It's been said that the Japanese revere the rebel of lost causes, but that in America there is no such thing as a successful failure. I bring this up in the context of engaging a cost-benefit analysis of the future direction of my life.
The anthropologist and the modern dancer share one key desire, and that is to excavate human ancestry and therefore find something "authentically" human. This is fundamentally to do with human communication -- therefore, for a dancing anthropologist (or an anthropologizing dancer), dance is primarily a communicative art form -- not just exercise, not just athletics or acrobatics.
Modern Dance in its staged presentation hankers for the Pre-Modern, not so much fighting as demonstrating against the mechanization of the human body in post-industrial society. There is an assumption of the existence of an elusive but ideal way of being a cohesive self. (if the modern condition requires such healing, such putting back together -- what broke? why did it break? can we prevent it? can we just "get over it" and move on?)
Anthropology seeks answers to the existential question through measurements and codifications of human physique and cultural, that is group behaviour, over time and across geographies. Yet Anthropology is not just a science, but a theology -- and I'm not trying to be grandiose here, this is the Merriam Webster dictionary's exact definition -- "dealing with the origin, nature, and destiny of human beings." It is evolutionary in outlook. It must be, I think to myself, a search for an absolute, because there is no joy, let alone purpose to living (well, aside from the process of living itself), in the opposite (that our destiny is purely survivalist, or anarchic).
But does this only hold true if destiny, rather than knowledge, is the object of the anthropological/artistic search? Is the concept of destiny itself passive? It connotes pre-destination, rather than immediate action; it assumes incontrovertible forces or agents exerting themselves upon, beneath, around, through, and with our real, immediate lives. What are the possible forms -- by this, I mean ways of daily living -- of a reflective AND active "political philosophy," as Arendt (my tragic inheritance: senior thesis 2004 on ... what?) would posit? What are the practices of political philosophy, as they are engaged now and as a normative ideal?
My questioning here now becomes pragmatic, and quick, also because I am going to a dance class in ten minutes.
Should I leave New York?
My roommate Ricardo Orellana, with whom I've been living these last two months, had news for me before bedtime last night. His octogenarian father living in Bolivia has just been diagnosed with prostate cancer, and will be coming up to America for treatment ... in two weeks, coinciding with the juncture of my February and March tenancy. I am very sorry for his family if this is true, for this is not a comfortable financial or personal situation for anyone to be in. But on my end, it means that my finally getting a little bit of a schedule in New York -- working cashier and coffee at a health-food cafe downtown on alternate days between my dance training -- is again disrupted by dislocation, and I either need to find another place by March 10th, or pack up and go ... back to Philly? Home to Singy? After a quick perusal of availabilities on Craig's List, I simply cannont afford the down payment on any housing options here in New York -- I'll have $900 in my bank account by the time Ricky pays me back my security deposit and March rent (I was, after all, only paying $250 a month for my half of the room). What to do?
Of course then I reassess my politics, and my philosophy, two considerations that I must live my life by in order to stay grounded, real, and sane (the others being family and friends). The homogenous (post-)modern dance world I now frequent is enlivening only as a continuity -- and as opportunity. I need work. I need work in order to practice. I need professional exposure. I suppose this means I must stay.
(Feb 23rd, 2005, edited and posted March 23)
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Friday, February 18, 2005
Books of 2005
This is an on-going summary of the books I read this year, and, when I can, my thoughts and/or quotes from them. They are listed by month of completion, with a running list of mid-read or future titles at the very bottom.
JANUARY:
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, A Grain of Wheat, Heinemann [1967] 1988.
Said the "classic novel of Kenyan independence," it travels through the years leading up to Uhuru and after it through descriptive and intimate psychological portraits of young people coming of age in their autonomy as much as their nation. The first chapter is arresting -- we instantly encounter the mental torment of protagonist Mugo who we later discover betrays the leader of the revolution, as well as a brief but shocking vignette of the dumb and mute muscleman Gitogo who is shot as just "another Mau Mau terrorist" while running to protect his mother when their town is under seige. We are placed in a very tense and politicized time, where survival is not necessarily reserved for the strong, and where private choices have significant public consequence.
The novel grows in intricacy this way, but soon there is little distinction between major and minor characters -- everyone gets the opportunity to disclose their emotional states, and the narration becomes monotonous and unnatural. The style shifts from imagistic and montaged to mid-afternoon psychological-melodrama. The problem is one of tense -- so much falls in retrospect that all events are memory, not action, and no specific conflicts are ever laid out, so they are never fully resolved either.
The voices are so frequently in third-person that it soon becomes apparent that the author is judgmental against all his characters, never quite embodying them, so that he has to explain away their failings in serving the independence movement rather than have us, the readers, understand them as if they were our own. And when the expositional voice is needed, neither does Ngugi succeed in stepping away from the characters to indicate what is symptomatic of the tragedies that do occur -- most pointedly for me is the vignette of Mumbi's momentous decision to "let Karanja make love to me" after years of his pursuit when he reveals to her that her husband has not indeed died in police detention and will return home. This incident remains Mumbi's mistake, resulting in her having a child that devastates her marriage with Gikonyo who only sees personal betrayal and not the greater injustice of Karanja's position of power under a system of oppression, if not torture. Ngugi's main characters all act out of compulsion, and it is unclear whether he chooses them to have no agency as a critique of reality or if this is a literary flaw.
There are gems. Everyone is crazed by upheaval, and it is enjoyable to hear Ngugi's sardonic tone beneath the voices of the confused British displaced at Kenya's achievement of self-rule, such as Dr. Lynd in "a sudden upsurge of pure holy self-pity." Ngugi is also above all concerned with the British, specifically, Christian legacy Kenya inherits (Mugo plays Judas, after all), and the cross as the symbol of both oppression and salvation, rebellion and sacrifice, is the unstated heart of the struggle for true self-governance in post-colonial states.
Lim, Richard, Got Singapore - Bits and Pieces from a Dot in the World, Singapore: Angsana Books 2002.
"Like it or not, we live in a state of perpetual insecurity. That is our karma. ... In our modest way, we must have our own sense of destiny." -- Brigadier-General George Yeo, Minister for Trade and Industry and former Minister for Information and the Arts
p.26 "And yet, underneath the pragmatic sophistication, there is the immigrant mentality -- do not waste what you can save.
