Monthly Archives: August 2008

art, quotes, writing

No – never.

Ethel. And do you think you will never be able to paint as well as M. Delaroche?
Clive. No – never.
Ethel. And – and – you will never give up painting?
Clive. No – never. That would be like leaving your friend who was poor; or deserting your mistress because you were disappointed about her money. They do those things in the great world, Ethel.
Ethel (with a sigh). Yes.

– W. M. Thackeray, THE NEWCOMES

Chapter 47, in the heart of THE NEWCOMES, which “Contains two or three acts of a little comedy,” is almost entirely done like a play, in dialogue. It was my favorite portion of the entire book. The lovers have escaped from the watchful chaperones and from the author’s digressive narrative, for a very short time. And it was in this chapter, where Ethel asks Clive if he can’t leave art to do something more respectable, something at which he might actually excel, that Clive stands up for himself. He’s not a very good painter, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to quit painting, either. I respected him much more after that.

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politics, Uncategorized

beyond the palin

My roommate and I woke up this morning and discussed Sarah Palin for an hour. When I returned to the Internet, I found some context in an Alaskan perspective on Palin, from the Mudflats Alaska politics blog. (A fellow WordPresser.) The full post is very informative, and goes into a lot more details on the Wooten ethics scandal, among other things. Here’s a sample:

Before her meteoric rise to political success as governor, just two short years ago Sarah Palin was the mayor of Wasilla. I had a good chuckle at MSN.com’s claim that she had been the mayor of “Wasilla City”. It is not a city. Just Wasilla. Wasilla is the heart of the Alaska “Bible belt” and Sarah was raised amongst the tribe that believes creationism should be taught in our public schools, homosexuality is a sin, and life begins at conception. She’s a gun-toting, hang ‘em high conservative. Remember…this is where her approval ratings come from. There is no doubt that McCain again is making a strategic choice to appeal to a particular demographic – fundamentalist right-wing gun-owning Christians. And Republican bloggers are already gushing about how she has ‘more executive experience’ than Obama does! Above is a picture of lovely downtown Wasilla, for those of you unfamiliar with the area. Behind the Mug-Shot Saloon (the first bar I visited when I moved to Alaska long ago) is a little strip mall. There are street signs in Wasilla with bullet holes in them. Wasilla has a population of about 5500 people, and 1979 occupied housing units. This is where your potential Vice President was two short years ago. Can you imagine her negotiating a nuclear non-proliferation treaty? Discussing foreign policy? Understanding non-Alaskan issues?

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location, music, travel

co-wabolabr-ator

Last night I went to the Montrose Saloon, which has been a Chicago venue for beer and music for over 100 years, to hear my roommate Angela’s old-time string band WABOLABR play. (I know what the name means, but then I’d have to kill you.)

I joined Janna, who’s just relocated to Chicago from SF, an actress and improvisor. We met through friends of friends at a reading at the Goodman. We ate chicken, rice, and beans from next door, drank Old Style (regrettable, but a necessary experiment) and talked about the unlikely, fortuitous journeys that have brought us here.

I am another version of her, or she is of me. She got into town a week before I did. We both have 415 area codes, professional links to TJT and the 16th Street Theater, and took extended Amtrak train trips along the way. And we both agreed that this city has all the resources, artistic generosity, and open spirit you could possibly ask for. Listening to ourselves and asking what would make us most happy and fulfilled, as artists and as people, is what has brought us to Illinois.

I knew it was a trend, coming here, but I didn’t realize how much of one it was. Janna’s profile as a person is very similar to mine, and we’ve taken many paths next to each other, and now we’re both here. This is exciting. It means the collaborators I’ve been looking for are looking for me, too. There have been times in my artistic career where I’ve been afraid of finding my doppelganger, thinking that she, whoever she is, is going to take “the spot” designated for me. That comes from a more competitive point of view. My doppelganger, today, would want to work with me, because that’s all I want to do. And if she’s out there, I hope she contacts me soon. The idea is really appealing. The pie of artistic collaboration is not limited to a certain number of slices. The more you eat, the more there is.

It was the first time I’ve really gone out just to enjoy myself in Chicago, and it was wonderful. The band’s voices echoed like Superballs. I walked Janna to the train station and we felt the windy chatter of the trees and air around us. The air moves so much here that you can’t walk down a street in silence, even when there are no people around – the trees are always, always talking.

I think what they might be saying now is, “Autumn is coming.”

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a propos of nothing, quotes

wholesome discipline

Ere long, I had reason to congratulate myself on the course of wholesome discipline to which I had thus forced my feelings to submit: thanks to it, I was able to meet subsequent occurrences with a decent calm; which, had they found me unprepared, I should probably have been unequal to maintain, even externally.

– Charlotte Bronte, JANE EYRE

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politics

dreams from the candidate

It doesn’t seem right to let the week go by without noting that Obama’s acceptance speech made me so proud to be a citizen of our country. I watched it with Robert from a Ravenswood television, eating Chicago pizza, and cheering. The next day, which was yesterday, I looked at everyone around me differently, on the train and on the streets. As if we were all agents of a collective force for change.

When I was in Vancouver in April, talking theater with another group of disgruntled artists, I was taken to task on the foreign policies of the Bush Administration, which is a little like taking candy from a baby. The only response I had to say was “I have a lot of hope for Obama.”

My Canadian theatrical interlocutor responded, “We all do, too,” which reminded me how many other nations have stakes in this election and in our politics.

That hope, which has grown as I’ve traveled around this country and heard people’s enthusiasm for him, and renewed sense of purpose, is now no more a dream. It’s a reality. We got him nominated, and now we can get him elected, and then we can get back to work. And not a moment too soon.

