anagnorisis - vermilion's text

Selma Kleinman as Anne-Marie
I'M SO SORRY FOR EVERYTHING

- VERMILION's TEXT -

[Communique: 05.30.02]

Park's a porno we can't see for writing;
our bodies unreel the placeless obscene...
my thorax a blade, a question -- you're biting
the grass a new green.

I flicker.
catching it settling into color.

- Laura Neuman

[Communique: 05.28.02]

Kissing can be simple, or it can be complicated. Kissing can be one thing or many things. In my recent experience, kissing has rarely been simple.

First and foremost, kissing is an action. Following a moment in which all else falls away save for one person's electric face, and a kind of vertigo sets in. Eyes lock and embodied desire takes charge. There is a force like gravity that pulls two mouths together, hence the sensation of falling. The moment is pure presence, without reference to past or future.

But kissing is also an act, one element that connects two stories like a joint. To kiss is to create an idelible memory, an event that can never be unmade. The repercussions of such an action may topple empires or they may go unnoticed, but this much is certain: To have kissed is permanent. Thus kissing represents a choice, an act of will, grounded some in distant but powerful narrative.

Kissing can be a ritual, like the ones in which we say hello, say goodbye, or drink coffee together. This kind of kissing creates its own logic and pattern that extends backwards and forwards through time like a chain of pearls. A relationship, after all, is not built on a single kiss but on a series of kisses, and the strength of the lovers' bond may be read in the trajectory of those exchanges.

Kissing can be a kind of marking, as an animal marks its territory. Such a declaration of ownership leaves an invisible tatoo that may last for a week, a day, an hour, or just for a single moment. Here we begin to count our kisses, how many planted on whom and where and how often. Here we begin to rank our kisses and to build of them an impenetrable fortress. Here, as the saying goes, there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek.

And finally, a kiss is always a question. Like a spider at the center of its web, all directions and degrees of motion become available in that instant. What will follow? What has come before? And most of all: "What does this mean?" Kissing has been overdetermined by a thousand years of multifaceted and multivalent stories. We are lost in its power. We cannot make sense of a kiss any more than we can stop ourselves from kissing.

i have had something to prove
as long as i know there's something
that needs improvement
and you know that every time i move
i make a woman's movement
and first you decide
what you've gotta do
then you go out and do it
and maybe the most we can do
is just to see each other through it .

I went back to Wesleyan this weekend. It was both familiar and strange. Memories flooded me, but I remained myself. The experience was long and weird and twisted up around itself, but the result is an old feeling both welcome and surprising: Clarity.

[Communique: 05.24.02]

Marion is miraculously back from the hospital today. YAY!

I have six mini-reviews up now on the Emergency Gazette Listings page. Leah Abel has brought up an interesting question: Would I have denounced Rennie Harris' Rome & Jewels as misogynistic if he and his company were not overwhelmingly black? In other words, do I percieve black masculinity as inherently misogynistic, while ignoring the equally deep misogyny that exists in white masculinity? Recently someone has written of the United States' war against the Taliban as appealing to a certain reactionary political trope, that of white men protecting brown women from brown men. I certainly want no part of this trope. The references in my review to Salt-n-Pepa and Queen Latifah are intended to make clear that my critique of black masculinity is about making room for black women and has nothing to do with white men.

I stand by my analysis of this production as misogynistic. I simply don't believe Harris when he says that "The show is about men's bullshit." Since it suggests no alternative and actually specifically negates the existance of women by clearing Juliet (and her mother, and her nurse) from the stage, I find the show to be more an examplar of men's bullshit than a critique of it. Of course, it is possible that I have a prejudiced tendency to see black theater as sexist. But on the other hand, isn't it more likely that black theater is marginalized and denied funding to the point where the only hiphop show that can get booked at places like BAM is a deeply sexist one? Isn't this the same reason why hiphop is so often seen as misogynist? Not because there is no feminist hiphop but because the white radio stations won't give it airtime? Similarly, I don't see Sarah Jones or DC's Hip-Hop Theater Junction getting national attention the way Rennie Harris does.

bell hooks, if you're out there, I'd like your advice on this...

[Communique: 05.23.02]

I am not ready for repentance;
Nor to match regrets. For the mouth
Bends no more than the still
Imploring flame

- Hart Crane

I don't know what this means, but I like it a lot.

