intellectual properties

red strings and rabbit holes

“I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is ‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle!“

- Alice, in Wonderland

i love synchronicity, even if oblique.

as posted, BadUnklSista, the butoh performance group i often dance with, is doing a 2-night production in SF this weekend @http://counterpulse.org/ , a double-bill with The Carepetbag Brigade, an unlikely composition of amazing performance artists who are currently doing an extremely mad take on Jack and the Beanstalk. while some of BUS performances are loose, organic pieces that we rehearse very little for, this one was choreographed, and because i was back east visiting my family last weekend, i wasn’t able to attend the rehearsals and therefore wasn’t able to participate as a performer. we went as audience members last night instead. jay asked afterward why i so like abstract performance art - what do i get out of it/what do i love about it? (a side topic being that i don’t think people can choose what kind of art (including music) moves them. you can try to make yourself like an art form, but really i think you either do or you don’t, n’est-ce pas?)  i can’t explain how much it moves me, every time, but i’ll try.

do you have those dreams, where nothing makes sense, you’re not even sure who/what/where, but you wake up with a feeling as though you witnessed something so deep it meant everything? i have them often, and the Carepetbag Brigade’s “You Don’t Know Jack” performance was as such, with people doing odd things with unexpected objects, saying things that on the surface sound like mad gibberish but when digested, when it all hits you as one piece, as a whole, seems so universal that it means everything.  the poetic dialogue and songs were interwoven in odd but meaningful ways, the words carefully chosen, the physicality rich and directive, and at the end i felt as if awaking from one of those dreams. i couldn’t quite grasp what had happened, but i felt changed by it.

and then, Bad Unkl Sista’s performance, which i won’t even attempt with the details. most prominently, I am completely in love with Totter Todd’s music right now (the dark place inside that you act from but never look at/swallow your fear, swallow it whole/you’re killing yourself with your own beauty).  BUS performances are always an honest and intense look at that which we are, the pieces of ourselves which we hide, which we let eat us from the inside, and the joy at relieving ourselves from such self-inflicted prisons.  there’s a certain part of myself that i am really not liking these days (in short: judgmental, and vocally), which is often exacerbated by visiting my family, and the performance last night brought a lot of that to the surface.  i am thinking i need a long strand of red string to tie around my wrist as a reminder of a few things i need to work on for a while (in the performance, such a string was used as a representation of your fear(s), which it is suggested in both song and action that you ingest, digest, and then regurgitate into something that tastes like relief).

thank you Bad Unkl Sista for always bringing such beauty, whether i am inside it or watching from afar. there’s another performance tonight @counterpulse in SF, which i’m sure will be similar but different. if you like intensity and songs and dances and abstract dreams that seem to say almost nothing directly but mean everything, i highly encourage you to attend tonight.

what does this have to do with rabbit holes and synchronicity?  the new Alice in Wonderland opened in SF this weekend, and we have a large crew (30+) who will be going to see it tonight, many of us in costume. and while the Disney version is just fine, those who have read the original texts know that Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass are much more than childrens’ stories, and are quite philosophically intricate and more than a little bit metaphysical.  it’s obvious why the psychedelic community latched onto its metaphors.

so with all the anticipation for the new film and mind wandering in that direction for this past week, particularly visiting my mother, who has an enormous collection of Alice in Wonderland memorabilia in her dining room/living room cabinets (indeed: dolls and figurines and books and all sorts of collectors items), walking out of the performance last night felt like the start of a weekend-long visit down the rabbit hole. then after another night of intense, crazy dreams, waking up this morning, it’s true: i’m really not sure i am the same person i was when i went to sleep last night, and if not, who that means i am today.

illin’

jay got sick last thurs night with what was at first thought to be food poisoning, from what unsure, and he was in bed and didn’t eat for 2 days.  which, you now, for a diabetic, is a little scary.  we went to a dinner party saturday night, and he sat in a room full of food and didn’t eat a thing.  i was feeling fine right up into that dinner party, although sluggish that afternoon, but at around 5AM sunday morning i woke up to a headache like i haven’t had since the last time we went to las vegas and my stomach in knots. i then spent all day sunday and all day monday in bed, under covers, eyes closed, unable to eat or drink a thing without it coming back up, my body literally shutting down.  yesterday i pulled myself together to go to work for a few hours and then attend the SF Fashion Feud, where, fueled by a red bull and a burrito, i finally started feeling like myself again.

