“It was on purpose that I started looking miserable, humiliated, hounded, and haunted, bedeviled, bewildered, and at my wit’s end. Some other comedians can get away with laughing at their own gags. Not me. The public just will not stand for it. And that is all right with me. All of my life I have been happiest when the folks watching me said to each other, ‘Look at the poor dope, wilya?’
Because of the way I looked on the stage and screen the public naturally assumed that I felt hopeless and unloved in my personal life. Nothing could be farther from the fact. As long back as I can remember I have considered myself a fabulously lucky man. From the beginning I was surrounded by interesting people who loved fun and knew how to create it. I’ve had few dull moments and not too many sad and defeated ones.”
-Buster Keaton, in his autobiography My Wonderful World of Slapstick (1960)
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Free Will
Everyone, Andrew, lives the life of their choosing.
Not just what they chose, but what they're choosing.
Game on,
The Universe
Not just what they chose, but what they're choosing.
Game on,
The Universe
Monday, October 25, 2010
not giving a fuck
In dim times, Japan's young men search for a new model
By Chico Harlan
Monday, October 25, 2010; A1
TOKYO - Something is happening to Japan's young men. Compared with the generation that came before, they are less optimistic, less ambitious and less willing to take risks. They are less likely to own a car, want a car, or drive fast if they get a car. They are less likely to pursue sex on the first date - or the third. They are, in general, less likely to spend money. They are more likely to spend money on cosmetics.
Japan's young men mystify their girlfriends and their bosses. They confound the advertisers who aim products at them. They've been scrutinized and categorized by social commentators, marketing consultants and the government. And they unnerve just about everybody who makes long-term projections about Japan's flagging birthrate and fading economy. Japan will grow or falter, economists and sociologists say, upon the shoulders of these mild, frugal, sweet-mannered men.
To hear the analysts who study them tell it, Japanese men ages 20 to 34 are staging the most curious of rebellions, rejecting the 70-hour workweeks and purchase-for-status ethos that typified the 1980s economic boom. As the latest class of college graduates struggles to find jobs, a growing number of experts are detecting a problem even broader than unemployment: They see a generation of men who don't know what they want.
Japan earned its fortune a generation ago through the power of office warriors, the so-called salarymen who devoted their careers to one company. They wore dark suits; they joined for rowdy after-hours booze fests with co-workers; they often saw little of their families. These are the fathers of Japan's young men.
But among business leaders and officials, there is a growing understanding that the earlier work-for-fulfillment pattern has broken down. The economy's roar turned into a yawn. Concern about Japan's future replaced giddy national pride. As a result, this generation has lost "the willingness to sacrifice for the company," said Jeff Kingston, author of the recently published book "Contemporary Japan."
Kingston added: "And now as Japan begins to unravel in a sense, young people realize that the previous paradigm doesn't work. But they aren't sure what comes next. They've seen what amounts to a betrayal in Japan."
Striving for balance
And so, instead of fantasizing about riches, Japan's young men now fantasize about balanced lives and time for their families and quaint hobbies. As they do, Japanese women are catching up. This month, the government said single women younger than 30 were, for the first time, earning more on average than their male counterparts.
Yuizo Matsumoto, 24, learned about the differences between old and young values when he worked for a small food development company. Matsumoto studied the way trace ingredients and artificial flavorings change a product's taste. He developed salad dressings and fruit juices. He liked his job, with one major complaint: He worked 14 hours a day, often on Saturdays as well. He worked so hard, he didn't have time to job-hunt for alternatives. So in July, with the support of his parents, he told his boss he was quitting.
"My boss said to me, 'If you quit this wonderful company you'll never succeed in life,' " Matsumoto said. "I think the concept itself of quitting is alien to them. I think it's very normal for somebody from the older generation to stick with something whether he's happy or not."
Many in Japan's older generation deride the young for listlessness, even a lack of what is thought of as traditionally male behavior. Playing to that characterization, some media accounts of the transformation note the extremes of behavior: how one in four engaged men now opts for a pre-wedding spa treatment; how young men host dessert-tasting clubs; how, given a hypothetical $1,000 to spend and a list of possible purchases, a lot of young men would choose a high-end rice cooker.
Similar to metrosexuals
But Japan's modern man, separated from the statistics, cuts an endearing profile. Pop culture writer Maki Fukasawa first wrote about the changing male gender identity in 2006, coining a shorthand term for the new man ("a herbivore" - gentle and cautious). Now Fukasawa, who has surveyed young Japanese men about their purchasing preferences, defends the herbivores' nobility. "The people of the older generation would buy things, consume things, even fall in love for status," Fukasawa said. "However, these young people have no desire for status. . . . Maybe we're searching for new values. This is a more sustainable model."
This isn't about sexual orientation. According to a 2009 survey from market research firm M1 F1 Soken, almost half of Japanese men ages 20 to 34 identify themselves as herbivores. No matter their sexual preferences, herbivores tend to be less overtly sexual. Many say they do not prioritize physical relationships. They're more likely to buy gifts for their mothers than for their significant others.
Japan's herbivores bear some resemblance to the metrosexuals familiar in America. Like metrosexuals, they pay a lot of attention to how they look and how they dress - with a preference for flannel-patterned shirts, bought first-hand but made to look second-hand, and tight-fitting pants. But herbivores reflect a wider societal movement.
And, as it turns out, even those who identify themselves as more traditional men, rather than herbivores, are a lot different from their fathers.
Like Shinsuke Kanemura, 25, a jockish graduate from the elite Kyoto University, who met his friend for a 4 p.m. ice cream before beginning his night shift. And Akira Tanaka, 26, a "carnivore" who ridicules the herbivorous desire to "blend into the atmosphere."
"I was brought up in a family where, if you're a man, you ought to act like a man," Tanaka said. He works as a hairstylist.
Those who have rejected the old model, though, haven't yet discovered a new model - a way to earn a comfortable living without losing a quality life. Much as they loathe the office place's stifling social obligations, Japan's young men - according to the latest government statistics - prefer lifelong employment to any alternative, mostly because they value a safe option over a risky one. Japan's dim economic climate, experts say, has spawned a generation of unsentimental job-seekers who see only a spectrum of flawed options.
Little income
This demographic has remained elusive for automakers, brewers and other manufacturers. According to Tokyo's Metropolitan Police, between 1998 and 2007, the number of driver's licenses in Japan increased by 1 million. But the number dropped by 30,000 for people age 20 and by 40,000 for people age 25. People in their 20s, according to government statistics, consume less than half the alcohol of twenty-somethings in 1980.
Yoshio Kanda, 28, a wedding photographer from Osaka, says he feels "awkward" when talking to people from the bubble generation. He describes a sense of opposite values. He notices this most, he says, "when we go out drinking."
"People of an older generation, whatever they say or do, it's to the max," Kanda said. "Our generation, we don't spend money to the max and we don't drink to the max. We feel the need to save. At the same time, it's not cool to be throwing up on the street after you've been drinking."
More than the earlier generation, Japan's young men, according to marketing consultants, value close friendships and memorable experiences. One recent beer commercial depicts a hiking trip. Another shows a bunch of pals, hanging out at somebody's home.
