I am pretty sure there are thumbtacks in my heels.
They grew up like children, like skyscrapers, like stubborn tree tendrils, they land with a gentle THWUMP in the cork of city/school/universe and make it difficult to leap without caution. They bleed. And they leak. Ooze? They're small. Microscopic; metaphor-sized, no one can see them, in fact, but they poke through favorite shoes and plant me far or near. I do not think they are autonomous. They loosen, like an iron joint being oiled, when packed inside during rainstorms or sustaining willing eye contact. They cannot dream. I have not always had them. Sometimes they twist like the top of a corkscrew and feign escape--but, BUT! they are always there when I wake up, ripping my cotton sheets and socks. They're an inconvenient truth but they are true, yup, I've just decided they're as real as tangerines and lines at Trader Joe's, I feel them now. I must be careful when I stand up in a few minutes to make more weak Blueberry tea, mustn't jump too hard off the mattress and scrape the tile.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Monday, February 22, 2010
NO ACCOUNTING FOR TASTE, I SUPPOSE
There's been an interesting, recurrent conversation at school for the past few weeks about the line between taste and quality. It's sort of understood (or agreed upon) that there is a vague bar for a piece being 'of quality'--meaning, in theatre school language, specific, well-framed, well thought-out, interesting, curious, etc. But the whole point of going to the theatre is to leave with a radically personal experience, right? ANNNNNND it's also "sort of understood" that not everyone likes the same things. So when you get to a certain point in a viewing experience where you can respect or appreciate something's essential 'goodness' without actually liking it or relating to it in any real way, is this just a comment on your individuality or the utter uselessness of even having to acknowledge this invisible bar for 'good work'? It makes me think of "The Emperor's New Clothes"--the second a limit is established, doesn't it kind of naturally envelop things around it? Don't people feel pressure to conform in terms of ideas, doesn't their ability to respond truthfully get sucked in? What's the point of rating anything if everyone will just think what they want to, anyways? Elevated language. Heightened stakes. More reasons to avoid the alarming, utter mediocrity of our every endeavor. That said, I think I might agree with whatever I am being a nebulous Devil's Advocate to--bad work can feel like a waste of time, while work I didn't necessarily like but had to concede was 'good' will still usually provoke me into thinking about SOMETHING. But then again, even if you have the fleeting thought that something was a waste of time, isn't that effective on one plane also? Perhaps something to go in the 'Do not ever do this' column of my creative brain? She speaks in circles. The whole thing is actually very interesting.
It struck me in the elevator that Acting and its related sciences--no, let's just say ART--is all about trying to get back to the same mindset of an indiscriminate child with an average capacity for sensory delight. Everything we do is about being curious and making inquiries in roundabout, weird, explosive ways towards life concepts that are simply too difficult to perceive of; only this time, instead of being hindered by lack of experience, we're just struggling awkwardly with the "adult tools" we've been granted--executive functioning, for instance. In Directing, we spent a semester hammering the buzz-concept "Tell me what you saw. This is a story of a person who..." into our brains, only to realize that this is the way we all thought before bigger words started to complicate simple meanings. In writing, I am taught to examine things in opposites, tensions, dialectics--and that simple act of finding contrast is absolutely kid-like. SO the morning clothing routine. I remember being a Bossy 10 year old "theatre company director" and being able to make the rapid-fire decisions I struggle with in the Now-Very-Real-World without reaaaaaaaaallly blinking an eye. The consequences of having to respect people (AS ADULTS. CONFOUND IT!) and realize...I dunno, DEATH suddenly become very Adam and Eve. What a shame, that loss of innocence. Let us all fork out gajillions of dollars towards student loans in attempt to re-learn what we already knew, except this time learn is 'pedagogy.'
Lots of posts seem to be about either boys or Peter Pan complexes...
Speaking of THE FORMER!!!
It's also strange, how you feel different people in different parts of your body. Hiccup motion on the layer of secondary skin right below my collar bone. Edge of my left cheek, a swirling. Definitive CHURNING around the inside of hips. These are all the different ways I feel about the 35 people I love on any given day, and the way they recur and dissapear and flame up has the same medical horror of self-medicating for an ulcer (I have never had an ulcer, this is a simile). It's physical and literal, wanting you. I do.
