We came. We saw. We made art. We helped other people make art. We learned stuff. We became one with humility. We both exceeded, and fell short of expectations. We thought on our feet and persevered. We were asked to return.
Not bad. Not bad at all.
Things didn’t go as planned. Attendance was less than expected, and we quickly abandoned our impressively prepared structure and variety of offerings in favor of scaling back to a very simple, smaller, fluid system. Way better than being caught with our pants down, though – we were on the ball, overstaffed and over prepared. Anything that went ‘wrong’ was out of our hands. Our volunteers showed, lit the room up and had a good time leading by example. We worked with some kids, and they were great. You can ask for more than that with a first workshop, but it’s probably not a very good idea to expect it.
We did it. We are real. And we have an assload of supplies for next time.
I’m having to pan out quite a bit more to fit it all now, and I’m about on the track I thought I would be. My water bottle, containers for restaurant leftovers and heightened awareness have been making a huge difference in what I bring home with me. I’ve been very diligent about bringing home my trash from Qliance as well, though that won’t be as much of a concern now that I will be working from home again. *sigh*
Partially because of this project, I am eating out a lot less too. Generally when I’m hungry I will hit a produce section instead.
Even switching back to loose leaf tea has improved my waste output – and my quality of life. It’s such a more savory experience to make myself tea in the mornings or offer it to a guest.
During our Vita Arts meeting last week, we came up with the idea to use most of these plastic bottles as funnels for a project we’re doing – making juggling balls. Perfect.
I am thinking to glue all the layers of flattened cardboard waste together into a canvas.
Who: Myself and Dyno performing aerial throughout the evening What: Flying House Productions: Just Art auction When: Friday, September 25 from 6:00 to 10:00pm Where: Fremont Studios, 155 N. 35th Street in Seattle
Elegant glass sculptures. Vivid watercolors. Oil on canvas. Stunning photographs. Delicate iron and wood carvings.
The silent and live auctions feature exquisite pieces by some of the Pacific Northwest’s premier talents, as well as pieces by gifted up-and-comers who have not shown in galleries or other usual venues. Proceeds benefit the Seattle Men’s Chorus and Seattle Women’s Chorus and the contributing artists receive 20 percent of the selling price of their work.
For more information on how to donate contact Murray McKay at murraym@flyinghouse.org or 206.388.1413.
The event will include one LIVE and two silent auctions, hosted cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, and entertainment by Seattle’s best Burlesque and Circus performers.
I suspect simply embarking on this experiment will produce an immediate decline in the waste I produce.
I’ve had it with consumerism, yet I’m neck deep in it. I’ve had it with plastic bottles, wrappers, packaging, waste. It pisses me off. It’s unnecessary. It bugs me. A lot. I’ve been noticing again. From Sara’s glass jar that she takes to the smoothie place to get filled instead of a Styrofoam one, to the bag I saw on set today, I’m noticing what these things are saying.
Hilarious. And true.
I’ve got like 4 of those kinds of canvas bags around here and can’t recall one time I thought to take one with me to the store. Perhaps if mine said what this one does… (To be fair, most of the time I put my groceries in my backpack, which was full today when i went shopping. But still.)
I feel like a raging tool every time I take my garbage out and sort all the recyclables, and see how much stuff I’m still generating. As it should be. I’ve supposed that because i dont bag each piece of my produce in 17 different bags I’m like, better than people who do or something – meanwhile each cup of tea I drink has a wrapper associated, every smoothie I drink has a cup I toss, I have vitamin water bottles all over the place, I buy stuff in boxes and wrappers all the time…
Thankfully though, I don’t think about it often – perhaps once a week when I take out my trash, sometimes 2 weeks if I’m really conscious and careful. But maybe I shouldn’t be thanking myself for that. Maybe I should be embracing my wastefulness full hilt and welcoming what a hypocrite I am.
In a rush to get to work and need something quick, someone else bought it for me, I’ll reuse it a couple times – All things I say to rationalize the bottles, wrappers, plastic bowls and other random shit I throw away on a regular basis. Recycling is still close enough to garbage to urk me. It’s an energy and resource suck that I initiate with my thoughtlessness and being lazy, that just doesn’t need to happen.
(Thanks for the video link, Miah!)
I’ve decided to live with all of my trash (sans yard waste, which we already compost and reuse), for two months — 2 weeks longer than it takes to form a habit. The effort is to document the process, and in the end, form better consumer habits based on the experience. I’m focusing mainly on things like vitamin water bottles and single serving packaging, grocery bags and other such things.
I want to see how much of this stuff I really contribute to our world. I just went and fished all packaging I could find here from the last week or so out of the trash and collected the various bottles from around my room.
I kept a few things I know are older to balance out the stuff I know I don’t have, like some clifbar wrappers and at least one paper to-go carton from my Pink Door gig last Sunday. I’m calling my official start date Sept 1. From now until Nov 1, the day before my 30th birthday, I will pack-out all of my consumer packaging waste and bring it home with me. If you’re someone who’s chosen a lifestyle that includes creative ways to be conscious of waste, I’d love to hear your advice.
Week 1 - sans the 4 plastic bags I forgot to put in the photo.
Looking at the word brought an acronym to mind – Why Always Soil The Environment? I hereby dub thee, the W.A.S.T.E. project.
Seems to me, many people spend a long time building their lives into something they can be proud of, something comfortable for them, in order to be safe to accomplish another something that’s bigger than themselves.
I have done my fair share of struggling, trying different configurations, playing small and dreaming big. Over the last few years, I’ve contemplated what the bigger thing might be, for me. Sure, I sometimes make people happy with my art. I make money helping other people do cool things, I volunteer, and my financial/geographical footprint is about 15% of what it used to be when I worked for Microsoft. I even turn the water off when I brush my teeth most of the time. But what can I REALLY do to make a difference in life?
When it came time for me to serve the world somehow, I found that I wanted to create a non-profit organization to help perpetuate the transformative capabilities inherent in expressing ones self, artistically. To make a space for people to experience the healing opportunities I have had through art in a more tactile, kinesthetic way than I have with my personal offerings of performances, music, paintings and that sort of thing.
I know art saves lives, because it saved mine. I’ve seen the results, and heard the stories of others, about the power of artistic expression to heal and transform. Whether it be from seeing it, appreciating it, facilitating it, being it, creating it, failing at it, living it – I maintain that art has the power to touch absolutely everyone.
