Postcards From Past Homes – Part III
January 1st, 2012 § 1 Comment
I’ve struggled all my life with my sleep pattern. If it can be called that at all. If you were to graph the duration, start and end times of my night’s sleep the lines would look like the currency graph of a country that goes in and out of war. There are the odd days where I go into perfectly deep sleep at 10:30 pm and wake up fresh as a lily at 7:30 am. But in the months that go by between two such days I wake up not fully slept or overslept anywhere between 8:45 am and noon and rushing around to get a shower and brush in before zooming off to work.
I have no recollection of the night before the morning I flew out to California to interview with a major Silicon Valley firm who had responded to my online job application. All I remember is the knot of anxiety in my chest which underscored by a heavy tiredness from not sleeping enough manifested in a dull ache around the sockets of my eyes. My friend had picked me up from my East 8th street apartment and dropped me to Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. I vaguely remember was running to the boarding area and the airline employees rushing me through the gate. They were smiling and joking about how another two minutes and they would have left without me. That would have been bad. Really bad. The said Silicon Valley firm had arranged to have me flown over to their headquarters for a one-on-one interview. Missing the flight would possibly have meant making a deal-breakingly bad impression even if by some chance they would agree to book me another flight.
I landed at Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport and in the 5 minutes it took me to get out, I bought my first ever cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee. I remember it being flavorful, sweet and satisfying. It pumped my blood with the desperately needed sugar and jolted me into a somewhat coherent state of mind. The driver of the Lincoln towncar was an enormous white man with a kind face and a comb-over wearing a black suit. At the end of the 10 minute ride to Santa Clara I fumbled in my pockets for cash and fingered what I knew was a $5 bill. I hesitated to make a decision with my slow, lagging brain. I knew I couldn’t ask for change in return. He wished me a good day and got in the car and drove off. I felt cheap and small.
The interview was unlike any other I’d been in. They were polite, unpretentious and friendly. Not bitter sharks trying to trip me up with a clever puzzle or drilling me about each bullet on my resume. By the end I was kind of even having fun talking to these people. I received an email about a month later informing me that they were interested in hiring me. Unable to control my emotions, I had had to get up from my chair at the lab and pace around for a few minutes to let the excitement settle down.
Cupertino, CA was posh and manicured compared to our dusty, rickety neighborhood in Tempe, AZ. My cousin had been kind enough to let me move into her place where she lived with her husband and 3 children. They had held on to their rental home instead of trying to buy a bigger house elsewhere because of the elite Cupertino school district. It was cramped and I felt my presence weigh heavily on the household. A million toys were perpetually scattered all over the house. The youngest one had dismantled several household items that lay around like relics of a ransacked home. A clock with the minutes hand bent into an “L” shape, a fan with its front grill removed, an old smartphone with its screened covered in a dry and caked coating composed of dribble and macaroni and cheese, a dead laptop with several keys ripped out to expose red stub buttons and green circuitry underneath. To lighten the impact of my presence, I would run errands and pick up the kids from school. The parking lot of the Garden Gate Elementary School was a sight to behold around 2 pm. It seemed like someone had taken a picture of a school in Hyderabad and replaced all the Maruti Suzukis with Toyota Corollas, the dusty courtyard with a lush green lawn, the rough, patchy road with well finished pavement and trash and debris with perfectly stenciled bright yellow and white lines guiding traffic on the street. What was not replaced however was clusters of Indian mothers in their nighties being excitedly chatty with each other before their children came running out of the classrooms. I observed them carefully and mentally placed them on a spectrum of cultural assimilation. You could tell the ones that had physically moved the US but not made an iota of effort to actually look around and see whats happening. They wore frilly nighties, had braided hair and made no fuss about weaving through the backed up cars to cross the street paying absolutely no heed and rendering no visual apology to the motorists. The slightly more integrated ones wore jeans and a sweatshirt and drove up in an MPV van. If they caught sight of their children before they actually got to the school curbside, they would stop dead center in the middle of the parking lot, get out and yell over the noise to their kids who would take the cue and come running and be shoved into the backseat. They would then make an illegal u-turn and drive off instead of driving around to exit from the designated spot thus betraying the incompleteness of their integration into American ways. The most assimilated mothers of all would be in their running clothes and often have a Martha Stewart haircut. They would wait under a tree out of everyone’s way and chat with sophistication with an Asian mother or even a Caucasian second-grade teacher.
I found my 3rd Street apartment on Craigslist. A super suburban townhouse in Santa Clara. I was mortally afraid of living alone so I picked a house that had 4 rooms each occupied by a different tenant. The thought of having roommates was comforting. One of the rooms, I discovered, was not for rent. It was the commuter room of the husband of the Asian landlady who used it as a crashpad when he was in town. He was rarely ever home though and it lay mostly empty. One night I saw him smoking out in the patio and asked him what he did for a living.
“I sell staff”. He spoke with a thick Chinese accent.
“What do you sell?”
“All kind of staff.”
The other roommate was a 19 year old, sickly thin, pale Chinese girl who had a phone attached to her head with scotch tape it seemed. She never came out of her room. Months after I moved in, one night when I was eating by myself at the dining table I saw her doing the dishes and over the noise of the tap I heard her sobbing. She missed her boyfriend. I promised her I would cook her a meal one of these days. She nodded with the typical Chinese politeness that implied that she appreciated my kindness but would never take me up on the offer. The other roommate was marginally more social. She wore spectacles with large black plastic frames and loved shoes. Her shoes filled the entire shoe closet downstairs which was supposed to be shared by everyone. I once came home to find the most enormous crab I have ever seen sitting in our sink submerged in hot water. He was big enough to take up the entire sink and one of his claws opened and closed slowly like some kind of creepy mechanical toy from an eighteenth century home display. I’ve never been shocked like that in my entire life. I had come home in a rush, turned on the tap in the kitchen sink and blindly stuck my hand underneath the running water only to look down and discover that my middle finger had knocked against a hard, slimy surface. It was her boyfriend’s father’s birthday and they were trying to keep it alive until the evening since fresh crab tasted better than dead crab. Even though I had lived with her for months now, I had to suppress the urge to ask whether the hours of psychological torment the crab underwent remaining half alive in the sink did anything for the flavour.
Most of my colleagues were married with families. The unmarried ones hopelessly socially inept. There was no social orientation, no effort to include me in the team. Business as usual. I became progressively more depressed as my long distance relationship floundered like a roller coaster. This was not the life of freedom I had imagined California to be. I answered a Craigslist ad titled “Learn Improv Comedy for Free!”. It turned out the group rehearsed in open air at Mitchell Park in Palo Alto on Thursdays. I landed up there on a Winter evening. It was completely dark and the park was huge. I hesitated for a few moments and considered that perhaps it was a trap when an elderly, pale looking lady with petrified eyes looked at me through the darkness. She had her hands wrapped around herself for warmth.
“Are you here for the improv?”
I stayed with the group ThursProv for two years and we performed in many theaters across the Bay Area. Most of them were tiny basements or backrooms behind a front business like a bar or gallery. Our culminating performance was a 25 minute set as part of the “Night of the Improv Rising Starts” at the Eureka Theater in North Beach. I made many friends over the course of those years and started to develop the first signs of a social life. Of a life, really. Enough to get a foot in the door. Now, I could actually choose a life that I wanted, not just weather what came my way.
Postcards from Past Homes – Part II
December 4th, 2011 § 1 Comment
The Ethiopian cab driver dropped me off at East 8th Street. It was dark, past 7 O clock, probably. He pulled out my suitcases from the trunk and tried to wheel them on to the sidewalk. The wheels sputtered and spun and the suitcase went round in circles.
“Is there nothing to caach?”
I looked at him blankly. My mind was reeling from the flying and from the change. The University of Cincinnati had been an intimate campus with beautiful buildings crowding together on a stretch on land navigable by foot in under 20 minutes. The University Palms apartment complex in Tempe, Arizona was a smattering of gray boxes and painted iron grill on a barren desolate landscape. I looked down and noticed the suitcase had no handles to pull it with. Which is not surprising because these were the same suitcases that we had filled with American goods and taken back from Madison, WI to New Delhi over 10 years ago.
The place was a 2 bedroom 2 bath, even though there were no beds. My three Indian roomies slept on padded mattresses on the floor. I quite liked the arrangement so I did the same except my bed was a folded up comforter that was reinforced by linen. I was taught to carry groceries back on a bicycle. The trick was to buy two gallons of milk, not one, and hang each in a bag from each handlebar. That way you didn’t feel the weight of either one. But if you veered ever so slightly the imbalance would jerk the bike in one direction and people would stare. In the evenings I would come back to 3 guys each bent over a laptop on the floor in a different corner of the house.
My feverish zeal to prove myself academically had waned from my days at Cincinnati. I played tennis on the campus courts in the evenings at times, biked over to see a movie with the roommates and sometimes hit the microbrewery around the corner. They had divinely delicious chicken rolls. On the weekends I would bike past the reveling undergrads. For some reason my department was co-located in downtown with bars and shopping complexes and shared an elevator with the businesses. At the end of day as I slumped in the elevator resting my backpack on its metallic wall, sometimes confused looking party goers would emerge on my floor. Dressed garishly, they would reek of alcohol and perfume and seem distinctly out of place. In the half minute it would take the elevator to go down to the ground floor, I would stand awkwardly avoiding their gazes. America had already begun to teach me one of those brilliant life skills, how to avoid the gaze of people. I felt short, my jeans being the inexpensive kind didnt quite fit around my skinny legs, my jacket bulged from under my backpack straps. shoes not the right brand, hair too puffy and the spectacles made my cheeks look chubby in contrast to the sleek jawlines of the mostly Caucasian men who frequently got lost on the elevator. Occasionally a gentleman who fancied his wits would try to make a sarcastic remark at my expense, to cut the tension in the elevator or to impress one of the dolled up girls, I couldn’t tell. I mostly hated these people.
Arizona is hot. Dry. Relentlessly dry. There was a pool in our apartment complex that was directly beneath the balcony. Some nights at some wee hour, shrieks of joy would be heard and girls dressed in nothing but flip flops would plonk themselves into the pool. If you peeked there would be a perfect body wading through the water like a shark. The sounds of frolicking would reverberate through the apartment and my roommates and I would look up from our laptop screens and smile at each other. Wry smiles of excited amusement but also of a frustrating realization that there was a life that was unattainable. As I neared the completion of my degree, I had proven myself to myself and was filled with a burning desire to belong. To prove myself to others.
< Part III, IV to follow >
Welcome, my friend
September 27th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
It imprints itself on my brain that I am outdoors. Climbing up a hill. The smell of eucalyptus, the gentle California breeze and the vast meadowy expanse. Hobbling along, my knee sends me reminders now and then. What for? There must be some reason for propelling myself up the hill. Ah yes, this is my escape. My oneness with nature where there are no expectations, no responsibilities, no reasons and no what-ifs. Just being. I plod along placated by this resolution. A vista approaches. Quite beautiful, really. The tree is located perpendicular to the grassy horizon at exactly the proportion of the Golden ratio. Molecules race around in my brain and match the image to some noisy, long forgotten pixelated image from the millionth Internet search for Adams or Bresson. The match is not exact, of course. Its more complex than that. We don’t yet understand exactly how. But I can’t quite see the tree any more. I can only see a hazy version of the image in my head. The world has dimmed to a limbo somewhere between reality and my mental images. I raise the device to my eyes. Photons bombard the sensor with information that activates electronic charge to cause numbers to appear on the display. Not quite right. I tweak and click. An array of pixels deposit themselves on a semiconducting surface.
Back home, I pour the pixels through an electronic duct into a larger electronic container. In the darkness, the device lights my face up with its flames of moving images. The hum of a magnetic drum confirms the transfer. In a moment, the drum will spin again and send electrons racing through the wire out to the socket on my wall and out blazing underneath the city roads and rivers buzzing around the country until they are gobbled up by a monster crouching in a dark air-conditioned building or basement. A monster with billions of tentacles that wrap around the globe and are arranged just so that the monster will stir and shake some of its tentacles to prod only those who are my friends about the latest happening, then the monster will go back to its crouch. Ah, Like. Comment. Like. Like.
The hike is memorialized, captured, trapped, consummated.
In the darkness, I stare at the thin slate of a metal box. A group of photons disappear into the little camera hole and disappear into the box. They emerge in a grainy, ghostly form to stare back at me. There I am. Thats the me thats in there. Straining for a life of his own, just like me. Welcome, my friend. Welcome, to the Machine.
Postcards from Past Homes – Part I
September 5th, 2011 § 3 Comments
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could send letters to our future addresses? I’m sure it would. But we can’t. No matter how much we extend ourselves to grasp it the future flits away from us like a dollar bill blown by the wind. However we can do it the other way round. Send ourselves postcards from our places of the past. The past. The pile of boxes and suitcases filled with stuff we have deemed to be not immediately useful but ultimately cherish-able. For all this hubbub about the benefits of living in the moment, nothing compares to looking at old forgotten photos and reliving memories from another time.
Sukhdev Vihar, New Delhi
The earliest address I am articulately conscious of is Sukhdev Vihar, New Delhi. The second floor flat of the third building in a row of 12. The buildings were white originally, one can only imagine. Through years of the Delhi smog and corrosion by acidic rain the plaster had undergone a change to off-white and peeled off in places leaving a mottled black and beige appearance. After walking up three mosaic flights of stairs one arrived at the door made of metal mesh and tough iron grill. The many plastic switch door bells that we had during the years made a wide variety of noises. Some made a loud and happy ting-tong, some an old fashioned rrrringgg, others a panicky zzrrrrrrr. The one thing they had in common was that they all rang all the time. 4 different domestic helpers, the vegetable guy, the fruit dude, the postman, the newspaper guy, neighbor’s kid, members of my family returning from work and school. Sometimes due to cheap manufacturing and overuse the rrriing over time would turn into zzzrrrr until finally the door bell would choke to its death and all you heard was a hollow click when you held down the switch. I spent 18 years odd in this establishment. Lovingly decorated by my mother with the finest Indian handicraft, woven cushion covers and custom made wooden furniture. At peak occupancy we had 5 people living in this 2 bedroom 1.5 bath place. My sister and I would sleep on the bunk beds while our grandmother slept demurely and lightly on a bed that my mother had expertly crafted to slide underneath the bed on wheels. It came with a comfortable mattress that was just large enough to fit my grandma’s fragile frame. My father kept pigeons in the balcony. One of them had black and peacock green feathers and a white crown. Her peers slowly abandoned her either through untimely death or random departure. Eventually she took to mingling with the locals and became some kind of tramp. The whole block became her home eventually but for the most part she stuck around in our balcony for easy food, shelter and mates.
University Houses, Madison WI
My father’s boss, an esteemed professor of the life sciences had given us old bicycles that his children had abandoned when they went away to college. One of them was a Schwinn sports bike of sleek frame and lightening speed. I zoomed this machine around the sunny summer sidewalks of the University Houses in Madison, WI. We’d arrived their by embarking on a Delta aircraft that took us through Frankfurt to the international airport in Cincinnati and then a TWA plane to Milwaukee. My father greeted us at the Milwaukee airport after a 3 hour drive from Madison. With my father was a Chinese gentleman with a wide grin who had kindly driven my father in his car. The duplex apartment at University Houses had a plenitude of space, illumination and treats in the fridge. The houses were made of exposed brick with stone facades and white pillars at the entrance. They were built with brown sloping roofs for the 8 month winter. It was during my life in this house that I picked up a strong American accent, put on at least 20 pounds, made my first and only African American friend and learnt how to play basketball. The community was a collection of academic folk from across the world. Our neighbors were Polish with two sons, Pyotrekh and Marec (Peter and Mark). Pyotrekh was a blonde haired kid with cheeks as red as apples and a shrill voice. Marec was a sullen looking kid with a pale face who was a kind of hesitant bully. Once my father told him he’d call the police on him and Marec let out the most heart wrenching wail which sent my father running back into the house lest he be arrested for harassing a child.
Morgens Hall (Left), University of Cincinnati, OH
Desserted
July 5th, 2011 § 4 Comments
One of the hallmarks of the modern-day world citizen is her ability to appreciate world cuisine. Though this does not extend to world desserts. Westerners don’t like Indian dessert. This makes sense because Indian dessert does not exist. Indian sweets or mithai are usually offerings of celebration, blessing or devotion. Not post-meal rituals. But stew, if we are to leave the technicalities aside, Indian sweet delights do not get the same traction as the savory sojourns. In general the common American customer will more likely come back for the C.T.M and not the kheer. The question of Chinese or other-Asian dessert is more complex. I don’t like them. By God. But who cares what I think. I’ve found talking to people that Asian desserts are a fairly polarizing force. I havent found anyone who doesn’t have a strong opinion. I either find people who are quick to agree with whole heart or quick to take a dab at my eye with their chopstick. Quite frankly I dont get the whole red-bean/gelatin/egg-custard/stringy-bamboo-extract scene. Then there is bubble tea. A luke-warm dairy-and-bean concoction which you pierce with a piece of PVC-pipe and suck up gelatinous balls through it which are enchantingly called “pearls”. People of all colors and race drink gallons of this stuff in the town of Mountain View, CA. I can’t help but feel ineffectual and deflated at the narrowness of my dessert vision. With considerable frustration and envy I see them doing the sucking motion with their lips and I can tell at what point they have been rewarded with a pearl because at that instant they stop suckling the PVC-pipe for a moment to chew the jelly-like spheres before wolfing down the load and then are at it with renewed vigor leaving me more perplexed still. 
Image Courtesy livestrong.com
Slowing it down
June 8th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
I just returned from the BATS studio in the Mission in San Francisco after what was an uplifting class. This despite the fact that I was stuck in traffic earlier in the day for 2 hours and then went to the wrong venue and then showed up for class an hour late. Learning improvisation reminds me time and again to slow it down. Deal with one thought at a time. That way life is never an overwhelming and draining effort. I experienced this while being stuck in traffic. The thing that causes the maximum amount of stress is the apprehension and abject fear of what will happen when you eventually get to class. The ears turning slightly red when you walk in, everyone turns to look for a moment or two and notices that you’re an hour late. That awkward muttering of an apology to the coach. Whereas in truth, its all entirely in my own head. People may notice that I was an hour late but they don’t attach to that occurrence the weight that I do. They have their own minor things to fill their stress budget. What will the coach think? All this races through your mind as you are stuck in traffic and its all utterly and completely pointless. There is not a goddamn reason that you shouldn’t be enjoying the San Francisco scenery as you drive rather briskly to class. Its not gonna make one bit of a difference as to what your attitude is here. If at all, by not being stressed you might have a chance at entering the class with a cheerful demeanor not dilapidated by tension. Anyway…. After expertly managing stress, I feel uplifted enough to write and its 11:21 pm. Impressive for me. I’m awake enough to actually read and process coherently The Camera, by Ansel Adams. There is something about reading the wisdom of masters that brings to you a wave of fresh perspective in life which washes over the wounds that you’ve inflicted on yourself by being insecure and fearful for your future. Get this:
The next time you pick up the camera think of it not as an inflexible automatic robot, but as a flexible instrument which you must understand to properly use. An electronic and optical miracle creates nothing on its own! Whatever beauty and excitement it can represent exist in your mind and spirit to begin with.
I’m filled with a sense of great wonder to know that Ansel Adams wrote these in 1980, a year before I was born in Carmel,CA which is an hour’s drive away from where I lie right now. To think of a typical journey in photography of the modern enthusiast. I don’t think I’ve ever stopped to consider the moment when I pick up the camera. Never considered what a beautiful tool it is and never bothered to first inquire as to its function. Instead there is the endless subscriptions to magazines, blogs, reviews, flickr accounts, flickr pro-accounts. The feverish seeking for the opinion of others who in turn sought the opinion of others further upstream. Though I value my camera greatly, I never relate to it. Though expensive, it is forever falling short of my expectations to produce an image of sufficient quality. After the initial excitement of a new purchase it is relegated to being an item that I wait to replace with an acquisition newer still. The quality of images increases by a small increment with the latest model but I never find the joy of bringing a picture of the mind to life. Hearing Adams utter these words hit me like a wall. It brought into focus the nervous tension of achievement and one-upmanship that permeates my entire attitude to photography. It slowed me down. Brought to me that moment of truth when I pick up the camera. The Camera, which must occupy a place of honor in the mind of a photographer as the instrument through which his creativity will breathe a breath of brilliant life. It reminded me, just like improv does, that creativity pulsates inside me with every breath but we must undertake with all of our being to embrace and unravel the craft, the instrument into which we blow this breath before it makes that sweet sublime sound that moves the very soul.
The Good Natured Chaplin
September 19th, 2010 § 6 Comments
“Chaplin thought about how to make it more true, not how to make it more funny.”
- Keith Johnstone
Keith Johnstone’s voice kept echoing inside my head as I watched The Circus this afternoon at the Castro theater. Clearly Keith had spent a lot of time studying Chaplin. The faint memories I recall from childhood while watching Chaplin movies on Doordarshan were of him doing a lot of kicking people in the rear and running and tripping over himself. Kids love that kind of stuff. In my row today, a determined looking mother sat with two of her radiant looking children hoping to inculcate in them a sense of appreciation for the right kind of stuff . They loved the scene when he gets stuck in the lion’s cage, they shrieked and gasped. My faculty of appreciation had clearly become more sophisticated and therefore rather dull. Despite myself I was moved, delighted, heartbroken and amazed.
Chaplin is a genius. This much is clear.
But what does that really mean. Firstly, multi-talented. Not a dabbler but a master of many skills. His mime. It is brilliantly precise and evocative. There is a scene where running from the policeman and chances upon the side show of the circus (so thats where the term “side show” comes from). The side show is a house with those mechanical puppet contraptions. The clown that hits his head on the fence repeatedly, the scarecrow that takes off his hat and puts it back on again. Chaplin and another thief who is escaping from the law proceed to assume a place in the side show and Chaplin picks up what looks like an eggplant and improvises a display where he turns and raps the thief on the head with the eggplant (on closer inspection, its an umbrella which makes sense, its more harmonious with the reality of the scene, an eggplant would be not as believable), turns back and opens his mouth wide and laughs. Then does it again in precisely the same fashion as last time. This is where I marveled at the perfection of his mime. Eventually the thief passes out from being tapped on the head and the facade is blown. The audience howls with laughter.
Being a master of theatrical skill is not enough to be a historical legend and at one time arguably the most famous man in the world. He obviously had a mystically deep insight into comedy. Escaping from the Policeman, he runs into a flailing circus act. The magician makes a bored looking girl sitting in the chair disappear and in the reappearing act, he opens the door to the chamber where the girl would usually be and sees Chaplin cowering in there stricken with the most beautifully portrayed fear. The girl then sticks her head out from under a hole in the ground looking bewildered and confused. The magician is stunned and panics and shuts the door only to find Chaplin now in the chair under the magic cloth. The crowd goes wild. He finally manages to escape and the normal act resumes. The crowd cusses and boos and asks to “bring back the funny man.” The crotchety circus owner offers Charlie a job which he instantly accepts in his perpetual zeal for survival.
At the tryout is where we see Chaplin’s satire at its best. The owner barks an order at him.
“Go ahead and be funny!”
Charlie proceeds to do a little gig. Again, brilliant mime. The clowns find it hilarious but the owner is not impressed. He wants that same madness that gripped the crowd when Chaplin bad barged in on the act running from the police. He is frustrated that he doesn’t know how to bring back the magic. Until one day when the handy men quit their jobs and Chaplin is hired to replace them his first task being to transport a stack of dishes. He immediately drops one dish and in the act of trying to pick it up nudges a horse standing nearby and is then chased by the horse on to the circus arena spilling dishes all over the place. The crowd once again turns into a cheering beast. The circus owner finally figures it out. ”He is a sensation but he doesn’t know it. Keep him on as a handyman.”
“Improvisation is an exhibition of good nature.”
