The world is a mask that hides the real world.
Thatâs what everybody suspects, though the world we see wonât let us dwell on it long.
The world has ways - more masks - of getting our attention.
The suspicion sneaks in now and again, between the cracks of everyday existenceâ¦the bird song dips, rises, dips, trails off into blue sky silence before the note that would reveal the shape of a melody that, somehow, would tie everything together, on the verge of unmasking the hidden armature that frames this sky, this tree, this bird, this quivering green leaf, jewels in a crown.â¦
As the song dies, the secret withdraws.
The tree is a mask.
The sky is a mask.
The quivering green leaf is a mask.
The song is a mask.
The singing bird is a mask.
Friday, December 02, 2005
wild parrot man: once homeless, now an author with a movie in theaters everywhere
Look who's squawking
The Guardian, Friday December 2, 2005
No one knows how a flock of Peruvian parrots made it to San Francisco. But one thing seems certain: they're about to become international stars.
Head to head: Mark Bittner communing with the parrots.
Photograph: Daniela Cossali
The view from the top of Telegraph Hill is breathtaking: fog rolling in across the Golden Gate bridge, ferries chugging across the bay to Alcatraz. The parrots like it, too. Scattered across the cypress trees, their bright green feathers and red faces vivid against the khaki leaves, they stare out across the water, just like the tourists - except now the parrots are tourist attractions themselves.
In matters of real estate, Peruvian wild parrots have taste. Telegraph Hill, in the sunny north-east of San Francisco, is a dense neighbourhood of steep, narrow streets - implausibly steep pavements are forced to morph into staircases, when they don't give up and revert to being cliffs - with wild, jungly gardens and little houses that cost the earth. It climbs through North Beach - San Francisco's great bohemian neighbourhood of strip joints, jazz clubs and beatnik cafes - ending 540ft up on Coit Tower, the priapic monument modelled on a hose-nozzle, erected by a millionairess with a thing for firemen.
For the longest time, only locals knew about these avian lodgers - all cherry-headed conures except one. But since the release last year of Judy Irving's successful documentary film The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill and Mark Bittner's book of the same name, the parrots have become national stars. Soon to be international, judging by overseas interest. When the next Time Out guide is published, there'll probably be parrot-spotting walks alongside the entries on Coit Tower, City Lights bookshop and Caffe Trieste.
Quite how the parrots got from Peru to North Beach, no one knows, though the movie offers plenty of theories: lorries crashing en route to pet shops; parrots hitching rides on container ships. But it's a tolerant place, San Francisco - as America goes, remarkably tolerant - so a flock of exotic birds sharing a few city blocks with the native sparrows and pigeons is as unremarkable as a street with Chinatown down one end and Little Italy down the other.
Tolerance, in fact, is one of the movie's underlying themes - along with freedom, connecting, materialism, ecology, Zen, and love. Which makes it a gentler, more bittersweet avian blockbuster than March of the Penguins, and very San Franciscan.
Irving has specialised in environmental films (Dark Circle, about the nuclear power industry, won a Sundance festival award) but this was her first "portrait film", the story of Bittner, an enigmatic, endearing, fiftysomething - homeless, jobless, but contented and self-sustaining - and his remarkably close relationship with the parrots. Irving, a cockatiel owner - it's perched on her knee as we talk - saw an article he wrote about it in Bird Talk magazine and immediately thought of a film. But the article said he'd had to leave the hill. When she heard he'd moved back, she contacted him. Keen to have a "visual memory" before he was forced to leave again, he gave her the go-ahead.
What started out for Irving as "sort of a hobby, with four rolls of 16mm film I had left over from another shoot" grew over four-and-a-half years from a 20 minute short to "this thing that changed my life". It would spoil the ending of the film to say precisely how.
After we've come to know and recognise Connor, the blue-headed parrot loner, Mingus, who nods like a junked-out jazzman whenever Bittner plays guitar, the hoodlum Sonny, coquettish Sophie and her big mate Picasso; after we've seen Bittner tend the sick and injured parrots and heard insights into their behaviour learned from spending hour upon hour sitting among them with a bowl of sunflower seeds, like a Buddhist Saint Francis, it's a shock when the camera cuts to an old homeless woman feeding pigeons on the streets. Irving asks Bittner what makes him different from the bag lady. He has no answer.
Asked the same question now, he says: "Really, the only difference is a lot of homeless people have drug and alcohol problems and I didn't." Bittner says he became homeless "by accident" in the 1970s when he moved from Seattle to become a musician and was disillusioned by an untrustworthy manager, his own egotism, and the break-up of a love affair. Since "it had all come apart at the seams", he decided to be a "seeker", as people did back then; he read a lot, crashed with friends, slept outdoors and relied on the kindness of strangers.
"I didn't work very much, but all I really needed was to feed myself and wash my clothes. Seeds are not that expensive." When vet bills for the birds needed paying, he'd pin a notice on the grocery shop wall and within hours get a call telling him a well-wisher had left a $100 bill.
Bittner says he was reading a book by San Franciscan beat/nature poet Gary Snyder when he first noticed the parrots. By another accident, for the next few years they became his full-time job. "I loved them, cared for them, just became absorbed with them, and in the end they brought me everything." He and his new partner have just bought a cottage on Telegraph Hill, where he is writing his second book - not about parrots. "I didn't see myself as the Parrot Man for life."