I’ve also seen how sharing myself artistically often effects and inspires people to action. How the experience of art opens people up to expressing life, to telling their once-quiet stories through a medium, helping discover courages and strengths we so often convince ourselves we don’t, or can’t, have. How art helps people face their fears, release difficult emotions, grieve, find direction and purpose.
Perhaps most importantly, I have seen how, no matter how bleak and helpless a situation may seem, one small, brave action creates a chain of them. Every time.
It’s never too late to choose to make a difference.
Vita Arts is sharing the power of art with the disadvantaged and transforming lives.
Our performances offer the public a chance to see our skills, and to be moved by the human spirit. Our shows also serve to fund and publicize our outreach efforts, working with individuals in small workshops, giving them a chance to experience creating art for themselves, perhaps for the very first time.
We are starting local, with two public performances and a workshop being planned in 2009 alone. We look forward to expanding our efforts in the coming years by collaborating with other organizations (such as disaster relief orgs, loss support groups, and those helping reform the incarcerated) to offer transformative art experiences to the disadvantaged of all ages, around the world.
Come find out more about who we are, what we’re doing, see a great show, and best of all, help make a difference.
Please note: If you are unable to attend this event and wish to support us, we are gratefully accepting donations. Provisional 501(c)(3) status is in the works, and will backdate once approved for tax deduction purposes. You may send donations to Vita Arts, PO box 20233, Seattle, WA 98102.
I feel fortunate and full today. I am going to DEFCON this year. I just received my itinerary from whitetras and it’s official. I’m bringing someone important to me to show him vegas for the first time.
I first went in 1995, when I was 15 and neck deep in linux, drugs and Marlboro Reds, and I’d recently discovered this thing called the web, and frequently picked fights about Slackware being superior to RedHat. I recall, during a recent move, finally throwing away my Slackware 2.7 CD which I had been keeping for posterity.
I went to defcon religiously for a time, my entire social network of people living inside a computer. I didn’t know most of their real names. I spent night after late night online tinkering, listening to music for the jilted generation (come to think of it, I think someone I talked to used ‘jilted’ as a handle..) and waiting for the next defcon, so I could see all these people in person again – and hardly remember most of it.
When I got a little older, I started playing with music, and joined mp3.com in 1997. The internet was still like the wild west and we were changing everything. My hacker friends helped me choose my juno 106 (thanks tfish) and hooked me up with equipment to make recording easier (tip of the hat to you whiteknight). After I created my first original song in 1999, on the floor of my living room, juno fresh out of its shipping box, paid for with my job breaking software at Microsoft, I started making a little money with CD sales and streams on mp3.com.
I was interviewed with ABCNews for an article on female hackers, and later about my music being online, based on a recommendation from Jeff Moss, assuring the reporter (Sascha, another person I’ve kept in touch with) I was definitely not a scene whore. I’m not sure how accurate that assurance was, but it sure felt good at the time. I still boast that Jeff pierced my navel, under mild duress in my studio apartment, sometime in 1999. That sounds pretty scene whorish to me, but who am I to say. Maybe we were just, you know.. friends.
Countless things have happened since my first defcon, and my introduction to the hacker community. My first website complete with a blue satin background and ripped off animated fire gifs was created in 1995, hosting a splattering of terrible teenage poetry. In 1997, Lars from the IRC channel #suicide sent me a black and white quickcam, and the neecam was put online, one of the first webcams during the era of Jennicam and Anacam, both of which were more popular, active and racy.
I’ve occasionally contemplated what my life would have been like had I never discovered the internet and been part of a revolution. I can’t fathom it. I can’t fathom how I could have possibly found another pool of socially awkward, skinny, pale, wide-eyed geniuses to have sloppy, dysfunctional teenage relationships with either. One of many reasons I am very thankful that my life turned out how it did.
I happened upon this awesome article about some of my friends. The L0pht is a fine example of what’s happened with this culture of misfits and criminals, but this is something that’s happened all over the landscape we built 10 years ago and long before that. I remember writing a rant about the difference between the hackers, my friends, and the script kids that were getting all the bad press, writing worms and breaking websites for attention. The hackers meant for what’s described in this article to happen from the beginning. They were out to change the world.
LOpht in Transition
04/01/2007
Michael Fitzgerald/CSO
Brian Oblivion. Kingpin. Mudge. Space Rogue. Stefan von Neumann. Tan. Weld Pond. That’s how the hacker group called the L0pht appeared before the Senate Subcommittee on Government Cybersecurity on May 19, 1998. They said, among other things, that they could take down the Internet in 30 minutes. The senators listened closely and afterward praised them effusively.
It was a landmark moment for hackers, shunned, derided and loathed by the technology industry. And it was a landmark for the L0pht too. Though the group was already known for its vulnerability disclosures, for the Hacker News Network, for tools like the hash cracking tool L0phtCrack, now “everybody [in the hacking community] wanted to be the L0pht,” remembers Jeff Moss, founder of the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences.
Not bad for a group that got its start when someone’s wife said it was time to get his computers out of the bathtub.
The L0pht shaped the way disclosures are handled and helped force vendors like Microsoft to change the way they address software security flaws. There’s no question, either, that by raising the visibility of security problems, the group spurred companies to begin paying more attention to security. “You knew you’d better rattle your own doorknobs before the hackers did,” says John Pescatore, a longtime information security analyst at Gartner.
Some think, though, that visibility has hurt software security. “They were the Led Zeppelin of gray hat hacking,” says Marcus Ranum, who is credited with creating the first commercial firewall product and is now CSO at Tenable Network Security. “By releasing gray hat tools and techniques they were able to get a tremendous amount of attention. And they opened the floodgates for all the bottom feeders that followed them.”
Ironically, it was Ranum himself who helped give the L0pht credibility. As CEO of NFR, which made software to find intruders on corporate networks, Ranum used the L0pht’s vulnerability research to strengthen his product, and hired the L0pht both to do a code review and to write modules for his product, giving the group a legitimate corporate client to tout. He says he considers the L0pht members his friends and says they are “great guys.” But he thinks those who have followed them find vulnerabilities almost as a way to blackmail corporations. He blames the L0pht, saying, “They have changed the industry for the worse.”
Nothing in the L0pht’s emergence from Boston’s bulletin board community in 1992 suggested it would achieve any more notoriety than other hacker collectives of the day. Brian Oblivion, a hacker with strong interests in radio communications, founded the group. Oblivion declined to be interviewed for this article, saying via Space Rogue that he was too busy. Chris Wysopal, who joined the L0pht in late 1992 as Weld Pond (a handle chosen by pointing at random at a map of the Boston area, because the bulletin board The Works forbade members to use real names), says that Oblivion “had so many computers in the bathroom that his wife couldn’t use it anymore.” She gave the group space in the South End artist’s loft where she made hats. And for several years, the L0pht was just a place for Oblivion and his friends to hang out after work and store their growing collection of computing equipment.
