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- VERMILION's TEXT -
[Communique: 04.29.03]
Saw Mac Wellman at Tonic last night. Inspired surrealism.
so i wrote something for the desert...
Heat of the world! Brass in on it glowing white-hot! The land lies, it doesn't tell you it hurts, and it goes and goes, the rudeness, the pink abrasive tiles and sticky wet words. Taking you for a copper moment no one in the heat of it, the heat of all of them, and the flies. Gathering clumsy buzzing and stinging around the prickle red skin-bake, rubbing into it, pulling on it, telling me what to do - but it's empty. I can't follow such a thick one, such a maze going pit-like into hot open breaths, such a dizzy wish to fall off the top of a fucking carnival rider. This is the heat of the moment, in the thick of awful haze when I'm washing your pebbles off down into some bucket of rubbing drumming heat rocks. Take it! I can't run that fast any more with air that pulls my throat down to my stomach, with rubber lungs in the oven all the time, with flies in my face and a dead man staring up at me and we both stare into the prickle red sun-bake sky.
[Communique: 04.28.03]
I had a lot of static around my sexuality. - Billy, Six Feet Under
The worst is when I forget that I'm a girl.
The worst is when I forget my sense of the unknown.
That's when you stop being able to cry.
Certainty kills you.
-- and I just don't know shit about white privilege or about anything; because what is whiter than a white man who thinks the truth is simple? what is this voice of concern and worry that tells me i can stay within the lines just by thinking the right thoughts? and who drew these lines anyway? what is this desire not to get into trouble? what is this use of the word "dangerous"? nigga you just don't know shit, and it's thinking you know shit that makes you act dumb. every time you don't go there because you think you know what something "means," and in your vast arrogance you think it "means" something "bad," please remember that the butterfly not flapping it's wings might also cause a hurricane. the point is you just don't know. what you get out of the story of easy political judgment is to think you know. what you lose is to actually learn. i'm sorry if it's scary. i'm sorry if it makes me feel uncomfortable. but i cannot keep going around pretending that i know what things mean. i'm sorry, but that's not what i want to do with my life.
my questions -- and they are questions -- pushing forward -- make me ask -- if i can bear it -- about those very things -- that aren't ready -- that aren't judged -- that would be wrong if wrong meant anything -- i'm sorry -- but i still have to ask -- what is evil? -- why did you name it? -- where does it get you? -- what are you hiding? --
where is some power? where is a moment striking like a match? what is the point of a shirt that disturbs everyone? what are the angry white boys doing? where do you put your anger? where do you put your joy? where do you put the questions you aren't asking? what are they and how can i ask them?
Frodo was a girl.
[Communique: 04.27.03]
Questions about the state of the art are backed by an anxiety over a loss of the unique. The problem of the unique is a problem of ownership. The more art is made and held in common, the less likely are individual works to achieve distinction; the longer the boom in popular participation, the less likely a generation or era is to achieve distinction. The evils of economic globalization are mirrored by utopian instincts towards a universal family. In the arts, what we call a success is a hallmark of what we call decline. Antidote then does not wait in a will roused to fulfil old models of success, but in an inspired science of failure. Failure will reverse decline. First, how good everything is.
- Erik Ehn
[Communique: 04.24.03]
So here is what I think of Cremaster.
[Communique: 04.23.03]
Yeah, the worst thing about dance departments is how they promise you Italian food, and then they just give you rolls. And when you show up it's not even the dance department anymore.
- from Micha's dream
America is about no one leaving the room.
- Peter Sellars
what would democracy look like? red sand in a bucket What do you do with doubt? You are grateful for it. That's where the good stuff is. Up until then you were merely effective.
- Peter Sellars
Sometimes I have small anxiety attacks. The last time it happened I took my anxiety in my arms and kissed it, and it was transformed. It revealed itself as a part of myself.
AUDITIONS FOR the desert ARE ON TUESDAY.
[Communique: 04.18.03]
Late, by myself, in the boat of myself - Jelaluddin Rumi At home in Boston for my sister's birthday. Watching the Bravo reality show of Cirque du Soleil. I will be their usher starting this week, for Varekai on Randall's Island.
At home in Boston for my sister's birthday. Losing myself in the ocean of my library, I find myself again there in it. Books that have been waiting for me here for years, picked out and postponed. Each time I come here I find that a few more books are ready for reading, like fruits ripening on a tree. Or is it I who am ripening? Rumi, Lorde, Brink, Rilke, Levi, Endo, Trungpa, Wangerin, Carter, Lovecraft, Oida...
