“First of all bullfighting is, as somebody once said very well, indefensible andirresistible …but I’ve turned against it for very much the same reason that my father, who was a great hunter, suddenly stopped hunting he said, “I’ve killed enough animals.” I’m ashamed of myself…I’ve seen enough of those animals dead, it was…a waste…almost all Spanish intellectuals have been against bullfighting for the last 150 years…Lorca is one of the few Spanish intellectuals who ever approved of bullfighting.”
— Orson Welles, 1974
If I were teaching a class on Brian Alessandro’s literature, I’d call it: “How Hard it is to Write and Move an Audience…With Unattractive Individuals.”
Alessandro’s follow up to the impressive The Unmentionable Mann (2015) is even more deviant, crafty, and insightful than its predecessor. His fifth novel (two previously unpublished, including Freud Droid which some avid readers lucky to get their hands on it — consider his best work and his first book, An Ego Dream Game, self-published in a limited edition in 2003) takes the gloves off completely and gathers prisoners as aggressively as it tries to shame the devil.
I admired the novel without liking a single character.
In what I felt initially had superficial similarities to a Todd Solondz film and its themes (the smug white suburban malaise, the yuppie heart of darkness, the emphatic white man’s ironic slouch towards racism or sexuality, etc.) Performer Non Grata is actually a backhanded slap at the hideous nature of white male masculinity (particularly) in all its toxic forms and incarnations (he displays the gamut’s psychosis from heterosexual to homosexual to beyond) and the violent escapades that that culture breeds. Our contempt for animals, women, and all entities that could be construed as their “others” is alarming and exquisitely detailed in this phantasmagoric book.
Centered around Risk Bonaventura, an American corporate zombie, and his deranged obsession with bullfighting and all that it implies— we are embroiled in a bizarre menage-a-trois between him, Javier his Spanish matador lover and Lorna, his wife, an academic and teacher (a character inspired by the deteriorated passion and warped ideology of none other than the disappointing Camile Paglia), Performer Non Grata is many things. But it is principally a crystallization of what has been latent in Alessandro’s entire body of work – from his novels to his plays, his film Afghan Hound, even some of his drawings – the pursuit of characters who are not particularly likeable. Especially Queer characters, that’s where his transgression lies. Javier is deeply disturbing, transmitting both homicidal and suicidal urges of the imprisoned masculine Queer; Risk and Lorna’s sociopathic son, Theo, is a graphic example of all that is terrible, coming to fruition. When you read the book, ask yourself: Which of these awful renderings could be me? The title says it all: there is no performer. There is only you.
The book is an orgy of sadism, meditations on Feminine and Masculine psychologies, the horror of rape culture, and the schadenfreude ethos of our media world and literally everything it embodies.
I could say it’s about a bullfighter, but it isn’t. And the novel in no way glorifies the atrocious act of killing a bull. It skewers the male perversion of wanting to become a bull fighter. I make this point because, unfortunately, many progressive and radical activists are losing their knack for insight and humor and are not understanding the differences between satire, irony, parody versus work that promotes violence against animals. I find it deeply disturbing that we allow Ernest Hemingway to sit comfortably on the edges of the Left because of his association with Cuba and later Castro – while not acknowledging his passionate desire to exert and romanticize aggressive male behavior, namely hunting and bullfighting. Orson Welles, in a stunning 1974 BBC interview, conceded how terribly wrong he was to have indulged in such a backward mode of thinking and behaving and he declared how sad he was that he and his ilk had participated in the murder of animals.
I could say the book is obsessed with rape but it isn’t. I could say it’s merely about toxic masculinity, but it isn’t. It transmits aspects of toxic masculinity. And it becomes increasingly the result of those toxicities, it expresses the pangs of the spoils of war.
I could say the novel seems to hold several mirrors up to the myriad of rotten pathologies in Western society but it doesn’t….at least not in a detached way. And if it doesn’t do that it’s not a mirror. However it is a reflection.
Alessandro houses a grotesque gallery of 21st century psychosis, proclivities, and behaviors— all which are vicious and antagonistic avatars, revealing the damage we endure and witness in our everyday life.
You learn a lot about a writer you like by focusing on how you approach their work. It’s unconscious of course, but it does determine a lot of how you process and inquire. If works of art are personal it’s also because we share a bit of ourselves as we interpret it.
*
If Unmentionable Mann was statelier and more mainstream, Performer Non Grata is more challenging and akin to the madcap, with its gravely dark humor barbed like a wire. Unlike many writers or filmmakers who try to employ a heavy satire or understated morality (often lapsing into nihilism – a problem for White authors as it is for Black hip-hop artists ) Alessandro is not trying to flex his “awareness” or wink at the problems of the white bourgeoisie or his working-stiff brethren, somehow desperate to always make a clever point at how moribund their culture is. Alessandro actually cares about his characters, despite how atrocious they are. Most artists nowadays and since the New Millennium have derogated themselves to cynicism, hipster irony, and the celebration of their worthlessness— as opposed to seriously criticizing it. The way most White people shrug their shoulders when confronted with changing the racist mores of their culture or how most men (gay or straight) recede like a middle-aged man’s hairline – when confronted with challenging other men on the oppression inflicted on women – our mothers, sisters, daughters, lovers, friends, aunts, teachers, co-workers, etc. – and the bestiality committed on our children’s minds.
When satire became smug parody, social commentary loses its way. An early critical observation I encountered with other readers or critics was that perhaps Alessandro’s characters were too venal, not aware enough of their harm to themselves and particularly to their victims, the people they inflict physical and psychological violence upon. But I came away feeling that was his point. To have these characters care would be dishonest. True caring is in the writing of the book. The characters are just that: characters. And so are most people.
Burroughs, Genet haunt the book marginally – but I would actually say the Rabelaisian spirit in the book is found through the alienated great grandchildren of Marshall McLuhan: abandoned and angry in this digital Sahara we are in – clamoring through the character of Theo, who asserts his power in the book (and over the reader) by his demented depictions that he wields through the power of YouTube, the young sociopath exceeding what McLuhan imagined, we’ve divorced ourselves through technology whilst creating a “global village,” but have made that community one that is steeped in the demonic nature of defiling and exploiting. A literal “futurist” notion of how to push the horror of rape. Theo makes YouTube scary in a very clear, direct, and immediate way. I am glad I don’t have children.
Alessandro’s proclivity for crafting an enjoyable reading experience about unlikable characters, is a conscious maintenance of art. Employing caricature, even profane exaggeration, he paints on his canvas in a myriad of ways – literary characters—not ersatz “real” people. I am not sure when audiences lost touch with characters VS “real” people and began to foolishly and erroneously judge dramatic art based on its human characters’ verisimilitude as “actual” persons living next door. Art is about the insides not “the next door.” If art does actually teach, then you learn from characters – not actual people.
When actors do it, principally in movies, it tells you more about yourself than about them. We like “the bad guy” in movies for example because he may be what most people actually want to be. There’s a strange notion that the more pitched, strained, or exaggerated an actor’s performance or mannerisms – the less human they are. The West has been categorically labeling behaviors and assigning pathologies based on our physical behavior and how we appear for at least the past five hundred years and no one finds it bizarre that our schools, teachers, critics have a nasty desire to keep ‘human reality’ at a base level, never rising above a Library tone of voice, never acknowledging the horror of civilization or the grandeur of opera in our lives.
