Tagged — Jamie Lyons
You drive through the tunnel and suddenly you're somewhere else entirely. The fog rolls in like it owns the place, which it does, transforming those ridgelines into something between a hallucination and a prayer. The eucalyptus trees rattle in the Pacific wind, their scent cutting through the marine layer with an almost violent clarity. This isn't pretty. Pretty is for postcards. This is real, abraded by weather, carved by geology, haunted by the ghosts of Cold War paranoia trapped in those concrete bunkers.
The trails wind through scrub and chaparral with a kind of brutal honesty. No manicured paths here, no gentle suggestions. Just you and the land and the hawks circling overhead, riding thermals like they're mainlining the wind itself. Down below, the waves hammer at Rodeo Beach's dark sand with rhythmic insistence, each crash a reminder that nature's been playing this same riff for millennia while we've been fumbling through our brief, frantic solos.
There's something magical about the Headlands, stripped down, uncompromising, refusing to be domesticated despite their proximity to civilization's gleaming towers across the bay. They exist in defiant counterpoint to everything orderly and controlled, a place where the elemental forces still call the shots.
I always leave different than I arrived. Salt-stained, wind-scrubbed, momentarily honest about my own scale in the universe. That's the real transaction here, beauty traded for truth, comfort exchanged for something more essential.
Engineering 2016
At 6:57 a.m. on April 7th, 2016 (this specificity matters, that exact fucking minute matters) Muriel Maffre, Ryan Tacata and myself dragged our asses up Slacker Hill in the Marin Headlands to do something either profoundly necessary or completely insane. We performed fragments of a lost Euripides tragedy, one of those plays that got shredded […]
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Engineering 2016
The thing about standing on a hill in the dark waiting for the sun is that you’re participating in the oldest ritual humans have, the one where we gather to witness something larger than ourselves and somehow make it mean more by being there together. So we’re up here in the Marin Headlands with the […]
ReadSpeculation 2016
Slacker’s Hill, Marin Headlands: some places just earn their names through the accumulated weight of bodies showing up, doing nothing in particular, letting the view do all the work. But at sunrise, with Muriel Maffre and Ryan Tacata running Euripides fragment #91 (we’re calling it Love is The Fullest Education) on this windswept chunk of rock […]
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Collusion 2014
Collaboration: three people trying to figure out how to make Shakespeare’s storm feel real when the actual wind off the Pacific is already doing half the work. We’re not building a set. We’re negotiating with architecture that predates us and will outlast us, trying to figure out where bodies should stand, how voices will […]
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Wanderlust 2014
Out of the rolling ocean the crowd came a drop gently to me, Whispering, I love you, before long I die, I have travell’d a long way merely to look on you to touch you, For I could not die till I once look’d on you, For I fear’d I might afterward lose you. Now […]
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Speculation 2014
We Players Lear Rehearsal at Battery Wallace in the Marin Headlands Doth any here know me? This is not Lear: Doth Lear walk thus? speak thus? Where are his eyes? Either his notion weakens, his discernings Are lethargied–Ha! waking? ’tis not so. Who is it that can tell me who I am? Shakespeare, King Lear, […]
ReadSpeculation 2014
Lear is a play [that] contains a great deal of veiled social criticism — but it is all uttered either by the Fool, by Edgar when he is pretending to be mad, or by Lear during his bouts of madness. In his sane moments Lear hardly ever makes an intelligent remark. George Orwell, in Lear Rodeo […]
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