Tagged — Jamie Lyons
Individualism 2023
You walk into Roble Gym expecting, I don’t know, something mystical maybe. Incense. Robes. The kind of earnest California spirituality that makes you want to jump off a bridge. What you get instead is bodies. Real bodies, doing impossible things with physics. These dancers move like they’re negotiating a peace treaty with the floor, every […]
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Collusion 2023
The real work happens in the stuff everybody else is throwing out. That’s it. That’s the whole goddamn secret. Most people file that stuff under “ignore and move on.” They’re right to do that, if they want to stay functional, keep their jobs, not alienate their friends. But if I’m trying to make something that […]
ReadAbsolute Solipsism 2020
So this is what it comes to: you, the mirror, and the slow-motion shipwreck of your own face disappearing under a forest of hair that screams “I HAVE GIVEN UP” in fourteen different dialects. Robinson Crusoe, sure, if Crusoe had Netflix, bottomless carbs, and a growing suspicion that Friday was never coming because there was […]
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Individualism 2016
The first time doesn’t exist in my head, it’s just gone, one of those origin stories you lose in the noise. But there’s your laugh, like gravel and light, cutting through those parties at my parents’ place. There’s me, just a kid, watching some play you’d put together, and you, you, asking what I thought. […]
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Individualism 2016
Betty Reid Soskin at ninety-four, ninety-four, standing there receiving an award named after Carey McWilliams, and the only thing more beautiful than the image is knowing she didn’t wait for permission to make history happen. She made it happen, hustled it into existence, because that’s what you do when the official story is a lie […]
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Individualism 2016
Look at those hands. Two generations of women who’ve spent their lives insisting that the body means something beyond what commerce wants to sell us, beyond what convention wants to contain. Anna Halprin, 90 something years deep into the radical proposition that movement is democratic, that anybody’s dance matters, holding hands with Tonyanna Borkovi, who’s […]
ReadSpeculation 2015
Backstage: Ryan Tacata as Carmen in The Balcony at San Francisco’s Old Mint. Entering a brothel means rejecting the world. Here I am and here I stay. Your laws and orders and the passions are my reality. Jean Genet, The Balcony
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Individualism 2015
Last week I spent some time with this gentleman outside the Old Mint. He’s a jazz musician. Played with some of the greats up and down California, the kind names you’d recognize if you knew anything about the real music, the stuff that mattered before everything got packaged and sold back to us as nostalgia. […]
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Individualism 2014
Look at these three women perched on the Fort Point rooftop in San Francisco, caught between acts of this site integrated Macbeth production, and what you’re seeing isn’t stagecraft. It’s the raw, unvarnished truth of what it means to be fully present in the middle of nowhere that matters. They’re witches, sure, but right now […]
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Adventure 2013
The sail, the play of its pulse so like our own lives: so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective. Henry David Thoreau Here’s the thing about getting on a boat with someone in the middle of San Francisco Bay: you find […]
ReadIndividualism / The City 2013
Look at Brian Yarish. Six-foot-five in his stockings, but he’s not wearing stockings tonight, he’s wearing five, maybe six inches of platform heel that would break my ankle in three places just looking at them. He’s working his way down Franconia like he owns the concrete, like he invented concrete, and you know what? Maybe […]
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Absolute Solipsism / The City 2012
So here’s the deal: I’m early. Not fashionably early, not strategically early. Just early. Standing on the steps of San Francisco City Hall like some kind of ceremonial parking cone, waiting for Dan and Ciara to show up and get married in a way that doesn’t count except that it counts more than anything that’s […]
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Absolute Solipsism 2012
Solipsism in a mirror I didn’t want any new clothes at all; because if I had to look ugly anyway, I wanted to at least be comfortable. I let the awful clothes affect even my posture, walked around with my back bowed, my shoulders drooping, my hands and arms all over the place. I was […]
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Individualism 2012
I’ve spent time with supposed intellectuals, credential-clutching Ivy League types who couldn’t find their own ass with both hands and a roadmap, people so wrapped up in their own mythology they’ve forgotten what actual intelligence looks like when it’s staring them dead in the face with those dark, knowing eyes. And then there’s Sharka. This […]
ReadIndustries 2011
It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids. Hunter S. Thompson I don’t know what the fuck I expected. You show up at a museum, they hustle you into an elevator, and suddenly you’re trapped in a metal box with strangers while someone’s doing something that might […]
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Adventure 2009
People ask me, ‘What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?’ and my answer must at once be, ‘It is of no use.’There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behaviour of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our […]
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