I'm Trying to Reach You

by Barbara Browning

  * Marjian Crtalić, who is said to be, even today, performing a work in progress – 8 years and running – called Living Dead (Globalization of the Subconscious). This piece involves the daily clipping of his hair and scratching of his scalp with his fingernails. “The artist,” we are told, “has amassed a multi-year collection of deposits of hair, water and sebaceous fluid from his scalp that is now approximately the size of a tennis ball.” According to the organizers of the reenactment, Crtalić has developed a “paranoid attitude towards his own thoughts and feelings as ‘products of a globalized identity “colonization.”’ This is further present in the need for purity in the frame of ‘my own demented obsessive-compulsive boosting of my own deficiencies.’ ”

  None of these recent works, however, seemed to be causing a problem – it was rather the reenactments of two (ostensible) seminal figures from the 1970s that were wreaking havoc in the streets of Zagreb.

  * In 1971, Tomislav Gotovac is said to have performed Streaking, which perhaps needs no explanation. Ten years later, he reportedly performed Lying Naked on the Pavement, Kissing the Pavement (Zagreb, I Love You!) – Homage to Howard Hawks’ ‘Hatari!’ He was basically streaking again, but this time he’d shaved his head and made out with the sidewalk. He was arrested for disturbing the public order.

  * Almost exactly twenty years later, Vlasta Delimar, a contemporary of Gotovac who had also been big in the ’70s, reputedly performed Walkthrough as Lady Godiva, which could, I suppose, itself be construed as a kind of historical reenactment. Anyway, Delimar was also arrested. A lot had happened in Croatia since the ’70s, but in the realm of naked performance art, it seems the more things change, the more they stay the same.

  So, surprise. The 2009 reenactors of both Gotovac and Delimar, bringing to life a questionable and politically contaminated art history for the benefit of a raggedy assortment of foreign intellectuals housed at the local corporate hotel, were also arrested. I didn’t actually see the arrests taking place, but I heard about them as soon as I arrived at the U. of Z. Faculty of Architecture, which was where most of the academic panels were taking place. It made me feel sad and vaguely responsible, but someone pointed out that maybe getting arrested was also a part of the “reperformance.” I wondered, though, if they thought they might have been protected by their association with visiting international scholars. But maybe that was just a manifestation of my own projection of a paranoid attitude toward Croatians’ thoughts and feelings as “products of a globalized identity ‘colonization.’ ”

  Anyway, the incident seemed to get blown over fairly quickly, but it haunted me throughout the day.

  I attended a paper on “Peter Sellars: Snake-Oil Salesman or Enfant Terrible?” and another on disruptive audience members. Nobody in our audience was particularly disruptive, though I’m sure a few of us were contemplating the possibility while listening. In the hallway afterwards I ran into Dan Ferguson and a couple of other acquaintances from NYU, and they invited me to lunch, but I just wanted to grab one of the conference box lunches and head back to the hotel to work on my own paper, which I was presenting that afternoon.

  It was the same old same old, of course – failures of communication in Forsythe. The ways in which the dancers could appear to be misfiring with each other, but ultimately the dance itself was forcing the viewer to face the absence of meaning.

  I know, doesn’t sound so upbeat, does it?

  I still wanted to tinker with it a little. I gave Dan my cell number, though. He said they’d located the one gay bar in Zagreb and were planning to head over there in the evening. That sounded interesting. I don’t mean I was looking for action. It seemed more like research. In fact, I pretty much always feel I’m doing research.

  I had to wait a few minutes at the Arcotel for one of those computers to open up. I had my paper on a flash drive. Once I got to work, I spent about twenty minutes moving some of those commas around. I looked at this phrase: “brutal propulsion, contorted mouths, buckling limbs” – backspaced, typed: “brutal propulsion, mouths in contortion, limbs in collapse.” Propulsion and contortion sounded too much alike. Tried again: “limbs akimbo.” Silly. “Scattered limbs.” One step over the line: too violent. “Limbs limning…” – uh oh, my addiction to grammatological figures was popping up again. Maybe I had it right the first time. My gaze wandered, vaguely, to the right of the screen, and slowly the hotel bar came into focus. “Oh shit,” I thought. “It’s him”: Jimmy Stewart, wearing that same manicured tennis outfit from yesterday, or at least a similar one. In the light of day, he was wearing shades – mirrored, with aviator frames. He seemed to be sipping an iced tea. As I stared at him, he slowly turned his head to face me directly. I’m pretty sure he was staring back at me, though with the shades it was hard to tell. He stood there for a minute or so, fixedly, and then gulped down the rest of his tea, tossed a handful of kuna onto the bar, grabbed his tiny racquet, and headed out into the streets of Zagreb.

