Confessions of a Slopaholic

"As the [new] industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance. I do not believe, or at least I do not wish to believe, in the absolute success of such a brutish conspiracy, in which, as in all others, one finds both fools and knaves; but I am convinced that the ill-applied developments of photography, like all other purely material developments of progress, have contributed much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius, which is already so scarce. In vain may our modern Fatuity roar, belch forth all the rumbling wind of its rotund stomach, spew out all the undigested sophisms with which recent philosophy has stuffed it from top to bottom; it is nonetheless obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy, and that the confusion of their several functions prevents any of them from being properly fulfilled. Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place. If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally."

- Charles Baudelaire, 1859, on his conviction that the new technology of photography would destroy visual art

When I was a kid, there were always gadgets in the house. My father was a scientist, after all -- much of our money growing up came from his inventions. (And there was probably an Asian fascination with novelty somewhere in there, too.) Massagers, recorders, remotes -- a handful were claimed by some of us, many more were discarded. Which isn't to say that they were wasted. I think I recognize the initial excitement at studying a new system -- once that was mastered, the device itself was detritus.

I ended up going into the arts, not the sciences, but I'd say I never really lost that sort of mechanical curiosity. Chatbots weren't a thing back then, but ELIZA was:

I'm trying to generate a quotation for a blog post.
DID YOU COME TO ME BECAUSE YOU ARE TRYING TO GENERATE A QUOTATION FOR A BLOG POST?
You got it, babe.
WE WERE DISCUSSING YOU – NOT ME.
I mean, accurate.
SAY, DO YOU HAVE ANY PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS?
Who the hell doesn't?
WHY DO YOU ASK?
I'm deflecting.
HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN DEFLECTING?
Pretty much since I gained the power of speech.
WHAT DOES THAT SUGGEST TO YOU?

I found this fascinating enough that I figured out how to code her from the ground up (in fuckin' BASIC, of all things – thanks, David H. Ahl). The point is that it wasn't just the output that was interesting – it was the underlying mechanism.

Likewise, when COVID hit and I found myself quarantined in a Boston apartment with a precocious toddler, both of us slowly going mad – finding creative ways to translate my one-man shows into streaming multimedia experiences is essentially how I kept my sanity. It wasn't sufficient to open up a Zoom room and stare into a webcam, because then it would just be a stiff, awkward exercise for everyone involved – I felt the need to find ways to use the tech to do something that I couldn't do in person.

So it seems only natural that I was an early adopter when it came to generative AI. At the sci-fi open-mic I hosted, we had a regular who read her generated poetry, built off of her own training data. I was captivated, pitching a Fringe show to a collaborator built around DALL-E long before ChatGPT entered the national conversation (though, alas, nothing came of that one, curse you, lottery gods...)

In a strange way, I've come to feel indebted to AI, as it's become one of my primary sanity-keeping tools for the past several years. I've worked with it on a number of private projects for loved ones, and during that time I've been sniffing around for the right professional project to experiment with, and I think I finally found one, and because of my impeccable fucking sense of timing of course that's happening in the precise moment that the tech has become incredibly controversial in our field...

...so I feel compelled to take a moment to discuss my reasoning here. Not to excuse, because it's practically first-principle for me that curiosity requires no excuse, but I truly do believe that it's a conversation worth having, and I truly do love hearing myself talk, so.

(I do want to observe that, y'know, it's 2026, and like literally every other conversation I think that this conversation has become, on all sides, counter-productively vitriolic. I also want to say that, while of course there's always the ugly groupthink and bullying and piling-on (not to mention a subset of people who seem to be desperately trying to pre-enact the opening scene of the Animatrix), for the most part my colleagues who are alarmed by this tech are arguing in good faith, and while I personally disagree with them they are not fools for being alarmed. This isn't a "stop complaining and buy tickets to my shows" thing – I mean, you obviously shouldn’t support art that you find unethical. I'm not trying to change anyone's mind, I'm trying to articulate my position, hopefully Picard-style. Only with, y'know more whiskey.)

So in the interest of that conversation, I'd like to lay out what I understand to be the core criticisms, and my thoughts about them. In escalating order of...well, of how seriously I personally take them:

THE TECHNOLOGY IS ECOLOGICALLY HARMFUL

So, keeping in mind that I'm a layman, not an expert, I'll do my best to lay out my ELI5 understanding of what's happening here.

AI, like nearly all online activity (including, for that matter, this post), is dependent upon data centers. Servers generate heat, and high activity requires water for cooling. As salt is corrosive, the best water for this purpose is clean and potable. Therefore, online activity uses potable water.