I look around me: all this modernity, all this gloss, yet as a people we have not learnt to flush our public toilets. A law has to be imposed to teach us to do it.
But reflecting on it now, I guess it shouls not be such a rude revelation. After all, we phased out the nightsoil system, which had served us for about a century, as recently as January 1987, when the last of the nightsoil carriers -- by then only 78 were left -- hung up their yokes and buckets."
p.90 "The Buddhist mind is an open mind, ever prepared for change. It goes with the flow ... to go with the flow and not against the grain [may be] to submit oneself to the political order of the day, even if it is dictatorial or inhumane.
But submission is very different from openness and preparedness...Zen Buddhism, with its emphasis on inquiry, is subversive in the eyes of those who believe in the perfection of dogmas and ideologies.
Some people have also told me that Buddhism is a passive religion. They understand the word karma as fate ...
But karma is not fate, it is the seed one plants when one chooses a course of action and, to be simplistic about it, one reaps afterwards what one has sown."
"The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." V.S.Naipaul, A Bend in the River (1979)
p.167 Lim on Naipaul: "the ultimate exile, the prototype of today's global souls who carry the world within them, but who belong to no one particular society."
"The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you have got the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit; once you have the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning; once you have got the meaning, you forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so that I can have a word with him?" Taoist sage Zhuang Zi
p.242 "In the post-ideological world, where even the leaders of developed countries have shifted their roles from statesmen to global salesmen, and where commerce and pragmatism rule, the new morality will be that of the market."
FEBRUARY:
Morrison, Toni, Beloved, Vintage [?] 2004.
Too much to say, or too little, when so much is felt!
Reage, Pauline, Story of O, Ballantine [1976] 1981.
I finally read this just over a year after being somewhat provocatively propositioned by an older gentleman who told me to read it, and I finished it in just over an hour because I decided that was about as much supposed erotica (sick, sick, stuff, could be another description) I could afford to infiltrate my consciousness. I am only writing about it here because I actually don't think it deserves to be ignored by the non-SM community at large -- if read for its themes and its delicate illustrations of what is human and normal at the root of a woman's desire to be enslaved and tortured, I see it as a confrontational critique of those who abuse that root -- which is love. Love "too-thick," perhaps, like in the book (above) I finished immediately prior to this one, that led Morrison's protagonist to similarly disastrous ends.
A lot of the book is repetitive anyway -- OK, OK, O gets whipped, lashed, humiliated, oh, OK, she's taken front and back by multiple men while blind-folded, she is pierced and branded, OK, OK! Enough. I flip pages to look for new character names, or little plot asides that are actually the significant moments. I find O being asked to pleasure herself and she meekly responds that she can't -- aHAH, social critique number one: woman is not socialized to understand, respect, and engage her own sexual pleasure. OK. Then there is Eric who, as a new initiate to the castle of Roilly and the atrocities that occur within it, falls in love with O and wants to marry her and save her. O herself refuses by allowing her owner Sir Stephen to showcase her to Eric "spread-eagled and gagged," who was so sickened that not only did he lose his love for her, but his resistance to the perversity of Roilly and himself takes O for the next three days and abuses her the worse. A-Hah again! The pain and power of vengeance! How natural and human appears Eric's soppy attraction to the quiet nobility of O's vulnerability, yet how evil his disappointment! Worse than unrequited love, crueler was the realization of O's lack of desire to be saved. And importantly, how shallow Eric's love, which was proven simply a self-reflexive love still primarily about his ego, his ability to save or to dominate the same.
Then there is the chilling form of 15 year-old Natalie who herself professes love for O after witnessing everything in the pleasuring of Natalie's older sister, Jacqueline, by O herself. Untouched, incognizant of sensual pleasure, Natalie's perverse desire is blatantly a reaction to the severe kind of loneliness only adolescence can be, especially encased by the shadow of her supermodel sister and whatever else kind of depression regular 15 year-olds find themselves facing. Natalie in this story is kept as an observer to all exploitations of O in preparation for her becoming initiated into Roilly herself. It would be sick, were it real, and for me her entrance into the book is a firm ethical call, because one can almost save this girl.
Good God, I wish this book could stand as testament to the ultimate consequence to everything *wrong* about sexual relations between men and women; good God, please let relations between ours sexes be at the worst about sharing properties (mortgage, bank account, kitchenware?), and not, as here, where one is property to be owned and exploited by another. It is to be noted that Reage's women are not painted as victims, and I am glad for it, because victims are completely helpless but yes, ladies, we can help ourselves.
P.S. Good God, please let curiosity not kill this cat.
MARCH:
Hansen, Phillip, Hannah Arendt: Politics, History, and Citizenship, Stanford University Press 1993.
In progress, on the edge of "lost interest," but it more or less seems to say in almost as rambling a way what it was I tried to relay in my senior thesis on Hannah Arendt and the Sublime: something else post-colon I can't exactly remember, and which I probably made up in a five am stupor the morning of its submission. We will return to this, because she (Arendt ... and myself) deserves more credit than that.
Greene, Brian, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, Vintage Books 1999.
Also in progress -- I was happily "strung" along (haha!) when I was still able to comprehend the science through strenuous (almost painful) high-school-recall. I find this absolutely fascinating, and absolutely relevant to my work in movement, but I need a breather. We will also come back!
APRIL:
Moore, Julia, Fat Girl: A True Story, Hudson Street Press 2005.
"For any woman who has ever had a love/hate relationship with food and with how she looks; for anyone who has knowingly or unconsciously used food to try to fill the hole in his heart or soothe the craggy edges of his psyche, Fat Girl is a brilliantly rendered, angst-filled coming-of-age story of gain and loss."
Picked up by chance, and two (more?) hours later the book allows me to feel ... recognized, purged even? The author truly had a miserable childhood with little respite, but this gave her the startling courage to view and voice the truth of what it is to be obsessive, compulsive, lonely, ostracized, self-hating.
JANUARY:
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, A Grain of Wheat, Heinemann [1967] 1988.
