AMERICAN DREAMING
By Wednesday Kennedy
[Above] Beautiful boy at the candlelight vigil at Union Square. (Photo by Wednesday Kennedy, 2001)
I didn't come to New York to wear beige. Beige isn't my colour. But at the Allure Day Spa, where the New York princesses come to be rubbed, blown and polished to perfection, nobody cares what you look like. They just care how you make them feel. I lead them into my warm dark room where I wrap them like babies. Each leg a cocoon. Then I take off my shoes and I size them up for density, temperament and accessibility. I score them out of ten and decide how hard I'm going to have to work for the next hour. Then I oil up my hands and I start on the shoulders. I like this job. It gives me plenty of time to mull. As long as my fingers keep moving, my mind is all my own. Outside New York is under ORANGE ALERT and everybody is waiting to die. The Govt predicts a dirty bomb any day now and has told us to go out and buy duct tape and plastic sheeting for the windows.
New York has sold out of gasmasks, and people all over America are stockpiling food and water in their bunkers. I don't have a bunker. I live on the 4th floor of a walk up on 38th street. If they nuke Times Square I'm fried. So instead of lining my coffin with plastic I have lashed out on a bottle of Stoli, some bubble bath and Hunter S Thompson's new book 'Kingdom of Fear'. When the world ends I would like to be in the bath having a martini with Hunter, but it is more likely to happen when I am leaning on a trash can or sitting on the loo. Death by annihilation is not supposed to be dignified. My friend Billy says the bomb will go off in Grande Central station when it's packed full of Jews. But I don't want to think about that. Just like I don't want to think about babies being blown up in Iraq. In my little room it's quiet and dark and lavender scented and people come here to forget. 'Pretend you're on a desert island', I whisper., 'Pretend you're in paradise', and my thumbs dig under the shoulder blades and my mind drifts back to before Sept 11th, to the last decadent summer before the world came to collect.
Hello America
it's really great to finally be here. It's been a long hard road to get here
first I had to get the teeth capped. Then the tits done. Then I discovered that the caps were whiter than the rest of my teeth.
But an aboriginal mate told me that dead people have the whitest teeth ... so I took that little tip
raided a few tombs, found myself a nice pair of dentures, ripped mine out and stuck theirs in.
SO they may not be my teeth but at least they're white.
You cannot go to America with yellow teeth. Even my mother knows that ...
 
[Above Left] The singing Newslady at the Port Authority Bus terminal [I]. (Photo by Wednesday Kennedy, 2001) [Above Right] The singing Newslady at the Port Authority Bus terminal [II]. (Photo by Wednesday Kennedy, 2001)
I didn't come to New York to massage New York Princesses, I came with an album called 'post romantic' and I came back with a one woman show entitled 'Cultural Refugee' and returned finally with a multi-media show called 'Last night in New York, I came because in a town like New York, ideas have a currency and I am a girl with ideas. I came because I thought I was dying from Howard's Heart and I wanted to be in a spot where the world could hear me scream. England was the past, America was the future. I came I came looking for hope and I found it.
'America, I wanted to hate you
but it was impossible. You're so sweet, you're so positive, you're so rich
You've been so good to me that I find I'm becoming rather fond of you.
Which is a dilemma. It'd be easier to hate you.
God knows I'd have plenty of support ...'
It was 1999 when I first performed Cultural Refugee in New York. Then you could say what you wanted to say about America and nobody took it personally. Because most of them didn't understand what you were talking about anyway.
'do you know how many people out there hate you?
do you have any idea?
No ... why peer outside the centre of the universe.
It's ugly out there anyway and most countries are just a bad copy of you these days.
Except for maybe Bangladesh. But what Bangladesh couldn't teach America about successful
weight loss programmes ...
Before Sept 11th they liked it when you slapped them around a bit. They thought it was cute and sexy. The critics were generous, attentive. I was 'Holy Golightly with a dash of hammy Aunty Mame', 'Tracey Ullman with a touch of Eddie Izzard.' I was 'almost as sharp as the stuff Denis Miller pulls off in his HBO half hour'. I was 'fresh and fun, sophisticated and smooth, witty and engaging'.
The adjectives flowed thick and sweet and I lapped it up like the half starved cultural refugee that I was. New York fed me back my dreams and pulled me through my own mirror until I started hallucinating my pampered form bathed in a spot light, feeding words to a sea of open faces. So what if the reality was a 50 seater black box theatre with no air conditioning on the 6th floor of an unmarked building with a man stuck in an elevator on opening night. Amidst all that chaos, three reviews, like love letters arrived to make it all worthwhile.
[Above] Cashing in on catastrophe. Calvin captures the mood of the nation. (Photo by Wednesday Kennedy, 2001)
'Watching Wednesday Kennedy, a self proclaimed Cultural Refugee enact her love affair with America is like watching Romanian born Andrej Codrescu take to the highways to discover the 'mcdonaldization of America in his documentary road film Road scholar'.
