When I looked outside my windows this morning, or, really, a little into the afternoon, it looked mildly cold. Wet from an earlier rain, the first of browned and oranged leaves pasting the ground, like the oversized paper ones that plastered my kindergarten and grade school halls in my forever-fall Halifax memories.
My espresso grounds were old, and I wanted caffeine before I tackled the mountain of dishes I had vowed to myself and my girlfriend I'd clean in the morning. She made dinner, I do the dishes. It's only fair, and I rarely accomplish anything before 4pm anyway. A good goal, baby steps, to start a mite sooner.
So groundless and caffeineless, I threw on my oversized cardigan I got as a Christmas gift last year, which I love in a "I can imagine myself being an old guy, maybe a professor, but definitely a writer" sort of way, and shuffled off to the corner Starbucks, lost in remembering teaching theatre to kids in similarly autumn leaf-adorned kindergarten and grade schools, thinking of all the Starbucks cups I drained waiting for the trains to get there.
Inside, the Asian-American barista took my order, and while she did, half asked her Hispanic-American colleague, who started to make my coffee, what the word for "inch" was in Spanish. He earnestly shook his head, and said he didn't know. I said I didn't think there was a word for "inch," because both Spain and Mexico use the metric system, which, I then felt necessary to mention, doesn't use inches.
If I could measure seconds in centimeters, we swam an Olympic sized swimming pool together, entirely doubting each other's knowledge and education, before she smiled pleasantly and handed me a croissant. America, it seems, goes on for another day.
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Sunday, October 6, 2013
Felina/Finale, the Uncertainty Principle Breaking Bad Thinkpiece
***If you can't tell, this is going to involve major Breaking Bad spoilers. So, don't read any of this if you don't want to know what may or may not have happened in the finale.***
So.
There exists on the internet these days a certain subgenre of thinkpieces that have generated themselves all summer at an exponentially rabid/rapid pace. This is, of course, the Breaking Bad Thinkpiece.
And of course, now that the series is over, and we've had a few days to digest the experience and implications of the finale, these kind of thinkpieces are replicating themselves with wild abandon.
I am throwing my hat into this well-traveled ring because I am, like all other writers of these thinkpieces, an unabashedly devoted fan, I can't help but have strong opinions about it, and I was honestly fairly disappointed with the story of the finale. Not the production of it, nor the experience of it entirely, even, but the story, and its implications for the series as a whole.
I went onto Gchat and spent a few hours in post-show analysis over several days with my best friends. I gorged myself on every review of the finale, every point of view I could find about what had happened. I just couldn't decide what I felt. What I was settling for. What I wish had happened.
It was sincerely difficult to articulate, because I felt like I was missing something that maybe I wasn't even really supposed to catch on to. My brain, which always tries to make things the most complicated they can be, couldn't figure out how to reinterpret this fairly-straight-forward and ultimately-semi-victorious hail Mary pass by Walter White, which, miraculously, it seems, all works out in his favour. Is it really ending this simply?
Walt dies on his own terms. He finally tells Skylar the truth, that he did this all for himself, because he loved it, because he was good at it, because it made him feel alive. He ends Heisenberg's career in an epic badass rain of jerry-rigged machine gun murder, he finally refuses the seduction of MORE money after he has safely used his fearsome alter ego to threaten his former colleagues/privileged khaki clowns into ensuring the money he DID save from calamity will end up in his family's care after all, and he even gets to be the guy who, when he learns of his former partner/son-turned-rat's suffering, lets him go, freeing his enslaved Ariel to the winds, where perhaps he can find true freedom and peace with his resplendently-lit woodcarved boxes.
It all felt so good, to see him do that, it was nearly perfect, 92% pure, it was fantastic. A fantasy. And, therefore, not what I was expecting from the series that had just pummeled us into the To'hajilee burial ground with the consequences of Walt's Heisenbergian ways.
I read desperately all the tweets and reviews that said the finale was perfect. I convinced myself to justify that Walt really didn't get everything right, that he still caused all this mayhem and is still dying alone, having destroyed his family and the empire he fought so hard to create. That the long-anticipated final finale surprise was, as Vince Gilligan said, the fact that there were no surprises.
That it basically went as mass-hoped, as planned. That we all were slavering to see some redemption, and Walt started to get a little but it was too late. That he broke bad, only to break good again with not enough time to make it all work. We wanted to see this show go out in a blaze of glory, and we got it, Walt's glory. Walt wins, but it's a thin victory. Surprise! We didn't surprise you this time, and that's the best surprise!
Hm. Maybe.
Then someone tweeted about Norm Macdonald's finale theory just as I was trying to go to sleep the night before last, and I spent the next three hours awake by the glow of my smartphone, reading every letter of Norm's tweets. And my too-complicated-by-half brain found what it had been looking for. Another way to read the finale.
This is worth digging through on your own, though the later you read this the more it will be obscured by football tweets, but basically, Norm puts a slightly different spin on the New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum's disappointed review of the finale, which says that the finale DID feel like Walt's dying fantasy of what he WOULD do, if he could get back to Albuquerque. Maybe this Felina finale is his dying wish, that he really dies alone in that car, mid-plotting and planning, and really we'll never know what happens to Jesse, Skylar, Marie, the neo-Nazis, Todd, Lydia, or any of the horrific machinations he set in motion the day he started cooking blue meth.
Norm goes further than Emily, though, because what he suggests isn't that "it's all a dream" and that Gilligan even overtly expresses this in the finale. First off, Norm doesn't care what Vince has to say about it at all, actually. The work speaks for itself. Even though all the writers basically say they meant the finale to be taken literally, Norm isn't having it. Not the way it's written, executed, cinematographed, etc.
No, when Walt exhales as the harrowing world-ending sound of police car tires against snow pull away and the red and blue lights of capture fade, it's his dying breath. From the keys dropping from the sky onward, things work out for the broken bad Mr. White, because they are symbolic. He works out how he would end his life, had he the time, had he the ability. What we see is a largely egocentric fantasy of this truly broken man setting it as right as he can.
The evidence that Norm brings to this is heartening, too. This is a supposedly nation-wide manhunt, that necessitated Walt being shipped in an oil truck all the way to New Hampshire, yet he glides back into town in a stolen car after calling the cops to him. He creeps into the Schwartz' new house unimpeded, and does so everywhere else. Skylar's new place, where the cops are watching. His old house, staring at his reflection in broken mirrors. He watches his son through double windows, a la Christmas Carol. Carol's name, of course, is made a big deal for no otherwise apparent reason. He is gaunt, his movements are slow, shuffling, unfrantic as we've known him, finally sure, finally, it seems, at some kind of peace.
The cinematography certainly lends itself to almost a dreamlike state. Jesse's fantasy of wordworking, the "clue" for the finale that everyone harped about in press events, is lit in single-source, golden, holy organ music-playing light, all sensual, tactile, a Creator with his creation, all going right. The same single-source, half-face-shadowing light, happens in Skylar's apartment. At the end, in the Nazi's clubhouse. The camera moves slower, lurking, Walt is revealed in places by magic. It is shot, Norm posits, intentionally, for us to feel it is unreal.
A note, too, about the shadows. Jesse is tortured until he really seems to have half a face, and is lit, and shot, in that half-face darkness. As is Walt many times. Repetitions of images of Gus, with half his face blasted off. And the pink teddy bear from the plane crash. Manifestations of Walt's destructive power. Two-faced. Janus. We see what the lies of Heisenberg has wrought. And Walt dies by his own hand but saves his surrogate son, and has the time to go be with his equipment, his Precious, a distorted shot of his face and blood on the only thing he ever truly loved. He did it, it wasn't all for nothing.
Or, if you believe Norm's theory, he didn't do it. He didn't actually do any of those things. He died in the car, frozen, alone, still plotting, fantasizing about the final gambit he never actually gets to make. The cancer gets him and it is, indeed, all for nothing.
If you can't tell, I rewatched the last two episodes of Breaking Bad yesterday, to see this theory in action for myself. And I have come to the conclusion that it does work, but probably not for the reasons you think.
There are definitely holes. If Walt is imagining this final conversation with Skylar, then how does he know about Todd's visit to their house, threatening her not to reveal anything she knows about Lydia? There definitely is not a jump cut in Walt's scene in the car, where we think he might be dead but then he flips the visor and the keys fall out! It's one continuous cut. Walt doesn't clearly seem to die and then revive.
And in terms of everything going right, magic things have happened for Walt all the time. He is incredibly lucky, and resourceful, and admittedly brilliant, even if his arrogance and pride cause him to miscalculate, or, in the case of Jesse, completely underestimate his allegiance.
Breaking Bad has had otherworldly-seeming things happen more than I remembered. The Cousins are shot and move like Death itself, coming for Walt's life in ways that are beyond human. I mean, Walt meets Jane's dad at the bar before he goes back to Jesse's place and watches her die, and this causes a cataclysmic plane crash? WHAT are the chances of THAT?! Hank discovers Walt's true identity because he leaves a copy of Leaves of Grass on his toilet seat?? HOW would that have actually happened?!
So Walt evading all the police forces of Albuquerque isn't too terribly hard to believe. Him sneaking ricin into a Stevia packet doesn't seem to be too farfetched, when he knows she always sits in the same cafe at 10am on Tuesdays, and she always wants Stevia. He put a fake ricin pill into a cigarette and planted it, somehow, in Jesse's Roomba, so that Jesse would stop worrying about accidentally poisoning someone.
Walt takes advantage of a universe that offers him up chances all the time. This universe offered him up some big breaks at the end, and he took advantage of them like he always did. He just now has his priorities in order. Which, given months in solitude in the woods, dying of cancer, paying a stranger $10,000 just to stay for a game of poker, isn't a stretch to see him come to the conclusion that with his dying strength, he needs to nut up and provide for his family at all costs. Gretchen and Elliot appear on Charlie Rose, and suddenly he has his plan. He sees his way out.
But should he be allowed to carry through his plans? The show, or, really, MY experience watching this show, has always been so UNCERTAIN about Walt. He's bad, but we still identify with him. He does worse after worse thing, and especially after Ozymandias, we SEE just how much of a monster he truly is. But he's not all monster. So should he get a chance at redemption?
Well, I think yes and no. And I think this finale actually gives us the chance to see both, even though they are diametrically opposed. At the same time.
I think Felina/finale is actually a quantum finale.
Heisenberg, remember, is the name of the scientist attributed mostly for coming up with the uncertainty principle, which, in quantum physics, is all about the fact that we can't know everything about a particle all at once, and whenever we "check" to see, for example, a particle's location, we can't determine the direction of its spin exactly. You follow this to the Schroedinger's cat conclusion, and if you put the cat in the box with poison, until you check, the cat is both dead and alive at the same time. Truly. Actually. You can't know for sure until you check.
Breaking Bad has always been hyper aware of its audiences' expectations. Its job is solely to tell a good story, and it has definitely done so with the Felina finale. But what it's also done artistically, which the literal finale sort of walks back, is create a truly Shakespearean, Euripidean character of negative empathy.
Paula Vogel talks about this in this video, which I can't figure out how to embed but will try to more later.
Her gist, though, is that great dramas used to be made where we are meant to struggle, as an audience, to decide what is right and wrong with these characters' actions. They are compelling, human, faulty, destructive monsters and we identify with them, we see the human inside them, we see the monster inside us. We don't like these characters, but we also really do. What should happen to them? Should Hamlet kill Claudius? Should Richard III gain control over everything? Should Lear get Cordelia's love back?
In most cases, the characters both win and lose, and tend to get more glory than actual peace or happiness.
I think, now that I've seen the finale, I definitely wanted Walt to fail. I wanted to see him denied the glory he sought. I wanted him punished for his sins, somehow, even if he gets everything he wants, because I don't want to live in a world where there aren't consequences to doing wrong, to doing evil. Breaking Bad, for me, is about how possible it is to delude yourself into thinking you're doing good, even as you set in motion actions that cancer everything around you, that destroy all you claim to be fighting for.
Is the world that just, that fair? Does karma exist? Can a man, even as loathsome as Walt, be judged so harshly, if he attempts to make good at the end?
I don't know. And I don't think Breaking Bad does either. But as artists, I think Norm's theory IS there, really, like any great work of literature does, to offer the alternative to the sexy, ratings-and-audience pleasing version. The literal interpretation.
I think both exist simultaneously. I think Walt's both dead and alive in that car, and until we check, until each one of us goes through that thought process for ourselves and determines what we truly believe or value about the universe, about America, about the actions of this flawed anti-hero, he has to both accomplish what he does, and also fail to accomplish it.
THAT ending, that sophisticated, do you really trust your senses, what do you think of this story, you be the scientist, you decide, or, if you'd prefer to be an artist like me and keep both options in mind at the same time, and/both instead of either/or, you get to decide what world you live in.
Breaking Bad is, therefore, to me a quantum reflection of what you think bad is. And what the world does with the bad and the good. You check, you decide.
So.
There exists on the internet these days a certain subgenre of thinkpieces that have generated themselves all summer at an exponentially rabid/rapid pace. This is, of course, the Breaking Bad Thinkpiece.
And of course, now that the series is over, and we've had a few days to digest the experience and implications of the finale, these kind of thinkpieces are replicating themselves with wild abandon.
I am throwing my hat into this well-traveled ring because I am, like all other writers of these thinkpieces, an unabashedly devoted fan, I can't help but have strong opinions about it, and I was honestly fairly disappointed with the story of the finale. Not the production of it, nor the experience of it entirely, even, but the story, and its implications for the series as a whole.
I went onto Gchat and spent a few hours in post-show analysis over several days with my best friends. I gorged myself on every review of the finale, every point of view I could find about what had happened. I just couldn't decide what I felt. What I was settling for. What I wish had happened.
It was sincerely difficult to articulate, because I felt like I was missing something that maybe I wasn't even really supposed to catch on to. My brain, which always tries to make things the most complicated they can be, couldn't figure out how to reinterpret this fairly-straight-forward and ultimately-semi-victorious hail Mary pass by Walter White, which, miraculously, it seems, all works out in his favour. Is it really ending this simply?
Walt dies on his own terms. He finally tells Skylar the truth, that he did this all for himself, because he loved it, because he was good at it, because it made him feel alive. He ends Heisenberg's career in an epic badass rain of jerry-rigged machine gun murder, he finally refuses the seduction of MORE money after he has safely used his fearsome alter ego to threaten his former colleagues/privileged khaki clowns into ensuring the money he DID save from calamity will end up in his family's care after all, and he even gets to be the guy who, when he learns of his former partner/son-turned-rat's suffering, lets him go, freeing his enslaved Ariel to the winds, where perhaps he can find true freedom and peace with his resplendently-lit woodcarved boxes.
It all felt so good, to see him do that, it was nearly perfect, 92% pure, it was fantastic. A fantasy. And, therefore, not what I was expecting from the series that had just pummeled us into the To'hajilee burial ground with the consequences of Walt's Heisenbergian ways.
I read desperately all the tweets and reviews that said the finale was perfect. I convinced myself to justify that Walt really didn't get everything right, that he still caused all this mayhem and is still dying alone, having destroyed his family and the empire he fought so hard to create. That the long-anticipated final finale surprise was, as Vince Gilligan said, the fact that there were no surprises.
That it basically went as mass-hoped, as planned. That we all were slavering to see some redemption, and Walt started to get a little but it was too late. That he broke bad, only to break good again with not enough time to make it all work. We wanted to see this show go out in a blaze of glory, and we got it, Walt's glory. Walt wins, but it's a thin victory. Surprise! We didn't surprise you this time, and that's the best surprise!
Hm. Maybe.
Then someone tweeted about Norm Macdonald's finale theory just as I was trying to go to sleep the night before last, and I spent the next three hours awake by the glow of my smartphone, reading every letter of Norm's tweets. And my too-complicated-by-half brain found what it had been looking for. Another way to read the finale.
This is worth digging through on your own, though the later you read this the more it will be obscured by football tweets, but basically, Norm puts a slightly different spin on the New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum's disappointed review of the finale, which says that the finale DID feel like Walt's dying fantasy of what he WOULD do, if he could get back to Albuquerque. Maybe this Felina finale is his dying wish, that he really dies alone in that car, mid-plotting and planning, and really we'll never know what happens to Jesse, Skylar, Marie, the neo-Nazis, Todd, Lydia, or any of the horrific machinations he set in motion the day he started cooking blue meth.
Norm goes further than Emily, though, because what he suggests isn't that "it's all a dream" and that Gilligan even overtly expresses this in the finale. First off, Norm doesn't care what Vince has to say about it at all, actually. The work speaks for itself. Even though all the writers basically say they meant the finale to be taken literally, Norm isn't having it. Not the way it's written, executed, cinematographed, etc.
No, when Walt exhales as the harrowing world-ending sound of police car tires against snow pull away and the red and blue lights of capture fade, it's his dying breath. From the keys dropping from the sky onward, things work out for the broken bad Mr. White, because they are symbolic. He works out how he would end his life, had he the time, had he the ability. What we see is a largely egocentric fantasy of this truly broken man setting it as right as he can.
The evidence that Norm brings to this is heartening, too. This is a supposedly nation-wide manhunt, that necessitated Walt being shipped in an oil truck all the way to New Hampshire, yet he glides back into town in a stolen car after calling the cops to him. He creeps into the Schwartz' new house unimpeded, and does so everywhere else. Skylar's new place, where the cops are watching. His old house, staring at his reflection in broken mirrors. He watches his son through double windows, a la Christmas Carol. Carol's name, of course, is made a big deal for no otherwise apparent reason. He is gaunt, his movements are slow, shuffling, unfrantic as we've known him, finally sure, finally, it seems, at some kind of peace.
The cinematography certainly lends itself to almost a dreamlike state. Jesse's fantasy of wordworking, the "clue" for the finale that everyone harped about in press events, is lit in single-source, golden, holy organ music-playing light, all sensual, tactile, a Creator with his creation, all going right. The same single-source, half-face-shadowing light, happens in Skylar's apartment. At the end, in the Nazi's clubhouse. The camera moves slower, lurking, Walt is revealed in places by magic. It is shot, Norm posits, intentionally, for us to feel it is unreal.
A note, too, about the shadows. Jesse is tortured until he really seems to have half a face, and is lit, and shot, in that half-face darkness. As is Walt many times. Repetitions of images of Gus, with half his face blasted off. And the pink teddy bear from the plane crash. Manifestations of Walt's destructive power. Two-faced. Janus. We see what the lies of Heisenberg has wrought. And Walt dies by his own hand but saves his surrogate son, and has the time to go be with his equipment, his Precious, a distorted shot of his face and blood on the only thing he ever truly loved. He did it, it wasn't all for nothing.
Or, if you believe Norm's theory, he didn't do it. He didn't actually do any of those things. He died in the car, frozen, alone, still plotting, fantasizing about the final gambit he never actually gets to make. The cancer gets him and it is, indeed, all for nothing.
If you can't tell, I rewatched the last two episodes of Breaking Bad yesterday, to see this theory in action for myself. And I have come to the conclusion that it does work, but probably not for the reasons you think.
There are definitely holes. If Walt is imagining this final conversation with Skylar, then how does he know about Todd's visit to their house, threatening her not to reveal anything she knows about Lydia? There definitely is not a jump cut in Walt's scene in the car, where we think he might be dead but then he flips the visor and the keys fall out! It's one continuous cut. Walt doesn't clearly seem to die and then revive.
And in terms of everything going right, magic things have happened for Walt all the time. He is incredibly lucky, and resourceful, and admittedly brilliant, even if his arrogance and pride cause him to miscalculate, or, in the case of Jesse, completely underestimate his allegiance.
