The Monitor
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- VERMILION's TEXT -
[Communique: 06.30.02]
I will not be able to post to Vermilion's Text from the road.
Email me at bspatz@wesleyan.edu.
Call me after 9pm or on weekends at 917-566-8205.
Goodbye...
[Communique: 06.28.02]
Listening to the Lola Rennt soundtrack!
Feeling extremely joyful.
Waiting for the journey to begin.
Wondering if six weeks will be enough.
Asking myself where first?
Saying hello... To a visionquest. To the search for Autonomous Zones. To no responsibilities. To my best friend from elementary school. To music played while driving. To many strangers. To the deserts. To the mountains. To the other ocean. To a different bed every night. To infinite accidents of timing. To the inevitable synchronicities of adventure. To the world, to questions lived, to a country unfolding.
... To the road, like so many before me.
[Communique: 06.26.02]
Listening to "Seeing Other People" by Belle & Sebastian.
Feeling incommunicably sad.
Waiting for the moon to come around.
Wondering if the world will ever begin.
Asking myself what is all this?
Saying goodbye... To a strange time in my life. To being home by midnight. To the city that never sleeps. To people who have hurt me. To people I have hurt. To friends who don't call me, and lovers I don't call. To my bed on the couch. To my grandmother still somehow smiling. To this tiredness in my bones. To this tenderness behind my eyes. To these long questions, to this long heartache, to the end of the beginning.
... To a grandfather I will always love.
[Communique: 06.21.02]
"Well, Benji... What's gonna be?"
- Milton Spatz - [Communique: 06.21.02]
Here are some photos of rehearsals for the Circus. There is even a blurry one of me. Hopefully there will be some photos of the show up there eventually, including my lights.
My second-cousin found a site that translates part of a Hebrew book about Tysmienica (or "Tismenits" in Hebrew), where my grandfather was born. His mother Sadie is listed in the index to names as Sara Runder.
Planning for the road trip. This is the projected itinerary, from the beginning of July through mid-August: Philly, DC, North Carolina, the 'Ham, New Orleans, Santa Fe, Austin, Grand Canyon, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, maybe Boulder, Chicago, and then home. Plus, of course, everywhere in between. Suggestions of places to go, things to see, and stuff to do are very welcome, as are offers of beds to sleep in and couches to crash on.
It will be nice to get away from all this. This last period of my life has been so different from any of the others. I downloaded 30 movie trailers this afternoon, but it didn't remind me of my purpose in life. I need to get out and see America and remember how vast the world is and how high the stakes are.
[Communique: 06.20.02]
Recently I have written often about my image of "kids in the city" and the goal of reclaiming the city as a fully interactive landscape rather than a network of paths connecting separate nodes. Along the same lines, I have become interested in the gardening projects of NYC and their attempt to create livable green space in interstitial urban "holes." Now I find that Deleuze and Guattari write with great excitement about exactly this kind of work when they constrast "smooth" (exploratory) space with "striated" (charted) space. But they also caution us not to put too much faith in the power of smoothness:
Even the most striated city gives rise to smooth spaces: to live in the city as a nomad, or as a cave dweller. Movements, speed and slowness, are sometimes enough to reconstruct a smooth space. Of course, smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries. Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us.
- A Thousand Plateus, p. 500.
If smooth space will not save us, then what will? If gardens will not bring our cities back to life, then what will? But perhaps we do not need to be saved; perhaps our cities are still alive. After all, remember, chaos never died. Maybe I just want to find the smooth space, then. That is a more modest ambition. Not to revive the city but to find the life in it. Not to spark a renaissance but to join up with one. Not to save theater but to be saved by theater.
And now...
What is a desiring-machine?
