Sometimes when I am trying to get myself to write (stalling) I reread this blog, looking, without thinking about it, for posts I haven’t written but wish I had.
That’s not an element!
Yesterday, I moved my boxes – all fourteen of them, containing everything I own – from the Calvert Street house to the Saint Paul house. I also put my rent and security deposit in the envelope with everyone else’s, and signed the lease. Now they’re going to have to work really hard to kick me out.
To celebrate, I joined three other students from my program at Trivia Night at the Wharf Rat in Fells Point. The WriSem team achieved victory, in the form of a refillable growler of Oliver ale, brewed on site. The only answer I knew was the name of the crystals that power the Enterprise* in Star Trek. And they knew it without me.
I did, however, provide moral support, and I won a tie-breaker in the second round with the aid of some skills I acquired from the ABF Drumz section of the LSJUMB. Once in the Band, always in the Band.
*dilithium.
dear occupant
The Durfee Foundation is the only organization that sends me mass emails beginning “Dear Artist,”.
Yes, And.
The Harry Potter / Laurel, MD / DC / Capitol Fringe / Our Mutual Friend extravaganza was fabulous. And then I came home and I did what I always do when things are going well, which is cook enough food for the whole week, all in one day.
Today, I got to observe a section of the creative writing class I will be teaching in the fall, and then had lunch with the teacher, one of my cohort (fiction, not poetry.) It was really helpful.
And then I found the practice rooms and the rehearsal rooms. So large, so beautiful. A night-black Yamaha grand, in a room bigger than some rooms I’ve lived in, with dark blue walls and a dark yellow curtain on one side.. It could have been the rehearsal room for a PBS special.
I played scales like a trash compactor collapsing – starting at the two opposite ends and meeting in the middle and then going back out. And then I played and played and played until my hands started hurting.
You know what I realized about piano, today? I have always had such a hard time personificating/anthropomorphizizizing the piano. It’s too big, and too mechanical. It’s not a he, or a she. It’s not a living creature, to me, which makes it very difficult for me to connect with it. I think at the times when I have quit piano, I have been caught up in this. I have felt like the instrument resisted connecting with me as I wanted it to.
But I realized, today – maybe it took playing a grand again to realize it, so enormous – the piano is not a human. The piano is a location – like a basketball court, or a track, or a theater. You can love it, but you just have to realize it’s not a person.
To love playing it, the person you have to love is the composer, or the singer, or your self. You can’t love the instrument, any more than you can love a football field. You can only love the music. The game. You just have to get out there and run, every day, and eventually you love yourself running.
And I wrote a poem today that I like. It is about theater. I think that everything I write is going to be about theater. This will stop me from having this same conversation about “Am I doing X or Y?” all the time. I am doing both.
in which I actually hear someone use the word “Yankees” in conversation
Dara: So you’re going to Florida. That’s nice, I’ve never been there…
B: Yeah, it’s all right.
Dara: I’ve been in Texas and Atlanta, but only for a few days. Baltimore’s the furthest south I’ve ever lived.
B: Nah, Florida isn’t the South. It’s full of all these people from Ohio and Colorado and shit…bunch of Yankees.
Slampoonedicidecyclopsitalfringe
Yesterday, I took care of lots of business (mmm, health insurance!) and found out that I have been officially approved for my new apartment, near 30th and St. Paul in Charles Village, in the form of a lease in my email. HuzzaH.
I then went to see Single Carrot’s SLAMPOONED the second time, followed by a “slamback” where Baltimore slam poets, many of whom were associated with Baltimore’s long-running Slamicide poetry event, performed after the show.
Baltimore’s individual champion poet was there – they are trying to raise money to send him to the worlds in Berkeley. He performed a hilarious boy-meets-girl, boy-screws-girl, boy-breaks-up-with-girl-because-she-gave-him-an STD crowd-pleaser, entirely written in references to computer and Internet technology. I can’t remember the lines exactly, but it was like, “Baby, you cheated on me with a Mac?? And you didn’t use a firewall??” It was really good. I’m not conveying it adequately.
Slamicide is seeking a new venue – many of the folks at the show last night suggested the newly opened Cyclops Books down the street. Cyclops is a music, poetry, and bookselling venue at Maryland and North.
I stood outside their front door with a Louisiana musician who said his name was Traveler for about an hour before SLAMPOONED last night. He held the door for a stream of men with amplifiers, while, one hundred feet to our left, a sixteen-year-old girl was getting arrested. Traveler is on his way to Florida for awhile, to record a new album. We exchanged road woes stories and hoped the girl would get let go.
