Rehearsing The Kids

Posted 12:02 PM by sean
It's nice to walk in to a junior high school and know that, no matter how shitty any of these kids are, I can just beat them to death with my bare hands. I won't do it, but it's nice to know I have the option.

I went in to the rehearsal hall, a really nice old auditorium with about five hundred seats and four hundred coats of paint on the walls. I love auditoriums, I love standing on the stage and seeing the seats. It could be that the stage was the only place I ever felt safe as a kid, but whatever the reason, it is the only place I go where I am reverent.

The kids can tell. As they come in, they know they can still goof off, they can still hassle each other and do their 7th and 8th grade pecking order ruthlessness, but they also know not to come up on to the stage where I am. They all showed up at about 3:25, all but one of them, and they didn't come up on the stage until 3:29. They know, I've told them, that 3:29 is their time and 3:30 is my time.

It's hard to imagine. I'm sure, but I am an effective disciplinarian when I need to be, and a very natural one. I am panicked about wasting other people's time, and I am driven to use every single second I have toward the artistic goal, and my own drive translates into inspiration.

These are great kids, really talented. I've been told a thousand times that I should teach full time, and maybe I should, but if I did, I'd end up with a worse group than I get by teaching ocassionally. Give me a choir of a hundred kids and I'd be great, but select the best 12 out of that group and let me inspire them twice a year and I'm the best choral director in the country. That's really my secret, I never stay anywhere long enough for contempt to breed. Also, I'd get sued for language and emotional abuse.

Because I treat them like adults. And they aren't. When you are directing a group of kids, the energy coming off them is like a group of pidgeons fighting over discarded bread, they seem to have a common goal but they just keep wandering and pecking, side to side, a disjointed whole made from distracted parts, methodically and spastically lurching toward their ideal.

So, you have to know that you'll have to say everything a thousand times. There are things I say all the time, "Breath from here, sing from here" kind of stuff, but there is also "what key are we in?" and "why is this note going flat?" and "where are you going to breathe?" kind of things, hurled at them as quickly as possible. It takes months. One girl will answer "is it the third of the chord?" and I won't let her answer again until even the 13 year old boy who is using his butt to run laps in his seat figures it out.

By 3:35, one girl still isn't there and I say, "I am going to single you out when you make mistakes. That is simply going to happen, so prop each other up when you feel bad. Tess is five minutes late. If we were in the studio, the studio would be getting paid, the producer would be getting paid, the AD and the PA are getting paid, I'm getting paid, there is money pouring out of this project, all waiting for *one* of you to show up. We can't start 'till the whole group is there, and five minutes is hundreds and hundreds of dollars..."

They know. But if I don't reinforce it, they won't. I fire kids, I've done it a lot. If you are late once, you are told not to do it again. If you are late twice, you're fired.

Because, despite how talented these kids are, despite the magic of music and theater, despite how much I want to be involved in the creation of the next group of artists, you should *never* be late to rehearsal or a performance, and if you are the kind of person who is, you need to quit and do something else. Be a lawyer, be a typist, be a writer or a publicist or... Jesus, I don't even know what most people do for a living, but go do that. Be late once a month to your job.

But if you are only as diligent as the average person, you will suffer and fail as an artist. If you are more diligent than the average person, you will suffer and fail as an artist. If you are the 99th percentile in terms of dilligence and hard work, if you turn over every stone, if you have stop gaps for every scenario, if your work ethic is unimpeachable, you will suffer as an artist, but you've given yourself a chance to not fail. You probably will still fail, this is s terrible life full of incredible odds, but yoou at least have a chance.

It gets to be 4:30 and these kids have been working for a solid hour with no breaks. They won't get a break. I need them to be able to focus and concentrate for an hour and a half, take a ten minute break and then do another hour and a half. It isn't fun, it's work. But these recordings will be here, still, when their grandchildren have grandchildren and they will be able to play the digital recordings on water molecules or whatever and I want those grandchildren of grandchildren to say "He sounded amazing..."

At 4:46, we are making the sound, the sound that I have worked with kids all over the country for the last 15 years trying to get them to make. Before I knew how to make it, I knew what I wanted, now I know and these kids have worked with me for a year now and I can get them within striking distance after an hour or so. So, I tell one of the girls to take the solo. I play the opening pitch and start counting off.

