ILLUSTRATION (II)

INTERROGATION (III): PROJECT 365

The lovely and talented Miriam Daly is Irving Berlin's great-great-niece. Every day she writes a song and takes a photo, and she will be presenting a special performance of these daily musical reveries under the rubric of Project 365 at the special Pretentious edition of Brick-a-Brac on Sunday, June 3. (More information, as always, is available at bricktheater.com/pretentious) She has submitted to our rigorous questioning with the following results:

What exactly makes your show so damn pretentious anyway?
I sing words like "cyclooxygenase." ("Ibuprofin" 11/09/06)

Name some obscure influences on your work – extra points for unpronounceability.
Obviously, one of the influences on my work is the Xiuhpohualli. I'm very into time constraints and numbers, and the Xiuhpohualli was an Aztec calendar cycle constructed from a count of 365 days.

The late Roland Barthes once wrote "For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture." Explicate.
Not only can an artiste with short arms never make a fine gesture, they also have a hard time reaching the pull-chain to turn on ceiling fans.

In what ways do you plan on alienating your audience? Cite an intentionally opaque or confusing moment within your production.
I will alienate my audience by never singing a song about heartbreak or true love, but may instead sing about the history of maraschino cherries, or the inflatable Union Rat. My audience will also be alienated by the fact that they will get to choose some songs, but will have to choose BLINDLY - just by date, without seeing the picture or knowing the title.

Which other Pretentious Festival show will you declare as your sworn ideological enemy, and why?
Hermits like me don't just have one enemy - the entire outside world and all the other shows included in that world are full of craziness and chaos that we'd prefer to avoid.

Please give us the gist of the acceptance speech you would use were you to win one of our Pretentious Awards.
"Thank you. Without your support I would have never received this award. Which I guess makes me co-dependent. Which probably goes well with my OCD...."

INTERROGATION (II): THIS IS THE NEW AMERICAN THEATRE

Reclusive billionaire and Brooklyn native Danny Bowes has written, with persecuted gadfly Tom X. Chao, a Pretentious Festival show that states its mission in its title: This Is the New American Theatre. Between bouts of crafting innovation out of shapeless matter using such tools as nudity and excessive self-absorption, Bowes has taken some time to answer our questionnaire. Here are his answers. (This Is the New American Theatre opens on Saturday, June 2nd - find out more about it at bricktheater.com/pretentious)

What exactly makes your show so damn pretentious anyway?
Two guys. One medium. Total reinvention.

Name some obscure influences on your work – extra points for unpronounceability.
Since the whole point of the show is that it's the NEW American Theatre, the only influences on this show are Danny Bowes and Tom X. Chao. However, I still get the extra points because for some reason no one can pronounce "Bowes." (It's like "oh" not "ow" . . . "ow" is what happens when I smack you for mispronouncing my name.)

The late Roland Barthes once wrote "For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture." Explicate.
Monsieur Barthes is, of course, being French, both pretentious and absolutely right. Both myself (Danny Bowes) and Tom X. Chao are in the neighborhood of six feet tall and, thus, have arms of sufficient length to make fine gestures, including the metaphoric extension of the middle finger to all theatrical traditions which preceded our much-needed reinvention of the medium.

In what ways do you plan on alienating your audience? Cite an intentionally opaque or confusing moment within your production.
We intend to alienate all theatergoers who like bad theater. Anyone looking for a boring show where the actors are unfunny and wear clothes is sure to be disappointed.

Which other Pretentious Festival show will you declare as your sworn ideological enemy, and why?
All other shows in the Pretentious Festival are our sworn ideological enemies for they either: a) are based in theatrical traditions that are neither new nor American; b) fail to adhere to the principles governing the New American Theatre outlined in our show; c) have actresses who are less hot and less naked than ours; or d) suck.

Please give us the gist of the acceptance speech you would use were you to win one of our Pretentious Awards.
Gist? I'll give you the whole speech: "You're welcome."

ILLUMINATION

Today represents a landmark occasion in the history of broadcast media, the history of art, and humanity in general. For it is the day that we unveil the long-awaited, slaved-over, soon-to-be-reviled, epoch-making, sense-enhancing, mutually-exclusive, mystic-mongering, profoundly abstruse, esoterically erudite, hermetically obscure, adverbally adjectival opus THE PRETENTIOUS FILM: THE MOST PRETENTIOUS FILM ON EARTH. It is directed by Tom Gubernat, auteur of the ages. Don’t even pretend your life hasn’t been changed.

