Googled "Eros by any other name" and it turns out that, yes, it is such anobvious pun that it has been used many times (and here I was, thinking I was being clever!). One is the title of an article about an exhibit that opened in Vancouver, one that featured partners engaged in sex before an audience- and the whole debate, is it art simply because you "do it" in a museum and charge people to watch?
It's a dilemma, I suppose. How to be original as history piles up, as search engines get more efficient. Everyone's "done it" before, probably "done it" better, probably "done it" so many times everyone is tired and bored and jaded and moved on.
There is no new trick under the sun, nothing original or intimate that hasn't been seen before. Everything, everything is "been there, done that."
Thursday, January 3, 2008
A Poem: Hem(Ophelia)c: Dehiscence
All the mad mad world in vein
kept cycling, and to what end?
All the blind and hurtling pain
course and surge around again.
Who are you? My love, my death?
the ground beneath my feet, my sky?
Who drowns me in the river Lethe?
Who will not let your mem'ry die?
All questions leave my heart in holes
and seeping what you bled in me
blossomed flower, platelets, soul
all drown the hopes you bred in me
Commit the wound, and thence to free
this useless pulse that never clots.
Break all promises with me
lay on my grave forget-me-nots.
Ere all the mad mad world in vein
keeps cycling, and to what end?
All the blind and hurtling pain
course and surge around again.
kept cycling, and to what end?
All the blind and hurtling pain
course and surge around again.
Who are you? My love, my death?
the ground beneath my feet, my sky?
Who drowns me in the river Lethe?
Who will not let your mem'ry die?
All questions leave my heart in holes
and seeping what you bled in me
blossomed flower, platelets, soul
all drown the hopes you bred in me
Commit the wound, and thence to free
this useless pulse that never clots.
Break all promises with me
lay on my grave forget-me-nots.
Ere all the mad mad world in vein
keeps cycling, and to what end?
All the blind and hurtling pain
course and surge around again.
I HATE THE REAL HOUSEWIVES OF ORANGE COUNTY!!!!!!!
There, just needed to say that.
I mean, here's a show that's an example of the lowest common denominator of American society... It makes me glad to be poor and struggling, because if I ever am as rich and as shallow and as empty as those "tanned and boned" botox browed bimbos, or their obnoxious look-over-the-shoulder pick-the-next-fresh-peach husbands, I'd RATHER DIE...
How many times will we need new seasons of stupid shows like this to learn: Money doesn't equal happiness, doesn't equal sophistication, doesn't equal intelligence. It's a means to an end, and if your end means sucking fat from your "end" then your "mean"-ingless.
I mean, here's a show that's an example of the lowest common denominator of American society... It makes me glad to be poor and struggling, because if I ever am as rich and as shallow and as empty as those "tanned and boned" botox browed bimbos, or their obnoxious look-over-the-shoulder pick-the-next-fresh-peach husbands, I'd RATHER DIE...
How many times will we need new seasons of stupid shows like this to learn: Money doesn't equal happiness, doesn't equal sophistication, doesn't equal intelligence. It's a means to an end, and if your end means sucking fat from your "end" then your "mean"-ingless.
Random Thoughts: Distance, Relevance, Liberation of the Stage (rambling!)
IDEA ONE: regarding distance.
Distance: how it brings depth to space.
In the comfort of the near and accessible,
we deal (easily) with the surfaces of things,
the surfaces of people.
everything is as it appears.
But in confronting the terrible-ness of distance,
one sees that places, people, things
are no longer innocent
but accompanied by a pain
the pain of the inability to endure the distance to reach them
and as a result everything takes on a depth
you can see through the skin of things
terribly see through them.
distance changes us, changes everything.
We SUFFER distances...
the distances between people...
insurmountable.
but perhaps, at times, put there on purpose.
IDEA TWO: relevance. The relevant revonant.
perhaps the greatest fear of the elderly (and arguably everyone)
is that they will become, or ARE, irrelevant
to the present discussion.
time is, after all, like an hourglass.
the future is the sand that is slipping gradually
the past is the sand that has passed and settled
the present is the narrowest point, where everything gathers
as through a fist
only to slip away through a minute hole.
the shape of time, the narrow present, is the same shape
of an idealized woman.
she too slips away,
somewhere between our
hopes and memories.
