This is the Way we go to Work

A "work ethic" is an interesting instinct. In point of fact, I'm not sure it is a pure instinct. I'm more inclined to believe that the so-called work ethic is as-much-or-more a product of environment than personality. I can't deny that some people just seem more energetic and driven from the moment they spring from their mother's womb--briefcase in hand and tearing the wrist watch from off their delivering doctor--but I also feel that everyone has within them the power, with a little discipline and determination, to say screw that and spend eight straight hours watching a

Mythbusters

marathon on Bravo.

Not that I speak from personal experience here.

My work ethic has been on my mind a lot lately, what with making curious headway in my professional life as an actor even whilst

being dropped from a show

and

losing my primary source of income

. Actors typically, I believe, work some very long and hard hours. They're just hours of constantly changing gears, so it often seems we're not concentrated, or disciplined. It's a little bit like we're each and every one of us a working mother, at least at this particular level. We work our "day job," and while we're at our day job our child (who, by now we hope, is a little more capable of taking care of itself) is in constant contact. We make phone calls on its behalf, we take lunch breaks to visit, or facilitate later time spent with the kid. There are no weekends, no evenings. There are games, and homework, and constant surprises. We feel guilty for not devoting ourselves enough at "work"; we feel guilty for not spending enough time with the boy/girl/meaning-of-our-life.

Take, for example, the pride I take in the post previous to this being my 200th. I feel pride over quantity, which is really nothing more than my work ethic at work. In addition, I feel some guilt. What? Guilt, you say? You mean over the hours you've spent 'blogging that could have been spent ending starvation, or resolving the myriad religious conflicts currently tearing our culture apart at the seams? No. No, I mean I feel guilty over not writing more here. Out of nearly 400 days I could have entries for, I have merely half.

Neil Gaiman

would shake his tangled locks at me in sheer disappointment.

No: I did not intend to pun there. (Go back. Look. It's there.) I'd rather it were a promised fart joke, but what can I say? There's no escaping genetics.

I'm reading a fantastically enjoyable

book about Buster Keaton

right now. I can only guess at its accuracy; it seems to have been compiled mostly from interviews of Keaton by the author, and I don't get the sense that said author was in the habit of cross-checking Buster's memory. Still and all, it makes for a great read. Buster Keaton started out just as early as he could get away with in vaudeville, with his family, and by the time he got to films he already had a tremendous amount of skill and experience behind him. From struggling as part of an ambituous family act, to being aprosperous and famous act, to breaking into film and becoming a star, Buster worked like a dog. The only thing that slowed him down was succumbing to alcohol in his middle life, and even through that he was all about the work.

It's hard to make money, do good work and get what you want from life. Maybe even particularly hard for someone living that ol'

The Third Life

(r). But it's no Depression-Era struggle, or walking away from a broken neck (yeah: he did), so getting down about it can seem pretty silly in perspective.

Send in the . . .. Oh wait; that's me.

I heard recently (can't recall where) that a fear of clowns was the universal fear of all children. I know some adults who would postulate that children ain't the half of it. Clown fear, or

coulrophobia

, is prevalent. Of that there can be no doubt. Check some articles, my fine, feathered readers: and a-

one

, and a-

two

, and a-

three

. I hardly feel a need to provide references for this phobia, however. It seems to be universally understood that clowns are, under the right, or wrong or, for some, any circumstances, scary.

Friend Davey

backs this up. He doesn't like clowns, either (though apparently the Puck from Neil Gaiman's Sandman he's just hunky-dorry with), and one of his best friends is a clown. It's tearing our nation apart! It's brother against brother! Cats and dogs, living together; mass hysteria!

And that is what I think the fear of clowns comes down to. Someone, please, tell me if I've got it all backward. I'd love further insight into coulrophobia. (And while you're at it, please break down the etymology of that word, too.) To me, who only fears the certain, intentionally scary clown, it comes down to anarchy. People simply don't know what a clown will do next, and on top of that, clowns are the ultimate breakers of the fourth wall, or the audience-performer separation. We can't exist without you, audience. If a clown gets his foot lodged in a trashcan, then stumbles around until accidentally setting himself on fire, and no one's around to hear the screams of agony, did the clown really get his foot lodged in a trashcan and stumble around until accidentally setting himself aflame? The sad answer is: No, my dear audience. No.