Breaking Bad has had otherworldly-seeming things happen more than I remembered. The Cousins are shot and move like Death itself, coming for Walt's life in ways that are beyond human. I mean, Walt meets Jane's dad at the bar before he goes back to Jesse's place and watches her die, and this causes a cataclysmic plane crash? WHAT are the chances of THAT?! Hank discovers Walt's true identity because he leaves a copy of Leaves of Grass on his toilet seat?? HOW would that have actually happened?!
So Walt evading all the police forces of Albuquerque isn't too terribly hard to believe. Him sneaking ricin into a Stevia packet doesn't seem to be too farfetched, when he knows she always sits in the same cafe at 10am on Tuesdays, and she always wants Stevia. He put a fake ricin pill into a cigarette and planted it, somehow, in Jesse's Roomba, so that Jesse would stop worrying about accidentally poisoning someone.
Walt takes advantage of a universe that offers him up chances all the time. This universe offered him up some big breaks at the end, and he took advantage of them like he always did. He just now has his priorities in order. Which, given months in solitude in the woods, dying of cancer, paying a stranger $10,000 just to stay for a game of poker, isn't a stretch to see him come to the conclusion that with his dying strength, he needs to nut up and provide for his family at all costs. Gretchen and Elliot appear on Charlie Rose, and suddenly he has his plan. He sees his way out.
But should he be allowed to carry through his plans? The show, or, really, MY experience watching this show, has always been so UNCERTAIN about Walt. He's bad, but we still identify with him. He does worse after worse thing, and especially after Ozymandias, we SEE just how much of a monster he truly is. But he's not all monster. So should he get a chance at redemption?
Well, I think yes and no. And I think this finale actually gives us the chance to see both, even though they are diametrically opposed. At the same time.
I think Felina/finale is actually a quantum finale.
Heisenberg, remember, is the name of the scientist attributed mostly for coming up with the uncertainty principle, which, in quantum physics, is all about the fact that we can't know everything about a particle all at once, and whenever we "check" to see, for example, a particle's location, we can't determine the direction of its spin exactly. You follow this to the Schroedinger's cat conclusion, and if you put the cat in the box with poison, until you check, the cat is both dead and alive at the same time. Truly. Actually. You can't know for sure until you check.
Breaking Bad has always been hyper aware of its audiences' expectations. Its job is solely to tell a good story, and it has definitely done so with the Felina finale. But what it's also done artistically, which the literal finale sort of walks back, is create a truly Shakespearean, Euripidean character of negative empathy.
Paula Vogel talks about this in this video, which I can't figure out how to embed but will try to more later.
Her gist, though, is that great dramas used to be made where we are meant to struggle, as an audience, to decide what is right and wrong with these characters' actions. They are compelling, human, faulty, destructive monsters and we identify with them, we see the human inside them, we see the monster inside us. We don't like these characters, but we also really do. What should happen to them? Should Hamlet kill Claudius? Should Richard III gain control over everything? Should Lear get Cordelia's love back?
In most cases, the characters both win and lose, and tend to get more glory than actual peace or happiness.
I think, now that I've seen the finale, I definitely wanted Walt to fail. I wanted to see him denied the glory he sought. I wanted him punished for his sins, somehow, even if he gets everything he wants, because I don't want to live in a world where there aren't consequences to doing wrong, to doing evil. Breaking Bad, for me, is about how possible it is to delude yourself into thinking you're doing good, even as you set in motion actions that cancer everything around you, that destroy all you claim to be fighting for.
Is the world that just, that fair? Does karma exist? Can a man, even as loathsome as Walt, be judged so harshly, if he attempts to make good at the end?
I don't know. And I don't think Breaking Bad does either. But as artists, I think Norm's theory IS there, really, like any great work of literature does, to offer the alternative to the sexy, ratings-and-audience pleasing version. The literal interpretation.
I think both exist simultaneously. I think Walt's both dead and alive in that car, and until we check, until each one of us goes through that thought process for ourselves and determines what we truly believe or value about the universe, about America, about the actions of this flawed anti-hero, he has to both accomplish what he does, and also fail to accomplish it.
THAT ending, that sophisticated, do you really trust your senses, what do you think of this story, you be the scientist, you decide, or, if you'd prefer to be an artist like me and keep both options in mind at the same time, and/both instead of either/or, you get to decide what world you live in.
Breaking Bad is, therefore, to me a quantum reflection of what you think bad is. And what the world does with the bad and the good. You check, you decide.
Friday, October 4, 2013
An Open Letter to Open Letters
An Open Letter to Open Letters,
I would like to write an open letter to open letters, but I have found I do not have anything to say, except that I appreciate the opportunity it provides to showcase openly how open and transparent I am about my process, as a human being and an artist, which of course can hide all the shadowy other reasons I am seeking attention by posting an open letter in the first place.
Writing an open letter is, in fact, much like shutting down the government, one does it for its own sake. One declares openly that one is a writer of open letters by writing an open letter, and ipso facto, mission accomplished. You don't even need to read this letter to know that I am a writer of open letters, and must be incredibly confident, smart, sexy, and artistic, to write my letters so openly.
This is something we all desire, sure. I write so you will read. I need you to understand me. I need you to love me. I need validation from the eyes and pageviews and downloads and listens and retweets and reblogs and Likes and hashtags and blog posts that show me to the world for who I want to be seen as.
I used to wonder what it would be like to be conscious of when I am in another person's dream. Like, if I killed someone in another person's dream, then in my real life I'd carry around that knowledge, that guilt. I am a murderer in your eyes. How awful, to not be able to tell that person, en medias dream, "No, you don't understand! That's not me! That's not who I am!"
If there is anything I can say to end this open letter to you, Open Letters, it's that this day and age, we are all our own Public Relations Managers, and we keep nothing "private." Except, of course, for all the things I am not saying in this letter. I mention others' dreams and my appearance in them. I will not mention my own.
I would like to write an open letter to open letters, but I have found I do not have anything to say, except that I appreciate the opportunity it provides to showcase openly how open and transparent I am about my process, as a human being and an artist, which of course can hide all the shadowy other reasons I am seeking attention by posting an open letter in the first place.
Writing an open letter is, in fact, much like shutting down the government, one does it for its own sake. One declares openly that one is a writer of open letters by writing an open letter, and ipso facto, mission accomplished. You don't even need to read this letter to know that I am a writer of open letters, and must be incredibly confident, smart, sexy, and artistic, to write my letters so openly.
This is something we all desire, sure. I write so you will read. I need you to understand me. I need you to love me. I need validation from the eyes and pageviews and downloads and listens and retweets and reblogs and Likes and hashtags and blog posts that show me to the world for who I want to be seen as.
I used to wonder what it would be like to be conscious of when I am in another person's dream. Like, if I killed someone in another person's dream, then in my real life I'd carry around that knowledge, that guilt. I am a murderer in your eyes. How awful, to not be able to tell that person, en medias dream, "No, you don't understand! That's not me! That's not who I am!"
If there is anything I can say to end this open letter to you, Open Letters, it's that this day and age, we are all our own Public Relations Managers, and we keep nothing "private." Except, of course, for all the things I am not saying in this letter. I mention others' dreams and my appearance in them. I will not mention my own.
Thursday, October 3, 2013
Five Paragraphs At A Time
This isn't going to be anything. I mean, it's going to be pretty much whatever comes to my head first, because what I've noticed with myself is that I tend to stop most, if not all, of what I think from coming out into the world for fear of it being rejected.
This is what happens when you perpetually doubt yourself. You play crystal ball strategist, you think you know the cards that are coming before the flip. You rely on your intuition, solely, to decide whether you should take any particular risk, stick your neck out at any particular angle.
Malcolm Gladwell says in order to overcome writer's block you need to break the expectation of writing perfect prose, and simply write a few paragraphs a day. He said four, but I like to be ambitious and like odd numbers better. I will likely arbitrarily edit these sentences so they appear as five paragraphs. If I haven't done this when you're reading, I apologize for wasting your eyesight.
Fear, I think we've all heard and hardly internalized, is the only thing to be feared itself, but I have to admit it's Shame that really gets me crumbling. Shame is a kind of fear, I suppose, but it's not private, like anxiety can be. It's not secret. It's wrapped up entirely in others, in your perception of their perceptions.
Right now I'm a little ashamed to admit (though hardly too ashamed to post on a blog), but I'm pretty lost. I don't know what to do next, for my career, for my art, for my life. I have no specific reason to be ashamed, of course, I am with someone I truly love, I live in a great place, I work hard at a hard job that pays me well for my hard work. But I want to make something. I want to be an artist. And I am blocked, right now, and five paragraphs at a time, in spite of all fears, I'll attempt to change that.
This is what happens when you perpetually doubt yourself. You play crystal ball strategist, you think you know the cards that are coming before the flip. You rely on your intuition, solely, to decide whether you should take any particular risk, stick your neck out at any particular angle.
Malcolm Gladwell says in order to overcome writer's block you need to break the expectation of writing perfect prose, and simply write a few paragraphs a day. He said four, but I like to be ambitious and like odd numbers better. I will likely arbitrarily edit these sentences so they appear as five paragraphs. If I haven't done this when you're reading, I apologize for wasting your eyesight.
Fear, I think we've all heard and hardly internalized, is the only thing to be feared itself, but I have to admit it's Shame that really gets me crumbling. Shame is a kind of fear, I suppose, but it's not private, like anxiety can be. It's not secret. It's wrapped up entirely in others, in your perception of their perceptions.
Right now I'm a little ashamed to admit (though hardly too ashamed to post on a blog), but I'm pretty lost. I don't know what to do next, for my career, for my art, for my life. I have no specific reason to be ashamed, of course, I am with someone I truly love, I live in a great place, I work hard at a hard job that pays me well for my hard work. But I want to make something. I want to be an artist. And I am blocked, right now, and five paragraphs at a time, in spite of all fears, I'll attempt to change that.
Saturday, September 21, 2013
Stray Observations About Time Passing, or, You Guessed It, It's My Birthday
Time is only your enemy when you try to kill it.
I have a very boring job a lot of the time. I mean, not all the time. For spurts of my five hours a night, I am engaged, present, smart, eloquent, passionate, talking about theatre, selling memberships, listening to people, giving and giving and giving and taking them to that sale. I sell hard, and when it works, it works. It's always a thrilling feeling.
But then there are hours, and I do mean hours, where I barely make contact with anyone. I dial number after number. I tick away the minutes and I try not to think about what else I could be doing. I do make a decent hourly wage, but the money's not in sitting around listening to answering machines. It's about making contact with people. Connecting. Inspiring them, with passion, about the season of theatre they need tickets for. Bringing them around to the sale. Now's the time! No day but today! It's about being a human being on the phone, already a mission of translation, and being a human being who can mobilize others into action.
It's hard to stay an action-inspiring human when the hours are rotting by. When there is no action. When you're bored. David Foster Wallace has a whole bit in The Pale King, where he has noted that the use of the word "boring" as an adjective appeared at the same time the word "interesting," one of the most soporific and un-useful words to ever cross an artist's brainpan. How "boring" also comes from the verb to bore, meaning to pierce with a turning or twisting movement of a tool. Violent image, eh? How you can imagine that tool going into your skull, because something's got to when no one will answer the damn phone.
I think we as a culture have become pathologically afraid of that particular kind of pain, of boredom. I certainly am. Normally I do whatever it takes outside of my shifts at work to escape boredom. On trains, on days off, even when I want to do nothing and relax, I feel guilty for letting myself get bored. For wasting time. I open up 16 tabs on my browser, I refresh Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, I read news sites, I look up useless facts, I play Dominion on my iPhone, all so I can avoid being alone with myself. All so I can avoid being bored. All so I can avoid feeling like I'm wasting the precious minutes I have, rotting down until the moment I have to return to work.
David Foster Wallace would say that if you can break past the initial pain of boredom, though, if you can handle that slow dull tool making its way millimeter by millimeter into your skull, you can actually break past onto the other side into a feeling of deep serenity, of calm, of presence. A Buddhist, meditative notion. A kind of self-acceptance.
Louis CK says it even better here. He talks about boredom leading to being alone with yourself, which inevitably opens you up to all kinds of intense feelings of unknowable sadness you feel about yourself, about your existence, about life in general. And how if you can let yourself feel that sad, if you can stop the urge to contact everyone you know, and say HI I'M HERE PLEASE LOVE ME, you can actually feel happy you get to feel sad, you can appreciate its beauty and its place in your life. Everything has to be someplace, even your sadness. You come to acknowledge and respect it as part of yourself. You come to love yourself a little bit more. And then you move a little bit on.
Which makes me think about perspective.
This Wait But Why article about Time's Perspective, using all kinds of simple, beautiful graphics to illustrate just how much of a blip in time we as human beings really are, in the face of so many years, billions of years, it made me feel the same way I felt first hearing Carl Sagan's speech about the Pale Blue Dot. About how infinitesimal we are, but also how momentary, how effervescent. For as how long it's taken for us to learn language, to develop technologies, to create civilizations, to make the art that fills the great museums of the world, it barely takes up an inch on the scale of how long we've been anatomically human.
As the Wait But Why article says, "If the Earth formed at midnight and the present moment is the next midnight, 24 hours later, modern humans have been around since 11:59:59pm—1 second."
When I worked at the PMA as a telemarketer, we'd get breaks. 15 minute breaks every hour and 15 minutes. And I used to really look forward to those breaks after a mind-numbing hour, because at least I'd be able to stand and stretch and grouse with the other callers about how I wasn't making any sales, etc. But I also used to physically dread those breaks, too, because I would usually spend most of my time anxiously looking at my phone, watching the minutes of freedom bleed down until I had to go back to work.
I'd waste my entire break from work dreading about going back to work. Not that I necessarily hated working, I actually like it most of the time, even when I don't make sales or get a slue of assholes on the phone, I generally like talking to people, I generally like talking about art and theatre. I like my current job a lot (which doesn't offer the trap of breaks, we just use the restroom when we need to). But I still dreaded getting back from those breaks so much, I rarely took an actual break.
Don't tell me you haven't done this. Don't tell me you haven't wasted a day or two of a vacation occupying the same space of dread.
Why do we do that? Why do we waste time dreading going back to work?
Or, to pose another question, why do we consider time we have not worked to be wasteful?
I'm being a little care-free with the "we," I mean you totally could be one of those enlightened people or Europeans who believe in the value of relaxing and promote a lax sense of time and due dates and long siestas and time really slowing down, so you can appreciate the small stuff and enjoy all that's around you. I envy you, if you exist in this world. I want to carve places in my life where I can live by those rules.
But we have to be productive to be in American society, don't we? In Western society, in North American society. We are a capitalist nation, you either win or you lose, you either waste or you produce, and being bored, being idle, being, well, that doesn't generate anything, that doesn't make anything you can sell society, so it's useless, it's bad, don't do it, stop daydreaming, Mark, get back to work. Quit being lazy. Quit thinking so much. Just do it. Get it done. Work harder, work faster, dial dia dial. These are things I tell myself frequently, especially when I'm feeling guilty for losing my way into a reverie.
Of course I can't actually day dream on the job, because in sales you have to be present. You have to be at the top of your game. And when I'm on a call, nothing else matters. No day but today. (I work for the theatre who created Rent, so excuse the constant reference) When I'm doing it right nothing else matters, which is very hard to do.
When I drop off the last 37 minutes of non-starts and wrong numbers, and I simply focus on connecting to the other intelligent living breathing being on the other line, minutes fly by. Work becomes play. I love talking about the upcoming season. The plays. The excitement. How meaningful membership is. I know they get it. I just need to bring them there.
And when it works, when it's the right time, when I've done my job right, out comes the wallet, and in comes the sale. Because it's not about cheap tickets or dollars and cents. It's about the theatre. It's about the mission. It's about the art, and wanting to stay connected to it. In those minutes I'm just being that guy, the guy who loves to talk about those things. Who means what he says.
My job is teaching me how to be better at doing that when I'm not talking to someone else. When I'm idle, dialing numbers, waiting, trying to keep a positive outlook, keep my energy and focus for the next call. I am trying, outside of my work, to both embrace the time I have to focus, to do things like write, create, research, read, stay in touch with people. But I'm also trying to do something that's maybe harder than all that other stuff: I'm trying not to feel bad for wasting time.
Because there's no such thing as a waste of time. All the errata, all the bullshit, all the nonsense, all the long lines in the supermarket, all the boring surfaces we attach our butts to as we wait for trains and planes and postal office workers, all of it matters. It does!
All of it contributes to that one second we as a human race, in the history of the universe, have been in existence. And there are more things in heaven and earth than can be dreamt of in our philosophies, we have no idea what bit of information we glean from those resting moments will be the KEY to our future endeavours, if we stop resisting the times when we feel we are wasting away, we might actually eventually be able to pay attention and see what's in front of us. We're the only ones who think that negatively about it. And it's a choice, to think about it that way.
This, too, comes from David Foster Wallace, in the deeply moving excerpt from his Kenyon 2005 graduation speech, the excerpt being redubbed This Is Water. If you haven't clicked on any of the other hyperlinks, click on this one. I dare you to wait in a line at the grocery store the same way again.
I'll wait until you come back.
At the end of this, I wanted to draw some larger conclusion about perspective and time and human history and art and life and boredom and pain and how that deep feeling of aloneness and the fear of the meaninglessness of our lives, how all of this can simply be overcome by not thinking about it. Don't pay attention to it. But I don't really think that's true. I certainly can't help it, when I'm down, that I criticize all my choices, I beat myself up for the mistakes I've made, I wish I had used this time better or said this thing to this person. I am constantly trying to overcome my own ruthless inner critic.
I think it's resisting the resistance that's the problem. I think it's feeling bad for feeling bad. It's not letting the defeatism be defeated. It's thinking that your struggles right now are more significant, more important, than the grand scheme of your whole life.
Last year, I made a few decisions that radically changed my life. I decided to visit a college friend for her birthday, took the time waiting for the train, riding the train, walking through the night air, the first time it smelled like fall to me, to arrive at my friend's door. I agonized over missing out on Fringe shows and on risking delays getting back to run my own. But something made me want to think bigger than just what was happening right then. I think I wanted to network with this friend's grad school friends, since I was thinking about applying myself. I put up with a lot of boring inaction, I went through a lot of motions, I sank and sunk into all this negative thinking, but then I met this woman who became the love of my life.
Now my life is almost entirely different. In the span of a year, which is now 1/26th of my life, everything has changed.
And I sit alone, with myself, writing to you, which is really also writing to myself, too, hi, and while I'm still plagued by wanting to be productive, to launch this New York artistic career, to make things happen, and simultaneously feeling lazy and slothful and afraid of taking steps and being wrong, afraid of trying and failing, afraid of feeling the bad feelings that one needs to feel to learn, even in spite of those fears, for the first time in a long time, I am very much looking forward to the years and years ahead. I can see them, dimly, stretch and stand in the horizon. Seeing it, knowing it's possible, that long view, takes the pressure off making every moment of now count, I think.
It all counts, but there's a lot to count. A lot. Life is very long, as a mentor near to my heart told me in New York a year before I moved here. It's time to remember, continually, to let it go. Or, as any Viewpoints teacher worth their salt would say, hold on tightly, let go lightly.
I think I've finished moralizing for the day.
//
Oh, also, a moment of unabashed excitement:
I finally did this! I finally wrote on my blog again! Happy birthday to me!
