Mother Jones

For a fun exercise, try to imagine Right Wing art. Can you? (No, I didn't say Right Wing Artists - that would be trivial)

Let's pretend for the moment that it is neither self-indulgent nor pitiful that I just made myself, alone, crêpes stuffed with stewed fresh peaches. My mother had pressed the peaches on me as medicine on her way out of town, because I don't eat enough fruit. Stuff that!

It would be self-indulgent were I to be seen at le Metro with enough money and charm and style for that. It might be pitiful were I to be depressed or lovelorn. As it is, they were, I assure you, far better than any you have ever eaten, nor did they cost a penny (The flour is ages old, I have no sugar but I do have ersatz maple syrup left over from my daughters' childhood. Perhaps the electricity will prove costly)

Now imagine a world in which museum pieces aren't all engendered in some time of flourish - economic and self-consciously cultural - where intellect stews and conforms and bursts forth with resplendance and beauty and brilliant power. Imagine that workers and trailer-trash actually were to have a chance, M&M style maybe, to take it to the top. Or how about a world without museums. How about that?

Imagine a world where Trotskyites don't spend all their energies debating doctrinal rectitude leaving such gaping lacunae in our Real World for Right Wing certainties hidden underneath their vague dark cloak that gets misnamed "conservatism". Where we really did understand what our government is capable to do to us and for us and where we might never doubt that the game is fixed and where our Dynastic leaders don't take their orders from some secret society and that they would never bring down towers for our own good and blame that on the least among us for some excuse to pulverize them. For us to do the dirty work and in our very own Name.

Sure, if you're taken in by Ayn Rand, you might think that realistic celebrations of powerful men can approach real artistry. You might find realist sculpture of the sort Tom Wolfe writes to be a fair imitation of art. You might prefer greatness celebrated or oversized egos taken down, but most people want art to get beyond pure demonstrations of talent to something approached by means of that talent, right? Whatever transcendence means I sure don't know, but it has something to do with the taste of fresh peaches, that much I know for certain.

Something already held in mind by the artist and then realized by her art places the artist in a superior position and so we might suppose that we don't have the talent even to think either; as well as lacking the talent to perform. School pretty effectively instills this lesson, no? I wonder whatever happened to actual education, without which we are not much more than apes?

The artist must be taken in by her own work and not in charge of it, right, and so even those museum pieces from our ages of glory are subversive at their roots. They challenge their age. It is as though a spirit were released and the artist its medium. And that spirit is never on the side of individual human greatness. Never. Unless sublimated  to Man as God, or beauty as truth or or or.

Most art - I'm pretty sure this is true - tends left wing once you move away from so-called realism. Think Ayn Rand's compatriot Tolstoy if you want art, and think the other Thomas Wolfe maybe if you want art and think white linens if you want your Southern Fried. The real always favors the powerful. Projections always favor the dreams of the downtrodden, for greater glory, for vindication, for something approaching beauty.

You might find the exhibition of extraordinary talent by way of its purest de-contextualized notes of grace to be artistic. Purest voice of striking clarity can take the place of hard wrought gems mined from the deepest parts of us. Even in church, there can be good music.

But inevitably, most such stuff feels either Stalinistic or like some sort of flag waving country music show in some Big Box Church which glorifies production values. It might be entertaining, but it ain't art. Unless it steadfastly refuses any message at all, and then I guess it's just entertainment, maybe like a ball game, and nothing wrong with that! Just like pornography and for the same or opposite reason, you know it when you see it, art. Whatever it's purpose, it stirs you, but in a way to uplift and stray beyond the pornographic commons.

The production of The Furies of Mother Jones over at Subversive Theatre has all the trappings of that country music show in Church. Fine spirit, stirring music, a transparent message about workers' rights. Clear realism devoted toward a crystalline message.

It ain't art, right? It's more like didactic presentations of the sort they were limited to under Chairman Mao because the little people couldn't be trusted to see through the racier stuff to the right kind of message. Everyone becomes self indulgent if given the slightest chance, and hell the blocking of pornography makes a pretty good cover for covering dissent. There's nothing terribly subtle about this one. There's no meaning below the belt and there's no culture at the bottom of a coal mine.