It is not quite accurate to make claims like "this many prompts uses this many milliliters of water." We can make general observations about which activities use more of the stuff.

Given these facts, it is my understanding that generative AI is on the low end of water usage. Streaming is much, much – like exponentially – higher. If I sit my kids down in front of a Bluey marathon, while I sit down in front of, say, Midjourney, I have done vastly more environmental harm watching Bluey than I have by generating images of Bluey in a zombie apocalypse.

(And streaming does not hold a candle to the water wasted by, say, meat production. If you've ever eaten a cheeseburger, that dwarfs both activities.)

Likewise, the water used in this process is not destroyed – it's not as though it's teleported into the vacuum of space. It would be more accurate to say that data centers temporarily remove potable water from local sources.

To be clear – this is locally harmful! I completely understand any community that battles a data center being built nearby, and I likely would, as well! This is not, however, something that translates to a national water shortage, which is largely an issue separate from, and predating, the tech.

Moreover, this is a relatively new technology. We've already begun extensive work in closed-loop cooling systems, and I have every reason to believe that this process is going to continue to grow more efficient. Like, if for no other reason than raw greed.

Look, part of my purpose with this post is to steelman the opposition. I'll be frank – I struggle with this one. If you are genuinely concerned about water waste, the specific impact of AI on data centers is very, very far down the list of meaningful impacts. The arguments are far better deployed against a wide variety of other, less vulnerable targets.

THE TECHNOLOGY GENERATES INFERIOR "SLOP"

"...I remember vividly the flickering light, his queer, broad head in silhouette, the dance of the shadows, how we all followed him, puzzled but incredulous, and how there in the laboratory we beheld a larger edition of the little mechanism which we had seen vanish from before our eyes. Parts were of nickel, parts of ivory, parts had certainly been filed or sawn out of rock crystal. The thing was generally complete, but the twisted crystalline bars lay unfinished upon the bench beside some sheets of drawings, and I took one up for a better look at it. Quartz it seemed to be."

I posit that if I were to hop into HG Wells' time machine, with nothing but the clothes on my back and a bag of McDonald's, and to reach into that bag and place a Big Mac before a human in nearly any place and time in human history, they would regard the feast before them with a Boris-Yeltsin-like awe. It is only in our current utopia of plenty that we can bring ourselves to sneer at it: it's cheap, it's common, for peasants, it's everywhere, it's slop.

I remember how dazzled we all were when the first generations started appearing, and I am not yet jaded. It's not slop – it's a fucking miracle. It can do things no human can do. And, likewise, it is utterly incapable of doing basic things that humans do effortlessly.

I am utterly mystified by how damning some people think pointing this out is. "It makes mistakes no human would ever make!" I mean, yeah, of course it does – because it's not human. Like, this is tautological, surely? The gleeful mockery feels something akin to this – like sneering at a toddler for not drawing shadows correctly. She's fucking four! Of course she can't count fingers! But aren't you impressed by her potential... no? Okay, I guess.

"It's so bad, I can always tell..." No. You can't. I promise you, you can't. What you can spot... is slop. If someone goes to ChatGPT and types in one prompt, the first unedited image they get is the easily recognizable piss-filtered slop. I don't blame people for being annoyed with this, because we're in a moment where that slop is obviously flooding social media, which was already barely useable.

But the reality is that, while slop is what's the most currently visible, the tech is already being used for a hell of a lot more than that. Carefully prompted images, edited in Photoshop alongside hand-drawn material, becomes virtually indistinguishable from something fully human-generated – because at that point it's not fully AI, but a collaboration between gray matter and gray metal. With discipline and a trained eye, AI generation does not supplant human skill, but becomes one more widget in a vast toolbox.

So where, exactly, is that line? Between lazy slop and creative discipline? I'm asserting that that is not clear. And, as someone who has long defended broad definitions and open doors, I'm resistant to building and defending an arbitrary barrier here.

THE TECHNOLOGY IS COSTING SKILLED ARTISTS WORK

...this is undoubtedly true, and I'm not sure how to respond except as I have to so many of these arguments in past decades, which is to continue gesturing urgently at the Candlemakers' Petition.

For my own part, the ethical line I draw is this: if it's something I hired someone to do in the past (or developed on my own), I continue to do so; if it's something I would have pulled an image off the internet for, I'm comfortable generating an AI prompt. Things like Fringe shows or multi-weekend events I design or pay for – a one-night deal, I'm down with talking to a machine. In other words, my own use of the tech is not taking work away from any of the designers I've worked with in the past, or hope to continue to work with in the future – I look forward to continuing to seek out human artists to collaborate with on illustrations for my books, among other things.

