location

Rhapsody in L

I realized today that people on the Chicago trains let their thoughts pass over their faces much more freely than on the New York subway. You don’t need a prop to distract and protect you, because you can silently interact with your fellow riders. The shared thoughts on the train are public property. You can people-watch. Everyone else is doing it.

Headphones are rare, as are sunglasses. The eyes of the riders wander like flies around the car. Everyone looks at everyone, and acknowledges that they are looking. They don’t turn off the Commander Data emotion chip in their brain for the duration of the commute. They are on the train, together.

And you’re surrounded by sky. You’re not staring at the wrong side of the earth’s crust, thinking about analogies beginning with bowels and bellies and Grendel’s mother’s digestive system – the train is flying through the air, eye to eye with birds and skyscrapers, making a loop above the rivers.

In New York, all I could see on people’s faces on the subway was “Don’t look at me,” and I had to have an elaborate equipage to survive an hour of it. Sunglasses, book, headphones, outfit, all armed and ready from the moment I got onto the train. On the daily commute from not-so-Prospect-Park-adjacent to 23rd and 6th, you were judged by the strength of your defenses against the other inhabitants of the subway cars. It was not okay to put your headphones on in the train. That made you look stupid. They had to be on already. You had to enter the train looking as if you slept with your headphones in your ears. (I think many of the people there did. In fact, I’ve just remembered, unpleasantly, that when I was in New York, I started sleeping with my headphones in, too. I started feeling naked and unprotected without them.)

Due to something being wrong with my skull, I couldn’t ever make the little Ipod buds stay in, so I was stumbling around the G and C and A trains cramming them back into my ears and looking like I didn’t know Brooklyn from a hole in the ground (which was true – I spent more time in a hole in the ground than I ever did in Brooklyn).

I finally caved in and went out bought white wraparound headphones with ear clips to make them stay on, but with the white cord so I could still be an Ipod poser hipster. Thus fully disguised, I sat there writing poetry through the battlements of my sunglasses, all over the yellowed pages of a chemistry notebook, staring around the train like the country mouse from Planet California that I was. I knew better – I knew you weren’t supposed to look – but no one has yet explained to me how to spend an hour trapped in a car with a hundred other people and not look at their faces.

But here, in what Rush calls “The Middle West,” everyone is so comfortable with themselves, their city, and their trains that you could recite poetry, I think, without incident, on a Brown Line car from Montrose to Merchandise Mart. Someone is probably doing so right now.

I told my father that after New York, Boston felt like Yosemite National Park, for its nature. Likewise, after New York, Chicago feels like the Emerald City of Oz, for the friendliness of its inhabitants. Or perhaps Munchkinland. Everybody wishes to welcome you. Chicago is the Miss Congeniality of cities.

New York is a one-night stand. Chicago is the city you go home with. (That is, if the train is running late enough.)

books, writing

les livres arrivent

Robert brought the boxes with my books in them up from Indianapolis today. (That line feels like some kind of very-long-winded meter, but I can’t match it. Less peripatetic, more ptero-dactylic.)

This was a surprise. I didn’t expect them until later on. But all of my books are here in the same city, in the same place, with me. If I wanted to, I could ride my bike a mile east, lakeward right now, break open the black Isuzu Trooper, and read every one of them. Right now. I could sit on the bumper, in the light of the open door, with Tom Stoppard and Flaubert and Brian Teare spread all around me and read until morning. They will wait there like eggs in their box-shells, waiting to hatch, until Ee and I move into our new apartment, on Sept. 1st. So soon!

I haven’t seen them from April 2007 on. For the whole year of assistant directing, they lived in Menlo Park, and I lived everywhere but there.

Existing without them hurt very much at first, and I have to write something more on that subject. But it was ultimately a powerful choice to let them all go. Helped me to understand their role in my life. I will write more on this.

quotes, writing

Yes, he had to start his day.

He awoke punctually at oh-four-hundred hours, as he always did “in the field” (and that was what he called the maneuvers) His valet was already standing in the room. And the equerries, he knew, were already waiting outside the door. Yes, he had to start his day. He would have scarcely a moment to himself all day long. To make up for it, he had outwitted all of them that night by standing at the open window for a good quarter hour.

– from THE RADETSKY MARCH by Joseph Roth.

Kaiser Franz Joseph’s interior monologue. And Roth makes me see more clearly that the phrase “interior monologue” refers to the dramatic – to the monologue – and that when it is practiced well, as it is here, brilliantly, you can feel the point-of-view of the character as if it’s spoken.