Said the "classic novel of Kenyan independence," it travels through the years leading up to Uhuru and after it through descriptive and intimate psychological portraits of young people coming of age in their autonomy as much as their nation. The first chapter is arresting -- we instantly encounter the mental torment of protagonist Mugo who we later discover betrays the leader of the revolution, as well as a brief but shocking vignette of the dumb and mute muscleman Gitogo who is shot as just "another Mau Mau terrorist" while running to protect his mother when their town is under seige. We are placed in a very tense and politicized time, where survival is not necessarily reserved for the strong, and where private choices have significant public consequence.
The novel grows in intricacy this way, but soon there is little distinction between major and minor characters -- everyone gets the opportunity to disclose their emotional states, and the narration becomes monotonous and unnatural. The style shifts from imagistic and montaged to mid-afternoon psychological-melodrama. The problem is one of tense -- so much falls in retrospect that all events are memory, not action, and no specific conflicts are ever laid out, so they are never fully resolved either.
The voices are so frequently in third-person that it soon becomes apparent that the author is judgmental against all his characters, never quite embodying them, so that he has to explain away their failings in serving the independence movement rather than have us, the readers, understand them as if they were our own. And when the expositional voice is needed, neither does Ngugi succeed in stepping away from the characters to indicate what is symptomatic of the tragedies that do occur -- most pointedly for me is the vignette of Mumbi's momentous decision to "let Karanja make love to me" after years of his pursuit when he reveals to her that her husband has not indeed died in police detention and will return home. This incident remains Mumbi's mistake, resulting in her having a child that devastates her marriage with Gikonyo who only sees personal betrayal and not the greater injustice of Karanja's position of power under a system of oppression, if not torture. Ngugi's main characters all act out of compulsion, and it is unclear whether he chooses them to have no agency as a critique of reality or if this is a literary flaw.
There are gems. Everyone is crazed by upheaval, and it is enjoyable to hear Ngugi's sardonic tone beneath the voices of the confused British displaced at Kenya's achievement of self-rule, such as Dr. Lynd in "a sudden upsurge of pure holy self-pity." Ngugi is also above all concerned with the British, specifically, Christian legacy Kenya inherits (Mugo plays Judas, after all), and the cross as the symbol of both oppression and salvation, rebellion and sacrifice, is the unstated heart of the struggle for true self-governance in post-colonial states.
Lim, Richard, Got Singapore - Bits and Pieces from a Dot in the World, Singapore: Angsana Books 2002.
"Like it or not, we live in a state of perpetual insecurity. That is our karma. ... In our modest way, we must have our own sense of destiny." -- Brigadier-General George Yeo, Minister for Trade and Industry and former Minister for Information and the Arts
p.26 "And yet, underneath the pragmatic sophistication, there is the immigrant mentality -- do not waste what you can save.
I look around me: all this modernity, all this gloss, yet as a people we have not learnt to flush our public toilets. A law has to be imposed to teach us to do it.
But reflecting on it now, I guess it shouls not be such a rude revelation. After all, we phased out the nightsoil system, which had served us for about a century, as recently as January 1987, when the last of the nightsoil carriers -- by then only 78 were left -- hung up their yokes and buckets."
p.90 "The Buddhist mind is an open mind, ever prepared for change. It goes with the flow ... to go with the flow and not against the grain [may be] to submit oneself to the political order of the day, even if it is dictatorial or inhumane.
But submission is very different from openness and preparedness...Zen Buddhism, with its emphasis on inquiry, is subversive in the eyes of those who believe in the perfection of dogmas and ideologies.
Some people have also told me that Buddhism is a passive religion. They understand the word karma as fate ...
But karma is not fate, it is the seed one plants when one chooses a course of action and, to be simplistic about it, one reaps afterwards what one has sown."
"The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." V.S.Naipaul, A Bend in the River (1979)
p.167 Lim on Naipaul: "the ultimate exile, the prototype of today's global souls who carry the world within them, but who belong to no one particular society."
"The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you have got the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit; once you have the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning; once you have got the meaning, you forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so that I can have a word with him?" Taoist sage Zhuang Zi
p.242 "In the post-ideological world, where even the leaders of developed countries have shifted their roles from statesmen to global salesmen, and where commerce and pragmatism rule, the new morality will be that of the market."
FEBRUARY:
Morrison, Toni, Beloved, Vintage [?] 2004.
Too much to say, or too little, when so much is felt!
Reage, Pauline, Story of O, Ballantine [1976] 1981.
I finally read this just over a year after being somewhat provocatively propositioned by an older gentleman who told me to read it, and I finished it in just over an hour because I decided that was about as much supposed erotica (sick, sick, stuff, could be another description) I could afford to infiltrate my consciousness. I am only writing about it here because I actually don't think it deserves to be ignored by the non-SM community at large -- if read for its themes and its delicate illustrations of what is human and normal at the root of a woman's desire to be enslaved and tortured, I see it as a confrontational critique of those who abuse that root -- which is love. Love "too-thick," perhaps, like in the book (above) I finished immediately prior to this one, that led Morrison's protagonist to similarly disastrous ends.
A lot of the book is repetitive anyway -- OK, OK, O gets whipped, lashed, humiliated, oh, OK, she's taken front and back by multiple men while blind-folded, she is pierced and branded, OK, OK! Enough. I flip pages to look for new character names, or little plot asides that are actually the significant moments. I find O being asked to pleasure herself and she meekly responds that she can't -- aHAH, social critique number one: woman is not socialized to understand, respect, and engage her own sexual pleasure. OK. Then there is Eric who, as a new initiate to the castle of Roilly and the atrocities that occur within it, falls in love with O and wants to marry her and save her. O herself refuses by allowing her owner Sir Stephen to showcase her to Eric "spread-eagled and gagged," who was so sickened that not only did he lose his love for her, but his resistance to the perversity of Roilly and himself takes O for the next three days and abuses her the worse. A-Hah again! The pain and power of vengeance! How natural and human appears Eric's soppy attraction to the quiet nobility of O's vulnerability, yet how evil his disappointment! Worse than unrequited love, crueler was the realization of O's lack of desire to be saved. And importantly, how shallow Eric's love, which was proven simply a self-reflexive love still primarily about his ego, his ability to save or to dominate the same.
