Death & Celebrity · 25 October 2009
On Sunday I went back to Pierce Brothers, to watch the tourists take pictures of the graves. A young woman on a mission arrived in a yellow airport taxi, tumbled out and careened toward the crypt of Marilyn Monroe. She placed her palm on the marble wall as the rest of her collapsed inside her old sweatsuit. The driver stayed in the cab, studying his nails. A father and his slacker-looking teenage son enjoyed a probably rare game of bonding, looking for treasure among the headstones. Look, over here! It’s Dean Martin! Hey! Check out the subtitle for Rodney Dangerfield! A couple whose bodies resembled puffy white wonderbread loaves trudged through grave by grave, systematically, sweating in matching Wisconsin Tshirts.
You think I’m making this stuff up. Well, it’s only like this on weekends. The place is so tiny that, sitting beneath the ponderosa pine tree up in the northwest corner, I see visitors’ weird celebrity obsessions play out like the cemetery’s their stage.
Other days, it’s an electric green postage stamp, hidden between highrises just southeast of the intersection of Wilshire and Westwood. I go because it is secret, and greener than green, and because cemeteries are a calming thrill.
Graves connect to this excitement for Halloween and all November, and the enduring child-terror of apocalypses. The 2012 billboards got plastered all over town this week, scaring the shit out of me and chasing me in to the peace of Pierce brothers several afternoons. Cemeteries are the apocalypse hiding place: if we get all the way through the game before the mean old end-of-the-world God decides to trash the place, then we are safe. Good humans: here is your prize. A cool, smooth slab of marble and relatively quiet neighbors.
Pierce Brothers is nearly impossible to find, even if you know where to look, because the passageways behind the highrises all seem to lead into parking structures. But there’s one, guarded by a man in blue, that goes straight behind a brick wall and opens up in to this unimagined garden. I can almost hear the bionic hedge growing up over the entrace once I’m inside.
But Sundays, in the blazing sunlight, with the visitors who have managed to find their way in… it’s the wrong kind of creepy. Sitting under the tree, I’m usually pondering not the void of death but them: what the sounds and movements they make can tell me about this phenomenon of celebrity.
I often want to ask what it means that yoga has come to the west and been embedded, and propagated, inside this logic of ultra-notoriety and extreme reputation. I don’t know. Watching the woman who flew in to weep at Norma Jean, the father and son who experience a name on marble as a treasure. What is the self-mortifying magnetism of this stuff?
It’s the same as the good old love of power and leaders, the logic of high school popularity and every other social machination, the fascination with fascination… but it’s also not. There’s a piece I don’t get. It helps to run in to Arnold Schwarzenegger or his orange Mustang at the Pan Quotidien beneath the shala a couple of days a week: he’s my innoculator. Fascination: TERMINATED. (But wait… is that still fascinating? Shit!)
So it’s more puzzling all the time, but one thing is clear: it’s all intensely morbid. I’m sure there are a million cultural studies essays on the essential sameness of celebrity and morbidity: about how James Dean and Marilyn and Diana, in their enduring moments of conflagration, are the apotheosis of fame. A fortiori, doesn’t it seem that, if you theorized that psyche had structure, then fame and death would have to occupy adjacent cells?
I don’t know. The more I watch the celebrity machine, the emptier and more mystifying and stupider it gets. The only thing I do think I know is that knowledge of death generates the best of insight and energy, and celebrity steals them straight away. I wish I could know what yoga would be with more reverence for death and less for renown.
Posted by (0v0)
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That last sentence reminds me of the yoga off the coasts discussion. You CAN know! Time to leave that celebrity matrix behind!
Posted by: Karen · Oct 25, 07:21 PM · #
:-) Probably….
But with respect to celebrity, I actually can’t know. We understand the student-teacher relationship, and the ideals of practice, through the lens of celebrity. We become “fans.” Myself included, certainly. It’s everywhere.
Especially in ashtanga. Why else would we be content to call “teacher” someone with whom we have no real relationship? The practice holds together because we relate to its figureheads as celebrities.
I mean… “world tours”? I LOVE them, but this is pure rock ‘n’ roll.
