The life of a writer is a miserable, solitary one. Or something. Actually, I tend to find life to be exciting and interpersonal interaction filled, which is perhaps why I’m not quite the writer I sometimes wish I was. But trust me–I’ll take friendship and human interaction over suicidal loneliness and depression any day. That said, there are some things I’m writing about, or have recently written about, or that you should know about, and this is a blog post that just slaps it all down. Welcome to the confusion of my mind.
What does the 1955 New American Machinist Handbook have to do with Susan Sontag, James Agee, and the ever-present tension in socially or politically engaged art between call-to-action and aesthetic seduction? I have no idea, personally, but these seem to be the questions Sibyl Kempson is grappling with in Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag, which opens this coming week at Abrons Arts Center, and constitutes the debut of her new theater company.
David Herskovits of Target Margin Theater is one of those people whose positivity and relentless optimism always blow me away. Not many directors think like him anymore: His TMT Lab series, an ongoing laboratory and incubator for exploring dramaturgical strategies for grappling with concepts, aesthetics, and ideas, has provoked me many times in the past, particularly with his last round dealing with the legacy of LES Yiddish theater from the early 2oth century. The next round is still in progress, tackling the work of Gertrude Stein. Whose work I’ve only seen staged once, by Heiner Goebbels. Who liked the bizarre interview I wrote up enough to have it republished in program notes for the show around Europe.
Jim Neu’s The Floatones. Which will be staged this May, by Catherine Galasso, at La Mama (where it premiered in 1995), with Jess Barbagallo, Greg Zuccolo, Joshua William Gelb, and Larissa Velez-Jackson. Someone pitched it to me as a series of “performance crushes,” which made me jealous because my performance crushes!
Catch at the Invisible Dog. If I haven’t seen you for a while, say hi at the Invisible Dog tomorrow where I will be a Catch. Which I haven’t been to for a while. NYC is playing host to Philly artists for iteration no. 67, so let’s give them a friendly Brooklyn welcome. I love Philly.
It was, if I recall correctly, sometime back around March 2013 that I had a late dinner with Zoe Scofield in the East Village where she proposed I do a project with her. We had no money and no practical way to do it at the time, but Scofield liked whatever it was I meant when I was talking about “embedded criticism,” and she was intent on shaking up how she made her work, so this thing called “No Ideas But In Things” happened. Sort of. It was tricky. I wrote a lot online but embedded criticism proved tricky. That said, this past winter I finished a 12,000-word essay which got whittled down to a mere 7,000 that will…well, more on that shortly! In any event, I was super-stoked when Zoe texted me this afternoon with the news that this afternoon she was announced as one of 175 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation 2015 Fellows. That’s hell of company she’s in, and I am absolutely honored to have been invited by her to spend a year and a half watched her create BeginAgain, and am excited to see what she does next. Congratulations!
Yesterday, I finally punched out some very quick thoughts on the controversial move by Actors’ Equity Association to make radical changes to LA’s 99-seat showcase code, and I felt like I should come back to it to more fully address what strike me as the most important issues raised by what’s going on there.
To briefly recap, Equity has proposed changes which essentially make it impossible for members to take part in small indie productions by requiring those producers to pay at least minimum wage for Equity members’ labor. This radically increases production costs and presents an existential threat to the health of a vibrant small theater community. On the other hand, it appears that LA’s more flexible existing showcase code has permitted some small theaters (particularly those most critically recognized) to grow much larger and robustly funded than, say, their New York counterparts.
While it seems clear that Equity’s move is overkill–throwing the baby out with the bathwater–the controversy nevertheless reveals the pernicious degree to which the devaluation of performers’ labor has become endemic in American theater. This is hardly limited to LA.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to write about the imbroglio in the Los Angeles theater community over the past few weeks–since Actors’ Equity, the stage actors’ union, announced plans to change the city’s local 99-seat showcase code–and I keep coming back to a conversation I had with the artistic director of an arts center that presents independently produced theater productions (the sort of experimental contemporary performance I write about). He’d been involved in several projects and initiatives that sought to figure out how to better compensate these artists for their work, and among other recommendations, one such panel had simply suggested that artists make less art, on the dubious grounds it could increase demand for the remaining pieces.
