intellectual properties

movement studies

last night we went to see our (awesome!!!) friend Mary Franck’s conceptual-performance piece, Permutae.

i had so many millions of things to say while sitting in that dark theatre,  and now i barely recall all of the places my mind went.

i don’t know why i resist loving conceptual art so much.  i think it’s because i can’t actually articulate why, and so when, afterward, i say “i absolutely loved it” and someone asks “why?” i feel suddenly unprepared, embarrassed to explain.  why do bodies moving absurdly through abstract scapes to nonmelodic sounds cause my self to dissolve?  the body as vocabulary, skin as an instrument: this speaks to me.

all i know is that not long after the performance started i realized that almost my entire body was moving also, while most of the rest of the audience sat still, the man next to me fully asleep.  not only do i enjoy watching, i uncontrollably want to be doing what they are doing.

i have an artist ticket to burning man this year, from doing butoh with BadUnklSista for BRAF and such.  it makes me feel odd as i still do not describe or consider myself an artist. but i think that i might do a solo butoh piece somewhere on the playa.  i will not tell anyone when or where.

attn: fiercely old party children

Babylon,
Where bricks of mortared diamonds tower,
Sailors lust and swagger lazing in moon’s beams
Whose laser gaze penetrates this sparkling theater of excess and strobed lights.
Painted whores, sexual gladiators, fiercely old party children,
All wake from their slumber to debut the Bacchanal.
Come to the light! Into the light! The invisible light….

–Invisible Light

this is definitely the most ridiculously campy song i have ever loved, but the first time i heard it, it felt like some sort of aural anthology, compressing the sound and feel of the late 90s->The Aughts dance culture (incl of course burning man) into one song, it just sums up so much….

ROYGBIV

^^ROYGBIV, originally uploaded by JasonUnbound

last 3 photos by special yellow guest, steph goralnick

from the Institute Village monochrome dinner party, rehashing monochrome day at burning man

butoh and wine and tapestry

ras-Artumnal-portrait-2194, originally uploaded by furtographer.

from the BRAF Artumnal 2010 portraits by the Furtographer

recently

performing with BadUnklSista @ the Black Rocks Arts Foundation ARTumnal fundraiser 11/20/10

Bad Unkl Sista in French Vogue (!!!)

the November 2010 issue of French Vogue has a section on Burning Man (bm-vogue-pdf), which is exciting for many reasons, but particularly since there is, not in the main article (which does feature art by other friends!) but in another section, a photo of our Bad Unkl Sista butoh crew during our white procession at the Temple at dawn on Thursday.

(enlarged below)

L to R: Kyle Hailey, Myana, Calli Beck, Orange, Wanda, Yaella

what you’re seeing is part of a full circle of 16 people. i’m only a leeetle sad that all you can see of me is a slight bit of profile standing on the far, far left, next to/behind Kyle, but *so excited* that as a group we made it into F*ING FRENCH VOGUE. since i’m pretty sure i will never get this close to being in Vogue again, and since i am technically in this photo, i’ll count this as it.

see also: my Burning Man 2010 report + this recent NYT article on BM-inspired haute couture in Paris

burning man 2010 (or: eat pray love on the playa)

“I have sometimes imagined that everything in the world is exactly where it’s supposed to be, all in their places, all the way down to the smallest things that we usually deem insignificant. Like that rock on the sidewalk in front of the grocery store on the corner. And if you kicked it—that rock—if you disrupted its place, it might leave a little rock sized hole of nothing, into which the world would collapse like water swirling down a drain.

But that’s not right. Things move. Everything moves. And the world never fails to swoop in and fill the place you thought was empty. The empty world is always full. Look around. Look again.

If you are lucky enough, in autumn, to see a leaf—when does it give?—falling from a tree, to witness its graceful descent to the grass in its entirety, and if you watch it close—don’t blink—it will occur to you that it’s absolutely fucking impossible. None of this is possible. And yet here we are, tenaciously, impossibly. You can dwell on the flowers. You can dwell on the rain. But if you do, if you make the crucial mistake of choosing this or that, you will have missed the greatest fact. That the orange flowers and the blue rain are mad for one another—raving lovers—grasping at each other, achingly, to close the space between.”  ~ BHJ

~photo by john curley~

.::.
introduction
.::.

as i noted in the prologue, my burning man this year was going to be different for multiple reasons, the 2 major ones being 1. jay wasn’t going and 2. i really, really, really needed a decompression chamber.

a bit more on #2: it seems i am a highly strung person. i am anxious. i get stressed over little things. i can’t sleep, and then i sleep for days. i have anxiety/panic attacks. i obsess over details. i keep meticulous lists. this has been helpful for my day job (which benefits from me being this way, and i excel at my duties), but not good for my overall being, and in the past year or so this has become literally painful, manifesting itself in my body and resulting in what is now almost a year-long chronic pain in my upper-back/shoulders/neck, most likely caused by anxiety and stress and has been non-responsive to all the other treatments i’ve tried, from muscle relaxers to chiro to acupuncture to rolfing (and in fact typing up this summary took longer than expected because whenever i type for more than 5-10 minutes straight, the pain comes back and i’ve only been able to write in spurts).

