Heterogeneous Spectacles(Jamie Lyons News) ❖ Jamie Lyons

Heterogeneous Spectacles

Volcanic Frequencies: Pole Star and the Geography of Motion

Pole Star isn’t ballet as usual or some cross cultural mash note. This is something else, bodies moving through my Reunion Island footage like they are mapping coordinates between volcanic eruptions and the đàn bầu’s single string howl, between lava fields cooling into black glass and Vietnamese tradition stretched taut across a stage at YBCA in San Francisco.

Võ’s music doesn’t accompany the dancers; it inhabits the same nervous system, breathing with them. The đàn tranh’s cascading notes and the percussive snap of bamboo against skin created this restless topography that the dancers navigated like they were reading weather patterns in real time. Alonzo’s choreography has always rejected ballet’s aristocratic bullshit in favor of something more,the body as antenna, picking up frequencies from the floor, from light, from sound. Here, with my projections of Reunion’s raw geology bleeding across the dancers’ silhouettes, it becomes about triangulation: Asian diaspora, African island, American stage, all pulling at each other like magnetic poles.

My images, those cratered landscapes, mist shrouded peaks, the violent beauty of rock meeting ocean, they weren’t backdrop decoration. They are the fourth performer, reminding everyone that the earth itself is always dancing, always in conversation with time and force and entropy. When those bodies suspended in space, backlit by my volcanic textures, it feels like watching evolution happen in real time.

This wasn’t fusion. It was collision, friction, the good kind that generates heat and new forms.

Alonzo King LINES Ballet Pole Star

The world premier of Alonzo King LINES Ballet Pole Star, with Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Palo Alto Tower Well

Thousands have lived without love,
not one without water.
W. H. Auden, First Things First, 1956

Seventy-eight feet of reinforced concrete. Corner of Alma and Hawthorne. Built in 1910.

A water tower. 155,000 gallons. It helped establish Palo Alto’s city-owned utility system, back when the city actually built things for the public good, imagine that. It did its job for seventy-seven years. Then in 1987, the water utility walked away.

1995: someone has an idea. Turn it into a six-story home. Why not? It’s there. It’s solid. It’s got history. Make something useful out of it.

Disruption Town says no.

So it stands there. Empty. A monument to nothing in particular. Can’t tear it down, can’t use it, can’t reimagine it.

Just a 78-foot concrete cylinder on a street corner, reminding everyone that Palo Alto has never met a creative solution it couldn’t reject.

Palo Alto Tower Well, 201 Alma St, Palo Alto, CA 94301.

Apr 14, 2019 | Categories: Engineering | Tags: Architecture, Palo Alto | Leave A Comment »

The Deep Art: Rehearsal as Sacrament

The deep art…

That’s the part that has to be guarded like a miser would his money…
Like a dope addict would his dope…
Like a lover with their love.
Alonzo King

What I’ve got here is the real raw nerve ending of creation caught mid spasm: dancers drilling themselves into some kind of transcendent oblivion in a fluorescent lit studio on Market Street that smells like sweat and rosin and the particular desperation of people trying to turn their bodies into pure idea. Alonzo’s got this line about guarding “the deep art”, which is either the most pretentious thing you’ve ever heard or the only honest metaphor for what it actually takes to make something that matters, and frankly both things can be true simultaneously. This isn’t the glittery Broadway finale or the Instagram ready grand jeté: this is the grinding, unglamorous rehearsal footage, the part where you see people actually working, where the illusion gets built brick by sweaty brick, where bodies become arguments and movement becomes language, and if you can’t handle watching the sausage get made then you were never really interested in art in the first place, you just wanted the pretty lie. Which is totally ok, I’ve seen The Real Housewives of Where Ever The Fuck and understand.

But here. This… The whole thing feels like watching someone purposefully choose the hard path, the one that demands everything and promises nothing except maybe, if you’re lucky, a few minutes where physics and poetry converge and something genuinely true happens.

Video: Behind the scenes in the studio rehearsal footage of LINES Ballet’s upcoming collaboration with Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ for their world premier of Pole Star.

