 We're coming out on a Friday at 3 to an event called Swimming Under Water and Cooling Your Bread. A title whose effectiveness I have only myself to blame. It was a quick decision. It was not Scott Fitzgerald reference. And we learned. So think over this a little bit of an experiment. I just want to talk very quickly. In the past, you know, Creadlead has featured writers on a certain topic and looked at their work when it's finished and published format. But it hasn't to my knowledge really featured people who, for whom writing is part of their practice with their work in process, just inviting them in the same way that we extended invitation to artists to share their work in its early or recently finished development. So I really want to thank Isaac and Tavia and Chani and David for jumping into this experiment and for everyone here. This is like a kind of select working group is how I think of it on this project. So we'll have all the participants present their work and then we're going to do a quick kind of Q&A that I'll moderate and then we'll open it up to questions that hopefully this can become very conversational if that's the will of the group. But thank you everyone for coming and without further ado, Isaac Butler. Thank you. Hello everyone. So I'm working on this book right now called The Method. It'll have some long subtitle that's good for search engine optimization. But it is essentially a biography of the method of this idea about art and human beings and acting that was probably wrong but also changed American pop culture. So before I get started, one of the two people who brought Stanislavski's teaching in the United States, the woman who taught both Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler acting was this woman named Maria Ospenskaya who was a very small, she weighed about 95 pounds and she would come into class with a glass of water and a pitcher. This was during prohibition. It was actually gin and she wore a monocle and she terrified all of them but she would always begin every class with make for me good atmosphere. So if you could do that, I would really appreciate it. This is just a little excerpt from a chapter from the Russia section. No one has ever seen this. You are the first. So thank you for that. It's a portion of a chapter called Do You Know the Secrets of Art? In either late September or early October of 1917 Richard Boleslawski returned to Moscow no longer quite sure who he was or what the city meant to him. Moscow had been a beloved stepmother of bohemian wonderland that as he would later remember it caressed and soothed those who walked at streets as Boleslawski himself had done late at night after rehearsal. He had a newfound patriotism though, a love of his not yet real Poland. He wondered who he was in this city and how he fit into its cosmopolitan workforce where a wealthy man's house might sport a French cook, English butler, Russian wet nurse, Italian valet, Caucasian bodyguard and Tartar janitor all under one roof. At the end of Boleslawski's wartime service and his return to Moscow had been fraught with danger. In February after widespread unrest the Tsar at long last abdicated. His name, successor and brother, Grand Duke Michael refused the crown and the Russian monarchy ended. Russia soon became a servant of two masters, the provisional government run by the Duma and the Petrograd Soviet of workers and soldiers deputies. The great war still rained down at storm of steel on the front and the central powers yearned for a moment of weakness on Russia's part so they could knock them out of the war. The provisional government issued an order requiring soldiers to return to duty and obey their officers but the Petrograd Soviet responded with order number one which instructed soldiers and sailors to instead obey the Petrograd Soviet above all and for the democratization of units. Now, units would elect representatives to the Petrograd Soviet and a committee to not only govern the units themselves but to confiscate all weapons in order to guarantee their power. To Leon Trotsky, order number one was a Charter of Freedom of the Revolutionary Army and as it had originated with the soldiers themselves the first fulfillment of the revolution's true potential. Boleslawski, an officer, remembers order number one as the, as the entree act of a blood soaked farce. Sure, as he wrote the intention of order number one was the same as the French Declaration of Human Rights mental freedom was good, political freedom splendid peace was beautiful, and so on but the immediate effect of the order was quote that soldiers shot and killed officers military orders were ignored the fighting army ceased to exist. For Boles, the Great War was a civil conflict, not a global catastrophe both the central powers and the allies had promised Poland independence if they wanted. Polish men enlisted on both sides of the conflict, often fighting against members of their own villages or sometimes even their own families. In his memoir way of the Lancer Boleslawski recounts a scouting some prisoners when one of them calls out to one of his soldiers a man named Peter. They recognized each other he writes. They were brothers Poles, one was in the Russian army the other in the Austrian the brother in the Austrian had not heard anything about his family on the Russian side for three years. Boleslawski fought in World War I for Poland when asked his politics he would answer I am a Pole. He felt his duty was to mother Poland not step mother Russia. If fighting for Russia held little appeal the second war between the proletariat and the ruling classes held even less. After a few months suffering the indignity of Soviet control the Polish Lancers hatched a plan. They would desert meet up with Polish units on both sides of the front and fight for an independent Poland. This plan failed stranding the Lancers near the Galician front where they exchanged fire with their former allies in the Russian army. The Lancers disbanded and Boleslawski fed back to his step mother bribing a station agent to secure a patch of floor on a train pack so sardine tight that people urinated where they stood and physically fought to escape when the train stopped at their station. Moscow was hardly a safe haven for him. As a former officer and a white too proud to hide his anti-red beliefs Boleslawski's life was in danger. He was saved by his career in the theater. He lived in Moscow under his Russian stage name but had enlisted with Polish pride as Boleslaw's Rizard Srednicki. He could also count on the protection of the holy knights of the first studio even the most hardened Bolesławski and there were a few wouldn't dare die on a fellow member. The first studio saw its own uphebals during the war. In 1916 Leopold Sular Sularzycki beloved leader of the studio wise Tolstoyan sage world adventurer source of joy and light for all who knew him finally succumbed to nephritis that he had developed in Canada while resettling the dokovers. His death cleft Stanislavski's heart in twain. One witness at the funeral described Konstantin Sergeyevich weeping like a child at the gravesite. The first studio needed a new leader and Stanislavski appointed Evgeny Vaktengov to the post a misanthrope with a wild temper Vaktengov couldn't be further apart from Sular's nurturing calm style and he also did not share Sular's singular focus on the first studio. He began his own private studio and in the years before his own early death in 1922 from stomach cancer directed wherever he could still the studio soldiered on only growing in reputation when Boloslavski returned he walked into a heated meeting about its future the studio which had officially been absorbed into the Moscow Art Theatre after Boloslavski's production of Wreck of the Good Ship Hope wanted its independence chafing under the dictots of the Moscow art they wanted greater freedom over season planning aesthetics and their approach to the system. Stanislavski and Morović were children of one era of apocal change the emancipation of the serfs in the twenty years of incremental liberalization before the crackdown of the 1880s. The first studio were all a younger generation children of the failed 1905 revolution they wanted autonomy rather than gradual liberalization under a monarch even a benevolent one like Konstantin Stanislavski although white when it came to Russian politics Boloslavski was all for the red principles of self-determination and collective labor when it came to the first studio he gave an impassioned speech in defense of its autonomy Stanislavski responded still fomenting still fomenting my boy but the greater freedom they saw was granted only afterwards he realized that in the theater I had taken part in something for which in the regiment the penalty was death the death of Seuler and the independence of the first studio drove a wedge between the holy temple of the system and its founder as the years went by Stanislavski would come to liken his studios to Lear's daughters in the first studio to goneral Lear's eldest and most disloyal child Stanislavski's own war years brought personal and professional trials that challenged the very foundation of his acting theories and at one point nearly resulted in his death when gavel apprenticeship bullet pierced both Archduke Ferdinand's throat and the shaky stability of Europe on June 19th 1914 Stanislavski his wife Lelina Kachalov the critic Nikolai Efros and several friends were in marrying that on holiday there they marked the 10th anniversary of Chekhov's death while Stanislavski continued work on an article which he never finished called various trends in the art of the theater outlining the differences between what he called hack work representation and experiencing when they heard the news of Ferdinand's death they knew with the certainty of the condemn that war become inevitable but due to massive troop mobilization train tickets back to Moscow were scarce by August 4th as Germany invaded