But there's another factor, too: Japan's young men have little money to spend. Only 3.5 percent of men ages 25 to 34 make more than the average workers' household income of about 6 million yen (or $73,600) per year, according to National Tax Agency.
Matsumoto, the former food developer, has only his unemployment stipend, which expires in three months. He hopes to find a new job before then. So far, he's interviewed for one position and applied for five more.
He admits there's a chance his next job could also require 14-hour workdays. He wouldn't want to ask direct questions about time off during an interview.
Matsumoto shrugged.
"I never thought my job was the priority - that it was everything in my life," he said. "I want my private life to feel enriched as well. . . . I feel that the system itself is built for the older generation, but the young people just go into it because they have no other choice."
By Chico Harlan
Monday, October 25, 2010; A1
TOKYO - Something is happening to Japan's young men. Compared with the generation that came before, they are less optimistic, less ambitious and less willing to take risks. They are less likely to own a car, want a car, or drive fast if they get a car. They are less likely to pursue sex on the first date - or the third. They are, in general, less likely to spend money. They are more likely to spend money on cosmetics.
Japan's young men mystify their girlfriends and their bosses. They confound the advertisers who aim products at them. They've been scrutinized and categorized by social commentators, marketing consultants and the government. And they unnerve just about everybody who makes long-term projections about Japan's flagging birthrate and fading economy. Japan will grow or falter, economists and sociologists say, upon the shoulders of these mild, frugal, sweet-mannered men.
To hear the analysts who study them tell it, Japanese men ages 20 to 34 are staging the most curious of rebellions, rejecting the 70-hour workweeks and purchase-for-status ethos that typified the 1980s economic boom. As the latest class of college graduates struggles to find jobs, a growing number of experts are detecting a problem even broader than unemployment: They see a generation of men who don't know what they want.
Japan earned its fortune a generation ago through the power of office warriors, the so-called salarymen who devoted their careers to one company. They wore dark suits; they joined for rowdy after-hours booze fests with co-workers; they often saw little of their families. These are the fathers of Japan's young men.
But among business leaders and officials, there is a growing understanding that the earlier work-for-fulfillment pattern has broken down. The economy's roar turned into a yawn. Concern about Japan's future replaced giddy national pride. As a result, this generation has lost "the willingness to sacrifice for the company," said Jeff Kingston, author of the recently published book "Contemporary Japan."
Kingston added: "And now as Japan begins to unravel in a sense, young people realize that the previous paradigm doesn't work. But they aren't sure what comes next. They've seen what amounts to a betrayal in Japan."
Striving for balance
And so, instead of fantasizing about riches, Japan's young men now fantasize about balanced lives and time for their families and quaint hobbies. As they do, Japanese women are catching up. This month, the government said single women younger than 30 were, for the first time, earning more on average than their male counterparts.
Yuizo Matsumoto, 24, learned about the differences between old and young values when he worked for a small food development company. Matsumoto studied the way trace ingredients and artificial flavorings change a product's taste. He developed salad dressings and fruit juices. He liked his job, with one major complaint: He worked 14 hours a day, often on Saturdays as well. He worked so hard, he didn't have time to job-hunt for alternatives. So in July, with the support of his parents, he told his boss he was quitting.
"My boss said to me, 'If you quit this wonderful company you'll never succeed in life,' " Matsumoto said. "I think the concept itself of quitting is alien to them. I think it's very normal for somebody from the older generation to stick with something whether he's happy or not."
Many in Japan's older generation deride the young for listlessness, even a lack of what is thought of as traditionally male behavior. Playing to that characterization, some media accounts of the transformation note the extremes of behavior: how one in four engaged men now opts for a pre-wedding spa treatment; how young men host dessert-tasting clubs; how, given a hypothetical $1,000 to spend and a list of possible purchases, a lot of young men would choose a high-end rice cooker.
Similar to metrosexuals
But Japan's modern man, separated from the statistics, cuts an endearing profile. Pop culture writer Maki Fukasawa first wrote about the changing male gender identity in 2006, coining a shorthand term for the new man ("a herbivore" - gentle and cautious). Now Fukasawa, who has surveyed young Japanese men about their purchasing preferences, defends the herbivores' nobility. "The people of the older generation would buy things, consume things, even fall in love for status," Fukasawa said. "However, these young people have no desire for status. . . . Maybe we're searching for new values. This is a more sustainable model."
This isn't about sexual orientation. According to a 2009 survey from market research firm M1 F1 Soken, almost half of Japanese men ages 20 to 34 identify themselves as herbivores. No matter their sexual preferences, herbivores tend to be less overtly sexual. Many say they do not prioritize physical relationships. They're more likely to buy gifts for their mothers than for their significant others.
Japan's herbivores bear some resemblance to the metrosexuals familiar in America. Like metrosexuals, they pay a lot of attention to how they look and how they dress - with a preference for flannel-patterned shirts, bought first-hand but made to look second-hand, and tight-fitting pants. But herbivores reflect a wider societal movement.
And, as it turns out, even those who identify themselves as more traditional men, rather than herbivores, are a lot different from their fathers.
Like Shinsuke Kanemura, 25, a jockish graduate from the elite Kyoto University, who met his friend for a 4 p.m. ice cream before beginning his night shift. And Akira Tanaka, 26, a "carnivore" who ridicules the herbivorous desire to "blend into the atmosphere."
"I was brought up in a family where, if you're a man, you ought to act like a man," Tanaka said. He works as a hairstylist.
Those who have rejected the old model, though, haven't yet discovered a new model - a way to earn a comfortable living without losing a quality life. Much as they loathe the office place's stifling social obligations, Japan's young men - according to the latest government statistics - prefer lifelong employment to any alternative, mostly because they value a safe option over a risky one. Japan's dim economic climate, experts say, has spawned a generation of unsentimental job-seekers who see only a spectrum of flawed options.
Little income
This demographic has remained elusive for automakers, brewers and other manufacturers. According to Tokyo's Metropolitan Police, between 1998 and 2007, the number of driver's licenses in Japan increased by 1 million. But the number dropped by 30,000 for people age 20 and by 40,000 for people age 25. People in their 20s, according to government statistics, consume less than half the alcohol of twenty-somethings in 1980.
Yoshio Kanda, 28, a wedding photographer from Osaka, says he feels "awkward" when talking to people from the bubble generation. He describes a sense of opposite values. He notices this most, he says, "when we go out drinking."
"People of an older generation, whatever they say or do, it's to the max," Kanda said. "Our generation, we don't spend money to the max and we don't drink to the max. We feel the need to save. At the same time, it's not cool to be throwing up on the street after you've been drinking."
More than the earlier generation, Japan's young men, according to marketing consultants, value close friendships and memorable experiences. One recent beer commercial depicts a hiking trip. Another shows a bunch of pals, hanging out at somebody's home.
But there's another factor, too: Japan's young men have little money to spend. Only 3.5 percent of men ages 25 to 34 make more than the average workers' household income of about 6 million yen (or $73,600) per year, according to National Tax Agency.