(For that matter, the tech simply isn't there yet for specific, complex concepts. If it's a high-profile event, my trust remains in human skill. For now, at least.)

For the show I'm currently working on, I'm developing images to accompany five hours of text. There is no scenario in which I would be hiring teams of artists to churn out literally hundreds of images that will appear for twenty seconds at a time.

Others, of course, must draw their own lines and negotiate with their own consciences (while supplies last).

THE TECHNOLOGY IS TRAINED ON EXISTING WORK WITHOUT THE CREATORS' CONSENT

A while back, one of my boys asked me what a hubcap is. I answered without thinking, then thought. How the hell do I know what a hubcap is? It's not like I learned about it in Introduction to Hubcaps, or like my parents sat down to give me The Talk about Hubcaps. Presumably, this information was acquired – like so much of it is – because I was following an adult around, slinging random questions at them while they absently tossed off responses.

Likewise, how do my children know what a car is? I didn't sit down with them and say "Okay, a car has four wheels, bumpers, mirrors, windows, etc., these are the individual elements that make a car, and objects that exclude these do not possess an essential car-ness." They followed me around, pointed at something, and said "Is that car?" and I responded "Yes, that's a car," or "No, that's a bike," or "No, that's a Pomeranian in a frenzied sexual heat, run," which is essentially what all those "Identify each part of this image that has a traffic light" captchas are doing.

Which is my way of pointing out that Artificial Intelligences are now learning the way Biological ones always have. I have a very hard time seeing training data as equivalent to theft. I trained my own intelligence by reading Orson Scott Card novels in my high school library while skipping Christology classes, and the man never saw a cent from me for it. Was that theft? (I mean, other than from my long-suffering parents' tuition.)

(Likewise, this is why early AIs were so notorious for finger-counting errors. If they actually were just copy-pasting the work of human artists, those errors wouldn’t appear. But the AI is trying to conceptualize what a hand is, and losing track.)

I'm a multimedia spoken-word artist – one of several in the Twin Cities. What that actually means is that we tell stories to an audience alongside a projected slideshow, usually to punctuate what's being said – sometimes there are animations, or scene changes, or funny images, or text that contradicts what's being said in a hopefully amusing way. So here's the open secret – long before the prevalence of AI, where do you think those images came from?

We stole them. We pulled them off of rabbit-hole Google searches and used them without accreditation. This is one of those small-scale, generally shrugged-at crimes in our profession (mainly because these are images that exist in front of our audiences for no more than a few seconds at a time). But claiming that using AI to generate some of these represents theft, but outright stealing is somehow what God intended, is, I think, a dubious argument.

(Likewise, I'm mystified to see some who are cheering on AI bans in art galleries at sci-fi conventions – when you then walk into those same art shows and see artists profiting from the sale of images of copyrighted characters.)

"I did not give consent for my publicly available work to be viewed by a machine intelligence" – it's natural for artists to be protective of their work, of course, but I Think It Goes Deeper Than That™. One emerging trend over the past couple of years on social media has been "If you hold [this particular opinion], unfriend me." This is weird to me, and I think I've pinpointed why – because they're conceptualizing their page as a private space, and asking someone to leave is equivalent to asking a rude guest to leave your home.

But – it isn't a private space. It's a big, messy, public, shared space. So from my point of view, demanding that others unfriend you feels more like walking into the middle of a crowded party and announcing "If you hold [this particular opinion], remove yourself from my presence immediately!" Er – no, if you've got a problem, you can leave.

Which points to what I see as an evolution in how we view who we are, and what we do. For those who live through social media, their online presence is a kind of constant performance, the audience for which they are constantly curating. But, man, I first stepped onto a community theatre stage in December of 1994, and the notion that I would carefully curate my audiences to make sure that there were no, say, fascists or communists in attendance (I am 100% confident that I have performed for both) seems...bizarre to me.

Likewise, the assertion by artists that biological intelligences may learn from their work, but artificial intelligences require their permission to do so, seems like an outgrowth of this philosophy. Once my work is released into the world, I don't believe I should have the authority to bar any specific individual from internalizing it, meat or machine.

THE TECHNOLOGY IS GOING TO MANUFACTURE A NEW INTELLIGENCE THAT WILL KILL US ALL

This is definitely one of the harder ones to wrap my head around, but there are enough smart humans I respect who are saying this that I feel compelled to grapple with it.

What we're talking about here is a technological singularity – a point at which an AI is capable of improving itself more rapidly than humans can do so, and accelerates beyond our comprehension into an AGI superintelligence.

