As I did in November for Golden
Child (see my report on 9 December), I picked up an individual seat for
David Henry Hwang’s The Dance and the
Railroad at the Signature Theatre Company.
I’ve known about Hwang by reputation for a long time, but the only play
of his that I’d seen before this season was the Broadway rendition of M. Butterfly back in 1988-90 so when STC
announced that Hwang would be the occupant of its Residency One for 2012-13, I
decided to try to catch the three plays on the bill. (Kung
Fu, the writer’s new play, will première at STC in September.) So far, I’ve been intrigued and thrilled with
the plays (and their productions) and I feel I’ve successfully introduced
myself to an artist about whom I’ve read for many years but haven’t really
experienced. Hwang has proved he’s one
of those playwrights who always has something interesting and worthwhile to say
and a wonderfully, idiosyncratically theatrical way of saying it.
When I write my performance reports for ROT, I include a survey of the press responses (and I will in this
case, too, before I’m finished), but I make a point of not reading the published notices
before I see the performance. The only
review I read ahead of time is the New York Times and that’s only
because I subscribe and it comes to my home.
So I was a little disheartened last month when I read Charles
Isherwood’s rather wan appraisal of the STC revival of Dance. Now, I know not to
invest too much in the opinions of other theatergoers, and there are some
reviewers with whose assessments I’ve had repeated disagreements so that I
discount them until I see for myself.
But I’ve often found that I agree with Isherwood’s estimation of a
performance (though not always, as witness my bitter dispute with him over his
review of the Atlantic Theater Company’s staging of What Rhymes With America last December: he loved it,
I . . . well, I didn’t; see my report posted on 3 January). What the reviewer did this time was contrast
the performances of Ruy Iskandar and
Yuekun Wu at STC with the work of Tzi Ma and John Lone in the roles they originated
in 1981 (and for whom Hwang named the characters). “Absent performances of
memorable intensity and lyricism ,” declared Isherwood, “the Signature revival
. . . exposes the play’s thin texture.” Because
I was as interested in seeing the play as in enjoying the production, I wasn’t
too trepidatious, but I was taken aback.
I’m pleased to report, though, that in my estimation, the Times reviewer was wrong. I
never saw the 1981 production and can’t make the judgment Isherwood made—actually,
Isherwood didn’t see it, either, it seems—but I didn’t find the “thin texture”
of which the Timesman
complained. Indeed, I found the play
richly textured and, for a 70-minute one-act, chock full of ideas and themes. I’ll get to the specifics in a bit, but
I was delighted with both the play and the staging.
Let me get the facts out of the way. I saw the performance under the threat of a
nor’easter predicted to hit New York on the evening of Wednesday, 6 March
(which ended up not striking the city at all that night). Staged in STC’s Alice Griffin Theatre, the
little proscenium space in the Pershing Square Signature Center on Theatre Row,
the production has been extended one week through 24 March. (The show began previews on 5 February and
opened on 25 February.) The Dance and the Railroad premièred in
a production of the New Federal
Theater at the Henry Street Settlement (not
coincidentally, an organization for immigrant Americans founded in 1893) on the
Lower East Side of Manhattan on 25 March 1981, having been commissioned by, of
all agencies, the federal Department of Education. It moved to the Public Theater in July and
ran there until December. Since then,
the play has been periodically revived at such regional theatres as the Asian
American Theatre Company in San Francisco (1983-84) and the East West Players
of Los Angeles (1992-93). The STC
production is the first revival in New York City since the 1981 première.
