by Jerome du Bois
On Saturday, The Paper Heart presents "The Wasteland Circus: The Final Curtain," yet another raft of performance pieces and video works by a lot of local stale bread. The Phoenix New Times has a little squib about it. The funniest part of the whole piece is the notion that this would ever be The Final Curtain coming down on these perpetual peripathetics, especially now that the loudmouths and musicians have won over the Mayor. They'll just move back and forth between Roosevelt Row and Grand Avenue, as they have always done.
Ever since the puerile need for attention has become institutionalized as "performance art," spoiled brats have inflicted their silliness on thousands of people who foolishly put up with it. Let's put a paper bag on our head and sing "Over The Rainbow" a capella and badly, over and over, and videotape it for a loop. Why not?
You can get away with anything.
That's the beauty of it: nobody can judge you. You can't fail. It's an infant's dream, being the center of a benign universe. No anxiety, everybody accepts you. Entire careers (Paul McCarthy) have been built on this very first solipsistic Freudian phase.
That's why Jeff Falk can drag out the same old meaningless macro mash-ups --"spooky ancient tribal surf," "mutated vaudevillian style," "kick out the jams," "challenge the audience"-- again and again. (Although this is the first recorded, I mean unrecorded, instance in which he does not use the phrase "cutting-edge." Maybe he's losing his edge as he's getting long in the tooth.)
Falk says "Wasteland Circus: The Final Curtain" will provide a sort of "greatest hits" compendium of Wastelands past. Featured "acts" will include performance artists Falk, Annie Lopez, Leslie Barton, and Peter Petrisko, Phoenix "godfather of poetry" Jack Evans, over-the-top slam poet The Klute, videographers Steve Gompf, Scott Massey, and Jose Gonzalez, and the band Last Wave, whose music Falk describes as "spooky ancient tribal surf."
"[The Final Curtain] will have a circus-tinged -- or tainted -- theme," Falk says with a chuckle. Falk himself will be hard to miss; he'll be dressed in "a clown suit with some bad face paint" -- sort of a perverted ringmaster.
It all sounds so edgy, doesn't it? But look at the list again. I don't know how long Massey, Gonzalez or The Galoot have been around, but the rest . . . I pay five bucks to see people I've seen everywhere I've stuck my head in for the last ten years? Do you think they have new things to say, do, or be, or are they just going to ride on the glory of their "greatest hits"? (Who needs new blood, anyway? They'll just hog the stage.)
Jeff Falk in a clown suit; that's new. Joel Grey on his worst day would blow his greasepaint away. Annie Lopez in a wedding dress but with a black leather mask. Never been done before. Leslie Barton and Peter Petrisko telling dirty jokes. Lenny Bruce could fade them into the wallpaper with a look. Steve Gompf, always wrestling with Trent Reznor, and losing. (And Un Chien Andalou was a loooong time ago.) And of course we all walk around with our favorite Jack Evans poems dutifully memorized.
Meet the new Phoenix, same as the old Phoenix.
Looks like it's going to be a long season.
Posted by Jerome at August 25, 2005 07:22 AM | TrackBack