the river that separates the living from the dead

The River of Styx (no, not the band) is, in Western mythology, the river one must cross to reach the netherworld, after death. Also known as the river of hate, Styx winds around Hades (hell) nine times. You need a coin to pay the boatman Charon (usually portrayed as a reticent, creaky skeleton in a black hooded robe). Styx is the river Orpheus crossed in order to retrieve his wife Euridice from the land of the dead.

A similar river exists in Japanese Buddhist mythology; the dead must cross the Sanzu no Kawa (Sanzu River) to reach the underworld -- and one's karma determines where in the river he crosses: the jeweled bridge for the exceedingly good, a ford for the regular folk, or the serpent and demon-infested waters for the particularly sinful; and similarly, the dead are buried with six coins to pay the boatman. I don't know why water myths appeal to me so much, but they do -- love the boy-dragon in Spirited Away who turns out to be the river in which Chihiro played as a child -- and the Buddhist myths about the Naga dragon who lives in the Mekong River near the border of Laos and Thailand where purportedly, the creature is responsible for catapulting fireballs from the water into the air every October.

The 15th century noh play Sumidagawa (Sumida River) refers to the river that winds through Tokyo to the bay -- which you can still take a touristy water taxi on today -- it's smaller and slightly more exciting (and probably a lot dirtier) than the Hudson. In the noh play this local river becomes, like the River Styx, a metaphor for the body of water that separates the living and the dead: a crazed mother in search of her kidnapped son takes a boat across the river. On the opposite bank of the river, she finds a crowd of people gathered around a tomb to hold a chanting rite for a stray child who died there exactly a year ago. The mother realizes that the child was undoubtedly her lost son. She hears her son's voice among the chanting crowd and even sees his image behind the tomb, but when she reaches out to touch him, he disappears.

British composer Benjamin Britten was so moved by the original noh Sumidagawa when he saw the performance in Japan in 1956, he returned to his home country of England where, 8 years later, the first performance of his version, Curlew River took place. His was an opera, a parable for church performance, and Buddhist references are replaced by Christian ones, but the storyline follows the noh quite faithfully. The current production at my job, originally produced by Opera Rouen, feels surprisingly evocative of its original noh inspiration. Let me say right now that I am NOT an opera fan, in fact I would outright say that I rather dislike opera -- the singing style, though virtuosic, has never sunk in for me. But director Yoshi Oida, and conductor David Stern, made this work as palatable as it could have been, for me. The musicians and performers entered from the back of the house, deliberately, very much like the (excruciatingly slow) entrances of noh performers. Costume changes take place on stage, both acknowledging the presentational nature of the performance as well as respecting the theater as a place of transformation (of time, of space). There are no elaborate set changes, but in the simplicity of choices (lighting water effects - though artificial; a real pool of water downstage, and the monks floating candle offerings in it), Oida time and again evokes the austerity of the noh tradition. Except for the Spirit of the Boy who does not appear on stage, the cast was all-male; and Michael Bennett as The Madwoman gives a heartrending performance, especially pitted against the cocky Ferryman (Reuben Willcox). Britten's music is not easy to listen to -- it is not immediately catchy nor comfortably melodic -- but it is powerful. Like a noh play, the plot unfolds in a heavy (at times soporific) trundle; but the peaks and jagged edges of the musical composition (played by the Opera Rouen ensemble which filled the theater beautifully) kept me emotionally engaged.

Megalomania, or, the worst plays I've seen in the last 6 months

Megalomania is a psycho-pathological condition characterized by delusional fantasies of wealth, power, or omnipotence - an unchecked id that desires and devours everything around him towards the end of conquering the world. And, as Noam Chomsky puts it, this kind of "pathological person, ... does nothing except try to maximize his own gain" (and yet is the precise kind of behavior expected of corporations read more from the man.) A kind of personality who is unable to acknowledge any other version of reality asides from his own.

Megalomania of course, occurs in varying degrees, and in my humble untrained opinion, tendencies towards it exist as a potential in every human being. The results can be as destructive and violent as Hitler's genocide or Kim Jong-Il's tyrannical reign over North Korea. How are these megalomaniac personalities encouraged, and how is it that they are able to rise to power in this world? Do those with pathological tendencies feed on the innate desire in human beings to be led, to give over our narratives to a higher power? Do the leader and the led both play equally culpable roles in constructing and enforcing this power dynamic?