  I looked back at my paper, unnerved. I’d written the first draft two and a half years ago. I’d just managed to move a comma or two, but it clearly wasn’t going to be much improved before my panel at 3:00. This reappearance of Jimmy Stewart also wasn’t exactly helping my concentration. I saved my changes, closed the document, and ejected my flash drive. I hesitated for a moment, and then opened up the Internet browser, heading straight for YouTube. I typed in “michael jackson moonwalk modéré satie.” Up she popped: the tiny dancer. I watched her quietly sink and rise in her mechanical little demi-pliés, with her little mudra-hands hanging at odd angles off her wrists. I watched it again. Evidently somebody else had, too: it was up to nineteen hits. I saw from the clock on the corner of the screen that it was really time for me to be heading over to the Faculty of Architecture to test my a.v. before my panel. But I couldn’t resist quickly scrolling down to check on the comments. There was a new one, from “quothballetcarper”: “Not bad, little lady. Keep practicing.” To which falserebelmoth had responded, in a language as peculiar and indecipherable as her choreography: “And I sneered – softly – ‘small’!”

  I got to my assigned room at 2:50, a little out of breath. I was supposed to be presenting with two other people – the prominent dance theorist Niels van der Waals, and a graduate student from the University of Wisconsin named Amanda Trugget. Amanda was trying to figure out how to open her file on a PC. She was a Mac person. There was a tech guy assigned to the room, but he didn’t seem to understand her question. She looked pretty nervous. When I introduced myself she said this was her first conference presentation. She had braces. I helped her figure out how to access her PowerPoint file on Isadora Duncan. Then I checked my own Forsythe images. Quite a few people were gathering around the door, but after chatting and peaking in, they all filed discreetly into the room next door. At about 3:05, someone shut that door, and you could hear the muffled sound of their panel beginning. Amanda and I settled into our seats, and the U. of Z. tech guy politely took a seat at the back of the room. In the awkward silence, Amanda and I flipped through our notes, smiled at each other, and checked our cell phones. I texted Sven: “low turnout wtf?” He texted back: “ :( ”

  At about 3:20, I stuck my head out in the hallway, and saw a sign taped to the door. I guess I’d missed it on the way in. It said, “Unfortunate news Professor van der Waals is unable to attend conference.” Well, that would explain the quiet migration away from our panel. I explained the situation to Amanda, and she started to cry, softly. I told her I’d be happy to listen to her paper. She pulled herself together, and began reading in a tremulous voice. When she got to the line about how Marinetti had rejected Duncan’s “childish sensuality” in favor of “the ‘cakewalk’ of the Negroes,” she looked up at me with an awkward grimace, her lips stretched painfully over all that orthodontic hardware. I nodded encouragingly, indicating that I understood this wasn’t her own word choice. Amanda forged ahead, stoically.

  At several points during her presentation, my mind
wandered. I was replaying that weird video in my head. I don’t think Amanda noticed. I was careful to maintain the appearance of rapt concentration.

  When she concluded, the tech guy and I applauded. Then, to reciprocate, I read my paper. Amanda, too, had an expression of polite engagement, but by the end, even I had lost interest. I came up with one lame question for her – the year of publication of the Manifesto of Futurist Dance – which she answered (1917). She asked me what I thought the phrase “Fiction (as wish)” meant in Forsythe’s Sleepers Guts. It appeared as a projection in the background of one of my slides. I started rambling about how, for Derrida, dance has to precede writing… But Amanda’s face was clouding over and I let myself trail off. The tech guy was already winding up the cables from the microphones, so Amanda and I just smiled limply and clapped for each other’s good manners. We gathered up our belongings in silence and each headed for the gender-appropriate restroom. I don’t think it was because we had to pee. I think we both just wanted to get away from one another. It was nothing personal. After washing my hands, and drying them, I stuck my head out into the hall. Seeing no sign of Amanda, I took off for the Arcotel.