In his excellent article entitled “Considering a Place in Fiction for Badly Behaved Queers” for the Gay & Lesbian Review, Alessandro expounds on this and specifically how it pertains to the presentation of Queer characters in novels and movies. The biggest misconception is that “reality” is truth. Where in fact we all know the reverse is the truth. And while it is true that most “lessons,” emotional impacts and even lingering thoughts are mainly imbued through the technique of “bad” characters, Black, Queer, and Women artists have to always mine the impositions of their double-consciousness when presenting behaviors because it is usually members of the oppressed class that do battle with the “cops in the head” when attempting to reveal the ugly side of any milieu, whether it’s real or completely made-up. It’s one thing for the stupid critic to attack you, a whole other thing when it’s a member of your own tribe.
The characters, even when slightly alien, are all manifestations of archetypes in one way or another, but Lorna and Theo reveal something else behind the mask. They are contemptuous in ways that are more insidious than the husband and father. Maybe it’s because they are, too, results of these Risks in life. When you read the book, you may pay attention to this dynamic. Alessandro does a superb job spinning the cobweb amidst this trio, an admirable quality in prose and one that is particularly cinematic.
While Risk felt easy enough for me to critique because of my own innate dislike (and disinterest) for such figures, it’s his freaky wife and son that disgusted me so — and upon which the novel’s emotional elements hinge on. Lorna and Theo would be more traditionally linked to the underarm of patriarchy, as victims of course. And they are, as well as being willing participants in the oppressive and hateful matrix known as capitalism. Alessandro makes them as ugly, if not more so, than the appalling weak Risk and the demented Javier, the toxic male embodiments, and their Queer applications. If the men were the cause, the women and children are the symptoms (Lorna’s thesis on rape is absolutely appalling and probably one of the best modern excoriations of the empathic losses we seem to be gaining every single day in the United States alone ). Upon my third reading, I was very excited how the novel seamlessly unfolds due to the character’s psychology and behavior. That may sound obvious, but it’s not. Some great novels are steeped in “telling a story,” versus character portraits. One way isn’t better than the other, the impact a writer makes is owning up to their strengths and not trying to con us. Alessandro is interested in psychology, he has a Master’s degree in it. And he applies that to character construction, not plot ornamentation.
I maintain if we reduce Shakespeare to plot — there’s nothing there. Shakespeare is about everything else. He exists in HOW and WHAT. Not the “meanings” or plot. And certainly not in appealing to audiences who want to be flattered. If you ever meet a Lady MacBeth or Richard III — run. Because they will not be anything remotely as fascinating as Shakespeare’s creations.
*
Creations. This is where Brian Alessandro thrives: where he lets loose. I like his anarchic humor and his uniquely “patrician punk” approach to writing and I hope he takes it further. For its all HIM. And in his world he has a lot to share about the society we participate in. Edmund White astutely declared the book as “speaking to our crazy times.” It’s not reflective of the times. It is the times. Within the novel, there’s nothing sacred (except annihilation) and nothing pure (except self-hatred, compliance to imperialist cruelty) and the heartbeat of the book seems crunched in and viperous and reaching out through its tentacles of social media and the internet. Kubrick gives you HAL. Alessandro gives you Theo. Pay attention, this character will have more gravity in the years to come. For the sociopathy of youth is the future of the novel and the world. Alessandro may in fact be linked to Kubrick’s clinical beliefs: man is fixed. He won’t change, possibly can’t – ever. He just develops…and usually that means his ability to hate, inflict pain, destroy just becomes more sophisticated. Anthony Burgess famously criticized Kubrick’s cinematic vision of Alex, his creation in his novel Clockwork Orange. Burgess felt that post 1968 Americans want (need?) to acknowledge that there is no hope, whilst Burgess himself was convinced change is always possible. It certainly is a moral choice how we decide to leave our characters. Do they learn lessons, is there a consciousness that gets expanded? Is there an empathy that gets embraced? (Funny enough, these questions rarely get specifically oriented. Gender, sex, identity aside – Native Americans/Indigenous and Blacks have a far more complex, darker, and brighter notion of “hope” than any white man could conceive. Except for Beckett or Kafka. Or even Burroughs, who’d probably state that if he had hope, he wouldn’t be a writer.)
Something I was struck by and never had considered after first reading was how much gay men’s struggles with masculinity are not just about seeking approval from other men in the way that hetero men do, but also in the ways that hetero women seek male attention/approval of their femininity. While I knew that was the case in terms of physique. Speaking with the novel’s editor, Laura Schleifer, I don’t think I quite realized that “performative/ritualistic acts of masculinity like bullfighting might be done by the male gays for the male gaze of the male gays.” It was something of a revelation to me when she announced this.
I refer to filmmaking or avatars of ‘smart’ independent cinema to broach the problem and connection I see inherent in both literature and movies: there’s a LOT of criticism of everything, facts even, tons of information but very little about life. And very little expression from a place of either genuine fear or outrage. The white nihilist filmmakers I grew up with like Todd Solondz and Neil LaBute did a lot of damage to my generation. It let white people off the hook, it created an intellectual distance from actual pain, and for me, ironically, it just affirmed what I always felt about most white people: they are even more callous amongst themselves, actually, than with me.
Brian Alessandro gets dangerous because he dares to reveal depth in characters who may be cruel or nasty — but he is not doing it to “understand” them as much as he doing it to state what he feels are facts about our life: despicable people live around us, yes, and they do have souls…but that is what prompts us to ask what is important to us, how much of society is bent or compliant to patriarchy, warped racial and gender views, demeaning of sex in all its forms and willfully enabling the rote pathological behavior of masculinity – toxic or otherwise – and what it “should” mean. Lorna crystallizes much of this and perhaps that is where the book’s political and social ills are actually clearest. Lorna could actually understand a Donald Trump and even make a case for him. Trump is a human being, folks. That alone should tell you something.
But decide for yourself. A plot synopsis would be irrelevant and insulting to a book that operates in both the imagination and the tactile world. The style of the writing is the meaning and one needs read a mere five pages of any part to get a sense of the power, humor, and ferociousness of good writing.
Some readers may wonder if the characters “change,” do they get “saved,” do they “see the light”?
Shakespeare died in 1616. Did his plays give any consciousness and empathy to his own culture? Did he make men, women, children, whomever – more sensitive? No. Quite the opposite, you could argue. The international prism (and prison!) of Capitalism cast its net, giving us racism and the formal end of humanity (the end of humanity is not going to be a nuclear holocaust, it was already a holocaust over the Atlantic ocean hundreds of years ago. Just ask the sharks!)– a mere three years later in 1619 when the Dutch first brought African slaves to North American soil. Three years after Old Willy died, the power of his words instigated everything he may been against.
Besides the bible, I am sure Shakespeare’s words were read by many slave traders. The same way Nazis read Rilke. Or worse, privately whistling the melodies of Mendelssohn or Mahler as they maimed the descendants of those artists.
Where’s the light here, attained?
If art had the power to imbue empathy in a revolutionary way, such human nightmares could never occur. But art unfortunately cannot do that. It is mysterious, but it’s not alchemy. And it’s not about casting a spell as it is about mesmerizing the human heart, the human mind. The best we can hope for is to be reminded of our own humanity. Art doesn’t change the world. It changes your relationship with the world. And occasionally can prompt us to take action. Poetry unfortunately has inspired man to rape and pillage. It also has inspired man to help each other, be kinder, and fight for the underdog.
