Marina Abramovic meets Ulay
âMarina Abramovic and Ulay started an intense love story in the 70s, performing art out of the van they lived in. When they felt the relationship had run its course, they decided to walk the Great Wall of China, each from one end, meeting for one last big hug in the middle and never seeing each other again. at her 2010 MoMa retrospective Marina performed âThe Artist Is Presentâ as part of the show, a minute of silence with each stranger who sat in front of her. Ulay arrived without her knowing it and this is what happened.â
âFor me personally, itâs important to be a part of this because I feel itâs a way of me showing gratitude that I live surrounded by a community in which I donât have to hide my sexual orientation. And no one should have to hide their sexual orientation. Loving people is a necessary part of being human, and it is very difficult to love people in secret. Itâs a horrible thing to force people to do. And I am not one hundred percent straight. ⌠Iâm so lucky to have a job where itâs OK for me not to be in the closet.â â Olivia Thirlby
this moment is the exact definition of perfection; i donât know anything more intense and beautiful than two people, madly wanting each other but still restraining themselves because the tension is too flawless to be broken.
"I won't let these little things
Slip out of my mouth
But if I do
It's you
Oh it's you
They add up to
I'm in love with you
And all these little things"
You can tell this was co-written by Ed Sheeran. That's probably why I like it so much. 1D doesn't sound that bad either...
While all of these lads look lovely...all I can think of while looking at this is that a woman wearing Zayn's outfit, with a similar haircut (or not), would look really attractive - in my opinion at least. Bowler hat + simple tee + skinny jeans = yes. That's all.
Yeah I've been feeling everythingÂ
From hate to love
From love to lustÂ
From lust to truthÂ
I guess that's how I know you
So I hold you close to help you give it up
Really enjoying this book right now. I've only read the first two pairs of letters and responses, and I've enjoyed both. Strayed's responses pack a definite emotional punch, and the letters to which she responds are, for the most part, equally emotion-packed. While some of her suggestions are questionable, as you'll find with many books you'll read, her intentions usually come across as sincere.Â
Read the Introduction by Steve Almond under the cut.
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From the INTRODUCTIONÂ by Steve Almond
I Was Sugar Once: Lessons in Radical Empathy
Long ago, before there was a Sugar, there was Stephen Elliott. He had this idea for a website, which sounds pretty awful, I admit, except that his idea was really to build an online community around literature, called The Rumpus. Being a writer himself, and therefore impoverished, Stephen prevailed upon his likewise impoverished writer friends to help.
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And we, his friends, all said yes, because we love Stephen and because (if I may speak for the group) we were all desperate for a noble-seeming distraction. My contribution was an advice column, which I suggested we call Dear Sugar Butt, after the endearment Stephen and I had taken to using in our email correspondence. I will not belabor the goofy homoeroticism that would lead to such an endearment. It will be enough to note that Dear Sugar Butt was shortened, mercifully, to Dear Sugar.
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Handing yourself a job as an advice columnist is a pretty arrogant thing to do, which is par for my particular course. But I justified it by supposing that I could create a different sort of advice column, both irreverent and brutally honest. The design flaw was that I conceived of Sugar as a persona, a woman with a troubled past and a slightly reckless tongue.
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And while there were moments when she felt real to me, when I could feel myself locking into the pain of my correspondents, more often I faked it, making do with wit where my heart failed me. After a year of dashing off columns, I quit.
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And that might have been the end of Sugar had I not, around this time, come across a nonfiction piece by Cheryl Strayed. I knew Cheryl as the author of a gorgeous and wrenching novel called Torch. But reading this essay, a searing recollection of infidelity and mourning, filled me with a tingling hunch. I wrote to ask if she wanted to take over as Sugar.
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It was an insane request. Like me, Cheryl had two small kids at home, a mountain of debt, and no regular academic gig. The last thing she needed was an online advice column for which she would be paid nothing. Of course, I did have an ace in the hole: Cheryl had written the one and only fan letter Iâd received as Sugar.
***
The column that launched Sugar as a phenomenon was written in response to what would have been, for anyone else, a throwaway letter. Dear Sugar, wrote a presumably young man. WTF, WTF, WTF? Iâm asking this question as it applies to everything every day. Cherylâs reply began as follows:
Dear WTF,
My fatherâs father made me jack him off when I was three and four and five. I wasnât any good at it. My hands were too small and I couldnât get the rhythm right and I didnât understand what I was doing. I only knew I didnât want to do it. Knew that it made me feel miserable and anxious in a way so sickeningly particular that I can feel that same particular sickness rising this very minute in my throat.
