Here’s what happened when the Duke walked into God’s house with a swing band and told the congregation to get off their knees:
September 1965, Grace Cathedral, and Duke Ellington’s bringing the whole damn orchestra into this Gothic pile of stone and righteousness like he’s staging a raid on heaven itself. Not asking permission. Not apologizing. Just rolling in with Harry Carney’s baritone sax and that whole gorgeous wall of sound and saying, yeah, we’re going to talk to God now, and we’re going to do it in 4/4 time.
Sacred music… it’s supposed to move you, supposed to grab you by the throat and shake something loose in your chest. The Europeans figured out how to do it with pipe organs big enough to fill a cathedral with sound that pins you to the pew. Duke just said, well, what if we did that but made you want to dance? What if the holy spirit showed up in a rhythm section?
I spent years touring with Lee Breuer’s Gospel at Colonus, and I watched it happen every single night. Saw audience members catch the spirit like it was contagious, and it was contagious. You’d see it start in one person, this involuntary movement, this opening up, and then it would ripple through the house. People who came in buttoned up and skeptical would be on their feet, crying, shouting, completely undone by what the music was doing to them. I once knew a woman who would have an orgasm when she heard Beethoven’s Fifth live at the symphony. Not metaphorically. Actually. The music would take her body somewhere her mind couldn’t follow. That’s not entertainment. That’s not even performance. That’s something older and more dangerous than either of those things. That’s ecstasy in the original sense, standing outside yourself because the sound won’t let you stay where you are.
Watch the faces in that cathedral audience. That’s the look of people realizing their whole framework just got detonated. Because here’s Ellington, this elegant genius who could have played it safe his whole career, who could have kept jazz in the nightclubs where white America felt comfortable with it, and instead he’s claiming this space. Not as a novelty. Not as some cultural outreach program. As a rightful heir to the whole tradition of humans making noise to touch something bigger than themselves.
The clergy’s sitting there in their vestments, probably spent weeks debating whether this was appropriate, whether you could really worship with a trombone section, whether letting jazz through those doors would somehow dilute the mystery. And Duke’s answering them without saying a word: this is prayer. This is devotion. This swagger, this joy, this complicated syncopated beauty, this is what it sounds like when humans try to speak in a language bigger than words.
I’m still hung up on Poulet, Bachelard, and Barthes, specifically that Sur Racine moment when they briefly gathered under what they called the Geneva School of existential phenomenology. The name sounds like something you’d find scratched into a bathroom stall in some Left Bank shithole, and maybe that’s fitting. But the work matters, pulls at me like a song I heard once at 4 a.m. that I’ve been trying to remember ever since. Here’s what keeps dragging me back: these guys had almost zero interest in actual theater (Barthes being the exception), and yet their criticism is absolutely soaked in theatrical logic. They were writing theater without admitting it, which makes it realer somehow.
Take Poulet. His whole method is about inhabitation, about entering what he calls the authorial cogito. You surrender your own moment in time to think as Racine thinks. This isn’t interpretation as some grad school parlor trick, some puzzle you crack to impress your dissertation committee. This is interpretation as a durational event, a sustained occupation of another consciousness. You move in. You unpack. You let their furniture rearrange your skull. Bachelard works differently but arrives somewhere similar. He treats imagination not as expression but as architecture, building interior worlds room by room, image by image, each one activated in time by whoever’s paying attention. Before Barthes even gets around to shattering the whole notion of the unified author, these critics are already treating consciousness as something that unfolds, collides, withdraws. Something alive. Something with teeth.
Their analyses don’t read like arguments. They read like performances. Consciousness, in their writing, becomes this mutable field, a space with boundaries that won’t hold still, where images appear, loop back, crash into each other. Vision matters. Rhythm matters. Duration matters. This is theater whether they cop to it or not. A performance happens inside whoever’s reading: images hit their marks, miss them completely, return changed. All of it unfolding in time and darkness, like some song stuck in your head that mutates every time it cycles through.
Barthes eventually just admits the theatricality. His shift away from the unified author toward plurality, grain, pleasure, that’s not abandoning phenomenology. That’s re-staging it. Meaning stops living in some single consciousness you can inhabit and starts living in the event of reading itself, in that live encounter between text and whoever picked up the book. Where Poulet wants coherence, Barthes introduces drift. Where Bachelard constructs rooms, Barthes opens trapdoors and watches you fall.
