Houdini's Premonition
Virtuality and Vaudeville on the Internet

Thyrza Nichols Goodeve 

"Cyberspace is about performance-that's precisely its joy and its problem. . . . 
One has to be malleable and capable of a fluid kind of transformation, 
provoked by interaction, before one gets into the technology."
	-Allucqu¸re Rosanne Stone [1] 

"When I was a kid there was no Future. Struggling through one 
twenty-four hour span was rough enough without 
brooding about the next one. You could laugh about the Past, 
because you'd been lucky enough to survive it. But mainly there 
was only a Present to worry about. "
	-Harpo Marx [2] 

"Here we are a jolly pair!" [3] 
They belt out their line in unison as a voice floats into view and lands near them on stage. It is from The Future, a time when the sudden materialization of the human voice-freed from the body-is an accepted mode of interaction. Clothed in material not yet invented, armed with hardware not yet imagined, The Future calls out to the two men on stage.
The Future: "Yoo Hoo, boys!" 
Weber: "What the. . . ? We may be a colored pair today, an Irish act tomorrow, but believe me, we will never be such a thing as that!" [4].
Weber runs towards The Future and kicks it. The sound of a hard object skidding across the floor, keyboard chattering and hard drive whirring, echoes through the theater. 
The Future: "Say honey, what's the matter? Don't you recognize me?"
Fields, who is tall and bullying (Figs. 1 and 2), grabs the plump, diminutive Weber by the bum and proceeds to slide him along the floor, head over heels, towards The Future. When they arrive at The Future's side, Weber-dangling from Fields's hand-reaches out to The Future in a gesture of contact and conciliation. 
Weber: "I apologize for my rudity." 
At which point Fields drops him on the ground, kicks him in circles, and pokes at his eyes with his fingers. 
Fields: "If I'm cruel to you, it's because I luff you." 
Weber pretends not to hear. He wipes the stage grime from his striped trousers with one hand while the other holds onto The Future. 
Weber: "I ain't gonna let go of ya, chicken. In fact I am delightfulness to meet you." 
Throwing its cabled tresses over its shoulder, The Future purrs, pleased that one of them has finally decided to be welcoming.
The Future: "Now hold on honey and grab your friend, there's something here you guys should see."
At which point her bandwidth opens wide to let them in, and the two vaudevillians-cables knotted about their necks like bow ties-finally take a leap, arm into arm, into The Future. 

Seance and History

"This was the least heralded and in some ways the most important communications revolution in American history. . . . For the rural American . . . the change was crucial. Now he was lifted out of the narrow community of those who saw and knew, and put in continual touch with a larger world of persons and events and things read about but unheard and unseen" [5].

The communications revolution Daniel J. Boorstin is referring to is not the telephone or the radio, and certainly not the Internet, although he could be alluding to any one of these inventions. In fact, the vast change he is speaking about is not even beholden to a new technology (although the railroad did make it possible). He is referring to RFD-Rural Free Delivery-the demand for free postal delivery to the farmer, a revolution successfully completed in 1906. A circuit of information crossing and interconnecting the United States, RFD performed like a pre-fiber-optic link, transforming rural and urban culture into one vast communication system. As Boorstin puts it, "For the first time it was normal for every person in the United States to be accessible by cheap communication" [6].
The same rhetoric, cast as an identical impulse to connect America in all its diversity, is at the root of Internet marketing today (as it has been the basis of telephone, radio, and television advertising throughout the 20th century). Straining against the fragmenting impulse of industrialization, technology offers the promise of reconnection. 
But the point of the brief nod to early 20th century American postal history is to suggest the manner in which the Internet-like so many of the new communications technologies heralded as if fully grown gods sprouting from ahistorical supercomputers-has its precedents. Precedents, as Heidegger has taught us, that aren't even technological.
In fact even before RFD, another popular manifestation-devoid of technological genesis-had crossed and connected the country (although again aided by the railroad and, later, the automobile). Described by Robert W. Snyder as the first "development of American popular culture . . . to erode the local orientation of 19th century audiences and knit them, despite their diversity, into a modern audience" [7], vaudeville was the most popular entertainment, and therefore communications system, in America from the 1880s to the early 1930s [8].
Vaudeville is often remembered as an archetypically antimodern form, dwindling in popularity in the very decade-the 1930s-in which Walter Benjamin wrote his influential essay on the effects of the rise of mechanical reproduction. Historians have been more interested in its roots in 19th century popular entertainments such as medicine shows, minstrelsy, carnival, and spiritualism than in its status as a precursor of 20th century avant-gardism. But, odd as it may sound, vaudeville is actually one of the more profound and unacknowledged precedents for the cyberways of our own virtual culture. In fact, Avital Ronell, great theoro-vaudevillian that she is, puts it this way, "As with most technologies and mind sciences, vaudeville was the research center for communications systems" [9]. Ronell's statement implies that just as William Gibson's cyberspace is a hybrid of past and future-the retro cloth of hard-boiled detective fiction cross-stitched with science fiction-so too the performative genesis of online culture may be found in the roots of a seemingly vanished vernacular form.
Vaudeville and virtuality (used here as a shorthand for online culture) are representative of the ends and beginnings of their respective centuries. Both share a performative ontology rooted in interaction, "live" performance, and variety structure. Through online culture's affinities with turn-of-the-century vaudeville culture, virtuality-too often discussed as merely "new"-is endowed with history. Vaudeville is also rescued from its status as merely a dead entertainment form. This essay might then be characterized as both seance and history lesson. 

