I Am Jack's Aching Nostalgia: Source Material for Dumb Puppy

I've been thinking about the idea of nostalgia lately - the idealization of the past or the longing for home.

Oops. Marshall hit a key and this posted too soon. Chaos has erupted.

Construed as turf, home just seems a provisional claim, a designation you make upon a place, not one it makes on you. A certain set of buildings, a glimpsed, smudged window-view across a schoolyard, a musty aroma sniffed behind a garage when you were a child, all of which come crowding in upon your latter-day senses / those are pungent things and vivid, even consoling. But to me they are also inert and nostalgic and unlikely to connect you to the real, to that essence art can sometimes achieve, which is permanence. - Richard Ford

An ideal museum show would be a mating of Brideshead Revisited with House & Garden. Provoking intense and pleasurable nostalgia for a past that none of its audience has had. - Robert Hughes

It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice – there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia. - Frank Zappa

I don't play nostalgia acts. I don't play nostalgia shows. - David Cassidy

Isn't life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves? - Andy Warhol

Solo: Practice Imperfect

It's become clear to me that I cannot write a solo show. I've tried three times in the past two years. So deceptively simple - unless you're given to impulses that include having the likes of 30 people on stage. That. That. Is the problem. I can't be thirty people. Can I? Or more importantly am I? Like Walt, do I contain multitudes? So it would seem. I've written and directed solos for others. But even then - there wasn't one single character. At times there were several characters in seconds. It seems that as soon as I start writing a solo I feel the urge to frustrate understanding and narrative to the point of insanity.

In developing a show for myself, I've tried various methodologies attempting to constrain the impulse. For the performance I gave last month, I finally had to be parental about it - imposing limits to the number of people I could perform. Got it down to five and then in the last hour to four. Not bad.

My concern is not with the impulse. But it's important to understand and refine the impulse or else it's simply a habit. I took off in the opposite direction - breaking the narrative down into components and devising spare movement/vocal phrases that I could edit and interchange like film. I wanted to slow down - stretch and expand time instead of trying to fill it up. Then, I played with the idea of failure - inspired by Andy Kaufman's Foreign Man. I practiced bombing, screwing up, and forgetting. Then I played with uncertainty - the question of not being in on the joke, of not being entirely comfortable with what I'm doing. Without an audience it really is like talking to a wall. But I found that it boiled down to creating states of presence - making room for being painfully, awkwardly present. In performance, this translated into a strong connection to the audience.

I also can't say I like solo work. It's an imperfect form. There's no one to collaborate with. Unless you count the pilates instructor and her clients who wandered through my rehearsal at random moments (giving me a new perspective on the idea of open rehearsals). If anything we formed a collaboration of inconvenience - she seemingly perturbed that I was babbling to myself, not to mention the David Byrne, Brian Eno music and me never knowing when the audience would show up and walk through. Next, the utter subjectivity of the experience - there is no outside perspective other than the audience's. It took awhile but I finally found a way to embrace the circumstances and go with it - a good lesson for any performance.

What I did find was that playing in the studio is its own reward and I want to continue that practice. It's nice to experiment and to not be bound by a deadline. I like taking one element of a piece and just examining it from a variety of perspectives over an extended period. I was able to find a number of different ways to perform a single text and to experiment and change aspects of the performance while I was refining other elements. Not that this doesn't happen in the course of any other production. But I found more room for failure working this way and failure takes on a different texture when it's not infused with paranoia about time (as in we open next week time) and thoughts of product.

Trip My Wire

Can I tell you about Portishead? Third came in the mail today. I've just started listening, but I'm hooked. A foregone conclusion. Portishead is one of those groups who register time and place for me. Back in 1996, I bought Dummy at some cramped indie record store off the main street in Saratoga Springs while I was doing the SITI intensive. I bought Portishead the following year. Together they formed the soundtrack for a grueling weekend spent driving through the Sierras crewing for a friend of mine who was running the Western States 100. Beth Gibbons' sultry voice and that wall of sound encompassed the highs and lows of uphill climbs and heat and rain and 24 hours without sleep and hypothermia and torn ligaments and giving up 23 miles from the finish.

