Some gems:
24. Know his poison, without standing there, pondering like a dope. Brand, amount, style, fast, like so: Booker's, double, neat.
40. Speak to an eight-year-old so he will hear. Use his first name. Don't use baby talk. Don't crank up your energy to match his. Ask questions and wait for answers. Follow up. Don't pretend to be interested in Webkinz or Power Rangers or whatever. He's as bored with that shit as you are. Concentrate instead on seeing the child as a person of his own.
58. Avoid boredom. You have enough to eat. You can move. This must be acknowledged as a kind of freedom. You don't always have to buy things, put things in your mouth, or be delighted.
60. Be brand loyal to at least one product. It tells a lot about who you are and where you came from. Me? I like Hellman's mayonnaise and Genesee beer, which makes me the fleshy, stubbornly upstate ne'er-do-well that I will always be.
That last one is for my homies.
]]>Two-thirds of all the yoga instructors I've known carry themselves with this attitude. It's tolerable, but unpleasant, and it doesn't help the work, in my opinion. For my part, it puts bitterness in my mouth. Just get on with the class: push us, but don't ask us to fit your mold. Focus on the practice of yoga, not the philosophical freight that you carry with it; that stuff can find its expression in the way you teach without stomping everyone's good spirit.
In the recent New Yorker profile of George Clooney, there's a nice little quote about how he deals with fans: graciously. He says, "You've got to offer these people a path back to their lives." The same goes for yoga: it's a profound practice—fine; it's not just a bunch of stretches, nor simply a matter of turning up—fine. But, O Instructor, you've got to offer us a path into it, from our lives, and back again.]]>
Sometimes it's easy to push your limb past a tight spot into a more comfortable one that looks "more stretched." But the value of the training is in that tight feeling. And sometimes it's possible to go "past" that place, into a pose that actually uses different muscles—hence, the ones that I felt, which were crying in pain, become relaxed. In each pose, I need to find the place where I, personally, can work usefully, without being too comfortable. This goes hand in hand with that motto that yoga teachers are constantly beating us with, "Don't try to look cool. Nobody cares." It's true! Nobody cares. Yoga seems to have a different culture than the martial arts, where there is an unacknowledged premium placed on looking tough.
We novices have a pernicious tendency, in yoga, to screw up our faces in pain. Somehow, our bodies seem to think that squinting and grimacing and and tensing our neck muscles will allow us to get an extra inch of stretch, or to endure it longer. It doesn't help, of course! Part of yoga's training is to help us relax our minds, even in difficult circumstances—a skill that I reckon will come in useful if I ever have to run a marathon, or escape from prison, or face a Bond villain's evil contraptions.
There are several things built into yoga practice that aim to take us out of our bee-swarming heads—to relax our minds—and be more conscious of our bodies: there's the injunction to breath constantly and smoothly, there's the constant dropping of the head and neck in poses where seemingly every other muscle in the body is fully engaged, and there's this lovely slogan: Don't do the pose with your face.
But the other day I came across this abandoned post, dated August 27, 2003. (Warning: this won't be interesting to anyone not already under the spell of Letters to an Unknown Audience.)
It seems to be a law of nature that almost no good writing about theatre exists. Writings about theatre are like unstable combinations of fundamental particles, I think, and they quickly disintegrate or become less meaningful. It's related to the fact that performance depends largely on the presence of the actor, making "performance documentation" a specious practice. Videotapes of theatre events are scant shadows of the original sense of time and space, and the opportunity afforded by live performance to choose what you look at.When I initiated this site, I resolved to read one theatre book per week. So far I have read about two.
The first was Anne Bogart's A Director Prepares. Bogart is to be reckoned with, as a director. She's done a string of well-respected productions with creative perspectives on classic texts, always using a lot of what theatre people call "movement"—that is, her productions avoid becoming talking heads. She even developed her own, widely-taught, approach to generating movement, an approach known as "Viewpoints."
The book is divided into seven sections that deal with problems a director is supposed to encounter in rehearsal. The choices are interesting: Memory, Violence, Eroticism, Terror, Stereotype, Embarrassment, Resistance. These are interesting axes along which to view a rehearsal, and to my knowledge they haven't been dealt with by other writers on theatre.
