EXTRA CRITICUM

Taylor Swift Ticketmaster Controversy Points to a Dangerous Thing No One is Talking About: The Slow Narrowing of Our Culture

 

 

The problem is clear: Social Media is Antisocial. It is not prosocial.

First I left Facebook. Then you convinced me that my bottom line depended on my return. Now I'm leaving Twitter.

Here's the inconvenient truth. Social media is fundamentally antisocial. And by that I mean the very architecture of social media does not support prosocial behavior. And when society is under threat of collapse, we all need (now more than ever) to find ways to access those parts of ourselves inclined toward acting in support of the needs of others first. 

My mother, Nechama Tec, embarked on the first comprehensive study of the Polish Catholics who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. In her first book on the subject, When Light Pierced the Darkness, she uncovered some surprising traits shared by most of the hundreds of Righteous Christians she interviewed. Turns out the usual categories by which sociologists would first embark on a comparative analysis of large groups such as religiosity, social strata, gender, etc. seem to have been largely inconsequential. Instead, she found some less obvious deeper qualitative traits that were shared by a majority of these individuals. And one of them was a pre-war established habit of prosocial behavior. 

Stop to offer help to someone who appears to be lost, dig into your pockets for some spare change to offer to a homeless person on the street, rearrange your schedule to help a friend who's being discharged from the hospital...

The people who habitually (easily, casually, even unconsciously) consider the needs of others important and interesting just might save us all when the shit hits the fan.

Social media encourages us to look inward, not outward. And it does this for one simple reason. 

It's public.

2021 Gratitude Roadtrip: Day One (or: Lemonade Squeeze)

Thursday November 25, 2021. Thanksgiving Day.

Whenever life serves up lemons, we have a choice. Well, maybe more than one. I suppose first we have to decide whether to make the lemonade or not. Trust me: you'll want to make the lemonade. Rotting lemons are nothing anyone wants to have to handle. Even on our best days.

But once we're in the midst of extracting every precious drop of juice we can and we're well on our way to producing that full glistening thirst-quenching pitcher, we have another choice.

We can choose to see today's misfortune as the unfair punishment of a cruel and sadistic world. Or we can look for all the ways in which, really, if we think on it hard enough... in the end we must admit that every wrong turn was our own damned fault.

Can you guess which of those two tends to be my default?

Stop whining. 

My original plan was to be on the road from NYC to Westport Wednesday night around 9PM. But packing a bag (or two) for 3 nights is seldom as simple a proposition as it maybe ought to be. When I finally zipped up my Tumi and went to grab the bag of fruit in the fridge I glanced at the clock on my cable box.

Needless to say, it was no longer 9 or even 10 or 11. And I would not be on the road to CT for another 5 hours due to a stupid mistake I made regarding the garage and its on-again-off-again Covid schedule.

For a New Yorker with a car and a getaway plan, the only thing worse than discovering your car is being held hostage to unanticipated garage hours is learning you've been towed to some part of New Jersey you cannot locate on a map.

I'd like to interrupt this post with a brief (but essential) Public Service Announcement:

2021 Gratitude Roadtrip: Day Zero

Wednesday November 24, 2021

For as long as I can remember, travel of any kind has always caused me an unusually high level of anxiety. I fret over what to pack. Make lists. Worry that my lists are incomplete. And when it comes time to move from one environment to the next, my body kicks into overdrive and I start moving faster than anyone interested in not bumping into things should ever move. 

So, as I prepare to head out of my apartment, I'm a sweaty zig-zagging mess. Typically I lock the front door three or four times before I'm satisfied that I've not forgotten anything essential. And this is not related to my age. When I was 17 our senior Drama class took a trip to Stratford-Upon-Avon and London to immerse ourselves in 10 plays in 7 days. I forgot my passport and had to shuttle from JFK to my childhood home in CT, missing our flight and meeting up with the group a day late. 

In an airport or a train station, I'm like a chipmunk checking and re-checking my ticket, water bottle, snacks, bathroom breaks, blah blah blah. And when the All Aboard announcement comes, watch out because I might just mow you down.

A friend of mine once suggested that my extreme freak-out around every transition from here to there can be traced to my mother's Holocaust experience which imprinted on her a simple equation: Packing up and moving = life-threatening danger. I find this theory of the case occasionally persuasive but usually it strikes me as just a little too obvious.

So, it might seem odd then that I've decided to spend the Thanksgiving holiday this year on the road.

My 2021 Gratitude Tour. Boston. NH. VT. Western Massachusetts.

Thanksgiving, 2021.  A largely-vaccinated public is slowly returning to life as it once was. Families all over the U.S. will be celebrating Thanksgiving as they used to -- gathered round the dining table passing the gravy and cranberry sauce enjoying the company of friends and family. 

