Burlesque

Last Saturday was the day of celebration for

Wife Megan

's 30th anniversary of the day of her birth and she, being the woman I married, wanted to go see some good, wholesome burlesque. You know burlesque, right? It's that quaint throw-back to a more innocent time, when men were men, women were women, and occasionally they all agreed to meet somewhere with dim lighting to reveal their knees to one another. One of the things I love about living in New York is being somewhere that such nostalgia for the frilly sins of the past exists. Any town that's a friend of anything remotely related to vaudeville and old-timey fun, is a friend of mine, as I always say (or will, henceforth). Furthermore, I specifically love burlesque. It's theatrical, it's joyous, and it usually incorporates lots of humor and props with its boobies. What's not to love?

So we went to

The Slipper Room

.

We stayed for many acts and several hours.

We left late, and they were still going strong.

Most of us will never be the same.

So from a theatrical perspective, it was a roaring success. I mean, if I can perform in something that really evidently changes people, I consider that a pretty big success. The specificity of that change is something that's even trickier than the change itself, given that all live performance is by its nature collaborative and interpretive. So personally, if you got something out of it, I got something out of it too. This reflects my attitudes on a lot of things. Like . . . dance. Or . . . board games. Or . . . other occupations of one's quest for joyous experiences. Let's not be judgmental about anyone's pursuit of happiness, even if they spell said pursuit "happyness." Hey: Rock on. It brings you joy and, on some level, that makes me happy.

Now there were some things I witnessed Saturday last that did not, per se, make me happy. The responses I had were more along the lines of being made to feel surprised, or confused, or scared. Very, very scared. But others really enjoyed some of these things, and no one got hurt or maligned beyond repair (though of course some audience mockery is part of the idiom), and so we can all look back on it and laugh. Sure, some of us may have gone home and gone directly into the shower, do not pass "GO!", do not bother removing one's clothing. But here we all are, scarless, and with a generally broader view of our fellow man, woman, and all others.

A broader view in a smaller world, I should say. I knew one of the performers -- had performed with her before, in fact. Her stage name is

Miss Saturn

, and she is a dynamite hula-hoop artist. She is also, it turns out, somewhat uninhibited in her display of God's gifts. When I performed alongside her, it was at

a benefit

for

Friend Melissa

's company,

Kinesis Project

. She hooped it up, I clowned around, and afterward she suggested we work together again some time, but I never followed up. Now I'm left to wonder if following up would have led me to The Slipper Room. It would not have been an entirely unwelcome opportunity, assuming I would have been able to stick to my personal preferences for the content of my act. During Saturday's experience I also had the unexpected mystery of feeling I recognized another performer: one "

Harvest Moon

." As it turns out, I don't. She's not who I mistook her for, but she has nevertheless reminded me that secret identities are as common in this city as free newspapers.

Some may view my appetite for nostalgia with disdain, but what can I say? I like sentimental sweetness in my indulgences, and could have used a bit more at The Slipper Room. After each break, the acts grew progressively more risque and shocking, and I grew less and less interested. Of course, if I were to run a contemporary burlesque show in New York City, I've no doubt I'd have to make similar allowances. After all, what we saw was probably closer in overall effect to us as the burlesques of old were during their time. These shows were shocking, titillating not just in sensual ways, but in visceral ones. The atmosphere should be one of reckless abandon and in this sense there was nothing inapt about my experience Saturday night. It was just that I had walked into a circa-1930s Berlin burlesque, when I had been hoping for a circa-1889s French one, I suppose. C'est la vie! I regret nothing!

Looking back, it occurs to me that there's an awfully fine line between anticipation and dread, and that line is going to be set at different places for different folks. A friend of mine recently sent me some writing research that discusses the role of feedback loops in sexual experiences. The gist of it was that "healthy" sexuality involves a feedback loop of increasing focus on arousal, and "unhealthy" (or perhaps, unhelpful) sexuality involves a neurotic, self-evaluative loop. Both increase the focus, but one allows you to engage, and the other rather prevents it. If we accept that sexual feelings are erotic in the broader sense, this is a very interesting way of looking at what we as performers inspire in our audiences. Will we fill them with eager anticipation, loathsome dread, or something of a different ratio altogether? In my opinion, neither is bad, just a different effect. And whatever effect, it begs the question: What, if anything, will we make the payoff?

