and I’ve only just now discovered the tea in the wardrobe department. Better late than never.
Wardrobe here is really fun – there’s a sign on the door that says “We Are The People Your Parents Warned You About.”
Noun Modifiers
In the course of the Convergence teleconferences, I mentioned to a friend of mine, who’s a filmmaker, that I make a distinction in my mind between directing and writing – directing is about allowing more freedom to other people in the process, being open to new possibilities, and writing is about total control over a limited sphere. They are very different. I didn’t use to feel this way, but I certainly do now, since I’ve stopped being such a controlling director.
Coming from the POV of film, however, he said that “everything is writing – directing is writing, editing is writing.” Because he does still have total control over every sphere. Because you can select the take, and you can get exactly – EXACTLY – what you want.
This is probably why film stresses me out as a medium. I can no longer imagine wanting that many things that specifically. I tried it, and it was exhausting. There’s so much freedom in being able to share those wants with others – to let them want things, and let that inform the process and the result.
And I think I’ll look to writing for control, and to directing for the absence of it. This came to my mind again as I was working on/with an actress with/on a monologue from Measure For Measure this afternoon. If I had gone into the session knowing what I wanted to see from her, I never would have been able to see what she had to bring to it.
The only way I would make a film again would be either an animated one (which is all writing) or else something like Chris Guest, with improv-based writing – where the film captures the final result of a process which is more theatrical.
Maybe writing isn’t even “writing” in that controlled way. Maybe the best writing is when you surrender control, as well, to the characters, the words, the sounds. Maybe everything is directing.
I am so unlike the artist and person I was at seventeen that I can barely recognize myself. At least I still use too many adjectives and adverbs. It’s still a problem, but at least it’s a problem that’s familiar. I can say, “Oh yeah, that’s me – I use too many adjectives.”
Keep your friends close…
And your enemies online. Being on the Institute for Distributed Creativity list has brought the much-needed phenomenon of anti-social networking to my attention. If I had an estate to endow on someone, I would endow it on these people.
Enemybook: “Enemybook is an anti-social utility that disconnects you to the so-called friends around you. Enemybook remedies the one-sided perspective of Facebook, by allowing you to manage enemies as well as friends. With Enemybook you can add people as Facebook enemies, specify why they are your enemies, notify your enemies, see who lists you as an enemy, and even become friends with the enemies of your enemies.”
Snubster: “Who Needs Friends: The Snubster Difference”
(Apparently Snubster is actually becoming a real networking site now, and people are bonding over their shared dislikes – which is how we really make friends, after all..)
Here’s a real quote from someone’s Snubster list: [name of guy she hates] i sit next 2 him in social studies & he is always yelling across the room 2 Britney & making noises. he gives me a headache & actually annoys me on purpose. I HATE HIM!!!!!
Hatebook (made by Germans) Hatebook is an anti-social utility that disconnects you from the things YOU HATE.
Madame de Stael of the Blogosphere
My Aries-in-arms and fellow exile from Los Angeles blogs at Campaign Champagne. If you’re not reading it, you’re not keeping up with the essence.
“Crawling into 2008. Sliding in at the last minute. This year feels silent, like the future itself is going out of style.”
(That title really isn’t a fair comparison. MDS has been eviscerated in history’s estimation as a writer, whereas CC is going to hold her own, I’m confident. I just meant that they were both arbiters of style. Can an estimation eviscerate? Probably not. Could I be maintaining more discretion of metaphor? Probably not, after three days of tech.)
Anyway, I love the way she writes, and I’m going to quote a bunch more of it here. The blog is vital.
” I left the country. Didn’t meet anyone new. Went to the Observatory again. Took a walk by myself to where I could see all of downtown and almost all the way to the beach. I live so hard that it’s a blur and I knew when I’d left that I hadn’t. Not really. Whenever I’m in town I still feel like home is at the base of the hills. That I’ll walk in and flop on my couch and check my voicemail and meet M at the corner.
I moved twice. Pared down to half my possessions, and then moved. And halved again, and moved. I put all the things that had been floating around in books. I probably have your number and your first flyer, and your notes to me, and the directions you gave me to your underground club. I have the postcards you wrote me from Asia, and Europe, and pics we snapped in the car and newspaper articles about us.
I read, and I wrote. I read to get me thinking about how people tell their stories, how they collapse a run around town into something people would want to read. I read books about the people I want to write about. And I wrote little bits of stories. 2004 leaked into 2005-2006, bled straight into 2007. I remembered what it was like to be nineteen and sneaking around my age, and being 24 and finally owning it.
I came down hard, and brought you with me. We cut out to New York and sped around downtown, we hovered on rooftops and smoked Los Angeles senseless. We found people we lost and realized we’d been on half-lives without them. We realized we had no secrets. Nothing happened this year really.”
Rhymes With Thesaurus
It looks like I’ll be subjecting the students of my former high school to another dose of the Greek chorus this June. Maybe I’ll be able to show them a tape of the show we put together at Indy. Or maybe I’ll get organized and try to hold a professional chorus workshop for adults in the same week.
I’m working on a rewrite of the 13 Chorus script tonight. I was pretty blocked on it, despite having made some casting and design breakthroughs in the past few days. But I got a lot of mileage out of whining to some of the designers during tech, and I just slept on it for awhile – and I woke up with one line, which is all I need –
“If only Medea had never, had never
(had never, had never, had never, had never)
If only Medea had never come here…”
And a little melody, which I will hum into this HTML editor and hope it transfers.
