Saturday, July 18, 2009

July 13-15: District of Columbia

Monday, July 13th, 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 14th, 2009


Walking around the National Mall, wandering through various gardens and displays and munching on food obtained from the street vendors, I’m struck by the observation – particularly in light of the fact that all of the tourist attractions are in such a compressed space, and that nearly everything is free and easily accessible to the public (with the notable exception of security checkpoints in damn near every building) – that this whole area resembles one gigantic museum. I imagine it would be possible to wander through here for days without seeing everything.


Spent much of the afternoon at the Smithsonian Museum of American History. I’m actually enjoying being able to sightsee under my own power – I can skip over the exhibits which hold little interest for me and pore over others, without worrying about someone impatiently tugging on my sleeve.


One floor was divided by quotations from the Preamble to the Constitution: for example, the section “Provide For the Common Defense” was devoted to military history. That was an interesting section, detailing surviving pieces from the American Revolution through the current occupation of Iraq. And one thing that struck me was how our perception of these wars has changed over time, in direct proportion with media access to them. Images from the Civil War included uniforms and swords – for Vietnam, you could walk through a simulated POW camp. Yikes. And it’s an exponential leap over the past fifty years or so: after all, Vietnam was our first televised war; the Persian Gulf, our first which broadcast live from a war zone; and the current invasion/occupation, the first to rely heavily on journalists embedded directly into fighting units.


But one weird side effect of this is the fact that we have a bizarrely sanitized view of wars preceding those, as though there were something far more noble and civilized about someone being hacked into pieces with a saber. We still have this perception of WWII as a clean, efficient engagement, when it was no different from any other conflict: rife with poor decisions and bureaucratic stupidity. The only difference is that now, we see those taking place in real time.


(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 15th, 2009


Last day in DC, so I decided to round it off with a trip to the Library of Congress, since there’s few things I love more than poring over documents.


Was particularly impressed with Thomas Jefferson’s personal library, which forms the initial core of the existing collection. It’s only a third of its original size – the rest were destroyed in fire – and it’s still more than worthy of note – his vast supply of medical textbooks, Islamic theology, political science, Ovid, Homer, Virgil ­­– I found myself standing there and thinking, whoa. There were pieces of all of these books floating around inside this guy’s head. He really was a classic polymath. And in that respect, the perfect dude to have around when trying to figure out how to build a new system of government from the ground up. We were lucky to have him.


There’s a certain trend among bibliophiles to be extremely resistant to new forms of technology. This isn’t something that I share – I love the internet, love the blogosphere (obviously), love electronic books like the Amazon Kindle (though I can’t afford them, myself). I don’t fetishize paper, but the words they contain, and those can be transmitted through a variety of different mediums. (Another reason I found myself in the theatrical profession.)


But – and this thought struck me as I was looking at a set of notes for a speech, scribbled down by Benjamin Franklin – the problem posed by electronic media is its impermanence. (Okay, yes, technically all media are impermanent – paper will sooner or later crumble away into nothing, as well, and most of it has.) We still have much of the correspondence between the founding fathers as they were composing the foundational documents of our nation, and that’s incredibly valuable information to be preserved. But e-mails and Twittering and text messages vanish away into the ether and are gone forever. (In most cases, thankfully. Lord knows, I have plenty of drunken messages I’m glad will never again see the light of day.)


Maybe it’s just another unfortunate side effect of prosperity – that whatever we have in abundance, we cease to value. And this is the Information Age. We’re so bombarded by stimuli that we cease to trust or value any of it.


No, stop. This is a bigger thought than a blog entry. I have to think about it more.


--


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.

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