Houdini's Premonition
The genesis of the incongruous juxtaposition that gave birth to this essay-virtuality and vaudeville-was actually a quip I made in response to being asked to speak on a panel on performance and technology. Initially a joke-yeah, I'll take the cornball world of turn-of-the-century vaudeville and graft it onto hip cyberspace-it soon blossomed into more than a goofy association. In fact, the connections began to grow and collect, and I found the spirit and imagery of another turn-of-the-century phenomenon beginning to overtake me. Spiritualism's favored tool, reincarnation, was no longer merely a thing of the past. Self-proclaimed New Vaudevillians were appearing on stage in SoHo as a new movement heralded in Backstage [10], while Harry Houdini, perpetual shape-shifter of the original vaudeville, kept materializing before me.
In The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality, Michael Heim discusses a computer program whose purpose is to help you and your computer interact in the creation of an outline. The name of the program is "Houdini." It "focuses on complex relationships that are linked rather than subordinated. Houdini allows you to connect any item to many inputs and many outputs. It fosters many-to-many connections" [11].
On 31 October 1996, the 70th anniversary of his death, a Halloween Houdini Seance was posted on the World Wide Web. It asked "everyone on the Web to attempt to contact Houdini sometime during Halloween for the 24 hours of October 31st. No kooks please, this is a serious test and tribute." Within the 24-hour period, I was on a long-distance connection with a friend in California. We were, in fact, talking about the online Houdini seance when suddenly a voice cut into our conversation. Graced by the airy, uneven tonality of an average cellular phone connection gone awry, the unmistakable voice of a man said, "I'm gonna get out of here." 
Wed as communications technologies are to the occult-the magic of technological cross-connection appearing as if motivated by ghosts and spirits-it is not surprising that online culture has continued the tradition of the seance [12]. Nor that at the moment Houdini was invoked telephonically, some guy would cut in screaming to get out. 
In fact the real Houdini-or better, the one whose body lived from 24 March 1874 to 31 October 1926-yearned for virtual culture. As a world-renowned "escapologist," he spent his entire life learning how to defy physical constraints (Fig. 3). Magic was not his specialty (he actually loathed associations with the supernatural); human will and ingenuity were. If anything, Houdini was a master technician. 
What is it about virtuality that Houdini would have found so comforting? Most likely the same qualities he found liberating about vaudeville culture: the protean nature of identity online; the centrality of interaction and participation; the experience of "live" performance; and the nonlinear format of the variety structure. 

Making It (Identity)
"Vaudeville wasn't just a career or a living, it was a way of life" [13]. In fact, from the 1880s to the early 1930s it was as much an economic road to assimilation for immigrant culture in America as it was an artistic training ground. As the mother of the Marx Brothers put it, "Where else can people who don't know anything make so much money?" [14]. With little social structure, and even less grasp of what it was to be an American at time when the national identity was itself undergoing construction [15], recent immigrants merely needed a boatload of courage and the ability to take their distinguishing features or talents and turn them into a first-rate act. 

"Vaudeville, vaudevillians, and their audience were America in microcosm.  A typical vaudeville audience covered the spectrum of American society. The very nature of vaudeville, where the opportunity was available to rise as far as one's talent and luck could take him, was representative of the American spirit. . . . The individual vaudevillian stood as a prime example of what could be achieved in a land of free enterprise" [16].

For example, in the appendix to Douglas Gilbert's American Vaudeville: Its Life and Times, "Fifty Years of Standard Acts: 1880-1930," the gamut of seemingly unemployable talents ranged from "breakaway ladder act," "electric globe performer," "iron jaw stunt man," and "flirtation dance act," to "duo of female boxers" [17]. In this sense, "the true vaudevillian was a 'character.' It was the essence of his art to create a stage personality so definite, rounded, unique, and so entirely his own, that he would be recognized and hailed whenever he appeared on a stage-in New York or in Kalamazoo" [18]. Vaudeville was the perfect port for the ideology of American individualism to land in. One's ability to devise a profession, and therefore a niche within American culture, was rooted in vaudeville's reputation as a "treasure house of individuality" [19]. Difference-of talent, race, ethnicity, gender, physicality-was precisely what would get you the job. Even scandal-one of the surest roads to celebrity in 20th century America-was good for a week or two at Oscar Hammerstein's sensationally driven Victoria Theater: 