as anyone who has ever been to burning man knows, it’s not generally a relaxing experience and people need days, if not weeks, to recover. first, if you’re going with any organized group, there is planning stress from the 10,000,000 emails from your campmates. yes, this is necessary if you want to create a kick-ass village with kitchens and showers and art cars and sound systems and lighting in the middle of the desert. but knowing what you are creating doesn’t make it any less stressful, IMO. in fact, probably more stressful than say, planning an event at work, because in this case you actually CARE.

also, i am not a “joiner”, and i don’t much care for rituals, ceremonies and the like, which makes me going to Burning Man seem even more ridiculous, because, as the BBC recently pointed out, it’s one of the largest secular rituals in the US at this point.

and then, there is being there. the weather. the full days of WOOOOO! the long nights of WOOOOO! the dozens of miles walked/danced/biked every day, back and forth, around and around the circus. so much time when you have absolute freedom! the lack of sleep and nutrients. the dehydration. the exhaustion.

i did not need that right now. i needed to RELAX. and so my burning man experience this year was, as nicoco pointed out one morning, more like being on a cruise ship. i did work when it was needed and what i could, but then i laid around a lot in my beach chair, finishing reading Eat Pray Love and writing in my journal. i sat around Center Camp, sipping coffee and watching people. i went to bed when i felt like it. lots of caffeine aside, i did not do any drugs (i’m sort of a tweaker already while totally sober; drugs usually only amplify this in an uncomfortable way and i’m better off just not even going there). i didn’t even drink all of the champagne i took with me, and not once did i really feel intoxicated.

the link to Eat Pray Love: i started reading this book while traveling in south america. i won’t go into the details of the book but will say that reading this after dealing with this stress-pain issue for a year and then 1. traveling to south america and then coming back to work for a week and 2. going by myself to burning man did provide excellent context for reading a novel about a 30-something woman’s self-healing journey after a period of overwhelming, disabling stress.

i did have many issues with the assumptions and context of the novel (many of which are detailed in this Bitch Mag article: “Eat Pray Spend” and so i will let that article serve as a proxy for all my other thoughts about 1st-world consumer appropriation of other cultural rituals and the current problems with the “Sex and the City” feminism that seems to be popular these days), probably more than the average american woman who doesn’t live in San Francisco surrounded by self-affirming cultural appropriators who spend tons of time and money going to ashrams and yoga and dance-meditation and ceremonies of various sorts and get off on depriving themselves doing herbal juice fasts, and so her “journey” wasn’t this crazy unique story to me – it was a longer version of what people i know do all the time. but the writing was good, while i didn’t really care much about her own personal story of transformation, i found the stories about the other people and cultural situation she encountered to be entertaining and thought provoking, and a few of the ideas really stuck with me and are embedded in the text below.

mostly: i found myself in my own version of Eat Pray Love on the Playa. i was alone, independent, self-reliant, and i was, for most of the time (exceptions, of course), alternately conscious of my intention to relax/detox and choosing my actions/thoughts accordingly, and then really zenned out. i mean, as much as i could, i emptied my mind, stopped caring about who/what/where/when, and completely checked out. in a place where Active Participation is strongly encouraged, this seemed at first a bit odd, and it took a couple of days to adjust and not be enveloped by the excited mania that was going on around me. but it was what i needed, and when i returned, i was in such a state of relaxation that it was unfamiliar. i was calm.

.::.

the journals

.::.

below are the journals i hand-wrote while on the playa, with some text/post-script added.

(if you just want to see more photos, steph goralnick’s are by far my favorite).

Continue reading »

black rock city, sept 2, 2010

Satellite Photo taken of Black Rock City Sept 2, 2010 taken by GeoEye

click through to view full size. pretty awesome.

BM2010: miles traveled

my blog/journal for burning man 2010 is going to be exceptionally long, as i did the thing that i said i would do, which was take time to hand-write in my moleskine every day. this means i have a more detailed record than previously (e.g. BM2008, which i did not post until 2009 and forgot much), which will take me some time to write-up, fill-in, embed links.

one interesting datapoint that won’t go into the narrative is that i did strive to wear my fitbit pedometer/activity tracker nearly every day, and the most impressive data is from Friday, September 3:

30,385 steps, 13.69 miles. this does include dancing.

this is interesting data to me for 2 reasons. 1: this wasn’t necessarily, in my mind, my most active day. either wednesday the 1st or thursday sept 2 was, but i think i forgot to wear my fitbit for parts of those days. 2: it shows my natural sleep pattern (4am to 12pm), and my theory is that when i am able to sleep in my natural pattern, i have the most energy and am the most active.

more about my activity levels/use of burning man as a detox/meditation space in the longer post.

Burning Man 2010: Photos