Waltzing

Just a short little post to say I had waltzing lessons this week. In front of many people. 

My significant other [1] has mentioned wanting to learn to dance many times, and so finally, I gave in. I asked one of our mutual friends, who happens to be a ballroom dancer, to teach us how to waltz. Nothing fancy, nothing groundbreaking, just your basic 1-2-3 waltz. 

So that's how we found ourselves one Thursday evening in the living room, sofas pushed against the wall, friends watching (and threatening to film us "for posterity," though that probably really meant "for the lolz on the internet"), tripping over each other's feet, and trying to count to three. 

After a bit, our friend declared it was time for a blindfold, so I could work on not looking at my feet and we could find out how good our sightless communication was. And bless their extroverted, people-loving heart, our dance instructor brought out the blindfold with a sort of apologetic-but-gleeful look of "How tricky this is going to be!" [2] And yes, I was apprehensive. Most of us are terribly reliant on our sight, and the thought of being without it, however briefly, is cause for discomfort.

But the blindfold? Was actually remarkably helpful. 

Remember that thing where I have trouble making eye contact? And that other thing about overstimulation? Being blindfolded cut all of that out. Much as I love J, making eye contact while trying to learn a new skill was challenging. Getting all the visual feedback from our friends sprinkled around the perimeter of the room was a lot to process. 

So for this introvert, dancing blindfolded was easier. All I had to do was count to 3, hold onto J, and not fall off my heels. 

xo, 
Devo


[1] I would have typed "SO," but I've watched too much Agents of Shield, and SO means "supervising officer."

[2] In my re-constructed, everybody comes out slightly British in their speech patterns. 

Thoughts on I Don't Want to Kill You

Trigger warning: Same as the first, found here.

Batman. Batman and serial killers. Yeah, that’s a good hook.

My midnight-reading play-by-play to K. via Facebook while reading I Don’t Want to Kill You: I have got to stop reading your scary books late at night, but: I CANNOT BELIEVE SHE DIED. First the therapist, now Marci the lady friend. BAH. Okay, back to reading. Gotta finish so can sleep. And then 30 minutes later (nearly 1am; which, recalling that I am secretly 80 years old, 1am is cRaZy late for me) upon finishing the book: And now his mother. Egads.

Which is to say, lots of people die in this book. Not John, Wells isn’t pulling a Shakespeare and killing the title character midway through (Julius Caeser in his eponymous play) – but he is perhaps pulling a Whedon, killing the characters the audience is emotionally invested in. And it makes sense for Wells’ story, just as it (usually[1]) does for Whedon’s, but still. It was all very sad and tragic.

And kind of yicky, too, it must be admitted. Marci the aforementioned lady friend didn’t just die, she was possessed by an identity-stealing demon who, while looking for love and acceptance and perfection, discovers that Marci’s life isn’t perfect and joyous and filled with love at all times, and becomes morose, depressed, and suicidal. So the demon controlling Marci’s body causes said body to kill itself (how much Marci is left in the mind is unclear), and the demon moves on to Brooke – thinking Brooke is the one, Brooke has the perfect life, John loves Brooke.

Yes, it’s a little strange. The demon of book 3 isn’t so much concerned with killing John (or even killing the girls it inhabits; that’s just a gruesome side effect) as it is with loving him, and by extension owning him [2]. The first demon had no body – it had to steal parts. The second demon had no emotions – it had to steal feelings [3]. This third demon has no self – it has to steal identities. It is the most supernatural of the three, having no form or mind that we, the readers, can really latch on to. IDWtKY was the most fantastical of the trilogy, and while it was a nice break to not be terrified out of my wits during the entire reading experience, this demon did rather make me roll my eyes.  The tragedy of suicide, and heartbreak, and jealousy, and mother-sacrificing-self-for-son was all very real and present; but the demon itself was just headshake-inducing.

Alright, enough about demons. Let’s talk about Batman.

