Attention Spanning

There's a commonly held opinion that our attention spans are shrinking, and many people attribute that to our rapidly evolving communication and entertainment media. I don't disagree as to the causes for the phenomenon, but I do question that lack of specificity in this summary view of our ability to, and interest, in maintaining attention. I mean, if you take a little time to really examine—

Ooo - lookit - puppies!

What was I saying? Ah, yes: abbreviated attention spans. Was there ever a time in our history when culture didn't seem to be accelerating? You could point to the so-called "dark ages," but what you'd be pointing at would actually be a gap of written record, not some great backward lurch of civilization. No, I believe this sense of cultural acceleration lies more in our psyches and personal perspectives than it does in some larger, more-objective sense of time itself. We are an impatient bunch of creatures. It's part of what motivated us to develop tools and agriculture, and it applies to the human psyche whether you're talking about Twitter or gunpowder. We always want something "better." Ambition and impatience are kissing cousins, at least in my mental genealogy.

I think what we're really talking about when we worry over attention spans is worry over being a part of it all, of being included and/or contributing. I'm talking about more than trending here; perhaps Zeitgeist is a better word, but that still implies a cutting edge, which is more limited than my idea. My idea has less to do with something concrete and static, or even directional, and more to do with movement. Instead of staying ahead in a race, adapting to rhythms and adding something to a dance, maybe. Sometimes we're on the fringe, and sometimes we're setting the beat, but always we want to be in there and a part of it.

Naturally, my idea is going to be an inclusive one. (You can take yourself out of the Unitarian Universalist Sunday sessions, but you can't take the UUSs out of you . . . rself?) But in this case, I tend to be in total agreement with myself, and not just because it's to the advantage of my argument. (I promise. [Myself.]) It may sound like a philosophical argument, and it is, but it's also a practical one. Everything changes, and everything has the potential to change very rapidly, so it's good both to have the willingness to adapt and the centeredness to choose. For me, its akin to the error of multitasking -- namely, that it can't be done effectively. What can be done effectively is to do one thing at a time, and be able to switch tasks rapidly while keeping priorities straight. That can be effective, but true multitasking is a fault to any objective. Unless of course your objective is to make a mess of something.

If our attention spans have, on the whole, gotten shorter, its a result of successful adaptation to our environment, and anyway I don't see it as an irreversible condition. Music can be an amazing salve to a wind-burned attention span. Theatre, too, if one is willing to give it a chance. There's a general idea that entertainment, as such, is also a primary culprit in the criminalizing brevity of our attentions, but there I disagree as well. In fact, entertainment is pretty self-nullifying if it doesn't take us in well enough to influence our sense of time in some way, be it for the better or worse. The word itself, to "entertain," comes from an idea of holding something together. Maybe that refers to people's attentions, and maybe it means keeping the dance alive.

Home Remedy

HWAET:

(Though perhaps it won't be such a long one, feels like it wants to be longish at the start.)

First off, thanks to all who have contributed to my last post (see

3/4/09

). I meant the questions, and I hope others (even ones I don't know all that personally) will keep posting in the comments. Stories rule, and everyone's a storyteller to one degree or another. Tell me a story.

Memories often make for interesting stories. Sometimes I think stories are motivated in part by a desire for a common experience, for each person to hold his or her life up against others' and ask, "So, does this make sense? Am I alone in this, or is this normal?" I visited my hometown this weekend to compare some stories with old friends and new family. It was a very short visit, arriving late Friday night and returning to the city Sunday afternoon, and I didn't do all that much talking or telling.

Wife Megan

's family dynamic is still new to me, particularly when extended family are about, and the reason we were home was to celebrate my nephew-in-law's second birthday, so they were. The other major social event was visiting Friends Mark & Lori's house, where along with

Friend Davey

were assembled various other people I knew or didn't know. So I listened a lot, with which I'm comfortable.

