“APP’oliO” 20BECKETT13 – + “MARGOT” : here we come: staging “…for to end yet again skull alone in a dark place…”

Appollo Beckett 2013 – 4 prose pieces from the 19802 at la MaMa

MARGOT- ( dancer – choreographer Lisa Giobbi)

NRA Idiocy and how we could stop them! And the face of the new Hitler.

USE KNIVES not GUNS!

THE FACE OF THE NEW HITLER

Cover of my 2nd book – the Staging of the SELF

NRA- I’ve been watching, living and dying in horror, disbelief, rancor, anger and rage, at what’s been taking place across the country recently. Well, not only so recently.

This morning, two short weeks after the worst mass massacre of children in history, in Newtown, Connecticut, we’ve heard that two volunteer firefighters were ambushed and killed by yet another maniac. It just doesn’t seem to matter anymore where it is or where you are, be it Oregon or Connecticut, Colorado, Virginia Tech, Columbine, or inside Rush Limbaugh’s brain or Trump’s hairdo …. It doesn’t seem to matter.

For those of us who live in huge cities like New York, Rio, London, Mexico City or Hong Kong, the idea of ‘getting used to’a ‘terror attack’ and the occasional mugging has become a sort of  weird norm.

And, of course we’ve always read and hear of these loonies who take out riffles and go on shooting rampages and these crazy cults like the one in Wako, Texas or the Manson Family or the Uni-bomber or “Jim Joneses” or Tim McVey and others, fueled by ego + hatred as taking place in remote areas and far away places. Well..

But this is very different. The weapons have changed. These are the ones that George W Bush insisted on calling WEAPONS OF MASS DISTRUCTION  and which is why we invaded Iraq for nothing. I mean, for Oil and … Let’s not digress.

These COWARDS from the NRA keep on citing the 2^nd Amendment. Well, when this was written, those who wrote it has none of the bushmasters (what an appropriate name for a weapon), or any other semi-automatic weapon in mind.

The sick mind of this Wayne La Pierre claims that our schools should become BUNKERS! Now, can you just imagine? Schools, movie theaters, theaters,shopping malls, public squares, parks, hospitals, ALL our nation, all turning into a HUGE BUNKERS?

This craze will only STOP when the following action  takes place and that is: (……….)

(my lawyer has advised me not to publish the rest of the article or else, I myself could become dead meat)

Let’s “moon” 2012 goodbye – just like I mooned Tristan in Rio – an opera in 3 acts

Mooning the Nazis in Rio after my staging of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde”

And finally …

The one published across our puritanical world.

BEFORE I FORGET, EVERYONE: HAVE A JOLLY MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!

LOVE

Gerald

2012 – the year of the books ! 2012, o ano dos livros – There’s still time, go get them. Ainda ha tempo, vá compra-los!

a life long gong of painting in the theater

Squeezed between Fernanda Montenegro and Torres (1991) rehearsals of Flash and Crash Days

taken from the book GT Citizen of the World (Cidadão do Mundo) – 3 years after directing the Beckett world premiers at La MaMa in New York and the Flying Dutchman by Wagner and some Heiner Mueller – age 31

Cidadão do Mundo _ Coleção APLAUSO

New book on sale / novo livro a venda: GT Citizen of the World / GT Cidadão do Mundo

Gerald Thomas Cidadão do Mundo (Life Achievement) Published by Coleção Aplauso – edited by Edilson Botelho

Blame on Kafka – not commenting on the Connecticut mass shooting!

Blame it on Kafka – I woke up today as an angel but who knows..tomorrow…

“Blame it on Kafka”, I’d shout whenever I’d come to my senses and whenever someone at school would try to play as a child which I was not a child I wasn’t a child. I wasn’t. No, not a child.

No. When your are given Kafka’s Complete Works at age 12 to read – and begin at the beginning, when was that? That is when it all started.

Let’s say it all started when Gregor Samsa wakes up from bad dreams and realizes , well…no point here. No point. I realized quite simply that I could also wake up as an insect the next morning. Even worse. I could be arrested without a reason, be tried without having committed a crime. I could have the gates to the Castle shut in my face, the forbidden gates made just for me, shut onto my shut eyes. Shut right as I got there to enter with my frowned forehead.

