I am scared. I'm scared that I will end up loving people who make me feel good or better about myself and not because I actually love a person significantly, with deep love, with anything deeper than what I feel for almost all people when I give them the time of day. I am almost constantly in love with all people -- it's probably why I avoid too many of them at one time. Because I can't love a mass of individuals I cannot distinguish one from the other.
A great practice to communicate with a distant someone your lived experience and environment is simply to draw it for them -- let your eyes become hands, let your mouthings become drawings, and paint. Touch everything you see as a thing, as a thing reflecting light; as a space, as a thing weighting space; as a thing in relation to ... other things. This is a gift. This is a shower of word blessings. This is loving.
Can I forget? How can I forget? How could I forget? Touch. It's heat. It's difference. It's extra-ordinary. It's extra-daily. It's not 2-for-1 discount, but it's a deal. It's definitely a bonus.
You lucky bastard.
Why feel this deep, why not feel, why I not feel, why I not feel? Why not feel? Why I not feel? why not? Why not feel? Why not?
I don't miss you, but I have you in the clutch of your imagination and in the gleam of my sweet teeth. Stay sweet. It's daily. But it's a plus. You may stay, but don't touch.
I have a wide range but very little cognizance or control over modulation. Something to add into the practice of daily art-love-making. Yeah.
Friday, July 27, 2007
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
John and Mel Storm Vienna
In the spirit of the Extended Lee Family Fun-Filled Jam-Packed Holiday Itineraries, John and Mel continue the legacy of aggressive tourist ambition. THIS one entry is definitely for the family (rated G). With just 42 hours from meet-up to send-off, here is our play-by-play:
Noon, July 18th 2007, Sudbanhof South train station, VIENNA: It’s been a year since we last saw each other! Hello!
First on the agenda is to introduce John to what on earth Mel is doing here. We walk through the Schweizer garten park towards a vast complex of red brick barracks built post-1848 called Arsenal. Housed inside of military warehouses converted into dance studios for the Impulstanz contemporary dance festival and workshops Mel is here to participate in, classes were in spaces large enough to accommodate observers, and John got a good earful of Mel’s comments and criticisms while watching what was going on. Since it adds to our checklist, it will be worthwhile to mention that we at least walked past the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum (Museum of Military History), and were tickled pink by the objects of warcraft and destruction (such as fighter jets, helicopters, and dud spuds) that surrounded us during our grassy lunch picnic on Arsenal grounds.
Below: An interview with artists being held inside one of the Arsenal converted dance studios.
We had every intention to visit the Belvedere Royal Palaces and gardens, considered some of the finest secular Baroque buildings in all of the Europe, also housing the largest collection of Klimt paintings. We fail. We sit beneath shady trees eating a chocolate croissant and topfen country-cheese pastry instead. Hoorah!
It’s hitting 38 degrees and we’re probably already sunstroked. Heading home to the apartment Mel is subletting in the quiet fourth district, we manage a quick shower and snack before setting off again, this time with flatmate Neal Jagtap (an Indian-American law student interning for the UN) to introduce both gentlemen to the tanz-theater arts scene.
We see most of Vienna’s majestic Ringstrasse buildings—such as the Parliament, Opera House, Rathaus (Town Hall) and boulevard thoroughfares—through the windows (and against a foreground of sticky armpits of fellow passengers) on the tram up towards Schauspielhaus theatre, where we meet up with Mel’s choreographer friend from Slovakia/New York, Palo.
John orders both a Pepsi and a local wheat beer, with just 20 minutes to curtain. It’s hot.
The theater’s red foyer embraces us and the flood of eager viewers (it’s platz frei) with floor-to-ceiling light boxes displaying images of shag carpet. Art. We secure somewhat central seats and are vigorously assaulted by what is perhaps the most difficult introduction to Europe’s tanz theatre scene I could have imagined for both Neal and John—French choreographer Alain Platel’s duet for acclaimed performers Benjamin Verdonck and Fumiya Ikeda interpreting a children’s book narrating the lives of Congolese child soldiers: “Nine Finger”. Awed by relentless virtuosity and raw emotion, we detox post-show with a petition signing, animated discussion, and another round of drinks.
Below: John, Palo, and Neal on the tram
Tram-hiking ourselves towards the city center, we stop for street food as only the late-night starving and reckless do. Neal receives a 3 Euro hot dog embedded in a hollowed bun, and reveals that this is the infamous Käsekrainer, or, cheese-filled sausage. Seeing as how the guidebook comments that this snack is “fondly referred to as an Eitriger, or pus-stick”, who could resist? Its excessively mouth-coating oil and cheesiness dressed with ketchup and mustard, we continue the heart attack with sandwiches from the doner kebab stand—-very salty, and in buns instead of pitas. Walking home, we pause by a public art exhibit outside the Kunsthalle Project Space where letters and words made from water droplets fall from a 20ft high truss, downlit by hanging lights to make them visible against the night sky. Art.
Day 2 (Hour since arrival: 21) begins with fruit, cereal, yogurt, and an iPhoto show-and-tell of this-is-my-life and here-are-my-friends and here’s-Sue-and-Duleesha’s and oh-my-it-has-been-a-year-since-the-wedding-how-time-flies. Phone call with Pat and Soo-Jin--it’s their 32nd anniversary! John tries out some of Mel’s stretches and thinks they’re quite painful. We get out of the house and walk towards the center of the city (Innere Stadt), about 15 minutes away. We marvel at Viennese architecture and eat ice cream along the way.
Below: Vienna street
Below: St. Stephen's Cathedral
St Stephen’s Cathedral (Stephansdom), according to a friend who has been a regular summer visitor to Vienna, has been covered by scaffolding for the last five years. Unsheathed this year, we beheld it’s yellow-green-black tiled roof in awe, both from the ground and from up the 343 steps of the cathedral’s 450ft-high south tower (completed in 1433 after 74 years of work). It has undergone numerous phases of building and repair due to the ravages of the Turks, the Napoleonic French and the Allies. We descend, dizzy and counting, to the happy embrace of Ottokringer beers served by a not-so-happy waiter dressed in too-high pants and alotta hair grease.
Tea-time. Dinner-time. When?!?! Now!!! Hungry. Hot. We manage to trudge 200m to taste the indistinguishable eggy-topped rye bread canapés at “must-visit” Trzeniewski, fueling the onward mission to subterranean Zwölf Apostelkeller, said to be “the sort of place your distant Viennese Uncle Fritz would take you…the labyrinth of vaulted Gothic and early baroque cellars have a Harry Potter-esque charm.” Both John and Mel have neither read nor watched nor desired Harry Potter, which perhaps is what inspired us to make the epic journey to what turns out to be a strange, empty, and unfriendly baroque dining hall.
We order piles of “local” food, no thanks to the eager translation of our green-vested and mean waiter, “Herr. Leopold.” (Mel is convinced that all these old waiters, as hoary as the gothic facades themselves, must switch nametags every other day to the point where they no longer know their given names.) Over the course of a couple hours of tremendously rude service, we manage to make Uncle Leopold smile and his gargoyle gang snicker in the corner by asking him to take a photo with us ... not OF us ... WITH us. Here we are, a happy family. Then John and Mel take all the cutlery with the extra rolls of bread we didn't ask for but that costed us a Euro each.
Below: John being a Gothic beast. And Uncle Fritz, uh, Leopold. And us.
A gelato cone at the wildly popular Zanoni & Zanoni finished us off and gave spring to our steps heading back home for a little rest before this evening’s performance.
Near home on Fleischmanngasse, we sit outside with cold homemade ices teas, laughing at the seating in a nearby public space being divided into individual seats instead of benches until we realize that this may be to prevent homeless people from sleeping there.
Hoofing it to meet friends for the performance at Kasino am Schwarzenbergplatz, we pass by the masterpiece of baroque architecture, Karlskirche (Karl’s Church), with hints of Roman and Byzantine on the exterior pillars depicting the life of Emperor Karl VI in spiraling carved stone relief, for about 5 seconds. Of equal curiosity are the young people lazing on orange beach chairs at the reggae bar facing. This is the post-modern. This is progress!
We proceed to watch the acclaimed Christian Rizzo's new piece for a solo dancer, "Comme crane, comme culte", which translates roughly to "Like cranium, like worship", which translates in the viewing of it, roughly to "Like a load of poop on my 12 Euro ticket". Again with the lovely Palo and a more neurotic American dancer friend, Mike, we try to hob-nob but very ungraciously drink out of other people's abandoned bottles of water until we ourselves hobble out to find better, cheaper refreshment. The day ends back at Stephensplatz with a milkshake AND ANOTHER serving of ice cream. It's. Still. Hot.
...John leaves to the airport at 6am the next morning. We clocked 42 hours, 2 dance-theatre performances, 2 weiners, 12 scoops of ice cream, 1 major tourist attraction, and 4 new friends (including Uncle Karl. Uh, Leopold). Lots of love to the rest of the family -- wish you were here! (but then we wouldn't have gotten away with just 1 major tourist attraction!)
Noon, July 18th 2007, Sudbanhof South train station, VIENNA: It’s been a year since we last saw each other! Hello!
First on the agenda is to introduce John to what on earth Mel is doing here. We walk through the Schweizer garten park towards a vast complex of red brick barracks built post-1848 called Arsenal. Housed inside of military warehouses converted into dance studios for the Impulstanz contemporary dance festival and workshops Mel is here to participate in, classes were in spaces large enough to accommodate observers, and John got a good earful of Mel’s comments and criticisms while watching what was going on. Since it adds to our checklist, it will be worthwhile to mention that we at least walked past the Heeresgeschichtliches Museum (Museum of Military History), and were tickled pink by the objects of warcraft and destruction (such as fighter jets, helicopters, and dud spuds) that surrounded us during our grassy lunch picnic on Arsenal grounds.
Below: An interview with artists being held inside one of the Arsenal converted dance studios.
We had every intention to visit the Belvedere Royal Palaces and gardens, considered some of the finest secular Baroque buildings in all of the Europe, also housing the largest collection of Klimt paintings. We fail. We sit beneath shady trees eating a chocolate croissant and topfen country-cheese pastry instead. Hoorah!
It’s hitting 38 degrees and we’re probably already sunstroked. Heading home to the apartment Mel is subletting in the quiet fourth district, we manage a quick shower and snack before setting off again, this time with flatmate Neal Jagtap (an Indian-American law student interning for the UN) to introduce both gentlemen to the tanz-theater arts scene.
We see most of Vienna’s majestic Ringstrasse buildings—such as the Parliament, Opera House, Rathaus (Town Hall) and boulevard thoroughfares—through the windows (and against a foreground of sticky armpits of fellow passengers) on the tram up towards Schauspielhaus theatre, where we meet up with Mel’s choreographer friend from Slovakia/New York, Palo.
John orders both a Pepsi and a local wheat beer, with just 20 minutes to curtain. It’s hot.
The theater’s red foyer embraces us and the flood of eager viewers (it’s platz frei) with floor-to-ceiling light boxes displaying images of shag carpet. Art. We secure somewhat central seats and are vigorously assaulted by what is perhaps the most difficult introduction to Europe’s tanz theatre scene I could have imagined for both Neal and John—French choreographer Alain Platel’s duet for acclaimed performers Benjamin Verdonck and Fumiya Ikeda interpreting a children’s book narrating the lives of Congolese child soldiers: “Nine Finger”. Awed by relentless virtuosity and raw emotion, we detox post-show with a petition signing, animated discussion, and another round of drinks.
Below: John, Palo, and Neal on the tram
Tram-hiking ourselves towards the city center, we stop for street food as only the late-night starving and reckless do. Neal receives a 3 Euro hot dog embedded in a hollowed bun, and reveals that this is the infamous Käsekrainer, or, cheese-filled sausage. Seeing as how the guidebook comments that this snack is “fondly referred to as an Eitriger, or pus-stick”, who could resist? Its excessively mouth-coating oil and cheesiness dressed with ketchup and mustard, we continue the heart attack with sandwiches from the doner kebab stand—-very salty, and in buns instead of pitas. Walking home, we pause by a public art exhibit outside the Kunsthalle Project Space where letters and words made from water droplets fall from a 20ft high truss, downlit by hanging lights to make them visible against the night sky. Art.
Day 2 (Hour since arrival: 21) begins with fruit, cereal, yogurt, and an iPhoto show-and-tell of this-is-my-life and here-are-my-friends and here’s-Sue-and-Duleesha’s and oh-my-it-has-been-a-year-since-the-wedding-how-time-flies. Phone call with Pat and Soo-Jin--it’s their 32nd anniversary! John tries out some of Mel’s stretches and thinks they’re quite painful. We get out of the house and walk towards the center of the city (Innere Stadt), about 15 minutes away. We marvel at Viennese architecture and eat ice cream along the way.
Below: Vienna street
Below: St. Stephen's Cathedral
St Stephen’s Cathedral (Stephansdom), according to a friend who has been a regular summer visitor to Vienna, has been covered by scaffolding for the last five years. Unsheathed this year, we beheld it’s yellow-green-black tiled roof in awe, both from the ground and from up the 343 steps of the cathedral’s 450ft-high south tower (completed in 1433 after 74 years of work). It has undergone numerous phases of building and repair due to the ravages of the Turks, the Napoleonic French and the Allies. We descend, dizzy and counting, to the happy embrace of Ottokringer beers served by a not-so-happy waiter dressed in too-high pants and alotta hair grease.
Tea-time. Dinner-time. When?!?! Now!!! Hungry. Hot. We manage to trudge 200m to taste the indistinguishable eggy-topped rye bread canapés at “must-visit” Trzeniewski, fueling the onward mission to subterranean Zwölf Apostelkeller, said to be “the sort of place your distant Viennese Uncle Fritz would take you…the labyrinth of vaulted Gothic and early baroque cellars have a Harry Potter-esque charm.” Both John and Mel have neither read nor watched nor desired Harry Potter, which perhaps is what inspired us to make the epic journey to what turns out to be a strange, empty, and unfriendly baroque dining hall.
We order piles of “local” food, no thanks to the eager translation of our green-vested and mean waiter, “Herr. Leopold.” (Mel is convinced that all these old waiters, as hoary as the gothic facades themselves, must switch nametags every other day to the point where they no longer know their given names.) Over the course of a couple hours of tremendously rude service, we manage to make Uncle Leopold smile and his gargoyle gang snicker in the corner by asking him to take a photo with us ... not OF us ... WITH us. Here we are, a happy family. Then John and Mel take all the cutlery with the extra rolls of bread we didn't ask for but that costed us a Euro each.
Below: John being a Gothic beast. And Uncle Fritz, uh, Leopold. And us.
A gelato cone at the wildly popular Zanoni & Zanoni finished us off and gave spring to our steps heading back home for a little rest before this evening’s performance.
Near home on Fleischmanngasse, we sit outside with cold homemade ices teas, laughing at the seating in a nearby public space being divided into individual seats instead of benches until we realize that this may be to prevent homeless people from sleeping there.
Hoofing it to meet friends for the performance at Kasino am Schwarzenbergplatz, we pass by the masterpiece of baroque architecture, Karlskirche (Karl’s Church), with hints of Roman and Byzantine on the exterior pillars depicting the life of Emperor Karl VI in spiraling carved stone relief, for about 5 seconds. Of equal curiosity are the young people lazing on orange beach chairs at the reggae bar facing. This is the post-modern. This is progress!
We proceed to watch the acclaimed Christian Rizzo's new piece for a solo dancer, "Comme crane, comme culte", which translates roughly to "Like cranium, like worship", which translates in the viewing of it, roughly to "Like a load of poop on my 12 Euro ticket". Again with the lovely Palo and a more neurotic American dancer friend, Mike, we try to hob-nob but very ungraciously drink out of other people's abandoned bottles of water until we ourselves hobble out to find better, cheaper refreshment. The day ends back at Stephensplatz with a milkshake AND ANOTHER serving of ice cream. It's. Still. Hot.
...John leaves to the airport at 6am the next morning. We clocked 42 hours, 2 dance-theatre performances, 2 weiners, 12 scoops of ice cream, 1 major tourist attraction, and 4 new friends (including Uncle Karl. Uh, Leopold). Lots of love to the rest of the family -- wish you were here! (but then we wouldn't have gotten away with just 1 major tourist attraction!)
Sunday, July 22, 2007
The Home Beacon
...is beaming. I just watched a melodramatic YouTube video promo for Singaporean theatre company Wild Rice's latest production: "not just a gay play, a great play". Why are all these gay men so attractive. Why was I not born a gay man so I could fit in. That's partially a joke (the hashed and rehashed: "I think I am a homosexual man trapped inside a heterosexual woman's body"). But any Singaporean will tell you the truth about economies of scale. And I am tired of being Foreign Fetish Beauty Oddity. How strongly my feelings towards repatriation bind me to do it is sadly proportional to how I perceive my prospects of mating.
Walking along city streets in New York City, a young woman alone will be accosted by appreciative if not prying eyes and the occasional grunt of approval. When the man dares speak, you will hear any range of salutations, such as:
"Sexy!" (in the declarative, rather than the nominative)
"You go the gym a lot?"
"Can I talk to you for a second?"
"Hey Mama"
"Hello Asia"
"Hello Korea, Japan"
Most often you will hear these towards the direction of south-by-south-west (your blind spot), since man in question is stationary (sitting on a stoop, loitering outside the bodega, riding in slow circles on his bike in front of a group of boys on the stoop or a group of boys outside the bodega) and you are moving (being productive, trying to achieve, having a place to go, people to assist, and a future to secure). If said man has been in the approach himself moving at a constant velocity, he would have decelerated in order to appreciate you in totality (front-view and back) before making his declarative assessment. So, usually, you hear these things in passing.
With relative frequency you will hear a more musky, inviting voice tell you "God bless you", either from the old and/or pious, usually accompanied by a gentle shaking or rocking of the head in as much wonderment and awe as I imagine myself reserving for the Grand Canyon.
And, depending on your neighbourhood, you may actually be approached with a run and a wave, almost as if you were a taxi cab, much as if the urgency of the appeal will make you stop and give him the time of day. Unfortunately this is often the case, since it is an appeal to your basic humanity (does he need help? did I drop something? no shit, is this guy going to get himself run over?).
"Hey, where are you from?"
(I am looking for coconut milk, this guy followed me into the store)
"You from, what, Thailand?"
(I have not made eye contact) "No."
"Vietnam?"
"No."
"Korea?"
"No." (why do they have preserved olives and capers and yet no coconut milk?)
"Japan?"
"No."
"China?"
