August: Osage County (why I’ll try theatre again)

2/26/2008 4:07 AM

I got an email from Sunil Vyas while I was at work yesterday and he just responded again. It seems I’ll see him on Monday the 3rd for dinner. How exciting. I am up on time and ready to go, but I want to write a little here first.
I keep thinking of the play that I went to see with Chandler. “August: Osage County” was a great play and in spite of the fact that I usually do not enjoy big c culture events I loved this one. I think I’d like to write a brief post about it for the Blog. I should start with the fact that I often, peremptorily, prejudicially and without cause, don’t like going to plays and being around the theatre crowd. This goes double for opera, classical music and experimental theatre. The last play I went to was the one about Buckminster Fuller with my dad (which has its own special load of fraught freight). I remember that it was in a warehouse-type theatre with lots of really engaged people, not a few of whom were old hippies like my dad. As I went into the big space with bleachers built to face the stage I enjoyed the “archive of Buckminster Fuller” and the “world games” that filled the space like some experimental museum. But I was not comfortable.
In spite of the fact that is was like a trip to my childhood, with buckyball globes (tetrahedrons cut out of postcards) made of cardboard and other oddities of the subject of the play, I felt disease. It is the same feeling I get when I go to the opera in SF, or Philly or (strangely to a lesser extent) in New York. I got crabby and judgmental, spending as much time assessing the clothes, styles, class and culture of my fellow theatre goers as I did watching the play, theatre, opera or anything else.
When I go to big-C-cultural events I inevitably start to compare instead of identifying. I begin to reach a point where I note every difference between myself and the other people attending the same production. I’ve noted before that I don’t get this way when I’m in an art museum, so this alienation and judgment is particular to the theatre-arts big-C-cultural events. I just don’t know why. I suppose I could go to a few years of therapy and figure it out, but I like sitting in my grouch-can complaining too much.
“August: Osage County” was a great play and a big-C-cultural event that I truly enjoyed. This leads me to believe that the real issue is the quality or my engagement with the productions I’ve seen. I know that I did actually enjoy the St. Petersburg production of Pushkin’s “The Fiery Angel,” but it had massive full frontal nudity and catholic bashing (fifty nuns stripped down and climbed all over the set nude: it was spectacular). But, I also enjoyed “August: Osage County” and it had no nudity. It was a human drama full of real people and actual emotions covered in very funny humor, which is how I try to avoid my feelings.
From the moment the play began I stopped taking inventory of my fellow theatre-goers and did not notice a thing besides Chandler’s tired head on my shoulders until it was over. I wasn’t even bothered by the people pushing passed my seat to get oiled at intermission. The guy behind me who was so drunk that his breath was making me tipsy barely bothered me as I watched the drama unfold.
It was like watching the most dysfunctional family reunion or chistmas dinner ever, in the tawdriest trailer park in the south. Yet I had no judgment of the people on stage at all (in spite of the bashing that the description I just gave suggests). I was immediately struck by the humanity of the characters, the reality of the actors’ performances and the use of humor to deflect the horror of a domestic tragedy.
I loved the experience of this play and look forward to going to more drama, if it is this good. This one play rescued three genres of big-C-culture for me in one felled swoop.

“Queens Boulevard Driftwood”

In my annual calender, on the page I started the poem were these two “bon mots:” “the truth broke my uniqueness” (3.22.7) and “My ability stand pain diminished” (4.2.7). I’m not sure why I wrote them down, who said them, or why they matter, but I’m digitalizing them.

I saw a huge chunk of wood in traffic on Queens Boulevard the other day and the traffic was slowly dissolving it. I though about it and I want ed to write a poem, and this is what I started last night as Erin (M) spoke.

