by Howard Pflanzer

How can you produce a brand new controversial American play in Mumbai?  I thought India would be an excellent place to produce and direct my new play, The Terrorist, a timely commentary on the US government policy of detention of South Asians and Muslims and the initiation of the war in Iraq.   The political climate in India was in some ways similar to the US, where the government had passed and implemented, The Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), which was modeled on the USA Patriot Act passed after 9/11.  In India as well as the US many “terrorists” were imprisoned without proper charges, access to legal counsel or a fair trial.  When the Congress party returned to power in India several years ago the act was rescinded.                                                                         

            The play is about Frank, who claims to be in security, his girlfriend, Claire, her boss, Roger, and a government agent, Paula, who is trying to find a terrorist conspiracy at all costs. The play explores each character’s particular view of terrorism.  Frank is a self-proclaimed fighter against terrorism, Claire is Frank’s supporter, Roger believes wholeheartedly in the US government’s fight against terrorism and Paula sees a terrorist conspiracy everywhere. Frank, Claire and Roger are ordinary Americans victimized by the US government.  In the end, the persecuted turn on their persecutor, Paula, in a bold reversal of roles.  Some people in the audience felt my ending did not take the terrorist threat seriously enough, while many others applauded the ending as a powerful protest against US government policies.

The Terrorist was presented at the Little Theatre of the National Center for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Mumbai for two performances, May 8^th and 10^th, 2003.  The play with a cast of four Indian actors, had a live tabla (an Indian percussion instrument) composed and performed by a young American musician, Daniel L. Scholnick.

The Terrorist was started at the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois in August 2002.   I read an excerpt to a group of the other artistic residents and several people said “it would stir things up.”  I knew I was on the right track and completed the play in the fall of 2002 before I left for India.    Some revisions and additions were made during the rehearsals for the premiere production in Mumbai.

My liaison at the NCPA, Arundhathi Subramaniam, poet and administrator, whose husband is active in the Mumbai English theatre, read the play with excitement and approved it for production.  She arranged for me to have the Little Theatre for two performances and rehearsal space as needed and available and introduced me to the key staff people.

In my first few weeks in Mumbai, I went to see every new play in English that I could, to meet the writers, directors and actors.   Indian plays written in English are being presented with greater frequency by a growing number of Indian theatre artists.   Writers are finding their voices, writing in English that is neither British nor American, but Mumbai-English, inflected by the rhythms and words of the Hindi and Marathi languages.  And many actors are performing plays in English.

I cast Radhika da Cunha, appearing in a play, Class of ‘84, as the government agent, Paula.  I auditioned a number of actors for the part of Frank, finally selecting Darshan Jariwala, who not only performs Indian plays in English, but in Hindi and Marathi.  After I chose him for the part, he was worried about his accent and I told him, “it would be an asset for the part.”   Avantika Akerkar, who was appearing in the Indian premiere of the Vagina Monologues, was cast as Claire.   As Claire’s boss, Roger, I cast Denzil Smith, a Mumbai actor with a wonderful voice who plays contemporary and classical parts.

I developed a production concept for the play that included a live tabla player on stage.  The stage at the Little Theatre was much deeper than it was wide.  I divided the stage into five playing areas: Frank’s workshop, where he is creating his “security” device, Claire and Roger’s office, a street area, a park area and a café.  Other transitional places were spun off from these locations.  The four actors remained seated at the back of the stage in a darkened area when not in a scene, along with the tabla player who performed live throughout the play.  The actors were able to move smoothly from one scene to the other underscored by the tabla.  All the playing areas had shadowy illumination which highlighted the ambiguity of the situations in the play.  The final scene of the play, where the characters are interrogated, was lit by a powerful flashlight, which was aimed at each actor’s face as he or she was questioned.

The fifth actor in the play was a musical instrument, the tabla.  It became a live musical presence.  I had listened to Indian vocal and instrumental music in a number of  Mumbai’s venues before I began rehearsing The Terrorist..   Every type of musical performance I heard used the tabla.  I thought, why not create a contemporary tabla score to emphasize theatrical elements in the scenes and link the scenes in the play.  I would use a traditional Indian instrument in a non-traditional way.  It would be a wonderful way to propel the action.   The composer, Daniel L. Scholnick, was excited by the concept and developed the score while watching the rehearsals.  After the performances, audience members commented how effective the music was in moving the plot along.

During the first few rehearsals, the actors thought the characters were simple because my dialogue is so spare, but as we worked they became challenged by the characters’ interactions.  As we explored their roles and improvised some scenes, the actors began to dig into their parts and complex characters began to emerge who defined their conflicting attitudes towards terrorism.  One of the actresses, Radhika da Cunha, had never done animal exercises in her acting classes, and we worked on her developing dog-like characteristics (listening for and smelling out terrorists) which she seamlessly incorporated into her performance as a government agent.  In the scene, which I dubbed “the discovery of the weapons of mass destruction” scene, Roger, played by Denzil Smith, did a brilliant improvisation underscored by tabla sounds, in which everyday tools: a screwdriver, a pair of scissors and a plastic hair band became extraordinary objects of terrorist menace.

My stage manager, Vijayalaxmi Londhe, went with me to the Chor Bazaar (Thieves Bazaar) in Mumbai to purchase props.  She bargained in Hindi and we bought everything from a powerful flashlight to an electrical switch that was the “security” device Frank was working on.  Going to the Chor Bazaar with its crowded streets and hundreds of shops of Muslim vendors was a theatrical experience in itself.  And I thought about the hundreds of Muslim detainees in the US imprisoned after 9/11.

To publicize the play, I obtained a list of the half dozen writers/editors who covered cultural activities in the Indian English language press and phoned each one personally.  Unlike in New York or other major American cities, it was not necessary to write a press release, but in each case when I spoke to a journalist, I pitched the basic idea of the play and the unusual circumstances of its production.  The Asian Age did a feature with a photo, “The Terrorist Strikes in May”, with a face-to-face interview about me as a playwright/director working in Mumbai, which appeared two weeks before the opening of the play.  The other press pieces were published around the time of the performance.  Midday ran an article, entitled, “Staging a Terrorist” about the subject of the play with a photo of two of the actors.  Afternoon did a feature, “The Terrorist Hits the Marquee” with a photo of me and the cast posed in the rehearsal space.  Briefer articles appeared in The Times of India and The Indian Express, which had profiled me earlier in the year.

To create further interest in the play, three scenes were performed by the actors on the tiny stage of the Tea Centre as part of the COHO Arts Festival in Mumbai to an audience of eighty people who crowded into the space the Saturday before the premiere.   The scenes were well received and this helped to produce a buzz about the play.

On a shoestring budget with great help from Indian theatre people, who worked in the English Indian theatre, the play was rehearsed for five weeks.  I focused on getting the Indian actors to perform as an ensemble and give an American feel to their performances.  Their training in Indian traditional theatre performance techniques helped them to create the stylized feel for the play that I was seeking.  It was a challenge for me to work with the actors to incorporate their techniques into my production but in the end it was greatly enhanced.

