'Til My Face Becomes a Mirror

How I became 100 artists

2011-06-15T16:14:00.000-04:00

So this guy is the latest TED speaker to blow my mind. This is an amazing project that crosses so many boundaries:

Between visual art and theatre, between satire and celebration, between the business of art and the creative process. Basically, this guy made up 100 artists, complete with names, histories and philosophies, and created individual artworks made by these imaginary artists for a biennial show for which he is the "curator". This inspires me for three reasons. First, this is the creative entrepreneurial spirit at its best. If it doesn't exist, you invent it - fearlessly, with wit, love and passion. Second, it is an ingenious way not only to make interesting art, but at the same time to examine the process by which art is made. Third, I think a lot of the art is pretty damn good. Watch this:

Shea Hembrey: How I became 100 artists | Video on TED.com

I love actors

2011-05-20T21:04:00.002-04:00

We had auditions for Rent today. For those of you who haven't heard yet, I have somehow found myself in the position of directing Rent at the New Rep. I'm not quite sure how this happened. It's a good thing, as it has shown me once again that it is never a good idea to dismiss anyone or anything because you just don't know. This musical, that I had dismissed out of hand as being smug, self-important and uninteresting is proving to offer an exciting world, strong characters, drop-dead gorgeous moments, and an opportunity to tell a story that has suddenly become incredibly relevant to my own life.

And actors. They drive me so crazy sometimes, as those of you have read this blog have seen, but after a day like today I just love them. People putting themselves, their dreams, their ideas of themselves out there with no protection, with guts, wit, good humor, charm and a total willingness to do whatever. It was so much fun watching them all go after it with such verve and what-the-hell commitment.

I am so grateful to all the auditioners, they have once again re-affirmed my belief in the worthiness of this ridiculous profession. I wish I could cast them all.

Brains! Brains!

2011-05-10T00:00:00.002-04:00

There was a very interesting show on either WBUR or WGBH this weekend, not sure which (I poked around some trying to figure it out, to know avail) about the brain. Specifically, it was an interview with Oliver Sacks, the great neuroscientist, and another guy, a painter, both of whom suffer from Face Blindness, or Prosopagnosia - the difficulty that a surprisingly large number of people have recognizing faces. It was a fascinating conversation, that dealt with the issue of recognition, and how we get by in a world where we don't recognize the things in front of us.

Anyhow, I was so tired today, after hoisting furniture into and out trucks for two days, that on a whim I Googled "Face Blindness". It lead me to this really neat website filled with really interesting cognitive tests. It's called:

Testmybrain.org and I spent the rest of the evening taking all the tests. Do I have Face Blindness (no), how good am I at visually picking things out of clutter (lousy), how good am I at reading faces (better than average)? It was really interesting and a fantastic time-waster. Check it out.

Master of None

2011-05-06T02:35:00.002-04:00

Back soon. Promise. Three weeks of 18 hour days. I haven't worked this hard since we started ASP. But I'm having so much fun. I love playing around in a theater. At this point on this project I am: Creator, Producer, Director, Writer, Publicist, Marketer, Sound Designer, Video Designer, Asst. Lighting Designer, Asst. Set Designer, Props Master, Costume Coordinator, Electrician, Event Manager, and Light Board Op. And I couldn't be happier. It is true. Theater can be fun.

Tina Hey

2011-04-12T19:50:00.001-04:00

Sorry I haven't blogged in a while. I am at the wall with Blood Rose Rising: the workshop, and we haven't even started rehearsals yet. Next week is going to be something else, let me tell you.

In the meantime, I wanna talk about Tina Fey. I didn't watch Saturday Night Live in the early 2000s. I am one of those annoying old farts she refers to derisively in her book (yeah, I read her book), who "thinks the show hasn't been good since the seventies". And I totally missed 30 Rock until recently. It wasn't until I saw her do her Sarah Palin on SNL during the election that I even knew who she was. And I was impressed. And I thought she was kinda cute. Not as Sarah Palin, as herself. So when we breezed by Date Night on Netflix a few months back, with all-time fav Steve Carell, I was open. And she was fabulous. So the interest gets piqued a little more. So when I get my awesome little iPad for Christmas, and Kelli and I are looking for something light to watch on it while we are snuggling up in bed, I thought, "hey, Tina Fey, what's this 30 Rock I've heard so little about?" So we watch.

I am in love. I admit it. I am in love. I wanted to enter into a polygamous marriage with Tina Fey and her husband. I don't know him, but I'm sure he's great. First of all, the show is laugh out loud funny - every few lines. I don't remember laughing so hard at a sitcom in, probably ever. And it's wonderfully weird. It manages to pull off the silly weirdness of real people in a way that Arrested Development never quite did for me. Liz Lemon is lovable, horrible, selfish and idealistic all at the same time in a totally improbable and completely believable way. And of course Alec Baldwin is a genius. Who knew? The whole cast is hilarious, and Jane Krakowski as Jenna does such brilliant satire on a subject that you all know has caused me more than my fair share of pain and frustration. We're just starting season 4 now, and I can't get enough!

So I read her book, Bossypants. That woman is 1)hilarious; 2)smart; 3)so honest; 4)just adorable. It's a great read, you should get it.

So yeah, Tina, if you want to move to Utah with me and Kelli and Jeff and all the kids and animals, just say the word. I'm there.

The World

2011-04-08T00:16:00.002-04:00

This story really got me. A children's theatre in a refugee camp. If you didn't hear about this, you should read this.

How I got that story

2011-04-01T00:52:00.008-04:00

It's finally happening, as many of you know. Blood Rose Rising will be doing a workshop production on April 23, April 30 and May 6 in Harvard Square at Zero Church St. It's a fitting venue, since I spent almost every minute of every working day in that room from 1993 to 2003, while I was at the ART. It's going to be amazing. Come and see it.

I have been working on this show for 22 months now. The idea came to me while I was at the 2009 TCG conference in Baltimore. I'd just been given my walking papers by the ASP, and was trying to decide what crazy thing I would do next. The conference was supposed to be about "Roots, Renaissance and Revolution" but it was really just about the Revolution. It was dominated by the under 40 crowd, both in terms of the subject of discussion and in who was getting the floor. The big takeaway from that conference was that we need to allowing drinking and texting in the theater. That may sound flippant, but it's pretty true. The new theater has to recognize that people want both a more multi-faceted kind of entertainment experience, and a place where they can express themselves as they see fit.

So I started thinking about how to do that. Having a theater that was more like a club was the first piece. That was obvious. Make it a fun place to be. A place you want to go and hang out with your friends, just as much as a place to see "art". Then you want something that will make people want to keep coming back. My first thought on that was to start a one-act club, where you'd do a new one act every weekend. It's kind of a cool idea, but the work would be insane, and I'm not the one to do it, because I hate reading plays; and logistically, organizing, rehearsing, and marketing all those plays would be a killer. Somebody should definitely do it, but not me.

So then it hit me that it could the story that made people want to keep coming back for more. Episodic drama had redefined television over the last 10 years, maybe it was time for the theater to follow suit. I floated the idea to a couple of friends at the conference, and they really liked it.

I was driving home a few days later, listening to Pandora. A song called "Is there a Ghost?" by Band of Horses came on. It's a great freaking song. I'm listening to this song, and I'm suddenly reminded of a story I had written during my last desperate period, when I had been let go from ART and just before I founded ASP. I wrote 3 1/2 screenplays during that period, all of which were pretty bad, but the stories were good. They had similar themes: One was about a man who becomes enamored by a strange mermaid in lake in Canada; one was about a pair of lost young people who decide to live their lies as characters from a 30s screwball comedy and end up killing each other in a film processing lab; and one was the story that has now become Blood Rose Rising. They all deal with the fascination we feel for the unobtainable. Oh, and one was about 4 middle aged guys who decide to start a rock band.

So I hear this song streaming on my iPod, and I remember this story, which was pretty neat, and I think to myself - "that's it. That's the tale we should tell."

And almost two years later, here we are. Here's the song, though we're not using it for the show. We have something much better, by awesome local band Alchemilla. But by way of tribute for a good idea. Here's Band of Horses:

Acting! thank you

2011-03-28T09:03:00.004-04:00

Kelli and I were having a conversation about a friend the other day, and we wandered into the topic of what makes people become actors. It's the nature of such conversations to become reductive and oversimplified, but it's interesting and can be illuminating nonetheless. We decided that there are three main motivations that drive people to willingly make themselves a spectacle to other people.

The first is the "Love Me Do" actor. This is somebody who wants an affirmation that they are a valuable person by having people see them and praise them for their courage, brilliance, and sensitivity. The play becomes an opportunity for them to shine. This person is secretly more interested in the curtain call than any other part of the show. Also, the backstage drama is almost as important as the one that happens on stage, much to the chagrin of many a stage manager.

The second is the "Anyone but me" actor. These people are drawn to the stage because it is a place where they can not be themselves. For whatever reason, the self is not a good place to be, and so they try to find a place where they can be somebody else for a while. These actors often don't even really enjoy acting very much, and rarely feel good about their work. But it's better than the alternative. For a few brief hours a night, they can not be. They are often nice and hard working, but you can sense their burden, and often a sense of futility or fear.

The third type is the "Peter Pan" actor. They just want to play. As a kid, they loved make believe more than anything else, and never really got over the fact that you are expected to stop pretending once you hit puberty. So they are drawn to the stage by the chance to continue the wonderful games of imagination that were so captivating as children. Those that get paid to do it count themselves lucky that someone else is naive enough to give them money for something they would do for nothing.

Obviously, few people are all one of these: most actors have a combination of these factors, and I bet you almost every actor would identify themselves as number three. But in my experience, only a few, and they tend to be the ones people most like to work with, really have that love of play at the center of their work; where the play's the thing, and acting is not more about psychology than art. Some really can't help it - life has dealt them a crappy hand - and some would benefit from thinking about something bigger than themselves for a change.

Yeah, I'm a cranky old cynic. But actors are ridiculous creatures, aren't they? We kind of ask for it... and don't get me started on critics...

Simple

2011-03-24T14:06:00.004-04:00

Kelli and I went to see Fragments at ArtsEmerson last night. It's 4 short pieces by Samuel Beckett, directed by Peter Brook (and Marie-Hélène Estienne). Now it's hard to go wrong with Beckett for me. I love how he brings together the profound and the incredibly mundane, the deepest despair with the simplest joy. I think he just zeroes in on the most elemental relationship between human beings and the universe. And he is so damn THEATRICAL. His plays are witty, moving, very funny, absurd and tragic all at the same time. I don't know how he does it. But he sends me.

And I can't imagine anybody better than late-career Peter Brook to direct his work. Brook and his company have made a lifelong mission of finding the most essential, deeply simple work, and it really shows in this small company. Two older gentlemen, and a young woman - who performed with such humanity and deep, profound simplicity. Nothing showy or indulgent anywhere; just being in the space with the words and characters. Three people relating with each other, with themselves, and with the world in the most natural way. It was just the thing for me.

The nerve

2011-03-22T20:41:00.004-04:00

So I'm trying to figure out what's happening with my body. For parts of every day the tingling in my arms has decreased to the lowest level in 5 months, and I begin to hope that maybe I'm getting better, getting back to the person I was. But then, pretty much every day, if I sleep too long, or after I've sat in a restaurant chair talking for an hour, or at other random times, suddenly my arms go all wiggy and I can't move my neck without thrills - the unpleasant kind - running up and down my limbs. And there's still that weird tiredness in my legs...

They told me that the spinal cord takes up to a year to heal, which is what I keep telling myself, but I can't help wondering if the damn thing worked at all. I'm itching to get another MRI to see if the frightening hourglass that was my spinal cord is really gone or if I still have that pinch, slowly eating away my mobility and strength. They don't want to give me one - cutting medical costs, etc., but I think I need to be a demanding health consumer. I was supposed to see my doctor this morning, but he bailed on me, and now I have to wait until Friday!

All in all, this recent change in the way I feel about my body is a constant drag on my subconscious. I think back to when I played Lucky, and would perform that nuclear explosion of a monologue and do a dead flat fall right onto my face so I'd bounce six inches in the air (the stage was padded, but still), or Marat Sade where I bought my own harness so I could be suspended by a meathook for an hour before running around screaming and hurling myself into metal tables. Or even two years ago as Coriolanus, getting wheeled around on that cage smashing it with wrenches as hard as I possibly could, sometimes missing a little so my fingers were perpetually swollen and bruised. Of course that's partly how I got myself into this mess... But to think that my whole world view would get changed by a play where I mostly stood around talking and sometimes played the viola, and for two seconds I got pushed over by a guy and fell hard on my butt and that has completely shifted everything, it's just bizarre. And I don't like it, I won't pretend.

As an actor you have to believe that you are invincible, to a degree, so that you can take the risks you need to take. I'm still trying to take the risks, but I'm so aware of the costs now. Maybe that's good...

