Early Morning Dream; Date = Dec. ?, 09

Sometime last week or so – recorded 12/13/09

The Little Fox & The Toy Plane.

In this dream, which I had not had the chance to record (maybe it was from Mon. the 7^th????), I dreamt I was following a little red fox down a roadway in some farm fields and meadows. The little fox was inside of toy plane. He wanted to fly it, but it was just a toy -- it was on wheels, that was all, it didn't really fly.  

Suddenly it became very windy!!! So windy, that the little plane was lifted aloft in the sky, taking off it seemed, and flying higher. The little fox was excited, in a sort of “look at me, look at me” moment, where he was flying it appeared. I was a little nervous so I started to run up to be closer behind the plane & fox – and then the wind turned the plane upside down, and the fox fell out of the plane and crashed into the big cornfield we were beside.

I don't recall if both the fox & the plane landed in the cornfield, but I immediately ran up to the corn fields where he had fallen to look for him. I could hear that on the other side of this thick row of corn, which was taller than me, there was a woman giving a tour to someone, and directing them to the farm house where stuff was going, some events, etc. There was a little clearing where I could walk up and along some of the corn, where I think the fox fell, and so I stuck my arm into the thick corn stalks and reached around hoping to find the little fox. Instead, there were just things like crickets and bugs.

I was sad. The woman then directed me up to the farm house, and so I head up to the farm house, which was like a bed and breakfast place, or an inn, with gift shops and such. It was old and big, and they had just finished serving some meal when I got there, but there was still lots of food everywhere. There were giant plates overflowing with pies, including savory pies, and baked squashes and everything was hearty, peasant-inspired food.  

There were rows and rows of old farm tables, which had not been completely cleared from those who had just eaten (who had already left the dining areas, it seemed). And there were workers who were now eating their meals, and a woman near the open kitchen next to the dining told me to help myself to whatever I wanted. Unfortunately, there were no clean plates or silverware, it seemed, but I found some plates that weren't too dirty to use, and helped myself to some of the food.

Then I went upstairs. The farmhouse inn had beautiful wood rafters and beams everywhere, and as I got to the top of the stairs, there was a narrow hallway to my left, with wood benches built into the walls on both sides. Suddenly, 5 individuals, sitting and standing along the corridor And they flickered, like they were not really there, that I was imagining them. I was told, by one of them, that they were the 5 ghosts of the inn, and I was one of the few people that could actually see them.

I went down another hallway, where there were shared rooms for boarders, and washrooms. I then decided it was time to go back outside and look for the little fox. Downstairs, there was some sort of harvest activity going on, and I ran out to the cornfield where I thought the fox might be and continued to look for him.

That is all I remember at this point. I don't believe there was much more I had remembered upon awakening from this dream when I had it.

carli castellani - 12/13/09

- Carli Castellani, October 2009

 

Yosemite Quick, a band out of Syracuse and the early 90s, playing "Emergency" live; sound and visuals a bit out of sync, but the energy comes through.  We posted this video as part of September's issues of the Status Hat Webzine:  Storytelling, as "Emergency" tells the story of two old-time t.v. shows... so perhaps it's mixed-media...

Carli Castellani, Artistic Director

It's been my working method for a long time that we are our stories.

Both individually and collectively, the tales that fill our minds and lives shape our language and experiences, acting similar to a filter or headset with which we interact with the world, whether we are conscious of it or not. How our earliest caregivers talked about their days, their work, their family, their loved ones, their hated ones (their challenges, conquests, petty likes and dislikes...), all intimately formed our own emerging language and worldviews.

Change the stories or how we tell them, and one can transform their life experience – not by rewriting the past, but by altering our perception of it. Difficult people, jobs, and situations either infect our lives as constant nemesi, or become the fodder for new or different choices.  At some point, we no longer find it necessary to circle the same blocks over and over.  We recognize the scenary and realize it's time to move on.  Yet for some, the ability to turn the page and start a new chapter remains a terrifying roadblock, postponed until it either becomes a critical emergency to do so, and they no longer have a choice but to effect change, or the idea remains frozen, reserved for often-failed New Year's Resolutions.  

A story I have found myself telling evolved from an attempt I made many years ago to discover what the difference is between those that seem able to make leaps of life-transforming change, and those that appear paralyzed by the very thought.  I eventually called that tale "The Archelogical Dig", because when I tell a story often enough, it tends to attract a title, and the metaphor that spoke to me centered around two groups of people I neatly divided the world's population into:  those that could go on an archelogical dig for a year, and those that could not.  

Nevermind that we don't all want to go on such digs, and people truly don't fall into neat piles of either-or.  The details of this story I told myself, before ever sharing it outloud with another, helped me work out some ideas that were themselves life-transforming.  I have since found myself in very creative places and situations that I had never anticipated when I first puzzled together the dynamics of how to do what I felt I must do, when the logistics  seemed daunting. But right now, I'll save the recital of "The Archelogical Dig"  for another day, and perhaps another format.