Belgium Stanislavski Lelina and a couple of others remained in what was swiftly becoming enemy territory their plan of escape involved taking a train to Munich and then another to Switzerland where they could then travel to Russia as Stanislavski describes it by the time they got to Munich the heat of war fever affected everything all human relations were changed he wrote in my life in art I will not describe all that the alien had to bear in an enemy country Stanislavski who cultivated his own vulnerability naivete openness while avoiding conflict whenever possible was uniquely ill-suited to this voyage on the way to Switzerland German soldiers boarded his train accused the Russians of being spies and arrested them the only reason Stanislavski survived that day was that he wasn't worth a bullet during an ammunition shortage instead the soldiers dragged the great director who had so impressed the Kaiser less than a decade before to a fortress imprisoning him and his wife for two days before deporting them to the very country they had been trying to reach in the first place they then traveled from Geneva to Marseille from Marseille to Odessa and then long last from Odessa to Moscow out of these trials came a renewed patriotism on Stanislavski's part Russian culture was a thing of great beauty and value intermingling with Europe benefited everyone but for Russia its own culture must remain west remain supreme and conveniently enough had he not developed something purely Russian with the system was it not born of Shepkin of Pushkin of Gogol the three greatest artists to walk Russian soil he made a speech the Moscow Art Theatre along these lines in September of 1914 the assembled company greeted it with skepticism everything Stanislavski encountered the war, personal triumphs and failures perhaps even his lunch led him to redouble his efforts to perfect the system but as even he acknowledged in my life and art those efforts came at a cost to his actual work as a theater artist as a director his rehearsals became laboratories for his theater theories stretching months or sometimes years as he sought the magic trick that would lead to experiencing on stage and as he prepared new roles as an actor he wandered so far into the tall weeds that he became lost there in January of 1916 Stanislavski undertook the role of I'm going to butcher all of these pronunciations I'm just warning you undertook the role of Colonel Rostinev in an adaptation of Dostoevsky's short story The Village of Stepanachikovo this production jointly overseen by Nemerovich and Stanislavski if you don't know Nemerovich as the co-founder of the Moscow Art Theatre Stanislavski within about five years but started and grew to hate each other but they co-directed many productions this production jointly overseen by Nemerovich and Stanislavski finally brought the artistic differences to the breaking point the heart of the fight had to do with the system and its approach to text and whether the actor or the writer was to be the chief creative force at the Moscow Art Theatre plays have three basic elements dialogue, monologue, stage imagery one of the system's great innovations between these three basic elements with their own inferences and inventions actors have been doing this forever, of course but the system codified the creation of both subtext and extra textural fleshing out of a character's backstory and life as part of the actor's job today this is so fundamental that we seldom question it nor do we notice how few plays written after the system contain the kind of long self-expositing monologues that were staples before in prose fiction the author does much of this work herself she has to mediate it, it lacks interpreters bringing it to life and has instead a much larger set of tools for creating a character in her world in the original story of Stepana Chicovo Dostoevsky describes Colonel Rostaev's psychology and backstory in great detail it would be difficult to imagine a man more benign and compliant he writes his generosity was such that on occasion he would have been ready to part with everything down to his last shirt and hand it to any needy person he chanced to meet Dostoevsky who instructed actors to find the good and villains and the bad and heroes could never accept such a simple characterization and his system as his system instructed he began with himself as the raw material for the part rather than the original story to Nemerovich Stanislavsky's approach was objectively wrong Nemerovich knew who Dostoevsky was and how he should be interpreted because Dostoevsky had already explained to him in great detail at the first rehearsal the co-directors didn't argue so much as give the actors conflicting instruction Nemerovich told the cast they would use the system but that he would aid them in bringing out what should be conscious while hiding what should be unconscious Stanislavsky meanwhile declared that the actors must experience the play not only in the terms laid down by the author but in all the circumstances which his own imaginations can create rehearsals dragged on and on as Stanislavsky sought out ways to feed the subconscious the cast fleshed out their characters' childhoods and figured out the tasks for each bit but they were no closer to getting the play ready for an audience in August of 1917 while Boloslavsky saw action at the front Nemerovich wrote Stanislavsky with an ultimatum Stepanichakova must go up in September or October the Moscow Art Theatre's Repertory was second to none but they needed regular premieres in 1915 they had only managed to produce one new show A Night of Pushkin 1X a year without a premiere would be fatal to their reputation but Stepanichakova was not finished in September and Stanislavsky the actor floundered Seuler's death put to rest any thought of premiering the play in 1916 on January 5th 1917 Nemerovich again wrote Stanislavsky 10 months and 156 rehearsals later Stepanichakova was no closer to finished the season was almost over the reputation was in tatters Nemerovich did what he felt he had to do he took over the show Stanislavsky's feelings be damned the rehearsals in February Nemerovich were coiled in horror from Stanislavsky's interpretation of Rostanov Stanislavsky felt he was so close the truth was just out of reach if he only had more time and a little faith from his collaborator he could birth a son of himself and Dostoevsky that will bear many resemblances to both mother and father but it was not to be on March 28th two weeks after order number one 14 months after they had begun working on it Stepanichakova finally had its first dress rehearsal Stanislavsky who had additionally played the lead in six repertory shows watched his best friend die weathered a crisis in his personal business and founded a second studio did not know his lines did not have a clear sense of his character and had no idea what he was doing to the audience watching the dress it appeared that he was having a nervous breakdown Kachalov's son Vadim described Stanislavsky's visible panic the bewilderment terror and fear there in the way he looked towards the prompter's box during intermission Kachalov approached him and said something awful is happening to Konstantin Sergeyevich by the end of the night Stanislavsky stood in the wings ashen and weeping Nemerovich resigned himself to the inevitable and fired Stanislavsky from the show it was Stanislavsky's greatest failure and the blame lays solely with him and his system in his obsessive need to perfect his theories rather than serve the greater good of his productions Stanislavsky never publicly complained but he also confined himself to his repertory roles for the rest of his life Stanislavsky's living actor of the Russian stage performed in a new production that part of his career was over during 1917 he found what's soulless he could in the theater's new audiences one of the provisional government's first steps after taking power had been to safeguard Russia's theater the jewels in the crown of its national culture the Duma appointed Nikolai Lavov a great lover of the stage to take over and de-imperialize the imperial theaters a mere ten days after the Tsar's abdication the newly renamed state theaters opened at the birth of the provisional government the restrictions on what plays could be performed for whom lifted Stanislavsky and Namirovitch's dream of a theater that was open to all could finally come true and no matter your politics red, white, or in Stanislavsky's case indifferent you could work at the Moscow Art through much of 1917 and barely notice the tumultuous arm wrestling match between the provisional government and the Petrograd Soviet when Richard Boloslavsky returned to Moscow he took back over his roles as if nothing had happened and began work on a new production of 12th night and on October 24th, 1917 that night, Colonel Moodle the chief of the Moscow police and a long time audience member of the Moscow Art Theater ran backstage demanding to use their telephone the actors didn't bother to hide their eavesdropping as he frantically shouted Burn it! Burn everything! Burn it at once! Moodle turned to the actors Petrograd, he told them, had fallen Trotsky's red guard occupied the capital's key institutions within hours they had seized Petrograd's railroads, telephone exchanges, telegraph stations banks and printing presses the next morning they would storm the winter palace and end the provisional government for good Moodle was in his police chief's uniform could he perhaps borrow a costume of some kind from the theater so he could get home without being murdered according to Boloslavsky's memoirs within hours Moscow transformed from a teeming polyglot metropolis into a city of silence punctually to a gunfire checkpoints choked its roads as the Bolsheviks sought out enemies of the people Boloslavsky, both a white and a former officer checked that particular box twice the first studio like all the other theaters closed