intellectual properties

QOTD: ‘i had to draw the drawing’

“i’ve always lived it as big as i could… my brother is married and retired and lives in staten island. and that’s good. his kids are all college educated. i had to do things. i had to draw the drawing, not look at someone else’s drawing and say ‘yeah, that’s a good drawing.’ since 1987 i’ve lived in a commune in brisbane called the annex. it used to be sex, drugs, and rock and roll. every sunday there was an orgy. we called it sunday services. man, that was fun. we had partners—that’s how my daughter was born—but the orgies were disconnected from that and it was fine. now it’s more about pasta dinners all together, and i’m a personal trainer and my roommate laura is a yoga teacher. do you know how high pasta is on the glycemic index? what i’ve learned is this: all the things other people think matter don’t matter. things other people see as sins. we’re all human. there’s a connection to it. as you get older you realize none of that stuff matters.”

- an SF cab driver, via scenes from my hood. it’s so San Francisco, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

on the bus (from “Veronica”)

“The bus humps and huffs as it makes a labored circle around a block of discount stores and a deserted grocery.  As the bus leans hard to one side, its gears make a high whining sound, like we’re streaking through space.  Looking beyond the stores, I glimpse green hills and a cross section of sidewalks with little figures toiling on them.  Pieces of life packed in hard skulls with soft eyes looking out, toiling up and down, around and around.  More distant green, the side of a building.  The bus comes out of the turn and stops at the transfer point.  It sags down with a gassy sigh.  Every passenger’s ass feels its churning, bumping motor.  Every ass thus connected, and moving forward with the bus.  The old white lady across the aisle from me sits on her stiff haunches, eating wet green grapes from a plastic bag and peering out to see who’s getting on.  The crabbed door suctions open.  Teenagers stomp through it, big kids in flapping clothes with big voices in flapping words.  “Cuz like–whatcho look–you was just a–ain’t lookin’ at you!”  The old lady does not look.  But I can feel her taking them in.  Their energy pours over her skin, into her blood, heart, spine and brain.  Watering the flowers of her brain.  The bag of green grapes sits ignored on her lap.  Private snack suspended for the public feast of youth.  She would never be so close to them except on the bus.  Neither would I.  For a minute, I feel sorry for rich people alone in their cars.  I look down on one now, just visible through her windshield, sparkling bracelets on hard forearm, clutching the wheel, a fancy-pant thigh, a pulled-down mouth, a hairdo.  Bits of light fly across her windshield.  I can see her mind beating around the closed car like a bird.  Locked in with privileges and pleasures, but also with pain.”

–from Veronica: A Novel, by Mary Gaitskill, the book I am currently reading. i have not read any of her other works, but this one reads, in style and content, somewhat like a female Bret Easton Ellis. slightly more poetic, but at the same time some of the sentences hit hard.  i like it.

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.

bad unkl sista: the study of soft: march 5&6 2010

hopefully i’ll be performing with BadUnklSista both of these nights next weekend - it should be intense, and beautiful.  come check it out, esp. if you’ve never seen BUS.

The Carpetbag Brigade and Bad Unkl Sista present two kaleidoscopic double-bill evenings of fun, disturbing physical theater and Butoh.

In “The Study of Soft”, featuring live music by Totter Todd (of Heavyweight Dub Champion), Pym (iampym.com) and F’kir Elderfae (Bad Unkl Sista), Bad Unkl Sista fuses multi-genre dance forms, live and original produced music, art installation, video and couture costuming into a continually evolving Butoh-based performance experience. For 2010 Bad Unkl Sista has begun a year long study of soft, and brings a different show to CounterPULSE each night.

The Carpetbag Brigade’s “You don’t know Jack” returns to CounterPULSE taking a Jungian twist on “Jack and the Beanstalk” with a dash of PTSD to create a surreal, comic tragedy of an alcoholic dead man and the shadow of his wildly dysfunctional family. Inspired by Robert Bly’s “The Sibling Society”, this funny, nightmarish fairy tale is a potent brew of physical theater, dance and a live musical score created by the ensemble cast.

tickets are $15-25 at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/100860

the last laugh

recently on This American Life (which is just one of the best things ever, and in addition to the radio broadcast, i highly also recommend the televised/video portions, which you can get via Netflix etc.), they had an episode in which they were searching for funny funeral stories, and apparently this was a hard thing to find.