I have a very boring job a lot of the time. I mean, not all the time. For spurts of my five hours a night, I am engaged, present, smart, eloquent, passionate, talking about theatre, selling memberships, listening to people, giving and giving and giving and taking them to that sale. I sell hard, and when it works, it works. It's always a thrilling feeling.
But then there are hours, and I do mean hours, where I barely make contact with anyone. I dial number after number. I tick away the minutes and I try not to think about what else I could be doing. I do make a decent hourly wage, but the money's not in sitting around listening to answering machines. It's about making contact with people. Connecting. Inspiring them, with passion, about the season of theatre they need tickets for. Bringing them around to the sale. Now's the time! No day but today! It's about being a human being on the phone, already a mission of translation, and being a human being who can mobilize others into action.
It's hard to stay an action-inspiring human when the hours are rotting by. When there is no action. When you're bored. David Foster Wallace has a whole bit in The Pale King, where he has noted that the use of the word "boring" as an adjective appeared at the same time the word "interesting," one of the most soporific and un-useful words to ever cross an artist's brainpan. How "boring" also comes from the verb to bore, meaning to pierce with a turning or twisting movement of a tool. Violent image, eh? How you can imagine that tool going into your skull, because something's got to when no one will answer the damn phone.
I think we as a culture have become pathologically afraid of that particular kind of pain, of boredom. I certainly am. Normally I do whatever it takes outside of my shifts at work to escape boredom. On trains, on days off, even when I want to do nothing and relax, I feel guilty for letting myself get bored. For wasting time. I open up 16 tabs on my browser, I refresh Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, I read news sites, I look up useless facts, I play Dominion on my iPhone, all so I can avoid being alone with myself. All so I can avoid being bored. All so I can avoid feeling like I'm wasting the precious minutes I have, rotting down until the moment I have to return to work.
David Foster Wallace would say that if you can break past the initial pain of boredom, though, if you can handle that slow dull tool making its way millimeter by millimeter into your skull, you can actually break past onto the other side into a feeling of deep serenity, of calm, of presence. A Buddhist, meditative notion. A kind of self-acceptance.
Louis CK says it even better here. He talks about boredom leading to being alone with yourself, which inevitably opens you up to all kinds of intense feelings of unknowable sadness you feel about yourself, about your existence, about life in general. And how if you can let yourself feel that sad, if you can stop the urge to contact everyone you know, and say HI I'M HERE PLEASE LOVE ME, you can actually feel happy you get to feel sad, you can appreciate its beauty and its place in your life. Everything has to be someplace, even your sadness. You come to acknowledge and respect it as part of yourself. You come to love yourself a little bit more. And then you move a little bit on.
Which makes me think about perspective.
This Wait But Why article about Time's Perspective, using all kinds of simple, beautiful graphics to illustrate just how much of a blip in time we as human beings really are, in the face of so many years, billions of years, it made me feel the same way I felt first hearing Carl Sagan's speech about the Pale Blue Dot. About how infinitesimal we are, but also how momentary, how effervescent. For as how long it's taken for us to learn language, to develop technologies, to create civilizations, to make the art that fills the great museums of the world, it barely takes up an inch on the scale of how long we've been anatomically human.
As the Wait But Why article says, "If the Earth formed at midnight and the present moment is the next midnight, 24 hours later, modern humans have been around since 11:59:59pm—1 second."
When I worked at the PMA as a telemarketer, we'd get breaks. 15 minute breaks every hour and 15 minutes. And I used to really look forward to those breaks after a mind-numbing hour, because at least I'd be able to stand and stretch and grouse with the other callers about how I wasn't making any sales, etc. But I also used to physically dread those breaks, too, because I would usually spend most of my time anxiously looking at my phone, watching the minutes of freedom bleed down until I had to go back to work.
I'd waste my entire break from work dreading about going back to work. Not that I necessarily hated working, I actually like it most of the time, even when I don't make sales or get a slue of assholes on the phone, I generally like talking to people, I generally like talking about art and theatre. I like my current job a lot (which doesn't offer the trap of breaks, we just use the restroom when we need to). But I still dreaded getting back from those breaks so much, I rarely took an actual break.
Don't tell me you haven't done this. Don't tell me you haven't wasted a day or two of a vacation occupying the same space of dread.
Why do we do that? Why do we waste time dreading going back to work?
Or, to pose another question, why do we consider time we have not worked to be wasteful?
I'm being a little care-free with the "we," I mean you totally could be one of those enlightened people or Europeans who believe in the value of relaxing and promote a lax sense of time and due dates and long siestas and time really slowing down, so you can appreciate the small stuff and enjoy all that's around you. I envy you, if you exist in this world. I want to carve places in my life where I can live by those rules.
But we have to be productive to be in American society, don't we? In Western society, in North American society. We are a capitalist nation, you either win or you lose, you either waste or you produce, and being bored, being idle, being, well, that doesn't generate anything, that doesn't make anything you can sell society, so it's useless, it's bad, don't do it, stop daydreaming, Mark, get back to work. Quit being lazy. Quit thinking so much. Just do it. Get it done. Work harder, work faster, dial dia dial. These are things I tell myself frequently, especially when I'm feeling guilty for losing my way into a reverie.
Of course I can't actually day dream on the job, because in sales you have to be present. You have to be at the top of your game. And when I'm on a call, nothing else matters. No day but today. (I work for the theatre who created Rent, so excuse the constant reference) When I'm doing it right nothing else matters, which is very hard to do.
When I drop off the last 37 minutes of non-starts and wrong numbers, and I simply focus on connecting to the other intelligent living breathing being on the other line, minutes fly by. Work becomes play. I love talking about the upcoming season. The plays. The excitement. How meaningful membership is. I know they get it. I just need to bring them there.
And when it works, when it's the right time, when I've done my job right, out comes the wallet, and in comes the sale. Because it's not about cheap tickets or dollars and cents. It's about the theatre. It's about the mission. It's about the art, and wanting to stay connected to it. In those minutes I'm just being that guy, the guy who loves to talk about those things. Who means what he says.
My job is teaching me how to be better at doing that when I'm not talking to someone else. When I'm idle, dialing numbers, waiting, trying to keep a positive outlook, keep my energy and focus for the next call. I am trying, outside of my work, to both embrace the time I have to focus, to do things like write, create, research, read, stay in touch with people. But I'm also trying to do something that's maybe harder than all that other stuff: I'm trying not to feel bad for wasting time.
Because there's no such thing as a waste of time. All the errata, all the bullshit, all the nonsense, all the long lines in the supermarket, all the boring surfaces we attach our butts to as we wait for trains and planes and postal office workers, all of it matters. It does!
All of it contributes to that one second we as a human race, in the history of the universe, have been in existence. And there are more things in heaven and earth than can be dreamt of in our philosophies, we have no idea what bit of information we glean from those resting moments will be the KEY to our future endeavours, if we stop resisting the times when we feel we are wasting away, we might actually eventually be able to pay attention and see what's in front of us. We're the only ones who think that negatively about it. And it's a choice, to think about it that way.
This, too, comes from David Foster Wallace, in the deeply moving excerpt from his Kenyon 2005 graduation speech, the excerpt being redubbed This Is Water. If you haven't clicked on any of the other hyperlinks, click on this one. I dare you to wait in a line at the grocery store the same way again.
I'll wait until you come back.
At the end of this, I wanted to draw some larger conclusion about perspective and time and human history and art and life and boredom and pain and how that deep feeling of aloneness and the fear of the meaninglessness of our lives, how all of this can simply be overcome by not thinking about it. Don't pay attention to it. But I don't really think that's true. I certainly can't help it, when I'm down, that I criticize all my choices, I beat myself up for the mistakes I've made, I wish I had used this time better or said this thing to this person. I am constantly trying to overcome my own ruthless inner critic.
I think it's resisting the resistance that's the problem. I think it's feeling bad for feeling bad. It's not letting the defeatism be defeated. It's thinking that your struggles right now are more significant, more important, than the grand scheme of your whole life.
Last year, I made a few decisions that radically changed my life. I decided to visit a college friend for her birthday, took the time waiting for the train, riding the train, walking through the night air, the first time it smelled like fall to me, to arrive at my friend's door. I agonized over missing out on Fringe shows and on risking delays getting back to run my own. But something made me want to think bigger than just what was happening right then. I think I wanted to network with this friend's grad school friends, since I was thinking about applying myself. I put up with a lot of boring inaction, I went through a lot of motions, I sank and sunk into all this negative thinking, but then I met this woman who became the love of my life.
Now my life is almost entirely different. In the span of a year, which is now 1/26th of my life, everything has changed.
And I sit alone, with myself, writing to you, which is really also writing to myself, too, hi, and while I'm still plagued by wanting to be productive, to launch this New York artistic career, to make things happen, and simultaneously feeling lazy and slothful and afraid of taking steps and being wrong, afraid of trying and failing, afraid of feeling the bad feelings that one needs to feel to learn, even in spite of those fears, for the first time in a long time, I am very much looking forward to the years and years ahead. I can see them, dimly, stretch and stand in the horizon. Seeing it, knowing it's possible, that long view, takes the pressure off making every moment of now count, I think.
It all counts, but there's a lot to count. A lot. Life is very long, as a mentor near to my heart told me in New York a year before I moved here. It's time to remember, continually, to let it go. Or, as any Viewpoints teacher worth their salt would say, hold on tightly, let go lightly.
I think I've finished moralizing for the day.
//
Oh, also, a moment of unabashed excitement:
I finally did this! I finally wrote on my blog again! Happy birthday to me!
Saturday, August 10, 2013
Stick, Ball, Veil, Walt, Jesse, Mike, & Nike
*Spoiler alert again for any non-initiated Breaking Bad fans. This will contain spoilers up to about halfway through season 4, as my girlfriend and I have only watched up to that point. I know what happens after, I'm rewatching, but I want her to be able to read this, so, you know, I'm gonna avoid spoiling plot points from episode 8 of season 4 on*
I've been thinking a lot about thinking recently. And how it frequently can hurt more than help me.
Last night, while watching an episode of Breaking Bad (Season 4, holy shit, we're almost there, 5.2 starts tomorrow!) my girlfriend explained to me the Michael Chekhov strategy of thinking of characters in three ways, as either a stick, a ball, or a veil, and how their shape, the rhythm of their movement, and what that represents energy-wise, could be used to break down and classify different types of characters.
Sticks, for example, are thinkers first. They are rigid to the world, appear impervious, they jut out into space. They can be bendy, sure, even like a twig, with many offshoots, but in general, they do not take in energy smoothly or receive it with any sense of ease, they stop it. They analyze. They process. Walt, in my opinion, is a steel rod, or a fire poker. Gus, a smooth, polished yardstick.
Veils, on the other hand, are any kind of fabric, really. A leather glove. A t-shirt. A piece of chainmail. They take in energy when they are acted upon, they move, they flow, they react. They are feelers first. Mike, in this case, while a toughened, weathered, worn, fisted glove, is a veil. He's an emotional man. He absorbs energy, and I tend to see him process emotionally first, in his eyes, even if it's distant. His mouth gives him away. But he's supple that way, he moves with the world. He endures and survives, as best he can, obviously.
And then there are balls, like Jesse Pinkman, who my girlfriend likened to a hard rubber ball, almost like one you'd use in wall ball or something. It'd really hurt if you were pelted with one. Bouncy, fast, darting off in sharp directions. Always moving, always doing. Acting first, feeling later, thinking later. We all know the ball-types in our lives, always a little unpredictable, always at the ready to take a leap, to do something. I really do envy ball-types, a lot of the time. Their kinetic energy, their ability, it seems, to not worry about what it is they're going to do, their easy sashay over the tiresome build-up and dread to the event of doing whatever it is you're about to do, not fearing the consequences, or really, rather, trusting that you'll be able to handle the consequences of whatever it is you do. They do that later, I imagine. They do things first. I am not a ball. I always need to prepare for what I'm doing.
Just do it, though, has become my motto for the past week or so. I've been getting bogged down at work, where I make sales on the telephone for memberships at an amazing New York theatre, because I have been constantly thinking about, preparing, analyzing, and dreading my performance, or really my prepared-for lack of performance, because I feel great responsibility to do well and constantly worry I won't, especially recently as I've had a couple bad weeks.
Sales, of course, is all about performance, it's all about actually doing, accomplishing something. You need to close, you need to convince, you need to get the payment info, you need to get people to commit. And I've been having trouble doing that recently, as the actual kind of sale I've been making has changed, and I've been wading deeper into true salesman territory, no longer just reupping former members, which is practically a customer service job, but convincing new people to take a leap of faith and commit on the phone to a season of theatre I have to make sure they realize is absolutely going to be amazing.
I've been thinking/writing a lot about telesales & telemarketing, which is figuring largely in my play I'm working on, but I've been having this impulse recently to sort of "save" those stories, or ideas, for my play, and not write about them here. Even though it's a major part of my life, I mean, it's a huge reason why I'm here in New York, it's my personal challenge, to get better at sales, to make more money so I can continue to be financially stable, so I can use my non-sales time to write and eventually to network, to direct, to produce, to do all the things I did in Philly but on my own, actually-self-accepted terms, I mean, the sales is the means by which I can eventually do all that. So it's been a bit all-consuming, and a bit writing-resistent, to obsess over just 25 hours of my week. I keep thinking I have to wait to write about the job, to only write about it in my play (which I maybe write two or three hours once a week, if that.)
But something my boss said, who's essentially the coach in the room, making sure his athletes are on the ball and improving, and most of all, making sales, something he said to me has stuck in my craw this week. It is, of course, a quote immortalized in song-in-everyone's-head by Rent, the notion that there is "no day but today." And it's true.
In telesales, there's always the escape valve of the callback. You get someone on the phone super convinced to go for the sale, but they have to talk to their wife or their husband, they don't have their credit card handy, they're about to go to dinner, about to feed their dog, whatever. When can I call you back? It's frequently a polite way to say no, or a polite way to chicken out, though sometimes, if you've built trust in the right way, you can still get them another time. With the leads I have right now, though, it's a bit of a kiss of death. And my boss has been saying, don't chicken out yourself, don't fall back on the callback, because tomorrow never comes, you need to get them today. Now. Inspire them. Today is when things happen. Don't wait for later. Now's the time to get life-changing theatre. Now's the time to commit. There's no day but today.
This, of course, is coming at a time when I'm painfully aware of mortality, of health issues that have been plaguing people I know. And of course my Uncle Frank, who passed away a short 8 weeks after he was diagnosed with cancer, comes to mind, a lot. There is literally no day but today. You never know when it's going to be your last. Why wait to do something meaningful, something important with your life, until you're ready? You're never going to be ready, and you might not get the chance tomorrow. If it's worth doing, it should be scary. It should be hard. It should be a risk. Just do it. You can feel, react, suffer, breathe, release, later. The readiness isn't all. The doing is all.
And it's a bit inspiring for this INFJ, this introverted, intuitive, feeler, judger, who takes things in by intuition, who deals with things by feeling them through, who imagines and analyzes and interprets every possible way of something happening, frantically trying to do it before it happens, so he can protect himself, protect himself from himself, from his feelings, protect his few close loved ones, protect his friends. As someone who's suffered quite a bit with an inclination towards anxiety, your classic neurotic worrier, I find myself constantly in a state of apprehension, of the pause on the starting block, holding your breath, just waiting for the gun, lost in every dimension of how the water'll feel when you hit it, who'll come out in front first, how I'll blow all my energy in the first ten seconds of the race because I've built up too much nervous energy to not let it all out when the gun finally fires. I am a cycle of oppressively humid summer days and random thunder storm releases. I am a nuclear reactor, trying to maintain myself before meltdown. I've gotten much better at the maintenance as I've gotten older.
It's become increasingly clear to me that a way to deal with my nerves, with my energy, with my imagination, with my will-to-stop-time-and-process-everything-internally-first, is to simple allow myself to not think about it. To trust myself as a functioning human being, and to Just do it, as Nike has imparted it to me. Nike, incidentally, is the Greek goddess of Victory, which I didn't really know until I looked it up today. She's one of the few winged goddesses, who swoops in on the battlefield to shower glory and fame on the victors of war. Victory. To the victor go the spoils. Those who act, those who do, the balls in life. The Just do its. They are victorious. Fortune favours the bold.
Growing up, I made a bit of a self-fulfilling prophesy of an internal myth about myself as someone who usually does not win. My clown, for example, is as mature as a little child, a sad, slow, heart-burst-wide-open, wide-eyed, love-seeking, sad little clown, who is so small in such a large world, wanting desperately to be loved by it, always just quite out of reach. The kid picked last in gym class for dodgeball, who goes "Okay guys. I understand. Thanks anyway, for picking me at all." Self-pitying. Inert. Sweet, but doing nothing to help himself. I think I learned at a young age when I was bullied to just accept their violence, as a way to get them to stop. I made it not fun anymore for them to tease me, I made it just sad, a passive-aggression, for sure, but a survival technique, from my serious-minded, literal, they-must-actually-think-I'm-awful kind of way. I still am such a serious guy, and have trouble being teased. Rarely do I ever imagine Nike to be visiting me. Because I just assume I'll lose, if I am attacked. I am not the victor on the battlefield, I am the corpse in the ditch.
But I'm definitely capable of victory. I do make sales, and I improve every time I've been given adjustments to my approach. I am a very quick learner, and I rarely make the same mistakes twice. As I get older, I am starting to treat myself with much more care, much more love.
The stick-ball-veil approach is also used as a way to analyze how characters behave in the world. When something happens to them, do they think about it, then do something about it, then feel about what's happened? Do they do something, immediately, then think about what they've done, then feel?
Do they react emotionally, then think about that reaction, then do something once they've processed it? What's the time in between those, the qualities of each? Walt uses his iron thought to smash his problem into analyzable pieces, then he quickly strikes at the problem, and then vibrates with the reverberations of what's happened, shuddering, boiling, crackling. Jesse leaps into action, bounding from one moment to another, then pitches and swerves with waves of feeling about what he's just experienced, and then, after a pause and the stillness, things dawn, pieces come together, he thinks.
Stick, ball, veil. We all are all three, it's really just a question of which one manifests first, which one dominates how you deal with the world.
What I've been working on, and it's brought a relief to some of the lower level anxiety and suffering I put on myself daily before work, worrying about how I'm going to do today, is simply to believe that thinking about it really actually, at a certain point, doesn't help, that there's nothing to do but just do it, just focus on the task when the task is at hand. No day but today. Ball, all the way, stick & veil later.
It's funny, because changing which state I naturally incline to first, at least for a good portion of my day during the week, it really doesn't feel like a rejection of who I am, you know, as an intuitive thinker/feeler, as a person who does deal with the world internally first, who can be very expressive socially but needs a lot of alone time to recharge. I can bring out the inner Ball when need be, I'm discovering. Perhaps this is a little bit what growing up feels like, learning how to highlight your strengths and forgive and negotiate with your weaknesses, to unlearn your childhood trauma coping mechanisms, to accept when you fail to do so, and pick yourself up for next time. To be at ease with who you really are.
Something Walter White is unwilling to do, forgive. Something Hamlet was too late in doing, acting, at least as far as conventional wisdom goes. "The readiness is all," sure, but readiness is not action. "Nothing is neither good nor bad but thinking makes it so," sure, but no matter how hard you try not to think about death, it's still there. Bad things do still happen in the world, even if you equivocate over whether they're bad or not. Doing, then, taking action, making something concrete in the world exist, that is what is all, that is what allows thinking to do what it does, that is what allows feelings to be had. Stuff has to happen for your rich complex inner life to respond to. Echolocation still needs sound.
