The team is preparing for a whirlwind summer tour of the living picture frame, a performance art piece that takes stage in a larger than life gold gilded frame. Various characters come in and out of the frame, in a variety of manners and dress. Onlookers are encouraged to break the third wall and melt into the unfolding of the performance. The performance can last from hours to 35 days. Brown and Laine had various descriptions: almost vaudeville, but not a carnie sideshow, participatory, a form of protest, a non-linear challenge into the spectrum of everyday human engagements and emotions. At one point Brown explained, “The Frame is a way, a tool, for us to communicate the way we interact as humans to an audience.”
Sabrina: Why Berlin?
“There are experimental aspects in Berlin that you won’t find in New York. They are stepping out of boundaries and finding creativity as spirituality.”
With former performance titles like Dumpster Diving, Cabaret Vulgare, and Operation Shitstorm, one can imagine that their work can disgust you the way a heap of sleeping bags next to a pile of half dried puke and a bottle of rum on the side of a New York alley churns your stomach. Or perhaps of the moment you notice that the fresh steaming dog pee streaming down the crevices of the sidewalk concrete slabs has found residence on your stiletto. Yet the humanity and rawness of these rotten egg experiences reels you in, like a smack in the face with a wet fish. You are at once with the oneness of fundamental human emotions and experiences.
In these economic times of recession and rapid unemployment we have been struck with the aftermath of the Bush administration era. The Fantastic Nobodies brings out an audience’s awareness to a level that we have lost touch. With a set of Nobody rich artistic semantics, they expose the rawness of our emotions to an existential level and inspire a much needed reform movement after the disillusionment of glamour and glitz and smoke and mirrors of former times.
Brown and Laine bid me adieu to tend to their followers below.
Peering through the bicycle spokes, a crowd clad in lumberjack plaid, thick rimmed eyeglasses, oversized grandpa sweaters hung over shear tights, long strapped leather purses and additional thrift store accoutrements, congregated under kaleidoscopic illuminations with an air of coolness maintained by a rubrics code that even Franz Boas couldn’t crack.
We descended onto the dance floor to catch Boy Crisis. A grin in a rainbow knit hat welcomed us, “Can I have a sip of your beer?” A few drips of sweat escaped his brow.
Cup exchanged hands.
Knit hat took a swig. A sigh of relief escaped him, “Thank you, I was so thirsty.”
Though a bit concerned I may wake up with mono, I still couldn’t help but smile at the easygoing communal sense of this exchange, “You are welcome.”
Boy Crisis’s pulsations riveted into the electro-indie parishioners. At one point lead singer Victor Vazquez, clad in an American flag shirt, was down upon his knees belting lyrics and banging one drumstick in both hands onto the drummer’s cymbal over and over. It was the raw passion of a live Ginsberg reading of Howl. One could not help but feel fully compelled to cast sails and join in this Fantastic Nobody revolutionary movement worthy of a Dada manifesto. Pull out your wallets and send this Mama and Fantastic kids to Berlin so that they may come home rich in true Berlin bohemia and inspire us all into greater depths of the mind!
As their last notes faded into the night, we drained the final dregs of our Stella, closed our knapsacks and departed for the trek home. Walking past the one-speeds chained to street signs, we promised ourselves not to drift afar and to keep a finger on the pulse of these artistic revolutionaries and epicenter of creativity, as should you.
