The Interlock~ part deux

My friend Cris noticed the other day that I always wear these black jelly bracelets. I do, I haven't taken them off since February 2000, when my old ones snapped and I was forced to remove them from my wrist.
When I first moved back to the east coast from California, I was living in Jersey City Heights and working at the Coach House Diner, in North Bergen. I moved a lot during my last year in CA and during one of my moves I found some old jelly bracelets that I wore in the 80's in one of my boxes. I began wearing them again, sort of as a connection to that time in my life when I was just getting into music and being excited about it. I also wanted to be Madonna (when I was 8, people). I thought it would be cool to keep them on at all times and see how long they'd last. Well, fast forward to my time in Jersey, and one day one of them just snapped, then another. They must've been 15 years old and I probably got them in a gumball machine, so I'd say that's pretty good. At the time I befriended a goth chick and her best friend/boss who would come in and sit at my diner counter that I manned to get some egg sandwiches and coffee before work. He owned Tony's Auto Shop, just a couple blocks from the diner, and she was his receptionist. I found her especially cool because she had an arm-full of black bracelets and wore ass-kicking boots that went up to her knees. We were talking about our bracelets one day when I asked her where she got hers....they didn't look like the standard skinny jelly bracelet, but thicker, and larger. 'Oh these? They're not bracelets. They're seals for air filters in a car...O-rings. I just steal 'em when Tony's not looking! Want me to get you some?' So the next day she brought me 4 of them and I realized how superior they were to my old, falling apart ones.

Fast forward to my time at Don Giovanni in midtown....this great old lady, a regular for us who is a former ballerina named Bella is ordering her usual lemon chicken with a mediterranean salad to-go when she notices my bracelets (the O-rings). 'Those are beautiful!' she says. You could sell those!' I didn't want to break it to her that I didn't design them myself, and their 'intricate', interlocked design is very easy to achieve, so I just thanked her. And later I was thinking about them and how I rarely even notice they're even there at all, they feel like an extension of my body of something. I don't take them off, I don't need to because they don't feel like anything and I can shower with them. I would compare them to a tattoo.

I was getting a massage once at my favorite Qi Gong Tui Na Chinese massage parlor, and the girl asked me to take off my jewelry, but I forgot about the bracelets. It didn't matter, they just moved up my hand when she was working on my forearm, and slid back down when she massaged my hand. I was relieved, because when I realized I almost panicked a bit, wondering if she'd make me take them off. Not that anything would happen if I did. I'm not trying to break a world record or anything, but it's just become a part of me.

So, as I wrote the last post, 'The Interlock", I felt it made perfect sense to include my fancy bracelets in with the idea. With marriage on the brain since George and I will be wed next spring, I've been thinking about what I'm going to do about my bracelets. Do I keep them on, even though they don't go with my antique styles of my dress and accessories and hair? I'm being girly now, I know. But I think about those things.
Maybe I'll make a new bracelet, in sparkly ivory beads, that can be interlocked in the same way that these ones do. That way they'll still be there, in a sense, just in a different, more elegant way.

I guess you could say they represent my love for what I call 'the interlock', in music, in dance, in relationships even, if you get all deep about it.

The Interlock

Let me take you back to my college years at California Institute of the Arts. I was a dance student, given a schedule of strictly dance-school classes without much room for any other art medium to dabble in, but my second year I convinced my mentor Lawrence (the biggest snooty ballet queen ever) to let me take a couple dance classes in the music school: African Dance and Balinese Dance. I was feeling claustrophobic from all the abstract modern dance that lacked music all together, except for the occasional ear-splitting abstract piece or spoken word crap (ok, I'm being harsh, but I couldn't for the life of me believe that my teachers didn't accept any of my choices of music to dance to, the reason for me to be inspired to dance in the first place, dammit). What a world away those classes were, literally and figuratively.

With African, I got a major workout while challenging my ear and dancing freely....the style of dance I learned was from Ghana, and the beat isn't standard 4/4 like it is in western music. I played a gourd shaker and performed for graduations, it was fabulous.
Balinese dance became my true love, though. With its intricate stylings and subtle gestures with the eyes, fingers, and angled body, I found it such an art form. The music is incredible, coming from an orchestra made up of many different sized xylophone-type instruments that are played on the floor with mallets, a gong, a time-keeper, and various other percussion instruments. The music itself is chimy and ringing and rhytmic, with many players playing the exact melody while others play the up-beat, so the result is a mesh of interlocked rhythms when played in sync. The costumes are elaborate and regal and you dance barefoot. No shoes makes Jessica a happy camper. I danced with both groups for a couple years and then my Balinese teacher asked me if I'd like to learn to play the music...I had no formal training besides the gourd (hee hee), but I accepted and learned quickly. I started on the Jegog, the deepest bass instrument played with a heavy mallet, then moved up to Calung, the higher bass with a wooden mallet, and tried out the gong as well. I became a part of the orchestra and toured around Southern Ca. to various schools and functions to play and dance with the group. It was really incredible and I miss it. I found a teacher at BMCC that was taught by MY teacher, he has a set that came from CalArts and he teaches beginner Gamelan. I dance for his performances and play a bit, but hopefully I'll find a group one of these days in the city to play with.