A Brechtian excursion into the brutality and angst of our times, this is a confrontational plays that expresses the darker corners of the class war, and the casualties of broken alliances under capitalism. Superb actors, a ferocious script…it shall prove to be a powerful, provocative and poetic experience at the theater. Both a play and a protest, it is the first American drama to engage with what is happening in both Gaza…and the art world itself. Click here for more details.
TICKETS NOW ON SALE–THROUGH EVENTBRITE. Premieres and runs April 25th – April 28th, 2024 at JACK Theater in Brooklyn, NY.
Original artwork by Brian Alessandro; 2024 depicting (L-R) Ward Nixon, Dennis Leroy Kangalee, and Tessa Martin as the fractious trio in The Life & Death of Art.
The spiritual ascent in the final moments of As an Act of Protest
Though the film was made in 2001 and scrutinizes the racial profiling and police brutality in New York City under Giuliani’s draconian reign, “As an Act of Protest” has never been more urgent than now. I approach this review—a defense born of moral outrage, really—not as a film critic, but as a fellow filmmaker and novelist. Often, it takes an artist to recognize an artist, talent to identify talent.
To contextualize, the film makes almost all contemporary activism and progressive finger-wagging histrionics feel like a disingenuous kindergarten special, a halfhearted performance staged by people who stand for nothing, driven by questionable motives.
The story centers on Abner, imbued with a glorious righteous indignation by writer-director Dennis Leroy Kangalee, who runs a Black theater group, and his actor Cairo Medina, Che Ayende in a turn that manages both a visceral nerviness and a cerebral intensity. Though Abner floats throughout the film like a haunted, haunting spirit, the spiritual journey—and crisis—is Cairo’s. He must cope with the unjust, criminal murder of a loved one at the hands of the NYPD as he reconciles his passion for expression through art or, failing that, a descent into violent vengeance. Ayende’s work here is unnerving, spellbinding, and ultimately heartbreaking. He is a force of brooding expression, tension, and apoplectic eruptions. He is compelling when silent and striking when in a verbose fury.
The acting is so raw, immediate, and naturalistic it seems more than improvised—it feels as though we’re watching real intimate connections being worked out. And yet, there is a fascinating formalism at play here. Rarely do we find actors who can balance with such adeptness the natural with the formal. The cinema of Cassavetes comes to mind. The theater of Baraka and Genet do, too. Kangalee clearly knows his film and theater history and understands where he fits in the ever-shifting canon. His marriage of forms and sensibilities is thoughtful; he assiduously toils toward excavating a new understanding of human behavior.
We have seen countless movies that celebrate straight white men at breaking points with society. Michael Douglas in Falling Down. Edward Norton in Fight Club. Joaquin Phoenix in Joker. Rarely are black men granted the same luxury of being enraged with the world and acting on their anger. And if we’re being honest, it is black men—especially black men in America—who have the greatest right to be in a, as Baldwin put it, “state of rage, almost all the time.”
The ruminations on the nature of theater, and especially the need for a Black theater, run deep and into enlightening spaces. Theatre of the Absurd is thought of when considering the film on a meta level—the way Black people are mistreated in America is in and of itself absurd. Cruel and unfair to an absurd degree. Kangalee knows this and his emphasis on theater suits such thematic meditations.
Kangalee, the writer, is relentless in his examinations and excoriations. He demands you pay attention and endure the rhythmic chaos and existential horrors he dissects, those dehumanizing atrocities experienced daily by black men and women. Kangalee, the director, doesn’t let up, either. He insists you confront the gruesome truth and either flee or find deep mettle to withstand the revelation of your complicity. Kangalee, the actor, serves as an effective provocateur, a missile in human trappings sent deep into the heart of the matter. Unlike too many current filmmakers who claim to make “message movies” or “take stands” against injustice and the establishment, Kangalee actually does. And he does so poetically, unapologetically, and with an authenticity that shames.
Speller Street Films has done an admirable job remastering the cult film that has screened at universities across the United States and in Europe, however, it is unconscionable that As an Act of Protest has struggled for nearly two decades to land distribution. I can only blame the American (mainly white) critical establishment for not championing it, instead doing the bidding of the film industry—yes, both the “independent” film scene and Hollywood. The fear, the lack of imagination and depth, and the outright racism that has kept the film from garnering a wider audience is unforgivable. The hypocrisy of the independent film scene is apparent. They speciously declare their allegiance to emerging artists, taking “risks” with “edgy” fare, seeing more deeply than the big wig studio executives, eschewing commercial formula, and promoting marginalized voices. This is all nonsense, though. They’re just better at hiding their ugly, venal faces, faithful only to maintaining the status quo, and the rejection, indifference, and bitterness that As an Act of Protest has met with is evidence of this.
These same critics celebrate Ava Duvernay, Barry Jenkins, Spike Lee, all gifted and worthy in their own right, but also too-polite “fighters” for the cause, falling into line, protesting within acceptable lines; they stick to studio parameters, abide by white executive decree, and follow the structural playbook of formulaic moviemaking. They are using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house, which leaves nothing dismantled, in the end. The structures remain. Kangalee has no use for the master’s tools and in his gritty, obliquely stylized aesthetic uses his own tools. And his dismantling is actual, not theoretical. He has no use for levity to break tension. He doesn’t care if you’re bothered by the cacophony of actors screaming into each other’s faces for two hours. He has no use for your precious sensitivities. Why should he? He’s not trying to become anyone’s friend. He is seeking to make enduring, personal art. And he has.
In a certain, eerie sense, the detractors of As an Act of Protest mirror the racist cops, corrupt mayor, and gentrified encroachers in the film itself. They too possess a colonized entitlement, a sense that they have the license to control, own, and kill.
Having followed the underground movements of As an Act of Protest, I possess empirical knowledge of the politics surrounding the film. And of the machinations intent on derailing it. I have witnessed too many cowardly, meek “critics” and academics lazily assail the film as if it posed a threat to their existence. The Guardian’s apathetic pseudo-review and TrustMovies’ ill-informed, vindictive rant, to name but a few. The same people who claim to want revolution and fancy themselves progressives, or even radicals, for that matter, reveal themselves to be anything but—they’re comfortable bourgeoise daunted by the prospect of being discomfited. They prefer a softer, templated blend of activism, something that will go down smoothly with their lattes and Wes Anderson confectionaries. To them, activism is little more than a fashionable accessory, a cute button or hip catch phrase. As an Act of Protest is a litmus test, one to weed out the truly rebellious and throttle the frauds into retreat. It’s exhilarating to watch the assault.
Brian Alessandro currently writes literary criticism for Newsday and is a contributor at Interview Magazine. Most recently, he has adapted Edmund White’s 1982-classic A Boy’s Own Story into a graphic novel for Top Shelf Productions, which won the National Book Award in 2016 for March. His short fiction and essays have been published in Roxanne Gay’s literary journal, PANK, as well as in Crashing Cathedrals, an anthology of essays about the work of Edmund White. In 2011, Alessandro wrote and directed the feature film, Afghan Hound, which has streamed on Amazon and Netflix. In 2016, he founded The New Engagement, a literary journal that has released two print issues and eighteen online issues. His debut novel, The Unmentionable Mann, was published in 2015 and was well received by Huffington Post, The Leaf, Examiner, and excerpted in Bloom. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize twice and the Independent Book Publisher Association Best New Voice Award. He holds an MA in clinical psychology from Columbia University and has taught the subject at the high school and college levels for over ten years. He currently works in the mental health field.
A disaster is when you wake up tomorrow and everything you knew has changed…
Artaud, late 1920’s …a nightmare is when you wake up and you have to justify and explain your anger to your oppressors as they beat you.
Kangalee, 2020
Unlike a plague a social cataclysm is far worse because the oil of the machinery keeps running. Fascism rests on nationalism and maniacal adherence to preservation of racial identity and hierarchy and a defense of that order, it is a swift, direct and organized violence. Massacres are surprising upswells of homicidal urges; genocides contain the celebration of racism and all its devilish rituals, they are capitalist perversions gone amok, they are conscientious slaughters that expect you to pay rent on the land you’re being executed on. When the bureaucracy is still in tact you don’t have Fascism (fascists don’t care for their enemies taxes) you have ‘Atrocity Exhibitionism’: murder in the first degree, things may feel chaotic where in actuality they are all well choreographed. Even what we come to view as science, and nature and luck — all collide under the ominous shadow of State Carnage. In the corners, swelling — are all the desires of artistic paroxysms which are waiting to explode, to actually combat and taunt the sword…with a pen. When a plague rears its head – it is a sign that something else is occurring. It is here that the Theater has an opportunity to shine but quite often it doesn’t. Not because it can’t but because the virus of racism usurps the potential for not only a catharsis, but the hope for a direct expression of the angst of the oppressed and all who find themselves crushed under the boot of the state. The only way to fight it is to enact a catastrophe upon the plague itself. And that is nearly impossible when a nation becomes a mass of spectators and collectors of awful visions as opposed to creators of them.
Poverty porn. Lynch porn. Snuff films. Bulleted brains. Crucified throats. An asthmatic at midnight. Skeletons at the door. Take your pick.
The New Millennium scourge now, although always uncertain, insistent and insidious, is more sophisticated than the bubonic plague and more nefarious than the Capitalism of the 20th century cause it is one we enable with our knees…
(We have sowed the seeds
of Kitty
Genovese)
*
The responsibility is on us – it is on visionaries, artists, revolutionary Leftist activists, humanitarians, it is on good citizenry and that is something latent in many people because the answer’s not going to come from a place that the government mandates or a site that the internet hosts. It will not come from endowments from the sky or in the form of a Netflix series. It will come from us. Crisis, catastrophes, holocausts – are survived and illuminated by those untangling themselves from the web. WE have to figure this out on our own, we have to move forward.
*
With the pandemic on the mind – and the reminder of white violence against black bodies clutching the spin of the world at the moment- amidst an alarming death toll —
— and the macabre glee that the media seems to encourage – a sort of digitized schadenfreude – my mind has constantly been dreaming and returning to the past and some of the hallmarks of my own creative inspirations…When I was most free, at my most dangerous dynamic and draconian. When electricity still surged through my veins.
The work of Antonin Artaud deserves great appreciation in any time in this century, but particularly now because of the Corona Virus and the racism that has been unleashed as a result of it, intertwining themselves into a plague like no other – and because the theater itself is a dead organ which no one has the courage or the impetus to actually want to bury.
Artaud was a French surrealist (although he later broke with the surrealists) and was a maverick of the European arts scene in the 1930’s, he was noted as a superb actor (and acknowledged for his fierce classically handsome features: acute cheekbones and intense eyes) and appeared in Danish filmmaker Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc as the Monk – easily one of the greatest works of 20th century art ever created.
