This past month has brought New York City residents more snow and slushy days spent narrowly escaping mini curbside lakes than the past few years combined. Fortunately, one of my favorite Left Coast artists arrived to help me bare it! Sadly, she left Friday morning and I already miss you greatly Ariel Goldberg… but the night before she left she took me to one of my favorite places in town, St. Mark’s Church, to see her friend Jess Barbagallo‘s new play SATURN NIGHTS. Saturn Nights is running January 27, 28, 29, 30, 31; Feb 1, 3, 4, 5 (8pm curtain) and I firstly would like to say I suggest ya’ll go check it out. It’s super weird. I’m not sure how articulate a review I can offer, but I would suggest you see it!
Saturn Nights is a dark play both in the physical sense and content wise. I tried to take notes during it, but most of my notes ended up written word upon written word that created a great collage affect that maybe I’ll incorporate into one of my paintings but due to my lack of memory, makes for difficulty in reviewing. Let me see… The play used a lot of mixed media tactics to slowly unfold a mysterious story full of dark truths and characters that seemed very odd, mundane and alone in their peculiarities with desires as American as ketchup. The acting in the play is superb and the dialogue gives attention to the small details that playwrights often overlook, offering audiences the chance to open their vision to odd complexities they’d normally not recognize. Spiritual epiphanies occur. An omnipresent radio narrator with a smooth lustrous voice strings characters along and offers weird insights into the cult of spirituality and its crossing with the cult of personality. The family the play follows believes their “dead” father is meditating in the backyard near a hole that many characters often look into simply because it seems there is something beautiful in the whole worth looking at. Many joints are smoked. Incest again tries to snare a relative. Basically, if you believe paganism should triumph over all then yes, you should see Saturn Nights. I think I’m going to go see it one more time as well!
Friday my heart began aching for love so I headed to the Old Stone House – the oldest house in Brooklyn still standing – for a poetry reading put on by Ugly Duckling Presse. Cedar Sigo, Julian Brolaski, and Kate Colby were on the bill, all are Ugly Duckling Press authors, the latter two are newbies to the press. Cedar opened up the night, my favorite line being “I have ladies eyelashes/ my ears stick out/ but I am smart” and yeah Cedar is great. I’ve been a fan of his since I lived in the Bay Area, which I sadly said said goodbye to quite a while ago.
Julian Brolaski and Kate Colby followed Cedar’s lead. Both have recently been published by Ugly Duckling and the press showed its range by housing both readers in the same night. Julian was witty, funny and very young whereas Kate was more traditional and serious in tone. Throughout the night I kept reloading pages on my phone hoping a certain someone would respond to me. I hate the anxiety and inability of being able to focus when the need for response overtakes all others. With global instant communication bound to human fingers, it seems we will never get what we want when we feel we need it.
Thank god for artistic deviations from personal obsessions, without cheap escapes I’m pretty sure there would be many more bullets in heads.
I’m very excited to announce that JT and I sat down with Taylor Mac today for an interview that will be published here in the next coming weeks. After the interview we felt compelled to go see some theater so we headed over to La Mama for the opening night of Camp Wanatachi.
Camp Wanatachi offers a witty account of a group of high energy young girls spending the summer exploring themselves at a Christian Church Camp. The dialogue and scenario’s explored by the writer and cast consistently revel in the absurdity of the truth Michel Foucault brought the world to attention to in “The History of Sexuality.” My father is a minister and my childhood could be summed up as one long church camp, so the characters discovery of sexuality through negative imagery and anti sexual discourse brought back a flurry of memories of jacking off boys in tents and copping feels of breasts at an extremely young age between prayers, meals, and hours spent pretending to worship in order to save face and convince my objects of affection that I wasn’t a demon and that yes, my needing their genitalia is fine.