Some people firmly believe art should provide empathy. When I was younger I did as well and was terrified when I realized it couldn’t. I feel art, ultimately, should shake your core. I felt absolutely no empathy except for the world at large after reading Performer Non Grata. The “world” that must endure these awful people.
I felt for myself. Because I must endure these atrocious characters from the novel — in our society. And sometimes tolerate them if I want to eat. Life is hard. So is the book. But, like most things that matter, that’s what makes it so special. Art is not for the weak. Neither is Brian Alessandro’s writing.
I am thrilled that Rebel Satori Press’ new book FEVER SPORES: THE QUEER RECLAMATION OF WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS edited by Brian Alessandro and Tom Cardamone has become a best-seller and includes my own essay on Burroughs and reflections on his impact on me as an artist, a writer, Black cis-straight man – who, as an outsider myself, identifies with the radicalism of Queer outlaws like him.
Rebel Satori Press’ new book, FEVER SPORES, features essays & conversations on William S. Burroughs by luminaries and independent authors alike
Ever controversial, the book seeks to re-contextualize the man, his guns, his history, his homosexuality, his relationship to women, transgressive ideas and writings – within the 21st century mainstream LBGTQ community and their new Queer outliers. Featuring interviews with luminaries such as David Cronenberg to Blondie to Samuel Delaney and urgent essays from writers such as Laura Schleifer, Jason Napoli Brooks, Michael Carrol, and Charlie Vazquez, FEVER SPORES will not disappoint and it opens new doors into new perceptions on Burroughs’ legacy and profound influence.
My essay on Burroughs explores the notion of words, oppression, the terror of language, addiction and the nature of art itself
My latest series of poems “FRAGMENTS” (Vol.1) was recently published in Rosalie Gancie & Carlo Parcelli’s avant-garde art & political journal, FLASHPOINT MAGAZINE, issue #17.
DL Kangalee directing Numa Perrier in an early rehearsal [photo by Nina Fleck,2014]
“There’s only one problem with man: the fact that he keeps going on. …I’ve been a frozen man a long time, at least since my last suicide attempt.”
— from “The Frozen Man”
(as featured in the digital chapbook, Fragments Vol. 1 – available in Flashpoint Magazine #17 – online now)
Che Ayende (Luis Laporte) as the conflicted actor Cairo in “As an Act of Protest” (2001)
“…’Killer of Sheep’ was made the same year ‘Star Wars’ was released — and has not been seen ever since. While brothers are applauding the heroes from a galaxy far, far away – they’re completely inured to their fellow brethren right in their own backyards. The same was true nearly 15 years later when Wendell B. Harris was virtually paid to NOT make any movies. One look at his magnificent ‘Chameleon Street,’ and everyone knew that a powerful voice had arrived. And this scared everybody. I always found it disturbing that that the Black Entertainment Complex had not welcomed him — the man had won Sundance, after all — in the years when Sundance actually meant something. They did not appreciate him they rejected him. (Maybe they just didn’t know what to make of him…let’s not forget that old Satchmo himself was terrified of Charlie Parker.)
…In the early 1970’s, Huey P.Newton wrote a stunning essay and review of Melvin Van Peebles’ revolutionary ”Sweet Sweetback’s Baaadasss Song”and hailed it as a new vanguard cinema for black people – an example of real artistic-political storytelling that the oppressed could appreciate. Huey wrote that he hoped this would inspire a whole revolutionary genre of black pictures. Instead, Hollywood saw they could make money by having a brother on screen and decided to further the ante by “gambling” on pictures like ‘Shaft’ (by Gordon Parks, ironically, whose brilliant “The Learning Tree” has been forgotten even though it was the first major Hollywood movie by a black Writer and Director! Of course, the rest is history and like they have done to Rap music – everything caved in; the Blaxploitation era arrived and all the racist, stereotypical ‘skin flicks’ flooded the world and artists like Bill Gun, Burnett, and even Van Peebles himself vanished into thin air. No wonder Huey P.Newton died in a crack house: he had no movies to go see…” — from “Towards a Black New Wave & Notes from the Underground,”
(Harlem, August 26, 2000)
“…the new breed of American filmmakers need to turn a blind eye to the Reservoir Dogs of the American Beauties and express themselves. Black people will play Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up,” blast Wu-Tang’s most innovative tracks, and spout the poetry of Amiri Baraka or Sonia Sanchez and yet will still think that a film like “The Best Man” or “Shaft” is good enough for them. I know there are a lot of talented, radical, sensitive people out there. But where are they? Certainly not behind the cameras…”
— from “Towards a Black New Wave & Notes from the Underground,” (Harlem, August 26, 2000)
(c) August 26, 2000; April 14, 2003; August 25, 2014 by Dennis Leroy Kangalee
They’re shipping knock-offs to Haiti.
(They forgot to send me.)
Somewhere across the ankles of the Atlantic beneath a sign for second-floor SUVs and torn up pink-slips, un-housed and dispossessed eyes peer through the gates that protect the imposter goods.
Officials cringe
when the boys
eyeball
the sneakers
that fell from their boxes like frozen feet that had been cut off and tossed out the back of the truck, sprinkling the broken boulevard like raindrops on an ice cream cone.
A cop lobs fake Nikes at a pensive boy with a Veteran’s limp and oversized coat. He laughs as the boy hops home with two left shoes and the cluster of police cruisers split into a compass of blazing sirens
each car
thinking he was the
North Star.
A red scarf emerged from the dispersing crowd.
This crimson-caped man’s
mad-dog
hands
clutched the air around him in freak-spasm night.
He lost his shoulder and dropped his jaw foaming at the mouth:
And a sound fell like a flame that had been fanned from the deep well of an executioner’s oven.
Ship.
Me.
To.
Haiti.
And the
blisters on the balls
of his feet
cut through the thick rubbers he wore and eventually rooted him into an eternity far beyond slums or beaten down blocks or inner city apathy.
Ship.
Me.
Or.
Shoot.
Me.
His fingers crawled like worms sprouting over a dead soldier’s bayonet. His scarlet fever snapping in the breeze like a matador. He waited to rotate in the barrels of the city’s finest. He just hoped their bullets would be as bright as he was.
An old woman shook her head and said to her husband, “That boy is crazy. Too much anger. Ain’t gonna bring em nothing. Bad for the heart”, she said.
He blew a kiss as they whisked by into their steeple.
He’d never be this again: a tsunami in the drone of the limping ghetto night.
For blood
is less likely
to boil
as we
get older.
…So I ask you have we truly hit the end, the rusted sediments, the ancient depositories of whales long dead and barnacles who swamped and sucked to stay alive?
Just a school of fish trembling, tremoring, and trying maybe that’s all we are: A school of fish, doomed.
Maybe we’re all madmen in scarlet scarves
knowing that shadows don’t lurk or loom
they simply stop being,
cease to follow
when there is nothing but stagnant air and a muffled heartbeat that barely brushes against the skin.
Deep schadenfreude
high as the cotton of a Mississippi nightmare
Ever seen a house on fire in the distance?
You know what every man is thinking?
“How beautiful that fire burns.
I’m just glad it’s not my house.”
(c) 2009, 2010 – from “Lying Meat & other poems beneath the Oil” by Dennis Leroy Kangalee
A child on the train this morning said to his father, “Lived backwards is the Devil.”
