intellectual properties

for 2011: austerity, focus, and grace

i am finding this “end of year” post difficult to write, and it’s coming out in pieces.  i am trying to wrap up 2010 in my mind and in writing and it’s not going well.

part one: recognition: grace

in my solstice blog post i talked about why this year hasn’t been fun for me. the thing that bothers me most about it is not that i feel like life has been cruel or unfair to me in particular – i am highly aware of my 1st world privilege and all the good things surrounding me – but that the overall affect on my mood and attitude has made ME not fun.  a couple of nice friends told me after that post that despite how i have been feeling on the inside, i’ve been a friendly, positive force for them, and i appreciated that, because i think most of all this year i have been afraid that i’ve maybe rubbed some people the wrong way with my grumpiness, even though it was rarely ever personal, and possibly even damaged some friendships/relationships.  my boss in particular – wow.  the combination of 1. work stress 2. body pain 3. not sleeping 4. task boredom have sometimes compounded me into a srsly ….bitchy person at work. some days even i can’t believe how grumpy i am at work. and that my boss puts up with it. i feel guilty about this. which goes back to my last post about my main resolution for 2011 is simply to try to be a more positive person, even if in just the little ways.  i want to have more grace.

part two: shedding skin, removing the unnecessary: austerity

like everyone else, i have (ongoing) goals of removing the unnecessary from my life, physically and mentally.  clean out the shelves, get rid of useless stuff, release attachment to objects, cleanse the environment and body.  the drastic Austerity Measures in europe this year piqued my interest in learning more about that idea, philosophically and economically, and while this 2010 Word of the Year has a bad reputation economically and politically, philosophically i am not opposed.

the crux (for me) here is whether austerity is, by definition, on the opposite end of the spectrum from hedonism. can you not be an Austere Naturalist (see: Hume), living life to the fullest, completely enamoured with creation, but without all the excess? isn’t that a better way to be, happier in simplicity? is this idea truly audacious in a modern consumer world?

more than anything though, i feel that simplifying my desires, my belongings, and my inputs and outputs will help me gain some focus. i need focus.  there is too much extraneous going on here.

part three: reincarnation: focus

recently some friends started an email thread wherein they reported all the things they’ve done/accomplished/significant events for them this year.  while i’m inspired by my amazing community, it also it made me sad, because i feel like i have notable nothing to say, and i didn’t participate in that thread.  going on vacation to south america and watching a lot of really good movies and being lucky enough to have worn some fabulous outfits this year don’t qualify as accomplishments to me.

in retrospect, the two biggest things that happened in my life this year have been 1) again, the ongoing body work/struggle to find pain resolution and 2) becoming a full time bike commuter.  at the beginning of the year i was certainly not expecting #1 to still be ongoing here at the end, and was unprepared for the mental toll it would take on my energy and commitment-to-do-things level.  as for #2, i knew that biking to work and back would be somewhat of a shift, but didn’t realize that it would feel like such an accomplishment. according to my exercise log i have biked over 1500 miles this year. every day that i get out of bed and get on my bike and make it to work is sort of a little miracle.

but if these are the two biggest parts of my year, i’m not sure how to feel about 2010.  in past years i’ve always found myself little side projects, moonlight jobs, or new hobbies that resulted in feeling like i accomplished something new and definitive.  i feel like i just let this year the last couple of years roll over me. maybe this is what i needed and a natural downcycle but it feels very unproductive and i feel that now i am overly-anxious to DO SOMETHING in 2011.