The play is centered on four tween girls torn between physical and spiritual love and their camp counselor. Obviously my favorite character was Daisy – the self described FREAK FOR CHRIST – and her need to come to a just reason for Kurt Cobain’s suicide in the name of love. My favorite aspect of the play is it’s ability to show the multifaceted face of love and the many hats it wears as it continues to haunt the human condition. I expected Daisy and the other girls to all end up in some sort of orgiastic love triangle, after all the play bills itself as a lesbian musical. Instead the play remained safe the entire way through and only offered a PG look into what I remember to be a very an often times XXX experience. Yes, I may be guilty of perversion but while I do strongly feel the play had its head in the right place its choices could have been much bolder. Many good ideas were expressed, like the camp counselor teaching the girls to write a love song using a violin riff from a Peking Opera as the sound accompaniment to a chorus, but instead of fully carrying out the idea the play jumped elsewhere. There were many moments like that one that would have benefited from a bit more danger and risk tossed into the mix. If the choices were a bit bolder the show could have made the LGBT tween drama an engaging experience for serious theater goers rather than a sweet and amusing Off Broadway musical. Continue reading →
Seeing Dan Deacon and So Percussion play at the Ecstatic Music Festival reminded me of all the times I was young and joined drum circles down by the piers of Southern California. It’s the only real place where business guys on their lunch break can hang out with homeless dudes floating through the afternoon on acid. The drum circle offers equality because there is no real head or tail. It’s an inclusive space for all walks of life to join together to rattle and bang out sounds. The main objective is to share rhythm by tuning into each other and ones self. Drum circles offer space for group consciousness to grow so that a collective voice can emerge from communally shared rhythm. Most of the drum circles that have snared me into a prolonged afternoon lull, coupled with a joint or five, have been full of amateur drummers banging out simple beats that could be easily followed. Usually there’s some cool-experienced-guru type with a few extra drums or rattles willing to share with the estranged passerbyers so that they may partake in “becoming one with the universe” through the experience of banging on shit with a buncha strangers. Unlike drumming groups and troupes, the drum circle is an end in itself rather than the preparation for a performance. The Dan Deacon and So Percussion segment of the Ecstatic Music Festival brought everyone in attendance together similarly to a drum circle in different kind of communal, rhythmic experience.
So Percussion started the night with five songs improvised in conjunction with absurd short videos friends of the band created. For those not familiar with So Percussion, they experiment with drums, percussion instruments and found objects that make interesting noises, using them to explore the realms of improvisational performance. They invited a couple friends to join them for the evening, having them stand in for a missing bandmate at the hospital with his wife and newborn baby. Their set opened with a pretty straightforward drum circle and then then welcomed the audience into more experimental work. Their second song began with the audience helping band members sing “Happy Birthday Elsie” into a cellphone to newborn Elsie. Congrats! And lucky Elsie got the song and video “Toothpaste Bit” dedicated to her. The song “Toothpaste Bit” incorporated such varied instruments as an electric toothbrush, drums, a computer, a metronome, and an electric guitar. In keeping with babies and the starry eyed quality of being young, they next played a video of an infant playing with an orange balloon, about twenty or thirty orange balloons were tossed to the audience and I watched as young and old audience members alike swatted the balloons back into the air. Much of their work is exploratory, and band members explained that they try to use the places they go – airplanes, hotel rooms, cars – as guideposts to make music from. They closed their opening set playing along to a video of one of their inspirations, Martin Schmidt (of Matmos fame), wearing a white shirt and black blow tie, playing with shakers, blowing buzzers, and shaking rattles in unsuspecting intervals.
When Dan Deacon took the stage he returned the audiences attention back to cellphones by holding two cellphones together so they could create feedback, showing us how we were to do this when we reached a certain point of the evenings next activity. He then had score sheets passed out to the audience so everyone in attendance could form an ensemble, encouraging everyone that it was going to be a big show with a large audience and even though we hadn’t practiced we’d do great. Once everyone got their score sheet we began to conduct “Take A Deep Breath.” Dan had everyone present synchronize their cell phone times and then set their alarms to 8:21. At 8:21 as everyone’s phone alarms sounded we all began enacting the 24 step instruction sheet for the new experimental noise band we all formed.
