Here’s the thing about these dudes buttoning themselves into wool and brass at Fort Point: they’re chasing something that never existed in the first place. The contact sheet doesn’t lie the way memory does; every frame captures another angle of the same desperate authenticity, the same hunger to touch something real by performing something fundamentally fake. These cats are out here on the rocks beneath the Golden Gate sweating through their period correct undergarments, loading black powder into reproduction rifles, and for what? To get closer to a war that was never about honor or states’ rights or any of that Lost Cause mythology horseshit, but about whether you could own another human being, full stop.
The contact sheet, that grid of sequential moments, those multiple takes on the same staged reality, becomes this perfect metaphor for reenactment itself: you shoot it again and again, trying to capture the feeling, the truth, but each frame just confirms you’re repeating a lie in different lighting. It’s pageantry as painkiller, spectacle as amnesia, and these guys are mainlining it every weekend, playing soldier in the shadow of a bridge that represents actual American ambition and engineering genius, not the dream of plantation aristocracy. The camera sees everything: the anachronistic watch tan, the historically inaccurate posture, the way contemporary softness shows through no matter how period the costume. Pure American fakery, rendered in 12 honest medium format exposures.
Here’s what you need to understand: 5:55 in the goddamn morning, July 1st, 2015, we’re doingEuripides, or what’s left of him, anyway, some scrap of text that survived the wholesale cultural annihilation of everything that mattered, everything that was true. No Man’s Friend, I call it informally, because even the Greeks knew that sometimes the only honest position is to be nobody’s fucking pal.
This is IOTA. The whole mad project: bringing back the fragments of the lost plays, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, the ones that didn’t make it, the ones that got burned or forgotten or simply erased by the grinding machinery of time and cultural indifference. I’m talking about reconstructing meaning from shards, from broken pieces, from the archaeological wreckage of what used to be whole.
Aquatic Park, San Francisco. Sixty two degrees. Partly cloudy. The kind of morning where reality feels negotiable. Six and a half minutes of performance. Eleven people saw it: three joggers who probably thought we were performance art nutjobs (they weren’t wrong), one baby who had no choice in the matter, and seven others who actually showed up on purpose to watch us resurrect fragments of dead language on a beach made of death itself.
Because here’s the thing nobody tells you about Aquatic Park: you’re standing on tombstones. Actual headstones. The markers that once meant something to someone, here lies whoever, beloved whatever, now they’re just municipal fill, WPA project rubble, the stuff you build beaches from when you decide the dead are taking up too much valuable real estate.
By 1902, San Francisco said no more burials in the city. Too crowded, too expensive, too inconvenient for the living. By 1921, they’re shoveling the dead out to Colma like so much inconvenient baggage. By 1941, the cemeteries are ghost stories. The early dead, miners, immigrants, loners, the ones who came here with nothing and left with less… they wound up in mass graves, anonymous, interchangeable. Their tombstones became construction material. Their names got buried under municipal progress.
So when we perform fragments of lost Greek tragedy on ground made from forgotten tombstones, we’re not being clever or ironic. We’re just telling the truth about what it means to make art in a culture that treats memory like garbage. The fragments speak to fragments. The lost call to the lost. And somewhere, beneath our feet, all those nameless dead are the only audience that really understands.
The Fragment… No man’s friend stays faithful to his tomb..
So here’s how it ends: not with a bang but with institutional validation, which is the same as saying it ends with a whimper dressed up in gallery lighting.
Franconia Performance Salon #14. The Museum of Performance + Design. A “joint collaboration,” which is fancy talk for “we got legitimized.” From Michael’s living room with Jordan smashing bricks into the floor to a proper museum space with proper lighting and a proper audience who knows how to properly appreciate experimental performance art. This is what success looks like, apparently. This is the death certificate.
But here’s what nobody wants to admit: the moment you move your dangerous thing into a museum, you’ve already embalmed it. You’ve agreed to let it be studied, catalogued, explained. The mess gets cleaned up. The blood gets wiped away. Everything that made those early nights feel alive, the genuine possibility of failure, the lack of safety nets, the sense that we were all figuring it out together in real time, all of that gets replaced with program notes and proper documentation.
Fourteen salons. Three years. From gear lust and new cameras to museum exhibitions. From raw experiment to completed work. From theft to archive. That’s the trajectory, and it’s the same one every goddamn time: you start something because the existing structures feel dead or uninviting, and if you’re successful enough, you yourself become the new dead structure.
