murder and create

I suppose I’m about three years late to this phenomenon but it’s only recently that I’ve seen even a few moments of an episode of the Jersey Shore.  For whatever it means, I did not own a television for the first season or two of the show.  And then when I did have the opportunity to actually watch it, I had absolutely no desire to.  My attraction to reality television had always ended with Jeopardy (and perhaps an odd episode of What Not to Wear when I’m in a television-watching mood and there’s nothing else on).  But this lack of exposure did not prevent me from mocking the show.  I grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where none of the cast members are actually from, but they might as well be.  I lived with these people for most of my life and I spent most of that time trying desperately to get away from them.  I knew these people and I was innately repulsed by them.  Why would I want to watch a show celebrating the very people I’d run from? 

And then this weekend happened.  It was one of those weekends that is characterized by a resounding depression that can be only be quelled by lying in bed crying or by lying on the couch watching mindless tv.  And MTV complied with an entire weekend of a Jersey Shore marathon.  The show really does wonders for your self-esteem.  I didn’t watch the whole thing, obviously, because even a depressing weekend requires sleep and some time outdoors, but when I did watch I couldn’t look away.  I’ve spent the last few hours trying to rationalize my attraction to this show.  Any way you look at it, there is little to like about this show.  Premise and cast aside, the filming and editing is frustrating at best.  The entire show seems to be filtered through some dulling agent, as though the footage actually existed on film that got a little dusty in storage.  To add to this effect are the numbered and titled scene breaks that seem to attempt to divide each episode into acts.  The editing is so choppy that scenes are cut and pasted and repeated multiple times in a matter of minutes.  Another perplexing element is that every outdoor shot is significantly duller than the scenes indoors.  After watching the show, I realize that the “Shore” in the name has little significance in the actually proceedings.  Only the “Jersey” matters (and even then few of these characters seem to be from New Jersey).  Little of this show occurs on the beach, which I had always thought was the main attraction to this place.  I have been to the Jersey Shore multiple times in my life and every time, it was to go to a beach that wasn’t Coney Island and because I couldn’t afford Aruba.  But this summer was the first time that I spent my weekend in a house spilling over with guidos, and they seemed as similarly uninterested in the beach as the cast of the show. 

It must be my anthropological background that keeps me watching, though.  I grew up around these people but I tried my hardest to never interact with them.  It’s as though I were the child of ambassadors in Asia, attending my all English-speaking school and coming home to my American family.  I lived among them and theoretically understood them, but was uninterested in really figuring them out.  This summer, two of my friends and I spent about 36 hours at the shore.  Of those, I don’t remember approximately twelve.  What I do remember though, was like trying to communicate with a different species.  They thought we were hipsters, we thought they were guidos, and we both denied these accusations.  As I write this, I am watching an episode where two of the cast members are dressing like “guido tool-bags” to make fun of them.  (Silly me, I had thought that’s what they were.)  Watching this show, and those twenty-four memorable hours spent with their kind, was akin to conducting research for an ethnographic study.  Understanding their speech requires mastery of, if not a new language at least a different dialect.  Like they were a tribe indigenous to sun-Saharan Africa, their clothing seems to serve an entirely different purpose than my own, and intentionally allows for the exposure of body parts my clothing is specifically designed to cover up.  Hats and sunglasses serve only impractical purposes.  They adorn their bodies in ways that I can only imagine to be considered culturally attractive, and they subsist on a diet of what’s to be found in their environment, namely protein and alcohol.  They seem incapable of preforming tasks that are commonly considered elementary, yet they seem to possess an entirely different skill set, consisting of activities such as blowing out and straightening one’s hair, spray-tanning to the shade of a Dorito, and finding cocktails in even the driest environments.  In their society, violence is the first rather than last option.  I admit, some of favorite moments in the show are when two or more cast members get into a physical altercation and suddenly large black men in neutral polo shirts appear to break them up.

I wonder how much of this behavior is scripted, however.  Human beings are like electrons that have the ability to behave like either particles or waves and only choose one when observed.  The act of observation alters the behavior of the observed.  Thus, the very nature of reality television creates an unrealistic outcome.  The opening credits of Jersey Shore contain audio clips from each cast member upon introduction.  These clips are taken from their audition tapes (where one can only assume that even these exaggerated individuals were exaggerating their behavior) and are taken entirely out of context.  (You can here the clips in context in the first episode of the first season.)  The show has been such a success that I’m sure they are instructed to amp up the drama as well as the stereotypes.  However, each cast member exhibits this behavior to very different levels.  Some are disgustingly comical beyond comprehension.  They routinely forget to wear standard undergarments, drink until the absence of said undergarments becomes apparent, whine, lie, provoke and antagonize.  Others seem like genuinely decent people who have just ended up in this insane situation.  I can’t imagine that constantly living under the camera’s eye can be a calming experience.  I’ve been through college, I’ve lived with a variety of roommates, I’ve been to bars and clubs and parties, I’ve dealt with a slew of issues in relationships, and I’m just happy that no one has caught any of in on tape. 

