-experiment-
I’m not going to do resolutions this year. I’m just going to wing it. I tried too hard this year to make everything perfect and I think I ended up missing out on a lot when I spent my time watching it all tally up. I don’t need a grand master goal. What I will say is I feel blessed for my ridiculous friends, my cracked family, the endless opportunities at my disposal, a few new great albums (yay Animal Collective, get em!) and, of course, the best and most utilized purchase of 2007: my gold lamé halter leotard. Lot’s o’ Love,
-Claire
Happy 2008!
You know what’s not great? Losing your passport.
I know. I lost mine. I will still be able to go to Dublin in 13 days but it was looking a leetle sketchy for a while. Now I would like to share some secret government code words what I’ve learned from the experience when I called and said I needed a passport in 17 days:
Monsieur GOV Man: Hmm, let me see what your options are.
Translation: This is bad. You are a grand champion supreme dipshit for losing your passport.
Monsieur GOV Man: You are not going to Dublin.
Translation: I am a wanker who works in a small cubical in the downtown courthouse where it smells like burnt rubber and wet cardboard. I administer passports but I never go anywhere and so I have to entertain myself by seeing if I can make you cry. Oh, look you’re crying. Nice.
Monsieur GOV Man: We do not have your informatin on file and your copy of your passport is useless.
Translation: We need to send your information through a branch of the FBI (true!) because you might have a plot to blow up Ireland, or to just go there.
Monsieur GOV Man: You could do the 7-10 day option…
Translation: This option takes 3-4 weeks, but we like to call it the 7-10 day option.
Monsieur GOV Man: You will have to do an expedited order.
Translation: You will have to give us lots of money.
Monsieur GOV Man: We have authorized outside companies to walk your passport process through.
Translation: You will pay another company [In Florida!] lots of money to do our job, because we are understaffed and surprisingly inefficient at shipping and printing passports to Arizona.
Monsieur GOV Man: I’m glad we could figure out a solution.
Translation: I’m glad you have enough money to make this go through. Also, I was getting bored with the crying and the begging.
Monsieur GOV Man: That will be 2-4 days.
Translation: Keep checking your mailbox.
In conclusion, don’t lose your passport kids.
Enough
Have you ever seen the Mexican? With Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt. I really like that movie, it’s one of those great romantic comedies with guns, so you can take guys to it and make them think they took you, like Grosse Pointe Blank. Julia’s haircut is great in that one, I’m going to cut my hair just like that in 9 months. Brad Pitt is just right in that movie, a little shaggy but not too elfin woodsy a lá Legends of the Fall (I WANT THOSE HOURS BACK BRAD) and not too strung-out looking like in Fight Club- I never feel like destroying something beautiful.
Anyways. Long tangent, inside a tangent. Pathetic. You know that scene in the airport? Where Sam (Julia) hangs up on Brad (yeah, like I remember his character’s name, he’s Brad) and the hit man Winston, (yep, remember that one) asks her, when she’s exasperatedly sighing and bitching brad out, “When you love someone, when is enough enough?” and she doesn’t know, and the answer is “never.” Then at the end she asks Brad and he knows the answer, because, you know, he’s Brad?
I’ve believed in that line for about 5 years now. I just recently decided that it is bullshit.
Ann Patchett helped. I read “Truth and Beauty,” for my memoir class. In it she describes her friendship with Lucy Grealy (from Autobiography of a Face, I just know you all went out and read it already….) and gives a more well rounded (if obviously one sided) picture of her friend. It’s an incredible read for many reasons, they’re like people you could see yourself being friends, yet they are also sort of Olympian. But one part stuck out to me especially. There’s a scene (SPOILER ALERT) where Lucy has gotten very into heroin after battling depression partially caused by her many failed surgeries, pressing book deadline and fears about being unloved because of her face and self-perception. They sit down, and at this point, you can still feel how close they are, but they’re running with different crowds, and Ann says something like, “I’ll leave you over this.”
This is a woman who literally CARRIED another woman, her best friend, around NYC, to dinner, to movies, to the pharmacy when she couldn’t walk because she had to get part of her leg removed in an experimental surgery to fix her jaw (scary, yes?). And here she was saying, I will cut you out, I will leave you, we will end- if you keep hurting yourself and keep hurting me by doing it.
