LAMA

  Seaperl Productions is in pre-production on the real-life Tantric Buddhist love triangle, LAMA (working title), that took place at Diamond Mountain.  

[seaperlproductions]

Cara Perlman Bio | Part 4 - 2000s

2000s

(Jane Smith and Steve Buscemi)

I decided to make a film about Jane Smith, the mother of Kiki Smith. She was almost 90 when I started. Her daughter, Kiki was famous now and her husband and Kiki’s father Tony Smith was even a more famous sculptor. Jane, a good friend of Tennessee Williams was an actress in Hollywood in the 40’s and she also sang a lot of opera. She had good stories. I produced a half hour piece about her called JANE SMITH 2000. It was my first commitment to film in a while as a serious effort. Jane loved it. She died maybe two-years later.

(Jane Smith)

9/11 happened. I watched it with a small hoard of people at my street corner, at Lispenard and Church. After both buildings fell down I met up with Laura Flanders who had been an experienced reporter in Beirut and the two of us took off toward the site and tried to get as close as we could. Debris was flying and floating everywhere. The cops wouldn’t let us south beyond Chambers Street. We were supposed to evacuate the neighborhood that night but I stayed. The next morning I went out and everything was completely covered with soot: streets, buildings, trees. Someone put bouquets of flowers on the tops of trashed cars. I walked around TriBeCa with sunglasses and a gas mask on and cried inside them. ID was required for a month afterward anytime anyone wanted to go below Canal Street. So I had to show ID in order to go home. There was hardly anyone around. It smelled bad. It felt bad. I started running along the pier where the air was better. I saw the Trade Center site being gutted and cleaned day and night. The massive hoses never stopped pumping water. The Westside Highway was a huge parade of strange trucks and people in all kinds of uniforms working feverishly.

I decided I needed a separate workspace. I continued to live at Lispenard Street and rented a studio in Long Island City. It was quiet and soft and the rents were pretty reasonable. There was a rundown but chic tennis club at the end of the block. I joined and learned how to play tennis while I was working, out there. It was very fun to play outside and see Manhattan across the East River. I stayed for two-years and then came back.

(Walker Art Center)

In 2002 I made a set for Amanda Miller at the Zurich Ballet. Amanda was a talented former student of Bill Forsythe. The set was a film about animals in the Bronx Zoo. I also made another set for Amanda this time in the States making inflatables for the stage, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. John Zorn did the music.

I was getting less excited about working with materials, materials that were possibly toxic. I was feeling the pull of the screen. In 2003 I decided to film the ski jumpers at Lake Placid because I thought it was a beautiful sport to watch, that I could do something with it and also and I could get there by car. I identified a few kids and followed them. It was a short film called SKI JUMPING IN THE US and ESPN picked it up and put it on their website as the Extreme Sport of the Month. They also hired me to write about it.

I was moving away from the art world. I wanted freedom from the studio life. I wanted to be around people. I wasn’t able to continue to pull off a lucrative career and I wasn’t invested in staying in the art world no matter what. Film was grabbing me. In 2005 I made a short movie about immigration. I got a grant from the Puffin Foundation to finish it.

(Scene from 110%)

Then I saw on TV that the women ski jumpers were trying to get into the Olympics. They were being interviewed during the 2006 Olympics in Turin, Italy and they talked about ski jumping being the only sport in the winter Olympics that didn’t have women. I called their PR person. The next day I got a huge package and a request to take on their story. I followed them for the next almost four-years and made a feature documentary about the US women’s team. 110% premiered on WNRK TV in Norway in 2011 and went to the Lake Placid Film Festival. It got distribution and it can be watched on iTunes. I met a guy who said he saw it recently on an airplane coming from Abu Dhabi to New York.

(Scene from 110%)

It was exhausting and expensive to make this film and I wanted to make another one. I loved meeting people, traveling, editing. Okay, what’s next? I spent the next two-years trying to figure out what I wanted as my next subject in film. I had firmly left the art world behind.

I decided to mine yoga and other spiritual territory. I came across a lot of press about John Friend, the former genius CEO of Anusara Yoga who got caught in a series of scandals. I interviewed some of the folks involved with him. But it still was not right. Then I came across Christie McNally’s Facebook page and the rest is…the present.

[seaperlproductions]

Cara Perlman Bio | Part 3 - 1990s

1990s

 I did a very large ballet project with Bill in 1991 called “Slingerland”. Among other things the set contained a film I made about blind people. I also made a homemade Playbill that sold, out in the lobby for a few German Marks. “Slingerland” was a big production with a lot of travelling back and forth. It premiered at Ballet Frankfurt where Bill was the director and head choreographer.