We can't hold onto her.
but back again to relevance.
it is not only a concern of the elderly
although it is perhaps felt most acutely by them
it is the concern of everyone
everyone wants to be RELEVANT,
a part of the present narrative,
a character in the story.
to be irrelevant is a fate worse than the
death of the protagonist, the death of the antagonist,
because at least their deaths matter,
have consequence.
irrelevance places one beyond the scope of things
beyond the scope of significance...
SO: a revonant, if i remember correctly,
is an undead spirit of someone who suffered a violent death,
it returns for one reason and one reason alone,
vengeance.
it cannot be stopped (except perhaps by fire)
until its thirst for vengeance has been slaked.
a relevant revonant... an irrelevant revonant.
a spirit whose vengeance no longer matters,
is no longer relevant???
IDEA THREE: the liberation of the stage
in the story Kipapa, and others (notably Exit Stage Right), there is the idea that the stage, that theatre, somehow is a liberation.
for an individual like Cliff, who "thinks too much,"
for whom life is like a chess board against an
invisible and all knowing adversary,
for whom the future is a possible Armageddon,
an unavoidable Atlantis (ala Plato)
an unavoidable Pompei (ala "Cities in Dust" by Siouxsie and the Banshees)
for whom strategy upon strategy cannot avoid a dark fate...
how is the stage a liberation from such a quandary?
to be someone else...
Replacements lyrics:
"If it's just a game,
then we'll break down just in case.
Then again,
I'll tell you what we can do:
You be me for a while
and I'll be you."
The theatre is a liberation and a cage... It is a liberation in the sense that it imagines the perfect audience, in the same manner that a writer must imagine the perfect reader, in the same manner (in a way) that a lover imagines the perfect love... The performance of an actor is always for this perfect audience, the audience that will recognize the transcendence of the actor into her role; acting is an extension of the self, an extending of the self INTO the another, through the mediation of the eye and ear and heart of an idealized audience... there are those that may hold that acting is actually a self-effacement, but that isn't accurate (at least I don't believe so); nor is it precisely self-expression, because those who hold roles to be mere mirrors of the self are not being flexible and true to the realities of their role... it is a self-extension, a stretching of the self outwards towards the role and towards the idealized audience...
the trap of theatrics is that it is always a performance for an other. in the absence of an imagined other, it does not know "how to act." It doesn't know how to "be oneself."
Distance: how it brings depth to space.
In the comfort of the near and accessible,
we deal (easily) with the surfaces of things,
the surfaces of people.
everything is as it appears.
But in confronting the terrible-ness of distance,
one sees that places, people, things
are no longer innocent
but accompanied by a pain
the pain of the inability to endure the distance to reach them
and as a result everything takes on a depth
you can see through the skin of things
terribly see through them.
distance changes us, changes everything.
We SUFFER distances...
the distances between people...
insurmountable.
but perhaps, at times, put there on purpose.
IDEA TWO: relevance. The relevant revonant.
perhaps the greatest fear of the elderly (and arguably everyone)
is that they will become, or ARE, irrelevant
to the present discussion.
time is, after all, like an hourglass.
the future is the sand that is slipping gradually
the past is the sand that has passed and settled
the present is the narrowest point, where everything gathers
as through a fist
only to slip away through a minute hole.
the shape of time, the narrow present, is the same shape
of an idealized woman.
she too slips away,
somewhere between our
hopes and memories.
We can't hold onto her.
but back again to relevance.
it is not only a concern of the elderly
although it is perhaps felt most acutely by them
it is the concern of everyone
everyone wants to be RELEVANT,
a part of the present narrative,
a character in the story.
to be irrelevant is a fate worse than the
death of the protagonist, the death of the antagonist,
because at least their deaths matter,
have consequence.
irrelevance places one beyond the scope of things
beyond the scope of significance...
SO: a revonant, if i remember correctly,
is an undead spirit of someone who suffered a violent death,
it returns for one reason and one reason alone,
vengeance.
it cannot be stopped (except perhaps by fire)
until its thirst for vengeance has been slaked.
a relevant revonant... an irrelevant revonant.
a spirit whose vengeance no longer matters,
is no longer relevant???
IDEA THREE: the liberation of the stage
in the story Kipapa, and others (notably Exit Stage Right), there is the idea that the stage, that theatre, somehow is a liberation.
for an individual like Cliff, who "thinks too much,"
for whom life is like a chess board against an
invisible and all knowing adversary,
for whom the future is a possible Armageddon,
an unavoidable Atlantis (ala Plato)
an unavoidable Pompei (ala "Cities in Dust" by Siouxsie and the Banshees)
for whom strategy upon strategy cannot avoid a dark fate...
how is the stage a liberation from such a quandary?
to be someone else...
