We Are Preparing to Take Your Call

Idle thoughts while on hold with the Screen Actors Guild:

Minute 10
...okay, one last time through the thing I'm calling about--find exactly the right language to describe it so the call will go fast--okay, yeah, that should do, yeah, good...

Minute 25
...damn but I'm good at computer solitaire...

Minute 33
...they keep repeating "We are preparing to take your call." What the hell are they doing to prepare? Repainting the office? Stretching a tin can and a string to my apartment?

Minute 47
...if I ever play one more game of solitaire in my life, I swear I'll scream my damn fool head off. Okay, there are a couple federal and state forms that I need to prepare today, I'll just go online and get those done.

Minute 71
...okay, the forms are done, and hey, look how much time passed! Why the hell am I still on hold? And what to do about the growing bathroom problem?...

Minute 77
...my shoulder hurts. Why haven't I put this call on the speakerphone before now? Now, is there any way to put the handset back in the base that doesn't create a hellish feedbaYOOOOWWW! No, apparently not...

Minute 80
...what am I calling them for again? Jeez, I have absolutely no idea...

Minute 91
...what's my name? Why is there disembodied piano music playing the same tune over and over? Why do these voices keep telling me comforting things that only make me ag-ag-ag-agitated?

Minute 97
mind blister sell aromatic potions lost lost lost (no no no more voices!) can't linger can't delay can't wait can't cant or keen (piano no piano, no please no piano!) phosphorescent pastaaaaahhh...

Minute 103
blink
blink
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Minute ...

Babies!

So last Saturday, we three who comprise Lightwheel had a meeting, did some stuff, etc. Monica, quite pregnant, had reached the stage of perpetual discomfort. Once she bounced up and down on the balls of her feet, instructing the kid "Get out!" We all had lunch, and arranged for her last visit with us on Tuesday before her due date swooped upon her.

Never happened. Monday morning, around 12:30, the smoke detector in her bedroom went off. Wasn't the sort of thing where the battery is going low so it beeps periodically: it all-out went off. No fire anywhere, no smoke anywhere. She and her husband Kent got up, got the device to stop screeching, and went back to bed. Half an hour later it went off again. No one knows why--the device had no history of false alarms. But a couple hours later, she awoke Kent again: the contractions, they weren't stopping. And so off they went.

We've started calling the device a "birth detector."

Little Madeleine Anne was born later Monday morning, and on Thursday Marc and I went over to meet the newest member of our little Lightwheel family. An adorable child, as you can see, and remarkably mellow: not a crier at all, I barely heard a peep from her during the hour or so we were there. Monica is tired but resting and recovering; her first child, Alexander, has already declared he's "tired of being a big brother," and Kent was a mixture of pride and weariness. Madeleine, meanwhile, just laid there, being passed from person to person with complete equanimity, her huge baby eyes taking in absolutely everything without any sign of fear or anxiety. A perfect child in a perfect world, while we filled in her mom on all the things that had gone on in the perfect world during the days when she wasn't paying attention.

The Dove Lieth

I was hard at work, setting up some wholesale sales of Zen Noir, when the phone rang. Caller ID showed it was some telemarketer so I ignored it and kept working; about ten minutes later it rang again, same thing, I ignored it again; then ten minutes later it rang yet again. Just to shut the wretched thing up, this time I answered. A too-cheerful woman on the other end first asked for "the lady of the house" (a particularly archaic construction, I thought), then assured me that the call wasn't a solicitation (thus getting her around the Do Not Call Registry), and that the call would take only ninety seconds. "Do you agree," she then asked, "that movie ratings have gotten too lenient?"

Ah, jeez. One of those.

She was definitely not prepared to get an earful, but come on, she'd called to solicit my complaints about the entertainment industry, and I'm in the entertainment industry. With very strong feelings about a particular subject.

The woman was with something called the Dove Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of "family-friendly" entertainment. Their website says:

Our standards and criteria are based on Judeo/Christian values, free from the pressure of commercial interests. We believe in a positive approach of commending high-quality, wholesome movies rather than condemning filmmakers for not meeting those standards.