Marion is in the hospital with pneumonia. I was there with her for eight hours yesterday. Tomorrow I'll be there again. Today my loving mother has ordered a temporary reprieve for me. My grandfather said: "Your mother told me to tell you to have a fun day today. No jobs. Just fun."

How long has it been since I had a day with no obligations? All alone in an empty apartment, it is almost ecstasy. A room of one's own...

[Communique: 05.21.02]

Last night I had the most terrible nightmare daydream. I was thinking about health insurance and I imagined being hit by a car and falling into a coma and waking from it twenty years later. My parents were sitting by my bedside. They were divorced, but had come together to see me. They were seventy years old. My mother had sold her studio to pay my medical bills and was now making smaller work in a smaller studio. My father still read book reviews and volunteered at hospice. My sister was fifty years old, married, and healthy. Cara -- who only a moment ago had been a beautiful young woman with spiked hair turning the corner towards Astor Place -- was now forty years old, like me. She remembered me as an important friend from her youth. She had many other friends now, friends who I did not know. I had lost so many years of my own life, but even more painful was the loss of those years in the lives of the people I love.

Time is all-powerful. Time alters everything beyond recognition. There is no structure that time does not demolish, no wound that time does not heal, no meaning that time does not grind away into dust. Time is precious not because it is rare but because there is too much of it. The universe is eternal, therefore only this moment has meaning.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculpter well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias"

[Communique: 05.20.02]

Marion is sad today. I am hungry. The world turns.

On the topic of inner demons, I have written a small poem:

my monster and i go round & round
and no solution has yet been found.

[Communique: 05.17.02]

The frontier moves with the sun, and pushes the red man out of these wilderness forests in front of it, until one day there will be nowhere left. And then our race will be no more, or be not us... The frontier place is for people like my white son, and his woman, and their children. And one day there will be no more frontier. Then men like you will go too, like the Mohicans. And new people will come. Work. Struggle. Some will make their life. But once, we were here.

Chingachgook, the Last of the Mohicans

Had myself a good cry last night about the passage of time and the mortality of civilizations. Imagine if the French had won, and we all spoke French here. Imagine that once the island of Manhattan was part of a deep, strong forest that filled the Hudson River Valley. Imagine that once there were trees, right here where I am. Later there were townhouses and tenements. Now there is me and mine. Later again there will be others. And what is the most that I can say for myself and for my people? Nothing grand. Nothing to transcend the historical. Simply that: Once, we were here.

Shouldn't art make you grateful? Grateful like a soldier returning from war, but without the threat of death. The lesson without the danger. Grateful just to talk, just to kiss, just to sit together, just to be free, just to be alive.

Those mountains, they don't give a shit. We crawl on them like fucking ants.

I want a skill -- a trade. But not in the woods, not on the stock market, not on the internet, not in the military. I want a skill that doesn't exist yet, a trade that has never yet been practiced. I cannot train in this craft, because it is not yet born. I can only look for it.

The skill is to find the skill. The way is to make the way. The game is to create the game. The truth is to seek the truth.

The work is to find the work.

But once, we were here.

[Communique: 05.16.02]

Watching: Quills directed by Philip Kaufman

Reading: Toward the Radical Center by Karel Capek

Thinking: What shall I do with my life? courtesy of globalization.

Yes, I could move to India tomorrow. But if I did, would my life be any more like a movie? I would still be myself. The seconds would still tick by. The doubts would remain, stronger if anything. And even if my life was in danger, still I would find no proof, no proof. Nothing solid to stand on. No leap of faith. No hot kiss of truth. Where are the drugs that I make for myself? Where is the crazed monkey part of my brain that remembers how to breathe? I watched a powerful movie this afternoon, but afterwards my life was still my life. I spent all evening with a beautiful woman whom I hardly know, and still my life is my life.

I do not feel that I can accomplish anything. I do not feel like the children in the city, who make the landscape their own. I am part of no community. I believe in no field of communication. I cannot find anything inherently worthwhile here. But what is inherently worthwhile in India? Why India? Why not Germany? Why not the South Bronx? Why not the apartment next door? Everyone is sick and beautiful; it is I who am too tired to see it. I think I am a coward.

To find the portal is easy. To step through it is hard.

[Communique: 05.15.02]

Ben Spatz: 1
Oxford Health Care: 0

War with the fucking newts.