My job is pulling the ball, and balls, out of me a bit more, and I am grateful for it. I am beginning to see myself make noise, and I am glad to be moving in this direction.
I've been thinking a lot about thinking recently. And how it frequently can hurt more than help me.
Last night, while watching an episode of Breaking Bad (Season 4, holy shit, we're almost there, 5.2 starts tomorrow!) my girlfriend explained to me the Michael Chekhov strategy of thinking of characters in three ways, as either a stick, a ball, or a veil, and how their shape, the rhythm of their movement, and what that represents energy-wise, could be used to break down and classify different types of characters.
Sticks, for example, are thinkers first. They are rigid to the world, appear impervious, they jut out into space. They can be bendy, sure, even like a twig, with many offshoots, but in general, they do not take in energy smoothly or receive it with any sense of ease, they stop it. They analyze. They process. Walt, in my opinion, is a steel rod, or a fire poker. Gus, a smooth, polished yardstick.
Veils, on the other hand, are any kind of fabric, really. A leather glove. A t-shirt. A piece of chainmail. They take in energy when they are acted upon, they move, they flow, they react. They are feelers first. Mike, in this case, while a toughened, weathered, worn, fisted glove, is a veil. He's an emotional man. He absorbs energy, and I tend to see him process emotionally first, in his eyes, even if it's distant. His mouth gives him away. But he's supple that way, he moves with the world. He endures and survives, as best he can, obviously.
And then there are balls, like Jesse Pinkman, who my girlfriend likened to a hard rubber ball, almost like one you'd use in wall ball or something. It'd really hurt if you were pelted with one. Bouncy, fast, darting off in sharp directions. Always moving, always doing. Acting first, feeling later, thinking later. We all know the ball-types in our lives, always a little unpredictable, always at the ready to take a leap, to do something. I really do envy ball-types, a lot of the time. Their kinetic energy, their ability, it seems, to not worry about what it is they're going to do, their easy sashay over the tiresome build-up and dread to the event of doing whatever it is you're about to do, not fearing the consequences, or really, rather, trusting that you'll be able to handle the consequences of whatever it is you do. They do that later, I imagine. They do things first. I am not a ball. I always need to prepare for what I'm doing.
Just do it, though, has become my motto for the past week or so. I've been getting bogged down at work, where I make sales on the telephone for memberships at an amazing New York theatre, because I have been constantly thinking about, preparing, analyzing, and dreading my performance, or really my prepared-for lack of performance, because I feel great responsibility to do well and constantly worry I won't, especially recently as I've had a couple bad weeks.
Sales, of course, is all about performance, it's all about actually doing, accomplishing something. You need to close, you need to convince, you need to get the payment info, you need to get people to commit. And I've been having trouble doing that recently, as the actual kind of sale I've been making has changed, and I've been wading deeper into true salesman territory, no longer just reupping former members, which is practically a customer service job, but convincing new people to take a leap of faith and commit on the phone to a season of theatre I have to make sure they realize is absolutely going to be amazing.
I've been thinking/writing a lot about telesales & telemarketing, which is figuring largely in my play I'm working on, but I've been having this impulse recently to sort of "save" those stories, or ideas, for my play, and not write about them here. Even though it's a major part of my life, I mean, it's a huge reason why I'm here in New York, it's my personal challenge, to get better at sales, to make more money so I can continue to be financially stable, so I can use my non-sales time to write and eventually to network, to direct, to produce, to do all the things I did in Philly but on my own, actually-self-accepted terms, I mean, the sales is the means by which I can eventually do all that. So it's been a bit all-consuming, and a bit writing-resistent, to obsess over just 25 hours of my week. I keep thinking I have to wait to write about the job, to only write about it in my play (which I maybe write two or three hours once a week, if that.)
But something my boss said, who's essentially the coach in the room, making sure his athletes are on the ball and improving, and most of all, making sales, something he said to me has stuck in my craw this week. It is, of course, a quote immortalized in song-in-everyone's-head by Rent, the notion that there is "no day but today." And it's true.
In telesales, there's always the escape valve of the callback. You get someone on the phone super convinced to go for the sale, but they have to talk to their wife or their husband, they don't have their credit card handy, they're about to go to dinner, about to feed their dog, whatever. When can I call you back? It's frequently a polite way to say no, or a polite way to chicken out, though sometimes, if you've built trust in the right way, you can still get them another time. With the leads I have right now, though, it's a bit of a kiss of death. And my boss has been saying, don't chicken out yourself, don't fall back on the callback, because tomorrow never comes, you need to get them today. Now. Inspire them. Today is when things happen. Don't wait for later. Now's the time to get life-changing theatre. Now's the time to commit. There's no day but today.
This, of course, is coming at a time when I'm painfully aware of mortality, of health issues that have been plaguing people I know. And of course my Uncle Frank, who passed away a short 8 weeks after he was diagnosed with cancer, comes to mind, a lot. There is literally no day but today. You never know when it's going to be your last. Why wait to do something meaningful, something important with your life, until you're ready? You're never going to be ready, and you might not get the chance tomorrow. If it's worth doing, it should be scary. It should be hard. It should be a risk. Just do it. You can feel, react, suffer, breathe, release, later. The readiness isn't all. The doing is all.
And it's a bit inspiring for this INFJ, this introverted, intuitive, feeler, judger, who takes things in by intuition, who deals with things by feeling them through, who imagines and analyzes and interprets every possible way of something happening, frantically trying to do it before it happens, so he can protect himself, protect himself from himself, from his feelings, protect his few close loved ones, protect his friends. As someone who's suffered quite a bit with an inclination towards anxiety, your classic neurotic worrier, I find myself constantly in a state of apprehension, of the pause on the starting block, holding your breath, just waiting for the gun, lost in every dimension of how the water'll feel when you hit it, who'll come out in front first, how I'll blow all my energy in the first ten seconds of the race because I've built up too much nervous energy to not let it all out when the gun finally fires. I am a cycle of oppressively humid summer days and random thunder storm releases. I am a nuclear reactor, trying to maintain myself before meltdown. I've gotten much better at the maintenance as I've gotten older.
It's become increasingly clear to me that a way to deal with my nerves, with my energy, with my imagination, with my will-to-stop-time-and-process-everything-internally-first, is to simple allow myself to not think about it. To trust myself as a functioning human being, and to Just do it, as Nike has imparted it to me. Nike, incidentally, is the Greek goddess of Victory, which I didn't really know until I looked it up today. She's one of the few winged goddesses, who swoops in on the battlefield to shower glory and fame on the victors of war. Victory. To the victor go the spoils. Those who act, those who do, the balls in life. The Just do its. They are victorious. Fortune favours the bold.
Growing up, I made a bit of a self-fulfilling prophesy of an internal myth about myself as someone who usually does not win. My clown, for example, is as mature as a little child, a sad, slow, heart-burst-wide-open, wide-eyed, love-seeking, sad little clown, who is so small in such a large world, wanting desperately to be loved by it, always just quite out of reach. The kid picked last in gym class for dodgeball, who goes "Okay guys. I understand. Thanks anyway, for picking me at all." Self-pitying. Inert. Sweet, but doing nothing to help himself. I think I learned at a young age when I was bullied to just accept their violence, as a way to get them to stop. I made it not fun anymore for them to tease me, I made it just sad, a passive-aggression, for sure, but a survival technique, from my serious-minded, literal, they-must-actually-think-I'm-awful kind of way. I still am such a serious guy, and have trouble being teased. Rarely do I ever imagine Nike to be visiting me. Because I just assume I'll lose, if I am attacked. I am not the victor on the battlefield, I am the corpse in the ditch.
But I'm definitely capable of victory. I do make sales, and I improve every time I've been given adjustments to my approach. I am a very quick learner, and I rarely make the same mistakes twice. As I get older, I am starting to treat myself with much more care, much more love.
The stick-ball-veil approach is also used as a way to analyze how characters behave in the world. When something happens to them, do they think about it, then do something about it, then feel about what's happened? Do they do something, immediately, then think about what they've done, then feel?
Do they react emotionally, then think about that reaction, then do something once they've processed it? What's the time in between those, the qualities of each? Walt uses his iron thought to smash his problem into analyzable pieces, then he quickly strikes at the problem, and then vibrates with the reverberations of what's happened, shuddering, boiling, crackling. Jesse leaps into action, bounding from one moment to another, then pitches and swerves with waves of feeling about what he's just experienced, and then, after a pause and the stillness, things dawn, pieces come together, he thinks.
Stick, ball, veil. We all are all three, it's really just a question of which one manifests first, which one dominates how you deal with the world.
What I've been working on, and it's brought a relief to some of the lower level anxiety and suffering I put on myself daily before work, worrying about how I'm going to do today, is simply to believe that thinking about it really actually, at a certain point, doesn't help, that there's nothing to do but just do it, just focus on the task when the task is at hand. No day but today. Ball, all the way, stick & veil later.
It's funny, because changing which state I naturally incline to first, at least for a good portion of my day during the week, it really doesn't feel like a rejection of who I am, you know, as an intuitive thinker/feeler, as a person who does deal with the world internally first, who can be very expressive socially but needs a lot of alone time to recharge. I can bring out the inner Ball when need be, I'm discovering. Perhaps this is a little bit what growing up feels like, learning how to highlight your strengths and forgive and negotiate with your weaknesses, to unlearn your childhood trauma coping mechanisms, to accept when you fail to do so, and pick yourself up for next time. To be at ease with who you really are.
Something Walter White is unwilling to do, forgive. Something Hamlet was too late in doing, acting, at least as far as conventional wisdom goes. "The readiness is all," sure, but readiness is not action. "Nothing is neither good nor bad but thinking makes it so," sure, but no matter how hard you try not to think about death, it's still there. Bad things do still happen in the world, even if you equivocate over whether they're bad or not. Doing, then, taking action, making something concrete in the world exist, that is what is all, that is what allows thinking to do what it does, that is what allows feelings to be had. Stuff has to happen for your rich complex inner life to respond to. Echolocation still needs sound.
My job is pulling the ball, and balls, out of me a bit more, and I am grateful for it. I am beginning to see myself make noise, and I am glad to be moving in this direction.
Sunday, July 21, 2013
Dick the Shit & Walter White, Shouting to be Heard
*Spoiler alert for those who haven't seen Breaking Bad, especially season 2*
Unavoidably Outdoors
Last weekend I went out to Central Park to watch my friend perform in one of I'm-sure scores of free Shakespeare productions, this one a fairly traditional Richard III. A couple summers ago I assistant directed a production of Much Ado About Nothing in a park in West Philly, so I've observed first hand many of the typical challenges associated with an outdoor production-- mainly that it's actually, unavoidably outdoors.
Nothing in outdoor spaces wants you to pay attention to Shakespeare. It's hot, it's dusty and dirty and grassy and buggy and sunburny and windy, it's noisy and distracting. It's very hard to drop into the language and world of the play as an actor, let alone an audience member, when a toddler is chasing a puppy in the far background of an important love scene, or an ice cream truck drives by cranking its creepy kiddie catch-song right as Beatrice is asking her finally-mutually-exposed lover Benedick to kill his best friend for her.
I was quick to notice the actors who understood how to play the language (and how to hold it in their bodies) in this particular New York City park, which, unlike West Philly, is quite huge and heavily populated. It's right in the middle of a metropolis, where the competition with 400 year old words includes traffic sounds from Central Park West, bicyclists and walkers from a main park path, and loud and probably-a-little-drunk wiffle ball players maybe half a dozen yards away, to name just a few. I was sitting on the ground in the dirt and it was heat-wave hot. I'm usually all about focusing on the 400 year old words. I love them. Especially Richard III. But as much as I sympathized with the red-faced bellowing thespians, my friend notwithstanding, this particular day was not really my day to watch or hear much Shakespeare.
Of course these park conditions get a little bit closer than most indoor productions to how it was when actors were first performing the text; Richard III was likely first performed in 1591. Most theatres had no roofs, most performers had to make themselves understood, had to throw their voices and shape their bodies large, far above the din of the crowd, who behaved much more like the rowdiest of sportsgoers than modern turn-off-your-cell-phones-and-unwrap-your-candies-before-we-dim-the-lights audiences. Doing Shakespeare in the park now becomes an act of reaching back in time, and when it does capture the attention and imagination of an audience, outside, in the world as it is, it can be absolutely magical. It can... when it works; like I said, though, nothing in the park wants it to.
Something I did notice, though, was the very fact of the effort it took; Richard III and many of the other men performing were really shouting to be heard. For this "stage," standing up on rocks and trodding through the grass, to carry any thoughts out to us, most of the men had to shout, had to gesture large, had to take as much space as possible to hold our attention, had to shake off psychological realism and enter the space of epic proportions, life and death, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones. It made me think about the psychological complexity/intimacy of the Richard III of the play, who, assuming (rightly, I suppose) that no one would understand or love him, undertakes these machinations that become a kind of shouting-to-be-heard above the din of the world. This man does horribly destructive things so that he can be seen, so he can be known. These actors, trying to rise above a world that does not want for you to be made intelligible, metatheatrically reenact that existential situation.
Difficult Men Shouting
A stray thought-- men shouting isn't exactly something I think most people want, or encourage, in the non-theatrical world. It's usually pretty trauma/flight-or-fight-triggering, especially for someone who's been through any kind of physical or emotional abuse. Men shouting are usually scary, or at least make everyone go tense. Any guy who's losing his shit tends to, in reality, off the stage, make the situation worse. His audience immediately stops listening, loses the ability to understand, and tends to react to what they see, not hear, which is a threat. His impotence is highlighted, not his strength. On stage or on screen, though, shouting can be highly glorified.
I've been rewatching Breaking Bad in preparation for the final half of season 5, as well as introducing my lady to the show. Something about seeing Walter White lie to and manipulate his wife, especially in Season 2, echoed backwards for me to Richard III. It reminded me that this particular genre of story, of watching a bad man do bad things so bad it's good, has a pretty long track record of success.
Right now, as it's been observed many many places, particularly in the recently-published novel Difficult Men, we're in a kind of golden age of television, and predominantly it's been of stories about anti-hero men who inspire provocation, ambivalence, pity, sympathy, and, ultimately, moral disgust or at least unease, as they fall from whatever high-ish ground they had to doing worse and worse things in more and more desperate ways, in many cases shouting, actually or metaphorically, to be heard or understood. Dick the Shit has a blood brother in Francis Underwood from House of Cards. He has a lot of cousins, too, in Walter White, Don Draper, Gregory House, Tony Soprano, to name a few. We love to watch these guys be bad.
A lot has been made of the rise of these shows and their antiheroes with the twin blows to the American psyche of 9/11 and the Great Recession, and that a shift in our culture and way of life, a toppling of men in positions of unquestioned dominance or perfect control, a loss of faith in our governments and financial institutions, in capitalism itself, all male-dominated enterprises to a disgusting degree, has lead to many people searching for that control, or yearning to see it crumble, in the stories we tell ourselves. Anti-heroes, then, work outside the systems of society, since those are untrustworthy and failing. They know better. They know what to do.
Richard III is all about having control, or the illusions he creates to make it look like, at least to the audience, that he has it. He addresses us constantly for the first part of the play, telling us his plans, how things are or are not going according to them, and how he'll exact his revenge. We don't get the direct address from Walter White or Don Draper, but we do see them jockey constantly for a sense of command of their world.
We tell ourselves the stories we wish we could see in our own lives, so the theory goes.
Everybody Cries
I don't deny that this smacks true to me in my own life. Throughout college, when I was feeling particularly out of control of my own life, especially my own feelings, I was pretty obsessed with House, even though it tended frequently to wobble into bad melodrama or recycle a lot of similar plot devices or even witty quips. But there was something about the cynical Machiavellian Dr. House, who always was one step ahead, who always could see what others couldn't, who always knew how to knock the right billiard balls together to sink 'em one after another, that I deeply envied. By identifying with him, I was almost able to, in this fantasy world, live his life, and, subsequently, feel in control. It felt cool to sometimes think as cynically, "Everybody lies," to remove myself from trusting humanity. Even as Dr. House did worse and worse things, as a drug addict and a hurt, angry person, I felt alongside him, and I saw the world he saw, because it let me be in control of it. I started to wonder if being wounded or broken was a prerequisite to being a genius, that maybe I needed my pain in order to be good at something. I think a lot of depressed people hold onto their depression for that reason, for that feeling of "at least I know this, at least I can control this."
I'm not sure if it was exactly that subway ride home after the play or another time soon after when I heard this, but I remember being on a train and listening to a baby start to cry, and I started thinking about how uncanny it was, to connect the two. The baby is really trying to make herself understood. She needs food or burping or whatever it is, and crying is the only way she knows how to signal to her parents that something's up.
I know I know absolutely nothing about children right now and I'm sure there are plenty of times when there's no reason at all for the crying (sometimes in life we get the same way as adults, I'd argue), but anyway, the thought stuck, and it made me feel like maybe all this shouting to be heard is really a call to be understood, that something that these men need is not being met, but they don't know how to get it. The world is too big, there's too much noise, too much competition, and the only way to get anyone's attention is to cry out.
"A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!"
An Event Horizon
Then I watched a bunch of Breaking Bad, Dick the Shit still in my head.
I saw methed-out-of-his-mind drug dealer Tuko beat the shit out of his lackey in the final episode of season 1 of Breaking Bad/the first moment of season 2. Tuko, here, to me, is a kind of grotesquified signifier of masculine rage. He is, in some ways, the most manly a man could be, if all men were were shows of strength and viciousness. Tuko is high off Walter White's super-meth, and when he's remotely crossed, in any way, he goes apeshit. He kills a man with his fists over an off-handed comment. Walt & Jesse witness this, and Tuko says "You're done," before leaving them. They drive away, terrified, understandably, for their lives.
The first thing Walt when he gets home is turn on the TV. He drones out, doesn't even hear his wife calling for him repeatedly. She has to literally walk up to him to snap him out of it. It's a funny moment in a slew of episodes full of them, because it says a lot about how we use consuming things like TV to drown out our own horrors. Or, at least, I know I'm guilty of that. Friend hurt my feelings? Watch House. Feel justified that humanity is bullshit.
Then Walt proceeds, still in a state of shock, to go over to his pregnant wife in the kitchen who's about to fix him some chicken, and he hugs her from behind, and then starts to kiss her, and then starts to sexually assault her. Skyler goes from laughing off the weird mood he's in, to asking him to knock it off, to getting upset, to essentially shouting him off her, as she smacks her head on the refrigerator. What makes matters weirdly worse is she has some kind of green goop on her face, like for a facial or something, and it adds an extra layer of strange humour/discomfort to an already odd, tense, vague, but also very not vague moment.
The first time I saw this episode I honestly don't remember feeling horrified about Walt. For a show that is all about moral ambiguity and Walt's downfall, this moment for me was a line that felt returnable-from, not the event horizon of morality that Walt seems to constantly toe. I can intellectualize his desperate grab for some kind of sexual/life control after a moment of witnessing sheer out of control terror.
Skyler follows Walt post-assault out to the pool where he wanders off to and tells him, bewildered, exasperated, but sympathetic, too, "I know you're confused and frustrated and terrified" (she's talking about him having cancer) "but you cannot take it out on me." Walt, silently, seems to agree.
