Maximum Verbosity

Camelot interview

2011-08-11T08:52:00.000-07:00

I recently answered a number of questions via e-mail for Sarah Wash (who went on to write an extremely flattering reflection on the show for Minnesota Playlist). With responses for the show ranging from enthusiasm to bafflement, I thought a more detailed exegesis might be of interest. Copied below, and spoilers ahoy.

1. I saw in a couple of places that Camelot is Crumbling is part of a trilogy--one for which you did a lot of background research. What did you research? And what can you tell me about the third show in the trilogy? Has it been written yet? How does it complete the picture?

Ha -- not exactly a trilogy (though I'd be curious to know where you read that). I see it as an ongoing play cycle, something akin (in style if not necessarily in quality) to Shakespeare's history plays, insofar as each one of the stories is self-contained, but placed in sequence they detail longer character arcs. (I'm actually quite wary of advertising the fact that I visualize a sequence of plays, since I fear that that might alienate audiences from wanting to see them individually.)

"Research" also feels a bit grandiose, for an activity that I do largely for pleasure -- the plays are a by-product of a lifelong love of medieval romances, rather than choosing to read the romances solely to inform the plays. This show in particular draws heavily (word-for-word in places) on the last book of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, a fifteenth-century epic novel written by a soldier in captivity. The book's notable in particular, I think, for painting an incredibly psychologically complex portrait of Lancelot.

I visualize Camelot is Crumbling as the final play in the cycle. I think that it speaks for itself, but it may be of some interest to note that it's heavily cut down for Fringe -- in the full draft, there's a third storyline revolving around Percival, tying the action back to The Rise of General Arthur (which largely features the exploits of his father, Pellinore). Light and darkness is a major recurring theme throughout the cycle, as well, and Percival is noted for being the knight that "pierces through the middle." Again, no idea how interested anyone might be in that bit of trivia, but there it is.

2. I'm not sure whether or not I was reading into things or not, but I sensed that there was some intense personal significance for you in writing about these issues--something that came through particularly in some of the things Mordred said and did. Can you tell me anything about the life experiences or personal reflections that led you to create this show?

I'm extremely wary of attempts to draw connections between a play and the playwright's personal life -- and in many respects I think that the playwright is potentially the worst person to draw those connections -- but I've commented that I think that Camelot is my most autobiographical show (and that's including my autobiographical shows). It's the one that's most intimately concerned with the theological issues that preoccupy me. It's interesting that you saw the connection with Mordred, because I find myself identifying more closely with Lancelot -- particularly with his kind of destructive, all-or-nothing stubbornness. I have a tendency to latch onto extremes, and to struggle with the idea of compromise -- certainly not on the nation-shattering level that he does, but it's a recurring problem for me. Moderation requires discipline, and in that respect the two of us are profoundly immature, undisciplined men.

Much of Mordred's dialogue was written over a decade ago -- heavily, heavily rewritten in that time, but I see him as expressing the frustrations of a younger man, whereas Lancelot is dealing with some seriously grown-up problems. The place I still connect with Mordred is in his irrationally anti-authoritarian streak, his desire to lash out against anyone in a position of power, justly or unjustly. It's that impulse to self-destruct, and to take out everything in range. There's a line of his that I cut from the play (but included in the trailer): "Destroying Camelot is only action that could have any meaning." I've been asked why he does what he does, and I think a lot of it is simply that the destruction of Camelot is a big red button in front of him that he's not supposed to push. And, yeah, there's definitely periods of my life where I identify with that.

3. What is the significance of the symmetrical, side-by-side staging (other than the content and the symmetry between the two characters)?

I think you've largely answered your own question here, but to expand on the idea a bit: the play largely revolves around comparing and contrasting the two men, the white knight and the dark knight. Philosophically, they both form their position from the same premise -- the absence of God, or an objective moral reality (and this is probably the respect in which I've drifted the farthest from the romances -- Lancelot is traditionally quite pious, for all his failings). Mordred uses this as a rationalization to indulge his impulses, whereas Lancelot views this as necessitating an even higher moral standard (although he, ultimately, struggles with that conclusion as well). The irony is that both paths (Mordred's destructive nature, Lancelot's unbending principles) lead them to the same place -- the crumbling of Camelot.

Moderation's a major theme of the Camelot cycle. Once Lancelot swears himself to an absolute, he's to some degree abandoned his own freedom, rendering his own behavior both predictable and easy to manipulate.

4. What do you hope your audience gets out of being a part of this experience?

Oh, man -- on the most basic level, I hope they have a good time. I think the two characters are relating exciting, compelling stories, and if that's not coming across that's my failure. Beyond that, I hope that people identify with the characters and the problems they're struggling with. One thing that fascinates me is that people tend to walk away from the show picking a side -- they're either Lancelot people or Mordred people.

The most gratifying thing I hear, and I've heard it a couple of times, is that it leads people back to Malory. He's a better writer than I am, which is why so much of his writing shows up in the show.

INTERMITTENT VEGETATIVE STATE

2011-06-18T19:52:00.000-07:00

WHAT'S UP?

On Saturday, July 16th, we're holding the fourth annual Wordstock fundraiser for Maximum Verbosity. Among other goals, this evening is intended to be the place where we announce our upcoming season.

Which renders it necessary for me to make the announcement that, for better or worse, there will be no season nine of Maximum Verbosity. We have a number of remaining projects through September; but this is, for all practical purposes, the end of MV as a year-round production company.

This is, really, the only critically important piece of information in this post. The rest, regarding my long, whiny, personal thoughts and feelings, can be encountered below.

WHY?

Really, there's dozens of reasons why this course of action is necessary. I've spent the past couple of weeks talking with friends and colleagues about what the best course of action for us is; but ultimately, this has been just to cultivate the illusion of control. The money situation is bad, and we can't continue because of that.

Much of this last season has revolved around attempting to find a way to expand our operations. I began, over a year ago, by sitting down and speaking with a number of producers who have managed to make the transition from Fringe-level theatre to profitable year-round production. (Most of whom, I note with some frustration, have been around for a substantially shorter period of time than we have.) I walked away with the sense that what is necessary for us to hit the next level is, well, press. MV is well-known within the arts community, if only by reputation -- but a production company can't be sustained by other artists. The key to hitting mainstream audiences is press, and the key to getting press is presenting yourself in such a way that press knows how to acknowledge you.

Season eight of MV revolved around presenting ourselves in such a way that press would be able to acknowledge us as a legitimate theatre company. This, frankly, failed.

(The other factor, of course, is time. We've existed for more than long enough to establish ourselves -- fuck, eight years is ripe old age for a theatre company -- but we would have to continue producing at the level we have for the past year, and we've been hemorrhaging money at a rate that makes continued production at that level impossible.)

WHA...WHY?

When I step back and examine it, it seems to me to be a classical lateral-thinking problem.

POINT: We can't go forwards. The amount of financial investment to sustain producing shows at the level we have been -- well, the money simply isn't there anymore.

POINT: We can't go backwards. At least, I can't; at least, not psychologically. I can't go back to producing one-man shows on Monday nights in obscure venues to single-digit audiences. Yes, they're profitable, insofar as they don't really cost anything -- but they don't produce anything meaningful, either.

