By the Archers (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger for all us regular folks).

I get to sit back now and think about it. (Crazy Scots.)

She knew where she was going (Wendy Hiller, aka Eliza Doolittle), but she was also a bit of a jerk. I am assuming it was necessary in that culture to be so, although there were a couple of Crazy Scots Women who didn’t seem as much like jerks and who certainly seemed to know where they were going…

Petula Clark as a young girl. (Not her so much. That was a non-sequitor. It was Pamela Brown who caught my attention.)

It was a little odd, but not nearly as satisfyingly odd as the only other Michael Powell movie I’ve seen, Peeping Tom.

Charming gentlemen and scoundrels (although you didn’t get to see the main scoundrel). Ladies and World War II young women (or one, at least).

The most best part was the curator’s notes and knowledge. I’m going to suggest now to all future Screen curators that they do a little research and prepare a short introduction. Not only did it make the film more interesting, it made the evening quite pleasurable.

Of course, we can’t all have the charm of Mr Holman.

In my infinite self-abased footlocker of insecurities there is one that has recently been making it difficult to close the lid. The nagging accusation that I am a dilettante: not serious, not committed, and not worthy of thinking of myself as an artist.

Because, like so much in life, this is a nebulous and ill-defined feeling that, like many paranoias, creeps unannounced into the room to hijack my brain from behind (it would hijack my self-image if I had one, but I don’t…’cause self-images are for mirrors) I am going to here lay out clear and well-articulated arguments for both sides. In the end, we will weigh them in the highly accurate scale of quick-draw gut instinct estimation and a conclusion will be drawn.

Reasons why I AM a dilettante:

1. I don’t make any money.
While this is not strictly accurate, when placing the money I make for doing what I call creating art against what my peers are making…my friends are making…what my children are making at their lemonade and popcorn stand at the foot of our steps in an afternoon…. I’m not really making any money. And I’m not even gonna touch hedge fund managers.

2. I make new work only once a year.
There have been years when I have made more, but on average over the past gaddimmed decade or more of stuff it comes out to approximately one per calendar year.

3. I haven’t remounted anything.
If I have I don’t remember it, and it’s not even 1:00 AM yet.

4. What I make gets seen as marginal, at best, to what is considered serious art if it gets seen at all.
Don’t make me explain this one.

5. I am better at feeling sorry for myself than I am at promoting what I do or even doing what I do.
So no pity, please.

6. I dress up in jackets and ties to make myself feel better.
Okay, there are other reasons why I wear jackets and ties, but Tom Ford once mentioned that when he felt off or was having a bad day he would dress up in his best clothes and shoes. And emulating Tom Ford is a fool’s errand, and a clear sign of arts-dilettantism.

7. I write rants online about miserable art and seem incapable of articulating anything intelligent to say about work that I respect and admire.
If I were serious I would have a vocabulary and a vision to express with it. If I were serious I would have nothing bad to say about anyone’s work.

8. I shun memorabilia and records of any kind for the work I am associated with, although I do keep what I feel is necessary for promotion and a small collection of things that I project as objects of study and admiration by future generations.
The shunning is probably false pride and the collection for the future FatSunny Museum is, well…true pride. If I weren’t a dilettante I would throw whatever I had in a closet and think no more about it cause I’d be so damned serious.

9. I can’t do anything alone.
Don’t start contradicting me.

10. I can come up with at least as many rationalizations why I am not a dilettante as why I am.
I can talk my way out of anything when I’m having a conversation with myself. If I were not a dilettante, I wouldn’t be talking to myself.

Reasons why I am NOT a dilettante:

1. Art is not a commercial product and so income from art is not a valid measure of success, much less seriousness.

2. I am not a machine. I make work as I make work, and the process changes as the work changes, and when it is ready it is ready. This is a founding principle of Skewed Visions and as such is a corollary to the proposition that Skewed Visions is about making art. Seriously.

3. Each piece is original, even if it may be a series or a further development of an earlier idea. The rigor with which each piece is created is reflected in the care taken to ensure that the ideas that are manifested in the work are current and present, reflective of both their creation and the world in which they are created.

