In my previous post I spoke about one of my favourite movies of all time, Beetlejuice (1988). Another that I love is The Crow (1993).
I mention this because I managed to get a copy of the movie on blu-ray recently and then watched it last weekend. This weekend I took the time to watch the extras on the disc, one of which was an interview with the lead actor, Brandon Lee. Lee died whilst making the movie which is kind of tragic and ironic and creepy all rolled up into one because the movie is about returning from the dead to set things right. This is also made all that more poignant because of the fact that Brandon was the late great Bruce Lee’s son. Bruce Lee was one of the few male role models I had as a teen and I would often spend hours in my bedroom training, trying to perfect Jeet Kune Do. Jeet Kune Do was Bruce Lee’s personal style of kung fu. In the Warner Brothers film, Enter the Dragon (1973), when Lee is asked, “What’s your style?”, he simply replies, “My style? .You can call it the art of fighting without fighting.”
He often referred to it as “the art of expressing the human body”. Lee believed that martial art styles had become too rigid and unrealistic. He called martial art competitions of the day “dry land swimming”. He believed real combat was spontaneous, and a martial artist could not predict it, but only react to it. A good martial artist should “be like water”—move fluidly without hesitation. Bruce Lee died at the age of 32 from a brain aneurism. Lee had just completed making ,
Enter the Dragon, the most successful martial arts movie of all time.
On March 31, 1993, 20 years later, Brandon Lee, Bruce Lee’s son, died of a gunshot wound during the filming of The Crow in an accident involving a prop gun. The Crow, like Enter the Dragon, was tremendously successful and became a cult movie. Like father like son.
In the interview that I mentioned (Brandon) Lee is tremendously engaging, and really speaks so eloquently and passionately. He quotes a passage from Paul Bowles’ book, The Sheltering Sky, which I really love and that I want to share with you:
Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. And yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, or five times more? Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless…
It was a quote that was to appear on his wedding invitations and instead now appears on his tombstone. Take what you will from this, as you must from whatever life throws at you. And with that I return to my life and what is going on.
So my first week of six weeks of fasting is done and dusted! This in preparation for my performance piece, 40RTY. I have to admit it was a bit of a slog. I have cut out all processed foods and animal products. So no dairy (man, I miss CHEESE!), no meat (I don’t do meat anyway), no eggs, no soya even, as soya products are processed. That leaves me with raw vegetables and fruits and their juices. In the first three days I felt as if I had the flu which is quite normal as your body detox’s: headachey, tired, cranky. In addition I developed cold sores on the sides of my mouth. But by Friday I was feeling a little better if somewhat lightheaded. Lots of cravings also and cursing myself for putting me through all of this. I went for a run on the Saturday after work and really struggled, just no gas/energy. I am here to tell you that fasting sweat really reminds you that you are just an animated meat-shape. Then on Saturday night, like a switch clicking on,suddenly I was no longer tired, I was the opposite. This means that I have barely got any sleep since then because I am all of a sudden seriously hyper! That’s bad because I am normally like that anyway, so I am literally hyper-hyper! So now it is Monday and I have 34 days until my performance! In reality though the performance has already begun and it started the moment that I began fasting. The idea is that by doing this, when I walk into the gallery space and present my performance, my mind will already be so focused (40 days of fasting will achieve this) that I will seamlessly progress from one to the other (fasting to performance) with the exclusion of all else. I will be, quite literally, a work of art. In addition I have been working on my installation which is really coming along nicely. I am excited to see it in the gallery space. I imagine it will be quite something!