feh

Aside from whatever emotional balm I'm getting from the spate of Swordspoint fic I've been writing, it's a good exercise in that Alec (for all his nasty comments ) and Richard are the two least verbal characters ever. How do two people have a conversation about something complicated or serious when they almost never ever speak in sentences longer than five words? This is the problem of the current thing I am working on, which is somewhat ambitious. I am struggling. I think I have it mapped out well, and I think in looking at this nearly finished draft, the answer is to cut it apart and make it one of those moody backwards and forwards things. But I'm still feeling weird physically, and I very much doubt that will happen tonight, espeically with dance class and a screening tomorrow, the fact of fencing on Monday and my shoulders hurting right now from lifting weights yesterday.

All that AC stuff I was going to write? I can't, apparently, churn out craptastic nonfiction when I have a headache. Strings, which I'm so behind on working on, is also suffering a similar fate. In that case, not feeling well makes me too aware of my own flesh to write about anyone else's.

I'm going to go sit in the bath and hem a pair of pants.

Also, I'm going to take this class: http://community.livejournal.com/nyc_for_free/1167992.html

Clearly, this is my new thing, taking classes in various odd and not particularly modern arts.

Oh yeah, and that dude who played Doogie Howser is gay. Hardly a surprise really, but after the evil genius that was his performance in Starship Troopers, I'm sort of irrationally thrilled he's one of my tribe.

marathon

I have almost always lived very close to the NYC Marathon course. For over 25 years of my life, in fact, I've lived, at different apartments, less than a block away from it. Like the water and the crappy subway options that's just been my life.

When I was little my parents always got us up to go watch the marathoners come up First. Those days, the 70s and 80s remain the age of great sportsmen in my mind: from tennis to basketball to the marathon, everything was legends and my parents made sure I saw all of them.

When I found out that everyone got a medal at the end, and one of those space blanket things, I decided I wanted to run the marathon too, because I was a kid who loved the bright shiny, who loved awards, like a crow with low self-esteem. But I knew the marathon, in all its symbollic glory both of my city and my ancient obsessios wasn't for me. It was too hard. I could sprint and I could walk a long long way, but not much else. For a long time, and to varying degrees, I had thought to walk it. So it would take me into the night to finish, and I could be embarassed, crowds gone except for those around a news story that actually had a reason to take that long. But I thought I didn't care, because I'd have my bright shiny and I'd have done a thing from history and myth. It wouldn't be much different from gym class anyway; people were always waiting on me. But I wasn't allowed to give up and just walk off the route of our exercises. Then I'd get in trouble. And it didn't seem most of the time like that was about teaching me not to be a quitter but about humiliating me for having the audacity to be slow, to fail in a way that required others to focus more attention on me than I ostensibly deserved.

I've still gone to the Marathon almost every year though. Even years I didn't know I lived right by it (that happened in Brooklyn a few times, I stumbled out to get groceries or do laundry and hello marathon!). It's only been in the last few years that I've realized this is something I won't die having done. That's a little weird for me, not because I care that much, but because I live like I'm twenty and I've got two hundred years ahead of me, but the marathon I've surrendered.

There's a system, when you live where I do. You watch on TV until the runners come off the 59th street bridge, then you throw on clothes and run down stairs. It's not much of a system, but it works and you don't get too cold. O ryou can listen for the copters. Luckily, I live to the west of the route here, not the east, meaning I can get to dance class without too much hassle too later.

I'll see runners on the subway with their friends and I'll sort of look and smile and look away and feel embarrased that because of my schedule I'll be in work out clothes too.

hush, hush -- Catch a Fire

When I was a teen, my parents took me to see Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Paul Simon at Radio City Music Hall. This was after the Graceland album had come out and the problem of apartheid and South Africa was well known to us all.

The 80s were interesting times, especially in comparison to these times now. There were injustices in the world that it seemed easy for us to agree on here in the States. Certainly, there was woe and misery we were perpetuating as well. But the world was changing, and those changes were good. Apartheid ended, the Berlin Wall came down, Tienamen Square galvanized us in some vague way. Certainly, even if we did nothing with our sudden world political awareness it was still better than just being afraid of nuclear war all the time.

My father worked in advertising, and when I was a young girl he was the creative direction on an ad campaign encouraging people to buy krugerrands, this before that was made illegal here or most of us really knew anything about South Africa at all. The campaign won some awards, as did a lot of my father's work. I remember when they shot the photos for it, and he brought home a snapshot of him posing with three milion dollars worth of the coins and some bars of gold too. They had beautiful animals on them, the coins, and my father told me about the guards and their guns there for the gold. I took the picture to show and tell and the framed award-winning ad campaign stayed up in the office, through apartheid and its fall. People remarked on that a lot, "Oh yeah, the krugerrand ads. That was weird." LIke that, not really saying anything.

We were not poor when I was a child, but our lives were largely about other people's money. We did not own property; the other relatives did. I went to private school and whatever we might have had to live richly went to that. My cousin in Atlantic City, whose parents had a black cat that liked to sleep on my head, worked in a casino. We all touched other people's money all the time, in one way or another. Now my mother works at a luxury jewlery store.

I saw Catch a Fire tonight at the SAG screening, and it's just simply phenomenal. For it does not endeavor to be an inspirational story. Nor does it try overhard to make anyone more or less sympathetic to show us complexity. Merely, people do what they have to for themselves and their families. Some of these actions are more justifiable in the big picture than others. That is all.

The concert at Radio City was long. And aside from just being backup on Paul Simon's songs, huge chunks of it (and it went on for hours and hours) was Ladysmith Black Mambazo performing their own stuff. I remember looking around, and everyone at the concert was white, and roaming around and getting beers while this group performed by themselves. I was very embarassed, and sank low in my seat, but I wasn't any less embarassed by my father humming along like this was his music too. Also, dude, everythign your parents do is embarassing at that age; all the better if you can attempt to ascribe reason to your horror.

I used to work with this Canadian guy who had lived in South Africa for a while. He lived in a small apartment with a bunch of foreign students. He said there was always too many of them, and people and matresses seemed to pile up on the floor. He said that South Africa felt like home to him, but that he never stopped feeling strange when he spoke to white South Africans his age because their predicament was so strange. He said they were paying for everything and willingly too, but that they didn't know why their number had come up more than anyone elses. Most of them, he said, talked about leaving because there would always be assumptions, and the suspicion of excuses no matter what they said, did or had done. He wasn't the most emotionally articulate guy in the world, but he was watching something dying (a theme, this year it seems), that should be, and trying to understand it.

What is remarkable about Catch a Fire is not that it takes your breath away, not that the music will be familiar to some of you who remember that period in the 80s, not that it has the requisite moments of uplifting battle against a grotesquely oppressive system. What's remarkable is that it captures this sense of teetering, teetering -- lives, politics, families -- and it caused me to burst into tears repeatedly, not in moments of cinematic punctuation, but just because for all the news I watched, for all those school room Amnesty International meetings I went to, this put a face on what the "normalacy" of a South Africa under apartheid looked like.

Of course, this was also a film about What is a Terrorist. And it's November 5th.

The title of this post comes from a song sung at the end, when apartheid is done, and people welcoming a boat of freed political prisoners sing, "hush, hush, South Africa."

Fantastic film which also must be commended for its absolute rich (if not always logical) use of language -- English, Afrikaans and Zulu.