We Want Your Stories!

Hi Friends of The Civilians,

Our “Let Me Ascertain You” series returns to Joe’s Pub on Saturday, May 17^th at 7pm. We’re hoping you can help us with our next installment: “F*cking and Dying.”

If you didn’t notice, we’re a bit obsessed with sex and death at The Civilians and this cabaret explores what happens when those fixations collide. We will look at the duality of human nature and our competing sex and death drives - our instinct for life, love and reproduction against our instinct toward death, aggression, and repulsion...and we need your stories!

If any of you or anyone you know might have good stories about sex or death or tales where the two collide -- please send details our way!

We’re looking to hear stories about…

- Wild coming-of-age sex stories or sexual explorations

- Sex addiction or Nyphomania

- Auto-erotic fetishes

- Dominatrix work

- “Terror sex” following disaster or trauma

- Sexual encounters near or connected to dying, funerals

...or of course necrophilia 

Please send us a brief summary of your story or shoot any questions you might have to projectmanager@thecivilians.org and if we think your story might work for us, we’ll be in touch about setting up an interview. Any and all leads are helpful. We’re looking forward to hearing your stories. For more information click here. 

Yours,

The Civilians

Photo Credit: Antoine D'Agata 

INSIDE LOOK: Death Project 2013 Investigation: Crime Scene Cleanup

Our Artistic Project Manager, Meridith Friedman, recently spoke with Doug Baruchin, owner of Island Trauma Services, a New York based Crime Scene Cleanup Company. With over 25 years of experience, the staff of ITS are experts in Crime Scene and Trauma Scene Cleanup Service. You can find out more about Island Trauma Services, Inc. HERE.

"We usually know what happened. Um, we'll get a call saying, oh this was a homicide,  and sometimes I'll look on the internet to find out, ok, homicide in Queens or Brooklyn or New York City, just so I have an idea of what I'm going to see before I walk in. Because no matter how many times I do this, walking across a threshold every time is a little bit of like, you know, what am I going to see. 

I remember the first one that I did was an elderly man. He was about 78 years old, and he put a pillow in front of his face and shot himself on Easter. And I remember thinking, you know, my God this is what you hear about. Suicide rates increase around the holidays. And I remember seeing this scene, and this poor man who was alone, I don't know why he was sad, maybe he lost somebody, but it got me. That I took home with me. 

I do know that New Yorkers, especially Manhattanites, are very resilient. And very, I can handle this. I've had several people come into the scene with me in New York City. Other people, “I can't go in that room; I don't want to be reminded.” Some New Yorkers I found were very curious, even about somebody they were related to. “So this is where they died, what is this stuff?” This is a conversation I never want to have with somebody. “Oh, this is, you know, probably his blood, this is where his head was.” 

Doug with a fellow ITS technician

I look at the people in Newtown, and how they all came together and supported each other and that's just...beyond anything I've ever done. We actually did call the school to offer to go up there and help them out for free, because it's just, you know, anything you can do to help somebody like that get back together is a huge thing. One of the hardest things to do is to move past what happened while everything is still there. You'll never go into that bedroom again and look at it the same way, but until it's at the very least cleared out, you can't really move past anything."

Thanks Doug and Meridith for sharing! Check back here every Thursday for a look inside our investigation into death, dying and the afterlife in NY. Stay tuned for details on a June performance date!

INSIDE LOOK: Death Project 2013 Investigation: New York City Ghost Bike Project

We’re doing an exciting investigation into death, dying and the afterlife in NYC for our next project this season. Our team is interviewing tons of amazing people with various spiritual, cultural, professional, and personal perspectives. We want to share our investigative process with you, so every Thursday check here for a glimpse into the worlds we’re entering and the people we're interviewing.

Our Associate Artistic Director Ian recently interviewed Jessie Singer, founding member of the New York City Ghost Bike Project, to learn more about bicyclists killed on our streets. Check out that project HERE

 

Here’s a glimpse of what Jessie had to say: 

“A woman named Brandie Bailey was killed on Houston Street and we painted this bike and locked it up on the street and we all looked at each other and said “Holy crap let's never do this again.” Then the next week after that, a block away, a young man named Andrew Ross Morgan was killed on Houston Street again so we built another bike and then we couldn't stop. It became as much a burden as it was, you know, our gift in a way. I've never had anything in my life to force me to think about strangers so much. People you would never meet. To spend so much time with their deaths and therefore their lives and their families, um, which has become a big part of the project. I think it was Brandie Bailey's sister who contacted us and said “I was able to take my parents. My parents came to the city to clean out Brandie's apartment, and I told them that this bike was there. They said before that they would never go to the crash site, that they would never go anywhere near that block ever again.” And this made them feel like they could go there and they could have a moment and put down flowers and spend time with this space where their loved one had died which otherwise would've been kind of sullied. It was dirtied before and now it was a space for them maybe...maybe it was a little reclaimed.”

"Death is something that is out there, sure, but the only thing that matters is what you do when you're living and what I do when I'm living is helping these people that have to deal with death. The process of memorializing is a process of memory but it's a process for the living. This is not a stairway to heaven. It's for the people who are still here who still have work to do, good to do, hopefully, or at least bad to correct. The vast majority of these deaths are preventable. They are caused by someone doing the wrong thing, someone is driving carelessly or irresponsibly or dangerously or drunk or on their phone. That's not an accident, that's an intentional decision that killed somebody. If anything the goal in all of this talking about death is to actually talk about, like, doing better in life...creating that new culture of respecting each other so people aren't dying like this or at the very least if they are dying then people are taking the time to remember that some terrible shit happened on that street corner."

Please donate to the Ghost Bike Project HERE

And join them for their 8th Annual Memorial Ride on April 21st. 

Photos from www.facebook.com/NYCGhostBikes

Egypt and PARIS COMMUNE

The three-weeks of protests in Egypt connected to the decades-old dictatorship of President Hosni Mubarak were finally successful today, ending with President Mubarak stepping down and passing authority to a "council of military leaders." (more info in the Times HERE).

Here are two interesting blog discussions of the current revolution in Egypt as compared to the 1871 uprising in Paris (explored in The Civilians' PARIS COMMUNE).

Cairo 2011, Paris 1871: The Uses and Misuses of History
and 
Going Viral, Paris Commune-Style: Egypt Uses Old Tools to Spark New Revolution

Here's a quick excerpt from PARIS COMMUNE:
LOUISE

Citizens! Power shared is true freedom. It is time that fraternity replaces charity, and federation replaces hierarchy! If I were the only person saying all this, people could say that I was a pathological case.  But there are thousands of us now, millions, none of whom gives a damn about authority. You see? Do you see?! It’s a simple thing. Don’t beg for your place in the world, take it!