If you caught the blip-on-the-screen that was my last post (from the wee hours of this morning), please let us never speak of it again.
I need to think twice before having a glass of wine when so fatigued, and on an empty stomach.
El V. was strange, to be sure: I did feel paranoid, and I was affected by what little wine I had (I finished it after the milonga ended). I said something really thoughtless to TS after our second song of the evening and it kind of ruined the dancing for the rest of the night. He got over it (he's much better at moving on emotionally from hard hits than I am) but I really couldn't.
What a bummer.
Amazing how much a change of mood can drastically downshift the quality of one's dancing: I started out feeling great and ended up tense and erratic.
These are different kinds of up-and-downs than the kinds I experienced a year ago (is it Nora's Tango Week again?), but still as devastating in quieter ways.
I'm going to the free welcome milonga tomorrow night since Milonga Roja is closed this week. It's going to be such a trip, stepping foot into that hotel again.
Nora's Tango Week last year was the beginning of a very long spiral downward for me (not just because of what happened to me there but also due to other things like my ex-boyfriend's grandmother passing away). It's strange to look at where I am emotionally and development-wise now and compare to where I was back then. It's encouraging to note how much I've grown during this past twelve-month period.
Will I feel so different next year?
I hope so.
jueves 3 de julio de 2008
martes 1 de julio de 2008
I DID IT!!!
How hilarious is that?
People are so beautiful and supportive, it's amazing. No one was weirded out that a beginner was performing on the same stage as them. No one had divatude. No one had anything but love.
Ney and Jennifer, Carlos & Elaine, beautiful Nila, Malevito (who drove out from Richmond after the all-nighter just to give us good energy), Sarah, all of my beloved non-Tango friends whom I rarely see anymore (if the mountain won't come to Mohammed...), my ex Sam...
I was nervous! TS and I had gone to the all-nighter and we'd only gotten about 4 hours of sleep.
I wasn't perfect (videos are brutal: my legs need to extend WAY more, and I need to release the hips by many degrees)...but I was so happy to see how much I've improved in the past handful of months: my knees are now much more together when I walk! I'm much more on my axis! I'm less pigeon-toed than before!
Hoorah!
TS and I are so happy and proud of our first performance together that we can't stop watching the video.
We even watched it backwards and in slow-motion today after a cozy dinner at home (we danced at Cocomo's last night, too, so a bit tangoed-out... no Beat tonight).
We are freaks.
But happy freaks.
Thank you, all, for your lovely onda and support.
miércoles 25 de junio de 2008
Disassociation
How the !@#*&%$ do you disassociate in close-embrace?
It's really, really hard for me to take a back cross around my partner when I'm in close... I suppose I have to really focus on the idea of the "flexible" embrace and let my right shoulder move more, building up the spiral energy before the hips can move.
*sigh*
El V. was packed last night: Murat, Michelle, Ney, Avik, all the SF-ers, some other SFTX stragglers lingering around.
It was fun.
Ney (who is super unsnobbish, which is a beautiful thing about him), brightly: Dude, we're all performing on Sunday! It'll be so cool!
Me: *a face*
Because TS and I are preparing for Tango in the Square (we go on at 2, 2:15 P.M.ish!) I'm not really dancing a lot with other people; in the last few weeks I've probably only danced with four other people total.
The embrace shifts, and there are surprises, some pleasant.
Abrazos.
It's really, really hard for me to take a back cross around my partner when I'm in close... I suppose I have to really focus on the idea of the "flexible" embrace and let my right shoulder move more, building up the spiral energy before the hips can move.
*sigh*
El V. was packed last night: Murat, Michelle, Ney, Avik, all the SF-ers, some other SFTX stragglers lingering around.
It was fun.
Ney (who is super unsnobbish, which is a beautiful thing about him), brightly: Dude, we're all performing on Sunday! It'll be so cool!
Me: *a face*
Because TS and I are preparing for Tango in the Square (we go on at 2, 2:15 P.M.ish!) I'm not really dancing a lot with other people; in the last few weeks I've probably only danced with four other people total.
The embrace shifts, and there are surprises, some pleasant.
Abrazos.
martes 24 de junio de 2008
Time
Yesterday, as I was rushing through a late lunch with my sister--it seems that I'm now always pressed--I glanced down at my hands, palm-down on the table for some unknown reason, like waiting cats.
They startled me with their raised veins, thick and blue, through my thinning envelope.
I'm getting old. And I really don't give a shit about the smiley attitude that dying is beautiful. Fine. It is. I get it. Some days I truly do love the idea of coming full circle gracefully, the justice of progress, the handsomeness of age, all silvery and profound and long, if I'm lucky. Dust, lines, cracks, beloved imperfections.
Today I'm not feeling that way. I feel like mourning, a little.
My face is not my own.
I don't really mean that, but it approximates the shock of recent mornings when I look into the glass and I see how the years have whittled the thickness of the epidermis into nothing and made it a translucent veneer for something that deserves better.
Youth is so short.