Worse! I could be tortured by a machine in a penal colony. A torturing device that would inscribe in my skin (with the help of a intricate clockwork of needles), every little misdemeanor or every time I cheated or every parking violation, every time I ran away with a slice of unpaid pizza in my hand as a teenager, no, no, TOO MUCH!!! Too much!

Yes, blame it on Kafka.

Or blame it on Emile Zola. Or on Marx. Or on Borges. Or on Joyce.

No, Joyce doesn’t come into my life until much much MUCH later.

Before Joyce, there is what I call the “German Parade”: my father would parade Heinrich Heine, Schiller, Goethe and Goethe and more Goethe – Yes, you heard me! Goethe!

The father and the mother of modernity and / or modernism: Goethe. The Goethe of Werther, the ultra romantic, the Goethe of Faust (meFist, meFaust, same thing, both creatures, one creatures reduced to “ONE-FIST”), the Goethe-the-Mayor-of-Weimar and the Goethe-of-the Einbahnstrasse – the one way system. The one way system which lead to city blocks, square city urban planning and all because he looked out of the window in Parma, Italy and looked at the confusion and, having written about the pact with eternity and destroying the past (something I share profoundly and Kafka does too), he could simply BUILD the future, rebuild the future into a more organized manner, less chaotic and more organized.

But WAIT. Organization may lead to Orwell. Organization may lead to control. Organization may lead to Huxley so…..what? What then? Cameras everywhere? 1984? No, surely not.

That isn’t what Goethe had in mind….or is it?

Was there a Hitler in Goethe’s Weimar Republic’s future? Hey, wait a second. What are you insinuating? What am I insinuating?

Yes, Gregor woke up slowly

I wouldn’t. I always jump out of bed in a quick move. Only to make sure I haven’t turned into a bug yet.

Not yet.

But I’m pretty damn close.

Gerald Thomas

December 14, 2012

 

 

Estado de São Paulo (newspaper) December 9, 2012 (Arts Section)

Estado de Sao Paulo Dec 9, 2012

Oscar Niemeyer – 1907-2012

!
!!!
Lived a good life

Viveu uma vida boa.

The celebrated Brazilian architect whose flowing designs infused Modernism with a new sensuality and captured the imaginations of generations of architects around the world, died on Wednesday in Rio de Janeiro. He was 104.
Mr. Niemeyer was among the last of a long line of Modernist true believers who stretch from Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe to the architects who defined the postwar architecture of the late 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. He is best known for designing the government buildings of Brasília, a sprawling new capital carved out of the Brazilian savanna that became an emblem both of Latin America’s leap into modernity and, later, of the limits of Modernism’s utopian aspirations. Shielded from the sun behind rows of elegant baffles, the building had a clean, stripped-down style that made it a sparkling example of classical Modernism while heralding Brazil’s emergence as a vibrant center of experimentation.

Mr. Niemeyer’s name soon became synonymous with the new Brazilian architecture. In 1939, he collaborated with Costa on the Brazilian Pavilion for the New York World’s Fair. Three years later, he completed his first house, a simple modern box resting on slender columns on a mountainside overlooking the magnificent Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon. In these and other early projects, Mr. Niemeyer was beginning to develop a distinctive architecture of flowing lines, structural lightness and an open relationship to natural surroundings.

Mr. Niemeyer’s international status was confirmed by the Brazil Builds exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1943, a show that also introduced his work to an American audience. Four years later, he joined Le Corbusier again, this time as an equal, when the two were selected to take part in designing the United Nations complex in Manhattan.
Supervised by Wallace K. Harrison, the United Nations design was a collaboration that also included international luminaries like the Soviet architect Nikolai D. Bassov and Max Abramovitz of New York. The final design was a compromise of sorts between Mr. Niemeyer’s concepts and those of his aging idol Le Corbusier.
Set amid gardens and plazas, the slim, glass-clad Secretariat tower and the sculptural concrete General Assembly building remain testaments to the belief in rationalism as a means to resolve international disputes and disparities.

In celebrating both the formal elements and social aims of architecture, his work became a symbolic reminder that the body and the mind, the sensual and the rational, are not necessarily in opposition. Yet he also saw sensuality and the brightness of dreams against a darker backdrop. “Humanity needs dreams to be able to survive the miseries of daily existence,” he once said, “even if only for an instant.”

Excerpts from the Obit published in the New York Times