July 9: District of Columbia

Pilgrim in an Unholy Land

From colleagues who have spent time in DC, I’ve heard two points consistently. The first is that it’s a place rife with irony, sprawling monuments alongside absolutely wretched poverty. The second is that it is, oddly enough, much like any other small town which revolves around a single industry: only in this case, that industry is the government. (As I discovered sending out press releases, when a not-insignificant percentage of e-mail addresses were ending in .gov. I sent the Pentagon a press release. I can’t imagine I have a huge audience there.)

The latter point being true: being a libertarian in DC feels kind of like being a Toyota manufacturer in Detroit.

--

What little driving I’ve had to do within the District has been stressful enough that I immediately obtained a metro pass. My changeover actually takes place at the Pentagon – it’s a major employer, after all – which means that I spend much of my ride alongside men and women decked out in full uniform and regalia. It occurs to me that I’m in a confined space with some of the most remarkable intellects in the world, dedicated to developing the most efficient possible ways to kill people. I’m torn between thinking that this is really creepy and kind of awesome.

Drives home the point, though, that this is a place with an omnipresence of military culture – whereas in Minnesota what I’m wearing isn’t much more than a theatrical device, out here it’s part of our day-to-day reality. I don’t know how that influences audience perception of what I’m doing.

Managed to swing into the Fringe Central location (here called Fort Fringe) and drop off my postcards. Eyeing the postcard table, I saw the usual combination of exclamation points and naked flesh. Why am I producing a show like this in this venue?

An Inauspicious Opening

When I opened my very first Fringe show in Minneapolis, I had a sum total of three people in the audience. As time went on, I eventually built a reputation and relationships and stuff, and I don’t think that’s something I’m likely to go through in Minnesota again – at least, not anytime soon. Then, when I did the Iowa Fringe for the first time, I opened to three people. A humbling lesson – that whenever you hit the road, you’re starting over from scratch. So guess how many people I had in the audience for my DC opening? That’s right – three.

(I’m ashamed to say I derived some satisfaction from the fact that Les Kurkendaal had exactly zero people in his audience, for the show immediately following mine. I find this bewildering, and the two of us commiserated that it’s difficult for out-of-towners to open the Festival with no opportunity to build word-of-mouth. Seriously, considering the fact that I’ve had exactly no pre-Fringe coverage, three strangers spontaneously showing up for one of my Arthurian scripts is, like, Woodstock.)

I’ve definitely had better times in front of an audience. One of the listeners dozed off several times during the show, another was doing her level best to give me polite attention, and the third was a theatre critic who alternated between rolling his eyes and loudly sighing.

And, in true opening-night tradition, his review sprung up that night, and wasn’t terribly kind. My impulsive responses are mostly stupid defensive ones (although I’ll confess that the “below-average storyteller” line stung) – I find myself wanting to say things like “Yes, but this is about a style of storytelling that revolves around character revelation as opposed to character transformation” and “Surely Pellinore’s stubborn refusal to learn anything from his experiences is one of the key points” – but all of those statements are foolish, because whether there’s any truth to them or they’re simply rationalizations, they do nothing to increase the audience’s enjoyment of the show.

Still. Been on the receiving end of countless negative reviews. Why does this one get under my skin? Because I like this piece. And I haven’t really invested this much of myself in a project since my last similarly-themed disaster – 2005’s Camelot is Crumbling. Which is one reason I haven’t done a project like this in years.

It’s a labor of love. One question I’ve been getting a lot is whether people think I’m likely to get tired of this show with such a long tour schedule: and I don’t think I will. (I could well grow tired of the lukewarm response, if this is any indication of how audiences are likely to continue. Past experience suggests that this is probable.) I haven’t really allowed myself to sit down with these source texts in a while, and now they’re all I’m reading. I could cheerfully write nothing but Arthurian scripts for the rest of my life (this is my seventh): if I thought an audience might let me get away with it, I’d try to do so.

--

Did the usual booze ‘n’ schmooze following the show, and fell back pretty easily into my more aggressive marketing patterns – and also hooked up with several people I’m likely to see again further along on the tour. (Indianapolis is apparently going to be inundated with out-of-towners this year.) My elevator speech was met with the usual combinations of blank-faced “interesting”s and a few “Wow! That sounds hilarious!”s.

Towards the end of the evening, I was approached by a local storyteller, and pleased to note that we’d both heard of each other’s work: she knew of my history with the Rockstars, and I knew of hers with SpeakeasyDC, which is, as nearly as I can tell, our east-coast doppelganger. I wonder if some kind of collaboration would be possible: must reflect and discuss.

Evening closed with my hosts driving into town after last call, because they are BBE (which stands for Best Billeters Ever. Or possibly Big Breast Expansion. It can be hard to tell out here).