When two attractive girls, Lillian Graham and Ethel Conrad, placed bullets in the leg of W.E.D. Stokes, a social registrate, Hammerstein went [i.e., paid] their bail. While the case was still coining lurid headlines, he billed the ladies at the Victoria as "The Shooting Stars." Their inability to sing, dance, act being highly immaterial, they packed the house to the rafters. Asked what he thought of the ladies' act, noted monologist James Thorton opined, "They'll have to kill someone to get another week" [20].
But making it in vaudeville was not easy. Vaudeville biographies, even of legends such as the Marx Brothers or Milton Berle, are fraught with horror stories of abuse, poverty, unlivable conditions, and exploitation [21]. True success obviously was the result of a performer's ability to transform inauspicious characteristics, remarkable skills, or obsessive interests into a great act. Hungarian immigrant Ehrich Weiss was able to do just this. Not only did he invent a profession, he became one of the mythic figures of the 20th century. His talent? Merely the desire and obsession to undermine locks, handcuffs, restraints, and any other modality of confinement he could find. 
Familiar to us as Houdini's profession of "escapologist" now is, biographer Ruth Brandon suggests that Houdini's quest for escape and disappearance was rooted in a sense of psychological freakishness (Fig. 4). Writing about his two most famous acts, breaking free of handcuffs and "Metamorphosis" (also known as "Substitution Trunk" [22]), she argues that they

"expressed as nothing else expressed, the man himself. When he performed those two stunts, Harry Houdini, like the freaks, was putting his own oddities-his own psychological deformities-on show. He was a performing freak, but a freak nonetheless. He never lost his affinity with these companions of his early days; and at the time of his death, one of the many books he was preparing to write was a book about freaks" [23].

Why did Houdini identify with the odd and the liminal and devote much of his life to an elaborate and mercurial biographical reinvention? Clearly he was never comfortable with who he was, not just as an immigrant and a Jew (and a small-statured man), but as the mythic force of Harry Houdini himself. Or perhaps "comfortable" is the wrong word to use for a man inured to physical pain and discomfort. His identity was driven by a will to escape, so that any definition or imposition of set structure was something to be outwitted. Self-made mutability and shape-shifting trickery were the basis of his creativity-which is one of the reasons Houdini has been such a central "form" in the work of artist Matthew Barney. Barney is a video artist and sculptor who has incorporated Houdini as a formal attribute in his work, from The Jim Otto Suite (1991) to the current sculptural video opera Cremaster 5. While many things about Cremaster 5 allude to Houdini-the setting (Budapest), a manacled bridge-jumping feat, and manacles themselves (Fig. 5)-there is no narrative persona named Houdini present. Like the original Houdini himself, he exists through performance and iconography, triggering Barney's personal and artistic preoccupation with how "Houdini knew how to pick a lock that hadn't even been invented yet. I'm interested in the physical transcendence that kind of discipline proposes" [24]. 
Barney's use of Houdini as an iconographic and physically transcendent inspiration, rather than an actual biographical character, was set up by the "original" Houdini himself, for whom biography was merely a chain to be snapped just like a steel lock. Few facts he told about himself were true. His birthday slipped about from 24 May to 6 April 1874, while his origins went from Budapest to Appleton, Wisconsin, to New York City, to Milwaukee, Wisconsin [25]. As Christopher Stahl puts it, Houdini's mythic production of himself verges on the postmodern: 

"The figure of Houdini is a reproducible, sculptural element that moves within the net of history yet always threatens (or promises to) to slip outside it. Hence myth as content: against the multiple and conflicting versions of him that circulate through the cultural consciousness, a phantasmatic "real" Houdini is idealized and stabilized by the proliferation of (fictitious?) details" [26].

One can see with what ease this utterly self-generating, self-replicating form might lurk about the byways of our contemporary virtual worlds. He was "simulacrating," so to speak, even before cyberspace was a glimmer in 20th century history's eye. At the same time, Houdini was the ultimate representative of vaudeville as a site not just for manipulating the proscenium limits of physical and biographical reality, but for defying them altogether. As Ruth Brandon writes, "Harry Houdini . . . could have flourished in no other milieu than vaudeville" [27].
Vaudeville was therefore where otherwise anomalous identities found a stage upon which to make something of themselves-a quintessential American modus operandi. Yet failure to move from mere oddity into something beyond the everyday-into novelty and entertainment-could literally decide whether one was accepted by America at all: 

"My grandfather, a rabbinical student, told the authorities at Ellis Island that he was a locksmith. Perhaps he thought America was already oversupplied with rabbis. They gave him a lock to pick, and when (being no Houdini) he failed, they sent him back to Europe on the next boat" [28].

Weber and Fields have landed inside the proscenium of The Future's computer screen. Feelings of abundance, variety, and wonder overwhelm them as they begin to knock their heads against the various windows, clicking themselves through cyberspace. Entering a MOO-one of the Internet's text-based virtual worlds [29]-they suddenly start changing form. "I don't feel quite like myself," says the unsure Fields, while Weber, who has been transformed into a sprightly young girl skipping lightly along a sunny sidewalk, disappears around a virtual corner. "Hey," yells Fields as a colorful figure approaches him. "That's not you, Think-A-Drink, is it?!?" A pitcher filled with brilliant hues of yellow and blue fluid bows in recognition. "I wondered when you guys would get here," it says to them, turning a shocking shade of chartreuse.