(I accrue good karma for the sake of finding my coconut milk, which is actually so I can complete the dessert I have already half made for my date later that night with Barry--I look him in the eye, and smile. I've been through this shelf already!)
"C'mon, where you from?"
(My Asian Mystery is sending ninja daggers through his flat-flapped cap and into his frontal cortex: I AM NOT INTERESTED)
"Singapore."
"Oh, wow, Singapore, huh ... "
Etc. He will ask me my name. I will sigh. I will tell him. He will lean his torso backward, tilted, while his arm lightly pokes my shoulder when he propositions me with an invitation to "can I see you again". I will smile. I will say no. He will ask why. He will ask me if I'm married. I will continue my hunt for dessert ingredients. I am not even paying half a mind.
This is not an isolated incident, for me or any woman of any race. Some have it worse. Some have it dirtier. Some have it with gleaming, rose-tinted reverence for the Zen Buddha Jasmine Yangtze aura they share with the stock-photoed women in the back of the Village Voice.
And frankly, I like it. Sometimes. It's affirming. It's challenging. It's a game. It's non-invasive. It's Brooklyn. It's Manhattan. It's b-boys of the 70s going flip and ape-shit over Bruce Lee movies when Canal Street was still as mixed as Lower East Side is now and Chinatown's gangs were Latin and Black too. This much I know from the weird white guy who likes to narrate this part of history in the Chinese bakery on the corner of Canal and Center Streets and which sells a scallion roll for only 60 cents.
I raise all this in order to raise how it feels different to be a young Asian woman alone here in Budapest and Vienna so far. I'm sorry, but they're Germanic. This area is the one that is fueling the sex trade and mail-order-bride industries. And if we had children, they wouldn't even have crimped hair or caramel skin. And there is always always the question of pure form, which should emphasize graceful and efficient execution (is she into men? is she into me? will she give me a smile? will she give me a number? can i at least watch her walk away and break even in effort-reward?), rather than knee-jerk mental ball-scratching (if I yell at her in what I know of her native tongue maybe she will uh Hey! Ni hao! Ni hao! Shay shay! Hallo!).
Because they don't say much, it's actually harder to tell whether or not to be on your guard. Because one assumes a general Viennese prejudice, it's unclear if the isolated and very, very odd salutation you do get directly are candidly respectful or shielding some deeper contempt. Because the men here who holler are old and wrinkled and have dirt beneath their fingernails and you know would have tickets to Phuket in a heartbeat if only they got enough on their unemployment. And this is all within the central districts of town. Mike lives up in the 22nd and talks about how the prostitutes on his walk home make fun of his gait and cackle and holler.
One thousand and twenty-four. That took a little over an hour, including research.
Ni Hao, Ni Hao
Walking along city streets in New York City, a young woman alone will be accosted by appreciative if not prying eyes and the occasional grunt of approval. When the man dares speak, you will hear any range of salutations, such as:
"Sexy!" (in the declarative, rather than the nominative)
"You go the gym a lot?"
"Can I talk to you for a second?"
"Hey Mama"
"Hello Asia"
"Hello Korea, Japan"
Most often you will hear these towards the direction of south-by-south-west (your blind spot), since man in question is stationary (sitting on a stoop, loitering outside the bodega, riding in slow circles on his bike in front of a group of boys on the stoop or a group of boys outside the bodega) and you are moving (being productive, trying to achieve, having a place to go, people to assist, and a future to secure). If said man has been in the approach himself moving at a constant velocity, he would have decelerated in order to appreciate you in totality (front-view and back) before making his declarative assessment. So, usually, you hear these things in passing.
With relative frequency you will hear a more musky, inviting voice tell you "God bless you", either from the old and/or pious, usually accompanied by a gentle shaking or rocking of the head in as much wonderment and awe as I imagine myself reserving for the Grand Canyon.
And, depending on your neighbourhood, you may actually be approached with a run and a wave, almost as if you were a taxi cab, much as if the urgency of the appeal will make you stop and give him the time of day. Unfortunately this is often the case, since it is an appeal to your basic humanity (does he need help? did I drop something? no shit, is this guy going to get himself run over?).
"Hey, where are you from?"
(I am looking for coconut milk, this guy followed me into the store)
"You from, what, Thailand?"
(I have not made eye contact) "No."
"Vietnam?"
"No."
"Korea?"
"No." (why do they have preserved olives and capers and yet no coconut milk?)
"Japan?"
"No."
"China?"
(I accrue good karma for the sake of finding my coconut milk, which is actually so I can complete the dessert I have already half made for my date later that night with Barry--I look him in the eye, and smile. I've been through this shelf already!)
"C'mon, where you from?"
(My Asian Mystery is sending ninja daggers through his flat-flapped cap and into his frontal cortex: I AM NOT INTERESTED)
"Singapore."
"Oh, wow, Singapore, huh ... "
Etc. He will ask me my name. I will sigh. I will tell him. He will lean his torso backward, tilted, while his arm lightly pokes my shoulder when he propositions me with an invitation to "can I see you again". I will smile. I will say no. He will ask why. He will ask me if I'm married. I will continue my hunt for dessert ingredients. I am not even paying half a mind.
This is not an isolated incident, for me or any woman of any race. Some have it worse. Some have it dirtier. Some have it with gleaming, rose-tinted reverence for the Zen Buddha Jasmine Yangtze aura they share with the stock-photoed women in the back of the Village Voice.
And frankly, I like it. Sometimes. It's affirming. It's challenging. It's a game. It's non-invasive. It's Brooklyn. It's Manhattan. It's b-boys of the 70s going flip and ape-shit over Bruce Lee movies when Canal Street was still as mixed as Lower East Side is now and Chinatown's gangs were Latin and Black too. This much I know from the weird white guy who likes to narrate this part of history in the Chinese bakery on the corner of Canal and Center Streets and which sells a scallion roll for only 60 cents.
I raise all this in order to raise how it feels different to be a young Asian woman alone here in Budapest and Vienna so far. I'm sorry, but they're Germanic. This area is the one that is fueling the sex trade and mail-order-bride industries. And if we had children, they wouldn't even have crimped hair or caramel skin. And there is always always the question of pure form, which should emphasize graceful and efficient execution (is she into men? is she into me? will she give me a smile? will she give me a number? can i at least watch her walk away and break even in effort-reward?), rather than knee-jerk mental ball-scratching (if I yell at her in what I know of her native tongue maybe she will uh Hey! Ni hao! Ni hao! Shay shay! Hallo!).
Because they don't say much, it's actually harder to tell whether or not to be on your guard. Because one assumes a general Viennese prejudice, it's unclear if the isolated and very, very odd salutation you do get directly are candidly respectful or shielding some deeper contempt. Because the men here who holler are old and wrinkled and have dirt beneath their fingernails and you know would have tickets to Phuket in a heartbeat if only they got enough on their unemployment. And this is all within the central districts of town. Mike lives up in the 22nd and talks about how the prostitutes on his walk home make fun of his gait and cackle and holler.
One thousand and twenty-four. That took a little over an hour, including research.
Saturday, July 21, 2007
This one's for the family
So I meant it, earlier, so, about my parents. My parents have been married for 32 years and 2 days. That is an approximation of 11,682 days of effort, struggle, partnership, shared experience. I have been involved in approximately 76% of this union. Um ... since birth, that is. I calculated.
It may seem odd to many who have known me over the years as being somewhat older than my age or "world weary" (citing a report card circa 1996) that I continue to obsess and confess about parents, family, relationship, searching, personal hygiene, hope, love, and other vulgarities, with such adolescent naivete, relish, and sense of righteous subjectivity. But as I meet the next generation of promising upstarts from Swarthmore, for example, and am asked by this bright buggy-eyed youngling with a Corona in his hand "Woah-what does it feel like to be 25?!?" I happily answer: "right. fitting. Now please remove me from your active short-term memory because I no longer need to abide by the rules of the diverse social laboratory that was our shared environment, as much as I treasure the memory, as much as it has enabled me and allowed me to grow. Please, no--really, you still have acne, a weak palate, and are embarrassing me with your sense of entitlement." I've been wanting to be 25 since I was 18. I think I am finally in my own skin. I think I finally fit. I think I have finally relinquished being "set apart". I am so lonely "set apart". I can finally cling to a status quo of pop cultural references and haphazard knowledges that I like. As I've been perhaps not so much proudly as cognizantly telling as many people as I can obtain a first impression with: "It's taken me 25 years of hard soul work to become as superficial as I am right now."
So my parents, yes, my parents have made a name for themselves, as a unit, as world travellers. They have made a fantastic team in this way, good representatives of our national and familial culture to others, and faithful, if not aggressively devoted opportunists of other cultures and histories. No stone unturned, I believe the phrase goes. No passport stamp uncoveted. Now, don't laugh -- you, too, shed an inner tear with the consolidation of the European states. You, too, are a collector of sites and I-was-heres. And surely I've written about this, too, that is, the ontological premise for the tourist photograph. Maybe this blog. Maybe my harddrive. Vintage: 2006. This is turning out to be a season of theme-making. I am in my skin. I am beginning to make sense.
So my parents, my parents, yes, so dedicated are their walking boots that when calling to wish them a happy anniversary in the company of visiting cousin John, I was greeted sooner with a "what are you doing in the house, why aren't you showing John the city?" than I could deliver a hung-over "but yesterday..." itinerary check-in. There is potentiality in everything. There is not a second to waste. They taught me that. They taught me to live like that. I mean it. I celebrate it!
My parents have a love of the itinerary. OK, to be fair, my mother has a love of the new (experiences, sites, nature, currencies, bank notes of these currencies, all of which require a solid itinerary to discover and execute/amass), while my father has a love of organization, and receives a performative joy from displaying organizational prowess, i.e. the tabulated, shaded, bold-typed, underlined, and italicized Microsoft Word itinerary. Somersaults, high kicks, and the triple-axel. My parents have a love of the itinerary. In honor of which, I am producing one, in retrospective (since all days are by nature full, it being very difficult or very impoverished to have NOTHING to do and to do nothing--and I say this with no small recognition of human beings who do, by injustice or unfortunate circumstance, live this way), of my 42 hours with dear cousin John Davys in Vienna. But for the sake of extended family who may have an interest in this dedicatedly EVENT-driven and NARRATIVE-based account and who yet may be unsympathetic to the otherwise circumloquacious Musings of my Um -- we start a new page.
It may seem odd to many who have known me over the years as being somewhat older than my age or "world weary" (citing a report card circa 1996) that I continue to obsess and confess about parents, family, relationship, searching, personal hygiene, hope, love, and other vulgarities, with such adolescent naivete, relish, and sense of righteous subjectivity. But as I meet the next generation of promising upstarts from Swarthmore, for example, and am asked by this bright buggy-eyed youngling with a Corona in his hand "Woah-what does it feel like to be 25?!?" I happily answer: "right. fitting. Now please remove me from your active short-term memory because I no longer need to abide by the rules of the diverse social laboratory that was our shared environment, as much as I treasure the memory, as much as it has enabled me and allowed me to grow. Please, no--really, you still have acne, a weak palate, and are embarrassing me with your sense of entitlement." I've been wanting to be 25 since I was 18. I think I am finally in my own skin. I think I finally fit. I think I have finally relinquished being "set apart". I am so lonely "set apart". I can finally cling to a status quo of pop cultural references and haphazard knowledges that I like. As I've been perhaps not so much proudly as cognizantly telling as many people as I can obtain a first impression with: "It's taken me 25 years of hard soul work to become as superficial as I am right now."
So my parents, yes, my parents have made a name for themselves, as a unit, as world travellers. They have made a fantastic team in this way, good representatives of our national and familial culture to others, and faithful, if not aggressively devoted opportunists of other cultures and histories. No stone unturned, I believe the phrase goes. No passport stamp uncoveted. Now, don't laugh -- you, too, shed an inner tear with the consolidation of the European states. You, too, are a collector of sites and I-was-heres. And surely I've written about this, too, that is, the ontological premise for the tourist photograph. Maybe this blog. Maybe my harddrive. Vintage: 2006. This is turning out to be a season of theme-making. I am in my skin. I am beginning to make sense.
So my parents, my parents, yes, so dedicated are their walking boots that when calling to wish them a happy anniversary in the company of visiting cousin John, I was greeted sooner with a "what are you doing in the house, why aren't you showing John the city?" than I could deliver a hung-over "but yesterday..." itinerary check-in. There is potentiality in everything. There is not a second to waste. They taught me that. They taught me to live like that. I mean it. I celebrate it!
My parents have a love of the itinerary. OK, to be fair, my mother has a love of the new (experiences, sites, nature, currencies, bank notes of these currencies, all of which require a solid itinerary to discover and execute/amass), while my father has a love of organization, and receives a performative joy from displaying organizational prowess, i.e. the tabulated, shaded, bold-typed, underlined, and italicized Microsoft Word itinerary. Somersaults, high kicks, and the triple-axel. My parents have a love of the itinerary. In honor of which, I am producing one, in retrospective (since all days are by nature full, it being very difficult or very impoverished to have NOTHING to do and to do nothing--and I say this with no small recognition of human beings who do, by injustice or unfortunate circumstance, live this way), of my 42 hours with dear cousin John Davys in Vienna. But for the sake of extended family who may have an interest in this dedicatedly EVENT-driven and NARRATIVE-based account and who yet may be unsympathetic to the otherwise circumloquacious Musings of my Um -- we start a new page.
Addendum: Owned by Google
So there is a slight disadvantage to this dashboard widget, which is that it has no scroll sidebar, so the more I write the more I push the window down past the edges of my screen, thereby losing my capability to press "Publish". It is also impossible for me to move the window higher into the vertical nether reaches past my weather report and yet-unsullied Stickie. It appears that I will be forced to become much more journalistic (succinct and/or episodic -- given my continuing verbosity, as well as gradiose ambition to hit 1000 words a day, I have a premonition that it will be the latter. Incidentally, if I could program/edit programs, I would make a filter that would play a sound effect of choice at the word count threshold of one's choosing, which may or may not be attached to another sound resembling a typewriter "ding" everytime you hit "enter". This, alongside my beloved vision of creating the web server ".dot", and the subsequent mother host site of "dot.dot", is among many in my archive of Unreasonable and Wayward Dreams. I read on the plane to Budapest about somebody who dropped their career in ___XXX___ financial promise ___ in order to become "an inventor". I lie. It wasn't on the airplane. It was in something almost as non-descript as an airplane magazine. And it's going to irritate me for a long time--longer even, than my eyeballs are going to irritate me right now since I forgot to take them out before jumping into bed with my thoughts and keyboard--that I can't remember.What I can remember is that I thought to myself, "God, what about her parents. Hard enough saying 'I'm going to take the higher path (if you flip the world upside down) and be an artist." Imagine if I came home and said, 'Hey Ma, I'm gonna be an inventor." Although this would add to my list of -TORs I could become (reference: What's In A Name? This blog, 2005 somewhere). I am still in parenthesis. Who was it that coined "parenthetical thinking?" Was it the same schmuck that talked about "rhizomatic thinking"? "Schmuck, in German, means jewellery. Speaking of parents ...
Owned by Google
I have finally discovered how to put Blogger on my dashboard. No more logging in; no more firefox fatigue. It will probably also make my musings a LOT more stream of consciousness than they have ever been, except then I suppose I don't feel as motivated by the sense of "common purpose" or "generalized, anonymous audience" as I do when doing this live. Sort of like how you work out with less intensity with weights at home than if you go to the gym. Lifestyle, it seems, is all about whether or not you achieve the feeling of purpose and production than the end point or product itself. Collectivity, it seems, is largely about Every Body doing their own tasks but in constant presence of others doing the same. "I want participatory privacy, in public," I confess to my friend Mike on 7/17, "which I suppose is like ten people taking shits in ten individual port-a-potties made of one-way glass."
Mike is also here for the festival, and has been here 4 or 5 times. He is a delightful handful of pining gay adolescence and soulful cerebrality.He thinks he has Asperger's Syndrome, a nervous system disorder related to autism and yes, which would explain a number of his behaviours. He proposed tonight to stage a solo for Every Life Lost In The Iraq War / Every Measure Of Land Lost From The Melting Of The Ice Caps / Every Bureaucrat Profited From THe Wastages Of Modern Living / etc. I am adlibbing a little. But in the bathroom later, I am thinking this is a great idea. Can we make it a global relay of very mild ambition. Can we do it humbly and authentically. Because I wouldn't want to aim to make of it another hype-generating do-gooder Live Aid. But it is something "to do" in the face of individual helplessness.
Mike is also here for the festival, and has been here 4 or 5 times. He is a delightful handful of pining gay adolescence and soulful cerebrality.He thinks he has Asperger's Syndrome, a nervous system disorder related to autism and yes, which would explain a number of his behaviours. He proposed tonight to stage a solo for Every Life Lost In The Iraq War / Every Measure Of Land Lost From The Melting Of The Ice Caps / Every Bureaucrat Profited From THe Wastages Of Modern Living / etc. I am adlibbing a little. But in the bathroom later, I am thinking this is a great idea. Can we make it a global relay of very mild ambition. Can we do it humbly and authentically. Because I wouldn't want to aim to make of it another hype-generating do-gooder Live Aid. But it is something "to do" in the face of individual helplessness.
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Vertigo + The Fake of The Real
I am standing on the diving board. I feel the spring beneath my heels. I feel my thighs kissing. I feel spandex, pinching. Ok. So take it off. I am naked. I am feeling a draft. I am not looking down. I am feeling the expanse. The expanse is inviting while frightening; the horizon is far away yet so encroaching I can almost grab it like cotton balls and stuff it into my mouth. I am a dummy. I am a cotton-stuffed dummy, held together by PVC-pipe hollow bone and layers of nylon pantyhose. My blood is inert and my nervous system is knotted together every 10 inches. I can barely stand.
If you climbed the ladder and you are going to fall off the board anyway, wouldn't you prefer to jump?
******
AUDITION DETOX, _______ ___ Company, New York
What is this bad taste in my mouth?
I make all rounds to the end of the day, not even sure of what they're looking for, not even sure if this process is reflective of how they work. How they work is what I really came here to figure out--that I can give them something is for me not a question. But that is precisely the problem. I know I can give, and those who can give me work know I can give. They just don't see me giving. And I won't budge until I know they are worth my effort. And I go home alone.
They want me to come in for their workshop and for their rehearsal process. I am actually not resistant to the idea, I just don't have the time until after my show on the 18th. Maybe the bad taste in my mouth is just an unpetted ego that would have preferred an unambiguous "YES". Good art feels like that: YES. What you can say, YES to. Your eyes widen and you shake your head in shock. Or your cheeks lift and you nod your head and smile on one side of your face. YES. YES. IT FITS. IT'S RIGHT. IT FEELS GOOD. I am patiently waiting for a time when the YES is clear and the REST outside of the YES just rests aside.
