Fleeting Faces

A couple days ago, I ran by a figure sitting on her stoop and was momentarily terrified. I could not figure out how her head was positioned, and so what I took for her face appeared deformed, like that of a monster. I stared and stared trying to locate her features until I ran right past her and the monster became human. Just an old woman with her head twisted sideways away from me, leaning on one hand. Phew.

A couple days ago, I attended a lecture at the Kimmel Center featuring Philip Glass and Lucinda Childs-- minimalist artists of the post-modern age. Lucinda held herself gracefully, was slender as a paper doll it seemed. Her veins stood out prominently, snaking down her long, thin, wrinkled arms and ended in large, beautiful hands with long, thin fingers that gestured elegantly in the air as she spoke. Her permanently knit eyebrows gave her face a hawkish look that was softened, however, by her gentle smile. Whenever she looked toward her right, in Philip's direction, half of her hawkish face was cast in shadow, the other half lit by stage light. I took a mental picture. In hearing a reference to her "silent pieces", she amended the term, saying they weren't quite silent as you could hear the pitter-patter of the dancer's feet on the stage. I loved that.

First Sound

I woke up to the sound of rain falling. It was the first thing I was conscious of...way before opening my eyes. It fell heavily, steadily. It was so beautiful...Love mornings.

Snowballing

Sometimes, when I read the news, I get the feeling that the stability of our race is hanging by a very fine thread. It's rather like an elephant balancing on a pebble. Or a marshmallow peep stuck in the microwave with the seconds counting down. I believe religious tolerance is key to maintaining this precarious balance, but it's the smallest incident that could snowball into something horrifically damaging on a global scale.

Who (besides da Vinci and Nostradamus) could have foreseen that the actions of a tiny church in Florida would lead to actual deaths in faraway Afghanistan? That is a very scary demonstration of cause-and-effect. Incidents like the planned Qur'an burning and that infamous Danish cartoon a few years back are just small ripples in a sea that is quietly seething underneath.

So which is it gonna be, religious strife or nuclear warfare, that finally puts an end to us? Stay tuned!

Tolstoyan Euphemism

Tolstoy's preferred euphemism for "to make battle/war" is "to chop and hack at each other" (Constance Garnett translation). He's a man of 4-lettered words.

And yes (as my fellow early-riser roommate pointed out), I am spending the good morning eating challah and reading War & Peace. Shana Tovah to all, and to all a good morning.

This Good Morning

Good morning! Good morning! It's the turn of the season and of a new day, and the possibilities seem endless. Who knows what this day will bring? What people I will encounter? Could be good, could be bad, could be LIFE CHANGING. Could be the love of my life. Could be ballet...Could be a greasy, cheesy, fatty burger. Could be a new feeling or a brand new idea. An alien might sweep me away, or I will sweep IT away into the vast possibilities of my new day. Already the birds are chirping! There go the possibilities of birds not chirping into my morning. An airplane drones in the distance. It has marked the sky and my morning. A rattle of tools, voices carrying indistinguishable words, a truck starts, the birds continue to chirp, my purple curtain ripples as the autumn breeze blows softly into my good morning. It is fresh! I must go and mark my morning.

Infinite Yet Bounded

My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep
The more I give to thee, the more I have
For both are infinite.

I have a theory about love. People say that love is infinite, but I don't think this is quite true. I think it is infinite so long as all your love is given to one person. But once you start loving more than one person, you begin to realize the finite qualities of love. I think you can love each person infinitely, but the overall amount of love that you can give in total is quite finite. This theory may be nearly as confusing as the fact that the universe is infinitely huge, yet bounded.

It is 3 o'clock in the morning. I'm babbling incoherently about something that can never be pinned down, about an ever-elusive butterfly.

Rhythm of Life

I just realized that for the past 2.5 months, I've spent 6 hours a day, 3-5 days a week in a narrow 2.5-foot-wide space with whichever co-worker I happened to be scheduled with for that shift. That's a lot of hours in such a narrow space, and yet, I don't ever feel confined.

