Lecture lecture

There’s really nothing like Harold Pinter to make you feel like you’re not doing much with your brain.

This is not to say I am the biggest Pinter fan of all time. Personally, I enjoy a little more entertainment in my entertainment (though I must admit, I heartily enjoyed the production of Old Times now happening at Strawdog Theatre. Sexy and funny and it helps when the cast is cute.)

Bu, oh, watch that Nobel lecture he gave. Although he was accepting the prize for LITERATURE, he gave the most eloquent speech on past WWII American foreign policy that one could hope to hear. He was playing to an audience that had honored him for just this reason, but his mastery of the finer points of recent history was daunting. His plays are these marvels of economy, disciplined and rich and suspenseful, and in his spare time he has honed a sharp mind for politics and social justice.

I value eloquence these days, especially the spoken kind. In my heart of hearts I fear that 6 years of graduate school has ruined me for ever expressing myself with simplicity and clarity, in such a way that I might profoundly affect the hearer. I have a job now for which I am supposed to do just that, for 18 years olds that have a thousand things more interesting than me to think about, and it keeps me up a night, worrying that I’ll never have an ounce the grace and legibility that would allow me to affect the listeners.

I’m not quite sure how you learn it. I suspect it has something to do with carefully constructed and rehearsed lectures, but as much as I think I am preparing, I never sound quite right to myself. The more I talk, the more sense slips through my words, and once I realize that, it’s hard to get my thoughts back on the train. Or wagon. Even my metaphors become tortured. I mispronounce things, too.

I hope it does one good to simply listen to a voice like Pinter’s. Economical writing and speaking might get imprinted on the brain, I tell myself. How do you do more with less? How do you think more but in the right ways? How do you look someone straight in the eye and say just what you mean?

Me and Igor--Paper Machete October 8, 2011

Hey, this is a piece with more than you ever wanted to know about international copyright law. Still isn't much! Also, Feist, I'm sorry:

Before I tell you about this thing that you should totally be outraged about, let me warn you that there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. You can rant all you like and you can shake your fists at the gods but the gods are cold and unfeeling when it comes to this particular topic. The sexy rock and roll issue. Of international copyright law.

This week the Supreme Court heard the case of Golan vs. Holder, a case in which the plaintiffs are arguing to overturn a 1994 law passed by Congress which removed thousands of works of art from the public domain and returned them to copyright protection. An op-ed piece in the New York Times this week argued that this essentially robbed young artists of access to important works. I argue that it’s also just totes unfair. See, this challenge is what I like to call a “no-backsies” argument, which is an argument that I have been fervently in favor of since at least the 2^nd grade. If you give me something, like the last Charleston Chew in your Halloween bag, for example, you cannot simply take it back if you later regret this generosity. Similarly, if I should find a way to foist a smushed Almond Joy on you during a diabetic stupor, you cannot later try to return said smushed Almond Joy to the aforementioned Halloween bag. That is pretty much what you learn in law school.

What kind of things would be removed from the public domain if the Supreme Court upholds the lower court decisions? Really cool things. Things like the Fritz Lang’s 1927 movie Metropolis and the complete works of Igor Stravinsky. Things that I personally don’t consume on a regular basis but that lots of people more cultured than me do and by god, if one single undergraduate film theory paper were to go unwritten in this country because of this law, that crime would be on the heads of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia.

This what I mean about our collective political impotence on the topic. Once any issue of importance gets to Supreme Court we are all essentially on the sidelines because those fuckers are there for life and could really give a Fritz Lang what we think of it. I’m basically comfortable with that, but only because I’m saving my energy for protests that could really change things. Like, circulating clever Cornel West quotes via facebook. I’m pretty sure that’s gonna dismantle the capitalist system by early next week.

Also, I’ve had to spend a lot of energy this week trying to decide if I should purchase new Feist album. Has anyone heard it? Is it good?

A friend under the age of 25 promises she can download it for me for free. She even offered to lie to me about how she got it so that I wouldn’t have to feel guilty. I don’t really believe that everyone should be giving away the things they made for free.

Although I am doing that. Right now. That money that you forked over today bought you a drink, not my legal insights and I won’t see a penny of it. And that’s cool. I’ll get paid in other ways. I’ll get the adoration of half-drunk crowd of the kind of people who chose to hide in a dark bar on this beautiful day. I’ll earn the kinds of cultural capital that can only be earned at a weekly live magazine.