Am I worried? Also yes, the other yes, the tremulous "do you need to go potty?" yes. As a side note, that's actually not true -- we falsely assign to children the role of shyness, when I've recently observed a live specimen display the greatest enthusiasm for pulling her pants down and tinkling in a bowl big enough to be her bathtub. Only hers is an unabashed "YESH." She has a constant stuffed nose. Going on. I am worried because I am worried that I am not actually authentic. I have another internal haunting dogma that states that if I am not truly authentic in this line of work for which I sacrifice all sorts of unspecified material glory which my above-average IQ could command, I might as well be fully false and wear high heels to work. But I know (I squint my eyes and raise an eyebrow: "I know", what a problematic phrase)...I know the underlying presumption of my potential for commercial greatness is only the smoke blowing from a business-aristocrat's pipe. That's work and sacrifice too. And besides, I'd get fat. At the end of the day, oh my vanity becomes my salvation.
So underlying this worry of inauthenticity is the rudeness of being presumed disingenuous. "What is she hiding?", I hear them ask through secondhand gossip from my friend who dances with the company. I'm not hiding anything. "Those who get to know Pisces-Aries cusp people better learn not to look for deeper reasons or ulterior motives behind their actions. Those born on this primal cusp resent being analyzed, feeling either rightly or wrongly that what they so openly present to the world is exactly what they really are--no more, no less," says my magic Birthday Bible. Tell me what I'm actually saying to you, I hear myself think, please stop telling me what you think I'm *not* saying because I say things differently from you.
Underlying this confrontation with perception and reality is my confusion about trust. Why should I trust the environment of this room--which is by nature of being an audition, competitive and judgmental (professionally, not personally)--to be "the real me"? I AM being the real me. The real me in reaction to this circumstance. There IS no other me than this in this particular moment. You want the real me then see me in the contexts of my choosing. You want the real me to look like what you have discovered is the real you, then hire me and pattern me into embodying yourselves. I am hiding nothing save my disenchantment with this process.
The daughter of a Taurus bull-queen shouldn't be surprised at her own stubbornness. "Make me trust you, show me I can trust you, and I will melt for you like the bubbling brook. Until then, it is winter in wonderland and I am sheeths of ice protecting the river beneath." Is it me? Am I the problem?
Why I am allowing myself this ridiculous obsession and sense of affrontery is because it makes me question what is it I actually have to offer the stage (to direct the progression of my own choreography, which is coming into being and not quite in its own skin yet) as well as to question my lifestyle and love choices, which are still problematic, because there is much at odds with itself, my sex in particular (both noun and verb).
I walked away yesterday with pleasurable advice: she (one of the pair of choreographers) pulls me away for a private counsulation in between rounds: "Listen. Relax. Just relax, Ok? Go with your groove. You have a groove, right? Dance from your pussy, and your groove. Ok?" I smile. The thought makes me happy. I am happiest when I am dancing from my pussy (pelvis). I like concrete advice. I was very pleased with this advice. I think I open my (upper) mouth so much it drowns out my lateral lips, below. But I am tired. I don't like being told what to do. I am tired of being told how to be. And I quickly shift from awkward to frustrated to pissed to disenchanted as we repeat and refine this phrase that is confining, not freeing, that is dramatic by nature but asked to be nonchalant (the aesthetics of cool or the cooled). As if nonchalant is truly feeling. I am not so much into this version of sexy. My sexy does not read this way. My sexy is hot and rompy, not parched and longing. My sexy I feel should be me at my heights, and my questions and my discoveries, not at my being untouchable.
But yes (the confessional yes, the yes-with-a-sigh, the exhaled yes (if there was an even lower case than lower case, I would have used it to write this "yes"), it is true that I am not getting my groove on. I am not getting turned on. Is it me?
I am melodramatic. Yes, melodrama is a mechanism. It is perhaps a release (it feels good, it feels recognizable), it is perhaps a wall (blocking the emergence of the unrecognizable, which is most exciting of all. The monster, unleashed). Perhaps it is cheap. Or is that just another word for accessible? [Child's face, perplexed more than tormented, slapped repeatedly across the face, back and forth, back and forth] Accessibility is a big question I am facing in the direction of my own work. What level of inaccessibility will I accept of myself?
Ultimately, I suppose, the presumption has to be: to be accepted on your own terms. In your own choice of representation. And it will *always be* representation. I am concluding as I write this (fighting to understand this bad after-taste of their process with this desire for the underpinnings of their aesthetic, regardless of results): Performance that is an act of intense private intimacy in public is peep show, violation, or church. Peep show, because the choreography is masturbatory. Violation, because the only way to really share would be to make love to the audience (which presumes consent at purchase of ticket, not at penetration; yet how do they say no?). Church, because it demands complicity. I told myself as much when I realized that this was what was happening at my residency at Nassau -- "if you want a parish, then get a church." I was becoming such a zealot for my cause of lostness in the ambiguity of the making that I lost sight of the theatrical form as presentation, possibly entertainment, possibly treatise, possibly invitation.
I have seen this company's work at many stages, for the sake of my friend that dances for them and who I have seen both grow and be stunted through their work (she will never admit to the latter because she will never realize it - she too is seduced by the ferociousness and exclusivity of their message that it is blinding. The Fake of the demand of the Real -- be authentic, be authentic MY way). They want the authenticity so badly I think that the choreography suffers. The movement is not movement, it is shape to shape, image to image, but there is no punctuation. They want "thick", so they do not want it to stop. So then mustn't that be movement? Their desire for speed does not allow much punctuation, or, at least, they have not learned how to ask for what sort of phrasing they want besides to copy the man delivering the phrase.
In terms of audition functionality, it is a lot to ask of bodies and minds that are trained to create contiguity of disparate elements (to seek efficiency, connection, fluidity, and rhythm = harmony) to abandon it for function which is not really function. For example, they did not score "throw"; instead, inside of this choppy phrase, they choreographed a move of "throwing" that suits ___'s body but that is still decorative since the energy generated is not used towards any end (falling, catching, bouncing, reverbing). The move does nothing but show off the skills that ____ has. That is the conceit of dance. But then they keep asking for us to "just throw". Lie.
It is a lot to ask anyone you barely know to just "be themselves" when being oneself is often in relation to task and environment and the environment here is chaotic (impulse=paralysis). It is difficult to want people to want, it is perhaps harder to want people to be people and then to want them to be your ideal version of people; or the version of people you have fought to become (but not every-people has your fight, nor have you theirs). It is, if you ask me, a little disingenuous to be asking for something specific (a phrase) and then asking people not to be stressed. Of course they are stressed. They are learning. Learning new things is stressful, it is survivalist. If you want it to be pleasurable, stop asking for such specific things.
I am wary of Emotional Evangelicals and Glory-by-Guilt-mongers in general. I hid my true identity from them until I could escape them in their holy houses. I hid my voice from them while mouthing their songs. I fell down and raised hands, hoping the gesture would give me their meaning, because Theirs was The Only Meaning. The more I am detoxing from this experience (and my many experiences in the studio with various makers) the more I am realizing that the only way to fight this bad taste is to work to represent myself the way I see fit. I do not fit. One size does not fit all. "Sorry Ma'am, we don't carry large". I have to create for me and for those who will shape me to becoming that which I aspire to be.
Dive!
If you climbed the ladder and you are going to fall off the board anyway, wouldn't you prefer to jump?
******
AUDITION DETOX, _______ ___ Company, New York
What is this bad taste in my mouth?
I make all rounds to the end of the day, not even sure of what they're looking for, not even sure if this process is reflective of how they work. How they work is what I really came here to figure out--that I can give them something is for me not a question. But that is precisely the problem. I know I can give, and those who can give me work know I can give. They just don't see me giving. And I won't budge until I know they are worth my effort. And I go home alone.
They want me to come in for their workshop and for their rehearsal process. I am actually not resistant to the idea, I just don't have the time until after my show on the 18th. Maybe the bad taste in my mouth is just an unpetted ego that would have preferred an unambiguous "YES". Good art feels like that: YES. What you can say, YES to. Your eyes widen and you shake your head in shock. Or your cheeks lift and you nod your head and smile on one side of your face. YES. YES. IT FITS. IT'S RIGHT. IT FEELS GOOD. I am patiently waiting for a time when the YES is clear and the REST outside of the YES just rests aside.
Am I worried? Also yes, the other yes, the tremulous "do you need to go potty?" yes. As a side note, that's actually not true -- we falsely assign to children the role of shyness, when I've recently observed a live specimen display the greatest enthusiasm for pulling her pants down and tinkling in a bowl big enough to be her bathtub. Only hers is an unabashed "YESH." She has a constant stuffed nose. Going on. I am worried because I am worried that I am not actually authentic. I have another internal haunting dogma that states that if I am not truly authentic in this line of work for which I sacrifice all sorts of unspecified material glory which my above-average IQ could command, I might as well be fully false and wear high heels to work. But I know (I squint my eyes and raise an eyebrow: "I know", what a problematic phrase)...I know the underlying presumption of my potential for commercial greatness is only the smoke blowing from a business-aristocrat's pipe. That's work and sacrifice too. And besides, I'd get fat. At the end of the day, oh my vanity becomes my salvation.
So underlying this worry of inauthenticity is the rudeness of being presumed disingenuous. "What is she hiding?", I hear them ask through secondhand gossip from my friend who dances with the company. I'm not hiding anything. "Those who get to know Pisces-Aries cusp people better learn not to look for deeper reasons or ulterior motives behind their actions. Those born on this primal cusp resent being analyzed, feeling either rightly or wrongly that what they so openly present to the world is exactly what they really are--no more, no less," says my magic Birthday Bible. Tell me what I'm actually saying to you, I hear myself think, please stop telling me what you think I'm *not* saying because I say things differently from you.
Underlying this confrontation with perception and reality is my confusion about trust. Why should I trust the environment of this room--which is by nature of being an audition, competitive and judgmental (professionally, not personally)--to be "the real me"? I AM being the real me. The real me in reaction to this circumstance. There IS no other me than this in this particular moment. You want the real me then see me in the contexts of my choosing. You want the real me to look like what you have discovered is the real you, then hire me and pattern me into embodying yourselves. I am hiding nothing save my disenchantment with this process.
The daughter of a Taurus bull-queen shouldn't be surprised at her own stubbornness. "Make me trust you, show me I can trust you, and I will melt for you like the bubbling brook. Until then, it is winter in wonderland and I am sheeths of ice protecting the river beneath." Is it me? Am I the problem?
Why I am allowing myself this ridiculous obsession and sense of affrontery is because it makes me question what is it I actually have to offer the stage (to direct the progression of my own choreography, which is coming into being and not quite in its own skin yet) as well as to question my lifestyle and love choices, which are still problematic, because there is much at odds with itself, my sex in particular (both noun and verb).
I walked away yesterday with pleasurable advice: she (one of the pair of choreographers) pulls me away for a private counsulation in between rounds: "Listen. Relax. Just relax, Ok? Go with your groove. You have a groove, right? Dance from your pussy, and your groove. Ok?" I smile. The thought makes me happy. I am happiest when I am dancing from my pussy (pelvis). I like concrete advice. I was very pleased with this advice. I think I open my (upper) mouth so much it drowns out my lateral lips, below. But I am tired. I don't like being told what to do. I am tired of being told how to be. And I quickly shift from awkward to frustrated to pissed to disenchanted as we repeat and refine this phrase that is confining, not freeing, that is dramatic by nature but asked to be nonchalant (the aesthetics of cool or the cooled). As if nonchalant is truly feeling. I am not so much into this version of sexy. My sexy does not read this way. My sexy is hot and rompy, not parched and longing. My sexy I feel should be me at my heights, and my questions and my discoveries, not at my being untouchable.
But yes (the confessional yes, the yes-with-a-sigh, the exhaled yes (if there was an even lower case than lower case, I would have used it to write this "yes"), it is true that I am not getting my groove on. I am not getting turned on. Is it me?
I am melodramatic. Yes, melodrama is a mechanism. It is perhaps a release (it feels good, it feels recognizable), it is perhaps a wall (blocking the emergence of the unrecognizable, which is most exciting of all. The monster, unleashed). Perhaps it is cheap. Or is that just another word for accessible? [Child's face, perplexed more than tormented, slapped repeatedly across the face, back and forth, back and forth] Accessibility is a big question I am facing in the direction of my own work. What level of inaccessibility will I accept of myself?
Ultimately, I suppose, the presumption has to be: to be accepted on your own terms. In your own choice of representation. And it will *always be* representation. I am concluding as I write this (fighting to understand this bad after-taste of their process with this desire for the underpinnings of their aesthetic, regardless of results): Performance that is an act of intense private intimacy in public is peep show, violation, or church. Peep show, because the choreography is masturbatory. Violation, because the only way to really share would be to make love to the audience (which presumes consent at purchase of ticket, not at penetration; yet how do they say no?). Church, because it demands complicity. I told myself as much when I realized that this was what was happening at my residency at Nassau -- "if you want a parish, then get a church." I was becoming such a zealot for my cause of lostness in the ambiguity of the making that I lost sight of the theatrical form as presentation, possibly entertainment, possibly treatise, possibly invitation.
I have seen this company's work at many stages, for the sake of my friend that dances for them and who I have seen both grow and be stunted through their work (she will never admit to the latter because she will never realize it - she too is seduced by the ferociousness and exclusivity of their message that it is blinding. The Fake of the demand of the Real -- be authentic, be authentic MY way). They want the authenticity so badly I think that the choreography suffers. The movement is not movement, it is shape to shape, image to image, but there is no punctuation. They want "thick", so they do not want it to stop. So then mustn't that be movement? Their desire for speed does not allow much punctuation, or, at least, they have not learned how to ask for what sort of phrasing they want besides to copy the man delivering the phrase.
In terms of audition functionality, it is a lot to ask of bodies and minds that are trained to create contiguity of disparate elements (to seek efficiency, connection, fluidity, and rhythm = harmony) to abandon it for function which is not really function. For example, they did not score "throw"; instead, inside of this choppy phrase, they choreographed a move of "throwing" that suits ___'s body but that is still decorative since the energy generated is not used towards any end (falling, catching, bouncing, reverbing). The move does nothing but show off the skills that ____ has. That is the conceit of dance. But then they keep asking for us to "just throw". Lie.
It is a lot to ask anyone you barely know to just "be themselves" when being oneself is often in relation to task and environment and the environment here is chaotic (impulse=paralysis). It is difficult to want people to want, it is perhaps harder to want people to be people and then to want them to be your ideal version of people; or the version of people you have fought to become (but not every-people has your fight, nor have you theirs). It is, if you ask me, a little disingenuous to be asking for something specific (a phrase) and then asking people not to be stressed. Of course they are stressed. They are learning. Learning new things is stressful, it is survivalist. If you want it to be pleasurable, stop asking for such specific things.
I am wary of Emotional Evangelicals and Glory-by-Guilt-mongers in general. I hid my true identity from them until I could escape them in their holy houses. I hid my voice from them while mouthing their songs. I fell down and raised hands, hoping the gesture would give me their meaning, because Theirs was The Only Meaning. The more I am detoxing from this experience (and my many experiences in the studio with various makers) the more I am realizing that the only way to fight this bad taste is to work to represent myself the way I see fit. I do not fit. One size does not fit all. "Sorry Ma'am, we don't carry large". I have to create for me and for those who will shape me to becoming that which I aspire to be.
Dive!
Monday, September 25, 2006
Update for Abena: Mexico & its aftermath
DEAR ABENA! I have decided to honor being back in touch with you by being back in touch with myself (my on-line version, that is). I am frightened by the idea that someone is Germany is actually reading my blog. Not for their sake, but mine -- my narcissism is already itchy to expose myself even more now! Incidentally, the words "itchy" and "expose" should really not go into the same sentence, particularly in a pubic, um, public forum. If I were an editor I would censure myself.
This, written after five days in Mexico with my love. It will be a month since we've seen each other when I go pick him up on Thursday.
August 31, 2006
I smell tequila in the air from my broken $35 duty-free bottle, probably cracked but unwrecked from a plastic bagged check-in. Still no liquids on planes, as with no shoes, which, having been instituted in 2002, is an indication of how the days of check-in-free travel have probably come to an end. I have to admit that a part of my anxiousness about getting home right now is not only to do with having to bear with the vigilante immigration officer in Atlanta, the re-check-in, the added security checks, the added hour to departure time and then the added hour sitting duck waiting for clearance. No, I need to get home so I can fix this bottle and salvage 100% agave 3 years in the bottle for my brother-in-law’s birthday. Think he’ll accept it in a couple Snapple bottles and a jello-cup?
The smell of tequila gives a different ambience to my midnight wait for Jersey transit. Fuck the baggage carrel. Carousel. Would it have worked properly I might have made the 11:41 instead. Now I feel like a renegade minor-league-model runaway with a drinking problem. Back from Acapulco with the last of my coco dulces and tamarindo candies attaching themselves gobule by gobule to my subingual line as I suffer this wait knowing that the wait for the AC at Penn Station – where the real alcoholics groove alongside parentless clans of touristing teenagers (why are they here? Why are they so loud? Why are they so tasteless?) – and the trek to Bedford-Nostrand means for Mel a grand total of 15 hours journey from love to normalcy and a vast, vast unknown.
Acapulco. Mecca of the fake breasted and leather-thonged starlet: Miami meets Hong Kong meets rural beach shack. The site for the shoot was owned by a sun-blacked man named Domingo, which, along with the location’s priceless sleepy castaway setting, made me look in the shadows for evidence of Friday and Crusoe himself. A 45 minute van ride and worlds away from our residence at the Hyatt, our Argentinian models were prepped on the glamour of sandblasted white plastic beach chairs, fed fresh-caught fish on long damp wooden benches and tables, and immortalized with their plastic beach smiles by the gift and artistry of my baby.
Baby I miss you. Interjection. This is what love is – a limitation to one’s tolerance for unnecessary people, because when your world only makes sense with one in particular you’d rather stare at wall textures then deal with predators and imbeciles.
