The Curiouser

So many cyber spaces with my name on them.  This one? Right here? The one you've stepped in? Yeah. Forgot I'd dug this tiger trap.  I clicked on a link on my website, and, well, here. Yup. Here I am too. I'm the one remembering how to touch-type using all my fingers.  Back when I taught myself this skill (maybe a decade ago...?) I did not have a robot questioning my word choice. (The robot seems especially annoyed with the word 'remembering' a few sentences ago, suggesting instead 'who remembered' but anyway...)  I'm talking about right now. You and me. Us. We are in this moment together, right?  Inscribed communication is this kind of miracle, right? It's how we mortals travel through time. This thought, a burst of electrical impulse in my brain that connects to my fingers, and lands here... waiting. Waiting...  For you. Your eyeballs, your electrical impulses and flowing blood and chemical chains in your system of parts.  And then we'll move on...

Agreement is not the same as agreeing.  Agreement is a state of being that is separate from point of view. Agreement is a way to adjust your mindset in order to be accessible, flexible, and civil as a participant in any discussion, classroom, public office, or any meeting of more than one person.  Agreeing to disagree is a form of passive aggressive stonewalling that has nothing to do with a state of agreement.  This is going to be a many faceted and often visited topic for the next few weeks as I work out how to express ideas and assumptions about agreement.

It took me three years to sit down and really learn ukulele. And it wasn't easy. Not because uke is hard to learn or play, but because I mostly played guitar and learning the new chord progressions for songs I already knew, well, that was difficult. Because the songs I knew on guitar didn't live in my head next door to the words, they lived in my hand. And using the ukulele chords was like using a different set of streets to get to my friend's house. And ukulele is soooooo small. It's a clown car of strings tied to wood, and for grown-up hands a soprano ukulele is a crowded little driver's seat with no head-room. It was precisely because it was small and could fit into my backpack next to my camera that I even packed the thing as I was flying from Connecticut to Florida for a weeklong playwright residency, which is fun, but can be lonely when you are not in rehearsal and in a strange city.  And this residency ended up being extra stressful and lonely for me when I d...

  This morning I was singing a song by LL Cool J, well, the chorus of a song as I recalled the music video from the 90s. Actually, I had to look up the actual artist who performed it, because beyond the hook of the chorus I don't know the song at all.  And this got me thinking about music and identity.  What does identifying with music as you grow up connect you to inside yourself, and when do stop listening to new things? And by listening, I mean that kind of knowing that is so intertwined with your soul that it's going to be with you your whole life.  For me, I think that started when the artists started being younger than I was.  "Oh, that's not for me," was what my head said as I dismissed to sounds. At some point that became this thing that I knew about the music without even really listening. But the radio and the videos still played, because inside me was this lyric and the voice of LL Cool J even tho I couldn't have named the artist five minutes ago. T...

 One of the big questions on playmakers minds is where is a space?  Theater is space dependent, and requires a live viewing and performance component. Many small theater events take place in small, borrowed spaces. Theater craft is often about borrowing.  When large venues and other public use spaces are constructed, we need to advocate for consideration of the community theater space. How the public space might function as a performance option can be part of the planning. As we reopen our public gathering areas, how can organized performance be a component of the process? 

  My birthday is on May 1st.  Last year was a birthday under lockdown. This year it is still going to be from a point of physical distance, I am planning to close the emotional gap with a month of my very favorite thing in the universe, STAR WARS.  This story is bonded to my sense of being. It landed for me when I was thirteen and facing a series of losses in my family and way of life.  Star Wars became  a friend and a place of refuge for me, I spent many hours each week earning enough money to see it at weekend matinees as it was held over for a year.  In this spirit remembrance and fun, I am constructing a month of Star Wars centric viewing. The start of the month will be a weekend of the original trilogy of films: A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. The second weekend will be for some of the Star Wars Stories: Rogue One, Solo, and the animated feature Clone Wars. The third weekend is back to the saga with a look at the prequels: Phan...

I'm working on a play. After putting a few pages together and figuring out most of the characters and a few of the major scenes, I'm puzzling out the rules that will govern the world of the play. This particular play is an adaptation of Oedipus at Colonus, and I have been thinking about it for a number of years. While the original material is a tragedy by Sophocles, my version will be a comedy. It will take place in a small pizza parlor, with a counter and one or tow tables. Through the story several Greek myths will unwind. It will be like a crossroads of stories that pass thru the tale o a refugee and his daughter living under a curse.  I am working to determine how the world will move. Will it all be in the confines of the pizza parlor, or will some of it take place outside? If it does move location, how will it be presented? These are some of the aspects of play-world plasticity that I am thinking thru. Besides being a playwright, I am also a designer. In order to compose a...

 Theater as an industry was broken before it went dark. We all knew it, but the teetering, guarded mess was too tangled and wobbly to fix.  As we reopen, the indoor venues will unfold last, and they won't be the same.  What is the opportunity for reinvention? What will theater in a decade even look like? 

