Then they take Barbara Graham into the gas chamber and strap her into the chair. They strap her around the chest, around the waist, around her arms, and around her legs. You see one of the executioners hooking up the tubes that will lead to an external stethoscope so they can tell when she’s dead. The guy discreetly whispers to her to count to ten when she hears the pellets drop into the liquid, and then to breathe in deeply, because that will make it “easier.”
She says, “How do you know?” Her voice is dripping with sarcasm. He pats her on the shoulder.
Then a lot of people gather around and look in the windows of the gas chamber. There’s a shot of the telephone, as if to say there’s still a chance somebody will make the call and commute her sentence, but nobody does. There’s a shot of the priest reading the Bible. There’s a big ticking clock on the wall. Somebody looks at it, and then gives the nod. You watch another guy open the tanks. You see and hear the pellets drop into the liquid and start to fizz. You count. You watch her breathe. Her head bobs. Then her head swings back. Then it bobs forward again. You watch her hand grip the armrest. You watch it relax.
Sven and I didn’t really talk about this movie. We went to bed early that night so Sven would get enough sleep before his long flight.
SINGULAR PLURAL
The rest of October was pretty quiet.
A couple of days after Sven left, David Rousseve presented a dance-for-film project in the department. It was melancholy and a little disturbing. A few days later I saw Felicia McKenzie again in the laundry room. She didn’t seem to recognize me. Dan Ferguson had a Halloween party at his place in Astoria. I went as Charlie Chaplin. Fang was a finger. Dan was a rabbit in a hat. Somebody went as a “Body without Organs” (BwO). There was also a very convincing smurf.
I didn’t make a lot of progress on my academic manuscript.
On November 1st, I got an e-mail from the woman I was subletting from. She was an anthropologist on sabbatical in Quito. She politely asked me to make sure my December rent check was going to clear before I deposited it for her. There had been a minor glitch in October.
I also got an e-mail that day from the administrative director at the Department of Performance Studies, Ramon Gonzalez, telling me that he was sending out an announcement to the list-serve about my talk on December 16 and I should let him know if I needed any kind of technical assistance. Mine was the last talk of the fall semester, and the departmental holiday party would immediately follow it.
Fuck. Excuse my language, but I really had to bite the bullet and figure out what I was going to say.
That evening was the opening ceremony of Performa 2009, the biennial performance art festival run by RoseLee Goldberg. The festivities were supposed to start at 8 p.m. in Times Square. Arto Lindsay, the sound artist, had collaborated with the choreographer Lily Baldwin on a kind of parade. Fang and Dan wanted to go. Times Square had always made me feel vaguely allergic (literally – sometimes I’d break out in hives), and I really felt I ought to be working on my talk, but I agreed to meet them anyway at John’s Hot Dog Cart on the corner of 46th and Broadway at 7:45.
Fang is petite but she can really put away the hot dogs. While she was wolfing down her third, Dan explained to me that the piece we were going to see was called Somewhere I Read… The event incorporated about 50 dancers moving through the public walkways of Times Square. As you surely know, this is one of the most densely commercial zones of the city. My allergy probably had something to do with this. It’s not just that I didn’t have the cash to participate in all that consumption. I found it aesthetically overwhelming.
Dan told me that Lindsay had composed the score for the performance to be played on the dancers’ cell phones. When we wandered into Father Duffy Square, where they have that TKTS booth, it took us a minute to figure out that things had already started. The performers were scattered around the illuminated steps. They were all dressed in tidy, belted, beige trench coats and they were waggling around their cell phones. Slowly, they began to assume a more uniform pattern of movement. Baldwin’s movement vocabulary was markedly pedestrian, even though all the performers had been culled from dance studios. The score, when we finally heard it emanating from the phones, was really very quiet. Sometimes you could hear almost nothing coming out of the phones, but the range of sounds, when audible, was varied – from the percussive to the slightly melodic to the squeaky and mechanical. The movement was correspondingly eclectic. Despite the fact that it was taking place in the national epicenter of theatrical overkill, one could certainly say that the general aesthetic of the piece was one of understatement. I snapped a photo on my own phone.