Artaud as the Monk in Dreyer’s overwhelming masterpiece “The Passion of Joan of Arc“
Artaud was an even better poet and writer; a brilliant thinker and the creator of the ‘Theater of Cruelty’, a theater he felt that would impel mankind to acknowledge his weaknesses and strengths and reinvigorate the human spirit to battle injustice, bourgeois malaise, Westernized imperialistic values, and re-connect not only the East and West – but the body and the spirit. his theater was a physically demanding and emotionally violent one, a theater that relied on literal blood sweat and tears; a theater that was based on saliva and the serious intention of changing the audience – meaning the world. He believed if the theater could act as a plague onto the audience – we would be healed. If you could feel the horror of oppression on stage, actually feel it in your bones as an audience member – you would be forced to change society. Confrontational, sweaty, and urgent; nearly impossible but blisteringly inspirational: Julian Beck & Judith Malina’s Living Theater (The Brig, Paradise Now), LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s Black Revolutionary Theater (The Toilet, Dutchman, Slaveship) and rock bands in the sixties like The Doors (“The End,” “When the Music’s Over”) — were heavily influenced by Artaud and are probably the most practical examples of his nearly impenetrable ideas. Even the heartbreaking eyes of Rene Falconetti who plays Joan of Arc in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc was no doubt influenced by Artaud’s notion of bodily insurrection: her eyes give us a revolution within her face, compelling the entire screen to protect and save her from her murder.
For a mainstream example in 1970’s-80’s cinema, watch Pasolini’s Salo (or 120 Days of Sodom) or Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon — the sheer force and commitment to revolt in Al Pacino and Judith Malina’s performances exude a sense of what Artaud hoped for his actors to convey. Although accused incessantly of “agit-prop” and being “too angry” for middle-class cinephiles my own 2001 guerrilla movie As an Act of Protest , an ‘anti-Sundance Independent film’ contains a palpable rage and incurs an Artaudian spirit in the last quarter of the film, where I meld Franz Fanon and Antonin Artaud into a theatrical mise-en-scene which spreads on the screen like a spark kindling before an imminent insurrection against racism….by metabolizing Artaud’s wishful theatrical rage…we find our way to Fanon’s cathartic ending. It is not mere revenge we are after, it is healing. The erasure of trauma.)
Break on Through: The Doors’ Jim Morrison was heavily influenced by Antonin Artaud.
The Living Theater’s anti-Military 1964 play “The Brig” was a crystallization of Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty. The government forced them off stage and out of the country…
Hollywood Revolt: Artaud & Method Acting. Al Pacino in “Dog Day Afternoon”, fueling some of the greatest anti-police screen acting in the history of cinema…enough to incite a riot.
Antonin Artaud is one of the Forgotten men relegated to the desks and journals of aesthete frauds and smug pretentious theater historians who, like the mainstream media’s imprisonment of the word liberation and revolution- try to keep Artaud confined to an intellectual ghetto know that has somehow traversed everything from so called experimental theater to pop new wave music. Yet Artaud remains – for the most smug Baby Boomer theater historians – a chic prototype of the great mad poet who suffered in the asylum not to free the bodies and minds of the people – but to give credence and legitimacy to MFA and graduate students who choose to type about the past as opposed to writing/confronting our present and therefore create a future. Artaud’s desire to overturn repressive systems, rebel against the hatred and imperialistic order of European governments, and wish to author a completely new language for the theater based on cries, screams, and shouts of the highest order is often met with mockery, denigration, and flippant irony suggesting that revolution of the body politic, human soul, and spiritual outreach is not impractical but amateurish and the result of a deranged mind.
Artaud, the Actor about 1920 [from Jack Hirschman’s 1965 Artaud Anthology by City Lights Bookstore]
Antonin Artaud is a forgotten man because those who were most inspired by him died as he did, mainly, and those perhaps like me – those of us who swung and licked up the crumbs of the revolutionary cultural feasts that exploded in the 20th century—have suffered badly exploring in the dark, often breaking our own legs as we attempted to find the stairway up to the bedroom but instead tolerated the crevice between the final step and the landing, unsure of what we might find if we went
All
The
Way
Like the man looking for his keys under the streetlamp ON THE OPPOSITE side of the street…we question and wonder, we stall and procrastinate. Like Hamlet, we retreat into our well plumbed brains holding on to the gasp that might just release that emotional molotov cocktail we are ashamed to throw. Unlike Hamlet, we have to spend more time enacting the destruction of the oppressor, not debating it.
Artaud resonates because his hallucinations were not just real, but painfully genuine.
He was a drug addict who suffered before and after entering an asylum, a man who wrote perhaps the greatest essay on van Gogh and the real meaning behind suicide; the first Anglo European male surrealist to declare a new form of theater while simultaneously denouncing colonialism, brutality and racism, Western provincialism…and the deep deep holiness of the Original Peoples (read his Conquest of Mexico play which excoriates the Spanish conquistadores and devises a play in which in a psychedelic reversal of history: the Indians righteously defeat the Spanish racists and I guarantee you will scratch yourself trying to figure out what happened to revolutionary anti-colonialist people in the theater and why are there no Anglo-Western theater poets like this today?)
Rage Against The Machine: An Artaudian moment in “As an Act of Protest” where the main character destroys the TV which frames his oppressor – The Fascist Mayor – as a virtual omnipotent entity.
He was a genius because he saw all that he could not somehow achieve and actually expressed that; he was a seer who had the temerity to recognize – in brilliant hallucinations- both his own abilities and desires as well as his limits and failures. Like Rimbaud he knew his death lay in the impractical reaches of his own art. Unlike Rimbaud he did not commit suicide of the mind or spirit (as Rimbaud did at 19 by giving up poetry to become an arms dealer) but he waved his own white flag as I now do, as we all must learn how to do.
Artaud, after shock therapy treatments and his time spent in a Rodez mental institution. 1946
There is strength in concession. It is not surrender. It is admitting simply the truth. And sometimes the bad guys do win.
Or rather
The good ones.
Do.
Lose.
*
Read his words. If he doesn’t make you want to form a theater of revolt than I don’t know who will. Read his essays. If you don’t tremble inside it’s not cause you don’t understand his brilliant use of language or the intensity of his visions — it is, perhaps, because you are too far removed from your imagination or your soul. Sometimes both.
My 1997 production of “Dutchman” jolted the MTV generation with this Artaudian rendition of Baraka’s masterpiece with Damon Gupton and Morena Baccarin (courtesy of HERE Theater, NYC)
I hope to convert you immediately, but that is highly unlikely. Antonin Artaud is dense and mysterious, alchemical and concrete, surreal and quotidian, spiritual and political. To read Artaud is unlike any other experience, he is one of the few poet-philosophers of our time who actually embodied his ideas, whose imaginative thrust outdid the corpuscles of his own body.
His words live and breathe on the page even if they could not find their way on the stage. Proving to us all that: the art is not in the “final product.” It is in the germ.
*
Excerpts below from “The Theater and the Plague” by Antonin Artaud, from The Theater and Its Double, 1938. (Translation from French by MC Richards, Grove Press, 1958)
*
“Once a plague is established in a city, the regular forms collapse. There is no maintenance of roads and sewers, no army, no police, no municipal administration. Pyres are lit at random to burn the dead, with whatever means are available. Each family wants to have its own…”
“The dregs of the population, apparently immunized by their frenzied greed, enter the open houses and pillage riches they know will serve no purpose or profit. And at that moment the theater is born. The theater, i.e., an immediate gratuitousness provoking acts without use or profit. “
“But whereas the images of the plague, occurring in relation to a powerful state of physical disorganization, are like the last volleys of a spiritual force that is exhausting itself, the images of poetry in the theater are a spiritual force that begins its trajectory in the senses and does without reality altogether. Once launched upon the fury of his task, an actor requires infinitely more power to keep from committing a crime than a murderer needs courage to complete his act, and it is here, in its very gratuitousness, that the action and effect of a feeling in the theater appears infinitely more valid than that of a feeling fulfilled in life.
Compared with the murderer’s fury which exhausts itself, that of the tragic actor remains enclosed within a perfect circle. The murderer’s fury has accomplished an act, discharges itself, and loses contact with the force that inspired it but can no longer sustain it. That of the actor has taken a form that negates itself to just the degree it frees itself and dissolves into universality.”
“If the essential theater is like the plague, it is not because it is contagious, but because like the plague it is the revelation, the bringing forth, the exteriorization of a depth of latent cruelty by means of which all the perverse possibilities of the mind, whether of an individual or a people, are localized.
Like the plague the theater is the time of evil, the triumph of dark powers that are nourished by a power even more profound until extinction.
In the theater as in the plague there is a kind of strange sun, a light of abnormal intensity by which it seems that difficult and even the impossible suddenly become our normal element…”
“The theater, like the plague, is in the image of this carnage and this essential separation. It releases conflicts, disengages powers, liberates possibilities, and if these possibilities and these powers are dark , it is the fault not of the plague nor of the theater, but of life…”
And the intoxicating, nearly impenetrable, closing paragraphs which never cease to raise the hairs on the back of my neck:
“The theater like the plague is a crisis which is resolved by death or cure. And the plague is a superior disease because it is a total crisis after which nothing remains except death or an extreme purification. Similarly the theater is a disease because it is the supreme equilibrium which cannot be achieved without destruction. It invites the mind to share a delirium which exalts its energies; and we can see, to conclude, that from the human point of view, the action of theater, like that of plague, is beneficial, for, impelling man to see themselves as they are, it causes the mask to fall, reveals the lie, the slackness, baseness, and hypocrisy of our world; it shakes off the asphyxiating inertia of matter which invades even the clearest testimony of the sense; and in revealing to collectivities of men their dark power, their hidden force, it invites them to take, in the face of destiny, a superior and heroic attitude they would never have assumed without it.
And the question we must now ask is whether, in this slippery world which is committing suicide without noticing it, there can be found a nucleus of men capable of imposing this superior notion of the theater, men who will restore to all of us the natural and magic equivalent of the dogmas we no longer believe.”
“Great paintings shouldn’t be in museums…Great paintings should be where people hang out. You can’t see great paintings. You pay ½ a million and hang one in your house and one guest sees it. That’s not art. That’s a shame, a crime…it’s not the bomb that has to go, man. It’s the museums.”
-Bob Dylan, August 1965
Interviewed by Nora Ephron & Susan Edmiston
A lonely Basquiat hangs on 57th Street…
At 9 West 57th street home of the Solow Art & Architecture foundation sits some of the most impressive famous modern art works known from Miro to Matisse…
Adjacent to the lobby on the left hand side 25 feet behind the large glass window hangs one of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s later paintings, Parts that he created in 1984. Appearing like a blurred collage, it is a bold dark red painting hosting a drawing of cooked chicken that appears pasted to the canvas, implying the tenets of his earlier street art or a pasted billboard. Next to it – are charred fragments, his idiosyncratic scribblings, a flame and then to the right of the canvas one his cryptic texts in which the word SNAKES can be made out. The yellow and blue streaks added another layer to the image, granting it a strange tension it might not have otherwise…
But I’m no art critic or expert and I don’t need to be. I’m simply relaying what I see and feel.
Seeing a Basquiat live is quite impressive. Not unlike the awesome effect of a Rothko (one of which hung in Christie’s window all summer long during an auction)
In the Solow gallery, the lights come on at 8am and you are immediately impressed.
And then disappointed when you are realize you are not allowed to enter the foundation’s gallery so all the art work hangs on a white lonely wall collecting 5th Avenue dust at best and perhaps a strained glance. With artwork with an estimated value of TWO HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS – donated to a private foundation of which the New York Real Estate mogul Sheldon Solow is the ONLY MEMBER of – this is a bunker that was created as a TAX SHELTER and since public accessibility is simply out of the question…it actually raises the stature and interest in these artworks because if they cant be seen by some everyday bum poet like me – it must be an important collection…You can make a private donation to the foundation but under no circumstances can you see the artwork up close and in person…you have to try your best to squint pass the glass windows and make out what you can of the Basquiat and Miro’s hanging in there.
