Hmmm. Seems to good to be true, only I know it to be true. It is based on availability, plus the nine dollar per club fee is actually 40.oo per annum/year.
It still winds up a very affordable package plan. I am pretty sure one can purchase tickets for up to two travelling together (they must, I think)...
It would be a really nice fare to go to NYC and honestly, while up there, we could do a Halloween/Day of the Dead thing if it is close enough (tho those tickets may be prepurchased?)
I would love to see some great live music myself! I am gonna put out feelers to see if we could stay with Clint and travel with him to see a fine band like Deerhunter (they'll be playing up his way sometime soon). Or, perhaps Pat and I could stay with Jeff and we could ALL go party in Atlanta?! I dunno if Jeff would feel up to something like that, I have most of his CD playlist burnt tho, and maybe he would be interested in hearing those bands live for some of the songs? Stranger things have been known to occur, like seeing tiny green people from Saucer-craft in Roswell, NM! :)
Well, if we can stay with Anaite in NYC, I think that would be the best bet. Shopping is sooooo cheap in NYC. I totally remember that. Thrifting is GREAT. The weather in October-November is EXTRAORDINARY... and the bands ALL play NYC. I could catch at least one cool one, if not more than that, and Pat and I could arrange for some cheap theater tickets and see what kinda exhibits there are at the time. It would be a really nice getaway/return to my favourite living place (except for London, of course, and well, Oakland was actually quite nice as well, the way it was gentrifying and adjacent to Berkeley. I'll never forget the aromatic Pacific in SF's whole cityscape. I loved "the Mission" and the hispanic latin xicana flavor of that place MOST OF ALL! Then, in Oakland there were these aromatic trees, which in Berkeley were even more prevalent over by Berkeley college where Patti and I saw MANY great shows! We saw "Laurie Anderson's Moby Dick" (excellant, amazing musical inspired theatre, Pat loves Laurie's voice, which is pretty unique), then Diamanda Galas live, and she had an amazing operatic vocal range and had moved past only dirges and was singing songs like "Downtown" interpreted through her Greek "mourner" soulfulness, the hairs stood up on my arms and the back of my neck and I felt a strong strong clusterfuck of energy burst right in front of me, and palpate and pound inside of me with percussive hits. Finally, we saw Pina Bausch's "Tannztheater Wupperthal" which was just visually amazing, and the dancers so athletic and the choreography wunderbar, so enlightening and soooo engaging and surprising! It was great living out West for the wonderful DIY hippy-punk lively artists and dance scenes. I loved the "Yerba Buena Center For the Arts" better than ANY other Museum I had frequented. They had bubbly candy-coloured Apple Macs in their snack space where I'd surf and email to my heart's content almost every day. It sure beat paying mucho dinero at the Cyber-cafes which did great business in that Dot.commie town! The artists that exhibited at Yerba Buena were all amazing! It was at Yerba Buena I first ran into Guillermo Gomez-Pena's work. He's someone both Patti and I love for his cheeky sardonic and sexy takes on Border-Crossing and multi-culturalism which he makes into stagey shows and displays of poetics and sheer wit! And boy, what a sexy dude! I also saw him read at CityLights books, who published him. I actually had him sign a book I still own by him "The Temple of Confessions." It has photos of he and cutie-pie collaborator Roberto Sifuentes doing their performative dirty-work! Finally, I saw an amazing Butoh dance performance by a husband and wife team called "Harupin-Ha." I missed catching the WHOLE festival, but seeing this, was to FEEL it right in the gut, a sizzling tingling in the tummy or breadbasket, plus a throbbing pulsing responsiveness in the heartspace of my chest. I would feel a connection to the Dancers that was really very near totally hypnotizing. I felt a connection as if by invisible strings, and they I felt such a sense of gratitude, empathy, warmth, and hospitality alternating with sadness and other cathartic things the couple would evoke and inflect so the Audience would all be on the same page and would really feel the burn and feel the love.
I know I am digressing, but, as to being a Walkie Talkie, the Talkie part also needs to be addressed properly I feel.
After witnessing "Harupin Ha" I was overcome by the spirit of Butoh, as I knew it from the first-hand encounter with the couple. I bought a poster which I fear I no longer have (I should look in the garage). I had that hanging when I didn't hang "posters" out in our Dome (a pleasure Dome indeed) we inhabited out in Oakland, which was just, beyond our slender means. Plus, evil wasps lived in clusters in these outside aromatic feeder trees and I was terrifed to go outdoors. Once outdoors, having eaten a delicious gourmet hamburger while Patti ordered her favourite Portabello Mushroom burger on a bun, I'd be terrified to go to my own door past the sentinels filling the trees with their rage and menace like Furies.