Among those friends were Space Rogue and a teenage hacker and skateboarder named Joe Grand, who went by the handle Kingpin (named for the bolt that runs through the truck, or axle, of a skateboard).
Grand calls from the road. He’s often on the road, literally—he is a triathlete good enough to have a sponsor. He’s 31 now and runs his own San Diego design shop, Grand Idea Studio, which has designed RFID and GPS modules for Parallax, an in-game videocamera for Gamecaster, and his best design yet, a video game accessory that he has licensed but can’t talk about.
Grand, an electrical engineer, has also written two books on hardware hacking and is a technical adviser to Make magazine. If all goes well with a pilot he’s recently shot, this fall we’ll see him on an engineering show on the Discovery Channel. Yet he’s nostalgic about the L0pht.
“I’m having a really hard time with realizing that I’m twice as old as when I joined the L0pht,” he says. “We did so many great things—what can I do to top that?”
The L0pht originally built a network so they could play Doom against each other. But they got more serious in 1994 and 1995, shedding some members and adding others with specific technical skills that complemented the group. They moved to a larger space in Watertown, Mass.
Excepting Grand, who was still in high school, all of the L0pht held various day jobs, often working together at places like CompUSA, Massachusetts General Hospital or BBN Technologies, the fabled research lab (Weld Pond, Brian Oblivion, Mudge and Silicosis all worked there at some point). They kept their identities hidden, in part to keep their day jobs. Everyone in the hacking community knew Dan Farmer had been fired from his job for releasing the Satan network analyzer. But the group wanted to turn the L0pht into a day job.
The charismatic, long-tressed Peiter “Mudge” Zatko had emerged as the group’s public face, if not its de facto leader. He developed, along with Wysopal, L0phtCrack, a tool that revealed weak passwords. Released in 1997, it’s still available on some websites today. “Back then, the companies would pretend [vulnerabilities] weren’t real,” says Bruce Schneier, the noted cryptographer and CTO of BT Counterpane. Schneier says the L0pht’s ability to build tools like L0phtCrack forced vendors to address security problems. “That’s the reason we have more secure software today. If it wasn’t for that, Microsoft would still be belittling, insulting and suing researchers,” he says.
By late 1998, the L0pht was actively trying to attract venture capital and turn itself into a real business—it had pushed out Stefan von Neumann and a couple of other short-lived members, and hired Christien Rioux (known as Dildog) and Paul Nash (known as Silicosis) to support L0phtCrack and do custom work for companies like NFR. The L0pht was not the first group of hackers to offer professional services or tools, but even in the giddy late 1990s, hackers still had an unsavory reputation. Finally, @stake, a security consulting firm, came to the group with $10 million in VC money and told the L0pht it could continue its research. The members voted to join it.
Even so, that merger, announced Jan. 10, 2000, marked the symbolic end of the L0pht. Over the next few years, its members were fired or drifted away, and @stake itself was gobbled up by Symantec in 2004. The only member of the L0pht still there is Nash. The transition was particularly difficult for Zatko, who spent six months on disability and left @stake after just two years.
Today, Zatko’s office at BBN is a rest area for sundry things. There’s a dead computer on a chair, and a working circa-1940s polygraph machine on a table. In a corner are two fishing rods and an antenna, part of an impromptu communications experiment. There’s a guitar signed by one-time porn stars Barbara Dare and Jamie Summers. A bound copy of the L0pht’s testimony in front of the Senate is on a shelf. On one wall hangs a picture of him with President Bill Clinton and Vinton Cerf, in which Zatko’s light brown hair is still rock-star length. It’s short now, parted in the middle. He has a goatee and wears glasses. He’s sore from a boxing workout the night before, a reminder that he’s in his late 30s.
Zatko says he can’t talk about what he does at BBN, other than to say it’s security-related and for some unmentionable three-lettered government agencies. He also says he returned to BBN, which employed him in the 1990s, before the L0pht was his job, in part because BBN told him there could be no publicity about the projects he was working on. “That was attractive as hell,” he says.
But Zatko can’t seem to stay out of the spotlight. He is the obvious model for “Soxster,” one of the main characters in former cyberczar Richard A. Clarke’s new novel, Breakpoint (the L0pht itself appears as “the Dugout”). And he acknowledges that he still “wants to make a dent in the universe,” the old motto of the L0pht.
After an hour of talking about the L0pht, Zatko suggests a tour of the older parts of the BBN laboratory in Cambridge, dating from when it was an acoustics consultancy. He shows off the silent room, the amplification room, the sonar tank, the place where it developed Boomerang—a technology being used in Iraq to help find snipers—and he talks about how much he likes the variety of the cool ideas BBN pursues.
“Originally, the L0pht was meant as a microcosm of here,” he says, with a wistful expression.
The spirit of the L0pht lives on most directly at Veracode, the security software company started by Wysopal and Rioux after they left Symantec in 2005. The company launched at the RSA Security Conference in February.
Wysopal post-L0pht helped codify responsible disclosure policies and establish the Organization of Internet Safety, and while starting Veracode he also managed to be lead author of The Art of Software Security Testing, published in December 2006.
Wysopal, at a rangy 6 foot 2 inches, was the tallest member of the L0pht and the oldest (he’s now 41). Rioux (whose handle Dildog was the original name Dilbert creator Scott Adams gave to Dogbert) was the shortest and youngest (now 29).
In early January, sitting in the conference room at Veracode, the two play Click-and-Clack about their time at the L0pht, and the purpose of Veracode, which in a real sense extends the L0pht’s mission: to make software more secure, in this case by offering a Web-based service that automatically checks software for security flaws, via a clever—and patented—technique for data flow modeling and modeling control flow analysis developed by Rioux.
Told of Ranum’s comments, Rioux makes a slight grimace. “The days are over when we should be flinging mud over the Internet about vulnerabilities,” he says.
Veracode has pulled in $19.5 million in capital from Polaris Venture Partners, Atlas Venture and .406 Ventures. While it has competitors, such as Coverity, Fortify and Ounce Labs, Veracode’s approach is “a cool spin” on existing security technology, according to Gartner’s Pescatore.
Both Wysopal and Rioux believe Veracode is ready to sharply reduce the world’s total number of software vulnerabilities.