Replacements lyrics:
"If it's just a game,
then we'll break down just in case.
Then again,
I'll tell you what we can do:
You be me for a while
and I'll be you."
The theatre is a liberation and a cage... It is a liberation in the sense that it imagines the perfect audience, in the same manner that a writer must imagine the perfect reader, in the same manner (in a way) that a lover imagines the perfect love... The performance of an actor is always for this perfect audience, the audience that will recognize the transcendence of the actor into her role; acting is an extension of the self, an extending of the self INTO the another, through the mediation of the eye and ear and heart of an idealized audience... there are those that may hold that acting is actually a self-effacement, but that isn't accurate (at least I don't believe so); nor is it precisely self-expression, because those who hold roles to be mere mirrors of the self are not being flexible and true to the realities of their role... it is a self-extension, a stretching of the self outwards towards the role and towards the idealized audience...
the trap of theatrics is that it is always a performance for an other. in the absence of an imagined other, it does not know "how to act." It doesn't know how to "be oneself."
Tai Chi: Energetic Coherence
I read most of a book called "Taijiquan: Through the Western Gate," by Rick Barrett. It is interesting, because he says that the most important "skill" or "principle" in Taijiquan (and, arguably, all activities) is what he calls energetic coherence. He draws several examples from a variety of fields to explain what he means by "coherence" but the clearest perhaps is the difference between non-coherent light (the light from a bulb, for example) and coherent light (a laser). His "point" basically (it sounds ridiculously simple) is that, in order to instantaneously manifest coherence all one needs to do is extend and FEEL the index finger... Sounds a bit the reverse of the old Zen saying of not focusing on the finger pointing at the moon... He goes on to flesh out this simple idea, first by discussing various ways to "test" coherence in the body (basically, a lot of muscle testing, similar to kinesiology and Omura's bidigital O-ring), and then to discuss other popular Taiji concepts through the lens of his Western perspective: for example, the concept of song (usually translated as "relaxation") he associates with the Western concept of tensegrity as manifest in the Buckley (?) ball; he also has a pretty lengthy discussion about the importance of connective tissue in the body, how it is the primary substrate of the body, and can communicate subtle signals twenty times faster than neurological reflexes. Interesting stuff, whether you're interested in Taijiquan or not...
One thing that interested me about Barrett's discussion about the primacy of energetic coherence was that he said that rooting arises out of coherence, and not the other way around. In traditional Taijiquan training, rooting is believed to be fundamental (all strength and power arises from your greatest ally, the earth); that is why Zhan Zhuang (pile standing) is (supposed to be) the first and most important exercise for all internal martial arts practitioners: it develops rooting. But here, Barrett is basically challenging this notion, saying that coherence must occur FIRST or rooting will simply be a musculoskeletal (i.e. discrete, localized, partial) skill.
I will attempt to incorporate Barrett's ideas into my Taijiquan (and other) practice...
One thing that interested me about Barrett's discussion about the primacy of energetic coherence was that he said that rooting arises out of coherence, and not the other way around. In traditional Taijiquan training, rooting is believed to be fundamental (all strength and power arises from your greatest ally, the earth); that is why Zhan Zhuang (pile standing) is (supposed to be) the first and most important exercise for all internal martial arts practitioners: it develops rooting. But here, Barrett is basically challenging this notion, saying that coherence must occur FIRST or rooting will simply be a musculoskeletal (i.e. discrete, localized, partial) skill.
I will attempt to incorporate Barrett's ideas into my Taijiquan (and other) practice...
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Slightly Funny Conversations (maybe you had to be there)
Conversation 1: with Willow:
Willow: "Daddy, I wanted to play on the piano but your stinky thing is on it so I can't."
Daddy: "What stinky thingy?"
Willow: [pointing to a statue of a seated Buddha, given to me by my Uncle Masao for Christmas; intended to hold votive candles or incense, it smells faintly of sandalwood] "That thing."
Daddy: "What, the Buddha?" [rolls eyes] "Yeah, I'm sorry."
Willow: "How come all your stuff is so stinky? Your herbs, everything!"
Mommy [laughing]: "Yeah, how come, Daddy?"