I also did a lot of thinking. These visits to Northern Virginia are usually a bit difficult for me. They're a little natural melancholy, being where I lived for my entire childhood and where I and my family no longer exist. What is more difficult, however, is how circumstantially vulnerable I feel there. I have no space of my own, though of course the Heflins keep their house completely open to me. I have no car, which is how one gets anything done there. (I presently have no laptop, which could mitigate some of that frustration.) My friends always make time for me and Megan's family always seeks to provide, yet there is also always a personal, mounting sense of angst whilst I'm there. It's reminiscent of being a teenager, which is the quick-and-dirty explanation I've leaned on for a while now. I was a teenager when last I lived there, so I have a tendency to revert, so I try to resist it whenever I visit.

This time, however, I realized that the sense of angst was much more immediate than some throw-back to my youth -- and it always had been. I recognized what I needed. This was practically a follow-up to another realization I had the last time I visited, in that both occurred under unusual circumstances: I was watching a movie. (Apparently, these movies combined stories with mediums of expression that agreed with me.) Movies generally get a bad rap for accomplishing anything other than entertainment, and it's a pity, because for someone who's open to it a film can open our eyes in some of the same ways (and some unique ones) that theatre or visual art does. Along with my vows to see more live music and theatre, I'm always telling myself I should take advantage of all the indie film here in New York, too.

Over my Christmas holiday, while waiting to be picked up from the Heflins' by my dad and driven up to my parents' place in Maryland, I was watching

Casino Royale

(2006)

. It seemed like a good, entertaining film to be watching. I'd seen it a couple of times before, but many things about it still held a lot of interest for me -- amazingly nuanced performances by Daniel Craig and Eva Green, amazing fight choreography, and rich cinematography. It's a James Bond film; what insight could I possibly expect? Through a series of circumstances best left to memory, while watching this movie it ended up that I got stranded in Burke, in an empty house. It was upsetting, not just frustrating, as my usual angst was. As I found a ride to the DC Metro and traveled up to Maryland on my own, I listened to the theme from the movie. I've always liked it, but it was particularly gratifying to the emotions I was going through. I realized in that moment that what I wanted, what I was so frustrated by every time I visited, was independence. Not just incidental independence, but in my life in general. Here I have this relatively footloose lifestyle, yet it limits me in some ways.

So I've been pursuing that in one way or another since then, and on this particular visit to NoVa, kept in mind the source of my angst. It helped, but I was frustrated (again) to find that it wasn't sufficient. I was missing something. I chalked the feeling up to frustration over having insight with no means to change the situation, and to some extent it was. Then, Sunday morning (whilst exercising some independence by abstaining from a visit elsewhere), I sat down in front of the Heflins' "Fios" (ooooooooooo...) and looked for a movie to order up. I saw that

Redbelt

, a Mamet-written and -directed movie I had some interest in was available, and fired it up. There's a lot to appeal to me here, some of it rather similar to what's appealing about

Casino Royale

, and I was probably similarly relaxed about watching it, though certainly my intellect was more engaged with prepping for typical Mamet-ian intricacies. I only got through half the film before having to move on to something else, but in that half was a moment in Chiwetel Ejiofor's performance (and, it must be acknowledged, David Mamet's script) that struck a deep emotional response in me. His character is talking for the first time with a woman who rather violently disrupted his school and situation -- she's struggling to express something to him -- and he says, "Is there some way that I can help you?" There's no attitude to it. He says it very simply; an offer. It's like it's what he's there to do.

It stuck with me. The scene cuts to he and the woman in his dojo, where he teaches her a small lesson in self-defense, then offers her a sign-up form in case she wants to learn any more. The moment I just kept returning to, though, was that single line of dialogue. I spent most of the rest of that day in one way or another trying to understand what I felt about it. On the one hand, it summed up pretty nicely for me what it is about good teachers that I like and aspire to. Good teachers are there to help the students in whatever way the students may need. On the other hand, I saw in this moment something I have been wanting very badly for some time now, without realizing it. Recognizing that, alongside this newly inspired need to be independent, gave me a surprising sense of purpose. The trick now will be to follow through on it.

