Things people ought to do but don't

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Banging on the cage

I was talking to a new friend yesterday, Joe Edelman, who asked me to design a tiny piece of an ambitious and awesome interactive experience he’s working on down in the Bay Area. Asked me to do something “personal and real and true”, and when I expressed a hope that I could meet such a standard he said, “Sure.  Just keep not quite thinking of yourself as an artist.  I think that might be the trick.”

Freedom.

I went to a concert tonight: They Might be Giants, the first famous band I ever saw live when I was 16, still around, still playin’, still puttin’ out records. The sound mix was bad and too loud and my ears are still ringing. The show was fine, we all bopped around, we all love the songs but magic wasn’t happening, at least for me, until the encore.

There’s this funny charade that we of North America (and maybe other places too, dunno) perform in which musicians who are well-known play their “last song” and leave the stage, and then we the audience demand that they return and play more for us and they do, and then they leave again but we know that if we ask hard enough they’ll come back again and they do, sometimes not even bothering to pretend that they’re surprised or flattered because we all know the script, we rehearse it every time. I go back and forth between finding this hilariously phony and elegantly polite. A whole roomful of people agreeing on the right way to conduct a complex social interaction is impressive.

Anyway, I was thinking about this while we hollered for them to come back the first time and they did; they started playing (and, kind of, looking for the first time all night like they were having fun) and it clicked, the music lifted me, and I joined the crowd, once an aggregation of discrete mildly obnoxious geek-hip individuals, now a sea of flesh and a wave of noise I was awash in. And I remembered what it meant to be a molecule of crowd, faces turned up to the too-bright lights, letting the too-loud music pound in our chests and our abdomens, flinging our bare insides before the band and begging, please, please let us forget ourselves. We love you. Take us away and leave the world behind. Please, gods of music, take us. We’re on your side, whatever side that might happen to be. And the reason I haven’t been to a live show in ages is because I forgot I was ever looking for that release, it’s been long enough since I felt it that I didn’t remember it was a thing you could feel. And shit doesn’t matter any more, and we can’t stand still and we don’t care who knows, and the boundaries of our flesh dissolve, and we occupy the whole room to the ceiling. Let me clarify that I was flat sober. I dissolved in that room. And what’s more, I think I used to do that more often.

And that brief, one or two-song glimpse of freedom stands in stark contrast to the way I am otherwise. It’s like turning on the light and realizing that the room I’m in is much much bigger than I thought it was when I was huddling in the dark, not daring to move for fear of bumping into walls.

There aren’t walls for miles.

And I think: Music. Fuck theatre. When a mediocre live show by a tired and long-touring band can thus lead me to the wild joyful edge of the selfhood cliff (and I can’t remember the last time a play did that for me) I realize a little of why I’m drifting away from the theatre. I don’t want to be told stories any more; I want to be scooped up, pulverized, and sprinkled on the moon. And all the trappings of life—home, job, friends, and especially this business of being an artist—seem just like that, like traps, like anchors holding me to the safe and loathsome ground.

This may or may not be a productive or healthy frame of mind.

But an angry, sad, frustrated, recently re-invigorated animal scratches at the inside of my ribcage. I want to go on retreat by myself for six months. Learn to really sing. Dance to actual instruments every night. I’m dying slowly in front of this goddamn computer screen. Let me out. Let me out. Let me out.

Hey look! I gave a talk!

Okay, so this is kind of an experiment. This is the first I've posted it on my personal blog since I've moved it over to Squarespace, and I haven't taken the time yet to figure out how to make it its own site instead of having all the nebunele wrapper, so ignore the trappings if you're visiting the site directly. I'll get around to that.

But hey, check it out! I gave a talk at Ignite Seattle in December and they just posted the video of it online!

http://vodpod.com/watch/5439821-alissa-mortenson-making-collaborative-art-that-doesnt-stuck-mp4

You can't see my slides real well, but they were mostly stolen images anyway so it's probably just as well...

xoxo!

Alissa

The renaissance of the undeep

Something's happened to me lately. Maybe just since I turned 30, maybe it's been happening for a few months or a few years. It's a series of symptoms that I fear might be connected.

These are them:

-I am unworried about how good of an Artist (pronounced ah-tiste) I am.

-I am enjoying pop music.

-I am unapologetically reading lowbrow fiction.