Ashtanga isn’t on the (immediately relational, personal) guru model at all. Indian devotees choose their gurus on the basis of intense interpersonal experience, not crowd level charisma and notoriety.
We just call it guru or teacher centric because we want to feel like our celebrities are extra special!
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 25, 08:39 PM · #
Love the Paris cemeteries, quiet, shady spaces filled with stone and old bones. Stumbling across, the tombs/graves of Sartre, Morrison, Adolphe sax and names I’ve never heard of, writers, poets that went out of fashion before I was born. I used to go there and read for a few hours. Death sat beside me with his toothy grin, chuckling away to himself. I raise a quizzical eyebrow, “You don’t get the joke? you will” and he continues chuckling. Many miss the idea of absurdity, it’s not that existence is absurd but that we strive for meaning in meaningless existence, that’s the absurdity and of course the Joke. So much searching for meaning, in the Ashtanga world especially. I’d forgotten, having buried myself in the workplace for the last few years, where my coworkers concerns are seemingly less ambitious. I think we get it, actually, we just can’t accept it, so keep looking for new texts, new gurus, new celebrities to confirm it, or to convince us we’re wrong or just to elucidate it in a way we can finally grasp and/or recognize make it ‘real’ for us. Lose your self through yoga…now if I can quickly find my self through Yoga then I’ll be able to lose it. More absurdity, no wonder he can’t stop chuckling to himself.
Posted by: Grimmly · Oct 26, 01:08 AM · #
I have done workshops with “celebrity”-types, but that’s nothing like a day-in, day-out practice with a teacher. Doesn’t the daily grind, over the course of years pretty much, uh… grind off the celebrity veneer? I mean, I can have a shiny celebrity teacher, but in the end the sweaty one-on-one interpersonal relationship will prevail. Won’t it? Especially in a Mysore room?
Posted by: karen · Oct 26, 04:41 AM · #
@Karen: I’m not sure if that happens, actually. Might take a hell of a long time. Part of what’s constantly self-generating about the world tour “rock n roll” culture is that THAT is how people out in nowhere like me get access to teachers. That’s why it’s nice to see superstars produce things like (ahem) yoga DVD’s where the poses are NOT perfect. It’s like knowing that the rock star hit a wrong note, but you still get the song. And of course, you still get the “show.” I feel a CONSTANT temptation not to discover the inner/outer contentment, but to discover the inner ROCK STAR. But I know this for what it is. It’s funny, almost.
V once said, long ago, somewhere on here, that “real” yoga would terrify people; you couldn’t sell it. It’s like the difference between mystics and lay religious people. For yoga to be about death would make every issue of YJ into a HORRORSHOW. That, in a way, would also be hilarious.
Recently I’ve started adding small but regular amounts of pranayama, post-asana, just to back off the “I got it, I didn’t” asana mind, just to add a little more “death” to things.
Posted by: patrick · Oct 26, 05:32 AM · #
I see where a student could keep shining the celeb light on the “big names.” But the vast majority of Ashtanga teachers out there are not big names. They’re just regular teachers teaching regular students. I’m wondering if LA (where people are so resistant to being regular people) breeds these situations where teacher and student don’t have value unless they’re special (i.e., celebrities — even if in their own minds). Still, I think that in situations where teacher and student hunker down and practice together daily — through thick and thin — for a while, well, you see through the celebrity and into the personal. I mean, how could it be otherwise (I guess if both teacher and student are fully invested in celebrity and willing to value that over the yoga…)
Anyhow, I think maybe I’m missing the point here.
Posted by: karen · Oct 26, 07:56 AM · #
I like Patrick’s idea!!!
I suffer from a fascination with celebrity gossip, though I doubt it would extend to a fascination with their graves. It must be incredibly difficult to retain sanity and balance working in Hollywood, particularly if you’re successful.
Posted by: Boodiba · Oct 26, 07:58 AM · #
The Hollywood thing is kind of a freakshow to me. :-)
Patrick. I strongly disagree, on the basis of having done exactly what Karen said above and has done, year in, year out (sometimes with a daily teacher, and sometimes with an occasional teacher). The warts-n-all teacher-student regularity, where you actually submit to the highest part of a teacher no matter who that teacher is, gradually grinds away both escapism and the need to perform. I see it student by student by student. I promise that it is possible to kill celebrity, through the paradox of kind of extreme devolution of one’s own “control.”