[Communique: 05.14.02]

Two conversations were had today, in two vastly different contexts and about two vastly different subjects, in which I found myself in a rather awkward position. In both cases, I was defending what appeared to be a conservative or reactionary view. My reason for this, in both cases, came from deep within my personal socio-aesthetics. It was nothing I chose. And yet I continue to hope that somehow what appears to be conservative may yet turn out to be what I call a true wolf or in this case a hidden wolf. That is, a position which appears on the surface to be conservative (because it closely resembles another position that actually is conservative) but which, when more carefully and more complexly examined, turns out to be radical.

The topic of the first conversation was the transcendence of modesty. I defended sexual modesty and privacy, saying that in my sexual utopia, there is room for both public and private sexuality. I claimed that the desire for modesty does not always have to be false consciousness springing from shame. I said: "If you are going to allow for S&M in a radical utopia, then you have to allow for privacy. How can you say that it's okay for people to hurt themselves if that turns them on but it's not okay for people to seek privacy if that turns them on?" But... Am I just speaking from my own sense of shame? My own fear of sexuality? My own longing for the safety of Victorian sexual repression?

The topic of the second conversation was the loss of auteurship. I defended the artist as artiste, as visionary, as willful director. I distanced myself from the performance art movement that begin in the 60s which brings randomness and super-human complexity into the work in order to transcend the individual ego. I said that to me, a better word than "control" would perhaps be "work," and that I experience this post-modern "distancing" effect as a kind of laziness. To me, art that replicates the world in all its complexity is superfluous. As in a conversation, I don't want to hear a cacaphony of possible responses, I want to get as close as possible to the other person's soul. But... Am I relying on an outdated essentialist understanding of the individual? Am I unwilling to give up the ego-centric gratification that visionary status accords? Am I betraying the dream of anarchism?

In both cases, all I can say is that I remain open to all discussion and I continually question my own positions, especially in these cases where I appear to be taking up "conservative" or "repressive" positions. And yet at this point, I still feel what I feel. I still believe that modesty has a place in a world without shame, and that the doomed and quixotic attempt at auteurship is humankind's greatest and only stand in a super-humanly complex and ultimately mysterious and unknowable universe.

[Communique: 05.12.02]

What about wanting to kiss more than one person?

What about not wanting to hurt anyone's feelings?

What about wanting to seduce without deception? What about wanting to communicate and still be romantic? What about wanting to play without being a player? What about letting the world sweep you off your feet? What about listening to desire? What about being honest with your body? What about letting other people decide? What about not being responsible for the world?

Wouldn't it be nice if we were older
Then we wouldn't have to wait so long
And wouldn't it be nice to live together
In the kind of world where we belong

Oh, wouldn't it be nice...

- The Beach Boys

It was a long day, but I have no complaints.

[Communique: 05.10.02]

A lifetime is not so long. You cannot wait for an ideal situation. You cannot wait for a tool without blood on it.

- Joseph Beuys

I once asked Joanne what to do with the realization that every action I perform does some harm in the world. No matter that these actions may also do good -- how can one speak or live or get up in the morning knowing that one is doing harm? Joanne told me to accept it. As David Levi Strauss adds to Beuys, "All of the tools are tainted. All of the tools have blood on them." Even the most altruistic lives are full of destruction.

To allow that the mere act of living includes doing harm goes against the great quixotic humanist desire to "do no harm." Her words spoken out loud broke a taboo. Indeed, one might almost conclude that the acceptance of mortality is easier than the acceptance of suffering. In any case, both are necessary. To Camus' crucial evocation of "the smile that forgets nothing, not even death," I would add: "Not even pain."

And now, a little portrait of my extended family at this moment in time. My father is asleep on the couch near me. Before he fell asleep we were talking about cult movies, the Granta quarterly, and the pragmatist view of history. Next to him is my great-aunt Florie, in a chair, also asleep. She is the crazy one, the only one of our New York Jew tribe to cross the line and become a Florida Jew. Her husband Lenny is in the bedroom with great-aunt Fay, great-uncle Leo, and my grandfather Milton. When I poked my head in a moment ago, all of them in there were asleep in front of the television. Meanwhile, my mom is in the kitchen with my grandmother Marion and Marion's third sister Shirley. They are trying to vacuum the dust off the filter on the air conditioner.