This is totally unfair, I know the girl will freeze up. You don't ask college kids to sight-read a solo in front of all their peers, I know she is going to fail. I count off and she squeeks out a note or two and then stops. "What happened?" I ask.

"I don't know if I can do this solo," she says.

"How are you gonna find out?"

She doesn't say anything. I don't either and the group is staring at the two of us.

"Look where you are," I say. "Look out there" I point to the rows and rows of empty seats. We're on the stage, half inch of cloudy laquer on a half foot of wood, literally "the boards".

"Out there," I say, "is full of people who don't know if they can do this solo. For the rest of your life, every single seat will be filled with people staring up here, saying to themselves, 'I don't know if I could do that solo', and you're going to be up here staring back at them. The only thing that separates the two of you is what?"

"I'm doing the solo?"

"Are you?"

"I'm doing the solo."

"Exactly." I give her the pitch again and count off. Of course she sings it fantastically and the rest of the group sings along. It's a kids song, a really basic little song, almost a nursery rhyme. There is no way that any one of the kids couldn't have sung it, sight-read it in fact. They could each have done it, and this girl was the teaching sacrificial lamb.

There is still one boy that isn't making the sound right, and I singled him out at 4:53 and make him sing it alone. The rest of the kids have taken up their pidgeon ways, nudging each other, writing little notes on their music, generally feeling like they are getting away with something, but they are actually just being allowed a little space while I work with this boy.

They are respectful and silent, but unfocused. The boy is locked on my eyes as we sing back and forth. I give him clues and secrets, different things. I finally say "half that loud" and he sings it a little bit better. I say, "half that loud again" and it's better still. I say, "as quiet as you can" and this voice, this gorgeous perfect bell tone comes out of the top of his head, and every single kid on stage stops what they are doing and whips their heads at me, huge smiles on their faces. No-one says anything.

"That was great, but it was too soft, right?" I ask. The boy, smiling, nods sorta dismissively. "You really need to make more noise than that, don't you?" The kid sorta laughs and nods. I lean in as if to whisper to him, and all the other kids lean in.

"Look, what's happening," I say in a whisper. "if I whisper just to you, using the smallest voice I have, every single person in this room is trying to hear me. In ten years, you are going to be standing in the middle of a stage exactly like this and you are gonna pause" and I say nothing for about five seconds, "and every single butt in every single chair is gonna lean forward, dying to know what you will say next."

I leave about five seconds of silence.

"Okay," I holler. "Next Thursday, exactly same time." and the group leaves with choruses of "Thank you Mister Williams" and the girl smiles and says to me "Thanks, Sean."

Hey, you won't be thanking me in seven years when you're part of the Fraudience at an Ashlee Simpson concert, but, yeah, for now, at this moment you are making music. And, I guess, this moment is all we got.

On Words, A Play

Posted 11:06 AM by sean
I have received more than a little encouragement from friends when it comes to seeing plays. It turns out, they really want me to see plays I don't like because it leads to wonderful blogs. I hate to disappoint, but the play I saw last night isn't going to fit into that.

Now, if I were to go to most of my friends and family and say "I saw a play last night, lasted about 2 hours and 45 minutes, and, despite the fact that it contained horrible domestic violence and rape, it was actually a comedy that ends in a passionate realization of the destruction of the self in order to create a sense of purpose" they would all say to me, "Yeah, isn't that the play you produced in 2000?'

It turns out, it isn't. But the similarities are striking. Sakharim Binder is a play by an Indian playwright, set in basically modern day India (although, who can tell, it could have been India from the 1600s except for the language) in a small house owned by the eponymous subject. Women in this culture are thrown out by their husbands and left to wander the streets, untouchable, until predators like Binder can collect them and make them servants, slaves and whores in exchange for a roof and some food.

I know, it doesn't sound funny, but it is actually. The sheer charm of the main character, as played by Bernard White , is the engine behind the show, and the entire evening would be worthwhile if only to get a chance to see this wonderful actor work. But he is not the only reason to see this show.

It is written in three acts but presented in two, which is a small problem only because, in terms of the drama, it reads in three acts. Binder brings home one woman, abuses the hell out of her and then kicks her out. I laughed the whole time. He then brings home a second woman, a "sexy" woman, and Binder can't quite make his abuses stick. He starts missing work, doing the chores, forgetting his place, just to please this woman. The third act, the first woman shows up and manages to stay, and the whole thing becomes a mess.