Circular Experiences

I had the pleasure of two different performances this weekend past, one for each day of it, and they were both returns for me -- not just in the sense of returning to the stage after a bit of an absence, but in returning to specific work that I have missed. And this weekend coming up, I have another sudden performance in a similar vein of return. They call me: Mr. Boomerang.

They don't, actually. Thank heavens.

Sunday was the opening night of a second staged reading for

Tom Rowan

's play,

Burning Leaves

(the closing night is this Wednesday; a very economical schedule).

Burning Leaves

, though studded with excellent humor, is largely a drama, and I was reading a lead role. I first read this role back in the summer, and really took to it. He's a guy who's on the outside of a new community, gradually well-loved at first, and then ostracized; an actor who leaves New York in the hopes of turning his life around. I find it very accessible, and am grateful to have the opportunity to be involved with it, not to mention to be brought back for its second incarnation. At the end of it all, the reading turned out rather well. We had some people there -- a rather substantial house for that festival, from what I understand -- and I turned in a decent performance. There were moments I didn't feel I really delivered on, but I don't think it was so as any audience would notice, and at least I get a second chance.

The readings are taking place at the

Ensemble Studio Theatre

, which is a very interesting theatre to me. One is greeted, upon entering the second-floor lobby, with what look to be rather typical production photographs from the 70s and 80s. Then you take a closer look, and see people like Sarah Jessica Parker, Elias Koteas and Bill Murray in those photos, all looking very fresh in posed black-and-white. The theatre occupies several floors of a rather run-down building on way-west 52nd Street. You wouldn't find yourself there unless you knew about it, and needed to be there for some reason. It looks like the definition of "not much." Another not-for-profit in a building most commercial enterprises would studiously avoid, or demolish. Yet the theatre has fostered an incredible amount of now-famous and award-winning talent over the years. I like this juxtaposition. It gives me hope, and makes me feel at home, all at the same time. The final interesting thing for me, however, is that the theatre was founded by one Mister Curt Dempster. Not a lot of people outside the American theatre world know

who Dempster was

, and far too few in it know of him, either. I never got to meet him. I know him by coincidence.

The first time I saw Curt Dempster, I didn't know it. He had a role in

The Manhattan Project

, a favorite movie of mine as a child and one of the few we owned on video cassette way back before they got more affordable. I didn't really recognize Dempster until a random encounter in college, and it wasn't with him -- it was with a play he had written:

Mimosa Pudica

(I mentioned this play here way back in

11/1/07

). In 1998 I was in a public library in Richmond, Virginia, looking for a satisfying short play or excerpt to spend an entire semester working on in my directing class. In a compilation of one-acts from the seventies, I found Dempster's play, and it really sucked me in. I was just beginning to own the idea of my moving to New York, and New York is where the play is set. Eventually, I would use one of my many trips there that year to take location-specific photographs for research and use in the play itself. More significantly perhaps, the play spoke to me about my social anxiety and need for love. It was a profound experience of development for me to explore it, and I've never forgotten it. And I'm working in the theatre in which it made its debut.

The night before, I performed with

Bond Street Theatre

as part of a benefit for the

NACL

. It took place in

LAVA

's studio space, in Brooklyn, and featured an incredible line-up of the bohemian and avant-garde circus & variety set. There was everything vaudevillian and circus-themed you can imagine, just shy of fire-skills performance, all in an intimate space off a neighborhood of Brooklyn I've come to know fairly well (well enough to know of

a great coffee shop

nearby). I was pretty anxious most of the time I was there, I have to admit. Some of it was performance anxiety, but a lot of it had to do with knowing very few people there and it being more than a little crowded with folks who either knew one another already, or had an eye out for people they should know. I was, to put it succinctly, feeling a little outside. Not because of any exclusion (far from it -- everyone was extremely friendly) but because I had such an intense desire to belong. I miss my days of regular circus activity, and hanging out with that crowd was a bit awkward for me. To be utterly shameless, I must admit that I kept wanting to jump up and shout, "I can do that! Can I do that? I can do that!"