It's fresh and fun to see someone mirror our culture. Kennedy's outsider perspective gives a wonderful spin on mainstays we take for granted. Welcome to American Wednesday. We're glad you came around to see us. (Christine Sparta, showbusiness review weekly.) I was hooked. From then on I spent every minute planning and nurturing my American dream. My body returned to Australia but my head never left New York and each Spring I returned to the city where my waking life was more potent than my dream life to carry out the next chapter of my brilliant career.
I had no time for men, I already had a relationship. An all consuming love affair with an entire city. I could afford to be a tourist. I had sponsorship and bed and board, and a brand new future. I was defying my destiny and soaring off into a red hot Central Park sunset. I wanted to etch myself into the city and feed it back it's own stories and every minute of my day was spent to that end. I recorded every sound of that summer. Picnics in Central Park, parties on upper west side rooftops, China Town at midday and the sweet sexy coo of the boys from Spanish Harlem who whispered 'hey mommy, hey little mommy'. I loved these macho mamas boys, I loved the opera singer in the apartment over the road and the postman who was tall and black and who had a name, Earl. I set up a microphone on my window sill on 103rd and Central Park West and I recorded garbage trucks and lovers and drunks and people having conversations with themselves. It was an endless show and when I lay in bed at night with my headphones on, pulling apart the soundscape and listening for the mood swings of the city all I could hear between the chaotic layers of sound were music and sex. I spent that whole summer in a state of arousal. New York made me greedy and then it fed me. I was so busy taking in the block that I didn't even bother with the skyline. Didn't look at it until it had a hole in it. I never even saw those towers before they went down. It all went to shit after that.
we are on alert
the skyscrapers are empty
the subways are quiet the frequent flyers are grounded the concerts are cancelled
and we are filling churches mosques and fresh kill trucks
we are praying to a god were not familiar with and trying to make peace with him before we go
any minute now ...
That night that I thought might be my last night in New York, I lay with one eye open waiting for the next plane to fall from the sky.
[Above] Sesame Street subverted by the letter T for terror. A lighter caption stolen from the News Corp electronic billboard. (Photo by Wednesday Kennedy, 2001)
Every siren was a warning and they came about every three minutes. We were cracked open, colour coded for terror and popping like a fusebox every time I closed my eyes. I kept trying to find the switch to turn myself off, but the catastrophe had fused me to the city and when I turned off the television I could hear fighter jets prowling overhead and the endless cacophony of sirens outside the window. So I gave up the idea of sleep, turned on my tape recorder and recorded sirens all night long. The next day I packed my camera and mini disc and I took the bus down Central Park West to a deserted Times Square. Broadway was naked without all her neons. It hurt to see all the electricity sucked out of her, grounded like the rest of us. I wandered around, glad for the weight of my camera and made my way to 26th and Lexington where posters multiplied on walls and telegraph posts and phone booths, creating a trail of grief that wove all around Manhattan.
I followed those posters to Canal Street and the barriers around Ground Zero, the vigils at Union Square, the debates in Washington Square Park, the memorial in Yankee stadium, the protests in Times Square. Every night for six weeks I found a different pocket of the city to record. For the first three days the city was silent. Car horns were mute and voices relegated to stunned whispers. And then, on Friday at W4 station just as the sun was going down, a group of black men gathered and broke the silence with words screamed into each other's faces like bullets. Heaving up the images of horror in some useless attempt at catharsis.
I wanted to sample the repetition, put it on a bed of war drums, with a heartbeat. I wanted to take the hollowed out eyes of the young black boy and put it on the cover, He was screaming 'plastic knives, plastic knives, why didn't someone do something?' Slaves die' says the old man. And in his eyes we see box cutters slicing through glass and women stuck in elevators and men in suits falling from the sky And that image repeated a thousand times, that we cannot erase from our mind's eye.
'How could you imagine a building melting?, melting ... how could you even imagine that?'
I watch myself in the mirror as I hold her foot in my hand separating each toe and pinching them gently. It's four o'clock and she's my first client of the day. Business is slow. The hairdressers reminisce about Christmas that came with $200 tips from loyal clients. This year they were lucky to get twenty.
