We who struggle with form and with America…

Alley music

When I first came to Chicago in spring 1980, it did not take long for the alleys to become my second home. I grew fascinated by this feature of the city, the uniqueness of which I came to understand only later. The street grid had been designed to include a secondary transit in every block, behind or beside buildings, to allow for garbage collection, garage access, even, in years past, the delivery of ice from an ice wagon or the deposit of coal into a chute. One could still see traces of these abandoned technologies on the older buildings. Alleys allowed all of the necessary functions without congesting traffic. This design produced a parallel pattern, loose, unkempt, with none of the street’s public-facing presentation. But in the alleys as I found them, nothing seemed to happen. They were like an alternate universe, a ghost city where the buildings turned their faces away from one another, a thoroughfare with its own sense of seclusion. As my fellow son of southern Michigan, Iggy Pop, proclaimed: “the city’s ripped backside.” He was singing about Berlin, but like him I rode this city’s train simply to be a passenger and see what I could survey. Mostly, when not at work or watching a double feature with subtitles at the Parkway Theater on N. Clark Street, I wandered the alleys. I almost never encountered another human. I was twenty years old. On one alley weekend afternoon, something transformative ambushed me. I would now describe it as the first time I heard music.

Certainly I had heard music before, both live and recorded, but never like this. I rounded a corner and a sudden blast of some unseen electric guitar, fuzzed out at maximum volume, startled me out of my trance. It became a frequent occurrence at any point in my wanderings: a sudden concert-like rehearsal blossoming in a somewhat decrepit post-industrial desert. I nearly always heard a guitar, but sometimes drums banged away in accompaniment. One time, I remember, a bass line bubbled along all by itself. I imagined the musicians whom I never saw, slightly older than I, plucking and strumming and manically battering obsessively in this or that garage, all the doors closed to mute the racket. It sounded like what it was: people who had no real idea how to play an instrument but who loved the noise and the sonic texture, and for whom these rough blasts of sound provided some needed escape from something, a channel of creative energy that they could not find elsewhere. I suppose that was my introduction to what people were starting to call “punk rock.” I even saw ubiquitous photocopied, hand-collaged posters taped to streetlight poles, advertising bands with names like No Wire Hangers. I did not know music could be like that, so amateur and raw. I had no idea that one could claim music in this way, as such an outpouring of one’s closest cares, acting out the newest, best life to come. For all its jagged energy, the music’s form seemed to issue from the form of the city, one structure begetting the other. This sound grew from this place, and from my vantage as an unseen witness, I overheard it in all its overflowing life force.

The point of this little recollection, is that, some four decades later, with the blessing of our housemates and supporters Carol Becker and Jack Murchie, we have converted a shared garage in our house into a dedicated sound-stage and studio. The first Every house quarantine production is now underway: Lin Hixson directing a twelve-minute film version of unbroken choreographic sequences from our new (postponed) performance Aquarium. From Helsinki, Essi Kausalainen has shipped us redesigned and extended costumes for our Chicago-based performers Bryan Saner (Lesser Electric Ray), and Elise Cowin (Eyelash Seaweed). Wearing Essi’s latest habitat/costume construction, Alex Bradley Cohen, who first performed with Every house in the 2018 Noise swims by Poets’ Theater performance, steps into the role of Limestone.

From the director’s notebook

Time does not just flow
Time works

Responding to the world more than initiating that which brings forth life from non-life

To think outside of our thought
To positively conceive of existence outside of our conceptions of it

Performance is a mode of presentation that makes relations apparent before us, connections that straddle through lives

Enjoy being confounded

Slow – So slow I cannot see it
Low – So low I cannot hear it
Bright – So bright I cannot look at it

Language less to express our thoughts than to awaken them

Another world is possible (poetry and voting)

Now with the garage door open, she steps away from the camera on its tripod and backs into the alley to assess the image. Occasionally our neighbors stop to watch with their children. They ask questions about this strange, elaborate, artificial environment. It’s a wonder, another world behind the “normal” one. It provides a form for manifestations of all the dreams, hallucinations, extreme emotions, companionship and love for which that dominant world has no time or place. Our garage studio frames a durable and resilient universe, a gathering place for any who happen to be wandering, seeking something without knowing what, magnetized by the sounds of another life, more free, and more friendly, an alternative to the abomination out there in what the grown-ups call “the real world.” Don’t get me wrong–it’s time to vote and to organize, send postcards, make telephone calls, spread the word, and act in ways that we never imagined we could until we saw democracy sacrificed and disfigured. All the while, we remember, bullying and intimidation is the empty talk of the weak and the soulless. It will not undo our minds or colonize our thought. We know who we are and of what we are capable. As Ralph Ellison said, “I [we] can only seek again and again to project that humanity as I [we] see it and feel it.” Out of this necessity, we stay “close to our roots,” as the saying goes. By roots, I mean the alley: repository of garbage and recycling, pedestrian haven, humble ground of creativity, and loving cradle of all the possible music.

Congratulations to Jonathan Slaght

I first contacted the writer and translator Jonathan Slaght when Every house was assembling our 2017 performance This is not a dream, marking the centennial of the October Revolution in Russia. Jonathan and I shared a love of the legendary Dersu Uzala, the Nanai trapper and hunter immortalized in the West by Akira Kurosawa’s 1975 film. Jonathan had published a new translation of Across the Ussuri Kray, the 1923 memoir by the Russian explorer Vladimir Arsenyev who surveyed the Ussuri basin in the Russian Far East where he had met Dersu. At our request, Jonathan delved into the Arsenyev Archive and produced the original 1916 Russian text of Shamanism and Animism among East Siberian Indigenous Tribes. He even translated it into English for us, providing the basis for Bryan Saner’s Arsenyev monologue.

Jonathan’s recently published book Owls of the Eastern Ice has been nominated for the National Book Award. The book tracks Blackiston’s fish owl, the largest living species of owl, through those same rugged landscapes. We take a moment to acknowledge his research into this singular creature, whose spirit, along with the endangered aquatic entities of Aquarium, haunts us and guides us now in our weary human world, as we lurch from one catastrophe to the next. The owl of wisdom flies at dusk, when some believe the day begins.

Take care, stay safe, and thank you all as always.

Matthew Goulish, dramaturg and writer
Every house has a door