Amanda Palmer, Live in Concert

A friend and I went to see Amanda Palmer in concert last night. It was an enjoyable evening, but there were plenty of foibles, so I'm going to give a rundown of the good, the bad, and the ugly for the edification of anyone who wants to know.

The Good:

Amanda Palmer is an amazing artist who clearly enjoys being onstage, flirting with the audience, and generally being an awesome performer. And the first opening act that started off the show, Vermilion Lies, defied all expectations of opening acts in general by actually being an enjoyable group.

The Bad:

The concert started two hours late, apparently because of the second opening act (Hair Somethingorother) who showed up two hours late for sound check. When it was time for their set, the stage stayed empty for twenty minutes, was suddenly occupied by three not-very-attractive drag queens and a man in a leopard print headband for about three minutes, and then fell suddenly dark and silent. Five minutes later they were out of the building and down the road, having wasted everybody's time.

The Ugly:

Really, Hair Whatever was the main ugly. But second was the sea of cameras that emerged over the crowd every time a new piece started. Seriously people, I want to see the artist, not your screens or flashbulbs.

But back to The Good:

Amanda Palmer, as I've said, was amazing. Creative songwriting, great stage presence, and mad skills at the piano. Not to mention fabulous lyrics to songs like "Ampersand" that sum up a great deal of my experience with heterosexual flirting:

The ghetto boys are catcalling me
As I pull my keys from my pocket
I wonder if this method of courtship has ever been effective
Has any girl in history said "Sure, you seem so nice, let's get it on"
Still, I always shock them when I answer, "Hi, my name's Amanda"

Then there's the fact that she can write a catchy doo-wop style song about rape and abortion that's actually fun to sing along to. Song title is "Oasis" if you want to check it out.

Then there was the opening band. (Alright, technically they were first, but they weren't the ones that brought me to the concert, which is why I'm talking about them second). I had never heard of Vermillion Lies, but they're a sister cabaret duo that gets points for vocabulary and creative instrumentation. Anyone who uses a typewriter as percussion gets points in my book. Ditto for marionettes and multicolored handbells. They had funny songs about heart transplants and global warming. And they sang backup for "Oasis," which worked really well.

So all in all, a good evening. My only real regret was that we had to leave early, while Amanda was still singing, because the concert started so late. The moral of the story, I suppose, is that awesome girl artists should sing together. And random drag queens that can't sing or be on time should be locked out.

God Hates...Fruit?

This image has been shamelessly stolen from a friend's livejournal blog, because it's one of the funniest pamphlets that I've recently seen. Read it and believe. God hates fruit.

I Love Chiropractors

I finally went and got my back checked out, after several weeks of procrastination, and discovered that I had two pinched nerves in my vertebrae. After a realignment that involved the chiropractor turning me on my side and pretty much doing a jumping Heimlich maneuver to my hips, I felt a lot better. Sore, but better. My back is stiff now, but not painful, which is a marked improvement. Aerial has been good, largely because hanging upside down is therapeutic, but chiropractors are better. I need to start keeping one in my pocket when I travel.

I'm also incredibly happy that the problem has been fixed so easily. After reading up on all the many things that could be causing back pain, from hairline fractures to protruding discs to any number of other icky things, a pinched nerve sounds like a walk in the park. No scans, no surgery, nothing too expensive or time consuming or painful or annoying. Just a few clicks and done. Huzzah.

Happy Ides of March

Ok, I'm a geek. But I have to celebrate it. In nonlethal ways. Which means that I get to send this ecard to the world:



Happy Holidays! :p

Ballet and body image

I've decided this week, now that I'm living near a dance studio, that I should start dancing again. So I took a ballet class on Wednesday, a barre workout yesterday, and another ballet class today.

Ouch.

There is nothing more humbling than going back to ballet when you've been away from it for over two years. I felt like an elephant, like a bull in a china shop, like all the most ungraceful metaphors in the world all at once. My body has lost all the nuanced movement that characterizes ballet. It felt so easy when I did it all the time, but now I feel like I'm as far from that level of nuance as I am from the moon or a six-figure paycheck. My brain still remembers it all, remembers that the hand goes here and the feet turn out like so and you lift and tuck and tendu and plie and make it all look beautiful and effortless. My brain remembers. But my body doesn't. And therein lies the problem. Because my brain remembers exactly what it all looks like, and how I should look in the mirror when I do each move. But the figure in the mirror looks nothing like how it should be.

