Enter your email Address

ENTROPY
  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Echoes of Infertility and Stifled Grief

      April 20, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Lost and Found

      April 14, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Elegy for a Tree

      April 12, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Coursing

      April 9, 2021

      Introspection

      The Birds: Little Bird

      April 1, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band

      March 23, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Finding My Voice

      March 9, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Individuation

      February 27, 2021

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Fragment One

      April 14, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: To Fly Among the Birds

      April 9, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: Another Red Ribbon – a nonbinary tale of absented love

      April 5, 2021

      Fiction

      Survivor’s Club

      March 24, 2021

      Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Fiction by Matt Goldberg

      March 24, 2021

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      an Orphic escape-hatch from the Hades of Literalization — Review of John Olson’s Dada Budapest

      April 19, 2021

      Review

      Claiming Space in Muriel Leung’s “Imagine Us, The Swarm”

      April 15, 2021

      Review

      Review: Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz

      April 12, 2021

      Review

      Review: Some Animal by Ely Shipley

      April 8, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      F*%K IF I KNOW//BOOKS

      April 13, 2021

      Small Press

      Tolsun Books

      March 16, 2021

      Small Press

      Inside the Castle

      March 9, 2021

      Small Press

      OOMPH! Press

      February 24, 2021

      Small Press

      Dynamo Verlag

      February 17, 2021

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch

ENTROPY

  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Echoes of Infertility and Stifled Grief

      April 20, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Lost and Found

      April 14, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: Elegy for a Tree

      April 12, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      Coursing

      April 9, 2021

      Introspection

      The Birds: Little Bird

      April 1, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band

      March 23, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Finding My Voice

      March 9, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Individuation

      February 27, 2021

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Fragment One

      April 14, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: To Fly Among the Birds

      April 9, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: Another Red Ribbon – a nonbinary tale of absented love

      April 5, 2021

      Fiction

      Survivor’s Club

      March 24, 2021

      Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Fiction by Matt Goldberg

      March 24, 2021

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      an Orphic escape-hatch from the Hades of Literalization — Review of John Olson’s Dada Budapest

      April 19, 2021

      Review

      Claiming Space in Muriel Leung’s “Imagine Us, The Swarm”

      April 15, 2021

      Review

      Review: Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz

      April 12, 2021

      Review

      Review: Some Animal by Ely Shipley

      April 8, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      F*%K IF I KNOW//BOOKS

      April 13, 2021

      Small Press

      Tolsun Books

      March 16, 2021

      Small Press

      Inside the Castle

      March 9, 2021

      Small Press

      OOMPH! Press

      February 24, 2021

      Small Press

      Dynamo Verlag

      February 17, 2021

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch
Music

Why We Danced

written by Adolf Alzuphar November 20, 2016

My gift to you will be an abyss, she said – Roberto Bolano

 

While all living on Old Glory’s peristyle, there is coming across Blanche Dubois exclaiming that “I want magic! Yes yes magic.” There is also the very first sentence of Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, “Mrs. Dalloway said that she would buy the flowers herself,” and then the second, “for Lucy had her work cut out for her.”

 

There are the pictures of Soraya that one can see in a magazine from the 1950’s. Soraya could not produce an heir for the Shah of Iran and so was divorced in 1958. An awful tragedy.

 

There’s also Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The Novel’s Tereza and Sabina, the first hurt by man’s infidelity, the second a man’s mistress torn between a conservative faith and communism. They are women living in revolutionary times, both affected and affecting (the reader included.)

 

There is Antigone. In Slavoj Zizek’s words: “while Antigone admires and loves her father Oedipus, she knows the truth about him. Her deadlock is that she is prevented from sharing this accursed knowledge.” Antigone knows a truth about the realities underlying human government, her father is King, and she also chooses to do right by her brother’s honor. There is, in the same play, Ismene, beautiful, who follows authority and does not rebel. In other words, there is Antigone and then there is Ismene.

 

There’s, importantly, Charles Baudelaire’s Dorothy.