As nearly as I can tell, there's three worthwhile reasons to produce a show:

1) It will make you money.

2) You will be able to pay it forwards to other projects.

3) It will bring you pleasure.

For the past several years, I've been producing projects that

1) Have lost money.

2) Have done nothing in terms of growing audience.

3) Have brought me far more frustration that pleasure.

...which raises the question, why make the extraordinary effort of time, money, and energy that production requires? I'm certainly not afraid of work; but I've been having to step back and ask myself, what is this working towards?

As any viewer of Dr. Who will tell you, when you have an unclimbable cliff before you, and an unbeatable monster behind you, the correct answer is to...go sideways.

FOUR EMOTIONS

So what are my feelings, regarding this course of events? I can narrow them down to four:

SHAME

...I certainly feel a great deal of shame; as much as, I would say, should be reasonably felt by the creator of a failed business.

I don't regard the failure as total. Certainly, I've managed to keep a theatrical production company afloat, almost entirely on its own profits, for eight years, during an economic recession. I've written and performed dozens of plays, hundreds of stories, and thousands of jokes. I am pleased by this feat.

By the same token, it *is* failure -- insofar as I established a goal for myself, and was unable to meet that goal. Moreover, failed to meet that goal through poor decision-making, and stubbornness. (I consider one of my great failures my struggle to accurately distinguish stubbornness from integrity. They're not the same thing.)

FRUSTRATION

Oddly, the great frustration I feel is the number of plot threads and character arcs that I've left hanging.

I love Pissing on the Great Wall as much as any show I've ever done -- but it was a fairly dark note to leave the Descendant saga on. I'm frustrated that we never got to explore Loki's final acts of co(s)mic despair. I may never forgive myself for leaving Penner in such a vile, awful place -- and, worst of all, I never managed to fully bring Percival into the presence of the Grail.

I had, in my mind, a plan to resolve many of these over the course of the next two years -- to take those characters, literally, through heaven and hell; to explore the landscapes of other worlds; to romp through time-traveling farces and, well, all kinds of wild adventures.

It may feel vaguely schizophrenic, to experience a sense of obligation to fictional constructs -- certainly, I feel intensely embarrassed even raising the idea around my colleagues -- but I'm the only creator they have, so. And I endeavor to care as much for them as, I hope, my own Creator does for me.

RELIEF

When I first began to entertain the idea of not producing a season nine, I was startled to discover a sense of relief.

I had an encounter with a member of the crew of PvtH -- who finally cornered me, and said that it was simply unreasonable for me to try to fill as many roles as I was. I don't know that I would have acknowledged the idea, if it wasn't coming from someone that I trusted -- but the fact is, I *had* been beating myself up for not keeping up with the number of responsibilities I'd assumed -- and *not* beating myself up for taking that number of responsibilities in the first place.

I sat down a few days ago, and actually figured out that I haven't been producing less than three shows at a time since June of 2009. That's not counting any of my acting or storytelling gigs, of which I've usually had a few going on at a time as well.

And, well...I've always been intensely resistant to the claim that I've been dropping balls, but how could I not have been? On the one hand, it feels like weakness to acknowledge it -- on the other hand, there simply aren't enough hours in the day to accommodate the number of responsibilities that I assume for weeks at a time as a matter of course.

I have *dozens* of sensible projects that I've been attempting to pick up, and simply ended up dropping, because production has absorbed my attention. And the great absurdity is that I never had any ambition to produce -- I'm a writer. I entered self-production because, after years of bulk mailouts, I came to the conclusion that that was the only way to get my work in front of people.

The sad irony is that now, my life has become production. I need to learn to be a writer again.

FEAR

The single greatest indication that I had that leaving production behind might be the right decision is that I was fucking terrified of it.

I've worked long and hard to establish myself as a member of the TC arts scene -- and I think I've done that. I've spent eight years doing that. The idea of pursuing other venues now -- e.g. publication -- is terrifying, insofar as it means starting over from the beginning.

So...I should probably do that. I mean, comfort is the death of creativity, right?

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

I'm hesitant to say. As I mentioned, I have dozens of projects that I've been putting on the back-burner, largely since theatre production has absorbed the bulk of my time. I'm not inclined to loudly announce them since most, if not all, will take months or years to come to fruition. I'm not afraid of the work; but I'm conscious of the short attention span in show business.

WHAT THIS DOES NOT MEAN

- I'm not done acting. I never intended to really enter the acting scene, but I'm astounded -- and flattered -- that there's a number of people that have indicated a desire to work with me in that capacity.

- I'm not done writing. If local producers are inclined to work with any of my scripts, I'd be delighted to collaborate. In fact, I've got a new show (potentially) in the works with another storyteller for (maybe) this December. I'm also debating whether or not to submit an application to the 2012 MN Fringe, since that's still both profitable and enjoyable to me.

WHAT THIS DOES MEAN

- I'm done producing outside of a Festival context. There's just no economic model I can construct that makes that make sense to me.

- I'm done touring after this summer. It's brought me an intense amount of pleasure, but there's simply no way that I can justify the expense -- profitability on the road has always been a hit-or-miss prospect for me.

- I still maintain the DBA for MV -- and will probably try to use it as an umbrella for various other projects in the future, if not plays (as such).

WHAT NOW?

We still have three remaining projects coming up.

THE RISE OF GENERAL ARTHUR

...at the MN Theatre Garage, July 10 and 17 at 7pm. Before looking at the end of the Camelot Cycle, it seems only fitting to revisit the beginning.

WORDSTOCK: THE FINAL CHAPTER

...at Kieran's Irish Pub, July 16th at 6pm. One last big blowout. Also, one last attempt to cover our outstanding payments, because good God it would be wonderful to close out with something resembling solvency. Featuring Joseph Scrimshaw, Ben San Del, John Heimbuch, Mahmoud Hakima, and Anthony Paul.

CAMELOT IS CRUMBLING: AN ARTHURIAN NIGHTMARE

...at the Kansas City, Minnesota, Indianapolis, and Chicago Fringe Festivals. A bit fortuitous -- this is, honestly, the show I would have pretty much chosen to go out on. (The only other real competitor was Lokasenna, our first show -- a musical comedy which would have been far too expensive to produce on any level that the script demanded -- although, truly -- the spirits of Thor and Loki (the soldier and the nihilist) seem, to me, in many ways to animate those of Lancelot and Mordred -- locked in their struggle to wrest meaning from the work of death.)

...YEAH?

I deeply regret the way things have gone. And I maintain my hope to provide you with many more hours of entertainment -- in one medium or another -- in the future.

Form vs. Content

2010-10-11T15:12:00.000-07:00

So I'm frustrated.

My philosophy has generally been: I'm happy to perform; I'm honored to perform; I'll take any opportunity to perform that I can get. It's been one of embracing, as it were, the very "Power of positive thinking" that I've been so critical of in my writing.

Last season, I produced a show called "Pissing on the Great Wall." I approached it with the same degree of intensity that I usually do; months of work, writing, previewing, crafting. Found a venue, and essentially said "I'll take any open slot you have." I took Monday nights. In February. And after several shows with single-digit audiences, I had to finally say: "I can't do this anymore."