Much like the work of Fritz Lang and Igor Stravinsky, I feel that my work belongs to the people. Here’s the single difference between me and Igor Stravinsky. He’s dead. He has been dead for 40 years. He doesn’t need the cash, he needs to be remembered. He needs to be part of the canon of Western music and to continue to influence young composers, good and bad, and to do that, they need to hear him.

I’m not quite sure how Ms. Leslie Feist of Canada feels about it. I kind of owe her some cash. I never paid for her last album, my buddy Anthony burned me a copy.

Here’s the difference between Igor Stravinsky and Feist. She appeared looking adorable under her bangs and sang her little song for the nice people at Apple computers and they put it on TV 1, 2, 3, 4, MILLION times and she made a fuckload of money. Though certainly not as much as Steve Jobs made. Because I can promise, he gave nothing away for free.

So, I guess, in conclusion, don’t give things away for free. Or do. But only if you’re Russian and canonical and dead. Or if you’re Canadian and are getting compensated in other ways. Or if you’re me and you’re just happy if people listen to you talk for a few minutes. Just don’t expect to get rich. That’s for the smart people who have better lawyers and a more sophisticated understanding of the “no backsies” doctrine. Just know that with your delicate artistic temperament comes an instinctive understanding that payment comes in lots of different currencies and hopefully you get the one that you need the most.

Also, during the justices’ questions, Chief Justice Roberts revealed that he is a closet Jimi Hendrix fan who got nervous about the possibility that changes in public domain law might prevent us from listening to Hendrix rocking out on the national anthem. So let’s all just take that image home with us. Chief Justice Roberts, in his smoky smoky chambers, weeping under the black light bulb and listening to Hendrix tear it up. Copyright law is SO rock and roll.

something I highly recommend

So back in January, I can across this article in the New York Times. And the guy, it was about, Marc Maron, looked vaguely familiar to me from my days of watching endless stand-up clip shows in Comedy Central in the early 90’s. So I listened to one of his podcasts, and I liked it okay. But then I listened to another one, his interview with Ira Glass, and it started with him just walking through the streets of New York, on his way to the interview, voicing all of his anxieties, his expectations, his fears about the interview. And they spun out so quickly, and were so familiar, and I was hooked. So I listened to a few more episodes, and then started subscribing, and then even gave him some (a little—I should probably give more) money. It’s hard to write anything about this podcast that hasn’t already been written. Maron’s neuroses and emotional battles are chronicled by everyone who writes about it and by him himself twice a week. At a point, early in my listening days, I was trying to describe the experience to a friend and said I suspected he might actually be a Buddhist priest in disguise. It was a little cute, but I stand by the sentiment. To really have the opportunity to listen to someone wrestle with pain and fear, to really sit in it and fight through it, to stumble from week to week, to fall into traps, is a really rare and intimate experience. But at the end of the day, to understand this podcast as simply a window into a person’s psyche doesn’t do it justice.

It’s about comedy, and more importantly, comedians, but mostly it’s about work. As someone who performs, it has a special resonance to me, but I suspect that there is nothing so unusual about the emotions described. Really, it’s about people who are trying to work, trying to do good work, and trying to get paid for it and trying to succeed in a field where success is instantly calculated, in the moment that the work is made: have you made people laugh? It’s what we all experience, with any work, but it is that experience, of wanting to succeed, distilled into something that is pure and terrifying. And, of course, it’s funny, because they’re comedians. Not that comedians are always funny, but these are.

A few months ago, I heard the ever-brilliant Ian Belknap deliver a treatise on the importance of work (full disclosure: it was at Write Club, and Ian trounced me in the competition.) He explained the difference between your job and your work—what you do for money and what you do because you need to. It’s pretty lucky to find your work in life. It’s even luckier when you get to do it for your job. Never mind financial success or fame. “WTF” means something to me because it is profoundly about work, hosted by someone obsessed with his own work, and yet never to the exclusion of his interest in hearing other people talk about it. I hope I always care so much about my work, and so much about what other people have to say.

A short short play

Sometimes I perform in "Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind." It's one of my favorite things in the world. Here's a play I performed last weekend.

