Listening, this time, to a bunch of Tolkien short stories that I picked up in Kansas City. Slightly dramatized but mostly quite faithful: "Farmer Giles of Ham" was in particular quite entertaining. (Y'know, Tolkien never gets props for his comic chops. The books are full of rustic comedy, but that never seems to make it into the various adaptations of his stuff.) I also found "Leaf by Niggle" to be extraordinarily moving, and hearing a superbly-done, and superbly-performed fantasy story about stuff that, y'know, really matters, was a nice reminder of why I try to do the stuff that I do.
I stopped in Des Moines to visit an old friend. We dined that evening at the Hessenhaus, a German pub/restaurant whose back wall featured the Iowa Polka Music Hall of Fame. I am prepared to declare this is as my cultural achievement in Iowa.
ME: Y'know, I'm really interested in Fallout 3 now that I've been to DC.
LIZ: Why?
ME: Well, because the whole thing is set in a replica of the city.
LIZ: That's cool.
ME: Yeah, it's supposed to really accurate. Only, y'know, with mutants and robbers crawling through the ruins.
(pause)
ME: Okay, maybe not all that different.
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My friend took me out to a tea shop in Des Moines. She sat herself down across from me, and said, "Okay. Want some unsolicited marketing advice?"
Sure.
So she pulls out a sketch pad, and begins doodling. And here's something that struck me -- there's a lot of people who have been very aggressively giving me marketing advice, but none of their suggestions have anything to do with the work that I'm doing. This is the first time I really sat down with someone who, I think, actually gets the concept of the show -- and from only a few brief conversations, at that. (Well, excluding the many years we spent discussing this stuff when we were teenagers. Which, come to think of it, may be more to the point.)
But she's always had a flair for visual designs, and was effectively able to produce some really iconic images. And while I know that current Fringe wisdom suggests human face and human body for publicity -- this show is all about icons. And about smashing icons together.
The key image of the show, I think, is that of Pellinore and the Questing Beast -- the noble knight, pursuing the chimerical monster across the desert. "What does it mean?" she asks -- and, well, it's not ever exactly explained in the original texts. Some scholars think that the sound of beasts that emerge from its belly indicates the corruption and civil strife that will tear Camelot apart from the inside. And Pellinore's assertion that it will continue to be pursued by his children is either hopeful or ominous, depending on how you choose to read that. But there's something compelling in that unquestioning, self-destructive pursuit of an unattainable goal. There's a parallel to art, to the act of creation, that a number of audience members of picked up on, though nobody seems to have yet grabbed hold of what it may evoke politically.
Or maybe it doesn't mean anything at all. Maybe there is no meaning, and this simply happens because this is what happens in Arthur's realm.
Some have asked me to be more specific -- to be honest, I'm worried about being obnoxiously heavy-handed. I'm not really interested in allegory -- that childish, simple-minded form of storytelling in which each image has a clear one-to-one parallel will something else. Rather, I'm interested in what Tolkien described as applicability -- the development of a richly detailed, internally consistent world, within which many parallels can be found.
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EVERYONE ELSE: Don't worry. You've got a following in Minneapolis! You're sure to a get a crowd there.
ME: Awesome! Thanks! So when are you coming to the show?
EVERYONE ELSE: ...
Hopped in my car. Can't express enough how gratifying it was to be able to reach up and plug "home" into my GPS.
I'm reassured by everyone that I'll have a strong audience showing in Minnesota. And I certainly have for the past two years. But that's not something I ever take for granted: I've learned the hard way that an audience won't necessarily follow you from one project to the next. Particularly when you genre-hop as heavily as I do.
In any case, since I'll be back in my hometown, posts here will be on the back-burner until I hit the road again. If you're interested in my adventures at the Minnesota Fringe, I advise you all to check out the blog I write for the Twin Cities Daily Planet at this link.
There’s an anecdote about the aging Groucho Marx – he was hired to entertain in a hospital – but when he arrived, he realized that the people there didn’t want to be told jokes, they wanted somebody to talk to. So he went from bedside to bedside, and proceeded to chat up each person he met. He would initiate every conversation by asking where the patient was from – and then proceed to talk about local gossip, places to eat, places to hang out. And the staff was astonished to realize that he’d been to nearly every town, from his years of traveling on the vaudeville circuit.
I wouldn’t mind being like that someday.
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I ended up, at the last minute and with no rehearsal, being the stage manager for Kirsten and Dean’s show. (One of the great pleasures of this stretch of the tour – I’m here with some of my favorite artists, well, ever.)
It was all routines I’d seen before, usually dozens of times (I’ve probably seen their material more than anyone other than, say, them). Since I was backstage, though, I was seeing them perform from the side. They have a series of sketches they do moving back-and-forth behind flats, and it’s startling to see just how hard they work.
(They did have one of those rare, bizarrely unresponsive crowds – not hostile, seemed to be enjoying it, but dead silent through the entirety of the show. I mean, who doesn’t laugh at the Star Wars parody? When Dean ignites that lightsaber, and makes that “come-get-some” gesture? I get that comedy is subjective, but Jesus.)
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Also saw The Miniature Housewife – review available at Womb with a View.
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My audience tonight was almost entirely made up of other artists. So the downside is, I didn’t really make any money; the upside is that it was one of the more fun performances.
Talked to Dean and Kirsten afterwards. Kirsten offered a few helpful suggestions – including the observation that Pellinore would not refer to a superior officer in such a familiar manner, even in casual company. (Rewrites ahoy.) Dean enjoyed it, with the caveat of being a bit overwhelmed by the wordstorming (new word? New word. Gonna start using it all the time now). Being the sweet guy that he is, he attempted to couch this is in friendly language: “I mean, we’re mimes, so we want less language. But I bet there’s a lot of people saying that they want more language,” at which point I burst out laughing. I have never, in the period of time I’ve been doing this, had an audience walk away from one of my scripts claiming that they want more language. I see no danger of this occurring.
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Went out with Mike Shaeffer afterwards, ending up in, of all places, the Lava Room – the same dive we ended up in at the end of last year’s tour. That makes this our official hangout, since we’ve been there exactly twice in two years. (Although it apparently turns weird on a Friday night, since we spent much of the evening being harassed by what appears to be Ron Kovic’s identical twin.)
Friday, July 24th, 2009
Spent most of the day being completely zapped – just staring into space for big chunks of it, not getting work done. Mentally, in addition to fatigue and my other physical issues. I’m a classic introvert, and often find that I need periods of isolation to recharge – the kind of hyperactive extroversion that touring requires is incredibly draining to me.
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I think I’m going to give a rest to talking about specific information regarding my shows in this space for now, and just let this be a tour diary – at least, until I have something positive to say.