The L0pht, then, are all now unquestionably legitimate, and their evolution serves as a metaphor for the security business, which is now mainstream. Companies like Microsoft and Oracle have developed methods to take care of vulnerabilities, and the L0pht deserves some credit for that turn of events. While the disclosure wars are again raging, thanks to bug-a-day campaigns and other ploys by the hackers of today, the L0pht’s overall impact on corporate security has been positive, say many, including Howard Schmidt, who knew the L0pht both in his role as a computer forensics investigator at the Air Force and as CSO at Microsoft.
Still, some vendors continue to try to shove security issues under the rug, and there is no question that more of the Internet is under attack today than ever before. So what of that?
Peter Neumann (no relation to the L0pht’s Stefan von Neumann) is 74 and still a principal scientist at SRI, working on security issues. He also testified before the Senate subcommittee on that day in May 1998. He says security vulnerabilities are a part of a much bigger set of problems that have existed for 40 years and probably will exist 40 years from now. But he chuckles when asked about the L0pht, saying, “They were pointing out that the emperor has no clothes on, and nobody wants to hear that, but they did it in a tasteful way that made people listen. They made a difference.”
I’m so very proud of my friends, and feel fortunate today to have had these people in my life as examples. Hell, just today I discovered a hacker friend of mine, Josh Klein (who I met after handles weren’t quite so important to ones safety, so I don’t know his) was not only the speaker in a TED talk, some of the most amazing presentations on the planet, but was in Oprah fucking magazine talking about his passions and experiments. My peeps are DOING something.
I, too, am out there doing my part to make a dent in the universe. I support a company I believe in as I make my base living to earn the stable springboard life situation I’ve built to do my more risky work. I’ve found a way to channel my compulsion to express and tell vivid stories, and the skills I’ve picked up along the way, toward a non-profit that matters. I have done some meaningful things, and I am growing, expanding, discovering new routes and possibilities nearly every day. I’ve come a long way from the girl who was found passed out under a van before defcon 6 had even started.
For a time, I wondered if my life choices, and the people I spent time with, were the reason I seemed so fucked up and constantly struggling. I wonder 15 years later, if they’re a part of the reason that, right now, I’m not.
It seems to me that this has been done somehow before, though I can’t think of an example offhand. I just signed up to DibSpace, a new online marketplace that uses a non-money currency as a bartering tool and have been playing with it. The design seems rather preliminary – the sites been around for about two months or so now – and already has about 600 members offering goods for up for dibs.
It’s like bartering but better – they keep track of your non-cash money (dibits), which are equal in value to dollars, and send you a tax doc at the end of the year to keep you legal. Rather than finding someone who’s services you want to trade for, you offer your own services for dibits, and then spend those dibits on whatever you want from the other businesses offering on the site.
From the looks of it, two guys run the thing. My initial support question, about setting up multiple businesses, was answered within about 5 minutes (soon, it will be possible to set up more than one business per account – which is good, for me.). It could easily out grow its staff, so I’m personally preparing for growing pains and looking forward to being on the ground floor to help out.
This site has even got me considering offering services I might not offer usually – like setting up a wordpress website for 150 dibs or whatever – and already thinking more creatively about how to get by in tight times. Oh, and they give you 100 dibs to spend just for signing up and adding your business.
I am excited to be working part-time at Qliance (http://qliance.com/), an amazing health care facility in Seattle which operates completely outside of the bloated US health insurance system.
I was skeptical at first, like I am about a lot of things. They are, however, stupendously awesome. Better health care for less. Better care for less than my copays under my free-to-me insurance through my old job, even. I spoke, on the phone with a doctor, about becoming a patient for 20 minutes today. 20 minutes. Have you ever done that?
In my search for a health care alternative as I lose that insurance through my former job, they have been an absolute breath of fresh air. For primary care, and the loads of little things I have break on me, I decided to go with them without hesitation last month. I am actually giddy to go in for my first official appointment next week – my 90 minute initial visit with my new doctor.
I’ve been asked a lot about how Qliance works, specifically how they can stay in business for how little they charge, and of course what the ‘catch’ is. I am happy to talk with people about Qliance and my experiences with them, and why I chose to join them vocationally as well as being a patient. I highly suggest that if you’re interested in learning more, you hit up their website at http://qliance.com or give them a call and ask them about it. They are open 7 days a week.
Additionally, though their site has some testimonials if you clicked around, it really bares mentioning a few of these:
As someone with many medical challenges, who’s involved in multiple forms of the medical profession including practice as well as insurance administration, and as a human being, I am so glad to see someone finally doing this. I am an advocate.
I momentarily considered posting in response to the article on the NYT site, But my days of putting myself in the middle of shit like that are quite behind me. I have my space carved out here, (where I post rather occasionally now) and a few other satellite networking footholds, and that’s about the gist of it anymore.
If not being drawn in by it, I can easily look past the gratuitous length and self-absorbed narcissism, (which I, being as I am, don’t see as much of a ‘bad’ thing anyway) to get at the bigger picture of its cultural and personal relevance. I believe Emilys cautionary tale is bravely presented, well written, and is worthy of an attentive forum.
I find myself comparing notes. Being thankful that I had a head start, before blogging was blogging and fuel for media companies. I started nearly 10 years before Emily did, spewing my guts and soul online as self-medication. Nothing in my life was too sacred to put on my site and allow to be picked apart, scrutinized, and more often, encouraged or supported by whoever decided to read it. As I evolved, I did similar things with my music and artwork. And eventually, I recognized my patterns and have taken steps to balance my life which have proven beneficial and quite rewarding.
After reading about Emily, I am again pleased that at one time I held the ideal that I would not ‘sell my soul’ or jump onto the emerging opportunity to make money off my journaling. How that young idealism served me in avoiding many of the pitfalls she fell into surfaces now and again as I live my life.
I’ve also found a somewhat sickening comfort in her story. I was not alone in my obsessive, often self-abusive use of my web site as a downright brutal form of therapy. Maybe my history, and the culture I come from, is not as weird and alien as.. well, it felt, at the time. Maybe I’m not such a freak afterall. I wanted to reach out to her, commiserate with her, advise her, learn from her. Thank her.
Emilys story is a candid look into a social phenomenon that is fascinating and in some ways inspiring, and also quite alarming and concerning. It’s a way of life that’s painful and scary, largely because it’s so misunderstood and scrutinized by the people outside of it.