Unspills

© Chloe Johnston (May 2011)

CJ onstage along with a glass of water. Maybe in a practical light that she turns on at the beginning. 

CJ:

There was a brief period of my life when I thought I might be a Quaker and I was taking a class in Quakerism. In this class, the teachers told us a story about a young woman who was murdered by an acquaintance. (CJ pours some water on the floor, from a glass) When the trial came to an end, and the prosecution was seeking the death penalty, the family of the murdered woman, who were Quakers, pleaded with the court to spare the life of the murderer. I think they told us this story as a way to illustrate the concept of non-violence and though the story has stayed with me for many years, I can’t say it turned me into a pacifist. To me, the story is just about the finality of death, and parents who understood that finality in their bones, who understood that nothing brings the dead back to life, nothing unspills blood, and life goes on. The Quakers are also very into moments of silence.

(CJ just sits in silence for 10 seconds or so, then tries to pick up the water from the floor with her fingers and put it back in the cups, after a few tries, the light goes out.)

Cut Hair

Sometimes I write short stories. I wrote this one in response to a painting as part of a celebration of the artist's work. It was fun. And I like the woman in the story and in the painting.

Cut hair

“It would show off your cheekbones,” said Marie. “Your cheekbones and your collarbones. I mean, if you do it, you gotta commit, like really commit to the idea that you might have to wear lipstick more often then you do now. And like, really good lipstick. Capital L lipstick.”
“Is that like LESBIAN lipstick?” said Sarah.
“Ha ha,” said Marie. “No, you’re going for the opposite effect. Actually. Unless you were going for the lipstick lesbian kind of lipstick look. But that’s a totally different look. That’s not like this picture at all.”
They both peered down again at the photo in the magazine Sarah held that had prompted this entire scintillating conversation. The movie star with the pixie cut was pretty but not stunning—she was an ACTRESS, on the cusp of maybe a big deal career but still reassuringly foreign and classy. A good source of fashion inspiration—for someone like Sarah, anyway, Marie assured her.
“I guess I’m just saying, its hard to know until you do it, what it’s really gonna look like. I mean, I think you basically have the bone structure for it, but it’s not like a sure thing. And then when you do it, it’s kind of done. So I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it, I’m just saying that maybe you should buy the lipstick BEFORE. So you have it. As a back up. Wait, aren’t you going to buy the magazine?”
Sarah froze. She had been about to return it to the shelf, Marie was right. She should buy the magazine, and take it with her when she went to visit her hairdresser. Then she would present the hairdresser with the picture and say, “Make me look like this.” Nevermind she didn’t have an appointment yet, or actually even a hairdresser. Never mind that not so long ago, she would have simply ripped the page from the magazine and pocketed it. There was a chance, of course, she might have been caught, and forced to buy the magazine anyway, but if alternative was actually buying the magazine, it seemed like a pretty good gamble. Besides, people at the Borders were unlikely to make a scene, so she’s likely be safe. In those days, she would have crammed the picture in her pocket, just because she liked it, and likely have forgotten about until after it had gone through the wash. But that was one of those behaviors she had decided to leave behind.
Deciding things was very important to Sarah. In fact, she had decided that DECIDING things, that making DECISIONS was something she needed to get better at, to sharpen her skills, to practice. She was going to decide what she wanted to be, and will herself into being that person. And the first step would be to will the rest of the world into seeing her that way, into seeing her as that girl. She needed to her head to be indomitable so that the rest of her might follow. Her body would have to follow.

The body was an important part of her DECISION. Her body now, well it worked okay, but it wasn’t quite right. Not yet. It wasn’t really lean, but it would be, she felt sure, once she had the right haircut and everything in her life began to fall into place. Her body would follow her hair and become hard, well, not Susan Powter hard (NOTE TO SELF: tell hairdresser not to me look like Susan Powter, avoid being both bleached AND manic simultaneously). No, she wanted to be ballerina hard. Lithe and indestructible and yet still held aloft. Though if she stopped to think about it, she had never seen a sugar plum fairy with a boy’s haircut.

“You might look like Mia Farrow, like in Rosemary’s Baby. That’s good, right?”
“Yeah, that would be cool.”
“Then you wouldn’t even need the lipstick. You’d be like a hot little girl or something.”

