Explorations

I found this quote as  a part of an ad for Costa Rican tourism in the subway earlier this week. Ironically I took a picture of this tagline with my camera, as it tells me the image with pale in comparison to my own heart-felt emotions. I didn’t mind really, it was an ad in the subway-but it did really get me thinking. This idea of experiencing vs documenting is paramount, not only now with our New York trip, but within museums, theatre, art, the very thing of life itself-do we experience or document?

It’s only natural to remember the good times, things, people, and beautiful moments of our lives. We want to remember these things, and with the expansion of technology it’s became so easy to do so. The ‘point and shoot’ cameras made photography accessible and easy for people to capture image, the camcorder made moving visual and audio ‘capturable’, blogs and online journals made thought and feeling ‘capturable’. But where does this leave us? In a day when signs are all over the MoMA, Met, Frick(this list is endless) explaining the policy on taking photographs, people are clearly more interested in documenting than experiencing. Sure, maybe a select few are documenting their experience, but those individuals are in rare form. Furthermore these people likely understand the truth in the above tagline better than anyone.  For theatres there’s the obligatory sign about ‘recording devices’, and try,  just try to take a picture. I feel that we as people live with a near obsession of documenting our entire lives, things we’ve done, the great sights we’ve seen, good, bad, ugly; one needs look no further than facebook to see this trend.

To me this whole movement towards getting every thing we’ve done ’settled away’, and ‘cataloged’ forever and ever is a dangerous and scary idea. Life is not simply a spectator sport, it’s for living, we must jump right in. We need to stop trying to fit the world in a picture frame, we need to see the world with both our eyes.  We need to let go of this fear about documentation. We are going to forget some of the most amazingly beautiful, truthful, and happiest moments of our lives. This is a undeniable fact akin to death and taxes. We need to accept this and move on. The point of letting go of documentation, is to rely on experiencing the experience. Getting vulnerable and allowing yourself to truly be moved. Instead of taking your picture in front of a Monet, allow your mind, your heart to take in the feelings, the thoughts, and fully let go…This is experiencing the experience.  Overtime the memory of the experience will fade, but the richness of the moment, is so remarkably heightened. Yes it’s only a moment, a mere blimp of time, yet what it lacks in length it makes up for with intensity

I think it’s important to remember: No camera will store as much as your heart.

oh, la, la… 

EverytimeIseesomeonehailingacabIwannarunupandgivethemahighfive.

Whew. OK. One more time: every time I see someone hailing a cab in the city, I just want run up to them as fast as possible and give them the biggest high five ever. I know it’s the dumbest thing ever, but I have to  physically restrain myself every time I see an outstretched arm with a open palm on the end of an unsuspecting stranger. 

So Thursday…I just did it.  I took a picture of the woman(some may say victim) as I passed from behind her, and then walked by her and across the crosswalk, so that I could  have a running start. There was nothing about her that seemed unusual, and after a second of trying to talk myself out of it, I took off. I ran across the crosswalk, leapt up, slapping her hand as if I were dunking the game winning point in the championship game.  As I was catching my breathe(panting a bit hard), I looked into her eyes, and she had nothing but a blank expression on her face. I then said, ‘Yeah, that just happened.’ She stood there for a few more moments until a cab pulled up, and she told the cab driver her destination. With a turn she said I was lucky she didn’t call the cops, we went our ways. There were several men watching from a store front and the were rolling over with laughter. I have to believe that she later smiled about our encounter too.

I can remember numerous occurrences since middle school when those around me have asked,  ‘When are you going to grow up?’ And when I say numerous, I do mean numerous; school teachers, administrators, employers, co-workers, fellow students, and yeah, even the kids I babysat for.  Not one of those people asked that simple question the same way…and the truth is my answer will hopefully never change.

I will never grow up.

Call it the Peter Pan Syndrome. I mean of course I want to grow up; live on my own,  support myself with a career(that I love), get a cool dog, and really ‘make it’. But along the way I don’t want to lose my inner child.

 Monday I had a wonderful experience at the Guggenheim Museum. After a beautiful walk through Central Park, I just lost myself for a few hours within the ‘Gugg’. It was cool, and somewhat unusal to see exhibits that I’ve read about in The Times weeks ago.