4. Art is not a popularity contest. If it were, well…you could just shoot me.

5. This has no relation to the question, is a lapse into self-pity and deserves to be ignored.

6. “Well, we all have those bad days when we can’t hit for shit. The more of them magics you use, the more bad days you have without them. So it comes down to finally all your days being bad without the bullets. It’s magics or nothing. Time to stop chippying around and kidding yourself. Kid, you’re hooked, heavy as lead.”

7. To be able to speak clearly is to have nothing to say. Well, all right, that’s completely untrue. But still, it is possible to have thoughts that are not language-based. A vision that is in a form other than in pictures. A mind that is more than a brain. The more interesting a work of art is, the more there is to say about it but the harder it is to say it. The weakness of intemperate crassness does not necessarily imply a lack of vision and vocabulary. And bad stuff ought to be publicly recognized as such. It’d save those of us who make it a whole lot of trouble.

8. The work is the work and nothing stands for the work but the work. Theater is ephemeral and representations of it are only representations of it. Otherwise, no bad work would ever receive grant support. Part of the importance of the work is its contemporaneous presence and its immediate death. It is like life and remains traced in memory in ineffable resistance to a culture of materialism, commercialism, appropriation, and manipulation.

9. No one can. An artist is not a solitary figure. An artist is a point in an intersecting web of relations, only defined as an individual by the structures of society. As a friend of mine once said, the genius is over there in the corner, not inside you.

10. So stop talking to yourself and do something. What are you waiting for? Start asking better questions.

…And there we have it. It seems all my reasons why I am not a dilettante are responses to the reasons why I AM one. So once again, in the end, it is the initial question that needs to be un-asked. Keep off the wireless electric drug, slam that lid, and get back to work.

Like? Want?

Must give to Skewed Visions’ Cubicle fundraiser.

Then you 2 can has this fine specimen of site-specific tableware!

Coming soon…

If you were there, you got a live trumpet playing along with the Nino Rota duet near the end.

The funeral scene was particularly fascinating to me, knowing that some of the heritage of the theater work I am interested in comes from circus clowning. I had always felt that that attribution was a little misleading, if not misguided. Because clowns are doofuses with red noses who squirt water out of a flower and drive around in small cars in parades.

But there’s clowns and then there’s clowns.

These were not even really very funny. At least not laughing funny. They were creating a funeral. And building a coffin. And fighting. And generally engaging in misery. But all this was done by means of a very particular theatricality that had nothing to do with psychology or reality as it is conventionally understood. It was a brilliant means of presenting anguish and horror without imitating anguish or horror. Because of the impoverished and inadequate means there was no question of achieving a verisimilitude. This demands a very particular kind of logic and syntax which is at odds with drama. At the same time there were multiple levels of reality existing simultaneously. These were the “poor” (in Kantor’s sense) efforts of a miserable bunch. So the heart of the question — the tragic, the anguish, the misery — became startlingly apparent. It was even moving, but in a different way. An unsentimental way.

Maybe this is only my education and personal experience talking, and I am alone in this perspective but I found it a highly encouraging experience.

That it may still be possible to achieve a mode of performance that exists outside conventions is wonderful — not merely because it is unconventional — but because it is a mode that is specific to the thoughts of the particular project…

That it may still be possible to create for each new performance event a different and specific mode of performance that is exquisitely appropriate to it…

That there is more to life than Mechanical Reproductions….

This makes me smile with my heart.

Next up, the Archers’ “I Know Where I’m Going.”

Last “Screen” on May 7 was the Busby Berkeley number, Golddiggers of 1933.

Brecht without the class struggle. Like screwball comedy, sort of, but more edge.

Someone told me it was derived from burlesque, which in retrospect makes sense, but wouldn’t it be great if movies were this smart and funny at their most crass now? Wazzat?

Not that this was Hollywood at its most crass then, but I must say the gratuitous sex play was pretty entertaining. “Pettin’ in the Park?” Well, huh. And that baby. My jaw was on my lap for much of this.

The class awareness was interesting too, and without criticizing the film for something it wasn’t, it made me wonder about its relation to the world around it in 1933.

But Dick Powell? A funny looking monkey whose ability is surpassed by his…well, most everything.

And Ginger Rogers singing a verse of “We’re In The Money” in pig Latin. That’s something to see, so I’ve linked here!

Karazy!

Next up is Fellini’s Clowns.