The city is covered in snow and two of my favorite living poets are taking the stage: CA CONRAD and Ariana Reines. Tighten up your boots, wrap yourself in your thickest scarf, call someone you can snuggle up with and venture out into the mystic..
CA Conrad is the recipient of the 2009 Gil Ott Book Award for The Book of Frank (Wave Books, Jan 22 2010). His collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock, The City Real & Imagined, was also published in 2010 (Factory School). Visit him online at CAConrad.blogspot.com.
Norma Cole‘s most recent books of poetry are Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988-2008 and Natural Light. A book of essays and talks, To Be At Music, appeared in August 2010 from Omnidawn. Cole teaches at the University of San Francisco.
Ellen Stewart was one of the most important founders of the off-off Broadway movement, starting the La Mama Theater and giving birth to the non-commercial, artistically audacious and visionary theater that started the careers of artists as widely recognized as Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman. La Mama also gave writers such as Sam Shepard and Harvey Fierstein places to cut their teeth and develop new work as well as providing a first home for performers ranging from Al Paccino to Bette Midler.
The list goes goes on and Ellen Stewart’s legacy deserves a full article on its own. Tonight however, as the lights of Broadway dim for a whole minute in honor of her passing on the 13th of January, (just two days before Taylor Mac’s new play opened at the theater that bares her name) all the tourists in Times Square will share a moment of confusion on their way into whatever dreck they spent one-hundred plus dollars to see, involuntarily participating in a theatrical legacy that transcends the confines of their fluff and spectacle seeking minds. In the days of post-apocalyptic Broadway, this is perhaps the best that we can wish for.
Back downtown at La Mama, Taylor Mac‘s newest work, “The Walk Across America for Mother Earth“, has just premiered and some friends and I had the pleasure of seeing a bit earlier in the week. Although I’d heard about Taylor’s work for a long while, I hadn’t seen anything of his until I got to see the manifesto/extravaganza that was last year’s “The Lily’s Revenge.” Plainly put, that show changed my life. It is still, and may perhaps always be, the single most generous piece of theater I will ever take part in. When that work is re-mounted in San Francisco this spring and I go to see it, I will discuss it more and hopefully will have also contacted Mr. Mac and talked him into giving us an interview. In the meantime, we have his new play to enjoy and while it’s not as epic or multi-faceted as “Lily’s” was, it is something to be seen and celebrated just the same.
Dodie Bellamy first turned me on to Ariana Reines two and a half years ago after she took me to see Rape of the Sabine Woman. I don’t remember exactly why Ariana was brought up while we drove through the rain and excitedly discussed the show we had just watched and became part of, but I am very thankful the name was dropped. When I got home I did some googling and found excerpts of “The Cow” posted online. I read the excerpts and immediately a fascination developed. Flash forward a few years and after much online stalking and book buying, I finally got to meet her after the staging of the second act of her play TELEPHONE which took place at the Guggenheim museum last fall.
This past year Ariana Reines has been segueing into music and more performative acts. Recently this manifested with her opening for one of my all time favorite bands and biggest crushes Psychic TV. When I found out Ariana was opening up for Psychic TV, I approached her and asked her to do an interview on the subject. Two days before the show, she read poems at The Red Horse Cafe as part of the P.O.D. reading series. As she opened up her reading, she gushed, “it’s really weird that I’m opening for Psychic TV and I’ve had the shits for the past 3 days so if I have to suddenly run off stage at any moment that’s what’s happening.” Later that night my life went up in flames, my long term girlfriend suffered a minor injury during her fire performance and we broke up. I too was suddenly in the shits… two days later Psychic TV cleansed my soul. By the time we got to a diner with Ariana, about four days later, my life had completely come undone. Dodie Bellamy posted the story I wrote about it all here.
When we first met up with Ariana for the interview, I was extremely nauseaus and unsure how I could function fully enough to work out a descent interview. But Ariana and JT were great. She annointed me with sandalwood oil and JT fed me lamb. Originally we set out to focus the interview on what it’s like to share the bill with Psychic TV but Ariana is such a major person, working on so many varied projects and giving so much of her energy to the world that it proved impossible to keep the interview tied to just one inspired subject. It brings J.T. and I immense pleasure to bring to you all an interview with the fabulous Ariana Reines.
