Gasland: Light my (water on) fire…

VP: That’s quite remarkable. Now, on a lighter note, I must say I quite liked your banjo-playing. And your theater company, International WOW has been continuously turning out good work. Does your political schedule leave you any time for other endeavors? Anything to look forward to?

JF: Well, it all tends to blend together… Our play Reconstruction played the last days of the Ohio Theater, in Soho, last spring. It’s a show dealing with the emotional impact of people losing their homes and it’s also about building renewable- and sustainable-energy theaters. It’s set to tour Japan and Germany fairly soon and the long term plan is to actually build those sustainable theaters as a part of the show, and to have the audience contribute both to the content on stage, and with the actual construction – and we’ll have 30% of cheap/free seating for an active audience who will watch the show on a row of apartment bicycles, generating the electricity for the performance that night by re-filling the battery. Those would be green and sustainable buildings and we actually received a Rockefeller grant to pursue this idea right here in New York. Just recently, on September 2^nd, Gasland was awarded the Yoko Ono/John Lennon Peace Prize – that will go towards building a Sustainability and Arts Center in the Upper Delaware that will also be monitoring the water quality up there. The job of Art in culture is to create a space where we can encounter and reassess what is going on in our society, Art is our chance at creating a dynamic dialogue between citizens and policy… And there’s no place I’d rather be.

This exchange took place a couple of days ago. Since then, a lot has happened to disrupt Josh’s improbable catch-up sleep. The day before yesterday brought to light that Homeland Security, apparently not content with making you walk barefoot on dirty airport linoleum, had been investigating Gasland’s audiences in a pre-emptive effort to quell possible environmental extremist actions. Are you a subscriber of Time Warner Cable On Demand? Beware. You might be growing an FBI file as we speak. To make matters worse, last night, Gasland opened at the IFC. If you spot any suspiciously unfashionable character on the sidewalk of 6^th avenue and 3^rd, you might want to introduce yourself, make sure they get your name right. You never know where your next fifteen minutes of fame might come from.