July 6-8: Michigan/Ohio

Soon as I crossed the latest border, I found signs posted every twenty yards – pretty consistently throughout the state – reminding that if I injure a road worker, it will cost me $7500 and 15 years.

Now entering Michigan – birthplace, according to some, of both the modern labor union and the American middle class. Or, as my hosts put it, the miner’s canary of America. Which is a rather ominous analogy, if there’s any accuracy to it.

Rolled into Ann Arbor, and from what little I’ve seen of it it’s the classic university town, all sunshine and red brick. The presence of the college has apparently done much to insulate it from the economic catastrophe afflicting the rest of the state. My sister lives in what appears to be a totally idyllic neighborhood, and I can tell that I’m going to enjoy my time here. It may just be familiarity – one of the advantages of family, after all, is that we all pretty much decided how we were going to feel about each other for the rest of our lives many years ago – but she and her husband have, in some indefinable way, created an environment similar to the one I remember growing up in.

Her husband and I spent much of the evening standing over a barbecue in their backyard, discussing kitschy inventions that could be mass-produced to make us stupid amounts of money. And, really – isn’t that image what the American dream is all about?

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

Being a big geek apparently runs in the family.

I spent much of the day with my ten-month-old nephew, who has the most remarkable attention span I’ve seen in a child that age – staring at new stimuli intently for minutes on end. This may an indication of intelligence. Or stupidity. Time will tell.

My sister had me take him around downtown while she ran into work to take care of some business there. I spent my time walking extremely slowly, constantly checking on him, and eyeing strangers suspiciously. This leads me to believe that I will be one of those obnoxiously controlling, overprotective Chinese fathers.

People kept stopping to talk to us, and I’m not 100% certain whether this was due to the baby or the town – almost certainly both. The town’s the same size as the one I grew up in, only with more ethnic and cultural diversity – I saw three used bookstores in a single city block. I don’t have the faintest idea how a community of this size can support that. (I essentially grew up on the Main Street immortalized by Sinclair Lewis (who, incidentally, is undoubtedly Minnesota’s laureate. Infinitely superior to that hack Fitzgerald (and isn’t this a lot of parentheses?)).) My trip thus far puts me in mind of Goldilocks and the Three Bears – if the farmhouse was too small, and Chicago was too large, this place feels just right. Well, not for any sort of long-term arts career, but it’s lovely to visit.

Spent a lot of time looking over my script, and I found myself (like, I suppose, many who view my scripts) thinking about boredom – particularly following my reflections in Out of Focus. One recurring problem I find in my profession – and it’s a hell of a note for an entertainer – is that large swaths of the population seem to be bored by the things that interest me – just as I’m bored by the things that interest them. (One reason, perhaps, why I’m frequently asked to do more autobiographical work. Which always leads me to think, really? You want to watch me standing onstage just talking about my life? When I can do all this other cool stuff like blather on about medieval manuscripts for an hour?)

I recall an artist’s discussion taking place at the Center for Independent Artists. I’m usually very impatient with these kinds of discussions – I find myself thinking of that anecdote about the centipede, who, when asked how he managed to walk with so many legs, immediately fell over. There’s a part of me that worries that examining the process too closely will somehow destroy my ability to use it.

I do remember one guy – can’t recall his name, but he was a slam poet – who made, I thought, a very apt analogy – that performance is like making love: it’s possible to do it in such a way that you just satisfy your own needs, and it’s possible to do it in such a way that you just satisfy their needs – but everyone’s going to have a lot more fun if you compromise, do a few things you like and a few things they like. It’s about seeking mutual satisfaction.

Which isn’t to say that I haven’t done performances where I felt like I was being gang-raped by the audience.

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

I had a splendid time at all of the other places I visited – but they were alien enough to me that they never felt truly comfortable, and I was ready to hit the road again. This is a first place I’ve been where I really found myself dragging my feet leaving.

My brother-in-law – a Michigan boy who went to school in Minnesota – observes that the key difference between drivers of the two states is that, while Michigan drivers rely on eye contact and constant communication, Minnesota drivers will tend to stare straight ahead, doing their best to ignore the other people on the road. My experience has borne this observation out.

Avoiding toll roads has kept me off of the highways, and led me to note that one of the great plains states looks much the same as the next, and that all of them live up to their collective name. Ohio, in particular, is huge, flat, and led me to carefully evaluate suicide.

Driving through, I find myself thinking about the concept of the heartland. There’s a certain absurdity to trying to extrapolate any meaningful data from such a small sample – I’ve been to Chicago several times, and each time I feel like I find a new face of that city, because there’s easily a dozen different cities within its limits. Everyone I speak to has a different definition, and are intensely defensive of those definitions. The assertion seems to be that you’re not truly Midwestern if you’re not from the proper cultural region, an assertion I find objectionable – much as I object to those who claim I’m not truly Chinese-American because I didn’t grow up in a Chinese community.

But it causes me to reflect on that idea that is, most likely, the unifying theme of all my scripts, and certainly central to this one – that language dictates behavior. Well, indirectly – language dictates perception which dictates behavior. State borders seem arbitrary at times – it seems strange to me to claim that North and South Dakota are culturally distinct, or that north and south California really have much of anything to do with each other – but the creation of a name creates a collective identity. I am a Minnesotan, whether that term has any meaning or not – but the fact that we’ve created that name, that word, has created a shared culture.

Crossed into West Virginia, then rapidly criss-crossed through three states, with all manner of winding cliffside roads. I was concerned about falling asleep at the wheel in Ohio, but at least if I did I wouldn’t end up pulling a Toonces the Driving Cat.

In any case, as soon as I crossed the bridge from Ohio into West Virginia, I looked up – and saw an eagle circling overhead. I am now officially out of the Midwest.

July 4-6: Illinois

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

I’ve ended up driving through about a dozen small Illinois towns as part of my effort to avoid toll roads. Thanks, Tomtom.

Out of Focus
Sunday, July 5th, 2009


I own two of these books. It shouldn't be too difficult to figure out which two.

Whoo, culture shock: leapt from the farmhouse to a meat-market dance club in the largest city in the Midwest. Was introduced to the Berlin Club in Chicago, and didn’t get out until five in the morning. (Five in the morning? Score one for Illinois over Minnesota.)

I’m told that the turnout – which I found overwhelming – was significantly less than usual, most likely due to it being Independence Day. (I actually forgot it was the Fourth – I know, I’m a bad Libertarian – so I was alarmed by the sporadic explosions taking place around me as I drove into the city. Apparently in Chicago, the official fireworks display takes place on the third – meaning that the fourth is devoted to awesomely illegal fireworks displays. We walked down at least one street where vision was significantly obscured by smoke, explosions taking place all around us. I wonder how many war veterans were having terrible, terrible flashbacks.)

The club was definitely one of those environments where the particular combination of chromosomes and gender preferences was not stacked in favor of a heterosexual male. I enjoyed dancing, although the number of wandering Captain McFeelyHands around various regions of my pelvis – steadfastly ignoring whatever timid, Minnesotan signals I was trying to give – cut short the experience a few times. Which led me to start wondering if enjoying myself too much would be sending the wrong signals, and trying to dial it down. And that led me to wonder, huh. Is this what chicks feel like all the time at these things?

I’ve spent a lot of time ridiculing my dad’s inability to focus on anything for any length of time – hustling everyone out to events, then immediately losing interest and hustling everyone out – but I definitely have a streak of it, myself, and I find it extraordinarily difficult to maintain my focus in environments like this. I’m reconsidering my earlier statement about requiring constant stimulation, because that’s exactly what places like this revolve around – but the stimulation is sensual, attempting to drown your consciousness in a way that’s visual, aural, and tactile – and with too much undifferentiated information to process, whole sections of my brain just lose interest and go wandering. (Which is one of the reasons I find myself annoyed by a lot of Bedlam Theatre’s work, but that’s a whole different essay.) Standing in the midst of the pounding music, flashing lights, and wandering hands, I find myself thinking I wonder what the oldest surviving sword is and which society produced it? and Are Superman’s abilities telekinetic or strength-based?

Mostly, though, I feel frustrated – disappointed at my inability to respond appropriately in social situations, and envious of those who can. Everyone around me seems to be having an awesome time – but I find myself thinking, huh. So this is what my dad feels like every time I drag him out to an art museum.

Monday, July 6th, 2009

My first apartment in Minneapolis was located near Dinkytown, next to the entrance to Highway 52. I used to leave my window open, so that I could go to sleep to the sound of traffic whizzing past. The apartment I’m staying at in Chicago is located next to a train station, which means that I get to wake up to the sound of bells and engines and whatnot.

(Why do I fetishize this stuff, anyway? Bears further examination.)

We had plans to hit the town on Sunday, but nothing seemed too terribly inspiring and we were frankly wiped from our evening of partying. While my hostess was at work, I spent the day with her partner, who’s an astonishingly cool lady, dripping with observations about the economic history of Chicago – I almost wish I’d been taking notes.

I definitely encountered an ideological leap at the Berlin Club. The environment doesn’t exactly lend itself to conversation, but there were a few political palavers shouted over the copious background noise, mostly with dudes trying to pick me up. (I am apparently far more attractive to homosexual men than heterosexual women. Le sigh.)

(Another sign that I’m back in the city – being greeted with stunned, open-mouthed shock at mentioning that I wasn’t an Obama supporter. As usual, my irrationality was forgiven once I clarified that I wasn’t a Republican. I decided I probably wouldn’t be speaking too much that evening.)

I assume that a shared political background is part of the unspoken social contract of entering the club, but it’s something I find with most communities –if I grin and say nothing, the assumption is that I share their core beliefs. (And once they’ve been talking for a while, you feel guilty correcting them.) Thus, in what little I could hear over the sound of music, my fellow conversationalists chattered on about the things that, of course, all rational people know: that conservatives are an undifferentiated body of white males who are simultaneously brilliant, conniving manipulators and blithering idiots; that military personnel are knuckle-dragging orangutans; that we require a centralized economy to protect us from the rigors of the free market. Much like the conservative groups I inhabit all assume that I share their homophobia and blind militarism and sexual repression. (Well, okay on that last point, but just because *I’m* hopelessly neurotic about sex doesn’t mean that I think that everyone else needs to be.)

I recall a science-fiction novel I read several years back – it wasn’t terribly well-written, and painfully heavy-handed in places, but it had a fairly interesting background. It details a dystopian America, brought about by a single invention which serves two functions. The first is that it enables people to vote on each individual issue from the privacy of their own homes – and that this anonymity unleashes a collective savagery in the American people. (Thus, perhaps, proving John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.) It replaces public discourse with a kind of unacknowledged mob rule; in other words, it replaces a representative republic with a direct democracy. The other function the invention serves is to allow individuals to control the information that they receive.

Now, what strikes me about the last point -- leaping from rural Wisconsin to Chicago nightlife -- is that this is something that we’ve already achieved. It’s possible to entirely insulate yourself from information that you don’t want to receive, and in fact that’s what most of us already do: conservatives watch Fox News and listen to AM talk radio, while liberals watch CNN and read the New York Times. With the rise of comedy shows and the blogosphere (guilty!), it’s possible to process news *entirely* through the filter of your choice. So it’s no wonder that when we hear anyone speak from outside of our self-created information bubbles, they sound like lunatics to us.

Not that I have a solution – the alternative, I suppose, is information controlled from a centralized source. But the problem with democratizing that is that it hinges on the idea that individuals make good decisions about educating themselves, which is a dubious proposition at best. Either way, it’s definitely a trend that I find troubling.

--

One reason I’m glad to be getting out of Chicago – the traffic. Oy.

July 2-4: Wisconsin

Phil 'n' Max Hit the Road
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

…annnd that title carries an additional meaning, aside from being an incredibly obscure reference to adventure games from the early nineties. The “Max” can only be referring to Maximum Verbosity – and since I’m traveling solo this year, that, I suppose, refers to the audience, crew, and billeters that I meet along the way. It’s been pointed out to me that, despite the fact that I’ve traveled all over the world, I’ve been practically nowhere within the actual country of my birth. Looks like the next couple of months are going to represent my opportunity to remedy that.

To recap: I’m currently on my way to open a brooding military drama in our nation’s capitol. Right now, I’m spending the night on a farm in Wisconsin, courtesy of an old colleague – the woman who played Elspeth in the first production of Libertarian Rage, back in 2006. She has, to my bemusement, swollen into expectant motherhood, greeting me at the door with freshly baked bread.

The last town I passed through on my way here – I didn’t catch the name, but for the first several blocks, each lamppost was decorated with a single American flag, and a banner welcoming me to the home of the world’s largest cheese curds festival. When I mentioned this to my hostess, she asserted that this was, indeed, a major event, which people would travel great distances to experience.

I…can’t imagine cheese curds representing a significant event in my life.

In any case, the place wasn’t hard to find – the GPS system in my car displayed, for several miles, a single, perfectly straight, unbroken road, surrounded by void on either side. As I pulled up – singing along to, appropriately, the soundtrack to Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog – I was greeted by a barking dog and a cat giving me just about the iciest stare I’ve ever received from a mammal. The animals seem to respond to me with about as much enthusiasm as I have to encounter them, and their owner derived visible amusement from my discomfort as she thrust various creatures into my arms.

(I dunno. I know that, statistically, I’m in exponentially more danger living in a city – from ten thousand things, not least the fellow members of my own species – but as placid as any of these various quadrupeds may look, I can’t forget the fact that any given one of them could kill me, like, really easily. And the only reason they don’t is that they think they’re not supposed to.)

(Okay, so not all that different from my own species.)

It’s not like the place is all that isolated – there’s a set of next-door neighbors with seven dogs and a surly teenage boy being yelled at by his mother, perpetually and with great volume. I mean, I’ve *been* to isolated – places like Alice Springs in the Australian Outback, a bubble of civilization surrounded by dry, cracked earth. This is nothing even close to that. But I’m a bundle of anxiety and compulsions – spent several days leading up to my departure in a series of panic attacks, anticipating the various things I’d forget – and metropolitan city living caters to that kind of neurosis. Meanwhile, out here I’m frantic because I can’t pick up a cell phone signal.