Performed without an intermission on an expressionistic set,
The Dance and the Railroad is the
tale of two Chinese workers on the transcontinental railroad, 20-year-old Lone
and 18-year-old Ma, who, during the Chinese Railroad Workers’ Strike of 1867, form
a unique friendship on a California mountaintop in the Sierra Nevadas. The two, along with their unseen co-workers
below, struggle through poverty, loneliness, cultural separation, and hunger to
reconnect with the traditions of their homeland, symbolized by Lone’s devotion
to Chinese opera. Lone was an acting
student of great promise (“I was one of the best in my class,” he tells Ma)
when he left the training academy and his homeland two years earlier to make
money for his family and Ma asks the older man to teach him the art. Through the exploration of the demanding
techniques of Chinese opera, an ancient art form that requires discipline,
focus, patience, and devotion—none of which the impetuous, mercurial Ma seems
to possess—that Lone and Ma learn not just about one another and their shared
heritage, but their current lives on Gold Mountain. (Though many Chinese in North America in the
19th century worked in domestic service, ran laundry services, and, as Lone and
Ma do, helped build the transcontinental railroad, most came here to dig for
gold in California’s gold rush, 1848–1855. The colloquial name of California among the
Chinese, here and at home, was Gold Mountain—though it sometimes also referred
specifically to San Francisco, the port of debarkation for passengers from
Asia. In Hwang’s play, Gold Mountain is
the mythical California of abundant gold, limitless opportunity, and
potentially vast wealth that the Chinese expatriates planned to bring back
home.) I’ll try to illuminate how Hwang
has used Chinese opera not just as an element of the story, but as an integral
part of the structure of The Dance and
the Railroad as I get into more detail, but it’s not by accident or
casualness that the "dance" in the
play’s title refers to this complex Chinese art form. It is, I think, a mark of just how
imaginatively talented Hwang is as a playwright and artist—and that makes his
plays add up to much more than the sum of their components. As you can tell, I’ve become very taken with
this writer’s work. I hope I can
articulate why.
According to
Hwang, he was inspired to write Dance
to accommodate the talents of actor John Lone.
Hwang, Lone and Tzi Ma had all worked together in 1980 on Hwang’s first
play, FOB, and the playwright had
begun to learn about Cantonese opera from Lone “who was raised in that form
when he was a kid in Hong Kong.” (Tzi
Ma, who was not trained in opera, knew a great deal about Chinese dance. Lone directed and choreographed Dance when it was staged at the New
Federal Theater and the Public.) Hwang
also wanted to write a historical play and the transcontinental railroad seemed
an accessible subject; then the author discovered the strike episode which
depicted the Chinese immigrants in a light counterintuitive to the general
impression of them as “subservient and victims.” The play, commissioned by the U.S. Department
of Education as one of four plays, was originally written for young audiences
who would be brought in from their schools for daytime performances; but the
company gave one evening presentation which Frank Rich attended. The Times
reviewer praised the show (“Stage: ‘Dance, Railroad,’ By David Henry
Hwang,” New York Times 31 March 1981) and Joseph Papp, impresario of the
New York Shakespeare Festival (now the Public Theater), transferred the
production to the Anspacher Theater. (Lone
won an Obie Award in 1981 for his performances in Dance and FOB and Hwang
won one for FOB.)
I only know a little about Chinese opera, but there are
several strong similarities with other traditional Asian theater forms,
including Indian kathakali and Indonesian wayang oreng, and I have read some
about all of those and seen performances on video. (I’ve only seen one live Chinese opera
performance, 30 years ago in the People’s Republic. There are several regional styles of Chinese
opera, of which Beijing, formerly Peking, opera is the best known. In the play, Lone was a student of Beijing
style.) I do know something more about
kabuki and that 17th-century Japanese theater is a derivative of Chinese opera
with which the Japanese art shares many parallels. All of these performance forms are highly
stylized, relying on abstract presentations of actions and even objects over
literal representations. Elaborate
costumes and makeup, much of which is also very symbolic, take precedence over
sets and props (which are often represented by simple objects such as fans and
staves), and all of these arts combine singing, dance, and acting in equal
measure (along with music and sound effects).
That the Chinese form is called opera and kabuki is often described as
dance drama only shows how, unlike western performance, theater in many Asian
cultures never fragmented as it did in Europe.
Chinese “opera” is no more a singer’s medium than kabuki is a
dancer’s—the artists in those forms and the others I named do it all with equal
skill and accomplishment. It therefore
requires decades of dedicated study and training to become even a journeyman
artist in those theaters, and most performers begin working on their skills at
very early ages (much younger than the 18-year-old Ma in Dance) and continue to train with masters in all the arts (acting,
singing, dance, musicianship, martial arts, speech, acrobatics, and several
more) all their performing lives. (Hwang
acknowledges that one point he’s making in Dance
is an acknowledgement “of what it is going to mean to live that life [of a
theater artist], to have that experience.
