quotes, writing

“For sixteen years now, Chicago had given Kendall the benefit of the doubt.”

When Kendall was drunk, when he was in odd surroundings like the Coq d’Or, when someone’s misery was on display in front of him, in moments like this Kendall still felt like a poet. He could feel the words rumbling somewhere in the back of his mind, as though he still had the diligence to write them down.

One’s country was like one’s self. The more you learned about it, the more you were ashamed of it.

– Jeffrey Eugenides, from this brilliant short story about democracy, money, and white-collar crime, “Great Experiment,” in the 3/31/08 New Yorker.

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music, theater

newsicals

Signature Theater acquires $30K for new musicals.

The recipients of the “Next Generation” grants are composers in their 20s and 30s whom Signature identified as songwriters of considerable potential and who already have had their work produced or recorded. The three are: Adam Gwon, a composer-lyricist whose musical “Ordinary Days” receives a premiere this summer in Pennsylvania; Matt Conner, who set the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe to music in Signature’s 2006 premiere of “Nevermore”; and Gabriel Kahane, a composer whose “Craigslistlieder” is a song cycle he fashioned from classified ads on the Web site Craiglist.

Via Artsjournal.

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theater

good news Wednesday

I’m so happy to report that Traveling Jewish Theater in San Francisco has met its first benchmark fundraising goal of 100,000 in the month of June, that they needed in order to survive as a company. They need to raise another 50K by Sept. 30, as well, but they have definitely turned a corner.

Their ability to achieve this goal in this depressed economic time is extraordinary, and speaks to the strength of their audience base. More on their blog, Inside TJT.

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music, quotes

nobody said opera was supposed to be easy

“It’s so much work. You spend years on this sucker. Then you have to deal with casting, and you have to deal with all of the egos and all of that. And yes, indeed, you do have to work with the singers, you have to work with the stage director, you need to work with the scene people, the lighting people, the musicians, the conductor, all of these extra people. And then it probably will be staged once, get ho hum reviews, and disappear forever. Uh, I don’t know. There are other things I guess I’d rather be doing.”
– composer Christopher Rouse, in an interview at Newmusicbox.org, via Artsjournal.

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music, theater

Poetic Salon @ Theatre of NOTE, Tues July 8

Here’s the info for the reading I’m directing next Tuesday the 8th, of Ron Allen’s short play, x restrung cortex. Our first and only rehearsal is tomorrow, since the play is only 5 pages long. We’re doing something really fun and surreal with it – we’re staging the play three times in a row, interspersed with songs from Ron’s band, Code Zero.

*****

Poets and Predators, Ladies and Lovers,
Guitarists and Gentlemen, Singers and Seducers –

On Tuesday, July 8th, at 9:30 pm,
in the guts (or the bowels) of Hollywood,
on the corridor of Cahuenga,
remove your inhibitions and put on your fedoras for the

POETIC SALON
@ Theatre of NOTE

Password: “naked rodeo”
(no one gets in without the password)

presenting
X RESTRUNG CORTEX
a one-act play
written in the poetry of the liberated tongue
about nothing and tuxedos

by Ron Allen (playwright of this year’s EYE MOUTH GRAFFITI BODYSHOP at NOTE)
(mis)directed by Dara Weinberg
featuring actors Michelle Hilyard, Jo D. Jonz, Jemal MacNeil, and Wendi West

performing with live music by
CODE ZERO
a performance group, a band of poetic theory and magnetism:
a manifestation of that which comes before name and form:
a hyper-creative juggernaut, a point of origin
featuring musicians Randy Bellfield on drums, Tony Parker on bass, Cinjez on keyboard, Ron Bodhidharma Allen on vocals, and Sarah Cruse on vocals

Location:
Theatre of NOTE
1517 N. Cahuenga Blvd (between Hollywood and Sunset)

Date: Tuesday, July 8th

Time: 9:30 pm

Admission: Free (with the password)

Dress Code: Formal, sensual, and poetical. Please wear tuxedos, strapless dresses, high-heeled shoes, ties, bustiers, lace, paisley, and others clothes appropriate for a poetic salon.
If you’re going to wear flip-flops, please put on a lot of makeup, even if you’re a man (especially if you’re a man.)
Jeans are acceptable as long as they are so tight and so low-cut that nothing is left to the imagination.

