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- VERMILION's TEXT -
[Communique: 03.28.02]
Feels like Spring today.
For me, the changing of seasons is all about memory. At this first breath of Spring, I think not only of last Spring but also of every Spring before. They form a chain through my life, like a necklace of pearls. Senior year at Wesleyan, MOMO and graduation. Junior year, Wonderland and 22 Lawn. Spring in Europe, traveling the continent with my little backpack, looking like a hobo in my long trenchcoat. Frosh year, alone and happy and riding my bike everywhere. And then of course there is Leslie, and before her Margaret. But my strongest association, the one that woke me up this morning, carried on the breeze through my window like a handwritten message in the hands of mischievous sprite, is of sitting on the field outside CRLS: Eating lunch, playing Ultimate, and climbing those poor lonely trees.
Yesterday I met with Kobun Aloka Kaluza and signed on to perform in his commedia-style improv of Michiavelli's MANDRIGOLA. The day before that I agreed to be a sort of dramaturg / assistant to Yelena in her post-mortem version of A DOLL'S HOUSE, which will be called I'M SO SORRY FOR EVERYTHING. The day before that I became the Technical Director for Ruth Winkler's CIRCUS OF VICES AND VIRTUES, which is based on Brueghel's drawings. Meanwhile I am applying to the Summer Institute at the Kitchen, and on Tuesday I interviewed Susana Cook for the Gazette. I finally felt like my time was mine again, so I immediately gave it all away. And I couldn't be happier.
[Communique: 03.23.02]
I finally put up some more recent poetry onto this site. It's poetry, but it's in prose form. Ben Schneider used to call such things "prosums." I can't tell if it's any good. I can never tell if anything I do is any good. Is that true? I now finally have lots of time on my hands, because Marion doesn't really require any care during the day. Thursday was a fantastic day with one great thing after another. Yesterday was a bit disappointing. I think it's time to starting Making Projects, but I don't know which ones. Eli says I should work on _The Desert_ and that I'll know it when the right theater project comes along. I feel totally blah. I think it would help if I could shift my schedule to earlier. I can't believe I'm putting up such boring shit in my weblog. Better next time, I promise. Meanwhile, go read the poetry. I wrote that when I was inspired, when I was excited, back in December.
Oh, and I decided that Eli was right about that Wooster Group blurb below. It is dismissive and stupid, and maybe if I had been in a better mood, or if I hadn't talked to Timmy Jones right afterwards, or if I weren't a bit worried about where I stand in relation to "successful" groups like the Wooster Group, I might have been able to see better what they are doing. This has vast repercussions for review-writing in general, but I can't figure out what they are. How can I tell a true reaction from a dismissive one? And isn't it okay to be dismissive sometimes? I like to pretend that you can escape these issues of responsibility by going into art instead of politics, but of course you really can't. It just becomes more complex and more obscure and less well-theorized and therefore more difficult.
[Communique: 03.18.02]
Removed from the EMERGENCY Gazette for political reasons:
_To You, The Birdie!_ by the Wooster Group. Video game theater. A psychoanalytic tournament where the players are bodily functions. Having harnessed the power of technology, the W. Group uses it to break characters into schizophrenic fragments. Separated from their own voices and faces, no one is sympathetic and nothing inspires feeling. Theirs is a vast but unpopulated machine. Richard Maxwell meets The Matrix. Eli says the reasons are "moral" not "political." Eli says:
The question of whether or not this review should be published in the above-mentioned gazette has neither a simple nor obvious answer. By taking the voice of a critic one accepts power and thus, necessarily, responsibility. This responsibility is necessarily dependent on the context in which the discourse enters the public sphere. Here, Ben speaks for himself, one voice with (for all intents and purposes) infinite space to express itself and (for all intents and purposes) an infinitely diverse world of performance to respond to. Writing for the Gazette, Ben reoresnts not only himself, but a publication with a complicated history and relationship not only to critical discourse but to the theatrical community which it has claimed as it subject and audience. The reasons are political, perhaps, but in the same way that Plato's _Republic_ was written for political reasons.