 
[Above] [Above Left] A ghetto patriot [I]: creates his own collage of anger and retribution and stands near a small memorial on Canal Street. A few weeks later I captured him again outside the Yankee Stadium after the city memorial. A young girl was having her photo taken with him. He had in that short few weeks become a type of patriot street celebrity. The back of his t-shirt says it all. (Photo by Wednesday Kennedy, 2001) [Above Right] A ghetto patriot [II] (Photo by Wednesday Kennedy, 2001)
The tourists are a trickle and the Wall Street guys visit rarely these days. The only regulars are the princesses and they're hard work. They all have long shiny straight hair and bony backs and they cannot drop their legs when you ask them to. You say, 'pretend you are a puppet ... pretend you're a bag of concrete', but they just cannot let go. 'You should spank them', said Billy, that'll make them drop their legs'. But it's not that sort of place and I don't care for them that much. I've begun to resent their insularity, their ten thousand dollar handbags and their manicured toenails. I want to lie down on a massage table and have somebody rub my back, I want my legs wrapped up in furry towels and a soft voice whispering in my ear 'pretend you're on a desert island, pretend you're in paradise'.
As if there is still a paradise, as if you can still escape to your desert island or your skyscraper apartment and find refuge . Sept 11th is like ground hog day. As soon as we hear the Orange alert, we're back there again, covered in white dust, running away from buildings, feeling the earth shift from under our feet. We are stuck on a groove called 'disaster', its only a matter of time ...
I am the bomb waiting to go off
tick tick bomb
a play for the new millennium.
a little ahead of its time but right on target
and what will be the next big thing now the last big thing is still ringing in our ears
TOP THAT BIG BOY
Every time the wind changed you could smell it again. For weeks after, the rotting reminder that you were living in a wound. Babies made me cry. We sat next to each other on subways and listened to each other's heart beat. Everybody was going back to family and to home, bunkering down and launching into God Bless America at the drop of a hat. I wandered around humming the vegemite song, not proud to be anything. 'God bless the child who's got his own'. It was hard to go home. Middle age was suddenly upon me and my crazy creative life in New York looked ridiculous and juvenile. In my three year absence my friends had lost hair, gained children and secured mortgages. I had a suitcase, some odd bits of furniture scattered all across Sydney and a fat scrap book of reviews that were already starting to go yellow. When I lay down in my childhood bed gravity suddenly took hold of me. That's what happens when I come back to Australia, she sucks me into her dry hard belly and reminds me where I come from.
[Above] The poster for Last Night in New York. Featuring some of the scenes from the show and the radio feature. (Photo by Wednesday Kennedy, 2001)
My mother sat beside me on my first night stroking my head silently while I cried. 'What are you crying about love?', she finally asked. 'There's no hope, I told her. There's no hope anywhere anymore. It was the end of the American dream and my dream too. I had come home to die. But it didn't feel like home to me anymore. In the city that taught me everything I know, I was a alien, I found myself at odds with even my closest of friends. Krockenberger was brutal.
We watched the spectacle of Americans weeping', he said 'but we weren't used to feeling sorry for Americans. We've been using our sympathy up on their victims we have none left for them. Everything about America is filmic. To an outsider none of this is abnormal. His objectivity disturbed me, but it also explained my culture shock. I had been straddling the globe and pissing in the ocean for too long. Overnight the world had closed it's borders and I was stranded. New York was a war zone and Sydney had gone back to the future and become a penal colony in drag. Howard's re-election blew out the last candle in my head. I bought a new doona, lay down in the dark and had a quiet nervous breakdown.
Then I woke up one morning and went back to work. At the end of the day I am a 'hope junkie'. In another era I might have been known to have a calling or a gift but in our current frame of reference I'm an addict and hope is my drug and creation is my tool. Forty hours of video and sound tape gave me motivation to get out of bed. My mission was to make a multi media show and a radio feature out of my twenty hours of video tape and my twenty five hours of sound. And my hope was to take it back to America as a gift of healing in time for the anniversary of Sept 11th. I would call it 'Last Night in New York' and it would follow the stages of emotion that the city went through in the weeks after the attack. 'The Night Air', Radio National commissioned the feature and many generous people came together to help me make the show, Sydney came to my rescue, worked for me for nothing but the glory, of which there was to be none, because I was leaving town and taking the show to New York.
I stayed on people's couches to save on rent and moved every two weeks just before I drove them crazy (and sometimes just after). Every minute of my day went to scripting and producing the show, it was a ridiculous feat, I could never do it again. It was insanity, I would not have been able to shape it in that time, had I not had the support of Brent Clough and his crew at the ABC. There were other allies too, Bruce Davies, Ruby Boukaboo, Iris Pictures, Mary Ellen Mullane, Madge ... On the night before I left for America, sixty people turned up at the old flour mill in Newtown where Alice Taylor had edited together the video. It was a supportive and generous send off and I took back all the horrible things I'd thought about Aussies. They were my tribe and I was touched that after all these years they still believed me when I told them it would pay off eventually. My parents armed me with travel insurance and my friends armed me with business cards and posters and press releases and photos. And with my show in my pocket, I took three valium and got back on a plane back to America.