I heard a couple standing behind me talking about what was going on. The woman said, “I think it’s one of those flash mobs. It’s probably an ad for those cell phones.”
That seemed like as plausible an interpretation as any other.
We stayed until the end, following a cluster of dancers that moved south for a block or so, attracting a mix of disgruntled, enchanted, bored, and mesmerized responses. Finally the dancers lined up to dump their phones, one by one, into a heap, and they dispersed into the crowd.
Fang and Dan and I kind of shrugged. We liked it, sort of, but we weren’t sure why. Fang had a stomachache (no surprise) so she left in a bit of a rush. Dan had a friend who was a chorus member in Wicked and he was going to hang around the Gershwin Theater until his friend got out. I decided to walk home, down Broadway. In the thick of things, under those enormous, illuminated billboards, I felt dwarfed, but as they receded behind me, I began to feel my normal size again. I was very glad to get down near 14th Street.
I texted Sven that picture of the dancers with the cell phones. He said, “ : / ”
Five days later I was doing my barre exercises to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. I was avoiding revising my manuscript and pulling together my lecture. I was also thinking about modality in music, and ballet positions.
Sometimes, of course, I feel pretty embarrassed of my formalism. I don’t mean my good manners, although I am pretty genteel. I mean my preoccupation with form, aesthetically. It’s not exactly fashionable. But just as I was thinking about this, Fang called to say that Marjorie Levinson was giving a talk over at CUNY that evening and she asked me if I wanted to go. I asked her who Marjorie Levinson was and she said she’d written a very influential article in the PMLA on the “New Formalism.” I asked Fang what that meant and she said that renewed preoccupation with form manifested itself in ways both radical and conservative. I asked Fang if she considered herself a New Formalist and she said, “Oh, of course,” as though this were self-evident. No need to ask if she were in the radical or conservative wing of this movement.
I hadn’t really thought of the filiform wart project as formal in its concerns.
I wondered if you could be a filiformalist.
I said sure, I’d go to the lecture with her.
Marjorie Levinson’s lecture was one of the plenaries for a conference on Romanticism and the city. The title of Levinson’s talk was listed in the conference program as “Clouds and Crowds, Solitude and Society: Revisiting Romantic Lyric,” but it turned out she’d settled on a different one: “Of Being Numerous.” I found it a relief that even somebody like her could apparently leave some aspects of her talk to the last possible moment. But she was very impressive. She talked about form as it’s thought about in various other disciplines, like cognitive science and systems theory. She gave the impression of knowing what she was talking about.
There was a young woman seated next to me who kept typing away on her laptop as Levinson spoke. I think she was an academic groupie blogger. I was staring at her screen – it didn’t seem to bother her. She typed:Representation’s most “significant” (haha) function, Levinson pointed out, is not to assign a signifier to some readily cognizable signified, but to have that signifier stand for something which can only be cognized as a representation. Kant’s mathematical sublime served as one illustration, the
sublime (or, in mathematics, the infinite) figuring as the representation of a failure in representation. The end-product of this representation, though, is a way of being-singular. The regime of resemblance, on the other hand, captures an ontics of being-numerous. Nothing exists in itself, but only in resemblance to other things (an arbitrarily large set of other things) – through proximity, emulation, analogy, and something I’m not remembering. Somewhere Spinoza and Deleuze/ Guattari make their way in there.
I also got lost during the segue from Spinoza to Deleuze and Guattari. I was just spacing out for a minute. Levinson had quoted that line from Wordsworth, “I wandered lonely as a cloud…” I was remembering that strange sensation I’d had walking down Broadway after the Performa event.