The things that are gained and the things that are lost and the things
you have to sacrifice and the things you have to work for—all of that became
part of the relationship between Ma and Lone and what they teach each other.” He was thinking of himself as well as artists
like Lone.) At 18, after eight years at
the academy, Lone tells us he was still in training in China; despite his
apparent talent, he wasn’t yet ready to appear on public stages. (A contributing factor to the length and
rigor of the apprenticeship is the fact, as demonstrated by Lone’s exercises in
Dance, that all the movements, dance
steps, and even vocalizations are artificial—they’re not natural
physicalizations.) In kabuki, an
18-year-old might be doing tertiary roles in productions with his father or
grandfather in leads, but he—all these theaters were traditionally all-male
forms (though women performed in Beijing opera from just before the foundation
of the Chinese republic in 1911)—wouldn’t graduate to star parts until he was
well into his 30’s or even 40’s. The
training is rigorous and takes all day for students. Working actors will take a class in dance or
martial arts or some other skill between performances, rushing off to the
master’s studio or the training academy and back to the theater for the next show. Even when they become established and
recognized actors, a kabuki performer might grab a class once a week or more if
he feels he needs to brush up or work out a problem. It quite literally never ends: it’s not a
life for the dilettante or the weekend duffer.
The playwright has said that he’s “always been attracted and
continue to be attracted to a formal challenge” such as offered by Chinese
opera. “I want to do something new with
the form of theatre,” Hwang says.
And, I started to
realize that I was writing Chinese American stories. It felt to me that it wasn’t sufficient to
put that within the same forms as traditional western naturalism. . . . I had to find an Asian American form,
which is how I began to incorporate Chinese Opera. . . . But this was my way of trying to find a
form that fit the content.
In Dance, Chinese
opera serves as a metaphor for the cultural heritage Lone and Ma and the other
ChinaMen (as Hwang’s characters call each other—they stress the second
syllable: chinaMAN and chinaMEN) have left behind in Fujian province
and are starting to lose the longer they stay in America. Lone has separated himself from the other
ChinaMen, much to their displeasure, so as not be sucked into the
identity-obliterating quicksand of the half-assimilated, half-alien émigré world;
his cultural anchor is his opera training, which keeps him connected to home
but also makes him different from his countrymen. They spend their time gambling on dice games,
drinking, singing songs (and one can just guess what kind), and telling stories
(and lies). Lone spends his up on a rock
outcropping dancing and practicing martial arts. (Is it a coincidence, given the origin of the
characters’ names, that his name is Lone?
Maybe, but it sure is appropriate.)
Ma climbs up to join Lone in his aerie on the excuse of warning him that the other
workers don’t like him because they think he feels he’s better than they
are. (He does, in fact, he admits.) They plan to punish Lone, Ma tells him, and
perhaps even hurt him for his arrogance.
Ma then asks Lone to teach him the opera. With all the bravado and impetuosity of a
teenager just beginning to feel his sap rising, Ma bargains and badgers Lone
and eventually convinces the dancer to become his master, even showing Lone
that he can conquer his quicksilver attention span. As much as Ma wants to find a connection to
something beyond the dreams of Gold Mountain, Lone clearly needs to connect to
another person. Lone, after all, is only
two years older than Ma, though he seems decades more mature—but he’s still
really only a boy himself. It really
doesn’t take Lone long to agree to train Ma, as if he just needed someone to
talk to and spend his isolation with.
The opera is the means for him to do that, for both men to reach out and
connect and hold on to something Chinese.
But the opera becomes something else, too, in Hwang’s hands. It’s part of the story, it’s an element of
the play’s theme, but it’s also part of the play’s dramaturgy. First of all, Hwang has stated that “I’m very
driven by form,” and points to his new play, Kung Fu, which “is not a musical but has dance and live music.” The
Dance and the Railroad isn’t a dance play or a ballet, but it has dance and
movement at its core. Further, aside
from the exercises Lone and Ma execute as they debate their lives as laborers
and outsiders, Ma enacts an opera about himself (self-absorbed teen that he
still is!), his life and his future as a rich and powerful man back in China,
and Lone joins him in the impromptu performance. Like Ma’s fantasies themselves, Chinese opera
is not only highly symbolic and stylized, it's impossibly romanticized. An opera hero isn’t even a Hollywood
hero—he’s a full-sized version of a children’s-story hero: he’s invincible,
he’s unbelievably powerful and clever, he’s unflinchingly brave and loyal, and
he can do things no human could ever do.
(Think Chinese martial arts movies only with fantastic makeup and
live. Opera battle scenes are amazing
feats of acrobatics and martial arts!)—and though Ma doesn’t get to go that
far, his impulse is to portray himself as the greatest opera hero in the
literature, Gwan Gung (a role it would take a real opera actor decades to be
able to play), whom Hwang calls “a really great super hero.”
