Series
What invisible forces are at work?
The Headmistress wants to believe she is the evil one, but the narrator has something else in mind. Faeries will never amount to anything, and narrators can impersonate people when they’re off in the bathroom, and may occasionally titter over smashed faces. And the devil should be obvious.
Zhang Huan, Family Tree (detail), 2000
(The author believes the only “true” translation of the Tao must be a mistranslation, for, as 老子 himself said, 道可道非常道, or ‘Tao as Tao not eternal Tao’. Enjoy this ongoing mistranslation!)
66.
How is it that the rivers and seas are able to become king over the hundred valleys? It is as a result of their ability to flow downward. In this way, they become as kings.
Similarly, when a saint wants the people to be raised up, this must be done through words that lower; wants the people first, must be done by putting the body last.
Is according to the saint that the government stands over them, yet the people are not burdened, the office is put before them, yet the people are not harmed.[1]
All of which is made possible because this is a joyful push by the politburo and by no means a hateful one. Accordingly, no one can therefore argue, causing, all under heaven to be unable to find anything to complain about concerning the politburo’s most recent re-education campaign.
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What devil possesses her?
Archibald has a little heart to heart with Poppy. The narrator is still going on about his covert powers. The man passed out in the puddle out front is just now coming to his senses. The headmistress uncovers two of her staff in a compromising position. What more could you want?
When will the narrator stop talking?
The narrator is having a bit of a nervous breakdown. Apparently, he’s a defrocked priest that lives on a Shanghai junk? Gundrun and Jack are discovered by the Headmistress in a compromising position.
Huang and Wu on the street with friends.
The narrator has certain ulterior motives. We learn more about Archibald’s back story. Boo Boo can no longer be controlled because she has been freed by the tentacles of imaginary bears. However, at one point, her face will be on fire. The doorbell rings. Who could it be?
What were those girls brewing in the woods? What secret longings burn in Abby’s heart? Find out in this second installment of the Crucible as a Oneman Show, our Bedroom Theater production. The girls are up to something, but what will come of it? And what of John Proctor and his wandering stare? As read by Mutable’s own Gabriel Boyer
Headmistress Ursula
Simone Fairfax is possessed by the devil, and a stranger has arrived at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies, but right now we are going to take a trip down memory lane to Headmistress Ursula’s young adulthood in Shanghai and the stranger she met and how he changed her life, and not for the better!
Arthur Miller, wherefore art thou? Very probably turning over in your grave at this minimalist interpretation of your classic play by Mutable’s own Gabriel Boyer, done in the same manner as it was done for Bedroom Theater some six years ago to an audience of two. This is the first of two installments of the Crucible. Enjoy the antiquated language, the muppet-like voices, the Morton Feldman score, and general witchery with the knowledge that you are safe several centuries in the future of these dramatically reproduced historical events, a time when you can laugh, cry, and reproduce at your leisure. To hear the second installment go here.
As read by Mutable’s own Gabriel Boyer.
The narrator’s true form
Simone still remains in the infirmary, her mind becoming less and less her own, and more and more a place populated by demons, while Boo Boo and the boy from the preparatory school down the lane look on, but we will not witness this scene today because the narrator is currently in the midst of a struggle himself, a polite conversation between his own will and that of the Dark Lord, while the Headmistress and her staff give Jack’s childhood friend a warm welcome in the front hall.
Perhaps the most famous Austrian next to Hitler is Arnold Schwarzenegger, current governor of California, former heavyweight champion of the world, and Hollywood film star, known for such memorable lines as, I’ll be back, and more recently for lines like, She’s either Puerto Rican, or the same thing as Cuban, I mean they are all very hot. They have the, you know, part of the black blood in them and part of the Latino blood in them that together makes it, while talking about California Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia, the lone Latina Republican in the Legislature, or, To those critics who are so pessimistic about our economy, I say, Don’t be economic girlie men, but back in the late 90’s, when none of us foresaw this turn in Schwarzenegger’s career, he was an idol to some. (True, he’s still and idol to some, but who are these people, and why?)
I remember, a friend of mine, Chris Huggins, had a Scharzenegger concept band, in which he sang songs of tribute to the man, and did body-building training throughout the show, a wiry little redhead with a Schwarzenegger mask and t-shirt. He was my roommate at the time and would occasionally break one of the panes in my wall of windows facing the hallway in the midst of a demonstration of his skills as a black belt, but I’ll never forget that performance he did in a loft in Brooklyn, his legs straddling the weights bench, a lifesize Schwarzenegger cut-out by his side, or how I vomited through a woman’s underwear that night because she wasn’t quick enough climbing off the toilet seat.