It has also just become real because I put it into words.
In a perfect world, I would write: if you can't say it on your birthday when can you, eh? I am actually yours (meaning I like you! and want to JUMP YOU!)--name. Everyone disintegrated into giggles. Yet--YET--in this one way, I have not advanced past the seventh grade. The way I wear my clothes, the way I cook my pasta, the face I make when I'm trying to stay awake, the questions I arch towards you like heavy softballs (repeated), the coy seductive way I ask for things, these are different, the way I speak. My stomach-aches. The pills and substances I use to make pain go away. Everything is at least a little...tweaked. Except that seventh grade knot of infrared light that no one can see, that settled like a mass of undigested cheese (gross, self) and started weaving spiderwebs and knots and sending out pulses and wavelengths to the tips of my stretching skin...that's the same. Same stupid clavicle fluttering. Same--beating, blind, bobbling--heart.
If you are sad, go read "Morning" by Frank O'Hara.
It struck me in the elevator that Acting and its related sciences--no, let's just say ART--is all about trying to get back to the same mindset of an indiscriminate child with an average capacity for sensory delight. Everything we do is about being curious and making inquiries in roundabout, weird, explosive ways towards life concepts that are simply too difficult to perceive of; only this time, instead of being hindered by lack of experience, we're just struggling awkwardly with the "adult tools" we've been granted--executive functioning, for instance. In Directing, we spent a semester hammering the buzz-concept "Tell me what you saw. This is a story of a person who..." into our brains, only to realize that this is the way we all thought before bigger words started to complicate simple meanings. In writing, I am taught to examine things in opposites, tensions, dialectics--and that simple act of finding contrast is absolutely kid-like. SO the morning clothing routine. I remember being a Bossy 10 year old "theatre company director" and being able to make the rapid-fire decisions I struggle with in the Now-Very-Real-World without reaaaaaaaaallly blinking an eye. The consequences of having to respect people (AS ADULTS. CONFOUND IT!) and realize...I dunno, DEATH suddenly become very Adam and Eve. What a shame, that loss of innocence. Let us all fork out gajillions of dollars towards student loans in attempt to re-learn what we already knew, except this time learn is 'pedagogy.'
Lots of posts seem to be about either boys or Peter Pan complexes...
Speaking of THE FORMER!!!
It's also strange, how you feel different people in different parts of your body. Hiccup motion on the layer of secondary skin right below my collar bone. Edge of my left cheek, a swirling. Definitive CHURNING around the inside of hips. These are all the different ways I feel about the 35 people I love on any given day, and the way they recur and dissapear and flame up has the same medical horror of self-medicating for an ulcer (I have never had an ulcer, this is a simile). It's physical and literal, wanting you. I do.
It has also just become real because I put it into words.
In a perfect world, I would write: if you can't say it on your birthday when can you, eh? I am actually yours (meaning I like you! and want to JUMP YOU!)--name. Everyone disintegrated into giggles. Yet--YET--in this one way, I have not advanced past the seventh grade. The way I wear my clothes, the way I cook my pasta, the face I make when I'm trying to stay awake, the questions I arch towards you like heavy softballs (repeated), the coy seductive way I ask for things, these are different, the way I speak. My stomach-aches. The pills and substances I use to make pain go away. Everything is at least a little...tweaked. Except that seventh grade knot of infrared light that no one can see, that settled like a mass of undigested cheese (gross, self) and started weaving spiderwebs and knots and sending out pulses and wavelengths to the tips of my stretching skin...that's the same. Same stupid clavicle fluttering. Same--beating, blind, bobbling--heart.
If you are sad, go read "Morning" by Frank O'Hara.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Speaking of Comment Moderation...
I like you! It's eating me up! I don't even love you, I just like you! This is just to say, I wouldn't necessarily jump you or cry at you or ask to be your girlfriend were we stranded on a desert island, I would settle for a movie and dotdotdot and possibly open-ended. Not even, just the movie and the dotdotdot and some cordiality.
