Paul Festa's Post-Gay Agenda

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2010-03-28T15:52:00.001-07:00

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Ziggy before & after

2010-03-27T09:53:00.001-07:00

James has been finishing his dissertation, and with me it's been one Glitter Emergency emergency after another. Certain household chores have been neglected, like grooming the dog.

This became intolerable after two people in one week shared their opinion that Ziggy was getting fat.

A few days ago Ziggy's Andis Easy Clip Clipper Kit arrived in the mail and last night, while James was preparing to be in Kevin Clarke's completely amazing Space Oddity number at Trannyshack, I put Ziggy on the kitchen table and gave him a haircut.

The Glitter Emergency Part II: I am full of fire and music

2010-03-16T22:27:00.000-07:00

Monday, first day of shooting for The Glitter Emergency, began at dawn and ended many agonies and ecstasies later. Here are some of the results:

Paul Festa as Stringendo in THE GLITTER EMERGENCY

Music by Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky

Queericulum and the Glitter Emergency concentration

2010-03-12T18:13:00.000-08:00

With the Center for Sex and Culture, the congenitally glittery boys and girls over at Comfort & Joy - a Burning Man camp that spreads playa dust (the good kind) throughout the year in SF - is hosting a daylong series of classes and parties tomorrow (Saturday March 13) that include a seminar that can help you get your Glitter Emergency fashion together in time for our big shooting party which is this coming Thursday March 18th at the Supperclub. Capping the day of classes is the ultimate extracurricular activity - the Queericulum Glitter Prom. I'll be the one in seven-inch silver glitter platform boots. They just came in today's mail. You are going to die when you see them.

Queericulum details here.

The Glitter Emergency Part I: How to glitterbomb a violin

2010-03-04T01:26:00.000-08:00

Sorry for vanishing - I've been in preproduction for a new film. It's called The Glitter Emergency and it combines elements of silent film, music video, dance film and drag number, set to the second and third movements of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto performed by yours truly, live or canned. The video storyboard, which describes what happens in every measure, is posted to the Glitter Emergency Website.

There's much to write about the film but this first post is reserved for a photo series on how to decorate the violin of a mephistophelean superhero, in this case named Stringendo.

Step #1: Hit pawn shop on Mission and plunk down $80 for Chinese violin, bow, case, crumbling cheap-ass rosin, Suzuki Method Vol. 1 and pad of manuscript paper.

If violin is cheap enough, you should be able to do your make-up in reflection.

Step #2: Strip violin of pegs, strings, bridge, tailpiece, fine-tuners, and tailpiece. Get your sandpaper ready.

Step #3: Summon all the frustration you ever felt learning the instrument, and sand.

Step #4: If you intend to play the violin after makeover, protect the fingerboard and neck with painting tape.

Step #5: Hang the violin in a well-ventilated area.

Step #6: Blast Prince in well ventilated area, shaking paint can for two minutes after rattle engages.

Step #7: Spray away.

Numerous light coats work best and prevent unsightly drips.

Step #8: Figure out something fancy for the ribs. Decide on a piece of holographic contact paper you have not quite enough of, and turn San Francisco upside-down in search of comparable replacement. Six hours later, give up.

Step #9: Consider alternatives.

Step #10: Despair.

Step #11: Put violin aside in frustration and paint bow. Protect horsehair in Ziplock baggie.

Step #12: Remembering theme of your movie, drizzle fine glitter onto wet silver-glitter acrylic paint.

Step #13: Repeat for bow.

Step #14: Repeat for scroll.

Step #15: Repeat for bridge.

Step #16: Glue rhinestones to purfling.

Step #17: Replace parts and have a photo shoot.

Flossie Lewis in print!

2010-02-01T16:45:00.000-08:00

Susan Sanford's illustration for Flossie Lewis's essay in The East Bay Monthly

For those of us who studied English with Flossie Lewis as high school or college students in the Bay Area, and who read her published short fiction (in Commentary among other places) and writing how-to book (Getting Engaged: Falling in Love with your Paper), it's a welcome rare event to see the master in print. It just happened - Flossie's in the January edition of The East Bay Monthly. I didn't catch this early enough to get a copy on newsstands, but her essay - an affecting sensory snapshot of her daily life in Oakland, where she's been living for the past few years, in a retirement community called Piedmont Gardens - is online here.

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

2010-01-27T19:29:00.000-08:00

Alef Ayin and John Hilinski, as fellow tragedians, as two smiling accomplices, friends, courtiers - two spies (photo credit: Calvin Jung)

I haven't posted for a while, mostly in the interest of keeping quiet how farcically "365 consecutive days of uninterruptible bliss" has fallen short (because whoever you are, you are not my therapist). The only uninterruptible thing about this year has been my work schedule, editing video and doing archival research for the Rapt Productions theater documentary by day and going straight from there, most days, to rehearsals for the TheatreFIRST production of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, which opened this past weekend and runs through Valentine's Day. Rehearsals were at Berkeley Rep School of Theater, performances are at the black-box theater in the Fox Theater building in Oakland, Rapt is 6 blocks up Telegraph from there, so James and have found our usual whereabouts precisely reversed, with me calling him from across the bay or cutting out under it, and him at home with the doggy.

Andrew Hurteau as The Player pops out of a trunk aboard ship in Act III - behind him, on the ladder, is Harold Pierce as Hamlet (photo: CJ)

The last time I worked with this director and several of the actors, also as a violinist with a small dramatic role, was in the North Bay Shakespeare Company's production of Twelfth Night in 2007. That was staged at the old stone amphitheater at Hamilton Airfield and was about as fun as a Shakespeare comedy with a great director and a brilliant and amiable cast in a public park sounds. Downtown Oakland isn't quite as much fun, and neither is doing a play while holding down a job. But working with this group - especially now that that rehearsal schedule is receding into memory - has bounced me out of the deep and narrow space where uninterruptible bliss was meant to be. To anyone in the market for a good antidepressant, may I recommend a small part in a good play - even one about death.