Aside from being impressed and intrigued by anothers beautifully written saga, these responses I’m processing from the content of her immense article are rather familiar. They have been tumbled around a lot throughout my years. The masturbation is fun, but it’s not the meaty juicy cut I tend to crave nowadays.
My big “AHA!” takeaway from the piece is the reader comments. So many generalized, reactionary, hypocritical statements about my “Generation” being nothing but a whining bag of fuckheads, sitting on their computers jerking off and saying mean shit to one another instead of doing something ‘meaningful’ with their lives.
Such a majority defining Emilys story about the realities of our social development as drivel, unimportant, a waste of their time, is saddening to me. I think it’s furthering the isolation, tendency to invert, and social disconnection of people who are growing up in similar situations and turning increasingly to their blogs instead of real life. The number of people publishing their privates is growing.
In reading these comments, many from portions of our society that would not have read about Emily if it were published in a more specialized place, I’m beginning to understand why it was a brilliant move to put her on the front page of a New York Times Publication. Like we really need more tragic death and war stories, more conformity, more consumerism, more capitalism.. evidence of the very dehumanizing shit that helped fuel the arrival of people with struggles like Emily has.
The want for attention, validation, to feel valued somehow, to contribute, and to be heard, is human. It’s not just Emily attempting to get those things by sharing her thoughts in her blogs. The isolated-yet-public (and instantaneous) method of blogging sure is easier to notice than someone who quietly volunteers at a soup kitchen in order to feel valued and important. Or someone who secretly beats the shit out of their kids behind closed doors to feel respected. But let’s get real people. It’s all the same basic stuff.
I think Emily has made mistakes while seeking the attention she desires, many of which have been hurtful to herself as well as her loved ones. Her progression is obvious, as is her intelligence and sensitivity. It’s clear that she’s learning and prioritizing, finding her way. The woman was 24 when she took the high profile, high stress job at Gawker in 2006. She was a kid for christ sake, and in many respects got eaten alive. She reacted by defending herself, gulped down the resulting shitstorm, and overcame.
When I first wrote about this, after reading so many all-too-familiar “what a bunch of self absorbed shit” comments in response to Emily, I was mindful of writing about me in response. The parallels between Emily Gould and the previous incarnation of myself are quite obvious. If you know about phuqed.org, I probably don’t have to mention much else.
This isn’t as uncommon as some would like to presume. It’s a culture that’s surfacing. Just like the geek/hacker community eventually surfaced to design your ipods, lock down your POP3 servers, and trick out your PDA’s. Just like the underground, unknown music community surfaced after that to collaborate with one another online, making music available to more people by building really ugly myspace pages.
And it’s being capitalized on, just like those movements were. Brilliant, young, impressionable people are getting ground up by the corporate machine in that process. Again. Always. There is a power in sharing your experience with others. I know it well and so does Emily. So, here. Take it.
This is the third culture wave I’ve ridden along with, and watched crash full force into our society. It’s my opinion that someone choosing to post some flippant remark about how having a blog won’t make Emily special in response to the kind of social commentary and insight Emily provided, has one hell of a wake up call on the way.
At least, I sure hope a wake up call is on the way. For the sake of this generation … raised by many of the people now scowling at Emily in disgust and hypocritically telling us all about it.
When I was little (a time I miss) I would sit in the garden talking to stones because I was positive they could hear me. I slept under my bed because I knew there was a quiet man, thin and in a suit, with a bald shiny head and a long shiny knife and a pair of black shiny shoes, who checked for me in my bed every night. I pressed the wart on my dad’s thumb because I was sure that every time I did, somebody got a wish granted. I spent hours building tiny homes for fairies: moss for the rugs, curved pieces of bark for the roofs, little chimneys and hearthstones, and beds made of flower petals. When my mom would complain about my dirt-stained shorts and muddy, tangled hair and grungy fingernails, I would explain that I was just doing my job. After all, without me, where would all the fairies sleep? Months later I would come back to look at my beautiful little homes and I would find them full of roly-polies and damp with mold. I was puzzled at first, but it started to sink in. The fairies didn’t use my houses. The fairies never existed. And one day my dad came home with a flat pink spot on his thumb. He had had his wart removed.
Later in my life, after all those rituals had faded (sometime in middle school, I think), I became enamored with Peter Pan. I’ve always had an intense fear of growing up, and Peter Pan was my ticket out. He was the last one of my dreams, but I completely believed in him, completely trusted him and never told any of my friends. I would sit in the basketball court in our backyard and whisper for Peter, in case he was hiding in the bushes. I would hug myself and envision us rising over the treetops, walking cleanly away from everything, never looking back. I wrote “Peter Pan: Enter Here” on a Post-it note and stuck it to my balcony door (always kept unlocked). I realized that he probably couldn’t read, so I included a picture of a door opening. I turned 10. Then I turned 11 and 12 and realized that soon it would be too late, that I would be too grown-up for him to take me away, so I desperately started bargaining. I promised I would be better than Wendy, better than any of the Lost Boys, if only he would come for me. He never did. It left me empty and devastated and angry, and I still feel it burning me whenever I remember those times.
I felt foolish and I felt lied to, and, perhaps in response, I started lying. Now I lie uncontrollably, compulsively — anything is game. I once faked stomach pain so intense I went to the emergency room for five days. Apparently I writhed and sobbed and shook even when I was on so much morphine I couldn’t remember anything. I couldn’t form coherent sentences, but I could lie. Something feels wrong about that, as if lying is like breathing. The strangest part is that I’ve never felt genuinely bad about that lie, or any of the lies I’ve told. I know I should, and there are rational reasons why lying is bad; I just can’t take any of them to heart.
It’s stupid and petty to call the death of childhood fantasies a betrayal of my trust, but that’s what it feels like. All the beautiful things I believed are gone, and now I can’t believe anyone or anything. I realized how easy it is to be lied to, how easy it is to lie, and now I’ve lost both my ability to trust and my own trustworthiness. I’m 18. I’m young, and most of what I feel qualifies as teenage angst, but this seems different. Something feels dead inside of me, and I don’t know how to revive it. I don’t know if there’s anything left to revive.
Anonymous
Dear Anonymous,
Deeply intuitive, highly sensitive people must become accustomed to having their dreams shattered. Those dreams will be shattered night and day, day in and day out; you can almost hear the sound of them shattering; it sounds like the shattering of glass that is part leather; it sounds like the shattering of the sea. In fact the sea is an endless shattering of waves just like our dreams: You hear them crashing all night long. You sense the passionate aspiration of the wave, how it reaches toward the sky before it falls; you know also how long was its gestation, how it formed way out beyond the reach of ships or planes in this or that tempest — all tempests being more or less the same to a wave. They’re just energy. Night after night you hear it, each wave traveling thousands of miles, reaching the shallows, aspiring to a height that in being reached breaches its form, and tumbling over. That’s the sound we hear night and day at the ocean: the sound of dreams shattering.