to protect it Boloslavsky, Michael Chekhov, Vera Soloviova and a few others moved into the building Chekhov and Boloslavsky shared a room and watched duties on the roof while the women stretched their food stores into meals they lived communally sharing everything except for cigarettes during the war the first studio had run a hospital for the wounded for the revolution they kept it open a neutral territory where red and white was the basic treatment from a nurse Boloslavsky became embroiled in a last ditch effort to in his mind save Moscow from the rent an old friend from the Lancers identified only as Alek approached him with a scheme together they would make their way to Tver, now Kalinin to their old cavalry school they would convince the officers and their army in training to attack the city which would inspire whites inside Moscow to revolt Boloslavsky had sworn to the other members of the studio to put politics aside for the sake of their artistic home but a Lancers heart beat in his breast soon he was on his way to Tver but the plan came to nothing as his old instructor told him the army obeyed the government they had obeyed the Tsar, they had obeyed the Duma now they must obey the Petrograd Soviet without deference to civilian leadership they risked chaos that chaos would come of its own accord however four short months later when the Russian Civil War began thank you thank you all for coming I'm taking a liberty to read from something that actually has been published but since it's within the six month window it's still work in progress of reaching your your hands and also I'm going to be doing a kind of slight remix or condensation of a chapter to get it down to the appropriate length of time for this reading here which has the side effect to be realizing that this whole chapter itself could have been half length anyways such as like thank you for the invitation the past has left images the French historian André Mainglant has written comparable to those which are imprinted by light on a photosensitive plate the future alone possesses developers active enough to scan such surfaces perfectly one aspect of the surface of representation that Mainglant's metaphor evokes is what photographers refer to as the crushed black these are the shadow areas that lack detail and texture due to under exposure and are thus called locked up or crushed according to the illustrated dictionary of photography we see these crushed blacks in most prints of Shirley Clark's 1967 film Portrait of Jason including DVD releases up until the full restoration of the film in 2014 these underexposed grays and blacks in the film, what is more they'll agorically repeat the underexposure of the film which has never been widely and consistently available until recently has the print left images on its surfaces that only the developers of today can scan perfectly this formal question takes us directly to the dialectics of loss and salvation which the film's subject Jason Holliday endures on screen and in the archives crushed blacks can be considered a printing flaw but they can also be deliberately employed for aesthetic effect crushed blacks seem to contain in their monochromatic starkness reserved images that might be revealed by a better developer in the future but what happens when art or theory plums those reserves are we to accept the removal of the crushed blacks as the fulfillment of the filmmaker's vision would such a fulfillment somehow redeem the director particularly in her vexed antagonistic relationship to her subject or is something vital missed by the current historicist drive towards perfect audio visual restoration with its off accompanying impulse to repair the injured historical subject if underexposed blacks on film are not simply devoid of content but to the contrary filled with incommensurabilities traces of a past life untranslatable into our own might we not instead find ways of valuing those zones of indistinction for and not in spite of their mystery by what method would we attempt such a transvaluation of the crushed black instead of history as we know it would this other method be a sort of fabulation Portrait of Jason is often described as the first feature of film with a queer black protagonist it is now a classic document to the cinema verite movement as well as an important work by an American female director the black and white film consists of approximately 100 minutes of footage called and edited by Clark herself from a 12 hour shoot in her duplex apartment in the legendary Chelsea Hotel which documented Jason Holiday holding forth on his peripatetic life as an entertainer domestic worker hustler and denizen of the sexual and racial under commons an immediate sensation upon its release Clark's film impressed the likes of Alan Ginsburg and Igmar Bergman Gilles Deleuze included a discussion of it in his 1985 cinema to treat cinema to the time the porch I always like this idea of Jason Holiday helping shape French post-structuralist theory from within yet Portrait of Jason has also continued to draw detractors who've considered it for a voyeuristic exploitation of a vulnerable subject critics have focused on the power of the white female director Shirley Clark wielded over her black gay male subject Jason Holiday the film has been characterized as a racist enactment of film as an apparatus of capture of black life in which the exposure of the vulnerable peripatetic Holiday which the exposure the vulnerable peripatetic Holiday gained was tatted about to his endangerment and exploitation by a privileged member of the New York City avant-garde and there's something in crushed shadows that binds cinema to theater and both to painting and poetry something that enables Shirley Clark's portrait of Jason to hold light within dark black within white and an incommensurable commons within both in evoking the incommensurable in relationship to the projects of the restoration of the film on the one hand and on the other the practice of reparative reading I am consciously evoking the work of Jose Munoz responding to the antagonism and dissent Clark's film continues to produce in particular between white feminist genealogies and queer ones I seek in this chapter a reading that works in the reparative mode Munoz moved in one that acknowledges antagonism and negativity rather than denying it instead of gradual revelation perfect restoration or the trope of how their love is termed the emotional rescue of the historical queer by the well-meaning well-adjusted critic in the present these strategies offer us an alternative that I want to call invoking along subterranean tradition of black escape negativity dark fabulation this is my moment holiday tells Clark's camera at one point I'm here on the throne and I can say whatever I damn please but it's got to be righteous you know everything about this moment in the film turns on the inflection holiday places on the word righteous a key emphasis that qualifies his relaxation into sovereign self-possession behind this puff of smoke and a sip of whiskey and brings into play a collective black idiom of spiritual struggle for post-secular freedoms it is important to note how holiday through this emphasis on truth and right pluralizes the moment of his cinematic visibility he is the queen on the throne able to finally say what he pleases no matter how profane but that saying must be righteous that is to say it must do a kind of justice that is incompossible with the conditions under which he appears which is to say that the saying justice that is incommensurate with the rights accorded under the law that held him lest we forget doubly triply criminal as he spoke and that justice has everything to do with the possibility for black social life as manifested under conditions of generalized dishonor and stigma Jason the director later noted to an interviewer lives nowhere where does someone who lives nowhere come from where does that person go Jason dares us to respond to this question wherever and whenever we are has this moment been righteous where are we to locate righteousness in a disillute fatiguing 12 hour film shoot in the penthouse apartment in the chelsea hotel with the subject being plied with liquor and reefered by a white director before being heckled by here and later her matinee idol boyfriend what kind of moment is this Barbara Kruger levels what has become the standard indictment against the film when she criticizes disturbing indulgence in cultural and racial tourism Clark who made several films about black life in New York City in particular the cool world from 1964 did see herself as a kind of reporter from the dangerous frontiers of urban life a position that however sympathetic to her subjects nonetheless arrogates to her the privileged filmmaker the rights of representation her editing of the film has come under scrutiny as well Charles Nero has placed the film in a series of narratives in which a black gay subject is ultimately exposed by the white directed camera as an imposter Gavin Butt has produced perhaps the most balanced assessment of the film to date arguing on the one hand that Clark's psychic and social cross identifications with black men comprise a queer feminism while acknowledging on the other how problems of social class are as much as anything else played out in the film's intersubjective mise-en-scene such imperfect and troublesome relationships but goes on to note are the very stuff that makes Portrait of Jason an important work of avant-garde film a position I corroborate and amplify here that is to say if Portrait of Jason was from its inception troublingly imperfect then the best that restoration or recovery could hope for might be to amplify those imperfections the tangled relationships in the film would need to grapple with the feelings of shame exposure and anger that Portrait both depicts and evokes complications that strike at the heart of all we risk when we claim both life and art for performance many