Third is a fine fuel: distortion commensurate to a time when my nerves are frayed and my consciousness is split by a year of sleeping in two hour increments and I feel like a snake eating its tail. So much unknown personally, artistically and globally. There are coyotes in my backyard.

Big List of Theater, Performance, Film

It's been over a year since I put together a list like this. Hoping to get out and see more theater now that #3 is 13 months old. So here's my wishlist for the upcoming month.

April 25 - May 25
Curse of the Starving Class - Family gone way wrong by Sam Shepard.

May 9 - June 27
The Rape of the Sabine Women - Rufus Corporation at SFMOMA

May 7
The Dance Discourse Project #3 - Dancers Debate the Body Politic

Check out the third installment of a lively series of discussions about topics in Bay Area dance, moderator Jessica Robinson invites Jo Kreiter, Ledoh, Sara Shelton Mann, Miguel Gutierrez and Rob Bailis to discuss the multiple layers of the political in their work, how bodies are politicized through movement, and how activism plays a unique role in the Bay Area dance scene. Co-presented by ODC, CounterPULSE, and Dancers' Group. Event is at Project Artaud.

May 1 – June 7, 2008
Attack of the Killer B-Movies: A Thrillogy of Low-Budget Terror! - The Dark Room Theater. Most of the funniest people I know are in this show. You can take that to the bank as they say.

May 14
The Rosenbach Company - Pop opera by Ben Katchor and Mark Mulcahy




May 14 - June 15
Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage - Banana Bag and Bodice/Shotgun Players
The rest of the funniest people I know are in this show.


June 1
The Anderson Project - Robert Lepage/Ex Machina at Zellerbach in Berkeley




June 21
Cinderella - The Zanzibar Puppet Theater in the Starlight Room at Harry Denton's. Why? Hmmm?

How It Feels

Sometimes you hit the books...

Sometimes the books hit you.

Writing the Writer/Source Material Text #2

In the twenties and thirties, American writers and readers were teased by two myths, or prophecies, which still hovered in the air. One was the myth of the Great American Novel, that sui generis book which would reveal, or invent, the meaning of American exeperience once and for all. The other was the myth of the Promising Young Man, who would do with language what Lindbergh had done with flight - something bold and unprecedented and definitive, which would cross the Atlantic and speak for us to all the world. Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Wescott, among others, were setting the pace by 1930, but then, a few years later, Fitzgerald had confessed himself finished in The Crack-Up; Wescott appeared to have stopped writing; and Hemingway was giving more of his time to enacting the role in public than to fulfilling it in private.

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It is odd, how we expect our best writers to do more than make us novels and poems. In Europe, works are all that is required of them, and they are honored accordingly. Here they must also use their bodies and personal histories and failures (above all, their failures) to make us emblems. And it these emblems that we ultimately cherish. Is it for the truth in Walden that we still acknowledge Thoreau, or for the image of a superb Yankee crank that his own biography gives us? And didn't Poe, Melville, and Mark Twain, not to mention Hart Crane and Fitzgerald and most recently Hemingway, have to give us dramatic totems of themselves in order to make us take their work seriously? - Robert Phelps, Introduction to Letters of James Agee to Father Flye

Music for Writing A Thesis

Have you ever heard He Loved Him Madly? Calm, spatial ambient jazz by Miles.

Here's an interview with Brian Eno discussing Teo Macero's production techniques.

ME: Some of my colleagues call the music of the Paul Motian Trio "Ambient Jazz", because sometimes this trio brings the music to such a level of subtlety, it's really just one or two notes lingering around in the air. I understand that there are a few classic jazz productions that had a big influence on you, like for example Teo Macero's production of Miles Davis' He Loved Him Madly.