This portrait must read very bland to anyone who does not know these people. That is the trouble with names. Unlike standard words, they are meaningless -- empty containers -- until you get to know the person to whom they refer, at which point they acquire intense meaning. The names Florie and Fay and Shirley are already funny to me; but to you they mean nothing at all.

[Communique: 05.09.02]

Sitting at home on my couch with relatives prattling on in the kitchen and classical music blaring on my grandfather's boombox, even the most fascinating subjects fail to interest me. Out in the city, walking through the cool air, surrounded by the grumble and chatter of Canal Street, even the most mundane information inspires. This is the power of the world. Do not forget it.

The dullard finds even wine tasteless but the sorcerer can be intoxicated by the mere sight of water. Quality of perception defines the world of intoxication -- but to sustain it & expand it to include *others* demands activity of a certain kind -- sorcery.

- Hakim Bey, TAZ

[Communique: 05.09.02]

Just now I was trying to decide between "renaissance" and "rennaissance." So I did what I usually do to resolve this kind of dilemma. I typed the word into google.com. The result was 2 million instances of "renaissance" as compared to 15 thousand instances of "rennaissance." I like the paradigm shift implied by this method. It's not that one version is correct and the other is incorrect. It's a ratio of use, and in this case the ratio is about 133:1. Enough to make it clear which spelling to use, but the metaphysical significance is different. Even one person can prevent the ratio from being infinite.

The ratio of "theater" to "theatre" is 17 to 16.

Of course, this only shows majority, and the majority is not always right.

The ratio of "Israel" to "Palestine" is 12 to 1.

The ratio of "man" to "woman" is 7:2.

[Communique: 05.08.02]

One of the most surprising developments in the Culture Wars is that so many commentators on both left and right have supported an anaesthetic position. Conservative cultural critics believe that culture is something fixed, and that it must be defended from change. This is anaesthetic logic. They also believe that the proper role of art is to act as social lubricant and analgesic, "to stimulate buying and anaesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex," as Susan Sontag once put it. On the other hand, there is a part of the academic determinist left that seems to believe that the only proper role of art is to convey political messages, or to treat social ills directly and unequivocally. From their perspective, non-instrumental aesthetic imagery is seen as just another opiate of the people; a curious attitude in the face of charges of cultural elitism from the right. Both sides view art as primarily prosthetic and anaesthetic: aesthetics as pain control.

David Levi Strauss, "Aesthetics & Anaesthetics."

Today I saw Dogtown and Z-Boys at Angelika. There is nothing that I love more unquestioningly or with greater faith and hope than the creation of a vibrant autonomous subculture. Like hiphoppers, punks, ravers, junglists, and slam poets, the Dogtown skateboarders made something powerful, and the power was -- here it comes: performative. Finally, an example that does not have music at its center!

This is what the experimental theater scene is missing: the sense of community, the sense of location, the relationship with the spatial and geographic environment, the craft, the distant vision of what success would mean within that craft, the excitement of doing something new, the sense of working with what one has on hand, the primacy of the senses, the communal intuitive rules that allow for disciplined play.

There must be a raised platform on every corner, a performer on every platform, and an audience for every performance. Only then will I be satisfied.

[Communique: 05.08.02]

I spent yesterday afternoon with the performer of the legendary equation known as Ramm-Ell-Zee. I would say more, but have been sworn to secrecy.

Following that, I went to a talk at NYU by Richard Schechner and Tadashi Suzuki.

If you like to cut or edit people up, you should be in film. In theater you have whole people. Animal energy cannot be cut up or even clearly defined.

- Tadashi Suzuki

Schechner says we privilege childhood in this culture as a time to play. That's sort of true, but we also have very severe and specific limits and definitions about what constitutes correct childhood play. Our children -- are they really more free than ourselves?

[Communique: 05.06.02]

Sometimes I feel like this.

[Communique: 05.06.02]

Last night we had a Big Discussion about the show. Yelena offered us the opportunity to make drastic changes in our staging of the play in order to fix some deep problems that lie within our production. Afterwards, when democracy had led us to the lowest common denominator solution, which is to do nothing because of the risk of losing what we have, I realized that it would have been better for Yelena to take a real directorial position on this. One of the reasons the actors couldn't choose themselves to take that risk is because that would have put onto them the responsibility for making it work. This would have paralyzed and confused them during the show. They would have been trying to think as directors while onstage: "Should this take place over here or over here?" etc. Whereas if Yelena had simply imposed the change on them as a directorial "rule" to follow, then they would have related to it as actors: Not "should this happen over here or over here?" but "how should I behave right now given the new rule?" This would have been interesting to watch.

