#musings about the mckittrick

[bargarraninc]

the child of a traitorous thane; musings on sleep no more's porter

SON He has killed me, mother. Run away, I pray you! [Dies.]

— Macbeth, Act IV. 2

There is a certain beauty to the Porter's character in Sleep No More — for he exists only in the transitional space of the Lobby, a minion of Hecate meant to set up the important scenes through which the looping tragedy of Macbeth will continue to flow. Without him, Banquo is not given the letter holding his prophecy, Malcolm never learns of the falcon shot down, the prophecy cannot take place.

The Porter is loop-aware — there is a consistent deterioration in the character as the show goes on, everything becoming harder and harder for him to deal with. Throughout setting up the scene for the next magical cycle, he is well aware what his actions lead to. It is why he tries to stall Agnes from going upstairs, to where he knows she will be put through the harrowing ordeal of tear collection by Hecate. He tries to keep her safe, failing each time.

Another party that he desperately (moreso than with Agnes) tries to keep safe is Lady Macduff, the innocent murdered for sins not hers in any manner. This is the most intrusive we see the Porter — as he tries to bat off Danvers and her poisonous milk, milk he knows will render Lady Macduff incredibly vulnerable and thus easier to kill.

In Shakespeare's Macbeth, the chief character who attempts a similar, desperate protection of the Lady and who too fails is the Lady's young son. Stabbed to death by the Murderers, her son cries to his mother — begging for her to run away, abandoning him in his last minutes as to save herself from a similar fate. Reversing the traditional parent-to-child protection, the kind we see with Banquo and Fleance when they are attacked, here, the child must be the protector.

Every loop, our Porter fights off Danvers and loses, watching Lady Macduff grow weaker in the aftermath of drinking the accursed milk. He then hears her death, tortured by its violent sounds as he hides in the lost luggage space, desperately trying to distract himself. Then, everything resets again, actions supplemented by his own hands and he continues to live this harrowing loop again and again and again. Why?

In my eyes, our Porter is not only Hecate's lost child in the forest but also the lost son of the Macduff's. The child doomed to protect his mother. After all, Fife is a wooded area.

The Porter is actively putting himself through the loops, losing himself to the inertia of Hecate's endless time magic, out of a deep, child-like hope that this time, he will be able to set things aright. Maybe, it will be this loop, just one more each time, that he will be able to protect his mother from the brutal fate she suffers. Just one more try. Hope keeps him centred as he hands away the note for Lady Macbeth to Danvers, moping in the phonebooth, knowing it will restart his suffering.

There is more substance in the performance to support the Macduff Child theory —

When Lady Macduff is murdered, something he is intimately aware of and scared by, the Porter hides himself into the Lost Luggage. He leans into childish methods of comfort, making paper boats and busying themselves playing with it, even if the boat is made of a tearful letter to his tormentor that he knows will be ignored. Some Porters even tear up at the noises, cowering closer to the counter.

The Porter only emerges from Lost Luggage when not only the murderer Macbeth but Macduff too is gone. In Macbeth, the only conversation we see between Lady Macduff and her son concerns her worriation that her husband is a traitor — abandoning her and her children in a place which he himself finds too dangerous to stay in. There is little affection lost for Macduff on the end of the Porter. He waits for him to be gone, only willing to put himself through the torment if it is to comfort his mother, to give her her coat. His traitorous father, gone again to protect the son of another.

Lady Macduff's messes are cleaned up with a gentleness the Porter shows little of to the other residents (bar Boy who he is in love with) who pass like storms through the Lobby. As he collects her strewn clothes, the Porter dons them with a childish glee, resembling more than ever a child rifling through their mother's cupboard, finding something that makes them feel beautiful. The clothes are collected carefully and packed away, her coat is kept safely hooked. Her presence in the lobby, even through just her abandoned possessions, is looked after gently.

You can never know the true story behind the residents of The McKittrick — for those are secrets they keep close to their hearts, lost in their chosen silence. But, this personal retelling of the Porter's story as I understood it is one I can share easily and so I do. My poor Porter, my poor poor Porter.

[bitter69uk]

“There are artists in various fields whose fame rests solely on how bad their work is alleged to be. Among them are the poet William McGonagall, the novelist Amanda McKittrick Ros, the soprano Florence Foster Jenkins and the film director Ed Wood. The latter's reputation as the world's worst filmmaker rubbed off on Dolores Fuller, his muse, lover and leading lady … It would be unfair to pick on Fuller for her stiff posture and stilted delivery in Wood's movies when the others in the casts were equally awkward, mainly because of the minimum amount of takes and the lack of strong direction. The "peak" of Wood and Fuller's collaboration was the camp classic Glen or Glenda (aka I Led Two Lives, 1953), an unintentionally hilarious, well-meaning film on transvestism … Wood plays the title role, while the blonde Fuller is his fiancee, described by the narrator as "a lovely, intelligent girl". She says things such as, "Here we are, two perfectly normal people about to be married and lead a normal life together!" not long before finding out that her husband-to-be is lusting to wear her white angora sweater. On being told as much, Fuller over-emotes before taking off the sweater and handing it to him.” 