BE: Well, you know how that record and one or two others from that period were made? I read an interview with Teo Macero, and it was very, very interesting, because I was so fascinated by these records. I really wanted to know how they were made. I don't often read interviews with musicians or producers, cause they're usually so uninteresting. There's nothing worth reading. But Teo Macero was very, very interesting. He told the story of how those records were made. Which is that Miles Davis would put together a group of people often, who hadn't played together before, take them into the studio, and there was just playing for a day, for hours and hours on end. And then off they go, and Teo Macero would then be left with hours of tapes, and he would go through and find little pieces, often repeat little pieces, which is very radical in jazz to use the same section a couple of times over. I mean, I don't think anybody had ever thought of doing that before. And it's a very interesting idea, to take something that is all accidents and chance events, and then make it all happen again. So suddenly you think 'Hold on - we've been here before.' It's like a strange deja-vu thing.

But what really interested me in those things: he did something that was extremely modern, something you can only do on records, which is, he took the performance to pieces, spatially. Now, those things were done across by a group of musicians in a room, all sitting quite close to another, like we are. But they were all close-miked, which meant that their sounds were quite separate from one another. And when Teo Macero mixed the record, he put them miles apart. So this is very very interesting to listen to a music, where you have the conga player three streets down the road here, you have the trumpet player on a mountain over there, the guitar player - you have to look through binoculars to see him, you know! Everybody is far away, and so the impression that you have immediately, is not that you are in a little place with a group of people playing, but that you're on a huge plateau, and all of these things are going on sort of almost on the horizon, I think. And there's no attempt made by Teo Macero to make them connect with one another. In fact he deliberately disconnects them form one another.

This is a very modern feeling for me in music, where you think of the music as a place where a lot of things can go on. They don't have to be going on together, in the sense that they don't have to be locked to one another. And the thing I've most disliked about a lot of recent music, particularly music done on sequencers, is that it's totally locked. Do you know what I mean? Every single thing is not only locked, but bolted and nailed and hammered together. So the music is so tight, there's no drift in it at all. And one of the things that one likes about live music, I think, is the fact that things drift apart and then come back together. And when they come back together, it's very very dramatic. It's fantastic. And then they drift again apart in their own worlds, and then suddenly they join again.

The rest is here.

This period of Miles career serves as the inspiration for my thesis. Roundabout anyway. I was looking into writing a thesis on Hunter S. Thompson and the performance of authorship when I came across Lester Bangs. I read this amazing review Bang's wrote about Miles Davis' On the Corner where he was essentially trying to figure out why he was still listening to something that he had initially reviewed as "the absolute worst album this man ever put out." It is a wonderful look at a critic interrogating their own response to a work of art - realizing that sometimes we don't like a work of art because we don't like what it says about us, about our culture and the way the world is. That sometimes as Josette Feral writes - "the art work judges us."

The Thing Has Been Done

It is a rather curious thing that is should take a hundred years to change anything that is to change something, it is the human habit to think in centuries and centuries are more or less a hundred years and that makes a grandfather a grandmother to a grandson or a granddaughter if it happens right and it often does about happen right. It is the human habit to think in centuries from a grandparent to a grandchild because it just does take about a hundred years for things to cease to have the same meaning that they had before, it is a curious thing a very curious thing that everything is a natural thing but it is it is a natural thing and it being a natural thing makes it a very curious thing a very curious thing to anybody’s feeling. One is always having to talk to one’s self about it that a natural thing is not really a strange and a peculiar and a curious thing. So then there we are a hundred years does more or less make a century and this is determined by the fact that it includes a grandparent to a grandchild and that is what makes it definitely different one time from another time and usually there is a war or a catastrophe to emphasize it so that anyone can know about it. It is a very strange thing that such a natural thing is inevitably to all of us such a strange thing such a striking thing such a disconcerting thing. The eighteenth century finished with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars the nineteenth century with the world war, but in each case the thing of course had been done the change had been made but the wars made everybody know it and liberated them from not knowing it not knowing that everything was not just exactly what it had been. - Gertrude Stein