Thinking Too Much About Nothing At All

I drove out to this county municipal building in San Jose a few months ago. I guess it must have been on the southeastern side of the city where there are miles of industrial and construction-type buildings. The building(s) were a set of cubes - that sort of nondescript, beige concrete, soul-sucking architecture that was all the rage in the 70's and 80's. Anyway, the Department of Environmental Services (where I signed up for the Food Safety class and test) was on the 3rd floor, so I had to take the elevator. Not a big fan of elevators, but I've progressed somewhat since I was three. I can actually get in one instead of standing outside it and screaming - a habit that started when I was a baby, apparently, the screaming. But like I said, I manage now and even if it gets crowded, I can still keep it together by breathing and willing the door to open at the appropriate moment. But don't ask me to look too closely at how some thing or other works (like my son asked me to look at the door of the elevator at Whole Foods the other day, how there are two of them and how they close behind you and whoops, almost lost it).

Let me just say that I don't mind all elevators. I like glass elevators because if the building is high enough it kind of feels like you're levitating, which you are. There's an elevator at Border's Books in Palo Alto that I like because it has this amazing sound, a low hum and thrum, that I am absolutely going to record and use in a show some day. I like the elevators at the MLK Library in downtown SJ because they open out and it feels like flying or at the very least like maybe you're a character in the Matrix or something. If they were faster, it really would be perfect.



But the elevator at the county municipal building was slow and jerky and too quiet so it kind of felt like being sealed in and that can be a problem. Luckily, I was alone. But I started thinking about this article that appeared in The New Yorker in 2008 about Nicholas White who was stuck in an elevator for 41 hours.

Passengers seem to know instinctively how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die. With each additional passenger, the bodies shift, slotting into the open spaces. The goal, of course, is to maintain (but not too conspicuously) maximum distance and to counteract unwanted intimacies...

Now every time I get in an elevator I feel like I'm doing some kind of performance. And being the kind of actor/person I am, I start to want to fuck with that and see if I can shake things up a bit. It hasn't gotten out of hand yet. This is just the idea stage right now. Because I also get caught up in a recursive loop where after I move around in the elevator attempting to defy the odds, I think that maybe I'm only making the next obvious choices, then I start thinking that there's absolutely no move I could make that isn't predetermined by the geometry of the box.


(n.b.: just watching this makes me feel like I'm being buried alive )

I find myself trying to engage other passengers in the performance. By facing them or talking to them or standing at an odd angle, or getting off at the wrong floor and then getting right back on. But how to tell if it's working? How many possible permutations are there? I'd like create a film that overlays all these floor patterns and then maybe make a dance of it.