“Someone told me not long after I moved here that people with talent and no ambition move to San Francisco, people with ambition and no talent move to Los Angeles, and people with talent and ambition move to New York.” (–PH)

OH HOW THAT RESONATES.

but WHAT? the thing is i still do not have any definitive goals.  i can’t tell you what i want to do in 2011.  or who i want to be.  so in addition to more Personal Austerity and Grace, i need Focus.

so here’s to 2010: the year i went to South America, the year i bicycled nearly every day, the year the whole world felt volatile and entropic on both a personal and global scale.

may 2011 be full of austerity, focus, and grace.

i finally felt christmas yesterday.

it started with a bottle of vintage red wine on my desk – covered in dust, from the cellar.

then a huge box of cookies and gifts from my mother arrived (i really only like the ones with jam in the middle.)

then some money finally came in the door and so i got a paycheck. yay!

and then i got a gorgeous sunset to mark the days definitively getting longer.

the mailbox held a thoughtful holiday card from a friend i haven’t seen in a while, warming my heart

and then instead of going to the gym we went out to dinner in Jack London and they have it all decorated up with a big pretty christmas tree in the middle. why can’t the lights stay on the trees all year? they can take the holiday parts down. but i think the lights should stay.

we had a nice dinner and some drinks and then some more drinks and the evening rounded itself out quite well.

i might even get uncharacteristically festive this evening and head out with all the drunken santa clauses for the Oakland version of SantaCon, although i’m more of a Sugar Plum Fairy type myself.

happy holidays, y’all. i know i might be kind of a grinch about the way it all rolls out sometimes, but in the end i’m all for celebration of life and creating light in the darkness.

black swan + joan rivers

speaking of transformations into black, we did go see Black Swan last weekend.  i know a lot of my friends were waiting with breathless anticipation for Tron and went opening night, but honestly i have almost zero interest in seeing Tron (although i did hear the soundtrack kicks ass (“Daft Punk’s Best Movie Yet” haha)). not to prejudge too much but it’s just not generally a genre of film i get excited about.  but Black Swan is totally my thing and i was VERY EXCITED about it. it did not disappoint. it’s not for the faint of heart.  i will try not to let any spoilers out here and just say that the combination of gorgeously bleak cinematography, dance, costuming (Rodarte!!), paranoid characters, schizophrenia and HEARTPOUNDING ANXIETY will leave you shaken.

while amazing and quite a departure from her normal self-confident-woman roles, i’m not sure that Natalie Portman’s performance deserves any more accolades than Barbara Hershey’s, who plays the part of Scary Stage Mom a little too well. THAT was some intensity.  Mila Kunis was……Mila Kunis. no big stretch on her part as far as i could tell, not that much different than most of the other characters i’ve seen her do.

the story was decent (not saying more due to spoilers), but i loved the style of the film more than anything. if you’re not into artsy-noir, maybe Black Swan isn’t for you, and in that case you should go see Tron.

.::.

in other movie viewing reports, i also recently watched the documentary about Joan Rivers, “A Piece of Work“, and was pleasantly surprised by the whole thing.  lots of great recent history about the comedy world, but WOW – such an amazing woman.  at 75+ years old she’s working non-stop, taking red-eye flights, traveling until 3am and getting up at 6:30 to work, doing multiple events a day, and as agile mentally and physically and as anyone i know, let alone most 75 year-olds. watching her made me tired and i’m not even 35 yet.

say what you want about her face (the plastic surgery thing is of course mentioned but not a huge part of the film at all), i was utterly astounded by the amount of wit and energy this woman has – STILL.  i can’t even imagine what a dynamo she was 40 years ago. i’ve read that people age dramatically after they retire/stop working. she’s definitely proof that if you never slow down, you never grow old.

inner black

jay read my last post and asked if all my 2011 posts were going to be overly pronoid and all about expressing my inner rainbow and shit. i said: MY INNER RAINBOW IS BLACK.

on that note, twisted lamb posted this video as “How To Get Ready For A Christmas Party”, and i think that’s effing awesome:

1.1 Negredo: The Raven – Director: Jez Tozer

that is how i get ready for any party of note.

not fun

one of my new years resolutions is going to be that i will try to be more positive, at least vocally and publicly if not successfully internally.  less ranting, less expression of exasperation/jadedness/hatertude, less wallowing, more focus on gratitude and affecting change for the better in my little world instead of worrying about the big one so much.