To be sharing that tiny space with another person is an interesting and new experience. It becomes essential to say "behind you" every time you pass behind your co-worker, no matter how repetitive it may seem (and I did feel like a broken record at first, but got used to it eventually).

It also becomes essential to know when to step in and help out in making drinks rather than manning the register (the business side of the job). I didn't get the hang of this until I began taking over the drink-making here and there and realized how many orders a barista can take before he or she becomes overwhelmed. Now I sort of get it, though it's not quite perfect yet.

When I do get the hang of it though, it feels rather nice because I hit a sort of rhythm with my co-worker and it becomes a partnership, or if you prefer more poetic imagery-- a dance. Working in this narrow space behind the bar has made me realize that there are rhythms to situations in life that don't explicitly involve dancing or music.

This evening, just a few minutes before closing, I looked out the window and saw dozens of naked men and women riding by on bicycles.

"Oh my god, it's the Naked Bike Ride!" I cried. Customers turned from their coffee to the windows, and my co-workers and I rushed over to the edge of the counter nearest the window and gaped at the mass of pale buttcheeks sitting atop bike seats, riding by with cheers and whoops. We gaped and gaped and I felt strangely uncomfortably at seeing strange men's dicks hanging out in the open.

The Penniless Picasso gave me another drawing today-- the 4th one so far. I love our Penniless Picasso. I still haven't told you what he said to me the other day, have I? Story for another post. Suffice to say that tonight, due to no particular reason, or perhaps due to several reasons at once, I am full of seemingly imperturbable happiness and love. As well, a piece of rabbit sits in my stomach (a consequence of dinner). I'm feeling jumpy.

Modern Jazz

Symmetry is closed on holiday for the rest of the week, and so I decided on a whim (and an invite) to take a jazz class at Koresh. I had no dance clothes-- not even a hair tie-- so I danced in denim capris and borrowed a hair tie from the girl at the front desk.

The class was lovely. I was surprised by a few things:

1) By how balletic the moves were. We used balletic arms (port-de-bras) and degages in warm-up, changements across the floor, and coupes and pas-de-bourres in the dance combination. Most pronouncedly, the teacher himself moved and carried himself with balletic grace, even when he was teaching a "jazzy" move.

2) By the lyrical quality of the dance. I was expecting jazz walks and such, but there was nothing of a sort. Throughout the class, we were continually falling into gravity, using natural momentum, never fighting against what felt natural. I think I am by nature a jumper and so I tend to spring up rather than fall into the ground by default. I had to work to fall into the arabesque instead of bouncing out of it.

3) By how much fun I had. In continually falling into gravity and using my natural momentum while dancing, I felt so utterly free. I walked home feeling like I'd been playing on a swing for an hour-and-half. I adore swings.

4) By how much of my nearly-yearlong training at Symmetry came into use in this jazz class. As I balanced on releve/high-pose, changement'ed across the floor, and simply every time I moved, I felt all my learning from the past year coming into play. What a worthwhile year it's been!

5) By how much I loved dancing in bare feet.

First Leaf and Tolstoy's Fundamental Theorem of History

"Beautiful," said the LC customer as I set his latte on the bar.

"Sure is...You were talking about the coffee, right?"

"The whole process. It's a beautiful thing to watch."

I felt pleased. I recalled for an instant what it was like on the other side of the bar, to have no idea of the difference between a cappuccino, a latte, a macchiato, and so on. To be amazed at the gorgeous foam and the complex leaf designs. Oh wait, it's only been two months since I've started working at LC, and I still am very much amazed by the leaf design! I made my first baby leaf on a latte last Sunday, and it really was a beautiful thing. My hand was going for a heart, then at the last minute, it did the side-to-side dance as if possessed by a will of its own, and suddenly, a small baby leaf sat atop the brown like a tattoo, curving with the rim of the cup.

Today, I watched as my co-worker, Handlebars, created leaf after leaf after leaf, and each time I watched amazed and tried to figure out how he made it look so nice. His leaves are especially circular and wider at the base with many thin prongs. My latte milk was not so on today. It's all about getting the right milk-- not too foamy, not to wet. The design will come of its own accord, as they all have been telling me since the beginning.

