheer concentration of interesting ideas, for the high success rate of its many experiments, you should go see this for yourself. So should the creators of Appommatox. Ticket information is here.

Opera review: Appomattox

Two friends from out of town invited me to the world premiere performances at the San Francisco Opera of Appomattox, the Philip Glass and Christopher Hampton work about Lee's surrender in the Civil War. I took the first opportunity, with my friend Myrlin from Short Mountain, Tennessee, thinking I would also go with Juliette, from Albion Ridge, tonight, if I liked it. Suddenly I find myself without Thursday evening plans.

Two caveats: One is that I cannot responsibly review the opera because I only got through the first half. I wrestled with my decision to desert at the intermission, weighing factors like my credibility as a critic, the $30 I'd paid Myrlin for his second senior rush ticket, and the possibility the opera would redeem itself in the second act. I finally decided that any work that had proceeded for its entire first half without a single interesting idea emanating from the stage or the orchestra pit was probably better left for dead on the battlefield.

The second caveat is that when I was a violin student Philip Glass was extremely generous to me. For my third-year recital at Juilliard, I put on "An Evening of American Music" and closed the first half with the Knee Play 4, an interlude from his first opera Einstein on the Beach in which Einstein plays violin to the accompaniment of a four-part male choir. As rehearsals started with the singers, I opened the Manhattan phone book, found the composer's number, called him up and told him what I was doing. He invited me and my singers down to his house in the East Village and we ran through the number for him. He not only gave us a coaching, but on the spot he composed for us a concluding passage that would make the interlude work as a concert piece. Later that week he sat for a telephone interview, which I printed in my program notes and which, if I can find the file, I'll post to my Web site one of these days.

I endured a fair amount of jeering snobbery from Juilliard faculty and classmates for programming Glass--one of my collaborators on the program made a point of leaving the theater before Knee Play 4 began. But I loved Einstein on the Beach. I'd discovered the music when I was twelve years old and it had an absolutely druggy impact on my imagination. At twelve, I couldn't have put words to the experience, but I was hearing something genuinely revolutionary (whether Glass touched off the revolution or just popularized it), something revolutionarily clean, vital, downtown, Eastern, technological (despite relying almost entirely on the human voice and traditional acoustic instruments), neon and new. Einstein's hallmark was the radical transparency of its harmonic language after seventy years of musical drip-painting, clarity that put into high relief not only the strangeness of the libretto and the vividness of Robert Wilson's stagecraft but the newness and singularity of Glass's instrumentation and timbre. After all the Juilliard jeering I was afraid my love affair with Einstein couldn't survive whatever sophistication I'd acquired since the age of twelve, but I went to the BAM revival in the early 90s and loved every minute of it. I stand by Einstein, I respect Glass, and I hurl mean thoughts at all the snobs I went to school with.

That's part of what made Appommatox such a dismal experience, feeling in my own response to it the dismissal and derision with which my friends left the recital hall before Knee Play 4. The first act of this new opera was stupefying. How else can we receive a ten-minute scene in which the women sing "war is sorrowful" over and over again over utterly unilluminating harmonic noodling in the orchestra? It's either sublime simplicity or numbing insipidity, and judging from the response of the audience in the dress circle, most people got numb. Einstein too was built on repetition, but with the newness of the way Glass wrote for the voice and the freshness of the ideas he and Wilson manifested, the results were always intriguing if not downright beautiful. In Appomattox, scene after scene unfolded according to a formula of idea-free reiteration.

"It's pretty glum," said Myrlin at halftime. "But it's war, and war is glum."

OK, I'll swallow the glum pill. But at least give me some hope it will be good for me! It's 1865, the women are all dressed for a Victorian funeral, the set with its blood-red moat looks like it was borrowed from a modern-dress production of Turandot, the libretto reads like the remix of a History Channel transcript, and the accent coach and the production's grim determination to be historically accurate have Mrs. Lee belting out lines like "Husband, it is not RAAAAAAAAGHT for you to do so!"

What I missed in the second half: Lee and Grant negotiate a surrender (negotiations!). Interruptions in which racial injustice from the near and distant future is portrayed (education!). A looting scene, and then a reprise: women lament the tragedy of war, the orchestra noodles.

My recommendation: take the money you would have put toward a ticket and get the original recording of Einstein, with the surpassingly pure and luminous soprano Iris Hiskey.