Hence: season eight. It's been a bizarre process: one that began with me sitting down with various artists who had managed to achieve success at the Fringe-level world, as well as successfully producing a year-round season. For the record? I found three. And one thing that struck me: my company is older than all three of them.

The thing is, I've always placed my faith in content: if I focus on developing an excellent script, then nothing else matters. Not the costumes. Not the presentation. If I produce enough, long enough, I'll find the audience.

One of the realizations I've been making -- one of those painfully obvious ones that I have been, for whatever reason, resistant to -- is that presentation matters. If there's threads hanging off of the costumes? If the sets were thrown together at Wal-Mart? It's completely irrelevant whether the script is excellent or terrible, because those other elements are so distracting that the audience never reaches the script.

---

I did an audition for Theatre Mu recently. Handed my resume to the director, who expressed amazement at the sheer number of shows that I've written/directed. Which neatly illustrated the divide between various theatre arenas to me. After all, nearly all of my colleagues have written/directed that many shows; that's what Fringe-level theatre artists do. But at the mid-level theatre world, it's unheard of. It's astonishing. There's a completely different measure of success.

---

So I've been spending the vast bulk of my energy, in the past couple of weeks, on presentation; on graphic design; on marketing-speak. It's frustrating to me, because I feel like it's wasted time. I know it's not -- it's critically important -- but it's hard for me to avoid the observation that I'm currently spending more time talking about the shows than I am creating them.

Moreover, my process hasn't changed. I'm working on developing material, exactly the same way I have for the past eight years. The shows aren't any different (beyond the expanding level of skill that inevitably must take place). But I'm getting press; I'm getting reservations; I'm getting a different kind of response, because the presentation is different.

These are all extremely good things. But as someone fixated on content over form; it's difficult not to have some degree of resistance to it.

some thoughts about season eight

2010-10-02T00:37:00.000-07:00

A quick note: the following are some thoughts cobbled together for a media interview. I can't imagine that all (or even most) will make it into print.

YELLOW KINGS AND DARKER THINGS

...is, fundamentally, a double-bill of two shows; one produced by Tim Uren (The Repairer of Reputations), and one produced by myself (Quantum Suicide and Other Songs of Death).

QUANTUM SUICIDE AND OTHER SONGS OF DEATH

...is composed, primarily, from short stories composed by me from the second season of the Rockstar Storytellers (2008-2009). So the writing/directing challenge has been, for me, primarily one of taking a body of material developed for short solo performances and reconstructing them into a full-length show for multiple voices.

Upon reflection, the best description I can come up with for the show is to describe it as a kind of concept album: a collection of individual pieces that combine to elaborate upon a larger idea. The unifying theme is that of time and death; perhaps more succinctly, that of mortality. So, the first challenge was one of selection (which stories unite thematically); the second was one of arrangement. The stories have been broken down into smaller parts and re-arranged -- dropping threads to be picked up later in the performance, in an increasingly elaborate pattern of recurring storylines -- as well as having been re-written to sustain recurring images, phrases, and ideas. Perhaps particularly apropos, as one of the key themes of the show is the fragmentation of memory.

Beyond that, the challenge has been taking stories developed for a single voice and adapting them for two. In some cases that's quite literal -- simply breaking down conversations between multiple characters to create a kind of theatrical dialogue -- whereas in others, it's more expressionistic -- phrases begun by one performer are carried by another, and tossed back-and-forth in a more stream-of-consciousness style.

I've been fortunate in being able to collaborate with Elizabeth Byrd. She's the only other member of Maximum Verbosity -- other than myself -- to have been a member from its inception: she composed the music for our very first show, as well as having served as editor for every MV script. (In fact, we initially met as part of a storytelling troupe in the Minnesota Renaissance Festival well over a decade ago, so this serves as a kind of return to our earliest collaborations.) She's a classically-trained vocalist -- one who's capable of doing everything from opera to pop to jazz -- and while she doesn't *sing* in this show persay, she was absolutely my first choice as someone capable of handling some extremely heightened and stylized vocalizations.

REPAIRER OF REPUTATIONS

I can't speak nearly as eloquently on this subject -- my knowledge is limited to what I've read of the story. the script, and those few conversations that Tim and I have had about the material.

"The Repairer of Reputations" is a short story, composed in 1895, about the far-flung dystopian future of 1925. The author, Robert W. Chambers, was one whose work later inspire H.P. Lovecraft and other authors of pulp horror.

Tim was one of those authors who first persuaded me that genre fiction could work onstage -- particularly in light of the fact that the spoken-word community at the time tended to be dominated by comedy and autobiography. It was particularly striking to me to note, perusing the script, that Tim had jury-rigged many of the same solutions to adapting stories as I had -- the rapid shift between dialogue and prose, for one.

One of the major assertions within adaptation of the past several decades has been an acknowledgement of the fact that information can't be conveyed from one genre to another; critical story points have to be changed, in order to work either theatrically or cinematically. I don't necessarily disagree with this fundamental point; but I can't ignore the fact that the vast bulk of those changes seem to me to be little more than rationalization. In short, one of the reasons I love Tim is his willingness to simply ignore that convention; the assurance that authors before made their assertions for a reason, and that they're worth defending. And that those assertions maintain a surprising impact regardless.

Friday, July 30th, 2010

2010-07-31T13:24:00.000-07:00

Almost Done It

Spent most of the day dealing with some (hopefully and probably only embarrassing) medical issues, which may necessitate my returning early. We’ll see how that pans out.

Had another show, back down to an embarrassingly small turnout. If last night was the inevitable Artist Night, then this was the equally inevitable Zombie Night – the night where the audience seems to be consistently engaged, but generates almost no appreciable vocal response. They seemed to enjoy it, but it’s always extremely frustrating to play. The temptation is to overextend yourself, but that reeks of desperation – it’s difficult to relax and let the story happen without the playful back-and-forth that usually propels it.

I dunno. One more performance left, and unless it really sells the hell out, I’m going to need to seriously re-evaluate the wisdom of returning to KC. The thought pains me – I’ve really come to love this place, and it’s only on this trip that I’ve begun to realize to what degree that’s true – but I’ve really done the best I can here, and it’s hard for me to justify continuing to throw money at it with so little return.

---

Saw two shows that evening, both by out-of-town solo performers. Saw Kurt’s show, and actually found it really engaging: it has that sort of uber-ironic anti-comedy thing going on, kind of Kids in the Hall but trippier. I was glad to catch it.

Followed it up with The Hefner Monologues, which I saw last year in Indianapolis. Was debating whether or not to see it again, and it was a wise decision: an 11pm show, populated almost entirely by other artists. The upshot of this is that he ended up performing a kind of director’s commentary – pausing and interrupting himself at various points to comment on what he was doing, which cities various jokes had gotten laughs in, et cetera.

They headed out to a bar in Westport – I offered to join them, and stumbled across the cast of SHARDS on the way to my car. Ended up sitting and talking for a while (and, hooray, we finally found YJ’s open, with the legendary late-night biscuits and gravy I’ve been craving since I was first told about them, and they were everything I was hoping for, and I could have been hit by a car immediately after consuming them and died – well, with a lot of regrets, but at least I wouldn’t have been hungry) before we decided to try to catch up with the others.