Matsumoto, the former food developer, has only his unemployment stipend, which expires in three months. He hopes to find a new job before then. So far, he's interviewed for one position and applied for five more.
He admits there's a chance his next job could also require 14-hour workdays. He wouldn't want to ask direct questions about time off during an interview.
Matsumoto shrugged.
"I never thought my job was the priority - that it was everything in my life," he said. "I want my private life to feel enriched as well. . . . I feel that the system itself is built for the older generation, but the young people just go into it because they have no other choice."
Saturday, October 23, 2010
humans
Michael Cunningham and a new generation of writers transcend 'gay literature'
By Dan Zak
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 23, 2010; C01
NEW YORK -- He sneaks a cigarette in the stairwell, through an emergency exit whose alarm does not sound. He sits on the eighth step, places a porcelain ashtray to the side of his bare feet and lights an American Spirit. He watches a curl of smoke creep toward the chicken-wired skylight in the roof of his Chelsea condo building.
If he were writing this passage, he'd start the next sentence with "Here is," his favorite device for centering the reader after a tumble of description. As in: Here is the novelist Michael Cunningham, on a Monday, in shades of gray -- gray of hair, gray of shirt, grayed in by concrete and cigarette ash, and gray of perspective on what, if anything, it means to be a gay novelist who's written a fairly gay book at a very gay time.
The gay thing is incidental, he says. This new novel, his sixth, is really about middle age (he's 57) and the over-ripening of long-term relationships (he smokes here out of respect for Kenny, his boyfriend of 20-plus years) and the yearning for true beauty in a world that's short on it.
Beauty, in "By Nightfall," dogs the protagonist, a middle-aged straight man named Peter Harris who is ambushed by a confounding lust for his wife's much-younger brother, a 23-year-old wanderer radiating a newness and virility that Peter has lost over time. The awakening of this homosexuality is contemplated with a restraint, maturity and matter-of-factness that seems absent from the media and the public sphere, where the military can't easily shake Victorian protocol, where the states form a patchwork quilt of conflicting same-sex marriage laws, where gay teens make headlines when they're beaten or suicidal.
The country as a whole still can't deal with the gay thing. Not so in the pages of Cunningham.
"Peter is very much like my straight friends -- he's not freaked out about it," says Cunningham, now back inside his condo, the skyscrapers of downtown flickering in the twilight. His feet are on the coffee table, near a decapitated stone statuette of the Virgin Mary and books of photography by Robert Mapplethorpe and Cindy Sherman.
"Most of the straight guys I know have had sex with a guy at some point or another -- in college, most likely," he says. "But, yeah, Peter's attitude to his own sexuality is not some wishful attempt on my part to be modern. It's simply what I see around me."
He pauses long enough for a motorcycle engine to trail a greasy roar up Sixth Avenue, nine stories below.
"And you have to hope that's some kind of progress."
Cunningham himself has stood for some kind of progress in modern American literature: a novelist who is gay, who writes for a wide and mainstream audience, who populates his stories with characters who aren't defined by their straightness or gayness but rather by their grappling with sophisticated problems. In 1990's "A Home at the End of the World," a gay male, a straight male and a straight female entangle themselves in a love triangle, but the novel is a vision of family, not a stoking of scandal. A textured, lovingly drawn lesbian couple is the axis of "The Hours," his blockbuster legacy-maker from 1998, but that wasn't the point. The point was: How do you get flowers into a vase when your brain is addled by the burden of existence?
The previous generation of gay writers has bequeathed a freedom to write about being gay in an unfussy, elevated way without worrying about advancing an agenda, says Cunningham contemporary Tony Kushner, who cites Edmund White and Larry Kramer as pioneers in literature.
"Every time a disenfranchised group seizes hold of a new form, there's a generation that has to struggle with it, that has to build the foundation and the house, and then the next generation moves into the house," says Kushner, who is currently reviving his AIDS-era epic "Angels in America" 30 blocks uptown. "With 'By Nightfall,' there's no proving that needs to be done, though sometimes I think, 'Oh God, I can't believe we're still struggling over these prehistoric things in 2010.' In the 1992 GOP convention you had Pat Buchanan's speech about ideological cross-dressing, and you still have people like Carl Paladino."
Kushner and Cunningham belong to this generation, to a stratum of accomplished, middle-aged gay artists who summer in Provincetown, Mass., a creative haven that is both deeply engaged with the world and insulated from its problems. The feeling there, Cunningham says, "ranges from frustration to despair to a kind of desperate optimism that sort of stems from the idea that all those homophobes are digging in because they're scared, because they can tell something is happening and they're sort of putting up their last fight." He wades into this year's strife with the same serene, even tone. "You tell yourself that real progress has been made, and then there's this rash of teen suicides that makes you wonder if anything will ever change really."
Things, of course, have changed for him. He grew up in California, went to Stanford despite his Berkeley mentality, and at age 19 was "knocked out" by reading White's "Nocturnes for the King of Naples" and Andrew Holleran's "Dancer from the Dance," impactful novels that were built around gay characters. By senior year he had taken up writing, and was dating a girl named Janet and branding himself as a bisexual.
"It was the early '70s," he says. "It would just be like, 'Let's work this out.' I'll just marry Janet. I love her and we'll have sex, and I'll have sex with guys and that will be just fine. It didn't work out that way."
He moved to San Francisco with friends and "got a little wild," then fled to Boulder, Colo., in search of someplace clean and new and natural, then wound through Nebraska and Laguna Beach, Calif., bartending and writing along the way, before arriving at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at age 28. A writing fellowship at Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center delivered him to Cape Cod, where he set down artistic roots while also making a home of Manhattan. When the AIDS crisis began to decimate his circle of friends, he became an ardent foot soldier of ACT UP. (He's not much of an activist nowadays, he says.)
Nearly 20 years ago he moved out of the "squalor" of a Thompson Street apartment to this top-floor, one-bedroom condo, which he admits is kept clean by Kenny, a psychologist. Props of conspicuous knowledge decorate the abode, whose vibe is rebellious in the classiest way possible. A huge Gregory Crewdson photograph projects its staged suburban ennui over an expansive wooden table holding twin Macbooks, a globe and the framed lyric "Love will tear us apart" by the British post-punk band Joy Division. Stacked neatly under end tables are written works by Freud, Henry James, Amy Bloom and the queer performance artist Justin Bond. In the bathroom, a rusted headboard light is clipped on a bookshelf flanking the toilet, so one might skim Frost, Pound or Yeats in a solitary pool of light.
Bisecting the main room is a floor-to-ceiling femur from a prison production of "King Kong" (bought secondhand) which stands against the wall.
And here is Michael Cunningham, barefoot, with his coffee, a streak of dried shaving cream at his right ear. He is a man at ease in the life of a 21st-century aesthete, swaying between glamour and bohemia, the realms of Hollywood (with whose denizens he parties and for which he's written screenplays) and the Cape (where he's a beloved friend to brilliant people who eschew worldly ambition). He's the type of guy who would, with his Provincetown book group, devote one entire night to drinking bourbon and performing aloud the Nighttown chapter of "Ulysses." Because why not?
