PERFORMANCE
by the Editor
It's the performance issue, and we've got our usual wide commentary on the subject, from Drew Kime 's report on his very first public performance as a food expert, to Mat Capper 's awareness that he tailors his performance to his audience, all day and every day.
Then there's Sean Watkin on his first performance as a singer, David Horowitz and his meditation on good performance, and — complete with link to the actual performance — poet David Budbill on performing his poetry of solitude and contemplation on stage with a couple of jazz musicians. Check out their links too.
Chuck Ivy's Photo Gallery is, unsurprisingly, a mash up of the film PERFORMANCE. Kid Carpet , who appears listening to performance, in our main page photo, sent some lyrics from his most recent performance. And Hunt N. Peck is back on form, performing in his usual way, in GREENBEARD: Chapter Seven.
The mysterious SEX PATELS sent along what purports to be an old interview of them, which, in usual Sex Patels style, explains nothing. Quite a performance.
(In EAP's attempts to draw out both the Sex Patels and to keep Hunt N. Peck's nose to the Greenbeard grindstone, we're trying to coordinate a publication of the complete GREENBEARD for 2010…complete with a CD of a Bollywood sea shanty, to be performed by the Patels. Stay tuned.)
And the best, most in your face, looking hard at it piece is Danbert Nobacon on Performance and Evolution? Closely followed by Chloe Hansen getting mistaken for a boy in the women's lingerie department in A Female Performance.
But the piece that made me think longest and hardest this month, though, is the disappointed cry of John Ross in POLITICAL PERFORMANCE. John has written four books about the Zapatista movement (the EZLN), in Chiapas, Mexico — a determined from the ground up revolution that, bit by bit, is reclaiming its own landscape from a centralized government seeking to exploit rather than aid. And John now finds the Zapatista's most visible spokesman, the charismatic Subcomandante Marcos, to be giving 'a shameful performance'. In fact, in an email to me, John was so disgusted with his own support for Marcos's prior performance, that he signed himself, "John Ross, Human Shill."
I think John's being too hard on both himself, and, curiously enough, on Marcos himself. It was the First World, hungry for sensation, that forced the Zapatistas to come up with some brand for itself, some icon that the Western media could grab onto and simplistically report. Marcos provided that, who knows how consciously and strategically? And it worked, too. People paid attention, because that was a story we'd heard before: charismatic, literature loving, mysterious man in the jungle fighting for the oppressed. There were more thoughtful reporters, notably John himself, who chronicled the real interest of the movement: how the weak were banding together and being strong, how they were reclaiming their everyday lives. But that was too dim a story, too unglamorous, for most of the news junkies of the world. So the stories about the Zapatistas were about Marcos.
In the end, though, the branding and whatever hype there was doesn't matter. Because, as John says, "If Subcomandante Marcos's public posture has been disastrous for the rebel cause, Zapatista communities in the highlands and jungles of southeastern Chiapas have continued to demonstrate the capabilities of collective action. The rank and file rebels' creativeness in providing a Zapatista education for their children and their defense of their environment, particularly native plants, are exemplary….While the EZLN eschews the public spotlight and has auto-marginalized itself from participation in national and international political activism, autonomous Zapatista communities in southeastern Chiapas continue to be living proof that another world is possible."
Welcome back.