Follow Through

Yesterday (thanks to an informal assignment set by

Friend Nat

[you're my boy, Blue]) I completed the first draft of a short play, the first bit of fiction writing I have seen through to the state of having a distinct and spelled-out beginning, middle and end since . . . well, I can't recall. It

is

a first draft, and was largely worked through during lunch breaks and lulls at il day jobo, so it's not a magnificent accomplishment. Still and all, there was a very pleasant sense of synergy I experienced in the writing of it and, as you can see, the mere fact of finishing something has me feeling cuddly with myself. So it got me to thinking about the "Notions" series (& a

1

, & a

2

, & a

3

) of 'blog entries I shared with my tremendous, and tremendously grateful, reading populace all the way back in October/November of 2007. (Verily, Odin's Aviary has become an institution.) (Please refrain from unsavory "institution" insinuations. That's rude.) The idea behind those was to experiment with how the accountability that announcing creative intentions invites would affect their outcomes. Simply put, would sharing my ideas for projects sap my enthusiasm for them (as it seemed to when I was younger) or would it hold me to my ideas and keep them coming back to my priorities list? Let's take a look, shall we?

• Freaky Chicks & Aspirant. These are my two most interesting ideas (to me, at any rate) for comic-book adventures, the first being one I wrote a draft of way back 'round 2000, the second being one I had the idea for RIGHT BEFORE HEROES CAME OUT, I SWEAR TO GOD. Both toy with the notions (heh-heh) of superhero(TM)-like people cropping up in mundane settings, and rather unwilling partnerships. These ideas, I confess, I've done absolutely nothing with in the intervening months. Can I explain myself in this? Not really interested in doing that, I'm afraid. Also: No. I can't. I really like these ideas, still. I just haven't done the work necessary to resurrect them.

• The Project Project. This is a play I badly wanted to write when first I thought of it, and is most likely of all of my announced notions to go the way of the Dodo. Frankly, the title is the thing I dig the most about anything I've come up with for it. I started writing it, and got about five pages in before feeling like I had really gotten off on the wrong foot. I found the characters unsympathetic and the structure nonexistent -- two very bad things, made worse by the fact that I was in complete control of both of them. Clever titles are like booby-traps for frustrated writers, man. And this one's a bear trap, because I can't get over how great it could be, if only I could figure how to make it have a heart.

• Mimosa Pudica. A play I directed in college; the idea being that I mount a showcase production of it here with me directing. I haven't re-read the play, I haven't researched a thing along these lines, nor been mentally casting. I've barely thought about it. BUT. Over the past few months a burgeoning desire to direct has been building, and expressing itself through this here 'blog. I think the important thing about this particular notion was that it got me thinking that way with a fairly safe specificity, and now my thinking has expanded to more daring possibilities (such as directing my own Zuppa-style show) which, frankly, may be more apt. Mimosa Pudica may still get done though. It would probably be a good idea to have an intermediate step between my intention and my ambition.

• Building various stilt-related paraphernalia. Mmm, yeah. Well, this is a tough one when you don't have ready access to a workshop. Also tough when your stilts have been in storage for the past three months. And finally, Corporate Carnival queered me on stilts for a little bit. May be coming out of that soon; still would be lacking a power saw or titanium lathe. (Though I do have some nifty welding goggles.)

• Picking back up the trombone. Uh-huh. Next!

• Punch & Judy. Heather and I have made very little headway on this project; just a bit of research (including a wicked-rad find by Samantha Philips) and discussion. However, it definitely informed our creation of Love is Crazy, but Good for our performances in Italy in June, and the experience of working on that ended up being a crucial step toward things like learning how to work together without outside assistance and learning what works, what doesn't. It's difficult to develop something whilst in separate cities, and with so much other Zuppa-related work to do, but I'm confident Heather and I will get something of this up off the ground.