Being There (Interaction and Intimacy)
Think-A-Drink Hoffman is a minor entry in Anthony Slide's Encyclopedia of Vaudeville. Slide was able to incorporate Think-A-Drink into his history because of a short description he found by the novelist Robert Bloch: "Think-A-Drink Hoffman's act was primarily a patter-and-magic routine built around an old gimmick-a container which pours liquids of several different colors" [30]. Had this incidental sentence not been written down, Think-A-Drink Hoffman might have vanished entirely from modern memory. 
Vaudeville was in this sense archetypically a phenomenon of physical culture and physical presence; utterly dependent upon the presence, proximity, interaction, and memory of physical bodies. As one man put it, "A theater needs to have an atmosphere of friendliness, it must be a place where nothing interferes with the rapport between audience and the stage. It needs the warmth of intimacy" [31]. Although such traits might seem necessary for all theatrical interaction, vaudeville audiences actually "felt that each show was being invented just for them" [32]. In fact, one of the most prized skills a vaudevillian had to learn was the ability to tailor each performance to the specific needs and requirements of a local audience, whether it be the mottled ethnicity of New York City or the white-male homogeneity of a midwestern mining town. As a result of this approach, "audiences sometimes seemed like co-producers of the show" [33].
A similar, but obviously more pronounced, fluidity between audience and performer occurs in the online world, particularly in the highly interactive and generative world of the MOO (Fig. 6). In this sense MOOs can be used as a synecdoche for online interaction itself [34]. The kind of virtual world and interaction they build represents the most extreme tendencies of online interaction itself. Take, for instance, the manner in which online participants, whether literal performers in a MOO or participants in a chat room or bulletin board conversation, merge towards a being that is both audience and actor, character and author. Speaking of the immersive experience of the MOO, Antoinette LaFarge emphasizes the experience of "being part of something larger, inside it, elsewhere," to the point that, "in their profound identification, the performers cross the boundaries between characters, between truth and fiction, between here and there" [35]. Performing in a MOO is an experience where the proscenium has been removed entirely and it is as though the entire physical boundary between audience and performer has been ripped and filled with electronic fluid, allowing the vaudevillian experience to travel into cyberspace. Even though the rough-and-tumble physical comedy of Weber and Fields was prototypical of the kind of kinetic chemistry that made vaudeville popular, MOOs carry on such a sense of interaction with-out physicality, taking interaction out of the restraints of a physical world into virtuality. 

"In one recent performance . . . a character named Candide got knocked off-line, an event much like an actor falling into the orchestra pit. Almost instantly, someone sent the idea up that Candide had been struck by lighting, and the performance incorporated the premise and continued" [36].

Houdini would have been proud, if not green with envy, appreciative as he was of how malleable the human body, and hence physical reality, could be. In fact, he named the youngest member of the vaudeville trio The Three Keatons "Buster" precisely because of the ease with which the little one was bounced and torpedoed about the stage by his father. The child was a "Buster," a little ball of flesh pummeled about as if hardly human. 
In truth, though, it is precisely this live, physicalized experience that proved to be vaudeville's Achilles' heel. The immediacy generated by audience and entertainer resisted reproduction. Indeed, those who experienced vaudeville firsthand recount the memory as though it is a fever passed between audience and performer that can never again to be recaptured:

"I loved it-I miss it-neither film nor TV had the warmth, the excitement, or the life of vaudeville-it moved you with an emotion quite missing in other entertainment-it reached and touched you, individually. And also caught you up in a communal happening-a sharing together of a common wonderful experience. Nothing has taken its place. It moved fast, had a wide range that kept you always absorbed-no act was on long enough so that you lost interest-the evening shifted from excitement to excitement, but on different levels, high comedy, sophistication, slapstick, dancing, singing-sentimental-jazz-acrobats-animals-a panorama that was gorgeous, funny, tearful, each in turn-a kind of entertainment audiences could lose themselves in, individually and collectively" [37].

