Just got this mail from the Red Hook Film Festival:
Hi Danny – Just a quick update – we are planning to open the Red Hook Film Festival with your film! (Red Hook-A portrait of Tommy Kane). It will screen on Saturday October 15th at 1pm in our opening block.
The schedule is up at our myspace page right now, and will be on the website tomorrow.
This year’s festival will take place on October 15th and 16th, 2011 at the Brooklyn Waterfront Artist Coalition (BWAC) screening room, which is located at 499 Van Brunt Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn, 11231. That’s at the very end of Van Brunt Street, across from the Fairway Supermarket.
Jack and I invite everyone who can make it to Brooklyn to the Festival. It should be a blast!
It’s 7 a.m. Everything is very, very quiet except for the pitter patter of rain and occasional whooshes of wind. The city still seems to be alive though. Saw two guys walking happily down the street (umbrellaless), one taxicab (available), one cop car.
Woke up to minor leaking under the french doors, quickly cleaned up with a towel. We have lots of batteries, bottles of water, and cold cuts in the fridge. Other than that, our fears of “Katrina II – N.Y. edition” are fading, though the TV keeps yammering that even worse conditions will hit us in the next two hours.
Yesterday, I heard a guy say into his cell phone, “No, I am getting ready. I’m going to fill up all the glasses in my apartment with water.”
Plan to spend the rest of the morning drawing, drinking tea and eating cold cuts.
This link takes you to some scenes from the show, but not the amazingly gripping ones we are in — which they are saving just for the broadcast.
We love the show which is full of weird and creepy things. The parts of the episode we are in was shot in my study and, to whet your appetite, here are a few location pictures from the shoot.
(Click on the first picture and controls will apear to control the slideshow.)
Patti's final resting place. She loved bears and cookies.
After five weeks, so much of our lives has returned to ‘normal’. Jack and I get up, go to work/school, worry about meetings and midterms, come home, hang out, eat dinner, watch TV, go to sleep.
A lot of things in our routines have changed. Patti handled every aspect of our domestic life. She walked the dogs, paid the bills, did the shopping, arranged dates with our friends, and a million other things I never knew needed doing, Sure, Jack and I helped out with a lot of that stuff, but she insisted on handling most of it. Now it all falls to me and Jack.
Oddly, doing chores isn’t a chore. On the contrary, it gives me a sense of order and control which I have been sorely lacking.
I like packing Jack’s Scooby Doo lunch box each night (it’s the same one I had when I was 13. Back then I was mocked for it but Jack’s turned it into a badge of coolness). I make sandwiched, pack snacks, write him lame little jokes notes.
I like walking the dogs and getting them back on schedule (I wondered how they would react to Patti’s absence. Would they miss their constant companion? She drove them around on her scooter everywhere, Joe at her feet, Tim in her basket. They were weird but are getting back to normal too. They have had some stomach problems and totally forgot their housebreaking for a while but they are getting better. I enjoy retraining them. Today we worked on sitting and shaking hands).
I like bonding with Jack though I have to beware that I don’t get too overbearing and overprotective. He is still a 15 year-old-boy and needs to stretch his wings. But, of course, because he is all I have left, I worry a bit excessively. He has a new phone so I can text and email and call him anytime. Sadly, I do.
I have been back at work for a couple of weeks. It’s been very busy and the routine distracts me. My tolerance for stress and bullshit is lower than it was. I still care but not necessarily in the same way I have for years.
Patti is still a part of my days. I think of her when I am at the butcher, picking ham. I think of her when I wake up in the middle of the night and want someone to discuss my dreams with. I see her down the block — only it’s not her. I bury my face in her overcoat in the closet and smell the last atoms that once touched her skin. Patti and I had a special vocabulary of our own, silly words I’ll never utter again except into my pillow.
Sometimes I cry. Sometimes I make myself cry. Crying is like starting a car that’s been sitting in the garage all winter; turning over the engine keeps the feelings alive, keeps my soul lubricated, stops me from becoming a dessicated husk. Pandy will always be in me, always be in Jack, so our sadness has been ironed into us, a layer of who we are, but not a crack or a break in us.
