MG at MCA Denver

As many of you know, my piece, The Whore’s Dialogue, is up at the MCA Denver right now.  I just wanted to share this interview with me, by curator extraordinaire Elissa Auther,on the MCA Denver blog–they have a QR code in the space that links to this interview for people who come through the show and want to know more and have smart phones that read QR codes.

I’ve been excited that so many folks have actually made it through Denver and gotten to see the show.  For those of you who might be passing through that part of the world, the piece is up at the MCA until June 23.

While you’re there, check to see what other events are happening–the MCA is always doing freaky fun stuff.  I’m a big fan of their Mixed Taste lecture series, and if you play your cards right, you can see both my piece AND lectures on Zombies & Raw Milk Cheese (June 6), Honky Tonk & Paper Recordings (June 13) or Comedic Opera & Vulcan Steel (June 20).

MG on Avidly!

In which I write about the strangle pleasure of terrible women.

ZD30

Hey Ingrid!  This one’s for you!

The NYT did a beautiful series in 2001 where they watched famous classic films with filmmakers; they paired All the President’s Men with Steven Soderbergh.  I bring this up apropos of Zero Dark Thirty, which I saw last night.   What Soderbergh says applies almost exactly:

‘I guess what impressed me most about ‘All the President’s Men,’ and what still impresses me, is that there is really no reason why this movie should work,” Mr. Soderbergh said. ”It’s a story that everyone knew. I mean, the movie was released in 1976 and President Nixon had just resigned in 1974. And the movie climaxes with the protagonists’ making a huge mistake. And yet it works so completely. I never tire of watching it.”

Many writers and reviewers have noted ZD30‘s debt to All the President’s Men, as a procedural film about very recent current events.  But I want to get into this a little bit, because Zero Dark Thirty does not work so completely.

ZD30 is the second of director Bigelow’s collaborations with screenwriter Mark Boal (Bigelow distinctly superior talent in the partnership).  In both The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark 30 we follow single-minded anti-heroes shaped and sculpted by their role as front-line fighters in the current reality of 21st century American warfare.  This pursuit suffocates any other personal qualities they might have possessed, making them unfit for any kind of civilian life or human intercourse that follows.

ZD30 does manage to keep the viewer engaged and on edge for two-and-a-half suspenseful hours, even as it takes us through 10 years of very recent history, leading, inexorably and obviously, to Usama Bin Laden’s death.  Time, and our hero’s search for Bin Laden, is marked by terrorist attacks, each of which contributes to the urgency of her obsession.  It is incredibly well directed–the Bin Laden raid is crafted with great care and virtuosity.

And yet.

In All the President’s Men, the hunt of the story–the culture of the newsroom, the coping strategies, the internal debates, how our lead characters learn together to make this story happen–is everything.  The ONLY time in the whole film that the film tips its hand as to the greater importance of Woodward and Bernstein’s work is at the very end, with the famous line, delivered in such a brilliant deadpan and with no swelling violins by Jason Robards as Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee:

“Nothing’s riding on this except the, uh, First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country.”

That balance–between the hunt and what it means–is off in Zero Dark Thirty.  And as such, we lose the humor, the hypnotic quality, the tension of watching people at work.  When people argue that the movie glorifies torture, they are missing something.  The film doesn’t glorify torture–it presents a CIA in which torture and black sites are a simple reality–and the directness with which it portrays that ends up being a far more effective a critique than swelling violins ever would be.

The problem, I think, comes down to Jessica Chastain’s performance as CIA agent Maya.   As much as the filmmakers try to telegraph that she is NOT A ROMANTIC LEAD, as much as they tell you she is ALL ABOUT HER WORK, they can’t help themselves, in the script or on the screen.

