• Attachment is a Nasty Business

    I don’t feel so hot, so posting is limited at the moment. Here is an interview with Melissa James Gibson, the playwright who wrote [sic] (which we loved) and now Suitcase, both produced at Soho Rep. We saw it last week and really enjoyed it, as did the rather actorly (Nina Hellman of The Civilans, David Greenspan, etc.) audience. Apparently, I should have written about this earlier, as tickets just went from $15 to $35. Still, it’s probably worth going, and certainly is more worth your time than any Broadway crap.

    There is an amazing, weird, disjointed quality to the dialogue in her plays. I had thought it was the way they are directed, but now that I’ve read the interview and seen an excerpt of the latest play, I realize that’s the way they’re written.

    From the interview:

    Rail: The idiosyncratic punctuation that you use for the character lines seems to offer an alternative to the more clichéd aspects of psychology in theater. Instead of rendering articulations of “emotion,” your characters seem to follow a musical score; one that expresses more ephemeral aspects of inner thought through pattern and rhythm. How did you begin to use these stylistic conventions?

    Gibson: I was just finding, more and more, that proper sentences and punctuation werenÂ’t adequately expressing what was in my head, in terms of dialogue. Punctuation has its place, of course, but it can lessen the degree to which subtlety and contradiction and ambivalence reside in verbal communication. And since a play is a blueprint for an oral form, it just makes more sense to me, for my work, to keep the language open to the switching of tracks it must constantly accommodate. IÂ’ve come to rely on carefully chosen capitalization, line breaks and what I half-jokingly call “actor intention tips,” which basically alert the actor to the fact that the intention behind the line may be at odds with what actually is said. In terms of the rhythms of the words, I do sort of think of the line breaks as thought breaks. For me, these are just another signal to the actor about the patterns inside a characterÂ’s head. Obviously, IÂ’m borrowing some of the tools of poetry and music, though I am, much to my sadness, neither a poet nor a musician. So maybe itÂ’s like IÂ’m operating a power saw without wearing safety goggles.

    Rail: There is also a strong thread of narrative fragmentation running through your pieces. Your characters are often collecting found objects, listening to voices in the stairwell, seeing snippets of home video through windows. The stories are never really beginning or ending.

    Gibson: Well, lives don’t behave. We are porous and susceptible beings and even when our intentions are definite we ineluctably veer. The veering is what interests me— that and the secret conversation that underlies every out loud one. I just feel such great affection for the evidence of our tragic, silly, smart and stupid selves.

    Here is a sample of the play:

    (Ring ring. Jen turns down the volume on the tape player and answers the phone.)

    SALLIE
    Is it
    Bleaker or more bleak I can
    never remember that rule Bleaker
    doesnÂ’t even sound like a word
    when you say it in
    isolation Try saying it Bleaker Bleaker Bleaker
    Ew thereÂ’s a guy outside clipping his
    toenails into the sewer Jen
    are you there

    JEN
    IÂ’m here I thought
    you might be my advisor

    SALLIE
    Did you hear from your advisor

    JEN
    SheÂ’s trying to
    Reach Me

    (SallieÂ’s gaze has landed on an apartment in the building across the way, where the film is showing again. Sallie picks up a pair of binoculars and looks through them as she continues to converse. We see what she sees, a section of home movies from circa 1940:

    A little girl, her father and her mother are sledding. The father wears a suit and overcoat, while the mother wears heels and a fur. They all take a turn on the sled.)

    SALLIE
    How do you know

    JEN
    SheÂ’s left
    Messages

    SALLIE
    Uh oh

    JEN
    And yesterday I received a
    Letter

    (SLIGHT PAUSE.)

    JEN
    Are you there

    SALLIE
    Sorry I got distracted
    Someone across the way is watching some old
    footage What did you receive

    JEN
    A letter Old
    footage

    SALLIE
    Home movies or
    something What
    sort of letter

    JEN
    She wanted to know where things
    stood dissertation-wise

    SALLIE
    What did you tell her

    JEN
    It was a letter Sallie

    SALLIE
    (focused on the film)
    Oh right
    IsnÂ’t it beautiful Jen I mean is
    there anything more beautiful Jen than
    people who dress in blatant disregard of their
    circumstances

    JEN
    Oh I donÂ’t know blatancy is problematic if you ask me Blatancy makes me
    nervous She
    said she was going through a messy divorce

    SALLIE
    Who

    JEN
    My advisor In her letter

    SALLIE
    ThatÂ’s too bad

    JEN
    So sheÂ’s trying to straighten out her affairs so
    to speak

    SALLIE
    So she can focus her energy on her messy
    divorce

    JEN
    I guess She said attachment is a
    nasty business

    (SLIGHT PAUSE.)

    ThatÂ’s a quote from her letter Attachment
    Is A Nasty Business

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  • Brooklyn Rail: John Waters

    Brooklyn Rail has a John Waters interview. Given that it’s not the NY Times, it’s a bit more about art than the other one.

