Periodically, a cheating incident or a procedural mistake will occur in a poker game, making it necessary to consult the video tape. All public card rooms in casinos have video cameras in the ceiling keeping surveillance on each table. Only the most blatant cheaters need worry here. The subtle work of the masters is undetectable except to the naked eye, the trained eye. The real eye sees what the eye in the sky cannot. It's a matter of depth perception.
If the simulacrum is a one-eyed, man-eating Cyclops swallowing us during our allotted 15 minutes of fame, theater is Ulysses tricking the giant by claiming his name is "Nobody." It is amazing how well those on The Hill play the homeless game. No one would suspect that most support $200 a day habits. How many of the sympathizers make a thousand or more a week at their jobs? The media is in two distinct camps. Pro says don't blame the victim. Con says don't make them out to be victims. Back and forth the debate rages without any real depth. Who's to blame? The answer is simple. "Nobody."
Theater blinds the simulacrum by first abiding by the adage, "Never bite the hand that feeds you." But more importantly, theater knows that the hand that feeds you is also food. Never nip at the simulacrum like some pet toy poodle. Take the hand that feeds you off at the elbow. Theater doesn't get reviews, it makes news. The media is manipulated and they have "nobody" to blame. Theater is the big lie that becomes the big truth.
When Prisoner of Love was finally published in English translation, we immediately put an order in to London for 50 paperbacks. They arrived around the same time we put up the tepee. We knew it would be a while before anyone would publish it in the States. Grove Press had the original rights and, knowing one of the editors there, we were privy to the fears involved in the ultimate decision not to publish it. It's interesting to contrast the covert censorship here with the whole Viking Press/Salman Rushdie thing occurring at the same time.
Many of our neighbors made their living by building and selling fake camcorder boxes on the street. It is an old and very skillful art. Talking to one of the oldtimers, I was told they used to sell fake radios the same way back in the 40s. The 50s saw TVs. In the 60s, the Polaroid Instamatic and 8mm home movie cameras were in demand. Ten years ago, VCRs were hot.
The art is in both the packaging and selling, just like in the real world. If these products for recording experience exemplified best how the simulacrum has infiltrated and usurped our daily lives, then the empty boxes we sold from The Hill were either its crowning glory or its complete exposure and overthrow. We never referred to our product amongst ourselves as either a video camera or fake video camera, only as "I sold two boxes today." Generally, the women were more skilled at creating the package, while the men excelled at selling. Gabriele learned to make the box with enough finesse that she could have sold them at "wholesale." That price was forty dollars; then the "retailers" would resell it on Canal Street for $100 to $400. But hers were a modified version that I alone could sell. Instead of filling the box with old newspapers, she put a bookmarked copy of Prisoner of Love inside. The bookmark offered a phone number to call for a refund if not completely satisfied. Nobody ever called. Maybe Genet was smiling down on us from his special heaven. Surely he enjoyed watching his book being sold in America for the first time as the equivalent of old newspapers but worth, if not its weight in gold, at least ten to forty times its market value.
Cops know all the con artistes. If they've got a hard-on for you, they'll arrest you. The standard is that they will take your box. But not to destroy it. They carry it with them in their squad the rest of their shift. Cops are looking for bigger fish and trade the box for information. If that fails, they can sell it for twenty bucks easily enough. Then they can use that to buy information or put it into the piggy bank toward the video camera they're saving for.
A woman asked Gabriele and me if we would put a box in an art show about the homeless she was curating at some gallery. We bought one wholesale from the master on The Hill who had taught Gabriele the craft. We exhibited her box as well as one of Gabriele's. The real and the fake. To the unknowing eye, they were identical. When the show was over, the curator came to us all distressed. One of the boxes had been stolen. Lucky for us, the fake and not the real one. The question regarding Prisoner of Love is whether it is a work of art or the real thing. Most think Genet's last work in theater was The Screens some thirty years ago. "Nobody" suspects something else.
Theater, like Van Gogh's Sunflowers, is a time bomb. Dying of throat cancer, by the time Genet began writing his memoirs, his subjects were already a pile of old newspapers. The Black Panthers existed only as a history lesson, and as the cause of the PLO became more and more legitimate to the world eye, the rebel Genet so loved was disappearing. "I love the rebel, not his cause." Theater is an alchemy of the past and present for a gold in the future. "Pulp fiction," reality chewed and half digested into a large cud. Genet does not spit out "a page torn out of history." His swan song is the ugly duckling of legend. Theater never becomes history, always becomes myth.