viewers of the film are most disturbed by the turn it takes towards the end when after demanding tail after tail from holiday Clark and her crew including her partner Lee abruptly turn on holiday calling him out for some despicable lies he has ostensibly told to tears which they piteously reject as yet another manifestation of his deceitfulness and deception astonishingly holiday a concurse with his accusation immediately drives up and ends the film announcing the entire experience a happy and successful one it is unsettling to viewers to find themselves aligned with a documenting camera that has by imperceptible degrees attached itself from its ostensible neutrality and become a hostile tool of interrogation motivated by jarring hostility as the film thus turns from an ordinary spectacle to a discomforting situation the mood alters in such a way as to leave many viewers from their different positionalities feeling awkwardly complicit Portrait Jason makes a provocative case study for investigating the question of loss of repair and if the dominant impulse is to bring the truths about this film to light I want to step into the block shadows instead in order to look elsewhere I want to take the question of agency in the portrait and distribute it in and out of the places marked crushed black the zones of indistinction between the theater and cinema between poetry and the graphic arts as Portrait Jason reveals nightlife is indeed a space where queerness and blackness co-animate each other in ways rarely captured in daytime familiarity with classic associations of night with sleep, dream intoxication and sex as we face the overlook in our knowingness the difference every nightlife must make to research and interpretive methods better calibrated to the world other sobriety exchanging day for night entails more than extending around the clock a method developed for 9-5 as Shing Vogel argues nightlife possesses its own epistemology of secrecy and exposure to plunge into its orbit is to circle around a star whose light unsteadily flickers in stark vitality that I want to both attend to and problematize in my genealogy of the black and queer performances that are archived in Portrait Jason not only was the subject of Portrait Jason a prominent figure of every nightlife and one whom Andy Warhol longed to capture but the production of the film itself was an enactment of it began at 9 p.m. on a Saturday night in Clark's duplex apartment the shoot lasted until 9 a.m. the following morning in pursuit of a subject who might reveal an unguarded facet of his truth to the camera Clark's gaze alighted on holiday as someone who by her later recollection desired to be in front of a camera but did not yet know how to hide himself from it holidays overt theatricality his readiness with quips body stories and sentimental ones his movie star impersonations and his little bits of business from a cavalry act he was forever in the process of getting together all this composed a surfative appearance that Clark planned to crack open precisely by giving holiday what he claimed most to want an audience that her film she was motivated by hostility toward holiday informed part of a plan to revenge herself for a tremendous insult from him adds another layer of regression to the cool seemingly neutral pose of the recording apparatus and this is not just an encounter between the filmmaker and her subject because the camera never pulls away from holiday viewers of the film only gradually become only gradually aware of the number of other people in the room director Clark's voice is heard early on and holiday interacts with two other male voices most notably that of the actor Lee Carl Lee who is present on set but played no official role in the production interposed between his throne and the audience of posterity is the circle of Clark her erstwhile lover Lee and her small crew it is in this mix of durations this interanimation of the living arts of theater and film what I want to call a living room theater emerged it is in this theater I wager that the occluded and blocked up shadows of every night life took shape it is also in relation to the terms of this theater and against them that Jason Holiday performed in reading the ephemeral evidence of this kind of interanimation of the hetero and homosexual in downtown New York I turned to the poet Marilyn Hacker who offers one account of the game of concealment and revelation in every night life in a 1985 poem in which she recollects fragments of life in the Greenwich Village of the 60s with her then husband Samuel Delaney this is an excerpt from Hacker moon dark to dawn loud streets were not quite scary footnotes in a nocturnal dictionary of art software on my ears and four walled cadenzas a little later in the poem she continues five months short of twenty I knocked back whatever the river sent he was gone two days might bring back on the third some kind of night music I'd never heard sunny the burglar punched with breakfast beers olive skinned Simon who made fake Vermeers the card sharp who worked club cars down the coast Hacker's account of hospitality her errant husband's various tricks is remarkable for its lack of moralism anger or self pity rather the poet's domestic scene setting quietly steals thunder from both her spouses putative infidelities and the heteronormativity that they both reject by reading her poetics out of a quote nocturnal dictionary that lies at the threshold between living room and street in the duration between moon dark and dawn Hacker's poems later interpolated into the Blaney's own memoir The Motion of Light and Water offers a model for listening to and speaking from the night music of every night life a poetics that gives space to the tensions and affordances of interracial, homosexual cohabitation and compassion in a manner that falls short of reconciliation but doesn't advance as far as total repudiation in my mind at least this other black-white domestic couple making due in the 1960s offers an alternate angle on the tumultuous gains played by Clark and Lee in a relationship driven by drug addiction and violence and dangerous enough to ensnare holiday in the psychotrauma of a living room theater recorded and exposed to posterity I'll stop there, thanks So really quickly we met in like 2015 I mean because I was going to do an exhibition in Toronto and I was writing I was writing a monologue for it that was going to be the main part of the exhibition and it was about something about like all my problems with just the weirdness of American acting and psychological realism and just how kind of insane it actually seemed even though it was the mainstream thing and on my Facebook feed showed this person I don't know if it was really an excuse but it was the person and just this thing said it's here, it's here and it was the cover of this book called Method Acting and It's Discontents by this punitive friend of mine who I didn't know and I was like, oh my god I was like, I'm going to stop here with psychotrauma on American psychotrauma so I contacted her and I was like we have to hang out and hang out, we did and then we were talking to Shani about this monologue I wanted to writing and then we wanted to do stuff in Toronto and then we decided to do a book together which would contain like a brand new essay by Shani and then a reprint of the monologue that was performed in Toronto sort of a brand new essay although it was also like it was supposed to be outtakes from my book everything that was like too crazy and small and like fucked up to include the actual book but then it took on a life that sounded became an original essay so and then and so we made this artist book which had like prints that I made for the exhibition which are all like a culted version of like images from the actor's studio and Shani and I wanted spending a long afternoon making a very paranoid diagram of the secret history of the 20th century through method acting and the book and so that wanted to be in the whole book which is coming out in the third state in the month it's called The Discourse on Method so what we're going to do is solve that acting because we're going to turn it over to these actors Shani will introduce her thing Blaine Retner and all that I don't think I'm going to introduce her except to say thank you Blaine I bought a plane ticket to Madison, Wisconsin in a fit of panic during the summer of 2014 I'd actually been in a semi-constant state of panic from the moment I signed my book contract the previous spring certain that this apparent happy event would result in one way or another in some sort of ornate shattering downfall which I imagine in every more even ever more haughty and megalomaniacal images but this was different I hadn't visited Wisconsin theater collection where the 406 cassette tapes recorded at the actor studio between 15, 1956 and 1969 have been housed since Lee Strasberg's death in 1982 I had to go I told Michael in the neutral voice of inarguable domestic imperative I booked a flight from New York to Chicago where I would change planes for Madison and arrive at a hotel near the university around 8 p.m. I would wake up the next morning and go promptly to the archives where I would sit in meditative stillness and take rigorous notes for the duration of the work day and I would discover extraordinary things that would raise my argument to new heights by thoroughly corroborating what I already knew and I would commune with the voice of Lee Strasberg which would ensconce me in the cool and miss of authorial legitimacy as we landed in Chicago it began to storm the plane to Madison was delayed then to Lee again I waited in the terminal and sent Michael pictures of the sky from my phone my flight was cancelled and there wasn't another available until the next afternoon meaning I was going to lose more than a half of my time at the archives I called the only person I knew in Chicago asked if I could stay the night at his place and got