Temporal Distributed Network of Public Open Space

September 21, 2007.
Park(ing) Day.
Celebrate it.
Read more about it here and here.

My Own Private Australia

C: Mom, do they have bad days in Australia?
E: What do you mean by bad days? Does it rain there? I'm sure it does.
C: No. Bad days. Do they have bad days in Australia?
E: Honey, I don't know what you mean by bad days. Could you explain?
C: Well. Do they have days when you get up and you feel bad? You think your friends don't like you and you can't think of anything fun to do?
E: Oh. Yeah. I'm pretty sure they have bad days in Australia.
C: (sigh)
E: Were you thinking of moving to Australia?
C: Yeah. I want to move to there.
E: I was thinking of moving there too.
C: Why? Are you having a bad day?

Mink Thinking Out Loud

Interesting thoughts on one of my favorite topics - Space.

Vlatka Horvat (Introducing Vlatka Horvat)

Richard Foreman's Strong Medicine

November 25, 1981
RICHARD FOREMAN'S 'STRONG MEDICINE'
By VINCENT CANBY
The New York Times

RHODA, a slender, pale woman in a sensible dress and sensible shoes, is in a state. To describe her as being extremely upset would be an understatement, much like a psychiatrist's saying that someone who is in the process of committing suicide is suffering an anxiety attack. Slang is more accurate. Rhoda is very nearly out of her wig, though her hair is apparently her own.

The movie is here, right here.

Interview: Simon McBurney & Nitin Sawhney

Here.

Marathon

Don't believe the hype. You don't have to make a tremendous impact in your first year as a writer. Matt Damon's and Ben Affleck's Good Will Hunting was five years in the making. Tom Schulman's Dead Poet's Society was ten. Billy Bob Thornton spent nineteen years in the wilderness to get to Sling Blade. Notice a pattern? The Greeks wish they had a mythology as elaborate as our star-studded, gold-paved Hollywood myths of instant success. There is the fantasy of Hollywood and there is the reality of Hollywood. In other words, don't mistake Hollywood sizzle for steak. The reality of Hollywood requires patience and hard work. Lots of your favorite films were more than a decade in the making. On the real road to fame and riches, there are many, many potholes, and much rejection in them there Hollywood Hills, so much so, that I decided to include the section at the front of my book, just so you'll think about this reality as you read the rest of the tips I share. Literally hundreds of people will say no, in the form of nondecisions and passes, for every one that says yes on your project. But even one "yes" can make for a successful career. Often luck happens when preparation meets opportunity.

Some of the best advice I received came early in my career from Emmy Award-winning writer Cynthia Cidre (Mambo Kings) who has spent more than twenty years in this business. She recommended the following Hollywood timetable: "Five years for overnight success and ten years to have a career." - Michael Lent, Breakfast with Sharks

Gonzo Journalism

As this honest man was casting his eye round the house, his attention was suddenly arrested. And pray, who are these? said he, pointing to a cluster of young fellows. These, I suppose, are the critics, of whom I have heard so much. They have, no doubt, got together to communicate their remarks, and compare notes; these are the persons through whom the audience exercise their judgments, and by whom they are told when they are to applaud or to hiss. Critics! ha! ha! my dear sir, they trouble themselves as little about the elements of criticism, as they do about other departments of science and belles-lettres. These are the beaux of the present day, who meet here to lounge away an idle hour, and play off their little impertinences for the entertainment of the public. They no more regard the merits of the play, nor the actors, than my cane. They even strive to appear inattentive; and I have seen one of them perched on the front of the box with his back to the stage, sucking the head of his stick, and staring vacantly at the audience, insensible to the most interesting specimens of scenic representation, though the tear of sensibility was trembling in every eye around him. I have heard that some have even gone so far in search of amusement, as to propose a game of cards in the theatre, during the performance. The eyes of my neighbour sparkled at this information - his cane shook in his hand - the word puppies burst from his lips. Nay, says I, I don't give this for absolute fact: my cousin Jack was, I believe, quizzing me (as he terms it) when he gave me the information.

