You must catch up on some fiction.
Atkinson, Bowen, Krauss
Rearrange the living room.
Acquire a hanging light for over the table.
Remember the radio talk show
(where the host brought up assimilation).
International human worries
International human worries
The cat knocks the tv remote off the mantle.
Exercise your memory (the names are starting to slip).
Add to your story-plot diary
(where you record plots to test that you remember them).
Beginnings, middles, ends
To the grocery store
Smoked gouda, bananas, kitty food
A text about “crazy human archetypes” arrives and it is delightful.
“Handless Maiden” and “Bluebeard” now come to mind.
Don’t kill yourself over details please.
[pause]
That book – what’s it called?
Something with Einstein
(It talks about memory palaces.)
Build a memory palace!
String it across your arms and clavicles.
(a perfect place for a palace)
A studio would be fine, though. Or a house.
Think a thought for Dad. An Irish proverb.
“Patience and forbearance make a bishop of his reverence.”
But could you do without the thoughts?
No.
But wouldn’t you like to sleep?
Yes.
To fall like a stone.
Yes.
Wake like a stone.
Yes.
Been working with Tara O’Con and Siobhan Burke on a series of movement patterns. We have a work-in-progress showing on March 1 (7pm) at THROW, presented by The Chocolate Factory and curated by Sarah Maxfield. Come see us!
Carl Riehl is in Chicago doing this show. So for now, we’re left to our own devices for music. Enter metronome.
I have always thought about using one in rehearsal. It brings back early memories of piano practice. Mrs. Crenshaw (whose home-based biz always smelled like pot roast and dust) would test out my rhythmic agility with all these testy practice pieces. Generally, she’d interrupt with a “Uh-ah, go back.” And back I’d go, refining a rhythm sense.
So I often associate an uber-taskiness with the metronome. It corrects; it checks. Yet, beginning the choreographic process with this unrelenting device as the only sound source has not necessarily been about correcting. In this new context, it’s been part sanity, part madness. How, you ask? Well, when Tara and I began to disassemble head movement from our foot patterns, we were tripped out by our bodies’ ability to find fleeting patterns without having any way of describing how we were doing it. We began to talk as our bodies tripped — saying things like “how am I even doing this?” What the hell was happening? (To quote Tara’s answer — “This is your brain on dance.”)
Also, Tara, Siobhan and I once started clip clopping down the street to the ghost of the sound of the metronome’s 130 bpm clicking in our ears. That was awesome.
And the sanity part. It has been in the recognition of time increments passing and the ability of the body step into a rhythm and find gradual change. It’s something I’ve vaguely understood as a listener of the music minimalists – Steve Reich, Terry Reilly, Philip Glass, etc. – but not as a maker of dance.
**Note to self: beware the cliche waters of modern dance or rolling your head over and over and over again.**
So we find ourselves in this territory of emergent patterns (where many have traipsed) – in a rhythmic landscape of simplicity, sameness and change. I am both humbled and fascinated.
Filed under: Literature, Music | Tags: Dar Williams, February, Naomi Shihab Nye, poetry
Poetry is something good for February since the second month of the year is usually a hard one. And poems are good during months that require more patience and kindness. (See Dar Williams’ song “February” – “February was so long that it lasted into March” Yes, you can say that again.)
I remember sitting in a lecture room listening to Naomi Shihab Nye read one of her poems. (a lucky girl!) The way she spoke and the way her poetry carved out a piece of understanding was a Thing. You know, that Thing to behold. But delicate too. A sleight of hand. A disappearing bunny. An untouchable. A flicker of truth that vanishes as quickly as it disappears.
This is why memorizing poems is rather satisfying, I think. It turns a flicker of understanding into a practice of being. The poem gains embodied meaning. Sacred texts have come down to us this way after all.
So I’ve been putting Nye’s “Kindness” to memory, if only to let the words sink down and just be with them. (and with February)
Back in 2005, I was listening to the Diva soundtrack – just one of those CDs I was thumbing through at the library. One of the tracks, “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana,” from the Italian opera hit me immediately. I found it morbidly spectacular but had absolutely no context for it. So I watched the movie (my reaction to Diva is a whole other story) and read about the opera and the Austrian story on which it was based, the 19th century serial novel Vulture-Wally by Wilhelmine von Hillern.
So with all it’s loaded context, I decided to use the aria for a dance parody I was making. This was all a part of my MFA thesis project about the hysterical female body (more loaded subject matter). There were handkerchiefs coming out of bras set against a huge bronzy wall, behind which loose-haired ladies would come and go.
In short, it was a study in melodrama that ultimately failed, but not in that openly embarrassing way. It was just so difficult to make, and when I watched it from the auditorium, it felt simultaneously bloodless and overwrought. I couldn’t talk about the piece in my thesis defense without crying. My professors were flummoxed by my stifled tears. Don’t you like what you make?, they were asking with their eyes. I fumbled for words. I was suppose to be defending my work and here I was, slightly unraveling. I did not realize at the time that trying to articulate my own sense of failure would be the healthy way to move on.
So I decided to put that piece and that song out of mind. In retrospect, I should have realized that impossibility. Denial is never a good option and also, once you study a thing, you tend to run into it everywhere. I cringed slightly when I heard the aria in A Single Man and noticed it was also prominent in Philadelphia, which I very belatedly watched several years back. (In film, this song has become strongly attached to gay men contemplating their deaths… but moving on.)