The father took no notice and told his son to “shut up.” A shame he could not accept or engage his son’s brilliant, precocious insight. That’s a brilliant poet right there in diapers, I was thinking to myself. I smiled. Which is rare because normally I am cursing the world – as well as my own place in it.
Then I re-read Norman Pollack’s beautifully searing and questioning piece, published in CounterPunch: “Israel’s Goliath to Palestine’s David” and through the looking glass I went…to get another fragment of truth.
Although it is a personal reflection and analysis of the hate that directs Israel’s nasty assault on the Palestinians, it is loaded with such truth, such spiritual and literal fact — that it would be very difficult for one to not regard the present regime of Israel as some kind of “new Nazism” for the 21st Century. It is not as far-fetched or preposterous as it may seem…if we African Americans have saddled up with the racist White Establishment by doing their bidding for them (President Obama’s nonsense, blacks willingly killing each other–keeping the FBI’s gang violence alive, and titillating white Liberals by gladly referring to ourselves heinously as “niggers” and “my niggas,” after ALL THIS TIME, etc, etc.) than it is NOT any more bizarre than to see the Israeli State Power and its complicit World Jewry members, who want to see Palestinians erased, compared to their own recent oppressors: the International-European Nazi party.
Think about it.
Yes, the devil is alive and well.
Thank You, Norm for writing this wonderful piece in CounterPunch.
He went to church. He prayed to his ancestors, wondering where their blood might have spilled before the Jews’.
He imagined what his mother’s face might have looked like in the car accident back home in New York the year before. Her face mangled and contorted in a permanent look of horror. His sister said she would not send him a photo even if he insisted. She told him he was macabre and losing his mind. Probably was right, but he couldn’t help re-playing the conversation in his head as he slid down the steps of the church facade. And then, for some reason, looking out into the city ahead and around him, his eyes kept reaching for the sky as if waiting for something awful to happen.
The “poemedy” aesthetic as created by Summerhill Seven (Alim Akbar) is the art of seeing every moment in life as perfected. I remembered this when I recently re-read Summerhill’s book “Notes of a Neurotic..” by Summerhill Seven . Touched that he proclaimed me the “Poemedy Artist of 2013,” I began to reflect on my first impressions of his writing and I thought it would be wise to share the original review I wrote of this poet’s brazen and beautiful book. (visit www.poemedy.com to learn more about his work)
Poet Summerhill Seven: Still crazy after all these years…
Invisible Man: Thoughts on Summerhill Seven’s Notes of a Neurotic
Reviewed by Dennis Leroy Kangalee Originally written March 5, 2005, Revised for publication July 29, 2005
Craziness on the Sleeve
“Sanity is not the goal. Since this book is by a self-proclaimed schizophrenic who inhabits a skitsofrantic life, then the lack of this state of being, often referred to as sanity, would have made these sololoquies impossible.”
– Summerhill Seven, “Trialogue”
I first met Summerhill Seven (Alim Akbar) in the summer of 2002 in New York City. I had been asked to direct a play about a group of local gamblers in a Harlem bar and had the arduous task of assisting the producer with the casting. I was not in the best of moods, was recovering from a nervous breakdown earlier that year, and was making a weak attempt at returning to directing plays which I had given up three years earlier in personal pursuit of filmmaking and writing. That summer, and well after that, I constantly had feelings of fragmentation, detachment, and rabid paranoia. I felt comfortable, however, upon meeting and eventually working with Summerhill Seven. You see, Summerhill is also a mad man.
I didn’t know much about Summerhill and still don’t. I know what I have to know and seldom ask or pry into his personal affairs and he seems to do the same. Our paths crossed, we ran in the same circles for a period, got high once or twice together, and even dated the same girl once. The girl was a writer from Chicago. She wasn’t crazy. This poor girl was psychotic and when I told Summerhill I would quit seeing her if he wanted to date her, he quipped: “Uh-uh, no, no you can have her.” I know he misses his mother, he was married once, he writes every day like a junkie looking for a fix, he adores Shakespeare, and shares my love for the Avant-garde. I always liked the fact that he was a lawyer. He seems to dig that I went to Juilliard – but didn’t graduate. We respect one another’s art and the demons that seem to rage within us. Summerhill was easily the most charismatic and fearless actor I had worked with in 2002 and certainly one of the most passionate and determined actors I have ever known.
We live in a moment in time that is crunched down-held up-sewn within the seams. We are hanging onto dear life in a punching bag that dangles on its last leg. No one is willing to risk it all to express the pain around us. No one is willing to free-fall as the majestic clowns and poets of the old were willing to do. In short: we are all afraid of the good fight. This is a problem far too great for me to go into right now, but one that keeps popping up in my head even as I try to gain distance on the “the scene” in America from Berlin, where I write this. Summerhill is easily ten years my senior, we are just barely contemporaries and commentators of the same generation. What I hold inherently sacred and vital to life – Summerhill does as well. This is what attracts me to his writings in his book. You see, at times, I feel like I have written it. (And no, to clarify he’s the schizo, I’m labeled the more fashionably – ahem – “Bi-polar”)
“I readily admit that the Americans have no poets; I cannot allow that they have no poetic ideas.”
– Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Part II/Book One
Notes of a Neurotic is an eclectic mélange of poems, humorous interludes, observations, and dramatic fiction. It is designed to “heal the emotions of the reader, the speaker, and the writer” This book is clearly a work of art that is reflective of the chaos in this world; a journey of an unstable man trying to find his way in this world…It is in many ways the spiritual biography of Summerhill Seven. Part manifesto, part confession – it is the current analogy in literature to what I tried to accomplish with my 2002 film As an Act of Protest. And being one of the only artists in New York City to publicly and proudly support my film (he taught it and screened it to his students), Summerhill’s work shimmers with a similar fever that mine has been dipped in. That is the fever of the split atom, the “crazy” urban black intellectual, the scared revolutionary artist…the neurotic. What I tried to do formally and structurally within my own directorial work Summerhill Seven has done as a writer. The difference is that where I may or may not have succeeded (my opinion alters depending on the day and my mood), I believe he has. Dashes and flashes of brilliance flicker, for example, in his Schizophrenic Skitsofrantic Soliloquies section These come off as Haikus or proverbs or as they have been aptly described as “the fruit of the poet tree”. In “Observation,” he writes:
I find that my life is a lot happier when I avoid white men in robes, whether they are black or white…robes.
Writing as an Arab American, he poignantly writes:
George Bush declared war on somebody and I don’t know who and I am losing my mind because everyone I know doesn’t like me and everyone I know doesn’t trust me.
His wicked and cool sense of humor stands to attention in “Peace,” which easily could have been part of a Richard Pryor monologue in the 1970′s. Check it out:
I prayed for peace and got it!
I was so dam bored I saw a dog and shot it.
The dog came back to haunt me,
Smoking a blunt and drinking coffee.
Can you imagine a dog with caffeine high?
But cool cuz he has chronic burning in his mind’s eye?
Summerhill Seven is a theater artist and I say this to re-iterate his approach and style to writing and assembling the works collected in Notes. In many ways, I feel relieved that he has begun to accomplish what I was waiting for. A new black literary voice who had one foot in theater, one foot in poetry, and one foot – ‘er hand – in outer space, or somewhere…Cosmic Humor is what I suppose we can call it. Something I myself have been tempted to explore. The combinations and mixes and the rapid pace of the altering styles is one of the main features of the new wave of Black American fine artists that emerged in the late 20th-early 21st century. Most of us who were interested in expressing his or her own unique voice – particularly those of us in Northern urban areas – did it in whatever vein we saw fit, even when the moods and shapes changed drastically from one moment to the next. Some just don’t understand the jazz of our work. Charles Mingus said that for him Byrd was it – the greatest – simply because he was expressing how he felt. The greatest self-expression abounds in simplicity, and yet its meanings and emotions are so doubled and tripled and full of inborn contradictions and philosophies about life you can experience the work over and over and never get tired of it.
