I took a picture on my phone of one of the posters outside a “FRIZERSKI SALON” and sent it as a text to Sven with the message “the zagreb hair situation.”
Then I thought that would be a pretty good name for a band. The Zagreb Hair Situation.
Sven didn’t text me back. Maybe he was sleeping.
That night I stayed in, watched a little CNN, and turned out the lights at 10:00 p.m. I had an early flight the next morning. When I got to the airport, however, I found out that my 7:00 a.m. Zagreb-Frankfurt flight on Croatia Airlines had been canceled – no explanation. That meant I’d be missing my Lufthansa FRA-LHR-JFK connections. They gave me a roundtrip taxi voucher, a voucher for a night at the airport Westin Hotel, and vouchers for two meals. They rebooked me for a flight out at the crack of dawn the next day.
The employees of Croatia Airlines were not particularly apologetic. First that weirdness with my bag – now this. I was also a little concerned that Sven hadn’t answered my last couple of texts. I sent him another one, explaining, in brief, my situation. I wondered if he’d misplaced his phone. The thought crossed my mind that it might be something worse. But it probably wasn’t. I didn’t want to add to the drama by sounding worried, so I wrote, somewhat flippantly, “living large: spam on voucher + night @ airport hotel!” I thought I’d start worrying in earnest if I didn’t hear from him by the morning.
My taxi driver to the Westin was very nice, in an understated way. In fact, I thought it was possible that he was a little attracted to me. He asked me if I was married, and I said, “No, you?” He said he was divorced with a 16-year-old son. He said his name was Brna, and he gave me his card. He agreed to take me back to the airport the next morning at 5:30. Feeling that Brna, at least, was on my side helped me relax a little.
I momentarily contemplated inviting him up to my room – I mean, not really, I was just kind of joking with myself, but I did consider how funny it would be to turn up in New York with Brna. I imagined Brna eventually meeting Sven. I thought to myself, “If that did happen, we’d probably all get along.” I remembered my massage therapist, Ellen, telling me once, “I like Eastern European men. Their depression can be very charming and they’re not obsessed with happiness which is linked, I believe, to a more relaxed idea of what breasts need to look like.” Ellen is great.
I ate dinner at the buffet at the Zagreb Airport Westin. In truth, the food was not bad. Before I went to sleep I read a little bit from a book on queer theory that enthusiastically quoted the somewhat unfashionable psychologist Silvan Tomkins: “If you like to be looked at and I like to look at you, we may achieve an enjoyable interpersonal relationship. If you like to talk and I like to listen to you talk, this can be mutually rewarding. If you like to feel enclosed within a claustrum and I like to put my arms around you, we can both enjoy a particular kind of embrace. If you like to be supported and I like to hold you in my arms, we can enjoy such an embrace.”
Just before I turned out the lights, I got a text from Sven: “sorry. bad day :(better:/ miss you.”
I just answered: “xoxo.”
Early the next morning, at the crack of dawn, Brna drove me back to the airport in silence. I gave him the last of my vouchers and we thanked each other. The rest of the journey was uneventful.
HARVEST MOON
It was good to be back in New York.
I was living in a sublet I’d arranged in those NYU faculty buildings between 3rd Street and Bleecker. Some people referred a little facetiously to these buildings as “The Compound.” They were built in the ’50s, and they actually look kind of like Soviet bloc architecture. In fact, I kept being reminded of them when I was riding from the airport to downtown Zagreb.
I hadn’t been there very long, but it already felt sort of like home. Of course, my capacity to feel “at home” under provisional and precarious circumstances is something I’ve developed over time. A dancer has to – and in fact, so does an academic. We don’t really choose the places we live. We go where the gigs are. After I got my undergrad degree at SUNY Purchase, I bounced around for a while until I landed in Stockholm. I was with the RSB from 1988-2004, which may seem like a long time, but as you can perhaps understand, I always felt a little bit like a visitor.