Sarah knew she wouldn’t look like a hot little girl. Unlike Marie, she knew what she had looked like when she really was a little girl and it wasn’t hot, and she wasn’t altogether unthankful for that. She had looked...it was hard to find a word for it. Maybe, messy? No, that was too charitable. She had looked dirty. She had looked like the kind of little girl who would grow up to be a teenager who ripped pictures out of a magazine.

She looked at the price on the magazine: $5. Not so long ago, that would have seemed crazy. She looked at her friend Marie, the kind of friend who you walked over to a Borders with during your lunch break. Who gave you advice on haircuts with absolute confidence and insulted you while doing it. She liked Marie because Marie was so decisive she plucked her eyebrows. Not even the tiniest hairs on her body were left to chance. Sarah thought it would do her good to have lunch with someone like that.
She looked at the picture of the actress one more time. It was undeniably pretty but it wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t quite what she had in mind. And she did have an image in mind, an image of the girl she wanted to be. Someone with strong dark hair, cut short and brutal above her ears. The kind of girl who wore deeply scooped necklines and took very deep breaths. The kind of girl who had banished almost all color from her wardrobe out of a deep sense of sartorial discipline. A girl who found peace in that kind of rigor. Who could tip her head back, even in a public space, close her eyes, and make a wish.

She smiled at Marie and headed toward the checkout counter. She would buy the magazine, even though she knew it meant one less beer this weekend, a purchase which would give her infinitely more pleasure. She would buy the magazine because she liked its weight, liked its resolutely shiny cover, liked the cover model’s brave teeth. She would buy it because the magazine felt like a decision, heavy in her hands. She would buy it even though she knew that she would never show the picture to a hairdresser. She would buy it even though she knew that tonight, after work, she would go home and pull the kitchen scissors out of their drawer, go into the bathroom, take off her shirt, stand in front of the mirror in her bra, and chop her own hair off. Then she would shake the dead hair from her shoulders, look at herself in the mirror and take a very deep breath.

Adventure in instruction #4532881

So it seemed like a good idea at the time to lock myself in a theatre overnight with a group of aspiring young playwrights. And, spoiler alert, it was in the end. Because sometimes, not often, but sometimes, everyone is their best selves. Sometimes the students push themselves to do some hard work and even then, know when to edit themselves. Sometimes the grown-ups (ie TEACHERS in my universe) are there for said students and help them make their ideas into something legible to the wilder world. Sometimes actors actually learn their lines and sometimes jokes actually work. Sometimes ideas mush together and become more than mush, become more than the sum of their parts and give real meaning to that mysterious word “inter-disciplinary” which only a few people care about but they care about it very much. Sometimes the stoner jokes are really funny and watching who are people not yet 20 struggle with their secret thoughts on a public stage is actually not cringe-inducing but sweet and honest and a bit brave. I had a good weekend, and I drank a lot of coffee and got to be glad, once again, that I am a teacher. But since I suspect that the very witty and black-humored teenagers who I spent all of Friday night with would cringe at that last statement, let me just say that my lesson learned is really this: put a kid in a tiger suit and let him pretend to be high and the humanities come to life.

Play

So once upon a time, I did this at The Write Club. I was defending "Play" in the epic battle of work vs. play. And I have to admit, work had some pretty compelling points. That may be why he won. Either way, I believe in what I said, in the same way I believed in dancing pigs when I was a wee tot and how they might be a good source for career advice. I'm not sure I was right, but I was always a sucker for a funny story, and THAT is good career advice.

Chloe Johnston - WRITE CLUB, Play - 9/21/10 from Ian Belknap on Vimeo.

Directing is hard, y'all

So periodically I am reminded that having devoted 30 years of your life to pursuit of one art form is actually not enough to have mastered it in any meaningful way. Malcolm Gladwell (he of the let-me-make-everything-complicated-very-simple school of writing, a school I have my doubts should be accredited, though I devour his output with vigor) says you need 10,000 of practice to become an expert in a field. Now my math isn’t very good, and it isn’t very good largely because I have spent the last 30 years IN REHEARSAL, in rehearsal for various plays that have never made me famous so should have at least made me talented. But every so often I am reminded I am neither famous, nor particularly good at this thing because if I were good then surely I would never stumble in my writing/directing/performing or otherwise honoring the GODS OF THE THE-ATER. Ack, who am I kidding? I always spell is THEATRE.

