Thursday Inspiration

In honor of Missy, who keeps saying she’d like to follow my web travels for a day, here’s a Thursday Inspiration directly out of my bookmark page.  Although my current blogroll is pretty recently acquired, I’ve been plugged in at the heart since I discovered the Hype Machine back in 2006. For those of you not acquainted, the Hype Machine is an mp3 blog aggregator. It surveys the entire expanse of the Internets for blog posts that contain music files. I found it by chance while working on the sound design for some show or another. I picked through. I poached. I started making the best mixtapes ever, and my coolness factor increased exponentially. Thanks, Hype Machine.

In 2006, a blog-surveying data collection engine seemed like a novel idea. Now there are hundreds of aggregators that whirl and click away, polling and cataloging the blogosphere according to any number of consumer profiles.  But, in the same way that you still listen to that song that came out your senior of high school–you know, the one that was playing when you went to that one place with that one person?  Uh huh, you know how it is.  I have a serious soft spot for the original.  

We Feel Fine, by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, is a web installation described as ”An exploration of human emotion in six movements.”  I love it.  I love it even though it takes forever to load and is so, like, two-and-a-half years ago. I love the 80’s-colored neon dots floating around attached to phrases like, “I feel that is something everyone needs to remember not only sacians,” and “I just hate this routine and don’t know how to change it and I feel like I only live for the weekends and I hate that.”  (The latter posted by a 19 year old in New Jersey.) 

It also has photos. Or you can set it to “murmurs” and watch the phrases appear on your screen as if you’re seeing them typed by the source. I find myself hoping that noone walks in on me, it’s all so painfully gauche and human and exposed.  Some days I’ll pluck random feelings from the random-feeling plucker and use them to sketch characters.  But most days I just stare. 

The most common feeling is “better.”  Hmm.  

If you’ve never seen it, go.

And then there’s Twistori.  It’s prettier. It’s sleeker. It’s more efficient. It’s so, like, 2008.  It filters all the tweets on Twitter by phrases like “I love,” and “I wish,” and parades them in front of you. It’s endless. It’s exhausting. It’s a fabulous performance piece. Check it out, but have your exit plan ready, mouse perched over the back button, before you get sucked in!  Bwah ha ha…

Happy Thursday.

10 News goes in for some victim blaming

Here’s the text of an email I just sent to David Yirchott, the Managing Editor of 10News.com.

Dear David Yirchott:

I read 10 News online and was appalled by this lede, and the accompanying headline.

“San Diego police are investigating a rising number of rapes involving young women who go on drinking binges, becoming too intoxicated to fight back or say “no,” it was reported Tuesday.”

How can you find it appropriate to report on the incidence of any kind of rape without any mention of the perpetrators? This is classic victim blaming and can only contribute to the alarmingly frequent occurrence of this criminal act. I expected better from 10News.com.

I hope that in the future you’ll consider reporting crime as if it were a crime, perpetrated by a criminal, and not an unpreventable consequence of the victim’s behavior. I don’t know about you, but I live in 2008, and victim blaming is old news.

How about this?

“San Diego police are investigating a rising number of rapes in which the rapists target intoxicated women.”

A concerned reader…

If you’d like to voice a similar concern, his email is dyirchott at ibsys dot com, or you can hit the contact button in the left margin on the page.

UPDATE: IT WORKED!!  Here is his reply.

Esther,

I have integrated your suggested text into the first sentence of our story. It now reads: “San Diego police are investigating a rising number of rapes in which rapists assault women who go on drinking binges and become too intoxicated to fight back or say ‘no,’ it was reported Tuesday.”

This adds mention of rapists as perpetrators and still maintains the elements of heavy drinking impairing resistance that the head of the sex-crimes unit specifically mentions as increasing.

Thank you for your feedback.

Why donate when you see no return on investment?

Budgeting season has begun.  Delicia went into her hole, budgeted like mad, came up to check for the shadow of a deficit and upon seeing only the sunshine she brought the budget to my house where Jo Anne and I chewed it over as my daughter played naked on her “pee  mat”. 

A side note here…the “pee mat” is a wonderful waterproof world where Penny can go sans diaper and let her tush air out.  I suspect budgeting would be a more relaxing process if we all did it on “pee mats”.

Back to budgeting…now when I said sunshine I didn’t mean MOXIE has the money it needs for the season.  HA. I say again, “ha”.  What I meant was that we figured out how much we had to get.  There is something exhilarating about looking a number in the face and saying “that is how much we are going to go get”.  Ticket sales accounts for a very small portion of most theatre’s budgets.  Companies that have nailed the corporate ask go there next but MOXIE is looking at you sweet individual donors. 