in a cab I met Josh our first year as theater majors at the Tish School of the Arts at NYU two weeks after we started college we watched the twin towers burn from our dorm windows he made up a bed for me in his living room pushed aside beer bottles and paper backs after I went to after he went to sleep I opened one of the books on the coffee table called the guys and gals of Beverly Hills 90210 which described the life practices and moral value system of Jason Priestley, Shannon Doherty and the Perry the storm had ended by the next morning Josh walked me to a car rental where they gave me directions to Madison I was so worried about taking the wrong turn that I kept the radio silent the whole way the Wisconsin Historical Society had an imposing building on the east end of the University of Wisconsin campus with a long row of ionic columns embedded in the facade I took an elevator up to the fourth floor for the center of film and theater research where the archivist expected me I requested five tapes three tagged effective memory exercise not including the librarians there were four other people in the room which was brightly lit with furniture that looked about 30 years old the archivist reminded me that I could manually copy whatever I liked but that no recordings of any kind could be made of the materials I assured him of my compliance the voice of Lee Strasberg is anxious and strained he repeats to himself and digresses in length and his verbal ticks are ubiquitous so to say as indicated by the result of which it's a voice and a speech pattern of someone trying to communicate something important but as I listened to the audio tapes I felt to me that somehow the content was gone missing or had been transformed into familiar sounding but indecipherable dialect there were long stretches that made close to no sense to me exegesis of plays I'd never heard long iterations of the same instructions to multiple actors that sounded both epithetic and strangely blank the most interesting in what Strasberg had to say about emotional experience and so I listened hardest during those sections this is because I had a hunch about truth and authenticity and for all the language of humanism his method actually pointed in a different direction towards a cyborg emotionality the machinic self fired with the blowtorch of mysticism going to acting school had been the best way I could think of to get to New York without completely alienating my school teacher parents but once there I imagined myself su generis I remember telling someone in all seriousness that I wanted to be an art object I'm not sure what I thought this meant but that at the time what now I can see that I did what I did mean it was a fantasy of enclosure I wanted to be a thing John Paul Sartre would call this bad faith Jacques Lacan would call it the armor of alienating identity Simone de Beauvoir would call it identifying with the patriarchy I think it was all of the above in my acting class as a tish I was often reticent to participate any time I had to get up in front of the class though I became focused one of our first assignments was to write down a monologue for ourselves about our lives I had a hangover that day and I had to present it and I had just reached my hair in the dorm bathroom perversely the teacher had pulled back the carton from the mirrored wall of the classroom so that we could watch ourselves acting I can still picture my 18 year old self straw hair pinching my eyes and crying Strasburg's exercises can be divided into two basic categories the first is devotion to relaxation the first is devoted to relaxation Strasburg is convinced that human beings are blocked that these blockages stem from social and cultural conditioning and that unblocking the actor is the first step towards authentic emotional expression the second group of exercises is devoted to its own form of conditioning conditioning the actor to respond to emotional sensory and emotional material as he or she would to real sensory and emotional material here's where things get tricky the actor practices what is called effective memory which includes both sense memory and emotional memory exercises to train her to respond to stimuli on stage in a truthful and authentic way she imagines she's holding a breakfast drink and practices smelling and tasting it she also practices emotional recall summoning up emotional memories from her past and reliving them the internal sequence of the emotional memory exercise changed somewhat over the course of Strasburg's career but it always started with the actor narrating the emotional event from her past sensorially what she saw, what sound she heard what texture she felt and then reenacting the event without narrating it after the actor had practiced this many times she would be able to summon up the real emotion she felt in her past all at will while she was performing the emotional memory exercise is the most famous and controversial of Strasburg's exercises and the crux of the criticism that he was practicing unlicensed psychotherapy at the historical society I listened to tape recordings of several effective memory exercises taking notes on my laptop this is from a tape marked Anastanovich 1966, April 19th long pause on the tape from minute 28 12 seconds to minute 29 and 15 seconds we just hear her breathing then she screams ah almost as if disgusted or frustrated and then she sobs several times and then silence sobs again at minute 30 and 6 seconds continues sobbing maybe laughing sobbing louder she says something alright I wish from that then it's inaudible and then another 2 minutes of silence moving around the room sighs, another 5 minutes of silence then Strasburg says that's it now could you intended to do more Anna says something inaudible you've gotten very frightened of what pause I don't know I don't know what happened I just got very frightened at one point I left the archives that night before it closed I was tired of listening to Strasburg berate actors and monologue about nothing his voice had started blurring in my head with the voice of my grandfather a psychiatrist controlling a narcissistic person when I started doing the research from my dissertation on method acting in my third year of graduate school it seemed like a perfect way to use an otherwise wasted chapter of my life working on it I often felt like one of the studio actors on the tape recordings uncertain, resentful, desperate for approval and terrified by the specter of annihilation lurking around every turn I tried to go to bed early but tossed in turn for hours I wondered if I had food poisoning I half hallucinated that I was stuck in Madison forever trudging endlessly to the archives and prison with the voices of the vengeful mid-century slowly turning into something maybe a pillar of salt I spent the rest of the night finally throwing up in the bathroom getting sick by yourself in a hotel room in an unfamiliar city is an extincentially rich experience deprived of the opportunity to theatricalize my feebleness for an audience I could focus on nothing but the gross substances of my usually coddled body in a feverish self-aggrandizement I started to feel exalted as if vomiting the contents of my stomach somehow got me closer to the pit of my bare life the entire trip had been somewhat masochistic from the beginning this felt like a literalization of an abjection that in other forms I secretly loved the most about acting it was obvious that Lee Strasberg was cursing me from beyond the grave just a little bit of context the monologue is called edition 8 and it was memorized by the different actors so that whenever you walk into this gallery for five or six weeks there was always somebody doing it hence the title it is actually done from the point, it is actually the subjectivity is actually a monologue that just keeps on having different bodies and it does not actually ever shut up and at some point it pitches a movie which is what you're going to hear I'm going to get to say it I always wanted to write this screenplay this penguin looking guy short, white, ethnic basically Richard Dreyfus or Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffman or any of those guys who became stars in the early 70's moves to New York to become an actor he falls under the influence of Lee Strasberg the inventor of method acting at the actor studio riots going on, bombings, vietnam all that stuff our guy is passively involved I mean, he walks by the demonstrations on the news but he's mainly studying his craft and working as a short order cook in Times Square and does some downtown semi-experimental theater and one time he's helping out on a Jack Smith kind of experiment for short that's shooting at the factory and the movie is about Pollock specifically about the act when in autumn 1951 when Hans named it the photographer and filmmaker, film Pollock paint because supposedly Pollock fell out of the way after two years' soap that was the night you flipped a dining table over on the Clement Greenberg because supposedly painting on camera doing retakes, performing being a painter for Hans made Pollock feel like such a phony such a fake such an actor he never recovered Pollock never felt like a genuine artist again Americans so hung up on authenticity right? Pollock in a white t-shirt painting Brando in a white t-shirt screaming Chris Burton in a white t-shirt getting shot so primal anyway, during the shoot something goes wrong, it's at the factory so it's that kind of shoot so everyone's on drugs and the guy playing Pollock I think it's Robert Guine has a meltdown he's on a lot of LSD and during the scene where they recreate Pollock painting on glass so Pollock painting underneath midway through the actor starts hyperventilating and suddenly he puts his fists through the glass he's so in character at that moment he's so immersed in Pollock's anguish and performing himself that he plunges his fists through the glass again and again getting huge starts