As The Day Goes

This particular day starts out in the kitchen, moves to the back hall, shadows of windows and myself, shadows of me blended with the River Oak outside our front door, other leaves, my face erased by clouds, maps of NC collaged into paintings, strange that I used maps of North Carolina years before I ever knew I would move here; moving upstairs, self portrait in my bedroom, on my bed, where I spent the month of August recovering from surgery, blended images of my mom and myself, my mom who died in February, out to my car, my odometer, reaching 50,000 miles, trip to Carolina Friends to pick up Claire, who then, on our return home, is lying on my bed, blended images of my hand and Claire, and others, again outside, driving to Ellis's house, portraits of my son who is channeling his relatives, the sepia photographs of my father, back home, last photo of Claire and me at the end of the day, in an elevator. The day as microcosm. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njpy7ZaUd8U


A Note About The Music

The music I used for “As the Day Goes” is titled “Kalimankou Denkou (The Evening Gathering)”, sung by the Bulgarian Women’s Chorus. There is nothing, really, that connects this particular song and the images shown. It is not because of the implications of Bulgarian music or any specific translation of lyrics that suggested its use for this piece. Of course my piece does move through the day and ends in the evening, but it is, rather, the plaintive tone, the general sense of old world longing that draws me to it, that makes it seem fitting for my piece about a day in my life. It has all the tonalities of the shul (synagogue) in Hurleyville, New York, where I spent the Jewish High Holidays and many weekends, as a child with my father’s sister, my Aunt Olive, and most of the Hochbaum sisters, brothers, cousins and our Zedi, my grandfather. It reminds me as well of the Yemenite music I danced to as a child and as a young adult. It is this resonance, this connecting tonality, that drew me to the Bulgarian women, singing about an evening gathering, and, to me, calling up memories of my my own childhood. It is, in the end, an apt accompaniment, I think, to a piece which follows the course of a day, ends in the evening and includes my own children with their countenances recalling those others always present and potent in their absence.