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Friday, June 13, 2003
Grouchy this morning...
Posted
11:00 AM
by sean
Gideon has a wonderful play that all three of us adore, we just aren’t sure if it might only be us who find it funny and awesome or if everyone would. We are desperately trying to work our way through it and decide if we should keep it in the festival we might be in this summer. That’s right, there is a festival we might be in, but we aren’t even sure if we want to keep this play in it. Because the play might be completely different by then and the festival opens on Ian’s wedding day.
Michelle also has a show she wants me to do with her at the end of August, and I have three weeks of recordings to do in July for a musician I loathe, and I have to fly there. I am also trying to finish the re-write on the gay one act I wrote (the one act is fine, the characters are gay, and I don’t have a title, so…) and I have an idea for another one act that a different theater company will do a reading of if I go ahead and write it.
And then there is Torch, still hanging over me. When I actually get into the music I love it, but there is a huge stumbling block in front of me. I am waiting for ‘The Song’, that one that hits about ten minutes in to the show, the first really up tempo piece, heavily verbal, big rock-out showy dance-y kind of thing. I have about eleventy hundred bad ideas for it.
(I told Mac about my idea for this one act I am writing now and he said it sounded cool, that I should write it, etc. and that I seem to be going through a phase of "refined insincerity" in my work, which I was excited by because it had never occurred to me that I had any kind of unifying themes in my work. But when I go back through my theatrical writing over the last few years, I do seem to be fascinated by the insincere specifically. Of course, in theater everything is artificial, but I am fascinated by lying and reversals and embraced betrayals.
Which I guess makes sense.)
All this to say, people think that the life of the lazy person is easier than the life of the diligent person, but I think the former ends up doing more work then the latter, and is less pleased with the work he has done. In the same way, a freelance artist does sometimes find him or her self in a position where the forseeable future is tied up in shit he or she doesn’t want to do. A person who gets up every day and goes to a job simply for money and does stuff that doesn’t interest them sees the same ocean of crap. The difference is that the end product is for the artist is more personally expressive and therefor more worth it.
I think the best possible world for me would be in producing or event planning. I love doing it, I’m really good at it, and, faced with the knowledge that I have to do stuff I don’t want to regardless, it would be great to have a steady job where the end could actually satisfy me as much as producing does now. I just don’t know how much I get out of performing, much less acting, anymore. As someone once told me, ‘Just because you’re good at it doesn’t mean it has to be your job. I’m great in bed, but I’m not going to be a hooker…’
Wednesday, June 11, 2003
Maybe spiritual people maintain this feeling, but for me, any belief in the supernatural left me around the same time that adolescence did. I remember that I used to believe in sprit guides and reincarnation, although God was always completely foreign to me.
And I must be wrong. So many people believe in God, there has to be some kind of terrible arrogance on my part, or simply shallow mindedness. But whenever people begin in on Faith or Spirit or describe anything as ‘spiritual’, I immediately start thinking they have a screw loose.
That being said, I do have palpable reminisces about belief. I know exactly what it felt like when I thought that things were happening that I had a direct relationship with on a completely non-physical level. And I think there ought to be a word for that feeling, the specific magical feeling you have when a surge of adolescent belief shifts into a sort of magical reality.
We are missing a lot of words. Shaddenfreude, and I might be spelling that wrong, is a German word that describes the sensation of taking joy in someone else’s pain. It describes many people’s reactions to Martha Stewart and I guess Hillary Clinton a few years back. Our weather words are pretty good, ‘Blizzard’ was invented in this country for the midwest, but I still don’t know what to call this extended winter turned muggy summer we are having. ‘Wet’ is all the weathermen can come up with.
My friends tend to be, above all else, wordsmiths. Some of them, like Mac and Ian and John, with professional aspirations (if being a poet counts as a profession), but most of them, like Ehren and Steve, are just fantastic word players. How we use words is similar to how other guys drink or play basketball or cite baseball trivia.
I think this is all related…
Ah yes, here’s how it’s all related. We are living in a world, my social group, where the commentary is almost as entertaining as the happening. We are rabid sharers of information and opinion, always letting each other know, in the most facile and showy terms, exactly what has happened to us, exactly how we interpret those happenings, and how much funnier it all would have been had we told the joke.
But that world away from this physical one, the world we don’t have words for, is one that we never talk about. I know nothing about the spiritual lives of my friends, mostly because if it ever came up we would shoot it down immediately. When Ian described his reasons for choosing his wedding date he gave me an obligatory eye roll at the ‘non waxing, non waning moon’ part, but for all I know he has had his charts done and regularly meditates, he just doesn’t discuss it with me.
I worry a little bit that I am missing something, but I also have this overpowering inclination that the spiritual life is just not for me. I don’t mock it, in many ways I envy it, but I cannot, for some reason, find any iota of truth within myself that there is a power greater than myself.
Probably just an ego problem.
And I must be wrong. So many people believe in God, there has to be some kind of terrible arrogance on my part, or simply shallow mindedness. But whenever people begin in on Faith or Spirit or describe anything as ‘spiritual’, I immediately start thinking they have a screw loose.
That being said, I do have palpable reminisces about belief. I know exactly what it felt like when I thought that things were happening that I had a direct relationship with on a completely non-physical level. And I think there ought to be a word for that feeling, the specific magical feeling you have when a surge of adolescent belief shifts into a sort of magical reality.
We are missing a lot of words. Shaddenfreude, and I might be spelling that wrong, is a German word that describes the sensation of taking joy in someone else’s pain. It describes many people’s reactions to Martha Stewart and I guess Hillary Clinton a few years back. Our weather words are pretty good, ‘Blizzard’ was invented in this country for the midwest, but I still don’t know what to call this extended winter turned muggy summer we are having. ‘Wet’ is all the weathermen can come up with.
My friends tend to be, above all else, wordsmiths. Some of them, like Mac and Ian and John, with professional aspirations (if being a poet counts as a profession), but most of them, like Ehren and Steve, are just fantastic word players. How we use words is similar to how other guys drink or play basketball or cite baseball trivia.
I think this is all related…
Ah yes, here’s how it’s all related. We are living in a world, my social group, where the commentary is almost as entertaining as the happening. We are rabid sharers of information and opinion, always letting each other know, in the most facile and showy terms, exactly what has happened to us, exactly how we interpret those happenings, and how much funnier it all would have been had we told the joke.
But that world away from this physical one, the world we don’t have words for, is one that we never talk about. I know nothing about the spiritual lives of my friends, mostly because if it ever came up we would shoot it down immediately. When Ian described his reasons for choosing his wedding date he gave me an obligatory eye roll at the ‘non waxing, non waning moon’ part, but for all I know he has had his charts done and regularly meditates, he just doesn’t discuss it with me.
I worry a little bit that I am missing something, but I also have this overpowering inclination that the spiritual life is just not for me. I don’t mock it, in many ways I envy it, but I cannot, for some reason, find any iota of truth within myself that there is a power greater than myself.
Probably just an ego problem.