Results of one of the last days of class of the past session. If you forgot to give one to me, or if you are feeling creative right this second, add yours to the list.

boolug zone. a time when a lack of playfulness about a situation has become the most deafeningly serious and dire thing about it

comtismr. someone i don’t know well but i know i trust deeply

crotopollo. a protocol that allows imagination to redefine it (in italian sounds like scrotus-chicken)

ethsthetic. attempt at showing one’s ethics through one’s style or image

genesisism. the act of assertion of a singular origina to a persona, place, thing or idea which defines or exclusively frames it. removes or ignores all earlier possible iterations, instances, or variations.

harmonoise. I speak of harmonoise when i tune one noise to another noise.

hootepic. to shout loud enough that the whole world listens

larvement. a political movement in a transformation stage

metairony. a response to the ironic statement that exposes something true about it. the metaironic statement also must be performed ironically, and would ideally have the consequence that performing irony would seem less cool than sincerity as a social norm.

poverteer. when I have no money, tho I suffer no deprivation due to my needs being met by non-monetary methods.
Also, poork (pronounced poor-kay.

streeadilinding. expressing not understanding and trying to know more without asserting that complete understanding is possible or desirable

transferbage. timeliness peculiar to formulation that arrives too late—the context that arises to welcome what you didn’t get a chance to say

usteem. the appreciation of the attributes of one’s existence absent the present gaze of others (albeit perhaps imagined), hence in the personal domain (not the metaphors of self-esteem understood in the domain of the public)

xtolipsa. putting off the alien I for too long—resentful boredom

Schematic from 'Fundamentals without Fundamentalism'

Photo taken by Ya’aqov Ziso

Cast of characters:
Snow Leopard
Dr. Larry Richards
Austin McCann
Abigail Kiser

Snow Leopard Report: The School for Designing a Society recently held a Graduation Ceremony for its 2011 spring semester participants. This event was hosted at the Herbert Brün House and featured a keynote “un-speech” by Dr. Larry Richards. We ‘graduated’ the following participants at the ceremony: Snow Leopard, Camille Euritt, Christine Weaver, Carly Guierrero, Austin McCann, Carey Smith, Maggie Taylor, Andrew Heathwaite, Yael Beretta, Julianne Panagacos, Trevor Bristow, Mark Eslin, Melanie Hinojosa, Derek Busby, elizaBeth Simpson, Jerehme Bamberger, Susan Parenti, Will Adams, Maggie Wallace, Brook Celeste, Aba Kiser, Ya’aqov Ziso, Jacob Barton, Kim Olsen, Meadow Jones, and Zoe Yoo.

Larry Richards Wait a minute! That list includes the organizers/teachers at the School! Do you mean to say that they received diplomas as well?

Snow Leopard I do! They did!

Austin Participants arrived early to hang Italian lights outside, set up food and art exhibits using food, arrange chairs in the seating area, and generally convive before the event. We, you know, mingled! After a short cybernetics game in the garden, we took our seats so that the program might start.

Snow Leopard The program started with performances from individual participants and groups. There were readings, songs, critical semester reflections, and –

Austin Real quick: The microtonal class’s performance was amazing! Jacob referring to the “Goo-Gone of sound”; that bit where Mark was the caller of some microtonal, desirable country dance: “Now pretend there’s no countries! Everybody give the caller a hug! The caller needs a hug!”

Snow Leopard After the performances was Dr. Larry Richard’s keynote “un-speech,” followed by participant appreciations, and the requisite commencement-ceremony walk, complete with diplomas and underscored by “Pomp and Circumstance.”

Austin We all blinked, then graduation was upon us.

Aba I totally agree. The community that emerged from the intention to think and speak critically about systemic issues in our flailing culture was still just getting off the ground by the time graduation came around. It wasn’t clear what we were celebrating! Was it that we had just spent three months together, befriending and cherishing each other? Was it pride at our individual project seeds, which we watched germinate during the semester? Were we rejoicing in the mass confusion, nerves, and frustrations of the past three months which didn’t turn us against one another, but curiously brought us closer together?