• Superhero(r) monodrama. I don't know how I feel about this notion, these days. The ubiquitous monodrama of the self-generating "creactor" is still something I'd like to have under my belt, but I feel more and more that I need collaborators to get my best work done. It's how I've worked all my life, really, and I'm not sure I'd even want to see a monodrama that had existed in solo for any significant stage of its development. Plus, when I had the idea, the Hollywood superhero(c) phenomenon hadn't quite hit the fever pitch it's at now. I would probably be working against a curve with that concept. Back to the notional drawing board, as far as I'm concerned.

• Using Friend Patrick's Sukeu mask in performance. See above? I don't know. In the spirit of Patrick himself, I'm loathe to apply the mask to something artificially. I want it to inform me of what it belongs with. This may entail getting in a room (with a mirror) with it and playing, without context. Which I should do anyway. It goes on the to-do list under "get new acting job." Patrick?

• My werewolf novel. You know, I increasingly feel that this story I've been writing and ruminating over has been co-opted by its own inciting notion. That is to say, maybe I don't want to write a story about werewolves (but literature needs another werewolf novel!) after all, and I shouldn't try so hard to make it be about that. What interested me and got me started on it was this different idea of what a werewolf might be. What has been most engaging about writing it (and I haven't done any writing on it in a long while) has been one of the non-central characters and writing about people who feel lost. So: Maybe I'm writing two different things without knowing it?

• The Very Nearly Perfect Comedy of Romeo & Juliet. It has a title! And a webpage! AND a 'blog! This is certainly the prospective project that has been most worked upon out of my lists, which is in keeping with my suggestion that I need collaborators to get anything done. In fact, the entire nature of the project is one of collaboration, being as it is a vehicle for collaborating with Italian artists, and I can hardly take credit for it as "my" notion anymore; if, in fact, I ever could. The very concept has leapt ahead, and in the best ways, in my opinion. I read my initial idea for the play and cringe a bit at the thought of working on something like that right now. Perhaps it's valuable, in the interests of getting projects accomplished, to think of them as inevitable, and also as something that will ultimately bear very little resemblance to the original notion.

• Red Signal. The clown, quasi-silent film screenplay. This, above all, is my most frustrating venture. Not because I haven't made progress on it; I have. That's the source of said frustration, because (much like a subway train faced with a...wait for it...) the writing hit a brick wall somewhere around March/April. There are a number of possible causes for this -- getting a new day job, busting my laptop, health concerns, getting on and into other projects -- but what it boils down to is that I feel rather out of ideas, and with three acts of a five-act outline all figured out (it's act the third that I have been stalled on; five's ready to roll). Three is certainly the magic number, and I'm confident that the cutting stage of this process will be immense, but I'm just not there yet. Something vital is missing. Apart from occasionally pondering (futility) the casting of the female role, I haven't returned to it in earnest since running out of track. Which. Is. Frustrating.

So all in all: I don't feel too bad about how I've done. I realize this list may read like it's largely a schedule of a lack of completion, but in writing it I've been reminded that every process is just that, and one can't rush it or skip steps. I could certainly have done better (especially when it comes to stilts, trombones and comicbooks) but I see in most of these notions a progression, at least in thinking. I'd like to be more productive ultimately, but that's why I checked in on these in the first place: to see how I can do that. In the spirit of this, this entry represents no great goal post, but another step in the process at large. So. Do I think sharing my ideas helped them move along?

Didn't hurt . . .

Lose Your Self

It's been a time of some frustration for me, lately. Frustration is not a particularly novel emotion on my part, I must confess. I'm something of a tense individual. (Please withhold any cries of "Understatement!" That's impolite.) My tendency is to hold energy in and rigorously control or funnel it when I let it out, which is part of why I find certain acting environments so appealing. Some because they are well served by this familiar approach, and others because they encourage me to abandon it completely, which is liberating. My natural impulse, however, is to control. Always has been, really. Any departures from that are still, no matter how incorporated they've become into my lifestyle, somewhat experimental. Some part of my mind is always thinking,

Okay boss; this is great and all, and I'm learning a lot, but when do we return to terra firma here?