What's real

2011-03-14T21:28:00.003-04:00

So on Friday I went to see my son Spencer as Winthrop in the Ottoson Middle School production of The Music Man: Junior! which is essentially the Music Man with half the songs and half the plot cut out. He did great, no question about it. The kid is a regular chip off the old block and knows in his gut how to sell a song. It was a thrill to see him, and I swelled with fatherly pride to behold it.

But something really interesting actually happened at this little event. The girl playing Marian was a little 6th grader - I mean a LITTLE 6th grader - she must have been 4 foot 2 - and she had a cold. She croaked her way through "Goodnight My Someone". Now somebody had been teaching this little girl about acting, and it wasn't a good thing. Maybe it was someone who thought that acting was an important skill in junior beauty pageants, because she would put her hand on her hip, give the audience a patent leather smirk, then toss off a line, and then prance around like a show cat. It was everything scary about child acting you can imagine.

But the girl had a cold, and she couldn't sing. At intermission, there was long pause, and then the director, a hyper-intense woman, the kind who are the only ones to be able to stand directing 90 kids in The Music Man: Junior! - which is both a good thing and a bad thing for the kids as far as their mental health is concerned. Anyway, she came out to tell us that the little girl was in tears because she didn't have a voice - and normally she had an AMAZING voice - but really wanted to finish the show - it was her only chance, after all. So she was going to finish the show, but we all had to know that she was sick and give her whatever support she needed.

So the little girl came out for "Till There Was You" in the second act. And she tried to sing, and her voice was Gone. Nothing there. And then, suddenly, an amazing thing happened. Truly beautiful and amazing. This little girl, who could have melted, or tried hell or high water to sing even though she had nothing but a croak, did something really special. She started to speak the song. And she spoke the lyrics, and she did it simply, and clearly, and with feeling, clarity and passion. Suddenly, in the midst of all this other wonderful silly stuff, she was really acting. Real. It was magical. And moving. So so simple.

And she finished, and the audience went wild, and she went right back to prancing up and down the stage like a crazy performing cat trying to win a beauty pageant, and the moment was gone. But it was Real. Funny when it shows up.

Glee

2011-03-10T19:46:00.003-05:00

Kelli and I watched the last episode of Glee last night. Or maybe it was the one before that - she's been really busy. I'm really torn about that show. I know from Facebook how much so many of my friends LOVE LOVE LOVE the show. And I myself feel a weird attraction to the characters. But there is a piece of me that can't help feeling that the show is....welll...crap.

The first thing is hard to quantify. It's this feeling that the show can't really decide what it wants to be. This weird uncertainty of tone keeps bugging me. Every week, suddenly all the students and teachers are all obsessed with One Thing. For example, a couple of weeks ago, everybody was interested in "DRINKING" - which hasn't been on the radar in any way whatsoever for two years, and suddenly EVERYBODY is getting drunk, embarrassing themselves, etc. And then they take a nice quick lesson that drinking is something you have to be thoughtful about, and BOOM, next week nobody is drinking anymore. Or being obsessed with Justin Bieber. Or whatever. I guess I wouldn't mind this sudden obsessionism if the show didn't continually insist that it's characters were also real people with real problems that I should take seriously. I can't rationalize these two totally different styles.

And then, are they really losers? They say they are losers, but some of the hottest students in school are in the chorus, and they do these performances again and again that students get really into, with amazing production effects, but still, somehow, they are not cool? At many school in the U.S., show choir is VERY cool, so what is the deal? Hard to manage the consistency here.

The final thing is, well, that the songs, which were pretty marvelous in the first season, are getting repetitive, and well, boring. The medium isn't kind to the theatrical, and you need a really fresh POV to make it work, and they are starting to run out of fresh POV. Though of course, I still get teary at show all the time (though I must admit that a cat food commercial can make me teary).

I will probably be excoriated eviscerated and emasculated for my cynicism. But there it is.

Death by blueberry

2011-03-09T17:09:00.002-05:00

Okay, so here's what I dreamt last night:

My brother Charlie and I were part of a choir in England who's director had committed a terrible offense, unnamed and unknown to me in my dream. According to ancient tradition, we were instructed to execute him in the following manner. He was set before the choir, tied up, and we all took turns hurling darts - like the ones you see in bars, or in someone's den - at him as hard as we could. We would dip the tips of these darts in blueberries, some, only some, of which were poison. He stood there like a statue, as he began to resemble a pincushion with dozens of little darts sticking out of him. I was very proud of my ability to hurl the darts with great force and accuracy into his body, but I couldn't help wondering if he was congratulating himself on the brilliance of having insisted on this bizarre and not terrible effective form of ritual slaughter.

Now, my brother and I were in a choir in high school - not English, but with a real elitist British bent. And it did have a choir director who was forced out by angry parents because he was one of those intensely ambitious artists who make great things happen for kids but often at the expense of their mental health. And I have recently been reminded of this choir because somebody on Facebook has been posting dozens of pictures of people and things from this era. But why was I so savagely happy with my ability to hit him with darts? And what the hell is up with the poison blueberries?

Spring is here

2011-03-06T18:50:00.002-05:00

Isn't life weird? I have spent the last two months thinking about death, and the inevitable decline of the body, and how pointless things are, and how people are selfish and insular, and everything negative.

And then, two nights ago, I'm walking my dog, Spiker! and we go by Spy Pond, and the light is shining on it, and the messy snow is melting everywhere, the air is still cold but with that smell of spring in it, and Spike is bounding up the hill in the most ridiculous and adorable manner, and I suddenly think: "this is awesome. this whole life thing. what difference does it make that it's finite. Or is it? who the hell knows. I LOVE THIS."

And then, I go see Hotel Nepenthe. Now, honestly, I almost don't go. ASP still threatens me with waves of misery, but I try to be brave for the artists whom I love. And I get there, and who cares? Nobody "complicated" is there, but people are there who are genuinely glad to see me, and it's just nice. I see the show, which is isn't perfect, but golly, the acting is awesome, the designers and director and author have put it all out there, and they are having such joy making this work, and there is so much to rejoice in here. It's magical. And then I go to see Kelli's Spring Concert at Milton. And the kids choreograph pieces that are AWFUL - but gosh, they are so joyful, who cares? And Kelli makes work that is so subtly brilliant, so delicately magical, I'm enthralled. Everywhere, people are making things. And my dog bounds through the melting snow and smells the amazing smells of spring, and I suddenly think: Winter makes you an extremist. Art pushes you to be an extremist. But it doesn't have to be that way. The effort, the engagement, the commitment, the simple pleasure in making stuff - what more to you need? This is GOOD.

Welcome Spring.

Linkded in

2011-03-01T21:59:00.002-05:00

I spent the day trying to figure out this LinkedIn thing. I'm not sure I get it. I have a feeling it could be useful to me as I try to get the Rose project off the ground, but I'm damned if I know how. I connected with about a million people, but now that I'm connected I have no idea what to do. Do I post things? Or what? It's all very "professional" and "business", and other stuff with "airquotes" around it. I guess I'm basically hoping that somehow it will lead me to people who want to invest in my project. One can dream...

When Ego is ego and art is art, part two

2011-02-27T12:38:00.006-05:00

Well, here's the thing. Last night I also saw, or was subjected to, the very opposite of Requiem. I'm not going to go into detail about who, what or where, because though it was almost unbearably terrible, it was innocent, and I'm sure well-intentioned; and it was free, so what can you do. It was intended to be some kind of artistic "happening" that brought together musicians, dancers, poets, and performance artists. Sounds kinda cool, right? But oh... First a stunningly un-Native American poet came out and intoned a poem by a Sioux holy man while a taiko drummer waved his drum sticks importantly in the air. Then a musician came out and made random noises on a flute and moaned while two modern dancers tried to get inspired. Then a contact improv duo came out and did some random contact improv while the musician continued to emote. Then something remotely interesting happened. Three guys with homemade speakers on their backs. They were attached to each other by 15' aircraft cable, which they sawed at with cello bows. There were sound pickups attached the cables, so as they sawed it made bizarre electrified groans in various pitches. They could change the pitch by leaning and pulling on each other in different ways. I have no idea what it signified, but it was unique, and thus somewhat interesting, until the contact improv-ers started to contact improv in and around their cables, and it just got weird and kind of awkward. Then the drummer came back out, with a friend drummer and drummed for a really long time while the poor dancers tried to keep it up and find some sort of meaningful movement to go with the endless banging. Then everybody came out and did their things all at once in an immense cacophony while the poet did another poem by the Sioux holy man, and then the drum-guy, who sort of seemed to be in charge, went crazy and then made everybody stop. And at last it was over and we could go sit down and watch Requiem.

As I said it was innocent, and naive, and well-intentioned, and several of the performers were obviously fairly skilled, but it had no shape, no context, and no perceivable point beyond satisfying the artists need to make "art". And it begged several questions. First of all, it made me wonder what gives people the right to inflict their art on others. All we were told was that there was a pre-Requiem performance - we had no way to know what it was until we got there, and once there, we felt coerced by the situation to watch them and somehow show our approval for their desire to perform - the kind of "they're so brave, we have to support them" mentality. They weren't brave, they were self-indulgent. Is there a God-given right to present art, and does it go no farther than that we all have the right to express our idea of art and force the rest of us to watch? Maybe coercion is too strong a word - I suppose I could have just left and waited until it was over, but the social pressure to stand there and watch this trainwreck out of respect for the performers was overwhelming. But why? This performance was about nothing, and gave nothing to anybody but the performers. It's something I see far too often - people "being true" to themselves and their art, which really stands for rampart self-indulgence and public, yes, masturbation.

I don't suppose there's anything new about this, or anything to be done about it. It's a free country, after all, and there's no way that we could have artistic arbiters who could really determine what art should and should not be seen. That would be the worse kind of censorship. But maybe there is a place for considerate self-censorship. Ultimately, I guess it makes me want to urge all artists to keep asking themselves, Why am I doing this? And if the answer is more about how it makes you feel than what you are trying to give to others, think twice.

When I was at ASP, I often argued that I didn't really think the individual artists mattered as much as WHAT we made for our audience. I got into a boatload of trouble for that belief, often. It is distinctly un-warm and un-fuzzy, though I'm not saying that the people don't matter, not at all. Without people willing to do it, often for little tangible reward for all the time and energy, there wouldn't be any art. It's just that they serve the ART, not the other way round. I still believe it. It's what made Requiem so transcendent. I guess it makes me a bit of zealot, but it's what I think.

Oh, and the guys who played the crazy cable/speaker three-man walking instrument thingy: These guys: They were pretty cool so I don't mind blowing their cover.

When Ego is ego and art is art, part one

2011-02-27T00:35:00.004-05:00

First off, let me just say that Nicole Pierce's Requiem is absolutely brilliant. One of the most enthralling and thrilling dance pieces I have seen in a long time. Nicole is an old friend who has danced with Kelli on several occasions, and I have always liked her quirky movement style, which often marries balletic elegance with an unexpected sort of robot-Barbie kind of vocabulary that is human, kinda comic, and kinda tragic at the same time. And Requiem takes it all to another level. First, it is set to the ravishing music of Mozart's masterwork of the same name, and just sitting the soul-drenching of beauty of that music is really all you need for a rich artistic experience; but you add to that the four living walls of projected trees that slowly morph from summer to fall to dead of winter, surrounding the space, and you get something memorable; then you add dance that is passionate, intelligent, intricate and deeply human - that seems to find all that is noble in the female passage from life into death, performed by masterful dancers giving every ounce of their talent and commitment - and you get something truly unforgettable. You're sorry you missed it.

But bizarrely, that's not really what I want to talk about. Because I had another experience tonight that was so far in another, fascinatingly awful direction, that I can almost think of nothing else. But in deference to Nicole, and what she deserves, I will stop here and continue tomorrow. Let's savor how exhilarating beautiful live performance can be, and leave it at that for the moment. Brava Nicole Pierce.

Mind's Eye

2011-02-25T23:24:00.005-05:00

I was listening to NPR's Science Friday today and this caught my attention. It's all about perception. There's a part of me that's just a science geek that loves this sort of thing. But there's always a piece of me that thinks about perception from the artist's point of view. How do we perceive, and what does the way we perceive have to do with how we make our art? The part of me that's the science geek doesn't really care if there is an answer to the question, and the artist part of me doesn't care if there's an answer either, as long as there is a question.

It's really interesting that for weird formatting reasons, the text above came out like that. I love it, in reference to the whole subject of this post, which is perception. Here is what it says: I was listening to NPR's Science Friday today and this caught my attention. It's all about perception. There's a part of me that's just a science geek that loves this sort of thing. But there's always a piece of me that thinks about perception from the artist's point of view. How do we perceive, and what does the way we perceive have to do with how we make our art? The part of me that's the science geek doesn't really care if there is an answer to the question, and the artist part of me doesn't care if there's an answer either, as long as there is a question. But check out the video. It's interesting that in order to hold onto a manageable perception of our environment, our minds only focus on a tiny portion of that environment, but make us believe that we still experiencing the whole thing.

I couldn't figure out how to embed the video in this blog, so you have to follow the link below. Enjoy.