I don’t think of imagination as something you do. I think of it as somewhere you go. A room with its own weather, its own quality of light. When I work on a play, I’m treating the theater itself as consciousness made physical, a space built to hold and transform psychological processes. A dramatic text isn’t some idea waiting to be illustrated, isn’t a thesis looking for visual aids. It’s a mind under pressure, organized by rhythm, obsession, what it can’t quite say, what it wants too badly. It’s not pure expression. It’s form doing damage control. It’s someone trying not to scream who screams anyway.
Directing is an act of assimilation. I absorb the virtual consciousness embedded in the text, but not through identification. Identification is narcissistic, a mirror game that kills everything interesting about difference. I’m not projecting myself onto the text like some bore at a party making everything about them. You know who you are. I’m creating space inside my own head for the text’s logic to operate. I open the door. I say, come in, burn the place down if that’s what needs to happen. In rehearsal, that logic mutates. It gets bodies, breath, resistance. What comes out the other end isn’t fidelity. It’s variation. A new consciousness assembled from the collision of playwright and director, warped further by designers, actors, the limitations of the room itself. What emerges is bastard consciousness. Hybrid and dangerous and beautiful.
The spectator comes last. If the ideal spectator even exists (I’m not convinced, though I’d love for you to prove me wrong), they don’t receive a message. They receive a situation. What lands isn’t the play but a layered transmission: the playwright’s consciousness filtered through mine, bent again through performance. Consciousness as turducken, excessive and unstable and impossible to fully process. You leave queasy, which means something worked.
Barthes gets closest to naming what happens to the spectator in Leaving the Movie Theater, which is, sidebar, my undergrad film theory students’ favorite essay every quarter. Spectatorship there isn’t about absorption or interpretation. It’s about residue. You don’t exit with meaning locked down. You exit with your consciousness slightly altered, dulled, overexposed, drifting back into the social world at a weird angle. What matters isn’t what you understood. What matters is what won’t leave you alone. What’s in your bloodstream now. Spectatorship as temporal fallout, as consciousness after impact instead of consciousness at attention. Theater, like cinema, does its real work not in the moment you’re focused but in the uneven dispersal afterward. You walk out into the street and the light’s different. Something shifted.
For clarity’s sake, I work with a stripped-down model: three subjects. Playwright, director, audience. This isn’t some ontological truth. It’s a heuristic, a way of tracking how consciousness moves through theatrical form. In reality, every pole fractures instantly. Playwrights are never singular, directors answer to institutions, audiences never cohere into anything unified. But the abstraction lets me ask one precise question: how does subjectivity travel? How does one consciousness reach another without colonizing it, without erasing what makes it separate, without pretending we’re not fundamentally alone in our skulls?
The question matters because I’m not interested in identification. Identification is safe. It’s a mirror game. It’s dead on arrival. Assimilation is riskier, requires hospitality, requires opening yourself to foreign psychological processes without any guarantee of harmony. Sometimes the text refuses entry. Sometimes it colonizes you. Sometimes it cracks open fault lines in your thinking you didn’t know existed. Failure isn’t the problem. Failure is proof something real is happening, proof you’re actually in the room with something that has its own life independent of you.
This is where contemporary theory gets complicated. Hans Thies Lehmann’s postdramatic theater sees the collapse of unified perspective but often evacuates subjectivity completely, replaces consciousness with systems and effects. Structure with nobody home. Rancière gives us the emancipated spectator but still treats perception as political arrangement rather than phenomenological event. Blau, and I absolutely adore this guy, gets closest when he describes the audience as constitutively missing itself, always out of sync with its own experience. What these frameworks sometimes lack is an account of what it actually feels like for consciousness to move through theatrical time. The sensation. The vertigo. The fact of it in your body.
Phenomenology, for all its blind spots and limitations, gives us that account, especially when you let it be theatrical instead of forcing it to stay theoretical and pure. Theater doesn’t represent consciousness. It stages consciousness. It builds conditions where subjectivities collide without merging, where assimilation is temporary and unstable, where imagination becomes somewhere we enter together but never occupy the same way. We’re there together but we’re not having the same experience. Alone together, which might be the most honest thing two consciousnesses can be.
That instability is the entire point. It’s hospitable. It’s dangerous. It’s the only way any of this works. You have to risk getting lost. You have to risk the text changing you more than you change it. You walk into the darkness not knowing who you’ll be when the lights come up.
We met in prison. San Quentin, to be exact. Which sounds like the beginning of either a really good story or a really bad one, depending on your tolerance for irony. Turns out it was the former.
When we were first dating she’s took me all around Hunters Point. The southeastern corner of San Francisco that everyone else in the city pretends doesn’t exist unless they need somewhere to dump their industrial waste or park their toxic cleanup projects. I’ve got my camera, because I guess that’s what you bring when the woman you’re falling for wants to show you her life’s work.