Then there is the chilling form of 15 year-old Natalie who herself professes love for O after witnessing everything in the pleasuring of Natalie's older sister, Jacqueline, by O herself. Untouched, incognizant of sensual pleasure, Natalie's perverse desire is blatantly a reaction to the severe kind of loneliness only adolescence can be, especially encased by the shadow of her supermodel sister and whatever else kind of depression regular 15 year-olds find themselves facing. Natalie in this story is kept as an observer to all exploitations of O in preparation for her becoming initiated into Roilly herself. It would be sick, were it real, and for me her entrance into the book is a firm ethical call, because one can almost save this girl.
Good God, I wish this book could stand as testament to the ultimate consequence to everything *wrong* about sexual relations between men and women; good God, please let relations between ours sexes be at the worst about sharing properties (mortgage, bank account, kitchenware?), and not, as here, where one is property to be owned and exploited by another. It is to be noted that Reage's women are not painted as victims, and I am glad for it, because victims are completely helpless but yes, ladies, we can help ourselves.
P.S. Good God, please let curiosity not kill this cat.
MARCH:
Hansen, Phillip, Hannah Arendt: Politics, History, and Citizenship, Stanford University Press 1993.
In progress, on the edge of "lost interest," but it more or less seems to say in almost as rambling a way what it was I tried to relay in my senior thesis on Hannah Arendt and the Sublime: something else post-colon I can't exactly remember, and which I probably made up in a five am stupor the morning of its submission. We will return to this, because she (Arendt ... and myself) deserves more credit than that.
Greene, Brian, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, Vintage Books 1999.
Also in progress -- I was happily "strung" along (haha!) when I was still able to comprehend the science through strenuous (almost painful) high-school-recall. I find this absolutely fascinating, and absolutely relevant to my work in movement, but I need a breather. We will also come back!
APRIL:
Moore, Julia, Fat Girl: A True Story, Hudson Street Press 2005.
"For any woman who has ever had a love/hate relationship with food and with how she looks; for anyone who has knowingly or unconsciously used food to try to fill the hole in his heart or soothe the craggy edges of his psyche, Fat Girl is a brilliantly rendered, angst-filled coming-of-age story of gain and loss."
Picked up by chance, and two (more?) hours later the book allows me to feel ... recognized, purged even? The author truly had a miserable childhood with little respite, but this gave her the startling courage to view and voice the truth of what it is to be obsessive, compulsive, lonely, ostracized, self-hating.
Friday, February 04, 2005
From New York with love
A letter to Hofan, who is studying movement theatre in Paris:
I am watching le comedie humaine on the streets and in the subway, such as this surprising ambulance arrival to the curb outside my window. Old man, red beanie, being loaded up and cared for. There, too, a family of orthodox Jews heaving boxes into a purple minivan. Here, more hints on the old man -- a bald and rotund police officer pouring water onto the pavement, and I see red disperse and disappear -- blood?
Japanese, maybe, girl, walks past my window and into the coffee shop. Green, not army-fatigue, but a military sort of olive, fur collar on the hood, white lace-up leather boots. Windscreen-like tinted glasses spanning temple to temple. Curly -- krinked, even -- bronze highlighted hair. If I guessed her beverage of choice, would I be right? She's a tall, not a grande girl, but not an addict either, no regular coffee here. Simple cappucino, maybe, elegance yet normality. Not like one of those tall skinny ladies with cups as long as their legs, ice-cold blended beverage whipped cream on top. Suck it through a straw, also long and slender. No, she I saw yesterday, and I wondered if that was the only thing she let herself eat all day.
So, how is New York? I am being a cruel observer of human life, and the more I do it the less I want to participate. I imagine with envy the comfort of regularity, but know that without constant change I feel like I die. I watched Eduard Locke's Lalala Human Steps last night -- an almost anaesthetized display of technical prowess, the dancers in abstract relationship to one another, if not to themselves. I fell asleep a little, missing the all male sections, but really no heart break because this was a piece made for the woman (note that though it was choreographed for the memory of Amelia/Emile, the transvestite friend of Locke's youth, the title is simply: Amelia). On pointe, with rapid turns, fast foot work, and equally torrential yet detailed hand and arm gestures, it was almost comic when Locke threw in a "modern" floor roll here and there, because the momentum inherent in such an action wasn't used. Instead, they continued in their Barbie-on-crack gesticulations, and the audience was enthralled. New Yorkers are such suckers for anything with a whiff of European tragedy.
But my main point is that afterwards, in a post-show discussion with Locke, he mentioned in passing his discovery in dance of movement for movement's sake; that dance moves for itself. The way he said it close to personified dance to me -- like "it" was a deity we invoke, appease, please, annoy, gratify, pleasure, depending on the nature of our movement. Which, to relate to my current detachment from place, purpose, or power, makes me think of what is achieved in travelling for travelling's sake, moving just to be moving -- the process of pilgrimage and not it's destination. It makes me think of busy-ness and how we so easily adjust to different paces of life. I think of New York and remember that I am in the capitalist center of the world, and that maybe that is why I cannot feel at rest. There is a sense here that one man's busyness makes the world turn, when really, the planet revolves on its axis regardless. I often feared that I had been "suburbanized" by my time at Swarthmore, but insofar as that may mean "de-urbanized," perhaps I am thankful, for I think I have realized gentler pleasures. That said -- this place must be great in the summer.
Where I live -- Astoria, Queens -- feels like a British seaside town on a sunny day. Pigeons rather than seagulls line telephone poles and rooftops, but the way they draw infinity in the sky, ensemble, and at random, carries an atmosphere of promise and timelessness that draws me to a feeling of walking along a wooden boardwalk above pebble beach. All buildings are low-rise -- nothing above four storeys -- which also gives me a sense of unattainable space; not immersive, like an actual landscape, rather distant but ever-present. The sky is a sexy lady, and whether it appears that she waves goodbye or beckons, you can't ever touch her.
A attractive young man walked out of the coffee shop, stealing glances at me, as he had done while seated, as he walks off to get lost in Union Square. I see him now at the traffic light, looking bewildered and with map or guidebook in hand. He spoke French on his cellphone -- Parisian? Moroccan? Tunisian? At this point, I think maybe he's waiting for somebody, because he's pacing.
"Susan," before me, is also leaving -- dressed hoodie-satchel-hippie-chic, I know her name because it was written on her coffee cup. I observed her as she oddly sipped at her orange juice and coffee alternately, swallowed, then slowly protruded her lips with shivering specificity -- a ritual of sorts, an act of self-poisoning? Staring into the distance with glazed eyes, her notebook and fountain pen which was to record, no doubt, the process of her magic imbibing, sat untouched upon her lap.
