something like a home

Growing up as an only male in a Sri Lankan family is a very privileged position. I didn’t quite realize what it must have been like for my sister to grow up beside me, to be subject to all that subtle inequality of affection. I am trying to confront that privilege, to acknowledge that it exists and to deal with it. So…

Daughters and Sons in South-Asian Families

As is custom the daughter stares discretely
out of old photographs,
         customary the meek smile caught in
at the corners of the mouth,
milk teeth barely glowing as they should,

as she should but the custom does not allow,
stamps the forehead with a future downcast
a future brow to be cast aside in the
         corner of the photograph,
the daughter squared away at bottom-left,
shoulder sheared
off by the dismissive bulb
of the camera,

the arm that holds the camera
the cheese-face father who holds the camera
steady in the shadow of the eaves,

the son in the middle of the photograph,
shining in the center of the old photograph
he holds now;
older;
creased with age and heavier to the ground.

His fingers tremble at the edges of the frame
as if the glow of the son in the center is blinding,
as if the hot white core of all that accumulated
potential          potential          potential
would slip
like a spring
unawares
through the old photograph
he has found in the family album,

         (but the sister there in the corner,
cornered by a vine and the yellow seep of
frangipani, an aunt who ignores her kindly
like a tree, a grandmother who pats her
head only after she has patted the son,
a mother behind the glowing son –
a genius! – he will do great things! – a brilliant
burning boy! – a brilliance, we say, a basket of
fruit in the eye! – let us ladle that luminance
over our heads and anoint our bodies with the
holy oils of his potential          potential          potential,
of that future in the prints
of his hands)

                     trembling at the corners
of the photograph,
drunk on a Monday afternoon,
flipping through the family album at his sister’s
house,
the money he has stolen from beneath her bed
crushed in the back of his jeans,
the sister-daughter
in the corner
sheared off by the bulb,
the cold stillness of potential,
that frozen waste perfected and
engraved in all those dead eyes,

the sister with the small smile, the
brow tilted forward and that ghost
of an arm that has disappeared forever
beyond the edge of the frame,
tangled in the freedom
of invisibility,

far and far from the lipless weight of the cheese-face,
the arm that holds the camera.

some hypnotic video-art

turn your lights down, your sound up and watch as Surabhi Saraf manipulates space and time with two simple movement-images of a woman cooking.

more about “some hypnotic video-art“, posted with vodpod

What is happening here? Saraf’s words: “PEEL presents a visual and sonic echo of the present instance: it takes an unexamined moment and gives it life. The transitional motion of going to the fridge to get an ingredient is stretched into the echo of an unforgettable instant, and what emerges is an examination of the subtlety and hidden beauty of that moment.”

With each repetition, the mundane act of cooking a meal takes on a resonance previously hidden, hidden perhaps because of its solitary nature, but now we are confronted with not one but 96 of these movement-images. That they are the same image does not matter. In fact, it is in playing with our expectation of rote repetition that Suraf achieves something that borders on the transcendent. The simple, unselfconscious gesture of replacing a wayward lock of hair behind the ear spirals outside the frame like some kind of ink-spill, slowly spreading its influence to all those other women, women who have become unstuck from the rigid requirements of time. There is something organic in the way these gestures move across the screen, like waves or long grass in the wind. Each of the 96 women we see is an unique instance of the same moment, and each acheives her own grace and beauty. Perhaps this is a comment on how the traditional gender roles in South-Asian communities tend to play out – women relegated to the kitchen, the unseen providers behind all the ‘unique’ moments of a man’s life. Most of my memories of my grandmother are of her toiling in the kitchen, sifting rice in a large tin pan on the doorstep or gathering curry leaves from the tree outside. Hers was a life of invisibility, of the constant work required to feed and fuel the rest of us. Saraf has opened up those unseen moments and shown us their beauty and importance. She has also shown us that each instance of that woman is unique, as each of those countless wives and mothers and maids is unique, bound only by the action of cooking, of ‘peeling’: of revelation.

what has happened to me?

