Boozy- Scene Notes and Ideas
Thesis:
Public housing is savior for us all, argued with mystical-religious fervor
If God applies order to the universe, then with the right mathematical formula, right density, etc., a visionary planner (able to maintain what is planned in perpetuity) could be the Second Coming.
We will envision Moses as the second coming, the promised heroic savior.
Salvation can be achieved through architecture and planning (thus, Co-Op City is the City of God on Earth). The world will be saved through careful planning and structures.
Show ends with rallying cry that we will eventually get the good work of Moses’ done and we will save the world.
Scene Notes and Ideas:
(Audience enters house to find space filled with housing units and inconsistently clad inhabitants. These people seem as if they are pulled from different times and space, and it is eerie. These inhabitants go about mundane domestic activities and occasionally stare out at audience. Eventually, lecturer enters and fumbles up to front of stage. Upon first sight, housing inhabits whip their focus towards him and slightly recoil, like wild cats. Their pupils dilate and they watch him suspiciously, intently. Lecturer engages audience with charm and awkwardness.)
Hi. Welcome. I’m really pleased you’re all here tonight for Boozy: The Life, Death, and Vilification— Um. The rest of the title I have to look at my program for. (looks for program in pockets. Can’t find it.) I don’t have a program. You all do. Feel free to look at it if you need the official title of this, um, “theatrical exemplar.” (smiles.)
What you’re seeing this evening is a presentation I’ve put together with the help of some theater types I met at a cocktail party only a few months ago and it represents the culmination of a thorough examination and cleansing they have performed on me. I used to be like many of you: I had doubts about the state of urban planning and how public works are conceived and executed. I had concerns about large public housing structures, single-zoning neighborhoods, and the seemingly absurd effort to quantify how much space a human being needs to live. (smiles again.)
But all that was prior to my learning about psychotecture and the visions of Robert Moses. I had listened too much to the voices of government’s corruptible in the guise of those morally righteous who charge themselves with “saving our neighborhoods.” I didn’t know about the history they don’t teach you. I didn’t suspect that such a formula was waiting to be discovered: to point us towards uncovering the divine geometry that lives within our everyday architecture and lives. I didn’t realize that trust in one savior is all that needs to matter and that faith in him will soon guide us back to our own Eden. A salvation that is attainable on Earth through our own construction—and, with dedication, in perpetuity. A salvation through public housing!
-Free Masons burst in. Fantastic movement shrouded in mystery. They dance the celebration of the sequence. They have uncovered the truth to geometry.
-A café scene along the boulevard. Relaxed, conversational. Le Corbusier meets with Goebbels. The plan for a new Rotterdam is requested, necessary for after the imminent planned attack on the city. Le Corbusier, speaking in French gibberish, concludes he would have no idea how to go about creating such a plan.
-Corbu weeps and visits the rabbits. He counts them. He sees how unhappy they are. There must be a conclusion. He counts again. Weeps. His wife, a disguised Jane Jacobs, comforts him and tells him there is no hope; people are only happy in their shabby tenements, their dirty streets with butchers and grocery stores, and are uninterested in aesthetics. She explains emergence theory. As she cradles him, they both smoke, fixated on the bleak future, and eventually fall asleep.
-Video of Co-op City. Modern dress, French accents but in English. Interviews by Lecturer with residents about life in New York housing projects, about Moses. Excerpt: “What Robert Moses brought the poor people of New York was hope. He created communities for the poor, new housing for them, a step up. You look at all the things he did: [List of achievements]. And that’s more than Roman emperors- a God on Earth. You say, sure, he didn’t get no one’s opinions, did it all by himself. But you don’t build like that by checking on everyone’s suggestions. You don’t give a step up to people by working within the Tammany System. You can’t create hope by committee.”
-Scene of mysterious Masonic planning. Smoke. Construction of modular boxes. They finally fit together. Burst of light. Magic. A baby is forged through alchemy.
-As this continues, Le Corbusier’s wife is awakened by FDR. They kiss erotically and she accepts special Corbu glasses implanted with camera. She replaces the sleeping Corbu’s with these and escapes into the night.
-Aphorisms from “Towards a New Architecture” are incanted, spitting out from all sides over Corbusier’s sleeping body: “Geometry is our greatest creation and we are enthralled by it.” “We must create the mass production spirit.” “The straight line is the great achievement of modern architecture. We must clean the cobwebs of romanticism from our minds.” “Modern decorative art is not decorated.” “A great epoch has begun. Industry, overwhelming us like a flood which rolls on towards its destined ends, has furnished us with new tools adapted to this new epoch, animated by the new spirit…” The words slow to a standstill.