My dad once gave a chunk of change to help fund Celebration of the Lizard, a musical of The Doors music but not at all about The Doors (another long story).  His friends wanted to know if he was going to make any money.  I think they thought he was going to end up a producer on Broadway and in the beginning I think he hoped he might.  My dad went to many of the early rehearsals after which he would come home full of exciting updates and stories. He met the writers, the cast, attended half the performances to which he brought friends, had special t-shirts made for the cast and crew to wear and at the Opening Night party he sat next to one of the surviving members of The Doors and exchanged watches.  He invested in an experience.  For three months he was along for the ride.  That is what my dad bought.  He bought a piece of the journey.  The show didn’t go on to Broadway but my dad will never forget it. On his wall in his office hangs a photo from the show surrounded by signatures from the cast and crew.

The process of producing a show is truly magic.  I am astounded on every Opening Night that we have done it again.  We have brought a room full of artists together and created on awesome collaborative live piece of artwork that exists only for a few hours a night and then only in the memories of those who witnessed it.  It is the art of creating a journey.  The journey has parameters but is a little different each time it is traveled because the participants are new every time.  The audience pays a small price to join part of the ride but the donor owns the experience and feels it in a visceral way.

The truth is that the return on investment is huge and a whole lot more reliable than the market.  Invest in life. Invest in art. It doesn’t have to be ours, though we would be honored if you would join our journey. There will be much more than free donuts involved.

Donate to MOXIE and join the journey now.

Community

First, before anything else, I’d like to tip my forty to the memory of Estelle Getty, who passed on last Tuesday, July 22.  This woman has made me belly laugh for years and years, and was a powerful member of the theatre community; a true champion of the underdog.  Estelle… thanks for the good times.  You will live on in my heart…. and in my collection of Golden Girls DVD’s.

Now onto the matter at hand.

What is a community? 

In ecology it is defined as a group of interdependent organisms inhabiting the same region and interacting with each other.

Sounds like theatre to me.

In theatre, we are all interdependent organisms… a playwright needs a theatre needs designers need producers need directors need a playwright needs an audience needs a theatre and so on.  Interdependent.  One cannot exist without the other.  When even one element is missing or weakened, the imbalance undermines the integrity of the entire community.

To me, that means it’s our job to look after one another, applying the wisdom that the health of one of us is the health of us all.  This includes standing up for injustice and helping each other maintain the highest level of integrity, so that we might keep working together, supporting each other, and growing as a community.

It’s here where it gets tricky, because we have to agree upon where we’re growing.  Which involves addressing function.

Like any organism, I think our main function is to simply… stay alive.  Our sunlight food and water is cold hard cash.  Money to pay artists, rent playing space, find our audience, etc.  But since we’re human beings, our needs extend WAY beyond these basics.

Our deeper function might be to develop artists, to be a meeting place for the larger community, to educate, enlighten and entertain.  All of these elements are significant, and each theatre assigns them a different order of importance.  But again, looking more deeply, people are the root of all of these functions.  And people need support.  We need the feeling of community, not simply the structure itself.  We need folks to have our backs and guide us, to get us pumped and excited about our work; so we can go on to do the necessary but sometimes not-so-fun work of running a successful business. 

In short, we need our peeps.  And if one of our peeps is at odds with another, we need to determine our priorities and act in a way that supports our ideals.

I’m grateful to be around a group of badasses who do this and do it well.

 

“No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, there can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.”

                                                                   ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Batman and the irresistible dark

I saw The Dark Knight  last night.  For those of you who have your head either in the sand or are hiding from summer blockbusters, this is the new batman movie. 

My husband and I had a night off because family volunteered to look after Penny Jane.  It was a huge task for us just getting out the door…Penny won’t take a bottle now.  She has a mind of her own and her mind is made up about bottles.  That’s another story. 

Back to batman.  I had heard that the film was dark.  No worries…I love dark movies….I am a huge sucker for really sharp editing, loud driving music and unnecessary violence.  I can’t help it.  I am a 16 year old boy trapped in a woman’s body when it comes to films.  To say that the film is dark is an understatement.  Watching Heath Ledger’s BRILLIANT performance knowing he was no longer alive was aweful but the movie itself seemed to say that all people are just a coin toss away from being raving homicidal maniacs. 

No wonder it was so hard for MOXIE to find any new plays that didn’t make you want to kill yourself! Delicia has read what probably amounts to a living room littered with plays looking for something to round out our season.  It needed to be something that was fun, something that would end the season on a high note, something that felt like an adventure.  We chose a play that includes a butcher, a murder mystery, several poisonings, selling illicit drugs to minors and  a cereal bowl filled with blood.  It’s funny.  This was the show that was the “fun” end to our season.  I know I am not saying something new that people don’t already know but really…people are seriously upset right now.  We’re are past angry as a country.  We are wallowing in the depths of despair and wondering if there is any good left in us. It’s showing up in our art.  It’s showing up in our summer blockbuster movies!!!!

