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- VERMILION's TEXT -
[Communique: 02.28.02]
Today is my birthday!
Last year at this time, things with Megan were about to finally end. All the same, it was a good year. "A pretty good year." I graduated. I got to play at being a sailor. I got to take the first leg of a road trip (which some might argue is always the best part). I got to move to NYC and start seeing theater and hanging out with anarchists and figuring out what it is I want to do. Yes, 22 was fully wellyish, as they say on the schooner Manitou.
Still, I expect more from 23. Eli tells me that TS Eliot published "The Wasteland" when he was 23. Rilke wrote "The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Cristoph Rilke" in a single evening when he was 23. I suppose that these are high standards. But this is the year in which I am going to find out to what extent I really need to "have a job." And who knows what else may come of that. I live in New York City, after all. All possibilities are open. The paths do not fork but explode apart like firework trails. There are no paths.
What shall I do to make the day special? Perhaps I shall go to the cloisters.
[Communique: 02.27.02]
There is a movie out now about a guy who vows not to have sex for forty days. This is a little bit like my current position with respect to art. Making projects is my compulsion, my obsession, my addiction, and my primary act of self-definition. Everything I do bears some relation to my projects. Some projects last weeks or months, others are over in a single evening. They have varying degrees of success. It's not clear that they bring me happiness, exactly, but I become despondent when they are not around. I cease to know who I am. It is through the act of creation that I become human. I can exist without art, but I cannot live. And yet here I am, and (forgive me father) -- it has been many weeks since my last project. I am doing something else, something equally worthy. I am taking care of another person, or a couple of them, and I know well that this business of care-taking is no smaller than that of art. Others will devote their lives to it. It will be their love. Yet it is not mine. For me it can never be quite at the center. It comes close, it orbits around that point, it exerts a gravitational pull on the "real" work. But it is not the work.
This is no declaration, not even a prediction. It is merely an observance of the current moment -- that no matter how true this present work may be, my center remains elsewhere. Finally: I am that I make projects.
Reading: _Titus Groan_ by Mervyn Peake.
[Communique: 02.21.02]
Curse the ghosts of ages past. This morning there is a breath of spring on the winter air, and I find myself falling backwards in time, as I always do when the seasons change, but this time I am not back one year to difficult love with Megan, or two years to its beautiful beginning, or three years to deep aloneness in Germany, or four years to to the simpler loneliness of Frosh year, but five years, five whole years, to the love I had with Leslie. Now she is standing on the porch of my mind, and she won't go away. Which is funny, because I'm actually the one who refuses to let go. Two nights ago I dreamt that we were reconciled, which is funny again, because in fact she hates me and won't even speak to me. I wonder if I will ever love so intensely again. Honestly I can't imagine it. Such a joining of beings. Such a relaxation into the other. Such desperation.
But I wouldn't go back, as Krapp says in Beckett. "Not with the fire in me now..."
[Communique: 02.20.02]
Drifting off to sleep, in one of those fleeting dreams that wakes you up with its own force, I was shot in the face. On the right side, just below my eye, the bullet a quick incredible thud, pain like a wall rising. My eyes suddenly open, I almost cried out. Then I choked to hold back tears. That simplest and most unimaginable violence. Where do dreams take us?
Later, I imagine my life if I do not achieve "success." It may be that my work is never "recognized" (as my mom says), that I am not funded, that no one is inspired by me, that no articles or books are written. It may be that twenty years from now my work is as small-scale, lo-tech, communal, personal, weak and wild as it is now. Suddenly that's okay with me. Suddenly I understand what it means to find the Work that is life-sustaining, the Work that does not depend on the World. And there are questions I believe in, and there are quests that can redeem me even if no one knows. I have a lot of work to do, but most of it will not be visible. All the work that each of us does that is invisible, all that tension, all those patterns, swirling beneath the radar of the gaze, of the many gazes, of what are in fact nothing more than invisible patterns themselves. We are not Visible in the Absolute. We only see ourselves.
Reading: _Brecht on Theatre_ as I've been meaning to do for a long time. _When Fox is a Thousand_ by Larissa Lai, which is poorly written (reads like a first novel) and yet somehow I can't put it down. _The Fall_ by Camus, to be discussed in our COL reading group. We the nerds. Funny how I like to scorn COL and yet every book on their (our) list is a book I want to read. What part of myself am I trying to escape? I think I know the answer to that.
Listening: "Fancy" by Reba McIntyre. Rufus Wainwright. Madonna. Carl Hancock Rux. Ani fuckin' DiFranco. I called Carnegie Hall to try to get tickets for when she comes in April. Didn't anticipate a problem. I was going to splurge on the money as a birthday present to myself. But the only tickets available are in the back row of the upper balcony. "Oh, I didn't expect that," I say, and the answer: "Well, they've been on sale for a whole week." A whole fucking week. Everyone is a fucking Napoleon.
My hair is yellow as corn.