A few weeks before the production opened I was told by the director of the American Center, a career diplomat, that they would give me money to produce any other play during this time of the Iraq invasion.  I refused.  I was then asked not to mention the American Center or the Fulbright program as assisting this production in the program and publicity.  The play was officially produced by an Indian foundation under the auspices of the National Center for the Performing Arts where I was a visiting artist.

The Terrorist was performed twice to packed houses.  All the officials from the American consulate turned out including the director of the American Center.   And the Indian Fulbright newsletter did a brief article with a photo about how I had directed a production of The Terrorist with some of Mumbai’s leading actors about “the psychological effects of terrorism” which the play was clearly not about. After each performance there were questions and a discussion of the politics of the play.  Most of the Indian audience members shared my concern about American policies in Iraq and towards the detainees.  I did another short performance piece, Surveillance, which was thematically related to the play.  The Terrorist was documented through photos and a video. After the performances were over, I found out there had never been a premiere of a new American play in Mumbai before.  It seems I had made theatre history way Off-Off Broadway.

Howard Pflanzer was a Fulbright Scholar in India during the spring of 2003.   The Terrorist was given its   American Premiere at the Laurie Beechman Theatre of the West Bank      Café NYC by the Unofficial New York Yale Cabaret (UNYYC) in June 2006.

Since I have like three venues to publish it in, and I told Tao I needed a galley, I feel obliged to write a review of Tao Lin’s novel, Richard Yates. I don’t think I will ever read anything by Richard Yates. Reading Tao Lin has a way of erasing any literary knowledge one had. I eagerly anticipated this release after reading Eeeee Eee Eeee and Shoplifting from American Apparel. He sold shares in this novel to publish it and not have to work at a vegan restaurant while he was writing it.

I feel not conscious enough of how I’m mimicking Tao Lin’s Style. Tao Lin’s Style is infectious and hypnotic. Writing about Tao Lin in Tao Lin’s style, as The Observer, or rather Christian Lorentzen, did, is hard to resist. I think the Observer was lazy. I approve of that laziness. Of course, as with Hemingway, another “bad” writer whose parody comes easy, and whom Tao Lin namechecks as much as Yates, and includes in the index, the style slips in anyway. While reading Tao Lin I find myself becoming much drier and flatter. I lose my obligation to feel strongly about anything, especially about how I feel about anything.

Tao Lin is indeed kind of a hipster writer. He’s easy to hate. I think when people say something is “polarizing” that thing often itself has an intense focus on neutrality. Some of the key phrases to use in a Tao Lin parody are “neutral facial expression” and “I feel neutral” and “said in Gmail Chat”. If you use these phrases you will be immediately parodying Tao Lin, and you don’t need anything else. Everything he writes is autobiography, or so it seems. Everything is exactly as it seems. It’s just one damn thing after another but there are some interesting elisions and refillings of previous story that are perhaps occuring more in Richard Yates.

There are more changes in Richard Yates from his previous style. Someone must have commented on the names of his characters, like how obvious it is that the main character is always Tao Lin but named like Sam or something. So he named the Tao Lin character Haley Joel Osment and the teenage Jersey girl he met on the internet Dakota Fanning. The ages are about right but the great thing about it is you still can’t actually picture the actors as the characters. I now see “Haley Joel Osment” and that represents a Taiwanese-American hipster writer to me. I wonder whether any kind of defamation charges could be brought but it’s too obviously a stunt. I am willing to honestly believe Haley Joel Osment crossed state borders to statutory rape Dakota Fanning, who is variously self-destructive. I do because those are the characters. There’s really a lot of name-dropping in this, which brings up that issue of how much writers have to be literary historians, or just more culturally aware, or whatever.

I’m afraid that it’s almost a homage to the novel’s namesake that Richard Yates has a pretty clear structure and plot, and particularly that it’s about someone simultaneously epitomizing and feeling alienated from contemporary American society. The story is most of the arc of a codependent relationship. In case you don’t know what that is, it’s when someone stays romantically involved because they feel the other person needs them and the other person (who often has some compulsion or addiction the first person enables) does more of that to get more from the first person. Neither person involved is very good and both are very depressed. What I like about depression in Tao Lin is that it’s not necessarily pathological. Halfway through the book I totally thought he’d impregnated her.

At first it seems like he just emotional abuses her and then it turns out Dakota Fanning’s been secretly binging and purging. I don’t think the “spoiler” concept is relevant here. “Haley Joel Osment” comes across as a total dick even though he does sort of know what to do. I like that Tao Lin does that with not-himself. I like the realism about this couple creating their own little world. I want to use the terms “party girl” and “cheese beast” and have someone understand them. I think Tao Lin is a party girl. I am a party girl. It’s easy to say the attitude is immature and neurotic, and I want to shrug that off as harmless and ubiquitous but the impact on “Dakota Fanning” makes it actually more morally conscious than a parody of Tao Lin. But “Shoplifting” already kind of had that underlying moral message. I think a lot of the couple’s professions of need actually sound kind of weird to me because I feel like every time I’ve said anything like that it was very very self-aware.

I don’t know. A lot of what they, and Tao Lin, do say is self-aware, but so dry that there’s no difference. I always feel like the manuscript was written with a lot less capitalization and punctuation, so it’s gone through that transformation already. Tao Lin definitely is being about neutrality in representation as a direction with an impossible goal. That’s too figurative for a Tao Lin parody. I don’t want to tell you what to do with these books but I do think Tao Lin is important to be able to parody.

I wanted to include some quotes from the book but it lost all the highlights I put in before about 2/3 of the way through and I didn’t want to be biased.

Anyway, I guess I like him because he’s familiar. He steals from places near the place where I work, but doesn’t mention stealing from us, which I appreciate. We have a similar social anxiety and detachment, and have our most emotionally intense experiences through internet chatting. He makes me think “I could do that” but this review was my chance to and I don’t think I could, or want to, and neither could that Observer guy.

Reviewed by K.A. Sitafalwalla

Partially a proclamation to the 1970’s, the artists and the derelicts, the rich and poor, the talented and talent-less, “Just Kids” stands as an ode to friendship and love; everything in between. Patti Smith’s memoir is poetic and true with an honesty and straightforwardness that is disguised in her poetry and music. Smith is a sage, a modern day Siddhartha reliving and recounting her experiences with the wisdom only experience and reflection can procure.
Opening the first pages of the stoic purple hardcover book one notices the choice of font, the simplicity of the layout and timelessness of the physicality of a book. The story told is the same: stoic, knowing, and open for a reader to take what he or she needs. The reader finds in the pages a retelling of Patti’s youth, her innocence, drive, ambition and devotion. Although the book is splashed with images of lanky Patti in her 20’s, her voice has slithers of grey and insight. It is as if she had been courting the tale her entire life, rolling it over and over, negotiating, chastising, disbelieving, and when the first words spiraled off her Remington typewriter she finally understood how and why those years of glamorous poverty and community of strangers gave way for the artist within.