I'm working a lot, enjoying the awesome range of creative jobs I'm being thrown, but exhausted. I feel like I'm being pulled in a million different directions: friends want a piece of me, so does family, and deservedly so. Love is a welcome eater of time, and I'm trying to carve out small hours here and there to come back to myself:
Take a long walk in the morning sun even in the face of blood-pressure-raising deadlines and slowly eat a delicious fresh morning bun from Tartine.
Bear the agonizing wait at Ritual where they make every cup with a lot of leisurely love.
Go to the gym at the appointed hour three to five times a week, without fail.
Sketch little monsters in charcoal and pen.
Look at pretty pictures.
And of course: dance every night I can with my baby (five to six nights a week!).
SFTX came and went, all with me in a sleepless bitchy blur (I got two hours on Friday night despite having skipped dancing and attempted to go to sleep early, had to run to the photo shoot in the early AM, then barely fell asleep in a desperate nap only to have to wake up again to attend TS's musical accompaniment to some films at SFTX's closed milonga).
My dancing is all over the place; I feel that I've clawed my way to the next plateau with regard to my walk, but I keep falling back due to physical and emotional fatigue.
TS is now helping me with my turns/disassociation/pivoting. I make some progress and then it's gone again.
Saturday we perform and I have given up on being nervous. It will be what it will be.
My dancer's bio: NOWHERE CLOSE TO THE LEVEL OF THE REST OF THE PEEPS WHO ARE ONSTAGE, SO BE NICE.
OK, I'm going to go to the Beat, now.
They startled me with their raised veins, thick and blue, through my thinning envelope.
I'm getting old. And I really don't give a shit about the smiley attitude that dying is beautiful. Fine. It is. I get it. Some days I truly do love the idea of coming full circle gracefully, the justice of progress, the handsomeness of age, all silvery and profound and long, if I'm lucky. Dust, lines, cracks, beloved imperfections.
Today I'm not feeling that way. I feel like mourning, a little.
My face is not my own.
I don't really mean that, but it approximates the shock of recent mornings when I look into the glass and I see how the years have whittled the thickness of the epidermis into nothing and made it a translucent veneer for something that deserves better.
Youth is so short.
I'm working a lot, enjoying the awesome range of creative jobs I'm being thrown, but exhausted. I feel like I'm being pulled in a million different directions: friends want a piece of me, so does family, and deservedly so. Love is a welcome eater of time, and I'm trying to carve out small hours here and there to come back to myself:
Take a long walk in the morning sun even in the face of blood-pressure-raising deadlines and slowly eat a delicious fresh morning bun from Tartine.
Bear the agonizing wait at Ritual where they make every cup with a lot of leisurely love.
Go to the gym at the appointed hour three to five times a week, without fail.
Sketch little monsters in charcoal and pen.
Look at pretty pictures.
And of course: dance every night I can with my baby (five to six nights a week!).
SFTX came and went, all with me in a sleepless bitchy blur (I got two hours on Friday night despite having skipped dancing and attempted to go to sleep early, had to run to the photo shoot in the early AM, then barely fell asleep in a desperate nap only to have to wake up again to attend TS's musical accompaniment to some films at SFTX's closed milonga).
My dancing is all over the place; I feel that I've clawed my way to the next plateau with regard to my walk, but I keep falling back due to physical and emotional fatigue.
TS is now helping me with my turns/disassociation/pivoting. I make some progress and then it's gone again.
Saturday we perform and I have given up on being nervous. It will be what it will be.
My dancer's bio: NOWHERE CLOSE TO THE LEVEL OF THE REST OF THE PEEPS WHO ARE ONSTAGE, SO BE NICE.
OK, I'm going to go to the Beat, now.
jueves 12 de junio de 2008
Of Wine and Men
I love that book. How could he write such a great thing and then write... East of Eden? Such a puzzle.
It's 12:47 P.M. and I'm in bed watching Kathy Griffin. She's funny. I swear I am a gay man because I think she's the second most hilarious person on earth (I don't know who's funnier, exactly, but I always like to leave a little room for error.)
I'm going to sleep tonight and in the morning I will feel like a brand-spanking-new woman. That is the desperate hope, anyway.
Tired as all getout. Last night TS and I worked together for a long time (i.e., he gave me a two-hour lesson) at a friend's home-studio. We'd tape ourselves, watch it and discuss, fix some things, tape again, rinse-repeat. It's a powerful way to improve the dance on many levels, including and beyond cosmetics.
For instance: I learned that my fullback boleos exiting on the open side in close-embrace look pretty good compared to the one exiting on the closed side because I straighten the supporting leg in the latter case too early. Also, my left foot tends to look pigeon-toed on the back cross because my hip doesn't rotate enough. And my knees are still too far apart in-stride (well. pretty much all the time, actually). We observed all of this while running through small sections of the footage in increments of miliseconds.
In one video, I fixed all of these problems. I looked like a completely different dancer.
Then of course, for whatever reason (encroaching fatigue, over-consciousness, TS working on his own stuff) I couldn't look exactly like that again in any of the following videos, but now I know I can look and feel much better.
That rocks.
I think I'm tired also because I've been drinking too much. I look like hell. Tonight I forced dry. My photographer friend came over to talk about an upcoming photoshoot over dinner and the balmy weather had us thirsty, but I was a good girl and stuck to sparkling water.