Most interestingly I fell in love with Cai Guo-Qiang, and his exhibit ‘I want to Believe’. You enter the  central atrium of the Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda, and find 9 identical and actual cars ‘falling’ through the space, simulating a car bombing, complete with flashing LED lights within and stretching out of the cars.  It was awe inspiring to see a visual of such a grand scale. This was a theme, I found that resonated within almost all of his work.  And I’m not alone in being swept away by this visual: Thomas Krens, Director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, says “[this]may be the best artistic transformation of the Frank Lloyd Wright space we’ve ever seen.”  It is beautiful, and everyone should go check it out. Cai Guo-Qiang also has a number of large pieces on exhibit that were created through gunpowder and explosions.  I was excited by this, but it wasn’t until I saw the video of him working did I really fall in love.  Looking at the final product(that measures up to 12 feet by 65 feet) his work seems so accidental, but looking at the artist work you find someone who has captured and plotted every single explosion and stroke. I really think that’s what pulled me in: the works ‘accidental’ qualities. Working with gunpowder is a really interestingmedium : “These practices integrate science and art in a process of creative destruction and reflect Cai’s philosophy that conflict and transformation are interdependent conditions of life, and hence art. At once intuitive and analytical, his gunpowder drawings and explosion events are intrepid, conceptual, site specific, ephemeral, time based, and interactive—performance art with a new matrix of cultural meaning.”

More info, pictures and video here: http://www.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/exhibition_pages/cai.html

The Guggenheim was an experience. Simply a wonderful, rich, and silently beautiful experience. However, getting there was also an experience-a hilarious one.  Katie and myself set out, full of hope and good intentions, to where we thought the Guggenheim resided. We basically ended up in Soho and not quite near the Guggs, but we found a PinkBerry’s so the whole ordeal was pretty worthwhile. But the store front is green?

Note the disgruntled face. Yeah, it was good-but I could have used more pink, and apparently the store refuses to publish it’s nutritional value facts leading many to think it’s not actually ‘fro yo’. (Soylent Green is people…anyone, anyone?) There are a bunch of articles and blogs on the issue, such as this one:

 http://www.starling-fitness.com/archives/2007/05/08/is-pinkberry-really-frozen-yogurt/

Before we looked at a map, Katie and I relied on the kindness(and subsequent intelligence) of strangers. I’ve asked strangers literally hundreds of times over the course of my traveling life-and rarely do I get steered wrong. When Katie ran into a shoe store to snag us directions she was met with an interesting answer, ’I've never heard of the Guggenheim’.  The woman went on to explain there ‘were of a bunch of old buildings’ around the area and we should ‘check them out’.  Her advice wasn’t very informative or reassuring…and maybe the woman was just yanking our chain(I do love a good joke) but the exchange provided a lot of thinking material, specifically pertaining to my project. Did she really never hear of the Guggenheim? What types of artistic expression does she seek out to view, to experience, to create..? What and Why?  Katie reenacts the whole experience below; proving to us that the Guggenheim is sometimes a hard destination…even when you know it exists.

Reggie put it perfectly: “Theatre kids in their natural habitat, can’t take them anywhere without them bursting out into song.”

And then we ended up in Central Park on Saturday: Spiderman ensued.

This is the tagline to one of the coolest dining options in all of New York City.  Sunday evening after The Seagull, Mary, Mitch, Katie and myself decided to try Panna II. Personally I really enjoy Indian food to begin with; sadly this post has almost nothing to do with how awesome the food was. Totally tasty. But no, this is not about how ridiculously awesome the atmosphere and people were.

From the moment our little group approached Panna II, you could hear a loud, fast beat pulsating down the street. Then we happened upon the restaurant; I say ’happened upon’ because if you blinked you would miss the 8 foot wide store front it occupied. Missing Panna II would be understandable if not for the massive(and I do mean massive) amount of glowing, and blinking Christmas lights and chili peppers in the window. Then there was the doorman. Yes, there was seriously a doorman. But not in that uppity snobbish way-no no, he was there to ‘cat call’ customers into the restaurant. And we quickly understood why: there were 2 other Indian restaurants right next to him, and 1 below him. The other restaurants(though clearly impostors) had attempted to put up chili pepper lights and Christmas lights too: competition was fierce. He convinced us that we picked “The right Indian place to eat at”, and opened the door to a space 8 feet by 40 feet. Tables were packed in very tightly and lights hung so heavily from the ceiling that even while sitting they touched the tops of our heads. The music was also really cool, and it gave the room a vibe. The waiter seemed to be having a lot of fun, and towards the end of dinner  sang “Happy Birthday” to the man next to us, with a light show as well(duh). The food was amazing. At a point Katie realized that the whole resturant was tilted(Mitch confirmed this) and the truth is, it only added to Panna II’s charm. Uneven, blasting music, crazy doorman and staff, delicious food, and more lights than the fire department would say is safe…

This place is just so alive.  