Form follows function in Summerhill’s Theater of Neurosis. And just when I feel he is going along with the flow of the stream and giving in to what the audience wants, he opts to swim his own way. This is his saving grace and what keeps him rooted as an artist. His interest in people, his pathologies, his political convictions, his sexual appetites, his impish desire at times to shock and annoy, most importantly – his sensitivity to the musical tones of life and the presence of death in our everyday existence. In his own unique way, Summerhill has created a post-modern metropolitan black Spoon River Anthology. Yes. This is another bizarre connection I have to him. The River Flows, the 1993 adaption, was the first off-Broadway play I ever did….I played Death himself and was like a character torn from Notes. These are not coincidences, for things don’t just happen -they happen justly.
In Notes, Summerhill liberally sprinkles his book with quotes from everyone from Saint Baldwin (James) to the prophetic rancor of early Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and the poetic wisdom of William Shakespeare. These quotes serve to remind the reader of either a theme or concept being explored or expressed and/or to give the actor reading it a cerebral inspiration on the page that may lead him down the correct path as he begins to dramatically interpret and perform a specific text. The book – a slim 148 pages – is packed with conceptual ideas, puns, clever plays on words and titles (i.e. poet tree, poemedies, essalogues, etc.,) but I am not interested in or willing to indulge us into the meanings behind those phrases or titles or explain how “clever” the author can be. Who cares? Real art is not about being clever. It is about expressing how much you know about life. And for all of Alim Akbar AKA Summerhill Seven’s broader appeal (when he performs, my wife refers to him as “the thinking man’s Will Smith” in the sense that he is good-looking and charming enough to be able to garner a willing and very harmless mixed crowd) and his ability to hold court with a potentially more varied audience than me, for example, his strength is not in the trappings and superficial aspects of his more liberal and accessible poetry. No. It is, I believe, in the heart and soul of his prose and monologues-proper. Or what he refers to as his Essalogues. This is where Summerhill excites me the most and where he is at his best.
Heads Up
The short story “Heads” is one of the most provocative and honest pieces in the entire collection. In its Raymond Carver-esque minimalism, tongue-in-cheek bravado, and muted satire, Summerhill recounts how he killed three white people (a racist punk, a lawyer, and a landlady) and is completely at wits end working and living with white people. They are simply too much to deal with and they do nothing but constantly aggravate and annoy. The entire idea – whether it is treated humorously or with straight up tragic insinuations – of killing white people or the “oppressor” is one that has infiltrated and consumed a great deal of modern Black American art work. It runs through the plays of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, the music of Public Enemy, and has been finessed and relayed masterfully by composers such as Bob Marley and is hinted at within the canvasses of the painter Aaron Douglas. Not literally, but in spirit. Even my own early work constantly wrestled with my own anger and frustration over what to do when living in a racist society. Summer’s treatment of the matter is less directly heavy handed, however, and not as tragic. It is much more absurd and has the maturity it takes to see the scenario through a simple and clean filter: it’s all a day’s work. The humor is venomous and already present in the opening paragraph:
I mean the idea of killing four white people in the twenty-first century
just for what, to redress some historical wrong? I just simply was not with it.
But now, that I have already killed three, I am starting to get into it.
I mean, I really am starting to get the hang of it.
Funny stuff. Very dry, very simple. What makes it funny is the element of truth behind it, what makes it creepy is that you know the narrator is tired and doesn’t have time for jokes. Or perhaps the former is the latter and the latter is the former? I don’t know, now I’ve confused myself. Anyway, it doesn’t matter – what the story reveals and how Summerhill seems to express it so effortlessly is what counts. Our narrator tells us he killed his first victim because he was called a “nigger,” he killed his second victim because he couldn’t stand working with, for, under this incredibly arrogant and prejudiced man who was one of the head lawyers in a law firm that had hired our brown-skinned narrator. Any black person who has ever worked in an office setting or corporate environment instantly recognizes the sort of white male that Terry Apath is. This is where you know that the bond and anticipated audience of this story is black because of the casualness and simplicity unto which the story is relayed. As with the tradition of African American literature – the story is very oral and has a great deal of “signifying,” and radicalizing simply within the speech/text. I point this out because I do find it important that black writers still approach their work in such a cool and naturally stated way. In an era of “Who is your audience?” and “No one will understand your references, people are not smart as they used to be,” it is refreshing that Summerhill invites the reader into his world, into his neurosis and doesn’t comment on what they may or may not understand. Instantly you are a confidante and this is what made some of the white listeners uncomfortable at the Book Party in February 2005, when portions of the book were read in public. Not that ayone objected, no. White people will never object to anything considered “artistic,” within a black or mixed milieu for fear of being labeled racist or a “phony liberal.” They will just roll their eyes, squirm, or smirk – as if to say “That is sooo hateful, I could never…! I’m more developed than you, gosh you people with your Superfly-Shaft-Badass-anger. I’ve seen it all before! I’m Jewish and I don’t write stories or fantasize about killing Germans or Arabs!”
First of all that would be a lame excuse and a ridiculous comparison. But of course they don’t have to write about anything similar – white people take out all their aggression directly. They don’t have to write stories, they can blow up countries. They don’t believe in art or therapy and when they they do – they site only musical artists. As if to imply that music is “free” from any political-social relevance…I am obviously generalizing here to make a very serious point.
Most Americans (particularly the young white American) miss the point when evaluating or simply even reading real African American fiction. It would be misleading, however, to imply that Summerhill is writing for white people. He isn’t. And when he does he makes it clear that he is. But this problem infiltrates black readers’ minds as well as whites. There shouldn’t be a need to specify or diffuse either way but we all know history and the way this world works.
My point: if White Americans aren’t going to read their masters or really dig into their own problems – the way Bob Dylan and Paul Simon did thirty-five years ago, then they had better read and taste the folk art of the Black American if they want to begin to understand their country, their world, their history…their neurosis. Summerhill doesn’t write about Pimps in the street and spray “hip” derogatory terms throughout his work. He’s beyond that, even though it is what is expected from Black writers and filmmakers. He doesn’t exploit “blackness,” women, or the so-called “urban jungle.” His grievances are real. He reveals the scowl behind the grin, the anger that is just below the surface. But for all his authenticity, no one seems to pay attention to Summerhill or several other artists working within the same mix. Folks will say: “Well, he’s got no audience, yet cause he hasn’t been on TV or featured on the front page of the Arts & Leisure section of the NY Times, or he hasn’t debut with some rising Pop Star-Gangster-Wanna-be-Hip Hop buffoon. Lies and excuses, my friends. But the reason this cuts deep is because being a theater artist almost lends itself to invisibility. Besides the Lincoln Center effete crowd and a few organizations, and a handful of WASPS in New England or Boston or even in good old “progressive” San Francisco – the theater means very little to people. Artists or otherwise. I often wonder if maybe that’s not the way it has always been….