"Who knows who else was reading Joyce in the world at that moment, but we were, in this little house in Provincetown," he says. "We finished up just as the sun was coming up and sort of walked out into the morning, slightly altered by the experience -- the experience you hope to get from any novel and too rarely get, which is a sense of living in a bigger, more complicated world."
Leopold Bloom's sad search for transcendence yokes many men, including the character of Peter, the married art dealer with the hots for his brother-in-law, and Cunningham himself.
"I think he's exploring these new empty feelings," says Chris Busa, founder and editor of Provincetown Arts Magazine. "If you think of the psychologist Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it's almost like Michael figured out sexuality and has moved to the higher needs, the more difficult, more spiritual and symbolic needs, those small awakenings that are not so much lustful but springing from a deeper source. He teaches me, a straight man, a lot. He opens up my mind to post-gay thought, gets beyond the polarization, and says, 'Let's consider new nuances.' "
And: "A huge challenge for a gay writer is how to be real to yourself and speak to multiple audiences and give them all something meaningful," says novelist and writing professor Paul Lisicky, also a product of workshops in Iowa and Provincetown. "I don't think there's anyone doing that better than he is. 'By Nightfall' respects the unpredictability of sexuality, and sees sexuality as a place of wildness that resists our ability to define it."
And: "Michael has never wanted to be characterized as a gay writer per se, and his work has been instrumental in getting people over that division," says his editor and publisher Jonathan Galassi, the president of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. "Before Michael there was a subcategory of literary fiction that was labeled as gay, and I don't think people do that so much anymore. I think he's part of the reason why."
Cunningham is more circumspect. A gay novelist today, he says, has the same responsibility as a straight novelist: to write the best damn book he can.
"Although I do think one of the great purposes of novels is to act as vehicles of empathy," he says. "There's really no art form that's better suited to help us understand what it's like to be somebody else."
Behind him, dusk veils Manhattan. Time to go to his final stateside reading before he jets to Canada and Europe for the second half of the tour. He slips on a leather jacket and Prada loafers, locks his door, and waits for the clunking elevator next to a large, framed, unsigned charcoal sketch of a man holding his head in anguish. He bought it for $200 years ago in San Francisco and wonders who and where the artist is.
On Sixth Avenue he hails a cab and, en route to 192 Books on 10th Avenue, muses further on how things were and how things are. He supports the Trevor Project, the suicide-prevention hotline for gay teens founded by his friend James Lecesne, and works occasionally with God's Love We Deliver, which serves housebound people with AIDS. He gets out of the cab a couple blocks south of the bookstore and walks the rest of the way.
"If there's a march or rally, I'll go to it, but am I organizing? No," he says. "It's so mysterious to me now. I'm confused as to what to do. Maybe things are just okay enough to keep us quiet enough. Why aren't there gay people marching up 10th Avenue? I don't know."
And then here is Michael Cunningham in a tiny bookstore surrounded by short-haired women in lambswool ponchos, and Chelsea boys in their distressed jeans, and perhaps a Peter or two. Although, regardless of sexual history or proclivity, couldn't everyone here be a Peter -- unsure how to navigate a bewildering world, hopeful for a life unbound by convention, searching for beauty by reading an author who's made it his business to find it?
By Dan Zak
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 23, 2010; C01
NEW YORK -- He sneaks a cigarette in the stairwell, through an emergency exit whose alarm does not sound. He sits on the eighth step, places a porcelain ashtray to the side of his bare feet and lights an American Spirit. He watches a curl of smoke creep toward the chicken-wired skylight in the roof of his Chelsea condo building.
If he were writing this passage, he'd start the next sentence with "Here is," his favorite device for centering the reader after a tumble of description. As in: Here is the novelist Michael Cunningham, on a Monday, in shades of gray -- gray of hair, gray of shirt, grayed in by concrete and cigarette ash, and gray of perspective on what, if anything, it means to be a gay novelist who's written a fairly gay book at a very gay time.
The gay thing is incidental, he says. This new novel, his sixth, is really about middle age (he's 57) and the over-ripening of long-term relationships (he smokes here out of respect for Kenny, his boyfriend of 20-plus years) and the yearning for true beauty in a world that's short on it.
Beauty, in "By Nightfall," dogs the protagonist, a middle-aged straight man named Peter Harris who is ambushed by a confounding lust for his wife's much-younger brother, a 23-year-old wanderer radiating a newness and virility that Peter has lost over time. The awakening of this homosexuality is contemplated with a restraint, maturity and matter-of-factness that seems absent from the media and the public sphere, where the military can't easily shake Victorian protocol, where the states form a patchwork quilt of conflicting same-sex marriage laws, where gay teens make headlines when they're beaten or suicidal.
The country as a whole still can't deal with the gay thing. Not so in the pages of Cunningham.
"Peter is very much like my straight friends -- he's not freaked out about it," says Cunningham, now back inside his condo, the skyscrapers of downtown flickering in the twilight. His feet are on the coffee table, near a decapitated stone statuette of the Virgin Mary and books of photography by Robert Mapplethorpe and Cindy Sherman.
"Most of the straight guys I know have had sex with a guy at some point or another -- in college, most likely," he says. "But, yeah, Peter's attitude to his own sexuality is not some wishful attempt on my part to be modern. It's simply what I see around me."
He pauses long enough for a motorcycle engine to trail a greasy roar up Sixth Avenue, nine stories below.
"And you have to hope that's some kind of progress."
Cunningham himself has stood for some kind of progress in modern American literature: a novelist who is gay, who writes for a wide and mainstream audience, who populates his stories with characters who aren't defined by their straightness or gayness but rather by their grappling with sophisticated problems. In 1990's "A Home at the End of the World," a gay male, a straight male and a straight female entangle themselves in a love triangle, but the novel is a vision of family, not a stoking of scandal. A textured, lovingly drawn lesbian couple is the axis of "The Hours," his blockbuster legacy-maker from 1998, but that wasn't the point. The point was: How do you get flowers into a vase when your brain is addled by the burden of existence?
The previous generation of gay writers has bequeathed a freedom to write about being gay in an unfussy, elevated way without worrying about advancing an agenda, says Cunningham contemporary Tony Kushner, who cites Edmund White and Larry Kramer as pioneers in literature.
"Every time a disenfranchised group seizes hold of a new form, there's a generation that has to struggle with it, that has to build the foundation and the house, and then the next generation moves into the house," says Kushner, who is currently reviving his AIDS-era epic "Angels in America" 30 blocks uptown. "With 'By Nightfall,' there's no proving that needs to be done, though sometimes I think, 'Oh God, I can't believe we're still struggling over these prehistoric things in 2010.' In the 1992 GOP convention you had Pat Buchanan's speech about ideological cross-dressing, and you still have people like Carl Paladino."
