What Was Once a Woman

(Improvised Whisper) Bum… Bum… Bum…

The beat of the drum

Constantly reminds me of how the music once was

(echo) The music once was

The beat of the drum

Constantly reminds me of when the people could feel

(echo) The people could feel it

(Improvised Whisper) I never meant… Drawn out… Just one thing

Up out of the ground

Up through our bodies and out through our mouths

Down out of the sky

Down into our fingers and back up through the clouds

Last night I was gunned down by an angel

I took my last breaths

Suspended over a creature I no longer recognized as self

The blood on her back mingled with the dark red color of her coat

Making it appear as if she were just sleeping

Back broken open and dry

She was just sleeping off the stupor, the sickness

Sleeping off each shattered vertebrae in her spine

She couldn’t remember a time when sleeping had ever caused her pain

Couldn’t remember the feeling of pain

Couldn’t feel

I gently molded my fingers into the cracks

In her spine trying to give her a piece of me

To mend her

Meditating on the ocean

 (Improvised Whisper) Lord… I am not worthy to see you… if only… say the word and I shall be you…

She whispered apologies of her situation, singing to me in her sleep,

“Death is not an absence but a passage from one state to the next.

Break down my bones, scatter my ashes, find them new homes.”

Last night you drew yourself a smile

False sophistication, a perpetual scoff, you scoff at this sleeping woman thinking

If she had a better dry cleaner 

If only she were more

She could have bought herself out of this war

That has manifested itself in a bullet in the back  

This is your reincarnation, my good fellow

Without your body we could never harvest your blood

Blood that will one day end up on your back

Just like this lady here

Last night I made love to your stars

At a dry attempt for compassion

Though we had no complimentary organ

She raised her beautiful foreign cunt to the skies  

And allowed herself to be injected with my melancholy justifications

We lay together in the midst of surrender

Mouths drawn open in ecstasy, singing

The beat of the drum will forever remind me

Of a time that once was

(Echo) A time that once was

The beat of the drum will forever remind me

Of the woman that once was

(Echo) The woman that once was

Once was is now everything

Deep in the dreams of a forever body

In the collective subconscious of our modes

We were one once

Bent spine shattered across highways  

Dreaming in the midst of war

Praying for anything that might allow us passion

I carry the savior

Written between your stars

 (Improvised Whisper) Drawn out… Bum… Just say the word… Bum… one thing…

Laughing Till We Think We'll Die,

Barefoot on a summer night.

In the style and dedication that we are both products of the 90's Beau and I ironically both got the other a mixed tape for Valentine's day. More (or possibly less ironically seeing as we've been together since high school) both tapes featured a lot of the same artists. Both sported a copy of our proclaimed song Home by Edward Sharpe and the magnetic Zeros.

I believe that when you hear a song it fills you; embodies you. When I listen to old 90's pop culture like N' Sync I feel pumped, I feel nostalgic... I feel like wearing cargo pants and a cropped top. When I listen to Mumford and Son's album Sigh no More, I could swear I feel God. When I listen to Home, I feel a calm excitement, I feel love, the same feeling that I feel when I look back at pictures of Beau and I over our past summers, the same feeling I feel when I watch this video. 

When you connect with something, you have the chance to become one with it. I wonder about this today as I consider Poet's Theatre and why I'm having such a hard time with it. This contentment is something that stems from the logical side of my brain (often ignored.) Poet's Theatre is neither poem nor theatre. It is neither strictly performed or strictly read. All the choices involved send my brain into a kind of akimbo state, overloaded and in the midst of escape without due process. In the realm of reality that is school, time consuming activities create anxiety. How do I read these pieces? Is each character there own entity? How should I take mis-spellings and punctuation? Linearly, non linearly, left-to-right, right-to-left? Should I brandish my highlighter in my scholarly quest for context and meaning or should I read to enjoy? Is there room for enjoyment in college? I used to believe it but as a writing and literature major one has to read so quickly you barely have time to soak into what you're reading, let alone be able to fully enjoy it.

Needless to say the duality of the genre has the capacity to overwhelm one that steps too close. One thing that really struck me was the misspellings. When performing the pieces the misspellings would function as dialect, but when reading the piece they can function not only as dialogue but a performance in themselves. For instance in the piece with the Grandma and Medusa the Grandma says "jest" instead of "just." The word just as an adverb means, within a brief preceding time. As an adjective it means guided by truth or principle. On the other hand, one letter off, to jest is to make a witty remark; to banter. Is the poet hinting at the witticisms and absurdity of this new form were anything goes. Remarking at the purity of such an act? I have not figured these out yet for myself. Although the light at the end of the tunnel has become more clear since our group reading on Wednesday.    

I'm never sure how long a blog should be to be a blog. If it were 140 characters or under it would be considered a "tweet," If it's a paragraph or less its a face book status update. Blogs are much less constricting. Even less constricting then ever before. You can upload videos from YouTube. (For some reason that screams progress to me.)  You can really do whatever you want in blogs, even incorporate a somewhat poorly conditioned ending.

End.

Tonight I'll Die in Black and White

Just like a Hitchcock Star.

[An Homage to Dodie Bellamy]

Sitting down in the Student Center Auditorium, waiting for Dodie's appearance was slightly exhilarating. I had spent all semester up until that point daydreaming through her pieces about what she looked like, how she acted, dressed like. I wasn't sure whether to expect an Ellen DeGeneres or a Sarah Vowell.   