INTERROGATION (I): NIHILS

We recently posed a series of questions to all of our Pretentious shows, so you, the readers, can get an idea how to mentally prepare yourselves for the artistic onslaught they will endeavor to provide. The following responses were provided by the estimable Mr. Trav S.D., author of the vaudeville history No Applause, Just Throw Money and the inventor of quoits. His show Nihils will open on June 16.

What exactly makes your show so damn pretentious anyway?
To paraphrase the blind lounge singer in Airport ’77, pretentiousness is “in the eyes of the beholder.” The Latin root from which the word springs means literally “holding [something] in front of oneself.” In a sense, all speech, all representation, is a similar feint, or dodge – a “shield” of (non)communication behind which to hide. Falsity and mask are the nature of the beast. The pretentiousness (or unpretentiousness… tentiousness?) of the current work is a matter of degree, then, not of kind. To grossly misrepresent a remark of Bertrand Russell’s: “If I am not pretentious…what am I?’

Name some obscure influences on your work – extra points for unpronounceability.
Baudrillard, Foucault, Bazin, Kant, Dostoyevsky, Joyce, Becket, T.S. Elliot, the Beats, Jim Morrison, Gertrude Stein, Sartre, Kierkegard, Nietzsche, Byron, Blake, Heidegger, Artaud, Adolphe Appia, Marshall McLuhan, Christian Metz, Stephen Hawking, Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Robert Oppenheimer, Lenny Bruce, the Velvet Underground, Jerry Lewis, Brecht & Max Reinhardt.

The late Roland Barthes once wrote “For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.” Explicate.
Theatre must not only address man’s primal nature, but his primate nature. Before man was pretensile, he was prehensile. The first theatrical audiences were austrolopithicenes, circa one million B.C. Savannah-dwellers mainly, they would periodically return to their Edenic mother, the arboreal habitat from which they sprang. Ensconced in the canopy, they would munch fruit and watch specialized members of their community enact rude frolics not substantially different from modern rock concerts, wrestling matches, and situation comedies. The long arms to which Barthes refers apply not so much to the performer as to the audience, who must rely on these appendages to ascend and navigate the branches…and (being prelingual) gesticulate their approval or disapproval of the performance. (This, too, some speculate, is the origin of clapping. Thalidomide babies and others can attest – when your arms are too short, you cannot clap.)

In what ways do you plan on alienating your audience? Cite an intentionally opaque or confusing moment within your production.
If I have not already alienated the audience with my last sentence, then there is nowhere to go but down. As for the performance, I don’t wish to tip my hand too much. Suffice it to say that the entire piece is composed of “cells” or “units” of alienation, based upon the principle of the Hegelian dialectic. From first to last, from Alpha to Omega, there is no theatrical moment within the piece that does not fold in against itself, in implied or self-evident replication of the Curved Space Theory.

Which other Pretentious Festival show will you declare as your sworn ideological enemy, and why?
Myself. Those who see the piece will be the first to agree – surely I am my own worst enemy.

Please give us the gist of the acceptance speech you would use were you to win one of our Pretentious Awards.
I intend to send an American Indian in my stead, who will give a brief speech about the historical mistreatment of his people.

VENDITION

Though we prefer to consider ourself above such pettiness, we cannot deny that we are members of a mercantile society. As such, tickets are now on sale for all Pretentious Festival shows. We invite the hoi polloi to hand us their hard-earned wages in exchange for the privilege of enlightenment. They may do so at

www.bricktheater.com/pretentious

or

HERE.

We advise you to beat your drums, raise your flags, and mobilize the masses - to such degree as you can manage to do so without ruffling your hard-won sense of icy self-regard.

ILLUSTRATION (I)

In February, we at the Pretentious Festival embarked upon what is destined to be among the most influential projects in the canon of post-post-modern art: the creation of Pretentious Imagery. A short film is in the offing, and a number of photos were taken (by one Tim Brown) of Pretentious goings-on at The Brick, featuring a number of Pretentious Artists who will be featured in our Festival. We will sporadically share this imagery with you, starting today. Click each image for full glory, and attempt to enjoy.