 

How we tell our stories continues to evolve.  We can now compose stories 140 text characters at a time, often in quasi-collaborative efforts at exploring "new" narratives (or harnassing shorter and shorter attention spans). Myself, I've constructed stories from scribbled sticky-notes and the contents of my purse dumped out on a table -- my collagist leanings, I guess.  Our snapshot collection accompanying our Setpember issue returned again to cut and paste in telling a bird's story (very imagined) in 9 photos. The little papermache theater also pictured here, "Storyhouse", is a work in progress that I have experimented with as a device for staging visual stories or tableaus. 

But in thinking about the many ways storytelling infuses the arts, we've only touched on a few in these pages.  Some of the concepts we didn't broach are at the core of this subject, such as audiences.  Another, one of my favorites, is the role of editing in story development and refinement (though our articles about story-telling conventions and storyboards both give brief insights into that aspect).  A couple of books we looked at recently for ideas are listed with our resources.

 

- Carli Castellani, Artistic Director

An Arts Collaborative:  Art + Music + Comics + More...

"The art experience is a primal and beneficial human drive. To create, and share with one another through the creative act, is vital for individuals and communities to flourish." 



Status Hat Productions is an arts collaborative based in Upstate New York. We develop new works in a variety of media, with an emphasis on multi-disciplinary works that bring together divergent artists and artforms.

We also seek to create and facilitate opportunities for participatory exploration of the arts, throughout the community.

Status Hat Productions is dedicated to fostering the time, space and resources necessary to cultivate the arts and art experience in everyday life. 

*************For information about upcoming and ongoing opportunities for artists, writers, musicians and others, as well as our internship program, please see: 

Opportunities - Status Hat Productions 

For the August, 2009 issue of our monthly webzine, see + hear:

"Looking at Collaboratives" 

     In late 2004, I first visited Russia as a guest artist, hosted in part by a national puppet theater and a composer's union. More importantly, I had traveled there to hear the debut of the 3rd symphony by Masguda Shamsutinova, a Tatar composer who had begun introducing me to her culture after seeing an exhibition of my work in Seattle ("Playthings", JEM Gallery, 2004).  
                                                                  

    As Masguda's own work as a composer had taken her on a life-long journey through folk and music ethnology, she had a strong call to preserve the vanishing traces of languages and traditions of the many peoples with whom she shares a nomadic ancestry. She was also intimately familiar with the richness, depth, and dream-like layers of material I would encounter as I entered a terrain she had long been exploring. She prepared me, in part, by telling me that from this one trip I would have "material to work with for years to come" which would inform and shape my own art, work, & life.  

         

     That statement foreshadowed quite a bit -- during that 2004 residency, I would be invited by artists I met to return to Kazan to take part in a project called "The Volga is Our Home".   By July of 2007, the Volga project voyage, a 10-day trip down the Volga river, would be complete. I returned to the United States with newly gathered material to add to what I already had accumulated. There would be several exhibitions in Russia later that year, and into 2008, of paintings that "The Volga Is Our Home" artists created, including my own. These were works completed during the voyage, and ones that were finished in the ensuing months, working from sketches, photos and peripheral materials the project voyage had generated.  

  

     

 

 

          There was yet another factor. The project and voyage had always communicated strongly to me many universal themes about landscape, environment, resources, how we shape and are shaped by these elements, and how this trail of time, history and culture is wrapped up at our very doorsteps and footsteps, wherever we are. The Volga River is not my home -- other bodies of water and landscape elements are and have been "home" -- but I do feel a deep connection with what the project represented globally; I would be quoted in Russian media saying "'The Volga is Our Home' is a metaphor for what the earth provides us". I was surprised, though, to find that while these general ideas resonated for many I talked to upon my return, and the idea of making a boat-trip down a river for 10 days is both intriguing and inspiring -- there wasn't a clear path for me to take in the course of mounting my own final exhibition of this project's works.

     

     In attempts to develop the video and photos shot from the Volga project into an installation component, I would pursue a few dead ends. Each of those threads would give me valuable insights, even when they screeched to an apparent halt for one reason or another. At some point, I even felt there wasn't enough residual energy from the project itself in the United States, that it was so intimately tied-up with a specific body of water that many here know so little about perhaps stifled some of it's momentum.  

    

     I eventually decided that in order to communicate to a larger audience, I would create an educational/arts program as an off-shoot, which I tentatively titled “Our River, Our House”. Encouraging the development of active observation and reflection skills, increasing awareness of the natural environment and habitats where we live, and using the transformative power of the art experience are all elements that I kept returning to, and that would form the core of "Our River...".

