Nowtopian

A remarkable, densely-packed weekend of San Francisco living, starting with the latest from my illustrious neighbors, Keith Hennessy and Seth Eisen with Jules Beckman, “How to Die,” at Dance Mission on Friday night. Like the last show Keith did, this is divided into two parts, the first on homelessness and the second on gay sex-and-drugs subculture. Those simple descriptions don’t come close to capturing the minimalist complexity of the performances, nor the deeper reflection they offer on our Culture of Denial.

My first reaction to the homeless half of the show was, like many, to be disturbed. It’s not fun and actually makes the audience very uncomfortable. Keith starts out sort of stumbling into the theater with Jules behind him, both in raggedy parkas, looking pretty darn derelict. Keith starts talking in a subdued, almost apologetic tone of voice, explaining the history of the Mission a bit, handing out snapshots of old men sprawled on our street, as they do every day, trying to situate the actual people we blithely and routinely walk past without seeing (in our case, mostly older alcoholic Salvadorans). A strange tinny voice explains how many people die by train decapitation, followed by Keith giving 9 reasons to die with Jules hurtling into him again and again, tackling him to the floor. It was the most comic part of it, but given the force of the crashes, the humor kept getting sucked right out of it too. A piano wire is strung diagonally across the stage and Keith threads it through his nose (where he normally has a ring) and then began the part that most haunted me later. I’m grossed out by the nose ring to start with, but then to see him sliding right and left, forward and back on this fine line, dramatizing the impossibly fine line on which homeless folks have to survive, lubricating it with his spit so it would slide through his nose…. it was an incredible thing to see. That part summarized the whole theme for me.

Part two is a pelvic-gyrating disco scene with Keith and Jules as heavy speed freaks while Seth lipsyncs to disco hits in a series of over-the-top shimmering disco costumes. The ‘connection’ between the two speed freaks is composed of feigned anonymous sex, rough and violent and loveless. Ultimately Keith assumes a series of the most degrading poses imaginable (which he also did for part of the first half), and just forces the audience to gaze at his self-degradation. The alienation dramatized in part two parallels the despair of part one, though in the second half it’s evidently much more self-imposed. Nevertheless, the title hovers over the show as we watch people on a slow path to death, isolated from each other and from their own humanity, producing their own deepening immiseration. Then Keith breaks in with a Brechtian self-critique which actually deepened the whole show, questioning the whole gist of the show by juxtaposing it to the two million AIDS deaths projected this year, largely among non-white inhabitants of Africa and Asia, often female and young.

And that in turn, nicely overlapped with some recent reading I’ve been doing. Planet of Slums by Mike Davis is his usual numbing tour-de-force of stats and analysis that leaves one enraged and overwhelmed. Iain Boal reviews it intelligently in the latest Mute magazine, but I wanted to note a small part of its broad and deep critique here: A disgustingly large portion of the world population is living in shit! You can get a gripping portrait of how desperate life is in Lagos, Nigeria in George Packer’s long article “The Megacity” in this past week’s New Yorker. But here’s Davis:

Continue reading Living and Dying in the City