I know I can't be serving coffee at LC forever (and why not?). I know I cannot be doing ballet at Symmetry forever (and why not??). But for now, let us appreciate and count our lucky stars that Angie gets to do both, day in and day out. Yesterday was the first day back at Symmetry after a week-long hiatus, and boy was it lovely! I had missed our teacher entirely too much. After the horrid, abyss-like Dark Age of Symmetry, whenever there is an extended hiatus at the studio lasting more than a couple days, it always starts to feel like a thing of the past, and that is a very melancholy feeling indeed.

Ultimately, life is a sad affair because everything good and nice will come to an end, and this summer has been especially good and nice (in fact, 2010 has been the hands-down the best summer I've ever lived in my 26 years). Pardon me if I sound depressing but sometimes these thoughts do occur in my otherwise obliviously blissful mind. I feel like Gilgamesh coming to terms with his mortality. Or like myself coming to terms with the fact that Prince Andrey and Natasha will not live happily ever after and grow old and curmudgeonly together. And Why Not???

Because Tolstoy says so, and he is the master of their fate, fictional as they are.

Tolstoy espouses an interesting view of fate, which goes something like...we are each of us free to make our own decisions, but once we do, our resulting fate is tied to the rest of mankind and history. Mathematically-- logically, it appears to make little to no sense. That is until one reaches page 937 of War & Peace:

"The progress of humanity, arising from an innumerable multitude of individual wills, is continuous in its motion...Only by assuming an infinitely small unit for observation--a differential of history--that is, the homogeneous tendencies of men, and arriving at the integral calculus (that is, taking the sum of those infinitesimal quantities), can we hope to arrive at the laws of history."

You see how hilarious this guy is? He applies complex laws of mathematics to discussions of fate! For all the ways in which he makes fun of Germans and their irrationally pig-headed faith in the sciences, he sure does enjoy using logic to pound his views home. Hey, Roomie, you see now why I burst out laughing when I read the above statement? It happens* to read very much like a typical math theorem from my old analysis textbook (I've added the bold fonts to emphasize the likeness). I laugh because I've finally discovered the reason for the existence of my math degree-- and it is to understand Russian literature. Thank you Tolstoy for giving purpose to my Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics.

*coincidence? I think not! I'm sure Tolstoy did his research into actual calculus textbooks.

Day of Rest

Ah Monday, my weekend! I could conquer the world! ...or I could conquer my bed. For now, I lie upside down on my couch-- barefoot and in the shirt I wore to work yesterday-- reading about Napoleon's attempt to conquer the world. Long live vicariously!

Any Given Sunday

Now that it's cooled down a bit in Philly, we've taken to turning off the AC and turning on the windows again. Oh how I've missed the noise. Earlier this morning, a car drove by blaring Middle Eastern music-- the kind with the lone voice trailing like a call-to-prayer-- and for a few seconds, I thought I was in the mountains again. Then the Doppler Effect flattened it out and took it away.

Now, a couple hours later, an outdoor church service with a big brass band keeps me from sleeping in. The priest calls me to Jesus and the Lord, his voice magnified by his zeal and a microphone. The pace and volume of the music crescendos, the shouts of "Glory!" increase in frequency. They're going for the goal! I'm anticipating...


...

...

Barista Talk

"Oh, by the way Angie, do you have kids?"

"KIDS? Do I look like I would have kids? I have Minnie Mouse on my shirt! In the front AND the back!"

"Not kids- keys! Why does everyone think I'm saying kids?"

"Oh...yes. I do."

Later...

"So you don't have any kids?"

"No but I do have a snowman. His name is Jellybean and he has a rainbow scarf. I sleep with him every night."