I would like to suggest that "desiring-contraption" would be a better translation than desiring "machine". A contraption conjures the notion of something taped together with heterogeneous found objects, clunking, churning, improvising, working through bricolage... The universe is a multiplicity of tinkering-centers that mutually alter each other in interacting wavefronts or interference patterns. A contraption is a put-together structure that produces effects. The universe itself "folds" energies into densities and intensities that structure themselves into "contraptions" that generate effects. An atom is a contraption. A molecule is a contraption, warped configurations of spacetime whose dense energy topologies generate various effects and "properties". Why "desiring"? ... "Desiring-contraptions" are bricolaged configurations or apparati of "substance" or the universe (you could call them emergent properties) that reach out to each other to alter and tinker in order to multiply possibilities. You could call them "hybridizing contraptions", but the word "desire" implies the forcefulness of will. There is a will-to-power in the machines, as they connect assemblages. When Deleuze & Guattari put forth the concept of "desiring-machines", they are saying that the universe likes to tinker with itself, it likes to play with itself, and we are the effects of that universal masturbation, that narcissitic polymorphous perversity. By suggesting that it is a universal tendency of which our desire is one example or manifestation, Guattari avoided a "subjectivist" take on subjectivity, which confines it to an interiority. Interiority implies a boundedness, a zone of private property, a compartmentalization of subjectivity that smells of capitalism. They prefer a model of subjectivity that partakes of an openness, an expansiveness, a Nietzscheian affirmation of will-to-power, of taking things to their greatest possibilities. This is to rework Freud and to assert that the id is universal. Subjectivity is a product of the id, which lives us all and everything around us. Id manifests in different ways; by nature it is multiplicitious and fluxual. It lives us. It delights in producing effects, in playing with itself, and we are the fireworks.
by John Landau, in the Deleuzeguattarionary
Does anyone else find this vision unspeakably beautiful?
[Communique: 06.20.02]
There are three new lessons in the Walkabout. I was hoping to post them here after EMERGENCY Gazette #40 was out, but we didn't get around to it this week, and today the Wooster Group is coming back to occupy their offices, so who knows now when it will happen.
Milty is still dying. Slowly, it seems. He is lying in his bed and does not know when we are in the room. Sometimes his breathing is labored. Sometimes fifteen or twenty seconds pass between breaths. I do not feel his presence here. I am grateful for the time I had with him. Now that all the relatives are here, I no longer feel anything. Crowds make me go numb.
It's different for my mother. She is constantly aware of his dying. She talks to him as though he could hear her. Is it important to distinguish what one does for the dying from what one does for oneself?
The Circus of Vices & Virtues opens today. The lighting is functional and at times even pretty, although some of the washes are uneven and not bright enough. I skimped on area lighting in favor of specials, and now the larger scenes are paying for it. You live, you learn.
Reading: A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari. I read this book two years ago and could barely get through it. Every sentence seemed to reveal a whole world and took me ten minutes to understand. Now I have internalized their vocabulary, and I can read their writing as if it were "normal." Now I can read their essays as essays (instead of as wild prophecies), and I am discovering that their historical / conceptual arguments are no deeper or more stunning than those of other great philosophers. In other words, they are not magic; they are only finitely deep. In fact, what makes them so important is not even the "content" of their essays but rather the vocabulary they built in order to articulate that content. Not what they argue about "smooth" and "striated" space, but merely the distinction between the two categories, is why the 21st Century may yet be called "Deleuzian."
[Communique: 06.13.02]
The anarchist "movement" today contains virtually no Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans or children... even tho *in theory* such genuinely oppressed groups stand to gain the most from any anti-authoritarian revolt. Might it be that anarchISM offers no concrete program whereby the truly deprived might fulfill (or at least struggle realistically to fulfill) real needs & desires?
- Hakim Bey, TAZ
Return of the Boom Bap: [anarchist people of color]
So there goes another large site I'd like to read in its entirety. The internet is like a library, except that every book contains every other book. There are no volumes, only entry points. There is no formal alphabetical order, only the inherent structure of language.
[Communique: 06.12.02]
One cannot simply create a theater ensemble or a Temporary Autonomous Zone the way one creates a reading group or a restaurant. Instead one designs a situation such that the work of building an ensemble can take place. One arranges the conditions according to which a rhythm might begin to build. This is how one avoids one's internal cop.
"If you suspend all laws..." You cannot suspend cultural forces and trends, you cannot get rid of the patterns and dynamics built into the the community. "Laws" are not fundamentally different from these "social" forces, they are just more formally structured -- more crystallized. Therefore the result of suspending the formal / written laws will be violent or peaceful, destructive or freeing, depending the cultural moment. Anarchism is simply the belief that abstract top-down laws written by nonrepresentative rulers are not good for the cultural moment. Anarchy is simply a cultural moment in which the structures of order are integral to the community rather than imposed from above.
There was a little Latina woman reading a book by Anthony Robbins called Giant Steps: Small Changes to Make a Big Difference: Daily Lessons in Self-Mastery. I hate to see women of color reading that kind of book, especially when they are wearing working-class clothes. I peeked over her shoulder and saw this "Lesson": I believe our decisions -- not the conditions of our lives -- determine our destiny. Someone should do a study on the relative social positions of the people who read this kind of book. Could it be that those in power don't need to personalize and psychologize their troubles because they actually have more control over their lives? Could it be that the disenfranchised turn to the psychological after being told from day one that the conditions of their lives are permanent, or worse, that their suffering is their own fault?