Boston poster

My movie Apparition of the Eternal Church is playing at the Boston University Messiaen Project international conference "Messiaen the Theologian." It's part of their three-year observance of Messiaen's 100th in 2008.

I spent most of the day working on this variation of the New York premiere poster and the DVD cover art. It will also appear on t-shirts for sale after the show, because documentary filmmakers gotta eat. I'm looking forward to the screening, after which I have 22 hours in which to get nervous about giving the Fantaisie premiere. The Fantaisie (1933) is one of only three pieces that Messiaen wrote for violin and piano, and that's including the single movement from the Quartet for the End of Time. There's no recording of the Fantaisie. So I'm guessing that even in a group of Messiaen scholars, the vast majority of the audience will never have heard the piece.

Click on the poster for a larger version:

Alex Ross makes my day

The New Yorker music critic mentions both Albert Fuller's Rendezvous Lounge and Apparition of the Eternal Church in this most gratifying of blog entries.

from Boonville to Berkeley: Bulrusher

Eisa Davis's play Bulrusher, which was nominated for a 2007 Pulitzer, is coming to the Ashby Stage in Berkeley Sept. 19 to Oct 21. I'm going Thursday night with a Mendocino friend--it's pay what you can the first weekend.

The play is written partly in the Boonville dialect known as Boontling. You don't have to be able to harp the ling to get the play, but here's the playwright's glossary in case you want to bone up beforehand (click images for larger versions):

another rave review for Twelfth Night

This from the September 7th edition of the Pacific Sun, which I would not reproduce here if I had a modest bone in my body. (Here's the pdf link--the review is on print page 33.)

...Bay Area theater veteran Worsley is superb as the deluded and delusional Malvolio...

Director Mary Beth Cavanaugh succeeds with some bold chances in this modern-dress production. On a wide empty stage—the only props are some gold-painted chairs and a few swords—she combines contemporary dance, pop music, slapstick comedy and Shakespearean dialogue to delightful effect. The show moves along briskly, with a great performance by Karrick as the perpetually intoxicated Sir Toby. The athletic Hernandez is his perfect counterpart as the volatile, hip-hop attired Sir Andrew. The ephemeral Kalli Jonnson does a marvelous interpretation of Feste, the wandering jester who manages to always be in the right place at the right time to propel the plot, tweaking the curiosity of the main characters with entertaining riddles and extracting fees for doing so.

In many ways the most astounding performer of all is Paul Festa, in the minor roles of Curio and the Priest. At key moments in the production, the multi-talented Festa (essayist, novelist, filmmaker, actor, musician) strolls about onstage with his violin, playing either unaccompanied or with recordings. It’s a brilliant, evocative bit of theater that helps lift this show to an unusually high artistic level.

North Bay Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is a funny, entertaining and artistically adventurous production. It heralds a bright future for the company, Hamilton Amphitheater Park and the Marin County theater community.

diary: Wyoming bloodbath

Paul Festa
to linda
Jul 16

hi mamma--

I just arrived in Jentel after a traumatic trip. Last night at 10:30 coming over a mountain pass on 90 between Idaho and Montana I broadsided a deer. It was scary and then it was gruesome and then it was sad. At some point I'll post the details in a blog entry but for now I'm just too exhausted and talked out about it.

Jentel is surprisingly beautiful and deluxe. They emphasize the rustic and the rugged in their promotional materials but I'm reminded of the [...] summer digs. High style with a southwestern flair. the other 4 residents now here seem very nice--a fifth, also from San Francisco, is also late.

more soon--about Oregon etc--and [...]

Love,
Paul



Paul Festa
Tue, Jul 17, 2007 at 7:58 PM
To: James

Hello my dear,

I am in the little computer room/library on the second floor of this swank house where the residents all sleep and take their meals. This place is cush! I was expecting something on the rustic side but it more resembles a $500/night Santa Fe bed & breakfast. Only they don't feed you breakfast--we're on our own for all meals. It's a nice big kitchen overlooking a nice big dining area, living room (with conversation pit) and vast windows overlooking the paved back porch area and the green meadow beyond. They've been getting a lot of rain up here and the landscape is surprisingly green. Rocky hills are behind us, a creek (which visual artist Mike and painter Kristen and I inner-tubed down this afternoon before dinner) wends its way through the valley and right by the retreat, and a short bike ride away there's a lake good for swimming. I haven't been there yet. I've spent a lot of time sleeping so far, not surprising considering how I got here and the caffeine withdrawal and the version of Mendocino sleepies that's common to all artist residencies and lasts at least three days. I barely got any work done today.