We had an under-21 in our party, however, which immediately eliminated a number of possibilities for nightlife. (Shades of the 2008 tour, when our stage manager had managed to come without a license, severely limiting our activities.) We ended up wandering around Westport for a while – which apparently comes way the hell alive on a Friday night, in the best and worst possible ways, place was crawling with cops and they all had plenty of work to do – before returning to the house of their billeter, a barber who works out of her own home.

One of those sprawling, endless conversations about work and art and all that good stuff, before I excused myself at five in the morning to try to get back to my place before my billeter woke up. Time flew right by, and I didn’t have a drop of alcohol in me. Who knew?

Wednesday-Thursday, July 28-29, 2010

2010-07-30T12:43:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010
On the Process of Aging

Ran into Curt Fitzpatrick (the title of his show is The Last Straight Man in Theatre, which makes me wonder if there’s something he needs to tell me about myself) – apparently the Westport Coffee House is where it’s at. Followed up with a visit to the Negro Leagues and American Jazz Museum. Haven’t been since 2008, and again found the experience sublime. They actually have a re-created jazz club that is still in use as a jazz club – on Monday nights. For the past three years, I have consistently recalled this fact on the Tuesday before I leave.

On Tuesday night, Cheryl invited Molly and I out to storm some urban thing. (I presume that she used more detail than that, but it was late and I was drunk.) I unquestioningly agreed. So Wednesday evening, we met at Fringe Central to…well, to figure out what the hell it was we were doing. I was handed a stack of programmes, advised to distribute them as well as postcards, and driven to the venue.

Arrived at a bar a short while later – walked into a room full of youngish, well-dressed individuals, all sipping wine and nattering away at each other. Found a woman at the desk, handed her the programmes, mentioned that I was from the Fringe, and…

HER: Oh, wonderful! Do you mind coming onstage and talking about the Fringe for a while?
ME: Huh? Uh, I’m not really prepared…
HER: Yes, please? Just a few minutes.
ME: I mean…I guess I could say a few words…
HER: Wonderful. I’ll call you up to the stage once we get started.

This, of course, prompted a half-hour panic attack. I flipped through the programme, trying to memorize numbers – first Fringe in 1947, 126 companies, 4th year, all shows under $10.00, et cetera. I also asked around (as subtly as I was able to, without blurting out “Where am I? What is this?”) – enough to figure out that I was at something called the Urban Core Group, and received a vague explanation without comprehending much of it. The guy who was explaining this to me then tried to charge me money to be present, despite my stating that I was there as a representative of the Fringe. I actually started to reach into my pocket before sanity re-asserted itself and I point-blank refused to pay, at which point he refrained from throwing me out, so.

HIM: So, are you a professional speaker?
ME: (long pause) …technically.

I suppose that it’s a great irony, considering my profession, that I have a blind and unreasoning terror of public speaking.

Eventually the woman who greeted me at the door assumed the stage, and attempted to go through a couple of announcements. The audience continued chattering away at each other. She stopped at several points, repeatedly demanding their attention, then plunged forward upon failing to receive it. She then introduced me.

I jumped out to the stage, opened with a quick joke, which was duly laughed at before the audience turned back to their conversations over their wine. I launched into a brief explanation of what Fringe is, observed that nobody was paying the slightest bit of attention to me, became irritated, mentioned that there were programmes at the back, then left the stage.

All in all, pretty lame. I glance back over what I’ve written, and wonder if I’m not being unkind – but, then, it strikes me that they were being rather more so.

---

Had another performance of Descendant, this time with about a dozen people, which is apparently a roaring success by my dramatically lowered standards. Audience was quiet but engaged, and as usual incredibly enthusiastic afterwards.

The structure of the show works. It’s my Goldilocks play, the one that does seem to hit that just-right balance of elements – you can enjoy the family drama at the most superficial level, but the more thoughtful stuff is there for anyone who wants to dig – thoughts about the concept of identity, and of the self, of individualism vs. collectivism, of determinism vs. self-determination.

Working on the sequel, Pissing on the Great Wall, was an interesting project for a couple of reasons, one of which was bringing me back to an old script and really analyzing what made it tick – a strange combination of travelogue, family drama, fish-out-of-water comedy, historical mystery, and political satire. I quickly realized, working on the new script, that it was neither possible nor desirable to re-create that strange alchemy – doing so would have made it into the worst kind of sequel. So Pissing had to become its own entity, somewhat darker, more thoughtful, certainly less wide-eyed and apparently much less likeable.

Which brings me to the other odd aspect of working on a sequel, which was a sudden consciousness of the concept of aging. My scripts are usually in development for a minimum of five years before they see the stage – I cycle through dozens of scripts I’m working on at any given time, putting one away for a few months and picking up another. But one of the results of this is having a surreal sensation of collaborating with a younger version of myself, someone with their own sets of ideas and systems that have since altered for me.

And that’s one of the bizarre things about dusting off Descendant again – I’m no longer the man who wrote that play. And in a sense, I’m no longer playing myself, either, but a younger version of myself – one who is often irritating the hell out of me. I read these lines onstage and find myself wanting to sit down with the author, tell him to, for fuck’s sake, relax – you’ll get through it. And the crap you’re worried about is going to turn out to not be a problem at all, and the stuff that is going to turn out to be a problem are things you haven’t even conceived of yet.

---

Headed over to the Pearl to hit GRIND, before I got a call from Molly – her car battery was dead, and the rest of her troupe was coming in. I headed on over to help out, and stuck around long enough to greet her cast as they arrived – including yet another former student of mine, fresh from a series of performances at another Renaissance Festival. And it occurs to me that I’m finally hitting the point of seeing a whole new collection of people hitting the circuit – that I’m no longer the pwnz0rd n00b. And that a phrase like pwnz0rd n00b is, in itself, a dated reference. Jesus.

Headed on back to catch the last 15-20 minutes of the show, then stuck around to hang out with the performers. Turns out they were having a cast party at their billeter’s house, and I managed to weasel my way into an invitation.

Turns out their billeter had been in the audience for Descendant, and pulled me aside from the rest of the group to share a glass of fine scotch with me. Turned out to be another fascinating guy – an Army brat from Iowa, who’d weathered careers in politics, law, and a failed marriage – so the show is apparently continuing to still work its magic, in terms of inspiring people to share their own stories with me.

Joined the rest of the group to hang out, laughing and talking, before glancing at my cell and realizing that it was 3am. Looked around the room and realized that it was easily one of those parties that could barrel on to five or six in the morning, excused myself, and headed home.

And the thought occurred to me, walking out to my car – there’s a time in my life when I would have felt genuinely remorseful for doing that – when it was critically important to me to close out every party, to hang out sharing dirty jokes and bullshitting until I was the last one left. But now, there comes a point in the evening where having that memory is less important to me then going home to get some rest.

Is that a loss? It seems like it should be, but somehow it doesn’t feel like one.

Thursday, July 29th, 2010
On the Aging of Process

Looking back over some of the previous entries, it’s hard not to see some patterns emerging.

(That’s another one of the things I find so important about travel – there’s that old saw about how traveling outwards causes one to looks inwards, and a change of environment does cultivate a certain sense of detachment.)