W.G. Sebald and Austerlitz.

Believe me, Sirree Bob, it’s not the only book I have read of his. And the internet is a great repository of reviews and discussions, if nothing else.

So much research, so little output.

But now, given the fact that my eyes have recently seen a site with potential and the grant needed to be written I have picked up this book that I re-read for the third time a couple weeks ago.

Regardless of what happens logistically with this show (and therein is a tale, my friend, to rival that of the Dormouse), this book is an opportunity to begin, once again, departing from accepted practices (both mine and the others’) in creating a performance work. It is a model I place in front of me. I can reach out and feel its texture and form. The challenge is to create this texture and form in space and time, to answer its clarion call with my own adenoid squawk.

Couple of things that immediately make me happy:

1. Pictures, without captions, interspersed at random(?) moments in/against the text of the novel suggest a similar disruptive/tangential process for performance (image making).

2. The story, or “information” maybe is a better word, is found in this book as a nameless narrator tells of his meetings over decades with the man who is discovering his lost/forgotten history, which itself is dispersed among the places and objects of the world. All fades, all disappears, but the connection between the human (both the bodily and the immaterially human) and the (physical, material) world — especially the architecture — is drawn delicately and inextricably. To quote Michael Jackson, We are the world.

3. A central moment that centers both the “narrative,” such as it is, as well as the emotional affect and the….um, whatever the whatsit is..of the book takes place in A Train Station. Cool, no? Yes!

Perfect for putting up against Cesare Pavese and Mario Giacomelli and maybe even Schubert — unless I go with Puccini…and those images of hands moving slowly through an empty space (which I have yet to grab).

“I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision.”

What is this nastiness now…

“Death will come and will have your eyes…”

Ciao, bella.

Theater. What a stupid idea.
Doing a play. A stupid idea.
But, protests my anonymous interlocutor, what about the value of a communal gathering of shared experience in seeing the stories of our world re-imagined in front of us? What about our collective need for stories to understand the world and ourselves? What about the ritual, the drama, the metaphor?

Stories, first of all, are not theater. Same for ritual, drama, metaphor, or whatever else you wanna throw out. These are merely attributes of the gentle washing of our minds. They are the fingerprints on our imagination. They are what allow us to bypass the radical possibilities of performance for the comfort of the familiar. (And act as a little grease for the aisles, too. Slip into this seat, O Patron.) And in a world as cold as theater is for the makers, we tend to take as many comforts as we can.

These things (stories, ritual, etc.) are not attributes of theater — they are only what comes to mind when the subject comes up and by default are often seen as attributes (or even vital fundamental characteristics).

In an earlier version of this disquisition, I began to elaborate on representation as it is commonly (ab)used in “Theatre.” Let’s allow that to pass for now. Because it led me into the fallacies of origins and progress, through the myth of the main stream and into the prison of the “avant-garde.” But still, enacting a story is not, in and of itself, the origin, foundation, essence, primary characteristic, or ultimate goal of theater. Isn’t this obvious, given a cursory glance at theater’s long and cobbled history?

Also:
Must we really distinguish theater from other art forms? Why? Are we confused? Can’t it be all of the above?

While I admit there is some stuff out there that seems to want to do what television can do so well, I don’t think anyone is truly confused about whether it is truly theater or something else. The similarity of some theater to television (for example) comes about as a natural development of an art form under current Western-Global economic conditions. Look for the most efficient mode of making money from this beast and exploit it. (Given’s televisions recent history this mode is somewhat less common, but the exploitation itself of course persists. Like herpes.)

Theater is not what happens on stage (or any other location). Neither is it a primal human instinct for storytelling or exhibitionism. Theater is what happens in our minds: in the minds of an audience. It is our job as theater artists (if we really want to live up to the complex history of that term) to create the conditions in which this can best happen.

If this is the case, which seems to me to be self-evident on my good days, then of course even the most crassly manipulative or thoughtless work can be easily called theater. It just won’t gain any legitimacy from being a well-told story, a pseudo-religious ritual, a metaphoric exploration of human consciousness, or a financial (ha!) juggernaut.

Gotta tell you about this great show I saw recently. It was great theater.