Now, it's not that my approach hasn't rewarded me. It has. Greatly, at times. However, in the long run, it's an obsessive approach, and therefore at best limiting -- at worst,

damaging

.

Saturday I had my second exploit into the misty realm of acupuncture. My first was several years ago, when I volunteered as a patient of cranial acupuncture for a demonstration to be given to a class of acupuncturistas. That was pretty intense. It was supposed to treat my ETs --

mysterious medical condition

, not league of other-worldly gardeners -- and it probably did, but it's always difficult to say. Qi/Chi? Meridians? Or simply reflexive muscle stimulation and a little calm attention? Whatever the function,

Fiancee Megan

has been reaping great rewards from acupuncture lately, and with

a personal recommendation

to her acupuncturalama, I went under the pin in the hopes of treating

my recent struggles with ma' balls

. Fine: my "pelvic floor dysfunction." But I still prefer to view it as an epic battle betwixt me, and ma' balls. Which, you know . . . might be indicative of said control issues. I am a land divided!

Recently I have had cause to observe a very interesting sequence of development in a short play I've been working on as an actor. I feel as though I've learned a lot about myself through it, which is not something I was expecting when it began. My frustration in this process can best be summed up as a difference of opinion. At first, I thought my difference of opinion was simply between me and the director, which happens all the time and is one thing. But due to various circumstances, I discovered my opinion differed from most of the other actors, and the playwright as well. I perceived the script, as it originally started, as a more naturalistic, character-driven story. Through various stages of working and some unusual factors, the concept was taken more toward farce, then amped up to screw-ball, and finally the script was pretty majorly revised to accommodate those changes in style and plant the story firmly in that genre. To put it plain, I began with one script that I liked, and it's ending with one almost entirely other. This is not the first time this has happened to me, but for one reason or another, it bothered me more this time. Whether or not it began with my own misconception of the piece, it has taken a lot of effort on my part to fulfill others' expectations.

I had been anticipating acupuncture to be a bit like a massage, in the weeks leading up to my appointment. You know, something that might at times be painful, yet ultimately relaxing. I may be a bit of a controlling obsessive (a

tiny

bit), but I've come to appreciate instances in which I'm expected to relax and allow things to happen to me. If I can avoid any hostile emotions, I do pretty well with that. It's a relief. Well, it turns out that acupuncture can be a bit of work. (I might've known.) Since I am treating what is essentially a self-inflicted injury, it makes poetic sense, at least, that I might have to put a little effort into treating it. The first acupuncture appointment is two hours long, so they can get the run-down on your condition, Chinese-medicine style. They could see the problem I was dealing with in my body, as I stood before them in my underwear. According to my acupuncturians, I'm all bent out of shape (no, really) in numerous subtle places. Also: I'm a liver person. This apparently means I tend to be frustrated, to rise up against challenges with a somewhat fervent and stubborn passion. They may eat ox tail, but those Chinese know something about something.

I didn't know what to expect of our premiere of an essentially new play, midway through our run. My character's opening monologue was changed pretty drastically, with some very out-of-left-field stuff, and I couldn't get effectively off-book for it in time. I could get

off-book

, but not

effectively

. So, with the playwright's permission, I took it in hand as a sort of

Zuppa-del-Giorno

adjunct to my performance, and largely winged it (wung it?). After all, the play had been changed significantly, and in the direction of absurdity, so maybe it would be best to go with that current and risk more, rather than less. I can improvise a monologue all day, but no one in my cast knew that, seeing as they had from me the careful development process over the previous month that I apply to a more naturalistic role. They seemed to largely take my angst over the changes to be anxiety over performing them, and I didn't try to dissuade this opinion, because my opinions of the play itself had very little to do with the job I had to do. I didn't want to get into a debate over the relative value of the play or the changes; I just wanted to get on with it. And what was the worst that would happen if I broke out my improvisatory style in performance? It tanks, and the playwright has something to consider the next time he has the impulse to revise midway through a run. So I set foot on stage that night, and wanged. Wung. What you will.