I would like to say – I recall a quote by Federico Fellini, in which he claims that every artist tells the story that they love – and that therefore Steven Spielberg is the luckiest artist in the world, because so many people love the thing that he loves. I’ve always been very resistant to this – I find it hard to accept – I can’t be this unique, surely? Can there really be so few that love the things that I love? Trying to woo an audience often feels like being an unrequited suitor – and the less they respond, the more I start to feel like a stalker.
One of the revolutionary aspects of chivalry is the fact that it’s a system of courtship that revolves, at least nominally, around self-perfection – around making oneself sufficiently worthy to achieve the object of one’s desire. (This simultaneously elevates the object of your affection – since you need to be prepared to affect a kind of transformation to obtain them – and denigrates them, since it reduces them to a kind of object to be won solely through your own action.) Pellinore even cites this as one of his reasons for joining the military in the play – “If I’m lucky, I’ll meet a good woman, and if I do, I want to be worthy of her, God willing.” But what this ultimately means is that, if your love is not returned, it’s not simply bad luck – but a personal failure, an imperfection of character.
Whether or not any of that’s true – unrequited love sucks. Regardless of whether the “romance” in question is referring to courtship or heroic narrative.
Saturday, July 25th, 2009
I arrived before the volunteers did for my show today, and so ended up guiding audience to the show that was taking place above mine. Not that I minded doing it, but it's kind of a kick in the nuts to be directing audience to somebody else's play.
In the case of one family, there was a little girl whose eyes widened as soon as she saw the sword. "What show are you doing?" I told her, and she replied, "Cool!" It's a shame she won't be able to come see it.
But I've been thinking about the excitement on her face at the prospect of knights and heroes and war and all that stuff. There's got to be a way to tap into that. Maybe it's time for me to do another kid's show -- I haven't done one for a while. I have a great love for the adventure/fantasy genre -- perhaps I've just been targeting the wrong demographic.
In my audience tonight was a mother who had been dragged by her teenage son. Both loved it. I assume he was drawn by either the knights or the soldiers -- I wish I'd had the presence of mind to ask which it was.
--
I stage-managed Dean's show again. My favorite piece of his is called Jackass the Mime -- a dark little routine that opens with him playing a street mime who nobody laughs at. It becomes, ah, unpleasantly ironic without audience response. And ends up feeling a bit reminiscent of the whole trip.
Spent my morning working, running off of a sudden burst of inspiration -- pinning down outlines and notes for three potential, and potentially marketable, Fringe shows. Bursts like this for me are rare but intensely gratifying. (The point at which I note that most amateur writers fall down when making the leap to professional is that they assume that writing is a constant burst of inspiration, and become discouraged when it isn't.)
The word inspiration comes from the Latin spirare, meaning, "to breathe." In many of the early texts, Merlin is described as physically inhaling a kind of foreign entity before prophesying. I can see the parallel to the act of creation: when it works, you really feel like you're riding, not guiding, the process.
--
Hit up the after-party, where I ended up spending a good chunk of it talking to Kirsten and Dean. She recently lent me a copy of C.S. Lewis' Reflections on the Psalms. In his introduction, he simply states that he's not going to be attempting to convince anyone of anything: his readers either need to already buy into the basic premise of what he's saying or need to be able to suspend their disbelief.
There's something gratifying about being able to chew over ideas with people with at least a somewhat shared ideology. Otherwise, everything becomes apologetics: if I want to talk about faith or conservatism, I have to spend a huge chunk of time onstage convincing the audience that these ideas have some value worth considering. It's a real struggle to achieve any kind of depth of thought while still arguing over the initial principles.
Woke up this morning to a deluge of well-wishing and birthday messages on my Facebook. What the fuck has happened to my life? Since when do I have so many cool people in it?
Had a nice, low-key day for the most part – stayed in for the morning and got some work done, treated myself to a Chinese meal in the afternoon. Actually got to meet my billeter for the first time – he’s been out of town – shortly before taking off for my opening night.
--
…annnd we’re not going to be discussing how my opening night went.
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Went to Fringe Central afterwards, where I ended up talking with a Vietnam medic turned salesman turned voice actor. One more for the menagerie that is Fringe.
(Incidentally – one of the great, surprising pleasures of storytelling for me has been the fact that when you stand onstage discussing a topic, I’ve found that there’s a huge number of people who are eager to return the favor. When I did Descendant, I heard similar tales of angst recounted from people of every ethnicity. So one of the cool things about this show is that I’ve been getting talked to by veterans lately – who feel compelled to give me war stories, boot camp stories, et cetera.)
(And not intending any disrespect to those many who enjoyed Descendant – but it’s grown hard, over the past two years, for me not to resent its success. (There’s a reason my last short story was titled “In the Shadow of the Dragon.”) I always assumed that once I had a really successful show, it would finally give me the credibility to work on those projects I was truly enthusiastic about. This…hasn’t proven to be the case. In many respects, it’s turned out to be quite the opposite.)
(Which leads me to remark on the vast amounts of unsolicited marketing advice that a struggling show draws:
THEM: Maybe the problem is…
ME: Yes, I know. People tune out as soon as they hear “King Arthur.” Nobody goes to see drama at the Fringe. The language is too dense for live performance.
THEM: But if you knew all those things going in, then you don’t get to complain when ow ow god and jesus you just rammed a fork into my eye socket)
I mainly swung by the central area to pimp my show at their open-mic night, which they run every evening. Things were late getting started – when I asked why, they indicated it was because their host for the evening hadn’t shown up. I jokingly said, “Hey, I’ll do it. I’ve hosted stuff.”
There was much muttering back-and-forth, and then I found myself onstage with a mic in my hand. Which is how I ended up being the master of ceremonies for the evening.
Turned out to be a lot of fun – small crowd, but very responsive. It struck me, hitting the ground running, that I’ve come a long way in my hosting from my first attempt – a religious storytelling cabaret, for which I wrote massive amounts of material, panicked, tried to perform all of it, and ended up dragging the evening onwards into oblivion. (I once again heartily apologize to anyone who had to witness this.)
But the opportunities I’ve had like this – the previews, the open-mics, et cetera – have reinforced for me something that I’ve badly, badly needed on this trip – that, yes. I do know how to have fun with an audience. I do know how to work a crowd. So it would really be nice to, y’know, have one occasionally.
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
Got up, stayed in, worked. My billeter proceeded to cook an amazing meal for me.
Was then picked up by Kirsten and Dean to check out the Narnia exhibit at Union Station. Kirsten and I are both huge C.S. Lewis fans, so that giant banner out front wasn’t something we could pass up.
So the exhibit is mostly a tribute to the Disney movies, although in the foyer they have a small room dedicated to Lewis himself – including his writing desk and several of his books. I pointed at a picture of the Inklings – “Those dudes are the reason that I’m a writer,” I said to Dean.