Larry Richards Who’s to say?

Austin I’ve graduated from a few things in my life: college, elementary school, toilet training class … but this graduation was different, and not just because teachers received diplomas along with students. Graduation ceremonies usually mark the end of something, objectively, heralding the commencement of new, different things, an entrance into the “real world.” Like you were saying, Aba: what can be said for our ceremony, which came in the middle of our projects, establishment of community, comradely forging of human bonds, our understanding of cybernetics, &c. — what purpose does this false ending serve?

Snow Leopard Well, some participants are leaving Urbana.

Austin True. Some of our participants are leaving town to return to their colleges, hometowns, jobs hawking kettle corn at the state fair, or whatever. For those folks, some of whom may never return to work with us, the ceremony may mark the actual end of their participation with the School as a group.

Larry Richards But the traces …

Snow Leopard Let’s talk about the appreciations.

Aba The appreciations! Julianne, who organized graduation with Susan, randomly assigned each of us 2-3 other participants to appreciate in any way. Some wrote letters, others sang songs, some gave personal tokens as gifts. This honest, compassionate tribute took an an incredible variety of forms.

Snow Leopard Andrew played microtonal guitar, Austin played accordion, Julianne made a special beverage, Mark and Camille wrote these incredible poems …

Austin But there were appreciations that were straight-forward, too: “You helped me so much with [x], your friendship and guidance this semester meant so much to me, &c.”

Aba I had tears streaming down my face for most of it, between quietly appreciating the thoughtfulness of each speaker and laughing my ass off at the salty, sweet humor of our ensemble.

Larry Richards I hadn’t seen that many teary people in formal wear since McCain lost the election! Wakka-wakka!

Aba Each appreciation took time and effort. It seemed like we all wanted to honestly, critically acknowledge the person and their contributions as students and as friends.

Austin And we avoided cliches wherever possible.

Snow Leopard The performances showed range and depth. The appreciations showed range and depth. If I have one main complaint, it’s that (like those killer cream puffs) it took till the end of the semester to show up in such abundance.

Aba It was a blissful and revelatory ceremony that acknowledged the position of all of us as players within this vibrant and varying community. It was a treat to relax and acknowledge each other at the end of some of the most confusing and heartfelt months of my life.

Snow Leopard Graduation was a zoo of wonder where hearts and minds seemed better to conspire and work in union than elsewhere and when during the semester.

Larry Richards The traces! The traces!

Austin Yes, let’s talk about traces. We’ve been talking as a group about “life after SDaS.” Earlier in this conversation, I’d mentioned something about leaving Urbana as the effective end of SDaS participation. But that isn’t quite right, I think. We should be viewing the consequences of participation in terms of traces. This graduation ceremony might be the last moment we are all as living, breathing bodies in the same room together, but what of the traces of our work? I imagine that we’ll see identifiable projects popping up in Korea (courtesy of Zoe this spring, Sora last fall, countless other Korean students), Baltimore (Maggie), back at Evergreen State College (Trevor, Will, &c.). The School isn’t a summer camp, a place where you have some magical experience, then it’s over and your mom comes to pick you up. This project is a rigorous training in an experimental methodology for social change and as such requires a kind of intellectual, creative probing that can’t just be dropped once you’re back at your job, living with your parents, sellin’ that kettle corn, &c.

Snow Leopard So … do people leave?

Austin Look for the traces!

Larry Richards And never stop retarding the decay!

End.