So it turns out that one of the director's primary functions is to take a certain kind of responsibility (for the show working overall) off the actors so that they can focus entirely on another kind of responsibility (for individual action according to context). When the director sets rules, they become givens and the performers can use them. When the director asks for consensus on decisions, it can be paralyzing to the performers.

On a separate note, I tend to imagine that my first "real" show (outside of Wesleyan) has to be utterly amazing, springing fully formed out of my head like Zeus from Titan. But the first show is not only the culmination of years of thinking, it is also the mere first step on a long path towards and ouevre. Actually everything one does is always both first step & culmination.

I want my theater to be performed in the midst of revolution. Like capoeira, training for the more martial arts. Like hiphop and punk, the soundtrack to raise our windhorses. Like hipbone glass bead games and MC battles, an improvised spectacle of performance defined by rules and stylized communication.

[Communique: 05.04.02]

Watching that movie about Abbie Hoffman made me feel that urgency again. Especially because ABC No Rio embodies so much of what I can't seem to find in experimental theater. Even more clearly I saw where I want to push theater... But not yet. I need to learn more first. This period of my life is like grad school, except that no school exists for the field I want to choose.

You don't live morally by not doing what you like, but by learning and learning and learning until you like better things, and then doing just what you like. And you don't make radical theater by ignoring your twisted parts, but by living an open life until your twisted parts become true wolves, and then making theater from that.

P.S. I am totally infatuated with the trailer for The Salton Sea. I'm fully not assuming that the movie will be as good. How could it be? This trailer includes at least four genres in this wonderful amazing way. My favorite part is the guy who leaps out of the elevator and dances around while on a secret mission. He is my hero. But the music in flames is beautiful too.

[Communique: 05.03.02]

Well, things are better today.

Movies watched at ABC No Rio this evening: A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, REPO MAN, three episodes of BLACK ADDER and the first half of STEAL THIS MOVIE. And that didn't even take me halfway through their fabulous 24-hour marathon.

I just need to keep learning. There's so much I need to know before I can start the real work. And yet all this learning is of course part of the real work, and the learning is never done, just like the work...

[Communique: 05.02.02]

Well, fuck me.

I am such an idiot for trying to have a critical outlook on this play while also being part of it. Trying to get the perks of the community without really joining. Trying to seem like I know what they're doing and also how they could be doing it better. Why is it so important to me to disassociate myself from everything that I do?

Theater is not made by thinking about theater, but by making theater. If I have all these directorial ideas, then I had better run some fucking workshops and make some short pieces. And stop worrying about what it all fucking means.

[Communique: 05.02.02]

The show opened yesterday.

I'M SO SORRY FOR EVERYTHING
The Performing Garage
33 Wooster St. (SoHo)
May 1-12 @ 8pm

People keep asking me how it went. I have no idea. I don't even know how it's supposed to go. It's such a strange show. Are people supposed to be moved? Disturbed? Confused? Inspired? Depressed? Does Yelena really not care how the audience reacts?

From the Manifesto:

We do not guarantee quality, stability, or edification. We, regretfully, cannot even guarantee your safety. Our performances are not products. They last as long as it takes to perform and no longer. We offer nothing to buy or sell. Each performance is necessary and slightly out of control. There is actually no "we" but one individual joined by others, all putting themselves through constructed experiences and inviting an audience to witness it. We offer nothing but a room of humanity. Each performance we make is a SCIENCE PROJECT.

The question of control...

But art is strongly linked to control. Control as power, will, utterance, meaning. Therefore: Loss of intellectual control, yes. Loss of centralized control, yes. Loss of egotistical control, loss of social control, loss of aesthetic control, yes yes yes yes yes. But loss of one avenue of control always in favor of another. Change the flow of energy, but do not lose it. Alter the method of communication, but do not break contact. Create more meaning than you destroy. Not a demonstration of random entropy, but a quixotic last-ditch insurrection of glory against it. A delicate balance.

No. Kick that binary in the ass. Art does not take sides in the question. Like meaning itself, like information, art hovers at the fractal border between chaos and order. The question is only which aspects to control and which to unleash.

vermilion's text = journal of a rootless cosmopolitan
all text by bspatz
return to anagnorisis

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