The idea is taken from drama, of course. Or it takes from the same thing from which drama takes. From spoken language. Almost all Roth’s narration is one form of interior monologue or another. It’s like people are always speaking, even when silent. Saying things like “Yes, he had to start his day.” It’s the I-voice without the monotony and selfcenteredness of the I.

Maybe all the bad monologues I keep writing belong as fiction narration. Maybe this is how I get into fiction, by thinking of all narration as monologue. Because if I don’t know who’s speaking, I don’t know how to write. My short stories all turn into plays. That’s fine. Some day a play will turn into prose.

directing, self-blogerential, theater

talking cats

So, I watched the Budweiser commercial with the dog and horse high-fiving each other, and I think we are at a period in society, for whatever reason (and by “we” I mean my narrow class-subset of young highly educated people who watch too much imagery) where “we” are highly entertained by the idea of talking animals again. A history of this subject would be great, but more than writing the article, I really just want to make a very simple Youtube video with a dog and a cat in “conversation.” No attempt would be made to have them move their mouths or anything. We’d just show the camera on the two of them there, and have actors speak. They could read “Talk To Me Like the Rain And Let Me Listen.” They could have an ordinary conversation. Found text, staged written text, anything. Much like how LIFE IN HELL has the still images. I think, and I don’t quite know why I think this, but I think it would be superbly entertaining and would also tell us something about our selves in this particular moment in time.

Part of the trip I’ve done on myself the past four years is to de-academicize myself. I was brought up in the academy, by which I mean that education is the cardinal virtue of my family. And I’ve had to learn, in order to make theater, to – when I have impulses like this – to resist analyzing them until I have staged them. The staging of them is the analysis. Going in with too much of a theory about how it is supposed to work will make them not work as well as they could.

I have been tempted to veer back towards theory a bit this year. But I know that I won’t really understand why it is things ought to work until I make them work. This blog ought to be called Practice Makes Theory instead of Style Over Substance. Maybe I will rename it.

self-blogerential, theater

An overwhelming question

1:23 am, the day before something new: time for a State of the Blog post. I’ve been running this site for over a year now, and I thought it was time to finally cave in and look at my traffic statistics. I was inspired to do this by stumbling onto Steve Pavlina’s website, hearing him talk about his mammoth stats, and wondering how I measured up. It feels a little bit wrong – like looking at your Amazon sales rank, or your grades as compared to the rest of the class. Pulling that narrow green ScanTron sheet out from under the manila folder on your teacher’s desk.

I’ll just say that there are more people reading this than I expected, so thank you, if you’re one of them, and I will try to keep keeping it interesting.

I have been going on job interviews all this weekend, and many employers have looked at this blog (which I post on my resume and in all my emails) as a way of learning who I am.

Q: What exactly is it that you do?
A: Whatever it takes.

Usually, I say some variation on “I work in theater” and “There are many different paths within our field, and I’m still exploring many of them.” But that’s the truth. Whatever it takes, whatever it wants, whatever he (or she) suggests – he being poetry, she being theater, some of the time. And it’s often less of a suggestion, more of a command. I have told several people about hearing a repetition of WRITE RIGHT NOW, WRITE RIGHT NOW, for the past few months – and sure enough, I’ve been doing a lot more writing.

Here’s one path, one answer to that persistent question: I’ve been experimenting with writing poetry where I write to the poem, addressing him (he has been masculine a number of times) and this personification of the poem has helped me deal with my own issues about motivation and inspiration. It’s powerful. I’ve written lots of stuff lately coming just out of the opening “Poem, I say…” and saying something to him. It’s definitely a rip-off of “Sing in me, Muse.” But it works so well. It opens dialogue. When I get really frustrated with the way my life is because of the career I’ve chosen (unsettled, broke, etc.) I speak directly to the poem. Or to theater. And I let them speak back.

Poem, I say,
how do you feel about being on my blog?
Weird, he says. If you must know.
Fair enough, I say.
And he sticks out his tongue at the camera.

Tonight, I was telling a friend of mine that I felt like I had made some poor choices for the sake of theater – for the sake of one play in particular. I phrased it badly, something like “The play made me do X.” I felt out of control, as if I was at the mercy of theater. He looked me in the eye and said “No, you made the play do X. You are in control. That was your choice.”

It’s important to remember that although it often feels like we are at the mercy of these childlike beings we bring into the world – plays, poems – they are, fundamentally, our children.
We make them what they are.