Very happily was I made a companion golden labrador for the day of the shoot. Awake at 5:30 to be on-site by 7, I made the most of my guilt-free impromptu holiday squiggling calligraphy in wet sand with my tondus and toes, triangle-posing to the rising sun over a vista of palm trees, distant rocky hills, rising mist from excited breaking waves dusting bullet lines of sea birds fishing for a decent desayuno. A sweet-faced man that I only notice later is bearing a rifle approaches: “Do you want to see turtles?” A short walk to a protected harvest area, I dig with my too-long-nailed index, carving swirls around little black heads attached to flailing cartilaginous flippers. Newly hatched. I don’t believe the conservationist there when he says that naturally, were they to be digging their own way out, it would take them two hours. Maybe they hesitate from the vibrations of our presence, but their complete vulnerability and spasmodic flapping makes me think them yet weak diggers.
The babies safely bucketed, under the nearby tent I am feeling nothing but guilt and magic staring at a bucket of day olds and a water-filled hull of two-day-olds. By three days, these creatures will be set free into the ocean, and by a hundred years will be the size of suburban family dining table. Guilt? Only because I know Jose would love to see this. Magic? I am made a princess thrice over. Plus I score a terrific photo of beach dogs staring at me as I walk back to site, affirming my happiness.
Brooklyn. Morning: He calls. He’s arrived to Madrid and his family heaviness. He sounds fatigued. I don’t recall hearing the phone, picking it up, or answering. All I know is that this morning I woke as the last, his presence naturally and unassumedly intertwined with mine.
What is dance? Interjection. According to the man I love, dance is masturbation, and I agree. It is also mastery. My choreographer Maija encourages me to allow yourself to be mastered by the technique (masturbated by the technique, Jose?), to lay yourself substrate to its power, history, and knowledge. And to the fact that it has and will continue to outlive your conscious existence. Well, I added that last bit. But it’s true.
She says she sees herself at a younger age in me: the most dangerous dancer in the room, because its so personal and unforgiving. The problem is, the worst danger you can be in this situation is to yourself. But I refuse to feel inadequate, I refuse to self-sabotage. I will ride this wave of chance and newness.
.... Today, September 25th, I realize I might get in trouble now with this confession. Please don't be hurt by the fact that I didn't tell you, Mum, about flying to see Jose last month. It was sudden, and I didn't want to alert everyone about a relationship I wasn't sure was going to work out! But it's working out .... so far ... !
This, written after five days in Mexico with my love. It will be a month since we've seen each other when I go pick him up on Thursday.
August 31, 2006
I smell tequila in the air from my broken $35 duty-free bottle, probably cracked but unwrecked from a plastic bagged check-in. Still no liquids on planes, as with no shoes, which, having been instituted in 2002, is an indication of how the days of check-in-free travel have probably come to an end. I have to admit that a part of my anxiousness about getting home right now is not only to do with having to bear with the vigilante immigration officer in Atlanta, the re-check-in, the added security checks, the added hour to departure time and then the added hour sitting duck waiting for clearance. No, I need to get home so I can fix this bottle and salvage 100% agave 3 years in the bottle for my brother-in-law’s birthday. Think he’ll accept it in a couple Snapple bottles and a jello-cup?
The smell of tequila gives a different ambience to my midnight wait for Jersey transit. Fuck the baggage carrel. Carousel. Would it have worked properly I might have made the 11:41 instead. Now I feel like a renegade minor-league-model runaway with a drinking problem. Back from Acapulco with the last of my coco dulces and tamarindo candies attaching themselves gobule by gobule to my subingual line as I suffer this wait knowing that the wait for the AC at Penn Station – where the real alcoholics groove alongside parentless clans of touristing teenagers (why are they here? Why are they so loud? Why are they so tasteless?) – and the trek to Bedford-Nostrand means for Mel a grand total of 15 hours journey from love to normalcy and a vast, vast unknown.
Acapulco. Mecca of the fake breasted and leather-thonged starlet: Miami meets Hong Kong meets rural beach shack. The site for the shoot was owned by a sun-blacked man named Domingo, which, along with the location’s priceless sleepy castaway setting, made me look in the shadows for evidence of Friday and Crusoe himself. A 45 minute van ride and worlds away from our residence at the Hyatt, our Argentinian models were prepped on the glamour of sandblasted white plastic beach chairs, fed fresh-caught fish on long damp wooden benches and tables, and immortalized with their plastic beach smiles by the gift and artistry of my baby.
Baby I miss you. Interjection. This is what love is – a limitation to one’s tolerance for unnecessary people, because when your world only makes sense with one in particular you’d rather stare at wall textures then deal with predators and imbeciles.
Very happily was I made a companion golden labrador for the day of the shoot. Awake at 5:30 to be on-site by 7, I made the most of my guilt-free impromptu holiday squiggling calligraphy in wet sand with my tondus and toes, triangle-posing to the rising sun over a vista of palm trees, distant rocky hills, rising mist from excited breaking waves dusting bullet lines of sea birds fishing for a decent desayuno. A sweet-faced man that I only notice later is bearing a rifle approaches: “Do you want to see turtles?” A short walk to a protected harvest area, I dig with my too-long-nailed index, carving swirls around little black heads attached to flailing cartilaginous flippers. Newly hatched. I don’t believe the conservationist there when he says that naturally, were they to be digging their own way out, it would take them two hours. Maybe they hesitate from the vibrations of our presence, but their complete vulnerability and spasmodic flapping makes me think them yet weak diggers.
The babies safely bucketed, under the nearby tent I am feeling nothing but guilt and magic staring at a bucket of day olds and a water-filled hull of two-day-olds. By three days, these creatures will be set free into the ocean, and by a hundred years will be the size of suburban family dining table. Guilt? Only because I know Jose would love to see this. Magic? I am made a princess thrice over. Plus I score a terrific photo of beach dogs staring at me as I walk back to site, affirming my happiness.
Brooklyn. Morning: He calls. He’s arrived to Madrid and his family heaviness. He sounds fatigued. I don’t recall hearing the phone, picking it up, or answering. All I know is that this morning I woke as the last, his presence naturally and unassumedly intertwined with mine.
What is dance? Interjection. According to the man I love, dance is masturbation, and I agree. It is also mastery. My choreographer Maija encourages me to allow yourself to be mastered by the technique (masturbated by the technique, Jose?), to lay yourself substrate to its power, history, and knowledge. And to the fact that it has and will continue to outlive your conscious existence. Well, I added that last bit. But it’s true.
She says she sees herself at a younger age in me: the most dangerous dancer in the room, because its so personal and unforgiving. The problem is, the worst danger you can be in this situation is to yourself. But I refuse to feel inadequate, I refuse to self-sabotage. I will ride this wave of chance and newness.
.... Today, September 25th, I realize I might get in trouble now with this confession. Please don't be hurt by the fact that I didn't tell you, Mum, about flying to see Jose last month. It was sudden, and I didn't want to alert everyone about a relationship I wasn't sure was going to work out! But it's working out .... so far ... !
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Thursday, March 09, 2006
dash dash dash
of many useless emails I infrequently send as shout-outs to long-losts, i like this one:
is this you?
nine months later i discover i still have your email address, if this is the one you are using .... hello from new york city, where i still am, yet dancing. projects yes, company - pending, choreography - ever in process, website forthwith. saving the world one cell at a time. i should put that on a t-shirt. that, along with "I cried for Kong", a statement that came up more than once from friends whilst watching the Oscars on Sunday night. I have others: "what the fuck you!" (overhead in a chinatown peddler's brawl), "--the fuh?" (for all those audiences new to contemporary dance -- regular post-show comment), "define gig" (for all us wannabes wanna-being in pick-your-own metropolitan-mess).
This is a random email, but I hope it brings you equal light and life as I'm sure you are continuing to give in your own daily travels/rambles. Don't forget: a line is two opposing ends waiting to meet in a circle.
Yours,
MEL
is this you?
nine months later i discover i still have your email address, if this is the one you are using .... hello from new york city, where i still am, yet dancing. projects yes, company - pending, choreography - ever in process, website forthwith. saving the world one cell at a time. i should put that on a t-shirt. that, along with "I cried for Kong", a statement that came up more than once from friends whilst watching the Oscars on Sunday night. I have others: "what the fuck you!" (overhead in a chinatown peddler's brawl), "--the fuh?" (for all those audiences new to contemporary dance -- regular post-show comment), "define gig" (for all us wannabes wanna-being in pick-your-own metropolitan-mess).
This is a random email, but I hope it brings you equal light and life as I'm sure you are continuing to give in your own daily travels/rambles. Don't forget: a line is two opposing ends waiting to meet in a circle.
Yours,
MEL
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
fell off the back of a truck on my way to palo alto recovered from the coma thank God but had to go under hypnosis to remember that i had a blog
WOW.
What month is it?
What day?
What year?
Can it be ... 2006?
Nearly mid-March?
Can it be?
Can I be?
I am so close to normalcy in my head that I can barely recognize the necessary scrambling for air that is evidenced by this journalling.
Yet in other lights I am in exactly the same place, six months deferred: still student, still single, still without full-time employment. Oh fuck. Who wants full-time anything right now anyway. As long as the dreams keep flickering in the predawn haziness of trustfundedness. Let the daylight of financial autonomy wait for my Romeo to first jump into bed before we squirm beneath sheets pierced by morning sun. I am so thoroughly alive and awake in my slumber.
Self-acceptance is a difficult thing. I don't know why I am fighting for wage labor, except for the guilty pleasure of walking out of the office by the clock when full-timers have to stay with the client roster of another two hours. No, I get to walk with pride amongst the school children, the homeless, the vagrants, the mid-Jamba-juice pre-hair-salon trophies and their nursing (elsewhere) children. I get to walk with common aimlessness into the throngs, wondering constantly when is the next time I get to eat, and what that might be.
I understand that with my active lifestyle, I need to be eating. I understand it's winter. But I begin to wonder how long it must continue that so much of my brain space is spent thinking about what to eat. "All my life," seeing that I am a constantly renewing, cell-generating, non-vegetative human being, is still sometimes difficult for me to accept.
Instead of these wry, pointless musings, I should probably be using the opportunity of being back on my blog to usefully list the pros and cons of various decisions currently on the agenda, or to strategize them all to fit within the context of each other, only accomplishable through self-discipline and God's desires burning themselves in legible English onto my white walls.
... Dancing for JoAnna. Not dancing for JoAnna. Working on my solo. Making myself a website to promote myself. What creative product/performance to make for Sue and Duleesha's wedding. Staying in New York. Moving home. Experimenting in Europe. Travelling to South America. Learning Spanish. Reinvigorating Polish. Applying for graduate school. Trying to reinvent myself as Asian. Forgetting that, and accepting once and for all that I am somewhere else in my past lives a European theorist and heroic cowgirl and Taoist sage, all of which have manifested in my current incarnation and result in my need to live forever in self-exile in the land of limbo, Fat America. ..... to love Jose. to not love Jose. to keep pretending that's a choice. to keep pretending the patient pursuit of dreams will actually leave me in a better place after their climactic end than i was in the first place. to keep running myself in circles. to not keep running myself in circles. to pretend like that's a choice. to keep saying that i'm "pretending." i'm pretending that I'm pretending. semantic ritual aside: i'm actually happy with how i'm living my life now because i've stopped comparing it to some imaginary life that i somehow screwed up on and failed to achieve. yay!
so now here is my italian, note: napolitan roommate to use my computer, typing at a significantly slower rate than I do. I take care of everything in the house, including all bill payments and rent, which she returns her share of to me via cash that she withdraws from ATMs citywide, $200 a day at a time (and, I suppose, sometimes stores beneath her mattress). in return for my logistical management, I get to make the effort to be civil when sometimes I want to be alone but otherwise not have to be more friendly than I have to on certain occassions when I'm tired to speaking slowly for her comprehension, or when I'm tired of having to listen to all her romantic stories. I also get to use her coffee pot. I also get to listen to more smooth jazz on the radio than I can sometimes stomach, but I also get private lessons in jazz pirouette in our living room (i spot Spain on the world map on our wall ... because it's right there at eye level, and because, well, part of my dream cycle has to do with spain and one man living in it right now). I got to watch Il postino with live commentary from a real Napolitan. I get a happy "Hey girl!" when I walk through the door. i get good energy, a great smile, and immense positivity. I get to learn how to be with other people. And the cynicism starts to fade ....
as the days unfold ..........
What month is it?
What day?
What year?
Can it be ... 2006?
Nearly mid-March?
Can it be?
Can I be?
I am so close to normalcy in my head that I can barely recognize the necessary scrambling for air that is evidenced by this journalling.
Yet in other lights I am in exactly the same place, six months deferred: still student, still single, still without full-time employment. Oh fuck. Who wants full-time anything right now anyway. As long as the dreams keep flickering in the predawn haziness of trustfundedness. Let the daylight of financial autonomy wait for my Romeo to first jump into bed before we squirm beneath sheets pierced by morning sun. I am so thoroughly alive and awake in my slumber.
Self-acceptance is a difficult thing. I don't know why I am fighting for wage labor, except for the guilty pleasure of walking out of the office by the clock when full-timers have to stay with the client roster of another two hours. No, I get to walk with pride amongst the school children, the homeless, the vagrants, the mid-Jamba-juice pre-hair-salon trophies and their nursing (elsewhere) children. I get to walk with common aimlessness into the throngs, wondering constantly when is the next time I get to eat, and what that might be.
I understand that with my active lifestyle, I need to be eating. I understand it's winter. But I begin to wonder how long it must continue that so much of my brain space is spent thinking about what to eat. "All my life," seeing that I am a constantly renewing, cell-generating, non-vegetative human being, is still sometimes difficult for me to accept.
Instead of these wry, pointless musings, I should probably be using the opportunity of being back on my blog to usefully list the pros and cons of various decisions currently on the agenda, or to strategize them all to fit within the context of each other, only accomplishable through self-discipline and God's desires burning themselves in legible English onto my white walls.
... Dancing for JoAnna. Not dancing for JoAnna. Working on my solo. Making myself a website to promote myself. What creative product/performance to make for Sue and Duleesha's wedding. Staying in New York. Moving home. Experimenting in Europe. Travelling to South America. Learning Spanish. Reinvigorating Polish. Applying for graduate school. Trying to reinvent myself as Asian. Forgetting that, and accepting once and for all that I am somewhere else in my past lives a European theorist and heroic cowgirl and Taoist sage, all of which have manifested in my current incarnation and result in my need to live forever in self-exile in the land of limbo, Fat America. ..... to love Jose. to not love Jose. to keep pretending that's a choice. to keep pretending the patient pursuit of dreams will actually leave me in a better place after their climactic end than i was in the first place. to keep running myself in circles. to not keep running myself in circles. to pretend like that's a choice. to keep saying that i'm "pretending." i'm pretending that I'm pretending. semantic ritual aside: i'm actually happy with how i'm living my life now because i've stopped comparing it to some imaginary life that i somehow screwed up on and failed to achieve. yay!
so now here is my italian, note: napolitan roommate to use my computer, typing at a significantly slower rate than I do. I take care of everything in the house, including all bill payments and rent, which she returns her share of to me via cash that she withdraws from ATMs citywide, $200 a day at a time (and, I suppose, sometimes stores beneath her mattress). in return for my logistical management, I get to make the effort to be civil when sometimes I want to be alone but otherwise not have to be more friendly than I have to on certain occassions when I'm tired to speaking slowly for her comprehension, or when I'm tired of having to listen to all her romantic stories. I also get to use her coffee pot. I also get to listen to more smooth jazz on the radio than I can sometimes stomach, but I also get private lessons in jazz pirouette in our living room (i spot Spain on the world map on our wall ... because it's right there at eye level, and because, well, part of my dream cycle has to do with spain and one man living in it right now). I got to watch Il postino with live commentary from a real Napolitan. I get a happy "Hey girl!" when I walk through the door. i get good energy, a great smile, and immense positivity. I get to learn how to be with other people. And the cynicism starts to fade ....
as the days unfold ..........
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
So about dancing. About projects. About body. About ...
I receive a lovely letter from Hofan in the mail today.
It was written earlier this month, in the midst, or probably nearing the end, of a three week long walking pilgrimage through France (my three pages have come from Cabrarets), apparently a fall activity shared by many. Oh Europe.
Hofan eats berries off bushes and fresh figs off trees during her daily average-five hour jaunts, nursing blistered feet and washing clothes for the next day come evening. Though immersed in an experiential pilgrimage and period of sort-of-solitude of an entirely different quality (I scavange newspapers from trash bins and pray for forgiveness for eating a leg of fried chicken that felt instantly to my teeth as GMO), I smile openly to myself that we share the same thoughts on our journeys, which I am grateful she has articulated so well:
Me too, Hofan. I, too, don't know if I am happy, but I am not unhappy. I don't know if I want to be -- if I could handle it. On the other hand, I do know that though I am not alone, I am lonely. Maybe I will always be lonely. I often consider it a sacrifice of my enjoyable solitude to follow or to lead dual or collective schedules, but I yearn beyond all else to be among kindreds.
My food anxiety of late is directly related to this, although thank God the flood gates opened, my anxious eggs wash upon plastic shores and I am relieved of all-consuming cravings. Apologies for the hideous poetry, although I find it kind of funny?!?! If you don't get what I'm talking about, please don't try!
My food anxiety of late is directly related to this. Is this sick, or is this normal, or is this normal for New York -- that when I want to treat myself, I do so not so much with food objects specifically, but with the social interaction it implicates. I treat myself to strong coffee and a pastry and a good read or write at a cafe. I treat myself to Chinese take-out and beer. I treat myself to crusty unsliced bread in spiced olive oil with red wine. I treat myself to a cigarette.
These are all "dates" with myself, and with the items of consumption that I would otherwise be enjoying with somebody else. The fact that I can accept this selfitude -- perhaps a better word than solitude, since I am not in actual fact isolated from human interaction -- not only as way of life, but as a preferred way of life (people are exhausting, as is the negotiation of 'fair trade' in energetic/social interaction) is worrisome to me ... but only a little. I trust that things will work out in the end.
****
So about dancing. About projects. About body.
My knees no longer suffer sporadic dull pains, whether sitting or walking or dancing.
My knees currently endure occassional sharp pains, sometimes sitting, sometimes walking, sometimes dancing. The good news is: the sharp is shorter, and easier to ignore. I'm serious!
They are stronger, though, and I do exercises to work to correct my alignment (my right knee is pronated quite severely inward) as well as to strengthen/lengthen my hamstrings and hip flexors to, as they say, "lift out of the knee", so I am surprised by the recent instances of new pain. Maybe it is transitional?
But I am also surprised about the development of my movement. I feel good about the progress of my technique. I am arriving at a comfortability about my body and the way I move. It is so much a work of mental concentration and calmness that its achievement is as satisfying in spirit as in physicality. Openness in the mind really does translate to openness in the joints and muscles, and hopefully, as Sally would advise in Yoga class, "openness between friends".
