Questions & Answers
1997 — Burn The Quilt
The Show
How was the making process for Burn the Quilt?
In a word: rushed. I’d been sitting on my butt since January due to my elbow nerves getting blown out while working as a word processing operator at a large environmental law firm downtown, and when Hank Hyena offered me a gig that summer I jumped on it. But I had a hard deadline coming up quickly:
Workers Compensation was paying for my new career training as a Microsoft systems engineer, and classes were to start the first week of September, 35 hours a week plus labs and exams for seven weeks. I knew I had to get the show up before that, and the best available dates were the 3rd and 4th weekends of August – just three weeks away. Yikes.
Do you think it is possible to give me some overview of the performance score for Burn the Quilt?
I was using a canned score – i.e., a taped soundtrack minus my voice and flute – and though I’d worked with taped accompaniment and studio pro keyboards and software on several shows, it was my first time alone with no engineer or musician with me for check and correction. I paid the keyboardist from the performance ensemble I’d jobbed in with in 1996 – Theatre Concrete - $300 for one hour in his studio with a custom piano sound and Vision notation software preloaded, plus the midi files and a DAT master tape for the performances.
It was a heavy lift and a rush job in many ways, but I came out of that hour with a more-than-serviceable score that was all on one Kurzweil weighted-key synth, with a prolonged sustained harmonic string effect when the keys were pressed and held, allowing me to give a lush “wall of sound” sonic wash to the opener and the closer (and, as the keyboard guy said, a bit schmaltzy, but damn that’s a beautiful melody so fuck him). The pure piano sound had a brilliant edge that added to the percussive effect of the underscore of some of the tunes, and the reverb was cathedral-shaped when the keys were released just right – that’s where the ‘superchords’ came in (cf. composer Jimmy Webb’s comments to me at a seminar in NYC in 2000 re his compositional technique of laying GMaj7-9 on top of Eb7sus2 an octave higher in the manner of Bernstein and Copland) to satisfying effect.
Songs were harsh and embracing, seeking balance in my rant. Anthemic in spots, lyrics not up to my usual standard but fit the score adequately, a couple of really great unexpected modal progressions in the open-ended flute improvisational spots that really cracked it (even the schmaltzy keyboard guy was impressed with that shit).
Or is it possible to think of the performance through a sort of ‘material analysis’ — so by that to identify what was materially there in the performance: the space, stage/props, costume, time duration, performer(s), text, music, movement, audience size, configuration etc etc … (an open ended list of things)?
The space was a square room, no stage or proscenium or lighting grid, where about 40 folding chairs had been set up along two walls with the entrance to the theater between the chair risers at the corner. One row of chairs was up a couple of feet on a riser, another row on the floor. The performance area was essentially the center of the room with some track lights that had been installed and a couple of those outdoor patio flood lights from GE focused on the cente of the stage with two more focused on the rear walls of the space.
At the start of the first performance week, I bought two brand new flags from one of the souvenir stores in the Castro (San Francisco’s main gay district), one rainbow Gay Pride flag, the other the Leather Pride flag (the first offshoot of the Rainbow Flag authorized by its creator Gilbert Baker, who was a friend and mentor of mine (and a cannabis co-conspirator) from 1990 until he passed away suddenly in 2017).
I took both flags out to the parking lot in the back of the theater facing Julian Street, and on my knees on the asphalt I took a pair of scissors and “distressed” both banners – that is, I hacked the fuck out of them, ripping holes and flingin fringe through the nylon fibers with an increasing degree of savagery as I progressed, then dragging them along the grimy asphalt picking up as much of the dirt and grunge and motor oil from ten thousand Impalas and Mavericks an Nash Rambler station wagons that had traversed Julian Street over the decades, growling indeterminately as I savaged the symbols of the affinity communities of the eleven years just past. After about half an hour of this, I was emotionally and physically wrung out; the growl I’d been making subsided, my inchoate cloud of frustration and aggression and
searing anger dissipated, blown away in the encroaching fog of the August afternoon.
I returned to the theater and hung both tattered, torn-up flags along the back wall of the space where they could be lit by the GE floods. That was my backdrop.
I had a standing mic down center, my music stand stage left, a table with a pitcher of water and a glass (un peu homage to Spalding Gray in Swimming to Cambodia) slightly to my right. That was the scenery. If my aesthetic was spare to begin with, this setup was Spartan in its stripped-down, stark provision; not much to shield the performer from the audience or block the flow, nothing for me to hide behind.
No props other than the water pitcher, the glass, and my flute. My costume was a red cotton T-shirt with the sleeves slightly rolled, blue jeans, and boots. The show ran for about 45 minutes; any longer and both audience and actor would have been carted off to the hospital with dehydration and heat exhaustion because there was zero ventilation in that space and things got really hot in there really fast.
I was the only performer for only the second time out of 13 Animal Ensemble shows; the other was my final Christmas show in 1995, the year I disbanded the Ensemble after Beowulf Nixon, having spent all of my collaboration coins at the casino buffet the preceding five years and being thoroughly done with wrangling difficult colleagues through difficult rehearsals in difficult (at the end, hostile) performance spaces, stripping my act down to the bare essential Animal, unfiltered and unfettered, on the cusp of a life change, a long-sought boost up to a new level of art where I could unreel my filament into the ether like Whitmans’ noiseless patient spider, hello out there, my elemental hamradio CQ, CQ, are you there, are you there, seeking a connection to a higher band of cyclic vibration, a more robust frequency, tying the air in knots at fifty thousand watts, clear channel.
