Deborah Fisher

The Man In Control

I am not watching Speed whenever I get a chance because it's great cinema. It's not. It's a stupid movie that's deeply confirming of everything you've already heard about gender and sex. It's a story about Insides and Outsides. There are inside spaces: a bus, a subway car and an elevator. These are your basic yonic cavities, filled with powerless, whimpering hostages. But from the outside, the same elevator, subway car and bus are hurtling projectiles that are eye-rollingly phallic. These renegade penises are under the control of a madman, whose goal is to blow them up and destroy everything inside.

Get it???

Sandra Bullock is driving. The phallus is in her hands, but she navigates from Inside. The only time she steps Outside she's immediately victimized. She gets nabbed by Dennis Hopper who takes her hostage and straps her into a vest of dynamite. Keanu Reeves is the only player who navigates between Inside and Outside. He's the one with all the options. She's a great driver, but ultimately it's all about rescuing her.

It's a love story, and a cheesy, predictable one at that. It's also a story about what kind of man you want to be. Dennis Hopper is the villain because he can't control the violence of his masculinity. He can't "stop the bomb from becoming," and this makes him deviant, dangerous, ugly. He gets decapitated. Keanu Reeves, on the other hand, is the quintessential Man In Control. He uses his masculinity to protect all the hostages, particularly Sandra Bullock, from Hopper's masculine violence. Keanu Reeves is as wooden as ever, but that's because he has one metric shit ton of purpose. He's so directed that he can do something wrong for all the right reasons. He knows when it's right to shoot the hostage, and he trusts himself to shoot the hostage well.

I am watching Speed over and over again because this archetypal Man In Control still has way too much power over me. I am watching a stupid movie because I am ready to understand that I believe a stupid myth.

I am by nature a sensitive person, a little more angsty than average. When left to my own devices I quickly bury myself in a Woody Allenesque avalanche of intelligent but ineffective concerns. My mind wanders. I fall in and out of focus. I have always wanted to be more direct and have always loved the way the Man In Control distills passion into purpose. Keanu Reeves contains zero angst in Speed. Even when his partner dies he is momentarily frustrated, but he never gets derailed. Speed is a story about what kind of man I want to be. I want to be the hero, the Man In Control.

Technically, I'm not a man. But I am enough of a feminist not to let my gender stop me from enacting a lame set of stereotypes about men and women over and over again! Speed came out in 1994, and that happened to be a phase in my life when I was dating a lot of straight women. The sex was boring and awkward, but I always got to play the Man In Control. I loved being the one who asked ex-boyfriends to leave, built shelves and fixed bikes and cars. I always knew where the fuse box was and was happy to come over in the middle of the night with a package of Buss fuses and a flashlight to Save The Day. When I saw Speed in the theater, my date was a pretty massage school student. The movie gave both of us such a high that we wound up getting thrown out of the theater lobby for wrestling.

I was dating women for the wrong reasons, because they made me look and feel more like a man--the Man In Control. The procession of straight girls were a gateway drug that set me up for a couple of relationships that were downright sinister in the way they looked past the actual person and focused on working out masculine and feminine power. These relationships looked and felt a lot like Speed, all rescuing and controlling explosions and driving to nowhere, fast, from the inside.

About eleven years ago a man fell out of the sky who has about zero interest in playing either Keanu or Sandra's role, and I still cannot believe I had the good sense to fall in love with him. I don't play the Man In Control with Joel. We play a more powerful game in which there is no need to rescue anyone from anything and explosions are fun. I live this game every day and it helps every other part of my life. But I don't examine it or give it a name. I don't quite identify with it. It hasn't displaced the Man In Control, who has become my weakest link.

I think I am meant to find and pick a fight with that guy in my head, the Man In Control. He's the one who feels like a drag queen when I dress nicely. He loved working at Socrates, and he's the one who really wants me to just go get certified as a union rigger so that he can feel comfortable at work again. He hates doing what I happen to be best at, and because of this he vetoes some of the smartest choices I could make. On the mat, he refuses to believe that he resides in a tiny female body and tries to muscle everybody.