I could at first barely feel the needles the day after the performance, they were applied with such a gentle touch, and in gradual stages of difficulty. I had two practitioners working with me, and they talked to me throughout, because I admitted my curiosity and, eventually, they needed to give me instructions. The needles were being applied to my front, and the final stages were in my calves and lower abdomen. That's when they started to sear a bit through, er, my meridians, as they slid in to their work. And one of the practitioners started to see a habit of mine, of my breathing, that she thought was contributing to my pelvic difficulties. Namely, that I breathe into my stomach, expanding it, and drive the air out when I'm exerting effort, constricting my abdomen to push. It's called diaphragmatic breathing; it's something every stage actor is trained in. And, as she was raising her voice to get me to

reverse

this physical tendency and

relax

(most self-nullifying command in the English language), I realized that she was right. I constantly contract my abdomen, even unrelated to my breathing. I've been doing it since high school. Through an extreme effort, I managed to reverse, to stretch my abdomen flat and long on the inhale and "relax" it out on the exhale, and they finished my poking, covered me with a thermal blanket and left me in the room to rest and let the needles do their work.

There's a certain relaxation to giving in to a force, or forces. I quickly reached my monologue Friday night, and let 'er rip. There was no shortage of energy, certainly, because it is a thrill, however familiar, to face an audience with something less than a plan. Yet I was relaxed, because it didn't matter what happened. Win, lose or draw, I couldn't even be sure what one or the other would look like. So I did my thing . . . and it was a hit. Even I was surprised; not because I didn't expect to succeed or because I thought the new play wasn't viable, but because in all my resistance to the changes I had felt that I wouldn't be able to leave that frustration behind, that I would inevitably carry it on stage with me. Somehow I had let it go, and the audience was delighted with my performance. The whole performance went great. Was I wrong about the changes? Should I have let go from the word go, and not complicated things with my opinions, my liver-induced feelings?

Lying there in a dark room the next day, riddled with pins, I managed to let go of a little bit of what all was pent up inside. Just a couple of spurts of acknowledged helplessness. That's what prayer essentially is, you know: letting go.

Acting is a confusing business, not to mention art form. I often forget what I'm doing here. Like an Alzheimer's patient, I'll suddenly awake to the room around me and be baffled at what my purpose was in entering it. The key to it is, I want to be an actor. Not a stand-up comedian, not a circus performer, not a mime or clown, and certainly not a clerk or secretary. All those roles are very nice, and I've been lucky enough to experience them all, and have opportunities to return to them. Yet an actor is a specific person, with specific goals that surpass entertainment. Perhaps we lose sight of that as a result of the actor seeming to be anything, seeming like a compilation of roles, all adding up to a bizarre nullification of identity. The experience of this show, however fraught, has served to remind me of what it is that separates an actor from a performer. An actor dares to let all of his or her practice, and technique, and safety go, and offer the self in every aspect up to the moment, to the risk of failing to entertain, in the pursuit of truth. An actor is not a cypher for any one person or idea, but for everyone. And I want, more than any of those other things, to be an actor.

The final diagnosis of my acupuncturologisti was that I needed to give up all front-ways strength training until my issue gets resolved, that I need -- if I am to continue exercising at all -- to find a way to do it that lengthens and relaxes my abdomen. And, ultimately, I need to find a different approach to working, altogether. Because my health and work isn't about just one direction of strength, or the appearance of success. It's about the risk of being open, of allowing what will be, and of constantly discovering new ways of being and, thereby, new risks.

But I'm still doing my push-ups. Damn it.