At the end of the talk, Fang asked a very intelligent question about Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of the “singular plural” and what it had to do with an unending situation of war. Actually, it was more of a comment than a question. She phrased it very politely and deferentially, but it was smart, slightly off-topic, and a little intimidating. I remembered Fang telling me that before she realized she wanted to be a conceptual artist, she thought she wanted to be a lawyer. She’d probably make a very good lawyer, though I suspect she’d have to tone down the scrumbling look.
The next day I was having my coffee and reading the paper when I got a text from Randy. He was at Lennox Hill Hospital.
Ellen had tried to kill herself.
Randy and Jeremy had been driving to Woodstock on the evening of Marjorie Levinson’s talk when Randy heard a disconcerting voicemail Ellen had left him asking him to look after her cat if anything happened to her. They tried to call, to no avail, and shortly before they got to their house they decided to turn around and check in on her at her apartment on the Lower East Side. After banging on the door for a while, the super let them in, and they found her slumped over the table. She’d taken a bottle of Percocet she’d bought off the Internet. Fortunately she’d vomited most of it up. They called an ambulance and Randy went to the hospital with her. Jeremy and the super stayed and cleaned up.
When Randy and Jeremy busted into the apartment, the cat was just walking around as though nothing had happened.
Randy told me visiting hours started at 11 if I wanted to come by. I got there a little early, and the two of us sat for a while in the lobby waiting. Somebody wheeled an ancient crone out in a wheelchair. He parked her right next to me as he went out to hail a taxi. She leaned over toward me and hissed, “Old age is not for sissies!”
I said, “So I’ve heard.”
She said, “I hate it!” She looked genuinely pissed off.
I thought of Bugs Bunny’s sister. I hadn’t seen her in a while.
When we went up to see Ellen, the nurse was very chipper. She admired the daisies I’d brought. Ellen looked about like she usually did after a night of excess, except she was in one of those standard-issue hospital gowns and she had an IV for fluids. The three of us made some slightly acerbic jokes, but occasionally Ellen would tear up and wipe her eyes with the back of her hand. Then three other friends of hers from yoga showed up in the doorway, and Randy and I kissed her on the top of the head and told her to call us if she needed anything. He’d gotten a key and promised to feed her cat.
Obviously, this experience derailed me from my work.
I was extremely sad that week.
I also kept thinking about that performance piece in Times Square. I decided to look on YouTube and see if anybody had put up a video of it. The official Performa site had posted one of the event itself, and another of an interview between RoseLee Goldberg and Arto Lindsay talking about it. She was asking him about the origins of the piece and he mentioned that years ago he had spotted Greta Garbo walking around Midtown in a trench coat and dark glasses. He seemed to be relating this to isolation and the cell phone, the way we move through the city in such a self-contained way.
“I vant to be alone.”
Both Goldberg and Lindsay noted the possibility of spectators perceiving the piece as an advertisement – Lindsay suggested “a poor man’s Banana Republic commercial” – though as I said, the woman I overheard thought it was an ad for the cell phones. That’s when Lindsay invoked Garbo, and “wanting to be alone,” which was interesting, given the number of performers involved. He also expressed enthusiasm over the fact that the initial call for dancers elicited “groups of friends – which was nice.” But I thought the question of what kind of affective relations the dance was meant to create with spectators was entirely suspended. Lindsay and his collaborators seemed content to teeter-totter on the brink of oppressive commercialism, allowing costume, sound, and choreography to simultaneously evoke and lampoon the flash mob – a genre of indeterminate political significance at best.
In the heart of a consumerist paradise/inferno, the intentional understatement and discretion of the performance were what made it seem both critical of and complicit with that consumerism.
You will find this, perhaps, an over-intellectualization of the event. Indeed, but this was what I was trained to do. This, and pliés.
I already told you about how sad I was, about the hives I sometimes get when I go to Times Square, and about my walk home after that performance, when I wandered lonely as a cloud.