Chastain’s beauty on camera, shining through even the bug-eyed, robotic intensity of her performance–the scenes of her curled up like a perfect little kitten, sleeping in her office or on her couch because she just can’t be bothered with a bed–the perfectly styled hair at totally unbelievable times–her final slow fragile trembling approach to UBL’s body bag–all of that shows the filmmakers’ need to justify and underline her lack of a personal life because of some messianic commitment to killing Bin Laden.  It drains the procedure, it justifies the procedure with beauty, and that is what, ultimately, undermines the film.

immediate thoughts on django unchained

1. Well of course Spike Lee is pissed.  No one would ever give him $83 million to make a movie in which a freed black slave slays dozens of evil white pro-slavery trash and then blows up a plantation.  They’d say Spike was being an angry black man.  Fox News would go into an apocalyptic apoplectic shock for a month.  Only the white guy, the master appropriator of black culture, gets to make that movie.  On this point, I must say, I am sympathetic.
2. Not as brilliant as Inglorious Basterds.  It would seem to be the next chapter of the same gesture of movie-making:  a combination of exploitation era cinema tricks on a big budget canvas set as an alternative take on history–and a history that ASSERTS JUSTICE over injustices of the past.  But IB took it to the next level, as they say–was made a more hallucinatory experience for this viewer–by staging WWII and the Holocaust as this entirely different parallel reality, a more complex world-making, supported in the film by the more complex plot–Shoshanna, Landa, the Basterds, the British spies.  After IB, I was expecting Django to take my head directly off of my shoulders.  It didn’t.
3. Part of this has to do with how history was managed.  IB‘s success, for me, was in how it created such a sideways alternate reality–one in which Americans and Brits actually cared about Jews during WWII, for instance.  I’m fresh up on my pre-Civil War American history, having recently reread the excellently culturally contextual John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights and the beautifully constructed Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America’s First Civil Rights Movement.  I highly recommend both.  The South was in hysterics over blacks having any kind of power in the two years before the Civil War.  I wish that Tarantino had solved the problems of historical inaccuracy by making the alternate reality more strange.
4. Django Unchained was too single-minded a revenge fantasy–so much so that the seams of pastiche felt more obvious.  Seeing it at the New Beverly was an outstanding experience, if only to see the parade of influences in the series of QT-curated vintage movie trailers that served as the previews.  But I couldn’t help but think of Reza Abdoh and Tight Right White.  After what Abdoh did to Mandingo (almost 20 years ago at this point!)–Django Unchained felt almost disappointingly straightforward.
5. (You’ll say I’m comparing apples to oranges, by discussing avant-garde theater next to big budget film; perhaps–but such was my increased respect for Tarantino after IB and Kill Bill, Vol. 1, that the comparison isn’t such a stretch.)
6. In the previews, you got a taste of how films like Mandingo made the horrors of slavery titillating under the guise of telling the truth.  Now, we are post-PC–so we must show the horror as horror–and the pleasure comes from watching the slaveholders turned into boobs.  This was a pleasure:  the slapstick of Jonah Hill and Don Johnson and the proto-Klansmen with their poorly made bag heads, followed by their bloody obliteration was the finest sequence in the film.
7. Lots of really well-crafted set pieces, actually.  But it just didn’t all hang together.  Is this the movie where we see and take a moment of silence to mourn the loss of Sally Menke?
8. Having lived in Claiborne County, Mississippi, I did get taken out of it a bit when I saw them going through landscapes that look nothing like anything you’d see hundreds of miles around where they were.
9. That being said, I would give a back tooth to watch this movie back in Mississippi.
10. This is the only time I’ve ever liked Leonardo di Caprio in ANYTHING AT ALL EVER.  He did some Daniel Day Lewis style scenery chewing and just seemed to be enjoying himself tremendously.
11. How do you bring THAT role up to Sam Jackson?  What was THAT conversation like?  “Uh, could you play like the worst Uncle Tom, but of all time?”
12. Although, perhaps di Caprio and Jackson’s incredibly enthusiastic performances come from getting to play the baddy bad guys.  And that brings us to why I wasn’t as big of a fan of Christoph Waltz in this film.  His character had no complexity–little actory details obviously meant to demonstrate “character work” (his constant patting down of beard and throat, etc)–just seemed precious and smug.  The character was too uncomplicatedly likeable.  No flaws.  Similarly, Django himself was pretty one note.  Which again, totally makes sense against the pastiche of influences–do we complain when Clint Eastwood was one-note?–but both characters felt like missed opportunities.