Jumping In

It's a wonderful feeling to be caught. Not in the red-handed manner, mind, but literally and physically caught -- as in, in interruption of your speedy progress toward something a bit on the hard side. Like the ground. It's also a great feeling to catch, especially if you're catching somebody who's in danger of said impact, but I covet a bit more the feeling of being caught, possibly just because it's a rarer experience for me. In teaching acrobalance to the youth of America, I'm more frequently the catcher. And, I admit, I have relished and relived some good catches I've made (one time I had to spin a falling girl around so that she, in effect, did a back flip before I set her on her feet . . . yeah, I revisit that, now and again . . .). But nothing quite beats the combined sense of vulnerability, gratitude and connectedness of having been caught. If you're open to the experience, that is.

I've been working on a short comedy for the past few weeks that performs as part of a one-act play

festival/competition

this weekend. It's called

Jump

(no; the other one) and it was penned by

Josh Sohn

, the gentleman I unexpectedly performed for in a

reading

back in the spring. It's an interesting situation, this production. As a part of a competitive series that contains 37 plays -- some of them longer than others -- we only perform twice if we fail to advance, three-to-four times if we go farther. So the whole thing has a curious similarity to a high school production experience, wherein you work for a rather long time, perform one weekend and that's it. Fortunately, it being a short play (under 20 minutes, I believe), the ratio of rehearsal-to-performance doesn't feel totally absurd. It is also strange to work on a pretty straight-forward, narrative comedy with strangers again.

I've gotten very comfortable with performing with my

Zuppa del Giorno

cohorts, and when we plunged in to

Jump

, I had a period of adjustment to contend with. We did not speak the same comic language right away. It was not collaborative in the same way as I have grown accustomed to with Zuppa, which not only made me reticent to put my ideas out there in rehearsal, but more than a little affronted when I received suggestions from fellow actors. (That's messed up; I'm still working out why I felt that defensive, initially.) And finally, and I believe for the first time, I'm the oldest person in the room. Everyone else in this show is early-to-mid-twenties. Which, well, is something I'd do best to grow accustomed to.

It's funny about comedy (ha ha): It requires a lot of trust. Stage comedy is like the do-or-die theatre -- there's little room for interpretation of audience response. Oh, we try to justify our experiences. "They were a quiet, attentive audience." "I saw everyone smiling, though." "It's this house; it's too hot/cold/separated/claustrophobic/post-modern..." When it comes right on down to it, though, live comedy is like a deathsport in which there's no overtime, and no one's allowed to a tie game. The only people who have it rougher than a stage actor in this regard (and I believe

Friend Adam

will back me up on this) are stand-up comedians. They practically stand up there and say, "Okay, world. Here's your chance to crucify me. No one else to blame but myself." Then again, too,

good

actors have to take a similar stance; even if they have a supporting cast of a dozen or more.

I've written here before about my rules of acrobalance, and how widely applicable I find them to be. Perhaps the most applicable is the idea of shared responsibility, summed up by the dictate, "Always be spotting." I wasn't familiar with the term "spotting" prior to learning circus skills, except as a part of a verbal sequence I was taught in my very first summer job, with

Beltway Movers

. (When lifting something heavy with someone else, you were told to say, "spot," meaning "brace yourself," then, "pick," meaning "we're lifting now." When lifting things such as pianos and trundle beds, I often added my own, more-flowery, four-letter words to this sequence.) Spotting, in a circus context, is to be ready to catch your fellow daredevil. When I teach, I teach everyone to always be ready to catch everyone else. It keeps people alert to think this way, which is generally helpful. It also reinforces that idea that all responsibility is shared. In this context, when something goes wrong or disappoints, no one is at liberty to blame anyone else, because each individual must always consider what he or she could have done to make it safer, better, or both.

As it is with acrobalance, so let it be with comedy. (And all other things.) Over the few weeks of rehearsal, I and my new friends have found a great deal more trust. I trust them to catch me if I fall and, more importantly, I've found the trust to forget myself enough to be ready to catch them at any moment. We'll have a very short time of fulfillment for our work to date, and it's entirely possible that we'll never see one another again thereafter. And, come to think of it, it's pretty amazing how we actors have to cultivate this sense of trust over and over again. Not just because it's a great thing in itself, but also because actors are continually being used. We will work for little-to-no pay, we accept a million tiny violations of our rights that others are alarmingly ignorant of, and frankly, get viewed as objects or sources of pleasure as often as we are as people. Put all that together, and it's pretty amazing that actors find any trust at all amongst themselves, much less intimately and repeatedly.

