Last Night a Necklace Saved My Life

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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.

Lapidary, Diamond District, Manhattan

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How can I possibly convince a Diamond District business owner to allow me into his stone cutting workshop to film the almost alchemical art of transforming nature’s mineral creations into high-end jewels? After a week of non-stop phone calling and perseverance, I discover that a little southern charm can occasionally take me a long way. I successfully convince a jeweler to allow me into his small workshop full of Brazilian craftsmen, only to discover that stone cutting is perhaps the noisiest art on the planet. The occupational hazards of playing the electric guitar are nothing compared to this!

Once I have finished shooting, I step into the afternoon sunlight of 47th Street and immediately notice an entirely different array of auditory sensations — equally particular to this New York City neighborhood. As long as no uniformed police officers are in sight, a steady stream of hawkers are beckoning each and every passer-by to buy a bracelet, a ring or simply an undocumented raw stone. Straight from our exotic, diamond mine to your fiance’s finger?  (Lynne Sachs)

Lapidary: The Sphere by Fritz Koenig

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The Sphere by Fritz Koenig The Sphere by Fritz  Koenig

This bullet is an old one.

In 1897, it was fired at the president of Uruguay by a young man from Montevideo, Avelino Arredondo, who had spent long weeks without seeing anyone so that the world might know that he acted alone. Thirty years earlier, Lincoln had been murdered by that same ball, by the criminal or magical hand of an actor transformed by the words of Shakespeare into Marcus Crutus, Caesar’s murderer. In the mid-seventeenth century, vengeance had employed it for the assassination of Sweden’s Gustavus Adolphus, in the midst of the public hecatomb of a battle.

In earlier times, the bullet had been other things, because Pythagorean metempsychosis is not reserved for humankind alone. It was the silken cord given to viziers in the East, the rifles and bayonets that cut down the defenders of the Alamo, the triangular blade that slit a queen’s throat, the wood of the Cross and the dark nails that pierced the flesh of the Redeemer, the poison kept by the Carthaginian chief in an iron ring on his finger, the serene goblet that Socrates drank down one evening.

In the dawn of time it was the stone that Cain hurled at Abel, and in the future it shall be many things that we cannot even imagine today, but that will be able to put an end to men and their wondrous, fragile life.

– In Memoriam, J.F.K. by J.L. Borges

Lapidary: Definition

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Lapidary (n.)

  1. One who cuts, polishes, or engraves gems.
  2. A dealer in precious or semiprecious stones.

[Middle English lapidarie, from Old French lapidaire, from Latin lapidarius, from lapis, lapid-, stone.]

A lapidary (the word means “concerned with stones”) is an artisan who practices the craft of working, forming and finishing stone, mineral, gemstones, and other suitably durable materials (amber, shell, jet, pearl, copla, coral, horn and bone, glass and other synthetics) into functional and/or decorative, even wearable, items (e.g. cameos, cabochons, and more complex facetted designs). The adjectival term is also extended to refer to such arts.

Diamond cutters are generally not referred to as lapidaries, due to their highly specialized techniques which are required to work diamond successfully.

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* Defintion from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2003. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.