Re-Engagement

Apropos Re-Enchantment, juxtapositions
          apropos, juxtapo

          abrupt transitions  

Re-enchantment involves its own Magickal Activation, for revival of the meaning and powers within the meanings of words, for the realization of Love, Justice, and the like. This activation is an action and a practice - intentional, character-based and building, mindful, radiant. Yet, obviously, basic, worldy practical actions of daily life must go alongside the spiritual initiative: genuine engagement, re-engagement.

It could easily be assumed that the meaning I’m giving to re-engagement is related to how much I’ve slowed down here on Substack since early November (as I was finishing up my book); yet, this whole Substack endeavor since a year ago November is a re-engagement in that way, in terms of extroverting the work - likely parallel with a natural rhythm of coming into and out of artistic introversion, not to mention the pandemic and our years of upended politics. No, the sense here isn’t only to assert a return or attempt at extroversion with regard to starting and keeping up with this Substack (so far I’ve made no promises to myself nor to my appreciative readers for timing, better that you get the unconstrained flow when it flows); but the type of re-engagement I’m emphasizing is the mundane, participatory, down-to-earth activity accompanying re-enchantment’s stardust.

But, yeah introversion/extroversion rhythms
Sometimes it's just a matter of GOING OUTSIDE! Or taking the bus somewhere

The weekend before Thanksgiving, my son and I went up to New York to see Krapp’s Last Tape as conceived and performed by Dennis Leroy Kangalee, whom I’ve mentioned in the past and whom I guarantee I’ll mention again.

Not least for having seen Kangalee’s interpretation of Samuel Beckett’s shattering play, which ran November 18-22, 2022 at Studio 111 in Brooklyn, directed by Vagabond, and produced by Susan Kingsland on behalf of the Kangalee Arts Ensemble with Audio Visual Terrorism. Website: Dennis Leroy Kangalee

Dennis Leroy Kangalee in Krapp’s Last Tape

Awe revived, past inspiration re-experienced
Beckett has always been so important to me
          Words and Music for writing and poetry
          Krapp's Last Tape for insight into the artist's lifetime arc 

Now, with Kangalee, a play I reveled in during early adulthood re-engaged

Last entry I mentioned philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy at UCSD teaching Beckett. This was when Beckett was still alive and Nancy knew him enough - I’ll never forget - to phone Beckett over one of the weekends between classes to ask him what he meant by “cursed deadly” (from Words and Music).

I do forget Beckett’s answer! Or I vaguely still fill in the blanks with a non-answer reported by Nancy where nonetheless there wasn’t doubt as to the contact and friendship and kindly response.

Kangalee’s Krapp’s is itself a lifelong engagement out of formative relish for the play.

A great performance does something nothing else can do. A moment zeroed in on through a gesture or a look, through an exactly right tone of voice as the devastating phrase is pronounced, through an emotion - even a thought - made visible, embodied; such an instant lasts in memory as an illumination of what’s usually lost in the flux. This is why I’ve always loved great acting, and great instances of acting, and why I’ve held people like Marlon Brando and Richard Burton (a great voice for Dylan Thomas’ poetry, by the way) in highest, serious, artistic esteem beyond fandom; likewise for actors nowadays who have their moments at these heights - Bryan Cranston, Cate Blanchett. Moreover, the phenomenon of a phenomenal performance is - like ritual, like ceremony - beyond audience; telescopic to the ephemeral, wonders get accessed and that’s that for whatever else is happening. Even in rehearsal wonderful things can happen and you can say, justifiably, art happened. In the span of three November nights in Brooklyn (for certain the Saturday night I was there), every sliver of momentousness that can be found in Beckett’s masterpiece was made to happen.

momentousness
          humor, poignancy

No wonder: the force of this performance has been building up for decades - packed accumulation of engagement, experience, knowledge, and skills powered to a ripened re-engagement - because it’s been over ten years since actor, poet, filmmaker, Dennis Leroy Kangalee has taken the stage.

Plus, thanks to Kangalee’s team and his and their design foresight, the technical mastery of the production gave salience to each gesture, facial expression, mutter, chuckle, and gasp.

          the previously UNUTTERABLE Speaks

At the beginning of the pandemic, I appreciated an online take on acting Beckett from Bill Irwin, master clown.

Beckett’s mime and clown traditions, vaudeville, slapstick. Also, Kangalee’s: “My new performance collective [Kangalee Arts Ensemble] aimed at celebrating the tragic dimensions and radical proclivities of the ‘clown’ within the Theater of the Absurd and both the social and political urgency of the solo perfomer.”

This one has the bananas.

DLK awareness of clown techne and, incidentally or not, ‘Irish-ness.’ Bill Irwin, Aka “Mr. Noodle” from Elmo’s World, presented his tour-de-force On Beckett/In Screen on November 17, 2020 with Irish Repertory Theater, almost exactly two years to the date before Kangalee’s performance. I was charmed by Irwin’s flair for physicalizing Beckett’s words.

Kanglee versions of an Irish and Black intersection: “surveying my inclinations towards mining similarites between Black American Blues and Irish gallows humor and settling on a West Indian middle ground’; “my version implicates the cultural and emotional similarities between the Irish and Black people”; “Irish gallows humor wrapped in West Indian lilts.”