I remember a number of people I met after I left the International WOW Company, who said to me in reference to the company, "Don't drink the Kool-Aid." I wasn't too surprised to find that there was this general perception of the company as a egocentric vehicle for the singular vision of the company's director. I laughed, then, at the comparison to what we all know about the terrible mass cult suicide by means of cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. But after watching Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple I am having a hard time laughing at all. I hesitate to focus a post on a TV program (consisting mostly of interviews with cult survivors), but this particularly haunting portrayal of Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple left a disturbing aftertaste. The details of how it came to be, in and of themselves, were not necessarily surprising. A neglected boy from a poor family in Indianapolis finds solace in the traditions of the black church, and as a young adult begins his own preachings based on ideas of justice and equality. In the 1970s, people from all over the U.S. responded to his call against the materialistic society and came to Ukiah, CA, to join his Temple; he offered people community, family, a place of trust and painted a very palpable possibility of realizing a utopia on earth. Of course, behind the guise of an extremely charismatic peace-loving fighter for justice, he was also manipulating people to sell their worldly possessions and donate everything to his church, carving out strong footholds in politics, forcibly having sex with numerous men and women in his congregation, and generally perpetuating a silent community controlled by fear and shame. When an article in a high-circulation publication threatened to expose him for the hypocritical power-monger that he was, he took his entire congregation into the jungle of Guyana, where he had been preparing a communal settlement called Jonestown. Here, what was supposed to be their socialist utopia, turned into the worst fascistic nightmare. People were not allowed to leave and the sense of panic and dread grew; concerned relatives of cult members created enough of a stir to get Congressman Leo Ryan to go down to Jonestown himself to see what was actually happening -- a visit that would precipitate the tragic deaths of over 900 people, including many families, parents with small children and infants, grandparents, siblings, and spouses. This is what was perhaps most shocking to me -- that people were willing to surrender not only their own lives to the insanity of this man, but the lives of their own children as well. It's one thing, to give up your own life for a cause or surrender your life to another more powerful ego, but to give up the lives of your dearest relatives? Bertolt Brecht portrays a similar climate in which family members turn each other in to forward the Nazi cause in his Fear & Misery of the Third Reich but the reality of this scenario really sunk in until I watched this show.

Tyranny reigns in overt and subtle ways all over the world -- since this is an art blog and not a political one (yes I am drawing a line) I want to talk about another event which deeply disturbed me this week along similar lines.

Megalomania finds a fertile breeding ground in the arts, where quality and expression are so entirely subjective -- and, especially in this country where there is no cultural foundation for an appreciation of theater and the attempt to validate and legitimize work often falls into assessing whether a production is professional and amateur - a ludicrous and arbitrary distinction in the U.S. that comes down to whether the artists in the show are paying the bills with their craft, or whether they still work that temp job by day or wait tables by night. Honestly you cannot tell me that a woman who spends her evenings singing about whoring herself in Miss Saigon is a more legitimate and therefore "professional" artist over a man who temps at CitiGroup during daylight hours and later dons an outrageous red hooded unitard stuffed with many inflatable balls to insult and humiliate his audience relentlessly (I am referring to a genius...) Money speaks little about people's creativity or skills, or power of imagination.

ANYWAY when Irwin stumbled upon this New York Times article, he, being a tech-geek, and me being a pessimistic yet curious theater-goer, we got tickets to what turned out to be a very unfortunate waste of a lot of money and cutting-edge technology. Losing Something, written and directed by Kevin Cunningham, who also happens to be the Artistic Director of the theater 3LD (3-legged dog), showcases one of the most innovative video projection technologies, enabling live performers to interact almost seamlessly with projected images. For example, an older version of a man can emerge from the live actor and dialogue with each other -- the projected man can wander off into the distance and return, a three-dimensionality that is surprising and noteworthy.

However, no amount of dazzling technology could have redeemed this display of total masturbatory self-absorption. Irwin described the script as a cross between Look Who's Talking 3 and someone's pseudo-lit-crit-scrawlings while stoned ouf of his mind. Here is best attempt to describe the piece: a protagonist, a Man, in the wake of 9-11, seems to have lost something (probably his coherent mind) and wanders about spouting pretentious, unending monologues encompassing fantasies of sexual perversion and people falling out of the sky. Projected are numerous topless but otherwise non-descript white girls twined around each other in a jungle of those latex resistance bands that dancers use to stretch out their calves with, who taunt and tease the protagonist in search of a missing acquaintance named Daniel. Images of falling bodies litter the stage from time to time, as does a revolving image of a talking baby-woman. It is unclear what the relationship of this baby-woman is to the Man, but she ends up materializing in the flesh, a full-grown woman in diapers, and topless. The Man stoops down to change her diapers. OK, so she's a baby, and I'll just ignore her jiggling boobs. Then, moments later, this baby-woman pulls down the Man's pants, wrests him to the floor, and fucks him, reverse cowgirl style while he continued to blandly spout off incomprehensible text about god-knows-what. I think this is where the older couple in the front walked out of the theater. It was not long before the next group of people walked out. We made our exit right after the most exciting part of the show for me, when they blinded the audience with white lights so that a performer could get in place -- when the lights restored the Man was talking to his friend Daniel who was suspended in the air (a live projection trick -- the actor is actually on the floor and etc. etc. who cares).

We walked out of the theater with stomach aches, terribly offended by how this could have happened. There was obviously a LOT of money going into actualizing this technically complex show. How was this writer/director allowed to do this -- like he was like: hey I found my journals from post 9-11 and I think they make for a really powerful text. And his girlfriend was like: yeah baby, that's a really great idea, you should do a show with it. I mean who knows. It reminded me of the comparably tedious Tempest (pictured on right) I saw at BAM which used similar technology -- Prospero and Miranda were the only live actors - the rest were projected/3-dimensional -- and also the inconceivably terrible The End of Cinematics also at BAM (pictured below), which was an awfully written and scored "opera" with 6 ginormous screens, live camera feeds and the works. Oh my god and then there was the Still Life with Commentator at BAM which was embarrassing and painful -- especially the lyrics...