-I find it easy to kill time without being productive or feeling guilt.

It's my own personal renaissance. It's a decline of snobbery and a return to enjoyment. It is also, and this is the part that worries me just a little, an embracing of mediocrity?

I feel like I've had lots of posts along these lines in the past year or two, actually, now that I think about it. I've been so goddamn worried about Achieving Things and Becoming Great that I had been forgetting to Enjoy Life. Even though I have carefully constructed my life to be as enjoyable as possible. I have surrounded myself with people I adore. I am living in a wonderful house. I consciously fought for a day job that earned me enough money without demanding all of my time, and that I enjoy, and that doesn't begin until afternoon. And now I have one. Teaching math to kids is awesome. I'm engaged to the man of my dreams. And I keep looking around and being like, oh no! I'm reading this book all night instead of Sleeping or Getting Things Done! and then I'm like, wait, my life is awesome. I was saying all along that I wished I had more time to read for pleasure. No Immediate Action Required.

Is that...selfish? Now that my life is so great, maybe I should start feeling guilty about how not-great some other peoples' lives are.

Or...something. This seems really young to be entering retirement.

Masterwork

The last couple of days I've been having a really good time drafting a script for the current theatre project I'm working on, One Forbidden Thing. It's getting exciting! And I'm noticing again this phenomenon: every time I write, and it's moving along, I'm convinced that what's coming out of my fingers is just brilliant. On some level, I have to be, or it wouldn't make it out of my head and onto the page. It has to seize me, delight me, convince me that it is powerful and funny and important or whatever, or I can't bear to write it and I sit there with a growing desire to check Facebook.

The feeling has little bearing on the value of the piece I am composing. There have been times I've gone to bed convinced that whatever I just produced is the most amazing thing ever written, only to look at it in the dreary light of morning and understand its irrevocable mediocrity or suffocating boredom. And then there have been times when I've wrestled with myself, slogging through distraction and depression, to churn out something barely usable, that the next day looks pretty all right.

Anyway, predictably, there's an emotional high involved in feeling like I am currently producing a masterwork. It's addictive. It comes easier, that feeling, the more often I am writing. It's sOOoooo, God, SO hard to get started, but then it's grind grind grind and then it's chug chug chug and then it starts to fly and that's better than anything.

I haven't felt that so much with writing theatre lately. Essays and some limited poetry and good long emails have come easily and satisfyingly to me, with that coincident grandiose love of what I am making, but writing Friend's Enemy, for example, was a chore nearly the whole time. In fact, if I think back over the times I've had primary responsibility over the text of a significantly-sized project (not that often, as I have been blessed with some incredibly talented wordy collaborators over the past many years), the last time I felt the sing of a large and glorious vision was maybe back in college, when I was proudly assembling a dialogue amongst 20th century poets to be performed onstage by a nude chorus about simple delight in humanity (thank God that one never saw production; it would have been a disaster.)

The point is, the last day or so of working on the One Forbidden Thing script, the singing came! The angel choir descended! I see before me the way through this beautiful, shimmering, profound, incredibly complex play and it is WONDERFUL! It will be my MASTERWORK! I understand EVVVVERYTHING!

So that means nothing, really, about the result. I'm currently nine pages into a very rough first draft that exists more in my head than on the page, and most of the substance is being generated by the actors of the ensemble in rehearsal. But it sure is nice to stop writing, not because I'm out of ideas, but because I'm out of time for the day, nice to have it on my mind as I try to sleep, nice to WANT to talk about it instead of dreading people asking me about it. There's something to work on in every inch of it, and I waste time bouncing back and forth because I suddenly understand the way to tie THIS together, and introduce THAT, and develop THIS...and I have to force myself to focus on whatever little section I decide to stop on.

So here's to inspiration, when and where it chooses to descend, and may I make as fertile a home for it as I possibly can for the rest of my life forever, amen.

In other projects: in case I haven't pestered you about it, I started an advice column about dealing with people. Which means that I am twiddling my thumbs waiting for questions to answer. So far I've gotten two. Come on! You've got a question, right? Everybody does! I'll even take silly ones! Or serious ones! The site is http://whatifiwrote.blogspot.com and you can send questions to whatifiwrote at gmail dot com and it would make me very happy if you did.

Love 'n insomnia,

Alissa