* (restored)
‘In performance art, usually one or more people perform in front of an audience. Performance artists often challenge the audience to think in new and unconventional ways about theater and performing, break conventions of traditional performing arts, and break down conventional ideas about “what art is,” a preoccupation of modernist experimental theater and of postmodernism. Thus, even though in most cases the performance is in front of an audience, in some cases, notably in the later works of Allan Kaprow, the audience members become the performers.
‘The performance may be scripted, unscripted, or improvisational. It may incorporate music, dance, song, or complete silence. Art-world performance has often been an intimate set of gestures or actions, lasting from a few minutes to many hours, and may rely on props or avoid them completely. Performance may occur in transient spaces or in galleries, room, theaters or auditoriums.
‘Despite the fact that many performances are held within the circle of a small art-world group, RoseLee Goldberg notes, in Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present that “performance has been a way of appealing directly to a large public, as well as shocking audiences into reassessing their own notions of art and its relation to culture. Conversely, public interest in the medium, especially in the 1980s, stemmed from an apparent desire of that public to gain access to the art world, to be a spectator of its ritual and its distinct community, and to be surprised by the unexpected, always unorthodox presentations that the artists devise.”’ — John Stockwell, NYT
____________
Selected venues
The Kitchen
Performance Space 122
Franklin Furnace
Dixon Place
Danspace
Dance Theater Workshop
ABC No Rio
The Performing Garage
La MaMa Experimental Theatre
8BC
The Pyramid
Club 57
King Tut’s Wah-Wah Hut
Chandalier
Darinka
____________
Further reading
* C. Carr On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century (Wesleyan, 1993)
* Roselee Goldberg Performance: Live Art Since 1960 (Harry N. Abrams, 1998)
* Brandon Stosuy Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992 (NYU Press, 2006)
* Marvin Taylor The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984 (Princeton University Press, 2005)
* Sarah Schulman and Chris Tyler on Their Generations
* Sally Banes Subversive Expectations: Performance Art and Paratheater in New York, 1976-85 (University of Michigan Press)
* Linda M. Montano Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties (University of California Press)
_____
Brief History
‘New York in the 1970s was a dismal place with high crime and abandoned real estate. Yet it was there that performance art was born with artists claiming space, mostly in lofts and outside major institutions. Artists played with objects, defied conventional stories, created dances from arbitrary movements and ignored the need to entertain. They performed in front of small audiences, often just their friends and other artists, unnoticed for the most part by popular culture.
‘Performance art pioneer Jack Smith is mostly known as a cult figure today, as is Stuart Sherman whose “spectacles” involved his almost slapstick use of ordinary objects, obsessively touched and handled, at a frenetic pace. Richard Foreman, whose Ontological-Hysteric Theater still exists, would set off clanging alarms to mark scenes and create sets as significant as any of his performers. John Zorn, who emerged as a important experimental music composer, was known for his Theater of Musical Optics, tiny objects like matches or doll house props, that he set up in grids and videotaped. These vastly different artists shared an absurdist sensibility, using the most modest of means to awaken audiences to new possibilities.
‘Unlike the Happenings of the 1960s, these works did not involve audience participation, nor did they evince the kind of hippie optimism which imagined that art could change the world. Instead, there is a strong streak of paranoia or cynicism running much of the work, such as Vito Acconci’s stalking of random pedestrians, and Mike Kelley’s routine of absurd tasks. Humor is also a key element, as in Mike Smith’s Baby Ikki encountering a police officer on a city street, or the Kipper Kids messily fighting in a boxing ring. Yvonne Rainer’s most famous work, this is the story of a woman who…, was performed for the first time in 1973. Using autobiographical material, Rainer told the story of Yvonne Rainer, using voice-over, live action, and projected slides and text. It blurred the distinction between art and life.