Maya Gurantz on This American Life!

This week, I have a story on This American Life’s Christmas Episode, “Lights, Camera, Christmas!”  It was all an awesome experience, and I feel so lucky I got to do it.

Why can’t you write like Nora Ephron?

Something I wrote back in the summer.

The great thing about parents is, they won’t ever really understand.  They won’t.  A few years back, my mother, seeing as I was devoting my life and skills, such as they are, to making devised experimental theater said to me, “why don’t you write like Nora Ephron?”Now, I love When Harry Met Sally, the romantic comedy that launched a million flabby imitators.  Ephron was, God rest her and speed her, one of the increasingly endangered species of the Great Wit; she was at her sharpest and funniest when giving toasts or interviews.  But her work was middlebrow and upper-middle-class-white-womanish, uptown New York liberal Jew in a prewar apartment, like Wendy Wasserstein, God rest her and speed her as well, a world of quippy skating around the dark and dangerous and savage and brutal landscapes of love.  They said what smart and funny women were then allowed to say, maybe a step over the line, no more.

Why don’t you write like Nora Ephron?  What my mother was saying was Nora Ephron is funny and Jewish and I suppose to my mom, sharp and edgy, and she writes things that provide some insight but don’t challenge her too much and she is successful and made money and Billy Crystal does her movies and why can’t you just be like that?

I can’t.  I can’t, because I know how dark it can get.  That after people realize they were meant for each other all along and fall in love that love goes somewhere, turning people into monsters.

You see it everywhere.  Like the whole recent rehashing of the John Edwards story.  It could be a Nora Ephron story, I guess, a sequel to Heartburn, her Washington DC adultery dark comedy slash social satire.  Big toothed floppy haired Southern-fried lawyer and Senator.  Upon first glance, everyone thinks–oh, here’s your typical philanderer, Clinton re-dux–but for years, strangely, seems steadily and faithfully married to his wife.  <beat> <beat> And then of course he knocks up a 43-year old New Age party girl who says in national interviews that through her love he has fallen to grace, he’s become a more truthful and integrated person, so many women don’t know they just need to let their men be men, I wrote my autobiography not for the money but because people need to know the wife isn’t a saint, ok?  Her wrath was so great, she just emasculated him, and of course I have compassion for her, I am so sorry that she doesn’t want to face the truth.

It’s excruciatingly hilarious.  The inevitability of it is hilarious–we think he’s one thing, then he isn’t…but then he totally is!–he fulfills every sad sorry stereotype of the big important man who needs his ego stroked.

It is a Nora Ephron satire, until you think about the wife, cancer in her bones, tearing her shirt and bra off in front of staffers and aides and screaming to her husband, “You just don’t see me anymore!” and using every nagging angry tool she’s used to keep him in line for decades and it doesn’t work anymore, he’s turned into a sullen child, cancer eats her from the inside out, she survived the death of a child and the birth of two more at the very age when she had expected to be done with all that–and she ends her life on a plate of folded ironies, she’s given your whole life to her husband’s political career she dies listening to this New Age kook expounding on how really, if you look at it, I saved him from that political career that just wasn’t making him happy–it wasn’t what he was meant to do–he was meant to be more of a philanthropist, like, you know, Ghandi–and because of that political career, the whole thing is just humiliatingly, humiliatingly public.  It’s so public it’s in your obituary.

****
I don’t know who the monster is.  But I know that I don’t love him any more.  I am living a life of responsibility and obligation, I am obligated to him and I can’t just end it, my responsibilities keep me from just ending it.  Even though it is unbearable–the wild swings of rage and disgust and frustration have settled into a low buzz of contempt that colors every interaction.I hate my cat.  I once loved my cat.  I once heard someone say that pet ownership is like a snooze alarm for your biological clock and perhaps that is true.  I had a child.  And now I hate my cat.

And I’m ashamed of it, not because I am actually ashamed but because I am not ashamed.  I feel like I am going to be judged by people in my life.  Meaning you.  You people who don’t know me.  I am telling you this, and I know that some people here will hate me for it.  I have a hard time emailing this one friend of mine because I know she will hate me.  She owns six cats–or is it seven?–who are constantly needing incredibly expensive and invasive medical treatments and liver transplants and eyelid surgeries and at any given time she is fostering several more, she has devoted her life to the welfare of cats, she was the one who helped us locate our second cat, which we got to keep our first beloved cat company, when he was beloved, before I decided that I hated him.

