llamas and peacocks

I spent the weekend on a ranch – or, as I like to call it, a "ranch." However, as Marc Antony didn't say, I come not to bury Caesar, but to praise him: This ranch included a pool, a hot tub, a ping pong table, a pool table, foosball, air hockey, tennis courts, basketball courts, two old video game machines, a jukebox, beds for twenty-some-odd people, multiple kitchens, more. Also the ranch was populated with horses, cows, dogs, chickens, burros, llamas, uncountable peacocks, and wild bunnies. I passed my time sleeping, eating, walking, talking to the llamas, eating, drinking, sleeping, talking to people, walking, drinking, sleeping, reading, and eating. I think that's a pretty comprehensive list.

I enjoyed talking to the llamas immensely, and yes I was anthropomorphizing them, but every time someone points that out, I think so what? They were obviously trying to communicate with me, too. If we both failed, that doesn't mean I can't have my own translation of it all.

It seems like it must be pretty nice to live on a massive ranch in Paicines, to make your own olive oil and host guests. To entertain your hobbies to your heart's content. How does one ever get here? we wondered. Not so much here but here in life. The quiet and the valley and the stars. I have trouble looking ahead into my life and planning backwards in this fashion, where would I like to be in twenty years and then think how to get there. But I also have trouble thinking where I'd like to be in five years. Or twenty months. And I was reading about the restlessness of Bruce Chatwin on this trip, his strong and genuine sense that surely we were not meant to be sedentary, that putting down roots was against his nature, and yes from that he extrapolated, so for all humanity, and wrongly so, but perhaps it is true for some of us, this difficulty of settling, this urge to move. That movement for the sake of movement is not at all bad. That there is a sake of movement.

dancing and failing

I took a hip hop class yesterday morning. This wasn't the first hip hop class I've taken, but I haven't had many. Perhaps five? Over the past few years I've taken a grab-bag of classes, including Afro-Brazilian, Modern, Bhangra, Salsa, Afro-Cuban, and Vogue. And Nearly every one has been a small study in fear and disappointment.

Warm-ups are usually ok. We stretch and it feels good. But after about the first fifteen minutes of choreography, I usually want to leave. I think, You could just walk out. The door's right there. No one will care if you leave. The instant feedback loop in a dance class can be terribly disheartening, even shaming. The teacher does a move. You are supposed to do the move. You try. You fail. You try. You fail. You are staring into the mirror, watching yourself fail. There is no outside agent, no intermediary, no tool or device on which to place the blame. It is your body, it is not doing the thing you are telling it to do, you are failing. Over and over. 

And it seems like it should work, that it should be simple: Your eyes take in information, your brain tells your body to replicate it, and bam! there you'd be. But it's as if someone says to you, "Repeat after me: cucumber," and you respond with "tennis racket." Why? you ask yourself frantically. Isn't this my language? 

It isn't, of course; that's the catch. Dance is its own vocabulary, with ideas and conjunctions, intonations and nuances, formalities and slang. It's easy to forget that, though, at least for me.  

Lousy as I am (by my own estimation, I am usually in the bottom 30-40%, skill-wise, in most any class I take), my competitive brain and threatened ego at some point start judging someone else who's also doing something wrong. The irony, of course, is that as soon as I do I'm lost. There is perhaps nothing else in my life that requires my full focus and attention so thoroughly as dance class. The instant I start paying attention to what someone else is doing instead of what I need to be doing, I mess up. Every time. It's a great lesson in being present, and in humility. And I think that having regular reminders to be humble is good for me. 

The class is an hour and a half. The feeling of miserable failure usually lasts through about the first forty five minutes of class. And even when, eventually, I start having some physical understanding of what I should be doing, I continue to make mistakes. Pieces I'd thought I'd mastered ten minutes ago suddenly trip me up and throw me off. But by the end of the class, I have a loose grasp of the piece. There are a few moves I do passably well. And my sense of accomplishment is wild, overwhelming and entirely out of proportion to the small task I've accomplished. And after ninety minutes of dipping and shaking, trying to be beautiful, tough, elegant, cool, it is incredible to feel near to that grace, that fluid elegance, to feel that if I have not grasped it, I am at least reaching in the right direction.

So I keep going back.

transitions

I've just come back from vacation in Chile and I feel intangible. As though wafting through. It's rather pleasant.


The opening up of the mind and returning to San Francisco where I like the air, the welcomeness of riding my bike, a dance class and I think: Maybe this is it. Maybe I have it. The feeling passes, or settles, or slides off, but it lightens me. Maybe it is only ever a feeling, not a state achievable. Love and a home. I feel improbable, and infinitely fortunate.

it's beginning to look a lot like

Today is SantaCon in San Francisco. Earlier in the week, I'd read that this was going to happen, but promptly forgot until biking just now past the groups and clumps of people dressed in Santa costumes, or at least Santa hats, heading...where are they heading? They don't even seem to be moving in the same direction. Maybe it's over.

