Saturday XXII · 19 August 2007

I’m just getting reaccustomed to the Southern California light. Anything more than a week away, and I wind up in Los Angeles-loving homecoming mode for days upon return. New York is perfect, though. I spoke a couple of times at the ASA conference, and it was not too disastrous. I’m trying to find a way to deal with speaking and teaching now that my bs bravado, which used to win prizes for impromptu speaking, has deserted me. I’m still pretty wobbly and adrenaline-wracked on stage, but I think it’s because I’m trying to communicate rather than perform. So I’m trying to to be patient instead of horrified by my own amateruity. In all, ASA has a way of reinvesting me in its world. I had an almost-four hour dinner with a big deal professor I’d never met before, and sort of fell for her. In the third hour, Tim Robbins walked through and when I bolted upright in response to a second’s eye contact (wow) she shrugged and told me to go back to what I’d been saying.

I practiced many times, and it was good. Met briefly the light and nympho genius boodiba, who gave me homework to improve my UKK-B, but repeatedly missed REW due to my gravitation away from (absent) Eddie’s and toward G and the excellent showers at YS. G introduced himself by criticizing my backwards supta vajrasana (I do it crim some days to ease the torqued lumbar), then put his hands on my sacrum and moved it brilliantly. That’s hours of bodywork I’ve been putting off, I thought. Worth the trip in itself.

Saturday afternoon, I skipped the conference’s key social event, where I’d only raise suspicion with my sobriety and meatlessness, and did a supposedly 3-hour workshop with Dharma Mittra that stretched past 9 pm. I think the experience deserves a review in this space, when I get a chance to recollect it.

Yesterday was our 7-year anniversary. He offered Encinitas, but I was still in LA reintegration space. Before dessert at some French café, we went to The Majestic for a terrible swords and sandals epic which I thoroughly enjoyed (the whole genre is so wrong, and I love it).

Then he finally showed me to the beautiful secret cemetery, hidden among highrises and accessible only through a long unmarked drive that appears to enter a parking structure, where various celebrities have plots waiting. Ray Bradbury, The Fonz, etc. For all my sincerity about it, I have to grant there is something kitchy about a secret garden whose entrance is marked by the sentrylike individual mausoleum of Armand Hammer. There are real-live dead celebrities there too. Billy Wilder’s headstone says “I’m a writer, but nobody’s perfect.” Someone had left fresh flowers for Truman Capote and Marilyn Monroe. The undead Jack Lemmon’s stone is engraved only with “in”—I suppose because it’s morbid to inscribe the “Rest” and “Peace” until the time comes.

Weekend links now.

? MIA’s record is officially out on Tuesday. Good to see some uncynical attention this time. Screw Pitchfork. Christgau’s review: “The eclectic world-underclass dance amalgam M.I.A. has constructed is an art music whose concept recalls the Clash.” Also, South Asia-o-philes will appreciate her Jimmy images.

? China tells the living Buddhas of Tibet they must obtain permission to reincarnate! “The so-called reincarnated living Buddha without government approval is illegal and invalid.” Read this article.

? The new Wm. Gibson book is pretty good, although for the hawkeye humor of his prose—he nails lines with the shrugging precision that Mr. Miyagi nails boards—it felt a bit thin. Still, while Gibson’s surfaces leave me cold, I increasingly feel in love with his subconscious. Here he is talking about process in Salon, and here’s a tribute website to Spook Country that goes a little far.

? More UCLA work on mirror neurons, this time their role in successful advertising. Crazy.

? Really good article by Jaron Lanier, whose idea of spirituality is “one’s emotional relationship with unanswerable questions,” on the Dawkins project. He writes:

It isn’t disrespectful to embrace God in a confusing way.... A complex God is less likely to rally violent mobs…. When scientists absolutely reject God, we leave behind only a simpler and more dangerous God…. Because people are afraid to die, they sometimes find hope in the unresolved status of the biggest questions. Take away that hope and you hand victory to whatever creep can give it back.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , social theory , sound , spirituality

Comment

1. That Lanier article is terrific! Thanks for the heads up.

   Posted by: karen · Aug 19, 02:00 AM · #

2. Don’t think about “presenting” or “performing”. Just be a storyteller. People like stories, especially if they have a point. What you say is immaterial, as long as the audience is engaged in, and gets the point of, your story.

   Have you ever read Jon Steel’s “Perfect Pitch”? It’s a little ad-biz focused, but it’s a wonderful book on the art of presenting.

   Posted by: cody · Aug 19, 05:27 AM · #

3. EDIT: I’ve been informed that Lemmon died in 2002. Missed that. So the “in” on his headstone must refer to some joke I don’t know. To honor him and his companion deepsixer Norma Jean, together with these sweaty days, I’m thinking a revisit of Some Like it Hot in the next few days.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Aug 19, 06:13 AM · #

4. CP, thanks. I just requested the book from the PL and should receive it next week.

   Fear of public speaking, the near-universal phobia, is an interesting thing. It makes sense that letting a narrative sort of flow or speak through you would ease the extreme self- consciousness that getting onstage can create. But I think that I worked through this as a high school forensics dork, and that years in the classroom have taught me to like a little intensity and the demand to articulate things well and convincingly off the cuff.

