The Perfect Notebook

It is one of those personal, secret blessings of my work as an actor/"creactor" that the work necessitates the use of notebooks. By secret blessing, I mean a requirement that makes me very happy for somewhat irrelevant reasons. I love notebooks. Something about their organization, informality, yet relative physical permanence satisfies me in a very personal way. (See the manila-folder sequence in

Stranger than Fiction

for a nice illustration of a secret blessing of one's work.) I find this a bit odd, this affection for notebooks, since I generally detest hand-writing when I could be typing. It is, however, undeniable.

I would like to design my own notebook. Not just design it, mind you, but get it made, so I can use it. Maybe I could turn this into a profitable enterprise (imagine funding my acting career with notebooks--I'm giddy at the thought) but primarily I'm simply interested in making something that helps me work. I have favorite notebooks as it is, mind you.

Moleskine(R)

is and always will be a classic, and they produce an impressive variety of sizes and custom uses. I also use the "

Katebook

" quite a lot for shows. They come in a variety of sizes as well, and are easy to paste script pages into; their best feature by far, though, is the colored page edges that neatly pre-divide them into 3 or 5 sections.

Neither of these brands satisfy completely, however. There are very particular aspects to working on the kinds of shows that I do, which require special considerations. It is a simple matter to answer these demands -- it's just that no one's done it yet, as far as I know. Someone, please, let me know if my answer is out there somewhere. In the meantime, what follows is a kind of verbal illustration of my dream-notebook.

• Size. A critical aspect. THE critical aspect, in many ways. I at once need something that fits easily into all of the bags I practically live in, and with the capacity to hold a lot of information in an organized fashion, and something that can be comfortably held in one hand. Because I'm often acting with it, see, and taking notes. A good size for me has been the 6"x8" Katebook; it's perfect for pasting standard script pages in, and not too cumbersome to hold (though a little thick/heavy when approaching the end of a rehearsal period). I might go with something more 7"x8", however, for various reasons to be further explained. And a little thinner; say, 1/2" to 3/4"?

• Durability. It must withstand the worst atrocities you may imagine, for not only will it be dropped, it will be thrown. And it will get wet. It may even be exposed to a Meisner exercise gone wrong.

• Binding. A tricksy question, my precious. I dig the hardcore durability of the Moleskine(R), but the notebook must be able to be folded in half, for hand-holding. Plus, with items added to it, it need to be able to expand a bit without turning into an effective doorstop. Which leads me to believe good ol' spiral binding is still the way to go. However, it should be with a thick strand that's very resistant to flattening or uncoiling, and that spiral needs to have a covering. Fabric, maybe. Something that saves it from the various abuses that taking a notebook in and out of containers invariably inflicts upon ye olde spiral binding.

• Cover. One of the best things about a Moleskine(R) is one of its most subtle features -- the cover. It's lightweight and pliable, yet coated with a material (formerly leather, not sure what now) that makes it extremely durable. The only fault I find with it is the color. It makes the outside fairly useless for titling or what-you-will. So in my world, the cover is the same stuff, only a lighter color. Not white, but perhaps a nice tan or beige. Rounded corners.

• Paper. Durable, yet fairly thin. Not so much so that ink bleeds through, but often the extra weight of a notebook has to do with using a kissing cousin of cardstock for the paper. The paper needs to have those color gradations on the edges that the Katebook has. And most importantly, it should be graph paper. GRAPH. PAPER. Why? It's the best. You can write neatly portrait or landscape, make neat columns and such, and drawings look fancy-fied by it. Rounded corners.

• Features. The elastic strap on Moleskine(R)s (it closes the book by wrapping around the right lateral edge) is perfect as container and place-holder. Most of these also have some sort of expanding wallet attached to the inner back cover for scraps of paper. In my notebook, there will be one such on the front cover, just big enough for one or two sheets (contact sheet, schedule) and a larger, compartmentalized one on the back. Both will fit an 8 1/2 x 11 sized paper, folded in half along the horizontal. Finally, within the spiral binding, there will be a place to hold a pencil. This will be a special design, as it will need to be suspended in such a way that it doesn't interfere overmuch with the opening and closing of the notebook.

• What it won't have. A spring clip -- too cumbersome, and ultimately non-useful. Other pockets -- huge increase on bulk. Removable paper -- unavoidably comes loose (this is a problem with the Katebook) and it's spiral anyway; torn edges be damned. Zipper closure -- notebooks were intended to be opened faster than that, douche. Pre-printed pages -- if I want a calendar or metric-conversion table in there, I'll use paste. Anything that juts -- why would you do that to us? It's like some kind of sick, Nazi, social experiment, watching people fumble getting things in and out of pockets and bags.