We were then ushered into a darkened room, where we waited for several minutes while the music swelled and the wardrobe opened. I found this irritatingly cute. (Although I was amused by the over-enthusiastic volunteers – “It sure is amazing that guy could have had such a good imagination so long ago, huh?” Actual quote.)
Exhibit was definitely geared toward kids (it boasts of teaching “The Science of Narnia.” Science? Seriously? That’s the tack we’re going to be taking with this?) – with clumsy lead-ins like “When the White Witch takes hold of Narnia, she causes the climate to change. Here’s an essay on climate change!”
I was sort of fascinated with all the behind-the-scenes movie stuff, though (I had issues with the movies, but they’re almost entirely, and entirely unsurprisingly, text-based) – the costumes, props, and set pieces – and realizing that, damn. In order to build the world, they really had to, y’know, build the world. The attention to detail – such as the carvings around the edge of Miraz’ shield – is astonishing; minute aspects of this production were labored over, aspects that the audience would never see on film.
It’s bizarre to see these images come to life, and I wonder what Lewis would have made of it. It’s strange to see something that you’ve imagined realized in three dimensions. Even in my own small case – I’ve had two comedians perform parodies of my writing style now, and two visual artists create their interpretations of my work, not to mention those few times I’ve been fortunate enough to hand over my scripts to directors who aren’t, y’know, me – and it’s always surreal to see that filtered through somebody else’s intellect. Tolkien was openly hostile to many of the attempts to adapt his work in his lifetime, and I’m quite confident that he’d hate the latest film trilogy. But there’s still an undeniable thrill to seeing their creations up and moving about.
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I spent most of the evening seeing plays: for anyone who’s interested in my thoughts on those, they are, of course, archived over at Womb with a View.
A lot of people expressed surprise that I was returning to Kansas City, since our numbers last year weren’t great and we had a few stressful experiences along the way. But, hey – it’s close and it’s cheap, so it’s relatively low-risk. More to the point, it’s a young Fringe (at five years it’s heading out of toddlerhood in people years; I guess that means that the Minnesota Fringe is well into its adolescence, and starting to notice boys. And girls. Because the MN Fringe is totally bi), and there’s a certain excitement to getting to jump on board a Festival as it’s just starting to achieve wider recognition. Plus, our numbers did start to pick up towards the end of our 2008 run, so I’m curious to see if I can now continue to build on that.
Arrived at my billeter’s place, a stunningly schwank apartment that is clean. Very, very clean. Like, Felix Unger clean. I, on the other hand, live in a tepid pool of my own filth. Spent some time exploring the neighborhood. I’m currently located in the Westport district, a prosperous area bearing signs boasting “Real people. Real places. Real life.” (Which suggests the kind of cultural elitism that drives me up the wall – so¸ your implied assertion is that the people who live on the other side of town from you aren’t real, yes?) So it’s a nice enough area, but it’s not the Kansas City I remember.
Then I drove down to the Fringe in the Crossroads theatre district. Crumbling warehouses, wailing sirens – there’s the Kansas City I remember.
(So one thing my hosts in both Chicago and DC asserted – independently of each other – is the role that artists in play in transforming the landscape of a city. Their assertion runs thusly:
1)area becomes economically depressed;
2)artists move in (presumably because the spaces are
a.cheap, and
b.because only artists are dumb enough to invest so much into operating their respective businesses at a severe loss);
3)gay couples move in nearby; and
4)neighborhood becomes gentrified.
If this assertion is true, then it begs the question of whether or not artists are a symptom or a cause of gentrification. It also suggests that Detroit is about to become the arts capitol of the nation.)
Was too early to check in at Fringe Central, so decided to swing by my venue to take a look. Coincidentally happened to arrive at the same time as my venue tech, which granted me a handshake, some face time, and a chance to look around before they set up.
Headed on over to check in, and was pleased to shake hands with and be introduced to the various staff members I’ve corresponding with online. Ended up hanging out for about twenty minutes, telling jokes and sharing stories of the various Fringes that we’d all worked. When I glanced back into the main area, I was grabbed by the arm and promptly given a tour of the building.
Is this what I’ve been missing? Midwestern hospitality? I feel like I’ve made more connections here in a half hour than I did in a week in DC.
Opened up a special weekend edition of the Kansas City Star, since they had an article about the Fringe in there. Guess what their leading image was? That’s right: a half-page splash of my publicity photo, with a caption plugging the show.
I have no idea whether or not that’s going to translate into audience numbers: but either way, this place feels right.
Sunday, July 19th, 2009
Had my tech rehearsal early this morning. My tech guy’s been super-cool and laid-back about everything.
Lighting is pretty limited – pretty much on and off – which I’m used to on the Fringe circuit. But surprised, this time around, that I find myself missing the cues – the subtle changes in mood, the abrupt blackouts, et cetera – which interests me because it indicates a pretty dramatic turnaround for me – that I now find myself thinking in terms of lighting design and stage pictures, as opposed to solely in text.
Went exploring the Westport area. I enjoyed the Kansas City ribs on my last visit here, but not enough to actively seek them out – so I stopped in a place called the Flea Market, which is, appropriately enough, a bar set in a flea market. They advertised something that had apparently been voted “Best Burger in KC” for two years running. They did not disappoint. You know it’s a good meal when you have to wash the grease off your hands afterwards.
Also swung by a used bookstore. They had an audio adaptation of several short stories by Tolkien (including my single favorite short story of all time, “Leaf By Niggle”), as well as a number of books by Geoffrey Ashe. He’s that rare combination of rigorous scholarship (at least, he usually indicates how much of what he’s saying is derived from solid detective work and how much is speculation) and raw enthusiasm – he’s the medievalist’s answer to Carl Sagan in that respect, I suppose. I picked up two on the cheap, since I’ve nearly burned through what I brought with me. (Just finished Robert de Boron, and am slowly working my way through an abridgement of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. One of my goals on this trip has been to read all of those remaining Grail texts that I haven’t read yet – I note that most of those are extremely pious in nature, which I found kind of a turn-off at the point in my life when I was first discovering them. I’ve since developed a fascination for medieval theology, so I’m having all kinds of fun digging into them now. Next up: Perlesvaus.)
I’ve seen two mentions of this show in the press, describing this as an attempt to examine the Gulf War through the lens of Arthurian legend. Erm, well, yes – you sort of end up doing that by default in the course of writing it, and there’s a level on which the action of the play can be read as a kind of protracted metaphor for American foreign policy – but my original intention is in fact the reverse: to find a new way of looking at these old stories, and to see if they still have anything to offer us. But I’m struck by the assumption: is there something in my marketing material to suggest that the Gulf War is the point? (Granted, I’ve been pushing that angle, since I’ve learned that a mass audience just doesn’t give a fuck about King Arthur. I have since learned that a mass audience doesn’t give a fuck about the Gulf War.) Or is the assumption that modern political commentary is simply more interesting than the old adventure stories?
