Raha Behnam

Periphery and Gut

February 09, 2013

I have been spending a lot of time contemplating, writing, thinking about what matters to me in dancing. And what seems to matter most of all is getting to the heart of something. But just finding honest, essential movement has been difficult because everything about the world we live in tends to favor form over content.

We, in the west, in the modern world of product-driven, disembodied culture,
we the doers,
spend so much of life on the periphery

physically isolated from our own guts and organs.

Bean Plant and Cloudy

January 23, 2013

I sprouted some beans, though I forget what kind they were. And here are some of the prized sprouters, and my kitten who likes to wreak havoc.

The city that stole my heart

October 29, 2012

My Best of New Orleans list, goes something like this…

Warm, sultry air put in motion as a gentle breeze. Hot sun blazes through the moist air and is brighter than I thought the sun could be.
Every morning, I awake filled with excitement at the thought of a simple stroll in glorious Audobon Park – massive, distorted trees, covered in lichen. How it felt those mornings just to walk beneath that shaded haven. Feeling so safe, comforted, alive as I haven’t felt in a long time. Exotic birds with ebony beaks cluster by a pond; a paved trail is flanked by a foot-trodden one; Spanish moss hangs from the thick tree branches, and sways in the breeze, like green, tree-ghosts.

And, speaking of ghosts, this is a city that takes Halloween as seriously as it deserves to be taken. This is a city that celebrates life by acknowledging death. Mid-October in NOLA and all of the glorious homes are decked out with giant, black spiders, zombies, skeletons. Even the most humble of abodes takes the time to cover bushes and trees in cobwebs. Halloween in New Orleans – a citywide ritual in a region rich with voodoo history. Magic pours out of New Orleans in more ways than one.

Awe-inspring, yet somehow humble architecture that speaks of culture, history and centuries of mixed memories. French colonial homes and archways; intricate steelwork fences. And what porches! These are the porches people speak of when they memorialize the south. Great, big landings that lay still in the warm evening air, beckoning for a sit and talk. Rocking chairs. Painted doors. When the sun sets, lanterns flicker – there is that magic again. But what I notice most in the architecture is the infinite variety. This is not a town built over night during some era of prosperous returns, planned and realized by the hands of a few architects. This is a town that has grown under the feet of Native American, French, African, Spanish, British,  and Caribbean folk.

Neighborhood streets are a maze for feet and wheels, as though little earthquakes have disturbed block-by-block. Concrete has risen in revolt; tree roots grow against the pavement. A quick drive to the store feels like a countryside adventure, as we slow down to avoid potholes the size of small mammals.

The sloowww, Big Easy.
Music, a way of life. Loud, brassy sounds of trumpet and saxophone. Wailing like this: “oooohh ooh waaa oohhh weeee”
Southern men with impeccable manners and warm smiles. Deep affection encumbered by nothing. Complete presence, because in New Orleans, it could all be destroyed tomorrow.

Bourbon.  Chicken fried steak. Fried, then fried again. Oysters, crab, crawfish. Gumbo. Blackened catfish. Blackened everything. Black everything, black city.

And now for some pictures. Unfortunately, these are almost exclusively from le Vieux Carre, the French Quarter, and not from the parts of the city that convinced me that I could live there tomorrow, if not today.

Life is Living 2012

October 14, 2012

West Oakland’s infamous reputation as a troubled neighborhood precedes itself. But despite this reputation for being a dangerous, crime-ridden, inhospitable, town, something like 30,000 people – families, seniors, young couples, hipsters, black, white, Chinese – live there. And though West Oakland has experienced more instances of gang violence and crime than, say, Berkeley or North Oakland, it also represents a dynamic, diverse and richly layered populace.

This was proven to me today, at the Life is Living festival, powered by Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s YouthSpeaks. I spent four hours hanging around at De Fremery Park by myself, enjoying the festival, and feeling more emotional in response to the music, culture, activism than I expected.

First of all, the location: De Fremery Park, also known as Li’l Bobby Hutton Park. Where, in the 60’s, the Black Panthers organized, connected, and rallied. See Elbert “Big Man” Howard of the Black Panthers talk about the park and its history, here. Oakland’s radical history is now often forgotten or obscured by the injustices and violences that have come to the area since.

Race on the Bart

October 11, 2012

On the Bart train on a Tuesday evening, heading towards the East Bay.
Three black girls, dressed in heels, sharing a set of headphones among each other, one of them holding a bottle of wine. They are having fun, messing around, maybe on their way to a party.

Their stop arrives and they get up to leave, as the bottle of wine slips from the fingers and shatters all over the train car floor, pink wine streaming from one side of the car to the other, underneath the seats, around people’s feet. They holler and laugh, as they continue towards the door before it would close in front of them.

But before they make it out, a black man, maybe in his 30’s, with a young, agitated voice calls out to them, “You’re not even gonna pick up none of that are you? You’re just going to leave it right there! That is what is giving us black people a bad name!”

With those quick words he cuts right through the thick fog of unnamed assumptions and subconscious opinions that filled the minds of all in the train car. He suddenly distills the moment from a vague nuisance to a rude awakening of what we were all thinking.

A post-racial society, some speak of? Impossible. I am not the only one who was jolted into recognizing that, yes, I did associate their unruly behavior with the color of their skin. Here, in the supposedly-oh-so-progressive bay area, we think we are beyond judgements, assumptions based on skin color, culture, appearances connoting a different world. But, in fact, we are a bay area heavily segregated, where skin color and socioeconomic status are too tightly bound together.
And all the organic urban farms in our tree-lined streets don’t change the systematized racism rampant on all sides of the bay. But maybe if more angry gentlemen on the Bart would speak the thoughts we were all thinking, we could get closer to a more transparent understanding of the mess we are in.

 

Washington, D.C.

September 15, 2012

I discovered recently, according to my astrology book, that Washington, D.C.’s astrological sign is Virgo. Suddenly everything made sense: the quaint, clean, organized row houses; the perfectly dressed and civilized adult culture; the workaholic nature of the population.

Although upon deeper research I found another source that stated D.C.’s sign to be something other than Virgo, the Virgo-ness of the city made so much sense to me that I decided to believe my first discovery. Here are some pictures of my little city, and our nation’s capital.

Neruda on Modernist Architecture

September 14, 2012

y ventana y ventana y ventana y ventana y ventana

y otra puerta otra puerta otra puerta otra puerta otra puerta

hasta el duro infinito moderno con su infierno de fuego cuadrado,

pues la patria de la geometria sustituye a la patria del hombre.

and window and window and window and window

and another door another door another door another door another door

until the harsh modern infinity with its hell of squared-off fire,

and then the country of geometry replaces the country of man

Move

September 02, 2012

Moving a third time in the last seven months, but hopefully this will be a more permanent stay. I have a deep impulse to build a nest and this time around it is stronger than ever.

Currently am reading a most beautiful book called Home Is Where the Heart Is, by Ilse Crawford, and it is inspiring me to stay committed to real, grounded, earthy materials like stone, wood, water, and build a home that is solid and calming.
It will be a work-in-progress to build a home that I have only so far dreamed about, so am trying to be patient with my ambitious ideas, and enthusiastic plans. Some of these include:

refinishing/repainting the wooden dresser I inherited
painting the walls, first my room, then the rest of the house
building a desk… with legs made of stone
hanging curtains to separate bed from workspace
a closet organization system

also, I will be scrubbing this place until its spotless and making it smell like angels! I love cleaning.

Raha & David in the Suburbs

July 09, 2012