Gratitude for All

Why is Thanksgiving my favorite holiday?

It’s about gratitude, which makes for a salubrious attitude.

It’s about friends, it’s about connecting over great food.

It’s about great questions like the one Orlando asked at our feast: “What do you appreciate about your mother?”

And as usual at Soundcliff (our home), it’s about poetry, music, improvisation, and everyone contributing a course. The meal usually starts at 1 p.m. and flows until 10 p.m., including breaks for hikes, conversations, and fun sharing.

Because several folks have inquired about this year’s menu, here it is:

Cocktails: Hard and soft cider, carrot-ginger juice, Chai, Ginger Tea, Margaritas, white wine

Pu-Pus: Cheeses, Belle’s homemade chicken liver pate, smoked eggs, chips with salsa, artichoke & cabbage dips (by Tom and David)

Oysters: Raw on the half-shell & cooked with Indian palak, parmisan & cream (Malcolm)

Salad: Fresh greens (spicy mustard, lettuce, cilantro, parsley, brocolini, etc.) with triticale berry mix topped with crab cake (Malcolm & Stephen)

Bruschetta: French bread with cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, and basil (Whitney)

Turkey: Roast brined garlic turkey (Gordon) with Sequoia’s cranberry relish and candied yams, garlic mashed potatoes, triticale salad, shaved brussels sprouts with almonds

Mead: fabulously fermented one-year-old mead (honey wine) by Tom

Dingle Sticky Toffee Pudding: an amazing cake with toffee and vanilla whipped cream (Chris)

And dessert all through the days: Michael Hathaway’s lime-coconut bars and cardamom lemon cookies.

*

Among the readings:

WHAT IS MY HEART’S DESIRE?

A beautiful quiet place in Nature, self-sustaining,

Where loving people pass their time in inspiration,

Do what’s needed, living well, mastering skills

As we help each other heal this world,

Preparing still richer worlds for all who care to share:

Where The Magical breathes in every heart

And reflects through all our faces, eyes and limbs,

Where Love and Wisdom have been discovered to be innate,

Where there’s time for wit and fun,

Where work and play and reverence are one,

Where we appreciate ourselves as Divinity that’s manifesting,

Where we create – live out – explore

the full, full wonder of our destinies,

Where we – serenely or ecstatically –

Where we – yes – truly walk in beauty

All the days of our lives.

- Michael Hathaway

**

Around the table: Chris, Michael, Sequoia, Whitney, Gordon, Tom, David, Orlando, Malcolm

And of course, from James Broughton:

Sing Out for Eros

You on your seat there

sit up and sing out

Sing Out for Eros

Love is unbelievable

so it must be believed

Believe your own loving

your passion and folly

your incredible hopes

Praise the marvels of

joy tube and love pump

If you must feel tortured

respect your misery

and be happy about it

Only the nonsensical is

at east with the Absolute

Listen to your angels

ripening your secrets

Come to beautiful terms

with the god in your body

with the body of your god

Share flesh with others

Wake love Make love

Clasp hearts Exuberate

And never look back till

you are far out of sight

*

Blessings to all for a holiday season with plenty of time for rest, introspection, wit, fun, and joy.

A birthday poem

When I got up this morning, a bald eagle swooped by and perched in the tree I can see from my bed... He's still there!

Radical

Unearth your roots

Shake ‘em at the sky

Uphold your traditions

Hold up your radical

Hold down your fort

Breathe easily, not queasily

*

Find and mine what’s obvious

By opening your eyes wider

Wide enough to take in

What you thought was forever outlawed

Wide enough to put out

A part of you you forgot

*

Love more

Love your weird self

Love what’s aching to come out

Love what struggles to get in

Unbind your weariness

And offer it to the sunrise

Express your weird self but

Keep it simple

Don’t be afraid to ask

And unlearn whatever’s holding you back

-- Stephen Silha, April 9, 2010 (my 60th birthday)

Psychic house cleaning

The living room at Soundcliff, transformed into temporary office...

Spring has definitely sprung in the Pacific Northwest. We’re seeing premature magnolia blossoms, tulips, daffodils, rhododendrons, cherry blossoms and more!

It definitely lifts the moods of everyone I can see. Gordon and I have been introducing color into our house, after 12 years of living in a house painted entirely Navajo White. After painting our living room wall a warm bricky red, we decided my office needs a red wall, too.

Bill Palmer masks the room in preparation for painting the office wall

Bill Palmer, our wonderful neighbor who is an exacting painter, agreed to spend an extra day painting my office wall if I would clear it out. It was a dare.

Bill Palmer, the amazing neighbor, painter, storyteller, father and raconteur

Those who know me know that my office looks like a cycloned paper junkyard. Not any more.

What surprised me most was that I discovered (duh!) that I write hundreds of notes, to-dos, and names of people on small scraps of paper, then bury them in my piles. Having unearthed most of my piles, I now have a to-do list that may number 200 things, but it’s organizable!

Now both walls are red -- the house harmonizes! (Thanks again, Gordon/Bell!)

This is revolutionary for me. Stay tuned to see how long it lasts…

Perspectives by the Bay

The amazing Golden Gate Bridge, which we crossed a number of times on our way to and from digit productions, where we rented gear

San Francisco and its gorgeous surrounds was where James Broughton spent most of his life.

It’s always fun to go there and meet people who were influenced directly and indirectly by him. You can still feel his spritely spirit dancing around the city.

Eric Slade, Big Joy documentary director, and I swung through for two interviews after our time in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. Art Adams worked skillfully behind the camera.

Keith Hennessy is an amazing performance artist, dancer, and queer theorist who considers Broughton one of his ancestors and inspirations. “There’s a queer scene and an artistic scene that I’m in, where Broughton has always been present,” Hennessy told us before a dress rehearsal for his current performance, CROTCH.

