Zelda knew the score. That exiled and floating world she’s talking about, it’s not some poetic metaphor, it’s the actual condition of modern existence… A feeling that everything solid has liquefied beneath us and all that’s left is the transaction, the exchange, the hustle. We’re all floating now, baby, untethered from anything resembling roots or permanence, and the only anchor we’ve got is whatever we can grab with our platinum card.
But here’s where it gets darker, where the romantic haze of Zelda’s observation crashes into something more brutal: What happens when that floating world isn’t a condition you can contemplate from a position of privilege, but the literal reality you’re born into? When your house floats because that’s all there is? When the water that suspends your entire community is dying, poisoned by the same forces that convinced us all that buying things could substitute for belonging to something real?
The spectacle of it all, and I mean spectacle in the Debordian sense, not the tourist-brochure sense, obscures what’s actually happening. We see surfaces, commerce, the exotic aesthetic of lives lived on water. We don’t see displacement. We don’t see thousands of people being erased because they can’t produce the right paperwork for land they never touched because their lives were always liquid.
You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
Alan W. Watts
Look at this thing. Three streams of water dripping into a pond like some cosmic punchline to a joke nobody remembers anymore. Built in 778, rebuilt in 1633, not a single nail holding it together, just wood and faith and the Japanese conviction that some things shouldn’t need explaining.
Clear water. Pure water.
The tourists line up with their little cups and ladles, drinking what they think are wishes, swallowing possibility like it’s medicine. What gets me is the absolute hunger in that gesture, this burning need to believe that somewhere, somehow, water falling from a mountain can change the trajectory of a life that’s already in freefall.
Alan Watts there with his aperture bit. Yeah, sure, we’re all just eyeballs through which the universe masturbates or whatever. But what he doesn’t tell you is how exhausting it is being the universe’s peephole, how sometimes you just want to be a blocked drain, opaque, refusing the view.
The thing is, and this is where it gets sticky, maybe the water doesn’t grant anything. Maybe the whole point is standing there with your mouth open like an idiot, vulnerable and hoping, which is basically the most punk rock thing humans do: continuing to desire in the face of cosmic indifference. Continuing to cup your hands under streams that have been running for a thousand years, that watched empires collapse and technologies rise and still just kept falling, indifferent as gravity.
Not one nail in the whole structure. Just tension and balance and the kind of engineering that says maybe holding things together doesn’t require force, just understanding how pressure works, where the weight goes, what bears what.
The photograph captures none of this, of course. Can’t photograph hope. Can’t photograph the specific quality of thirst that makes people believe in waterfalls.
音羽山清水寺
Kiyomizu-dera, Kyoto Buddhist temple, Otowa waterfall
I’m standing in some medieval stone square and the light’s doing that thing where it’s too golden to be real, and there’s a woman in white doing something with her body that shouldn’t be possible, and you think maybe you’ve finally lost it. Maybe that house wine at lunch was actually paint thinner. Maybe you died somewhere between the ramparts and the Rue de la République and this is what comes after.
But no, there’s fifty people watching, and they’re seeing it too. Except they’re not just watching her, because twenty feet to your left there’s a guy screaming Shakespeare or Artaud or his divorce papers, who the hell knows, and behind you someone’s erected an entire puppet cathedral and set it on fire (metaphorically, probably, the French have permits for this stuff), and you realize you can’t take it all in. You literally cannot. Your circuits are fried. You blink and the whole thing shifts, now it’s some Kurosawa fever dream happening on a goddamn carousel, and you’re standing there like a rube with your jaw unhinged, thinking, “Did I just see what I think I saw?”
The photo’s your only witness. Your only proof you didn’t imagine the whole bleeding thing. That it wasn’t just the bad wine and the good sun and the way this place turns your brain inside out until you’re not sure where the performance ends and your own psychosis begins.
This is Avignon. This is every street corner screaming at you that you’re alive and everything matters and nothing matters and LOOK AT THIS RIGHT NOW. You’re drunk on theater. You’re ruined for normal life. And you wouldn’t have it any other way.
I ride earth’s burning carousel. Day in, day out. Sylvia Plath
We’d just stumbled out of Cremaster, brains still melting from Barney’s latex and petroleum jelly fever dream, trying to articulate what the fuck we’d just witnessed, all that obsessive bodily mythology, those baroque genital landscapes, when the alley starts filling with them.
