Nebunele.com

I think that I am going sane or maybe going in

Someone please tell me to go to bed now

I made some cookies today

All the cocky young internet comics stormed my world again tonight

Like Pandora’s box, I gotta close this machine again

before hope slips out

I had the super-cool opportunity to go to Olympia to hang out in the state capitol on Thursday. There was a bill up for debate in the state House and the Senate about renewing a hotel/motel tax that’s been a large source of arts funding in King County for the last decade or two, and a call to action in the nonprofit community sent us all scurrying down there to show up in support of the bill (which the hotels and motels, quite understandably, would like to die a nice quiet death.) Anyway, the experience of sitting in the legislative session was surprisingly awesome. I have this general notion of legislative politicians as being the doofy sum of their dorky/dumbed-down campaigns, and was pleasantly surprised to find out that in fact, our state government is run by people who seem reasonably competent and intelligent! Who knew? For each bill that was up for debate, the chairwoman called up testimony for and against, and then the representatives would ask perceptive and well-informed questions of those there to debate the bill. There was a woman sitting at the side of the room whose nameplate had the title “research analyst” and it appeared to be her job to answer all the informational questions about the content of the bills themselves. I kind of want her job! Actually, Mom, this would be an awesome job for you. She was there to know all the bills inside and out, anticipate and research circumstantial questions (”is one of the proposed sites of effect on the Indian reservation?”) and explain the information to the lawmakers in the room who don’t have time to research all that. Holy moses! What power!

The other nice thing was that the architecture of the capitol building (and the corporations building/office of the Secretary of State) was lofty and grand and white-marbled and gold-lettered and columned and beautiful. I know it’s naive, I know it is, but I walked in and felt a sense of greatness and accomplishment, and pride in what we flawed humans have made of ourselves despite enormous logistical difficulty. I mean, our government is messed-up and bureaucratic and inefficient and full of compromise, and is responsible for many horrible things, but at least it functions, and some stuff does get done. That’s not trivial when you’re representing millions of people who all disagree about what, exactly, should be done, and how. I felt, wandering under those high ceilings across those impeccably clean white marble floors, a bit like I feel when I walk into a cathedral–I may not agree with everything that goes on here, but god damn this reverent setting gives me hope and a sense of faith.

Crossing the campus of the capitol, though, Bret and I had to laugh at the old oak trees growing next to the pedestrian path. They all sported huge, unwieldy branches that would certainly have broken and crashed onto the sidewalk or overbalanced the trees themselves had they not been held up by serious and elaborate metal-and-concrete scaffoldings, permanently installed. How like a bureaucracy.

Rubbernecking with the best of ‘em,
Alissa

…but it sounded so good, and I wanted an excuse to linger at Adam & Lena’s new place. I was doing better with getting up at reasonable hours, but here it is 5:18, and I have a brunch date with Sparky at 10, and the amount of sleeping I’m getting tonight is shrinking steadily.

I tried to figure out the name of that play I saw in college that inspired me so. I think it has the word “Requiem” in the title. I saw it at the UW between 1998 and 2000. But I can’t find a list of their old seasons online, and I looked at their slideshow of production photos but there weren’t any photos from that production. It was about painters who lived in the 19th? or early 20th century. There is a monologue in that show that I want to learn. But I don’t know the title or the playwright. I saw it with Adam, and later that month we fought about money, partially because of something I said to him that was about a conversation we had had immediately after the show. Ringing any bells, people who don’t know what I’m talking about?

(Sigh) it’s my personal Lost Play. I had a great moment watching it, an epiphany about being a woman, and I’m crushed that I can’t go back and look at it again. The information doesn’t seem too impenetrable…ooh, wait! Why don’t I just search on all play titles with the word “requiem”in them? There couldn’t be that many…

Huh. The internet tells me about four plays with “requiem” in the title…for a heavyweight, for a nun, for us, and for the innkeeper. None of those is the play I’m talking about. Shoot, maybe it didn’t have requiem in the title after all. Argh, I just did a search in various play databases for plays about painters and got a little overwhelmed.