“Queens Boulevard Driftwood”
A six foot block of 8” by 10”
Aged for a century deep in
A warehouse that held barrels of oil
That 2 floors down became pens

Flame de-industrialization
For cold steel replacement buildings:
To fill with pressboard furniture
Covered with white and birch veneer

The rubble of that factory
Trucked away thirty cubic
Yards at a time to a depot
Lashed to barges along the River

The illegal that packed the charred beam
In the 30 yard dumpster lashed loose
The blue plastic tarp containment
Disposable archeology

Too fast turn by stallion carting
Out flew bricks, rubble and plaster
The beam that held up 100 years
Of hard work and new things fell out

Wave after wave of traffic rolls
Over and over the charred cedar
Crumbling and shaving the wood cut
A century ago by dagos

Yellow, then red and green again
The pulsing of the traffic thuds
Over and over the charred cedar
Gnawing away on the old beam

Smoothing the remains of the tree
Felled so long ago in mountain woods
A century hidden in red brick
Supporting piece-work now done by

Dominicans and Poles and
Koreans and Fujianese
And Hondurans and Mexicans
With bleary eyed efficiency

When I see the board dissolving
Under the waves of rush hour tires
It smoothes along the rough grain grown
When Lincoln debated Douglass

The grain shows like the tree itself
Fell down in a cold mountain stream
And was worn away gently in
The most tranquil of rural deaths

Waves of cars on Queens Boulevard
Lap over the wetback hewn board
Eroding it like the bowsprit
Of a shipwrecked sail freighter

Made redundant by steel and steam
Wave after wave on the freezing verge
Wears away the tree cut down quick,
Casually, when Queens was built

By dawn there is only a smooth
Core, the size of a root, halo-ed
By splinters worn off, car after car
Queens Boulevard Driftwood

This poem, on reconsideration, reminds me of this shit.

Physical Therapy and Abu Ghraib

So I’ve been undergoing physical therapy twice a week for a while now. Some of you might notice the photo above from an earlier post. as I am stretched and pulled, massaged and exercised I am for period of ten minutes each time left alone in a cubicle with electrodes strapped to my ankles. My ankles are then wrapped in ice-packs and the power is turned on. This increases bloodflow to the recently “exercised” joints and I think is helping (I am getting better). During those lonely twenty minutes a week I have been composing poems on my crackberry:

As I lie in my curtain-cubicle
Stretched and stretching out
Upon the insurance company wrack
Tring to revive my ligaments

I feel the gentle surge
Of the curative electrodes
Taped to my lower extremities
As I stare up at the curtains

That separate me from
The other patients with
Other infirmities
Stretched shocked wrenched

Each of them must feel
The tears of their own flesh
Rehabbing looking up
At the fluorescent

Curtains that separate us all
Hanging from the tracks
That segregate walls
For our own lonely cures

Stretch (This one is a revision of the first that speaks more directly to an imagined interrogation instead of the isolation that I feel in that cubicle and in the medical world.)

In a hyper-clean cubicle
On a Plynth Three Section Table
Model sixty-four-eighty-five
Sold only to prisons and HMOs

Lies a man Bound by zip-ties
Lies a man who does not speak
The language of his “providers.”
He is to undergo “truth-therapy”

At the hands of a good Hoosier
Raised on corn and bologna
Jello, macaroni, potatoes and
Bread that you can make balls out of

As concerned about march madness
As he is with homeland security
He puts medical electrodes
On the depilated scrotum

Telling the patient patient in poor Urdu
What he is doing just like a real doctor
He explains the range using the LCD readout
Then he connects the wires

He illustrates the discomfort of the number two
With his military training school Urdu
The LCD reminds him of the scoreboard
At McCracken that Hoosiers venerate

Lost in thought he wonders about
The bracket he filled out in the px
And if there were any upsets in the first round.
Then he reads the first urdu question typed on the sheet

There in the hygienic curtained exam room
Two men speak in Urdu one of whom
Is thinking about college basketball
And the other of his flaming balls

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

 

Happy New Year (Rat)

Black History Poem: Obama/Obama Prime

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In times past
There were giants
Walking the Black earth
Delaney, Douglass, Garvey, King and X

We know that now because we can see
Their tremendous silhouettes
Against the horizon of history

But the little people who followed them
Could not see them against dawn or dusk
They looked up @ them, with faith

In their righteousness, the justness
Of their causes. Minding not
The hot glare of midday white disapproval

They relaxed in the cool shade
Of righteous goliaths
Stretching from the dawn of history
To the dark dusk of hope