Thanks for being there for me when I called the other night so distraught about the accident. In the bright light of day it's hard to even conjure the horror of that experience, and the sadness that overwhelmed me afterward. I really do have the heart of a vegetarian! Meanwhile I passed (and actually hit) the corpse of another deer some hours later, and after that saw a dead dog on the side of the road, and several other smaller roadkill. A couple of the artists here collect these specimins and paint them. I'm very glad Ziggy's not here! They all went for a walk this morning and saw a four-foot rattlesnake. So far all I've seen is a little garter snake and a bunny rabbit.

[...]




Paul Festa to Jim
Jul 17

Hi Jim--

I've been on the road almost continuously since I saw you last and have finally landed in a place where I will stay put for a month, the artist retreat in Wyoming. It's heavenly--landscape, campus, residents and staff. I had a somewhat traumatic drive here, via the Oregon Country Fair (a giant hippie outdoor mall)--the drive was endless, half again as long as Google Maps suggested, and crossing the stateline between Idaho and Montana on a mountain pass in the middle of the night I broadsided a deer. It was scary, gruesome, and sad, and having been on the road for the previous 12 hours I was not in a particularly stable frame of mind to begin with. I didn't manage to kill the deer, which was the very worst thing about it, and then there is the condition of my car, which I might have totaled though I did manage to drive it the rest of the way to Banner, Wyoming, going 60 miles an hour while everyone was passing me at 85.

[...]

New York, Israel and Paris were all overstimulating. How has your last month and a half been?

Love,
Paul



Paul Festa
Wed, Jul 18, 2007 at 2:11 PM
To: Holcombe

so great to get your message--it was on my list of things to do online to look you up on tribe and say hi and thanks for all the fun hours at OCF. I have an idea to be a vendor next year. No more of this tourist-without-a-wristband bullshit!

wyoming is amazing so far--this place, the jentel artist residency program, is really swank, a big surprise--I was expecting rustic. A river wends its way around our little campus (6 residents, 3 of us queer) and a lake is said to be a short bike ride away. rocky hills above us past the river and the Bighorn Mtns. in the distance. the weather has been pretty mild, with a few thunderstorms. lots of snakes and rabbits out here, and I'm keeping my eyes open for antelope, which are common as deer out here.

speaking of deer, I had a traumatic drive from OCF after broadsiding one on the mountain pass at the Idaho-Montana stateline, in the middle of the night, after 12 hours of driving. Unfortunately, I just wounded the animal--heartbreaking! I was running back up Highway 90 with a flare in my hand to warn other cars when I saw the flashing lights of a state trooper, and stopped running (and burst into tears) a minute later when his gun fired, twice. I have to get going now because I'm taking my car into Buffalo to a body shop. It's pretty smashed up--kind of a miracle that the airbags didn't inflate and that the car was drivable the rest of the way here (15 mph under the speed limit until the sun came up--boy was I spooked, esp. after the (cute) trooper warned me that elk were also on the roads...)

thank you for the portland invitation! i would love to visit and spend more time with you. I don't think this is going to be the time to do it, because I want to spend time in Yellowstone on my way out of here, and then visit friends in Nevada, and my next destination is Camp Kunst-Stoff in Willits if I can work the event, Aug 17-19. I'm anxious to hear your music! Thanks for the link--and for looking at my essays. Hopefully I'll have a novel to show you one of these, um, years.

Love,
scribble



Paul Festa to Cory
Jul 19

Hi Cory! The rest of my OCF experience was brief. I hung out with Holcombe and some of his buddies at the campground, ate some dinner, passed out, packed up, and drove to wyoming. I almost made it here safely, but crossing the Idaho-Montana stateline, in the middle of the night after driving 12 hours, I broadsided a deer. I'll spare you the details. Suffice it to say that I'm grateful not to have been injured,and sorry about what happened to that poor animal and my poor car.