So here’s what I remember…there’s this girl painter who wants to be taken as seriously as the boy painters. She enters a (men-only? maybe) salon contest, anonymously, with her painting of light. But her painting is derided as competent but frivolous, and the monologue I remember is her recounting her understanding of why…she had chosen shiny things to paint in her still-life, in order to capture various qualities of light, and had without thinking chosen objects that are considered feminine–a hairbrush, a necklace, a mirror. So that even though the judges did not suspect that it was a woman who painted it, her painting was considered less serious because of her womanly subject matter, and some dude who painted light coming off a haystack or something won the prize. And there was another bit in the play about women not being allowed to attend the life-drawing classes in school because there were naked people and it wasn’t appropriate…except that of course women were allowed to model, nude, in those same classes they were barred from studying in.

Anyway. Anyone know this play? Help! I’m going back to bed to try to sleep some more.

sleepy hugs
Alissa

Late update: Scofie, in the comments, totally showed off his superior ability to navigate the UW’s web presence. The play I’m talking about is Dream of a Common Language. Scofie, you’re a genius. Now I have to go read it and see if it’s as good as I remember!

Taking Claytie to the airport at 4:30, and haven’t managed to fall asleep yet. Seeing as how it’s 4:20 now, I suppose I’ll give it another try when I come back. My sleep schedule’s been all funny lately.

Medea Knows Best opened tonight, and nothing blew up! This is in great contrast to my expectations. We had a sold-out house and a partial standing ovation. There was a reviewer from the Seattle Weekly there; I hope he noticed the people standing.

It’s funny, though; I seem to have misplaced my sense of the play as a whole. I came offstage thinking, “Why am I doing this play, again?” So my triumph at its apparent success was somewhat muted tonight. This isn’t the first time I’ve asked myself that question, and so far every time the inspiration comes meandering back when it wants to. So I expect it to return this time too. But at the moment, feeling bewildered instead of celebratory. Why make a play about Medea? About images and ideals? Are we really asking questions I don’t already know the answer to? And then, of course, it becomes: why am I doing theatre, again? What’s so great about this art that using a different medium can’t accomplish the same thing better? And I don’t know the answer, tonight, at 4:25 on Saturday morning, not having slept since the opening show and the cast party. I may not be in the best mental state to analyze my career choices.

Any other theatre people out there ever feel deflated instead of stoked by an opening? Does it mean anything? I can’t remember, now. I vaguely remember feeling this way after some renditions of the Secret Ruths, but usually only after I felt like I had given a substandard performance. But I did all right on stage, tonight. So…

Well, so keep moving forward. This is where faith becomes important. I trust the self that has been inspired by this stuff enough that when the inspiration takes a vacation I won’t collapse. I will be re-inspired. I know because I know. And I think of Mother Theresa and her years and years of agonizing doubt and how she kept doing what she thought she ought to, even when the inspiration and her connection to God was gone, and I think, “did she do the right thing?” and I think, “yes.” and I think, “was she happy?” and I think, “no.” and I think, “is it maybe a little ludicrous to compare myself to Mother Theresa?” and I think, “It’s time to take Claytie to the airport.”

Bye!
Alissa

It’s so easy! My buddy Dave has a buddy Rebecca who lives in London and blogs haikus. Never met the girl, two degrees of separation, love her. Internet makes celebrities out of quiet people.

I should go to bed. I’m not tired. Cognitive dissonance.

Tomorrow: finish Act II (again.)

Rehearsals had been rough for a little bit, have been pretty nice lately, but our musician quit before everything got nice again. Seeking another one urgently. Know anyone? We open on the 7th…

Avoiding the dishes,
Alissa

Omigosh! I almost forgot! The whole reason that I opened up my blog in the first place wasn’t to post the Erin poem at all, but this quote I found yesterday in Tin House, volume 8, number 4. Because it suits the Agnes de Mille post I wrote a few days ago, and also some of the posts before that. This is it:

(It’s from an interview with John Banville. Who apparently is a famous novelist. I haven’t read any of his books. He is appeallingly (no typo) arrogant throughout most of the interview, talks about being dissatisfied with previous books, and this is what they end the article with.)

