What I liked
When he touched my face. Only mine. Like being touched by Jesus.
What I didn't like
That there are no more performances, meaning you, dear reader are shit out of luck.. but don’t worry, I think CATS is streaming somewhere, and can leave you with a similar sense of dumbstruck awe. GOD, I LOVED THIS EXPERIENCE!! (just figured a show this unhinged and unorthodox deserved an equally unhinged and unorthodox review)
My overall impression
All cards on the table… who doesn’t want to be the love child of Jim Morrison, Lin Manuel Miranda, Trent Reznor and Allen Ginsberg? Who doesn’t want to throw out the window whatever conventional one-act they’ve written with it’s pesky characters and story, and instead just go out on a stage and rant into a mic one’s original heightened poetics, a song of frustration with this fallen country, with suburbia, with Time, with the ghost of lost Love, and CREPES and turn it into an experience that pisses in the face of all convention? This is the kind of shit that I could imagine doing when I was 19 years old when I was fully loaded with enough combustible teen angst to power a Pearl Jam tourbus cross-country, but lacked any kind of courage to do so. In fact, though I’ve written poetry, I don’t think I’ve ever been in possession of enough confidence to perform a ANYTHING like this, a blitzkrieg so wretched up from the Primordial Id as to be almost incomprehensible and yet you can FEEL it…? How??? Is it his muffled rapid-fire rhymes broken only by jarring moments of wispy romantic sentiment – a heart trying to break through the chaos? Is it the relentlessly pertinent political projections, the Lou Reed cooing off-key to mind-numbing hipster beats which created such an intoxicating atmosphere for us all – to the point where I am thumping my foot and banging my head along with the insanity? So unique… So specific.. i kept thinking throughout that an artist would really need to be FEELING himself in order to pull this wild fuckery off, which Travyz clearly is… The show is a hot mess of awesome fearlessness. It’s a boil on your genitals that somehow turns you on. It’s a maniacal exercise in intellectual sabotage, with Travyz cackling madly under his unruly flop of black hair (god that bitch has great hair) It’s a tarantula in your beer. A mortifying hoax of pure authenticity.. because rest assured Travyz is not faking it. He has always been who he is. This is why we love him. To anyone who would call this show a primo act of pretension, I would ask two questions A) “even if true, how would that detract from this diabolical spectacle” and.. B) “would YOU have the courage to let your own freak flag fly so high and proud without giving one single shit?” The answer to both is NO. The rest of us are cowards. Make no mistake, Gatzby Is. the very FRINGE of the Fringe…
You have to be there in order to understand.. and then you still might not understand, but you still have to be there. Respect.