Like forgotten bodies on a crucifix. Which is what most art becomes anyway…there are more eyes that have laid upon a man hanging than a great painting…Lynchings have probably, cumulatively, brought together more people for free in public spaces – than great art work. And lynchings, too, in the end made money. They pressed postcards of black men having been lynched. People collected these.
I’ve always been curious about death and galleries such as the Solow Foundation , may be , in fact, where souls go to die. You have to have had a soul in order to die. And most artwork – even if their creators are malevolent – had souls…and continue to have them…they just eternally linger beneath dust and broken light. Like vampires who can’t die.
But you don’t have to be John Berger to know that the statement Mr. Solow is making is simply: “I own this. You do not. And never will. ”
Far away from the public and his audience: a Basquiat hangs twenty feet away from the glass window in the lobby of the Solow Building. A painting surrounded by…uninhabited space…dust that will never fall upon a human shoulder…and light unbroken by a bobbing head or footfalls that go to kneel before the holy altar of powerful art. Do not weep for empty churches – for they at least can rejuvenate one. Even an atheist can gain sense of his soul in an empty church. But it must be empty. It’s the cordoned off, hostile emptiness of a gallery or museum or “personal” foundation that should make us weep…
Imagine if your lover hung on the wall, waiting for you.
“First of all bullfighting is, as somebody once said very well, indefensible andirresistible …but I’ve turned against it for very much the same reason that my father, who was a great hunter, suddenly stopped hunting he said, “I’ve killed enough animals.” I’m ashamed of myself…I’ve seen enough of those animals dead, it was…a waste…almost all Spanish intellectuals have been against bullfighting for the last 150 years…Lorca is one of the few Spanish intellectuals who ever approved of bullfighting.”
— Orson Welles, 1974
If I were teaching a class on Brian Alessandro’s literature, I’d call it: “How Hard it is to Write and Move an Audience…With Unattractive Individuals.”
Alessandro’s follow up to the impressive The Unmentionable Mann (2015) is even more deviant, crafty, and insightful than its predecessor. His fifth novel (two previously unpublished, including Freud Droid which some avid readers lucky to get their hands on it — consider his best work and his first book, An Ego Dream Game, self-published in a limited edition in 2003) takes the gloves off completely and gathers prisoners as aggressively as it tries to shame the devil.
I admired the novel without liking a single character.
In what I felt initially had superficial similarities to a Todd Solondz film and its themes (the smug white suburban malaise, the yuppie heart of darkness, the emphatic white man’s ironic slouch towards racism or sexuality, etc.) Performer Non Grata is actually a backhanded slap at the hideous nature of white male masculinity (particularly) in all its toxic forms and incarnations (he displays the gamut’s psychosis from heterosexual to homosexual to beyond) and the violent escapades that that culture breeds. Our contempt for animals, women, and all entities that could be construed as their “others” is alarming and exquisitely detailed in this phantasmagoric book.
Centered around Risk Bonaventura, an American corporate zombie, and his deranged obsession with bullfighting and all that it implies— we are embroiled in a bizarre menage-a-trois between him, Javier his Spanish matador lover and Lorna, his wife, an academic and teacher (a character inspired by the deteriorated passion and warped ideology of none other than the disappointing Camile Paglia), Performer Non Grata is many things. But it is principally a crystallization of what has been latent in Alessandro’s entire body of work – from his novels to his plays, his film Afghan Hound, even some of his drawings – the pursuit of characters who are not particularly likeable. Especially Queer characters, that’s where his transgression lies. Javier is deeply disturbing, transmitting both homicidal and suicidal urges of the imprisoned masculine Queer; Risk and Lorna’s sociopathic son, Theo, is a graphic example of all that is terrible, coming to fruition. When you read the book, ask yourself: Which of these awful renderings could be me? The title says it all: there is no performer. There is only you.
The book is an orgy of sadism, meditations on Feminine and Masculine psychologies, the horror of rape culture, and the schadenfreude ethos of our media world and literally everything it embodies.
I could say it’s about a bullfighter, but it isn’t. And the novel in no way glorifies the atrocious act of killing a bull. It skewers the male perversion of wanting to become a bull fighter. I make this point because, unfortunately, many progressive and radical activists are losing their knack for insight and humor and are not understanding the differences between satire, irony, parody versus work that promotes violence against animals. I find it deeply disturbing that we allow Ernest Hemingway to sit comfortably on the edges of the Left because of his association with Cuba and later Castro – while not acknowledging his passionate desire to exert and romanticize aggressive male behavior, namely hunting and bullfighting. Orson Welles, in a stunning 1974 BBC interview, conceded how terribly wrong he was to have indulged in such a backward mode of thinking and behaving and he declared how sad he was that he and his ilk had participated in the murder of animals.
I could say the book is obsessed with rape but it isn’t. I could say it’s merely about toxic masculinity, but it isn’t. It transmits aspects of toxic masculinity. And it becomes increasingly the result of those toxicities, it expresses the pangs of the spoils of war.
I could say the novel seems to hold several mirrors up to the myriad of rotten pathologies in Western society but it doesn’t….at least not in a detached way. And if it doesn’t do that it’s not a mirror. However it is a reflection.
Alessandro houses a grotesque gallery of 21st century psychosis, proclivities, and behaviors— all which are vicious and antagonistic avatars, revealing the damage we endure and witness in our everyday life.
