Juliet's Economy

In the balcony scene of Shakespeare’s most famous love story, Juliet confesses to the dark night her love for the man she’s just met. Little does she know, Romeo is there in the bushes, gazing up at her with heart also blazing. In the scene that follows, the surprised Juliet elaborates a theory of love that has been interpreted for centuries as naïve and idealistic. What happens if we take seriously the model of love articulated by this young girl from Verona? What if love is an economy that operates not on scarcity but on abundance?

Blame teenage insecurity, blame the patriarchy, blame his aching heart still reeling from Rosaline’s refusal, in any case, Romeo’s model of love is grounded in a traditional economy of exchange. He wants to receive and give in equal measure, at an agreed-upon time. Love is trade, and the trade must be fair.

When Juliet tries to leave, saying that this is all happening too fast, Romeo stops her, saying like so many men before and after him: “O, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?”

“What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?” asks Juliet

“The exchange of thy love’s faithful vow for mine,” he says.

She laughs at his pedantry: “I gave thee mine before thou didst request it!”

Juliet needed no guarantees before she confessed her love. She required no certainty of exchange. She gave because there was nothing else to do with her overflowing love but give it – to the night sky, to the vision of Romeo she held in her heart, to whoever was listening in the garden.

“And yet I would it were to give again.” She continues.

This worries Romeo: “Wouldst thou withdraw it? for what purpose, love?”

“But to be frank, and give it thee again.” Juliet knows that it isn’t the having or the getting of love that is the most pleasurable, but the giving of it. She wants to give, and give again; reaping repeatedly the pleasure of the gift.

She laughs again (at least in the production in my head): “And yet I wish but for the thing I have.”

There is nothing stopping her from giving her love endlessly. She need not await exchange. She need not play coy with her devotion until she’s received certainty that he will give his back.

“My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.”

In Juliet’s economy, there is no scarcity. Giving love only generates more.

Fire in my Belly: Watch Now!

Take four minutes out of your day.

Give them to the painful and soulful vision of artist/activist David Wojnarowicz, who recently ascended to renewed prominence after the Smithsonian pulled his super-8 film Fire in my Belly from their exhibit entitled "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture." Apparently Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1992, was showing too much of his difference, and not hiding his desire well enough for some tastes.

The film was made in 1986/87 in honor of a friend and fellow artist who had recently died of AIDS. For those of us who don't remember that time, this was before AZT and cocktail drugs, when a diagnosis was a death sentence. The government was ignoring the plight of thousands living with HIV, viewing them as more of a threat to be managed than a populace to be cared for. Death was close by, and Wojnarowicz's haunting film captures the urgency and intimacy of this very recent time in history that some would prefer to forget.

Go all out. Full-screen it. Give yourself the experience.

David Wojnarowicz "A Fire in My Belly" - Smithsonian, National Portrait Gallery Edit from ppow_gallery on Vimeo.

Note that the original film was silent, and 13 minutes in length. The above version, which was pulled from the Smithsonian, has been edited and supplemented with a soundtrack of original recordings from ACT UP! protests in the 1980s.

Also, lets all take a moment to remember that the HIV/AIDS crisis is not over. Worldwide, 2 million people die every year from AIDS-related illnesses and each year 3 million more acquire the disease. While many of these new cases are far removed from New York's West Village, the call to action is still as important as it was in 1986. ACT UP! FIGHT AIDS!

Buy More Stuff

With Christmas less than a week away, it’s Buy More Stuff season!

Trying to define or describe Buy More Stuff is complicated.

Call it street performance, call it culture-jamming, call it schizophrenic capitalism at its finest, Buy More Stuff looks like a very polite protest attended by earnest, young, well-dressed professionals. Here and there, a head of bright pink hair or particularly prominent facial piercings make you wonder exactly what slice of the Seattle populace these protesters might represent.

The group stations itself in the heart of the shopping district at peak hours of holiday gift-buying frenzy with their iconic signs and fliers. Their message is clear, succinct, and limited to a few phrases: “Buy More Stuff!” “Hurry!” “Or else they’ll run out of stuff!” “Or you’ll run out of time!”