For those who believe playwright Suzan Lori-Parks or David Mamet still have any true power or progressive instincts on stage – they are holding worthless promissory notes. Mamet imitates himself, Parks cashes in on what the mainstream audiences will expect her to turn in or evaluate – particularly as an African American woman. Neither are of the current state of consciousness emanating within the arts (whatever is left of it, that is) and both are very comfortable. Those looking for the real news, the truthful insights, and the still untamed social and political observations should read Summerhill Seven’s work and go underground…wherever that is. I guarantee the monologues and theatrical texts that Summerhill offers are a thousand times purer, personal, and poetic than anything in the mainstream theater or poetry houses. Because, similarly, if Russell Simmons destroyed comedy with Def Jam Comedy (as Bernie Mac claims he did) then he absolutely murdered poetry with his Def Jam Poetry. Nowadays, it is typical and passé’ to hear some Black or Latino or East Asian or Middle Eastern poet or some gay white chick with piercings get on stage and whine (these people don’t even know how to scream) about racism, sexism, the War in Iraq – all in familiar and rhetorical cadences, with a wink, nod, and bow to the word(s) “my nigga,” “George Bush-shit,” and/or something to do with “pussy-bush-the ghetto-the street-Gucci-Donna Karan-Park Ave-USA-” Blah, blah, blah, blah…Empty. It’s all empty. Such is the nature of pop. Particularly when it is popular to assume a stance of righteous anger. Summerhill himself is not innocent of any of these popular and accepted streams of current poetry, but Summerhill is not a poseur. He’s been to the gutter and back. He’s lived and as much as he loves poetry, even he has admitted that – similar to the state of hip hop and Pop music – the poetry in NYC scene is dead. It is dead because it has been co-opted.
Poetry, like the theater, is dead because it still sells itself out to pimps who want to rape it. Poets continue to bend over (like their cousins – the independent filmmakers) and completely ignore their pride, talent, and soul. Why should poets perform on main stage theaters, why should filmmakers want their films to be seen in malls? Is that the most we can achieve and hope for? Wouldn’t we rather gather in someone’s intimate apartment and create our own studio? Are artists that contemptuous of each other that we really can’t work together because we all just want to be richer than each other and get revenge on our un-supportive families or patronizing bosses or apathetic teachers? The poets of the night are dead – because they want to be. They drop their pants, grab their ankles and give up any virtue or innocence left. They are like victims who beg to be raped and then cry when someone tells them “Are you nuts? You need to do something about this! You need to call the police!”
Keeping that in mind, read the following and imagine it is the last scene of a play. Imagine you saw every meticulous slice of nonsense on Broadway, then got a headache from the imposters Off-Broadway. You went home, vomited, felt a lot better and swore to yourself over that toilet-bowl that you would never go “drinking” again. A friend begs you (or if you have no friends imagine a little angel flies into your face) to go and read/see Summerhill’s work and “taste” something new… You go, taste it, and realize maybe even half-way through – that what you are drinking ain’t new, it’s just what most of us under 40 are constantly denied: truth within the arts.
So, imagine: you are seated somewhere and it is dark. There is a slight chill that runs up your spine. There are maybe twenty people in this audience. Under the moon, the stage lights flash up from below – they are dim and but we see our Narrator clearly – because we experience something almost foreign in its brightness. The lights slowly dim as our Narrator admits: (perhaps in a choked up whisper)
Terry was fun to kill; killing the landlord was out of anger and I just did it because.
It was kind of funny, technically speaking I am not sure if it was on the same day
because the Arabs start their day in the dark at 12 am. But, as you already know the
landlord was Jewish, and for the life of me I don’t know when they start their day.
But since her Jewishness was incidental to the cause of her death, I guess it didn’t really matter.
I just strangled her for no more than a minute a two.
I had on the same blue-green Isotoner gloves that I strangled Terry with.
Our man tries to smile, but can’t. He looks at his gloves , lights a cigarette, and looks out into the audience. Blackout.
Read Hang Time — Summerhill Seven’s poetic memoir, back in print and available now!
I don’t know why but my heart sank when I read he’d used the term Ad Hominem.
On the bus, in the grave, below a lunchroom doorway or within the scheme of park — a part of me rustled. I watched his face on the screens above the mildew & steam rising from the machines, I missed the rinse cycle but didn’t care & my eyes were hurt and glossed and I couldn’t make out the fuzzy framed picture on the TV.
All I could do
was fold
& smooth
the edges of
my underwear,
smell the fabric of the toothen-caved-towel
& just mumble to myself that it’s all going to pass
cause it always does
But a part of me felt a little like a cheat,
a doused bunny who’d gotten away,
a mouse in a big house,
a tangle cherry-tree
still standing after the storm.
A part of me felt for him in a way I probably shouldn’t and I wondered what I would have done had I really known him, had I been his friend once or his enemy, his neighbor, or his bandmate, his dealer, his girlfriend, his mother, his father.
And I recalled my own self-important blues and irritating holler of my twenties, my unhinged moments of lucidity, my righteous breakdowns, my challenge of truth, my call to arms…But I was certain my shrill-shrill call was no false alarm, my anger not bitter hatred, my contempt not imaginary — but valid.
“He’d read Orwell & Huxley.”
Who hadn’t?
He was just probably the only one who understood it.
He read Mein Kampf.
Not David Lerner’s poem, but the book by the man who came to be known as the face & name of the twentieth century, the man single-handedly credited for inciting the zeitgeist, the man who made pop culture.
“There isn’t one brilliant mind on this planet who hasn’t read that book,” a college professor explained. “No one cared enough to help this lad as he was making his way down the crooked stairwell of sanity…everyone apparently was aware of his psychological demise or his mental sickness – “
Was it because they smelled just as bad?
If you’re both wearing the same cologne, how can you tell who’s sweat is filling the air?
Rhetoric doesn’t kill.
Apathy does.
And if betrayal is a mother fucker,
Denial is an assassin who will work for deferred pay –
But when he collects it is not currency he will want,
It is complicitness.
I have just one idea, let’s play a game:
Lets play the numbers game – I’m getting into that one now, I’m an American after all.
Nine years old? She was just nine years old?
I got you beat by 2 years just some months before: she was 7 years old murdered by police. Who mourns for Aiyana Jones?
![DL Kangalee directing Numa Perrier in an early rehearsal [photo by Nina Fleck,2014]](https://dennisleroykangalee.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/10690116_573367119432026_5609516480051834646_n.png)
![Dennis Leroy Kangalee, 2013 [Photo by Nina Fleck]](https://dennisleroykangalee.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/photo.jpg)
Dennis Leroy Kangalee 
Brian Alessandro’s novel “Performer Non Grata”
“First of all bullfighting is, as somebody once said very well, indefensible and irresistible …but I’ve turned against it for very much the same reason that my father, who was a great hunter, suddenly stopped hunting he said, “I’ve killed enough animals.” I’m ashamed of myself…I’ve seen enough of those animals dead, it was…a waste…almost all Spanish intellectuals have been against bullfighting for the last 150 years…Lorca is one of the few Spanish intellectuals who ever approved of bullfighting.”
— Orson Welles, 1974
If I were teaching a class on Brian Alessandro’s literature, I’d call it:
“How Hard it is to Write and Move an Audience…With Unattractive Individuals.”
