I Yam What I Yam

Once upon a time, back before the Republicans had important things to do, like prevent Americans from getting health care, they had to while away their days with more frivolous matters like preventing Americans from seeing art.

I, for one, was grateful to the Republicans for banning controversial art.  After all, I was raised in a suburban shopping mall. How would I have known what culture was if it weren't for some crusty old senator railing on about how I better not lay eyes on it?

Of course, it's easy to be nostalgic for those good old days when the government still funded art and thus could censor it.  

Back then, we young irate feminists would rant about how empowering it was that Karen Finley advocated peeing  in art museums that didn't display enough work by women artists or artist of color, or peeing in polling booths when only white males are on the ticket.

Now, alas, I live in mail-only ballot Oregon, so if I pee in my polling place, it also means I'm mopping my floor and trying to blame it on my cat.  

And most of my sisterhood-was-powerful feminista comrades have turned breeder.  They still talk about peeing all over the place, of course.

It's just that now they're talking about it because they're swapping stories about pregnancy-related loss of bladder control.

(Note to Republicans: if you really don't want teens to have sex, don't bother telling them about the merits of abstinence.  Tell them that sex leads to peeing in your pants.  And your car.  And in at least a few cases I've heard of, the grocery store.  Trust me, that will be more persuasive.

Or you could just teach them to use condoms.  That way we won't need nearly as many clean-ups on Aisle Seven).

All of this might explain why I never became a Karen Finley-level performance artist.  It's not that I don't admire her for shoving a yam you-know-where.  It's just that when given a yam myself, my inclination is to shove it into a nice sweet potato pecan pie.

Because that is my level of subversive behavior, really:  substituting yams for sweet potatoes.  

It sounds a little more rad if you call it commingling the ol' angiosperms.

But not much.

In fact, I am such a garden-variety goody two shoes, that when I was in a performing arts fest this weekend, it involved 

not yams in the can (and no, I don't mean the kind of can you can find in Aisle Seven, if you step rather gingerly around the all-too-apt Piso Mojado sign), but merely pancakes from a mix.

And even then, when I was having trouble getting my 1 cup measure into the box (I know, getting my 1 cup measure into the box sounds like it could possibly be a euphemism for some really perverse thing one of the NEA Four might have tried and failed to get funding to do, but really, it isn't), I was so goody two shoes that instead of just dumping my Bisquick all over the place (again, dumping my Bisquick all over the place is, alas, not a sexual euphemism), I just fumphered my way through the performance, hoping if I cut back on the milk, all would go well.

It didn't.  

Which meant no steaming stack of pancakes to buy the audience's love.  

But we did win their hearts with the video that played while my batter ran rampant over the sizzling-hot onstage griddle (again, NOT a euphemism).  

Because if you are going to confront an audience with a brilliant director's impenetrable storyline, you might as double your pleasure, double your fun by mashing it up with yet another brilliant director's impenetrable you-know-what.

And no, I am not talking about his yams.

The audience was certainly amused.  Though I don't think any laughed so hard they peed themselves.  Sorry, Karen.  Maybe next year.

Ten Artistically-Inspired Days that Shook the World, Just As Though the World Was an Itsy Bitsy Snowglobe and Art Was a Curious Toddler

As we all know, in Christianity the biggest holiday of the year involves a kindly man in a fabulous red suit getting loaded on his sleigh. 

 I mean, loading up his sleigh and giving everyone a nice gift.

Judaism being the fun time that it is, our biggest holiday of the year involves a week and a half of begging forgiveness, culminating in swinging poultry around and then beheading it.

Why do we do this?  Because if you behead the poultry and then swing it around, it makes a really big mess.

Oh, you meant, why the swinging chicken in the first place?  It's because we're hoping God will let us live for another year.  Unlike poor Mr. Chicken.

Something is Kosher in the State of Sweden

Thus, the Days of Awe:  ten days to prove your life is worth something. 

Now, I realize we're barely past Bastille Day, talking the run-up between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur may seem a little premature.

Mayhem and Mob Violence:

Storming of the Bastille, 1789, or

the Fortunoff's Going Out of Business Sale, 2009?

I guess the Ten Days of Awe are on my mind because here at Dutchboy, we are heavy into the Ten Days of Are We Really Going to Pull This Off?

Instead of swinging a soon-to-be-headless hen around, we are swinging around the words of a certain glabrous playwright.

Of course, when you are working with Richard Foreman's diaries, you can let fly any which way you want, because no matter how the pages land, they are not going to make any less sense than they did when they were delicately packaged by the genius' own hand.

Oooh, that makes it sound like Foreman has The Thing is taking his dictation.

Thing, take a memo:  it is once again time for the Annual Richard Foreman Festival.

Which means that for the past week, the Cheez and I (and a bunch of other Portland artists/performers) have been madly making art.  Or what we hope is art.  It's a little hard to tell until the bun is out of the oven.

I'd love to tell you all about it, because it's been zany and weird and wonderful.  And because I pretty much tell you whatever the hell else I've been up to.

But I won't.  Because I'm hoping you'll come see the performance.  It's this Sunday, 5 pm, at Imago Theater. Which no, is not the usual venue, but yes, is air conditioned.  So hopefully this year we'll really do some performing, and not just some perspiring.

Although I don't want to give too much about our piece away, I guess I can whet your appetite (HINT!) by sharing this exemplum of a perFOREMANce from the year before last.  Click that full screen icon and turn the volume up.  Because who doesn't want to see a larger-than-life Hello Kitty confront the Golfish King?

Of course, this year's piece is totally different, because the text is totally different.

Well, maybe there are one or two similarities.  Suffice it to say, we found we had a few more random objects around the house that are waiting for their close-up, Mr. Demento.