Kushner and Cunningham belong to this generation, to a stratum of accomplished, middle-aged gay artists who summer in Provincetown, Mass., a creative haven that is both deeply engaged with the world and insulated from its problems. The feeling there, Cunningham says, "ranges from frustration to despair to a kind of desperate optimism that sort of stems from the idea that all those homophobes are digging in because they're scared, because they can tell something is happening and they're sort of putting up their last fight." He wades into this year's strife with the same serene, even tone. "You tell yourself that real progress has been made, and then there's this rash of teen suicides that makes you wonder if anything will ever change really."
Things, of course, have changed for him. He grew up in California, went to Stanford despite his Berkeley mentality, and at age 19 was "knocked out" by reading White's "Nocturnes for the King of Naples" and Andrew Holleran's "Dancer from the Dance," impactful novels that were built around gay characters. By senior year he had taken up writing, and was dating a girl named Janet and branding himself as a bisexual.
"It was the early '70s," he says. "It would just be like, 'Let's work this out.' I'll just marry Janet. I love her and we'll have sex, and I'll have sex with guys and that will be just fine. It didn't work out that way."
He moved to San Francisco with friends and "got a little wild," then fled to Boulder, Colo., in search of someplace clean and new and natural, then wound through Nebraska and Laguna Beach, Calif., bartending and writing along the way, before arriving at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at age 28. A writing fellowship at Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center delivered him to Cape Cod, where he set down artistic roots while also making a home of Manhattan. When the AIDS crisis began to decimate his circle of friends, he became an ardent foot soldier of ACT UP. (He's not much of an activist nowadays, he says.)
Nearly 20 years ago he moved out of the "squalor" of a Thompson Street apartment to this top-floor, one-bedroom condo, which he admits is kept clean by Kenny, a psychologist. Props of conspicuous knowledge decorate the abode, whose vibe is rebellious in the classiest way possible. A huge Gregory Crewdson photograph projects its staged suburban ennui over an expansive wooden table holding twin Macbooks, a globe and the framed lyric "Love will tear us apart" by the British post-punk band Joy Division. Stacked neatly under end tables are written works by Freud, Henry James, Amy Bloom and the queer performance artist Justin Bond. In the bathroom, a rusted headboard light is clipped on a bookshelf flanking the toilet, so one might skim Frost, Pound or Yeats in a solitary pool of light.
Bisecting the main room is a floor-to-ceiling femur from a prison production of "King Kong" (bought secondhand) which stands against the wall.
And here is Michael Cunningham, barefoot, with his coffee, a streak of dried shaving cream at his right ear. He is a man at ease in the life of a 21st-century aesthete, swaying between glamour and bohemia, the realms of Hollywood (with whose denizens he parties and for which he's written screenplays) and the Cape (where he's a beloved friend to brilliant people who eschew worldly ambition). He's the type of guy who would, with his Provincetown book group, devote one entire night to drinking bourbon and performing aloud the Nighttown chapter of "Ulysses." Because why not?
"Who knows who else was reading Joyce in the world at that moment, but we were, in this little house in Provincetown," he says. "We finished up just as the sun was coming up and sort of walked out into the morning, slightly altered by the experience -- the experience you hope to get from any novel and too rarely get, which is a sense of living in a bigger, more complicated world."
Leopold Bloom's sad search for transcendence yokes many men, including the character of Peter, the married art dealer with the hots for his brother-in-law, and Cunningham himself.
"I think he's exploring these new empty feelings," says Chris Busa, founder and editor of Provincetown Arts Magazine. "If you think of the psychologist Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it's almost like Michael figured out sexuality and has moved to the higher needs, the more difficult, more spiritual and symbolic needs, those small awakenings that are not so much lustful but springing from a deeper source. He teaches me, a straight man, a lot. He opens up my mind to post-gay thought, gets beyond the polarization, and says, 'Let's consider new nuances.' "
And: "A huge challenge for a gay writer is how to be real to yourself and speak to multiple audiences and give them all something meaningful," says novelist and writing professor Paul Lisicky, also a product of workshops in Iowa and Provincetown. "I don't think there's anyone doing that better than he is. 'By Nightfall' respects the unpredictability of sexuality, and sees sexuality as a place of wildness that resists our ability to define it."
And: "Michael has never wanted to be characterized as a gay writer per se, and his work has been instrumental in getting people over that division," says his editor and publisher Jonathan Galassi, the president of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. "Before Michael there was a subcategory of literary fiction that was labeled as gay, and I don't think people do that so much anymore. I think he's part of the reason why."
Cunningham is more circumspect. A gay novelist today, he says, has the same responsibility as a straight novelist: to write the best damn book he can.
"Although I do think one of the great purposes of novels is to act as vehicles of empathy," he says. "There's really no art form that's better suited to help us understand what it's like to be somebody else."
Behind him, dusk veils Manhattan. Time to go to his final stateside reading before he jets to Canada and Europe for the second half of the tour. He slips on a leather jacket and Prada loafers, locks his door, and waits for the clunking elevator next to a large, framed, unsigned charcoal sketch of a man holding his head in anguish. He bought it for $200 years ago in San Francisco and wonders who and where the artist is.
On Sixth Avenue he hails a cab and, en route to 192 Books on 10th Avenue, muses further on how things were and how things are. He supports the Trevor Project, the suicide-prevention hotline for gay teens founded by his friend James Lecesne, and works occasionally with God's Love We Deliver, which serves housebound people with AIDS. He gets out of the cab a couple blocks south of the bookstore and walks the rest of the way.
"If there's a march or rally, I'll go to it, but am I organizing? No," he says. "It's so mysterious to me now. I'm confused as to what to do. Maybe things are just okay enough to keep us quiet enough. Why aren't there gay people marching up 10th Avenue? I don't know."
And then here is Michael Cunningham in a tiny bookstore surrounded by short-haired women in lambswool ponchos, and Chelsea boys in their distressed jeans, and perhaps a Peter or two. Although, regardless of sexual history or proclivity, couldn't everyone here be a Peter -- unsure how to navigate a bewildering world, hopeful for a life unbound by convention, searching for beauty by reading an author who's made it his business to find it?
here we go again... :)
Woolly Mammoth's hit play 'Clybourne Park' to return in summer 2011
By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 23, 2010; C01
In a twist on the here-today-gone-tomorrow cycle of putting on shows at Washington's subscription theaters, a hit Woolly Mammoth play is going to be here again.
The drama returning this summer is not some revenue-building piece of fluff, but a serious (and seriously funny) work that was a success for Woolly this past spring: "Clybourne Park," a play by Bruce Norris that throws open to discussion such pertinent issues as re-gentrification and whether we can ever truly speak frankly about race.
The show will be remounted on Woolly's stage, just off the corner of Seventh and D streets NW, beginning on July 21 and running through Aug. 14, with the entire original eight-member cast reprising its roles. Bringing the show back will cost about $225,000, Woolly officials say. That's nearly double the amount the company normally dedicates to an add-on summer event, such as the one-man "Lord of the Rings'' parody that played last summer.
"Our tendency is to put on a play and then say, 'Let's move on,' " says Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth's longtime head, who directed "Clybourne." "I think one of the things that put us over the top with 'Clybourne' was the depth of the conversation it created. There was a special fit between the play and the city."