To which I suggested that if the purpose was to pay artists some sort of minimum for their work, perhaps they should just form a union to require institutions such as the one he ran to ensure that artists made such a minimum while they were working there, and preventing his institution from presenting works that violated such wage minimums. To which he responded with some version of: “A union? Are you kidding me?”
The point isn’t to throw stones at some anonymous figure (who, for the record, has instituted several initiatives to ensure better compensation for artists). Rather, it’s to get at one of the core problems we in the arts face whenever we try to deal with these sorts of issues. Even the best meaning people, confronted with the practical reality that our behavior would have to change in order to achieve the ends we want, tend to retreat from the positions they hold so dear. It’s easy to say, “We value paying artists a living wage for their work,” but much harder to change our own institutional behavior to make that happen. And this is the problem which lies at the heart of the controversy playing out in Los Angeles in increasingly vitriolic terms.
This mass expanse of blank and unattractive concrete was conceptualized by Renzo Piano you ungrateful little shits.
Note: Upon re-reading this, I’m irritated by how rant-y it is, and have added what I hope is a fairly succinct post-script at the end.
For the past two days, the theater Internet has been blowing up in response to a pair of reviews—published in the Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times respectively—harshly criticizing Steppenwolf’s production of Idris Goodwin and Kevin Coval’s This Is Modern Art (based on a true story). A number of issues are in play at once: the role of the critic in responding to art, the obligation of art to uphold the moral good when oriented to children, racial privilege and bias, and, somewhere in there, the merits of street art.
Unfortunately all of this has proven quite difficult to unpack, mainly because Hedy Weiss’s review in the Sun-Times is not only blatantly racist but easily one of the dumbest reviews anyone’s read in a major newspaper in recent memory. This is unfortunate in that it distracts from the more pertinent issues at play across both. The Tribune’s Chris Jones is not overtly racist in his review, giving it the gloss of relative acceptability despite its dubious (at best) moral argument against the play, so it becomes hard if not actually unfair to treat him as on the same side of a debate as the wholly objectionable Weiss.
What the whole thing adds up to, though, is the single greatest indictment of the sorry state of American theater criticism I can imagine. This may not be the most important point (the racial dynamics at play are just plain ugly and ignorant) but the fact these reviews exist demonstrates the complete lack of fucks everyone involved in their publication–from author to editor to publisher–don’t have to give for theater criticism.
This is an update to the post I finally decided to promote yesterday. Sometimes you know things aren’t good for you, and apparently daring to say that what’s racist is racist is one of them…when people decide that racism is okay. An overstatement? Yes, obviously. The point I set out to make is one that people either got and found uncontroversial, or didn’t get and apparently was objectionable because free speech. I don’t know exactly what to say other than to try to clarify how I understand the objection.
The post I wrote was an attempt to apply ideas from Stanley Fish’s essay “There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech” to understanding the tensions that exist over the actions–and responses to those actions–of Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical and investigative newspaper targeted in early January by terrorists in response to that publication’s cartoons depicting a variety of subjects: first and foremost the Prophet Muhammad; second, mockery of traditional Islamic values through the Muhammad caricature; and third, a tendency towards racialized, stereotypical presentations in the service of the prior two points, as well as toward “terrorists.” I add scare quotes around the word “terrorist” because, among other angry interlocutors on the Internet, I was accused of not distinguishing between a religion (Islam) and a race (Arab…or maybe North African, depending on context) which are necessarily represented thusly. In any event, for this failure I sincerely apologize: I assumed people had seen the cartoons Charlie Hebdo published that caused such a fuss. Or maybe that they could grasp why portraying “terrorists” as grody bearded dudes in Aladdin costumes might seem racist.
In any event, I apologize; if you can’t see these points, you surely have bigger problems to deal with in this unhappy world than a critic pointing out the failings of your own critical faculties.
