Joe Donahue reading at the blue door

Terrific readings last night at the Desert City and Blue Door Reading series (Randall Williams, John Taggart, and Joe Donahue). I recorded Joe Donahue's reading for miPo Radio. I will also record various other readings in NC. You can listen to Joe's reading (and subscribe via itunes etc.) by clicking here:

Joseph Donahue Reading at the Blue Door

The family Rothenberg leads this goat to Claude Levi-Strauss' fine book Totemism

Things that are making my skull ooze.

Jerome and Diane Rothenberg recently visited Duke -- Mr. Rothenberg giving a reading centered around his translations of Picasso and Schwitters, but that also included his own work. The real highlight was the discussion afterwards which centered around Picasso's interactions with the Surrealists, Futurists and so forth, and the cross-pollination found there. The reading & discussion got me diving into the Rothenbergs' Symposium of the Whole, which is a generous selection of texts from multiple disciplines (mostly poetry, anthropology) that have helped create the concept of Ethnopoetics as evident in Alcheringa, Technicians of the Sacred and elsewhere. This book, along w/ Rasula & McCaffery's Imagining Language, have sent me on a bit of a remedial course of topics I have no background or training in. So I jump to big names.

Levi-Strauss's book is interesting not only in its explication of totemistic structures, but also of the contexts in which they can arise. For instance, "totemism as a system is introduced as what remains of a diminished totality, a fact which may be a way of expressing that the terms of the system are significant only if they are separated from each other, since they alone remain to equip a semantic field which was previously better supplied and into which a discontinuity has been introduced." Of interest is how a totemic sign, once adopted as a sign, is distanced from the animal it signifies -- for instance, many tribes or clans will adopt rituals to pay respect to their totemic animal (or an animal of the same kin), but it is more systemized and social than direct belief in the animal: "although the caribou has completely disappeared from Southern Canada, this fact did not at all worry the members of the clan named after it: 'it's only a name,' they said to the investigator. The totem was freely killed and eaten, with certain ritual precautions . . . [they] said the animal offered itself more willingly to the arrows of hunters of its own clan . . ."

It was kinda thrilling how well this led to my recent Roland Barthes bender. Maybe the topic of a later entry.

All very interesting, no?, not least of which as a possible 'out' if a Lucipo member is grilled on naming the clan after a line of Uncle Ez's. We're like totally diminishing his totality, ok?

Two Recent Obsessions

Opera.

John Cassavetes.

I don't know if the two are related.

I don't have much coherent to say about either yet. Nevertheless,

Cassavetes's films from the sixties and seventies have been re-released as part of the brilliant Criterion Collection. They are

Faces
Husbands
Shadows
A Woman Under the Influence
Killing a Chinese Bookie
Opening Night

He directed several other films on into the eighties before he died in 1989. I haven't seen all these films, but I want to.

As for operas, I've been listening to

Turandot
La Boheme
Carmen
The Barber of Seville

My parents listen to opera a lot, so I grew up familiar with the genre but never paid it much mind. A few weeks ago, I listened to The Barber of Seville. Once I got past imagining Bugs Bunny massaging Elmer Fudd's head, I realized what I'd been missing. I haven't listened to any other music since really, unless it was something someone else picked.

The Cassavetes stuff is incredible in that I see so many stylistic choices in his films that I'd always attributed to other (and younger) directors. Watching his films, I feel like I'm seeing where some of the more well known greats of the 70s and 80s got some of their ideas.

A Woman Under the Influence is a particularly intense work. It's a long, two plus hours, movie which is composed of maybe four? very long scenes. There are more scenes in the movie, but excluding the four, these others operate on the level of conjunctions. The long scenes are impressive because they show how much of a story can be told by attention to key moments. To say it another way, the "time" of the film is maybe several months? or so? Instead of giving us shorter moments spread throughout that time, we get these very long scenes that largely deliver the jist of the idea of the scene pretty quickly. He could easily have cut these long scenes down by half and still told the story that he is trying to tell. By staying in those scenes though, he ends up involving the viewer in the moment with such, at times, painful attention to detail. It's impressive to see how just when I thought the scene had been wrung of anything of value that he was able to push it even further. The depths to which he takes those scenes allows them to have a life beyond the cliche to something that feels disturbingly real.

