Modern Day Tragedies

Dearphotograph.com

Dear photograph,

I told you there would be better days.

Joel Witte

Regret

If Music Be The Food Of Love, Play On

Sundrenched World - Joshua Radin

- The song struck me when I was taking a quick run through the whole album, which probably has some of the best written songs of our time IMO-- there's something very Grey's Anatomy about it. Apparently Stacie Tookey choreographed a piece to this song on SYTYCD S7 with Kent and Allison. I'm not particularly crazy about the piece, especially when they set the stage awash with orange light-- get it, "Sundrenched" World? There are two versions of this song: the dirty one has the F-word somewhere in the middle which, after having listened to the clean version a billion times, makes that particular segment beyond jarring. Or may be I'm just shy and conservative.

The Fear You Won't Fall - Joshua Radin

- Marko from SYTYCD S8 did a solo to this piece in one of the last few episodes, and it was splendid. He really is a beast, and he reminds me that one need not become Mr Fantastics or Miss Elastic Girl to dance contemporary. Just gotta have that beastly core which can sustain a cartwheel for days (which Marko practically did in the Statue item in the top 20 episode). The lyrics are incredible, Radin really is one of the finest musical talent of our time, if he did write all those songs himself.

District Sleep Alone Tonight - The Postal Service

- This song has been stashed in my iTunes for the longest time, and only on one lazy afternoon when I decided to put my iPod on shuffle that I came across this song. There's something in the song that creates a dark atmosphere: something slightly industrial about it, something a tad lyrical, all amounting to a great company in a daydream, while I sat there minding my own business on the bus from Bukit Timah to Kent Ridge.

Nothing Better - The Postal Service

- The beginning of the song makes me want to move-- again it's the atmospheric touch to it that speaks to the body. However, it gets slightly teenybopperish once the person starts singing, but it doesn't make me want to claw my earphones out because of the lyrics: the surgical imagery kinda does it for me, or may be it was because I was doing Grey's Anatomy marathon at that time. May be. No, definitely.

Poison & Wine - The Civil Wars

- Dee Caspary has all the best songs, and his pieces are almost always a success. This song was done on SYTYCD s8 as an ending piece for one of the earlier episodes. I loved the walking in the item: very stylised, very expensive, very Victorian. Jordan and Melanie were a stand-out, but coming back to The Civil Wars: the band comprises two personnels, a girl who looks like Christina Perri and a dude who looks like Johnny Depp. They have some other awesome songs, but this one is definitely a winner.

Sunshine Song - Jason Mraz

- I hate it that I can't get an studio-recorded version of this song: the one I have is the concert version, and for the one good minute and a half all I hear is rabied fans bursting their pulmonary veins out, which is not the most pleasant thing preluding a quiet song, especially when you listen to the track way early in the morning. To me, the lyrics are genius, I can listen to it all day long, anytime. It's one of those pick-me-up songs that makes the world seem slightly more bearable, especially when you have an impending 6-hour session on Monday mornings. Great prescription for psychological health and upkeep.

Arrival Of The Birds - The Cinematic Orchestra

- Koustav introduced me to this song some time ago, and I'm obsessed with it ever since. It's such an incredible piece of music, it makes you feel melancholic, and it makes you wanna move. Then again, the Cinematic Orchestra can do no wrong in my eyes-- great mugging companion for sure. The album "Les Ailes Pourpres: Le Mystere Des Flamants" or "The Crimson Skies: The Mystery Of The Flamingos" is so well done. Check out "Hatching" and "Crimson Skies" ft. Luo Rhodes. Amazing.

What You Are - Jewel

- A piece of country music can never hurt anyone. I chanced upon the song when I saw this Victoria's Secret clip on YouTube. The clip made my day-- Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, call me.

Skin - Rihanna

- Somewhat I like how quiet the song is, very different from her-- urgh-- intelligible rant on sexual aberrance or relentless asking of what her name is. Did she forget or something? I'm not so sure about the red hair still, she looks like she's wearing a wig every time I see her, but with a body like that, who cares right?

I Was Here - Beyonce

- I see this song as B's confession-- she really wants to make the statement, and I feel it's very very sincere. I watched her half-hour-long documentary on the new album, and this song went easily up my chart of favorite songs. She's trying to figure things out, and it's nice to see her journey and the hard work that is happening in the background-- it makes you appreciate more what's eventually in the foreground. After the documentary (I forget the title, I blogged about it not too long ago) I actually could sit through "Run The World (Girls)" music video without wanting to barf at the expressions. Nonetheless, may be B should have saved a couple of more dollars: say, by not having the Tofo Tofo dancers flown all the way from some African dessert, because her subsequent music videos are beyond budget-- and I mean this blog has more budget than those videos. B needs some new inspirations for them music videos, or at least a new accountant for budgeting.