Our cast of characters:

Panelist #1 (Austin McCann): author of this letter, panel participant, SDaS participant
Panelist #2 (Susan Parenti): panel participant, SDaS organizer
Panelist #3: Acclaimed young writer & current undergraduate philosophy student, writing his thesis on 20th century Marxist theory
Panelist #4: Queer/feminist/Latina-(identified) artist of political art products (e.g. posters, zines)
Panelist #5: Contemporary artist & co-organizer of a non-political* art gallery in Miami
Panelist #6: Editor of a non-political art magazine (not mentioned in article)

To whom it may concern:

I’m writing to thank you for inviting me and Susan Parenti to speak on the Art & Social Change panel at New College. I hope you found our performances helpful towards fostering a context for challenging formulations (i.e. articulating formulations that are challenging as well as challenging other folks’ formulations). The School for Designing a Society posits that disagreement is desirable; Herbert Brun said that “agreement is a non-violent way to make another person superfluous.” He wrote some pretty wonderful stuff about communication, “anti-communication,” and other matters relevant to Susan’s and my performances on the panel. But yes, we value disagreement, we value challenging people to articulate new ideas and new(ly articulated) wounds to create climates of ‘intellectual vulnerability.’ In the workshop I said that we played with a dialectic of friction and care: while desiring friction (disagreement), we’re also not interested in that because we have chaos boners: we believe that caring for social wounds is a critical part of desirable social design.

So when Susan challenged Panelist #3 on his aesthetic theory, or when I said that I disagreed with Panelist #5 on the character of technology in capitalist society, or Panelist #4 didn’t like that I used the word “pedagogical” — in these moments, when everyone got all weird, you should understand that that response comes from an academic climate opposed to meaningful conversation (which includes disagreement). In my experience, most New College professors aren’t oriented towards challenging their students to really articulate why they think the things they think, say the things they say, and do the things they do, but challenging students/people in this way is actually a pretty great tool towards learning to take yourself and your impact on the world seriously. Susan’s dramatic appeal to the will to desire of the other panelists and audience members garnered the panel’s only applause, but her interruptions of the terribly long-winded others on the panel curried her no favors with the audience, who seemed neurotically terrified of disagreement.

Some of the questions implied by these first two paragraphs: What are the characteristics of a desirable panel? Do we want to cultivate disagreement between parties, or have everyone say their piece, then go home?

“Playing” close attention to the “art & social change question” is important, and if I can extrapolate a theory from attendance, it seems to be of popular interest (unless folks had nothing better to do on a Saturday night or Panelist #3 has a huge fan club)! It’s a question that brings with it a lot of boring clichés from activists, artists, and those who refuse to acknowledge the significance of either art or activism or the meaningful relation between the two, but that makes it your job, ye facilitators of the panel, to design against the possibility of clichés or ignorant comments.

Small idea: I think that next time (and there should be a next time, and I would love to participate as much as you want) you should invite people who actually care about social change. Poor Panelist #5! I think she felt a little hoodwinked during the panel. She seemed prepared to talk about the “politics of art” or some such thing, but she definitely has no interest or experience in making art that is interested in creating a social (i.e. political) conversation. (Although I would argue that all art does that, but she at least doesn’t seem intentional designing around political consequences). I’m being sincere here. She was out of her element. It would be like putting me on an art history panel: I might have some opinions merely as a guy who does something sort-of-connected to it, but I definitely don’t have a whole thing about it.

And Panelist #3 would have been, in my opinion, more useful talking as the exceptional artist he is than as some college philosophy student. Apparently he was articulating some sort of version of “Frankfurt School” philosophy: the irony there being that the School for Designing a Society comes directly out of the Frankfurt School – Herbert Brun worked closely with Adorno, and Frankfurt School philosophy has been an important orientation in our work (find Dr. Rob Scott’s recent doctoral dissertation for evidence).