(Scene from Slingerland)

Around this time I became re-involved with Maggie Smith the now former owner of Tin Pan Alley. She was involved with law and social justice and increasingly with a Black Nationalist struggle called the December 12th Coalition. She invited me to come to some meetings uptown. Crack was emerging as a huge problem, along with police brutality and serious housing discrimination. I went to meetings in a room full of Black intellectuals and Maggie Smith. They asked me to run errands and make banners and listen to what they were thinking about and saying. The men insisted on being on the outside of the line and got slammed by police billy clubs, whenever I would go uptown, to their Harlem demonstrations. The local black priest wore a gun tucked in his back underneath his robes. Anytime there was an event the food was always delicious and there was a lot of warmth toward me.

(Lynn Stewart & William Kunstler)

Maggie also introduced me to people who were in jail for their politics and encouraged me to get involved. I went to political trials in New Jersey and Massachusetts where I watched Lynn Stewart and William Kunstler defend some of the radical lefties who were underground in the 1970’s. One of them was Richard Williams who I visited for about a year at the jail in Trenton, New Jersey until he was transferred to the State Prison in Lompoc, California. He had a life sentence for killing a State Trooper. I used to bring him food packages every few months. It wasn’t the most rousing relationship I’ve ever had but I was into it as an experience of going to a prison on a regular basis and seeing what it was like, who was there visiting, the smell of the place, the waiting, and Richard behind thick dirty glass on a telephone talking to me.

I am still working away, and thinking in the art world. It is the early 1990’s and after years of stage props I now had a penchant for light materials. I was also facing increasing storage needs at home and that really bothered me. I got the idea that I would make inflatables. That meant I could make air-filled objects any size and then flatten them out when they weren’t being used. I found a place on Long Island that sold me a used, from the 1960’s, portable inflatable machine that probably weighed about 400 pounds. I made my own tool and dye system out of brass by molding different shapes and started working. I made a show of made-up paleontology, skulls and claws, big pieces maybe 12 feet tall, out of transparent vinyl and showed them at the Holly Solomon Gallery in 1993.

(Mother’s Breath)

In 1997 I applied for and got a the prestigious Guggenheim Foundation Grant in sculpture. They said, “Here’s forty-grand. Do whatever you want.” I proposed a twenty-five foot high, inflated rock to put on top of Jeffrey Deitch’s art gallery on Wooster Street in SoHo. He gave me the go ahead. That was great fun to have a huge piece outside. I put this rock called Mother’s Breath on a timer so a light inside the sculpture went on at dusk and turned off at dawn. The rock looked like something from outer space. The real moon rose every night right behind it. Mother’s Breath sat on a one-story building that was like a stage that the rock sat on. I used to hang out in the big parking lot that was in front of the building and listen to people talking. “What is that thing?” etc. To me, the parking lot was like the orchestra section. The rock on top of the building was also directly across from the upstairs bar at the SoHo Grand Hotel. So the hotel bar was the mezzanine and the hotel rooms above, the balcony. So I got to replay my stage career with Mother’s Breath in SoHo.

(Jackon Pollock & Lee Krasner)

In 1999 I got another big grant, this time from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Suddenly I was going into the new millennium with cash. But dealers didn’t want to take me on in the art world, not really. I wanted recognition for all this work over the years. I needed support and nothing significant was forth coming. How long was I to keep knocking at the same door? Damn…..did I sabotage myself? Maybe. Maybe not.

[seaperlproductions]

Cara Perlman Bio | Part 2 - 1980s

(Scenes from TOPLESS)

Meanwhile I was working on my own career. I was pushing ahead with film. By this time I was using a super 8 camera. It was truly portable. I was also living on the Lower East Side with my roommate Jane Sherry, who was a topless dancer. We decided to make a docu-drama about a night in her life. We used the back room of the apartment for a set and shot TOPLESS (1979). We built a table for Jane to dance on. She brought in her real waitress from the job and I directed a fake show. I was living on Ludlow Street then, renting out my loft on Lispenard Street because I was bored being in TriBeCa. Ludlow was crazy with action and people from all walks of life. I also made an adventure film, POOFO (1980), about a bike messenger (I was a bike messenger in real life then) with Kiki Smith and Ellen Cooper. I got to show both films in the Edinburgh Film Festival in Scotland and the London Film Coop. I went to Scotland and stayed with Robbie Coltrane who later became a pretty famous actor. At the time he was chauffeuring Nick Nolte and his wife around Edinburgh. After the festival I went off by myself and shot a short documentary called SUPER VISTA, a super 8 film, about the political bombing of the train station in Bologna, Italy.