******(There are three theatrical conventions that drive me mad that I will throw in as asides. In almost every play or movie where one woman is presented as meek and homely and the other is presented as a sexual dynamo I, *WITHOUT FAIL*, find the homely one more attractive in every way. It's like they find the most beautiful woman in the world, and then fit her with a pair of glasses or a baggy sweatshirt and I'm supposed to be convinced. The first woman in the play, Sanjiv Jhaveri is certainly less famous than Sarita Choudhury but she's actually more attractive and, to me, a better actress.)

The play is long, but I'm not sure that's bad. It's so long that you forget you are in a play for most of it, you find yourself transported to the world being presented. Within the first 45 minutes, I had completely accepted Binder's worldview, and I found myself annoyed at the many people who were fighting against it by acting like human beings. I was frustrated with the second woman for being independent and not putting up with Binder's abuse. By the end of the play, when the real dramatic push happens, I remembered I was in a theater just in time to start applauding.

That being said, it felt like, at times, the writer was including a lot of stuff in the play that could have been left out. There are several scenes with extra characters that certainly flesh out the rest of the play, but by the end, I had wished the play was maybe shorter and had focused on our main three characters a little more. I'm always glad when a professional company includes more actors, particularly ethnic actors who can't always find good roles, but at nearly three hours it did end up being a price to pay. If you keep your audience in the theater for an hour longer than they expect, you kinda have to justify it.

*******( Theatrical Convention Annoyance #2- Blackouts. I don't know if Mac has convinced me of this, or if we both thought it was true and it became a rallying point for working together, but I really hate it when the stage goes dark and the actors move stuff around while we pretend we aren't in the theater for a minute. It's the weirdest ten to thirty seconds of my life. Okay, the lights are out, the actors are stumbling around, I can *hear* them, but I'm really not supposed to be paying attention to them... but I'm also not supposed to make any noise myself.

It's like all the people involved in the play are saying "Okay, this little bit here? This isn't the play. Don't pay any attention for the next few seconds... wait, except pay *close* attention because you never know when the lights might come back up and we'll start the play again. Pay attention, but pretend that you aren't here... You know what it is, it's like we're *hiding*. Pretend that we are small children playing hide and seek, and you know *exactly* where we are, but you aren't going to catch us *quite yet*. In fact we can make as much noise as we want... up to a point. We can make noise, but we have to sound like we're trying *not* to make noise. So, when we leave through the functioning door on stage, it will make a noise when it closes, but it will make the quietest possible noise and then *BOOM* the lights come on and NOW THIS IS THE PLAY! WE'RE BACK! MORE PLAY!"

Even worse are the black box plays where they do "dark, dark grey-outs". Not blackouts, mind you. The actors on stage have almost enough light to change the set, which is, of course, just enough light for the audience to see every single thing you are doing, but is also little enough light to ensure that an actor will break his foot moving a desk.

What's a director supposed to do? I don't blame the director, I blame the writer. If you are writing stuff where scenes change instantly, you are writing a TV show or movie. Plays happen in one or two total spaces. And a director can always "Children Of A Lesser God" the whole thing and bring out a bench that indicates every single playing space. My friend Dan Kois did every single play with four chairs.)

Full disclosure, I know the guy who runs the company and if I had *hated* this show, I would still try to write something nice. But you can tell when I'm bullshitting, the truth is, this is a magical amazing piece of theater, powerful and rhapsodic.

And I wouldn't say it was good just because of my friend. The truth is, the play company has been producing the most consistently good theater of any company I've regularly seen in the past three years. Sure, when you go see one of their shows, you can be sure you are seeing a great internationally themed script with great actors. And that alone is enough to separate them from most other companies.

But more than that, the world of the play is perfectly created by their team of designers. The set, lighting and sound design are so *articulate* so focused and exact in this production, as they have been for all of the past productions as well. Names like "Antje Ellerman" (who's set design for this show is fantastic) and "Nicole Pearce" (who's understanding and understated light design propelled the show) and "Bart Fasbender" (who showed, in his brilliant work both in this show and in "Trust" that sound design is the most overlooked and undervalued aspect of theater) are names that won't mean much to most of you, but without them this play would not have been the incredible evening it was.