And my other friend who has consciously chosen the care and feeding of the animal kingdom in place of having children, I can’t tell her, I can’t confess to her, that our cat is ratty and ragged and probably has worms again and I keep forgetting to give him his flea medicine so that he won’t get worms, but I’m also too embarrassed to go back to the vet to get him more worm medicine, he has clumps of hair falling off of him for some unknown reason, but then I get resentful for him dragging mud and falling off fur and worms inside my house that is actually generally so much cleaner now that we let them go outside.

We let them go outside because we no longer have the energy to keep them from bolting out the front door, and after the hellish year long house renovation inflicted on me by my husband, I can’t bear the thin layer of catness I imagine would be on everything if they never went outside plus I don’t want to clean a litter box any more, I just don’t want to do it, mostly because I don’t know where in my hard-won lovely house I could ever bear to put a litter box.  If you want to come over and help us figure that out, we’d love to know.  But also–I comfort myself with the fact that I know our cat is happier that way–he wants to go outside, he wants to come back in, he always did, so fine, I no longer love him, but then I no longer care if he tomcats around.  It’s a fine arrangement.

Even though the cat lady friend’s organization made us sign a contract that we would keep the second cat indoors, he now goes outside as well.  The second cat puked on the stairs to the basement this weekend–we heard it happening on the other side of the door–my husband said he would clean it, but I doubt he has, and doubt he will until he gets hit with the anxiety that perhaps the puke ended up on his camping gear downstairs.  When my husband does occasionally take pity on the cat and brush him, we amass giant amounts of hair, a tumbleweed of fine dusty cat hair, and Lou is gleaming once more and restored to his old powerful self, I feel pity, but mostly I feel irritation and hate.

What can be terrible about love turning into hate is that sometimes the one who is now hated doesn’t deserve to be hated.  Lou–his name is Lou–is a stellar cat.  The kind of cat who just wants to be in whatever room the humans are in.  He’s huge–a big animal–and satisfyingly warm on the lap when you don’t hate him and purrs like a motor and just wants to be a person.  He’s also moody and tormented and complex and brilliant.  He has learned to imitate a child’s cry, but this is nothing–earlier in our life together, he meowed in such a way that I realized he was trying to speak English.  He lets children pet him and when he’s annoyed by it, he doesn’t swat, he just gets up and leaves.  Everyone in the neighborhood loves him.  In fact, our neighbor, a Korean lady with a limp who likes to ask us incredibly personal questions about our finances, told me that he’s her cat now.  He follows her down the street, he comes to her for breakfast at 5:30am every morning when he knows she’ll be up to go to church.  I feed him! I say, stung.  Yes, but I touch him, she says, petting me.

You’ll hate me for this too, but we call Lou the Date Rapist.  I told some of my husband’s co-workers that, and my husband says, “I don’t call him that, YOU call him that,” and I snap that we aren’t in front of a confirmation committee.  Lou strides in, eyes fixed, climbs on you, sits on your lap whether you want it or not, and after you make it clear you don’t want it anymore, you don’t want it, he just sits his whole weight down and it fills you with anxiety and rage.  It fills me with anxiety and rage.

I don’t want to pet him anymore.  I think it started when I was seven months pregnant and living in a construction zone with no heat, no electricity, no kitchen and no laundry, just dust and boxes and giant breasts and an alien growing inside me and these paws and that fur sidling up to me, trying to climb on me.  I didn’t want him on my bed anymore.  He was dirty and aggressive and I just wanted some space.  Now, 2 years later, I still just want some clear space around me, free of the physical needs of my child and my husband.  At the end of every day, after my toddler goes to sleep, I barely have anything left for one man, and even then, I often need some convincing just because I’m so tired.

And I don’t know why he comes to me–the cat, not my husband.  Why doesn’t the cat go to my husband?  Why doesn’t he go to the person who is more likely to feel pity and love?

