Celeste Gainey

"As a lighting wizard on film sets and on the page, Gainey is a 'nuancer of mood / romancer of stars.' Her poetry glimmers with playful takes on light, shadows, and glances behind the scenes: 'De Niro idles in his Checker. Cybill flirts behind / her Jackie-Os.'" - O, The Oprah Magazine

[celestegainey]

She's coming to town!

Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent

The Andy Warhol Museum

Pittsburgh, PA

January 31-April19, 2015

[celestegainey]

"I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see."

- Duane Michals

[celestegainey]

“I’ve always been impressed by the fact that upon entering a room full of people, you find them saying one thing, doing another, and wishing they were doing a third. The words are secondary and the secrets are primary. That’s what interests me most.”

 - Mike Nichols, director (1931-2014)

[celestegainey]

"The wider world perceives fashion as a frivolity that should be done away with. The point is fashion is the armor to survive the reality of everyday life. I don't think you can do away with it. It would be like doing away with civilization."

- Bill Cunningham, Bill Cunningham New York

[celestegainey]

"Flying on to Monterey I had a sharp apprehension of the many times before when I had, like Lincoln Steffens, 'come back,' flown west, followed the sun, each time experiencing a lightening of spirit as the land below opened up, the checkerboards of the midwestern plains given way to the vast empty reach between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada; then home, there, where I was from, me, California. It would be a while before I realized that 'me' is what we think when our parents die, even at my age, who will look out for me now, who will remember me as I was, who will know what happens to me now, where will I be from."

- Joan Didion, Where I Was From

[celestegainey]

God Only Knows - BBC Music

What I love most: the floor lamps blinking on and off!

[celestegainey]

"Even as Nelson Mandela always insisted that his accomplishments were collective—also achieved by the men and women who were his comrades—the media attempted to sanctify him as a heroic individual. A similar process has attempted to dissociate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from the vast numbers of women and men who constituted the very heart of the mid-twentieth-century US freedom movement. It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals in order for people today to recognize their potential agency as a part of an ever-expanding community of struggle…I would say that as our struggles mature, they produce new ideas, new issues and new terrain on which we engage in the quest for freedom. Like Nelson Mandela, we must be willing to embrace the long walk toward freedom."

Angela Davis

[celestegainey]

“Beauty comes from contrast. I love contrast, either the lack of it or the abundance of it.”

- Conrad Hall, Cinematographer, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, In Cold Blood, Fat City, American Beauty, Road to Perdition, and many more.

  -      

[pleaseexcusethispoem]

Terrance Hayes is the author of Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are Wind In a Box, Hip Logic, and Muscular Music. His honors include a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the...

[theparisreview]

On the Met’s new Charles James retrospective: “The Met seems to be telling us—showing us—that we should view [dress and fashion] as high art. This is not a new argument, of course, but in spite of past scholarly and curatorial efforts, it has never decisively taken hold … James would seem the perfect antidote, and in many ways he is: a great designer who was never a celebrity (few outside the field of fashion have ever heard of him), an inveterate craftsman who was also a genuinely imaginative artist—a sculptor of satin and silk willing to sacrifice everything including profits for the perfect seam…”

For more of this morning’s roundup, click here.

[celestegainey]

“Focal Glow is the follow spot on the modern stage. It is the pool of light at your favorite reading chair. It is the shaft of sunshine that warms the end of the valley. It is candlelight on the face, and a flashlight on a stair… Focal glow draws attention, pulls together diverse parts, sells merchandise, separates the important from the unimportant, helps people see.

Ambient Luminescence is the uninterrupted light of a snowy morning in the open country. It is foglight at sea in a small boat, it is twilight haze on a wide river where shore and water and sky are indistinguishable. It is in any art gallery with strip-lighted walls, translucent ceiling, and white floor. (…) Ambient light produces shadowless illumination. It minimizes form and bulk.”

Play of Brilliants is Times Square at night. It is the eighteenth century ballroom of crystal chandeliers and many candle flames. It is sunlight on a fountain or a rippling brook. It is a cache of diamonds in an opened cave. It is the rose window of Chartres… Play of brilliants excites the optic nerves, and in turn stimulates the body and spirit, quickens the appetite, awakens curiosity, sharpens the wit….”

- Richard Kelly, modern architectural lighting pioneer

[celestegainey]

“When I began my career the theatre had accepted women as stars, set designers, stage managers, and even directors, but not in the technical field. In the long years since the time when women’s roles were even played by boys, that had remained a closed male world.

To overcome rude prejudice, I used courtesy, on which my mother had insisted since my birth. I also cultivated a careful impersonality, which disregarded sex, in spite of the ‘dears’ and ‘darlings’ used between the sexes as part and parcel of social usage in the theatre world. My only real weapon, though, in the battle for acceptance, was knowledge. I did know my stuff, and I knew that the technicians knew theirs. I honored, truly, their knowledge and their prerogatives. And gradually they came around –– from stagehands to directors –– to honor mine.”

 - Jean Rosenthal,  pioneer in lighting for the stage,  from The Magic of Light

[roxanegay]

So, I'm a college student on a budget -- not a unique circumstance, I know. Still, as such, my first avenue for reading books is reserving them from the library. About a page into Bad Feminist, I decided that owning your book is something I am willing to splurge for. Thank you for sharing your writing.

That is so flattering to hear. E-mail me your name and address at roxane at roxanegay.com and I will send you a copy of Bad Feminist. Save your money. 

[celestegainey]

Way to go @roxanegay: spread the knowledge w/ love––it just might catch on!

[celestegainey]

"What I want most is to have / been a girl with you and played on the opposite team so I could have liked you and / competed against you at the same time."

- Eloise Klein Healy, poet, "Asking About You" 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, EKH!

[celestegainey]

“Greek architecture taught me that the column is where the light is not, and the space between is where the light is. It is a matter of no-light, light, no-light, light. A column and a column brings light between them. To make a column which grows out of the wall and which makes its own rhythm of no-light, light, no-light, light: that is the marvel of the artist.”

- Louis Kahn, architect

[celestegainey]

"that was love but i kept on traveling"

- Frank O'Hara, "Mary Desti's Ass," 1961

[celestegainey]

"There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army."

- John Ashbery