Category: Performance

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Movie and a Reading

Emily came over earlier and we watched Cisco Pike, Kris Kristoferson’s film debut. He plays a has-been but still-struggling singer/drug dealer trying to leave the drug biz, drawn back in for one more deal by corrupt, jaded but dreamy police Sargeant Gene Hackman, who offers a light sentence on a previous drug charge if Cisco can raise $10,000 for him by the end of the weekend by selling his confiscated pot. Kristoferson is pre-beard, softer, and with what looks like the promise of a great career–he even wrote and performed several of the songs in the film. I think that Gene Hackman is one of the greatest actors of his generation, able to convey malice and dangerous potential with the twitch of an eyelash. Plus he’s just beautiful. Emily is the perfect person to watch 70’s film with–she understands the radical urgency of the fashions and the aesthetic significance of the pulled-back zoom.

I made some crab cakes and a salad, and then we took off for a reading of New Narrative writers at Artifact, a salon that happens once a month in the Mission. Laura Simms, a poet from Wisconsin read her poetry, and Dodie Bellamy read from an essay that she’s working on about her work. Dodie’s essay was brilliant, so completely entertaining. She read about being a student of Bob’s, who takes responsibility for unleashing the New Narrativers on us, and afterwards she came to me and said she felt strange reading about Bob and our house in front of me, but I told her we were talking now and that I was completey charmed by the piece. Her metaphors are so clever and witty. She spoke of being a Language Poet groupie, and learning to write from gay men, who showed her that pornography and group sex were okay subjects to write about. She was introduced by her husband, writer Kevin Killian, whose introduction could have earned an Academy Award nomination, so filled with sincerity and wit. We split before Rob Halpern could read, but I tend to drift with his writing, so it was for the best.

Tomorrow it’s time to meet Bachelor #5, and a second date with Bachelor #2!

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Shostakovich and Plum Blossoms

Saturday night I had a wonderful evening with D&D, first dinner at Caffe della Stella and then Shostakovich at the symphony. The performance began with a piece for jazz orchestra, written when Shostakovich was very young, a very lively piece of music that segued into a violin concerto and finally the dirge-like 13th Symphony. The piece ended with a cellphone accompaniment from an audience member, extending the music firmly into our post-Cage era.

I’ve been photographing up a storm. Forget all the bears for a sec, I’m druelling over plum blossoms! In between rain showers, I’ve been teetering on top of a rickety ladder and shooting some medium format color shots of my Italian prune plum in bloom. They’re almost abstact, with wild punchy color and tree-ness that’s like in cubist space or something. Unlike anything I’ve done before. They look photoshoped, but are completely unmanipulated, shot with a very slow film, aperature wide open (as always), and literally from a bird’s-eye-view. I’ve decided to scrap my previous plans for my show at Meridian next month and include a wall of these photos. They’ll mirror formally the sound piece on the opposite wall, and play nicely against the exploding testicles grid to the right. You all must come!

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Mickalicka-hi-micka-hi-nee-ho

Yesterday BC and I went to Palo Alto to hear a friend of ours, Elaine (we always pronounce her name “e-LAINE!!!” like Dustin Hoffman at the end of The Graduate), sing tunes of her Jewish hertitage. We were so pleased by, first of all, her voice, which was sweet and full and expressive, and by the range of songs that she presented. She started off with some romantic pastorals, one of which ended with the lines…

Morning, the dove calls,
your hair is covered with dew.
Your mouth turned to the morning as a flower
which I will gather unto myself.

Isn’t that a lovely image? And then she moved into songs from eastern Europe, Spain, and a few that she wrote herself. One of the Spanish songs contained interesting cross-cultural influences, including a sainlty light in the heavens over the Jewish quarter and a child born in a manger.

The studio pipes are clogged, so I’ve sent BC off to buy my pumpkin for the Pumpkin Carving Contest while I wait for the plumber. I hope I can get it in by the deadline! I’ll post pictures later, if I can actually execute the complex idea that I’ve conceived… Stay tuned!

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They Dropped the Bomb on Us–And We Paid For it

I survived. We survived, BC and I, the bomb dropped on San Francisco in the form of John Adams’ opera, Doctor Atomic. At least Monteverdi and Strauss have interesting and complex music to enjoy when the libretto gets silly, but I can’t remember one melodic passage to sing in the shower tomorrow. And. Speaking of. The language. The language. The language was. It WAS so. It WAS so. Difficult. To follow AND so. Uninteresting. Frustrating in the way that it had completely no relation to the way the music was structured, presented in fragmented segments that were almost impossible to follow and whose emotional tone was neither illuminated nor supported by the music. I supposed they did relate, the music and the libretto, in their fragmented distance from the action and meaning. And what was it about? Really. The beginning of the end of humankind? Well, what about it? What about these men who created such horror? There were essentially no narrative or moral conflicts, only a collage of brief interactions and speculations that led to a bright light at the end and the sound of a Japanese girl’s voice pleading something unintelligible. Please. Yoko’s “Kiss, Kiss, Kiss” says more. Aside from the ineffective, simplistic, and trite placement of a baby crib under the Bomb (what has happened to the avant-garde?), I did love the spare staging, though, which incorporated long shadows and a disorienting rising and falling mountainous horizon.