Yeah, that's true.
[Communique: 03.17.02]
A friend asks: "Is it ok to do theater? Is art selfish?"
Claim the universe. Art is history. Choreography is anthropology. All art
is conceptual. All theater is political. If you're making selfish
theater, it's not theater's fault, it's because you're living a
selfish life. Live a radically generous life, and the work will be
radically generous. What is missing from art is also missing from the
world. Leaving art won't help you find it. An artists' life can be as beautiful as anyone's, or as ugly.
What I learned from Pedro.
[Communique: 03.16.02]Towards a new adaptation of Peter Pan:
"Food money sex sleep sun sand & sinsemilla -- love truth peace freedom &
justice. Beauty. Dionysus the drunk boy on a panther -- rank adolescent
sweat -- Pan goatman slogs through the solid earth up to his waist as if
it were the sea, his skin crusted with moss and lichen -- Eros multiplies
himself into a dozen pastoral naked Iowa farm boys with muddy feet &
pond-scum on their thighs."
Hakim Bey, "Wild Children" in The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism
Beyond Peter the effeminate sprite (traditional), but also beyond Pan the dark and terrifying god (my original vision), there is this fucked-up oversexed drug-laced sweat-drenched agricultural earthy messy teenager. God the punk. The traditional Peter is pre-adolescent, and my Pan god is an adult, but no -- this story is all about being a teenager, caught precisely between the innocence of childhood and the reality of adulthood, all the while knowing that childhood was never innocent and adulthood will never be real.
[Communique: 03.14.02]
I've noticed, over the past several years, that I like to identify certain of my traits as being due to a cultural legacy. As in: "In my family, taking a bit of someone else's food without asking is a sign of affection." Or: "Where I come from, before you unwrap a present, the person who gave it to you has to make a speech that explains the nature of the gift (without telling what it is, of course), and maybe one or two things about how you should regard it. This is to forestall any possible instantaneous negative reaction that could occur if the receiver were not adequately briefed."
I really like the feeling that my family has traditions. Not being observant in our Judaism, we have no traditions that go back more than a generation or two. The traditions that have been passed down through 5000 years of Jewish history, we no longer have. This is a very modern problem and a fairly American problem. It's not even really a problem. But I do want to be able to give my children something like a tradition. Parts of it will be old (like reading Shakespeare), parts of it will be newer (like the proclamation just before any present is unwrapped that "it's a tie!"), and some I will just make up when the time is right. Will the newer traditions also always be more shallow? Will they be sure to disappear? Isn't it an oxymoron to speak of newly created traditions?
Last night we had another session of putting together the EMERGENCY Gazette. It was lovely, although we had to postpone layout & printing until tonight. I spent the whole evening refurbishing the website.
[Communique: 03.13.02]
I didn't post anything up here for a while because I was busy making the transition from my old Powerbook 1400 to an insane new Titanium G4 Powerbook. Things still haven't settled down. This machine is obviously infintely more powerful, but I am still struggling with the vast new-ness of OSX. For example, it's nice that I can do a real file search with "root# find -name [name]" instead of that silly old Sherlock, but I can't seem to get a handle on organizing any of my files because the whole thing is just too BIG. And going back and forth with OS9 for all my old applications is also strange. The good news is that it never crashes. Well, it did crash once. Yes, I actually managed to crash all of OSX, which is like crashing BSD, which is very difficult. Okay, enough with the techno-babble. That's why I wasn't posting. I expect to start being a normal person again... soon...
Reading: Nothing.
Listening: Nothing.
Doing: Playing on the computer...
[Communique: 03.05.02]
I am also a bit switch. As an adjective.
Listening to: Ani. Who else?