Nils gave up directorship of the ballet in ’93. I worked under Simon, Frank and Petter, and finally Madeleine Onne, who was the one who gently suggested I might want to begin thinking about transitioning to teaching. No hard feelings. I liked Madeleine. I heard she recently took over direction of the Hong Kong Ballet. I wish her well.
Anyway, that was when I moved to Evanston to do my PhD. At least I was already used to the cold. Sven and I worked it out so that I’d visit Stockholm in July and January, and he’d visit me in April and October. The PhD went by in something of a blur. It was good to get back to reading so much. I like theory. Academia suits me. I actually wrote the dissertation pretty quickly. My advisor said dancers were disciplined. It’s true, I’m generally pretty good at setting myself tasks and then following through. It’s just the book revisions that have been holding me up. I had no trouble mounting a theoretical argument. But how to make it more accessible to a broader audience? I felt like I’d hit a wall.
Still, I had no business feeling sorry for myself. It was considered something of a coup that I got this post-doc. It wasn’t the most auspicious time on the academic job market. There was really nothing in the way of academic jobs in Sweden for the kind of thing I did.
Sven and I kept deferring the conversation about what all of this meant for us.
I was also lucky to get that sublet. It was a studio apartment, but fairly spacious, with a balcony. Nearly everybody in the building was NYU faculty, except for some really old people who were already living in the buildings before NYU bought them in 1964. One of the more ancient denizens of the compound lived on my floor. I’m sure she’d seen a lot of NYU tenants come and go, probably some with little concern for the old timers, so I wouldn’t have blamed her for feeling suspicious of recent arrivals. Whenever I saw her I tried to be especially polite. I held the elevator for her as she inched down the hallway with her walker. Sometimes it took her a good three or four minutes. The elevator would start making a honking sound to indicate that I’d been holding it too long, but I persisted. She was hard of hearing so I guess she wasn’t particularly bothered by the obnoxious elevator alarm. Once she’d gotten in safely, I’d smile at her and nod. Then she usually said something accusatory, like, “DIDJOO LEAVE DOSE STINKY BOTTLES IN DA GAHBAGE? SOMEBODY LEF’ SOME STINKY BOTTLES IN DA GAHBAGE!” She screamed on account of her hearing difficulties. I’d try gently to assure her that I wasn’t the culprit, and she’d say, “WHAT?! YA GOTTA SPEAK LOUDAH! MY EAHS AH SHOT!”
After several of these encounters, though, it seemed like she was starting to take a shine to me. At least she started broaching other topics than the accusations. One day we were coming up together in the elevator, and she shouted, “YA KNOW, MY BWUDDA WAS A VEWY IMPAWTAN’ POYSON.”
I shouted, “EXCUSE ME?”
I thought maybe I’d misunderstood her, but she said it again: “MY BWUDDA WAS A VEWY IMPAWTAN’ POYSON.”
I shouted, “OH REALLY?”
She said, “YEAH.” She paused and looked me straight in the eye. “MEL BLANC.”
Perhaps appropriately, I drew a blank. And then it dawned on me: Mel Blanc. The voice of Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, and Tweety Bird. She was Bugs Bunny’s sister.
I said, “WOW. HE WAS IMPORTANT.”
She said, “YEAH. I KNOW.”
After I got back from Zagreb, I did some laundry, went over to the Morton Williams to get some basic provisions, showered, and did a few ballet exercises holding onto a chair for the barre. It might have been more productive to take class, but given my financial situation that seemed like an indulgence. That day I did my routine to the Frank Sinatra album Only the Lonely, in my underwear: pliés, relevés, tendus, dégagés, ronds de jambe, battements. I like to do just the b
asics, but really slowly. That’s why I put on the Sinatra. He’s so concentrated.
My sublet faced south, and I guess the people living in the north-facing building on the Bleecker side of the superblock could see me if they really wanted to. I mean, they’d need to use binoculars to see much, but if they were determined, they could probably catch me doing these exercises in my underwear. Of course this made me think of Miss Torso in Rear Window, the exhibitionistic ballet dancer across the courtyard. Thelma Ritter’s character predicts she’ll end up “old, fat, and alcoholic.” Hm. Sven and I had watched this movie together when he came to visit in April. Sven was on a film noir kick. We got a few things from Netflix. I hadn’t seen Rear Window in years, though I read an essay about it in a graduate seminar on feminist spectatorship. It was fairly unsympathetic to the Jimmy Stewart character.
