History in the Red Bricks

This contribution is a comment on the two nights of YOU BELONG TO ME performances regarding urban development and the place of radical queer performance. It could be my degree in Community Development that is showing, or maybe -- in the spirit of artists James Luna and Julie Tolentino's works -- I am responding to an archival drive. I think both.

There's much talk about the development of downtown Riverside, of late. Several of the restaurants are closing shop due to the economy and class relations, but beyond that there's forever been a dead nightlife with only little slivers of success for the entrepeneurs who give it a go. I shalln't open up all the cans of worms.

You know what I'm talking about. Finding space to do radical queer work outside of local bars or clubs is about as easy as getting a deeply-lodged splinter out of your finger with one hand -- and no femmes in sight. Rosalyn Deutsche talks a lot about the impact of a whiteness as a class and property-ownernship minded mentality in its production of late 21st century capitalism in her book, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (1996). There's no bottom line to the book -- it is brimming with gold. But appropriate to my comments about the impact of Julie Tolentino and Ron Athey's presence in the Inland Empire, I offer this up: "Democracy and its corollary, public space, are brought into existence when the idea that the social is founded on a substantial base, a positivity, is abandoned" (274). Essentially, if one were to ask why queer and trans durational work needs to be in Riverside in additional to GLB cultural events, I would tell you this is the reason: we need a deep soak out here in artistic practices that are themselves deeply immersed in theoretical knowledge about the production of (alternative, resistant) spaces. Queer still seems to queer, as in the verb. More on that below.

With over 140 attendees on each night and such a vast array of ages, proclivities, ethnic, sexual and aesthetic orientations in the room, I can report only for myself that the two nights of performance at 6th/Main Street (the old jazz club) were fantastically surprising. Not the kind of surprising where you jump in your shoes (though I did that), but a grounding one (like after yoga or a good jog). I could not help but notice how vibrant Riverside was when left in the right hands, and how the night did seem alive with ebbs and flows of a downtown life whose interests could catapult a renaissance – for real – from there. Queer performance artists have a way of not only putting on a representational moment through the ‘event’ of their official performance time slot, but they also restructure social relationships and open up new possibilities for engagement, critical thought, and the exchange of (visual and performative) ideas about pleasure and queer survival. This is what Deutsche points to in the excerpt that I pulled above. Tolentino, Athey, and all the artists + programmers know -- and bear the responsibility in that knowledge-- that they are creating social space ... that it is not a given. In short, queer survival is on the line. That is never to be taken lightly – and I believe none of those who attended the "You Belong To Me" nights of performance at the old jazz club nor who performed in or worked the night for a second took their eyes off of that reality. Rather than a design of commerical entertainment, queer durational work attendant to alternative histories and corpo-realities has a deeper goal.

If my slip is showing, it’s because I have an opinion and a practice related to queer survival in the public sphere through performance/art. While the struggle to get through is part of the journey, I also want what many queer artists and thinkers want – a place that feels like home, a place that shares more than scraps, and a place that is, in fact, glorious. That is no easy matter in mainstream America when it comes to the use of public space. Yet, I come from a town that took out a city street to extend the size of the local park as a response to how residents of all kinds wanted to use its geography; I have been spoiled with possibility.

Translating that to the the old jazz club, I wanted to know: would the event meet the demands of the space? Would the room filled be filled with all that it could be – ideas, people, health, welfare, intermingling, focus, challenge, and a politics worth emulating in the names of the minority folk invoked (queer, feminist, trans, African American, Asian American, Native American, Latino/a, Arab American, hip hop, punk, and homeless)? As the building held us in, would we fulfill our part of the bargin to hold its histories in, in one way or another? These were some thoughts in approaching the weekend.

During the week of the YOU BELONG TO ME workshop/seminar and performances, the city of Riverside (or its hired hand) continued to demolish downtown Riverside’s Chinatown history. That's plain old racism/classism in the guise of urban development. On Monday night, I took a walk from 6th and Main towards University Ave., straddling the overturned soil and ‘caution’ yellow plastic tape over the current construction in the mall, alerting pedestrians not to tred. The "city of arts" reconstruction there, distracts from the demolition just a few blocks down, on Brockton. That is the way history goes . . . . throw up some fanfare while the rest of us live in our bodies with the histories we know are being leveled or cemented -- literally -- into the ground. There are names to indicate these histories, Oaxacalifornia, the East side, Riverbottom, Box Springs, and more.

