I would rather be ashes than dust I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time. Jack London Source: Ernest J. Hopkins, San Francisco Bulletin, 2 December 1916
Here I am, another asshole with a camera and a crisis. The Irrawaddy dumps me here like so much spiritual cargo, and I stand there with my manufactured wonder, my photo ready epiphany, feeling the whole rotting weight of my bullshit pressing down like the heat.
But here’s the knife twist, I’m not even here for me. I’m here because someone else wrote the script, someone else’s dream of what “living” means, and I went along with it like a coward. Like saying yes was easier than saying “this isn’t me.” So now I’m floating down this river toward temples I don’t give a damn about, checking boxes on someone else’s bucket list, and the worst part is I knew. I knew walking in that this whole performance, the superficial seeking, the faux wandering, the shallow spiritual tourism, was everything I despise.
I wanted authentic? I got a postcard of someone else’s life. I got a thousand temples and a million other seekers just like me, except they actually want to be here. They’re reading from the same script, sure, but at least it’s their script. Me? I’m not even the protagonist of my own sellout. I’m the supporting actor in someone else’s fantasy about what it means to be alive, and every golden spire is just another monument to my own capitulation.
Yangon at least had the decency to be messy, to refuse projection. But here? Here I get exactly what I pretended to want, which is why I hate it twice, once for being tourist trash, and once for reminding me that I chose this life. That I traded my actual self for someone else’s idea of what I should be experiencing.
Jack London had it wrong: sometimes you’re neither meteor nor planet. Sometimes you’re just a tourist in your own life, going through someone else’s motions, pretending the view means something while your actual self drowns in the Irrawaddy.
Failure… it’s the only fucking meal worth eating when you’re stupid enough to think you can improve Anton Chekhov. My Head is Burning. Christ, of course it is. Your head, their heads, Chekhov’s rotting tubercular head somewhere in a Russian cemetery still burning with the knowledge that a hundred years later, some ambitious assholes with a sketch of a steamer trunk and a dream would try to cram all that gorgeous, suffocating yearning into a box that literally comes apart to become the set.
Anton Chekhov’s a beautiful, devastating trap for anyone under forty who thinks they understand disappointment. You don’t. Not yet. Not the way those three sisters don’t understand they’re never getting to Moscow. Not the way Chekhov understood it while coughing blood into handkerchiefs and writing love letters to actresses who would leave him.
My Head is Burning, someone in this group picked that title because they felt it. Because, in that moment, with Michael and Niki and Kathryn and whoever else was stupid enough to believe this could be pulled off, our heads WERE burning. With ideas. With the certainty that if we just got it right, if the trunk I was imagining designing opened just so and became the set, if the costumes packed just perfectly, if everyone would just shut up and listen, or maybe Kathryn’s, or maybe Michael’s, or maybe that’s why it fell apart, then we’d crack the code. Wed take this Russian aristocratic ennui and make it speak to… who? Audiences in someones living room, or whatever black box theater would have us? Ourselves?
But seriously, here’s what was beautiful: my trunk.
Everything contained. Everything necessary. Nothing extra. Anton Chekov’s Three Sisters are trapped in a provincial town with all the detritus of their father’s military life, surrounded by officers and samovar and yesterday’s newspapers and the weight of “we used to be in Moscow, we used to matter.” And I wanted to put that in a trunk. Ideally a Louis Vuitton steamer trunk… vintage of course… it turns out these are very expensive.
That’s not just clever stagecraft, that’s understanding something essential about Chekhov. It’s all RIGHT THERE. The whole world, the whole tragedy, everything you need is in the room. There’s no missing ingredient. There’s no magical elsewhere. Moscow isn’t going to save them because Moscow is just another room with different furniture and the same burning heads.
My trunk was going to prove that. Open it up: here’s your world. Here’s your prison. Here’s your stage. Now go suffer beautifully.
Two or three rehearsals. I remember them as “interesting.” That’s the word people use when they can’t quite access the feeling anymore but know it was something. Interesting means: someone said something that made me see the text differently. Interesting means: for maybe twenty minutes during Niki’s puppet play, it actually worked, whatever “it” was. Interesting means: I saw the ghost of what it could have been before the egos started calcifying and the inexperience revealed itself not as charming naivety but as actual incompetence.
Too many egos, too little execution.