We are really bad at understanding what this means, in the same way that we are really bad at conceptualizing the scale of the universe from looking at the night sky. When we say a "superintelligence," we tend to think of, like, a really smart guy. By definition, we cannot imagine it. It means that it will do things that we can't understand, in the same way that we do things that bacteria can't understand.

This is why some of those paying attention to this are obsessed with things like coherent extrapolated volition. The fear is not that AI will "turn evil" and hate us – the fear is that a superintelligence will be totally indifferent to us. The Dodo bird did not go extinct because we really, really hated Dodo birds [CITATION NEEDED] – they went extinct because we were pursuing our own goals, and did not really care or think about  the consequences to other species on this planet.

"Come, dear, you’re not so wicked as you think. The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity."
– George Bernard Shaw, who I'm sure would object to being dragged into this conversation

That said, we have historically been hilariously bad at predicting transformative technologies (y'know, the Mark 13:32 thing). And that said, the fact that the mass extinction of our species is even on the table, and we're arguing about things like graphic designers not getting work, suggests that we are being fundamentally unserious in our approach to this thing.

THE TECHNOLOGY IS GOING TO MAKE US DUMBER

This is...actually a fair point. Teachers at every level have been sounding the alarm about the literacy crisis, and I've taken this seriously enough to have spent the vast bulk of my waking hours for the past several years homeschooling my children.

I'm a writer. (At least, that's what Grok tells me when I beg it to.) More than that, I'm a crabby middle-aged man who fears change. We've created a tool that summarizes text and simulates human writing convincingly, and have made it immediately accessible to every human with an internet connection. It's hard to imagine the results of this not being culturally catastrophic.

Language is the tool we use, not just to communicate, but to conceptualize our shared reality. The struggle is the point. It's supposed to be hard, damn it, and I walked three miles to and from school in four-foot high snow while composing Spenserian sonnets like God intended.

That said, I don't doubt we would all be happier if social media had never been invented, but that's not going to stop me writing and posting this online. I'll compromise by making it far too long for anyone to read. At least, without an AI summary.

BUT OTHER THAN THAT, MRS. LINCOLN, HOW WAS THE PLAY?

When I'm having a disagreement with someone, and they make a series of scattershot arguments of varying degrees of seriousness, I start to suspect that they're evading their own core thesis. And that's a suspicion that's been growing the more I watch this online debate.

So I'm guessing here, but here's my best guess. The sudden ubiquity of the term "slop" represents an underlying anxiety – deep down, we're not so much afraid that what AI generates is slop, as we are afraid that it isn't. We are in our Creator's image, subcreators ourselves, and that's the irreducible spark that makes us unique. If we've successfully created something that can simulate that process, even imperfectly, that's terrifying. Existentially. Not just for us as creative professionals, but, like, for us as a species.

My suspicion is that, like Victor Frankenstein, we are horrified by our child, not because it is unlike us, but because we are afraid that it is too much like us.

"The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart."

I'm not confident of this one. It's just a guess.

OF THESE, HOPE

"Are you then so easily turned from your design? Did you not call this a glorious expedition? and wherefore was it glorious? Not because the way was smooth and placid as a southern sea, but because it was full of dangers and terror; because, at every new incident, your fortitude was to be called forth, and your courage exhibited; because danger and death surrounded, and these dangers you were to brave and overcome. For this was it a glorious, for this was it an honourable undertaking. You were hereafter to be hailed as the benefactors of your species; your name adored, as belonging to brave men who encountered death for honour and the benefit of mankind. And now, behold, with the first imagination of danger, or, if you will, the first mighty and terrific trial of your courage, you shrink away, and are content to be handed down as men who had not strength enough to endure cold and peril; and so, poor souls, they were chilly, and returned to their warm fire-sides. Why, that requires not this preparation; ye need not have come thus far, and dragged your captain to the shame of a defeat, merely to prove yourselves cowards. Oh! be men, or be more than men."

I'm not an effective accelerationist – there are far too many aspects of the tech that I find alarming to regard it with unmixed wonder.

But where others see apocalypse, I see hope. One day, our species will be destroyed – if not by this, by some other catastrophe, of our own making or otherwise. When that day comes (for of that day and that hour knoweth no man), if we are to remembered at all, I would have us remembered as a valiantly curious species, even to the point of foolhardiness.

Concepts I've been hearing a lot lately are "human," "inhuman," or "anti-human." When faced with an unknown frontier, caution is wise. (I've read Mary Shelley, and I've seen that infamous clip of Elon Musk having a casual evening at home.) But surely the most human response, the best human response, is curiosity, excitement, the passionate hunger for knowledge.