That’s what we hear on the street, too, as we go about our business, the sound of dreams shattering on the pavement, collapsing into foam and noise.
What can you do? Well, you can celebrate. You can dance about it. This constant shattering is the universe in motion; everything shatters like the waves of the sea. We all shatter. Everything vibrates, is porous, is temporary; it all moves. Liquids course through us; invisible particles pass through us; chemicals enter us and exit us; we are factories of oxygen and nitrogen and carbon; and, as thinking creatures, we have antennae of the most sensitive kind; we pick up rare signals from unknown transmitters that leave no signature; we divine patterns in the air. We sometimes almost see the whole thing before us. And then it shatters. It all shatters.
Welcome to the shattering world. Welcome. You are young. You are young enough to remember being able to see into the nature of the world easily. Kids can do that. They see right through what we take to be solid. It isn’t solid to them. It’s more like what it really is, a temporary vibration, a cluster of waves on pause, something shimmering in the air that you can just barely make out. That’s what we’re living in.
If you give the population certain kinds of tests you find that most people are well suited to ignoring all this, well suited to propping up the illusions that we live with: that what you see actually exists, that we live in a physical world, that laws hold, that you get up in the morning and you do your work and go to bed at night and raise children and that’s that. It is not hard to imagine why this might be so; in the long evolution of humanity it was often the case that tribes needed to eat, and those who could kill or farm or cook would be more highly valued than those who claimed to see inside the hearts of trees and artichokes. So most of us are well suited to the workaday world. But not all. Some of us insist on looking inside the invisible heart of creation. We think there’s something there. We stand on street corners trying to explain what we know. We go mad. We become rock musicians or mystics, or we go into the woods for solitude, or we seek religion or science. You know, the whole deal with kooks and whatnot. That’s us. You and me. Bunch of kooks.
But we must get jobs or we don’t eat. We must do well in school. So we must all agree that this illusory world of important work and money and relationships is the real world. We must agree that it is real in order to stay motivated and out of jail. We tacitly conspire like theatrical producers to put on a ridiculous play that has been selling out on Broadway for 10,000 years. Our cultural project requires this unending and often exhausting suspension of disbelief, to shut down what we hear inside our heads and pretend that this is not just a fleeting moment among the stars, that we actually are here on this earth to promote democracy and find a better mouthwash.
And that is the job to which you are being called now. True, it is sad. You are being called to join this army of citizens who toil night and day in support of an illusion. You are being called to renounce what you know and who you are. It is sad, but it is also a rite of passage. And it is just another role in the play.
It’s like joining the army. You get up early and put on a uniform and march out there to kill the enemy that you used to love, the world of the “imagination.”
The important thing to realize is that everything you are experiencing as a young person making the transition to adulthood is normal. It sounds crazy but it is simply the truth of the matter. When we are young, we see easily what physicists and mystics know only through a lifetime of arduous study: that matter is a vibration, sort of, and that everything is energy, sort of, that invisible worlds exist, and that language can only capture the edges of this eternal and infinite reality.
So let me tell you about my dentist. My dentist says to me the other day, Cary, you are a thinking man, so think about this. My son, he says, is in college up at Davis, and he’s home on break and he says, Dad, do you believe God is all powerful? If God is all powerful, can he create a weight that is too heavy for him to pick up?
And I am floating very high on nitrous oxide by this point, so I see it quite clearly. To a human pretending to be a god, that’s an insurmountable contradiction. But to a god, it’s no problem at all. The problem is language. Our language is not the language of God. Mathematics is the language of God. I feel sure that mathematically such an indeterminate state of being both all powerful and able to create things that defy one’s omnipotence is amenable to description — like you can describe quantum states and stuff like that. I’m no mathematician, but I feel confident it would be no problem if I spoke the language of math. I’m not sure I got it across to my dentist, as I was pretty high on nitrous, but I meant to tell him. So Dr. D, if you’re out there, that’s my answer.
Here is one more thing and then I will shut up: We know that most of what we intuit is actually real, in the sense that we are constricted more than expanded by our senses, in the Blakean sense: We begin as eternal, capable of infinite knowledge and understanding, and are increasingly bound and blinded by our senses as we live our earthbound lives. So we treat our various arts as illusion, in order to continue with our daily routine. We pretend that the arts, the sciences, the ideas of mystics and saints, that those things are the realm of illusion and unreality when in fact the opposite is true.
This shaking thing bound with baling wire and string, this prison routine of paperwork and punishment, this mechanical bird we operate: This is the illusion. What you saw in the woods, the things you make in your mind, those things are closer to what is real.
But don’t tell anybody. Instead, you have to find ways to embody this vision so that everyone can agree it’s not actually real. You have to become a maker of films or pottery. You have to put it in something physical so people can say, Ah, what a nice vase! Let’s put some flowers in it!
Frequently, I have difficulty articulating what it is that we do at LRS and what I feel my place is in it all in a fashion that someone outside the troupe can readily assimilate. Often I find challenges in helping my friends and loved ones understand what they’re in for, and how different we are, when they come to see me perform, or share the experience of being a guest at the studio with me.
Recently, I became privy to a poetic, well-written and obviously heartfelt summation of a friends first experience at LRS. I feel very excited and privileged to share it with you, with permission by the author and our creative director.
REVIEW OF The Black Show at THE LITTLE RED STUDIO
The Little Red Studio is immersion theatre. I had no idea about this going in, and in fact, had thought, as I walked up to their seemingly unassuming red door just north of downtown, that I’d be seeing just what I’d been invited by theater coordinator Kerry Christensen to see: a show. You know, a show…a play. The kind where the same thing happens as has happened a hundred times before. You buy a ticket. You get program. You find your seat. The lights go out and something begins to happen on a stage. You watch whatever it is that happens. You leave. I had no idea how different this particular show was going to be.
When I walked up, the man at the door informed me that there was a reception around the corner and that I would be led back to the theatre once the space and the cast was ready. I remember one of my eyebrows going up as I looked at him, sort if in this quizzical Spock sort of way, as I thought “You mean I can’t just walk in and sit in the dark and prepare to watch something happen onstage?” Already this night was turning interesting.