Mar 22, 2019 | Categories: Cinematics, Industries, Speculation | Tags: Alonzo King LINES Ballet, rehearsal | Leave A Comment »

Hewlett-Packard Building 15

Hewlett-Packard Building 15. From 1965 to 1973, they made small electronic transformers. Circuit boards from ’65 to ’87. The building blocks of the tech revolution, made right here.

Acids. Metals. Solvents. All part of the process. They stored the chemicals in a shed until ’73, then upgraded to a “bunker” from ’74 to ’87. Because calling it a bunker makes it sound safer, I guess.

The site, now re-addressed as 3181 Porter Drive, like a new number will make people forget, is part of the Hillview Porter regional plume. That’s the polite term. What it means is: the groundwater is fucked. The whole Stanford Research Park area. Poisoned.

The Department of Toxic Substances Control oversees it now. Ongoing operation and maintenance activities. Translation: they’re still pumping and treating groundwater contaminated with tetrachloroethylene, trichloroethylene, and their “associated daughter products.” Chlorinated volatile organic compounds. The kind of stuff that doesn’t go away on its own.

This is what innovation looks like from the ground up. Literally. The stuff they don’t put in the press releases.

Hewlett-Packard made transformers and circuit boards. The chemicals they used to make them are still there, decades later, seeping through the soil.

Progress has a price. Someone always pays it.

Mar 19, 2019 | Categories: Engineering | Tags: Palo Alto | Leave A Comment »

Notre Dame, Paris

Here’s what I didn’t think about when I was standing there at midnight in front of Notre Dame with a Polaroid camera: that I was taking a photograph of something that wouldn’t exist anymore. Not in two days. Not ever again, really. Not the way it was when I was there, then.

I’m just exhausted. Jet-lagged beyond all recognition of what time means anymore. I’ve come from Reunion Island, and Paris is just another stop before home. Before the Bay Area. Before I can finally stop moving. I’m wandering the streets and something makes me take this picture. Maybe it’s the light. Maybe it’s because Polaroids are stupid and romantic and completely impractical, which is exactly why they matter. I remember sitting on a ballard waiting for it to develop, the chemical smell, that slow reveal of shadows and stone and eight hundred years of human ambition made vertical barely illuminated by a nearby streetlight.

I probably didn’t look at it that hard. I was tired.

Next day, I fly home. When I finally get there, after circumnavigating the entire goddamn globe, I don’t unpack. I don’t check my phone. I don’t do anything except fall into bed like a building collapsing.

Then Lindsey wakes me up. And here’s the thing about being woken up from that kind of sleep, I’m not even in my body yet. I’m somewhere between continents, between time zones, between conscious thought and absolute nothing.

“Notre Dame is burning down.”

It’s too absurd. Too perfectly timed to my own small story to be real. But it’s real. I watch it on a screen. The whole world watching something die in real-time.

Somewhere in my bag, probably still unpacked, is that Polaroid. That stupid, beautiful, accidental document of a thing that was about to end.

That’s the thing about photographs, about memory, about standing in front of monuments at midnight when you should be sleeping: you think you’re just killing time. But sometimes you’re a witness. Sometimes you’re holding evidence of the world as it was, before.

The Polaroid didn’t save anything. Notre Dame still burned.

But I’ve got this piece of film that says: I was there. It stood.
We both existed at the same moment, under the same sky, before things changed.

But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Feb 20, 2019 | Categories: Wanderlust | Tags: Architecture, Paris | Leave A Comment »

The Beautiful Failure of Forever

The cemetery is an open space among the ruins,
covered in winter with violets and daisies.
It might make one in love with death,
to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais

Death tourism: let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs among the tombs and rubble of Cimetière du Père Lachaise. That’s what they call it when you schlep across Paris to gawk at graves, and maybe that’s fair, maybe that’s exactly what it is, but so what? The stones here don’t give a damn about my motivations. They’re too busy being gorgeous, crumbling, covered in the kind of patina you can’t fake, the accumulation of a hundred wet winters and diesel exhaust and the breath of ten million pilgrims searching for something they probably can’t articulate.