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Checked out the opening-night party, which was already exponentially better than last year – I remember being here in 2008, where most of the after-parties consisted of the Maximum Verbosity crew, 3 Sticks, the staff, and a few stragglers hunched over their beer in the corner. And maybe my expectations have been adjusted, but this place felt hoppin’.
(The T-shirts – although I haven’t yet sold any – have already done their job in terms of building audience interest – I’ve had several people come up to me, peering at it, reading it aloud, offering their various jokes and commentary, and lending me an excellent segue into plugging my show.)
It’s been said that every profession has their own unique nightmares. I know that’s certainly the case in theatre, as most actors will nod in recognition when you mention “actors’ nightmares” – which usually consist of being onstage, unrehearsed, without being able to recall a single line of dialogue.
Now, I used to have these all the time. Only they stopped a few years ago, when I switched from primarily performing the words of others to primarily performing my own. Now?
Now I have writers’ nightmares, in which I find myself onstage, struggling to perform a show that I haven’t written yet. I usually have a few notes scribbled down, consisting of a few vague plot ideas and a couple of one-liners, which I bumble through before a stony-faced crowd.
I wonder what’s going on in my subconscious. And if this is the reason that I suck at improv.
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I spent most of the day in working. I’m relieved to have finally caught up on my publicity for Boulder and Indianapolis. Still to go: Melbourne. Plus the shows I’m still getting set up for October and December.
Arguably the single most frustrating aspect of doing such a wide tour is the amount of energy I have to spend catching up on publicity – I’d rather be able to focus on the show itself once I hit the road. Oh, well. Tradeoffs in all things.
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Hit up – and performed at – the previews tonight. The quality of the material seems to be generally high (although I was, once again, the sole performer doing drama).
The event was hosted by a pair of performers doing schtick as outrageous characters. They were both entertaining and did an excellent job, though I maintain my usual dislike for “wacky” MCs: my sense is that the job of a good host is to keep the evening clipping along sharply, not to bring the show to a halt every five minutes.
Classic “straight-man funny-man” stuff, anyway, with a heavy emphasis on Don-Rickles style race-baiting. Managed to subtly keep the audience in the “it’s okay, we’re joking, we’re all just playing around” space without drifting too far into audience discomfort. He found one Hispanic audience member who cheerfully played along: when asked “What do you do for a living?” he replied, without a missing a beat, “draw on social security.”
(I was particularly impressed with the fact that the comic immediately identified me as half-Asian; most people who register anything at all peer at me for a moment and make several wrong guesses.)
Along those lines, the standout act for me was definitely by an Indian performer – the KC Fringe’s first international artist. It was a kind of dance/storytelling performance, a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi, about the moral dilemmas faced by a hunter trying to kill. The performance ended up being part dance, part pantomime, as he shifts into the various characters and animals; while the bulk of his movements are designed to clearly indicate character and action to us, these are punctuated by several that are purely expressionistic. I even found something Chaplinesque in his ability to rapidly switch back and forth between intensity and whimsy.
(Although the content of the piece raised many of the issues I have with Hindu/Buddhist/vegetarian points of view – which is that they tend to sidestep the whole point that we are killing machines. We’re built for it; two hundred thousand years of evolution have made us into the most effective killers in the history of the planet. It’s arguable that our most significant environmental problems emerge from the fact that we’re just too damn good at it.)
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Part way through the evening, I felt someone tugging roughly at the back of my waistband. Kirsten spent several minutes fussing over my uniform. “You need a belt,” she said, frowning. “And your boots aren’t regulation. Pellinore looks like a sloppy soldier. He’d get his ass beat.”
Kirsten – of the Kirsten & Dean comedy duo – is also Air Force (although she recently switched to the Navy), and was one of my early consultants – I sent her an early draft of the script, to see if she could help correct any of the glaring inaccuracies. I’m amused to note that she’s more distressed by what I’m wearing than by what I’m saying.
I’ve had a few veterans see the show by now, and for the most part they tend to either avoid me or take off immediately afterwards, which I’m not sure how to interpret. I’d be fascinated to hear what they make of this nonsense, despite the fact that what I’m doing is far from documentary – the Iraq of the story is a fantastic landscape, after all, having about as much to do with the real Iraq as say, Thomas Malory’s Britain had to do with the real island.
In any case, she expressed her desire to hit up an army surplus store and get me whipped into shape. We’ll see how that works out.
Mike Shaeffer and I found ourselves stranded and without car. Fringe being what it is, we simply trusted fate to take us by the hand. A dude offered to give us a ride:
ME: What’s your name?
HIM: Kirk.
ME: Oh! Like the captain I’m sure that’s the first time you’ve ever heard that I’m so sorry.
HIM: Yeah. Let me just pull up my starship.
A few minutes later, a limo pulled up.
MIKE: (joking) Well, looks like our ride is here, guys!
(Kirk gets out.)
ME: Holy shit.
It turns out that the dude has a private limo that he just picked up on Craigslist. He’s been toying with the idea of throwing in some Guitar Hero 3 and turning it into a gamer-specific commercial vehicle. Or possibly fixing it up and selling it. But he may just hang onto it because it’s, y’know, a fucking limo.
ME: So are you from Kansas City?
HIM: Not originally, but I’ve lived here for a while now. I moved around a lot growing up – this is the first place that really felt like home.
ME: What do you like about it?
HIM: I don’t know. It’s a way more cosmopolitan city than most people think.
ME: Yeah. This is my second time here, and I feel like I’m seeing a completely different place.
And thus we spent the evening with Kirk, an Air Force brat turned rainforest explorer. He took us out to an Irish pub and regaled us with stories of avoiding deadfalls. It’s fascinating to see that there’s still people doing the Richard Francis Burton thing – traveling the world and accumulating bizarre experiences.
And then I find myself thinking, holy shit, am I one of those people? I don’t feel like it – I feel like an uptight small-town Midwestern boy. But it’s one thing that always baffled me about the success of Descendant of Dragons, when people expressed fascination with my experiences – wow, they didn’t feel magical at the time. How did I feel performing a pig sacrifice? Well, I was hot and sweaty and annoyed for the bulk of it. In retrospect it’s totally heady stuff (and yes, I’m working on some more autobiographical shows down the line, get off my tits), but at the time it’s just one more day in front of you.
Glanced up at the clock on our way out of the pub: after midnight, making it officially the twenty-first. Travel stories, a limo ride, and a pint of Guinness. I’ve had worse starts to a birthday.
…and a long trip it’s been, too – not least having to once again traverse the purgatorial wasteland that is Ohio.