MP: We finally get to interview you! How did you get in contact with Psychic Tv? What is your relationship with them like?
AR: It’s such an honor because I love you both. I first met Eddy their drummer two and a half years ago by chance. I had gone to see them before Lady Jaye died at the Bowery Ballroom. It was one of a few concerts I went to in my life alone. Because no one I was friends with was interested at the time, I don’t really know why. It’s funny I was talking to Eddy about this the other night. I’m in between a lot of things in my life and there are a lot of little worlds that don’t seem to spill over into each other even though I think they should and Psychic TV for me and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is one, I don’t know, four or five years ago when I realized that Genesis Breyer P-Orridge existed, I happened to have the money and found out about the show and was able to go to the show all in time which usually doesn’t happen for me since I usually find out about things after they happen. Two years later I made friends with Eddy, we have the same birthday.
MP: Cool.
AR: A year ago Genesis and Eddy and Bryin were going to do a performance at the Issue Project Room but Genesis had to go into the hospital that day, and it was sort of a strange semi-cursed day in many ways. I hadn’t met Genesis and then she had this sudden lung inflammation, so Mal-O-Mar nite turned out to be the writers and Holy Shit but no Thee Majesty and Holy Shit was amazing, though of course we missed Thee Majesty. It was just sorta this tacit thing, I guess Eddy gave her some of my books.
MP: And Genesis must have loved them.
AR: I don’t know. We never discussed it. And then I was on the bill. I don’t really know what went on on their end of things. Is that an answer?
MP: Yes! Earlier we were talking about how people pay to go and see things, people spend time and plan to get tickets ahead of time, schedule the night off to give themselves to something, to take part in an experience but you get there and it seems so many people are just there to act like they’re hanging out at their local bar…
AR: Can I interject?
MP: Yeah, of course…
AR: Well a friend and I were talking the other night, she was the person I went to see Marina Abramovic’s “Seven Easy Pieces” with. I don’t know if you two know about this, but in 2005 Marina did I think seven nights of performances at the Guggenheim. Many of the performances were extremely violent and very difficult. But for me the most violent and difficult thing to bear about the performances was that people were talking throughout the performances. People talked like they were at any other sort of gathering where sophisticated people talk, like they were at the races, or if you have ever read Edith Wahrton she describes how high society people talked through the Opera. It’s like this is how a sophisticated acculturated place functions.
For me what was interesting and devastating about the Five Easy Pieces performances was that I felt she was providing an example of a kind of concentration that is lost to the world. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen her perform but she has an extraordinary amount of energy which she can communicate to those people who are really there, really there. Of course many people have a very powerful experience of her performances, and the internet has helped to document this; perhaps it has become more popular to offer oneself to her as her fame has grown? I don’t know. But I remember in 2005, it was a very peculiar situation. The Guggenheim was totally crowded, and it was this combination of a chic meet-and-greet and a space of radical emotional and psychical upheaval. It is not just that what she did or simply how she was made people cry.
My first time being in the New York Times happened then, by the way, not that this matters and they didn’t know who I was, but I yelled, “You don’t have to do this again” in a very wrung moment that bizarrely made it into the review of the show. She was cutting her stomach open and from one of the high coils of the Guggenheim a man yelled back “yes you do” and I started sobbing uncontrollably and ran out of the building, having definitively experienced the most overpowering trauma and elecrification ever inflicted on me by art. It was the most powerful experience I had ever had from a live art experience.
I turned my life upside down for a year forcing myself into what had made that experience so enormous for me. And not just for me. It seemed to me that her concentration and her generosity were a colossal triumph, because in many ways she in these performances was also merely a kind of centerpiece for high culture to rotate around like a carousel of painted ponies bobbing up and down. Like at a fine dinner there may be a centerpiece with plums and candles or whatever. Or a giant Thanksgiving turkey. And that was her. Or a maypole that people circulate around. And that is often what art is for people. And that’s also what ritual is. So it functions on both a low social level and on a very high level. And most of the people, or lets say half, are there to participate in it socially. But there are other people there that want to participate on another level or who cannot help it, who are hungry, whose souls are hungry.
