between art and life

Program #2: Music+Text+Film

2008-08-15T09:31:00.000-07:00

"I wanted something other than what I could make myself and I wanted to use the surprise and the collectiveness and the generosity of finding surprises. And if it wasn't a surprise at first, by the time I got through with it, it was. So the object itself was changed by its context and therefore it became a new thing."

-Robert Rauschenberg (October 22, 1925 - May 12, 2008)

Saturday, August 23rd 7pm
&
Sunday August 24th 3pm
62nd & Hollis Street
Emeryville, CA
(Map it)

(A benefit for the La Casita Preschool)

We will begin Saturday evening with a 7 PM reception, (wine, beer, soft drinks, and snacks), performance at 8, followed by more wine, beer, etc. and a chance to chat about what you've seen and heard or just catch up (Sunday’s reception will begin at 3PM). We prefer that you come no later than 7:45 on Saturday and 3:45 on Sunday, as to not interrupt the performance. We will be asking for a suggested donation of $35 on Saturday and $20 on Sunday.

This event is a benefit for La Casita Preschool in Berkeley.

The Performance

1. Way To Sea

Music by Johny Blood

Performed by Joshua Batson, Johny Blood,
Dennis Finnegan, & Gwyneth Merner

Text by Johny Blood & J.C. Brunner

Images by Chris Willging

An underwater train journey.

A dream brings the narrator back to his late friend
and his past with the accompaniment of tuba, foghorns
and grainy black and white images.

2. War Unattended

Music by Dennis Finnegan

Performed by Joshua Batson, Johny Blood, Dennis Finnegan, Mark Bernfeld & Gwyneth Merner

Text, Photography, & Video by M. Mewborn

Read by Eric Robertson

Edited by Chris Willging

War and childhood in Asia.

Photos, music & video document the narrator’s
travels to where his father did a stint as a war pilot
and where his own obsession began.

3. Sit, Eat, Drive, Talk

Music by Dennis Finnegan

Performed by Joshua Batson, Mark Bernfeld, Johny Blood, Dennis Finnegan & Harry Yaglijian

A Film by Chris Willging

Family, travel, childhood.

The filmmaker’s journey through the Midwest with her parents to visit long lost childhood friends, elderly aunts and uncles, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The Texts

2008-07-01T15:19:00.000-07:00

Performed June 14, 2008

Going, Going, Gone
by Eric Robertson

The Island
by Adam Sass

Witchenbye: Hotel
by James Brunner

The Island

2008-07-01T15:15:00.000-07:00

by Adam Sass

My friend on the island has no use for me
But I visit him every day.
Encamped amid mounds of oyster shells
Inflatable furniture blown
from passing pleasure craft,
an idle scattering of
60s vintage pornography
carefully protected from
fog and seaspray in
waterproof plastic
envelopes, some now so old
as to be festooned with
puritanic barnacles,
A shortwave radio tuned to
shipping chatter and
Coast Guard boardings
He sits in a tar-flecked pink lawnchair
and watches the tide come in.

Seeking but not finding refuge
From a memory now sun-faded
I had rowed from island to island
across the vast shining bay.
How painful my shoulders,
my arms, my blistered hands
after a day’s rowing!
And each one I landed at
the same as the last,
rock upon rock, streaked
with gull guano,
the same dull grass
poking from the same
cracks and crevices,
all this quickly seen
from offshore so
that soon I no longer
bothered to land
only approached
closely enough to confirm
what I already knew,
until I came to his island.

That first day, I remember,
I missed the wave's best arc
And felt the boat sweep
sideways, half abreast,
A bit of the breaking crest
spilling over the stern
sloshing around my ankles
And I thought it might flip me
suck me under, tumble me
against barnacled rocks
sharp shoals and mussel beds
but instead skidded me up the beach
the wave giving a last flippant slap
to the boat's boards before
sliding back down the sand.
Taking the advice,
I pulled it further up,
well beyond the water's reach.

When I looked up I saw
he was laughing his ass off.
You almost missed that wave,
It's lucky you caught it,
Your timing's off, or you
weren't even trying.
Next time put yourself in the
right place to catch it
And you will not be out
there flailing your oars
trying to catch up.
Get it right there before it breaks
And it will do all the work for you
I should know, I'm lazy.

At first I thought I would entertain him
Pay for my intrusion with
Wit, wry observation,
News from the world,
And kept the air filled
with words, adding
ever more anxiously
to their buzzing swarm
as he sat in silence
looking over
my shoulder
Until at last
In a pause
While I regathered
my spent breath
he finally replied
as I’d been hoping
all along he would
so I would not have
to keep thinking and
thinking of the next
word and the next.

And he said,
You will probably take
this the wrong way
as that is the habit
of your sort but I am
telling you anyway since
that is the habit of
my sort.
Will you for God’s
sake stop being
so damn interesting
just for a moment
if that’s all you
can manage
though I’d prefer forever
if it’s not too much trouble.
I don’t care what
you read or heard or
ate or drank or stuck
your snout in and
what it reminded you of
or what year it was
whether good or bad
or who made it
or praised it
or called it worthy
but not so worthy
as the previous
of its kind,
(would you ever
want this said
of you?)
there is nothing
at all interesting
about you
being interesting
and I’d rather
you tried boring
for a change
because it would
suit us both better.

He did not look
at me once during
this speech but
continued to
stare resolutely
over my shoulder
and I said nothing
in reply, thinking
if he wants boring
then he can have it,
and so we sat there
in a silence that
grew less silent
the longer it lasted
and I heard a seal
barking on the other
side of the island
and the distant
claxon blast of a
train rolling down
the east shore
and the surf stopped
short by a rock
I knew loomed
broad-shouldered
behind me
and the prim
fussing chatter of
a black bird with a
long red beak
that probed the sands
for minute prey
and whose name,
I discovered,
I dearly wished
I knew.

There, he said,
that’s better.

See all that land there? he asked.
That's park land
Protected for my benefit.
Yours too, I guess.
But I was here first.
How long? I asked.
What’s the date
on that Playboy?
he asked. 1968.
Now you have some idea.
That’s a long time, I said.
Yes, but it’s just time.
Not to you, maybe,
but to me. Mere time.

Oh, I know how you look at me.
I'm the old islander,
full of histories,
seer and sage,
wanderer of the far lonely places
not made for your world,
seeing through its
many-veiled
madness from this
my remote stronghold.

Well I am no such thing, and it
gets tiresome to watch your eyes
glaze over in the thinking of it
when I am sitting right here and
it’s clear you prefer the me behind
your eyes to the me before them.
In fact I'd tell you to get the hell
off my island right now,
only as I made the mistake
of telling you before, it's
not mine to remove you from,
though I was here first.
So at the very least you
might stop looking at me
with that childish longing
as if I was a book
you'd like read to you
by grandma because you
can't be bothered to

read it yourself
out of your own
fantastic laziness.

Do not pretend I am not
just some afterthought
that became a sort of hobby
one day out of the lack of
anything else to do.
You are welcome to skulk
around here I suppose,
can't stop you anyway,
but do not pretend it was
some grand manifest destiny
brought you here because it wasn't.

Sure you can tell me all kinds of things,
(Here adopting a sneering backcountry drawl)
the ma who stewed roadkill for supper
the pa who wouldn't let up
with the hickory switch
back of the old shed
Or maybe even something more original,
Go on, surprise me
But I won't believe them
Because the ones you didn't make up
altogether you misremember altogether
and I wasn't there anyway was I?
But the tide is coming in
and coming in and that
is no story
no simulacrum,
no way.

Now have a clam,
that one there looks done.

Behind his encampment
a steep-sided ravine
sliced back into the hillside,
from which flowed a tiny stream
its mouth choked with
nettles, poison oak, burdock,
thistle and wild rose,
along with less punitive
varieties of plant life,
ferns, trillium, and laurel.

This narrow gulch led back
to his hermitage, as he called it,
a root-roofed cavern carved into
the streambank, to which he
retreated when unwanted visitors
appeared off his shores.
These included
school children
and their teachers,
if the teachers
weren’t worth
looking at,
young men
with large dogs,
ugly nudists
(the only kind
he’d ever seen),
anyone resembling
a prison escapee,
and park rangers.

None of whom
had yet found the courage
to penetrate the phalanx
of sharp and stinging
island flora that guarded
the ravine’s entrance.
And so he considered
himself safe back there,
though under no illusion
that it would last.

How do you stand it?
I asked. I never could.
It’s not so bad, the
pain is never boring,
never the same.
Take nettle and poison oak,
there’s a combination.
First it’s pure fire,
the nettles at work,
then over time it eases
into a long slow itch
that keeps you busy
for a week.
The idea is always worse
than the real thing,
and it’s the idea
that stops them
every time.
Even the rangers.
They’d rather pretend
I’m not here, and
when I’m back there,
I make it easy for them.

You didn’t hide when I came,
Why not? I asked.
It was too funny to miss.
You almost flipped your boat.
I wanted to see how it played out.
Well, how’s it playing out?
Not as funny. You’ve gotten
better at landing it.
I’m beginning to
wish you were a woman,
about 23, knows how
to fish, loves older men,
belongs in that magazine,
hates a messy camp.

Why are you here? he asked.
I burned my own house down
and my family in it.
Why are you here?
I stole 3 million dollars
from a company
that no longer exists.
Why are you here?
I witnessed a crime
and they want
to kill me for it.
Why are you here?
I have 10 pounds of
cocaine hidden under
that rock over there.
Why are you here?
I dug a hole and
came up on the wrong
side of the border.
Why are you here?
They said there was
work for me.
Why are you here?
I’ve come to steal
your porn.
Why are you here?
I threw a ball game.
Why are you here?
I threw a horse race.
Why are you here?
I skipped bail.
Why are you here?
Something I ate.
Why are you here?
I like crabs.
Why are you here?
I haven’t decided yet.
I thought so.

Every Sunday, he said,
if the wind was right,
he could hear the church bells
ringing in the city
and knew each one by its tone:
There is Old St. Mary’s
in Chinatown
and Peter and Paul
on Washington Square
and Grace Cathedral
prim on the hill
and the Presbys
who need a new bell
I think.

Some of my best friends
have gone to church,
he said, and I did not
begrudge them it.
It’s much easier than
making up your own
religion, which is what
everyone seems to do
these days.

If there was a church
here I might go it,
he said, Or not, if the
surf was too loud for the
bells to waken me.

Your best friends, I said,
Where are they now?
Dead, mostly, I think.
And me? I asked.
You? He laughed.
You are in the running.

Much as I loved it
his island had never seemed
remote enough to me,
all but in the shadow
of the great bridge
that tied the many-hilled
city to the nearer shore,
downwind of its cookpots,
fishing boats, coffee,
wine, crabs, creosote,
kettle corn and cologne.
Why live on an island
if it did not grant the
grand and stoic solitude
that seemed to me
the birthright
of the melancholic,
the misanthrope.

Why?
Because I like it this way.
There is more to see.
Girls on boats,
freighters,
aircraft carriers,
submarines,
lost causes,
human comedies.

The best things
wash ashore here.
There is always
something curious
drifting away
from that place.
Look at it –
it is one curious thing
on top of another
and eventually some of it
must blow my way.
It should be obvious to anyone
I'm in the right place.

The next day something
was different. The wind
had blown bit and pieces
of his camp all over the
shore. His lawn chair
overturned, a tarpaulin
engulfing a boulder
jellyfish-like, and
one of his magazines
drifting forlorn
in a tidepool
courting the cold embrace
of starfish and anemones.
I plucked it out and
presented it to him
ceremoniously, as if
it were a perfect pearl.

Aha, I was wondering where
she went, he said.
I knew there was a reason
I let you come around.
He was squatted
on the sand
staring at my boat.
It’s quite a mess out here today, I said.
Windstorm last night?
Yes, almost blew me in the bay.
Why don't you clean it up for me.
It will be good practice.
Practice for what? I asked.
For cleaning up your mess back there.
The one that keeps you coming out here
Hoping it will be gone when you get back.
But never is. You know the one.
I didn’t say anything. I will never say
anything to him again, I thought.
Well, what’s keeping you? Get to work!

Why don't you clean it up yourself? I shouted.
Because I won't be here.
Oh? Where the hell will you be?
Back there. He pointed across the Bay
at the hazy hills to the East.
And how are you getting there?
Do you expect me to give you a ride?
No, I told you, you’re staying to clean this all up.
You’re not making any sense, I said.
You never did.
And just as the last syllable
left my lips he sprang to his feet
crossed the short distance to my boat
with astonishing speed and
before I could even decide to follow
had shoved it back into the surf,
hopped aboard and begun rowing
with a strange maniacal grace
for the other shore.

Don’t tell me this isn’t what you wanted,
he called across the water.
Why else would you come here
again and again?
But don’t worry,
you won’t be lonely,
I’ll visit you every day.

Witchenbye: Hotel

2008-07-01T15:11:00.000-07:00

by James Brunner

This is Room 100. It’s bare except or the television screaming in white. It never goes off, just gets bigger and smaller.

You may get the Tower Room. It’s exceeding long with high ceiling. Children make their noise en masse outside in the schoolyard. It comes with a fever. Not many choose it or can find it. It may no longer be there.

Room 612 has a view of the parking lot. It’s very reassuring.

On the fourth floor, all the rooms are one. Desks and beds are laid out for efficient work and rest. Please keep the lavatories clean. Or else.

Some choose to stay in the elevator. Saves choosing. They’re pleasant! And they work.

The north staircase is the most used. It doesn’t clean easily and still carries the smells of smokers past. Cockroaches can occasionally be seen. Some food trays may not have been cleared. It can get hot.

Room 202 has vast curtained windows. All the furniture is large. The carpet is thick. There’s a table for the Board of Directors. They’re not here; they rarely come. It’s very clean. You feel someone might walk in at any moment. With a request for you, or to take your request, or maybe with an order. Whatever it is you know you’ll accept it or maybe they’ll accept it. Whatever it is, it will be acceptable.

The central landing on the fourth floor is simply appointed with a couple of desks, chairs and framed pictures from old magazines. The window ledges are rather high. You have to stand almost on tiptoe and lean over to see the busy students and professors hurrying in the courtyard below. It’s a perfect place to consider suicide. Never been done, though.

The terrace is a good place to meet and talk. There’s a flow of people and there are spaces for little groups to form and dissolve naturally. Most people are happiest here, in between where they’re coming from and where they’re going to.

Here’s the first floor reception area. Remember: waiting is not the same as striving.

The men and women who work at the reception desk see you as an object to be processed by screening. Just do what they say. Don’t be affronted if they appear to regard you with curiosity or without curiosity, with or without interest, in a friendly or unfriendly way. They don’t care about you at all. You’re just passing through. Do so quietly.

In Room 100, you’re trying to figure out what the TV’s screaming about. Actually, it’s you screaming.

The power plant is very impressive. Nobody works there, they just oversee it. It works by itself, making power and moving it, heating and cooling. Always turned on and pumping--for your benefit and mine.

You can get there by train. Who are all those people, heads nodding? Are they waking or falling asleep? Some are fresh and some are wilted. They all seem to have been riding for a long time.

“Which room is mine?” Which would you like?
Choose one you can have and make it your own.

Room 617 has a small kitchen and dining room. A couple of plants here and there could make it quite cheery. Put a home entertainment system with cameras, speakers, phones and screens. Watch yourself or allow someone else to watch you. It’s like picking at a scab or eating potato chips though; you can’t always stop when you want to.

Some prefer the dormitories. They make it easy to be oneself by resembling someone else. Deserted throughout the day, by night they’re saturated with the warm, heavy smell of communal somnolence. What a thrill to escape from the severe rows of identical cots and lockers into wild, turbulent dreams. And how satisfactory the relief at returning, your departure not noticed or remarked upon.

Sometimes you don’t get enough privacy. The sound of someone else shitting, or trying to come, or sobbing may disturb or arouse you. Pretend you’re not aware.

Tiger

2008-07-01T15:09:00.000-07:00

by Eric Robertson

There are 500 of my kind out there. Maybe less. 420.
You can understand why I'm defensive.
Pick my teeth with knife. Give an evil eye.
Just 420 of my brothers and sisters. My ma?
I don't know where she is.
Her fingers ornamenting someone's neck maybe.

So you can see I'm touchy.

Siberia is beautiful in the winter.
Birch trees all striped against the snow.
You can imagine a clear day.
An orange sunset against this.

I don't think about blood the way you do. That's for sure.
The earth spins me upside down.
I hear all the creatures that were.
So distant now. A trail of animal crackers.
A circus of silhouettes frozen on the horizon.
Crows picking the crumbs.
My memory like your childhood. That old.

Tony the Tiger selling cereal. Exxon gas.
Black Sambo a fictional friend. We all have beliefs.

I don't wear a white cloth bib when I carve my meat. None of that.
Not what you would call civilized. No no.
No factory farming. No conveyer belt.

I don't see blood like that.
Little drops rolling around some Styrofoam plate
wrapped in plastic. Red meat laying on absorbing pads. No.
When I see it I'm in it.
I hear it.
That's the closest I get to metal.
All that iron.
I hear it bubbling through my teeth through a clamped trachea.
I wear it on my forehead.
A giant bindi for my cousins in Bengal.

Martha

2008-07-01T15:08:00.000-07:00

by Eric Robertson

A person could feel small looking at those great big flocks. When I was a boy in the 1850s they flew over for hours. A mile wide and a hundred miles long. The jungle got right in yer veins just watchin' 'em. It was a damn sight. Evenin'-like. The whole sun gone. Just a little light around the edges.

And they only knew how to mate in great numbers. They couldn't get their juices up if they weren’t smellin' the air full of themselves for a hundred miles. That was their problem. There couldn’t ever a been an Adam and Eve. God must have thrown a batch of 'em down already winged.

Talk about wilderness. They were in the trees ever'where and they had so many nests they looked like berries on a bush. Those little eggs fed every crow and fox in the forest. Weren't enough natural enemies to eat 'em all. The crow and fox started having dinner together like they weren't natural born enemies themself. And those ladies in the trees just kept laying eggs one after another.