Our contribution to the evening's festivities was well-received, I thought; it took the audience awhile to warm up to what we were doing, but they got there and brought their laughter with them. Our performance was not a physical one; it was, in fact, intensely verbal. Still, it was highly comic, and I managed to get a little standing back-bend in there, which is a favorite "straight-theatre" move of mine that can be snuck into otherwise wordy exchanges. It seemed harmless in rehearsal, but it's just possible that doing the move whilst all adrenalized (is SO a word) aggravated

my pre-existing condition

, because since then I have had unpleasantness to contend with. This would inform a sane person to relax about all this circus nonsense. A believer such as myself might even take it as some kind of sign or omen added atop a pile of others that perhaps, just perhaps, it's time to let that physical stuff go.

This weekend I am all-of-the-sudden performing as my silent film clown (details soon @

Loki's Apiary

). I don't know exactly what I'm doing yet, but I know I want it to be physical, full of dangerous pratfall, to the point of flagrant masochism.

Comedy & Tragedy & Everything In Between

Because why be specific? Specificity isn't all that important, is it?

I'm involved in two very brief, very different rehearsal processes this week, both of which had their first rehearsals yesterday. Some people spend their Sundays unwinding, doing a crossword or sipping coffee and loading up on carbohydrates. Me, I have two rehearsals. I'd be lying if I said it didn't feel great. In spite of

how busy I've been

with acting gigs this fall -- in counter-spite of my supposed priority to remain decidedly non-busy leading up to

The Big Show

-- I have missed being in rehearsal. It's good to get back to it, albeit on a Sunday and doing double duty. In fact, this entry title was very nearly appended with "& Commercial Work," but at the last minute

ADM Productions

decided they didn't need me after all. I'm choosing to perceive that as "maintaining my theatrical integrity" this week, rather than "losing paying work."

My first rehearsal Sunday was for a follow-up staged reading of

Tom Rowan

's play,

Burning Leaves

. You may remember my writing about

Burning Leaves

back in July

, when

the initial staged reading

was performed. This reading around, the script has been trimmed and we're under the guidance of director

Gaye Taylor Upchurch

. It's being performed on two separate days under the auspices of The Ensemble Studio Theatre's

Octoberfest

, despite protestations from naysayers that October is, in fact, past. I find this personally fitting; I missed out on doing any performances in the actual October.

This rehearsal started out strangely for yours truly. I was a little late, in part because I was hefting a surprisingly heavy Mac CPU for later deposit at the technology recycling fair down at Union Square that day. Why then? Why lug this to rehearsal? Well, it's been sitting,

2001

-like, in a corner literally for months as recycling events, er, cycled past. Plus, it didn't seem that heavy at first. So it was with aching arms and a strong desire not to have to explain myself that I arrived to discover that I was the only member of the previous cast who would be in attendance. This has happened to me before. It's an interesting position in which to be. It means that either A) you were the only one who nailed it last time, or B) you were the only one who was desperate enough for work to perform in another unpaid reading. Or some combination thereof. Either way, I was surprised. I really enjoyed the last group that I read with, and it probably held me back in rehearsal having certain expectations for character interpretations. The director, "GT," seems to have a great approach though, and I'll shake off my stale expectations much better at the next rehearsal. She reminded us at the end of rehearsal that the text was very detailed and expressive of emotion, and so that it made sense to act

on

the lines and not take too much time with unspoken beats. A very smart initial critique.

I got the Mac to Union, where they collected my zip code and asked if I'd like to be interviewed for Comedy Central. But I was going to be late for the next rehearsal, and shuddered to think what Comedy Central might have been filming for. Alas: I'm sure I missed a golden opportunity for my career...

Bond Street Theatre

rehearses out of the loft apartment of its managing and artistic directors, Michael McGuigan and Joanna Sherman. It's on Bond Street, aptly enough, which is not too far south of Union Square, and I paused on my way there just long enough to purchase a sandwich and coffee. I'll be performing with them both on Saturday for a

benefit in Brooklyn

, and this pleases me greatly. I had to turn down an offer to work with Bond Street at the start of summer (conflicts with Italy, a desperate need to hang on to my day job, etc.), and such a situation can often lead to a write-off of the actor. Fortunately for me, Joanna and Michael share a lot of the same interests I do, and my skills are valuable to the kind of theatre they generally produce. Plus they're just neat-o in general. So after a really great thirty-minutes-or-so of conversation about ensemble theatres and collaboration, we got down to work on our short presentation for the benefit: an adaptation of Monty Python's famous

Argument

sketch

. Bond Street works in Afghanistan and with artists from there, and as you might imagine has been experiencing a lot of frustration in obtaining cultural visas for their collaborators to visit and perform in the US. They've channeled this frustration into the adaptation, tweaking this hilarious send-up of bureaucracy ever-so-slightly.

