What I Saw: Best of 2008

I'm not done with 2008 yet. Since it's already January 31, maybe you can see how these things happen for me. I'm pretty pleased by how much I was able to see this year and by how many things I saw that affected me so profoundly. This list is my way of acknowledging these artists and expressing my gratitude for their work.

1. Have You Been Here Before? 2. No. This is my first time. - Robert Wilson.

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Big 3rd Episode/Happy Ending - Superamas

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Beowulf - Banana Bag and Bodice/Shotgun Players

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The Pandora Experiment - Christian Cagigal

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Quizoola - Forced Entertainment

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The Anderson Project - Robert Lepage

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If You See Something Say Something - Mike Daisy

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Three Sisters - Susannah Martin/Porchlight Theater Company

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The Rape of the Sabine Women - Eve Sussman/Rufus Corporation

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Figaro - Theatre de la Jeune Lune

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As is the case with lists like these I'm expected to offer some sort of rationale for my choices. Since I plan to/need to write in depth about some of these shows, I'm only going to offer you images and a brief explanation. If you object, by all means come hunt me down.

1. Have you been here before? 2. No. This is my first time.: Stopping.
Big 3rd Episode/Happy Ending: Contemporaneity.
Beowulf: Inventiveness.
Pandora Project: Wonder.
Quizoola: Exposure.
The Anderson Project: Sensuality.
If You See Something, Say Something: Storytelling.
Three Sisters: Environment.
Rape of the Sabine Women: Vision.
Figaro: Imagery.

In Honor Of 4'33.

You can become narrow minded, literally, by only liking certain things and disliking others, but you can become open-minded, literally, by giving up your likes and dislikes and becoming interested in things. - John Cage

Blue Light Special

I've read most of Infinite Jest in the dark. At night after I put my son to bed, I lie down on the floor and read by the blue light of our night light. Then, I'll get up, leave the room and take the book with me so I can continue reading it. But I hardly ever do. I take it back to the bedroom and read it in bed - again by the blue light. Occasionally I've gone to sleep with the book on my pillow above my head. I have incurred no injury from this yet.

I'm sure years from now, I'll be able to recall these exact circumstances much the same way I remember reading Crime and Punishment in the humid, Louisville summer lying on my couch and, in particular, the time I fell asleep only to be woken up by a six-inch cockroach crawling across my face. These physical circumstances always seem to adhere to my memory and form my attachment and perspective on what I'm reading. By now, reading IJ in the dark with the blue light on is the SOP and integral to the experience. It is the experience. It's reading. Reading.

One of the things I find myself doing now, 300 some pages in, is being more conscious of the connections I'm trying to make and asking myself why I'm doing that. Why not just read the book? Let the work speak for itself.

That said I wanted to share this:

...under all that froth, that energy wasted attacking confectionery ads, lies the true, hard core of Wallace's work: its engagement with depression, addiction and death. Infinite Jest contains the most accurate and moving descriptions of clinical depression in modern literature. Read now, the Kate Gompert chapters provide a mature, gentle explanation of Wallace's own death. And they forgive us, his wife, his parents, his friends: we weren't to blame. They are noble pages. As Thomas Pynchon has said: "When we speak of 'seriousness' in fiction, ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death." It is a tribute to modern America that this is so. Modern America beat fascism and it beat communism. Death is the last oppressor left standing in America.

The manner of Wallace's death has changed the meaning of his work. Pages that seemed self-indulgent now feel painfully earned. Scenes that were coal have become diamond. At the minimum this should shut up James Wood. Wood famously called Wallace (among others) a "hysterical realist."... "Hysterical" was always an appalling word to use, to deny the subjective reality of other writers, but today it reads like Patton slapping a shell-shocked soldier. Reading Infinite Jest now, it's not the same book. Each time I go back, it has grown new facets, like a crystal. I don't know how great a book it is, because it isn't finished yet.

David Foster Wallace lives.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men @ Sundance

Have you read the story behind Jon Krasinki's adaptation of DFW's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men? Check it out here. The clip looks great. More info here.