4 Reasons Not To Date A Dancer

By Kyle Butler

At the tender age of 19, I started dating a contemporary ballet dancer. His knowledge of art and culture, I thought, would elevate my aesthetic acumen. We would cry ugly tears at Balanchine’s Swan Lake and convulse with laughter at Les Ballets de Trockadero de Monte Carlo and make out during intermissions in Manhattan’s most pretentious cultural venues.
Friends, family, onlookers, laymen, serfs of our urban kingdom would envy my real-life Adonis like a 3rd grader envies her best friend’s My Size Barbie.
Somehow, I would develop his poise, grace and athleticism, through divine intervention or osmosis or a steady diet of post-coital cigarettes and ballerina tea.
The love? Raw, physical, gritty. The sex? Divine. The pillow talk? So artsy.
In the nearly three-year relationship that followed, I came to appreciate dance in a way that I never had before; I fell deeply in love; much of the former was realized. But there was always a profound disconnect, I think, between us: He was a dancer, and I was not.
So, if you ever find yourself lusting after a man in tights or that quirky, flexible B.F.A you see in the dining hall or even Channing Tatum in Step Up, first consider the following:

Other men and women will touch him in various states of undress. For work. Modern and postmodern techniques like contact improvisation rely heavily on touch to facilitate the choreographic process. Or, in English, prepare to watch your significant other sandwiched between two men clad in thongs, heavy eye makeup and body glitter, only to receive hearty applause from 300 elderly arts patrons.

He’ll talk about dance all the time, and you’ll never quite get it. This may be characteristic of other creative types, too. But no matter how many performances I attended or books I read, my opinion on dance felt uninformed or invalid. The barriers of entry to understanding an art without words are high and nebulous. I was an illiterate child in a world with no Hooked on Phonics.

Effective communication is difficult. Conservatory-bred dancers communicate fundamentally with the physical, or in metaphors of space, movement and the human body. Every argument turns into a series of indecipherable quips about the geometries, anatomies and spatial intentions of your relationship.

You will inevitably feel fat and uncoordinated. Alas, this is self-explanatory. “His ass is amazing” quickly turns into, “His ass is amazing,” followed by a rash of unsuccessful fad dieting and anxiety dreams about anabolic steroids.

Ladies and gentlemen: Sashay at your own risk.

Vulnerability

Yesterday marked a two-month-long worth of a journey with the Harlequinn.

It was, for the lack of a better expression, what it was. I realise I sound like a therapist-- being on the fence about things, being merely descriptive due to the inability to pass a defensible judgment-- but to be really honest, I don't really know what I felt about the whole thing. The one thing I knew was that I was glad that it was over. Not that it was a grueling or a painful experience, people in the past have said that joining Suntec was such a vicious endeavour, but now that I have walked in their footsteps, I think they totally blew things out of proportions. Not to say that it was not tiring either, but I guess I was lucky enough to have never reached an impasse during crunch time in those many weeks. Things worked themselves out, albeit rather slowly in the last weeks since we all were losing steam, and we managed to iron things out just in time.

I am happy with all the performances that I did. Right from the get-go, I knew I would gain nothing from the experience other than the memories of having gone through all that. It was a memory-making exercise. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I did not have the testosterone to want more than what I did. We were different, and that was all there was.

With a face caked monstrosity I stood there on stage feeling absolutely nothing. I cracked a smile here and there just in case the camera caught my face, I didn't want to have a smack-arse face. Nonetheless it really made me question, specifically, why I invested so much time and effort and energy in dance. I danced because I knew how to do it, I knew where to do it, and I didn't mind doing it. A good-enough, solid, matter-of-fact and honest answer. But as to the question of the opportunity cost of the it, I don't think I have such a straight forward answer.

So I chanced upon this talk by Brene Brown on TED, and she spoke about The Power of Vulnerability. Before I clicked on the video, I told my self I would close the window the second she started to speak like Chicken Soup for the Broken Soul. She didn't. She was a researcher, and she spent one good decade of her life delving into different types of persons: those who have a sense of connection and those who haven't, and then she analysed the behaviour of those who do. And she said:

The other thing that they have in common was this: they fully embrace vulnerability. They believed what made them vulnerable made them beautiful. They didn't talk about vulnerability being comfortable, nor did they talk about it being excruciating (like they did in the Shame interviewing). They just talked about it being necessary. They talk about the willingness to say "I love you" first. The willingness to do something where there's no guarantee.