however, going to bed after having your first meal in 3 days be a red bull and a burrito isn’t a recipe for a good night’s sleep, and i had some seriously tumultous dreams last night. i don’t remember all of them except the one right before i woke up, but i do know that they were all anxious, stressful, uneasy.

this is the one i recall:

i pulled out of the gate of my loft building in west oakland (a neighborhood often riddled with street crime IRL) onto the one-way street, going the wrong direction.  i was in some sort of high-speed golf cart type thing.  i was driving fast, the wrong direction.  i had a machine gun, or some other automatic weapon. i was firing streams of bullets randomly across the plaza intersection of West Grand and Mandela Parkway, in all directions, at oncoming traffic. i was full-throttle.  i was alone.  i was brazen.  i did not care.  i was blank.  i headed up mandela parkway, still going the wrong way, until i saw, parked ahead, a police car.  i abandoned my golf-cart and weapon.  i made it look like i was on foot.  i went running up the police car, suddenly the victim.  i was crying.  i was telling what i saw, giving the witness account but knowing that i was the one who had done it, guilt tying my stomach in knots, hoping to not get caught. this went on for a while, me playing the victim while knowing i was the offender. the anxiety, the self-hatred, was overwhelming. i couldn’t tell if i was remorseful about what i had done, or if i just didn’t want to get caught.  there didn’t seem to be a lot of remorse. just a lot of not wanting to get caught.

i woke feeling sick to my stomach, some of which leftover from my actual illness, some from the dream. i have never in my life been inclined to such violence. there is no part of me that even wants to play “shoot ‘em up” video games, where one pretends to kill. i have had a few violent outbursts in my life, and they totally caught me offguard.  so waking from this dream - in which initially i was utterly void of guilt, willing to kill innocents to express my anger and rage (at what i still don’t know) - i was horrified at myself.  that any part of my psyche could even have that ability. and then to flip to the role of being the guilty person pretending to be the victim - a person who would steal and rob and kill and then blame others, and then claim it was an act against them. that mindset was, in the end, even more disturbing than the initial role, more gut-wrenching. to live with that.

my coworker suggests that in our dreams, we are all of the roles, and that in this instance i was 1. the aggressor 2. the cop and 3. the victim.  and that some part of me is doing/wants to do something i know is wrong, then another part of me that stops me from doing it, and then i feel restrained, but guilty for even doing/wanting to do the thing in the first place, finally representing my feeling of restraint as being a victim. upon reflection i do not know what this thing is in my life that i could be feeling this way about. i could take some guesses, but there is nothing front of mind.

OR, perhaps i was putting myself in all 3 roles as a sort of empathic exercise.  there hasn’t been any recent significant bout of violence in my immediate ‘hood, but i still see signs of it on a daily basis, and reading the news there is no escaping the reality that life for the poor is only only getting poorer, and imaging that frustration is maybe where these dreams come from, as i ride the bus or bike through the city and see the homeless with their shopping carts, the youth with their attempts at making themselves feel big and part of something bigger, the elderly just trying to get by as invisibly as possible, having learned that standing out often only means being beaten down.

regardless of interpretation, i awoke with all of this in my consciousness, still feeling a little ill, waiting restlessly for the day when the entire world can take a global sigh of relief.

no strings attached

i want to walk naked through the streets with you, barefoot, our bodies and minds worn clean.

.
.
.::.
.
.
i don’t know what i was dreaming, but those are the words that were running through my head when i woke up this morning.

dreams of inadequacy

a painted room
a shelf to sort
i will do it
i will.
SHUT UP.
i will.
and then morning comes, and nothin is finished

projection

last night i had a dream wherein my longtime friend and tori fan Aurabelle and i went to a tori amos show at a small venue, and we kept telling the people who came with us how awesome and intense she is, and then she took the stage and proceeded to sing a couple of severely dark and disturbing “new songs” that sounded more like psychotic rants with banging on the piano and throwing chairs around the stage and breaking shit and then after like half an hour of this she completely lost it and started screaming and sobbing and eventually left the stage. the people we were with thought this was part of her “intensity” we told them about, but Aurabelle and i both started crying and hugging each other because it felt like had just watched someone we love have a horrible nervous breakdown. and then i woke up.

