Last Night a Necklace Saved My Life

BY | Posted on | FILED UNDER Categories Brooklyn, Diglot, Kermis, Lapidary

I received a package in the mail with a new necklace and an earcuff. I did my sanitizing ritual and I immediately start crushing on my new acquisitions. Annika is talented at her craft and makes unfussy things you can wear with anything. But still, this feels vapid. Why do prettiness at a time like this? Cerebrally, I can justify it perfectly: this sale was donating proceeds to health-care workers and I want to continue to support women-owned small business. But this rationale does not account for the discreet, reckless glee when I catch myself in the mirror.

Monica Salmaso’s duets of classic samba bear two distinct traits: very humble objects for percussion instruments, like a clay bowl or aluminum table, and guests airkissing the opposite edge of the frame at each farewell. This awareness of the confining edge and the need to broadcast human contact, mirrors and models for its audience. We Brazilians are big on kissing our cheeks, and touching each other liberally. A stranger might splay his hand over your shoulder blades in a supermarket aisle, just to scooch by with a heavy basket. Contact is not immediately perceived as a threat. The physical boundary of privacy is just not upheld that way. This gets me wondering how long before a random touch will resume being just a signal, and not a sentence.

Matchboxes serving as an impromptu tambourine is an old trope in samba culture. To me, it’s always shown that people are undaunted by not being able to afford a proper instrument, and let nothing stand in the way of their song, which is commendable. But it’s the air kissing the edge of the frame that moves me to tears, because it serves as evidence of their deep commitment to visible affection, but also the more zeitgeisty awareness of spectatorship, like a benevolent, compound investment in the language of togetherness. She titled the series: “ Ô de casas”—this is what you’d say if spontaneously venturing into your neighbor’s home in the Brazilian countryside to announce your arrival. When John Berger draws a line in the sand between nudity and nakedness, he does so by bringing our attention to the fact that nudity includes the awareness of being seen naked. These musicians bring unintended awareness to their separateness and bridge it in a smack.

Today, I also learned that a vibrant screenwriting professor passed away from Covid-19. She was part of the vulnerable group, yet my contact with her left imprints of anything but vulnerability, she was fierce in her feedback, and warm in her humanity. I went back to my class notes and found this:

“The artist’s conflict is always that he wants to do his work,

but the world doesn’t give a damn”

Milena Jelínek, an expat like me, from the Czech Republic, is gone and I haven’t been able to shake off the thought of what her final hours must’ve felt like. I take solace in the fact that she lived fully present, as far as I can tell. If rituals do little for the departed, I think we will just begin to grapple with how being deprived of mourning rites affects our personal threshold between life and death. This edge goes unwatched.

I mark my ongoing aliveness by getting washed, combed, dressed and now, bejeweled. Some people cling on to organization, others productivity, I stick to being presentable. Presentation is interlocution, and interlocution assumes others. Today, phantasmagorical others. This is my week alone while my kid is with his dad. I have to emulate otherness, and I do. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as earcuffs before I struck a friendship with Annika, and now I do. Coping as pizzicato, stringing along, one pluck at a time.

Club Quarantine is another welcome phenomenon in my feed. D-nice just has the most understated demeanor for a DJ and the nostalgic repertoire appeals to my current sensibility. I watch the little response emojis flurry upscreen on his Instagram live and try to relate to this impulse. I place little faith that the action of clicking one more heart icon will give any communal sentiment. My necklace, on the other hand, is palpable, my assumption of others via feeling presentable in front of the mirror, pays off. I enjoy watching D-nice sway his body and get creative on transitions between tracks. Milena taught me how to pay a lot of attention to character entrances and exits, it’s a dramaturgic workout of sorts.

Before undressing to go to bed, I think of the enduring grip of the performance of femininity as I remove my props.  I tend to get unjustly annoyed when complimented on my looks. I’d much rather get high marks for all the qualities that I cultivate in myself, not whatever it is that I got on the DNA crapshoot.

Merit drapes nicer.

The Artifact

BY | Posted on | FILED UNDER Categories Brooklyn, Diglot, Foudroyant, Pelagic

A kitchen rag, a deep dive, a lexicon expanded.

The first time I hovered over a manta ray on the bay of Fernando de Noronha Island, was one of those moments that you want to prolong indefinitely. The graciousness of that aerodynamic span, the perfect water temperature as I coasted the stream, the shimmery surface of this polka-dotted mild beast, everything conjured up the necessary requirements for enchantment. 

I can’t say as much about the old kitchen rag, previously a gift from my son’s Swedish godmother, which I was scalding with vinegar, detergent and boiling water. It caused a whole other configuration of astonishment and the combined smells made me slightly dizzy. Perhaps my head had already been set spinning the moment I caught myself scavenging the house for needle, thread and cloth. I had never spent so much uninterrupted time inside this house. I found my snorkeling mask in the closet. A mere two weeks ago I had seen pictures of an Italian man sporting one of those at the supermarket and I laughed at his ingenuity. 