    Waters: Andy Warhol used to say his movies were better to think about than see. Well, this is true here too. In Eat Your Makeup thereÂ’s a scene thatÂ’s important where we do the entire Kennedy assassination, where Divine plays Jackie. Two years after it happened we shot it and people were really pissed off about it.

    Rail: Just like after 9/11, you couldnÂ’t do anything that related to it in content without being “respectful of the tragedy” or else youÂ’re suddenly a national traitor and “unpatriotic.”

    Waters: Yup. And that’s what I’m saying, it was almost like that. Oh Andy [Warhol] would have. Andy would have done a beautiful painting of that— I think he would have. The rest of Eat Your Makeup is all right. It has some good stuff in it, but it’s a 40 minute film that should have been 15 minutes. I learned that as I went along. Now they can’t stop me from cutting. My movies now would be 10 minutes long if they didn’t stop me in the editing room. Just the good parts! That’s what this photo work is. Sometimes the good part is 1/24 of a frame. That’s really cutting it down. (Laughs).

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  • I’m a city boy

    I’m a city boy. In the big cities they’ve set it up so you can go to a park and be in a miniature countryside, but in the countryside they don’t have any patches of big city, so I get very homesick.

    — Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

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  • Fernando Carabajal

    carabajal-chalk-elephant.jpg

    Chalk Elephant, 2003
    Fernando Carabajal
    Chalk & glue

    We saw work by this young artist on our trip to Mexico City. The gallery, Nina Menocal, has now put up a few images of his work. There aren’t any good details of his drawings, but the photo of the table gives you a feel for how the project room looked.

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  • Obscenity

    We all have our own ideas about what constitutes obscenity.

    Congress, FCC Focus on Pay Television Indecency

    Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain urged cable and satellite companies to offer parents the ability to pick and choose what channels they get so they can protect their children from violence, sex and profanity, an idea that resonated with other lawmakers and regulators.

    …

    But lawmakers also heard that federal power to enforce decency standards on subscription cable and satellite service was limited compared to material on the public broadcast airwaves.

    “It seems interesting that we say … if it’s on just a higher channel number, which you can get just by clicking your channel changer, we’re going to ignore it and not pay attention to it,” Sen. John Breaux, a Louisiana Democrat, said.

    “We ought to look at the whole spectrum of what we get over our televisions,” he said.

    Suicide Car Bomb Kills 47 at Iraqi Army Center [Rumsfeld says it’s just human nature.]

    A suicide car bomb killed 47 people at an army recruitment center in Baghdad Wednesday, taking the death toll to about 100 in two attacks on Iraqis working with the U.S. occupation forces within 24 hours.

    9/11 Panel to Access to Edited Memos [emphasis mine]

    The federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks will get greater access to classified intelligence briefings prepared for President Bush under an agreement announced Tuesday with the White House.

    The 10-member, bipartisan panel had been barred from reviewing notes taken by three commissioners and the commission’s executive director, Philip Zelikow, who reviewed the data in December but couldn’t take the summaries with them. Under the agreement, the entire commission were allowed to read versions of the summaries that were edited by the White House.

    White House lied about Al Quaeda Nuclear Plant Threat

    The White House stepped back from a high-profile assertion by President Bush, in his January 2002 State of the Union Address, that U.S. forces had uncovered evidence of a potential attack against an American nuclear facility.

    In the speech, Mr. Bush warned of a terrorist threat to the nation, saying that the U.S. had found “diagrams of American nuclear power plants” in Afghanistan.

    Coming just months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — and as U.S. forces were on the hunt for al Qaeda in Afghanistan — the statement was offered as evidence of the depth of antipathy among Islamic extremists, and of “the madness of the destruction they design.”

    “Our discoveries in Afghanistan confirmed our worst fears,” Mr. Bush told Congress and the nation in the televised speech. He said “we have found” diagrams of public water facilities, instructions on how to make chemical arms, maps of U.S. cities and descriptions of U.S. landmarks, in addition to the nuclear-plant plans.

    Monday night, the White House defended the warnings about Islamic extremist intentions, but said the concerns highlighted by Mr. Bush were based on intelligence developed before and after the Sept. 11 attacks, and that no plant diagrams were actually found in Afghanistan. “There’s no additional basis for the language in the speech that we have found,” a senior administration official said.

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  • Backing down?

    Via Talk Left, I learn that the government seems to be backing down a bit on the whole peace activism = terrorism thing. I’m sure it’s because of the post James did.

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  • Museums and the Web conference

    I’m thinking about attending this. Are any of my readers? Have any of you been to it before?

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  • Protecting us from dangerous musicians

    Several Cuban musicians were nominated for Grammies (Grammys?) Most of them couldn’t attend the ceremony because the USA denied them visas.

    US authorities have refused to let five Cuban Grammy Awards nominees travel to Sunday’s ceremony in Los Angeles.