I'm here at an artist retreat and like it very much--there are five other residents and we're all watching the sky wondering what the hell we're going to do if Mother Nature makes good on the tornado warning that was just broadcast on the radio. The area (near Banner) is spectacularly beautiful--surprisingly green, hilly, with the bighorn mountains in the distance to the southeast, antelope and deer, rabbits, bullsnakes, rattlers all spotted just in the first few days here. I have my work cut out for me--I'm aiming to write the third draft of a novel. My computer just arrived--Apple just replaced the optical drive for the second time.

[...]

xx,
pf



Paul Festa
Sat, Jul 21, 2007
To: James

[...]

I'm doing OK about the novel. I've ramped up very quickly to my 6 hours/day routine, and they've been productive if painful hours. Yes, I'm excited about where the novel is going, but before you get excited you have to be demoralized about how bad the previous work is,especially work that was revised ad nauseum--you have to grieve the deaths of all those little darlings, which took so much time and effort, revision and residencies and reading aloud, to produce. I swore Wyoming would be a bloodbath--and this was before I knew I would hit a deer--and I'm going to make good on that. I'm just not going to enjoy very much of it.

It helped to finally start writing the third draft, this new document into which I've forbidden myself to cut and paste. So far it's a really good discipline, and a lot of things that would have seemed impossible to delete are, in fact, not getting typed in. I've radically rewritten the opening chapter--not revised, rewritten--so that will take a lot of tinkering and reading aloud, etc., before it's settled, but I think it's a better foundation. That thought does battle for my mood with the dread of how much similar rewriting remains, and that dread is a powerful motivator to produce a much shorter draft this time.

I'm just facing up to the hard lesson any writer has to face, which is that this is a necessarily destructive process, and you're not destroying some external object, you're destroying something that came out of you, something you flattered yourself at one point to not consider shit. I have to keep reminding myself of the blithe energy with which Picasso painted over his bulls and turned them into women and flowers, though it's worth noting that his objects rose and fell and were finally born in a matter of hours, while I (we novelists) have to endure this process over years.

[...]

Love,
Paul


Paul Festa
Sun, Jul 22, 2007 at 12:41 PM
To: linda

Hi Mamma--

Unless USAA throws me a curveball, it looks like Ed should just repair the car. I think he took pity on me and deliberately skewed the estimate low so that the car wouldn't get totaled out. If it were totaled out (for example if USAA quibbled with the pre-accident worth of the car), then USAA would offer me a check for that value and the company would own the car. I would have first right of purchasing it back from them for the salvage value. This is how both Ed and the USAA agent described the situation to me. Ed, meanwhile, said if I did buy it back, he would buy it from me in turn and for a few more hundred dollars--he seemed very interested in the car. So I think he overrode some personal interest in lowballing the estimate.

Things here are going very well after some brutal days staring at the novel and the harsh comments of my readers. I appreciate and ask for unvarnished honesty but it's still very painful to read, re-read, come to grips with, synthesize along with my own judgment. Plus I was still upset for much of the week about the nightmarish experience of hitting the deer and the consequences for it and for my car. But after two or three depressive days, the work is going really well. I'm rewriting the novel from the ground up, in a new Word document. This revision technique was recommended to me by a MacDowell writer and it's really proving its worth. The standard method is to delete things from the existing draft, perhaps write over them, but that is a destructive, painful process. Now it's just a passive matter of unworthy leaving things behind, with the option of adding them later, and so I'm anticipating a much leaner novel when I finish. That will certainly not be by the time I leave here--with three weeks left I'm only ten pages into the new draft.

There's one other San Franciscan here, a painter, and she and I are the stay-at-home workaholics. The others went to the movies last night; they just took off to go see show trials. [...] I like most of my fellow residents well enough and we have pleasant interactions but nobody likes a workaholic and that would describe me for the duration of this residency. I get out on my bike every evening for an hour at sunset, when it's cool, and the surrounding landscape is breathtaking, rocky hills on either side of our flat green valley, and the Bighorn mountains in the distance, the sky full of magnificent cloud formations and electrical storms throwing around distant, oddly silent lightning bolts. it feels like we're on a nature preserve--deer and antelope by the dozens, wild turkey, bull snakes and rattlers (I haven't seen one of these yet but the others have), rabbits and of course a menagerie of insects. I vacuum my studio for box elder bugs, living and dead, four or five times a day, and the day I read about the first West Nile cases in Wyoming I got three mosquito bites. In any case these bike rides and my three meals are my only leisure time. I carve out two hours a day for reading, and while I'm enjoying (fellow MacDowell fellow) Mary Gaitskill's Veronica a lot, I'm struggling with [...]. I have to look up two to four words on every page! And they're not big pages! In any case I will leave Jentel with a bigger vocabulary, but not a bigger circle of friends. Also, hopefully, the first half of a much smaller novel.