And so radical philosophy isn’t just a thing to talk about in classrooms and panels — you can actually do meaningful work with it (but don’t tell universities that or they’ll lose their perpetual underclass of cynically-educated unemployed elites)! Panelist #3′s aesthetic orientation is probably not dissimilar from ours (though you couldn’t tell from his cool nihilist posturing), but we operate in radically different contexts, viz. Susan and I do stuff with our philosophy, Panelist #3 studies philosophy in college. And let’s be real about what kinds of logic those distinct contexts generate. When we are in a system, such as the university system, and we don’t have a cybernetic awareness, we forget that systems want to perpetuate themselves. To that end, they solve the problems that assail them, perpetuate the problems that they profit from, and generally love to promote non-threatening ideas. The university system solves the problem of theory radicalizing thought radicalizing action by creating a neat, safe context for that theory to exist w/o implying any necessary action.

And Susan was right when she asked Panelist #3 “who benefits from that idea [i.e. that art is ultimately a private/individual aesthetic relation],” because aesthetic theories are connected to the societies in which they are generated (Panelist #3 said that very thing at the start of his first comment) and when an “anti-political” aesthetic theory like the one that Panelist #3 casually tossed off (Harold Bloom’s conjecture that art shouldn’t concern itself with social consequences) is articulated by someone representing a dominating class in our society, as Harold Bloom is, we need to acknowledge and critique that!

My point is that social change is not a marketing tool, it’s not some cute little academic notion to deconstruct in the safe, politically protected halls of academia, and it’s not some annoyance for “pure” artists to deal with. Social change is the process by which we end preventable suffering. I don’t think it’s every artist’s responsibility to do anything – I don’t believe in universal mandates, not just on political grounds but because they’re unrealistic. Art does lots of stuff for lots of people. Fine. And there are some artists who are “apolitical” (meaning refusing to engage their art in social conversations) whose work is wonderful to me, such as Matisse or the American abstract expressionists. I think putting them on an “Art & Social Change” panel would be a mistake, but I value their work.

Anyway, I’m taking this opportunity to respond as an invitation to reflect personally on the question of “Art & Social Change,” and I hope you’ve found some value in it, too.

*NB: I use the terms “political art” and “non-political art” in reference to an artist’s intentions, not social consequences. I use “non-political art” to point to artists who aren’t interested in the social consequences of their work. “Political art” is a more complicated term: some “political artists,” I would argue, do not care about the social consequences of their work, either … but that’s a conversation for another time.

Scene 1.
Introduction

At the beginning of this month, New College of Florida hosted its 4th annual All Power to the Imagination! Conference, a convergence aimed at “closing [the] gaps” between radical theory & practice.

Student organizer Matt Polzin invited me to present at the conference. I’ve lectured on art & radicalism at API in previous years. This year, I explained to Matt, I had nothing to say except on behalf of my work with the School for Designing a Society, and so could I please bring one or two SDaS organizers? Little did I know that in the days preceding my suggestion, philosophy professor Dr. Aron Edidin suggested that SDaS be invited to the conference, indicating traces of the proto-SDaS Performers Workshop Ensemble’s residencies there in the early 90s. When I suggested that API invite me-as-SDaS rather than me-as-myself, I unknowingly closed a gap!

Susan Parenti agreed to travel with me to my sunny, cynical alma mater. We offered the following language for our presentation:

DESIGNING A DESIRABLE SOCIETY
Dr. Susan Parenti & Austin McCann, School for Designing a Society

A college-educated young person can speak of what she knows, but cannot speak of what she desires—the terrain of her DESIRE, and of HER desire, is untraveled by her, alien. “Desire” is defined as wanting the not-yet, as missing that which only the desirer can create and for which the desirer is needed.

What to do? In the attempt to grapple with slippery political problems, two related, overlapping approaches are called for: design & composition. Susan & Austin took “All power to the imagination!” as the design challenge for this session; we will explore design & composition as approaches to slippery problems. Both approaches hinge on desire: an image of not-yet-existing reality, deliberately formed as a critical reflection on images of currently existing reality.

