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- VERMILION's TEXT -
[Communique: 10.30.02]
Note to self: Read nonfiction. Raise stakes.
[Communique: 10.27.02]
The Never Land is Peter's world. But isn't there another important sense in which it is actually Wendy's fantasy? In the same way, the myth of revolution is upheld by the charismatic leader, but actually it is the fantasy of the followers. If it were not, they would not follow. So who is responsible for the illusion, the one who creates it or the ones who believe?
Sometimes I can feel you - Heather Nova, "Truth and Bone"
J. M. Barrie's PETER PAN turns out to be a much more interesting play than I ever would have expected. The gendered and racial imagery is absolutely fascinating. There is a touch of the feminine in Hook, he writes, as in all the greatest pirates. Is there any way to interpret this line that isn't at least just a little bit queer?
Timmy and Casey and me met Steve Ben Israel at the Moondance Diner tonight, and he gave me a copy of his new CD. Over thirty people have contacted me about neverland. I love New York.
[Communique: 10.26.02]
This morning I read JM's account of being put in jail for civil disobedience along with Ammon Hannecy and few other protesters. I know Hannecy's name from Utah Phillips, via Ani Difranco.
On 8th Avenue I was approached by a short and stocky black woman wearing a lot of makeup, who asked me if I was aware that I was co-starring in her movie. She wanted to know what I was reading because it didn't figure into the script as she understood it. After we parted, I heard her singing behind me for a few blocks. I let her catch up to me because I wanted to complement her on her voice, at which point she presented herself to me again. This time she informed me that she is not crazy, and that she didn't want anything from me. She told me that she is a drag queen trying to break a cocaine habit. "So why is a fifty year old black man walking down the street acting crazy, dressed like a woman and singing at the top of his lungs? Could be the effects of the cocaine. You don't know." She also told me that God loves me and He makes the pavement speak.
Then I went to a workshop with Eiko of Eiko and Koma. It was very sensual work, the kind that once made me comment to Andrew Suseno that contact improv is a lot like sex. He did not agree at the time. Probably he would still not agree.
Then I went downtown to work PHOTOGRAPH. Running the show is now an easy task. Today I worked on plans for the upcoming neverland auditions during the longer scenes. Picking my four performers has become a three-day event, and by my calculations I will still not be able to see everyone who has expressed interest.
Now I am home. It was a strange day. I am feeling a little lonely. After Eiko's workshop I felt as if I had had the most lovely sex with three different people, two of them strangers. Some kind of imaginary sex with no emotional baggage, no sweat, no clumsy naked bodies -- just cuddling and warmth. I felt good after the workshop, but now my bed feels strangely wide in its emptiness, and I miss having a lover.
Your world is yours not mine... - Cirque du Soleil, "Quidam"
I woke up this morning from dreams of Star Wars meets the Lord of the Rings. I went out into the world to dance, to design, to breathe. Now I am listening to "Comfortably Numb" and crying. Live. Breath. Create. Sing. Cry. Walk. Love. Be.
[Communique: 10.24.02]
Radical experimental physical ensemble theater.
The theater must be radical, or it is of no use. It must be experimental, or it is of no interest. It must be physical, or it is of no importance. It must be ensemble, or it makes no sense.
JM writes of finding workable anachronisms.
These days: A director takes a script. She confronts it, she argues with it, she gives it to the actors and together they wrestle with it. Finally the transform it, they produce a new play out of the old one, in dialogue and contrast with it. They evolve and workshop strange costumes, alien readings, ironic interpretations, and finally they make a new show out of the same text. Instead of A DOLL HOUSE, they stage a kind of anti- or post-DOLL HOUSE. The fruits of their work become their final product. The playing-with-Ibsen's-script has itself become a new script.
I do not want to create a new script. Instead, I want to put the process of transformation on stage: the multi-level work of reading, writing, research, and downright corruption that takes us from the original to the post. This work, normally hidden from public view, is as performative and as interesting to watch as any scripted show. This is what I am calling "improvisation," but it is not like any improvisation I have ever seen.
I try to be sociable. But when Julian's father defends every reactionary cause I can't stand it. I find myself so enraged that I hastily say I have a headache and tearfully leave the house.