I have been building a nest. Carefully bringing back the twigs and berried branches that are necessary for permanence. Or at least the illusion of permanence. I am here, surrounded by the need for comfort, for security, for a future that is always given, never found. How have I come to this place? How is it that my desires are now for roots, for deep thick veins shooting through the soil and reaching for the warmth of some core that I cannot see, cannot feel, have only heard about from others? I am becoming attracted to women who are settled in their lives, who have found jobs, who wear their pencil skirts and black pointed shoes with modesty, with the grace that comes from hungerless eyes. This is strange. This is overwhelmingly strange. I feel like an impostor these ordered lives.

Everyone says, Jerome, you have so much potential. Potential for what? Where is it that you want me to go? What is it that you think I am able to accomplish. The word ‘accomplish’; to accomplish one’s self, to accomplish one’s work, to be an accomplished man. What does that mean? It makes me sick. It makes me sick because I know that I am the only one, or at least one of very few, who can be uncomfortable with that word, with the thoughts that accompany it. Why is it that we feel that we must leave something behind us, like the slime trail of a snail crossing a sidewalk after rainfall? We mark our temporal territories with deeds, with good works and the good sculptures of our working hands, with the weight and heft that we value so much. “A life well lived,” we say, “that is all that matters.” And a life well lived is a life that was weighty, that had heft and influence, that was like a white sun that steadied the orbits of others, that was filled with the laughter of the spheres: the friends, the family, the lovers. Somewhere along the way, I got lost, I thought there was only one way to this goal. I thought there was only one goal…

What is this permanence that we value so much? Why is it that we look at the drifter, the transient, with so much pity, so much contempt? We say, a man who lives for nothing but his own experience is a selfish man, a solipsistic man, an immoral man. We label him a misanthrope and cast him aside, we say, “you had so much potential, why did you throw it all away?” Why are you without a home, without a lover, without a family? Why are your friends like so many rooms you pass through, ephemeral and fantastic? You are a chimera and we cannot grasp you. Your skin is oiled and slick, you shift through all the colors and are a prism to no one. How dare you say we cannot feed the hunger we see in your eyes, how dare you say we cannot fulfill your desires? You do not need us, and we want to be needed. We function on need. We exist because we are needed. You are not needed here.

My nest, it is unraveling. The last safety net is gone. She is gone. That cube of friendship, that glass cube she bought at some trinket shop, slipped into a three-sided metal sleeve and gave to me as part of a conversation we had many years ago. She gave me back a word that we had fought over, a word that even now I cannot say, I have not said since she gift-wrapped it and slipped it into my hand. “Here,” she said, “this word is yours, keep it, I do not want it any longer.” The church we parted in was gone. Some kind of symbol. We were almost lovers there, once. We almost talked to each other with our bodies. But she could not feed the hunger in my eyes. I was a fool, I projected my fulfillment into a future that could not cannot did not does not exist. Now she is gone and I have given her the word, now the church that was abandoned and left in the freedom of its abandonment has been demolished. They are putting up condos there. People who have espresso machines and light fixtures from IKEA are going to live in them. People who tell me I have so much potential, so much potential to have a home as well, to have a cottage and a boat and an espresso machine, potential to buy my parents out of bankruptcy, to have a partner whose financial statements are mixed with mine, a joint high-interest account, some blue-chip stocks for the future, some money saved for traveling in the future, some food in the freezer for the future, something for the future, for that future, for our future.