  Last week I colored a handful of eggs to go into a blue bowl on our table for Easter Sunday. As the weather turns warmer it has me missing the cold nights and the lights and preparations for those chilly air holidays. And this has me thinking about the secret visitors that we invite into our homes. The magical beings who bring toys and foods and fix shoes... In this year of not bringing other people into our homes it seems that the magical beings have extra meaning this year. Wrapped into the traditions is this place we set for the ones we do not see, or the place for the honored guest left open at our feast. This year most of the places are left open.  What part of us does the magic creature feed? How is our own presence felt thru absence? In this place not filled there is hope and remembrance. 

The lock loves the key The key is bound to the ring The door keeps secrets.

 When we talk about the work of others, what are we saying about ourselves? Why not start championing the work of the people around you? When you bring up the positive difference people on your team are making, you can also reenforce the strength of the team. An added bonus is that you begin to build your credibility as a person who sees talent.  Be a champion of others as often as possible. 

  Once you start cultivating them, ideas are everywhere. The seed of an idea is a question, asking "what if". But the seeds fall from an earlier flower: observation.  Observing the world, understanding yourself in it, compassion for others, seeing past the obvious, stoking curiosity -- there are all ways to enhance your observational skills to generate ideas. Because an idea is not the end place. The idea is one of many little floating bits, one the air, underfoot, in the dirt. The art of it is being able to find a workable idea, a strong idea, the one to grow.  The selection process can be luck when you are first learning to cultivate, and as you get better at recognizing the worth, that's wisdom. 

I know , I know, the famous quote form Steve Jobs is "Real artists ship." And the wonderful Seth Godin has a whole book dedicated to artists and creatives getting to the work and simply shipping as a daily practice (his book is called "The Practice" after all.) But there's this whole other way of doing the work, a wee bit at a time -- chipping away in a consistent manner... one little sliver more, one beat, one sentence, one stroke, one step... it's not a race. Chipping, you often have to step away for perspective, and then return to chip some more, and step back again to make sure you're chipping the right bits off. Little and Often Make Much is a mantra that got me through writing a whole book and so many other things. Keep chipping at it. Step away. Return.  As Michelangelo remarked about the marble, the giant is sleeping within. We have to release him. But be careful not to knock off the nose or something because you were determined to simply chip ...

 In the story, the greatest hero rarely slays the villain.  Monsters, sure, henchmen, yeah, but the arch-villain, the main object, hardly ever goes over the edge. Or if they do perish, it's usually their own fault.  What was the goal? When the hero first set out, it was probably to slay the villain. But things change. The hero acquires skills and friends and knowledge along the path, gaining a broader perspective. When they face the villain the hero has realized that there are other goals beyond this one.  When we consider our own goals, what happens if we think about the larger mission? What if the mission isn't simply to reach an objective, but to be immersed in the journey? What if the goal is a learning path that meanders and eddies and takes a little more time?  Instead of goals, we seek an adventure path. How might this change what we consider the outcome? 

 Today I watched a live performance via live-stream. A friend of mine had adapted a one-woman historical drama to work through YouTube and Facebook Live.  Sitting together in a theater is a long time away. Until then, it's important to practice resilience.  What hybrid forms will this time we are spending suspended in square bubbles on screens inspire? 

Aristotle did a lot of thinking based on his observations of the world. It was his observations that got him to begin questioning, and the questions led to more observations. He worked to discover essential qualities and find rules and definitions for the structures that governed the organization of the world. One of the basic principles he questioned and sought to define was the difference between what was alive and what was dead. He came up with rules that could determine if a thing was animate and inanimate, and examine properties that drove the living force from a creature to make it dead? He determined that the living force was a "vital" quality. For two millennia people sought to measure or capture this vital quality, this living spark. Vitalism survived as a science until the late nineteenth century.  While it is no longer a "science", I do think this question of vitalism applies to the performative arts.  I once heard playwright Romulus Linney state, ...

In a cognitive science course on Art & Perception, we learned that part of what makes us recognize art as an art object is that we understand the frame. Without the frame, we can mistake a construction for reality.  Yesterday on a podcast I heard a successful creator speak about how he organizes his life by narrowing the frame that allows choices to flood in. This helps him reduce the cognitive load on decisions so that he can simply get to work. He produces a lot, including a daily blog. Today I am thinking about the frames as I work on learning how to frame the commands for making this blog space. I am on day 2 here. The window of this blog is a frame, yes? I am working to narrow my frame and figure out what is essential enough to put here. 

Over the holidays one of my friends gave me a mug.  BE A VIKING it said, and there's a picture of an old norseman on it. He had gone into a shop to find something funny about England or Scotland or Ireland, maybe a tea towel with the queen, knowing how much of an anglophile I am. But the shop turned out to be exclusively nordic. So the mug has a viking on it.  For the past couple of years I've found a word that I write in my book around the new year that is to be my guide word to get me around the sun. The first time I chose the word "help" and worked to either help someone or to be helped each day. This proved to be a great way to be useful and to practice asking for aid when I needed it. For the beginning of 2020 I chose "forth" which was intended to remind me to "go forth" and do and create in a bold sort of way. Well, we all know that going anywhere became problematic what with a pandemic and lockdowns and social distancing. Although, I did wor...

  This is a test ride faster