Such an evening, shifting from excitement to excitement, becomes a living form passing into the audience like a spirit at a seance. The audience and performer are possessed by a "life" that has since passed away (which is why stock images of vaudeville so often come off drenched in maudlin or melancholy). 
In her description of a hypertext MOO (a MOO designed as a set of navigable texts rather than as a virtual world), LaFarge presents us with a vision out of the Terminator movies-of a machine-run post-apocalyptic landscape barren of human interaction: "For anyone accustomed to the liveliness of inhabited MOOs, these MOO hypertexts are eerie places, like cities immediately after some holocaust has wiped out the entire population" [38]. Without "lively" inhabitants to build a MOO-their constant "creation and destruction" ever calling the world into existence-the MOO, like vaudeville, becomes only hollow memory, partial documentation, or (in the case of MOO hypertexts) complex manuscripts. Both traditions demand the "being there" in real time of audience and performer. It is not possible to reproduce either one by documenting or replaying it. "Aura" is no longer a fatality just of the age of mechanical reproduction; electronic culture-generating technologically based auratic experience-contains its own melancholic structures of mourning as well. "Death and mourning are two of the central themes of online theater," although "if the idea of death is permanent [online], death itself is not [since] the dead are easily resurrected" [39]. Such is the boundary that marks the metaphysical difference between physical and virtual culture. While vaudeville staged routines where audience members could pull the switch to an electric chair, setting a flurry of electricity about a forlorn actor-criminal in a staged performance of death (and retribution), virtual culture executes electronic bodies capable of virtual resurrections. 
"Damn," one can hear Houdini say, his envy of virtual culture once again getting the better of him. The proud owner of his very own electric chair, Houdini tried to defy death by taking on the charlatan spiritualists of his time who had promised shamelessly to bring him into contact with his beloved mother after her death; a promise they were unable to fulfill. Nor were his wife Bess and loyal followers able to bring Houdini back in a series of seances held during the 10 years after his death. Except-or so the story goes-for a loud and unexpected thundershower that exploded down upon the participants during the 10th and final public seance. Bess had just asked the world to turn on the lights and accept that Houdini had not come back when an otherwise clear sky broke into a torrential downpour lasting a few minutes. Some believe this was Houdini's way of saying, "I'm here." I like to think it was his way of saying, "Look what I've become." Protean acts were a staple of turn-of-the-century performance, "usually presented by the legitimate stage performers who made multiple costume changes but also built characterizations and presented complete dramatic scenes" [40]. Appearing as a loud and impetuous bundle of outspoken weather, Houdini was merely showing us-once again-his prescient desire for the protean being of virtual culture. 
The sprightly young girl has turned into a squat, hyper-muscled guy. "I can't seem to get the personality right," he says as he tries on another one. "I never did like being such a bully." Suddenly his environment changes and he's lost in a sea of babies. His belly balloons out. "Wow," he says as a slight Austrian accent tumbles from his lips. He strokes his belly and starts pumping babies as if they are dumbbells. A wizard's shape floats in the ether above. It is Fields, bellowing with laughter at what he has made of his friend and partner from the fluid electricity below. 

Doing It (Variety)

"Like vaudeville, online theater lends itself to the extravagant, the absurd, and especially the comic"[41].

In the mid 20th century, the French film theorist Andrˇ Bazin made a famous pronouncement about the "wish" behind narrative cinema. Emphasizing that an idea "invariably precedes the industrial discovery" of any invention, he concluded: 

"The guiding myth, then, inspiring the invention of cinema, is the accomplishment of that which dominated in a more or less vague fashion all the techniques of the mechanical reproduction of reality in the 19th century, from photography to the phonograph, namely an integral realism" [42].

Ironically this very property-realism-wed with a technology of psychological immersion (narrative cinema) is one of the attributes that subsumed vaudeville and led to its demise [43]. Vaudeville-progeny of minstrelsy, the carnival, and the medicine show-was never about mimicking reality but about prodding and making fun of it. Folly, humor, artifice, and naked theatricality were the tools of its trade. Its organizing impulse was not the smooth transitions and unified principles of narrative but the disparate, nonintegrated lunacy of a variety structure. 

1. Dumb act (worst spot).
2. Anything as long as it's better than the first.
3. Wake up audience.
4. Big act-first punch.
5. Big but not too big-get audience buzzing.
	INTERMISSION
6. Sustain attention, but don't make too strong an impact.
7. Main act.
8. Chaser.

As the above list demonstrates, a typical vaudeville bill was structured into eight modular units. Contiguity undeterred by realism or continuity was the basis of the bill's logic. No overriding thematic or structural elements linked the various acts. In fact, each act was to be as different in kind, mood, and quality as possible. President Woodrow Wilson declared that vaudeville's very susceptibility to unevenness was the trait he found most soothing: "I like . . . especially good vaudeville when I am seeking perfect relaxation. . . . If there is a bad act at a vaudeville show, you can rest reasonably secure that the next one may not be so bad; but from a bad play [or film], there is no escape" [44].
So while an "integral realism" dominated the experience of mainstream 
cinema, vaudeville drew its power from what Martin Rubin calls "the Tradition of Spectacle. . . . a primarily nineteenth-century tradition of popular entertainment: the tradition of P.T. Barnum, the minstrel show, vaudeville, the three-ring circus, Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show, burlesque, and the Ziegfield Follies" [45]. Such Traditions of Spectacle engaged the audience through a nonintegrative structure and produced, in Rubin's words, "feelings of abundance, variety, and wonder" [46]. Nonintegrative forms (which Rubin lumps under the term "19th century aggregate forms") were places where "heterogeneity ruled, where as much diversity as possible was included under one roof" [47].
Entering an online server for the first time is a little like entering some wild protean cartoon castle as a child. Doorways abound, opening up to fantastic spaces hardly imaginable. Curiosity and information serve as one's narrative guides. Narrative in a virtual world is up to you and the characters (and corporations) with whom you interact [48]. While this is true of all online interaction-does anyone ever just get to "the," or "a," point online?-it is particularly true of online theater, which, "like a beehive or a mind . . . builds its structure as it goes" [49]. Variety, produced through interaction, is the elixir that keeps your juices flowing. In this sense, heterogeneity-online-is the spice of life.

Main Act: Fantastic Pregnancies 

"The Variety Theater is a school of subtlety, complication, and mental synthesis, in its clowns, magicians, mind readers, brilliant calculators, writers of skits, imitators and parodists, its musical jugglers and eccentric Americans, its fantastic pregnancies that give birth to objects and weird mechanisms" [50].

