So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
DavenportBeach, it’s not some tourist trap with overpriced fish tacos and selfie-stick assholes. It’s raw. Wild. The kind of place where a woman and her Portuguese Water Dog can just be.
Lindsey and Sharka. That’s it. That’s the whole story. A dog built for water doing what dogs built for water should do. Running. Swimming. Losing their goddamn minds with the simple ecstasy of being alive on a Tuesday morning.
No social media strategy. No manufactured moment. Just the Pacific doing its thing, cold and infinite, and a creature who understands that joy doesn’t require explanation. Sharka’s not thinking about meaning or purpose. She’s just in it.
And Lindsey? She gets it. She brought Sharka here not to perform happiness, but to live it.
That’s the whole game right there. The sea, the dog, the moment.
The thing about watching a dog run, really run, is it strips away all the pretense we wrap ourselves in. No existential dread, no performance anxiety, just pure kinetic joy translated into muscle and breath. Sharka doesn’t give a shit about my Instagram feed or my quarterly earnings report for the board. She’s a four-legged refutation of everything hollow.
Under the Captiola Wharf’s pylons where the light cuts through in dusty shafts, where the pier’s underbelly drips with barnacles and the smell of kelp and salt hangs thick, that’s where truth lives. Not in some meditation app or self-help gospel, but in the simple, beautiful fact of a creature moving through space because movement itself is enough.
I’ve forgotten how to be present like that. I often intellectualize and monetize and optimize the wonder right out of everything. But Sharka Cão de Água ? She’s running like the world depends on it, which today maybe it does. Like joy is a radical act, which it absolutely is.
Watch her disappear into shadow and light, and tell me you don’t feel something crack open inside.
Museums are incredible places to fall in love. Or maybe just to realize you already have.
Lindsey and I are at the Legion of Honor, standing in front of Klimt and Rodin, two guys who understood that the body is both temple and ruin, that desire is inseparable from decay, that gold leaf can’t hide the fact that we’re all just meat and longing. Vienna meets Paris. Ornament meets rawness. It’s perfect.
Our first date? Turner at the de Young. Turner. That mad English bastard who painted light like it was trying to murder the canvas, who made the sublime look like a shipwreck in progress. I mean, what kind of lunatic takes someone to look at maritime disasters and atmospheric chaos for a first date?
Turns out, exactly the right kind.
Because here’s what happens in museums that doesn’t happen at bars or restaurants or any of the other performance spaces we call “dates”: you stand next to someone, looking at the same thing, and you find out how they see. Not what they say they see, not what they think they’re supposed to see, but what actually moves them. What makes them lean in. What makes them go quiet.
So we’re looking at Rodin’s sculptures, those tortured figures clawing their way out of marble like they’re being born and dying simultaneously, and then we turn a corner and it’s Klimt. All that Viennese decadence, those society women wrapped in patterns like they’re trying to camouflage themselves as wallpaper, as wealth, as anything but vulnerable human beings.
The contrast is obscene. It’s everything. Rodin strips away; Klimt piles on. One says, “Here’s the brutal truth of the body.” The other says, “Here’s the beautiful lie we tell to make it bearable.”
Lindsey gets it. She sees the conversation happening between these two dead guys across centuries and mediums. She sees that museums aren’t mausoleums. They’re arguments that never end, questions that keep getting asked in different languages.
I have the gift of neither the spoken nor the written word, especially if I have to say something about myself or my work. Whoever wants to know something about me -as an artist, the only notable thing- ought to look carefully at my pictures and try and see in them what I am and what I want to do. Gustav Klimt
That’s the thing about falling in love in museums: you’re not just falling for the person. You’re falling into a shared way of looking at the world. You’re finding someone who understands that Klimt’s quote, about how his pictures should speak for him, is both true and completely beside the point. Because pictures never speak for themselves. They need us. They need two people standing there, in October light at the Legion of Honor, trying to translate what moves them.
And that translation? That’s the beginning of everything.
Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while Marx, (Groucho)
The whole fucking premise is so simple it hurts: you take artists, real ones, not the kind pumping out content for the algorithm gods, and you put them somewhere beautiful and remote and you say, “Here. No deadlines. No bullshit. No one’s checking in on your productivity metrics. Just… make something. Or don’t. We don’t care.”