[Communique: 04.17.03]
I was in Amsterdam from March 31 to April 7. Here are some moments from life and dreams:
1. Boys in hotel rooms, war on television, food coming small on big plates. 2. The boy is growing a beard everywhere. I do not know who this man is but he frightens me, like my father did, and all the smoothness lost to boys and girls. This is monster. 3. Bajir doing Love/Sad as a one-person show, as fool in harlequin rags, surrounded by funky musicians, drums, electronics, etc. In a white space like Iben Nagel Rasmussen. 4. DYKE-BOY. BOY-DYKE. 5. LOVERS OP GEEN LOVERS? 6. "You are in my head. What are you doing in there?" 7. I am ready for work with bodies and objects. 8. Smells like weed, I am thinking, time to think. 9. ... Waiting in the velvet sea ... Finding something there? 10. hallelujah11. 2 voices 12. Jess Weinstein a waiter in a cafe near home and I burst into stupid tears - like I've really looked that hard! (But everyone does seem to have a fucking job!) 13. Trevor: "Right there. Good." No fun. But I came back to apologize. Is that a good or bad relationship where you can't apologize? 14. A strange cat. That's why I like it. I myself am of this world, but I love things that are not of this world. 15. SEX LUNACY - "Right now! Your cunt! Where is it? 16. 16. Stop de oorlog! GEEN BLOED VOOR OLIE! 17. no holes - no mountains. Don't you see? I HAVE to be able to love her and also to make art. Otherwise the art is meaningless. 18. LIQUID SUNLIGHT 19. I KNOW WHAT SUCCESS IS.
And now...
AUDITIONS FOR the desert ARE ON MONDAY.
Instead of rehearsing with an international cast and performing to the audiences across Europe in a production about the war in Sarajevo, he had an urge to create theater in Sarajevo, with his colleagues and students, for Sarajevans, as a form of spiritual resistance and moral encouragement. In a furious tempo, he organized concerts, film screenings and performances, and hosted foreign artists who dared to come to the city to perform. He was working with Susan Sontag when she came to rehearse Waiting for Godot, under the light of candles, with actors tiring quickly from malnutrition and cold.
... I learned from Haris how the situation of seige and constant threat to life fosters self-composure rather than panic and disorientation; how one achieves the utmost concentration and an increased speed of doing things under duress and with practically no resources.
- Dragan Klaic, "Theatre off the map"
If New York were under seige, what theater would we make? We would stop preaching as if to the privileged about their morals and responsibilities, we would stop complaining idly about the bad government. We would declare our allegiance to those aspects of New York that we love, and we would fight for them, simply, elegantly, in raw theater basements and night-time church performances. The rest we would just shrug off, lumping law-enforcement crackdown and terrorism into the same pile of shit, not worrying through our guilt but acting quickly, with the assurance and humility of those who can hear the constant buzz of death in the air.
Friends, New York is under seige. What do you think this war is? Who do you think will suffer? Do you think you are immune? Do you think guilt is not a plague? Do you wish you were safe? Do you wish you were innocent? Are your hands bloody? Is the blood your own? Do you think you are powerful enough to deserve punishment? Do you think shame is punishment? Do you want to be flogged? Are you willing to take it in public? Who do you think will watch? Where do you think you are? What do you think is happening here?
[Communique: 04.08.03]
That's the reason why I'm advocating the arts as pure activism, pure participation. If Picasso's working on a painting and there needs to be some red in the upper left-hand corner, he doesn't write a letter to the editor of the newspaper, he doesn't call his mother and complain, he doesn't sit in the corner of the bar and get drunk with his friends; you take some red paint, you squeeze it out, you pick up a brush, you put it in the red paint and you go and put red paint where there is some red paint missing...
Hence my wish to get active, this grass roots energy that says a single human being is immense not small. The media world tells you that you're just one small insignificant person, and anything you thought is your problem, you're a pathological exception. Art is about a pathological exception like Vincent Van Gogh expressing himself and then a whole bunch of other pathological people saying, "Oh my God, that's the most beautiful thing I ever saw,' and then beginning to notice that each one of us is a pathological exception...
This is the kind of empowerment that first comes out of our art programmes, where a single human being feels their immensity, and where we understand that one thing created by somebody in isolation or with a small group of friends turns out, four centuries later, to be kind of important. What's so beautiful is that art goes against the terror of numbers that this century has introduced, where everything must be quantifiable and the biggest numbers are the most important. We know McDonalds has sold more hamburgers than anyone else ever, but if you are confusing that with cooking, we do have a problem. The numbers aren't what's important. Think of two people: One is whoever is on the cover of Newsweek this week, and the other is a Tibetan monk in a cave in the Himalayas praying for world peace. Who is doing more in the world?
Art is about elevating the power of prayer. It's understanding that prayer does change things, does change lives and is the most powerful thing we know. It's a lot more powerful than the people who have armies, and the people who have giant marketing plans. At the end of your life, on the Day of Judgement, will you be able to say, "I sold eight billion tubes of toothpaste," or will you be able to say, "For a few minutes I brought a little more justice into the world'?
- Peter Sellars
Hits since 03/22/02:
It was suffocating my art.
what would queerness look like?
the man in a pink dress has a drum
something real and tender
no light and no land anywhere,
cloudcover thick. I try to stay
just above the surface, yet I'm already under
and living within the ocean.
1207-1273, Balkh (Afghanistan)
trans. John Moyne & Coleman Barks
radical theater director
vermilion's text = journal of a rootless cosmopolitan
all text by bspatz
return to anagnorisis