Moroccan (as I've now decided him), is back, speaking on the phone to his reluctant date. I wonder if I should try and start a conversation with him when he's done, just to see whether or not he really is African.
Not going to the Steps (an uptown dance studio full of ballerinas and jazz artistes) work/study meeting this morning was a good decision. Though I am fast fatigued by the downtown (improvisation) dance scene and its post-modern philosophical mess, going uptown for 20 hours a week would distract too much from honing my own craft and learning to listen to my own creative voice, which are my primary aspirations right now. Which I do for free, for me, sitting in Starbucks coffee. But only in New York!
I am watching le comedie humaine on the streets and in the subway, such as this surprising ambulance arrival to the curb outside my window. Old man, red beanie, being loaded up and cared for. There, too, a family of orthodox Jews heaving boxes into a purple minivan. Here, more hints on the old man -- a bald and rotund police officer pouring water onto the pavement, and I see red disperse and disappear -- blood?
Japanese, maybe, girl, walks past my window and into the coffee shop. Green, not army-fatigue, but a military sort of olive, fur collar on the hood, white lace-up leather boots. Windscreen-like tinted glasses spanning temple to temple. Curly -- krinked, even -- bronze highlighted hair. If I guessed her beverage of choice, would I be right? She's a tall, not a grande girl, but not an addict either, no regular coffee here. Simple cappucino, maybe, elegance yet normality. Not like one of those tall skinny ladies with cups as long as their legs, ice-cold blended beverage whipped cream on top. Suck it through a straw, also long and slender. No, she I saw yesterday, and I wondered if that was the only thing she let herself eat all day.
So, how is New York? I am being a cruel observer of human life, and the more I do it the less I want to participate. I imagine with envy the comfort of regularity, but know that without constant change I feel like I die. I watched Eduard Locke's Lalala Human Steps last night -- an almost anaesthetized display of technical prowess, the dancers in abstract relationship to one another, if not to themselves. I fell asleep a little, missing the all male sections, but really no heart break because this was a piece made for the woman (note that though it was choreographed for the memory of Amelia/Emile, the transvestite friend of Locke's youth, the title is simply: Amelia). On pointe, with rapid turns, fast foot work, and equally torrential yet detailed hand and arm gestures, it was almost comic when Locke threw in a "modern" floor roll here and there, because the momentum inherent in such an action wasn't used. Instead, they continued in their Barbie-on-crack gesticulations, and the audience was enthralled. New Yorkers are such suckers for anything with a whiff of European tragedy.
But my main point is that afterwards, in a post-show discussion with Locke, he mentioned in passing his discovery in dance of movement for movement's sake; that dance moves for itself. The way he said it close to personified dance to me -- like "it" was a deity we invoke, appease, please, annoy, gratify, pleasure, depending on the nature of our movement. Which, to relate to my current detachment from place, purpose, or power, makes me think of what is achieved in travelling for travelling's sake, moving just to be moving -- the process of pilgrimage and not it's destination. It makes me think of busy-ness and how we so easily adjust to different paces of life. I think of New York and remember that I am in the capitalist center of the world, and that maybe that is why I cannot feel at rest. There is a sense here that one man's busyness makes the world turn, when really, the planet revolves on its axis regardless. I often feared that I had been "suburbanized" by my time at Swarthmore, but insofar as that may mean "de-urbanized," perhaps I am thankful, for I think I have realized gentler pleasures. That said -- this place must be great in the summer.
Where I live -- Astoria, Queens -- feels like a British seaside town on a sunny day. Pigeons rather than seagulls line telephone poles and rooftops, but the way they draw infinity in the sky, ensemble, and at random, carries an atmosphere of promise and timelessness that draws me to a feeling of walking along a wooden boardwalk above pebble beach. All buildings are low-rise -- nothing above four storeys -- which also gives me a sense of unattainable space; not immersive, like an actual landscape, rather distant but ever-present. The sky is a sexy lady, and whether it appears that she waves goodbye or beckons, you can't ever touch her.
A attractive young man walked out of the coffee shop, stealing glances at me, as he had done while seated, as he walks off to get lost in Union Square. I see him now at the traffic light, looking bewildered and with map or guidebook in hand. He spoke French on his cellphone -- Parisian? Moroccan? Tunisian? At this point, I think maybe he's waiting for somebody, because he's pacing.
"Susan," before me, is also leaving -- dressed hoodie-satchel-hippie-chic, I know her name because it was written on her coffee cup. I observed her as she oddly sipped at her orange juice and coffee alternately, swallowed, then slowly protruded her lips with shivering specificity -- a ritual of sorts, an act of self-poisoning? Staring into the distance with glazed eyes, her notebook and fountain pen which was to record, no doubt, the process of her magic imbibing, sat untouched upon her lap.
Moroccan (as I've now decided him), is back, speaking on the phone to his reluctant date. I wonder if I should try and start a conversation with him when he's done, just to see whether or not he really is African.
Not going to the Steps (an uptown dance studio full of ballerinas and jazz artistes) work/study meeting this morning was a good decision. Though I am fast fatigued by the downtown (improvisation) dance scene and its post-modern philosophical mess, going uptown for 20 hours a week would distract too much from honing my own craft and learning to listen to my own creative voice, which are my primary aspirations right now. Which I do for free, for me, sitting in Starbucks coffee. But only in New York!
Thursday, February 03, 2005
Coming to terms with capitalism
Slow, relatively uninteresting days, completely by myself. My phone cut off for a full – gasp – 24 hours – requiring what equates to just over a dollar for each hour to reinstate it (ouch!) – and my internet connection repeatedly “unavailable,” it’s no wonder that I spoke so openly with Black Male Bill sitting across from me at the Barnes and Noble coffee shop/magazine section. Noting that I was jotting down the website address for an MS program for Public Policy and Human Development in the Netherlands, he asks me if I’m applying to grad school, and I, peering at his selection of books on essay writing and career change ask him the same thing. What ensues is a solid lesson in making choices, one that I am finally ready to hear, as my silver spoon is coming up dry and empty and I have to learn to survive. I blatantly take notes from our conversation – questions such as “Do I embrace the capitalist model?” arise from the confrontation of our differing perspectives.