No question this show presents a good time. It doesn't depict a good time, but somehow it manages to be fun and stirring and uplifting for its audience. It sharpens the context for all systemic abuses, and gives the hand clapping foot stomping onlooking participant a refined view of how it feels to be at the bottom of the social structure, where the compulsive bottom shopping of each of us resolves into outright destruction of those lives closest to the manufacture of whatever it is that fuels the desires others of those of us with enough wherewithal to buy our tickets.

Every single one of us, each time that we seek out the cheapest gas for our cars, or the pennies less on-line conduit for our gizmos, or refuse to pay the union rate on the excuse that they're all fat and lazy; each one of us participates in whatever it is the global corporate compartmentalized sociopathic powers-that-be have to do to get it to us. We are the destroyers of lives, not any them.

We know the government regulators are both overpowered and in cahoots. We know that, even as we refuse to pay them any more than we can make just getting by ourselves. Getting by now includes that big flat screen and a couple of cars not to mention a jetaway vacation and lots of eating out. These are our birthrights as is our sense of style, which includes the political rectitude to sympathize with and rhetorically support the blasted working class.

But so whom are we to trust? I mean who are we? Are we trustworthy? Will we do a damned thing to assure that there is not more destruction to meet our bottom feeding shopping habits? Will we really continue to regard our priests and civil servants as special cases of people who should and must and will by God be above the base-line habits of the rest of us? We fully intend to punish them to the fullest extent of their pretenses. When they fall short of their pledge to honor. The rest of us are only innocent bystanders, members of some audience.

So, yeah, I'm not really sure that this is art, Subversive. It is necessary, it gets my blood boiling and it satisfies my pride in lack of any style at all. But then I've always been a lousy consumer, failing almost ever to get the best deal. (I paid far more than my fair share for this show too, trust me on that.)

But there is a difference between the right-wing didactic stuff and the left wing. The one celebrates celebrity and success and looking good and rising high and mighty. The other celebrates the little guy, the miner under ground, or the sweatshop worker who's just a blip on the power-brokering radar of those captain of industry superstars who get all the credit for pushing history forward.

And as anyone watching the film Titanic, which must have been derived from O'Neill's Harry Ape (and so which one's real and which one's art???), as anyone in those audiences knows, it's in the boilerroom where the real fun can be had. Among the working folk.

Lots of the audience for this show wanted to ride up in the freight elevator which can take you up to the Manny Fried if you don't want to walk those two flights up to the third floor. Normally, this is preferred only by older or infirm audience members, but somehow there was advanced billing that this time the freight elevator was an echo from the show. It was replicated on the set, and the audience could experience in ironic mirroring what it must feel like to be lifted from gloomy darkness to enlightenment.

We are all of us trapped underground. Tea partiers think the goons are all in the government and that freedom is freedom from government interference, never crediting that corporate power has long since overwhelmed the power of our civil servants. Freedom from means freedom to be exploited so long as we continue to make no distinctions according to scale. So long as we regard corporations as legal persons with rights and freedoms just like those we're just dying to trade away.

So OK let's say this show is less art than politics. That's what Subversive Theatre is for, right? But you know the music in the show makes a mess of that assumption. It might not be mass market art or the kind of aristocratic beauty which still gets aspired to and longed for and even lusted after.

It's the kind of art they celebrate in Appalachia, where the workers once had real lives and real music and real family tradition and where performance is always live and never even expects to be on TV. And it's cheap. And it's hardly realistic, moving back and forth in historical time and realistically depicting the projected nightmares of betrayers who try to hide their own guilt from themselves. The rats patrol the dug-up graveyards. The workers sing like superstars.

So, yeah, let's call it art and have a party. The workers will prevail. The teapartiers will wake up. We will see the sunshine someday soon just like those miners down in Chile. And if you really want to help them, see this show and take it to heart. Indulge yourself.

I Went to See the Mother . . .

But I never saw the play. Instead, I participated in it; a couple of times as a cop, once as a strike breaker, and for a few scenes as a coat rack. I didn't want to seem over eager, but the audience was of similar size to the cast, and they needed extras.