These words have been quoted everywhere words are quoted:

And Democrats, we must also admit that fulfilling America’s promise will require more than just money. It will require a renewed sense of responsibility from each of us to recover what John F. Kennedy called our “intellectual and moral strength.” Yes, government must lead on energy independence, but each of us must do our part to make our homes and businesses more efficient. Yes, we must provide more ladders to success for young men who fall into lives of crime and despair. But we must also admit that programs alone can’t replace parents; that government can’t turn off the television and make a child do her homework; that fathers must take more responsibility for providing the love and guidance their children need.

And these:

These are the policies I will pursue. And in the weeks ahead, I look forward to debating them with John McCain.

But what I will not do is suggest that the senator takes his positions for political purposes. Because one of the things that we have to change in our politics is the idea that people cannot disagree without challenging each other’s character and patriotism.

The times are too serious, the stakes are too high for this same partisan playbook. So let us agree that patriotism has no party. I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain. The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America, they have served the United States of America.

The full text of his speech is here.

Let us keep that promise, that American promise, and in the words of Scripture, hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess.

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theater

some definitions

Writer – someone who cares too much.

Director – someone who also cares too much, but is prepared, for the sake of the play, to be the person who couldn’t care less.

Actor – Forced to reside between these opposing forces, both carefree and careful at the same time.

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the chorus

pattern

I’m still trying to answer the question of why I care about the chorus, which was asked of me by a 13 WAYS/TDIA audience member in Los Angeles. To this end, I’ve been trying to answer a larger question, of why I care about the many aesthetic sub-groups of things that I like. What connects our interests? What is the spider’s saliva on the web of belief, of practice, of obsession?

Yesterday. I meet with an actress. I ask her to graph herself, not in so many words, or maybe in many more. She does. She does so in relation to style, and picks these axes: mime, puppetry, physical theatre, children’s theatre, spectacle, awe-ful moments that make you lose your breath. What connects them, for her, is a sense of openness. Accessibility. She is interested in the branches of our profession that welcome rather than exclude.

The exercise makes me think about my own list: rhyme, the chorus, and so on. But I think what connects all of them for me is the sense of pattern. Connection through repetition. There was a moment when we were working on the verse structure for a chorus in 13Ways/TDIA and worked a mathematical pattern, one based on an additive triangle, into the poetry of it. I have rarely been happier.

One of the poem-things I picked up last evening at the Printer’s Ball was called “Verses Without Choruses” (collected within SAY IT WITH SILENCE, by Zebulun, published by Seven Ten Bishop) – which is all poetry since the Greeks, I suppose – but an interesting exercise, isolated sad verses, four lines on a page. So very individual. The verse, like the cheese in the nursery rhyme, stands alone. The chorus stands together.

Here is one of Zebulun‘s isolate verses::

McQ

How come everyone knows how
we
feel about each other except for
us

I love his work, but the solitary sadness in its form is exactly why I want to write choruses without verses. For the sake of the pattern.

It represents a pattern which our lives do not have, but which we seek. Hope for that pattern is what makes it beautiful, and also what makes it dangerous. My parents were watching the Olympic opening ceremonies, and they thought of choruses, but they also thought of the Nazi rallies. This is not the first time this comparison has been made to me. Chorus-mob.

Before I worked on 13/TDIA I think I would have been more sickened by that thought, and considered that perhaps, aesthetically, I yearn for totalitarianism on some level. But in the hands of the Greek playwrights the Chorus is the voice of something more than that. It is a voice of reason, of dissent, of logic – also of emotion and passion. It is not merely the tool of the political leaders. It is, of course, as fragmented, momentary, and complex as people are. It’s a group.

It is, I suppose, also my father’s field of study. “Sociology – the study of how people act in groups” – I’ve been rattling that off to friends since I could rattle.

People are all part of temporary, transient groups, formed from connection or for convenience. The chorus of Democrats or Republicans, for example. The chorus of the citizens of Athens. The chorus of women. The chorus of bloggers, if you like. And yet, we are all alone. We are born alone, we live (mostly) alone, and none of us dies with anyone else, either. We spend a lot of time trying to deny that fact, because the less alone we can be, the happier we are.

The chorus, like friendship, marriage, family, and other such forms of art, lets us believe that we are not alone. I think that loneliness is more terrible to me than death. I am less concerned with art making us immortal than I am with art bringing us together. The chorus is the formal representation of the idea that, simply, we are not alone.

Closer? My new thesis of the moment: the chorus is important to me because it means that we are not alone, and that there is a pattern to our lives. Neither of these things is true, but both are beautiful – and the more we believe and practice them, the more true they become. I think that I am also reacting against a pendulum swing in artistic taste towards things like three-character plays, one-person shows, and the theatrical celebration of the individual as opposed to the group.

Entropy is a fact. Chaos is a fact. Order is a lost cause. But we still find meaning and beauty when we learn that the structure of some biological or chemical thing has symmetry to it, or follows a mathematical sequence. It is the same meaning and beauty that we find in the chorus.

Oedipus’s sadness is from being alone. So is Medea’s. “Alone and without a city.” There is nothing more terrible. More, if you will, anti-social. Anti-society.

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writing

Present tense

Riding home along Montrose Avenue with a bicycle basket full of poetry magazines, from last evening’s Printer’s Ball, I immediately think of the sentence, “Riding home along Montrose Avenue with a bicycle basket full of poetry magazines…” and notice that I am turning my experiences into words in the moment of experience, and noticing this makes me stumble and almost fall off the bike, making the words no longer true. But I manage to keep writing. (Riding.)

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