The emphasis in design & composition is to engage in dialogue with a situation. Along the way, the problem’s problematic language is taken to task, interrogated, altered, and refreshed via “playing attention to language.” This workshop—part paper, part performance—aims at addressing problems which cannot be addressed in the system in which they arise. To that end, we will bring forth an arsenal of tools/concepts to help us to think ourselves out of the box, formulate our desires, and create the societies we want to live in.

Dr. Susan Parenti founded the School for Designing a Society in 1991 with other teachers, performers, artists, and activists to answer the question “What would I consider a desirable society?” In the spaces between coordinating this project, she is a touring performer, writer and collaborator with Dr. Patch Adams. Austin McCann is a language activist/social change artist, current SDaS student, and non-profit development staff person.

Part of my hope was to touch the wound lying at the heart of undergraduate cynicism. Maybe I wanted to create the workshop that would’ve helped me when I was at New College, suffering the painful throes of my own post-adolescence, abetted by an absence of my care in my intellectual labor: I was part of the “cynically-educated class,” as Peter Schumann once called it. And I think our workshop made huge strides towards sounding the clarion call of the reconstructive vision, belying vulnerability and hope.

Scene 2.
“Designing a Desirable Society”: the workshop, or: how to convince kids from a beach paradise to move to a corn desert

More than 35 people of diverging backgrounds and interests participated in the workshop. I was hoping to reach apples sitting higher up in the tree than already politicized activists and counter-cultural types; and as we surveyed the room, we happily counted Continental philosophers, modernist drama enthusiasts, photographers, and school teachers in our ranks.

Here’s a rough, bare outline of our 3½ hour presentation:

• BASIC SDaS DESCRIPTION:
  • Who we are, what we’ve spawned
    • “The School for Designing a Society is a project for people committed to changing society by means of composition, design, performance, and care. We approach those problems which—we assert—cannot be solved within the system/structure/context in which they arise. In order to solve them, we need to compose and design new systems/structures/contexts. Not only will these problems not be solved within the systems in which they arise—-they will be perpetuated. Herbert Brün wrote, ‘Every system will solve the problems that assail it and perpetuate the problems that maintain it.’
    • “A participant in the project of SDaS is thus involved in an entailment structure of study and action: the participant needs to study problem, social change, systems, structures, society as we know it and society as we desire it, desire, composition, design, performance, choice, assertion, power, power over, media, commitment—and to care all these things as well as to know them.  At all points: language is involved.” (Susan Parenti)
• META-LEVEL CONVERSATIONAL METHODOLOGY:
  • Conversation as a technology:
    • Intellectual vulnerability: “midwife-ing each other towards thoughts we hadn’t articulated yet about what we want, why we hurt, who we are”; creating an environment for creating risks
    • The dialectic of friction & care (not trying to win in a discussion) in our desirable conversations; legitimate questions
• DESIRE
  • False Statements
  • Performance, The Politics of the Adjective ‘Political’
• LANGUAGE
  • Language speaks us; language has its own agenda/dynamic
    • Loneliness of people in a familiar language
  • “If you seek the new, compose asynchronicity” (Larry Richards)
  • Ethics being embedded in language through mastery (Heinz von Foerster)
• DESIGN
  • Bandages assignment (ran out of time)
    • Based on a premise by artist Krzysztof Wodiczko, name a wound, then design/compose a bandage that both heals the wound and exposes the social conditions making it possible
      • Austin’s New College-specific point: How often do we read a passage in a book by, e.g., Foucault, by which we are deeply moved, but have no productive response to? This methodology allows us to turn our intellectual labors into design strategies for social change
  • Performance, Harry McClintock’s “Big Rock Candy Mountain” (Austin on accordion; suggested by participant Alex Cline as an example of false statements)
  • Design Groups
    • Sensitivity to systemic dynamics; the way that certain desires are implied by others
  • Design Ideas
    • We shouldn’t have to start from scratch; how we can borrow structures from other language?
    • Ex. AA, “edges” (permaculture)
• WRAP-UP
  • GPS: We know what we did, but we don’t know what what we did did (ran out of time)
  • Q&A

Trying to cram the School’s work into 3½ hours was a challenge, as you might imagine. I kind of hoped to give participants too much information so that there’d be desire for follow-up, necessitating a visit to either Gesundheit! this summer or Urbana next year or in the future, etc. And our feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

(I shouldn’t count these damn eggs before they hatch, but … what’s that? Did I just hear the train whistle of the old New College –> SDaS express? Could it be? Let’s start the welcome party!)