These are the near famous words my great grandmother passed onto my grandmama, who in turn passed them onto my mom. My great grandmother mind you is a woman who survived both the Holocaust and raised six children alone during the Great Depression; she experienced a great deal of hardship. However, my great grandmother never complained about hard life was for a Russian immigrant during these times. She struggled to take care of her children in the face of great adversity; in not only economic terms, but barriers presented by language and cultural as well. It was her demand that the children(my grandmama and her siblings) spoke English. No matter how bad things became for the family, knowing English could save them.

I think about this today while riding the subway in New York City. “You can never get lost as long as you know English”. The words run through my mind akin to the pace of the express train we took…on an impromptu trip to Harlem. Yes, we got lost. It was fantastic. We had planned and plotted everything out, and somehow due to construction the local train turned into an express train the stop before the one we had intended to take. So what?

For starters, we(and by we I mean Mary, Karen, Reggie, Donna and myself) got off the train and walked up to the street. After a gander and a healthy laugh at our shared folly we walked back down into the subway. Thankfully we had already purchased our passes and we got back into the subway with ease. After a few moments with a subway map, and a stranger’s advice we ended up back on the train, and within 20 or so minutes had reached our destination: Central Park.

Being lost was a really useful experience. I couldn’t help but think of my great grandmother, and that perhaps I experienced a fraction, a very small fraction of the plight of trying to make it in a world you don’t totally understand. An accidental trip to Harlem and my great grandmother–funny how things peice themselves together. More later-off to the MOMA

Consider it Martin Luther King’s lesser known version, a first draft of sorts: I Don’t Have A Dream.

This is exactly how I currently feel. I don’t have a dream. I don’t want to be anything, I don’t want to do any one thing either. This might sound scary for some, but for me it provides a small, if growing comfort.

It’s nice to see my classmates so excited about acting, or direction, or stage management. It’s moving to see individuals so passionate about something, anything. I look no further than my Latin Professor, Liane R. Houghtalin, whom I adore. I tend to think she’s half the reason I didn’t switch to French or Spanish after last year. Houghtalin is just so amped about coming into our class everyday; you can tell that she loves, no breathes…no, in fact lives the constant study of Latin, the classics and archeology. It’s like this constant study is her very essence. It’s inspiring to study and work under her. I mean Latin still sucks-it always will, but experiencing her passion makes the trip worthwhile. She tries to share her passion with us; it’s hard not to recognize her efforts. When I look at Houghtalin I see someone who has seemingly found their ultimate purpose and joy: she has ‘arrived’.

Then there are my classmates. Lucia, Jen and Sommer are all jazzed about stage management, David about acting, and so on. These people all have a want, a hunger, a need to follow their dream and passion. They want to be a stage manager, or actor; they have a ‘destination’.

I can’t help but feel that I’m wandering about; sort of aimless and a bit dazed. I don’t have a dream. There’s nothing I really want to do. I have no destination, or it’s off the map. I don’t want to call myself an actor, or a director, or an investment banker, or a teacher. I want everything: eclectic.

‘…i want out of the labels. i don’t want my whole life crammed into a single word. a story. i want to find something else, unknowable, some place to be that’s not on the map. a real adventure. a sphinx. a mystery. a blank. unknown. undefined…’ chuck palahniuk.

I don’t have a dream, and it’s wonderful. I’ll just react to whatever comes next. There are few instances where I’ve been truly allowed to simply react; but there is a remarkable and rare intensity that is derived solely from this reacting, surviving- that’s where I feel alive and awake.

There is no road-map or destination and sometimes I wish that I did have a label or destination to cling to. There is a safety, or at-least the illusion of safety attached to these ideals: labels and destinations. But, “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.” -Helen Keller

I can respect Martin Luther King and Houghtalin, I admire their dreams and passions; but I don’t have a problem with not having a dream either.

I’m ready.

Few people will fully understand the understated importance of this post’s title. I am indeed a runner. I have been since as long as I can remember. Growing up, my Mother was almost always training for a road race or marathon, and instead of sticking me at home she let me ride my bike along side her. These bike ride/runs with my Mom still stand poignantly in my childhood memories; they were and are remarkably formative and critical to who I am.  Once I was old enough I became apart of the youth track program, and then elementary and middle school until I started to run in high school. Up until high school I was a sprinter, I liked the short distances and strict form it required. As I entered my freshman year I ran on the Cross Country team. It was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. In addition to transforming into a distance runner, I learned so many valuable lessons and pushed myself to a very new place.

