Author: Dave

Opening Weekend

Had a great opening weekend with the show, and Sunday turned out to be our best performance, in front of our liveliest audience. Hell of a rush, especially when we nailed one particularly troublesome scene. It’s the trouble with fast-paced farce, it’s so damn easy to get a scene derailed, even by something as simple as an actor missing a line by a beat or two. (Says I after my weeks of experience being in a single farce. Weeks, I say!) So yeah, it’s the trouble with this farce anyway, and I can see it translating that way broadly to the genre. But, bottom line, we kicked some ass with it, and it was a heck of a lot of fun.

I was also kind of talked into running for a spot on the Board at dinner after Sunday’s performance. Not that I expect to be elected, though I didn’t expect to be cast in this show, much less offered the lead part. Still, that’s way away in June or July or something. We’ll see if it would be “one thing too much,” but I have ideas on what I can scale back or eliminate if/when it all gets to be too much. Right now, as I’ve said, I’m just glad to be meeting local, creative people and getting involved in something outside of the apartment. I’m not looking to establish any empires, or steer a theatre group to my vision (since, shh, I don’t have much of one), mostly just looking to put down something very much like roots, since we’ll likely be staying in this area for quite some time.

Tomorrow I’m going to try to get back into writing at lunch (beyond the blog) on the regular. I had sacrificed a lot of lunch hours to memorizing lines, but now I probably only need a couple of refreshers to carry me through the next two weekends of performances. We’ll see what I do end up writing. I’ve allegedly got some collaboration projects in the hopper, so we’ll see if those take over my time in the near future, or if I go off noodling on my own.

Media

Sensitivities, Part 1

I’m rapidly coming to grips with a lot of mental/emotional sensitivities lately, and one of them seems to be hype. I certainly remember experiencing it before now (Harry Potter was the big example), but lately I’ve found that nothing ever really sounds good when it comes to reading or movies. And I realized that’s because I follow too many authors and readers on social media. Which is silly, on some level, because I love talking about this stuff, but social media has been so deeply co-opted by marketing sensibilities, that I find myself kind of numbed by it all.

Now, this isn’t a condemnation of social media in general, or one of those hand-wringing “what has it all come to” type posts. It’s just… me. Penicillin is great for 99% of the population and saves a lot of lives, but if I take it, I’ll blow up like a balloon and die. And I’m thinking it’s a lot like that for me. I’m happy people’s books get hyped and spread around on social media. I hope like hell if and when I publish, it’ll work like that for me. It’s just a thing that seems to work in reverse for me.

Thinking about it, I realized that part of the problem is that I’ve come to miss just discovering things. My “golden age” for reading (and watching movies for that matter) was when I would just wander the aisles and pick up what looked interesting, primarily back in high school. I discovered some lemons that way, but I also discovered a lot of what became my favorites, and hidden little gems. Just the other night at dress rehearsal I was mentioning the David Mamet movie A Life in the Theater, starring Jack Lemmon and Matthew Broderick. None of the other actors I mentioned it to had seen it, but it’s a great little film (adapted from a play, of course–with a recent production starring Patrick Stewart, no less) about working actors in New York, and I keep thinking about it now that I’m acting again.

It’s much the same with books. I discovered my favorite author, Lois McMaster Bujold, that way just browsing the sci-fi shelves in the library. Now, I know part of this is just a change in general awareness. I can’t put a lot of genies back in bottles, and I’m probably always going to have some low-level awareness of authors and works if I plan to continue pursuing a career as a writer; it’s almost unavoidable, unless I go full recluse. (And you never go full recluse.) So I understand I can never quite recapture the magical feeling of discovery that is often what I feel is missing when I read a book or rent a movie these days.

But I think that, lately, it’s hype that’s kept me from even trying.

Theatre

Rehearsal’s Over, Time to Perform

About three months ago, I followed a whim and decided to audition for a play. The reasons were fairly simple: I missed being involved in the theatre, I needed a creative outlet that wasn’t writing, and I felt like I needed to find a new social scene in my new area. (The expected social opportunities not really materializing like I thought they would.) I’d done theatre in high school, a bit at university, and once in “regular adult life,” and I’d enjoyed it each time I’d done it, and made some good, if not lasting friendships along the way. So, I requested a script and went to auditions, figuring I’d offer to help out with set construction or props or something if and when I didn’t get offered a part.

So when they did offer me not just a part, but the lead… well… I was a bit taken aback, but pleasantly so. They asked if, given my limited and distant experience, I could reliably memorize the metric butt load of lines, and I said yes, probably. They wanted to make sure I wouldn’t have a panic attack over it all, and I said I’m sure I wouldn’t. I did have a few, of course, but just the same I managed. We started rehearsing just after New Year’s, then went without our scripts at the beginning of February. Last night was our final dress rehearsal.

