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Four days in Cairo for for a friend’s graduation.

Festivities then roaming the city, including seeking out beer (it takes us two days, and four hours, the windows have plywood nailed over them because in this Muslim city, you don’t want to be seen from the street.)

Then a descent into tombs and Erwan (the brother) is bored and listening to hip-hop on his Iphone and I try to tell him no, these were the first rappers, don’t you see? They made whole rooms to show off their wealth and possessions. He doesn’t really buy it.

Mostly I am amazed by the movement – teaching cows to walk, the geese threatening to take flight.

We come upon the first rounded wall and the first graffiti (c. 1,800 BCE) done by some priests.

In Cairo I feel like I have awoken from a slumber – seeing old friends, back in a family, the pulsing of a city 20 million+, descending into the massive grave of 24 dead bulls with black granite tombs and then emerging to the pale heat of the desert – I just want more.

Don’t believe the hype – it’s all lies, these stories about trees falling in the forest. To fell a tree you don’t hack away at the core, you don’t throw your weight against its large trunk and emerge victorious, you don’t take vicious strokes and then yell “timber . . . “  This is all myth – there is no struggle, no crack, no thud.

Instead when you remove a tree, you do so in parts. You start from the top and you cut away: branches with a chainsaw, side trunks with an axe, ropes and pulleys to guide each falling piece. This is how you take apart a tree, until, in the end, the removal is so clean and so complete, you forget that the tree was even there.

 

 

 

I’ve just completed a five week trip across the USA.  Atlanta, across the south to Texas, up to Kansas and Iowa, through Chicago and Detroit, down through Philly and the Carolinas and back to the South. Stopping on the way with friends, listening to Greek tragedies on tape while driving, watching the signs out my window.  Here are a few.

This morning my aunt Susan, uncle Steve, aunt Julie (my Skype), my mom, and my friend Jim all read through my play “my grandpa’s dead body.”  The play borrows elements and characters from our own family, although mixes them with a darkness and a skewed vision of Iowa different from the one I live. It was a brave and moving experience, art and life co-mingling.

 

Drove through Selma this am. Shocked at the state of downtown – this was always a magical place to me and now it’s a ghost town. What has happened to one of the birth places of the civil rights movement?

With my dear friends Christine (shown) and Ola (behind the camera).