Merce cunningham

I'm so glad I saw his final piece, opening night on his final birthday. And the lecture later, at the Guggenheim, on the process of chance. I was as exposed as possible I guess, and I was charmed.

My favorite piece by Cunningham is Winterbranch from 1964. It was performed in black sweatsuits and a footballer's facepaint, largely in darkness with roving spotlights, with drilling, abrasive music (design by Rauchenburg and music by LaMonte Young I'm pretty sure). The dance was about falling, ways of falling and getting up. There is repeated impact of all the joints on the floor, or sliding down without an impact, or a sudden trust into a backwards spin he must've learned with Martha Graham and then made more violent. It looks like a disaster. I love this photo of it because it features Carolyn Brown, the most incredible modern dancer I've ever seen on film. Plus she is beautiful. Merce is center in this photo. If you ever find a copy of Winterbranch you should see it and I would like to see it again too.

after

the kids have really sunburned necks and watery eyes, but Lilli's always looked spaced like that anyway. She's really skinny and was wearing a sweatshirt down to her knees. Gabe was clearly angling for a sleepover, sprawled on the couch. In a few energetic minutes they shot fireworks out the front windows, onto the street.
no one knows: lydia's friends are still checking in "Stay strong, love you" on Facebook. My mom proposed not having a service. She was just tired probably, impossibly tired. It was her little sister. I checked, she was just recently turned 43 years old.

free to be...

i don't wanna change because i still wanna be your friend foreveranever

pina bausch

Pina Bausch died today in Wuppertal, Germany, the industrial town she has enlivened since 1972 with the work of her company, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch.  

Her work may be most known to the non-dance world by its appearance in the Almodovar film Talk to Her.  A scene from Cafe Muller appears in the opening.  Pina and another dancer wind around a room full of chairs with their hands out and eyes closed, wearing nightgowns.  A man tosses the chairs out of the way.  They cease on the wall stage right, and slide down.  Pina frightened me in that scene many years before I studied her work: she was very thin and severe, with great pain in her tense elbows, and a futile lifting of both legs just a few degrees from the floor before dropping them down to join the rest of her body.  Pina Bausch in that scene is depicted above. 

I have since been inspired by her other works, which depict people in bizarre action.  In Nelken, the floor is covered in carnations, and in one scene a man in a ball gown alone onstage is running around, shouting at the audience.  Another scene, I believe this is from Muller, has a woman in a very regular dress standing center, while ten or so men go about the deliberate work of touching her, dissociative and nonsexual, on the nose, the forearm, the skirt-hem, the hair, and her body sways from all the hands though they each only exert slight force.  She combines normal elements to achieve the absurd, or perverts a single action by its repetition to surreal effect.  All the dancers are acting as people, not anything ethereal, no dancerly proportion of distance, and that is what is absorbing about these scenes.  

A few of my favorite segments I could find are below. 

Michael Jackson died

all i want

all i want to hear right now at all is either Going to California or the singles from 50 Cent's first album. I'm eating a excessive number of figs because they are outrageously delicious. Figs and milk and 50. I really miss years like 2003. Looking forward to my dad's commentary on whatever Power 92 is playing when I get home and we're driving somewhere together.

what goes on

Wednesday I'd slept at Jason's to avoid the miserable L train construction. We woke up and Stella went to work, I bought eggs and bacon and we used pancake mix I'd found in the bins at my old dorm and made a big breakfast. Dan and J were a lil grumpy until they got their little mcgriddles in their bellies.
We each swallowed an adderall from the upstairs drug dealer and walked from their apartment in Bushwick to Ridgewood, Queens. The porches looked like Urbana or the small brick homes looked like Chicago, and the desolate corners of expressway entrance ramps and car dealerships looked like Jefferson Park, Chicago. We turned south-west, walking through blocks and blocks of factories where there were no other pedestrians. Everything felt good, I guess that was the drug. I had energy and wanted nothing.
Walked to the Williamsburg Bridge, crossed into the city (walking the bridge takes 28 minutes). We'd walked something like nine miles when we landed on the Lower East Side. Jason found a batgammon set that I only just now remembered and realize I left at Home Sweet Home later.
Then were did we go... joined by Michael Quattlebaum and a boy named Nanu we walked to a zine release party, and then the Soho Grand Hotel. I bought a tank top; my shirt had stayed just slightly sweaty all day (the shirt was left at the club too, shit). At Nanu's place in TriBeCa there was a boy that looked like Willem Defoe and also a girl who looked like ugly Lady Gaga and is an alleged thief and a Japanese girl named Sayaka and a Mexican boy named Tom Pipol. I liked those last two a lot. We all drank. I had 2 drink and was wasted because I hadn't eaten. We went to Home Sweet Home for the goth night but I was too drunk to tell if it was fun or not or how long I stayed. When I left it was raining. Couldn't be bothered to untie my jacket from my purse, walked from below Delancy at Christie to 26th and 1st in that tank top, couldn't feel a thing.
It was a big New York day, and I was happy for it. I was so happy for so much of it.

Later I learned how sick my aunt Lydia is, and have felt very badly ever since. It is my intention to go back to Chicago after my class ends to spend time with my family; they are hurting very badly.