the chorus

We have come to Athens, father, at last

I now have a copy of the recording of the TO DIE IN ATHENS reading, playing behind me right now as I write. It’s the best quality recording I’ve ever had of any of my work. Drew did so much with volume adjustment. The piano is a little creaky, but the whole thing sounds like an old BBC radio broadcast -really echo-y and rich.

Mandi, Drew and I had a meeting in Echo Park last night, listened to this, and talked. They have a really amazing concept about doing TDIA in club venues. I was stunned by how much they’ve dreamed about the project, and have come up with a way it could fit into a very different venue than traditional theater. And they’ve been listening to the recording themselves, which amazes me. We’ve made something other people want to listen to.

Audio is a purer way of capturing theater than video is. This was, of course, a reading, so there wasn’t much to see. But it’s making me wish I had a really nice audio recording of every show I’ve ever done. I’m thinking of taking the videotapes of AVW and BH and getting someone to make them into audio files.

You can listen, and imagine the play. It’s very effective. I don’t know if this recording is the one we’ll be sending out to lots of people – probably one more generation of rewrites to be done first. But it’s lovely.

Father, I do not know this place,
But the city is Athens.

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quotes

I think about it now

Oh great white city
I’ve got the adequate committee
Where have your walls gone?
I think about it now

Chicago, in fashion, the soft drinks, expansion
Oh Columbia!
From Paris, incentive, like Cream of Wheat invented,
The Ferris Wheel!
[…]
Chicago, the New Age, but what would Frank Lloyd Wright say?
Oh Columbia!
Amusement or treasure, these optimistic pleasures
Like the Ferris Wheel!

– Sufjan Stevens, “Come on! Feel the Illinoise!” from the album of the same title

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a propos of nothing, travel

on leaving los angeles (t minus 7)

I tell a three-year-old that I’m moving to Chicago, which is why I won’t be coming to play with her again for awhile. I look around for a map to show her where Illinois is, and can’t find one. She understands, and takes me to her window.

“Look,” she says.

I look out, over the city I have to leave again. I squint through the light at the houses, the apartment buildings, the red tile roofs and fire escapes, the palm trees, oak trees, dead trees and living trees, the hills and the sky. The view is faded, like a photograph left in the sun.

She points to the highest of the peaks and shows me a house on its edge. The home of some rich person in the hills, perhaps, or some hippie in the canyons. It’s very far away, and the light catches its roof. I can barely see it.

“That’s your house there. You go live there, up on the mountain,” she says.

“Okay,” I say, and give her a hug. She sounds like she means business.

As I walk out the door, she adds, “If you go there and it’s not your house, then you can come back.”

I thank her and go to buy my plane ticket.

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writing

Roald Dahl describing his first meeting with C.S. Forester

I was thrilled. I had never met a famous writer before. I examined him closely as he sat in my office. What astonished me was that he looked so ordinary. There was nothing in the least unusual about him. His face, his conversation, his eyes behind the spectacles, even his clothes were all exceedingly normal. And yet here was a writer of stories who was famous the world over. His books had been read by millions of people. I expected sparks to be shooting out of his head, or at the very least, he should have been wearing a long green cloak and a floppy hat with a wide brim.

But no. And it was then that I began to realize for the first time that there are two distinct sides to a writer of fiction. First, there is the side he displays to the public, that of an ordinary person like anyone else, a person who does ordinary things and speaks an ordinary language. Second, there is the secret side, which comes out in him only after he has closed the door of his workroom and is completely alone. It is then that he slips into another world altogether, a world where his imagination takes over and he finds himself actually living in the places he is writing about at that moment. I myself, if you want to know, fall into a kind of trace, and everything around me disappears. I see only the point of my pencil moving over the paper, and quite often two hours go by as though they were a couple of seconds.

“Come along,” C.S. Forester said to me. “Let’s go to lunch. You don’t seem to have anything else to do.”

– Roald Dahl, “Lucky Break”
THE WONDERFUL STORY OF HENRY SUGAR AND SIX MORE

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dance, theater

a dancing domestic tragicomedy

Unknown Theater, one of my favorite companies in Los Angeles, presents AN ATTIC AN EXIT through July 27: a dance event from San Francisco.