IDWtKY talks a lot about performance vs. reality. Is John his internal, sociopathic thoughts (the thoughts that want to torture and maim, deform and kill, embalm and destroy)? Or is he his actions: ridding the town of demons, rescuing the women in the torture house, not attacking his mother with a knife? He explicitly ponders this, as people in the town start calling him a hero, praising him for his cool and collected demeanor in the face of dead-body-in-the-lake. John has, naturally enough, trouble reconciling this external hero-accolading with his inner monologue of hit/strike/kill.

Nolan’s Batman trilogy is also all about performance [4]. Yes, the trilogy is about a lot of other things too, but the character of Batman is utterly a performance, along with his alter-ego, Bruce Wayne.  Batman is “what the city needs him to be” and Bruce Wayne is the cover up for that (super)hero performance: by presenting one character to a certain subset of reality (Gotham’s elite), another character is given space to play [5].

As I wrote to K.,  Batman has all the trappings of an actor: he has props and tech -  grappling hook and wing gear so he can fly, because superheroes are supposed to fly. He has a costume: wears a mask, because heroes as far back as Robin Hood wear masks. He has a set: a secret lair, and a silly character name with -man in it, because that's how these things go. And it's a good performance, a necessary performance; a performance that saves a lot of people and does a lot of good. But it’s still a performance, an act.

Then there’s PartyBruce, who buys the Russian ballet, owns an obscene amount of hotels, and sasses CEOs during board meetings. His are the antics of a partyboy; his props are a fast car and a plethora of suits, a magnificent manor house, and several servants. Oh, and money. Lots of money. This, too, is a performance.

And then somewhere, there's the man that performs both of these characters; holds them both inside, can be both of them, and really, at the heart of things,*is* both of them. Is this man somehow separate, or is he the parts he plays? 

Nolan’s Bat trilogy deals with the same issue as IDWtKY: is a person what they think, or what they do? Is John a hero because he saves people? Is Batman? Or are they both just the darkness within, lost little boys who long for a love they can’t achieve?

On the other hand, it is rather a fallacy to assume that these things (what you think vs. what you do) are mutually exclusive. Life is a performance; to live is to act, in both senses of the word. Just because I am both good marshalling large groups of people to complete a task and bad at talking to those same people one-on-one doesn’t mean that one action is true and one action is a lie. They are both true. They are both me. The sociopath who wants to cut people apart to examine their insides and the teenage champion who demon-slays are both John Wayne Cleaver. The Dark Knight and the yacht-partier are both the youngest Wayne.

The demon of IDWtKY wants perfection, immutability, Reality, Truth – and it is driven mad when it realizes, as it moves from girl to girl, killing as it goes, that shifting shadows on a cave wall are the Truth. To live is to act, and to change; to be one way sometimes, and another way later. Not in a hypocritical way (professing one thing and intentionally doing the opposite), but just in the way that life takes many skills and many performances. The stage of existence requires deep, complex characters with many varied strengths and weaknesses, not clownish tropes. Truth is self-perception layered with others’ perceptions – the Truth is that John is both a heroic monster-killer and Mr. Monster.

As with most things, Shakespeare said it: All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts…

***

And with that, we end my rambles about Wells' trilogy, and most likely also end my foray into the horror genre.

xo,

Devo

[1] I, like much of the fandom, am not entirely convinced that Wash needed to die. Angel, yes. Tara, sure. All those Dolls, probably. But Wash?

[2] ] Maybe? By now, it’s been a while since I read this book, and I’m riffing. So riff with me.

[3] Somebody should have sent it over to tumblr; there are MANY feels to go ‘round, there.

[4] Leastways, it is when the person watching is one who has spent vast quantities of time contemplating the nature of performance vs. reality in Shakespeare’s collected works. Which is to say, if you’re me.

[5] In the sense of “play up on a stage”, to act. English gets very slippery here, because “to act” is both “to do an action” and “to perform a story on a stage” – and both meanings work in the context of Batman. 