You've made things very complicated, feigning ignorance. Now I don't know what we're doing. Should I say something, maybe? Would that ruin our bizarre flirty friendship? Are you stupid? Do I need to launch myself at you in an elevator or something? More alarming and more likely all the time--is there something wrong with me. ?
I wish you'd just man up and say something. Other things are beginning to float around my headspace, but I really like you. It's eating me up! This is not friggin eighth grade, I'm a grown ass...woman. I have shit to DO. I guess I'll say something. I hope I'm not a freak, for saying all this, but I think I may just have to tell you. It's something to do with your stupid eyes.
You've made things very complicated, feigning ignorance. Now I don't know what we're doing. Should I say something, maybe? Would that ruin our bizarre flirty friendship? Are you stupid? Do I need to launch myself at you in an elevator or something? More alarming and more likely all the time--is there something wrong with me. ?
I wish you'd just man up and say something. Other things are beginning to float around my headspace, but I really like you. It's eating me up! This is not friggin eighth grade, I'm a grown ass...woman. I have shit to DO. I guess I'll say something. I hope I'm not a freak, for saying all this, but I think I may just have to tell you. It's something to do with your stupid eyes.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
IT'S SUCH A CLICHEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Maybe when I live
angry 90s songs
Maybe when I live in a brownstone
and split time between Paris and here
I won't want to eat off your face
or cry over Nutella
or think about stupid potatoes that grow green things in my closet because they wither and die
or letters with smudged writing
or...royalty
or absinthe
or bad kissing
or debacles in the front seats of jalopies
or a couple of scars, I guess
or your stupid question
or the lack
or hard-core free porn
I'll just eat ice cream out of no sense of obligation or need for categorization but rather because I like how it tastes
and I won't remember how to cry because laughing suddenly became the only important thing.
Hate.
Full.
angry 90s songs
Maybe when I live in a brownstone
and split time between Paris and here
I won't want to eat off your face
or cry over Nutella
or think about stupid potatoes that grow green things in my closet because they wither and die
or letters with smudged writing
or...royalty
or absinthe
or bad kissing
or debacles in the front seats of jalopies
or a couple of scars, I guess
or your stupid question
or the lack
or hard-core free porn
I'll just eat ice cream out of no sense of obligation or need for categorization but rather because I like how it tastes
and I won't remember how to cry because laughing suddenly became the only important thing.
Hate.
Full.
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
The Second Half of Little Women; Dying
Stories that end badly. Rephrase: stories that end with people re-adjusting their definition of happiness to suit a generally more bleak world:
-Skins, seasons 1 and 2
-Degrassi (up to the school shooting episodes)
-Braveheart; come to think of it, most sweeping epic movies too long to fit on one DVD disc
-Titanic
-Lord of the Rings
-The Sound of Music
-Casablanca
-Aida; come to think of it, most things with an Act Two
-Little Women
"Little Women" was possibly my first real encounter with the horror of getting older.
The second part is boring.
There is less Christmas, less light, less family gatherings, less love, more tears, more wrinkles, more grey, more disease, the death of Beth, and a general feeling of forced contentment. Does she really love Gabriel Byrne (Or the Professor, if you read the book)? That sure happened fast. Seemed to me that Jo was really meant to be with Laurie. I guess this is okay, even though he is less attractive than Christian Bale and generally less fun. Beth is still dead.
