The Actual Annotation
06 March 2024
Animal J. Smith
1 Animal is going to disappear, completely
Well, that happened. How Chris (the poet here) knew I’ll never know, but he was prescient After moving to New York City in 1998 and getting established there as a performer, musician, and leatherman (link to Beat One: A Night At The Lure), I’d found a studio apartment in an office building conversion four blocks due East of the World Trade Center. I lost that home as a result of the terror attacks on New York on September 11, 2001, and with it everything I possessed, including my entire performance archive of The Animal Ensemble and more than 20 years’ worth of handwritten scores, performance documentation including every extant recording of my work, my entire collection of sheet music dating from the 1970’s, my US Army Band and Chorus archive, and untold notes, ideas, posters, performance costuming, accessories, and memorabilia ... everything was lost, and with it any evidence that I had ever been an artist of any sort, that Animal had ever existed. My journey back took 21 years.
2 Standing out on the street
Down the backstairs
Of three-three-three
5 Smoking a nervous cigarette
Squinting into the evening August sun
Beard scratchy and hot with tobacco
Chest tightening
Warmed flannel
10 Battered leather
Sweat building up in his pits
Chris got that spot-on. The makeshift theater space where I performed Burn The Quilt was a converted office space on the fourth floor of 333 Valencia Street in San Francisco, and it was totally unventilated. Although August in San Francisco tends to be cool due to the summer fog, we do get a few hot days during the month, and the last weekend in August of 1997 was no exception. I was sweating like a stuck pig before, during, and after each performance. I’m not a tobacco user but I sure as hell felt like a smoke, and if I was smoking anything it was probably a couple of hits of green bud to take the edge off before my final performance.
It should be noted that 333 Valencia Street, then and now, did not have a backstairs or fire escape, but there was a large parking lot behind the building where we actually burned a strip of the quilt panel I made during each show, and Chris got my feeling and attitude exactly right. Uncanny.
It’s the last show of four
And the second-to-last day of summer
That night, after the show had closed, I was in a pizza joint on Folsom Street having a slice with a friend. I glanced up at the TV and saw the news: Princess Diana had just died in an auto accident in Paris. My friend saw my shocked face and said, “You didn’t know?” I hadn’t bothered to check the TV news while I was recovering from the performance. Strangely, that’s how I’ve been able to remember the performance dates for Burn The Quilt all these years, and I’m resisting the temptation towards metaphor.
Tomorrow he will clear everything out of the shoebox dressing room
10 Sweep up
Glitter, hair
Hand-cut strips of orange cellophane
Pack props, instruments
Wigs
My strike process for BTQ was to take down the “distressed” Rainbow Pride and Leather Pride flags that were the backdrop for the performance (“distressed” by my hacking at them with scissors, cutting them to shreds, stomping on them and dragging them through the parking lot of the theater, making sure they were dirty as fuck, smeared with motor oil, just as debased and desecrated as I could make them. I cut the heart out of the Leather Pride flag (which I always thought was a bit cloying), wrapped it in rough twine, made sure it was caked with dirt and gunk, and hung it from one of the lighting poles. It suited me.
15 Into two big bags
Sling these over his shoulders
Give Jill the keys
Get his deposit dollars back
Stuff them in his jeans
Close! My friend Hank Pellisier (aka Hank Hyena) had rented the theater space earlier that year, and when he ran into me in the Castro one day, said, “You should do a show!” He gave me the space for free, and I might have cleared $100 from all four performances... I had a policy of holding my ticket prices to $5.00 so that people with AIDS, on disability, and low-income folks from the neighborhood could see my work (which always put out a measure of hope for surviving AIDS). So I had a few bucks to shove in my pants pocket – enough to replenish my weed supply and treat some friends to dinner.
20 If he were a different person he’d burn this place down
In a blaze of glory
He sees that
Has a sharp imagination
Swilling gasoline out on the wooden staircase
Here's where Chris keys into my strong iconoclast streak – burn it all down in a radical pyrotechnic pyre of fire! Thing is, it had been done (by the artists Seemen that summer near the industrial waterfront where they torched a spinning effigy of Rush Limbaugh), and God forbid I should be derivative!