You can do that? You can just leave people behind? This is a revelation, a seemingly simple, obvious one. At some point, someone, even if you love them, may hurt you, enough that it’s ok, more than ok, to say enough.
My mom called me right before I came home for break. She was crying. She had been offered a chance to go on a two-week tour of Spain. Essentially for free. It’s part of the program she works for to take recent high school grads in groups on trips to Europe. She’s been to Ireland, England, Italy, Germany, Austria and France. This trip would just be her and the two others who run the program testing it out. She was thinking of not going. I told her she was an idiot. She told me she wasn’t like me, she didn’t go on adventures. I asked where she thought I learned to be like that.
She didn’t want to go because of my father and brother, both of whom are, deep down, good amazing people. They are both at a point in their lives where they need help, from someone, but this is ridiculous. My brother, after his first semester of college, one year after he got out of his 4th substance abuse rehab program had failed a class, he had a huge fight with my dad and they were thinking of pulling him out of school. They aren’t going to pay for him to party and make the thoughts behind his eyes run even slower than they do now. When I got home my brother and father had just had a huge blow-out over my brother’s supposedly horrifying myspace account which he left on the computer screen (way to go champ). Doors were slammed, the air felt thick and electric when I went in the house. My mom’s Christmas cookie candle was burning alone, hopeful and ignored in the kitchen. When my dad was helping me move my boxes in, my mom went to open the door for him, and it was awkward because the box was big, the doorway small, and he cut his finger on something. He screamed, “FUCK,” like he’d lost the finger to a table saw and asked why she had stood in that way. Like she did it on purpose. It was the kind of anger displacement and sore finger pointing used by kindergarten children.
She didn’t want to go. To Spain. On a trip maybe ZERO of the world’s population will ever be offered. For them. The man she’s separated from a year this month, the one who wont stop feeding the dog under the table no matter how much it bothers her, who leaves his dish after dinner for her to clean, after 25 years. The son who drains her teacher’s salary to buy pot and fuck around, who gets calls in the middle of the night, just one ring, the one who can’t get a ride home from his sketchy friends and so has me pick him up from random Walmarts, Walgreens(s?) and fast food stores all over town. He gets in my car and always smells like axe body spray, cigarettes and every drunken mistake I’ve ever made. I always suddenly hate whatever music is in the car, when he gets in. He sinks things often.
Enough is enough. Now.
She’s going to Spain. I don’t care if I have to carry her on the plane myself. Let’s see those only one 4 liter plastic bag o’ liquid ma’m freedom fighters even try to stop me.
We all have been given our own bodies, our own minds for a reason. I believe in love, I believe in helping others, I do not believe in self-destruction.
Enough.
Shit. It’s Christmas.
Am I using this for displacement now? Very possible…
Well, I guess what I’m saying is, take a little time to take care of yourself. It’s the only way, really, that you’ll be able to take care of anyone else, you know, if they deserve it.
I’ll write something happier tomorrow.
you know what’s better than writing final papers…
This:
http://www.freerice.com/
It also feeds more people and makes you feel smart. Party on.
you know what I wish?
That I could make my “looking for” on my facebook account say “male outtie spoon who french braids.”
BREAK ON THROUGH: Junior Year, Semester 1, Playlist Of Super Great Tasty Hot and Bothered Hits
1. Super Sexy Woman: Sufjan Stevens (She has super sexy thighs, for super reproduction. This is a Mary, Claire, Kelsey song).
2. Blue Mind: Alexi Murdoch (remember when you were only a child?)
3. Last Dance With Mary Jane: Tom Petty (Mary, I was in line at the dining hall the other day and some guy goes “oh my my, oh hell yes,” and I went “honey put on that party dress,” and then I made a new friend. Thank you.)
4. Please Me Like You Want To: Ben Harper (sigh)
5. Meat Market: Everybody Else (Favorite song to drive around Claremont with my windows rolled down to, I realize of course that it is bad punk pop rock at it’s best/worst).