It's difficult to perform the sketch without lapsing into UK dialects, but it's also a good struggle that reminds me to own the language in my way, rather than merely copying

Michael Palin's famous performance

. Michael (McGuigan) has also added a bit of

Abbott and Costello

into the mix, as though the verbal specificity weren't heightened enough. It was slow-going at first, but that's just as well when it comes to that kind of vaudeville-esque wordplay. Little, mundane decisions take up time at the start, but if you don't resolve them first you end up with much bigger questions about solving issues with pacing and the like later on. So we warmed up slowly to the text, and after a couple of hours had begun to find some rhythm and make discoveries about how to adapt the humor to the stage. It's a pity in a way, because this kind of sketch really deserves hours of continuous rehearsal to get it crackling, but we all at least have enough shared vocabulary in our work to make a few more leaps in the process than others might. I'm looking forward to the performance of it even now, and wonder what our second and final rehearsal will produce to add to it.

I staggered home happy, but incapable of making basic decisions, such as what to make for dinner. It was a fairly long run of rehearsal and improperly handled H2O/sugar intake, and gave me pause about being an actor full-time. It was a very brief pause, however. I should be so lucky to be so exhausted at the end of every day.

Advent Horizon

I've paraphrased here before (oh, don't make me cite -- yes, I read my own copyright disclaimer -- yes, I'm a hypocrite -- I'm always a hypocrite on Mondays) this idea that my college art-history teacher was fond of putting forth: (art) history is not a progress. That is to say, it is a mistake to view history as a linear story of increasing knowledge, awareness and accomplishment. The veracity of

Caravaggio's light

is in no way superior to the

Lascaux cave paintings

, simply because of its skilled naturalistic composition, any more than

Cubism

was way better than

Pop Art

. Our tendency is often to observe human history as a linear progress, be it toward improvement or destruction, probably because this perspective is linked to how our minds work. Yet it is not only a limited view, when it comes to culture it's an incredibly inaccurate one. Take the Library of Alexandria, as a grandiose example. If we take the progressive, linear perspective, its destruction would suggest that some time just prior to the 8th century, the world took a huge step backward in information and culture. However, its destruction also vastly decentralized the accumulation of recorded human knowledge and increased the value of its recording, leading perhaps even more commerce of ideas. It's just as possible that we moved forward as a result, or in any three-dimensional direction. Culture is too complex a category to be judged by two dimensions in my opinion, even without the element of time getting involved.

Now, I'm getting dizzy from the heights of my academic aspirations here (and nervous that someone will quickly push me off for too much theorizing), so I'll just get to the topic I had in mind.

I'm still slugging away at

Harold Lloyd: The Man on the Clock

, and I've just gotten to the section in Harold's (in everyone's) history at which sound entered film-making. There are more misconceptions about this extremely sudden phase of movie-making history than can be summarized. It seems as though the entire industry just went ahead and freaked right the hell out over it before it had even begun, and so lots of the information we have from this period smacks of over-simplification, movie-mag exclamation and collaborative ass-covering. Perhaps the most common misconception, and one I subscribed to until I actually -- you know --

researched

the topic, is that the famous comedians of the silent era mostly failed in sound because of vocal failings. For the longest time, I believed Buster Keaton had an awfully strong Bronx dialect that interfered with his "talkies." Not true. In character, and mostly in life, Buster had a very earnest, slightly dopey Midwestern American regionalism that actually served his deadpan expression awfully well. In spite of this obvious documented fact, not to mention his vaudeville upbringing (they talk in vaudeville, believe it or not), the myth of Buster's dialect is an irksome pervasion.

