Extreme Unction

There's something about those Brits -- they just don't seem to get Kiki and Herb like I get it and like I know some of mine and theirs do in New York. But so many of the Brits end up wandering in and out of the room while Kiki is on stage with her life on the line. I mean she does have Herb for when things get really scary. But those Brits just don't seem quite able to hear her. Or to let themselves give themselves up to hearing her. And if you don't do that -- well, i'm not sure why you're coming to a show to listen to Kiki.

But maybe i just wasn't drunk enough and am only talking about me. I was glad to hear her sing "bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bangin' in the nails," even if just for a bit, and even if it made our ex-priest-in-training friend Chris squirm a little bit.

I did, however, give myself up to listening to Neil Bartlett. On the train back to Paris from London and quite in spite of myself. He has a recently published collection of performance piece monologues that he did from the mid-80's until very recently, and in 1996 or so he did a thing on the seven sacraments as painted by Nicolas Poussin. He did it in London Hospital, to which i have an incidental connection b/c Titi de Paris and I lived at Whitechapel for a brief stint and in order to get to the pad from the tube you had to walk under the awning that protected arriving ambulances and hence also gave you a view onto an almost always full room of people waiting to be seen as emergencies. So I was already all pro the idea of the piece.

There's lots of references to the fact that death is happening around the room where he was talking, about the fact that statistically people tend to die in the darkest and coldest hours, between 3 and 6 in the morning, so that when it comes to his engagement with the painting "Extreme Unction," it makes a lot of sense. But not nearly as much sense as the description of the "piece's" final moment (Kiki says in the back of my head, "'cos you know, when it's spoken word, it's not a song, it's a piece"). Bartlett's stage presence spends a lot of time at the end talking about the gesture of the man in the painting holding the candle. He says that he's not actually touching the dying man's arm, but that he's waiting for the moment when someone, a nurse or someone else in the know, can signal to him that now is the time to touch him. "Go on, now's the time." And then Bartlett's stage presence leaves the stage and goes into the next room and there, there is a bed next to which he sits down, and in that bed there is no one but the indention of the former presence of a human head in the pillow and Bartlett is holding his non-existent hand. Fuck me. I couldn't stop the waterworks in spite of my nap and my lovely weekend. And of course it is that time of year.