6. Motel for Misery: Tommy Jordan (I love this song. If I made you a CD this year, you probably got this song)
7. I Love to Dance: Langhorne Slim (This song reminds me of little dancer Alex)
8. Cry to Me: Soloman Burke (mmm. saucy.)
9. Sad Eyes: Bat for Lashes (song which tiny version of Ben Stiller named Ryan Heffington choreogrpahed to when Sydney and I went to dance at the Edge. Most beautiful movement I’ve ever seen a man with a top knot do.)
10. Sleeping Lessons: The Shins (Shins Concert! Berkley! Stanford! Woo!)
11. Time to Pretend: MGMT (Kelsey song. Love it.)
12. Lusty: Lamb (Dance drama song. All alone in this heat…)
13. Let’s Dance: M. Ward (Four different people gave me this song this year, I really like it, thanks guys)
14. The Interloper: Hugo (Dance Drama song. Pony chicken, pony chicken…)
15. Gimme More: MISS BRITNAY (The song during which I only had to look around backstage, and there would be Alissa and or Michael, half naked. gimme more.)
16. Lover’s Spit: Feist- but it’s actually Broken Social Scene’s song, you know, in case you didn’t know (When I went home for thanksgiving break I watched Half Nelson by myself and I really liked it and had great emo moments during the scenes to this song, and several afterwards by myself.)
17. The Good Life: Kanye West (Let’s go on a living spree!)
18. Please: Ray LaMontagne (Oh this song. I’ve listened to this song too many times this semester. It’s just lovely and sexy and sad and wonderful.)
19. Soul Kitchen: The Doors (mmmyes)
Choice Interpretation
So I’m done with my memoir class, which is great, because I’m done with a class, but also sad because I loved that class. [Great sentence]. The following is the first thing I wrote, and the class voted it should go in an anthology we’re making of our work, Walt helped me with the first version and this one includes stuff about the dance drama. Yay. Also, I didn’t know how to end it so I stole from blog stuff, which is proof positive that having a blog makes you not fail out of life.
Choice Interpretation
I was wearing a blue full body unitard, complete with stirrup foot straps. On top of this was a large white fencing bra creating lusciously stationary mounds across my chest. Then add a sports cup. They’re called jock straps, I remember. The kind I went with my mom and little brother to buy when he started little league and he looked eagerly down the display and pointed to the largest example of Extreme Package Protection and said that one! I was wearing that one! and it was cutting into my thighs while I sat. This ensemble was covered up by a man’s white button-up shirt, but not a Banana Republic-lazing-against-the ol’-white washed-Connecticut-beach house- rail, oh no, we’re talking disco rodeo embroidery, swirling and curling and flowering down my torso to meet with my own skirt. A cute, slightly boho, summery skirt that used to make me feel like an ephemeral flower child when I wore it but that I can now never look at in the same way. I was cast as the shy transsexual in the dance about transsexuals.
I, unlike the rest of my dancing blue fellows in unitard, was not allowed to reveal the highly symbolic sports equipment suspiciously bulging beneath my clothes indicating ambiguous and almost caricatured gender confusion. Instead, I ran with a large spoon. I met, flirted with, and delicately– yet earnestly– dry humped the downstage right wall. I sat front and center on the stage, during alumni weekend, with the president of Pomona College out there in the just visible audience, my legs spread wide. I was pretending to birth a clock.
I looked seductively out to the glowing red exit sign above the theater’s seats as instructed, but my mind wandered. What the hell am I doing? How did I get here? Did my Mom find her comp ticket up front? She’s always been really accepting of everything I do, but is this just too much? Is she having a heart attack out there somewhere, or sinking down low in her seat, trying to hide the red hair and face that permanently link us together? What’s she going to tell her friends when they ask about my performance? Are people going to see me in the dining hall and think: hey isn’t that the clock fetish girl? I should not have eaten that extra cookie. Then it was time to get up and put my natal clock prop backstage quickly before we transitioned into the greek tragedy-esque swaying orgy- my favorite part.