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writing

Blog in me, O Muse, and…

I woke up today and decided all my poems were going to be written to the poem: and that many of them would begin with “Poem, I say,” and then going on to say something. I also decided that this was going to be the theme which would unite all the ununited work I’ve written this year, and that I would call it “The Hubris Cycle.” Bad Homeric.

I wrote several on this theme today, in between 6 hours on Creative Capital, Round 2, for the Convergence (we have made the most extensive and elaborate budget I have ever made, for anything, ever) and continued dramaturgy work for Jess in PDX – she’s making her epic ASTRAL WEEKS dance cycle now, starting workshops – and I have to say, addressing the poem directly doesn’t make it any less intimidating. In fact, it talks back. The poem takes over the poem. Which is good in terms of getting writing done, but bad in terms of getting the writing I want done.

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a propos of nothing, F&F, writing

friends from the past

An old friend comes to visit, a writer, another native Californian, an iconoclast, a fellow formalist, a devotee to the goddess of rhyme. We haven’t spoken in over a year, but he finds himself in Los Angeles, as I do. We talk politics – I tell him about my intention to work for the Democrats until the election happens, and he shares with me that he spent a week canvassing in Ohio during the primary.

We talk poetry. I show him some of the stuff I’ve written this past year – one extremely formal, one loose and semi-formal (like a winter dance), one simple and prosaic. The semi-formal one, about revenge, is one I realize I wrote for him and his sensibility even when he wasn’t present. He’s one of my ideal readers. He’s always had a good ear for my work, one of the best, but I am moved, as always, by how he feels the emotion of the writing.

I am proud of these poems. I’m moving towards something with them. And he senses, more than anyone I’ve shown the informal poetry to, the void in the heart of them when they are rhymeless. He knows what that means to me.

Being in LA right now must be the right choice, if things like this are going to happen. I vow, foolishly, to find somewhere in this city to read my poetry while I’m here.

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quotes, travel

OLIVIA: Why, what would you?

VIOLA
Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Halloo your name to the reverberate hills
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out ‘Olivia!’ O, You should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth,
But you should pity me!

OLIVIA
You might do much…

For whatever reason, perhaps because of Viola’s “you should not rest/between the elements of air and earth,” perhaps because of the single-minded obsession of the lover she describes, which is exactly how I feel about the chorus, how I feel about most things I pursue in my work or my life, these lines have never been out of my head, this entire year. I post them here, in the hopes of moving beyond them. They are beautiful, but very dangerous. Viola might do much, but she might undo herself in doing it. Spoken like someone (like me) who needs to, as Frodo yells to the Hobbits, “Get off the road! Now!” A break, however brief. A rest. A respite.

But nothing makes the gods laugh like making plans: and I plan for less travel, knowing in my bones that you can’t really ever get off the road once you get on it.

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a propos of nothing, travel

things I lost on the road

It’s hard to lose things when you have so little. Before I traveled the country for a year, I would lose things constantly. I had too many of them, and kept none of them in the right places. Now, it’s hard for me to lose things at all – and the ones I did lose are very clear to me.

Ashland: my apartment, my starbase, my location, my illusions of immortality.
San Francisco: Eight hundred dollars, when I drove my friend’s car, with the bike rack still on it, into the roof of a parking garage.
Los Angeles: My heart. I thought I had lost my watch, but I found it again. (I found my heart later, somewhere between Indy and Portland.)
Denver: a Christmas postcard of the Miner family standing in the rain at Lucy’s soccer game.
Indianapolis: my glasses, which I bought in Ashland. My illusions of my invincibility as a director.
Portland: a yoga mat, a Loteria card from Denver with the inscription “La Muerte” on it that Juliette gave me, and a birthday card my brother sent me with a picture of a little girl trying to roll a boulder up a hill.
Ithaca: The airlines lost my guitar, but they found it again.
New York: my illusions of the East Coast.
Hawaii: my delusions about the nature of work and happiness.
WCX: my illusions of eternity.

What I have gained on this trip would take ten full blogs to recount. And I have lost very little. It was definitely worth it.

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