it wasn’t a good dream.

dream following

ariel has written a most beautiful post about following a dream - literally - that just made me feel all sorts of things - melancholy, joy, regret, sadness, a deep yearning for the fields and woods of my youth, an alice-in-wonderland sort of confusion about what is real and what is not and how we create these lives we live in. as i said in the comments, i often dream of the woods and streams where i grew up, and whenever i have a chance i go back there and wander the fields, hoping it never gets bulldozed into a subdivision, so this almost made me cry. it’s so much a thing that i would do and dream of doing, and she captured it beautifully.

political nightmares

i did not sleep well last night.
first, my body is sore from all the silly dancing and being stuffed into incredibly uncomfortable costumes @ yuri’s night, and then we went hiking yesterday on top if it, and when my muscles ache i find it hard to sleep.

second, i had a really frustrating dream. i dreamed that i had produced a bunch of brown t-shirts that said something about Obama on them in white text. somehow, one of the words was the exact opposite of what i meant, or perhaps there was “not” included that shouldn’t have been, so it said something like “Obama is not the future”. i don’t know what the exact phrase was, but the editing mistake was horrifying, and the t-shirts were being sold like hot cakes all over the internet and all kinds of conservative people were buying them and i couldn’t stop it from happening. i woke up frustrated and panicked and confused, especially since i’m not even a committed Obama voter and would never even think of selling political t-shirts on the net or doing anything that “activist”. i’m way too seriously skeptical of all politicians to ever even wear a candidate button, so why in this dream was i doing such a thing?

i think it’s because i sometimes feel like what i write here is equivalent to hula hooping naked with ‘free tibet’ painted across my chest at a rally, for example, and it makes me feel exposed and defensive, especially when it starts uncomfortable conversations with friends and family. that’s what i get for writing about politics when i said i wouldn’t. it’s a source of stress instead of a release valve for it, and i definitely don’t need any more stress.

the thunderjournal makes an appearance

speaking of weird happenings with people/blogs you’ve never met, ryan’s comment on the last post reminded me:

the ThunderJournal appeared in my dream the other night. i have no idea the exact context, such as dreams can be, but i was perhaps in a bookstore or a doctor’s office or somewhere perusing a collection of ‘zines - the self-published, xerox-stapled kind - one of which was written by a woman and there were pictures of flowers on the cover, and it was clearly titled “ThunderJournal”, and there were several issues/volumes. i wondered, in my dream, if ryan knew about this.

all mimsy were the borogoves

jay got up at about 4:30am this morning to catch a flight, and sometime between then and when i woke up a few hours later, i had a crazy dream.

yesterday i read dooce’s post about her “college dreams” - the kind where you show up to a class on exam day and don’t know anything, or find out you’ve been registered for a class all semester that you never went to (note: i did actually have a couple of very anxiety producing experiences in college there were not quite as dramatic as NEVER going to a class you had registered for, but close, and so for me these dreams don’t feel like total fiction and do produce a lot of anxiety) - and i guess reading her post triggered the dream i had last night.

it was different this time: this time, i was no longer at UMich - i had gone to another school - somewhere in Florida? - for my senior year, perhaps due to having trouble of some kind at UMich. several of my other friends and college roommates (aimee j in particular) were there too. at the dorm in florida, i kept wandering the halls, asking everyone how i was supposed to know what classes to attend. there was no calendar. i did not have a class schedule. everyone else was coming and going but i felt stuck there in my pajamas, unable to figure out how to figure out my classes. it sort of felt like the time i was an intern in DC and my roommates all had these very important intern positions and had to be at their jobs really early and wear suits and my intern position was sort of …undefined… and so i slept in late and barely did anything and was always just laying around in my pajamas while they scuttled back and forth and did important things. anyway, in my dream i was begging people to help me figure out what i was supposed to be doing and they all looked at me like i was nuts as they ran off with their books and papers. i finally found some sort of playbill that had my name listed being in class for something like 4 days, like for a 4 day seminar - and i had already missed 2 of the days. i was confused because i thought that i had transferred for the whole year, but the schedule said i was just there for a seminar.