The only thing left is what to call it. And, you know, actually diagramming it, producing and distributing it. Marketing it. Legal action when I get sued by both Moleskine(R) and Kate's Paperie. Aw, forget it! Who needs the aggravation?

Anything is worth the realization of the perfect notebook...

Update 3 June 2008: Ask, and the good people at MAKE shall provide!

Incorporation

Next week I'll be performing a show twice daily down at the World Financial Center, under the auspices of

The Women's Project

. The show is called

Corporate Carnival

, and is much as it sounds -- a sort of carnival (though more circus) celebration (though more satire) of corporate America (though more capitalist America at large). It will be performing in the

"Winter Garden" section

, May 14 - 16, showtimes at 1:00 and 7:00, and the 15th thrice, the previous times plus a 4:00. We earn our money over there at The Women's Project, fo' sho'.

The show itself is interesting to me for a return to collaborative creation and my status within it. I'm one of a sort of inconsequential chorus called "The Temps." We burst through between main acts with commercial-like interruptions, and supplement the other actors' "scenes." We're also on stage even when we're "backstage," owing to the nature of our staging the show in an open area, and we're all responsible for developing a "greenshow" act. Greenshow acts are sort of a roving warm-up before the main stage begins, especially useful in this format because they get people's attention by adhering to a busking style. So we're doing all that (see above "fo' sho'"), but our additions to the show itself are not necessarily especially skilled. I'm stilting for one commercial, but for the most part the Temps' contributions aren't particularly physically demanding. In spite of the many circumstantial similarities between this project and the work of

Cirque Boom

and

Kirkos

(particularly Cirque Boom's

Circus of Vices and Virtues

, in which I played a stilt-walking businessman), they're very different in that regard.

I've had to create a lot of self-generated output recently. So much, in fact, that today I began to worry for the first time if I wasn't just recycling and regurgitating. This is due in part to hammering out an outline for a potential performance piece (pah pah pah) for Italy, under the auspices of

Zuppa del Giorno

. I took the three archetypal clowns we portrayed in

Silent Lives

, and bits and sequences from all our shows (Zuppa-related or no), added a dash of some of my favorite stage conventions and voilà! A . . . show! Of sorts! I kind of hate it! But the idea is that we'll all get into a room together soon (somehow) and develop it, or something that doesn't resemble it in the slightest. Not sure which one I'm hoping for at this point.

Sludging through this effort reminded me of working on my clown film (see

3/27/08

), in that I was writing out actions more than words, trying to tell a story through humorous, true deeds and bits. It was also reminiscent of the film in that I was frequently stuck, trying to figure out how to go on from a given point, and I've been feeling pretty stuck on the film script as well. It seems that once Our Hero (this is what I've been calling the clown character in the script) gets out of Central Park, I have very little direction for him. And now, after a couple of weeks of contributing to generate original scenes for

Corporate Carnival

, I have to develop a greenshow act for it, and I'm drawing blank. It's a little like I've run out of gas. Cough! Cough! Sputtterrrrr . . .

Yet on Sunday (see

5/5/08

), with eager and communicative collaborators, the ideas were flowing like gasoline in the 1990s. Perhaps what I need to do is engage in dialogue with someone who is inclined to be energetic about this kind of thing. Perhaps, too, I need to just get out of my mind and into my body. That was definitely a key element in Sunday's successful creation. This block may be entirely symptomatic, in fact, of a period of relative creative isolation of late. I started writing the clown film when I was between day jobs, and there were no theatre commitments, and very little energy on my part going into find them. At the time I viewed my individual effort as reclaiming a little of my work for myself (as part of my process of dealing with letting go of

As Far As We Know

[see

1/15/08

]), and so it was. Yet it was also a retreat.

That's the nice thing about work. As long as you're doing it, you're working.

It's a Long Story . . .

The Aviary has a new feature to the left (to the lef'!): Links to my shared items on

Google Reader

.

