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the Spotted Mind's LiveJournal:
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| Monday, January 10th, 2011 | | 8:12 am |
Please to be editing me?
If you still magically read this, and are in one way or another a poet or enjoyer of poems or something, and have the time to read things, I need some editing help. Get in touch if you want to be my favorite person in the world. | | Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 | | 10:47 am |
So: I got an email from this girl over the summer, requesting that I help her out starting a slam team here at Yale. We've got a spoken word group, but no actual team to go to Nats. Being the idiot I am, I ignored how super busy I am and said yes, of course. Well. It's only been a few days, but it's going SO WELL. Check out our website: www.teethpoets.com More important: guess who the only feature we have confirmed is? Oh, right, that would be Sierra DeMulder. So I'll FINALLY get to see the person everyone's been gushing about since nats. SO! Is anyone coming out to the northbeast anytime soon? I've actually got a feature for you now! It's going to be sweet! And it's a once-a-month deal, so we're trying to keep the quality high. Got any suggestions? Friends? People to avoid? Hit me up! I want to make this happen like woah. | | Monday, August 17th, 2009 | | 11:39 pm |
BREAKING NEWS
The San Francisco Zoo just let me name their new penguin chick: http://twitpic.com/dqoliIsn't she cute? They asked for suggestions on twitter, and I suggested Goose- from "Magellanic Goose," the original name for the penguin. And they actually picked it. From what was apparently a lot of entries. So I have 2 free tickets to the Zoo, and can officially say that I've named a penguin. Sweet. | | Thursday, August 13th, 2009 | | 12:56 am |
To anyone who's ever heard me slam: I need to pick two pieces to fix and practice for performance because Yale is starting a slam team and I need to perform for the little froshies to persuade them to get involved. Oof. HELP which should I use?! | | Sunday, May 17th, 2009 | | 10:42 am |
incoherent thoughts upon finishing my last paper and coming to terms with my idiot boyfriend
I'm a senior in college. My (soon-to-be-potentially-temporarily-ex) boyfriend is sort of an idiot, or at least a little too broken, but I'm getting used to the idea. I have to have a career in a year. I finally have time to do the reading I want to, and it turns out that reading is reading for my senior thesis, because it's something I actually care about. Farmers markets and fresh mesclun greens still attached at the root and the freshest yogurt I've ever tasted with blueberries and chesnut tagliatelle with pesto and a nice stout make for a meal that transcends awkwardness. I like getting free cappuccinos from independent coffee shops and cannoli from mob fronts. I like living in a house with a part-time bee keeper. I'm writing again. I've got 10 days to get a computer screen. I need to study for the GMAT and make writing samples for grad school. I need to think about grad school. I need to think about where I want to travel after graduation so I know what language to take next year. I need to do a lot of things, and they all happen to coincide with things that I want. I miss California, and long walks in the hills. I want to work in a restaurant but I've realized that I don't need to work in the production of quality things in order to understand them. There are so many things that I want to do and so much time to do them in but I can't figure out the order and I'm afraid of getting stuck in any one of them. But I also believe in paying bills. And then there's the part of me that wants to be like Edie, the crazy one that commands the center of the room, and that part of me hasn't gotten a work out in a while. But she's pretty antithetical to the rest of me. Also, I miss singing. I want to take lessons and actually be trained. I want people to hear me sing and think that I'm good, heaven forbid. I don't know if many people know that side of me. I want to be published. I want a lot of things. I must take this opportunity to get working on them. I want to grow vegetables in our backyard while we still live in that house, and learn to cook things more complicated than pasta, and get in shape and travel and and and and and | | Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 | | 10:03 am |