In the Trunk
Rewatching it after a few years of knowing some very dear and close women who have had experiences with sexual or physical abuse, I look at the episode, and Walt, differently. The moral ambiguity that I think the show crafts very wisely feels a little thinner here, to me. Not that I think the show should/could've done anything differently, and as we go into the final half of the season I expect Walter White to get every bit of comeuppance for the evils he's done, the bad he's become.
But violence has a rhythm, abuse has repercussions, in the literal sense of the word, reverberations. You can watch it dramatized in Breaking Bad: Tuko beats up his guy, Walt has to process that, has to put that somewhere. Violence breeds violence. Men shouting, needing to be heard. Walt can't tell Skyler the horrors of what he's seen, he couldn't bear the shame at this point in the series, but somehow he still needs to be understood. What pain we could all excise by just saying what needs to be said.
I wrote down notes about this as I was watching these episodes, thinking about this post, and then I kept watching. An episode or two later, Tuko kidnaps Walt, and one of the weirdest, most out-of-character-classic-psychological-gestures happened. Walt is locked in the trunk, dizzy and sick out of his mind, ostensibly because his cancer is getting worse. Walt has a kind of dream/hallucination in the trunk for a few moments before it opens. And what, oh what, could it be he dreams of, in his moment of life-threatening crisis?
A heavenly vision of Skyler, smiling, beaming down on him with love and forgiveness, repeating, again and again, "I understand."
Unavoidably Outdoors
Last weekend I went out to Central Park to watch my friend perform in one of I'm-sure scores of free Shakespeare productions, this one a fairly traditional Richard III. A couple summers ago I assistant directed a production of Much Ado About Nothing in a park in West Philly, so I've observed first hand many of the typical challenges associated with an outdoor production-- mainly that it's actually, unavoidably outdoors.
Nothing in outdoor spaces wants you to pay attention to Shakespeare. It's hot, it's dusty and dirty and grassy and buggy and sunburny and windy, it's noisy and distracting. It's very hard to drop into the language and world of the play as an actor, let alone an audience member, when a toddler is chasing a puppy in the far background of an important love scene, or an ice cream truck drives by cranking its creepy kiddie catch-song right as Beatrice is asking her finally-mutually-exposed lover Benedick to kill his best friend for her.
I was quick to notice the actors who understood how to play the language (and how to hold it in their bodies) in this particular New York City park, which, unlike West Philly, is quite huge and heavily populated. It's right in the middle of a metropolis, where the competition with 400 year old words includes traffic sounds from Central Park West, bicyclists and walkers from a main park path, and loud and probably-a-little-drunk wiffle ball players maybe half a dozen yards away, to name just a few. I was sitting on the ground in the dirt and it was heat-wave hot. I'm usually all about focusing on the 400 year old words. I love them. Especially Richard III. But as much as I sympathized with the red-faced bellowing thespians, my friend notwithstanding, this particular day was not really my day to watch or hear much Shakespeare.
Of course these park conditions get a little bit closer than most indoor productions to how it was when actors were first performing the text; Richard III was likely first performed in 1591. Most theatres had no roofs, most performers had to make themselves understood, had to throw their voices and shape their bodies large, far above the din of the crowd, who behaved much more like the rowdiest of sportsgoers than modern turn-off-your-cell-phones-and-unwrap-your-candies-before-we-dim-the-lights audiences. Doing Shakespeare in the park now becomes an act of reaching back in time, and when it does capture the attention and imagination of an audience, outside, in the world as it is, it can be absolutely magical. It can... when it works; like I said, though, nothing in the park wants it to.
Something I did notice, though, was the very fact of the effort it took; Richard III and many of the other men performing were really shouting to be heard. For this "stage," standing up on rocks and trodding through the grass, to carry any thoughts out to us, most of the men had to shout, had to gesture large, had to take as much space as possible to hold our attention, had to shake off psychological realism and enter the space of epic proportions, life and death, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones. It made me think about the psychological complexity/intimacy of the Richard III of the play, who, assuming (rightly, I suppose) that no one would understand or love him, undertakes these machinations that become a kind of shouting-to-be-heard above the din of the world. This man does horribly destructive things so that he can be seen, so he can be known. These actors, trying to rise above a world that does not want for you to be made intelligible, metatheatrically reenact that existential situation.
Difficult Men Shouting
A stray thought-- men shouting isn't exactly something I think most people want, or encourage, in the non-theatrical world. It's usually pretty trauma/flight-or-fight-triggering, especially for someone who's been through any kind of physical or emotional abuse. Men shouting are usually scary, or at least make everyone go tense. Any guy who's losing his shit tends to, in reality, off the stage, make the situation worse. His audience immediately stops listening, loses the ability to understand, and tends to react to what they see, not hear, which is a threat. His impotence is highlighted, not his strength. On stage or on screen, though, shouting can be highly glorified.
I've been rewatching Breaking Bad in preparation for the final half of season 5, as well as introducing my lady to the show. Something about seeing Walter White lie to and manipulate his wife, especially in Season 2, echoed backwards for me to Richard III. It reminded me that this particular genre of story, of watching a bad man do bad things so bad it's good, has a pretty long track record of success.
Right now, as it's been observed many many places, particularly in the recently-published novel Difficult Men, we're in a kind of golden age of television, and predominantly it's been of stories about anti-hero men who inspire provocation, ambivalence, pity, sympathy, and, ultimately, moral disgust or at least unease, as they fall from whatever high-ish ground they had to doing worse and worse things in more and more desperate ways, in many cases shouting, actually or metaphorically, to be heard or understood. Dick the Shit has a blood brother in Francis Underwood from House of Cards. He has a lot of cousins, too, in Walter White, Don Draper, Gregory House, Tony Soprano, to name a few. We love to watch these guys be bad.
A lot has been made of the rise of these shows and their antiheroes with the twin blows to the American psyche of 9/11 and the Great Recession, and that a shift in our culture and way of life, a toppling of men in positions of unquestioned dominance or perfect control, a loss of faith in our governments and financial institutions, in capitalism itself, all male-dominated enterprises to a disgusting degree, has lead to many people searching for that control, or yearning to see it crumble, in the stories we tell ourselves. Anti-heroes, then, work outside the systems of society, since those are untrustworthy and failing. They know better. They know what to do.
Richard III is all about having control, or the illusions he creates to make it look like, at least to the audience, that he has it. He addresses us constantly for the first part of the play, telling us his plans, how things are or are not going according to them, and how he'll exact his revenge. We don't get the direct address from Walter White or Don Draper, but we do see them jockey constantly for a sense of command of their world.
We tell ourselves the stories we wish we could see in our own lives, so the theory goes.
Everybody Cries
I don't deny that this smacks true to me in my own life. Throughout college, when I was feeling particularly out of control of my own life, especially my own feelings, I was pretty obsessed with House, even though it tended frequently to wobble into bad melodrama or recycle a lot of similar plot devices or even witty quips. But there was something about the cynical Machiavellian Dr. House, who always was one step ahead, who always could see what others couldn't, who always knew how to knock the right billiard balls together to sink 'em one after another, that I deeply envied. By identifying with him, I was almost able to, in this fantasy world, live his life, and, subsequently, feel in control. It felt cool to sometimes think as cynically, "Everybody lies," to remove myself from trusting humanity. Even as Dr. House did worse and worse things, as a drug addict and a hurt, angry person, I felt alongside him, and I saw the world he saw, because it let me be in control of it. I started to wonder if being wounded or broken was a prerequisite to being a genius, that maybe I needed my pain in order to be good at something. I think a lot of depressed people hold onto their depression for that reason, for that feeling of "at least I know this, at least I can control this."
I'm not sure if it was exactly that subway ride home after the play or another time soon after when I heard this, but I remember being on a train and listening to a baby start to cry, and I started thinking about how uncanny it was, to connect the two. The baby is really trying to make herself understood. She needs food or burping or whatever it is, and crying is the only way she knows how to signal to her parents that something's up.
I know I know absolutely nothing about children right now and I'm sure there are plenty of times when there's no reason at all for the crying (sometimes in life we get the same way as adults, I'd argue), but anyway, the thought stuck, and it made me feel like maybe all this shouting to be heard is really a call to be understood, that something that these men need is not being met, but they don't know how to get it. The world is too big, there's too much noise, too much competition, and the only way to get anyone's attention is to cry out.
"A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!"
An Event Horizon
Then I watched a bunch of Breaking Bad, Dick the Shit still in my head.
I saw methed-out-of-his-mind drug dealer Tuko beat the shit out of his lackey in the final episode of season 1 of Breaking Bad/the first moment of season 2. Tuko, here, to me, is a kind of grotesquified signifier of masculine rage. He is, in some ways, the most manly a man could be, if all men were were shows of strength and viciousness. Tuko is high off Walter White's super-meth, and when he's remotely crossed, in any way, he goes apeshit. He kills a man with his fists over an off-handed comment. Walt & Jesse witness this, and Tuko says "You're done," before leaving them. They drive away, terrified, understandably, for their lives.
The first thing Walt when he gets home is turn on the TV. He drones out, doesn't even hear his wife calling for him repeatedly. She has to literally walk up to him to snap him out of it. It's a funny moment in a slew of episodes full of them, because it says a lot about how we use consuming things like TV to drown out our own horrors. Or, at least, I know I'm guilty of that. Friend hurt my feelings? Watch House. Feel justified that humanity is bullshit.
Then Walt proceeds, still in a state of shock, to go over to his pregnant wife in the kitchen who's about to fix him some chicken, and he hugs her from behind, and then starts to kiss her, and then starts to sexually assault her. Skyler goes from laughing off the weird mood he's in, to asking him to knock it off, to getting upset, to essentially shouting him off her, as she smacks her head on the refrigerator. What makes matters weirdly worse is she has some kind of green goop on her face, like for a facial or something, and it adds an extra layer of strange humour/discomfort to an already odd, tense, vague, but also very not vague moment.
The first time I saw this episode I honestly don't remember feeling horrified about Walt. For a show that is all about moral ambiguity and Walt's downfall, this moment for me was a line that felt returnable-from, not the event horizon of morality that Walt seems to constantly toe. I can intellectualize his desperate grab for some kind of sexual/life control after a moment of witnessing sheer out of control terror.
Skyler follows Walt post-assault out to the pool where he wanders off to and tells him, bewildered, exasperated, but sympathetic, too, "I know you're confused and frustrated and terrified" (she's talking about him having cancer) "but you cannot take it out on me." Walt, silently, seems to agree.
In the Trunk
Rewatching it after a few years of knowing some very dear and close women who have had experiences with sexual or physical abuse, I look at the episode, and Walt, differently. The moral ambiguity that I think the show crafts very wisely feels a little thinner here, to me. Not that I think the show should/could've done anything differently, and as we go into the final half of the season I expect Walter White to get every bit of comeuppance for the evils he's done, the bad he's become.
But violence has a rhythm, abuse has repercussions, in the literal sense of the word, reverberations. You can watch it dramatized in Breaking Bad: Tuko beats up his guy, Walt has to process that, has to put that somewhere. Violence breeds violence. Men shouting, needing to be heard. Walt can't tell Skyler the horrors of what he's seen, he couldn't bear the shame at this point in the series, but somehow he still needs to be understood. What pain we could all excise by just saying what needs to be said.
I wrote down notes about this as I was watching these episodes, thinking about this post, and then I kept watching. An episode or two later, Tuko kidnaps Walt, and one of the weirdest, most out-of-character-classic-psychological-gestures happened. Walt is locked in the trunk, dizzy and sick out of his mind, ostensibly because his cancer is getting worse. Walt has a kind of dream/hallucination in the trunk for a few moments before it opens. And what, oh what, could it be he dreams of, in his moment of life-threatening crisis?
A heavenly vision of Skyler, smiling, beaming down on him with love and forgiveness, repeating, again and again, "I understand."
Saturday, July 6, 2013
Homo homini lupus?
It's never lupus, Dr. House always says.
I first discovered the phrase used for my title "Man is a wolf to man" by watching this video about monkeys and other animals and their senses of fairness, found via the incredible Pig Iron Theatre Co.'s 2013 production of Pay Up tumblr. It jives very much with this hour and forty five minute long talk I listened to before the holiday by Richard Wolffe called Capitalism Hits the Fan, which I'll link via New Paradise Laboratories' FRAME post, where I found it. I might've been involved with getting it there, and I'm sure I found that link via a much-more-informed-than-me Facebook friend or Tumblr follower. I don't remember exactly how, but you can see it on the hyperlink above.
I think I'm sourcing these materials very much out of a sense of fairness to the organizations that are drawing my eye to inspiring content. As someone who's in sales, and very much wants to learn not only how to live an awake, aware life about the consumer choices I make, I also want to locate myself in a net of interdependent thinkers and coagulaters of information that I rely on to make whatever kinds of conclusions I make. Sourcing material becomes a kind of currency, in a way, a good faith to give you all the chance to see what it is I've seen, and make your own conclusions on it.
I should also note that I'm interested in practicing a fair amount of transparency in terms of my process. Not quite sure where it's heading. It's having an impact on my play, which I'm happy to say has actually started to want itself to be written, and so I'm taking the opportunity to lean into as much candor as possible, fully aware that that is still a performance, and me talking about it, and talking about talking about it, is still angling myself to be seen in a certain light, perhaps to cast shadow against things I don't want to be seen, or talked about. Not sure, at this juncture, if I can offer much in terms of clarity or coherent thoughts on that. I guess we hide what we hide, whether we want to or not. I'm starting to recognize in myself a certain lack of interest or awareness in really hiding a lot, though. I am stronger when I'm vulnerable, which I learned from Pig Iron's Summer Session clown training. It might be part of why I'm returning to this blog project, and letting my voice hang out there in the wind.
One free radical thought before I get going, though. I've made a timer for myself today. I'm seeing World War Z at 8:10pm tonight, likely solo, and I have a feeling the whole issue of man being wolf to man may come up. So this blog post is sort of like a repository for thoughts swirling in my head prior to seeing it. I've not read the book the movie is based on, though likely will after seeing the movie. I'm excited to be getting back more into reading.
But anyway, the point, about transparency and fairness, is that the assumption the TED talk on animal instances of fairness & caring for the wellbeing of others, working together, altruism, is that animals DON'T do that, that men are at their most bestial when they only seek out for themselves, and at their most human when they help others. Acknowledge others. Me wanting to share where I'm getting my thoughts from, so you can watch/read them and can make your own decisions, is a way of gesturing to you that I think you're as smart as I am (or, at least, I hope you feel that way) and I care about you not perceiving me as claiming this knowledge for myself, as coming from myself, somehow making my status above yours, intellectually. I hope the knowledge helps, in whatever way it can, because I do think a lot of the knowledge is helpful.
To surmise and distill hopefully not too reductively the argument of the TED animal talk, animals aren't all selfish bastards. Capuchin monkeys don't like it when one gets fed grapes (a superior food) and one cucumbers. They have an innate sense of fairness, or at least of when things are NOT fair. Chimps work together to bring food in for the both of them. Elephants, too. And while humans are obviously not animals, in many ways, our caring about fairness, about equality, justice, is perhaps more engrained and emotional, and less rational and idealistic, than we thought.
The TED animal talk, an anti-venom to the notion that man is a wolf to man, though, is being counteracted in my mind by the Capitalism Hits the Fan video, which tore down some very important ignorances I've had as to what the state of the United States and its economy is in. Definitely worth the full hour and forty five minute listen/watch, especially if you care about the Great Recession and the plight of the American worker beyond the political rhetoric. Richard Wolffe has an annoying voice, I will admit that, but he clarifies for me a lot I only had a hazy understanding of, about the US' history in terms of work-force and wages and the flawed nature of capitalism.
Basically, until the 1970's, America had been in a hundred and fifty year growth period in terms of both worker productivity and worker wages. Working Americans enjoyed a rising standard of living as they also became more productive at their work. It's an entirely unique situation in the history of the world, and it makes a lot of sense as to why we have the sense of American exceptionalism that we have. Before the 70's, you truly could come to the States and pull yourself up by your bootstraps, at least in terms of being paid better wages as you worked. China, too, had a revolution in the 70's, though, and with the new power of American distribution brought by the advent of Walmart, it became a cheap-goods producing powerhouse. I'm not exactly clear why this happened, but America stopped paying its workers more for more productivity, they instead were paid the same, even as Americans worked more and more hours, they were essentially paid the same wages, they didn't rise with costs of living, etc. etc. America became a huge debtor nation, because capitalist corporations figured out how to take the money they would've spent paying people more, and sold it to them as credit, which they could earn huge amounts of interest on, further bankrupting and burdening Americans with more work to do, for more hours, for no more pay.
A key moment for me, emotionally, was when Wolffe talked about the American worker having this kind of private reaction to the hard times, of blaming himself. He didn't get into the right school or get the right job, he isn't working hard enough. It really struck me how rigged the game was, getting us as a population to become overstressed, overworked, using the one thing that was sure to soothe us when we weren't working: by buying stuff, cheap crappy stuff, sold to us by the people who own our debt. For the first time, I felt like maybe my own senses of being overworked, underpaid, in over my head in debt, and just now starting to crawl an infinitesimal bit out of it, weren't my own fault, like I'd truly been lead to believe. Maybe my enjoyment of Apple products and Starbucks coffee and Hollywood movies and Netflix and the internet weren't solely because I'm a lazy, worthless consumer, wasting away at jobs that don't use my skill sets and underpay me for my time *(Definitely way less the case now, and I have to say, this doesn't apply to teaching when I was doing that, because I absolutely did not have that kind of soul-draining experience then-- rather a soul-enriching one.), that my values of hard work and excelling at everything that have been engrained in me since birth, are actually a response to a growing desperation in the system of capitalism itself. And we're living in a time where all that shit is hitting the fan, and maybe it's not MY fault, but ALL our faults, and actually more accurately mostly the decisions of the top tenth of a tenth of a percent of us, who profit most from the way everything is as it currently is.
These thoughts are very preliminarily sketched. I mostly took away that emotional relief, that I wasn't the only one feeling like I was overstressed and underpaid (though, again, now I'm doing much better, magically, in a very unique situation for someone my age in the field I'm in), and how surprised I am that I'm not surprised our system is actually rigged to do that. I thought it was just a theatre person reality, that the capitalist realities of play producing meant that our idealism and passion and love for what we do was going to take the place of actual payment and ability to focus on ONLY doing what we want to do, that we NEED a focus-splitting day job because theatre is about art, but needs commerce to survive, so you will not be paid much and will need to focus-split, but you'll still get to be a part of ART, which needs all of you to be done the best it can. So feel bad about not doing it your best, while you're scraping away at your crappy day job. But don't complain, because that's weak, and your fault for not being hard-working enough.
I actually do believe very strongly in the value of hard work, and I can take long hours and little resources like the rest of us. And I'm sure there are plenty of times where I am definitely being lazy and defeatist, instead of hunkering down and powering through. Not to diminish my human weaknesses at all. But maybe, just maybe, the story is a little more complicated than that, and I'm being set up, like we all are, to fail a little bit more than we would if we were given the right management, the right incentives to work, the right kind of job that gave us the right sense of ourselves. Maybe the mission is as important as the pay day, when you get down to it. Maybe believers make better workers.
There's a lot more to unpack in all this, but that's surmiseably what has been going on in my head. We've got an animal sense of fairness built in, actually, we aren't all wolves to each other, but we're also not living in the pack we thought we were living in, and we're very slow to realize just how rigged the game now is. I don't think it's the America we want to have, or want our children to be in. But the big question, of course, is how to change it, when it's keeping us just sated or distracted enough to keep itself alive. For now.
There's obviously much more to say about everything, but that's it for me for right now.