On His Toes

Today, after morning class, I lay on the floor stretching and watching Kip teach the following pointe class. Usually, he gives directions while perched on his stool at the front of the class. Today, though, he stood himself in pointe shoes and led the students into exercises. Kip in flowing army-green pants and satin pink toe shoes, leading a pack of lesser mortals into ballet exercises? I'm so done looking at women in toe shoes. I was struck by the juxtaposition of masculine and feminine: cold, hard green against soft, reflective pink; rippling, billowing fabric against the boxy hardness of pointe shoes; Kip in toe shoes. Gorgeous, gorgeous.

Night

Tonight, K called his style of teaching a "dying breed". It is an old style of teaching that treats ballet as the conceptual art that it is. Its poses and moves are motivated by abstract concepts, ideal shapes and consideration of perspective from audiences real or imagined.

As a dancer in training, one could go through the entire training process successfully without knowing or giving a damn about these more elevated aspects of ballet. Technically, one need not know that the aim of the arabesque is to give the illusion of an "inverted firmament"-- a curved line extending infinitely into space-- in order to achieve the pose. The imagery is admittedly "lofty", but then again, I've always been attracted by lofty ideas. What could be more lofty than the studies of relativity and mathematics? But in ballet as in math, one can learn to perform the functions and operations without understanding their deeper significances, and that is perfectly fine.

In terms of mathematics, this doing without knowing would be like being told that sqrt (2) is irrational and learning even to perform operations on irrational numbers without ever having seen the proof that sqrt (2) is irrational. Is it necessary to see the proof? Not in the least. But does seeing or better yet deriving the proof bring one's understanding and appreciation of mathematics to a whole new level? Indubitably. The lack of understanding of the motivations behind moves seems to be the case in most ballet studios: one learns to execute the moves without knowing why. It becomes a "gymnastic feat" rather than art.

Tonight, I was reminded of why I was here in Philadelphia. It is within the walls of the studio on 19th in Chestnut that the art of ballet is endowed with a special spirit and rigor that is hard to find elsewhere in the country and most of the world. And moreover, my instructor seems to believe in the goodness of human beings despite having seen the detritus-- the most banal examples of our race. In fact, it is one of the most interesting and inexplicable aspects of K's personality, that he is drawn to and seems to interact most comfortably with the kinds of characters that the rest of society shuns due to their obvious deficiencies in morals, mental soundness, or other typically valued human traits. I can only theorize that he does so because he himself understands what it is like to be shunned especially having come from the viciously competitive and egocentric world of ballet.

And yet, despite everything-- despite having decided he hated ballet because of its musty museum piece-like quality, and despite having experienced the worst human behavior in the very world he represents, he continues to teach ballet precisely because in his opinion, it takes the best parts of being human and displays them in unconscionably beautiful forms, whether static or dynamic. Now that I think about it, I feel extremely lucky that as a mere student of ballet not aiming to make it a profession, I will only ever expose myself to the good and beautiful side of ballet and not the dirty side. Unfortunately we cannot be so blissfully naive about our actual professions.

Tonight after ballet class, as I walked through the city streets in the dimness of night and balmy summer air, dwarfed by massive skyscrapers reaching to the heavens, I came to the realization that I've been wrong in thinking I needed to find a purpose to support my ballet habit which brings me so much happiness. My happiness is my purpose, and I don't need anything more. Even photography is superfluous.

While walking through the dim, muted streets of Center City surrounded by towering skyscrapers, I recalled a few nights ago how I had gone for a close-to-midnight walk with my camera and wandered into the most unearthly scene of children and lovers, friends, mothers and grandmothers playing in an enormous fountain shooting out magnificent jets of illuminated water like liquid moonlight. On the other hand, homeless folk lay on the benches and grass covered in thin white sheets like the dead.

The two children, years later, will remember nothing but a great big fountain, jets of water spraying in their faces, marble statues bigger than life, and pearl-colored water arcing into the limitless navy sky like white rainbows. For them, nothing will exist outside of this fountain at least in their memories. The grown-ups on the other hand will very well remember that an entire city lay outside of this fountain-- the Moore building, the Franklin Institute, City Hall in the distance, the homeless closer by. The next night, I awoke at three in the morning with the word "kinderspiel (child's play)" bouncing around in my head, and obeyed a sudden urge to take night shots from my rooftop.