Too often, radical convergences promulgate this kind of anti-intellectual “actions speak louder than words” orientation, which excludes the person who takes words very seriously, who recognizes that ethics can be implicit in well-crafted language (cf. Heinz von Foerster), and this person is a great person for SDaS to connect to. The theoretical component of this anti-intellectualism is exhibited when so-called “radicals” enforce a uniform code of political and linguistic desirables (this is called “political-correctness” by reactionaries) on political energies which are, at their heart, desires, i.e. necessarily idiosyncratic. Radical critical thought should not look uniform, yet that is the reality at so many radical spaces. It is not a conversation, but an imposition; counter-domination, not transformation. But this anti-intellectualism has an equally undesirable challenger. You know him: the undergraduate philosophy student whose articulation of, e.g., “the real Heidegger” is supposed to be making a huge contribution to our collective political thought. This essentially academic creature, so out of place in radical spaces concerned with social change (he is a creature of analysis, not change), is treating a corpse for syphilis, rather than promoting health in a living being. He is creating an expert’s analysis of the problem, devoid of actionability. These two undesirable choices force individuals with radical energies to either (1) subsume their desires into pre-established general political movements or (2) reject social change practice as either ineffective or not meaningful, retreating into cynical disengagement and/or, for artists, individualistic aesthetic hedonism.

This long, unfair generalization is aimed at bolstering the uniqueness of what the School for Designing a Society were offering at New College’s All Power to the Imagination! conference, and our positive reception affirmed this hopeful frame.

TO BE CONTINUED …

Yael: I think I’d like to become a teacher.
Austin: Oh yeah? Like … college? High school?
Yael: No. I want to invent my own pedagogy.

Well, sure I can update you about what’s been happening lately. Actually, it’s been happening. Between the Performatorium and IMC-Omnia, continuous returns from class invitations, and the upcoming dance performance … okay, I’ll slow down.

Look. This semester, the School has three distinct tracks: (1) Connecting Cybernetics & Social Change, (2) Microtonal Design, and (3) Feminist Composition & Design. Some of our full-time students, especially visiting students who’ve traveled to Urbana to participate, are engaged in all three tracks, but others participate more selectively. I (Austin) participate in the Feminist Composition & Design course, in addition to some other general SDaS classes, such as the all-student weekly Plenary (a kind of SDaS-fundamentals course that includes a community meeting) and the Design Groups, a creative zone where folks bring their desires for new societies to groups to explore the ins-and-outs of their designs.

In the Feminist course, we’re seeing “returns” from a number of different invitations (invitations is code for assignments; the existing political system uses mandates to accomplish its goals; for folks at the School, voluntary participation is of utmost importance). We’ve been exploring counterpoint & narrative, the performance of everyday life, pivot points in any context where the viewer is required to retroactively correct her understanding of the preceding events. We watched part of a documentary on early feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony and talked to to Safiya Noble about feminist approaches toward technology; after Safiya’s provocative presentation, our class spun off into a lively conversation about intelligent technology systems, economic ethics, and how to design web search engines that promote human values over economic profit. The other tracks have been similarly busy.

