[as if in dreams] A newsletter from Joseph Zitt #030
PDF (More printable) Edition
(That is, either this is the PDF edition or that is a link to it.)
09 April, 2021
This is issue number 30 of the newsletter. (Link: YouTube)
A note: Email newsletters obscure where links go. They shouldn't. I had talked with some other newsletter writers and the person who makes this Buttondown system about it. While what the corrupted links enable isn't all that useful for anyone, it's too tied into the code to turn off easily.
So those of us who have discussed it are looking to, at least, show the source site for links. That way, you can check them before, say, burning up any of the handful of visits you might make to a firewalled site such as The Atlantic, or finding that Google now knows that you've visited a site that you would have avoided on your own. The right to know where your clicks are taking you would seem to be one of the basic early promises of the Web, but it's rarer now.
A message I sent appears to have kicked off a discussion between two bloggers whom I admire, John Naughton and Dave Winer about ways of improving the software and infrastructure of blogging and newsletters. I'm pleased.
By the way, if you're reading the PDF version, the footnotes show the full link location. I've sent a request to the people who make the conversion software to see if it's possible to magically pull in more information. It would be cool if it were so, but it's a long shot. The developer just posted to the mailing list that it would be possible, but it looks like it would be beyond my current programming skills. Maybe someone else will be inspired to try it.
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Onward!
In the middle of the week, it was surprising hot here, with dust clogging the air. At least that's what I'm told. I didn't get outside. I came down with what felt like a bad cold on Monday night. I called out sick from work on Tuesday and Wednesday. Family suggested that I run the air conditioner because of the heat and dust, but I was already chilly. I tried to get things done. I mostly ended up either sleeping or curling up in my TV chair and bingeing Glee. At least I tried to curl up. The chair isn't all that big.
I was also sick, though less so, on Saturday. I had been asked to attend the morning service at the House of a Hundred Grandmothers. It was the last day of Passover (which is one day shorter in Israel than elsewhere), and, among other things, there's an extended prayer for the dead. Even though a large number of women attend, they still need ten men to be able to do it, and were worried that there wouldn't be enough. I got up in time and got dressed, but realized that I had a headache and was sneezing like crazy. It wouldn't be good to be contagious with anything in a room full of elderly people who might have lowered immune systems, even though we all would have had our vaccinations. I sent a text to my family's caregiver. She told them I wouldn't make it. I also stayed away in the afternoon, when I usually visit. They agreed that I made the right call in not coming over.
Big news on the film project front: our dancer has officially signed on. Cheryl Nayowitz came to Israel from New York about ten years ago. She's a trained dancer and yoga teacher, with degrees in Dance Therapy from NYC and a background in dancing there. She has a strong religious background and lifestyle, which gives us a common language in developing the movement. Speaking today of what the dance might convey, she brought up stories of the passionate, worshipful movements of Hannah and Miriam in the Bible. Exactly. This helps focus ideas of costuming and related issues in the film.
This is a collaboration, so I'm leaving many aspects of the dance up to her invention. Four images of her will be in motion onscreen throughout the film. This got a bit confusing in discussion today, since I was going between the singular and plural in speaking of "the other dancers," by which I meant the other images of herself who would be dancing at the same time though, of course, she wouldn't see them as she was doing the dancing. It's analogous to the ways that, in making the sound, the members of Gray Code (or, in other sections, four recordings of myself speaking or playing sampled piano) are recorded independently, with the knowledge and trust that what everyone is doing would fit together.
A metaphor that I used: at any time, multiple people in adjacent time zones might be doing the evening prayers of a given tradition, whether it's ma'ariv or Vespers or something else. They would be doing it simultaneously, not knowing who and where the others might be or which part of the liturgy they are performing at the moment, but knowing that the community is doing this, in some sense, together.
We'll have more information about Cheryl and her work in the near future. Meanwhile here's a link to a beautiful essay that she posted at The Shlomo Katz Project about a year ago.
So now we can move forward with the project as:
dreamtext
a film by Joseph Zitt
dance by Cheryl Nayowitz
music performed by Gray Code and Vered Forbes
I'm looking to get the crowdfunding campaign, as well as a Facebook group for the project, started quite soon. I had lagged on it for a while, but having an active collaborator makes all the difference.
Colophon
(Unchanged from last week, except for this line.)
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See you next week!