Kalli Jonsson as Rosencrantz (photo: CJ)

Stoppard is my favorite living playwright based primarily on my experience of one production of one play - The Real Thing, which I saw twice in London and once in New York several years ago. I'd only seen a videotape of R&G before doing this one and was very glad to get the opportunity to know the play from the inside out. The production is great, but don't take it from me - here's yesterday's Oakland Tribune review. (My pull-quote from the review: "funny...equipped.")

Kalli and Harold with TheatreFIRST artistic director
Michael Storm, as Guildenstern (photo: CJ)

R&G runs through Valentine's Day - Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights at 7:30, Sunday at 2PM. It's a block from 19th St. BART and they're not checking IDs on the "under 30" pricing. More about the show and tickets here.

Graham Patzner and Paul Festa as tragedians as Player Queen and Player King (photo: CJ)

Left to right: G. Randall Wright (tragedian), Siobhan Doherty (Ophelia), George Killingsworth (Polonius), Graham, Chiron Alston (Claudius), Kalli and Michael (photo: CJ)

My own pix from rehearsals:

Natasha Noel (Gertrude)

Michael and Aleph

Voice

2010-01-10T22:29:00.000-08:00

Without commentary, two observations about voice:

Mel Gussow: What kind of playwright are you?

Tom Stoppard: In general terms, I'm not a playwright who is interested in character with a capital K and psychology with a capital S. I'm a playwright interested in ideas and forced to invent characters to express those ideas. All my people speak the same way, with the same cadences and sentence structures. They speak as I do. When I write an African president into a play, I have to contrive to have him the only African president who speaks like me.

MG: What if you were writing an American play?

TS: All the Americans would have to be educated at Sandhurst or Christchurch - Rhodes scholars discussing John Wayne.

MG: Doesn't that limit you?

TS: It limits me in areas I'm not interested in expanding.

Mel Gussow: Conversations with Stoppard
July 1979 interview

Nowadays the journalistic critical cliché about a young poet is to say that "he has found his own voice," the emphasis being on his differentness, on the uniqueness of his voice, on the fact that he sound like nobody else. But the Elizabethans at their best as well as at their worst are always sounding like each other. They did not search much after uniqueness of voice....It would hardly have struck them that a style could be used for display of personality.

Thom Gunn
Introduction to Selected Poems of Fulke Greville
(as quoted by Colm Tóibín The New York Review of Books, Jan. 14, 2010)

Weird Scrabble

2010-01-04T22:23:00.000-08:00

I had big plans for my first blog entry of 2010 , some combination of manifesto and multipart indictment and cry for help that would dispose of 2009 with appropriate violence, but trying to write about the last year at this distance feels like tapdancing in a tarpit, so here we are. Here I am, committing what in this household is a cardinal social sin: telling a Scrabble story. "Honey, you're telling a Scrabble story..." We suspect we've lost friends letting these slip in mixed company; conversationally they inhabit a zone somewhere between Margaret Cho routine reenactment and D&D reminiscence, and betray comparable interpersonal and psychological degeneracy.

Thanks to Facebook Scrabble, I play enough these days that I dream about the game. In this morning's dream, I had both the Q and the (Q), which in this dream version of the game was like a cross between a blank and a Q - but it was very unusual and lucky to get both Q and (Q) - it was a first. I woke up with a clear memory of the dream, so I had to make sure I wasn't still asleep and dreaming an hour later after I cycled through the morning's My Turn games to find this:

The screen shot convinces me pretty thoroughly that I was awake. I'm guessing it was a Flash glitch - the second Q vanished, along with several other tiles, when I reloaded the page. It's the first bug of that kind that I've noticed in about 100 games.

I am one of the most skeptical people I know when it comes to notions of the paranormal or the extrasensory or the prophetic, but I am officially counting this as weird, in the old sense of the word, whose ultimate root is "to become" - weird which means "wayward," which means (OED) "fate, destiny...magical power, enchantment...the three goddesses supposed to determine the course of human life...one pretending or supposed to have the power to foresee and to control future events; a witch or wizard, a soothsayer...a supernatural or marvellous occurrence or tale...an omen or token significant of the nature of a future event; a prognostic..."

The larger entry about the turn of the year and decade will culminate in my pledge that 2010 will be 365 consecutive days of uninterruptible bliss, and let this be a correlative declaration, the egg custard amuse-bouche of a haruspex: in 2010, I will have both Qs.

Middlemarch

2009-12-09T20:07:00.000-08:00

A recent Facebook status update "finished Middlemarch" generated so much response in the comments that I could barely get a word in edgewise, which made me grateful I still have recourse to a blog.

I started Middlemarch mostly because Barry Owen wouldn't shut up about how great it was, and while Barry gives me frequently occasion to cite Emily Dickinson's observation that transport is not urged, this urged experience was in fact transporting. At least for the first few hundred pages, and again for the last hundred and change, leaving four or five hundred pages in the middle, a forced march if there ever was one. My paperback, after a week of rain in the Tennessee woods, began to enact the degradation of my interest, to the point that I was carrying the book around in two pieces and then in dozens, and by the time I got to New York I was leaving behind me in subway cars and cafes a Hanselesque trail of Victorian fiction, most of which I didn't expect to miss.