On the street Julian confronts me. Why am I not tactful?
I can't. I can't. I cry out against the whole way of life.
Julian asks me what I really want. And I tell him the other side of the fantasy, the dream I have of being in the real world doing some useful.
"I want to go to Detroit... and I want to talk to the men who work on the assembly line... and I want to find out..."
But I don't know what I want to find out. Something about why the factory worker lives in a real world and I do not.
Not long ago, I worked in a factory too, and I thought I would be trapped there, in a world not my own, forever. And now I'm on West End Avenue. But I don't belong here either. I don't belong to bourgoisie.
Can Julian understand this? Not now...
But I understand, Judith! I understand! There are so many layers...
[Communique: 10.23.02]
From the diaries of Judith Malina:
May 14, 1948. The declaration of the Jewish state of Israel... I have strong and divided feelings about this important news... It is not Zionism that moves me. Zionism is not the establishment of the true Zion. The true Zion reconciles Jew, Arab and Christian... Holy war? How can one hate the Arabs for defending the land they have lived in while we Jews were dispersed over the whole earth?... May the viciousness of the battle never rouse me to hate...
May 15, 1948. ...We were discussing [the vote, at a birthday party]... I am trembling with all sorts of emotions. The atom, its fearsome weapons, in the frail hands of men. I flee to the bathroom, the only private place in the apartment. Here I ponder: What within my tiny scope can I do? I am small, yet I am strong. It is not beyond my power to make choices. But it's so difficult...
May 30, 1948. ... [A member of the Third Party Campaign] asks me what my plans are. At the mention of a new theater company he attacks me, "Would you want to direct a theater under a fascist government? Because that's where we're heading unless..." ... He is pessimistic, as any reader of newspapers should be. He is enthusiastic. I agree with him about peace, freedom and the possibilities of radical politics. And when he asks whether I wish to become a member of the PAC, the Political Action Committee, I know I will have a tough time defending my negative response...
June 1, 1948. ... The newspapers and radio report disasters, floods, wars. The United Nations asks for a Palestine truce. Arabs and Jews agree under conditions that will make peace impossible.
Her writing feels like home. If she were my age now, I would fall in love with her. I want to write to her, as the young poet wrote to Rilke -- because she did it. She succeeded. Anarchists and theatermakers alike count her among their heroes. She bridged art and politics; she was at the crest of a theatrical revolution that was simultaneously cultural and political as well. And: she did it not by living a life of lonely discipline, but by finding a soulmate -- a fellow traveler -- an artist who was also a working partner.
I do not have time to finish the diaries. It is a library book. I will look for it online. It's hard for me to believe that this is a published book. Have others read it, and did they feel the same way? I cannot shake the absurd idea that I am alone in this, that no one has ever read these words before; that I am privy to some secret intimacy; that this book was intended for me.
[Communique: 10.22.02]
[Reading] Gide's Journals... And of his devoted reading of Stendhal's journal over a period of two years, as a great delicacy which he allows himself only in small daily portions. He expresses the wish that one day his journals might influence some young man as he was being influenced.
It's like that box of cereal on which there is a picture of a woman holding a box of cereal on which there is a picture of a woman holding a box of cereal, until the picture becomes too small to see. Am I the one too small?
Now I want to read Stendhal.
- Judith Malina, Diaries 1947-1957
Am I the one too small? Now I want to read Gide.
I feel strangely close to J. M. through reading her diaries. Because of a coincidental connection, I may in the future have some chance to meet her. I will feel then as she must have felt meeting e. e. cummings, or corresponding with Jean Cocteau, back when she was 21, when the Living Theatre was only a fretful hope and Julian would not admit that he loved her.
Julian and I went to see about renting the Fifth Avenue Playhouse. The manager seemed amenable but is asking $2000 a week, and a certified check in advance for two months rent -- $16,000. Is there that much money on earth?
Stopped in at the Cherry Lane where Bob Ramsey gave me my season's paycheck for $44.76.
- J.M.
And now: Am I the one too small?