And that terrifies people. Because we’ve built this entire civilization on the idea that every moment must be justified, monetized, optimized for maximum extractable value. The Puritan work ethic metastasized into late-stage capitalism’s final form: the notion that a human being at rest is a human being wasting time, which is really just wasting money, which is really just wasting oxygen that could be better used by someone more productive.
But here’s the thing about whim, and this is what Groucho understood when he said we’re all just a whim of several billion cells having a good time for a while, whim is the only honest impulse we have left. Everything else is programming. Marketing. The internalized voice of every authority figure who ever told you to sit still and color inside the lines.
Whim is where the real work happens.
Take Aleta Hayes up here in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Dancer. Choreographer. Someone who’s spent years training her body to be an instrument of precise, repeatable movement. And what does she do when you give her space and time and permission? She takes that trained body out into the woods and lets the landscape tell her what to do. Site-specific work, which is just a fancy way of saying “I’m going to respond to what’s actually here instead of imposing some predetermined bullshit on the space.”
Watch her in those photographs and you see someone in conversation with dirt and light and gravity in ways that would never occur to her in a proper studio with mirrors and barres and all the infrastructure designed to make dance legible, marketable, reproducible. Out there, the mountain gets a vote. The wind gets a vote. The angle of the sun at 4 PM on a Tuesday in October gets a vote.
That’s yielding to whim. Not the abandonment of craft, she’s still every bit the trained artist, but the willingness to let craft serve discovery instead of the other way around.
You want to know what’s radical about a place like Djerassi Resident Artists Program? It’s not the mountain views or the studios or whatever amenities they’re peddling. It’s the permission structure. It’s the institutional blessing to follow the thread that makes no sense, to chase the idea that has no commercial application, to spend three weeks failing at something just to see what failure teaches you. To take your perfectly good dance vocabulary and see what happens when you put it in dialogue with redwoods and fog and the particular quality of silence that only exists in places where humans aren’t the dominant conversation.
Because art, real art, the kind that matters, doesn’t come from discipline alone. It comes from the moment when discipline breaks down and something else takes over. Call it instinct, call it the unconscious, call it whatever name makes you comfortable. But it’s whim. It’s the undefended moment. It’s what happens when Aleta stops choreographing and starts listening. When the body becomes a question instead of an answer.
And yeah, most of what comes out of those moments is garbage. That’s fine. That’s the deal. You yield to a hundred whims and ninety-nine of them lead nowhere and one of them cracks the universe open just a little bit and suddenly you remember why you started making things in the first place, before it became a career, before it became a brand, back when it was just this weird compulsion you couldn’t explain to your parents.
The rest is just survival. The hustle, the grants, the residency applications, the carefully curated social media presence that proves you’re Serious and Professional. All necessary. All soul-deadening. All part of the transaction we make to keep doing the thing we love in a world that fundamentally doesn’t give a shit about whether we do it or not.
So you take the residency. You go to the mountains. You yield to whim. You let the landscape choreograph you instead of the other way around. And maybe nothing happens. Or maybe you remember what it felt like before you learned to be afraid of your own impulses, before you calcified into someone who only moves in approved and recognized patterns.
If you want to understand what Raegan Truax is doing, you’ve got to throw out everything you think you know about performance art. Forget the pretentious gallery openings, the wine sipping theorists nodding knowingly at shit they don’t understand. This is something else entirely.
37 hours. Thirty. Seven… Barefoot. No breaks. No food. No clock.
Most people can’t sit through a three hour movie without checking their phones. Raegan spent 37 consecutive hours inside Citation at CounterPulse, using her body like it was the only instrument that mattered, because it was. Sweat. Skin. Breath. Blood. The raw materials of being alive, transformed into something that makes you uncomfortable precisely because it’s so goddamn real.
It’s not about suffering for suffering’s sake, that’s the lazy read. It’s about presence, about excavating what it means to exist in a body across time when everything in our culture screams at us to speed up, gloss over, move on. Raegan plants herself in duration like a flag in hostile territory and refuses to budge.