“Jennifer Levasseur/Kevin Rabalais: You’ve talked about disliking your books. Can the artist hope for more than failure?

JB: As Beckett said, ‘Fail again. Fail better.’ It’s all we can do. Everybody fails. The acknowledgment of that failure is very important. Perfection is not of this world. It’s the quality of the failure that counts.”

I like this because it resolves something for me about this point of view, namely: if all we can hope to do is fail, why try very hard? I do find the notion “perfection is impossible” both comforting and freeing in my own work, so I’d like to be able to reconcile it with honest effort and a thing to strive for. But this is why to try: the quality of the failure counts. My next play won’t be perfect, but it’ll be a better failure. That’s worth working for. Thanks, Sam and John.

Quick! Poll: it’s 8:30am, I’m getting over a cold, and I haven’t slept all night. I have a lunch date at noon and a date date tonight at 9:30. I also have an hour or two of work to do to prepare for next week’s fundraiser. Do I a) go back to bed and do some more trying-to-sleep for a couple hours? or do I b) resign myself to skipping a night of sleep and maybe nap in the afternoon, after my lunch date?

decisions, decisions.
Alissa

Well, it’s 8am, and no sleep for me all night. I’ve been trying since two. I blame the cold medicine I took two–no, three days ago for throwing my schedule all out of whack. Hence the 5am poetry yesterday and here, now, the 8am poetry today. I gotta start sleeping at night or I’ll inundate my so-far-faithful audience.

A poem for Erin

She knew the dress would be too tight.

It was a knitted dress, homemade lining sewn in,
and spying it in her grandmother’s cedar chest
she knew also that it would look well on her.
That too-hot day,
the too-thick garment—
alone in her grandmother’s house,
she laid out the dress on the bed
and abandoned her shorts in a crumpled pile
on the bedroom floor.
the dress inched over her shoulders—oh, tight, but smooth,
a tug or two wedging it in place.
Her breasts squashed in it, her arms
restricted to 45 degrees,
she regarded herself in the mirror,
a funny old-fashioned girl,
comely, in an old knit dress. A fly
buzzed at the closed half of the half-open window.
No breeze stirred the gauze curtains.

When her grandmother returned,
the girl, in shorts again, shamefaced, explained.
The dress, too hot, too close, would not yield.
Difficulty breathing, half an hour’s stifling lonely struggle,
half-clothed and her sweat soaking into the old dress,
the delicate heirloom, the old treasure.
The clinging of the lining.
Trapped. She could not move her arms.
Discomfort, dehydration, panic. Scissors.
Her grandmother’s astonishment.
“but I made that dress in 1950…”
“I know, Grandma. I’m sorry.”

-Alissa

…so I actually wrote at the end of my last entry that I was finally tired, that it was incomplete but I was going to finish the rest of that entry next time I sat down, but I just reread it and it totally doesn’t say that, it just stops in the middle of the narrative. I don’t know what happened to the rest of that text. Did I accidentally delete it? Did I only imagine typing it? Very strange, what happens to the brain at 2 in the morning. I was pretty sure I had said that.

Well, anyway, here I am back to finish it! I had lots of espresso yesterday and a too-rich dinner last night, which I think is why I woke at 4:30 in a mild bout of gastronomic discomfort. That has passed, but so has sleep. So I am here with my blog. This is a continuation of my previous entry.

So the tower was there after the smoke had cleared. I was there at the front, nervous, excited. Minutes passed.

Then the ground at the base of the tower was glowing red & yellow, simmering, heaving
with flame that I couldn’t see distinctly. I imagined rumbling. The tower itself was untouched by flame, but it seemed a bit like a rocket near takeoff.

There followed an artfully constructed fireworks show from the base of the tower, which did well for building suspense but seemed to go on rather too long (I found out from other friends later that there was music playing during this on the populated side of the exhibit; that probably would have made the timing of the fireworks more sensical. Still, though, I’m a fan of the expectant hush that was on my side. We were tense. Waiting.)