‘These artists laid the groundwork for the East Village of the 1980s, with venues such as 8BC and the Pyramid Club featuring acts with lots of transgression. No longer stumbling into unrenovated lofts, the audience learned that performance art was hip, outrageous and entertaining in its own idiosyncratic way.’ — Time Out (NYC)
___
15
Tim Miller
‘Since moving to New York at the age of 19 to pursue his interests in art and performance, Miller has not only been presenting his own work but also facilitating the development and presentation of other artists’ work. At 21, he became part of the small group that founded one of New York’s most important alternative performance spaces, PS122. Later, when he moved back to his home state of California in the early 1990s, he helped found yet another alternative space in Los Angeles, Highways.’ — Hyperallergic
My Queer Body (1992)
Ishmael Houston-Jones
‘Ishmael Houston-Jones started dancing in the abandoned NYC Public School 122 in 1979; using the newly formed weekly Open Movement nights to meet collaborators, dancers, friends, and lovers. Ishmael and a band of like-minded art rebels that included Yvonne Meier, Stephanie Skura, Stephanie Doba, Frank Conversano, Fred Holland, Jennifer Miller, Robin Epstein, Mark Russell, John Bernd (RIP) as well as directors Charles Dennis, Tim Miller, Peter Rose and Moulton formed the early informal core of what became Performance Space 122. As a choreographer and performer Ishmael Houston-Jones’ early work used movement and text to address issues of race, sexuality, and the AIDS crisis. Houston-Jones and Fred Holland shared a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie Award” for their Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders. Works Houston-Jones premiered at Performance Space 122 include: THEM and Knife/Tape/Rope, both of which were collaborations with novelist Dennis Cooper. He also appeared at Performance Space 122 in the work of Holland, Meier, Bernd, Cathy Weis, DD Dorvillier, Terry Fox, Rotozaza and DANCENOISE. As a teacher at the American Dance Festival, The Eugene Lang College at the New School, the Center for New Dance Development in Holland, and many other schools and festivals, Houston Jones has nurtured continuing generations of radical dance makers.’ — Broadway World
Fred Holland & Ishmael Houston-Jones, 1983
Penny Arcade
‘Penny Arcade Aka Susana Ventura is an internationally respected performance artist, writer , poet and experimental theatre maker known for her magnetic stage presence, her take no prisoners wit and her content rich plays and one liners. She is the author of ten scripted performance plays and hundreds of performance art pieces. Her work has always focused on the other and the outsider, giving voice to those marginalized by society. Her willingness to speak truth to power at the expense of career concerns has made her an international icon of artistic resistance. Her decades long focus on the creation of community and inclusion as the goals of performance and her efforts to use performance as a transformative act mark her as a true original in American theatre and performance.’ — pa.tv
excerpt from Penny Arcade’s “True Stories”
Tehching Hsieh
‘The performance artist Tehching Hsieh has isolated himself in a barren, caged room, making no contact with the outside world; lived and slept on the streets of New York, avoiding any form of shelter; and tied himself to fellow artist Linda Montano with a rope—each piece lasting for an entire year. (“Life is a life sentence; life is passing time, life is free thinking,” he has said, suggesting the stoic philosophy that guided these radical, time-based performances and others of the late 1970s through the ’90s.) Yet, despite having undergone these extraordinary performative endurance tests, Hsieh is often excluded from major texts on conceptual and performance art and, strangely, remained relatively unknown until he quit making art altogether.’ — artsy.net
Outside Again is a short documentary on Tehching Hsieh’s performances
Carmelita Tropicana
‘Carmelita Tropicana has been performing in New York’s downtown arts scene since the 1980s, straddling the worlds of performance art and theater in the U.S., Latin America and Europe with her irreverent humor, subversive fantasy and bilingual puns. She received an Obie for Sustained Excellence in Performance (1999) and is a recipient of the Performance and Activism Award from the Women in Theater Program / American Theater in Higher Education (2015). Notable and recent works include: Schwanze-Beast (2015), a performance commissioned by Vermont Performance Lab; Recycling Atlantis (2014), a performance installation at 80WSE Gallery; Post Plastica (2012), an installation/video and performance presented at El Museo del Barrio; and the highly anthologized Milk of Amnesia (1994). Her publications include the book, co-edited with Holly Hughes, Memories of the Revolution: The First Ten Years of the WOW Café (University of Michigan Press, 2015). Tropicana has taught at numerous universities and sits on the Board of Directors at Performance Space 122 and NYFA.’ — ct.com
Carmelita Tropicana Sample
Pat Oleszko
‘Performance artist Pat Oleszko makes a spectacle of herself—and doesn’t mind if you laugh. With elaborate handmade costumes and props, she utilizes the body as armature for ideas in an array of lampoons that call her audience to action. From the personal to the political, her performances and installations ceremoniously exorcize through humor. Hoisting an enormous burning bra on the exterior of the Women’s Studies Research Center, the exhibition Fool for Thought highlights costumes and performances from a wild variety of events including Hello Folly: The Floes & Cons of Arctic Drilling, Oldilocks and the Bewares, Stalking Walking Topiary and The Pat and the Hats. Oleszko, self-identified as the Fool in question and the questioning Fool, fans the flames with rousing absurdity and maintains that she who laughs, lasts.’ — brandeis.edu
Four/Shortened Works
Hapi Phace
What ever happened to Hapi Phace? The drag queen from the 80s – yes, in NYC. Anyone know? Is s/he till in NYC? I used to think Hapi Phace was hilarious. Lives with a doctor on an old farmhouse in Sharon Springs now. Hapi Phace moved to Boston a few years ago. Well, if anyone knows him…tell him someone in NY misses him!