She tells me that I am now famous in Vevey, Switzerland, where a larger-than-life-size photograph of me has gone recently up on display at a traffic circle glass-encased billboard thingy.
Strangers on the other side of the world know what my butt looks like. Kind of fun, but also weird.
Speaking of wine, or lack thereof, I had three glasses of this amazing chardonnay last Friday at an Argentine winery up in Napa while listening to TS play a gig.
I didn't know that Chardonnay could taste like that. We were stupid and didn't buy any bottles while down there.
They were having some fancy-ass dinner/tasting event for a very small select group of drinkers and the launch of a new wine; the imbibers must have been big-deals because there were only about fifteen, *maybe* twenty, of them and there was a hell of a lot of fanfare: a live band, a legion of waitstaff hovering about with gourmet mini-empanadas and bottomless bottles, channel 4, gorgeous presentation of everything right down to the silver mate gourds lining the dessert table in the owners' mansion where we all retired to postprandially.
The sun has set on the evening for me, I think, because I'm nodding off. Can you tell by the rough cadence of this post?
See you tomorrow at La Pista.
It's 12:47 P.M. and I'm in bed watching Kathy Griffin. She's funny. I swear I am a gay man because I think she's the second most hilarious person on earth (I don't know who's funnier, exactly, but I always like to leave a little room for error.)
I'm going to sleep tonight and in the morning I will feel like a brand-spanking-new woman. That is the desperate hope, anyway.
Tired as all getout. Last night TS and I worked together for a long time (i.e., he gave me a two-hour lesson) at a friend's home-studio. We'd tape ourselves, watch it and discuss, fix some things, tape again, rinse-repeat. It's a powerful way to improve the dance on many levels, including and beyond cosmetics.
For instance: I learned that my fullback boleos exiting on the open side in close-embrace look pretty good compared to the one exiting on the closed side because I straighten the supporting leg in the latter case too early. Also, my left foot tends to look pigeon-toed on the back cross because my hip doesn't rotate enough. And my knees are still too far apart in-stride (well. pretty much all the time, actually). We observed all of this while running through small sections of the footage in increments of miliseconds.
In one video, I fixed all of these problems. I looked like a completely different dancer.
Then of course, for whatever reason (encroaching fatigue, over-consciousness, TS working on his own stuff) I couldn't look exactly like that again in any of the following videos, but now I know I can look and feel much better.
That rocks.
I think I'm tired also because I've been drinking too much. I look like hell. Tonight I forced dry. My photographer friend came over to talk about an upcoming photoshoot over dinner and the balmy weather had us thirsty, but I was a good girl and stuck to sparkling water.
She tells me that I am now famous in Vevey, Switzerland, where a larger-than-life-size photograph of me has gone recently up on display at a traffic circle glass-encased billboard thingy.
Strangers on the other side of the world know what my butt looks like. Kind of fun, but also weird.
Speaking of wine, or lack thereof, I had three glasses of this amazing chardonnay last Friday at an Argentine winery up in Napa while listening to TS play a gig.
I didn't know that Chardonnay could taste like that. We were stupid and didn't buy any bottles while down there.
They were having some fancy-ass dinner/tasting event for a very small select group of drinkers and the launch of a new wine; the imbibers must have been big-deals because there were only about fifteen, *maybe* twenty, of them and there was a hell of a lot of fanfare: a live band, a legion of waitstaff hovering about with gourmet mini-empanadas and bottomless bottles, channel 4, gorgeous presentation of everything right down to the silver mate gourds lining the dessert table in the owners' mansion where we all retired to postprandially.
The sun has set on the evening for me, I think, because I'm nodding off. Can you tell by the rough cadence of this post?
See you tomorrow at La Pista.
martes 10 de junio de 2008
Is it June, Already?
It's hot in San Francisco. I stuck it to the man and quit my job. I spent all night drumming with a bunch of drunk musicians for a TG birthday. Yeah, *drumming.* Love is edifying.
And it's June, already.
Amazing.
Contracting full-time has me free to go to bed at 5 A.M. and wake up at 11 or noon, which might perhaps contribute more to fatigue than the other way around, but at least I'm exhausted on my own dime.
Ah, the hours.
How they fly.
And it's June, already.
Amazing.
Contracting full-time has me free to go to bed at 5 A.M. and wake up at 11 or noon, which might perhaps contribute more to fatigue than the other way around, but at least I'm exhausted on my own dime.
Ah, the hours.
How they fly.
miércoles 28 de mayo de 2008
Upswing
Practiced with TS all night Monday. He coached me on moving more assertively into open space; imagining that I'm creating a sort of suction as I walk backward and he walks forward, for instance. The idea of "falling" into step and minimizing effort.
Last night at El V. I felt so much better. The dancing was fun again.
TS: You're on, tonight.
I'll enjoy the ride up, no matter how short, before the plateau hits me again.
Last night at El V. I felt so much better. The dancing was fun again.
TS: You're on, tonight.
I'll enjoy the ride up, no matter how short, before the plateau hits me again.
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