The fireworks died down and there was nothing again. A minute crawled by. Another minute. I was breathless; I could not speak. The sense of something enormous about to happen was overwhelming.

And

then

it

BLEW.

The explosion filled my entire field of vision. There was a bright mushroom cloud at the base of it and a second one on top. Mez took a picture of this as it was beginning that doesn’t do it justice. Maybe this one gives a little better of an idea. The heat created by it was so intense that I could not remain sitting upright; I dropped back to my back and looked up at the sky that was suddenly, violently, totally consumed in flame. In that moment, the incessant voice of critical analysis that had been chattering in my brain for all of Burning Man was incinerated. Just blasted out of my head. I felt vulnerable and adrift and like I had been punched in the stomach and the head at the same time. My gut was reeling.

I sat up when the explosion was finished (must have been a few seconds, but it seemed like minutes) and saw four great jets of flame, the height of the derrick, just blasting away, surrounding but not yet consuming the thing. The wood, astonishingly, still seemed intact, untouched, despite being bathed in intense flame. It was like all this fire was happening so suddenly that the wood didn’t have time to warm up or catch on. And as I looked at this shocking fire, this raw, too-fast burn that hadn’t even gotten to the wood yet, I was suddenly enraged. With my critical voice knocked out of me, all that was left was the experience of this massive fire, this incomprehensible, overwhelming power that felt like it was burning inside me somehow. And I was full of anger and bitterness and overwhelmed with helplessness about our relationship, as a culture, to oil. I watched the silhouettes of these twisted, frenzied worshipers seem to dance to this unnatural fire. They were unable to turn away, unable to do anything about the power of the destructive force of this material but glory in it, be swept up in its power as I was myself at that very moment, be entranced by its poison. I was furious and there were tears in my eyes and I was in agony. And after minutes of this vertical inferno, the wood of the tower finally caught–I think I saw the bottom sections burning first and then finally the top, though the details are hazy now. And eventually the jet flames died and it was just the tower burning. We were far enough away that we couldn’t see individual flames; there was just the tower outlined in glowing red-orange-yellow-white, burning light into my retinas, burning futility and anger into my being. Giant showers of sparks and massive chunks of 2×4s detached themselves from the structure to rain directly onto the oblivious, upturned faces and arms of the worshipers. It was awful. It was the most visceral and least intellectual understanding I have ever had of what this fuel does to us, what it makes us do; an emotional understanding of lives lost over this, like a crazed sacrificial dance, the blood we spill for oil and the damage we do and the passion, the romance, the glory that we do it with. It was me burning in there, and I was so clearly one of those twisted figures, dancing to this dark, evil dance, unable to turn away, sobbing uselessly as I trod innocent still-living bodies into pieces, into the earth. Like the figures had been doing all week, I was burning on the inside. It was like being swept painfully, brutally away in a crashing tidal wave of fire. It was…it is impossible to describe what it was like. I reread what I’ve written and the enormity of it escapes me. I was both scarred and purified in that flame. I was both implicated and redeemed. Not forgiven, but cauterized. Changed. It is the most viscerally powerful experience of art I have ever had or expect to have.

We watched the thing burn until finally the whole structure leaned, toppled and crashed. I did not return the next day to visit the now-lonesome figures.

here’s one of the burning figures; here’s another. And another from above.

Thanks, Mez, for the photos. Check out his other pictures of burning man in that group, if you have time!

xoxo
We are all damned
-Alissa

Trying to get on an earlier sleep schedule just means a day of punishment, I think. I thought if I went to bed at 12:30 I’d be able to wake up at 8:30 without too much fuss. But I know myself better…when used to crashing at 2am, my brain simply will not quit at midnight. Well, I tried. I’m just going to have to be sleepy in the morning.