That was one of my most recent experiences with modern dance. My first was when I was ten years old and my mother, who is occasionally more prone to spontaneity than to research, took me to see a rather mature show at a local university. There, a small brunette ghost of a woman rolled across a blue lit stage covered only in Saran wrap while an old man in a mysteriously damp looking trench coat muttered furiously at a cardboard train with a huge white clock over his head that continually ticked down the time before he died or became a tiger, I can’t remember which. There were church bells, followed by flashes of orange, I remember that. I spent the entire show tugging at her sleeve wishing to leave while she shushed me and muttered something about the ticket price. I wonder now what she thought of that rolling woman, bound in reflective but translucent plastic. I wonder now who or what she saw that kept her in her seat.
When thinking of performance in dance, I imagine moving to music, through music, with music, creating out of nothing yes, but creating something someone watching will understand, appreciate, and maybe, if you’re good, even be moved by. Dancing allows me to decide when everyone looks at me. I do not blush when I dance. Backstage I’m safe, special and in preparation to take the magic that hovers waiting in the wings for me out to the audience. Onstage I am sure and have command over myself, I draw confidence and strength from those who sit and watch, held in place by my movement. I’ve always loved dance, but when I first encountered modern, I could not see how such a seemingly random and lawless moving discourse could ever empower its master or inspire its audience.
At college, long before I donned the blue suit, I was in a piece, almost as strange, with a red heart-shaped sack we all either carried around reverently or carelessly dropped. This was supposed to symbolize the way we, as humans, put our trust in others and then watch as the idiots we let into our lives screw it all up. When we showed our work to the directors of the five-college modern dance department they nodded at her explanation of the piece and then told my choreographer it was “too easy to follow, too with the music, and would she maybe think about changing the accompaniment to techno?” I began to learn that to each person what counts as “good” modern dance is all up for interpretation and taste, and occasionally, putting your beautifully rhythmic and lyrical piece to choppy techno beats.
In Garrison Hall at Scripps I once sat through a ten-minute piece in which an Asian man dressed in a yellow body suit and a white man in red, chanted in what seemed to be a Native American prayer and rolled into each other like overturned ketchup and mustard bottles. At least you can walk away from the million-dollar painting of a red dot on stretched white canvas in a gallery; it’s rude to walk out on a person.
I once traveled on assignment for my first modern dance class to Santa Monica to see a professional dance show recommended to me by my professor. In a cramped, fashionably run-down studio space I learned why you should never trust a man in silver lamé warm up pants who counts music in nines.
My program told me the piece was called “Room” and was a solo by a man named Layard. He was a short, slight man who could not have weighed more than 115 pounds. Dressed in a shockingly shamrock green velvet suit complete with top hat and gloves lined with gold corded embroidery, he walked around his stage- really just the floor- inside a circus ring made by we, the audience, sitting in a wide circle. He had a long headless rose stem in his mouth and looked like a strange mix breed of toreador and ringmaster. Suddenly he opened his mouth and ferociously spit out a perfect red rose. The ample blossom made a clean arc through the air before landing heavy with his saliva on the floor with a wet thud. Next he threw tarot cards previously hidden up his sleeve onto the ground. He retrieved one card and, seemingly appalled by its content, began a speech that switched from an elevated commandingly clear voice to gurgling gibberish during which he would actually drool on himself. From what I could hear or try to focus on when my mind could break away from the image of his dangling mouth fluid, the speech was about show, theatrics and illusion.
The real horror, however, came when amidst his crumbling animalistic diatribble he turned in my direction and walked, tiny man-hips swiveling toward me. Standing directly in front of me, but looking wildly all around the circle, he took off his top hat and released a rain of bright red feathers. He took off his gloves and jacket, and his skin was coated and dripped with red glitter. In the violent red lighting it looked like diva armor, like blood. Then against all I was willing of him, he took off his velvet pants, his green shiny shirt to reveal a miniscule, red, woman’s lacy bustier and see-through silk mini-skirt with red feathers lining the bottom. It looked like the kind of costume they used to make us wear to dance competitions where we would she-bang our little nine year old bodies around to remixes of Selena, that or the kind of thing you see in small town sex shop windows. Either way, it wasn’t long before he began to take that off too. He turned to me as I became his personal clothing rack. He draped his skirt and red lacy thong panties on my shoulder so they bled down my chest and then he took his bustier, its laces lying limp, long and stringy and placed it on my lap. He then reached out, this naked, wet, sparkling little man, and stroked my cheek with a sweaty, glitter-covered hand.
