In rehearsal...

Day 10.

It's an emotional role. I was ready for the heavy lifting, but not the residual soreness. For hours afterwards my head was messed up. Images. Etc. The same stuff you use to get where you were going hangs around at the edges for a while since.

I studied this stuff. Once upon a time, in the same rooms I'm now rehearsing, I spent three or four hours a day four days a week for a year coming up with new and exciting ways to make myself feel terrible. Eleven or twelve of us in a room for an entire year with a misery sherpa pushing his students to go deeper inside of themselves- antagonize griefs, stoke childhood grudges, find your id and flog him with a coat hanger.

And we did. I did. With my mind I murdered, mangled, deceived, crafted scenarios of violation- for a year. And came home every day afterwards. The teacher taught this class used a term "acrobat of the heart". I think the term is clumsy, but it's meaning to me- the effortless taking of terrible emotional risk is very clear.

That year, 2002 to 2003, I felt a kinship with the people with whom I studied. We weren't curing cancer- more often we were doling it out and grieving over its occurrence for some assignment- but I think it's safe to say that we felt like we were. There was a genuine sense that we were hot shit- and this might be the natural outcropping of indulging every deep-seated, mean-spirited, childish fantasy we could come up with. (I use the first person plural here and irritates me- but I can think of no other way to show how dialed in I was to these other peoples frame of mind- there were no secrets- secrets slowed you down. Everything was shared. One guy tried to hide his sexual orientation during the year and it was painful to watch...)

We were good at angry- both the boys and girls. People could find rage. Everybody thinks they've been done wrong. Sad came slower for the boys than the girls, but one by one the tears came for the boys and the subsequent congratulations. Also, there was the spectre of being CUT from the program hanging over every class. So a nice emotional breakthrough could keep those feelings at bay for a couple days.

As a rule the class was not able to do sex. A part of the training centered on sex- and getting "related" to sexual activity. Horniness, as anyone who has seen a live sex show in Amsterdam knows, is difficult to reproduce on stage. True also in the classroom. The sex-based assignments (catchy turn of phrase, no?) were almost uniformly disastrous and far too embarrassing to list here (comments enumerating said assignments will not be published- you have been warned.) There was sex occurring licitly and illicitly outside of the classroom, but I couldn't say any more than anywhere else.

A siege mentality set in after six months of emotional work. Classes would be met with a hardness from the students. The eyes, once soft around the edges and quick to moisten, steeled over, strayed from the work on stage to smuggled crosswords puzzles and mindless doodles. February and March lasted a year and a half. Good work was greeted as indifferently as bad, weeping became a minimum wage job.

This may have been necessary. "Acting," as my then-girlfriend then pointed out to me, pointedly, after being treated to another of my lengthy whining screeds, "is hard." And it is. Or should be. And after a while, it became better to treat it with a little less respect and awe.

So now I'm back in rehearsal, doing the heavy lifting of emo-work (we never called it that, but my calling it emo makes me feel more ridiculous about it and somehow better) and I need to get my after work detachment back. Indifference has to be cultivated. Again. I punch in again at noon.

btw,
2 things that I share here.
1) Excellent article shared by stillman (whose blog still rules)on whether or not to respond to your critics...
2)This is a poach from beatdown's excellent screed re: toilets.
"I haven’t even talked about the toilets. There is a huge handicap stall, which I could never use because I don’t need to feel like I’m shitting in an open field."

Seriously, beatdown, I've walked by a half a dozen handicapped accessible bathroom stalls and I giggle every time. Thanks for that.

Gandhi would keep reading... Why don't you?

Afterthought on the King of Pop

UPDATE: Significant Tabloid story today sheds a little light.

How do you write an obituary about a man who's been dead for thirty years?
-Inherit the Wind

By beginning with a quote from a famous play, I will now tag this blog "classy."

Okay. Ten thousand, million things have been said. And as I have no facts to offer, no theories to hand down, and no outrage to share; all I have left are questions. Or specifically one question. I offer this question along with some possible answers. If the spirit moves you, let me know where you stand either briefly or expansively- because I'm keen to know.