In "Memory," she is confronted with the fact that Americans have no performative tradition from which to draw in creating performance material—or so she thinks, at first. By contrast, performers with clear ethnic roots, or with ritualistic religious backgrounds have memories of movements in their bodies, which they can revisit while developing gestures and actions for their characters.
But on further consideration, Bogart decides that she herself, and generally, an American, does have performative tradition and memory on which to draw, citing vaudeville, operetta, and the evangelical tradition.
My favorite chapter of Bogart's is "Violence." In rehearsal I am constantly working to elicit answers from the actors. Unlike talking over a set design, or building a piece of software, I can't just cycle between brainstorming and ciriticizing. Every idea needs to be held gently because the actor's delicate personal associations with it are the origin of his performance. But inevitably I get to a point where the actor and I directly disagree on the meaning of a moment. At that moment I do an act of violence, discarding the actor's coddled belief and substituting a new one. Then we have the hard work of rebuilding the associations that will allow the actor to actually perform it. Bogart urged me to get comfortable with that feeling of violence, and I'm slowly getting there. But it is a delicate balance: too much violence and the actor has nothing personal to motivate himself. Too little and he will slip out of phase with the rest of the piece.
I've become so artistically lazy since then!]]>
Next night, potluck dinner. We went up on the roof and got an Edinburgh panorama: Arthur's Seat, Blackford Hill, Edinburgh Castle (lit up and dignified on its rock), the carpet of pink-gray rooftops and chimneys, and a bloody red-orange sunset in the west. We went to the fenceless edge and peered down into people's flats, where they played Wii, knitted, and folded laundry.
I had to run to Diane's Pool Hall, described by one patron as "not a pool hall but a fightin' hall." First game: rubbish. Second game: run. Third game: rubbish. Our hammered Basque friend called someone a postcolonial motherf_cker, to our great amusement. After closing, we set out across the Meadows and turned up in a children's playground, new and sturdy, its resilient rubber sheets holding our feet still. The swingset seats were wide and the chains strong. The zipline held sure and zipped well. Someone fell over; "Basque down!" was the call. A cute young French couple was called to the scene: A swingset is called a balançoir. Jane Birkin speaks perfect French but sings in a crummy English accent to sell records. We surrounded ourselves with wheezes: What would a James Bond villain say if they had their final showdown in a kid's playground? The cops drove by and said nothing.
Bright and early the next day I went mountain biking. My old chum Jamie brewed a huge cup of strong coffee and loaned me a bike. We cycled along the canal, passing the two songs (mother and daughter) I got to know last year on canal trips. We cut over to the Water of Leith, a strangled little trickle coming down out of the suburbs. We got up into the farmland on the edge of the Pentland Hills. Sheep baaed. The pasture was amber and the heather green. The hills rolled.
Up and down the hills we went, along gnarled rocky paths and loose gravel tracks, up and over the first pass into a quiet valley with a reservoir. Blip said the fish and ba said the sheep. There were the gorse bushes with their coconut-smelling flowers. We kept going and going, up and down tracks until the last peak was too high and the mud was too thick and the view was too sweet, then we rolled down the hill and back along the Water of Leith. Near a gaggle of teenagers playing, we roused a heron from the water; he was great and blue and I've never seen a heron at full span from above: terrifically smooth, those wide wings slowly pulsing.
Back in the city, all were out on the town. Among the cyclists on the canal was one riding an ordinary, or penny-farthing. Another graceful thing. I ate a craload of trail mix and went home and slept.]]>
But, an English friend of mine stung me, explaining that many Britons have been incensed that people around the world would try to tell the UK what to do with Northern Ireland—namely, to give it sovereignty or let it join the ROI. Many Northern Irish people are, of course, quite happy to be part of the UK—while others point to a history of English oppression on the island.
We Americans, I realized, are especially predisposed towards any group that wants to separate from a big parent or neighbor. But when the Southern States sought to break away for self-determination, in 1861, bringing them back by force was (and is) thought to be a great moral imperative. The issues in Tibet are surely more subtle than I'd thought.