Every electoral map of the country tells me that, ideologically, this is the kind of place I should be living, rather than the left-wing population centers I’ve devoted my career to. But while I think I can see the appeal of this kind of life, I’m a city boy at heart. And I can’t imagine living in a place like this.

God of the Gaps
Friday, July 3rd, 2009


I wonder how many households in America have "Raising Dairy Goats" next to "Living Wicca"?

Okay, so I’ll confess that – once the fairly alien experience of waking up to cocks crowing and cattle lowing has worn off – and I’ve shoved enough antihistamines down my throat to keep from choking to death on my own mucous – sitting out here is pretty cool.

And as soon as I wrote that, all seven of the neighbors’ dogs started barking. Awesome.

--

One of the more curious developments of my sister’s cancer is that, when the cancerous bone in her arm was removed, it was replaced with a cadaver’s bone, under the assumption that it would, given time, regenerate. Several years later, she began having complications, and a cursory examination revealed that she did, indeed, have a dead person’s bone rotting away inside of her own flesh.

I still remember, when she came home from the surgery to have it removed, she was carrying a plastic baggie of the items they had used to hold the bones together. As I recall, they consisted entirely of metal hinges, screws – y’know, stuff I would pick up to build props with Ace Hardware.

I don’t really know what I was expecting – some kind of high-tech process involving, I dunno, lasers or something. But a lot of medicine doesn’t rely on much more than basic engineering. And a lot of surgery has more to do with carpentry than science fiction.

--

Oh, that’s right. I loathe insects. I forgot.

--

As my hostess showed me around yesterday, she greeted many of the animals, by name and with considerable affection. On our way back to the house, she casually gestured to a small enclosure and said, “Oh, those are the ones we’re probably going to butcher."

Huh, I thought. So you do distinguish between the ones you develop long-term relationships with and the ones you eat?

That’s the thing about things like, say, freshly-squeezed milk – sure, it’s nice, but I can’t really forget the fact that it just, y’know, came out of something. Which applies to pretty much everything we consume, but it’s harder to pretend otherwise when you encounter the immediate reality of food production.

I guess it’s my own version of the God of the gaps fallacy – I choose to believe that everything I can’t see is governed by some mysterious, almost divine process, whether it's medicine or agriculture. The messy reality is more than I’m comfortable with knowing.

--

Which is partly what was going through my mind when the dog bounded up, eagerly and with tail wagging, with a decaying goat’s spine clutched between its teeth. Awesome.

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

Here I sit again, staring at the single road running past this place. Yesterday, I counted a grand total of six cars driving past, one of which was the neighbors’, and one of which was a school bus dropping off the neighbors’ kid.

In retrospect, this stopover has been exactly what I needed – I spent the days leading up to my departure in a state of pretty much constant anxiety, and the isolation here has enabled me to catch up on a lot of publicity. But while my mother may have grown up in a place like this, I am, as everyone is at great pains to remind me, my father’s son, and I find myself growing restless – I miss the constant stimulation of my usual environment. (Which may be, at least in part, why I chose the manufacture of entertainment as my profession.)

I’m profoundly grateful for my time here – but I’m ready to hit to the road again.

--

Okay, I take back all of my snide remarks about the cheese curds festival, because as nearly as I can tell over half of the towns I’ve driven through have championed some kind of cheese variant as their defining feature. And her I always thought that the depiction of the Wisconsinite obsession with dairy products was a pop-cultural exaggeration.

In Defense of Darkness

Writing the kind of work that I do, I'm frequently accused of being pretentious -- of trying to elevate the significance of my own obsessions by recasting them in the heroic language of the past. (And if that bothers you, boy, are you going to hate this latest show.) That's an accusation that I'm not necessarily prepared to refute -- but even greater than that sin is, perhaps, the period of time that I choose to fixate on -- not the classics of Greece and Rome, nor the enlightenment of the Renaissance -- but rather, on the Dark Ages themselves.

Why, some have speculated, would anyone choose to fixate on those benighted and barbaric times? Particularly when they're surrounded by the ideals of democracy and humanism and all that good stuff? Because, I counter, it's in the Middle Ages that the modern man was born. Current scholarship favors the Renaissance, but I disagree. My reason? Here's, say, nine.

1) The language that you and I speak? That I'm writing in right now, and that you're reading? Medieval. Dating in its earliest form to the Anglo-Saxon invasions of Britain, at which point the island was renamed to Angle-land, or, as we know it today, England -- and its brand-spanking-new language, English.

