Seeking System

An essay: My triathlete

My companion Marc is an athlete, and I knew it before he said

anything. There was a big "29" Sharpie-tattooed on the indentured

crescent that happens when a muscled person flexes his calf, right

there on the back of his left leg.  It's a brand reserved only for

BMIs less than 25, a coterie of slim and sinewy overachievers who

insist on more than the bone-pound of running;  more than the waterlog

of swimming; and more than enduring the triangle of pain known as a

cycle seat than cycling: triathletes.

This shouldn't have surprised me (the only time we'd met before, he

was on his bike, wearing a spandex onesie) - but I was startled. 
He had run a triathlon in Staten Island on the

very day that we took the L train to Brooklyn and hefeweissened

ourselves into first-date conversational oblivion.  Many people can do

both of these things but not in the same day. The 29 was to mark his

age group. He was already superhuman, and I was pretty much just who I

am:  Lois lazy.

I, a non-athlete, never played a varsity sport or a junior varsity

sport; have gone to yoga class once a month for the past three years

and still raise my hand when the instructor asks if there are any

beginners; and was forced to wear a neon yellow armband at second

grade sleepaway camp that indicated  to every last camper my

ineptitude at swimming.  But the good thing about a first date in New

York is that there are no armbands; you can bluff your way around your

own deficiencies.   You can steer the conversation towards the lush,

plush, and figurative island of your musical knowledge; your political

opinions; your childhood pets.  I fudged out a whole afternoon this

way. He bought every minute of it.

I soon remembered one of the best aftereffects of a great first date:

the visions you have of being with the person in the long term.  Part

of this invovles a few extended daydreams of self-improvement.  As a

non-athlete, I always know that I'll be figured out by the athlete

sooner or later if I don't whip myself into shape.  The first time he

lifts up my shirt, he'll know it hasn't done a sit up in years.   So I

imagine myself being covertly personal trainered all into the night,

after the lights are off at Equinox.  It's just me and some giant

fauve former muscleman with a boombox.  I'm wearing a big

weightlifters belt and heaving giant dumbbells while Marc is on the

other side of town, in slow heartbeat sleep, thinking about running

across the Brooklyn Bridge with me next weekend.  I imagine him never

finding out that before we met I was on a ninth grade soccer team

that never scored a goal or won a match; that I attempted the track

team and tripped over a hurdle in a meet and had those little rubber

grit-sands embedded in my leg for weeks; that I was once pelted with a

nerf football in a school assembly and sobbed my way, with an audience of

200, to the nurse's office.

Then I imagined taking Marc to a sports event. Although there's no proven correlation
between a good fan and a good athlete, men are really impressed by a woman
if she knows the name of the shortstop for the Staten Island Yankees.  An added
plus to this is that the players on the team will, by virtue of their natural

abilities, overshadow your date's own athletic prowess.   He'll be put

a little in his place, without you having to put him there.

Then I would show Marc my golf swing.  It looks real.  To make me feel better,
my dad always says that it actually could be, but who can afford an $80 round of golf in

a city where a good beer is $9, and a good concert $25, and a good

pair of shoes $300?  And none of those other things make my back hurt,

and there are no old men or frumpy clothes or stuffy pro shops.  To

add insult, many real athletes doubt the legitimacy of golf as a real

sport.  Marc is one of them.

I actually put a few of these fantasies into play with swimming results.
Marc played along for a while with my aerobic and sports-related

decoys, but he figured me out on the day we were to run across

the Williamsburg bridge.  It was February.  My lungs needed

dewinterizing.  By the time I got to the crest of the bridge, he had

gotten to the end and looped me.  We settled for brunch at La Bonita.
And a sweaty public kiss.  And a bus ride home.

I guess I just have that Schopenhauerean need, when selecting a mate,

to find someone who fills my own voids.  He called it the will-to-life

(wille zum leben) syndrome:  I, the last-picked hurdle-fallen knee

scab, choose you, the Division One All-American.

I have tried in various ways to make myself more athletic.  I even a

took a job as a summer outdoor adventure leader, guiding teenagers

through backcountry forests in the North Cascades of Washington.  They

figured me out too.  I bought a bike for my birthday, and Marc agreed

to be its custodial manager for the winter.  It was stolen over the

holidays.  Neither of us made much of a fuss.  He probably figured it

was providence.