It piqued my interest somewhat because I was once struck by a quote posted on facebook: Sad people are beautiful people. A bizarre statement, and I totally agree with it. So when I heard her say all these things, I wanted to know what her take would be. And after ploughing through the data, she made the observation that:

We numb vulnerability. ... It was funny when I set something out on Twitter and Facebook that said "How would you define vulnerability?", "What makes you feel vulnerable?" Within an hour and a half I got a hundred and fifty responses. Because I wanted to know what's out there: "Having to ask my husband for help when I'm sick and we're newly married", "Initiating sex with my husband", "Initiating sex with my wife", "Being turned down asking someone out", "Waiting for the doctor to call back", "Getting laid off", "Laying off people". This is the world we live in. We live in a vulnerable world. And one of the ways we deal with it is that we numb vulnerability. ...

The problem is, and I learnt this from the research, that we cannot selectively numb emotions. You can't say "Here's the bad stuff!"-- here's vulnerability, here's shame, here's fear, here's disappointment. I don't want to feel these. I'm gonna get a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. I don't want to feel these. ... You can't numb those hard feelings without numbing the other aspect of emotions. We can't selectively numb emotions. So when we numb those, we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness. And then we are miserable and we are looking for purpose and meaning, and we feel vulnerable, and we take a couple of beers and banana nut muffin. And it becomes a dangerous cycle.

One of the things that we have to think about is how and why we numb. And it doesn't just have to be about addiction.

As she said, the aim of research is to control and predict-- she predicted right. This is really what I think has happened to me, in dance, and in life in general. The reason why I think I'm losing reason for passion is that I have numbed myself, voluntarily or otherwise. And I can only think of two reasons why I have done so-- one: is that my body is so so fatigued that it shoved me to the point of not caring, and two: is the fear of vulnerability. I have held opinion about others that they loved their passion more than it loved them, and I think I just don't want it to happen to me.

I know what is going to come in the future for me, and perhaps I am desensitising me to prepare my self to bid good bye to dance before it does to me-- slowly climbing out of the hole that I've toiled digging for the past five years. Perhaps there is no reason for such great investing in dance, and the realisation of that absence should mark a turning point. I can dance still, but I could and should do so in moderation (although I'm skeptical whether such thing exists), and "moderation" is definitely not the word to describe what I'm doing at the moment. This is, ironically, true to Merce Cunnigham's words:

You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and may be hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls.

I did, but perhaps I don't have to.

Delicious

I always wanted a trampoline.

The day I first saw a big one, I knew I had to have it. It was the most glorious thing I had ever seen.

The day I first jumped on a big one, I felt that I had met my soulmate, in the form of mesh stretched across a steel frame, attached by springs.


It wasn't until I was around 19 that I finally had this soulmate sitting joyously in my backyard.



It took years, YEEEAAAARRRSSSS, of begging. Pleading. Reasoning. Then more begging.



Finally it's assembled in the yard, only after my Dad makes repeated visits during the build, just to make sure the foam safety padding isn't forgotten. No Dad, I didn't forget.





The first jumps are magical. The next jumps are bordering a religious experience. I can't believe this is real.





Now the jumps come only after a verbal contract with my parents:

NO JUMPING IF WE'RE NOT HOME

NO FRIENDS JUMPING WITHOUT US KNOWING

NO JUMPING IF WE'RE NOT HOME



Fairly straight-forward.



So it's 2 days after we get it, and news of the new purchase travels fast. My friend Ross is one of the first ones to come over for a jump.

We're both doing tricks and jumps and jumps and tricks, all under the watchful eye of my Mom who's at the kitchen sink. Everything is going well until Ross does some spin move and loses his balance. He lands too close to the edge, and his momentum leads him off the trampoline. Instead of being thrown onto the lawn, he rolls onto his side, attempting to grab onto the frame. His side hits the padded bar, and he groans in pain, then flops onto the lawn.




Shit.




He lies there holding his ribs, fighting for breath. A million things are going through my head.

Most of those things are "I CAN'T LOSE THIS TRAMPOLINE!!!"



I run to the kitchen, with a fraudulent air of relaxation and calm. I'm an AC-tor.


I get two large cups full of ice. "They're for frosty beverages, of course - all this jumping has worked up a sweat." I also pocket a plastic bag.



I return to Ross who has regained his ability to speak, but is now feeling a crunch every time he breathes. It's probably the muscle that is knotted up and rubbing against the ribs when you breathe, I explained. My 19 year old brain is grasping for straws.

He puts the bag of ice on his side.




Soon after, the pain is too much to bare and Ross needs to leave. DON'T TELL MY PARENTS, I plead. He doesn't.


He sneaks out of the house so they can't see him limping along with his leaking bag of ice, and drives home. Apparently on the way home the pain gets even worse, and he drives to the hospital instead. It's confirmed: 3 broken ribs.


I don't remember much after this. I think it's my brain trying to protect me from evil. All I remember is Ross saying something about blood in his pee.


That's gross, and I feel bad for Ross.





But I still have my trampoline.

-- "Don't Tell My Parents" by Mike Rosenthal