It wasn’t always like this.  Lou was our pride and joy at first.

We found him in the parking lot of a pinball joint in Alameda, the Mayberry of the Bay Area.  One night, we saw him, a skinny and lithe tuxedo fellow, collarless and friendly.  When we drove off home, Ben said–you want to go back and get that cat, don’t you?  I nodded.  We drove back.  I got out of the car and went, “pss pss pss,” and trotting out of the darkness, Lou came, leapt into my arms, and got into the car.  He sat in the backseat in my lap, and purred all the way home in a car with strange people.

I emailed owner of Lucky Juju and left a description at the local shelter, just in case he did have an owner.  How could he?  I sniffed.  Collarless!  Hungry!  Left in the parking lot! By the way, even though he now goes outside, he has no collar because he finds ways to pull the fucking things off every fucking time.  The pinball owner wrote me back–he said that yes, he belonged to the woman upstairs, he was such a cool cat, he’d sleep on top of the pinball machines while people played them.  He then wrote, “she doesn’t take very good care of him.  Follow your conscience.”

With this information, I was ready when the owner called, having found the shelter listing.  She called him Romeo.  (Cuz he’s such a lover).  I said, well, we just didn’t think Romeo had an owner, what with his being collarless and thin and running around in a parking lot and all.  Then Ben talked to her.  She opened up, confessed that her boyfriend lived in the City and she wasn’t always able to feed Romeo, but that they had a special inter-special bond, and she didn’t believe in ownership of pets or other people anyway, and they knew that at some point, if they moved on, they moved on, no hard feelings.  What a loon!  we thought, and happily kept Lou, and got him Dizzy to keep him company.  He trained the younger cat to clean it’s own ass.  He and Dizzy have an post-neutered erotic brotherhood.  I once watched them start to lick each other’s assholes and had to leave the room.

We were happy, those first few years.  Ben and I shared little stories every day about the cute things the cats did, in the same way we now caress the details of our child’s moments of sweetness.  The only fly in the ointment was my mother.  My mother hated the cats.  She grew up in Israel where cats lived in the alley and were as dirty as the rats they chased, she believes that anyone who willingly lives with an animal has some psychological pathology, animals are DIRTY.  During my attempts to get pregnant and the length of my pregnancy, she kept sending us the worst articles she could find on toxoplasmosis and was sure our child would be born blind and deformed.  I am glad she is not here to learn that I now hate my cat.

My mother once shared with me told me that she and her brother my uncle discuss how to best influence–meaning control–their children.   She believes that they no longer use a sledgehammer approach, instead, she says, “we are like drops of water on a rock,” drip drip drip drip until they get erode into way.  And this is how she maybe convinced me that cats are dirty, that my beautiful house will always just feel a little nasty and inhospitable and smelly and disgusting to every person who enters because we have cats–but that no friend will ever tell me the truth because they are my friend and she’s my mother so she can tell me the truth.  This is how she believes that she can get me to have a second child and stop making art about sex–in fact, perhaps to write like Nora Ephron.

Obama’s Speech

A couple of months ago, I finally read Game Change; as much as I enjoyed the book, very little felt new to me–it surprised me, actually, how much I remembered every twist and turn of the 2008 election.

I don’t know why I was so surprised–for the full year before the election, I spent a good portion of my days reloading Nate Silver and reading every Talking Points Memo update and watching dozens of campaign speeches.

Many critics of last Thursday’s speech write that Obama disappointed them, he didn’t soar, he played it safe, he was dull and plodding and didn’t reach the rhetorical heights of which he is capable, and that people desperate want to hear.

But what I have long noticed about Obama as a speaker is that his rhetoric soars most highly when he attempts to engage new listeners, people who might be giving him a chance for the first time.  It’s an organizer trick–be stunning and stellar when you’re trying to get folks to “buy-in”.

Once you have bought in, once he knows that the expectation is coming from loyal fans yearning to be “taken” somewhere–that’s when he clamps down on the theatrics.  That’s when he gets quiet, and serious, and substantive.