I had a flashback to that Jimmy Stewart look-alike in the Arcotel in Zagreb.
What was it with that guy, and what the hell was he doing in Zagreb? I was pretty sure he wasn’t part of the conference – he really didn’t seem to fit in with the PSi crowd – but he was definitely passing through.
Well, I had been, too.
After I finished my barre exercises, I fixed myself a snack (hummous and raw vegetables) and sat down at the computer to move some more commas around. I did that for about forty-five minutes before I decided to let myself go on the Internet for a minute.
Famous last words. At this point, it won’t surprise you that I ended up back on YouTube watching that Satie dance again. I knew as well as you what I was doing, and I knew it meant my “productive” time was over for the day. The moth’s video was up to forty-three hits. Who was watching it? I looked at the column of related videos – unsurprisingly, plenty of Satie, a few just piano solos, and a couple of other choreographies, none of which were of particular interest. There was, however, a video of Natalia Makarova dancing The Dying Swan to Saint-Saëns. It was posted by Schoevia. I clicked on it. It’s pretty shocking. It’s Fokine’s choreography, as you may know, but Makarova’s interpretation is unique, and people tend to have fairly extreme responses to its convulsive qualities.
The comment section was volatile. BubbleChikk14 started it off: “HER ARMS ARE BEAUTIFUL!”
But arakhachatran responded “No her arms are not beautiful. Thats her worst part in thisperformance. You dont understand anything in ballet but try to act like a smart ass.”
That really pissed off yuliya1995 who shot back: “how do you know she has very gentle arms and i bet you cant do that so who do you call a smart ass? its you who is a smart ass who think they know about ballet.”
A few others weighed in, mostly outraged at arakhachatran’s philistinism. Somebody named ahamayoisac took a more Solomonic attitude, acknowledging that the arm movement was not elegant in a typical balletic way, but was expressive of genuine agony and for this reason “perfect.”
Frankly, I love it, but I think arakhachatran had a point. It’s practically spastic.
And then I saw it: a recent comment – dated July 27, 2009 – by falserebelmoth. She must have been watching this video, which might explain its popping up as “related” to her own. Of course, superficially, they were utterly unrelated: Makarova’s emphatic stabbing of the floor with those pointe shoes, her anguished face and contorted, convulsing torso had nothing to do with falserebelmoth’s quiet little moonwalk and her indecipherable downward glance.
And yet.
I’m sure it had something to do with the weird confluence of recent events – the shock of MJ’s passing, my dismal, meaningless conference presentation to the singular audience of Amanda Trugget, those disturbing encounters with Jimmy Stewart at the Arcotel… It was difficult not to read some kind of connection between these things, and I felt like the moth was trying to tell me what it was.
Her comment was, true to form, oblique, ambiguous, and strange: “like Birds One Claw upon the Air…”
To which quothballetcarper had immediately responded: “fancy seeing you here little lady. hows the pointe work going? practice makes perfect. i have my eye on you. bye.”
She answered, with what appeared to me to be modesty, quiet dignity, and slight defiance: “I cannot dance upon my Toes – No Man instructed me.”
He shot back: “Instruction is my specialty, little lady! Ur speakin to the ‘pro’! Whippin gals like you into shape is my ‘racquet’! Dont think Im goin to go easy on u just because ur a girl!”
Wow. And they thought arakhachatran was obnoxious.
I watched Natalia Makarova dance The Dying Swan five more times. Her tremulous, skinny legs stuttered over her pointe shoes. Her mouth was pulled back in a grimace. Everything about her communicated suffering.
“i have my eye on you”? What exactly did he mean by that?
I considered forwarding the YouTube link of Natalia Makarova to Sven but decided against it. Too much tragedy.
