Rejoice
Missy | January 23, 2009
Commute home self-portrait on the Brooklyn Bridge
The days are getting longer!
New Favorite Song, vol 3
Missy | January 20, 2009
Also, my favorite band right now and for the past, oh, 18 months. Animal Collective, performing “My Girls” live:
The album dropped today. Listen for free here.
UPDATE: There is now an official video. Stereogum talks about it and embeds it here. The mouths kind of freak me out, but damn if seeing them bop along doesn’t reinforce the catchiness in the song.
New Favorite Song, vol 2
Missy | January 10, 2009
This actually might be better called “New Favorite Band”, since the video below is maybe my third favorite song on the record, that being Alpinisms by the School of Seven Bells. Alas, no video exists for favorite songs #s 1 and 2.
This is an acoustic version of “Connjur”. The girls are twins, hence the similarity in their voices and, of course, their looks.
(Note: Embedded video was not appearing in my Google Reader. Please click through to my page to view.)
Dancing days are here again
Missy | January 10, 2009
One of my 2009 goals is to return to dance. You maybe didn’t even know I left. Last year I was taking classes at both Dance New Amsterdam and at Cunningham until two things happened: my DNA teacher stopped teaching there (and I am picky about teachers) and I had and still have knee pain that was increasingly aggravated by activities such as yoga and dance. After an orthopedist told me to stop dancing (I never bothered with a second opinion), I went the route of combining physical therapy with continuing classes but sitting out during the big, jumpy across-the-floor stuff, still in mild but tolerable pain. And then, for no reason that I can think of now other than an overarching and probably overblown sense of discouragement, I quit all of it.
I miss it. I’ve been back in yoga for a few months and I started and am continuing tap dance classes, all with minimal knee pain (especially if I wear a special knee brace). But, I haven’t gone back to the kind of dance I really love, that which challenges my brain and muscles like nothing else does. Part of me is afraid to go back to Cunningham because it is difficult–for example, because of its rapid changes of direction and head and arm positions; and it requires commitment–the whole warm-up series should be committed to memory so that time is not spent re-teaching it every single class, even at the elementary level. The other part of me is, I suppose, just shamefully lazy.
All of this is a long way of introducing two videos I recently uncovered. First, Mondays with Merce is finally starting! These are webcasts with Merce Cunningham and his company. The first video (link here; I couldn’t embed it) features interviews with Merce about his technique with clips from his company class and from the most recent Dia:Beacon performance. It all looks very basic until just before the midway point. In the part of class when he throws across-the-floor combinations at the class (standard procedure in this or any dance class), you start to see even professional dancers struggle. Difficult stuff.
The second video is Pond Way, which was the first Cunningham piece I ever saw, years ago when I lived in DC, at the Kennedy Center. I remember being stunned. For all its abstraction, it was dance that made sense to me; I attribute this program to yanking me out of my traditional tastes, albeit relatively late in life (I never was all that precocious). Music by Brian Eno. Backdrop by Roy Lichtenstein.
I dunno. I think these videos might be more for me than for you. Wish me luck; who knows how many more years my body will be able to tolerate what I ask it to do. I need to remember that whenever I feel afraid to even try.
Back to work blues
Missy | January 1, 2009
Messing around with our respective cameras selfie. Coney Island.
Tomorrow I return to work after being off since December 17. I’m feeling really bored but I’m nevertheless regretting not scheduling my time off until the 5th. My thinking, brilliant at the time, was that I should ease my way back into work with a one-day week, a one-day week in which most others will still be out.
Bored. I was just thinking about how much of my break I’ve spent in my pajamas, listening to WOXY and staring at my tree or spending inordinate amounts of time on the internet.
Then again, I was thinking about how I hung out with friends on something like six separate occasions; I got a tattoo, and watched the whole season of Flight of the Conchords during the initial pajamas-wearing healing of said tattoo; went to the dentist (no cavities!); watched Twilight (you read that right), Flight of the Red Balloon, Burn After Reading (kind of a stinker), L’Eclisse, His Girl Friday (again), Reprise (again), Singles (also again, partly out of a bout of nostalgia and partly because it popped up as a recommendation when I discovered that I could stream Netflix films), Wall*E (brilliant beginning that slides unfavorably into Making A Point), The Secret of the Grain, The Dark Knight, Christmas Vacation and A Christmas Story and a few episodes of The Young & the Restless; I helped my mom shop for a new leather recliner (so she can, you know, watch Wall*E) and played with my brother’s dog; saw a band with the man I’ve been seeing and rode bikes to and from Coney Island on my birthday with him; had a birthday and, subsequently, a couple of birthday dinners; celebrated two others’ birthdays and an engagement; shot and developed some film for the first time in awhile; crashed a film critics pre-New Years gathering at the Brooklyn Inn, though stood inside to stay warm while this podcast was being recorded; at that bar, bumped into an old friend from my grad school days whom I haven’t seen in over ten years; I did a little yoga to counteract the slow December weight creep; I cleaned my apartment and my closet; I got a massage and a pedicure, and I read a fair amount (though probably retained little); I left Brooklyn only to travel to Ohio; I wrote my goals for 2009, which are ambitious and risk over-scheduling my time at the expense of having more fun.
Really, I don’t know why I think I need that extra day. Besides, I also need to ease my way back into Manhattan so I can spend this last holiday weekend getting myself to that Eggelston retro and to experience, hopefully, the womb. Let’s go, 2009.
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Listening
Unmap
Volcano Choir
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Reading
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
David Foster Wallace