My good friend Courtney and I were talking about this "denouement conundrum" in light of the British show SKINS this past weekend--keep in mind that Courtney was perhaps the only person in life to go through her premium girl adolescent years unaware that Beth in "Little Women" dies because of some woefully misinformed abridged children's version of the book. Like "Little Women", SKINS begins in a kind of blissed out family paradise--there are these fabulous characters, and very small bad things happen to them (drug runs gone awry=scorched skirts by the fire), but things are acceptably alright because within these certain constructed worlds, the worst things that CAN happen are scorched skirts and crazy dealer goose chases. Then suddenly, someone is hit by a bus (or gets scarlet fever. Keep up, now) and the whole WORLD is dramatically jolted. I will try not to be naive, but there's an important difference between stories like these and stories that are presupposed as tragedies or stories that are less well-written or stories that seem to live within the same world the whole way through a play, in that even crazy things are not outrageously unexpected. And I know that "good dramatic structure" calls for exactly that which I have just decided I hate in an epic--something shocking and terrible and irreversible in every way. But my problem is less with the jolt and more with life after--in a lot of media, it seems to me that people try to jam this concept of "bittersweetness" into an ending. But no one can convince me that life with the grungy German professor, however lovable, is better than life with Marmie in the Christmas of 1865. I will not buy that life fleeing the Nazi's in Austria is more fun for the VonTrapp family singers than playing with elaborate marionettes in matching curtain-costumes, even with a hit song at the end about climbing mountains. These people are all settling and fake smiling and trying to make me believe that through the haze of my tears, there is light. But is it actually a good story (or worse, is it just a horrible thing to know about life?) if I refuse to believe them? What am I missing?
I guess it might be worse if things ended in bald tragedy, maybe certain Shakespeare being an exception. If TITANIC ended with the shipwreck, I would probably be righteously pissed off. But does anyone really feel comforted by an 88 year old woman dropping a bajillion dollar necklace off the side of a boat? Does James Cameron really think he can get me to smile this way? Leo just died because some bitch would not roll over six inches on her piece of driftwood. I don't care if Grandma was "a dish", I don't care about Bill Pullman (is it Bill Pullman?) releasing his money-grubbing diamond dreams in favor of the magic of hearing a little old woman talk about her life for three hours. This is MOVIE-caring.
Maybe people--meaning both the makers and the watchers--are afraid of letting things end badly for beloved characters, because it is either too horribly depressing or too painfully much like real life or awful urban legends in kind. I know the movies are about escapism. But I wonder what creates the sort of sick compulsion to destroy me and then MEEKLY attempt to build me up again? That's like giving a hobo a sandwich, yanking the sandwich away, and then offering a piece of gum with the smiling dipshit gravitas of someone who actually believes that gum is BETTER than a sandwich, maybe because gum is somehow more morally fulfilling. But this isn't true. Sandwiches are always better. And maybe, maybe I rescind the tragedy bit--certain sad endings might be better, because then at least I don't feel either condescended or lied to. It will hurt, but I can probably take it. Just know that if you take the sandwich, there is no turning back--I don't want your gum. Reviewing my list, the possible exception to this metaphor might be the end of Casablanca and the beautiful friendship line--but THAT'S the cinematic gold of a lollipop, or something, which is so delightful and unexpected that you could almost forget about what you've already been offered and denied (sandwich). That might be the formula, the difference between good endings (re: movies I like) and jerk endings (re: movies I don't like).
"Little Women" is a Potbelly's Italian sub and a stick of Orbit.It is the specific crux of this essay because it is the most about me.
Becoming more lucid: it's that thing again about "settling"--I feel, in my heart, that the tragedy and horror of "Little Women Part Deux" is irredeemable by the ending because everyone acts like it is supposed to be a wonderful happy finish but it is not, and could never be, as happy as the beginning. This is growing up. This is dying. But if re-adjusting standards of joy to grown-up pursuits and ideas is the notion, then I will decide to hate this movie full-stop (well, probably not. It's delightful)! I won't allow "growing up"="having SERIOUS as opposed to frivolous problems"="fun vs. lame"!
I had a day--today--where I worried that this was happening to me in the real world. I remembered for a split second the way I spent time, on average, when I was drifting around between 9 and 12: my cousins and I playing make-believe games, and me writing stories all the time, and Christmas being more fun, and less people having cancer and less people being dead and more fun stories circulating in general. Why is life sadder, the older you get, is it just to do with longevity and probability? Really losing innocence, meaning that people stop lying to you? I don't want to be lied to. But I also don't want to go to the gym, or worry about money, or be one of those obnoxiously embittered single women on Valentine's Day in New York who feels compelled to mention booze or drugs in accordance with weekend plans, and I don't want to be lonely, and I don't want to do the dishes. I'm not saying there were less problems when I was 11, necessarily (because I did burn skirts. And later, I had a fair share of run-ins with drug dealers) or even that the problems then did not hurt as much as they do now, but rather that life is becoming "Part Two." And it IS less fun, sometimes--in some ways, obviously, not. But I am beginning to worry above all things that if my life for some reason were never to change but rather continue on the trudging, fumbly, uphill trajectory without a bus or a case of scarlet fever to deter or energize or alter it, I will not even be one of these aforementioned thrilling stories but rather the person who CAN truly be comforted by some cheap, stupid, piece-of-gum ending. That might be what it is to be lonely or lost in the first place, looking for silly solutions. But we're older now--that's the point. Too old to be silly.