We are introduced to young Patti in her home in Chicago and the foundation from which her artistic inclination, intellectual curiosity, and austere simplicity, are rooted. Her father admired the works of Salvador Dali while her mother taught her to kneel down by her bed and pray. Little did Patti, the rebellious punk rocker, know the significance these notions would carry. Years later in the Chelsea Hotel, in the blur of the faceless famous, Dali acknowledged her presence: “You are like a gothic crow.” From Chicago she and her family move to New Jersey; she becomes alienated from the life she was familiar with but this move initiated her bond with literature. Her character deepens, as do her relationships with her siblings; relationships that will keep her grounded and free.

Patti’s steadfast devotion is part of her nature. She never veers too far from poetry, music, or the people whom she loves. Her commitment, inspiration and fortitude are unyielding. Just Kids tells the life and love past of Robert Mapplethorpe. He was a multi faceted artist who showed Patti the life of a true artist. He remains the artist of her life as he continues to be her muse. The memoir fulfills a promise to Mapplethorpe: “Before Robert died, I promised him that I would one day write our story.” The love they shared was unique in that they were kindred spirits, devoted and married to each other by forces beyond explanation. There is a mystical aura to their friendship filled with coincidences and knowing; a kind of trust that comes from beyond the world of matter driven by fate. With their separate artistic visions they complimented each other, challenged each other and depended on each other. They found balance in chaos, a routine of Nescafe, “bad” doughnut shops, and a muse in one another. As a couple they waxed and waned but their foundation for an everlasting friendship had been sealed.

Historical moments – markers in time –ground the story. We hear the artists’ reply to the Son of Sam horrors, the Kent State Massacre, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Smith observes the change in the air, the attitude shift from the peace peddling hippies to the transcendentalist beatnik poets to the defiant, questioning artists who will become the forbearers of Punk and the underground downtown art movement of the early 70’s. The disorder of the changing face of America stood as comrade, instigator, and bystander to Patti and Robert’s own relationship. The reader witnesses their many phases, their hunger and need for each other and mutual understanding of an unyielding bond.

Just Kids is a salute to an uncompromising artistic ethic she and Mapplethorpe pursued. It is a celebration of youth and the peculiar satisfaction of freedom regardless of how many burnt cups of coffee, day old rolls, or second-hand stores one must endure. For it was not a matter of subjectification, it was a matter of being free in New York City, free to board in the Chelsea Hotel, free to sleep in Tompkins Square Park, free to express the vision of the artists’ truth.
Patti Smith’s mythic storytelling might come as a revelation, her references to God and the power of prayer, her religious upbringing, and the faith that embossed her life gave her certain buoyancy –trust in herself and trust in progress: the journey of her life. Her rowdy stage performances of the 70’s and critique of socio-political happenings hardly fit with the geeky bookstore clerk of her youth. Smith shares her excitement in feeling the changed energy in the air when Bob Dylan attended his first Patti Smith performance. She calls it an “initiation,” as if she needed that nod from another poet whom she respected to confirm, validate, and encourage her own artistic quest.

Smith offers an intimate account of a bourgeoning art scene in downtown New York. She is straightforward, honest, and romantic. Her commitment to art is both a dedication and allegiance to the many that inspired her: Rimbaud, Genet, Dubuffet, Piaf; and the many that challenged, protected and collaborated with her: Dylan, Ginsberg, Shepherd, Hamill. But among them all it was Robert Mapplethorpe that taught her to see and practice through the lens of an artist.

by Kurt Gottschalk

I first heard about it when I was about 12 — a store where Kiss albums could be procured for about a dollar less than at the mall; a store that, strangely, wasn’t in the mall. It wasn’t far, but it did mean asking my mother to make another trip.

Things seemed different at this new store. It wasn’t as crowded, but people were talking to each other and the guy behind the counter even asked me about what I liked. Before long a relationship had been established — between myself and Danny and John, two of the clerks — but also between myself and the store. I went in every weekend with my $5.86 (almost 25% of the paycheck from my after-school job) and bought what they told me to buy. I might object that things seemed too weird (David Bowie, Devo), but I’d always oblige and ultimately never felt misguided. (On some weeks I’d save a few dollars by perusing the cut-out bin, unknowingly buying into a mob ring by doing so. I didn’t know about that underworld relationship until years later, after reading William Knoedelseder’s highly recommended Stiffed: A True Story of MCA, the Music Business, and the Mafia.)

The difference between the store at the mall and the store down by, well, another shopping plaza became central to my adolescent identity. Danny and John not only crafted my musical development, taking me by the hand and guiding me through art rock and into punk and new wave, but they became the figureheads for what would become my circle of friends in high school. In a small, conservative city in central Illinois, even listening to Elvis Costello or The Clash put one on the outs. Weirdos certainly weren’t heteros (somehow “Devo” even became slang for “gay”). I met other young music obsessives Danny and John had been grooming, and we came to be friends. We taped each other’s records and tried to form bands. The store at the mall no doubt did more business than the one in the plaza. They had all the Top 40 albums on the wall and the latest hits on the sound system. But they weren’t there to have conversations or to tailor recommendations. And they certainly weren’t there to recognize the kids with the burning curiosity and help them along their ways. They were there to move product.

That store at the mall might be something like what Internet record shopping is today. Certainly there are those who would argue that any number of online-community models replicate the brick-and-mortar experience (and in truth my interest here is more in exercising a bit of nostalgia than in proving them wrong). The two worlds are certainly parallel. People who started purchasing recorded music only after the Santana / Matchbox 20 merger have their own ways of learning and acquiring. And they have their ways of begging, borrowing and stealing, if on a larger scale, just as we had ours. (A Buddy Holly cassette held in one hand at JC Penney, a George Jones in the other while the coat is put on, the tapes left midway in the sleeves because I just had to know what they sounded like). But for those who came of age fondling vinyl, the record store was a shrine, a temple for the merchandising of art that cannot be replaced by virtual experience.

I went on to work both sides of the divide, or all three if you count a life spent haunting stores. As a co-founder of the online store Squidco and, currently, a member of the collective operating the ESP Records storefront in Brooklyn, I’ve worked the culture of both Internet and physical stores. Online stores may be more convenient, and are sometimes cheaper, but nothing matches the clubhouse of the actual shop.

That club feeling is a big part of what Gary Calamar and Phil Gallo’s Record Store Days: From Vinyl to Digital (Sterling Publishing) is about. The book is a well deserved glorification of the independently-owned shop, full of photos and stories about record store proprietors. It makes for a bit of a sad celebration: In large part is comes off like being at a wake where no one talks about the cause of death. Avoiding the sad state of record sales until 175 pages in makes the book seem a bit hollow, although the story of the dying industry in the face of Internet file-sharing is discussed and written about so much that it might be just as well. When Calamar and Gallo finally do get to the state of the industry, they handle it succinctly. It’s not an economics textbook, and they do a reasonable job of covering the issue and getting out again. And while the business end of the record business isn’t really the thrust of the book, the authors also include a good and concise discussion of the controversies around Soundscan, the point-of-sale data collection system that replaced the copies-shipped method of charting record sales in the 1990s, causing a major shift in the Billboard charts.