The Man In Control thinks that he can actually save the world, and this makes it a lot harder for me to just respond cleanly and openly to the world, even though I am convinced that this is a better strategy.

Lost

I've gotten lost before.

The last time I got lost it was an acute situation. I was in graduate school and was told by someone on my committee that my artmaking practice relied upon a specific crutch, and that I could actually walk just fine, so they were taking the crutch away. I responded by shutting down production for a few months, spending most of my time either hiding out in an aikido dojo or gardening, and the rest watching The Empire Strikes Back and Star Wars over and over again.

I came out of this better than okay, with a clearer, way less fraught sense of my art and an MFA show that exceeded my expectations. I could not have done this without getting lost. I left that period deeply grateful that I allowed myself to do so, proud of myself for loosening my grip on that desperate artist's need to always Produce Product and taking the time to slow cook, or percolate, or whatever it was I was doing.

It's is so easy it is to forget what's good for you. I am lost again, and this time the lost-ness is more chronic than acute, I think because I have other responsibilities and a fuller life. I've been lost for about a year. I am spending a lot of time in the dojo. This time I am watching Speed over and over again.

Yeah, Speed. Starring Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves. I have no excuses--the mind wants what it wants. Last time I am certain that I was trying to put down my Luke Skywalker complex. This time I am probably coming to terms with the fact that I don't have a penis.

This time I am also complaining and resisting more. I felt awful and lazy during that first lost phase, the Star Wars phase. But I think I had the discipline not to whine too much while I was in the throes of it. And I know I learned the last time that getting lost was the very best thing that could have ever happened to me. I have not been thinking about my current lost state with the reverence or gratitude that I thought I would be able to bring to it this time. I completely forgot that I promised myself that I would enter this phase with more patience and more grace than last time, not less!

This could be a function of why I got lost in the first place. I think the demons I have been setting myself up to face are scarier than last time, and that the outcome is much less clear. I have no MFA show deadline acting as a parachute, and am not convinced that the endgame is even art. I'm in freefall. It goes without saying that it's just a lot harder to get lost and keep a job and pay a mortgage in an expensive city where nobody else looks lost than it is to get lost and live off student loans and what is probably the best TA pay in the country, in affordable student housing that's delightfully close to the beach.

Yeah, UC San Diego was perfect for getting lost in a way that New York is not. But here I am in the city; life never hands you anything that you truly can't tackle and this lost-ness is still a gift that I would do well to embrace. I can get lost in New York, and am well-equipped, finally, to do so. My financial needs are met, I have a tenant, my job is strange but secure. I can muster some grace and awareness moving forward. Maybe focus my attention on just being here, and perhaps figure out why Speed and not The Matrix or Die Hard or Point Break.

I Could Try To Throw You, Or I Could Get You To Throw Yourself

I consider myself a strong person, and on balance this has been a positive force in my life. I have propelled myself into a ton of weird new experiences, trusted my abilities, learned a lot of skills and made some big, cool things. But right now my life has organized itself into one enormous lesson about the limitations of strength. What I am finding is that strength is always a limited resource. This is particularly true for a smallish woman with an overly strong attachment to the literal, physical world. I can haul a lot of bags of cement and only get so strong. But the limitations of strength are apparent even when the required strength is not physical, or when strength means harnessing physical effort to a piece of strength-amplifying equipment like a crane or a bulldozer.

Strength is always a one-way street. It's about applying my resources (muscles, equipment, emotional control) to the situation at hand. When I use strength, I am betting that my resources will be sufficient and that I will understand what to do with them. When they aren't, or I don't, I am out of luck. Strength is a path that's all about effort and expense. The end game is always depletion.