But of course that's exactly what they're doing. There's language all over their site condemning filmmakers, in that sweetly passive-aggressive tone that these people should get patented. "Moms and dads are concerned about the gratuitous sex, violence and anti-family values that their children are exposed to," they say, and "For years we have watched the morals and attitudes of the entertainment industry slowly creep into our society." They refer to the "increasingly salacious" content of most contemporary entertainment; and there are prominent links to the FamilySafeDVD site, which offers edited versions of mainstream movies--edited versions that were not created by the creators but chopped up by oh-so concerned busybodies with no right to do so. The Dove Foundation's website offers links to an edited version of Finding Neverland, and this one in particular boggles the mind: what on earth can there be to edit out of Finding Neverland?

The woman was completely surprised when, in answer to her question, I flatly said "Nope." She should be thankful that I didn't continue with the thought, because in truth I feel the MPAA's restrictions are too stringent. Quite aside from their sheer arbitrariness (see the documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated for the whole absurd story), I'm just not a big fan of self-censorship, which is exactly what the MPAA is. It was created by the entertainment industry for the purpose of convincing the public that the entertainment industry is responsible enough to monitor its own content.

I say that the best way to convince the public of your responsibility is to actually be responsible. And with that said, it might surprise the people at the Dove Foundation that I really don't have much use for movies that revel in gratuitous violence, like any of the Rambo films, or anything with Dolph Lundgren in it. I don't have much use for gratuitous sex, either, although come on, I'm a guy, I don't mind exactly, but... well, you know.

(Actually, good sex in a movie can be a glorious thing. The Spanish film Sex and Lucia, which my friends the Halperins distributed, is a wonderful movie with interesting characters who love each other and engage in loving, playful sex that has kinda ruined sex scenes in most other movies for me.

Nor am I one of those who routinely denies that movies (or any kind of art, videogames included) can have a harmful effect on the young. Hell, a movie can have a harmful effect on anyone--it's a necessary corollary of what I do that if I choose to believe a story can have a positive effect, it must also be possible that it have a harmful effect. Artists do have a responsibility to their audience, it's that simple.

The thing I don't believe in--and here I am adamant--is that we should shelter our children from such things. Case in point: when I went with the family to Europe about nine years ago, my brother and sister were I think 12 and 14, something like that. We reached Amsterdam and, when the parents went off somewhere, I took Adam and Amanda down to de Wallen, the infamous Red Light District. Then we hit a torture museum just off the Dam. I did this because I firmly believe that children should be exposed to everything--so long as there's an adult present. If they had wandered into de Wallen on their own, that would have been bad; but with me there, both keeping an eye on things and answering any questions they might have, then I think it is exactly the sort of education kids ought to have. (I made sure we all went to the Anne Frank House, too, which the Dove people would probably approve.)

The same with movies and books and whatnot. Experience them under supervision and I think pretty much anything goes--and if it's uncomfortable for the parent, well, that's the parent's problem. The artist has a responsibility to be a good artist, to tell his stories responsibly; and parents have a responsibility to be good parents, to make sure their kids are actually prepared for life--which they cannot be if they've been sheltered from everything dark their whole lives.

This is why I think organizations like the Dove Foundation are just plain wrong. In truth, I would like to see more family-oriented films--and the Foundation's assertion that family films tend to make better profits has some real merit. But it's also true that if that balance were to change--if there were a lot more family films and a lot fewer violent films, then the family films would be seen as a dime a dozen, and the more, shall we say, exotic material would seem rare and exciting and would make terrific profits. That's just how things are.

The woman cut off the call before I was done saying my piece, and I rather suspected that she hadn't included my response in the opinion poll she was taking, because she seemed like the sort who only wanted to hear opinions that matched with her own. So I went online and took their web-based poll, just to make sure they had some dissenting opinions. You can do that, too: just go here. Wouldn't it be fun if we could completely throw their numbers off, and restore a little sanity to this particular conversation?

Experimental Theatre

Last night I went to see two plays, one after the other, something I haven't done in ages, since those days when theatre was my whole life. One play was relatively straightforward but flawed; the second, a late-night at the Met Theatre in Hollywood, was not at all straightforward, and deeply flawed--but interesting.

The play is called "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" (here's their MySpace page), and it begins with two different things: director Dara Weinberg's desire to explore improvisational theatre, and then her decision to use William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell" section from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The paradoxical nature of Blake's diabolical inversion of biblical proverbs seems to have inspired her to cast away one of the defining elements of theatre, namely narrative, in favor of a celebration of moment and instinct. (It's entirely Buddhist in its devotion to Now--and yet, paradoxically, Marc Rosenbush, both a Buddhist and a longtime practitioner of avant-garde theatre, found it all infuriating. But then, so did I, for reasons I'll get to in a second.)