I need a teacher. So much of my life has been spent looking for one, in one way or another, consciously and subconsciously. Most of my interests to date have been centered around this dynamic, whether I cast myself as the teacher or the student. I want to teach, I want to lead, but I also want to keep learning and keep improving and not just in acting, or circus, or some other skill, but in life. So -- and I'm addressing you directly here, Universe -- I'm looking for my next teacher.

Fair Winds

Last night I attended what was a first for me: A staged reading of a musical. Tom Diggs, of NYU's First Look fame from some time ago, wrote the book and lyrics, and invited me out for it by replying to

my

email about

Blueprints

. This could be the most direct evidence of the importance of simply being present in the New York theatre community as it relates to contacts and casting: People call on the people they've heard from recently. More evidence of this was to be found in my own efforts to assemble a cast for my upcoming reading -- I had a couple of people respond as unavailable, and when I searched my files for replacements, I realized I had neglected a whole throng of good possible actors for the roles. Why? Because I hadn't spoken to them in a while. But I digress.

Once Upon a Wind

is a musical that concerns itself with the story of two children coming of age in WWI England. Jay d'Amico wrote the music, and Jeremy Dobrish directs, which was an unusual coincidence -- Friend Todd is now appearing in

Spain

, a play he directed for the MCC in 2007. I was impressed as all hell with the cast. I find readings to be difficult to act, given the restraints of physical movement and all the conventions involved (such as music stands). These people gave a very effective reading

with full song

. A small feat for musical-theatre types perhaps, but I was impressed as hell with them: Molly Ephraim, Alex Brightman, Laura Fois, Kavin Pariseau, Marcus Stevens and Ken Triwush. Oran Eldor gets a lot of credit for that, I'm sure, as the musical director and (I assume) pianist. The reading was a part of the

TRU Voices series

at The Players Theatre, exactly the same venue at which

I performed in

American Whup-Ass

last spring

. It's a showcase for plays seeking production, and specifically focuses on getting feedback and advice from accomplished producers.

The play also concerns itself with an interesting phenomenon in England at the time --

the Cottingley fairies

. It takes some inspiration from the story, I should say, and it's a story I have some familiarity with. When I was very young, I went through a period of some obsession with "paranormal" occurrences and sightings. I wasn't so much interested in ghosts, rather with mythological or prehistoric beasts that might, in fact, exist. So I had read a little something about Elsie and Frances and their faux photographs, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the reading I was watching would be using that kind of source material. As you might imagine a musical doing,

Once Upon a Wind

explores the world of believers versus pragmatists, but it does it with a surprising balance. It never goes Disney on you (one could just about wait for the Tinkerbell meta-joke), yet keeps a sense of humor in the face of serious subjects like the loss of a loved one and our dueling needs to grow up, and to remain innocent. I hope Tom continues with it, and that it develops into a full production.

Personally, I don't feel that the will to believe is necessarily childish, or delusional. I think it's creative, and creativity is a strength, not a weakness. During the turn of the century, and the world wars, a lot of people turned to spiritualism and its cousins in search of something. We tend to view such searching as naive and, in a sense, this is as true as can be. It begins with accepting the possibility that we don't know something. And that's the beginning of any good discovery.

The Rest is Finally Silence

Duun...duun...duuun...

DU-NUH!

(dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, duh...)

That's the Also Sprach Zarathustra, made popular of course by the Kubrick film, 2001. I could have gone on with my rendition, but I figured it was so obvious that your mind would naturally fill in the crescendo progression. I know mine is; over, and over, and over.