The Facebook thread saw people shouting out their favorite characters and this made me feel inadequate, because I had to think about it. The most popular choice and obvious candidate was the heroine, Dorothea, because she sacrifices a fortune for love (a development that will come as a genuine surprise to anyone who has never read a work of fiction), but she is a less obvious candidate because she is possibly the most perfectly moral Christian to ever lay a sincere claim on a reader's sympathy. Her religious faith and personal uprightness manifest themselves in perverse ways, so she earns plausibility as an eccentric; but I found myself too conscious of the fact that I was being asked to sympathize with a woman with a spotless soul, and every reader has her limits.

Dorothea reminds me of Milton's Jesus, poor schmuck, who winds up having the poem stolen out from under him by the far more entertaining fictional presence of Satan. In Middlemarch, much of the first two books (of eight) captivated me, but none of the characters or their fates really did until late in the book when Bulstrode, the Christian prig with a dirty secret of financial impropriety, is exposed and disgraced and his wife confronts him:

It was eight o'clock in the evening before the door opened and his wife entered. He dared not look up at her. He sat with his eyes bent down, and as she went towards him she thought he looked smaller - he seemed so withered and shrunken. A movement of new compassion and old tenderness went through her like a great wave, and putting one hand on his which rested on the arm of the chair, and the other on his shoulder, she said, solemnly but kindly -

"Look up, Nicholas."

He raised his eyes with a little start and looked at her half amazed for a moment: her pale face, her changed, mourning dress, the trembling about her mouth, all said, "I know"; and her hands and eyes rested gently on him. He burst out crying and they cried together, she sitting at his side. They could not yet speak to each other of the shame which she was bearing with him, or of the acts which had brought it down on them. His confession was silent, and her promise of faithfulness was silent. Open-minded as she was, she nevertheless shrank from the words which would have expressed their mutual consciousness as she would have shrunk from flakes of fire. She could not say, "How much is only slander and false suspicion?" and he did not say, "I am innocent."

Thumbing though the novel, it began to suspect that I wasn't always alone in my impatience with the life of the saint. Earlier in the book, the narrator insists on her own sympathy for the novel's first ogre, Dorothea's much older first husband, the dour and studious Reverend Edward Casaubon:

One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea -- but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage? protest against all our interest, all our effort at understanding being given to the young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble; for these too will get faded, and will know the older and more eating griefs which we are helping to neglect. In spite of the blinking eyes and white moles objectionable to Celia, and the want of muscular curve which was morally painful to Sir James, Mr. Casaubon had an intense consciousness within him, and was spiritually a-hungered like the rest of us. [...]

He had not had much foretaste of happiness in his previous life. To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul. Mr. Casaubon had never had a strong bodily frame, and his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying. His experience was of that pitiable kind which shrinks from pity, and fears most of all that it should be known: it was that proud narrow sensitiveness which has not mass enough to spare for transformation into sympathy, and quivers thread-like in small currents of self-preoccupation or at best of an egoistic scrupulosity. [...] For my part I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self -- never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted. Becoming a dean or even a bishop would make little difference, I fear, to Mr. Casaubon's uneasiness. Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control.

Sexism may explain my impulse to always think of Eliot in terms of bridging Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf, but in my favorite passages I'm always conscious of that lineage. It has to do with the always shifting balance between satirical mordancy and affection. The narrator admonishes herself for neglecting Casaubon's point of view, his humanity, and then confesses her pity for him, which is an admonishment to us - for a weird, modern moment we are the target of her affectionate satire. Both of these maneuvers, to me, are twice as compelling as anything she attempts in the story of her 19th century St. Theresa.

So the novel's only characters I could deeply care about were its scoundrels in their undoings - Bulstrode primarily, and Casaubon, also exquisitely spoiled Rosamond in her protracted and fierce confrontation with the realities of her marriage, and most of the payoff comes in the final stretch. What makes the first few hundred pages so effervescent are the lighter barbs aimed at these denizens of the provinces:

Celia coloured, and looked very grave. "I think, dear, we are wanting in respect to mamma's memory, to put them by and take no notice of them. And," she added, after hesitating a little, with a rising sob of mortification, "necklaces are quite usual now; and Madame Poincon, who was stricter in some things even than you are, used to wear ornaments. And Christians generally - surely there are women in heaven now who wore jewels." Celia was conscious of some mental strength when she really applied herself to argument.

Here is the womb of Virginia Woolf's feminism:

A man's mind - what there is of it - has always the advantage of being masculine - as the smallest birch-tree is of a higher kind than the most soaring palm - and even his ignorance is of a sounder quality. Sir James might not have originated this estimate; but a kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality with a little gum or starch in the form of tradition.

And in Mrs. Waule's inheritance anxiety, the resonance of the opening line of Pride and Prejudice:

...there remained as the nethermost sediment in her mental shallows a persuasion that her brother Peter Featherstone could never leave his chief property away from his blood-relations: - else, why had the Almighty carried off his two wives both childless, after he had gained so much by manganese and things, turning up when nobody expected it? - and why was there a Lowick parish church, and the Waules and Powderells all sitting in the same pew for generations, and the Featherstone pew next to them, if, the Sunday after her brother Peter's death, everybody was to know that the property was gone out of the family? The human mind has at no period accepted a moral chaos; and so preposterous a result was not strictly conceivable. But we are frightened at much that is not strictly conceivable.

One last favorite line with special pertinence to the unpublished novelist's criticism of Eliot:

...very little achievement is required in order to pity another man's shortcomings.