And that was it. #14. The last one, for me at least. We moved it to the Museum of Performance + Design, which should tell you everything, when you take something that started raw and messy in Michael’s living room and put it in a museum, you’ve already admitted it’s over. You’ve already agreed to taxidermy. The work got archived before it was even finished dying. The complete story of all fourteen nights is there if you want to see how things that start as theft end up as exhibits.
Or go back: Salon #13, when it became ritual instead of risk.
You can just see a little peep of the passage in Looking-glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing-room wide open: and it’s very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond Oh, Kitty, how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in it! Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It’ll be easy enough to get through. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
Mid-June on the Bay and the wind’s barely showing up for work. We’re drifting more than sailing, which is fine. Perfect, actually. The kind of lazy afternoon where doing nothing becomes an art form, where the only ambition is another Pacifico and maybe, if you’re feeling industriative, pointing your phone through the empty bottle at the city.
Saroyan said if you’re not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life. What he didn’t mention is what to do when you’re already alive, pleasantly buzzed, and the breeze has clocked out early. So you fuck around. You hold that golden glass bottle up like some kind of dime-store kaleidoscope and frame the skyline through its neck. Coit Tower refracted. The Transamerica Pyramid bent slightly by cheap Mexican lager residue and geometry. The whole goddamn city filtered through your afternoon’s consumption.
There’s something honest about it, this view. Not the postcard version. Not what you’re supposed to see. But what you actually see when you’ve been out here long enough that your phone battery’s dying and you’ve stopped checking it anyway. The city shimmering through glass, through beer, through the haze of doing absolutely nothing while the boat rocks gentle beneath you.
Saroyan understood. This place is made for delightful adventures, sure. But also for this: for empty bottles and experiments. For creativity born of boredom and heat and a sail that’s barely filling.
If you’re alive, you can’t be bored in San Francisco. If you’re not alive, San Francisco will bring you to life…… San Francisco is a world to explore. It is a place where the heart can go on a delightful adventure. It is a city in which the spirit can know refreshment every day. William Saroyan
To great dreamers of corners and holes nothing is ever empty, the dialectics of full and empty only correspond to two geometrical non-realities. The function of inhabiting constitutes the link between full and empty. A living creature fills an empty refuge, images inhabit, and all corners are haunted, if not inhabited. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
This performance, this gathering at Stanford, it’s the most honest transaction we could do. You take someone who’s poured themselves into a place, into their craft, into the unglamorous work of making art and teaching and creating space for others to create, and what do you do? You fill the emptiness they’d leave with presence. With bodies and voices and the ephemeral magic of performance itself.
It’s a beautiful con, really. For just a moment, you reverse the flow. All that energy they’ve been radiating outward? You bounce it back, concentrated, undeniable. You make them sit there and feel it, see themselves through the eyes of everyone they’ve touched. It’s uncomfortable as hell and absolutely necessary.
Because people like Ryan? They’re too busy building refuges for everyone else to notice they’ve become one themselves. A living space others inhabit. A corner that’s haunted by possibility and generosity.
So you gather around on of the Stanford fountains. You perform. You fill the void with gratitude and make the invisible visible, even if just for an a few moments one rainy afternoon.
There’s something deeply, irrationally beautiful about staging dead Greek shit at a racetrack. I mean, here we are: 1:15 in the afternoon, June 6th, 2015, Golden Gate Fields, where the smell of horse piss and broken dreams hangs in the air like a question nobody wants to answer. It’s 71 degrees, sunny, perfect California weather for watching tragedy unfold. And we’re doing Aeschylus. Or what’s left of him. Glaucus of Potniae, a play so lost that all we’ve got are shards, fragments, the literary equivalent of finding someone’s tooth in the rubble and trying to reconstruct their entire face from it.
But let’s talk about where we’re standing, because this place has always been about violence and transformation. This was Rancho San Antonio once, José Domingo Peralta’s land until July 1852 when John Fleming bought it and turned it into a cattle shipping operation. Picture it: cows getting herded onto boats, crossing the bay to their execution. First blood on this ground, literally. Then came the Giant Powder Company in the late 1800s, manufacturing black powder, dynamite, nitroglycerin, all the tools of American industry and American destruction. Between 1879 and 1892, the plant blew up four times. Four fucking times. You’d think someone would get the message, but no, we just kept making explosives on this cursed patch of earth.
Fast forward: they built the grandstand just before World War II. Inaugural race, February 1, 1941. Same year it showed up in Shadow of the Thin Man as a crime scene, because of course it did. Then the war came and the Navy seized it, renamed it Albany Naval Landing Force Equipment Depot, stored hundreds of landing craft destined for the Pacific theater. This ground, again, staging death. After the war ended, they went right back to racing horses.