 

Ever So Far from Here

 

This is the house, the sacred box,

Where, always draped in languorous frocks,

And always at home if someone knocks,

One elbow into the pillow pressed,

She lies, and lazily fans her breast,

While fountains weep their soulfullest:

This is the chamber of Dorothy.

— Fountain and breeze for her alone

Sob in that soothing undertone.

Was ever so spoiled a harlot known?

With odorous oils and rosemary,

Benzoin and every unguent grown,

Her skin is rubbed most delicately.

— The flowers are faint with ecstasy.

 

 

Dorothy is a pretty familiar character, isn’t she? She’s been painted by mastery: Mary Cassatt, Paul Gauguin, Berthe Morisot, and even Pablo Picasso. She is beautiful but never doing something important either to civilization or to herself other than being beautiful. She is Ismene, the opposite of Antigone. Her chamber, room, is where she lives, to be courted or, as so many old plays go, stolen away.

 

There’s Rock and Roll, a 20th century phenomenon pretty like 18th century Vienna’s Waltz. In both cases, in caste societies, the privileged step outside of the norm and dance the seedier dances of those less privileged than them. The Viennese nobility found the waltz in the dancing lower class and Rock and Roll was found in the segregated living of black Americans.

 

There are the kids, millions of them, and among them women and men who would like to produce Rock N’ Roll. Japanese Breakfast are those kids, those who have, have wandered their souls through society, nature, and infrastructure, through country, in the end to decide that what this country needs is not rhythm, harmony, or melody, but all of it combined into a band’s music. Musical kids laying claim to the nation’s fatum, its fate – with an idea about a state of grace that can be cultured by music.

 

Japanese Breakfast are a band of girls and boys producing, yes, cool, ambient, slogan, Rock N’ Roll but poetic Rock N’ Roll. They two are in the business of producing narratives and characters, in their case often unnamed. The difference is the music that comes along with story. Their magnificent first album Psychopomp is mostly written by Michelle Zauner, a chanteuse-songwriter as the poet Sappho was.

 

Come to me now once again and release me

from grueling anxiety.

All that my heart longs for,

fulfill. And be yourself my ally in love’s battle.

 

  • Sappho

 

 

Dorothy, burned into their minds … Dorothy, burned into their soul … Dorothy, come with, leave your room, is what Psychopomp leads to, amongst other things. In an age of accelerated living, our rooms generate selves, don’t they. Psychopomp taunt to them help exclaims. The polity is so often disturbed by what it hears, feels, and says that it awakes not as it was previously. It awakes with new commitments and convictions but some things, such as rooms never change.

 

Why Dorothy? Perhaps because she has been painted, we humans have sold Dorothy’s room as a norm to both the girls and boys: promising that courtly romance, obedience, and chivalry and the way forth. It’s a simple formula: we wait for it to gain its luster and for be for the most part unquestioned to then mass produce it.

 

Like most other American cities, New York is a product of the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, built on a standardized grid, conceived neither as a thing of beauty nor as an image of the cosmos, much less as an expression of man’s humanity to man, but as a shopping mall in which to perform the heroic feats of acquisition and consumption. – Lewis Lapham

 

Especially in the United States, from the cities, and industrial parks, we’ve built for ourselves, we’ve packaged and sold Dorothy and Dorothy’s chamber of a room beyond to the masses that we are, making Dorothy, and her room, that much more popular.

 

Now that some of us don’t think it’s funny that Dorothy often isn’t friendly, we dance for the fall of an empire. Amongst many other things, Japanese Breakfast, crusaders like all Rock N’ Roll bands, shout, sing, slowly sometimes, Dorothy out of a frame and portrait of herself that she did not paint, and even Ismene, to the new ball, the one with noise and poetry layered onto melodic audacity.

