I have been hiding here for months. Out of habit, out of fear, out of poverty. Paris marginalizes me…I don’t have the means to open her up to taste her treasures. I see them, they wink, but when day comes to day I am underdressed, undergroomed and unprepared for facing the city. I don’t have the energy or the clothes, the money, or the makeup. Yesterday, marching to the end of the Tour de France I accidentally stepped on the pointed shoes of a pinched faced Parisian boy. I said “Pardon” and turned to him. He threw his hands up turned his head toward and away from me, seemingly seething with insult ready for me to get into it with him.
“This is what we do, we French, we fight.” There is certainly a long lineage of scrappy French…Napoleon being a mighty one. A well –dressed ego. It is true, the French do it well…they dress well, they intellectualize well, they party with refinement. Aperitifs, entrees, red wine, dancing, clean up. Their ritualized way of partying being dressing living looking. I want it and can’t take it on..Too rich for my blood. Shit! Each day I attempt being at peace with my place in the purgatory of surviving… That I can buy apples and a coffee and spend the day writing reading or walking or rediscovering Paris, because that only costs time and that is currency I’ve got. So I have her treasures. The time that she gives me. There is nothing that is urgent to do...penniless I am free to wander the city, see her casually. Then pushed into the subway, with the manufactured perfume smell that bursts in the underground , through the grates the purposeful perfume that doesn’t camouflage the urine, battery acid smell the subway’s homelessness. Each day hides under the next and I sleep and relive working for the beautiful people in their penthouses. When you step out you are in the throng of it, never alone. And I wanted this, chose it, but it isn’t worth it, according to my estimation. The stressful tightness where you can’t sigh and breathe and see the delights of space. But the tightness here..you can’t hide out anywhere really .There is the anonymity of the city because you are one of many, because my lack of funds I can wander the city casually. Admire her curves and write about them. Write about how she makes men mad. More often than not I see men whimpering on steps. Drinking in squares. Yelling at no one. The madness spreads. She demands madness, tightness, ritual..heavy sleep.
Monday, July 25, 2011
Friday, July 22, 2011
Raw Hide
When will I stop peeing in hallways? Each night returning to the 9 meter dream, camping out in the city. One morning a mouse drowned in my toilet. I awoke to see it struggling, quivering in the dirty water..helpless, as I was to help it. I closed the lid on the toilet. A miniature of my existence, helpless, drowning, glamour-less.
I had been told multiple times at Lecoq how wrong I was the way my body didn't expand to bear the mask, that I rushed through improvisations, or, at times, certain teachers wouldn't respond to me at all, had already stopped believing that I was capable of growth and therefore didn't talk to me whatsoever. I couldn't respond to the criticism, the "provocations' because it was a chorus of voices, like my mother, telling me that I was wrong. What do you do with these provocations. Puzzle with them, make work out of it. Well, if you are a student, on a grant, with a benefactor or a series of benefactors, you can have the time the invaluable gift of creating work of the poor... stage pieces with minimal props, manipulating found objects, creating soundtracks from metal pots and wires. I found that the most prized productions were often, not always, constructed by students who were solely in Paris as students. Who had their mornings or afternoons for rehearsal. Could show their dedication to the artistic struggle by solely being an artist, without economic inhibition.
Or, binge-eat and nanny thank-less children who pee on your stockings and nearly break your nose with plastic swords. Cycle, repeat....too exhausted to rinse. I played the counter role to the crisp, well-tailored, parisian sophisticate . The wealthy living in a dream reality where they spoke slowly and each person, lays on their words, lounging and without motivation. Listless, breathy, without duty. I had wanted to come to art school to be inspired by unconventional creative license..Insanity that is condoned. But the lower middle-class duty shrouded my freedom to make openly..I felt bound by duty and work..very germanic. Tell me what to do and I will put my head down and do it. The creative process is one where you advocate for yourself. You get nowhere without self advocacy. I found myself in a whirlwind of conflicting doctrines/methodologies/ideals. One being Lecoq-ian "Push the space", make your presence known, advocate for your ideals the true work you want to make, and the other the doctrines/annals of Paris..squeeze into a box, hide, scurry, take arms in the face, hands in the crotch..disappear on the subway...microwave your bagged solo entree.I saw now that the Parisian romance was saved for wealthy girls on vacation in the city of love. I can’t afford my nails being done or the time to comb my hair. Paris tells me to shut up..to close the space..be small so I can fit in the metro train, my clothes, my room. Be small. Then fight for your space on stage to sit. It is amazing that such a sophisticated world tears you..breaks you…makes you a raw wild animal..unless you are good to look at and have the money and time to maintain..which I don’t, didn’t..could. But there are loopholes, and anyone who’s waited in a line in Paris knows that the loopholes are dark and ceaseless like the windmills of your mind..Intellectualism, survival of the fittest, meltdown of the childhood trauma victim. At least I know what my limits are..what environments condone my growth..what conditions I need in place to create…love and belief..Wait. I already knew I needed those conditions..I guess I just needed a 9-month long whopping aching blinding reminder.