[Communique: 06.11.02]
The carton of milk is colored green. Why is it green? Why is nothing right? This man, this old man, is he old man coyote? Does he bear any relation to me? His nose is mine, or mine is his, the same curl of the lip and long jowls. I carry his sense of humor like a log through a forest. What do I owe him for that? What can I pay him for making my mother? Without him there would be nothing. And yet the world goes on.
I could stand at the top of a building and look out over this gross and sprawling city and remember running through acres of forest before humans came to this island, when a bear's claw crushing the wet earth was the loudest sound. I could tell you about the pigeons and their million children and the rats that live in the underground. None of that would explain why we are here, or help to salve the burning terror of tomorrow.
If India drops a nuclear weapon on Pakistan because of Kashmir, then millions of men in turbans and women in saris will enter the class of the guilty, and America and Germany will have to make way for the new evil. If that happens, I will no longer dream of leaving this country. I will know then that no place is innocent. I will see the blood on the snow, on the dirt, in the grass. I will give up my dream of perching on one foot with a spear hunting lions with the Masai. I will forget about what a woman told me about diamonds in the heart of Siberia. I will surrender to New York City and face my fears here.
Genet went to live with the Palestinians. He liked young boys. Sometimes I look down the length of my prodigal arm and think I am queer for myself. I paint my fingernails blue to live the questions. I like to feel small and sick, I like the weightless satisfaction of being helpless. I like to feel great and powerful, I like the massive heart attack of arrogance that manhood has given me. I like the sacrifice of innocents in the night. I like to be innocent, sacrificed in the night.
Yesterday it seemed to me that the world would go on if I were to die. I watched a "boogie-rican" Bruja spin a yarn out of her witty sexy mouth, running off on WTC until I thought: They can do it without me. No ghetto in the world needs me to teach its children kindness. No poor person wants my blood money. If I do anything at all it must be because I have to. Otherwise I might as well stay at home and drink my orange juice.
I still have to make things. The act is involuntary. The pictures come to me in the night like prophecies and if I don't spit them out then I have to swallow them. Eventually there's a wad in my throat and I write a book. Eventually I pull back from my lover, saying: No. I can't kiss you anymore. There is someone else. Her name is Random Acts of Beauty. Can I help it if I want to be an angel? Can I help it if my father taught me to be larger than life? The sins of the fathers also contain blessings. How to take what you want and run... How to speak truth to power without raping its wife.
He is sleeping now, and will wake "dis-oriented." No, it's not the morning. You don't have to get up. I'm here to visit you. You're in the hospital. It's Tuesday. The month is June. The year is 2002. We are on a briefly shining planet. We are falling softly through the darkness of the unbelievable. I am your grandson, and I think my name is Benjamin. I was born somewhat North of here. I took the train to come down. I am afraid of flying. I am afraid of dying. I secretly want to live through the plague. I secretly want all of this to be over. I secretly hate my body. I secretly worship my soul.
The carton of milk is colored green because some idiot didn't realize how ugly it would be. Nothing is right because you are living a dream. This dream is your essence. You cannot give it up, you can only fight, and eventually the fight will be over. This old man is Old Man Time, he is Old Man River, he is a survivor of a thousand tiny Holocausts. His sense of humor is what has kept him alive these ninety years, and if you're lucky it will keep you alive that long. You owe him your life. You owe him everything. You owe that to everyone you have ever met or spoken to or read about. Without you there would be nothing. And yet the world goes on.
[Communique: 06.07.02]
Went to the Not in Our Name gathering at the Judson Church yesterday. It was nice to see the good guys in action. Feels like there are so few of us this time around, though. But maybe it's always like that in the beginning.
The "War on Drugs" could have been our generation's Vietnam War, our rallying point, but everyone knew that was never going to happen. Now we have another chance with the "War on Terrorism." This is a war on the third world in the interests of the complete supremacy of the United States of America. In response to this state-sponsored terrorism, we have the chance to become a radical generation like that of the 60s. Once mobilized, we can link up with the struggle against racism in this country ("The War on Drugs") and the struggle to come back into a sustainable relationship with the natural world.