The aesthetics of most of the highly conventionalized theaters is complex
and esoteric, having been refined over centuries of practice. Put simplistically, however, Chinese opera
emphasizes beauty and stylization over psychological truth and imitation of
life. So, while Ma values how his
co-workers feel about him and whether they win their strike against their
American bosses, Lone is only concerned with his own integrity regardless of
how others see him and how the striking men face their commitment, not whether
they win in the end. Daily reality or
eternal values—popular songs and stories down in the camp, or the aesthetic
rigors of opera dance and the discipline of martial arts up on the mountain? Impetuosity and impatience or control and inner
strength? Wealth and twenty wives, or the
richness of ritual and the beauty of tradition.
The surprise is that this seems like a set-up for Lone to vanquish and
humiliate the naïve and gullible Ma or for Ma to become a disciple of master
Lone. But what Hwang does is let Ma’s
innate strength—the callowness is a mask, the way he meets the world in
contrast to Lone’s aloofness—win Lone over.
Lone never entertained the possibility that a man can be all that Ma
seems to be and still have the fortitude to have the drive to endure the
demands of the opera.
Directed by May Adrales, whose previous work I haven’t seen, the STC
revival of The Dance and the Railroad
is presented in the little Griffin on a set designed by Mimi Lien as an
expressionistic rock outcropping high above the workers’ camp. Lit abstractly by Jiyoun Chang with washes of
multiple hues, the large, brown sculptural slabs, like something abstracted
from the old 1960’s Star Trek, a kind
of alien landscape of stark levels and planes, serve as a kind of jungle gym
for the performers as they climb, hop, and slide around the several levels and
surfaces. In a guide for directors
written by my friend (and frequent ROT
contributor) Kirk Woodward, he advises: “[A]sk yourself outlandish questions like these: Will this set be fun for
the actors? Will it be a space that will
inspire and challenge them? Will they have a good time in it?” Lien’s set for Dance certainly answers those questions in the affirmative. (Kirk’s book, “The Director’s Book of Weird Ideas,” will appear in ROT in a four-part reduction entitled
“Reflections on Directing” in April.)
The abstract setting
contrasts nicely with the realistic costumes of Jennifer Moeller, based
obviously on the stereotypical 19th-century garb of the Chinese immigrant—both
men even wear their hair in queues, Lone’s beneath a skullcap. The expressionistic set also compliments the
stylized movements of the Beijing opera dance and martial arts gestures Lone
performs through much of the play as he teaches Ma his art and his
discipline. While the set is mostly jagged
edges and flat surfaces, Chinese opera stresses curves and arcs, avoiding sharp
angles.
There’s another contrast, one which Isherwood noted in his review, that I
think is theatrically interesting. The
play is set in 1867 and, along with Moeller’s costumes, the content of Hwang’s
dialogue is perfectly in line with the time.
This isn’t a play with a temporal disconnect—what we know and believe
now put into the mouths of characters living almost 150 years ago. But Lone and Ma speak in a colloquial style
more like today’s youth. It’s not
intrusive or emphatic, and it’s handled unselfconsciously by the actors, but it
is noticeable. My sense was that what we
were hearing was a “universal translator’s” rendition (think Star Trek again) of the conversational Chinese
Lone and Ma would actually be speaking to one another, rather than a stilted
English or even an approximation of 19th-century English (as heard, perhaps, on
screen in Lincoln). I imagine Hwang used this convention
deliberately, and it worked fine as far as I was concerned. (I’m not sure Isherwood’s observation was
really a complaint, but he did make a note of it.)
Isherwood’s main complaint, as I noted, was the difference in stature
between the performances by the original Lone and Ma (John Lone and Tzi Ma) and
Yuekun Wu and Ruy Iskandar at STC.
Since, as I said, I didn’t see the 1981 performances, I can’t really
make a comparison, but I can’t offer any complaints about the work of the two
accomplished actors I saw. I’ve never
seen either man’s work before, but I had no problem believing the circumstances
in which their Lone and Ma were supposed to be existing or the unique
relationship the two actors develop between them. Iskandar, whom I suspect is a few years older
than Ma’s 18 (he finished NYU grad school three years ago), captures the
younger man’s loose physicality and eager demeanor with conviction—helped, in
no small measure, by his baby face.