In her Director's Note, Ms. Weinberg describes her approach as "a chemical reaction between the past and the present," further writes that

We believe that part of what makes live performance special is spontaneity.
The other part is madness. The irrational, the Dionysian. We ask you to join us there, to be both spontaneous and irrational, and to surrender to a dream.

All of which immediately caught my attention, because I have long-standing complaints with the shape of most contemporary theatrical productions. When film does Realism so well, what on earth is the point of doing Realism on a stage as well? When I walk into a theatre and see a set consisting of some walls, a sofa and a dining table upstage, I'm immediately tempted to just give up there and then, and get out fast.

Now, people are comfortable with Realism because it looks like their lives, so it won't ever go away from theatre, from novels, from any of the plastic arts, and certainly not from film. But there are other possibilities in a theatre, in that living, breathing, communal space, possibilities that I happen to think are best exemplified by the work of Samuel Beckett, which is exactly why I spent so much time in Chicago as an actor working with Splinter Group, the Beckett specialists (now they are Irish Rep of Chicago). Once I'd found people who saw theatre pretty much the same way I did, I happily abandoned thoughts of developing a career in order to do work that consistently excited me. (Then I abandoned acting, but that wasn't Beckett's fault at all, that was just me realizing that there was something else I needed to be doing.)

Theatre should be stark, and surprising, and unsettling; it should resemble but not imitate real life; it should be poetic, not prosaic; it should be an island unto itself, each theatre space a rotating wheel of worlds. So as I looked at the program for "Marriage of Heaven and Hell," standing there in the lobby with friends and minor celebrities (the wonderful Kirsten Vangsness from Criminal Minds), I read mini-articles with titles like "What's Wrong With Theatre?" and thought Great! My people!

And what I expected was perhaps something a little like Mary Zimmerman's Proust celebration in Chicago a few years ago, an installation piece titled "Eleven Rooms of Proust," or maybe Peter Handke's play "Offending the Audience" (which Marc once directed at Emerson). I imagined a theatre space without chairs, in which we audience members became a part of the production.

My friend Ezra Buzzington, one of the producers of the show, would tell us nothing about the production, wanting it all to be a complete surprise. So I was mildly disappointed to walk in and find a standard seating section where, since I was in the back row, it would be impossible for me to interact with the show at all. (Not that I was entirely up for that--it was a late-night, after all, and I'm a morning person.) Still, there were interesting things going on: several video monitors and TV sets were placed around the remaining three walls of the theatre, and a crew member with a camera was pointing it at the audience, at the set, wherever her fancy suggested. Another crew member was in a kind of dangling crow's nest, with wires that would enable her to cause parts of the set to move whenever she felt like it. Two musicians were perched above the action, improvising music that was alternately heavenly and hellish. The result was a fluid space that was designed to be as improvisational as the performance scheduled to happen within it.

Then the performance began. The actors came out, dressed in some rather silly costumes that suggested a cheap Berlin nightclub's costume party (although I liked the guy with the gas mask on sideways), and the house manager flipped a coin to determine which actors would be "in heaven" and which "in hell." They went to their respective corners, the music came up, and the show began. Almost immediately I had one of those "Oh no" reactions.

First off, the music was too loud, so many of the actors were completely inaudible. Not that it mattered--they had all memorized all seventy of Blake's proverbs, and repeated them randomly throughout the performance--and clearly a few of them were particular favorites of the group, because they got repeated a lot. (Only occasionally did these recitations seem meaningful in any way.) Thus you were left to watch the movement work onstage, and that was just as improvisational, in that "I've seen Bob Fosse's work but never actually studied it" way. Windmilling arms, ungracefully undulating bodies, kinda sorta in time with the music.

From moment to moment, one actor was supposed to take the lead while the others imitated or responded to that lead (mostly imitated); then, organically, a moment would lead some different actor to take the lead. But if such an organic moment didn't happen, then the particular undulation would go on for a while as the group collectively tried to figure out "Okay, now what?" Even worse, only a few of the actors seemed to have any real dance and/or movement experience; one actor in particular was so ungainly, so completely disengaged, that he badly dragged down the entire production. I think he only spoke a line once, never took the lead movement-wise, he simply lingered in the background and awkwardly imitated what others were doing. It felt like watching a jazz ensemble perform when one member of the group only picked up his instrument a week before, has no particular feel for it, and has never improvised before, either.