/ From The Guardian’s obituary for Dolores Fuller / 

Born on this day 100 years ago: actress Dolores Fuller (10 March 1923 - 9 May 2011), whose collaborations with her erstwhile boyfriend, no-budget auteur Edward D Wood Jr, ensure her status as a cult movie icon. (She’s portrayed by Sarah Jessica Parker in the 1994 biopic Ed Wood - the sole Tim Burton – Johnny Depp film I can tolerate). After her association with Wood ended, the admirably durable Fuller reinvented herself as a successful songwriter, most notably for Elvis Presley movies (she co-wrote absolute bangers like “Rock-A-Hula Baby”, “I Got Lucky” and “Do the Clam”). Pictured: Fuller in her angora-sweatered glory in the early fifties.

[jmjafrx]

“Inside the loophole, you can hear the slave girl’s runaway tongue, after Harryette Mullen’s track on resistant orality; Nina Simone’s lyric about a bird flying high; Assata’s poem about contraband love in hell and her grandmother’s dream-prophecy about the escape from the cell; the subterfuge of noise that Debbie Africa and her cellmates made as they ushered the child into the world; Frederick Douglass recounting, a decade after the Narrative and having abandoned the burden of being a representative man, how he was not a solitary hero, but rather that they were all in open rebellion that morning; Harriet Jacobs instructing other slave girls to be cautious and cunning at an early age; Hortense Spillers explicating the gift and impossibility of the black maternal, with Joy James extending Spillers’s line in the captive maternal and Christine Sharpe in the womb as factory; Nahum Chandler’s lesson on anacrusis, the expectant music of the before, and his step-by-step guide to paraontology in Cecil’s music and Du Bois’s compositions; Tina Campt humming the frequency of black life; Fred Moten amplifying the more-than-pain of Aunt Hester’s scream; Orlando Patterson and Claude Meillassoux expounding on the structural design of “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”; Sethe’s refrain, mother make your mark on me; Élisée Reclus encouraging us to let our lives be beautiful, foreshadowing Amiri Baraka, if we could see ourselves, we would dig ourselves; Harriet Jacobs musing aloud in a cramped cell about the feel of the earth under her feet; Hazel Carby spinning a genealogy of black women’s reconstruction and Thavolia Glymph providing the account of the war against the women, the war-within-the-war; Du Bois’s call: How does it feel to be a problem? and Chandler’s response: How does it feel to be a problem of thought?; Zora Neale Hurston chuckling, let’s bring this talk down to earth and make plain that we speak with our sister’s tongue in our mouth; NourbeSe Philip trying her tongue in the discourse on our hidden anguish; Gloria Wekker and Omise’ke Tinsley whispering mati, just friends, the embrace of a lover, life in the hold; still life, still life, Sharpe utters and augments; Frank Wilderson’s full stop: there is nothing analogous to this!; Jared Sexton murmuring about social life and social death to the tune of “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue”; Riley Snorton introduces Mary Jones to the chorus, wedding the fungible and the trans; Dionne Brand cautioning us, do not for a moment forget the casual homicide of the dress, do not forget that nowhere has the assault come to an end; Zakiyyah Jackson speaks on it—the blackness of blackness or sublimity and the void; Rizvana Bradley chiming in about the lyric surplus that always exceeds and escapes; Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts takes it to the bridge: the shape depends on what it is designed to bear and who bears it; Ella Baker and Angela Davis affirming, yes, you have grasped the world at its roots, so you know the struggle is eternal; the chalk screeches against the blackboard as Denise Ferreira da Silva draws a diagram and writes the equation about blackness as matter signaling infinity, building with Gayatri Spivak’s speculations on value, Cedric Robinson’s Das Black Capital, and Sylvia Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis; after the exercises on frequency and tonality, the chorus enters again, Glissant’s refrains about free and forced poetics aerated by Ashon Crawley’s black breath; Paul Gilroy, channeling Ralph Ellison and Seyla Benhabib, stresses the unsayable and the music of transfiguration; Wynter’s laughter precedes the most beautiful cover of Aimé Cesaire’s “Poetry and Cognition” that you have ever heard—poesis as black capacity; Stuart Hall explicates the concept of “articulation” so we might understand the way the world works and how the structure holds together; Rosa Luxemburg decries the dangers of a policeman-like historical materialism and anarchists improvising in the air; Joshua Clover, finding his way to black music like the white boys from Liverpool, says the riot seeks to preserve nothing; Guy Debord mutters shyly about a theoretical account of practical action, because he knows philosophy is nothing compared with what they do in the streets of Watts, not interpret the world, but change it; Katherine McKittrick and Alex Weheliye introduce the deep beats and bass of the Roland TR-808 drum machine, crooning lyrics about black heartbreak, Fred moanin’ about what we owe one another and the generosity of the debtor, the secondary rhythms of the subprime, and Moor Mother making dissident music of all of this.”

