Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Monday, May 28, 2007
The Theatre, The Theatre - What's Happened to the -
Stephen Leigh Morris of the LA Weekly explains it all for you in American Theater's Failure of Nerve.
Overheard conversation in a Palo Alto cafe:
(two women, ages 55 - 65)
A: I saw that play - Homebody/Kabul just before I left.
B: What did you think of it?
A: I didn't- I didn't think it was successful.
B: But they go to Afghanistan- This woman?
A: Right. You never know whether she dies or disappears or...you know, pulls a Kurtz.
B: Arrogant, naive Westerners flying themselves headlong into something they know nothing about.
A: Reminded me of a Paul Bowles novel. The Sheltering Sky? But I have to tell you about the play. Well- it was nearly four hours long! If you're Shakespeare-
B: Or Mozart-
A: Right. Anybody else- forget it. You don't get to write four hour plays
If you want to see an exercise in recycling, just turn to the regional theater openings announced in American Theatre Magazine. To watch the majority of new plays in the established venues of New York and around the country is to hunger for the kind of electrical charge that, in their times, made Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee and August Wilson the buzz of America’s coffee shops, cocktail parties and subway lines. Their plays, frequently denounced by critics and audiences, were indispensable to the lifeblood of the culture and its conversations. For that same vitality today, we turn not to the theater but to TV, to the likes of Jon Stewart, George Clooney and Oprah, who, under the weight of colossal commercial pressures, show far more bravery than most of our institutional theaters. The underlying causes of the blandness in our theater are more nuanced than the obvious “commercial pressures” that everyone talks about. Compounding the problem is an identity crisis. Theater gets so little respect because it has so little self-respect.N.B. - another fine read: Playwrights' Theatre? by George Hunka. Why fine? Because I agree with him! Subjectivity noted.
8/1/03
Overheard conversation in a Palo Alto cafe:
(two women, ages 55 - 65)
A: I saw that play - Homebody/Kabul just before I left.
B: What did you think of it?
A: I didn't- I didn't think it was successful.
B: But they go to Afghanistan- This woman?
A: Right. You never know whether she dies or disappears or...you know, pulls a Kurtz.
B: Arrogant, naive Westerners flying themselves headlong into something they know nothing about.
A: Reminded me of a Paul Bowles novel. The Sheltering Sky? But I have to tell you about the play. Well- it was nearly four hours long! If you're Shakespeare-
B: Or Mozart-
A: Right. Anybody else- forget it. You don't get to write four hour plays
Version X
I think that most people, myself included, are most comfortable conceptually living about ten years back from whatever point in time we've reached. And I think we all have these moments that are vertiginous and terribly exciting and very frightening in which we realize the contemporary. Absolutely. And I think it induces terror and ecstasy and we retreat from it because we can't stay in that state of panic which I think is the real response to what's happening to us. We're more comfortable with an earlier version of who we were and what we were. It makes us feel more in control. - William Gibson, No Maps to the Territories
Friday, May 25, 2007
Got Answers?
What is the “right thing” to do?
If we just leave, will the average Iraqi citizens be safer?
I don’t know.
Would Iran meddle with things?
I don’t know.
Would the Sunni/Shia conflicts be settled or turn into all out Civil War?
I don’t know.
This is just the start of my questions.
Read the rest here.
Found via The Center for Improved Living. The soldier answered the May 24th question for the day "What do you REALLY want to do today? "over at CFIL, replying "I wish I could be home eating ice cream with my wife and daughter...I'm sick of Iraq. "
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Gimme Gilmore
Lorelai: (next to the oven) Hey, did anyone ever think that maybe Sylvia Plath wasn't crazy, she was just cold?
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
1001 Nights Cast
Monday, May 14, 2007
From Mother's Day Past
5/4/01
We've lived in our little house a year now. The creek rushes by behind our heads as we sleep. We weren't swept away by floods this past winter, so life is good. You can hear the owls call to each other at night and during the day the peregrines swoop down the creek path to their nests. It gives me a big whooping rush to see them.
Tonight I was waiting outside the Exit Theater nursing Carter and a pimp gave me a dollar for Mother's Day. "Are you a mother?" (like why would I be nursing this kid?) Anyway, he handed me a dollar before he was chased away by Meredith. "Man, I'm just trying to do a good thing on Mother's Day." I bought myself a cup of coffee.
We've lived in our little house a year now. The creek rushes by behind our heads as we sleep. We weren't swept away by floods this past winter, so life is good. You can hear the owls call to each other at night and during the day the peregrines swoop down the creek path to their nests. It gives me a big whooping rush to see them.
Tonight I was waiting outside the Exit Theater nursing Carter and a pimp gave me a dollar for Mother's Day. "Are you a mother?" (like why would I be nursing this kid?) Anyway, he handed me a dollar before he was chased away by Meredith. "Man, I'm just trying to do a good thing on Mother's Day." I bought myself a cup of coffee.
Get A Plan
My Mother's Day present yesterday, in addition to this groovy, love inspired bag
from my son, was a couple of hours of cafe time to write. Which I did. I worked on my thesis (that damned black cloud that hovers reminding, haunting, annoying, identifying as incomplete, marking as unfulfilled--worse than King Hamlet's ghost!). Actually it's not that bad - I'm only struggling to get it written in the snippets of time available at the moment. In fact, I spent last week making a chart of those such times (I'm bad with time and need the visual). Is that an act of desperation? It felt like I was being productive.
Frankly, I feel like Jane Austen. Not that I have to hide my writing in my needlework or under the desk blotter, but that I have to steal little moments throughout the day to get down a line or two of anything. What am I thinking trying to write seven scripts? Well- why not? Of course, I see the obvious, if time is so short, why am I blogging? Instant gratification. Community. Time to stretch out my brain and figure out what's going on with me (ooh, that sounds so crunchy).