[Communique: 02.16.02]
I'm searching for a place to have my birthday party. Last night playing bughouse with my old chess team from high school, I was put on the scent of a certain study made in NYC about "privately owned public spaces." It turns out that a Harvard architect / lawyer guy named Jerold Kayden made a study of over 500 such places in NYC. The database is available online at the NYC Department of City Planning website. I think this is completely amazing. I want to go to all the spaces and compile a more user-friendly version that describes each one. According to a google search, no one has made the connection between the word "Kayden" and "anarchism," but really this is the perfect job for an anarchist task force. At the very least I want to print out the list and distribute it through MayDay. These are the spaces we can reclaim for social and culture grassroots purposes. My birthday party is only the beginning. We need a map of these places just like we have maps of usable dumpsters. These are spaces that we own without even realizing it! Talk about reclaiming space...
[Communique: 02.13.02]
Apologies to all my adoring fans, this site has been down for about a week because of Stargate switching to faster servers and changing all their IP addresses. Just kidding about the adoring fans, I don't think anyone reads this stuff except for myself, but that's okay because I'd be keeping a journal anyway.
This period in my life is a grey haze of doctor's appointments and taxi rides with adorable but slow-moving grandparents, sprinkled with more colorful tidbits of Leah and Dave and darling Eli. I have given up on Making Projects for the moment. If I'm going to tell my grandmother to buckle down and just get through the next three weeks, then I have to be ready to do the same. Of course, this means that all my nervous intellectual energy is bubbling around with no focal point. Usually I filter the constant semi-OCD flow of small ideas through the lens of a specific project, but right now I have no project, so the ideas are buzzing around like little blue bees in my sky-white mind. Can you tell from my prose that I just finished reading _Autobiography of Red_ by Anne Carson. A beautiful book. I'm also reading the 9/11 graphic novel collection of contributions from many comic book artists. Its politics run the gamut from reactionary to leftist, with Alan Moore spinning his deep sticky wisdom on the final pages. Tonight I am going to see Rufus Wainwright perform. Ani is coming to Carnegie Hall in April but I can't stand the idea of how much that kind of thing costs. On the other hand, she is the person who most easily comes to mind as a contemporary personal hero.
[Communique: 02.08.02]
I ought to be tripping. It's been a crazy week. Visiting Brie in Philly, playing with her adorable kittens, seeing her show, munching a $60 dinner for two, catching the train back on Saturday morning, joining the anti-WEF march, running in some folks from Wesleyan and Lucia too, all of us having dinner, then going to that F2 after-party and beatboxing for the first time in front of a crowd of strangers alongside Kid Lucky and Not for Profit, getting milkshakes in Chelsea with Eli and Phillip at 4am, staying up the next day until 4am again putting out the EMERGENCY Gazette, meeting RoseLee Goldberg, followed by the first boykiss of my life, and meanwhile my grandmother back and forth from the hospital, her throat all burned and sore from the radiation, and my grandfather at his operation to remove Basal cell carcinoma, and afterwards his eye all swelling up, and meanwhile the vertigo of queer romance continues...
I ought to be tripping. It's been such a crazy week. But I'm not. I feel quite grounded. The show I was going to see tonight got cancelled. I wanted to drop by the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center but it closes at six. I've been indoors all day and I'm going crazy. I'm not very good at wandering the city alone, without purpose. I need to make dates to meet people, or plans to see certain places, otherwise I just stay in all day, but it's impossible to do that when I don't know what's going to happen with M&M from one moment to the next. So instead I just stay inside like Sandra Bullock at the beginning of _While You Were Sleeping_ and lounge around and read and listen to music and serf the vast & slothful oracle we call the web.
Reading:
Listening:
Thinking:
"I wish the real world would just stop hassling me..." Matchbox 20. What a lovely statement about our generation. How annoying is it to have to deal with all those stupid politics, all those neurotic leftists who have to get involved in other people's business, who gives a shit if we're bombing other countries, who cares whether or not we invade Iraq, I just want to be left in peace to watch my MTV and eat my Ben & Jerry's ice cream, don't worry, I'll be sure and throw it up later...
If a theater cannot accomodate all these elements, then it is not the anarchist theater.
[Communique: 02.04.02]
Last night a bunch of us were at the Performance Garage until the early morning publishing the EMERGENCY Gazette. It was glorious. As Yelena said: "a whole group of people
working together, working separately, sprawling out, drinking beers and coffees, debating in doorways." My very definition of Making a Project, and the kind of thing I was always going for with Mnemosyne.
The January stuff has been archived. I will write more later.
_Sexual Anarchy_ by Elaine Showalter.
_Autobiography of Red_ by Anne Carson.
beautiful Rufus Wainright CD from Eli: "Cigarettes and chocolate milk..."
my pop mix on MD: "I wonder what it's like to be a superhero..."
Anarchist theater will teach two things: Skills and sabotage -- Or, in Pedro's language, Affirmation and Intervention. The anarchist theater ensemble will be made up of people of all ages, from toddlers to adults. Its rehearsals will take place in public spaces or, if indoors, then with open doors. The theater work cannot be "interrupted" by the appearance of children, old people, crazy people, the public, the police, or the "real world." If a theater cannot accomodate all these elements, then it is not the anarchist theater.
vermilion's text = journal of a rootless cosmopolitan
inspired by slander
all text by bspatz
go to anagnorisis