Iskandar’s Ma is a thoroughly charming adolescent naïf. I don’t know how much previous experience
either actor had with Chinese opera (there’s a credited Chinese Opera
Consultant, Qian Yi, to whom I give great acknowledgment), but Iskandar displays
the kind of determination of a novice at a not-quite-learned
skill—concentration and tenuous physical control he struggles to maintain. His dialogue betrays a boy trying to seem
like a man, and the actor embodies this trait thoroughly, an eager puppy trying
not just to please his master but to impress him—“A child who tries to advise a
grown man,” Lone calls him. Though it’s
never certain that Ma will succeed, Iskandar demonstrates his resolve time and
time again, even as the character complains about being made to endure
meaningless drills.
As Lone, Yuekun Wu, though only a few years older than Ma is supposed to
be, comes off as the grown-up. While
Iskandar moves with the loose and casual physicality of a contemporary teen,
Wu’s Lone is more formal, both in speech and movement, the result, I imagine,
of Lone’s traditional opera training. As
with Iskandar, I don’t know if Wu had any previous training in Beijing opera,
and there was an occasional tentativeness in his movements, but the actor
manages to be convincingly expert in the context of the performance. At least Wu made me believe he knew what he
was doing and he projects an air of self-confidence and poise. While I could see Iskandar’s Ma watching his
own moves, like a tyro dancer learning new steps, Wu’s Lone is sure of himself,
at least in the presence of Ma. Still,
Lone is only 20 himself, not so much more of a grown man than Ma, and he seems
to need a companion, someone with whom he can share his solitary devotion to
the dance, and Wu lets us see his suppressed pleasure at having Ma come along,
even as Lone berates the younger man. As
much as Lone sets himself up as the father to Ma’s son, Wu occasionally lets us
see—a brief hesitation to criticize, a fleeting smile at an accomplishment—that
it’s really closer to two adolescent friends, one a year or two older but not yet
beyond the need to be part of a group—even a group of two. Maybe what I witnessed was the result of two
actors having come into their roles more completely than they’d been at the
critics’ preview Isherwood saw. It
happens.
Since I’ve already cited some of Timesman
Isherwood’s remarks, I’ll let him lead off the review wrap-up. He called the STC staging of Dance a “tepid, almost soporific revival”
which “gets mighty thin as this short play ambles along.” In the New
York Post, however, Frank Scheck declared that “Hwang’s moving drama” is “worth
the journey.” He issued the caveat that
the short play “is more of a vignette than a fully fleshed-out drama” and that
“what we see” is more important that what we hear, but acknowledged that
director Adrales “fully mines the play’s emotional richness.” Joe Dziemianowicz of New York’s Daily News wrote only that this was a
“well-acted” performance and implied that Dance
is a lesser Hwang work, but gave little more of an evaluation. Neither did Linda Winer, who commented in
the Long Island Newsday only that “[t]he dialogue is jarringly modern and a
little dull,” but that she could “watch [Yuekun] Wu dance all night.”
The New Yorker dismissed the production by
declaring that “Hwang’s cerebral dialogue rarely moves from the head to the heart, so the
performances at times seem self-conscious and wooden.” In New
York magazine, Scott Brown observed that the STC revival of Dance possesses “sparkling charm and flawless comedy” and
pronounced the play “perhaps the purest, most poetic distillation of Hwang's
wry lostness and dislocation.” Helen
Shaw in Time Out New York asserted
that beyond the Signature Theatre, “this elegant two-hander wouldn’t get a
hearing, since its tidy rewards do not outstrip its compact size,” but
continued that “this production sets off the small jewel [of the Griffin
Theatre] perfectly, so we can consider its frequently affecting facets in
proportion and comfort.” Shaw noted that
“Hwang didn’t always balance his fable structure with thematic complexity,” but
insisted that the “graceful, extended climax,” the opera improvised by Ma and
Lone, “deepens the piece immeasurably” and “creates the sense that an epic—tragic
and globe-spanning—has been folded infinitely small, and we have stumbled
across it, curled up and hidden inside a short story.” (Of all the critical comments, Shaw’s
captures my response the best.)
The “elegant and
disciplined revival” of Dance at STC,
wrote Erik Haagensen in Back Stage,
is “an unlikely but fascinating mixture of Chinese opera staging techniques and
a naturalistic drama.” “The simple but
gorgeous physical production,” declared Haagensen, “is a stunner.” Complaining that the play’s occasionally “a
bit intellectualized” making it seem distant, the Back Stage reviewer concluded that “the play always recovers
quickly. Inventive and deeply felt, ‘The
Dance and the Railroad’ is memorable theater.”