White painted bodies coming at us like a slow-motion avalanche of the undead, dozens of them, moving with that signature Butoh crawl, that trembling-insect-broken-marionette thing that makes your spine remember it used to be a snake. The timing was so cosmically perfect it felt scripted, except no one scripts this kind of collision.
Here’s what Hijikata knew that Barney circles around in his own baroque way: the body is the last honest thing we’ve got, and using it for anything other than meaning, for pure, aimless, useless expression, is revolutionary. Not revolutionary like Che Guevara, revolutionary like your cells suddenly remembering they’re not office equipment.
These dancers weren’t performing for us. They were just happening, occupying space with their awkward, trembling, utterly uncommercial flesh. After hours of Barney’s million-dollar body horror, here was the street-level version, no budget, no narrative, just human rehabilitation in real-time. The machine hates this because you can’t monetize a shudder, can’t package genuine physical strangeness. Both Barney and these dancers understood: the body, unproductive and strange, is a weapon.
My profession is the business of human rehabilitation, which goes today by the name of dancer… All the power of civilized morality, hand in hand with the capitalist economic system and its political institutions, is utterly opposed to using the body simply for the purpose, means, or tool of pleasure. Still more, to a production-oriented society, the aimless use of the body, which I call dance, is a deadly enemy which must be taboo. Tatsumi Hijikata (founder of a genre of dance performance art called Butoh)
July in Avignon, watching Belgian weirdo Jan Fabre, the festival’s designated madman-in-residence, make his performers roll around in their own sweat while reciting what I can only assume was poetry, though my French was drowning after the third pastis. The whole goddamn city had become one sprawling theatrical acid trip, and I was here for it, even if I had no fucking clue what I was looking for.
I was a graduate student. PhD in theater directing. I was trying to reconcile academic horseshit about “legible arguments” with the messy, sweaty, totally irrational reality of what actually happens when people get on stage and do things. Before the PhD grind, I’d worked with Mabou Mines, hauling cables, rebuilding sets in a black box theater in PS 122 that smelled like rats and incense, taking shows to festivals where the “dressing room” was a medieval closet with electrical wiring that looked like a suicide pact. I knew what it meant when a projector died five minutes before curtain. I’d been on the other side of the curtain. But Avignon wasn’t that. Avignon was full possession, demonic and unapologetic.
Here’s the thing about the Avignon Festival: it doesn’t give a shit what you think. It doesn’t need your approval or your understanding. This isn’t Broadway, it’s not even off-off-Broadway. This is theater as fever dream, as dare, as near-religious mania. Fabre had packed the 2005 program with what the directors pretentiously called “poets of the scene,” which apparently meant artists too deranged to stay in their lane. Dancers sculpted. Actors painted. Musicians crawled across stone floors covered in what might have been ash or might have been cocaine… at this point, who the hell knew. Boundaries between disciplines evaporated like cheap wine spilled on hot pavement.
And speaking of wine… Jesus Christ, the wine. You’re in the Rhône Valley, surrounded by some of the best on the planet, and nobody’s being precious about it. Nobody’s swirling and discussing “notes of black cherry.” You drink because you need fuel for the arguments you’re about to have at 2 AM about whether that last show was genius or complete bullshit.
I was sleeping on my friend’s floor. The bathroom was so small you had to step into the hallway to wipe. But it was cheap and you could stumble home at 4 AM without dying. We’d wake up destroyed, make terrible coffee that tasted like punishment, and try to piece together what the hell we’d witnessed the night before and why it felt like we’d barely survived.
The rhythm was brutal. You’d crawl to a café mid-morning, mainline espresso and Marlboros while plotting your cultural assault for the day, then disappear for the afternoon because July in Provence isn’t weather, it’s a weapon. Only tourists and the clinically insane try to function at noon. We’d escape to some crumbling house outside the walls with a pool that was more algae than water. Nobody cared. We’d float for hours drinking rosé from bottles with handwritten labels, wine made by somebody’s cousin in a barn somewhere.