2) The two largest religions in the world today? One of them -- Islam -- was born in the Middle Ages, when the merchant Mohammed supposedly received a vision from the Archangel Gabriel -- and the other, Christianity, also rose to prominence in this time. They came into conflict in a series of wars known as the Crusades -- memorably evoked (by name!) by President Bush during his tenure. So that animosity and vitriol that fuels most of our current wars and blog posts and whatnot? Born -- naturally -- in the Middle Ages.

3) That middle-class that politicians talk about (and cater to) constantly? And the union system that wields such devastating power of our economy? Can be traced directly back to the rise of guilds of skilled artisans that were emerging as European cities swelled in size.

4) Our entire legal system -- one of common law, with a trial by a jury of peers and founded on the concept of legal precedent, accountable to the state rather than to the church -- we largely have Henry II to thank for, thank you very much.

5) Angsting over your last relationship? We have the Middle Ages to thank for our whole existing concept of courtly and romantic love. The significance of this can't be underestimated. The chivalric code of Lancelot du Lac may seem silly and archaic, but he was a pioneer for the fucked-up relationships that we're struggling through now. The gender roles and combinations may have shifted recently, but the template we still use for relating to each other was born a thousand years ago.

6) Then there's concept of individual liberty, and the limitation of state power. All effectively articulated in the Magna Carta, a medieval document that subjected executive authority to the law. The document's easy to romanticize -- in reality, all it was really doing was taking power from one thug and dividing it among several -- but it started a dialogue, a language, and a system of thought that eventually led to Oliver Cromwell and John Locke and Thomas Jefferson.

7) Maybe this whole conversation seems silly and annoying, and you just want to nip down to your local watering hole for some libation. Beer and wine have been around for nearly as long as our species has -- but the distillation of liquor? Whether you want to order a brandy, scotch, whiskey, vodka, or gin -- all of them were discovered in the Middle Ages. Even if you abandon those and grab a beer -- the whole concept of brewing hops into beer, and thereby being able to control its flavor and consistency, was born then as well. Even the bar you're sitting in exists because of the Saxon alehouses that preceded it.

8) The literacy that enables you to read windy and rambling blog posts -- for that, you can thank yet another medieval invention: the printing press, which for the first time in human history enabled us to disseminate written information widely, without relying on monks copying out every letter by hand. (Oh, by the way, Catholic monasteries? Those centers of learning, which are responsible for the preservation of nearly all of the texts we have both from this period and before? We can thank the Monastic Rule of St. Benedict.)

9) Or the country that you occupy (assuming that the bulk of my readership is in the United States) -- although we have pretty solid evidence that the country had been discovered by both the Chinese and the Icelanders previously, it was the voyage of Columbus that brought our continent to the attention of European civilization.

So why does any of this matter? Because the vast bulk of what you do, think, or feel, can be traced directly back to a single period of time. My own religious faith, political ideology, theatrical profession, racial identity, sexual relationships, and alcoholic fraternity -- all achieved their current form within a single millennia. That's *extraordinary*. And to not be conscious of that fact seems to me to be failing to acknowledge *why* any of us believe the things that we believe, or behave the way that we choose to behave. It is to live in profound ignorance of why we are the way we are.

Which is, perhaps, why I -- throughout my career -- keep coming back to the romances of the medieval writers. I find something modern in Malory's imagination. And we haven't evolved as much as we like to believe that we have.

'Tis the Season. And Speaking of Seasons....

This last season -- that is, the period of time between August of 2007 and August 2008 -- has been one of the most creatively exhausting in recent memory. This is due, no doubt, to the success of two projects that I was involved in: the creation of Descendant of Dragons, my first solo show and to date Maximum Verbosity's only legitimate hit; and the creation of the Rockstar Storytellers, which has helped keep several prominent Fringe artists visible throughout the year.

See, my plan for creating a season has always been simple: I come up with ten thousand ideas, and attempt to mount all of them. Nine hundred and ninety-eight of these ideas fall through the cracks along the way. Thing is, this last season, I had the momentum going to get nearly all of these shows up.

Of these, the two ensemble shows were the most successful: Logorrhea and All Rights Reserved were, I suspect, largely coasting on phenomenal casts and the reputation of my last Fringe outing, and though the latter received an extremely volatile reception from the critics, that didn't seem to prevent audiences from coming and laughing at the jokes.

The two new solo shows -- The Hunting of the Snark and The Secret Book of Jesus -- both flopped rather dramatically. I suspect that this is due to a combination of poorly marketed concepts on my part, and the fact that they were both mounted as part of struggling events (Alice in Biffyland for one and the Spirit in the House Festival for the other.)

