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p.s. Hey. I must have put this post together when it was a lot cooler outside. So, the premiere last night will be hard to characterize. I guess I’ll save whatever details for my day report to Itmpw down below, but, for now, I’ll share what I said to someone in the moment last night, i.e. it was like our piece was sort of like the Titanic if the Titanic had somehow managed to make it back to port without completely sinking and killing any passengers, although when the reviews start appearing, the 'back to port' part might end up being wishful thinking. It's complicated. I'll explain below. Anyway, I'm feeling pretty burnt out, and yesterday -- as well as today it would seem so far -- was just about the most miserably hot 24 hours I've ever lived through sans AC, so I'm not going to be a very lively or longwinded p.s. buddy today, sorry. ** Oscar B, Thanks, O! ** Killer Luka, Wait, where can I see these collab drawings that others here seem to have already seen? Are they in some obvious place? If so, I'll try to find them on my own later. ** Nick Hudson, Hey, Nick! Yeah, I've been following your musical and label adventures from afar, meaning via Facebook, I think. Can't wait to hear the album. Hope you get to make it over to Paris. Lots o love. ** Scunnard, The Palais des Papes will be mine as soon as possible. It doesn't even have much a door or a ceiling anymore, so it shouldn't be so hard to crack. Okay, I'll check out those French 'climatisation' guys as soon as I finish checking out the French 'rain dance' guys. ** Tim Yelvington, Thanks, Tim. I'm not sure what we gave them. Hell, quite possibly. ** David, The owl was just about the only thing that behaved last night. Go figure. I wish the 'out' here was something one could choose to venture into rather than having to live, breathe, and sleep inside. The problem with the holography is that when you project hologram into a realistic environment -- and the forest is a real if dead forest -- they look cheesy. That's why the holography we are using is psychedelic and decorative. ** Colin, Thanks, C. I hope the socks knocked off weren't our own, ha ha. ** David Ehrenstein, Thanks for all the great supplements. I don't know much about fashion, but I know enough to know John Galliano is one of the biggest bores in haut couture. ** Tender Prey, Hey! Yeah, the heat, right? Jesus Christ. My kingdom for a decent breeze. I can hardly think. Well, I'm sure glad you guys weren't in attendance last night. I think it'll start working more properly starting tonight. We've got a day ahead dedicated to plugging any many leaks as possible. Yeah, can't wait until you guys here where we can commingle our voices and sweat. ** Bill, Thanks, Bill! Like I told Wolf and Tender, I think it's a very good thing that you'll be seeing the piece after it's had a few days to settle. ** Alan, Hey. ** Changeling, Thanks, C! Oh, if only we could have used a parrot. Nope, it's a European forest, probably Austrian knowing Gisele's imagination, and the fog is only accurate to the locale if you watch the piece stoned, which not a bad idea at all, come to think of it. How's stuff with you? I miss reading your blog/writing due to my limited internet situation. Maybe after we get the piece right, if we do, I'll get to cruise on over there. ** Sypha, Thanks, James. Good move, alerting the Tibet folks. He'd have to be crazy not to feel heavily honored, and he's not that crazy, right? ** L@rstonovich, Thanks, buddy. The birds of prey did behave themselves! ** Math, Good, 'cos I definitely want one. Cool, whenev', Math, say the word. ** Pascal, Thanks, P! ** Stan_cz, Well, as I said above, the bird behaved, and you were correct, yes, and if you get some that German intuitiveness going on about the other parts of the piece, do indulge it. ** Popzeus, Hey, man! Let me say once again how much I like your screen name and everything it stands for. Rabinowitz/ Turtle Point is an excellent suggestion. What a great press that one is. Awesome to see you. ** JoeM, Well, America's high lunacy quotient is great for artists and/or art lovers but bad for the poorly educated and/or evil. I doubt this will quell your dislike of our bird usage, but the falconer we work with is this ecologist, animal rights guy who doesn't believe in training bird and whose birds live in the wild and choose to come to him from their wilderness homes when they feel like it because he has great food and treats them respectfully. He tries to make their theater work seem like little adventures. Basically, they aren't trained, they just fly from bit of food to bit of food when they feel like it. If we'd worked with a more normal kind of bird guy who keeps birds in cages and gives them no choice in the matter, our piece would be in much better shape, probably. ** Empty Frame, Thanks. I did get a rose if not cries of 'Author!'. Oh, that's cool of you to look into the Porn Festival thing. Thanks a lot for that. I'll get to Berlin one of these days somehow. Dude, the fucking heat, no fucking kidding! ** Magick Mike, Hey. Which Jabes book are you reading? Awesome, that guy. I don't know if I know 'Towards a New Poetic', but, of course, that sounds way, way up my alley. I'll try googling the title. Can you share the author's name? Thanks, man. ** Steevee, I hope everything comes together re: those things you're stressed about. I'll go ahead and get the Big Boi. Your 'very good' is good enough for me. ** Justin, Hopefully VK's post hasn't signaled my blog's Scientologist-originating doom. All is quietish so far. I'll hunt down that documentary, thanks a lot! What's so cool about it? Hope the writing went really well! ** Heliotrope, Thanks, Mark. I'm going to hold your best wishes re: the piece over until tonight, if that's okay. ** You-x, Thanks a lot, Joseph. ** Postitbreakup, Coolness, thanks, man. ** Inthemostpeculiarway, Oh, feel