From the Touching to the Tasteless

I know, you have been up all night. Night after night. Wondering. Worrying.

Where is Macaronimaniac? Why has the frequency of posting dropped off to a such a tragical trickle?

Sorry. I was out doing all sorts of things worth blogging about. So many I've had no chance to blog about them.

So without further ado, here is some eco-friendly, earth-saving, environmentally-sensitive material.

That means recycled.

First Recyclable:
Holly and Justin have been our neighbors for 3 years. About 2 months into those 3 years, they had kid #1. Which means said kid is deep into the Terrible Two's.

We are doing everything we can to help. Which mostly consists of reminding them that their baby monitor signal reaches to our house, and they are welcome to bring it over any time and have a martini with us.

The martini-with-static-purr lure was quite strong for a while there. But it hadn't worked of late, because Holly had been preggers with kid #2. Now he's finally arrived, and in addition to running the Feeders and Breeders program here in Portland RFD, I thought we should celebrate the blessed event with a nice hand-crafted baby gift.

Something the new parents and the sometimes delightful and charming, sometimes babymeltdown-goes-nuclear older sister can all enjoy.

As for the baby, we didn't really bother trying to please him. Being as all he really enjoys is the boob, and he's already got two of those to choose from.

But we do hope one day he will enjoy this. If his sister hasn't chewed it to bits by the time he's cognizant.



Isn't that so sweet you just need a damn insulin shot?

We got it done at Walgreen's, of course. Not actually the Walgreen's across the street. I wrote the poem. Cheez and I screwed around in photoshop. We uploaded the results. I arranged them. We hit done. And they processed it who knows where.

The shipping cost more than the book itself. But hey, if you want a copy, lemme know, because Walgreen's will be happy to ship you one, too. Why should baby Wyatt be the only one to enjoy Holly's boob?

Second Recyclable:
Having Seussified ourselves with that enterprise, we turned to preparing a piece for this year's Richard Foreman Festival.

For those of you too lazy to click on the link in that last sentence, let me sum up what you missed (albeit shorter and without the funny):
Step 1: artists in a variety of media are given 14 pages of disembodied dialogue written by avant-garde playwright Richard Foreman.

Avant-garde for those of you who do not have a liberal arts degree means no one knows what the hell he is talking about.

Not even him.

Maybe especially not him.

Step 2: Said artists have 10 days to create an original work based on the dialogue.

Some artists choreograph and perform original dances.

Some artists compose and perform original music.

Some artists stage and perform original one-act plays.

And then there is Macaroni and her squeeze the Cheez.

We took random lines from the already seemingly random dialogue and hand-crafted beautiful illustrations, with all the talent of . . . well, let's just say we're a little advanced over Wrigley, but not much.

But don't take my word for it. See it for yourself. I think you'll find this one is touching in only the most literal sense.


In the live performance arty version, we started with a quick thumb wrestle onstage, then I read the passages and showed the images while Cheez played "Under My Thumb" on guitar.

Not exactly Karen Finley shoving a yam up her butt, but cut us some slack. It was 100 degrees the night of the performance. No one wants orificial art when it's that hot.

And really, we have a whole Yamhill of art up our butts, most days.

In the Buff!

Who would you rather see in the buff?










Option a: Avant-garde playwright
sporting fishing vest

Option b:

Humorist blogger
sporting tiara

Great news! You don't have to choose. You can see us both in the buff.

Even better news: we will not be naked. Cause the buff we will be in is the Boston Underground Film Festival, which will take place next month at the Brattle Theatre (known to the hard up undergrads in Harvard Square as the place to go on a date with that pretentious guy from discussion section).

Besides being a sporter of fishing vests, Richard Foreman is a freakdog playwright, and I mean freakdog with the highest level of admiration. Discipline is the key for a writers, and good ol' Richard, he gets up every morning and first thing, before he walks the dog or reads the Times or cashes the latest check made out to "Genius" from the MacArthur Foundation, he writes.

He writes dialogue. Not for any particular characters in any particular setting. Just dialogue. Then when he's got about 50 pages writ, he gathers it up and puts it on the internet for the free use of anyone interested in disembodied freakdog dialogue. This being America, home of the freakdog and the brave, a surprising number of people are interested.

One of them is Linda Austin, artistic director of Performance Works Northwest. Every year, PWNW hosts a Richard Foreman festival. Linda chooses a random section from Foreman's journals, lines up a bunch of artists (dancers, poets, etc.), and gives them 10 days to make some work based on the selection.

The performers bring a range of talents to the project. Or at least most of them do. Me and my squeeze the Cheese, we just brought a lot of crap we had lying around the house, and of course my predilection for the digital camera.

Guess which of the following items we did not have in the house before the 10 days of awe:










Hello Kitty head on musclebound transformers body? Had that.
Two-headed red corduroy cat? Had that.
Sword-shaped letter opener commemorating the Alamo? Had that.
Staghead candle holder? Had that.
Now Serving sign from the California Department of Correction permanently stuck on inmate 66? Had that.

What we didn't have was the goldfish, in either medium (cracker or rubber). But since we wanted to depict a Foreman poem called "The Goldfish King," we ran right out and got them.

With these treasures and our usual collection of plastic astronauts, plastic bison, and of course the head of Farah Fawcett on a pencil, we were able to cast a nice five-minute, four-act video. Although the closing credits did acknowledge, "Some goldfish were eaten in the making of this film."

Anyway, if you have ever wanted to see the marriage of a transgendered Hello Kitty to Farah Fawcett as set to accordion music, then the Boston Underground Film Festival is the place for you. Fishing vest and tiara optional.