Speaking of Irish, Earish just came out from Robert Kelly, homeophonic translations (or transcriptions) of thirty poems by Paul Celan along the lines of what Louis and Celia Zukofsky did with Catullus: Kelly listens for the English in the German, so ‘Irisch’ becomes ‘Earish,’ and - decisively - ‘Wegrecht’ becomes ‘vague wreck.’ Apropos too to the magick of language and re-enchantment as discussed last entry, Kelly’s bio in this publication from Beautiful Outlaw mentions his early age affinity for the “haunted reality of words.”

“Screwy jumping from one thing to another, no?” - Antonin Artaud, as translated by Jack Hirschman (whom we lost in 2021), with a Bugs Bunny toon to its tonality, appropriately reflective of their shared era - Bugs’ and Artaud’s - in the forties.

Artaud as the OG actor-poet who puts it all out gives it all up.

So there can be Kangalee in Krapp’s Last Tape 2022’s all in tragicomedic investment in what the play’s all about, what’s it all for creative ideals over a lifetime, solitude and losing, Krapp himself in all earnest irony, repetition of the same old same old daily, loops of tapes and their spirals, loops of different phases of life, same urgencies different knowing, “Be again, be again,” recurrence, sparse disorder of recording.

[Pause.] Seventeen copies sold, of which eleven at trade price to free circulating libraries beyond the seas. Getting known. [Pause.]

tragic iron wry 
          comic stages

of the artist's life

The evening was an excellent demonstration of pure artistry for my sixteen-year-old (now seventeen-year-old) son, Gryphon - already a practiced actor and filmmaker - who wants to make a career in film.

clown topic, clown topos

felicitous juxta Jester poses
The Killing Joke Activation of the Trickster archetype, Divine Fool archetype Activations here (I and II), towards overcoming Evil Clown incarnations, reckless senselessness of tyrannies in our time, absurdities, nihilism, breakdown, whether personified or systemic 
 
quixotic tilting at the chaotic

In The Killing Joke, forthcoming - the Joker interrogated and juxtaposed/joked-supposed with ancient archetypal delving. The Batman comic book character in film and comic books, as well as in the Arkham Asylum game.

In my book, I have a whole poem on that Arkham Asylum video game: permit me to suggest it’s the most formidable poem ekphrastic to a video game yet composed.

video games [invalid entry!]
Upspiraling the ephemeral to its vivid simulative Infinite

Wait! One More Thing I Want to Share with You…

as a Seasons Greetings and heading into the New Year,
(which Dennis Leroy Kangalee shared with me following 
my Buber/Wiesenthal post). 

Perfect, in the first part, for the necessary return to beginner’s mind, child’s mind, re re-enchantment.

As to the second part, I’ve already just mentioned video games, so - for further juxtapositioning - Red Dead Redemption 2 fans have added justification (if needed, as I kinda do) for their deep identification with an outlaw and a thief.

          Here suppose, juxtaposed
           video games immersion on the level of the most profound and wild narrative art, great books, epic cinema Western (classical and spaghetti), there're also Kurosawa samurai flicks more than inflected in Ghost of Tsushima 
          as with Breaking Bad set beside Dostoyevsky, 
          ergo Better Call Saul for extra Trickster archetype activation - iconic clown coloring, Saul Goodman's garish shirts, ties, and suits. 

Of course, it's much more than that, from art to life it's always more than that, for spiritual freedom and freedom of thought and genre, new forms out of technology breakthrough media, breaking canons (except for the Canon of the Free Spirit), there are no rules, in the end it's up to you to decide your morality and your story-form.

Thus, from DLK, this passage* from Dov Baer, The Maggid of Mezeritch, which can be found in The Wisdom of the Jewish Mystics by Alan Unterman (published as New Directions Paperbook 423 in 1976):

" In the service of God, one can learn three things from a child and seven from a thief."

From a child you can learn:
1) always to be happy
2) never to sit idle
3) to cry for everything one wants

From a thief you should learn:
1) To work at night
2) If one cannot gain what one wants in one night to try again the next night
3) to love one's coworkers just as thieves love each other
4) to be willing to risk one's life even for a little thing
5) not to attach too much value to ones things - even though one has risked one's life for them -- just as a thief will resell a stolen article for a fraction of its real value
6) to withstand all beatings and tortures but remain what you are
and;
7) believe your work is worthwhile and not be willing to change it.
                            

* “I discovered this from an old 1978 Rolling Stone interview with Bob Dylan by Jonathan Cott.  I thought it was mind-blowing and then found the actual book it was quoted from. In the Rolling Stone interview, Dylan himself is at a loss for words upon listening to this as Cott reads it to him. Cott basically brings it up as a roundabout commentary on the nature of spiritualism and overt religious significance in Dylan's songs at the time since he had recently become a re-born again Christian, but also in reference to the holiness and singularity of the labor and task of the Artist himself.” - Dennis Leroy Kangalee

Forgive me ongoing: no matter how much I proofread, I goof, and then try quick-as-lick to fix it on on the website. Correct me, but also check the website or app to see if I’ve corrected it already. (Yeat’s Leda from last time, I’ve done worse.) At the same time, how inspiring to me to be confimed in Dov Baer’s #7 - like a thief, like a ganif - not to wish to change my work.

For the sake of engagement and re-engagement, please feel free to answer this email directly or comment on the public-facing page through the Substack website or app.

Dani Kriatura’s “Kangalee in Krapp’s Last Tape” (2022)