free to gush away, ha ha. Thanks, man. I'll link you to the reviews. They'll be in French, but I'll pass them on for better or worse. Good, so 'Valerie ...' was pretty much all you hoped. I feel I've now gotten the all-clear sign to try it for myself if I can find it somehow. Ha ha nice eyebrow shampooing story. What a strange idea. Sounds like using conditioner too would be a must. Yeah, I had a meth phase, mid-80s, Amsterdam. They called it 'Pep' there, at the time at least. Nasty business. Could have been my Texan blood taking over. Okay, my day. I'll skip the stressful pre-show stuff and cut to the chase. So, everything started well enough. The theater was completely packed, and, for the first forty minutes or so, the piece went almost perfectly. There’s this massive fog tempest in the middle of the piece, and it was lighter and thinner than it’s supposed to be, but it still looked pretty good. But then it stopped, and the fog is supposed to linger in a particular way for a certain amount of time, but it just immediately died and faded away, leaving the next scene, which is supposed to be shrouded in fog, barren. (It turns out that five hundred sweaty bodies altered the atmosphere so much that the fog had no strength or ballast, and we have to try recalculate that today.) At the very moment the fog died, Peter Rehberg hit a sound cue, but, instead of the noise appearing, his computer’s sound card suddenly fried, thereby eliminating most of the piece’s score. He went to the back up recordings, and they had been killed too. So, the piece was stuck in a dead silence, and Peter had to cue up some random track on his iPod to fill the space, which of course confused the performers who work with sound cues, so they had to sort of improvise, and this piece is very intricately choreographed, so that was bad. Eventually, Peter found an early sketch of the score somewhere, and we had to use that, further confusing the performers. Then, at the end of the scene in question, Jonathan C. is supposed to creep up behind Jonathan S. and hit him on the head with a breakaway bottle filled with fake blood. To our horror, we saw him approaching JS holding a real bottle. We thought he didn’t realize and was going to do serious damage to JS, but apparently he couldn’t find the breakaway bottle for some reason, and he was forced to try to strike/ glance a real bottle off JS’s head without hurting him, which he did, phew. Anyway, after that, it was just one mistake after another. The fog displays were too wispy. The lighting designer missed a bunch of cues, and, for instance, during one supposed long black out, the audience could see the mannequins being moved on and off stage. The black outs, which are already too long, took forever. The music and sounds kept cutting in and out, etc., etc. The song that's in one part of the piece started playing during the dialogue scene, kind of ruining it. It was kind of a total miracle that the piece ended without us having to give up and stop the show. The audience responded surprisingly enthusiastically, although when Gisele came out for a bow, there was loud booing from part of the crowd, luckily a fairly small portion. We were a wreck. Peter and Gisele both burst into tears out of frustration, and basically we felt like we had survived and were lucky more than anything else. Obviously, this was not the premiere we had hoped for. We’ll see how much damage has been done starting today, I guess. We'll see what the very positive crowd response meant and whether it included the tons of reviewers and curators who were there. And today we’ll be crazily trying to fix everything we can fix in time for the show tonight. After the show last night, we had a reception, and everybody was nice and supportive and stuff, and I was completely spent after a while, and I went back to my steamy pad, and tried not to worry, and slept wetly. That's the best I can do, I guess. Please inform me about your Friday, if you would be so kind. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Thank you, man. Yeah, we change/ improve the piece constantly. I'm sure there will be a few small but significant changes by the time 'the curtain goes up' tonight. ** 吳婷婷, You're so dogged. ** Brendan, I want to know how Blum and Poe affords that gigantic newish space of theirs. Somebody behind the scenes must be either very rich or rather corrupt or both or ... I mean, I'm sure Murakami makes them a bundle, but still. ** Misanthrope, What if V.K. and Ton really were the same person? Can you imagine? Best of both worlds? I think so. Well, unless you were an Artforum subscriber, there should be at least a bunch of pieces you haven't read yet. For my money, 'Two Girls, Fat and Thin' is Mary's worst book. Not to say it's bad 'cos she's always pretty awesome, but I think her real genius lies in the short form, personally. ** Bollo, Thanks a lot, man, on both fronts. Oh, so much envy on that rain of yours. Count your blessings for sure. ** Little Foal, If you see this before you head out, have a quiet, wonderful weekend full of blissfully printed words. ** Emily, Hi, Emily! Thank you a lot for the very kind words. Gee, your blog is terrific! What a great find. Everyone, Emily has a very cool blog entitled 'Without Obsession Life Is Nothing'. Go have a long look, okay? It's here, and it's terrific! We're trying to get our work to the UK more often. We did our piece 'Jerk' in London last year, but that's all. Maybe we'll get lucky and some UK curator will feel he or she needs to book the new one. Anyway, thank you a lot again, and please do be here whenever and as often as you feel like it. ** Okay, we have a lot of repair and corrective work to do today, and I need cold caffeine badly, so I'll go do all of that. Don't get too burnt by the post today. Handle with care, etc. See you tomorrow.
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