I walked to the space around the corner and upon walking into what seemed to be the theater’s office space, I was asked by the first of many people that night who greeted me with a smile, to check in, which I did with two women who handed me a carnation, and offered me a glass of wine. They asked me to enjoy the string player who was filling the room with music, or to look at the art on the walls while I waited to be led to the space for the show.
The art, which I later realized were accurately painted images from the show I was about to see, were huge canvases, most definitely intriguing: nude bodies of various sizes and shapes in body paint, all with texture and feeling. This show was not going to be a tired rendition of Chekhov or Ibsen. I was getting really interested.
People milled around chatting, each carrying a flower like I was. The room felt somewhat like a cabaret, but with an edge. I could sense that I might end up being a participant in the evening…
We were here to see The Black Show, the Little Red Theatre’s second of three “color” shows, and this one in particular had caught my attention. It had been described to me as erotic, death-infused, and rich. These are themes which strike home with me, and having felt recently a need to connect with more passion in my life, and to explore my heart and mind in new adventurous ways, this sounded like a great show to go see.
Turns, out, it was a great show in which to particpate as well. What actually happens in the show? That is difficult to say. Every night is a little different. It all depends on what the participants bring to the the event in terms of their willingness and energy.
On this particular night, we were led from the reception to the theatre space in groups of three or four. My guide, in costume as emcee for the evening with face paint, a thick chain around his neck, and a billowing shirt, was Jeff, owner of the theatre and painter of the images I’d seen in the reception as it turned out. He explained with enthusiasm and sincerity, that he wanted to welcome us to the evening and then once inside, he divided our little group up, sending each of us off with a cast member to get a tour of the space.
Jeff was my guide and he started to show me around. And once inside of the Little Red Studio, a tour is appreciated, as we had entered a different world. This was no normal theatre space. The Little Red Studio did not contain rows of seats facing a stage. It felt more like a loft space designed for personal exploration and artistic experimentation.
There were rich colors, plush seats and cushions arranged all over in various configurations, as well as light and dark areas around the room and its various corners and nooks in which different elements of the performance itself laid in waiting for the night to begin. Jeff showed me the main staging area with its shadowy lighting and huge blank canvas against the back wall, a pedastal in the middle of another part ofthe room on which a perfect bodied girl in a tight latex jumpsuit wearing a gas mask stood observing people come in… you know…the usual fare for a night at the theatre.
All around the room, cast members toured other guest/participants through the space, explaining different things to them. A girl with red palm prints over her breasts walked by silently. Different other cast members, (or were they just visions of some kind….or more unsettling and exciting, other visitors to the Studio, just more engaged than I was?), made their way through the space as well, welcoming and preparing us all for the night.
It was difficult to tell who was cast member and who was spectator, but as I quickly realized, the most difficult thing for me to determine that night was whether or not I myself was a cast member or a spectator.
We were invited to take seats around the main performing area, and then the show began. It began without fanfare. It just began. Three butoh figures, came forth from the dark. If you’ve never seen butoh before, it is sort of like your worst nightmare come to life, mixed with delicate grace. The three cast members, looking like aged corposes, and painted head to toe with what looked like pale mud, staggered into the play space. They each were turned by other cast members to face the audience, where they then froze in place.
Each of three cast members who had turned them, proceeded to take a small container of black paint, and proceeded to pour that thick paint over the head of each still figure. As the paint dripped slowly down bodies to the floor, each of the cast members reached back for a martini glass, also filled with paint, and a paint brush. They proceeded to look for people in the audience to whom to hand the glass and brush combo.
This wasnt an empty gesture, or a trite way of suggesting that we might at some point break the “fourth wall”. This was an invitation, which I accepted and which we all did, and within minutes, we were all particpant performers, painting these three ghostly figures ourselves. At the Little Red Studio, there is no fourth wall, or third, second, or first for that matter.
After the body painting, we were asked by our emcee to make our way to another part of the Studio space to see two women writhing and flowing and intertwining in the middle of the floor to music. These women, erotic and sensual and not pornographic, were described by our emcee as goddesses interacting as they want to be seen.
As soon as they were done with their display, we were brought to another area of the space to hear poetry, read slam style, by the very cast members who we’d bodypainted just an bit before.
The cast then invited people to taste chocolate in the center of the space, a richness that made the sensory offerings of earlier in the night very tactile and real. The night then relaxed into an open party for a bit, with dancing, music, and wine flowing as people made their way around and through the space as if it was a nightclub. Performers and spectators interacted as one. This is the Little Red Studio’s idea of an intermission: it was a continuation of the theme.
The Little Red Studio never breaks character because there are no characters to break. Its performers are living their art and they invite you to live yours as well. Like I said, its immersion theatre.
There’s an apprehension with any theatre like this…and for the record, I want to say that there isnt much theatre out there in the world like this, and probably for that very reason: it makes you nervous, albeit in the best possible way. At the Little Red Theatre, you find yourself with that same worry that you might have when an entertainer is looking for a volunteer for his or her show looks in your direction and starts to motion towards you. Its a sense of “do I really want to be here right now?”.
But you do. Because to say no to the experience is to limit life. When it all comes down, I realize again and again that there is so much truth to whoever it was who said “I will never regret the things I have done, just the things I haven’t done.” The Little Red Studio offers you the chance to try things you haven’t done, if you have the courage to say yes to the experience. I found myself excited and intruigued, nervous and at the same time ready for anything.
We reconvened in the main performing space to watch an arial bondage piece that made me want to study knots in which a woman, tied by her partner, is swung around the space from a rig connected to a point in the center of the ceiling. It was seductive, enticing, and unsettling at the same time. He was too good with the knots he tied, and she was too easily tied. I liked it. It made me reflect on power and control, in a passionate context.
We watched the girl who was wearing the gas mask and latex earlier, be body painted on an altar of sorts, now wearing neither latex or mask. She was a vision, perfect, and captivating. All of this screamed of the themes of the night: of sensuousness, richness, life, and avoiding death by delving more into life itself.
Throughout these seemingly disjointed experiences, there is spoken text of course…but not in a traditional sense. Narrators guide us through the expeirence with thoughts death and life and the pursuit of passion. There is a tactile sense to everything, from the words themselves, to the rich red fabric which covers a naked form writhing on the floor, to the ending of the piece, which was the most tactile of all.
The cast assembles in the center of the stage and performers invite by extended hand each member of the audience to approach the cast and stand in front of them…there, the cast showers attention on the audience member, with smiles, with feathers that brush against your face, with laughter, with hands on your arms and eye contact…and you just take it in and say yes to it. It is a ritual of passage from the show back out into the world, and that touch and connection is a feeling more than anything else that you can bring into your day to day lives and continue to long for as you go through the sameness of your day.
