I'm eating local mushrooms from the mushroom guy at the farmer's market. They are put into a scramble from local hens that laid multi-colored eggs alongsidea cup of Sumatran coffee roasted by my favorite coffee shop. I think every day should start like this. I've been considering the costs of my breakfasts. I steer clear away from expensive cereals. I have oatmeal with honey, raisins, and walnuts more often than not. I estimate this meal to cost me about $1 plus $0.50 for the coffee. I try to stick with oatmeal, because I thought it was the cheapest, and it generally tastes like what I imagine manna must have been like for the Jews fleeing Egypt. Pretty good. But this egg meal is surprisingly cheap. Two egg scramble with mushrooms is also approximately $1.
I'm telling you all: put that cereal away, go to a farmer's market, buy some eggs and mushrooms. Heat some butter and give the mushrooms a few minutes of fry, crack the eggs and scramble. A little salt. Then you email me and tell me if that was NOT worlds better than magnificently overpriced processed wheat product floating in milk that tastes weird and tinny and is far removed from what fresh must actually taste like (I've never had raw milk...) You will probably be spending about the same amount of money.
But it's a hassle getting to the farmer's market, and if you don't live in Portland, it probably only happens once a week... But trust me, when you get there, you won't be sorry. I've been meaning to read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. It's a book about her year removing herself from the industrial food chain and supposed to be a great read.
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Last night the ballet was awesome. I haven't been to much ballet or professional dance, and I can't look at the dance and conceptualize the underlying technique. What they are doing seems so far removed from the possibility of my own dance that I can merely take an aesthetic appreciation away from it. Thus one must not take my comments too seriously. I was struck by a few things. First the dance rarely seemed a direct response to the music - the music often seemed to be accompanying the dance, as a sort of background. It seemed like the little hits that synchronized with the dancers were meant to accent THEIR movement, rather than their movement accenting the music. This is certainly a different conception of dance than what I have been brought up with. I'm reminded of a passage I heard Andrew Smith read from Toni Morrisons's book Jazz - it talks about the dancers thinking they know and control their own movements, but the music is a silent, overarching (even oppressive?) master. In the ballet, if the dance is not a direct response to the music, I'm not sure what takes the role of master - maybe the choreographer, but I don't even think that. The movements and the dance, as beautiful as they were, elicited a deep existential quandary - WHY? Why do these particular movements? Why choreograph these pieces? I can be forgiving of myself in this regard, because my why is answered by the music. The music plays; I dance. It is simple, logical, straightforward. But if the dance is separated from the music?? It's somewhat frightening to consider. Somehow it seems disconnected from all art and nature. I quote again from Isadora (and I may have written this earlier, but the gravity of her words account for the repetition)
"For three hours I sat tense with bewilderment, watching the amazing feats of Pavlowa. She seemed to be made of steel and elastic. Her beautiful face took on the stern lines of a martyr. She never stopped for one moment. The whole tendency of this training seems to be to separate the gymnastic movements of the body completely from the mind. The mind, on the contrary, can only suffer in aloofness from this rigorous muscular discipline. This is just the opposite from all the theories on which I founded my school, by which the body becomes transparent and is a medium for the mind and spirit."
That being said, I loved the show and will certainly go more. I simply found it odd that the most resonant moments for me were ones that were inherently eerie and unnatural. Moments of brokenness, awkward poses, missed connections, hopeless solipsism, dire moments when, more often than not, the crowd laughed. But can these moments be considered dance in my conception of the word? I don't know, but I swear this modern ballet is more at home mimicking and twisting that which is natural than it is at representing it.
And then I went dancing in a suit. You want to feel good? Try busting a move solo, in a suit, to a rocking band.