My nest is unravelling. I am sick of being ashamed of being a bum. I am futureless, and I am proud of it. You can call me selfish, you can call me narcisistic, but you cannot call me lazy. Because I have my work. Because my life is always a work. There are no vacations, no brief repreives from the grind. There is only life and life and life. I do not want to accomplish, I do not want to fulfil, I do not want to potentiate. Because those words are no longer mine, because if I do those things they will never be done on my own terms. My potential is my own buisness. If I choose to teeter over the edge, if I choose to hover forever uncertain, if I choose to merely survive and not ‘accomplish’, then do not be so arrogant as to presume I am lost. To be lost is also to lose, and not all losing is faliure. It is I who have lost you, it is I who have become abandoned, not because you have abandoned me, but because this is the result of my agency. The room is empty, the room is free.

red machine – part one

A man has what looks like an epileptic seizure outside a hotel room. He recovers and opens the door. There is an old man sitting on the bed, shuffling three upturned cups on a low table. The man doesn’t know if this is his room or somebody else’s. His key dissipates from his hand. The old man questions him in a cryptic, Socratic way. The man doesn’t seem to remember anything that happened to him before he entered the room. The old man asks him, “What’s your name, Hugo?”, and the young man, perplexed and hesitating answers, “Er… Hugo.”

So begins Red Machine – Part One, a new play by some of Toronto’s leading playwrights and directors. Yes, that’s right, its all in the plural – there are three writers (Brendan Gall, Micheal Rubenfield and Erin Shields) and three directors (Chris Hanratty, Geoffery Pounsett, and Christopher Stanton) creating three intermingled set-pieces that work like motifs in a classical construction, each building on the other and coalescing in unexpected ways, characters and props bleeding from one scenario to the next, but all of it somehow cohesive and thematically consistent. At its best Red Machine seems to be working on some liminal part of our unconscious, and the audience is enraptured in its surreal web of intertextual dialogue, dreamlike auditory landscapes and the constantly mutating story. At its worst it comes across as self-indulgent, too enraptured with its own convolutions to realize that the audience has been left back some way down the road.

Of course that might after all be the work’s intentions: to stubbornly deflect any sort of linear analysis and symbolist analogies by never closing itself to a steady interpretation. To create theater that is ultimately about the immediacy of the experience of theater, the glut of feelings aroused and subsumed in 90 minutes of imaginary collaboration. ‘Hugo’, the ostensible protagonist, begins the play in a state of confusion, not remembering what happened before he entered the confines of the room. In the same way the audience is thrust into the room of the stage, and asked to cast aside the gravity of their lives for the duration of the work. We are the Hugo stumbling into a darkened room like a partial invalid, trying desperately to make sense out of the incidents and characters that surround us like old lovers. To talk about experimental theater without losing oneself is to talk about the feelings evoked, and the feelings evoked are definitely formidable: loss, confusion, fear, and perhaps the irony of retrospect.

Each segment is supposed to correspond to a particular area of the brain, the physical organ of consciousness. This brain is the ‘red machine’, and in one sense, this work is really a re-examination of an old theme, that of the mind physical versus the mind metaphysical. Here the physicality of the theater mingles with its imaginary reality, the reality of the play as witnessed by the spectator, his/her mind the delicate and form-creating drapery over the hard bones of performance created by the artists. There is a segment of the play that revolves around the game of cups played by the old man. Every cup is upturned except for the last one, and here the audience is left hanging. “What if,” the old man asks, “what if I turn over this cup and out comes a huge wave of soapy water, water gushing out of the cup and not stopping, filling up the room, drowning everyone?” The artists almost seem to be taunting us: you know that in reality such a thing is impossible, but you create the reality of the theater, and is it any less real if you are as apprehensive about turning over the cup as Hugo is? Does the physical impossibility of a thing really mean that it cannot exist? And perhaps this is what the Red Machine is trying to show us, some kind of transcendence of the whole over the various parts.

