Thursday night (Aug. 21), the Switchback Sea flotilla gave their buoyant performance
at the docks of the Hudson River Maritime Museum, along the Rondout Creek
in the downtown district of Kingston. It was a combination of art, drama, music, with a
bit of activism and mythology thrown into the mix.
Debut took place in Troy on Aug. 15, then the tour stopped in Albany the next night. Crew members claimed the Kingston show was below par, primarily due to fatigue from a late-night dance party, following Wednesday night’s (Aug. 20) gig at the Saugerties Lighthouse.
Woodstock hippies didn’t send Saugerties reviews downstream, but lower Hudson Valley got wind of the event from a blurb in the Times Herald-Record (which mistakenly pigeonholed the gig as merely ecological). Cable 6 News also confused the event as primarily environmentalist.
Switchback is mostly about having fun on the river, while making art. The recycled aspect of the boats, and its alternative fuel sources, are only corollary to the story presented on stage. Local media didn’t stick around long enough to grasp the theme. A more accurate account was published in the August 18th New York Times, “A Floating City With Junkyard Roots.”
The ensemble will make its way down the Hudson River, stopping at various points, until reaching the Deitch Studios art gallery in Queens on Sept. 7, where NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg will deliver the key to the city (no gig that day).
Cable 6 TV news anchor gave the wrong date for an upcoming Beacon appearance (on Aug. 24th — not the 23rd as misstated). Croton is on Aug. 27th; Nyack is on the Aug. 28th; with final performances at Long Island City, Sept. 11th, 12th, & 13th.
Above, an inside view of the steamboat Althea.
The ensemble consists of seven water craft, crewed by nearly five dozen young
hipsters, partly Big Apple dwellers, others from points further west. Two flotilla vessels were absent for the Kingston show (one canoe docked for repairs, the other — a standard
motorboat — moored away). The remaining fleet looked like the
Merry Pranksters on water. Makeshift rafts, converted
boats, a motorized hot tub — all decked out with decorative festoons of recycled bunting.
The Maria, above, a makeshift skiff.
Below, the artist named “Swoon.”
Swimming Cities of the Switchback Sea was inspired by a real-life maritime movement of musical
vagabonds living on recycled rafts, known as the Floating Neutrinos — who are legendary for crossing the Atlantic in houseboats literally made of garbage. A spinoff project named “Junk” is currently en route to Hawaii, floating atop 15,000 plastic bottles.
This summer’s Hudson River endeavor — Switchback Sea — is organized by renowned NYC street artist Swoon, — who collaborated on a similar venture last year down the Mississippi River, named the Miss Rockaway Armada. Swoon became famous pasting fine art prints on public walls in cities.
The Alice, above, a pontoon raft.
Some of the Miss Rockaway followed Swoon to New York, continuing a tradition. One of the vessels — steamboat Althea — was trucked up to Troy, NY from Texas by the Kinetic Steam Works of San Francisco. It was refurbished with a biodeisel engine. Chicken John Rinaldi, the fleet’s engineer, was known back in Frisco as a fringe candidate for
mayor.
Dramatic content — authored by Lisa D’Amour— consists of monologues by fictional fleet characters, allegedly adrift for roughly 75 years (nobody knows exactly how long). Each testimony differs slightly, but the common thread is a dualistic mythical sea Goddess who protects the flotilla. According to legend, the seafaring band of outcasts originally set off as refugees — during a “great launch” — fleeing a worldwide economic collapse. Folk takes speak of a river beneath the river, accessible through a trap door. Several crew members consider themselves ghosts. The spoken parts are separated with musical interludes by the band Dark Dark Dark, working in conjunction with circus composer Sxip Shirey. The tunes have a timeless Klezmer tone, with banjo, accordion, upright bass, and shanty vocals.
The raft Lucille, above.
Below, the steamboat Althea.
