I realized something today about something I saw yesterday. We were walking in the mountain town of Leh (it’s cluttered and noisy with generators spewing diesel everywhere) and its chaos of honking horns and mix of cultures (Buddhist, Muslim, a pinch of Hinduism for being In India and white tourists from everywhere they hail from) has made it difficult for me to see much or pinpoint anything. Yesterday I had a close to out-of-body experience using the Internet. But then we were walking past a gate, one of those orange …
It’s Been a While
It has been quite a long time since my words appeared here in blog-land. As I thought about it during a week away from the Hong Kong hustle, most of what I would have or could have written in those intervening weeks was: So many people. So many people. So many people. So many people. So many people. So many people. So many people. So many people. So many people. So many people. The plentitude of people took over. About all I could comprehend was the pushing and elbowing and …
Merce Cunningham Dance Company Final Legacy Tour
T and I saw Merce Cunningham’s Dance Companies’ performance of Nearly Ninety a few weeks ago while she was visiting. This version of the piece was accompanied by new music from former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones and mixed-media sound composer Takehisa Kosugi. I had not seen Cunningham’s Company perform before, and watching contemporary dance for the first time in years in Hong Kong snapped many things in to place. The dancers thrillingly embodied relationships in their every movement. Just writing that I am thrown back to a tribe …
Bearing Glocks
This is now weeks-old news. Another person in America went crazy on a crowd with a fully–loaded machine gun. Prior to this, a few months ago, J and I found ourselves sitting around a campfire with University students from mainland China and Hong Kong. These students could not comprehend how anyone in the U.S. could buy a gun (they also wanted to know how it could be true that people in America did not believe in Global Warming, but that’s a whole ‘nother post…). I have never had much cause …
This Is ‘Critical’
Vocabulary. One of the amazing things about languages is how differently words can be interpreted, and how much this has to do with context. As universal and boundary-crossing as languages can be, they are still, always and ever, a local matter. The word “critical” is one we use all the time in a positive light when discussing educational pedagogy in the states. In the U.S. we talk about wanting to create “critical thinker,” and no one bats an eye at the possibly negative connotations of the word “critical.” Of course, …