Expatriate Dave

introduced me to Reader, all from across the Atlantic and everything, and for this he must die. Dave, you are a sunumabitch, and must die, for now I have a tremendous difficulty justifying any time spent on the activities of my actual day job. Dave's imminent demise notwithstanding, now you can quickly view other 'blog entries and online articles that have piqued my interest of late. It's a nifty way of citing my sources and streamlining some of my brain activity not necessarily related to

The Third Life

(r); though really, it all relates. Plus, my 'blog is about ten-to-twenty screen shots tall, so I could probably insert one of Shakespeare's histories to the lef' without scraping bottom.

I have hoped and searched for a way of making this style of 'blog wider in format, so that such would not be the case, but it is as yet in vain. I am nerdly, but not in a computerly way, and shan't venture to edit the html myself. God no. Imagine the potential losses!

I do go on. And on. And on. (And on. [And on. {And on.} And on.] And on.) And, I on. Wait. What? I on. Hold on. I--on. I . . . woul- on! On on on! Look at my goings on! ON!

The above is an abstract sort of summary (get it?) of my mental processes. I may be way off base here, but I think this aspect of moi is a big part of the reason I experience so much frustration in learning other languages. I am at once in love with order and complexity. I appreciate specificity in ideas, but strongly resent the inability to wiggle within formats and the mediums of expression. So I'm rather stuck on English -- that most ambiguous of languages -- rather than html, or Italian. In part because I learned it first, hence I have "wiggle room" that no other language can compare to sans decades of study, but also because its value is ingrained on my conscience. English means the script of a new play I've been cast in. English means communication with my loved ones. English means western literature. I heart English.

That is part of why I write at such length on almost every subject I address here. Most of my entries, I'm well aware, would not pass the mustard (intentional abuse of idiom; because I can) with any English teacher in his/her right mind. Most of my ideas can be summarized in an abstract (ah ha!) of about twenty-five words or less. I write on these ideas in meandering, playful ways because I'm improvising on a theme. (I

knew

I should have stuck through to Jazz Band! Where's my trombone...?) I'm improvising on a theme because I enjoy it, and because it's the best way I know of surprising myself with my own conclusions. There's almost nothing empirical about the process, when I'm doing it right. Generally speaking, I'm a little too cautious to become a

Dirk Gently

altogether, but there's something to be said for not determining the end before you've begun.

I suppose I have mental processes on the brain because I've been helping

Fiancee Megan

with her thesis paper. Last weekend was spent by-and-large helping her compile and organize data, actually. (It's fun to pretend you're in school, if you can reach that state of feeling as though it takes a certain load of decision-making off of you.) It had been a while since I had dipped toe in that kind of scholastic world, and I was reminded of the comforts and drawbacks of ideas such as determinism, causality and the empirical/scientific processes. Simply put (or so I hope), most school environments depend upon concepts of quantification and objectivity in order to function to standards, which concepts have varying degrees of use or relevence to any given lesson. They gots to grade you, and you gots to learn somethin' from its. I'm not faulting empiricism at all. How could I fault something so useful? Neither, however, do I consider it the Omega to every question's Alpha.

Consider a school paper. Generally speaking, the student is supposed to state an objective and hypothesis, then do this and that to prove the hypothesis, preferably using hard data and citing other opinions. In the end, a conclusion is drawn. The conclusion needn't be conclusive, nor even agree with the hypothesis (though some teachers insist on revising one end or the other until they match, which is so stupid it makes me want to scream), but no one likes to feel dumb and most people, by the end of working on something, like to feel they got somewhere relatively significant. So a conclusion ties it all up. Like a well-crafted play, there's a beginning, middle and end, with no dangling doubts or questions. Pretty. Concise. Let's us bronze it, and put it on a pedastal.

Though it has been reprinted onto numerous magnets, mugs and mouse-pads, I'm still a big fan of this excerpt from Rilke's collected letters to a young poet:

"I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."

One of my biggest problems is that it's hard for me to admit that I don't know something. It's not that I can't do it; it's that it pains me to do it, which is in some ways worse, or at least more complicated. So I practice not knowing things all the time, even as I'm trying to learn more and more in the hopes that by the time I'm 80 or so I won't have to endure

not

knowing quite so much. Until then, loving the questions is a pretty effective approach to ignorance. At least that way, the questions get asked, of myself as much as of anyone else.

Update

(not minutes after I posted; see reader sidebar article)

:

Ira Glass agrees with me...

"Indeed, that might be the single biggest reason that This American Life has more in common with the documentary films of

Errol Morris

or the writings of

Studs Terkel

(both oft-cited Glass influences) than with any network magazine news program: It follows its sources where they lead, instead of using people as props to support a premise that’s usually been decided upon before the actual reporting has even begun."

