At last night's session of this year's Self-Production Boot Camp (for members of the Dramatists Guild of America), I posed a loaded question I never tire of asking because the responses I get always offer new insights into the current state of our culture.
We were in the middle of a session on fundraising when I interrupted the flow to pose a question that I don't think enough of us have ever even considered.
Who is the greatest subsidizer of the Arts in the United States?
The Zoom room echoed with the sounds of stunned (stumped) silence. So, put another way:
From which sector does the mother lode of Arts underwriting come from?
One of the things that's most thrilling about teaching Self-Production Boot Camp is that I get to swim in the current of where the newest work is taking shape these days. The motivated, focused and endlessly inventive creative artists who are drawn to even consider the possibility that they could (or maybe even should?) produce their next new work give me hope for a better future.
And so when Wednesday comes around I always look forward to those 90 minutes when I get to absorb as much of their optimism and ambition as I wish.
Pinching myself at all this talent: Barbara Kessler, Rev. Yolanda, Ann Klein, Anke Summerhill, Patrice Haan and Sloan Wainwright! (What?!)
Our first Monday of the month monologue series Some1Speaking has been running almost three years now. It began as our finalist judges arrived at the very first slate of prize winning monologues for the Hear Me Out Monologue Competition and I took a look at the dozens of brilliant pieces that hadn't won and realized we needed you all to experience the magic of a few minutes in the presence of these unforgettable characters for yourselves.
Now, almost three years in and I'm so excited that some absolutely kick-ass singer-songwriters have agreed to swing by and start each show with one original song performed live with no fancy equipment, just an acoustic instrument and their naked voice singing directly into the Hear Me Out Zoom Black Box.
April 3rd, when Janet Kenney will be performing her own monologue (which she developed in my most recent Advanced Monologue Workshop) her dear friend, the super-talented songwriter
And I have to pinch myself as the talent just pours in with their generous sharing of their gifts. Here are some of the other amazing singer-songwriters who have already said yes to my audacious request.
Burt Bacharach has left the planet. Upon hearing the news this morning, my breath caught in my throat and I found it hard to move. I've never met the man. I know very little about him as a person. But I'd be hard pressed to name a composer in my lifetime who approaches his reach and there's something else about Burt Bacharach's music that ensures his legacy will be felt for generations. Bacharach is like the 20th C. Mozart. His craft was impeccable. His compositions all held together so beautifully without any need of duct tape or super glue. Like the finest furniture maker whose tongue and groove construction just holds together on its own, his songs were the closest thing to perfect construction since Mozart.
And he was almost as prolific as Mozart.
Here for your listening pleasure is one of my faves, which I remember singing along to in my pajamas at age 7.
The most precious commodity we have as artists is our ability to see things differently. The artist looks at a pile of junk hundreds of others have absent-mindedly walked around on their morning commute and finds within it whole universes. The artist hears the same middle-of-the-road slogans we all bathe in all day every day and finds deep within them or around them or because of them new and amazing discoveries about what it means to be human.
In short, to be an artist of importance, you need a mind of your own and in order to cultivate a mind of your own it is essential that you disconnect from the prevailing narratives which grow narrower and less remarkable every day.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news kids but as far as I can tell we are living through one of the swiftest and most efficient periods of cultural and intellectual closing ever experienced in modern human history. If the Renaissance was a period of extended and unprecedented opening the early 21st Century is most certainly the opposite. In fact, it's difficult to identify even one controlling force in the construction and organization of our modern lives which does not in ways sometimes subtle and sometimes clumsy nudge our collective unconscious toward greater predictability and mediocrity.
If you care about your work, about the culture at large and about managing to carve out a satisfying existence in the Age of the Algorithm, you have no choice but to consciously choose everything and anything which might support your quirky, unpredictable, independent and often inconvenient way of looking at the world.
How do you do this?
Prioritize any input yet untouched by the Algorithms.
What do I mean by this? Whatever you feed your mind will ultimately nudge your way of thinking in this or that direction.
Here are some examples of choices you may find yourself making. Get in the habit of asking yourself how each potential use or your precious time came into your consciousness. Chances are, if mass media played a role in it at all, it will lack much in the way of nourishment for a mind that finds inspiration in the most unexpected places.
I'm not saying avoid mass media entirely. But I am saying a diet consisting of nothing but mass marketed culture will do much to mold you (slowly over the years) into an easy uncritical consumer of whatever it is the machine would prefer you consume. And, let's face it, when you accept such a bland and safe role for yourself the Algorithms and the corporations who control them will reward you immediately and handsomely. And your rewards will be widely shared via social media so as to encourage others to follow in your footsteps. Because of course, corporations are not in the business of ensuring the survival and thriving of an idiosyncratic unpredictable and less efficient culture. No, no, no. Unpredictability and inefficiency are fast becoming dirty words in the lexicon of our brave new world.
How ready are we for live performance as we used to enjoy it? We're circulating a very short survey. Please take 3-5 min. to answer a handful of key questions about your feelings in the fall of 2022.
As I thought about whether to move the RT Inner Circle to Patreon I had to stop and think about everything I'd been producing, presenting, performing or hosting over the past few years.
Would the offerings stack up and strike all of you as worth it?
Patreon offers artists a reliable revenue stream (albeit a modest one) by inviting members of the artist's sphere of influence to make a monthly financial contribution to the general health and well-being of the artist and by extension everything they create and offer to the world each year.