(Scenes from POOFO with Robbie Coltrane (left) and Kiki Smith (right))

I came back to NYC and started working at a Times Square Bar called Tin Pan Alley in late 1980. It was located on 49th Street between Broadway and 8th Avenue. It was a lefty political, artist, biker, whorish place where many people went to, have a good time. The owner, Maggie Smith was a very talented entrepreneur who could bring many types together happily. The food was great and cheap. Tin Pan was women run. Nan Goldin and Kiki Smith among others, cooked there. I was one of several bartenders. Many luminaries stopped by: Johnny Rotten aka Lydon, Jim Jarmusch, John Zorn, folks from the Revolutionary Communist Party, movie stars, and idiots. It was a wonderful crazy place.

(Maggie Smith and Nan Goldin)

In 1980 I started painting. I was making portraits of people from my now art studio/apartment on Ludlow Street. People would come over, friends, people from the street, art types. I painted them live using finger paint on finger painting paper. I made many of these portraits over a few years and started showing in galleries. I also published a book called “Fingerpaint Portraits” in a group of four with Jane Dickson, Keith Haring and Tom Otterness. The art scene was happening in the East Village and SoHo. There was a lot of meeting and greeting, openings, and generally getting out into the art world on a regular basis.

(Cara painting (left) and standing in front of her painting of Fab 5 Freddy (right)

In 1984, I moved to a loft on the Lower East Side. Clinton Street east of Ludlow, was a burned out dirt heap at the time, lots of drugs, and building alarms going off at all hours. The building was mostly artists and I was friendly with my upstairs neighbor Ronald Thornhill, a former ballet dancer. He introduced me to Bill Forsythe. Bill was making ballets in Europe and doing pretty well. He came downstairs to my studio while he was staying with Ron and working in with the Joffrey Ballet in Midtown. He asked if I wanted to come to Europe, to Paris and work with him on a new ballet and make my own sets based on the kind of work I was doing in the studio.

(Bill Forsythe)

I started working with Bill in 1983. Our first gig was at Opera Comique making a ballet called “France Dance”. I made huge standup cardboard animals and tiny monuments. The lead character in this ballet was a woman midget, and then there were the dancers. I got a space to work in the attic of the Paris Opera and we stayed at Nureyev’s guest apartment. Nureyev was the director of the Paris Opera at the time. He wasn’t around at first but showed up later. He was crazy for Bill who was a star in the making.

I met Nureyev a little later, for the first time, on the elevator at the opera house. He was wearing a big cape and clogs over white tights. We were the only ones on the elevator and I told him I was staying at his next door guest apartment with Bill. He was slightly unfriendly.

I was making pretty good money with the ballet. When I came back to NYC, Colab was mostly over and I ended my job as a bartender. I was having solo shows at Semaphore Gallery and I was living off my work. I was also living cheaply on the Lower East Side with Tom Otterness who was now my boyfriend.

I went back in 1984 to Europe and made another ballet with Bill. This time we made a project at the Vienna State Opera for an Alban Berg Festival. The final staged piece was a video. I made lots of objects and paintings for this video. The actual dance took place under the stage. It was filmed with my objects flying around. When we premiered it we got tons of boos and cheers simultaneously. No one just made a video on that huge stage with a live orchestra where people took their ballet so seriously. What a thrill that was. The Austrians wouldn’t let me take a public bow in a sleeveless shirt. They gave me a jacket to put on.

Tom came up from Italy, watched our show and then he and I drove back to Pietra Santa, a small town on the west coast of Italy in the north right across from Florence. He was working there on a sculpture show and he already had a sweet apartment. He rented me a separate studio. I made a series of ceramic pieces. It was beautiful there and we stayed for about two-months. I also came back with a small pile of work.

