for dancers--and everyone else?

I came upon this on youtube tonight, and was delighted. I found it said something about the dance that I've been failing to articulate for some time now.

Metal is very stylized, and in some ways that makes it perfect for the ballet.

Ballet is all about extreme stylization. Each generation of dancers since the court of Louis XIV has faced some pressure to be lighter, more stately, graceful, delicate, and higher on their toes--growing generation after another towards heaven, up out of dark medieval symbolism that associated downwards and bodies with hell and earth.

As time has come and passed, that heavenly ideal became an idol of self-destruction. In a world where virtually all the stars are women, blooming young and retiring by thirty, generations of men follow student to master as they shape, dictate, choreograph and direct. By the late 1980's the image that dominated ballet was the inherited ideal of Bruce Balanchine's work: transparently slender, long limbed, tall, and young, with the disposition of an adoring child and skin the color of a freshly peeled apple.

In keeping with the tradition of Dance, the visual surpassed the corporeal. Balanchine taught his dancers how to "cut some corners" on technique, creating spectacular stage performances alongside premature retirements and tendinitis. Children ready to give anything for the New York City Ballet sacrificed physical maturity as they starved themselves into--and then sometimes out of--the shape proscribed.


Set against nightwish, figurine grace and surreal, doll-like perfection have made ballet real for me again. In this fantasy playground, historical footage emphasizes every marionette pause, and the dark undercurrents of ballet's approach to sexuality and gender are left clear. Here we remember her invisible bones, the impossible thinness of her ankles, the irrevocable constancy in which she exists only for her beauty, and the way all of us worship her for it as she dances on, forever--in every way that matters--alone.

Here, removed a step from The Great Western Heritage of Culture And Dance, it is easy to believe the ideal is not real; it is easy to believe that no one really thinks this is the ultimate embodiment of who and what I am supposed to be.

Here it is possible to conceptualize ballet as only one aspect, to raise it from it's dark beauty and, in some small way, integrate it to myself--without being eaten by what I would have left behind.



Here's a link to the blog of the fellow who did it; deep thanks for a masterful and insight provoking job.

This is another amazing film piece. It showcases a very tangibly corporeal side of the dance, and at the same time, overwhelming performance, grace, and technique.

shameless

But so beautiful.



So That You Will Hear Me
By Pablo Neruda

So that you will hear me
my words
sometimes grow thin
as the tracks of the gulls on the beaches.

Necklace, drunken bell
for your hands smooth as grapes.

And I watch my words from a long way off.
They are more yours than mine.
They climb on my old suffering like ivy.

It climbs the same way on damp walls.
You are to blame for this cruel sport.
They are fleeing from my dark lair.
You fill everything, you fill everything.

Before you they peopled the solitude that you occupy,
and they are more used to my sadness than you are.

Now I want them to say what I want to say to you
to make you hear as I want you to hear me.

The wind of anguish still hauls on them as usual.
Sometimes hurricanes of dreams still knock them over.
You listen to other voices in my painful voice.

Lament of old mouths, blood of old supplications.
Love me, companion. Don't forsake me. Follow me.
Follow me, companion, on this wave of anguish.

But my words become stained with your love.
You occupy everything, you occupy everything.

I am making them into an endless necklace
for your white hands, smooth as grapes.




Full text including the original can be found here.

Experiences slightly like getting hit by a truck

include
1) Watching Hotel Rwanda
2) Reading Crime and Punishment
4) Getting hit by a car
5) Noticing that your closest friend is not only a violent fascist but intends to fully pickle himself in alcohol before the night is out.


So. . . here's the thing about reading Dostoevsky, or at least Crime and Punishment. As far as I can tell, there are three options; you can try to stonewall it and not feel anything, you can take it tongue in cheek, or you can read the whole thing literally and let the melodrama of it sweep you into its world.

I have a bit of a problem with taking things literally, so naturally my first reading was all about this third approach. . . hence, slightly like getting hit by a truck.

Lately I've been introduced a little into how the rest of the radical left carries its self. Some are just bitter and/or delusional; a few are very well read and insightful. Among the many ideas I'm not particularly familiar with yet is that socialism is the next stage in some sort of natural progressive order, to succeed our present system just as capitalism replaced monarchy.