Revenge of the Nerdly

Last year, not too far off from this time, I wrote to you about my experiences at

Camp Nerdly

(see

5/7/07

&

5/8/07

), the weekend excursion for people who enjoy role-playing and story-telling games. It is true to its name, and is a brilliant excuse for people who are "old enough to know better" to go out into the woods and play pretend. I was hesitant to attend last year. Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but it took

Expatriate Dave

keeping an eagle's eye on my ever-changing schedule to get me suddenly signed up and ready to go. I was all, "I'm going to Italy then; I can't," and he was all, "Are you still?" and I was all, "Well, no, not then, but--" and he was all, "Hey, you're signed up and paid and do you need me to bring camping gear?" I couldn't help a sense of dread. I stopped playing that sort of game in my later teen years because I found it started inhibiting -- instead of hosting -- my social life. And now I act for a living (well, for certain periods of said living) and why would I do that, in effect, without pay? I couldn't conceive of feeling comfortable, much less having fun, at the event. Nevertheless, I attended, because time with Dave is invariably well-spent, and because at that moment I needed a little quiet time to myself with some trees. Boredom be durned.

Boredom be durned indeed. I ended up having an incredible time. It was like a renaissance of creative wells I had plum (get it?) forgotten about over the years. Hence my return this year. Well, that, and the fact that Childhood Friends

Davey

and Mark are going to nerd-out there, too.

Last week I found myself in conversation with Friends

Adam

and

Geoff

at

Rodeo Bar

, when I brought up my return to Nerdly. Adam naturally resorted to our glib repartee vis-a-vis (all this, and not a day of French class) "rolling 20s" and "+1 to attack," but Geoff, being of a somewhat less nerdly sort (he watches [and understands] organized sports) did his best not to mock me. Which I congratulate him on: A for effort. Instead, he tried to understand why in God's name I would ever spend time and money on such a pursuit. Having to explain myself in terms a fellow actor could understand proved to be an interesting challenge. I'm not sure how successful I was, though Geoff seemed satisfied enough to not follow up with D&D jokes.

Why? Why why why? Well, to begin with, let me dispel a few misconceptions. Camp Nerdly is primarily adults, so I'm not going in relishing the idea of appearing as a God (or, as a rather pathetic 30-year-old) to a bunch of pubescent SciFi/Fantasy types. Nerdlians have jobs and lives, generally speaking. They do this for fun or, in many cases, it

is

their job. They get paid to work on games. Also, Nerdly is not a huge LARP (Live-Action Role Playing [the ones you fear, who costume themselves and have sword fights in public areas]) festival. I've got nothing against that kind of gaming per se, but if it was the dominant form at Nerdly I probably wouldn't be interested. Finally, when you read "role-playing games," you have to think past bedroom secrets and children getting overly excited over rolling dice. Think, as well, of story-telling.

I get naturally high (booze and drugs are banned) off of attending Camp Nerdly, because it's three straight days of creating unpredictable stories with very intelligent and creative people. When I was all done last year, I rode a wave of creativity for weeks. Creativity is like one's physical muscles, in that the more one works with it, the stronger and more adept it becomes. And, similar to physical training, adding elements of competition and/or teamwork (gaming & collaboration [which, together, you might as well term "improvisation"]) heightens and specifies the exercise. Camp Nerdly allows me to bounce off game designers, writers and even some fellow performers, who all compel me to stretch and strengthen my imagination. Plus, I dig fantasy, man. Everyone does, in their own way. I'm just a little less limited in my appreciation than some ... and way more limited than others, most notably many of the attendees and game-hosters at Camp Nerdly.

So I'm looking forward to it. Now all I have to do is not get acting work that conflicts. My friends might kill me. It can be hard to help people understand how having a freelance career means it trumps almost all other plans. It's all just a roll of the dice.

Back Ward

You may have noticed my absence from the Aviary for the last week. I continued writing, but wanted to leave my entry addressing Staff Sgt. Keith "Matt" Maupin (see

3/31/08

) up and prominent for a week. The remainder of last week's entries have now been published, in which you can find plenty of evidence that I'm back to my usual inanity.

The last week was actually a pretty busy one with theatrical activities, each of them under the guise of a "staged reading" (and y'all know where I stand on those [see

2/27/08

{but also

3/11/08

, for a semi-retraction}]). These were paying readings, however, and at least one of them was a play I might actually stand a chance of playing the character for in a full-scale production. Allow me to procede in reverse chronological order. Or, if you won't allow it, read backwards.