Like many others, I’ve spent the last week and a half trying to wrap my head around the traumatic events that unfolded in Paris, when gunmen slew a dozen journalists and cartoonists in the offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. I also watched as, predictably, a heated debate exploded online within mere hours following the initial assault (and well before the bloodletting ended in simultaneous sieges a couple days later) over whether Charlie Hebdo‘s cartoons mocking Islam (or, at least, targeting certain aspects of Islam and associated extremist practitioners and political ideologues, if you prefer) constituted racism or Islamophobia. Richard Seymour at Jacobin magazine made the first big splash by declaring: “I simply take it as read that — irrespective of whatever else it does, and whatever valid comment it makes — the way in which that publication represents Islam is racist.” The response to those suggesting that perhaps Hebdo was a problematic standard-bearer for the cause of free speech and expression was angry and occasionally near deranged in its outrage (consider Jorg Heiser in Frieze).
For my part, I was both troubled and didn’t, at first, want to try to respond by writing something. As a journalist and a critic, one of the things I’ve grown tired of to my bones is an Internet flame-war. I’m flogging a dead horse by pointing out that these days, reflection and reporting are out of fashion; it’s easier for writers to churn out several-thousand-word think-pieces in mere hours, apparently, than to grapple with the deeper and more problematic aspects of the issue they’re supposedly responding to. In fact, what we normally wind up with are puffed-up jeremiads about this or that–bloggers and opinion columnists yelling at one another across the web. This sad state of affairs will flame for a few days and then, when the news cycles on, the discussion will simply be dropped, regardless of whether it’s an important one to have.
Anyway, I had no desire to contribute to that, so I simply sat down and read Stanley Fish’s There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech (and it’s a good thing, too!) [PDF] and then thought for a while.
The setting is of a cold January night in New York City, where a lonely critic sits hunched over his chickenscratch notes when begins to shake in disturbing fashion the cracked rectangle of obsidian black glass at his elbow, simultaneously emitting a tinny sad trill of bell-like tinkling. Pick it up he does, swiping a finger from left to right across the distressingly lattice-worked bit of glass, and to his ear to hear the squawking voice of the editor. Where’s the report? he asks. On its way, replies the critic, but the notes are a mess! Deadlines are past! replies the editor. It’s hopeless! says the critic. Surely there’s a subject? squawks the box. Too much, is the reply, and not enough at once! How was the trade-show? asks the voice. Outgrown itself, is the reply, and continues: Ouroboros-like, it eats itself–a trade-show pretending it’s the festival itself that the trade-show is meant to feed. To which the editor responds: Surely there’s a story there!? To which the critic responds: One that everyone knows! But there’s art! rejoinders the apoplectic editor. Of a fashion, replies the despondent critic. Surely it’s diverse? the critic is asked. As the Oscars! he replies, sardonic. What are these people paid for then? asks the editor. The critic: Paid? The editor: Yes, who pays them? The critic: Where are they from?
It was an answer as much as a question.
Silence on the line. The discussion is at an end. Deadlines are past, repeats the editor, story’s due. The notes are shit, is the critic’s pathetic response. And there’s silence again.
A Joke
A Brazilian and an Argentinian walk into a bar, where they meet Eisenstein. He tries to explain montage to them. They misunderstand him and make bad theater.
[Rimshot]
The Brazilian assumes that the point is that, by taking similar (rather than dissimilar) narratives and collapsing them together in a confusing scenario, new meanings can emerge (they don’t). The Argentinian assumes that the point is that, if you provide the subjective back-stories for multiple films, new meanings can emerge (rather than humdrum social commentary). Theatrical devices are employed in the presentation of these rather conventional narrative theater pieces, which is why it’s so sad in the end: If only they’d known that instead of bothering to try to stage complicated filmic narratives, they could have just made (mediocre) films, everyone would have been happier!
“Забей на это дерьмо,” says Eisenstein. Alas, they don’t quite understand.
“Estúpido de mierda ruso,” says the Argentinian (according to Google Translate).
“Você não entende saudade,” says the Brazilian (according to Google Translate).
“Вы не понимаете, как сделатьхороший театр,” says Eisenstein (according to Google Translate). “Это не монтаж То есть просто рассказывать историю.”
But everyone who can’t read this exchange without Google Translate went home happy, because intercultural exchange happened.