*******(Yeah, you knew I wasn't gonna leave it at that. #3- Stage combat. I've seen shows where people actually hauled off and hit each other, and believe me, it's worse than the staged combat. When people hit each other, you just get worried all to hell that the *actor* is hurt. But stage combat is just terrible. There are many ways that television and movies have ruined theater, the jump cuts, the "natural" dialogue covering up brilliant "stage" dialogue, the fact that every moderately talented actor goes straight to method acting without ever learning how to articulate or speak loudly, etc... But stage combat is the one area where these glaring problems are met head on with the flaw of using film sensibilities on stage.

See, back in the day, we always knew we were watching people pretend. Aristophanes didn't pray that he would find the perfect actors to embody his characters, no-one was watching a play and thought "Hey, that's *actually* one of the neighboring lords that we are sworn to kill!" When people got killed, the characters lay on the ground dead and, yes, breathing. The combat was in bold strokes, obviously theatrical.

But now, we have "naps", the small noises that accompany the crappy looking balletic fighting that happens in plays. Every time someone is slapped, someone else claps his or her hands together. There's nothing wrong with this, but when the actors have spent an hour *embodying* the characters, then they take a swing at a spot some five inches away from the other person's face, and someone frickin' *claps* at the same time, it just looks ridiculous.

I have never, in the history of my play going and my play, um, being-in, I have never felt like stage combat looked good. Wrestling is fine. Choking someone to death is fine. But anything that has to have an accompanying sound is *ridiculous*. I saw a woman slap a man at a 1400 seat auditorium and I had bad seats, I distinctly *SAW* the man clap his hands together as he brought his hand up to his face.

In summation: If you have a part for an ugly girl, cast an ugly girl, if you have to have combat, make it wrestling, and avoid black outs at all costs. I have spoken.)

Complications

Posted 9:31 AM by sean
This site is designed specifically for me to talk about things that piss me off in a way that cracks me up about them. My family has, over the years, lost their tolerance for my full fledged deep breath rants, mostly because I like to say the *exact* same thing in about thirteen different ways. I like to extend a metaphor. I like to take things to their absurd conclusion. I started this blog so that I could spare my family and friends the bullshit, and it has done it quite a bit. My family email list and my best friends email list are both somewhat down in traffic since I started this blog, and I'm sure that, even though most of them come read this, they are happy with that.

But, time to time, I find that something I've written has hurt someone's feelings, and I'm not sure how to feel about that. I have a knee jerk reaction to finding out I've hurt someone, and it isn't pretty. When someone says, "this was hurtful to me" I actually become ruthless. "Well, what the fuck is wrong with you, then?" I say. "Buck the fuck up. If what I say hurts your feelings, you're pretty goddam fragile and you really should, y'know, exercise your emotional muscles a little more."

I don't know why this happens. When people are hurt by me, I have learned to feign compassion, but I am honestly faking it, waiting for the bullshit whining to stop. (In case it isn't apparent, when I dig a hole I like to dig nice and deep and make sure the walls are good and slick. I don't want me climbing out of this later.) I wish I knew why I have such hostility to people claiming I've hurt them, but I feel like the expression of your pain is a waste of time.

Let me be clear, I absolutely *hate* hurting people, I just can't stand being told that I have. It isn't that I feel the other person is weak, it's that I want something other than admission of damage. I want debate. If I say something that hurts your feelings, then I want to know why, I don't want to know that you're hurt. "You are wrong, and here's why" is something that means something to me, but "You've hurt me and... nothing, you've just hurt me" fills me with rage, and that rage leads to more pain. For you.

I feel like I can defend almost anything I've written on this blog, but really quickly, some of what I've written about God and religion has upset some people, so let me make a couple of things really clear.

1. I do believe that, as political movements, Christians and Muslims are trying to take over the world, I also believe that Jews are not. Christians and Muslims, as non-political entities, are praying and looking to God and doing whatever it is that religious people do, and, it's my suspicion that they would be happy with their religions taking over the world, but I've never tried to argue that.