[Communique: 10.21.02]
Now I'm sick. Was it a mistake to launch neverland in the middle of this most hectic and emotionally draining of weeks? I don't think so. The Work provides as much energy as it saps -- only in a different form.
But I am sick. And that is really no fun.
[Communique: 10.21.02]
Timmy has a copy of the Disney Peter Pan soundtrack on vinyl, storybook included! Won't that be fun to deconstruct. I can't wait. I'm asking ABC No Rio if I can do neverland there; waiting for phone calls; starting to plan rehearsals. This has been stewing in my head for over a year now...
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
We began to argue. Should we dig a hole in the backyard and bury the old man in it, pack our few things and leave the house under false names for secret destinations ... or should we throw ourselves upon the law? ... While we were discussing these things, we heard a low rumble in the distance. We thought it was thunder but when [we] turned on the radio to find out what time it was, only martial music was playing and the newsflash informed us that the coup had taken place; the army was in power, as if this was not home but a banana republic. They were encountering some resistance in the north but were rapidly crushing it. All the time we had been plotting, the generals had been plotting and we had known nothing. Nothing!
The thunder grew louder; it was gun and mortar fire. The sky soon filled with helicopters. The Civil War began. History began.
- Angela Carter
The country is marching to war. Have you read about the pig farms? Iraq has declared amnesty for all of its prisoners. This is madness. This is the best I can do.
Schon einundzwanzig, und noch nichts fuer die Unsterblichkeit getan. [Twenty-one already, and I still haven't done anything worth immortality.]
- Judith Malina, co-founder of the Living Theatre, 1947.
[Communique: 10.20.02]
I sent a big email out to everyone, telling them about A PHOTOGRAPH and neverland. Now I'm off to a Mayday meeting, and then to distribute my "neverland" cards around the east village...
You don't have to have faith, as long as you don't give up.
[Communique: 10.19.02]
To be honest; to bare my soul to (you) strangers...
This week has been strange. I have been strangely functional since the death of my grandmother, strangely happy, and at the same time stupid, moody, unable to concentrate, making dumb mistakes.
At the peak of my hubris, sprouting my new project, I wrote this:
I honestly feel like I am carrying a theatrical revolution in my bag. And who cares if this is a fantasy? It will get the job done... When I think about this stuff, the only other thing I care about is love. I mean I don't care about acting, about electoral politics, about looking cute or anything else. But I still do care about love, about making a family one day. So there are two things I want out of life: a family, and a theatrical revoluton.
...but now i am undressed from my imaginary mantle, alone & lonely and in my room at the end of this long week full of wonderful moments i tried to appreciate, friendships i am trying to fix, and above all some kind of longing, an ache to reach out, a sadness where i can't understand the people i love, or even myself...
this too shall pass, but first it must be lived.
[Communique: 10.18.02]
Hey! There is a new project!
[Communique: 10.17.02]
there is so much that I want to write...
about the past week ... about the past day ... about what Bajir and Mandy said ... about what timmy said ... about theater i am making, theater i will make ... about the fear of never making theater at all -- and it is a fear... but i do not have time, so i will just say this...
i am alone in NYC for the first time ever today.
[Communique: 10.15.02]
You are invited to A Photograph: Lovers in Motion.
[Communique: 10.13.02]
"I want you to know: I had a great life."
- Marion Spatz - TUESDAY. She told me how she used to get dress patterns from Emil. She told me to take her box of fabrics, and the patterns too, in case I could use them. She told me to take the television, the fax, the sewing machine. "Tomorrow I'll show you how to use that machine again," she said. "I'll show you once and you'll know it forever."
WEDNESDAY. She did not show me how to use the sewing machine. She moved with difficulty to the chair, to the couch, and back to bed again. "I have to get up," she said at one point. No reason; she was restless. We helped her stand, and she did a little dance. We danced with her, and she smiled that beautiful smile. That night, she began to hemorrhage inside and cough up blood.
THURSDAY. We gave her oxycodine, morphine, atavan, and tussionex for the cough. She dripped blood as she lay on the bed. Occasionally she would raise her eyebrows as if surprised, or smile ever so slightly. We smiled back; into the silence.