We’ve been friends with Soft Spot for a while now and we’ve always loved them, but seeing them play last night at the cake shop made it clearer than ever that their evolution is in full blossom. Their grace, momentum and exuberance has teamed up so seamlessly with their musicianship that watching them play now brings to forefront things that were only hinted at when we first started watching them play. They seem to have effortlessly found a place all of their own in the midst of some of our favorite bands today. Evoking the immediacy of Future Islands (who they covered last night beautifully) and the witchy femininity of Beach House with a more progressively rock sound than either, they are finally riding a wave of transcendence all of their own. Though live performances will be rare in the coming months due to cold weather and the creation of new material, we recommend keeping your ears to the pavement and your eyes on their myspace. You want to share in this before it ends up costing you twenty dollars a ticket.
In my entire 27 years of living there has not been another year that has been as equally challenging and rewarding as 2010. Aside from moving around from job to job and struggling to find creative inspiration, I have also watched as my and all of my friend’s lives have been challenged in similar fashions. The romantic DNA of 2010 has been the most tangled and complicated I’ve borne witness to. The relationships of those closest to me were all set upon by a cosmic clouding these last 12 months that has made consistent engagement and a tracking of time close to impossible. It is the general census of most of those around me that this year has been hard to re-cap in terms of things that happened outside of ourselves. While we all seem to remember where we were when shit hit the fan and where the revelations our collective and individual healing processes have brought forth started to take place, we find it harder remembering when certain movies, albums, songs, art openings, theatrical events and other artistic and/or public happenings went down. This is detrimental to creating an end of the year list that’s in any way comprehensive because unlike other years where art events serve as touchstones to my emotional life, this year that logic was reversed.
The main thing I will say in 2010′s favor is that it is by far the most present I have felt in a long while. While I don’t wish any sort of overarching hardships for me or for any of my favorite people in the universe, the timing of the events this year that resulted in a psychic domino effect beginning at the start of summer and trailing us all right up into the holidays, has fused us all closer together as a unit than I had ever formerly thought possible. In the background of our crisises and at the forefront of our celebrations, here is some of what we were listening to.
My ten most re occurring favorites of 2010 in ascending order:
It’s a bit of a shock to file away everything that happened this past year into memories. But it’s official, 2010 is dead. Truly life is zooming out and 2010 showed me over and over just how small my position in the grand spectacle we call reality. This past year I made the move from the West Coast to NYC and was fortunate to get to do quite a bit of traveling: Los Angeles, Austin, New Orleans, San Francisco, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Paris, Woodstock, and ended it in Miami partying with all the legendary Club Kids at Susanne Bartsch’s extraordinary NYE extravaganza.
My year began focused on getting my play “Life on Mars: The James Bidgood Story” off the ground, but after I showed it at Poet’s Theater in SF last February, my life came apart in Los Angeles and I had to hit the road toward uncertainty. Looking back on the year, I’m able to see all the beautiful times that sprouted in a year that was heavily coated with pain, sorrow, loss and heartache. Unfortunately my anxiety level was at an all time high all year long, and looking back I’m acutely aware that I never seemed to fully be present, I was constantly worried about what was going to happen next and afraid my life would again come undone. It’s impossible to live fixated on worry or anxiety or whatever… So for 2011 I want to try to give up worrying about tomorrow, embrace the present and spray paint my visions gold.
2010 really proved individuals must accept change and be able to adapt to the changes life constantly evolves toward. 21st Century literacy is no longer limited to the ability to read and write. Now the literate person must also be able to adapt and constantly be able to learn and unlearn in order to relearn. Unlearning/relearning and change are difficult concepts because they inherent a sense of loss and me being an emotional person, I grieve each and every ending.
Here are a bunch of pictures of the NYE party my friends The Zand Collective and I rang in 2011 at:
