This camera has an eye that cannot see
the act of toxic scrolling that can be
an agony of the mind that’s driven me
miles from “amour de soi” that’s all I need
to find my peace and spread prosperity
to those who I see and see me as rarity
These lenses can keep flashing filthy BANKNOT£S
for people who hide behind their idle followers
of photographs they’ve taken to promote
their “soulmates” with whom they’re asymptotes
projecting life as seen by the Kardashians
with selfies in a shell that’s rather porcelain
Insta-society needs velvet antidote
to filter trash and help one to self-love
San Francisco’s well-known drama group Word for Word, which for 23 years has been staging short stories with ever-increasing theatrical sophistication, recently brought to the stage two finely wrought tales by Irish writers about Irish writers at SoMa’s Z Below. The results were a pleasure for both lovers of literature and of the stage.
Word for Word’s cunning device is so obvious one wonders why nobody ever thought of it before: take a good short story and stage it as a play, with every word spoken by a character in the story. The opportunities for theatrical magic are patent, and potent, and taken entire advantage of by Word for Word and its talented staff.
Tonight’s embarking (I saw it on April 1st) brought two stories, one by Colm Tóibín, the comfortable, fashionable middle-brow writer (“middle-brow” is sometimes mistakenly taken for a putdown, though it isn’t; a sturdy literary culture needs a strong middle-brow culture to keep the low-brow aspiring and the high-brow honest), based on an anecdote from the notebooks of Henry James. The anecdote was told to him by Isabella August, Lady Gregory—the Lady Gregory—writer, playwright and Irish folklorist, probably most famous in this country for her association with the poet W. B. Yeats and their mutual support of the celebrated Abbey Theater, now the National Theatre of Ireland. Henry James never worked up the anecdote into a story, but Tóibín uses it to draw out a tale about an affair between the unhappy Lady Gregory and the poet and womanizer Wilfred Scawen Blunt, and her long, puzzled savoring of what seems to have been the one great physical passion in her life.
I often think of September 29th, 2001 as my birthday. It was the first time I marched in Washington, DC, and in many ways was the culmination of a process that started about three years earlier when I found out about the School of the Americas (SOA), a Latin American military officers’ training facility located at Ft. Benning, GA. But that day in DC there were two demonstrations against the impending war in Afghanistan, and I participated in both.
I had been to protests before, but nothing I had experienced in Cleveland, OH (Clevo) prepared me for the tense and sometimes violent Anti-Capitalist Convergence (ACC) march on the World Bank, which ended with hundreds of us getting detained in the plaza in front of the building.
In retrospect, of course, the differences make total sense. What’s demonstrating for the legalization of marijuana with maybe three hundred people mostly too stoned for any sort of serious shenanigans, or participating in a so-called solidarity rally while people on the actual front lines are breaking unjust laws elsewhere?