This is IOTA. The project. The beautiful, possibly insane endeavor to perform every remaining scrap of the lost tragedies: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, the whole pantheon of ancient Greeks who understood something essential about suffering that we’ve managed to forget between our smartphones and our medicated contentment. These weren’t complete plays. They were pieces. Remnants. The things that survived when everything else burned or rotted or just got erased by time’s casual indifference.
And where do you stage this archeological theater? Not in some sterile black box. Not in a university auditorium with uncomfortable seats and grant money stink. No, you do it at the racetrack, where people go to watch beautiful animals run themselves into oblivion, where desperation wears a cheap suit and hope costs two dollars a ticket. You do it on land that’s been consecrated by cattle blood and nitroglycerin and war machinery and desperate gamblers. You do it for 2,756 people who showed up that day, probably not knowing what the hell they were about to witness. Eight minutes and twenty seconds. That’s all it took. Eight minutes and twenty seconds to perform fragments that have survived 2,500 years.
Because that’s honest, isn’t it? That’s where tragedy actually lives: not in museums, but in the margins, in the places where loss and longing do their daily business, where the ground itself remembers every kind of ending. The fragments demand this kind of recklessness. Aeschylus wrote about Glaucus, some poor bastard who got eaten by his own horses, driven mad, everything going sideways in that particular Greek way where divine punishment and human folly get so tangled you can’t tell them apart anymore. All we have are pieces of that story, and maybe that’s perfect. Maybe incompleteness is the point. Maybe standing there at Golden Gate Fields under that perfect 71 degree sun, speaking these ancient, broken words over the PA system for eight minutes and twenty seconds while the horses thunder past on ground that’s exploded and bled and shipped bodies off to war, we’re closer to the truth than any pristine production could ever get. This place understands fragments. It’s built on them. And for those 2,756 people, for that brief, strange moment, so were we.
Doc was collecting marine animals in the Great Tide Pool on the tip of the Peninsula. It is a fabulous place: when the tide is in, a wave-churned basin, creamy with foam, whipped by the combers that roll in from the whistling buoy on the reef. But when the tide goes out the little water world becomes quiet and lovely. The sea is very clear and the bottom becomes fantastic with hurrying, fighting, feeding, breeding animals. Crabs rush from frond to frond of the waving algae. Starfish squat over mussels and limpets, attach their million little suckers and then slowly lift with incredible power until the prey is broken from the rock. And then the starfish stomach comes out and envelops its food. Orange and speckled and fluted nudibranchs slide gracefully over the rocks, their skirts waving like the dresses of Spanish dancers. And black eels poke their heads out of crevices and wait for prey. The snapping shrimps with their trigger claws pop loudly. The lovely, colored world is glassed over. Hermit crabs like frantic children scamper on the bottom sand. And now one, finding an empty snail shell he likes better than his own, creeps out, exposing his soft body to the enemy for a moment, and then pops into the new shell. A wave breaks over the barrier, and churns the glassy water for a moment and mixes bubbles into the pool, and then it clears and is tranquil and lovely and murderous again. Here a crab tears a leg from his brother. The anemones expand like soft and brilliant flowers, inviting any tired and perplexed animal to lie for a moment in their arms, and when some small crab or little tide-pool Johnnie accepts the green and purple invitation, the petals whip in, the stinging cells shoot tiny narcotic needles into the prey and it grows weak and perhaps sleepy while the searing caustic digestive acids melt its body down. Then the creeping murderer, the octopus, steals out, slowly, softly, moving like a gray mist, pretending now to be a bit of weed, now a rock, now a lump of decaying meat while its evil goat eyes watch coldly. It oozes and flows toward a feeding crab, and as it comes close its yellow eyes burn and its body turns rosy with the pulsing color of anticipation and rage. Then suddenly it runs lightly on the tips of its arms, as ferociously as a charging cat. It leaps savagely on the crab, there is a puff of black fluid, and the struggling mass is obscured in the sepia cloud while the octopus murders the crab. On the exposed rocks out of water, the barnacles bubble behind their closed doors and the limpets dry out. And down to the rocks come the black flies to eat anything they can find. The sharp smell of iodine from the algae, and the lime smell of calcareous bodies and the smell of powerful protean, smell of sperm and ova fill the air. On the exposed rocks the starfish emit semen and eggs from between their rays. The smells of life and richness, of death and digestion, of decay and birth, burden the air. And salt spray blows in from the barrier where the ocean waits for its rising-tide strength to permit it back into the Great Tide Pool again. And on the reef the whistling buoy bellows like a sad and patient bull. John Steinbeck, Cannery Row
To get at what’s real, and every artist worth a damn knows this is the whole rotten game, you need to fuck with logic itself. You need the contradiction, the beautiful lie that tells the truth.
