Thursday, January 29, 2009

The Catharsis of Terror

Yesterday one of my friends posted a Kafka quote that made me cheer: "The only thing worse than suffering is the refusal to suffer." My response was that I am pro suffering and anti-comfort, because it's the American addiction to comfort that makes us infantile and spiritually bankrupt.

Then we had quite a lively discussion about the function of suffering, with a few people chiming in that poets are overfond of suffering. Being poets, we had to clarify our definitions of suffering. Joe believes suffering is the refusal to live in your life. I'd agree with that, adding the spin that the suffering results from an *inability* to live in your life, probably because of fear, and that this is the root of the addictive behaviors that make a full, rich life impossible.

Because I am also a wiseacre, I had to admit that my notion of suffering is to be too far from a Starbucks at any given time. (See my above comment about addiction...)

We raised a few questions that I think about all the time. Joe put forth the idea that suffering is a luxury because it presupposes a lack of detachment that one could, theoretically, choose to assume. Given these parameters for suffering, I became aware again of how much Blake's idea of clean living through excess has formed my way of being in the world. All of my addictions, and the relinquishing of them, have been extremely instructive, mainly in how they allowed me to shunt my grief aside.

When my first love killed himself I was faced with an unassailable grief, and I had to either join him in the grave or find a way to live with what felt like unbearable loss.

Joe's point that making a habit or a fad of suffering can be just as detrimental as the refusal to suffer absolutely played up my conflicting emotions about the gothic subculture. On the one hand, the vocabulary of horror and terror has allowed me to grapple with issues of grief, fear, death, identity, and power in fruitful ways. On the other hand, romanticizing the shadow side of life can foster an inability to confront the crucial aspects of the shadow by providing a ready-made cache of imagery that was always meant to function as a starting point for discussion, not the solution. But this is an idea as old as Eden: that naming something tames it.

I hunger for a legitimately terrifying art. I still believe in the uses of catharsis when it comes to terror, and I don't mean the ratiocination involved in mysteries, thrillers, or forensics shows. I've heard it said that, as we age, we turn away from horror and instead work out the same issues by craving mystery stories, in which the hero is dead and the lyric event of violence has passed, and in which problemsolving done at a remove is the palliative for heightened emotions.

I still want horror movies and books that scare me, dammit. And as I age, they are getting harder and harder to come by. The last one I enjoyed was The Descent.

Fred Botting in his book _Gothic_ posits that gothic can no longer function because it has not survived the extreme inward direction of the twentieth-century's psychotherapeutic culture. All I know is that I can no longer sit still for B horror movies.

Voodoo Consort Number One and I talk about this a lot, since he is a filmmaker and loves crappy horror movies. He doesn't understand why I used to adore these films and now can't abide them. We read two books together and had a great discussion about gender identity and horror movies: _Men, Women, and Chainsaws_, and _Recreational Terror_.

Add belly dance to these thoughts about the function of gothic, and you've got a major preoccupation of the Voodoo Sisters.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Monster Hybrid

Has anyone seen Underworld: Rise of the Lycans yet? I must admit, during the first two of these Underworld movies I was mostly preoccupied by Kate Beckinsale's lip gloss...and her tight pants. But by now, I'm anticipating this third installment in the series. I think it's the hybrid action that's got me interested. And werewolves are the stepchild of the monster franchise, I don't know why. There seems to be a dearth of werewolf movies. The last one I liked was Ginger Snaps.

What is there to say about monster culture that hasn't already been done, ad nauseum? I'm so over the whole zombie thing that I could cheerfully disembowel myself. Michael Jackson is going to be adapting "Thriller" for the Broadway stage. "Evil Dead" has become an off-Broadway musical. Do we need further proof that zombies have mainstreamed?

I thought zombies were over years ago, when I choreographed I Shimmied with a Zombie for Belly Horror in 2007. I did that choreography as a tribute to Voodoo Consort Number One, who has recurring nightmares of a zombie apocalypse and who, over coffee in the mornings, regales me with exit scenarios predicated on New York's eventual zombie occupation.

My abiding interest is in vampires, and I'm delighted that the groovy ghoul seems to be enjoying a return to prominence in fiction lately--the travesty of Twilight notwithstanding; don't get me started. I plan to read the Sookie Stackhouse novels soon.