so while it’s still 2010 let me gripe/whine for a minute.  a longer post reflecting on 2010 and moving into 2011 is (maybe) pending, but these current bullet points from this morning sort of sum how this whole year has felt for me:

–waking up to a negative bank account balance is not fun

–not feeling confident to go places/buy things you want to for the holidays because of empty bank account is not fun

–having your first email of the day be from a disgruntled tenant with a soaked computer because the roof leaked all over his office because you can’t afford to fix it is not fun

–a full year of ongoing chronic neck/shoulder/back pain that appears nonresponsive to hundreds of dollars in treatment is not fun

–i’ll keep this brief right now but i’ve been going back and forth too much in my head about how much of this is self-inflicted misery (what more should/could i be doing to help these situations for myself), and that is also not fun.

i had some awesomeness this year (Priceless, Chile/Peru, Burning Man, fun weekend excursions and things with friends/family), and i am super grateful for those times and people and i don’t mean to belittle them, but overall, the other 45ish weeks of this year have felt like personal purgatory (see: notes from February, not to mention the mental impact of global socio-political-economic situations) and NOT FUN.

it feels pretty terrible to write that. not fun.

yeah, maybe i’m just an actual grownup now with grownup responsibilities and problems, but i refuse to believe in “acceptance” of things you can change (aka settling) and don’t think that wanting the majority of your life to be/feel FUN is too much to ask. and this is where most of my not fun comes from: i know i can change some of these things, that life is what you make it, but the fact is that i haven’t.  acknowledging this (and the possible reasons why) is NOT FUN.

i digress, but hopefully that will be the last big of negativity you read from me (at least for a little while…).

language

if there is one human thing in this world i fully understand, it’s music and dancing.

vampy

i walked into a shop i frequent this afternoon and a customer at the counter turned and looked at me and said, without prompt or me saying a word, “where are you from? you look very european”.  anyone close to me knows that this question gets asked of me quite often and that i am always confused by it – what is it that makes me look not-American enough that strangers frequently ask me this question?  the woman asking had a european accent herself, and when i smiled she said “oh! and you have fangs too.  just like me!”,  pointing to her teeth. i never had braces or my teeth straightened, and if you look closely it’s true, i do have fangs. just like her.  i asked her where she was from and she said Poland, which made me wonder for a second if part of Transylvania was in Poland, but i looked it up and it wasn’t. but maybe i have more Romanian blood than i know about.

december weekends thus far

so while it is dark and rainy and i have been staying home watching a lot of movies lately, i swear that’s not all we’ve done.

two weekends ago (12/3) we first went to jay’s company holiday party, which, at several hundred people, jammed DNA Lounge full enough to be uncomfortable and while i give huge props to the Solar City employee band for being awesome, the whole thing sort of felt like a crowded wedding reception for someone you didn’t know. so we used up our drink tickets and left.

we went instead to this random party in Eville that a scene acquaintance had tipped us off to. it was a small empty loft space, and as we walked in the bottom floor the realization that we were WAY TOO OLD to be there hit instantly. it was “decorated” like a college basement – faded hippie tapestries and terrible pop art LITERALLY duct-taped to the walls. there were also a lot of kids (and i say that because we were at least a decade older than most of them) sitting on the floor drinking cheap beer and looking bored. the music was coming from upstairs, so we quickly headed that direction. upstairs was your classic low-ceiling-small-room-with-mattress-shoved-against-the windows situation, meaning NO AIRFLOW, also decorated with random things stuck to the walls with duct tape. and carpeted. so it was hot. and stuffy. and because 1/2 the room – literally – was filled with speakers (waaaaaay more speakers than necessary for a 20×15 room), it was LOUD. wow was it loud. but good sound.  after a second of reeling in the atmosphere, jay looked at the DJ, who was hunched over a laptop, and said….”is that…..?” and it was. he’ll rename nameless here because i’m not sure how he feels about it but it was a friend of ours, who i assume was also a friend of the person who told us about the party. and IMO, he played a GREAT SET, and i just said fuck it and danced my ass off as all these hipster kids stood around looking bored. [friend] finished his set and the next DJ started to set up, complete with his own crew of staring trainspotters who stood motionless next to the DJ table, and i was like….this is either going to be really good or really really terrible. and suddenly he dropped some drum and bass which was ok but once again i said fuck it and danced my ass off in that tiny hot little room until i was sweaty and out of breath. at one point a dude came in with a backpack full of cold cans of PBR and offered everyone in the room one. EXCEPT US. and then we left. total time there: maybe 75 minutes. but hey, that’s more than i’ve danced nonstop for quite a while. since burning man probably. sometimes you just gotta dance.