Priming The Mind's Eye

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French philosopher Henri Bergson has a famous quote: "The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend." Bergson probably meant it metaphorically, but it seems to be literally true according to research by psychologist Martin Rolfs and colleagues. Rolfs studies the role of rapid eye movements in visual perception. shot, produced by flora lichtman, additional imagery prelinger archives, martin rolfs. french man: david zax.

Digital Theatre

2011-02-23T23:06:00.002-05:00

My good friend Don Tirabassi showed me this site this afternoon. It's called Digital Theatre, and they sell HD recordings of major British theatrical performances on the internet. My question is, Is this good for the theatre? My second question is, Is there any doubt that this is the future?

Silver Jubilee

2011-02-22T20:08:00.004-05:00

I had a post here about something that happened, or rather didn't happen, to me recently, but I have removed it as not being in a spirit I would like to embody. Onward and...well onward, anyway.

Bill T. again for me

2011-02-17T19:36:00.007-05:00

I've become something of a cynic in my old age. I've been kicked around by the arts enough to be pretty suspicious of artists waxing rhapsodic about their divine gifts to mankind and how much they suffer and how important their work is. I have seen a lot of plain selfishness disguised as artistic intensity (I've a got whole post ready for that as soon as I can figure out how to get a bit of video onto this thing). But Bill T. Jones strikes a chord with me. For those who remember, my blog is named after something he said in an interview with Anne Bogart at the TCG conference a couple of years back. He's arrogant, self-absorbed and sometimes provocative for the sake of being provocative, but there's something rarefied about his artistic commitment that actually gets me believing again.

He was on "On Point" this morning, and this one caller's recollection and his response got me teary and nodding with a sense of real artistic purpose. Listen up:

You can here the whole Podcast here.

Thanks Bill, and Tom, and Marisa.

Separated at birth

2011-02-16T23:43:00.001-05:00

I knew I'd seen him somewhere before...

Jungle of Cities

2011-02-15T00:50:00.002-05:00

I was reading an article from the New Yorker yesterday - it's the January 10th edition, if you're keeping score - an only moderately interesting article about this woman promoting Freudian psychoanalysis in China. I can't pretend that I was following the article very closely, but suddenly something arrested my attention. It said, "afterward, he invited me to his home in Beijing, near Tiantonyuan, a cluster of pale, pointy high-rises which is famous for being the largest housing compound in China (it has four hundred thousand residents)." FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND. In a housing project. Can you imagine? A single development almost the size of Boston?

The world is a big, crazy place.

Underworld

2011-02-13T14:49:00.004-05:00

So I dreamt last night that I had died and gone to hell. It wasn't too bad though. Hell seemed to be a large old school, like a high school or college building, where I sat in a class taught by a wise old woman. I don't know what the class was about, but it might have been philosophy - because this woman's lecture was more of sermon on personal truth and excellence.

It turned out, too that it was possible to escape from hell. Down the hall from the classroom was a huge room, the end of which just stopped in darkness at an impossible precipice. A black pit yawned before me, and another student told me that if I jumped into the darkness I could escape. He jumped and vanished. I deliberated for a time, worried that jumping off the cliff could just as easily lead to my annihilation, but eventually I gathered my courage and leapt into the void.

When I was a child I used to have a recurring falling nightmare. I would be holding my mother's hand and looking up at an ominous brick building. Suddenly I would be standing at the top of the building looking down at her. Then I would fall off the building. The fall was sickening and terrifying, but just before I would hit the ground I would find myself back at the top of the building, my mother still out of reach below. Then I would fall and be up again, fall and be up, over and over again until I awoke in a cold sweat.

In this dream, however, the fall was not unpleasant. It was a controlled fall, through darkness, without any sensation but gradual descent.

I landed to discover, much to my surprise, that the exit from hell was a small luncheonette. It was busy with customers, most of them young college students, much like my fellow schoolmates in hell. I walked through the restaurant out onto the sunny street. That was it. Then I woke up.

This dream reminded of why I sometimes wish I could be a novelist. I have this idea for novel, called "Odysseus in America". In it, Odysseus, the master tactician and innovator, contrives to escape from Hades and finds himself in California, from whence he makes his way across the U.S. on a second odyssey, avoiding the old gods who want to return him to the underworld, to try to get across the sea to Ithaca to find his beloved Penelope. I think it could be great story, but I'm just not a novelist. I have ideas, but the thought of putting them down on several hundred pages just makes me tired.

The Left Hand of Darkness

2011-02-12T21:16:00.004-05:00

So, over the past several years, I've been experiencing a curious phenomenon. It seems to have some kind of karmic significance, though what it might be I can't say. Over the past few years, I have purchased a number of very nice, high quality, warm, flexible gloves. And after a few months, invariably, I lose one. Now this is not so unusual. But it is curious, that there is a unique pattern to my glove loss. See if you can figure it out:

Yes, you guess it: I only every lose the right glove. What could it mean? Is it that, as a left, liberal minded person, I must lose the right, conservative covering? Or do I lost the right, leaving the wrong, and so am not able to choose the "right" path?

Well, last night, going out with Bridget and Chris to see the Whistler in the Dark production of "The Europeans" and celebrate Bridget's birthday, sure enough I lost one of the lovely and expensive gloves Kelli had got me for Christmas. And which glove was it? Yes, it was the right glove - or the correct glove, depending on how you view this.

But wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, I found the glove, outside on my front walkway, where it had dropped out of my pocket as I ran to the car. So I didn't lose the right glove. But what did I find?

Animal Kingdom

2010-10-29T15:17:00.003-04:00

So it's Friday afternoon, and just came in from killing a creature in cold blood. The cold blood of pity, but still...

I heard Spencer yelling at Spike outside a few minutes ago "Leave it! Spike! Give! Leave it". Spencer came in the house. "Spike has a bird in his mouth," He said. "Is it dead?" I asked. "Not sure, I think it's twitching."

I went out into the garden. Sure enough, there was our sweet, shaggy dog, sitting in the garden with a wing and a foot sticking out of mouth. I put on a glove, grabbed his collar and wrested the bird from his unwilling mouth. He's a very good boy - he wasn't excited about it, but he didn't make trouble.

The bird was a mess. I don't know if Spike had caused it, or if he had found it that way. But it was alive. Much of its feathers has been torn off its belly, which was red and bleeding. Its head was lolling back and forth, I think its neck was broken. It had its eyes tightly close when I pulled it out of Spike's mouth, as it were just waiting for it all to be over. But it opened them when I pulled it into the air. It looked at me. Usually, I find bird's eyes to be so strange, so alien, they hardly seem like they come from the same planet. This bird's eyes were so full of such familiar things: pain, weariness, confusion, hope. It was heartbreaking.

I could hardly bear it. There was clearly no way it was going to survive - it was a shattered wreck. Should I give it back to the dog? I thought, rather incoherently. Should I put it somewhere safe where it can eke out its last breaths? That seemed cruel, it must be in a lot of pain. So I put it down on the flagstones of our patio, and I picked up a big stone - a piece of white marble that decorates the flowerbed - three times the size of the poor creature. Its head was facing the ground so it couldn't see. I held the rock over the bird's head at a height of about two and half feet, and let it fall. It was over instantly.

Then I put the bird's body in the trash, so that Spike, or some other animal wouldn't get at it. It seemed, ironically, the most respectful thing I could do.

Don't Vote - yeah, that's American Values...

2010-10-20T09:51:00.003-04:00

I stumbled across this this morning and I just couldn't believe it. It's aimed at Hispanic people in the Nevada election, and is the most blatant example of voter suppression I think I have ever seen. How can people who claim to believe in the United States and in democratic values possibly condone this? It is so fucking hypocritical. The ad ran in Spanish, which I've put first, and then the English translation, which didn't run on the air, but for those of us who don't speak Spanish is useful - there's also a story in the Huffington Post:

seeing red

2010-10-20T00:38:00.002-04:00

I have never been a fan of abstract expressionism. I never really got it. Big canvases with paint on them - that's what it looked like to me.

I don't know if it's the part I'm playing - Danny in Cherry Docs - but for some reason, this article, in the New Yorker, really got me. You probably can't read it without a subscription:

“Abstract Expressionist New York,” at MOMA, review: newyorker.com

But there it is, anyway. I found the descriptions of the art suddenly deeply sensuous, gripping, and emotional. I mean, look at this picture:

Granted, it's kind of hard to see when it looks so small and, well, red - but there's a fever to it that suddenly I find deeply compelling. It probably is Danny who is doing this to me. He is the kind of guy who sees red, a lot, and the kind of guy who is constantly pulling intense spiritual significance out of the most insignificant details. His desperate need for some kind of spiritual grounding, for something to mean SOMETHING, is making me see import in the simplest of things. "There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow." Suddenly I get the frenzied passion behind these strange painters who were looking for something so deeply essential that the paint, the canvas, the deepest colors and simple lines, somehow took them to a =more essential, primitive space than any form or figure could do.

I kinda get it now...

Cry

2010-10-15T00:31:00.003-04:00

So I had this dream last night. People telling you their dreams is usually lame, but this one I felt was strangely beautiful, and so I'm going to subject you to reading about it.

First off, we were wandering through an old city looking for the vegetable market. Don't know what that means. But we wound up at this old house which was inhabited by a small group of artists. One of them had a friend, a young woman, who had recently been killed by a stalker - she was a beautiful, clear, simple girl with straight blond hair, and she had been cut down. He was grieving, and we all joined him in his grief. We took ordinary towels that we had folded up, and we played them - we twisted and squeezed them - and the most beautiful, complicated music came out - intricate, sad, but sweet and so lovely.

The artist who was grieving was a muralist, and on the wall were two of his murals. They were side by side. One was called "Cry #1" and the other "Cry #2". They were simple. They were both images of a staircase - that's all - that rose up, and plummeted straight down. The first one was simple, four steps going up and then over; but the second was high, high, high - it reached around the corner and fell from a great height. Somehow, they encapsulated for me so perfectly the idea of what it means to cry. You must climb your grief, step by step, to the summit, and then you can fall, free - a descent that is at once a release and a loss.

I woke, at 4:30 a.m., feeling so lucky that I had had this dream. I mused on it, trying to remember the details, until I drifted off again about an hour later. Good night....

Skinheadcase

2010-10-09T05:52:00.003-04:00

Danny is starting to get under my skin. That's the part I'm playing in Cherry Docs. This happens to me with most characters, for good or ill. When I played Hamlet, I famously couldn't decided anything, but moped around my life in a state of withdrawn indecision. When I played Coriolanus I became intrepid, uncompromising, and impulsive. When I played Dorian in Opus I became obsessed with good skin care.

I guess it's a good thing that he's getting in there. It's not the kind of play you can get away with skimming along on the surface. As he says in the script, "you've got to get to sinew." Trouble is, he's kind of a morose, thin-skinned little bastard. I've found myself surprisingly cranky these days. I thought it was the troubles with my neck, money troubles, and my anxiety about how difficult it has been to learn the lines to this play - the first and last of which lead me to worried thoughts about losing my capacity as an actor. If there was one place I always felt like I was in command of myself and what I did, it was in the rehearsal room. Not so right now. I'm struggling, irritable and fighting a vague sense of inadequacy.

Of course it didn't occur to me until I was lying in bed at 5:30 this morning, unable to sleep and gloomily examining the state of my life, that I realized it was the damn character who was working this insidious mojo on me. Not only is he cantankerous, edgy, laconic, he is also deeply vexed by profound existential questions about his own place in life. There I was, lying in my bed. I sleep on my side, facing the edge of my bed, and I often wake up in the early hours because I've somehow pushed off the covers, and I am lying there exposed and freezing. This morning, and I'm lying there and noticing how close I am to edge, like I'm on the edge of a cliff ready to plummet into some sort of abyss. Cheery. Then, it hits me. That's Danny thinking. I feel a little better, but, of course, I can't sleep because I suddenly start writing this post in my head and I know I won't be able to get back to sleep until I get it out. Obsessiveness, another Danny trait. So here I am, at 6 in morning, when I should be sleeping because I have another tough rehearsal day ahead of me doing another thing that the annoying bastard I'm playing does incessantly. Soliloquizing.

High diddly dee...

It's going to be a great show, though.

Kindness

2010-10-03T10:02:00.002-04:00

We went to see In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) last night at Speakeasy. It was a good production with strong work by the women in the cast, especially Lindsey McWhorter and my friend Anne Gottlieb.

I was thinking about what it was that I found so appealing about Sarah Ruhl's writing, and it occurred to me that she refuses to recognize the existence of evil in people. Stupidity, stolidness, selfishness and myopia, yes, but not evil, and not hatred. Her empathy is so great that she really is able to see and express every single character's point of view and to make us appreciate their need to be understood and listened to.