(Any comments pointing to more thorough arguments against the Free Tibet cause would be appreciated.)]]>
I didn't realize how jaded I was about the existence of space travel in our time until I saw that Wikipedia has a banner template for articles about in-progress spaceflights. In other words, there are enough in-progress spaceflights over time to make it worthwhile to design a special banner warning people that the article might change during the mission.
Guys, we're sending handwritten 19th-century books into space with robots. That deserves a what-what. (Jetpacks still to come, of course.)]]>
Most people will not have heard of Jay-Z until this week, when newspapers reported that Glastonbury's top billing for some American rapper had led to disappointing ticket sales. ... The subject matter is standard hip-hop fare, reflecting an upbringing in Brooklyn's housing projects and a street culture of drugs and guns (along with tiresome sexism and money-worship), yet the lyrics avoid cliche: "Blame Reagon for making me a moster / Blame Oliver North and Iran Contra / I ran contraband that they sponsored." His later work is marked by increasingly inventive delivery: instead of firing off words, the rapper slows down, stretches his words or simply stops.]]>(The Guardian, April 10, 2008, p. 36.)
What is wrong, in my view, is industrial meat production. The chain that leads from the birthing of a cow in a breeding center, to its growth on fattening grains (which themselves are intensively farmed), to its glory days in a CAFO absorbing hormones and grazing the shit of other cows, to its arrival at the abattoir and then its grinding and processing, is a peculiar invention of man and particularly the modern capitalist supply chain which perfectly dissociates consumers from the origins of their products. My vegetarianism is a protest, a demonstration, against these methods.
It’s not a matter of the animal not having a chance to defend itself, as people sometimes say. Chickens, pigs and cows are at a distinct disadvantage against human hunters and husbanders anyway, as is the gazelle when faced with a lion. The gazelle has its own adaptations—its speed, for example—but at least nine times out of ten it’s the lion that eats the gazelle and not the other way around. In a wild ecosystem, predators sometimes starve, and prey populations go up and down—they evade better or worse—so there’s a natural balance. But in terms of the eating, we know who’s eating who. A man who eats from a cow herd, if that herd lives in some sustainable balance with the man, is no less ethical than the lion that eats the gazelle.
I don’t object to the use of tools or technology in hunting or raising food animals. Let us have our human advantages—our tools, our planning intellect—fine! But when we start to use the animal as simply a factor, leveragable to maximize production, we’re doing something wrong. If we lose the larger ecological cycle that animals participate in, we start taking unexpected costs. We see these costs in many places: There are the occasional health scares, like mad cow disease, that are nurtured by the animals’ unnatural diets. Hormones given to the animals might affect human health in unexpected ways. There is the land-use problem, that getting human energy from animals requires ten times as much land as getting it from plants. It’s not the technology as such that causes a problem: it’s the assumption a tool that increases yields on your farm—a hormone, say—won’t have unsustainable costs somewhere else. It’s the policy of focusing on results, rather than the cycle that produces them.
Even if animals deserve to die—to become someone’s lunch—we should still respect their life, I feel. As living things, they deserve not to be managed strictly as food items. They deserve to eat a diet that their digestion is adapted for, rather than one that fattens them up. (If they are meat-eaters, they deserve to eat other living things, rather than the ground bones of other industrially-farmed animals, which is commonly used as feed.) They deserve to roam, to graze—to follow their behaviors. The industrial system puts the animals in an extremely tight cycle of birth, feeding, waste removal, and slaughter, which is not a life.
Not all agriculture is as intensive as industrial meat production. Older ways of farming were more holistic, allowing the animal a fairly natural life before cultivating it—that is to say, slaughtering and butchering it for the table—and some farms strive to operate this way today. (One such farm, Polyface Farms, in Virginia, is astutely profiled by Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma.)
Above all, I want to know the chain, to know what I'm eating. Forget about facing the animal with a sharp flintrock on an open plain: If you can stare your food chain in the eye, then you can eat from it. If you insist on averting your eyes, you're doing something wrong.]]>