Pulling out of Virginia, I found myself reflecting on my Fringe experience. Frustrating, yes, but not just because I lost a few hundred dollars – I’m confident that I’ll be able to earn it back in Minnesota – but because I’m really not sure what else I could have done. I was never able to find the mechanism to let me into the crowd. And though I didn’t have to cancel a show – to date Maximum Verbosity has only ever cancelled once – it was a close thing.
I am, perversely, relieved to see the other touring artists struggling. The question of whether or not this particular show is a failure will have to wait until further down the line. (Although I note, with a grimace, that my brilliant marketing strategy consisted of taking one genre that everybody hates – Arthurian legend – and stapling it to another genre that everybody hates – military drama.)
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There is, apparently, a Green Lantern Road located somewhere in Virginia. This knowledge makes me happy, and I choose to share it with you.
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Stopped for gas part way through Ohio, and stopped into the station to see if they had any CDs for sale (seeing as I’ve burned through The Hobbit, A Wizard of Earthsea, two separate recordings of Le Morte D’Arthur, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Jarhead, and a solid chunk of Dante’s Divine Comedy). They did – two shelves full of country music and Hannah Montana CDs. (I wonder how many of the latter are being picked up by truckers on their way through?) Audiobooks consisted of memoirs by Ollie North and John McCain.
This was in a gas station attached to a Country Pride restaurant. Driving away, I passed two more restaurants with “country” in the title. Then I drove past three dudes on horseback. Man, I assumed I’d have to be at least two states south to start encountering this stuff.
Rifled through my pile of CDs, and contented myself with some bardic tales from the Mabinogion. Listening to them, I found myself reflecting on the tradition of bard and skald – on the fact that there were once storytellers who traveled from place to place, being offered food and lodging in exchange for both their performances – tales of wonder – and their gossip about the bizarre fashions and customs of the various lands that they’d traveled through. Which really isn’t all that different from what the artists on the Fringe circuit do now, I suppose, or the vaudeville entertainers who preceded us. The model’s slightly different, due to the fact that we rely more on a money economy than a barter economy, but the principle is basically the same.
In one respect, that kind of continuity is comforting, with all of the doomsayers who are constantly clamoring that “theatre is dying” – no, it’s not; even if the economy completely tanks, there’ll still be plenty of people struggling to do this for no kind of reward at all. It’s one of the peculiarities of our species: that we have this compulsion to write poems or sing songs or tell jokes.
(Of course, theatre as a viable economic specialization may well be dying, so that’s cold comfort for those of us trying to make this our profession.)
Also found myself listening to the Rockstar CDs (fifteen bucks for a two-CD set! How are people not buying these?) and, aside from experiencing my usual amazement at the fact that I get to work with these people, was particularly impressed, this time around, with Allegra’s piece, and particularly the craftsmanship of it – I see her perform frequently enough that I’ve come to take that for granted. It’s one of her usual meandering road-trip stories, beginning with her cousin’s eulogy and drifting through seemingly unrelated episodes before elegantly tying them back together. Her theme this time? About how the journey is of at least equal importance to the destination.
When I first started planning this trip, I had a number of people express concern, and not without reason – I don’t have a great driving record (God, I fit every awful Asian stereotype on that account), I get panic attacks in traffic, I’m notoriously absent-minded – but even now I find myself regretting the fact that I’ll be flying the second half of this trip. The talk of the romance of the open road isn’t all bullshit, and while many of the trade-offs are painful – the complete lack of economic stability, my poor earning power, the complete accountability for my actions, the dependence on so many factors beyond my control – still. I’m not punching in somewhere at nine o’clock. I don’t have a foreman standing over me. And while it produces a lot of misery, it’s worth remembering that sometimes – liberty can be sweet.
Along the way, I eventually stopped at a station with a slightly wider range of options. Rifling through their bargain bin, I walked out with a collection of old bluegrass hits and – wince – Andrew Lloyd Weber. (I know, I know, I just lost any Fringe cred I might have had, but I need to stay awake, and that means something I can sing along to, and thanks to my sisters I know the lyrics to damn near every Weber song ever written.)
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Stopped at a Long John Silver’s in Missouri. I haven’t eaten there since I was a kid. I’m not a huge fan of fish normally, but I can’t get enough of the stuff if it’s batter-fried. (Does anyone know if there’s one in Minnesota?)
While I was dining, I noticed two sets of teenage couples enter separately, order their food, sit down, and start holding hands. Oh, I thought, isn’t that just precious. Then I realized that they weren’t sharing a gesture of affection: they were saying grace. I’m back in the Bible Belt.
The omnipresence of Greco-Roman architecture, not to mention the anthropomorphosis of various political ideals (the Ladies Justice and Liberty are only two of among several), can’t help but put me in mind of classical temples. So if the Supreme Court building is our temple to Themis; the efficient angles of the Pentagon, our temple to Ares; Fort Fringe, with its grungy warehouses promising cheap beer, naked flesh, and spiritual revelation, our temple to Dionysos (my patron); and the White House, our seat of executive authority, the seat of almighty Jupiter; then the National Archives and Library of Congress can represent only our temple to Athena, goddess of wisdom, civilization, and accumulated knowledge.
I spent most of the afternoon at the Archives – I knew if I was going to do at least one tourist-y thing while I was in town, this was it, because I’m super-geeky for this kind of thing. And it’s all here, from General Washington’s wartime correspondence (scribbled onto sheets of parchment) to the audio recordings of the Nixon administration’s backroom dealings. The documents here not only store history, but have, at various points, made history as well. And for me – as someone who’s spent several years traveling the world, tracking down decaying documents that have been carefully concealed from a government actively seeking out and destroying them – the existence of a place that not only accumulates information, but makes it available for public dissemination – well. The significance is not lost on me. Somewhere among those piles of sheets are my parents’ immigration papers, and the patents for my father’s inventions. The history of my family – in this country, at least – is documented.
Saved the main event for last, the Rotunda, which houses the Charters of Freedom – the three founding documents of the United States. Forget the White House tours, man – this is what I came to see. Since it is the main event – most tourists just come to see those and skip the rest of the exhibits – it was a large line, with about a forty-five minute wait. It was all restless and antsy and sweaty and lots of people complaining – judging by what I overheard, the vast majority of people didn’t know what it was they were seeing. (No, I don’t mean they didn’t appreciate it, I mean they didn’t know what they were in line for. Or where they were. Which leads me to wonder what they were doing there – do tourists just naturally gravitate towards crowds?)
(I also overheard one child behind me, exasperated with her enthusiastic father’s explanations, exclaim “I hate history!” Heh. Wait until you’ve lived long enough to see some of it happen, kid. It gets real interesting real fast.)
So I was expecting to be underwhelmed, but still got choked up when I saw the documents and the signatures and everything. Because I’m a big dork like that.