You could choose to submit to a teacher who is right in front of you. I have practiced with a teacher whose physical practice was very much less advanced than mine and filled with fear and whining. And we made it work by bringing the greatest tenderness, formality and sincerity to it. She understood what I needed and she absolutely took it to that place and then a step further, showing me the highest in herself. That was what I needed to practice. No some fantasy.
On your other point, shit that is brilliant! We should all write to the YJ demanding more Kali, more pranayama. More death, more destruction. I’m sure Sally Kempton, who is keeping all her fire under wraps (I’ve started subscribing again just to read her milquetoast columns and imagine the iron fist behind them), could take it there. I have a feeling she’s looking death in the eyes every day, and generating all kinds of shakti and love from that point.
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 26, 09:06 AM · #
Also… I usually feel like screen violence is even more toxic than, I don’t know, marijuana and hamburgers. But my friend was frustrated and down last night, so we watched 300. Oh my god! It’s this beautiful, leo-loving, mash-up of Satyricon, Lion Witch & the Wardrobe, and Braveheart. (The final image is a direct quote of the martyr cover that Muhammad Ali did for Esquire.) I hadn’t even realized this movie was the story of Sparta meeting the armies of Xerxes at Thermopalye.
The film is just this insane celebration of life (and notoriety) through death. The thrill and gratitude of being able to die meaningfully. It’s all about Sparta’s supposed heroism, so I don’t think Herodotus and Thucidydes would object too much to the telling. Anyway… this problem of the meaninglessness of death is not new, I guess.
Admittedly, I do love Sparta. It’s kind of the immature, workaday, non-mystical side of ashtanga. Passionate, insane ascetics with a penchant for closed-door debate, relentless death-drive (hello, stopping the mind?) and great abs.
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 26, 09:43 AM · #
We do in fact know that Krishnamachyra considered himself to be a descendant of Lycurgus, as well as of Nathamuni. His great nephew’s rickshaw wallah’s barber tells in his book, ‘The Haircuts and Hieratical Heresies of the Harijan’, that K once walked almost 8000 miles to visit a wolf’s cave near Therapne, the birthplace of his famous lupine Lacedemonian forebear.
It is said that the formerly egregious ephebe, Krishnamacharya, fell into a most frownsome state for a month, refusing to talk with his favorite representative of the British Consular Service(Madras) and even eschewing the food packages sent by his concerned mother.
I belive that it was during this phase of his rather peripatetic education that he developed the pre-Swensonian form of what we now know as ‘Ashtanga Vinyasa’. I do agree with the learned lady’s correlation of these two essentially oligarchic millieux: brutal ‘natural’ selection processes, the discouragement of early marriage, sanctioned ‘thievery’ during development (don’t get caught giving teacher trainings) and the desensitisation of the genitalia through rough and uninvited sexual contact, with ‘workaday’ aspects supported by helots and Mexicans, respectively.
I have incorporated some of the Spartan lineage’s lore into my own practice of late (since Friday morning) with great success. I find, for example, that a studded leather cod-pouch really engages mula bandha, making jump-backs a real joy. Also, I have discovered that brandishing a hoplon and spear (actually a fruit bowl and a broom handle) whilst roaring around the living room in a mock melee with Persian aggressors is a much better precursor to the meditative state than ‘chanting’ those faintly embarrasing platitudes and blocking the facial orifices with my fingers.
Posted by: Professor A. Grumblethwick · Oct 26, 11:27 AM · #
Stop. What you really want is to submit to the giant disco-goth Xerxes. And that’s fine. Xerxes is the perfect teacher for you.
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 26, 12:29 PM · #
Well I don’t agree. What gives you the right to appoint a teacher for me? On what basis? Surely not on the video evidence – a couple of indeterminate bounces in (purportedly) your kitchen! What kind of a corpus anima is that? Your body of work is a mere sheaf of loose leaves when compared with my own shelf-filling collected works. I will not serve, I will not submit, no matter how much oil (castor or otherwise) is slathered around by the ungainly unctuity of metropolitan America.