This place is the real deal. Not some sanitized memorial park with regulation headstones lined up like tract housing for the dead. Père Lachaise is chaos made permanent: crypts stacked on crypts, crosses leaning drunk against mausoleums, cats prowling between the monuments like they own the joint. Which they do.

Some come here for Morrison or Wilde or Piaf, sure. Everybody does. But that’s just the gateway drug. The real kick is getting lost among the nobodies, the forgotten merchants and minor poets whose grand monuments are now just moss farms, whose immortality projects failed spectacularly. There’s something honest about that failure, something that cuts through all the pretense.

The place smells like wet stone and earth and time itself. Cobblestone paths wind uphill past enough wrought iron to build a battleship, past angels missing their heads, past flowers rotting in old wine bottles. It’s beautiful and it’s ugly and it refuses to apologize for being either.

This is what endures: not the fame, not the carefully constructed legacies, but the trees pushing through marble, the graffiti on celebrity tombs, the absolute indifference of stone to human vanity. You walk out different than you walked in, a little more awake to the whole absurd enterprise.

Père Lachaise Cemetery

Feb 19, 2019 | Categories: Engineering | Tags: Paris | Leave A Comment »

Marcel Proust

Marcel Proust. 1871 to 1922. Fifty-one years, most of them spent indoors.

Asthmatic. Sickly. Spent the last years of his life in a cork-lined bedroom in Paris, writing in bed, sleeping during the day, working at night. Obsessed with memory, with time, with how the past lives inside us whether we want it to or not.

In Search of Lost Time. Seven volumes. 3,000 pages, give or take. One of the longest novels ever written. Took him fourteen years. He died before he finished editing it.

Everyone knows the madeleine. The little cake dipped in tea that unlocks his entire childhood. Taste as time machine. Flavor as memory. That moment, that’s Proust. The idea that the past isn’t gone, it’s just waiting for the right taste, the right smell, the right sensation to bring it all flooding back.

He wrote about aristocratic French society, love, jealousy, art, homosexuality… coded, careful, because this was early 1900s France and you couldn’t just say it. He said it anyway, just in a way that required paying attention.

The first volume? Rejected by publishers. André Gide at Gallimard turned it down without reading it. Proust had to self-publish. Later, Gide admitted it was the biggest mistake of his career.

Now it’s considered one of the greatest novels ever written. Modernist masterpiece. Essential. The kind of book people say they’ve read but haven’t.

The sickly kid who barely left his room wrote 3,000 pages about memory and time and everything that matters.

The madeleine. That fucking madeleine. He understood something the rest of us spend our whole lives trying to figure out.

If at least, time enough were alloted to me to accomplish my work, I would not fail to mark it with the seal of Time, the idea of which imposed itself upon me with so much force to-day, and I would therein describe men, if need be, as monsters occupying a place in Time infinitely more important than the restricted one reserved for them in space, a place, on the contrary, prolonged immeasurably since, simultaneously touching widely separated years and the distant periods they have lived through — between which so many days have ranged themselves — they stand like giants immersed in Time.
Marcel Proust, The Past Recaptured, 1927

Part of a bigger thing I’m doing. Grave. People who mattered to me. People who changed how I see the world.

Feb 01, 2019 | Categories: Engineering | Tags: Paris, Writers Against Forgetting | Leave A Comment »

Queer Light and Formaldehyde: Robert Wilson Does Shakespeare

There’s this thing that happens when you strip away everything you think you know about a piece of art, when you stop genuflecting at the altar of tradition and just look at what’s actually there, raw and pulsing and strange. Robert Wilson gets this. He gets that Shakespeare’s sonnets were never meant to be polite museum pieces, carefully preserved behind glass for tourists to photograph and forget.

