a world of _

Last weekend I went with a friend I've known for close to forty years to see the Mark Morris Dance Group at Zellerbach Hall on the UCB campus. It was a good performance. The first half were older English songs and some comedic songs by Ivor Cutler, the latter full of odd juxtapositions and surreal imagery. The second half was a lot of Morris thinking his way through the pas de deux or couples dancing which was interesting and lovely in parts.

The audience was fill of white and grey haired people, my age and older. This happens more and more. Sometimes I think it's just because you tend to notice more people like you than not. Sometimes I think it's because of when I'm usually out in the world, times when it's only the retired or unemployed tooling around. When we rode BART from the airport Saturday night it was full of young people because it was Saturday night, you know? 

With the Morris performance though, it's likely because most of the people there discovered Morris when he was a young choreographer and they were young or youngish too. There is a way that we can move through the world surrounded by people of approximately our own generation, sharing an aesthetic and world view, a world of geezers.

I saw the Vice News documentary on IS earlier this week. It showed a very different and oddly homogeneous world too.

A world of men.

I mean it. I think I saw maybe two veiled, shrouded women in the entire documentary and in one case, one of the sharia law enforcers told the woman's husband, not the woman, that she should have a thicker veil. It's a hard world for me to understand. In an abstract way,  I can sort of understand the romantic appeal for some men. Here's this unambiguous, all-embracing war against evil. What I don't get is wanting to live in a world so restricted and so reduced. It is a world of strict laws and stricter punishment. It is a world with only co-religionists and a limited number of them. It is a low information world, where reality is strained through the interpretation of other men. It might be a safe world, but that safety comes at a huge cost.

A cost that some are willing to pay.

I wanted to link the video because I think everyone should see it, but it's gone now.