Parts 2 and 3 will be produced at other theatre festivals during the summer. For fans of conceptual theatre, this is a very juicy bone to chew on. Unfortunately, for those after stimulation of a character-oriented kind the Red Machine offers very meagre pickings. This is primarily for people who get excited while reading Lacan, or who furtively cruise the aisles of 24-hour grocery stores while singing German opera as part of a cognitive experiment on the mental resiliency of midnight shoppers.

ahh, there’s nothing like the smell of liberal guilt in the morning…

Risa Morris performs Wallace Shawn’s monologue, The Fever. The stage is bare except for a wicker armchair and a harsh spotlight spangling Morris’ hair as she sits, leans, and wriggles uncomfortably through the 90 minute performance. Her voice is soft at first, self-effacing, and then picks up speed and intensity, the white bourgeoisie narrator recounting the framing experience of kneeling over a toilet bowl in a third-world country wracked by civil war and communist rebellion, watching water-bugs crawl in “increasingly complex patterns” on the cheap floor, finally vomiting her torture and self-flagellation in a stream of self-directed invective.

It is a performance meant to startle, to knock out of serene complacency the professed non-involvement of the spectator, to confront head on the privileges of living comfortably in a country like Canada. Morris’ performance is with little flaw, only stumbling over a few words and seeming to lose a little conviction when ranting about Marx’s Das Kapital. But otherwise she draws us in completely with her steady, intelligent eyes, focusing on each member of the audience in turn, bringing each and every spectator into an individual accounting of their actions. Nothing is left innocent – in fact the very idea of innocence is upturned like a cool stone in the forest to reveal the nest of wriggling worms in its dark underbelly. Every action we take, Mr. Shawn proposes, whether it be as innocuous as drinking coffee in the morning or as fraught with peril as giving change to a beggar, is an action that rests on a long and invisible history of injustice, of cruelty, of the most unimaginable and unjustifiable violence.

But we know this, right? After all, we are the liberal elite. We are those ‘enlightened people’ who know about class privilege, about the inequitable economic relations that lie beneath and behind every act of commerce, about how drinking a cup of Nestle’s Nescafe is a direct infringement on the rights to a fair trade with farmers in countries like El Salvador and Nicaragua, about how the gap between the rich and the poor is self-justified through market forces that merely work to maintain the status-quo while presenting the facade of progress. We know these things, we have beliefs. As the narrator states,

“Every person is a person, every person believes certain things. My friend Bob—my friend Bob believes that “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” And Fred—Fred believes that “today’s rebel is tomorrow’s dictator.” And Natasha believes that peasants in poor countries just want to be left alone to farm their fields in peace and quiet, and they couldn’t care less about the ideologies of the right or the left. Mario believes that social criticism in plays and films can be expressed most effectively through the use of humor. And Indrani believes that works of art, including performances of opera and ballet, can change individuals and, through them, society. And Toshiko believes that the only real contribution that people can make toward solving the problems of the world is to raise their own families with good values. And Ann-Marie believes that the rich and the poor should live as friends and should work together to make the future better than the past.

But the question—the question is—Would it really matter if it were Fred who believed that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others? What if Fred were to wake up one morning and think he believed that, forgetting that that was actually the belief of his friend Bob?

Fred believes certain things—you can say that. But what does it mean? Does it mean something? I don’t remember . . .”

This is the power of the play – it forces us to confront the convoluted knots of self-deception that maintains our sense of decency, of comfortably staking the moral high ground. We are good people, we think. We are people who buy fair trade and local, we participate in communities, we are involved in labor organizing, we slip in Socialist thought in our critiques of government, we give money to charities, we create art that creates sympathy with the poor, we are aesthetes, we are the informed Left dammit, and we are decent people!

Right?

Wrong, argues Wallace Shawn and Risa Morris:

“Do you remember that day in school when you were playing with those three other children, and the teacher appeared in the room with four little cakes and gave all of the cakes, all four of the cakes, to that little boy called Arthur, and none to you or your two other friends? Well, at first all four of you were simply stunned. For that first moment, all four of you knew what had happened was unjust, insane. But then your friend Ella tried to make a little joke, and Arthur got furious and he hit Ella, and then he went into a corner and he ate all the cakes. It was an example of someone getting away with something.