Beautiful, exhausted artists—dancers, actors, directors—would lounge at the pool’s edge, smoking, arguing about whether the body mattered more than language or whether words still had a fighting chance. One actor, Anne?, had performed the night before in some piece about desire and death that involved a lot of nudity, what looked like motor oil, and chanting that may or may not have been Yiddish. Now, wrapped in a towel by the pool, she was explaining her artistic process with total sincerity. I had no idea what she was talking about. But I believed her.
Evening meant diving back into the medieval labyrinth. Shows erupted from churches, basements, rooftops, random courtyards. Bodies twisted in ways that made me feel every cigarette I’d ever smoked, every bad decision, every late night. The city didn’t just host theater—it became theater, an entire urban organism hijacked by performance.
And then, somewhere in the chaos, I saw the real shit.
Josef Nadj, this Hungarian-French choreographer who makes bodies move like haunted architecture. Ancient. Carved. He and his dancers don’t perform; they channel something older than language. Watching him, I felt the floor drop out: entire histories of gesture compressed into a single trembling hand. It was the kind of thing that makes you realize you don’t know a goddamn thing.
Romeo Castellucci destroyed whatever boundaries I still believed in. His stage pictures were apocalyptic and devotional at once. Castellucci doesn’t make theater; he makes visions. Religious visions for a godless century. I walked out of his all three of his shows shaking, unsure if I’d seen art or had a stroke.
And Marina Abramović. Fuck. The high priestess of making you uncomfortable. Her piece didn’t “perform” anything…it demanded something from you, some kind of ethical attention that felt invasive and absolutely necessary. She made staring feel like being interrogated by a deity you didn’t believe in but suddenly feared. It was the first time I understood that endurance wasn’t spectacle…it was communion.
After those encounters, even Fabre’s sweat rituals made sense. Not logical sense, but bodily sense. These artists weren’t offering meaning. They were offering thresholds. Portals to something you couldn’t name but recognized.
Between shows I’d post up at a café, slam espressos, listen to theater kids argue about Artaud in French like they could resurrect him through cigarette smoke and sheer pretension. The Palais des Papes loomed over everything, this monument to medieval corruption turned into a stage for avant-garde heresy. The irony was obscene and perfect.
The Off festival added its own insanity: fifteen hundred shows crammed into every doorway, attic, and alleyway. Actors pushed flyers with manic, end-times smiles. Street performers colonized every plaza. Every stone wall was a potential stage. It was overwhelming, occasionally unbearable, but relentlessly, defiantly alive.
Late nights ended at this wine bar near the Place de l’Horloge, packed with actors, directors, clowns (the non creepy type), and true believers. The owner would pull out dusty bottles from his personal stash. Gigondas, Vacqueyras… Wines that tasted like secrets whispered directly into your bloodstream. We’d drink, smoke, argue, confess things we’d regret, contradict ourselves, then stumble back to that floor we’d claimed as home.
The theater itself? Unrelenting. Exhausting. Sometimes transcendent.
Sometimes absolute garbage. Usually both at once.
But somewhere between Nadj’s carved bodies, Castellucci’s annihilating images, Abramović’s charged stillness, Fabre’s sweat-slick provocations, and that green pool full of half-baked theories and beautiful people arguing about nothing and everything, somewhere in all that chaos, I understood something my graduate seminars and years touring with Mabou Mines had prepared me for but never quite named:
Performance isn’t about clarity. It’s about bodies insisting, against heat, exhaustion, self-doubt, and the sheer absurdity of it all, that meaning still flickers somewhere between the gesture and the witness. That the attempt still matters, even when it fails.
Especially when it fails.
When July finally ended and everyone scattered back to their regular lives, I was sunburned, broke, possibly damaged, and certain of only this:
Art doesn’t exist to explain the world.
Art exists because bodies refuse to shut the fuck up, even when drowning in images, noise, and the general soul-crushing machinery of modern life.
Look at them up there in the white nothing, those figures scattered across snow that doesn’t give a shit about their aspirations or their carefully calibrated sense of adventure. They’re having what they’ve decided to call a party, because that’s what you do when you’re off somewhere expensive, you give it a name, make it official, pretend the experience is somehow transformative.
Victor Where did you spend the last one? Amanda (warmingly) Victor. Victor I want to know. Amanda St. Moritz. It was very attractive. Victor I hate St. Mortiz. Amanda So do I.
