Next Iron Chef Symon

OK, so apparently I'm able to post twice in one day when one of the posts involves TV. I formally request that I have my graduation dinner at Chef Symon's restaurant in Cleveland.

Look at Symon's heavy profile and then at his hands clenched so eloquently behind his back. That dissimilarity is endearing. Against Besh's perfect parade rest, Symon seems like the underdog. Oh, I wish they both could have won.

I got the photos from Michael Ruhlman's blog.

Our hero loses hope but regains his lip

I think maybe I'm not good at this. Keeping a schedule, turning out pages.

The play I was in, John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation, is over and struck. Great, more free time!

Except this next week is tech week for Witness, and I continue to have schoolwork. I'm doubting pretty darkly whether or not I'll achieve my goals. But I am going to continue trying. It's hard, though. Whose idea was this, anyways?

Also, I had some hair removed from my upper lip. I love the feeling of the breeze blowing across my philtrum.

A Positive Review; A Haiku

I grew a moustache
But it made no impression.
Nudity; clenched jaw.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

What a nice review, right? I'm a little disappointed that he doesn't mention my hairy lip--but then, as you can see from the photo, it's not worth much mention.

Like it's my job? I forget that I have another job, which my parents pay $45,000 a year to allow me to do.

It looks like I'm more able to update every other day than every single day, so that's what I'm going to expect from myself.

I haven't written anything substantive for my play since last Thursday. Though last night (late, late, after finishing a paper), I did have an idea of how to solve a problem in my concept. Have I written it down? Nope, I'm sitting on it!

Re: Anne Bogart:

Miss Bogart is a very influential theater artist, the 'mama of uptown theater' according to her pal and student Tina Landau. As an undergrad in Baltimore, I have no real concept of what that means. How good are her productions? I have no idea. How many artists self-identify as being Bogart-based? I have no idea.

I find A Director Prepares to be about equal parts false philosophy and artistic hokum. I think it's often irresponsibly written (check your facts, Bogart!) and self congratulatory. So my opinion is obviously not balanced (though I will defend it as fair).

One Bogart vocab word I kind of like is 'irimi' - - a concept she learned from her extensive training in aikido (Anne Bogart could beat me up, everyone). This is the idea that at any moment, you may have to defend yourself or attack your opponent; either way you will have to act, decisively and probably violently. A practical example: Bogart is directing a show and knows she needs to fix something, but she doesn't know how. She begins to walk towards the actors regardless, and by the time she's close enough to drop them with an awesome aikido chop, she knows what to say.

I like this idea because it's how I started this blog post. I had no idea then how I would finish.

The End.

Water on the brain

Quotes from A Director Prepares by Anne Bogart, pages 127-129.
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"Two scoops, please, on a waffle cone." Picture from the lecture slides of a class I'm taking.

Artistic types, I think, like to say how similar their ventures can be to science, and vice versa. But artistic types need to be careful.

"The part of your brain that can easily divert you from your path is commonly called the frontal lobe. It generates the constant buzzing in your head that wants to censure you and is out to ambush your every move. In order to find a creative flow you have to give the frontal lobe something else to do so that it will stay out of your way. "

The brain is lobular and lateralized, as Bogart alludes to (I know; I learned so in High School AP Psych). But the functions ascribed to the separate lobes and hemispheres by artistic types (and by middle-management training, and the popular media, and anybody who wants an easy way to say ‘this is how and why I’m different from you’) are not so clear as they hope—not clear to them and not, even, to the neurophysiologists who devote their lives to studying the brain’s rococo architecture. How disrespectful it is to co-opt, misrepresent, and dumb down another’s life-work to suit one’s own argument! How distasteful, and what misperceived dysmorphia, to so enthusiastically vilify a part of one’s own body.

We teach young women to hate their bodes, and something like 5 million now have eating disorders. Do we want intellectually anorexic artists?

"Busywork! My one weakness!"