Definitely Sarah Vowell. Dodie and Sarah have a similar honest humor that they express by lack of expression. The fact that Dodie's voice is calm and unaffected as she talks about "deer's undulating assholes" and her personal narrative makes the jokes work within the reading. Her writing can stand on it's own. She doesn't need any stunts, guests or interpretive dances (though it would have been awesome). 

Every time I hear the word essay I cringe a little. I've always seen the essay form as a completely uncreative activity. It's a form in which your ideas aren't valid unless you can back it up with someone else's work. Or at least that what I always thought; grueling threw papers on the history of slavery or the problems with airport security. I saw essay writing as a strategic compilation of data, Dodie Bellamy has changed all that. When I think of her writing I imagine Marie Massacre on our 2a.m. trips to Zacks diner, slouching down in her seat and screaming through, what was once the smoking section, I do what I feel! In her essays and narratives Dodie writes what she feels. She doesn't hide information on her own life or what she surfed on the internet yesterday. She doesn't conceal facts because she can't site an article on JStor to prove this legitimacy. Dodie is an intelligent, quirky, hilarious woman and you get to see all of that in her writing.  

Interestingly enough, when I got up from the reading I spotted my boyfriend in the front row. We'd been fighting all week and every time I saw him I got the urge to punch him in the face. Or more likely, hit him with my cat's wooden scratching post. He doesn't play with it anyway so he'd never miss it if I destroyed it. My first thought (after the fantasies subsided) was, if I do loose my cool and hit him maybe Dodie will write about this moment. Becoming a Dodie Bellamy character to me is comparable to being a Hitchcock starlet. Each allows for a sense of vulnerable glamor. My second thought was whether or not security would be called and whether or not there'd be some consequence from Eastern Michigan for the conduct infraction. The prose did seem to out way the cons but instead I shuffled out of the auditorium with a hollow feeling to replace my anger. The hollow feeling I get every time I shut down my emotions.  

Final Summation: Dodie is the Bomb. 

This is how I roll...

animal print pants outta control.

Bout days always start with me getting "I'm sexy and I know it" by LMFAO stuck in my head. Including a visual of Cookie Rumble in her skating gear doing a dance that I can only describe by referencing John Travolta and Olivia Newton John's moves in "Your the one the I Want" at the end of Grease. On bout day, you wake up excited. Thoughts are punctuated with anticipation.You could imagine that in such a heightened state of merriment and nerves it would be hard to focus on something such as Samuel Beckett, a man that demand a certain sense of focus. If you thought this, you would be right. But here's the old college try-

Disclaimer: Reading performance pieces upsets me. It takes me hours pouring over pages wondering which is the proper inflection, how would the director choose to set up each scene, ect. It's much easier for me to watch different productions and go from there. I discovered this when I was an "actor" in high school (quotations marks to connotate a lesser amount of skill.) If I was reading a part for a play I'd never seen before I totally missed the emotional mark- every time. If I was supposed the be the blushing flower, I was the boisterous butch. If the role asked for weeping, I was knee slapping. Additionally, every acting teacher I had told us to go big or go home. So when mixed it up, I mixed it up good.

The greatest plunder to my career was during one of my senior projects in which my partner and I received a scene from Shakespeare's 12th Night. At this point, my emotional disorder was already quite apparent to me and needless to say the whole situation made me nervous. The teacher of the class was not only an actor herself, but a director and proclaimed expert on the subject of theatre. Handing me a Shakespeare piece as a self led project was like handing a blind woman a copy of Dickens' Great Expectation and asking her to turn in a report by Friday. I was ill equipped for the mission. My character, later described to me as a bubbly cougar lusting after her prey, was played as reserved and merely friendly older woman. This mistake killed the entire scene. My partner was amazing. Right on the nose.
 
Attempting to focus in more on Beckett- I view Beckett's work as relying on the emotion. On a state of mind other than the purely intellectual. You have to feel Beckett. When I first read Not I, I didn't get an intellectual sense of what was going on, who the character was. I got a sense of her, a feeling of her situation. It wasn't until Contemporary Forms picked the piece apart that I moved past that sensory vision (As you could imagine I missed most of the major facts about the character.) Similarly, experiencing Waiting for Godot, is exactly that, an experience. I can pull no objective facts, have no sense of plot line other than the obvious waiting. Just a thin sense of possible themes and sense. Actually, all I can focus on is whether or not Godot is God. I'm pretty sure Beckett claimed that Godot is not God, but it is fascinating to watch/read the piece in the context of Godot as God. It brings a whole new life to the piece. A new life that maybe Beckett was not aiming for. Though he was a protestant, it is possible that he was trying to portray life, not necessary life in the context of religion. By saying that Godot is God you instantly limit the production while leaving it open ended allows us to explore the humanity depicted in the show at a much broader scope. Saying Godot is God could also limit your audience. Not everyone wants to see a show summarized as two character waiting for God. In our lives we wait for so many things. Each period takes a little out of us, until we are tight legged, hunch backed and waiting to die. Waiting, desperation, lonliness- these are broad themes that we can all relate to.

Thinking about waiting while waiting is slightly ironic. My one tracked mind is angered and yet relieved by the forced new topics when all I want to do is skate. It would be interesting to see how the topics of one track mindedness change with age. It seems like now-a-days most of those tracks revolve around sex. Kids are interested in the next heart throb, teens are thinking about doing drugs and having sex with each other, and adults love talking about their kids (and sex/having sex to have kids.) It'd be an interesting survey topic.