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The Overcoat

BC and I just got back from ACT’s production of The Overcoat, a wordless play based on a short story by Gogol, with music by Shostakovich. BC’s tonsils are the size of bowling balls. Their clanging kept me up all night last night, so I sent him up the hill with an aspirin and a hug goodnight. The play was great. All of the action was conveyed through body movement, delightfully and cleverly wed to the music almost like a ballet. I wouldn’t call it experimental theater, as it was, well, completely accessible, and told in the manner of an old silent film–but without title cards. or film. The story was very simple, about a clerk who takes abuse from everyone because of his shabby coat, spends all of his money on a gorgeous new overcoat, is instantly respected, and then he celebrates too enthusiastically, hops on the wrong trolley to the other side of town, and gets rolled, his coat stolen. He end up in a psychiatric ward, the lights fading to black as they wrap him in his brand new straight jacket.

Isn’t it just like that?

Big Chris’s tonsils are seriously frightening. I screamed when I first saw them. I think he’s a little nervous about having them removed. After his dad and uncles were rounded up and taken to the hospital to have their tonsils removed, they woke up with sore throats and no more foreskins. Everyone thinks that there must be some connection to his Dad’s ultimate decision to have the rest taken off and his named changed to Stephanie. I just want to sleep.

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Leglifters, Organic Peaches, Skits, Tony’s

So BC’s nieces are here, and we’ve been channeling the teen beat all weekend. Friday we went to see the Giants actually win a game, after a brief stop to see Connie’s stellar show at LIMN. We sat way out in left field–where else?–and listened to the two chicks and one guy behind us get progressively louder, more intoxicated, and quite friendlier with each other. The left field seats are situated where social interaction and eavesdropping easily command more attention than what’s happening in the diamond. But still, I tend to obsessively watch for “leglifters,” the guys who lift their legs when batting. I haven’t formulated an hypothesis yet on the difference between the leglifters, the legtwisters, or the kneeknockers, but I know there’s some relation to something significant beyond batting average.

On Saturday morning, Big Chrissy wasn’t content with just us taking the nieces to the farmer’s market, he decided to make it extra special for them by enlisting the aid of the Mayor of the Farmer’s Market, Philip, to lead the tour and provide the appropriate level of pomp to the stroll through Vegetalia. Afterwards, I whispered to the girls, “Now, did Chris tell you who Philip is…?” Thank you Philip for making their day.

The next evening, after a Thai excursion to Osha on Valencia, we moseyed on over to Mission to take in the latest skits from Uphill Both Ways, led by our very own Dave. The trio performed various new comedy skits that had us giggling quite profusely, but the cellphone piece, in particular, had us hyperventilating. Dave has this amazing big outdoor voice that seems totally ready for prime time, or Broadway, and that completely fills the Dark Room Theater with booming hysterics. I’d love to ride a roller coaster with him.

This morning we drove up the coast to Marshall for oysters at Tony’s. I don’t know why I told you all that we were going to Scott’s, or why you all nodded your heads like, “Oh, Scott’s, great.” It’s Tony’s.

I’m pretty bushed from Nate’s funeral tonight on HBO. The show continually astounds me, the only show with dialogue taken from real life, my life, and real therapy sessions, my therapy sessions, and not abstracted theatrical representation of them. I’m hoping that something equally dramatic and accurate will takes its place so that I don’t have to create my own mini-series. I’m into watching these days.

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Carol, Bruce, Megan, BC and the Goat

My sister Carol, her husband Bruce, and their daughter Megan have been visiting. Carol’s branch of the family tree is the calmest and most stable. She married an even calmer person than she, and they produced this really calm daughter. I love it when they visit–they’re interested in everything, and are engaging and warm.

Saturday I took them and BC to see Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who is Silvia? at ACT. It’s an amazing play, about a man who falls in love with a goat. Martin is happily married, has a teenage gay son, and has just won the Pritzker Prize. Everything seems perfect. But during a taped interview with his best friend, he reveals that he’s in love with a goat. The play is a contemporary classical tragedy, with a suitably tragic and horrific ending. Most of the play consists of him explaining to his wife about his other love, while the wife breaks large vases and overturns furniture, the house physically falling apart around them. Martin doesn’t understand why people can’t see beyond their moral boundaries. Yet he’s always correcting people’s spoken english, refusing to let them deviate from proper grammatical usage. His son’s a mess–Billy, as in Billy the “kid,” Billy Goat. Billy’s like a little undeveloped version of his dad. His sense of morality becomes confused by his father’s transgression: an embrace between father and son turns into an erotic kiss, emphasizing the son’s confusion about sex and love. It was clever to have the son be gay, with homosexuality so recently thought of as a pathology, leading us to think that there is something wrong with us in not understanding a love that’s foreign to our experience. I wish I could talk about the ending, but for those of you going to see it, I won’t spoil it for you–although halfway through I leaned to Megan and said, “Blank-ety has to blank Blank.” It’s the only way it could have ended, and when Blank-ety does blank Blank, the tension that has been building is tossed onto center stage and pops like an aneurism.