My unmeasured love of diving is tied to how it brings me an alternate reality so different from my own, without gravity, where the refraction of light through a liquid medium charms me so that I endow this object, this mask, with an affection by proxy. I washed it with lavender detergent, and I leave it handy now.

Was I exaggerating? But it was the CDC that recommended the use of masks and I found these instructions on the New York Times.  I’m really bad at following even recipes willy nilly, but I did just so for this mask. It was sunny out, so I sat on the balcony to catch some fresh air and put on a mild playlist. Normally, these little projects confer a particular sense of competence, when I dominate a new skill. I recognized this sentiment in the glimmer in my son’s eyes when I taught him how to cook risotto.  Having barely turned 14 in reclusion, he’s been recruited into a range of chores. I taught him how to operate the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, how to fold sheets, and brush the toilet bowl. I sent Maria, our cleaning lady, money to stay home and started a spreadsheet for what has now become our cleaning routine. 

Manual labor has been the easy part. To read something like cultural criticism by Lauren Berlant, that is hard work, and although I don’t necessarily miss these deep dives, when I do manage them, it brings me great relief, as it feels like recovering a choreography one thought forgotten. 

I choose a light gray thread that will look discreet against the blue striped fabric and used my son’s school ruler to measure the fabric and get distracted thinking of the paradox at hand; everyone covering themselves up in masks, while the most raw and explicit in us was becoming increasingly visible—fear.  One or two uncertainties lend charm to life and mobilize our poetic sensibility.  Yet a snowball of the same prime-material, striking us down, not only leaves us at a loss but it also crumbles entire façades, and renders transparent forces palpable. My Irish neighbor, who previously would barely muster a “good morning”, now posed incisive questions about my supplies, as I struggled to move my heavy shopping cart. The French photographer with whom I went out a couple of times before he vanished, now reappeared in my texting thread. Failing to see the point of his investiture, I just wished him luck before stanching the correspondence. Who am I to redeem someone at a moment like this? 

“I’m pacing my building’s rooftop, why don’t you do the same in your backyard, that way we can pretend to be going for walk?” Natacha suggested by phone. I giggled, waking up my facial muscles to this rarified exercise in the last few weeks, and took her suggestion.  She is French-Congolese, I’m from Rio. Among the many subjects broached, we scratched our heads over the impossibility of social isolation in Kinshasa or Rio, where populational density is upwards of five thousand per square kilometer. The denser parts of Lombardy barely reach four hundred. The minute I disconnected the phone I started thinking how global mobility will be affected by this, as airlines go broke, recession tightens, and national estrangements develop.  I had spent the last year applying for doctoral research work in faraway universities, with low residency requirements.  I had already dreamed up and budgeted this bouncy existence between Europe, New York and my native Brazil. Today, I consider myself lucky to have a backyard where I can hop around and exercise. On the days when I manage to convince myself that it is imperative to train my aerobic capacity, to keep my lungs in top shape, I have no qualms about cranking up Outkast and gallop in lateral and nostalgic stride. On rainy days, I can guarantee that one can hold hands with Glen Hansard to the punishing cadence of Say It To Me Now

I had scheduled a skype call with my friend Ellen, from Taiwan, to celebrate a week since she stopped having the fever. We met in 2010, disheveled and sweating it out at a Shaolin class in Chinatown. Now, I put on a flowery dress, the aqua necklace my dad had gifted me last year, and I put on eyeliner, as my sister had taught me to on her last visit here.  I don’t want my hands to forget how to do that controlled movement. This was less about covering up my unrest with chromatic camouflage,  I just thought Ellen deserved to have someone on the other side of the screen who bothered to get ready for this lunch date, so pomp could fill in where no physical presence was to be found.  Our salutation bows replaced by computer mike testing protocols.

There is one step in mask making which consists of turning it inside out, disemboweling so to speak, to reveal the strings attached to the double cloth sandwich. At this point, this could have easily been a comfort toy for my niece, already isolated in Mauá. But I confirm this artifact’s destiny as mask, remembering my last conversation with my friend Basia: “They use it all over Asia, and they managed to reign in the curve. If nothing else, people tend to steer clear from you on the street, this is useful in lowering supermarket contact.” Basia sent her dad back to Poland via Berlin, left her doctor husband in Queens and is living out of her mother’s basement upstate.  Juan, her husband, is from the Basque country in Spain. A trained surgeon, he now swabs patients suspected of being positive for the virus. Today, she has already posted about his using a plastic liner in lieu of protective gear. The peak for hospital demand is not supposed to hit until late April. How first-world-ism is going to be redefined after this, or how many façades will come down until I retire my hand sown mask  is a source of endless contemplation, which I hope will bubble up at every dinner table, every prolonged shower. 

