Another Day at the ICA

I shouldn't stop off anywhere on a morning I have a performance, but I had a feeling. I believe in that stuff -- not seeing angels or hearing voices, but hunches. And my hunch was right, because I scored a Frosty and a Rudolph made out of melted plastic chips. I have an Easter Bunny and a lavender egg already; these will go along perfectly. Only I'm so late now, I won't have time to add them to the installation today.

I've got to get into my singlet, which is what I wear for the piece. I thought a red one would suggest a Soviet/Olympic image, which has nothing to do with the piece really, except at Simon of Cyrene, where I talk about donating Bibles to Russia. I also settled on a singlet because it shows off the body I bought from Bally for $40/month over the past year and a half. Not that that has anything to do with the piece either, but it is my life, and I'm entitled to use it in my art.

The yarmulke I wear is one of the, quote, controversial elements of the performance. It's only controversial because I am not myself Jewish, but I met with an ADL guy who determined that since I don't desecrate the yarmulke, or Judaism in any way, they wouldn't denounce the piece. He even wrote a column about it in a local newsletter, saying the confrontation of yarmulke and cross was perhaps the heart of the piece.

It's called, "The Truth Will Set You Free, but First It Will Make You Miserable." What I do, in this very limited space, is a series of monologes while walking the stations of the cross. While chained to the floor. I had to make some alterations, because the ICA's space is rectangular, and the chain effect works better in a circle.

My stations are made from stuff I got at Christmas Tree Shoppes. I decided to leave the tags on where I could. It was October when I bought them; that's why there's sort of an orange-and-black theme to them. I thought that would be controversial too, because I am not Catholic either. Fact is, I was raised Quaker, but that doesn't make for good art.

Not that we don't have our spiritual moments. I once saw a rainbow while coming out of a curve on Storrow Drive. For a second I actually thought it was a special effects the Pops had arranged for a concert. When I remembered that rainbows are real, I burst into tears. But you write a story like that to your Nana. It doesn't exactly "challenge."

"The Truth..." is more complicated than that, and it's far more performance than art. The complete piece takes 90 minutes, so most people have never seen it all. I had a friend do some time studies to determine the average length of viewing. Five minutes. He said the average time at paintings was 50 seconds. So I shouldn't complain.

Norman Deeks, whose show got closed down in Providence, used to say you have to let the art tell you what it wants. When we were in the Visual & Performing Arts program, he used to get a lot of grief for not representing African-American influences in his work. But what was the guy going to do -- he was a Black man in Vermont. He was grateful people came to his shows at all.

For the Providence show, he put out all the traditional imagery -- Kente, Egyptian, Harlem Renaissance. A giant photography collage of Black faces came with a palette of skin tones and a sign that read "How Black Are You?" By my own reckoning, I am the shade of Julian Bond.

What started the commotion was his Comments book, which took a turn for the bizarre just a few days into the show, but went unnoticed for over a week. Someone had written something hateful, then someone wrote back. Before too long, there was the Dialogue on Race going on right there in the Bannister Gallery, and Deeks went wild over it. He built a stand for it. had it lit. Added 20 felt-tip pens and called it, "You Know What THEY'RE Like."

One picket line, 10 editorials, and a rock-throwing incident later, and an RIC spokesman declared live on the channel Four News that he "didn't need this shit."

Maybe the art can't always get what it wants.

I ran into Deeks about a month ago, at the dry cleaning counter. That is, he was behind the counter, in a knit shirt embroidered with a Sarni Cleaners "S," and I was on the other side with an armload of shirts. There's no pretending not to recognize him, so I tried, "How's it goin'?" And he pointed to a toothpaste smudge on one of the sleeves and asked, "And what's the nature of this stain?"

At VAPA we used to say, in situations like that, "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din."

Given the circumstances, I didn't try it on Norman Deeks.

Nearer My God to Thee

The Armenian Library & Museum of America boasts the largest collection of Armenian artifacts in the United States. The collection fits within a 3-story building next to the Police Station, but is no less impressive for it. Coins thousands of years old, ancient weapons, re-created churches, and a memorial to the 1.5 million exterminated during WWI. Above the articles from nay-sayers claiming the genocide never happened, is a quote from Hitler, "After all, who remembers the extermination of Armenians anymore?"

What visitors have come to see today is the Jack Kervorkian art. It is hard to know whether people expected the vivid Frida Kahlo-style expressions of pain or pathology, or the striking indignities inflicted on God while trying to take His side. The gallery notes are written by Kervorkian himself, in a blithering manifesto that shows off his vocabulary more than his ethics or passion. No one speaks.

Being raised the child of genocide survivors, immigrants, and a lifelong pathologist, one comes to the end of each day with a different attitude about life and death than the rest of us do. He may have done more for visually expressing physical pain than any artist in the 20th Century, besides perhaps Kahlo herself. It is a shame his reputation as a legal gadfly will eclipse his reputation as an artist.

Advanced List Mangement

"Habit is just a disciplined obsession," ~~ me
"Moses, write this down." ~~ Him

To Dos: whatever paper can be reached without moving
Brainstorm list in the order that things come to mind. Re-order according to a reasonable map that avoids backtracking.
If a weekend list, divide by day.

Groceries: right hand kitchen drawer
Write it down when it runs out. Food on the left; non-food on the right.