Because we live in a city where you can be not a bone athletic and get

by and have a fine time, some of our hardest weekends are weekends away. 
Recently we bunked in a hotel room in Chicago with no running water and a hairy bathtub and

a highly flammable duvet cover and no running water.  It was

apparently in the beautiful residential neighborhood of Lincoln Park

but we got in late and couldn't see it.  We made a pact to stay for

the first night and bail on the second night and get ourselves to a

high-end boutique hotel with complimentary lemon water in the

lobby as soon as we woke up. But I awoke groggy under the flammable duvet
alone: the runner in him had awoken at 0600 hours for a pacey sunup stride.  He came back all

aglow and sweaty and endorphined, while little me was shivering in a

hot sweat in our desert room.

"I actually like this neighborhood," he said to me while I sipped from

a bottle of water and gurgled it around in my mouth with toothpaste

and spat it into the dirty sink.  "I think we should stay."  His

runners high had come to a direct head-on with our three-

star covenant from the night before.  If athletes only got good

hardware and not all of those good feelings and afterglows, it might

have been easier to wake up alone.

We ended up switching hotels that day, and he later attributed his

hallucination to the morning jog. My untoned stomach is now an object of both of our affections - apart from bedding, it's the only soft thing in the apartment.  And I often

imagine myself with a picnicbasket-full of chicken salad sandwiches at

the finish line, and he with 35, 41, 47, 54, all the way up to 100,

inked on the sweet spot of his calf. 

An essay about getting too old for things

In the 1988 Gainesville, Georgia Civic Center Tee-ball draft lottery, I was drafted by a team called the Shrimps.  This was second grade, I knew what shrimp tasted like, I knew what it rhymed with, and I knew that my reputation for wimpiness - realized one kindergarten morning in a gym with felt carpet during a peg-the-slow-kid elimination game of battle ball - was already pretty much general knowledge.  So I planted my feet firmly on the brown shag and stood next to my mom as she arked the rotary phone seven numbers to the commisioner's house and pulled a heist for me.  My Spring '89 silkscreen cobalt kids Beefy-T read, in white cursive, Bears.  It was the first time I had been, by my own volition, too old for anything. 

I was too old for the Shrimps.  The Bears were a better team, anchored by a stout third-grader who would later go on to play college basketball named Katie B. Davis.  You would never call her by just her first name.  Her dad was a coach of some sort and I imagined him setting up her practice tee, her ball not inside a sock attached to a rope slung over a tree like mine was, but free to homerun into the thick of the woods, and her knocking the lights out of every last practice ball, deep into dinnertime. 

There are only a few things I remember about being on the Bears - the smell of cheap bubble gum that stays powdery for a few seconds when you chew it, chalky tart lollipops with hollow plastic sticks, the way that Katie B. was always our caboose, rbi'ing every last little cub of us; another girl called Louise who had braces and the nickname train-tracks;  Amy, who was funny with glasses;  and the two little Tubman-Scovak twins, who were only on the team because their older sister Fiona was on the team, and their mom could only sit through so much t-ball. In short - very little about the season.  No memory whatsoever of our victory over the Shrimps.  Don't even know the names of the other teams, if there were any, if we played them, whose dad played referee, who was the coach, what did my mother drive (maybe a brown Peugot), etc.  What I remember is that little phone call, made by my 100-pound mother, from our house on Turtleback Road.

What made me think of it was yesterday, when I realized I would never drive across the country.  Not because I don't know how to drive a car - though I don't own one and barely remember - and not because I couldn't find someone to go with me - my friend Geoff did it this past summer with a u-haul full of mid-century furniture and coffee table books - but because I'm too old for it.   All I did was drive my sleeping boyfriend in a rented car up a fairly pleasant highway in Virginia, but 75 miles in and only one cd of music and only four songs on repeat had hedged my brain just enough.  And here is the most anti-magical moment of all - you never realize the things you are too old for until you are suddenly too old for them.  I was just driving.  Being too old for something doesn't have much to do with age, but it does have to do with comfort, and with what you are finally no longer able to put up with. 

I'd like to distinguish this from the kind of too oldness that happens because something has gotten old - and by that I mean stale, and unfun, and a chore.  Trips to visit in-laws, for instance, can get old.  The way that certain men I went to college with still fail to remember my aquaintance, though we've been introduced six or seven times, has gotten old.  I'm not too old for it though, because meeting them again and again is out of my control. 