I first discovered the phrase used for my title "Man is a wolf to man" by watching this video about monkeys and other animals and their senses of fairness, found via the incredible Pig Iron Theatre Co.'s 2013 production of Pay Up tumblr. It jives very much with this hour and forty five minute long talk I listened to before the holiday by Richard Wolffe called Capitalism Hits the Fan, which I'll link via New Paradise Laboratories' FRAME post, where I found it. I might've been involved with getting it there, and I'm sure I found that link via a much-more-informed-than-me Facebook friend or Tumblr follower. I don't remember exactly how, but you can see it on the hyperlink above.
I think I'm sourcing these materials very much out of a sense of fairness to the organizations that are drawing my eye to inspiring content. As someone who's in sales, and very much wants to learn not only how to live an awake, aware life about the consumer choices I make, I also want to locate myself in a net of interdependent thinkers and coagulaters of information that I rely on to make whatever kinds of conclusions I make. Sourcing material becomes a kind of currency, in a way, a good faith to give you all the chance to see what it is I've seen, and make your own conclusions on it.
I should also note that I'm interested in practicing a fair amount of transparency in terms of my process. Not quite sure where it's heading. It's having an impact on my play, which I'm happy to say has actually started to want itself to be written, and so I'm taking the opportunity to lean into as much candor as possible, fully aware that that is still a performance, and me talking about it, and talking about talking about it, is still angling myself to be seen in a certain light, perhaps to cast shadow against things I don't want to be seen, or talked about. Not sure, at this juncture, if I can offer much in terms of clarity or coherent thoughts on that. I guess we hide what we hide, whether we want to or not. I'm starting to recognize in myself a certain lack of interest or awareness in really hiding a lot, though. I am stronger when I'm vulnerable, which I learned from Pig Iron's Summer Session clown training. It might be part of why I'm returning to this blog project, and letting my voice hang out there in the wind.
One free radical thought before I get going, though. I've made a timer for myself today. I'm seeing World War Z at 8:10pm tonight, likely solo, and I have a feeling the whole issue of man being wolf to man may come up. So this blog post is sort of like a repository for thoughts swirling in my head prior to seeing it. I've not read the book the movie is based on, though likely will after seeing the movie. I'm excited to be getting back more into reading.
But anyway, the point, about transparency and fairness, is that the assumption the TED talk on animal instances of fairness & caring for the wellbeing of others, working together, altruism, is that animals DON'T do that, that men are at their most bestial when they only seek out for themselves, and at their most human when they help others. Acknowledge others. Me wanting to share where I'm getting my thoughts from, so you can watch/read them and can make your own decisions, is a way of gesturing to you that I think you're as smart as I am (or, at least, I hope you feel that way) and I care about you not perceiving me as claiming this knowledge for myself, as coming from myself, somehow making my status above yours, intellectually. I hope the knowledge helps, in whatever way it can, because I do think a lot of the knowledge is helpful.
To surmise and distill hopefully not too reductively the argument of the TED animal talk, animals aren't all selfish bastards. Capuchin monkeys don't like it when one gets fed grapes (a superior food) and one cucumbers. They have an innate sense of fairness, or at least of when things are NOT fair. Chimps work together to bring food in for the both of them. Elephants, too. And while humans are obviously not animals, in many ways, our caring about fairness, about equality, justice, is perhaps more engrained and emotional, and less rational and idealistic, than we thought.
The TED animal talk, an anti-venom to the notion that man is a wolf to man, though, is being counteracted in my mind by the Capitalism Hits the Fan video, which tore down some very important ignorances I've had as to what the state of the United States and its economy is in. Definitely worth the full hour and forty five minute listen/watch, especially if you care about the Great Recession and the plight of the American worker beyond the political rhetoric. Richard Wolffe has an annoying voice, I will admit that, but he clarifies for me a lot I only had a hazy understanding of, about the US' history in terms of work-force and wages and the flawed nature of capitalism.
Basically, until the 1970's, America had been in a hundred and fifty year growth period in terms of both worker productivity and worker wages. Working Americans enjoyed a rising standard of living as they also became more productive at their work. It's an entirely unique situation in the history of the world, and it makes a lot of sense as to why we have the sense of American exceptionalism that we have. Before the 70's, you truly could come to the States and pull yourself up by your bootstraps, at least in terms of being paid better wages as you worked. China, too, had a revolution in the 70's, though, and with the new power of American distribution brought by the advent of Walmart, it became a cheap-goods producing powerhouse. I'm not exactly clear why this happened, but America stopped paying its workers more for more productivity, they instead were paid the same, even as Americans worked more and more hours, they were essentially paid the same wages, they didn't rise with costs of living, etc. etc. America became a huge debtor nation, because capitalist corporations figured out how to take the money they would've spent paying people more, and sold it to them as credit, which they could earn huge amounts of interest on, further bankrupting and burdening Americans with more work to do, for more hours, for no more pay.
A key moment for me, emotionally, was when Wolffe talked about the American worker having this kind of private reaction to the hard times, of blaming himself. He didn't get into the right school or get the right job, he isn't working hard enough. It really struck me how rigged the game was, getting us as a population to become overstressed, overworked, using the one thing that was sure to soothe us when we weren't working: by buying stuff, cheap crappy stuff, sold to us by the people who own our debt. For the first time, I felt like maybe my own senses of being overworked, underpaid, in over my head in debt, and just now starting to crawl an infinitesimal bit out of it, weren't my own fault, like I'd truly been lead to believe. Maybe my enjoyment of Apple products and Starbucks coffee and Hollywood movies and Netflix and the internet weren't solely because I'm a lazy, worthless consumer, wasting away at jobs that don't use my skill sets and underpay me for my time *(Definitely way less the case now, and I have to say, this doesn't apply to teaching when I was doing that, because I absolutely did not have that kind of soul-draining experience then-- rather a soul-enriching one.), that my values of hard work and excelling at everything that have been engrained in me since birth, are actually a response to a growing desperation in the system of capitalism itself. And we're living in a time where all that shit is hitting the fan, and maybe it's not MY fault, but ALL our faults, and actually more accurately mostly the decisions of the top tenth of a tenth of a percent of us, who profit most from the way everything is as it currently is.
These thoughts are very preliminarily sketched. I mostly took away that emotional relief, that I wasn't the only one feeling like I was overstressed and underpaid (though, again, now I'm doing much better, magically, in a very unique situation for someone my age in the field I'm in), and how surprised I am that I'm not surprised our system is actually rigged to do that. I thought it was just a theatre person reality, that the capitalist realities of play producing meant that our idealism and passion and love for what we do was going to take the place of actual payment and ability to focus on ONLY doing what we want to do, that we NEED a focus-splitting day job because theatre is about art, but needs commerce to survive, so you will not be paid much and will need to focus-split, but you'll still get to be a part of ART, which needs all of you to be done the best it can. So feel bad about not doing it your best, while you're scraping away at your crappy day job. But don't complain, because that's weak, and your fault for not being hard-working enough.
I actually do believe very strongly in the value of hard work, and I can take long hours and little resources like the rest of us. And I'm sure there are plenty of times where I am definitely being lazy and defeatist, instead of hunkering down and powering through. Not to diminish my human weaknesses at all. But maybe, just maybe, the story is a little more complicated than that, and I'm being set up, like we all are, to fail a little bit more than we would if we were given the right management, the right incentives to work, the right kind of job that gave us the right sense of ourselves. Maybe the mission is as important as the pay day, when you get down to it. Maybe believers make better workers.
There's a lot more to unpack in all this, but that's surmiseably what has been going on in my head. We've got an animal sense of fairness built in, actually, we aren't all wolves to each other, but we're also not living in the pack we thought we were living in, and we're very slow to realize just how rigged the game now is. I don't think it's the America we want to have, or want our children to be in. But the big question, of course, is how to change it, when it's keeping us just sated or distracted enough to keep itself alive. For now.
There's obviously much more to say about everything, but that's it for me for right now.
Sunday, June 30, 2013
A Move to New York, or, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story
Hey.
It's been a while.
I'm at this again, a little bit.
They say when you want to start a diet you should never tell people, because then your brain will experience the reward of getting the approval of others for dieting, which'll short circuit your motivation to actually diet and lose weight. As long as you feel the short-term reward of approval, you'll feel, subconsciously or consciously, that you've already won, which, tragically, shoots you in the foot in terms of actually winning. You actually lose, which reinforces the negative thinking that might've gotten you in that state-of-needing-to-diet-which-you-'re-just-now-climbing-back-out-of-by-deciding-to-diet, and you're back at the beginning of the whole torrid self-hate affair.
So, basically, the whole counting chickens before they hatch thing bears phenomenal, actual subconscious weight.
Beware.
//
It's a rare gift to notice when you're being changed.
Not a gift as in a talent, like, "look at me I've noticed I've changed," but more that it actually is a literal gift, a present, to be present enough to notice your quality of daily life is different, and in my case, is graciously improved.
From over here, now, New York Mark can look back at Philly Mark, and even further back at Walla Walla Mark, and see just how far he's come. In terms of my day-to-day wellness, it's quite far, though there's a lot still to do.
As there always is, I imagine.
So let me start my saying that there were basically two powerful and interconnected forces that allowed me to recognize that I was no longer over there in the worse place,
that let me see where I'd been, and where I am.
The first, of course, is the physical move to New York.
And that move came about very suddenly, though I'd been looking to move and preparing to move for a while, working like a dog really to be able to afford it, but I didn't really need to move until the end of June, when I was done at my Philly apartment. Jess, my girlfriend, was moving at the beginning of June, and I was going to help her, but if we needed to be in two separate cities for one more month, that would be okay.
Instead, on an off-chance job app, a response to a Playbill ad for a telesales assistant manager, on a day after I was already in New York watching Jess act in a reading of a friend's new play, I went and interviewed before jumping on a bus back to NYC after what felt like my 15th rejection just the week before.
I was in a state of supreme "fuck it"ness.
I had built up the last three big interviews I'd gotten, which were all directly involving artistic fields I aspired to be in, directing, literary, dramaturgy, in a way that I now see as incredibly insecure. I went in to these interviews quivering, terribly desperate to be approved.
I should throw a quick bone to those of us (all of us, I'd say, at some point) who have the need to be approved. It is a deeply human thing, especially when you're younger. Especially when you don't quite have the "fuck it" sense you might need to achieve, in spite of people not caring, or not connecting, or just not hearing what you need them to hear, or care, or connect to. And I will say that giving your approval and receiving someone else's approval is a wonderfully loving thing to do, and when you can, I implore you to do it. We're all quite busy privately tearing ourselves down, and building each other up is perhaps more important than we're comfortable with culturally.
Anyway, for some reason, I banished the usually overactive part of my personality that doubts everything I do, and I interviewed, and I was hired on the spot. I sold him, my boss would later say. It was an incredible and accidental event of self-confidence, but it triggered my boss holding me to that sense of self-confidence, which, after a painful first week of work, I began to learn I could summon quite regularly, and I've been improving on that point ever since.
Moving to New York and working in sales, in this particular way of doing sales which is both more effective and more difficult than the way I was doing sales in Philly, has woken up a part of me I'd desperately needed to wake up -- the desire to work, and work hard. I'd gotten shamefully lazy, focusing my energy only on my relationship, and spending most of the time I was apart from her bored and unmotivated at work, or anxious and depressed over not creating anything, but doing very little to create.
The second thing I did to kickstart this internal shift was actually just read a book. A biography of David Foster Wallace called Every Love Story is a Ghost Story by D.T. Max. I picked it up as a hunch, following finishing David Foster Wallace's The Pale King, which I read a few months after finishing Infinite Jest after an actor friend of mine in Theresa Rebeck's Seminar told me Wallace put himself metafictionally in Pale King. Wallace never finished Pale King, he killed himself after working on it for ten years, and still being nowhere close to finishing it. He arranged what he had of the novel very carefully in his garage, chapters in neat piles, disks and computer harddrives beside them, along with notebooks of notes, etc., before hanging himself on the back porch. He did this only maybe 2-3 years after his incredible 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address, fan-titled This Is Water, which is still a huge source of inspiration for me whenever I'm succumbing to the negative thought-spirals of depression. Wallace had gone off his medication, and never quite found his balance again. He fought with depression and addiction his whole life. All of his works and his life story speak so deeply and keenly to me, and I think he has a lot to say on stage, which I want to craft for him.
The description of his college years, particularly where he first began to really struggle with his anxiety and depression, put me back into my own college days, in a very personal, horrible way. Being in a much healthier, happier place now, it was almost overwhelming to recognize how tortured I'd been, all four years really, not just senior year, and I only was now able to do that by hearing about how someone else handled his own disease in his own way.
To be completely clear and fair, I was never suicidal, and while I had some dark moments, I didn't suffer to the same degree that he did. For anyone who reads the book, I am definitely identifying by proxy, not by specifically what he went through. I'm not claiming I'm a genius writer, either.
But recognizing the pain I was in was a function of me not being in that pain now. Recognizing now how bad it had been then was only possible because I wasn't there anymore. Perhaps I am quite a bit happier and healthier than I realized.
But the major thing the book did for me was reawaken an awareness of a part of my identity I think I've long kept hidden, embarrassed, insecure, unsure of how to claim, desperate to discount. I tell people all the time that I'm a director, a performer, a self-producer, a theatre-maker, and then I sneak in at the end a little bit that I'm a writer. Like, you know, when it calls for it. And even then I'm not terribly assertive about it.
The book reminded me that actually, fully, truly, I am a writer. I love to write, I love to create worlds, I love to create language, I love to be in charge of crafting moments, and while I've had a love for directing that grew out of college (I recently reminded my college roommate Graham about the moment we were walking home from a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and I was so furious at the time about how the production was done, on a dramaturgical level, and he, frustrated with my fury, in a moment of now-self-historic import, asked "WHY do you CARE so much?!?!" and I answered before thinking "I JUST DO!!!") I have also had a love of writing, a love I only furtively engaged with in college, never to the serious extent of study I needed to in order to really grow.
So now that I'm in a new city, with a whole new schedule that affords me quite a bit of down time, at least for now, and I have a chance to rebrand myself a bit, I'm going to take back a part of myself I've long felt too insecure to hold onto. I regret not thinking of myself more actively, more fully, a WRITER while I was in Philly, of course because I did actually write and create. And many of my friends might be looking at me like WHY IS THIS A SURPRISE TO YOU? OF COURSE YOU WRITE but I have to say, I honestly just never allowed myself to admit it fully. Those of you who do, I love and respect you. And I acknowledge I've been more than a little silly.
So those are some of the things that've been going on within me recently, that I'm just now able to process, a little bit. I've internally made some decisions to help me explore, expand, and work fucking hard, on this new acceptance of what I truly want to do, as a creator. But like the whole admitting-the-diet-to-get-the-approval thing, I'm going to keep the specifics to myself. I do want to share my happiness over this self-realization, though, and I welcome your well-wishes as I extend my own to you. I hope you are peeking over the edge at something new within yourself, too.
It's been a while.
I'm at this again, a little bit.
They say when you want to start a diet you should never tell people, because then your brain will experience the reward of getting the approval of others for dieting, which'll short circuit your motivation to actually diet and lose weight. As long as you feel the short-term reward of approval, you'll feel, subconsciously or consciously, that you've already won, which, tragically, shoots you in the foot in terms of actually winning. You actually lose, which reinforces the negative thinking that might've gotten you in that state-of-needing-to-diet-which-you-'re-just-now-climbing-back-out-of-by-deciding-to-diet, and you're back at the beginning of the whole torrid self-hate affair.
So, basically, the whole counting chickens before they hatch thing bears phenomenal, actual subconscious weight.
Beware.
//
It's a rare gift to notice when you're being changed.
Not a gift as in a talent, like, "look at me I've noticed I've changed," but more that it actually is a literal gift, a present, to be present enough to notice your quality of daily life is different, and in my case, is graciously improved.
From over here, now, New York Mark can look back at Philly Mark, and even further back at Walla Walla Mark, and see just how far he's come. In terms of my day-to-day wellness, it's quite far, though there's a lot still to do.
As there always is, I imagine.
So let me start my saying that there were basically two powerful and interconnected forces that allowed me to recognize that I was no longer over there in the worse place,
that let me see where I'd been, and where I am.
The first, of course, is the physical move to New York.
And that move came about very suddenly, though I'd been looking to move and preparing to move for a while, working like a dog really to be able to afford it, but I didn't really need to move until the end of June, when I was done at my Philly apartment. Jess, my girlfriend, was moving at the beginning of June, and I was going to help her, but if we needed to be in two separate cities for one more month, that would be okay.
Instead, on an off-chance job app, a response to a Playbill ad for a telesales assistant manager, on a day after I was already in New York watching Jess act in a reading of a friend's new play, I went and interviewed before jumping on a bus back to NYC after what felt like my 15th rejection just the week before.
I was in a state of supreme "fuck it"ness.
I had built up the last three big interviews I'd gotten, which were all directly involving artistic fields I aspired to be in, directing, literary, dramaturgy, in a way that I now see as incredibly insecure. I went in to these interviews quivering, terribly desperate to be approved.
I should throw a quick bone to those of us (all of us, I'd say, at some point) who have the need to be approved. It is a deeply human thing, especially when you're younger. Especially when you don't quite have the "fuck it" sense you might need to achieve, in spite of people not caring, or not connecting, or just not hearing what you need them to hear, or care, or connect to. And I will say that giving your approval and receiving someone else's approval is a wonderfully loving thing to do, and when you can, I implore you to do it. We're all quite busy privately tearing ourselves down, and building each other up is perhaps more important than we're comfortable with culturally.
Anyway, for some reason, I banished the usually overactive part of my personality that doubts everything I do, and I interviewed, and I was hired on the spot. I sold him, my boss would later say. It was an incredible and accidental event of self-confidence, but it triggered my boss holding me to that sense of self-confidence, which, after a painful first week of work, I began to learn I could summon quite regularly, and I've been improving on that point ever since.
Moving to New York and working in sales, in this particular way of doing sales which is both more effective and more difficult than the way I was doing sales in Philly, has woken up a part of me I'd desperately needed to wake up -- the desire to work, and work hard. I'd gotten shamefully lazy, focusing my energy only on my relationship, and spending most of the time I was apart from her bored and unmotivated at work, or anxious and depressed over not creating anything, but doing very little to create.
The second thing I did to kickstart this internal shift was actually just read a book. A biography of David Foster Wallace called Every Love Story is a Ghost Story by D.T. Max. I picked it up as a hunch, following finishing David Foster Wallace's The Pale King, which I read a few months after finishing Infinite Jest after an actor friend of mine in Theresa Rebeck's Seminar told me Wallace put himself metafictionally in Pale King. Wallace never finished Pale King, he killed himself after working on it for ten years, and still being nowhere close to finishing it. He arranged what he had of the novel very carefully in his garage, chapters in neat piles, disks and computer harddrives beside them, along with notebooks of notes, etc., before hanging himself on the back porch. He did this only maybe 2-3 years after his incredible 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address, fan-titled This Is Water, which is still a huge source of inspiration for me whenever I'm succumbing to the negative thought-spirals of depression. Wallace had gone off his medication, and never quite found his balance again. He fought with depression and addiction his whole life. All of his works and his life story speak so deeply and keenly to me, and I think he has a lot to say on stage, which I want to craft for him.
The description of his college years, particularly where he first began to really struggle with his anxiety and depression, put me back into my own college days, in a very personal, horrible way. Being in a much healthier, happier place now, it was almost overwhelming to recognize how tortured I'd been, all four years really, not just senior year, and I only was now able to do that by hearing about how someone else handled his own disease in his own way.