The rest of the colorful volume is full of love letters and mash notes, all torn from the diary of defining cool by commercial means and related by merchants and musicians. Susanna Hoffs remembers naming her band The Bangles so she could be among her favorites in the “B” section. (It’s my favorite section as well, although Hoffs may not have been shopping for Derek Bailey and Anthony Braxton). Robyn Hitchcock reveals the “fetish element” of collecting punk singles for the picture sleeves. And my fellow WFMU DJ Michael Shelley recalls mirroring my JC Penney act, going to the New Rochelle Mall to pocket Nick Lowe and XTC 7”s. (New York clearly had cooler malls than Illinois).

For the most part, the book reads like a bunch of guys hanging out at a record store swapping stories, which in a sense underscores what the local store is all about. A more incisive look at the ins and outs of making and selling records, can be found in the documentary I Need That Record! The Death (or Possible Survival) of the Independent Record Store. Brendan Toller’s film, available on DVD from MVD Visual, is a good history entertainingly told. In 77 minutes, Toller covers the disappearance of local stores and ties that to a corporatization that reaches back to the radio payola scandal of the early 1960s and up to the current day, where Wal-Mart represents 20% of all national record sales.

As succinctly put by Legs McNeil, former editor of both Punk and Spin magazines, “When you’ve got accountants running the record labels, you’re not going to have very good music.” Or, as Glenn Branca says in a boisterous interview, “Criminals, thieves and bastards are attracted to making money.”

As with Record Store Days, I Need That Record does a good job taking a national focus, representing New England to California and the oases in between. Toller is a dynamic storyteller, using cartoon graphics, film and animation clips, and old TV spots (including some vintage MTV) to frame a complicated story where the villains aren’t always apparent and the crimes not completely clear. The case Toller makes against corporate control of distribution of what is, after all, supposed to be art is ultimately quite scathing.

The future of the music industry remains, of course, a gapingly open question. But at least for the generations who didn’t grow up buying and listening to music on a computer, the record-store clubhouse hasn’t been replaced yet. As Rand Foster, proprietor of Long Beach, CA, store Fingerprints, tells Calamar and Gallo, “The important part of retail is the culture you’re selling. It’s the museum element that stimulates people.”

review by Janet Bruesselbach

Apparently every five years PS1, MoMA’s converted-school extension in Long Island City, has a huge group show featuring local artists. While this may be only the second Greater New York, they seem pretty intent on the historicity of the thing. One of the biggest contradictions of having a “local artists” show in this city is that most of the artists will be either immigrants or part-time residents. Perhaps the joke is that the entire world is really Greater New York.

PS1 is disorienting. It’s nice to have another context besides Art to see art in, but the elementary school vibes throw things weirdly and I always feel like I’m missing something. But hey, it’s one of those “pay what you want” places, so the only thing you have to lose is your time and maybe a buck.

Okay, so the worst thing is that there’s too much video in this show. Video is by nature a selfish medium, not only because it demands time but because it requires technological support. I thought I would feel more envy of the artists included and wonder why I wasn’t included, or wonder why I wasn’t curating. I felt a twinge when I saw that one of the videos included someone I knew in college, but I didn’t feel any of that envy at the show, because I wouldn’t want to be the person who had made or chosen these things. I hate cool people.

This is the retrospective room.

It became one of those “find a redeeming thing” games. Individually most of the pieces had something going for them, or, at least, those that weren’t goofy videos. If there isn’t something funny about art, if there isn’t a joke to “get” or “buy” about it, I tend to skim over it, maybe just because I’m biased against romanticism and transcendence.

Then again, maybe this show could use some transcendence. Artists are perverts. The walls were full of glory holes. At all levels, for all sizes and shapes of perverts! And yet, two rooms had “adult content” warnings, for when things were more than bluntly suggestive. The whole thing is a dirty joke and the biggest influence on my entire generation has been internet porn. But maybe that’s just me? And why don’t I like the filth more? I usually do.

DETEXT was an installation that shaped the show. I only later found out that DETEXT had removed the “con” from what it was doing, intentionally, and that all the phrases in giant letters in hallways were excerpted from spam messages. The museum has 4 levels (0, 1, 2, 3) and it seemed like the level of innuendo in the phrases corresponded with the levels.

Here are some things I liked:

Tommy Hartung is good conceptually but I get the feeling he outsources the craft. Some drawings a friend did for him weren’t very crafty, either.

Michele Abeles’s photography

Ishmael Randall Weeks had a very scientific feel.

Nearby on the second floor, and whose label I couldn’t find (making them all the more confusing) were a couple of museum-style stands with bits of archaeological-looking artifacts in them, but all pretty obviously made out of contemporary cheap materials. The artifacts were mostly fimo clay.
Everything by the Atlas of Radical Cartography in a third floor hallway also had a research feel that fit very well in the school building. I particularly remember copies of maps with “latino” and “america” labeling two general (and reversed) areas of the Americas which had been given to people crossing the Mexico-U.S. border and undergone evident wear. There were “maps” there with significant research behind them that remind me of how awesome Jen Dalton is.

Ashley Hunt: “The rich can be rich because they got tired of being poor.” That reminds me. If you haven’t been listening to David Byrne’s Here Lies Love you should.

This is going to look really dated in 5 years, Debo Eilers. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Brody Condon’s video of a smurf tribe finally makes that wooden sculpture outside the Hamburger Banhof make sense.

An artist with the hip-as-dick name Liz Magic Laser displayed her purse taken apart by a surgery and dissection robot, the “Da Vinci System”.

Hank Willis Thomas’s isolation of depictions of blacks in mainstream magazine ads filled a room and held our attention for way longer than anything else. If nothing else it showed that progress is never continuous and always double-edged at least.

David Brooks is a rainforest conservationist.

Some of the only painting featured included Dave Miko and Leidy Churchman, whose “Three Beards” reassures me that there is nothing more macho than two cocks in your ass.

The Bruce High Quality Foundation can always be relied upon to be sickeningly hip, filling one room with artists’ genitals and another with a pedestal exchange program, “Perpetual Monument to Students of Art”, in which clean sculpture pedestals are substituted for used ones from local schools throughout the show. It sort of looks like the holocaust memorial in Berlin. Anyone who’s done gallery installation will like stuff like that. All the jack-off-in-a-box glory hole installation elements, not so much.

Aki Sakamoto’s “skewed lies / Central Governor” had a great steampunk, participatory mood and kept the basement feeling like a paranoid secret center of operations we children had illicitly discovered. Also there was goldleaf.

And uniforms:

My date said “I feel like my time has been raped”.

The “Shadow Play” Paintings of Debra Drexler at HP Garcia

In Drexler’s large oil on linen canvases at HP Garcia, swathes of color float and submerge upon a gray middle ground, suggesting an intermediary realm between water and air, consciousness and dream. Her colors appear to float on, or rather within, reflecting pools of aether, forming sometimes recognizable natural elements such as roots and branches, flowers, or even birds. With an almost musical painterly lyricism, her palette of bright pinks, reds and oranges and violets derives organically from the flora and fauna of Hawaii, where she makes her home. Against the gray open-slate backdrop, which also connotes a formless state of semi-consciousness, these colors move and spark, recede and burble. Though the brighter colors recall her celebrated “Gauguin’s Zombie” series (and of course Gauguin’s own gorgeous Polynesian palette), the tone here is moody and reflective, prompting an instant association with Monet’s Water Lilies and other aquatic works. The deliberately abstracted brushwork, however, acknowledges the practice of AbEx masters such as Joan Mitchell and especially the later works of Willem de Kooning, streaky and bright, painted over or emerging from a veil of mostly gray feathery brushstrokes, a shadowy realm which also serves as a metanym for the uncertain but creative field between painter and viewer.