No, things you are too old for are not things that have gotten old - in fact, you once were young enough for them, and happy to do them.  I would have gladly played left field for the Shrimps if I hadn't realized what a wimp I was in p.e. a month prior to the draft.  In '85 or even as late as '86, I didn't know I was a wimp.  

After you have gotten too old for something, you may have a revival, and want, say, to drive across the country, but you don't want to do it in the traditional sense - in a car with over 100,000 miles and a busted air conditioner and a lot of fast-food wrappers on the floor and a couple of sticks of gum stuck in the ashtray (the car is old enough that it has one).  You want to do it up  - you want to become an audio-guided tourist of an authentic scene from your own imagination.  The first thing that comes to mind are middle-aged women who rent Mustangs and take girls trips and don't wear sunscreen and go out too late.  It makes me realize that trying to fight too oldness is somehow beside the point.  You are supposed to get too old for things.

Some things that you eventually get too old for are things you never will have done;  others are things you did endlessly.  Foresight does you no good - it only creates a sense of projected regret about something you can't even name.  You can make a list of things you'll do before you're too old for it, but something always get passed by.  Maybe it's supposed to.  I was lucky that my mom was brave enough to call up the commissioner, that I had eclipsed the moment of no return and saved myself from future regret with the Shrimps, but you very rarely get a chance to do that - maybe everyone only gets to do it once.  But who knows - the Shrimps might have even beat us in World Series '88.  And somehow all of the negative space in memory from not being on that team is just as fun to think about.  At the end of the season, we all got trophies.

NYCB: The Nutcracker, Romeo and Juliet, and Jewels

I've seen the NYCB thrice since the last post, and have been, in short, underwhelmed, surprised, and abstracted.

The Nutcracker, with Yvonne Boree as the Sugar Plum Fairy, on a late December Saturday night, in a full-priced seat in the Orchestra, was over-storied, under-choreographed, and dull. 

Romeo and Juliet, with Sterling Hyltin and Robert Fairchild as the lovers, on an early January Wednesday, in a student seat from the third ring, was believably dramatic, expressively danced, and unsappily romantic (and Daniel Ulbricht as Mercutio was the bright spot of the night).

Balanchine's Jewels, on a mid-January Saturday night, from the fourth ring sides, with Ashley Bouder dancing in Rubies, Abi Stafford dancing in Emeralds, and Maria Kowroski dancing in Diamonds, was unclear about itself, despite the technical chops of these dancers, from beginning to end.  Balanchine-lovers love Jewels, and I'm not a Balanchine-lover yet, but even Ashley Bouder projected so much showmanship at this performance that the relationships between dancers and their partners seemed meaningless.  This was the first explicitly non-story ballet to come from Balanchine, but even a subtraction of narrative implicates moving bodies in space into a relationship with one another, and this connectivity was wholly missing from tonight's performance.  A most chilly, lonely night.

I still look to the rest of the winter repertory with pleasure - because I discovered the twenty dollar fourth ring sides seats?  Because I still get a thrill out of ballet formation?  Because A.M. was right, that the orchestra has never been better?  Because it's winter? because it's fun to deconstruct intended meaning out of these pieces?  Because the photographs lining the walls at the New York State Theatre are grainy and haunting? 

ABT - Takeaway

Two more notes from four nights at ABT

1.  Systems
The median ABT female dance body is significantly healthier (less protruding bone!  more boob!) than the median in the other companies I've seen this season.  While it seems gauche to discuss each dancer's body specifically (more on why I think it seems gauche some time later, sparked by the other AM, who recently noted, in the middle of a compliment about her dancing in the NYCB's winter repertory, that he "didn't enjoy the physicality" of Wendy Whelan), I can't help but say that I was amazed at the bodies I saw - particularly the curves of ABT's dramatic ingenue Gillian Murphy and the legs of its crown princess, Julie Kent. 

