NP - A 24-Decade History of Popular Music

[John Bailey]

If anyone on the list ever gets the chance to catch Taylor Mac's live
show A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, it's the most Pynchonian
live experience I've ever had.
A 24 hour show performed by hundreds including several marching bands,
acrobats, burlesque performers, puppeteers, a 24-piece orchestra,
choirs, knitters, and the entire audience, it traces the entire
history of the United States through the songs that were popular in
each decade. At its centre is queer performance artist Taylor Mac who
this week won a MacArthur 'genius grant' for the show (among other
things).
It's pretty much M&D and AtD live, and there were a lot of tiny
historical nuggets among the sweeping history that I actually only
recall ever hearing about in those two novels. The barbed-wire dress
made of hotdogs only made real sense from AtD's reflections on the
significance of barbed-wire in American history, but it looked pretty
good too.
Mac doesn't perform it in one 24-hour sweep any more for reasons of
staying alive, so it's carved into six events, but by hour five of the
first night I was already sold on attending the second. The
carnivalesque aspect is astonishing, and it was the hour I spent
blindfolded - feeding strangers grapes, stumbling blindly around the
theatre, being caressed by roses - that sold me.
If it ever arrives in your town, sell plasma or your plasma screen TV
to get along.
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l