Jazz is the best analogue for what was attempted last night; and bad jazz nicely describes the result. Jazz is, of course, defined by its improvisational nature, and the good stuff is sublime--but that's because it takes place within a structure. When musicians "trade fours," they improvise solos for four bars while the rest of the band supports them, usually by vamping in such a way that the overall structure of the song remains essentially static, leaving room for the soloist's exploration within that shape; then after those four bars are done, the next soloist will jump in and the first soloist becomes a supporting player. The mathematical precision of the four-bar structure is essential to the freedom and artistry of the solo. But when jazz got too sophisticated, when it moved into the Free Jazz era, then the music became so esoteric that only other musicians could appreciate it. And at that moment, jazz began to die.

Talking to Ezra after the show, he could just as easily have been to a free jazz concert as this theatre performance. When we complained about the utter lack of narrative, he said that he doesn't give a fig about narrative, he wants to watch the actors' exploration of the moment. He's an artist watching artists explore their art. Which is fine for we artists, but if we want the form to survive, if we want theatre to still be here in a hundred years, it can't just be some masturbatory exercise only intended for ourselves and our friends. (I used to joke that in Chicago, the only money anyone ever made was the same ten dollar bill--our friends paid ten bucks to see our shows, then we paid ten bucks to see theirs, and it was always the same bill.)

There is room for improvisation in theatre, of course there is--but it needs to be more bebop than free jazz, it needs some kind of shape within which it can flourish. These guys, they keep throwing out the baby with the bathwater every time, reinventing the whole thing almost from scratch, meaning that by the time they begin to get any sense of what they're about on that particular night, the show is already over.

There was one nice moment. An actor had picked up a flat metal washer from somewhere, was at the head of a line of other actors undulating together, and seemed to be about to pass the washer to the actor behind him; but instead he dropped the washer in her pocket, which produced some amusing responses as people tried to get to it. It meant nothing but it was, in an evening of entirely improvised theatre, the only moment that was actually surprising. And a sense of surprise, of joyous discovery, is exactly what was missing from a show that should have been filled with it.

It's an interesting premise, and I celebrate Ms. Weinberg's attempt to explore it. But this show needs six months of rehearsal before it ever goes in front of an audience again. For now, it's just an indulgent mess that, to an outsider who has the misfortune to wander into it, makes the entire theatre community look bad; that seems to confirm that whole "selfishly self-absorbed" rap that keeps hanging over artists.

The Great Leap

There comes a moment when you just have to let it all fly. Sometimes you choose the moment, sometimes the moment chooses you. And here I am, at the moment.

No longer a wage slave, I now toil solely for myself and my partners at Zenmovie and Lightwheel. It is, of course, utterly terrifying. And there are so many things to do that I'm still a bit flustered, trying to sort out how to get it all done efficiently. The result, at least for now, seems to involve flitting from one project to another, getting a little bit accomplished in several tasks but not quite finishing anything. I'll surely get a better feel for it, but right now I think I'm still a little flummoxed at the idea that there isn't much difference anymore between Friday and Saturday. All that easy built-in structure, gone, leaving just Me and Time. Little Me; Big, Big Vasty Time.

I've got money laid aside for a couple months, and something has to happen during that time. I've always hated deadlines but I just gave myself the mother of all deadlines. And it won't be catastrophic if it doesn't work (after an unpaid summer internship with the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival I got home with $35 in my bank account and a huge stack of bills, but came out from under that just fine); but oh man, I really need it to work. It's time to get down to it, to take that risk, to do what I've always said I was going to do.

Started working on a short story over the weekend, the first time I've worked in straight prose for a remarkably long while. I had a tiny little idea that has already blossomed into something mysterious and strange, and it has definitely been a challenge to write. Which is good: the best way to deal with my new life-challenge is with an art-challenge. And if I pull it off, there's a little money coming in--from writing. From that which I must do.

We've had some interesting meetings with some interesting people concerning City of Truth, and we're going to be workshopping it tomorrow night with some more interesting people. Already we have a host of ideas to make the script better and deeper, and they're all good character ideas, not just showy set pieces. So I'm hopeful there will be good news to report, pretty soon.

Because man. Now there's no choice--there has to be good news, and sooner than soon. I so don't want to have to go back to someone else's office, ever ever again.