Oh-CD!

I can’t not link to this, so there you go.

(I’m a terriblerer too, you see.)

Spoiler. Alert.

There’s movies I’d like to see but feel way too apprehensive about to actually watch, so after reading Russ’ review of Haneke’s remake of his own Funny Games over on Chud, I just had to read the spoiler. It’s over here. If you’re like me and too much of a wuss to watch it, read it. Or don’t.

Untitled #2 (issues)

I’m way more bothered by waiting for, and not getting, answers to my messages to people on OkCupid than I expected. First approximation as to why: it’s another way of being reminded of early experiences with my parents, where I would try to show them something of myself and they would effectively flat-out refuse to react in any way that was intelligible to me. I know about how I crave the feeling of being seen and of being supported, and although that need isn’t being met at all well at the moment, I feel I’ve become quite capable of keeping it in perspective, and reassuring myself that I’ll get that fixed somehow soon, and that a lack of mirroring and support in an ongoing conversation is not as threatening as the same situation used to feel when I was five years old. Still, I feel I’m missing a beat here. I’m encountering a variation on something I’ve already got a grip on, that feels familiar enough that I thought I’d be able to handle it way better than I turn out to be. Well that’s disappointing.

On the other hand, it occurs to me that although the risk of getting overwhelmed by shock and confusion is still pretty much there in full force, a new maneuver I’m starting to employ much more than before is getting righteously pissed off with anyone who act like this. Tewtelly unfair to those probably really nice people at OkCupid of course, but rather healthier for me. I’ll keep in mind that I’d do well to figure out a way to direct that anger to worthier targets of course, but in the mean time I’m determined to suppress my reflex need to be apologetic about innocent bystanders getting spattered with stray sprays of bile.

In other words, through editing this post it’s become clear to me that I honestly feel that whoever doesn’t answer my messages can go fuck themselves. In fact I hope they do, so that they’ll be in a better mood when (not if) they decide to answer my messages after all.

Tl;dr

I saw this post over at Guruphiliac, and that’s as good an occasion as any to get some bits on screen about other stuff I’ve been chewing on, first of all the discovery of the surprising new dogma:
Happiness and suffering have nothing to do with each other. They’re not in opposition, an increase in the one doesn’t lead to a decrease in the other, they are in a word: unrelated. The reason for this is (possibly) that they come from different areas of the human.

My feeling is that this dogma clarifies a lot of the problems Jody discusses, because a huge majority of the problem of cults and gurus and beliefs and ideology is the assumption that doing your best to attain the happiness that is promised as the goal of the discipline or method or regime will make you happy, and that when you are happy you will suffer a lot less. That’s untrue. You will always suffer. That’s what Buddha said, and I believe it, so that settles it. Let me go into a little digression about the Triyana here, maybe it’ll clarify a bit how I see this distinction between happiness and suffering.

So Buddha said: “To be alive means to suffer”, and I like to think that means that I will only stop suffering when I’m not alive anymore, whatever that means. The yanas are three main ways to live with this idea. Hinayana says: I won’t ever be happy until I stop suffering. I think suffering is bad for me and for others, so the first thing I should do is stop being alive. That’s pretty hard to do without causing more suffering, so hinayana seems to spend most of its time trying to get the attitude of not being alive while not specifically being dead to work.

Mahayana sees all that work and is a bit put off by all the effort that inevitably has to go toward saving one’s own soul (to mix metaphors for a bit), and concerned about all the others who are still suffering anyway, so it tends to pretend that the subject is already gone, that all the concern that used to circle around the subject is already available to be spent on helping others to not suffer, in hopes that this will mean an increase in happiness I guess.

Tantrayana says “Well that’s sweet, but is it actually helping? No it isn’t, and you know why? Because you will always suffer, which is because you are alive.” Tantra seems to me to be an attitude that is able to recognize that happiness isn’t attained by reducing suffering, that suffering might be accepted in a way that reduces suffering. That sounds way more ascetic than I thought it would, but it might be a smart way of thinking about suffering, ’cause what are you gonna do about it, huh? You are going to suffer, nothing’s going to change that. Tantra knows this and says “You know what we’ll do? We’re going to find out how happiness feels, and we’ll start off by politely ignoring suffering. All this focus on suffering isn’t getting us anywhere anyway, might as well pack that in and go do something enjoyable.”