I’ve been meaning to post anyway for ages. I wanted to write about Burning Man, which was so built up for me over the course of the last ten years that the reality could be nothing but deflating, despite the fact that I got to go flying around in a little plane and saw one of my favorite pieces of art ever there and stayed up past dawn on consecutive nights and roamed around in the desert–my car is still coated with playa-dust on the inside. Black Rock City is a lovely place, if a little obsessed with itself.

The thought of describing the art that I liked is daunting. I’m going to give it a shot, though. I’m afraid of boring myself with it, because it takes a lot of words to describe. Feel free to skip this entry if it bores you, too.

So one of the first things I saw, the first night I arrived, was a 100-foot wooden tower built to look like an oil derrick. You couldn’t miss it; it was well outside the main city horseshoe, but it was gigantic. Also at its base were huge metal worshipers…maybe 30 feet tall? industrial-style (gears and chains and so forth were the building materials) human beings in contorted postures of ecstatic worship. The sculptures had fire pulsing inside at various chakra points, and there were levers and buttons that onlookers could fiddle with to produce giant fireball-gouts of flame from out one fellow’s head and another woman’s gut. One woman’s chest pulsed with flame like an apocalyptic heartbeat.

If you join the line at the base of the tower, you are eventually allowed to climb it and survey the whole of Black Rock City from the top. This was a surreal event for me, as I had arrived in the desert mere hours ago, and to see the city from above was more or less to look down on a giant, hyper video arcade. At night, people and bicycles are decorated with glowing, flashing, and pulsing colored lights so that the art cars roaming the desert sans headlights don’t run them over. Most of the big art installations and all of the on-playa dance clubs also had considerable multicolored wattage pouring forth. The city itself is like a circle with one side rubbed out from 10:00 to 2:00, maybe two miles in diameter? and art is scattered throughout the city and far beyond it, so that you can travel a mile or two out into the open playa to visit more remote installations (this faux-derrick was only about a third out, compared to some of the farther-away installations.)

So anyway. From the top, you can look down on those frenzied worshipers and the much smaller flesh people milling among them, and see the panorama of the crazy city, and feel mild vertigo. Very nice. I climbed down and went on looking at other things in the city up close.

Now, like most wooden art in BRC, this derrick was slated to burn at the end of the week, the night before the Man burned. That day, though, there was an intense white-out dust storm (yet another apocolyptic experience that was maybe the best of all) that had delayed their preparations for that event, so the burn was delayed until after the Man burned on Saturday. I’m happy about that, because the Man would have been an awful anticlimax if I’d seen this first.

(Actually, the Man was already an anticlimax on its own. I wasn’t expecting much from it…and it didn’t let me down. Funny that the thing that started this whole crazy event is sort of an afterthought now. (and I think that would have been true even if he hadn’t been pre-burned this year.))

So after the Man burned on Saturday night, I and a few friends biked over to the derrick to see the show. The side facing the city was bound to be crowded, so we biked over to the far side of it. The Rangers had established a wide perimeter around the thing, and we were right at the edge of the cleared area. No one was behind us, and to either side were people widely spaced. I understand that being on the city side of this event was a vastly different and far more crowded experience.

Now, all day I had been hearing rumors about this event. They were using some ridiculous amount of rocket fuel to not just light it on fire, but to really explode it. The perimeter they had set up around the thing was so big I couldn’t see or hear the people opposite me on the circle, yet my friend (who has experience treating burn victims) didn’t trust even this generous distance and was even farther back from the edge than Mez & I, who were right up on it, talking to the Ranger who was on guard against folks suicidally rushing into the circle. From where we were, the figures of the metal worshipers were clearly visible, though less than hand-sized (a la “I’m skvishing your head”) and the tower was still of considerable size, field-of-vision-wise.

Nothing in Black Rock City starts on time. It was quiet where we were, and as the minutes flowed nonchalantly by with nothing happening, there was a growing sense of peaceful expectation. Half an hour or an hour passed from the time the thing was supposed to go. Finally, we saw a vehicle (a moped?) drive into the circle, and out the other side. Dim figures were visible moving quickly away from the structures in the center, out to the edge of the circle. Everybody stopped talking. And we waited.