Ever since I was a kid – who knows why – I had in the back of my head the age of thirty as a sort of cut-off point for a certain degree of success. (After all, most of my heroes were headliners by the time they had left their teens.) I’m nearly thirty now – hardly ripe old age, but I’m not going to be a twenty-something for much longer, and that shifting of a single digit, while arbitrary, still has a lot of symbolic weight in my mind – particularly as it’s doesn’t seem likely that I’m going to be anywhere near the goals I’ve been shooting for. I don’t feel like I’ve been squandering my opportunities – on the contrary, looking back over the last decade, I think I’ve done a good job of more often than not keeping my nose to the grindstone. Which, if anything, makes falling short of those goals even more frustrating.

That’s been manifesting itself in a variety of ways over the past year, almost universally unhealthy, and I’ve made some pretty catastrophically bad decisions that have hurt a lot of people I’ve come to care about. Every time I think I’m starting to pull myself out of it, I step back and realize that I’m mired in the same place, if not repeating the same mistakes then still responding to the same impetus.

But, yeah – it all seems to come down to alarm at my own biological clock, which is, of course, nothing more than a kind of hubris. Hence agreeing to just about every project I’m getting offered, these days. Hence spending my entire trip here struggling to recapture past experiences. Hence, perhaps, the entire love-hate relationship I’ve had with Descendant for the past three years.

They say the first step is admitting that you have a problem. Which has never been the difficult one for me. Is that what this blog is? What these shows are? Just another form of the Catholic confessional, allowing me pour out my sins, receive absolution, then be set free to sin again?

Perhaps the true theme song of this trip is Count Basie’s Dark Rapture:

…night time brings the rapture
bringing of delight, boy
while we both recapture
the thrill that fills the still of a Congo night…

…may we share the dark rapture
and every year take a flight
may we always capture
the thrill that fills the chill of a Congo night…

---

Received a call from Curt in the afternoon – wanted to know if I wanted to accompany him to the Jazz Museum. Hell, I could cheerfully spend all day there, so, yes.

Got there early, and spent some time walking around the neighborhood. 18th and Vine is the historic Jazz district of Kansas City, and in a lot of respects it’s stayed pretty close to its roots: filled with all manner of bars, bands, and nightclubs.

There’s not a lot of places that I’ve been able to visualize any kind of life for myself – they’ve been limited to Minneapolis, Melbourne, and Hong Kong – and Kansas City, despite my fascination with the place, has never really been on that list. But hanging out in that neighborhood – yeah. I could cheerfully live there. Multiple choices for live jazz every evening? That’d be just some life, I tell you what. Provided, y’know, that cost of living in that area wasn’t as exorbitant as I assume it must be.

Took Curt to the Flea Market afterwards – yes, I could eat there every night, if I could possibly justify it to myself – then went to catch The Tragedy of Rumplepunchkin afterwards. I’ve always had some mixed feelings about the fact that almost none of my former teachers have ever really attended my shows – mixed, because it would certainly mean a lot to me for them to be there, but at the same time I recognize that most of them wouldn’t care for the work that I’m currently doing, and then we’d both have to decide how much we care about that – but I understand their perspective, as well. Watching performers who I spent some time training, even many years ago, and it’s hard for my brain not to snap back into that role – hard for me to shut it down enough to relax and enjoy the show, which certainly isn’t fair to them.

Then had the pleasure of seeing one my cousins for an hour. He lives in KC, but we rarely see each other when I’m here, largely because both of our schedules preclude it – he’s a surgeon, and I’m Fringing, so. Beyond that, it’s another one of those clashings of roles I find myself struggling with – I don’t know that I’m comfortable mixing the marketing whore/party lizard that I play on the circuit with the face that I try to present to my family.

Had a good time, though, this time in the Power and Light District, which I hadn’t seen before – mere blocks from the crumbling theatre areas, it’s definitely a more yuppie-ish part of town, leaving me to again marvel at just how schizophrenic this city is.

Made it in time to set up for my show, which was packed, as it turned out to be the Artist Night – when you’re touring a show, there’s always one night where all of the other artists end up deciding to come. So, you don’t make much money, but it’s definitely one of the most gratifying audiences to play – they totally get all of the more writerly jokes, as well as the high-concept stuff.

Immediately afterwards we descended, en masse, to Fringe Central again. As usual, the place was pretty much deserted except for us – I reclined with a beer and watched with amusement as various other performers leapt up to the mike for each other’s entertainment.

At one point – as there were about five people from three different companies onstage, working their way through a song with a variety of instruments and occasionally breaking down and arguing with each other – I turned to Tim and said, “Does it ever strike you just how absurd our lives are?”

He responded, without hesitation, “Yes. But you can’t ever let yourself think that way, because then you start to tell yourself that there’s no way you can possibly do it, and that’s the beginning of the end.”

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

2010-07-28T11:03:00.000-07:00

Takin’ a Break From Doin’ It

…as tonight is my night off from performing.

Every time I set out on one of these trips, I throw together a mix – basically, I select the “most frequently played” from my iTunes, drop out the longest-running ones, and burn them onto a CD. The result usually consists of show music – I tend to build playlists for each individual show or story as I’m writing it, and listen to those songs over and over again as I’m working. One of the odd exceptions is “Meds”, by Placebo, which has become the de facto theme song of this trip by virtue of my inability to get it out of my head. It has a suitably angsty, adolescent, Pink-Floyd-esque quality.

---

I’ll confess to some frustration with this particular trip – I just can’t seem to figure out what to do with myself. Last year, I was able to set out every night with no idea of where I was heading or where I would end up, with never dismaying results. This time around, I seem to find myself wandering about aimlessly more often than I’d like. Am I just burned out on the city? It seems unlikely – I’m sure there’re thousands of holes-in-the-wall I have yet to discover, but I’m just not finding them.

Maybe the problem is expectation. Glancing back over what I’ve just written, it seems pretty clear that I came here in need of a very specific kind of experience; so maybe when I let that go, I’ll be able to find something. We’ll see.

…since, y’know, letting go is the kind of thing I’m so good at.

---

My billeter’s location actually isn’t too far from the one I had last year, which means I’m within easy walking distance of the Westport area. My impression is that Westport is very much the Uptown of Kansas City (i.e. much more hipster-oriented). But, yeah, I know this area pretty well, so I had the opportunity to (finally!) make it to a café with free wireless and start catching up on work.

Part way through, I ran into another chunk of the cast from Grind, doing their flyering business throughout the city. I’ve grown rather fond of these guys; they’re a bunch of Carlton graduates, and remind me a lot of Ben Egerman and Rachel Teagle before them: galloping into view with boatloads of enthusiasm, seizing hold of every opportunity as it arises. I talked to them for a while, and they echoed my frustrations at not being able to find what to occupy themselves with. I offered my services as a tour guide – really, I’d just like the excuse to hang out with them more. I gave them my phone number and asked them to give me a call if anything came up. Call, me GRIND: The Musical! (They won’t call.)