Passersby stop, confused.

Some ask who the protesters are working for: Does the mall pay you to do this?

> No, just here to get the message out. Buy More Stuff!

Some are angry: What are you, like, die-hard capitalists or something?

> No, just want to encourage everyone to Buy More Stuff!

Others are sure they’ve seen through the irony: You’re being sarcastic, right?

> No sir! 'Tis the season to Buy More Stuff!

My favorites are the smug passersby who act like they’re in on the joke. They smile or raise an awkward fist in solidarity with what they’re reading as a progressive, performance-art commentary on the state of American consumerism. They get it. They're hip. And then they walk into Macy’s. To Buy More Stuff.

Freud describes the phenomenon of “disavowal” as a compromise made within the human psyche when it becomes necessary to believe two contradicting things at one time. I don’t actually believe that something bad will happen if I say “Macbeth” while inside a theatre. And still, I never say it. And I chide anyone who does. Disavowal.

We accomplish the act of disavowal by splitting our ego in two. One part serves what Freud calls the “reality principle” and the other serves the “pleasure principle.” Hence the “there are no calories in cookie crumbs” scene of disavowal. I know better, but I do it anyway. The fantasy is not actually believed. But it’s not not believed either.

The Buy More Stuff protest is so potent because it takes aim at the fantasy-producing disavowal at the heart of the western capitalist project. We know that stuff will not make us happy. We know that buying more stuff will not fill the holes in our lives. We know that buying more stuff for our loved ones will not make them love us more or defend us from abandonment. And yet, we walk into Macy’s.

The embodiment of sobriety and reason in their three-piece suits with professionally lettered signs, the Buy More Stuff protesters are not ironic. They are not, in fact, trying to get people to Buy Less Stuff through some sort of reverse psychology street ministry.

Instead, Buy More Stuff asks us to hold our fantasies accountable. In doing so, the protesters reveal the sometimes uncomfortable disavowal that is subtly taking place within each of us as we indulge in the pleasure principle of consumption.

Now excuse me, I have to go to Macy’s…

The Tempest: Provocative but incomplete

Provocative but ultimately uninspiring, Julie Taymor's film The Tempest was full of "incomplete gestures."

If memory serves, I borrowed this expression from one of my mentors, Robert Woodruff, years ago. Sometimes in art-making practice, audiences accept aesthetic choices that seem unjustified or erratic if the piece itself experiments with form in such a way that generally ignores or transcends traditional causal relationships. Robert – a director with a truly unique vision and no love of traditionalism in the theatre – encouraged formal innovation in his classroom but would never let us get away with what Homer Simpson describes as "weird for the sake of weird."

A play doesn't necessarily have to have a story, he told us, but it does require the evolution of an idea. The cause and effect relationships within a play need bear no resemblance to those of the outside world, but they do need to work together to build a world with internal logic, stakes and circumstances.

Shakespeare’s The Tempest poses many rich questions about the nature of power. From whence does power flow, and does its earned or unearned derivation affect how it should be used? How should one wield the power one possesses, and under what circumstances should one exert power over another? How does feeling powerful, or powerless, change the shape of your world?

Taymor is clearly drawn to the magnetism of these questions and how they relate to active identity markers in our current era. Casting Helen Mirren, a woman of approximately her own age and popular acclaim, in the role of Prospero (a role often considered the aging Shakespeare’s self-portrait) is an invitation to consider the state of the female artist, scholar, and culture-shaper today. But to what end? Mirren’s performance is strong, but feels shoehorned into an idea of Prospero that Taymor doesn’t relate to the rest of her production.

Her Caliban, played by Djimon Hounsou, is similarly problematic. Clearly West African in appearance, consistently half-naked and sometimes in chains, his character evokes the Atlantic slave trade. Prospero’s castle strongly resembles Elmina Castle, a slave-holding fort in Ghana where dehumanizing conditions were forced upon prisoners before they crossed through the “door of no return” onto slave ships. To what end? How does this idea evolve over the course of the play? Where does Caliban go when he exits the castle dramatically at the play’s end? I just hope he doesn’t end up in the colonies tending tobacco fields.