 

Oh do you believe in heaven?
Like you believed in me
Oh it could be such heaven
If you believed it was real

Is there something you can do with yourself
As I sift through the debris
While I empty every shelf
And flounder in the muck that I’ll be drowning in so soon
You can’t watch me from the banks then
Turn to say you’re swimming too

 

If ballrooms, dancefloors, once hosted mainly well shaped social dance from the minuet, the waltz, the foxtrot, to the cakewalk, they now host rebels. The larger cities and their need for symbols of political rebellion and amassing literally infinite amounts of capital, the same cities where philosophy and liberalism are a thing, have sculpted the rock and roll, R&B, bluegrass, etc., of the contentment of smaller cities and rural areas newly and packaged it, as they have packaged Dorothy and her room. Now women and men either dance alone, swaying back and forth, or else dance together without much form, in the polity where Minerva, goddess of wisdom, patroness of Rome, whispered to the founding fathers, and mothers, that it has come the time to live without a court and meld democracy and capitalism. Psychopomp goes beyond that, into the realm of bodily movement with real societal consequences.

 

The frame began to break by itself and the canvas slipped down. A fleet of kids ran, one girl with ribbon in her hair, trampling the dress that had so obsessed about Dorothy and had persuaded Dorothy to remain in her chamber. Then there was no more belief in Dorothy, that she must exist, is what this fairytale ends up being, after a night out, or a night in (or morning, or day,) listening to Psychopomp. What do we make of empty canvases and frames, poems without much meaning anymore? We seem to forget that they are there, as they fade away. To replace Dorothy with whom, or what?

Why We Danced was last modified: November 16th, 2016 by Adolf Alzuphar
0 comment
0
Facebook Twitter Google + Pinterest
Avatar
Adolf Alzuphar

Emmanuel Adolf N. Alzuphar is a critic and works in politics. He writes primarily about music and art. He is especially fond of Abstract Expressionist art and Jazz music. He dreams of being given the chance to one day advise an elected official on 'beauty' and on 'fun.' He has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, MIC, Blavity, Skin Deep, and other publications.

previous post
All They See is Brown
next post
This Bitter Earth

You may also like

Foux – Afrikaans

September 5, 2019

Carly Rae Jepsen, my savior from quarantine despair

December 24, 2020

Dat Politics – Tracto Flirt

February 14, 2016

Entropy’s EP of the Week: Sometimes the Blues is Just a Passing Bird by The Tallest Man On Earth

February 14, 2015
Facebook Twitter Instagram

Recent Comments

  • parri Loved the article. Beautifully captured..stay strong. Something must await for you at the end of this path..

    How Bodybuilding Ruined My Life ·  April 2, 2021

  • Waterlily Heartbreaking, real, and often so vivid. Parents, family, the pain and the damage we carry for them and from them. There is a black void where bits and pieces of our soul take leave to as we watch our...

    Descansos ·  April 2, 2021

  • Neo G I hsve to check this out! Is that doom on the cover!!

    Dskillz Harris & Chile_madd – The Next Episode ·  March 28, 2021

Featured Columns & Series

  • The Birds
  • Dinnerview
  • WOVEN
  • Variations on a Theme
  • BLACKCACKLE
  • COVID-19
  • Literacy Narrative
  • Mini-Syllabus
  • Their Days Are Numbered
  • On Weather
  • Disarticulations
  • The Waters
  • Session Report series
  • Birdwolf
  • Comics I've Been Geeking Out On
  • Small Press Releases
  • Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like)
  • The Poetics of Spaces
  • Tales From the End of the Bus Line
  • Fog or a Cloud
  • 30 Years of Ghibli
  • Cooking Origin Stories
  • Food and Covid-19
  • YOU MAKE ME FEEL
  • Ludic Writing
  • Best of 2019
  • The Talking Cure
  • Stars to Stories
  • DRAGONS ARE REAL OR THEY ARE DEAD
  • Foster Care
  • LEAKY CULTURE
  • Jem and the Holographic Feminisms
  • D&D with Entropy

Find Us On Facebook

Entropy
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

©2014-2021 The Accomplices LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Read our updated Privacy Policy.


Back To Top