May 9th, 2018. High noon. East Palo Alto shoreline. Sixty-four degrees and sunny, the kind of day that makes you forget, for a moment, that everything ends badly. Especially here, where the ground itself is a monument to bad decisions.
We’re standing on a Superfund site. Toxic landscape. The kind of place where American ambition literally poisoned the earth, where someone’s “path of steady success” left behind carcinogens and heavy metals in the soil. The irony isn’t lost on us, it’s the whole fucking point.
We staged a fragment. One of Euripides‘ lost tragedies, no one knows which one anymore, because history is a hungry thing that eats most of what we make. Five minutes of ancient Greek warning delivered to maybe fourteen people, maybe sixteen, on land that’s still sick from progress. We called it Path of Steady Success, which suddenly feels less like a title and more like an indictment.
The fragment itself? Pure Greek darkness dressed up as wisdom. It’s a warning shot across the bow of anyone who thinks they’ve got it figured out: The gods get bored. That’s the message. You’re riding high, everything’s golden, you think you’ve earned it, you’ve deserved it—and somewhere up on Olympus, the divine is filing its nails, yawning, thinking, “Yeah, we’re done here.”
It’s about hubris, obviously. That Greek obsession with pride that comes before the fall. But it’s more specific than that, it’s about the shelf life of success. The universe doesn’t hate you; it’s just indifferent, and that indifference has an expiration date. Even divine favor has its limits. The gods won’t prop up the same winner forever. They get tired of the same old story.
And here we are, performing this ancient warning on contaminated ground, proof that they were right. Fortune isn’t permanent. The heavens got tired of propping up whoever poisoned this place. Success ran out. What’s left is us, and a few people willing to stand on toxic earth to hear words that are 2,400 years old and still true.
This is what we’re doing with IOTA: resurrecting the scattered fragments of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, the plays that didn’t make it. The warnings that got lost. Bringing them back to life in places like this, site-specific theater, where the water meets the poisoned land and everything feels both temporary and permanent in the worst possible way.
Because that’s the point, isn’t it? Nothing’s permanent, not success, not luck, not even the plays themselves. But the damage? That sticks around. The ground remembers what we’d rather forget.
For five minutes on a Wednesday afternoon, in front of a handful of people who showed up during their lunch break, these ancient words lived again. A warning about hubris, delivered on a landscape that proves we never fucking learn.
The Fragment
The man on the path of steady success
should not think that he will enjoy
the same luck for ever,
for the god—
if one should use the name ‘god’—
seems generally to grow weary
of supporting always the same men.
Mortal men’s prosperity is mortal;
those who are arrogant
and assure themselves of the future
from the present
get a test of their fortune
through suffering.
Location
Two Superfund sites. In a residential neighborhood. Bay Street, East Palo Alto. And here’s the kicker, neither one is on the EPA’s National Priority List. Because apparently, some poisoned ground is more of a priority than other poisoned ground.
1990 Bay Street. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Priority List, Inc. used to make pesticides there. Arsenic-based pesticides, because of course. Zoecon Corp. bought the place in ’72, kept making agricultural chemicals. They say no contamination traces back to Zoecon’s operations, which is corporate-speak for “don’t look at us, look at the other guys.”
Then there’s 2081 Bay Road. Romic Environmental Technologies Corp. Twelve-point-six acres of what they called a “chemicals processing plant.” What it actually was? A toxic waste recycling facility. They took the nasty shit from companies like Hewlett-Packard, you know, the printer people, and did God knows what with it. Started in 1956. Ran for fifty years until they finally shut it down in 2007 after, and I quote, “a series of environmental and safety violations.” Which is like saying the Titanic had “a minor leak problem.”
The monitoring wells? Contaminated. Arsenic. Lead. Cadmium. Mercury. Selenium. It’s like a greatest hits album of things that shouldn’t be in your water. And here’s the part that should make your blood boil: approximately 58,000 people depend on wells within three miles of this site as their source of drinking water.
Fifty-eight thousand people. Real people. Families. Kids. Living their lives on poisoned ground, drawing water from poisoned wells, because someone decided East Palo Alto was a good place to park their toxic waste.
This is what success looks like from the other side. Someone made money. Someone made pesticides and processed chemicals and built a business. And when the gods got tired of propping them up? They left. But the poison stayed. It always does.
Collaborators
Daniel Guaqueta Drummer. Electronica artist. A guy who grew up split between Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Bogota, Colombia, two worlds that shouldn’t fit together but somehow do in his music. He’s got cumbia in his blood and Delta slowness in his bones. The kind of musician who hears rhythm in everything: bicycle chains, truck engines, the way waves break on a shore.
When he was in college in Mississippi, studying classical music and jazz, getting into Megadeth and Firehose, he stumbled on a Mermen album (note: if Santa Cruz had an official band it would be the Merman). That album, Be My Noir, begins with the sound of waves. He put the needle down and everything changed. Now most people, when they discover a band they love, they buy the t-shirt, go to a few shows. Daniel? He started his own surf-rock band, even though he’d never surfed. And later, after Daniel moved to Palo Alto, he became a Mer-sideman, filling in on drums when they needed him.
The guy’s a true artist. A Mississippi native who makes electronic music that blends ambient avant-garde with pop, who understands that music isn’t just notes on a page, it’s texture, it’s atmosphere, it’s the space between the sounds. A sonic landscape.
For this performance on the toxic shore, this five-minute warning about hubris delivered to maybe sixteen people on poisoned ground, Guaqueta brought his 5 gallon bucket of a drum, his understanding of rhythm and space, his willingness to stand in a place that America forgot and made something beautiful anyway.
He’s the kind of collaborator you want: someone who gets that this isn’t just about the music. It’s about where you make it. Why you make it. What it means to resurrect ancient warnings in a landscape that proves we never fucking learn.