-A lone motorized toy car arrives onstage. It tilts and whirls. It is joined by another. It knocks into Corbu. He awakens. He looks at cars, dismisses them, and eats a croissant while watching the rabbits. He is transfixed. He enters their cage and counts them. More cars enter. They travel in a grid pattern but eventually begin to knock into one another. A cacophonous sound grows from the ground. Corbu sees the cars and he sees the rabbits. He is confused, inspired. He climbs out of the cage. More cars enter. They knock into one another. He is feverish, whipping around, counting the cars. The pieces are beginning to make sense…
-Suddenly, a flash of lightning. The Masons enter and engage Corbu in math. They instruct him in space and zoning, and the sequencing of man. FDR arrives on the scene; he levitates and joins the fray. They dance in celebration. The baby child is handed to Corbu. He raises it to the sky. Goebels enters. Corbu says to him: “I will build your city.”
-Crashing video sequence of math. Numbers race across the screen. How many people can fit in a square acre? Corbu does the math. Images of the 3 Million Person city speed across the screen, as well as calculations and the Fibonacci sequence. Shots of a laughing FDR. Dollar bills cross the screen and the pyramid’s eye winks sinisterly. “Novus Ordum Seclorum”= “A new order has begun.” The pyramid uncaps and we are thrust into Hitler’s maw. Screams and smoking bones. “Le Corbusier’s world is the world of the concentration camp.” “Modern construction… robs man of his soul.” Small animated figures are sealed into housing units. Cars fly by on 16-lane highways.
[Onstage below, FDR and Goebels instruct and watch Corbu create a model cruciplex. FDR and Goebels smoke cigars and laugh like dictators, while Corbu, baby strapped to his back, sweats and feverishly assembles and reassembles model to perfection. Corbu awakens from his fever: “The house is a box in the air!”]
-Tempo shift. Infomercial-style live presentation of the modular, between Corbu and lecturer. Sizes and proportions explained. Four brutal axioms and five points of architecture quickly illustrated. Moses and FDR watch along, enjoying what they are hearing.
Testimonial from young idealist urban planner Robert Moses, who steps forward, extremely white bread and self-satisfied: “What Corbu has done here is truly create a housing plan for the 20th century. Homes that are fit to the human body. Open spaces for play. High-density living. Allowances for car and mass-commuting into the heart of the city. All the benefits of the suburbs AND the city. A real understanding of the type of home that the human mind and body desires—today.”
Back to program. Stalin, Mussolini, and Goebels enter onstage. They are pleased. Mussolini proclaims: “I like to go swimming on the roof tops!” Moses is sick to his stomach. Corbu says: “I dedicate the Modular to Authority.” World leaders applaud. Moses is shaken to his core.
Corbusier’s (Jane Jacobs) wife looks on at scene as Richard III and plots revenge. Her hump is labeled “emergence theory.” Brooding music: “Such form as the metropolis achieves is crowdform: the swarming bathing beach by the sea or the body of spectators in the boxing arena or the football stadium. With the increase of private motor cars, the streets and avenues become parking lots, and to move traffic at all, vast expressways gouge through the city and increase the demand for further parking lots and garages. In the act of making the core of the metropolis accessible, the planners of congestion have already almost made it uninhabitable.... "We must restore to the city the maternal, life-nurturing functions, the autonomous activities, the symbiotic associations that have long been neglected or suppressed. For the city should be an organ of love; and the best economy of cities is the care and culture of men.
"The arena, the tall tenement, the mass contests and exhibitions, the football matches, the international beauty contests, the strip tease made ubiquitous by advertisement, the constant titillation of the senses by sex, liquor and violence -- all in true Roman style.... These are symptoms of the end: Magnifications of demoralized power; minifications of life. When these signs multiply, Necropolis is near, though not a stone has yet crumbled. For the barbarian has already captured the city from within. Come, hangman! Come, vulture!”
-Images of flames seizing Europe. Conquest. Onstage, Corbusier and various world leaders are engaged with a giant map and the total replanning of the world. Allies, Axis leaders, and several Free Masons work together on this master plan. Young idealistic planner Moses is sick to his stomach from what he sees. He is feverish. He stumbles forward to find Corbusier’s Masonic baby in a basinet. He holds it forth as a figure of innocence, swallows it whole, and an angelic beam of light strikes his body. He is filled with the life force of a monotheistic deity.
-He begins pounding his fist over and over again, which gradually becomes deafeningly loud. His face turns red.
-Images of people without homes, troops returning from war. Moses weeps. Leaders create Title I housing and sign bills for other government initiatives for urban re-development. Coffers fill. He sees people without homes still. There is no construction. The greedy eyes of Tammany, Stalin, and FDR dart this way and that. The Masonic pyramid explodes with coins. Moses’ anger swells. His pounding grows louder. His body teems with sorrow. There is none of the promised rebuilding and his face contorts with supernatural rage, thick vessels emerging through skin…
-One by one, we see the deaths of FDR, Goebels, Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, and then Le Corbusier drowning. Ferocious other-worldly forces seizing his body, Moses channels the strength of these leaders and, magnificently, Stuyvesant Town rises from the ground.