Well, I wanted to be a Butoh dancer after seeing Harupin Ha. I looked up much on Butoh, and one doesn't require the same training that is so strenuous as say Ballet requires. Many of the postures adopted are actually postures meant to imitate the body of a crippled person. I thought "hey, I can sure imitate or impersonate that! I am halfway there in my day to day affairs." It was a fact I used a cane at that time my left side in the lower region and my lower back were just sooo very troubled and wracked by pain. I imagined that Butoh could cure me, could set me free, as though it were a discipline of that nature like Qi Gong or Tai Chi (which always made me feel fantastic after following a teacher or master for only a half-hour or so, enacting a set of rules, following a specific formula, embodying the form).
I am just now reconnecting with some of my past endeavors. Butoh? I'd LOVE to see more of it. I'd love to be able to participate in it, with a masterful performer/choreographer not with a charlatan or too Yankee-hybrid-dance-troupe or dancer which I have seen happen. They pith the body of Butoh and the spirit is evacuated in the process, which is to say, some Dancers, generally American, the Germans often do a fine job at interpreting Butoh, and add and mix "expressionistic dance" of the Bausch variety in which adds rather than takes away. As I have said, many Americans have ruined the Butoh dance, but then again their are Japanese who I feel emphasize the wrong things and screw the essence of Butoh up; and then there are the masters who have all but created this very young folk art! Yukio Mishima, that illustrious yet kinky literary beacon of Japan liked to watch Butoh and apparently had some kind words about it. It evolved out of the "post-apocalyptic" Japanese nightmare which also spawned anime, graphic novels or "manga" and so on. In China, the ascendency under the Communist cultural revolution created "Scar literature" which was a unique movement of a kind, and something very intriguing.
I am just now reconnecting with some of my past endeavors. Butoh? I'd LOVE to see more of it. I'd love to be able to participate in it, with a masterful performer/choreographer not with a charlatan or too Yankee-hybrid-dance-troupe or dancer which I have seen happen. They pith the body of Butoh and the spirit is evacuated in the process, which is to say, some Dancers, generally American, the Germans often do a fine job at interpreting Butoh, and add and mix "expressionistic dance" of the Bausch variety in which adds rather than takes away. As I have said, many Americans have ruined the Butoh dance, but then again their are Japanese who I feel emphasize the wrong things and screw the essence of Butoh up; and then there are the masters who have all but created this very young folk art! Yukio Mishima, that illustrious yet kinky literary beacon of Japan liked to watch Butoh and apparently had some kind words about it. It evolved out of the "post-apocalyptic" Japanese nightmare which also spawned anime, graphic novels or "manga" and so on. In China, the ascendency under the Communist cultural revolution created "Scar literature" which was a unique movement of a kind, and something very intriguing.
In ending, there are so many cultural veins to be mined and combined in many variegated plausibilities and "mashes" as they say; and this will become more pronounced as we are already seeing in films inspired by Japanese, Korean, and Chinese cinematic genius of today! Butoh is bound to have a more intriguing place in the history of Japan in particular, as far as adressing in its role as a "dance of darkness" the horror of the second world war visited on Japan as like on no other.
Carolyn Forche, the American poet who at one time worked in journalism and mainly for Amnesty International has some of the MOST powerful and cunning and human poetry existing as "poems of witness" as she refers to much political poetry written as exegesis of the inhuman horror's of the twentieth and now twenty-first century particularly as it relates to impunity, human rights abuses, and the fall-out (pun intended) of the wider-ramifications of participation in a war.
Her poetry is horribly, deeply, disturbingly beautiful...like Butoh can be, like Harupin Ha and the Butoh I saw. I felt in the presence of the best side of our natures, and the husband and wife duo embody so much humility; living as resteraunt owners in the bay-area where they had immigrated long ago.
On that note: I wish I wasn't so damned tired while writing this, and I wish I could get inspired with regards to writing again. It had seemed like I was, I wrote a story with Ryan in mind along with an old friend from my mental hospital stay at St. Joseph's. Sadly, I have grown rather numb as of late. I am mentally click clicking and clacking but that is NOT the same as to be moved from the interiority of one's soul, of the body, of the heart. The "jouissance" I absolutely was experiencing is sort of dying or dimming out... but it remains, and on ocassion, like today for example, it will flare right up One must work a little at being "receptive."
It's a paradox, but it's the truth as I know it.
Liz
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