Hapi Phace does her Comedy Monologue at The Pyramid Club
Eric Bogosian
‘Bogosian is an author and actor known for his plays Talk Radio and subUrbia as well as numerous one-man shows. Between 1980 and 2000, six major solos written and performed by Eric Bogosian were produced Off-Broadway, garnering him three Obie Awards as well as the Drama Desk award. His first two solos, Men Inside and funHouse were presented at the New York Shakespeare Festival. His third, Drinking in America, was produced by American Place Theater. Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead and Wake Up and Smell the Coffee were all produced commercially Off-Broadway by Frederick Zollo. In addition to Bogosian’s touring the United States and Europe, the solos have been produced featuring other actors in Argentina, Brazil, Italy and Poland.’ — collaged
Eric Bogosian “Medicine” (1994)
Spalding Gray
‘Spalding Gray detailed the minutiae of his neuroses, fears, experiences, and desires through his cutting and dry self-deprecating humor. An actor, playwright, and novelist, Gray came into his own with the 1987 film adaptation of his monologue Swimming to Cambodia. The spare set included Gray sitting at a table with a pitcher of water and a drinking glass with a map of Cambodia behind him while he detailed parts of his personal history with a history of the Khmer Rouge and its impact on the people of Cambodia. Author Francine Prose described the power of Gray’s monologues to Bruce Weber of the New York Times, “He transformed darkness into dark comedy.”‘ — EoWB
Terrors of Pleasure (1988)
Alexis del Lago
‘A short documentary, directed by Craig Calman and alternately called He Made Herself a Star, is a marvelous peek into the bygone world of a quietly fading goddess. The ever-alluring drag legend Alexis Del Lago has been beguiling clubgoers for decades. I remember meeting her in the ’80s and even then she seemed a dazzling relic from an earlier age. Here she talks (in a sadly faltering voice) about Warhol and Mapplethorpe (whom she found “tacky”) and shows us the pictures of an incredible life lived to the fullest, on the furthest edges of society. This is our LGBT history,people, and Alexis is a living monument to our culture.’ — WOW
The Exotic Queen Alexis del Lago at the Pyramid Club NYC 1980s
John Bernd
‘In the early 80s, the yet to be named AIDS epidemic was decimating the New York and San Francisco’s large gay male populations. The dance and theater worlds in were particularly hard hit and for the next decade untold numbers of artists were lost until the effective anti-viral medications became widely available in the mid-90s. Among them choreographer John Bernd, who died in 1988 at age 35. Bernd had worked with such dance luminaries as Merce Cunningham and Twyla Tharp, as well as collaborating with other legendary artists from other fields. Bernd founded the improvisational collective Open Movement in Performance Space 122. He received a Bessie Award in 1978 and in 1986, two years before his death, prestigious New York Dance and Performance Award. He was at the height of his creative powers, as a dancer, choreographer, composer and interdisciplinary visual artist.’ — The Dance Journal
TELL ME MOVING (1985)
Holly Hughes
‘Holly Hughes is an internationally acclaimed performance artist whose work maps the troubled fault lines of identity. Her combination of poetic imagery and political satire has earned her wide attention and placed her work at the center of America’s culture wars. Hughes was among the first students to attend The New York Feminist Art Institute, an experiment in progressive pedagogy launched by members of the Heresies Collective. While there, she worked with feminist artists such as Miriam Schapiro and Mary Beth Edelson and participated in performance work at A.I.R. gallery. In the early ’80s, Hughes became part of the Women’s One World Café, also known as the WOW Café, an arts cooperative in the East Village established by an international group of women artists. As the Village gradually became a magnet for the avant-garde art world, WOW served as an incubator for a generation of artists.’ — STAMPS