Before this essay takes on the dimensions of a mind beholden only to virtual culture, let us recall a modernist figure who sensed the elements of a new sensibility on the rise. Speaking as one of a generation "born . . . from electricity," F.T. Marinetti was capable of generating the phenomenon of the "Futurist marvelous" from Variety Theater [51]. In fact, Marinetti's essay "On Variety Theater" (1913) reads like an uncanny modernist preamble to Donna Haraway's "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," although built from the bedrock not of socialist feminism (as Haraway's essay is) but of Variety Theater. Marinetti viewed Variety Theater as an inventive, not regressive, popular form; a modality of the 20th as opposed to the 19th century. "Here are some of the elements of this marvelous:" 

"powerful caricatures; abysses of the ridiculous; delicious, impalpable ironies; . . . cascades of uncontrollable hilarity; profound analogies between humanity, the animal, vegetable and mechanical worlds" [52].

Not to push the analogy too far (as politically Haraway and Marinetti would hardly enjoy the comparison), but Haraway's "Manifesto" sets off from the premise of a blasphemous myth built from irony. And what are the three categories of the cyborg boundary she emphasizes as crossed in the late 20th century? The boundary between human and machine, between organism and machine, and between physical and nonphysical reality (for example, virtuality) [53].
In 1913 Marinetti celebrated Variety Theater for its very ability to construct "profound analogies between humanity, the animal, vegetable, and mechanical worlds." And, as the discussion of Houdini's latent virtuality suggests, the curtain between physical and nonphysical reality was precisely the boundary he himself was attempting to tear open. 
Marinetti saw another aspect of Variety Theater that associates it with the future, "a cumulous of events unfolded at great speed, of stage characters pushed from right to left in two minutes" [54]. Present-day hard drives, built as they are for split-second transformation of information into characters scooting across the screen "from right to left" (but in seconds, not minutes), could only, one imagines, find Marinetti wetting his pants in delight. And seeing how "the Variety Theater is alone in seeking the audience's collaboration," he would have been thrilled by the murky causality of online theater where "each node affects many others more or less simultaneously . . . [and] patterns emerge that could not have been foretold from the individual parts of the system. A flock appears from some birds, but the flock is not deducible from a single bird. The flock is an emergent entity that owes its existence to a web of birds" [55]. Here online theater literally and figuratively instantiates the kind of "theater of amazement . . . and body-madness" that Marinetti, wedding The Future with Variety Theater, was hoping to invent. 
Weber: "Did you feel that?"
Fields: "I figured it was you, bopping me on the head again."
The Future: (giggles)

Chaser (Lounge Theory)
Certainly, virtuality and vaudeville are worlds apart, if not because of the century that separates their births, then certainly through the metaphysical differences that distinguish physical from virtual culture. But there is a shared modality linking these two otherwise divergent worlds, one that Marinetti believed evoked the very future. In this sense, computer hardware may just be the most suitable place for Think-A-Drink Hoffman to finally make a return as the flow of information is drawn across the proscenium of cyberspace and a button-click forces the electronic liquid to flow while Houdini jumps through his virtual straightjackets and Weber and Fields become online MOO performers conking one another on their virtual heads. 
Then again, there's another way to look at it. Consider the phenomenon of theoreticians of virtual culture as lounge performers decked out in gold lamˇ blazers with mirrored lapels, preferring to engage their audience with song under spotlight. Witness Mr. Simulacrum himself (Jean Baudrillard) on break from his rendezvous on-stage with a rock band while Alluqu¸re Rosanne Stone-wonder woman of virtual systems and the "protean act" of transgender identity-performs in a desert outside of Las Vegas. An image of The Future tapping her way, theoretically, to the tune of a vaudeville routine:

"The lights dim for transsexual professor Allucqu¸re Rosanne Stone's way-off Broadway performance theory. . . . The highlights of the performance are its low-ball moments-rewritings of "I Get a Kick out of You" and "The Lady is a Tramp," thoroughly vamped and camped up by Stone, whose booming recalls Ethel Merman. Cole Porter's classic is recast as a love song to guest of honor Jean Baudrillard, becoming "I Get a Kick out of Jean B." which, while failing to scan, gets many laughs and embarrasses the pants off Jean B. himself, who is trapped in his seat near the stage by a hot spotlight. Turning the spot back on herself, Stone subverts the ultra hep and undeniably het Sinatra standard by singing "That's why the Lady is a Trans" to the delight of all repressed gender-benders in the audience. 'This is new, I think to myself-lounge theory'" [56].

Weber: "This is new?" 
Fields (tapping his foot): "Yeah, they call it Lounge Theory. It sounds delightfulness to me!"
At which point Weber and Fields jump up, grab Baudrillard, and throw him back on-stage with Stone. The four start poking at one another's eyes, chasing and bopping each other about. The Future looks on, content and amused. "Let's all join in," she says as the room begins to swirl with movement and shapes. A figure appears from out of the ether; it is Marinetti holding up a large card from which he reads: "In every way encourage the type of the eccentric American," at which Baudrillard lets out a crass, Frenchified whoop. Unbemused by the upstart, Marinetti continues to read from his plaque: "The impression he gives of exciting grotesquerie, of frightening dynamism; his crude jokes, his enormous brutalities, his trick weskits and pants as deep as a ship's hold out of which, with a thousand other things, will come..."-at which point a knock is heard, and stepping out from the text appears Houdini, "the great Futurist hilarity that should make the world's face young again" [57]. 