You learn a lot about a writer you like by focusing on how you approach their work. It’s unconscious of course, but it does determine a lot of how you process and inquire. If works of art are personal it’s also because we share a bit of ourselves as we interpret it.
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If Unmentionable Mann was statelier and more mainstream, Performer Non Grata is more challenging and akin to the madcap, with its gravely dark humor barbed like a wire. Unlike many writers or filmmakers who try to employ a heavy satire or understated morality (often lapsing into nihilism – a problem for White authors as it is for Black hip-hop artists ) Alessandro is not trying to flex his “awareness” or wink at the problems of the white bourgeoisie or his working-stiff brethren, somehow desperate to always make a clever point at how moribund their culture is. Alessandro actually cares about his characters, despite how atrocious they are. Most artists nowadays and since the New Millennium have derogated themselves to cynicism, hipster irony, and the celebration of their worthlessness— as opposed to seriously criticizing it. The way most White people shrug their shoulders when confronted with changing the racist mores of their culture or how most men (gay or straight) recede like a middle-aged man’s hairline – when confronted with challenging other men on the oppression inflicted on women – our mothers, sisters, daughters, lovers, friends, aunts, teachers, co-workers, etc. – and the bestiality committed on our children’s minds.
When satire became smug parody, social commentary loses its way. An early critical observation I encountered with other readers or critics was that perhaps Alessandro’s characters were too venal, not aware enough of their harm to themselves and particularly to their victims, the people they inflict physical and psychological violence upon. But I came away feeling that was his point. To have these characters care would be dishonest. True caring is in the writing of the book. The characters are just that: characters. And so are most people.
Burroughs, Genet haunt the book marginally – but I would actually say the Rabelaisian spirit in the book is found through the alienated great grandchildren of Marshall McLuhan: abandoned and angry in this digital Sahara we are in – clamoring through the character of Theo, who asserts his power in the book (and over the reader) by his demented depictions that he wields through the power of YouTube, the young sociopath exceeding what McLuhan imagined, we’ve divorced ourselves through technology whilst creating a “global village,” but have made that community one that is steeped in the demonic nature of defiling and exploiting. A literal “futurist” notion of how to push the horror of rape. Theo makes YouTube scary in a very clear, direct, and immediate way. I am glad I don’t have children.
Alessandro’s proclivity for crafting an enjoyable reading experience about unlikable characters, is a conscious maintenance of art. Employing caricature, even profane exaggeration, he paints on his canvas in a myriad of ways – literary characters—not ersatz “real” people. I am not sure when audiences lost touch with characters VS “real” people and began to foolishly and erroneously judge dramatic art based on its human characters’ verisimilitude as “actual” persons living next door. Art is about the insides not “the next door.” If art does actually teach, then you learn from characters – not actual people.
When actors do it, principally in movies, it tells you more about yourself than about them. We like “the bad guy” in movies for example because he may be what most people actually want to be. There’s a strange notion that the more pitched, strained, or exaggerated an actor’s performance or mannerisms – the less human they are. The West has been categorically labeling behaviors and assigning pathologies based on our physical behavior and how we appear for at least the past five hundred years and no one finds it bizarre that our schools, teachers, critics have a nasty desire to keep ‘human reality’ at a base level, never rising above a Library tone of voice, never acknowledging the horror of civilization or the grandeur of opera in our lives.
In his excellent article entitled “Considering a Place in Fiction for Badly Behaved Queers” for the Gay & Lesbian Review, Alessandro expounds on this and specifically how it pertains to the presentation of Queer characters in novels and movies. The biggest misconception is that “reality” is truth. Where in fact we all know the reverse is the truth. And while it is true that most “lessons,” emotional impacts and even lingering thoughts are mainly imbued through the technique of “bad” characters, Black, Queer, and Women artists have to always mine the impositions of their double-consciousness when presenting behaviors because it is usually members of the oppressed class that do battle with the “cops in the head” when attempting to reveal the ugly side of any milieu, whether it’s real or completely made-up. It’s one thing for the stupid critic to attack you, a whole other thing when it’s a member of your own tribe.
The characters, even when slightly alien, are all manifestations of archetypes in one way or another, but Lorna and Theo reveal something else behind the mask. They are contemptuous in ways that are more insidious than the husband and father. Maybe it’s because they are, too, results of these Risks in life. When you read the book, you may pay attention to this dynamic. Alessandro does a superb job spinning the cobweb amidst this trio, an admirable quality in prose and one that is particularly cinematic.
While Risk felt easy enough for me to critique because of my own innate dislike (and disinterest) for such figures, it’s his freaky wife and son that disgusted me so — and upon which the novel’s emotional elements hinge on. Lorna and Theo would be more traditionally linked to the underarm of patriarchy, as victims of course. And they are, as well as being willing participants in the oppressive and hateful matrix known as capitalism. Alessandro makes them as ugly, if not more so, than the appalling weak Risk and the demented Javier, the toxic male embodiments, and their Queer applications. If the men were the cause, the women and children are the symptoms (Lorna’s thesis on rape is absolutely appalling and probably one of the best modern excoriations of the empathic losses we seem to be gaining every single day in the United States alone ). Upon my third reading, I was very excited how the novel seamlessly unfolds due to the character’s psychology and behavior. That may sound obvious, but it’s not. Some great novels are steeped in “telling a story,” versus character portraits. One way isn’t better than the other, the impact a writer makes is owning up to their strengths and not trying to con us. Alessandro is interested in psychology, he has a Master’s degree in it. And he applies that to character construction, not plot ornamentation.
I maintain if we reduce Shakespeare to plot — there’s nothing there. Shakespeare is about everything else. He exists in HOW and WHAT. Not the “meanings” or plot. And certainly not in appealing to audiences who want to be flattered. If you ever meet a Lady MacBeth or Richard III — run. Because they will not be anything remotely as fascinating as Shakespeare’s creations.