Introverting in Vegas

I dislike many things, including: crowds, loud noises, un-leavable situations, and being tired. Las Vegas is full of these things; heck, it is the Platonic Ideal Form of these things. And yet while in Vegas, I found myself strangely and unexpectedly having a blast.

I and a friend (let's call them[1] E– ) poodled our way there a while back, for to see a couple of the permanent Cirque shows, Kà[2] and O. They were amazing, almost rapturous.The music reverberated in your chest, shades of light told evocative stories, the heat of the flames toasted your face, and cool lights with dripping hoses made you feel like a mermaid or a shark. Cirque is everything I love: performance, story, acrobatics, music, near-miraculous technical feats, humor, beauty – soul-immersing and sense-saturating art.  I expected to delight in them.

What I did not expect to delight in was the rest of the Vegas experience.

And sure, maybe had we been there for longer – we stayed only two nights (I’m tellin’ ya straight, the only reason E— and I ever even considered Vegas is because we are both theater tech junkies to the bone, and it’s the only place in the entire world you can see those Cirque shows) – I would have burnt out, freaked out, peaced out. But for two days, Vegas was glorious. Mostly, it was gloriously itself.

Completely unintentional, but isn't it great that the sunlight is only hitting the flames on the torch?
Also, roller coaster in the background, because why not?

To say that Vegas is “itself” might seem weird, at first. After all, it’s the home of many replicated famous things: Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, Brooklyn Bridge, Elvis, Roman columns, animatronic Neptune, castles: the list is endless. Nevertheless, despite its replications, Las Vegas is its own outrageous whole, greater than the sum of its redundant parts.

It is a brash and over-the-top place, to be sure. There are acres of casinos (not even an exaggeration; the MGM alone has nearly 4 acres), miles of walkways and stairs, buildings that take up whole blocks. The MGM, where E—and I stayed, is the second largest hotel in the world, with more than 6,000 rooms[3]. Is it also lit up bright green at night with a giant gold lion out front, real subtle-like.

Shiny

The Strip is deceptively long; from our 8^th floor room, the sign for the Bellagio looked close. This was false. It was, in fact, almost a half an hour walk, once you included getting out of the MGM (not a calculation that comes up anywhere but Las Vegas, where the hotels are the size of small estates), down the strip, and back to the Bellagio, which is set away from the street by a massive set of stairs and two long moving walkways, and into the O theater.

A very, very long hallway

Which is all to say, Vegas has much much-ness. If you can paint realistic sky inside, do it. If you can put one restaurant in a hotel, why not twenty? If one television is good, a whole wall of them sounds like an excellent idea. Why buy only one “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” tchotchke when there are shotglasses, shirts, sunglasses, dice, purses, mirrors, and pens? As an introvert who dislikes too much stimulation, I thought this would horrify me. It didn't.

I like stuff (people, places, books) to be what it is (...er, are?). Facades – watching people or places struggle to be what they’re not – are exhausting and disheartening. Illusions will be shattered quickly enough; there are already enough dreams deferred, parades rained on,  hopes destroyed without adding pitiful self-delusion to the midst. As a person who gets tired of trying to understand what people actually mean instead of what they say, I love that Vegas isn’t putting up a front, shellacking itself with a veneer of cosmopolitanacity[4]. I expected Vegas to be trying for suave and sophisticated and to be failing miserably. 

Instead, Vegas embraces and loves itself, pop-up wedding chapels and all.

Never change

xo, 

Devo

---

[1] Yes, yes; I'm using them  in the singular; those who care about such things feel free to have a snit. We all have those little things that annoy us. But I do present the following as evidence, for those who are swayed by things like the Oxford English Dictionary, which I imagine you might be if you’re bothered by singular-them in the first place: “They: In anaphoric reference to a singular noun or pronoun of undetermined gender: he or she.” Note it doesn't say "colloquial" or "slang."

[2] Yes, the one where a performer died. But everything was running smoothly during our stay.

[3] All according to Wikipedia, the source of ultimate truth.

[4] What? The –ness noun-maker gets overused. And besides, -acity is reminiscent of “tenacity,” which is a great word.