Alessandro’s follow up to the impressive The Unmentionable Mann (2015) is even more deviant, crafty, and insightful than its predecessor. His fifth novel (two previously unpublished, including Freud Droid which some avid readers lucky to get their hands on it — consider his best work and his first book, An Ego Dream Game, self-published in a limited edition in 2003) takes the gloves off completely and gathers prisoners as aggressively as it tries to shame the devil.
I admired the novel without liking a single character.
In what I felt initially had superficial similarities to a Todd Solondz film and its themes (the smug white suburban malaise, the yuppie heart of darkness, the emphatic white man’s ironic slouch towards racism or sexuality, etc.) Performer Non Grata is actually a backhanded slap at the hideous nature of white male masculinity (particularly) in all its toxic forms and incarnations (he displays the gamut’s psychosis from heterosexual to homosexual to beyond) and the violent escapades that that culture breeds. Our contempt for animals, women, and all entities that could be construed as their “others” is alarming and exquisitely detailed in this phantasmagoric book.
Centered around Risk Bonaventura, an American corporate zombie, and his deranged obsession with bullfighting and all that it implies— we are embroiled in a bizarre menage-a-trois between him, Javier his Spanish matador lover and Lorna, his wife, an academic and teacher (a character inspired by the deteriorated passion and warped ideology of none other than the disappointing Camile Paglia), Performer Non Grata is many things. But it is principally a crystallization of what has been latent in Alessandro’s entire body of work – from his novels to his plays, his film Afghan Hound, even some of his drawings – the pursuit of characters who are not particularly likeable. Especially Queer characters, that’s where his transgression lies. Javier is deeply disturbing, transmitting both homicidal and suicidal urges of the imprisoned masculine Queer; Risk and Lorna’s sociopathic son, Theo, is a graphic example of all that is terrible, coming to fruition. When you read the book, ask yourself: Which of these awful renderings could be me? The title says it all: there is no performer. There is only you.
The book is an orgy of sadism, meditations on Feminine and Masculine psychologies, the horror of rape culture, and the schadenfreude ethos of our media world and literally everything it embodies.
I could say it’s about a bullfighter, but it isn’t. And the novel in no way glorifies the atrocious act of killing a bull. It skewers the male perversion of wanting to become a bull fighter. I make this point because, unfortunately, many progressive and radical activists are losing their knack for insight and humor and are not understanding the differences between satire, irony, parody versus work that promotes violence against animals. I find it deeply disturbing that we allow Ernest Hemingway to sit comfortably on the edges of the Left because of his association with Cuba and later Castro – while not acknowledging his passionate desire to exert and romanticize aggressive male behavior, namely hunting and bullfighting. Orson Welles, in a stunning 1974 BBC interview, conceded how terribly wrong he was to have indulged in such a backward mode of thinking and behaving and he declared how sad he was that he and his ilk had participated in the murder of animals.
I could say the book is obsessed with rape but it isn’t. I could say it’s merely about toxic masculinity, but it isn’t. It transmits aspects of toxic masculinity. And it becomes increasingly the result of those toxicities, it expresses the pangs of the spoils of war.
I could say the novel seems to hold several mirrors up to the myriad of rotten pathologies in Western society but it doesn’t….at least not in a detached way. And if it doesn’t do that it’s not a mirror. However it is a reflection.
Alessandro houses a grotesque gallery of 21st century psychosis, proclivities, and behaviors— all which are vicious and antagonistic avatars, revealing the damage we endure and witness in our everyday life.
You learn a lot about a writer you like by focusing on how you approach their work. It’s unconscious of course, but it does determine a lot of how you process and inquire. If works of art are personal it’s also because we share a bit of ourselves as we interpret it.
*
If Unmentionable Mann was statelier and more mainstream, Performer Non Grata is more challenging and akin to the madcap, with its gravely dark humor barbed like a wire. Unlike many writers or filmmakers who try to employ a heavy satire or understated morality (often lapsing into nihilism – a problem for White authors as it is for Black hip-hop artists ) Alessandro is not trying to flex his “awareness” or wink at the problems of the white bourgeoisie or his working-stiff brethren, somehow desperate to always make a clever point at how moribund their culture is. Alessandro actually cares about his characters, despite how atrocious they are. Most artists nowadays and since the New Millennium have derogated themselves to cynicism, hipster irony, and the celebration of their worthlessness— as opposed to seriously criticizing it. The way most White people shrug their shoulders when confronted with changing the racist mores of their culture or how most men (gay or straight) recede like a middle-aged man’s hairline – when confronted with challenging other men on the oppression inflicted on women – our mothers, sisters, daughters, lovers, friends, aunts, teachers, co-workers, etc. – and the bestiality committed on our children’s minds.
When satire became smug parody, social commentary loses its way. An early critical observation I encountered with other readers or critics was that perhaps Alessandro’s characters were too venal, not aware enough of their harm to themselves and particularly to their victims, the people they inflict physical and psychological violence upon. But I came away feeling that was his point. To have these characters care would be dishonest. True caring is in the writing of the book. The characters are just that: characters. And so are most people.
Burroughs, Genet haunt the book marginally – but I would actually say the Rabelaisian spirit in the book is found through the alienated great grandchildren of Marshall McLuhan: abandoned and angry in this digital Sahara we are in – clamoring through the character of Theo, who asserts his power in the book (and over the reader) by his demented depictions that he wields through the power of YouTube, the young sociopath exceeding what McLuhan imagined, we’ve divorced ourselves through technology whilst creating a “global village,” but have made that community one that is steeped in the demonic nature of defiling and exploiting. A literal “futurist” notion of how to push the horror of rape. Theo makes YouTube scary in a very clear, direct, and immediate way. I am glad I don’t have children.
Alessandro’s proclivity for crafting an enjoyable reading experience about unlikable characters, is a conscious maintenance of art. Employing caricature, even profane exaggeration, he paints on his canvas in a myriad of ways – literary characters—not ersatz “real” people. I am not sure when audiences lost touch with characters VS “real” people and began to foolishly and erroneously judge dramatic art based on its human characters’ verisimilitude as “actual” persons living next door. Art is about the insides not “the next door.” If art does actually teach, then you learn from characters – not actual people.
When actors do it, principally in movies, it tells you more about yourself than about them. We like “the bad guy” in movies for example because he may be what most people actually want to be. There’s a strange notion that the more pitched, strained, or exaggerated an actor’s performance or mannerisms – the less human they are. The West has been categorically labeling behaviors and assigning pathologies based on our physical behavior and how we appear for at least the past five hundred years and no one finds it bizarre that our schools, teachers, critics have a nasty desire to keep ‘human reality’ at a base level, never rising above a Library tone of voice, never acknowledging the horror of civilization or the grandeur of opera in our lives.
In his excellent article entitled “Considering a Place in Fiction for Badly Behaved Queers” for the Gay & Lesbian Review, Alessandro expounds on this and specifically how it pertains to the presentation of Queer characters in novels and movies. The biggest misconception is that “reality” is truth. Where in fact we all know the reverse is the truth. And while it is true that most “lessons,” emotional impacts and even lingering thoughts are mainly imbued through the technique of “bad” characters, Black, Queer, and Women artists have to always mine the impositions of their double-consciousness when presenting behaviors because it is usually members of the oppressed class that do battle with the “cops in the head” when attempting to reveal the ugly side of any milieu, whether it’s real or completely made-up. It’s one thing for the stupid critic to attack you, a whole other thing when it’s a member of your own tribe.