The Dog and Pony Show (Bring Your Own Pony)
Ralph Lemon
‘Much of Lemon’s success is attributed to his unique ability to express dramatic and emotional content through movement using new art forms. Ralph Lemon is currently the artistic director of Cross Performance Inc. in New York. Lemon strives to invent and be innovative with each performance he creates by conveying different concepts and using different media. The core of Ralph Lemon’s style in his earlier works was atmospherically showcased with strong costumes and props to visually help the audience understand the narrative. By the early 1990s he strayed away from a theatrical style to a more movement oriented style by focusing on the body. Ralph Lemon uses both his art and anthropology backgrounds to influence his choreography, but he refrains from distorting the cultural importance of dance within traditions.’ — collaged
Talking Dance (1997)
Frank Maya
‘Maya was part of John Jesurun’s legendary serial theater piece, Chang in a Void Moon, when it premiered at the Pyramid Club in 1982. His music performances had always verged on theater with interludes of acerbic monologues he called rants. In the mid- 1980s, he began focusing more on his rants, joining a growing cadre of solo performers such as Spalding Grey, Eric Bogosian, and Karen Finley, who were similarly examining American society through a personal lens. He created three hour- long solo performances that tackled pop culture, gender issues, and the mundanity of existence. Thirty years before the current outcry over the lack of minorities in mainstream media, Maya was commenting, “There’s a few movies like Cotton Club where they take all the black actors who’ve been out of work for ten years and put them in the same film… People say, ‘See we’re making progress.’” His acclaimed shows were performed at P.S. 122, La Mama, Dixon Place, the Kitchen, and Lincoln Center’s Serious Fun series. He also toured the mid-Atlantic states and performed in Germany.’ — Vaudevisuals
Recorded at La Mama Theatre on April 20, 1987
Mabou Mines
‘The company began as a resident company at Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in the East Village. In 1986, the company won an Obie Award for Sustained Excellence for its theatrical contributions to the Off-Broadway community. As the company stated in a 1990 press kit, “The artistic purpose of Mabou Mines has been and remains the creation of new theatre pieces from original texts and the theatrical use of existing texts staged from a specific point of view. Each member is encouraged to pursue his or her artistic vision by initiating and collaborating on a wide range of projects of varying styles, developing them from initial concept to final performance. This process is intense and often lengthy. While the director of a Mabou Mines work is responsible for its concept and its basic structure, the ultimate production reflects the concerns and the artistic input of all its collaborators.”‘ — collaged
an excerpt of Mabou Mine’s “Lucia’s Chapters of Coming Forth by Day”
Lady Bunny
‘A fixture of New York night life since the early 1980s, when she moved from Atlanta with her pal RuPaul, Lady Bunny is arguably the city’s reigning drag queen, less a mother hen than a queen bee with plenty of sting. Her signature look — big curves, bigger hair — has endured, as has her act: scowling, spiky comedy, laced with political jabs and honeyed with Southern-fried gregariousness. And while much has changed in L.G.B.T. life over the past 17 years (gay marriage, PrEP, Caitlyn Jenner and “RuPaul’s Drag Race”), Lady Bunny retains the rude and crude spirit that has eroded over the decades, both from downtown Manhattan and from drag itself, now that “Drag Race” has minted a new crop of camera-ready stars.’ — NY Times
Werq the World
*