Also of note, many of the scenes and much of the dialogue in these scenes is improvised.

Opera. What I admire about it is fairly simple: enthusiasm. Opera is so enthusiastic; it's a wonderful change from art that tries to denigrate itself.

Beyond that though -- and more importantly -- the complexity of the music and skill of its performance creates an experience that is compelling. Much pop music in my experience -- and I like a lot of pop music -- can easily be sequestered into the background of experience. Opera demands (and rewards) your attention.

Two video artifacts

I was in Philadelphia for a day-and-a-half last week and spent an afternoon at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Truly, I was in the Marcel Duchamp room for almost my entire visit, but I saw two video artifacts also. Bill Viola's "The Greeting," which I had heard about before, and Peter Rose's "Odysseus in Ithaca," which I was unfamiliar with.

I've read about Bill Viola for years, and have seen a few of his works here and there. He's a very good writer and his "Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House" selected writings is to video art what Stan Brakhage's writings are to film art. One work I've read a lot about but hadn't seen before is "The Greeting." That link goes to the museum text about the piece, which notes the significant art-historical and biblical references in this video (I won't rehash them here).

Basically, this is 45seconds of live action slowed down to become a 10minute piece. The action consists of two older women standing on an ancient urban streetcorner. They interact a bit, and you can see down the alleyway behind them two small silhouette figures in a passageway also interacting. Then a young woman walks in from the side of the frame, embraces one of the older women, and they interact for a while. Then the video is over.

There are lots of ways to read this video. I chose to discard the art history and religion. The initial thing that hit me was just how many different expressions and emotions flash across the faces of the actresses in what you know is literally split-seconds of real time. It's simple, right -- super-slo-mo -- but it really makes you reconsider your definition of experience within the frame of mental processor speed. How much of our lives are we simply not able to be aware of?

I watched facial expressions and body language for a while before I became aware of the two sihlouettes way back down the alley behind the women. At first I thought they were static -- a part of the set -- but then I could see slight movement. At one point one of them turns and disappears -- the remaining figure waves -- and then the first figure returns quickly. Presumably this pair is a detail in the Jacopo da Pontormo painting that Viola based the imagery on. He's preserving the original image exactly, so these figures are an obligation in that respect. But the fact that he puts them in motion -- making a second narrative, and making it even more ambiguous than what he makes of the three women -- is more than simple pictorial acknowledgement. We're trained, in our viewing of film and video narrative, to note all action because the assumption is that we wouldn't be shown anything if it wasn't significant. In a detective show, you don't see any false clues, and when the phone rings it's never a wrong number. So I sat there trying to figure out what the significance of this second pair could be, but every idea I had was pretty flimsy. About as flimsy, essentially, as the narrative necessity assumption we've been trained to make. Maybe Viola is simply trying to reveal our defaults for what they are. Hard to say.

Usually with video art in museums you're walking down a hallway and you see a darkened alcove or room, and you note the title and length of the work on the card outside, and you go in, and the piece is already in progress. So you watch it to the end and then wait for it to start over again. Then when you get to the point where you came in you either leave (if you're not interested in it) or you stay to the end again (to see the whole thing from start to finish). I lucked out with Peter Rose's "Odysseus in Ithaca" and walked in to see the title on the letterboxed screen.

The screen went white as the audio came in. Just the hum of the recording equipment. Then a gray bar comes in at both the top and bottom of the screen. It takes a couple of seconds before you understand what you're looking at. The camera is moving backwards down a parking deck ramp, looking back at the light of the outside. The rest of the video is long shots out of the side of a car descending levels in the empty deck. The screen is cut into three sections giving you two shots -- the two outer thirds are one shot and the middle third is another. You see the concrete walls of the inside of the deck. You see the level numbers pass as corners are turned. You hear the whoosh of the car tires on the concrete and the clack-clack of the tires going over the rubber seams between the concrete panels. The camera is always stationary. The final shot finds a single car parked on one of the levels.

