Random Ten

1. Andante from Piano Concerto No. 21 - Mozart
2. Please Don't Bury Me - John Prine
3. The Christmas Song - Dexter Gordon
4. Riptide - Lou Reed
5. The Hippopotamus Song - John Lithgow
6. The Beast in Me - Nick Lowe
7. Always - Leonard Cohen
8. Frosty the Snowman - Fiona Apple
9. A Small Plot of Land - David Bowie
10. Me & Saddam - Bill Hicks
    

Why Do We Train?

I found this quote today. Substitute theater for athletics.

Training is one of the most neglected phases of athletics. Too much time is given to the development of skill and too little to the development of the individual for participation. - Bruce Lee

The Mating Mind

Art as a Form of Sexual Selection

from David Byrne's Journal

Appropriately enough, just as I head to Miami for the Miami/Basel art fair extravaganza I finish the chapter in Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind on art. It’s sure to be controversial with this art fair crowd, as he posits that art evolved as a kind of display useful for sexual selection. One immediately thinks of the peacock’s tail when one hears display, but the peacock doesn’t make his tail — he’s born with it. Art is a display outside the body, made by the skill of the hand and mind. Miller posits that the ability of our minds to charm, seduce, captivate and enrapture — via artistic work, conversation, language, dance, sport — gives proof to potential mates that not only are we physically appealing, which can be assessed relatively quickly, but that we might have deeper levels of genetic fitness beneath the visible surface. more

Spatial Relationship

Trajectories of Desire: A Sociology of the Non-Rational

Krista Connerly

Over the past year, I have engaged in a series of experiments that have to do with the collapsing of personal and social space, as well as the mapping and negotiation of desire within that space. These experiments took the form of contact that I have made with people I have sat next to on various transit systems.

What does touch consist of? How does the physical body extend into the space around it? What and where are the spaces around our body that we consider ourselves? (I.e. the space between our shoulder and neck). How dense is our spatial self? How far does it extend into our environment? How do we negotiate our spatial selves and desire? How intimate can we make a stranger? How strange can we make ourselves?

more here

Friday Random Ten

1. Humans from Earth - T Bone Burnett
2. Everybody Knows - Leonard Cohen
3. The Chanukah Song, Pt. 2 - Adam Sandler
4. After the Gold Rush - Thom Yorke
5. Innocent When You Dream - Tom Waits
   
6. I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry - Al Green
7. Mister Heat Miser - Big Bad Voodoo Daddy
8. You're A Mean One Mister Grinch - Whirling Dervishes
9. I'm Not Your Stepping Stone - The Sex Pistols
10. Hombre Secreto - The Plugz
    

No Way As Way

From Lucas Krech

There was a quote going around a while back that had to do with walls. Barriers. I passed it on along with a lot of other people. It was John Clancy who said:

Every generation recognizes the same problem. Every generation comes to the same wall.

Most generations divide into two camps. One camp recognizes the wall, measures it, and begins to climb it. Some may actually get over to the other side, who knows? Most of the first camp, however, settle on finding a position somewhere on the wall and begin to jealously guard it.

The other camp, standing at the wall, not climbing, divides as well. Half spend their lives standing at the foot of the wall, shaking their fists and shouting. The other half grows bored and walks away.

That's what most generations do, upon finding themselves at the wall.

The exceptional generations, the historical generations, tear down the fucking wall.

It is a lovely bit of rhetoric and the imagery is fantastic. It is a stirring and strong direct call to action. But the fundamental premise is false.

There is no wall.

(more here)

Source Material Text #2

The artist's eye must be hungry, and my eye is hungry.

Walker Evans

I do regard photography as an extremely difficult act. I believe the achievement of a work that is evocative, and mysterious, and at the same time realistic, is a great one, and rare one, and perhaps, sometimes, almost- an accident. It’s akin to hunting. Photography is. Ah...In the same way ah that you’re using a machine and you’re shooting something and you’re shooting to kill. You get the picture you want- that’s a kill. That’s a bulls-eye.

Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts.

Santa?

Zippy Christmas Play about global warming.

Play

By Sam. Posted on What's Good/What Blows.