      

     Meanwhile, upon contemplating the river that is currently my home, the Hudson, I began building a large sculpture, part boat and part river-goddess inspired by a myth about the "Last Queen of Kazan" (Suyumbika -- a tale and set of imagery I repeatedly encountered on both of my trips to Russia). During the last year since I began this sculpture, I have also been immersed in my work as Artistic Director of Status Hat Productions, which has been undergoing a significant growth-period and -- to use a boating metaphor once again -- has required steady navigation through the course it is sailing. It is only now that I am finding the opportunity to return to the materials of the Volga project, and to the half-finished sculpture in our studio. I am heartened by tales of explorers like Mr. Hudson, who persisted in their work despite several "failed" attempts. Mr. Hudson (and others) never found the fabled Northwest Passage. They also never discovered anything new – only that which was new to them.

- Carli Castellani

July, 2009

(originally published in Status Hat Production's July, 2009 updates - "River Talk..."- at http://www.statushat.org)

 
 

This is the shed.

– not the one the naked lady fell through the roof of one brisk spring morning shattered by her screams and the police arriving. That one had been metal from the chain store --  instant construction -- and actually was rather tidy, or else she would have been more injured by her plunge from the balcony next door that day.

This is not so tidy.

This smells of dirt, of course and yes, of many yesterdays decaying slowly. Webby stuff coats what you find here, and the air is stale.

But it is not the garage that housed the boxes and boxes of books we helped our friend move and re-move so many times, but never rid herself of until one day she could no longer sort through them any more or think she might ever... so we left them at the goodwill with the broken plastic barney sliders and clothes that were not in resellable condition all dumped in the parking lot, even though the sign said wait for the attendant. We didn't wait, we had more to pack and move again waiting for us, and there would be a trip to the city dump too. I remember chew marks on the dressers in that wooden garage that was so hard to open the oversized doors of –

That garage, like the metal DIY that had to be re-roofed after it broke the ladies tumble, no longer exists. They have been destroyed and replaced by other things, or maybe just more weeds.

Nor is this particular holding spot, where a different sort of clutter has accumulated, the dirty cellar where I left the oversized rug because I was so exhausted from my own move  so I didn't get the full deposit back.  I had worked so hard otherwise to leave that cottage where I wrote a novel about my disheveled coming of age -- and published a zine from old school cut & paste -- clean. Outside on the covered deck the squirrel stalked me in that house trying to get in, and I broke my 1920s sleigh bed not from crazy sex but from pushing it across the room one night because I didn't like sleeping under the windows yet didn't have the patience to take the bed apart before I shoved it grunt by grunt into the far corner. I was black and blue and the slat that gave out that day would never be repaired the bed would be on blocks years later, when I finally sold it and fled that foggy brigadoon that had trapped me in it's spell.

I did my laundry in that particular cellar, but never liked it. Only the rug was stored down there; the owners were otherwise very kind to me. I was surprised they withheld my money, but I moved on, after tears because at that point in my life I still had only moved from one place to another when I absolutely had to, had no other choice, had exhausted all possibilities.  I cried because I fell so madly and deeply in love in with places that I lived, even if they had funky cellars you entered from outside and didn't care for much. And, yes, I cried projectile tears, every wound a stolen home I could not bear to loose...  never mind the dead people that were now piling up in my life as well -- I can cry for them really I can -- but looking for a new place to live is what sent me over the edge and was something I avoided and avoided and we all know how well that tactic works –

It boomerangs back until we are housed in our own disdain.  

I can continue this listing of storage places that are not the one at hand –

There are many. And there are yards full of broken toys, and demolition sites I returned to accidentally while makikng a video of everywhere I lived in my 20s, along with one of me trying to find the spot on my back that hurt and somehow thought the video would capture what two mirrors couldn't.  

And of course the storage locker where I briefly had to retrieve the magazines for my merchandising route, until the company went to shipping them direct.  That locker was similar to one where there were indeed dead bodies found, but those weren't my dead people they were some one else's and why I had always been afraid of rented storage places because I somehow divined people would use them to store bad things they had done to others --

This place is different, though it may share some things in common with it's kin.  It is alive, at least as I understand it. And now as I write this, there is a marching band outside my window not the first time either, though it's been awhile since the helicopters were always buzzing around it seemed – 


carli castellani

In both incarnations, they certainly have evoked the bringing together of people by some strange muse  --

From musicians, puppeteers & dancers who helped workshop the initial productions of "Rock On, Genghis Khan"... to illustrators, graphic artists, writers, students, more musicians, and others, who now find themselves crossing paths with the characters that populate this evolving rock opera/comic book landscape --

 

A Lost-In-Time Warrior!

Two modern-era musicians looking for a drummer, among other things !

Shape-shifing Time Dervishes!

A Former Warlord (Genghis Khan!), awakened from the netherworlds by the sound of music happening somewhere in the land of the living...

 

 and peripheral beings of their worlds past & present:  

 

Horses!  Cars!  P.A. Systems!