(My brother found this. The Bill Evans deck stands out.)
Two weeks ago I auditioned for the Palm Springs International Playwrights’ Festival. After spending the previous week searching for an audition piece through plays I own and plays I’ve never heard of, I was lamenting to a patron – one I often talk movies and Jewish culture with (yep) – that I couldn’t find a monologue after he’d asked me, “What’s new?” He beamed and told me about a play he was in 30 odd years ago, Moonchildren, and that its closing monologue might interest me. With little time left to prep for the audition, I asked him for his copy – which turned out to be his acting copy, full of notes and grime, when he was in the L.A. debut in the mid-70s. I photocopied the closing monologue, chopped it up a bit, and read the play in one sitting.
The play is incredible. It’s set in the late-60s, with eight college students shacking up in a strange yet workable arrangement of friendship, disgust, love, lust, and of course, “No, I haven’t touched your fucking hamburgers.” The play opens blacked-out, with the students – trickling in – waiting to catch the cat (that may or may not exist) give birth. This scene sets up that there’s something wrong with Bob, and most of his housemates are sure its the draft notice that he received recently. (The only thing Dick is sure about is that Bob is probably responsible for some 40 or so frozen hamburgers of his that he ate without putting them on the common stock.) The play covers a school year, with the winter break dividing the play in two. It’s a great play and I’d love to see it staged.
As for the actual monologue: it was my best audition yet. In the last year I’ve realized that it’s not about line memorization as it is about telling the story. That seems so obvious now, but “learning the lines” was how I was taught (and I bet the common way it’s taught). I learned it from Brian Raffi when we were working on Our Town, but it’s similar to how my father told me to tell jokes: just make it yours. And I made the Moonchildren monologue mine.
I was cast in a reading for Like Mother Like Hell, which, by title alone, sounds great. It’s a comedy so I’m looking forward to that change. I was glad to just be cast in anything for the festival, but just searching for it online didn’t return much, so maybe it won’t have the exposure as I had originally thought. But that’s okay; I’m just looking forward to working.
The festival is in late January and I will be posting dates, location, etc. soon – if anything, to advertise for the damn thing.
I moved to Indio last month, some extra 20 miles away from my job – and from Los Angeles. It was hard at first: I would linger at work, bullshit at Starbucks and finally go home around 9PM. It’s hard to admit that I hate being alone, but by now most of the people that know and love me already know that – so why kid anyone? But after I situated my room (I live in a small casita, attached to a house, but virtually on my own) and started to look at the prospects of being happy or miserable, it was easier being home… hell, I even like it now. I’ve been able to balance who I spend how much time with with how much time I spend alone. I’m able to focus on feeling better alone, confident in the decisions I’ve made, and hopefully turn that into a real plan to move to LA and act.
But here I am again, talking about what I want. A common aspect in my life is starting things and not finishing them. I start books, finish them only halfway; I have boatloads of poems (and short stories, two novels) that are around here somewhere; if you could see the drafts of blogs I’ve started… In the last year this has become apparent to me, and of course explains why I haven’t pursued acting to the degree I have wanted to. But I feel that I’ve been more honest to myself and others about my lack of motivation and I really think I can do something about it. I can’t act like a 15 year old anymore and I can’t get stuck at 27 either.
I’ve rediscovered photography and trotted my camera down to the carnival two weeks ago and got some pretty good shots. I’m just waiting to finish this roll so I can actually see my work. But this all started when I found 13 rolls of shot film two months ago, all waiting to be processed (see above), so it’ll be awhile before I see something developed.
There are plenty of blogs and poems in the works and I work on one or the other pretty much everyday – a line here, an update there. I have a month or so off from tutoring and I’m looking forward to that time to myself and my work.
(Oh, and I also rediscovered Outkast with Stankonia. Damn, why did I sleep on this?)
Ba Ba – Sigur Rós
Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) – Arcade Fire
There There – Radiohead
Panthers – Wilco
7/4 (Shoreline) – Broken Social Scene
Good Song – Blur
Born Into a Light – Ryan Adams & the Cardinals
She’s Electric – Oasis
Here Comes Your Man – Pixies
This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) – Talking Heads
Atoms for Peace – Thom Yorke
Black Milk – Massive Attack
Utopia – Goldfrapp
Skeletons – Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Astral Weeks – Secret Machines
(Not sure who designed the poster but it came out great.)
CalState San Bernardino, Palm Desert Campus is finally releasing their latest Sketchbook, their third volume of PDC student work. It’s so overdue that I’m not sure when it was originally to be published or even what I submitted for consideration. I’m sure I sent “Capone’s” and maybe “Tiger, Tiger” or even “The Moon Is the Truth of the Night,” but I don’t know what they’ve picked. The editor, Heather Benes – who, regardless of how late the book is, I know has been working damn hard on it – last told me that they were probably going to select two. We’ll see.
