Sundown Poetry Series–Paul Allen
Yesterday evening, I attended an excellent Sundown Poetry Series reading by Paul Allen. His poems from his new collection, Ground Forces, were on target in describing the human condition as well as quite hilarious. The new venue for the event, the City Gallery, provided a lovely backdrop of the series as well as air conditioning.
Allen also played guitar, and sang. The line the stayed with me the most is, “In my mind, bi-polar is a bear with an interesting sex life.”
What a unique way to think of illness.
Ten Trees
After the reading, I went to check out the Ten Trees Exhibit and documentary by Sam Fleischner that was is in the back on the gallery.
The exhibit is a theatre made of ten trees worth plywood, and the accompanying film, which was made in South Carolina–one of the largest producers of plywood–was shown in the structure.
The film shows the entire process of the plywood manufacture from cutting the trees to finished product, on a truck, awaiting delivery.
The movie is very much like an episode of How It’s Made, except it doesn’t have narration or music. The only sounds are the sounds of the production of the sheets (even with workers taking breaks and looking bored).
It can be mind-numbing stuff in points so it’s not in any running for the most scintillating Piccolo production.
Even so, I saw the film as part of the installation as much 
as the walls or the seats. I found it interesting to see the process of the plywood being made as I sat on the seats in the finished piece. I liked the rattle and hum of machinery and seeing the workers go though the work of producing the plywood.
It’s something that I don’t often witness.
We live in a world in which we largely removed from how the things we use are made, and for me, the film is a meditation on this point.
In that way, the movie and exhibit work well together.
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