In her catalog essay, Lisa Paul Streitfeld sees Drexler’s figural motifs as evocative of archetypal Jungian emblems, such as the deep roots of the tree, the flying bird of the spirit, and particularly the Shadow(s) we all battle in our attempts to subsume the ego, tapping into the power of a collective unconsciousness. For Strietfield (and apparently for Drexler as well) these paintings themselves serve as metaphors of spiritual transformation, much as the processes of the alchemists did for Jung, with shamanic echoes of healing and self-sublimation. Drexler attempts to map the points at which might certainty might break though the murk of uncertainty, or joy emerge from anxiety (Think Beethoven, or Joy Division(?), just as daylight breaks through a shade of branches. In the large double-canvases such as “Poesis Through Forked Branch” or “Dissolution into Joy”, a triumphant chord of awareness is carried by the sheer verve and skilled coloring of the paintings themselves, emerging from the struggle and chaos of the multicolored but mostly grayish striations of what appears a muddled, middle ground.

One can also see in these works a kind of synecdoche for the state of contemporary painting in general, echoed in Drexler’s cryptic statement: “Form offers roots but is sticky with entanglements”. Her paintings evince conflict as well as some resolution of the flux between figural and abstract, chaos and deliberation, the cosmological or spiritual and the stubborn, even seductively terrestrial. Behind and even with the dazzling colors of paradise lies a grey miasma of mundanity (and the gray matter which must sort it). A gray area that also defines a point of departure. The figural elements (un)certainly function as metaphors, even in their inchoate and airy forms. Like the most powerful abstract paintings of the last century, reproductions can only provide a crude chart of her stratagem; the luminosity of the oils themselves, along with their deft application can really only be truly appreciated in person. These are rare works, which show an artist struggling with and for the spirit.

—Michael Carter

HP Garcia Gallery

580 Eighth Avenue @ 38th Street (7th Floor)

Gallery Hours: Tues- Sat 1 - 6 pm

212.354.7333

By Vedan Anthony-North

With a name like “2010” you don’t really know what to expect when heading to the 2010 Whitney biennial. Unfortunately, you don’t really know what to think about the exhibit after leaving either. Though the theme of “2010” is justified by the curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari in the exhibit’s introduction as purposefully having “no theme” but rather representing the tenor of a generation, the biennial came across as scattered, disjointed, and lacking cohesion.

Walking into the Whitney Museum, the incoherent intentions of the exhibit came across almost immediately. While some of the artwork spoke to the political and social tensions of our time in direct and effective ways, such as Curtis Mann’s inventive After the Dust, Second View (Beirut) in which bleach is strategically used to conceal portions of photographs (found on Flickr) of the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah to create the illusion of an explosion, these powerful pieces were frequently followed by disappointing compositions whose attempts to articulate the frustrations of the time fell short.

Pieces such as Ania Soliman’s confusing NATURAL OBJECT RANT: The Pineapple, a collection of twenty-six photomontages (one for each letter of the alphabet) dedicated to the pineapple and it’s relationship to consumerism and colonialism seemed to reach towards an exploration of politics, yet the seemingly random subject (the pineapple) and the equally arbitrary decision to use the alphabet as a means of examination, left me distracted rather than focused.

Bonami and Carrion-Murayari peppered these outright politically explicit pieces with more abstract artwork that had a similar success rate. While some artists attempted to explore the process of production and perspective through the manipulation of a medium, others took a more direct approach. Scott Short’s engaging painting Untitled (white), reflects the illogical patterns of human perspective. Using the technique of photocopying photocopies, Short forcefully makes one question the permanence of interpretation. Conversely, R. H. Quaytman’s series of paintings and silkscreens entitled Distracting Distance, Chapter 16 which all focus on the architectural design of a window in the room of his exhibit, works with line and an established landscape to draw the viewer into the subject of perspective. Unfortunately, Quaytman’s predictable use of optical illusion and fails to offer anything new to the discourse and is easily forgettable.

The disconnected nature of the biennial is not to say that the entire exhibit failed, and you will surely be both stunned and impressed by some of the more powerful, expressive and fascinating instillations executed by talented contemporary artists. “2010” simply falls flat in capturing the political and social moment in which we are living. Instead of acknowledging the apathy of (some) American youth growing up in a video-game culture, the stalemate of our partisan politics or the impact of two wars on all our lives, Bonami and Carrion-Murayari attempt to jumble anything and everything that can be interpreted as reflective of our time into four floors of art. Ultimately, it is too easy to say that the generation of 2010 lacks a theme; every age of creation has motif and time will tell that 2010 is no different. Unfortunately, the collection presented at the Whitney does not reflect the essence of “2010”.

By : Brian Boyles, New Orleans

It was getting a little too possible, you know? That we might make it, that whatever the forces leveled at our survival, they were internal, fixable, matters of fairness or racial understanding or budgeting. We could do that, couldn’t we? The Saints won, didn’t they? We all shared that memory–a new memory, a positive outcome, a colorblind embrace. And whatever the lingering bitterness of ousted politicos, we had a new administration and some hope. The recovery was over, long live the reinvention!

And then the Shortcut Gang hits us with the heart punch. Again.

The Shortcut Gang consists of deregulators, lazy executives, paid-off politicians, and the entire anti-government shakedown party. The oil companies are the Tweeds for the Gang, pulling strings in order to consume dollars and nations unencumbered. Larger than even the Last Superpower, Tweed is in Indonesia, in Nigeria, in Houston. The less rules, the better. Short-term gain, fuck the long term, fuck accidents, fuck workers on the rig. You sit around playing with your dick about safety and the environment, you get lapped by some state-owned bastards out of Moscow or Beijing.

For a very long time, the Shortcut Gang worked away at the rope connecting government to commerce, wearing off the details, the quality checks, the back-up plans that are the basic function of a capitalist government. Those things make sure the machine runs smoothly, but the Gang doesn’t want smooth. They want fast and they want more. If it gets rough, well, they can ride with that. But rough for them may mean a good hard lay for some middle-aged chick in the MMS office, maybe a bathroom snort or a complimentary hotel room. None of this Planning bullshit, though. Leave that to academics and Libs.

So the shit hits the fan in the part of the country most accustomed to this way of doing things. Louisiana is as close to an oil kingdom as any in the Union, wide-open to the industry which pays the state enough to minimize income tax and fatten up the fellas in Baton Rouge. At least 100 years of this deal has left us poor but happy, with a lot less land than we started with. If Huey hadn’t forced their hand, we wouldn’t even have that.

Then this happens and now we face losing that part of our state that makes all the rest possible–the Gulf. The food, the federal money, the music–it all comes from the Gulf, when you think about it. We eat seafood and spice, watch politicians make bank from new bridges and levees, and serve as the northern most port of the Caribbean. The Gulf is the essential fact for understanding this part of the world.