The title refers to Homer's hero's homeland. Odysseus returns home to find a political mess and has to hide his true identity for a while before he can figure things out. I've always thought this was a lame idea, and particularly abusive to his wife Penelope, who he's purportedly testing. But I don't remember the denoument anymore, to be honest. The starkness of the empty parking deck and the eerieness of the lone car jive with the disorientation that Odysseus must have felt. Simultaneous opposites spring to mind: familiarity/alienation; family/stranger. When I saw the car at the end I found it very sinister -- it's backlit -- but a couple of hours later I thought about it again and thought that it could be seen as a positive. Either a way out of the desolation or a sign of life.

For about eight months I've been trying to write a play that could be performed in a parking deck. There's a mausoleum quality to parking decks -- the strange light, the rectangular shapes, the descent, the petroleum smell. And since they're so often desolate you feel unsafe in them. You anticipate a hidden mugger or something. Sound is funny in there too, with all the echoes. I got one play underway that started pretty good, but then it expanded and became something else that required a variety of settings, and then it morphed again into a film idea. Anyway I've been thinking about parking decks a lot and have walked several of them in Durham on Sundays, when there are no cars in them, in order to get ideas and take pictures. I liked this film because it caught a lot of what I find interesting about the decks. And it dealt with the repetition and uniformity of the environment without being a repetitive and uniform video.

I can't help but find the final shot of the lone car dramatic in a bad way, but I can't come up with a better idea. Rose couldn't simply have given us 6 minutes of looking at the deck and then fade to black. Or pulling up to the exit booth -- that would have been awful. I have a couple of ideas about what I would have done with the car. All of them would attempt to implicate the role that the car plays in city and national politics, as well as individual identity. By referencing Odysseus, Rose is probably accomplishing all of that.

Tiny Ninja Theater's "Macbeth"

I just this afternoon saw the Tiny Ninja Theater production of Shakespeare's "Macbeth" at the Manbites Dog Theater in Durham. The company consists of one man -- Dov Weinstein -- and scads of tiny action figures (mostly ninjas), most of which are literally less than an inch high. The set is a tabletop less than a yard wide, which Weinstein sits behind. And he moves the figures around with his hands or with magnets beneath the tabletop. He does all the lines, in different voices. Since the action is on such a small scale, there are only three width-constrained rows of seats. A maximum audience of 22. And they put plastic binoculars on every seat.

This is condensed Shakespeare -- Macbeth was 45 minutes long -- but it was shrewdly chosen stuff. And despite the incessant technical amazement that I was experiencing, I can say that this was pretty good drama. I wasn't sitting there thinking of grand metaphors for his formalism, though the line "All is but toys" was poignant. Anytime I'm watching a performance I'm very aware that I'm watching artifice -- people pretending to be other people in certain situations -- a lot of dumb show in a way -- so I appreciated the extreme artificiality. And that ultimately brings you back to the original text. Weinstein isn't joking around. He's giving you Macbeth.

The staging was really the performance though. When you walk in and see the setup, and see the tiny ninja figures, you have to ask "How is he going to pull this off?" Weinstein's very smart though, and he knows how to pace the performance perfectly so that he never repeats his effects and moves steadily from one thing to another. Shakespeare, of course, gets a lot of credit for that too. But it's obvious that Weinstein has acting and directing skills, in addition to his puppetry talent. The ways that he positioned the figures that were in dialogue were well thought through. Sometimes you laughed at this (I mean these are toy figures, for god's sake) and sometimes you noticed how clever his idea was. And then sometimes this cleverness was transparent and you just saw drama, which seems unlikely even in retrospect.

