Entries tagged "art"

good news

I was just awarded a grant from Theatre Bay Area to finish the script of my Law Project show.

Huzzah! Many thanks to the community of theatre folks in San Francisco.

What happens 40 years after fame and fortune?




What happens 40 years after fame and fortune?

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What happens 40 years after fame and fortune?

Peter Tork is no longer a Monkee and touring as The White Man’s music
with his pal Stanley Lee Jordan. I’m sitting at the Little Fox theatre
in Redwood City watching their clogged and slipper/shoed feet tap
enthusiastically to their acoustic guitar solos and receeding-hairline
harmonies.

It’s hard to know which is worse, the attempts at jokes in the patter
between-songs or the songs themselves.

“Now a song about your first love…..a car of course.”

These guys make the Kingston Trio sound like James Brown.

Just when you think an attempted melody can’tr get worse, there’s a
lyric

” Driving/driving/hotrod driving my MGBGT”

And when you think the lyric can’t get worse, there’s a harmony to be
foisted upon you.

So why am I sitting here? Because my lesbian goth pal Ann called me up
today and sais “dude, my first girlfriend is dating Peter Tork and he
wants to meet me.”

As we sat down Ann told me that her ex wouldn’t be here and that Peter
has several girlfriends.

After the first few chords, all I could think was:” this guy gets women
to sleep with him ?”

Ok everything I just blogged above was done during the concert itself, to help me get through the music. There is video to prove the music to you and as soon as Ann sends it to me, I’ll put it up.

Ann waited to meet Peter in the CD purchasing line. Despite the fact that he turns out to be “spending time with ” Ann’s ex (I guess that’s what the 65 year old straight guy musicians are calling it these days :-), he was very nice, excited to meet Ann and wanted to immediately introduce us to his sister (I guess under the theory that all lesbians know or want to know each other). He turned out to be right. We hung out with his sister Annie and her girlfriend until we realized that there was a second half to the show. Of course, it turned out that we know peoplpe in common. Annie was very cool about it all and told me that “Peter has a lot of lesbians in his life…. his ex-wife, his sister…” Peter Tork, lesbian node. L Word, you can add it to the chart.

The new service sector: American Girl

While I was in LA for a gig I went to a mall. I ran into a group of 8 girls aged 6-10 who were all dressed to match their dolls. They informed me that this mall housed one of 3 American Girl stores in the country and they’d driven over a day to make a pilgrimmage.

I went to have a look. The word “store” doesn’t quite capture it. There is a restaurant for the dolls with a full menu; a stage show, a Disneyworld-style tour of the lives of the dolls who are all characters from American history from many races (though therer were no slave dolls, they had all been freed). And yes, you could get your dolls hair done.

I really wished I’d had a video camera so that I could share the thoughts of women who were working there, paid to cut and brushing (with toothbrushes)  the hair of the dolls of 8 year old white girls. I wish I could have talked to them at all but they were busy doing their jobs and there was no really appropriate moment to chat.

I had one Barbie doll at 8 and pulled her head off and that was that.

But in this store (which is an anthropological experience like no other I’ve had this year) there was music playing and self-affirming journals mixed in with the doll jewelry and hair products. There were even dolls that had freckles and played sports upstairs and I was astonished to find myself choked up.

Henry Darger helped me understand Michael Jackson. I think.

Henry Darger: Angel with American Flag Wings
Henry Darger: Angel with American Flag Wings (detail)

Stace and I watched a documentary, called In the Realm of the Senses by Jessica Yu the other night about Henry Darger. She’s the filmmaker best known generally for her Acadamy Award speech about her dress costing more than her film (and best known at to me at Yale for her athleticism, sexy fencing brochure photo, and being Marty’s sister). Like Jessica, I saw the “outsider art” exhibit at LACMA in the early 1990s and never forgot Darger’s amazing and kinda creepy artwork and 15,000 page book about a battle between young girls and an army in lands I cannot pronounce or spell correctly.

This is a really interesting film which animates much of Darger’s amazing collage artwork. It’s about a sensitive and intelligent boy who was abused and abandoned young and lived the rest of his life within his interior realm and imagination, most of which was focussed on children.

He had no friends or social contacts and scraped by as a janitor. He did try to adopt children but was refused. No one even knew he made this artwork until after he had died.

This film made me think a lot about Michael Jackson who, it seems pretty likely, was abused as a sensitive and talented boy and who has had the means to create a world that matches his internal fantasy life in which only children are to be trusted.

There is an odd mix of naivete and sexuality in Darger’s work (he draws young girls naked quite often, with what appear to be penises). I am really interested in understanding the myriad effects of sexual and other forms of child abuse andthe creative ways in which people deal with this all-too -common and overlooked reality. Of course being abused does not exculpate anyone from their actions, but it is important for genuine undstanding. And Michael Jackson is nothing if not an enigma. I haven’t yet had a chance to read Margo Jefferson’s book, but I have thought a lot about how normal people seem to think it is for white women to manipulate the hell out of their bodies via plastic surgery but how odd it is for a black man to do the same.

What if you never quite felt your body was your own?




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