Let’s talk about that. Because that’s not just this production, that’s EVERY collaboration that falls apart, from garage bands to marriages to tech startups to the Russian Revolution. People who cared TOO MUCH and knew TOO LITTLE. Or vice versa. That’s the most dangerous combination in art. If you don’t care, you just phone it in and move on. If you know what you’re doing, you can weather the ego storms because you’ve got craft to fall back on. But when you care intensely AND you’re making it up as you go? That’s when the knives come out.
Michael had his vision. Kathryn had hers. Niki and I had ours. And Chekhov’s ghost sat there smoking and laughing because he KNEW. He wrote a play about people who can’t act, can’t decide, can’t execute, who just sit around talking about what they’re going to do someday while life happens TO them. And here we are, re-enacting it in rehearsal.
The play was directing itself. That’s the horrible joke.
Those napkins though. Those scraps of paper. With sketches of steamer trunks.
You know why I wish I had them? Not because the designs were revolutionary, they definitely weren’t. I wish I had them because they represent the moment BEFORE disappointment. Before things collapsed. Before I learned that good ideas aren’t enough. Before I understood that theater, like love, like everything worth doing, requires the brutal grinding work of compromise and craft and showing up even when everyone’s being an asshole.
Those napkins are from the Garden of Eden. They’re from when I still believed.
I’ve seen schmucks with whole filing cabinets full of “brilliant ideas” that never happened. Screenplays. Business plans. That novel they’ve been working on for fifteen years. You know what makes my napkins different? I actually DID it. I TRIED. It died, sure, but it lived first. For two, maybe three rehearsals, MyHead is Burning existed in the world as something more than a concept.
Most people don’t even get that far.
Here’s what Chekhov understood that I was learning: the yearning IS the point. Not the arrival. Not Moscow. Not the successfully executed touring production in a steamer trunk. The burning head. The passionate inner life smashing against the dull external reality. Olga teaching school forever. Masha trapped in a loveless marriage. Irina’s naive optimism curdling into acceptance. And all of them talking, talking, talking about how it’s going to be different.
This production didn’t go anywhere. It never was. The trunk never got built. The napkins are gone. Michael and Niki and Kathryn scattered to whatever lives they’re living now. And somehow, accidentally, we created a perfect Chekhovian experience. We yearned. We burned. We failed. And here I am, a decade later probably, thinking about those two or three rehearsals that were “interesting.”
That’s not tragedy. That’s not even failure, really. That’s just life, doing what life does. Which is exactly what Chekhov was writing about. My head is burning because I’m alive. Because I tried something. Because it mattered, even though it didn’t work. Especially because it didn’t work.
The trunk idea? Still brilliant, by the way. Someone should steal that. Someone probably has. Fucking internet trolls. And maybe their production failed too. I hope so. And maybe their head is burning right now, thinking about the napkins they lost, the collaborators who couldn’t execute, the beautiful doomed thing that almost was.
It goes without saying that you could not vanquish the ignorant masses around you; little by little, as you advance in life, you will be obliged to yield and to be swallowed up in the crowd of a hundred thousand human beings; life will stifle you, but you will all the same not have disappeared without having exerted an influence; of women like you, there will be after you perhaps only six, then twelve, and so on, until finally you will become the majority. In two or three hundred years life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, amazing, astonishing. Man has need of that life and if it doesn’t yet exist, he must sense it, wait for it and dream of it, prepare to receive it, and to achieve that he must see and know more than our grandfathers and fathers saw or knew. Anton Chekhov Three Sisters
So Steve Jobs died last week, and I’m sitting here trying to figure out what the hell that means to me, this guy I never actually knew but who was always just… here.
Growing up in Palo Alto, I couldn’t escape him. Not in the celebrity sighting way, not in the “oh look, there’s someone important” bullshit that makes people pull out their phones and act like idiot assholes. It’s more intimate than that, more ordinary, which makes it stranger. He was part of the landscape. I’d see him. He existed. He occupied the same few square miles of overpriced California real estate that I did.
My mother has an art gallery, and sometimes he’d stop in. Alone, not making a production of it. Just a guy looking at antique prints. He lived around the corner from me. I’d pass his place driving home from campus or on runs, huffing past while he was probably inside somewhere, in recent weeks dying, though none of us knew it yet. That’s the thing about proximity without connection, you share space but not lives. You’re neighbors in the most literal, meaningless sense. I never knocked on his door, the security guards sitting in parked cars on the street outside his house no doubt would stopped me. We were strangers who happened to orbit the same patch of earth.