[...]

Love,
Paul



Paul Festa to Tom
Jul 24

Hiya Tom--

I just logged into friendster when I realized that I don't have your email address! how could that be? email me at paulfesta@gmail.com.

I picked up your message in the middle of a long and extremely difficult road trip, from Eugene OR (oregon country fair) to Wyoming where I'm at an artist retreat for another 3 weeks. the night you called I broadsided a deer on the Hwy. 90 mountain pass at the Idaho-Montana stateline. Horrible! middle of the night, no shoulder, no cell reception, car just about totaled (but operational), the animal not quite dead. truly one of the worst experiences and, if I may say so, a grand excuse to be late in getting back to you. I've been a little scatterbrained since then.

In Wyoming is this small artist's retreat in the micro town of Banner called Jentel (http://www.jentelarts.org). I'm here with five others for a month and I'm beginning the third draft of my novel. I'm also trying to learn a hideously difficult violin part for a Messiaen quartet I'm supposed to play in the spring. It will take me exactly that long to learn it.

Meanwhile it's great to hear from you and do email me at gmail so we can be in touch more easily.

xx,
pf



Paul Festa
Mon, Jul 30, 2007 at 1:51 PM
To: Greg

Dear Greg--

I write from Wyoming, where I've been rewriting my book at a residency here for the last two weeks. I had a fantasy about finishing the third draft here, but it's very slow going and with only two weeks left I'm going to have to content myself with getting through about a third of it. Still, this place is beautiful, in a green valley filled with wildlife--we see antelope and deer, porcupines, wild turkeys, bull snakes and rattlers. I'm the stay-at-home workaholic of the group but did join the 5 others to catch a production of The Laramie Project in town the other night. College and high school kids put it together and what they lacked in acting skill and experience they made up for in passion for the play.

[...]

Love,
Paul



Paul Festa
To: Suzan
July 28

Sorry you won't be able to join us--do wish john a happy birthday for me and break a leg performing! Yes, brunch on the deck was the last gathering, and I have your crepe-maker to prove it.

My summer has been a little nuts. Getting out of town was nuts, New York was nuts, Israel was nuts twice, first visiting my sister in Tsfat and then faeries in Tel Aviv who took me to a celebration of [...] in the Negev for the summer solstice; then Paris was really nuts especially after Air France lost my valise. It arrived in San Francisco just as James was leaving to pick me up at the airport.

I had a brief stay in SF and then drove to the Oregon Country Fair, a big outdoor hippie shopping mall and then drove to Wyoming, where, crossing from Idaho into Montana in the middle of teh night after driving all day, with no shoulder and no cell coverage, I struck a deer, didn't manage to kill it, and totaled my car.

So now I'm stranded in Wyoming. The plan is for James to pick me up and then we'll do the drive together, a few nights in Yellowstone. A woman at the Berkeley Rep school of theater wants me to play fiddle in her production of 12th night, along with a couple of tiny roles, and I'll have about five minutes to learn my lines and rehearse between getting back and the start of previews.

I'm very flattered and gratified you're looking at my blog and I look forward to looking at yours. Mine appears to be a complete ghost town. Write some comments goddamn it!

LOVE (and hi to Lizzi)
pf



Paul Festa
Sat, Jul 28, 2007 at 2:38 PM
To: Robin

Hi Robin! I write from the Gentile Artist Residency Program (http://www.jentelarts.org) which is very near Ucross but is smaller, just six of us here for a month in swank southwestern-style house in a lush valley that resembles an animal preserve. they do have bikes here but I brought my own and have been riding it every evening there isn't lightning in the sky.

I am rewriting the novel from the ground up, a method of revision suggested to me by someone (you?) at MacDowell. It is very slow going, but I'm pleased with early results.

congrats on the jaffe! I got a small grant recently, on my way here, in the form of a collision with a deer that (sickeningly) didn't quite kill the animal but totaled my car. I wasn't quite prepared to be carless but it will certainly save some moola and tide me over to some income-generating spring screenings of my movie.

