Tag: The Body

From Hank David

I have been thinking tonight about Thoreau…. his statement that most men lead lives of quiet desperation. Even when unhappy, there can be a control from positive isolation. And everyone likes control, especially if they are unhappy.

When I worked at Union Station I befriended a few homeless dudes, and would occasionally get them food. They weren’t grateful for just anything. They wanted what they wanted. Very specifically. If you’re doing a nice thing, you want it to be nicely received, but what I took from that experience was this: somehow not having control makes people try and assert a control that may be inappropriate. I’ve noticed this occurring among those in poverty of all sorts.

Desperation and distance makes people distance themselves even more to be in control. They judge to be right. To make their decisions, their work, their unhappiness, right.

The full Thoreau (paraphrase, apparently):

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

Big ups, Hank Dave. Big ups.

Taking things off of Bourgeon

I’m updating Bourgeon (the online arts magazine I run) and am taking off some of the posts I made shortly after I moved the magazine online.

There was a certain rush in moving the magazine online. All of the potential of what one can do with that. When you do a print magazine you have to get everything together, lay out your pages, etc etc. When I went online I got a little drunk with the possibility of publishing whenever I wanted…

The mission of Bourgeon is to project the voices of artists, helping them document their work for current and future audience.

So I’m removing the posts I did after moving the thing online, which just don’t belong there. I wrote this in follow up to an article written by Kevin Platte – founder of the Cowboys – published in Bourgeon.

 

———– from Nov. 7, 2007 ————–

Here is some video of the D.C. Cowboys, a local dance company.

There are a couple of things that I find very interesting about their work. But first let me say that this video – which is from the closing ceremony of the Gay Games in Chicago – does not do them justice. They have excellent video on their website (www.dccowboys.com) which I couldn’t steal.

Many companies use sex appeal, but most seem to be kind of regretful of it. Or, if they’re not regretful of it, I feel like they should be. A lot of times it seems like if choreographers aren’t confident of their dance, and want people to like it, they just remove clothes from the dancers.

The DC Cowboys sexuality is part of the dance, unapologetically. There’s something relaxing about that to me. There’s none of the “look at me don’t look at me stuff” that happens in some work….

—–

It’s Personal

I just watched ‘Taken’, the new movie with Liam Neeson online. I hate to encourage bad behaviour, but for those who don’t know, if you google streaming movies, you can pretty much watch anything in the theaters right now on your computer. Of course, sometimes it’ll be a bad copy, dubbed in russian, with chinese subtitles, but most of the time they’re pretty good copies. What’s the morality there? We don’t get such slick Hollywood movies if “we” don’t pay for them. I would never have paid for that movie in a theater, but I digress… The story-line is quite simple. Liam Neeson kills bad people who are tormenting and killing good people (including his daughter, who they’ve abducted.) She was abducted to be forced into sex work.

What’s the morality there? If they aren’t forced into it, prostitution is all good? Not infrequently people find themselves desperate, with few options, and plenty of bad people there to encourage them to worse choices…. Prostitution is peachey if done out of economic desperation? Prostitution is peachy if not done out of economic desperation? I digress, again.

The line in the movie that sticks with you is when he kills yet another bad guy. The bad guy says: “It wasn’t personal”. This particular bad guy runs the auction house where Liam’s daughter was sold. Liam says: “It was personal to me.” The good part of the movie is seeing all the bad people get obliterated. Most of the time that doesn’t happen, though. Most of the time we just don’t see them.

hipsbannerHIPS was founded in 1993 by community and police representatives in response to recognized need for specialized services for youth engaging in sex for gain in Washington, D.C.

HIPS reaches over 100 sex workers each night on outreach and makes over 8,000 contacts each year. That is from the HIPS website.

Just because we aren’t seeing it, doesn’t mean it’s not happening. And most of the time Liam Neeson isn’t there to make it personal. I don’t know what the solution is. It seems as long as there is demand, be it for bootleg whiskey, cocaine, or young women/men, people will fill the supply. Prosecution is critical. Support for the vulnerable is critical. So is encouraging responsible personal choice from everyone you ever come into contact with. That’s the best I got. And if you can, please consider supporting HIPS with a donation today.

One of the great things about doing well in capitalism is that it buys you distance from things. It buys you isolation. I’m inspired by the people – including the people who work at HIPS – who voluntarilly confront difficulties that they could buy their way out of sight from.