The photographer’s stuck with this gorgeous prison: the world as it actually looks. Light, shadow, the brutal specificity of this face, this moment, this grain. I’m a slave to what’s there. But the only way out, the only way, is through the trapdoor of paradox.
So I take that camera, that supposed truth telling machine, that “mirror with a memory” the old timers called it, and I treat it like it’s lying. Like it’s a dream machine. Like it’s not capturing reality but transforming it. The camera becomes some kind of alchemy box, and the picture? The picture’s not a document. It’s a metaphor, a symbol, a secret message written in light.
Once I stop giving a shit about all that surface stuff (the perfect texture, the correct form, the faithful reproduction) that’s when I can actually use all of it. Use it to chase down something that matters. Something true in ways that have nothing to do with accuracy.
The real truth. The poetic truth. The kind that kicks me in the teeth and makes me feel alive.
Here’s what happened: 8:01 p.m., May 4th, 2015, and we’re standing in the Emeryville Mudflats, that beautiful nowhere between Oakland and the Bay Bridge, performing what’s left of SophoclesSinon. And when I say “what’s left,” I mean four words. Four fucking words that survived 2,400 years while empires rose and burned and we landed on the moon and invented the internet and forgot how to look each other in the eye.
This is part of IOTA, this mad, gorgeous project to resurrect the ghost plays, the lost tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The fragments. The scattered DNA of stories that once made grown men weep in stone amphitheaters.
It’s 52 degrees, partly cloudy, that Bay Area twilight that makes everything feel like you’re living inside a photograph that’s already starting to fade. Fourteen people showed up. The performance lasted three minutes and forty seconds. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
The Fragments
But here’s what those four words carried: Sinon, the original con man, the prototype for every lying bastard who ever smiled while twisting the knife. The Greeks left him behind as bait. He claimed kinship with Palamedes, you know, the guy his own side sacrificed, and he sold the Trojans on the greatest marketing campaign in Western civilization: that wooden horse was just a little gift for Athena, nothing to worry about, definitely don’t destroy it or the goddess will make you sorry. But bring it inside your walls? Man, then Troy’s going to own Greece forever. Victory guaranteed.
They bought it. They wheeled doom right through their own gates because one smooth-talking survivor knew exactly which buttons to push.
Four words. Three minutes and forty seconds. Fourteen witnesses. One bridge overhead. And somewhere in that cold mud, something ancient breathed again.
The Location…
Early 1960s, the Emeryville Mudflats became this dream of American refuse transfigured into art. Somebody, or a bunch of somebodies who understood that trash and beauty aren’t opposites but siblings, started building monuments out of what the tide brought in and what we threw away.
Medfly Man waving from his throne like a demented king. Heffalumps. Prima ballerinas pirouetting in place forever. The Driftwood Five, a band made of ocean garbage, frozen mid song. A full size train going nowhere. The Red Baron and the Sopwith Camel locked in eternal combat above the mud. A Viking the size of a house. An Egyptian canoe with a boy mummy at the helm and a gold casket lashed to the deck, because why the hell not?
When I was a kid in Berkeley, my mom would drive my brother and me out there to play. We’d climb those driftwood sculptures like they were our personal jungle gym, splinters and salt air and the smell of rot and creation all mixed together. It was ours. It belonged to everyone and no one. You could touch it, crawl inside it, become part of somebody else’s vision without asking permission.
And the whole time, while these insane sculptures multiplied like some kind of beautiful virus, 90 species of birds, clapper rails, barn swallows, black phoebes, just kept living their lives around it all. They didn’t care about the art or the statement. They had their own concerns.
Then 1998 rolled around and Caltrans decided enough was enough. Eighty Dumpsters. They brought in a helicopter, a helicopter, to scrape it all away. Plastic bottles, glass, foam, rotting railroad ties soaked in creosote, utility poles, shopping carts still dreaming of supermarket aisles. Art, trash, whatever you want to call it when something means something to somebody.
Today? Gone. All of it. Maybe you’ll spot a rogue piece if you’re lucky, some stubborn survivor clinging to existence. But mostly it’s just driftwood and trash washing up like it always did, like it always will, waiting for someone to see it as something more than what it is.
