A false impression that might develop when reading my “movie reviews” (more like recalls, mixed with reverie) is that once I’ve posted a synopsis, I never look back. Another movie in the bag, no longer worth thinking about. That’d be wrong of course. I continue to data mine for treasures, and keep finding them, as I retrospectively rearrange the facts of my experience.
Like take the Bee TV movie, which I’ve only recently seen: what is it about bees the gets our attention, beyond simply being stung? I’d say it’s that they dance to show the way.
What if humans are like that too; in many wisdom traditions that’s how they’re portrayed. Where did we ever get the idea that “truth” is something one scribes on parchment, articulates in print? Why not learn a lesson from the bees and talk about communicating truth through dance, through performance?
Timing matters in that case.
In terms of parchment though, I use it a lot, meaning I’ll keyboard these blog posts (electronic parchment) and doodle with sharpies in my bus binders. When I ride public transit, I’ll sometimes take a binder along in my briefcase. I might read while we’re lurching along, and then stop at a coffee shop to do a recall and add my two cents. That’s my model of the PWS in GST really: input (reading), value added (edit/recombine), output (posts and doodles… performance art).
I might be pondering performance art and dancing bees for another reason: the surrealist cabaret I took in last night at Clinton Street Theater.
Was I the oldest one present? No matter, at least I was in costume, and could hob knob in line (a couple blocks) with another geek, who once worked in the Silicon Hills, a lesser used moniker for a sister city in some dimensions (talking demographics): Austin, TX.
He / him is a long time friend of visiting faculty (they / she). He talked NSA, FBI, Carnivore… a well-know shoptalk in geek circles. I talked nonprofits (NGOs).
I learned more about how this cabaret was likely organized: a call goes out, acts get submitted, and the selected eight acts get sequenced with an intermission.
The clowns with their collection boxes, wandering the aisles during showtime, reminded me of the clowns in Bhutan, who performed the same function, especially focusing on us tourists, there for the experience.
I’m thinking of a car trip we took to a famous festival, I wonder if I’ll recognize the name of the town from Google Earth… Wangdue Phodrang. I remember it pretty well.