That is why the company has taken an unusual extra step with this play, one that seems to strike a nerve wherever it is staged. The New York production, at off-Broadway's Playwrights Horizons -- produced concurrently with Woolly's -- received stellar notices, and a London version this fall at the highly regarded Royal Court Theatre proved so successful that plans have been announced to move it for a commercial run in the city's West End.
Few Washington stage productions get anything like a long life because of the time constraints attending the presentation of a full roster of plays. Studio Theatre, with its four smallish performance spaces, has the most flexibility for extending the runs of popular offerings by several weeks. But that's an exception. The downside for serious theater is the limited exposure a play can get: Few works have the opportunity to be seen by enough of the public to take hold of the city's consciousness, to become fodder for widespread dinner table debate, in the way a movie or a YouTube video might.
Woolly is banking on the goodwill generated by the initial run -- which was extended by a week -- to engender another ticket-buying groundswell. Norris's provocative piece should have the dramatic firepower to fill Woolly's 265-seat theater again. The inspiration for "Clybourne" is Lorraine Hansberry's landmark 1959 drama, "A Raisin in the Sun," about a black family moving into a white Chicago enclave. Norris trains his ironic lens on the repercussions of that sale among the family's entrenched white neighbors, and then, 40 years later, looks at what happens when the house is sold again, this time to a professional white couple, in what is now a black neighborhood.
Shalwitz remains struck by how resonantly Norris's thematic blueprint applies to Washington and plans to explore the connection in additional programs of audience talk-backs and panel discussions. "This helps Woolly to continue to be committed to the life of the play," the artistic director says.
It also helps that, contrary to common practice for the company, the set for "Clybourne Park" was preserved. "We either had to get a dumpster, or a canister," says Jeffrey Herrmann, Woolly's managing director. Choosing the bin ultimately made the decision to restage the show that much easier. All Herrmann's staff has to do is fetch it from a storage yard in Maryland.
By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 23, 2010; C01
In a twist on the here-today-gone-tomorrow cycle of putting on shows at Washington's subscription theaters, a hit Woolly Mammoth play is going to be here again.
The drama returning this summer is not some revenue-building piece of fluff, but a serious (and seriously funny) work that was a success for Woolly this past spring: "Clybourne Park," a play by Bruce Norris that throws open to discussion such pertinent issues as re-gentrification and whether we can ever truly speak frankly about race.
The show will be remounted on Woolly's stage, just off the corner of Seventh and D streets NW, beginning on July 21 and running through Aug. 14, with the entire original eight-member cast reprising its roles. Bringing the show back will cost about $225,000, Woolly officials say. That's nearly double the amount the company normally dedicates to an add-on summer event, such as the one-man "Lord of the Rings'' parody that played last summer.
"Our tendency is to put on a play and then say, 'Let's move on,' " says Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth's longtime head, who directed "Clybourne." "I think one of the things that put us over the top with 'Clybourne' was the depth of the conversation it created. There was a special fit between the play and the city."
That is why the company has taken an unusual extra step with this play, one that seems to strike a nerve wherever it is staged. The New York production, at off-Broadway's Playwrights Horizons -- produced concurrently with Woolly's -- received stellar notices, and a London version this fall at the highly regarded Royal Court Theatre proved so successful that plans have been announced to move it for a commercial run in the city's West End.
Few Washington stage productions get anything like a long life because of the time constraints attending the presentation of a full roster of plays. Studio Theatre, with its four smallish performance spaces, has the most flexibility for extending the runs of popular offerings by several weeks. But that's an exception. The downside for serious theater is the limited exposure a play can get: Few works have the opportunity to be seen by enough of the public to take hold of the city's consciousness, to become fodder for widespread dinner table debate, in the way a movie or a YouTube video might.
Woolly is banking on the goodwill generated by the initial run -- which was extended by a week -- to engender another ticket-buying groundswell. Norris's provocative piece should have the dramatic firepower to fill Woolly's 265-seat theater again. The inspiration for "Clybourne" is Lorraine Hansberry's landmark 1959 drama, "A Raisin in the Sun," about a black family moving into a white Chicago enclave. Norris trains his ironic lens on the repercussions of that sale among the family's entrenched white neighbors, and then, 40 years later, looks at what happens when the house is sold again, this time to a professional white couple, in what is now a black neighborhood.
Shalwitz remains struck by how resonantly Norris's thematic blueprint applies to Washington and plans to explore the connection in additional programs of audience talk-backs and panel discussions. "This helps Woolly to continue to be committed to the life of the play," the artistic director says.
It also helps that, contrary to common practice for the company, the set for "Clybourne Park" was preserved. "We either had to get a dumpster, or a canister," says Jeffrey Herrmann, Woolly's managing director. Choosing the bin ultimately made the decision to restage the show that much easier. All Herrmann's staff has to do is fetch it from a storage yard in Maryland.
“Mr. Fellini says that his wife sometime resists his view of her talents, which he summarizes as ‘a mingling of youngish and clownish.’ But make no mistake: in suggesting that his wife is a clown, Mr. Fellini means no insult. ‘The clown is the aristocracy of acting,’ he says. ‘To be a clown means to have the possibility of making people cry and laugh.’”
“Why do I so frequently include a levitation scene, a body rising up? Simply because the scene has a great power. This way things can be created that are more cinematic, more photogenic. When I imagine a person suspended in mid-air, it pleases me.. I find myself filled with emotion. If some fool asks me why in my last film people float up in the air, I would say: “It’s magic”. If the same question came from someone with a more acute intelligence & poetic sensibility, I would respond that for these characters love was not the same thing as it was for the author of Betty Blue.
For me love is the supreme manifestation of mutual understanding, and this cannot be represented by the sexual act. Everybody says that if there is no ‘love’ in a film, it is because of censorship. In reality it is not ‘love’ that’s shown on screen but the sexual act. The sexual act is for everyone, for every couple, something unique. When it is put into films, it’s the opposite.”
-Andrei Tarkovsky
“It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.
We should long ago have become angels had we been capable of paying attention to the experience of art, and allowing ourselves to be changed in accordance with the ideals it expresses…It’s ridiculous to imagine that people can be taught to be good; any more than they can learn how to be faithful wives by following the ‘positive’ example of Pushkin’s Tatiana Larina. Art can only give food—a jolt—the occasion—for psychical experience.”
-Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema
“Why do I so frequently include a levitation scene, a body rising up? Simply because the scene has a great power. This way things can be created that are more cinematic, more photogenic. When I imagine a person suspended in mid-air, it pleases me.. I find myself filled with emotion. If some fool asks me why in my last film people float up in the air, I would say: “It’s magic”. If the same question came from someone with a more acute intelligence & poetic sensibility, I would respond that for these characters love was not the same thing as it was for the author of Betty Blue.
For me love is the supreme manifestation of mutual understanding, and this cannot be represented by the sexual act. Everybody says that if there is no ‘love’ in a film, it is because of censorship. In reality it is not ‘love’ that’s shown on screen but the sexual act. The sexual act is for everyone, for every couple, something unique. When it is put into films, it’s the opposite.”
-Andrei Tarkovsky
“It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.