The hunters would build a campfire beneath 'em. Soak grain in sourmash for 'em to eat and then catch 'em floppin around drunk. Then they'd pinch there little heads between fingers like a farmer goin' down a row pinchin' potato bugs.

But now there gone. This year, 1914, has seen the last. Now I wish I could see those black clouds that went on forever. Now there's too much sun. The skies too lonely. All that lights on us with no blessed relief. We're naked now with out 'em. They was the clothing. More'n just a feather for a ladies hat.

The poor folk ate 'em… and the hogs. And some men made millions off 'em. Men who paid for colleges and had universities named after themselves. But all they could do was name the last pigeon Martha, after the first "first lady". When it was too late, that was the best they could do to relieve their conscious. As if that last girl was not just a walking zombie that didn't have more use with this world than an eraser at the end of a pencil. Seems like they could have come up with something better. What's a good name for the last lady? Enid? Nevermore?

When I was a boy we sang "A Friend of the Earth is a Friend to Me". I guess there not singin' that song in school anymore.

Hear that chuggin' off in the distance? That's the factory. Hiding the sun with all that black smoke. Kind of like the passenger pigeons. Except the air was good with the passenger pigeons. A billion wings all flappin' at once.

California Delta Smelt

2008-07-01T15:02:00.000-07:00

by Eric Robertson

Hey! Listen to Me!

I am a CALIFORNIA DELTA SMELT and I am tired of all these big ass, dangerous, just plain WEIRD creatures getting all the attention.

I mean do you have to be a whale to get saved?

All you people want is biggest, fastest, most dangerous, MAN-EATING!
It all sounds like some cheap porn site to me.

So the blue whale has a heart as big as a Volkswagon beetle
and the green mamba's bite will kill a man in seven seconds.
Does everything have to be in the Guiness Book of World Records for someone to pay attention? I mean do you actually have any idea how hard it is to lay 2000 eggs?

So I've Caused Some Trouble
and people can't use their jet skis everywhere
and farmers can't grow watermelons in the desert.
Well whoop te do! Is anybody dying over it?

I guess I should! That is what you'd like, huh?
If I just laid down and died.
You'd like to see my little white belly floating on top, wouldn't you?
Let's just forget about MY ANCESTORS and the millions and millions of
generations came before ME!

This is all about YOU!
Getting' the water YOU need
getting' the water for YOUR party pontoons,
to grow YOUR geraniums, to take YOUR warm, soothing,
two-hour-long BATHS.

This is all about YOU and that beautiful, crystal-clear, twice-scrubbed
water YOU NEED to flush down YOUR doo-doos.

I'm just a fishy little SMELT.
Go ahead forget me.You've got Shamu and Coco
and your cute little Ling-ling.

Watch your tv reruns of
Steve Irwin grabbing snakes by the tail
dangling his baby in front of alligators.
See if I care!

You just do what you do and never-mind exterminating me.
I'm just a little California delta smelt.

the program

2008-05-28T11:34:00.000-07:00

Saturday, June 14, 2008
1512 62nd St. @ Hollis
Emeryville, CA
(Map it)

Reception: 7:00 pm
Performance: 8:00 pm
Followed by wine & victuals
until whenever

Suggested donation:
$10 or whatever you feel it's worth
(admittedly a complex calculation)

-Robert Rauschenberg (October 22, 1925 - May 12, 2008)

Music

Johny Blood & Dennis Finnegan

Text

Going, Going, Gone (Tiger/Passenger Pigeon/Whale)
- Eric Robertson

The Island - Adam Sass

Witchenbye: Hotel - James Brunner

Images

Paul Mueller

why we are doing what we are doing

2008-05-28T11:28:00.000-07:00

We do this -

Because we seek connection

Because some of us are overwhelmed by solitude

Because others of us enjoy solitude, but only to a point

Because we like you

Because (some of us) find television dull

Because it's rent free

Because our parents (some of our parents) paid good money for our education

Because we were never good at self promotion (none of us)

Because we think you will find it interesting, if not enjoyable

Because Flag Day only comes once a year, and you have to stand up for what you believe in.

Because all the great literature has already been written, so we wrote this.

Because (some of us) adore television and want to present you, the viewing public, with something just as entertaining

Because it's an election year

Because even when you say the same thing over and over, sometimes you have to say it again to make sure you said it right

Because when you present something to an audience, you're on your best behavior.

Because we enjoy each other's company

Because it helps us get out of bed each morning

Because in doing this we render homage to the artists who inspire us (to wit, Robert Rauschenberg, October 22, 1925 - May 12, 2008)

Because - we do