“The more I see him as someone who helped set up the conditions – the material, the psychological, the imagistic, the psychic conditions under which I operate, as both as an artist and as a gay person—the more I start to perform out of that place, to extend that lineage.”

Keith Hennessy at Dance Mission before he took off his clothes for (part of) the performance, "Crotch"

“He has a kind of child’s eye view on the body and sex and God and the earth and all their interrelations. He brings a combination of innocence and curiosity to each of those pursuits.”

Here I am with Anna Halprin, at the beautiful Marin County home she and her husband Lawrence built in the 1950's

Friday, we got to visit Anna Halprin, the dancer and choreographer who was part of James’s life from the 1940’s on. In a way, she was his muse – the dancer he always wanted to be. And she danced to his poetry, as you can see in a brief scene in the Big Joy trailer.

Anna was married to Lawrence Halprin, one of the great landscape architects of the 20^th Century, who passed on last October. Together, they inhabited a creative space in Marin County, where we interviewed Anna.

She and James were part of the “San Francisco Renaissance” after World War II – an important story we’ll be able to tell in the Big Joy film. She described the creative environment: “We were very free and open-ended, not very self-aware. There was a lot of fun, excitement, cross-pollination between us.

“In New York, the dance scene was more traditional. I was working alone, but in connection with the painters, the poets, architects, the actors’ workshop – looking for stimulation, cross-fertilization. The word multi-disciplinary came up as a description of the work we were doing.

“James and I had a special relationship because we both enjoy wit. I never could take anything too seriously around him. … We both dealt with serious subjects in a witty way.”

We shoot Anna dancing James Broughton's poetry at San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts in Broughton's film "Four in the Afternoon" (1951)

Being with Anna in her beautiful home was inspiring to me, and gave me a better sense of the community she and Lawrence shared with James Broughton, Alan Watts, Imogene Cunningham, Richard Brautigan, and others.

California dreaming ...

Cinematographer Ian Hinkle and Director Eric Slade line up the perfect shot of the Pacific Ocean, a spiritual soulguide for James Broughton

Eric Slade and Ian Hinkle and I just finished three days of shooting in Los Angeles! We barely escaped the rains, and had lovely weather and an amazing host.

It’s becoming a tradition in the Big Joy Project to start with a challenging interview. The first time we worked together last April on the Big Joy film, we interviewed James Broughton’s ex-wife Suzanna Hart, a wonderful artist who lives in a senior facility in Mill Valley. She seems to be in a state of permanent memory-lapse, so her answer to the first questions was “I don’t remember.”

After we showed her the “program” she created for her wedding to James in 1962, her memory started to return. By the end of the interview, she was so cogent we looked at each other and said, “This interview was worth the trip to San Francisco!” (Ian lives in Victoria, Eric in Portland, and I near Seattle.)

You can see her in the trailer for the film, which we finally got online after YouTube censored it for nudity. (Go figure – if it were grossly violent they wouldn’t censor it. James’s films were also banned in St. Louis and censured by PBS in the 1980’s.)

Poet Robert Peters' portrait was done by Don Bachardy. When he saw the microphone there, Peters asked "Is he going to talk?"

On this trip, we interviewed the preeminent poet and poetry critic Robert Peters, who did some of the best analysis of James’s poetry in the 1970’s and for years taught at the University of California at Irvine. He’s also suffering from some kind of senile dementia. He’s very jolly, has a great sense of humor, but remembers little. However, when he read James Broughton’s poetry, he did it with rare verve:

Are you willing to go to
your own infinity
Willing to relish a really
fine undoing?
What's wrong with going
all the way
for a bangup crucifixion?

As things are now
everyone is mad
asleep or
on the wrong bus

-- James Broughton

It was fun to see Peters and his life partner poet Paul Trachtenberg watching a scene from James Broughton and Joel Singer’s film Devotions where they are lifting weights and doing intimate athletics together in their back yard.

Don Kilhefner in the living room of Michael G's house in LA

We also had a great interview with Don Kilhefner, a therapist and pioneer of the gay liberation movement who really understands James Broughton’s Jungian analysis and his role as an early leader of the Radical Faeries.

The next day we interviewed Mark Thompson, an author and photographer who knew James better than most and who was responsible for convincing me I needed to make a film about James rather than writing a book. “If you write a book,” he told me in 2008, “it’ll take eight years to do it right, and nobody will read it because who’s heard of James Broughton? If you make a film, and it ‘s good, you’ll have an audience if you still want to do a book.”

Obviously, I took his advice. And look at the fine mess I’ve gotten myself into, as Laurel and Hardy would say.

Not quite Laurel and Hardy: Mark Thompson and Stephen Silha

We also got to interview Mark’s husband Malcolm Boyd, the famous Episcopal priest who wrote the best-selling Are You Running with Me, Jesus? and Take Off the Masks. He coined a new word explaining James in our interview: “quadra-sexual.”

Our host in LA was Michael G, and old friend and surely the host with the most. His home, his cooking, and his repartee ware truly inspired. The only downside was that his dogs ate all my energy bars and tried to eat one of Gordon’s bells. (Actually, he only ate the leather cord and the bronze ‘This is It” bell is still for sale at a bargain price on the Big Joy website!)

We also had a wonderful dinner at Vermont, a restaurant which Michael and his partner Manuel created and re-created.

We then drove to Santa Barbara where we interviewed one of my favorite practitioners of Big Joy, the author and poet Michael Hathaway. He’s truly “The Gardener of Eden,” and we got to shoot him in his garden and on the beach.

Michael Hathaway

Michael, Ian and Eric in Michael's garden of eden

More from California coming soon.

Stephen and Ian on the beach at Santa Barbara: messages from the sea coming in