I love clown work. I was introduced to it as a performer by a fellow clown,

Grey Valenti

. Friend Grey graduated from the

Dell'Arte school

, is a member in good standing of

Zuppa del Giorno

, and directed our only full-length clown production to date:

Silent Lives

. I think it's safe to say that Grey feels she learned a lot from clowning--the which she does in the general

Lecoq

/red-nose style--and applies those lessons to the rest of her life. I was very cautious to enter that world for quite a while. Rather like my few flirtations with attempting dance, I would find myself feeling lost in the work, a stranger in a strange land, and quickly become discouraged. Add to that all the aspects of clowning that actors are trained

not

to do, such as acknowledging the audience or drastically modifying one's behavior on stage in response to them, and you have yourself a pretty scary little world to enter . . . even without the intimidation of how personal clown work is. The idea is that one's clown is unique to one's self, thriving on our unexpressed emotions, and that the more difficult a time the clown is having, the funnier it is to the audience.

Taken from that perspective, I wonder if persons suffering from coulrophobia might not start to feel some sympathy for the clowns they meet.

It's unfortunate that, in our community at large (I'm speaking here of the U.S. of America, people), a "clown" has the stigma that it does. Google images of "clown" and (as of the date of this writing) you get that whole "birthday-clown" package, replete with elaborate face paint, grotesque colors and ginormous shoes. You also get Google suggesting you try searching for "

scary

clowns

." The allegory here is very nearly self-evident. I don't know a lot about how the birthday clown(TM) became the prototype clown for us. I can assume influences from what I know of clown history, but that's just what they'd be: assumptions. I do go so far as to suggest, however, that the birthday clown is the result of a certain competitive and/or capitalistic philosophy we tend to adopt, knowingly or no. Drive anything to a certain point of extremes, and it will become grotesque.

These things do not a clown make. We've got clowns we love (or hate) unabashedly, without fear, surrounding us in our culture. Certainly

two of the greatest silent-film comedians

were clowns (I'm not sure I'd classify Harold Lloyd as one; I see him as beginning the swing toward more naturalistic comedy), and possibly the birthday clown has borrowed from their pedestrian wardrobe.

Dr. Stephen T. Colbert

is a clown, and I don't mean that in the derogatory sense. I mean that he is an iconic comedian, heavily dependent upon his audience, and who is developed out of the particular personality of a performer. The fact that he is also a scripted telelvision "host," more verbally motivated than driven by pratfall, is simply an adaptation to the time, and has evolved from other, more Western traditions of clowning. I believe Simon Cowell may be a clown, too. If he really behaves the way he does on

American Idol

at all times in his life, well, then he's not, and I pity him.

The funny thing about clowns (ha-ha), is that we are essentially children. I've spoken to a lot of people with theories from all sorts of places about why this fear of clowns. My sister recently insisted that the "traditional" clown face-painting taps into a primal fear of death, that children see a white face and know instinctively that it means a dead person. Could be. Lots of articles suggest that clowns are chaos-makers, and most mythologies contain some such figure, which is often associated with animalistic behavior. A fear of clowns, then, is a survival instinct, a defensive reaction to something outside one's community that has found its way in. (Never mind that many Native Americans figured this clown figure--Raven--for having created the world.) I can dig it. Me, though: I think people are threatened by the anarchy of a person behaving child-like. That is, in ignorance of "the rules."

As I grow older and (ever-so-slowly) more mature, I value what the clown has to teach me more and more. The clown takes nothing for granted. The clown makes mistakes regularly, and makes them with absolute commitment, and sometimes they even work out for him or her, in which case he or she never comes to view it as a mistake. The clown sees purpose in everything, understanding in nothing. The clown is selfish in its needs, yet absolutely dependent on the love of others. The clown, in short, makes me feel a little less an "adult, " and a little more human.

Which, I admit, can be scary.

Soup for a New Year

Sew: Zuppa del Giorno needs to submit a video of our work to festivals in Italy. The trouble? We don't got no good video of our shows. In an effort to share what we do have, I post here for reference the three excerpts I've managed to film and hang on to.