I don’t really remember noticing the smoke start to rise, but it covered the base of the tower. Then it covered the bottom third of the tower, and the twisted worshipers disappeared into it. The cloud rose inexorably until it was covering the tower, and I realized it was getting bigger side to side too–then I realized it wasn’t necessarily getting bigger, it was just coming toward us. In a moment the stars were consumed in the creeping greyness and we were engulfed in a cloud of uncomfortably chemical-smelling smoke, and I thought nervously of my friend sitting 50 feet behind me, and wondered if I wasn’t making a stupid choice by trusting the perimeter set by strangers whose credentials I hadn’t bothered to familiarize myself with. What if they were incompetent? What if this smoke was flammable and they hadn’t counted on the wind? But I sat where I was, resigned to dying at Burning Man for my stupidity, being *pretty* sure I was going to survive but entertaining notions of how many people would die if the flames came out this far.

The smoke cleared in about a minute, and we saw the tower again, motionless, intact.

Here’s an experience I’ve had a few times: I invite a friend out to see a play with me, a friend who doesn’t go to a lot of theatre. The play is mediocre or bad. I am apologetic about dragging my friend out to see it, but they demur–in fact, they thought it was great! They really enjoyed it!

This is disappointing to me, and I’m only just starting to be able to articulate to myself why. I am not disappointed in my non-theatre-going friends’ taste. But because I have been lifted to the heights of my soul by theatre, been dashed on the rocks of reality by theatre, been awestruck, altered, asked to change my whole way of seeing the world by theatre, it’s disappointing to me that this mediocre or competently done bit of drivel is all my friend has ever been led to expect from theatre.

It’s like, you know, when there’s this utterly magical place you know about, with an amazing view of the ocean that’ll rock you to the core of your being. And there’s someone really special you want to share it with, and you plan the day for weeks, and finally–finally! the day comes, and you drive or walk or fly to the place–and it’s socked-in fog. You can’t see five feet. And your special friend looks around, and inhales, and nods, and smiles, and says, “This is great!” And they’re not just being polite, they really mean it, they like it a lot.

But it’s not the thing you wanted to show them. And no matter how much you explain about how great the other thing is, they can’t possibly understand without seeing it. And you’re still alone in the vast beauty of the thing you wanted so badly to share, even though they think they’re with you. And it’s frustrating.

So, I don’t know. I could write something bitter about how so much theatre today is crap that it’s no wonder nobody goes any more blah blah blah, but I hate that shit. That’s all of art, right? A hundred failures for every success, and it’s kind of more beautiful that way, and even the worst failures aren’t worthless.

I just wish…I don’t know…I wish that everyone would go see, that hundred-and-first time, instead of giving up around sixty-three. But when I take my friend, and they are pleased by number two, I know they’re going to give up soon unless they get lucky and see #101 early, out of order. Because my friends are smart! They won’t be satisfied with mediocrity for super long. And I can talk until the roof of my mouth dries out, but there’s no reason for them to have any faith in more magic existing than they’ve already witnessed. So there’s a little bit of desperation in me when I take people to plays, because I want so badly for them to be taken and lifted, and I feel like I only have so many chances before they start wanting to do other stuff.

But maybe I am being snobby and arrogant. Maybe I don’t have an exclusive, and maybe, they really, they genuinely were moved by that play we just saw that I didn’t think much of. Isn’t it a little righteous of me to think that I’ve seen something they haven’t, that they couldn’t possibly understand until they see it themselves?

But I do, I do feel that way sometimes. I don’t know if I’m right. But I feel that way sometimes.

-Alissa

next day update: Yeah, so my good friend Dave says, and is right: All this time I’m asking if I’m arrogant to think I’m seeing something other people haven’t. But of course, when they like the play, they are seeing something that I’m not. Of course! And I am humbled to be exposed as so egocentric. :p Thanks for the reality check…it’s true. And so from now on I must remember to ask “what is it? what did you see?” and get knocked out of my box.