pina bausch and Yerba Buena

Dropped off a proposal for a show at Yerba Buena. I do not have a rejection letter yet from Yerba Buena, so that will be a nice addition for my file! But it is a great piece. Not very dancy, but who dances anymore? Ha ha ha ha. pushing, sweat and shattering glass, what more do you need?

Also just went to pina bausch’s web site.
http://www.pina-bausch.de/auditions.htm

I liked what was written about workshops etc. No ambiguity there. Nice and clean. Kinda like a rock, no questions how to deal with it. Wish I had more of that in me.

Have you seen “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”? Watched part of it and was surprised about Mickey Rooney’s character.

gym

When in Munich on Sunday, we went to a climbing gym there, run by the German Alpine Club. great gym really tall and mostly lead climbing. But the coolest part was that there was no waiver to sign, no test. Just go in and climb. I guess if you hurt yourself, it’s your own damn fault. plus the landing there is just a concrete floor, no pebbles, no foam, just concrete. There were routes outside also. Wish there were a gym like that back home.

Why are so there many waivers in the “land of the free”?

Is that just a symptom of a slow erosion of our rights in general?-right to a fair wage, right to healthcare, right to a freely elected government

or are one man’s rights another man’s privileges?


Yesterday went to Neuschwanstein in Bavaria. Which I think the Disneyland castle was modeled after. We walked up to the castle and found out there was a 2 hour wait to get in for the tour. People had large tickets with the time of their tour on it. Once their tour time was on, they got in line after walking through the turnstiles. Totally Disneyfied.

Disney got the idea from King Ludwig’s castle, which now has to manage crowds in the same way.

Is it a bad piece or just not your aesthetic?

Just saw a dance show in SF. Good thing it was short as it was not very interesting. This is not to say that the dancers weren’t any good. The dancers were well rehearsed and knew what they were doing, hit their cues, legs were high etc.

But nothing original in any of the pieces, no questions or investigations. Eventhough I did not like the show I am still glad I went. It is good to see what other work is being created in one’s artistic community. Too often I have heard dancers in the Bay Area say that they are tired of going to shows because they do not see anything they like.

The point isn’t to just see stuff you like. If that were the case, stay home and wait for your next NetFlix selection to show up. The point is to see as much as possible to challenge and define your own aesthetic. You might even get a small nugget from a piece that inspires you in a new direction. The point is too see as much as possible so then you can complain that no one is doing anything good. ha ha ha

Final Friends

Just watched the last friends episode.

What a dumb ending. quite uninteresting. no catch, no surprise, no change.
could have had deformed baby, plane crash, avian flu…

B-Day, August 6th

Kinda like D-Day except for it involves a big H, so maybe it should be H-Day, as in Hydrogen Bomb over Hiroshima.

I remember a few birthdays ago I was taking some summer school classes at Cal and heard a protest march about the Bomb being dropped on August 6th. I’ve got enough problems with birthdays, and then people protesting. Oh woe is me….

Wonder if anyone was born on August 6th 1945, if anyone was giving birth when the bomb hit….

Random Random Random

Yesterday Kelly and I were walking around Lake Merritt. I looked down in the water and saw a two things I would never imagine sitting near each other on the shells near the edge of the lake.

One was an egg, a regular chicken egg (though maybe it was a duck egg or an egg of some other fowl denizen of the Lake. The second object was a mini disco ball about the size of a tennis ball.

an egg and a disco ball…go figure

how did they get there? were they placed there together? What are the chances? Could you ever thought of that combo?

Random Random Random

Honestly

Just was driving back from the airport this morning, or was it afternoon. Anyways, heard an author on the radio, A.M. Holmes I think the name was. She was being interviewed on that show on NPR hosted by Linda Hunt. The author kept beginning sentences with “Honestly…” or “I have to honestly say…”

If she needs to use the word honestly so many times, is she telling thre truth when she does not use it? It’s kinda like grocery stores that have healthfood sections. What is the rest of the food then?

digital replacement

Recently I have been seeing more and more people listening to music playing on their cellphones. The sound quality is horrible, but there they are walking along listening to it anyways.

It must be music they have heard before and the badly reproduced digital version of it triggers a memory of the song they know. So in some sense the song they are hearing is in their head not the one coming out of the tiny cellphone speaker.

References is all we have nowadays. Digital music leaving out all the nuances of analog. Protein powder, Cliff Bars and vitamins replacing the complete nutrition humans used to eat. All the anitoxidants etc. continually being “discovered” which were there all along in a balanced diet.

Kinda like pornography. A stimulation that triggers a larger inate response within the human animal. Not the real thing but a reference to it. How much more removed from real experiences and expression are we going to get? To what extent does this reach in our collective psyche? To other people dying (IRAQ). It has definitely infiltrated the food chain. People, myself included, have no appreciation for where MEAT comes from.

It is all so sanitized.