I am currently directing some very talented, hardworking college students in some plays written by other very talented college students and while I couldn’t be prouder of them, I had a moment last weekend of being frustrated by the director, namely, MOI, who is about 12 years their senior and, I fear, their intellectual inferior. Because here’s the thing, it doesn’t matter how many years I’ve been at it (and I will remind you, it’s been 30) I always forget a few things. Here’s the one I had to relearn for the 1500^th time (or perhaps the 10,000^th): YOU HAVE TO GIVE ACTORS DIRECTION THEY CAN USE. Don’t tell them to do things because they will look cool. Don’t tell them to do things because they create a general mood. Tell them why they WANT those things, in that moment, in that character. Put it in terms of need. Cause here’s the thing, I can scoff all I want at that Method-y/Stanislavski-y/motivation-y language that we use in the theatre, but the fact of the matter is, we are people, and we are motivated (!) by desire. By the things we want. That’s why I’m telling them to do things—I WANT to create a certain image. So why, oh, why, must I always be reminded to put all my direction into the language of desire?

Side note: When I was directing a play in college, I told one of my friends to stop being so 19^th century in his understanding of theatre. As if I understood either theatre OR the 19^th century. You’ll be happy to know he teased me mercilessly for this and continues to do so, over a decade later. 

A little story about ludus

For Valentine's Day on Monday I was invited to perform a piece on love at the Drinking and Writing Theatre at the Haymarket Brewery. I was asked to write about "ludus," a competitive form of love, love played for sport. I wrote a nerdy (sexy?) little version of the myth of Atlanta. Here it is:

Atlanta paused to consider the golden apple that had been tossed at her feet. It was deep yellow gold, 24 carat by her estimation, in the impressive likeness of a GOLDEN delicious variety. Though she appreciated the verbal pun on the part of the craftsperson, its existence was troubling. “Really?” she thought, “I’m really supposed to stop, pick this up, and lose the race because it is shiny? Is that what the world thinks of me?”

This was a rhetorical question, of course. First off, she wasn’t actually saying it out loud, because there was no one around. The other runner was still far behind. Second, she knew very well that this was what the world thought of her. The world expected her to be easily distracted by shiny things because she was a girl. Not only was she a girl, she was a princess. Not only was she a princess, she was a princess with strong opinions. These are all things that her world, which was not yet considered ancient Greece but instead terribly modern, could not abide.

It was galling that this was what the world thought of her, of course, but she was basically used to it at this point. What got her was that it had been tossed by the guy she was racing against, and although she had every intention of beating him, when she caught a glimpse of him before he slipped on the full battle gear he was required to wear (her rules) she thought he might be cute. Alas, just another douchey warrior. Figured.

She glanced behind her. Still no other runner in sight. She stooped to pick up the apple. What would she even do with a solid gold apple? She slipped it into her pocket, but mostly because she didn’t want some near-sighted chipmunk to come upon it and break a tooth. She ran on.

By the time the second apple rolled across her foot, she knew something was seriously up. This one was a perfect replica of a honey crisp, and while she still felt that it was an egregious waste of precious metal, she had to admit, she was touched that the guy had done his homework and discovered her favorite variety. But then she realized that he probably wasn’t actually some oracle, and more likely some sort of god must be involved in these shenanigans. Fucking Aphrodite, always fucking Aphrodite. Actually that was factually true, Aphrodite was always fucking, since that was basically her job description, which was fine, a girl’s gotta make a living, but why, thought Atlanta, must she metaphorically fuck with my footrace? This was, she understood, an attempt on the part of her competitor to suggest that his interest in her was actually inspired by love, rather than moneylust, and though it was clever of him to let her know he found her, and her likes and dislikes, INTERESTING, it was also sort of pathetic. A very expensive way of tugging her pigtails. She was about to kick the apple out of her way, but then she considered that it might make a nice paperweight and slipped it into her pocket next to the golden delicious. She really needed a paperweight. She had lots of papers and her desk was near an open window.

