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Image by Michael Hart.
WHO IS SHE?
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Image by Michael Hart.Don’t Turn Out the Spotlight
Well, well, well…looks like guitar-peddling website jemsite.com found our little blog and was interested in finding out what, exactly, is “a Counter Critic.” Never one to pass up an opportunity to wax narcissistic, we capitulated.
Click here for the full C.C. interview.
After “Aftermath”
This "character" was tortured in Abu Graib, and members of his family were killed because of the U.S. invation of Iraq.
Jessica Blank and Erick Jensen’s “Aftermath” closed this weekend at New York Theater Workshop, and I was able to attend the Sunday matinee.
This work is well-written–or, “well-assembled”, as most of the dialogue is taken from transcriptions of interviews with post-American invasion Iraqi refugees—and the cast is very gifted, each member of the company delivering performances that in turns stirred and disturbed.
I will be honest that I wasn’t sure whether or not I even wanted to see this play. I knew the subject matter would be difficult. My central reservation was tied to a personal (call it a moral) skepticism about making art out of current human atrocities; more specifically, play-acting the lives of people who are currently suffering.
I don’t really have a philosophical place of argument. It’s more a feeling I get. Like when TV shows started incorporating the current Iraq war (still not over, folks) into their plotlines. I find it uncomfortable to watch. By presenting the war as status quo, and by avoiding the war’s political precariousity (that is: a war can only exist as long as it is allowed to exist by a governing body), these shows seemed to offer a tacit endorsement of the war. The war is even necessary in order for these narratives to resonate the way they are intended. It’s topical, and all topical subjects are tied to temporal proximity.
At any rate, my reservations proved both correct and also inept while watching “Aftermath.”
The play presents six stories of real Iraqi refugees; refugees who I assume (perhaps naively, perhaps optimistically) are still alive and living under reprehensible conditions thanks to our country’s war against theirs.
The tactic of the playwrights is fair enough: get the audience to care about the characters (can we call them “characters”?) through humor and amiability, then, once they’re hooked, thread in the conflict, the carnage, the cold hard truths about life, and the reality that our tax dollars were (and still are) at work in ruining the lives of real live people in another country, on another continent, in a place where most of us will never set foot in our entire lives.
And make no mistake: the creators of this show are profiting from its success, and, therefore, these events. It is also sketchy that the dozens of people who were interviewed in order to make this work are not directly credited, nor even thanked in the program, and that Blank and Jensen are given sole credit for “text.” But then, what is it to “thank” someone for a stories such as these? [UPDATE: Please see discussion with Erik Jensen in the comments below, including a clarification of my intentions with this paragraph.]
But I resist faulting “Aftermath” for being manipulative, even though it is that to a degree. There is something in it that goes well beyond the authors’ care to execute their job well; to construct an interesting theatrical structure; to draw in the audience; to tell a story. But this is also where that crisis comes to a fore, in that really all art must on some level entertain, and in order for performance to survive–to reach people, and therefore, touch them–it must be successful.
But what does it mean for this play to be “successful”? And what does it mean to be entertained by these stories? Read More…
Possibly the worst music video of all time
The ad across the bottom actually makes it better. Click here for the version without the ad, but I don’t recommend it.
Question: Is this kid performing?
I saw this MGMT video the other day, and I have to say, I thought it was brilliant. But also complicated, and, by my own definitions, unethical. (Skip about 1 minute in for the video proper.)
Now, can we, as humans, find pleasure in the unethical? Umm, all the time! But obviously what intrigued me about the video is how much it resonates with the previous post’s discussion about performance, who can be said to be performing, and who/what is capable of participating in performance as art.
You all probably know where I stand in regards to the question Is this kid performing? But I’m curious to know how readers feel.
REGARDING ART, PERFORMANCE, AND THE PRINCIPLE OF CONSENT
Wednesday night, I attended Steven Cohen’s presentation of film works at CPR in Williamsburg. During one of the brief discussion breaks—led by a becostumed Cohen—one audience member prefaced his question by stating that “the audience inevitably becomes part of your work.” The assumption went unchallenged.
It struck a particularly live chord for me, as throughout that evening, I had been wrestling with this question: To what extent are the unsuspecting people in Cohen’s film documentations a part of the work? For me, it is not a closed case.
The co-existence and co-contextuality of Cohen and the people his performance reaches—generally a live, public, and incidental (if targeted) audience—is certainly integral to the constitution of his work. The two cannot be entirely separated.
But I am suspicious about just how readily Cohen and many others transmute real live autonomous human beings into works of art, which is what we do when we say that an audience “becomes part of the art”; we have circumscribed the audience within the material boundary of the art; we have taken away their autonomy and their will.
Cohen’s work, like the work of certain other artists creating work today (and also like the work of many artists over the last handful of decades), blurs the conservative separation of performer and audience. But while blurring may occur—and I’m starting to understand most definitions as blurred lines, rather than crisp lines—I don’t know that it’s actually ever possible to erase that line.