Yes let's get together in September! Brunch on my north-facing deck, while there's still sun.

Love,
pf


Paul Festa
To: Barry

[...]

How was Sea Ranch? I just farted thinking about Luca.

Wyoming is, in your phrase, spectacular nature. The real spectacles are off in the distance--the bighorn mountains. We have a small green valley and rolling rocky hills, but the profusion of wildlife is astonishing. I spend ten hours a day in my studio and most of the rest of it in the house preparing meals and sleeping, but just in my ritual sunset bike rides I've seen dozens of antelope and deer including lots of bucks and spotted fauns, two porcupines (the only two I've ever seen outside of a zoo), a rattlesnake, on the path five feet from the front door, two bull snakes on the road, and no end of cute little rabbits, everywhere. Adam, a Pittsburgh painter, saw a golden eagle a few mornings in a row, but everyone's jealous of me because of my porcupine sighting (there's a picture on a recent entry of my blog).

The other five artists are very friendly but I'm the workaholic recluse of the group. I don't take my meals with them because it just takes too long, and I decline invitations to town, to the county fair (that hurt), to hike in the hills, to tube down the river. I feel the cost of this trip, mostly to James who is chained to the house with full dog responsibilities, and I feel a tremendous impatience to get this draft finished. I had a fantasy about finishing by the time I left, but the pace of the rewrite is making December/January a more likely completion date. Your comments continue to goad me to clarity and directness in my prose--and I would like to have said brevity too but the new draft is shaping up (at p. 50) to be exactly as long as the last one. Still, I think it moves faster--and dirtier, as Daniel Handler put it in the prior crit.

Love to Dan!

Love,
pf



Paul Festa to David
Aug 1

Hi David--

I'm still here--the Jentel sessions run for a month from the 15th to the 13th. I've been an incredible workaholic here, at it seven hours a day for 15 days straight now. The idea of taking a vacation day seems terrifying! The going is slow--I'm rewriting the book from the ground up, retyping it into a new document. Some parts from the second draft are going in almost verbatim, but not before going through the very fine-toothed comb of my having to type each word.

Forgive me if this is repeat from my Tribe email, but i inaugurated the trip with a car accident, broadsiding a deer on a mountain pass just over the Montana border on 90, middle of the night, no shoulder, no cell coverage, wounded animal, hysterical queen. Twenty minute later, gunshots from a state trooper, tears. Since then, autobody shop, insurance, parents, etc. None of this counts toward my seven hours.

How's by you?

xx,
s


Paul Festa to Mike
Aug 3

[...]

I've had a crazy summer since I last saw you. Israel was nuts, Paris, nuts, Oregon Country Fair and the drive to Wyoming, nuts (I totaled my car colliding with a deer, mountain pass, middle of the night, no shoulder, no cell coverage, dear not quite dead until a state trooper came along and put a few bullets in her). I've been a complete workaholic since I've been here, taking only one night off so far to catch a production of the Laramie Project in the nearest town. I've written about 60 pages of a ground-up rewrite, which incorporates a lot of the old draft but I'm writing it in a new document. On my evening bike rides I'm seeing a ton of wildlife--a couple of porcupines, wild turkeys, deer and antelope, rattlesnakes and bull snakes. the other 5 residents are more social, the eat together and hang out every evening, so I'm the oddball recluse, but I knows what I came here to do and it wasn't to spend 3 hours around the grill every night with wine! Today's my one day off from the novel and so am happy to catch up with you a bit.

Will I see you en route to or from BLC? I got a gig playing violin and some very tiny parts in a production of 12th night in the north bay every weekend in September, so I will be busy but daytimes will be good.

love,
pf



Paul Festa to Christopher
Aug 8 (4 days ago)

[...]

How are things with you? I'm in Wyoming where I have been working my brains out on the novel, preparing to play violin and a few small parts in 12th Night, and recovering (emotionally) from totaling my car on my way here. I struck a deer on 90 coming over the Montana state line, mountain pass, middle of the night, no shoulder, no cell coverage. Cute cop though. When he shot the poor wounded animal I burst into tears.

xx,
pf

Paul Festa to Christopher
Aug 9 (3 days ago)

Yeah, the deer thing was pretty awful, made worse by the fact that I'd been on the road for 13 or 14 hours at that point jacked on caffeine. Fortunately the accident wasn't through my own error--I was driving under the speed limit--she was just right there when i came over the hill around a curve and when I honked and slammed on my brakes she just stood there and stared at me like a...well, you know the rest.