I had the pleasure of meeting the former owner of the old jazz club, Mary Williams, when she stopped in on Friday night while James Luna and Ursula Rucker were singing. Mary Williams and her husband come from a long line of African American entrepeneurs in the city of Riverside, which includes Darren Conkerite, the owner of Back To The Grind cafe (host of the 4-day workshop/seminar). I am fond of predecessors -- they know how a space works; if treated with respect, they can be willing and excited to share their errs and successes. From a feminist position, I also felt moved to overtly recognize Williams -- to let her know I knew she had labored hard to keep souls alive in Riverside .. or, more specifically, that I had been moved by her work. So, I pursued a moment with Mary and her friends. We crossed the bridge of strangers and met in the middle, shared a second. The music was audible and, more importantly, could be felt down the pedestrian mall corridor, pulsing through the jazz club windows. Perhaps that is what drew she and her friends -- who knows. To me, with the gorgeous lighting Jennifer Doyle, Shane Shukis, Julie Tolentino, and crew Abigail Severance, Steakhouse, and Pig Pen set up, that red brick building shone from far down the block. A phrase from Frederick Jameson comes to mind here. Jameson says that "without laughter, speech is a dead language." From Jameson I come to know that any event staged in an ‘old’ building participates in the question of how to reach from the present into and through the past – calling up and culling up the successes, failures, surprises, and reliefs of the architectural space as a potential, living breathing language. I heard chortles that night, amongst the blood and brick. Too, Doyle and Athey talked about the camp figure that haunted his performance in their art talk earlier that day, another kind of laughter audible against the brick.

Williams' curiosity at what had become of her old digs spoke -- to me -- of the larger thing that connected us: the giant red brick casing that was brought to life -- and, in exchange, gave life -- to the stories Ron, Julie, James, Ursula, Heather, and Zachary brought with them to share with us. Which gets me to my main point. Like Williams, (many) queer performance artists wedded to the corporeal as their medium are synched in a specific way to buildings, to space. It is part of the discussion.

With the big push to make Riverside "the city of arts," do city officials know that they need the kind of radical queer performance we saw over the weekend to achieve their goal? To really give the town life? Sylvester, open up your ghostly voice and sing it out, right about here. The notion that ‘gays sparkle up the place’ is best landed in a complex tapestry of racial histories and sexed, class relations. Beyond the wish for urban gentrification that this statement makes -- which is barking up the totally wrong tree; I'm not here to make someone else a nice place to colonize -- there is a core element of truth to the impact queers and gender-variants (in connection with mainstream "GLBTIAQ" identity discourse, but different from that discourse) make in keeping a town deeply meaningful. This gets lost on a general public. So I am going to explain it for a second.

All of the pieces confronted the fantasy that there was anything but labor involved in making survival glamorous. From Zachary Drucker’s hot aqua bikini to the dark suits of Julie Tolentino and Ron Athey’s danced duet, to the outfits in the crowd, it was, after all, an incredibly glamorous night. More importantly, it is the choreography of a space open to bois, femmes, to grrls, to activists, to punks, to sharp feminists that queer culture, to youth, to the homeless man who showed a few of us where he liked to sit, that gives that glamour its ferocity. The devastatingly beautiful contribution each artist made to stage their knowledge about the power of the corporeal is a missing link in sub-urban and rural design. I know I haven't quite made all the connections I need to in this entry to make that crystal clear, but there it is: my point.

I am no native to the Riv., but like many who have lived in the I.E., I find myself returning to it, more often than I intend. Finally, the town glistens for me, due in no small part to Doyle and Shukis’ tremendous efforts in bringing this durational and queer performance art to home turf. And beyond measure, I carry that little sparkle due to the rock star artists Ron Athey, Julie Tolentino, Ursula Rucker, James Luna, and Praxis wonders Heather Cassils and Zachary Drucker.

Will life go back to what it was prior to this weekend’s performances: Tolentino's "Untitled," Athey’s "SELF-OBLITERATION Solo #1: Ecstatic," Tolentino's "CRY OF LOVE" (2009), Tolentino's archive of Ron Athey's piece, "THE SKY REMAINS THE SAME: Tolentino Archives Athey's SELF-OBLITERATION Solo #1: Ecstatic," Cassils’ "Hard Times," Drucker’s "The Inability to be Looked at and the Horror of Nothing to See," Rucker’s poetry+voice, and Luna’s sonic stories? Bah. The game is well underway, and returning always builds on what we hold in our bodies.