Juliette Ideler White 1922 - 2009

2009-11-29T15:26:00.001-08:00

Juliette Ideler White
1922 - 2009

Juliette died this afternoon a rich and full year after her lung cancer diagnosis. In that year she went through the Panama Canal, explored Mexico, checked out the Hermitage, and went to a lot of parties in her honor. Nearly to the end she was entertaining guests in her little house on Albion Ridge, taking care of us as much as if not more than being taken care of. Juliette lived until she died.

Two of Juliette's granddaughters kept a blog of her final days that will have a eulogy and any further information. I've posted a Facebook tribute page (Juliette Ideler White Tribute) with a treasury of her photographs (with more to come) and a video friends posted of photos with Juliette playing the soundtrack.

Juliette Ideler White and Paul Festa
portrait by Greg Gorman, 2009

The last letter I wrote Juliette captures something of what I felt for her and feel for her memory:

Tuesday, 17 November 2009

Dear Juliette,

Aren’t we cute? You with your chanterelles, me with my Amanita calyptroderma. I cleaned and chopped them all Sunday night when we came home and yesterday James made a year’s supply of mushroom cream sauce. I sautéed more for lunch with leftover beef and Brussels sprouts and some chicken sauce and penne pasta. Three intact caps await stuffing. Sarah Silverman said that when God gives you AIDS, make lemonAIDS, and contemplating what she would say about mushrooms – on second thought maybe I’d better not. Meanwhile, despite excellent digestion after eating these now for four days in a row, I remain creeped out by the Chronicle story people keep forwarding me, about the Lodi family that wound in a hospital waiting for new livers after harvesting Amanita phalloides last week. The story carries a picture of the offending mushrooms and they look just like these. Was it your book or one of the Websites I looked at that added that the Death Caps are delicious?

Speaking of death, I got Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead out of the library and wouldn’t you know it, the musical tragedians (of which I am one) have not one single fucking line. But I signed on. Doing Twelfth Night two years ago was outrageously fun and this is a reunion of that cast and director.

I loved our last weekend together, being with you and your family, having you at the party, vertical or horizontal as the case may have been – it occurs to me that I might not wait until my final illness to order my bed put in the dining room. My last weekend with you was like all the rest in a crucial respect, because, odd as it might sound (to some, but not to me), despite the circumstances it was fun, and it was fun because even in dying you still know how to live, and you’ve taught that by example to me and to everyone around you. I couldn’t be sad in your presence. Back home, awake with my new insomnia, much different story. But with you I was happy, and you were so much more alive than dying, though you were and are teaching, by example, how to do that too. Like putting the bed next to the dining room table, by the window looking out on the rhododendrons and the tree whose name you taught me last visit and which I can’t remember now – some lessons stick better than others.
Fun with photos and mushrooms and granddaughters and a garden party – too much fun to want to interrupt it with sentimental declarations but I’ll risk one now. I was always happy in your presence. Twenty or thirty years of happiness, of carting my friends and boyfriends and parents and husband up the coast to share it, like showing them where the chanterelles come up. I think it was Saturday night that I dreamed I was in the forest at dusk and the place was alive with the sentient spirits of mushrooms. It wasn’t the mushrooms themselves but the spirits of them, in the redwood canopy winking light and communicating something to me that was joyous and exalted. While you’re still here to read this I have to thank you for all the joy.

Incoming! Karen Hartman

2009-11-07T19:32:00.001-08:00

Playwright and Apparition of the Eternal Church star Karen Hartman is headed to San Francisco, Stanford, and back home to New York for readings of her new play. Here are the details - I'll be at the Tuesday night show directed by Cal Shakes director (and George's son) Jon Moscone.

Goldie, Max, and Milk
A comedy about learning to do what comes naturally

Max, a single lesbian, just gave birth. She’s unemployed, with a house that’s falling apart, an ex on the loose, and no clue how to nurse her four-day-old baby. Can Goldie, an Orthodox Jewish lactation consultant, guide Max into motherhood? Or will conflicting family values get the better of them both?
***
Monday, November 9, 7:30pm at Stanford University CERAS Hall
Contact David Goldman for more information at davidg1@stanford.edu

Tuesday, November 10, 7PM
ACT's Hastings Studio, 30 Grant Street, 6th Floor
Free. For reservations: Jill@playwrightsfoundation.org

Thursday, November 19, 4PM
New York 11/19, 4pm, directed by Leigh Silverman. newdramatists@newdramatists.org

Passing Strange Acquaintance

2009-10-26T10:43:00.000-07:00

Roslyn Ruff, the blogger, Colman Domingo

New York is so little. I always spend some time making plans in advance, though I know the trip will be mostly scheduled by being in the right place at the right time. Colman Domingo was walking through Union Square, eastbound briskly, we made eye contact, twirled - a few days later I was sitting at the Hungarian Pastry Shop across from Columbia with Paul La Farge - a freshman year college suitemate (we were Paul, Paul, Pablo and three guys with other names), catching up on life since our last meeting seven years ago, and he was trying to explain what his wife Sarah Stern does as associate artistic director of the Vineyard Theatre, and asked if I’d ever heard of Colman Domingo; I had a date to see him that night after his show A Boy and His Soul at the Vineyard. Paul and I spent the afternoon dissecting the third draft of my novel, and then I went down to the theater to get my rush ticket and have a brief reunion with Sarah, whom I’d met in San Francisco the last time I saw Paul.

Colman’s show was a knock-out. The frame for the story is his discovering, in the basement of the recently sold family house, crates of old soul records destined for landfill. For 85 minutes he thumbs through the crates, spins records, sings and dances along, and sort of hypnotizes you into unawareness that you’re hearing a coming out narrative and family drama. Hearing the coming out story sound fresh in 2009 is one of the most astonishing theatrical achievements I’ve ever been privileged to witness; coupled with the serial and compounding pleasures of experiencing Colman Domingo alone onstage for 85 minutes, it amounted to a perfect night in the theater.