And therein lies the allure.  There are some unexpected moments (when the Yanamamo mother cradles her child; when the Dobe Ju/’Hoansi sister laughs at a joke told by her friend; when the Nuer boy winces as his forehead is ritualistically sliced; when J-Woww tracks down Jionni for Snookie) when you realize that they, too, are just human.

I am not a wedding kind of person.  I am not even a marriage kind of person.  My future seems more common-law-no-need-for-celebration (well, maybe something small so that someone else can buy me things like this).  So, last summer when, due to some bizarre reasoning, I was asked (via my mother) to be a fill-in bridesmaid three weeks before a wedding for people to whom I was so distantly connected that simply being invited was surprising, my first reaction was to say “no,” which I did vehemently for a full twenty-four hours.  I wanted to buy a dress of my choosing and drink shamelessly at the open bar, without having to feign concern over entrances, aisles and rehearsal dinners.  However, after a series of phone calls from my mother (who refused to relay my negative response and promised to buy my dress) and pleading from my sister (who, due to a similarly confusing series of events, and a more eager-to-please personality than my own, had been wrangled into being a bridesmaid weeks earlier, and wanted my company through what were sure to be excruciatingly awkward dinners and limo rides), I caved. 

This being a big, fat, Greek wedding, I wouldn’t have been surprised with a ridiculously bright and ruffled dress, but this bride was far more tasteful than that, and our dresses were simple (and totally re-wearable) cocktail-length numbers from J. Crew.  The bride and groom were both around 40 years old.  I imagined this bride had been planning her wedding for a long time before she met the groom, and the years had made it simple and elegant. 

A few days before the big event, the wedding party went out to dinner together.  It was awkward but could have been much worse.  My sister and I managed to tag-team our way through tedious conversations, and the food was good.  Though it was at that dinner where I first met my future usher.  He was easily twice my age and size, factors I would have been able to overlook had his personality been even moderately tolerable.  Everyone else was dressed appropriately for the occasion, but he wore denim shorts with sneakers and tall black crew socks pulled up to his mid-calf.

“What do you do?”  I asked, trying to make conversation.

“You know how there are doctors for people?  Well, I’m like a doctor for buildings.  I can walk into a building and tell you what’s wrong with it.”  I think that translates into building inspector, though maybe he was actually holding a stethoscope up to walls and listening for murmurs.  

The morning of the wedding, we met to take photos before we piled into our limos and headed out to Long Island.  Inside the limo, my dapper usher never removed his sunglasses.

 “Do you dance?” he asked me. 

“Ehh.”  Anything more committal would have been either a lie or an invitation. 

“I never dance,” he said, “but my mother, this morning, she kept telling me I better dance, and I was like, ‘Ma, leave me alone.’” 

This was going to be a great day. 

When we arrived at the church, we waited just outside the nave as the guests took their seats.  Everything unraveled in a kind of ordered chaos.  Boxes of numbered corsages and bouquets were distributed according to a mysterious but definite plan, however no one could seem to figure out in what order the couples should line up or where exactly the flower girls had gone.

I stood quietly beside my usher, though he had no intentions of remaining silent.

“How long have you had that nose ring?” he asked.

“A few years.” 

“I have lots of piercings, too.  I’d want to walk down this aisle with all my earrings in and showing all my tattoos, but they would freak out in the church.”

I could respond to this with only a gentle, “Hmm.”

I knew that walking down the aisle I held my bouquet with two hands, but that walking back, I was supposed to take his arm in mine.  I played ignorant and clutched my flowers both ways.

After having stood for an hour through the ceremony in six-inch heels on a marble alter, my sister and I waited in the back of the church shaking out our ankles and longing for a seat.

“You think those are bad,” he said, nodding towards my shoes.  “You should try standing in these things.  They’ve got no support.  No support.”