(Also – since the line is so large, they display a number of other related documents, from an early copy of the Magna Carta onwards. The exhibit then concludes with – a copy of the Charter of the United Nations? Which seemed like an incredibly weird choice to me. The implication seems to be that the existence of the UN represents the natural evolution of what the other documents began. A hypothetical person very similar to me might be inclined to argue that it represents a completely opposing impulse from the one that produced the Declaration of Independence. But he’s not here, so.)
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Les asked me if I’d be comfortable hitting up a gay bar he found, to promote our respective shows. Comfortable? I work in theatre. If I’m not comfortable, this is a piss-poor time to realize it.
Monday nights, as part of a desperate effort to play to stereotype, constitute their “show-tunes evenings,” where patrons may request numbers from various movie musicals to be broadcast on a variety of screens set up around the bar. (Which leaves me wondering, why the close association between theatre and gay culture? I mean, I get that it’s self-perpetuating now, but where did it originate?) (And also sheepishly acknowledging that I actually know the lyrics to most of these songs. I grew up as a little brother to three unrelenting musical-theatre machines in the eighties, so.)
Flyering was moderately successful, in that the people expressed tremendous enthusiasm and interest, as well as a lot of “Oh, that Fringe Festival thing – is that going on now?” I guess I just always assumed that the gay community knew whenever a major theatre event was taking place – like, there’s a pink telephone that goes off in a wealthy socialite’s mansion, a la the 1960’s Batman.
(Also successful in that I was kissed on the throat by either a woman or a reasonably convincing tranny. Lights were low, so it’s anybody’s game at this point, I suppose.)
But this is the first trace of nightlife I’ve discovered in DC – a community of people who are relaxed and playful and welcoming. (As opposed to the occasional stiffness of the Fringe after-parties.) If only there was some way to throw the two groups into a large hadron collider – then you’d have a Festival. (Or possibly the destruction of the Earth. From my perspective, either could arguably be an improvement.)
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Les and I then proceeded to discover exactly why the nightlife dries up so quickly in the District. We decided that we’d be responsible and take off early, so we left at around 11:30pm to hop on the metro. We then spent a frantic period of time attempting to decipher the various garbled, automated voices telling us what transfers to take, and ended up stranded in a metro station as the last train pulled away.
OPERATOR: We’re closing up now. You guys have to leave.
ME: But we aren’t staying anywhere near here.
OPERATOR: Wow. Sounds like you’ve got yourself a real problem there.
(pause)
OPERATOR: Whelp, gotta go!
We emerged from the station to find ourselves in the middle of nowhere – no cars, no cabs, nothing. I called my billeters, who agreed to come out and pick us up, because they are BBE (again, Best Billeters Ever. Or quite possibly Before the Battle of Endor.)
Another one of the weird aspects of this city – since significantly more people work here than live here, everything tends to shut down at, like, ten o’clock. This is a really weird place.
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009
Walking around the National Mall, wandering through various gardens and displays and munching on food obtained from the street vendors, I’m struck by the observation – particularly in light of the fact that all of the tourist attractions are in such a compressed space, and that nearly everything is free and easily accessible to the public (with the notable exception of security checkpoints in damn near every building) – that this whole area resembles one gigantic museum. I imagine it would be possible to wander through here for days without seeing everything.
Spent much of the afternoon at the Smithsonian Museum of American History. I’m actually enjoying being able to sightsee under my own power – I can skip over the exhibits which hold little interest for me and pore over others, without worrying about someone impatiently tugging on my sleeve.
One floor was divided by quotations from the Preamble to the Constitution: for example, the section “Provide For the Common Defense” was devoted to military history. That was an interesting section, detailing surviving pieces from the American Revolution through the current occupation of Iraq. And one thing that struck me was how our perception of these wars has changed over time, in direct proportion with media access to them. Images from the Civil War included uniforms and swords – for Vietnam, you could walk through a simulated POW camp. Yikes. And it’s an exponential leap over the past fifty years or so: after all, Vietnam was our first televised war; the Persian Gulf, our first which broadcast live from a war zone; and the current invasion/occupation, the first to rely heavily on journalists embedded directly into fighting units.
But one weird side effect of this is the fact that we have a bizarrely sanitized view of wars preceding those, as though there were something far more noble and civilized about someone being hacked into pieces with a saber. We still have this perception of WWII as a clean, efficient engagement, when it was no different from any other conflict: rife with poor decisions and bureaucratic stupidity. The only difference is that now, we see those taking place in real time.
Okay, so, one thing that irritates me about all this: I’ve opposed this particular engagement since its inception – regarded it as a tactical error of nightmarish proportions. (This is, in fact, one of the very few political points that has remained consistent through my near-total ideological transformation.) So while I’m gratified to see that resistance to the occupation has grown, I find myself growing increasingly irritated with the manner in which the American public flipped its original position: that we sent an armed force overseas in a surge of emotion, but promptly lost the will to fight once we realized that it was going to be messy. The fundamental question, surely, is whether or not the war is just, no? If it is, then we persevere regardless of the cost; if it’s not, then we get the hell out. But the revelation that war can in fact be long, and difficult, and painful, and expensive, seemed to come as a total shock to that not-insignificant portion of population that was cheering as tanks rolled into Baghdad. We were perfectly okay with initiating a conflict until we realized – gasp! – that some of our people might actually get hurt.
I still oppose the occupation, and support withdrawal. But as usual, I find it a lot easier to support a cause when I don’t have to be around other people who do, too.
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Hit up a storytelling open-mic with Les that evening, partly to publicize and partly to see how they do things in my particular medium out here. (Actually, it was more like a storytelling cabaret – they rely so heavily on such a wide variety of content restrictions that I’m actively uncomfortable with referring to it as an open-mic.) They had a decent house of extraordinarily well-dressed individuals (I mean, seriously. They make the Rockstar audience look practically blue-collar). I ordered a double-shot of Jameson and promptly choked on it when I was charged as much as I would normally pay for a bottle of the stuff.
The tellers were all more-or-less solid, with a supremely warm and appreciative audience. Afterwards, while the audience presumably waited for their limos to come and pick them up, I went out with some of the core group.
There’s obviously an art to the aggression of east-coast conversation that utterly escapes me – I made several attempts to enter the conversation, failed, and gave up after about ten minutes, resolving to just absorb as much information as I could. It’s fascinating to observe the mechanisms of another group of this nature, although the dogmatism that many such groups share continues to rub me the wrong way. (There were the usual screeds against tellers who utilize music stands; against tellers who work in genres other than autobiography; against tellers to swear too much. Urgh. Surely effectiveness is the key question? No?)
We left at around eleven, since it’s DC, and it’s apparently the law. (“You look so gloomy!” expressed the host with some concern as I got up. Ah. I see we haven’t met.)