To be completely clear and fair, I was never suicidal, and while I had some dark moments, I didn't suffer to the same degree that he did. For anyone who reads the book, I am definitely identifying by proxy, not by specifically what he went through. I'm not claiming I'm a genius writer, either.
But recognizing the pain I was in was a function of me not being in that pain now. Recognizing now how bad it had been then was only possible because I wasn't there anymore. Perhaps I am quite a bit happier and healthier than I realized.
But the major thing the book did for me was reawaken an awareness of a part of my identity I think I've long kept hidden, embarrassed, insecure, unsure of how to claim, desperate to discount. I tell people all the time that I'm a director, a performer, a self-producer, a theatre-maker, and then I sneak in at the end a little bit that I'm a writer. Like, you know, when it calls for it. And even then I'm not terribly assertive about it.
The book reminded me that actually, fully, truly, I am a writer. I love to write, I love to create worlds, I love to create language, I love to be in charge of crafting moments, and while I've had a love for directing that grew out of college (I recently reminded my college roommate Graham about the moment we were walking home from a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and I was so furious at the time about how the production was done, on a dramaturgical level, and he, frustrated with my fury, in a moment of now-self-historic import, asked "WHY do you CARE so much?!?!" and I answered before thinking "I JUST DO!!!") I have also had a love of writing, a love I only furtively engaged with in college, never to the serious extent of study I needed to in order to really grow.
So now that I'm in a new city, with a whole new schedule that affords me quite a bit of down time, at least for now, and I have a chance to rebrand myself a bit, I'm going to take back a part of myself I've long felt too insecure to hold onto. I regret not thinking of myself more actively, more fully, a WRITER while I was in Philly, of course because I did actually write and create. And many of my friends might be looking at me like WHY IS THIS A SURPRISE TO YOU? OF COURSE YOU WRITE but I have to say, I honestly just never allowed myself to admit it fully. Those of you who do, I love and respect you. And I acknowledge I've been more than a little silly.
So those are some of the things that've been going on within me recently, that I'm just now able to process, a little bit. I've internally made some decisions to help me explore, expand, and work fucking hard, on this new acceptance of what I truly want to do, as a creator. But like the whole admitting-the-diet-to-get-the-approval thing, I'm going to keep the specifics to myself. I do want to share my happiness over this self-realization, though, and I welcome your well-wishes as I extend my own to you. I hope you are peeking over the edge at something new within yourself, too.
Monday, March 11, 2013
Goddamnit David Foster Wallace
When I finished reading Infinite Jest I have to admit I was disappointed.
Are you kidding? I invested myself into a 1000 pages for that to be the ending?
I remember distinctly feeling the urge to go back to the beginning,
To start again, and read the whole thing,
To see if I could figure it out.
Then I stopped myself.
My rational brain took over.
1000 pages is long enough to read a book, that is over the appropriate length as is.
You shouldn't reread it,
The point must be you'll never figure it out.
He must be saying life is cruelly nonsensical in how it ends.
He killed himself eventually.
It makes sense.
A few months later (now) I am working on a show about writers
And one of the characters admits to writing a couple thousand pages
All on this one novel he's been working on.
All on one novel. A double David Foster Wallace.
Indeed he is treated like a genius.
So on a break in the green room,
I get to talking with the actor playing the DDFW
And mention this fact
(Sort of a tricky assistant director way to give a non-note,
To express passion about a fact that may not have come to light quite the same way before,
In hopes of inspiring the sense you wish was there with what you see--)
Anyway,
He starts to talk about Infinite Jest, which he's also read,
And mentions how after HE finished reading the book he ALSO was let down,
And went online.
I went online, too, but half-heartedly. Like, it felt like cheating,
To read what other people thought.
I wanted to keep my experience with it to myself.
I think I was a little afraid I was too dumb to have really read it.
Well, so, but apparently I am a little dumb
Because I should've followed my instincts.
The last scene of IJ isn't the end at all--
It seems DFW wanted you to go back to the beginning
Where cleverly hid within the first few chapters
was the so called "final" scene
Where Hal and Gately dig the antidote "entertainment" out from Hal's dad's skull
A very Hamletian image
Which, when you first read,
& that's made reference, you don't remember
Because you didn't know what you were reading.
So the sick joke is that Infinite Jest IS a kind of infinite jest,
You're supposed to read it start to finish to start to finish,
And perhaps do so infinitely--
But no one ever will, because the book is famous for being given up on
Too difficult, too dense, too complex, too sick, too silly, too giving-legitimacy-to-the-inner-turmoil-of-the-privileged--
I remember randomly bumping into a friend at the airport
Waiting to fly home to California for Christmas
And we got to talking,
And I mentioned I was reading the book,
Sort of surreptitiously showing off to him about how smart & intellectual & hipster & cool I was,
To read such a difficult literary book,
And I remember him being like "Aw man, I hate that book,
I hate how it coolifies that way of thinking, you know?
It makes depressive and sad thoughts really cool,
When they're not, you know?
I feel like it's no wonder he killed himself.
The book was just too unnecessarily complicated, I stopped after about halfway."
And I know I felt the same way at times,
Though I also know I felt rewarded for taking on the challenge,
Like, he wanted to test readers, to see if they'd follow even if they didn't quite understand,
Or read even when they were sort of being pushed NOT to read,
DFW said in an interview that he felt like he set out to write a really sad novel,
And was surprised everyone thought it was so funny.
A hyper-aware hyper-aware guy.
Someone who wants to control how he is seen.
Someone who plays a part.
An actor.
There's a part in Infinite Jest where Hal postulates
that Hamlet is only pretending to pretend he's mad--
That he uses the excuse of performance to really let himself be crazy
He (David, Hal, Hamlet, my airport friend, my actor friend, myself)
Doth protest too much, methinks--
Are you kidding? I invested myself into a 1000 pages for that to be the ending?
I remember distinctly feeling the urge to go back to the beginning,
To start again, and read the whole thing,
To see if I could figure it out.
Then I stopped myself.
My rational brain took over.
1000 pages is long enough to read a book, that is over the appropriate length as is.
You shouldn't reread it,
The point must be you'll never figure it out.
He must be saying life is cruelly nonsensical in how it ends.
He killed himself eventually.
It makes sense.
A few months later (now) I am working on a show about writers
And one of the characters admits to writing a couple thousand pages
All on this one novel he's been working on.
All on one novel. A double David Foster Wallace.
Indeed he is treated like a genius.
So on a break in the green room,
I get to talking with the actor playing the DDFW
And mention this fact
(Sort of a tricky assistant director way to give a non-note,
To express passion about a fact that may not have come to light quite the same way before,
In hopes of inspiring the sense you wish was there with what you see--)
Anyway,
He starts to talk about Infinite Jest, which he's also read,
And mentions how after HE finished reading the book he ALSO was let down,
And went online.
I went online, too, but half-heartedly. Like, it felt like cheating,
To read what other people thought.
I wanted to keep my experience with it to myself.
I think I was a little afraid I was too dumb to have really read it.
Well, so, but apparently I am a little dumb
Because I should've followed my instincts.
The last scene of IJ isn't the end at all--
It seems DFW wanted you to go back to the beginning
Where cleverly hid within the first few chapters
was the so called "final" scene
Where Hal and Gately dig the antidote "entertainment" out from Hal's dad's skull
A very Hamletian image
Which, when you first read,
& that's made reference, you don't remember
Because you didn't know what you were reading.
So the sick joke is that Infinite Jest IS a kind of infinite jest,
You're supposed to read it start to finish to start to finish,
And perhaps do so infinitely--
But no one ever will, because the book is famous for being given up on
Too difficult, too dense, too complex, too sick, too silly, too giving-legitimacy-to-the-inner-turmoil-of-the-privileged--
I remember randomly bumping into a friend at the airport
Waiting to fly home to California for Christmas
And we got to talking,
And I mentioned I was reading the book,
Sort of surreptitiously showing off to him about how smart & intellectual & hipster & cool I was,
To read such a difficult literary book,
And I remember him being like "Aw man, I hate that book,
I hate how it coolifies that way of thinking, you know?
It makes depressive and sad thoughts really cool,
When they're not, you know?
I feel like it's no wonder he killed himself.
The book was just too unnecessarily complicated, I stopped after about halfway."
And I know I felt the same way at times,
Though I also know I felt rewarded for taking on the challenge,
Like, he wanted to test readers, to see if they'd follow even if they didn't quite understand,
Or read even when they were sort of being pushed NOT to read,
DFW said in an interview that he felt like he set out to write a really sad novel,
And was surprised everyone thought it was so funny.
A hyper-aware hyper-aware guy.
Someone who wants to control how he is seen.
Someone who plays a part.
An actor.
There's a part in Infinite Jest where Hal postulates
that Hamlet is only pretending to pretend he's mad--
That he uses the excuse of performance to really let himself be crazy
He (David, Hal, Hamlet, my airport friend, my actor friend, myself)
Doth protest too much, methinks--
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Sometimes you need a mirror
Stand in front of an audience.
There's a full length mirror standing among them.
Maybe a few.
Maybe for you.
There are times when
I am really fucking angry.
Is that what it means to be a man?
REVENGE THIS FOUL
AND MOST UNNATURAL
MURDER
I know it's not acceptable for men to show any emotion
At least that's what I've understood to be the case
Growing up
Even for my father
Who's by no means a meathead or testostertank
or war hero or anything like that
Even for an accomplished doctor
An intellectual
A goofy nerdy musician
To feel is to fail
So don't "do" it
Don't perform it
Keep it inside
You keep it to yourself
You stay strong for the ones who are relying on you
No one wants to see their leader overwhelmed
No one wants to watch tears fall, snot clot,
pain tourniquet out of your chest
But
I'd like to suggest
Or
Rather
I believe it is the case
That one emotion men are culturally forgiven for displaying
Openly and in front of other men
and women particularly
Is rage
TOO HOT, TOO HOT
Take any king, take any leader, any tyrant, anyone in charge
Yelling, commanding, swelling chest and pulsing veins
This
Gets
Things
DONE
Isn't impotent rage like the standard for men?
It's what we have access to
The "I'm not gonna take this shit anymore"
The "I've had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!"
The "This. IS. SPARTAAAA!!!!"
"FREEDOM!!!"
"YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!"
In the fantasies we watch these men then get shit done.
"GET THEE TO A NUNNERY!!!!!!"
Battle cries.
Rebel yells.
Exhale all the breath you've got, batter it against your vocal cords,
Send the enemy running
Because you are full of might and terror
And you must be obeyed.
To be a man do you need to be obeyed?
What happens when you're not?
What happens when you don't get what you want?
When no one will listen?
When no one understands?
When you're a cypher, even to yourself?
When your uncle's killed your dad in the most shameful, underhanded way,
And is fucking your mom, married your mom, and wants you to play nice?
To stop being sad? To stop FEELING?
To feel is to fail.
What do you do? What do you do?
What if you don't know what to do?
When you yell at your audience
Aren't you really watching yourself?
SEEing yourself be powerful
Be mighty
Be strong
Be a man
Performing
Does anger allow us to DO something
Does anger allow us to see
our fragmented reflection in the faces of those who fear us
That we are perceivable?
That we are seen?
That we could be understood?
And how often does that really work?
That we really feel understood?
How often does yelling and anger and rage lead to destruction and pain and no going back
That is of course a simple question.
Sure, the rest is silence,
But the conversation ends.
Everybody, men and women, of course, we all need to get mad sometimes
Hawks and handsaws
We all need to act out, to wave our arms, raise our voices, feel ourselves being seen, being heard
We need to let the feelings out we can't express
Because sometimes we can't express the horrible things we never thought we'd feel
Until they need to just express themselves
Sometimes we can't know what we think until we see what we say,
to borrow an expression that's not mine.
But.
But.
But.
Hold on there, cowboys.
If we were able to express even battered shards of how we feel as we go
To people outside ourselves
If we felt we were heard more regularly
If men were allowed, expected, even, to be intelligible outside of themselves
Would we really need to kill everyone and end the play
Only the last to fall?
To feel is to fail,
But since when is failure worse than death?
Does Hamlet really speak to anyone but himself?
Is he not perhaps holding that mirror up, not to nature, but only to himself?
There's a full length mirror standing among them.
Maybe a few.
Maybe for you.
There are times when
I am really fucking angry.
Is that what it means to be a man?
REVENGE THIS FOUL
AND MOST UNNATURAL
MURDER
I know it's not acceptable for men to show any emotion
At least that's what I've understood to be the case
Growing up
Even for my father
Who's by no means a meathead or testostertank
or war hero or anything like that
Even for an accomplished doctor
An intellectual
A goofy nerdy musician
To feel is to fail
So don't "do" it
Don't perform it
Keep it inside
You keep it to yourself
You stay strong for the ones who are relying on you
No one wants to see their leader overwhelmed
No one wants to watch tears fall, snot clot,
pain tourniquet out of your chest
But
I'd like to suggest
Or
Rather
I believe it is the case
That one emotion men are culturally forgiven for displaying
Openly and in front of other men
and women particularly
Is rage
TOO HOT, TOO HOT
Take any king, take any leader, any tyrant, anyone in charge
Yelling, commanding, swelling chest and pulsing veins
This
Gets
Things
DONE
Isn't impotent rage like the standard for men?
It's what we have access to
The "I'm not gonna take this shit anymore"
The "I've had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!"
The "This. IS. SPARTAAAA!!!!"
"FREEDOM!!!"
"YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!"
In the fantasies we watch these men then get shit done.
"GET THEE TO A NUNNERY!!!!!!"
Battle cries.
Rebel yells.
Exhale all the breath you've got, batter it against your vocal cords,
Send the enemy running
Because you are full of might and terror
And you must be obeyed.
To be a man do you need to be obeyed?
What happens when you're not?
What happens when you don't get what you want?
When no one will listen?
When no one understands?
When you're a cypher, even to yourself?
When your uncle's killed your dad in the most shameful, underhanded way,
And is fucking your mom, married your mom, and wants you to play nice?
To stop being sad? To stop FEELING?
To feel is to fail.
What do you do? What do you do?
What if you don't know what to do?
When you yell at your audience
Aren't you really watching yourself?
SEEing yourself be powerful
Be mighty
Be strong
Be a man
Performing
Does anger allow us to DO something
Does anger allow us to see
our fragmented reflection in the faces of those who fear us
That we are perceivable?
That we are seen?
That we could be understood?
And how often does that really work?
That we really feel understood?
How often does yelling and anger and rage lead to destruction and pain and no going back
That is of course a simple question.
Sure, the rest is silence,
But the conversation ends.
Everybody, men and women, of course, we all need to get mad sometimes
Hawks and handsaws
We all need to act out, to wave our arms, raise our voices, feel ourselves being seen, being heard
We need to let the feelings out we can't express
Because sometimes we can't express the horrible things we never thought we'd feel
Until they need to just express themselves
Sometimes we can't know what we think until we see what we say,
to borrow an expression that's not mine.
But.
But.
But.
Hold on there, cowboys.
If we were able to express even battered shards of how we feel as we go
To people outside ourselves
If we felt we were heard more regularly
If men were allowed, expected, even, to be intelligible outside of themselves
Would we really need to kill everyone and end the play
Only the last to fall?
To feel is to fail,
But since when is failure worse than death?
Does Hamlet really speak to anyone but himself?
Is he not perhaps holding that mirror up, not to nature, but only to himself?
Friday, February 22, 2013
Play, meet audience
I've been scurrying from teaching and telemarketing to PTC these past few days, working as a literary assistant and general helper for the PTC@Play new works festival. We're about halfway through.
Being a "literary assistant" for this means basically being the stage directions reader for the readings you've been assigned to, as well as the person who picks up out of town artists, gets them their W9s and their checks, and generally helps out with whatever needs to get done, ushering, table lifting, etc. It's the kind of role I know well, especially having worked with Play Penn as an artistic intern a few summers ago and as an Arden Apprentice back in the 2009-2010 season.
Being able to be a literary assistant now is a huge gift. I can actually read stage directions with clarity and breath now. I have confidence I didn't have. I know what to worry about and what not to. I worked on Bruce Graham's reading of Stello & Lou, the opening for the festival, and I just had a blast. It was easy! Since when is anything in the theatre easy??! But Bruce really had done all the work.
I don't think we knew quite how special the reading would be until we were up there in front of the audience. The actors of course turned up the juice. And the first joke gets thrown, and boom! The audience just erupts in laughter. ERUPTS. And that energy just kept perpetuating itself.
It was like the play and the audience were on a first date, and everything was just CRACKLING. It was hot, it was easy, it was fast, it was incredibly fun. What a great night.
It's one of those plays that's just a coupla guys and a lady talkin', but you can't help but be drawn into their rich emotional worlds hidden just beneath the acerbic one-liners and South Philly parables. You laugh and cry, each almost as easily. I certainly did up there on stage.
It was damned fun to read, and all I was doing was helping along. Stage directions are just there to help the audience imagine the visual action. They're there to make the process easy, and there to keep the energy afloat in between dialogue.
And you could FEEL that energy rushing back and forth between actors & audience, easily, again and again, the build up to the next joke, the next observation, the next argument in someone's logic, and then there'd be the release, the laugh, the sigh, the knowing snicker. It was incredible to be up there, sitting right beside these actors as they do their thing, and to feel so acutely the audience responding. And I'd just cut in every now and then to help the story along.
It felt good to feel so good about something like this, actually. Because I think this play and this audience knew what mattered. It was all about connections, between the characters, between us.
In a way, it became a great way for me to have a brief audience of myself. Seeing how far I'd come since I first started assisting in staged readings, etc. Seeing my confidence and ease, my focus on what I feel matters, it was a nice date with myself, too.
I'm glad I get to be along for the ride.
More on more with regards to this soon, I'm sure.
Being a "literary assistant" for this means basically being the stage directions reader for the readings you've been assigned to, as well as the person who picks up out of town artists, gets them their W9s and their checks, and generally helps out with whatever needs to get done, ushering, table lifting, etc. It's the kind of role I know well, especially having worked with Play Penn as an artistic intern a few summers ago and as an Arden Apprentice back in the 2009-2010 season.
Being able to be a literary assistant now is a huge gift. I can actually read stage directions with clarity and breath now. I have confidence I didn't have. I know what to worry about and what not to. I worked on Bruce Graham's reading of Stello & Lou, the opening for the festival, and I just had a blast. It was easy! Since when is anything in the theatre easy??! But Bruce really had done all the work.
I don't think we knew quite how special the reading would be until we were up there in front of the audience. The actors of course turned up the juice. And the first joke gets thrown, and boom! The audience just erupts in laughter. ERUPTS. And that energy just kept perpetuating itself.
It was like the play and the audience were on a first date, and everything was just CRACKLING. It was hot, it was easy, it was fast, it was incredibly fun. What a great night.
It's one of those plays that's just a coupla guys and a lady talkin', but you can't help but be drawn into their rich emotional worlds hidden just beneath the acerbic one-liners and South Philly parables. You laugh and cry, each almost as easily. I certainly did up there on stage.
It was damned fun to read, and all I was doing was helping along. Stage directions are just there to help the audience imagine the visual action. They're there to make the process easy, and there to keep the energy afloat in between dialogue.
And you could FEEL that energy rushing back and forth between actors & audience, easily, again and again, the build up to the next joke, the next observation, the next argument in someone's logic, and then there'd be the release, the laugh, the sigh, the knowing snicker. It was incredible to be up there, sitting right beside these actors as they do their thing, and to feel so acutely the audience responding. And I'd just cut in every now and then to help the story along.