Sigourney Weaver said that art school is a waste..a tortuous place where she and Meryl Streep lost themselves..were stripped and afraid to create. Do artists need to go through this experience? To reach the bare brittle bones their basest being so that nothing hurts them any longer. Criticism sleeps and you can create because you’ve been so badly burned bruised beaten you don’t care if people like it or not..it is for you and not them. Just make and let people tell you you can’t hold the space. Just take a loud dump in the stairwell toilet. They’ll all hear.
I had been told multiple times at Lecoq how wrong I was the way my body didn't expand to bear the mask, that I rushed through improvisations, or, at times, certain teachers wouldn't respond to me at all, had already stopped believing that I was capable of growth and therefore didn't talk to me whatsoever. I couldn't respond to the criticism, the "provocations' because it was a chorus of voices, like my mother, telling me that I was wrong. What do you do with these provocations. Puzzle with them, make work out of it. Well, if you are a student, on a grant, with a benefactor or a series of benefactors, you can have the time the invaluable gift of creating work of the poor... stage pieces with minimal props, manipulating found objects, creating soundtracks from metal pots and wires. I found that the most prized productions were often, not always, constructed by students who were solely in Paris as students. Who had their mornings or afternoons for rehearsal. Could show their dedication to the artistic struggle by solely being an artist, without economic inhibition.
Or, binge-eat and nanny thank-less children who pee on your stockings and nearly break your nose with plastic swords. Cycle, repeat....too exhausted to rinse. I played the counter role to the crisp, well-tailored, parisian sophisticate . The wealthy living in a dream reality where they spoke slowly and each person, lays on their words, lounging and without motivation. Listless, breathy, without duty. I had wanted to come to art school to be inspired by unconventional creative license..Insanity that is condoned. But the lower middle-class duty shrouded my freedom to make openly..I felt bound by duty and work..very germanic. Tell me what to do and I will put my head down and do it. The creative process is one where you advocate for yourself. You get nowhere without self advocacy. I found myself in a whirlwind of conflicting doctrines/methodologies/ideals. One being Lecoq-ian "Push the space", make your presence known, advocate for your ideals the true work you want to make, and the other the doctrines/annals of Paris..squeeze into a box, hide, scurry, take arms in the face, hands in the crotch..disappear on the subway...microwave your bagged solo entree.I saw now that the Parisian romance was saved for wealthy girls on vacation in the city of love. I can’t afford my nails being done or the time to comb my hair. Paris tells me to shut up..to close the space..be small so I can fit in the metro train, my clothes, my room. Be small. Then fight for your space on stage to sit. It is amazing that such a sophisticated world tears you..breaks you…makes you a raw wild animal..unless you are good to look at and have the money and time to maintain..which I don’t, didn’t..could. But there are loopholes, and anyone who’s waited in a line in Paris knows that the loopholes are dark and ceaseless like the windmills of your mind..Intellectualism, survival of the fittest, meltdown of the childhood trauma victim. At least I know what my limits are..what environments condone my growth..what conditions I need in place to create…love and belief..Wait. I already knew I needed those conditions..I guess I just needed a 9-month long whopping aching blinding reminder.
Sigourney Weaver said that art school is a waste..a tortuous place where she and Meryl Streep lost themselves..were stripped and afraid to create. Do artists need to go through this experience? To reach the bare brittle bones their basest being so that nothing hurts them any longer. Criticism sleeps and you can create because you’ve been so badly burned bruised beaten you don’t care if people like it or not..it is for you and not them. Just make and let people tell you you can’t hold the space. Just take a loud dump in the stairwell toilet. They’ll all hear.
parisian parting (p. 1)
Coming to the end of my time in Paris. Anxious about the next part outside of Europe, and still have a lot to explore here..want to explore a lot. But, with loved ones partners travel mates. When I am sane-minded and in a routine. When I am financially autonomous, and can bike in the French Riviera, or hot spring in Iceland. I dream of places and experiences and ways of being in the country that I haven't known, fully aware of my propensity toward challenging myself, otherwise known as giving myself a hard time...the anti-joy approach.
I have cultivated a round, nonsensical way of being, living, breathing here. During the school trimesters it was a unique tortuous routine...After the semi - regular morning walk from the 5th arrondissment to the 10th..over the Seine and past Notre Dame through the prostitution play ground with beckoning tit-laden doorways through the archway the porte of Saint Denis past fruit vendors. Walking to school with classmate Tonya, this was the meditative calm, the processing ground of teacher's approaches and classmates' struggles angles choices before my morning apple to school and the studios and the awkward silences and sometime "bonjours" of classmates eerily set into the mode of creating work.
I have cultivated a round, nonsensical way of being, living, breathing here. During the school trimesters it was a unique tortuous routine...After the semi - regular morning walk from the 5th arrondissment to the 10th..over the Seine and past Notre Dame through the prostitution play ground with beckoning tit-laden doorways through the archway the porte of Saint Denis past fruit vendors. Walking to school with classmate Tonya, this was the meditative calm, the processing ground of teacher's approaches and classmates' struggles angles choices before my morning apple to school and the studios and the awkward silences and sometime "bonjours" of classmates eerily set into the mode of creating work.
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