There's a popular axiom amongst circus performers: Leap and the net will catch you. I think perhaps for actors it should be, "Just jump. I'm sure it'll at least be interesting."

Up in Smoke

Last night I acted in a staged reading of one of

Tom Rowan

's plays,

Burning Leaves

. Foist of all: I have a lot of audience members from the night to be grateful for. It must have seemed like I was packing the house, which would be easy to do--it was easily the smallest "theatre" space I have ever worked in. It was akin to a return to the womb, and the play is not, as yet, a short one, so I owe big thanks to Friends

Geoff

,

Natalia

,

Kate C.

,

Sister Virginia

and

Fiancee Megan

. Way to go, guys. Way. To. Go.

Not that the experience was in any way bad. The script is, in fact, excellent. My friends were very engaged by the story and the performances, and only had critique for the run time -- a quite forgivable fault in my opinion when it comes to an initial reading. This was evidently a reading aimed at giving Tom some perspective on his work in action; the crowd seemed intimate and friendly, and he has already got a literary agent representing him (she was in the front row, and what I wouldn't give to know her response). I felt fairly good about my work, though I had a bit of that familiar sensation wherein I think to myself, "Damn--that went so much better in rehearsal..." It's hard to get away from that, particularly in a performance that has such a brief and concentrated rehearsal period. I just try to remind myself that some things go worse, but others go better, and I just have to stay open to the possibility each time of having the most true and effective performance yet.

I had several reasons to meditate on the various distractions that can enter an actor's concentration during his or her work, even while the reading went along. Not that I wasn't kept busy: I think there were maybe ten pages out of over a hundred on which my character didn't have substantial dialogue. The distractions, though seemed to begin to gang up on me even prior to entering that (very small) room. I had dressed casually nice for the event, and was careful to keep myself that way through my work day, but at my hasty dinner I spilled grease on my pants. The chairs we sat in for the reading had arms (rehearsal did not), which felt limiting and inappropriate, somehow. And my friends, God bless them, all sat in one corner and were not shy about being themselves. Add to that the audience just being very visible and very close in general, and you have yourself many interesting choices for being taken out of character. Fortunately for me, the script is very effective, to the point at which I almost didn't need to manifest the emotions involved. They were just there, ready.

In some ways, being an actor can boil down to an exercise in determination and concentration. The funny thing is, we have to remain supple and open at the same time, to allow impulses in and unpredictable forces to affect us. My character in this reading, a former NYC actor who moves to a more suburban environment to teach, recalls a director he worked for telling him acting should be a "stripping away of layers" to his soul. Apart from this immediately reminding me of the onion scene from

Peer Gynt

, it also reminds me of how the actual craft of acting, at its best, seems to work. Never mind souls and Truth, and all. A really successful acting experience is all about shedding, rather than accumulating, layers of analysis and lines and decision and fear and, hell, everything. Even the concentration so necessary for doing an effective job has to eventually become unnecessary. We're aiming for an emptiness, a nothingness, of sorts, to become cyphers for . . . what? Maybe it is Truth (by which I mean something more than simple verisimilitude), or maybe it's some kind of human energy, continuous and interdependent. I can't say. All I can say is that my best memories of jobs well done are suspiciously blank. They're mostly just a

knowing

of having hit the sweet spot, and the collective details are as impossible to touch as a leaf turned to ashes on the wind.

This reading was no such sweet spot on my part, though it went well enough. It was, however, one of those experiences that reminds me that this work is worth the struggle, the concentration, all of it. Sometimes, it seems like a very good trade-off indeed.

