Between festivals.

I found myself in doubt, enraged, confounded, nostalgic, impatient, rooted, laughing, lost.
In Africa, the Americas, Europe and most especially, the Midwest. On rafts, zodiacs, canoes, motorboats, kayaks and pontoons on the Great Salt, the Squam, the Michigan, the Mediterranean, what remains of the Owens. On the Kickapoo, the Chicago, the Callecalle, the Cruces and the Calumet. Along the Green and beside the Pacific. It’s good to be on the water. I think I like rivers best. How they stand still and move past, incising, conveying.
I heard night crickets chant and watched light become crepuscular, then granular, while the horizon glowed in 360 degrees around a massive darkened puddle, as seen from its center, during the two-minute-forty-second total eclipse. Post totality – nine hour traffic jams driving north from Golconda on the back side of pilgrimage.
I thought about hearsay, and sea-basing, also, siege, intervals, undersea forts, public voices, dislocation, data clouds and cycads.  But most of the things I thought about, I have forgotten. 

Between.
Some greats.
Ursula K Le Guin. Mark E Smith.
Anne Wiazemsky.
Peter Hutton. Dick Gregory.
Maryam Mirzakhani. Joe Frank.

In between.
My students and I teach each other things.
I listen to music and water the plants.
Have friends over for smoked fish.
Hold family.

Between festivals, there were other festivals.
It’s good to watch films shot in places
I don’t live, full of people I don’t know, in a city I don’t belong to.
I like the stack of disorientation.
But cinema orients me too. I’m so often watching films. They are also home. Parallel estates.

Deborah Stratman showed The Illinois Parables at Forum Expanded in 2016. This year, her new short film Optimism is part of the programme.