And now he’s gone, and I realize I’m going to miss him. Not because I knew him, because I didn’t. But because he represented something about this place, about the relentless fucking optimism and the gorgeous arrogance of believing you can remake the world from a garage in Palo Alto.
He was proof that it wasn’t all bullshit, that sometimes the mythology is real.
The thing that gets me is how many other people will miss him too. All these people leaving apples on his fence. And the millions who never met him, never passed his house, never saw him quietly contemplating art in a gallery. They’ll miss him because he gave them something, beauty, utility, a different way of seeing.
I guess that’s the real trick, isn’t it? Mattering to people you’ll never know.
I’m walking through Manhattan at 3:13AM and I stumbles on this… a blow-up sex doll sitting in an empty rickshaw like she’s waiting for a fare that’s never coming?
Now this isn’t art, it’s archaeology. It’s evidence. Somebody else staged this little theater of the absurd and then abandoned it, and I just happened to be there with a camera when the city revealed its actual face. The face it only shows at 3:13AM when the performers have all gone home and the props are just sitting there in the street, naked and unexplained.
I didn’t arrange this,New York did. Some anonymous somebody went to the trouble of inflating that doll, placing her just so, and then walking away. Maybe it was a joke. Maybe it was art. Maybe it was despair. Maybe it was all three and none of them matter because the result is the same: a monument to the city’s essential hollowness, just sitting there on the street for anyone awake and damaged enough to see it.
New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves… A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolute meaningless. Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
This Miller quote isn’t commentary now, it’s prophecy fulfilled. Miller wrote about the city as performance, as nothingness dressed up as meaning, and here’s the proof: a synthetic woman in a vehicle of exploitation, both empty, both abandoned, both ridiculous and heartbreaking in exactly the way Miller understood cities to be.
The only dishonest thing would’ve been walking past without documenting it. Because this is the real spectacle: not the one I build, but the one that remains when I stop building. The debris. The aftermath. The sex doll nobody came back for, sitting in a rickshaw going nowhere, at 3:13AM in the greatest city in the world.
That’s the ennui. That’s the meaninglessness. That’s the absolute truth of the thing.
Niki Ulehla’s jewelry and small puppets are about control and the illusion of it. She’s making something so fucking small that you have to pay attention, they demand you slow down and actually see them. In a world screaming at maximum volume, Niki’s working in whispers.
These aren’t just tiny baubles or pocket-sized marionettes. They’re a middle finger to the spectacle industrial complex. While everyone else is supersizing everything, making it louder, bigger, more consumable, here’s someone hunched over a workbench creating objects that might as well be secrets. Jewelry that’s also performance. Puppets that are also ornament. The categories collapse into each other like drunk strangers at 2:53 AM, and suddenly you realize the whole taxonomy was bullshit to begin with.
All that medieval mysticism about gems containing power, serpents with emerald collars, diamonds that render you invisible, it’s the same impulse that makes a tiny puppet mesmerizing. I want objects to mean something beyond themselves. I’m desperate for it. I need talismans, totems, proof that the material world isn’t just dead matter waiting to be monetized.
What strikes me is the intimacy of scale. A puppet you wear. A piece of jewelry that performs. They exist in that zone between body and exterior, between the private and the public. You wear them, they move, they catch light, they tell stories only you and whoever’s paying close enough attention can decode. That’s theater for an audience of one who happens to be you.
The craft itself is an act of rebellion. Every stitch, every wire, every minuscule gesture frozen in metal or wood is saying: complexity still matters. Detail still matters. The small and strange and labor-intensive still has a place in this algorithmic wasteland we’ve constructed.
And maybe that’s Niki’s point. In an age of infinite reproducibility, of content sludge, of everything optimized for the feed, here’s work that can only be what it is. Irreducible. Unscalable. Human.
These photographs. Bodies bent, faces caught mid-transmission, that particular quality of light that happens when people stop performing and start doing. This is what happens when you take two traditions that refused to lie and smash them together in a room in San Francisco.
Look at that close-up, the woman’s face split open by whatever’s moving through her. That’s not acting. That’s not some MFA showcase where everyone’s angling for the right kind of noticed. That’s someone who’s been doing the work, the daily, unglamorous, ego-murdering work that Grotowski demanded, and Ginsberg’s words aren’t being recited, they’re being lived through.
Grotowski spent decades stripping away every comfortable lie we tell ourselves about what performance is. No costumes to hide behind. No fourth wall to protect you. Just human beings in a room attempting to reach some frequency of truth that makes your average theater look like a fucking shopping mall.