How will this new president shape theatre?  Bush has certainly left his mark.  What do you think we can expect from playwrights in the next few years? Can audiences take any more dark material? Is MOXIE crazy to have programmed a season that reflects the current darkness when other theatres are taking pains to program fluff to give people relief? As one of our upcoming plays taught me…during the depression people would take their handout from the government and even though it was supposed to help them feed their families for weeks…many of them would blow it all on candy.  They called it the sugar syndrome.  Should we be programming sugar when playwrights are giving us meat?

How to run a theatre company with no theatre

MOXIE does rehearsal/reading for first production Dog Act at E Street Cafe in Encinitas in 2005

All you need is somewhere for actors to perform and an audience to sit right?  MOXIE is in the process of discussing what we need in the theatre space that may or may not be built for us in Encinitas in the future.  We got the first round of plans back from the folks who will be funding this elusive venture.  No office space.  No rehearsal room.  This made me reflect on how MOXIE has been running a company without a  theatre “building” to speak of for the past 5 years.  Here are a list of places we have run MOXIE from and held meetings including: designer consultations, interviews, production meetings, auditions, board meetings, season planning meetings and sometimes rehearsals.

• Coffee shops Favorites include Twiggs on Park Blvd, Lestats on Adams, Starbucks in Horton Plaza.  Much of The Treatment was rehearsed in coffee shops with people watching.
• Cars  We have done really productive business on the way up and down from Encinitas in Jo, D or my car as we made our way to and from city council meetings. We actually did the first read through of WET in the car on a road trip to San Francisco to see Dog Act.
• Living rooms MOXIE was conceived in Liv’s living room and grew up in D and Jo’s place. Chairs were rarely involved but food was almost always present.
• Mexican food restaurants Favorites include Valentines downtown, El Zarape on Park Blvd and that place near the old Actors Alliance…what’s it called? Many rolled tacos were consumed in the process.
• On the phone  Delicia and I have probably talked for 30 minutes to an hour almost every other day for 5 years. Today we worked on casting, discussing budget, planning donor asks all while I scrubbed poop out of my daughter’s cloth diapers in the bathroom. I love multitasking!
• Near dumpsters We have had to do nearly everything ourselves for years, including taking out the trash.  Dumpsters that have witnessed important decisions include the dumpster in the alley behind Diversionary Theatre and the dumpster hidden in the bowels of Horton Plaza.

This is just what comes to mind.  I am sure the list is much more extensive…so why do we need a building right?  Aren’t we doing just fine? Truth is kids…we’re a little tired of not having a place to call our own but I bet you even when we get it, and we will one day soon, we’ll still find ourselves discussing the future of MOXIE over a toilet stall in a public restroom.  MOXIE is a part of who we are and it exists wherever we go (no pun intended).

Thursday Inspiration

Here are a few lines out of Howard Barker’s poem Don’t Exaggerate, selected in honor of Sight Unseen:

The final solution to the problem of art
Art is a problem, after all
Is to call it incomprehensible
To burn it only lends it grace

I moved this here from a fascinating discussion of contemporary music and the nature of art over at Superfluities Redux.  It comes as a bit of a surprise that I’m linking George Hunka, whose intellect as a blogger often floats several layers of abstraction above my earthbound head.  But I was thinking about Sight Unseen, in which an artist is created a charlatan and his muse is created a ruiner of men. (Wow, that’s a criminal oversimplification, but an interesting one. Discuss.)  I was particularly thinking about the music for Sight Unseen, and just how far Paul and I should go with modernity in the music.  How much do we subvert traditional melody with harsh, strange sounds that parallel the character’s harsh, strange paintings? As I was thinking about this and scanning my blog reader, this paragraph caught my eye, quoted by Hunka from David Byrne:

There are lots of books exploring what the fuck happened with 20th century classical music, when many composers willfully sought to alienate the general public and create purposefully difficult, inaccessible music. Why would they do anything that perverse? Why would they not only make music that was hard to listen to, but also demand, as in the case of Zimmerman, that the piece be performed on twelve separate stages simultaneously, with the addition of giant projection screens and other multimedia aspects? Were these composers competing to see whose works could be heard and performed the least?  Why would anyone do that?

Here is Howard Barker again, this time on pain.

It is impossible – now, at this point in the long journey of human culture – to avoid the sense that pain is necessity; that it is neither accident, nor malformation, nor malice, nor misunderstanding, that it is integral to the human character both in its inflicting and in its suffering, this terrible sense Tragedy alone has articulated, and will continue to articulate, and in so doing, make beautiful…

Happy Thursday.

Caffeine and Infrastructure

Before I update you on MOXIE shenanigans, a quick note about my kidneys.  Between preparing to run Sight Unseen for the first time tomorrow, fielding the not-so-unexpected news that “oh my god, the new theatre may not be ready on time for first tech” and brooding over that most difficult question of all, “how the hell does the tea kettle get onstage between scenes six and seven?” I took a moment to tally the coffee intake.

In the language of actors, “this is a discovery.”

I drink one cup in the morning over breakfast, one at Missy’s house when I drop off Milo, one per break all day long (that’s at least four, okay, on most days six) and, if I have any evening obligation (and I usually do), that motivates a seventh.  Holy cow. No wonder I’ve turned to hard liquor to get myself to sleep these last few nights.  

Let me give you some context. I’m an ex-smoker. I used to use cigarettes to force myself once per 90 minutes to exit the rehearsal room vortex and step out into the world outside. Now that I’m not a smoker anymore I see that this was desperately foolish.  In return for temporary and by no means guaranteed relief from the pressure to create (totally self-inflicted, of course) I obligate myself to an activity that takes up two-thirds of my break?  And it is so not cost effective.  See, like most reformed sinners, I like to preach the folly of my past.  I was lost, but now…  I am clean. I am healthy. I am not addicted. Not, not, not addicted. But I still need to get out of the rehearsal room.  And the coffee maker is such a perfect distance away. It isn’t so far that I can’t get back in plenty of time to chew my nails and think about that teapot. And it isn’t so near that I can’t clear my mind, or at least my vision, between runs of that problematic sitting-at-a-table scene five.

So… coffee it is. I am not clean. I am not healthy. I am addicted. But the show is going well. I have no intention of cutting down the coffee intake, at least until previews. It is what it is. I heart coffee and I’m not ashamed to say it. 

In other news, Milo took four steps unassisted.  Nick and I were both watching. Yay.  I’ve decided it counts and have announced that he is “walking.”

Now, about MOXIE.  Well, a little bit, anyway.  We’re cooking up some cool stuff that isn’t quite ready to be announced.  In the meantime Delicia is out of rehearsal for the first time since December (seriously, five back-to-back and overlapping shows, she made it look strangely appealing), and is focussing her attention on infrastructure.  We are long on talent and arguably short on doing things the same way twice. To combat the chaos, we’ve scheduled a staff retreat next month. The eight MOXIE staff members will arrive with job descriptions, observe how they do and don’t overlap, and leave with an organizational structure. 

How much coffee do you think I should bring?

in the pockets of the peeps

Can people afford to come to the theatre?  I was just pondering this today, because I know I can’t…

I had opened up my date book this morning to figure out when I might see the six shows I need to see in the next couple of weeks.  Of those six, I’ll be comped for four of them, but will most likely have to pay for the other two.  And I’m bummed out!  Because they’re around thirty bucks per, and coming from north county, add another thirty for gas and… well you all know the story.  Bottom line is, usually… if I can’t get in for free… I can’t go.

I can only imagine the agony that the folks who never have comps go through!  :)

I think it would be an interesting experiment, to slash ticket prices  (unless of course a show is selling out), and see if we can pack the house.  If we double our audience, we’re making the same amount of money, but we’re reaching twice as many people (maybe younger people who generally have less money). And that could be a way to broaden our audience base.  If people know that a night at the theatre could cost roughly the same as a night at the movies (when you include what people spend on food) then possibly folks will choose theatre over movies.  

Or maybe it’s wishful thinking, and houses would still be sparse and we’d all be up a river

But I happen to like wishful thinking.

Thoughts, o’ brilliant ones?

smiling in the trenches

Happy Friday everyone!

I don’t have much to write about today, but I’ll share this with you:

I’ve had a bit of an epiphany, sparked by some lines in a book I’m reading by Thich Nhat Hanh called “Peace Is Every Step.”   

I have decided that I am going to try to ENJOY writing this play, instead of gritting my teeth and struggling towards an ending!  What a concept, hey? Because I don’t know where it’s going or how it’s ending… but if I can enjoy playing with it, and enjoy the act of creating it… hopefully the work will be infused with great energy and spirit, and will be more satisfying to me, as well as to anyone who happens upon it.

Yay.

Here are the lines from whence this inspiration came:

“When we do not trouble ourselves about whether or not something is a work of art, if we just act in each moment with composure and mindfulness, each minute of our life is a work of art… If we just act with awareness and integrity, our art will flower…”

So thanks Thầy.  Nicely spoken.

Now get out there and enjoy your lives!