Premio Dardos: Blog On Blog Love

First of all, in the words of Roseanne-Rosanna Dana, I've got to say, it's an extreme pleasure, a joy, a thrill, a chill, and a real snappy surprise to receive a Premio Dardos (Top Darts) Award from Mead Hunter. Thank you, Mead, for recognizing me: I'm glad to know that someone enjoys my twisted sense of purpose here at ghost light.

The rules for accepting the award are as follow:

1) Accept the award, post it on your blog together with the name of the person that has granted the award and his or her blog link.

2) Pass the award to another 15 blogs that are worthy of this acknowledgment.

3) Remember to contact each of them to let them know they have been chosen for this award.

This was hard and has taken me many days of deliberation, during which I forgot to check in for jury duty. Thank goodness I was excused today. What happens when you blow off (I started to write blog off) jury duty? Anyway, the awards. A few of the blogs I read, such as BLOGORHEA and Splattworks, have already been awarded, but here is my list of blogs that I feel deserve to be singled out. And the Premio Dardos go to - hold your applause until I've read all the names now-

1. Theater for the Future
2. The Hub Review
3. Leon's Weblog
4. Tim Etchells
5. M. John Harrison
6. Museum of Doubt
   
7. Superhero Journal
8. Wish Jar
9. Ordinary Courage
10. Heading East
11. mono no aware
    
12. Compromise is Our Business
13. Project 1968
14. An Angry White Guy in Chicago
15. Suburban Bliss
    

I'd like to take more time and explain why each blog is deserving, but that would take this ceremony way past the shank of the evening. Instead, I'm going to break the list down and write about each one or a group of them in the weeks that follow. In the meantime, check them out - they inspire me every day and make me laugh, giggle, guffaw often.

1st Rule of Directing: Safety is Not Last

Directors? Do Not: I repeat: Do Not: no matter how tempting it might be: Do Not: ever, under any circumstances: Do Not Shoot Your Actor! Like that may be some unwritten rule, like at least up until this point, 'k?

Conversely. Actors? Never let a director point a gun at your head. Rule of thumb on this: never. It leads to nowhere good. If for whatever reason, you do find yourself with a director pointing a gun at your head, take a moment and ask him/her if that's a real gun they have pointed at your head. This breaks the ice a little if you're feeling a little tension coming off the barrel. If the gun is real, next point of order is to ask if they've checked if it's loaded or not - like you know, recently (as in just before they picked it up this very moment to point it at your head the only one you've got). Then you'll have a clearer idea of your situation. At the very least you'll have confirmation that like maybe the director is pointing that gun at you because it's actually going to happen in the show and not because he/she is swinging his/her psychopathic impulses. 'Coz, at least, then you'll know. Because like what psycho ever shot a gun without first taking the time to make sure it was loaded or not? And who wouldn't, unless they're shooting from a tower or somewhere hidden, when asked politely, be happy to supply that requested information? Oh, another thing, weapons checks and fight rehearsals are not optional.

And, just another point of safety? Although I have a feeling I'm preaching to the choir here. Even if you're absolutely sure there are blanks in the gun? Do Not: I repeat: Do Not: Put-the- Gun-To-Your-Head-&- Pull-the-Trigger. I used to work in a theater in upstate New York. Remember Jon-Erik Hexum? He used to work there and you know what? Even then he always played with his props - weapons too. And he played with his props until the day he pulled the trigger on a .44 magnum and was killed by the impact of the blank. He died on the way to the hospital. 'Coz guns are dangerous, 'k?

h/t Parabasis.

5 Things

• Mystery & Birds: 5 Ways to Practice Poetry by Ada Ada Limón. via wood s lot
  

• American Artist and Arts Organizations Circa 2009: Get Over It and Adopt a New Paradigm by Muire Dougherty.

• What 100 Paintings Will Teach You by Jen Lemon.

• The end of a nightmare by Jon Brooks. I can still remember the day GWB was first got off the plane and was doing his initial survey of the troops. I was on the phone with a friend who had been an aide in the Clinton White house and we both were commiserating over the fact that the end of the world had finally come.

Lear: Dost thou call me fool, boy?
Fool: All thy other titles thou hast given away; that thou wast born with. - King Lear (I, iv)

• Sky Lanterns. Sky Lanterns. Sky Lanterns. Sky Lanterns. Sky Lanterns.

Words, Words, Words - Infinite Jest Vocabulary Building

Today's word: O.N.A.N.