The difference this time around is that the U. S. Government is pretty sure we won't protest too much as long as U. S. boys are not getting killed in large numbers. We need to prove them wrong. We need to prove that we didn't rise up against the Vietnam War *only* because of American deaths, but also because WE WILL NOT HAVE OUR GOVERNMENT COMMIT ACTS OF WAR AND TERRORISM AGAINST OTHER PEOPLES IN OUR NAME. Therefore we will rise.
I do want to make one point about the stance of the Left with regard to Israel / Palestine. There seems to be a certain blindness to the complexity of the situation, which is different from that of Vietnam in the 60s or those of Afghanistan and Iraq today. In the case of Israel, the U. S. Government is not going in directly with military force. Instead, it is acting through what in Latin America would be called a puppet government. This is an important distinction, because as much as Israel "represents" Western imperialist interests in the region, it is also very much a servant, and it exists where it does (outside of Europe) as a direct result of the Holocaust. The Jews were successfully expelled from Europe in the first half of this century. They live in the Middle East and in New York City because nowhere else would take them.
If Israel "represents" America, it does so in the way that the Soviet states "represented" Russia. Like the puritans and the pioneers in this country, the Israelis arrived in the Middle East to escape persecution. Their massive violence (to the point of genocide) against the Palestinians is a case of clear evil and must be stopped immediately -- but it must also be seen in context. And it is no more "the Israelis" who are killing the Palestians than it is "the Americans" who are putting all the black men in this country in jail. I would like to see more focus on dissenting Israelis, as well as on Palestinian movements with better human rights records than the PLO.
As with the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, all this talk of "ancient ethnic hatred" obscures the political realities. It is NOT "the Israelis vs. the Palestinians" -- it is more like "those who want peace and justice vs. those who want power for themselves." And all Israelies are not Zionists any more than all Palestinians are terrorists.
[Communique: 06.04.02]
Thank god the Hip-Hop Theater Festival is in June instead of the July. I really didn't want to miss it again this year.
Tim Jones makes an excellent point about hiphop theater, which should be added to what I said about race and criticism last month. Hiphop theater, much more than hiphop music, tends to use hiphop always / only to talk about "life in the ghetto." Is this is a case of "performing" black-ness for a white (theater) audience? Anyway, this is only a trend and there are certainly some wonderful exceptions.
Molly Aaronson-Gelb writes of "representative" vs. "substantive" diversity in casting. I have never heard these terms before but I find them very useful in naming an important distinction. Leah Abel says: "Nomenclature."
The mouth of the fox cave gaped and coughed (of course there were no foxes left, not here, but that cave coughed just the same, choking forth some other unfox thing).
- "Haunting" by Laura Neuman
[Communique: 06.02.02]
Just watched Snow Falling on Cedars. What exquisitely rich and deep photography, especially in the beginning. And what is it about string instruments in winter? I once wrote a whole piece about two lovers cavorting round a cello surrounded by snow. (Consider also the opening of Amadeus.)
The Japanese on their way to internment... Just like the Jews in Nazi Poland, or the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears, or the Arabs in jail right now in Brooklyn. Forced relocation. The destruction of home and the separation of kin. Imprisonment. This is real evil, maybe the crux of all evil. This is what makes me cry.
The "love" story doesn't really touch me. Ethan Hawke's character Ishmael is too much of an asshole. I hardly feel compassionate for him; he just seems pathetic and spoiled. I approve of his actions at the end, of course, but they are hardly worthy of all that praise. So he avoids being a total bastard. So he does the right thing. Whoopie. And I absolutely loathed it when the entire Japanese community started bowing to him in the courtroom, looking up at him on the balcony like some Great White Hope. His father was a Fellow Traveler -- he's just in love.
What got to me in this movie was the history. (Same as with The Last of the Mohicans.) So maybe I am finally opting out of the individualist-romantic myth and moving towards real history...
Also, for future reference, the childhood romance in this movie bears no relation to the crazed adolescent sexuality that has been on my mind these past few months. I am not especially interested in the universal and essentially asexual curiosity of children. What interests me in Bataille's Story of the Eye and in movies like Another Day in Paradise is a certain desperate, escapist, and deeply self-centered sexuality that is part of the contemporary American cultural landscape. It is this whacked out junk that both seduces and repulses me with great force. (Incidentally, Larry Clark's other movie, Kids, is evil not because it portrays this kind of sexuality but because it tries to play it like a documentary.)
Hits since 03/22/02:
b. June 28, 1914 - Tysmienica, Eastern Galicia
d. June 21, 2002 - New York City
vermilion's text = journal of a rootless cosmopolitan
all text by bspatz
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