But I am no "born again," that is, I am still me -- I continue to yelp, sometimes swearing, when I get a little overwhelmed by a new move or by too much momentum. I'm still a little extreme, a touch out of control. I still put a lot of force into my movement, but I accept this as right for both who I am intrinsically -- my impatience combined with the force of my desire -- and for my age and level of experience in this form. I think it's a difficult thing to accept professionally -- that what "they" want may not be what one, as a performer, as a body, can give at a particular point in time, or the conundrum familiar to every industry: how can I get experience without experience? Here: how can I give them post-modern cool and quirky, when my body still wants large and lyrical? I think the comfort in this realization is in embracing and delivering one's desires of the present in the present. I think its true that you never know where you may be a week, if not a day, in the future, how you might change. This change, in the body, is always a surprise.
In terms of projects, it looks like I won't be doing Laura's kind of crazy Motown-singing kazoo-blowing piece about "Luh-ve" at Dixon Place in a couple weeks. Scheduling is hellish, and the other two dancing are her roommates, as well as, from my observation, her muses, who manage to read and translate her sometimes vague ideas like sugar translates cocoa. It's a match. It's a wavelength. It's a bit of relief, actually, on my part, although it would have been fun. We may still work together. Laura's still made of liquid steel, and we are still good friends.
Working with Keiko and with Jesse is great learning how to be in their way of thinking by trying to express their ways of moving. It's hard, sometimes, because the logic of individual expressive thinking is so specific -- why this syncopation? why this pause? how can i give them what they want, if what they want is for me to move like them? I mean, I have a lot more input into the process than that. But implicitly, I suppose in my role as eager performer, the pressure is there to perfect my rendering of them. In general, as an aid to my own improvisation and dancing, I really enjoy the specificity this tension encourages, the nuance, the detail. It's something I appreciate watching, so I am liking that I am learning to perform with such focus.
We're on break with Alice for a couple weeks, but I will still see her this weekend rolling around in peat moss and horse poo as I'm working tech crew on her performance in JoAnna Mendel Shaw's Equus Project (.org, if you're interested in details). It's taken me ten months here to get my name in a program, and it's under "Production". Still, seeing my name in print shocked me, and then I shocked me that it shocked me. It's just so ... brazen, so short, so up front: Melinda Lee. Don't get me wrong, I'm not disappointed. I like seeing my name like that, so succinct, so ambiguous, so undecorated. I just laugh at myself, because I think I entered this dance passion as a sort of dream of an ideal self that could be if I willed it strongly enough, someone elaborate, "deeeep", romantic ... someone coming from an identifiably ancient, sophisticated culture, of course: something dramatic. So seeing myself finally realized (that is, in the process of being realized) as a professional in this dream as, well, straight-up ME -- the Melinda Lee of credit card purchases and report cards and transcripts and half-hearted caffeine-soiled papers and internet sign-ups -- is somehow significant. If this makes it any clearer, I think I will feel the same way when I see my name printed in my sister's wedding program. Proud.
And lastly -- gosh, and it's already midnight -- there's the fledging though determined project trying to continue out of The Kitchen Summer Institute between myself, two dancers, and a Parsons Design student and his motion capture technology. I am getting crazy into dramaturging this, which I find highly enjoyable, and think it's good that the movement investigation is collaborative because otherwise I would take this bull by the horns so fast that I'd just as fast get swung off it and skulk off to the stands in a huff, abandoning the bull, the waiting audience, my otherwise promising future as a matadora. We're using the text and themes of Samuel Beckett's Not I, a monologue for a woman's mouth, and combined with my heavy personal investment in readings of phenomenology in the writings of Deleuze and Luce Irigaray, among others, I will admit to grand visions of playwrighting and directing and video work adding into this mix. We are applying for space grants and showing grants, etc. If I stick around long enough to make it happen, I actually think the premise and the talents are strong enough for this to be a successful experiemental piece. In the meantime, at least I have a driving force and outlet for my own mad creativity.
It was written earlier this month, in the midst, or probably nearing the end, of a three week long walking pilgrimage through France (my three pages have come from Cabrarets), apparently a fall activity shared by many. Oh Europe.
Hofan eats berries off bushes and fresh figs off trees during her daily average-five hour jaunts, nursing blistered feet and washing clothes for the next day come evening. Though immersed in an experiential pilgrimage and period of sort-of-solitude of an entirely different quality (I scavange newspapers from trash bins and pray for forgiveness for eating a leg of fried chicken that felt instantly to my teeth as GMO), I smile openly to myself that we share the same thoughts on our journeys, which I am grateful she has articulated so well:
"I do not know if I can claim to be happy or content but at least I can say I am not discontented or unhappy. I do find myself grateful for a myriad of small miracles: a peek of a rainbow, a juicy mulberry, a cobweb laced in dew. I laugh out lough when a funny thought occurs to me. It is good to have food when I am hungry, and a place to sleeeep when tired.
Yes I am grateful for this abundance."
Me too, Hofan. I, too, don't know if I am happy, but I am not unhappy. I don't know if I want to be -- if I could handle it. On the other hand, I do know that though I am not alone, I am lonely. Maybe I will always be lonely. I often consider it a sacrifice of my enjoyable solitude to follow or to lead dual or collective schedules, but I yearn beyond all else to be among kindreds.
My food anxiety of late is directly related to this, although thank God the flood gates opened, my anxious eggs wash upon plastic shores and I am relieved of all-consuming cravings. Apologies for the hideous poetry, although I find it kind of funny?!?! If you don't get what I'm talking about, please don't try!
My food anxiety of late is directly related to this. Is this sick, or is this normal, or is this normal for New York -- that when I want to treat myself, I do so not so much with food objects specifically, but with the social interaction it implicates. I treat myself to strong coffee and a pastry and a good read or write at a cafe. I treat myself to Chinese take-out and beer. I treat myself to crusty unsliced bread in spiced olive oil with red wine. I treat myself to a cigarette.
These are all "dates" with myself, and with the items of consumption that I would otherwise be enjoying with somebody else. The fact that I can accept this selfitude -- perhaps a better word than solitude, since I am not in actual fact isolated from human interaction -- not only as way of life, but as a preferred way of life (people are exhausting, as is the negotiation of 'fair trade' in energetic/social interaction) is worrisome to me ... but only a little. I trust that things will work out in the end.
****
So about dancing. About projects. About body.
My knees no longer suffer sporadic dull pains, whether sitting or walking or dancing.
My knees currently endure occassional sharp pains, sometimes sitting, sometimes walking, sometimes dancing. The good news is: the sharp is shorter, and easier to ignore. I'm serious!
They are stronger, though, and I do exercises to work to correct my alignment (my right knee is pronated quite severely inward) as well as to strengthen/lengthen my hamstrings and hip flexors to, as they say, "lift out of the knee", so I am surprised by the recent instances of new pain. Maybe it is transitional?
But I am also surprised about the development of my movement. I feel good about the progress of my technique. I am arriving at a comfortability about my body and the way I move. It is so much a work of mental concentration and calmness that its achievement is as satisfying in spirit as in physicality. Openness in the mind really does translate to openness in the joints and muscles, and hopefully, as Sally would advise in Yoga class, "openness between friends".
But I am no "born again," that is, I am still me -- I continue to yelp, sometimes swearing, when I get a little overwhelmed by a new move or by too much momentum. I'm still a little extreme, a touch out of control. I still put a lot of force into my movement, but I accept this as right for both who I am intrinsically -- my impatience combined with the force of my desire -- and for my age and level of experience in this form. I think it's a difficult thing to accept professionally -- that what "they" want may not be what one, as a performer, as a body, can give at a particular point in time, or the conundrum familiar to every industry: how can I get experience without experience? Here: how can I give them post-modern cool and quirky, when my body still wants large and lyrical? I think the comfort in this realization is in embracing and delivering one's desires of the present in the present. I think its true that you never know where you may be a week, if not a day, in the future, how you might change. This change, in the body, is always a surprise.
In terms of projects, it looks like I won't be doing Laura's kind of crazy Motown-singing kazoo-blowing piece about "Luh-ve" at Dixon Place in a couple weeks. Scheduling is hellish, and the other two dancing are her roommates, as well as, from my observation, her muses, who manage to read and translate her sometimes vague ideas like sugar translates cocoa. It's a match. It's a wavelength. It's a bit of relief, actually, on my part, although it would have been fun. We may still work together. Laura's still made of liquid steel, and we are still good friends.
Working with Keiko and with Jesse is great learning how to be in their way of thinking by trying to express their ways of moving. It's hard, sometimes, because the logic of individual expressive thinking is so specific -- why this syncopation? why this pause? how can i give them what they want, if what they want is for me to move like them? I mean, I have a lot more input into the process than that. But implicitly, I suppose in my role as eager performer, the pressure is there to perfect my rendering of them. In general, as an aid to my own improvisation and dancing, I really enjoy the specificity this tension encourages, the nuance, the detail. It's something I appreciate watching, so I am liking that I am learning to perform with such focus.
We're on break with Alice for a couple weeks, but I will still see her this weekend rolling around in peat moss and horse poo as I'm working tech crew on her performance in JoAnna Mendel Shaw's Equus Project (.org, if you're interested in details). It's taken me ten months here to get my name in a program, and it's under "Production". Still, seeing my name in print shocked me, and then I shocked me that it shocked me. It's just so ... brazen, so short, so up front: Melinda Lee. Don't get me wrong, I'm not disappointed. I like seeing my name like that, so succinct, so ambiguous, so undecorated. I just laugh at myself, because I think I entered this dance passion as a sort of dream of an ideal self that could be if I willed it strongly enough, someone elaborate, "deeeep", romantic ... someone coming from an identifiably ancient, sophisticated culture, of course: something dramatic. So seeing myself finally realized (that is, in the process of being realized) as a professional in this dream as, well, straight-up ME -- the Melinda Lee of credit card purchases and report cards and transcripts and half-hearted caffeine-soiled papers and internet sign-ups -- is somehow significant. If this makes it any clearer, I think I will feel the same way when I see my name printed in my sister's wedding program. Proud.
And lastly -- gosh, and it's already midnight -- there's the fledging though determined project trying to continue out of The Kitchen Summer Institute between myself, two dancers, and a Parsons Design student and his motion capture technology. I am getting crazy into dramaturging this, which I find highly enjoyable, and think it's good that the movement investigation is collaborative because otherwise I would take this bull by the horns so fast that I'd just as fast get swung off it and skulk off to the stands in a huff, abandoning the bull, the waiting audience, my otherwise promising future as a matadora. We're using the text and themes of Samuel Beckett's Not I, a monologue for a woman's mouth, and combined with my heavy personal investment in readings of phenomenology in the writings of Deleuze and Luce Irigaray, among others, I will admit to grand visions of playwrighting and directing and video work adding into this mix. We are applying for space grants and showing grants, etc. If I stick around long enough to make it happen, I actually think the premise and the talents are strong enough for this to be a successful experiemental piece. In the meantime, at least I have a driving force and outlet for my own mad creativity.
Friday, October 07, 2005
Nothing to say
Drinking cheap wine I get corked at the store because my corkscrews and switch-knives are always confiscated at airports, because what use are they in your check-in, what will you do when you need to slice a tomato for your impromptu sandwich whilst waiting out a lay-over in Zurich?
So much for packed lunch.
I think I might have spent 21 hours in the last two weeks cooking. That's a blatant lie -- that would be three hours a day. Um, every two days. I suppose it feels that significant because the hours I don't spend cooking I don't spend doing much else ... reportable. This is something I have to get used to in dance -- you cannot max out everyday. Your body will fail you. My usual average 5 hours in the studio daily is already pushing it.
So I've been cooking a lot. I bought a 3-cup rice cooker with steamer tray (cum vegetable strainer) for $21.95 (plus tax). I make brown rice to go in wraps, with lettuce and chick pea curry. I make brown rice to go with steamed vegetables and shiitake-ginger dressing. I make spaghetti al oglio to go with my cheap wine. Most ingredients come from farmer's market and Jack's 99 cent store. Did you know they have packaged ham and chicken breast and cottage cheese, not to mention olive oil and vinegared bell peppers? Granted, the chicken tastes like tuna (I'm convinced it is), but for 99c a pop, it's a steal.
Last week was healthy.
I discovered the irresitible bunches of basil for $1 at the market, and put it raw with everything: grilled chicken salad, mango-ham salad, sandwiches, curry. Fresh, red tomatoes with everything -- bliss.
This week was hormonal hell.
Unaccountable bouts of depression, cravings for fried foods, chocolate, dairy, and the equivalent of Tajikistan's annual requirement for carbohydrate.
[Tajikistan, Jumhurii Tojikiston: population 7,163,506. Borders China, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan. Slightly smaller than Wisconsin. Poorest in the region: GDP (@PPP) = $1,100 USD), although growing. Evidently, the geographic scope of my stomach. Incidentally, $1,100 is approximately what I spend in a month, if I don't go shopping or have to look nice for a wedding.]
Still, I've gone down a size, and wonder as I wander down the stairs past the mirrors lining the first floor hallway of my apartment building -- can this be it? Is this what I was looking for? Now, can I stop and be normal?
But that's also a lie. It's what I recognize as myself thinking, but it's not really what I'm thinking. I'm thinking it's a pleasant reward for the hard work I'm putting in to concretize my technique, one of the few things I ever really wanted ... for me. I still also want world peace. Hearing the troubles of returnees to Southern Sudan on the radio in the mornings doesn't help my confidence in post-modern/post-ideological dance-making assisting this desire.
So cooking -- again, an emotional outlet, which, once unsatisfactory (because the need became too strong, or because the coping became too weak a substitute), became a distraction and a crutch, which also equals a potential avenue for self-destruction. I've been very grouchy because of this inability to control my hungers this week. Sounds trite, but surely you can empathize. Who likes being willed against their better judgment?
So much for packed lunch.
I think I might have spent 21 hours in the last two weeks cooking. That's a blatant lie -- that would be three hours a day. Um, every two days. I suppose it feels that significant because the hours I don't spend cooking I don't spend doing much else ... reportable. This is something I have to get used to in dance -- you cannot max out everyday. Your body will fail you. My usual average 5 hours in the studio daily is already pushing it.
So I've been cooking a lot. I bought a 3-cup rice cooker with steamer tray (cum vegetable strainer) for $21.95 (plus tax). I make brown rice to go in wraps, with lettuce and chick pea curry. I make brown rice to go with steamed vegetables and shiitake-ginger dressing. I make spaghetti al oglio to go with my cheap wine. Most ingredients come from farmer's market and Jack's 99 cent store. Did you know they have packaged ham and chicken breast and cottage cheese, not to mention olive oil and vinegared bell peppers? Granted, the chicken tastes like tuna (I'm convinced it is), but for 99c a pop, it's a steal.
Last week was healthy.
I discovered the irresitible bunches of basil for $1 at the market, and put it raw with everything: grilled chicken salad, mango-ham salad, sandwiches, curry. Fresh, red tomatoes with everything -- bliss.
This week was hormonal hell.
Unaccountable bouts of depression, cravings for fried foods, chocolate, dairy, and the equivalent of Tajikistan's annual requirement for carbohydrate.
[Tajikistan, Jumhurii Tojikiston: population 7,163,506. Borders China, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan. Slightly smaller than Wisconsin. Poorest in the region: GDP (@PPP) = $1,100 USD), although growing. Evidently, the geographic scope of my stomach. Incidentally, $1,100 is approximately what I spend in a month, if I don't go shopping or have to look nice for a wedding.]
Still, I've gone down a size, and wonder as I wander down the stairs past the mirrors lining the first floor hallway of my apartment building -- can this be it? Is this what I was looking for? Now, can I stop and be normal?
But that's also a lie. It's what I recognize as myself thinking, but it's not really what I'm thinking. I'm thinking it's a pleasant reward for the hard work I'm putting in to concretize my technique, one of the few things I ever really wanted ... for me. I still also want world peace. Hearing the troubles of returnees to Southern Sudan on the radio in the mornings doesn't help my confidence in post-modern/post-ideological dance-making assisting this desire.
So cooking -- again, an emotional outlet, which, once unsatisfactory (because the need became too strong, or because the coping became too weak a substitute), became a distraction and a crutch, which also equals a potential avenue for self-destruction. I've been very grouchy because of this inability to control my hungers this week. Sounds trite, but surely you can empathize. Who likes being willed against their better judgment?
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Dream Diary, rated PG(13)
I fall asleep to Indie Arie, and seven hours later these bizarre events occur:
An outdoor barbeque in Hong Kong -- memories from my adolescence.
This leads somehow to an immense music talent audition held in a raked concert hall, like Lang*, only the organ is in the center. There is a director and a haughty Chinese woman with a boring mid-length straight hairstyle who plays piano and doubts that anyone talented enough will walk through the door.
Enter Tommy*, bearing a guitar and I think probably a homemade burrito wrapped in foil. He is optimistic, almost naive in this setting. Three other equally country-ish boys join him and they play a simple but happy folk song. Somehow the youngest of the group (I suppose now they are brothers?) is asked about his specific talent -- suddenly there is a large audience. He is asked to play piano. He's never learnt piano. But he will give it a shot, despite the odds. Everyone waits, chattering. The casual chatter amongst the crowd starts to turn cacophonous, when there erupts from the piano "DUN-DUN-DUN-DUHHHH ... DUN-DUN-DUN-DUHHHH ...." I've known this since the beginning of the scene, but this is a warped version of the discovery of Amadeus Mozart.
Now we are being treated to a concert by the discovered genius in cosy outdoor amphitheatre. Everyone is clamoured around the kingly/teacher/authority figure, an old blond woman. We have an argument about immigration, the difference between foreign nationals and expatriate Americans coming from Hong Kong to the States. This, disrupting the concert. I am angry.
Again, four boys, friends. A Steve Weintraub-y* figure is in trouble with his girlfriend because he has attempted to hawk off videos of the two of them having sex in 69 different positions. Somehow the colors here are dark turquoise, blue, green. The girl is blond. She is upset, but misses him greatly.
Cut to scene of angry parents of said girl: pillow-talk. Big, Oafy, Bearded father--frankly, looking a little like Bernie Saffran*, bless his soul--is livid about the treatment of his daughter. Elegant brunette wife seems to be trying to calm him down -- "don't take it down, take it up" -- when, in a sick twist, it is evident that she is encouraging his lust for revenge -- "Take it up to the cupboard, where you can use the extension cord." (implication: for strangulation)
Cut back to turquoisey bluey dormy room. Big, Oafy, Bearded father has snuck in to lay in wait for Steve Weintraub-y figure, and decides to hide in the closet. Somehow, miraculously, he fits.