the glass in his wrist weeping, weeping, punching through glass again and again crying, this is how it ends this is what happens this is the new sublime and it's the most compelling performance our Serpico looking hero who's just helping out in this film has ever seen but also the most aversive you're standing back watching but only because you don't dare get close you're only an audience because you don't dare get close this is all the trauma all the naked humaneness emanated in terrifying ways that Lee Strasberg is constantly trying to get out of and get out of the studio and yet these waves are also fundamentally repunt they make you into an audience but it's like Rosemary says this is no dream this is really happening and it really makes you wonder why people make such a big deal about catharsis because this is actually what that feeling is like and sure the ancient Greeks were into it but maybe celebrating that feeling there's a sense in a society that restricts the votes of the class males and encourages homing slaves but the drugs this guy's been hidden on the floor still crying they're all fucked up how are they going to get this guy to the hospital but they manage and somehow Warhol's money takes care of the rest but it's a long night of the soul for our guy he doesn't know if he's ever going to be able to come up and rise the subways the C's the C, the A, the 7 out in the Queens back into Manhattan until he soaps up and we see him alone wandering down Cornelia Street with a black leather jacket and a 5 a.m. light a little trade center is going up behind him and back to his fourth floor block he stands in the living room back to work his roommate or playwright is asleep it's time it's time to go it's time to go to Hollywood and seek his fortune in film and TV and because in the early 70s he decides to drive aerial view of the west side hiring now that kind of acoustic guitar that you can see in companies hitting the road montage in the early 70s we see him in the rolling countryside powering down interstates in Ohio fucking endless hours straight through wheat fields on Kansas local roads everywhere he goes he encounters a lens flare everywhere he goes he meets salt in the earth type soup a willing to share their table and break the bed with them in our change, no, blessed by his company in turn everywhere he goes he meets women daughters, mothers either free spirits or urine to feed he bends down to communes in Colorado, New Mexico Arizona Colorado, New Mexico Arizona, takes peyote LSD, gets high, learns about sustenance for Armenian guitar, finds America as Simon and Garfunkel constructors too it's basically an hour-long montage and by the time he arrives in LA, his Malibu 40 in the 101 in dusk the capital records building rising up against the sunset like Skull Mountain King Kong, 10 years have passed and it's 1981 you don't ask me how it's like a time warp he doesn't even notice so, we're at act 3 now and our guy, should I give him a name looks into an audition and gets a job almost instantly as the sidekick on a new TV show about crime fighting stuntman he moves into a new home in the hills he's a fresh new face and up and coming young star he's been seen dating Lindsay Wagner the biopic woman he's still taking glasses still trying to improve his craft at the actor's studio West and in a spare time hangs out with Lee Strasburg's daughter Susan and her ex-husband Chris and Lee's drug out son John he's having a high old time but he's a cipher no one feels like they know him his publicist frequently invites journalists to stress the fact that he does all his own stunts like the young Steve McQueen and in interviews he mutters sexy and cryptic things like I just wanted to feel I just wanted to feel real you know he's still going to classes still working on finding his truth and midway through shooting for season 2 something terrible happens our guy is doing his own stunt jumping from the roof of a four-story building with a winch of a moving crane in order to intercept a fleeing jewel thief on the street below when the crane swings wide the victim carries him smack into the brick face of the building opposite and he lets go of the cable and falls three stories onto an onion and bounces off landing on the street face down he's not moving everyone is frozen then breathe the emergency vehicle for the paramount law has been called but slowly he's back on his own his stuntman skills have saved him taught him how to break his fall he's on all fours now still bent over and slowly rises to one knee and looks up everyone steps back is his nose broken or his teeth missing he raises a hand to his face still looking at the assembled crowd realizes his face there there's a face-sized depression crisscross with wires transistors chips his plastic eyeballs start left then right and he turns his head and sees his face about 20 feet away lying face up on the dusty soundstage street he rises slowly to his feet picks up his face and walks away this is, of course the end of everything career, friendships, all of it in a coda we see him months later walking down the beach in Malibu or San Clemente and plaid shorts in the hoodie face plate off scanning the lonely beach with the metal detector yeah grab some chairs and do a quick fun Q&A I feel like it's a real Q&A we should try to make this movie right now but I might be asking a little bit um, thank you all thank you that was great at the very end I want to ask about where your projects are and just to say more and where people can find you but first I have two questions for the group one is about writing and the other is about reading so the first one um, you know the the ill-fated title of this event was from an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote you know, writing feels like swimming underwater and holding your breath so I'm interested if anyone wants to talk about what the experience of writing is for them and what tactics do you employ to try to get words onto the page I'll say for myself I'm a huge advocate of Neil Gaiman's advice you should either you should give yourself two options you can either write or you can do nothing and that's what you can do and then eventually you will become so bored that you will just feel compelled to start writing because what else can you do other than sit and board so that's what I've been using in my own writing practice such as this so I'm curious if other people have developed strategies, tactics, or feelings or you can talk about your own objection self-loathing I find that each project the writing process is really different maybe that's because I choose very different projects I don't know but I just find that what writing actually is changes from thing to thing for this book in particular it's like a very involved iterative process of reading things and then putting them in a color coded google doc so that I can go back and cite them easily and then that eventually becomes an outline and then I take that outline and a pad of paper and I write it out longhand with nothing with access to the internet anywhere near me and then I then type that up into it you're just constantly going over it again and again but that's nothing like what my writing process has been on anything else I've done it's just that what I had to do to get going on this one personally other thoughts yeah I haven't yet tried the color coded google docs but like mental note I'm always looking for some some hack that I don't yet know about in terms of like how to collect and collate and organize I'm a big fan of doing research I guess before researching and researching I have to be as far away for the internet as possible to the point where I'll even go to doing initial drafts by hand if necessary just to kind of filter out the noise and that's something that sort of happened over the 20 years of my adult life as a writer you know the latest thing now is some of you know that you can actually write from you can dictate your writing now increasingly you know so it's almost like a process of writing all together just go straight to the audio but and I also I write I both write collaboratively like I write in collective I like collaborative writing and I like writing with other people meaning like separately but we get together to have a good writing date that's like my version of writing or nothing you can't socialize and then if you do a certain amount of time writing then you can get a coffee and talk I'm not sure where to go with this I guess well because I trained as an actor I'm like really turned on by self-revelation but also really turned off by it so I think that this particular piece was about negotiating that yeah I guess with this piece I was really excited and inspired by David's David's piece which I had seen in Toronto and so I was thinking about ways that I wanted to respond to it from my own perspective yeah I don't know what else to say but I guess there is something about performing a character in writing that I find generative and exciting and I think that David's mode of the monologue was one enabling way in for me it's one fun fact Johnny is like that archive the University of Washington Wisconsin Madison that's where the car papers are for that chapter amazing we have a list of photos of that archive room in the book as well I I really hate writing and I really enjoy revising so I think over a long time of publishing I evolved this system where I lock myself up in a crowded cafe and just vomit out as much stuff as I can in an hour or so and I don't even look back at what I'm writing and then the next and then I go back to the next day I do the same thing and then the third day I do the same thing and then on the fourth day I go back to what I wrote but cannot remember on the first day and see if there's anything salvageable in it and from there on I start dividing my time between like vomiting up new stuff and then doubling back to stuff I don't remember writing as though it was