And now the Gulf has cancer. Now we all sit in the waiting room, the most glorious, flower-laden, musical waiting room in the world, full of busty women and the new energy of post-Katrina New Orleans, but a waiting room cast with the usual pall of foreboding and antiseptic. We wait for the doctor to come out and tell us one outlandish story after another, of mud and top hats and diamond saws and British fops and dispersants. Well-accustomed to this torturous, media-narrated humiliation, we brace for another fucked up summer.

Whenever the oil stops flowing, we’ll be sitting next to a big pot of toxic stew. Obama says he’ll be there with us. But at night, when the smell of oil blows in and the shrimpers are dead in the water, a way of life gutted by the Shortcut Gang, a way of life that might’ve been the last vestige of America as it once was, a free place of hustle, hard work and hard party, then it will feel very lonely. No lawsuit, no speech, no shortcut will replace what is now lost. Then it will feel very lonely, indeed.

by Claudine Aime

Within the hustle and bustle, nestled in Midtown Manhattan’s highly corporate district, it would be easy to miss any form of artistic expression, but New Yorkers are no stranger to the eclectic collage of art, music, and pop culture that their city has to offer. Deep in Bryant Park, hidden among the trees, a large yellow cubic platform stands. There are women dressed in summer dresses, on top of it moving erratically. It may at first seem confusing, but that is exactly artist Kate Gilmore’s intentions, in her pedestrious and colorful art spectacle. Cleverly named “Walk the Walk”, was more than just women walking idly, it was her expression of the everyday movements and actions shared by many of the surrounding office employees. It embodies mobility and progression in a fast paced workforce.

As many artists have learned before, igniting interest with public art is no easy task, but Kate Gilmore, along side with Public Art Fund, have managed to spark cognition in the minds of many of the observers. From May 3, 2010 to May 7th in Bryant Park from 8:30 to 6:30, 7 women shuffled along in the 100 square feet cubicle 8 feet off the ground wearing bright canary yellow dresses and beige shoes in a pattern that resembles systematic chaos. Perplexed by the sight, a 29-year-old Met Life employee went during his lunch break to investigate the display; only after reading the synopsis did he fully understand what was behind the artist’s vision. When asked his opinion he stated “the exhibit is a good and clear representation of the daily grind.”

Just a glance alone wouldn’t suffice: to get the clear picture, a full experience of the piece and its many dimensions, one would have to examine not only the exterior but the interior of the structure as well. Following the yellow theme, on each side of the brightly colored cubicle there are entranceways allowing on-lookers to enter in from four directions. When walking into the cubicle you are bombarded with the cacophony of the footsteps above, mimicking the sounds you are likely to hear in office and apartment buildings. The footsteps became more than just the sounds of a group of people pacing, but an intricate dance-like pattern that the women navigated effortlessly. In an interview with one of the performers, Sophia Stoll explains that one of their tasks was to convey personality and emotion without the exchange of words. “We communicate with each other by stomping our feet.” Since they were not allowed to speak to each other, stomping became their own intimate form of non-verbal communication. Walking about in a 100 square feet area for 5 hours a day was a difficult task for them to do without speaking, so physical expression became useful as a social outlet.

Aside from the visual enjoyment of watching these young women perform on this vibrant cube in a shady setting in the park, is there more to “Walk the Walk” than just a simulation of the work force or a pessimistic depiction of the monotony behind it? Is it just “our life as we know it”, worker drones confined to stifled expression, or is the message deeper? Kate Gilmore said it best during our impromptu interview, stating “even though they’re in this one little space and not much is happening they are actually really navigating each other in a goal base way. If it wasn’t goal-based then they would just be going around in circles, but they’re not, so while they’re still confined to this space, they’re still having to maintain their own identity and space in this very generic environment.”

reseña por Daniel Torres en Lourdes Vásquez reciente libro “Tres Relatos y Un Infortunio”

“Estoy cerca de la puerta. Presiento que cada pisada marca el final de mis días. Detengo el paso en el dintel”.
“La gente es propensa a toda clase de accidentes”.
“A Guille le falleció una pierna”.