Coward knew the score. “So do I,” Amanda says about St. Moritz, and there it is, the whole beautiful, terrible truth about why we drag ourselves to places we claim to despise. We go because everyone else went, because we heard it was supposed to mean something, because sitting still in the familiar places feels like death by a thousand mild contentments.
The photograph doesn’t lie though. The postcard prettiness, leaves you with what’s actually there: human shapes against an indifferent landscape, trying to make meaning happen through sheer force of will. That’s the party, not the champagne or the designer snowsuits, but the raw fact of people choosing to be cold together, to lounge in a place that will forget them the moment they leave.
What makes you human isn’t what you love. It’s what you endure, what you choose even when you know it’s ridiculous, even when Amanda and Victor are both rolling their eyes at the whole goddamn enterprise. The party happens anyway. It always does.
I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more Franz Kafka, The Castle(1926)
Those tombstones piled on top of each other like desperate drunks at last call, twelve thousand bodies crammed into what, a few acres? Twelve layers deep in some spots. Because when you’re forbidden from expanding, you dig down, you stack up, you make it work in the cramped nightmare reality deals you.
And Kafka knew. Of course he knew. “I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.” That’s not romance, that’s oblivion as mercy. That’s the ultimate privacy in a world that won’t leave you alone even in death.
I’m in Prague so naturally Kundera’s haunting me, Unbearable Lightness, Tereza and the weight of images as evidence that any of this matters, and suddenly I’m face-to-face with Koudelka. The man who shot Prague like it was already a ghost story before it even happened. Josef Koudelka photographs this stuff like it’s the last transmission from a dying civilization, which, let’s be honest, it kind of was. No pretty lighting, no National Geographic soft-focus horseshit. Just stone and shadow and the accumulated weight of centuries pressing down on your chest until you can barely breathe. His photos of Prague in 1968 make you feel the claustrophobia of history, the way it suffocates and preserves simultaneously.
This is what great photography like Koudelka’s does: the work doesn’t comfort. The work confronts. The says: here, look at this beautiful terrible thing and try to sleep tonight.
Prague, Czech Republic
Jul 17, 2003 | Categories: Wanderlust | Comments Off on Where Death Stacks Up: Prague’s Last Claustrophobic Embrace
When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too. Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
Psychedelic Art: Bill Ham inventor of the Light Show.
Maybe this is how it all started.
Me thinking I’m a photographer. That I have what it takes to make pictures that other people actually see. Not the travel snapshots everybody takes, the trite bullshit clogging up social media feeds from here to eternity. But real photographs. Pictures with an eye.
The thing is, Lee Breuer doesn’t know that. Hell, Lee’s never seen a single frame I’ve shot. Maybe—probably—the only reason I’m here at all is because I was the only person he knew who could get his hands on a camera.
But here I am anyway. Getting paid seven hundred and fifty bucks to photograph Bill Ham. The Bill Ham. Inventor of the light show… that psychedelic extravaganza that defined sixties rock shows. Liquid projections swirling across the Fillmore walls while minds dissolved and reformed to the beat. Lee’s writing an article on the guy, and I’m the idiot with the camera.
We’re in Pacific Heights. Bill’s house, the same place he’s occupied for thirty, maybe forty years. Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company lived across the street back in the day. You can still feel the ghosts.
And Bill. Bill is amazing. Joint going the entire time, of course. This steady ember of consciousness-expansion burning throughout the interview. One gem after another, this cascade of creative genius pouring out of him between drags, stories about color and light and the intersection of technology and altered perception. He’s talking, and I’m completely absorbed, nodding like an acolyte at the feet of a master.
Then Willie Brown shows up. Former mayor Willie goddamn Brown. Walks in, takes a hit off Bill’s joint like it’s the most natural thing in the world, which in this house, at this moment, it probably is, then splits. “Interview,” he says with that signature smile. Gone.
And I’m so mesmerized by the whole scene… the stories, the smoke, the casual appearance of San Francisco royalty, that I forget why I’m there.
Lee has to nudge me. “Take the pictures.”
Right. The camera. That’s why I’m here.
But regardless, despite my amateur-hour unprofessionalism, despite not knowing what the hell I was doing… I think this is where it started. This moment. Me, the accidental photographer, getting paid to document genius while discovering maybe, just maybe, I had something to contribute too.