25 Clattering down in heels
Tossing a lit match over a perfumed, expanded shoulder
Strutting out onto Valencia
Hailing a cab
Extended glossy nails
Although Chris gets my flamboyant and to-hell-with-it side well here, this is where we see the divergence/mashup in Chris’ vision of me that day and in those times. I’m not a drag performer. My stage presence – and life presence – is, if anything, hypermasculine, a classic leather/biker look with shaved head, beard, big booming voice, very much not feminine. A reaction, perhaps, to being called a “fem” throughout middle and high school in the 1970s with a touch of being disattracted to cross-dressing of any sort, especially sexually (I hate it viscerally when “cunt”, “bitch”, and “pussy” are used in sexual encounters with men, that’s just not me), but I like being what I find attractive. Plus, in San Francisco, drag performance artists are a dime a dozen, you know? And to be brutally honest, I don’t have the balls to do drag even as a joke. I just don’t have the courage to see myself feminized and to act that way, and I have the utmost respect for my many friends and fellow artists who have made drag a major part of their lives on- and offstage. They are brilliant, and I could never hope to pull it off as well as they.
30 If they’re not going to come and fill the place for him
Laugh
Weep
Applaud with hands smacking hard, painfully
Such is their enthusiasm
35 Clapping at their collective revelation
Gasp
To get outside immediately
Worked up
Animated
40 Ready to change the world
Right now
C’mon c’mon
A brilliant, dangerous urgency
Here, Chris senses the impetus that we all felt as queer artists in the age of AIDS: get your work out now, get it all out, because the minute your virus activates, your days and hours are numbered. We’d all seen friends, colleagues, loved ones go out in a flash, waking up one day with a slight cough and be dead of ravaging PCP pneumonia by midnight. Or worse, and far more common, the long, slow decline of end-stage and final-stage AIDS – but the result was the same: our work cut off just as we were ascending, getting traction, getting good. There was so much to say, so much that needed to be done, needed to change instantly for us to have hope of surviving to make more art.
Chris also alludes to a “collective revelation” and the response he senses that my work evokes in my audiences, and he got that exactly. To my enduring surprise and delight, more than once members of my audience would be stuck to their chairs after show’s end, just stunned by what they had seen and heard. It was a revelation to me that just maybe I was on to something with my radical message of blistering hope where we had no reason to have hope at all, and the words and music and tactics I used onstage and off to convey that hope to other and to myself. I’m grateful that I was able to move people in those ways, and the hope is that I still can.
If they’re not going to show up
45 Buy a goddam ticket
Spend their money on beer and pizza in the Castro instead
This is where I had to shake my head and wonder exactly how Chris had managed to get into my head at that moment in time as he looked back through his poet’s telescope to 1997 ... this is almost word-for-word what I was thinking and had been feeling for some time about the guys in the community who would tell me “I’m your biggest fan” but never bother to walk the half-block from the goddamn bar to the warehouse where I was performing. The best and most honest reason for skipping my shows was presented to me by a stately fellow named Charles, a friend of one of the subjects of my political performances, when I asked him why he hadn’t come to see the show about his friend: “I had a fist up my ass.”
Then nobody should perform here
No tired beat poetry
No simpering cabaret tunes
50 No dry discussions
Flaky old queers sitting around a microphone on tired chairs
Circling the same unsolvable moans
This was in fact my take on the poetry and performance scene of the late 90’s in San Francisco: tired, insular, moribund, uninspired, whining endlessly about how oppressed we all were and far too limp to get it up to “stick it to the Man” or stick anything anywhere. And all of it was oh, so hetero. Small wonder I was chomping at the bit to get out of there.
No
They can flatten the burnt-up palace
55 Scrape away the blackened wreckage
Build something, anything
Grey and sleek and pointless
Computer-generated glass by an assistant architect
An intern
60 From a second-rate firm
Offices to let
To sit empty
Waiting for a start-up
And the right price
Although 1997 predates startup culture as we think of it today, this is an accurate impression of my feelings regarding tear-it-down artistic destruction and the vast realms of new build in the City that sat unoccupied, waiting for a downtown boom that never seems to happen. There’s an echo of that here today in 2024, as our downtown sits emptier than ever in the wake of COVID and the prevalence of remote work ... ghostly emptiness has replaced ghastly excess and no one knows quite what to do with all that space or how to fill it with life again.
65 But he’s no arsonist
When he’s off stage
He’s not one who burns things up
No, I’m not. And I never was. Despite my name, appearance, and onstage bombast, I’m not a vandal in the classic sense – if I’m inclined to destroy a literal or figurative structure, I’m even more inclined to have a vision of what to replace that structure with. Chris keys into a recurring theme in my art life and my daily walk: things are seldom what they seem. I’m not what you think I am, but I am everything that you think I am.
He’s a vanisher
He’ll spend the deposit on a Greyhound ticket
70 Slip out of town and into the autumn
Head somewhere quieter
Getting sicker, eventually
Tired
An animal that can find a hole
75 A place to retreat to
Exactly, Chris. I took a Greyhound more than once, heading up to the North Coast for a weekend just to see, smoke dope, think... I was blessed with a connection to an Episcopal retreat up in Lake County on the side of Cobb Mountain about two hours north of the City called the Little Portion Hermitage. Father Leo Joseph was the Guardian there, and my best friend Lanny (who ran sound and lights for Burn The Quilt) was Leo’s boyfriend for years and lived up there. I spent many weekends and holidays in quiet contemplation up there, and when I started the HIV miracle cocktail drugs in 1996, Fr. Leo had me up there for about a week as I was sweating and shaking and breaking them in. It was indeed a hidey-hole for this animal, and I found blessing and comfort there.
Burrow away in a blanket
Fever and hallucinations
Dreaming of grasshoppers
Breeze
80 Notes on a flute climbing up scales
Higher, higher
Chris scores an unintended echo of a lyric from my signature tune Pieces of Jesus:
He climbs to the top of the overtone series,
He marshals his partials, he collates his queries.
When I would escape for a time in exactly this way, there were plenty of visions, dreams, apparitions taking forms of new and intimidating music and thought, Lord knows I sweated out a ton of toxins on my retreats, and when I’d play my flute on that mountain, I could hear the echoes ring forever, overtones and partials spinning up into the ionosphere and beyond ... those places where I could be loosed from the wires of the City and let my sound expand, freely and fully.
There’s a glory in this too, Animal
In the existing
In the attempt
85 In the doing
The first time I read this, it brought a tear to my eye. How the fuck did Chris know? I was not ever underwritten by arts councils, grants, well-to-do benefactors. I financed every show myself, paid the performers carfare out of pocket, and was told by the theatre critic for the San Francisco Chronicle that “we have no intention of ever reviewing your work.” But I was intrepid. I knew that I had to keep going, I could never stop, no matter how much I was ignored and blown off by the theater and gay establishment. And I would think to myself that the effort I was putting out would not go unnoticed by the universe, that there was something worthwhile to making this effort even when all objective metrics indicated that I was a failure and that I’d never break through. There is indeed something to be said for perseverance, a form of glory in the doing, in the striving, in the eternal reaching up, in the inexorable moving forward through time and art and history, in the attempt to create something that means anything.
As I write this, I’m glad I stayed in the gig, because I still have that creative drive, and now in my 60’s I have so much more to say, so much more to impart, so much more need to connect and to do everything I can with as many people as I can gather to change our world and our lives for the better, for now and for a hundred years from now. What we do is important, even (especially) the small things for art, for the Muse, for our Creator, for one another. This is how we leave a legacy that lasts, that actually means something for today and for the future.
Last drag
Animal closes his eyes
Feels the heat on the lids
That pink-red
90 Prepares to ascend to the stage
And as I unite my own memory with Chris’ vision of that day, I see and feel once again the determination on my face, in the way I move, once more into the wings awaiting my entrance, ready to leap into the wolf’s mouth. In bocca lupo I go again, ascending to the stage, suspended in constant animation, spinning music through a metal stick with holes in it, trying like hell to find the right notes that will solve everything forever.
I am grateful to Chris Gylee, Aslan, and ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS for the original
poem, for the communication, connection, and collaboration that followed its publication and my discovery of it, for being allowed to write a series of creative responses to it, and for being the heralds of my recall to life and art today.
Animal J. Smith
South of Market, San Francisco, California
6 March 2024
Well, that happened. How Chris (the poet here) knew I’ll never know, but he was prescient After moving to New York City in 1998 and getting established there as a performer, musician, and leatherman (link to Beat One: A Night At The Lure), I’d found a studio apartment in an office building conversion four blocks due East of the World Trade Center. I lost that home as a result of the terror attacks on New York on September 11, 2001, and with it everything I possessed, including my entire performance archive of The Animal Ensemble and more than 20 years’ worth of handwritten scores, performance documentation including every extant recording of my work, my entire collection of sheet music dating from the 1970’s, my US Army Band and Chorus archive, and untold notes, ideas, posters, performance costuming, accessories, and memorabilia ... everything was lost, and with it any evidence that I had ever been an artist of any sort, that Animal had ever existed. My journey back took 21 years.
2 Standing out on the street
Down the backstairs
Of three-three-three
5 Smoking a nervous cigarette
Squinting into the evening August sun
Beard scratchy and hot with tobacco
Chest tightening
Warmed flannel
10 Battered leather
Sweat building up in his pits
Chris got that spot-on. The makeshift theater space where I performed Burn The Quilt was a converted office space on the fourth floor of 333 Valencia Street in San Francisco, and it was totally unventilated. Although August in San Francisco tends to be cool due to the summer fog, we do get a few hot days during the month, and the last weekend in August of 1997 was no exception. I was sweating like a stuck pig before, during, and after each performance. I’m not a tobacco user but I sure as hell felt like a smoke, and if I was smoking anything it was probably a couple of hits of green bud to take the edge off before my final performance.
It should be noted that 333 Valencia Street, then and now, did not have a backstairs or fire escape, but there was a large parking lot behind the building where we actually burned a strip of the quilt panel I made during each show, and Chris got my feeling and attitude exactly right. Uncanny.
It’s the last show of four
And the second-to-last day of summer
That night, after the show had closed, I was in a pizza joint on Folsom Street having a slice with a friend. I glanced up at the TV and saw the news: Princess Diana had just died in an auto accident in Paris. My friend saw my shocked face and said, “You didn’t know?” I hadn’t bothered to check the TV news while I was recovering from the performance. Strangely, that’s how I’ve been able to remember the performance dates for Burn The Quilt all these years, and I’m resisting the temptation towards metaphor.
Tomorrow he will clear everything out of the shoebox dressing room
10 Sweep up
Glitter, hair
Hand-cut strips of orange cellophane
Pack props, instruments
Wigs
My strike process for BTQ was to take down the “distressed” Rainbow Pride and Leather Pride flags that were the backdrop for the performance (“distressed” by my hacking at them with scissors, cutting them to shreds, stomping on them and dragging them through the parking lot of the theater, making sure they were dirty as fuck, smeared with motor oil, just as debased and desecrated as I could make them. I cut the heart out of the Leather Pride flag (which I always thought was a bit cloying), wrapped it in rough twine, made sure it was caked with dirt and gunk, and hung it from one of the lighting poles. It suited me.
15 Into two big bags
Sling these over his shoulders
Give Jill the keys
Get his deposit dollars back
Stuff them in his jeans
Close! My friend Hank Pellisier (aka Hank Hyena) had rented the theater space earlier that year, and when he ran into me in the Castro one day, said, “You should do a show!” He gave me the space for free, and I might have cleared $100 from all four performances... I had a policy of holding my ticket prices to $5.00 so that people with AIDS, on disability, and low-income folks from the neighborhood could see my work (which always put out a measure of hope for surviving AIDS). So I had a few bucks to shove in my pants pocket – enough to replenish my weed supply and treat some friends to dinner.
20 If he were a different person he’d burn this place down
In a blaze of glory
He sees that
Has a sharp imagination
Swilling gasoline out on the wooden staircase
Here's where Chris keys into my strong iconoclast streak – burn it all down in a radical pyrotechnic pyre of fire! Thing is, it had been done (by the artists Seemen that summer near the industrial waterfront where they torched a spinning effigy of Rush Limbaugh), and God forbid I should be derivative!
25 Clattering down in heels
Tossing a lit match over a perfumed, expanded shoulder
Strutting out onto Valencia
Hailing a cab
Extended glossy nails
Although Chris gets my flamboyant and to-hell-with-it side well here, this is where we see the divergence/mashup in Chris’ vision of me that day and in those times. I’m not a drag performer. My stage presence – and life presence – is, if anything, hypermasculine, a classic leather/biker look with shaved head, beard, big booming voice, very much not feminine. A reaction, perhaps, to being called a “fem” throughout middle and high school in the 1970s with a touch of being disattracted to cross-dressing of any sort, especially sexually (I hate it viscerally when “cunt”, “bitch”, and “pussy” are used in sexual encounters with men, that’s just not me), but I like being what I find attractive. Plus, in San Francisco, drag performance artists are a dime a dozen, you know? And to be brutally honest, I don’t have the balls to do drag even as a joke. I just don’t have the courage to see myself feminized and to act that way, and I have the utmost respect for my many friends and fellow artists who have made drag a major part of their lives on- and offstage. They are brilliant, and I could never hope to pull it off as well as they.
30 If they’re not going to come and fill the place for him
Laugh
Weep
Applaud with hands smacking hard, painfully
Such is their enthusiasm
35 Clapping at their collective revelation
Gasp
To get outside immediately
Worked up
Animated
40 Ready to change the world
Right now
C’mon c’mon
A brilliant, dangerous urgency
Here, Chris senses the impetus that we all felt as queer artists in the age of AIDS: get your work out now, get it all out, because the minute your virus activates, your days and hours are numbered. We’d all seen friends, colleagues, loved ones go out in a flash, waking up one day with a slight cough and be dead of ravaging PCP pneumonia by midnight. Or worse, and far more common, the long, slow decline of end-stage and final-stage AIDS – but the result was the same: our work cut off just as we were ascending, getting traction, getting good. There was so much to say, so much that needed to be done, needed to change instantly for us to have hope of surviving to make more art.
Chris also alludes to a “collective revelation” and the response he senses that my work evokes in my audiences, and he got that exactly. To my enduring surprise and delight, more than once members of my audience would be stuck to their chairs after show’s end, just stunned by what they had seen and heard. It was a revelation to me that just maybe I was on to something with my radical message of blistering hope where we had no reason to have hope at all, and the words and music and tactics I used onstage and off to convey that hope to other and to myself. I’m grateful that I was able to move people in those ways, and the hope is that I still can.
If they’re not going to show up
45 Buy a goddam ticket
Spend their money on beer and pizza in the Castro instead
This is where I had to shake my head and wonder exactly how Chris had managed to get into my head at that moment in time as he looked back through his poet’s telescope to 1997 ... this is almost word-for-word what I was thinking and had been feeling for some time about the guys in the community who would tell me “I’m your biggest fan” but never bother to walk the half-block from the goddamn bar to the warehouse where I was performing. The best and most honest reason for skipping my shows was presented to me by a stately fellow named Charles, a friend of one of the subjects of my political performances, when I asked him why he hadn’t come to see the show about his friend: “I had a fist up my ass.”
Then nobody should perform here
No tired beat poetry
No simpering cabaret tunes
50 No dry discussions
Flaky old queers sitting around a microphone on tired chairs
Circling the same unsolvable moans
This was in fact my take on the poetry and performance scene of the late 90’s in San Francisco: tired, insular, moribund, uninspired, whining endlessly about how oppressed we all were and far too limp to get it up to “stick it to the Man” or stick anything anywhere. And all of it was oh, so hetero. Small wonder I was chomping at the bit to get out of there.
No
They can flatten the burnt-up palace
55 Scrape away the blackened wreckage
Build something, anything
Grey and sleek and pointless
Computer-generated glass by an assistant architect
An intern
60 From a second-rate firm
Offices to let
To sit empty
Waiting for a start-up
And the right price
Although 1997 predates startup culture as we think of it today, this is an accurate impression of my feelings regarding tear-it-down artistic destruction and the vast realms of new build in the City that sat unoccupied, waiting for a downtown boom that never seems to happen. There’s an echo of that here today in 2024, as our downtown sits emptier than ever in the wake of COVID and the prevalence of remote work ... ghostly emptiness has replaced ghastly excess and no one knows quite what to do with all that space or how to fill it with life again.
65 But he’s no arsonist
When he’s off stage
He’s not one who burns things up
No, I’m not. And I never was. Despite my name, appearance, and onstage bombast, I’m not a vandal in the classic sense – if I’m inclined to destroy a literal or figurative structure, I’m even more inclined to have a vision of what to replace that structure with. Chris keys into a recurring theme in my art life and my daily walk: things are seldom what they seem. I’m not what you think I am, but I am everything that you think I am.
He’s a vanisher
He’ll spend the deposit on a Greyhound ticket
70 Slip out of town and into the autumn
Head somewhere quieter
Getting sicker, eventually
Tired
An animal that can find a hole
75 A place to retreat to
Exactly, Chris. I took a Greyhound more than once, heading up to the North Coast for a weekend just to see, smoke dope, think... I was blessed with a connection to an Episcopal retreat up in Lake County on the side of Cobb Mountain about two hours north of the City called the Little Portion Hermitage. Father Leo Joseph was the Guardian there, and my best friend Lanny (who ran sound and lights for Burn The Quilt) was Leo’s boyfriend for years and lived up there. I spent many weekends and holidays in quiet contemplation up there, and when I started the HIV miracle cocktail drugs in 1996, Fr. Leo had me up there for about a week as I was sweating and shaking and breaking them in. It was indeed a hidey-hole for this animal, and I found blessing and comfort there.
Burrow away in a blanket
Fever and hallucinations
Dreaming of grasshoppers
Breeze
80 Notes on a flute climbing up scales
Higher, higher
Chris scores an unintended echo of a lyric from my signature tune Pieces of Jesus:
He climbs to the top of the overtone series,
He marshals his partials, he collates his queries.
When I would escape for a time in exactly this way, there were plenty of visions, dreams, apparitions taking forms of new and intimidating music and thought, Lord knows I sweated out a ton of toxins on my retreats, and when I’d play my flute on that mountain, I could hear the echoes ring forever, overtones and partials spinning up into the ionosphere and beyond ... those places where I could be loosed from the wires of the City and let my sound expand, freely and fully.
There’s a glory in this too, Animal
In the existing
In the attempt
85 In the doing
The first time I read this, it brought a tear to my eye. How the fuck did Chris know? I was not ever underwritten by arts councils, grants, well-to-do benefactors. I financed every show myself, paid the performers carfare out of pocket, and was told by the theatre critic for the San Francisco Chronicle that “we have no intention of ever reviewing your work.” But I was intrepid. I knew that I had to keep going, I could never stop, no matter how much I was ignored and blown off by the theater and gay establishment. And I would think to myself that the effort I was putting out would not go unnoticed by the universe, that there was something worthwhile to making this effort even when all objective metrics indicated that I was a failure and that I’d never break through. There is indeed something to be said for perseverance, a form of glory in the doing, in the striving, in the eternal reaching up, in the inexorable moving forward through time and art and history, in the attempt to create something that means anything.
As I write this, I’m glad I stayed in the gig, because I still have that creative drive, and now in my 60’s I have so much more to say, so much more to impart, so much more need to connect and to do everything I can with as many people as I can gather to change our world and our lives for the better, for now and for a hundred years from now. What we do is important, even (especially) the small things for art, for the Muse, for our Creator, for one another. This is how we leave a legacy that lasts, that actually means something for today and for the future.
Last drag
Animal closes his eyes
Feels the heat on the lids
That pink-red
90 Prepares to ascend to the stage
And as I unite my own memory with Chris’ vision of that day, I see and feel once again the determination on my face, in the way I move, once more into the wings awaiting my entrance, ready to leap into the wolf’s mouth. In bocca lupo I go again, ascending to the stage, suspended in constant animation, spinning music through a metal stick with holes in it, trying like hell to find the right notes that will solve everything forever.
I am grateful to Chris Gylee, Aslan, and ONCE WE WERE ISLANDS for the original
poem, for the communication, connection, and collaboration that followed its publication and my discovery of it, for being allowed to write a series of creative responses to it, and for being the heralds of my recall to life and art today.
Animal J. Smith
South of Market, San Francisco, California
6 March 2024