It was from Chris that I first heard about Pumping Iron, the 1977 documentary about Schwarzenegger and the larger world of competitive body-building. He was inspired by the innocent, youthful, athletic Arnold, waxing poetic when he started in on the man’s great feats of the past. He talked of Schwarzenegger quite a lot in those days, as Arnold were indeed Hercules or Conan, as opposed to a Kindergarten Cop, and eventually Governor of California, although perhaps Schwarzenegger’s shift towards politics began with True Lies. Enjoy the peak into a younger, kindler, and gentler Schwarzenegger below.
In a way, the Austrian poet Christian Loidl’s demise was an Icarus action, radical as was his life. Chris’ partner wrote me—“It seems that he had taken mushrooms and jumped out the window, out a of a closed window, so he had to break the glass first, and then he fell or jumped and broke his neck. That’s all.”
People who are afraid of heights are not afraid of accidentally falling. They are terrified of their inexorable urge to jump, to fly, an abyss-merge-craving-rapture as a triumphant exit strategy to Zion, the highest region. Chris called himself an “airpoet,” he lept at life—in the faith that he could grab it. He believed: Let’s be realistic and demand the impossible; and, The only thing worth contemplating is that which cannot be contemplated.
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The family of Karl Wittgenstein, who was one of Austria’s richest men when he died, in 1913, may deserve some gloomy sort of prize, the Palm of Atreus, perhaps. His youngest child, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, once asked a pupil if he had ever had any tragedies in his life. The pupil, evidently well trained, inquired what he meant by “tragedy.” “I mean suicides, madness, or quarrels,” replied Ludwig, three of whose four brothers committed suicide, two of them (Rudi and Hans) in their early twenties, and the third (Kurt) at the age of forty. Ludwig often thought of doing so, as did his surviving brother, Paul. A budding concert pianist when he lost his right arm to a Russian bullet, in 1914, Paul was imprisoned for a time in the infamous Siberian fortress where Dostoyevsky had set his novel “The House of the Dead.” Ludwig later claimed to have first entertained thoughts of suicide at around the age of ten, before any of his brothers had died. There were three sisters: Gretl, Helene, and Hermine. Hermine, the eldest child (she was born in 1874; Ludwig, the youngest, arrived fifteen years later), and the guardian of her father’s flame, never married. Helene was highly neurotic, and had a husband who suffered from dementia. Gretl was regarded as irritating by most people, including her unpleasant husband, who committed suicide, as did his father and one of his aunts. Bad temper and extreme nervous tension were endemic in the family. One day, when Paul was practicing at one of the seven grand pianos in their winter home, the Palais Wittgenstein, he leaped up and shouted at his brother Ludwig in the room next door, “I cannot play when you are in the house, as I feel your skepticism seeping towards me from under the door!”
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Monochrom purports to be what hydrogen atoms are capable of when you give them 15 billion years to evolve, but what does this mean? For one thing, we know that this means an arts collective where all members work together to create multi-media projects that are often presented as absurdist attacks. From Marxist puppet shows to Nazi petting zoos, a virtual soviet village called Soviet Untersoegersdorf to bar-bots and Arse Elektronica. Projects abound at monochrom, but monochrom is also a blog about the political and the pop, the absurd and the outlandish, e.g. Indiginous leaders brought to Quito to watch “Avatar”.
Considered Austria’s “art-pranksters”, they call themselves an “art-technology-philosophy group of basket weaving enthusiasts and theory do-it-yourselfers,” but who are they really, or are they even really at all? In 2002 they were invited to represent Austria at the São Paulo Art Biennial, and decided to manufacture a non-existent artist to represent them for the event. “People would ask, ‘So where is Georg Paul Thomann? I’d like to meet him again; I think I met him twenty years ago at an art fair in Dusseldorf,’ or whatever. We would reply, ‘He’s just sitting in his hotel room. We’re rather happy that he doesn’t show up, because he’s quite an asshole.'”
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I was working at the Film Forum in NYC when the original Funny Games was released—as in the one starring Susanne Lothar and not the shot for shot remake starring Naomi Watts. This was in 1997 and here in America we were still suffering from a quaint post-apocalyptic ethos in which the world as we know it was bound to end any moment now. We were hopeful that things as they stood couldn’t go on much longer. And then we saw Funny Games.