Tomorrow night we open, and I couldn’t be more excited. We do nine shows across three weekends, which is the most ambitious I’ve seen in a community theatre. I’m not complaining, though, I enjoy the long run and multiple opportunities to perform. The show is a damn good one, I have a few funny lines, and I’m surrounded by wonderful actors and crew who make the whole show come together, very much in a “sum is greater than the parts” sort of way.

And along the way, I’ve made some friends that I hope remain friends for a good long time. I hope to perform and work alongside them for many years to come, whether in this theatre or others in the area. That whim worked out pretty well for me after all.IMG_0198

Old Writing

Last night I was fiddling around, consolidating and rationalizing my family’s digital archives, and stumbled on some old writing. I actually got caught up in reading a couple of the stories I’d written. As fashionable as it is for writers to lambaste their older stuff as rough and unproven… well… I think I liked what I was reading. It wasn’t perfect, by any means, and I’m sure I could do better now (particularly thanks to Mary Robinette Kowal’s short story writing class–highly recommended, btw), but there was something about those stories that I just loved.

Part of it, I’m sure, is that I was very much writing the sort of things I loved to read and I wished there was more of. Particularly, sprawling science fiction intrigue/spy type stories that interconnected on various levels. I’ve been focusing on some fantasy projects recently, and while I really enjoy those two, it’s fairly clear to me after just a half hour perusing old stories where my heart lies.  I may need to get back to those soon.

Blogs and Me

I’m not a diarist. I never have been, really. My attempts at journaling and such would be laughable, were it acceptable to laugh at such awkwardness. The closest I came to managing it was on a university trip to Russia in 1997. But even then, I was often days behind, and wrote my entries as though I were writing them that day, which just seems… so weird and beside the point. My friend Jim would actually journal as we walked around, and tried to do the journalist’s thing of counting his photographs and making notes of what he was photographing. Eminently sensible, but a trick I could never pull off.

Mostly I was too busy immersing myself in the moment, and that’s been my downfall in a lot of ways. Life has always been too interesting for me to pause from it and take a moment write it down and collect my thoughts.

And such was always the problem I had with blogging. The other time I really was hitting a stride in terms of journaling was back in 2004, when I was deployed to Iraq as a Marine. Though then, it wasn’t so much a diary as a broadcast letter home, one that saved me from writing a bunch of individual ones, which I didn’t have a lot of time for. Though, of course, that was also a rather dishonest account as I often concealed the threat we were under to keep people at home from worrying. The few moments of unalloyed honesty (frustration with my superiors, for instance, or a reference to someone in my unit being arrested) were filtered and hidden to keep me from winding up in front of my CO answering uncomfortable questions.

Otherwise, and perhaps especially because of Iraq, I’ve always felt the need to justify my blogging/diarying. As in, most of my posts (published and otherwise) would start with some kind of rationale for the writing of them. And the irony was that after Iraq, my life seemed altogether too pedestrian to chronicle with any kind of regularity. All that left me was commenting on current affairs and throwing my two cents in on the topics currently up for discussion among the people that I followed regularly in social media.

The thing that I missed, of course, is that writing itself is reason to write; and these days, I’m starting to feel like I’m emerging from some kind of hibernation. I’ve held back, considered, thought, observed–things I’ve gotten decently good at, I think–but now I feel like I’m ready to start writing and communicating again.

Personal

Me and NASCAR and Me

I went to my first NASCAR Sprint Cup race last weekend. Ostensibly with one of my best friends, though he spent the entirety of the race asleep in our tent. His other friends are pretty nice, though, and it was a fun and interesting experience. I got sunburnt, and not enough sleep the night before, but that’s okay.

I’ve been not-following NASCAR long enough that watching the race was an interesting exercise in detached observation. I don’t have a favorite driver (since Bobby Labonte wandered off the scene), nor do I have a “nemesis” driver (though I can see why people just have a hate-on for Kyle Busch), and my rooting interests are somewhat academic. I’m eager to see Danica Patrick do well, if only to help prove that male dominance of racing is largely cultural, and not tied to some mystical masculine traits only available with the addition of some testosterone. And of course, any kind of “brand loyalty” (like, Pepsi drinks can go fuck themselves because Jeff Gordon) is not my game at all.

That said, I like racing. I’m not a huge fan of noise for its sake, or even cars really, which I sometimes think as strange from a man who grew up in Metro Detroit. But I like the competition and the strategy. I like seeing how different cars perform in identical conditions, and I like seeing the edges to which the drivers will push in order to gain the advantage.

Also, the thing that has always struck me about NASCAR especially is that it seems like it’s actually, under the hood so to speak, the nerdiest of the major American “sports.” There’s so much more involved, especially now, than some raw love of cars or the skill of the drivers. The forces involved, the engineering necessary to govern it all, the numbers numbers numbers. (Baseball might be the next nerdiest sport, but only because stats nerds have made it so, speaking of numbers.) And I get why nerds tend to stay away, and it mostly has to do with the culture that NASCAR has inherited in unbroken line down from the moonshiner days, which I certainly saw on full display last weekend.