(Pocket definition of SantaCon: People dress up in Santa costumes and go bar-hopping. Lots of people. There are official bar stops and routes. Then they get drunk and peel off as their sobriety/tolerance levels dictate. This is not unique to San Francisco, and it's only quite recently that it's become a big-deal thing here.)

All of this raises a lot of questions.

Why is this happening? is, at the most superficial level, the easiest of my questions to answer. SantaCon started in San Francisco, and it started as a weird prank. Now that flash dance mobs are everywhere and all the time and unimpressive, it's harder to imagine how a sudden and unannounced appearance of a group of Santas might have felt in, say, the 80s. But SantaCon used to be culture jamming, and now it's just pub-crawling and public drunkenness. More on that later.

Why Santa? Some quick theories would be, in no particular order:

1) It's funny/ironic to deconstruct/dismantle/demythologize/you-get-the-picture the childhood arbiter of Goodness by putting on his signature uniform and getting publicly drunk.
2) Santa is supposed to be unique, so again it's funny/ironic for him to suddenly be multiple.
3) The costume, or some version of it, is readily available on the cheap.

Why public drinking? or, Why is this happening, part 2? Now this is where I start to get confused. Because I'm not really sure what this is really about. As in, I'm not sure why it's fun to dress up as Santa and go bar-hopping with a whole lot of other people, some of whom you know and some of whom you don't, also dressed as Santa. I'm not sure why that is the thing one would want to do with one's Saturday afternoon.* We can look at some of the obvious answers: People like drinking, and even more when they're with their friends. But what is the specific appeal of the crowd? This, for me, is the most intriguing part. I tend to not enjoy large drunken crowds. It is a guarantee that some people will get too drunk. They will vomit, maybe near you, maybe on you. They may get pushy. The bars will all be crowded because you are bringing a crowd.

Now my central problem lies, I suspect, where it so often does: a failure to understand the appeal of doing something because a lot of other people are doing it. I think I've always been a contrarian, and mass culture and its seeming desire to get me (and everyone) join in has always gotten my back up. This may just be a fancy way of not calling myself an elitist. I'd like to think that's not all there is to it, though. The strongest feeling I have when viewing SantaCon (which, yes, I'm using as a stand-in for a lot of things right now) is not superiority, but confusion. I have a fundamental distrust of things that say, "If you do this thing that other people are doing, it will make you happy," that there is an objective "happiness" that we can all work towards, at the same time, in the same fashion, and that once we get there, it will be the same for all of us. I just don't think that's true. Nonetheless, that seems to be the messaging that most people receive and act on.

I know this is getting long, but I can't help but feel that this is also related to my confusion around beauty, and the ways in which most of us most of the time work so hard to change our appearances to chase after an abstract beauty. And then some people end up not looking like people anymore. They're going after the Form "Beauty," which is presumably something they've seen in a magazine, on TV, in films, etc., but it's not what they actually look like and then people end up looking generic and interchangeable.

I want people to be encouraged to pursue an individual idea of happiness, an individual idea of aesthetic. I guess I'm that much of an idealist/hippie, I guess I'm that naive. But I think it could work.

I invite your comments.

*I have friends who were at SantaCon today. I'm positive. And I'm positive that they're people I like and think are awesome. What I'm trying to say is that I'm not so much interested in criticizing SantaCon as I am in trying to understand it.

grl lookit that body

For reasons too complex and irrelevant to detail here, I've spent a fair amount of time this fall driving around the suburbs of the south bay listening to contemporary pop music. There only seem to be four or five songs in contemporary pop music right now. At least, that's the conclusion I've been forced to draw, since the radio plays the same four or five songs every hour over a six hour period. This is enough to make me lose my mind.*

But it got me thinking about pop music again (which doesn't happen all that often) and it seems to me that with the rise of the internet, culture is experiencing a simultaneous unification and fracturing. We seem to me to be moving towards an increasingly graphic, increasingly bland, hyper-mass culture, while simultaneously creating countless increasingly specialized micro-cultures. And perhaps we are losing (or eroding? or destroying?) our middle ground. I'm not sure what I think that means, quite frankly. Except that it does seem to only deepen issues of access and diversity when the "dominant" culture is only becoming more dominant and more narrow in its message and representation.

What is that message? As far as I can tell (and as the above links more than suggest), it's party like there's no tomorrow. And it doesn't even feel like editorializing to say that this sounds like the music of a civilization in decline.

*Hey kids! Want to do something really surreal? Watch those music videos with the sound off.

the external world

I've been thinking a lot lately about validation, about what is worthwhile, about – at the risk of putting it far too dramatically – what it is we live for. Not to pretend it is or should be the same for everyone; more, I've been trying to find a means to measure myself and the best means I can find is myself. I do not think there is a thing that exists that is the thing I want. I think the external world lacks it. And if I do not value existing metrics, what can will read true to me? To stop this constant pushing away, this dismissal, this roving for a way to know.

I think I need to create my own ruler. This is a strange problem, once you think about it, because it is more than a question of scaling a system to me. The question is: What is the system and what is the scale? 

nothing like a lack of color here

Sometimes things

resemble other things.

(I flatter myself Lydia Davis would approve.)