“Yes, darling you can have a sip of my wine, but only after two forkfuls of rice. “ Fourteen years of age, third week homebound, I let it slide. Has my parental mask of exemplary role model fallen? Not a minute too soon. He asks me about the meaning of the word genocide, which he overheard me saying while talking to a friend from São Paulo. I offer him the leftovers of our homemade birthday cake. His lexicon, my split ends, we will all come out of this overgrown.

The first use of my cloth mask takes place when I go to the ATM to get cash. I needed to pay Freddy, the Colombian handyman who came over to fix a small leak. He has no paypal or bank account, because he is part of the transparent thread stitching this town at the seams with undocumented labor, under accounted, under addressed. The longing to be underwater is suddenly no longer something I can simply indulge in. Once I used the bank’s keypad, believed to be a viral hotbed, I started treating my own hand as a radioactive object. I brought it home, and straight into the sink, without sparing my jacket’s sleeves, then undressing entirely, adding to the laundry pile.  Except for the mask itself, that I washed by hand, with boiling water again, so that it would be ready for use the next day, or until the ones I ordered online got here. Between the risk of postal service closures and valid Amazon strikes, I come to terms with the fact that I am already living in a reality very different from “my own”, with gravity, where any refraction of light charms me, because neither my sight, olfactory or tasting capacities have suffered losses, so I endow this object, this mask, with an affection for caution as we face this invisible beast.

In Between: Seoul, & New York

BY | Posted on | FILED UNDER Categories Diglot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bTpt9mQkIsI speak Korean and English. I live in Seoul and New York. I’m “in between.”This film is about me and my friends who exist in both cultures and languages.The background music is written and sung by Jazzy Ivy, a Brooklyn-native, a good friend, a mentor of mine and a talented musician,who is pretty well-known in Korean hip-hop scene.

Whale Joke

BY | Posted on | FILED UNDER Categories Diglot, Manhattan, Places

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QDQ3-UEdq8″Whale Joke” is exploring the language of comedy as the same “Whale” joke is told by different people.  New York is a haven for comedy of all types, but is very famous for it’s stand up scene.  I decided to play with the normal feel of a stand up lounge (brick wall, person standing alone facing the audience . . .) but instead using joke that has very little to do with actual words.  I like the fact that everybody can tell a joke, but the way a joke is told and recieved is all in the expression that is used in telling it/ hearing it.  This joke contains very few words so the language is completely dependent on the way the joke is expressed and interpreted.

As each person expresses the same joke in a different way, the language of the joke changes with each person’s interpretation of the joke.

Not only is the joke teller expressing the joke in a different individual “language” but every audience member understands it in a different way. For example, one audience member might find the very first person to tell the joke  hilarious, while another audience member might find someone else later on in the sequence to be funnier.  The receiving/”understanding” of the joke is completely based on the persons preference.  Do they think it is funnier based on Gender?  Age?  Vocal pitch? Facial movement?  Timing in which the telling occurs in the sequence?  There are so many factors that a person never considers that go into enjoying a simple joke, but each factor is like another personal language that needs to be interpreted so that the humor is registered.

Humor is a languages that changes with each person involved in the interaction.

Diglot: Choice Meats in the Meatpacking District

BY | Posted on | FILED UNDER Categories Diglot, Manhattan, Places

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9KJQnBl8Tk    This video juxtaposes images of the upscale clubbing scene and the grungy blue collar meatpacking business that coexist in this unique manhattan neighborhood. Although the video doesn’t literally present a diglot, in a sense the neighborhood is speaking two different languages by sending out mixed messages of its identity. On another level, the video itself sends mixed messages. On one hand it is the displaying the upscale crowd mixed with the lunchpail crowd and on the other hand it also derogatorily compares woman to meat. (I personally don’t believe that woman are comparable to meat!)

Diglot: The Fall of the Tongue

BY | Posted on | FILED UNDER Categories Diglot, Manhattan

Tongval—no words
—11 September 2001

bouwkundig tekenaar
was-ie,
staand, met blauwdruk onder de arm, en ik
stagiaire, onderweg naar ’n meeting,
in de voetstappen van
mijn boss’ brogue, langs gelijke cubicles
op een hogere vloer dan—even
boven
de tweede skylobby.

als mijn kinderogen
die kentekens van badgasten
op afkomst scanden,
vlogen mijn immigrant eyes
van naambordje naar naambordje,
en keek ik
over zijn partition: “I collect
found poetry. Can I have your card? I’m
Dutch, you see. It’s
your name—

Geen Tong.”

hij knikte.