The first is a selection of moments from our first show, Noble Aspirations. This show was completely structured improvisation, and we were still finding our style. These clips feature myself, Todd d'Amour, Zac Campbell, Richard Grunn, David Zarko and Grey Valenti. As I understand it, only one of us was Equity at the time, and he allowed for the show to be taped and shown. Here you have it:

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Let's just hope that one day this finishes loading, because the next is an excerpt from Silent Lives that we performed on demand (and without rehearsal) for one of our potential collaborators in Italy. It was taped on my digital still camera, propped on a theatre seat. So: Not awesome quality, once again. But it was a thrill to have this excerpt on file, all the same. The clip features me, Heather and Todd again. It is a point in the show when the two ingenues want to romance one another for the first time, but are too young to know how, so the fantasy of Rudolph Valentino intervenes for some much-needed lessons in amour. Incidentally, it's my understanding on both of these next videos that there's no Equity conflict because they were filmed out of the country:

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Finally, a very, very raw representation of Death + A Maiden, Heather's and my clown piece. David Zarko gives us our introduction. This piece was directed by Grey Valenti. It's heavy with musical cues and props--none of which we had in Italy when we made a command performance. This was the first time Heather and I did the piece, ever, without the music, and we adapted a trunk of arbitrary items to represent our standard props. In this piece, a toilet brush is a mirror, a sword replaces a scythe, etc. So it may be a bit tough to interpret this. I play Death, who falls in love with the woman he's fated to dispatch of:

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Brass Monkey

Pursuant to

Friend Dave's recommendation

, I caught an $11.75 matinee of

The Golden Compass

yesterday. To be honest, this was also pursuant to not working, having a cold and being pretty certain that I'd do myself worse financial disadvantage if I had two hours more out amongst the Christmas fairs of New York. But I digress (shamelessly [and at great length {mostly as an excuse to ((ab))use proper parenthetical structure}]), and the title of this entry has not merely to do with ripping off

Friend Davey

's 'blog conceit.

The Golden Compass

, in my opinion, has two highly effective devices on which most of the success of the movie rides. The first has to do with the first half of the movie. Everyone's soul, you see, in this imagined world, exists outside of themselves as a sort of animal familiar that never leaves their side. Nicole Kidman's familiar (or daemon) is a monkey, with oddly metallic fur. Upon her introduction to the plot, the metastructure of the story goes a little something like this: Hey, look at how pretty our film is, how fantastical, isn't it all so calming and utopian and OH MY GOD WHERE'D THAT SCREAMING MONKEY COME FROM!? I am not kidding. There was this one time when, I swear to you, the monkey popped up from the bottom of the screen from out of nowhere. I mean, he didn't even have something he could realistically be standing on in the environment, and there he was again, screaming. If I had been one of the animators on this, I would have saved the file, program, whatever, of the monkey, for use in startling my coworkers for years to come. Just imagine sweating through your 2007 TurboTax when, from out of absolutely nowhere, a screaming golden monkey juts his head into your screen. In all fairness, the movie should have at least been

sub

titled

The (Screaming) Golden Monkey

.

Oh yeah. The other highly effective device can be summed up in two words: Bear and Fight. Bear fights. Fo' reals. Keep your eyes peeled. This could be a whole new sub-genre of action film. And if so, I am there, I am wearing the t-shirt, I am learning the terminology (

ah, the classic Rips-Lower-Jaw-from-Body technique...

) and I am enrolled in the Bear Fighting fantasy camp. Stick some giant foam paws on me. I am ready to rumble.

When the fur settles, and the dust as well, this is pretty much a good-time, only-enough-pathos-to-justify-some-violence Christmas movie. Lots of snow. Talking animals. Cute kids. And two of the most gorgeous adult actors on the screen these days, for mom and dad. (In fact: Hey: I know that movie casts often repeat themselves, but weren't these two just in that

Body Snatchers

reremake? This reminds me of the

Batman Begins

/

The Prestige

and

The Matrix

/

Memento

phenomenon. Not to mention the unholy trinity of Willis/Jackson/Travolta. Spread some of the love around, Hollywood.) They even clipped off the ending of the first book in order to make the film conclude a bit happier, which actually upsets me more than sucking the supposed Atheism out of it.

As to that (the Atheism)--I'm sorry, but I just can't stay off this topic (see

12/7/07

). Friend Younce posits in his

Comments

section that if the ultimate plot of this trilogy involves "killing God," it indicates not only a belief in God, but an actual finger, pointing to God, saying (yes, they'd probably have talking fingers in this sort of trilogy), "Hey look: It's God. I found him/her/it. He/she/it exists." I'm afraid I disagree, to a certain extent. The author, as any fantasy author may be accused, is clearly working in allegory. To "kill God" is in his allegory to eradicate the supposedly irrational belief in God from within ourselves. In fact, what will be really interesting as far as these movies go will be to see how they handle that little feat in the third film. The characters' "daemons" represent individualism, or Humanism, after a fashion.

