winging it

The latest issue of the Atlantic has a fantastic new piece by Jeffrey Goldberg titled ”The Things He Carried” (November 2008) that reveals just how hard it is to get in trouble with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). His thesis? “Suspicious that the measures put in place after the attacks of September 11 to prevent further such attacks are almost entirely for show—security theater is the term of art—I have for some time now been testing, in modest ways, their effectiveness,” Goldberg writes.

For months the author blatantly attempted to raise red flags at airports across the country, carrying any number of questionable or prohibited items, including: “Al-Qaeda T-shirts, Islamic Jihad flags, Hezbollah videotapes, and inflatable Yasir Arafat dolls (really). … pocketknives, matches from hotels in Beirut and Peshawar, dust masks, lengths of rope, cigarette lighters, nail clippers, eight-ounce tubes of toothpaste (in my front pocket), bottles of Fiji Water (which is foreign), and, of course, box cutters.” 

The whole thing is laced with the blackest—and bleakest—sort of humor, and is just begging to be adapted into a short film. Not unlike Catch-22 or even the Cohen brothers most recent film, Burn After Reading (other than the fact that Goldberg’s account is nonfiction), “The Things He Carried” is a classic critique of big bureaucracy and our culture of fear. And an entirely vindicating read for anyone who’s ever rolled their eyes at the ridiculousness of 3 o.z. bottles in quart-sized bags.

behind the looking glass

  those stripes actually work
What does the Bronx Zoo, the Village Petstore and Charcoal Grill, a Banksy installation in Greenwich Village, and an actual pet shop with sweet pups in the window have in common? 

Well, yes, they all have animals—albeit exotic, domestic, and “other.” But that’s not the thought that kept knocking around in my head, while tracking down the giraffes, the gorillas and the big bears at the zoo, or while marveling at the ingeniousness of the Banksy installation, or while cooing over puppies tumbling around in shredded paper strips. The shocking realization was how we observers (myself not excluded) expect, demand even, some sort of performance from the animals. To happen upon a zebra grazing in a non-African-looking environment is startling.

she files her nails at the village petstore

Where’s the set? What about the children, I mused, is seeing the zebra here, like this, going to mislead them to thinking that zebras roam free in the wilds of upstate New York, when they see a like habitat? Elsewhere, crowds clustered around a gorilla sitting against the glass. She sat there, bemusedly inspecting us (with a little too much self awareness, I thought), sticking her tongue out, occasionally putting her hand flush up against the glass over where a child’s hand pressed against the glass from the other side.

At the Village Petstore and Charcoal Grill, the “pets,” per se, are putting on a show—they’re acting human. A chimp watches animal shows on television, surrounded with the litter of human

mail…

Also reported on: http://artsreporting.blogspot.com

So I saw something tonight that’s in development (am I allowed to be blogging about this? I will be judicious.) And it was awesome, even in its un-doneness. Writer-director-guru Aya Ogawa and tech-arts-guru Irwin Chen workshopped an early (and very unfinished) version of a theater show tentatively titled “Artifact” as a part of CUNY’s Prelude Festival. I will disclose few relative details—what do they matter anyway when they are subject to change—but this show did inspire me to think about email communication in the present age.

It’s funny. Email is generally perceived as the most off-hand, causal of forms, and yet, with its cursory computer-based text format, it’s more prone to revision than say… a handwritten letter. Maybe this just hit home for me tonight because I’m presently keeping a (handwritten) journal that will be reviewed by someone not myself, and I’m actually fretting about the spelling of those stupid words I can never spell correctly, but it was incredibly impactful to watch someone who you don’t even know (and can’t even see, really, their back is to you) to struggle to type out a letter that is… important to them.

In the way of salutations, in the way of how letters expressed real sentiment. But typed. They wrote, spontaneously. They paused, and reread. They deleated, by highlight. Other times, it was by cursor backspace. 

We’ve all had those emails that are important, (emails that are letters?), where you edit yourself, because you can. That scene left me wondering, where do those feelings/ that initial sentiment/ go? It can’t just disappear. Energy expended only changes forms. What if… all of that energy we put into our super-composed emails… that form that is supposed to be so freehand… what if those original feelings are still, somehow, imbedded in the spaces in between?

you let sublet?

I’ve been traipsing about with The Sublet Experiment theater crew a lot in the last week. The gig is this: Kindly friends and family have lent the group their living spaces to put on a theater show in their apartment/loft. Relinquish keys, anxieties, etc. Leave while anywhere between a 12 and 30 strangers arrive at your apartment for the show, except on the night(s) you stay to watch yourself. And in that case, pretend you don’t live there, prepare to be surprised when the actors drink from your glasses, brush their teeth in your bathroom sink, etc., and restrain from jumping to answer the front door buzzer when it rings.

One of the oddest aspects of the experience is that it really feels like an intimate gathering, a dinner party or a night of charades, rather than public theater. Afterwards, the guests stand around and chat in small groups, gathering coats, scarves and gloves. A cluster of empty beer bottles sits on the kitchen counter, ready to be taken to the recyling crate that sits on the landing outside the door. The home stereo plays softly, and the water runs steadily as someone washes a few dirty glasses—props, and, I wonder, possibly a remnant dish from the host? Would you leave a dirty dish(es) in your sink if the show was coming over?

Next up, after wandering nomadically for nearly six months, changing venues every week, playwright Ethan Youngerman and director Michelle Tatenbaum have found an as-of-yet-undisclosed, semi-stationary venue for The Sublet Experiment for the month of March. After March, who knows? The natives may get restless…