My daughter arrives home from the National Portrait Gallery with the gift of a post card. Tom Phillips lithograph of Samuel Beckett: “NO MATTER. TRY AGAIN. FAIL AGAIN. FAIL BETTER. So many of the people who I met in the US squeezed time for conversations in between the wild rush to meet funding application deadlines.… Continue reading Sandwiched by Angels
Author: David Slater
Mr. Peet and an Airport Lounge and Love continued…
And so it all comes to an end, my great American Adventure (only joking of course it doesn’t) with a cup of coffee from Mr. Peet’s place in the departure lounge at JFK. Joanna Harris had taken me to the original store in Berkeley and of course she had known him as she had… Continue reading Mr. Peet and an Airport Lounge and Love continued…
“It’s wonderful people can do things like that”
It is towards the beginning my visit to MoMA that I missed the critical companionship of the women I had wandered round the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton Massachusetts with. “Let Art Touch You” is the museum’s strap line. These women knew how. We’re back to driving on the Los Angeles freeways at night in… Continue reading “It’s wonderful people can do things like that”
Love and an awkwardness with words
We’re not good about talking about intimacy, certainly in the UK. Up until now most of my writing energies have been focused on the mostly joyless last of writing funding bids, trying to secrete passion in between the lines of recycled text. Taking this sabbatical has been a delight. Suddenly whole new packages of words… Continue reading Love and an awkwardness with words
Books
[Bibi Melville from Maryland talking about a cross-generational/ cross-cultural programme that she is working on] Almost eight weeks ago in Burbank on the outskirts of Los Angeles I help to run a workshop for senior managers at EngAge. We asking the question how can we more effectively communicate the stories from different residential centre programmes.… Continue reading Books
Buying Oranges with Susan Perlstein.
In Rotherhithe back in the 70s, on the south shore of the Thames, there lived a retired lighterman named Johnny Coffee. Lighterman ‘drove’ barges single handedly up the Thames using muscle, skill, and huge oars. Johnny had an a list of phone numbers hanging around his neck with contacts to anyone you could care to… Continue reading Buying Oranges with Susan Perlstein.
Penelope, Guitars and a Salt Marsh
To the Museum of Modern Art and “Imagination and the Changing Mind”, a symposium that considers how innate differences or changes that develop in later life can beget creative engagement and meaningful contribution to society. Afterwards I snatch a brief conversation with one of the keynote speakers, Anne Basting. Anne is the Director of the… Continue reading Penelope, Guitars and a Salt Marsh
“What good is melody?”
. I leave the choir rehearsal in the Prospect Hill Seniors Centre and the sky has cleared. We are high up and there is a view; white scuddering clouds under a huge blue sky. There is the drone of the late afternoon traffic heading north-west along Prospect Expressway. Brooklyn and Manhattan stretch out beyond and… Continue reading “What good is melody?”
Snow and Shakespeare
‘So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, ‘So long lives this and this gives life to thee.’ We are in Manhattan in the mid-town east side. A day care centre for people who have Alzheimer’s. It’s a poetry reading and poetry making project led by Gary Glazner of The Alzheimer’s Poetry Project.… Continue reading Snow and Shakespeare
On the roof tops with Andy Torres
In Washington DC I take the bus out to Mount Rainier to visit the home of Andy Torres. Andy is in his young seventies and is a former company member of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange. He still works with their company teaching classes in the community. I had met him the day before when… Continue reading On the roof tops with Andy Torres
Creativity, Arts and Older People 