So I get the discomfort there, and the general reaction away. It’s just a shame, is all. There’s a lot for nerds, math and physics nerds in particular, to sink their teeth into. There’s an underlying grace and purity to the competition that can be fascinating, when viewed that way.

And yeah, I’ll probably go back to that particular race next year.

Personal

I Love Maps, Part 1

I love maps. Maps maps mapsy maps.

Despite the scorn they sometimes get, I especially love fantasy and role-playing maps. There’s something about all their crinkly edges, the mysterious empty spaces, especially outside the bounds of the primary story. Something about it makes me want to dive in and discover how the map and terrain differ, so to speak. Nothing quite sets the imagination to flight quite like it, for me.

I found the map featured above while looking for a good, detailed map of Middle Earth (why? cuz). This comes from a game I never played, but kind of wish I had, Middle Earth Role Playing, by Iron Crown Enterprises. I enjoy me some Lord of the Rings, including playing the MMO, but there is something about having been over the familiar terrain a thousand times that made this map in particular stand out. I love all the edges and expanses and unexplored possibilities here. I know it’s not “canon” but, hell, I play the MMO. Obviously I’m not concerned with canon, overmuch.

Full version of the map is here.

Media

Engage As Intended

As usual, I don’t intend anything prescriptive by what I’m about to say–I’m just kind of musing on art and story and experimenting with the conclusions that the musings bring me to. This is may well be a theme around here. Disclaimer out of the way, I’ll proceed.

The beautiful freedom of the modern age is that we as consumers can engage with art in almost any way we choose. In fact, the recombinant engagement that a lot of people choose across the internet, from fanfic to vids to Tumblr gifsets to mashups, makes literal a lot of what we talk about when we say that genre is a sort extended artistic conversation. To greater and lesser extents, the creators of recombinant and transformative art are directly engaging with the art in question, interrogating and deconstructing it in really unique and enlightening ways.

This is very cool, and I applaud it.

One of the other ways we’ve started to engage with media and art, lately, is the almighty binge. I remember the first time I binged on a show–the first time I could binge on a show–was when I got the first two or three seasons of Stargate SG-1 on DVD. As I recall, I spent a few days on the futon in my wife’s apartment (before she was my wife, of course) mainlining Jack O’Neill and Daniel Jackson and Samantha Carter and Teal’c like a fiend. Couldn’t get enough. It was glorious. It was a temptation I simply could not resist, if I could even conceive of resistance as an option.

I’ve discovered a few things about binging in the years since, though. One is that it leaves me wanting more where there is no more. I was lucky, back then. I ended up getting all of the DVDs that were out at the time, and got caught up to where Stargate SG-1 was when it jumped over to the Sci-Fi Channel. So then I had more on a weekly basis for about half a year, every year. But binging on a show that’s already done, when I’m watching all there is of it… that’s kind of a bummer.

The other thing I realized is that the binge leaves everything… more muddied. There really isn’t a chance to reflect on what I’ve watched, let it sink in, let any anticipation build. My wife and I are catching up on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. right now, after leaving it for most of the year. But, for various reasons, we can’t really binge on it. We get in about two episode a week, and that’s it. So, as of this typing, Skye is in near-death coma and has been since Saturday night. I probably won’t get to see the follow-up episode for another week-plus, given our weekend plans.

That’s cool. I’m down with that. It gives me time to think a bit on it, gives it time to mature, to “season” I guess.  I don’t need to rush through it.

One of the other things I’m finding is that people work on the weekly TV show as its own art form, within its own constraints. I think I first encountered this idea in a blog post by John Scalzi (don’t ask me to go spelunking through his archives for it; I’ll get lost down some 300 meter shaft), where he was advising, in his calm-headed way, that This New Medium did not mean the death of That Old Medium, that people had said the same thing about That Old Medium back when it was new. The idea being that stories will find their natural place, that if there’s a story that can only really be told in Smell-O-Vision, it will be best told in Smell-O-Vision but that won’t mean we can’t still create stories for the “traditional” cinema. We won’t have to create everything for Smell-O-Vision.

I’ll call this A Scalzian Principle (but not The Scalzian Principle–the dude has too many to grant any of them the definitive article).

Anyway, it has occurred to me that, especially with older shows, but still with new shows, there is a reward to watching them more or less as they were originally intended to be seen. Now, in a lot of cases, especially let’s say pre-2000ish, this did actually mean you could watch them in any particular order. A lot of them did feature the dreaded reset button, the horror of ungrowing characters and static, immutable situations. But I’m also coming to appreciate this constraint that the creators had to work in. How do you make Thomas Magnum’s exploits suspenseful when you know he and Rick and TC and Higgins are still going to be alive at the end of the episode?

I could probably write a whole other blog post answering that question, so I won’t try to get to it here. I’ll think about writing it another time, though. Suffice to say that I’m finding it both interesting and instructive to see the art in that kind of constraint. How is it handled, how is it done well, how does it fall down?

But, well, also I’m just enjoying the shows for the sake of the shows themselves. Just watching them as they are, as they were intended to be watched.