So, heaps of restrictions apply to the above, especially the caveat that I’m probably not talking about the triyana at all, but straight out of my ass. Which is as good a segue as any to make a stupid joke:

Jody said: “[the] distance between a person and their own nondual truth”

…..

Hahaha! Nice one Jody!

(He hasn’t posted my second comment yet. Was I too harsh on Lefevre or something? Should I not have mentioned Almaas? I’ll rework it for a post here, although I neglected to save it so I’ll have to make up what it was about. Ah the joy of narcissism in full flower, a fresh new blog, a fresh new stats page to refresh over. and over. and over again. Just like I refresh Jody’s blog to see if he posted my stupid comment, and OkCupid to see if any of the pretties reply to my messages (hint: no).)

Tofu sauce #2

I’ve finally invented an alternative to tofu sauce #1, Maraq’s take on the Vietnamese sour fishy soy sauce, which is: plum sauce with extra bits. Extra bits include: fish sauce (again), chili (for added bite, not hotness), lemon and sesame oil. It is delicious and sticks to your tofu a lot better than the #1.

The awesome idea I had this morning

“The Parental as Alien” (Cool, right?)

I was thinking about cults, ideologies and other hegemonizing discourses; and how the creepy people who are into them can seem, from outside, like an alien force. And obviously the intense effort that is spent on the collaborative psychoses, like ufology and similar pursuits, is indicative of what kind of need it is that can drive people to those extremes of belief.
There’s an almost essential similarity between the feeling that people who believe have, about why they have to believe. Of course, I think those kinds of drives and needs are ultimately daddy/mommy-issues.

And honestly, I can’t remember how my brrrain managed to invert this whole clotted tangle of orphaned memes. But somehow I imagined a flip of perspective: from the usual one, where a person is obliged to work himself to death in order to please daddy/mommy enough so that He/She will keep the scary aliens (who want to eat me) away from me; to a new one where it feels as if the dysfunctional power dynamic between the parental and me forces me to become an alien, which through the feedback loop is encouraged by the parental, and therefore, after making me wonder why it is that the parental wants me to be an alien leads me to conclude that the parental is itself the alien. QED (har). So anyway from that perspective it makes some sense that people who feel they truly believe look like aliens, and to regard the images of whoever it is that serves as the father figure for their particular creed, be it religious, political or economical, as images of the Alien. Not that those dudes were aliens IRL of course.

[sorry for not making any fucking sense. this flu seems to be haunting me again. inquire within comments.]

Braid

Interview with the developers of the most anticipated game of this morning.

[via RPS]

LOL

Vogue

(Loldel?)

Panta rhei 2.08

• heb je wcg wel s gezien? fffascinating. 300 tot 500 apm in starcraft. en ‘t publiek! bizar, kijk. (doc door nat.geo.)

• ooh die ‘trailer‘ voor starcraft is ‘n demo video van 21 min. trouwens retemooi om te zien. (Go ahead, it’s just half a gig download.) jammer dat ik dat niet kan spelen =[

• spore on ds preview. producers’ commentary: “I mean, playing as a carrot is not ideal. But you can do it if you want.”

• the only superhero i’ll ever need (from marvel anyway)

• check alt txt v/d pic bovenin. maar: ‘t gaat dus alweer over raytracing als 3d engine! en intel zegt: alle 3d engines worden volledig raytracers. en id zegt: nietes. en kieron zegt: my brrrain, it melts.

• Now that we’re comfortably numb with whatever it is the Man deems suitable entertainment for us, let’s see what Lenin has to say about the youth these days. Nice roar you’ve got there, tiger. Stirs the blood. (Actually deserves some more comment, this one.)

• and to cheer us back up again: i still love it when doug loves movies. (even though i still pine forlornly for the days that doug loving movies sounded like him and peeftee having drinks.)