The Mother is written as a didactic play, a Lehrstücke according to Wikipedia. Brecht meant to break down barriers between audience and actor as between worker and consumer, or so I learned. And I had been all ready here to give plaudits galore to Kurt Schneiderman and his Subversive Theatre for something completely new and different! Hesitation always being the better part of valor . . .

But really, what a great way to get the audience's attention. You mill about the space, sometimes part of the action, sometimes sitting on the floor, sometimes getting pelted with (fake) rocks. As I like to brag here, I witnessed lots of experimental theatre Off Broadway back when that meant something, and in London; all back in my youth. Of course I remember no particulars, and it didn't change my life, apparently. I mean I'm not a theatre person and being a witness in the audience gives me no more authority than to claim that I know the law because my father is a lawyer. But I've witnessed uncomfortable experimental theatre, let me tell you. It was plenty unsettling, you know, just like the absence of a happy ending from a Hollywood movie. About as pointless?

But you aren't doing the same thing when you participate that you are when you are sitting in an audience. It's really hard to know whether to smile knowingly or appreciatively the way you might in solidarity or competition with your seatmates, or whether someone is watching you, and you should put on a show of trying to act.

A couple of times I was meant to act like a cop; a nasty. But I felt that if I was going to act like a cop I should at least show my own fear and ambivalence about what I was being ordered to do. There was no director, exactly, to tell me how to behave. But I did feel exposed and vulnerable, hoping mine wasn't the live bullet, that no-one's eyes were on me. I shot into the air over the protesters' heads. For real?

Sure, we got quickie instruction in what would happen and rough general indications of our roles. These were offered by fellow actors with whom we'd bonded by a bean-bag toss game before the show began. Or had it already begun?

These same actors had invited us in by including us in their foul language and general tired and jaded camaraderie as they got ready for the show. They weren't being paid to do this either, and maybe it wasn't all acting to feel tired and jaded. But they hadn't paid to get in, and presumably this was something they really really want to do. Act, um, on stage? Well, act anyhow.

But they acted grateful to us, and slightly pissed toward everyone absent, just as we "audience" members might have felt toward our absent crowd-mates. I was a little taken aback when someone asked me if I was OK after being pelted by fake rocks. Were they serious? Do I look that frail? Or was that person more properly still  in character than I was? I'd already sat down again to watch. I answered sincerely "I'm fine" as though the thought that I wasn't fine was a ridiculous thought. Oh!

And why weren't they just jumping at the chance to recruit me when I made eye contact after no-one was raising his hand to volunteer for missing roles? Do I look that old? That far from being able to act? Or you know, maybe it takes one to know one, like it's OK to say out loud on NPR that gay men might like Real Housewives, because of the implicit role-playing of those, um, real actual (NOT) housewives, but that no real man could stand the show. So, yeah, like women are all role-playing all the time, and can't not watch, so they said, like a trainwreck, other women making fools of themselves, but only gay men would do that? Well, it's an interesting concept, but a little politically incorrect if you ask me.

Affirmed in my manhood, still it's hard to know how to behave as an audience member thrust into the act. The play was about "the Mother," an illiterate woman who was worried about what would happen to her son if he continued to buck "the Man." It was about a teacher who couldn't see the good of literacy for people destined to remain denizens only ever of the working class. It was about co-opting workers of one stripe - a butcher, say - against workers of another and making them think that they were special for a day or a minute or the duration of a confrontation. At least you've got a job. We're rewarding you handsomely to take our side against the ruffians.

Take orders. Take direction. Or just do what comes to you or what comes naturally. The play's the thing. The mother gradually did learn to read. Unwittingly, she became the de-facto rallying point for the cause. She was that out of place, and who would attack a mother protective of her son? The teacher learned to value reading himself, and wanted to be called comrade in the end. I wished I'd had a role.

Well, I did have a role of sorts. I ran the elevator for the night, and I needn't have bought a ticket, but, well  I felt responsible to contribute, even though I'm unemployed, and don't always give handouts, but after the show there were, indeed, a few people who would have been quite challenged to take the two flights of long stairs back down. It felt like it should have been a part of the play, you know, a huge freight elevator with signs all over saying that other than the operator and his freight, people were not allowed. I tried for a paranoid joke as I crashed the gates down. You won't be getting out of here. It went over OK.