Daddy: [rolls eyes]
Conversation 2: with Lynn, while making this chocolate-kahlua upside down cake:
Lynn: "Are you looking at the clock? Okay, so it says to whip it for two minutes. What time is it now?"
Randy: "It's 5:47."
Lynn: "Okay," [turning on the mixer] "so when it's 5:48 tell me, and I'll turn it off."
Randy: "I thought you said two minutes."
Lynn: "Yeah, but it's a good mixer. I don't want it too whipped."
Randy: [thinking for a moment] "What, like me?"
Lynn: [laughs] "Yeah, it would ruin the consistency."
Jokes (from a certain uncle): "Yeah, I wanted to trade in my wife when she was 40. I wanted to make change. So I went to the bank, and said, I got one 40, I want two 20's."
Also (from same uncle), during a discussion with Jessica's mom, who is from China. She had gotten a new wallet from Jessica, but because it was so large, Jessica's mom actually cut it in half. After some laughter, uncle said: "Oh, that's so Chinese. Now, instead of one wallet, you got two!"
Willow: "Daddy, I wanted to play on the piano but your stinky thing is on it so I can't."
Daddy: "What stinky thingy?"
Willow: [pointing to a statue of a seated Buddha, given to me by my Uncle Masao for Christmas; intended to hold votive candles or incense, it smells faintly of sandalwood] "That thing."
Daddy: "What, the Buddha?" [rolls eyes] "Yeah, I'm sorry."
Willow: "How come all your stuff is so stinky? Your herbs, everything!"
Mommy [laughing]: "Yeah, how come, Daddy?"
Daddy: [rolls eyes]
Conversation 2: with Lynn, while making this chocolate-kahlua upside down cake:
Lynn: "Are you looking at the clock? Okay, so it says to whip it for two minutes. What time is it now?"
Randy: "It's 5:47."
Lynn: "Okay," [turning on the mixer] "so when it's 5:48 tell me, and I'll turn it off."
Randy: "I thought you said two minutes."
Lynn: "Yeah, but it's a good mixer. I don't want it too whipped."
Randy: [thinking for a moment] "What, like me?"
Lynn: [laughs] "Yeah, it would ruin the consistency."
Jokes (from a certain uncle): "Yeah, I wanted to trade in my wife when she was 40. I wanted to make change. So I went to the bank, and said, I got one 40, I want two 20's."
Also (from same uncle), during a discussion with Jessica's mom, who is from China. She had gotten a new wallet from Jessica, but because it was so large, Jessica's mom actually cut it in half. After some laughter, uncle said: "Oh, that's so Chinese. Now, instead of one wallet, you got two!"
An anagram of Vladimir Nabokov's: Telemachus and Hamlet
Although Nabokov is perhaps best known for "Lolita," he also wrote a dark tale called "Bend Sinister." In the preface to the edition I read (Time books), there was some discussion about Nabokov's love of anagrams. One which was interesting (to me) was that between Telemachus (the son of Odysseus, who sought news of his father after he was lost in the "odyssey"; his name literally means "far fighter") and Hamlet. In fact, with the addition of a couple of letters, Telemachus is basically Hamlet spelled backwards.
The ties between Telemachus and Hamlet are interesting. Both are somewhat distant characters (an observer of the absurdity of existence in the one instance, and the son of an absent father in the other [which is which???]), and both are in some way defined by their fathers.
I intend to incorporate Hamlet/Telemachus into the story Kipapa, which is supposed to hint at the trials and tribulations of Cliff, a "military brat" friend I once had: specifically: how do you live (i.e. fully enjoy) the world when you know your time is always limited (i.e. three year terms of service in any given location)? How do you "pace" yourself when you have no idea of the "distance" involved in your life? Love, of course, plays into this story, as it is always the bramble that snags us in existence...
The ties between Telemachus and Hamlet are interesting. Both are somewhat distant characters (an observer of the absurdity of existence in the one instance, and the son of an absent father in the other [which is which???]), and both are in some way defined by their fathers.
I intend to incorporate Hamlet/Telemachus into the story Kipapa, which is supposed to hint at the trials and tribulations of Cliff, a "military brat" friend I once had: specifically: how do you live (i.e. fully enjoy) the world when you know your time is always limited (i.e. three year terms of service in any given location)? How do you "pace" yourself when you have no idea of the "distance" involved in your life? Love, of course, plays into this story, as it is always the bramble that snags us in existence...
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