Hybrid monsters are the way to go. In this post-Jungian age, we can all see the way our core archetypes blend, and a vampire-werewolf hybrid seems to humanize the vampires and make the werewolves a little more...classy? articulate? Depends on which vampire mythos you're considering. Mine is pretty much mired in the 19th-century Romantic Byron gentleman vampire, but if you are subscribing to the revenant kind that ravaged Europe before Romanticism took hold, you're thinking of vampires as much more akin to werwolves, anyway.

A quick note about Beckinsale's makeup in the movies: I'm fascinated by the understated nude lipgloss, on which the blood shines so compellingly, like blood on a baby's lips. Reminds me of Stuart Townsend's makeup in Queen of the Damned, all mauves and purples. This is a trend I've been noticing in films, that the more outre the character is supposed to be, the more unobtrusive the makeup is (think Olympia Dukakis's character--surely the most complex and liminal--in Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City movies)

As someone with four planets in Scorpio, I'm coming around to the nude makeup palette because I'm down with using my appearance as a smokescreen and with blending in rather than standing out (I have my moon in Leo; I wasn't always this willing to assimilate. But living in NYC, where you can go out painted up like a gilded Statue of Liberty every day and no one spares you a glance, has cured me of my mania for looking different. Well, that and the fact that I'm staring down the cold, hard muzzle of 40.)

As an old-school goth chick who's used to using the same black kohl on eyes, cheeks, and lips, I find the new palette refreshing, particularly as I age. I can no longer get away with the bruise palette of cosmetics without looking like a drag queen that's been beat up in the Meat Packing District.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Buy Voodoo Sisters Gear!

Yeah, it's the non-poet again, writing, not about beautiful thoughts, but about CRASS COMMERCIALISM!!

We've opened a CafePress store, linked to our website, and also of course, found here. I has a good time working on the graphics for this, so I hope you have a good time wearing them around.

--Melissa V.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Expertly Loved, and Beautiful

This poem by Judy Grahn exemplifies the kind of creative spirit that shuns living up to others' expectations or inside of others' frameworks without a single, crucial, individual twist: In effect, what a yawn it is to have smooth poreless skin and a hardbody that ripples but may not quiver, even when in the throes of love, or dance.

Give me the margins, every time.

In the company I keep, even in the audience for the Voodoo Sisters, what I want are people who question, who risk, and especially those who weave the inescapable threads of themselves into established, sacred forms--not those who abandon form altogether. Because really, "gothic" is such an embattled term in art to begin with, as far as the literary sense, and then when you apply it to dance, Tempest's Gothic Bellydance Resource being a stellar example of lucid writing about GBD, what we're talking about is imagery transforming an ancient movement vocabulary. Just as this poem by Judy Grahn shows how spiders, those ultimate artists of the natural world, express their love in an entirely characteristic but--for the speaker of the poem--new way.

The poem's untitled, but here it is:

The most blonde woman in the world
one day threw off her skin
her hair, threw off her hair, declaring
'Whosoever chooses to love me
chooses to love a bald woman
with bleeding pores.'
Those who came then as her lovers
were small hard-bodied spiders
with dark eyes and an excellent
knowledge of weaving.
They spun her blood into long strands,
and altogether wove millions of red
webs, webs red in the afternoon sun.
'Now', she said, 'Now I am expertly loved,
and now I am beautiful."

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

U-G-L-Y You Ain't Got No Alibi

I've been thinking a lot about ugly. So much of what has attracted me about goth culture is the romanticizing of what is unknown, frightening, or downright unsavory. The older I get, though, the more I am of necessity and by dint of simply surviving coming to embody the Crone. I'm over 35, and my own face frightens me when I encounter it in bright sunlight at, say, eleven in the morning. The ravages of time. My teenaged self prisoned in my chest like Merlin in the tree where the sorceress Nimue put him.

This becomes an issue in photo shoots, too. With all the technology available, I could of course get rid of the eye bags I've got (in which small rodents could happily snuggle for the winter, I assure you--since I've been averaging five hours' sleep a night since I got the puppy). I choose not to. I kind of like them. They are baroque, ornate, puffy, the tarnished color of bruises on bananas. They're mine. They're the map of a life, just as my tattoos are.