2. I have no knowledge of God, and I have done what I could to distinguish this from a lack of belief. Agnosticism leaves open the possibility of God, and to me, that isn't true. If I say to you, "there is no connection between Saddam and 9/11" and you respond with, "There might be, and I believe there is. There is no way for you to have all the facts concerning the matter, and I honestly think there is a connection," then I think, with every fiber of my being, that you are wrong.

My wife is agnostic. She worries about Kharmic retribution, about tempting the fates. To her, there is something more at work in the universe than simply stimulus/response. If we are about the get in a car for a drive, I can say, "I bet you a thousand dollars we don't get in an accident!" and she'll say, "Jesus, Sean, I wish you wouldn't say that." We haven't talked about it too much, maybe she believes in God even more than that, but she definitely believes that you can make bad things stay away and good things come your way by thinking and speaking like a decent person.

3. I have tried praying and it's never worked. I have tried to ask God for guidance, and I've gotten nothing, Horrible things have happened to me that I didn't deserve and wonderful things have happened to me that I didn't deserve. I've worked really hard for something and then it came to pass, and I've completely bailed on other things and they have not panned out. I live in a universe where work and luck have given me everything I have, and where apathy or delusion or bad luck have led to every failure.

4. I firmly believe that my lack of ability to find any kind of higher power is a shortcoming on my behalf. Sure, I declare all of this stuff boldly here on the blog, but, as I said before, I like saying the same thing thirteen different ways and this gives me a forum to do that. If my declaration that I have never felt God makes you feel bad then either I'm hitting a little close to home for you or you should quit reading my blog.

5. If you have ever tried to convince anyone else that your religion was the right one, then you are, at the very least, a passionate believer. If you have ever tried to convince someone else to *join* your religion, then you are very zealous indeed.

If your religion is the fastest growing religion in the world, and every single male member of your church spends two years, on their own dime, going door to door across every single nation in the country trying desperately to convince anyone and everyone you bump in to that not only is your religion the true religion, but that everyone should *join* your religion, then you are a zealot. It's pretty easy math.

I don't see that there is anything wrong with being a zealot. Every single day I try to make people laugh because I'm always trying to convince myself that I'm funny. You want to baptize people because it helps you convince yourself that your view on God is the right one.

We're all a little nervous.

But there is a difference between praying alone in your closet, and banging on people's front doors. I'm not trying to hurt anyone, but if you think I'm wrong then tell me *why*, don't tell me my words hurt. I can't apologize for saying what I meant and what is hard to argue is wrong. I don't want to hurt people, but, really, these are just words and if they mean something to you, tell me what it is and I'll modify my language or we'll agree to disagree.

The Other Story

Posted 9:19 AM by sean
Yeah, let me tell you the story you aren't going to read when you go to Salon's piece about the poor Ashlee Simpson's debacle at Saturday Night Live.

Y'see, the world is full of little-girl-lost stories, the Red Riding Hoods that set out on an unwise but well intentioned course through the dark woods just so we can gasp when the obvious happens, she is eaten by a wolf disguised as someone she can trust. Yes, it' a tough world for Ashlee Simpson, no doubt.

But look at the language in the story, and you'll see a real horror show. In talking about her lack of skill, they admit that "MTV captured her first performance ever at The Knitting Factory in L.A., replete with promotional fraudience swooning enthusiastically for the cameras."

Never mind that a person who had never performed ever in front of a crowd was losing her onstage virginity on MTV, and never mind that the article made that seem unfair to *Ashlee Simpson* instead of unfair to thousands and thousands of performers every day who sing for passionate crowds of people and are ignored (or, say, *EVERY SINGLE ORCHESTRA IN THE WORLD*, *NONE* of which will ever play on any of the "music" channels), never mind the obvious, let me tell you a real horror story.

Six years ago, a girl got up and sang at her junior high school cabaret. She sang "Wind Beneath My Wings", and her mother cried. Weirdly, it wasn't just her mother. Everyone was knocked out. She was incredible, somehow she sang with the maturity and clarity that escaped the other kids. It wasn't showey, it wasn't perfect, and the girl isn't gorgeous, so how was anyone to know that when she stood up and sang it would melt the hearts and knees of every person sitting in folding chairs in the junior high school gym.