Estas tres oraciones, que sirven de epígrafe a esta reseña, son las oraciones iniciales de los tres cuentos que aparecen en el nuevo libro de la puertorriqueña Lourdes Vázquez, titulado Tres relatos y un infortunio, publicado en la serie “Semillas de Eva”, de la editorial de la Fundación Ross en Rosario, Argentina. El propósito de esta serie es editar pequeños libritos, de 18 por 9 centímetros, para vender, además de en librerías, en puestos de revistas, farmacias, supermercados, etc., dentro de Argentina. Lourdes Vázquez es la primera extranjera que publica en esta serie, siendo todas las demás escritoras de Argentina.
En cada una de estas sorprendentes historias aparece el desastre, el infortunio, el accidente, la muerte, el dolor, la desgracia, como leimotiv de las acciones de los personajes. En “La habitación”, el primer cuento que abre la brevísima colección, se narra la vida de una hija que vuelve al Caribe desde Galicia para cuidar de sus padres envejecientes. “Accidentes”, el segundo cuento, habla de las anécdotas que cuenta Malena, una señora que limpia apartamentos, sobre los habitantes de una comunidad donde vive la narradora del relato. El último cuento, “Memoria de Guille” es casi un poema sobre un personaje fascinante, el típico viejito achacoso que descubre los límites de su cuerpo, lo que no invalida para nada su proclividad al deseo: “Guille, en la soltura de su vejez y a pleno día, quedaba quieto debajo de cualquier palo de jobos y entre el claroscuro de las ramas repentinamente surgían senos de hembras de diversas formas y color. Tanto seno le excitaba la memoria y alteraba la razón y la paz del día…”
Lourdes Vázquez es conocida por su poesía y su narrativa, la que le valió el prestigioso Premio Juan Rulfo de cuento (Francia) en el 2002. Su literatura tiene un centro solar: la problemática de la mujer contemporánea en sus relaciones con la familia tradicional que ha querido siempre alienar la identidad femenina al espacio privado de la casa. Vázquez crea, a través de su escritura, mujeres reales y fuertes que cuestionan estas artimañas que el patriarcado ha querido tenderle siempre a lo femenino.
“La habitación”, el primer cuento de Tres relatos y un infortunio, aborda la tensión cultural entre madres e hijas. La mirada que nos ofrece la narradora hacia la relación tensa que una hija tiene con su madre envejeciente es reveladora. El lenguaje delata esta tensión: “¿De dónde sale la fortaleza física de este esqueleto?”. La narradora protagonista nos pinta una imagen de la madre que va más allá de las visiones idealistas que tenemos del concepto de la maternidad. Aquí “el esqueleto” es la madre de la protagonista, y mantiene su autoridad matriarcal ante la visita de una hija ilegítima de su esposo. La crítica a la costumbre nada ortodoxa del macho caribeño que tiene hijos fuera del matrimonio humillando a su esposa ante la sociedad es mordaz. O así lo entiende la madre cuando dice: “…en esta familia las únicas hijas que existen son las mías”, afirmando su lugar de esposa legítima en el orden de las cosas. Para la hija, sin embargo, es la negación de conocer a otra hermana habida fuera del matrimonio. El rasgo que más destaca de este cuento es la distancia que toma la narradora protagonista al alejarse de la familia, y al optar por “construir mi mitología, para poder dar a mis hijos la esperma de donde puedan agarrarse”. Ella no será una madre castradora como la suya, sino que construirá su propia “mitología” más allá del seno materno y le dará a su prole esa “esperma” de la que “puedan agarrarse” para pisar firme.
“Accidentes” es un relato en el que se instala el rumor como protagonista. Malena nos cuenta, a través de la voz de la narradora, las historias de las personas que viven en un edificio de apartamentos que la misma Malena limpia, y al hacerlo, tiene un acceso ilimitado a la intimidad de sus ocupantes: “Malena me contó más tarde que le preguntó al viudo, qué va a hacer con la ropa de la difunta y el viudo respondió, ‘no sé’”. La diégesis o la narración se da de manera oblicua: de Malena, a la narradora, a nosotros: “No era muy fashionista la profe, me dijo Malena. ¡Qué buen corazón tienes Malena!, le contesté”. En este pasaje vemos el comentario de la narradora acerca de Malena y las palabras mismas de ella así como el comentario dirigido a los lectores por parte de la narradora. Todo un circuito de diégesis o narración que comienza con la primera mención del personaje en el cuento: “Todo esto me lo contó Malena mientras limpiaba mi apartamento”. Aquí Lourdes Vázquez se acerca a esa comunidad de mujeres que hablan entre sí y comentan la vida o los “accidentes” de los otros, acorde con el título del cuento en cuestión. Hasta que Malena desaparece con una sola nota: “No haga preguntas sobre mi paradero. Que sirva ésta para despedirme. He sufrido un grave accidente”. El desconcierto de la narradora protagonista la lleva a reflexionar sobre esta poética del infortunio que aquí nos ocupa: “Miré por la ventana, la gente caminaba con paso rápido y ojos de sospecha como temiendo una desgracia”.
“Memoria de Guille” en su brevedad y su efectividad es tal vez el cuento mejor logrado de la serie, no sólo por la ternura con que Lourdes Vázquez construye el personaje desde la dedicatoria (“Ay! Guille, me haces falta”), hasta la caracterización del viejito “dressed to kill” o vestido para matar, a la hora de alistarse para “su visita médica”: “Y ahora, Guille vestido con guayabera y pantalón haciendo juego. Perfumado con Old Spice, ya está listo… Vestido de inglés en expedición geográfica, vestido como un reparador de sillas eléctricas, o como un cowboy el día de su boda. Vestido Guille con gafas de Versace…”
Los achaques típicos de los viejitos a cierta edad, lo que recuerda al padre postrado en la cama del primer cuento, “La habitación”, es el paradigma que trabaja Lourdes Vázquez en este breve texto, donde la caracterización de un solo personaje clave, Don Guille, es el orden de la narración. El signo Guille encarna ese infortunio mismo que es la edad y la vejez, pero poetizado aquí por medio de las descripciones del individuo, que pese a la decadencia de su cuerpo enfermo, se viste de guayabera y pantalón “haciendo juego”, a la caribeña, llevando gafas de marca Versace. El título del cuento, “Memoria de Guille”, lo dice todo. Es el recuerdo, la imagen del tiempo detenido en un cuerpo disfrazado, como acaba la historia.

Tres relatos y un infortunio es, pues, la nueva entrega que nos hace Lourdes Vázquez como una filigrana. La edición en libro de bolsillo color naranja es como un folleto de viaje, palabra, narración y poesía, que nos acerca a tres historias sostenidas sobre el hilo fatídico del infortunio y su poética.

Daniel Torres*

· Spanish and Latin American Studies Professor at Ohio University.
· Lourdes Vázquez latest are Cibeles que sueña= Cybele, As She Dreams, Artist Book by Yarisa Colón Torres; the anthology Cuando narradoras latinoamericanas narran en los Estados Unidos (Ross, 2009) and the script: A Porcelain Doll with Violet Eyes Staring into Space=Una muñeca de cerámica con ojos violetas (Wheelhouse, 2009).

Written by Phaedra Pinkston
 
Arising NYC poet Puma Perl newly released poetry book, “Knuckle Tatoos” accounts the artist’s exploration from the hard knocks of self liquidation to personal fulfillment. 
 
The Brooklyn native grew up being  inspired by the beatnicks of the 1950s and keeps busy performing open at open mic nights in lower Manhattan and postings on her inventive online blog http://pumaperl.blogspot.com/ 
 
Perl chose the title because much like tatoos, she feels the past is something one can never hide or erase.  This is not the poet’s first published works, “Belinda and Her Friends” was Perl’s first collection of poetry published in 2004.  The author describes the book as more character driven poems. 
 
Knuckle Tatoos can be found at St. Marks Bookstore in Manhattan and Amazon.com

Review by Bonny Finberg

I just finished watching Sheldon and Diane Rochlin’s  powerful 1968 film “DOPE.” It documents a unique world and time through the lens of London 1967.
There was an international cabal at that time of artists, junkies, hippies and other unclassifiable characters on the periphery that fueled a a new world order before that became a term for something sinister. The zeitgeist of sex, drugs and rock and roll was just a manifestation of something deeper. And because this something was partially about testing the limits of limits, it was bound to get out of control.
A candid and intimate view of London at the height of the ‘60‘s, when “the world (was) embracing a new consciousness” as someone in the film puts it, we see brief appearances by Marianne Faithfull, “Doctor Robert”, Chet Helms, the exterior of Alex Trocchi’s Karma Sigma, the boutique “Granny Takes a Trip”, The Roundhouse, UFO, live footage of legendary English bands, the first macrobiotic restaurant in London and a film screening at Better Books.

As it’s central focus, “DOPE” follows a waifish girl named Caroline around London with her friends, who are mostly concerned with shooting up. They spend their hours in a kind of spacey playgroup, listening to music, sometimes making art, dancing to records, strolling through the park and staring at the moon. There is a naive charm to their wide-eyed openness to the next beautiful thing, the next sensory pleasure. But a repetitive hunt for the next fix or new drug cocktail becomes their primary occupation. Witness Caroline’s initial guilessness about her explorations. Essentially, we see her questioning a friend about the nuances of different drug states, for example, what cocaine feels like and can he get her some. What begins as occasional use ultimately becomes a full-blown addiction. Caroline’s curiosity is transformed into an urgent preoccupation which triggers a series of sordid negotiations. Standing inside a phone booth, we see her self-respect slowly erode as she persists in trying to obtain what she needs from her sister, Prue who lives nearby with her junkie boyfriend, Tony. Prue tells her she’s expecting friends for dinner. Caroline’s questions and insistence poignantly reveal not only her desperation but also her sense of relative insignificance in her sister’s life. In the end she convinces her and goes to get what she needs. During her visit Tony discusses the ins and outs of treatment centers and the excellent smack to be had through these programs. It should be noted that at that time, heroin was legal in England with a prescription. Junkies were technically not a criminal class and there was a continuum of all types and frequencies of drug use. A previous title for this film was “Boots at Midnight” which refers to the chemists shop where junkies would gather at midnight to fill their prescriptions.
Among the other characters are Casey and his girlfriend Diane, who is pregnant. We follow them as they try to get a van together in which they can live & travel.  Casey gets into heroin following in the steps of his psychic mentor Geno an accomplished musician who died a gruesome death at a young age. His tale figures prominently in the film, told by one of the voiceovers. We also hear Geno singing “Cocaine”as a refrain throughout the film.
Another couple. Chris and Sharon and their baby Maria, are from San Francisco. We see Chris on the phone trying to set up deals in an unnamed business that he’s involved in. Seeming more middle class than the others, at least on the surface, they have a house in Fomenterra, and  Sharon’s main occupations are buying things, taking acid and dancing at Pink Floyd concerts.