It happened election night.  It happened during his Inauguration.  Those speeches were serious, somber even, as he tried to make clear the tremendous challenges we were facing, and to temper any expectations that these problems would be solved quickly or easily.

That’s what happened at the DNC.

As it was, I thought the speech did have a larger, loftier ambitions; scaffolded on the incredibly well orchestrated 3-days of speeches preceding him that repeated a  refreshingly well-organized Democratic party line:  Osama is dead and GM is alive, we support gay marriage, women’s choice, health care, the Republicans have nothing to say, etc.; this left Obama free to not have to waste time trumpeting a check list of accomplishments.

Instead, I felt that Obama, as he has often before, outlined a philosophical defense  of the idea that citizenship matters.  That, as Publius wrote in the Federalist papers, citizenship in the United States requires the tacit acceptance of various obligations and commitments to each other and our community and our future survival.

It was a big ideas speech, reiterating, in an understated way, the same claims that shot Barack Obama to the top of our national consciousness at the same convention eight years earlier:

A belief that we are connected as one people. If there’s a child on the south side of Chicago who can’t read, that matters to me, even if it’s not my child. If there’s a senior citizen somewhere who can’t pay for her prescription and has to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it’s not my grandmother. If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It’s that fundamental belief — I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sisters’ keeper — that makes this country work. It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family. “E pluribus unum.” Out of many, one.

 

Letter to Mr. Daisey

Like anyone needs to read another person’s opinion of this, I know.

Lots and lots and lots of people have been talking about the whole This American Life retraction of Mike Daisey’s story, which itself had been excerpted from his solo show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.” I am squarely in the camp of folks who find Daisey and his schtick indefensibly smug and lame and his response to his exposure (and the New York Public Theater’s response) to have revealed him (and the American theater) in all his (and its) repellent hypocrisy.

Of course, the real point of all of this is to not lose sight of the working conditions in China. But something about Daisey sticks in my craw. Not as a betrayed TAL listener. But as an artist who has worked in the theater, and specifically in political theater, and research-based theater.

First, let me share that when I heard the original show in January, I was put off by Daisey’s tone. His delivery so profoundly self-satisfied and overwrought, blatantly manipulative. So aware of the “power” of his most compelling “stories” (which were all fabrications). Frankly, when the retraction came out, I wasn’t even surprised about his lies–if anything, I felt embarrassed that the staff of TAL had ever found him compelling and trustworthy.

I have spent over a decade working with solo performers (some of the best!), creating art and live performance and theater that is political and research-based and community-based and news-based; I tend to believe that when a story is truly compelling, you don’t have to cram it down your viewer’s throat–you can present it, and give the viewer room for his or her own experience with the material.

In 2008, I was working on a show called CLEAN which was all about the toxicity of high tech manufacturing in Silicon Valley–the gap between our fantasy of what technology can do for us, and the harsh realities of the costs of that technology. I used two stories ripped from the headlines–of Hans Reiser, a Linux developer who was then in trial for the murder of his ex-wife; and of Fernando Jimenez Gonzalez, a worker at a Redwood City PC board manufacturer, who was found drowned in a vat of sulfiric acid (by his father, who also worked at this factory).

I took these two stories and put them side by side; and of course, I took liberties. For Gonzalez’ story, I imagined his fall into death, and slowed it down, and created a fantasia of the memories he would be encountering of his short life as he was dying. It was, dare I say, a poetic interpretation. For Hans, I used found text from interviews and online chat rooms, but the key line in one of his monologues was entirely inserted from one conversation I had years earlier. I know all about doing deep research and using that to inspire theatrical work.

But I did not insert myself into the story. In fact, when my friend Krissy Clark, a reporter for Public Radio, was inspired by CLEAN to do a story on Jimenez Gonzalez, they cut me out of the story, because the story was not about me.

And this is why I believe Daisey must be held accountable for his fabrications–because of how he presents himself as a storyteller in this piece. His whole performance persona is a self-aggrandizing schtick based on saying “I was there, I saw it, I was a witness and as a witness, I had a real emotional experience and as such, I have a certain moral authority.”