Right now I'm choreographing an Alien piece, which is meant to stand for the utter joy a creature feels at being solitary and unobserved, and therefore free. The audience will get the voyeur's pleasure of spying on what a lethal predator does when she's alone and simply puttering around after waking up from a nap.

Look in the mirror. What do you see? Creatures that have their eyes in the front of their head are predators. The title of the piece of music I'm using is "Bathed in Love." I've always thought that the predator/prey relationship is one of love.

What does all this have to do with ugly? Just that I'm freelancing more at home rather than being out in the world, and I'm acutely aware of what a toll the beauty myth takes on my everyday dealings, how such nonsense as framing others' expectations saps my power. When I'm home I don't have to wear makeup, or even clothes. I don't have to bind my breasts so they look perkier.

Reminds me of when I shaved my head, and my mother-in-law asked me why I did it, and I said it was because it's so easy to be pretty, and so much more interesting to find out what's underneath the obligations to delight the eyes of other people.

The root of the word "glamour" is the same as the one for "grammar," and points to the relationship between Logos and spellcraft. The ability to put people under your spell, irrespective of what you look like. Reminds me of some of my favorite lines from Yeats: An aged man is but a paltry thing/a tattered coat upon a stick/unless soul clap its hands and louder sing/for every tatter in its mortal dress.

As youth flees from us, what recourse do we have but to develop the spirit, the mind, the heart, all brimming with the delight of a life richly and exquisitely lived from within, with awareness, plugged into the five (in my case, six) senses?

Who wants to see ugly bellydance? Isn't dance supposed to galvanize the onlooker with its beauty, strength, flexibility? Should all art be beautiful?

The movements I'm thinking of to depict this effort of carving Medusa out of rock where her own gaze has prisoned her has to do with the grace that comes from awkward.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Welcome Deirdre Voodoo!


The Voodoo Sisters would like to welcome Deirdre Voodoo!

An accomplished Turkish and Egyptian-style dancer, Deirdre Voodoo became a friend of the Voodoo Sisters when she became our rubber kidney supplier. It doesn't get much better than that.

See Deirdre and Melissa Voodoo in action in "The Golden Golem," below:

Friday, January 9, 2009

The Shimmy Diet

This is the time of year when weight-loss advertisements--many of them targeted to women--run rampant. Do you make resolutions for the New Year? Is one of the resolutions to drop a few pounds?

I don't make such resolutions anymore. Since I quit smoking nine years ago, I've gained and lost the same thirty pounds about five times until I just resigned myself to a certain easy-to-maintain size, on the advice of my doctor. She said, "If you have to change your whole life to be a size 2, what's the point? Gaining and losing is just as bad for your health as an 'extra' ten or twenty pounds.' "

Then one of my friends gave me an ice cream maker for Yule. I've made olive oil ice cream, which was fabulous, and today I'm going to try peanut butter chocolate caramel ice cream.

All of this adds up to what I'm calling the shimmy diet. Because, seriously? I'm attracted to women with tummies, whose generous curves bespeak a love of the table and all its sensuous promise. It's why I got into bellydance to begin with, to see delicious women shake, rattle, and roll. This is not to say that sylph-like dancers are not beautiful. They are. I simply prefer watching voluptuous women bellydance.

My shimmies are a lot easier during the wintertime, when carbohydrate-rich food ensures you can see my shimmies from space. And that's the way I like it.

If you're going to make a resolution for this new year, make it about health and not about perpetuating the beauty myth that is breaking the back of women's happiness and sexuality. Make this the year of the shimmy!

Sunday, January 4, 2009

For Beginner Bellydancers

I've had a ton of beginners asking me about what videos to use if they can't get to a real teacher.

You NEED to take a look at Autumn Ward's new DVD. Buy it direct from her so she makes some money off the project. (No, I get nothing from this. I just know how she teaches-- really, really well.)

http://www.autumnward.com/

-mv

The Voodoo Sisters Make the Bitch List!

Yes, it's true-- the Voodoo Sisters have a mention and a pic in this month's issue of Bitch magazine!

Pick it up on your local newsstand!


-mv