Not Wearing A Shirt

4 February 2008

Ant Hampton sent me info on upcoming London showings of the Rotozaza performance Five in the Morning. It’s next week –  February 13th and 14th – at 7.15pm at the Shunt Lounge, London Bridge. Tickets are £5 – free to Shunt Lounge members. Here’s more info on the show, including a very nice New York Times review.

Also got mail from Michael Thomas of the Chicago based performance outfit Lucky Pierre who says they are “collecting short writings (memories/fragments/ http://timetchells.com/images/analysis) about a big topic, the Vietnam war”. Contributions in the form of writing or images are welcome, and are held anonymously, being gathered on the project’s web-page in digital stream of consciousness/fragment archives titled Collective Vietnam. Here’s one fragment of the text submitted so far:

I have a memory of my eldest brother burning his draft card in our backyard in Kansas City. I don’t know whether this was an act of civil disobedience, a celebration of the war’s end, an empty “high draft number” display, or a false memory. It was summer and he wasn’t wearing a shirt. Or that’s how my memory has it. I was born in 1961 and he was born in 1952 or 1953. That is the only thing I remember about the Viet Nam war. And it might not actually have happened.

For myself I can’t decide which of the fragments from Michael Herr’s amazing book Dispatches I can pretty much quote from memory would be best to send them. Think it might be this one:

I went to cover the war… behind the crude but serious belief that you had to be able to look at anything, serious because I acted on it and went, crude because I didn’t know, it took the war to teach it, that you are as responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you do. The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, it just stayed stored there in your eyes…