Walking into the Berliner Ensemble for this 2009 production feels like stumbling into someone else’s opium dream, except the smoke is made of light and the hallucinations have been choreographed with surgical precision. Wilson doesn’t direct so much as he architects, building spaces where time moves like honey, where a single gesture can stretch across what feels like geological epochs. 25 sonnets, winnowed down from the 154 by Jutta Ferbers with the kind of brutal editorial instinct that separates wheat from chaff, stripped of pretense, freed from the prison of their own reputation.

And then there’s Rufus Wainwright’s score: this mongrel thing that shouldn’t work, this collision of medieval German Minnesang and cabaret and pop that sounds like what you’d hear if you could crawl inside the skull of someone caught between centuries, between identities, between the person they’re supposed to be and the one they actually are. It’s romantic when it needs to be, sure, but there’s something rotting underneath, something disturbing and feral that reminds you these poems were never just pretty words about pretty feelings.

These sonnets are queer. Not in the sanitized, historicized, we can explain this away sense, but genuinely, thrillingly fluid in their desires. Male, female, the boundaries dissolve. The Fair Youth, the Dark Lady: Wilson doesn’t apologize for any of it, doesn’t soft-pedal the subversive gender play that’s been sitting there in plain sight for four hundred years while scholars coughed politely and changed the subject.

The Berliner Ensemble actors move through this landscape like figures in a Renaissance painting that’s been dipped in formaldehyde: the boy, the fool, Cupid rendered as something both ancient and utterly contemporary, Elizabeth I herself, Shakespeare watching his own words performed back to him. Every gesture is sculpted, every beam of light a character in its own right. Wilson treats theater like installation art, like performance can be both discipline and fever.

What emerges isn’t nostalgia, isn’t dusty reverence for Shakespeare. It’s recognition that these poems, written by a man in a world we’ll never fully access, still speak directly to the confusion and hunger of wanting what you want, being who you are, in a world that demands explanations you don’t owe anyone. Suspended in time, yeah. But alive. Dangerously, uncomfortably alive.

Jan 03, 2019 | Categories: FalseArt | Leave A Comment »

La Grande Nuit de l’Opéra: How Maria Callas Murdered Everyone at the Palais Garnier and Made Them Thank Her

December 19, 1958. The Palais Garnier. You want to talk about a moment when the universe temporarily stopped fucking around? This might have been it.

Maria Callas didn’t just perform that night. She walked into that gilded Belle Époque monument to French self-satisfaction, all those marble staircases and chandelier’d horseshoe balconies where the bourgeoisie had been pretending to understand art for a century, and she basically committed an act of violence. Beautiful, necessary violence.

The guest list read like some dream of mid-century cultural weight: René Coty (the French President), Jean Cocteau (who’d already seen everything and was jaded about all of it until he wasn’t), Charlie Chaplin (genius recognizing genius), Brigitte Bardot (sex personified sitting there in the dark), and Aristotle Onassis lurking in the wings like fate wearing a tuxedo. This wasn’t an audience. This was a tribunal of the arbiters of what mattered, and they’d come to pass judgment.

Callas showed up dripping in couture and jewels, because if you’re going to destroy people, you might as well look like a goddess doing it, and what she did in that first half was basically give a masterclass in how to make human suffering sound like the only thing that’s ever mattered.

“Casta Diva” from Norma, Bellini’s prayer to the moon goddess that’s so pure it shouldn’t be possible for a human throat to produce it. But Callas wasn’t human that night. She was channeling something older, something that understood that beauty and pain are the same damn thing. The voice floated out over that audience like smoke, like a ghost, like every regret you’ve ever had made audible.

Then she pivoted, because Callas never let you get comfortable, into the “Miserere” from Il Trovatore. Verdi’s death march dressed up as music. The scene where Leonora stands outside the prison tower while Manrico’s about to get his head removed from his body, and all she can do is sing about it. You want desperation? You want the sound of someone clawing at the walls of the universe? That’s what she gave them.

And then, then, she hit them with “Una voce poco fa” from The Barber of Seville. Rossini’s firecracker of coloratura, all flirtation and manipulation and brilliant, calculated feminine power. She went from tragedy to comedy like switching channels, proving that the whole range of human experience was just there, available, in her instrument. No big deal. Just casual mastery of everything.