O.N.A.N. = Organization of North American Nations - formerly the United States, Mexico, and Canada.

Onanism/onanisme (for the French Canadians) - masturbation baby, probably conflated from a passage in Genesis about Onan and his brother Er who were both killed by God. Did you know that Yahweh only personally killed seven people? The rest was left up to floods, fires, etc (acts of God according to my insurance policy.)

Er - Judah's first born son. Onan's brother killed by God because of his own (Er's) wickedness. In Hebrew Er spelled backwards spells the word for evil.

Onan - Second son of Judah. Killed by God for pulling out too soon, as in coitus interuptus with his dead brother Er's wife, Tamar. Genesis 38: 6 - 10. This is where masturbation and sin get conflated. In fact, what God objects to apparently is Onan pulling out of Tamar and disobeying Jewish Law. It was acceptable to have sex with your brother's wife provided your brother was dead and had no children. It was considered an obligation. Onan apparently doesn't object to having sex with Er's wife, but doesn't want to lose his share of his father's inheritance. Having sex with Tamar and begetting children would seriously work against his interests. What the Bible says about masturbation. (Just FYI.)

And although this is possibly reaching even more than I already have, there is a Ham in the Bible who is one of Noah's three sons. Ham is Noah's youngest son and gets cursed because he sees/and exposes his father's nakedness to his brothers. Some version of the phrase "expose father's nakedness" is used elsewhere in the Bible and is thought to be a euphemism for having sex with one's mother.

What does any of this have to do with Infinite Jest? Maybe nothing. Maybe just little guidelines or reinforcements of the storyline, and/or possibly deadends, visual interest spots along the road to nowhere. Mental masturbation. Onaniste c'est moi [sic].

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words. (Hamlet, Act 2, sc2)

UPDATE: Lauren Ambrose stars in Loving Leah, a romantic Hallmark Channel comedy about a woman who marries her dead husband's brother in accordance with an all-but-forgotten Jewish law.

Free Tickets to Lemon Anderson/Under the Radar Festival

For those of you in NYC. There are free tickets available for the following performances of
Lemon Anderson's County of Kings: the beautiful struggle running at The Public Theater and part of the Under the Radar Festival.

Sunday, January 11 @ 3pm
Monday, January 12 @ 7pm
Tuesday, January 13 @ 7pm

First come first served. Email to reserve: utrtickets@publictheater.org. You'll get an email confirming your reservation.

Waiting for the Sea Monkeys to Hatch: Slammed By Infinite Jest

My outlook has changed since I read these words back in September. Okay. That's not entirely true. My outlook - as in my general response the world coming at me - is still pretty much the same.

everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

I am relieved to say that in just a few short months, I'm more able to adjust my response. Not always. It should come as no surprise that it's infinitely easier to adjust your response to situations that mostly involve the people you don't know, than it is to adjust to those situations that seem to repeat themselves involving the people closest to you. But I can now see the possibility of how that might happen. I can also see how I might adjust my reactions to my own internal pressure (I think I was getting at that here). But I can assure you, at this point, I've had very little success. Like the saying goes, you can never know your own tao, and so it is also true that it is difficult to get away from yourself. The external world creates that illusion. Like you can watch tv, movies, read, take drugs or whatever, but there's always the ultimate realization that there is no escape. You only think you've been taken outside of yourself.

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

I suppose that's what I love about art. Because of all the things I could look at, it comes the closest to getting me outside of myself or at least in a position where I can look in on myself and the world through the filter of art.

you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

And it's easier to drive in traffic and hang out at the grocery store. In fact, adjusting my reaction to the grocery store has allowed me to actually engage with the people there in a fairly reasonable way and in turn, they've started responding to me. I can count on at least having an entertaining conversation at the store. But now the problem has migrated. To the making of the meal itself. It's like one of those slippery balloons that turns in on itself, where no matter how you grab it, it jumps out of your hands.