---

Determined to do some serious and irreparable damage to my bowels, I subjected myself to a Patty Melt at the Flea Market. (For a once-a-year indulgence: so worth it.) Then set out to Just Off Broadway to catch Tim’s show. (They seem to be setting some of the venues by theme this year – in this case, all the Shakespeare shows in one venue – which is smart: I recall them doing something similar in Indianapolis to great effect.) By far, the best-attended show I’d seen – I presume due to some combination of the success of his show last year, and the fact that “Lot O’ Shakespeare” is a pretty solid marketing package – art combined with a nifty parlor trick.

I flyered his crowd on the way out, then stuck around long enough to flyer the next crowd on the way in. The upcoming show was “Boobs, Burlesque, and the Bard”, and I could barely keep up with the number of people.

So…what is it with KC and burlesque? I mean, just about every Fringe Festival I hit on the circuit has one or two burlesque shows, which have an attendance that varies from moderate to respectable – but KC has, like, dozens. And they’re always, always packed. Even the shows that aren’t burlesque shows are trying to be – I was amused to note the huge percentage of previews that involved people removing their clothing. I mean, all Fringes are a little sex-crazy, but this is noteworthy.

Anyway, flyered that crowd, glanced at my cell, and realized that I had just enough time to bolt over to another venue and catch another crowd. Made it in right before start time, bought a ticket (immediately before asking what show I was seeing, to the amusement of the box officers) and grabbed a seat. Headed to the lobby as soon as the lights rose at the end of the show, eager to get this crowd, too. Found myself waiting for about five minutes before I realized that, oh. The entire audience had consisted of the artists’ family and friends. Oops.

---

The volunteers talked up a couple of late-night bars at great artist hangouts, great places to flyer and network, and I met the prospect with enthusiasm. I headed to Fringe Central, to see if I could talk anyone else into joining me.

Bit of a tough row to hoe, since the few who were there seemed to want to stick around. Enh, I dunno – it’s hard for me to be game for the open-mike again. I mean, pretty much every night I’m going out and doing my stuff for a handful of people – I don’t want to go out afterwards and do the same thing for a body of people who care even less. It’s just not fun for me to work that hard for so little. I envy guys like Tim, who will eagerly perform monologues for three people and regularly holds performances in his own apartment – but I’m not constituted that way, and it’s extraordinarily difficult for me to continually generate the energy for that kind of performance.

Perhaps more to the point, I just couldn’t handle spending another night in the same place. I really don’t want to slink back home with my only memory of Kansas City being hunched over the same bar every night. So I was able to con a few people into heading the street with me.

I say “con”, because, well – one of the places was closed, the other place dead and in the process of closing. Well, yeah – Tuesday night. But, yes. Starting to go a little crazy. all play and no work makes phil a big jerk

Flee, Spammers! fleeeee

2010-07-27T12:17:00.000-07:00

...I'm back. Having finally rediscovered internet access. Here comes the backlog.

Saturday, July 24th, 2010

Why Do I Do It?

…is the question I am frequently asked these days, with the unspoken implication of “Why are you an idiot for doing this?” Why am I going to freakin’ Missouri? Particularly when I’m already so overcommitted? And I’ll confess, it’s a question I’ve been asking myself, in the days and hours leading up to my departure. Why am I doing this? Am I forgetting anything? Why am I doing this? I can’t do this. Oh, God, why am I doing this? All running through my mind, packing, loading, all the way through navigating my way out through classic Twin Cities roadwork-crippled traffic.

And then I was out, and then…silence. In my head, anyway, and only for a moment. There’s nothing quite like popping out of the TC metro area like a champagne cork and watching the freeway open up in front of you with Ennio Morricone blasting from your car stereo.

I’ve been thinking a lot about happiness, anyway, mainly because I haven’t been experiencing much of it lately. Presuming we can sidestep that whole uber-American argument (but you have so many things! How can you be unhappy with so many things), I do have a remarkably blessed existence – not least, the extraordinary community of people I find myself surrounded by, and I value them more than I can express – but happiness seems to be based on a wide range of stimuli for a wide range of people. I have been happy at various points in the past, and I’m old enough, and I’ve experienced this cycle enough times, to be confident that it’s just a question of hanging on until the wheel turns again.

But when I think about those brief periods of happiness that I’ve experienced in recent memory, the pattern is undeniably consistent – it’s been when I was on the road. There’s something about setting out with no knowledge of where you’re going to end up that evening, of being liberated from the traps you’ve built around yourself in your environment, of being able to re-invent yourself over and over again – yeah. I still have my intense ambivalence regarding travel, but I’ve been doing little enough of it lately that the romance is pretty goddamn energizing right now.

Of course, it’s not sustainable. Or particularly profitable. And it’s incredibly draining, incredibly quickly. It’s not at all unlikely that I’ll be reduced again to my typical, quivering mass of neuroses by the end of the week. But I don’t know that that’s what’s going to happen. And that’s the point, innit?

---

The drive down was fairly uneventful – I spent most of it working on memorizing lines for my 3,012th Fringe show – doing my typical routine of stopping for gas/food/facilities in various small towns, and watching accents evolve over space.

Here’s the thing. One of the recurring arguments I get into with fellow Minnesotans is whether or not Missouri is considered part of the Midwest or part of the South. I usually argue for the former – that’s how the US Census identifies it, in any case – but if the accent is any indication, I may have to re-evaluate my opinion.

See, in Kansas City proper, there’s a wide range of speaking patterns, and most of them aren’t particularly noticeable. (I’ve written in the past about the fact that accents tend to fade as you get closer to population centers.) But in the small towns I stopped in along the way, I was consistently greeted with that nasal, twangy drawl I can only identify as Southern.

But, yeah, that observation did serve to remind me of the fact that, hey, I’m heading to a different place. Another aspect of touring that fascinates me is the fact that different crowds respond differently. Which is the case with every show I’ve done, but most notably in 2008 with All Rights Reserved. Even sidestepping the more dramatic stuff that went down, it was a completely different set of jokes that hit. Saying “nigger” in Minneapolis might have drawn a few gasps, but for the most part people were willing to relax and trust that it was going somewhere. In a more diverse city, with its own history of racial tensions, it was a trickier slur to drop.

…and it only just now occurs to me that, hey, I’m taking my big racial-identity show this year. That should be interesting.

Provided that, y’know, anyone’s in the audience.

---

Arrived in town in time to gatecrash my billeter’s birthday party, taking place at a local pub. Picked up the key, drove back to her place, got myself set up, and decided to walk back out to join the festivities.

The walk back took about a half-hour – a little longer, since someone asked me about my Stanhope T-shirt and decided to invite me into a bar to buy me a drink. (Again – this kind of thing simply does not happen to me in my own city, but happens with absolute consistency every time I travel.)

Arrived back at the bar – a roomful of strangers that I immediately began to introduce myself to, interjecting myself into one conversation after another. (Which, again, is something that I’m utterly incapable of doing in Minneapolis.) Another thing that fascinates me about this city – this is my third time here, and I feel like I find a different city every time I come. A number of people I spoke to agreed with this observation – Kansas City, more than other places I’ve been to, seems to be a clumsily-knit collection of communities that have little to no interaction with each other.

But, yes. If they say the measure of a person is by their friends, my billeter is a very cool lady indeed. Spoke at length to a used-bookstore owner who invited me out to an open-mike, a former New Yorker who was a significant part of the creation of the Daily Show (and was kind enough to share plenty of behind-the-scenes nitty-gritty), and a representative of PBR who kept me in free beer for much of the evening.