So I’ve come back to the song, the opera and the Vulture-Wally story about a tragically heroic tomboy fighting the ice gods and the townspeople in the Tyrol region of Austria. I’ve wondered why I’ve needed to return to this material – to accept (un-deny) a little piece of my own history perhaps? And to have new eyes and ears to see and hear it? Yes and yes. Since it began with a song, I’ve now turned to singing. Working with composer Carl Riehl, we’re taking bits and scenes from Vulture-Wally and casting them into an assortment of song motifs from the late 19th century on into the present. So far, we’ve made a Polka (which turns into a Waltz), a smokey little Motown piece, and now we’re working on a Minimalist piece for a dance. Next is Go-Go.
I look forward to sharing them soon, live and recorded.
This slow motion video by Straylight makes me wish I could feel time this slow. (At his site, he also links to all kinds of experiments in freezing/futzing with time. For example, Improv Everywhere’s flash mob froze 207 people in the middle of Grand Central.)
Upon reading more about the logistics of his film experiments, I now see what makes it so fascinating to watch. He’s creating the effect based on a still human subject (or mostly still) with a moving camera in slower playback mode. Filming from the train, he’s captured nearly still bodies with a 210fps camera while trekking at a train speed of 35mph, then playing back at 30fps. (He’s on an express train passing a local stop, thus MOSTLY catching people in stillness while they wait, but there is some human movement, which is not as lovely to watch as the still body.)
What if you could experience life like this??? It would mean slowing your time perception experience by 1/7 while the world had frozen up for a moment. Trippy.
Filed under: Everyday
Been catching up on the Letters of Note feed. They posted this memo from Nixon’s speech writer William Safire from July 18, 1969. A beautiful relic. In it, there is a proposed statement should Aldrin and Armstrong’s moon mission fail. Question: How many “should they fail” speeches are out there in the ocean of archives, all drippy with pathos?
But back to hypothetical moon disaster statement…
What’s especially creepy to me is the fact that Nixon’s statement would have aired immediately upon knowing the mission had gone awry (yet, of course, after “would-be widows” had been called). His use of future tense = a real chilly kinda haunting. So the astronauts would have still been out there in space, awaiting imminent death, while Nixon would have announced to the world that yes, our heroes were about to die. I’m imagining these men floating in the ether, their brain activity low but the hearts and guts still churning, thanks to the support of the big fluffy white space suit.
Yeah, yeah, I know. We’re in the future. That never happened! ”One giant leap for mankind…” happened. But you have to wonder at the sincerity of Safire’s words (diplomatic as they are) formed in the theater of his head in the year 1969. Side note: How about all those sincere fears and diary-like freak outs in the embassy cables brought to us by WikiLeaks this week?
But back to theater inside Safire’s head…
It’s best assuaged if you read Armstrong’s letter to the 1969 EMU (extravehicular mobility) crew, written in 1994, on the 25th anniversary of the moon landing. He pretty much thanks th crew for making a really awesome spacesuit that is 11 layers thick — a suit he calls “tough, reliable and almost cuddly.”
So the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show installed a street exhibit of wings worn in their previous shows. If you’re on Broadway between Prince and Houston, you can’t miss them. Magical. I want one.
Spent the day with Virginia. First, this tea room on the upper east side, where we shared the “Mad Hatter” – 3 scones, 2 pots of tea (jasmine and chocolate chai), 2 sandwiches (cucumber and ham-gruyere) AND chocolate mousse with chocolate chip cookies. Ridiculous. [pause] RiDICulous.
Then, I visited her lab, where – and I quote Virginia – “it’s all about the colors.” She does not lie. Her lab IS your mental picture of a lab. Pretty pretty colors in beakers, tubes, clear hoses. And then there’s the organizational boxes and trays and shelves housing various science-y gadgets, all of which have Virginia’s name affixed to them. Stealers, you can’t have Virginia’s things.
Then there’s the color coding of very specific protein expressions from many single cells mapped out on Virginia’s computer. This map is made possible by the very large flow cytometer, which shoots a laser beam through single cells to capture an image of those tiny proteins. All in a day’s work for Virginia. Fascinating and amazing for me.
A blurry Virginia with flow cytometer. As you can see, there are instructions on how to run it. As simple as that. Hmm.
Filed under: Food
I have this thing for Italian Wedding Soup. Something about putting hearty greens into a meat-happy soup. (Also, side note – I am now going through a root vegetable adoration phase, having recently discovered the joy of oil-slathered veggies blasted with extreme temperature. Yum.)
Anyhoo, back to the meat and the soup. I saw a nice recipe on Everybody Likes Sandwiches. It was the fennel/cayenne spice combo in the meatballs and the Parmesanrinds in the broth that got my attention. Result: fabulous!
Here’s ELS’s soup:
Here’s mine (a bit blurry, but ya know – iphone + crappy kitchen light):
Filed under: Media
Photo by Sacha Goldberger
After hearing that his grandma was depressed, photographer Sacha Goldberger asked if he could help. So he asked if she’d like to don a cape and helmet and do a superhero photo shoot. Hell. Yes. And supreme she is.
More amazing photos at My Modern Met and at this MySpace page (with more than just the superhero photos) he created for grandma Frederika, otherwise known as Super Mamika.