I would say it was a pretty big deal. And one that I can’t fully describe. Running and being a runner has been such a big part of my life, that I wrote my college essay on the topic. That’s half of what inspired this post: I found my college essay today, tucked away in lost files and it explains this feeling far better than this post could:

The Importance of the Sweet Betweens

It’s 6:00am and the night clouds are already beginning to burn off as I lace up my Asics and grab my jacket. This Saturday begins like most every other, with a run. It’s the type of morning where I dread my run, the regrets of three ice cream sandwiches sit heavy in my stomach and my calves are laden with pain from yesterday’s hill workout. But I push past my own excuses and set out of the hilly, narrow road ahead of me: Rattlesnake Hill Road.

My house shrinks with each stride, and my calves slowly loosen. I pass the pond and water fall, the housing construction and the remnants of the sewer installment. In the distance I hear screeching birds, allowing me to recognize that the world is waking up. With the first few miles behind me now, my breathing becomes easier. In the middle of my run, past the miles of loosening up, beyond the doubts and self-recriminations over yesterday’s ice cream sandwiches; I can think. I can really think. Heavy breathing and  the tenderness in my knees still a good four miles out, the opportunity allots me plenty of time to think. I call these miles ‘the sweet betweens’; and sweet they are. My mind begins to wander and soon the dialogues begin; with myself, my parents, friends, teachers, authors of my favorite books and poets.  My thoughts catch up with me, refusing to lose step-what I owe to myself, to others, my broken resolutions and what really matters to me. I try to lose them on the uphill, but they are far stronger than I am.  Anyplace else I would have given the back side of my hand to such idle musings, but out here they are as inescapable as the yellow dash that divides this narrow road.

The driveway ahead with the peach mailbox offers me a chance to turn around and head home. I decline. The mailbox just steps before me, presenting itself as a compromise, a place to say ‘far enough’. But I’ve learned over the years to use these seductions to my advantage. I tell myself that I’ll run to the mailbox and then decide whether or not to turn around, knowing full well that I will draw sustenance from reaching it and then refusing it’s invitation. The midcourse of my run is not unlike the course of my career and my life at large, where I’m tempted to accept the distance already won.

Eventually I set my eyes on a green house a half mile or so ahead, there a dog comes charging out, offering me the perfect chance to cross the road. I begin the wide arc of a return and head back to the pond and waterfall and the housing construction. From the opposite side of the road, even a road so narrow as this everything looks different, transformed by having become a part of my past. The sweet betweens have taught me more about myself than any other event in my life. It’s a lesson I learn every time I run. And at 18 I realize how lucky I am, blessed really to be on this road, even knowing that where the down hills once welcomed me, the up hills now rise in their stead.

Running has provided a remarkably important outlet for me. Yesterday, I sweated it out for a good 45 minutes to Cher and Mika and Say Anything and Eminem.  Everything just melted away: stresses, midterms, shows, meetings, homework, bad grades, people… they all to a backseat to a new found clarity. Looking back on this essay, written some years ago now, there is still one very true statement: It’s a lesson I learn every time I run.  This undefinable, near unknown lesson that resonates with me each run contains a clarity, or illusion or clarity that makes everything else seem so simple and organic.

As Gregg had mentioned last week in class, the most important part of reading the newspaper is making valuable connections. Taking a story to personalize it, or show it’s relation to another story, or idea: the synthesis of the information is where the true value lies.

Reading the Times this week I found an individual who has done as such. Enter Milos Forman. Foreman is a Czech filmmaker who is screening his 1971 comedy Taking Off this Thursday at the MoMA, kicking off a two week retrospective of his work. At the end of the article Forman recounts the tale of a friend trying to discourage him from taking on One Flew Over the Cockoo’s Nest( he went on to win an Oscar for his direction in the work): “While I was reading ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’ ” Mr. Forman recalled, “an American friend of mine said: ‘Don’t go near it. It’s such a piece of Americana that you will never be able to express the Americanism of the story.’ “I said: ‘What are you talking about? For you it’s a book, it’s fiction. But I lived that story. For me the Communist Party was Nurse Ratched. And everything that is described in the story of that book I lived. So to me it’s a Czech movie. It’s a documentary.”

There was never any doubt, though an unshakable believe that Forman held on to: This Story, is my Story. Forman personally connected to the work and refused to let go. While Gregg spoke more of making analytical connections, the personal connection is just as important. Forman saw himself and his story in every aspect of Cuckoo’s Nest; enough to say that is was a story he has lived.

Connecting. Attaching. Fusing. These are not simple things to do. Though remarkably important.