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009
Last day in DC, so I decided to round it off with a trip to the Library of Congress, since there’s few things I love more than poring over documents.
Was particularly impressed with Thomas Jefferson’s personal library, which forms the initial core of the existing collection. It’s only a third of its original size – the rest were destroyed in fire – and it’s still more than worthy of note – his vast supply of medical textbooks, Islamic theology, political science, Ovid, Homer, Virgil – I found myself standing there and thinking, whoa. There were pieces of all of these books floating around inside this guy’s head. He really was a classic polymath. And in that respect, the perfect dude to have around when trying to figure out how to build a new system of government from the ground up. We were lucky to have him.
There’s a certain trend among bibliophiles to be extremely resistant to new forms of technology. This isn’t something that I share – I love the internet, love the blogosphere (obviously), love electronic books like the Amazon Kindle (though I can’t afford them, myself). I don’t fetishize paper, but the words they contain, and those can be transmitted through a variety of different mediums. (Another reason I found myself in the theatrical profession.)
But – and this thought struck me as I was looking at a set of notes for a speech, scribbled down by Benjamin Franklin – the problem posed by electronic media is its impermanence. (Okay, yes, technically all media are impermanent – paper will sooner or later crumble away into nothing, as well, and most of it has.) We still have much of the correspondence between the founding fathers as they were composing the foundational documents of our nation, and that’s incredibly valuable information to be preserved. But e-mails and Twittering and text messages vanish away into the ether and are gone forever. (In most cases, thankfully. Lord knows, I have plenty of drunken messages I’m glad will never again see the light of day.)
Maybe it’s just another unfortunate side effect of prosperity – that whatever we have in abundance, we cease to value. And this is the Information Age. We’re so bombarded by stimuli that we cease to trust or value any of it.
No, stop. This is a bigger thought than a blog entry. I have to think about it more.
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Climbed up top to look down at the view of the central library, with the various researchers at work. It’s an impressive sight – a large, circular hall, with books and books and shelves and books radiating outwards from the center; out into the various hallways and side rooms beyond it; out into the other buildings surrounding this one. Somewhere, among all of those texts, are neatly filed (I wince at the thought) several of my earliest scripts, since part of the copywriting process is sending texts to be filed away here. I wonder how many of the other fumbling, broken attempts of other struggling writers are housed in those corridors. This is the single largest library in the world; the single largest collection of books. This is our Library of Alexandria, our record of the achievements of our people. And like the Library of Alexandria, war and flame could do away with it all forever.
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Swung by the beer tent before my final show – not so much for a marketing push (since I’ve basically given up on that at this point) as to take one last look around. I was surprised to discover that the place was hopping, more so in the middle of the week than it had been over the weekend. Moreover, I received several friendly greetings and even sat down and managed to have a few amiable palavers with people I’d met. So it seems that there is some success, as far as community-building goes; it’s just a much longer, slower process, for whatever reason.
Not that that translates into audience numbers – I got to close out my show with a grand total of four in the audience, which is as large as an audience as I’ve achieved out here. Nobody from the gay bar; nobody from the storytelling evening; none of the dozens of dozens of patrons I’ve handed out cards to and fired lame jokes at.
But it was all right – well, not all right, but it was for that night, at least – because the show was fun. There may have only been four people, but hey – at least half of the audience with me, chuckling at the various jokes and attentive throughout. If I’ve gotten nothing else out of this, it’s a hell of a tighter show. And a resolve to bring my A-game to each and every Festival down the line from here.
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My trip in Washington, DC, ended exactly the way that every good party does; with everyone else asleep in their beds, and two guys polishing off a bottle of good Irish whiskey into the wee hours of the night, talking shit about nothing important, nothing in particular. Because I have BBE.
Which can, well and truly, stand for only one thing: the Best. Billeters. Ever.
Woke up to discover that I have once again sunburned all of my exposed flesh. And, once again, this has taken place during a show where I am exposing much of said flesh.
Headed on down early to check out a series of previews going on at the beer tent – I’m doing one myself tomorrow, and I wanted to get a sense of the crowd/venue. It was initially discouraging, going from one staff member to another, none of whom had heard of it. I finally went to Fort Fringe and asked someone there, who looked at me in confusion and promptly disappeared for five minutes before returning with the information.
Watched a few previews. These could all be fine shows – but I’ll most likely never know, since I barely heard a word of what was said. Took several notes. I’m pretty sure I can handle this performance-wise – I have a lot of experience with this kind of venue – but I’m not sure what piece to do. As I’ve discovered working my material at various open-mic events in the Twin Cities, this show doesn’t excerpt well. Something strongly visual would be nice, but the densely-composed prose of the various pieces and prophecies are difficult enough to follow while in context, let alone outside of it. Must think on it.
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Four people in the audience tonight – this was likely due to the fact that I was scheduled against one of the Fringe’s after-parties. The band was playing in the venue immediately adjacent to mine, and started playing about halfway through the show. I spent a good chunk of it trying to shout my dialogue over their musical stylings. I’ve had better times.
I was approached afterwards by some dude from Mississippi, who asked me if I was from Louisiana. I’ll take this as a compliment – one of the great tests of an accent is whether or not you can fool the locals.
(I’ve also been asked, more than once, if I’m a Gulf War veteran. Er, no – particularly in light of the fact that I would have been, what, eight during Operation Desert Storm? I saw it on TV, though. That’s almost as good.)
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Hung out late flyering the crowd, then spent about a half hour trying to find a cab to take me back to my billeters’ place. There were plenty to choose from, but none that would take me where I was trying to go – mainly because, while I had the address, I’m not a local, don’t know the neighborhood, and couldn’t direct them. (Er, if a cab won’t take out-of-towners to places they don’t know, doesn’t that kind of defeat much of the purpose of a cab service?)
In any case, finally hit up a bunch of locals who gave me a few numbers to call. No answer at the first one, but the second was more successful. When the cab showed up, the guy still didn’t know what the place was, but this time I refused to get out until he pulled a map out of his trunk and found it. (Spent about five dollars doing so, but at that point? Well worth it.)
Saturday, July 11th, 2009
Had two people in my audience today. Sucktitude.
I guess at this point I’m trying to regard my work here as a series of (ludicrously expensive) dress rehearsals. And the material is tightening up. I looked up during the Merlin scene to see half of my audience – well, one woman – sitting with a big goofy smile plastered across her face. And suddenly it hit me that, yeah. This scene is fun. That’s why I like this character. Most of Merlin’s lines are plucked directly out of Geoffrey and Malory, and they have a playfulness to them that’s still kind of irresistible.
And the scene between him and Pellinore is really charming – one of those classic, bizarre relationships that form between two people who have absolutely nothing in common. It’s a light comedy scene, and it can be played as such. Lord knows, the show badly needs it.