For me, performance must always be consensual. Absolutely. No question.
It is interesting that in the beginning of the first film Cohen showed, he includes documentary images of Jews in Nazi-era Vienna who were forced to scrub the streets with toothbrushes before crowds of jeering onlookers. This presents us immediately with—well, above all else, a morally reprehensible action, but also—a precise illustration of what performance cannot be. Read More…
About The Bacchae
The Public Theater's "The Bacchae" -Photo by Damon Winter, for the NYT
I know it’s been a while since I threw down a bona-fide review around these parts. So I’m breaking silence with some thoughts on The Bacchae, which wraps up its run The Public Theater’s Shakespeare In The Park this week. (Warning: this may fall more under “rant”.)
It’s also been a while since I had been to one of the Delacorte shows. Getting older leaves you less zest for pulling an all-nighter at The Works (now closed (sad face)) and stumbling over to be one of the first people in line on Central Park West at 3am, just to get tickets to see Meryl Streep in “The Seagull”; although, it was totally worth it just to see her do a cartwheel on stage.
At any rate, this year’s Virtual Line made it easy for the old folks (hit “send” when the Mac strikes midnight) to get in, so I drug myself up to Central Park to check out what a friend of mine said he “wished I had seen”. He later clarified that he was just curious about my opinion, and wasn’t really recommending that I see it. Hmm…
Well, I suppose I would categorize this show under the old-artists-got-picked-to-do-a-big-gig-together-and-no-one-pushed-them-to-do-better-work category (I’ve still got my eye on you, Trish). The wafts of arrogance this production exudes is troubling. Not blatant arrogance—although, there is plenty of that in Jonathan Groff’s petulant Dionysus—but the “we’re great artists and don’t we know it, and the public won’t know any better” kind of arrogance; casual; comfortable; like a nice pair of orthopedic shoes.
But when we go to the theater, we don’t want orthopedic shoes. We want riveting ideas, and risk-taking gestures. We want to be pushed (although, not necessarily physically pushed, Ms. Young). We want to know that the artists are pushing us, and themselves, to the level beyond where we are. We want the art to be in front of us, so, by going to it, we are taken to a new place. This production fell far back and behind what we know about theater and what we know about ourselves. It eschewed the central subject of the play with demure stereotyping and philosophical meandering. (In case you’re wondering, the central subject of the play is Dionysus: The god of drinking and fucking.) And along the way, presented us with several examples of exactly how not to use drag and homosexuality in the service of constructing a heterodoxic narrative.
What director JoAnne Akalaitis was thinking when she conceived this piece is beyond me (I’ll get to details when I get to them). For help, I looked to the program notes. Sometimes, you just have to.
In the notes, Nicholas Rudall, who made the translation for this production, is quoted as saying, “The Bacchae is a play rich in themes, and one of its most disturbing is the inadequacy of rational human government in the face of the ecstatic irrationality of Dionysus…The Bacchae is, in the end, a document of human folly. Dionysus lacks mercy. And to assume that human wisdom and human rationality are forces that can resist him is a monumental mistake.”
Umm, wrong. Read More…
It Is Written
As some of you may know, I have been hard at work on a new opera over the last few months. It is now finished and had its world premiere this past weekend at the Mt. Tremper Arts summer festival in the Catskills.
With my ensemble, Collective Opera Company, we created SCARLET FEVER, an evening-length operatic adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s iconic novel, The Scarlet Letter, which is a book that everyone thinks they know or remember, but in reality, no one knows or remembers much or any of it.
At any rate, while the work (I believe) is strong, and each performance was met with a wonderful audience and some amazing feedback, I was discouraged (I am only human, after all) not to have received really any listings from the NYC classical music and opera media (although we did get this amazing preview in “The Times” – The WOODSTOCK Times, that is…).
This frustration, I’m sure, is no stranger to those who pursue careers as artists. I’m sure the party line is not to give a relationship with the media too much power over you. I agree that this is probably a healthy point of view. But forcing oneself to “not” feel this way does not alleviate all the angst and frustration one may feel for feeling overlooked by the press.
I also don’t believe—for the most part—in invoking mind over matter, when matter has a very real effect on our lives. In this specific case, press coverage (and I’m not even talking about reviews here, but simply getting cultural event listings) effects the number of opportunities people have to find out about your work, which effects how many people will actually come see your work, which effects the opportunity for people to talk about your work, which also promotes your work. Press coverage is real (in this way), and really can have a significant effect on things like ticket sales, and the general awareness of the arts community to your work.
So, yes, I felt snubbed, and annoyed that the NYC classical music media complex ignored (whether intentionally or not) what I believe to be an important event in the larger conversation of opera, classical music and theater.
I’ve since done a little research, and was happy to find out that in at least one instance, that the neglect was basically bureaucratic.