Lighting devices included regular light bulbs, a red laser pointer, a penlight, and one of those round dome lights that you press down on the dome to click the light on. The laser pointer was particularly affecting, as the figures used for Macbeth and Lady Macbeth were large and hollow so that when the red laser hit them the entire figure glowed blood red. And at the end, when Macduff brings Macbeth's head onstage, Weinstein used a superball for the head, which also got the glow treatment. There was a big pile of lots of ninjas onstage -- the dead bodies from the clash of armies -- and the laser light crawls through the tangled bodies before resting on Macbeth's head. Then lights-out and the play is over. Chilling.

This is a very fun show to see, and not just for its technical aspects. Weinstein also does a few other shows (Romeo&Juliet and Hamlet, among them), so check out his site and see if you can catch one. It's the coolest idiosyncratic show I've seen since Basil Twist's Symphonie Fantastique or the Trachtenberg Family Slideshow Players.

art radio

check out this art radio website. Tons of great radio programs. Including nude theatre with Edwin Torress, poetry readings, archive recordings from MOMA etc.

PS 1

Eric Baus' "Something Else the Music Was"

Noah Eli Gordon just sent me the latest chapbook off his Braincase Press -- "Something Else the Music Was" by Eric Baus. It looks supercool -- 4-color silkscreen cover, translucent fire-engine-red endpapers -- and the work inside is good too.

The 3 short serial works within -- "I know the letters this way," "Something else the music was," and "Waiting for my name" -- all consist of sentences and paragraphs. The first work has a short paragraph the dimension of a stick of chewing gum on every page. The second work is made of running sections of a few one- or two-sentence paragraphs separated by asterisks. The third work is a formal hybrid of the first two. So there's a cumulative linearity to the book.

Reading this little book is like growing up. The I in "I know the letters this way" has a childlike diction and logic in lines like "I learned to read with my hands by accident" and "The man told me I would see him every other day and I did see he was a different man." And there are other enstranging tactics in play: the questions lack question marks ("Is it her I am talking to really.") and the quotations lack quotation marks ("Do you want me to keep on writing was the first thing I ever said or do you want tme to stop."). The awkwardness of the language is always tearing away from its apparent content. Is the child's diction shaped by a developing grasp of logic, or is the child's logic shaped by a developing grasp of diction?

The title series builds upon these kinds of idiosyncratic lines but introduces a flatness in shuffling in statements of fact like "I do not remember that tree" and "The flames far away are red and red." There's a defensiveness-through-clarification behind a lot of the lines that's unnerving because so many of the simple nouns in the work (comb, tree, bird, triangle, paper, title) repeat amidst three characters (man, woman, boy). The relationships between these characters are textual, not emotional or physical, and the artificial language forces you to calculate your own distance from the work as you read it.

The last work is spare, with only a few lines per page. This is the entire penultimate page:

This is natural.

On the appointed day, the sequence completed, she looks up, and he goes to the beginning.

This time no one has a name.

Without the contextual support of the tight, comfortable paragraphs of the first work or the almost-nested permuting sections of the second, these lines seem open and isolated. They simultaneously mean everything and nothing. You've been abandoned with them.

This book does more than point out how meaning falls away from language when context is complicated, shifted, or removed. It supplies enough interpersonal context (never going as far as being narrative) between pronouned "characters" that you're tempted to emotionalize the relationship between meaning and language as you read. You're learning as you read it.

This is the first work of Baus' I've read, though I'm now going to pick up his "The To Sound" which won the 2002 Verse Prize. Kudos to Noah for putting this book out.

alban elved dance company

this evening i saw a performance by alban elved dance company on wake forest's campus. (the group's name is all lowercase all the time -- impossible to tell, with my rejection of capital letters for most e-purposes.) they are a local (winston-salem based) group with international circulation. the artistic director and choreographer (karola luttringhaus), like her assistant director (andrea lieske), is german. how folks from berlin end up in w-s, nc, i'm not sure, but it's our luck. they describe their work as "interdisciplinary contemporary dance," which means it "incorporates everything from bungee cords to 3-D animation, video projection, aeriel fabric, live music, fractal image computations, site specific productions, and outdoor work," and they also collaborate with academic scientists, as in tonight's performance. (quotations are from the program.) the two pieces on this program were conceptually fascinating and physically well-rendered.