What I have found most dismaying in the response from so many of my colleagues is a near-total lack of curiosity. Like – doesn't any aspect of this fascinate you? On some level, is this not an opportunity to better understand ourselves, to fathom one more corner of our unfathomable universe, to reflect on the nature of intelligence and reason itself? I can't, I can't be alone in this passion, surely?

The nature of the show I'm currently working on is composite. On the one hand, I'm working the way I've always worked, the way that historians and playwrights have worked for thousands of years – the slow, tedious labor of crawling through text, over and over again. (I'm a writer, with a writer's prejudices – I'll confess I find the notion of using AI to help me write to be mystifying. The struggle is the point, it's supposed to be hard, and without that why bother in the first place?)

On the other hand, I'm in constant dialogue with AI to develop the multimedia aspects of the show. And that process is continually exciting my imagination. On some level, it feels to me as though this show, after 250 years, is being illustrated by the collective unconscious of mankind itself – flag and finger glitches and all.

I don't know if it will work, any more than I've known if any idea for any show I've ever had would work. Maybe it'll be an embarrassing failure. I'm taking the approach that I've always taken – that if there's no risk of failure, there's no point in the attempt.

I wonder what its subjects, our founding fathers, would make of this. As with literally every other subject, I imagine they would be fiercely divided. I suspect Franklin would find it fascinating. I am confident that Adams would be horrified.

Since we're talking about the future, it seemed appropriate to give the last word to a starship captain. I considered Captain Picard's closing argument from the AI-centered The Measure of a Man, but this argument seemed important enough for me to bring out the Big Gun:

"They used to say if man could fly, he'd have wings. But he did - fly. He discovered he had to. Do you wish that the first Apollo mission hadn't reached the moon, or that we hadn't gone on to Mars, and then to the nearest star? That's like saying that you wished you still operated with scalpels and sewed your patients up with catgut like your great-great-great-great-grandfather used to. I'm in command. I could order this. But I'm not, because Doctor McCoy is right in pointing out the enormous danger potential in any contact with life and intelligence as fantastically advanced as this. But I must point out that the possibilities, the potential for knowledge and advancement is equally great. Risk: risk is our business. That's what this starship is all about. That's why we're aboard her. You may dissent without prejudice. Do I hear a negative vote?"

The Douchebag With a Thousand Faces

“What does she look like?”

The question stymied me. I mean, it shouldn’t have – it was innocent enough. A moment ago I’d been nattering on enthusiastically about a character I was developing in one of my scripts, and it wasn’t until the question was put so baldly that I realized I didn’t have the faintest idea what she looked like.

I could, however, hear her voice clearly – her cadence, her tone, her verbal tics. I may not be much of a visual thinker, but I’m obsessive about dialogue. I think this has mostly served me well, as a playwright who works with some fairly expressionistic material. Over the past twenty years, I’ve had the privilege of seeing many of my characters animated by many different bodies, of all shades and shapes.

The joy of show business is that it’s a uniquely collaborative form. Now, when I pick up one of my older scripts, I see many faces.

---

In what feels like a lifetime ago, I was director of a mime troupe for a youth theatre. After concluding our last project, I asked them what they wanted to work on next. The two answers were “Norse mythology!” and “Commedia dell’arte!”, with some wit immediately suggesting “Why not both?”

I laughed, and then chewed on it. Why not both? Maybe it was nothing more than a kind of apophenia, but the more that I looked at it, the more it made sense to me. Farcical exploits revolving around an amoral trickster? Larger-than-life characters both immune to harm and incapable of growth? So we improvised, and I spitballed character exercises, and we hammered together some wordless physical comedy.

Years later, when I was setting out on my own and digging through old projects, it stood out as a potentially fruitful premise. For months I pored over the Eddas, scribbling down lyrics and one-liners. And after many more months of blind mailouts, a response to one of my despairing posts to rec.arts.theatre.plays (it was 2003, so think Reddit before Reddit, kids) mentioned the Fringe.

There followed a musical revue, a touring one-act, and many, many open-mics. My point is that this process was, at every step, collaborative. Actors ad-libbed jokes, and I reworked them into the text. Audiences told us what was and what most definitely was not working.

Working on the script again after so much time has felt, oddly, less like rewriting and more like a collaboration with a version of myself that no longer exists. I am, by nearly any definition, a better writer now than I was then. But I know too much – I reject jokes out of hand because of course that won’t work. There’s something a little melancholy about looking back at a giddy new playwright who will throw out gag after gag without hesitation.

This was my journeyman project. While I’d been writing plays for theatres on commission for years, this was the first production over which I had creative control. This was the first space I had to give these voices, and faces, free rein.