And then I brought the cage back up, in case there was someone left behind. And sure enough there was one of the actors, grateful for the lift. Er, I mean the descent. On the way down, he proceeded to tell me about how he had just had back surgery, and had gotten himself out of the hospital early because the show needed him. He'd done the earlier performances in the face of excruciating sciatica. This one nearly rigid with post-operative pain. And I'd thought that the cop complaining of his recent back surgery during the show was speaking a memorized line. A cop too lazy to work in the face of hurting striking workers. Making excuses.

I was struck that this actor's speech was halting - not what you'd think of as an actor's smooth diction. But he'd just delivered - led, really - this almost perfectly pitched and timed high speed projectile dialog. An argument. A staccato performance worthy of something David Mamet would produce. How does this work? The pivotal moment of the play, the catapulting into heightened consciousness of the importance of standing firm in protest, delivered by a man who couldn't strain his back?

Am I changed? Is my consciousness lifted? Could I have something to say if I were offered a stage on which to say it? Would I ever stand up against the Man? Well, I wouldn't pull the trigger if ordered. Not unless it was an act for the greater good and the director was shouting at me exactly what he needed me to do. This director, young Bob Van Valin, was so disarming, though. Really nice, like a tour director. So polite, when he wasn't being foul-mouthed and drawing imagineary lines we weren't to cross.

But in the end, good show old man!! Jolly good! (I'm affecting a little accent there, and, um, pretending Kurt's an old man)

Inception

Hello World!

It wasn't all that long ago that I was willing to pay the cost of an economy car to purchase a home-built clone PC. I probably wasn't willing to pay enough to buy the brand-named item, just as I will probably never be interested to spend more than economy car prices for wheels. But it was a chunk of change - over $5K -  to have something without graphics or mouse on which to calculate complicated spreadsheets. Eventually some statistics. Mostly for word-processing.

Think of it! Nowadays, when cars are still more essential than they were even back at the beginnings for PCs, what would it take for you to be willing to spend, say, fifteen thousand dollars, to do something you can already do, but in new ways? Seemingly better ways? How much more of your world is there left to mediate, digitally. Remember the thrill of graphics? Of color? But do you remember that the price had already dropped, and that's what made your desire harden into purchase.

Can you even imagine such a thing? A fifteen thousand dollar digital device? There's very little difference among various flavors of wheels so far as what they're good for, and  yet the price differential can be intense. But less intense, really, than it used to be. There is a standard car price, just as there is a standard PC price, and the spread from luxury to abject suffering is as if from all to nothing. Cars generally work better than they used to and so the only reason to spend more is likely for comfort or luxury. If you can't pay for reliability, buy a used car. But used laptops cost more than the newer cheaper ones. And cars are really digital devices now too. A big giant brain on wheels, is how I think I heard the Ford Focus touted. The most economical car around.

These days if you see someone engaged in extreme physical maneuvers, you will almost certainly see someone nearby with a video cam. What's it called? Parkour? The Guggenheim is soliciting You-tubes for a major show of "the new" and movies have become about what a movie is about. The world has ended and we are driving on fumes. Momentum carries us as though things were still as they ever have been, word without end, amen.

It is my turn now, to get the job I really love. Now, where will I be applying? The only amazing thing about this film, Inception, is that its protagonists, the dream invaders, are still doing someone else's bidding. They have no independent source of income. They have a boss. These dream invasions are done for the purposes of corporate espionage. Victory means staving off world domination. Mac beats PC. Google rules. The movie maker mocks himself mocking his audience; the roobs who will pay to be hyped and think they can think as fast as the film can move.

I watched this one, as I once did the Lord of the Rings, right up close at neckbreaking vantage. It sucked nearly as badly. In a mall full of unselfconscious mallrats and never a one of them with video cams, since why would they need them? There is nothing apart from self-disclosure in the mall.These people all look like they want to be a porn video. Personally. Just for you, my love. Or, safely, can I pay for some private anonymous session across the 'net. You show me yours and I'll show you mine, but only one of us picks up the tab? Weird.

