The Anger Project

Perhaps it is art's nature to heal -- but during these meltdown days, when bailout money goes to the derivative vandals and this oh-so-vaunted system folds in on itself like bad origami, I would argue that any healing we are going to experience will not come from calls to bipartisanship (why can't Obama govern like he actually won the election?) or hope. I think healing -- useful, purgative, truthful healing -- will only come from rage, honest moral rage at the stupidities, lies, and fuckings-over of the princes in power.

Rage apocalyptic. Rage drenched in scorn. Rage that flings the spit off the teeth at supersonic speeds. Rage that makes it impossible to forget and to sleep well at night.

This rage is the only reason to make art, is the only thing that can inspire art that matters, that will outlast fashion and profit. This rage is not about art made to soothe the ego, elevate the ultra-personal, diddle the private. Its power comes from a passionate impersonality, a fiery coolness, a fierce gentleness -- and a hatred of everything false, slavish, stupid, predatory. In the end it is an art about making things better, about showing people how they can act better than their selfishness and fears allow them to act. It is ultimately, then, about love. Not the sentimentalized tripe and self-involved silliness spooned into us by the wardens of our entertainment culture, but something much harder-edged, without schmaltz and dreaminess, almost in the realm of sacrifice, what Christ must have felt on the cross, both human and inhuman (since he was both), both heart-shattering and released. This is a rage which is a healing where the wound is more important than the medicine, since the wound is what keeps us alive and awake, the wound, as Howard Barker puts it, that the rope makes as we are pulled from the swamp.

An art that keeps the wound open, rage that cleanses, love both suckling and sundering -- these will heal the affliction of being alive in this country.

My plays of rage:

• The Fever Dream of Captain America - Muslims Muslims everywhere -- and barely time to round them all up. A mosque frequented by taxi-cab drivers is the latest threat to American ideals.
• Melts Into Air -- When Christian, a middle-aged anonymous executive, is summarily cashiered from the his job, with no real prospects for finding new employment for a man of his age, he and his wife, Doritt, decide it is time to pursue an American dream that has nothing to do with the nightmares of the present age.
• Not Here -- Jeff Boss sends the President of the United States a podcast -- but, of course, the Powers already know what it is he has to say.
• Stimulus -- Laurel and Jewel (war veterans), along with Deke (a survivalist) and Nub (Laurel's husband), decide to kidnap their political representative, Albumen, to buy him out so that he'll work for them directly. Given that they've all just been fired from the plant where they worked because the plant is being exported to China, they don't have much money with which to dicker -- but that doesn't stop them.
• T62 Afghanistan 1988 -- A Soviet tank crew at the ass-end of the war in Afghanistan is trying to make it home in one piece. Not bloody likely.
• When The Military Bares Its Breast, The Eagle Finds Its True Devotion -- Carver is back home in the land she defended after doing her tours. It is not a place that necessarily has a place for her.

As always, look forward to hearing from you.