Blueprints is done! Whoopsie Daisy is done! Let there be much rejoicing! Also: I'm sad to have it be over so quickly! Aww. Some days you just can't win for losing. Are we relieved that we pulled it off? Certainly. It also felt surprisingly good, this show. We found a synchronicity, a unity, to our varied performances that we didn't necessarily deserve, given how little time we actually worked in the same room together. It felt good. It felt right. Patrick, Melissa and I discussed how natural it was to work together (especially in the West End Theatre, site of so many of our other collaborations) and personally, I feel the unity we found had as much to do with our common creative origins back in 2001 as with anything else. Even Friend Kate was on hand for Friday night's performance, so we had a full Yurtian accord for the first time in years.

We had a problem with audience, due largely to the last-minute notice we were able to give, but miraculously I had very important people to me in the audience both nights. Friends Laura & Daryl attended Friday night, which was a little like introducing a new girlfriend to her possible in-laws. I've done lots of work with these two, particularly Daryl, but it's all been relatively straight (read: not circus-y nor expressionistic), scripted theatre. Introducing them to my silent-film clown, Lloyd, and some of the work (in-progress) I create for myself was slightly harrowing. Then again, they received it well enough, and perhaps my eccentricities are not quite as latent in daily life as I'd like to perceive them to be. Sunday, Michael and Joanna from Bond Street Theatre were in attendance, which was a complete surprise. It's nice to think that they followed up on last week's collaboration in that way, especially given how busy they both are. Afterwards we talked in some detail about my work, which was also nice, having two experienced clowners and physical-theatre types from whom to receive critique.

And what was there to critique? Plenty; but as an acknowledged work-in-progress, I thought my piece went off rather well. Most of all I was struck by how delicate a thing I'm trying to build via all this throwing myself about (oh man--pun above totally unintentional, I swear to you). Eliciting laughter through a character's confusion about, suffering from, and ultimate adaptation to a new environment (or a new perception of his environment) requires a careful journey, no matter how many pratfalls happen along the way. It requires an extremely intimate responsiveness to the audience, and I rather shut myself off from that possibility by giving myself restrictive music cues. The timing, in other words, was more dictated by the music than by the moment. If I could have, I would have changed the piece to take more time between our opening and closing performances, but I backed myself into a corner there with what I had orchestrated. That's a definite lesson for next time (right up there with making sure I have more than a week in which to prepare). Some of my other lessons included techniques and bits that definitely worked, however, and I can hardly wait to try them again.

What I ended up building was essentially an exploration of a couple of things:

• The themes and tropes of silent film clowning I want to utilize in Red Signal, including transformation; and


• The use of the surreal in relationship to comedy and our recent (current) history.

Lloyd starts out as an uptight, shut-off New Yorker, going about his daily business. The beautiful and surreal come at him in a couple of ways, through some "inanimate" objects (a flower and a hat) and a woman, all of which quickly break down his ability to adhere to his routines and function in the world. As a result, he has to start over with everything, soup-to-nuts. Also as a result of this, he's suddenly aware of the audience's presence, which terrifies him. Resisting this, he tries to flee, but finds himself trapped in the theatre. Recognizing this, he tries to at least shed the trappings of this new perception, and goes into violent attempts to be rid of the "sticky" hat that suddenly appeared on him. All fails, in spite of a (hopefully) overwhelming array of physical stratagems, until he sticks his head off-stage and tries to pry the hat off that way.

And this where it starts to get surreal (yes, the prior seems completely normal to me). When his head pops back out, it has a different hat on. Instead of a black fedora, it is a grey top hat, in turn wearing welding goggles on itself. Lloyd reaches up to investigate, then heads toward the off-stage to see about where the new hat came from. He doesn't get far, quickly retreating from a small, bright light that skitters across the floor toward him from out the wing. He retreats from it, to escape through the other wing, when a second comes shooting out. He crouches upstage, away from both, then remembers the goggles on his hat and lowers them over his eyes. Thus protected, he approaches one of the lights crouched, like a cat. He bats it around a few times, then pounces on it and puts it in his mouth. Then he pounces on the other and does the same, standing to reveal two glowing cheeks. He quickly starts to retch, however, and when the lights pop out, he palms them so they face the audience side-by-side and become eyes, his fingers the eyelids/lashes. They look around the audience, blink drowsily, wink at someone, etc.