the first was a short (15-minute) piece called "a link with darkness," that invited the audience to meditate on the way technological progress has been accompanied by a weakening relationship between us and the heavens -- particularly true in urban areas, where the city's halo blocks out all but the hardiest stars. this piece was a collaboration with wake forest professor yue-ling wong (jointly appointed in the computer science and art departments), who created 3-D animation sequences of the milky way, a tree that swayed in the wind and changed with the seasons, cave drawings of bison, the moon orbiting the earth, and a flying dragon, which appeared in turn on a huge screen behind the dancers. to experience the piece properly, you had to watch the whole thing through 3-D glasses (provided) -- they give me a headache, but it was well worth it. the dancing related to the animation in different ways: sometime responding to it directly, sometimes treating it as setting, sometimes operating as indirect comment upon it (or vice-versa). the piece created a real mood and made me feel (without sentimentality) the loss we don't even recognize we've sustained in relation to this aspect of the natural world.

the second piece is called "une journee abstraite." (i can't figure out how to get the accent over the first e of "journee," so you'll have to imagine it.) this piece was much longer -- 50 minutes -- and would be of particular interest to poets qua poets. it "explores issues of language -- both human and computer," putting very interesting pressure on the question of what can be expressed. a computer screen was projected onto a portion of the backdrop. the centerstage was occupied primarily by a huge, multi-storied structure that was meant to symbolize a house, but also seemed to me to be another representation of the computer. in particular, what suggested this to me was the way the ground, first, and second floors were behind screens in the opening minutes, and the dancers could only be seen as shadow/sillhouette. they were human texts, speaking in a variety of languages (italian, hebrew, french, german, and english were the ones i caught), just as the computer both flashed its words on-screen and projected them audibly in a voice meant to simulate those "computerized" bank tellers that give you your current balance in a jerky sequence of disjointed numbers. the computer animations were designed by professor jennifer burg of wake forest's computer science department. the only other aspect of the set was a dozen wooden straight chairs scattered "randomly" around the stage and/or suspended from the ceiling (of the auditorium, not of the "house").

the dancing was necessarily very physical. the ground floor was only about 2-3 feet high -- you'd think of the part of a basement apartment that is visible above ground, except there was no below ground. : ) so the dancing in that space was mainly rolling, crawling, and squirming (very rhythmically and with great control) from one place or position to another. the first and second floors were full height, but there was only one long plank of actual floor (separating the ground and first floors) -- the structure of the house was suggested only by the metal bars that outlined the walls and floors/ceilings. so the dancers were constantly climbing, sliding, swinging, balancing, and so forth, when they were in/on this part of the set. one dancer had a prop, a video camera, which she loved using to see/record the other dancers through, but hated when it was turned on her. "you can't see me!" she would shriek in horror, each time. the multilingual (mis-/non-)communication continued, on and off, and meanwhile, the computer went slowly and tediously (yet compellingly) through the steps of its functions to solve the math problem "11+12=23." at two different moments in the piece, the computer and one of the dancers offered this insight: "self-reflection can only get you into trouble."

i could say more, though i must confess that i'd need to see it again to figure out how to really do the piece justice in a description. mainly, however, i hope to intrigue you (especially, but not only, you nc lucipoets) enough to go check them out when you have a chance. here are some selected upcoming shows: dec. 8-19 in charlotte, nc (a holiday showcase); jan. 27-feb. 6 at the "cool new york festival"; feb. 16-20 at duke in durham, nc; and back in w-s at salem college on feb. 22-24. (they'll also be in winnipeg, canada; boulder, co; and laramie, wy in the coming year.) i'm sure their website will have full details (or at least tell you how to contact them for more info). i'd love to hear back from anyone who catches them.

peace.