Tonight after ballet class, about a block from the El on the way to a tango practica in Fishtown, I would see an owl on a rooftop, hoot at it to see if it was really an owl, and then continue on wondering if it was good luck or bad luck to spot an owl in the night. When night falls, everything becomes a little bit more mysterious and magical.

Horseshoes Milonga

I walked out of the subway station and heard the clopping of horseshoes. Out of the night appeared a carriage pulled by a lone white horse. It was one of those cheesy tourist horse-and-carriage rides. I hailed it like a cab and the driver pulled over asking if I needed a ride. I accepted duly noting that the driver was female-- Rule #2 in the Hitchhiker's Guide for Girls. Rule #1 would be "No hitchhiking in the middle of the night, especially in shady neighborhoods like Fishtown. But that's a hard one to follow, I find, whether I'm in Fishtown, Seattle, or Lebanon.

And so I found myself behind led by way of horse through the main streets, and then through the back alleys of Fishtown that I usually do my best to avoid. That night though, while the driver chatted amiably about how she'd been working this job for the past two decades, I found the view from behind fences and shadowy growth of trees impossibly romantic. The smell of sawdust alerted me that she was close to home, but she continued on until we were about one shady block from the back of the tango studio. Here she let me off and told me which way to go, waving away my money. I thanked her and ran off for I was already fairly late, climbed into and wended my way through the Field of Absurd Objects, and eventually approached the front window where the now-familiar sight of men and women dancing in intimate embrace met my eyes.

Here's a secret about tango dance events: the best time of any milonga is at the very end of the night at around 2am, usually. By this time the general crowd has gone home, and so the atmosphere is intimate, less chaotic. Poetic. Gorgeous strains of Piazzolla are played specially at this time. Only the really serious dancers are left. Meredith, Andres and Damian finally dance.

A couple stands at the doorway leading to Jerry's apartment looking out at these remnant dancers. A heavyset couple, his arm around her waist, her arm around his waist. Their heads form a window; through this space between the couple, in the distance, I see Damian and his partner waiting for the cue to start dancing, wreathed by the periwinkle blue Christmas lights framing the studio's window. I move past the couple and over to the piano. Nearby, Andres leads Meredith into a ridiculous number of spins that look ridiculously fun. She stumbles and laughs, then recovers and spins again. They move along in the line of dance.

Next comes Kristin and John, he'd finally nervously and hilariously worked up the nerve to ask her for a dance. I had been sitting between them in Jerry's apartment in the back of the studio, and it had been like watching high school. Or middle school. Only he was 24 and she in her 40's with a child. At tango, there are a number of women who dress and carry themselves in a way that belies their true age by a decade, sometimes two. I find myself chatting with Kristin about the worth of having a child. She is different from my older friends who do not have children. I think in becoming a mother, what you lose in lightness of spirit, you gain in putting aside superficialities and...yourself.

Carolyn walks in dressed to the nines in a champagne pink form-fitting satiny dress-- a dress she bought more than ten years ago with a custom-made slit on the sides. She is Walking Elegance. Someone should stop time so she will never change. But someone probably had the same thought about her when she was in her 20's and now she's even more beautiful-- and wiser, and a better baker. She had catered the entire menu that night. She says goodbye to us, brushing cheeks one-by-one. She leaves.

Ori walks in, high on life as usual. He had promised Elinora Ballerina a dance and had never followed through. Such is Ori. I watch the two of them communicating. She communicates with intimacy, no matter who she is with. I like, I like. John reasserts himself:

"It's one of those days where...where...where..."

We waited. He blew air under his bangs in frustration as we mocked him playfully as he struggled to get his words out.

"It's one of those days where everything should have gone perfectly,...but didn't! I wish I could do this day over again!"

"Hi, my name's Angie, nice to meet you!" We shook hands again. Before the night is over (just barely), I see them on the floor together in the line of dance.