The gala is Friday, October 23rd. Starts at 5PM. Free food, free music, free Sean.
“In the last ten years I’ve become a different person. And why is that? I’ve worked too hard and too long, Nurse. I’m on my feet from till night; never any rest, and at night I lie under the blanket afraid they’ll drag me off to some patient. I haven’t had a single free day since we met. Who could help growing old? And life itself is dull, stupid, filthy…. It sucks you under. You’re surrounded by eccentrics, nothing but eccentrics; you live with them two or three years and bit by bit, imperceptibly, you become one too. It’s inevitable. Look, I’ve grown this huge mustache…. It’s stupid. I’ve become an eccentric, Nurse…. At least I’m not as stupid as this mustache, my brain’s still in place, thank God, but my feelings are dead. I don’t want anything, I don’t need anything, I don’t love anybody….”
Dr Astrov, Uncle Vanya
ze plan:
-move to a casita in Indio, 2-3 months.
-get a 9 to 5 in Los Angeles.
-move to Los Angeles, first time.
-pick up a part time job (Amoeba? Waiting tables?).
-work 40-60 hours for the first 6 months, survive and save money.
-chop away at those hours by going out for auditions, workshops, agencies.
I want to act; that’s what I think I’m supposed to be doing. Each day that I’m not in LA, not getting myself out there – anything other than acting is not work. I’m ready to give it a good try. It’ll be hard, but I’m not going there to wait tables, get discouraged, and go home. I think that for whatever talent I don’t have, I can make up with my charm and my ability to learn.
I wouldn’t call the last month a total writing slump; it may have felt that way initially but it was classical Sean, the Poet: write something, ignore it, and return to it and blast it to hell in one night. The work in question are two poems: “The Late Greats,” and “The Moon Is the Truth of the Night.” Both deal with my lackluster motivation, but in two settings: the career choices of “The Late Greats,” and my struggles with myself as a capable lover in “The Moon Is the Truth of the Night.”
As usual, Jen was very helpful with this process and she cleaned up “The Late Greats” into the state it’s in now. When she suggested that I not use “DJ” in the poem (er, she deleted them), I first thought it was a rude pull – that’s what the poem’s about! But part of this process, the “ignoring,” is key in forgetting what isn’t important, and when I read her revised edition I found my true work. However, “The Moon Is the Truth of the Night” is a piece I had unfinished at the time I went to Jen with the other, and it may still need work, but when I punched out that second section – I found my true work there, too.
While this was supposed to be my year where I evoked George Oppen with the completion of “This City Anew,” it feels that I’m going more towards Anne Sexton in my honesty and Charles Bukowski in my dreary and anger – which I’m not sure I feel consistently, if not just at that moment. The next poem, “Casanova,” is even further Bukowski. As long as I not yell at cars driving too fast, and hopefully return to “This City Anew” the umpteenth time, I should be okay. Or maybe I could write a bitter poem about how I never finished my one “masterpiece” and bring it full circle. (Joking.)
Even outside of work, this month has been busy. Erica and I threw a party the day before she left for Los Angeles to start her internship at MGM. While the distance and the stress of her job has been taxing on us, we’re both handling it pretty well. I’ve visited her twice now (took her to the Wiltern Theater this last weekend), and it’s evident that we are using both the distance and the reunions wisely. This summer is our run up to moving to LA – how close and when is still in the works. Also, my friends Kim and Andrew are getting hitched in Hawai’i and we’re going on an almost all comped flight and staying at an incredibly reduced Marriott (it’s good to have United Airlines muff up Erica’s flight last year/friends that work at Marriott).
Lately I’ve revisited my atheism and existentialism. Rather than treating it as something that is just understood about me, I’m viewing it as something to consider daily. This doesn’t mean just arguing with believers and laughing with other non-believers (both as a jerk), but instead I’ve gotten my head back into the writings of John Perry and Richard Dawkins, I’m writing argument/response pieces to typical questions (the problems of evil, free will, Pascal’s Wager, etc.). My raising, equally Catholic and critical, has lent me the tools to approach the Universe and who we are my way. Oh, I need to reread the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy too. (Seriously.)
Again, the play. I need to treat this season alone as a grand opportunity to research and develop the Bill Evans project. This last week I’ve added a stronger comedic element, hopefully something that will take the play to deeper dramatic levels by suckering the audience in and sucker punching them. It’ll only work if both the comedy and the dramatic climax are equally genuine. I’m thinking of the success of Lars and the Real Girl.