This all sounds very dramatic, looking it over. I swear I am not trying to compare my life in any way to "Lord of the Rings". But I want truth, I do, I want it above all, I want always to know the difference between the feigned/pretended and the authentic (lalala ACTING SCHOOL). I can't phrase this correctly: I want to grow up. I do want a "Part Two". But does it really HAVE to be so much more BLEAK? And almost worse, does it have to end in a comforted, stupid lie because I'll undoubtedly be so lost and bleak that I need a lie? I only want the truth.
But I also do not want sad things...
Best ending of all: resucitation. "It's a Wonderful Life". George Bailey (sigggggh) on a bridge: "I wanna live again! I wanna live again!"
I wanna live again!
-Skins, seasons 1 and 2
-Degrassi (up to the school shooting episodes)
-Braveheart; come to think of it, most sweeping epic movies too long to fit on one DVD disc
-Titanic
-Lord of the Rings
-The Sound of Music
-Casablanca
-Aida; come to think of it, most things with an Act Two
-Little Women
"Little Women" was possibly my first real encounter with the horror of getting older.
The second part is boring.
There is less Christmas, less light, less family gatherings, less love, more tears, more wrinkles, more grey, more disease, the death of Beth, and a general feeling of forced contentment. Does she really love Gabriel Byrne (Or the Professor, if you read the book)? That sure happened fast. Seemed to me that Jo was really meant to be with Laurie. I guess this is okay, even though he is less attractive than Christian Bale and generally less fun. Beth is still dead.
My good friend Courtney and I were talking about this "denouement conundrum" in light of the British show SKINS this past weekend--keep in mind that Courtney was perhaps the only person in life to go through her premium girl adolescent years unaware that Beth in "Little Women" dies because of some woefully misinformed abridged children's version of the book. Like "Little Women", SKINS begins in a kind of blissed out family paradise--there are these fabulous characters, and very small bad things happen to them (drug runs gone awry=scorched skirts by the fire), but things are acceptably alright because within these certain constructed worlds, the worst things that CAN happen are scorched skirts and crazy dealer goose chases. Then suddenly, someone is hit by a bus (or gets scarlet fever. Keep up, now) and the whole WORLD is dramatically jolted. I will try not to be naive, but there's an important difference between stories like these and stories that are presupposed as tragedies or stories that are less well-written or stories that seem to live within the same world the whole way through a play, in that even crazy things are not outrageously unexpected. And I know that "good dramatic structure" calls for exactly that which I have just decided I hate in an epic--something shocking and terrible and irreversible in every way. But my problem is less with the jolt and more with life after--in a lot of media, it seems to me that people try to jam this concept of "bittersweetness" into an ending. But no one can convince me that life with the grungy German professor, however lovable, is better than life with Marmie in the Christmas of 1865. I will not buy that life fleeing the Nazi's in Austria is more fun for the VonTrapp family singers than playing with elaborate marionettes in matching curtain-costumes, even with a hit song at the end about climbing mountains. These people are all settling and fake smiling and trying to make me believe that through the haze of my tears, there is light. But is it actually a good story (or worse, is it just a horrible thing to know about life?) if I refuse to believe them? What am I missing?
I guess it might be worse if things ended in bald tragedy, maybe certain Shakespeare being an exception. If TITANIC ended with the shipwreck, I would probably be righteously pissed off. But does anyone really feel comforted by an 88 year old woman dropping a bajillion dollar necklace off the side of a boat? Does James Cameron really think he can get me to smile this way? Leo just died because some bitch would not roll over six inches on her piece of driftwood. I don't care if Grandma was "a dish", I don't care about Bill Pullman (is it Bill Pullman?) releasing his money-grubbing diamond dreams in favor of the magic of hearing a little old woman talk about her life for three hours. This is MOVIE-caring.
