Clean slate excitement

Coming to you live from my brand-newly renovated bedroom (still in process, actually as I need to paint all the doors)!

I'm savoring a tingly moment laying in bed on freshly washed sheets within freshly painted and constructed walls. Space! It's everywhere! 

For anyone stumbling across this post who doesn't regularly indulge my griping on the woes and glory of diy construction, the abstract is three and a half years ago we bought a house under foreclosure in a boston neighborhood that needed a complete overhaul. The most recent project is making a beautiful feel-good bedroom with a usable closet that had a chance of housing my unnecessarily large amount of things to wear. The preexisting bedroom was tiny, perhaps 8'x15', and had a laughably small space to hang clothes (I refuse to call it a closet). Luckily there was a strange L-shaped room next door, and the shared wall wasn't load-bearing.  In January we moved our queen-sized bed into my 10'x12' home office (!! I won't mention what became of my productivity in these last few months), and broke out the sledgehammers and contractor trash bags.

Fast-forward through weekends full of demo and hauling Sheetrock, joint compound and the Sisyphus-reminiscent task of eradicating the constant snowfall of dust from the entire house, and the whole month of February where Russell was away on a business trip and I kept trying to get rid of the dust (nemesis!).  Flash back to me in my clean-sheeted bed facing a brand new direction (bed/chair/desk alignment in any given room is a huge deal to my brain), with super saturated cool-Brown walls and gleaming shiny white trim and reconstructed radiators (I'm a painting boss, no modesty). Awesome new bronze light fixtures hang overhead, but most importantly in my direct line of sight are four doors blocking the way to a spacious new closet! 

This is certainly the best moment of home ownership. Even though it's seriously rough gutting every room in the house, getting to live this feeling upon completion of each room in the house provides complete validation.

Now, how to decorate...

Contently unsettled

It's late, but not as late as it's been on many other late nights.

I'm tired, but too wired to sleep.

After a full day of painting and hip related appointments and moments I declared myself free of both things, flinging myself on the couch to read after rehearsal, and yet now I'm upstairs painting with a sore hip. 

Too much symmetry that's not symmetrical at all.

Something refreshing in dance-film-ville

Here is short film that's been circulating Facebook-land.  Maybe you've seen it already but I wanted to leave it here because I think it's beautiful.  

Often (opinion) dance films are strangely void of, well, dance.  Possibly over half of the dance on camera I seek out seems to be comprised of hand gestures, artistic shots or pedestrian movement, but not a lot of bodies moving in athletic, intricate, choreographed ways.  The other half of the time I find myself watching a dance that has consequently been filmed, as is, for the stage, which doesn't really quality as a dance film.  

The selection below melds beautiful vigorous movement with a solid argument for being a film piece, not live work.  The choreography holds equal weight to the choices made in setting up the shots, the location, the music, the costuming, the editing.  Everything is genuine, intentional, any hand on a body (one's own or the other's) is super deliberate... refreshing.  All of the components are incredibly well balanced and actually deserve to be a semi-narrative film piece that can be categorized as a dance film. 

Valtari- Written & Directed by Christian Larson. Choreography by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui

Now, is the top removal near the end a bit cliche?  Maybe.  I could very well be sick and tired of people taking off their clothes onstage in dance/theater/perf art, just for the hell of it.  Then again it's kind of nice that the pair of dancers has the naked torso skin-on-skin happening.  Doesn't it feel really lovely to lay your bare back against someone else's?  Yep.  

Also-also, does the warehouse setting remind anyone else of a post-apocalyptic version of the game Portal?

Strikes a chord

Give yourself 19 minutes and check this out. It's nice to have someone speak so accurately and eloquently about something I've been thinking about/worried about/questioning for years, though if you read this blog you probably know me too well to consider me an introvert, in fact, you probably think of me as semi-obnoxious.

The Fox

Ok.  Last Friday I was listening to a weekly music show on NPR, and they unleashed this bad boy.  I thought it was great, until I saw the video, and I fell even more madly in love with these crazy Norwegians that make songs about foxes.  If you're bored at least make it to a chorus...

Tech week anthem, anyone?  How quickly will this become annoying...

(answer: never.)

But what if you're playing video games as an outcome of distraction?

Interesting article on how to rebuild an attention span.  Unfortunately I can't find the time or focus to finish it right now so I'll have to get to it later.  If anyone gets through it and can answer the question in the subject of this blog post let me know.

Sprezzatura

Sprezzatura [sprettsaˈtura] is an Italian word originating from Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, where it is defined by the author as "a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it".^[1] It is the ability of the courtier to display "an easy facility in accomplishing difficult actions which hides the conscious effort that went into them".^[2] Sprezzatura has also been described "as a form of defensive irony: the ability to disguise what one really desires, feels, thinks, and means or intends behind a mask of apparent reticence and nonchalance".^[3]

The word has entered the English language; the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "studied carelessness".^[4]

(definition stolen from Wikipedia after I happened upon this new world!)