207 lines
9.7 KiB
Plaintext
207 lines
9.7 KiB
Plaintext
Trip Without a Ticket
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(Don't Pay For Your Copy)
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Guerilla Theater
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Our authorized sanities are so many Nembutals. "Normal" citizens with
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store-dummy smiles stand apart from each other like cotton-packed capsules in a
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bottle. Perpetual mental outpatients. Maddeningly sterile jobs for
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strait-jackets, love scrubbed into an insipid "functional personal relationship"
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and Art as a fantasy pacifier. Everyone is kept inside while the outside is
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shown through windows: advertising and manicured news. And we all know this. How
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many TV specials would it take to establish one Guatemalan revolution? How many
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weeks would an ad agency require to face-lift the image of the Viet Cong?
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Slowly, very slowly we are led nowhere. Consumer circuses are held in the ward
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daily. Critics are tolerated like exploding novelties. We will be told which
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burning Asians to take seriously. Slowly. Later.
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But there is a real danger in suddenly waking a somnambulistic patient. And we
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all know this.
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What if he is startled right out the window?
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No one can control the single circuit-breaking moment that charges games with
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critical reality. If the glass is cut, if the cushioned distance of media is
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removed, the patients may never respond as normals again. They will become
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life-actors.
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Theater is territory. A space for existing outside padded walls. Setting down a
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stage declares a universal pardon for imagination. But what happens next must
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mean more than sanctuary or preserve. How would real wardens react to
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life-actors on liberated ground? How can the intrinsic freedom of theater
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illuminate walls and show the weak-spots where a breakout could occur?
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Guerrilla theater intends to bring audiences to liberated territory to create
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life-actors. It remains light and exploitative of forms for the same reasons
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that it intends to remain free. It seeks audiences that are created by issues.
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It creates a cast of freed beings. It will become an issue itself.
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This is theater of an underground that wants out. Its aim is to liberate ground
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held by consumer wardens and establish territory without walls. Its plays are
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glass cutters for empire windows. (10/66)
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Free store/property of the possessed
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The diggers are hip to property. Everything is free, do your own thing. Human
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beings are the means of exchange. Food, machines, clothing, materials, shelter
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and props are simply there. Stuff. A perfect dispenser would be an open automat
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on the street. Locks are time-consuming. Combinations are locks.
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So a store of goods or clinic or restaurant that is free becomes a social art
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form. Ticketless theater. Out of money and control.
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"First you gotta pin down what's wrong with the West. Distrust of human nature,
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which means distrust of Nature. Distrust of wildness in oneself literally means
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distrust of Wilderness." --Gary Snyder
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Diggers assume free stores to liberate human nature. First free the space, goods
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and services. Let theories of economics follow social facts. Once a free store
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is assumed, human wanting and giving, needing and taking, become wide open to
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improvisation.
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A sign: If Someone Asks to See the Manager Tell Him He's the Manager.
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Someone asked how much a book cost. How much did he think it was worth? 75
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cents. The money was taken and held out for anyone. "Who wants 75 cents?" A girl
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who had just walked in came over and took it.
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A basket is labeled Free Money.
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No owner, no Manager, no employees and no cash register. A salesman in a free
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store is a life-actor. Anyone who will assume an answer to a question or accept
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a problem as a turn-on.
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Question (whispered): Who pays the rent?
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Answer (loudly): May I help you?
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Who's ready for the implications of a free store? Welfare mothers pile bags full
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of clothes for a few days and come back to hang up dresses. Kids case the joint
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wondering how to boost.
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Fire helmets, riding pants, shower curtains, surgical gowns and WWI army boots
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are parts for costumes. Nightsticks, sample cases, water pipes, toy guns and
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weather balloons are taken for props. When materials are free, imagination
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becomes currency for spirit.
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Where does the stuff come from? People, persons, beings. Isn't it obvious that
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objects are only transitory subjects of human value? An object released from one
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person's value may be destroyed, abandoned or made available to other people.
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The choice is anyone's.
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The question of a free store is simply what would you have?
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Street event: Birth of Haight/Funeral for $ NOW
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Pop Art mirrored the social skin. Happenings X-rayed the bones. Street events
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are social acid heightening consciousness of what is real on the street. To
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expand eyeball implications until the facts are established through action.
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The Mexican Day of the Dead is celebrated in cemeteries. Yellow flowers falling
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petal by petal on graves. In moonlight. Favorite songs of the deceased and
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everybody gets loaded. Children suck deathshead candy engraved with their names
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in icing.