And the light there. Unbelievable. The light in that part of the city is something else. It’s industrial and ethereal at the same time. It bounces off the Bay, cuts through the ruins of the shipyard, illuminates the contradictions in every frame. Beauty and poison sharing the same golden hour.
We’re walking, and we’re talking, and we’re doing what post docs do when they’re falling in love: we’re sharing our triumphs and our traumas. The writing that works and the writing that don’t. The advisors who get it and the ones who never will. I’m shooting. She’s explaining the impossible project of trying to make sense of environmental racism, of green gentrification, of what happens when a neighborhood finally gets cleaned up just in time to price out everyone who survived the contamination.
And somewhere in there, I capture this image. The one that would eventually become the cover of Toxic City. Her book. Her years of research and resistance and documentation of how Bayview-Hunters Point has fought for cleanup to mean something more than displacement, for environmental justice to be inseparable from reparations.
That cover image isn’t just a photograph. It’s a record of where we started. Not a bad origin story, all things considered.
From the publisher: Toxic City presents a novel critique of postindustrial green gentrification through a study of Bayview-Hunters Point, a historically Black neighborhood in San Francisco. As cities across the United States clean up and transform contaminated waterfronts and abandoned factories into inviting spaces of urban nature and green living, working-class residents—who previously lived with the effects of state abandonment, corporate divestment, and industrial pollution—are threatened with displacement at the very moment these neighborhoods are cleaned, greened, and revitalized. Lindsey Dillon details how residents of Bayview-Hunters Point have fought for years for toxic cleanup and urban redevelopment to be a reparative process and how their efforts are linked to long-standing struggles for Black community control and self-determination. She argues that environmental racism is part of a long history of harm linked to slavery and its afterlives and concludes that environmental justice can be conceived within a larger project of reparations.
Shooting dance rehearsal is like trying to bottle lightning while someone keeps striking the match over and over again.
Répétition. The French got it right. Repetition, yes, but also something more… a ritual of refinement, of searching. Watch these LINES dancers move through Alonzo King‘s choreography and you’re watching the same phrase fifty times, but it’s never the same. Each iteration shaves away another molecule of doubt, adds another layer of intention. It’s meditation. It’s obsession. It’s beautiful and slightly insane.
The light in that studio, harsh overhead fluorescents mixed with whatever San Francisco sunshine manages to sneak through the windows… it’s not pretty. It’s not romantic. But it’s honest. This is the light of work. Real work. The kind that makes your body sing and scream simultaneously.
Photography, that’s the hunt for the single perfect moment. The decisive instant. Cartier-Bresson and all that. You wait, you breathe, you click. One frame that tells the whole story. But video? Or Motion, or whatever you want to call it is something else entirely. It’s the long view. It’s duration and accumulation. You’re not looking for the moment; you’re capturing a process. The sweat building. The adjustment in a shoulder blade. The way a dancer marks through a sequence first, then commits. Then explodes.
You can not cheat with video. The lens sees everything, the stumble, the recalibration, the moment where muscle memory kicks in and transforms effort into grace. The camera sees what the body knows before the mind catches up.
These LINES dancers, working Alonzo’s vocabulary, all that length, that impossible extension, they’re translating something ineffable into flesh and space. And you’re there, camera rolling, trying to honor that translation without getting in its way.
I am shooting a ballet rehearsal at LINES. Beautiful people doing beautiful things. It’s all very controlled, very precise. Art with a capital A.
Then I walk outside.
City Hall steps are packed. West Coast March for Gaza. Thousands of people, and they’re pissed. Not the polite, NPR-liberal kind of protest. This is urgent. Raw. The kind of anger that shuts down ports at 5 a.m., which is exactly what happened the day before in Oakland, longshore workers honoring picket lines, refusing to load weapons bound for Israel.
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The whiplash is immediate and uncomfortable. Five minutes ago I’m documenting dancers perfecting their craft in the Old Fellows Building. Now I’m in the middle of people screaming about genocide. Day 100 of the assault. Twenty-four thousand dead. The numbers don’t lie, even when we wish they would.
You can’t ignore the contrast. The aesthetics of ballet, all that refinement, that pursuit of perfection, and then this messy, necessary chaos of democracy. Both are performance, in a way. Both demand to be seen.
The light was perfect, which feels almost obscene to mention. The light doesn’t care about your moral crisis or your complicity or the fact that you’re standing there trying to figure out how to photograph grief without exploiting it.
I was in that studio because someone was paying me. I was on those steps because I couldn’t walk away. That’s not Nobel. It’s just paying attention. Barely.