But he and Irving are still watching out for them. The film and book have become a focus for a campaign against a Connecticut utility company trying to gas a wild parrot flock. And, closer to home, they're meeting this week with a neighbour who has chopped down three of the five cypress trees on Telegraph Hill that the parrots call home. Such is the flock's fame that wire services and national newspapers are vying over which will be first to get the results. Bittner is hoping that the new DVD release will keep the wild birds a priority. "We want to celebrate wildness," he says, "not destroy it."
· The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill is released on December 9.
The Guardian, Friday December 2, 2005
No one knows how a flock of Peruvian parrots made it to San Francisco. But one thing seems certain: they're about to become international stars.
Head to head: Mark Bittner communing with the parrots.
Photograph: Daniela Cossali
The view from the top of Telegraph Hill is breathtaking: fog rolling in across the Golden Gate bridge, ferries chugging across the bay to Alcatraz. The parrots like it, too. Scattered across the cypress trees, their bright green feathers and red faces vivid against the khaki leaves, they stare out across the water, just like the tourists - except now the parrots are tourist attractions themselves.
In matters of real estate, Peruvian wild parrots have taste. Telegraph Hill, in the sunny north-east of San Francisco, is a dense neighbourhood of steep, narrow streets - implausibly steep pavements are forced to morph into staircases, when they don't give up and revert to being cliffs - with wild, jungly gardens and little houses that cost the earth. It climbs through North Beach - San Francisco's great bohemian neighbourhood of strip joints, jazz clubs and beatnik cafes - ending 540ft up on Coit Tower, the priapic monument modelled on a hose-nozzle, erected by a millionairess with a thing for firemen.
For the longest time, only locals knew about these avian lodgers - all cherry-headed conures except one. But since the release last year of Judy Irving's successful documentary film The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill and Mark Bittner's book of the same name, the parrots have become national stars. Soon to be international, judging by overseas interest. When the next Time Out guide is published, there'll probably be parrot-spotting walks alongside the entries on Coit Tower, City Lights bookshop and Caffe Trieste.
Quite how the parrots got from Peru to North Beach, no one knows, though the movie offers plenty of theories: lorries crashing en route to pet shops; parrots hitching rides on container ships. But it's a tolerant place, San Francisco - as America goes, remarkably tolerant - so a flock of exotic birds sharing a few city blocks with the native sparrows and pigeons is as unremarkable as a street with Chinatown down one end and Little Italy down the other.
Tolerance, in fact, is one of the movie's underlying themes - along with freedom, connecting, materialism, ecology, Zen, and love. Which makes it a gentler, more bittersweet avian blockbuster than March of the Penguins, and very San Franciscan.
Irving has specialised in environmental films (Dark Circle, about the nuclear power industry, won a Sundance festival award) but this was her first "portrait film", the story of Bittner, an enigmatic, endearing, fiftysomething - homeless, jobless, but contented and self-sustaining - and his remarkably close relationship with the parrots. Irving, a cockatiel owner - it's perched on her knee as we talk - saw an article he wrote about it in Bird Talk magazine and immediately thought of a film. But the article said he'd had to leave the hill. When she heard he'd moved back, she contacted him. Keen to have a "visual memory" before he was forced to leave again, he gave her the go-ahead.
What started out for Irving as "sort of a hobby, with four rolls of 16mm film I had left over from another shoot" grew over four-and-a-half years from a 20 minute short to "this thing that changed my life". It would spoil the ending of the film to say precisely how.
After we've come to know and recognise Connor, the blue-headed parrot loner, Mingus, who nods like a junked-out jazzman whenever Bittner plays guitar, the hoodlum Sonny, coquettish Sophie and her big mate Picasso; after we've seen Bittner tend the sick and injured parrots and heard insights into their behaviour learned from spending hour upon hour sitting among them with a bowl of sunflower seeds, like a Buddhist Saint Francis, it's a shock when the camera cuts to an old homeless woman feeding pigeons on the streets. Irving asks Bittner what makes him different from the bag lady. He has no answer.
Asked the same question now, he says: "Really, the only difference is a lot of homeless people have drug and alcohol problems and I didn't." Bittner says he became homeless "by accident" in the 1970s when he moved from Seattle to become a musician and was disillusioned by an untrustworthy manager, his own egotism, and the break-up of a love affair. Since "it had all come apart at the seams", he decided to be a "seeker", as people did back then; he read a lot, crashed with friends, slept outdoors and relied on the kindness of strangers.
"I didn't work very much, but all I really needed was to feed myself and wash my clothes. Seeds are not that expensive." When vet bills for the birds needed paying, he'd pin a notice on the grocery shop wall and within hours get a call telling him a well-wisher had left a $100 bill.
Bittner says he was reading a book by San Franciscan beat/nature poet Gary Snyder when he first noticed the parrots. By another accident, for the next few years they became his full-time job. "I loved them, cared for them, just became absorbed with them, and in the end they brought me everything." He and his new partner have just bought a cottage on Telegraph Hill, where he is writing his second book - not about parrots. "I didn't see myself as the Parrot Man for life."
But he and Irving are still watching out for them. The film and book have become a focus for a campaign against a Connecticut utility company trying to gas a wild parrot flock. And, closer to home, they're meeting this week with a neighbour who has chopped down three of the five cypress trees on Telegraph Hill that the parrots call home. Such is the flock's fame that wire services and national newspapers are vying over which will be first to get the results. Bittner is hoping that the new DVD release will keep the wild birds a priority. "We want to celebrate wildness," he says, "not destroy it."
· The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill is released on December 9.