    Musicians up for best tropical Latin album award – including veteran star Ibrahim Ferrer – have not got visas.

    Ferrer, 77, told press in the capital Havana: “I am not a terrorist. I couldn’t be one. I am a musician.”

    A US diplomat in Havana said the US administration could suspend the entry of people deemed to be “detrimental to the interest of the United States”.

    …

    Ferrer is the best-known of the nominees after appearing in 1999’s Buena Vista Social Club film. He recently won BBC Radio 3’s world music award for best artist from the Americas.

    The other artists to be refused visas are Guillermo Rubalcaba, Amadito Valdes, Barbarito Torres and the group Septeto Nacional Ignacio Pineiro.

    But pianist Chucho Valdes, nominated for best Latin jazz album, has been granted a visa.

    Land of the Free?

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  • You can look at the lamps

    Mim Udovith interviews John Waters for the NY Times.

    UDOVITCH Do you think it’s harder to be transgressive now than it used to be?

    WATERS I’ve never tried to be. Transgressive — does that mean you change how people look at things? That would be the greatest flattery anyone could say to me. But I’m just setting out to do what I always do. First, I do it for myself. And then, maybe when you go to the movies after looking at my pictures, you can make your own movies in your mind. You can watch something and say well, that image could go here. You don’t have to like the movie. You can look at the lamps.

    …

    UDOVITCH Do you feel you have any mentors?

    WATERS Tennessee Williams made me realize that everything they told me in school was a lie and I didn’t have to pay attention to it. Warhol certainly influenced me when he so wisely put homosexuality and drugs together, finally, where they belonged. Little Richard, because I wanted to be the white him in the hippie world. That’s why I have this mustache. And Jean Genet, of course. I don’t even remember that I named Divine after the character in “Our Lady of the Flowers,” but I’m sure I did. They made me have the nerve to do what I wanted to do, so that I didn’t care that I didn’t fit in, that nobody else really liked what I liked when I was growing up.

    jackie-divine.jpg

    John Waters
    Jackie Copies Divine’s Look
    2001

    We went to the John Waters opening at the New Museum Saturday night. See the Holland Cotter NY Times review here.

    It’s the last show before it closes and work begins on the new building on the Bowery. I saw him a few times, but I didn’t talk with him. I’ll go back to watch the early films they’re showing. I did see Gary Indiana, Andres Serrano, and many other artists and writers, including a few people from his films, plus many more who looked like they belonged in one. I heard Patty Hearst was there but I didn’t see her.

    It was a more interesting, and younger, crowd, than other New Museum events I have attended. I loved that the second floor was left empty for the big crowd to just have drinks and hang out. Every opening should have such a luxury of space.

    This reminds me of an amusing John Waters story. In the early 1990s James and I saw Romper Stomper at Film Forum. It’s a pretty disturbing movie about racist skinheads in Australia, with plenty of violence. If it hadn’t had Russell Crowe in it, I doubt I would have gone to see it. During a lot of the worst violence, I could hear the person sitting right behind me giggling. When the lights came up I turned around to see who this idiot/madman might be. I wasn’t annoyed anymore, in fact I was quite pleased, when that person turned out to be John Waters.

    One other item: his new art book is amusing.

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  • In a totalitarian state, dissent = terrorism

    If this isn’t police state behavior, I don’t know what is. Lifted from Kos, go there for more info. The FBI-Joint Terrorism Task Force is asserting a right to compel peace activists (including the Catholic Peace Ministry in Des Moines) to appear before a secret grand jury without a lawyer.

    Yesterday, February 3, Detective Jeff Warford of the Polk County Sheriff’s Office-FBI-Joint Terrorism Task Force came to Catholic Peace Ministry’s office here in Des Moines with a subpoena for me to testify before a Federal Grand Jury next Tuesday, February 10. Mr. Warford also served papers on Elton Davis at the Catholic Worker House and Patti McKee, who was coordinator of Iowa Peace Network until last month. The Grand Jury process is shrouded in secrecy. We do not know who or what the object of this investigation may be, beyond “possible violations of federal criminal law in the Southern District of Iowa.”

    The proceeding will be behind closed doors. We may not have an attorney present. We have the right to plead the Fifth Amendment, refusing the answer questions that might incriminate us. The government, then, can offer us immunity from prosecution, in which case we will obliged to answer under threat of contempt of court and could be imprisoned for the length of the Grand Jury session, 18 months, should we continue to refuse to answer. This immunity would be limited to our own testimony and anything any of us say could be used against the others.

    Whatever is going on, this is definitely an escalation on the part of the government’s war on dissent and clamp down on civil liberties. The fact that anything that we three and the peacemaking communities we represent could possibly attract the notice of a “Terrorism Task Force” is reprehensible. Please spread the word, express concerns you have with Federal and Polk County authorities. Keep us in mind and prayer.

    Brian Terrell
    Executive Director
    Catholic Peace Ministry

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