Intermission. People probably needed oxygen.

Second half: Act II of Tosca. Puccini’s magnificent exploitation film, where art and murder and sex and politics all slam into each other in Scarpia’s apartment. Callas was Tosca, the diva who kills the police chief because he’s a predator and she’s not having it. The “Vissi d’arte”, “I lived for art, I lived for love”, became this searing question about why God lets terrible things happen to people who just wanted to make beautiful things.

And here’s the thing about that performance: it was real. Not “realistic” in some bullshit theatrical sense, but real in the way that matters. Callas wasn’t indicating emotion or “portraying” passion. She was actually experiencing it, right there, in front of everyone. That’s terrifying. That’s why people couldn’t look away.

The fact that this moment got preserved on film (now restored and colorized in 2023, so we can see her in full Technicolor splendor) means that future generations get to witness what actual transcendence looks like. Not the polite, tasteful version. The dangerous version. The version that reminds you that art isn’t supposed to be comfortable. It’s supposed to crack you open.

La Grande Nuit de l’Opéra wasn’t just a concert. It was proof that sometimes, just sometimes, one person can stand in front of the void and sing it into submission. And everyone else can shut the fuck up and listen.

Dec 19, 2018 | Categories: FalseArt | Tags: Music | Leave A Comment »

Devils Slide / Matchstick Cove

Devil’s Slide is the kind of place that makes you understand why people drive off cliffs. Not in some morbid, suicidal way, though Highway 1 has claimed its share of souls who got hypnotized by that impossible blue, but because beauty this raw, this uncompromising, it does something to your brain chemistry. It rewires the circuits.

You come around that bend south of Pacifica, and suddenly you’re clinging to a ribbon of asphalt that some maniac engineer decided to carve into a mountain face that clearly wanted nothing to do with human ambition. The Pacific is doing its thing three hundred feet below, eternal, indifferent, crushing rocks into sand with the patience of a god who has all the time in the world and knows you don’t.

That WWII bunker up there… Some military genius decided this godforsaken, beautiful stretch of coast needed defending. From what, exactly? Japanese submarines? The relentless assault of pelicans? It’s been abandoned for decades, covered in graffiti, slowly being reclaimed by ice plant and salt air. A concrete monument to the temporary nature of everything we build, everything we fear, everything we think matters.

Standing at Matchstick Cove, so named because when you look down from the right angle, the rock formations look like spent matches scattered by some giant’s hand, you understand that nature doesn’t give a damn about your Instagram feed or your curated experience of authenticity.

This is the California they don’t put in the brochures. Not the sanitized, wine-country, Travel & Leisure where everything is optimized and disrupted. This is the California that kills you if you’re not paying attention. The California that was here before the Spanish missions, before the Gold Rush, before anyone decided that manifest destiny was a good enough reason to pave paradise.

The thing about Highway 1 through here, and they’ve since built a tunnel to bypass the worst of Devil’s Slide, because apparently we’ve lost our taste for mortal peril during the morning commute, is that it forced you to confront your own insignificance. Every winter, chunks of the road would just slide into the ocean. The earth was quite literally saying: “I don’t care about your need to get to the Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay.”

You want the real California experience? Pull over at one of those dirt turnouts where there’s no railing between you and forever. Get out. Feel that wind coming off the Pacific, air that’s traveled four thousand miles from Japan without touching land. Listen to the waves hitting those rocks—the same sound the Ohlone people heard, the same sound that’ll be here long after our whole ridiculous civilization has collapsed into the sea.

That’s the thing about places like this: they don’t need you. They don’t want you. They’ll be here, indifferent to your passage, your photography, your attempts to capture or commodify or understand them.

…innocence of eye has a quality of its own. It means to see as a child sees, with freshness and acknowledgment of the wonder; it also means to see as an adult sees who has gone full circle and once again sees as a child – with freshness and an even deeper sense of wonder.
Minor White

Dec 12, 2018 | Categories: Wanderlust | Tags: beach, Ocean | Leave A Comment »

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