Excerpts:
“I’m terribly sorry, but it’s all been checked out, turns out there’s no place for you. Why just go to your car now, there’s no gasoline in the tank. Walk to your bike then, somebody’s stolen your spokes. Who the hell steals spokes? Put on some shoes then, sure why not, you’ve got a hole in your heel now, don’t you, yes? Well sure you can tape them up. Go on now, tape them up with that moldy old tape you’ve got in the back of the shed, rotting. Now walk to the money machine, put your card in. Money machine’s got nothing to say to you. So go to the job store, look for a job, but the shelves are made of dust, and there’s wind whistling through the crooked front teeth of the man sitting behind the desk. So keep walking, past the abandoned old buildings, all boarded up, where they were going to put in those condos. Condos — you remember condos? Go to the place then where you used to lay your head on the grass — the grass is gone, there’s no grass. First it turned to weeds, and then the drought, and now it’s all rocks and stones and dried poop. Go on, lad — go ahead and cry, crying is free — and legal. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, I know. You had your bootstraps firmly in hand, it was all supposed to work out. But it didn’t and well that’s that, and now there’s just no place for you, in particular, as it turns out. So, you stumble down to the river, because where else are you going to go?…
“We started as a bunch of piers built off the edge of the shore. We moved down there after a bunch of us came home to find giant orange stickers across our front doors. We knew it was nothing we could fight, so a group of us moved down to the river, started building out. The piers looked like a continuation of the shore. The city even tacked up a temporary street sign — it eventually became the top deck of Maria — Savage Lane. People would come down to buy things they didn’t want to be seen buying in town. Cigarettes, liquor, girly magazines. There was a little bit of everything for sale. But the special police started coming around more and more. One night they came out, said we had two choices — be gone by morning, or watch the piers go up in flames. We packed through the night, tying down supplies, bottling water, and just before daybreak, we started chopping, untying, unlocking, and setting the piers free. Boats, seven of them…
“There is no trap door, to no underground river, it doesn’t exist… Anyway, these boats have been in the water more than 75 years. The crew’s taken them into hiding twice, dragging the entire fleet into a secret cave or lagoon. You ask me why they went into hiding? You’ll hear stories that we’re all made up of crime genes, prone to looting unsuspecting campers. Some might say that we’re descended from a bunch of prisoners escaped out a window descended with a sheet rope. You can believe that if you want — it’s no skin off my teeth. But it might be scarier to believe the truth — we’re all just a bunch of free thinkers with no place left to go.
“The original design of the boats has evolved over the years. The Althea used to be a double-decker; the Alice grows by the week like weeds. But it all was the idea of the original captain, who convinced his closest friends to take to the water with him. The early years were rough — the bickering, the weather — and one night after pushing the boats through a hail storm, the captain had a dream of the ultimate docking place, where the water was smooth as glass. And there were little colored lean-to’s built for everyone. The air smelled like honeysuckle. And everything was abundance, year-round — raspberries, fresh sweet water, cigarettes that rolled themselves, carrots leaping clean out of the ground, right into people’s mouths, and so forth. And there was this woman, overlooking it all, straddling the river, her skirts full of eternity pockets. Yeah, that’s what he called them — eternity pockets. And in the dream she had eight arms and two heads, and she was just humming this song that kept everybody moving about their day with the sweetest little smile on their face. Hurray, hurray, she’d reach into her pockets, and she pulled out gifts, shower them on everybody, gold dust, flower petals to make old skin young. When the captain broke from that dream, he had a pencil in his hand, and he had drawn a picture of her in his sleep. And they are called the sisters, and they are the protectors of the fleet. Not everybody believes in her, but they sure do enjoy dressing up like her for Halloween. It’s OK, she doesn’t mind if you don’t think she’s real — she’s ready to sweep you up into her skirts just the same.
“Water surface, and sky surface, surface of my eyes upon the air. River, take my feet away… no wiser than the wood on that dock. Wandering through dead ends and stump fields, skin fish-hooked, and dog-bitten. Nine tenths of reality is concealed from our eyes, will the real river please rise up? These boats were built quietly — if violently — with eyes at half focus, with many hands, trying to see. And the fleet grows outward like a plant, like a creature, each appendage with its own set of nerves. When we come down the river, many people don’t even notice. Maybe their eyes can’t adjust to that sort of shape on the water. And others cry ‘ghost,’ because it’s much easier to explain away a specter, than a fleet of live souls, who have chosen a life of continuous drift. We’re not ghosts, any more than you are.
“Why are we doing this? Well, because we stopped being able to imagine a happy life. Why take to the water? Because everything is water, and someday everything will be water. Why are we doing this? No really, to continue the drift we were born into. And, to one day arrive at the hem of her robe, she who may be two-headed, or may have eight arms. She, who is both inside and outside of time, she who can fit into the smallest crack of the smallest stone, or grow as large as an undiscovered forest — rolling, emerging — beauty inside of beauty. Why beauty? One day, everything will be beautiful, it is possible that that day is today. Why take to the water? Maybe everything continues down below the surface of the soupy air. Why take to the water? Soon it will be the only open space. Why beauty? Tell me how you are spending your time. Why are we doing this? By now, you must know that’s a pointless question, now go to sleep. Why take to the water? Take to the water, and you will find out.
Catch one of the remaining shows, if you can. It’s free, and worth the trip.
Listen to the Aug. 21st Kingston performance as MP3 audio: http://www.midhudson.info/special/switchback [This opens a folder with individual tracks] [Can’t play it? Get Quicktime]
Download the recording as a torrent here: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4357217
