EX OFFICIO MOFO DAVID THOREAU

...aaaaand we're back!

Introducing VEDA:

VEDA is an investigation into the collective and personal trauma of the Bush era and, specifically, the catastrophic disenfranchisement experienced by many citizens during the Katrina disaster. Our premise begins with the notion that most Americans have a sense of how many people perished in the attacks on 9/11, but few people have any idea how many people died during Katrina. Such a blind spot is indicative of the quick way in which most Americans moved past the tragedy. We hope to ultimately offer people an opportunity to re-consider the collateral damage done to our collective and individual psyche.

The Abraxas Stage works primarily with the forms of sign language, dance, music, and the actors work as embodied by the method of physical actions. Our work represents an emerging form that cultivates the integrity and harmony of full-body expression.

Here is a link to a short promotional video that explains our work:
http://www.vimeo.com/1526044

Danyon Davis
danyondavis@gmail.com
917.686.3219

For the Abraxas Stage:

Danyon Davis, Abby Gerdts, and Ali Sohaili

Additional personnel:

Daniel Brooks, Sal Mitsou, and Aaron Moten… more to follow… [WATCH THIS SPACE!]

WE ROUST THE ‘VAYGS

Ah — Venice. My new (if somewhat temporary) home. Home of summer surf camps for kids, electricity crackling off the power lines, glamorous bougainvillea — and, well, the homeless.

The homeless situation in Venice, indeed in L.A. and all of California (somewhere between 300-400K, depending on who you ask) is prolific. And I say this only somewhat tongue-in-cheek— the statistic indicates a significant display of strength in numbers with respect to the coming class wars.

My own life has been rather hobo-rific for some time now. I’ve spent four years altogether in my adult life on the road, dragging my recently deceased cat from town to town.

I’ve been trying to roll a seven, or pull the bullets, or whatever pithy luck-at-gambling expression you prefer. It’s really a simple equation, right? Young beautiful actor goes to top school in the country – just add agent, stir, add a sprig of parsley, and start printing money, right?

I’ve recently looked into investing money and this question keeps coming up—
“How risk averse are you?”

I go running just about every morning on the beach between Santa Monica pier and the pier in Venice. Along the way, I am always passing the, uh, disaffected in their r.v.’s – the dudes (and ladies) sleeping in lawn-chairs on the beach, the ripped coal-black brotha’s wandering glassy-eyed thru Muscle Beach in a trance.

…and my heart starts to shudder. My heart dances. There is a singular yearning in me to live essentially – “deliberately”, as HD put it. Some deep understanding in my own biology that wants to plunge thru concrete and plant myself in the soil.

And I think about the mad scramble for safety as night falls, and the lack of what in my Little Lord Fauntleroy world amounts to certain fundamental elements of hygiene. It takes energy to hold that insane counterbalance of hustling and sustenance together. That energy has a half-life thru which it transmorphs into radioactive anxiety. I think about the nighttime hustle and my attention snaps to the cluster of fragments that join together unevenly in my life to shape a definition of comfort.

“How risk averse are you?”
“Do you have the nerve to step off the grid?”

I’ve been living in cities half my life and I have been paralyzed by my sympathies for the down-and-out. Somehow here, though, homelessness as a lifestyle choice seems like more of a defensible posture than in a place like NYC. Yeah, maybe it is just the weather, stupid.

My friend Nel’son has spent quite a bit of time with the down and out here, having recently acted in a movie that filmed down on skid-row. He tells me a large number of the homeless in L.A. are highly educated. I don’t doubt it. This town is literally shaking apart - psychically AND seismically. There’s nothing holding this town together. Not to get all shrill lefty on you, but - to agree to participate in the social order is a tacit approbation of uncivil, unjust empire. To paraphrase Gandhi – “every dog eat a dog and the whole world will go hungry”.

I pass the time these days reading Mike Davis – himself a strict Marxist, or so Connie Conradstein tells me. Hey man, I barely have a high-school diploma, so everything I know about Marxism & Trotskyites I learned on Wikipedia. I do know that Mike Davis irradiates and illuminates southern California right down to the bones. He exposes the murky depths that could drive even a well-educated person insane or off-the-grid— that is, IF he didn’t believe in something greater, like the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

My creative partner Abby and I were sitting outside on the patio of this cute little kitschy, I dunno’, breakfast cereal cafe that I began to frequent upon my arrival to Venice. Free internet access and the owner is a knockout with a whole hippie/ beach girl/ southern belle thing that makes me weak. Her name is Paige.

Anyway— so we’re sitting outside of this place and a vagrant approaches us spewing very addled , very foul racist, violent, and sexual invective. He really got in our space, it was one step away from being way too much. He left without incident, but I thought Paige should know what was happening on the grounds of her establishment.

Paige let us know such behavior on the block was owed to this little bodega next door that caters to junkies with cheap underwear for sale (for when a junkie soils him/herself) and other such emergency needs. But she thanked us all the same. Right there in her prim little polka-dot, frilly summer dress – dressed to sell fruit loops with, like, gummi-bears on top and “nutty monkies” (nutella and English muffin affairs); she said,

“Thanks cuz y’know, we roust the ‘vaygs”

which is railroad talk for,

“we beat them damn hobos til they and their kind know not to come around here”.

I do not intend to stay in Venice, or indeed anywhere, long enough to get rousted.

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