This is quite interesting to me, at the moment, as I delve into the world of Cherry Docs - which is full of evil. Reading Frank Meeink's book Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead, the amount of evil and hatred perpetrated by almost everybody is stunning, and very discouraging. It is indisputable that there is way too much senseless cruelty and brutality in the world, which people inflict on one another for no good reason. But Sarah Ruhl has the ability to see and explore areas of the human experience that are just as urgent, compelling and universal, but are concerned with need, love, and - and to me this is the actually the most salient - just plain confusion about what the heck is going on in our lives and what we should do about it.

I often like to say, and I'm hardly original here, that drama takes place at the fringes of life - you need a good crisis to make a good drama. But Ruhl manages to make compelling drama that exists more in the middle - where people are mostly okay, but still profoundly lost in the daily effort to live. It touches me just as deeply as the most extreme tale of human suffering and redemption. Almost more so, because it's more like my own life. Not that I've had much experience with the electronic stimulation of the quelque chose...

It's a Vision thing

2010-09-29T07:20:00.004-04:00

We had the first readthrough of Cherry Docs last night. I'm excited and a little scared. David Gammons brought his usual mystical brew of understated genius. I've never seen any other director who uses imagery and design to access the deepest truths at the center of the play. Most other directors, myself included, talk around the play: themes, characters, effects. David somehow manages, through the images he brings, the designs he makes or draws from others, and a few well chosen words, to go right to the soul of the play. He creates a world, with a few well-chosen strokes, that has deep textures, subtle nuances, and a rightness that makes you, as an actor, feel absolutely confident that you are stepping down the correct road.

It's inspiring. And, as I said a little scary.

This one is a beast.

Spring Standards

2010-09-26T20:46:00.001-04:00

A friend of Kelli's posted this on her Facebook page. And I must say it is one of the most beautiful things I have seen in a long, long time...

Head games

2010-09-22T22:34:00.002-04:00

So tonight, I went to the Boston Psychoanalytic Society - Bipsy, to her friends - to talk about Shakespeare and acting. It was strange, and interesting. I was approached by a very genial and generous therapist names Walker Shields, who had seen some ASP stuff and had won this prize for writing a paper called, "Imaginative Literature and Bion’s Intersubjective Theory of Thinking".

Now Bion, it turns out, is neither and ancient Greek nor an alien from "Ben 10", but british psychoanalyst from the early 20th century. My friend Walker has developed a group model whereby you use a piece of imaginative literature - a poem by Emily Dickinson and the "To be or not to be" speech in this case - as the springboard for an active exploration of the soul of a group. He was interested in the relationship between this practice and the theater, and asked me to join him in a discussion as part of his giving his paper and collecting his prize.

We've had a bunch of "My Dinner With Andre" kind of lunches at a thai place in Belmont, which I wish everyone who is interested in the personal and spiritual practices of making theater had been at - they were really cool. The main points, I guess, to summarize:

1. Theater and psychoanalysis are really similar.

2. The chance to enter into a kind of reverie in which imaginative literature causes impulsive and unexpected associations, thoughts, memories and reflections, is essential to both fields, and really cool.

3. Human beings are naturally drawn to make stories and create connections, and the feedback loop created by a storyteller and an audience is essential to get deep into the human psyche

4. To actually get deep into the human psyche, it is necessary to nudge people out of their comfort zones, and create an environment where they are dealing with their sensory input in an immediate and improvisatory way.

Now, none of that is all that strange, I guess. But it was pretty cool. Most of the time I hate talking about acting and making theater because it's mostly such self-congratulatory bullshit, but in this context, it was pretty cool. And I thought theater was pretty cool, too.

magic waves

2010-09-22T00:01:00.003-04:00

So today I joined the ranks of the amazed. Kelli had told me about Magic Marcus the Avatar of Acupuncture, but until I experienced for myself, I couldn't really appreciate it.

I have had this impingement in my neck for almost 6 months - chiropractic, physical therapy - it hasn't really done anything. So I sit down with Marcus, he asks me a few questions, then he asks me to put my arm over my head. I do, but it hurts. So he puts these two little magnets on my wrist, and asks me to do it again. Low and behold, it's so much easier - like noticeably so. He moves them, it's even better. He moves them again - it gets worse! So #2 was better than #3. Huh?

He works on me for a while, and sends me home with more magnets - and, okay, it's only been about 8 hours. But my neck, shoulder and hand feel better than they have for almost three months! My chi, getting aligned. Who'd a thunk it? Obviously, it's not cured, I will have to wait and see. but wow. I guess it's science, medicine, fact. But it seems like magic to me...

2010-09-20T14:55:00.005-04:00

In the few moments before I fall asleep these days - I'm sleeping rather blissfully well these days - partly because we're all waking up before 7 a.m. It's also because I have less to worry about these days - finances are still really tricky, but I do find a great weight has lifted since the end has truly come in my relationship with ASP. Of course, I shouldn't be sleeping so much. The impingement in my neck seems to like nothing so little as sleep. The longer I sleep, the more screwed the nerves in my arm are the next day - and the longer it takes for the tingling and numbness to return to its base state - just in my forefinger and thumb and not all up my arm. Still, sleep is fun these days. So rarely in my life have I be able to regularly enjoy the sensation of drifting easily and quickly off into the land of nod. I'm also dreaming more, and the dreams are often quite entertaining. I should start to write them down.

But I digress. I was going to say, before the above paragraph got hijacked by sleep, that in the short moments before I fall asleep, I have been reading a really neat book. It's called The Lost Books of the Odyssey, by Zachary Mason. It's a bunch of short stories - some really short - all variants of sections of the Odyssey. What if Odysseus had come home to find Penelope remarried, that sort of thing.

There's a good review of it in Slate, here.

It's pretty contemplative, and the individual chapters are all elegantly brief, and very thought provoking. The one in which Odysseus is a shaman who creates Achilles as a golem is one of my favorites, and really does connect to some very thought-provoking resonances with the myth. That's its real attraction - by looking at these well-known adventures from a slightly different angle, it reveals some of the timeless images, themes and questions of that amazing journey.

Check it out.

Awkward Family Pet Photos: The Book

2010-09-18T18:04:00.003-04:00

I was whiling away the time looking through the wonders of the Awkward Family Photos website - a marvelous time waster if ever there was one. This had to be my favorite, though. The delicious blasphemy of it must be savored.

It's a funny site. Check it out.

Awkward Family Pet Photos: The Book

Big Love

2010-09-17T18:55:00.005-04:00

Kelli and I watched What's Eating Gilbert Grape last night. Kelli had to watch it for Class Day at Milton - I guess they were talking about it at some Class Thing. Anyhow, I'd never seen it before. It was pretty good. I've always liked Johnny Depp (someday I must tell you the story of how we met him and his wife in the Park in Rome), and Mary Steenbergen. And Leonardo Di Caprio does pull off a very convincing kid with mental deficiencies. When it came out, I remember I as at the age (29) where I was starting to feel that young people were trying to be cooler than me, and so I pooh-poohed their pretense of deep experience and wouldn't go near the movie. Now that I am old, old old I have more respect for the work of people younger than me - since so many people are younger, now.

Now I really was surprised and impressed by Darlene Cates as Mamma. Like so many people, I'm sure, we wondered what had happened to her, and how and whether she was making out, given her extraordinary girth.

Happily, she still seems to be with us. I was really struck by a quote of hers on IMBD:

"I wish everyone that's kind of hiding away at home still could understand or could have the same experience that I did. Once I did the Sally show, all of a sudden I realized that if I went out and people stared at me, I wouldn't know if they were staring at me because I was fat or because they recognized me from being on TV. That empowered me.

I had to make a choice, I could stay where I was and be miserable, or I could take a risk and do something exciting. I talked with the author, Peter Hedges. There were some things in the book that I didn't like. We talked about those extensively and I trusted him because the character was based on somebody that meant something to him in his life. So I knew that it wouldn't be anything horrible. As we went along I was so proud of the way that the character was portrayed and so proud of the way that the children came around to see that this woman had these good qualities, and how much she really did care about her family."

With America's horrible problem with obesity - which we see all over, especially when we travel out to Missouri to visit Kelli's relatives - it's important to remember the human being that is stuck in there...

Groove for the Ages

2010-07-25T04:09:00.003-04:00

Last night we drove out to see my brother perform at the Colonial Theater in Pittsfield, MA - ahead of such celebs as Betty Buckley and John Oliver - with his one of a kind a capella group the GrooveBarbers. For those of you who don't know, Charlie was one of the founding members of the modern a capella sensation, Rockapella. Sadly, having to decide between going full time with group or earning a living for his children, he had to choose the latter, and left the group before their breakout hit Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? Luckily, the other founders eventually left the group as well, and re-formed in a more relaxed, goofy and hip form as the GrooveBarbers.

They sing several time a year, around the country, and they are tight, tight tight!

Here is there typically tongue-in-cheek promo video - which they put together after they landed a national spot for an allergy medicine called Astelin:

The thing that made this event in Pittsfield really special was this. They do a version of "Concrete and Clay" by Unit 4 + 2, and they traditionally bring up some sweet young thing and make her play the triangle while Kevin, the baritone, sings mock-romantically to her. This time, thanks to my brother, they brought my Mom and Dad up on stage in honor of their 50th wedding anniversary, which is coming up next month. The whole place was cheering and laughing, and utterly transported, and I was a happy wreck. My folks were funny and sweet and great and the big hit of the evening. And my brother, he's got a heart the size of Alaska, and he sings about it, too.

Ovo O boy

2010-07-22T22:33:00.003-04:00

So somehow I got on this nice woman named Kathy's list. She works at Rochefort Associates, a publicity firm, and they handle Cirque du Soleil here in Boston. So suddenly, out of the blue, she sends me two fifth row center seats to the new show, Ovo. She'd done the same about three years ago, with Kooza, and I'd taken Spencer. He was seven at the time, and kinda liked it, but ran out of gas in the second half so we went home early.

I asked Dash if he wanted to go, and he didn't, so I brought Spencer again. This time, we were both totally blown away. It's a fantastic show.

Every time I see a great circus I wonder what the hell we think we are doing in the theatre. The circus is so much more amazing, breathtaking, moving, exciting, involving, immediate, visceral, and, in spite of the superhuman abilities of the people performing, human.

These performers have spent their lives perfecting boundary-defying abilities - really putting us lazy-ass actors to shame. And they are so in the moment, so real, pushing up against the limits of human possibility - it's just incredibly powerful.

Some of my favorite things (click on the link to see the performers):

Little chinese girls whirling drums on their feet so fast it looked like they were running in to some new dimension.

Chinese yoyo guy spinning three of those yoyos on his string in a tiny circle an inch from the floor.

Slack wire guy standing on his hands on a unicycle on a loosely swinging wire that was being pulled up into the air while he balanced.

Spider woman crawling head first down the vertical climbing wall at the back of the stage.

The whole thing is a play on the world of insects, and the strange abilities of these performers fit so well into the crazy world of superstrong, superflexible, wild and mysterious bugs. It was lively, entertaining, full of joy, and utter captivating.

Check it out.

Moan

2010-07-04T11:08:00.003-04:00

For the last 15 years I have pretty refused to accept that was getting further and further from the age of 30. It is still pretty much impossible for me to comprehend how the words "46 years old" and myself could both be descriptors of my personhood. So this summer I've been really irritated with the way my body is refusing to go along with my determination not to get actually older.

First, after a fall during Opus, I developed an impingement of a nerve in my neck which is causing numbness in my left thumb, and when I over-exert myself it sends shockwaves up my arm. It's not really getting any better, and every time I do anything really physical it seems to get bad again. So basically, it seems like I'm just no supposed to anything physical.

Of course, I do anyway, because I am staunchly refusing to accept that I can't do everything I want to do. So I was playing tennis with Spencer yesterday - he's really into it, and since I am, too, I'm incredibly excited about the possibility of playing real games with him - and pull a groin muscle running for a shot. I've never had a pull like this before - it really hurt, and now I can barely walk. It just gave out - spectacularly, in the middle of doing something I've done a million times.

My big concern is that I'm starting to slide down the slippery slope. My neck injury means I can't exercise as much as I should, which makes my body weaker and more susceptible to injury, which means I get hurt more, which means I can't exercise as much as I should, which means... pretty soon I'll be driving around the mall on a little red SpinLife Scooter.

I'm not ready!

Holy Outrage

2010-06-10T19:06:00.004-04:00

I had a very interesting meeting with a student I've been working with. Her name is Colleen Hughes. She's a graduate student in the BU playwriting program. I directed a stage reading of her play "The Prayer Bargain" which is a really fine piece of work, if I do say so myself. It's a semi-autobiographical piece about a deeply human and messed but Boston Irish family in Somerville. It's funny, awkward and difficult. She's preparing it to send around and I'm helping her with the final revision before it goes out.

While we were talking, I asked her if she was thinking about any new subjects for plays. She mentioned this story. It's really unbelievable, the appalling double standards that the Church seems to have no trouble living with - priestly pederasty must be managed and covered up, but a nun who chooses to save the life of the mother rather than let both mother and fetus die - BOOM! - excommunicated. And my understanding is that excommunication means not only that she can't be a nun anymore, but that, in her world view, she's damned for eternity. How the Church decides what is black and white and what is a grey area is really stunning. And I think it will make a terrific play.