"Steve" is repentant only in as much as he misses the girl desperately. There is an odd joviality and pride in his manner -- it is understood that he sought to share their intimacy as a testament to their great, genuine, love, not as exploitation. They are both unabashedly proud of their sexual feats. (maybe this is coming from the plot of Salman Rushdie's Shalimar The Clown, which I just read?)
Cut to flashback scene of their first time. This is pretty hot. Somehow, I have more of the viewpoint of the man.
Cut back to dorm room. There is a list, and people are lining up, signing up. Turns out, "Steve" is actually signing people up by number to purchase each of the 69 positions he and blond girl achieved, but he is doing this as a declaration of his continued love for her. B.O.B.Dad is still in closet, somehow softening. This ends happily.
Now we are in a large theatre watching a Broadway show. I am seated with my immediate family -- Mom, Dad, Sue. We are in the first few rows. It is a show I suppose based on the previous, um, love story, since everyone's singing about sex. I am busy critiquing the theatrical elements in my head. There is a Nutcracker-winter-like scene where everyone enters in white, and a revolving white-polka-dot gobo is swirling. Next scene is the big musical number. Lead is blond girl, and her name, stage or real I don't know, is "Kelly Rorque". Chorus of teenagers/children. Everyone still in white. That girl from Oliver Steele's class who has a sweet face, and sandy hair in two Chinagirl buns is in the chorus, as is an unfamiliar, but specific-looking young Chinese boy. They are all singing Kylie Minogue's Locomotion, except that the lyrics of the verse are all rhymes about sex. It's a little disturbing, kind of like the diarhhea-song, but more so.
I wake up.
Notes:
*Lang Concert Hall, award-winning performance venue situated in Swarthmore College.
*Tommy: Caucasian Vassar-graduate who is dancing in the piece with Alice. Works for a hedge fund. Short buzzed hair, prominent nose with a sharp angle at the top but bulbous nostrils. Nice guy.
*Steve Weintraub: NYU kid I went out with a couple times. Graduate student in Art History, straight out of Oberlin undergrad. Snooze. Jewish, brunette, here: a goatee, petite features, bright blue eyes. Slender. My age, looks alternatingly intelligent & sexy or Twelve.
*Professor Bernie Saffran: Swarthmore's much beloved and be-missed Economics guru, who passed away earlier this year.
***
Much like my deeply-lined palms, which contain many a unexposed revelation, anyone out there was to decipher my crazy dream?
The interesting thing about writing out a dream is that your judgments about the characters and their motivations is entirely inside-out, and are as critical to the shaping of the narrative as the sequence of events that occur. Meaning, as the author of your dream, you are simulataneously 'inside' each of the players even though you don't feel like you control what they do or what happens to them. Like when the reconciliation between "Steve" and the Blond Girl I know is happening only by the dissipating anger of the hidden Father. You have eyes in all places.
The deja-vu in dreams is such an interesting feeling: "I've been here before, yet it's not quite the same." The locales are all distorted memories of places I've actually experienced, and of such variety. Like my wardrobe, on the occasion that I actually take inventory. Something from everywhere around the globe.
An outdoor barbeque in Hong Kong -- memories from my adolescence.
This leads somehow to an immense music talent audition held in a raked concert hall, like Lang*, only the organ is in the center. There is a director and a haughty Chinese woman with a boring mid-length straight hairstyle who plays piano and doubts that anyone talented enough will walk through the door.
Enter Tommy*, bearing a guitar and I think probably a homemade burrito wrapped in foil. He is optimistic, almost naive in this setting. Three other equally country-ish boys join him and they play a simple but happy folk song. Somehow the youngest of the group (I suppose now they are brothers?) is asked about his specific talent -- suddenly there is a large audience. He is asked to play piano. He's never learnt piano. But he will give it a shot, despite the odds. Everyone waits, chattering. The casual chatter amongst the crowd starts to turn cacophonous, when there erupts from the piano "DUN-DUN-DUN-DUHHHH ... DUN-DUN-DUN-DUHHHH ...." I've known this since the beginning of the scene, but this is a warped version of the discovery of Amadeus Mozart.
Now we are being treated to a concert by the discovered genius in cosy outdoor amphitheatre. Everyone is clamoured around the kingly/teacher/authority figure, an old blond woman. We have an argument about immigration, the difference between foreign nationals and expatriate Americans coming from Hong Kong to the States. This, disrupting the concert. I am angry.
Again, four boys, friends. A Steve Weintraub-y* figure is in trouble with his girlfriend because he has attempted to hawk off videos of the two of them having sex in 69 different positions. Somehow the colors here are dark turquoise, blue, green. The girl is blond. She is upset, but misses him greatly.
Cut to scene of angry parents of said girl: pillow-talk. Big, Oafy, Bearded father--frankly, looking a little like Bernie Saffran*, bless his soul--is livid about the treatment of his daughter. Elegant brunette wife seems to be trying to calm him down -- "don't take it down, take it up" -- when, in a sick twist, it is evident that she is encouraging his lust for revenge -- "Take it up to the cupboard, where you can use the extension cord." (implication: for strangulation)
Cut back to turquoisey bluey dormy room. Big, Oafy, Bearded father has snuck in to lay in wait for Steve Weintraub-y figure, and decides to hide in the closet. Somehow, miraculously, he fits.
"Steve" is repentant only in as much as he misses the girl desperately. There is an odd joviality and pride in his manner -- it is understood that he sought to share their intimacy as a testament to their great, genuine, love, not as exploitation. They are both unabashedly proud of their sexual feats. (maybe this is coming from the plot of Salman Rushdie's Shalimar The Clown, which I just read?)
Cut to flashback scene of their first time. This is pretty hot. Somehow, I have more of the viewpoint of the man.
Cut back to dorm room. There is a list, and people are lining up, signing up. Turns out, "Steve" is actually signing people up by number to purchase each of the 69 positions he and blond girl achieved, but he is doing this as a declaration of his continued love for her. B.O.B.Dad is still in closet, somehow softening. This ends happily.
Now we are in a large theatre watching a Broadway show. I am seated with my immediate family -- Mom, Dad, Sue. We are in the first few rows. It is a show I suppose based on the previous, um, love story, since everyone's singing about sex. I am busy critiquing the theatrical elements in my head. There is a Nutcracker-winter-like scene where everyone enters in white, and a revolving white-polka-dot gobo is swirling. Next scene is the big musical number. Lead is blond girl, and her name, stage or real I don't know, is "Kelly Rorque". Chorus of teenagers/children. Everyone still in white. That girl from Oliver Steele's class who has a sweet face, and sandy hair in two Chinagirl buns is in the chorus, as is an unfamiliar, but specific-looking young Chinese boy. They are all singing Kylie Minogue's Locomotion, except that the lyrics of the verse are all rhymes about sex. It's a little disturbing, kind of like the diarhhea-song, but more so.
I wake up.
Notes:
*Lang Concert Hall, award-winning performance venue situated in Swarthmore College.
*Tommy: Caucasian Vassar-graduate who is dancing in the piece with Alice. Works for a hedge fund. Short buzzed hair, prominent nose with a sharp angle at the top but bulbous nostrils. Nice guy.
*Steve Weintraub: NYU kid I went out with a couple times. Graduate student in Art History, straight out of Oberlin undergrad. Snooze. Jewish, brunette, here: a goatee, petite features, bright blue eyes. Slender. My age, looks alternatingly intelligent & sexy or Twelve.
*Professor Bernie Saffran: Swarthmore's much beloved and be-missed Economics guru, who passed away earlier this year.
***
Much like my deeply-lined palms, which contain many a unexposed revelation, anyone out there was to decipher my crazy dream?
The interesting thing about writing out a dream is that your judgments about the characters and their motivations is entirely inside-out, and are as critical to the shaping of the narrative as the sequence of events that occur. Meaning, as the author of your dream, you are simulataneously 'inside' each of the players even though you don't feel like you control what they do or what happens to them. Like when the reconciliation between "Steve" and the Blond Girl I know is happening only by the dissipating anger of the hidden Father. You have eyes in all places.
The deja-vu in dreams is such an interesting feeling: "I've been here before, yet it's not quite the same." The locales are all distorted memories of places I've actually experienced, and of such variety. Like my wardrobe, on the occasion that I actually take inventory. Something from everywhere around the globe.
Sunday, September 25, 2005
PERFORMANCE REVIEW: Gerard Mosterd
Angin & Kamu/Jij
@ Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Center,
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
September 3rd, 2005, 8:30pm
Featuring Wendel Spier, Thao Nguyen, Loes Ruizeveld, Ederson Rodriguez Xavier, Ming Wei Poon
Choreography by Gerard Mosterd
____________________________________________________
A double header, this evening's presentation of Dutch-Indonesian choreographer Gerard Mosterd's identity crisis deals entirely with dualities and the indeterminacy of being in between.
First a solo, then a group work for "five dancers, five mosquito nets and a video beamer," both Angin and Kamu/Jij are dexterous demonstrations of how appropriate contemporary choreography can be to express and present ambiguities, grappling in the body, through space and symbol, the questions of what cannot yet be defined.
Yet this discovery is not in itself innovative. Mosterd's choreography on the whole carries an ambition that perhaps blinds itself to the nuances, thus the true sophistication, of the complex realities it is based upon.
Angin, performed by Singaporean, Amsterdam-based Ming Wei Poon, is described as "an autobiographical research on being blown in between two cultural backgrounds." It was the result of a collaboration between Mosterd and Japanese dancer Shintaro O-Ue, evidenced by the Butoh influence upon the opening scene.
Poon breathes heavily, shivers, and spasms as he falls into the window of light before him on an otherwise dark stage. Stepping back into the dark to regain control, this sequence repeats over and over, forward and across the space. In a somewhat facile representation of two worlds, the stage is divided by light into right and left halves which Poon oscillates between. Concluding his passage back and forth--being "blown in between"--the stage is lit more fully as a whole for another repetitive section of athletic, Graham-based modern sequencing which proves to be Poon's sole modus operandi.
Although satisfying in his technique, Poon lacks the emotional inspiration to express anything deeper about his situation or his character's cultural duality aside from the fact that it exists. The choreography furthermore fails to offer the dancer anything other than abstract movement that travels back and forth through the space, thereby rendering the piece nothing more than a thematic trope. What about being blown between? What about control? What about exclusion? What about isolation? The piece lacks specificity in its direction, and contrarily too little abandon in its movement.
Though with a similar formalism, a more discrete narrative emerges from Kamu/Jij. After a projected video-loop of a sensuous heterosexual partnering, the stage activity begins in indecision. Tilting silently in unison right and left, back and forth, the dancers act as a collective pendulum, counting down, it seems, until they break away and apart. Enigmatic vignettes ensue, cinematically 'cut' by black-outs between, depicting sex and romantic pursuit in a series of somewhat painfully pantomimed pas de deux. A trio of women become more frenetic as they weave through each other, in a complex spatial patterning that is one of the highlights of the piece. The five come together again, marking time. Two men enter as on a conveyor belt, improvising with snake-like body-rolls and spinal twists. The devastatingly entrancing Wendel Spier eats a rose. Finally, in an unclear development, all five dancers end up confined separately in hanging columns of mosquito net and, just as unclearly, fight their way out of the nets and flail, kicking and falling, to their spasmic end. Oh these 'post-modern' fashionistas, with their spiked hair and fuscia-painted eyelids -- they struggle to free themselves only to end in chaos!
Again, there is nothing new about Mosterd's concept. Then again, there is nothing new about an East-West cultural conflict. His book-ending revisit to the video-loop after the collapse of the staged world -- this time, with confusing added images of Javanese text -- further irritates in its adherence to rulebook choreography and its conflation of cultural specificities to iconic mores. West is abstract, (post-)modern, fabricated. East is ancient, tribal, authentic. Get a grip -- Clifford Geertz we are not.
Yet somewhere along this hour-long journey I felt something, and in this lies Mosterd's strengths: his patient use of time and periodicity, and his success in establishing place through consistency over time.
The world of Kamu/Jij is one of suspense, if not suspended animation. The disconnectedness of the scenes, and the disconnectedness of the movement vocabulary itself -- for the most part a staccato, stop-start gestural sequencing -- are well-suited to the theme of duality.
It results in the dancers appearing as programmed automatons -- I hesitate to say, 'dolls' -- which degrade or 'short-circuit' as they are wrenched between two worlds, two moralities, by indecision or conflict; they appear as to suffer an electromagnetic malfunction between like poles. Not only is the rapid point-to-point sequencing fascinating to watch, but as its awkwardness develops over time from otherworldly to lingua franca, we too sense that we have been trapped within the theatre in the confines of this limbo of in between. We feel a similar, and familiar wrenching -- that of confusion and unknowing.
Thus Kamu/Jij feels very much a continuation of the concept behind Angin, whereby the "subject of double moral" it seeks to deal with through the lens of public intimacy plays out rather as an inevitability of cross-cultural dualism.
Perhaps Mosterd would benefit from a further developed sound score to carry, rather than mire, the dancers through to a true climax, or find a way to intersperse the Javanese text -- in sound or in image -- throughout the piece so as to make that element relevant and meaningful. With movers so talented, and a structure so promising, the choreography needs only to battle through its own indecision in order to arrive as raw, as elegant, as truly contradictory as it wants to be.
@ Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Center,
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
September 3rd, 2005, 8:30pm
Featuring Wendel Spier, Thao Nguyen, Loes Ruizeveld, Ederson Rodriguez Xavier, Ming Wei Poon
Choreography by Gerard Mosterd
____________________________________________________
A double header, this evening's presentation of Dutch-Indonesian choreographer Gerard Mosterd's identity crisis deals entirely with dualities and the indeterminacy of being in between.
First a solo, then a group work for "five dancers, five mosquito nets and a video beamer," both Angin and Kamu/Jij are dexterous demonstrations of how appropriate contemporary choreography can be to express and present ambiguities, grappling in the body, through space and symbol, the questions of what cannot yet be defined.
Yet this discovery is not in itself innovative. Mosterd's choreography on the whole carries an ambition that perhaps blinds itself to the nuances, thus the true sophistication, of the complex realities it is based upon.
Angin, performed by Singaporean, Amsterdam-based Ming Wei Poon, is described as "an autobiographical research on being blown in between two cultural backgrounds." It was the result of a collaboration between Mosterd and Japanese dancer Shintaro O-Ue, evidenced by the Butoh influence upon the opening scene.
Poon breathes heavily, shivers, and spasms as he falls into the window of light before him on an otherwise dark stage. Stepping back into the dark to regain control, this sequence repeats over and over, forward and across the space. In a somewhat facile representation of two worlds, the stage is divided by light into right and left halves which Poon oscillates between. Concluding his passage back and forth--being "blown in between"--the stage is lit more fully as a whole for another repetitive section of athletic, Graham-based modern sequencing which proves to be Poon's sole modus operandi.
Although satisfying in his technique, Poon lacks the emotional inspiration to express anything deeper about his situation or his character's cultural duality aside from the fact that it exists. The choreography furthermore fails to offer the dancer anything other than abstract movement that travels back and forth through the space, thereby rendering the piece nothing more than a thematic trope. What about being blown between? What about control? What about exclusion? What about isolation? The piece lacks specificity in its direction, and contrarily too little abandon in its movement.
Though with a similar formalism, a more discrete narrative emerges from Kamu/Jij. After a projected video-loop of a sensuous heterosexual partnering, the stage activity begins in indecision. Tilting silently in unison right and left, back and forth, the dancers act as a collective pendulum, counting down, it seems, until they break away and apart. Enigmatic vignettes ensue, cinematically 'cut' by black-outs between, depicting sex and romantic pursuit in a series of somewhat painfully pantomimed pas de deux. A trio of women become more frenetic as they weave through each other, in a complex spatial patterning that is one of the highlights of the piece. The five come together again, marking time. Two men enter as on a conveyor belt, improvising with snake-like body-rolls and spinal twists. The devastatingly entrancing Wendel Spier eats a rose. Finally, in an unclear development, all five dancers end up confined separately in hanging columns of mosquito net and, just as unclearly, fight their way out of the nets and flail, kicking and falling, to their spasmic end. Oh these 'post-modern' fashionistas, with their spiked hair and fuscia-painted eyelids -- they struggle to free themselves only to end in chaos!
Again, there is nothing new about Mosterd's concept. Then again, there is nothing new about an East-West cultural conflict. His book-ending revisit to the video-loop after the collapse of the staged world -- this time, with confusing added images of Javanese text -- further irritates in its adherence to rulebook choreography and its conflation of cultural specificities to iconic mores. West is abstract, (post-)modern, fabricated. East is ancient, tribal, authentic. Get a grip -- Clifford Geertz we are not.
Yet somewhere along this hour-long journey I felt something, and in this lies Mosterd's strengths: his patient use of time and periodicity, and his success in establishing place through consistency over time.
The world of Kamu/Jij is one of suspense, if not suspended animation. The disconnectedness of the scenes, and the disconnectedness of the movement vocabulary itself -- for the most part a staccato, stop-start gestural sequencing -- are well-suited to the theme of duality.
It results in the dancers appearing as programmed automatons -- I hesitate to say, 'dolls' -- which degrade or 'short-circuit' as they are wrenched between two worlds, two moralities, by indecision or conflict; they appear as to suffer an electromagnetic malfunction between like poles. Not only is the rapid point-to-point sequencing fascinating to watch, but as its awkwardness develops over time from otherworldly to lingua franca, we too sense that we have been trapped within the theatre in the confines of this limbo of in between. We feel a similar, and familiar wrenching -- that of confusion and unknowing.
Thus Kamu/Jij feels very much a continuation of the concept behind Angin, whereby the "subject of double moral" it seeks to deal with through the lens of public intimacy plays out rather as an inevitability of cross-cultural dualism.
Perhaps Mosterd would benefit from a further developed sound score to carry, rather than mire, the dancers through to a true climax, or find a way to intersperse the Javanese text -- in sound or in image -- throughout the piece so as to make that element relevant and meaningful. With movers so talented, and a structure so promising, the choreography needs only to battle through its own indecision in order to arrive as raw, as elegant, as truly contradictory as it wants to be.
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Peptalk and politicking
Don't let anyone -- especially yourself -- ever tell you that your so-called passion may just be a colossal waste of time.
If they said it anyway --
Don't listen.
No matter what the statistics are -- and the incidence of failure is rated high in this field -- you are never a statistic to yourself and to the people that love you. And sometimes it's not even a case of needing to look around you to see who's at the front of the queue, or to feel better about yourself by glancing at those behind, and then calculate your odds. Sometimes, probably more often than conventionally thought, you just have to wait your turn. Pay attention, move forward with the line, cut if the opportunity avails. Most importantly -- check yourself before you even leave home. Don't get turned away after waiting because you forgot something crucial, like your passport for a flight, or your sense of play for a creative project.