- Jonathan Oldstyle (Washington Irving), The Morning Chronicle, 1801

"Say," he said, "you look like you might be in the horse business...am I right?"

"No," I said. "I'm a photographer."

"Oh yeah?" He eyed my ragged leather bag with new interest. "Is that what you got there--cameras? Who you work for?"

"Playboy," I said.

He laughed. "Well, goddam! What are you gonna take pictures of--nekkid horses? Haw! I guess you'll be workin' pretty hard when they run the Kentucky Oaks. That's a race just for fillies." He was laughing wildly. "Hell yes! And they'll all be nekkid too!"

I shook my head and said nothing; just stared at him for a moment, trying to look grim. "There's going to be trouble," I said. "My assignment is to take pictures of the riot."

"What riot?"

I hesitated, twirling the ice in my drink. "At the track. On Derby Day. The Black Panthers." I stared at him again. "Don't you read the newspapers?"

The grin on his face had collapsed. "What the hell are you talkin' about?"

"Well...maybe I shouldn't be telling you..." I shrugged. "But hell, everybody else seems to know. The cops and the National Guard have been getting ready for six weeks. They have 20,000 troops on alert at Fort Knox. They've warned us--all the press and photographers--to wear helmets and special vests like flak jackets. We were told to expect shooting..."

"No!" he shouted; his hands flew up and hovered momentarily between us, as if to ward off the words he was hearing. Then he whacked his fist on the bar. "Those sons of bitches! God Almighty! The Kentucky Derby!" He kept shaking his head. "No! Jesus! That's almost too bad to believe!" Now he seemed to be sagging on the stool, and when he looked up his eyes were misty. "Why? Why here? Don't they respect anything?"

- The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, Hunter S. Thompson, (originally published in Scanlan's Monthly, vol. 1, no. 4, June 1970), reprinted in The Great Shark Hunt, Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1, Strange Tales from a Strange Time, 1979.

Creating Positive Online Communities

Someone gets nasty, in a comment or post -- maybe personally insulting or unjustly accusatory toward you or another community member. Almost immediately someone else takes offense, and lashes back on your site. Then more people join the fray from all sides, flaming each other brutally. Comment threads overflow with vitriol.

Distressed loyal community member start crying out -- on the site and via e-mail -- for you, the site manager, to stop the brawl and make the creeps shut up. Their concern is well-founded: When online communities get overrun by hostile posts, it has a chilling effect on all other conversation. If this happens too often, it can kill a community.

Is there a better way to ruin any online community manager's day?

The bad news is this: These kinds of problems are inevitable, at least occasionally, on any site where open discussion is allowed. The more controversial your site's content, the more frequently you'll have to battle flame wars. In short, if you allow discussion, you can bet that a fight will break out sometime.

The good news? There are many things you can do to cultivate a positive, constructive online community where vitriolic outbreaks are relatively rare, short-lived, and easy to handle.

A list of 12 tips can be found here. As a fellow playwrighting pal of mine would say, there's something about the power 12.

Port Huron Project: Staging Yesterday's Protests Today

And interesting performance/protest intervention:

...if you had wandered into this spectacle on Thursday evening, you would have found yourself not exactly in the midst of an actual protest but somewhere slightly removed, in the disorienting territory where art meets political engagement.

The firebrand orator was Max Bunzel, a 23-year-old actor from New York, juggling the role between movie auditions — for a fee, although he said that the speech, originally delivered by Paul Potter, the president of Students for a Democratic Society, during the 1965 march on Washington, genuinely moved and affected him. Most of the college-age spectators gathered there in a clutch were fully aware they were witnessing art, but by the end they also seemed not to be simply playing along but to be genuinely engaged by Mr. Potter’s arguments.

Mark Tribe, an artist and assistant professor of modern culture and media studies at Brown University, has organized a series of such re-enactments at sites where important speeches of the New Left originally took place, and he says his intention was precisely to create such a strange cultural and political straddle. The goal was to use the speeches not just as historical ready-mades or conceptual-art explorations of context, he said, but also maybe as a genuine form of protest, to point out with the help of art how much has changed, yet how much remains the same.

