BdP intimacies: a love letter / thank-you note, of sorts.

A little over a year ago I headed to Santa Monica to meet my friend Jen for fish tacos and beer before my very first BdP show. Required by The Inland Emperor for a graduate seminar on queer space, I was mildly curious about the performance and the atmosphere. I remember sending my ex a flier of the show, or reading an e-mail to her over the phone — something of that sort, something that exhibited the pastiche of discourses and tongues now trademark of the BdP — and I remember her dismissive response: “I have no idea what that means.” Well, I didn’t know what the show would mean, either. But I dressed up in my red cowboy boots, made the date for tacos and beer, and put on my critical-love hat. I was going to see some queer Latina/o boi-butch performance art and, dammit, I’d try my best to find something of value.

I don’t know how The Inland Emperor and her students ended up in the front row, but there we were, very intimate witnesses to one of the most intimate performances I’ve ever seen.

I have to admit that I remember only bits and pieces from that first show, and I make no promises for the accuracy of these memories (fantasies?) — a video and voice lust-fest, a black-and-white checked bathroom, a lot of sex toys, including an enema and a sink full of dildos, a voice-over tale of pain and pleasure and shame, sausages frying, then the live bodies, the swing and smack of a flogger, or was it a whip? All right in front of my eyes, under my nose. I know there were other sketches and skits that produced various other pleasures and pains, yet I was set on fire by the opening.

At the break, restless with longing and a full bladder, I braved the bathrooms and then wandered away from the crowds to place the long-distance phone-call. I was turned on, and knew of only one person with whom I could share that feeling, one person thousands of miles away who could satisfy that desire. (The socially acceptable person, at least, because at the time I hadn’t been introduced to the differences between commitment and monogamy.) She was asleep. I couldn’t summarize what I had seen in that first act. I never was able to articulate to her just what was so deeply jarring and moving and fulfilling and fucking hot about it. To be fair, I probably didn’t want to tell her. I was predisposed to think that she wouldn’t understand. So it was my secret, one of them, in a relationship already coming to an end. I hung up the phone and returned for the second act.

That night I had great conversation and food with Jen. And I encountered, for the first time, as a spectator, my soon-to-be new Daddy, Daddy Rick, who created and performed in the enema-sausages-flogging piece that so haunted me.

Out of that art and intimacy came more art and intimacy. I haven’t done or read any theorizing on performance art, but it seems to me that one of the powers of performance art is what it generates in and among the group of spectators (critical intimacy?). Dialogue and desire, the chance to make new connections. This seems obvious to point out, but in thinking over my experience with BdP performances, and how I might best respond — rather than critique, at least for the moment — I am obviously inclined to elaborate on what has been done to me by the performances themselves. Me, the willing victim. So I hesitate to perform more close reading of their performances because my response is so personally and emotionally inflected. Caught up in this personal inflection I find I perhaps wasn’t the best critical viewer; and, logistically, I didn’t take notes. I can only offer close readings of my emotions. I admit willingly to my privileged and conceited position of personalization. But what better compliment can I give to the BdP than look at how you have drawn people together and here is how you have affected me. This is a shared implication, a drawing of momentary community between raced, classed, sexed, sexualized, and generational subjects that usually don’t find themselves in a communal space. Implicated together in the discomfiting intimacy of an erotically dripping performance.

But I was saying that the intimate, deliciously violating performances of the BdP engendered more intimate violations, and more art, this time between me and my Daddy. For example, Daddy Rick writes this poem, entitled “Exodus to the Flame”:

Time has allowed the fire to settle
Now it burns and sparks
Kindled by our flame
Awaiting a flare
Long nights spent apart
Dreams of holding, kissing, falling
Radiated by lust’s memory
Flashes of a glow
Eluded by life’s wicked truth
Escaping love’s present confine
Prisoner to romance
Containing love’s inferno
Exodus to the flame
Submitting to fear
Searching the firestorm
Holding on to a glimmer

I write in response:

Smoulder-spark

At the center of our bed is a smoulder
at the center of our smoulder is that spark
waiting to burst flame. The bed a shared memory
of lust kindling inside two spirits living
two lives, working to stoke the spark of delicious
inferno. Unable to indulge in that craved
destruction. Two spirits confronted with the
paradox of the wholeness blossoming from
ashes. Carrying the spark like a secret
a burden a promise a hunger. Because
fire is not kind. The spark ruthless
as it consumes in hot licks, our tongues burning
one another until we bring down so much
love it’s pain. But we beg to be blessed with such pain.
Gladly carry the spark and its promise of flame.

