Fasnacht, Ink on paper, ITIN ’04
Theater Fetish
mixed media with mask
24″x72″ ITIN ’03
So my mother calls me last night and says, “Your blog is obsessed with death. Are you OK?”
I say, “Well I’m obsessed with death, but I’m fine. There just seems to be a lot of people dying in the world…always has been.”
And I start quoting Woody Allen from Annie Hall as I am want to do
And she says, “Stop quoting movies.”
So I promiss her I’ll go to a happier place in my blog, like memories of Fasnacht in Basel, when we all went as a family, but really that was a trip right after 911 to flee America and for my brothers and all significant others to stand around that stone my dad carved in a way we hadn’t done when just my mom and I and my Aunt put half of his ashes there a few years earlier. It was a happy time, but certainly orbiting around the big D.
Of course, Fasnacht is in itself obsessed with the dance of death (Totentanz) and seems to have that “primitive” obsession with history and anscestor worship in its dance of the mask (Mummenschanz). It manages to be dark, but still fun and funny.
There is a line in omEGG where the old Swiss man, M. Tristan announces: “I never wanted to be a German, but it happens to you sometimes when you are born in Germany….”
Germans have an odd outlook on the world and certain Austrians haven’t made that any easier for German culture…this goes almost double for German/Jewish culture and Einstein and Freud and on and on…
Which brings us right back to Woody Allen and todays morning movie moment. I’ve been making omEGG for my old friend from college, David Conrad. I’ve always known him as a fairly erratic and angry guy – albeit with a lot of charm and charisma. He’s gotten a fair amount of work in Hollywood and in the theater, but he usually gets cast as the “pretty boy”, or the “confident prick”. Having watched him chew the scenery of life on plenty of occasions, I thought it might be nice to let him chew up a set, or two as well.
Because of this, I spend a certain amount of time thinking about him and drawing “him” from old rehearsal footage from Arc (he plays my rich brother on the Brooklyn Bridge in that e-book). It was sort of funny to turn the Channel from news about the snow faintly falling on the living and the dead and see old Connie in Woody’s last americanpiecture Anything Else. Not Woody’s best, but interesting in that Woody is finally allowing himself to play old and he’s sort of recycling his old movies and it is a weird Bergman trip in time for him…or maybe we’re back at Orson in the mirror again. Inside the museum, infinity goes up on trial,as the poet said.
Painting for Orson Welles (Hamlet), oil on canvas, 65″x85″, ITIN ’03
Munshani Collection