Liberation Road

How to turn loss into liberation? When does the shock of absence begin to open to new freedom? It starts to happen when the gaping hole of grief into which floats the endless list of losses finally exhausts itself. The day arrives when you wake up and your chest does not feel crushed by a sun that brings the memory of everything that no longer is, and instead you want to drink some tea. When you start to want to read again, maybe just poetry here and there, but you are surprised to feel yourself laugh again. You feel the scar tissue building up in your chest allowing you to breath again. It will never completely go away, the chest pain, but there is a growing knowledge that the pain you have endured is what makes you a person of worth.

It could be for your grown manchild who hasn’t ever had his heart broken, but you know when that happens, he will come to you, and you will know how to hold a space for him to feel his pain instead of repressing it. It means that when your own first love calls you to exorcise his deep hurt about his young girlfriend, you will know exactly what to say. Because the pain that you felt 30 years ago is still in your heart. It’s right there, ready to serve you by giving you the right words to help a man you once wanted to marry be kind to someone he now wants to marry. It’s there for you when your old love’s young girlfriend, whose plight you know all too well, needs someone who will understand the exact nature her pain. You know that dream, and that loss.

The pain that has been refreshed by your own recent losses tunes you up for these conversations, enables you to say, “Take the high road,” and “This too will pass.” Each time you convince someone else that everything will be all right, you convince yourself. Then you start to feel what it means to be free.

See Zoe's Butoh performance. Butoh is about Liberation Road.

The Valentine goes to...

Joe Bender. The lover man that keeps on giving. The lover that holds me through dark winter nights when I writhe like a dying fish in grief over some loss that has nothing to do with him. Joe, who picks me up off the floor an tucks me in, brings me tea, tells me everything is going to be all right. That he still loves me. Joe, who believes in me when I don't. Who has evolved into the man of my dreams. Who stands up to my extreme bitchiness with nonviolent communication. Who recognizes when I'm taking out all of my feelings of injustice on him, even when I skillfully disguise my accusation against some small, innocent gesture as an injustice committed against all womankind. When I push Joe to the breaking point in a storm of confusing emotion that would lead most people to eject themselves from our ship to swim to save his own life, Joe finds his sea legs in the hurricane and sets me, and us, straight.

Joe's love is especially commendable when I'm seasick and suffocating, flopping around on the slimy deck due to the loss of another love. I am in the best relationship imaginable, one that has withstood 27 years of tumult, finally able to rest on the smoother waters of parenthood alongside three magnificent kids--all artists in their own right, and who love us so much that they want to be part of our community--having spent so much time together we can be 100% ourselves... In a marriage built on complete honesty about everything under the sun, including our other lovers: for this Joe gets the deepest, darkest, bittersweet chocolate heart of my devotion.

Ash Wednesday. I stopped into St. Patrick's on Mission just in time for mass. Packed to the gills with people of all colors, all ages. I usually only go into a church when it's empty. I like Christ stripped down of all religion and rhetoric. I like most prophets and saints, in spite of their religious affiliation. I like rituals. For Ash Wednesday...I contemplated my transgressions. For lent, I am giving up a person.

Pic: In the Temple at Burning Man 2012, Joe guiding me on a trip that included a four hour, major dust storm.

Privacy?

I'm reconsidering privacy. The pleasure and sometimes shock of knowing there is an audience of readers both known and unknown in a world with no boundaries gives me serious pause.

I live in one big room with Joe. Almost everything in my "private life" takes place in this room.

My kids walk in and out. We've trained them to knock. Their friends walk in and out. They knock, too.  I love it. I'm used to it. I like lots of people around. I grew up in a big family and any privacy I carved out was hard-won. I remember going into the backyard at night when I was desperate to be alone and sitting in the dog pen along the side of the house away from all windows and smoking a cigarette. Just me and that lonely dog Laura, whom my Dad wouldn't let into the house. I think I started doing that when I was 11 years old... a soft pack of Winston's that I stole from my aunt Joanne that lasted a couple of years. I didn't need to be alone very often.

