Have been out of town most of this week, but I had to say something about this Feburary 4 event at the BPC: Marshall Reese and Gary Sullivan read together last week, and it was a truly memorable and relevant experience. Allow me to enthuse for a minute about Marshall's wild, Mac Lowian vocalizations and his reintegration of political content into romance-novel lovemaking scenarios involving the majority whip: this part of the event was masterful. Marshall is a dedicated political artist who fortunately understands that humor and activism can coexist in the same space. What was the quote? "The more of that space they take away, the greater the darkness I draw from becomes." This darkness is not a bad place to inhabit, overall, like the process of attempting to retain one's optimism in the midst of total suveillance. There's a scenario in which the poet reads along with a speak-and-spell, his commodified language simultaneously entertaining and disturbing, making strange.
Meanwhile, I was pretty dazzled by Gary Sullivan's reading. There's no denying the relevance and timeliness of this poetry. As a plugged-in form of social satire which determinedly lingers over moments of embarrassment and awkwardness, it seems so complete. Part of the problem is trying to figure out how to talk about it without ruining the effectiveness of the jokes by belaboring points which would be otherwise intuitive (though Jack makes an effective stab at it here). One of the things I enjoyed the most about Gary's reading was that it managed to recapture the sense of reading as performance in all dimensions. Each of the pieces he read involved taking on a definite and distinctive character that was distinctively not his "poet personality." These included the enthusiastic telephone operator of "Poetry Phone," the weird gagging child who recited "I MADE A LOIN," and the bardic character in "Bruce" who riffed Bruce Andrews-like jargon with run-on syntax over a hilarious impersonation of Springsteen. The result of all these is part parody, part homage, like much of what Sullivan does. Then there are the equally "staged" and acted multivoiced pieces, such as the hilarious "Olson Studies," in which an authoritative Olsonesque character tries to train a mealymouthed subaltern to pronounce some of Olson's famous catchphrases correctly, to little avail.
What made these performances so effective, as I noted regarding the Bruce character, was the way in which Gary expertly manages to critique something by in many ways becoming or embodying that thing, a position which creates conflicted and coexistent layers of irony. Anyone in acting since Anna Deveare Smith can tell you that to imitate, one also has to be able to sympathize performatively. After all, the inability to act like the other evinces the fact that one literally does not see the other. But there's another wrinkle to Gary, and by implication, to Flarf: it's the notion of acting an impossible role, that of a male critiquing maleness. The paradoxical attempt to celebrate the experience of embarrasment, or the "weak male," often results in a strange gleefully exasperated exploration of male-male hating or left-left hating, an exploitation of the fragility in masculinity as well as the failure of its utopian narratives (including Marxism and, yikes, feminisms which employ Marxist rhetoric?) in the larger liberal culture. In this context, Sullivan's transfigured, trashy pleasures accrue a lingering sense of social satire. This was among the funniest and liveliest of all the readings I have been to this year...people in the audience were practically rolling on the floor and gasping for air. What does it matter if the material is Googled? As the receiver of a sort of grostesquely distorted zeitgeist, this poet knows where to direct his antennae, and how to embody and perform the data in a convincing way. That's what brings this work to life.