At curtain, Colman got an instant standing-O and was besieged by admirers, and a bunch of us repaired to an Irish bar down the street for sidecars and the kitchen’s last serving of hot wings. The party ended up me, Colman and Roslyn Ruff – the two of them are coming to Berkeley Rep. in the new year for Athol Fugard's Coming Home, which they premiered at the Long Wharf Theatre. Colman and I went over how we know one another: I thought it was through Eisa Davis and their Berkeley Rep creation of Passing Strange, but in fact we go further back than that – we were dancing together at The Box on Divisadero back in the late 80s, a memory that was retrieved when I explained how I first put Eisa together with her Aunt Angela the night we were all at Queen Latifah’s New Year’s Eve concert there in 1989.

Speaking of Angela Eisa Davis and Angela Yvonne Davis, Colman’s show was only one of the autobiographical plays by Passing Strange alumni that were produced in New York during my two weeks there. At the Hip-Hop Theater Festival, Eisa’s play Angela’s Mixtape had a three-night run. Eisa, star of stage and screen (including Apparition of the Eternal Church) and a Pulitzer nominee for her play Bulrusher, happens also to be a beautiful singer and pianist, dancer and rapper, and tells the story of her radical East Bay upbringing, and the rich and burdensome legacy of her name, using all those talents, often two or more simultaneously. The show is a whirlwind of song and dance and, like Colman’s, conveys an affecting family drama almost slyly – while Eisa lulls you into theatrical dazzlement, the pathos sneaks up on you.

After the show, I took a few pictures of the cast and posed for this one recreating a picture of me with the Davis family from 1994, when we went canoeing up Big River in Mendocino. I swear I didn't shave my head for the second photo.

top: Angela, Eisa, and Fania Davis, the blogger
bottom: Linda Powell (role of Angela Davis), Kim Brockington (role of Fania Davis), Eisa Davis (role of herself), the blogger

Tedious people in drab surrondings: fall collection

2009-10-23T10:41:00.001-07:00

When people ask me why I spend two weeks in the backwoods of the American South once or twice a year, and what I do there, I tell them:

Apparition hat trick

2009-10-21T22:31:00.000-07:00

Anyone who spends as much time looking at Facebook status updates as I do may already know that I concluded my recent trip to New York by partying just a wee bit too hard Monday night, missing my flight Tuesday morning, leaving my cell phone behind in the East Village, spending the next eight hours paying fines, sleeping, eating and crying a little in JFK Terminal 4 (I really know how to party).

Today, a trio of consolation prizes. The first I found randomly on YouTube - a slickly produced two and a half minute documentary about the Apparition of the Eternal Church screening that took place in Trondheim, Norway (at the notorious Church of Our Lady) in September of last year:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe2rYg2blQo

Thanks to the collective brain otherwise known as Facebook, particularly the node of it belonging to Diana Anders, I have this translation of filmgoer commentary (tentative where followed by the question mark):

"It was not provocative, no, but it was fascinating - there were some odd people in that!"
"Surely each of us here had a different experience of the piece - there are so many ways to interpret this."
"Some people might find it blasphemous (?), but I liked it."
"It was very high quality."

- that last comment certainly a reference to Squeaky Blonde's famous bong hit.

Then, today, this showed up in Unquiet Thoughts, Alex Ross's new New Yorker blog:

Two other Messiaen films worth seeing: the DVD of Pierre Audi’s Netherlands Opera production of “St. Francis of Assisi,” with a magnificent lead performance by Rod Gilfry; and Paul Festa’s mind-bending documentary “Apparition of the Eternal Church.”

If my Juilliard education taught me nothing else, it taught me that a mind is a terrible thing not to bend (thank you Albert Fuller).

I started this blog entry as "Apparition double whammy," but then, searching on YouTube for the Trondheim link, I found two videos of three young people videotaping themselves listening to Apparition of the Eternal Church (the organ piece) through headphones. Say what you will about the results (I rated them "awesome"), but as far as I'm concerned this was one of the most gratifying manifestations of the whole Messiaen project to date.

LET ME TELL YOU JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL world premiere

2009-09-13T10:40:00.000-07:00

Paul Festa cuts himself shaving in his short film
LET ME TELL YOU JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL

Thursday my short film LET ME TELL YOU JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL screens at the Castro Theatre as part of the Fourth Annual Good Vibrations Independent Erotic Film Festival. Per request of a cast member, this will be the film's world premiere and swan song - a one night and one night only experience.

There's a $1500 audience-choice award so please forward this page far and wide, rest your voice on Thursday, bring your very loudest friends to the show, get them drunk, and make some noise for me. Here are the details and, below, my submission to Good Vibrations Magazine describing the film.

Good Vibrations Independent Erotic Film Festival
Hosted by Peaches Christ and Dr. Carol Queen
Castro Theatre
Thursday, Sept. 17
7pm pre-party in the Pleasure Lounge (theater's balcony lobby) - $10
8pm screening in the theater - $10

Paul Festa
LET ME TELL YOU JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL
(2003 / 2009)

Late in 2002, when John Cameron Mitchell solicited 10-minute audition videos for his “Sex Film Project” to create a nonpornographic, sexually explicit movie (the final product would be called Shortbus), I had no idea how to make a film. But I had an idea for an audition video, and I had iMovie on my computer, and I had a deadline, so poof! I became a filmmaker.