It's been said, and with reason: one should pay more heed to one's own advice.
I hadn't been in a rehearsal for such a long time, until Monday. That's not an excuse, that's just self-exposition. It's also a directive. Rehearsal is not class. I have to learn to create without constant self-judgement and without guidance. No matter how fun the improvisation is, no matter if you haven't really found what you're looking for yet, by the time the choreographer says "set it" you've got to deliver the goods!
I like Alice. And again, for the second time, when I typed her name I mistakenly wrote "Alive". A flattering mistake to make, I reckon. Alice alive! She is my choreographer.
She lives up to the nickname. She has bright hazel eyes and a fauxhawk of wavy black that reveals some gray roots, salt-n-pepper. This chick is older than I remember. Then again, I only met her once in January where she took down my info after liking the way I warmed up for an audition. Does she notice that I've gotten a wee bit better, technically? Can she forgive that I'm a nutcase the instant I feel pressure to "set" a combination? Or is this just the three weeks off on family-duty, Peranakan food, and post-travel exhaustion? Why is it that I always get choreo-block trying to make phrases of my own (leading to mild frustration, the quiet, but intrusive question of What am I doing?!, and the pep talk above)?
The process has been fun and challenging, though thankfully not over my head. THe other dancers appear young, like me, but well-seasoned, and good. Alice's style of movement is totally compelling -- she has an acute awareness of the follow-through from initiation point to the rest of the body, resulting in awkward (I refrain from the too-often employed "idiosyncratic") but logical ripples, spirals, risky weight transfers. The jazzarina in her enjoys the occasional high leg, the hip hop in her gives her the stop-start "lock" control mechanism that adds subtle detail, thus, fullness to her phrasing. It is very satisfying movement. We have another three days this week of this workshop, then we'll meet weekly until the January production.
Because this is a blog, because the rise of the blogosphere is so lauded as the new media for democracy, because it's by nature discursive, I feel obliged to halt the "soft" stuff and get into a good session of Katrina politicking.
(a) who's not angry ... GET angry!
(b) my primary issue is with general incompetence, over racial prejudice -- I really feel the current administration is more clueless and arrestingly bureaucratic than it is vindictive. J'accuse: negligence and shameful idiocy, Your Honor. Bad leader! Bad puppy!
(c) for populist fun, visit http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2678975 to hear Kanye West use a live aid-appeal for his own agenda, or follow the link there to see the eager masses 'welcome' Dick Cheney to New Orleans. Think: Eddie Murphy being greeted on a dark street in Coming to America. Their responses are not too dissimilar.
(d) let's make it clear what policy responses we should hope for in response to Katrina, the hurricane itself:
(1) Save the marshlands of the Southern Gulf that act as buffer to the inland cities (and as an ecological treasure);
(2) Reduce carbon emissions to reduce global warming = reinstate Kyoto, quit pandering to the automobile industry, hell, revamp your entire energy policy;
Adding in Katrina, the emergency relief disaster:
(3) Fix FEMA!
(4) Get out of Iraq.
.....
A friend of mine here, a dancer, lost her step-grandfather to Katrina. She is five foot two and a powerhouse -- moves like her joints are made of jelly and her legs are made of steel and her heart is full of love and fire. He, her step-grandfather, was in the hospital at the time, on check-up for his Alzheimer's. Apparently when the hurricane hit New Orleans, the hospital lost electricity, had little food, and had to ration their water to three ounces per patient per day. For six days.
Six.
.....
Return to point (a), please.
If they said it anyway --
Don't listen.
No matter what the statistics are -- and the incidence of failure is rated high in this field -- you are never a statistic to yourself and to the people that love you. And sometimes it's not even a case of needing to look around you to see who's at the front of the queue, or to feel better about yourself by glancing at those behind, and then calculate your odds. Sometimes, probably more often than conventionally thought, you just have to wait your turn. Pay attention, move forward with the line, cut if the opportunity avails. Most importantly -- check yourself before you even leave home. Don't get turned away after waiting because you forgot something crucial, like your passport for a flight, or your sense of play for a creative project.
It's been said, and with reason: one should pay more heed to one's own advice.
I hadn't been in a rehearsal for such a long time, until Monday. That's not an excuse, that's just self-exposition. It's also a directive. Rehearsal is not class. I have to learn to create without constant self-judgement and without guidance. No matter how fun the improvisation is, no matter if you haven't really found what you're looking for yet, by the time the choreographer says "set it" you've got to deliver the goods!
I like Alice. And again, for the second time, when I typed her name I mistakenly wrote "Alive". A flattering mistake to make, I reckon. Alice alive! She is my choreographer.
She lives up to the nickname. She has bright hazel eyes and a fauxhawk of wavy black that reveals some gray roots, salt-n-pepper. This chick is older than I remember. Then again, I only met her once in January where she took down my info after liking the way I warmed up for an audition. Does she notice that I've gotten a wee bit better, technically? Can she forgive that I'm a nutcase the instant I feel pressure to "set" a combination? Or is this just the three weeks off on family-duty, Peranakan food, and post-travel exhaustion? Why is it that I always get choreo-block trying to make phrases of my own (leading to mild frustration, the quiet, but intrusive question of What am I doing?!, and the pep talk above)?
The process has been fun and challenging, though thankfully not over my head. THe other dancers appear young, like me, but well-seasoned, and good. Alice's style of movement is totally compelling -- she has an acute awareness of the follow-through from initiation point to the rest of the body, resulting in awkward (I refrain from the too-often employed "idiosyncratic") but logical ripples, spirals, risky weight transfers. The jazzarina in her enjoys the occasional high leg, the hip hop in her gives her the stop-start "lock" control mechanism that adds subtle detail, thus, fullness to her phrasing. It is very satisfying movement. We have another three days this week of this workshop, then we'll meet weekly until the January production.
Because this is a blog, because the rise of the blogosphere is so lauded as the new media for democracy, because it's by nature discursive, I feel obliged to halt the "soft" stuff and get into a good session of Katrina politicking.
(a) who's not angry ... GET angry!
(b) my primary issue is with general incompetence, over racial prejudice -- I really feel the current administration is more clueless and arrestingly bureaucratic than it is vindictive. J'accuse: negligence and shameful idiocy, Your Honor. Bad leader! Bad puppy!
(c) for populist fun, visit http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2678975 to hear Kanye West use a live aid-appeal for his own agenda, or follow the link there to see the eager masses 'welcome' Dick Cheney to New Orleans. Think: Eddie Murphy being greeted on a dark street in Coming to America. Their responses are not too dissimilar.
(d) let's make it clear what policy responses we should hope for in response to Katrina, the hurricane itself:
(1) Save the marshlands of the Southern Gulf that act as buffer to the inland cities (and as an ecological treasure);
(2) Reduce carbon emissions to reduce global warming = reinstate Kyoto, quit pandering to the automobile industry, hell, revamp your entire energy policy;
Adding in Katrina, the emergency relief disaster:
(3) Fix FEMA!
(4) Get out of Iraq.
.....
A friend of mine here, a dancer, lost her step-grandfather to Katrina. She is five foot two and a powerhouse -- moves like her joints are made of jelly and her legs are made of steel and her heart is full of love and fire. He, her step-grandfather, was in the hospital at the time, on check-up for his Alzheimer's. Apparently when the hurricane hit New Orleans, the hospital lost electricity, had little food, and had to ration their water to three ounces per patient per day. For six days.
Six.
.....
Return to point (a), please.
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
A season for dying
September 6, 2005, 8:59am: SINGAPORE
Mum and Dad have just left this morning for London, where they will rent a car and drive down to Hove, near Brighton, joining my father’s four remaining siblings to bid farewell to the eldest of the flock. Lee Soo Bee, at age 71, has passed from earthly mezzo-soprano glory to godly glory, and as they mourn I celebrate a life so fully and adamantly lived.
It is the season for dying.
Or isn’t it always?
149 perish in an airplane crash in Medan. Thousands to tragic completion in the Southern Gulf. My grandfather, at last, at age 102.
This is what I see in the eyes of the grieving: the strain of self-control, redness, soreness, weeping capillaries which shed blood in order to not shed tears—-the internal negotiation of memory, guilt, propriety, and presence. Let the first to convulse be the nearest to the deceased, and the rest shall follow.
I hug Daddy in the swimming pool where we are trying to get him on a regimen to lose 30 pounds in three months. His cardiologist says he is on the borderline of having artery blockage. We’ve only completed six laps when Mum comes over with the news about Soo Bee, 13 years my father’s senior. My father is not an emotional man, but I see again the reddening corneal struggle that signals a growing and multilayered realization of loss, history, and of one’s own mortality. The struggle too is in placing the tenderness of the first above the fear of the last. Perhaps it is the middle, then, that mediates, the calmness of remembrance that is the still eye of the storm.
I was asked by my cousins to speak on behalf of the grandchildren at the second night of O-pa’s wake. The podium was not opened as it was on the previous night to unplanned eulogies, however, and we had to be satisfied with the ritual and characteristic restraint of a Methodist service. I was maddened by the impersonality of this farewell. Yet I was also overwhelmed by the intensity of our collective emotion as a family, and so maybe it was a good thing that I wasn’t called to the occasion. I think O-pa himself would probably have preferred it this way, as he was a man of staunch discipline and rigid, though loving, religion.
Here is what I might have said:
I am the seventh of my O-pa’s nine grandchildren. The first of his great-grand-children will be born in the next sixth months. He was 79 years old when I was born.
For us to know him so late in his life meant that we knew him as both legend and living. We knew that he was a teacher, principal, and father that commanded great respect. He was authoritative not only by his liberal use of the cane, but by demonstration of his own life that was led by disciplined commitment to God and family. He used to run a mile a day. He wouldn’t allow anyone to miss the nightly family meal. He would literally call every church in Singapore, searching, if one of the grandchildren in his custody didn’t come home right after Sunday service (sorry, O-pa!).
Yet to me, the greatest legacy he leaves is of his love. He was always a man of moderation, which made his excesses all the more meaningful. The unrelenting persistence of his courtship of my grandmother, for example, resulting in a 64-year-marriage. His sending away of his pregnant wife to the safety of Indonesia at the onset of the Second World War. The extravagant purchase of bridal jewelry for the wedding of his only daughter, my mother. The purchasing of his first family home under my grandmother’s name – a fact she did not know until she had to sign to sell it years later.
I relish all these stories as relics of a past that I, being born in modern Singapore, cannot touch. But there are more recent examples of his colonial mannerisms and humor that gave me a sense of him as a historical figure in real time. I recall the time he once described to me an upset of the stomach as, “a revolution in my tummy,” or how he would sometimes pronounce the end of his meal by clinking his spoon rapidly against his glass—-a schoolmaster even in the home. And he still had his standards of appropriate behaviour in his later years, for the raucousness of the family’s post-meal banter would often cause him to throw up his hands in displeasure, shaking his head declaring, “Enough! Enough!”
This was the O-pa I loved—-a living monument to history, integrity, and devotion. Yes, O-pa was ...monumental (at just over five feet). I thank him for living so long, for enduring the suffering of old age and the indignity of infirmity, because in doing so he grounded us in a sense of identity tied to ourselves as family and to our country that no government program, no textbook can give. For his life of faith I am always grateful.
O-ma turns 87 today. Usually jocular and casual, O-ma looks genuinely touched as my mother surprises her last night to wish her a happy birthday. She has, as my mother later notes, “begun to feel it.” She took little time to move her bed back into the master bedroom, where O-pa and his nurse used to stay, and to hire painters to redo the apartment. But now, in the dim desk lamp glow of the 13th evening after his passing, O-ma looks needy. I wish I could stay longer. I’ve always wished I could stay longer, while I continued to stay away. She still keeps a landscape photograph I sent her in 1998 on her dresser. She is staring at it meditatively when we walk into her room. It’s way past dinner – she’s already taken out her teeth. A sarong is wrapped tightly around her waist and loose button down shirt. I will visit her today for lunch, which I know makes her happy because I like listening to her talk, and I always finish my plate. She will complain about the misery of her diet, as her kidneys can’t sustain the intake of oils and fats of regular Singapore fare, and her diabetes won’t allow her much more than a few pieces of fruit for dessert. But her eyes will squint mischievously when she will steal something from my serving, and we will laugh and argue over her philosophies about love and other maladies.
I can’t wait to come home. Can she?
Mum and Dad have just left this morning for London, where they will rent a car and drive down to Hove, near Brighton, joining my father’s four remaining siblings to bid farewell to the eldest of the flock. Lee Soo Bee, at age 71, has passed from earthly mezzo-soprano glory to godly glory, and as they mourn I celebrate a life so fully and adamantly lived.
It is the season for dying.
Or isn’t it always?
149 perish in an airplane crash in Medan. Thousands to tragic completion in the Southern Gulf. My grandfather, at last, at age 102.
This is what I see in the eyes of the grieving: the strain of self-control, redness, soreness, weeping capillaries which shed blood in order to not shed tears—-the internal negotiation of memory, guilt, propriety, and presence. Let the first to convulse be the nearest to the deceased, and the rest shall follow.
I hug Daddy in the swimming pool where we are trying to get him on a regimen to lose 30 pounds in three months. His cardiologist says he is on the borderline of having artery blockage. We’ve only completed six laps when Mum comes over with the news about Soo Bee, 13 years my father’s senior. My father is not an emotional man, but I see again the reddening corneal struggle that signals a growing and multilayered realization of loss, history, and of one’s own mortality. The struggle too is in placing the tenderness of the first above the fear of the last. Perhaps it is the middle, then, that mediates, the calmness of remembrance that is the still eye of the storm.
I was asked by my cousins to speak on behalf of the grandchildren at the second night of O-pa’s wake. The podium was not opened as it was on the previous night to unplanned eulogies, however, and we had to be satisfied with the ritual and characteristic restraint of a Methodist service. I was maddened by the impersonality of this farewell. Yet I was also overwhelmed by the intensity of our collective emotion as a family, and so maybe it was a good thing that I wasn’t called to the occasion. I think O-pa himself would probably have preferred it this way, as he was a man of staunch discipline and rigid, though loving, religion.
Here is what I might have said:
I am the seventh of my O-pa’s nine grandchildren. The first of his great-grand-children will be born in the next sixth months. He was 79 years old when I was born.
For us to know him so late in his life meant that we knew him as both legend and living. We knew that he was a teacher, principal, and father that commanded great respect. He was authoritative not only by his liberal use of the cane, but by demonstration of his own life that was led by disciplined commitment to God and family. He used to run a mile a day. He wouldn’t allow anyone to miss the nightly family meal. He would literally call every church in Singapore, searching, if one of the grandchildren in his custody didn’t come home right after Sunday service (sorry, O-pa!).
Yet to me, the greatest legacy he leaves is of his love. He was always a man of moderation, which made his excesses all the more meaningful. The unrelenting persistence of his courtship of my grandmother, for example, resulting in a 64-year-marriage. His sending away of his pregnant wife to the safety of Indonesia at the onset of the Second World War. The extravagant purchase of bridal jewelry for the wedding of his only daughter, my mother. The purchasing of his first family home under my grandmother’s name – a fact she did not know until she had to sign to sell it years later.
I relish all these stories as relics of a past that I, being born in modern Singapore, cannot touch. But there are more recent examples of his colonial mannerisms and humor that gave me a sense of him as a historical figure in real time. I recall the time he once described to me an upset of the stomach as, “a revolution in my tummy,” or how he would sometimes pronounce the end of his meal by clinking his spoon rapidly against his glass—-a schoolmaster even in the home. And he still had his standards of appropriate behaviour in his later years, for the raucousness of the family’s post-meal banter would often cause him to throw up his hands in displeasure, shaking his head declaring, “Enough! Enough!”
This was the O-pa I loved—-a living monument to history, integrity, and devotion. Yes, O-pa was ...monumental (at just over five feet). I thank him for living so long, for enduring the suffering of old age and the indignity of infirmity, because in doing so he grounded us in a sense of identity tied to ourselves as family and to our country that no government program, no textbook can give. For his life of faith I am always grateful.
O-ma turns 87 today. Usually jocular and casual, O-ma looks genuinely touched as my mother surprises her last night to wish her a happy birthday. She has, as my mother later notes, “begun to feel it.” She took little time to move her bed back into the master bedroom, where O-pa and his nurse used to stay, and to hire painters to redo the apartment. But now, in the dim desk lamp glow of the 13th evening after his passing, O-ma looks needy. I wish I could stay longer. I’ve always wished I could stay longer, while I continued to stay away. She still keeps a landscape photograph I sent her in 1998 on her dresser. She is staring at it meditatively when we walk into her room. It’s way past dinner – she’s already taken out her teeth. A sarong is wrapped tightly around her waist and loose button down shirt. I will visit her today for lunch, which I know makes her happy because I like listening to her talk, and I always finish my plate. She will complain about the misery of her diet, as her kidneys can’t sustain the intake of oils and fats of regular Singapore fare, and her diabetes won’t allow her much more than a few pieces of fruit for dessert. But her eyes will squint mischievously when she will steal something from my serving, and we will laugh and argue over her philosophies about love and other maladies.
I can’t wait to come home. Can she?
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
A post on dancing! Finally!
I showed Isaiah and Chaina how to do a headstand today. It was the longest and most graceful I've held a headstand yet -- I have quite a recent comfortability with being upside down, thanks to all the Pilates and core-strengthening I do. Looks like my technique is going somewhere. Looks like all I need is an audience to really execute. That, or the fact that I danced seven hours today. Takes a while to really get in your body, eh?
I realized today in class that I love Oliver. I'm not in love with Oliver, but I love the man's spirit in movement, I love that he exists and exists as a live human being who demonstrates that it is possible to reach the ecstatic in dance. That there is little way to decipher what erupts out of his body as technique at all, despite the high rond-de-jambes* and ballet vocabulary. I love that he's goofy and sensitive to his daughter's emotional rollercoasters, which, at age three (?), are frequent and sometimes inexplicable. I don't necessarily love that he gets turned on (kinetically - who knows how else) only, it seems, by 80s and early 90s hits. He's so Euro. But I think it's fun. It's satisfying to be in his class. And either I've become a super-groupie, or it's true what seems apparent to me that he is getting more "choreographic" in his final combinations.