True, many film actors simply couldn't speak. Rugged cowboys had squeaky voices. Little darlings smoked five packs, unfiltered, per day. Yet if we have to summarize the cause of the upheaval of various actors' careers at this time, it would be more accurate to point to the bigger picture (pardon the pun) than the details. That is to say, with the advent of synchronized sound in movies, an entirely new form was created. We call them both "film," as though the material used to record these works was the defining feature, but it's a little like calling Picasso and van Gogh the same thing because they both put colors on flat surfaces.

Silent film had more in common with even dance and visual art than it did with talkies, then or now. Simply consider the fact that most major silent films were accompanied by live music. We tend to link silent film with film-in-general because we view movie-making as a progression, like technology, and because the two are similar in narrative devices. Even in this last commonality, however, the two are quite distinct. Silent films often suffered from too much story, whereas the bulk of popular American movies in the past 50 years have been largely driven by plot. It's a little difficult for modern audiences to grasp the idea of a "good" movie not necessarily relying on a "good" story, but in such a sceptical case, I point to two answers: a genre -- action movies -- and a specific film --

2001: A Space Odyssey

.

HOLD ON. I should have prefaced this by saying, beautiful as it is, I hate watching

2001

. I usually spend the whole time thinking to myself, s

elf, why did Kubrick have to give up on story-telling when he was so good at it?

It is a mistake, in my opinion, to rule out individual movies simply because of a lack of story.

2001

has a great deal in common with silent film, and if you're committed to the ideal of film-making being a visual medium, well, there you go. In my humble opinion, where Kubrick went wrong was in effectively abandoning comedy at the same time he began abandoning traditional narrative structure. 'Cause he was incredibly funny, too, and the profound loss of the silent film is in its comedies.

That's not to discredit the melodramas, historical pieces and fantasy films of the period in any way. I just mourn the comedies more. What seemed to happen was that the industry got itself all a'twitter about the money to be made (and lost) over the advent of sound, and in the momentum of all that most everyone lost sight of the forest for all the trees; including the actors. Well, I shouldn't say "everyone." Some persisted in the original form. Chaplin made a well-received silent film after sound entered the picture (so to speak), and I'm reading about Lloyd's struggles to adapt, too. Apparently he was started on a film when everything started switching over and, when he saw people's reactions to the novelty of sound, Lloyd felt that he'd better try to adapt. He dubbed and re-cut the film,

Welcome Danger

, in response to the demand. Apparently, this film includes a sequence of minutes of black screen as the characters are heard stumbling around in the "dark." This was either a desperate incorporation of the new technology, or something of a wry joke on the audience. I prefer to believe the latter explanation.

The differences between a silent film and a movie with sound are too numerous to summarize in total. The general category of things I miss the most from silent comedy, though, is the sight gag. We still have visual jokes in movies today, but they work differently. Our stories have become so much about the written word that everything springs from its parameters. Instead of beginning with images or ideas, jokes begin with language and behavior. Behavior is, in fact, the dominant action in movies today. It quickly became automatically more sophisticated to build stories from words, and eventually that prejudice became so ingrained that we became embarrassed by our active past. Even the greatest actors of the past seemed crude to our "modern" sensibilities, telling us too much, insulting our intelligence, their actions speaking too loudly, so much louder than our words.

Many argue that it's just a change of taste, that what we have now is what we need now in terms of culture. Maybe so. Lord knows I have a biased affection for times gone by when it comes to visual art and -- to a lesser degree -- music as well. Maybe it's pointless for me to insist that silent films are still relevant, still interesting and affective, and that we lose something good by losing "the name of action." Maybe. Still. Watch Harold's young man struggling to climb a high-rise in the need for success; then we'll talk.