I picked that one up listening to Gary Shteyngart just now. How can he know about these things and I can't? He seems to think he's the last reader on the earth, the last writer, likening himself to some Jap shooter still hiding out in some cave on some Pacific island, not having heard the news that the unthinkable has happened and the sacred emperor has been defeated. No one reads anymore. But I read Absurdistan, and this guy is as far from a writer as you can get and still be published. His text is digitally mediated; all satire, no earnest sense. There is no irony left in the world anymore. No sense of irony, since it's all ironic all the time.

So Inception, the movie, insults its audience almost beyond the point of endurance. It mocks all chase scenes, all shootemups, all secret agent movies, and the only thing I don't get is why the protagonists still have to have employers. I mean if you can dig into people's dreams, shouldn't you be self-employed at the very least? Shouldn't you be the master of the universe instead of minioning for some other master? Or is that how they work out the bad guys' bullets never landing?

But really, the moment of Inception is when you are up against it. When you return from Seattle, say, to Buffalo and you just can't help noticing that the people in the commuter airline ghetto out of JFK have last years' model of laptop, smartphone, clothes, looks on their faces. You can't help but wonder if the genepool has been drained by the cooler places, or is it just a matter like those vanity photoshoots you used to be able to do for your boyfriend, where you get all made up like a whore or like a bride and that's what they do in cooler more moneyed venues. Some combination of both by each?

But really, when you want that kind of beauty then you are a rapist as were these mind-fuckers in the movie as they were doing to you in the audience, and it isn't art or literature or even satire. It's rude and deadly to your soul. Don't watch it. It really really sucks. I don't even know what I'm saying, but I know the message has been implanted. Don't watch it if you value your soul.

Subversive Shorts Bee Lineup, AKA "A"

With a start, I realized that I should have been up in Toronto where all the real subversion was happening last night. Too late. I've been preoccupied with family matters, and numb to the world stage. Our own Seattle right around the corner, where acting up can make a difference. But then I watched a burning police car via over-the-Internets video and it looked so Canadian. Almost as if they have no interest in fanning flames of provocation. According to Michael Moore, they don't even lock their doors. And the cops with batons were equipped with bicycles, of all the crazy stuff. They were probably dialed in to the subversives' Twitter accounts. No-one looked very guilty. Not even the police. We're such hosers down below.

Subversion gets no satisfaction these days, and there are still unaccountably scant audiences down at the Theatre. Which only means that there's more room for YOU. These shorts are good!

I can't quite agree that this "A" or "Artaud" lineup is better than the one I saw last week. These short one-act plays were certainly engaging, but sometimes veered in the direction of a Saturday Night Live skit, which was what I fell asleep to last night, literally. Well, it was a re-run, so it wasn't technically "live", but it was live once! (Eat meat, it's what's for dinner, though you should eat stuff which was alive and not in industrial feedlot simulating life, as I learned the other time from the "B" lineup) It could just be the venue which keeps the crowds at bay - I'm pretty sure that if you threw these shorts up on a television screen, or a YouTube say, audiences would howl. Buffalo-born has made the world stage before!

Real theatre (sic) is face to face in a way, although I think if the actors were to make eye contact of the sort real people do they could never quite do the incredible job they did here last night. These actors were *in* to their roles. What a pleasure!

To run them down - not like police do, but like reviewers do - there were middle schoolers acting like adults negotiating gender politics as on the world stage of trade negotiations to our North (I might have my scale and venue mixed up). There was a traffic control disembodied voice posing as a very masculine God. There was celebration of the quiet choices of the abused women of the world, stood in for by an offstage silent smiling nun of ones imagination. The sister act-ed by a gay woman celebrant of absent judgement toward dronish subservients in a patriarchal structure of abuse which hardly becomes the Universal Church of Men. There really were bees composing Genesis, with some gender role reversals. Well, all you have to do is to imagine queens and drones and this was funny honey. Sweet. A Boorish banker opening an American do-gooder NGO-sponsored eco-tourism mecca down in South Africa with ironic twists. I mean, talk about ironic! You don't even know.

I don't know if life imitates art, or if the other way around, and how come it all coheres if only in this one mind, but each play plays on the others and on reality, so-called, and there's microcosmic shift which might be enough. It always has been. Did you think the world could change its mind all at once?