My Island

If I had an island, I would name it "Noman". No man is an island entire of itself...

If I had a photography business, I would call it "Yellow Sky". Yellow sky. Interesting choice...You can't see colors, can you?

Shift #10 Behind the Bar

By the way, I made beautiful microfoam today. The beautiful microfoam translated into a beautiful cappuccino for an anonymous customer at LC. Love coffee. Love ballet. Love life.

Belly Button Awareness

Belly button awareness is key to maintaining balance in ballet. In this morning's ballet class, I imagined my belly button being pulled by a thread hanging from the ceiling, then traveling slowly up my spine, past the nape of my neck, all the way through the top of my head. We used this imagery to maintain our balance as we slowly rolled up from a forward cambre on sous-sous (on our toes) back into the upright position. How strange it was to see my belly button hanging above my head, rather like a perverse mistletoe.

In ballet, the line between the imaginary and real, the intangible and tangible, the abstract and concrete is crossed so often that I find myself questioning the relative importance we place on the real, tangible, and concrete. Many concepts like balance are so far above our understanding (ie: difficult to attain) that they are best explored through imagery and visualization of more easily-known concepts like mobilized belly buttons or a docked boat pulling away or moving, tangible energy. Similarly, concepts in physics and math are often only understood through imagery and mappings (to concepts already understood) because they so far exceed the functional limits of human cognizance. It is easy to dismiss the imaginary because of its intangible nature, but the preponderance of imagery and mappings in math, science, literature, dance, and in our very language even just goes to show how heavily we actually rely on it as a tool for understanding the oh-so-important "real world".

Eat Sleep Breathe

Go to ballet.

Sleep in ballet clothes.

Wake up in ballet clothes.

Go back to ballet.

A more pleasing cycle I can hardly think of! Although the Krebs cycle comes pretty close.

Philly has been blessed with the usual amount of thunderstorms this summer. Normally I would have nothing good to say about thunderstorms, but last night, while the thunder clapped and rumbled and shook the skies and rain pounded heavily on the rooftop, I was caught in a bubble of warm yellow and rose-colored light, doing slow grand plies and cambres to the strains of classical piano music. The juxtaposition of this oasis of warmth against the jarring and frightful sounds-- whose violence, however raging, cannot penetrate my ballet sanctuary-- is sublimely beautiful.

Penniless Picasso

"You good?"

"No...I think I'm wicked."

So responded La Colombe's very own Picasso, a penniless artist who's been a patron of my workplace since its inception 16 years ago. He's a fixture now, the old whiskered face framed by long, scraggly gray hair hanging from a balding dome, never seen without his sketch pads cradled beneath his arm. He walked in today, approaching the bar with a lost, bewildered, half-crazed look in his eyes. After a minute, he ordered a granita, which I poured for him, though his entire appearance screamed "homeless". He just stood there with his sketchpads under his right arm and stared at the granita without taking it, as if he both feared it and was shocked by its existence. Which is why I asked.

"Don't worry, we'll take care of it," said another regular patron of LC, who himself comes anywhere from zero to 15 times a day. He was sitting with two other regulars at the table right in front of the bar. They were clearly enjoying the show-- the crazy man's mischief and my display of naivete. Later, my co-worker informed me of the strange penniless man's history and unusual status at the coffeeshop. Everyone at LC is convinced that he is a Picasso waiting to be discovered. His artwork is purported to be incredible, though I have yet to see it. I wonder why they don't display his artwork at the very cafe where he is fervently revered, the one place where he is actually appreciated. Fame may be something that LC's Penniless Picasso will find six feet under.

One of my customers today was a former classmate at Penn, though he was more of an acquaintance, a friend of a friend.

"So, what are you doing here?" he asked.

"What am I doing here? Serving coffee, smiling at customers."

On the surface, this is exactly what I am doing at La Colombe. But in my mind's eye, I see farther and deeper, where the landscape is bigger and more spacious and crosses oceans and unknown territory. I am here, but I am elsewhere. Ooh, I kind of understand our Penniless Picasso now, that look in his eyes.