You're in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down-

Oh.

Oh.

Oh.

Just watch.



The rest is here.

via Adrian McKinty via The Dad Department

5 Things: Sources of Inspiration Edition

• Raimund Hoghe: in conversation with Lili Chopra.
• Cormac McCarthy's Paradox of Choice: One Writer, Ten Novels, and a Career-Long Obsession. (thank you, JW)
• The Art of Theatre #4. Paris Review Interview with Edward Albee (1966).
• Death is Not the End/David Foster Wallace: His Legacy and his Critics.
• This is Water. (Recording of David Foster Wallace's Kenyan College Speech
• Bonus #1. Rumpus Power Point Interview with Jennifer Egan. Full interview here.
• Bonus #2. The Limits of Control, James Franco.
  

Boy Meets Girl Structure Slightly Twisted

Bill Monroe: Bluegrass Music Documentary

and it cuts off and I can't find the rest. But well...

Big List: Take It to the Bank Edition

This is the most devastating artwork/performance I've seen in a long time. It eloquently captures something that, for me, is still beyond words.

Lost It, video still

Still photos: James Pepper Kelly

The work is by Liz Magic Laser (isn't that a kick-ass name? Liz, I mean.) and she currently has an exhibit based on Brecht's Man Equals Man at the Derek Eller Gallery in NYC. LML originally staged the play at ATM vestibules inside banks throughout the city, then videotaped each actor's performance. The exhibit includes the video that cuts together those performances, some ephemera, and a theater stage (that was used for the opening night live performance of The Elephant Calf).

chase, Liz Magic Laser, Derek Eller Gallery, May 21 - June 26.

Sam Winston/Authorship

Romeo and Juliet collages. Made by cutting up Shakespeare's play and arranging all the words into three categories: Passion, rage, indifference.

Indifference text

Folded Dictionary
Pretty self explanatory, eh?

Folded Dictionary

Here's a talk Mr. Winston gave about authorship and the creative process.

It's Nice That Talk #16 – Sam Winston from It's Nice That on Vimeo.

Mr. Bill Monroe: Wayfaring Stranger

A few weeks ago I was in the DC area and was telling a couple of friends about the play I'm working on. One friend said the story makes him think of Bluegrass because of how soulful and mournful it is (inspired by old Scottish and Irish ballads and gospel, blues and jazz). Bluegrass deals with the supernatural - ghost stories or stories of obsessive love and death and weird transformations (The Wind and Rain), or spiritual enlightenment or release from the body and material concerns. And so now: the obsession with Bluegrass.

When the writing process is working for me, I'm getting all kind of these little gifts and they end up either solving problems with a play I'm working on or taking me deeper into the story (usually the latter, well okay: both, often both). I'm always so grateful for these unexpected sources of inspiration and to those lovely people who inspire me.

Get to Work

Theatre artists who seek to stay visible in this profession should realize that the experiment starts in yourself. You have to ask the necessary questions: Why are you in the theatre? What does it mean to be in the theatre? Art has no age. You stretch every time you do art, regardless of how old you are. You can be very old, even though you are twenty years old, and you can be alive and young at seventy years old. If you are ready to do this very hard work, then go do it - or maybe you should choose something else. - Valery Fokin, Artistic director, Meyhold Center

David Byrne Ted Talk: How Architecture Helped Music Evolve

Who's That Writing?

I've been listening to City of Refuge performed by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, but can't find a reasonable video on youtube. If you're curious though check it out here.

Stop, Stop, Don't Let's Start: The Madness

I found this post by Laura yesterday (not sure how I missed it before) and it touches on the thing that has been gnawing at me for the past several months. She talks about leaving theater and about discovering that she can come back to playwrighting without engaging with what she labels the American Institutional Theater System, what I call Standard Theater Operating Procedure or STOP (I think, at one point, I called SOTP, but STOP is much more catchy don'cha think?). She writes:

I also figured out that I can write them [her plays] on my own terms. I don’t have to indulge in the American Institutional Theater System. I don’t have to stuff an envelope and mail my work (with a $15 check) to a bunch of strangers. I don’t have to work with directors who have no idea how to work with me. I don’t have to discuss what’s wrong with theater to a point where I’ve forgotten what I like about it.

My only responsibility is to write.

This is what I've spent the last 4-5 years doing and this process has paid off in my writing. I have to keep reminding myself that now. Because for the past few months (and for the first time in 4 years), my process has felt completely wrong, completely fucked, and completely compromised.

It's one thing to go off and write on your own terms. It's another to re-engage with the system. Especially to re-engage before you've completed the work you set out to do. And that, I think is my problem now. The process is compromised because I compromised it. I sold it out before I saw it through. And there is huge remorse and an enormous sense of violation. So if you set off in a direction outside of the AIST/STOP, stay on the path. Don't let anyone divert your purpose.

Wonder what the decisional regret vector on this looks like? I suspect it points directly down or else it's a slow, torturous incline.

Maybe we need to start a support group for playwrights who just want to write.

Big List: East Coast/West Coast Time-based Edition

Belmont Stakes @ Belmont Park, NY. Looking forward to watching Ice Box run. Yah. This is me picking the horse this time.



whiteonwhite:algorithmicthriller [beta version], eve sussman & rufus corporation @ The Museum of Modern Art, NYC, June 6. Q + A with the artists @ 6:30pm



Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams, Renée Green @ YBCA, through June 20.





Florian Hecker & New Humans @ YBCA, Jun 19.



Listen to a few New Humans sound compositions here. My fav? Drone. Just wipes the slate clean. Aaah. Bliss me out.

Writing with The Absentee on Repeat