2009

Holland Cotter writes about Blood and Guts in High School for The New York Times.

March 27, 2009
LAURA PARNES
‘Janie 1978-1982, a.k.a. Blood and Guts in High School’

Participant Inc.
253 East Houston Street,
Lower East Side
Through Sunday

For several years Laura Parnes has been working on a video adaptation of Kathy Acker’s 1984 novel, “Blood and Guts in High School,” presenting segments as they were done. The piece is now finished and being shown at Participant Inc.

Acker, who died at 53 in 1997, was one of the most dynamic American fiction writers of her time, her work a violent, pornographic, punk-feminist version of Gertrude Stein with lifts from William S. Burroughs, Marguerite Duras, Jean Genet and her own life. Her prose has the pile-driver beat of a garage-band drummer, its anarchic tone a perfect counteroffensive to the recycled folksiness of the Reagan years.

Ms. Parnes makes this historical context clear by prefacing each section of her video with news clips of the mass suicide in Jonestown in 1978, the nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Israeli attack on Beirut in 1982 and the conservative ascendancy in national politics. Against this backdrop Acker’s protagonist, Janey (as spelled in the book, and well played by Stephanie Vella), moves, changing clothes and hairdo but not her sullen, affectless demeanor from scene to scene.

In place of Acker’s motormouth prose, however, Ms. Parnes has written a script of short, emphatic lines and long silences, with actors moving in slow motion when they move at all; often cut-and-paste editing does their moving for them. Ms. Parnes has cooled Acker’s frenetic world down to the stately pace of a Greek tragedy, retaining the hilarity but increasing the menace of Janey’s episodic abandonments, imprisonments and punishments.

Filmed on bare-bones sets put together in gallery spaces, the video is a model of how to bring off an ambitions project with scant resources, and also of how to respect source material while transforming it. And where Acker’s novels have a quick-hit crash-and-burn intensity, Ms. Parnes’s video floats like a shark, forever hovering, but always watching and moving.

HOLLAND COTTER