Maybe people--meaning both the makers and the watchers--are afraid of letting things end badly for beloved characters, because it is either too horribly depressing or too painfully much like real life or awful urban legends in kind. I know the movies are about escapism. But I wonder what creates the sort of sick compulsion to destroy me and then MEEKLY attempt to build me up again? That's like giving a hobo a sandwich, yanking the sandwich away, and then offering a piece of gum with the smiling dipshit gravitas of someone who actually believes that gum is BETTER than a sandwich, maybe because gum is somehow more morally fulfilling. But this isn't true. Sandwiches are always better. And maybe, maybe I rescind the tragedy bit--certain sad endings might be better, because then at least I don't feel either condescended or lied to. It will hurt, but I can probably take it. Just know that if you take the sandwich, there is no turning back--I don't want your gum. Reviewing my list, the possible exception to this metaphor might be the end of Casablanca and the beautiful friendship line--but THAT'S the cinematic gold of a lollipop, or something, which is so delightful and unexpected that you could almost forget about what you've already been offered and denied (sandwich). That might be the formula, the difference between good endings (re: movies I like) and jerk endings (re: movies I don't like).
"Little Women" is a Potbelly's Italian sub and a stick of Orbit.It is the specific crux of this essay because it is the most about me.
Becoming more lucid: it's that thing again about "settling"--I feel, in my heart, that the tragedy and horror of "Little Women Part Deux" is irredeemable by the ending because everyone acts like it is supposed to be a wonderful happy finish but it is not, and could never be, as happy as the beginning. This is growing up. This is dying. But if re-adjusting standards of joy to grown-up pursuits and ideas is the notion, then I will decide to hate this movie full-stop (well, probably not. It's delightful)! I won't allow "growing up"="having SERIOUS as opposed to frivolous problems"="fun vs. lame"!
I had a day--today--where I worried that this was happening to me in the real world. I remembered for a split second the way I spent time, on average, when I was drifting around between 9 and 12: my cousins and I playing make-believe games, and me writing stories all the time, and Christmas being more fun, and less people having cancer and less people being dead and more fun stories circulating in general. Why is life sadder, the older you get, is it just to do with longevity and probability? Really losing innocence, meaning that people stop lying to you? I don't want to be lied to. But I also don't want to go to the gym, or worry about money, or be one of those obnoxiously embittered single women on Valentine's Day in New York who feels compelled to mention booze or drugs in accordance with weekend plans, and I don't want to be lonely, and I don't want to do the dishes. I'm not saying there were less problems when I was 11, necessarily (because I did burn skirts. And later, I had a fair share of run-ins with drug dealers) or even that the problems then did not hurt as much as they do now, but rather that life is becoming "Part Two." And it IS less fun, sometimes--in some ways, obviously, not. But I am beginning to worry above all things that if my life for some reason were never to change but rather continue on the trudging, fumbly, uphill trajectory without a bus or a case of scarlet fever to deter or energize or alter it, I will not even be one of these aforementioned thrilling stories but rather the person who CAN truly be comforted by some cheap, stupid, piece-of-gum ending. That might be what it is to be lonely or lost in the first place, looking for silly solutions. But we're older now--that's the point. Too old to be silly.
This all sounds very dramatic, looking it over. I swear I am not trying to compare my life in any way to "Lord of the Rings". But I want truth, I do, I want it above all, I want always to know the difference between the feigned/pretended and the authentic (lalala ACTING SCHOOL). I can't phrase this correctly: I want to grow up. I do want a "Part Two". But does it really HAVE to be so much more BLEAK? And almost worse, does it have to end in a comforted, stupid lie because I'll undoubtedly be so lost and bleak that I need a lie? I only want the truth.
But I also do not want sad things...
Best ending of all: resucitation. "It's a Wonderful Life". George Bailey (sigggggh) on a bridge: "I wanna live again! I wanna live again!"
I wanna live again!
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