   It may be that some time in the presence of genuinely charismatic speakers my have ruined me somewhat by setting a crazy standard. People who can do more than just disarm a room and hold it still, but really get through to the people they’re adressing, as individuals. But there I go romantizing charisma again….

   Posted by: (0v0) · Aug 19, 06:28 AM · #

5. It’s sometimes struck me as pretty funny to think about the presenting skills that are needed as an academic – when you spend so much time on your own with written words! Before I headed to a conference this year I was attending a workshop with Dena Kingsberg. She read us a poem that really rang true with me – it was about how in those moments of pressure, of reality, when it matters, we can sometimes stand in our own way with our consciousness/our minds. My practice has helped me to get that part of myself to stand aside a little and let me step out and present as myself, someone communicating with the other people in the room.

   Posted by: Sally · Aug 19, 02:22 PM · #

6. Welcome home! You got to see the cemetery . . . cool. It’s a pretty magical place.

   Posted by: RE · Aug 20, 02:04 AM · #

7. I have you to thank, RE. I cannot believe it’s been here under my nose all this time. It’s pretty amazing.

   Sally, that is exactly what I’m talking about. I like the way you put it, and that you’ve found this stepping out of the way in order to communicate at a deep level to be possible. I can tell I’m not there yet….

   Posted by: (0v0) · Aug 20, 02:46 AM · #

8. P.S. Sally, earlier you mentioned a conference in San Francisco in May. Was it the ICA? If so, did you go to the reception at the art museum? That was me.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Aug 20, 03:13 AM · #

9. So is your sacrum coming back into line now? Or at least better?

   I liked the Lanier quote. I’ve enjoyed some of his stuff in the past, I’ll have to go read the article.

   Posted by: gartenfische · Aug 20, 01:41 PM · #

10. YES! It was the ICA... And, yes, I did go to the reception at the art museum! Was it you who presented the award there? It is truly amazing the paths that cross and you do not even realise… I was mostly in the health comm division… I practiced in SF most days too – at Yoga Tree Valencia.

    Posted by: Sally · Aug 20, 01:45 PM · #

11. Thanks for asking, G.

    Yes, steady improvements are happening. I’d say that the relationship of S1-L4 is close to being aligned: it has held since Greg Tebb moved it a week ago Monday. That’s nice: it’s no longer wanting to shift so much toward the back body, and as a result a lot of flexibility has returned. This means more endorphins. Hello.

    However, I can tell (and so can Petri the Finn— he is good) that the sacrum is still rotated in place. So things are still a little weird, and I’m careful with it. At the same time the tension pattern, a contraction of the quadratus lumborum, is still with me, albeit just as a shadow of its former chronically- contracted self. Interesting that even as the skeletal misalignment resolves, the “protective” tension patterns I developed in the low back over the past 5 months of misalignment are not totally gone from my muscle memory.

    Posted by: (0v0) · Aug 21, 03:42 AM · #

12. Sally, you’re breaking my heart. Ships passing in the night. I would have taken you on a walk through Chinatown to a cafe I like in North Beach, in the shadow of the Transamerica building. After Yoga, of course.

    I’m glad you got to YT Valencia. That dense old floor (sweat-warped pine?) is the surface on which I broke my toe 16 months ago. Showboating on an exit from kapotasana: really dumb move. My brother used to live in the building, directly above the studio (the Mysore teacher there, Clayton, had ideas about moving into the space when my brother moved out). When I was in town for ICA, I actually practiced at YogaStudio on Divisadero because I’m a sucker for beautiful spaces.

    About which one was me. Ok. I wasn’t the one presenting the award. More like the one receiving it.

    There were two co-recipients, actually. A large, curlyhaired Harvard prof, and a longhaired westcoast grad student. I am not a Harvard professor.

    If I had only blogged about the weekend in advance, maybe we would have figured it out. As it was, I just mentioned it obliquely in a post about the Siva statues in the museum. Weren’t those great? (Link)

    Posted by: (0v0) · Aug 21, 04:05 AM · #

13. Oh – that sounds like it would have been a wonderful break from the slightly-hectic schedule… My colleagues would have found it very amusing – not only disappearing every morning at dawn for yoga, but meeting up with another blog-known-yogini! And here I was thinking that I was probably the only one in that sea of faces to have been working both mind and body on the mat before working the mind at the conference.

    It is heartening to know that like minds are dotted through the fields that we walk.

    A huge congratulations on the award – I remembered a Dutch male recipient from that night, and now that you remind me I can recall you too. But I was quite engaged in conversation about possible collaborations – it never really stops at those things. Though I loved my quiet time amongst the Buddhas and the Sivas.

    The quiet focus of YT was something that I really enjoyed. My studio here in Melbourne is light-filled and bright, so the contrast helped me to draw inward – something I can have trouble with when in a new space.

    I think that I blogged about going to SF, but not sure if I mentioned that I would be attending a conference… though my blogging has stagnated as I am writing more and more in (and through and around) my topic.

    Posted by: Sally · Aug 21, 11:08 AM · #

14. Hmm… guess I’ll be going to the next ICA! Let’s hope it’s somewhere with good yoga.

    Posted by: (0v0) · Aug 21, 11:42 AM · #

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