"And I think guilt & innocence
"I guess now I'm going home..." It's like she's been sent home from school for being bad, expelled from class for talking back... Think of that -- suspension as a metaphor for jails, for capital punishment, for all ways we ostracize and destroy those who do not follow the rules. It reminds me of Pink Floyd: "When I was a child I had a fever... My hands felt just like two balloons..." Childhood is the dreamtime. Those experiences craft everything that comes after. We never forget those fevers, those tears, those jealousies...
I am thinking of a play entirely about children, not as they are but as we remember them, as we remember ourselves before we became who we are... Bring out the sex, the death, and the rock & roll... Freud meets Artaud... Peter Pan in through the window giving french kisses to prepubescent children. "And just a little bit of pixie dust..." Beep. Turn the page...
[Communique: 03.04.02]
Okay, I figured it out. I am soft butch.
I was lying around in a pool all day today, completely fuzzy. I called the RBR people to ask about getting a press ticket for Ani and they requested a copy of EMERGENCY. So I gave up, thinking that as soon as they see it's obvious zine-like quality, they will laugh in my face. I wasn't even going to send it. But Eli said I should send it, and then suddenly I had this idea about writing an article on cultural superheroes from Ani to Laurie Anderson to Rammellzee. I had been planning to do this anyway as a Walkabout, but now I think I will do a whole article. And I will send a proposal of that article to RBR, and maybe there is one chance in a million that they will let me go to the Ani concert.
After that I was so excited that I had to jump up and do pushups and headstands and dance around and who knows -- I might even *finally* take a shower. It's been quite a weekend.
Listening: _Little Plastic Castle_ and Megan's Ani mix. Over and over and over.
Reading: _Laurie Anderson_ by Roselee Goldberg. "Journal Redux" by Famous Joe. And a back issue of makezine.
[Communique: 03.03.02]
For those of you who couldn't come, I had a lovely birthday party in the atrium at 590 Madison Avenue. A whole bunch of us sat there at ate cake for seven hours, commandeering three tables and 16 chairs at the peak of the event. For the record, the following illustrious guests were in attendence: Eli Rarey, Yelena Gluzman, Dave Hanlon, Megan Spence, Emily Ackman, Tove Hermanson, Ben Blum-Smith, Leah Abel, Tamar Leffert, Camille Acey, Natasha Johnson, Sarah Bruner, her friend Dan, Joanne Alcantara, her boy Alex, and me. In attendence via cellular communication were such luminaries as Jim Isler and the long-lost (to me) Emma Rothfeld. "Fly Up Crazy Kazoo Yon Over Under!" as we used to say.
It is nice to be 23. Among other reasons, 23 is prime. Riding Amtrak to New Haven with my Benny, I was informed about certain properties of prime numbers about which I had previously been ignorant. For example, in a modular set of the numbers 0 through 22, in which addition cycles back around such that 20 + 5 = 2, it will be possible to adequately define the operation of division *only* because the base of that modular set (23) is prime. Heaven forbid that I require an age-based modular set one year from now, because such a base-24 set will not allow division, 24 being far from prime. Benny feels that 24 is redeemed somewhat from its non-primeness by its large number of factors (2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12) but since 23 has no factors at all, I would accept as its equal only a number of which all numbers are factors. Infinity would perhaps suffice, but I do not expect to reach that age. All the same, it would be a grand occasion if I did.
Other Important things happened this weekend, but they cannot be discussed in the public arena.
[Communique: 03.01.02]
So now I am 23.
This is a picture of my favorite animal, the slow loris. You can probably just tell by looking at it how wonderful it is, but let me also tell you that it moves like an acrobat in slow motion, that it is full of grace and strength, and that it nevertheless maintains constantly its indescribable, impossible, infinite cuteness.
The February vtext has been archived.
Hits since 03/22/02:
At St. Ann's Warehouse in DUMBO (Brooklyn) until March 30.
"They are a matter of degree.
"What is justice to you
"Might not be justice to me.
"I went too far, I'm sorry
"I guess now I'm going home..."
vermilion's text = journal of a rootless cosmopolitan
all text by bspatz
return to anagnorisis