So sure, there are a lot of ways a theatrical piece can be bad, but in these cases, I think it's safe to isolate two major contributing factors.
1.) Technology is given higher priority over content/story/drama. No doubt technology is amazing and will enable us to expand what is possible on stage. But technology is only a means, not contents in itself. I know it seems obvious, but it cannot be stressed enough. It's like, don't talk for the sake of talking, talk to me if you've got something to say, bitch.

2.) Brings me back to this week's theme: megalomania. In the cases of Losing Something and The End of Cinematics particularly, it was clear that these people need to be checked! Somehow they have created a situation or environment in which their voice is not questioned and therefore their art has turned into a sprawling self-obsessed goo. While these artists are not colonizing small countries or perpetrating genocide or swindling people out of their life-savings (well I don't know this for a fact, I can only ASSUME this is not the case), they are taking over $30 away from me and asking that I pay attention for an hour or more -- and most importantly, they are telling me, with the amount of money they have access to, that they are playing a role in defining what theater is today. And if their vision of art is shaping our culture... Discussion about the pros and cons of living as an expatriate for life to come.

Killer of Sheep, and other things to do with animals

Killer of Sheep is playing this week at the IFC. A powerful work of cinema created over 30 years ago by Charles Burnett and released commercially now for the first time. Shot in black and white without a linear narrative, it is a stunningly poignant imagistic series of vignettes tracking the lives of men, women and children in the Los Angeles ghetto. Sam works in a slaughterhouse, while his children play in the rubble of dilapidated construction sites and his wife preens herself at home in front of the mirror. There is no story perse, only clips of the bleak options Sam's life has to offer: working at a liquor store for a dumpy white woman who wants to seduce him; getting involved in criminal activity. An outing to the horseraces with friends is derailed by a flat tire; a car motor he purchases off of friends is ruined when it falls off the truck; he slow dances in the bedroom with his wife, but cannot make love to her. These shots are interspersed with those of the children who find modes of play within their given environment. They throw rocks at each other in a vacant lot, jump from ledge to ledge on the roofs of apartment buildings, and laughingly pummel each other on the dusty ground. The most amazing scenes were of Sam's 5-year-old daughter (played by Burnett's niece), mind-blowing in their simplicity and the emotions they invoke. She sings to herself while playing with a doll, hangs around the house wearing this crazy dog-face-mask, she comforts her father in the kitchen as her mother looks on from the living room in tears, unable to penetrate the wall of numbness that surrounds Sam. One of Sam's first lines in the film have to do with suicide, and the final scene shows the bloody process of sticking, hanging, killing, de-skinning and hacking up sheep in the slaughterhouse. Despite the hopelessness of the subject matter, the stark beauty of the imagery and the soulful soundtrack hold the film aloft.

Some awesome and intriguing previews as well:

ZOO: a doc about a man who is partial to horses

The Holy Mountain: some insane psychedelic mindtrip with religious iconography gone wild, made in the 70s.

Day Night Day Night: Suicide Bomber in Times Square

The Boss Of It All: newest offering from Lars Von Trier - a comedy! - about an actor hired to perform the role of a CEO in an office

Fay Grim: Hal Hartley's latest starring James Urbaniak (love him) and Parker Posey (and Jeff Goldblum)

Black Sheep: a mock horror movie about the attack of the man-eating sheep!

Totally sold on becoming an IFC member. Free popcorn!

Losing Sleep over Zodiac

Over the last few years, only a handful of movies have shaken me so much that they have kept me awake. In fact, I can only really think of one -- The Pianist -- which totally got under my skin. Well, Zodiac did too, in its own way, causing a very fitful sleepless night for me. A 2 hour and 40 minute-long psychological thriller following a San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist's obsession with the serial killer who terrorized the Bay Area in the 1960s and 70s, the film is extremely well-acted, as the critics all say -- though I would argue that Robert Downey Jr. is essentially playing himself (as he does in practically every movie he's in) and everyone (esp Jake) seemed to age remarkably well through the movie, which tracks these folks for over a decade. But the real success of the film was not in the moments of horrific murders (yes, they were bloody and thrilling and terrifying) but the insidious way fascination takes root in the horrible. The movie awakens the desire to investigate, to solve the puzzling ciphers, to delve into the mind of the killer -- whose identity remains throughout the movie (and, officially, still today) unknown. It's also a funny film -- depicting the frustration of bureacracy in police forces as officers try to cooperate (or not) across different geographic jursidictions, in a time when not all police stations have a "telefax." I was totally engaged on so many levels, to the point of being so skittish I couldn't walk into a dark room by myself after the movie. And unlike, say, Silence of the Lambs, which is also a great psychological thriller, but still lapses into silly terror tactics with Anthony Hopkins' punny lines about his penchant for human flesh, I thought Zodiac stayed focused on a very real and grounded logic and innate human curiosity for and attraction towards the dark, violent and unexplained. I mean, for a Hollywood movie!