Ginsberg was doing the same demolition job on American poetry. “I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel” wasn’t metaphor. It was testimony. It was refusing every safe distance between the poet and the poem, between America and its reflection in the mirror.
So when you get people who’ve trained for years in Grotowski’s monastery of presence channeling Ginsberg’s raw American howl, mixing it with Southern calls and shouts… Either you get academic theater that smells like grant applications, or you get something that makes the hair on your arms stand up.
These photos suggest the latter. That ensemble shot: everyone locked in, no one mugging, no one outside it. That’s what happens when years of training dissolve and what’s left is just human animals making sound and meaning in the same gesture.
This kind of work is so rare now because it requires you to mean it. Not seem to mean it. Actually mean it. Most of us are so armored up, so defended, so busy managing our personal brand, that the idea of being genuinely vulnerable in front of strangers feels like suicide.
But that’s what these people signed up for. That’s what shows in these frozen moments. The willingness to risk looking foolish, ugly, broken. The willingness to let Ginsberg’s words use you rather than you using them.
Whether it achieved that lightning strike of genuine transmission, you’d have had to be there. Photos can only show you the aftermath, the bodies still vibrating. But the fact that anyone’s still trying, still believing that something real can happen between human beings in a room…
Niki Ulehla went to the San Francisco dump, not to throw something away, but to find something, and she pulled Dante’s entire cast of the damned out of discarded lumber, scrap metal, and abandoned leather, carved them into marionettes, and staged the Inferno right there among the mountains of our collective waste. This is the kind of beautiful perversity that reminds you why art matters, why anyone bothers making anything at all.
Because when you stage a 700-year-old vision of hell at the literal endpoint of American consumption, when you make Virgil and Beatrice dance on strings cut from our own garbage, you’re not just putting on a puppet show, you’re holding up a mirror made of trash that reflects something so brutally honest it makes your chest tight. The circles of hell rendered in actual detritus, the punishment fitting the crime in ways Dante never imagined, performed at the place where hope supposedly gets abandoned but somehow, impossibly, gets found instead.
See the whole damned thing, every puppet, every circle, every piece of resurrected trash performing Dante’s Inferno puppet show as recycled materials performance art… click here.
The title: I Am America. As if the work itself is saying, this howling, this reaching for something beyond commerce and comfort and the whole sick machinery, this is what America actually is when you strip away everything false. And the Workcenter doing Ginsberg in a gym, that quintessentially American space of humiliation and aspiration, and I caught the moment when something sacred punched through the profane. That’s not just ironic, that’s cosmically correct.
Because Ginsberg was always trying to make the sacred scream at street level, right? “Moloch whose buildings are judgment!” He wanted to grab American commerce and conformity by the throat and shake some kind of mystic truth loose. And Grotowski’s people, Mario and the Open Program crew, they’re after the same impossible thing: the moment when the performer stops performing and becomes a live wire, when technique dissolves and you’re just watching someone burn themselves down to find something real underneath all the cultural scar tissue.
My photographs wrestle with the central problem: how do I document a thing that exists specifically to resist documentation? These aren’t actors playing at transformation. They’re using songs, shouts, those calls from the American South (which carry their own freight of pain and transcendence) to actually do something to themselves and anyone watching who’s brave enough to stay open.
Stanford University’sRoble Gym becomes this accidentally perfect space for it. No theatrical pretense, no velvet curtain between the sacred and the sweaty. Just people in a room where bodies have been pushed to their limits in a hundred different ways, now being pushed toward some other kind of limit entirely. The walls have seen competition; now they’re seeing something that makes competition look like a child’s game.
The photographs become evidence of something that can’t be fully captured, which might be exactly what they should be. Proof that it happened, that people still try to burn away the bullshit in front of strangers, that there’s still space in this country for the kind of raw, uncompromised seeking that both Ginsberg and Grotowski insisted was not just possible but necessary.
What we’ve got here is the whole beautiful fucked up contradiction laid out at ankle level. Those heels, man. They’re not asking permission, they’re not apologizing, they’re just there in the frame like some kind of manifesto written in sequins and fuck you platform architecture.
This is what happens when the theater of identity stops being theater and becomes flesh, becomes sweat, becomes the concrete reality of walking down Mission Street with the sun beating down and every step a small act of defiance against the tyranny of normal. Those shoes aren’t costume. They’re not drag in the sense of something you put on and take off. They’re the uniform of someone who woke up and decided that comfort was the coward’s bargain, that blending in was a kind of death.
