Archive for May, 2006

Workin’ For The Weekend

Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006

I am in such a totally liminal state right now, and have been for the past several weeks, that it has been really difficult to keep the blog up. There are things I can’t talk about it, things I don’t want to talk about, and things I’d love to talk about except I can feel that I’m becoming the guy who tells the same stories over and over because I never know what I’ve said and I’m having very few original experiences.

This I can say with a good bit of sincerity; I don’t know how it is that some people can maintain the lifestyle of the mythical artist, with great deep draughts of life and nights of severe drinking, and still be capable of producing any kind of art at all. I understand that not everyone wants to produce the same volume of, y’know, stuff that I do, but I’m definitely of the opinion that if you produce quantity, then you can mine out a nugget or two of something palatable, and, seriously, I have wasted more hours in my life than most people have lived, so I feel like buckling down is the only option.

But, man… I have friends who have several jobs and still maintain their artistic lives. Of course, these are friends who simply don’t sleep enough, and who are really bad at keeping blogs. But these people are not, y’know, *drinking*. Ever. Unless they don’t sleep at all.

We have a big board, that I’ve taken pictures of before, and here it is now, blurred to protect the egos of those involved…

At the bottom are my assignments, and it looks like I’m still 5 song and 6 guitar solos shy of being done. The problem, of course, is that these pieces of music take time, and it’s more time than you might think. Because writing a song takes a while, and then, there is the real possibility that it will either suck or, it simply won’t work in this show. I wrote a really nice sweet tune for the A-Train Plays that the reviewers felt didn’t work with the script.

I mean, there wasn’t a script at all and we wrote the thing in 90 minutes on a train in rush hour, but yeah, I can see their point.

So, the liminality continues. Not yet done producing all that I need to produce, and only time and step after step will take me there. Please forgive if this is either boring or poorly updated.

Air Dramaturg

Thursday, May 11th, 2006

We’re working on “Air Guitar” The Musical, which has prompted several of our friends to offer up their services. Air Theremin has been called. Air Poet has been claimed. Air Harmonica will be played. This has led to things like “Airemin Face” and “Airmonica”.

The problem is that the show isn’t written yet. So, what we really need are some Air Writers, and maybe an Air Director to help us along. In honor of Dan, this is what we really need… Air Dramaturg.


This is a bad idea, and the Air Dramaturg is trying to find out how to explain this.


This is actually a worse idea. Air Dramaturg is actually pissed.

Notice the books…

Actually, that’s not such a bad idea, come to think of it.

The tie really makes the dramaturg

How am I going to make it seem like this is my idea?


Aren’t you glad you’ve got me explainin the play to you?!

This is going to be the very best play ever.

The Magical Mystery

Monday, May 1st, 2006

Last night, I returned to the theater where Fleet Week went up for the second time since our show closed. It’s worth perusing the website of the Lucille Lortel, which has been a downtown theater since being a downtown theater meant something. Nowadays, people are performing in converted storefronts and basements, which is certainly really cool, but it isn’t quite the majesty of the plush seats and the proscenium.

I’ve always been really wary of the modern view of Christianity, this love of Jesus like he’s a boyfriend up in the sky. People’s rhapsodic odes where they declare their deep and passionate love of Christ make me feel queasy because there is so much *romance* in it, so much eye-brimming lust, so that people talk of their deity in the same way they describe their husbands or girlfriends. It makes me embarrassed.

So it becomes difficult for me to talk about waking up this morning with a sense of purpose and urgency, and with that faint unsettling feeling of having been made love to the night before by someone new. The show we saw isn’t the best show in the history of whatever, but every time you have sex it isn’t gonna be Cleopatra or a young Lauren Bacall or anything, sometimes it’s just a lovely partner who loves you and lets you sleep well for one night.

This is going to be much shorter than it should be, because I really do find it impossible to describe. I am a fan of theater in a way that I will never be a fan of music. I sit and become transported, my brain goes to a different place when I’m in the theater. I don’t get the same thing from a black box, and this could be the part of my personality that has been accused of only ever dating good looking girls, but there is something about the theatricality, the falseness and attention to detail… there is something about the *attempt* to make a show following the protocols of the theater that fills me with unexplained joy.

As a quick aside, the sprouting up of black box theaters all over the city, and all over the country, is wonderful. I have friends who work exclusively in theater spaces that are too small to handle a proscenium, and the work here can transport me because of the story and the craft. But there is a difference between wearing your own street clothes during a performance and being in costume, between having a set and props and miming the sets and props. I’m not saying it has to be Ibsen for me to get it, but a complete aesthetic, from the seats I’m in all the way to the backstage crew, is capable of transporting me despite the possible limitations of the script. I love being in the theater, and it is the simple love of a simple minded fan.