And your life is another example. It’s the life of someone who’s gotten away with something. And yet your fanaticism is so extreme that you won’t let that thought come into your mind….

Now, a decent person cannot be a person who’s gotten away with something. A decent person cannot have what it’s not appropriate for them to have. And this understanding of yourself gives you the basis for a view of the world. And so you can look out at the way the world works, and sure, there are many many things that of course disturb you—the situation of your Knut, who loves Wagner, but who’s so badly paid by his publishing house that he can’t even afford to go see the operas he so deeply loves, or all the examples of man’s inhumanity that you see on your television every single night, like that terrible overseer on that rubber plantation in southern Malaysia—but still you can say that the way the world works is fundamentally not unjust, because you’ve received a share of things which you know it’s appropriate for you to have, and it’s appropriate for all the people who are like you all over the world to have the share that they have, that means that it’s not inappropriate for all the others to have the share which remains. You know that what you have is what you deserve, and that means that what they have is what they deserve. They have what’s appropriate for them to have. And you must admit it…”

The play ultimately becomes more than an indictment, it becomes a fascinating display of just how to deal with the basic injustice and indecency of our lives, of how to deal with not being a good person. In effect, how to live without self-delusion and still maintain a functioning level of sanity.

“Sometimes I was fine. I remember one morning—a marvelous blue sky—I had my hair cut. Gentle hands molded my hair so that it fit over the shape of my scalp like a cap. Then I bought myself a pair of comfortable socks, and then I looked at them carefully, and I bought two more pairs, because it’s not easy to find the kind of socks I like! Then I went to a sweet little restaurant and had lunch with a woman in a lemon-yellow suit whom I’d known since I was eight. But then I got into a taxi, and as I was riding across the city, that feeling, that sickness, filled me up again. It seemed to start in my stomach and move out through my legs, my chest. And my stomach was beating, it was just like a heart. A cold sweat on my forehead and neck. I wasn’t me. When the taxi arrived, the person who got out of it wasn’t me. I was nowhere. The person who paid the driver was actually no one.”

Volunteering for Fringe has many benefits, and one of the best is getting to meet the actors and directors. Talking to Lisa Morris beforehand, she seemed bubbly, jovial, eager to show off pictures of her five-year old daughter in a handy album she carries around with her, and casually expending that liberal energy in sweeping gestures and a wide, open smile. But after the performance I was tongue tied, and I stumbled stupidly saying in a voice a mouse would scorn, “Er… how can you…?” – “Live with yourself?” one of her friends finished for me and laughed. “No,” I said, recovering a little, “how do you manage doing an intense performance like that every night?”

It was a cop-out – “How can you live with yourself?” was exactly the question I wanted to ask, but that is not a question you ask of anybody. It is a question you ask of yourself.

There’s a performance schedule on Lisa Morris’ website and the Fringe homepage. Check it out if you’ve got the time. Tickets are 10 bucks and all the proceeds go to Doctors Without Borders. If you’re anything like me, this is right up your privileged leftie alley.

paris, texas

Watched Wim Wender’s 1984 film Paris, Texas last night. It left heavy trace metals in my brain that sifted through my dreams and now lies like a thin layer of white silt all over my skin. The images, the music, the language, all of it so cohesive in creating a total experience of loss and sacrifice, of truths hard won and cherished in the calloused hand like a freshly unearthed gem. The opening shots of the bare Texas landscape, and the Mohave desert in California retreating to the edge of the camera’s frame, the deeply worn, dirt-caked face of the anonymous man who wanders around the parched landscape looking for water. Travis (played by Harry Dean Stanton) has been lost for four years, and we meet him as he wanders around the desert and finally collapses in a gas-station from dehydration. His brother is notified. We learn that Travis once had a wife and a son. The son is now living with the brother and his wife, and it is to this home that Travis is taken to. He does not speak for the first half-hour of the movie. When he finally does he is like a man rediscovering language, like someone who has forgotten the purpose of the tongue. Where has been all these years, what has he done? These are the mysteries the film gradually unwinds in an unhurried pace.