.yllautnevE .ti fo gnah eht teg uoy ,em tsurT.

Last night I participated in a reading for an aspiring playwright, one who simply wanted to hear her words aloud in order to move on to the next stage of revision.

Kate Chadwick

is an actress, primarily, but I've never seen her work. I met her whilst working at the law office that used to employ me full-time. She is also a dancer, and the subject of her one-act that we were set to read,

Swan Song

, was the inner world of a classically trained dancer coming to realize she needs to break free of some of that world. I played the central character's brother (rather the comic relief, along with their sister) and we read in the living room of an apartment in Queens. I've usually enjoyed this kind of pizza-and-soda reading, but this one was particularly fun. Kate has a particularly lively sense of humor that, it seemed, everyone there shared. Interesting, too, how she incorporated that sense of humor into her writing of a largely serious play; I reaped a lot of the benefit of that, playing a kind of clown type. Kate's piece was also interesting to me for being a kind of dance/theatre hybrid, akin in some ways to the circus/theatre work I do. One can never adequetely describe those movement aspects in writing, so the play can not exist solely as literature. Frustrating in development, but ultimately a worthwhile effort, I find.

Saturday was occupied with the rehearsal for and performance of a staged reading of one of the NYU BFA program's playwright's plays. (That sentence? Totally why I haven't applied to said program.) Juliana Avery wrote

The Biographer

, and last Saturday I and a group of about six worked to represent it on stage. It was something of a gruelling day, actually. We rehearsed from 2:00 to 6:15, then took the stage at 6:30, and with a five-minute intermission the play ran until 9:00ish. Juliana, to her great credit, is entirely aware that cuts are necessary to make the play function. We received some of those cuts at 5:00, and they were certainly good ones, so I trust she'll procede along those lines. Juliana developed this play under the auspices of NYU's Steinberg lab, a subsection of their BFA program that I have been lucky enough to be involved with, in-class (I often wish I could make a sustaining day job solely out of the work I do for that class, actually).

The Biographer

reminds me of the novel

Starting Out in the Evening

, in that the inciting action has to do with a somewhat successful writer in his twilight years allowing a young female writer to interview him for a biography, but thereafter it takes a very different series of turns. I played the writer in flashbacks to his thirties (it really is an extremely castable decade of my life I'm in), when he met his (lasting) wife. By and large, a supporting character. The scenes were brief by comparison, and the character emotionally young, for all his life experience to that point. Yet he was delightfully fleshed out. Juliana has a real talent for throwing no opportunity for character development away and, as an actor, I value that extremely.

Finally, straddling Thursday and Friday was

The Things We Did and Did Not Do

, by Theresa Parsell Giacopasi. I read scenes from this play twice in class with Theresa, and she was kind enough to cast me in the reading. I do mean kind, because the character I played afforded me the opportunity to play to the hilt one of my favorite types, and one I rarely have an opportunity to play, at that. Jackson is a would-be private eye, and I modeled him largely after Bogart's Marlowe, naturally. I realized in working on

TTWDaDND

(for those too-brief hours) a big aspect of that type that makes it particularly appealing to me, especially in the context of Theresa's play. I am a straight man (read: stage type, not sexual orientation [though, read that too, if it suits you]) and there's no getting away from it. That's not to say I don't have a sense of humor; it's just that my type is the straight guy. Playing a PI trapped in 21st century upstate New York allowed me to play it straight, and still be the one to deliver punchlines. Best of all, the key to the character is that he's a guy who's frustrated at how unaccomidating his world is to the kind of man he's most fulfilled being -- something of a familiar position for a struggling actor (not to mention a geek who wishes Batman were real and he were him). The play is a comedy with a healthy dose of melancholy conflict. Theresa even gave Jackson a saucy moll to bounce off of at the climax (Gentlemen: Kindly remove from the brains from the gutters.), perfectly portrayed by fellow First Look actor, Michele Vazquez. In short: Too much fun.

These drams of theatre can often serve only to whet one's appetite for more, if the material is interesting enough, and such is the case here. Assuming I am still headed for Italy some time this summer (which, at this point, is its usual dubious sort of assumption) I've got a limited amount of time in which to be cast in something that won't conflict with that trip. Which means I need to jump on the audition train. Poste haste. Which I hate.

So somebody hire me based on my unique writing style. Hire me as an actor, mind you. Ready . . . GO!