It feels appropriate. The script contains in microcosm many of the defining features of what would become Maximum Verbosity: the dense language; deconstruction of a medieval text; the casual mixture of comedy and horror; a keen interest in the problem of evil; an admiration for and dread of the harsh face of moral freedom; plus, y’know, lots of dick and fart jokes. Probably more than I would include now, but, hey, I was twenty, and I’d been writing children’s theatre for years. Cut the kid a break.

---

I pick up the script now and I see many faces, and hear many voices. I take pride in the work that I’ve done. I remember the long hours and the fights and frustration. But I also remember that I didn’t do any of it alone.

We live in a world today that I don’t think that younger version of me could have fully conceived of – a world in which everyone has a platform. It’s both wonderful, and horrifying. And I’d say that its existence makes live theatre more precious than ever. Sure, the medium is dying. It was dying then, too. I expect it’ll still be dying twenty years from now, or two hundred years from now. Because if the theatre loves anything, it’s a long fucking death scene.

Taking the words that were once inside my head; hearing and seeing them reinterpreted by so many artists of so many different disciplines; walking into a room full of strangers, and sharing them; I mean, sometimes I have to step back and say, like, what percentage of the population of the planet gets to have this experience?

Thank you for coming tonight, and thank you for listening. I’m an individualist (neither unapologetic nor rugged), and I don’t believe that it’s prudent for me to speak for anybody else. But having the opportunity to share these words with you – heady and hacky, profane or profound - for the past twenty years - has been the honor of my life.

Hic Sunt Dracones

I'm pretty sure that I've written before about one of my key revelations from my days of teaching comedy: that the students who came in with some preconceived notion of "the tragedy of the clown" almost always ended up embarrassing themselves. The more they tried to craft some sort of calculated stage persona, the more affected that persona seemed. But when they focused on problem-solving the material, on telling jokes and structuring sketches and communicating clearly, some sort of raw and interesting and compelling identity would emerge.

It made me a great believer in what I'd call an organic process. Don't think about your voice too much, just talk to the audience. Your voice will come.

I never set out to be a political comic: I wrote a bunch of sketches, set them next to each other, stepped back, and realized that I apparently was one. (I suspect that if I'd started out with the word "satire" in my mind, the results would have been pretty freaking dire.) My last book wasn't formally plotted -- I whipped together stories for holiday shows when I was asked, got bored enough to have them start sharing characters, stitched them together into a narrative, filled and chipped and smoothed until I wound up with a grotesque tale of multiversal redemption. It's not a story that I planned, or that I would have thought of if I'd sat down and brainstormed: it emerged, for lack of a better word, organically.

This is one thing that's always dazzled me about many of my colleagues: their ability to churn out catchy, marketable titles, then sit down and write a hit show that fits. This isn't a dig! Many of those scripts are superior farces. It's not drudge work, but a process that stimulates their imaginations.

I'm envious; mine has never worked that way. I typically start out with a handful of lines and images and premises that feel like they go together -- I loop them together, try to carve out a narrative that makes sense of them. Usually this falls apart. A small percentage of the time, I come out the other end with a story or a show that I really like -- a smaller percentage of the time, I find an audience that really grooves on it. (It's probably unwise for me to publicize just how much marketing is an afterthought.) Much of the past decade has been my making peace with the notion that the transformative work of genius I'm hoping to leave behind is growing less and less likely -- it's far more plausible that I'll die some weirdo tinker, churning out vulgar curiosities in his basement.

There's a great gulf between the kind of writer I would have chosen to be, and the kind of writer I ended up being. Which is a pretty rambling lead-up to the point that I never intended to be a horror writer -- but at some point, I had to step back and acknowledge that over the years, I've written a fuckton of horror.

---

I've been wearing the "horror guy" hat for a while now, not least because I'm one of only a small handful of local tellers to consistently work in the genre. There's always been something a little strange about this for me. I'm not saying that the stories aren't horror, I'm saying that they ended up in a different place than they started. In my own heart, I'm a fantasist -- but one who believes that magic should be fucking dangerous.

Magic -- by my definition, anyway -- represents some sort of violation of the natural order. For someone as compulsive as I am, that can't be anything other than horrifying. Whether we're talking faery wells or fox spirits, no one brushes against that other world without being transformed, and nobody walks away unscathed. A sip of those waters is loss and madness and terror, and transformation is a lyrical word for death.

Jonah heard a voice of power on the wind, and ran for his damn life -- I'm saying that that impulse makes complete sense to me.

---

So if my intent wasn't moralistic, what's the moral that I found? When I laid the stories out end-to-end, I discovered (and, uh, spoilers for, like, half the stories in the collection, I guess) that apparently my favorite twist is a protagonist who discovers that they are, or is revealed to be, the monster of their own story. (Hence the title.) What that says about my own psyche is probably best left to others.