I'm not kidding, this was good stuff. The first short was acted out by students at the Performing Arts High School Magnet (another Buffalo invention), which is surely harboring some talent. Some good teaching. Some almost unbelievable presence on stage. The monologue by the gay sister of the sweetly innocent nun was performed so convincingly that I felt as though she stood for everyman, liberated, constrained, uncertain, freed, holding back from judgement herself, though she had every right to toss firebombs. On the model of silent women the world over who need honoring, but not, you know, worshipping.

And really, you should see actors channeling bees looking down on us humans-without-awareness. Divided as we are from the continuum of life. Genesis. Exodus. Who knows how the world will change? One awakening at a time? Person to person? The bees really are telling us something about our mono-culture, I mean the real bees, the ones we depend on for our pollination and our lives, and, um, I think we can't live without them, no matter the buzz down in South Africa which drowns out the thoughts of superstars. We didn't project our dreams on that screen this time, did we?

Right before the show I installed a new battery to the supposedly irreparable iPod my daughter's cat accidentally showered. People camped out all night to get the latest of these false presentations of seamlessness, interfaces without any way in. Willing to overlook flaws at the cost of a fatted service contract, as though they never crash. I will not refrain from opening smooth exteriors, you know, certainly not because I've been mesmerized by Word or words or acting.

The place where I bought the iPod battery represents a mission to protect landfills from poison superannuated electronic gear by demonstrating how easy it is to repair. Yeah, I know I'm being greenwashed, but, well, still I'd rather watch live theatre than participate in staged protest, and the "genius bar" just tells you they don't fix these things. I'm no sucker for guys in robes representing some mysterium.

Who knows how the world will change? The only thing that we do know is that it will, because the math doesn't work out the way we're going. Why not start here? Why not now? As my friend and I were walking out there was a full red moon just above the treetops, over the low buildings of this supposedly dying city. Now I just found out that I'd missed it's eclipse. The moon's, I mean, not the city's - for that I've been fully present. These menstrual pulls cannot be gainsaid by my manly artifice. My head was turned, as was God's, on stage, by flesh. Hey, I'm human. I'm implicated. She was hot!

Subversive Shorts!

None of us can know our own personal deficits. They are blind spots; lacunae, to borrow the title from a recent Barbara Kingsolver novel I admired. (I'm now savoring her nonfictional take on living close to the land, reading it slowly in imitation of the manner of eating which will provide the best reward, local and global, as she celebrates.)

We can know our deficits only by a kind of emotional triangulation from among the feedback we receive, trying to filter out that which is motivated by the lacunae in others; sometimes these are projections which might have nothing at all to do with us. We can try to modulate the ways in which we discourage useful feedback. Our resistances and sensitivities and bluster and anger. Our touchiness.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle must be the most intelligent book I have ever read. It uncovers much of what is really going on with our food culture. Just now, shopping at the local food co-op, I was distressed to learn from how far away my veggies had been shipped. But at least the Co-Op does provide that information now. I have been informed, and that's a start. The books wasn't meant as entertainment, but it's written well. Eat your spinach. As though it wasn't, well, yummy when well prepared and not repetitive to the point of evermore!

There is no delegating out my responsibility to make good choices, though good enough will nearly always be quite good by my lights. I have no real direct experience with the kind of fresh and lovingly raised food that Kingsolver celebrates and grows and worries over. I want to know why she will devote only a year and not a lifetime? Slowly. My standards aren't that high.

Last night I was among the ever more flush audience at Subversive Theatre for opening night of the "B" lineup, the "Brecht" series of their annual festival of short one-act plays. I liked them all. I don't know how to hoot as do the insiders, but I clapped loudly, only later learning that I should see the "A" or "Artaud" lineup if I want to see the good stuff.

The place felt cool; more comfortable than I remember. I remark on the irony now, that this theater has purchased an air conditioner, even as one of the shorts - a  post-apocalyptic play set in the future when air conditioning is illegal and ice, bizarrely, is the erotic toy of choice - might make it seem a Hummer of a buy. There are no perfect, no pure, no ideal choices. There is no escaping irony. None.