Diane Rochlin, who now goes by the name Flame Schon, is a master of editing and in “DOPE” creates a dynamic tension between the characters and their surroundings. Sound and image combine in a multi-layered texture, creating a third dimension within the frame. A heightened disorientation and sensory flooding engages the viewer in the characters’ altered states. To the filmmakers’ credit, this is achieved without the usual shenanigans used in many preceding films, some of which have become something of a nostalgic joke beginning with the black and white spirals of Lost Weekend. More than “Pull My Daisy” in color, it reaches even further, and by the end of the film the drugs have transmuted the innocence of these young dreamers and seekers into something much darker. The stoned intellectual games of Corso, Ginsberg and Rivers were played raucously and with much humor, while the games here have a more desperate frenzy and the humor always has a tinge of irony.

The Rochlins, who incidentally were friends with the five main characters and lived with them during the shoot, were silent and invisible nearly 100% of the time, and spare us the interference of a point of view. This allows wide birth to decide for oneself whether these are spoiled children or enlightened beings. At times they appear shallow and self-consumed, at others, poignantly courageous in their willingness to go to the edge for no other reason than the journey. Of course 1967 was a time when anything was game among a large peer group. The counter-culture had become so large that it had become it’s own subsystem of the larger hierarchy, with the same constructs of power and status. Power is as universal as birth and death. The economics of the drug world were no different than any other capitalist engine and supply was tied to the junkie’s demand even in London at a time when one could register and obtain clean needles and all the smack necessary to avoid cold turkey. At the same time, there was still a stigma and even in this comparatively liberal view of drug addiction there were consequences. The authorities, most importantly the medical profession, might think you were malingering, not admit you to an emergency room and leave you to die at home. Geno Foreman, whose untimely death is described in all it’s grim details by his friends, was a known and respected musician who had played with Bob Dylan among others and was a registered addict. Writhing in agony and throwing up his own shit because of an undiagnosed stomach obstruction, the hospital refused to admit him. After a few days, with his frantic wife doing all she could to no avail, he died a horrible death. Nevertheless, life among his friends went on. The junkie’s life was deemed better at a time when anything “outlaw” was good and anything “conventional” was bad. Conventional logic was you took care of your body and mind and believed “everything in moderation.” So, it was simply a matter of doing the opposite just to prove you could get away with it.
Each scene brought back a time when apartments and urban park meadows smelled like rose incense, patchouli oil and hashish. Everyone had good skin. You could be a junkie and be kind of beautiful about it, teeth still in your head, death far enough in the future that it might seem romantic to see how far before you destroy yourself, maybe die young and become legend. It could be justified if you called yourself an artist so almost everybody had a sketchbook or notebook with druggy scribblings or some stringed thing that they plucked badly.

One of the most disturbing aspects of this unfolding story is the presence of children. Their presence makes a strong impact on anyone who’s had the fortune to have one. I was once offered junk by a friend, but envisioned my 8 year old son waiting at home and decided against it. For me, the babies in this film, parents shooting up as casually as they changed diapers, seemed to be standing dangerously close to the third rail. Watching these infants and toddlers in the punctured arms of their parents made me sad, angry and afraid. I couldn’t help but wonder what became of them. And their parents.

Many of the people in this film seemed to move through a world of their own making, managing to keep themselves in drugs, real estate and plane fare. Some were genuinely broke or worked at menial jobs, but little of this is emphasized in the film. The insularity of their social milieu was most striking during one sequence when Caroline spends an afternoon in the country walking and conversing with an old upperclass man at a fox hunt who has much to say about “The Jews.” He tells her the fox doesn’t much mind and that when he ‘was in Egypt you could “give a wog a kick up the arse” and nothing to pay.” This qualifies as one of the funniest scenes in the film.
In one conversation with the filmmaker, Sharon speaks about her and Chris’s house on Formenterra, a tiny island a short ferry ride from Ibiza. It was only $8 a month. This was during Franco’s Spain when you could buy a decent bottle of wine for fifty cents. She paused, giggled and then said that she wanted to rent another house on the island and another and another and just spend five years going from one house to the other.

   I knew many people like the ones in this film and kept expecting to see someone I knew appear in the frame. Some of them died. Some of them lived exhausted boring lives. Some of them got straight and did great things. Some of them stayed high and did even greater things.
When writing this, I took another look at “Pull My Daisy.” What struck me was the joy. The stoned playfulness of a generation earlier had a different shade. There was a candid hedonism, a spiritedness in these poets, musicians and painters of New York bohemians in the 1950’s that seemed to be missing in the lives of Caroline and her friends. Perhaps it was the romance of this earlier time that inspired the generation of   Hippies depicted in “DOPE”. Much of their carousing seemed a desperate attempt to fulfill a fantasy about themselves. But both films are exquisite documents of a time and place: films that never get old, that reveal new truths when watching them for the third, forth, or even, tenth time. “Dope” is the chronicle of a time when many of us thought that this is where the world would find its soul and everything would always be the way it was and the way it was was eternal and we were immortal.

“DOPE” was shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975. It has been screened at different times at festivals or special screenings and has become an underground classic, something of a collector’s item among its cult following. Unfortunately, you can only see it in its entirety on DVD. It can be ordered from Flame Schon directly at: themoviedope@gmail.com
Official website: http://www.dopethemovie.net/

“DOPE” will be screened in full on May 30th, 2010 at the
HIP DEATH GODESS FESTIVAL in London.
(Read an excerpt about the festival from the Shindig Magazine article below)

A celebration of the psychedelic and surreal through live performance, film and projection will take place at the end of May.Hip Death Goddess features live music sets from contemporary bands Wolf People and The Lucid Dream, plus a selection of avant-garde films by Kenneth Anger and a screening of the unreleased 1968 documentary “DOPE” by Sheldon Rochlin and Diane Rochlin (Flame Schon). There will also be an invocation of the Hip Death Goddess - with dances performed by Ultra Violet Violence conjuring manifestations of the subconscious mind.
The event is hosted within the Bedford’s circular ‘Globe Theatre’, lit by the Bardo Light Show’s hand-manipulated oils and chemical slides, and accompanied by an ongoing psychedelic soundtrack from the last 50 years.
Sunday 30th May, 3pm-11pm, Globe Theatre at The Bedford, 77 Bedford Hill, Balham SW12 9HD. Train/tube: Balham. £8 Entry.
For further information about this event email:info@hipdeathgoddess.org