- Keith Johnstone
If you fail on stage and are good natured about it, the audience will want to take you home and cook you meal. Chaplin is an embodiment of this principle. Repeatedly we see him fail with extremely good nature. And that is hilarious. The Circus is a magnificent illustration of good nature and an extraordinary commentary on what constitutes funny. A reminder that the magic of spontaneity cannot be planned for or theorized about. That there is this intense delight in seeing someone relentlessly committed to the pursuit of an objective but being thwarted in every essay. Charlie Chaplin brings to you the most wonderful ways in which he can fail but always remains completely true to the story. He is absent-minded enough to wipe the fish along with the bowl but wily enough to play an entire game of golf without owning a golf ball, brave enough to fall hopelessly in love and adorable enough to know he has nothing to offer the girl. I wanted to bring him home and cook him a meal and take him shopping.
To truly laugh, you must be able to take your pain, and play with it!
- Charlie Chaplin
Unlaborious
September 8th, 2010 § 4 Comments
Its been hot. Legitimately hot. Usually the sun tries to fight its way through the San Francisco fog like water through oil. It makes it to the ground only in spots. But we’re saying that its been hot enough to sit and drink ice cold drinks all day. The sun has bathed the city in bright and burning light. Just in time for the long weekend that too. The Gods are smiling upon the hills. We gathered at Dolores Park on Labor Day to watch an outdoor performance of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. In classic weather-confused San Francisco fashion I met up with the crew at the corner of 21st and Valencia wearing a woolen V-neck. “Can’t compromise on fashion.” said one of the gang. I stifled a pang of irritation and peeled off the Camel brown sweater. For once, fashion hadn’t at all been on my mind. After standing forever in line at Ritual Coffee I finally walked out with my (rather well done) iced Mocha.
It had been a while since I’d actually felt like picking up my hefty SLR to shoot something. Today I cradled it sans-bag hoping to get a few of the mime troupe. We had perched on a cherry red blanket and an orange print curtain on an unusually steep hillock in the park. A gentleman in a summer hat sat just ahead of us with two daughters. One of them proceeded to roll down the hill rather unceremoniously without any accompanying shrieks of pleasure or any other emotion really, like a log rolling along a river current. The sibling was clearly more vivacious and let out a yelp. “Oh my God daddy, its the perfect rolling hill!” Onlookers smiled with appreciation. The proud daddy egged her on with a nod of approval. She threw up her hands and a red tshirt, khaki shorts and black sandals deposited themselves at the basin. The surrounding crowd who was watching the spectacle having lost interest now busied themselves with straightening out corners of blankets, arranging shoes and fishing inside backpacks for bottles of water. As if determined to have the last hurrah, the daddy now rolled down the hill and did so with finer form than his progeny, body straight and silent with alarming speed and finesse his hands held together in a reverent Namaste over his head he was a torpedo of a man. His hat came off mid-hillock only to streamline his movement to a swifter smoother roll. There were murmurs and giggles.
“He’s totally showin off.”
“Awww cute.”
“Whoa! He’s quick.”
The SF mime troupe put on an entertaining yet surprisingly dated show outlining the frustrations of labor organizations. They highlighted the tyranny of the corporation and the irony of the collective. “I’m surprised that there are people who still speak in terms of the labor theory of value” said A as a matter of fact. People cheered as they cussed at banking corporations and urged us to check out noboss.com. “Little do they know, 99 out of a 100 people here are bosses” remarked A now bordering on humorous contempt. Photographing the mime troupe was not allowed. Instead I spent considerable time licking on a pineapple flavored ice-lolly. It’s been at least 10 years since my last one but I was thrilled that I still had it. Suck with passion until all that remains is white ice and then bite it off without ever letting it fall off the stick. Pat.
I photographed the crowd. Which was infinitely more interesting anyway.
The sun had moved and the initial shade advantage we had scored by arriving early abandoned us. I glugged my tetra-pack of coconut water. J sampled some but did not find it to his satisfaction. Sri Lanka is hard to compete with. I resisted photographing the mime troupe still following the rules like a good citizen, nay, temporary worker.
But could resist no longer. Sneaked one in right at the end.