written by somebody else and then I'm capable of judging it or revising it and then slowly some kind of format takes shape which has been working for me for the past couple years but you know who knows I would only have one other thing which was like in researching this book which I'm only a third of the way through having written a draft which you heard some of today you know I eventually found this is going to sound crazy but why not we're on a panel I eventually found that I could sort of take tips from how Stanislavski started approaching roles to how he approached to approaching writing so like one of the major things that again we take for granted now is the dividing of the job of the actor to discrete tasks and you put those discrete tasks together and then you have developing the character or you take the bits what they call bits and then when the Russians came over here and taught it they pronounced it beats and it became beats the beats of a story right and so he had this idea that an actor can't think about the whole role at once they can think about the actions the character undergoes and then eventually put that all together and you have a role and so every time you know I wake up often my heart racing like five beats at least faster than it should with like how the fuck am I going to manage everything that I have to manage to get through this there's all these people who know more about it than you know all the usual self-loathing stuff and it's like oh right I will break it into discrete tasks into its bits and then I will go bit by bit until I have enough together that I can make something and so you know like that has been that has helped get me over my hatred of the blank page and everything like that it's like I'm not going to write everything about the method today or read everything about the method today but I can read Shawnee's amazing book and I can write like some notes or interview someone or whatever and you just kind of bit by bit so to speak get through it I know that's sort of very boring but it was very weird that like at some point I was like oh wait I'm doing I'm having the same approach to this that I'm reading him have about to his own thing although hopefully my book will be on time unlike any of his productions and performances once he realized this in the spirit of revision I'm going to scrap my original second question I have a different one which is I think everyone everyone in this panel has you know different practices right right criticism right monologues, dramatic work but also maybe poetry and teaching is also another practice and so I'm curious how the various aspects of your work inform one another you know what do you take we heard a little we kind of gestured at with Shawnee's monologue and your story to acting education but I'm curious how you think about those two things or three things or however many intersections you work at I like I started writing these monologues just because I you know I sort of shifted from being a theater director to exhibiting stuff in an art context and I really missed I really missed working with actors and I really missed I missed all of that so I just started evolving a way of sneaking one into the other and the only way to really do that because initially I would just hire people to write like I hire playwrights to write things for exhibition but then that seemed like a cop-ass and then I just started writing my own stuff and I generally try to I think the voice in it is generally the same voices in my criticism which is the same voices in as my voice in the classroom which is fairly enthusiastic extremely bewildered and kind of like very assertive without having anything to back it up and I think that voice is pretty much consistent through all the different fields that I meant Yeah I guess so when I said that this essay is like outtakes from my book part of what that meant and means to me is that it was everything that was actually like the most exciting but that I had no evidence for and didn't sort of fit into a kind of you know standard accepted scholarly practice so lots of you know of course the personal stuff but also this kind of sense that I had that there was this creepy thing going on with the method that nobody was really acknowledging although it was completely central to the experience that so many acting students and actors I think have so I guess that I do think of this writing as a different mode than my scholarship like and I you know sometimes I have fantasies about bringing them together more but I also am kind of into not because I do think that there's an important place for evidence based reasoning in the world and I also think that there's an important place for like you know flights of fantasy and that there is thirdly like moments when that can go over but you have to be really careful I think and how you do that and it has to be I think it has to be done in a way that doesn't feel like flaky and unsatisfying but rather feels like you know exciting and suggestive so I guess yeah I feel like that third space that you just described is like so much where I live right between evidence based reasoning on the one hand and flights of fantasy and then it's for me it's in Afrofabulations which is largely devoted to kind of iterative experiments and telling these kinds of stories that I don't want to tell the whole story in the traditional fashion I don't want to do the traditional historical but I also you know I don't want to like get called out for you know making shit up or you know there's a way it's almost like both and you kind of like make it even harder for yourself you have to do double duty right so the version that I gave today was something I've never tried to do which was just to take the story of the chapter out and tell only the story and what you missed was all the evidence I spared you as an audience here in the paragraphs in between right so hopefully you know I don't know if that worked or not but it was an experiment and it's one that I think a lot of a lot of academics right now I think as we're looking at like the state of the humanities to make a big large you know raise a large issue right we're called to communicate in ways that I actually think that fear folks are well primed you know actually in some ways because of maybe these long histories of the method and other just theatricality writ large we're actually well primed to sort of like answer that question of what it means to sort of like hit your marks down and deliver communicate even if it takes you 10 months or 12 years however long it took them to make that show there is that sense of like interface with the public that I think other parts of the humanities can really gain from actually we were having a conversation about this this past summer right or two summers ago right what can what can what can theater and arts contribute I think that's kind of answering the question yeah I mean I think for me you know I was trained as an actor sort of probably more Adler I guess but and then was a theater director and stuff like that but but you know it's like I always go back to or you know like this book has a particular set of challenges because it is a narrative work it is a biography but it's not a biography of a person right it's a biography of this idea of how it transformed and then it transformed others and all sorts of stuff and so I just try to keep going back to that as a first principle there's the easy part of it and it's not easy the clear part of it or the thing I keep going back to that I think the theater background helps with is just looking at like what is the action of this story what causes what to happen there's this book that I don't actually like very much but it's useful for freshmen called backwards and forwards that is a book about script analysis it's all about just putting a whole script together as a chain of causation right A causes speed to happen and you can go through a whole play from its ending to its beginning or its beginning to its ending if you've done it right that is a very useful idea when you're trying to tell any kind of story and I feel like when you have the narrative and the narrative is clear and the narrative is exciting while still being rigorous that's the difficult part in terms of you know being factually accurate and things like that you can fold all sorts of other stuff can I start mixing my metaphors you can fold all sorts of egg whites into that batter no you can fold all sorts of other stuff into it and so that's a lot of what we were doing in the first book that I wrote the world only spins forward the oral history of angels in America a lot of it is about trying to figure out a way to do that and I'm trying to figure out a way to do that here because like in order to understand the story of the method there actually is a lot of bizarre conceptual stuff that you have to understand that to be very clear no pioneer of any stage of the method was good at writing about it Stanislavski is one of the most abominable writers you will ever read Strasberg's dream of passion doesn't really explain anything Adler's, her only complete book on writing is just this sort of step of things with terms never explained Bolislavski is probably the best but then his book is like has anyone read acting the first six lessons he doesn't know that it's this book where he's imagining this dialogue with this impressionable young woman who is referred to in the book as the creature and it's this series it's six scenes where he's like so even though if you look up Bolislavski's lectures which have only really been published once in this Routledge edition he's actually the clearest writer about what effective memory is and all sorts of stuff his own writing on it is garbage so it's like that's its own challenging ideas you have to try to explain you have to try to get them right even though Stanislavski changes mind about all these words meant and stuff but you have to kind