RE: YOU'LL WANT TO BUY SOME OF THIS

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 10:58 AM, JF wrote:
Live Action New York 09: Scandinavian Performance Art

Scandinavian performance art is on the move. Live Action New York 09
features in its first edition some of the most important contemporary
Scandinavian performance art in an intense and exciting event going
beyond mainstream contemporary art, Live Action New York 09 is here
and now, it's ephemeral, it has attitude, it's fleeting, and it is
avant-garde. Don’t miss out.

On Thu, 11/12/09, GE wrote:
Can one actually buy performance art? And if so, what does one do with the performer, when they become tiresome?

On Nov 12, 2009, at 11:06, VH wrote:
I believe there's a no-kill shelter for them out in Williamsburg, but really one should only adopt a PAT (performance artist trendster) if they can take care of them for life.

2009/11/12 JM wrote:
We adopted a mime from them a few years ago. It was terrible. She fractured her skull walking into an imaginary door, and we had to have her put to sleep.

On Nov 12, 2009, at 2:10 PM, JF wrote:
That was not an accident. It was suicide, induced by the fact that you kept throwing imaginary banana peels on the floor in front of her every time you saw her.
I still have the imaginary Shetland wool sweater she knit for me.

On Thu, 11/12/09, IM wrote:
You guys, I am right here. Okay? It was pretend...it was just art. Okay? OKAY? I am alive and well and living in Brooklyn.

I am happy to have escaped a cold fate in off-Drottninggatan theater, though. The unions made everything impossible.

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 at 2:42 PM, VH wrote:
Evidence indeed that a performance artist is for life, not just for Christmas.

On Nov 12, 2009, at 2:56 PM, Gregory Edwards wrote:
You guys are missing the whole thing. Thing of it is, performance artists can make real good pit fighters. Back in Chicago, got a few second-hand from a breeder on the west side, ran my own kennel for while. Lots of fringe theater in Chicago, but you got to have the eye for the feisty ones. And if you take to breeding yourself, you gotta cull the soft ones. What you want is a real nasty, screechy, open-mike type—lots of piercings and such—but try as you might, some times you end up with a mime... or worse, a grad student. Then it's head in the bag, dunk 'em in pool. Nothing else to be done. But if you get a real bad-assed street artist, pissed-off protest type—well, all you gotta do is force-feed them red meat, and read them an op-ed from the Wall Street Journal time to time. Don't hardly need to beat them. When they hit the ring, it's holy hell out there.

OLD FRIENDS

I am in Chicago...my hometown.

Last night I had sushi (Delicious, buttery, could stand up to any NYC sushi restaurant) with two old friends of mine with whom I have had similarly complicated relationships: I stopped speaking to Danny because I didn't like his girlfriend, Joey stopped speaking to me because his girlfriend didn't like me. And last night, all I could think about was how much fun I was having; how nice it was to be with people who had walked a ways with me on the long, craggy-rocked path I have hiked towards adulthood. It occurred to me that I meet people all the time, people whose emotional lives are undoubtedly pocked with the relationships that formed them, people who love their family and their old friends, people who stop a bullet for someone I will never meet.

I have met too many people now to give myself to my friends as readily as I once did. I am so quick to find fault, easily bored, difficult to impress. There is something about my friends from my hometown--It is one reason why this place, this gladhanded city by the lake, has such a hold on my heart.