Every single element of my life is crying out for a strategy that is better than strength. But a lifelong habit is tough to even see around, much less change, and so I have been relying on aikido to make this new strategy into a physical, visceral reality. The whole point of aikido is to use the strength of the attack and not your muscles. I have achieved only the narrowest slivers of understanding about how this works. Your hips are important, there's a lot of talk about moving from your center. This is all still theory for me. But it seems clear that my strength is an impediment to understanding. Strength makes me rigid, makes me misunderstand where I should be putting my attention. It makes me stop listening.

It turns out that giving up strength is a hard lesson to learn even in an environment where everybody's supposed to be learning how to do the same thing. Aikido is a very subtle business, not a fast road to understanding anything. And the dojo is full of distracted, imperfect humans who are all self-directed, and all on the same long road. Shortcuts to understanding abound. I wind up training too much with guys (and a couple of women) who are at a similar skill level and use the same amount of strength that I like to use. When I train with these people I feel like my aikido is excellent, but that's an illusion. We are just expecting the same amount of muscle and inattention from one another. Whenever I train with someone who's sufficiently different from me, it is immediately clear that I am still muscling it.

Yesterday I had the honor of training with Ruth Peyser, who's in the video above, and I should screw up the courage to train with her more often. She reminded me that I am training to find out what lies beyond strength. We were doing a technique that isn't unlike the one in the video, and you can see in the video that there's a lightness to the way she's working, right? It's powerful--the person she's throwing is compelled to move--but it's not about her strength at all. Ruth gave me some good tips about where I was putting my strength and how that strength was making her heavier and harder to throw. That was welcome. But what was really instructive was the way she threw me. I kept landing on the ground, and feeling like I should be there. But there was so little pushing or effort on her part that I felt like I must be doing something wrong. I am nervous around Ruth because of her skill level, so I assumed I was anticipating her and throwing myself, and I criticized myself for it. She said no, and showed me where she was taking my balance so that I had no choice but to throw myself.

Tai No Henko

I just spent an hour and a half writing what I usually write about and it felt like total bullshit. What can I say? This is a building year--what I usually think has been rendered irrelevant. What does seem to be relevant is all this new stuff that has no specific relationship to what I usually identify myself with. And I know that a blog is a branding tool and that I am going off message, but I have no choice but to go with it. I have no brand to be, and stand before you unpacked, desperate to write but with nothing to prove. So today I'll try to describe something that I do at least once a week, but that I don't understand very well.

A common way to begin an aikido class is with an exercise called Tai No Henko, which is basically this:

1. You grab my wrist
2. I move around this point of conflict
3. We switch roles

This is one of those deceptively simple exercises that has about a million good places to put your focus, but I am a beginner so I can talk about maybe ten. If you're attacking me, I want to think about my whole body, not the point of conflict. I want my whole body to stay upright, my center to stay low, my feet to be firmly connected to the earth. I will be stronger if I can move both of my hands together like a matched set, even though you are only grabbing one of them. My shoulders should be relaxed and my fingertips should be alive and radiating energy, and even though I am not supposed to be thinking about this point of conflict, I should be thinking about the way you're gripping me and moving my gripped hand in a scooping motion, so as to break your grip. My hands should always be in front of me--I should resist the urge to move my body and leave my entire arm with you. I should be doing all this moving with my belly and not with my arms. This is all easy to say, and surprisingly difficult to do.

When it's your turn, my attack should be committed but not fighting--I should pretend to fight well, while simultaneously taking into full account who you actually are and what you are in this for and the fact that we are actually colleagues. I should balance empathy and martial intent. My palm should remain connected to your wrist even after you do the scooping thing. This means that instead of just breaking my grip, your scoop should move through my whole body, make me move diagonally a little, bend at the elbow and back so that my face is kind of close to your arm. If the exercise changes so that instead of just stepping to my side you start moving in a circle, my job is to keep up, to keep that connection between my palm and your wrist. To keep myself generally martial and safe, I want to always be looking at and moving with you, not giving you my whole arm by keeping my body still. You're doing the technique, but we should both be working equally.

