The Yoga Cure: Alive and well in Artland

I couldn't do this one yesterday....but soon!  (Wiki Commons)

Yesterday, I did something I haven't done in about six years, and it made an enormous difference.

I took a yoga class.

I've never been a yoga nut; I really haven't been a nut for anything, not even my beloved horse. But I did enjoy yoga when I got the chance all my life. When I was young (that is to say, under 60), I didn't need to practice it often because I was strong, healthy and flexible and I never had a problem with a pose.

That was then, this is now.

I actually could not perform the one-legged poses; I had suspected my balance was off, but that tested it.

I actually fell over in one close-to-the-floor tripod pose.

The instructor fell out of a pose shortly thereafter. No, she didn't. Yes, she did. This is England, where people are polite, doubtless the source of the hostess drinking from the finger bowl when an ignorant guest does so that the guest won't feel embarrassed. Just so, the instructor fell out of a pose. I actually wanted to tell her, "Hey, you didn't have to do that. I'm a former Yank, I can deal." But I didn't. Why should I rain on her civility parade?

Enlightenment through very gentle movement

But I learned something. By the end of the class, I realized that my faintly perceived balance issues were actually more like total lack of muscle tone. And of course, after having ridden horses, hard, for 20 years before just hanging it up eight years ago and doing zilch for exercise, the descent in strength was long and hard.

Fortunately, I am healthy. Despite my evening cocktail, which I regard as natural anyway, I eat no crap. I breathe as little crap as I can, which is probably very little indeed in semi-rural Cornwall. I work (sometimes) at staying mentally and emotionally healthy...although I admit that the go-round with the IRS 2.5 years ago about pushed me off the rails. Still, even that had a good effect; I renounced my US citizenship to rid myself of those wankers once and for all, and I'd wanted not to be an American for a long, long time.

So back to yoga and art.

Yoga Nazis

Before I left Upper East Tennessee/Southwest Virginia for the last time, I had started going to a  yoga class at the Johnson City, TN, community center. It was very inexpensive, like about 3 bucks, but the instructor was magical. I loathed the Salute to the Sun, still do, but  the rest was wonderful and her closing meditation alone was worth the price of admission. I have missed it since 1997.

I tried a yoga class  in Westminster, MD, about 6 years ago, realizing lack of riding was wrecking my muscles. But I was doing a lot of gardening, and frankly, it was better than the class. Then I tried one in Frederick, MD, that almost killed me. It was, I learned yesterday, probably Bikram yoga, which is like eastern calisthenics in a very, very warm room. I did that only once. And gave thanks that I lived through it.

And then the years rolled by. When I lived in the flat in Tavistock, I walked everywhere. Now, from my house on a windy road with lots of traffic in suburban Cornwall? Not so much, proving I do value my life. Good excuse, though, to become a slug.

Good yoga transcends place and time

Yesterday, at Sadhana Yoga Studio in Tavistock, owner/instructor Kathryn Blackie got me back to reality and yoga. She is kind. She is competent. She is knowledgeable. She does a good closing meditation. I actually signed up for two months of classes, something I have never done, ever.

Some parts of me, despite not being able to stretch ANY pose to the max, were sore, but a good sore.
The pain that had crept back into my knees after I tinkered (wildly) with the paleo diet that had cured them last summer disappeared. Last night, I didn't get the excruciating pain in my hips that had been with me most nights for a couple of months now.

In short, a single, gentle yoga class, in which I failed to do any pose to the max, cured a lot of what ailed me.

It also cured my attitude. I'd been snapping at Simon for weeks, for nothing. I thought it was the various promotional problems with my artwork and my writing making me crabby. Apparently not. Apparently it was disorder in my system. I had no need to snap at the poor man yesterday. So I didn't, and he was so happy, back to the charming, funny Simon I met and married.

I had been fretting for weeks about things that are very probably seven years away. I stopped fretting.

Onward and upward

I wrote a diatribe just for fun. (I love exercising those rhetoric muscles.) I finished a small painting. I cooked a really swell Chinese dinner-twice-cooked pork, spicy eggplant and cold peanut noodles. I ate fruit for dessert, not chocolate. (Simon was less thrilled with that, as he seemed to feel compelled to eat canned peaches with me. Yes, canned peaches. A childhood fave that I happened to have on hand. Plus I believe what a friend from Goa once told me; it is not good to eat raw fruit after dinner.)

So what's this got to do with art? Everything. One cannot properly produce artistic works if one is hurting and listless and lethargic and thinks there might be something wrong...which doctors probably could not pin down, but would have a good time trying to do and probably wreck the rest of one's life in the process.  I admit, I was actually thinking of visiting a doctor. Me. Visiting a doctor. Without having been tossed off a horse and carted off against my will. That's how bad it had gotten.

I'm going to do a few poses later today. I'm going to do a few tomorrow. I'm going to do a few every day, and lots of them on Tuesday mornings from 10 am to 11.30 am.  Why not? The benefits are enormous. They include:

• Less pain, heading toward none.
• Regaining strength and balance.
• Meeting some nice people.
• Being less crabby.
• Being more peaceful.
• Getting more writing and art done.

OK. Yes, increased work appears on my list. But you knew that. I might be one of a small group of Type A introverts in the universe. But there it is. And I make no apologies for it.