2.  Gillian Murphy and Walt Whitman
Gillian Murphy seems to do a better story ballet (Fall River Legend) than she does abstract ballet (the Benjamin Millepied-choreographed, Nico Mahly-composed From Here On Out). There is something uniquely narrative about the way she carries her awareness -- she also can do a facial expression while dancing that is appropriately dramatic and expressed - I find many dancers trying to do this and coming off either overdone or distracted.  This is why I found her a little too watchable in the abstract pieces - she somehow brings a narrative to them where maybe there shouldn't be.  She really brings the American to American Ballet theater - there is something healthy and wholesome and earnest about her, and I wonder if this must be part of the reason she graces so many ABT poster covers (not that to be called American means that one must be healthy and earnest -- it's more that she is like what we want America to be, an idealization that plays up the fact that comparatively we live a newly habited, and for ballet's sake newly sophisticated, place).  Even with all of this, Murphy can't carry a largely undanced story ballet like Fall River Legend, Agnes de Mille's adaptation of the Lizzie Borden story, on her goodness alone. 

A Third Eye - George Platt Lynes

George Platt Lynes is more famous for his male erotica photographs than his ballet photographs.  But I found a copy of his book Ballet over the summer at the NYU Library, and nobody has stopped me from renewing it. 

This book is so rare that I hope Twelvetrees Press won't mind that I direct you to an excerpt from its introduction:

Ballet is the subject of these photographs, yet it is often only incidental to their structure and purpose.  George Lynes studied in Paris with Man Ray and admired Jean Cocteau and Gertrude Stein.  It was under these influences that he opened his photography studio in New York City during 1932; surrealism, neo-romanticism and other European visual movements remained with him.

When Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine invited George Lynes to photograph their ballets, they understood he would bring something else to their vision:  a third eye.  The shadows of these images are filled with Lynes' mentors: Cocteau, Joseph Cornell and Pavel Tchelitchew among them; but the light, Lynes has made his own.  These photographs are airless and brittle, they float before us bearing the magnificence of their maker's obsession and their subject's otherworldliness.  They are selected herein for their visual interest. No history is implied, or document recorded, other than the tracing of one man's passions.
Jack Woody, 1985

I also can't find any images from the book online - the image I've subbed is a Paul Cadmus photograph of Lynes and Monroe Wheeler.  and

To add my one nightcap thought:  there is a photograph toward the front of this book of Sono Osato, taken in 1937.  Osato wears a full-length, light-refracting black dress, princess and fitted to the hip with a full train, and it is so startlingly contemporary that I saw some semblance of it yesterday in the black-longsequinned fringe dresses in the window at Prada.

ABT, Saturday night, First Dance: Clear

I carried my copy of Alastair Macauley's ABT recap with me to City Center on Saturday night with the intention of looking it over in my seat before the show began, figuring out which parts of it I had to try and agree or disagree with, but it was too electric in the lobby and in the grandstands to get in any good alone time with the Arts section.  For $27, I was seated in the left rear mezzanine, a chilly region so far north of the stage that the dancers are rendered before you as tinily as they look on the cover of your program.  Saturday night was my first premiere, and with it came its donors in all of their uptown splendor:  bejeweled and upper-easty and cocktail-dressed (and fighting gravity).  It didn't feel like old New York (whatever that is), but it did feel energetic and tipsy, and somehow that audience pulse transferred straight through to the dancing (or maybe all along it was the dancers projecting their energy into us). 

Off the bat was Clear, a stunt-punctuated, high velocity, man-based ballet from the Aussie choreographer Stanton Welch (a repertory encore for ABT set to two Bach violin concertos).  It reminded me of watching figure skating on television and waiting to gasp when a skater landed a triple axel - a ballet full of air and revolutions.  Not such a bad ballet to watch from the rear mez, where form and formation end up becoming what you notice because you can't see the minutiae - these men are dime-turning and weaving in and out of each other with communicative, back-of-the-house-reaching precision.  The costumes were simple nude longtrunks (think of a longer extension of the trunk from Cezanne's The Bather on show on the 5th Floor at MOMA), and the backdrop was nude, and what was clear was not any costuming or lighting or sonic gimmick, but lucid, full frontal expression, as if the title's reference is: strip away decorative elements and you have pure movement.  The Paul Taylor men seem to have gone to the same school for jumping as these ABT dancers (no names because to me in the rear mez, the were a collective) - but these men would have been at the top of that class. 