I have a curious history with the books this franchise is sprung from. I have only read the first two, and those quite by necessity. It was toward the end of my first trip to Italy, in 2006, and I came down with a serious bug that laid me up with a high fever for almost a week. With nothing to do but lie in bed and either read, or try to learn Italian from their daytime television, I quickly tore through the novel I had brought:

The Mask of Apollo

. (A birthday gift from

Friend Patrick

, and the first Mary Renault book I ever undertook.)

Friend Heather

loaned me the first two books of

His Dark Materials

and I drank them up in lieu of the excellent white wines of Orvieto. I write about it now, similarly afflicted (though no high fever, thank...whatever providence may be), and acknowledge that my knowledge of the books is partial and drenched with fever-sweat.

I reiterate: Go Atheists. I've got nothing against them, just like I've got nothing against Christians or Muslims. Those for whom I do have something against (that made sense grammatically, I swear), is them what (that bit didn't, though) exercise their beliefs--any beliefs--by way of disparaging others'. Up with that I shall not put. It may seem only fair; the Atheists have had to deal with eons of persecution, I realize, but here's another thing I'd do away with: the symbol for justice being a beam-balance scale. Balance is good, but dichotomy is simply a deceptive paradigm for identifying anything. I'm all for clarity, but I aspire to understand all things beyond a simple yes, or no. All things are a part of a whole, in my humble opinion. Balance, in the theological, philosophical sense, cannot be expressed on a simple beam. I come around, by tender footfalls, to my point.

In my post of December 7th of this year, I mentioned in passing that the notion of "fate" is inescapable to me because it permeates every story we tell on some level. (Pullman, the author of the books in question, by the way, values stories above all else. Reminds me of

Gaiman

in that way.) Especially in theatre, fate, or some analogue of it, sort of makes the motor run. This goes for both tragedy and comedy. Similarly, I'm not sure one can tell a story without God entering into it. If we could, I'm not sure we'd want to. The storyteller is, after a fashion, God of the story. What gives the majority of humans meaning in their lives? God. Who determines meaning in a story? The storyteller. This paradigm (or matrix, if you will) manifests in our novels, movies and plays on conscious and subconscious levels. It's tough for me to point toward it in

His Dark Materials

before having read the third installment but, for those who know the series, might not the presence of "dust" (magical stuff from the universe that connects people to their souls, and their souls to the source of "dust") be a manifestation of a, albeit rather Universalist, concept of divinity?

Perhaps I am simply too influenced by what little classical education I have absorbed. All the Greek plays have a theme that can be summed up as, "Hey, you can mess with the Gods all you want, but after a few hours, they get the last word, machina or no." I agree with the Atheists when they tell us (calmly, without insult) to take responsibility for the here and now, and love humanity for being human. I'm just not sure that it's possible to kill God off entirely, in spite of Nietzsche and Pullman and the rest. Please, contest my claim; I'd love to hear theories, especially as relates to storytelling. Interestingly enough, Friend Dave is also a big proponent of role-playing games for which there is not necessarily a storyteller. In these, instead of a typical structure of a game-master, who tells everyone what's going on, the players themselves contribute to the narrative in different ways. Perhaps therein lies a way of retiring God. Perhaps, instead, it creates a pantheon of Gods.

Part of my holiday travel plans include venturing south to Friends Davey, Dave and Mark, to play this sort of game all together. It's an appointment a long time in the making, and I'm looking forward to it. These friends of mine are some of the best storytellers I know. I'll let you know what stories we create together.

You can bet a screaming monkey will enter into it, somewhere.

A Kung Fu Follow-Up

Hey there. I can't get it out of my head. My last entry sang the praises of kung fu movies, and since then I've been trying to figure out for myself my personal top five list of the flicks. I am by no means an expert--most of my kung fu knowledge lies in the mainstream of the kung fu river. Probably the most off-beat thing I ever rented was

The Crippled Masters

, which is about as exploitative as it sounds (but those guys can kick A.). Also, for reference, by my definition a "kung fu movie" is any film that incorporates technique-heavy hand-to-hand combat as a central plot element. Here we go, from last to first . . .