She’s not performing masochism. She’s interrogating it. There’s a fierce intelligence at work here, a queer feminist methodology that asks, what if endurance isn’t about domination but about possibility?
What if vulnerability is the most radical act?
The body becomes archive. The body becomes argument. The body becomes the most honest thing in the room.
You can have your safe, digestible, three minute attention span art. This is for people who still believe that time is political, that the flesh matters, that showing up, really showing up, means something in a world that’s forgotten how.
I think cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals. I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object. Roland Barthes, The New Citroën, 1957
Rolling into the car wash, and Jim Croce’s on the stereo singing about working his fingers to the bone, and suddenly you’re eight years old again. When a car wash was fucking Disneyland? When those giant brushes descending on the windshield were like alien tentacles, an5d the soap foam was some kind of psychedelic storm, and the whole goddamn tunnel was this portal to another dimension where water came at you from every angle and made the world outside dissolve into color and chaos?
You’d sit there in the back seat, absolutely transfixed. The roar of the machinery. The way the light changed when you went under the dryers. That moment when the car lurched forward on the track and you weren’t driving anymore, you were just surrendering to the machinery, letting it take you where it wanted.
Barthes said cars are the Gothic cathedrals of our era. Maybe. But car washes? Car washes are pure theater. Pure spectacle. A four-minute show where your vehicle gets baptized and you get to sit inside this metal box watching water and soap and brushes perform their ritual dance.
Croce understood the blues of it, the working man’s relationship to the wash. But he maybe didn’t capture this part: that primal childhood thing that still flickers when you hear the first spray hit the hood. That sense of wonder at the simple magic of it. The way soap and water and industrial brushes can still, somehow, feel like witnessing something extraordinary.
The Fragment
he blows no longer on small pipes,
but with savage blasts,
without a mouthpiece.
Three lines of Sophocles, three lousy lines that survived when 96 percent of his work got swallowed by time. This fragment doesn’t want to be understood. It wants to be encountered.
So I picked the Wave Organ, this broken-ass sculpture built from cemetery stones and PVC pipes that barely works half the time. Peter Richards and George Gonzales built it in ’86, back when the Exploratorium still had some weird juice to it, and it sits out there on the Marina jetty gurgles and wheezes when the bay feels like cooperating. Most days tourists lean into those pipes expecting some grand aquatic symphony and get maybe a burp, maybe nothing. The place is a monument to noble failure, to ambition that got 70 percent of the way there and then shrugged.
Perfect. That’s where you stage Sophocles Fragment 116.
Because here’s what I had to work with: “he blows no longer on small pipes, but with savage blasts, without a mouthpiece.” That’s it. That’s the whole text. No context, no character name, no stage directions, just this image of someone or something abandoning refinement for rawness, technique for howling. The civilized pastoral pipe for the unmediated blast.
I brought in Lauren Dietrich Chavez because if anyone understands what it means to move without a mouthpiece, without mediation, without the protective distance of technique, it’s her. I brought in Derek Phillips to layer sound onto a location that’s already all about sound, or the promise of sound, or the gorgeous failure of sound to show up when you need it. Dylan Johnson made costumes that had to work against wind and salt spray and the basic inhospitality of concrete and water. We weren’t creating a production. We were making an event that could collapse into absurdity at any second, and that possibility of failure was essential.
You rehearse at a place like the Wave Organ and you learn real quick that you can’t control a goddamn thing. The tide comes in when it wants. The pipes gurgle or they don’t. Joggers pass by. Dogs bark. The bay refuses to be a cooperative partner in your theatrical vision. And that’s the point: the fragment itself is about abandoning control, about the savage blast that doesn’t give a damn about our carefully constructed harmonies.
Lauren moved through these improvised sequences while Derek added layers that competed with the wind and the slap of water against stone. The whole thing lasts maybe fifteen, twenty minutes. Then it’s over. Done. Joggers keep jogging, and the Wave Organ goes back to its usual business of mostly not working while the bay does whatever the bay does.