then, last weekend (12/10), as noted on friday night we went to the monochrome/ROYGBIV potluck dinner party at the world-famous Langton Labs, followed by a fun house party for our friend George, who everyone loves, and who made himself internet famous with his Banksy halloween costume this year.

saturday night we went to the 1st annual (i hope) Lost Horizon Night Market in SF, which was supposed to be “super secret” but with several hundred (if not a thousand?) people in attendance i’m not sure how secret it really was (+ it was covered by the Chron).  the idea behind this thing is that people rent box trucks (U-Hauls and the like), turn them into either a small theatre space or a diorama-like thing (“installation”, i guess is the proper word), and then line them up on a street somewhere and voila! short-term interactive street fair type situation.  read about and see photos here. i thought it was a huge success and lots of fun. i particularly liked the Lebowski bowling alley in the back of the semi, and the slot car races. there was also a fair amount of reminiscing, as the site for this event was our old renegade location, where we….sigh….used to dance until dawn.

180 degrees + good hair

watched 2 more great docus last night (time snuggling in bed watching movies is greatly exceeding time at the gym the last 5 days):

–Good Hair, a documentary about black hair starring Chris Rock as the investigator of cultural feelings on the subject.  lots of interesting tidbits about what black women go through dealing with their hair, and how it affects everything in their lives from how they feel about themselves and eachother, to what activities they will/won’t do, to relationships to sex, including ethical questions about things like putting a dangerous chemical solvent on the heads of toddlers, spending $1000-3000 on a weave when you can’t pay the rent, and the basic question of why it’s not sexy or cool to just have the hair you’re born with. also investigates the industry behind where all that hair comes from and the market to get it. obvi you can extrapolate these ideas out to all kinds of beauty issues, but this one is very specific, and Chris Rock is hella funny.

plus: Ice-T is seriously one of the most awesome people on the planet.  i swear, every time i hear him speak i think he’s a genius. he definitely has one of the most grounded, clear perspectives on life ever, and his interview on this subject are a highlight of the film.

–180 degrees south.  i’ll spare you all my wanderlust thoughts while watching this amazing film and just tell you that if you 1. love to travel, 2. love surfing and/or rockclimbing/mountaineering, and/or 3. support nature conservancy and protection of indigenous cultures against hazardous development, you should watch this movie. really one of the most well-done and engaging – without being preachy – films on the naturalist tip i’ve seen. great cinematography, great music, great blending of adventure footage combined with philanthropic discussion.

“The film follows adventurer Jeff Johnson as he retraces the epic 1968 journey of his heroes Yvon Chouinard and Doug Tompkins to Patagonia. Along the way he gets shipwrecked off Easter Island, surfs the longest wave of his life and prepares himself for a rare ascent of Cerro Corcovado.”

Yvon Chouinard, in addition to being part of the team of the first climbers to climb the biggest rock faces in Yosemite with no fixed ropes, founded the company Patagonia, and Tompkins founded North Face.  both are approaching 70 years old in this film, and have an excellent long view of what it means to be a nature lover. super highly recommended.

QOTD

“Every child dances, and then you learn not to.” — Mark Morris

~via