of like sneak it in amidst this story the story is what's going to keep people for my purposes reading from page to page I feel like just a quick on the flip side of this I was super influenced by this German playwright named Rene Poles which mainly because he showed people like in the throes in the throes in the throes of critical theory massively overwhelmed by everything theory was doing to their head and sort of related that to an inability to get a grip on the contemporary situation whatever it is so what it wound up doing was he was creating a bunch of everyday critics who were incapable of getting on top of things and they were like talking and talking and like that feeling seemed so it was a once scholarly and completely non-objective and like full of affect and heat and I thought that was a really interesting way of going about it where it's so blatantly illegitimate but so earnest in its attempt to like get a grip on what's going on that that would be another way of writing to communicate that just to circle back to this I do feel like there's you know even as I kind of absurdly reductively laid out a distinction between the Apollonian and the Dainese of writing I actually don't think that it's ever one of the other and that we're all trying to muddle through a space of trying to find something new to say that makes something new possible in the world while also being exciting in like an affective way so I guess I get the truth is I do feel like the third place is where we all are whether or not we admit it like in that yeah I have time for one or two questions from the audience anyone have a question I will bequeat this microphone to you so you can be amplified and recorded any questions I'll even allow a comment I have a question for everyone I am wondering if you have a innate intuition for when when is enough research enough when do you get to the point where okay I think I know enough I'm going to write about this when you start to forget the stuff you had in the beginning yeah this is at least for me you know there's every facet every major kind of story chunk or character in the story of the method someone has devoted their entire life to researching already you know what I mean I will never know as much about the life of well I probably know about as much about the life of John Garfield as there is but I will never know enough about the life of the guy who wrote the biography of Richard Boleslawski which is actually a quite good biography it's like 300 pages long he spent like 20 years writing it I went to his papers at the University of Scranton because he spent his whole life writing this his whole academic career writing this 295 page book about a director who he really well I care about it but no you know there's something very moving in a canticle for Liebowitz kind of way about that but like so the answer is you'll never know enough you just at some point I feel like it's kind of intuitive at some point you're just like I'm so scared I'm now starting writing I just think it's a mistake to think of one before the other I mean I think it's really like you research even as you write from ignorance and what you're spitting out will guide your research further and I mean I always feel like they should be happening side by side you should be getting smarter even as you're like you're like expressing your uninformed thoughts and opinions because those are actually the spine of what your argument is going to be even if they're ignorant and then the reading educates the writing and then the writing binds and focuses the reading and ideally to me they would happen at the same time Can I have you as my editor now I feel like that's the best answer too because what it makes me think of of course is that even when you know something you're still trying to communicate it to a reader who doesn't it's enough so that you can convey it in the structure of the piece that you end up writing that makes a lot of sense much more than what I was going to say which was just to add that for me I think academia has all kinds of deadlines that just forced me to turn up to turn in turn in and and those deadlines are just it starts with having to turn in your term paper on time do you want to write a book chapter for this anthology and taking those deadlines as just a kind of artificial way of getting me to get started right and it's sad to say but somehow sheer panic along can get me writing and can get me out of the state of perpetual research I think we've all sort of faced that you know you go back to your research notes and years back in your research notes and if you go back far enough you realize you've had the same thought multiple times right so you just really need to like you do need those outside voices to reminding you that you know that that chapters do other questions from the house actually feel like Shirley Clark right now you are Jason thank you again it was really incredible listening to all of the work I guess my question is sort of surrounding the idea of fact and maybe evidence is the better word or how I mean especially in this day and age but especially in a western context because I think it's maybe different and in the not west what exactly do you think your responsibility is or like not responsibility it's like do you think there's like a true thing and then there's like a or is it like do you have a point of view on a certain way that a fact or like a life of like true things exist and you're using evidence to like back that up or is there like I'm just thinking about like when you guys are saying like you have to like what is personal and therefore you know versus like what is at you know like what you what you can take to your publisher like what are they going to get mad at you about when they the publisher they won't get mad at you because publishers don't pay for fact checking it's it's what you'll get caught if you're you know like that that thing with Naomi Wolf on the BBC where she got caught in that thing and you know it's what you'll get caught with afterwards but yeah but I don't I mean I'm writing a I don't know it's like my work is a work of nonfiction and I take getting the factual record accurately very seriously it's not always possible there's a bunch of sort of gray areas I mean we don't know there's no no one knows where the notes from Stella Adler's one-on-one studies with Stanislavsky are or if they even ever existed she came back from that and was like you got it all wrong this is how you do it he backed me up I'm right about everything but those notes don't exist I mean they don't exist there's a chart of what the system is we don't really know what the last decade of Stanislavsky's life was really like and whether or not he was living under house arrest is a really big open question we don't know whether he protected Meyerhold we do know that shortly after he died Meyerhold was arrested and then he was essentially you know beaten to death and in prison so you know there are you know you run up against things that you don't know the truth about and you try to get as close as possible I think you try to be as honest about that as possible but when there is an actual verifiable fact you have a duty to that fact to represent it I feel like I think Senaz that that question is actually what is so fascinating about I mean that is actually like the question you know so it's not I don't think that's an answerable question I think that's what's so interesting about this whole if you want to call it a tradition or this whole line of in creative experience that like goes by the name of method acting it's that there's there's at the same time that a truth and authenticity are postulated because they have to be structurally for the thing to work like everything else is undoing it and so you know I would argue that there's that like the fiction of a truth or authenticity is only of the thinnest and actually it's propping up all this other stuff and that that actually is like that other stuff is what's really interesting there and even when we when when the exhibition was up Sony came up and she led an affective memory exercise with one of the actors but even that you know like and he really he went he went deep you know I mean he was really like and then afterwards I was like real and he was like I mean halfway you know like I mean he was doing it for one of the weird things about the affective memory exercises they don't they take place for an audience the audience is the rest of the studio but there's no so and that is exactly that weird flimsy half state of authenticity where it's sort of there and sort of performed and doesn't happen without an audience so and like meanwhile like we're all having like these like these like very sincere conversations about do we just exploit this poor actor like he just like spilled his gut you know what I mean like so like as even as we're sort of you know we're rehearsing this this all the all the problems of like truth and exposure you know he's like well you guys you know awesome I want to wrap up a couple thank yous thank you to Jack Smith who's now been invoked twice during this festival I feel like it's watching and braiding over us and thank you to Frank the director of the Segal Center thank you to Sonata who's also the co-curator in addition to audience percent of this festival for envisioning this event along with me and thank you to Tavia, Isaac, David and Shawnee and Lane, Redmer and Eric Coddy who were there thank you to you guys oh and is this Mike Salon everyone should buy afro fabulations at a bookstore other than Amazon and discourse on Bethany when it comes out oh yeah at the I think you can pre-order at the 5013 website so yeah thank you I'll use it yeah so I'm going to go buy it yeah so I'm going to go buy it yeah so I'm going to see Mike and I'm going to be chaptered by and I'm going to go by and I'm going to go buy it yeah so I'm going to buy it yeah so so I'm going to go buy it yeah so so