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A digger event, Flowers, mirrors, penny-whistles, girls in costumes of
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themselves, Hell's Angels, street people, Mime Troupe.
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Angels ride up Haight with girls holding NOW! signs. Flowers and penny-whistles
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passed out to everyone.
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A chorus on both sides of the street chanting UHH! -- AHH! -- SHH BE COOL!
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Mirrors held up to reflect faces of passers=by.
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Penny-whistle music, clapping, flowers thrown in the air. A bus driver held up
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by the action gets out to dance a quick free minute. No more passers-by,
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Everybody's together.
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The burial procession. Three black-shrouded messengers holding staffs topped
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with reflective dollar signs. A runner swinging a red lantern. Four pall bearers
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wearing animal heads carry a black casket filled with blowups of silver dollars.
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A chorus singing _Get Out Of My Life Why Don't You Babe_ to Chopin's _Death
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March_. Members of the procession give out silver dollars and candles.
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Now more reality. Someone jumps on a car with the news that two Angels were
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busted. Crowd, funeral cortege and friends of the Angels fill the street to
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march on Park Police Station. Cops confront 400 free beings: a growling poet
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with a lute, animal spirits in black, candle-lit girls singing _Silent Night_. A
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collection for bail fills an Angel's helmet. March back to Haight and street
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dancing.
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Street events are rituals of release. Reclaiming of territory (sundown, traffic,
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public joy) through spirit. Possession. Public NewSense.
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Not street-theater, the street _is_ theater. Parades, bank robberies, fires and
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sonic explosions focus street attention. A crowd is an audience for an event.
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Release of crowd spirit can accomplish social facts. Riots are a reaction to
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police theater. Thrown bottles and over-turned cars are responses to a dull,
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heavy-fisted, mechanical and deathly show. People fill the street to express
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special public feelings and hold human communion. To ask "What's Happening?" The
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alternative to death is a joyous funeral in company with the living.
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Who paid for your trip?
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Industrialization was a battle with 19th-century ecology to win breakfast at the
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cost of smog and insanity. Wars against ecology are suicidal. The U.S. standard
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of living is a bourgeois baby blanket for executives who scream in their sleep.
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No Pleistocene swamp could match the pestilential horror of modern urban sewage.
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No children of White Western Progress will escape the dues of peoples forced to
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haul their raw materials.
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But the tools (that's all factories are) remain innocent and the ethics of greed
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aren't necessary. Computers render the principles of wage-labor obsolete by
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incorporating them. We are being freed from mechanistic consciousness. We could
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evacuate the factories, turn them over to androids, clean up our pollution.
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North Americans could give up self-righteousness to expand their being.
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Our conflict is with job-wardens and consumer-keepers of a permissive
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looney-bin. Property, credit, interest, insurance, installments, profit are
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stupid concepts. Millions of have-nots and drop-outs in the U.S. are living on
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an overflow of technologically produced fat. They aren't fighting ecology,
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they're responding to it. Middle-class living rooms are funeral parlors and only
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undertakers will stay in them. Our fight is with those who would kill us through
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dumb work, insane wars, dull money morality.
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Give up jobs, so computers can do them! Any important human occupation can be
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done free. Can it be given away?
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Revolutions in Asia, Africa, South America are for humanistic industrialization.
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The technological resources of North America can be used throughout the world.
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Gratis. Not a patronizing gift, shared.
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Our conflict begins with salaries and prices. The trip has been paid for at an
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incredible price in death, slavery, psychosis.
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An event for the main business district of any U.S. city. Infiltrate the largest
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corporation office building with life-actors as nymphomaniacal secretaries,
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clumsy repairmen, berserk executives, sloppy security guards, clerks with
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animals in their clothes. Low key until the first coffee-break and then pour it
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on. Secretaries unbutton their blouses and press shy clerks against the wall.
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Repairmen drop typewriters and knock over water coolers. Executives charge into
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private offices claiming their seniority. Guards produce booze bottles and
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playfully jam elevator doors. Clerks pull out goldfish, rabbits, pigeons, cats
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on leashes, loose dogs. At noon 1000 freed beings singing and dancing appear
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outside to persuade employees to take off for the day. Banners roll down from
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office windows announcing liberation. Shills in business suits run out of the
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building, strip and dive in the fountain. Elevators are loaded with incense and
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a pie fight breaks out in the cafeteria.
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Theater is Fact/Action
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Give up jobs. Be with people. Defend against property.
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Communication Company SF 2nd Edition 6/28/67
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