Here is the Story

OW!

2010-06-08T19:22:00.002-04:00

Well, I was all set to post something fabulous today because my dear friend Bridget complained that I never did - when I burned the shit out of my hand cooking dinner. I was grilling little beef satay - I grabbed the charcoal chimney with my new hot pad from Target - and it burned right through the damn thing and melted the webbing between my thumb and forefinger.

OWWWWWWWWW!

But here I am, pecking out this post, because I AM THAT SORT OF GUY!

For those interested in how to care for minor (you call this MINOR!?!) read this...

Lena Horne

2010-05-10T13:20:00.003-04:00

Lena Horne died today at 92. I read this great piece about her in the Chicago Tribune. I didn't know much about her life, but she was one remarkable lady.

Game World - dystopia or what?

2010-04-19T17:17:00.002-04:00

As I've said before, I love to go to Ted.com to see what crazy things people are thinking up. I stumbled upon this lecture yesterday, and it completely blew my mind.

It's a half hour long, but you should take the time to watch it all because the ending is dizzying. It's hard to know if it's the most dystopic thing I ever seen, or kinda cool. But I think he's kinda right - it's coming.

Wii Games - E3 2010 -

Best Scam Letter I Have Ever Received

2010-04-12T00:43:00.002-04:00

I just love this. It has everything! Enjoy!

INEW NASSAGE FROM MAMY BELLO

Dearest One ,

PLEASE HELP YOUR SISTER

I am Mamy Bello,a Sudan lady who was married 14 years ago to a British National Sailor,Eng OUSMAN BELLO.I and my husband ever lived happily until his death early this year which has turned me into pieces.He died in a deadly ship wreck in the Bermuda triangle,a mysterious triangle.

Since he died,I have not rested from his brothers who are high MAFIANS. They want everything my late husband left behind and threaten me everyday to hand them over to them seeing that I had no child for my late husband.I have escaped so many assassinations/killings from them because Allah is on my side knowing that I am not evil.

Presently,I am hiding in a village in West Africa (SENEGAL)as a refuge. from where I send this email to you. I ran away with all the details of the money my dead husband left for me which his brothers want to take away from me forcefully.

This money is huge to the tune of 5 Million Pounds,Which I want to transfer or send this money out of Britain immediately and purchase my air ticket back to Home at the end of this Month or 1st week of Next Months.Truthfully,I left all my belongings and ran away including my laptop which these evil brothers of my late husband took away from me suspecting that I will be in constant communication with some people or police who can help me. You may not understand what I mean but I am telling you the truth.

Sincerely,in sudan I have no son or daughter and I left sudan many years ago,now I am 29 years old. I seriously need your help. I have no other help and I had so many sleepless nights thinking about what to do and how to get This Money out of Europe,I would have aboundon the money for them,But i don't have any other means of survival because I and My Husband operate a joint account.I managed to sell some of our properties AUCTION and made up this money to 5 Million Pounds.

I want to send it out of Britain All I need is your sincerity if you can help me in receiving this money in your account or any way because I must send it out within one week.Can you help me please ? I don't want to loose this Money.If you can assist me,these are what I need from you :

1.Your real names

2.Phone number

3.Location

When I get your consent ,I will call you and speak with you on the phone so that you will confirm my voice as your sister and friend. I know you will be confused how I got your email. I searched in Google But i was touch in My spirit when I came across your email but I don't know much about yoI will be very very glad if you can tell me somethings about you and promise me that you

will not cheat me or run away with the money if I send it to you to keep for me. In return,I

will give you 35 % of the money if you prove yourself sincere and helpful.

Thanks as I wait for your fast response.

N/B: Now I don't have phone number now because these evil men tapped into my number and

every conversation I make,they listen to it. So If I get your number,I will call you from a

phone boot,it is safer for me this way.But reply to me :mamybelloousman@yahoo.com

Yours sincerely,

Mamy Bello.

I'm a sucker for it, what can I say?

2010-02-26T11:10:00.002-05:00

I just love Olympic women's figure skating. Like a lot of people, I know. But it just opens those floodgates. Those earnest, devoted people making this strange and difficult thing so beautiful. This was just a great competition. I totally bought into the drama around Kim Yu Na and all the pressure on her from South Korea. And I haven't seen a more captivating performer on the ice in a long, long time. And the former queen of the sport, Mao Asada, fighting - really fighting, you can see it in her skate, with a powerful intensity, against the gentle, elegant force of Kim.

And then Joannie Rochette, again. I mean, to channel that pain into something so beautiful, and share it with the world. It's a special thing.

I sat there on my couch, gushing like a fire hydrant. And I'm doing it again now, as I write this.

You can't embed the NBC Sports videos, so here's the link if you didn't watch it.

This is something though

2010-02-25T03:00:00.003-05:00

Okay, I admit that my last few posts have been a little, shall we say, dark? I've found myself back in that indignant place because a few things that have happened recently.

However, I'm not going to dwell on that. Instead, I watched the women's short program tonight - it was actually on last night but I recorded it, and must say that this lady - Joannie Rochette - had me just weeping and full of spirit. You probably know the story - her mom died of a heart attack just a few days ago. And she skated anyway - of course she did, and she should have - you know her mom would have wanted her to - and she skated so beautifully. You could see how much was inside her - she was grey with pain, but composed - and her father in audience - that poor man out there trying to make something of this horrible situation - his eyes were novels. And she finished and broke down. It was truly brave, and generous, and what performing should be about. It was just something special.

So I'm back on the getting-through because 1)somebody always got it much worse; and 2)You just gotta keep putting it out there.

Collaborators

2010-02-24T13:35:00.003-05:00

In France after 1940, when the Nazis rolled through and captured Paris, they set up a puppet government, the Vichy regime, which was ostensibly independent but actually an arm of the Nazi government. Some of the people in France joined the Resistance, to fight for Free France and subvert the puppet government any way they could, to keep fighting the wrong that was Nazism. I think we can all agree these were the heroes, but they were also the people who stood up for their principles. Most of the people just went along. The worst of them, the ones who turned people in, were called Collaborators, but how different were they from the ones who did nothing? Of course, it was almost impossible to justifying sticking your neck out to support Free France - people's livelihoods and sometime their lives could be seriously damage. But I would say the it was mostly fear of personal hardship, rather than death, that drove people.

Life is hard, and most people don't feel like they have the luxury to stand on principle, even if it is for something really important. Especially if that something important has to do with the suffering of others. If we are safe, and comfortable, and okay, it is so much the easiest path to just go along with whatever injustices we happen to observe. We can feel pity, and a little guilt, for those who are suffering, but it is easy to feel those things. They don't take up much of our time, and are mostly forgotten, only occasionally seeping into our consciousness for a few moments, soon to be dislodged by our own selfish concerns and interests.

The French example is a big one, with huge consequences for the Resistance, the Jews, the gays, and others. But those relatively small injustices - against a small group, or just one person - are so prevalent in our lives. We walk by them every day, they happen to our friends and colleagues, and we see them, and we feel guilty, but it really is too much trouble to stick one's neck out, and besides, it's ultimately somebody else's problem.

We're all Collaborators. Every day.

Time

2010-02-09T16:04:00.004-05:00

So I just closed Indulgences. It was a lot of fun, mostly (see last post). And now. For the first time since, gosh, 2003? I have nothing to do until March 9th. I mean, not literally nothing. I'm trying to scare up a directing job, I'm working my new idea (stay tuned), I'm trying to figure out how I'll put food on the table next year. But suddenly, I have all kinds of time. It's very weird.

Yesterday, I got the kids to school, messed around on the computer, went to the store, went to another store, picked up the kids, hung out with the kids, made Jalapeno margaritas (I marinated the jalapenos a little too long and the tequila was very spicy), made dinner, cleaned the kitchen, watched Caprica with my wife, and went to bed.

Today, I puttered around, went to the gym, went to the store again, picked up the kids, took Spencer to ballet, took Dashiell to swimming, and then I'll pick him up, take him to a friends house, make dinner, put the kids to bed, muck about on the computer, and go to bed.

So, yeah, I'm basically a house husband. It's so weird. But kinda good. I'm surprised that I'm not glummer and more bitter, but I'm trying to go with the flow. We shall see.

But I've spent the last god knows how many years rushing about, way behind on everything. Only on vacation, out in Missouri, did I ever feel like I had time. Now I have time, in the middle of life. It's kinda good, notwithstanding the horrible years that brought me this. Funny.

Comedy is Hard

2010-02-06T09:02:00.002-05:00

We really felt like we were getting somewhere. Indulgences is a tricky play - definitely funny, but its balance of nutty randomness, standard oneliners and philosophical invention is hard to manage. But the last 5 or so shows we really started to chug along. Audience response was starting to get a least relatively reliable, and we'd had 2 or 3 really solid houses - thank heavens one of these included Wednesday night when playwright Chris Craddock came to see the show. This was, in fact, one of our best houses, and we left that night feeling like we had found the rhythm of this show.

Then Thursday came along. One of our biggest houses. And they sat there like stones. Like stones. And it wasn't like we were pushing, or playing for laughs. We were just doing our thing. And nothing was coming back. Even the ending, which in the early shows was the one place we could rely on getting everybody involved and laughing, they was chuckling and some grinning, but it felt like a house half the size.

And then Friday came. A fairly small house, which was surprising for a Friday night at the end of a run, but you never can tell. And they sat there. Like dead stones. Not only did they laugh at nothing, except in embarrassed pairs here and there. But they gave nothing back. The old joke, "is this an audience or an oil painting" was never truer. And again. No rhyme or reason to it. We weren't pushing. We were moving it along because we were getting nothing, I say nothing, back, but it wasn't rushed. We were talking to each other, playing the story. It's a good show. So where were they?

It makes me wonder if people know how to be audiences anymore. I'm not sure they understand that they owe something more to the experience than the money they put into the ticket. They are there to share. The event only happens when we make it together. And, yes, it's the performers' job to make it easy for them to enter the story, but it takes an act of will to say, I get it, this is the story we are making, let me get in on this. Sitting there, admiring the skill of the actors, or mentally critiquing the play, or waiting to be entertained, just doesn't cut it. When you go see a play, you need to hold up your end of the bargain.

Pretty Cool

2010-02-01T18:37:00.003-05:00

We've been waiting for something to really grab us since Battlestar finished. Dollhouse was disappointing. Castle was a dud. Flash Forward had possibilities but hasn't really lived up to the mind-bending coolness of BSG.

So Caprica came along. Looking questionable, to say the least. The Pilot ran like two weeks ago, but we haven't had time to watch it until this weekend.

Well, it is very promising. VERY. It's all origins-of-the-cylons, and virtual reality and bringing the dead back to life, and promises, like BSG, to get into the "nitty gritty", as my current character likes to say, about existence, God, and the meaning of it all. Performances are strong. Eric Stoltz has aged very well, still pretty sexy. Looking forward to the next installment.

Check it out:

Chip off the old block

2010-01-28T11:58:00.003-05:00

We went to see Spencer in All My Sons on Tuesday. Talk about proud parents. He really did a great job. He has some of the only laughs in that very serious show, and his timing and delivery were spot on. Gosh I was proud!

The show was terrific. Very strong acting all around. It's an interesting part for Will Lyman, who has such an innate sophistication that at first he seems a funny choice for rough old Joe, but he is such a fine actor that it really didn't matter. I found him delightful and moving and utterly convincing.

And Karen MacDonald? Off the charts! She has this one moment, when she suddenly assails Joe saying something like "Don't you say a word" that is one of the most powerfully filled moments I've ever seen on stage. Her character's whole life is in the line, and I almost felt it physically knock me back in my seat. I was stunned. Such awful depth and power. It reminded me of her extraordinary Mother Courage, another landmark in her magnificent career. Yep, she good.

So, when it sweeps the Nortons, I will for once say "well deserved". It's really a special evening. I only wish it had been in a smaller space - I did sometimes feel the intimacy of the stage life, and the immediacy of what was happening, blunted by size and distance. I could see how good it was, but I couldn't feel it as powerfully as I knew I could if I were right in there with them. But there's nothing they can do about that. And the set was beautiful. I loved the huge cyc, and the use of film, and the presence of the indoor space that you couldn't see but could really feel.

All in all, very worthwhile. The whole show was almost as good as my son :)

War

2010-01-21T22:03:00.002-05:00

So I've been trying for the last few months to understand why there is so much incivility and craziness in our civil discourse recently. Two people in the cast confirmed that Brown supporters had set fire to neighbor's Coakley signs and replaced them with Brown signs. I mean, what is that? Why so much hysteria, so much hate and fear mongering, so little actual conversation.