Netflix: saved in favorites
Whatever the load will bear. Rearrange as often as suits the mood.Occasionally scroll the list and reorder 1-12 from the lower end of the list without heed to what is picked.
Read Friends' lists and repress urge to do same.

Booklist: spiral notebook, nightstand drawer
Any of several rituals may be followed, depending on the library, and other books on the nightstand. Since the nightstand is usually non-fiction, fiction gets priority on the booklist. Non-fiction marked with a +, fiction not marked.
Sample options for picking the next book:
Open notebook to any page and start at the top...
Actually start at the beginning...
Start at the end...
Pick one row in the fiction section and confine choices to list items which fall in this area... [How Sons & Lovers got the call just yesterday]
Note the first number you see when you walk into the library and use that to determine page, line, or combination of the same...
When the book is completed, write the mm/yy next to the title. If the book was not worth finishing, strike it out. (Begone, disappointing book!)

Amazon Wishlist: they keep it
This is not a serious list. This is a true wish list, like circling horses in the paper. But people can shop from it, and that's nice.

Letter Basket: bookshelf
There is the regular rotation... and the response rotation. Pour a drink; this one is not for the normal.The rotation is a list of recipients, followed in order. One per day, generally, but not exclusively. That is to say... there must be one, but there need not be only one.
Letters received are in the response rotation, which supercedes a recipient's place in the regular rotation. BUT... responses can not fully displace the regular rotation, or people will fall woefully behind. So, the "next" letter is from the regular rotation, unless the last one was, in which case, go the the response rotation. (In other words, "every other one," a pleasing enough pattern when you don't specify it like a computer command.)

This List: appeared in my head driving home.

My sister keeps all of her spices in a cardboard box under her sink. But we love each other anyway.

Reading is FundaMENTAL

It takes parents some time to get used to Mark, the children’s librarian, before they trust his recommendations, or even his approach, to their children. Spindly, thick-spectacled, like a Jerry Lewis character, with a highpitched ebullient voice (“Hiii, Nicky!”) and a librarian’s social awkwardness that comes across as over-excited in him, downright curt in Cindy, the head librarian. But he remembers the kids, and the books they like. He helps them as full-fledged patrons, and since they are bookish kids themselves, they say, “Can you help me find something, Mark?” And he says, “Suurre!”

Nicky’s mom asks if he has enough books for the weekend. “Because I don’t want you sitting around doing nothing,” she says.

Mark says, with a gasp, as if he is nine himself, “Ooo, did I tell you about the Legends of Ballard?”

“That’s not the one with the animals, is it?” Mom says impatiently, as her smaller children wrestle for the stroller seat.

“It’s not the animal one,” Mark says, in a tone that suggests Mom might be his Language Arts teacher.

But Nicky jumps in:
“I know that one. The kids play dirty tricks.” Mom hums her disapproval.

“Ohhh..” says contrite Mark, quietly, “…we don’t want any dirty tricks.” His face puckers up around his nose. “Encyclopedia Brown. Did you like those?” Nicky has wandered into the shelves. When he returns with a selection, his mother says,

“He needs something more challenging. For his vocabulary.” The toddlers are both tipping back the stroller. “Stop it.” She says. “Nicky, go with Mark and pick out some things. Four books.” She shows him the number. She passes in front of the circulation desk, avoiding Cindy’s piercing stare. Cindy does not think children who can not read belong in a library.

At the “New and Recommended” shelf, Nicky’s Mom sizes up the collection. “When are you going to recommend something again?” she says in Cindy’s direction.

The stout librarian, who loves romance books series as much as her embroidered sweaters, joins Nicky’s mom in front of the thick potboilers. She knows all these authors, and which books are “her newest one,” and what order to read them in. She begins handing them over, declaring this one “so funny,” and this one “real good.” And “her, I just love. I’ve read them all.”

“What’s that one where she’s looking for a husband?”

“They’re always looking for a husband.”

In the end, Nicky chose Vols. 1, 2, and 3 of a kid’s version of Robinson Crusoe. His mother chose nothing.

Susan Sontag Goes to the Gym

This occurs to me as I glance up over the Vanity Fair on the handles of the stationary bike and glimpse my reflection in the mirror. The gray streak is new, and not as cool as hers was. With my hair in a ponytail, my face looks square, my ears tacked on as an afterthought, much too large for my head. Susan Sontag's ponytail would have looked marvelous, her white stripe a badge of courage, linking her mind to her body.

She wouldn't read, I decide, and let the fat magazine fall to the floor. She would work her mind as well, stimulated by the whirr of pedals and the wail of Deborah Harry. Sontag studies human nature from the seat of her bike, smirking at who wipes down the equipment and who does not.

When she squeezes her legs together in the thigh press, she does not distract herself from the unfortuante stirrup image. She stares herself down in the mirror and tries out turns of phrase.

She would make much of the men who straddle the bench of the shoulder press and pump up a red-faced grunting lather, then hurl themselves from their machines between reps, leaving them stagnant, sweat-stained in the wet spot. They strut a few feet away, snapping their necks from side to side, always keeping a watchful eye on the apparatus -- still, for the time being, their territory.

I like to think of a feminist coffeehouse in heaven, where Sontag was pouring 2 glasses of wine when Betty Friedan walked in. Betty flops into a chair and says, "Oh, things just got crazier after you left." And Sontag says, "It expands... it fill the space available." They touch glasses and stay there all night, and nobody misses the gym.