at some point i stopped caring about figuring out the class schedule and was trying instead to find my friend marc. i had a bouquet of flowers to give him - black flowers, tied up with black ribbons and bows and black tissue paper, like for a funeral. while searching for marc, instead i found shannon, who was swinging from the ceiling in the main entranceway to the dorm (a two story entrance hall made of dark wood, with stairways going up in all directions and stained glass windows), sitting inside a large wooden chandelier that was really just a very large spice rack - like, instead of lights or candles, there were little glass jars of spices, and she was sitting in the middle. she was swinging back and forth, totally enamored with her spices, singly softly. this makes incredible sense, because shannon posted about her new spice rack the other day. it was very Alice in Wonderland, the scene with shannon and her spicerack, with the winding staircases and whatnot, and i think she may have even been dressed like Alice(?), which also makes sense now, because at the disco camping event next weekend, we are having a very large Mad Hatter Tea Party for which everyone is going to dress up in character, and i was thinking a lot about what to do for my character yesterday.

my dreams are obviously very impressionable. everything i read, think, or see gets blended into them. it’s rather amazing, my dreamlife. i’m glad that last night mine ended on a whimsical note and not with the anxious “ohmygodi’mfailingoutofcollege” feeling, as i hate waking up like that. instead, i woke up thinking of shannon, singing to her new amazing spicerack.

dancer dreams

a few months ago ariel reported that she had a dream wherein she was an amazing dancer, but in reality was having trouble living up to her own dream of herself, and i started this blog post in response, because i’ve had that dream. i was the most amazing yogic modern dancer, strong and lithe and moving over the floor like some kind of lightfilled elastic being, both in time to the music yet somehow seemingly effortless. i sometimes still use that dream to visualize movement whenever i’m dancing for performance in front of people. it’s great inspiration to see yourself as you’ve always wanted to be, and even if you think it’s impossible to be that person, to strive toward it, to get as close as possible. perfection is, after all, unattainable.

You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
- Jack London

it’s been three months since she had that dream and i started this post, and for some reason i hadn’t wanted to finished it, probably because i haven’t done anything about realizing that dream. i haven’t wanted to really admit that i’m not living up to my own dream of myself. i even had a very explicit conversation about this with a friend not shortly after i started this post, in which he encouraged me to be proactive in taking steps in becoming the person i’ve always dreamed i would/could/should be, and i promised i would and he has tried to goad me forward. yet, somehow, i’m still resistant, and have done none of the things i said i would (might) do that might help me realize the dream of being an amazing dancer. am i scared, or just lazy?

~~~~~~~~~~~~

BUT

i also sort of like being a dilettante. i’ve got my fingers in a lot of pots at the moment, and if i were to take the time and devote myself to just one (like scheduling in time for dance classes), the others would surely suffer. i don’t feel like i’ve found anything just yet that’s worth sacrificing everything else for; that, and i’m already an above average dancer (i can find at least a dozen people to vouch for that statement), so why push it? why not just be happy with my natural ability? i’m far too old to start a career as a dancer, so why bother? but then again, how would i know unless i’ve tried?

“I asked [Phyllis Diller], ‘How do you do so many things?’ And she said, ‘I don’t do anything that isn’t easy. I try things, and if they’re not immediately easy for me, I quit instantly.’ That’s some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten.”
-Penn Gillette

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a couple of weeks ago i went back to the gym and renewed my membership. i was having a bad PMS day, and all i really wanted was to go read all the gossip rags while slowly spinning my legs on the exercise bike, working out some of the physical tension, and then to go sit in the sauna. that’s what i did, telling myself that i’d start out slowly and work my way back up to regular workouts. that was 3 weeks ago. i just went back to the gym again today, and i haven’t been going to yoga either. i have grand plans to start going to the gym in the morning before work; i hear it makes you feel good, but honestly any time i can get myself there 2-3 times a week would be an improvement over the zero times a week i’ve been going.

rambling long story short:
need to get off ass and start having a little discipline. i never want to regret not doing these things. there’s a drop-in modern dance studio in berkeley that has evening classes. i think i should go check it out.