some pictures of the second snow (Wednesday) last week:
taking these shots made me rather alarmingly late for work (ok la, just 10 minutes but when it comes to Swedish punctuality ten is a whole lotta minutes) but how could I resist? it all melted away by the time we ended, although i saw it snow and rain a lot more while we were working.
Thursday I watched a modern dance piece with some of the BW girls. It was bizarre, and strange, and for the first thirty minutes I stared at three Swedish girls in black scuttling about on the floor in high heels and thought of choreography in my head instead. But the second half was definitely an improvement-- because it is currently 5.52am and I am in no shape to type up a new account you will have to make do with a rather lengthy and incoherent harangue I wrote earlier:
the second half definitely was a vast improvement, although 2 out of the three items were not much more engaging. what i liked best was the penultimate item; when it comes to contemporary pieces i think perhaps I only really truly connect with items that have a backstory to them. The way this item established it was truly thought-provoking; the soloist entered the stage and stood on a chair, with one high heel on and one on the floor. it looked almost as if she was about to hang herself. then, in company to the cadence of a stand up comedian's jokes and bouts of canned laughter, she began to move. the man's voice, low and confiding, made accomplices of the audience even as we watched his unwitting torture of the girl. "I knew this girl whom I couldn't forget whom I could have fallen very deep in love with" or something like that-- "She was a very strange girl; she liked to dance very fast to very slow music"; "she wrote me a beautiful letter. I read all the way to the bottom and crossed out the name at the bottom and wrote my own. I sent it back to her *cue canned laughter* I never heard from her again. I guess she didn't like what she wrote."
And each time he spoke the recorded laughter would play, and each line seemed to inflict even more pain on her. The chair became less of a perch for self-slaughter than a stage for mockery-- her self was exposed shred by shred. And as it went on the words started tumbling-- they cut the lines and spliced them, rocked the rhythm with more laughter. The cruelty of it all was that we laughed still at the man's words, but after a while I stopped-- it cut. You could feel it.
And when she danced with one shoe on and one shoe off you could see the yearning, the incompleteness-- the heels women wear for the men they love, the things they do to please them, the extents we go to, to make them love us-- or in the hopes that they will. I liked that piece a lot a lot :)
THAT'S how you use high heels, man. not walk them down the stage with your gloved hands -.-
abstraction for the sake of abstraction is neither artistic nor intellectual.
i've got three different accounts of my days going on at any one time and they're all piecemeal. I never know what I've written down anymore. In any case, a few pictures--
Friday I successfully defended my essay-- it wasn't as much of a nightmare as I thought it would be, and I think I put the Finnish girl who was my opponent through rather a lot of grief. In feedback she said I wrote with a very journalistic style; I guess some things just don't leave you, ever. I miss writing, even if I'm still pretty sure I could never live that kind of life. I'm not talking about the crazy nights or the pissy newsmakers or even the pornsite posting. I'm talking about having it spill over into your life, when you pick up the hotline call and find out that the body they found on the other end is a loved one, a friend-- someone you knew and cared for. I'm talking about having your soul picked bare, if you had to cover that story.
Ah well in any case it's not as though Singapore's newspapers are that dramatic or-- after a while-- have that wide a reach or scope. No offence intended. Anyway the poor Finnish girl told me later that she had to check a dictionary for every other word and even got her half-American boyfriend to translate. Whoops. :S
Sunday's reggae class was replaced by an AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME teacher. if I though Carmel was good this girl is in-freaking-sane, even though she taught in Swedish (and probably thought I was an idiot because she kept talking to me and I just gazed back helplessly at her). Thank god for this one girl in my class who helped to translate her more important instructions, like "she just asked us to dance opposite each other, so you have to go to the back" etc. After class I ran up to her and asked her if she taught anywhere else. Her reply? "I used to teach here and everywhere else, but I'm going to LA for like five months so I won't be here for the spring semester." god damn :(
that's her, in the adidas outfit. the other is some OTHER swedish girl in my class. my pic with her is terrible and blur :( Her name is Karen. I think if i ever do have kids I will name a daughter Karen, because 3 out of 4 Karens I know are crazy dancers and if names have any power at all......... (I'm going to end up like Maureen's mum in Centerstage, I know it. Hey watching the movie I felt like slapping Maureen for throwing it all away anyway).
And this lovely thing is on my knee after sunday's reggae. It keeps getting
Speaking of practice I think the BW girls now hate me, especially after I made them do 10 jackknives to round up warm-up. But it was only ten. sheesh.
the weekend was a very social one and I spent all of Monday recovering from it. But I don't feel like typing more now and in any case I've got to go and
And because I ought to remember a bit about what else is going on outside my little Swedish haven-- I'm glad Dad's back safe and sound in Singapore, he smsed me and said that for five days in Padang he had nothing to eat but combat rations. Also, something else-- quite outdated, but still-- Obama's Nobel win may have been decidedly a tad unwarranted, but all the vitriol is even more undeserved-- especially from his own countrymen. For chrissake people this is your president. Feel a little pride, will you? And it's not as if Nobel prizes haven't been awarded to people who haven't actually done anything material, if you wanted to put it that way. Aung San Suu Kyi is still under house arrest and the junta is still in power; and didn't someone get one for his efforts in dealing with apartheid even before it ever ended? I'm not knocking their efforts, they ARE valiant-- but at times the accolade can be awarded as much for an idea, an inspiration, a symbol as it is awarded for an actual achievement.
Having said that I did not like Obama's acceptance speech. I thought he played the family card rather too hard-- digression is the soul of wit, but his words rang too false for my liking-- and in any case I think he should have rejected it. Aung San Suu Kyi and incomplete efforts are all very well, but how do you reconcile ordering something like 50000 more troops in Afghanistan with accepting a Nobel peace prize? Even if the end result is peace, there's too much uncertainty in the interim and too much violence in the process that cannot be justified until you can fully calculate what the end result is (yes, in a situation like this, I think I may almost be persuaded that the end justifies the means. Perhaps.). All I can hope is that he will show that he deserves it, and for all the hating to STOP.
Ok it is 6.34am I am starving I think it should be safe to go make breakfast in a little bit :)
And sometimes, I tell them, I like to put my head back, like this, and let the rain fall in my mouth. It tastes just like wine. Have you ever tried it?