p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, I had some just the other day with whipped cream. Good stuff. ** Thomas Moronic, Hey, Thomas! There is veggie-friendly jello. I had some the other day. To be honest, it’s not quite the bouncy, delightful experience that the non- jello provides, but it generally does the trick. The thing by me in in the new issue of Richardson is a spread of pages from the ‘Gone’ scrapbook, so if you have that book, you’ve got what’s in the issue. I have a copy of the issue here, but I haven’t cracked it yet. The magazine is kind of kinky hetero trendy in general, but, yeah, it’s a thing. Great to see you, buddy! ** Corey Heiferman, Hi. Glad you dug the show. Thanks for the link the Jello heiress stuff. Wild. What a name! Yeah, I heard about the Netanyahu stuff. What a mess. I’ve never read Amos Oz unless I’m spacing out, but I don’t think so. Might be too trad. for me, but I don’t know. I might wander down and watch the fireworks over the Eiffel Tower on NYE, but that’s about it. Oh, yeah, sure, if you want to translate my poems into Hebrew, etc. That’s very kind of you. Hit me up if you want to talk about it. Thanks! I believe ‘Wrong’ is the only book of mine that’s been translated into Hebrew. I might be wrong, but I think so. Strange that whoever chose that one. Bon day! ** Sypha, Oh, right, jello as an upset stomach’s friend, I remember that. I’m still a non-TV watcher apart from a bit of this and that, so it’s almost all Greek to me. ** Bill, There you go. I vaguely remember jello having a somewhat quelling effect on my upset stomachs when I was wee. Start on a piece! Yay! ** Misanthrope, You giving up sweets for health? Chocolate’s good for health. Well, the dark stuff. That sounds like a very sugary cake right there. Consider that I have now signed up for one of those raspberry champagne cupcakes. Those sound like magic words. It seems to me that doing trade work and rapping would make good bed fellows. Granted, I don’t listen to a lot of rap. Yep, that’s what they say about stopping meds, but I assume it’ll be your good old invisible internal social worker again soon. I’ve never been on meds. Seems weird now that I think about it. Probably because I avoid medical stuff like the plague. Well, it is true that that paragraph of yours is pretty reader friendly, man, but people love that shit, and movies spring from it like Zeus’s head, and it scans, so … cool. ** Steve Erickson, I’m surprised I don’t have a DVD player too. Just laziness mostly. I have seen ‘Savages’ ages ago, and I do remember it seeming to have virtually no relationship to what he’s known for. Great about the freelance break of sorts. There’s a new Deerhunter album? I hope they re-up their game. ** Okay. I managed to restore the second half the NYC performance art post whose first half popped up here a few weeks ago, and that’s your weekend’s entertainment. See you on Monday.
Now available in North America 
*
Hi!!
Huh, I totally lost track of time and thought today’s Friday but… no. Apparently, today’s already Saturday which is kind of sad. So anyway, here I am.
How was your Christmas? Did you do anything special? This year, I had a very peaceful and nice one. I got tons of books, I’m already halfway through my third one since the beginning of my deliciously free days. I finally got my hands on Marilyn Manson’s autobiography. I’m not very, very deeply familiar with his music, I mean I’m not an obsessed fan, but I’m really interested in him as a person, maybe you understand why. What are your thoughts on him?
And about the insane New Year’s Eve party I’m planning… heh, I’m not planning an insane New Year’s Eve party. My dog is hugely terrified of firecrackers so I won’t leave her alone – Anita will join me and maybe we’ll get comfortably drunk, just the two of us. Do you have any plans? Oh and do you ever make New Year’s resolutions?
Oooh and yes again! Did you manage to turn in the script? Are you a free man?
Have a very, very great weekend and see you soon, Dennis!!
P.S.: what an amazing post today! I’m off to see a friend in a few moments but I’ll definitely come back for every last word/second of this! Thank you!
Great stuff today. It all seems so long ago and far away now. Great people, great work.