Friday Random Ten

1. Why Is This Commercial? - Negativland
2. I Am Not Your Broom - They Might Be Giants
3. The Chanukah Song - Adam Sandler
4. Two Studies On Ancient Greek Scales - Partch (Kronos Quartet)
5. Waltz from The Face of Another - Toru Takemitsu
6. Pandering to the Locals - David Cross
7. Get Up John - Ricky Scaggs & Kentucky Thunder
8. You Wouldn't Like Me - Tegan & Sara
9. Rock Me Amadeus - Falco
10. Army of Me - Björk
    

Anne Bogart & Mary Overlie Podcast

Clicky here if you want to download it.

Source Material - Text #2

I'm calling it text #2, but it's actually the third part of a play cycle. There is a title, but I want to stay away from that for the time being.

It's a surprise to me that I'm returning to this work. I thought I was done with it. Until I discovered a little item called "The Expanding Vacant Spot" in Greil Marcus' book The Dustbin of History. There I discovered the fate of little Maggie Louise Gudger (one of the children documented by James Agee and Walker Evans in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men). Maggie died at the age of 45. She drank rat poison. So there it is. My jumping off point.

As I work on this new text, I'm thinking about the previous two plays I devised from the Agee/Walker text. Considering what worked, where I fell short, and where my interests are now in contrast. In the first production, I was much more interested in remaining true to the text - the intentions of Agee. Agee specifically. But in looking back, I realize I was on the right track when I wrote a scene where Agee and Evans discuss their work.

The contrast between the two is stunning. In his essay, Marcus compares Agee to a faith healer and Evans to a coroner. It's a dead on description of these two artist's approach to their work, and the strength of the first play was in highlighting their difference and their attraction to each other artistically and sexually. I also focused on the musicality of the text and the earnestness with which Agee wrote.

What I missed was the irony - I was aware of it, but didn't focus on hitting it home for the audience. Agee was also constructing a rather long argument against another work - And You Shall Know Their Faces by Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell - a work he was deeply offended by with regard to its objectification of the families documented - the patronizing, entitled attitude the authors took towards persons, places, and things. He felt the book made no attempt to document or reach any understanding about the lives of families, but instead consided it a tract that reinforced East Coast liberal's view of poverty as a "cause du jour."

In the second text, I think I hit the irony both in devising the script and in the direction of it. Maybe it turned some audience members against the show. They saw it as being frivolous with a serious subject - poverty and need. I wanted certain characters to reek of insincerity. To expose their shallow thought processes. But also to dive into the depths with them when they went there - often unexpectedly. I wanted the show to be tight and unrelentless. I was able to give the direction a filmic quality. We worked in the studio trying to devise physical ways to convey the idea of a close-up and a frame using only the actors' bodies without being literal. I'm not sure this was apparent to anyone - except for a film editor we had in the audience one night. But it created a good focus for the actors. The control they had over their movements served as an editorial device highlighting and/or distancing the text from the action.

In approaching this new text, I'm thinking about distance, objectivity, and objectification. About irony and humor. I'm currently reading A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke. In the book, Handke sets out to write about his mother's suicide by creating what he called "formulations" - a method of composition that allowed him to maintain his distance from his subject. He wanted to construct a text that would stay true to the facts of his mother's life without "standing in"
for her or obliterating her by making her a character. That is the task I feel is necessary in the construction of this play and one that I was attempting in the play I wrote as part of NAPLWRIMO (achieved with minimal success, but hey, that's what first drafts are for). Anyway, enough meandering. Until next time.

The following 3 pictures are from the set of part 1 of the play cycle. It's simply text applied to gallery flats. It was quite an effective framing device for the play and looked beautiful onstage. I'm coming back to these for the following reasons:

1. I'm attracted to text.
2. I like that this text has absolutely no meaning unless you are close enough to read it - onstage it's an object.
3. This play is about objectifying persons, places, and things.

B

I used to try to figure out precisely what I was seeing all the time, until I discovered I didn't need to. If the thing is there, why, there it is.

B

Documentary: That's a sophisticated and misleading word. And not really clear. You have to have a sophisticated ear to receive that word. Art is never a document, though it certainly can adopt that style.

B

My thought is that the term 'documentary' is inexact, vague, and even grammatically weak, as used to describe a style in photography which happens to be- my style. The item should be documentary style- an example of a literal document would be a police photograph of a murder scene. You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless.

Viewpoint: Gesture

What is the I?