Vignette 2
Thursday past, or rather early, early morning Friday past: H. and B. wander into an LES top-shelf whiskey bar to meet C. and Other-B, who are curators. C. is dancing in lively fashion with Tat. A bear-hug is initiated with B. Flights are too early but deference must be paid. Welcome to the hyperjetlagged international performance art jet-set. Pleasantries are exchanged. Nominal discussions of art unfold. Old acquaintances rekindled in proper trade-show fashion. New acquaintances made. Email addresses exchanged. Others depart. C. and Tat are the first as needs must. The gate is dropped halfway and everyone smokes indoors. January in New York.
On 38 Young(er) Slovenian Singers
Recalling the day following the previous vignette, it was–at least in the estimation of one of our guests–beautiful. Carmina Slovenica, a Slovenian choral performance group, arrived at St. Ann’s Warehouse as part of the Prototype Festival. For a piece called Toxic Psalms. It’s quite lovely. It has to do with how people in a social situations defer to power. Wars in the Balkans are referenced, as are the Milgram Experiments. The chorus is invited to develop the piece, and the banality of influence takes over (the irony of deference to power thus lost). They produce a choreography worthy of a youthful imitation of Pina Bausch, happy to please a scenographic imitation of Robert Wilson.
The singing is good.
Vignette 3
Saturday night and the intrepid correspondents, in need of release, sojourn down to the TriBeCa Grand for a party hosted by a certain Kunt. At which a surprising number of heterosexual males, incapable of grasping the subversive spelling of the host’s name, came in hopes of finding their way into some of the titular good by night’s end. Which was confusing to most others.
Everyone agrees this is the best work anyone’s seen so far this week.
[The drummer awkwardly begins to rimshot, then doesn’t know what to do, and elects to smoke what we assume is tobacco.]
Vignette 4
Setting: Late night, near the individuated bathroom stalls of an LES bar. One man holds a plastic bag containing a contraband substance. Along with another, he wanders into one such stall. The following is overheard:
Man 1: So what do we do with it?
Man 2: There’s really only three options, and I don’t see lighting it on fire as a good idea.
They pursue the remaining two options with equal aplomb.
Outside WMFU’s Monty Hall
Radiohole has minutes before completed a reprisal of Myth (or maybe meth), a text written by the late Tom Murrin. The event is a gloriously and disastrously marvelous, prompting questions such as: “Did he really just puke inside his box costume?” [yes]; “Did the constant slipping on food detritus distract from textual fidelity?” [possibly?]; and [this author’s favorite], “I’ve never seen this one before–which part did they fuck up? Because something was definitely fucked up there.”
Cigarettes alight outside Monty Hall (where the staff seem increasingly concerned about the sort of New York art-world riffraff permitted inside their fine establishment), B., a performer from whose costume crustacean-nethers audiences recently witnessed a green-jello roe being consumed, comments that, “This is like the dudes’ version of Untitled Feminist Show.” Which elicits a lengthy conversation about how best to present a marathon evening of Myth (or maybe meth) alongside Young Jean Lee’s Untitled Feminist Show and, most lately, Straight White Male. The primary point of contention is the potentially best order in which to program said three shows.
Then the screening began. The film begins with footage of Yanukovych’s legendary press-conference, where he breaks a pen. Literally seconds later, special agents [police] appeared, the lights were turned on, and they announced that there was information suggesting a bomb had been planted, and requested that we immediately evacuate the premises. While this was happening, the special agents who’d been impersonating audience members, and those who’d entered when the screening had been halted, demanded that the proceedings not be photographed or filmed in any way. It got to the point where cameras were being openly knocked out of [audience members’] hands. In the basement’s exit, those who were being “rescued” from an explosion were stopped by at least 5 special agents, who’d organized a check of documents and a search of possessions. We requested that they explain whether their operation was to save us, or to detain us.
The life of a writer is a miserable, solitary one. Or something. Actually, I tend to find life to be exciting and interpersonal interaction filled, which is perhaps why I’m not quite the writer I sometimes wish I was. But trust me–I’ll take friendship and human interaction over suicidal loneliness and depression any day. That said, there are some things I’m writing about, or have recently written about, or that you should know about, and this is a blog post that just slaps it all down. Welcome to the confusion of my mind.