We should long ago have become angels had we been capable of paying attention to the experience of art, and allowing ourselves to be changed in accordance with the ideals it expresses…It’s ridiculous to imagine that people can be taught to be good; any more than they can learn how to be faithful wives by following the ‘positive’ example of Pushkin’s Tatiana Larina. Art can only give food—a jolt—the occasion—for psychical experience.”
-Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema
love this collaboration, debut, and moment
Robin Williams to star in 'Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo' on Broadway
October 21, 2010 | 2:47 pm
Call it daredevil casting, a shameless box-office ploy or the producers' implicit acknowledgement that they have a tough sell on their hands.
Thursday's announcement that funnyman Robin Williams will star in the Broadway production of "Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo" will no doubt cause a good deal of headscratching for those who saw the dark and violent war drama when it ran in Los Angeles at the Mark Taper Forum and Kirk Douglas Theatre.
"Bengal Tiger," written by Rajiv Joseph, is scheduled to open on March 31 at a still undetermined Broadway theater. Moises Kaufman, who directed the L.A. productions, will return to stage the New York version.
The production will mark Williams' Broadway debut as an actor. (He previously appeared on Broadway in a comedy show that had a limited run in 2002.) The actor is expected to play the title role of the tiger, a mangy captive of a Baghdad zoo who serves as the anthropomorphic narrator of the war drama. Kevin Tighe played him in Los Angeles.
Hardly family-friendly fare, "Bengal Tiger" is grim, bleak and tragic, though certain scenes have a perverse sense of humor.The play follows the intersecting stories of two American soldiers, two sons of Saddam Hussein and several other characters caught up in the current Iraq war.
"Bengal Tiger" had its world premiere in 2009 at the Kirk Douglas in Culver City. The following season, the production transferred to the Mark Taper Forum, with the same creative team. The play was a finalist for last year's Pulitzer Prize for drama, but lost out to the musical "Next to Normal."
Based in New York, Joseph has had his plays produced at a number of off-off-Broadway theaters as well as regional theaters. This is his first play to reach Broadway.
Times theater critic Charles McNulty wrote in his original review of the play that "I’m tempted to call it the most original drama written so far about the Iraq war."
-- David Ng
Monday, October 18, 2010
Massive Re-definition
Highlights from Ben Cameron's incredible TED talk...
- Technology is the biggest competitor for leisure time.
- A typical entering University student arrives at college already having spent 20,000 hours online and 10,000 playing video games. Video games outsell music and movie recordings combined.
- Cultural consumers are used to downloading on the internet, 24 hours a day, for $0.99 a song, or for free.
There is a seismic redefinition of culture and communication taking place.
Adrienne Rich: We are out in a country that has no language, no laws, whatever we do together is pure invetion, the maps they gave us are out of date by years.
We are engaged in a fundamental Reformation. Thanks to the invetion of the internet, web technology, mini-cams and more, the means of artistic production has been DEMOCRATIZED for the first time in all of human history. The means for artistic distribution has been democrotized for the first time in human history, too. YouTube, Facebook, etc., you have worldwide distribution without leaving the privacy of your own bedroom.
Massive Re-Definition of the cultural market, where anyone is a potential author.
In the entire world, audience #s are dropping, but the # of art's participants are exploding. Pro-Ams-- amateur artists doing work at a professional level- are becoming widespread. They are radically expanding our notions of a potential of an aesethic vocabulary. They are challending and undermining the autonmy of our cultural institutions.
We live in a world defined by participating, not consumption.
Now we have the rise of the professional hybrid artist.
We, in the performing arts, will be more important than ever before. Buisness leaders will depend more on emotional intelligence, the ability to listen deeply, empathy, to articulate change to motivate others, especially now.
- Technology is the biggest competitor for leisure time.
- A typical entering University student arrives at college already having spent 20,000 hours online and 10,000 playing video games. Video games outsell music and movie recordings combined.
- Cultural consumers are used to downloading on the internet, 24 hours a day, for $0.99 a song, or for free.
There is a seismic redefinition of culture and communication taking place.
Adrienne Rich: We are out in a country that has no language, no laws, whatever we do together is pure invetion, the maps they gave us are out of date by years.
We are engaged in a fundamental Reformation. Thanks to the invetion of the internet, web technology, mini-cams and more, the means of artistic production has been DEMOCRATIZED for the first time in all of human history. The means for artistic distribution has been democrotized for the first time in human history, too. YouTube, Facebook, etc., you have worldwide distribution without leaving the privacy of your own bedroom.
Massive Re-Definition of the cultural market, where anyone is a potential author.
In the entire world, audience #s are dropping, but the # of art's participants are exploding. Pro-Ams-- amateur artists doing work at a professional level- are becoming widespread. They are radically expanding our notions of a potential of an aesethic vocabulary. They are challending and undermining the autonmy of our cultural institutions.
We live in a world defined by participating, not consumption.
Now we have the rise of the professional hybrid artist.
We, in the performing arts, will be more important than ever before. Buisness leaders will depend more on emotional intelligence, the ability to listen deeply, empathy, to articulate change to motivate others, especially now.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Thursday, October 14, 2010
a beautiful demo waltz.
and now, i find, i've changed my mind. i found a new religion................
face the truth: no subsitute for love. i will wait for you. no substitute for love.
i travelled around the world, looking for a home.
I found myself in crowed rooms feeling so alone.
I had so many lovers who settled for the thrill of basking my spotlight,
I never felt fulfilled.
And now,
I find I've changed my mind. I found a new religion.
Face the truth; no subsitute for now.
I will wait for you. No substitute for love.
Face the truth. No substitute for love.........
I had a change of heart.
I'll make a brand new start.....
No famous faces, far off places, trinkets I can buy..
No handsome stranger, petty danger, drug that I can try..
No ferris wheel, no heart to steal, laughter in the dark,
No one night stand, no far off land, no fire that I can spark...
Face to the truth: No substitute for love.
I will wait for you. No substitute for love.
I will wait for you.
No substitute for love.
No substitute for love.
Face the truth, I will wait for you.
No substitute for you.
face the truth: no subsitute for love. i will wait for you. no substitute for love.
i travelled around the world, looking for a home.
I found myself in crowed rooms feeling so alone.
I had so many lovers who settled for the thrill of basking my spotlight,
I never felt fulfilled.
And now,
I find I've changed my mind. I found a new religion.
Face the truth; no subsitute for now.
I will wait for you. No substitute for love.
Face the truth. No substitute for love.........
I had a change of heart.
I'll make a brand new start.....
No famous faces, far off places, trinkets I can buy..
No handsome stranger, petty danger, drug that I can try..
No ferris wheel, no heart to steal, laughter in the dark,
No one night stand, no far off land, no fire that I can spark...
Face to the truth: No substitute for love.
I will wait for you. No substitute for love.
I will wait for you.
No substitute for love.
No substitute for love.
Face the truth, I will wait for you.