(Cara’s sculpture on on of the former Canal Cinema marquee)

I started to get more deeply connected to sculpture. I no longer rented the Lispenard loft to my friends and instead started using it as my art studio and lived with Tom on Stanton Street. I also made a short films including one called CANAL STREET, a portrait of a street that was a mixed and secretive street scene. The Lower East Side was also still a strange mix. But TriBeCa (which now had this name TriBeCa - Triangle Below Canal Street) was definitely moving up in status in spite of Canal Street. It was becoming a fancy neighborhood. The glitterati of the 80’s art world was hanging out in fabulous neighborhood restaurants like The Odeon and there was a booming club scene which I had absolutely no interest in. I also continued going off to Europe to work with Bill on new ballets. The ballet folks were becoming my second family. The dancers were great at going out together and having fun. The guys and the women wore high heels and crazy clothes and would drag me out with them. They all ate their hearts out, made good money and traveled everywhere. Dance is such a physical thing so there was a lot of closeness and ease with people. I loved being around them. I worked with Bill and his composer Thom Willems, a Dutchie who did most of Bill’s music. There were some nasty fights but I learned a lot from working with Bill Forsythe. He is a very talented artist.

By 1987 I was showing sculpture at Fawbush Gallery. I made a set of blackish ceramic dogs based on a real group that used to hang out at Tompkins Sq. Park. A semi homeless guy had about 13 dogs. They mated with each other so the dogs looked a lot alike. They followed him everywhere in a long line. I made a set of these dogs, life size and showed them among other pieces at Fawbush. Bill Forsythe loved them and asked if I would make more for a ballet set. In 1988 I made them for “Behind the China Dogs” a ballet at Lincoln Center at the State Theater (now the Koch Theater). The ballerinas were in super chic sexy black outfits with the misfit dogs. Being on the stage at Lincoln Center was a particularly big deal because it was my home theater since I was a kid (growing up right outside of the city) and now here I was putting my stuff on stage. Yes a big thrill.

(Cara’s dog sculptures)

Tom and I were fading. We broke up around 1989 and I moved back to Lispenard Street. So now it was my home and studio. I lived in a small part in the back and kept most of it open for work.

* * * * * * * * * *

Don’t forget about “Part 1 - 1970s” of Cara’s Bio.

[seaperlproductions]

Cara Perlman Bio | Part 1 - 1970s

I graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1973 with a BFA and came to New York. There was lots of cheap space in a very remote TriBeCa which had no name then. I rented 2000 sq. ft. on Chambers Street in early 1974, put in a bathroom and an abbreviated kitchen, painted it fluorescent pink and started making things. Initially I started dragging in found stuff from the street, nurses uniforms, boxes, books, doll parts, lumber, anything that looked interesting and put things together.

 All four of us in the building were artists but hardly anyone else lived on the block at that point. There were regular shootouts at Ralph’s Bar on the corner of Hudson and Chambers. I used to hide behind a car until it was safe to move.

 My first job was across the street as a security guard at the local cheese store, Cheeses of All Nations. I never caught anyone stealing. The owner was drunk everyday by late afternoon and gave me a loads of free cheese.

(Julia Hayward, Richard Serra, Kiki Smith, and Walter Robinson)

The local bar, three blocks away on Duane Street was Barnabus Rex. It was a tiny place with a pool table that took up almost the entire room, a jukebox and a bar. There was beer for sixty-cents and shots. Baranabus was an artist hangout, very hip and crazy. Lots of art luminaries. Julia Hayward aka Duka Delight, Richard Serra, Kiki Smith, Mike aka Walter Robinson, Diego Cortez.

(Diego Cortez)

(Sony Portapak)

By early 1976 I sold my improvements to another tenant and moved from the loft to the new affordable housing high rise on Chambers and Greenwich St. I lived on the 24th floor facing the Hudson River. I wanted to be modern, live high up and work less material centric. I was trying things out. I got my hands on the first Portapak, the first portable video recording system, made by Sony. It had a huge reel-to-reel tape deck. An assortment of cords went out from the deck into a big heavy handheld camera. I built a wagon for the deck so I could take it outside and try stuff. It was very clumsy and tiring but it was something amazing too. I found a way to make performances and have a record. I made a video of cooking a chicken on top of the stove but didn’t put it in a pan. Artist pals John Torreano and James Nares came over and did narrations of “The Country versus the City” or “The Four Seasons”. I remember James saying, with his upper class English accent, “I don’t like the fall, everything is falling.” I started making objects again as part of the video projects and unfortunately I was damaging the brand new parquet floor. It six months later and it was time to go.

(John Torreano and James Nares)

My art pal Andrea Callard found an empty building and asked me if I wanted a floor. She had also been my neighbor on Chambers Street and it sounded great. Andrea and I and Bernice Rubin went to talk to the landlord, an older gent named Nathan Seril who had an office on Franklin Street He was a little nervous, he said, renting to girls. But he said okay finally and he put us in his Rolodex under G for the Girls. We moved to Lispenard Street, one block south of Canal Street between Broadway and Church in the summer of 1976.

