Dark Dancers

Recently I went to see Black Swan.... recently, I mean the day that it opened, I did not walk, but RAN to the theater because I couldn't BEAR to not have a bit of Darren Arronovsky (a fellow Edward R. Murrow HS alum) in my life as soon as humanly possible. Basically, two weeks later and I'm still thinking about it, or, more accurately, haunted by it.

I'm always fascinated by the frothy notion of dancers that we carry around. Perhaps it's the nearly ubiquitous ballet school experience that most American girls have, including the pink tights and the ballet box and the recitals with the really awful costumes. Perhaps because it's something that so few people travel with it past the Saturday morning phase into the "wow, my legs hurt, my feet are hideous and I have no life outside ballet" phase.

I was really intrigued at how clearly this male director was able to see past a largely female romanticized fantasy about ballet into the much more dark, competitive and, physically wretching world of professional dance. It got me thinking to another man who was able to see the darkness of this world, Edgar Degas.

For most people, Degas' ballerina drawings are actually a buttress for the myth of the charming, romantic world of dance... since it was drawings and sculptures of young, teeny girls in big, pastelly costumes that were simply as light as air.... and after all, isn't that the fantasy of every young girl who studies dance (until it's time to take it super seriously?).

But, in all reality, the work is actually a bit darker. Very rarely did we see his little dancers on the stage once he truly "owned" the little dancers as a subject. They were stretching and massaging limbs and practicing and, in short devoting their lives and days and bodies to ballet.

And, they were, by the way, very, very little girls. Think 11 to 14 for the most part. Wealthy, older male subscribers (which Degas eventually became) paid handsomely for the privilage of gettng back stage access to watch rehearsals and get to know these young girls. (Ew.) The girls, largely from poor backgrounds, relied on patronage and "emotional appeals" by these patrons to the directors of the ballet for "promotion" and "notice" since their fortunes largely depended on "making it big" in the ballet. Actually, in truly a sad story, apparently the girl who posed for the famous and beloved Ballerina with Tutu sculpture (one of which is at the Met), eventually was pimped out by her Mama and ended up in a Bordello in Montparnasse. Triste, indeed!

One of my overwhelming takeaways from Black Swan was how rare in today's world we see artists completely, utterly, devoted to their art. This dedication is historic and I suspect it has always been tinged with a bit of desperation and working against the clock... before you get too old, or too fat or too whatever. I think that this desperate devotion to the ballet had to have been one of Degas' main attractions, it certainly seemed to be Aronofsky's. (Dancers, Pink and Green 1890 and The Little 14 Year Old Dancer Age 14 both at the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Malo

I haven't written in ages and ages, but I've decided to re-dedicate the purpose of this blog. I've been told that I am a model guest for cocktail parties and dinner parties (to which I am often invited). This probably comes from my natural ability to make good conversation. I abhor boring talk, and I'd much rather hear people's opinions of music and movies and feelings and weird happenings in their lives than talk about what they do for a living or what they think about Brad and Angelina (though sometimes that too can be interesting!). So, I am going to repurpose Art for Cocktails to NOT JUST educate a bit about ART (which it certainly will still do), but to hopefully also spur some good topics of conversation, even if it's simply to tell other people how utterly dumb or silly you find this blog.

So, in that spirit, I had a funny thing happen to me recently. I found my old journals. I have kept journals for the better part of my life since I was in high school. It's fairly amazing to have chronicled 15 years of your own stupidity and to read through it and see yourself almost like a fictitious character in a predictable movie..(predictable because, obviously, I know how each of my mini-sagas was going to end... INCLUDING all of my relationships!). I read through my junior year of college like I was watching a 70's horror movie "RUN! RUN!! Why aren't you running! No! Not that way!? Why are you moving so slow!". To say that I made the same mistake over and over again would be the understatement of the decade and to say that I genuinely had never noticed that I did this before is probably the only testament to my sanity that I have. It's funny because, if you yourself journal, the documenting is easy, but the revisiting, not so much. Well, as Oprah says, to know better is to do better...
Anyway, I did have MOMENTS where I realized I was making bad decisions, including one where, while being tortured by a boyfriend (which is actually a much more straight forward word than the complicated, horrible relationship we really had) I copied down this poem that I felt perfectly encapsulated how I felt at the moment. If you have ever loved the wrong person (which really is another way of asking if you've ever really truly lived) I hope you find some comfort, and even humor in this poem.

It's actually a very famous song called Malo by the incomparable Argentinian singer Liliana Felipe, here translated into English..

Bad because you don't love me
Bad because you never touch me
Bad because you have a mouth
Bad whenever you please
Bad as lies
Bad breath, constipation
Bad as censorship
as a bald rat in garbage
Bad as poverty
as a drivers license photo
Bad as a rubber check
as smacking your granny
Bad as trichinosis
Bad as a hit man
Bad as spiders
Bad & full of cunning
Bad as order, decency or a good conscience
Bad wherever you look
Bad as a throbbing root canal
Bad as a rusty nail
Bad as a Czech film
Bad as cold soup
Bad as the end of the century
Bad by nature
Bad from head to foot
Bad, Bad, Bad
Bud, but so damn beautiful

The image above is "The Day After" by Edvard Munch (1894).... For me, Munch, above most artists always shows heartbreak so well, and this is certainly no exception. Munch was part of the Expressionist movement. Basically, the easiest way to think of EXPRESSIONISTS is to think of them as the next logical step after the Impressionists movement made it's mark. The Impressionists were scandalous in the beginning because they presented impressions that the beautiful images left on them, the artists. The expressionists (who really originated in Germany as an outgrowth of a theoretical movement.. Nietzche, etc)were more interested in placing on canvas their impressions of FEELINGS; they were EXPRESSING their emotions. Munch tended to really wear his poor little broken heart on his sleeve a bit more obviously than some of his contemporaries, which I think helped make him the big "star" that he did in an art historical perspective.