In a word: rushed. I’d been sitting on my butt since January due to my elbow nerves getting blown out while working as a word processing operator at a large environmental law firm downtown, and when Hank Hyena offered me a gig that summer I jumped on it. But I had a hard deadline coming up quickly:
Workers Compensation was paying for my new career training as a Microsoft systems engineer, and classes were to start the first week of September, 35 hours a week plus labs and exams for seven weeks. I knew I had to get the show up before that, and the best available dates were the 3rd and 4th weekends of August – just three weeks away. Yikes.
Do you think it is possible to give me some overview of the performance score for Burn the Quilt?
I was using a canned score – i.e., a taped soundtrack minus my voice and flute – and though I’d worked with taped accompaniment and studio pro keyboards and software on several shows, it was my first time alone with no engineer or musician with me for check and correction. I paid the keyboardist from the performance ensemble I’d jobbed in with in 1996 – Theatre Concrete - $300 for one hour in his studio with a custom piano sound and Vision notation software preloaded, plus the midi files and a DAT master tape for the performances.
It was a heavy lift and a rush job in many ways, but I came out of that hour with a more-than-serviceable score that was all on one Kurzweil weighted-key synth, with a prolonged sustained harmonic string effect when the keys were pressed and held, allowing me to give a lush “wall of sound” sonic wash to the opener and the closer (and, as the keyboard guy said, a bit schmaltzy, but damn that’s a beautiful melody so fuck him). The pure piano sound had a brilliant edge that added to the percussive effect of the underscore of some of the tunes, and the reverb was cathedral-shaped when the keys were released just right – that’s where the ‘superchords’ came in (cf. composer Jimmy Webb’s comments to me at a seminar in NYC in 2000 re his compositional technique of laying GMaj7-9 on top of Eb7sus2 an octave higher in the manner of Bernstein and Copland) to satisfying effect.
Songs were harsh and embracing, seeking balance in my rant. Anthemic in spots, lyrics not up to my usual standard but fit the score adequately, a couple of really great unexpected modal progressions in the open-ended flute improvisational spots that really cracked it (even the schmaltzy keyboard guy was impressed with that shit).
Or is it possible to think of the performance through a sort of ‘material analysis’ — so by that to identify what was materially there in the performance: the space, stage/props, costume, time duration, performer(s), text, music, movement, audience size, configuration etc etc … (an open ended list of things)?
The space was a square room, no stage or proscenium or lighting grid, where about 40 folding chairs had been set up along two walls with the entrance to the theater between the chair risers at the corner. One row of chairs was up a couple of feet on a riser, another row on the floor. The performance area was essentially the center of the room with some track lights that had been installed and a couple of those outdoor patio flood lights from GE focused on the cente of the stage with two more focused on the rear walls of the space.
At the start of the first performance week, I bought two brand new flags from one of the souvenir stores in the Castro (San Francisco’s main gay district), one rainbow Gay Pride flag, the other the Leather Pride flag (the first offshoot of the Rainbow Flag authorized by its creator Gilbert Baker, who was a friend and mentor of mine (and a cannabis co-conspirator) from 1990 until he passed away suddenly in 2017).
I took both flags out to the parking lot in the back of the theater facing Julian Street, and on my knees on the asphalt I took a pair of scissors and “distressed” both banners – that is, I hacked the fuck out of them, ripping holes and flingin fringe through the nylon fibers with an increasing degree of savagery as I progressed, then dragging them along the grimy asphalt picking up as much of the dirt and grunge and motor oil from ten thousand Impalas and Mavericks an Nash Rambler station wagons that had traversed Julian Street over the decades, growling indeterminately as I savaged the symbols of the affinity communities of the eleven years just past. After about half an hour of this, I was emotionally and physically wrung out; the growl I’d been making subsided, my inchoate cloud of frustration and aggression and
searing anger dissipated, blown away in the encroaching fog of the August afternoon.
I returned to the theater and hung both tattered, torn-up flags along the back wall of the space where they could be lit by the GE floods. That was my backdrop.
I had a standing mic down center, my music stand stage left, a table with a pitcher of water and a glass (un peu homage to Spalding Gray in Swimming to Cambodia) slightly to my right. That was the scenery. If my aesthetic was spare to begin with, this setup was Spartan in its stripped-down, stark provision; not much to shield the performer from the audience or block the flow, nothing for me to hide behind.
No props other than the water pitcher, the glass, and my flute. My costume was a red cotton T-shirt with the sleeves slightly rolled, blue jeans, and boots. The show ran for about 45 minutes; any longer and both audience and actor would have been carted off to the hospital with dehydration and heat exhaustion because there was zero ventilation in that space and things got really hot in there really fast.
I was the only performer for only the second time out of 13 Animal Ensemble shows; the other was my final Christmas show in 1995, the year I disbanded the Ensemble after Beowulf Nixon, having spent all of my collaboration coins at the casino buffet the preceding five years and being thoroughly done with wrangling difficult colleagues through difficult rehearsals in difficult (at the end, hostile) performance spaces, stripping my act down to the bare essential Animal, unfiltered and unfettered, on the cusp of a life change, a long-sought boost up to a new level of art where I could unreel my filament into the ether like Whitmans’ noiseless patient spider, hello out there, my elemental hamradio CQ, CQ, are you there, are you there, seeking a connection to a higher band of cyclic vibration, a more robust frequency, tying the air in knots at fifty thousand watts, clear channel.