My favorite Cyclops dialogue:
A (to a large man wearing an undershirt): Are you with the band?
B: No, I’m with the strippers.
All this is to say that I think it’d be a great place for a Baltimore poetry slam…and conveniently located ten blocks or so from my new Appartement.
This Morning, someone outside my window is honking like they are getting paid for it. In a few hours, after the obligatory watering of the plants, I and friends are going to see Harry Potter (which Anthony Lane didn’t like, but I’m not going to let that stop me) and then road-tripping to DC for two Capital Fringe shows. It’s my first time in the nation’s capital. I do think it’s appropriate that all I’m doing is seeing theater. (I’m trying to send a message.)
a tax dodge set up by some dentists
There is a new Thomas Pynchon novel coming out August 4th, titled Inherent Vice.
From the Penguin synopsis (via the Examiner):
…he [main character] soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.
I have just enrolled in my student dental insurance, so this seems very appropriate.
I use antlers in all of my decorating
One last “why Menken/Ashman are in yr house, eating yr dinner” post from BEAUTY AND THE BEAST – I’m almost done rhapsodizing about how theatrical it is. First, Gaston has Lady M’s line, “Screw your courage to the sticking place!” They just throw it in there, in perfect rhythm with the rest of it. And then, I realized that the “No one fights like Gaston” number is totally that amazing number you give the character actor, the one who doesn’t get the girl…it’s the “Sit Down, You’re Rocking The Boat” or even the “Make Them Laugh” of this movie.
So good.
Lyricist Howard Ashman died of AIDS six months before the film was released, which is something I also didn’t know in 1991.
Fifty Frenchmen can’t be wrong
To elaborate more on the Menken/Ashman work in BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, one of the things I can appreciate about it now is the way that the same musical themes are used by opposing characters to express different viewpoints – within the same song. It reminds me of the medleys in West Side Story, esp. TONIGHT.
Like this, from the opening medley, BELLE:
Sung by Belle:
There goes the baker with his tray, like always
The same old bread and rolls to sell
Ev’ry morning just the same
Since the morning that we came
To this poor provincial town
Sung by townspeople:
Look there she goes that girl is strange, no question
Dazed and distracted, can’t you tell?
Never part of any crowd
‘Cause her head’s up on some cloud
No denying she’s a funny girl that Belle
Same music. Different words. It’s a really simple effect but enormously effective. And the way in which it’s effective has to do with the element of the chorus I’m always interested in – the collective nature of imitation. The way ideas, words, themes, are shared between people in a chorus environment. The way that everything gets repeated and reflected back.
In a wrestling match, nobody bites like Gaston
It has been raining here for the last two days. Not constantly, but violently and intermittently. I have my Poland gear with me all the time now – raincoat, umbrella.
Today, I learned more about a Hopkins program where graduate students tutor undergrads who are having trouble adjusting to college academic work. I saw a posting for it and wanted to check it out. Speaking of checkouts, then I checked my first book out of the library, with my now-working new ID card. It was the DVD of the Disney BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, which I have really wanted to watch for awhile now – and I wasn’t sure why.
Well, I watched it, plus the special features, and I learned the following things which I did not know when I was nine years old:
– Walt Disney tried to develop the story in the 30s and also in the 50s, but never got past the drawing board. (Hey, this is the context in which “the drawing board” is being used properly!)
– Jerry Orbach from LAW AND ORDER played (and sang) Lumiere, the talking candlestick. There was a great all-round voice cast, but that one really blew me away.
– The enchanted objects were thought of as, variously (and I am quoting people here): “having the audience’s experience.” “the interlocutor.” “A Greek chorus.”
– The art director pitched the design concept as “Bambi with interiors.”
– The composers, Alan Menken and Howard Ashman, structured the songs and the music in the film “like a Broadway musical,” with turning points in the plot happening during songs.
– The lighting was consciously designed to be “theatrical.”
I have always felt a little self-conscious about the influence that LITTLE MERMAID and BATB have on my chorus stuff. I’ve been very aware of the animation in “Kiss The Girl” in particular. But now, with the knowledge that Menken/Ashman were thinking in those terms – and with more context for the way theater permeated those productions – it seems entirely appropriate. Henceforth, I will cite this movie as an influence without confusion or embarassment.
And then I wrote a poem from the point of view of the guy who runs the asylum where they’re going to lock up Belle’s father, just because he has the best line in the whole movie:
“I don’t usually leave the asylum at night, but he said you would make it worth my while.”
Dara Weinberg 