In retrospect, it's not all that surprising -- while there is great peril in excessive self-analysis for the organic-process guy, from my point of view, one of the major dominating themes of, like, everything I've ever written has been the problem of sin and redemption. This is probably unsurprising from a Catholic author.

Redemption is challenging to write about -- nobody deserves it, and we can't survive without it. Vengeance is always more appealing, but its end is always despair.

Ego and appetite are both obvious and omnipresent. Redemption is, at best, a tortuous, lifelong process. Worse, it's both tedious and unromantic. Falling is more thrilling than climbing, after all, and there's a reason more people have read the Inferno than the Purgatorio. But someone resolving to try to make that climb -- someone planting their foot and taking one meaningful step upwards -- I believe that to be worthy of a story or a song.

These are the stories of those who fell.

There is an imperfection in the human mind - a crack, a flaw, a crevice - one that fascinates and repulses all those who find it. It is empty of all but impulse and appetite and the memory of hope. What if you looked over the edge? What if you fell? And after the fall, what would you see in the mirror?

Dragon shadows, bleeding statues, wolf dreams and time machines - your biological clock is ticking, and it's time to get metaphysical in this twisted cabaret of the macabre. This is the road map to your own personal inferno, fondly dedicated to everyone who is dying...especially you.

Fully illustrated by artist Tom Cassidy, and with a foreword by author Michael Merriam! 

WARNING: contains tales of horror and dark fantasy, and consequently some disturbing, violent, and sexual imagery, including descriptions of sexual assault. 

Launch party this Friday at Strike!

Holy Fooling

"Then were there brought unto him little children, that he should put his hands on them, and pray: and the disciples rebuked them. But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven."

When I was studying at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic High School, to the delight (okay, I mean, let's be real here, to the weary annoyance) of my friends, I was known for the composition of what came to be called "phil-poems." These generally represented brief but luridly described episodes in which a hapless Jesus would stumble across increasingly depraved scenarios. Once they had served their purpose, I would fold them up and conceal them in various books around the school library, and I'm only a little ashamed to admit that there's still some part of my lizard brain that reduces me to helpless schoolboy giggling at the thought of some future student picking up a copy of The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and being scandalized by soaring verse describing Christ participating in a squirrel orgy.

The humor (insofar as there was any) came from the clash between the nobility of the savior, heightened language, and utter filth. I have apparently failed to outgrow this impulse. (Indeed, much of the comedy I find funny, from the Marx Brothers to Monty Python, revolves around applying an astounding level of artistry to astoundingly stupid things.)

"Finally he spoke: 'I'm really getting quite a kick out of this notion of playing God like a dirty old man in Skidoo. You wanna know why? Do you realize that irreverence and reverence are the same thing?'

'Always?'

'If they're not, then it's a misuse of your power to make people laugh.'"

I suppose it was inevitable that I'd find my way to the comedies of Aristophanes and the rituals of

Dionysos (patron of liquor and the theatre); and, as I stumbled back towards faith, that I would find its echoes in my own religious tradition -- particularly in the Middle Ages (which is probably reason #69,105 for my fascination with that period). And I did lots of reading. I read about the many uncomfortable inversions of the Feast of Fools, and the conflict it created between the Church (body of Christ) and the Church (political machine). I read about Saint Simeon the Holy Fool, and the vulgarities in which he would indulge to mock the world of the flesh. I read Dante Alighieri and looked at the paintings of Bosch, at their many descriptions of torture and deviance and insanity, and quickly developed the suspicion that, like many horror writers before and since, their position of piety allowed them to revel in some seriously impious art. And I read a fuck-ton of the aforementioned Chaucer, with his tales of Biblical tomfoolery and anal penetration and what have you.

What I experienced while reading the medieval humorists wasn't so much an expansion of consciousness as it was a sense of recognition -- a clear sense that the sacred and the grotesque are not only compatible, but that the profane and the profound can coexist, should coexist, in some crucial way *must* coexist.

This has been occasionally bewildering to my audiences. I've had reviews of my comedy shows that criticize the apparent contradiction when I leap from a sincere expression of faith to a ten-minute sex farce. (And it undoubtedly presents a marketing problem, when patrons on the left dread the former, while patrons on the right dread the latter...) But the fact is that shock is the by-product, not my goal, and the contradiction has never really been all that obvious to me. Certainly not in all the art I've ever truly loved, with their poetry and obscenity and song and flesh and breath and divine madness.

"The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!
Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!"