What confused you most about Michael Jackson?

1) The changing skin color? (This was inexplicable but fairly constant- blamed on a skin disease but clearly ranged well past any variation of that difficult to spell disease that I've come across.)

2) The child molestation charges? (This is not difficult for me to understand, conceptually. There are people who molest children on our planet. Jackson may have been one. There are people who attempt to make money fraudulently. Jackson may have been their victim. But after the first whiff of impropriety don't you think you'd have moved heaven and hell to avoid a second one?

3) His Peter Pan infatuation? (I'm sorry this is creepy. Not as creepy as this guy. But creepy.)

4) His relationship with his own children? (Dangling them out windows. Putting them in masks. Running out of names after the second child- Prince Michael 2?)

5) Bubbles? Emmanuel Lewis?

6) His extraordinarily homely second wife?

7) The extraordinary circumstances of his death (A doctor on hand to give him an intravenous Demerol injection and then not to have opiate-neutralizers on hand when he stopped breathing? A suicide? An assisted suicide?)

8) The Martin Bashir interview? (on Children in his bed: "Why can't you share your bed? That's the most loving thing to do, to share your bed with someone.")

there are a million more things with Michael. But I can remember in 1987 wondering, worrying even, that he might be gay. And by 1997, wishing it was only that he was gay.

The man was a colossus. I can't think about what coolness is without calling up images of Michael. I can't watch people dance without thinking about Michael. But somewhere along the way, I broke with him because I thought it was all too strange. And I don't know where that took place exactly.

And now trying to examine where my own willingness to suspend normal human expectation snapped, I find that the arc his image described seemed to always deviate too widely from the norm to find a clean breaking point.

One thing seems certain to me: despite thousands of hours of videotape, millions of photographs, endless interviews, retrospectives, and biopics I have no idea who Michael Jackson was. None.

Gandhi would keep reading... Why don't you?

Let me just say this about that...

About a week ago I saw an evening of one acts with five people I knew in it.

I did not like the show.

I was genuinely rankled by a number of things in the writing of the shows and in particular one of the shows so I looked up the playwright and I saw a number of glowing things had been written in support of this show.

I thought to myself, this is bad. Here is, to my mind, an awful play being produced by professional actors in New York City that may well be produced other places with only supportive comments about it published.

I didn't wish to talk to the people who were in the show about it- they had a show to do. And they were producing more of this playwright's work in the future.

But I had an opinion and one that I thought might be of valuable service to someone who might consider producing the show in the future. So wrote my opinion and showed it to a couple people and they said while it was harsh I had made sure that it was about a person's work and not about a person. The playwright was a real person, not a student, a professional having his work produced professionally in a professional space, so I figured this was fair game. And as only 20 people visit this blog on any given day- about 7 of whom stay for any length of time- I presumed (wrongly) that I would have simply slaked my outrage at this awful play and the world would move on.

And of course the next day, I saw that someone had googled the playwright’s name and found the page and stayed for a while and then there were a series of “Asshole” and “Fuck Off” postings in the comments, followed by a “we’re not friends anymore” and a “your blog has consequences” comment. The suggestion was made that my intention was to drive people from seeing the New York production (which in fact had two more shows after my blog was published). I felt comfortable that the fourteen or so people who read my blog on that weekend would not have much of an impact on ticket sales. I still feel pretty confident of that.

All of which brings me to this morning and some realizations.

Art is a fucking contact sport.

We’re here to affect one another and if you affect me, even if you affect me to the point where I say “Your play was terrible. Just terrible. All scraps of it should be burned so that no one ever has to experience that piece of garbage again.” You should want to see that. You should WANT me to write that. Because then at least you have affected someone. You have reached the stated goal of connecting, touching, moving somebody.

Lots of good playwrights and composers have run up against the problem of saying their plays should be burned/banned/destroyed/decommissioned- Stravinsky jumps to mind. Brecht is another. Baraka. John Millington Synge (sp?) To be told that your work is meritless might mean that your show is on the right track- to offend my sensibilities utterly might be exactly where you want to be.

