A little tiramisu today to a talented actor/singer/songwriter named Cassandra Kubinski. She plays the psycho girlfriend of the title squirrel in Sean Overbeeke's short student film, Sam (note: R for language and adult situations!)-- a great role, as far as I'm concerned, hardly less distinguished than her appearances with Michael J. Fox on Spin City and Sean Connery in Finding Forrester.
But apparently, acting is not Cassandra's primary creative skill.
On her website I learned that Cassandra aims to make it big singing folk pop, a la (according to her promo copy) Billy Joel and Fiona Apple. She gives a generous sampling of mp3 files of her work, and dare I say it, as a dad of a 10-year old, Cassandra is Disney Channel ready. That's a compliment, by the way.
Take a listen to Hiding Underneath-- very naughty, but safe, somehow.
And here is the chorus from her Cradle the Moon, one of the winners of the 2005 Positive Pop Song Contest.
And I get so defeated, just tryin' to hold on
When I can't hold my head up, my spirit is down,
Then I come home to you, when I'm safe in your arms,
I can hold the sun, and cradle the moon.
I wonder if that would be disappointing to Cassandra to hear--Disney Channel ready. But there are worse things than being accessible worldwide.
Sean Overbeeke is a generously talented guy with a lot of moxie and commercial appeal, and Cassandra Kubinski strikes me as the same type. It must have been interesting to be at the University of Connecticut at Storrs when they were making Sam.
Knock 'em dead, Cassandra. Here's one fan pulling for you.
OK - I'm seeing a strong pattern here as I read more of your aesthetic impressions and your own creative work. The way so many of Cassandra's pices start with lovely simple piano and then her voice, lovely, young, vulnerable, present - all characteristics that are best set simply... Your comparison of Paris and Greece... There are two things that emerge to me.
First, you have a fascination for the essential, like earthy smells and tastes, life & death, eating, blood and pain, love, the feel of the ground under our feet.
It was my impression as a student of ancient Greek philosphy (at UNC-CH) that not only were Greek philosophers fascinated with the root ideas, but their very language was all tangled up with the most basic of things, and sounded like life itself. Hebrew strikes me in a similar way, as a language that is created from the sounds of earth and life and death, but both Hebrew and Greek go on to have enough superstructure to build religions, cosmologies, and metaphysics.
When I studied Latin I was overwhelmed with the cleverness, the intricate weave of the language, and particularly of the poetry, like the Aeneid. The same, it seems to me, could be said of French or Arabic. But Greek and Hebrew have gradually come into my view, like hills emerging across the valley as the mist clears later in this day that is my life, as the older and more essential places.
So I'm not surprised to see you spend so much creative energy on things Greek and Proto-Greek - regardless of your abiding love of Latin, and your daily work with it.
Second, your passion and compassion for youth. Cassandra's sound, face, themes, are all young. It's not innocence that draws you, though, I think - because it's not children you seem primarily drawn to, but the transition to adult awareness while the possibilities and desires still remain boundless. The conviction that power is limitless. The Israeli's are purported to draw their fighter pilots (the most daring in the world) solely from adolescents because so many 17 year olds believe they are immortal.
So it's not innocence, but something else that is still intact in youth. Infinite horizons. The same sort of view of the world and life that makes us godlike, creative, confident, open. Of course we inevitably discover our limitations and must overcome that realization - that is one way of defining coming of age... There is an intoxicating beauty in the young man or young woman poised on the brink of that journey, and your daily work and your creative work are planted on that edge, where you can watch, listen, and help.
I plan to order her CD. Adult artists (Paul Klee and Alexander Calder, among others) sometimes remark that their art is an attempt to learn again how to draw as children. My artistic journey is like that, too. And from that place on the road, it is possible to look backwards and forwards to the lovely work of artists like Cassandra.
Posted by: Moominpapa | February 04, 2007 at 10:51 AM