This first installment of what would become our first trilogy took place in the Minneapolis storefront window just below what used to be spacespace in May 1997. This second piece attempted collaboration in a serious way. The three of us worked extensively with the sculptor Stanislaw (Stas) Retinger, developing both ideas and images, for a storefront window.

The original idea came from the Kienholzes’ Pedicord Apartments at the Weisman Art Museum. The larger idea to fill an old hotel with rooms of performance-installation of our own design was adapted to the resources at hand and we found an old office building in the Elliot Park neighborhood of downtown Minneapolis.

Stas constructed a viewing portal in the storefront window with a curtain that rolled up for a “show” every ten minutes. Outdoors on the sidewalk we rigged up a speaker that played the sounds of a shipwreck during a storm at sea. Indoors was a floor covered with river rocks on which stood an old wooden chair and end table. The table barely held a platter covered with fruits, vegetables, and a large stuffed fish, all of which was lashed to the table with rope.

Sitting in the chair was an actor made up in a very fake blonde wig and foam mermaid tale, wrapped from head to fin in white bandages. This mermaid was also bound with ropes to the chair. (This publicity shot was taken just outside the building.)

Across all of this landscape a wild wind blew, scattering bits of white through the air. As the mermaid ate fishsticks and did a crossword puzzle (as well as could be expected while bandaged and tied down), the top half of Jon-Benet Ramsey’s face peered over each frame of the rear office window, which was in nine sections.

This piece took the audience into account in a way the first piece hadn’t. It was created for an audience to take part in as voyeurs, peeking into another space. Drawn either by the crashing outdoor soundscape or curiosity, the audience members would stand and stare for a few seconds or several cycles of the scene. But the audience had to take a step towards us to engage the performance. The performance wasn’t given to the audience, and neither did it provide conventional performance satisfaction: there was little more to take in than the installation — even though it included a (somewhat) active performer. It was in this sense, a melding of visual art and performance.

But this relationship between the audience and the performance was one that we would return to in different forms in the future. In any case, it was a practical example for us of the possibility of engaging the audience in an active role (without forcing them to take part) in the experience of theater.

The space, however, was transformed — and as completely as possible — into an entirely new space. The geometry of the space remained, but little consideration was given to its history or topography. It was an office space, and the contrast of its former use with its current transformation was the link intended to stimulate meaning.

The title, Urban Sirens, was meant to draw parallels between the way we are drawn to the gruesome or sordid (such as the Jon-Benet Ramsey case) and the sirens of myth. Media storms waylay us as we go about our otherwise quotidian lives.

…which I wrote in 1996, when Brooklyn was barely still Brooklyn, not too long after the Mother of All Battles, just before Skewed Visions was formed. There are so many things I would talk more about now, but that’s probably why it remains interesting to me now. It’s all lies but it is all deeply true. (Of course, Skewed Visions performances are refined and delicate flowers and no comparison ought to be made between this tasteless effrontery and our own theatrical wizardry.)

Fountain of Youth, 1996
In a small garage in Brooklyn, New York, a group of young people have been putting on shows since 1993 for whomever will show up. The shows seem confused, anarchic, and sophomoric; they are called things like Barf, and Fuck Off! and usually they last for no more than half an hour. They have received little attention and operate without a budget for publicity. To all intents and purposes, the company (called, at various stages: Poop, Snotrag, Pisspoor, Ralph Mutt, and now Mother of All Theatre Companies (MATC)) seems like one of those adolescent fountains of juvenile expression. However, despite this – or maybe because of it – MATC (in whatever incarnation they happen to find themselves) has been doing shows for almost three years and are attracting a great deal of only local attention (I have been told that the shows “sell out” without advertisement). Having seen two of these shows myself, I would like to pass on the knowledge of their existence because I believe the company embodies a mode of functioning that is an effective model for performing groups.

The artistic force behind this young company is a young woman who calls herself Anita Break. Her real name is Anita Swanson and she grew up in Northfield, Minnesota, my home town. I went to visit friends in New York over winter break, ran into Anita, and saw her company’s productions of Fuck Off! and Barf. The shows ran on consecutive nights in the garage of a friend’s parent.

