dennis bathory-kitsz

At 10:06 AM 9/17/01 -0400, you wrote:
>I'm not sure it's right to be writing you all like this

It's exactly right. I've been very slow to take this in ... my first reaction was to keep moving on, not to stop, because it would be the best way to show that, as an artist, I could create art under any circumstances. I was wrong. New York is my old home; too long ago, but not so long that the towers weren't yet there. I even performed in them in 1977, along with others during beloved Charlotte Moorman's last festival before her exile from the city. And so, way up here in the serene mountains, I felt first a ripple -- when I was keeping on keeping on -- and then a wave, and now, a kind of emotional backwash that's drawing something very essential out of me and back into the sea of humanity. My passport came up for renewal today; I got a haircut; next week autumn begins. It seemed like a message from the calendar. I don't know what the political forces will do, and I fear that (and I'm loathe to say this aloud, but I believe it) those who so missed the passing of the cold war are balancing a momentary sorry with a longer, deeper sense of equally horrific purpose. I fear the future, not from a falling Dow Jones, but from vengeance in place of justice. Two days ago I sent out a request for pieces composed in response to this event, and learned that most of us, as you and I have been, are in a state of artistic paralysis. I do not have the genius that could create a 'Guernica' or a 'Quartet for the End of Time', and so I sit here, as you do, seeing my one gift, to be an artist, no more than a tattered and torn and pitiful and ultimately empty package.

Love,
Dennis [Bathory-Kitsz]


	At 10:06 AM 9/17/01 -0400, you wrote: >I'm not sure it's right to be writing you all like this It's exactly right. I've been very slow to take this in ... my first reaction was to keep moving on, not to stop, because it would be the best way to show that, as an artist, I could create art under any circumstances. I was wrong. New York is my old home; too long ago, but not so long that the towers weren't yet there. I even performed in them in 1977, along with others during beloved Charlotte Moorman's last festival before her exile from the city. And so, way up here in the serene mountains, I felt first a ripple -- when I was keeping on keeping on -- and then a wave, and now, a kind of emotional backwash that's drawing something very essential out of me and back into the sea of humanity. My passport came up for renewal today; I got a haircut; next week autumn begins. It seemed like a message from the calendar. I don't know what the political forces will do, and I fear that (and I'm loathe to say this aloud, but I believe it) those who so missed the passing of the cold war are balancing a momentary sorry with a longer, deeper sense of equally horrific purpose. I fear the future, not from a falling Dow Jones, but from vengeance in place of justice. Two days ago I sent out a request for pieces composed in response to this event, and learned that most of us, as you and I have been, are in a state of artistic paralysis. I do not have the genius that could create a 'Guernica' or a 'Quartet for the End of Time', and so I sit here, as you do, seeing my one gift, to be an artist, no more than a tattered and torn and pitiful and ultimately empty package. Love, Dennis [Bathory-Kitsz]
	back to first responses to newsnotes table of contents