You document what’s in front of you. Sometimes it’s art. Sometimes it’s rage. Sometimes it’s both, and you don’t get to choose.
We Dadaists are often told that we are incoherent, but into this word people try to put an insult that it is rather hard for me to fathom. Everything is incoherent… There is no logic… The acts of life have no beginning and no end. Everything happens in a completely idiotic way. That is why everything is alike. Simplicity is called Dada. Any attempt to conciliate an inexplicable momentary state with logic strikes me as a boring kind of game… Like everything in life, Dada is useless… Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Dada is a virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all of the spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions. Tristan Tzara, ‘Lecture on Dada’, 1922
Samuel Rosenstock, changed his name, moved to Zurich during World War I, and decided art was bullshit.
Dada. He founded it. 1916, Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. While Europe was tearing itself apart, trenches, gas attacks, millions dead for nothing, Tzara and his crew said fuck it. Fuck art. Fuck sense. Fuck meaning. If the world’s going to be insane, we’ll be more insane.
Nonsense poetry. Random words pulled from a hat. Performances that were deliberate chaos. Anti-art as protest. If civilization led to World War I, then civilization deserved to be mocked, destroyed, pissed on.
“Dada means nothing.” That was the point. The name itself was chosen randomly, pulled from a dictionary. Meaninglessness as rebellion.
1920: moved to Paris. Brought Dada with him. Staged provocations, scandalous performances. Art world hated it, which meant it was working.
Then André Breton showed up. Wanted to organize Dada, give it structure, turn it into Surrealism. Tzara said no. You can’t organize chaos. You can’t institutionalize anti-art. They had a legendary falling out. Breton punched him at a performance. The friendship was over.
Surrealism happened anyway. Breton got his movement. Tzara kept doing his thing, writing, agitating, staying true to the original spirit of Dada even when everyone else moved on.
Joined the Resistance during World War II. Anti-fascist to the core.
Buried at Montparnasse Cemetery in 1963. The guy who said art was bullshit, buried with all the artists.
Shot on infrared film in Cimetière du Montparnasse. Signed Limited Edition 17” x11” print of 10; stamped on verso. Professional black & white printing on Hahnemühle fibre-based Matt paper.
Jan 01, 2024 | Categories: | Comments Off on Tristan Tzara (Cimetière du Montparnasse)
Here’s the thing about Aleta Hayes and those Stanford Facilities Operations workers that nobody wants to say out loud because it makes the PhD crowd uncomfortable as hell: these guys with their hands in the dirt, their backs bent over root systems and drainage patterns, thirty to fifty feet up in the goddamn canopy where one wrong move means you’re not finishing the composition, they’re operating on a level of artistic integrity that would make most tenured teaching professors weep into their summer festival applications.
Aleta knew it. She saw what the rest of the campus walked past every day like it was wallpaper, that the real aesthetic revolution was happening outside and above, where guys named Miguel and Chen were sculpting with chainsaws in the sky, pruning oaks with the kind of three-dimensional spatial awareness that would make a Giacometti look clumsy. Creating negative space while dangling from a harness, composing with biology and physics and gravity and seasons, painting with perennials that would bloom and die and bloom again.
Because try hanging fifty feet up a coast live oak with a Stihl saw and tell me about your performance art piece. Try reading the growth patterns, the stress points, the way light will hit those branches six months from now when the leaves fill in. Try not falling to your death while making aesthetic decisions that will shape the landscape for decades.
That’s commitment. That’s vision married to craft married to physical courage married to actual consequence. These are installations you can’t un-install, in a medium, living wood, that fights back, that has its own agenda, that will outlive everyone’s career and most people’s memory of who taught what where when.
Aletacollaborated, didn’t condescend, that’s the key difference. She recognized artists when she saw them, even if their studio was the sky and their materials had root systems and their safety equipment was more sophisticated than anything in the sculpture lab. She understood that working at height, with living systems, with real stakes, requires a kind of presence that most gallery artists only theorize about in their statements full of five-dollar words.
No pretensions. Just the work. The dangerous, essential, beautiful work that holds up the world while the academy argues about theory and who has the better office.
It is the human habit to think in centuries from a grandparent to a grandchild because it just does take about a hundred years for things to cease to have the same meaning as they did before. Gertrude Stein, Narration: Four Lectures by Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein shares the grave with Alice B. Toklas. Of course she does.
American writer, poet, expat. Left Pittsburgh, left America, landed in Paris in 1903 and never really left. Set up shop at 27 rue de Fleurus with Alice and held court. A salon. Everyone came through. Picasso. Matisse. Hemingway when he was young and broke and hungry. Fitzgerald. They all showed up, drank her booze, looked at her art collection, listened to her talk.