Saidiya Hartman, Extended Notes on the Riot – Journal #105 December 2019 – e-flux https://ift.tt/2tZtfft

I wasn’t prepared. What a #BlackTheory shout!

Read the post: https://ift.tt/2vrMSgt

[readwithjoy]

My therapist, who I talk about Sleep No More a lot, asked me a question I would like to ask you. Why do you keep going back to Sleep No More? I explained the closeness I feel to the characters and the fact that I still haven't experienced everything since I've only been 5 times. As someone who has been more times than me, how would you answer this question?

I believe that everyone’s answer to this question is unique.  But if it helps, here is a post I wrote when I was visiting the McKittrick for the 100th time. 

Musings on the Hotel

Don’t tell your therapist this...but one tongue-in-cheek answer I often give to this question is that I return to the McKittrick over and over because even though it’s expensive--it’s cheaper than therapy! :-) 

[lynchgirl90]

Keep Kyle MacLachlan Weird: David Lynch’s Muse Happily Returns Home The #TwinPeaks and #Portlandia star talks art, wine and what makes the Northwest so special

“Before we start, I just need to say there’s a coyote looking at us,” I tell actor and vintner Kyle MacLachlan, as we’re about to sit down to talk over coffee in the back of the McKittrick Hotel’s empty and darkly lit bar, on what is probably the hottest day of the summer. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch sight of a stuffed coyote, menacingly lurking behind one of the banquettes. And the Twin Peaks actor, 57, reacts in a delightfully surprising way: His eyes light up, his curiosity is infectious, and before we’ve even had the chance for a formal introduction, we’re across the room investigating the creature together.

MacLachlan’s enthusiasm is a running theme during our afternoon together, a quality that lends itself well to playing an overly exuberant mayor on IFC’s satirical sketch comedy Portlandia, now entering its seventh season. After iconic roles in David Lynch projects such as Dune, Blue Velvet (and the aforementioned cult favorite TV show) and recurring characters on Sex and the City and Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., MacLachlan’s spent over a decade in the wine business producing one of Washington’s highest rated wine labels. He’s still up for the next challenge, whatever that may be. Lately, that’s been stepping back into the shoes of Special Agent Dale Cooper for the Twin Peaks’ revival; 26 years after the original series wrapped, it’s set to air again on Showtime in 2017.

While filming the new Twin Peaks, MacLachlan spent a good deal of time in Los Angeles, where he and wife Desiree Gruber (known for executive producing Project Runway) have dipped their toes into art collecting. He finds himself mostly drawn to objects and craft arts—baskets, cornhusk and beaded bags—particularly those from the indigenous tribes of the Pacific Northwest. And then there’s the fact that his good pal Lynch is a prolific visual artist, so naturally he’s acquired a few originals from him over the years. “I have some stuff that he’s [David Lynch] done—some of his pencil work and shading, smaller pieces and stuff that’s he’s doodled…that he made to me or I’ve kept,” he says. “Those are really personal. We’ll be sitting at a breakfast somewhere, and he’d be just kind of making something, and I’d say, ‘Hey, David can you just put your initials right there?’ ”

Read the rest here (X)

[readwithjoy]

Costume inspiration

The way that I’ve thought about costumes for McKittrick parties in the past is to try and find an on-theme but slightly quirky idea. For example--for the Wizard of Oz party I created a costume that depicted the Road to Oz. It was the yellow brick road winding through the poppy field and up to the Emerald City. For the Clue party I decided to come as one of the rooms--the Library. 

For this party, I’m a bit at a loss for inspiration. The theme is basically “Halloween party.”  Which is fine. But it’s not specific enough to have a kind of off-to-the-side engagement that I like to explore. I’m not looking for suggestions--there are lots of options, of course. Witch, zombie, mummy, etc. etc. etc.  I just find them somewhat boring and generic.

Oh well. Perhaps the costume muse will give me an idea in the next week or so.  We’ll see...  If not--some sort of Victorian witch or familiar it will be. If you see me at the party and I look exactly like my Tumblr avatar...don’t be surprised. 

The Road to Oz

[readwithjoy]

What are the other reasons you keep coming back to Sleep No More?

Here are a few posts I’ve written about this in the past:

Musings on the Hotel going into my 100th show. (January 2016)

A post after my first “August at the McKittrick”  (August 2014)