Check out Rex Reed’s 2018 necrology I’d been wondering about Pat Marshall — Larry Gelbart’s wife who played the “heavy” (in a manner of speaking ) in “Good News”
She gets slyly dissed in this great number
Dear Dennis, wanting to wish you all best for 2019, hoping it will be less harsh. Thx for citing Men and Apparitions on your 2018 list. Made me happy. Not sure where to go now…Hoping to get to Paris, in 2019. Again, I loved yours and Zac’s film. xxlynne
Kegston, Hey! I loved your Xmas story, man! It was the only Xmas gift I got, and it was plenty. Really? I always think every year is going to be amazing. And it usually is. But I don’t think I will that to happen necessarily. My friend John, who has a cameo in ‘PGL’ — he’s the guy whose photos are the subject of the roadside shrine — is in Florida visiting his folks for Xmas, but I don’t know where they live so I guess you won’t bump into him. You kind of almost make me want to visit Tampa, which is pretty big for me. Zip for New Years. I hate New Years. I don’t drink hardly or do drugs anymore, so I don’t see the point. You? Resolutions? I always forget to make them. Maybe I will this year. Yeah, I will. Yours?
Hey back. Thanks so much about the story, it wasnt much, just thrown together with the little time I had this holiday. The story is a loosely influenced parody of Lee conquering John Browns raid at Harpers Ferry. Your optimism preceeds you. I’m totally optimistic. Its hard to shake off the body stuff sometimes, but otherwise, the worlds a really big oyster. That’s so funny, I was in argument one morning with the bay and thought of him. And thats a weird scene. The girls backpack. Florida has its finer points. Tampa is pretty bong. People are mostly chillin’ with a little gruff on top. Floridians are washed out, jaded, complacent, and entitled, spritely, transplanted, and fabulous. Florida is like Texas, I wonder if its really part of the U.S. I’m southern, and theyre not southern, theres only a hint of it. I get along fabulously in Spanish territory. Tampas cool, our metro has legit art museums, the Dali Museum, and some other neato-misquoto stuff. The bookstore downtown is another hainted place. The ghost is notorious for moving around chairs. The story goes there might be a medical mystery. I let ghosts guide me to books in stores, you know 12 to the left, 3 up, 2 down… first book I find there… “How My Doctors Killed Me,” or something like that. In not so good news, lost an old friend. Worlds biggest Kiss and Pantera fan. I know I wont be there to see him put in the ground, but I know its another Kiss casket theyre lowering. Resolutions, I kinda got my shit together. 1. New business to wipe away all the old business this year, 2. Take over the world… you know the standard stuff. This post is really cool, reminds me of hearing RuPaul talking about Ego-Psychology to explain overcoming repetition compulsions and to help explain drag. Much love, off to the beach
Don’t mean to pull too much out of that little quip about Deerhunter but it caught my eye. I was a huge fan and somehow Monomania broke the spell. I’ve wondered if I’m missing something…
Deerhunter have made a music video for “Death in Midsummer,” the first single from their new album, and I was underwhelmed. But the album, WHY HASN’T EVERYTHING ALREADY DISAPPEARED?, comes out Jan. 18th. I saw them live in their prime, and they were great then. The encore began with a lengthy speech from Bradford Cox where he said “I’m glad there are so many people here so I can pay for my therapy to recover from the child abuse I suffered.”
Hi Dennis, I loved that era. I had sent my friend a link to Part One – she was friends with Reza, and because of that, I was able to see most of his pieces, the most memorable being Tight Right White. I’ll never forget Spalding Gray’s movie Swimming to Cambodia (I think it was called) – which had a sequence about his marijuana experience, which was exactly like mine used to be. Described it to a T, which is why I had to give it up. Hysterical. Wishing you the happiest of New Year’s!
PS: funny thing was, my friend and her husband didn’t care for Reza’s work at all, being conventional theatre-goers. But I loved his stuff and sat on the floor next to Susan Sontag at T.R.W. – she told me she had just gotten off the plane from Sarayevo – but I didn’t know why until just now, when I found this article on her directing Waiting for Godot there:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1993/10/21/godot-comes-to-sarajevo/
test
test
I’ve played some of your spoken word on my all vinyl radio show Observations of Deviance. (KXCI, 91.3, Tucson).
Last week was 3hrs of Derek Bailey.
This week was free jazz, Syd Barrett, UK post punk, bossa nova, psychedelic folk, etc.
Love the Blog.
I’ve played some of your spoken word on my all vinyl radio show Observations of Deviance. (KXCI, 91.3, Tucson).
