Heterogeneous
SpectaclesJamie Lyons — News & Writing

Niki Ulehla’s Hansel and Hansel marionettes

Niki Ulehla’s Hansel and Hansel marionettes

Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions. Alexander Calder So here I am, belly-down on the floor of a Dogpatch studio, camera in hand, staring into the wooden faces of two dead-eyed puppet boys who’ve seen things…Β  Hansel and Hansel. Niki Ulehla makes marionettes. Not the kind you remember […]

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Sharka

Sharka

No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development. Milan Kundera,Β The Unbearable Lightness of Being I can count on one […]

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Franconia Production Meeting

Speculation:Β  Friends around a table, wine flowing, talking about impossible things like how the fuck we’re going to mount a puppet show in a living room. This is Niki’s vision we’re serving here. And when I say serving, I mean it in the most primal sense. Everyone at this table, Nat included, is there to […]

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Franconia Production Meeting
Nobody’s Watching and That’s the Whole Fucking Point: Butoh at High Noon

Nobody’s Watching and That’s the Whole Fucking Point: Butoh at High Noon

Here it is, mid fucking day in Avignon and the sun’s a blowtorch turned on this stone plaza, 100 plus degrees of Mediterranean fury, and there’s this ghost, this white painted wraith doing Butoh like he’s negotiating with death itself, and I’m the only sonofabitch here to see it. But here’s the thing that breaks […]

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September 7, 2009 · Wanderlust

Bolinas Sunrise

Bolinas Sunrise

I open my eyes and the first thing that hits me isn’t the Pacific light knifing through those salt-stained windows or the fact that you’re horizontal in a room where somebody once fucked their way through the Summer of Love, no, it’s the absolute silence. The kind of quiet that makes me understand why people […]

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The Use of Uselessness

The Use of Uselessness

People ask me, ‘What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?’ and my answer must at once be, ‘It is of no use.’There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our […]

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The Tree Had Better Shit to Do: Sesame Street’s Accidental Beckett and the Puppets Who Made Existentialism Sing

The Tree Had Better Shit to Do: Sesame Street’s Accidental Beckett and the Puppets Who Made Existentialism Sing

Somewhere in the vast corporate labyrinth of Children’s Television Workshop, some lunatic. blessed, probably way underpaid, convinced a room full of executives that what American four-year-olds really needed was Samuel Beckett filtered through puppet nihilism. And they were absolutely goddamn right. Because here’s what Waiting for Elmo understands that most prestige television has forgotten: absurdity […]

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