Thursday, June 14, 2007

Bigfoot sighting/avant-garde play in Germany

I don't want to bury the lede, so here it is, the Bigfoot photo. The legendary hominid was captured on film, earlier this month, by a South End man hiking in New Hampshire's Franconia Notch State Park:

It actually looks more like a Skunk Ape, now that I think of it -- but they're only seen in the Everglades, I believe. Or could this be more evidence of global warming: charismatic mega-fauna cryptids migrating north? Anyway, I will alert the proper authorities.

I was particularly excited to see that the cryptid in question was sporting an orange Hermenaut T-shirt. (Look just south of its distorted, hairy visage and you'll see the telltale rocket ship logo.) Hermenaut was an independent philosophy/pop culture magazine that I published in the 1990s, and it's nice to know who our readers were. Even if they turn out to have been quasi-mythical hominids.

I coined the term "hermenaut" for the magazine's title, and always hoped it would catch on as a neologism, meaning something like: an intrepid discover-creator of meaning; a funambulistic interpreter of all sorts of texts, working without a net; 'a traveler in search of signification,' as I put it when Scott McLemee profiled the journal for Lingua Franca. So of course I was very excited to hear that MIT theater prof and avant-garde theater director Jay Scheib is directing a play, right now, in Germany... about "hermenauts."

The play -- or, rather, the Science Fiction Opera Saga, of which "4 Hermenauten" is the "pilot episode" (the pilot is made up of four short chamber operas) -- is called "Kommander Kobayashi." Here's a production still:

Composed by Moritz Eggert, Aleksandra Gryka, Ricardas Kabelis, Juha Koskinen, and Helmut Oehring, and directed by Jay Scheib, it premiered in Saarbruecken on June 7. I believe it ends this weekend. Here's all I know: "Five Hermenauts racing away from a mission that went very very wrong -- and racing headlong, into the jaws of a new mission (about which we have little information, except the aching premonition that it's gonna go bad bad bad...)" Sounds just like publishing an independent magazine!

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 12:59 PM

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