A day or so ago, somebody made reference to the familiar parallels between the U.S. and Rome in it's final days. It's an old song, but a very accurate one, and it suddenly occurred to me that this was what is was all about. Rome was a war state - perpetually at war for more than a two centuries. And now we are pure and simple a war state, too. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the so called war on terror. And this war-mentality has permeated every piece of civic life. Nothing can be a conversation, a dialogue, a process. Nope, everything is a war and the people on the other side are the enemy, even if they are fellow Americans. In fact, that's worse because they are traitors to whatever the true principles of America we decide are important.

I have to say that I think part of the problem with what the Democrats have been doing is that they are not good at war. The left-centrists have been trying to work with the right in the old-fashioned art of compromise, and the right is not interested. Nor is the left who want Obama to be a warrior for liberal policies. Now maybe that is what he should have done - said "Mandate! full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes!" The whole compromise thing is certainly not working because nobody wants to compromise - they want to destroy the enemy.

But do we really have to be at war with everything? Is that really the American way?

People Suck

2010-01-20T00:11:00.002-05:00

If I have learned one thing over the last two years, it is that people suck. I spent my whole life believing that they are essentially good, and bigger than their tiny lives, but the fact of the matter is that people are small, petty, fearful, easily swayed, impatient, intolerant, unimaginative and generally undeserving of this beautiful planet.

Sigh...

Another Opening another show

2010-01-18T14:03:00.002-05:00

Tonight's opening night of Indulgences at New Rep. It's been a good process - great cast, great people over at New Rep - such a different vibe over there from what I've been used to.

I was pretty nervous about how people would take the play - especially the New Rep audiences. It's a strange play, no doubt about it, and I wasn't sure at all if people would go on the ride. It's got some really great stuff in it, though. I particularly love the character Joel Colodner plays (brilliantly) - he has these really fascinating ruminations on identity that are magical, funny and really thought provoking.

So far, people seem to be going along for the ride. The old ladies at the Sunday show were surprisingly into it, and if they like it, things look good.

Tonight should be fun - and then we're off.

Furthermore

2010-01-17T00:44:00.003-05:00

Here's the thing. First of all, I really do mean it when I saw that I don't mind Garvey's endless criticism of me and my work. He is allowed to hate it. But here's what bothers me about it. It's the unspoken assumption that the people who are making this "tripe" are somehow some kind of fat cats who are just interested in selling pap to the masses and have neither integrity nor understanding. Garvey's cynicism is projected onto the objects of his criticism. It never seems to occur to him that dozens and dozens of people are working incredibly hard for weeks, many hours a day, for very little pay, not to be praised and extolled - because, let's face it, even the great reviews in a town like this don't really add up to much - but to make something that expresses their relationship to a story, in the hopes that people will be moved, entertained, and provoked by it. And if people are moved, entertained and excited, maybe that's actually a good thing, even if it doesn't fit into a certain reviewers presumptions about what a play is supposed to be about.

Rather than constantly saying, "this work is a transcendent work, and look how vile these people are to expect us to be excited by their trivial, trashy, trendy tripe - and yes, see, people are fooled, but isn't that just the worst? - maybe say, "people are moved, entertained and seem to enjoy this stuff, maybe they've tapped into a useful piece of this story." Because no production is going to encapsulate all the glory that exists in our minds when we imagine a play we love. But it's actually going to be in the world, and we're actually going to share it together, which is what the damn things were written for in the first place.

DeWitt he ain't

2010-01-15T22:09:00.005-05:00

Can I just say that I love Tom Garvey? He is the ultimate example of the old adage, "Those who can't do, teach, and those who can't that either, become critics." He just makes me giggle. He clearly aspires to be Boston's answer to Addison DeWitt, the devilishly powerful critic from the Brilliant All About Eve but has neither the style nor grace nor "Witt" to achieve it. What you do get is as reliable as an old fart complaining about his Depends. He hates everything, ESPECIALLY the Actors' Shakespeare Project. It doesn't matter what they do. This is clearly what he believes the critics job to be. He goes to such lengths to let us know how much he knows about Shakespeare, going on and on and on expounding his narrowly dogmatic view of the "bard's greatness," and how ASP fails to achieve it.

And this, of course, is the problem. He is so enamored of his own deep understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare (and, it appears, drama in general), that he is completely unable to do the critic's job, which is to openmindedly examine the efforts of theaters to achieve their goals in putting on a particular play in a particular way. No doubt a good critic views a project through the prism of his own point of view - and Mr. Garvey certainly has a point of view - but if your only response to what other people are trying to do is to condemn it for not fitting within your point of view, then you are, as Mr. Garvey has so effectively done to himself, marginalizing yourself.

Here's his latest:

I must say, I kinda feel for the guy. How long has it been since he actually enjoyed a performance in a theatre, especially of the stuff he supposedly loves, that is, Shakespeare? And that's another thing, he is constantly ascribing the kind of cynicism that he is obviously burdened with to others. He can't imagine that anybody is actually looking for a dynamic and meaningful entrance into the physical experience of these plays (which, I must emphasize, is dramatically different from what we imagine them to be in our scholarly classes, which my friend seems to have taken a few too many of), but attributes everything to a cynical desire to be hip and trendy.

And then, there's the whining. That's where I begin to lose sympathy. "Well, Don Aucoin really liked it, but SIGH I just don't get it - once again I'm the prophet crying in the wilderness where everybody seems to be enjoying themselves, but I see that they have all drunk the Koolaid so let me just say that at least somebody has noticed that western civilization has gone down the toilet." If the people who are coming to the shows, including the hundreds of students and seniors, and just plain folk who have been scared and bored by Shakespeare their whole lives, are actually finding that they are excited and engaged by these EXPLORATIONS of the plays - and I write that in caps because that is all that any one production of any play can be - then maybe it's not they who are missing something. I'm just saying...

His Majesty

2010-01-13T23:20:00.004-05:00

In case you can't make it out, that's Eddie Izzard on the jumbotrons, and that's me taking a picture of it while he is performing because we were there! Oh yeah! I got Kelli tickets for Christmas, and we went and howled and laughed, and wheezed and hyperventilated with 10000 other people. I haven't laughed so hard in I can't remember when. It was marvelous.

I mean, who else can do 15 minutes on the invasion of Italy by Hannibal, and how ridiculous the latin language is? How is that funny? In Mr. Izzard's hands, however, it is magic. That and the Raptor tipping his hat to everybody and growling (you had to be there) were a couple of my favorite moments.

He is such a genius at making the whole thing seem like a total improvisation. It's like you're at a really fun cocktail party with him, and he's just going off on this that and the other, except there's 10000 other people howling along with you. That's a sound I hadn't heard before.

Of course, given my current state of black cynicism, it did make me wonder about this whole theatre thing again. What it is, why we bother, when this is so much more satisfying in so many ways. However, we soldier on...

In my dreams

2010-01-07T23:12:00.005-05:00

Hello again. Been a while.

So, I don't know if it's because I've just finished directing A Midsummer Night's Dream, but over the past few nights, my dreams have been incredibly interesting and vivid. I almost wrote down the one I had the night before last, and I wish I had, because it was cool, but now I can't remember it at all.

But I do remember some of the one I had last night, and it was both beautiful and profound.

The protagonist was a rather mousy, twenty-ish girl with short hair - never seen her before - who was my alter-ego in the dream, I guess - and a genius. She was also something of a paranoic, and had this incredibly complicated system whereby she would unlock various things of hers with a kind of a machine into which she would insert a certain number of one dollar bills - like a handheld atm in reverse. What she was actually doing I don't remember.

The significant event in the dream was that the sky - a beautiful, foggy, cloudy grey, was slowly descending on the earth. It got lower and lower during the course of the dream, until all the people were lying facedown on the ground, waiting for the sky to crush them flat. This was the conviction of all the people in this world: that space was being flattened, so that when the sky touched the earth there would be no more room for anybody, and we would all be squashed into oblivion.

But my mousy avatar didn't believe this - she did some strange thing with her dollar bills, and somehow, as the sky finally touched the earth she stood up into this strange new world - which was a foggy nothingness. All the other people were not annihilated either, but were transformed into strange arachnid creatures that scuttled away into the mist.

The strangest thing about this new place was that, in spite of the fact that it was formless, featureless, and completely grey and obscured, it was full of the hope of new possibility and life. It was so wonderful not to have been destroyed by the flattening of the universe, that this non-place was beautiful, magical, and full of promise. Gee, I wonder what that means?

Beautiful Clean

2009-09-24T17:42:00.001-04:00

I was showing some of the research I've been doing for Midsummer to my Directing Class at Emerson, and one of my students started talking about these reverse graffiti artists, who paint by cleaning the filth off city walls. She sent me some links. This stuff is really cool:

And here's another link that talks some more about it.

Off we go.

2009-09-15T12:12:00.002-04:00

So we started rehearsals for Shrew last night. All in all, it went pretty well. I was rather dreading the whole meet and greet part of it, and sure enough, it was AWKWARD. I have welcomed and introduced 17 productions at ASP, and to just sit there while others did it was a bum out. Plus, all the higher ups in the company, staff and board, who are responsible for my current situation, were sheepish and weird, and I was not about to make it easier for them.

Once we got started, things improved, thank god. The reading was fun and exciting. But, it's a strange play. Reading aloud those later scenes where Petruchio keeps saying, "Say what I tell you to say, or you don't get fed", it's hard to see how we are going to find that larger theme of the value of compromise in civilized life and not the "oh my god this play is so mean to women" feeling.

But, Melia has great idea for the frame - we're doing the induction, and there's going to be a crazy, CRAZY meta-theatrical twist to the whole evening - with actors playing characters playing actors playing characters playing characters! And Jason has done a great job on the space. It's a new and really organic use of the Basement, and will make for a very dynamic evening. And with Sarah Hickler and Rob Najarian both there working on movement, we have high hopes for the physical comedy and slapstick to be intense.

As long as I can steer clear of most of the stuff that comes in from outside the rehearsal hall, I should be okay.

Baby he's back

2009-09-10T13:18:00.001-04:00

For anybody out there who has started to lose faith in our President, and didn't watch his speech last night, you should watch. All of it. The man is in the house!

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

We're number 37

2009-09-10T12:10:00.001-04:00

I found this on the Huffington Post. Pretty funny. I'm really hoping the "You lie!" controversy is finally going to swing the tide back toward some kind of sensible action on this health care thing.

Home.

2009-09-07T22:19:00.002-04:00

5470 miles. 40 days.

We are back home. It was an amazing trip - we had a great time as a family.

I'm glad to be home, but I'm also trying to wrap my mind around this working thing. I have to make my syllabus for Emerson, learn lines for Shrew, start production meetings for Midsummer, and try to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. Again. I kind of feel that at 45 I should be coasting a little bit more than this. Ah well.

As time goes by...

2009-08-28T00:51:00.001-04:00

My son turned ten years old today. Ten years. Old. Gosh.

The Lion

2009-08-26T10:54:00.002-04:00

Never forget

2009-08-24T14:03:00.003-04:00

We were driving from North Carolina to Missouri and Kelli really wanted to stop by Graceland on the way. We stopped in Atlanta first, to visit Rachel May and family, and then headed on. We didn't make it all the way, and stopped, randomly, in Tupelo, Mississippi. Lo and behold, it turned out to be the birthplace of Elvis! Kelli said, in her best Midwestern accent, "God made you stop here - he led you here."

We stopped by. It's surprisingly unassuming and pleasant (and inspirational - see photo). It's a little house:

The grounds are actually rather tasteful. We were greeted by a very old and kind volunteer who shook and held my hand for about two minutes while he was talking to me about the difference in snowfall between Tupelo and Boston. He was so nice, but there was something strange.

I looked closely at him, and saw that there was a small spider web spun between the brim of his hat and his glasses. I kid you not. God knows how long he had been there. I kept thinking of one of the "old caretakers" in a Scooby Doo episode. I kept expecting him to rip his mask off to reveal a terrifying skull face or something. It was sooooo weird. I wish I had a picture to prove it, but Kelli had the camera and didn't see it, and I could hardly bring it up.

Things a person oughta should do.

2009-08-19T17:42:00.005-04:00

One of the great things about this vacation so far has been doing nothing. For the first time in 5 years, I have the freedom to just be.

When we were up in Canada, I sat in a lawn chair and watched the big, beautiful clouds march by - for an hour. It was awesome.

Today, it was rainy in Carthage, Missouri. I woke up early, around 7, with Dashiell, and went downstairs with him and puttered around for a while. Then, around 9, I went back upstairs and went back to sleep for an hour and a half. But that's not the cool part. Later in the day, around 3, I went back upstairs to read, and it started to pour, so I put my book down, and just listened to the beating rain. Pretty soon I was asleep again, dreaming about staging Midsummer on this ruined staircase that ran about a half a mile up a huge hill.

I cannot remember the number of times I have said, over the last 5 years, "this is one of those days where you should be home dozing in bed with a good book" - today, I finally did it.

I think we spend way too much time in this country doing stuff, and not nearly enough just being there with the sounds and smells of the world.

I'm back but I'm not

2009-08-19T17:39:00.002-04:00

Many travels. Many things to think about. I'm still in Missouri, still "on the road", but I'm ready to the land of posting.

End of the beginning of the...

