I'm very glad I took Dance Appreciation in college.  For those of you who haven't taken it, it can actually be summed up in one sentence: "Dances don't necessarily have stories, so if it doesn't make sense, just watch the bodies and the movement, because that might be all you're going to get in the way of narrative."  Okay, so that's a compound sentence, but you get the drift.  I find it can be quite freeing to see a dance knowing from the start that it may not tell an actual story or make sense.  So for this dance, Glory, although the choreographer himself has a looooong story about how it relates to the Jonetown massacre, in reality it's okay if you just want to look at the way the dancer's butt muscles flex when he tries to propel his nude body across the floor while lying face down using only his shoulders.  At least, that's what I told myself as I looked at the way his butt muscles flexed as he tried to propel his nude body across the floor while lying face down using only his shoulders..

For the second piece, Feed, it was supposed to explore the inside and the outside of the body and the connections between them, or something like that, and the program contained a three-paragraph explanation of the piece that reminded me of Julian Child's from Wigfield, and made me afraid that the "dance" would consist of "pooping on stage" but in reality he just wiggled around some more in what appeared to be a pair of silver Issey Miyake Pleats Please shorts, and no or solids fluids of any kind were either ingested or expelled, so that was nice. 

In other non-narrative news, I went to see Inland Empire, the spooky new David Lynch movie, with Lookinfortime yesterday.  I'd heard it was hard to follow, and actually they showed an introductory clip from David Lynch who described the movie as "a very long movie that no one understands," but the movie made much more sense than I expected it to make... because I expected it to make no sense at all.  I find it can be quite freeing to see a film knowing from the start that it may not tell an actual story or make sense.  Aside from the part with the human-sized rabbits who lived in a sitcom on TV, it was actually a rather straightforward suspense film, only with lots of strobe lights and a soundtrack so filled with booming bass sounds that it literally made my fillings ache (and I don't even have any fillings.) 

There's a startling image at about the 2 1/2 hour mark where one of the Laura Derns briefly morphs into one of those fucked-up googly-eyed Steve Madden-style faces, an image that will haunt my nightmares from now until the day I die.  I know people like to throw the word "trippy" around, but that part was practically a documentary about what it's like to look in the mirror when you've taken a trip without leaving the house.  Not that I've ever done that, of course...and by "that" I mean looked in the mirror.  Anyway, I really liked it, all 2 hours and 48 minutes of it, and most especially the Nina Simone song at the end.  I loves you, Nina!  Don't let 'em take me!

After the movie was over, I made a funny joke.  I said, "There was one thing I didn't understand...." Then we just laaaaaughed. 

That is all.