No substitute for you.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
sans straitjacket
Backstage: Donnellan brings 'Three Sisters,' 'Twelfth Night' to Kennedy Center
By Jane Horwitz
Wednesday, October 13, 2010; C02
Many directors start rehearsals of the play they're about to stage with an interpretation in mind. The actors sit around a table and do a first read-through, and often the designers present models and sketches of sets and costumes already conceived.
Many directors may work that way, but Declan Donnellan emphatically does not. Nearly 30 years ago, he co-founded the celebrated Cheek by Jowl theater troupe in London with his partner, designer Nick Ormerod. They developed a different way of working, one they also draw upon when they undertake projects abroad in French and Russian.
Donnellan is president of the Russia-based Chekhov International Theatre Festival Foundation. His stagings for the festival (with Ormerod's designs) of Anton Chekhov's "Three Sisters" (Oct. 19, 20) and Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" (Oct. 22, 23) are about to land at the Kennedy Center ever so briefly. The Moscow-based cast will perform in Russian with English surtitles.
When he starts rehearsals, Donnellan explains by phone from London, "we put absolutely nothing in front of [the actors]. . . . Everything slowly arises from the rehearsal period," including Ormerod's designs. There is much improvisation early on with the Russian performers, and exercises that Donnellan calls "etudes," as the actors dig into their characters.
"We work in such a way that we tailor the play to the actors we have," Donnellan says. "We try not to straitjacket what we're doing into a concept that's preconceived." The actors "sort of invent things, and then I ask them to do things in very different ways . . . and bit by bit, how we do it emerges. . . . We always do that, before we begin the rehearsal period, to see what's alive."
Donnellan remembers that when he staged "Sweeney Todd" at the Royal National Theatre in London, composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim asked him when he would "freeze" the show -- a common term for when the tinkering stops. Donnellan jokes that he "wasn't properly brought up," and was unfamiliar with the concept.
"The two plays that are coming [to Washington], 'Twelfth Night' and 'Three Sisters,' are very, very unfrozen. So they do vary, minutely, from night to night. . . . Some things must be the same every night, and some things must be different. . . . It's a balance."
When he works with Russian actors, he says, he has an interpreter by his side, but language seems to matter less and less. "The linguistics are just a tiny percentage of communication, and I communicate with my Russian actors probably better than I communicate with anybody else. . . . One of the things a director has to do is to be able to say to the actor when he thinks they're lying, you know. And, actually, you can tell that very easily."
By Jane Horwitz
Wednesday, October 13, 2010; C02
Many directors start rehearsals of the play they're about to stage with an interpretation in mind. The actors sit around a table and do a first read-through, and often the designers present models and sketches of sets and costumes already conceived.
Many directors may work that way, but Declan Donnellan emphatically does not. Nearly 30 years ago, he co-founded the celebrated Cheek by Jowl theater troupe in London with his partner, designer Nick Ormerod. They developed a different way of working, one they also draw upon when they undertake projects abroad in French and Russian.
Donnellan is president of the Russia-based Chekhov International Theatre Festival Foundation. His stagings for the festival (with Ormerod's designs) of Anton Chekhov's "Three Sisters" (Oct. 19, 20) and Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" (Oct. 22, 23) are about to land at the Kennedy Center ever so briefly. The Moscow-based cast will perform in Russian with English surtitles.
When he starts rehearsals, Donnellan explains by phone from London, "we put absolutely nothing in front of [the actors]. . . . Everything slowly arises from the rehearsal period," including Ormerod's designs. There is much improvisation early on with the Russian performers, and exercises that Donnellan calls "etudes," as the actors dig into their characters.
"We work in such a way that we tailor the play to the actors we have," Donnellan says. "We try not to straitjacket what we're doing into a concept that's preconceived." The actors "sort of invent things, and then I ask them to do things in very different ways . . . and bit by bit, how we do it emerges. . . . We always do that, before we begin the rehearsal period, to see what's alive."
Donnellan remembers that when he staged "Sweeney Todd" at the Royal National Theatre in London, composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim asked him when he would "freeze" the show -- a common term for when the tinkering stops. Donnellan jokes that he "wasn't properly brought up," and was unfamiliar with the concept.
"The two plays that are coming [to Washington], 'Twelfth Night' and 'Three Sisters,' are very, very unfrozen. So they do vary, minutely, from night to night. . . . Some things must be the same every night, and some things must be different. . . . It's a balance."
When he works with Russian actors, he says, he has an interpreter by his side, but language seems to matter less and less. "The linguistics are just a tiny percentage of communication, and I communicate with my Russian actors probably better than I communicate with anybody else. . . . One of the things a director has to do is to be able to say to the actor when he thinks they're lying, you know. And, actually, you can tell that very easily."
Paradise
Most people, Andrew, think that paradise is a state of having all you want, when actually, it's a state of not having all you want, but knowing that it's near, that you can have it, and that you will.
Kind of like Springfield... and everywhere else on your floaty, little planet.
TBT,
The Universe
Kind of like Springfield... and everywhere else on your floaty, little planet.
TBT,
The Universe
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
october's new susan
Your focus does seem to be on improving your personal life, for that is where a lot of the action in your chart will be centered these days. Yet your career will be getting some nice energy too, so you can choose where you'd like to direct your awesome aspects. Just don't spread yourself too thin and just as importantly, don't wait too long. Act now to improve the part of your life that you want to see progress on first. Life can't always be this sweet. While it is, use your advantage for all it's worth.
trust
So many of us have lost this ability, even before we have graduated from high school. And most especially we lost our ability to trust ourselves. Trust is an interesting word, and one that can be interchanged easily with the word "knowing". Knowing is inherent to our being and is ever present, even when we don't hear it or place value on it. Trust is a knowing that is operating atop a bed of doubt. Knowing is the information that comes first, before we talk ourselves out of it. Knowing is first, doubt takes time.
To trust our knowing, we must first step out of the fear of being wrong. How quickly we can abandon ourselves when the threat of being wrong is present. Know your knowing, live life with abandon and do not abandon yourself.
To trust our knowing, we must first step out of the fear of being wrong. How quickly we can abandon ourselves when the threat of being wrong is present. Know your knowing, live life with abandon and do not abandon yourself.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
game face
Andrew, I can't even remember the last time I was this excited for you over all that you're on the verge of doing, being, and having.
Just sayin' -
The Universe
Just sayin' -
The Universe
Monday, October 4, 2010
I'm Not An Insect
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, and die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects."
Specialization is for insects."
Sunday, October 3, 2010
but how did they escape?
“For the problem is this: we know by what way the assassin gained admission - he entered by the door and hid himself under the bed, awaiting Mademoiselle Stangerson. But how did he leave? How did he escape? If no trap, no secret door, no hiding place, no opening of any sort is found; if the examination of the walls—even to the demolition of the pavilion—does not reveal any passage practicable—not only for a human being, but for any being whatsoever—if the ceiling shows no crack, if the floor hides no underground passage, one must really believe in the Devil.”
-Gaston Leroux, The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907)
-Gaston Leroux, The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907)
Friday, October 1, 2010
it's all been about this one here
title, for now:
dancing with ursula.
or maybe, the training of wizards.
dancing with ursula.
or maybe, the training of wizards.
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