Or, in Mr. Tribe’s view, has grown worse since the era when Mr. Potter urged his listeners, with characteristic 1960s deconstructionist fervor, to “name the system” that allowed the Vietnam War to happen.

“Forty years has elapsed,” Mr. Tribe said, “and the system that Paul Potter talked about has gotten so much more sophisticated. The military-industrial complex or capitalism or whatever you want to call it has globalized and intensified.”

The speech by Mr. Potter (who died several years ago) is the third so far in what Mr. Tribe calls the Port Huron Project, named after the New Left manifesto. The first, performed last summer in Central Park, was a re-enactment of a 1968 speech by Coretta Scott King, and the second, this month on Boston Common, was a reprise of a speech given in 1971 by the activist Howard Zinn urging widespread civil disobedience. Creative Time, the New York public-art organization, has agreed to help produce three more speeches next year.

The project fits into a growing subgenre of historical re-enactment as performance art. (read the rest here)

Of course. It's on Youtube. Or go here to read more about the project and to see the complete video.

Project 1: Until the Gun is Silent


Project 2: The Problem is Civil Disobedience


Project 3: We Must Name the System

Let the Dog Drive*

I'm breaking the seal on the August blogging moratorium. I'm not procrastinating by posting this, I'm relieving pressure, and feeling nostalgic, and to be quite honest - a bit down. I've been feeling very isolated lately - artistically and personally. The personal part has never really bothered me much before (or if it does, only sporadically), I guess because I've reached a state of acceptance about it and also, because I had the artistic thing going with the theater company so both needs were served. At any rate, as a remedy, I'm going to post.

So.

In June, I read And Then, You Act. If anyone is keeping score, I said I would reread the book and post about it the second time through. Instead I've been obsessing about a couple of chapters - Intention and Attitude. Starting with Intention (30 - 50).

Who Are Your Colleagues?
Look around you right now and see who is there.

These particular people around you at present are the key. They are your collaborators for now.

They will serve as mirror, engine, necessary resistance, and your inspiration. They are your material and your means. With them, you begin to generate work. Without them, you are nothing.

(How can you go wrong with a girl in a party hat?)

In the process of working with these people in your present circumstance, you will meet other people, and the circle around you will expand, alter, and redefine itself again and again.

The temptation to wait until the perfect situation and the right people are in place before you make your best effort is simply avoidance.


Do not wait. Your dedication to the given circumstances, right now, will eventually bring you closer to others who share your own belief and commitment. If you do not commit fully to the people with you now, like-minded others will never show up.

Learn to love, admire, respect, and appreciate the people with whom you work. These colleagues, partners, and coworkers provide the necessary keys to your own development and growth. An attitude of respect will prevent the specter of neediness from raising its ugly head. Neediness is never attractive and rarely productive. - Anne Bogart, And Then, You Act

Okay. So maybe Anne's not being literal when she says to look around you right now. Or maybe she is. Either way, this is what my territory looks like. And that's not even considering the construction going on in my house.

Regardless. This is a difficult statement to come to terms with. I think one of the most challenging things about being in a theater company is wrapping your head around this one. At one point or another it comes up. How you deal with it determines the direction of the company.

It also comes up when working on a single production. There's always someone who treats the group as if they're doing everyone a huge favor just by walking through the door. Usually late. This person creates huge drag. And drag asserts itself upon the group in insidious ways. Scenes for some reason are difficult to stage. It's hard to keep momentum going during rehearsal. Yes. Because a huge black hole has opened itself up and is sucking the entire creative process into its deadly maw. But I' m getting off topic - into Attitude, yes? I think these two things - Intention and Attitude - are linked. But it's not my intention to go there today.