Storage closes tomorrow. Haven't started packing yet. Working full time, feeling 9-5 seep into my bones again. It's a calcifying feeling. Not sure what it'll be like to be home without that someone else beside me. Not sure what highrise living is going to do to my bones. Starting this collaboration, this exploration, this mosaic thing with tiles. I've started so many things and finished so few. Haven't finished the plague, though it's been around two weeks. Just want to wake up breathing through all of my nose. Just want to wake up not exhausted. | | Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 | | 11:25 am |
I have 105 pgs of writing due in the next 18 days. 60 of those are due on the same day. Shit. On the other hand, boy is adorable and lent me his computer and we can work in the same room at the same time and actually get things done, which means I won't have to avoid the guy I'm dating until school ends like I thought I was going to have to in order to not fail out of life. Which is nice. | | Monday, April 13th, 2009 | | 10:49 am |
various incoherent thoughts strung together
i forgot about post-show depression. he hasn't forgotten about me. i need to find the key to the bike lock so i can leave this show behind, but i left it somewhere i can't remember.the apartment is a wonderful film; i had forgotten how beautiful shirley maclaine was. tropic thunder was an interesting pairing, but somehow it worked. | | Friday, April 10th, 2009 | | 2:52 am |
I couldn't say this coherently last night, but
as long as your exgirlfriend upsets you because she's upsetting and not because you want her back, I could give a flying fuck what she does. I just don't like to see you upset. Nor do I like the idea that I could be a rebound, consciously or otherwise. I 'm 99% sure I'm not, but there you go. | | Thursday, April 9th, 2009 | | 7:48 am |
Cayenne and grapefruıt and bourbon go really well together. So do ouzo, fennel, and lemon. Incredıble cocktails after dress rehearsal with a boy you like=one of the better things in life. | | Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 | | 3:13 pm |
Oh, tech week. Thank god for boys who make tea and don't mind incoherency. | | Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 | | 12:26 pm |
Everything is better when the sun is out. Opening night in 2 days. Holy crap. Apparently after it's over, we're going on a proper date :) | | 3:04 am |
I now like stairwells a lot more than i did this morning. The last two hours certainly made up for the whole slipping-and-bouncing-down-3-stairs thing this morning, I think. Though that might have been the fault of the rain anyway. But! One life goal realized because of said rain. I like how he makes otherwise upsetting things into moments I've been waiting for. | | Sunday, April 5th, 2009 | | 11:53 am |
| | Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 | | 12:40 pm |
| | 12:48 am |
so... now that i think this guy's pretty swell... what do i do? wait to see him on thursday, i suppose, but that's so frustrating! killing my inner desire to talk to him is taking serious self control. meh. mustbestrong. | | Monday, March 30th, 2009 | | 1:54 am |
SO. Today I was not at rehearsal because I had to go see a play in new york. The play was actually the worst assault on aesthetics and basic sensory experience that I have endured in the last several years. I didn't mind, though, because before the play I went to Veselka (which is a ukranian place near St. Marks Place.) There, I realized that Peter Gallagher (of OC fame) was sitting at a table. When he left, we were given his table, and I was pretty stoked. And then my suitemate leaned over and told me that Jon Stewart was sitting at the table next to ours. His daughter has better bangs than mine. She's 4. We proceeded to watch him trick his daughter with the old "what's that over there?" in order to steal some of her macaroni and cheese. The end. | | Thursday, March 26th, 2009 | | 3:17 am |
Portrait of a contemporary artist or performer (super work in progress due in 10 hours oy)
A Dialogue with Gravity
In the promotional images for a photographic exhibit celebrating Kazuo Ohno’s 100th birthday, he appears in a pond, sopping wet and clutching a wooden tray painted red. His skin, powdered white with rice-powder, sinks inwards, clinging to his prominent bones no more substantially than does his soaked shirt. Yet despite the struggle to stay afloat, his vermillion lips present the smallest of smiles. It’s an appropriate image to advertise the work of the man who helped to pioneer Butoh; as a solo performer, he has spent his career exploring and embracing just such struggle and all its physical manifestations. I first encountered Kazuo Ohno when a friend sent me a clip of one of his performances. In it, Ohno, only 80 at the time of its recording, shuffled across an empty stage wearing only a white