FRIDAY. She breathed but she was not with us. She began to fade, internally, and her face greyed out like a shadow.
SATURDAY. She was gone.
[Communique: 10.07.02]
Okay. I'm not stoned anymore. Now I just have a cold.
I went to a great panel at NYU tonight. Five short notes:
1) The title of the series is radical longings. Which longings are radical today? Desire is the motor of fascism as much as of radical good. The longing for home, for past, for history, for truth, for simplicity, for power... What makes a longing radical? Whether or not its imagined fulfillment would make a better world than the one we live in now? Or is it something more immediate, less utopian?
2) Theater is a realm in which the visible is primary. As in a New York subway car, the labels we give to strangers on first sight are based on their visible selves. What relation does visibility have to origin (historical self) or identity (ontological self)? What can be done to subvert the "coercive logic of visibility," which tramples these other selves? Perhaps what theater knows is *precisely* how to subvert that logic.
3) There was a big discussion / debate about colorblind casting. Is there a point after which the audience is alienated because the genetic lineage is not "believable"? It is only because we are obsessed with (visual) race that skin-tone seems so important. After all, we *know* that one actor is not really the child of another. Why should it matter that they are different colors more than that they are from different countries? Is theater really about *pretending* in this way?
4) Postmodernism includes two very distinct and seemingly oppositional trends. On the one hand, it is all about claiming one's historical identity. On the other hand, it is all about being able to finally and ultimately jettison and escape from the prison of one's historical identity. In postmodern theater, actors can only play themselves. In postmodern theater, actors can finally play anyone, even a character of a different race. Postmodernism is drowning in too much history. Postmodernism is lost in the ahistorical. Postmodernism has shown us that nothing is truly cross-cultural. Postmodernism has shown us that everything is actually cross-cultural. This is not a paradox. These vectors (identity, history, the cross-cultural) are indeed the site of postmodernism -- in both directions.
5) One of the panelists told us that her family in India watches "The Simpsons." This is, in the end, a terrifying fact. The American monoculture is a huge juggernaut, trampling over other cultures far more ancient. But after all, that is what empires do, and "America" is the largest empire in the history of the world. That is where we are.
There is much more to say, but I will leave it at that for now. In any case, it's good to be back in myself again. Did you miss me?
[Communique: 10.06.02]
Midnight: Still a little bit stoned.
When will this end?
[Communique: 10.06.02]
It's past noon. I've got some kind of pot-based hangover, and it's pretty fucking weird. Can't seem to bring myself to get out of bed, let alone get dressed or do anything productive. I feel like Spider Jerusalem, and this is my column, and the cat has gone fucking psycho, running around like a maniac chasing invisible prey, but maybe it all makes sense and I've just gone crazy.
I would be all set to lie in bed all day except that I left my bag over on the upper west side, and I need it for tomorrow's rehearsal. Hopefully by this evening I won't be quite so incapacitated.
God, I hope I don't stay this way forever. I'm still fucking high. Answering my cellphone at home... Does any of this make sense? I think I've gotten more high since I woke up. Dave Hanlon just called me and I had this little mini-hallucination in which his voice conjured up an image of a 19th Century Count living in a castle in Inwood... Count Hanlon: "Hellooooo, Ben. It is I..."
Anyway, I spent all of Yelena's lovely wedding dinner writing furiously and madly into a little notebook. Filled up 64 pocket-size pages. Talk about prolific. There are machines in me that can unleash a torrent of verbal drivel unlike any that the universe has known before! And you can read it online, if you care to. It wasn't a very nice experience. The first trip I would ever call "bad" and my last one for a while, I think. I got paranoid and felt abandoned and imagined that I was playing a murder mystery game in which I was the victim. And this is still going on, so if anyone wants to call me or come over and give me a hug today, it would be appreciated. But it's worth skimming for the high points, from fork erotica to the Gendru-Turing hypothesis to the phenomenological exegesis of an onion.
It was a weird night. I think I'll watch a movie & take a nap.
[Communique: 10.05.02]
the old farmroad's a four-lane that leads to the mall...
- Ani
I can't take this line. It's my thing about history.
but once, we were here.
- Chingachgook
According to Michael Mann, this line is the heart of the movie.