How would I know? How would I know which of these short plays and how, degraded women to make an ideological point? I could tell that some did to some women present. I can tell the difference among didactic and entertaining and emotive. There is no accounting, none, for personal reaction, though.

There was only one play which really moved me that way, theatrically and not in my mind alone: three characters, the mother and father of a soldier deployed in Iraq, at a coffee shop to meet his sweetheart. She would be travelling through Turkey, abandoning her Olympic hopes, to assist her lover in his escape from the travesty of this so-called War. The father celebrated his own service medals and couldn't face the shame of his only son, the deserter. The mother handed over her St. Christopher medals, finally resisting instruction from her Man - direct orders actually. She remained behind to sip her tea. Sending her husband home, startling when the barrista called her name in stentorian fashion. The absent husband's coffee finally ready post-departure. In her name. Old habits. Die hard. Go AWOL. With difficulty. The girl's parents care only for her Olympic glory. Echoes of the gods of the first piece.

The Medals play was the main course for me, meaning that it moved me to understand in a way which had a chance to change me. I recognize these in-formations of my own self. The ways in which I am inhibited from making change in the world around me. Barked orders, timid forays, checking my moves against the norms.

Oh, I mean that one short, but you know, it was that they were short which made them so easy to swallow. A kind of ratatouille when taken as a whole, or, no, different foods on a single plate, or no, courses, maybe as part of a gourmet dinner. My reach exceeds my grasp, of theater, of food, of what it is that will make people more certain in ways to do less harm.

Others among the shorts were meant more purely to enlighten. The vegetable side dishes. The vitamins. To teach the audience about our prison system, and how cruel it is to families. To teach about our petro-based agriculture. To demonstrate how that line to distinguish humanity from beastliness gets pushed ever farther back until we can justify even torture, on animal Prozac and Muzak and climate controlled comfort in their solitary feedlot pens. Not so unlike the assisted living facility where I recently moved my Dad. Why wouldn't you be happy there, Dad? You can't do anything for yourself. Anyhow.

It's hard to see all the distortions - how it might be that there is no choice but to raise animals this way for slaughter; to justify their suffering by making a fine and final distinction between animal and human. Kingsolver gently mocks the purity of vegetarians, since animal death is also implicated in vegetable growth in human cultivated plots. But many vegetarians might eat meat if the animal's end was that surprising to it; that unanticipated and the life was merely cut short instead of denied at the outset.

Which justification would you like for your daily bread? That it does, in fact, taste that much better when raised with love and locally and without having been distorted by breeding to make the long trip from grower to grocer? Or that you will feel better spending more and tasting less, always waiting for the prize in its true season. How much more would you spend?

I admired the cleverness of each of these pieces, but in the end, I guess, I still choose to be enlightened in a manner which entertains, which moves, which stops short of teaching, didactically, someone else's certainties. I would prefer to witness someone acting out what we all must go through to make the right choices; to fill in all our own gaps. Vitamins are only necessary in the first place because we breed out the complexities of the food we eat. I've been so informed.

I can have no idea how food might taste if we were to raise it properly, without industrial feedlots, allowing fuller genetic variation, and bringing harvests closer to their markets. I still rather suspect that the food I prepare with love still tastes that much better than the stuff I could prepare if limited to a radius of 50 miles in its true season.

I have this feeling that it's not all bad. That the present distortions will be rectified, that this is all the inevitable result of an oil-bender which can't last much more than the hundred years of its allotment. A mere human lifetime, give or take. I have a feeling that people will start to understand how our pleasures distort and destroy so many lives; animal, vegetable and even miracle by the displaced and outsourced decisions we leave to the marketplace. I suspect that we will learn to nuzzle one another again, and walk away from our wombs with views in which we hibernate to be born anew.

But I am absolutely certain that nothing will change without courageous re-presentations of what is going on. That line between pure entertainment and truly moving art has become so distorted now that theater must mock cinema, cirque du soleil enterprise in scope. Phantom of some former opera. So, I remain glad for Subversive Theatre, and for protests the world over, and for pure didactic instruction. I don't care if it's someone else's certainty, if they are moved to act. I am lacking in taste, I guess. My lacuna. I moderate my gluttony by small bites, chewed slowly, followed by drink and not only for the bodily satisfaction. I've been so informed.