  Maybe now you will understand why I’d been toying with the idea of writing a novel. It’s not that I don’t enjoy academic writing, and it’s not like I want to be the next Stephen King. Honestly, I love the idea of a paper with an audience of one. Well, two if you count the tech guy. It really had more to do with that question of Amanda’s.

  That evening someone from the conference organized an impromptu session in the lobby of the Zagreb Youth Theatre where conference attendees could process Michael Jackson’s death. Maybe “organized” is the wrong word. I noticed there were not a lot of people of color at this conference. The motley crew that assembled in the lobby of the Zagreb Youth Theatre seemed unsure about whether they were there to speak, or to listen. Someone did, however, read aloud the brief statement issued by the performance artist Reverend Billy (of The Church of Stop Shopping) on his website. It was quite moving. It addressed MJ directly, and encapsulated the extreme beauty and disfigurement of the artist as the logical conclusion of advanced capitalism: “We created you and you created us. I am proud and I am ashamed.”

  Dan Ferguson texted me that night at about 10:00: “@ gbar mesnicka 36 upper town.” I looked up the address on the little map of Zagreb that came with the conference materials. It looked like a doable walk, so I headed out on foot. It was a beautiful evening. Zagreb is a fairly quiet town – not really known for its nightlife. The weather was pleasant, and aside from a few sour-looking elderly pedestrians, most of the people I saw seemed to be teenaged couples making out on benches. They were very workmanlike about this. There was not a lot of laughter or conversation. On my way up into the Upper Town, I stopped in front of St. Mark’s Church, which they say dates back to the 13th century. You wouldn’t know it – big chunks of it were destroyed and then replaced after various catastrophes, both natural and man-made. The roof has a mosaic of the Dalmatian, Croatian, and Slavonian coats of arms. In the evening light it looked as if it were made of Legos.

  I turned the corner and walked up the hill on Mesnička Street. It was very quiet, and apparently mostly residential. When I got to number 36, I wondered if I’d made a mistake – or if Dan had. It looked like a regular row house. But then I saw there was a doorbell with a discreet label saying “gbar.” I buzzed, and almost immediately a middle-aged guy with a crew cut opened the door and nodded me in. There was a rainbow-colored neon sign over the bar, and they were playing VH1, relatively quietly. It was dark and air-conditioned. Aside from Dan Ferguson and his three other friends, the only other people in the gbar were the man who let me in, a young, hot guy staring at the video screen, and the bartender, who was a woman. She was also young and good-looking, with spiky hair and a pierced lower lip, but she was very serious. Dan, however, introduced her as though she were already a friend. “Gray, Zlata. Zlata, Gray. Zlata makes a mean Thirsty Lesbian!”

  I said, with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, “Oh, really?”

  Zlata just stared, waiting for my order.

  “Is there something you recommend?”

  Zlata said, with nary a hint of a smile, “We have two specialty cocktail, Thirsty Lesbian and Double Penetration. Thirsty Lesbian is wodka. Double Penetration has two kinds alcohol. I recommend beer, Zlatni Medvjed.”

  I looked at Dan’s glass. It had a pink liquid in it that I guessed might be sweet. The TL. I considered asking for more information on the DP, but since I wasn’t really in the mood to get hammered, I went with Zlata’s recommendation.

  Dan introduced me to his friends, who were all, like him, ABD. Sometimes I feel a little old in these situations. I went back to graduate school as what they euphemistically call a “mature” student, but these days a lot of doctoral students are fresh out of their undergraduate institutions. All three of Dan’s friends, two guys and a girl, were gossiping about some confrontation that had occurred at the plenary that day. I try to steer clear of academic gossip. I have one of those little figurines of three monkeys next to my computer at home: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. I tried to engage Dan in a separate conversation. We didn’t have to apologize for missing each other’s paper because we’d been scheduled in the same time slot. I asked him how his had gone.

  He said, “Do you want the blow-by-blow?”