I went to a talk-back with Paula Vogel at Berkeley Rep when they produced How I Learn To Drive. She talked about finding your people. The people - five at the most - who are your collaborators. For years, I've been trying to cultivate that group of people. But it's a difficult thing. Because while you may recognize those elements that make a person your ideal collaborator - the feeling may not be reciprocated. Rejection must surely figure prominently in the heartbreak that Ariane Mnouchkine talks about when she discusses working with her company. It hurts when people leave you. It hurts when people reject what you have to offer.
But like any relationship, risking rejection is necessary. How else will you find your people?

That's tricky. Maybe you have to work with a lot of people and get rejected over and over again. Maybe it's like Stephen King's rejection nail in On Writing, you just have to keep slamming them on there. Each one gets you closer to yes. Or maybe you toss in the towel on the whole thing and when people stop smelling your desperation maybe they can bring themselves to stand a little closer to you. Or maybe you don't focus on the rejection or the potential rejection. Instead you focus on what's in front of you. Which is the work - Jetzt fängt die Arbeit an, as George would have it.

Bob: It gets a whole lot more complicated when you have kids.
Charlotte: It's scary.
Bob: The most terrifying day of your life is the day the first one is born.
Charlotte: Nobody ever tells you that.
Bob: Your life, as you know it... is gone, never to return. But they learn how to walk, and they learn how to talk and you want to be with them. And they turn out to be the most delightful people you will ever meet in your life.

- Lost in Translation, Soffia Coppola

The work for this particular writer and director must also be balanced with motherhood. My kids are my collaborators in a very essential way. Probably the most challenging people I've worked with in my life. Yes. They provide that necessary resistance. But they've also exposed my own. My resistance to going with the flow - following their rhythms, not mine own. My resistance to being constricted in terms of time - with each child the time I have to myself has gotten less and less. I mean it should be obvious, right?

So what's up with the resistance? I've been thinking about this for several years - since my daughter started walking. I've been watching how she sits, stands, walks, and changes direction She can squat for an endless amount of time on her little legs, then spring up and run off without so much as a huff of effort or apparent discomfort. I've been studying Suzuki for ten years and so these particular movements are of great interest to me. Around the same time, I saw the Grand Kabuki Theater of Japan (stick with me, I really am going somewhere).

I was watching Bo Shibari (Tied to a Pole), a kyogen comedy, about two servants who whilst - you guessed it - tied to a pole manage to get into their master's sake - hilarity ensues. The piece showcased the two actor's (Nakamura Kanjaku and Nakamura Kikaku) agility and versatility. I could see some of the same movements that we do in Suzuki marches and walks - side kicks, brushing the floor with the feet, stamping, and squatting - all done with ease and grace and humor. So I asked myself why I put so much effort into Suzuki? Or more precisely, why so much effort into making it look difficult? If you take as a given that it is hard, why show the difficulty? Why waste time showing how hard you have to work? Is this effort useful? Is it entertaining or enlightening in anyway? To anyone? It's not like I hadn't been told this before. But observing my daughter and watching the performance demonstrated the concept.

Another example. A friend of ours died recently. He went to bed and never woke up. So far the doctors have been unable to determine the cause of death. He was reasonably healthy and in good shape. He just didn't wake up. His wife went into the bedroom eventually and found him. I can't begin to imagine what the loss must be like. But here's the thing - whatever private agony she's going through, she is still happy and breezy and engaged. And not in a soldiering-through-it-so-that-we-all-feel sorry-for-her way. She's just navigating through her given circumstances with grace and ease. I'd like to get myself to a place where I could have that kind of equanimity.

This resistance to the given circumstances, to the necessary resistance of one's life or one's art is an ineffective use of energy. It undermines your intentions. So just stop it, 'kay? I'm having a hard time doing that lately and I'm trying to find my way through this, trying to let go, stay present, and allow my collaborators to lead. Like I have a choice.