The characters, even when slightly alien, are all manifestations of archetypes in one way or another, but Lorna and Theo reveal something else behind the mask. They are contemptuous in ways that are more insidious than the husband and father. Maybe it’s because they are, too, results of these Risks in life. When you read the book, you may pay attention to this dynamic. Alessandro does a superb job spinning the cobweb amidst this trio, an admirable quality in prose and one that is particularly cinematic.
While Risk felt easy enough for me to critique because of my own innate dislike (and disinterest) for such figures, it’s his freaky wife and son that disgusted me so — and upon which the novel’s emotional elements hinge on. Lorna and Theo would be more traditionally linked to the underarm of patriarchy, as victims of course. And they are, as well as being willing participants in the oppressive and hateful matrix known as capitalism. Alessandro makes them as ugly, if not more so, than the appalling weak Risk and the demented Javier, the toxic male embodiments, and their Queer applications. If the men were the cause, the women and children are the symptoms (Lorna’s thesis on rape is absolutely appalling and probably one of the best modern excoriations of the empathic losses we seem to be gaining every single day in the United States alone ). Upon my third reading, I was very excited how the novel seamlessly unfolds due to the character’s psychology and behavior. That may sound obvious, but it’s not. Some great novels are steeped in “telling a story,” versus character portraits. One way isn’t better than the other, the impact a writer makes is owning up to their strengths and not trying to con us. Alessandro is interested in psychology, he has a Master’s degree in it. And he applies that to character construction, not plot ornamentation.
I maintain if we reduce Shakespeare to plot — there’s nothing there. Shakespeare is about everything else. He exists in HOW and WHAT. Not the “meanings” or plot. And certainly not in appealing to audiences who want to be flattered. If you ever meet a Lady MacBeth or Richard III — run. Because they will not be anything remotely as fascinating as Shakespeare’s creations.
*
Creations. This is where Brian Alessandro thrives: where he lets loose. I like his anarchic humor and his uniquely “patrician punk” approach to writing and I hope he takes it further. For its all HIM. And in his world he has a lot to share about the society we participate in. Edmund White astutely declared the book as “speaking to our crazy times.” It’s not reflective of the times. It is the times. Within the novel, there’s nothing sacred (except annihilation) and nothing pure (except self-hatred, compliance to imperialist cruelty) and the heartbeat of the book seems crunched in and viperous and reaching out through its tentacles of social media and the internet. Kubrick gives you HAL. Alessandro gives you Theo. Pay attention, this character will have more gravity in the years to come. For the sociopathy of youth is the future of the novel and the world. Alessandro may in fact be linked to Kubrick’s clinical beliefs: man is fixed. He won’t change, possibly can’t – ever. He just develops…and usually that means his ability to hate, inflict pain, destroy just becomes more sophisticated. Anthony Burgess famously criticized Kubrick’s cinematic vision of Alex, his creation in his novel Clockwork Orange. Burgess felt that post 1968 Americans want (need?) to acknowledge that there is no hope, whilst Burgess himself was convinced change is always possible. It certainly is a moral choice how we decide to leave our characters. Do they learn lessons, is there a consciousness that gets expanded? Is there an empathy that gets embraced? (Funny enough, these questions rarely get specifically oriented. Gender, sex, identity aside – Native Americans/Indigenous and Blacks have a far more complex, darker, and brighter notion of “hope” than any white man could conceive. Except for Beckett or Kafka. Or even Burroughs, who’d probably state that if he had hope, he wouldn’t be a writer.)
Something I was struck by and never had considered after first reading was how much gay men’s struggles with masculinity are not just about seeking approval from other men in the way that hetero men do, but also in the ways that hetero women seek male attention/approval of their femininity. While I knew that was the case in terms of physique. Speaking with the novel’s editor, Laura Schleifer, I don’t think I quite realized that “performative/ritualistic acts of masculinity like bullfighting might be done by the male gays for the male gaze of the male gays.” It was something of a revelation to me when she announced this.
I refer to filmmaking or avatars of ‘smart’ independent cinema to broach the problem and connection I see inherent in both literature and movies: there’s a LOT of criticism of everything, facts even, tons of information but very little about life. And very little expression from a place of either genuine fear or outrage. The white nihilist filmmakers I grew up with like Todd Solondz and Neil LaBute did a lot of damage to my generation. It let white people off the hook, it created an intellectual distance from actual pain, and for me, ironically, it just affirmed what I always felt about most white people: they are even more callous amongst themselves, actually, than with me.
Brian Alessandro gets dangerous because he dares to reveal depth in characters who may be cruel or nasty — but he is not doing it to “understand” them as much as he doing it to state what he feels are facts about our life: despicable people live around us, yes, and they do have souls…but that is what prompts us to ask what is important to us, how much of society is bent or compliant to patriarchy, warped racial and gender views, demeaning of sex in all its forms and willfully enabling the rote pathological behavior of masculinity – toxic or otherwise – and what it “should” mean. Lorna crystallizes much of this and perhaps that is where the book’s political and social ills are actually clearest. Lorna could actually understand a Donald Trump and even make a case for him. Trump is a human being, folks. That alone should tell you something.
But decide for yourself. A plot synopsis would be irrelevant and insulting to a book that operates in both the imagination and the tactile world. The style of the writing is the meaning and one needs read a mere five pages of any part to get a sense of the power, humor, and ferociousness of good writing.
Some readers may wonder if the characters “change,” do they get “saved,” do they “see the light”?
Shakespeare died in 1616. Did his plays give any consciousness and empathy to his own culture? Did he make men, women, children, whomever – more sensitive? No. Quite the opposite, you could argue. The international prism (and prison!) of Capitalism cast its net, giving us racism and the formal end of humanity (the end of humanity is not going to be a nuclear holocaust, it was already a holocaust over the Atlantic ocean hundreds of years ago. Just ask the sharks!)– a mere three years later in 1619 when the Dutch first brought African slaves to North American soil. Three years after Old Willy died, the power of his words instigated everything he may been against.
Besides the bible, I am sure Shakespeare’s words were read by many slave traders. The same way Nazis read Rilke. Or worse, privately whistling the melodies of Mendelssohn or Mahler as they maimed the descendants of those artists.
Where’s the light here, attained?
If art had the power to imbue empathy in a revolutionary way, such human nightmares could never occur. But art unfortunately cannot do that. It is mysterious, but it’s not alchemy. And it’s not about casting a spell as it is about mesmerizing the human heart, the human mind. The best we can hope for is to be reminded of our own humanity. Art doesn’t change the world. It changes your relationship with the world. And occasionally can prompt us to take action. Poetry unfortunately has inspired man to rape and pillage. It also has inspired man to help each other, be kinder, and fight for the underdog.
Some people firmly believe art should provide empathy. When I was younger I did as well and was terrified when I realized it couldn’t. I feel art, ultimately, should shake your core. I felt absolutely no empathy except for the world at large after reading Performer Non Grata. The “world” that must endure these awful people.
I felt for myself. Because I must endure these atrocious characters from the novel — in our society. And sometimes tolerate them if I want to eat. Life is hard. So is the book. But, like most things that matter, that’s what makes it so special. Art is not for the weak. Neither is Brian Alessandro’s writing.
Performer Non Grata is published by Rebel Satori Press, who published the wonderful Fever Spore: The Queer Reclamation of William S. Burroughs, edited by Tom Cardamone and Brian Alessandro in 2022.
Dennis LeRoy Kangalee
Jackson Heights, NY
April 30, 2023
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