We’ve taken this fragment that barely survived 2,400 years, matched it with a sculpture that barely survives the tides and the salt air, and somehow in all that precariousness and fragility and likely failure, we’d honored what the fragment was actually about. The savage blast. The rejection of refinement. The howl without mediation.
I staged it where the architecture itself is fragmentary, cobbled together from tombstones (literal gravestones from Laurel Hill that got bulldozed to make room for condos) and I let the whole enterprise be haunted and half-ruined and honest about its own limitations. I don’t pretend I’m resurrecting Sophocles. I’m not. I’m trying to make something new out of the scraps, something that’ll disappear just like the original disappeared, and maybe, if I’m lucky, if the wind’s right, someone in the audience will catch a glimpse of what the ancient blast might’ve sounded like before it got civilized into scholarship and footnotes.
Making something that acknowledges it’s already half-gone even while I’m making it. No mouthpiece. Just the blast.
This is part of IOTA, this sprawling, maybe impossible mission to resurrect the ghost plays. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, the stuff that got lost, burned, forgotten, buried under two millennia of Mediterranean dust. We’re dragging these fragments back into the light, making them breathe again, making them mean something in spaces that don’t give a damn about the fourth wall or subscriber audiences or any of that institutional bullshit.
Performed at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco Lolas was a performance installation by Ryan Tacata that explored notions of cultural assimilation and resistance through one lola’s garden, an assemblage of found materials, religious icons and constructed identities.
Some developer, Lennar, or “Five Points” when they want to sound like they give a shit about community, throws a “Grand Opening” for luxury townhouses called “Monarch.” Because of course they’re called Monarch. Because nothing says “we care about the people who’ve been living here for generations” like naming your overpriced boxes after royalty.
And where are these palaces? Right next to the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. You know, that Superfund site. That radioactive, toxic, contaminated piece of earth that the Navy used as a toilet for decades, testing nuclear materials and dumping God knows what else into the ground while the predominantly Black residents of Bayview got cancer and asthma and birth defects and were told, implicitly, that they didn’t matter enough to warrant clean soil.
This is the beautiful American grift in its purest form. First, you poison a neighborhood because the people there can’t fight back. Then you “clean it up”, and by clean it up, I mean you move some dirt around, declare victory, and sell the lie that it’s safe. Then you build luxury housing on top of the poison and sell it to people with money who either don’t know or don’t care what’s beneath their imported floorboards. And the people who lived through the contamination? They get priced out, pushed further to the margins, erased.
Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, the Mothers and Fathers Committee, Causa Justa, they showed up to this Grand Opening with signs and voices and the kind of fury that comes from watching your home be slowly murdered and then sold off in pieces. They understand what the marketing materials don’t mention: that “luxury” and “contamination” can occupy the same coordinates when you’ve got enough capital and enough shamelessness.
It’s environmental racism dressed up as urban renewal. It’s late-stage capitalism playing dress-up in sustainability jargon. It’s the same story that’s been told in Flint and Cancer Alley and every forgotten neighborhood where the poor and the brown live downwind from someone else’s profits.
And Lennar’s out there with champagne flutes while the ground beneath them glows.
Protest to Protect Bayview Hunters Point
Against Pollution and Gentrification!
Philoctetes, that poor bastard marooned on Lemnos with nothing but his festering wound and his famous bow, becomes this perfect metaphor for anyone who’s ever been discarded by the machinery. The Aeschylus fragment’s almost gone, just scraps really, which makes it even more tragic because we’re left rehearsing ghosts under some absurd totem pole like we can summon what’s been lost.
The guy gets dumped because he stinks, because his suffering makes the warriors uncomfortable on their way to Troy. There’s something so brutally honest about that: the hero with the magic weapon nobody wants around because pain embarrasses the living.
What we’ve got left are fragmentsrehearsing other fragments: and Jeff Schwartz channeling a character from a mostly lost play about abandonment and necessity, performing under carved wood that’s probably someone else’s cultural monument entirely. The whole spectacle becomes this layered archaeology of wanting: wanting the play back, wanting Philoctetes heard, wanting art to matter again. The wound never heals, but maybe the rehearsal itself is the point: the perpetual return to pain as the only genuine thing left.