We Have Enough Black Holes, Thank You

I hope you will have a wonderful year, that you'll dream dangerously and outrageously, that you'll make something that didn't exist before you made it, that you will be loved and that you will be liked, and that you will have people to love and to like in return. And, most importantly (because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now), that you will, when you need to be, be wise, and that you will always be kind. - Neil Gaiman

(h/t A)

Now in the Year of Nivea Skin Care Products: Infinite Jest Pages 1 - 63

I'm thinking now that my Hamlet dream from a few nights ago is not entirely unfounded - ie. as in out of nowhere. I started reading Infinite Jest, (Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy etc), a few days ago as part of a blog through of the novel started by Isaac. Other folks in the group have posted responses here and here.

It's an understatement to say IJ is a book about obsession. It's not just a portrayal of obsession as witnessed from its various character's addictions to drugs, entertainment, or sex, nor is it a commentary on those addictions. It's an often uncomfortable performance of obsession, an invitation/exhortation to join the party, to participate in and surrender fully to the book's many fixations. At heart, it's possibly an attempt to understand the author's own obsessions or thought processes or maybe just a way of letting off some interior pressure. At any rate, it has awakened/highlighted my own obsessive inclinations and has me waking up in the middle of the night with the voice of the novel in my head inscribing all the visible objects in my room and recurring thoughts in my head with the minute detail laid out in the book. I will read this book - submerging myself in it - drowning in its infinite loop potential. I can read - in many cases am reading- this book to the exclusion of all else. This is not making daily family life pleasant. Where does one go to decompress from this? Back to Cormac McCarthy (probably the best option as he is mining a different vein in the post modern novel) or to the impossibly, self-absorbed rhetorical stylings of J.M. Coetzee? (I think not.)

Today's word: Cardioid. As in "E.T.A. is laid out as a cardioid (DFW. IJ. Footnote 3, page 983 in my edition)." Here DFW roughly describes a cardioid and how the tennis academy founded by Hal's father, Himself, are laid out:

with the four main inward-facing bldgs. convexly rounded at the back and sides to yield a cardioid's curve, with the tennis courts and pavillions at the center and the staff and student's parking lots in the back of Comm. -Ad. forming the little bashed in dent that from the air gives the whole facility the Valentine-heart aspect that still wouldn't have been truly cardioid if the buildings themselves didn't have their convex bulges all derived from arcs of the same r, a staggering feat given the uneven ground and wildly different electrical-plumbing-conduit wallspace required by dormitories, administrative offices, and polyresinous Lung...

So what is a cardioid besides being heart-shaped? Ah, there's the rub. A cardioid is a closed curve with one cusp (a cusp being a singularity as in the singular point of a curve and in the case of a cardioid, the single point around which the curve revolves.). Cardioid derived from the Greek for heart- shaped. Cardioid for heart curve – one of several mathematical curves that produces a heart-shape. Why not simply say heart-shaped? Because heart-shaped is a singular, flat literary image whereas to truly appreciate cardioid you have to embrace or, any way, should/may want to consider embracing it's geometrical and philosophical allusions.

Cardioid is not simply heart-shaped. It’s really not. As you can see here and here on these nifty wiki pages. But also, and specifically, deeper: as in the Limacon of Pascal seen here which describes a family of curves each of which, ultimately, when projected tangentially, comprise an infinite loop into space. In relation to the book: ETA is the singularity around which the Incandenza family and the perhaps the action revolves and including the various tangents/fractals of the book. Or: Cardioid could, may, might be a geometric, graphical expression of the many story paths, tangents, etc that DFW lays out in Infinite Jest. Then again, it could be just be a simple description of the layout of ETA - a heart-shape is a heart-shape and all that. Finally, a prediction: the structure of the book will be an infinite series of curves (circular story structure) revolving around a central event or time (basically a cardioid structure).

Note: I, myself, have a particular obsession with Hamlet which I exercised about ten years ago by cutting up and collaging most of the play and then writing my own version that combined Hamlet and Electra (sounds like an episode of Slings and Arrows, eh?). Lately, I've been thinking about another production of Hamlet. So, with that on my mind, I'm willing to admit that everything may just look like Hamlet to me. Although, admittedly, Infinite Jest is a pretty obvious reference, not to mention that Hal and his friends dig up Hal's dad's Himself's head (page 17 of my edition) and there is more, but I'll leave off.

Note: most of what I've written is a prediction. This is my first time through the book. So I'm sure in many cases I'll stand corrected.

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at
it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know
not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment,
that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one
now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen?
Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let
her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must
come; make her laugh at that.