2009-07-28T15:16:00.003-04:00

Well, I did something today I have never before done in my 45 years - I cleaned out my desk. It was a weird feeling - throwing stuff in boxes, throwing stuff away. I tried to decide if I wanted to keep some things as records, in case somehow I end up being somebody who writes an autobiography and I have to try to recall my stormy years at the Actors' Shakespeare Project. But I put them in the recycling bin. Ya gotta move forward, ya know?

I also had to decide if I was going to leave certain "gifts" behind as caustic reminders that I had a taken everything else away with me, but I chose to take the high road there.

I don't know how I feel about it. I'm very glad I'm leaving on a six week trip tomorrow, so I can clear my head of the past 2 years for real, and get thinking about the future.

At least my friends are interesting

2009-07-22T23:26:00.003-04:00

So, though I am currently one of the most boring people on the planet, I am impressed by some of my friends. I had two meetings recently, in particular, that were pretty impressive.

On Sunday, I had coffee with a friend, a terrific actor and incredibly funny person - okay, it was Steve Barkhimer! When I arrived, he was passing the time reading Plato's The Laws. Turns out, funnyman Steve has been spending the last 10 years or so making himself into a Plato scholar- and the Laws was the last notch on his belt and he would be master of the whole canon.

Now, I was a Classics major in college, and I never read The Laws. It's pretty dry stuff, but we discovered some very interesting. The Laws consists of a three old guys talking about what the perfect society might be. Steve told me (remember, I have never read so much as a word of it) that the spend the first couple of books talking about stuff like how much they should drink, and what sort of music they should listen to. This is what's important in the perfect society, I guess.

What's interesting is that I was there to talk to Steve about this project I have been thinking about, and I started off by referring to the TCG conference I went to in June. It was all about Gen Y, how to reach them, make them come to your theaters. One of the basic lessons people were talking about was that to get Gen Yers into your theatre, you had to let people drink in the theater. Another thing was that Gen Yers are looking for a total experience, so that you had to look for ways to include music, spoken work, etc., around your performances.

So it looks like we've come full circle, back to Plato.

Day Dreaming through Dad-dom

2009-07-20T16:41:00.002-04:00

It's strange, but I'm definitely finding myself slipping into a summer dream over the last week. I have hardly had a single creative thought, and very little impulse to try to have one.

Mostly, I'm being a stay at home dad. It's kinda great, and kinda boring. I do laundry, pick up toys and clothes, make meals, put my kids to bed, take them to the pool and the tennis courts. I feel a little like I'm sleepwalking, but in a rather pleasant dream. But there's almost no thinking involved, which is a little weird.

I've spent most of the last 5 years thinking intensely all the time: worrying, wondering, pondering, inventing, obsessing, solving, raging. These days, I just do basic stuff, and my mind hums along quietly, without anything particularly interesting going on in it.

Obviously there are exceptions.

Okay - this is really cool

2009-07-16T18:36:00.000-04:00

Check out this new way to message.

Half-Mad Escapade

2009-07-15T10:38:00.002-04:00

You'd think I'd be too old for this sort of thing, but I wasn't the oldest - my brother and my father both joined my sister, her husband, and 6 teenagers to go see the latest Harry Potter movie at MIDNIGHT last night. And Spencer!

That was the real reason for going. My teenage nieces were all set to go, and they invited Spencer, who's been tearing through the books lately and really wanted to go. I wasn't about to just let my 9 year old go off to a movie theater at midnight, so along I went. Good excuse, right? Ok, I also really wanted to see the movie.

It was an incredible scene. I should have taken pictures. That had it on 12 screens, and there were hundreds, thousands, of college kids, many of them dressed up, ready to go. There were signs on the doors when we arrived saying, "next available show, 3:15a.m." and sure enough when we got out at 2:45, there they were, people even crazier than us.

I liked the movie a lot. It was really beautiful - shot with real eye for interesting geometries and compositions. It's also very funny, which makes a nice break. And those kids are learning to act. The climax is not as violent and crazy as the book, but focuses more on the psychology and worked for me. And it has the most beautiful credits I can remember seeing.

Spencer loved it - the whole thing - staying up late, being with his cousins at this event, and seeing the movie. So it was pretty great.

Auto Tune the News

2009-07-12T12:48:00.002-04:00

My brother introduced me to these. This most recent one found on Huffington Post. I think it's the best one so far. They use the auto-tune software that pop music artists use to keep their voices on pitch and then add a boatload of silliness.

The Sign Says Headshots

2009-07-10T23:24:00.004-04:00

The results are in - after an exhaustive poll of 8 or 9 people, I'm choosing the following three shots:

The first one will probably be my main shot - it was overwhelming favorite. The second one will be a commercial shot, and the third will be just to have around if I need something a little edgier or less youthful (I feel kinda good that I can get still look fairly young at the ripe old age of 45).

They all still need re-touching, but I'm very happy with the way they turned out. Thanks to everybody who helped me decide. Props to Stratton McCrady who did such a fine job on them. Use him for all your photographic needs!

Ziggurat: newyorker.com

2009-07-08T17:53:00.003-04:00

I have been very taken by this story in the latest New Yorker about the Minotaur:

Ziggurat: newyorker.com

I'm ashamed to admit it, but I rarely read the fiction in the New Yorker. I'd like to say that the reason is that Kelli is always stealing them and hiding them on her bedside table, but the real reason is that I'm just too lazy to spend the time to get into them. Pretty much I just read the movie reviews, the theatre reviews, the Shouts and Murmurs, and look at the comics. It's sad.

But this story really sucked me in. That's partially because I'm still the geeky classics major, and I just have a weakness for classical mythology; but it's got a glimmering poetry to it - with a limpid clarity like a fluorescent bulb burning in a misty back street dive somewhere. It's got an ache, too - which I think is my favorite thing about art - how it examines those hungers you just can't satisfy...

Truth is Stranger than Fiction

2009-07-06T23:09:00.003-04:00

I recently got it into my head to re-read The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas. I wonder why? It's the story of a man falsely accused by jealous rivals who for really quite trivial reasons subject him to almost Biblical suffering and rob him of his simple dreams and throw away his whole life. But he comes back and exacts a slow and very thorough revenge upon them...

To be honest, I actually didn't notice the revenge fantasy part of this until I had started reading the book again. There's another, realer, more basic reason I was drawn to this book. It's my "creep into a den and safely escape" book. When I was about 12, I went to my friend Simon's farm in the countryside of Ohio. I chased a ball into some very dense brush, and came out with an absolutely horrific case of poison ivy. I had it all up both arms and both legs. I was in such discomfort that I was confined to bed for about 4 days.

My bed was in a converted barn, and was one of those delightful contraptions built by industrious intellectuals turned handymen - a set of massive plywood bunkbeds, made of the cheapest materials and thus almost demonically overbuilt - a fortress of wood - I recall you could actually slide some sort of panel in front of, though that is probably the invention of my memory. However, it was a den, no question about it. I could disappear there, all day, and nobody would even know I was there. And for those 4 days, I did nothing but read The Count of Monte Cristo. It was a marvelous escape from my unbearably itching body - into the streets of Marseille, the dungeons of the Chateau d'If, the secret cave, the buzz of Rome, the intrigues of Paris. I was completely lost. I can't remember ever reading such a big book so fast, and being so completely swept away. I think I'm looking for that feeling again.

So I'm reading it again. It's a great read, I can tell you. Last time, I read the abridged version, that came in at just over 800 pages. This time, I'm going for the full 1243! I can't put it down!

I was particularly struck by this passage, which I marked: "I thought him enough of a philosopher to realize that there is no such thing as murder in politics. You know as well as I do, my dear boy, that in politics there are no people, only ideas; no feelings, only interests. In politics, you don't kill a man, you remove and obstacle, that's all.*" Ah, politics. It's the same in big governments, and little companies...

Oh and don't see the movie - it's appalling. Read the book!

*translated by Robin Buss

FIFTEEN

2009-07-05T22:11:00.004-04:00

Well, he did it.

Roger Federer is the stand-alone greatest tennis player ever. 15 Grand Slam Titles, in 6 years - it's unreal.

I know you're probably not a big tennis fan, but indulge me - this is huge. This epic, epic final: 5-7,7-6,7-6,3-6,16-14 - which Andy Roddick really should have won - he was playing a bit better than Federer - but Roger just kept hanging on, and on, and somehow ended up the winner. It's the kind of thing that makes you love sports again -committed, acrobatic, intense, and full of artistry and history. Two guys pushing their bodies and minds to the physical limits for 4 1/2 hours - I know it's not like earth-shattering or anything - but it's beautiful. Like a really good play.

This will explain why I haven't been posting that much recently. I've been pretty much glued to the television for the last two weeks. I sat there for 5 hours today watching this incredible match. Spencer watched it all with me - finally getting so excited during the marathon 5th set that he would jump up, run through the living room, then come barreling back and throw himself on the couch, then do it again. And this is a 9 year old! My dad was their, too - but he mostly stood there and made sage comments, as is his wont. I think he wanted to Roddick to win, so he was a little down. My mom watched, too, but at 10-all in the 5th she couldn't take it anymore and went out to the kitchen and ready the TLS until a match point finally came along.

But I really feel for this guy:

He looked like somebody had killed his dog. After all that work, to come up short again. Still, he was very gracious - I admire his class.

You betcha!

2009-07-03T18:04:00.003-04:00

Well! This is a surprise. People are speculating that it's so she can concentrate on running for president in 2012, but I don't see how this will actually help!

My brother thinks she's just tired of the neverending bad publicity, and will show up as a talking head on Fox with a nice six figure salary. Stay tuned!

The world is your photo library

2009-07-03T14:00:00.001-04:00

This is a truly amazing piece from TED -

As Time Goes By

2009-07-01T22:56:00.002-04:00

We watched Casablanca last night - first time I have seen it in probably 15 years. Oh My Freakin' God is it a fantastic movie!!!!! I had forgotten. Here's why:

1. The supporting cast is chock full of great actors giving beautiful cameos that make every moment of it a treat - they draw you into such a complete world, where you really feel all the desperate human stories passing through the town. Every moment is alive with wit and truth. Claude Rains, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, S.Z. Sakall, Leonid Kinskey all giving perfect little jewels of performances. It's like really, really good Chekhov.

2. Chemistry. Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman have such a hot relationship seething beneath the calm 1941 surface. There's such ache in their every encounter. It's really interesting to read that most of the people making the movie thought it was fairly run of the mill. Bergman called it "pretty ordinary stuff", and writer Julius Epstein said it had "more corn than in the states of Kansas and Iowa combined. But when corn works, there's nothing better." But it won best picture in 1942 and survives as one of the best movies of all time.

3. Humphrey Bogart is one of the most extraordinary film actors ever ever ever. This movie is one of the first old flicks I every saw, when I was about 15, and it started me on a lifelong love these great pictures, but I, of course, was completely in love with Ingrid Bergman. She was the most radiant, beautiful, expressive and deep women I had ever seen, and I have continued to adore her through the years.

But as a young man, I never appreciated Bogart's genius. I liked him - he was tough and dry - but I confess that I sometimes found his delivery monotonous, and he seemed a little stiff to me. Ah youth. Watching this movie again, now, I am overwhelmed with the subtlety and specificity of his acting, how much he is in the moment at every moment, and how incredibly passionate he is, how bold and honest his choices. It's miraculous stuff.

And let's not forget Dooley Wilson, who gives as sensitive and genuine a performance as you are like to see. And he didn't even really know how to play the piano. Beautiful.

Breaking the Law - now and then

2009-06-30T12:39:00.003-04:00

Kelli and I watched this episode a couple of days ago, in honor of Farah Fawcett, and it is just great. It is really trying to be so provocative, I think, and yet it is so kind of sweet and innocent. It has everything: The male prison guard who's sexually abusing the inmates - by leering; the Nurse Ratchet-like female guard who shows she's a scary dyke - by glaring; the horrible prison conditions, in which the poor inmates are forced to pick potatoes (I mean, potatoes? who thought that up?), and yet all the inmates are beautiful and clean and wake up in their bunks in full make-up with their hair all silky, blown, and feathered. And last but not least there's the shocking discovery that the prison is really a prostitution ring, though the prostitution seems to mainly involve dressing up in nice evening wear and going to a neverending cocktail party.

There's something so sweet and charming about the whole thing. It makes a fascinating comparison to The Wire, which Kelli and I finally started watching this week, too. Times have changed...

Biz of the biz

2009-06-29T23:14:00.004-04:00

I had a big day today. First I had a bunch of largely productive callbacks for Midsummer.

Then I went to my first real theater audition in more than five years. It was an interesting experience. I think I did well. I tried to prepare better than I did the last time I did this. This comes from watching so many hundreds of auditions over the last 5 years. I had never realized before what a difference it made when people weren't well prepared. I mean, it didn't always make a huge difference to see somebody come off book, though you can't help but be appreciative of the effort. But it always made a difference in the level of detail they brought to the reading, and their ability to take take adjustments and actually do something with them.