I have heard in acting classes, and I most stubbornly refuse, to 'get out of my head. ' If we must be thus symbolic, I’d much prefer to 'use my head through my body,' or some other phrase that doesn't disenfranchise the mound of pinky-gray ricotta inside my head (or the quicksilver neuron threads running throughout my body). And I hate this idea that we need to trick ourselves into good acting (or writing, or whatever):

“You have to engage that part of your brain ['that wants to censure you and is out to ambush your every move'] with busywork so that it will be otherwise engaged.”

Is my brain a delinquent child, that I must distract it and lie to it to get what I want? Or rather--to be a good parent--if my brain is delinquent, how have I made it so and how can I discipline it while still treating it like a human?

Happy happy birthday--

I started this blog 5 days ago with (what we call in the business) a 'soft launch'--it was up and open but I didn't expressly invite anyone in.

Now that it's Nov. 1 and naplwrimo has officially started, I have added this blog to my facebook profile and told my family about it.

Incidentally, because I started early, the nice people at National Playwriting Month probably can't sanction my play. But they're part of what inspired me to get started.

It is also my older brother's birthday!

Hey, brother! How old are you?

So what better way to celebrate his birthday than by inviting him and the rest of my family to come and read me write about myself?

I really don't know how old he is. If I had to guess, I'd say 26. I remember his birthday because it's the day after Halloween. I remember my little sister's birthday because it's on the 9th of April and mine is the 9th of January. I only was able to wish my Mom a happy birthday because my Dad called to remind me (thanks Dad, sorry Mom!). I have two other siblings whose birthdays are mysteries to me (actually I remember my younger brother's birthday is June 13, because one year that was the day we got out of school for the summer. Unless it's the 14th). I also could not name for you all of my aunts, uncles, and cousins.

I guess that last paragraph sounds a little light-hearted, so lest you think I'm totally insensitive: this does keep me up and night, and I surely felt like a dick when Dad reminded me of Mom's birthday.

But that's not the point! The point is: Happy Birthday Austin!

More about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it

When I insist (for some reason) that I'm not going to talk about the play I'm writing on this blog, I mean mostly that I'm not going to share the play itself. I will share updates about its progress. Like I'm going to do right now.

"What you describe is the single most important practice an aspiring writer can learn. It is, literally if you will, the make or break fact of the aspiring writer’s life: you either have or do not have the capacity to maintain a daily writing routine—same time, for the same amount of time, producing roughly the same quantity of words." ---Michael Ruhlman to The Amateur Gourmet

I'm the president of Witness Theater, a (nonreligious) student theater group at JHU. We produce about 3 showcases of student-written one-act plays a year, and one student-written full-length. I'm hoping to have a full-length ready to submit by Nov. 25; I started writing on Oct. 25.

I read the above-quoted interview and it scared me very much. I find many food/tv personalities scary (I have dreams where Alton Brown is mean to me), and Michael Ruhlman is my newest phobia. He's from Cleveland too. I just want him to love me.

So I've resolved to prove that I have the capacity to work at writing like it's my job; this blog is part of that effort.

I have not been a good boy so far. I intend to wake up at 9 every day and shuffle to my writing table (AKA the kitchen table). Not easy; see Fig. 1:

Good intentions<------------------------------------------->Good deeds

Fig. 1: Please note that they are far apart.

I have, however, written some of my play every day. Actually so far it's been transcribing the ideas that I already had which, for some reason, I had decided to sit on. I sometimes think it works to hold an idea in my head so that it can work itself out up there. But then I remember that what 'works' is to write it down as soon as it comes, work on it until it's too big or to small or too smudged to see anymore, and then maybe walk away. Then maybe (MAYBE) while you're gone, it will work itself out.

If I don't do my work, maybe naked children will do it for me! Photo from here.
(They wear hats instead of pants because their privates are on their heads.)

So I was going at a good clip, confusing memory for creativity, until, on Monday, the clipper stopped. The wind left my sails, to continue that metaphor. I was lost at sea. It was really mortifying.