loin cloth. Eerie chanting and the whining notes of some unrecognizable string instrument underscored his shaky, flinching movements. He moved from the knees. He bent and moaned. Finally, he lifted his head, and from behind a mass of frizzy black hair, I caught a glimpse of Ohno’s face. It was contorted beyond recognition: jaw extended; tongue thrusting outward between rows of bared, uneven teeth; nostrils floating between his whitened cheeks; and the tiny black dots of his eyes erupting, unnaturally exposed, beneath his forehead. He leaned backwards, letting his head roll towards the ground, and a line of drool trickled across his face. I closed the window. Butoh was created in the 1960s by Ohno and his artistic partner, Hijikata Tatsumi, amidst the cultural transformation in Japan that followed World War II and the atomic bomb. It can be translated roughly as “stomp dance,” though more often as “dance of darkness.” Mark Holborn calls it a “dangerous, subversive form of dance theater”; Dance Magazine deems the dancers’ bodies “the physical equivalent of songs- broken, dissonant, and often hilarious.” Yet my favorite description of the work comes from one of its current performers, Amagatsu Ushio: “Butoh,” he says, “is a dialogue with gravity.” Ohno and Hijikata started their artistic partnership with forays into street theater. Their work became increasingly movement oriented, drawing from both Japanese tradition and the nascent field of modern dance, and eventually evolved into Butoh. It was not well-received; the pair was banned from dance festivals in Japan for many years after presenting an early work. Critical discomfort arose in part because Butoh actively engages and flouts aesthetic convention: it embraces the grotesque. A butoh piece appears nothing like typical dance. It denies grace and elegance and any unnatural or culturally imposed gesture. It exists to interrogate all aspects of Japanese culture and everyday life, engaging tradition in order to transcend it, reaching for movement so organic as to approach the involuntary. To unleash basic impulses within the body, performers put their bodies through extreme deprivation, starving or avoiding sleep for days until any external stimulus would provoke power physical reactions. This method is most associated with the darker and more troubled Hijikata, however. Ohno approaches the art differently: though he often embraces struggle and pain, what levity or joy might be seen in modern Butoh can be attributed to his influence. Unlike Hijikata, Ohno is a devout Christian. On and off the stage he has a saint-like presence, commanding attention with stillness rather than chaos. Though his work is still enormously provocative, it reaches for something less dark or terrible than ultimately elusive. In any performance the concentration and control he pours into every motion is immediately apparent. Individual body parts are isolated and exhaustively explored. Even now, at the age of 103 and confined to a wheelchair, he spends hours developing the expressiveness of his hands. According to Edin Velez, it is “a way back to fetal purity.” After my first encounter with Butoh, Ohno’s terrifying face remained in mind for weeks. Finally, deciding to share my distress if I couldn’t just forget it, I went in search of the video clip to send to my friends. Instead, I found “My Mother:” Ohno wears a large flowered hat and tiptoes about the stage to the sound of crashing waves, playing with his sleeves. Each of his arm movements rolls outward from the place where his ribs meet his sternum. His eyes flick upward, his chin strains forward, his legs buckle. He gathers his robes around him, and strokes their scarlet interior slowly. As his shoulders collapse inward, with a grey wig and exaggerated, feminine eye-makeup he is suddenly an old woman, bending against the wind. And then he stands, as the music quiets, and tilts his head upwards, breathing. It’s enough to take a single step. | | Saturday, March 7th, 2009 | | 1:01 pm |
It is astonishing how much I hate feeling trapped. | | Saturday, February 28th, 2009 | | 2:04 pm |
In the armpit of america, I started to understand modernism and the financial crisis.
If he told her he had not created disobedience he lied. Now the cyclone spirals above my house. I vow not to go to heaven if that's the only ladder. (not mine but I can't be bother to look up the amazing author because i am in tom's river new jersey and thus entitled to be lazy) ___________ What I want is a house filled with flowers no matter the season. ___________ I am vaguely obsessed with Butoh now. |
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