In the cyber press, Zachary Stewart declared on TheaterMania that “Hwang takes a big risk by employing such an
idiosyncratic form, the combination of naturalism and Cantonese opera—and it
pays off.” Dance, which Stewart observed “still feels fresh” even after 32
years since its début, is “formally innovative, crystal clear in its
story-telling, but not overly-simplistic.”
The play is “brief but impactful,” said Matthew Murray on Talkin’ Broadway. Comparing this 1981 drama with some of
Hwang’s recent plays, Murray noted that Dance
“captivates as much by what it doesn’t say as by what it does . . . trusting
you—like the characters—to develop your own perspective and point of view.” Murray voiced some significant reservations,
too, however: the play’s short length “is not quite sufficient for exploring
all the complexities Hwang introduces” and Adrales’s staging “does not
contribute much additional weight.” The
acting, however, compensates for many of the deficiencies and the play still
provokes, Murray affirmed, because it explores significant questions. On CurtainUp,
Deirdre Donovan pronounced that STC’s production is “a bang-up revival” which
has “struck gold with two talented young performers.”
Almost all the
review-writers mentioned the truths Hwang explores in Dance, the sociological and historical values it incorporates as
the writer tells his tale. Even the
reviewers who had little to say about the quality of the script or Adrales’s
revival paid at least passing notice to Hwang’s content. This is what has grabbed me in Hwang’s work
so far. In addition to his distinctive use
of various kinds of theatricality, drawing on both western and eastern
elements, Hwang wants to explore ideas.
“I need to have a question” in order to write, explained the playwright. “There’s something I don’t understand, and I
write the play to find out how I feel about the issue.” I can’t imagine a better impetus to
write—plays, stories, essays, whatever—and a dramatist who has something he or
she wants . . . no, needs to explore is well on his or her way to becoming an
important writer. If he’s also
theatrically clever and inventive, if he’s also good with words and characters,
he’s going to get my attention sooner or, as with Hwang, later. I can’t get to an allusion to Shakespeare or Chekhov
(actually, I suppose Ibsen would be a better icon to invoke here), which is
what people like to do with serious dramatists, but when Hwang speaks, I want
to hear—and see—what he says. Maybe
that’s not enough, but it’s a hell of a start.
I may have come late to this party—but I’m mighty glad I got here in the
end.
[I don’t usually add a note to the end of one of my
performance reports on ROT, but this post comes out near an auspicious
date for the blog. Yesterday, 16 March,
was Rick On Theater’s fourth
anniversary. According to the tally,
this will be my 308th post as well—not that I wrote all of them. I have selected them all, occasionally asked
friends and colleagues to write one (or more in some cases), and I have added
introductions and exit comments to most of the articles that I haven’t composed
myself. I named the blog Rick On
Theater because I expected it to be a home
for my performance reports, but I knew I’d be filling the gaps between plays
with other articles on topics I thought would be interesting—at least to
me. I’ve covered other performing arts (“Lady Gaga: Artist for Our Time” by Kirk
Woodward, 1 November 2011) and the visual arts (“Pudlo Pudlat, Inuit Artist,” 28 September 2009); I’ve published
on many culturally-related subjects (“Susanne
Langer: Art, Beauty, & Theater,” 4 & 8 January 2010), often
expressing my own opinions (and sometimes those of other people), but always
intending to inform. The same has been
so of the articles I’ve posted that bear no relationship to the arts or
culture, like the personal reminiscences (“The Berlin Wall,” 29 November 2009) and articles about
curiosities (“Crypto-Jews: Legacy of
Secrecy,” 15 September 2009) and interesting historical oddities (“Guy Debord & The Situationists,” 3
February 2012). I hope I’ve hit
the target more often than not, but I’ll keep on going in the same direction in
any case, because it’s all I know to do.
I read all the comments and reply to most of them, but in the end, I’m
the editor and publisher of ROT, as
well as its principal contributor, so I only have my imagination on which to
rely. I’m pretty much a geezer now, but
I’m not doddering yet. Being a geezer
has its benefits, too: it means I’ve been around the block a few times. Maybe I’ve seen a thing or two en route. Meanwhile, I plan to keep on truckin’ for at
least another year and a couple of hundred more posts. Join me—and tell your friends. ~Rick]
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