It's a tiered model so, those most casually affiliated contribute something you may hardly notice. In our case we set the lowest tier at a $3 monthly contribution.
$3 per month amounts to a little more than $.09 a day. Hopefully anyone who has found joy or value of any kind in any of my workshops or the Hear Me Out programming won't hesitate to join us.
I decided to simply keep the three existing benefits of RT Inner Circle membership as has been the case for free for all these years: subscription to the semi-monthly RT Inner Circle e-Notes, priority notice of contests and other submission opportunities and the exclusive RT Inner Circle Comp Ticket promo codes which allow you to pay zero at many of the online events I host.
This choice, I hope, sends a clear message:
That thing you were getting for free all this time now has a $3 price tag but no one is going to force you to jump on board. You can choose to continue in the RT Inner Circle without signing up on Patreon but I really hope you'll seriously consider enrolling at Patreon, thereby contributing to a community that chooses to honor the value of what I've been making happen for people with a small outlay of cash each month.
It's never simple when something you've been getting for free is suddenly protected by a Paywall. I remember the first time I clicked to read an article in the New York Times online only to be suddenly asked if I had paid for a subscription. It felt like a betrayal.
That's the last thing I want to make you feel. So, if you wish to remain in the RT Inner Circle and avail yourself of certain opportunities, announcements and bits of professional advice contained in the e-Notes and on the YouTube channel, no one's going to be policing you, waiting to stop you.
But, some of the things I've been giving away free of charge, like Wednesday Gathering, for example, have never been free of cost to me. So, in order to continue to drop in on the occasional Wednesday, all we ask is that you set aside $36 a year for the privilege. I hope you'll agree that that's negligible compared to what it means to you to know that the gathering is here. Because of course, the Wednesday Gatherings are not a writer's workshop, like the Roland Tec Online Writers Workshopin which an instructor (me) has carefully constructed a course in order to result in a specific result (your completion of a specific goal for your work over a six month period).
As I said, before launching on Patreon, I thought it might help for me to make a comprehensive list of all the things I'd offered the community since the start of this pandemic.
If you're one of the dozens of folks who've emailed in frustration at not being able to locate a project, deadline, video, schedule or anything else related to a Roland Tec enterprise, you're in luck. As of today, you need only ever remember one address.
In 1922, an unknown composer who supported his family by working as an insurance man, did something audacious. He self-published a collection of songs he'd been writing over several years and proceeded to mail out complimentary copies to practically everyone of some importance he could think of. His name was Charles Ives and today, thanks to the efforts of another composer of a younger generation who championed his work, he is widely regarded as one of American music's greatest composers.
It would be easy to take this little anecdote as evidence that all we need in order to succeed is perseverance and a touch of audacity but the sobering truth is that of the hundreds of copies of Mr. Ives' 114 Songs that he sent out, most sat on desks and languished unopened for years, if not decades. Had it not been for the passion of the young composer Henry Cowell who made it his personal mission to get the establishment to recognize the great leaps of imagination made by the older man, we might never have heard much of this groundbreaking music.
Those of us who write for the stage do so in an environment in which the discovery of something wonderful and new is well on its way to becoming nothing short of miraculous. With virtually no meaningful governmental support of our theaters, there is no place really to which a playwright can send his or her script and be assured of a thoughtful read.
The sad truth is when you send your full-length play or screenplay to the literary department of a target theatre or the development department of an independent film production company the odds are stacked against you.
Some of you may recall reading about the couple of Halloweens I spent teaching Ear Training and Music Theory to a wonderful music-loving community of folksingers and songwriters gathered by my pal Cosy Sheridan in the Utah desert. I learned so much about Music, something I thought I understood in every which way, by attempting to teach certain principles of how its put together to students who did not know how to read music notation. There really is something eye-opening about diving into a language without the usual visual markers we're used to referring to.
Anyway, anyone who has attended one of the Hear Me Out Monologues Labor Day Festival and Awards Ceremony will recognize the name Cosy Sheridan because it is she and her husband Charlie Koch who have provided our incredibly moving musical interludes in between the presentation of Finalist monologues. I consider Cosy to be one of the finest lyricists of our time. There is an economy to her songwriting that surpasses any other I can think of. When you enter into a Cosy Sheridan lyric the words will creep up on you as she chooses carefully to collect the seemingly simplest possibly prosaic words and phrases to spin her tale. And then just when you're lulled into thinking that everything there is to see has already been seen she somehow shifts our focus and the whole world is alight with something unexpected.
In a nod to CoVid and the disappointing need to put Moab Folk Camp on hiatus these last two years, Cosy is offering a songwriting retreat called Desert Song. It'll run from Tuesday May 31st through Friday June 3rd in the gorgeous setting of Moab.
David Geffen is so maligned. And there's so much more to him than meets the eye. I highly recommend this documentary which opened my eyes to the depth and breadth of his contributions. Too often in this culture we have a knee-jerk negative reaction to bald ambition and ego. But consider what this larger than life figure has managed to do for the culture. It's inspiring.
I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Jean-Paul Yovanoff to talk about my approach to teaching, my philosophy about the performing arts and a whole lot more. I had such fun talking with Jean-Paul for his podcast BE OUR GUEST. I wanted to share the interview with you all here.
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