I don’t name him Black Male Bill in jest, only he was very forthright in highlighting his identity as such as a major hindrance to the achievement of his goals in life. I wonder how overt the racism has been as his computer programming workplace, or if it has just been the gradual accretion of dismissive remarks and lack of promotions that has characterized his experience. Of course I would not know what this is like, but he is sympathetic in hearing me state frankly that, “No, but, I am a woman,” which presents itself with its own societal and biological pressures and limitations. Ultimately, I am Melinda Lee, and that is probably the worst demon of all that I have to deal with. Maybe Bill for Bill also, though you wouldn’t know it. He is expressionless and speaks in a calm monotone his articulate explications on “judicious decision”-making. Whether he takes aspirin for a headache and whether he should marry his current girlfriend are decisions similarly made – “judiciously,” with thought to the amount of risk involved (the pill makes me drowsy and I have to drive in an hour = no), added to a touch of intuition (we get along really well = yes). I used to find such a process unfathomable, incomprehensible, maybe even inhuman and uncompassionate, but that’s only because I didn’t have to go through it myself. I have not really made any concrete decisions for myself in life, or set myself parameters or goals to achieve and then move on from. I can’t commit because I’m laden with carrying around the past and the unfinished – a single person surrounded by STUFF, unwilling to relinquish any of it because in every bit of material possession there is an affirmation of those memories, experiences, and potentials in me. Unwilling to take on any more STUFF because, firstly, it would further complicate the absence of organization with Existing Stuff, and secondly, because it would consume valuable excess storage for Better Stuff that may or may not come in the near future. Sitting at the buffet table of life, Melinda Lee wants it all and therefore, none of it.
I always thought capitalism was the root cause of most all evil in life, resentful that it was my benefactor yet the thief of my father from daily life and of my family from national significance. Then I blamed, in turn, the West, colonialism, our English language, and our Christian legacy (I am the fourth-generation). I blamed my mother when my father turned out to be all right human being who said “sorry,” and she became the embodiment of all things wrong about domesticated womanhood. I eked out from her confessions of her dramatic past in order to “heal” it but in so doing also assumed a position of superiority and intimacy despite a gaping 35 year difference that maybe we were both wrong to accept. I blamed the trauma of displacement in adolescence for falling in love with the wrong men, I blamed class and cultural difference for break-ups, and I blamed heartbreak for not knowing what I wanted in school. And often, I would come back to hating my privilege. “Why couldn’t I have been born to a working class family?,” I would hear myself think. “Through the struggle of survival, we may have had stronger family values, and I would have learned how to toughen up and work harder.” What a ridiculous romanticism. Along with wanting to “play baseball in the yard with my dad,” had I, of course, been a boy, such internal voices I am now going to blame on the infiltration of Western mass media into my childhood. In terms of resenting the money I come from, now that I’ve graduated from an elite and expensive college I realize that everybody wants what it was that I got. Well, hell. Couldn’t somebody have told me this earlier?!?!?!?!
So now, there’s no one left to blame. Any shame I may feel in having been spoilt and lazy only incapacitates me further, so I am taking the time out from all expectation to give myself reason to make myself proud of me. And let’s get real and grow up – not only did my foreparents work long and hard to provide for us, but also we were not, despite the cultural confusion, raised in America – there are very distinct class barriers that exist in a more traditional, less “developed” society that Singapore is not exempt from. That I inherit a legacy of progressive thinkers – insofar as aspiring for something better is progressive – is something I should be proud of.
So priorities, high, medium, low, and percentages of effort spent in them. Checkboxes.
I don’t name him Black Male Bill in jest, only he was very forthright in highlighting his identity as such as a major hindrance to the achievement of his goals in life. I wonder how overt the racism has been as his computer programming workplace, or if it has just been the gradual accretion of dismissive remarks and lack of promotions that has characterized his experience. Of course I would not know what this is like, but he is sympathetic in hearing me state frankly that, “No, but, I am a woman,” which presents itself with its own societal and biological pressures and limitations. Ultimately, I am Melinda Lee, and that is probably the worst demon of all that I have to deal with. Maybe Bill for Bill also, though you wouldn’t know it. He is expressionless and speaks in a calm monotone his articulate explications on “judicious decision”-making. Whether he takes aspirin for a headache and whether he should marry his current girlfriend are decisions similarly made – “judiciously,” with thought to the amount of risk involved (the pill makes me drowsy and I have to drive in an hour = no), added to a touch of intuition (we get along really well = yes). I used to find such a process unfathomable, incomprehensible, maybe even inhuman and uncompassionate, but that’s only because I didn’t have to go through it myself. I have not really made any concrete decisions for myself in life, or set myself parameters or goals to achieve and then move on from. I can’t commit because I’m laden with carrying around the past and the unfinished – a single person surrounded by STUFF, unwilling to relinquish any of it because in every bit of material possession there is an affirmation of those memories, experiences, and potentials in me. Unwilling to take on any more STUFF because, firstly, it would further complicate the absence of organization with Existing Stuff, and secondly, because it would consume valuable excess storage for Better Stuff that may or may not come in the near future. Sitting at the buffet table of life, Melinda Lee wants it all and therefore, none of it.
I always thought capitalism was the root cause of most all evil in life, resentful that it was my benefactor yet the thief of my father from daily life and of my family from national significance. Then I blamed, in turn, the West, colonialism, our English language, and our Christian legacy (I am the fourth-generation). I blamed my mother when my father turned out to be all right human being who said “sorry,” and she became the embodiment of all things wrong about domesticated womanhood. I eked out from her confessions of her dramatic past in order to “heal” it but in so doing also assumed a position of superiority and intimacy despite a gaping 35 year difference that maybe we were both wrong to accept. I blamed the trauma of displacement in adolescence for falling in love with the wrong men, I blamed class and cultural difference for break-ups, and I blamed heartbreak for not knowing what I wanted in school. And often, I would come back to hating my privilege. “Why couldn’t I have been born to a working class family?,” I would hear myself think. “Through the struggle of survival, we may have had stronger family values, and I would have learned how to toughen up and work harder.” What a ridiculous romanticism. Along with wanting to “play baseball in the yard with my dad,” had I, of course, been a boy, such internal voices I am now going to blame on the infiltration of Western mass media into my childhood. In terms of resenting the money I come from, now that I’ve graduated from an elite and expensive college I realize that everybody wants what it was that I got. Well, hell. Couldn’t somebody have told me this earlier?!?!?!?!