But the notion that people are supposed to leave the theatre with bit lips and teeth grinding doesn’t work for me. The Internet allows me to participate in the discussion- the discussion that begins in the dark of the theatre and ends up lit up on my laptop.

Other people have taken the opportunity to defend the playwright as a friend. That’s a nice thing to do. And from their perspective, I’m a bad person. I attacked the play. Named the playwright. May have cost them an audience member or two. What I did was aggressive and reactionary, mean spirited and belligerent. The playwright is a delightful person, a teacher, a friend. I can’t argue any of those points. I don’t know the playwright. I only know what I saw. And none of his many personal virtues showed up in the play(s) that I saw last Thursday. The corollary seems to be that if you are friends with someone, and I am friends with you, I am not allowed to publicly say that I dislike their work. This creates problems. A lot of mediocre-to-terrible artists are really terrific people.

So if Ross’ comment is right, and it appears that it is, that what I have written here is going to impact some of my relationships then so be it. I can’t back away from what I believe or my right to believe it. I was invited to participate in a discussion by a theatrical company and the company provoked from me a strong reaction which I went out of my way to take time to state.

But I’ll promise this: I’ll be at Dennis Bush’s next play and I’ll write right here if it was better than Asylum. And believe me when I tell you that I hope like hell it is. Gandhi would keep reading... Why don't you?

In which I blog using Larry King's voice to reveal tidbits about my own life

...while riding my bicycle, I was accosted late at night by two young no-good-niks in a beat up minivan. They pulled aside me and tried to sell me drugs. I just said no...

...also on my bike, I saw a black labrador standing so still I thought he was a statue. He was not...

...playing a character with Asberger's syndrome means never having to say you're sorry...

...for every good tattoo I see, I see forty thousand terrible ones...

...Iranians seem to know how to use Twitter, but they don't seem to know how to count votes correctly...

...I've discovered a great coffee shop near my house. The two women who run it tell me it's going broke...

...There is no excuse for the price of tomatoes in Florida in the summertime. $1.99 a pound for something that grows in the backyard? Shame on you, Publix...

...I think I know why this coffee shop is going broke. I'm the only person here...

...People who are overweight, extremely tan, and very hairy tend to look like gorillas riding bicycles. Particularly when they are on bicycles.

...Cinder blocks are the ugliest building material ever created. Narrowly edging out vinyl siding...

...Watching people you dislike become older and uglier can be quite satisfying...

...The swimming pool where I am is exactly the same 92 degrees as the air that surrounds it. It's hard not to feel like your swimming in spit...

Past celebrity blogs: Andy Rooney and Adolf Hitler.

Gandhi would keep reading... Why don't you?

Living La Vida Livingstone

i don't really recall when it all went down.
In 1991, i used a dial up BBS to download my first pornographic GIF. A good racket too, except that they did phone verification on age and my mother picked up the phone before I could. But clearly, at age fifteen I had a handsomely pixelated pornographic line drawing on my screen and I knew that computers worked and could be used.
In 1993, I applied for an email account from the Math department (only way to get one) and was able to chat online with friends for free (as opposed to 50 cents a minute long distance charges (daytime on a weekday).
In 1995, i saw the internet for the first time. It had been there for a while but I had a macintosh and therefore never saw what it looked like. See that was back when there was a computer called Macintosh which was owned by apple but was not an apple because apples all sucked and only macintoshes were good. Or something.
By 1998 it was unthinkable not to have email at your house. By 2002, it was unthinkable not to have broadband at your house. And by 2006 it was unthinkable not to have wireless internet at your house.
And now I am in Florida. I have lived here before. But now I have no internet. Of any kind. I have no car of any kind. I propel myself from place to place using the gentlemanly art of bicycling. I go upwards of 15 and 20 miles a day on the bicycle in head indeces of 105 and up. I no longer notice that my shirt is soaked through to the bone for many hours of the day. i ride on a bicycle with a basket. i wear a floppy hat, bad sunglasses, and floral shirts. I wave to the natives who wonder why I have no car.