Add to the above a remount of Descendant, and the fact that I was doing 2-5 storytelling gigs each month -- and committed to generating new material for all of them -- and it's not hard to see where that exhaustion may have come from. At several points during the year, I had one colleague or another pull me aside and advise me to slow down. While I don't think that I allowed any of the individual shows to suffer from my divided focus -- well, okay, maybe one or two performances were pretty grisly to watch -- marketing certainly took a hit, as did my own mental well-being.

Thing is, I set out to do the same thing this season, only to discover that shows are slipping through the cracks again -- I can't seem to get any of my proposals off the ground, can't seem to get any venues booked. (Well, I suppose "can't" is relative. I was commiserating about this with a colleague over a beer, when he pointedly asked what I've done since the last Fringe. "Hardly anything!" I whined. "Well, yeah, I've performed in every Rockstar show except one, and I've either hosted or featured at every Word Ninjas event, and I did another set for Vilification Tennis, and that new storytelling festival down in Rochester, and, oh yeah, I wrote and performed a new forty-five minute solo show back in October, but I didn't even produce that one..." Yeah, okay, but comparatively I've slowed down, and backsliding is the thing that troubles me.)

But, yeah, the sense that I have -- and particularly after our last Fringe show -- is that the Descendant magic has worn off. It's not hard to see why -- many of the above shows had people in our audience who discovered Maximum Verbosity through the '07 Fringe, and were startled to find that my real passions tend toward much more stylized text -- expressionism and slapstick, horror and fantasy -- rather than the hand-wringing, soul-baring autobiography that made me a flavor of the month. Which may explain why, to my surprise, my reaction to that magic wearing off isn't dismay so much as relief. There's a sense in which I feel like I've rediscovered my freedom to work on the projects that interest me, rather than investing so much in high-stakes productions.

Only to discover, of course, that the problem with freedom -- heh. And how many of my blog entries could begin with that phrase -- the problem with freedom is the fact that it's paralyzing. With a stack of unproduced scripts in front of me -- and a dream project that I'm finally summing up the courage to tackle -- I've been struggling with one of the most frustrating periods of writer's block that I can recall. Or, to phrase it more succinctly, the problem is that now that I've given myself the time to create everything, I find that I can't create anything.

That's been turning around in the past few weeks, as I'm getting closer to pinning down a show in March. Of course, anything can happen up until the contract gets signed, which is why I won't go into more detail about it. And, of course, it's an ape-stupid project -- there's almost no time for pre-production, an abbreviated rehearsal process, no budget and a sprawling ensemble to manage, if I ever manage to get auditions pinned down.

And I'm loving it. For the first time since the Fringe closed, I'm springing out of bed in the morning. My productivity has tripled. Space to create is all well and good in theory, but apparently I thrive on chaos, on taking disparate pieces of information and slotting them into the illusion of order. Whether or not all the elements for getting this show to the stage pull together, I've gotten my kick in the head to get moving again.

See, the problem -- and this, of course, has always been a key problem for me -- is balance. Extremes are easy. Moderation requires discipline.

Still, I've got plenty to keep me occupied in the meantime. I finally got around to writing up a set of bylaws and executive positions for the Rockstars, after which I was promptly elected Chair. And if you're looking for something to do the day following Christmas -- and who isn't? -- we've got a new holiday show, "Jingle Bell Rockstars," 10:30pm at the Minneapolis Theatre Garage, immediately following Joe Scrimshaw's "Fat Man Crying." Hell, see both.

And stay tuned.

All Rights Reserved: Reviews and Reflections

So I've been avoiding the DNC coverage as much as possible. But I do a weekly trivia night at my local bar, and I plunked myself down in front of a television broadcasting the Olympics. After about five minutes, the bartender stepped in front of me and switched the channel to CNN. So, uh, there I was.

I've talked about Obama's campaign before. In terms of policy, he's not fundamentally different from most other Democrats; I wasn't really interested in the product in the many other forms in which it was offered to me, and I'm not really interested in it now. But the aspect that I've always struggled with, regarding his campaign, isn't policy, but rhetoric. It's easy to grasp why he's been so fervently embraced: he's managed to seize hold of the language of liberalism, and make it soar. If the philosophy is one that you love, then his speeches must be electrifying. But if you struggle with the underlying assumptions, the linguistic hoops he leaps are rough going.

Former Virginia governor Mark Warner was the first to speak. He expressed the usual shame and outrage, that so much is being invested in our military that could be spent on domestic programs. Erm. What about those of us who regard investment in a vast state-controlled infrastructure to be more monstrous and irresponsible than investment in national defense? For those of us who disapprove of centralizing authority within a Federal government, there isn't a place in either party. It's a game of false opposites: you can choose *where* you want that power to be centralized, but *decentralizing* power simply isn't on the menu. Laying out arguments in this format *creates* the positions that are socially acceptable to adopt.