See, before I had kids, I split my time working in/on my massage practice, rehearsing, and writing. In between clients, I had a time to write in my notebooks (I follow the Nathalie Goldberg practice of trying to fill a notebook a month with writing. Well, I used to follow that practice). I find this kind of extended pen to paper writing yields unexpected results, opens my writing up in ways that working on the computer doesn't. Plus, the act of spending 4 - 6 hours a day in a meditative state doing massage also tapped into a creative source that fed my work. Both practices became severely curtailed after my first son was born. The birth of each child has put more limits on the amount of time I can write. But I agree with Malachy and his Coppola theory, my time may be limited, but that limitation has made me a better writer. The process has become more distilled with the arrival of each child. And perhaps I need to write seven scripts right now because of the urgency I feel to make sense of the world, to put things in perspective for myself and for them. Oh, and there's making a living at it. But one thing at a time, eh?
That's where the plan comes in. Visuals again. And I've been inspired by these posts and am convinced I just need a plan. So in addition to working on my thesis yesterday, I began formulating a writing plan for each play. I'm still working on that. Plus I belong to the Playwright's Center and get two nice emails each week of all the grants and theater companies looking for submissions. Every week I find a few that interest me. I need to create a list of those so I can keep track of them. These mental notes are getting too long to maintain.
I know these lists work. I did it a couple of years ago for my screenplay - created a list of 20 producers, 20 production companies that might be interested in my script, 20 agents, 20 screenplay contests, etc. It may seem far away from the art part of writing, but I found that by looking at the work of these companies, it helped me understand my screenplay better and to identify the ways in which my script fell short. It helps me with rewrites. I don't feel like I'm trying to fit a mold, but trying to emulate work I genuinely admire. Semantics are important.
I must stop.
from my son, was a couple of hours of cafe time to write. Which I did. I worked on my thesis (that damned black cloud that hovers reminding, haunting, annoying, identifying as incomplete, marking as unfulfilled--worse than King Hamlet's ghost!). Actually it's not that bad - I'm only struggling to get it written in the snippets of time available at the moment. In fact, I spent last week making a chart of those such times (I'm bad with time and need the visual). Is that an act of desperation? It felt like I was being productive.Frankly, I feel like Jane Austen. Not that I have to hide my writing in my needlework or under the desk blotter, but that I have to steal little moments throughout the day to get down a line or two of anything. What am I thinking trying to write seven scripts? Well- why not? Of course, I see the obvious, if time is so short, why am I blogging? Instant gratification. Community. Time to stretch out my brain and figure out what's going on with me (ooh, that sounds so crunchy).
See, before I had kids, I split my time working in/on my massage practice, rehearsing, and writing. In between clients, I had a time to write in my notebooks (I follow the Nathalie Goldberg practice of trying to fill a notebook a month with writing. Well, I used to follow that practice). I find this kind of extended pen to paper writing yields unexpected results, opens my writing up in ways that working on the computer doesn't. Plus, the act of spending 4 - 6 hours a day in a meditative state doing massage also tapped into a creative source that fed my work. Both practices became severely curtailed after my first son was born. The birth of each child has put more limits on the amount of time I can write. But I agree with Malachy and his Coppola theory, my time may be limited, but that limitation has made me a better writer. The process has become more distilled with the arrival of each child. And perhaps I need to write seven scripts right now because of the urgency I feel to make sense of the world, to put things in perspective for myself and for them. Oh, and there's making a living at it. But one thing at a time, eh?
That's where the plan comes in. Visuals again. And I've been inspired by these posts and am convinced I just need a plan. So in addition to working on my thesis yesterday, I began formulating a writing plan for each play. I'm still working on that. Plus I belong to the Playwright's Center and get two nice emails each week of all the grants and theater companies looking for submissions. Every week I find a few that interest me. I need to create a list of those so I can keep track of them. These mental notes are getting too long to maintain.
I know these lists work. I did it a couple of years ago for my screenplay - created a list of 20 producers, 20 production companies that might be interested in my script, 20 agents, 20 screenplay contests, etc. It may seem far away from the art part of writing, but I found that by looking at the work of these companies, it helped me understand my screenplay better and to identify the ways in which my script fell short. It helps me with rewrites. I don't feel like I'm trying to fit a mold, but trying to emulate work I genuinely admire. Semantics are important.
I must stop.
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Creating New Work
Too often people think of art as whim and fancy. It is more akin to law. It is an intellectual virtue and a knowledge of how things are done. In the artistic process, you are seeking the definitive choice where there could be no other. Beethoven said, "I don't write what I want to write, I write what I should."
When you are building a house, you don't want to walk to the bathroom when you open the front door. So too in constructing a ballet - there is logic and a lot of thought. Dance is thought made visible as music is thought made audible. Because ultimately it is the communication of ideas, you want clear thought.
Art is informed by science and the laws that permeate nature. The distinct difference between science and art is the approach. The artist's approach is from the inside and the scientific approach is from the outside. The artist must fully realize what is being communicated, not intellectually, but by becoming it. It is through the atoms that things are truly understood. - Alonzo King, Artistic Director, LINES Contemporary Ballet
Friday, May 11, 2007
Perspective
Artist Chris Jordan's American Self-Portrait features photographs of plastic bottles, handguns, pain killers, the daily amount of money our government spends on Iraq, and more. Check it out here.
106,000 aluminum cans. How much we use in the US every thirty seconds.
Partial zoom:
Actual size:
Thanks again to T.
106,000 aluminum cans. How much we use in the US every thirty seconds.
Partial zoom:
Actual size:
Thanks again to T.Wednesday, May 02, 2007
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