It felt good to feel so good about something like this, actually. Because I think this play and this audience knew what mattered. It was all about connections, between the characters, between us.
In a way, it became a great way for me to have a brief audience of myself. Seeing how far I'd come since I first started assisting in staged readings, etc. Seeing my confidence and ease, my focus on what I feel matters, it was a nice date with myself, too.
I'm glad I get to be along for the ride.
More on more with regards to this soon, I'm sure.
Decisions, decisions (1/?)
Why do we decide to do the things we do?
How do we arrive at those decisions?
God do I agonize over that all the time.
As a director (and artist, really), decisions are kind of everything. From the moment you commit yourself to a project, you're making countless decisions. Who to work with. How to frame the production. What you care about. What you can afford to care about. What you can't afford not to.
Sometimes these decisions aren't really decisions. Like, not actively. You don't debate back and forth between separate & distinct options and come to a rational conclusion about which option is best. A lot of a production, or a life, really, can feel inevitable. There wasn't a choice between apples and oranges. There were only, always pears. I feel that way about love, too. A lot of times you say yes before you even know why. And always you are forced to defend decisions you never even knew you made.
I've been thinking a bit about making firm decisions as a culturally-masculine trait. It's at least something that I feel expected of as a man. Being a Decider. Being confident in my decisions. Sticking by what you do, not wallowing in possibilities, being firm and strong and, well, decisive.
Hiding in there is the notion that I have to make rational decisions, too. Men & emotions aren't really supposed to coexist, in this Culture of Masculinity World, except in the case of anger and frustration as a natural result of testing a man. So feeling bad about decisions, being unsure, feeling lost, feeling afraid, these don't really mesh with an understanding of men as mountains. Mountains don't feel. They stand.
Now the work I like to do can function quite against making decisions this way, sort of unilaterally, in a top-down hierarchical fashion. Knowing in advance sort of defeats the purpose of experimental theatre -- then where's the experiment? Even the most traditional play I start by trying to locate the places where I don't know how to solve the problems it presents. Decide as I may in advance, it's really the process of doing the thing that unlocks what these potentially infinite moments are.
Certainly setting framework and limits on creativity fosters clarity, fosters specificity, and can foster quite a lot of creative growth. You have to kill the notion of ALL ideas to find which of THE ideas your piece is actually working with.
The actual has to kill the potential. Sad, I know, but true.
So, to kill a few potentials.
I am moving to New York City this summer.
It's a decision I made over several months, not knowing what would happen with grad school, not knowing what will happen with the other opportunities I've applied for, nor really knowing if I was ready to go when I decided.
I made the decision as emotionally and intuitively as I did rationally. The woman I love is moving there, and I want to be closer than a 2 hour 2 train ($33 roundtrip) ride away. I want to start building my life with her. We both want that.
And I think there's a lot of stigma and cynicism against that? Like, it's sort of a role reversal, in a way, for a man to move for a woman & her career. I mean, it's not to say I'm not also moving for my career, which is at such an indeterminate state at the moment it really could go anywhere.
So, I'm moving because of that state of indeterminacy.
I'm moving for the new jungle gym.
I am moving to be challenged by the sheer size and scale of New York.
I'm moving to be challenged by the competitiveness,
the cutthroatness, the danger, the madness, the stress.
I'm moving for the opportunity and moving for the change.
I'm moving for the move, in a way.
Which I think is okay.
Which isn't to say I'll be leaving Philly behind.
Cue that half-measured indeterminacy.
I'll still be back.
Particularly for opportunities that keep pushing me forward.
I think that's okay, too.
In all ways, I'd prefer to define my own limits.
I recognize fully that I've very little control over a lot of things.
So, rather than jump to the anger and frustration mode when I am being tested,
I'd like to sit
In this state of not-knowing
And feel along the walls for what I can.
I'm going to write a lot more about decision-making and masculinity and moving and art and everything, but I definitely want to put something up on this blog as it's been far too long since I last decided to post. If there's a firmness to my decision-making I want to bring out for the future, it's in getting out from under my covers and keeping writing.
A daily decision-making challenge.
How do we arrive at those decisions?
God do I agonize over that all the time.
As a director (and artist, really), decisions are kind of everything. From the moment you commit yourself to a project, you're making countless decisions. Who to work with. How to frame the production. What you care about. What you can afford to care about. What you can't afford not to.
Sometimes these decisions aren't really decisions. Like, not actively. You don't debate back and forth between separate & distinct options and come to a rational conclusion about which option is best. A lot of a production, or a life, really, can feel inevitable. There wasn't a choice between apples and oranges. There were only, always pears. I feel that way about love, too. A lot of times you say yes before you even know why. And always you are forced to defend decisions you never even knew you made.
I've been thinking a bit about making firm decisions as a culturally-masculine trait. It's at least something that I feel expected of as a man. Being a Decider. Being confident in my decisions. Sticking by what you do, not wallowing in possibilities, being firm and strong and, well, decisive.
Hiding in there is the notion that I have to make rational decisions, too. Men & emotions aren't really supposed to coexist, in this Culture of Masculinity World, except in the case of anger and frustration as a natural result of testing a man. So feeling bad about decisions, being unsure, feeling lost, feeling afraid, these don't really mesh with an understanding of men as mountains. Mountains don't feel. They stand.
Now the work I like to do can function quite against making decisions this way, sort of unilaterally, in a top-down hierarchical fashion. Knowing in advance sort of defeats the purpose of experimental theatre -- then where's the experiment? Even the most traditional play I start by trying to locate the places where I don't know how to solve the problems it presents. Decide as I may in advance, it's really the process of doing the thing that unlocks what these potentially infinite moments are.
Certainly setting framework and limits on creativity fosters clarity, fosters specificity, and can foster quite a lot of creative growth. You have to kill the notion of ALL ideas to find which of THE ideas your piece is actually working with.
The actual has to kill the potential. Sad, I know, but true.
So, to kill a few potentials.
I am moving to New York City this summer.
It's a decision I made over several months, not knowing what would happen with grad school, not knowing what will happen with the other opportunities I've applied for, nor really knowing if I was ready to go when I decided.
I made the decision as emotionally and intuitively as I did rationally. The woman I love is moving there, and I want to be closer than a 2 hour 2 train ($33 roundtrip) ride away. I want to start building my life with her. We both want that.
And I think there's a lot of stigma and cynicism against that? Like, it's sort of a role reversal, in a way, for a man to move for a woman & her career. I mean, it's not to say I'm not also moving for my career, which is at such an indeterminate state at the moment it really could go anywhere.
So, I'm moving because of that state of indeterminacy.
I'm moving for the new jungle gym.
I am moving to be challenged by the sheer size and scale of New York.
I'm moving to be challenged by the competitiveness,
the cutthroatness, the danger, the madness, the stress.
I'm moving for the opportunity and moving for the change.
I'm moving for the move, in a way.
Which I think is okay.
Which isn't to say I'll be leaving Philly behind.
Cue that half-measured indeterminacy.
I'll still be back.
Particularly for opportunities that keep pushing me forward.
I think that's okay, too.
In all ways, I'd prefer to define my own limits.
I recognize fully that I've very little control over a lot of things.
So, rather than jump to the anger and frustration mode when I am being tested,
I'd like to sit
In this state of not-knowing
And feel along the walls for what I can.
I'm going to write a lot more about decision-making and masculinity and moving and art and everything, but I definitely want to put something up on this blog as it's been far too long since I last decided to post. If there's a firmness to my decision-making I want to bring out for the future, it's in getting out from under my covers and keeping writing.
A daily decision-making challenge.
Saturday, February 16, 2013
I'll follow you (2/2)
So I taught class again today, which I usually post all kinds of positive shit about on Facebook because I'm so enthralled after class with how well these kids are taking to all the stuff I love: Viewpoints, Shakespearean text, improvisational skills, etc. Some of these kids are really mature enough to handle the stuff in Winter's Tale, which is exciting. I feel like I hit a bit of a wall today, though. My education director said that week 5 is a tricky one, especially with these kids. I'll take her word for it.
What I love about this class though is that even when it's not great, it's still pretty good. After warmups we focused on spatial relationships, getting them to awaken to being aware of an audience while they improvise and consider what was interesting to look at on stage. They took to that really well, though lost a lot of it when we switched to actually improvising things.
I always start this class with at least 20 minutes just playing catch in a circle. It's a good focus warm up, and as they've gotten better at it we've added more balls. Totally stole this from my undergrad advanced acting prof -- I'm sure others have done the same thing.
What I love about the exercise is it really activates all the skills you really need to be present in performance and in improvisation. You've got to have a soft focus, taking all your partners in, because one of them could send a ball your way any second. You've got to be loose, to accept balls and transfer their energy from the catch into your next throw. You've got to trust your other ensemble members, and release the ball maybe a second or two before you're really ready to. You've got to be ready for anything and work hard to make sure your partners succeed -- the goal is not to trick anyone or pelt the ball at someone's face. And these kids are taking well to it.
Once we went into improv mode, based on some monologues they wrote responding to Leontes' "Too hot, too hot" speech about jealousy, though, things got a lot tougher. I think it was hard for a lot of them to express what it truly felt to be jealous or angry. We got some interesting moments toward the end, and I started them on reading through the final scene, where Leontes is forgiven. Rereading the scene struck me with what may be the key word for the play, for me, which was a fun discovery, even if it was kinda just for me and not for the kids, who were focused more on just understanding what was being said.
So Leontes & co. are staring at the Hermione statue, (Hermione being Leontes' wife he orders to banish after he perceived her maybe cheating on him with his bro Polixenes, not Harry Potter's totally platonic ladyfriend badass witch, which causes her "death") and Paulina, Hermione's loyal friend, says she can make the totally-not-real statue move, on one proviso: Leontes will have to re-"awake his faith."
This struck me, maybe because I was in a Viewpointy mood and thinking about how important it is to trust everyone in the room to work together toward telling a story-in-becoming, that very much what Leontes does not have up until this statue test is faith, and in a way, asking him to believe Paulina has magic to reawaken his dead wife mirrors Shakespeare asking the audience to believe a) Leontes really did freak out that jealously to begin with & b) he believes this somehow-age-appropriately carved and almost-life-seeming statue is actually a statue, and not the living Hermione who'd been hiding out with Paulina for 16 years and is now finally being able to be reconciled to her husband and to meet her daughter, who Leontes had also cast out 16 years ago, thinking she was illegitimate.
Faith.
It's a hard word for us, nowadays, with its religious (and by religious I mean more political/church, not spiritual) connotations, and in a world that since 9/11 has seemed to be almost entirely out of control, at risk of ending at ANY MOMENT, so CLUTCH everything you love and HOLD ON; it's easy to see why our digitally-&-immediately-gratified-culture wouldn't put much stock in "faith," a word that has as antiquated a taste as "honour." I think a lot of us are afraid to be destroyed. We're afraid to be hurt. We're afraid. And having faith in someone else, especially those who you're vulnerable to, is an impossible task to achieve without getting hurt. Because people are people, and they fail.
I think it's a mistake when productions don't show us an actually flirty Hermione at the beginning, which feels like it totally belongs in the text. Hermione is not simply a victimized martyr, innocent as a wafting lily, who gets to come back at the end and forgive everyone. In fact, it's telling that in the statue scene, she focuses her energy on her child first when she "comes to life." I think she's a whole person, and whole people flirt, even if they aren't going to do anything about it. Maybe Hermione wanted to bone Polixenes, you know, maybe there was temptation there.
I think it's dangerous to put all the onus on Leontes & his perceptive skills, which really makes him seem to freak out FOR NO REASON, because it implies that if Hermione DID do any flirting, his reaction would be acceptable. And the only reason that his jealous rage is unacceptable is that she OBVIOUSLY didn't remotely approach doing anything wrong. If she did, it'd be fair game for him to ruin everyone's lives. His jealous rage is not acceptable, regardless of the circumstances. He seeks revenge, too, much like Hamlet & Richard III, but much more like Othello, he does it for reasons that don't add up.
There is no ocular proof, there is no surety. We do live a life of Viewpointsy vaguery and ambiguity. It makes for hard lessons in class, especially with kids who are just now understanding that people fail sometimes, and that's actually part of being human. But I don't think we are dumb, as a species, men or women. We perceive what we perceive.
In the case with Othello & Leontes, though, what they were perceiving was not the actions of a whore, but that of a woman being a living person, not a statue, not an anesthetized holy goddess floating above in her halo, but a woman living and carrying on her own conversations with men. Othello & Leontes freak out, they blame the women, not for actually cheating, but really for it just being a possibility, a potential hurt, a potential failure. They are not secure enough with themselves to know that what's transpiring is harmless. They not only do not have faith in their spouses, but, more to the point, they do not have faith in themselves.
I think you have to know you're worth being in a relationship with for that relationship to last. I'm just starting down that road myself, for the first time honestly, and I don't think I could've gotten to thinking like this without royally fucking up a lot about thinking about what it takes to love someone.
But at the end of the day, the only person living and breathing and making decisions and deciding to be with one person, one whole unique fallible person, is you, and you have to trust you're worth sticking with, just as you have to trust the person who's sticking with you to do the sticking.
Faith involves failure. In catch, there are always dropped balls. We misjudge the distances we need to send balls, we overshoot, we throw to people who aren't ready, we have weird sudden spasms and send our balls rocketing askew, out of anyone's reach. We fuck up.
But everyone breathing together, listening to each other, and not giving up when the balls occasionally land? There's a kind of holy focus there, and the more we all relax, the more catches are successful, the longer the dance of catch and release lasts, and that's where real creation can happen.
So basically I should just play catch with Othello & Leontes for a little while, and save Desdemona & Hermione a lot of trouble. If only I'd been around.
What I love about this class though is that even when it's not great, it's still pretty good. After warmups we focused on spatial relationships, getting them to awaken to being aware of an audience while they improvise and consider what was interesting to look at on stage. They took to that really well, though lost a lot of it when we switched to actually improvising things.
I always start this class with at least 20 minutes just playing catch in a circle. It's a good focus warm up, and as they've gotten better at it we've added more balls. Totally stole this from my undergrad advanced acting prof -- I'm sure others have done the same thing.
What I love about the exercise is it really activates all the skills you really need to be present in performance and in improvisation. You've got to have a soft focus, taking all your partners in, because one of them could send a ball your way any second. You've got to be loose, to accept balls and transfer their energy from the catch into your next throw. You've got to trust your other ensemble members, and release the ball maybe a second or two before you're really ready to. You've got to be ready for anything and work hard to make sure your partners succeed -- the goal is not to trick anyone or pelt the ball at someone's face. And these kids are taking well to it.
Once we went into improv mode, based on some monologues they wrote responding to Leontes' "Too hot, too hot" speech about jealousy, though, things got a lot tougher. I think it was hard for a lot of them to express what it truly felt to be jealous or angry. We got some interesting moments toward the end, and I started them on reading through the final scene, where Leontes is forgiven. Rereading the scene struck me with what may be the key word for the play, for me, which was a fun discovery, even if it was kinda just for me and not for the kids, who were focused more on just understanding what was being said.
So Leontes & co. are staring at the Hermione statue, (Hermione being Leontes' wife he orders to banish after he perceived her maybe cheating on him with his bro Polixenes, not Harry Potter's totally platonic ladyfriend badass witch, which causes her "death") and Paulina, Hermione's loyal friend, says she can make the totally-not-real statue move, on one proviso: Leontes will have to re-"awake his faith."
This struck me, maybe because I was in a Viewpointy mood and thinking about how important it is to trust everyone in the room to work together toward telling a story-in-becoming, that very much what Leontes does not have up until this statue test is faith, and in a way, asking him to believe Paulina has magic to reawaken his dead wife mirrors Shakespeare asking the audience to believe a) Leontes really did freak out that jealously to begin with & b) he believes this somehow-age-appropriately carved and almost-life-seeming statue is actually a statue, and not the living Hermione who'd been hiding out with Paulina for 16 years and is now finally being able to be reconciled to her husband and to meet her daughter, who Leontes had also cast out 16 years ago, thinking she was illegitimate.
Faith.
It's a hard word for us, nowadays, with its religious (and by religious I mean more political/church, not spiritual) connotations, and in a world that since 9/11 has seemed to be almost entirely out of control, at risk of ending at ANY MOMENT, so CLUTCH everything you love and HOLD ON; it's easy to see why our digitally-&-immediately-gratified-culture wouldn't put much stock in "faith," a word that has as antiquated a taste as "honour." I think a lot of us are afraid to be destroyed. We're afraid to be hurt. We're afraid. And having faith in someone else, especially those who you're vulnerable to, is an impossible task to achieve without getting hurt. Because people are people, and they fail.
I think it's a mistake when productions don't show us an actually flirty Hermione at the beginning, which feels like it totally belongs in the text. Hermione is not simply a victimized martyr, innocent as a wafting lily, who gets to come back at the end and forgive everyone. In fact, it's telling that in the statue scene, she focuses her energy on her child first when she "comes to life." I think she's a whole person, and whole people flirt, even if they aren't going to do anything about it. Maybe Hermione wanted to bone Polixenes, you know, maybe there was temptation there.
I think it's dangerous to put all the onus on Leontes & his perceptive skills, which really makes him seem to freak out FOR NO REASON, because it implies that if Hermione DID do any flirting, his reaction would be acceptable. And the only reason that his jealous rage is unacceptable is that she OBVIOUSLY didn't remotely approach doing anything wrong. If she did, it'd be fair game for him to ruin everyone's lives. His jealous rage is not acceptable, regardless of the circumstances. He seeks revenge, too, much like Hamlet & Richard III, but much more like Othello, he does it for reasons that don't add up.
There is no ocular proof, there is no surety. We do live a life of Viewpointsy vaguery and ambiguity. It makes for hard lessons in class, especially with kids who are just now understanding that people fail sometimes, and that's actually part of being human. But I don't think we are dumb, as a species, men or women. We perceive what we perceive.
In the case with Othello & Leontes, though, what they were perceiving was not the actions of a whore, but that of a woman being a living person, not a statue, not an anesthetized holy goddess floating above in her halo, but a woman living and carrying on her own conversations with men. Othello & Leontes freak out, they blame the women, not for actually cheating, but really for it just being a possibility, a potential hurt, a potential failure. They are not secure enough with themselves to know that what's transpiring is harmless. They not only do not have faith in their spouses, but, more to the point, they do not have faith in themselves.
I think you have to know you're worth being in a relationship with for that relationship to last. I'm just starting down that road myself, for the first time honestly, and I don't think I could've gotten to thinking like this without royally fucking up a lot about thinking about what it takes to love someone.
But at the end of the day, the only person living and breathing and making decisions and deciding to be with one person, one whole unique fallible person, is you, and you have to trust you're worth sticking with, just as you have to trust the person who's sticking with you to do the sticking.
Faith involves failure. In catch, there are always dropped balls. We misjudge the distances we need to send balls, we overshoot, we throw to people who aren't ready, we have weird sudden spasms and send our balls rocketing askew, out of anyone's reach. We fuck up.
But everyone breathing together, listening to each other, and not giving up when the balls occasionally land? There's a kind of holy focus there, and the more we all relax, the more catches are successful, the longer the dance of catch and release lasts, and that's where real creation can happen.
So basically I should just play catch with Othello & Leontes for a little while, and save Desdemona & Hermione a lot of trouble. If only I'd been around.
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