Okay, off to BC’s to watch Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe to round out the Edward Albee experience.

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D and Kate

D and I just saw Kate Mulgrew in Tea at Five, a one-woman show about Katherine Hepburn. The house was only half-filled, due to unenthusiastic reviews, with tourists with their half-priced tickets, and gay couples. The first half takes place in her family’s seaside home in Connecticut 1938, with Kate vainly trying to get cast as Scarlet O’Hara, 6 flops in a row and Howard Hughes behind her, just before her triumphant return to the screen in The Philadelphia Story. The second half takes place years later, in 1983, pretty much everybody in her life dead, and Warren Beaty sending flowers to convince her to return to the screen yet again. Kate Mulgrew did a great job with the role, with brief moments that went beyond impersonation, particularly in the second act when she twists Hepburn’s physical disintegration to stunning comic and tragic effect. She drops the monologue altogether, jiggling her head and shifting her weight, freezing, re-imagining all of the Hepburn tics that we’re so familiar with as a kind of Japanese butoh dance.

Did you people read or see Awakenings? It’s D! I go away for a week and he’s had like 3 dates, his phone buzzing constantly, is all flirty on the phone with his man friends, studying film history, asking me to plays, hanging with the Movie-Bears, making friends, we walk down the street and everybody’s like “Hey D!” and “Woof!” I didn’t know that people still said that. Yes, indeed, my big furry ward is getting better. It has been a long slow horrible crawl to that woof, and tonight I was so happy and proud. He even looks different, projecting confidence and charm. He is finally waking up. He’s alive, alive I tell you!!

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Palindromes

Last night BC and I went to see Palindromes, Todd Solondz’ latest, and plopped ourselves down several rows ahead of Davide and Richard at the Castro, I in my regular seat, #107, 10th row center. It is an amazing film, about a girl, Aviva, who wants to have a baby. The role of Aviva is played by several different actresses, including a 40-year old Jennifer Jason Leigh. Her desire is thwarted by her parents’ misguided need to protect her, her age–she’s only 13 or so–and, the film seems to say, fate. At one point the older brother of Dawn Weiner (falsely, he says, accused of molesting a child), tells Aviva that we’re destined to start back where we started, that we are who we are and there’s no getting around it. The film illustrates this physically through Aviva’s storybook adventure, which ends up where it began, with her having sex with her buddy Judah, who changes his name to Otto at the end of the film to make the connection overt. Solondz creates a world in which everyone speaks very softly, yet within the softness are extremes of moral ambiguity and physical anguish. At many times we’re squeamish because he makes us laugh hysterically about something that in the next beat is heart-wrenching. The absurdity and cruelty of the world is just too much to not laugh at–that kind of laughter that sounds like sobbing. He has created a small masterpiece.

And remember Richard Masur? He plays Aviva’s dad! Remember? He was Ann Romano’s sometimes boyfriend, David Kane, on One Day at a Time! I had such a total crush on him when I was 10.

Tonight I took my sister to see Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, which reminded me of Todd Solondz in how they create hilarity by upending convention, but of course without all the depressing stuff. The all-male troupe dances playful parodies of classical ballets. Yet with all the hilarious physicality, there is an amazing poise and strength to each dancer. Odette, the queen of the swans in their Swan Lake is played by Olga Supphozova, whose comic timing and broad delivery is as impeccable as his powerful precise dancing. In Fokine’s Dying Swan, Ida Nevasayneva jiggles an endless number of feathers from his tutu as he prances histrionically across the stage and back, again and again, the flow of feathers non-stop, his death a grand guignol burlesque.

And who was seated but a few rows ahead but A.J. Kiltbear in full regalia. Before he waved me over, I thought “Another ‘kilt-bear’ in the east bay?” before I realized that there is only one Kiltbear. At least for me. Thank heavens he didn’t lean against the wall at any other time than intermission, as this swan was quite a distraction from the ones of stage.

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Missing Philip

Nayland posted this morning that his former lover had died. I called Michelle in New York and confirmed that Philip Horvitz had passed away suddenly while on a plane. Philip was going to perform at the John Sims Center on the 10th and since getting his e-mail, that’s all I’ve been thinking about lately, so excited to see him perform again. He was part of a group of artists that combined dance, performance, comedy, theater and poetry into a thrilling new form of performance art that was as entertaining as it was intellectually stimulating. He was a compact ball of fire, performing as and deconstructing Sammy Davis, Jr., every bit his equal, belting out mournful screeching tunes in the group Tiny, reading excerpts from Pete Townsend’s “diary” with Absolut Manpussy—or in his bizarre mini-revival of Company. He lived downstairs, or it could have been up it was so long ago, from Christian Huygen, and often Christian and I would listen at the lightwell as Philip’s voice drifted up (or down), serenading us with his softly rendered version of the “meow-meow, meow-meow” song from the Meow Mix commercial. His creative spirit is really going to be missed.