so i just want to put it in writing that when i die, i want there to be humor at my funeral. it’s ok if you cry too, but there better be some laughter. song and dance/skits/standup comendy/whatever. i’m imagining more of a posthumorous posthumous roast centered around poking fun at yet celebrating me, my life, and the things and people that i love than a funeral.

that is all.

postmillennial hope

“I give thanks to America, a country insane enough to declare the pursuit of happiness to be an inalienable right.”

i’m reading Susan Sontag’s most excellent book In America: A Novel, about a group of well-to-do Polish people who give up everything - for some of them including fame and wealth - to become farmers/settlers in Southern California around 1876. why would these people, who had everything, give it all up to work as field hands? the book is amazing at expounding on the thoughts/ motivations of the such early immigrants - The Dream of America was *so big* that even those who had everything in their homelands were willing to give it all up for a shot at The Dream. how many of those dreams came true?

relatedly, yesterday i shared on gReader and facebook this piece from Adbusters written by Michael Larson, a philosophy teacher from Pittsburgh:

Postmillennial Tension: Can we be the ones we’ve been waiting for?

some excerpts:

That dominant ideal of modernity is tied to a notion of ever-expanding progress and limitless consumption. The oil crisis of 1973 signaled the onset of the postmodern malaise. “Our future was all of a sudden mortgaged,” writes Bourriaud in Altermodern. So while capital has continued expanding its reach in other areas, there has been a lingering denial – an inability to mourn the lost object and the dream’s impossibility. If this was the death of the dream, then our present reality of global warming, water and food shortages, market collapse and the continued proliferation of violent factionalism make it clear that we had better get on with mourning and confront the sorrow we have been trying to repress. Putting it off has only allowed the problems to grow.

We have had a century of continuity in which the basic operating assumptions of the economic system have been hegemonic. In fact this version of “modernity” was to have closed the book on history: We have reached the best of all possible worlds; there are no alternatives. Proclaiming the end of history intimates that our desires have been satiated and that there is nothing further to strive for.

i don’t read adbusters too much anymore because i think a lot of it IS too hopeless/ armageddonist/depressing, but i still subscribe to the online feed and what caught my eye about this one is that there has been something in my mind for a really long time now with respect to my particular demographic - educated middle class americans with plenty of food, clothing, shelter - that goes something like “WE HAVE EVERYTHING.  WHY AREN’T WE HAPPY?”, which seems simple, but it is all heavy with a million questions about both of the words “everything” and “happy”, and extends way beyond myself and my community to America as a whole, and our self-image of always “the best. america is the best. the best of everything is here. it is yours to take if you work hard enough”.

but it turns out that maybe, just maybe, that isn’t true, that the American Dream was a fallacy, or, even worse: what if the “everything” isn’t enough when you get it? what if, when you get to the top run of the ladder - the house, the yard, the boat, the kids, the degrees, the “everything” - what if then that isn’t enough? it must be really depressing to get to the top and realize it’s not far enough.

my speculation is that, like the early Europeans who came from perfectly good lives with solid communities to risk everything on the American frontier, there is a part of human nature that is utterly insatiable, no matter what you give it, and that the “everything” we want isn’t as physical as we’ve been lead to believe - via consumerism, marketing - the “everything” is something intangible, and possibly unattainable. it’s what drives us as humans to do what we do. if it were attainable, how would we evolve?

my generation (X), and the next (Y) seems to be the first in a few to really FEEL this. we were taught, growing up in the 80s especially, that once certain things were attained, peace and happiness would follow. but all after our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents hard work, building industries and fighting for civil rights and freedom, those of us in the educated middle-class who have access to all the things our forefathers dreamed about, here we are, standing on the top rung of the ladder, and we’re still not happy, and the world - and the rest of the world - it’s even more of a mess than before.

that is why the one sentence that hit me most in this piece was “Jean-Paul Sartre described anguish as the recognition of responsibility and the ensuing need to act without guarantee, without hope.“  as Americans, we have a lot of responsibility in this world, as we consume most of the resources and control a lot of the politics. but what hope can we feel now about it all, when it seems we inherited a wealth of square pegs but none of them fit in what turned out to be round holes?

so then finally, the author asks:

So we find ourselves in this moment of rupture, precariously exposed to risk and perhaps devoid of hope. Can we think of these facts as possibilities? Can we confront our situation and imagine what things might be like otherwise, even without guarantees? The end of history has reached its end. Can we be the ones we have been waiting for?