In this theatrical tour-de-force, Looney-tunes comedy meets magical realist mystery
in a single room crammed full with riddles, levitation, baking supplies,
and two meticulously explorative characters you will never forget.

This language of this blurb reminds me of some of the blurbs I’ve tried to write for other semi-surreal, multimedia, multi-element performance shows, especially the something “meets” something part.
I get it, and I automatically know vaguely what genre of work this is, and that I will enjoy it, and that it’s going to be complicated, whimsical, and really good. But I wonder if the language is communicating everything it can to outsiders or civilians – if there is a way for us to describe this kind of work more concisely. It’s difficult, when part of the nature of the work is that it includes many, many elements.

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theater

Help us name our enormous, fully funded, ten-theater complex in the Vegas desert!

So, there’s already a company called the National Theater of the United States of America. (This reminds me of the difficulty we had in naming Upstage Project.) I tried to come up with a couple more names for our concept theater, the enormous ten-theater complex in the Vegas desert, with full funding.

The Corporate Theater of the United States
The Theater Corporation (there is a “national theater corporation” that the Shuberts run out of DC…)
The National Theater of America (problematic, def. “america,” etc., although maybe being politically incorrect is exactly what we need…
The National-Conceptual Theater (or National-Corporate…National-Corporeal…)
The National Theater of Las Vegas
The National Theater of the Desert
The Manifest Destiny Theater
The Theater of Expansionism
Theater of Money (We have more than we know what to do with…)
Theater of Entitlement (because the citizens of this country are entitled to a ten-theater complex in the Vegas desert…)
Theater of Entitlement: presenting a full season of the culture of entitlement since 2008…

Or we could just call it Manifest Destiny. That’s my new favorite.

A search for URLS not yet taken under “manifest destiny” reveals these delightful folks from the World of Warcraft:
Manifest Destiny is a raiding guild on the Dark Iron (PvP) server and is paced towards hardcore progression. We are currently clearing all of Karahzan and hope to be starting the 25 man’s (Gruul’s and beyond) shortly.

Your suggestions are welcome.

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art

re/flection

A friend and I reflect that the ability to translate an idea from your sphere of art into someone else’s is one test of how good the idea is. And that often it gets better, or more interesting, in the translation. He says this is the same as with intellectual ideas, that if you can explain them between disciplines, they are strengthened. I know it helps me to try to tell him what I’m thinking. It’s hard, but worth the effort.

What would an idea be that you couldn’t explain to someone else? Would there be value in cultivating such ideas, so specific to genre (or self) that they couldn’t be moved?

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theater, writing

Edge of Los Angeles

Readings for Edge Fest LA’s Los Angeles History Project begin today and extend to next Sunday, including new plays from Aaron Henne, Tom Jacobson, Philip W. Chung, Judy Soo Hoo, Teresa Chavez and Rose Portillo, and Larissa FastHorse & Brian Joseph. All readings are free and at the Autry. The website calls these readings “six new plays about our city and its rich history.”

Aaron’s play, RECORD STORM SPREADS RUIN!, is today at 11:

A corrupt administration. A leader clinging desperately to his power. A devastating flood. In 1938, Los Angeles Mayor Frank Shaw, on the verge of being ousted from power, broadcasts over the radio airwaves to a drowning city. His citizens, some living and some dead, converge on City Hall to offer him one last chance at salvation from his past deeds, before he is overtaken by a record storm.

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art

saturday art

One of my friends has a group show, Searching For Clarity, at the Art Rental & Sales Gallery at LACMA. I thought I’d put the information up here. Bruce is the parent of my oldest friend, Tyler, and a brilliant abstract artist. I’ve never put an image on my blog before, but here’s one of his paintings, Occulation.

Occulation by Bruce Dean

The simplistic imagery in Bruce Dean’s current series of spheres, conjunctions, and eclipses uses mixed media on paper to tap into the memories and ideas we all share at a subconscious level.

The Art Rental & Sales Gallery at LACMA is open Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday from 11 am to 4 pm, and the show runs through July 17.

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