Suddenly, one of the "eyes" goes berserk, flying about erratically. The other soon follows suit. They fly into proximity to one another and flip about there for a bit, then part to explore away from one another; now they are like mating fireflies. One suddenly hovers, focused on something in the darkness upstage. His/her mate eventually notices his/her absence, and flies to join him/her. They zoom upstage and illuminate the woman, and look her up and down. Then Lloyd places the lights as lenses in his goggles. The woman smiles at him, takes his hand, and together they leave the stage, his "eyes" lighting their way.

That's the short play what I made. I don't know how much of the reasoning (the abundant reasoning) behind it was clear to the audience, but given the exploration of the surreal I was aiming for I'm content to have people make of it what they will. I learned a lot about the exploration of transformation involved in my script for Red Signal, mainly that people get and appreciate it best when they have a little distance from it. This was made awfully evident for me in the moment of recognition of the audience. It served as a very clear indicator that his world had changed, but only worked for me when it was very deliberately comic. When I did it with very precise double-take timing, it elicited a laugh, and the audience felt enough sense of perspective to appreciate Lloyd's plight without feeling responsible for it. So, I believe, they felt safer to empathize and identify with him. If I did it at all naturalistically, it created, rather than released, tension for my audience. They identified with his fear too immediately, perhaps, and felt a need to rationalize his (their) existence rather than go along with the humor. The film, if I can ever get it made, needs to steer a careful course between observation and empathy.

As for the surreal . . . well, what can you say about it, really? It was fun to do, I can say that. Certainly people enjoy having their expectations boggled a bit. My question about it was whether or not something made today in the spirit of the old silent-film comedies ought to step up the surreal aspects a bit. I mean, the silent comedians were often surreal in their creations; Buster Keaton particularly, and he was practically revered by the Surrealists who plied their philosophies after him. Yet all that surrealism came from fairly rational sources, used in supposedly irrational ways. Do we as audience experience the same lifting-out of the mundane as the audiences of Chaplin's and Lloyd's (Harold) films? With all the strange twists and turns art and culture have taken in the past century, might a contemporary silent film benefit from reinterpreting its moments of "surreality" into more abrupt or inexplicable forms? In his time, Keaton's use of a bass as a boat and a violin as a paddle were absolutely surreal, but now I wonder that it might only be perceived as "clever." When we can hardly tell what's CGI anymore, our surrealists must take a somewhat harder tack. My hypothesis for this little experiment was that a contemporary audience must be confronted with something a little more abrupt, a little less sourced, if they're to experience any real sense of surrealism.

I think it worked. I think, actually, it really worked. In a sense, all I really did was to subvert the order of transformation for the objects a bit, so that their immediate given purpose may not have been as obvious. (Frankly, I don't really understand the intended purpose of those weird little light things.) The hat and goggles contradict one another's associations -- assuming you're not a big steampunk proponent. The lights immediately behave differently than one might expect -- an idea that came to be, by the way, from reading Sophie's World. All the action was a sort of fluctuation (or flirtation) around the intended use of the objects until finally the lights become Lloyd's actual eyes. (Incidentally: They definitely weren't made for that; I owe myself a little more work to make those little sums-of-riches stick in there.) The effect, I think, was to initially baffle, but coupling it with a laugh (the surprising change of hat off-stage) made it non-threatening. Lloyd was threatened, then playful, then interactive, which allowed the audience along for the ride a bit. It's hard to say just how good the result was, but I think I'm at least on my way to something really positive, unique and satisfying.

That's what it's all about, really. I'm excited to keep the momentum going, both on my own work and on collaborating with Patrick and Melissa (and maybe even Melissa's dancers, Zoe and Madeline -- they're Tony-the-Tiger grrreat). The holidays can be a real sluggish time for me in terms of my creative work. There's just so much else to do. But somewhere, in the back of my head, I'll be revisiting this harrowing and lovely experience. If you see me with a distant look on my face, I'm probably imagining how I might do a handstand whilst blinded by my own brightly shining eyes . . .