Tuesday and Wednesday I sort of solved the problem by plotting the play out scene by scene. It feels like progress, though there are of course plenty of new anxieties: How flawed is my concept? Will it work? Can it work? And if (when) I dwell too long on these, that last one morphs into a question truly terrifying:

Can I work?

So on that terrifying note: Happy Halloween! What are you dressed up as? I'm a naked elf.

(It's more coincidence than costume).

Ditka's Revenge

The number of midwestern slavics with unfortunate facial hair is inexplicable. I am proud, now, to count myself in that multitude.

"Someone put a kielbasa in my mouth! I'm ready" www.threesources.com

I've had a long bad day. I'm sorry my third post ever is about the beetle-grub that's growing on my upper lip. In my defense, it's for a play.

I actually had the vague hope that my moustache would be both classy and rakish like those of certain movie stars--but that age is past, I think; new movie cameras too readily exposed the greasepaint with which Clark Gable beefed up his flavor saver.

I love and hate my moustache. It makes people uncomfortable, I think. They don't want to ask if--seriously? a moustache?

If they did inquire, I'd surely excuse it with the play, but in truth I'm the one who suggested it in the first place.

His Spirit Animal is a Hot Dog

...

...
...
...
DAD?
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So the Indians are done for the year (obvy!); I'm really glad at least one man from the land of Cleve is succeeding for real for real.
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Photos taken from Google Image Search.
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I'm from Cleveland, by the way.

In the Interest of Attribution

"Bitch, please." Thanks for the photo, www.eleganthack.com

The title of this blog is also the title of a poem by the bitchin' poetess Marianne Moore. It was the title of that before it was the title of this.

Miss Moore wrote often in a syllabic style, establishing a new stanza form in each poem. A pretty neat way to work: rigorously formal but not slavishly inflexibe. Here's an example:

Like a Bulrush

Or the spike
of a channel marker, or the
moon, he superintended the demolition of his image in the
water by the wind; He did not strike

them at the
time as being different from
any other inhabitant of the water; it was as if he
were a seal in the combined livery

of bird plus
snake; it was as if he knew that
the penguins were not fish and as if in their bat-blindness, they did not
realize that he was amphibious.

Fear not the weird lineation and lack of capitals. This is a poem about a seal. Miss Moore wrote often of animals; her mother once said (according to Elizabeth Bishop, in response to a different poem, Nine Nectarines & Other Porcelain), "I am so glad that Marianne has decided to give the inhabitants of the zoo...a rest."

Miss Moore had this to say of critics:

...If he must give an opinion, it is permissible that the
critic should know what he likes. Gordon
Craig with his "this is I" and "this is mine," with his three
wise men, his "sad French greens" and his Chinese Cherry--Gordon Craig, so

inclinational and unashamed--has carried
the precept of being a good critic to the last extreme...

From Picking and Choosing. Miss Moore knew from criticism; she made her living reviewing books and editing various literary magazines. Her wise words will bear on this blog, which is going to be a bunch of different things (bear with, please).

Folks, that is some bear shit in the sand in Michigan.

I've embarked on National Playwriting Month 7 days early (yes, I started three days ago; I hope to finish 7 days early), and I'm going to post something on this blog every day, in order to keep myself on task. Miss Moore's thoughts on criticism are relevant because I probably will talk about my play infrequently, instead using that playwriting process as a way to look at related processes: acting, reading, directing, thinking, talking...

That little blurb (an inadequate representative, really, of Miss Moore's poem) is also relevant because Gordon Craig was a great family physician of the early 20th century theater, a true general practitioner: actor, author, director, critic, surgeon.

"I'm a dude, y'all." Thanks, WikiP.

I don't pretend to the expertise of Mr. Craig or Miss Moore (though obviously I do have my pretensions). I'm a senior at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. I'm in the process of applying to graduate schools for an MFA in dramatic writing. I like Sam Cooke and I like cooking, and I'm sure I'll find things to say about those things in the near future. Here's the first poem Marianne Moore ever wrote, composed in 1895 (I think she was 8?):

Dear St. Nicklus;

This Christmas morn
You do adorn
Bring Warner a horn
And me a doll
That is all.