She jogged on, which was actually kind of hard with 2 3 pound hunks of gold in her pocket. This whole race thing had seemed like a good idea at one time, or at least an entertaining one. She would only marry a guy who could beat her in a footrace. She added the rule about him having to run in full battle wear later, mostly because it was pretty funny. When she got bored with that, she added the rule where they got killed if they lost after a few them whispered some anachronistically demeaning comments as she ran past them and though didn’t know why, hearing the words “junk” and “trunk” directed at her made her feel self-conscious about her jiggling ass. It was a cruel world. Sometimes you want to just take a nice long run outside without feeling like your body is available to every leering centaur with a grabby hooves, and while she couldn’t do much to protect all the other women who felt the same way, she could at least decapitate the assholes that had the temerity to evaluate her physical assets during her own footrace. It seemed fair.

So points to this guy for keeping his mouth shut. Still, she felt that tossing heavy objects in her way to distract her had to qualify as cheating. She would be a little sorry to murder the guy who had gone to the trouble of involving deities in his subterfuge, but rules are rules.

When the third golden apple bounced off her ankle, she was really pissed. First off, OUCH. Second, it was starting to seem like a cry for attention. One apple to the foot—quirky, like a handlebar moustache or two-toned sandals. Two apples to the foot—establishes commitment to afore-mentioned quirkiness, like a side-career as a sculptor or orchard farmer. Three apples to the foot—desperate, like all these quirks exist to essentially mask a dull personality or bad teeth. She had stopped to examine the damage done to her tendon (not yet called Achilles, for obvious reasons) and picked up the apple. This one was a macintosh, smaller and rounder than the others, with a little golden worm peeking out of one side, and she smiled in spite of herself. Then she had a thought. The young man she was racing that day had tossed these apples, had cheated, because he knew he could never outrun her. The apples were a message that said, “You are faster than me, yes, but I. WANT. YOU.” He was clever—and devious. Then another thought occurred to her. If this man had managed to charm three golden apples out of Aphrodite, he was not only rich, he was also probably pretty golden delicious himself, for while Aphrodite was undeniably slutty, she did have a taste for bronzed skin, dark eyes, and good cheekbones, a taste Atlanta shared. So the guy throwing these apples was slightly untrustworthy, fiendishly handsome, hot for her, and in possession of an excellent pair of calf muscles, or so they looked to Atlanta as he sped past her. She let him pull ahead, examining from behind, as she rolled the golden macintosh around in her hand. It all spelled trouble, and she couldn’t help but get turned on by that. Maybe, she thought, as she slipped the apple into her pocket and began jogging towards the finish line, just maybe, she’d let this one live.

indulging self

“But what if it’s self-indulgent?”

I used to hear this a lot from students, generally when they’ve been given permission to perform something they’ve written. It ranks right after “It’s pretentious” as one of the most baffling comments I hear repeatedly wherever I teach. I can never get a good working definition of pretentious out of a student. No one knows what it means, they just know, like obscenity, it gives them a funny tingly feeling that they have to pretend not to like.

“But what if it’s self-indulgent?” I teach students who want to be performers. Not all of my students want to do this professionally but they want to do it well because, unlike in most other classes they will take, if they do not do it well they will fail in public. This is a very motivating force, and one I am familiar with.

The students who are worried about being self-indulgent are not, surprisingly the one’s who shouldn’t worry. They are often the ones who are locked in their heads, not their egos, who are afraid of taking up space, even as they get edged out of the space by louder voices.

I don’t want to squash that impulse. It’s good to think about where and how your words might land on other ears. It’s good to not make sound for the sake of making sound. But it’s also good to make sounds that you can hear, to think about shaping them in ways that might actually, oh, I don’t know, convey meaning and bring joy to other people.

Yes, Virginia, it is self-indulgent to get up in front of a group of people and talk to them about yourself. You should take it seriously and tell your story with care and in such a way that someone else thinks “yes, that’s my story.” But it’s no more self-indulgent than driving a car. Or drinking from a disposable water bottle. Or any often myriad other things you do each day without thinking simply because everyone else is doing them.

Not everyone needs to be telling stories in front of large audiences. Very few people do. But doing the work to get a story ready for a large audience, giving it a beginning, middle, end, and figuring out what it’s ABOUT—these are all healthy ways to live. Study your life, and process it, and share it with compassion and humor. These things are nice and make you a better person.