It will not surprise you to learn that after watching the Performa videos on YouTube I couldn’t resist checking in again on AhNethermostFun. I’d been avoiding her channel, knowing it tended to provoke my paranoid delusions. I felt it also contributed to my academic procrastination. But this experience with Ellen had left me feeling tender, and I found myself concerned for the moth as well. I breathed a sigh of relief when I opened her page: she’d recently posted another dance! It was Satie again, another of the Gnossiennes, but this time played on distortion guitar and electric bass, sounding much like that earlier “Natural Woman” rendition. The moth was partnered again, but this time with an older gentleman. He was concentrated, delicate, and elegant, and both he and the moth danced with their eyes closed, as if trying very hard to savor every note of the haunting melody. He was wearing some kind of leather pouch around his neck. She had on a Che Guevara t-shirt.
In her description of the dance, the moth had written a peculiarly threatening little note: “To foe of His I’m deadly foe – None stir the second time On whom I lay a Yellow Eye – Or an emphatic Thumb.”
The cab freshener had answered, beautifully but obscenely: “phallic thumb of love.”
I was mildly scandalized.
And the email jerk? Surprise. He was confusing, touching, and terrifying, all at once: “OH OKAY I GET IT ITS LIKE THE DUKE SAID (HEY WEHRE THE HECK IS HE ALREADY???): IM A GREDY OLD MAN_LIFES BEN GOOD TO ME AND I WANT SOMEMORE OF IT. OKAY HES GOOD 2 GO BUT KEP AN EYE ON THAT GURLY BOY!!”
I wondered if he was making reference to that last Gnossienne – the one with the handsome woman. But perhaps you’ll understand why I also took this warning personally. And as if to drive home my concern, that vicious Favre fan brrtfarvroools piped in: “fegget faggte fagget bitch byatch fagget suck my weenie!!!”
They let Ellen go home on November 8. I went to pick her up at the hospital. She was acting like everything was just fine, going off about how great her new meds were and how she couldn’t wait to get some decent sushi. When we opened the door her cat came over, looked at us, and walked away. Ellen smiled wryly. “Somebody missed me…”
But her place was warm and cozy. She put Erykah Badu on the stereo. I made her some chamomile tea. Randy was also going to stop by after work. I didn’t want to make her self-conscious by asking too much, but eventually she just said, “Gray, I’m good. You can go now. I kind of want to take a bath. Dude. I love you.” She said it as though I were the one who needed taking care of. We had a hug and I headed out.
I stopped by Economy Candy on Rivington Street, which I’d often do when I was in that neighborhood because Sven liked Beeman’s gum and it’s about the only place you can get it. I don’t
even remember when he first had it, but he liked it when I’d bring him some. Economy Candy is a little overwhelming. Just in the gum section of the “old time favorites,” they have Chiclets (bulk and in boxes), Fruit Stripe, Adams’ Sour Apple, Choward’s Scented, Teaberry, Razzles (various flavors), Jolt, Double Bubble, a wide selection of bubble gum cigars and cigarettes, and those little gum “gold nuggets” that come in cotton bags tied with string. These are all up in the front of the store, which is heavily trafficked. I stood there staring at the Beeman’s for a minute, thinking about Sven. I felt my eyes fill up with tears. I picked up three packs and ducked behind a rack of novelty items so nobody would see me cry. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and looked up at a giant Elvis Pez dispenser. They also had Darth Vader.
It took me a little while to collect myself.
When I left Economy Candy, I turned west on Ludlow, made a right on Delancey, and rounded the corner on Allen, where I ran straight into a pack of earnest young dancers swinging their arms up in assertive fifth positions en haut. The assertiveness of their dancing was all the more marked given the constraints of their garments: they were wearing trench coats! For a moment, I was sure they were a few members of the Performa crew who had gotten loose and were now roaming the city. But then I realized that their movement was altogether different. Except for their clothing, they bore no resemblance to the dancers I’d seen one week earlier.
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