My one problem with this piece was the female dancer, who, dressed in a beige crop top with bell bottomy tights, flitted in and out of the picture in fits and starts.  You think she's gone for good and then, like the old Energizer bunny commercials, she dances back in out of context.  I was surprised at myself for being ruffled by her, but realized she made me realize that the hes were hes - in other words, she introduced a narrative relationship by presenting herself as the other (her choreography is different!  her body is different!).  It's the way you might notice a beautiful woman when she walks into a room full of men - you start to think of their relation to her, what they all want to do with her, and tension ensues.  Before she entered, they were charged up ions, springfooted and abstract, and after she entered, they were men.  To add insult, her costume was a bit Mamma Mia (not the Met's, but Broadway's - with apologies to Michael Kors). 

More on the other two ballets (and Sunday night's program too) tomorrow!

Turnips!

I either forgot that they were partly purple, or I never knew. 

"When knowledge accumulates ceaselessly but at random, it increases the desire for system."
- Raymond Aron

A few things to love about the James Sewell Ballet

1.  There's only one blonde-bunned dancer in the group - Emily Tyra, ballet's Erica Christensen.  The other dancers are specific and rangey and darkheaded.  She, too, is specific and rangey, but her all-American-ness stands out, as if she was chosen to be part emblem of the American ballerina, and part statement on behalf of the troupe - we are all different, they seem to say, and each of us was chosen for a reason .  I contrast her to Sterling Hyltin, a principal at NYCB who replaced Ashley Bouder in Wheeldon's Saturday afternoon show - a beauty, easy on the eyes, but not commanding herself - not commanding her partner - and not, so far, commanding you. (I do have hope for her - she looks deeply felt in the NYCB winter bulletin).  But it was satisfying to watch the Sewell dancers - by the end, each of them had revealed something dramatic, something dark, something odd, about themselves.   

2.  In a primordial, monster-inspired ballet called Schoenberg Serenade, I was amused by the elements of play: seven company members - an odd, uneven corps - a bug with six legs and a head.  Arms and legs angling and creeping like spiders.  The company stacking one on top of the other to form various entymological puppets, then deconstructing back into dancers before your eyes.  A Sewell choice:  dancers Caroline Fermin and Justin leaf wear their wild hair down.  It  speaks the same language as the rest of the choreographical wildness.  Same goes for the mesh tank that reveals Nicholas Lincoln's tattoos!

3.  In an 11-part ballet called Opera Moves, Sewell presents ballet's answer to the variety show - Tyra reveals that she's at least a double threat with an operatic croon of Lonely House.  The other AM is irked that these operas aren't properly cited, but as an opera virgin, I was just happy to be hearing some.  The costumes radiate with warmth and graphic wizardry:  pink and peach lycra, red velvet.  Embellishments call to mind gladiators and the chandelier and buck point graphic artist (name!  name!  can't remember his name.  He's in the lobby, the coat closet line, at the Moma).  Sally Rouse is the most versatile dramatic ballerina I've seen - she can do romance, she can do friendship, she can even do funny - a tough one for ballerinas, who often seem too perfectly graceful and aligned to perform feats of physical humor.  But Rouse isn't misaligned, she's just small and dense and concentrated and emblazoned - a pistol, as my dad would say.   Or a firecracker.   

At the end of a weekend full of Wheeldon and Sewell, Sewell shows me more sculpture, more play, more movement, and cooler men (Chris Hannon is ballet's Christopher Moltisanti). I'm excited to give Wheeldon another chance.  Alastair MacAuley threw little darts at each of these companies, and he amuses me, but I suspect that he's grumpy - he's also sage enough to have earned the right to use his weapons. I'm not, and I'm excited to hunt and gather my own opinions, and bring them back here to the system.   

jsballet.org - James Sewell Ballet's website

http://www.barefootpenny.blogspot.com/ - into the mind of a Sewell dancer!  (the regal, stoic, Icelandic looking one: ballet's Bjork!)

"and everyone and I stopped breathing"

I'm a dropout of Phil Levine's poetry class, but I still love him (you can love something that doesn't love you!), and I missed the chance to hear him read tonight on behalf of a caffeine low, so I came home and looked him up and found this - a Frank O'Hara poem:

http://www.wnyc.org/news/articles/18356

 

And this, a reading from 2005: 
http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v3n2/features/levine_p_031605/levine_p.htm

So here's to this new personal magazine, and to ballet and New York and Phil Levine and all the things you quit and October and everything in it.