-Everything relents. Moses is astonished by his power. He is afraid of his power. He looks at his hands in disgust. And then he sees the celebration…
-The people rejoice in a full-out gospel number. Light embraces Moses. The press showers him with praise. “What Robert Moses has done is given parks to the poor people. Communities in which to play.”
-Moses, gives an impromptu speech to the people, some perhaps sung in patter with a refrain like “Trouble.” Stunned by his newfound celebrity, he is charming, but coarse: “Really, you all are very kind but all I’ve created is something completely beholden to logic: You put the people with the people. (applause.) Just as you put the business with the business. (hardier applause.) And you put the industry with the industry and never the twain shall ever fucking meet! (uproarious applause.) Right? I mean why did it take so goddamn long? You should be angry. (smiling.) Tammany and the late FDR would shit their imported French silk pants if they saw us actually building housing with the money allocated for it. You and me, we put the citizens of New York on top of the other citizens of New York, and then the kids of New York have all this room to play in between, to run around. (cheering.) I don’t care where you put ‘em—don’t argue with me—but “parks is good.” Say it with me: “Parks is good.” (they repeat.) You got parks and you got high-density housing for the people. You’ve got it all paid for by the government. And—(smiling broadly.)—I mean, I don’t understand what the blowjob-loving mother-fucking problem is?!? (people go crazy.)
-Jacobs broods in her kitchen. The ghost of FDR visits her; they fornicate in front of her husband and children. FDR is furious because Moses has betrayed him and the intended purpose of mass-scale housing works. Jacobs is furious because Moses is running counter to emergence theory. Government cabal is hatched to dethrone Moses. Mayor Lindsay and a judge enter Jacobs’ kitchen, wringing their hands. They will help take Moses’ power away. All four wring their hands. [The kitchen might only partially viewable from audience and majority of scene is seen from projected live video feed and heavily miced audio.]
-Musical montage [with repeated refrain, sungthrough or dialogue over vamping]:
- More Title 1 housing springs to life. Meanwhile, Moses is dissatisfied with his progress. He works to cultivate more. Images of daisies and butterflies sprouting from its windows and mortar.
-He sees still others are unhappy- those that live in suburbia or with too much room. It is perplexing to him.
-Alone at night, he withdraws from an old filing box Corbu’s models from the TV presentation, as well as a dead rabbit. He blows dust off of both, and pulls out a ruler and a set of electrodes. As he pumps the rabbit full of various voltages, he takes frantic notes. Suddenly, a breakthrough.
-Back on the podium: “Look, Corbusier was a fuck. (cheering.) However—however, right—settle down. Corbusier was a fuck. But he had one thing right: You make people-sized homes and you’ve got happy people. You make a home that’s too big, and you got too much room, you don’t know what to do with yourself. You get depressed. You all know what I’m talking about. You make a home too small: And, well, you’ve got just as bad a problem: clausterphobia, oppression, a general sense of unwellness. But, you make the right home, a human-sized home, and whap bang fuck-your-mother: you’ve got happiness! Now, I don’t know where Le Corbusier got his measurements of how to make the perfect home. What can I say? He was a genius. He was French. To be goddam honest, I never understood a fucking word the man said. But, the one thing he knew about was psychotecture. What’s psychotecture? It’s the, etc…”
The People cheer. The crowd slowly transforms into vaguely religious psychotechture acolytes, hoisting aloft psychotecture slogans and pictures of Moses and of the unite d’habitation. The community board speech evolves into a religious sermon with call and response and wild fervor.
Mose announces he’s decided to create a psychotecture Jerusalem where his theories can be put to the test. Thus, he has begun plans for a Co-op City. His acolytes rejoice. This is the Promised Land. Moses leads them to the plot of land. They enthusiastically begin digging and singing, only to be stopped by the sudden appearance of Mayor Lindsay, Jacobs, a levitating dead FDR, and a judge holding a court order…
-Court scene adapted from The Brothers Karamazov where Jacobs is pitted against Moses. Jacobs explains her thoughts about mixed-use zoning and the space a person needs to live. Moses explains his theory of psychotecture and generally why less space is good for the human being. The judge decides Moses is correct, and then reveals himself to be the Lecturer. He winks, holds up the dead body of the judge who he has apparently killed, and says: “Unlike real life, only history can judge Moses and his accomplishments.” Every laughs. Jubilation.
-Magnificent sequence as Co-op city is assembled onstage and people lock themselves inside. Song delivered by all characters from within their domiciles, subdued and hopeful, singing anthemic number: a rallying cry that we will eventually get the good work of Moses’ done and we will save the world.