We all got together as a group for a few big events recently:

• IMC-Omnia 2: IMC-Omnia is a semi-regular event hosted by Oddmusic (organizers of the Microtonal Design track) aimed at turning the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center (our host organization; an incredible, diverse community media project) into a temporary artists’ colony where anybody can work on a project within the IMC’s 30,000 square foot facility for a set period of time (24 hours, ideally).  This time, IMC-Omnia 2, the length was shortened: it lasted 12 hours, starting at 11:59pm on Friday night and continuing until lunch the next day. Highlights of the night:
  • Microtonally re-fretting an electric guitar
  • Watching Rafter’s 2004 archival film of the School
  • Julianne returning from the dumpsters with crates of food at 3 in the morning!
• The next IMC-Omnia, lasting a full 24 hours, will start Friday, April 22nd, before midnight. Do you have a project you want to work on? Contact Jacob Barton at udderbot@gmail.com.
• Oddmusic hosted the 2nd Performatorium at the IMC. The Performatorium, or Oddmusic Mixer, is a trying-out space for SDaS students & community members, where they can bring projects in various stages in completion to a room of willing collaborators, available to offer advice, participate in the composition process, or just pay attention. Jacob’s prompt: “We are approaching the midpoint of a semester of agitation and wonder. What desires, designs, compositions, can WE—having presented and mingled—now TRY onstage at the IMC???” Presentations included:
  • Ya’aqov whistling “Sarabande in C Minor” (for solo cello) by J.S. Bach
  • Julianne’s and Aba’s poetic/pugnacious dance piece, choreographed to a recording of SDaS organizer elizaBeth Simpson singing “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)”
  • Snow Leopard encouraging us to verbally challenge a segment of Macbeth as it was read
  • Mark Enslin conducting a microtonal ensemble performing a Paul Koltheimer piece in “11-edo” tuning
  • So many others: Andy Burton doing some right-on free improvisation with his percussion smorgasbord; Rodney Peacock performing on the black keys of a piano; Carey Smith reading some micro-poetry …

Other School for Designing a Society-related news:

• Long-time SDaS organizer & friend Danielle Chynoweth gave birth to a boy, Ezra Shine! Congratulations, Danielle!
• Susan Parenti & I are going down to New College of Florida to present some SDaS fundamentals at that historical college’s 4th annual All Power to the Imagination! Radical Theory and Practice conference. (We’re getting ready to blow some minds!)
• SDaS Movement class continues. Rumors are there’s going to be a dance performance, fundraiser, & carnival-of-sorts planned in the next month. Stay tuned!

Until then … we’ll be here.

10 to 4 is an acoustic play which twists shards of political activism and thought’s aging into the brain of language. The play posits a “language brain”: given that we’ve evolved brains specifically designed to hide their workings from us, what hide-and-seek might we play if brain were actual language and not only linguistic function?

Early in the play, one of the two main characters says, “What’s in my head, what I gotta think—what I’ve got to think—I’ll lay it out for you”. The stage becomes the inside of his brain, a hectic hub-bub of sentences, parts of speech, linguistic gestures, inflections, vocal timbres, a half inch of cerebrum sentence-snarl, “Bullshit! I can see right through this!!”

The title of play refers to activities happening ten minutes before a 4 o’clock weekly Saturday afternoon protest against Blackwater. This protest is organized by one of the main characters, an eccentric and committed political activist who has created his activism, his politics, and his commitment as a composer creates music, whimsy to fact. The Schumann-singing activist bumps into a young neighbor who neither has any interest in the activist’s thinking nor takes any pleasure in his own (“my neural networks suck”).

Throughout the play three such Saturdays occur at 10 minutes before the 4 o’clock protest, where the question “You coming with?” hangs upside down—a kind of linguistic bat—asked by the activist to his new friend amidst a clamor of metronomes and dinging egg timers. Learning and other colonizing acts happen during this spanse of Saturdays. While the activist slowly decays from discoverer to mere teacher (“I’m Christopher Columbus, not Professor Columbus!”) under the pressure of his new friendship, his young friend is visited by his own brain made flesh—a multiversa of language hullabaloo, hullaba-do, and—finally—hullaba-don’t.

7 p.m. Saturday, January 29
7 p.m. Sunday, January 30