He seemed to not understand that there was a definite gap between lacks-the-cushioning-of-a-sneaker and stiletto, though I suppose, in all fairness, it is probably for the best that he wasn’t familiar with the pain of a high heel. 

Outside the church, bubbles were blown and doves were released, which came as a bit of a shock to me and my sister when a flock of birds suddenly flew out of a basket beside us.

Between the wedding and the reception we took photos in a beautiful park nearby.  As we rode there in the limo my usher unwittingly entertained us.  He told me and my sister that we had the gift of natural beauty, without needing any makeup.  On few other days of our lives had we been as made up as we were that day.  Does he think our eyelids are natural a pale silver, I wondered.  We were also informed that often, people were intimidated by how smart he is, that he could have been an engineer or a photographer but he just didn’t have the time, and that he’d dated a few “Brides of Frankenstein.”  This last bit of information came unprompted and unattached to anything else, and I’m still not entirely sure what point he was trying to make.

In the park, we spent hours posing for a slew of photographers.  Most of the photos were benign enough, though a few involved some cumbersome and confusing parasols that the bride had purchased for her bridesmaids, and in one we were instructed to “pose sexy,” a command that none of us understood, so none of us altered our polite smiles. 

At the reception, I filled up at the cocktail hour and avoided my usher.  Every time I went into a bathroom, women would corner me and ask how, and to whom, I was related.  I’m the groom’s cousin, I would tell them, because it was easier than explaining that I wasn’t.  I spotted the bar and ordered what I hoped would be the first of many drinks, only to be carded.  Since my bag was in the bridal suite upstairs, and my high-heeled feet couldn’t take another flight of stairs, my mother had to get me drinks for the rest of the night.  I downed a drink and when we were introduced upon entering the hall, I took the arm of my usher.  I loosely held onto it as we waited for the newlyweds to be introduced.  Suddenly the music switched from U2’s “Beautiful Day” to Usher’s “Oh My Gosh,” and the couple entered to the romantic lyrics: “Honey got a bootie like pow, pow, pow/Honey got some boobies like wow, oh, wow.”  I had grown to genuinely like this couple, but I did not need to imagine how many ways he had to love her.  After their first dance, to a Greek song I didn’t know, the couples in the wedding party were called upon to join them.  Reluctantly, I danced with my usher for what seemed like much longer than three minutes.  I awkwardly hung onto my bouquet with one hand. 

“Here’s to yours,” he said, leaning closer to me. 

“Huh?”

“Here’s to your wedding,” he clarified.

I laughed.  “I don’t think we’ll have to worry about that.”

            It was one of those pleasant days in June that makes going outside imperative but the actual moments outdoors not entirely enjoyable, with too cool breezes piercing that constant glare.  My mother and I went down the block to the fifth avenue festival and walked through crowds of chubby Brooklyn boys with flat-brimmed Yankees caps, thin lines of facial hair, and even thinner girlfriends, who wore shorts too short for June (and public display) and tank tops cut low enough to reveal thick strips of sturdy, Technicolor lace bras.  We walked past trucks filled with vats of hot sausage and peppers ready to be scooped onto heroes, and long tables covered in catering trays (three bucks a plate—fill it yourself) set outside restaurants. 

We each got large black iced coffees from a café and found a pizza-eating contest in which a friend was participating.  Five men stood on a makeshift stage.  We watched with our friend’s parents and girlfriend.  Someone had a video camera.  The participants were all pretty young, between 18 and 35 if I had to guess.  They were all a little squishy though only one was traditionally overweight.  They all ate no fewer than ten slices in twelve minutes.  The winner ate more than fifteen, my friend lost with ten and a quarter.  I watched, sipping at my iced coffee, occasionally turning away when a slice was rolled or shoved into a mouth too vigorously or some soda chugged sloppily.  The camcorder switched between the mother and girlfriend’s hands.  The father, a slight yet muscular, nearly blind real estate attorney, shook his head and wondered aloud why his son chose to do this, and in front of people?  It was disgusting.  He was going to make himself sick!  I, too, was disgusted.  Other than my coffee, I may have had a bowl of cereal or a piece of fruit that morning, maybe.  But I was also somewhat jealous.  I wanted to be able to eat twelve slices in twelve minutes and not be sick enough to die and hate myself for a slew of reasons after.  I couldn’t eat one slice in twelve minutes without it hurting me and then thinking about it for the rest of the day.  

I have an article up on Lemondrop!