So I tried to be really ready. Even though it's been a while, I've been in this business long enough to know it's out of my hands now. I enjoyed it, now it's over. Of course, we'll see how it goes when I start doing these a lot more and start feeling the percentages again.

That's probably the toughest adjustment I have to make. I've been pretty used to not having to audition for a really long time now, I'm afraid I'm spoiled. I loved it, and kind of started thinking it was my right being where I was in my career. So I have to keep reminding myself that Alvin Epstein is still auditioning for stuff at 85, and get off my freakin' high horse...

Anyway, very tired after the audition, which lasted over two hours (that would be a good sign, except it lasted that long for everybody), so now I'm chilling, cleaning up the kitchen and relaxing to my Boards of Canada station on finetune.com.

Wish we had a nice warm Multiverse

2009-06-27T20:20:00.003-04:00

When I was younger, just out of college, full of promise, and really had never had anything bad happen to me, I fantasized about the Multiverse.

I had always been a bit of a physics dilletante: I read all the popular books about physics and boasted to people that I had actually been able to put my mind around the duality inherent in relativity. I remember becoming especially enamored by the Multiverse.

This is a concept that is based in lots of unbelievably esoteric mathematics, but to my simplistic brain, it basically reduced itself to the idea that quantum mechanics doesn't allow for a precise description of where and what a particle is doing at any particular moment, but that there's a cloud of probability around each potential event. The Multiverse theory says that maybe there's not really a cloud, but that each time the state of a particle can have several different outcomes, the universe splits into different alternate universes where each outcome exists in a separate universe - so an infinite number of universes exist where every single outcome of every single event is the reality of a particular universe. So there is a universe where Gore won the election, etc.

I began to imagine, when I was 20 and everything in my life was so fucking good, that maybe the way the universe worked was that each individual soul in God's multiverse followed the best possible path - so that in my multiverse I would enjoy the best, most satisfying and enlightened life - for everybody else, maybe a terrible thing would happen to somebody - they would get killed in a car crash, get cancer, something like that, but in the universe where their basic consciousness actually resided they lived to a happy, maybe perfect and eternal life - so that all other beings in your awareness of the world were only shadows of their actual selves, and so the apparent suffering so present in the world was not really being suffered by the souls of the people, and were instead sort of object lessons to intensify your experience of the world. In their actual universes, they were the ones who were enjoying health, success and happiness.

Wouldn't it be nice. Sadly, the events of the last year have led me to abandon this fantasy - or if its still true, I am a cipher in somebody else's universe... the number of bad things that have happened directly to me or to people really near me seems to make this vision of the multiverse just simply untrue. Now, I guess I still haven't been run over by a truck, or been given a death sentence, but things are rough enough that I can hardly pretend that life is a barrel of roses...

Gender Bias In Playwriting

2009-06-25T16:02:00.003-04:00

I was driving home from a meeting with Spiro at the Lyric, trying to get something going for next year, when I heard this fascinating little piece on Talk of the Nation.

There's also a NY Times article on it today.

This Economics PhD student, Emily Glassberg Sands, did a study on gender bias in the playwrighting business, and found, not too surprisingly, that there is some. But some of the results were really interesting.

When she sent sample scripts to Artistic Directors and Literary Managers, the same script, but half with a male nom de plume and half with a female one. The same script scored higher, particularly on its likelihood for success, when they thought it was written by a man. The funny thing, though, is that this bias was primarily manifested by the female ADs and Lit managers.

Another thing she found out was that respondents found the same female characters more sympathetic when they thought the play was written by a man. What to make of that?

I felt good karma, because I had just been pitching two plays I want to do to Spiro, and they're both by female playwrights. Let's hope it comes around.

Once

2009-06-23T11:21:00.003-04:00

We watched Once last night - it won the best song Oscar in 2008. It's a sweet, sad, beautiful film that manages to be about reaching for your dreams and having unfulfilled desire at the same time. I'd heard about its natural documentary-style simplicity and wanted to see it, and finally managed to.

Every time they started singing I got all weepy. What I love about this film is the naive joy these people have in making art. It's like breathing - there's a directness and total lack of ego in the way they play and sing, even in the way they act. They are totally focussed on what they are making and you can see how it feeds them just to make it. When you see artists making art for the simple love and need of making it, and not out of the needs of the self, it is so moving.

I miss that.

Mr. Elegant

2009-06-22T19:33:00.003-04:00

For the next two weeks, I will be obsessed with this man:

Yes, Roger. Wimbledon has begun. And Mr. Federer has the chance for an unprecedented 15th major title.

Until last year it was all about Justine. I loved Justine Henin. She was beautiful to watch, incredibly complicated and mysterious - totally my type. Now she is retired and there's nobody on the women's side who comes close to grabbing my interest. But Roger's pursuit of tennis history. That is something I can get excited about.

More news

2009-06-21T18:05:00.003-04:00

So the Mousavi claim seems to be false. Check out the Huffington Post. Excellent blog on what is going on. I keep thinking of '89 and Tianamen Square and thinking about how much the world has changed since then. We are actually helping by being able to connect with the people through the internet. It's freaking amazing.

Here's a compelling video and and great post from Huffington:

10:54 AM ET -- Rage against the machine. An Iranian-American writes: "In my spare time, I make short documentaries and music videos, and my 22 year old cousin in Iran asked that I make a video for him with his favorite song. I just spoke with him and he told me that his friends and him are watching it before they go out to protest. He was stepping out the door to protest when I spoke with him just a few minutes ago. A lot of Iranians from Iran rely on huffingtonpost.com for their information. If you could somehow post this on your website and get this out to the youth in Iran, it would mean a lot."

An eerie calm

2009-06-21T09:52:00.001-04:00

This one's really beautiful, and so sad:

Rumors on Twitter the Mousavi has been arrested.

Guess i spoke too soon...

2009-06-20T16:33:00.002-04:00

Went to the gym and stayed glued to the treadmill to watch intense images of demonstrations in the streets. Big crowds, not huge but that's mostly because the security forces appear to have cordoned off the places where people were supposed to demonstrate so they are having to improvise.

From #iranelection on twitter:

AllisterF RT @mashable: Shocked and moved by the YouTube videos coming out of the #iranelection crisis:http://bit.ly/vPDLoless than 10 seconds ago from TweetDeck

Sleepless

2009-06-20T06:51:00.003-04:00

So I'm up at 6 again. For some reason, no matter how tired the rest of me is, my brain seems to be crazy active at 6. Usually I'm steaming about recent events and wondering what I'm going to do next. This morning I've been thinking about this guy:
Things are not looking good. Got the following tweets from #iranelections:

iranelectionsGC Update: Mousavi and Karroubi did not show up to today's session, GC to confirm election outcome very soon.about 1 hour ago from web
iranelectionstoday's 4pm demo has been called off. Editor of Etemad Melli Qoochani has been arrested. Mousavi and Rafs to issues communiques soon.about 1 hour ago from web

Indications are that it's over. I guess we'll know later in the day whether people come out any way for the demonstration. What I keep thinking, and what keeps me from going back to sleep,is that in spite of all the comparisons to 1979, things are so fundamentally different.

Khamenei is not the Shah. People may not love him or his politics, but as a theocrat he wields such tremendous moral authority in that society that it's hard to fight. When the fight is about Ahmadinajad it's one thing, but when the Supreme Leader puts himself at the center of the conflict, essentially saying, "if you keep this going, you're not defying the president-elect, you're defying me", it's a whole different ballgame.

Before this, it was all about an enthusiastic wave of reform sweeping through the country - kind of like what happened here in the last election, with people really responding to the "Change" message of Obama. Now, it's much more stark choice: revolution; and it just doesn't sound like Iran is able to go there just yet.

I guess we'll know soon enough.

We're all in this together

2009-06-18T15:58:00.002-04:00

My newest favorite site it TED - Technology, Entertainment, Design, and it is AWESOME. My friend Marianna told me about it, and I guess a lot of people know about it already, but it was new to me and it's blowing my mind. It's kind of like poptech in that has a bunch of videos of presentations by all sorts of exciting and interesting people, but they're really nicely done and the site is beautifully organized.

This is one of Clay Shirky is fantastic. It's incredibly relevant, given the events in Iran, and really mind-blowing. He's talking about the transformation of media from 20th century norms to what is happening now, and he does it ways that are cogent, surprising and totally paradigm shifting. He flows from the 2008 election, to the 2007 elections in Nigeria to the Chinese earthquake, and lays out a clear explanation of the way that new media are both completely new, and completely here to stay. It is well worth the 17 minutes it takes to watch.

On lighter note, check out this one. It's a close magic master doing amazing and hilarious things with cards. Watch him seem to drop, fumble and futz a big messy pile of playing cards and miraculous deal 5 winning poker hands from it. If you don't have a lot of time, I recommend skipping to about minute 18, and watch him deal cards that disappear right before your eyes.

So Say We All - Vote!

2009-06-16T13:30:00.004-04:00

This came across my Facebook page from Mary McDonnell, and it brought back the memories. It's the Tubey Awards from Television Without Pity. I pretty much just voted for BSG in every category it was nominated for, but for those of you who know a little more about TV shows than me, it might be more complex. I miss you, Kara!

Close Your Eyes

2009-06-15T20:32:00.003-04:00

My spring has been strange, and tonight was a very strange night indeed. I participated in an event that left me trying to think where in dramatic literature, or any literature for that matter, there was a corollary experience. A man pretends that everything is fine and good, and promises a bright future to somebody so that they too can feel that everything is fine and good. But it's not fine and good, and the person he's telling is actually the person who is punishing him, and is the one who made it not fine and good. But they don't see it that way, and the man is bound by honor and duty to smile and reassure and make everything okay, even though he's losing everything.

The only thing I could think of was the end of Season Two of Buffy, where Angel has temporarily lost his soul and is opening a portal that will suck all of this reality into the demon dimension and thus end the world, and he gets his soul restored at the last minute, but it's too late, and Buffy has to destroy him to save the planet. It's not really an exact corollary, but it's a great scene, so here it is:

Ceratops.

2009-06-15T18:23:00.002-04:00

Call me a neanderthal, but this movie looks really funny. Really stupid, but in a good way. Of course, you fear that they put all the funny bits in the trailer...

...and Away

2009-06-14T18:10:00.004-04:00

We went to Pixar's UP today. I read a review of it in the New Yorker by David Denby that made me need to see it. It is an absolutely gorgeous film: full of wit, and an achingly bittersweet understanding of the sweet pain of lost youth and opportunity, and the need to let go and look forward. It's also got a really fun sense of silliness: the evil minions in the film are all dogs, and they have all of that species' sweet and eager single-mindedness. I was telling my son Spencer that the main take-away from the movie was "don't use dogs as evil minions" - you can't trust them not to go for the ball.

My favorite moment though, which I wish I could get a still of, is when the old guy, beautifully voiced by Ed Asner, has decided to rescue the kid and and bird, and throws all his old furniture out so that his house can float again. In the earlier part of the film, he had created a steering mechanism with his old victrola and a crank - now he's lost all this and he is steering his floating house with two ropes wrapped around his decrepit old body - it's positively heroic, and stunningly human and frail at the same time.

It's a great film - see it.

Jos ei viina, terva tai sauna auta, tauti on kuolemaksi.

2009-06-12T17:04:00.004-04:00

I went to the gym today, after staying up waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too late last night, and after my workout, I was sitting in the sauna (not with these guys!) when I started thinking, what am I actually doing here? What IS this sauna thing? What does it really, actually do? I know it's supposed to make me sweat and relax, but does it actually have any therapeutic value?

So here's a few things I learned on wikipedia:

• Records and other historical evidence indicate that the Finns built the first wooden saunas in the 5th or 8th century.

• It used to be a holy place, a place where women gave birth, and where the bodies of the dead were washed.

• In Finland, the sauna was thought of as a healing refreshment. The old saying goes: "Jos ei viina, terva tai sauna auta, tauti on kuolemaksi." ("If booze, tar, or the sauna won't help, the illness is fatal.")

• Therapeutic sauna is the use of sauna for health purposes. It requires cycles of both hot and cold, in a predetermined manner to bring about therapeutic change.

• Sauna has also been found to reduce levels of stress hormones adrenalin and noradrenalin and to increase levels of ACTH, cortisol and beta endorphin. Sauna has been found to increase the hormone testosterone in men. Sauna also found to reduce prostaglandin F2alpha and protect against oxidative stress. It enhances activation of monocytes to bacteria and endotoxins.

• Sweat tests have shown pharmaceutical drugs are eliminated in sweat. Narcotics, alkaloids, and barbiturates are eliminated in sweat, and elimination increased with heat.

So there you have it. I don't imagine that my sitting in the sauna for 10 minutes once or twice a week is really doing anything for me, but I can pretend it does...

Yes you CAN (comment)

2009-06-12T10:35:00.002-04:00

I was wondering why nobody was commenting on my postings, when I figured out that you couldn't without signing up for something. So I changed that! Now you can get in on the action!