How can another see into me, into my most secret self, without my being able to see in there myself? And without my being able to see him in me. And if my secret self, that which can be revealed only to the other, to the wholly other, to God if you wish, is a secret that I will never reflect on, that I will never know or experience or possess as my own, then what sense is there in saying that it is my secret, or in saying more generally that a secret belongs, that it is proper to or belongs to some one, or to some other who remains someone. It's perhaps there that we find the secret of secrecy. Namely, that it is not a matter of knowing and that it is there for no one. A secret doesn't belong, it can never be said to be at home or in its place. The question of the self: who am I not in the sense of who am I but rather who is this I that can say who? What is the- I and what becomes of responsibility once the identity of the I trembles in secret? - Jacques Derrida

Collateral Damage

See what over 348 billion dollars is buying you.
No More Victims.

Friday Random Ten - You Better Watch Out!

1. Santa Claus Is Coming To Town - Joseph Spence
2. Blues and the Abstract Truth - Oliver Nelson
   
3. This Property Is Condemned - Maria McKee
4. Rejoice and Be Happy - The Violent Femmes
5. Christmas In Hollis - Run - DMC
6. Sounds - Suzy and Maggie Roche
7. Greatest Love of All - Whitney Houston
8. Monologue 4 - Christian Bale/American Psycho
9. A Smile Connects Us - Kermit the Frog
10. Complicated Shadows - Elvis Costello & the Attractions
    

Things That Look Like-

I've become obsessed with manifestos in the past week or even things that look like manifestos or some poetic recipe for or about theatre - which is one of the reasons why I find this so interesting and this.

Serve and enjoy.

Jean-Luc Godard Interview

Godard talks about being a film critic and Brigitte Bardot's obligatory nude scene in Contempt.

Interviewer: What do you think of reviews?

Godard: I think much more highly of them than most people do. It's probably because I was a critic once, and I said a lot of bad things. I was cruel and mean to a lot of people. And though my opinions haven't changed, when I read bad reviews, the important thing for me, is the discussion that's taking place. Whether it's good of bad is not the issue for me.

Manifest Inspiration

Please read this manifesto written by Dorothy Lemoult (creator and organizer of NAPLWRIMO, and incredible non-stopping French woman, theatre artist). Dorothy has been a source of inspiration for me this past month because of her passion and commitment to her work and her enthusiastic support others in theirs.

Artifacts

Part 1 of a 6 part interview with the artist Christian Boltanski. More here, here, here, here, and here.

Rock Stars, Baby

A music video from NYC theatre pals. They are Banana Bag & Bodice and the show - The Fall and Rise of the Rising Fallen opens at P.S. 122 in the spring of 2007.

Appetite

I

am looking at-
Exploding the proposition of why we sit in the theater.
What is our agreement with the audience?
What are we all doing here?
Is it theatre?
Why is it necessary?
Why should we look at it?
What will it cost us beyond the spectacle of it all?
What do I risk?
What is at risk?
Will is steal my soul?
I am looking at past work and contemplating its necessity.

Depth.
Exposing pretension, full of one's selfness, adulation, smugness, and distance.

Give me an experiment gone awry.

Give me an experiment that reveals heart and soul.

Give me an ambitious failure.

Give me an experience that defies definition, theory, everything I think I know about life, about art.

Give me pause.

Give me a theatre that speaks life-
Give me acts of agression, control, confession, desperation, displacment, mendacity, transgression, violence, shock of the routine, unspeakable kindnesses, grace beyond measure.

Speak bitterness. Possibility. Hope. Hunger.

Pull a Kurtz.
Make a leap.
Make. Make. Make.
Don't ask for permission.
Embrace terror, pain, joy.
Don't traffic in commerce.
I want no more disposable experiences.

I want something that endures.

How does it all transpire?

How do you plan to move it forward?

Start with the basics.
Bodies in space - actor, audience.
Necessity in every breath and gesture.

Break through limitation - emotional, spiritual, physical.

Do the work and get on with it.

Be grateful.
What is your obstacle?
You are.
When you ask to be challenged you don't get to negotiate the terms.

Say yes.
Be brutal.
Fight for yourself.
Insist.
Let go of approval, the attaboys.
Validation. Recognition. Belonging.
Official acceptance = Death.

The past has nothing to give you but -

inspiration-

momentum-
- and ?'s.
The past makes and unmakes you-

Can't change it.

Can't undo it.

Don't repeat.
Survival is a projection into the future.

Feed yourself.
Say yes.