PBR: You’re an actor, right? You’re used to having your picture taken. I’ll give you free beer if you let me take your picture holding it.
ME: …you are like the Santa Clause of liquor.

People ask me, why do I do this? Which doesn’t seem to be the relevant question to me. The real question, I think, is why don’t a pull a Tim Mooney and do this all the freakin’ time?

---

(A: paragraph five, for those of you taking notes.)

Sunday, July 25th, 2010
How Can I Do It?

…becomes the more pressing question upon arrival.

Started off the day by checking in at Fringe Central, where I was once again surprised by the recognition and warm reception from the staff. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – this community of people is the thing that keeps me coming back year after year, in the face of wildly varying success.

MV did okay in ’08 – not amazing, but, y’know, serviceable. Freakin’ tanked in ’09. And in that case, the evidence suggests that I need to accept full responsibility, since several of my colleagues from out-of-town were doing gangbusters. Moreover, I was doing all of the same publicity work they were doing, in many cases more so – which suggests that it was the show itself that was presenting the marketing challenge.

Which is the main reason that I chose to bring Descendant – it’s my most consistent money-maker. It’s growing harder and harder to justify coming here, if I can’t generate an audience, so this is something of a desperate attempt to rationalize the amount of time, energy, and money I keep investing in this place.

---

Spent most of the afternoon flyering. Which wasn’t hugely successful, since, like every other city I’ve been to, theatre venues tend to not be located in the ritzier areas of town; hence, lots of empty storefronts. Also, doing this on a Sunday might not be the most brilliant idea I’ve ever had. Also – I really need to remember to create posters, flyers, and postcards; I generally create two of three and end up regretting that I don’t have the third. I have my usual bevy of postcards, and a set of 11x17 posters that look fantastic, but there’s simply not a lot of places to put them up, and a stack of flyers sure couldn’t have hurt.

---

My venue’s a bit of a hike; not as bad as, say, the Ritz or the Gremlin in MN, but still definitely off the beaten path. The fact that I had to circle the area about five times before figuring out where it was – and the fact that every local who I’ve asked about it has responded with “Huh?” – is not hugely encouraging to me. Combine the above factors with a Monday-night opening and I’m not holding my breath for the initial turnout.

Tech was a bit of a mess, since we ended up trying to tech three companies in three hours. Spent most of the time hanging out with the Journeyman (Players? Theatre? Lost their card and I don’t have internet access at the moment), who are doing a play which they described as “absurd.” (Well, actually – I asked three individual company members what their show was about, and all three responded with something like a combined sigh, a snort, and an eye-roll – couldn’t have been tighter if it was rehearsed – and then, when pressed, responded “It’s absurd.”)

My tech seems like a reasonably cool guy – he’s an R&B/Gospel musician, born and raised in KC – in fact, who claims to have been born on a Greyhound bus as it was entering the city limits. Offered him a lift to the opening night party after that, where I was delighted to hook up with a number of familiar faces – Tim Mooney, for one; the cast of GRIND: The Musical, for another – who was kind enough to mention my show on their blog, and for whom I am now returning the favor – and two of the cast of SHARDS, a group of first-time Fringers composed of a good chunk of former students of mine, in a bizarre clashing of worlds that I have yet to fully adjust to.

Opening night was a blast, as usual, but I’m wondering if it wouldn’t be smarter at this point to move the action to a larger venue – I understand the importance of establishing Fringe Central as a location in everyone’s minds, but the event has simply grown beyond the building’s capacity. Crowded, sweltering, and noisy, it was a tough room to play – you really had the option of plunging forward and nearly passing out in the press of bodies, or hanging toward the back and not being able to hear anything. Regretfully, I had to spend most of my time with the latter option.

For my three-minute preview, I opted to do my Fringe-For-All piece from 2007 – opens with a bit of clowning, I tear my clothes off to reveal the Game of Death jumpsuit, then closing out with some slam poetry. It was a huge hit in MN, but I wasn’t sure if it was just a fluke.

…and turns out, nope. Was really successful, at least for the portion of the audience I was able to see/hear/communicate with, which hovered in the neighborhood of fifty percent – one of those shows that’s super-fun to play, where you can just hold those moments and know that the audience is hanging there with you. Really validating, in that “I-can-still-do-comedy” kind of way.

---

So, yeah. I definitely have the sense that I’ve done everything right this year, marketing-wise – I have the right show, I hit with my preview, been suitably aggressive with the cards and flyers – no press this time around, but dem’s the breaks. We’ll see if this pays off tomorrow night.

Monday, July 26th, 2010
Am I Doing It Yet?

So I departed in the morning (er, noonish) with a bus schedule I managed to print off of Google. The bus system’s a bit of a pain here, though – I find their website nearly impossible to use, and they generally don’t post schedules at the bus stops – so I decided to set out on foot.

Sun was hiding initially, but I forgot that KC can get deceptively humid – forgot only briefly, however, as my environment was at pains to remind me of that fact. A bit concerned, considering all of the fatigue issues I’ve been having lately, but I stopped at a CVS to pick up three bottles of Gatorade and set out.

I actually prefer walking to driving on tour – I’ve stated before that I don’t think you can really get to know a place until you’ve gotten lost in it a couple of times. Imagine my disappointment, then, to realize that I’ve reached the point that I can actually navigate my way around fairly well. This is strange, because I regularly become disoriented in my own city. I can only conclude that I manage to be somewhat more alert to my surroundings when I’m in unfamiliar territory.

Made a few stops – one at the blissfully air-conditioned Crown Center again, to restock their supply of postcards – before I made the five-mile trek back to my car. A bit of a wince admitting that, since there was once a time in my life when that would have been nothing. Oddly, Fringe is the time of year I seem to lose weight, despite eating a disproportionately large amount of junk food – presumably because I spend most of the time on my feet.

---

Hit my car, and broadened my explorations a bit, mostly trying to re-familiarize myself with areas I’d been before. Considered swinging by the Union Station – a large, museum-type area – hit it last year with Kirsten and Dean, when they had a Narnia exhibit. They had a thing about dinosaurs this time, and I like dinosaurs, but I recall it being pretty kid-oriented last year, and I really didn’t want to be the creepy guy looking at dinosaurs by himself, so I gave it a miss.

A sprawling Liberty Memorial was visible just down the street, however, with a WWI museum built into it. Walked around the grounds a bit before realizing that the museum proper was closed on Mondays. As are most museums. Which rather elegantly dismissed a big chunk of my potential plans for the day.

Rediscovered the Westport Flea Market – which serves one of the most amazingly greasy burgers I’ve ever tasted – and the nearby half-price bookstore, where I picked up a bunch of road-trip tapes last year. Picked up a copy of Humphrey Carpenter’s “Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien” – since I am apparently determined to read every syllable the man ever wrote – and a big metal thing displaying the silver-age JLA, since I am apparently a big ol’ geek.

Between flyering, walking, and driving, I’d figured out my territory pretty well again, and it was about time for me to head on out for my opening night.