When I started this blog, I made a conscious decision to use my actual name. It took a couple of years to make that decision. It was a breakthrough to overcome my fears of exposure and rejection. Most of the readers of this blog do not make themselves known to me, but many come out of the woodwork to comment to me in person. Which is wonderful. But there are hundreds of others of you who return to see what's up, and as many who come for the first time each month. It's just a strange thing, this knowing and not knowing your audience.

I have found that the scope of subjects I'm willing to explore here has narrowed considerably. It's choking me.

Where once I didn't give a shit and felt the torrential flood of freedom when confronting the blank page, now numerous boundaries arise that I simply cannot cross. At this time. Sucks.

This requires of me the use of filters and circumlocution. But mostly results in silence. Forgive me. I'm working through it. I'm considering changing the privacy options...by asking people to request permission to subscribe. It' not that I need to know everyone who is following, but I need to know that a few people are not.

I'd like to ask, how would you feel about this? You can answer me anonymously, or with your name. Or by emailing me directly to engage in a conversation about it: kimbender7@gmail.com
Or by calling me. I'd really like some feedback before I make the decision.

Thanks.

Sundance

Saw 23 films. Went to some good parties. Drank a fair amount of really good whiskey.

Parties: Why am I'm always among the first to start dancing? Even though I'm "on the older side" (aka old), it remains a job I take seriously: getting the party started. It's like setting the table. Someone's gotta do it if people are going to eat. Talk, talk, talk. Who cares? I want to see people losing control. Highlight: dancing like a wild freak with Naomi Wolf, shouting into her ear about cervical orgasms. If you haven't read her book, Vagina, A Biography, get it. Order it. Make it your job to know all about the vagina-brain connection. I'm serious. Assigned reading.

The second half of the festival is always calmer. When you can really get down to business and see a shitload of films.  After half of L.A. has gone back home. It's all about seeing as many films as possible and finally spending real time at New Frontier exhibitions. But really, seeing films, taking chances, discovering a subject you had no idea about. A whole new world. Or a new way of seeing the world.

I liked Lovelace, a narrative feature about Linda Lovelace, her relationship with Chuck Traynor and rise to porn stardom. It was directed by Bay Area filmmaker team Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. The structure of the film was effective: taking the audience through the major events in her life and career in the way the public perceived them, then going back to those events to show the abusive relationship behind those same scenes - based on Lovelace's autobiography entitled Ordeal published in 1980 - and her anti-porn activism. The film sparks an important, and relevant dialogue about porn, third wave feminism and domestic abuse. Big congrats to Rob and Jeffrey for an extremely well-executed and moving film. Really well cast and acted by Amanda Seyfried, with Peter Sarsgaard, Hank Azaria, Adam Brody, James Franco, Sharon Stone. The film sold the night of the premiere to RADiUS-TWC. Looking forward to healthy debate on porn. I think Naomi and I disagree about this film.

On the subject...Went from there to Interior. Leather Bar. directed by Travis Mathews and James Franco. The 60 minute hybrid doc/scripted narrative imagines scenes deleted from the 1980 film Cruising starring Al Pacino; it explores homophobia, transgression, radical queer subculture then and now. The piece was all shot in a day and half with both straight and gay men actors. Mathews eloquently spoke in the Q&A about wanting to show "non-simulated sex" in his films, using real sex to tell real stories about the human condition, and the importance of maintaining radical subcultures in a society that values "normalcy." That was the most compelling argument made by the piece, though so much verite footage of filmmakers shooting filmmakers making a film and talking about it was often tedious as fuck. Again, looking forward to more healthy debate about this film and the subject.

The Stuart Hall Project was an unexpected highlight. Directed by veteran British filmmaker John Akomfrah, the film explores the life of the U.K. intellectual and cultural critic Stuart Hall, matching Hall's ideas about the impact of cultural events on individual experience/identity with the music of Miles Davis. This is an absolutely gorgeous film, crafted from 50 years and 8,000 hours of BBC archival footage of historical events and Hall's television program about cultural phenomena. In the Q&A, Akomfrah was extraordinarily articulate about Hall (a friend and great influence), the film, his process, Miles Davis, and his goal  of "translating" Hall, who is now in his '80's, to keep alive his contribution to our understanding of self.

Sundance at its best provides a snapshot of the cultural zeitgeist - new questions, new information, new connections, and new enthusiasm about the role of media in catalyzing change. If you are lucky. I was lucky.