And she talked. Brilliant, difficult, impossible. She wrote like no one else, experimental, repetitive, maddening. “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” People still argue about what the hell she meant. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which is really her autobiography but told through Alice’s voice because why make it simple?
She and her brother Leo, they championed the artists no one understood yet. Bought their work when they were nobody. Picassos, Matisses, Cézannes hanging on the walls when these guys were still struggling. She had an eye. She had taste. She had ego the size of France.
Leo eventually split. Took his share of the collection and moved back to California. Palo Alto. So some of the greatest art of the 20th century, paintings that would later sell for tens of millions, ended up in fucking Palo Alto because of a sibling rivalry.
World War II, Gertrude stayed. Jewish woman in occupied France, and she stayed. How? Connections. Luck. Compromises that still make people uncomfortable. She survived.
Died in 1946. Alice lived another twenty years, lost and broke, the art collection sold off to pay bills.
Now they’re buried together. Stein and Toklas. Forever.
Love, genius, compromise, survival. Masterpieces in Palo Alto. It’s all connected.
Shot on infrared film in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Signed Limited Edition 11” x17” print of 10; stamped on verso. Professional black & white printing on Hahnemühle fibre-based Matt paper.
Dec 05, 2023 | Categories: | Comments Off on Gertrude Stein (Cimetière du Père-Lachaise)
You walk into Roble Gym expecting, I don’t know, something mystical maybe. Incense. Robes. The kind of earnest California spirituality that makes you want to jump off a bridge.
What you get instead is bodies. Real bodies, doing impossible things with physics. These dancers move like they’re negotiating a peace treaty with the floor, every muscle screaming in slow motion. It’s brutal. Beautiful, sure, but brutal first.
“A dialogue with gravity,” he calls it. Which sounds poetic until you watch someone spend forty-five minutes lowering themselves six inches while looking like they’re being torn apart from the inside. This isn’t dance as performance, it’s dance as excavation. Like they’re digging something out of themselves one agonizing movement at a time.
This is Stanford, not some temple in Kyoto. But somehow that makes it better. More honest. These dancers didn’t come here to transcend the body, they came to inhabit it so completely it becomes something else entirely.
Fifty years they’ve been doing this. Fifty years of falling down and getting back up in the most difficult way imaginable. That’s not art. That’s devotion bordering on insanity. And yes, I respect the hell out of it.
Butoh belongs both to life and death. It is a realization of the distance between a human being and the unknown. It also represents man’s struggle to overcome the distance between himself and the material world. Butoh dancers bodies are like a cup filled to overflowing, one which cannot take one more drop of liquid- the body enters into a perfect state of balance. Ushio Amagatsu
Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace. Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost, 1887
Irish. Brilliant. Flamboyant. Dead at 46 in a cheap Paris hotel room, broke and broken.
Six foot three in Victorian England. You couldn’t miss him. Didn’t want to miss him. He walked into a room and owned it.
Playwright. Poet. Novelist. The Picture of Dorian Gray. The Importance of Being Earnest. Witty as hell. Sharp. Dangerous. Said things like “I can resist everything except temptation” and meant it.
Lived openly. Loved openly. Men, specifically, which in Victorian England was a crime. Not just socially unacceptable… an actual crime.
1895: the Marquess of Queensberry, father of Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas, publicly accuses him of being a sodomite. Wilde sues for libel. Massive mistake. The trial exposes everything. He’s arrested, tried, convicted of “gross indecency.”
Two years hard labor. Reading Gaol. They broke him. Physically, mentally, spiritually. The guy who wrote comedies about upper-class British society spent two years doing hard labor in prison for loving the wrong person.
Released in 1897. Went to Paris. Wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Lived in poverty under an assumed name. Three years later, November 30th, 1900, he’s dying of meningitis in the Hôtel d’Alsace.
Legend says his last words were “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.” Probably bullshit, but it sounds like him.
Dead at 46. Buried here. His tomb, designed by Jacob Epstein, a modernist sphinx, became covered in lipstick kisses from admirers. Thousands of them. They had to put up a glass barrier to stop people from destroying it with love.
Persecuted. Imprisoned. Exiled. Died in poverty. All for being himself.
Victorian England got its pound of flesh. The world lost a genius because he loved men.
Shot on infrared film in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Signed Limited Edition 11” x17” print of 10; stamped on verso. Professional black & white printing on Hahnemühle fibre-based Matt paper.
Nov 05, 2023 | Categories: | Comments Off on Oscar Wilde (Cimetière du Père-Lachaise)
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