(Andrea Callard)

I was still a regular at Barnabus Rex and the more upscale, sit down and eat diner, Magoos. I was also making more friends in the art world. I started hanging out with Tom Otterness, a sweet guy from Kansas and Alan Moore, a thin, impoverished lefty. We would walk around endlessly and talk. Sometimes we would be at someone’s house and then a few people would yell up (no one had door bells in those days) and we’d all hang out. A group of artists were forming. We argued lefty politics and art. The gallery system was bankrupt, predictable and boring.

(Tom Otterness and Alan Moore)

By 1978 I was part of an artist collective. The first name was Green Corporation, aka Green Corp. That lasted for a short time until it turned into Collaborative Projects, aka Colab. There were about 30 of us, white and straight, with a few exceptions. Everyone was pretty ambitious and traumatized. There was endless arguing about politics and means of getting from A to B. It was also pretty sexist, especially at the beginning. But we wanted to change the rules and make a new version of what it meant to be together. We realized that we had some power because there were lots of talented artists with strength in numbers. Colab got some grant money early on, then more and more. We put on several gallery type shows, The Doctors and Dentists Show, The Batman Show, the Manifesto Show in people’s lofts. We had a series of Access Cable TV shows; All Color News, Potato Wolf, a live show of skits that I initiated, and Red Curtain, a pre-taped movie channel. We had several versions of the A More Store, a roving shop that had several different locations at different times. A More Store sold artist multiples. There was also a catalog for the A More Store that mailed products directly to the buyer. In 1980 we mounted The Times Square Show on 40th St. right off 7th Ave. The building was in an old massage parlor. Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf were kids who showed up. Jean Michel Basquiat also showed up as SAMO with his writings on the walls. It was four floors of whatever anyone wanted to do. The rules were, that it was open to others but we had to agree that whoever was participating was basically okay, that no one else could just take it over. Materials included mashed potatoes, manifestos, drawings, paintings, sculpture and installations of every imaginable shape and form. We also had film and video shows there.

(Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and Jean Michel Basquiat)

In advance of the show we took out 3, 30-second TV spots on WNEW, channel 5. I got to make one of those. It was a thrill to see my 30-second spot on late night TV. We also got a grant to use the Spectacolor Board to advertise the show. The board is still on 42nd Street facing Broadway and 7th Avenue where the ball goes down on New Years Eve. It was, in 1980, one of the only moving image boards on the block.

[seaperlproductions]

Charismatic Rule Breakers flew into the Sun! #ChristieMcNally #MichaelRoach #DiamondMountain

[seaperlproductions]

#NatalieThomas as #ChristieMcNally in #LAMAthemovie. #DiamondMountain #tantricBuddhism

[seaperlproductions]

#LAMAthemovie is a romantic thriller. #ChristieMcNally was the queen.

[seaperlproductions]

Check out what a former #student has to say about #ChristieMcNally. #DiamondMountain #TantricBuddhism

[seaperlproductions]

From Lama the movie

[seaperlproductions]

#DiamondMountain, tantra and lofty ideals or in the end was it a cult? 

[seaperlproductions]

Lamathemovie a trip to the desert. #diamondmountain

[seaperlproductions]

Arizona desert near #DaimondMountain

[seaperlproductions]

Buddha in the Desert

On this rural dirt road near the town of Bowie, not far from the foothills of the Chiricahua Mountains, there's hardly any noise during the...

[seaperlproductions]

LAMA: Christie McNally

Christie McNally as a smart young woman has many options and chooses the unconventional path to follow a Buddhist monk. She makes herself indispensable and becomes the chosen student. Christie is not a natural hustler. But she is a good student and is methodically taught to grow into her role and assert herself as a performer. Her installment as Lama brings controversy. She carries the weight of being not believable because she’s come in on the guru’s coattails and also because she is a “blond bombshell”. She is not shy about deploying her charms to acquire whatever her heart is set upon getting. Lama Christie becomes the Queen of Diamond Mountain. She is a tough meditation teacher and doesn’t discourage extreme devotion. When the tables turn, Christie becomes a guru to Ian her new love. His violence and weakness destabilizes Christie. Increasingly she is prone to magical thinking and makes irrational choices.

[seaperlproductions]

Clip from #LAMAthemovie. #DiamondMountain #Buddhist #indiefilm

[seaperlproductions]

#Arizona #desert near #DiamondMountain #Buddhist retreat center. #LAMAthemovie Made with @nocrop_rc #rcnocrop