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Heather Wagner and the Blast collective (New York), Martha Wilson at Franklin Furnace (New York), and Jennifer Riddell and the MIT List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge, Mass.) for the opportunity to present versions of this paper. Special thanks to Antoinette LaFarge and Henry Jenkins for their comments.
I would also like to thank Pernille Albrethsen, Jayetta Benefield-Slawson, Cornelia Cody, Dwandalyn Reece King, Robin Maltz, Ronalda Nicholas-Frazier, Michael Simon, Christopher Stahl, and William Sweeney, the graduate students with whom I explored vaudeville as a vernacular American modality in my class, "Popular Performance and the Fine Arts: From Vaudeville to Matthew Barney," at New York University, Department of Performance Studies, Spring 1997.

References and Notes
1. Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, "Just Like a Goddess: A Conversation with Allucqu¸re Rosanne Stone," Artforum, September 
1995, p. 83.
2. John E. DiMeglio, Vaudeville U.S.A. (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1973), p. 59. 
3. (Joseph) Weber (1877-1942) and (Lew) Fields (1867-1941) invented knockabout physical comedy and excelled in the corny joke, e.g., "Who is that lady I saw you with last night?" "She ain't no lady; she's my wife." I have used some of their original lines throughout this text. See Anthony Slide, The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994), pp. 539-543.
4. They were known for changing the ethnicity of their act depending upon the context. As biographer Felix Isman wrote, "They fit any figure, as did the second-hand suits in the Broadway schlockshops." Slide [3] p. 539.
5. Daniel J. Boorstin, "Citifying the Country," in The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Vintage Press, 1973) pp. 132-33.
6. Boorstin [5] p. 133. 
7. Robert W. Snyder, "Vaudeville and the Transformation of Popular Culture," in William R. Taylor, ed., Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1991) p. 133. 
8. Historians disagree on when exactly to chart the beginning and end of vaudeville proper. But it is by the 1880s that vaudeville, under the tutelage of "Father of Vaudeville" Tony Pastor, had become an American institution. In the 1860s Pastor began to develop and popularize middle class "vaudeville" (using the name for the first time in 1876), transforming it into a respectable popular entertainment from its roots in the exclusively male saloon culture of "variety." In effect, Pastor replaced "variety" with the more legitimate and bourgeois-sounding "vaudeville." The end of vaudeville proper (but not as a modality that continued into the era of radio and TV) is generally agreed to be in 1932, when the Palace (at Broadway and 47th Street in New York), premiere big-time vaudeville house, ceased presenting vaudeville on a regular basis, switching to film. Although vaudeville continued to be presented on and off in between film screenings throughout the early 1930s, the Palace became mostly a motion picture house by 1934. In 1951 Judy Garland made her famous come-back on the Palace stage. For a discussion of the genteel origins of the word "vaudeville," see Douglas Gilbert, American Vaudeville: Its Life and Times (New York: Dover Publications, 1940), p. 20; Charles W. Stein, ed., American Vaudeville as Seen by Its Contemporaries (New York: Knopf, 1984), pp. 3-5; and Robert W. Snyder, The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) p. 12. 
9. Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989) p. 365. 
10. "For These Performers, Variety Is the Spice of Life," Backstage, February 7-13, 1997.
11. Michael Heim, The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) pp. 50-51.
12. Ronell [9].
13. June Havoc, quoted in DiMeglio [2] p. 55.
14. Quoted in Snyder [8] p. 46.
15. See, for instance, the literature on the 1893 Chicago Colombian Exposition: 
Neil Harris, Wim de Wit, James Gilbert, and Robert W. Rydell, eds., Grand Illusions: Chicago's World's Fair of 1893 (Chicago, IL: Chicago Historical Society, 1993); Robert Rydell, All the World's a Fair (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1984); Revisiting the White City: American Art at the 1893 World's Fair (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute, 1993).
16. DiMeglio [2] p. 2.
17. Gilbert [8] Appendix, p. 395-410.
18. DiMeglio [2] p. 41.
19. DiMeglio [2] p. 5.
20. Abel Green and Joe Laurie, Jr., Show Biz from Vaude to Video (New York: Holt, 1951) p. 18.
21. DiMeglio [2] p. 59. See also Groucho Marx's memoir Groucho and Me (New York: Dell, 1959); Milton Berle with Haskel Frenkel, Milton Berle: An Autobiography (New York: Delacorte Press, 1974); Fred Allen, Much Ado About Me (Boston: Little, Brown, 1956); Eddie Cantor, As I Remember Them (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1963).
22. "Metamorphosis" was the name Houdini preferred for this illusion of instantaneous substitution. The trick consisted of a shackled Houdini slipping into a sack that was then tied at the top. The shackled and ensacked Houdini was then locked into a trunk that was itself bound with chains and placed behind a screen. The partner then stepped behind the screen and within seconds an utterly unshackled Houdini appeared and removed the screen to draw his now shackled partner from the sealed trunk and sack in which he himself had been only seconds before.