He closed out by quoting Thomas Jefferson: "I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past." And I'm grinding my teeth, wondering what Jefferson would have made of this whole campaign. This is the same Jefferson who claimed that "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants," right? A claim that it's very hard to imagine this campaign making. Simply quoting a statement by one of the founding fathers (the author of the Declaration of Independence, no less!), outside of the context of his entire ideology, may not be actively deceptive -- but it's certainly misleading.

The next speaker goes on to state words to the effect of "I'm not going to mention how John McCain is simply carrying on the policies of the Bush administration" -- you just fucking did! The hell? It's one of the most absurd permutations of politically correct speech -- hearing people say things like "I'm not a racist, but there's something I just don't trust about black people." Yes! Yes you are a racist! Throwing a polite caveat in front of the statement doesn't alter that fact! And claiming that you're not going to stoop to the level of saying something, while in the process of saying it -- gah.

Hillary Clinton assumes the stage, and the camera spends half of its reaction shots on her husband. She wields the same gut-wrenching, manipulative human-interest stories about those suffering under our current health care system -- channeling it into applause for a system of universal health care, without any examination of either the underlying problems of our system or any of the countless alternative solutions -- then draws further applause for championing the nineteenth amendment(!).

I don't mean to single out Democrats here (although they're an easier target for me lately) -- the Republicans are, if anything, far *worse* in the language they use. Even alternative parties have been struggling to ape them, consciously or otherwise, under the unspoken assumption that by imitating their most repulsive qualities they can achieve their success.

I can't even blame the politicians making these utterances, either. They say what they need to in order to generate the response they require. They're fundamentally no different from so many of my colleagues, self-styled political comics who use the same words and phrases to trigger the appropriate response, regardless of whether or not they have a script with anything churning beneath that. We're all in the same business, after all -- show business -- and we use *exactly* the same collection of tools to survive.

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I've been putting off posting my thoughts about the Minnesota Fringe run of the show -- I have, well, too many, and too many that it's going to take me a while to sort through. I will say that we achieved a very mixed response, and that I received more hostility in response to this script than any show that I've produced since 2005 ("Camelot is Crumbling").

I've had several people corner me, arguing about the use of language in the script -- whether or not it's responsible or irresponsible, and laying out careful arguments about why or why not. That's fantastic, and exactly the kind of dialogue I was hoping the script would produce. On the other hand, the vast bulk of responses I've received has been along the lines of the following:

"Some sketches hit the mark and others just seemed offensive -- and I am not easily offended. Since I think that is part of the intent of the show, they succeed."

"The gratuitous use of racial and anti-gay epithets added nothing to the show."

"My father and I went into this show with high hopes. This would be a show that would inform us, that would give us a new point of view of the world. All though we did leave with a new point of view then the one we had when we entered. The way we were brought there left little to be desired.

Rudeness. Not understanding that we live in a day where words are more then words."

Putting aside for the moment the question of whether or not it's appropriate to use a comedy show as an introduction to the entire philosophy of libertarianism -- I don't know that I accept "rudeness" as a legitimate complaint, in a show whose primary thesis is that all kinds of monstrosities can be couched within polite language.

These reviews aren't upsetting so much as frustrating -- because I simply have no idea what I could have done differently; I don't know how I could have written this script in a way that would have made them happier. I don't know what the phrase "Words are more than words" means. The "use of racial and anti-gay epithets" was -- discussed. At extreme length. Within the text itself! Irresponsible? Perhaps. Hurtful? Possibly. But gratuitous? I don't accept -- the use of language is absolutely essential to the point being made by the text.

What could I have done? To not use the language -- in a show that is devoted, specifically, to examining the use of language in a political arena -- seems profoundly hypocritical to me. I worried that the script was too preachy, too obvious, wearing its agenda on its sleeve. And what troubles me about these reviews isn't that they disliked the show, or that they disagreed with the underlying points -- it's that they don't seem to be aware of what the underlying points are. And as a writer, I have to regard that as my failure: but I'm at a loss as to what I could have done differently.

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And as a writer, watching the DNC -- it's exactly the same arguments being played out, exactly the same rhetoric that I can't stand, exactly the same rhetoric that the script is trying to pull to pieces.

I dunno. A lot of this script emerged from the frustration of sitting through so many Bush-bashing political comedies, and feeling so intensely isolated; of looking around me at all of the people laughing, and wishing that I could join in. So I wrote a script that I was hoping could be an olive branch between us -- "See? We're not so different after all! We all want the same things! We all have the same enemies! All we're fighting over is language!"

But I suspect now that I was wrong. Maybe we don't have so much in common. And we are different. Maybe I just plain don't have anything to say to the left, and maybe they just don't have anything to say to me.

But I'll confess -- working on political comedy always leaves me in a pretty bleak place. And watching yet another election process leaves me in a bleaker one.