The great thing about having this blog going now is that I can write unrestrainedly about my own process, even if not about others’. Anyway, when I’m trying to do rewrites, I usually can’t crack them open until one line, whatever it is, arrives. I have this one line – so now I know I’m going to finish the rewrite.
Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be…
It’s been a busy week – not only did I see Sweeney Todd again, (just as bloody, just as good), watch an open dress of Theresa Rebeck’s OUR HOUSE (vitriolic sendup of reality TV, pools of blood, writer-strike humor), have teleconferences with almost all the confirmed Convergence participants, and just finish 3 days of LYDIA tech, but I managed to overhear this conversation in the elevator, not five minutes ago:
Woman: My mother always wanted me to marry a cowboy, and I said, hell no.
Man: I’m not a cowboy?
Woman: Well, you do fix the fence sometimes. You’re sort of a cowboy.
Man: I could be a cowboy.
Woman: You do have those outfits. (To her companion) He has some cowboy outfits.
But back to what’s really important, which is the Sweeney Todd movie – I went to see it again on Tuesday despite the impending tech and my unfinished rewrite. I had Phil’s observation in mind that it was too clean of a London for him, and it certainly is a very clean propscape. Every object that’s introduced is used. Every reference is followed up on. It’s a spare staging.
It’s like a play in that way, and I think it’s Burton’s homage both to the material’s theatrical origins and to the single-minded focus of Sweeney’s mind. There may be other things in his world, but he doesn’t see them. And Sondheim approves – ArtsJournal led me to a piece in the Lebrecht Weekly where the composer said “This (ST) is the first musical that has ever transferred successfully to the screen.”
In conclusion, January 12 is my mother’s birthday. Happy birthday, Mom.
For the third year running,
the Super Bowl has interfered with my ability to rehearse. It conflicted with both VAST WRECK and MOH&H, and now it conflicts with a day of the Indy Convergence. I’m glad Caitlin noticed in time. Maybe this can be a Dara theatrical tradition, like being in previews on my birthday (also for the third year running!)
In other sports-related news, I just saw the Nuggets beat the 76ers at the Pepsi Center. Iverson had 38 points.
Lydia, Week 3, Day 4-6
Day 4:
The playwright returns and we do a runthrough for him, followed by 2 hours of intense script notes.
Day 5:
We spend a day focusing on one character’s arc in particular – running all his scenes and making major changes in them. It’s as if every person in the room, from the director to the ASM to the actors not in his scenes, are bringing their energies to bear on that one character, on helping him grow in the play.
The actor works extraordinarily hard, and we make a huge breakthrough, which reminds me of Amina and Meisner. The initial script draft with this scene had him performing an action, eating, which we cut because he wasn’t doing it. In the third hour of intense discussion of one rewrite, someone suggests that he return to eating – and suddenly the scene opens up like a key being turned in a door. Those actions are so simple, and so powerful.
I have to keep principles like that in mind when I get to Indy in February and start getting all experimental with the choruses. There has to be a way to learn from it – to let the choruses have actions too, and all those same tricks of single characters.
Day 6:
We begin working through Act 1 again, and end with a run of the first act. (Pleasantly, we lose nine minutes off the first act in said run.) This plays up tensions in a different character’s act, and the playwright and that actor spend the evening working together, in preparation for more changes.
We go into tech on Jan 10th, so the changes are coming fast and furious now, while they can.
The Federalist Crosswalks
One of the good things about moving around the US like this is that you get to see the best features of many different cities. Denver has diagonal crosswalks in its downtown streets. Portland has a Free Square within which all the public transportation costs nothing. In Ashland, drivers, including truck drivers, stop for all pedestrians, even at green lights. In Austin, I lost my preconceptions about Texas driving, when I saw several pickups back out of driveways like they were putting babies to bed.
And the air and water are different, too. If I’d never gone to Ithaca, I’d never know how curly my hair could be, and if I’d never come to Denver, I’d never know the true meaning of dry skin.
I moved into my new apartment yesterday, with all the cast, which is why I’m musing on the nature of travel. I have a Murphy bed which folds down out of the wall, three closets, and a view of downtown. It took me about twenty minutes to figure out where the bed was. When it’s unfolded, I sleep on a slight rake, with my feet lower than my head. It makes me feel like I’m camped out on the slopes of some mountain with the Fellowship. This may also be because I’m on the sixth floor, which is the highest up I’ve ever lived.
My brother just arrived in Atlanta, and left me a message saying so – and wishing me well in “Denver, or wherever you are.”
Theater, or Wherever You Are.
By the way, my friend Alex, who I’ve known since I was 14, is tied with me for the number of cities we’ve both been in in 2008. (He’s a lawyer.) I knew there was a correlation between our professions.
My Uncle Travelin’ Sonnet, Deux
Another woes-of-the-road sonnet, from Will “Complaining” Shakespeare. Honestly, I wish he’d stop ripping off Bob Seger.
CXIII.
Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind;
And that which governs me to go about
Doth part his function and is partly blind,
Seems seeing, but effectually is out;
For it no form delivers to the heart
Of bird of flower, or shape, which it doth latch:
Of his quick objects hath the mind no part,
Nor his own vision holds what it doth catch:
For if it see the rudest or gentlest sight,
The most sweet favour or deformed’st creature,
The mountain or the sea, the day or night,
The crow or dove, it shapes them to your feature:
Incapable of more, replete with you,
My most true mind thus makes mine eye untrue.
Dara Weinberg 