Last week was 3hrs of Derek Bailey.
This week was free jazz, Syd Barrett, UK post punk, bossa nova, psychedelic folk, etc.
Love the Blog.
test test
I’ve played some of your spoken word on my all vinyl radio show Observations of Deviance. (KXCI, 91.3, Tucson).
Last week was 3hrs of Derek Bailey.
This week was free jazz, Syd Barrett, UK post punk, bossa nova, psychedelic folk, etc.
Love the Blog.
test rest
eee
Dennis, Man, I haven’t heard Bogosian’s or Gray’s name in a while. Nice to see that.
Yeah, It’ll only be a matter of time until I’m used to this med again. Fingers crossed.
So it’s LPS’s birthday today. I’ll be picking up that cake soon, hahaha. Not that it’s on my mind or anything…
No, I think you’re right about that little paragraph of mine. Thing is, it’s pretty unintentional, the mainstream-ness of it. About halfway through writing the first half, I thought, “Fuck, this is really fucking mainstream and conventional…” Oh, well, it is what it is.
However, I do some things stylistically, depending on the character/scene, that I think are rather subtle and (I hope) make it more/better than something traditionally mainstream. This second half, which is different from the first but about the first, is all from one character’s recall and in the first person rather than the first half’s third person, so there’s a different point of view and a bit of a commentary on remembered things. We’ll see. I can’t say that I’m unhappy with any of it. It is what it is and I’m okay with that.
Another thing -and I’ll stop after this- is that that first half is pretty clinical/reserved/restrained in its approach to the story, whereas this second half is quite the opposite, with a lot more, um, “personality.”
Like I said, we’ll see. 😀
Hey Dennis. Thanks for clearing that up about what was in Richardson magazine. I already have Gone, so I can give the meg a miss.
Hey! I finished my yearly review of art/music/books/films of 2018 (with a bunch of photos I took). If you fancy a look, it’s here: https://bitmapcrematorium.blogspot.com/2018/12/2018-past-tense.html
Hey Dennis. I just tried to post this twice but it vanished twice! So apologies if you get three messages at once.
Great day – so many new things to check out.
I finished my best of 2018 list if you fancy a look – it’s here:
https://bitmapcrematorium.blogspot.com/2018/12/2018-past-tense.html
I imagine the Downtown New York Performance Art scene must be very different today… is there one at all? Rents for those spaces must have skyrocketed since then.
Here in Leeds things are just ticking over. Been to see my minor-stroke-rehabilitating dad in hospital each day and he’s doing fine, just moaning about the NHS food and chatting about sports with the other patients. I reckon he’ll likely be discharged next week sometime. It’s a while before he’s allowed to drive again, so my brother will drive me back up to Dundee this coming Friday.
Hey Dennis. My messages keep vanishing! I hope you don’t get a ton of spam from me!
Here’s my end of year list:
https://bitmapcrematorium.blogspot.com/2018/12/2018-past-tense.html?m=1
Such a delightful surprise there’s a part 2 of this. Have you seen this Hapi Phace home video? It’s extremely endearing. RuPaul fans who aren’t as into shaky home video can skip to 20:22, but I’m gonna be that person and strongly recommend the whole thing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RLBy1JUm0o
Felt like cheating the Google Alphabet overlords to find this and that’s the greatest compliment I can give anything on the internet.
At first I was upset to read about Tehching Hsieh not getting recognition. But then again, any stunt packaged slickly enough can pretty much get morphed into Forrest Gump’s Run Across America, no?
Have you ever seen a Human Cannonball? I saw one after a minor league baseball game and will never forget it. This isn’t the same performer but it claims to be a world record as of 2011:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Y14kEY-6fk
Hi Dennis:
This is a great post. I don’t know much about downtown culture at that time but I’ve been realizing that importance. Thank you for compiling it.
I just wanted to leave a brief (though sincere) wish for your 2019. I realize you had the busiest year one can imagine and I’m hoping it was good. Plus, my honor to have met you and Zac and have seen Permanent Green Light here in fine NYC. I’m happy to see it being well received. Best of luck with its London ICA Screening.
Happy 2019 and thank you for your continued support.