It was an absolutely unprecedented moment. Advice columnists, after all, adhere to an unspoken code: focus on the letter writer, dispense the necessary bromides, make it all seem bearable. Disclosing your own sexual assault is not part of the code.
But Cheryl wasnât just trying to shock some callow kid into greater compassion. She was announcing the nature of her mission as Sugar. Inexplicable sorrows await all of us. That was her essential point. Life isnât some narcissistic game you play online. It all mattersâevery sin, every regret, every affliction. As proof, she offered an account of her own struggle to reckon with a cruelty sheâd absorbed before she was old enough even to understand it. Ask better questions, sweet pea, she concluded, with great gentleness. The fuck is your life. Answer it.
Like a lot of folks, I read the piece with tears in my eyesâ which is how one reads Sugar. This wasnât some pro forma kibitzer, sifting through a stack of modern anxieties. She was a real human being laying herself bare, fearlessly, that we might come to understand the nature of our own predicaments.
***
I happen to believe that America is dying of loneliness, that we, as a people, have bought into the false dream of convenience, and turned away from a deep engagement with our internal livesâthose fountains of inconvenient feelingâand toward the frantic enticements of what our friends in the Greed Business call the Free Market.
Weâre hurtling through time and space and information faster and faster, seeking that network connection. But at the same time weâre falling away from our families and our neighbors and ourselves. We ego-surf and update our status and brush up on which celebrities are ruining themselves, and how. But the cure wonât stick.
And this, I think, is why Sugar has become so important to so many people. Because sheâs offering something almost unheard of in our culture: radical empathy. People come to her in real pain and she ministers to them, by telling stories about her own life, the particular ways in which sheâs felt thwarted and lost, and how she got found again. She is able to transmute the raw material of the self-help aisle into genuine literature.
I think here of the response she offered a man wrecked by his sonâs death, who asked her how he might become human again. âThe strange and painful truth is that Iâm a better person because I lost my mom young,â she wrote. âWhen you say you experience my writing as sacred what you are touching is the divine place within me that is my mother. Sugar is the temple I built in my obliterated place.â
In this sense, Tiny Beautiful Things can be read as a kind of ad hoc memoir. But itâs a memoir with an agenda. With great patience, and eloquence, she assures her readers that within the chaos of our shame and disappointment and rage there is meaning, and within that meaning is the possibility of rescue.
A small selection from the rather extensive collection of favourited excerpts.
"Extroverts are sometimes credited with being 'pro-social' â meaning caring about others â and introverts disparaged as people who don't like people. But the reactions of the infants in Kagan's test had nothing to do with people. These babies were shouting (or not shouting) over Q-tips. They were pumping their limbs (or staying calm) in response to popping balloons. The high-reactive babies were not misanthropes in the making; they were simple sensitive to their environments."
I'm an introvert and I honestly love people. I know I may not do a great job at showing this claim, as I do sometimes â to explain my recluse nature in a self-deprecative way â state that 'I dislike people' with an eye-roll. I am definitely sensitive to my environments. I'm in my head a lot, going over tons of (often trivial) passing thoughts in detail. A highly-stimulating environment makes me want to crawl under the covers after a short amount of time.  Â
"I'm aware that I'm holding my torso tensely, one of the telltale signs of the high-reactive."
I notice this once I calm down after stressful and casual conversations. My body immediately sinks.
"Slow animals are best described as shy, sensitive types. They don't assert themselves, but are observant and notice things that are invisible to the bullies. They are the writers and artists at the party who have interesting conversations out of earshot of the bullies. They are the inventors who figure out new ways to behave, while the bullies steal their patents by copying their behaviour."
While I understand that Cain is trying to uplift the spirits of a commonly putdown segment of the population, her comparison of extroverts and bullies in this excerpt is a bit inflamed. She ventures into using the same tactics that she denounces.Â
"It's not that there's no small talk...It's that it comes not at the beginning of conversations but at the end. In most settings, people use small talk as a way of relaxing into a new relationship, and only once they're comfortable do they connect more seriously. Sensitive people seem to do the reverse. They 'enjoy small talk only after they've gone deep'...'When sensitive people are in environments that nurture their authenticity, they laugh and chitchat just as much as anyone else.'"
This. I really don't mind small talk if that is not all that is taking place in our conversation. I'd rather we stay silent than try to care about how the construction's really bad in the area. Talks like those really take a toll on my social resources.Â