---

Okay, tiny audience, let’s get that out of the way right off the bat, which by no means means that I’m out of rationalizations – it was a 7pm on a Monday night, after all – but worth noting that they had chosen to come see the show with no prior knowledge, based entirely on the show title/image/description. Descendant’s consistently done that – the only other show in my repertory that’s had that effect is The Secret Book of Jesus. Usually, people seeing my show is contingent on them having talked to me or seen me preview it or heard about it – it’s rare for one of my shows to garner audience on its own, and one of the reasons I picked this one to bring.

But, yeah. It’s the first time I’ve performed the show in its entirety since 2008 – I’ve performed it in chunks regularly in the interim – and I was startled by how emotional a lot of points of the story were for me. I figured that I would have cultivated some kind of detachment by now, but I’ve obviously made no progress whatsoever in resolving this stuff for myself. So much for art as therapy.

In any case, both my audience and my two box officers (who were listening just outside) were extremely effusive afterwards, and eagerly offered to talk it up, so we’ll see how that pans out.

---

Had the option of sticking around to see the show after mine, or of grabbing a bite to eat and heading on over to Fringe Central. Still riding the post-show buzz, and wasn’t really up to sitting through an unknown quantity – so stopped at a Thai place and headed on over to FC.

The place tends to be pretty dead on weeknights, and has been for as long as I’m doing this. It’s symptomatic, I suspect, of how the Festival is structured. It’s a week long – opens on Monday and closes on Sunday – so the only people really seeing shows through the week are die-hard Fringers. The actual Festival doesn’t take off until that closing three-day period. So through the week, people are either seeing shows (generally at 7pm, 8:30pm, or 10pm Mon-Thurs), or going home – it’s usually the out-of-towners huddled around the bar. Which is fine, since we all know each other by now, but it’s not really an effective means of networking.

I was also invited to host the open-mike again. Flattered as always, but I’m not 100% sold on the fact that it’s such a great idea – I mean, half the time there’s a half-dozen people there. The people who want to see performances are out, well, seeing performances. I’m not sure what it would take to make the place into the evening destination it needs to be. People seem to enjoy it, though, so it’s entirely possible I’m overthinking this.

---

It may also account for the fact that Tim Mooney is consistently greeted with “Hey! You’re the guy who did ‘Dancing Nude’ last year!” and I’m consistently greeted with “Hey! You’re the guy who hung out at Fringe Central all the time last year!”

Note From Melbourne

2009-09-27T05:05:00.001-07:00

Tonight, I showed up at my venue to find a sign out front claiming that all shows had been canceled due to illness -- our venue manager was in the hospital, and unable to let anybody into the space. Because I have the most awesome tech ever, she immediately made a series of phone calls and secured us a performance space above a nearby coffee shop. Since all of my props, costume, and (perhaps most importantly) script were locked inside, the show would have to go forth without any of those things. My tech spent several minutes frantically scribbling all of her cues onto a sheet of paper so that I could use her tech script (in ten-point Times New Roman, squint) as my reference material. All of this happened in the space of approximately half an hour.

As the audience shuffled in, I tried to say the following to them. (I would love to say that this is exactly what I said, but I'm rarely anything resembling eloquent without the opportunity to write my material beforehand.)

Six years ago, I formed a company called Maximum Verbosity, out of the belief that words could do damn near anything. Tonight, we're going to put that hypothesis to the test.

Normally, this is a show punctuated by visual cues: by costume, props, and carefully-rehearsed changes in lighting and mood. I believe that this story is strong enough to survive without any of those things. It should be: it's already survived for over fifteen hundred years.

But for tonight, we're all going to be part of a little Brechtian experiment. Here's hoping I can entertain you.

July 27-28: Iowa

2009-07-31T13:39:00.000-07:00

Monday, July 27th, 2009

Relieved to be on the road again.

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.

Thatcher Williams invited me to see a rehearsal for Spermalot, which is performing at the Minnesota Fringe: my thoughts can be found at my Fringe blog on the Twin Cities Daily Planet.

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

Afternoon tea in Des Moines.

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.

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.

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.

July 23-26: Missouri

2009-07-31T13:29:00.000-07:00

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

In true Fringe fashion - a random photograph of myself and this rather fetching creature, presented with no explanation.

Went out to get some work done at a nearby internet café. I was wearing my campaign shirt for Doug Stanhope’s 2008 Presidential run, when the dude sitting behind me noticed – claimed that he had been a stand-up comic on the circuit for a while, and had known Doug back when they were first starting out. We started chatting about various venues in Minneapolis which we’d both performed at.

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.

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.)

Also saw The Miniature Housewife – review available at Womb with a View.

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.

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.

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.

Since this is a show that's also going to the Minnesota Fringe Festival, I've posted a few more thoughts at my blog at the Twin Cities Daily Planet.

Sunday, July 26^th, 2009

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.

I closed out the closing night party. Score.

July 21-22: Missouri

2009-07-23T12:31:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, July 21^st, 2009

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.

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 22^nd, 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.

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.

July 18-20: Missouri

2009-07-21T10:56:00.000-07:00

Saturday, July 18^th, 2009

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 19^th, 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?

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.)

Monday, July 20^th, 2009

A dream…to some. A NIGHTMARE TO OTHERS!

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.

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.

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.)

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.

Star Trekkin’, Across the Universe…

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.

July 16-17: Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri

2009-07-18T20:02:00.000-07:00

Phil ‘n’ Max in Surfin’ the Highway

…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.)

There is, apparently, a Green Lantern Road located somewhere in Virginia. This knowledge makes me happy, and I choose to share it with you.

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.)

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.

July 13-15: District of Columbia

2009-07-18T16:24:00.000-07:00

Monday, July 13^th, 2009

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.)

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.)

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 14^th, 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.

(One item I found fascinating in the military memoirs I studied in preparation for this project is how this changing perception has affected the attitudes of those within the military: that we now have a generation entering military service that is already incredibly jaded about government. There’s no longer the same kind of naïveté and loss of innocence that’s such a strong aspect of the mythology of the generation preceding them.)

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.

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 15^th, 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.

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.

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.

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.

July 10-12: District of Columbia

2009-07-15T10:36:00.000-07:00

Friday, July 10^th, 2009

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.

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.)

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 11^th, 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.

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.

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 12^th, 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:

NAME: phillip andrew bennett low

POLITICS: libertarian

VERBOSITY: maximum

SEXUALITY: excessive hetero posturing, likely homosexual

RELIGION: sort-of Catholic but whiny about it

PROFESSION: pompous douchebag

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?

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.

July 9: District of Columbia

2009-07-10T09:23:00.002-07:00

Pilgrim in an Unholy Land

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

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

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

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

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

An Inauspicious Opening

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 6-8: Michigan/Ohio

2009-07-10T09:13:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

Being a big geek apparently runs in the family.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 4-6: Illinois

2009-07-07T13:53:00.000-07:00

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

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

Out of Focus
Sunday, July 5th, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, July 6th, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

July 2-4: Wisconsin

2009-07-06T14:46:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God of the Gaps
Friday, July 3rd, 2009

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

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

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

--

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

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

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

--

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

--

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

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

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

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

--

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

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

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

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

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

--

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

In Defense of Darkness

2009-05-28T03:13:00.001-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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