Funny Games is a perverse vision largely because it presents a human view of persons we at the time could only despise and envision skewered on the meat-hooks of industry. Georg and Anna are upper middle class and middle of the road, off to their summer retreat when two unexpected guests arrive at their door asking for eggs, two youths wearing white gloves who they were introduced to just a while earlier by an oddly anxious neighbor. The youths proceed to break the eggs, and work their way into the home, first through a play-acted buffoonery and then through acts of violence, sadistic games, the family strung up and forced to go along with their captors so as to keep each other alive just a little while longer.
We were those youths.
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Gert Jonke, who died last year just shy of 63, depicted with grace and mad humor what his fellow Austrian Hermann Broch once called the “jolly apocalypse” (“die fröhliche Apokalypse”) that accompanied the collapse of Europe from 1914 to 1945 and that’s anything but past and gone in the era of the European Union. The three short works here are a farewell tribute meant to show various related aspects of Jonke’s art. The first is a letter to his baby son Hans, who died suddenly at age four months, and is taken from a book that mingles fiction, autobiography, reminiscences, tributes to friends, and brilliant essays on music. “Hyperbole 1,” from a series of snapshots or vignettes in drama form called Insektarium, is one of several studies by Jonke showing the social origins of perception and memory. In his last few years, “Leavetaking” became Jonke’s much-anticipated signature piece.
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My first contact with the Vienna Action Artists was through the DIAS, or Destruction In Art Symposium held in London during the autumn of 1966. Gunter Brus, Otto Muehl and Hermann Nitsch, and also Gustav Metzger, received a lot of publicity during this season. By art critics and underground newspapers, of course. Why not? Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York blew itself up at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960, watched by a distinguished audience. Robert Rauschenberg had just spent a month slowly erasing a Willem de Kooning drawing. First there were Constructivists, then there were Destructionists. Yet even Time magazine was not outraged. In the article they wrote about these events, the Wiener Aktionismus, or Vienna Actionists, were grouped favorably within the in vogue international Happenings movement. And it became well known among certain circles that the then famous Pete Townsend, lead guitarist of the pop group The Who, had seen the DIAS actions. He adapted them to his guitar smashing performances that became a moving icon, the kinetic ideogram, of a widespread artistic ferment against the frame, the gallery, the museum, all received genres and the proscenium itself in its many manifestations. Transformed into a swank craze, indeed, the influence of the Vienna school became almost a leitmotiv of London’s Swinging sixties. Destructive art was featured again, and used as such, in the nightclub scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-Up. Jimi Hendrix showcased destruction art in his Monterey Festival performance.
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Butcher Billy before his head injury.
The year is 1903 and something has happened to the narrator, and Satan is very definitely in control of the story. Simone is floating above her bed and saying horrible things in a strange voice, while down below Butcher Billy is receiving a warm welcome in the front hall. Also, in case you’ve forgotten, Grammar Instructor Gundrun is slowly transforming into a more demonic being, and Handyman Jack is a cannibalist. At some point in the below episode, Archibald the Professor of Arcane Knowledge uses his powers to transport Butcher Billy out onto the moors. Keep this in mind.
Something about the fact that each of us is the product of several billion years of successful reproduction tempts me to believe that there is a kind of providence at work in mating. That for each of us, our perfect mirror exists. For the fat, the ugly, the hopeless, the deranged there is their compensatory fetishist and mate. Me, I’m lazy—or something like it. I have my interests, but I pursue them with the intensity of one watching goldfish. I think about having a perfect sex life, what it might be like, how it work, but I do little to make it a reality. Do I really want to spend that much time brushing my teeth, washing my hair and combing my pubes? And so I have fallen into a kind of romantic complacency—a sort of challenge to the women of the world that they will have to be more desirable than a night alone, or I will remain, prized gem, undiscovered.
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Boo Boo in a moment of pique.
The Narrator is acting strangely, but why? Don’t worry. It’s unimportant. Even if you think it’s actually the most important thing, you are quite wrong. Actually, what you should be paying attention to is the portal that’s opened up behind the young scholar Simone’s head for it is a portal into Hell itself, one that is crying out for it will have the girls Simone and, dare I sat it? Boo Boo?
Today is a free for all of whatever music we feel like playing. If you have a request just send it psychically to us in the past, while here in the present, Gabe will be reading from various situationist comic strips for Book You! this week, not to mention Gabe’s Guide to Getting Lost. Also, this week, the pipes are angry because Gabe is about to head out to Eugene, OR, and Malcolm is about to go on tour (as Lineland) and with Animal Hospital, all of which means this will be our last podcast (though episodes of Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies will continue to be posted weekly for those of you who have become addicted to this touching tale), which means that at last we are free, and we can hardly see in front of us. Indeed.