What separates a great film from merely a good one is the self-conviction in the power of its own images. When Travis in the beginning is looking for water, stops at a tap outside a lonely gas-station, discovers that it is broken, then walks across a brown expanse towards the door of the building, the camera lingers on the rambling form of the man – it does not cut immediately to an interior shot. We are subjected to the walk, the actual time it takes to get from the tap to the door. We are immersed in the dust, the heat and harsh light – we are forced into contemplation. This is possible because what we are looking at has an intrinsic power – the mysteries are real, they are not filmic fabrications meant to manipulate. The camera watches, it does not dictate.

The dialogue as written by Sam Shepard is spare, precise, and has no emotional window-decoration. I know Shepard’s work mainly as a playwright – my friend played a part in a recent production of Cowboy Mouth, which also dealt with the mythos of Western Americana and its eventual disillusionment. In Paris, Texas he employs the same spare style, like some sort of cross between Hemingway and Faulkner, where suddenly the poetry of an unexpected turn of phrase hits you sideways and takes you unawares. The characters are simple people leading complex lives, and the knowledge they have gained through their mistakes and regrets is a tough knowledge, a knowledge that comes from looking at things truly and knowing that nothing lasts, everything is mutable, stability is a lie, and sometimes you have to lose in order to grow.

(A person who means a lot to me I now realize is blind to the power of images. This blindness gives that person a kind of power – she is able to remain unaffected by almost any type of gaze. A shot of a burning expanse of arid land means nothing to her, while to me it is a visceral experience. I am lost in the landscape, but returned to myself in its barest form. My breath catches a bit. But there is nothing for her – it only remains as it is, an image of a desert. It is not transformed into a reflection of spirit. This immunity to images is something I have noticed many people around me share. Is it because we are so inundated by the image (our culture is, after all, a culture of images) that we are like water-logged ships sinking in a chaotic ocean, unable anymore to tell the difference between one water and the other? Or perhaps we have come to distrust images because of what we see around us all the time, fabrications meant to entice, to coerce, to manipulate. So when we come across an image that is merely itself and should move us with its honesty, we dismiss its naked depiction as the Emperor’s new clothes.)

Anyways, here’s a scene from late in the movie. Don’t watch it if you plan on actually watching the film, but for those who need a little more encouragement to check out this gem, go ahead.

Wenders is part of the ‘New German Cinema’, as it is called. It rose in the 1960’s and flourished right up to the mid-eighties, and included directors like Herzog and Fassbinder. It was started with The Oberhausen Manifesto published by 26 German filmmakers in 1962. The text is as follows:

“The collapse of the conventional German film finally removes the economic basis for a mode of film-making whose attitude and practice we reject. With it the new film has a chance to come to life.
German short films by young authors, directors, and producers have in recent years received a large number of prizes at international festivals and gained the recognition of international critics. These works and these successes show that the future of the German film lies in the hands of those who have proven that they speak a new film language.
Just as in other countries, the short film has become in Germany a school and experimental basis for the feature film.
We declare our intention to create the new German feature film.
This new film needs new freedoms. Freedom from the conventions of the established industry. Freedom from the outside influence of commercial partners. Freedom from the control of special interest groups.
We have concrete intellectual, formal, and economic conceptions about the production of the new German film. We are as a collective prepared to take economic risks.
The old film is dead. We believe in the new one.”

I wonder how something like this would fly in the current film climate in Canada. The only people I know who are actively part of the scene tend to refer to it as the Film Industry with absolutely no irony. Is it possible anymore to take financial risks like those that produced the films we call ‘great’?

Just some random  musings from a film geek.

Now its off to the Fringe for voulunteering duties. I’ll try to post up some reviews of the plays as I see them.

reflections from the bloc

I’ve just found the best site ever.