  I said, “That sounds like one of Zlata’s cocktails.”

  Turns out almost nobody showed up for his panel as well. Then we realized the gbar was also virtually empty. It was a little sad, and a little funny.

  Dan and his friends wanted to stay to see if things would pick up after midnight (doubtful). After I finished my beer, I excused myself, awkwardly hugged everybody, walked back to the Arcotel, texted Sven about the names of the cocktails (answer: “:)”), brushed my teeth, and turned in.

  The next morning I made the mistake of eating the wall decorations at the Arcotel. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My room, and presumably all the other rooms, had a decorative metallic apple holder on the wall near the desk, stocked with two Red Delicious apples. It was stamped, in English: HAVE A NICE DAY. I’d been looking at these apples for the last two days. I felt one. Definitely real. I figured they had to replace them anyway, so I might as well eat one. I washed it. I took a bite.

  It was a shocking mouthful of mealy mush.

  This incident made me ponder: my somewhat distressing financial situation; the notion of “decorative” food; the ubiquity of the English language and the global implications of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe; what the maid might think when she found this mealy apple with a humiliating bite taken out of it in the trash can; if I’d been tipping her appropriately in kuna; what it would be like to be a hotel chambermaid in Croatia; biblical representations of paradise and temptation; sexuality and sin. Sven.

  I was still hungry, of course. I hoped there still might be some muffins or something over at the conference site. I’d let myself sleep in, feeling my experiences of the day before exonerated me of much responsibility in regards to attending other people’s panels. In fact, when I got to the U. of Z., there was some burnt coffee and a bowl of apples in remarkably similar condition to the decorative ones at the Arcotel. Maybe this was just the way they ate apples in Zagreb. Somehow that made me feel better.

  I attended a late-morning panel on performance and new media. There was a guy who introduced himself as a “witch doctor” and he compared the manipulation of avatars in cyberspace to the use of voodoo dolls. That was a little disturbing. But then a woman gave a pretty rousing talk in defense of “collective solipsism.” She showed photos of an “Air Sex” competition, an installation by Sophie Calle, and an interesting YouTube video of a 12-year-old girl doing the SpongeBob SquarePants dance in her San Antonio bedroom.

  This video made me think of falserebelmoth – another small, almost embarrassingly intimate domestic chamber dance.

 
I really liked that SpongeBob SquarePants dance. But the business about voodoo dolls had left me a little unsettled.

  When the panel was over, I grabbed another boxed lunch and headed back to the hotel. I made a bee-line to that computer that I’d started to think of as “mine,” and pulled up the performance that I’d also started to have kind of proprietary feelings about. It was up to thirty-three hits. So mine would make thirty-four. This time, though, I couldn’t seem to focus on her dance. I was watching her shadow moving across the wall behind her. Sometimes it danced right out of the frame, but then she’d dance it in again. I’m not sure why it would make me so anxious every time her shadow disappeared.

  That was when I felt a presence again just over my left shoulder. I knew exactly who it was. I closed the browser just as the dance was ending and sat there with my hand on the mouse, refusing to turn around and acknowledge him. My heart was beating. I’m not sure if I was afraid or angry.

  Jimmy Stewart said softly, “Hm,” and strode past me and out the big glass doors. The handle of his miniature racquet was jutting out of a small beige backpack. I watched him check his watch, look up and down the avenue, and then flag down the approaching tram. I think he was looking back in my direction as the car carried him away.

  On my last afternoon in Zagreb, I decided to skip all panels and meander through the city. The weather had turned slightly overcast. This seemed like an appropriate backdrop to all that Habsburg architecture. I was lamely trying to pick up a word or two of Croatian from the signage in the store windows. It seemed that every 20 yards or so there was a hair salon, and these were marked with the word “FRIZER” or some variation on that term. Like, FRIZERSKI, which was probably the adjectival form. It was odd there was evidently such a preoccupation with hair styling, because despite all that professional attention, most people’s hair looked terrible. Croatian people didn’t strike me as a particularly unattractive people, but there was definitely a styling problem. Even the more intentional looks seemed badly misguided. It was strange because in many other ways they struck me as quite cosmopolitan.