 
[Above] [Above Left] Fear in the eyes of the young New York arab boy. Framed by the posters of the missing. (Photo by Wednesday Kennedy, 2001) [Above Right] poster of the missing ... five days later (Photo by Wednesday Kennedy, 2001)
'Last Night (the last night of what precisely is never clarified) centers on a video that Kennedy shot in the month following the terrorist attack. Various New Yorkers of assorted ethnic stripes defend Islam, condemn Afghanistan, chastise America and croon 'Imagine' astonishingly off key. Her often interesting portraits are tarted up with far too much slo mo, freeze frame and over exposure not to mention the distracting sound collage. Perhaps a better soundtrack might have helped, particularly this quatrain by New York darlings, the strokes, who sing, "And people they don't understand/your girlfriends they can't understand/your grandsons they won't ever understand/On top of this I aint ever gonna understand " The song title? 'Last Nite'. (Alexis Soloski Time Out Sept 2002)
Last night in new York played at the Trilogy Theatre, West 44th street, from the 15th August to Sept 11th. It was recorded for Japanese television, German Public radio and a French film crew as part of a documentary about the artistic response to Sept 11th. They didn't have much to choose from. There was so little artistic response to Sept 11th that The Observer stuck me in the same paragraph as Lisa Minnelli. But if I was swanning with the stars in print, in reality I was performing to a handful of tourists and the only review I got was from a floppy intern at Time Out who was still learning how to write. In my absence clever foreigners with big mouths had gone out of vogue and the empire was retracting at the very moment it was expanding. My contribution was viewed with suspicion. This was their catastrophe, I had no business sticking my nose in it. While half the city was attending memorials and personal tributes, the other half were staying indoors and keeping their mouths shut. Sept 11th was like a badly digested meal that the anniversary made them swallow all over again. For all of my good intentions, my timing was terrible.
The radio feature did better. It has been sold three times in the US and Barrett Golding from hearing voices.com just wrote to me, describing it as a 'staggering work of heartbeaking genius'. God bless him. A few kind words and all is forgiven. As a career woman I am a very cheap date. The Aussie poets came over for a while in October and we launched a global anthology of new fusion poetry called 'Short Fuse' and got beaten up in a few poetry slams. By November I was cleaned out and exhausted. I needed to find a cave again, so I made up a fake resume and sold myself as a massage therapist and as usual I am making it up as I go along.
[Above] [Above] Candlelight Vigil Union Square. (Photo by Wednesday Kennedy, 2001)
I have learnt from this job that everyone is beautiful when they are relaxed and on their backs. Perhaps I've found my calling. I used to like to see myself as a cultural terrorist but now I know that was just vanity. I am useless in the face of all this destruction. I don't know who is terrorizing me more, the American Government or the cut out photo of Bin Laden who says BOO without moving his lips. I have an empathy for the enemy that I cannot reconcile and that I no longer dare to name, in the kitchen with the hairdressers and the pedicurists who have come from Poland and Russia and Hungary and who will die to defend their American Dream. They tell me that I'm an ungrateful Australian and that I don't know the value of freedom and then they go back to flicking through their magazines and meditating on the lives of celebrities. I want to be just like them.
It's a preferable alternative to Orange Alert which scrambles my brain and which, we all agree, is very bad for your skin. I will march tomorrow in New York and my friends will March in Sydney and London and Paris and if there is any breath left in democracy, we might stop America from invading Iraq. I hope so because I'm tired of dreaming about dead people and it's hard being an economy class jetsetter with all this fighting going on. I've had an open invitation to Budapest to perform 'Last Night in New York' and an invitation to Bali to co-write Bruce Lee the musical. But while it looks like the world is about to end, I'm hanging out with the fluffy towels. I get my best ideas here. I'm currently writing a note to the terrorists and offering them a list of other cities to bomb. The only dirty bomb clinic in America is in Tennessee, so perhaps they might start with the T's. I'm just trying to be helpful. Do my bit for the war effort. :) Onward and Upwards.
About the Writer Wednesday Kennedy
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Wednesday Kennedy has published, performed and recorded extensively for more than a decade. She last performed in New York in "Cultural Refugee", that was part of the midtown International Theatre Festival in 2000. Born in Sydney, she began her career as a TV journalist, scripting, producing, directing and presenting more than 160 shows for national broadcast. She was lead singer of the legendary Sydney post-punk pop band Saigon Children's Choir. She studied and performed kyogen (traditional Japanese comedy) with the Kennedy/Ogawa Players in 1991 in Tokyo. She has appeared at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the Oz Festival in Amsterdam and at literary and music festivals across Australia. Her CD "Post-Romantic" was released in 1999, leading to performances in New York and Boston. She also writes and performs regularly for the Australian Broadcasting Corp., which will present "Last Night in New York" on the Radio National "The Night Air" on Sept. 11. |
[Above] Photo of Wednesday Kennedy by Natalia Novikova, 2002.
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Thylazine No.7 (March, 2003) |