Why do this? Most of the reasons to do this exercise are to me completely mysterious. The teacher at my dojo who does it most is utterly inscrutable most of the time, muttergrunts instead of talks, obviously has this deep, Jedi-like connection to what he's doing but has no way to unpack this connection for a novice like me. I love his classes anyway, they make me feel like a total retard and aspiring genius at the same time. Apart from the mysteries, there are simple reasons to do tai no henko. You learn timing, you learn to move your whole body in response to a conflict and not focus on that one point. When I started aikido my idea of myself as a coordinated person was shattered, and I found for a long time that I valued the chance to practice simple footwork, to practice feeling solid.

Tai no henko is also an almost perfect abstraction of a conflict. When I was training on Monday I found myself thinking about it in terms of rhythm: calm start, aware action, calm end. I was partnered with a blackbelt, which is always intimidating, and so I tamped down the inner conflict by focusing on starting and ending the technique with a clear sense of, well, starting and ending. And I wound up with a powerful takeaway. I tend to think of conflict as existing outside of time. But there is no conflict before or after this moment of attack, and well, the phrase "blending with the attack" deserves its own treatment, but suffice to say for now that you can be aware and calm enough before the attack that there is no jarring conflict in the conflict itself.

Perfect Conditions

One of the things I've been doing for most of my life is trying to create the perfect conditions to do work. I've spent a lot of energy on protecting myself from assholes, jobs that take too much of my time or energy, workplace politics, friendships that don't give, tasks that distract me from my art, hobbies that take time and money and so on.

This has not been an awesome strategy. It's a negating way to look at the world that has blinded me to the opportunities that are directly in front of my face. And it has allowed me to believe that I am much more of a hothouse flower than I actually am. I don't need perfect conditions, and I am boring and useless when I try to speak to you from my self-imposed contextless vacuum anyway. I need context, relationships and resistance.

MFA into MBA

Today Seth Godin put his finger on exactly the reason art stopped feeding me, and why I quit making it.

Art made me angry, and I finally figured out that I am not an angry person, that this bitterness I felt was circumstantial and self-imposed. I was angry because art is a gatekeeper game. You don't get to set the value of your own product, and that's a powerless position to put yourself in if you are looking to make a living. Gatekeepers also tend to prevent innovation and affirm what they already know, and so tend to value artists that are behind the curve. My art succeeded most when it was at its least interesting. Most of the people I know who have decent art careers are making art that follows the pack. And because their careers are built upon seeking approval, they are pretty tense, frightened and protective.

What gives me hope is the fact that gatekeepers aren't everywhere, and that art is a set of highly transferable skills. Going to art school is all about putting a language on your relationship to the world, and with that language you're supposed to figure out your vision--what you have to offer. It's powerful to habitually think in terms of what you have to offer. As an artist you get a lot of experience producing, explaining and defending your vision. You learn how to see the world in terms of shaping it, and how to find meaning. You hone your sensitivities. You learn how to let the world in so that you can do something with it. Unless you have rich parents, you learn how to bootstrap. You make bad financial decisions and learn from them.

I know a few people my age with hot-to-midling contemporary art careers in the city. Almost to a one, I don't enjoy spending time with these people. They are as a group suspicious and reactive, and they all work way too hard and care way too much about what other people think of them.

Almost every person I know with gallery representation has seriously asked me why I am killing my career by writing art criticism and keeping a blog.

But I also have more retired artist friends* than I can shake a stick at, and these people are supremely nourishing. My retired friends are positive people who care more about what they are offering than who they are offering it to. They chose not to waste time chasing a destructive culture that exists to exclude them. They moved on to legitimately innovative pastures and are doing cool shit--shit that's way cooler than what the folks I know with galleries are doing. They can do this because they've got real creative skills and have powerfully defined their own playing field. They're not giving their power away to gatekeepers or otherwise clinging to what they thought they wanted to do when they were nineteen. Instead, they know that they went to art school for a broad reason: to innovate. And they set themselves up to do that.

It's entirely possible that the MFA is the new MBA.

*and friends who have gotten faculty positions and therefore have time and pressure to create but don't need to think about art in terms of money.