And there’s something raw about catching them at street level, at the exact altitude where the performance meets the pavement. Not the face, not the costume from the waist up, just the foundation, the literal and metaphorical support system for moving through the world as an act of resistance. Or celebration. Or both, because why the hell should it have to be one or the other?
Carnival gives people permission to be what they already are, just louder. But these queens, they don’t need carnival. Carnival needs them. They’re the ones who understand that every day is a kind of carnival if you’re willing to strap on six inches of glitter and structural engineering and claim your square footage of street like it’s a stage at the Fillmore.
Vericocha… is dying. Not in some romantic, poetic way, but in the way all good spaces in the Mission are dying now, rent creeping up, city breathing down their neck, same old San Francisco story of things that matter getting squeezed out for things that pay. It’s one of those spots you walk past a hundred times before you notice it exists, tucked into the neighborhood like a secret nobody asked you to keep.
The performances are in the basement. The Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards doesn’t do theaters anymore, they do spaces, places where the walls still remember what happened there before. Vericocha’s basement has that smell, that feeling of concrete and accumulated time, the dampness of underground existence. The kind of place where things either die completely or get born again.
This isn’t theater. Let me be clear about that up front. You go to theater, you sit in the dark, you watch. You came here tonight for something else entirely.
ELECTRIC PARTY SONGS: OR, WHAT HAPPENS WHEN GINSBERG MEETS GROTOWSKI IN A SAN FRANCISCO BASEMENT
The Electric Party Songs project started as experiment, Workcenter taking Allen Ginsberg’s poetry and turning it into something alive, something that moved and breathed and happened in real time at parties, actual parties where people gathered. Not readings. Not performances in the traditional sense. Events. Encounters. The kind of thing that makes you reconsider what’s possible when bodies and voices and words collide in space.
They took it to nightclubs. Squats. Private homes. Anywhere but a proper theater, because the proper theater kills this kind of work. You need the friction of reality, the uncertainty of a space that wasn’t designed to hold what you’re about to do. You need Vericocha’s basement, struggling and imperfect and absolutely right.
The structure is open, meaning it shifts, adapts, responds. They’re not recreating the same show every night; they’re creating a new event every time, using dynamic material derived from Ginsberg’s poems but transformed into something visceral, electric, yes, but also strangely intimate. The goal isn’t entertainment. It’s not even art in the way we usually mean it. It’s an investigation into what happens between observer and performer, how presence changes when you’re packed into a basement instead of separated by a proscenium, how time stops being linear and becomes something you’re swimming through together.
THE THING ABOUT WITNESSING
There’s a moment in these performances, and I’ve been told this, I haven’t invented it, where you stop being an audience member and become something else. Not a participant exactly, because you’re not doing anything, but you’re not passive either. You’re necessary. Your presence matters. The performers need you there not to applaud but to complete whatever circuit is being formed in that space. It’s the feeling of an exceptional party, that rare night when something unnamed hangs in the air and everyone feels it at once, that collective…
“we are HERE, this is HAPPENING.”
Ginsberg understood this. The Beats understood this. San Francisco used to understand this. Performance isn’t something you consume; it’s something you’re inside of. And Grotowski, that maniacal Polish genius who spent his life stripping theater down to its essential molecules, he understood it too. What Mario Biagini and the whole Open Program crew are doing is carrying that understanding forward, but not as museum piece, as living practice, still searching, still asking questions.
WHY IT MATTERS IN A BASEMENT IN 2011
Vericocha is struggling. The Mission is changing. San Francisco is eating itself alive in the name of progress. And here, underneath all of that, there’s a performance happening that refuses every commercial impulse, every easy answer, every comfortable theatrical convention. It’s not a show; it’s a series of unique encounters, each one unrepeatable.
Electric Party Songs has evolved into several distinct pieces now, performed as part of broader Workcenter programs at places like SFMOMA and PAI, but this basement version, this struggling-venue, low-ceiling, people-packed-in version, might be the truest iteration. Because that’s where the work began: in friends’ apartments, at parties, in spaces where performance wasn’t expected and therefore became necessary.
You go down those stairs not knowing what you’ll find. You come back up changed, or you don’t come back up changed, but either way you were there. You witnessed something that won’t happen again exactly that way. In a basement. At Vericocha. While it still exists.