It is a small suburban home.  Stone steps surrounded by shrubs curve up to the front door.  Inside, it is kitschy and bright, but obviously a family home.  Each room is painted a different color (I would later see the paint cans stacked in the basement), old food and drink advertisements are framed on the walls, and a retro salt and pepper shaker collection is displayed throughout the house.  The kitchen table and chairs are a sparkly red vinyl, and the bathroom has an aquatic theme.  Pictures of grandparents and children line the back hallway.  One of these children, a son, emerges with a friend.  He wears a soccer uniform and later will be sent to the friend’s house for the night. 

There are two tables of food—one with snacks and with desserts.  All are vegetarian.  A bucket with a sign signaling donations for traveling bands sits on the table of snacks.  I am told that, at the last party, the dessert table had a cosmic section.  This time, though, the far end contains liquor bottles, the array and dustiness of which reminds me of my mother’s collection, in formation since her wedding and stored under the armoire until parties when they form a neat arrangement on her server.  The party is an odd mix of college house party and ones my parents throw.  The setup is very parental—more, and more elaborate, finger-foods than would ever be set out at a college—but while some people pick, others bring equipment to the basement and there’s the knowledge that the party isn’t just this food. 

The host looks like a character out of “The Big Lebowski,”—his belly protrudes, his hair is stringy and long, and he smokes pot in a back room. The crowd is mostly men over thirty-five.  The only women, at first, are a few wives—moms refilling chip bowls and cutting slices of pizza in half—and their single friend who wanders the house holding a perpetually half-empty glass of rosé, and who is one of the few who speaks directly to me.  (She asks if she should break into the untouched seven-layer dip.  I tell her yes.)  Later, a few hipsters will show up.  They’re the kind who attend a small liberal arts school in the woods, and therefore do not realize what they are.  Some will stumble, openly drunk off the host’s beer and they will talk in loud voices about the “mad food” here, but for now, it’s only the parents. 

I make my way through the house and I pass the son sitting on a small couch and watching the Disney channel.  A small crowd has gathered on the back porch.  I eavesdrop on people talking about changing neighborhoods and recent movies.  One conversation shifts seamlessly from guitars to golf.  I hear the family’s dogs barking in the garage, where I assume they’ll be locked until the party’s over. 

We are all called into the basement for the show to begin. The basement is unfinished with a cement floor, cinderblock walls, tool racks, and a washer and dryer.  A few tea candles and a large plastic jack-o-lantern light the room.  I look at the people around me.  Just about every person here is markedly different than everyone else.  It’s a crowd in which I do not fit, but no one does.  The only thing that seems to unite everyone is that they all spend a significant amount of time defining the term psychedelic as it relates to sound. 

The first band to play has seven members—six men and one woman—all over forty.  There are two drummers and five guitar players, though one man occasionally abandons his guitar to curl up on the floor and groan into a microphone he cups around his mouth.  When I take my seat in the basement the band is only one drummer and two guitarists and, though they are playing, I assume that they are warming up.  But slowly, the other members make their way to their instruments and start playing.  Most of them have a beer, and they’ll stop occasionally to sip from it.  One man sets his bong on an amp and draws from it regularly.  Another sets up a patio chair in which he sits while he plays—his guitar resting atop his expansive belly.  They are plugged into a wall of amps and I can physically feel this music.  I have also, accidentally, sat beneath a drum, so this adds to the vibrations.  With my earplugs, the music sounds loud though not obnoxiously so, but if I open my mouth it gets noticeably louder, and when I remove one plug for one second the volume is overwhelming and it takes my ear too long to recover.  The seven members play what they want when they want—they each take little breaks and when they decide they are finished, they simply unplug and leave.  They play, continuously, for about twenty minutes, and while I like listening to them, it definitely feels like I am watching them practice.  They each play their own things, held together exclusively by their influences.  The whole thing sounds like a twenty-minute breakdown in a Doors’ song, which is certainly fun but not really anything special, either.  I imagine what led them here—the failed dreams of becoming the Stones, and the desire to keep playing with other people.  It seems to me that none of them are particularly interested in noise music as an art form, they just want to play their instruments and don’t want to play specific songs.  This strikes me as sad at first, but then I realize that it’s wonderful—to stop playing would be sad, but to have house parties with friends and food and music is pretty great. 

The second band consists of two dads—men with big bellies and balding heads.  They are seated on the far side of the room, and each plays a guitar.  They play two songs, both noisy and atonal and improvised, but also very soft and delicate.  One guitar has the sound of a sitar, and one man sings actual words, quietly.  Between songs, he apologizes for putting everyone to sleep.  “Don’t worry, we’ll wake up later,” one girl sitting in the front says.  I do not know if that is just a statement or an insult.  These men surprise me with the tenderness of their set.  It is unexpected but not harsh. 