i also felt a lot of this, but wasn’t able to express it, during Obama’s HOPE campaign, like all of Democratic and minority America felt like everything had been done - all the groundwork was laid out, and now everyone was pinning their future on one man/one moment that was going to seal the deal. HOPE is what Obama tried to sell us, and for the election season, we bought it. but here we are 1+ years later, and people are getting depressed because the whole world didn’t change when Obama took office.

so what about now? we have to stop waiting for the thing that is going to save us. we have to stop standing on the top rung of the ladder, thinking there is no where else to go. we have the tools to build a new future. we are what we have been waiting for.

a key case for abortion

in december, an old high school friend of mine sent an email about health insurance coverage of abortions to my high school alumni email list, asking all of us to take action opposing it.

i responded to him that i would not sign his petition, and that if he wanted to hear why, i’d be willing to discuss it. he responded that he was open to hearing all sides, and i was welcome to present my perspective.

i looked around the web for the best case study i could find to fully illustrate why i think it’s important to have abortion at least be an OPTION for health insurance providers and patients.  but i couldn’t find anything that really hit home, was too emotional about it to respond personally, and couldn’t engage, and so i never responded.  until today, when i read this story.  it’s brash, yes, and not a “medical case study”. but it’s 100% honest story that presents a side that isn’t often heard: for some women, pregnancy is physical hell, and sometimes, it is the best choice for you and your family.

i sent him this story. whatever “side” you are on, please read the whole thing below, but really, besides the medical specifics of her case being a perfect example of why it should be a MEDICAL OPTION, this is the most important point:

“…abortion is an acceptable choice. It is not shameful and
it need not be a secret.

More than 45,000,000 legal abortions have occurred since Roe v. Wade
for tens of millions of women, but you almost never seem to hear their
stories (unless they’re now a pro-lifer with a huge guilt concept).

Why don’t we talk about this more? Well, because we’ve been taught not to. By the women (and men involved) before us who didn’t talk about their abortions, by the religious right who told us we were whores for wanting to enjoy sex without the punishment of pregnancy and childbirth, and by the left who hung their heads in sorrow that people “had to” get abortions.”

full story below:

Continue reading »

you are what you think

“Watch your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.”

–unknown

the ugly truth

in response to THIS:

But the more I write on the internet, the more I keep bumping up against people who don’t want to wonder and move. They want to stand still in the simplicity of knowing it all.

The truth is a mess of lies and broken bones. First it’s this. Then it’s that. And then it’s gone. Is that bleak and negative and hopeless and ugly? What’s the alternative? If I bring up Haiti (or Auschwitz), it’s not like I’m TRYING to be hopeless and ugly. It just fucking is hopeless and ugly. That’s what it is, man, when people fly planes into buildings and the earth swallows 200,000 people. No one gets out alive. That makes ME a bummer?

If you think I’m a bummer, then I feel misunderstood.

i was just discussing this concept today WRT suburbia, and some of the people who decide to live there, and how different their worldviews must be than mine. not everyone, but some of them, trying to escape all the inequities of the world and live in a clean little bubble, and how i either ride my bike or the bus or the car through the ghetto at least 2x a day, and almost every time i see something that makes my heart break.  why am i choosing this instead of what they have chosen? sometimes i think it’s because it helps me to see the truth of this world, a point of view i cannot live without;  it keeps me grounded, and compassionate.  keeping yourself protected only breeds isolationist tendencies.

that whole Keats “beauty is truth, truth beauty” thing - i call bullshit.  sometimes there is nothing beautiful about it, despite the poetic temptation of believing everything that has truth in it is beautiful.  i agree there is so much beauty in the world that sometimes it is enough to make you want to cry;  that doesn’t exclude the opposite from also being true.  i think about this a lot, really - how to be positive in a world full of negative, without putting blinders on. and i also hate that some people think i’m a downer because these are the things that fill my brain - these things i didn’t create, and sometimes i need to talk about them, hoping that words will help.

miss velvet cream/metamorphica in NOVO Mag

photos from a Metamorphica figure drawing workshop i did almost a year ago with miss velvet cream as the stylist just turned up in print in NOVO magazine’s current fashion issue:

(that’s me on the right)

the next Metamorphica is on Feb 26th with BadUnklSista as the stylist, which never disappoints.  if you or someone you know enjoys figure drawing, check it out.