02 December 2010

Pensées/Melancholia

2 decembre, 2010

A melancholic mood has set in. Why, when a dusting of snow frosts the sloped roofs of Notre Dame and all Paris is dressed with lights, colorful kitsch and holiday cheer, am I yearning for the solitude to work, for a burst of creative energy to sweep me up into a grand finale fitting for this four months of fantasy and productivity? The Parsi streets looked sad to me this morning. OK. I was sad.

I think I've just answered my own question. Yes, I do not want it to end. At the core of it, I think, is an addiction to and nostalgia for the rhythm I set into motion: of videotaping myself first thing in the morning--whether in one of Micadanses studios or in my wonderfully day-lit apartment--then downloading the morning's footage into Final Cut Pro while I shower and warm a cup of left-over coffee, and sitting at the laptop for a few hours, making something of it all. I would then take a walk to a museum or get lost in the maze of streets in the Marais while the video sequence was being rendered, and return to watch the results  before tweaking it, rendering into QuickTime, then uploading it onto YouTube. Next morning, (It would often take a good 12 hours for the uploading), I would write my journal entry, embed the video into it, and send it off into the world. Poof.

And am I not suffering as well the temporary loss of my laptop to the local Apple repair shop? Duh. The logic board died a few weeks ago, and I'm supposed to believe it did so for a reason: to give me a break, to slow me down so I would ponder retrospectively where I've come to: whether there has been any evolution, development, "progress", dare I say improvement or heightened sophistication, paring down to the essential, getting to the point, less is more, etc. And how am I supposed to do that when I cannot lay it out on a time line, compare and contrast, make new edits, cut and paste, outline a presentation with some kind of narrative flow that emerges from the work itself?

Ahead of me, John and I have a day and overnight trip to the Loire Valley with our new dear fiends Maggie and Ghislain, then a few days to prepare for the week in Lisbon. If I need activities to make me feel productive or important, I'll have them there! But again, it's not the public presentation or service to the field I miss as much as the very solitary work itself. From December 13-27, then will be my last weeks here, and it will be difficult not to try to levitate the Tour Eiffel or film a full-length feature video as my farewell gesture to my beloved Paris.

I think I'll stroll down to the Bibliotheque Forney at the Hotel de Sens and leaf through books and arts magazines to keep myself from jumping out the window. December in Paris. (I want my laptop!)