Slightly more successful but still incomplete is Taymor’s vision of the airy spirit Ariel. Played by a pale-painted Ben Whishaw, Ariel is, in this production, a genderqueer shape-shifter whose pectoral muscles sometimes soften into small breasts. In Ariel’s strongest and most frightening scene, s/he takes the form of a huge harpy, the angriest of female monsters. Are we to read Ariel-as-Harpy as the dangerous familiar of our female Prospero, who stakes a strong claim on traditionally masculine forms of power? Are we being asked to imagine gender as the cloven pine from whence this genderless creature dreams of escape? Once again the connections are almost there, but the internal logic doesn’t hold.

All of these gestures are promising but partial. As the time ticks by and the imperative of plot must be obeyed, the ideas contained in the bodies and costumes of Prospero, Caliban, and Ariel are dropped like unreturned serves on a tennis court. Of course, the film is not required to answer all the questions about race, gender, and sexual expression posed by both Shakespeare’s script and Taymor’s vision. Answers are boring! However, the practice of posing deep questions with rigorous engagement is vital. The incomplete nature of the otherwise interesting gestures disappointed at least this viewer, who hoped for a richer, more internally coherent and productive world.

Juliet, short and muscular

When I was 17, I played Juliet in a community theatre version of Romeo and Juliet. This was nearing the end of the phase in which I considered myself an actress. The year before, I'd played Madge in William Inge's mediocre play Picnic, a young pageant-winner described as "the prettiest girl in town." I was not an unpretty teen, but it was dawning on me that with my broad shoulders and square jaw, I wasn't quite pretty enough to be a professional actress. I felt like a fraud playing Madge, a role that Gwyneth Paltrow had played a few years before, but felt slightly more comfortable in Juliet's skin. Juliet is, after all, a tomboy. The consummate ingenue, she's also a rule-thwarting, death-unfazed badass who really, really wants to get laid.

The reviews were generally complimentary, but I couldn't get over the first few words of one critic's response: "Fairfield's Juliet, short and muscular..." What the reviewer was wrestling with wasn't my height (I'm not that short) or my unjustifiably sculpted deltoids, but the subtle genderqueerness of my teen persona. It was latent over a decade ago, but, like Juliet's lupine sexuality, was ready to pounce given the least provocation.

The lack of variety in gender expression of female actors in mainstream theatre is appalling. Blame for this can be scattered widely (and accurately) on agents, graduate schools, playwrights, heteronorm audiences, wary producers, and more. As a director, I'd like to personally call out directors for their painfully limited creativity when it comes to what versions of womanhood take center stage.

We need more dykes onstage. More tomboys and tough girls. More bois and butches and trannyboys and andros and genderfuckers. We need more subtly non-normative girls with square features and strong frames. We need tall women and deep-voiced women and short-haired women. And not just in ensemble-generated dance-theatre pieces in NYC and SF! We need butch Juliets, boyish Cozettes and dyky Blanche DuBois' on stages across the country. And we need brave directors - who trust audiences to welcome nature's spectrum of gender variance - to cast them.

Here's the deal. Under-representation of lesbian characters onstage is a serious matter, but a different one. We definitely need more stories of women loving women (playwrights: get on it, and directors: cross-gender casting, STAT!). But until the classical canon is toppled and filled with queer characters, let's remember that gender expression and sexual object-choice are not inherently linked. You can have a broad-shouldered, genderqueer female-identified ingenue pair beautifully with a leading man of any shape and size without sacrificing chemistry or believability. This short muscular Juliet was certainly in love with her sweet-faced, long-haired Romeo, but that's another story...

Only A God

In On the Marionette Theatre, by German Romantic author and philosopher Heinrich von Kleist, the first dancer of the Opera insists to the narrator that the grace of the marionette is superior to the grace of human beings...

