The Royal Road

Jenni Olson:
All I want to do is read novels and go to the movies. I crave the catharsis of narratives. Those contained portrayals of life that give us the vicarious desolation and heartbreak, inspiration and triumph we don't even know that we need.

Jenni Olson:
I think of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo as a sort of cinematic ode to nostalgia - it's a cautionary tale really, about the pull of the past and the futility of striving for things that are unreachable precisely because they only exist in the long ago.

Jenni Olson:
One of the main reasons I'm so attracted to landscapes and buildings is the sense that, unlike people, they tend to endure for many generations. They posses an intimacy with the past that no person, however old, can approach.

Jenni Olson:
I've been filming the landscapes of San Francisco since just a few years after I arrived here. In capturing these images on film, I'm engaged in a completely impossible and yet partially successful effort to stop time.

Jenni Olson:
I continue to search for inspiration in the movies just like I did when I was little. I'm inordinately obsessed with the stories of others, seeking within them the key to sharing my own.

Jenni Olson:
In the same way that outdoorsy people experience feelings of calm and wholeness from spending time in nature, there are also those of us who discover a profound serenity in the man-made environment of yesterday.

Tony Kushner:
Everything new is better than everything old. 'The bad new things instead of the good old things,' wrote that great dialectical playwright, poet and theorist Bertolt Brecht. I love the rigor of that challenge. To be able to risk the Satanic temptation and a retreat backwards towards what's easy, familiar and safe - the remembered past which is always misremembered. To always be on guard against nostalgia. To be able to see the future in the bad new things.

Jenni Olson:
Aside from introducing the burden of Tony Kushner's disapproval into my life, this speech has prompted me to reflect at length and somewhat obsessively, on my aversion to the bad new things and my affection for the old. To this day, I suffer from a compulsion to defend my overly intense attachment to the past.