Next up is an Italian duo.  They look like they could be brother and sister (both slender and pale and both with straight brown hair to their hips) but I do not ask.  As they set up, I understand a little of what they say.  I hear them say, “playing in a house,” and “we’ll see,” both of which seem like appropriate statements.  He plays the drums, she predominately plays the saxophone but at various moments employs bells (including a cowbell), a whistle, and a melodica.  At one point she yells what I can only assume to be an Italian interpretation of a Native American ghost cry.  The drummer’s mouth, though constantly open, changes shape each time he hits his drums, as if to personally emulate the sounds they’re producing.  There is something impressive about their playing, but their parts do not fit with each other.  I realize that this is the point, and that, I suppose, there is something impressive about being able to totally ignore each other, but throughout their set, I cannot help thinking that they need something else—another person, a computer, even—if not to tie them together at least to add a deeper texture to their sounds.  They are at their best when they play together, though.  Her solos look and sound like a painful test to see how high she can go, and at times it appears she is sucking air out of her sax rather than blowing into it; his sound like what they are—a boy playing drums in a basement.

After the Italians play, and the lights go up, the host and a few men who look like they should be teaching middle-schoolers art or phys-ed, or instructing customers on types of hammers at Home Depot, form a circle in the corner and pass around a joint.

The final band to play is a collaboration between two men: one young, dressed entirely in black and paunchier than he would like to be, on guitar and pedals; the other, an older fellow with long white hair and beard, on the saxophone.  He reminds me of a sax-playing Santa (the ones on the streets at Christmastime) who has taken to the bottle.  He plays his saxophone by slapping it.  The young man lays his guitar across his lap and pokes at it with a variety of tools at though he were playing a frantic game of Operation.  About halfway through his set, I realize that his head is moving more than his hands.  They sound noisy, as their genre implies.  They are the headliners and they are more atonal and harder to listen to listen to than the previous bands, and the audience seems to love it.  A girl sitting on the floor by my feet sways her head dramatically.  At first I cannot tell if it’s because she’s really feeling the music or because she looks to weigh eighty pounds and has had more than just a few beers, but when she folds her legs up to her chest and rests her head on her knees, I assume it’s mostly the latter. A large woman stands beside my chair and keeps stepping back until she is essentially on top of me.  She turns around, takes a hold of my elbow, and yells over the noise that she’s sorry for stepping all over me.  I yell back that it’s okay.  Throughout the set, whenever she bumps me, she reaches around and rubs my arm.  When the young man stages a particularly exuberant attack on his guitar, the woman raises her fist to her face and blows a kiss. 

After their first eight-minute song, the Italian girl grabs her sax and joins in.  She and the older man engage in a series of endurance tests.  They both blow until they sweat.  His stance shifts forward, she leans back.  At one point, I imagine them as small children, screeching into their new instruments before encouraging parents.  He wins every time.  The man on guitar pauses to allow for this little competition, and then he raises his arm and waits, for what I do not know, but at a very specific moment he slams his hand onto a pedal and begins playing again.  The crowd cheers.  When they finish this song, met with ecstatic applause, he asks if there’s time for one more.  The people around me laugh—as though they would ever deny him the opportunity.  They play again, a song much like the previous but about half as long.  When they finish, all three are out of breath, and the entire basement claps louder and longer than they did for the other bands.

Later, upstairs, as I wait on the couch with Stanley, one of the family’s cats (who materializes only after the noise is over), I watch an unexpected number of people purchase albums from these men.  “I have to warn you,” the younger one tells a potential customer who inquires about the price of a record.  “That’s a one-sider.  It’s twenty, but the label’s selling it for thirty, so, you know.”  The transaction is completed. I have been to many shows with bands that perform composed (and interesting) songs and pack the merch tables with their five-dollar cds and three-buck cassettes, and rarely does anyone buy as much as they do here.  One of the album covers features a photo of a naked woman sprawled on a bed.  A lanky man with white hair stands a few feet away and talks with the Santa saxophonist.  The lanky one breaks away and approaches the table.  He spots the photo of the woman, laughs, claps his hands and turns back to his friend.  “Who is it?” he asks.  They remind me of excited adolescent boys.  “I don’t know.  It’s a secret.  Well, he knows.”  I assume he is referencing the guitar player.  I imagine being the unnamed naked woman, being gawked at by men young and old, on an album of improvised sound and it makes me feel more uncomfortable than any of the night’s music has. 