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Creations. This is where Brian Alessandro thrives: where he lets loose. I like his anarchic humor and his uniquely “patrician punk” approach to writing and I hope he takes it further. For its all HIM. And in his world he has a lot to share about the society we participate in. Edmund White astutely declared the book as “speaking to our crazy times.” It’s not reflective of the times. It is the times. Within the novel, there’s nothing sacred (except annihilation) and nothing pure (except self-hatred, compliance to imperialist cruelty) and the heartbeat of the book seems crunched in and viperous and reaching out through its tentacles of social media and the internet. Kubrick gives you HAL. Alessandro gives you Theo. Pay attention, this character will have more gravity in the years to come. For the sociopathy of youth is the future of the novel and the world. Alessandro may in fact be linked to Kubrick’s clinical beliefs: man is fixed. He won’t change, possibly can’t – ever. He just develops…and usually that means his ability to hate, inflict pain, destroy just becomes more sophisticated. Anthony Burgess famously criticized Kubrick’s cinematic vision of Alex, his creation in his novel Clockwork Orange. Burgess felt that post 1968 Americans want (need?) to acknowledge that there is no hope, whilst Burgess himself was convinced change is always possible. It certainly is a moral choice how we decide to leave our characters. Do they learn lessons, is there a consciousness that gets expanded? Is there an empathy that gets embraced? (Funny enough, these questions rarely get specifically oriented. Gender, sex, identity aside – Native Americans/Indigenous and Blacks have a far more complex, darker, and brighter notion of “hope” than any white man could conceive. Except for Beckett or Kafka. Or even Burroughs, who’d probably state that if he had hope, he wouldn’t be a writer.)
Something I was struck by and never had considered after first reading was how much gay men’s struggles with masculinity are not just about seeking approval from other men in the way that hetero men do, but also in the ways that hetero women seek male attention/approval of their femininity. While I knew that was the case in terms of physique. Speaking with the novel’s editor, Laura Schleifer, I don’t think I quite realized that “performative/ritualistic acts of masculinity like bullfighting might be done by the male gays for the male gaze of the male gays.” It was something of a revelation to me when she announced this.
I refer to filmmaking or avatars of ‘smart’ independent cinema to broach the problem and connection I see inherent in both literature and movies: there’s a LOT of criticism of everything, facts even, tons of information but very little about life. And very little expression from a place of either genuine fear or outrage. The white nihilist filmmakers I grew up with like Todd Solondz and Neil LaBute did a lot of damage to my generation. It let white people off the hook, it created an intellectual distance from actual pain, and for me, ironically, it just affirmed what I always felt about most white people: they are even more callous amongst themselves, actually, than with me.
Brian Alessandro gets dangerous because he dares to reveal depth in characters who may be cruel or nasty — but he is not doing it to “understand” them as much as he doing it to state what he feels are facts about our life: despicable people live around us, yes, and they do have souls…but that is what prompts us to ask what is important to us, how much of society is bent or compliant to patriarchy, warped racial and gender views, demeaning of sex in all its forms and willfully enabling the rote pathological behavior of masculinity – toxic or otherwise – and what it “should” mean. Lorna crystallizes much of this and perhaps that is where the book’s political and social ills are actually clearest. Lorna could actually understand a Donald Trump and even make a case for him. Trump is a human being, folks. That alone should tell you something.
But decide for yourself. A plot synopsis would be irrelevant and insulting to a book that operates in both the imagination and the tactile world. The style of the writing is the meaning and one needs read a mere five pages of any part to get a sense of the power, humor, and ferociousness of good writing.
Some readers may wonder if the characters “change,” do they get “saved,” do they “see the light”?
Shakespeare died in 1616. Did his plays give any consciousness and empathy to his own culture? Did he make men, women, children, whomever – more sensitive? No. Quite the opposite, you could argue. The international prism (and prison!) of Capitalism cast its net, giving us racism and the formal end of humanity (the end of humanity is not going to be a nuclear holocaust, it was already a holocaust over the Atlantic ocean hundreds of years ago. Just ask the sharks!)– a mere three years later in 1619 when the Dutch first brought African slaves to North American soil. Three years after Old Willy died, the power of his words instigated everything he may been against.
Besides the bible, I am sure Shakespeare’s words were read by many slave traders. The same way Nazis read Rilke. Or worse, privately whistling the melodies of Mendelssohn or Mahler as they maimed the descendants of those artists.
Where’s the light here, attained?
If art had the power to imbue empathy in a revolutionary way, such human nightmares could never occur. But art unfortunately cannot do that. It is mysterious, but it’s not alchemy. And it’s not about casting a spell as it is about mesmerizing the human heart, the human mind. The best we can hope for is to be reminded of our own humanity. Art doesn’t change the world. It changes your relationship with the world. And occasionally can prompt us to take action. Poetry unfortunately has inspired man to rape and pillage. It also has inspired man to help each other, be kinder, and fight for the underdog.
Some people firmly believe art should provide empathy. When I was younger I did as well and was terrified when I realized it couldn’t. I feel art, ultimately, should shake your core. I felt absolutely no empathy except for the world at large after reading Performer Non Grata. The “world” that must endure these awful people.
I felt for myself. Because I must endure these atrocious characters from the novel — in our society. And sometimes tolerate them if I want to eat. Life is hard. So is the book. But, like most things that matter, that’s what makes it so special. Art is not for the weak. Neither is Brian Alessandro’s writing.
“All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
This quote from Beckett’s ultimate novella Worstward Ho (1983) is one that could apply to Richard Pryor’s literal life. One, had he been a tattooed inmate of this universe – which he plumbed through like a torpedo – that would have been scrawled on his arm. It not only could be a striving addict’s mantra or a rebel’s reminder, but an affirmation for all of us who leap and try but always find ourselves disappointed either in ourselves or the world around us. It is the artist’s Hail Mary.