And long for it you will, long after the lights in the theatre space come up.
The Little Red Studio offers not just this show but many others. Having had a chance to see their recent two man show on manhood and gender, I can assure you that this is a space that is being well used to challenge, inform, and to forge new theatrical ground in Seattle.
The space deserves your patronage, and even more than that, you, passionate reader, deserve to create space in your life to be there in order to experience it all. Its worth it, and so are you.
In the last few weeks, as I have struggled with my bodies sophisticated, yet debilitating compensation patterns, and face another MRI of my impinged spine, I have been tumbling with the possible reality that it may be time to leave my aerial career behind for good. I am fascinated by my body, its ability to rotate, guard, pinch, splint, and shape around whatever is causing all this purposeful chaos.
And of course, I am scared. However it’s been fun and challenging to re-think my role at the studio, were my being grounded to be the case, and how excited I am to continue branching into other outlets and energy exchanges there.
Gregs words have fueled my passion for the company, the troupe, and what we are collectively sharing with the world. I’ve replenished inspiration and drive regarding my contributions to this entity that has shaped my life so much, enriched my human experience boundlessly, and shown me what it is, for me, to hope and be free. I feel invigorated, released into broader possibilities, and hold an even higher regard for what it is we invoke, and what we are becoming, at LRS. Thank you for sharing your experience with us, Greg.
Greg can be reached with comments and questions through the Little Red Studio.
One day a young man was standing in the middle of the town proclaiming that he had the most beautiful heart in the whole valley. A large crowd gathered and they all admired his heart for it was perfect. There was not a mark or a flaw in it. Yes, they all agreed it truly was the most beautiful heart they had ever seen. The young man was very proud and boasted more loudly about his beautiful heart.
Suddenly, an old man appeared at the front of the crowd and said “Why your heart is not nearly as beautiful as mine.” The crowd and the young man looked at the old man’s heart. It was beating strongly, but full of scars, it had places where pieces had been removed and other pieces put in, but they didn’t fit quite right and there were several jagged edges. In fact, in some places there were deep gouges where whole pieces were missing.
The people stared — how can he say his heart is more beautiful, they thought?
The young man looked at the old man’s heart and saw its state and laughed. “You must be joking,” he said. “Compare your heart with mine, mine is perfect and yours is a mess of scars and tears.”
“Yes,” said the old man, “yours is perfect looking but I would never trade with you. You see, every scar represents a person to whom I have given my love – I tear out a piece of my heart and give it to them, and often they give me a piece of their heart which fits into the empty place in my heart, but because the pieces aren’t exact, I have some rough edges, which I cherish, because they remind me of the love we shared. Sometimes I have given pieces of my heart away, and the other person hasn’t returned a piece of his heart to me. These are the empty gouges — giving love is taking a chance. Although these gouges are painful, they stay open, reminding me of the love I have for these people too, and I hope someday they may return and fill the space I have waiting. So now do you see what true beauty is?”
The young man stood silently with tears running down his cheeks. He walked up to the old man, reached into his perfect young and beautiful heart, and ripped a piece out. He offered it to the old man with trembling hands.
The old man took his offering, placed it in his heart and then took a piece from his old scarred heart and placed it in the wound in the young man’s heart. It fit, but not perfectly, as there were some jagged edges.
The young man looked at his heart, not perfect anymore but more beautiful than ever, since love from the old man’s heart flowed into his. They embraced and walked away side by side.
How sad it must be to go through life with a whole heart.
Remember…
Work like you don’t need the money.
Love like you’ve never been hurt.
Dance like nobody is watching.
Pass this on to someone you like. I did.
For show and touring information, time lines, sound tracks (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED), more beautiful pictures, 360 degree stage displays and the opportunity to purchase cirque merchandise, visit their exceptional web site at http://cirquedusoleil.com
After seeing Mystere in las vegas.. I have become absolutely fascinated with joining Cirque Du Soleil. I have put my original music composition on hold in order to practice the style of singing that cirque uses, as well as tracking down a gymnastics center that will train me privately since there are no classes in existence for students of my age group. I practice singing to the live Mystere sound track at least once throughout a day, and have working with the Saltimbanco track as well.. though it isnt as rewarding to sing to because the recording isnt live. I also rented Algeria, the movie.. which wasnt a show exactly but more of a love story.
What I remember most about the story was the ring master talking to all the performers before the show, after his daughter left to be with her true love. He drew a line in the sand on the ground and asked his hoop artist to cross over it, then asked if she understood what she had just done. When she said no, he explain that she had stepped from the dark into the light. They are the dark. We are the light. We are the smiles, the ambition. The show is to bring light to those who live primarily in the dark.
When you are in the light you forget about your problems, about your hardships, and you shed that light on all who have come to see you perform. Thats exactly the way I feel. I want to do it to make people happy, just as becoming a trance DJ was for the joy of making people happy. It’s all about doing something that matters, and makes a difference. I think have -finally- found the perfect way for me to do that.
After seeing Saltimbanco twice while they were in town here, and being witness to the diversity and energy present in cirques traveling shows, I have decided that rather than be stuck up on a balcony singing for a resident show in a less than desirable area (vegas or Orlando.. ugh.) I would like to travel with them. According to Susan, one of the singers with the show whom I had the pleasure of meeting, Saltimbanco is the only current show in which the singers are an active participant on stage rather than being on the sidelines.
They performed chinese poles in both Mystere and Saltimbanco.. it just absolutely fascinated me. The performers wear special shoes to help them grip.. but the poles are indeed smooth metal. The pressure on your arms and wrists alone during some of the performance is enough to fracture bones if you are not properly trained. If you have ever seen a cirque du soleil show LIVE (TV does NOT fucking count you posers!) you will notice that most of the performers do more than one type of amazing act. In Saltimbanco, one person i noticed in particular was part of bungee, chinese poles, russian swing and assisted in almost every other act in the show.
It’s amazing what awesome characters are involved in the making of the show, and how easy it is to become totally entranced in their stories. With Mystere, the theater was so huge it was hard to tell who was who, but on the up side i was far enough away to see everything that is going on.
One thing about cirque is that there is ALWAYS more than one point of interest in every act, even if the lighting focuses on one character for a while. I am also interested in duo trapeze, russian swing and contortion. Circus – celebration of life, exploration and the joy of experiencing it.