I have to go 8 miles roundtrip to get internet. Or food. The food I can bring back in my bike's basket. The internet stays there. There are a few secure connections around my residence but I can't match the names with the connections so i can't beg them. I'm like a junkie for internet now. I need 'net. I need to be able to read useless information about baseball and Iran. I need to be able to wiki every useless fact that's ever been in my head. I need to see the pointless links that smart people place on twitter.
Rehearsals start tomorrow. I'm hoping that will fill the hole in my life left by the erstwhile internet.

You know what's not doing it? Cable frigging television. I have 50 channels which I'm watching on a non-flat screen without DVR and everything just looks ludicrous. I feel as though I've been placed in a time machine and thrust back into the year 2000.

So if you're wondering where I am, I'm in the jungle. Walking through weather that could best be compared to a forest of steaming groins, dodging bugs, and developing bicycle bruises on my buttocks. I'm not complaining. I can feel myself developing character.

And if this blog seems more pointless than usual, I hope you'll excuse it. I smelled burning peanut butter earlier which I understand to e a sign of heat stroke.
Technorati Tags: Florida, Me, Life Without Internet

Gandhi would keep reading... Why don't you?

How does one respond?

I have begun to recognize "aggrieved" as the native state of the New York City resident. When I leave my apartment, the moment I step outside of my door, I view myself as the unwitting victim of every second of my life. Car horns are personal affronts, slow walkers are obstructions hurled by G-d, people talking too loudly on their cell phone on the train are war criminals waiting for my vigilante justice... I know that I am not alone in this. Beatdown writes a nearly endless channel of his rage and I find I admire its specificity. I recognize that I was not always like this, I've always been a man possessed of peevish quirks but this New York City has turned my twinkling constellation of inappropriate rage into a burning sunset of confused and foaming loathing for everything and nothing in particular. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

The thing is- when you cross-pollinate my locational reflexive rage with my native disgust with the theatre you end up with... last night. A confession: I have two theatre degrees including a terminating Masters of Fine Arts from a once-respected football school. My Swiftian rage at all things theatrical is a thing I have come by honestly and with hours of tedium, allowing me now to sit at the theatre and instead of being bored becoming enraged, nauseated, twinged by physical pains that border on paranoid persecution. I should not go. I try not to go. I've shared these feelings with others in my field and I can recall a close friend confessing that he was one of the few people in the theatre he knew who actually enjoyed going to shows. I am not made of stone! I do like many shows. Even in shows that are flawed I can find things to appreciate: performances, clever lines, inventive direction, even a moment or two can bail out an otherwise irredeemable show.

Consider that preamble.

Dennis Bush's Asylum, part two of a three part evening of one acts, is the worst show I've seen in four and a half years. I won't name the company that produced it or any of the actors because I believe this terrible play to be solely the responsibility of the playwright. A forty minute exploration by nine or so actors of how they came to reside in a non-descript, unexplored asylum, delivered as disjointed and interrupted monologues complete with weeping, screeching, writhing, etc. Apparently crazy people repeat themselves. Therefore each monologue is said in its entirety more than once.

The actors tried to be game. I know many of them- I came to see them, I hoped for them to do well but this text was so awful that I simply felt that they were being punished by this man's work. The two other pieces were marginally better, the third even had a brush with near theatricality at the end but on the whole the texts that were presented did not deserve my time or the time of the good actors who performed them.

So consider this a bully-pulpit. I know some of you here are people who have googled this playwright are considering putting up his "Asylum". As an audience member, a person of the theatre, and a human being who has had forty minutes of his life hog-tied and raped by the inhuman (and I mean that not in some Artaudian sense of an inhumanly cruel theatre- I mean non-human; bearing no correspondence with human life as I have experienced it) mundanity of this short piece, I encourage you to take this unsollicited opinion and continue walking past Dennis Bush's dreadful play.

Shockingly, while this blog may seems harsh- this is my second rewrite to soften it up. If there were room for constructive criticism of this piece, I would have offered it. Torch this village, relocate its residents, pour salt in the soil where it used to be located, and purchase and burn every map that described its location. That would be constructive. Otherwise, make every effort to escape from "Asylum." Gandhi would keep reading... Why don't you?