Murderous Clowns

In honor of MY NOT BEING ABLE TO SEE

THE DARK KNIGHT

FOR DAYS AND DAYS

, I thought I'd finally get around to writing the sequel (heh heh) to

this little gem

of an entry. I wasn't sure if I'd ever write about this. It's a difficult entry to justify in the ethos of the Aviary (because I've been

so

dedicated to my mission statement to date) except perhaps to say that: 1 - my doing clown work makes for a very real interest in the sociological implications of any clown identity; B - my early cultural influences have untold ramifications on what I choose to create today; and * - it's

BATMAN

weekend, people! And I've got to be a part of it!

Really though, it's Joker week. That's the big excitement over the movie and, I'd wager, would be even if it were not for Heath's untimely exit from the stage. The Joker is almost as iconic a character as Batman himself, and certainly as graphic and emblematic a villain as has ever risen from popular media. He may even indicate that a pervasive fear of clowns has been around a lot longer than some of the current media we have to propagate it. Before

The Dark Knight

, or

Batman

, or

Killer Klowns from Outer Space

, or

It

, or

John Wayne Gacy, Jr.

, or the original appearance of the Joker in Batman #1. Maybe it's always been around, pre-

Punch

. Maybe the fear was first, and the laughter second. That's certainly in keeping with my general theory of humor. [Laughter = self awareness * inevitability, squared.] And for those of you who consider the Joker a relatively trivial source of terror, consider this, too: In his first dozen appearances in the comics, he averaged about three murders per issue.

In my deep, unending and intricate research into

coulrophobia

(sp?) I have discovered some amazing things. Unfortunately, I can not share these things with you, because they are far too intricate, deep and, uh, unending, to . . .. Okay. I haven't exactly been to the library yet. But I've spoken with people about it, and I'm amazed by how few people know who John Wayne Gacy, Jr., was. (He was executed in 1994; one less clown to deal with, coulrophobes.) I thought he was sort of a household name, right up there with Dahmer and Manson, but I only spoke to one or two people who even had an inkling of who he was. Well, he was a seemingly pedophilic mass-murderer with a penchant for imprisonment and grisly dismemberment, who apparently can't even properly be classified as a psychopath. He also enjoyed moonlighting as a birthday clown. Pogo the clown.

So it's difficult to discount coulrophobia as absurd or irrelevant. It could even be a pretty basic survival instinct, as some have suggested. Some of the most ancient human rites involve masks and grinning figures that don't necessarily mean us well. The Joker's white face may as well be the clay pasted to an aboriginal witch-doctor, or the bleached skull an African shaman paints on his face. And death is absurd, too. Well, it seems absurd to the living, anyway. Living is to some extent based on ignoring the fact that we're going to die. This is such a prevalent philosophy that those who embrace death, or even simply associate themselves with it, are seen as somehow mystic or insane. The skull of a deceased comedian grins back at Hamlet's philosophizing, and when anyone grins, they expose the teeth -- the only "bones" directly visible on a living human body.

The Joker makes a great villain for Batman, and the two sum up a very basic human struggle pretty succinctly, so I have to forgive this perpetuation of the coulrophobic phenomenon. Batman is serious, and the events of his life have meaning -- he's a believer. Hell: His whole "superpower" is a character trait, that of determination. And Joker, well, he stands in absolute contrast to that. My favorite characterizations of him never allow him a moment to regret even his own failure. For him, it is all absurd, all pointless. He's not appetite-driven or suppressed, like Gacy, nor a traumatized child who is endlessly acting out his worst fantasies and fears. The story has no significance to the conclusion because, at the end, all our stories end the exact, same, way. If only he could convince Batman of that, maybe then he'd be able to rest. If only the Yorick had survived into Hamlet's story, maybe he could have made everyone see the folly of their ways.

So how do you tell the difference between the jester, who just wants to make fools of us all, and the joker, who wants to make us all corpses? Well, sadly, you can't. That's part of the dread of comedy, and the thrill of death. You just have to take your chances.