23. Ruth Brandon: The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini, (New York: Kodansha International, 1993) p. 59.
24. See my "Travels in Hypertrophia: A Conversation with Matthew Barney," Artforum, May 1995; "Matthew Barney 95: Suspension (cremaster) Secretion (pearl) Secret (biology)," in Parkett 45 (November 1995), as well as my "Recitative (Hunchback), Aria (Houdini), Ensemble" in the book version of Matthew Barney's  Cremaster 5 (New York: Barbara Gladstone Gallery, 1997).
25. Christopher Stahl, "Escaping Fate: Magic, Form, and Matthew Barney." Unpublished seminar paper, New York University, Spring 1997.
26. Stahl [25] p. 5.
27. Brandon [23] p. 105. 
28. Brandon [23] p. 9.
29. MOO is a recursive acronym; it stands for MUD object-oriented as MOOs are object-oriented programming environments. (MUD stands for multi-user dimension or multi-user dungeon.) Both MOOS and MUDs are online virtual worlds, but MUDs are usually set up as highly structured role-playing games, while MOOs are more open role-playing environments.
30. Slide [3] p. 496.
31. Max Gordon, quoted in DiMeglio 
[2] p. 29. 
32. Snyder [7] p. 134.
33. Snyder [8] pp. xv, 6.
34. I take this device from Avital Ronell, who used the telephone as a synecdoche for her study of technology. See Ronell [9] p. 20.
35. Antoinette LaFarge, "Did Anyone Bring a Word or an Ax: Towards an Id Theater." Paper presented at College Art Association Conference, New York, February 1997.
36. LaFarge [35].
37. Florence Sintow, quoted in Robert Snyder [8] p. 146. This memory was recounted in 1984-the signature moment of George Orwell's now classic dystopia as well a founding moment in virtual culture. In that same year, William Gibson's cyberpunk novel Neuromancer was published and Donna Haraway wrote "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" (see note 53 below).
38. Antoinette LaFarge, "A World Exhilarating and Wrong: Theatrical Improvisation on the Internet," 
Leonardo 28, No. 5, 416 (1995). In this essay LaFarge lists vaudeville as one of the traditions from which online theater draws. She is interested specifically in the linguistic territory of malapropism and comic language that the two traditions share.
39. LaFarge [35].
40. Slide [3] p. 407.
41. LaFarge [38] p. 418.
42. Andrˇ Bazin, "The Myth of Total Cinema," in What Is Cinema?, Vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) p. 21.
43. For an excellent discussion of vaudeville's impact on early film comedy and narrative structures, particularly in terms of the "vaudeville aesthetic" (Ch. 3) and as a "specific performance tradition" (p. 60), see Henry Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts? Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). Also Robert Allen's dissertation Vaudeville and Film: 1895-1915 (New York: Arno Press, 1980).
44. Epigraph to Slide [3]. Originally printed in The New York Dramatic Mirror, 20 January 1915.
45. Martin Rubin, Showstoppers: Busby Berkeley and the Tradition of Spectacle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) p. 4. 
46. Rubin [45] pp. 12-13. He is speaking of the musical genre in particular, which he describes as structured by the "shifting and volatile dialectic between integrative and non-integrative elements." 
47. Rubin [45] p. 14. 
48. Online servers like America Online (AOL) serve much the same purpose as vaudeville circuits once did. Vaudeville was a business first and foremost. In the 1890s, a group known as the "Syndicate" began to control vaudeville through the booking of shows in theaters all across America. B.F. Keith and Edward Albee (estranged adoptive father of the playwright), in the form of the hugely powerful Keith-Albee circuit, controlled big-time vaudeville nationwide by the 1920s. 
49. LaFarge [35].
50. F.T. Marinetti, "The Variety Theater," in R.W. Flint, ed., Collected Writings of Marinetti (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1971) p. 118.
51. As Henry Jenkins reminded me when I gave a version of this talk at the MIT List Center in February 1997, Marinetti was not the only figure who appreciated vaudeville's modern appeal. After all, Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's revolutionary theory of the "montage of attractions" was inspired by his work in burlesque and popular theater; see S. Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, Jay Leyda, ed. and trans. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949). In an American context, both Gilbert Seldes, in The Seven Lively Arts (New York: Samore Press, 1924), and Edmund Wilson championed vaudeville as an important popular art even as it was vanishing. Yet it is Marinetti's particular formulation of variety theater's "Futurism" that links it most overtly to current online culture. 
52. Marinetti [50] p. 117.
53. Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto" in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).
54. Haraway [53] p. 117.
55. LaFarge [35].
56. Andrew Hultkrans, "Gadget Love: On Three Days in the Desert," Artforum, January 1997, p. 21.
57. Marinetti [50] p. 121.

Thyrza Nichols Goodeve is a writer who lives in Brooklyn Heights, New York. Her essays and interviews on contemporary art and technology have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, and Parkett. She is a senior instructor at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York City.