He (and sadly, TAL, in the original story) framed him as a performer who did what even journalists don’t or can’t do–and in doing this, in going to China, in going to these factories, in interviewing these workers, was able to, through the magic of his persona, of his personality, of his daring, uncover things that no one else can. So brave! So aggressive! So dauntless!

But of course that isn’t how the real world works. You don’t show up in the biggest industrializing nation in the history of the world in a Hawaiian shirt and get the whole story presented to you in 10 days. The real story of Apple and manufacturing gets pulled together by hundreds of journalists, workers, watchdog organizations, activists, translators, policy-makers; it gets told over weeks, months, years, in pieces.

You can also take all this work and research, and distill it into a theatrical production. But when self-canonization is central to the work, that’s when the integrity fails. That’s where it stops for me.

So when Daisey makes excuses for himself that what he did was not wrong because it’s theater, when he refuses to admit that he lied and instead calls it “unpacking the complexity,” I have to call a big fat bullshit on that. Mostly because if we demanded higher standards for our theater, we would do better than giving the stage to a self-aggrandizing fantasist and narcissist with no real insight. We could do better than the big man with the big heart doing big Forrest Gump melodrama (I was there for the moon landing!) and making up facts where truly sophisticated synthesis could have been demanded.

If you want a compelling piece of journalism on this, might I recommend Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang.

Historical Schema

Right now, I am currently in the middle of editing my thesis, a four-channel video installation initially inspired by the characters of the “raconteuses” in 120 Days of Sodom. Some historical scaffolding:

In de Sade’s half-finished pornographic screed, written while he was imprisoned in the Bastille before the French Revolution, four corrupt nobles stage an orgy with their wives (who are also each other’s daughters), twelve boy virgins and twelve girl virgins.

But something is missing!  The most important element of this whole party is the hiring of four older women, brought in to narrate the spectacle.  These women are to sit and tell stories of their lives.  They are taxonomists of the perverse, and de Sade goes to great lengths to communicate that the party can absolutely not happen without them:

“the plan was to have described to them, in the greatest detail and in due order, every one of debauchery’s extravagances, all its divagations, all its ramifications, all its contingencies, all of what is termed in libertine language its passions.  There is simply no conceving the degree to which man varies them when his imagination grows inflamed…and he who should succeed in isolating and categorizing and detailing these follies would perhaps perform one of the most splendid labors…it would thus be a question of finding some individuals capable of providing an account of all these excesses, then of analyzing them, of extending them, of itemizing them, of graduating them, and of running a story through it all, to provide coherence, and amusement.”

DeSade’s novel can be seen as an Anti-Rousseauian text–man’s innate nature isn’t good or noble.  Man’s nature is perverse and disgusting.

In L’Age d’Or (the film through which I came to this story), Bunuel sets his final act at the end of the orgy; the nobles totter out of the castle, one by one–the leader of the band, Duc d’Blangis, looks startlingly like Jesus.  A virgin limps through the open door, suffering and bleeding, and collapses.  Jesus/Blangis approaches her, wraps her in a tender embrace, and brings her back inside.  We hear a blood-curdling scream, and Jesus/Blangis reappears, strangely without his beard.  Here, Bunuel shocks the audience by ending a tale of impossible bourgeois love with a vision of Jesus as a corrupt murderous libertine.

Salo, the Pasolini adaptation of the novel from the 1970s, by setting the story in Fascist Italy, becomes a humanist fable about the corrupt nature of power.

In my research on de Sade and early pornography, I discovered the ‘whore’s dialogue’, a popular and famed form, in which the old whore educates the young novice about sex and human nature.  I feel that de Sade’s old whores, left narrating and maintaining the titillation of the nobles’ orgy, must have emerged from this tradition.

In thinking about the theoretical purposes of pornography;  it makes the personal political by transforming intimate bodily acts into written language.

porn structure

meta-structure:

1. Woman has a problem.

2. Woman needs to solve problem by fucking.

3. Problem is solved by fucking.

Porn mini-structures

1. 2 people meet (sometimes more)

2. There are tensions between these people, due to the ways their social statuses meet or don’t meet, connect or don’t connect.

3. These tensions can only be resolved by fucking.

4. They fuck.