"My reply was that, no matter how cleverly he might present his paradoxes, he would never make me believe a mechanical puppet can be more graceful than a living human body. He countered this by saying that, where grace is concerned, it is impossible for man to come anywhere near a puppet. Only a god can equal inanimate matter in this respect. This is the point where the two ends of the circular world meet." (Kleist, On the Marionnette Theatre)

In this video, an inanimate object (the fans) animate another inanimate object (the fabric). The result is so full of vital grace that it calls my own liveness into question. In the interaction of these two non-sentient phenomena I see and feel emotional depth, symbolic meaning, a dramatic arc, and a clear aesthetic vision. I'm not sure if this is an argument for a god-less universe or one where god-full-ness is everywhere. Perhaps that's the place "where the two ends of the circular world meet."

P.S. Everything in this post is borrowed from the brilliance of my friends: performer Grace Booth, who found the video, video artist Joe Moore, who showed it to me, and playwright Elizabeth Hersh, who connected the beauty of this dancing scarf to Herr Kleist and his automatons. And Daniel Wurtzel (not yet a friend) is the installation artist who made it in the first place.

Bakhtin and Santarchy

So every year I await, with glee, this event.

Since winter of 2005, I have thrown in my lot with ho-ho-hoardes of manic Santas who pick a Saturday in December to gallivant though bars, clubs, and public spaces in the cities of their choice, spreading holiday cheer and purging late-winter angst. Clad in my homemade in-your-face-sexual-gender-queer-faux-cowgirl-fuzzy-raver Santa Suit (google image search "Santa Chaps" for proof), I hit the streets with my friends, feeling as though we're taking part in a contemporary version of the Bakhtinian "Carnival" - the secular social festivals of the European Middle Ages in which traditional class structures were temporarily inverted:

"One might say carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order. It marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed" (Bahktin, Rabelais and his World).

During Santarchy, everyone dressed as Santa is kin. Names dissolve into the sea of intersubjective Saint Nicks, and a strange secular sense of collective power is felt. A red mass united sans political program, Santas hug and make small talk, share spiked cocoa and discuss the intricacies of unique suit-construction. Santas fuck gently with the "muggles" (citizens and bar-goers that generally resemble them on any other day of the week), but have clear policies against fucking with kids or the police.

The trap of counter-cultural rituals like these is that the inversions are only temporary. As every Master's Thesis on the Burning Man Festival must contend with, Santarchy makes us wonder whether impermanent upswellings of culture-jamming collectivity actually challenge the authority of prevailing powers or ultimately reinforce them. Santarchy is of course guilty of most of the charges of contemporary pop culture events: reliance on internet access, unapologetic commercialism, racial-homogeneity, and latent sexism (while fiesty female Santaclowns abound, there are still a few exploitative gropey Santas).

Bahktin maintained faith that the wicked mirth generated by Carnival could ripple outwards and help to expose the "gay relativity" of all human cultural products. My Santarchy apologia relies similarly on my belief that sometimes we are what we pretend to be. Or rather, we have the potential to become more like those versions of ourselves that we strategically assume. My red-suited avatar is a sexually-liberated, gender-queer, loud-mouthed social muse that believes in the power of singing together, drinking together, and momentarily releasing the given name that binds me inside a claustrophobically singular identity. My Santa isn't afraid of death or final papers or Gropey McDrunkenClaus or the surprisingly aggressive SFPD because she has her bearded tribe at her back and peppermint schnapps in her flask.

Unsuited now, I return to my law-abiding, sobriety-favoring, responsibility-bearing graduate student life. Till next year, Santa.

Towns Like Ours End in Fire

Please enjoy Towns Like Ours End in Fire.

This piece was directed by me with sound design by Beth Hersh (in collaboration with Sigur Ros) and video by Joe Moore (in collaboration with San Francisco weather).

It was shot on location at 84 Athens Street.

It is dedicated to Emmanuelle.

The video is six minutes long and starts with twenty seconds of black. Keep watching! It's paced more like a modern dance piece than like a Youtube video. Thanks for viewing.