I’ll never forget him, not just because he looked like some Liberace fantasy Adam figure, but because of what I saw when he did finally look directly at me. Up close I could see that he had large dark puppy dog eyes, like Goofy in old Disney cartoons, with the long nose, a perfect bulbous sideways oval at the tip, and a drooping slope along his cheeks. Later on, when I was safely back at Claremont, my cheek scrubbed clean of the scarlet flecks, I wondered about him outside his Room, where he wasn’t allowed to parade his flaccid penis and box of props around for public consumption. When he goes to Starbucks he’s still a very short, very skinny man with a strange face and an even stranger occupation. In five minutes flat this man, whom I didn’t even know or speak to, told me about how people can be blinded with showery, how voice can be stripped by sexual confusion, gender bent, the uncomfortable shoved out and made to be discussed. Or at least that’s what I got out of it. I didn’t ask any other audience member what they thought, secure as I was in my own superior analytical skills.
It’s been too long for me to figure out what happened in that first modern dance piece with the Saran wrap lady and the tiger/dead guy I saw with my mother. Maybe I’ll ask her about it someday since I’m old enough now that we can talk about the hard things you don’t know to ask about as a child. Maybe she was intrigued by the movement, maybe she related as a woman to the translucently bound female figure, or maybe she just wanted to stick it out the entire show she had paid to see. I retain that the condiment rain dance duet was just garbage. And although I wasn’t sure I belonged in the plastic protective wear of a large jock strap and fencing bra last semester, I know now the choreographer of the piece did, at that time. Thinking about him and our time spent together in rehearsal, when he could not comment on his own sexuality while we explored it in the dance, I realized he was lost trying to define himself and he was without any other safe place to bring it out for consideration. Creating that piece and having us present the squirmy themes that chased him around in his head was his way of exploring an internal debate and inviting others to do it with him. It’s difficult to really convey everything I’ve seen and done under the heading of modern dance. It would appear to be a fluid discourse, an outlet through which people can attempt to portray the crazy things they’ve seen and thought in the jumbled worlds of their minds. Although it may make people frown in confusion or preemptively choose an aisle seat, modern dance can be a wonderful exhibition of the contemporary human struggle for self-expression and communication.
This semester I found myself in a dance show based entirely on the poetry of Jim Morrison from The Doors. During one section we danced around with 2 foot glow sticks like some LSD crazed rave monkeys. We pardoned ourselves for the light show section, figuring if someone came to see a show entirely composed of poetry written by a guy who spent almost an entire decade eating peyote buttons and howling at the moon, they were getting their money’s worth. After the show, it was the most complimented piece. My “solo,” consisted of me just sitting in a chair saying one poem. I sat in my chair, a desk chair I myself had upholstered with gold fabric into a shimmering thrown, and thought about the wonderful things I’d done in dance, the beautiful and empowering foundation I’d built to sit upon. I felt my heartbeat racing in my temple, pumped to an amplified pulsation from the previous fast-paced dance number. As I spoke another’s words aloud I felt the dance within the rhythm of the poem and felt myself within it too. I had taken those words, so long rehearsed and made them my own. I sat still, a ringmaster in my own right like Layard in his circle laying it all out there, naked and lit, feeling the beat of my heart in my brain and allowed myself to speak. I wonder now what it was that the audience heard.
the rrrreal world
I wonder what it will be like when I have to leave college and no one will make me my own stack of fresh warm fluffy chocolate chip pancakes simply because I frowned and sighed when there were no chocolate chip pancakes left in the tray marked “chocolate chip pancakes.”
I think it will be very scary with less time to read long winded pre-1900 british literature about a scullery maid who covers herself in chimney soot and has secret kinky hearth sex with a gentleman of ill-repute who just happens to be half her height (yep). And also there will probably less personal pancake service.
Who wants to start a puppet tribe?