"Words . . . Words. Words."

"Hasn't it ever happened to you that all of a sudden and for no reason at all you haven't the faintest idea how to spell the word 'which'? Or 'house'? Because when you write it down you just can't remember ever having seen those letters in that order before?"

Don't fret. I'm not about to go on another

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

quote frenzy

. I've just got words on the brain, and when I wrote the title to this post (I almost always start with a title, oddly enough, and rarely change it after writing the post -- even the automatic cursor placement of Blogger assumes you want to write the entry first) I had the experience of looking at the word "word" and thinking,

That can't possibly be how "word" is spelled

. This post title comes from an audition I had for Hamlet, years and years ago (read: 1999). Polonius asks Hamlet what he reads, and Hamlet famously replies in a three: words words words. A lot has been made of his response. A lot has been made of every damn thing Hamlet says. I, being a bit of the clown Hamlet warns the players to avoid, made a gag out of it, pointing to one page (words), to the facing page (words) and then turning up to Polonius to deliver my assessment: Words. I probably unconsciously lifted this from Gibson's delivery, but ol' Mad Max milks it WAY too much and kills the rhythm. So sayeth

this

guy. [Lifteths hands up, pointseth thumbs inward.]

I'll be having an increasing emphasis on Shakespearean topics as time progresses toward

The Very Nearly Perfect Comedy of Romeo & Juliet

. Next week, in fact, I'm teaching a Shakespeare class with Friend Heather of

Zuppa del Giorno

fame out in the autumnal splendor of the Poconos. (It really is a

tough

job sometimes...) It'll be a new class for us to lead, and we're planning on modeling it after what Zuppa does naturally, taking the week to teach the students how to approach Shakespeare's text using character archetypes and a specific, creative physicalization. We figure they get plenty of emphasis on the text as it is in regular class, and our work will give them new tools to apply. Still and all, words are rarely as important as they are in interpreting teh Bard. (That felt wicked, using LOLspeak with Shakespeare. WthTFth, Jeffeth?) I love Shakespeare. You might not know it, to look at my resume, but I do. In preparing to teach, I went out to ye olde storage space and unearthed my Bardic textbooks. In my

Linklater

book I found folded a journal of mine from college and, reading it, I was reminded of exactly how much I love that language, those words.

As I performed in

a reading

last night, I got to thinking about words, and how expressive they can be in so many more ways than literal meaning. My character in the reading was given a lot of open-ended ellipses, which can be difficult to interpret with specificity, particularly with only a few hours' rehearsal. The playwright suggested that I play the character with more emphasis on his neuroses than I had in rehearsal, so as I performed I explored the ellipses as spaces dictated by interrupting thoughts and emotions, rather than cognitive stops. It worked rather well for me, and got me listening to the "music" to be found in the follow-through of lines. There's this general rule for Shakespeare, that its effective and, in most cases, desirable, to carry one's energy directly through an entire line; indeed, right on through a page's worth of "line." Why does this work so well with verse? Think of it as a song. A mediocre song with a good hook that lasts three minutes or so works fine. But a six-minute tune that engages you the entire time, leading your emotions to all different places, there's nothing quite like that.

Another notable Shakespearean repetition is in King Lear: "

Howl howl howl howl!

" It's a cry of anguish from Lear, turned nearly animal from his misadventures and, ultimately, his daughter's death. It is in its way an aria. The only thing a performer has to guide him (or her, why not) is a nod to the cadence suggested by the rest of the verse and their emotional state at the time. "Howl" isn't even a word, per se, but an onomatopoeia. Language is a beautiful medium in which to work, and the real grace notes are in nothing so much as the spoken delivery. I'm looking forward to returning to a study of that.