Monthly Archives: December 2008

directing

know it like the back of my head

I recently saw some images of the workshops from THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL, in late 2006.
My own face, or the back of it, was interspersed with the faces of the actors – photographed in close black-box quarters by my duo of consumnate Craigslist videographers. I see my ponytail and my head swathed in a bandanna (I obviously didn’t shower that morning), and that fake leather jacket from Target I wore every day for a good year and a half. I’m a very jaded and world-weary 24, but from the ancient vantage of 26, looking at her, I look as young as a teacup.

I have a variety of these back-of-Dara’s-head-while-directing pictures: from the first LYSISTRATA even, at seventeen. It’d be a fun little image montage to put together.

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chicago

here in my car

Today, I drove a friend to the bus station – my first time operating a vehicle in falling snow since the ’08 Convergence, and my first time navigating Chicago on wheels since we were apartment-shopping in August. I was driving an enormous Isuzu Trooper, with 4WD, and I still found it all but impossible to park, keep from skidding, etc. And unlike Indianapolis, these weather conditions are occurring in crowded city traffic.

North Avenue
(please don’t kill me, other drivers)
Fullerton
(please don’t kill me, other drivers)
Armitage
(please don’t kill me, other drivers)
Montrose

While I was trying to park in and around some growing snowdrifts, for the very first time since coming to this city, I found myself thinking, “It might have been a mistake to move to Chicago.”

The moment I set that car key down on my friend’s dining room table, I was, once again, happy to be here, and on foot, and I walked the long block between Damen and Western with positive exuberance at how cold I was, purposely stepping in the tallest snowbanks because I could.

When I got on the bus, the floor was slick with water, and I tried to put my transit card in the meter, but the driver told me to sit down so I wouldn’t fall. He did the same thing for everyone. When the weather is like this, people have to help each other out, or else, you know, be alone, cold, and grumpy, or fall down on the floor of the slippery bus… Maybe that’s part of why everyone is so nice here. The weather made them do it.

The snowbirds flee, the city becomes less populated, and those who stick it out either get really whiny or else form a sort of brotherhood. We’re all in this together, right? I think that’s what it’s going to be like for, as people keep reminding me, “the next FOUR MONTHS.”

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theater

stalling:

I am on one deadline, and I have nightmares about another one. I dream, variously, of not having organized everything for the set build (I have no sets that need to be built) and of financial shortfalls in a theatrical production (no such production exists.) My mind reverts to the most recent set of artistic stresses. It’s kind of nice to wake up feeling guilty over having neglected a nonexistent play, when I haven’t worked on any theater since June. My anxieties are retro.

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poetry

Supersonnet

Trying to make a poem fit into a page limit, I cut out all the stanza breaks except the one that seems essential. The result: two enormous stanzas, one of forty lines, one of twenty. Now if it was 40:30, it’d be some kind of gargantuan sonnet: an enormous poem in the proportions of 4:3. But I still think it’s a cool form.

Stanza breaks mean so much less to me now. It’s like everything I write could go as well in couplets, or triplets, or whatever. This is a state of affairs I never could have imagined when I was eighteen.

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poetry, quotes

sweet nothings

I’m writing a poem with some variations on the word “nothing.” Yes, this has been done before. Before, before, and before.

Romeo is banished; and all the world to nothing that he dares ne’er come back to challenge you; or if he do, it needs must be by stealth. Then, since the case so stands as now it doth, I think it best you marry with the county.
– Nurse, ROMEO AND JULIET
(By the way, there’s an old movie called All The World To Nothing, from 1918 – I was hoping to steal that title myself.)

Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.
– Lear, KING LEAR

Is whispering nothing?
Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses?
Kissing with inside lip? stopping the career
of laughing with a sigh? – a note infallible
Of breaking honesty? – horsing foot on foot?
Skulking in corners? wishing clocks more swift?
Hours, minutes? noon, midnight and all eyes
Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only,
That would unseen be wicked? is this nothing?
Why, then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing;
The covering sky is nothing; Bohemia nothing;
My wife is nothing; nor nothing have these nothings,
If this be nothing.
– Leontes, THE WINTER’S TALE

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books, chicago

what I don’t understand

It’s a very literary set of readers on the 70 bus. I was reading over the shoulder of my busmate and I saw the name Gabriel Betteredge. Couldn’t remember why it sounded so familiar for awhile, and then I realized he was reading THE MOONSTONE. I love Chicago. Last week there was someone reading Walter Benjamin.

It is one of my rules in life, never to notice what I don’t understand.
– Gabriel Betteredge, THE MOONSTONE (Wilkie Collins)

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animation, art

making fiends, making fiends

I haven’t followed the fortunes of animator Amy Winfrey for a long time. It’s always nice when you are distracted from an artist’s work for awhile and return to find them flourishing.

Her simple and adorable MuffinFilms series got me through many a dark night of the undergrad (particularly the abstract and enigmatic “I Dream Of Muffins”) I must be the only person in the world to not know that she has two seasons in the can of a now-not-so-new animated series on Nickelodeon, based on her webisodes of Making Fiends. I’m so happy for her.

Amy Winfrey’s influence on me reached its highest point when I briefly considered going to animation school at UCLA, because she did. I thought, at the time, having alienated many of the actors I knew by choosing to direct choruses exclusively, that creating animated work was the only way I would ever realize my theatrical ideas. I sincerely believed that I had to give up what I insultingly called “live-action.” I even made a derivative homage film, vaguely in her style, called “The Misfortunes Of An Arrogant Child.”

Unlike Amy, I had no sense of humor.

Luckily for both the world of animation and for my own artistic ego, some years after that, Theatre of NOTE allowed me to realize some of those weird visions, in the flesh – with actors far better than anything I could have ever hoped to draw. The moment I was able to work with real people, I forgot entirely about cutting little characters out of cardboard.

I still have been thinking of making animated films, though – lately I’ve wanted to create a series of rocks reading poetry. It’d just be a rock moving slightly with stop-motion, almost no movement, with a human actor’s voice reading the poem. I don’t quite know why.

Anyway, thank you, Amy, for bringing me hope.

Making fiends, making fiends,
Vendetta’s always making fiends
While Charlotte’s
Making
Friends…

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