There is a homeless man in my neighborhood who wanders the streets in an almost stereotypical manner.  He dresses in coarsely-textured, earth-toned, torn and oversized clothing, his long matted hair falls not to his shoulders but rather radiates softly around his head, and he walks crookedly, always talking to himself and gesticulating madly.  He is indeed simply mad—schizophrenia, I imagine, though never violent, never even aware of the real people around him.  But here’s the thing—if you stop and look at him, really look at him in a way that you have probably never looked at a homeless man before, you will notice that he is a very handsome man.  He is young, mid-thirties at most, and if you can imagine his face scrubbed clean and shaved, you realize that he has a face that could make good impressions.  And as you think this and sympathize with him, you wonder if, in the end as in the beginning, it all comes down to physical beauty.  

Rule number one is strict—shirts must be worn at all times, unless granted prior approval by me, or to be fair, by every single person who will have to see you sans shirt.  Automatic approval is granted at beaches but revoked immediately upon ascending onto the boardwalk.  Keep this in mind.

Last night, I took my first trip of the season out to Coney Island to see the Friday night fireworks.  I hadn’t been there since the renovations, and was surprised to see that besides a few refurbished rides, some clean bathrooms, more trashcans, and cashiers with computers, there were not many drastic changes. 

The fireworks began at 9:30 and the boardwalk was packed well in advance. It was definitely overcrowded but it was also so crowded because of obesity.  I would slide to pass a person only to bump off some slab of fat protruding from a right underarm.  Is this the way of the future?  Perhaps it’s not overpopulation that will crowd the earth, but a physically larger population, instead. 

I hadn’t seen fireworks in a long time and this display was reassuring—not spectacular (though my sister, who stood alongside the launch site, was amazed), but not disappointing.  They were marred, however, by the dj in a gazebo who never stopped playing his thumping music.  He added his own comments throughout, such as: Brooklyn in da house?; We gonna be here all night!; and Alright ladies, saddle up.  What were we preparing to ride?  Fireworks? Music? Men, specifically the dj? Two teenage boys in front of me were moving in a way so that I assumed they were pretending to be shot by each rocket’s blast (some of the fireworks did indeed seem like the blitzkrieg), but I soon realized that they were just dancing. Later, after the fireworks had finished, when people were beginning to move out, a woman next to us walked away and left her sunglasses behind.  My father picked them up and called after her, “Dear.”

“It’s Coney Island,” I said, “No one answers to dear.”

The hindquarters of male ballet dancers resemble nothing so much as those of horses.  This is accentuated by their light brown tights stretching taught across every expanse of muscle, plunging into every crevice, and shiny as a thoroughbred’s coat.  For the first dance, the Brahms-Haydn Variations choreographed by Twyla Tharp, the five principal couples all wear outfits made of this tight pale brown material—the men in the aforementioned tights and matching tees, the women in fitted tanks and tiny, flimsy skirts.  The company wears the same cuts but in off-white, like apartment walls.  The stage is accented only with golden light, and the dancers pair off and commence a series of deceptively effortless lifts, spins and leaps.  In most modern forms of entertainment, rarely are we asked to choose where we focus our attention.  For much of this dance, a majority of the company is onstage simultaneously, and the audience must choose either to concentrate on a specific couple, or view the entire stage as a teeming and swelling amorphous organism.  Narrowing in on one couple, however, allows the sharply muscled physiques to become apparent.  These bodies are anatomy guides—each leg and arm curving as the muscles dictate.  Watching them, my companion and I later agree, makes us want to be better people—to stand up straighter, to drink more water, to possibly starve ourselves?  The simplicity of this routine is beautiful—it allows viewers to see the innate elegance of the dancers and their movements.  The costumes in the later dances, On the Dnieper and Fancy Free, are more elaborate, accessorized constructions—longer skirts and thicker material accompanied by bags and hats.  Oddly, the men look more masculine, intimidating almost, in their tights, rather than dressed as soldiers, knaves or flirtatious sailors.  Dressing them in common clothing, however unusual these particular clothes may be, invites the comparison to other soldiers, knaves, and simply ordinary men, and ordinary men don’t leap and twirl through the air or fill out their jeans like Beyoncé.  

“And then he began to think about how repulsive adolescent artists or pseudoartists were when viewed from up close.”