* Non-dancey folk: rond-de-jambe is the rotation of one leg at the hip in a half-circle. It can be along the floor, or a fast circular kick in the air; torso straight or dipped in opposition the height of the foot. It is a ballet term, and classic ballet alignment would demand strict even balance in its execution, whereas in contemporary choreography the aim might be for the acting leg to pull the body off-balance, which would create momentum towards another movement. In musical theatre or more prescribed modern techniques such as Graham and Horton, there is the "fan kick". Think poofy skirts, bloomers, and cheers.
What do I mean by "choreographic" -- I mean that the combinations at the end are less intended to demonstrate the technique than to communicate an emotional or expressive meaning. I don't know if Oliver realizes he is doing this. I don't want to sound presumptuous, but with all the frustration he's had to deal with with his knee injury and his surgery next week, and whatever else is making life a little tougher these days, he's making more interesting art. He's making art. He's not just making sequences.
Funny that it's taken eight months of this blog to actually start writing about my dancing. This is why I started this blog in the first place (I think): dancer in New York, my new, though long-awaited skin. I scribble notes after every class, but usually it's a mix of text, stick-figure diagrams (w/ one triangle for the chest and one for the pelvis), and poetic inspiration. In other words, it's a horrible read. Thanks for bearing with me on this one. Detailing movement into words is quite taxing. Try it. Try describing everything that's going on in your body and everything your body is doing when you get up to brush your teeth. There -- you've just had your first composition class.
I realized today in class that I love Oliver. I'm not in love with Oliver, but I love the man's spirit in movement, I love that he exists and exists as a live human being who demonstrates that it is possible to reach the ecstatic in dance. That there is little way to decipher what erupts out of his body as technique at all, despite the high rond-de-jambes* and ballet vocabulary. I love that he's goofy and sensitive to his daughter's emotional rollercoasters, which, at age three (?), are frequent and sometimes inexplicable. I don't necessarily love that he gets turned on (kinetically - who knows how else) only, it seems, by 80s and early 90s hits. He's so Euro. But I think it's fun. It's satisfying to be in his class. And either I've become a super-groupie, or it's true what seems apparent to me that he is getting more "choreographic" in his final combinations.
* Non-dancey folk: rond-de-jambe is the rotation of one leg at the hip in a half-circle. It can be along the floor, or a fast circular kick in the air; torso straight or dipped in opposition the height of the foot. It is a ballet term, and classic ballet alignment would demand strict even balance in its execution, whereas in contemporary choreography the aim might be for the acting leg to pull the body off-balance, which would create momentum towards another movement. In musical theatre or more prescribed modern techniques such as Graham and Horton, there is the "fan kick". Think poofy skirts, bloomers, and cheers.
What do I mean by "choreographic" -- I mean that the combinations at the end are less intended to demonstrate the technique than to communicate an emotional or expressive meaning. I don't know if Oliver realizes he is doing this. I don't want to sound presumptuous, but with all the frustration he's had to deal with with his knee injury and his surgery next week, and whatever else is making life a little tougher these days, he's making more interesting art. He's making art. He's not just making sequences.
Funny that it's taken eight months of this blog to actually start writing about my dancing. This is why I started this blog in the first place (I think): dancer in New York, my new, though long-awaited skin. I scribble notes after every class, but usually it's a mix of text, stick-figure diagrams (w/ one triangle for the chest and one for the pelvis), and poetic inspiration. In other words, it's a horrible read. Thanks for bearing with me on this one. Detailing movement into words is quite taxing. Try it. Try describing everything that's going on in your body and everything your body is doing when you get up to brush your teeth. There -- you've just had your first composition class.
Saturday, August 13, 2005
What's in a name?
I remember doing this exercise at age 14, at which point I promptly discovered the world of (many dead) porn stars and the ubiquitous usage of "Lee" as an often-Southern pseudonym. Thanks to Blog-Idol Joko (I'll still call you that, why not), here it is again as part time-waste, part soul-search activity: the Google "(name) is" hunt for self-definition:
MELINDA IS …
Melinda is worth watching if you like Woody Allen
Melinda is the wild one in an old college threesome
Melinda is perhaps an even bigger mess
Melinda is spreading her own sense of self-worth and value to these kids
MELINDA is a haunting tale of a young girl living alone in a world of rot and decay
MELINDA is now in-stock and is ready to ship upon your order
Melinda's is also known for scarves, hats, and handbags
Melinda is a neurotic, chain-smoking warning
Melinda is cute, flighty, and ready for love
MELINDA LEE IS …
Melinda Lee is a very popular radio host in California
Melinda Lee is an attractive enough woman, word on the street is that she is wrapped tighter than Martha Stewart receiving a bouquet of carnations
Melinda Lee is Vice President of Geosam Investments Limited, a private investment company based in Halifax, Nova Scotia
Melinda Lee is up early on a Wednesday morning to prepare egg rolls for frying.
Melinda Lee is a 20-year student of a variety of yoga and personal growth disciplines.
MELINDA LEE - IS HER GOOSE COOKED?
Melinda Lee is a dentist and a dancer of many disapplines.
"Melinda Lee is a warm, compassionate person who offers her clients knowledgeable techniques and is a spiritual light with her overall healing."
Melinda Lee is a delicious recipe that you can cook quickly and easily.
Melinda Lee is one of thousands in the Recipes-to-go Ethnic Cookbook.
Melinda Lee is the most dedicated and committed person we have ever worked with
Melinda Lee is on VHS or DVD, or possibly Pay-per-view.
MEL LEE IS …
Mel, Lee is at it again
Mel Lee is talking crap
MELINDA IS …
Melinda is worth watching if you like Woody Allen
Melinda is the wild one in an old college threesome
Melinda is perhaps an even bigger mess
Melinda is spreading her own sense of self-worth and value to these kids
MELINDA is a haunting tale of a young girl living alone in a world of rot and decay
MELINDA is now in-stock and is ready to ship upon your order
Melinda's is also known for scarves, hats, and handbags
Melinda is a neurotic, chain-smoking warning
Melinda is cute, flighty, and ready for love
MELINDA LEE IS …
Melinda Lee is a very popular radio host in California
Melinda Lee is an attractive enough woman, word on the street is that she is wrapped tighter than Martha Stewart receiving a bouquet of carnations
Melinda Lee is Vice President of Geosam Investments Limited, a private investment company based in Halifax, Nova Scotia
Melinda Lee is up early on a Wednesday morning to prepare egg rolls for frying.
Melinda Lee is a 20-year student of a variety of yoga and personal growth disciplines.
MELINDA LEE - IS HER GOOSE COOKED?
Melinda Lee is a dentist and a dancer of many disapplines.
"Melinda Lee is a warm, compassionate person who offers her clients knowledgeable techniques and is a spiritual light with her overall healing."
Melinda Lee is a delicious recipe that you can cook quickly and easily.
Melinda Lee is one of thousands in the Recipes-to-go Ethnic Cookbook.
Melinda Lee is the most dedicated and committed person we have ever worked with
Melinda Lee is on VHS or DVD, or possibly Pay-per-view.
MEL LEE IS …
Mel, Lee is at it again
Mel Lee is talking crap
Friday, August 12, 2005
Another sense of home
This is quick. I just want to get this off my chest.
I come home tonight -- somehow, everyone's excited. At 42nd St in my train change-over there is a dark, dirty man (darker from dirt, probably) sitting with a hat for change and three disgustingly dirty and wet kittens. How recently were they born? Does their mother there not care when Dark Man grabs the wettest of the kittens to polish with his shirt, with as much vigor as one might do tarnished silverware? So there is this 'event', as precursor to the show that's actually drawing crowds ten feet away. It's a crew of breakers I have not before seen, at the usual spot where the Christian Scientists yell at you to take their free stress tests. If you ever need to get stressed -- see them. They will yell at you. Ok, but there's a bigmungous crowd around these breakers, firstly because they have enlisted a plastic-bucket drummer -- you've seen him, he's usually busking on the other side of the station -- as their beatbox, and secondly, primarily, they are all shirtless and beautifully RIPPED. I indulged in a free ogle, before they could enlist me to stand still with three sweaty tourists while one of them would vault over our heads and then yell at us for money to have experienced this in 90 degree heat. All respect to these boys who do this to make ends meet (and who have eight-packs). But I'm not hanging around for this one.
OK, so finally home to 136th and broadway, and still, everyone's excited. There's an extraordinary wait at my late-night deli of choice because, for whatever reason, some woman with painted eyebrows is buying ALL her groceries ... at 11:30pm ... probably for her entire family. The counter that is usually graced by no more than ten items a customer is LOADED. Some adolescent brown boy with the body shape of that pink-blob character in Sponge Bob cuts in front of me to buy a lottery scratch card. Ok. So I get out finally with juice to freeze for tomorrow's insta-sweat that is morning class with Oliver (quel j'adore!), and bread, and pineapple (mmm!) and plaintain chips to go with the guacomole that I am going to make. 8 dollars. Yipes. And you know I'll blast through the juice in two days flat.
Shit! So my point! I get home, Tito's hanging on the doorstep with some ladies I don't recognize but who probably live here. He lets me pass, but leaps past me on the stairwell like a child who just got candy -- I make fun of his talking up the ladies, and he's only half talking to me (the other half in his head -- both of them) when he sputters out: "only the middle one! I've been in love wid'her since I was eight ... no, six ..." Tito leaves the door open for me as I, not so much in love after being brushed off by aforementioned boy over the phone yesterday, trudge heavily one step at a time to apartment 15.
Rosario (why is she not Rosaria?) is sweeping -- I love when she calls out to me, "Meh-leenda, Meh-leenda!", this time to express how tired she is (in Spanish). I'm tired too, too tired to attempt a "yo tambien." I reply in English. It's chill.
Excited. Everyone's excited. Plenty o'kids around, I know them, they're related, or live in the building, they are as free here as they are in their own family homes. I am about to pour juice to freeze in my Nalgene and make guacomole and slice a tomato when I see Little Guy waddle towards me. Little Guy is Howie (they say: "ow-ee", so that's what I'm pretending his name is written down). Howie turned two a couple months ago, he's the two-year-old I tell people is a ghetto superstar when I explain what it's like living here. He's young enough to not be afraid to enter my room, and previously we had bonded over his trying on of my shoes. This is a beautiful child. More so to me, tonight, because he recognizes me -- he lives here intermittently -- exclaims recognition, and waddles up to hold my hand. We play our shoe game again -- I give him my sandles to wear, which he does competently (the middle thread sitting snugly between his Little Big Toe and his Little Second Toe), he looks up at me with a confused expression on his face -- too much English? -- but nods when I ask him questions.
Howie's innocent affection frees up all the other kids to interact with me more. And this is the point I am finally getting to. Isaiah tells me about his girlfriend at school. Chaina is excitedly running into the other room to explain in Spanish how Howie is holding my hand. The other little girl, the sweetheart, smiles coyly and just goes with the flow. Howie wants some guacomole. I think it's more that he wants whatever object seems to have drawn my left hand's attention away from his right. He's possessive that way. I like these kids. I like kids. I haven't spent enough time with any to get exhausted to the point of anger -- maybe this is why I don't force time with them. But I enjoy kids.
And I wish I could have hugged these kids ten minutes after our guacomole episode and told them that they did nothing wrong by being boisterous kids, even though Mummy screamed at them, restrained them with her harpee-shriek, and then with her beating hand. She is the one who just gave birth again. She's not had it easy. It's not easy living so tightly together. I get a feeling she never really wanted kids, but it pleases her mother and its what she's supposed to do. But she's become more vicious lately, especially with Isaiah, who loves her dearly, and what I had to get off my chest tonight, before washing the garlic smell truly off my fingertips or bathing my sweaty self, is the feeling I had gurgling inside me while washing my dishes with my back to the sounds of her abuse. This was not discipline, when at other times, her harshness and occasional violence is. I don't pretend to sit on some pedastal of humanitarian concern when it comes to how someone must discipline their kids. But tonight was arbitrary, and somehow I am involved. I'm that kid from next door who got all the kids here in trouble. I'm the one who got them to overstep their bounds, because tonight, everyone in the city was excited. I was inappropriately friendly, and we were having a good time, and somehow that was against the harpee's house rules.
This is only mild tension. So far. And I obey, as did they. I stop talking to the kids, who have all been relegated to their room anyway, the door closed behind them. Howie is left, but follows Tito who distracts him away from crying about my tomato that he can't reach. And I wash a little apple for a pre-bed snack. And I walk into my room, and shut the door. Lifting the screen of my laptop, I wake up a portal to another world and live within my four white walls and this cyberworld alone. The apartment is silent.
I don't know what it is that I represent to her -- God, I don't even know her name, so maybe it's that, and every other similar indication that I don't, won't, can't belong -- but sometimes I think she hates me. No, that's a lot of emotion. She doesn't care about me that much. But I do think she thinks I'm not someone she wants influencing her kids. And I close my door.
This is where I live.
It's starting to feel a little more like a home, in all the senses of that word.
I come home tonight -- somehow, everyone's excited. At 42nd St in my train change-over there is a dark, dirty man (darker from dirt, probably) sitting with a hat for change and three disgustingly dirty and wet kittens. How recently were they born? Does their mother there not care when Dark Man grabs the wettest of the kittens to polish with his shirt, with as much vigor as one might do tarnished silverware? So there is this 'event', as precursor to the show that's actually drawing crowds ten feet away. It's a crew of breakers I have not before seen, at the usual spot where the Christian Scientists yell at you to take their free stress tests. If you ever need to get stressed -- see them. They will yell at you. Ok, but there's a bigmungous crowd around these breakers, firstly because they have enlisted a plastic-bucket drummer -- you've seen him, he's usually busking on the other side of the station -- as their beatbox, and secondly, primarily, they are all shirtless and beautifully RIPPED. I indulged in a free ogle, before they could enlist me to stand still with three sweaty tourists while one of them would vault over our heads and then yell at us for money to have experienced this in 90 degree heat. All respect to these boys who do this to make ends meet (and who have eight-packs). But I'm not hanging around for this one.
OK, so finally home to 136th and broadway, and still, everyone's excited. There's an extraordinary wait at my late-night deli of choice because, for whatever reason, some woman with painted eyebrows is buying ALL her groceries ... at 11:30pm ... probably for her entire family. The counter that is usually graced by no more than ten items a customer is LOADED. Some adolescent brown boy with the body shape of that pink-blob character in Sponge Bob cuts in front of me to buy a lottery scratch card. Ok. So I get out finally with juice to freeze for tomorrow's insta-sweat that is morning class with Oliver (quel j'adore!), and bread, and pineapple (mmm!) and plaintain chips to go with the guacomole that I am going to make. 8 dollars. Yipes. And you know I'll blast through the juice in two days flat.
Shit! So my point! I get home, Tito's hanging on the doorstep with some ladies I don't recognize but who probably live here. He lets me pass, but leaps past me on the stairwell like a child who just got candy -- I make fun of his talking up the ladies, and he's only half talking to me (the other half in his head -- both of them) when he sputters out: "only the middle one! I've been in love wid'her since I was eight ... no, six ..." Tito leaves the door open for me as I, not so much in love after being brushed off by aforementioned boy over the phone yesterday, trudge heavily one step at a time to apartment 15.
Rosario (why is she not Rosaria?) is sweeping -- I love when she calls out to me, "Meh-leenda, Meh-leenda!", this time to express how tired she is (in Spanish). I'm tired too, too tired to attempt a "yo tambien." I reply in English. It's chill.
Excited. Everyone's excited. Plenty o'kids around, I know them, they're related, or live in the building, they are as free here as they are in their own family homes. I am about to pour juice to freeze in my Nalgene and make guacomole and slice a tomato when I see Little Guy waddle towards me. Little Guy is Howie (they say: "ow-ee", so that's what I'm pretending his name is written down). Howie turned two a couple months ago, he's the two-year-old I tell people is a ghetto superstar when I explain what it's like living here. He's young enough to not be afraid to enter my room, and previously we had bonded over his trying on of my shoes. This is a beautiful child. More so to me, tonight, because he recognizes me -- he lives here intermittently -- exclaims recognition, and waddles up to hold my hand. We play our shoe game again -- I give him my sandles to wear, which he does competently (the middle thread sitting snugly between his Little Big Toe and his Little Second Toe), he looks up at me with a confused expression on his face -- too much English? -- but nods when I ask him questions.
Howie's innocent affection frees up all the other kids to interact with me more. And this is the point I am finally getting to. Isaiah tells me about his girlfriend at school. Chaina is excitedly running into the other room to explain in Spanish how Howie is holding my hand. The other little girl, the sweetheart, smiles coyly and just goes with the flow. Howie wants some guacomole. I think it's more that he wants whatever object seems to have drawn my left hand's attention away from his right. He's possessive that way. I like these kids. I like kids. I haven't spent enough time with any to get exhausted to the point of anger -- maybe this is why I don't force time with them. But I enjoy kids.
And I wish I could have hugged these kids ten minutes after our guacomole episode and told them that they did nothing wrong by being boisterous kids, even though Mummy screamed at them, restrained them with her harpee-shriek, and then with her beating hand. She is the one who just gave birth again. She's not had it easy. It's not easy living so tightly together. I get a feeling she never really wanted kids, but it pleases her mother and its what she's supposed to do. But she's become more vicious lately, especially with Isaiah, who loves her dearly, and what I had to get off my chest tonight, before washing the garlic smell truly off my fingertips or bathing my sweaty self, is the feeling I had gurgling inside me while washing my dishes with my back to the sounds of her abuse. This was not discipline, when at other times, her harshness and occasional violence is. I don't pretend to sit on some pedastal of humanitarian concern when it comes to how someone must discipline their kids. But tonight was arbitrary, and somehow I am involved. I'm that kid from next door who got all the kids here in trouble. I'm the one who got them to overstep their bounds, because tonight, everyone in the city was excited. I was inappropriately friendly, and we were having a good time, and somehow that was against the harpee's house rules.
This is only mild tension. So far. And I obey, as did they. I stop talking to the kids, who have all been relegated to their room anyway, the door closed behind them. Howie is left, but follows Tito who distracts him away from crying about my tomato that he can't reach. And I wash a little apple for a pre-bed snack. And I walk into my room, and shut the door. Lifting the screen of my laptop, I wake up a portal to another world and live within my four white walls and this cyberworld alone. The apartment is silent.
I don't know what it is that I represent to her -- God, I don't even know her name, so maybe it's that, and every other similar indication that I don't, won't, can't belong -- but sometimes I think she hates me. No, that's a lot of emotion. She doesn't care about me that much. But I do think she thinks I'm not someone she wants influencing her kids. And I close my door.
This is where I live.
It's starting to feel a little more like a home, in all the senses of that word.
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