Here we live and now.

Saw this collection of short contemporary dance performances (quintuple bill?) in Korzo today. First of all, the order of the program sucked. I like to be nice to Korzo, because they’re nice to me, giving me all those opportunities to see awesome dancers for cheap, but really now. Why put the two performances with energy, with humor, with bodies that are present and human and not bound to some doubtlessly smart but bloodless concept before the intermission? So that we can all be bored to tears after the break?

So: ‘Barocco’ by Chirpaz and Cere. Nice piece, strong images formed from strong bodily performance, simple enough but with wit and oodles of vigour. I liked the vocabulary a lot, it reminded me quite a bit of the few lessons in Hawkins technique I took with Vincent Cacialono. Chirpaz and Cere go on the list of makers to watch, as does Reut Gez on the list of dancers.

Also on that list: Kim Fischer, one of the two dancers who worked with Erik Kaiel on ‘my true north’, and Kaiel himself of course (pity (for me) that every dancer I’m interested in and ask about the possibility of taking classes with them is so busy… By far one of the nicest chats I’ve had with a maker though, I’m still nervous about approaching people but he made me feel welcome, and was pretty much ready to start a duet then and there in the foyer it seemed (another one?), and I really liked him for that). Kim made quite an impression already in ‘The autopsy project’ with Gingras and confirmed his growth here. Heleen van Gigch has a great stage presence as well, she did a fluttering hand gesture that for some reason reminded me of a similar one, again in ‘The autopsy project’. This piece is awesome. Some impressions: How the gradual opening up of space by movement is supported by light on this tiny black box stage was great, and much more subtle than it looked. The music was nice, beaty and groovy, but never overpowered the movement, and there were a couple of moments where it actually seemed that the two were moving together closely enough to become a third thing, which is a rarity. (It’s much easier to create that third thing by having them contradict each other.) The bluntness of some of the images was really fresh and refreshing. And of course it was a joy to see the use of contact improvisation as a source of the vocabulary.

So, all that made me a happy Somabile. What happened after the break though, oof. Do I need to dig into this…? I’ll keep it short for now. PUUR (miniatuur I) by Neel Verdoorn: I’m pretty comprehensively bored with this kind of movement, yes it’s clear and powerful and precise but it feels as if a lot of people who work in this idiom are still so enamored of clarity power and precision that they don’t notice that a great majority of phrases could be swapped out with something else without altering the expression of the piece. That’s wrong. The images were again pretty blunt, but this time in quite an unevocative fashion, they just sort of stood there. They got build up, there they are, the performers take a little breath from their hectic exertions, give us a moment to appreciate the image Yes We Get It. It is a Confrontation. Of Different Worlds. Okay. Moving on. (You notice how I can’t be short about stuff that annoys me?) (Oh, talk about being short: luckily, PUUR didn’t seem to fill the 20 minutes allotted it by the program. Did the makers notice there wasn’t enough there?)

’silence never calls out’ by Edd Schouten, who is not a dancer, and it shows. Good grief. Sure, I sort of get the concept, and I heartily sympathize with an interest in silence, and I support a decision to be obnoxious and obstinate about how the piece is formed if you want to be honest about silence. But really, the impression was much more of people trying waaaaay too hard to be honest, failing, and compensating by being very very serious and very very tense. And tension isn’t very silent.

Finally (finally!) ‘On an even keel’ by Vaclav Kunes. Oooh art. Now let’s not be mean, Rei Watanabe is a gorgeous dancer and I enjoy the hell out of that; but the piece itself: again with the seriosity that wasn’t really earned. Seriousness was suggested by the weird backdrop that didn’t show anything except pretty lights, now and then; by the liner notes (do I mean the program notes? I think I do) which talk about life changes in general, and how in general they tend to change our life, which was reflected in the thoughtfulness with which the performers let go of one set of phrases and stood there for a while, considering their next moves, I guess?

Now, E8 is peanuts for a really great performance, even if I only get to see two pieces of about 20 minutes each. I might just go to see them again. But the waste of time and talent in the other three made me sad and angry.