MacDowell Colony: Landlines

When I was at MacDowell late last year, Oct-Dec, an artist by the name of Anna Schuleit was working on a big installation having to do with telephones for MacDowell's centenary celebration. A few days ago, I got email explaining that

one hundred telephones -- that taboo device at a colony meant for undisturbed creative work -- have been temporarily installed on one hundred trees across MacDowell’s grounds by Schuleit's team of more than 200 volunteers. On Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, as the thousands of celebrants walk the grounds, the telephones — drawn from every decade of the 20th century and with 100 different sounds — will begin to ring.

But who will be calling?

Why, it will be YOU. Colony Fellows from across the country and across the decades. It is you, those who cannot be here, who will play the most important role of all: to call and lend your voice to the Colony’s 100^th anniversary.

[...]

We ask, we plead, we implore, we beg, and we so hope that you, a friend of MacDowell, will dial your phone and tell a story, ask a question, pose a riddle, sing a song or otherwise reach out to meet one of the celebrants on the Colony property for this once-in-a-lifetime event. Your call will pass through an old fashioned switchboard operated by children from Peterborough. They will connect your incoming call, by hand, to one of the telephones mounted on 100 trees spread across the MacDowell property. There, the phones will ring, and the visitors physically present will answer.

I got all excited about this--it seemed propitious that I would be calling from another artist colony, and on my last days here, and I decided I would call and offer the person on the other end of the line a choice between music and fiction. When I called earlier tonight, the switchboard was overwhelmed. I called four times before an operator picked up, and by the time I reached him, he'd been brought down to a low frazzle. Some of the trees around the colony weren't accepting calls, and he wound up trying to connect callers to each other. He had a number of us connected on a party line, and one older fellow seemed very put off by the fact that he wasn't being connected to a tree. The rest of us tried to make the best of things--what part of the word party didn't this old fart understand?--but the experience was a bit like being at a very loud cocktail party at an art school reunion where you don't know any of the other people and you're all blind, a little hard of hearing, and possibly underwater.

Eventually I was put through to a tree, and that's when things really went downhill. I offered the woman on the other end of the line a choice of fiction or music, and when she chose fiction I got nervous. The thing I was prepared to read was the monologue by an eccentric and potty-mouthed black queen, a scene I'd read in high Ebonics with great success at the Jentel Presents presentation at the public library on Tuesday. I figured if I could pull off an African-American Radical Faerie rant at a public library in Wyoming, it would go overjust fine in the MacDowell woods. But not very far into my reading I felt very, very foolish--there was no way to perform this over the telephone. It required space and body language and an audience. "I think I got the gist of it," said my tree woman about halfway through, putting us both out of our misery.

No, that's not accurate--I still had the misery of embarrassment and disappointment to contend with. I'd wanted to contribute something fun and vital to what seemed like such a great project, and for twenty minutes I felt like I'd let Anna and MacDowell and myself down by simply trying too hard (the usual way). Twenty-one minutes after hanging up, though, I remembered that it's an *artist colony*, and that the occasional performative face-plant, while painful, is most definitely the price of learning how to make art.

Here's a story in the New York Sun about the Landlines Project.

day of the blog

an angry Wyoming mob

Jentel Artist Residency Program
Banner, WY
I spent the first three and a half weeks here writing as though I had a publisher and a deadline--you know, money at stake. I took the novel and the comments of my pitiless writer's group (in last night's dream Barry called the last draft "morally bankrupt"), the notes I'd fed into a tape recorder on my drive out here, the dark suspicions I've harbored about the work but never faced, and I brought all this knowledge and self-loathing to bear on a pack of 4x6 note cards, each of which became a chapter outline for the third draft. These three days of work, among the unhappiest of my creative life, propelled the subsequent 21 days of difficult but fluent labor, which have resulted in 80 pages (40,000 words) of a brand new draft, typed into a new Word document, that I hope I don't flatter myself to think are almost readable.

I almost made it to the end of Part I (of IV), but twenty-three days of writing seven hours a day, with one day off in the middle, have slowed m