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Dear Minnesota Fringe Festival:
Thank you for teaching me how to work an outdoor venue.
Sincerely, Me.
I have a lot of experience doing street theatre. I have a lot of experience working bars. Both paid off at my preview. I ran up, snapped off a few quick jokes, and dived into the middle of a scene.
I chose the battle between Pellinore and Arthur. It has some physicality to it, is one of the sequences that I perform off-script, and is one that, given the nature of the preview, can possibly be played as a pulse-pounding action scene.
And I discovered that, hey. It’s not that it can be played that way – it should be played that way. It’s two guys beating the hell out of each other in the middle of the desert for no good god damn reason – it brutal and senseless and awesome. I’ve been trying to play it with the same ponderous, affected delivery of the prophecies, and that’s a mistake.
In any case, it’s not like this was an amazing or life-changing event or anything – but it was fun. I was up there, rocketing through the scene, working the crowd, and they were with me. And it reinforced for me that this piece can be really, really fun with a crowd to bounce it off of.
It’s a shame that none of them will be coming to see the show. I wish I understood why.
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ME: I saw a show yesterday, and the woman doing it seemed shocked that I was there. What’s up with that? Don’t the artists see each other’s shows here?
LES: I have my usual rule about seeing other artist’s shows: if they don’t see mine, I don’t see theirs.
ME: Huh. I usually do the passive-aggressive Midwestern thing, where I go to their shows and then they feel guilty and have to see mine.
LES: (rolling his eyes) Honey, I’m from L.A. We don’t do guilt.
So the after-parties have been consistently thinning out at eleven. In many respects, this feels like the Bizarro Fringe – audiences don’t hang out late; locals don’t go to see the out-of-towners; patrons are unusually resistant to postcards; participants don’t talk to each other.
The last point is particularly weird. I do what I usually do at Fringes – walk up to either individuals or groups, jump into their conversations, start joking around with them – and they either just stare at me or ignore me. This may be tied to the fact that nobody seems to really be drinking, either. (At three dollars a pop for a PBR at the beer tent! They’re practically giving this stuff away!) I don’t know if this just an aspect of Midwestern beer culture that doesn't extend out this far, but I feel like I’m having an extraordinarily difficult time connecting with people. At any other Festival, after the first two days I’d have a crew of people I was looking forward to every night. Out here, I work the crowd for about fifteen minutes then end up sitting by myself until I go home. Bizarro.
Which isn’t a knock on the administration – far from it. The staff seems to be aware of this stuff and working hard to build an accessible Fringe culture – they’ve set up the beer tent (which very few people use), space for audience reviews online (which nobody writes on) – I don’t know what it takes to connect with this crowd.
I’m frustrated about my lack of audience numbers, but somewhat relieved to see that it seems to be across-the-board for out-of-towners (i.e. it’s not just me). I keep wracking my brain to think of what I could have done differently. I sent out press releases (snail- and e-mail) several weeks in advance; contacted countless special interest groups (everyone from the SCA to the local Republican Party); and spent every night flyering crowds. At any other Festival, I’d be selling respectably at this point. But I just feel so exhausted; I’ve been pouring out an incredible amount of energy and getting nothing in return.
Sunday, July 12th, 2009
Went to explore the National Mall with Les – he was pretty excited about approaching the White House, but I could never quite lose track of the fact that we were approaching one of the most secure buildings on the planet. Nobody approaches that structure without being closely watched, and I wonder if somewhere our identifications are being matched up to a set of profiles:
WEAKNESSES TO BE EXPLOITED IN HAND-TO-HAND COMBAT: cheap whiskey and self-loathing
ETHNICITY: possible Chinese sympathies
PERIL: yellow
LES: Look! There’s people just hanging out on the front lawn! Michelle said this was going to be “The People’s White House.”
ME: (snorting) Right. And just how far do you think I’d get if I jumped the barricade and bolted for the front doors?
(pause)
ME: I’m the reason they have security measures, aren’t I?
I am super-skeptical of the “People’s White House” thing, though. To the best of my knowledge, the last time anybody really took a populist approach to that building was during the impromptu kegger following Andrew Jackson’s inauguration. Which arguably did more damage to it than the War of 1812.
(Okay, so I’m an American history geek.)
Walking around, I’m struck by the odd fact that while in terms of population this is a huge city, in terms of geography it’s not much more than a small town: most everything seems to be within walking distance of each other, and I’m learning my way around fairly quickly.
--
Spent a chunk of the day handing out postcards. Over the years, I’ve come to regard this as an interesting improvisational exercise: I see people walking towards me, and have to assimilate as much information as quickly as possible (what are they wearing? What are they saying? What are they looking at?) and incorporate it into a one-line marketing segue. (If I don’t come up with something in time, I have my usual repertory of lame jokes to fall back on.)
I may have delivered my worst marketing line yet, though:
HER: Oh, I wanted to see this one.
HIM: Yeah, but look – it’s sold out.
ME: Hey! You know what’s not going to be sold out? (whipping out my postcard) This show!
I’ve been encountering a lot of resistance to my usual flyering schtick here – people really seem to be working to avoid me. I get a few laughs and friendly conversations out of it, but a much greater proportion than usual of people wrinkling up their noses and giving me the vibe of “Oh…is this going to be good?”
I don’t know. It’s Fringe! Why do you care if it’s going to be good or not?
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Hit my fourth performance tonight, with a grand total of one – yes, one – person in the audience. This entailed the usual weirdness of a sparsely-attended storytelling show – do I just stare at him the whole time? Do I avoid looking at him?
So, any hope of turning this around has pretty much evaporated. That makes this Festival – with the sole exception of my mime shows – the worst-attended experience of my career. Yes, that includes when I was just starting out. Yes, that includes the Spirit in the House Festival. Yes, that includes my other out-of-town performances. So, am I coming back to this one? Oy! Expensive lesson learned.
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.
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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.
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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).
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.
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.
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One reason I’m glad to be getting out of Chicago – the traffic. Oy.
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.
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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.
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."
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.
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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.
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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.
Well, uh, let's see...I may very well be the world's only practicing non-Catholic, in that I attend mass weekly, but reject many of the core dogma of the church, do not accept the rite of Communion, and haven't been to confession since I was a teenager. I could probably create a clever rationalization for that, but it's mainly due to moral cowardice. I'm a capital-L Libertarian and serious enough about it that I've actually done a fair amount of writing and speaking on the subject.
What else? I'm a decent playwright with the bad reviews to prove it; I'm half-Chinese, half-white; I'm a high-school dropout with a GED and yes, I'm happy with that decision; and I have an autonomic disorder which severely limits my activity, although I train hard and possess a remarkable degree of mobility, considering. How's that to start with?