Another Part of the Forest

Scenes from St. Louis (where I spent the last five days):

1) St. Louis Post Dispatch: Two women are in custody in connection with the beating death of a man in the Kennedy Forest area of Forest Park, police said.

P______, 26, of University City, was found dead early Monday. Police said he died of head trauma. Police said that either late Sunday or early Monday, P_____ went with the women to smoke marijuana in the park. P____ made advances toward one of the women, but she refused, police said. The second woman, who police described as that woman's girlfriend, then allegedly hit P____. He tried to run, but the women caught him and continued to beat him, police said.

Police said both women were larger than P_____. The women told police that P_____ had tried to rape them, but police do not believe that happened. Both women, ages 25 and 20, were arrested early Tuesday. Neither has been charged.

I was in the park for on the day this happened. Walked by the spot that it happened (hours before it happened) and was commenting to my beloved about how shady things used to happen in the bushes of Forest Park in my childhood. In fact I had a gay manager back during my table waiting days who used to describe in elegant detail the sensual male-on-male athleticism that took place in that part of the forest. He used to mock up the jingle for the Muny, a la Ethel Merman, "Meet me in the bushes! The bushes of Forest Park."

My heart goes out to this guy. He was only 26. It will not be possible to reconstruct the events that took place immediately before he was bludgeoned to death but I think that this guy thought if he got these two large women stoned that he might be able to indulge in some flagrante delecto a fresco. Get his menage a trois on. Clearly this man was looking for some italicized love making. And as his stoned fingers reached out to clutch that first corpulent boob, suddenly the evening took on a very different tone. I think of being stoned out of your tree and pursued by large women intent on killing you. Running through the bramble, somewhere between Pentheus in the Bacchae and Ralph from Lord of the Flies. Unconfirmed rumors state that these Maenads used a Louisville Slugger as a Thyrsus.

2) My mother has taken me and my girlfriend to her gym. Her gym is profoundly clean, air-conditioned to the point of preternatural comfort, and stocked with fitness machines that astronauts use.

I'm grunting my way through my routine (chest and triceps, since your dying to know) and I see a face I recognize. One of those faces from television that begins to torture your brain because you can't quite label it- actor? athlete? late forties, early fities, trim to the point of making his skull look inappropriately large- NEWSCASTER! I recognized the guy as a newscaster from childhood and he and I were the only two working out by the freeweights so I say, Hey! You're R____!

He says that he is and suddenly we're working out and chatting. And it's very pleasant. He wears a shirt from Kansas University which has been banned by the administration ("OUR COACH CAN EAT YOUR COACH") and he mentions he's got kids there. The guy is precisely the same size and shape as he was since I started watching him on TV 25 years ago. It occurs to me that a) to be on television is to know precisely what you weigh everyday b) fat is just the silt of time washing up on the banks of your abs. Beautiful in its way.

So, R_____, what are you up to now? What channel are you on these days? And it turns out he's not. He's been laid off due to a station merger and for the first time in 30 years is not reading the news. I offer my condolences but he explains that no! It's great. He's been dating this "not Christian, but not exactly new age, but she's spiritual you know and younger than me" chick and she's really helped him realize that he's absorbed a lot of nastiness in 30 years of reading the news. This made sense to me. He explained that he's got a brother who's a homicide detective for 25 years and that both of them are sort of in a post-traumatic stress situation now as they are middle aged.

We talked about a ton of stuff- working out, he asked me about New York and I did my best to make it sound like I was doing well (because you've gotta impress total strangers, particularly ones who used to be on television). And as I was leaving he told my mom I was a good guy which I thought was kind of hilarious but perhaps I came off as needing that. Dear God. And then he mentioned he had a radio show and asked me for my phone number and would I like to be on it to discuss what working out in NYC is like. I said yes without really thinking about it and spend the rest of my weekend in St. Louis wondering what I would talk about if he called.

And he never did.

My Headline: Jilted Newscaster Displays Brief Flash of Humanity Before Behaving Like a Regular Newscaster. Or maybe he just wanted to smoke dope with me and kill me in another part of the forest.

Gandhi would keep reading... Why don't you?