There is nothing like living with a cat.
Yelena Gluzman is getting married today. And Amanda and Lisa are having a baby any minute. May have already happened. Feels like there's been a lot of death around me this year, and it's not over. Good to have some births and marriages as well.
The cat is running around wildly and sniffing the gas mask I have hung on my wall. I say "the cat" because although I live with three cats, only one of them is my personal friend.
[Communique: 10.04.02]
God is real. - subway sticker
The war is coming, my friends.
In some places, the war is already on.
The carefully manicured lawns of Los Angeles's Westside sprout forests of ominous little signs warning: 'Armed Reponse!' Even richer neighborhoods in the canyons and hillsides isolate themselves behind walls guarded by gun-toting private police and state-of-the-art electronic surveillance. Downtown, a publicly-subsidized 'urban renaissance' has raised the nation's largest corporate citadel, segregated from the poor neighborhoods around it by a monumental architectural glacis. In Hollywood, celebric architect Frank Gehry, renowned for his 'humanism', apotheosizes the siege look in a library designed to resemble a foreign-legion fort. In the Westlake district and the San Fernando Valley the Los Angeles Police barricade streets and seal of poor neighborhoods as part of their 'war on drugs'. In Watts, developer Alex Haagen demonstrates his strategy for recolonizing inner-city retail markets: a panopticon shopping mall surrounded by staked metal fences and a substation of the LAPD in a central surveillance tower. Finally on the horizon of the next millenium, an ex-chief of police crusades for an anti-crime "giant eye" - a geo-synchronous law enforcement satellite - while other cops discreetly tend versions of "Garden Plot", a hoary but still viable 1960s plan for a law-and-order armageddon.
- Mike Davis, "City of Quartz" (c)1990
I say this to theater artists: Public performance laws are loopholes for radical action. We can stage legal, choreographed riots. We can label protests as performances and get permits for them; make street "dances" that consist of sheltering the homeless in the midst of the rich - in their plazas, in their gated communities, in their bedrooms. Take to the streets in clown makeup and wigs. Performances are rallying points, physicalized language strategies, active thought engines. Numbers and letters, signs and symbols, control the fates of millions - therefore we hack into culture directly. Meaning is our territory, and we must take it back.
Last night at a Not in Our Name gathering, Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory read from the Melian Dialogues. The parallel with Bush's war in Iraq is striking, with the Athenians saying things like "The strong do what they can and the weak do what they must." The whole thing made me want to laugh and cry at the same time. Wally Shawn's work is always like that. He is a brilliant man.
Melos / Iraq / Vietnam: And how, pray, could it turn out as good for us to serve as for
you to rule?
Athens / America: Because you would have the advantage of submitting before suffering the worst, and we should gain by not destroying you.
The evening was inspiring, and such wonderful people were there. Howard Zinn, Suheir Hammad, Even Ensler, Ed Asner, Pete Seeger, Oscar Brown Jr. and more... Tony Kushner was especially intense, complex and activating at the same time. I sometimes forget what a fucking genius he is. His are some of the only contemporary scripts that I could ever imagine wanting to stage. Still, all that beauty... And the drums of war march on.
so we're led by denial like lambs to the slaughter, serving empires of style and carbonated sugar water and the old farmroad's a four-lane that leads to the mall and my dreams are all guillotines waiting to fall, and i wonder then what it will take for my country to rise. first we admit our mistakes and then we open our eyes.
- Ani, "subdivision"
Call your senators and representatives, my friends. Make art. Only speak.
Hits since 03/22/02:
breathing into me
and these hands
I can feel them tugging at my sleeve
I move through the day
in the rhythms that I've known
I've got this crazy dream
of stripping down
to truth and bone...
Your dreams are yours.
You may have touched the stars
but they weren't moved.
And if you reach for me
I may not choose to hold your hand.
I might smile, or I might turn away...
b. March 17, 1917 - New York City
d. October 12, 2002 - New York City
Jesus is American.
Meat is good for you.
Earth is the center of the universe.
My ass is made of special crystals.
vermilion's text = journal of a rootless cosmopolitan
all text by bspatz
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