Barf consisted of a series of skits strung together mainly by the fact that it was the same three actors in each of them. In the first skit three actors sat in a row of chairs, one behind another, facing stage right. At a silent cue all three began doing complicated hand gestures that resembled from what I could see slapping flies, scratching, and masturbation. The gestures grew in proportion and speed until they resembled nothing other than a dance. This level of exertion and complicated choreography continued beyond the point where it became excruciatingly boring and then petered out, until a sort of hostile stillness reigned.

This led directly into the second skit. One of the actors slid off his chair, another slowly stood up and the third continued to sit. This actor began a long theoretical speech but acted as if she were going into a bathroom in an elementary school as a child, complete with asking the teacher, walking down the hall, and all the more explicit associated activities, performed explicitly. The third actor continued to stay on the floor but began licking everything in sight including an audience member.

The third skit began when the third actor began to actually wretch. The other two slowly stopped what they were doing and watched in alternating boredom and fascination. Barf ended abruptly when an alarm clock went off. The actors stopped “acting” and stood where they were.

Fuck Off! was less formal. It consisted of a line of actors rushing in and out of the garage, around the yard, and from the roof of the house screaming obscenities and gibberish at each other, the audience, passersby on the street, and then at various objects in the garage, including a television screen that showed first various sitcoms, news, and a pornographic video. When the pornography had been on for some time, the actors slowly became distracted by it, then absorbed by it, then bored by it, then angry with it until they began to shout Fuck Off! at the television.

These shows were attended by probably twenty to thirty people which was quite a crowd for the garage space. The audience, mostly teenagers and young adults (although somebody’s parents were there and seemed to accept what was happening without qualms), reacted positively. Some laughed, some applauded, some gasped; but all seemed to enjoy it and no one objected to the immaturity as far as I could see. It is difficult to reconstruct the elaborate and careful structure and design of these pieces in words. The rough edges are easier to describe. But in this combination I found a parallel to a true beauty. Somewhere beyond prettiness or cleanliness there is a beating heart and it is bloody.

The work done by MATC is youthful: immature, puerile and silly, but its youth is its strongest point. Like youth, the shows MATC puts on are straightforward yet complicate what they come into contact with. It is flexible, raw, playful and rough. Most of all the company claims the joy and play inherent in obscenity and puerility: an adolescent pimply insight into the inextricable ugliness and beauty of passion.

MATC shows get done regularly, attract a consistent following, and the company manages to support itself through donations at the door. No one makes any money, but then no one expects to. The two shows I witnessed were fascinating because they seemed to open a door to performance that restructured certain rules of theatre. In a way that is theoretically astute and cohesive with much work in performance historically and being done today, Anita and her crew of unruly teenagers acted as a catalyst for work that I am doing, both in writing and performance.
To this end, I asked Anita to write something for me so that I would have a resource to refer to in writing about MATC’s shows. This is what she sent me (hers was handwritten):

Mother of All Theatre Companies: A Manifesto
Hurry up please it’s time. Of expansion: viral, creeping, shambling, disorganized and weedy. Of a dog about to vomit: before the habit sets in, before the indifferent beak could let her drop. Off the top of the rollercoaster before the plunge where climbing is falling is not moving at all. The scratch of the rat making another hole in the nest. The crackling of highspeed photography. Of explosive decompression. Of internal combustion. Into the heart of an immense darkness. Crawling under fingernails, leaving a trail of regurgitated dust. The worms crawl in the worms crawl out the worms play pinochle on your snout. When “snot” and “poop” are meaningful words filled with insidious intent. Saying, “What a beautiful pussy you are, you are.” And meaning it. Obscenity, queen of the sophomoric heart, come to me. I will cry your adolescent tantrum to beat at the hearts of the sane and mature. Puerility, inanity, obesity, our time has come. What happens when an immovable force meets an unstoppable object? A silent rate of motion, where stillness is absolute speed in a room without air. A space of location where stasis is absolute direction. The space between events where nothing happens again. Personnel without personality. I am. I are. I is.

Just thought I’d been sounding crankier than usual lately so I’d say this: I’m getting excited about having a bunch of people singing.

This one has been in my head for a while. Not sure if it’s really related to the show, but when you’re fishing you need some bait. (At least I think you do, not being a fisher. Or a fish.)

And for some reason it makes me happy. Maybe I need a ukulele chorus…

Plus, looking back at those Giacomelli pix just gives me a little tingle!