In the mirror, I have no alignment. My toes point, but not as far as they should. My feet turn out, but not as far, my legs lift up, but not as high, I jump, I turn, I extend, I pose...but none of it looks like it should. Part of it is that I'm horrendously out of practice. And part of it is that I'm at least 25 pounds heavier than I was in high school, the last time I seriously did ballet. Now, I was never a stick figure, and I never cultivated my anorexic tendencies to a point where they were relevant, but still. I was relatively thin. In the mirror now, I see every inch of my added padding as larger-than-life, an exaggerated caricature of my actual shape. And I know, intellectually, that my weight is actually just fine and my proportions are fairly normal. But you can't say that to a ballet school mirror. They're designed to make you want to become thin.

The funny thing is, I never really paid that much attention to the mirror in high school. I knew what I looked like and that I looked good, so besides the occasional alignment check it was never really relevant. I only started to get self-conscious in college, when I started gaining weight and taking different dance techniques that I didn't know as well. I learned to ignore the mirrors then, because if I focused only on what I was doing and didn't look, I didn't have to fight myself or the movement nearly as hard. And when I got good enough, I didn't have to ignore the mirror. It became irrelevant again. I'll get to that point again here inshallah, probably just in time for me to start traveling again and lose it all. Which means I'll fight the same battle through again when I get back.

Even though it's a Sisyphus-ian effort, though, I'll still do it. I love dance too much to let myself stay out of shape, and I know that in another week or two the mirror gremlins won't seem as bad. You have to wonder what's in an art form to make people stay with it despite the fact that it tends to foster self-hatred. And the answer is this: once you get past that point of self-hatred and focus on the dance, it becomes magic. Once you truly focus on the dance and attain the technique to take you farther, you can suspend normal reality. You can experience total freedom in movement. You can fly.

Which means I'll deal with the mirror gremlins until I reach that point again.

Don't ask, don't tell?

I just read an article stating that the people who originally convened to instate teh "don't ask, don't tell" policy in the military barely even knew what the phrase "sexual orientation" meant when they first started discussing the issue. They came up with the policy in the name of "unit cohesion," the idea that if there were gay people in the military it would make military groups less able to work together, or something like that. That straight people would be squicked out and not want to deal with people who weren't like them.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathaniel-frank/as-congress-moves-to-end_b_171070.html

Of course, nowadays, now that several people have been kicked out of the military for being gay, more are being kept in because it seems like people just don't really care about it any more. One service member announced that he was gay on "60 Minutes" and has had felt no military ramifications whatsoever.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2008-01-07-gay-troops_N.htm

I get the feeling that the more people who die in Iraq, and the more people want to get out of Iraq, the less people will care about who exactly it is that's serving as long as they're doing their job.

What happened to my hair?

Last week, I got a haircut for free. And was reminded acutely that you get what you pay for. It seemed like a good idea at the time. A salon was advertising for models to display different styles. I figured I'd go in, have something new and interesting done, and go out feeling like I'd gotten the change I needed. When I got there, though, I discovered to my chagrin that I was the only model who'd signed up (I use the term "model" loosely here, meaning only someone who's willing to go to the hairdressing seat blindfolded). An hour and a half later, after the tender ministrations of ten people struggling to perfect a new cut, my hair was significantly shorter and highly voluminous (never cut curly hair for volume. It leads to something looking suspiciously like a 'fro). I spent the next few days investing in headbands, hairclips, and styling products to mitigate the 'do. I even bought a bottle of purple hair dye, which I haven't gotten up the impetus to use just yet, but that is waiting as soon as I'm sure I won't have an interview anytime soon.

All this got me to thinking...is my hair gay? There's a fine longstanding tradition of lesbian hair, but it's generally limited to buzzcuts, fifteen-year-old-boy-cuts, and the fortunately out of date mullet, which is thankfully rarely seen anymore. My former long, flowing locks were certainly good at getting attention (at one point in college I had three friends fondling my curls and saying that my hair deserved to be groped, looking like it did). But Botticelli-style waves are not inherently gay. Neither, I think, are short, fluffy curls, though they're probably a bit closer. My girlfriend tells me that short hair is hot. It might be. Research has shown me that my current cut does not meet the accepted definition of "lesbian hair" (which, oddly enough, is not "hair that belongs to a lesbian.")

Apparently, there are references to specific cuts:

http://www.lesbiatopia.com/2007/03/lesbian-hair-good-bad-and-ugly.html

http://www.lesbilicious.co.uk/community/lesbian-hair-the-secrets-untangled/

And certain stars have apparently been seen sporting some of them:
http://www.afterellen.com/blog/dorothysnarker/lesbian-hair-makes-a-comeback

I think that I'm actually somewhat relieved. Not having lesbian hair means that I don't fit into a stereotype, which is always good, in my book. And I admit, I enjoy being ambiguous, in this as in other things. So while my haircut may be interesting and unusual, it does not mark me as gay. So people will still have to wonder ;)