So now, there’s no one left to blame. Any shame I may feel in having been spoilt and lazy only incapacitates me further, so I am taking the time out from all expectation to give myself reason to make myself proud of me. And let’s get real and grow up – not only did my foreparents work long and hard to provide for us, but also we were not, despite the cultural confusion, raised in America – there are very distinct class barriers that exist in a more traditional, less “developed” society that Singapore is not exempt from. That I inherit a legacy of progressive thinkers – insofar as aspiring for something better is progressive – is something I should be proud of.
So priorities, high, medium, low, and percentages of effort spent in them. Checkboxes.
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
An important day
I feel grown up today.
So I may not be making oodles of money -- or at all, actually, though I am living off my own savings -- and I may not have a namecard. I have a postcard with my feet jumping out of the frame and my phone number is on there although my service has been disconnected because I haven't paid the bill since November. I have a performance venue in March for which to make and show new work -- OK, so it's at my alma mater (the benevolent Swarthmore), but why fight it? I have an important audition coming up in two weeks that's exciting because it's not only paid work but with four different new choreographers in a month-long residency project. For this I need to prepare myself, physically and psychologically. That's purpose. I am beginning to understand what it is like to truly create and define yourself -- to be a self-made woman, to be fashioning myself according to my personal desires. If I'm not directly saving the world yet I am definitely growing and developing maturity and skills with which to maintain a positive self, which is the first step.
Why today?
For the performer, life can be lived only for the purpose of four minutes.
I lucked out on a Monday morning to have one of Danspace Center's studios available for me to "stretch" and quietly work in, after doing my regular Monday, Wednesday deal of cleaning from 8:30-10:00am in order to get $4 class tickets (down from the regular $14!). I did various necessary and silly things the rest of the day, all the while manuveuring my way to getting my solo song onto CD and trying for the life of me to set movement to the entire four minutes, rather than just the 2 and a half I did for the Green Chair show. I went to the improv jam at the Children's Aid Society later that night and tried to stow myself away in a classroom adjacent to the gymnasium where the main activity occurs -- foot-crushed goldfish crackers on the otherwise inviting hardwood floor -- in order to continue pushing through the movements of this solo work, only to be found by various distracting jam friends (so I just went and jammed instead). But there I danced with Joe, an Oberlin graduate, who moved so fast and autonomously, it was a very different challenge to dance "contact" with him. But in talking through this style afterward, he instructed me on the contact of energetic fields, or distinct states of being, recounting in rapture a prime example of this in a solo of Bill T Jones.
"People don't remember your movement, they remember your energy," spoke Joe,
"Bill T Jones only used 12 movements, but as I was watching from the wings tears were running down my face."
"How long was the piece?"
"Seven, maybe eight minutes, even, but it didn't feel like it. Just 12 movements. It seemed that he could open and close his own pores upon command, that's how clear he was. Me, in my movement, and when I'm dancing with you, it's not about me trying to 'hear' what you are 'saying,' but for me to be clear in my directions and we will see where that takes us. I dance with old people as a part of my job,"
-- here I grin, recalling movement therapy sessions at the Caritas old people's home in Bytom, slightly afraid but loving witnessing the revelry possible in extended movements from limited limbs --
"and this lady the other day, she moved so simply, just like this --"
Joe closes his eyes, smiles, and pops up his shoulders: right left right --
"It's the energy that matters."
Thus it was that I could redefine the concept of my solo as the embodiment of an energetic state, for indeed, I had found only a few key elemental movements but was using them in the context of some heightened beingness. Thanks, Joe.
So I proceeded home, nervous and tired, strangely at peace in procrastinating, buying groceries, eating yogurt, tending to split feet, all the while waiting to lie down, finally at 2am, to listen to Iron and Wine Track # 2 over and over again. To watch myself, to find the logic and the journey in correspondance with my character and the music. I rose at 6 am to repeat this exercise, which was an interesting way to choreograph because I was trying to locate the correct energy rather than steps. I am reminded of how frustrated I would feel during Composition class with Sally Hess because I tried to force myself to "make" movement before I had clarified to myself the nature of the motivating energy. Up at 6, I listened to the music and my vision in it, I wrote the description required of the audition and listened all the more, I got up to have a little breakfast and yet another blessing occurred. Leonardo and his wife both left, and having fired the babysitter recently, left Fabrizio to his own devices. Ricky was still asleep in our room, and I was beginning to question how I was going to try out some of the necessary new movement without waking him or looking like a stretch-meister-idiot, when Fabrizio calls out and Ricky supplants himself to the other room to quiet the boy down. Isolation! Me, my tomatoes (which were to go under my dress and fall out before the actual emergence section of the dance), and a creaky floor as the only giveaway that I was dancing. Thank God. I left the house at a decent 8:45 to reach Dance Theater Workshop just short of 10 to make-up, warm-up, and calm down before my 10:40am audition slot.
So there she was: my protagonist in Study for a Portrait of a Young Girl (jumping out of her skin). This is how I am feeling grown up. She is no longer me, and when I dance her, I am "she" -- not "me." The performance act is not my heart on a platter, but a state, a force, not an exposition, but an almost allegorical figure. The choreographic question is HOW does THIS CHARACTER move, and WHY? The question of why people dance and why they need to dance will always be a perplexing enough one to ask. Does it have to be because there is no other way? Or because some rites must be seen and felt, not simply rationally understood?
"The piece enacts a female struggle for selfhood in an explosive yet detailed solo work. It journeys through stages of development by distilling and embodying energetic states. It is itself a rite of passage, a cathartic rite."
Was it "good"? Did I suck? Was it messy (a little bit -- cold feet, you know)? Was it moving? Did I fully engage that huge vessel of space? I am trying not to judge myself or over-analyze the reactions of the ten person deciding panel. They have another full day today and next Monday to think about all of us candidates in context and against each other. What it was for me was NE-CE-SSARY and at that point that's all that mattered. It was indeed a coming of age process to put myself and the quality of my ideas to the scrutiny of professionals, without disdain, without panic, yet without detachment -- bravery, not bravado. Of course it matters -- I would love to perform in their showcase in April -- and of course rejection will hurt, depending on what they say, specifically. But I feel defined, and am ready to move on, excited to keep creating. I'll be showing it again at the University of Utah's MFA audition this Friday -- just for them to see me, and to get a better idea of their program -- and She -- the "boxer girl" -- will come back probably more refined than ever. Six months after her first inception, this is the longest I've ever retained a relationship and I like the feeling that there are many places yet to go.