Giddy and happy from the sun, the sugar and the greenery we hobbled back. A wanted gelato and cooed the entire way to Valencia and 22nd about how he will buy espresso and turn it into an improvised affogato. He then used 3 plastic cups and 3 plastic spoons to accomplish the feat, much to my dismay and displeasure. This Labor day was spectacular in that I didnt actually realize that it was going to be a holiday until 4 days before so there was not the frantic plan making and trying to get a spot at Glen Camp before hand. No pressure. Just mild and stretched out languid sun. Plans and activities materializing out of thin air spontaneously but slowly like cotton candy. The hour melting into the next. Sprawling and meandering. Ice lollies, cocunut water and bare feet. Perfect.
Improv Playmates Blog
September 7th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
I’m writing for an improv blog along with some brilliant improvisers. If you’re interested in that sort of thing or if you think improv equals stand up, you need to check this out. The Playmates are a group of improvisers based in the Bay Area (Peninsula region) who play together on a regular basis but also have their own independent improv engagements. This blog is an attempt to capture the beautiful diversity of improvisation activities that the members are involved in.
Bearing our own cross
September 2nd, 2010 § Leave a Comment
We tend to reflect on the larger things in life. When something big happens. Like if we have a big fight or suffer a big loss. Then after the debris has settled we reflect. This reflection brings a lot of learning and wisdom. We have more depth. Looking closer, there is a finer spectrum of time in the transition from the explosive to the reflective phase. In this transition there is usually a period of immense fear, anxiety, sorrow and indecision. Our consciousness is stricken with doubt. At this time we need friends, family, well-wishers and at times an intimate relationship to tide us over until the doubt and despair subsides. Most of us live our entire lives like this. Garnering the support of close ones to help us stay afloat in times of strife. Why is it that we must lean on others at these times? The reason is that the fear, whether it is the fear of uncertainty or the fear of making the wrong decision, paralyzes us. We are overwhelmed by it and lose the vitality and energy it takes to actually face it so we must survive by the healing energy of those close to us. The love and kindness of our family and friends is a vibrant field of energy that helps us to heal. Though at times, if we are not careful, we make the mistake of transferring some of our burden on to them. Maybe we end up having a fight with our mother because the negativity inside us was too much to take and she was the easiest victim. Perhaps we let our friends talk us away from our fears and insecurities. They remind us of how wonderful we are or of times when we had been strong for them. Maybe they say that things are going to be fine. Sometimes we foster a hatred or indifference for the person who we think is responsible for our suffering. With time and with mental reconciliation, it eventually becomes ok and we are on our feet once again. After this whole process we usually have learned some lessons and become wiser in order to not repeat some of the same patterns again.
Sooner or later we feel incomplete once again and it must all be repeated in one form or the other.
Maybe this time the process of recovery is more sophisticated. Instead of a simple reiteration our inherent worth, our friends now propound theories about what type of person we are and what that means for our life path and why we find ourselves in these situations. A lot of psychoanalysis is involved. We are wiser so the dialog sounds wiser. Though in all of this movement there is never any salvation. There is not spiritual growth. There is only the maturing of language. There is one more possibility though. The possibility that we face it completely alone. Not heroically, please. Not in the sense of the Marlboro man. That is merely the romantic entertainment of a silly notion of strength. We cannot be alone. As long as we are in this world, we cannot live in isolation even though some of us might want to. But to see the fear and despair. See it in its totality, in its myriad manifestations as negative thought, as bodily sensation, as the constant mental commentary, as the tendency to hide it. In fact see the content of entire consciousness. This takes extraordinary alertness, energy. This energy is available. Not only in the love of family and friends but in all of nature. Have you ever tried being in nature very silently, quietly to see the deep joy and energy there is. Once we tap into this energy, not by doing anything or practicing meditation but just by being quiet and letting it come to us, then we are ready to observe, to attend to our fear and sorrow. Attend to it, not intervene by using language to impose stories upon it, not look for its causes and effects, but attend to it, be it. Know that we are continuously energized by the presence of people in our life but not by their reassuring words. Reassurance is running away from what actually is. From what is us. To end sorrow, each one of us must learn to bear our own cross. Even when the weight of it makes us falter and fall to the ground. It is our own. First we must see that the energy and love of all of mankind is inside us, the beauty of nature is inside us. There is immense energy and once we see this, then we begin.