The great thing about that Makarova dance is that it’s obscene, but everybody acts like it’s normal. There are a lot of contemporary choreographers who just go ahead and make the obscenity explicit. People like Marie Chouinard. She’ll put her dancers in bondage gear and pasties with prosthetics and toe shoes. I kind of like Marie Chouinard, but Makarova’s more interesting to me.
There’s a famous essay by the dance theorist Susan Leigh Foster called “The Ballerina’s Phallic Pointe.” The title basically tells you everything. I could go into detail, but it’s probably not necessary. It’s a great essay. When I read it in graduate school all kinds of things became clear to me. Susan Foster is smart, and the essay is very erudite, but the tone is a little cheeky. At one point, she says, “She is, in a word, the phallus… Now this is a naughty thing to propose.” Well, yes, Susan, it is.
I like to imagine what would happen if you passed this essay out to all those stout, pushy moms with their little girls in pink tights at the Joffrey School.
There’s another famous essay in the field of dance studies by Joann Kealiinohomoku, called “An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance.” That one also tells you pretty much what you need to know in the title. I often think of that one when people ask me if I do “ethnic dance.”
I’d been thinking a lot about Michael Jackson, and not just because of that dying swan. Actually, it was probably hard for anybody to stop thinking about him that week. Standing in line at the register at Morton Williams, I noticed his picture was all over the tabloids. I’m not sure how they rallied all of those editorial forces so quickly. He was even on the cover of TIME – just days after his demise. The conspiracy theories were rampant. I usually tend to be a pretty sober person. I’m not particularly quick to suspect foul play. But everyone seemed to agree that that personal physician of his was going to have some explaining to do. And as I said, I had my own personal concerns.
Of course mystery was something MJ seemed to encourage, what with the disguises, the glove, the various things he seemed to be trying to conceal. And maybe it’s natural that his propensity for concealment produced in me – as it did in many others – a complicated response. I already mentioned Reverend Billy. Like everybody else, I was a little perplexed by Barack Obama’s statement on Jackson’s death – but I also understood why he needed to pussyfoot around the issue. You may remember – he called MJ a “spectacular performer” but he felt compelled to add that there were “aspects of his life that were sad and tragic.” There were a few different ways to interpret this: as a melancholy reflection on MJ’s purportedly abusive upbringing, or as a subtle repudiation of his own purported abuses of others; as a lamentation of his seeming inability to own and inhabit his blackness, or as a suggestion that a racist world had led him to practically flay himself as a sacrificial lamb at the altar of whiteness. I realize my language may appear a little exaggerated. But maybe not so much for somebody like Barack Obama.
On the evening of July 29, the day that I’d gotten home from Zagreb, unpacked, showered, shopped, done my ballet exercises,
moved commas, putzed around on YouTube and discovered that uncanny video of Natalia Makarova flapping around like a gorgeous, convulsive fowl, I decided to check in one more time on falserebelmoth. “Decided to check in” may be stating this a bit casually. The truth is, she’d been flapping, moth-like, at the edge of my consciousness, and my own fascination was striking me as a bit creepy. But I couldn’t help myself: I went directly to her channel. She’d only joined a month ago, which is when she posted that Satie dance. Five channel views. Two subscribers (GoFreeVassals and that pesky quothballetcarper). There was a short string of channel comments, all from the carper, all in the last few days: “Hi. Two assignments. Learn Harvest Moon. Make a dance in ur bathtub. We dont have alot of time. Practice! Bye.” Then, “Back from my vacation at Moms. Aside from my racquet, Ive been using an axe and a chain saw a great deal recently, so when I say that I will hound you until you have produced, you must understand the real threat. I cn be brutal. Dont mistake the mild demeanor.” And finally, “Not joking about ur tub. Or the axe. Hurry up, no exuses. And remember, ‘Never say sorry its a sign of weekness.’ ”
The tone of these posts gave me pause. Obviously, he was probably joking – but the persistent axe jokes made me uneasy. I realized the degree of my interest in these private exchanges was inappropriate. It was unlikely that the carper was going to act on his threats. And yet stranger things had happened – like the case of that German Internet cannibal.
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