The idea was to tell the story of The Breeders, a memoir I’d just written about an affair I’d had with a married couple who resembled my parents. The narration was a mock radio interview with Terry Gross – whose questions were represented by text tiles that sounded eerily like her. Dirty Polaroids I’d taken with the couple provided visuals, along with old home videos, blow-up doll sex scenes, and other materials not usually associated with legitimate smut.

I didn’t quite get permission to use those Polaroids in the audition video, and when I saw the Good Vibes call for entries, I finally asked. The answer was no. So I sat down with the audition tape and boiled it down from its 10-minute narrative form into the 3-minute music video it is today. What I like about the new version is the way the story comes through in shards, in remnants – it’s a little bit like looking at some crumbled ancient statue or incompletely stripped Victorian and using surviving details to reconstruct the original. I also like that it’s both the first film I ever made and the most recent, and I’m thrilled for it to be my first work to screen at the Castro.

SAVE THE DATE - SF - dirty movies (one mine) at the Castro

2009-08-26T16:34:00.000-07:00

A week of sex-film events in San Francisco (http://gv-ixff.org/film/) culminates Thursday, Sept. 17th with the 2009 IXFF Independent Erotic Film competition at the Castro Theatre!

My film is a remix of the audition video I submitted many years ago for John Cameron Mitchell's "Sex Film Project," which became "Shortbus."

Please show up in force and make some noise for me. If I win the audience award, drinks are on me until - well Dorothy Parker said it best:
“I like to drink martini’s, two at very most, three I’m under the table…four I’m under the host.”

From the film festival page:
Step into elegance and enter the Pleasure Lounge upstairs at the Castro Theatre, where the drinks are cold, the dancers are hot, and guests spin to win free prizes to the sounds of live jazz and sultry burlesque by Twilight Vixen Revue. Then head downstairs to see what’s hot as IXFF finalists compete for the audience choice award and $1,500. The screening will be hosted by indie film queen and drag celebrity extraordinaire, Peaches Christ, along with the fabulous Dr. Carol Queen, Ph.D.

When: Thursday, September 17th
Time: PRE-PARTY 7:00 – 8:00 pm, SCREENING: 8:00pm
Cost: $10 Pre-party, $10 Screening
Where: Castro Theatre, 429 Castro Street, San Francisco, CA 94109
(415) 621-6120
castrotheatre.com

Jennie Dusheck on healthcare reform: What is the point of a private option?

2009-08-06T18:31:00.000-07:00

The beautiful biology textbook co-authored by Jennie, Asking About Life

I just posted my first Daily Kos diary. The impetus was to get a wider readership for an email my friend Jennie Dusheck sent around about the public option debate and our country's unfortunate (by this I mean pathological, lethal and evil) attachment to industrial control over health insurance.

Give it a read, make some comments and circulate further. It's not clear that the good guys are winning this one.

Dear Applicant

2009-08-04T23:02:00.001-07:00

A friend whose book is making the rounds of publishers wrote today with rejection anxiety. Lacking any original wisdom about how to handle either the anxiety or the rejection, despite such a wealth of experience with both, I turned (as usual), to e.e. cummings but also to Larry Kramer, who was generous enough to include this passage in introducing The Destiny of Me:

Like me by the men in my life, my play had first to have its own history of rejections: by the Public Theater (both Joe Papp and JoAnne Akalaitis), Manhattan Theatre Club, Lincoln Center, Playwrights Horizons (both André Bishop and Don Scardino), American Place Theater, Second Stage, Long Wharf in New Haven, Hartford Stage, Yale Rep (both Lloyd Richards and Stan Wojewodski, Jr.), South Coast Rep in California, the Goodman and Steppenwolf in Chicago, and Circle in the Square on Broadway.

I list these not to either tempt fate (oh, the nightmare possibility of those reviews that begin, "The numerous theaters that turned down Larry Kramer's new play were wise indeed...") or flaunt my rejections (The Normal Heart, Faggots, and my screenplay for Women in Love were originally turned down by even larger numbers), but to offer this thought to other writers, and to the little child inside that one talks to: almost more than talent you need tenacity, and an infinite capacity for rejection if you are to succeed. I still don't know where you get these even after writing this play to try to find the answer.

As for E. E. CUMMINGS (as his name is given in the collected poems of 1954), below is the dedication to the volume of poems whose title page is found above:

Apparition press - Globe and Mail

2009-07-30T09:14:00.000-07:00

My film Apparition of the Eternal Church is having its British Columbia premiere in the coming week - Sunday, August 2 and Sunday, August 9, at the Vancity Theatre, Vancouver International Film Centre. Today's Globe and Mail - Canada's largest paper - has this write-up by Fiona Morrow. Excerpts:

This hour, watching headshots of individuals listening to music we can't hear, is entirely absorbing, moving – sublime, even. From invocations of religious imagery and howls of pain, to ecstasies of both the divine and the sexual, the immediate responses to the music are consistently hilarious, intelligent and primal.
...

The positive audience and critical reaction – from screenings in America and Europe, in cathedrals, concert halls and cinemas – has, he says, been overwhelming. “The reason the film is fun is, I think, the same reason that people thought it was fun to take part,” he says. “And that is because, for most of us, musical response is such an interior, hidden experience. We sit in a concert hall and we are expected to be quiet. We have to save up our emotions to the end, and the only way to express this incredibly varied experience we've had over 30 minutes or an hour, or four hours, is to shout. It's not very articulate.