Whitewash

 

Drawing from book 12 Years a Slave (Wikipedia)

I've been looking forward to seeing the film 12 Years a Slave. Directed by Steve McQueen, it it scheduled to open in the UK on January 28, 2014. I expect I'll have tickets booked at my local Vue as soon as  I possibly can. I read the book a couple of months ago, and loved it, if one can use such terminology regarding a subject so fraught with horrors, particularly for an ex-New Yorker who grew up in horror at the things that went on in the American South up to the Civil War, and after for that matter. The first time I drove south, below the Mason-Dixon line separating former slave from former free states, I was horrified that some motels had huge signs saying "Colored." At first, I thought they were talking about TVs, and then it dawned on me.

I worked, in 1968, in a restaurant in the Florida Keys. There, no blacks were served, but no one ever told me not to serve blacks. As far as I know, no black person ever arrived and asked to be served, the colour lines were so firmly drawn. But the racism was all around; when I went to get the courtesy card from the local Winn-Dixie supermarket, they asked for my race. I refused to write it in. They asked me why, since I am white. I told them THAT's why...because I am white, and I am insulted to be asked to prove I am not black, since it made no difference to me whether I were white or black, so why should it make any difference to them? They let me have the card. Whoop-de-do! I could now cash my paycheck at the supermarket. And I figured I had made a small point for humanity.

White and Black were different in America

Of course, it would have made a great deal of difference to my life had I been black in America. Some bad, some good. For instance, I couldn't get an internship at Time, Inc. magazines because I was not a member of a minority, and Affirmative Action had been instituted right before I got my bachelor's degree in 1970. Had I been black or Hispanic, I would have been a shoo in.  It was not the end of the world, though, and life went on.

Later, when I was in grad school in 1973, in Georgia (the deep south), I was told by a prospective employer that I would have to refuse to wait on black customers if he told me to. I refused that offer of employment. Within the year, a black woman was the maid of honour at my wedding. Was I saying anything to that racist restaurant owner by choosing her? Not as far as I know. Alberta Knox, former sometimes singer with the Hot Nuts, was simply my best friend.

All this is not to proclaim my status as an enlightened white former New Yorker; it is to let readers in the UK know how totally pervasive dealing with the race issue was, and still is, in the United States.

How to screw up advancement

That having been said, I am now of the opinion that two black men have done great harm to journalism and the arts in America, one because his grasp was longer than his reach and the other because he is, to put it mildly, an unreconstructed intellectual bumpkin whose ignorant posturings would be an embarrassment regardless of his race.

The first man is Jayson Blair, the man who submitted plausibly bogus stories to the editors at the New York Times; those editors did not recognize shoddy journalistic practice until it smacked them in the face. Blair set feature writing back a good few decades with his shenanigans. It would have been the same had he been white. But there is some reason to believe that the editors were doing their own version of Affirmative Action, and in their appalling ignorance, selected for bling and nor for brains, doing no one any favours.

The second man is Armond White, whose name I had never come across until today. It seems, though, that he pitched a hissy fit--which is to say was unbearably rude and condescending--when Steve McQueen won a New York Film Critic's Circle award for directing 12 Years a Slave. According to the Toronto Sun:

Armond White, the editor of New York arts publication CityArts, whose opinions are often at odds with those of other film critics, called out, 'You're an embarrassing doorman and garbage man. F**k you. Kiss my a**'.'

Another Canadian publication, Maclean's, noted that White thinks of himself as a "pedigreed film scholar." Odd, scholars rarely use such terminology as that above. They usually have larger and more creative vocabularies with which to express disdain or delight, and they usually refrain from the sort of ad hominem attack that would seem to be White's speciality.

I would consider White a boor at best, a mental midget at worst, as long as we are traversing the Ad Hominem Trail, opened by none other than White himself. And I'm fairly certain my mongrel dog's pedigree is better than White's scholarly pedigree, regardless of where he got his sheepskin. I should think he'd be an embarrassment to most universities.

Which issue is he protesting?

It would appear that White, who claims enlightenment beyond that of all others, finds it somehow unacceptable that a British man could direct a film about an American black issue. But it is not, of course, a black issue. Enslavement of one group of people by another is a human issue. Period. We were all affected by it, one way or another, and no one person has a mandate to claim the high ground. Not one. We all have traces of racism within us; we all have been affected by racism in some way. We all have the right to speak our minds about it, to make films about it, whether because we are intrigued by the art itself, or because we wish to expiate our own or our society's guilt.

By the way, the Steve McQueen in question is not the white action-film hero; he is the black British director.

So what is White saying, then? That McQueen was somehow being a waterboy to vicious white men? That he has no right to make an American film, being a British man? That the book was trash? What, exactly, is this black man--who preens himself like a bygone Bojangles and who retains the name White while many black men changed to African-derived names--what is this grandstanding peacock of loud plumage and absent substance doing, exactly?

Darned if I know. I think he's laughable, frankly. Which many of the readers of the Maclean's article noted as well. One wrote:

It's obvious what White is doing. It's equally obvious what a wank it is. Pure self-indulgence. If you like something you should be honest about it and give an unfiltered review, regardless of what the 'masses' OR the 'cognoscenti' think. Clearly he waits to see what the consensus is, and if something gets too many raves, he feels it's his duty to take it down a peg. Hey, what ever gets him off, it's his own business, but it has nothing to do with reality.

Indeed. White's substance- and literacy-challenged rantings do about as much for me as American artist Julian Schnabel's sticking pottery through canvasses and calling himself a genius did. Less, really. At least Schnabel was, for a time, entertaining. White? Not so much. Just a bully using his racial pulpit to get away with stuff that marks him not as a fighter for human equality and artistic standards but, to descend into his chosen gutter, an elitist wanker reverse cultural snob of, however, the very highest order.