But you’ll still be my friend, won’t you?
Posted by: Professor A. Grumblethwick · Oct 26, 12:47 PM · #
Regarding the need for ‘more Kali,’ did you see Heidi Klum’s Kali photos ?
Posted by: Carl · Oct 26, 01:58 PM · #
True, youtube still can’t transmit shakti. They’re working on it, but for now you may as well stick your finger in a light socket. Or go see Xerxes.
Carl, holy shit. That is the best and most frightening Halloween costume I have ever seen.
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 26, 03:24 PM · #
HK’s Kali “leaves Hindus fuming” (every last Hindu, apparently):
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Indians_Abroad/Heidi_Klums_Kali_act_leaves_Hindus_fuming/articleshow/3677674.cms
I dunno. I was delighted by the costume. It made me like her the way “Dick in a Box” made me like JT.
Inner rock star? You guys know I’m not big into swearing, but that’s the LAST fucking thing I’d ever want to cultivate!
Posted by: karen · Oct 27, 04:36 AM · #
:-)
I wonder what Kali would say to these politicians who think they own her.
Jesus Christ.
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 27, 09:51 AM · #
Timberlake’s Dick In a Box didn’t do anything for me. I still find him uncompelling. But I surmise it affects you similar to the way Natalie Portman’s uncensored rap affects me.
Posted by: Carl · Oct 27, 10:28 AM · #
Really, Natalie Portman’s uncensored rap, eh? Was it the catalyst of your whipped cream question on FaceBook, by any chance?
If NP’s rap makes you love her forever because you’re really impressed with a single product she created & her willingness to be a total goofball, then yeah, DIAB is like that. If it means you think she’s hot, then no, not like my JT epiphany.
Posted by: karen · Oct 27, 12:07 PM · #
I suspect I said that thing about real yoga at a time when I was very enamoured with the idea of Ashtanga yoga being this thing that made me so captivatingly different, and required this amazing hero strength from me (that of course, I have), because this was the chance to rise up from the mediocrity and shine my light.
It was all bullshit. The real power is in serving.
:-D
Posted by: V · Oct 27, 12:34 PM · #
Sorry, got a bit carried away.
Posted by: V · Oct 27, 01:09 PM · #
Karen, I guess they aren’t similar. Whereas NP’s rap video is a witty hip-hop commentary on public adoration of celebrity personalities, JT’s DIB video seems mostly a commentary on the absurdity of pop and hip-hop culture. As V points out, however, it’s all bullshit.
Posted by: Carl · Oct 27, 02:18 PM · #
V! Well said! And hilarious, too.
Posted by: karen · Oct 27, 02:22 PM · #
ｍａｎｙ 满意爱热 called 分为爱热 chosen －bitches， 个体 ｕｓｅｄ 头 ｉｔ。
Posted by: DurgaDawg · Oct 28, 04:17 AM · #
Whoever this Durga may be (the IP is in Kathmandu, Nepal—no wonder I can’t get these neat characters in the comment field) I am glad she agrees with Vanessa too. (Don’t apologize V, I love this in you!)
Also, to review: we don’t use the word bitch here at IO. Kali doesn’t like it.
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 28, 08:54 AM · #
savasana?
Posted by: Sara · Oct 29, 12:16 AM · #
I outrank her, so she’d better get used to it as well.
Posted by: durgadawg · Oct 29, 07:03 AM · #
Yes, dying practice.
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 29, 10:49 AM · #
This post and its ladder sent me directly to the cemetery of Montparnasse. An old lady cleaning the flowers and brush on the tomb (of….) with a hand broom. Cesar vallejo’s plain grave, on which people had left chunks of cement, business cards, odd trinkets. Stuff-asana. The trees just kept dropping their yellow.
Posted by: Sara · Oct 29, 11:32 AM · #
This is a fascinating post. I like how you’ve made the connection between what you see in the cemetary and the current yoga celebrity obsession. Interesting!
Posted by: roseanne · Oct 29, 08:22 PM · #
:-)
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 30, 06:32 PM · #