Notes scribbled during a performance of Cineastas, expanded upon and turned into ten rules to live by

1.Two lives are more balanced than one. A double life is preferred, and keeps people guessing.

2. Objects reconstruct life. Look around a space, how everything is placed tells our story.

3. The juxtaposition of two things paves the way for a third idea. The superimposition of fiction upon a life creates a hybrid existence, clarified, rare, potentially immortal.

4. Everything that belongs to us will someday be part of someone else’s film set.  Take as a case in point, adultery.  A husband or a wife is as apt to show up in someone else’s drama as an ascot or a handbag.

5. There’s little time left.

6. “To Moscow we must go!” Ever since Chekhov wrote Three Sisters, this expression has exemplified a longing for poetry and art and culture and a desire to escape the low-brow and the mundane.  In Cineastas, the character goes on to ask, “What will I do once I get there?”

7. We see fictions.  We see our lives through fictional lenses.  Does art imitate life or is it vice versa?

8. In all stories, the inciting incident is what sets a character off upon a transformative journey.  In Cineastas, the filmmaker starts out to make his or her film.  It is the inciting incident which interrupts, transforming the experience of making the film into a harrowing, mind-boggling, revelatory act, which is the play within the play we take delight in.

9.  What changes? What lasts? How does the concept of erasure force us to see the things in life that are valuable and therefore fleeting? Or, is it the other way around: is our ghost life valuable because it is a slate soon to be wiped clean?

10. Fiction lasts longer than lives.  Identity is fluid.  We can identify with the Russian Steppes, we may perceive those hills containing measurable qualities that will sustain us.  In the end, what we have to live on is story-telling and imagination.