* By David Bowman

As we transform from a culture of homogeneous authority (where people could talk about good with relative comfort) to one of jangling diversity, the vocabulary of critical distance and journalistic objectivity has lost ground to that of personal essay, confession, memoir and the performance art of punditry. Whether we respond to art in print or conversation, we face the challenge of constructing an “I” that reveals and questions itself as it goes – monitoring the place of perception in the formation of judgment – while remaining humble. In other words, the responder’s “I,” written or spoken, must never mistake itself for the subject, that is, the work of art being examined. - Todd London

Missing Anne Braden

Deep Ecology & Postmodernity:

Making space for conversation / Chris Drinkwater

Remove the world around the struggles, keep only conflict and debates, dense with men, purified of things, you will have the theatrical stage, most narratives and philosophies, all of the social sciences: the interesting spectacle we refer to as "cultural". Whoever says where the master and the slave are struggling?

Our culture cannot stand the world. - Michel Serres

Let me state as bluntly as I can the oppositions with which I shall be working. The following are some deep ecological assumptions:

1. That things, somehow, have meaning in themselves (i.e., intrinsic meaning).

2. That things matter in and for themselves (i.e., intrinsic value).

3. That things are connected, in a whole, of which 'we' are inextricably a part.

4. That others (human and non-human, organic and inorganic) are absolutely Other from the apprehending human subject, in a way that resists any explanation, measurement or commentary.

5. That our knowledge of the above brings us face to face with our absolute ignorance and our mortality. Through such encounters with limits, human beings can begin to acknowledge the non-human in ways that resist the latter's reduction to the status of resource.Some countervailing assumptions of postmodern cultural analysis would be:
   

1. That nothing, neither word not thing, has meaning in itself. Meaning arises out of the play of difference between inherently unstable signs. Meaning is shot through with ambiguity .
2. That what matters and what doesn't matter is (over)determined within the field of power-discourse-knowledge.
3. That everything is connected and falls apart in the same moment. Postmodern cultural analysis as a critical practice uses the imbrication of things in order to lend itself to their falling apart (that is, to the deconstruction of universal constructs, fixities of meaning, reifications).
4. That alterity is a mark of discourse, an excess, that arises out of the necessary limits of language.
5. That knowledge claims are always situated and provisional, marks of social construction, rather than of representation, with no central agency. We would do well to admit this state of contingency, as a great deal of human injustice, as well as misplaced hopes, have arisen out of beliefs in, and claims to, Truth that may be accessed by language, but is independent of language. There is nothing mysterious about this impossibility of an original ground of truth. It is simply a corollary of our involvement in the field of discourse. From this point of view, claims such as the one above, about confrontation with absolute ignorance and mortality, are liable to sound rather grandiose. They may threaten a repetition of religious expectations, of salvation even in finitude. They sustain the belief that there is something we are ignorant of. The whole sense of postmodernity is that there is no such 'thing'.

Fish! They are so water-colored!

- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I hear beyond the range of sound,

I see beyond the range of sight,

New earths and skies and seas around,

And in my day the sun doth pale his light.

A clear and ancient harmony

Pierces my soul through all its din,

As through its utmost melody--

Farther behind than they, farther within.

- Thoreau, Inspiration

A human being is part of the whole called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and for affection to a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole Nature in its beauty. - Einstein

Thank God!

The British, Chinese, and United States Governments have given the Japanese people adequate warning of what is in store for them. We have laid down the general terms on which they can surrender. Our warning went unheeded; our terms were rejected. Since then the Japanese have seen what our atomic bomb can do. They can foresee what it will do in the future.

The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians. But that attack is only a warning of things to come. If Japan does not surrender, bombs will have to be dropped on her war industries and, unfortunately, thousands of civilian lives will be lost. I urge Japanese civilians to leave industrial cities immediately, and save themselves from destruction.

I realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb.

Its production and its use were not lightly undertaken by this Government. But we knew that our enemies were on the search for it. We know now how close they were to finding it. And we knew the disaster which would come to this Nation, and to all peace-loving nations, to all civilization, if they had found it first.

That is why we felt compelled to undertake the long and uncertain and costly labor of discovery and production.

We won the race of discovery against the Germans.

Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.

We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan's power to make war. Only a Japanese surrender will stop us.