And on that note, having this blog has helped me have more perspective on them.

location

if you have nothing appropriate to say, Margaret, you will restrict your remarks to the weather

This sign is all over Ravenswood: “No Parking If More Than 2 Inches Of Snow.”
I find it amusing, because today the weather is mild and sunny, with a light wind moving through the air. The trains are full of girls in flip-flops and sundresses on their way to the “beach.” I can’t really imagine what more than 2 inches of snow looks like: Denver’s winter, at least the one I went through, rarely exceeded that.

This summer wind is so gentle, before and between the storms. Deceptively gentle. My parents, last night, told me that a family friend of ours spent a year in Chicago and, one day, was blown into the middle of oncoming traffic by the force of the winter winds. It sounds positively comic-book violent.

dance

estrangement

A friend of mine, a dancer, was injured yesterday, in the course of an ordinary rehearsal – but what is “ordinary” for performers is extraordinary for the human body. A joint broken in three places, a cast, and a different trajectory for the next few months are the result. Thankfully, it’s not a serious injury. It’s one that someone in good health should bounce back from with time, as I’m sure my friend will, being in the best health of anyone I know. But it was a rude awakening from the dream that we work in.

I read an article on ArtsJournal a few weeks ago about dancers having a higher rate of injury than professional football players. I can’t find that link again, but here’s a longer and grim post from their ArtsWatch blog about the many things that make a career in that field tough.

It makes an interesting point about “audience estrangement” (their phrase) and the world of dance, as compared to the parallel audience decline in the music world:

Classical music critics point to audience estrangement from atonal music in the second half of the 20th Century as a reason for classical music’s decline with the public. No such claim can be made for dance. Contemporary dance has continued to evolve and produce stars. Small modern companies do some of the most exciting work in all of contemporary arts, and the field is vibrant with new ideas. More traditional companies never stopped offering plenty of classic fare.

And yet, even the top companies are a difficult sell when they tour [SJ Mercury News] outside the largest cities…

theater

the limitations of science

This afternoon, I have a job interview, and then I’m going to see a reading of Elaine Romero’s play WALK INTO THE SEA, at the Goodman, as part of their Latino Theater Festival. Ricardo Gutierrez, who I know from the LYDIA cast, is in it. Here’s the theater’s blurb:

The fault lines in Karl and Virginia’s marriage are revealed when their son Edward, diagnosed with autism, retreats behind a mask of silence. Karl, a microbiologist who specializes in viruses, buries himself in his work, while Virginia embraces religion. This haunting new play offers a complex and moving look at the limitations of science and the importance of family.

quotes, style, workstyle, writing

Who are these people?

Q: Are you one of those writers who keeps a regular schedule?

A: No. How I wish! Who are these people? That sounds marvelous. It takes me a long time to write, because I think out everything before I write it. When I write something, even a tiny section of a long thing, I think about it for many weeks. Perhaps that’s why my work is always so much “my work.”

– Jamaica Kincaid in a Salon interview. I read her collection of Talk of the Town essays, TALK STORIES, today, and was overwhelmed by the exact simplicity. Every word means something. She has an overheard person at a party say “Sensation, as you know, is the tyranny of Los Angeles.”

quotes, writing

Who would not be poor if he could be sure of possessing genius?

“Sir,” says the Colonel, “I hope it is not your practice to measure and estimate gentlemen by such paltry standards as those. A man of letters follows the noblest calling which any man can pursue. I would rather be the author of a work of genius, than be Governor-General of India. I admire genius. I salute it whenever I meet it. I like my own profession better than any in the world, but then it is because I am suited to it. I couldn’t write four lines in verse, no, not to save me from being shot. A man cannot have all the advantages of life. Who would not be poor if he could be sure of possessing genius, and winning fame and immortality, sir? Think of Dr. Johnson, what a genius he had, and where did he live? In apartments that, I daresay, were no better than these, which, I am sure, gentlemen, are most cheerful and pleasant,” says the Colonel, thinking he had offended us.

– from THE NEWCOMES, by W. M. Thackeray

Why have I waited this long to read more Thackeray? I only picked up THE NEWCOMES in the Ravenswood library because it had illustrations by Edward Ardizzone, who I have loved since seeing his illustrations of Eleanor Farjeon’s THE LITTLE BOOKROOM when I was a kid. Little did I know how good it was going to be. I find myself slowing down in deference to the density of Thackeray’s writing. I’m going to have to start over again from the beginning and read it at the pace of a snail – but what a happy snail. I think I’m going to enjoy this as much as the time when I was in Berlin and I decided to read every novel Thomas Hardy had ever written.

Dara Weinberg

writer // teacher // director // los angeles

Monthly Archives: August 2008