The performances, the happenings, the holy-fool moments that won’t sit still long enough to get nailed to a gallery wall and labeled and lit up for some collector’s tax write-off. I dream the stuff up. I make it. I document it like some kind of obsessive lunatic with a tape recorder and bad coffee breath. I dig through it at 3 AM when I should be sleeping. I try to understand it even when understanding feels like the booby prize. All because this work, this messy, sweaty, beautiful racket, is telling me something I NEED to know, screaming it really, about the places and the people and the broken-down beautiful communities it crawled out of.
And once I actually get it, once I really understand how these environments got bent into the shapes they’re in, the physical, the social, the political, the whole rigged carnival, I start to see the cracks. Hairline fractures running through the concrete. The places where it could’ve gone some other way. Where it still could, if anybody’s paying attention. If anybody still cares enough to look.
This isn’t some nostalgia trip. This isn’t an archive of yellowing photos and half-dead memories and conversations I should’ve walked out of about six drinks earlier. This is about USING this stuff, this practice, this whatever-the-hell-it-is, as living breathing evidence that what we’ve got handed to us isn’t the only deal on the table.
That the way things are is not, repeat, NOT, the way things have to be. It’s about proving, with my own two hands and whatever’s left of my nerve, that there are other ways to live. Other ways to be. Ways I maybe haven’t had the imagination or the plain dumb guts to reach for yet. But I’m reaching. I’m still reaching.
