i amsterdam
Hanging out in Amsterdam. Spent today and yesterday just wandering, getting super lost, but eventually finding me and other vaguely familiar things. Anycase, it’s been a great three weeks in europe. Falling in love, deeper and deeper, living perfectly imperfect.
Just catching up on all the silly shows I watch at the moment, like Community and Parks and Rec.
Queen’s Day this weekend, then to Paris where I’m going to find Chipotle because it’s apparently there now, then back to Nantes, then to Vienna and Prague and eastern europe. Finally, back home.
It’s funny how used to someone you can become. Sleeping alone already feels weird.
I miss you.
allnight dancetrash
I’m frustrated.
Finaly Fantasy XIII is rather disappointing. The battle system’s pretty great but the story’s pretty not. It’s a beautiful looking game and all that, but it’s lacking a lot of what makes Final Fantasy games so awesome. Though, too, this is my first time really playing a game in, like, eight years.
I bought a Playstation 3. Because I was bored. I have many things to write before I go to France.
But all I do is sit and sit and lie down.
But not sleep.
I miss my Lily.
automatic static
why aren’t we emotionally available
we are, just not to women
Three more asian days.
mornings remind me of you
These autumnal days resurrect me in the proper way and all I want to do is sit inside of it, breathe, and close my eyes for days and years, wake up in a new world that was always here.
Molly Gaudry‘s The Lit Pub is back! Click the link and browse around. There are even a few [five] posts by me about my favorite books, which can be found at the click.
Meant to be doing some reviewing, some reading, but all I want is to expand beyond my body and float into the sky, be a cloud.
And then because she’s my favorite ballerina and I love me some Prokofiev:
my prima girl
Polina Semionova is the finest dancer alive. It doesn’t hurt that she’s beautiful.
ballet, better than beer
Art can save your life. And it’s meant to.
I’ve found, in this difficult time i’ve somehow plummeted into–this phestering psychosis propagated by diurnal delusions, maliciously maniacal, avariciously afflicted–is best treated with heavy doses of ballet.
I’ve spent much of the week burrowing into filmographies and laboring through waking life, and i’ve been unable to read more than a few sentences strung together. Even of my own, i find my words quite worthless and meaningless and so i’ve stopped reading them in case i end up deleting it all, which would be rather unfortunate. To safeguard against myself, i went so far as to e-mailing my oeuvre to myself, an odd internal war i seem to be fighting with and against the person i am.
Anycase, that wasn’t the point. The point is ballet. It’s hard to say where it started or why, but maybe Stravinsky or Prokofiev or even admirable Tchaikovsky are to blame for creating such breathtaking music, for ecstatic movements and undilutable beauty. Or maybe it’s because i met this girl and the fact that she was a ballerina amused and excited me. In anycase, i’ve become quite taken with it. It’s an art of the highest order, standing firmly in its own arena and speaking in the purest of voices: the voiceless kind, the language of music and bodies. It’s a language which cannot lie, and for that, to me, it’s the most perfect and, in my own fumbled attempts at artistry, it’s what i’m always reaching for, a transcendence, a way to make words so much more than just words, but make them something true, something that matters, to move beyond these trivial signifiers that i hate and love in equal measure. But music and bodies, they’re so perfect and so, well, perfect. And when i watch ballet, i fall in love, not with a person or myself, but with existence and it moves me beyond my body and these walls and i breathe in air and know that it’s there. And it matters, to me. The poetry of bodies, singing, radiating. And the aesthetics of ballet are perfect for my mind and i only recently realised, i think, what it is that defines beauty to me. It’s an important realisation, but maybe all of you already know what you believe beauty to be. I wasn’t fortunate in that regard and fumbled through millenniums of religions, philosophies, mythologies, stories, words words words, only to find what mattered, and it’s what matters in a fundamental way and we’re born knowing it, i think. But we forget. Or i do. Maybe only i did. Lost Beauty and searched for Her everywhere but didn’t even know Her name anymore. So i called out, reached out, turned out the lights, turned them back on, and when i came home, She was there already wondering why i left in the first place. But i think i know it now. Understand it, maybe. And ballet fits well inside Her. A brilliant birth, the advent of ballet, only a few centuries old, too. The lines, the movements, the music, the faces, the arms, the legs, the ground they leave and the air they lust after. There’s so much precision and grace. That kind of grace i’ve desired for countless lives only to find it in a pure form, digestible. It was real and it was magic.