• The Transporter
• Okay, yes, I know: I'm already in trouble with a lot of people. Jason Statham is not a martial artist and, frankly, he's a bit of a toolbox . . . especially in this film, for which he seems to have WAY over-compensated for his receding hairline in the ol' weight room. Just let me speak my peace, and we'll move on. Corey Yuen choreographed the fights in this film, and he's someone we haven't seen a lot of in the west. He's brilliant, and at the top of his form here. Anyone remember what it was like to decide to watch Die Hard for the first time, thinking, "Oh well, I know it'll be real dumb, but I've me time to kill," only to find yourself blown away, literally and figuratively, by the movie? This is what happened to me with Transporter, only in a geeking-out-over-kung-fu way. I expected dumb action with lots of orange fire balls; I got elaborate, creative fight choregraphy patterned after a particular actor's strengths. La la la, bad-ass driver, la la la, lots of guns, la la la, OH MY GOD HE JUST KICKED A GUY IN THE HEAD BACKWARDS!
• Ong Bak
• Oh my God in heaven. If you are a fan of unbelievable, real physical feats, this is a flick for you. If you dig authenticity in your martial arts, and learning about new ones, this is a flick for you. If you get squeamish over the sound effect of bones breaking, don't . . . uh . . . don't rent this movie. Seriously. You'll yuke. But it rules. Tony Jaa stars in this movie, which principally involves Muay Thai traditional kickboxing (very different from aerobic kickboxing). It also has the best foot-chase sequence I have ever seen.
• Legend of Drunken Master 2 (US title)
• This would be one of those highly mainstream kung fu movies I was talking about. It's remarkable because it's an incredibly pure martial arts movie from the latter part of Jackie Chan's career (wherein most of his movies are sort of adventure comedies). Jackie actually fired the director for his predilection for wire work, so there are only two or three moments of wire-suspended antics, and those for exaggerating responses to kicks. The movie is perfect for Chan. It centers around Chinese Drunken Boxing, which is a very eccentric style perfectly suited to his creative choreography and incredibly acrobatic movement. Part of what's cool is that the final fight is between Chan and his real-life bodyguard. (Also cool because it points up a weakness of drunken styles [that they generally don't include powerful kicks] by way of Chan's bodyguard being a fierce foot boxer [found paper bag, breathing into it...geeking out...subsiding...].)
• The Chinese Connection (US title)
• There's so much to say about this movie, it's difficult to know where to begin. It doesn't translate to our times so well, but most of Lee's movies come across as pretty dated these days. Three words should sell it: Nunchaku-Katana fight. It is definitely his most hard-core martial arts flick, and it has a downer ending. Lee was trying to expand his range as an actor (or at least his cast-ability), and he made a movie that was an almost overt expression of his disgust over the racial discrimination he experienced trying to work in America. Now the style is pretty tough to pin down. Lee sort of patented his martial-arts philosophy under the name Jeet Kun Do around 1965, under which philosophy he spurned adherence to traditional forms as limiting to a fighter. He was trained from youth in Wing Chun, however, and The Chinese Connection (Fist of Fury in China) concerns a character who returns to avenge the death of his kung fu teacher, who was presumably a traditional practitioner. Someone who knows more about gung fu needs to throw me a freaking bone here.
• Fist of Legend
• Now, some will call a foul on me right here, right now.Fist of Legend, you see, is a remake of Fist of Fury. Jet Li stars, Yuen Wo Ping (the first Matrix) choreographs. Un. Be. Lievable. There's plenty of wire work in this one, but it's beautifully incorporated into actual climactic moments in a fight (I know: what a concept [okay, there is one embarrassing "one-arm pull-ups" bit]). The glory of this film is just how coordinated the direction, choreography and Li's movement are. Li was the youth wu-shu champion in China for, like, sixty-two years in a row, or something like that. And wu shu is pretty, if nothing else. They ditch the downer ending, as you might expect, but they have a fight between blind-folded fighters. Literally, blind fighting.

Before everyone starts freaking out and commenting (though I suspect this may end up another comment-less entry) on my lack of Shaw brothers, or my adherence to big-budget glam in this list, kindly note: These are my top five. They don't have to be yours. If you think that's lame, I have but one response.

. . . Boot to the head . . .