downward glance.
And yet.
I’m sure it had something to do with the weird confluence of recent events – the shock of MJ’s passing, my dismal, meaningless conference presentation to the singular audience of Amanda Trugget, those disturbing encounters with Jimmy Stewart at the Arcotel… It was difficult not to read some kind of connection between these things, and I felt like the moth was trying to tell me what it was.
Her comment was, true to form, oblique, ambiguous, and strange: “like Birds One Claw upon the Air…”
To which quothballetcarper had immediately responded: “fancy seeing you here little lady. hows the pointe work going? practice makes perfect. i have my eye on you. bye.”
She answered, with what appeared to me to be modesty, quiet dignity, and slight defiance: “I cannot dance upon my Toes – No Man instructed me.”
He shot back: “Instruction is my specialty, little lady! Ur speakin to the ‘pro’! Whippin gals like you into shape is my ‘racquet’! Dont think Im goin to go easy on u just because ur a girl!”
Wow. And they thought arakhachatran was obnoxious.
I watched Natalia Makarova dance The Dying Swan five more times. Her tremulous, skinny legs stuttered over her pointe shoes. Her mouth was pulled back in a grimace. Everything about her communicated suffering.
“i have my eye on you”? What exactly did he mean by that?
I considered forwarding the YouTube link of Natalia Makarova to Sven but decided against it. Too much tragedy.
The great thing about that Makarova dance is that it’s obscene, but everybody acts like it’s normal. There are a lot of contemporary choreographers who just go ahead and make the obscenity explicit. People like Marie Chouinard. She’ll put her dancers in bondage gear and pasties with prosthetics and toe shoes. I kind of like Marie Chouinard, but Makarova’s more interesting to me.
There’s a famous essay by the dance theorist Susan Leigh Foster called “The Ballerina’s Phallic Pointe.” The title basically tells you everything. I could go into detail, but it’s probably not necessary. It’s a great essay. When I read it in graduate school all kinds of things became clear to me. Susan Foster is smart, and the essay is very erudite, but the tone is a little cheeky. At one point, she says, “She is, in a word, the phallus… Now this is a naughty thing to propose.” Well, yes, Susan, it is.
I like to imagine what would happen if you passed this essay out to all those stout, pushy moms with their little girls in pink tights at the Joffrey School.
There’s another famous essay in the field of dance studies by Joann Kealiinohomoku, called “An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance.” That one also tells you pretty much what you need to know in the title. I often think of that one when people ask me if I do “ethnic dance.”
I’d been thinking a lot about Michael Jackson, and not just because of that dying swan. Actually, it was probably hard for anybody to stop thinking about him that week. Standing in line at the register at Morton Williams, I noticed his picture was all over the tabloids. I’m not sure how they rallied all of those editorial forces so quickly. He was even on the cover of TIME – just days after his demise. The conspiracy theories were rampant. I usually tend to be a pretty sober person. I’m not particularly quick to suspect foul play. But everyone seemed to agree that that personal physician of his was going to have some explaining to do. And as I said, I had my own personal concerns.
Of course mystery was something MJ seemed to encourage, what with the disguises, the glove, the various things he seemed to be trying to conceal. And maybe it’s natural that his propensity for concealment produced in me – as it did in many others – a complicated response. I already mentioned Reverend Billy. Like everybody else, I was a little perplexed by Barack Obama’s statement on Jackson’s death – but I also understood why he needed to pussyfoot around the issue. You may remember – he called MJ a “spectacular performer” but he felt compelled to add that there were “aspects of his life that were sad and tragic.” There were a few different ways to interpret this: as a melancholy reflection on MJ’s purportedly abusive upbringing, or as a subtle repudiation of his own purported abuses of others; as a lamentation of his seeming inability to own and inhabit his blackness, or as a suggestion that a racist world had led him to practically flay himself as a sacrificial lamb at the altar of whiteness. I realize my language may appear a little exaggerated. But maybe not so much for somebody like Barack Obama.
On the evening of July 29, the day that I’d gotten home from Zagreb, unpacked, showered, shopped, done my ballet exercises, moved commas, putzed around on YouTube and discovered that uncanny video of Natalia Makarova flapping around like a gorgeous, convulsive fowl, I decided to check in one more time on falserebelmoth. “Decided to check in” may be stating this a bit casually. The truth is, she’d been flapping, moth-like, at the edge of my consciousness, and my own fascination was striking me as a bit creepy. But I couldn’t help myself: I went directly to her channel. She’d only joined a month ago, which is when she posted that Satie dance. Five channel views. Two subscribers (GoFreeVassals and that pesky quothballetcarper). There was a short string of channel comments, all from the carper, all in the last few days: “Hi. Two assignments. Learn Harvest Moon. Make a dance in ur bathtub. We dont have alot of time. Practice! Bye.” Then, “Back from my vacation at Moms. Aside from my racquet, Ive been using an axe and a chain saw a great deal recently, so when I say that I will hound you until you have produced, you must understand the real threat. I cn be brutal. Dont mistake the mild demeanor.” And finally, “Not joking about ur tub. Or the axe. Hurry up, no exuses. And remember, ‘Never say sorry its a sign of weekness.’ ”
The tone of these posts gave me pause. Obviously, he was probably joking – but the persistent axe jokes made me uneasy. I realized the degree of my interest in these private exchanges was inappropriate. It was unlikely that the carper was going to act on his threats. And yet stranger things had happened – like the case of that German Internet cannibal.
Somewhat guiltily, I clicked on the carper’s moniker and was transported to his page. He, too, had only signed up a short while ago, and in fact, he only had one channel view – mine being, presumably, the second. He did, however, have a video, evidently just posted. My heart registered with a thunk the identity of the slight, poised figure standing in the tub, eyes downcast, dressed in virginal white: it was the rebel moth! The neck of a miniature guitar, secured by a large, pale hand, was visible in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. The bathroom’s fluorescent light cast a dreamlike glow on the frosted glass of the shower enclosure.
The title of the video was “bathtub dance (harvest moon).” I clicked play.
Another plunky little chord progression started up – not Satie, but the old Tin Pan Alley tune, “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” on the uke. After four stumbling little bars of an intro, a scratchy, crooning voice came in:
The night was mighty dark so you could hardly see,
For the moon refused to shine…
Couple sittin’ underneath a willow tree,
For love they pined.
The little maid was kinda ’fraid of darkness
So she said, “I guess I’ll go…”
Boy began to sigh, looked up at the sky,
And told the moon his little tale of woe…
The “boy” squawked his mild complaint, as the “little maid” tiptoed her way around her tub en demi-pointes. At one point she executed a demure little bump and grind. The song and the dance were ridiculous, melancholy, amateurish, luminous, lewd, indecent, and foreboding, all at the same time. With the last chord, the scene faded to white, and the ambient echo of the bathroom seemed to hang for a moment in the air.
I