But I will not. 

I'm not there yet. I'm still too anxious about CoVid to do that despite my booster. And so, I'm taking to the road and heading north to Boston, New Hampshire, Vermont and Western Massachusetts in pursuit of the one thing I most ache for: the company of dear friends.

To keep things absolutely safe I'll be meeting them for 30 min. walks outside. No indoor meals with anyone but myself. When I eat indoors it'll be takeout in my hotel room. But it's powerful to me, the idea that in a few short days I'll be reconnecting physically with some people who have meant the world to me.

In the end we are not what we eat. But we are who we love. Or that's how I see it. I hope you'll drop by. I'll be posting entries on my experience -- written and possibly a bit of vlogging as well. Please join me. And join the discussion by posting a comment.

Get Outta the Road! You wanna get yourself killed?

It was a mild sunny early Summer day. As my friend David Heath took this picture of me (which I now use as the Roland Tec Inner Circle email banner) a woman walking by shouted that to me with great urgency. 

Get outta the road! You wanna get yourself killed?

I had just asked David to snap my pic. We'd been walking along one of the sleepy blocks around Yale in New Haven, CT, on our way from lunch to a favorite gelato spot. As soon as I saw the stencil along the edge of the sidewalk, I was in love. 

In love with the message.

In love with the image of some transgressive artist marking up the streets and sidewalks of New Haven with a message of peace.

In love with the alignment between this found moment and my overarching philosophy of how to be a creative person in this fractured world. 

And in love with the joy of sitting down on the street for no reason other than the wonder of stumbling upon something that inspires you.

Now that this image has morphed into a kind of logo for my brand, the shouted warnings of passersby take on new meaning.

Get Outta the Road! You wanna get yourself killed?

For anyone making their own way as an artist these days, the road can often feel treacherous. 

We might sit in the road of our careers waiting years for even a bicycle to ride by.

Or we might sit in the road and enjoy a steady flow of pedestrians and traffic coming this way.

Or--god forbid!--we may just have found a spot that suits us when around the bend--boom!--a delivery truck mows us down and we lose everything.

So I suppose you could choose not to get in the road, not to risk rejection, criticism, the disdain or derision of your peers. But I'm pretty sure that getting in the road, at least for a few minutes, beats the hell out of standing at a distance, safely protected from the potential danger of oncoming traffic, never having risked a thing. Until one day you die, never having even tried.

Take a seat. If you're uncomfortable, you can always get back up. But you'll go to your grave knowing that at least you gave it your all.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Bodega.

I'd run in to grab some peanut butter (confessed addict. I know, I know...) and there was a woman on a cell phone having a conversation.

In 2021, no less!

And she was not happy. But she was taking great pains to appear calm while her thumb and forefinger did a little dance which seemed to be more about chipping the nail polish off of her thumb than anything else.

It was clear she was talking to a man. One she'd slept with. A lot. And also one that she clearly regarded more as a boy than a man. 

And he was really asking a lot of stupid questions.

No Words. Helen Levitt's 1948 Silent Film: In the Street Gets a Gorgeous New Score by Ben Model

Helen Levitt was a friend of the family but I only met her maybe 5 or 6 times. As it turns out she was best friends with one of Mom's close friends, also named Helen. Well, these two Helens were often falling out of love with each other and so we only saw Helen Levitt rarely. But I remember studying with astonishment one of her books of photographs of New York City street scenes. What I immediately loved about her pictures was that there was so much richness of the human experience in every shot yet they were framed and angled in a way that did not dictate how I was to feel. Like life, these photographs did not prejudge. There was room the breathe.

Take a look at this marvelous moving picture which really works a lot like her still photographs do. 

 

Our pasts -- recent and distant -- collide on E. 4th Street

Members of New Opera Theatre Ensemble (the opera company I founded in 1988) have been meeting once a week for an hour via Zoom ever since the pandemic arrived. During the hour we spend together online, we often improvise musical etudes. One great byproduct of the pandemic has been reconnecting with this bright brilliant endlessly inventive musical family that I've missed but that now live scattered here and there. Pictured clockwise from upper left: Vicky Pittman (Keene, NH), Mary Ann Lanier (Northampton, MA), Jon Rosenthal (San Francisco, CA), Roland Tec (New York, NY), Merle Perkins (Boston, MA), and Sylvie Stewart (Nashua, NH).

During Pandemic Pause, I've been consciously pushing myself to get out of my comfort zone artistically. What does this mean for Rolando Teco? Well, I've always enjoyed performing to a point but I do suffer from exaggerated stage fright. Sometimes my performance anxiety grabs hold of me mid-morning and doesn't let go until the moment I'm taking that final curtain call at night. It's one of the many reasons I never seriously considered acting or performing music as a career. The nerves (mine, to be exact) might've consumed me.