“But when people can express what they are feeling as they are feeling it, it's so much more satisfying and illuminating.”

e.e. cummings on art, Spring, and your 401k

2009-07-21T21:35:00.000-07:00

My head is spinning from all the cummings I've been reading this summer - mostly from i: six nonlectures (author photo pictured above), which in addition to its autobiographical essays collects not just his own poems but those of keats, wordsworth, shakespeare, donne, shelley, dante, rilke, chaucer, et al. My memory isn't even the cracked colander it was in my youth but I managed to commit this quatrain to memory in Cazadero:

(While you and i have lips and voices which
are for kissing and to sing with
who cares if some oneeyed son of a bitch
invents an instrument to measure Spring with?

Nevermind that I started picking up some disquieting right-wing strains in the philosophy, not to mention the anti-Science streak evidenced above that gets under my skin like cayenne - there's so much here I couldn't wait to share with specific friends (A.M.D., this means you, and B.R.O. of course) and with the blog - before I give this book back to Juliette, from whom I've borrowed it about twenty years before discovering it on my bookshelf before the Cazadero weekend, here they are:

So far as I am concerned, poetry and every other art was and is and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality. If poetry were anything - like dropping an atombomb - which anyone did, anyone could become a poet merely by doing the necessary anything; whatever that anything might or might not entail. But (as it happens) poetry is being, not doing. If you wish to follow, even at a distance, the poet's calling (and here, as always, I speak from my own totally biased and entirely personal point of view) you've got to come out of the measurable doing universe into the immeasurable house of being. I am quite aware that, wherever our socalled civilization has slithered, there's every reward and no punishment for unbeing. But if poetry is your goal, you've got to forget all about punishments and all about rewards and all about selfstyled obligations and duties and responsibilities etcetera ad infinitum and remember one thing only: that it's you - nobody else - who determine your destiny and decide your fate. Nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else. Toms can be Dicks and Dicks can be Harrys, but none of them can ever be you. There's the artist's responsibility; and the most awful responsibility on earth. If you can take it, take it - and be. If you can't, cheer up and go about other people's business; and do (or undo) till you drop.

***

As it was my miraculous fortune to have a true father and a true mother, and a home which the truth of their love made joyous, so - in reaching outward from this love and this joy - I was marvellously lucky to touch and seize a rising and striving world; a reckless world, filled with the curiosity of life herself; a vivid and violent world welcoming every challenge; a world worth hating and adoring and fighting and forgiving: in brief, a world which was a world. This inwardly immortal world of my adolescence recoils to its very roots whenever, nowadays, I see people who've been endowed with legs crawling on their chins after quote security unquote. "Security?" I marvel to myself "what is that? Something negative, undead, suspicious and suspecting; an avarice and an avoidance; a self-surrendering meanness of withdrawal; a numerable complacency and an innumerable cowardice. Who would be 'secure'? Every and any slave. No free spirit ever dreamed of 'security' - or, if he did, he laughed; and lived to shame his dream. No whole sinless sinful sleeping waking breathing human creature ever was (or could be) bought by, and sold for, 'security.' How monstrous and how feeble seems some unworld which would rather have its too than eat its cake!"

And this, with relevance to the last post (and which, loving criticism, I can't wholly believe) from Rilke:

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing to be so little reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and fairly judge them.

Finish him!

2009-07-20T10:22:00.000-07:00

Episode 4 of the BBC's I, Claudius miniseries shows Livia making an appearance backstage at the Coliseum to give the gladiators a little pep talk. She paid good money for these games and she expects a real fight, no more faking it with pig bladders filled with blood, etc. Then, in the royal box, just as Claudius faints at the sight of Livia getting what she paid for, we hear her cry out to one of the gladiators, "Finish him!"

I had two Livia moments this week, one courtesy of Frank Rich and the other from Anthony Lane. Rich's column in the Times, shredding Sonia Sotomayor's Republicans critics, can't really be excerpted, because like most of his stuff it derives its effect from the piling on of example after example of right-wing idiocy. By the end, you find it hard to believe there are even 40 Republicans in the Senate, or that these will last more than another election cycle or two - but then you remember Karl Rove crowing about the permanent Republican majority he was creating and you are inspired to reflect on the perils of overconfidence.

Anthony Lane's evisceration of Brüno in the July 20th New Yorker ("Mein Camp") is similarly difficult to quote, and just as devastating. The closing graf could stand alone:

“Brüno” ends appallingly, with a musical montage of Sting, Bono, Elton John, and other well-meaners assisting mein Host in a sing-along. Here’s the deal, apparently: if celebrities aren’t famous enough for your liking (Ron Paul, Paula Abdul), or seem insufficiently schooled in irony, you make vicious sport of them, but if they’re A-listers, insanely keen to be in on the joke, they can join your congregation. Would Baron Cohen dare to adopt a fresh disguise and trap Sting in some outlandish folly, or is he now too close a friend? To scour the world for little people you can taunt, and then pal up with the hip and rich: that is not an advisable path for any comic to pursue, let alone one as sharp and mercurial as Baron Cohen. All his genius, at present, is going into publicity, and, in the buildup to this film’s release, he has not put a foot wrong—or, in the case of Eminem, a buttock. But the work itself turns out to be flat and foolish, bereft of Borat’s good cheer: wholly unsuitable for children, yet propelled by a nagging puerility that will appeal only to those in the vortex of puberty, or to adults who have failed to progress beyond it. Call it, at best, a gaudy celebration of free speech, though be advised: before my screening, I had to sign a form requiring me “not to blog, Twitter or Facebook thoughts about the film before 6th July 2009.” A guy pulls down his pants and bares his soul, and we are forbidden to have thoughts? What is this, the Anschluss?

