Writing.
June 19, 2009
Frank Butler:
“Do you ever feel like you’re going nuts? And then you tell yourself, well, everybody is nuts, and you mention your fear to anybody and they’ll force a laugh and say, well, every body is crazy, ha ha ha. You make comparisons and you come out ahead. You aren’t in jail, or in a mental hospital. Two pluses right there. But still.
I’ve felt slightly crazy, if slightly is a possibility with crazy, since I was a kid, wetting the bed in Vermont, running away so often that my parents had to tie me to a tree. Even then, I’d thought about killing somebody, some asshole, but never came close. The gap between thinking something and doing it is wide, a long swim, fraught with what if’s, and those what if’s are internal cops. We don’t want to get a ticket.
So I was a young man and didn’t conform and turned into an older man who still doesn’t conform but goes to work everyday, although I cheat the IRS and I hope to fuck they don’t catch me. If they do, I am going to plead insanity. I was a member of the Students for a Democratic Society in 1974 at the University of Vermont, so I know I am on a list, and that list consists of other subversives such as crazy people who cannot be controlled. We’re all being watched, but there is one loophole: being looped. The mentally ill in our country have more freedom than the rest of us. They can murder and eat children and if they can prove that they’re nuts, they get life imprisonment and three meals a day, maybe a couple of butt fucks, but hey, better than no fucks, right? Read more
Stop It!
April 13, 2009
Stop it! Stop trying! Stop the Vaudeville Monkey Dance! Stop “stooping to conquer” – it’s over, the game, the dream, the plan, the linked-in, Facebooked, You Tubed You.
The end of hope is the beginning of art. It has taken me 56 glorious failures in 56 confusing years to figure that out. Now I get it…and I get it good. If they don’t get it, you don’t want them to get it.
Kidnapped by FACEBOOK
April 9, 2009
The reason I seldom visit my blog is that Facebook has become my website, my blog, my performances, my diary, my escape – like solitaire… easy, don’t have to dress, speak, walk, type, smile. I have quit FACEBOOk several times but alway sign up again within 24 hours. My so-called friends don’t visit my blog, they visit facebook, and the talent it takes to pull them to your Facebook page with a one-liner is fascinating. I have discovered that bad news or a personal confusion encourages friends to contact you immediately with a virtual back pat and Anne Landerly advice. I’m sorry, I am so tired tonight i can barely type. Last night, insomnia, today, locked out of apartment, dog walked into sewage/tar puddle up to his ears. Still 48 degrees at high noon, here in New England – a chilling, consistent wind slapping at us unsuspectingly, as we turn a corner away from the sun. Just awful. Bone aching spring. Feels like my bones are separating from my muscles. what kind of illness is that? I know you may be uncomfortable joining facebook and becoming my long lost never met friend from, say, Greece or Syracuse, but until I get my addiction under control that’s where I’ll be— thinking up one-liners as swiggling worms on a hook thrown to the middle of nowhere.
Bringing back the Salon
April 9, 2009
Performance Artist
Laurel Casey
Fluxus Cabaret/First Oil Paintings
April 10th, Pratt Hill, Providence 2009
Host: Elliot Garcia, Pratt Street Townhouse, Providence RI
Pianist: Kent Hewitt
Guest Call-In: Madame
Consultant Artists: Matt Macintire, Judith Tolnick-Champa
Art Speak Bull for Grant Purposes and Ass Kissing: “I liken what I do to a life game, an adventure in absurdity, an adult fairytale in which people are engaged as much with themselves as with me. The audience decides what’s going on and what’s to be learned from the experience, if anything. Everybody is a participant. I am not sure whether my performances are art because they crucify each individual art form for the sake of the whole. They are more of a synthesis of live experience as I set up events and situations in relation to the present audience. In the case of group activities, such as painting, the act of art IS the art.” – Laurel Casey
Laurel Casey is a devotee of “FLUXUS” – an art form similar in spirit to the earlier art movement of Dada, emphasizing the concept of anti-art and taking jabs at the seriousness of art. Fluxus artists use their performances to highlight their perceived connections between everyday behavior and art. Fluxus art is often presented in “Events” or “Happenings. Laurel’s preference for Guerilla Cabaret in main stream bistros, restaurants and lounges is predicated on her belief that an audience should be “pure”- lacking instruction on how to relate to the performance. (i.e. audiences preparing to laugh at Comedy Clubs) No matter the environment, Laurel’s performances consist of a minimal instruction, opening the event to accidents and other unintended effects. Also contributing to the randomness of events is the integration of audience members into the performances, realizing Casey’s notion of the viewer completing the art work.
Marsha Tucker, New Museum of Contemporary Art
Strange Bedfellows
October 26, 2008
Buddy, Artin, Dawn struggle to comprehend Cabaret
- Meatballs? Easier to understand and they taste better.
Due to a strong sense of self respect and the inability to kiss ass, I will not be at the Sidebar again. It isn’t that they weren’t generous for a couple of months and also quite kind — It’s just that they don’t get it. I felt myself getting more stupid as the weeks passed. And, vise versa, I didn’t get them. You know what I mean. I tasted the meatballs. To me, they’re just rolled up Hamburgers. Undigestable. It isn’t that anyone was wrong, it was just a bad match. You can go into the Sidebar on Saturday nights and see the perfect music/restaurant match. Don’t forget to snap your fingers to “Fly Me To the Moon!” …. Meanwhile, I am invited to New York to be interviewed for some strange Russian TV program about Jazz which is shown in 17 countries. Hopefully I will get a gig in Siberia! Google “Oleg Frish”….!! Will visit old friends at Don’t Tell Mama – and see if any previous pianists, for example, the great Paul Trueblood, are in the city, monitor my brain and see if I have it in me to go back permanently. Old friends in a loft on West 38th Street offered me their spare bedroom. But truthfully, I feel beaten down at the moment. Beat. Like a Beatnik. Christmas. Its ability to remind us of a previous Christmas, when we knew we were safe and Santa was coming. Be patient, Santa will return! Meanwhile, I’m singing at Ricardo’s in Lowell, MA for New Years Eve with Odie and Todd — Spending Christmas in D.C. with daughter – back to a couple of comedy clubs I worked last winter. Then, to New Orleans for two weeks – Newport is on the horizon and Boston, too, due to a reconnection with Joshua Jansen, Boston’s Gay Sweetheart and friend of nightclub owners all over Bean Town. It’s got to be around here somewhere. p.s. Check out Le Scandal in Manhattan, google them, I’m talking to Bonnie, there, about a spring fling.
Thanks to smarter nightclubs owners, live entertainers continue to eat well during this economic downturn. It was during the Great Depression that Cabaret and Vaudeville got their start as people swarmed into the pubs to forget their troubles for a few hours. The cost/value ratio of live entertainment suits the recession pocket book and mind-set. If you stay home and wallow about your wallet, you’ll soon find yourself in the emergency room for a failed suicide attempt, chronic depression or Epstein-Barr Virus. Without health insurance, your stress-related illness will cost you upwards to $1,000 dollars. A night out in a cabaret will run you about $50 to $75. I rest my glass of champagne.xx
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The cop looked in the dumpster and noticed a picture of his wife. He had just received a complaint from the Olympic Sports store that someone had dumped bags of garbage in their dumpster. That someone was me. I’d cleaned out a few drawers of hometown memories that morning, – high school notebooks, graduation pictures, diplomas, clippings and headed into what I thought was a free-for-all dumpster tucked behind a strip mall. After I threw the bags into the dumpster I took a walk with the dog and when I returned to my car I was met by the policeman and the assistant manager of the Olympic Sports store. Read more »