To a degree, the safety of the barrier that is Zoom by way of my laptop has let me experiment in this arena more than I might be comfortable doing otherwise.

Anyway, when the first email from Gaven Trinidad came in inviting folks to participate in a virtual open mic co-hosted by New York Theatre Workshop and Poetic Theatre, I didn't immediately move on as I might have were it any other year. Let me pause here to observe that just about 6 months before the pandemic hit my friend Yvonne Delet and I had gone to a Moth Slam at Housing Works and I'd put my name in the hat to tell a story. And I was a bundle of nerves. The beer I had did little to calm me. They pull the names out of the hat at random and throughout the evening. When the first name was called that began with an "R" I almost choked from fear. "Don't call my name, please don't call my name" I heard myself whispering.

But then an interesting thing happened. 

They called my name. And in that moment when I registered that they'd said "Roland" I was filled with an unexpected emotion.

Joy.

And I got up and told my story and it went well and I was runner up and when I got home, I grabbed a big 5x7 pink index card and scrawled on it in Sharpie: 

As nervous 
as I was, the moment they called
my name, I was
T H R I L L E D

An Hour and a Half

After my first sleepless night in my apartment after having been away for awhile, I noted, first the sound of gentle rain out my open bedroom window. Then I glanced at the alarm clock on my nightstand. 

8:00 AM

I debated. Should I get up despite the late hour and enjoy a walk in the rain (as is my thing), or skip it and get to the business of the day ahead.

I opted for the walk.

On my way out of the building I noted with surprise that the overnight doorman was there chatting with a woman with a gorgeous dog waiting patiently.

I turned back toward them and asked a question we don't ask much these days in a world where "smartphones" are ubiquitous.

"Excuse me."

"Yes," they both answered in unison.

"I'm sorry. Do you happen to know what time it is?"

One of My Fondest Performance Memories

Going through my files, I just stumbled upon this pic which brings me back to one of my favorite moments from two summers ago when I was trekking up and down the I-95 and I-87 corridors performing my solo storefront spectacle, No Place to Hide. During this, my first attempt at this, hosted by the Colonial Theatre in Keene, NH, a choir from a local middle school passing by on their way back from an afternoon concert of their own, stopped at the window and engaged with the strange middle aged man typing in a window.

When I learned they were members of a school choir, I asked for a song and they spontaneously broke out into song, in glorious 4-part harmony. I remember pushing my ears to the glass to try and hear them in all their glory, a reminder of the barrier between us and the human drive to connect no matter what.

Those kids were such an inspiration to me. And on other nights and afternoons when I found myself typing away with no one stopping to interact, I'd recall that moment and it kept me pushing through with the knowledge that there are always surprises waiting for us on the other side of the glass. We just have to persevere long enough to encounter them. 

#Unfriendfacebook

Look what just showed up in my INBox.
Wow, Facebook. You really care. That means so much!

 

Umm... No, thanks. I'm good.
But thanks for everything, Facebook. ;)

Here are just a few of the stories you may have missed. Click on the image to link to referenced article. If you have a story to add, please do so as a comment to this post. Thanks!

 

 

 

This is what practice looks like.

Couple years back while I was teaching in Roanoke, I grabbed a few seconds of footage of this line of folks casting fishing lines on a grass lawn. At first blush I just thought it was one of those amusing visuals for its absurdity.

No water within sight. Just a grass lawn, train tracks and asphalt of nearby streets and sidewalks of downtown Roanoke.

But now as I watch it, I see something I didn't see at first.

A Good Example of Too Many Plot Points

I sometimes find it hard to convey to writing students exactly how we know that a script is collapsing under the weight of too many artificially assembled plot points. This actual item from today's local news may serve as a fine example.

Man Who Attacked Cafe Workers Was Suspect in Two Murders Then Died of Heart Attack

Hitting Storefronts and Thankful for the Generosity of My Fellow Artists

I'm spending a good portion of this summer workshopping my storefront spectacle, No Place to Hide. In a nutshell, I appear inside the storefront window of a local business somewhere typing on a laptop and either by means of projector or flatscreen, every word I type is instantly enlarged and displayed to passersby.

I started doing this piece without fully understanding exactly why I was doing it. Something just seemed to propel me to want to try this out.

Truthfully, I'm not yet sure what this will all amount to, whether the playwright in me will ultimately find this format interesting enough. (I tend to want my work to be somehow transformative, either by way of taking an audience on a journey, or at least shaking them up a bit and the jury's still out on whether this idea has the potential to do this for us.)