Thursday September 8th was another morning of oil
wrestling with myself during yoga. What’s weird is that within the body of the
overwhelming heat were these thin threads of cool air, but they seemed to
contribute to my sweating rather than to help relieve it.
I really
needed to do laundry, but I was out of detergent. The only thing I had was a
musky three-in-one shampoo, conditioner and body wash that I’d bought last week
from the Dollarama, so I used that to clean the two items that I needed to wear
that night for my pose at Artists 25, which were a certain shirt and pair of
shorts.
It was a
lot hotter than the Thursday before when I actually wore my motorcycle jacket
for the short ride up to Artists 25. I decided this time to just bunch up the
heavy jacket and to hold it in between my handlebars as I rode.
Cy was back
from his and Banoo’s trip to Armenia for her family reunion. Since she can’t go
back to Iran, they meet every few years in freer country. Two years before it
had been in Turkey, but this time they picked Armenia. I think that this was
Cy’s first time meeting Banoo’s family, but I asked how Armenia was. He told me
that it’s beautiful, but poor. Another artist at the session said that she’d
visited Armenia when it was still under communist rule and it had been quite
prosperous then.
Most of
what I know about Armenia came from reading George Gurdjieff’s autobiography. I
quoted for Cy an old Central Asian saying from “Meetings With Remarkable Men”:
“Boil three Russians, you get a Jew; boil three Jews, you get an Armenian; boil
three Armenians, you get an Aisor.” I had to explain because, I think Cy
thought that I’d said “eye sore”. The Aisors are Assyrians. They are scattered
all over the Middle east and Central Asia and they tend to be Christians. The
implication of the saying is that Jews are better with money than Russians,
Armenians are better with money than Jews, but Aisors know how to make money better
than anyone in the world.
I
watched an episode of the Ernie Kovaks show from the 1950s. It was quirky,
though not always funny, but it was highly influential for later television
comedy shows such as Laugh In. One of the skits had a TV show called “The
Answer Man”. People would write letters and Kovaks’ character would answer the
questions. One letter was from a man who was living in a fireproof warehouse
that was burning down and collapsing as he wrote the letter. He asked the
answer man if it really was a fireproof warehouse and the answer man responded
that it was fireproof and that if he survived the fire he should apologize to
his landlord for doubting him.
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