A Few Scattered Thoughts

A few scattered thoughts:

• I love your ideas for the show.

• I get the low budget thing, and I'm seeing low budget as well. A slight clue that the show is happening in Arthur's present-day mind would be the low-budget presentation. A ballet, if it happens, could be done with video, but I'm fine with it not happening.

• I taught some kids whose mom owned a costume shop in Lansing. They might have something mascoty for us. Did you ever see the Viking mascot on Freaks and Geeks?  

• It occurs to me that Farthington, Steffi, and Rusty all ascend in this story as the Joe Lazarus figure descends. They are the strange fruits that have overtaken the garden in the absence of a gardener figure.

• I like The Benefactor figure.

• I read Kubla Khan as the greatest of all Romantic poems about the beauty that can result from the unattainability of the unattainable. That is one reason I like thinking of this performance in light of Coleridge. Really, we've got a metanarrative--glimpses of what we'd really like to share with the world. It's the story of our impossible attempt to give the world Arthur White as much as it is about Arthur White's struggles to save Iceland, whatever Iceland represents to him.

• My love of morality plays reemerges as well, although in a postmodern way. All of the formal features of the Iceland struggle have some sort of symbolic significance to Arthur that he attempts to solve by assembling versions of the concert in his mind, but we can't quite call any of the figures allegorical because who knows what they mean. In my mind, I feel an intuitive connection between 70's cults and contemporary digital culture and it informs my understanding if Farthington v. Humboldt, but I can't spell it out enough to cry allegory. Still, even just something that teases an audience toward allegorical thought carried in a frame of amateur public performance satisfies the part of me that wants to carry the torch of Catholic performance art by nodding toward morality plays.