I am changed most because my future is blank. The many plans and decisions we made over the past 24 years are gone. Instead, I have to form a new map, a new set of goals, a new vision of what I’ll be in the years ahead. I imagined that Patti and I would keep growing old together, leave the City one day, go somewhere warm and easy, drawn and paint side-by-side, visit Jack and our grandchildren, feel free in new ways, live a full creative life. Now, it’s just empty. Not bleak or barren but absolutely undefined. I could do anything. Jack and I could move anywhere, anytime. The security I have been saving for all these years seems irrelevant now. I have to provide for Jack till he graduates …. but then what? Who will I be? What will I want? I have no idea.
I have lived with disability for 14 years, always looking for curbcuts, accessible bathrooms, room to maneuver. In an instant, that consideration has vanished. There are restaurants we can go to we never considered before. We can travel without worrying if the hotel has a roll-in shower. And, yet, I would do anything to have that limitation once again, give up any freedom to help Patti through the door or up the step.
Life goes on. The road bends. New obstacles and opportunities, ditches and valleys appear. I am taking them turn by turn, mile by mile, step by step. Head up when I can keep it up. Looking back now and then, but still moving forward.
My friend, d. price, called me from his surf shack in Hawaii and told me: “The universe picked you and decided to test you. It decided you were strong and had everything and so it would throw you a curve. First, Patti had her accident and it watched to see if you would crawl into a hole or would make the most of the experience. When it saw that you had become stronger and wiser, had discovered that everyday matters, the universe decided to test you again by taking Patti away altogether. Now it’s waiting to see what you will make of this, will you use it to learn, to share what you learn, to make the world a better place? The universe is just waiting to see.” I said, “Why can’t the universe just leave me the fuck alone?” He just laughed.
“Fortunately I am not the first person to tell you that you will never die. You simply lose your body. You will be the same except you won’t have to worry about rent or mortgages or fashionable clothes. … You will not have to worry about cellulite or cigarettes or cancer or AIDS or venereal disease. You will be free.” -Cookie Mueller
Last night we had the most extraordinary memorial tribute to Patti. There were over 200 people attending and people had to wait outside to get in. There was singing and story telling and orchids and roses and the most love I have felt in my life.
My joke with the many friends who helped to plan the evening was that we should have a party so fantastic that Patti would be really mad she wasn’t there. The evening was that and much more … and Patti did attend — her spirit was very much alive all night.
Jack and I talked when we’d come home and both felt the same thing: that the horrible void we’ve had since last Thursday has been replaced by a peaceful knowledge that we are going to be alright because so many, many people loved Patti and us and will always be there for us, making sure we don’t go off the rails.
Thank you everyone who was there and to the many others who sent us messages of peace and support. We are very fortunate.
I am on the plane home from a whirlwind trip to the American Institute of Architects (AIA) annual conference in Hot Springs. I was invited to speak about drawing to a group of several hundred brilliant creative people and the honor was all mine. Last year I addressed the conference in Nashville and it was so great to get people who design and build things for a living back in touch with drawing, the very skill that first inspired them to become architects but which so many have neglected in favor of computers.
Unfortunately I was unable to play all of my videos for the folks in Hot Springs, most of which are posted here on my YouTube site. I am so grateful I was invited to this conference and hope to have the chance to talk to more architects (and doctors and teachers and just about anyone who needs to get back in touch with their creativity).
P.S. This is the first time I have made a post while 15,000 feet in the air — hope it works!
I am very excited to announce that I’ll be addressing the Art and Soul Retreat in Portland on September 29th. I’ll be kicking off a fantastic week of creativity. My talk will be open to conference attendees and also to the general public. Find our more here. I hope to see you there!
I’ve just marked five years of keeping this blog. The milestone prompted me to think about how much time blogging, corresponding, promoting, writing,self-justifying and so on have absorbed of my free time. It has been a wonderful experience, but the very thing that started me on this road has suffered the most — namely, time for my own drawing.
So I have decided, for an indeterminate period, to take a break from scanning and posting and uploading and monitoring and responding (and I’ve been pretty lax at even at doing that recently). I will be using that time instead to draw and paint and write and think and learn and be.
I shall keep a bit of a record of how that’s progressing on the right hand side of this site, a mini blog within a slumbering blog where I can ruminate on what I am doing and learning with no intention to make a mark on anything but the pages of my journal.
Eventually, I shall probably return, recharged, refreshed, and newly resolved.
In the meantime, feel free to read the 842 posts that precede this one or any of these books. Or better yet, join me in getting off the computer and doing some drawing instead.
Until we meet again, I remain,
your pal,
Danny Gregory
I am very excited to announce that I’ll be addressing the
Danny Gregory 