The dirty jokes, in a way that I've been struggling to articulate for the entirety of my adult life, represent not some deviation from my faith, but its ultimate expression. And -- as someone who spends a lot of his time doing highbrow deconstructions of Malory and Thucydides and their ilk (and don't get me wrong, I love that work, too) -- I find, perversely, a kind of innocence in reaching back to touch that giggling schoolboy. Y'know...intimately.

Which is a really long windup to my announcement that, hey, I wrote another book!

It's December 21st, 2012, and something's gone terribly wrong with the timeline. Now it's up to Saint Nicholas, a soft-boiled detective, and an unknown carpenter's son named Jesus of Nazareth to set things right in this giddily blasphemous collection of literary parodies by internationally touring storyteller phillip andrew bennett low. Fully illustrated by cartoonist Kay Kirscht, and with a foreword by comedian Joseph Scrimshaw!

WARNING: May contain mature language, as well as immature and insensitive humor regarding genitalia, flatulence, regurgitation, sex, drugs, rock and roll, lies, videotape, duct tape, tapeworms, subversion of ethnic stereotypes, fulfilment of ethnic stereotypes, hate culture, rape culture, ape culture, horticulture, and/or a general posture of deep reverence for deep irreverence. Not for the faint of heart or stomach.

Launch party November 28th at the Phoenix Theater. I don't know if my cast of drunken prophets and trickster angels will find a home with you, but I'm pretty confident that a cash bar won't hurt.

The Secret Book of Jesus

I've been buried enough under both touring and paid writing assignments to not have been able to blog this particular production -- but I've gathered enough online detritus that it's worth collating here.

THINGS TO WATCH

1:03     The Secret Book of Jesus - Kansas City Interview. Brief and fluffy interview I did at the KC opening.

1:25     The Secret Book of Jesus - Teaser Trailer. Trailer I put together for the show some months ago.

2:57     The Secret Book of Jesus - Fringe Teaser. Live promo I did of my show at the Kansas City Fringe.

THINGS TO LISTEN TO

51:29     What's So Funny? Podcast interview I did with Levi Weinhagen about writing and performing comedy.

1:01:12     Body Mind Spirit NEWS. Phone interview I did with a holistic radio program in Michigan.

1:07:43     Screw It! a podcast about wine. A rather silly podcast interview that involves evaluating sundry liquors.

THINGS TO READ

07/15/2015     Kansas City Star Promo. A nice plug from Robert Trussell in Missouri.

07/21/2015     Zenfolio Photo Album. Some photos that were taken of me at the KC Fringe.

07/23/2015     KCMetropolis Review. "A slow-moving production, this is a show to see if you have a good grasp of scripture."

07/28/2015     RedCurrent Interview. An interview I did with Laura VanZandt shortly before opening.

08/05/2015     Single White Fringe Geek Review (5 stars): "This Jesus, Mary and Joseph, all shown to have rougher edges, tempers, and senses of humor, become so human, as do those around them, that you have to remind yourself they are all central figures in a religious narrative that some people never think twice about."

08/06/2015     Minnesota Playlist Review:  "...low’s delivery is pitch-perfect for the material: equal parts prophet, bard, and snake oil salesman...his flair for showmanship serves nicely to leaven the dense language and subject matter of his material."

08/07/2015     Grail Diary Review:  "I walked out wanting to read his script.  And peruse his sources. And ask him what he thought about what he was saying."

08/01-10/2015     Minnesota Fringe Festival Audience Reviews (11 reviews, 4-star average): "Funny and fascinating apocrypha about Jesus told with phillip's trademark exhaustive research, humor, and precise wordplay, but without the esoterism that can scare some audiences off."

08/14/2015     One Girl, Two Cities Review: "...one heck of a storyteller, and he’s picked some strange stories about Jesus’ youth full of unfamiliar words that a lay person could easily trip over. phillip’s a pro, though, and I didn’t notice even a single misstep."

08/17/2015     Alpha Omega Arts Review: "...performed with lots of passion and the promise of drama...would be far better suited as a book than as a performance. It's not that the content is bad theology, although I'll leave that to clergy to decide. It's simply bad theatre..."

08/19/2015     NUVO News Review (3 stars): "...you have to be impressed...low is a very commanding storyteller."

08/20/2015     Plays with John & Wendy Review: "low’s delivery is crisp and entertaining, and contains no judgment of the texts...why balk at the infant Jesus confronting a dragon?"

MY REVIEWS

I have collated my coverage of the Minnesota Fringe Festival (46 articles in toto) at this link.

...my profound gratitude to everybody who took the time to come and see the show, and especially those who took the time to share their thoughts afterwards. I'm honored to have had the opportunity to entertain you, and hope that you'll continue to extend that opportunity to me in the future!