For the first time in her short life, this awkward little girl did something that garnered her positive attention. Not only did the thing that she sang celebrate her talent, but it also celebrated the history of music. She had discovered her voice, literally and figuratively, and from that moment on she had walked into the world of those-who-give-us-that-which-we-cannot-express-on-our-own. She became an Artist, in league with Mozart and Moliere and McCartney and French Cavemen Who Drew Hunting On Walls. There is an ineffable something that she has. She becomes something completely *other* when she stands in front of a crowd, the notes become a song, the melody has meaning, a single note she sings, wordlessly transports you.

She got leads in the school musicals, she was senior soloist at graduation, she went to college... but somehow her voice was never enough. She was a little bit heavy lidded in the eye, her skin was flawed and she never could figure out make-up, she was a little thin in the bust and a tiny bit heavy in the thighs... she just couldn't get people to *listen* anymore because now that she was 19, her voice wasn't the focal point of her performance. Music has become pornography, the audience isn't listening, they want to fuck someone.

People needed to want to fuck her, and they just didn't want to fuck her *that much*.

She moved to Los Angeles, believing she could do more for her career if she lost weight, wore a wonder bra, got into the Screen Actor's Guild. She tried out for American Idol and made the first four cuts but, in the end, her mouth was a little too pouty, her eyes weren't matched in shape, there was something just not *beautiful* about her. And she wasn't getting in the unions.

She lost her baby fat in six months in LA, she now had no breasts at all and a small butt and thighs, and she still wasn't getting work. She made money waiting tables and then spent it all on a voice over audition class that promised her a demo, which she got. She didn't realize that voice overs are done by only 150 people in the country. She waited tables more and blew her money on headshots with a creepy photographer, who's portfolio contained fantastic artistic nudes.

She started drinking, gained a little weight, started smoking to lose the weight, but her voice survived. She did open mic nights and afterwards every woman in the place told her she was amazing. Because she wasn't that beautiful, and women can support other women who aren't that beautiful. The men liked her performance, but didn't want to fuck her. So they described her as "talented", "gifted", "musical", the kind of words you use for a child, but never "soulful" or "stunning" or "heart-breaking", the words you use for a woman. And no A&R people ever sought her out.

Her headshot photographer calls her with an industry gig. They're looking for musical types to go to a rock concert and cheer on a young performer. It's non-union, you get $40 for the gig and you support an up and coming musician. Our girl thinks it's a pretty good idea. Spread the love. She honestly believes that if she goes and screams for this young girl, it will get paid back to her when her chance comes. She doesn't know that, at 21, she's already too old, her chance was never going to come.

She goes and she screams her head off for Ashlee Simpson, and the MTV cameras glimpse her. She's part of the "fraudience". Out photographer gets some pictures. In a sweaty tee-shirt, braless and jumping, he sees something of her can actually take pictures of.

Our girl thinks the photographer will be able to help her career. In six months, she'll have moved from smoking to crystal meth, and she'll be taking pictures to support the habit. The drugs will ruin her skin, the lifestyle will ruin her voice and the pregnancy she will get at 23 will be easier for her to get rid of than the STD she'll get at 26. At 28 she'll stop drugs entirely, find God and a husband. When she's thirty, she'll stop even auditioning for community theater, depressed that she is always light years ahead of the ingenue and still always playing the character role. She'll play Adelaide out in the Valley one last time and she'll get a rave review, but no-one sees it, no-one ever will. No follow up phone calls, no casting agents.

She'll retire without telling anyone, even herself.

She will still sing, in church, in her kitchen. And her girlfriends will still tell her she's amazing, and they will say so knowing that she will never succeed so they can do it with a clear conscience.

And you are telling me that Ashlee Simpson, millionaire, #1 album seller, has it hard? You're telling me that we should feel bad for little girl lost? She's Red Riding Hood if Red Riding Hood was *carried* through the woods in a rickshaw, arrived at grandma's to find a palace where the wolves wait on her hand and foot and as she's eating dinner she realizes that her 1999 Château Le Pin Pomerol is a little *too* chilled.

This business is not full of girls you've heard of that have fallen apart. The Olson Twin in rehab, the Courtney Loves and Sean Youngs. One, maybe two new basket cases a year, that isn't this business. This business is thousands and thousands of broken dreams every single month. Every famous woman is standing on the corpses of thousands of women they don't deserve to be in the audience of.

And if you bought Ashlee Simpson's album, you are the problem.