Basement Valentine

The past two days have been really thought provoking - especially watching Ron and the seminar students work together in and through a vocabulary so different than that which I use in my own teaching. It has been a pleasure to present my recent work with the seminar participants (who are mostly artists and creative professionals), with my colleagues and students - and seeing this group mingling together in the basement of Back to the Grind.

The discussion today - about sex, the body, and performance politics - was superb - really genuine as people staked out really different perspectives, and made key interventions to push discussion further.

The film program was intentionally provocative - I wanted to give the night an emotional arc, and not an easy one tonight. I suppose I wanted to work against the easy sentimentality of Valentine's Day. So, I started with an early work by James Luna, History of the Luiseño People (1993), in which the artist sits alone at home, smoking and drinking, and making phone calls on Christmas Day to friends and family from whom he is alienated, or estranged. I also showed Suzanne Lacy's Learn Where the Meat Comes From (1976) - a hilarious feminist classic which is much funnier than it sounds. The first "act" ended with Johanna Went's jaw dropping 1984 performance "Knife Boxing." I'd never seen this - my god, it has everything! Giant tampons pulled from a giant vagina. Naked dolls, the Statue of Liberty. A lamb-head. Went screams and shouts throughout to a beating drums and a dissonant sax. It's noise for the ear and eye, and absolutely amazing. Act 2 was more tough - two shorts by Chloe Piene, a short film by David Wojanarowicz, a fifteen minute visual essay on Hermann Nitsch, a performance video by Franko B ("I Miss You") and finally, Linda Montano's deeply moving, terrifyingly real "The Death of Mitchell", in which she recites the story of learning of her ex-husband's death in a monotonous chant. On the screen we see her face, covered in acupuncture needles. It's a hard piece, and deeply moving. (My Valentine's card to the class seems to say - Love is Hard.) As a few students in the seminar expressed interest in the line between spoken word, "reading", and performing, I thought this would give us all something to consider.

In some strange expression of worlds colliding (see my other blog) - there seems to be a giant American Youth Soccer Organization regional tournament here this weekend. The hotel is crawling with kids in their kits. I am trying to stay away from the hotel bar, where I'm sure I'd find the refs.