Saturday morning and I’m getting deep with the Au Pairs. Why don’t they have a jukebox musical? Also they do an excellent version of Bowie’s “Repetition”, which I always thought was his attempt to write a Talking Heads song.

I hear things differently when I turn of the streaming options and just haul out records and listen to them all the way through. In fact I’m trying to reimagine my current audio set up – to refocus on quality, now that I don’t have to shove fifty different multimedia boxes through he same amplifier.

Yesterday I enlisted help with overhauling this site to make it more useful to visitors. It might be nice if you could look at some of the images of my work and find out what the piece was called, for example.

Also revisiting a project from 1997 : Hare Follies, a performance collaboration with Chris Cochrane and Patricia Hoffbauer and Ishmael Houston-Jones. It reads to me now as the culmination of all of the rabbit – hole – racial images in my work from the early 1990’s onward. For a long time I couldn’t bear to watch myself in it. But there’s a lot in there i feel actually good about, even though it’s my biggest most public fan letter to Richard Foreman and Kathy Acker ever. At least I trod the boards of the Brooklyn Academy of Music in my union suit, narrating all my fears of internalized racism.

The show is about me owning my shit, and looking at it now, there are parts that prefigure the ways that my performance would move out of public spaces and into the kink/BDSM context. There’s a lot of humiliation, dominance and restraining in the show which incorporates my rewriting of things like Blacula, The Turner Diaries, The Octaroon, and transcripts of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. I wrote the script, designed the costumes and sets and directed. I wanted to have someone else act the central part but I remember during the audition process when I was trying to get Stuart Sherman to take the part he just looked at me and said “Really, these are your issues, you should do it”. He was right, but that has lead me to shy away from watching myself in it for twenty years.