And hy returns with:

Ice and Fire together we unite
Lovingly we douse the craving that is ours
Melting away at the fear of pain and submission
Licking the flame that quenches the thaw

Burning the desire of lust’s wicked bond
Engulft in a cynical blaze of smother
Feeding the fuel when ashes smoulder
Dripping with the fluid of last night’s savor

Hide the ashes from the morning light
Shades keep out the sun while the burn is still
While the cat is witness to the fall of the wicked
Only now the fire winds again and the Phoenix rises

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And so we write back and forth, through and over the terrain of our relationship, lovingly redeploying one another’s language and turns of phrase, in a verbal fondling and arousal not at all separate from pain, fear, anxiety. But in my mind this is about more than two people just writing love letters to one another. It feels like a reverberation of that first performance, an after-shock of the graduate seminar I was enrolled in, a trolley of change I gratefully hitched myself to at the end of last March, and of which I have vowed to never again let myself be afraid. These poems survey intimate moments but are not private, and not only because they are accessible in an online public space. They have a shared history. They are part of the intimacy generated by that one required BdP performance, a little over a year ago.

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Everything I love is ugly. I mean, really. You would be amazed.

– Ani DiFranco, “Adam and Eve”

Just about a week ago, I saw my 2nd BdP show, this time at the side of Daddy Rick, now my partner in lust and love, in words and in flesh. I knew not what I would value from this performance, but I knew I would be looking to value something, because that seems to be one of my gifts. Recently I have been thinking of how values are established, what gets valued, what slips under the radar of worthy critique, of worthy creative production, of worthy critical attention. Thinking of graduate study and academia in general, it’s been brought home to me over and over how some texts and disciplines and methodologies are perceived as unworthy of my critical time. Questions such as “Are you still focusing on books?” or “Are you planning on sticking with that period?” contain subtle intonations of value. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed with the judgments circling around me, and I definitely find it more than a little difficult to figure out what I want to study, without considering who will and will not value the study. This is certainly more about my own issues and insecurities holding me back. And yet — and yet — I feel there is still some truth to the insidious circulation of value in academia. I find my professors, my peers, and myself participating in slights/sleights of judgment without considering contexts and wholeness. (Here is a structural question: is the dismissal a kind of fragmentation? Well, if value is not carefully and complexly assigned, fragmentation is sure to occur. Though wholeness is only a fantasy. I guess I’d just prefer a whole bunch of fragments.) I had such an experience in a graduate seminar with a celebrity-scholar. It seemed that every class was spent in dismissing someone’s argument, no attempts being made to find a moment, at least some moment of value, even in the suckiest of pieces. (Ironically, and sadly, in the following semester I took great pleasure in performing the same kind of judgment on this star’s most recent book.) Well, I’ve never been fond of the act of dismissal. As an action, it seems to be committing the same sins on which we so often base the dismissal. Granted, I am aware of my own tendency to let intellectual rigour slip in the face of my drive to locate and acknowledge some value. The point I want to make is that I approach everything in the world, except perhaps myself (though I’m getting much much better at developing a positive narcissism), as containing some nugget of value.

But what I have learned from BdP performances, and my recent exposure to performance art in general, is that one must approach it, and everything, with a willingness to shift what qualifies as valuable. In some ways, this most recent performance of the BdP directly addresses this issue. I found myself wondering, at first, how the title of the performance, “BdP get U.G.L.Y.,” worked to connect the drastically different skits. I was profoundly moved by what I felt to be the raw beauty of the pieces, particularly the video-skits in the first act. But the BdP were taking some pretty ugly subjects within both homo- and heteronormative communities and making art out of that “ugliness.” Much more could be said on ugliness as used, abused, and disabused by the BdP.

For the moment, however, I say thank you.

More terms.

Intersubjectivity

Femininity

Femme

Pain

Pleasure

Whiteness

Privilege

Reading practices

Love

Value

Taste

Distaste

Can I gather together texts around a theme, rather than a period or even a discipline?

Posts on deck: on the BdP; the eight million dissertation projects I have in mind; more on the fear/shame of the text; brother and perversion; the stray dog and puppies living underneath the house.