Bespectacled

I just finished me my first read of

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell

, a book I have longed longed to read, and was not disappointed by. If Dickens had only written about magicians, I would have enjoyed my required reading so much the better. In an odd way, it encourages my

steampunk leanings

of late. Of course the setting of the book predates any sort of industrial revolution by quite a bit, yet something about the juxtaposition of magic on an otherwise historically rational world sets me in mind of the steampunk. That, and it's set largely in Britain, home of all good steampunk. (

Expatriate Dave

: I need a grood steampunk gadget to go with my steampunk jacket.) (All: Can I stop saying "steampunk"? No I can not. And you wouldn't want me to, really. Steampunk.) Finally, on the subject of steampunk (henceforth: steampunk), someone really needs to make a good, contemporary movie in this vein. Sadly, no one will. Oh, they may try, but they'll botch it good. Elements can be found in

The Golden Compass

,

Hellboy

, and of course any Jules Verne adaptation. In fact, in my ideal world, such an ideal steampunk movie would be directed by Guillermo del Toro, with consulting art direction by Tim Burton, include specific references to Verne all over the place, and feature predominantly craft and in-camera visual effects. Also it would be aware of the cultural similarities between Victorian England and contemporary United States. Make it so.

But the actual subject of this post is actually to point up something I've noticed thanks to the new book I'm reading:

The Man on the Clock

, by Tom Dardis. It is, so far, not a great book, but it was the only remotely portable biography of silent-film actor Harold Lloyd I could find. Lloyd was a great comedian, and was the basis of my base character in

Silent Lives

. Not nearly as many people know him as do Chaplin and Keaton. I wanted to learn more about him because I dig these guys as pioneers of art, entertainment and media, and because I'm lagging a bit in the idea department in completing my clown silent film outline (see

3/27/08

). As I read, I discover (assuming Mr. Dardis' writing is to be believed) that I have far more in common with Lloyd than I was aware of. He seems to have been a very careful sort who loathed making mistakes, and something of a frustrated actor in the beginning, trying to find his own way. I've also noticed a remarkable potential connection between two things I love: He'd've been the perfect Clark Kent; and Superman.

Harold Lloyd apparently had some difficulty early in his film career in establishing a memorable, unique character upon whom the production companies could bank. He was just a few career footfalls behind Chaplin, and only one or two behind Keaton, but it could be argued that he was a lot more behind in experience to the two. He grew up on stage, but as a regular actor who took what roles he was given, rather than the kind of innovative vaudevillians Charlie and Buster had to be. In an unfortunate turn, he even made a character called Lonesome Luke that was so derivative of The Tramp that it's a little difficult to believe as an honest mistake. (Then again, it's a pretty human tendency to "borrow" -- sometimes without even realizing it -- from those around you when starting something new.) At any rate, audiences liked Lloyd because he was daring, easy on the eyes and a good actor, but they didn't really identify with him until he figured our his glasses character, or Glass Man.

The glasses were pivotal in Lloyd's effectiveness as a character. The Glass Man worked because of the expectations implied by his appearence with the glasses. They made him accessible and identifiable, sure, but in a very specific way. The films Lloyd made after 1918 and his discovery of the Glass Man began to evolve his stock progression. A goof, a klutz, and hopeless boy gets in over his head in adventures that have him thrown this way and that, until just at the end, seemingly miraculously, he overcomes every adversity, usually through some incredible act of bravery, strength and cleverness. It must have been as though one were going to a Buster Keaton movie that switched at its climax to a Douglas Fairbanks. As he established his character, Lloyd even bested Chaplin (in my humble opinion) at incorporating pathos and empathy. A conglomeration, to be sure, but a very effective one that may have been responsible for moving movies toward still more sophisticated forms.

Nevermind whether or not

that

was a good idea.

Siegel and Shuster began a long process of creating the Superman(TM) we all know today in 1932. He went through a lot of revisions over the six years before they sold him to Action Comics (the initial comic they wrote featured The Super-Man as a psychic bad guy), at which point his appearence and general origins are at least similar to what we know today. It's just possible that they were sunconsciously influenced by Lloyd films. Many of the names they used in their creation were references to movies, and though they've never mentioned him by name, they have included silent films amongst their influences. Shuster: "But the movies were the greatest influence on our imagination: especially the films of

Douglas Fairbanks

Senior."

Harold Lloyd was tall, brunette, athletic and charismatic, but it was all belied by those glasses, and his own relatively reserved persona in real life. Superman certainly was a zeitgeist comprised of too many elements of society and culture predating him to point to any one as a significant source. It is precisely because of this conglomerative nature that I'm inclined to believe that Harold Lloyd's character had some influence on the creation of at least Clark Kent, if not Superman himself. And hey: Even if I'm wrong, it's clear that American audiences love a good underdog scenario.

Which gives me hope.