EXTRA CRITICUM

When it comes to Art, I have a strong bias.

I recently contributed a small amount of money to a theatre company whose work I like. I had received an email from them asking and I didn't hesitate to give. Oddly, right after their email came in another email from a similar small theatre company came in, also run by people I know and who I think are talented.

And yet. The second company didn't get a dime of my money. Why?

Let’s Get Creepy: Brothers Quay at MoMA

There’s really no point in me trying to convince you that the Quay Brothers exhibit at MoMA is worth your time and money. Either you find them deeply disturbing and you like them or you find them deeply disturbing and you don’t like them. However, since they are not a household name, I thought it might be useful to design a little quiz, a litmus test, really, so that you can decide whether or not they’re right for you.

Times Square Meltdown

File this one under: Street Theatre. So I'm walking in Times Square--well, trying to. I'm trying to make my way from the corner of 44th and Broadway to the corner of 41st and Broadway and you don't have to be a New Yorker to know that that shouldn't be a long walk. And i hear this guy muttering under his breath. And slowly I think I hear what he's saying and it's hard to imagine it but he's actually saying:

Yes, people. You are still actually human beings, with--perish the thought!--advanced brains. You may walk like cows but, no, you are not stupid cattle. You are actually human beings with brains so why don't you consider using them, please! Thank you!

When you know you're in the capable hands of a real playwright...

Reading a friend's play today, as I reached the bottom of page 1, it occurred to me, this is how you know you're in the hands of a real playwright.

Performance Art?

Spotted this on the sidewalk today at the North West corner of 9th Street and Sixth Avenue. It made me smile. First I came upon this:

Typing Behind Glass

Wow. What an eye opening experience I had yesterday!

When Micheline Auger approached me about sitting in a storefront window and playwriting for a few hours I must admit I didn’t really think it through before jumping on board. The audacity of the idea eclipsed any questions I might have had about how it would feel to share such a personal process in public.

As the day drew closer I found myself worrying about it. Not quite regretting, but fretting over which play I would expose to the world. Should I revise an old gem that I adore? Or should I continue forward on my epic exploration of the rise of Ted Kennedy?

In the end I arrived at what felt to me the perfect choice.

That Weird Sense of Clarity

The great Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami never intended to be a writer. When he graduated from college, he took out a loan and started a jazz club. The club was a great success. He ran it for 10 years.
One night he was at a baseball game, watching an American player named Dave Hilton bat. Hilton hit a ball deep into the outfield (it would end up being a double). As the ball sailed through the air, a thought, clear and unadorned, came into Murakami’s head – “I’m going to write a novel.”

He did, a novella called Hear the Wind Sing. It won a prestigious writer’s prize. His second novel was also a success, so he sold his jazz club in order to write full time. More than a dozen books later, with sales in the millions, translated into dozens of languages, Murakami is regularly mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize.

Cartoon: Infinite Loop

Hyperspecialization = Death

File this one under "All Out Rant."

I have a friend who has cancer. How many doctors does she have? To calculate that number, simply count her organs.

Okay, I may be oversimplifying. But not by much. The hyperspecialization that permeates every facet of our culture is what propels one playwright I know who is also an actor to go by two completely different names.

The Joy, Magic and Mystery that is Music-making

Over the past couples weeks I've had the pleasure of going into the recording studio to record a collection of songs from the musical Katherine Burger and I have been working on for, well... a while. :) A big part of this process was finding just the right pianist to play the hell out of some tricky and oddly quirky music. In Mary Feinsinger, we found not only a wonderful musician but a real gem of a collaborator. After only a few hours of working with Mary at the piano, she really "got" my music.

When you put notes on a page, you're really putting down a blueprint for music-making. And a lot is up to interpretation. How you make the music "breathe" through phrasing. How fast or slow. How consistently fast or slow. How loud or soft. Where to suddenly get soft. Some of these things can be notated but a lot of the nuances of how dynamics and articulation and tempo relate to the essential thrust of the music are beyond words.

Irresistable Julia Child Remix

Big thanks to Andrew Altenburg for spotting this exceptional online tribute!

"HUMBLE BEAUTY: Skid Row Artists" A Different Kind of L.A. Story

Full disclosure: I’m working as the Social Media & Crowdsource Consultant for the film HUMBLE BEAUTY: Skid Row Artists. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s move on to the interview with the directors, Judith Vogelsang and Leititia Popa Schwartz.

DL: Tell me a little bit about HUMBLE BEAUTY: Skid Row Artists. 

Judith: HUMBLE BEAUTY is the true story of how art saved the lives of talented homeless and very indigent men and women -- fine arts painters -- in the worst area of Los Angeles.

Changing my work habits... slowly.

Are you a marathon writer? Or a dribs and drabs, scraps of paper on the fly kind of writer? I've always been the former. I would fret and fret and not do a lick of work until finally I found a few solid days in which to focus 100% at which point I would sit my ass down and write, write, write, eat, stretch. Repeat. And it would be so intense and exhausting that at the end of getting out a draft (usually this kind of work involves a first draft), I would want to unplug the phone, lock the doors and veg out on Law & Order and pizza for a few days.

My therapist suggested recently that this might not be the healthiest approach to living.

Take My Advice, Don't Take My Advice

Here's a recent email exchange I had with Andy Bowley, one of the fine, fine cinematographers who worked on my documentary, A Life's Work. How we arrived at this point in our back and forth doesn't matter. What matters is the content of this excerpt, which I think fits in nicely with the theme of the film and the blog.