It occurs to me that some people have a kind of literalist-Dostoevsky approach to the world; they see all the wrongs that come of this stage in that "historical order" in vivid detail, perhaps even exaggerated, but as a matter of perspective, not dishonesty. They walk the streets and meet a man whose family is starving, and over the course of a thousand pages they watch helplessly from a very slightly less precarious position as that family--and the various exceedingly human individuals in it--continue in their abject poverty until they are mercilessly crushed by the system in which they've no choice but to exist.

They experience all this in a sort of vivid technicolor detail, and for them life is rather like getting hit by a truck. I go through stages of being this kind of person, but most of the time I've only a relatively blunted underlaying awareness. Still, the awareness is there, and the emotional-truck people are impossible to discredit. After all, the world is much more full of Marmeladovs--people whose lives actually, rather than emotionally, resemble being hit by a truck; perhaps the world is a lot like Fyodor saw it after all.

Speaking of which

For any of you who, like me, have found yourselves lost by recent news about the finance markets, a very useful link. . .

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/diamond-and-kashyap-on-the-recent-financial-upheavals/?em

In search of a numerate left

Here is what I would like to know: Why do so few individuals on the political left trouble themselves to address economics? As my brother likes to point out, one of the primary things we lefties have got on our side is Reality. As on the curve above, in certain circumstances--some of us would argue, virtually all circumstances--the bleeding heart solutions are, really, the best solutions on all sorts of levels.

Let's take the living wage vs. the wage ratio approach. The wage ratio approach is so far out there, so radically bleeding heart, that one doesn't even hear it discussed on a legislative level . . not even a little bit.

Judging by our bleeding heart criteria, a living wage initially seems like a great idea. . . but it sort of floats out there by it's self, a fantastic humanitarian notion unsupported by all those Hard Nosed Ideas about Economics and The Reality of Doing Business that the right so likes to pretend are their own.

So we'll move along to a different wage policy instead. I suggest (as I'm sure various other people have suggested at various times) that instead of putting a price floor on labor, it become illegal to pay the lowest paid employees of a company less than 1/5 the pay rate of the highest paid employees.


From an economically literate standpoint, this makes more sense in several ways. Firstly, as the libertarians and neo-cons should be pleased to note, it avoids the market inhibition of a cost floor.

It's true that a 500% boss can be living pretty well while the bottom tier employees basically starve, but I'm not terribly worried about this scenario. . . we don't see a much reduced demand for labor from the price floor currently in place (the minimum wage) because the level of that price floor is very close to market price. So yes, some people might end up, at some point, having to sell their labor for low prices. . . but it leaves the neo-cons and "hard nosed realists" No Room To Complain. No matter how little your company is making, there is always enough to pay your employees 1/5 as much as you take home.

My favorite thing about this approach is that it strikes directly at inequality. I don't think we need more than a 500% inequality factor*; I think that's enough to still give plenty of incentive to innovate and perform well. While maintaining those incentives, it reduces the treadmill effect that "economic growth" combined with increasing inequality creates.

It also reduces incentives for companies to become so mamoth sized, thereby encouraging them to remain small and diverse, protecting competition for the consumers. I think that's worth the fact of some reduction in economies of scale.

Now, don't get me wrong; I don't think this policy would be enough to make it worth abolishing the minimum wage all on it's own. With certain other protections in place, that might be good. . . but even without them, if I had to choose** between a living wage and 20% of the CEO's wage, I'd choose 20% of the CEO's wage any day.


Sadly, the second-largest reason this sort of policy is unlikely to be adopted by the mainstream left is that minimum wage laws are infinitely easier to pass. The largest reason, striking more at the heart of the matter, is that an inordinate amount of funding comes from individuals who make a lot more than five times as much as their employees.

To me, these kinds of solutions seem to be all over the place, and it also seems that no line of defense short of sacrificing babies to the free market on the new moon could defeat them.

So why aren't we talking about them?






*and due to variance between companies, inequality could still be a lot more than 500%.

**given that there would still be various firms competing for my labor. BTW, if anyone out there wants to school me on labor markets and the like, have at.

*** Also, thanks to Indexed for the illustration.