I finished Thomas E. Ricks’ Fiasco and it’s hard to say it was “good” to go over the details of the first three years of the botched Iraq War, but it was. On my plate: Richard Dawkins, John Perry, Charles Bukowski; Uzodinma Iweala’s novel Beasts of No Nation; The Chirs Farley Show (an oral history collected by his brother and a Jim Belushi biographer); Al Tony Gilmore’s Bad Nigger!: The National Impact of Jack Johnson. “What to read?” all before getting to Ricks’ follow-up, The Gamble, about the past three years of the war. But, I’m sure there’s a Bill Evans biography out there waiting for me – or is that my and Kelly’s play?
We had to put Mokie down last week. He was a great cat and he lived a long and lazy life. We miss him.
I’m in a slump now; I’ve not written anything since “Car lights” two weeks ago and I’m not even fully happy with that. I used to get really discouraged, like I wasn’t really a writer if I didn’t write everyday, or at least weekly. But then I read Raymond Carver’s “Work” and “Drinking While Driving,” and like most of Ray’s work, I treated them like our dialogue.
“Work”
for John Gardner, d. September 14, 1982
Love of work. The blood singing
in that. The fine high rise
of it into the work. A man says,
I’m working. Or, I worked today.
Or, I’m trying to make it work.
Him working seven days a week.
And being awakened in the morning
by his young wife, his head on the typewriter.
The fullness before work.
The amazed understanding after.
Fastening his helmet.
Climbing onto his motorcycle
and thinking about home.
And work. Yes, work. The going
to what lasts.
It’s been awhile since I’ve read “Work,” and this is my first reading after taking on a second job and working seven days a week. It has a different meaning tonight; I feel older. Yes, that has a good feeling, but I feel I’ve been too distracted or too excusing to work as hard as Carver did. But I still believe that I can only work (write) when it comes to me, and I know I’ve had some months in my life when all I did was work. It’s not any better or worse – it’s just “work.”
“Drinking While Driving”
It’s August and I have not
Read a book in six months
except something called The Retreat from Moscow
by Caulaincourt
Nevertheless, I am happy
Riding in a car with my brother
and drinking from a pint of Old Crow.
We do not have any place in mind to go,
we are just driving.
If I closed my eyes for a minute
I would be lost, yet
I could gladly lie down and sleep forever
beside this road
My brother nudges me.
Any minute now, something will happen.
I mistakenly remembered this reading “I have not written anything in six months,” but that doesn’t matter: “Any minute now, something will happen.”
Jen worked on a poem, a new form that destroys one word and explores all of its possible meanings. It came out really well. Not to try and trump her, but it reminded me of a section for the epic form of “This City Anew” that I wrote last year – a new form I called “say say” (which left me with the Wings’ song stuck in my head for ages). “When the earth grinds the sky,” like all of the other sections of “This City Anew,” is meant to be possible on its own. I’ve always felt that it was the most standalone (apart from the titular section) of the pieces.
Oddly, the first “say say” I wrote was about Raymond Carver. I was flying back from Missouri with my family and I showed it to my brother. I remember his eyes lighting up. I need to hold on to that. When I dig it up, I will post it.
Kevin Stetz sent this to me a few weeks ago.
Bill Evans interview; the return of Bill Nye; K. Stetz needs to embrace the initial; CBEST update
I discovered this Bill Evans interview (1966) when I was looking at Kelly and mine’s play, which is loosely based on the life and work of Evans. I found it interesting that he was not only as passionate about jazz as I had always hoped, but his opinion that jazz improvisation was just a revival of the classical form – lost simply because there were no equipment to “‘permanize’ or to ‘catch’ music” – that, because the music had to be written down, classical music abandoned its improvisational process.
While watching Discovery’s Planet Green (I know, give me a break right? Why can’t TV stations just stick to programming?), I saw a commercial for Bill Nye’s new show, Stuff Happens. Nye is one of the few heroes in my life, and I’ve met him twice, so this is very exciting.
Last Friday, Erica and I went to Water Canyon to catch Kevin Stetz’s gig. He played some oldies, a few new ones (including “Midnight Moonlight in the Morning,” one he showed me last month), and ended with a Neil Young cover. It’s nice to see someone so comfortable with their work and their talent. And, even with the occasional feedback, the man gets a lot out of one guitar.
I received my unofficial results the other day: I passed the CBEST. Oddly, I haven’t written much these last two weeks, and even odder is that, shortly after taking the test, I’m not sure I’m ready to be a teacher. Instead, I’ve decided to move to LA to pursue the talents I have – acting and writing. But, with the CBEST, I can now substitute teach, which will help me get a feel for that profession while I also avoid simply being a waiter while I wait to be discovered.