So I may not be making oodles of money -- or at all, actually, though I am living off my own savings -- and I may not have a namecard. I have a postcard with my feet jumping out of the frame and my phone number is on there although my service has been disconnected because I haven't paid the bill since November. I have a performance venue in March for which to make and show new work -- OK, so it's at my alma mater (the benevolent Swarthmore), but why fight it? I have an important audition coming up in two weeks that's exciting because it's not only paid work but with four different new choreographers in a month-long residency project. For this I need to prepare myself, physically and psychologically. That's purpose. I am beginning to understand what it is like to truly create and define yourself -- to be a self-made woman, to be fashioning myself according to my personal desires. If I'm not directly saving the world yet I am definitely growing and developing maturity and skills with which to maintain a positive self, which is the first step.
Why today?
For the performer, life can be lived only for the purpose of four minutes.
I lucked out on a Monday morning to have one of Danspace Center's studios available for me to "stretch" and quietly work in, after doing my regular Monday, Wednesday deal of cleaning from 8:30-10:00am in order to get $4 class tickets (down from the regular $14!). I did various necessary and silly things the rest of the day, all the while manuveuring my way to getting my solo song onto CD and trying for the life of me to set movement to the entire four minutes, rather than just the 2 and a half I did for the Green Chair show. I went to the improv jam at the Children's Aid Society later that night and tried to stow myself away in a classroom adjacent to the gymnasium where the main activity occurs -- foot-crushed goldfish crackers on the otherwise inviting hardwood floor -- in order to continue pushing through the movements of this solo work, only to be found by various distracting jam friends (so I just went and jammed instead). But there I danced with Joe, an Oberlin graduate, who moved so fast and autonomously, it was a very different challenge to dance "contact" with him. But in talking through this style afterward, he instructed me on the contact of energetic fields, or distinct states of being, recounting in rapture a prime example of this in a solo of Bill T Jones.
"People don't remember your movement, they remember your energy," spoke Joe,
"Bill T Jones only used 12 movements, but as I was watching from the wings tears were running down my face."
"How long was the piece?"
"Seven, maybe eight minutes, even, but it didn't feel like it. Just 12 movements. It seemed that he could open and close his own pores upon command, that's how clear he was. Me, in my movement, and when I'm dancing with you, it's not about me trying to 'hear' what you are 'saying,' but for me to be clear in my directions and we will see where that takes us. I dance with old people as a part of my job,"
-- here I grin, recalling movement therapy sessions at the Caritas old people's home in Bytom, slightly afraid but loving witnessing the revelry possible in extended movements from limited limbs --
"and this lady the other day, she moved so simply, just like this --"
Joe closes his eyes, smiles, and pops up his shoulders: right left right --
"It's the energy that matters."
Thus it was that I could redefine the concept of my solo as the embodiment of an energetic state, for indeed, I had found only a few key elemental movements but was using them in the context of some heightened beingness. Thanks, Joe.
So I proceeded home, nervous and tired, strangely at peace in procrastinating, buying groceries, eating yogurt, tending to split feet, all the while waiting to lie down, finally at 2am, to listen to Iron and Wine Track # 2 over and over again. To watch myself, to find the logic and the journey in correspondance with my character and the music. I rose at 6 am to repeat this exercise, which was an interesting way to choreograph because I was trying to locate the correct energy rather than steps. I am reminded of how frustrated I would feel during Composition class with Sally Hess because I tried to force myself to "make" movement before I had clarified to myself the nature of the motivating energy. Up at 6, I listened to the music and my vision in it, I wrote the description required of the audition and listened all the more, I got up to have a little breakfast and yet another blessing occurred. Leonardo and his wife both left, and having fired the babysitter recently, left Fabrizio to his own devices. Ricky was still asleep in our room, and I was beginning to question how I was going to try out some of the necessary new movement without waking him or looking like a stretch-meister-idiot, when Fabrizio calls out and Ricky supplants himself to the other room to quiet the boy down. Isolation! Me, my tomatoes (which were to go under my dress and fall out before the actual emergence section of the dance), and a creaky floor as the only giveaway that I was dancing. Thank God. I left the house at a decent 8:45 to reach Dance Theater Workshop just short of 10 to make-up, warm-up, and calm down before my 10:40am audition slot.
So there she was: my protagonist in Study for a Portrait of a Young Girl (jumping out of her skin). This is how I am feeling grown up. She is no longer me, and when I dance her, I am "she" -- not "me." The performance act is not my heart on a platter, but a state, a force, not an exposition, but an almost allegorical figure. The choreographic question is HOW does THIS CHARACTER move, and WHY? The question of why people dance and why they need to dance will always be a perplexing enough one to ask. Does it have to be because there is no other way? Or because some rites must be seen and felt, not simply rationally understood?
"The piece enacts a female struggle for selfhood in an explosive yet detailed solo work. It journeys through stages of development by distilling and embodying energetic states. It is itself a rite of passage, a cathartic rite."
Was it "good"? Did I suck? Was it messy (a little bit -- cold feet, you know)? Was it moving? Did I fully engage that huge vessel of space? I am trying not to judge myself or over-analyze the reactions of the ten person deciding panel. They have another full day today and next Monday to think about all of us candidates in context and against each other. What it was for me was NE-CE-SSARY and at that point that's all that mattered. It was indeed a coming of age process to put myself and the quality of my ideas to the scrutiny of professionals, without disdain, without panic, yet without detachment -- bravery, not bravado. Of course it matters -- I would love to perform in their showcase in April -- and of course rejection will hurt, depending on what they say, specifically. But I feel defined, and am ready to move on, excited to keep creating. I'll be showing it again at the University of Utah's MFA audition this Friday -- just for them to see me, and to get a better idea of their program -- and She -- the "boxer girl" -- will come back probably more refined than ever. Six months after her first inception, this is the longest I've ever retained a relationship and I like the feeling that there are many places yet to go.
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