But this is also part of a larger and very personal relationship with one’s work and the media. What is that moment of throwing something out into the canyon of the world, then straining your ear out to hear the echo? It is natural to want this. It is natural to feel let down when the echo does not bounce back. Some might say it is an immature, arresting neediness (or narcissism) on the part of the artist. But there may be no way to eradicate these feelings, and personally, I’d rather spend my energy working around, over and through it, than razing it.
I also feel that if this sort of principal is having an unfairly and excessively negative effect on emerging artists (since press coverage does tend to favor the established venues/organizations), then we should be addressing it head-on, and not just wish it away through self-help.
That said, a few months ago, after I finally bought a Macbook (and subsequently coined the phrase “There is no Art. Only Mac.”), I wrote a little ditty about this desire to be noticed by the New York music critics, and the sadness I feel (well, not the “someone died” kind of sadness, but sadness nonetheless) when the papers turn their cold, silent shoulders to my work.
I’ve inserted the track above (with a fierce new music sharing service, soundcloud, which should allow listeners to actually make comments on the track) and you can read the lyrics through the comment clouds.
Call it art as criticism; art as protest.
Call it a song.
BTW, John Hughes: “Yes, you’re a total fag”
Sorry to hate—once again—on a recently deceased beloved creator of popular entertainment, but I have to. Not just to be contrarian (as a darling friend accused me of being, just yesterday!), but to voice a legitimate criticism of John Hughes’ work that I have held in recent years.
I should say that, if I die, I would want people to look at my work clearly, for what it is, and not to confuse their judgments about my work with their feelings of appreciation for me as a person. Can’t we hold these two things separate?
To get to my gripe, John Hughes’ work will never, to me, be considered truly great work because of the string of casual homophobia that runs through all of his teen movies. All of our favorites. All of those movies we now, collectively share and reminisce over. All of these seem to have characters that reinforce the pressurized teenage use of homosexual pejoratives.
One of my favorite Hughes movies—a film I will share in communion with my sister in perpetuity—Sixteen Candles, is the culprit from which I derive the subtitle of this article. The self-empowering use of the word “fag” by Molly Ringwald’s “Samantha” toward the nerd-geek “Farmer Ted” (played by a scrawny, if tenacious Anthony Michael Hall), is just one example (and notable because it is uttered by a female character) of how Hughes teens understand and wield the power of institutional homophobia. I don’t have the research to list just how many times a gay slur punctuates these iconic scenes of teenage turmoil, but I encourage everyone, as they review the canon of Hughes films (as we all will now) to take notice of the numerous ways this form of homophobic game play crops up.
Now, the ways in which these slurs are used are always casual (if I recall correctly), and are never more than a simple fact of the socio-political rules that define teen relationships. They are often (again, if I recall correctly) not targeted at identified homosexual characters, but, rather, are employed in their more pervasive usage, whereby the slur is used to belittle a male heterosexual character; to challenge his power; to intimidate him; to ridicule him. While not as outwardly destructive as the kind of bigotry directed at suspected or openly homosexual characters, it is no less damaging, particularly in how it sustains the illusion of the assumed heterosexuality of the person who uses the pejorative while putting the recipient of the pejorative on the defensive of his own compulsory heterosexuality.
If you don’t think these moments send loud and clear messages to young people who lap up these films for all the other wonderful, smart things Hughes movies offer, you’re wrong. There is no shortage of homophobic reinforcement in our culture, and in the 1980s, homophobic discourse had not yet reached the roadblock of political correctness that, for better or worse, has squeezed out much of the room that slurs like “fag,” “faggot,” “queer,” and “homo” used to have.
But taking into account the era in which these films were made does not excuse Hughes’ recurrent use of these homophobic slurs. Did it accurately capture teen life in the 80s? Perhaps. But wouldn’t that still be the case today? I can’t imagine that youngsters have stopped ridiculing each other via these homophobic tropes (in fact, just the other day, my boyfriend and I were walking past some pre-teenage kids, one of whom had pulled his shirt off and was sort of gyrating and dancing as we passed; a friend of his was quick to point at him but say to us, “He’s gay! He’s gay!” It was cute, and funny, although by bf made a good point, “In a few years they’ll be pointing at us”). But today, these slurs would more likely be used in film to critique the homophobia inherent in the experience of youth (much like Brüno targeted homophobia as it actively sought to elicit it). In important contrast, Hughes’ homophobia is always used in a way that affirms the empowerment of homophobia via the positive, clique-inclusive currency of the slur; i.e. the user is always elevated above the receiver, who is laughed at. Let’s also keep in mind that these films are not documentaries, but are scripted, pre-meditated, and edited compositional works of film art.
I’m not saying we can’t enjoy these films. I don’t even need to articulate how many great things we can take away from them. But we should keep in mind that as we enjoyed these movies, we also absorbed the dark ethos of teenage homophobia. And that, no matter who you were, or how much you did or did not understand sexuality and issues of sexual orientation, when Samantha called Ted a “fag,” you knew you didn’t want to be one.