What i meant to do was just post a video but i got stuck talking, typing, rather, and my fingers can’t help themselves when they get a keyboard under them. One word multiplies and then the day’s gone by and i’ve piled fifty pages into a document that i can’t read. I haven’t been writing, though, except for the random burst of a story i wrote the other day, which, really, isn’t a story but more an exercise in grammatical labyrinths, trying to Daedalus my way through all these insipid words i heap and heap and heap until i’m drowning in them, much like this post.
Marianela Nunez is a true talent and she’s radiant here playing Odile.
She plays it masterfully and with great intelligence, for what could be more menacing, more evil, than the smile of a beautiful woman? But, aside from the acting bit, she’s an incredible performer, and if i had been born a woman, i would dream endlessly of being a dancer. Miss Nunez, she’s taken a bit of me with her, i think, and i’ve very much a fan.
And then, because i feel like it and the Royal Ballet has many of its performances online, i’m dropping the final act of Swan Lake in here, which is brilliant, and i almost wept at the end.
Ballerinas have wondrous bodies, i think. I like my women thin, perilously thin, maybe, to my own fault, and i don’t like large breasts. They seem clunky and clumsy and i don’t know what i’d do with them. Ballerinas have great poise, and i like legs, strong but elegant. Their bodies are a unique poetry, the poetry of Tennyson, perhaps, whereas, say, the normal person’s body has the poetry of a sixteen year old drunkard bellowing into the night. The body of a dancer or anyone, really, who works in a performance type art [sports, too, i'd qualify] has to be its own piece of art. The arms of a boxer, the back of a swimmer, the legs of pitcher, all of these are, in their own perfect way, pieces of art. The most perfect kind, mind, because it goes beyond simply being a piece or an instrument or an object.
I like Anna Pavlova, too, though there are few videos of her, owing to the temporal problem of film being in its infancy during her life. She’s an interesting dancer, almost clumsy, but ecstatic in her movements, and, somehow, perfect, transcendent, like every movement contains all of her, and it’s that kind of reckless artistry that should be admired.
That last video is over 100 years old.Seems so very strange to me. That piece, The Dying Swan, was created specifically for her. Many have gone on to perform it, including Miss Nunez, but i can’t seem to find her performance online. I still know next to nothing about ballet, but it soothes me and it’s cast a rope ladder down in this hole, and maybe i can climb out soon.
A more recent performance of The Dying Swan.
That’s probably enough from me, yes?
you are not beautiful
The world has gone blind and no one understands what beauty is anymore. There is only me, and so i must educate.
I could watch that for hours, methinks, and i’ve been watching it over and over here in between staring at the walls and wolfing out. It’s perfect and beautiful, beautiful in the proper sense, in the aesthetic way, and i’ve become an unashamed aesthete, and i likely always was. It makes me weep, this dance, this song, their movement so perfect, so fluid, like everything that ever was or has yet to be, and there’s this power, rising, rising, rising, heard in violin strings, the ways they cry, the ways they teeter back and forth and saw through you, the way they collide and recombine to take you from where you sit to where you will one day be, and their bodies, her legs, her expression, because surely the show is all her, and it’s not simply that she’s a beautiful woman, because that’s obvious, obtuse, too narrow, but that she is a goddess, a form of precision and perfection, and the way she moves is poetry, it’s songwriting at it’s most powerful, it’s words at their most integral, it’s you and me and all that’s in between, and i could weep, are you weeping, you should weep, and you should watch it on fullscreen, dim the lights, turn the sound so loud you no longer hear your heart beating, your lungs breathing, because when it hits, the moment, this singularity where all comes together, when your heart collapses and becomes a part of mine, right around that 3:00 mark, you should weep, because that is what perfection is, that face, her expression, and you should climb onto your roof and transform, become new and whole, become a part of me and I, a part of all that is and will be, because there’s a wholeness in there if you have the right eyes, if you’ve the heart to see true poetry and true language because there is no language, no poetry, no sound quite as glorious, quite as permanent, as eternal as the songs of the body, of the female form in all its eloquence, and don’t close your eyes, never close them, because if you breathe too long than the moment’s gone and perfection is a thing of instants and moments and never a flicker longer, because she’s perfect here, beautiful, unforgettable, but, when the curtain closes, when time starts again, when the dream ends, she’s just another person.
To shift gears completely, i want to read this book by Grace Krilanovich solely because of this introduction by Steve Erickson, who, if you know me, you know is my hero and the world’s greatest novelist. Or at least america’s.
Shift once more, the ravishing Pela Via has been interviewed by the glorious Craig Wallwork at his site which can be found if’n you click his name. Both writers, both great, and links to their stories may be found at their respective websites.
Wolfing out tonight. Oh, new It’s Always Sunny, too. Musn’t forget.
Go forth, see beauty and live gorgeously. I demand it.