Both these columns put me into fits of schadenfreude, which is by definition mixed with some pity: how can the viruses responsible for these lesions on our culture and politics show their faces after press like this? As someone who intends to make his own share of marks on the world, and hopes they will be reviewed, I search for lessons: never to be that terrible is one, and two, if I am, and I get called on it, to take solace in the knowledge that somebody somewhere is really enjoying my bad reviews.

***CORRECTION***

Fodder for the critics - in one paragraph I got two things wrong: it's Episode 3 of I, Claudius, and it's Livilla - played by Patricia Quinn (Magenta to you Rocky Horror fans) - who cries "Finish him!"

This fact-check brought to you by YouTube, where I verified that Livia's speech to the gladiators is the bitchiest thing that's ever been on TV. Check it out - the whole episode (not to mention series) is worth watching but the speech itself is from 2:56 to 5:04 here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2YgoZQugjU

e.e. cummings on the Internet (1953)

2009-07-06T19:50:00.000-07:00

James and I spent the weekend in a bizarre serpentine canyon above Cazadero from which I emerged dazed, James tan and the dog half pink. Many strange and beautiful things seen and experienced, but the thing I was most anxious to post to the blog was this discovery, from the e.e. cummings book I took with me up and down the creek: i: six nonlectures. Since the book was published in 1953, you can imagine my surprise to read these observations about a medium that wasn't invented until 1969 and didn't find its way into the average home for another twenty-five years after that.

You will perhaps pardon me, as a nonlecturer, if I begin my second nonlecture with an almost inconceivable assertion: I was born at home.

For the benefit of those of you who can't imagine what the word "home" implies, or what a home could possibly have been like, I should explain that the idea of home is the idea of privacy. But again--what is privacy? You probably never heard of it. Even supposing that (from time to time) walls exist around you, those walls are no longer walls; they are merest pseudosolidities, perpetually penetrated by the perfectly predatory collective organs of sight and sound. Any apparent somewhere which you may inhabit is always at the mercy of a ruthless and omnivorous everywhere. The notion of a house, as one single definite particular and unique place to come into, from the anywhereish and everywhereish world outside--that notion must strike you as fantastic. You have been brought up to believe that a house, or a universe, or a you, or any other object, is only seemingly solid: really (and you are realists, whom nobody and nothing can deceive) each seeming solidity is a collection of large holes--and, in the case of a house, the larger the holes the better; since the principal function of a modern house is to admit whatever might otherwise remain outside. You haven't the least or feeblest conception of being here, and now, and alone, and yourself. Why (you ask) should anyone want to be here, when (simply by pressing a button) anyone can be in fifty places at once? How could anyone want to be now, when anyone can go whening all over creation at the twist of a knob? What could induce anyone to desire aloneness, when billions of soi-disant dollars are mercifully squandered by a good and great government lest anyone anuywhere should ever for a single instant be alone? As for being yourself--why on earth should you be yourself; when instead of being yourself you can be a hundred, or a thousand, or a hundred thousand thousand, other people? The very thought of being oneself in an epoch or interchangeable selves must appear supremely ridiculous.

Suppervision Pride

2009-07-01T21:43:00.000-07:00

With the beautiful and talented Gary Lutes before our June 26th Suppervision performance of the last movement of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time

Suppervision Pride was my third and final gig this past weekend, and the only one I got any pictures from, which is a shame because I raided my middle-school classmate Eric Glaser's drag closet, and Jupiter rearranged my drag and make-up for my second show Thursday night. Where are the paparazzi when you need them? In any case the first show at Supperclub was a success - I was the first dinner-theater act in history to perform Schnittke, and the dining room went gratifyingly silent for eight minutes. The second was at Tingel Tangel where I played the same music and it was a fiasco. I knew, walking into the jampacked bar, that the Schnittke wouldn't register, but decided to muscle through. It was much worse than I'd thought, thanks to amplification ugliness and a persistent non-drug-related hallucination I had that someone was walking around the stage behind me fucking with the mikes. Oh well! The reason I muscled through was for the boot camp concentration exercise (did I really just write the words camp concentration?), and in that sense it was a success, as I got through the piece, which I'd only committed to memory that week.

backstage at Suppervision with a friendly neighborhood little slut and $50 worth of Kryolan make-up, which I just remembered I still haven't gotten off my chin rest

dance party in the dressing room

I love this picture by Tom Schmidt despite the fact that it doesn't convey the extreme precariousness of the stage. I was on a three and a half foot ledge above a 15-foot drop and was so nervous walking out at the beginning that my knees almost knocked and I let my elbow scrape the wall for support. The keyhole-shaped projection is video of clouds passing over me. Gary played piano on the stage below.

In honor of our impresario I glued this rhinestone "III" to my head for the bow. After performances, there was dancing, and after dancing, there was the after party, and after the after party was the after-after party, and after that I walked home and was in bed by 8 a.m. Saturday morning and managed not to lose my violin or anybody's drag.

three SF performances in the next two days

2009-06-24T08:22:00.000-07:00

Thursday, 25 June 2009

Supperclub - I'm dinner theater, playing Schnittke around 8:30 or 9

657 Harrison St between 2nd an 3rd (415) 348-0900

Thursday, 25 June 2009

Tingel Tangel - Pride Edition - again Schnittke, guessing I'll go on around 10

THE 'NEW' BLUE MACAW
2565 Mission St btwn. 21ST AND 22ND

Friday, 26 June 2009

Suppervision Pride - again at the Supperclub - show starts at midnight

Messiaen Quartet for the End of Time last movement, with Gary Lutes, piano

657 Harrison St between 2nd an 3rd (415) 348-0900