the performing body

On a mid-Saturday break, the review of the week.

- Swimming. I did swim 3 km. this week (proud of my little discipline achievement!) and, one day, had quite an anthropologically fascinanting encounter.

We were swimming in the pool, next to another lane where an old lady was also swimming calmly. Suddenly, what seemed like an american football team showed up. Some 5 or 6 guys, tall hyper-broad-shoulder, muscles, biceps, and just general "massiveness". Well, they were very aggreessive and definetly just waiting for us to get so annoyed that we would leave. We didn't, out of principle. But it was like swimming in the Atlantic with this massive waves drowning you when you tried to breath. Their oversized bodies were just too heavy and their swimming skills were far from perfect so it was like dropping a bomb in the water when they tried to swim.

I was very intrigued by their bodies. Some of them had a triangular shape so clear that it looked surreal. I wonder how many pills you have to take for the perfect geometry. It was very disturbing because, somehow, they were ideal bodies, ideal guys. What we are told is ideal. And I found them... plain. They seemed so perfect, only comparable to those houses in the magazines where no one lives, just decorated for the pictures. It seems no one was inhabiting those bodies either. Very disturbing. And highly unattractive. It was not sexy, which I know was supposed to be. It was just so scary, monster-like.

Well, that drove me into thinking that day about that night back at home when I watched the Rolling Stone's Rock'n Roll Circus on ARTE. I remembered Mick Jagger singing "Sympathy for the Devil", taking off his shirt. I did youtube it immediately. This lead to a "Mick Jagger" mania in the last few days. I cannot help but to feel there is something divine, extremely attractive and quite fascinating about his body. An inhabited, expressive, interesting piece of humanity. There it lies, the attractive body, the ideal body because it is so specific. It crawls, it jumps, it rests, it twists and bends and stands straight up. So unique, so determined. It doesn't have a myth, it has a voice.

PERFORMANCE 1968

Of course this Jagger fixation lead me to watch "Performance", his film debut. More than recommend it: preach it. It is a piece of art like only those circunstances could produce. It has some truly fantastic scenes. I feel like it has brought something new to my life, some awakening.

The bed scene, the bullet scene, the intro, the "videoclip", the mirrors and the mushrooms. The photograph is quite ironic, if you have seen the movie. I still think it is very beautiful, even though it does not come from the movie plot, probably just from a photo session on set.

I am awake. Not illuded. Just happy, free, surrounded by my own visions of greatness.

INTO THE WILD

Saw it yesterday. It stayed with me during the night. I holded him tight, never letting him go.
Somehow I had not felt like that since Catcher in the Rye. Like I wanted to be there, to put my arms around that boy and tell him it was going to be alright. It is a human impulse stronger than a screen.

And I feel more than ever that the world is full of martyrs, people who died so that we could learn. Who gave their lifes to the experience of knowledge. Those should be our Gods, our gurus. The dead souls of the extreme.


Because nature and freedom can trapp you so easily, the only performance that makes it true, all the way, is the one that goes as far as madness.