The atomic bomb is too dangerous to be loose in a lawless world. That is why Great Britain, Canada, and the United States, who have the secret of its production, do not intend to reveal that secret until means have been found to control the bomb so as to protect ourselves and the rest of the world from the danger of total destruction.

As far back as last May, Secretary of War Stimson, at my suggestion, appointed a committee upon which Secretary of State Byrnes served as my personal representative, to prepare plans for the future control of this bomb. I shall ask the Congress to cooperate to the end that its production and use be controlled, and that its power be made an overwhelming influence towards world peace.

We must constitute ourselves trustees of this new force--to prevent its misuse, and to turn it into the channels of service to mankind.

It is an awful responsibility which has come to us.

We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes. - Harry S. Truman

Read the rest here.

The Worst of It

Confronting creationists and scriptural literalists, it’s hard not to rub it in. If you want to believe that the earth is four thousand years old or that angels hover over Knoxville on warm summer nights, God bless you, that’s what freedom’s for. But when Christian troglodytes obstruct education, vandalize basic science, and humiliate craven politicians already dancing like organ grinders’ monkeys to please Wall Street and its media, enough is enough, and it was enough in 1925. Some of us, without much luck, are trying to have a civilization here. It’s an uphill struggle, and a lot of you aren’t pulling your weight.

When the South is safe for Darwin, maybe that’s when we can begin to boast. (Read more here.)

The basic premise of my reviews is that all theatre – from burlesque, ballet, farce and musical comedy to high tragedy – has human significance. The job of the theatre critic is first of all to determine what the human significance of a particular play or performance is. In doing this he evaluates it. Every play or performance has a certain quality of “weight” of life in it. The critic must try to define its essence and place it in some personal or traditional scale of values which the reader in his turn is permitted to judge. - Harold Clurman

The Other Leg

The Enlightenment is essentially what I left home looking for, and I found it. I’m pro-choice, in favor of gay marriage, and against creationism and the war in Iraq. But I spent a little over a third of my life, including the presumably most formative years, living in the South. Mathematically, that makes me just about exactly as Southern as the American people, thirty-four percent of whom are Southern residents. Both sides of my family have been Southern for generations, I sound Southern, and when my local paper in Massachusetts announces a festival to “celebrate the spirit of differently-abled dogs,” I react as a Southerner: I believe I care as much about dogs’ feelings as anybody, but I can’t imagine that a dog with three legs minds being called, with all due respect, a three-legged dog.

I believe in the Enlightenment, I just don’t believe it covers everything. I don’t believe it would cover everything even if everybody believed in it. And not everybody does. May I repeat: Different people hold different truths to be self-evident. (Read more here.)

Keepin' It Real

Lee: You always work by candlelight?
Austin: No-uh-Not always.
Lee: Just sometimes?
Austin: (puts pen down, rubs his eyes) Yeah. Sometimes it's soothing.
Lee: Isn't that what the old guys did?
Austin: What old guys?
Lee: The Forefathers. You know.
Austin: Forefathers?
Lee: Isn't that what they did? Candlelight burning into the night? Cabins in the wilderness?
Austin: (rubs hand through his hair) I suppose.
Lee: I'm not botherin' you am I? I mean I don't wanna break into yer uh- concentration or nothin'.
Austin: No, it's all right.
Lee: That's good. I mean I realize that yer line a' work demands a lot of concentration.
Austin: It's okay.
Lee: You probably think that I'm not fully able to comprehend somethin' like that, huh?
Austin: Like what?
Lee: That stuff yer doin'. That art. You know. Whatever you call it.
Austin: It's just a little research.
Lee: You may not know this but I did a little art myself once.
Austin: You did?
Lee: Yeah! I did some a' that. I fooled around with it. No future in it.
Austin: What'd you do?
Lee: Never mind what I did! Just never mind about that. (pause)
It was ahead of its time. - Sam Shepard, True West

Criticism only consistently changes the critic – whether further narrowing views of the art policemen, or incrementally expanding the horizons of the open-minded thinker. - Matthew Ghoulish

Brilliant

Theatrical Entropy Part 1
The New Testaments Toward Theatre