Read how Samuel Beckett and Richard Pryor’s tragicomedy saves and enlightens us in the March edition of the Luminal Theater’s Wavelengths.
I am thrilled that Rebel Satori Press’ new book FEVER SPORES: THE QUEER RECLAMATION OF WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS edited by Brian Alessandro and Tom Cardamone has become a best-seller and includes my own essay on Burroughs and reflections on his impact on me as an artist, a writer, Black cis-straight man – who, as an outsider myself, identifies with the radicalism of Queer outlaws like him.
Rebel Satori Press’ new book, FEVER SPORES, features essays & conversations on William S. Burroughs by luminaries and independent authors alike
Ever controversial, the book seeks to re-contextualize the man, his guns, his history, his homosexuality, his relationship to women, transgressive ideas and writings – within the 21st century mainstream LBGTQ community and their new Queer outliers. Featuring interviews with luminaries such as David Cronenberg to Blondie to Samuel Delaney and urgent essays from writers such as Laura Schleifer, Jason Napoli Brooks, Michael Carrol, and Charlie Vazquez, FEVER SPORES will not disappoint and it opens new doors into new perceptions on Burroughs’ legacy and profound influence.
My essay on Burroughs explores the notion of words, oppression, the terror of language, addiction and the nature of art itself
Write text, edit by copy and paste and whatever and however the text is either repositioned or pasted, I leave it alone – altered format and all.
I am only concerned with the text itself, with the flow of words and their implied meaning.
The nuance, the presentation, the visual style happens randomly, sometime dictated by the order of karma or energy or some other mysterious force, sometimes by sheer beautiful accident.
The mission for me is to get these words up on the mountain –not fixed but moving upward somehow into someone’s eye or mind; penetrating another part of the brain where there might be a little less resistance.
The trick is how to create and destroy at the same time. In redefining myself, in trying to consciously make an identity and present one to you – I not only transcend lies or fantasy, but I imbue the imagination…
We saw the electricity finally that had been there all this time. As if a current had exploded right in front of us demanding to be seen and not necessarily heard…but acknowledged. Its joy had returned. As if the television went from Black and white into technicolor. And all that time we held our breathes foolishly, as if we were not going to make it. And we realized we were 44 not 14 and that was a beautiful thing… because although we’d seen the lower depths we could at least now imagine the greatest heights. And that was good enough. And if colors can remind you of that- or even your own reflection in the mirror (finally) well damn it you’ve kicked the insides of the snipers who await silently with the cops in your head ready to arrest your bliss at any moment. You won. And you can’t believe it. Cause you could never simply admit that you were worth more than the world you entered wanted you to believe.
AVAILABLE DIGITALLY OCTOBER 30, 2020 ON “VIMEO ON DEMAND”!
A film that started with the murder of Amadou Diallo in 1999…and resuscitated it’s social relevance and artistic merit itself, pathetically, in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. Death’s energy may kickstart the wheel of protest art but it is the hope of a creative retaliation that makes it explode….
“When will American cinema catch up to the full-throttle legacy of Rebel music and songs that declaim change and challenge authority?”
– Robert Kramer, American Radical Filmmaker (Ice, Milestones)
When all is said and done
you stand alone with a catalog of memories and actions. And like the Actor, it is our actions ultimately that define who we are, how we choose to fight or retreat. We all feel like the Nowhere Man sometimes but maybe it is not failure or malaise that consumes, but risks that genuinely tried. Not “nowhere plans” but actual attempts – stabs at the wall, great failures perhaps – but proof one has lived and had thoughts and some passion for SOMETHING. And, if anything, at least my words can do what I can’t: resist trembling in the face of Capitalism and the force of obedience. The “bastard literature” which may have given birth to my own madness is one that I claim with glee. Radical art, protest art, works and ideas that rejuvenates every sense of urgency from the eyebrow to the bowels. There is no more time for games. This ends it all. Walk into the valley, the great wash of the sun. turn your back on mediocrity. make art that can’t – but tries – to alter the world. And when they say you’re hateful, you’re diseased, you’re un-romantic – just let your sigh do the talking.
After a successful re-emergence of this cult classic in 2015, Speller St Films is preparing to finally release a limited edition of the DVD replete with a special facsimile of the original screenplay and the notes that made up my own conception of ‘Third Cinema 2000: a cocktail of guerrilla film-making and the political stringency of Black and Brown peoples oppressed and colonized throughout the world, who not only are conscious of their condition, but seek to change it by “any means necessary.” As an Act of Protest is the anti-Spike Lee version of a socially conscious films and attacks racism from the oppressed’s point of view with no irony or pop-art trappings; no advertising hipness or cool slang. It is meant to destroy the oppressor and all who saddles his gaze with his and uplift the dignity of the radical who fights him. It is a direct descendant of singular films such as Melvin van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Christopher St. John’s The Top of the Heap Oscar Williams’ The Final Comedown and downright dangerous Blacks films like The Spook Who Sat By The Door.
Acknowledged by Variety in 2002 as being a “powerful” film that aims to “teach and shock,” it was heralded by many on the underground and alternative Black film critics (such as Kam Williams and Hugh Pearson) who championed the film when mainstream papers refused to address it. Woefully pertinent and tragically eternally relevant in the racist world we live in, As an Act of Protestis a gritty, poetic, theatrical drama that does what the best conscious hip-hop albums did and what the gnarliest politically-tinged punk albums sought to do: it speaks truth and implicates us all in the decision-making of how we are going to live our lives.
Dennis Leroy Kangalee 