Thank you for Not Smoking

Per Lisa's suggestion, I checked out Thank You for Smoking. Well, unfortunately, it wasn't on Netflix or Hulu, so I had to watch just clips of it on Netflix. The reason I like this as source material for the work is that it gets at the kind of backwards logic that I'd like to explore coming from Good Life Corporation. One particular passage comes in a scene between Aaron Eckhart and his son. He takes his son (who lives with his mom) on a trip to California and explains to him about his job a lobbyist for the cigarette industry. As an example, he says they should have an argument about vanilla ice cream vs. chocolate ice cream. The son tries to find arguments about why chocolate is better, but Eckhart says that both flavors are good, and people should have the freedom to choose whichever they feel like on a particular day. "But you didn't convince me," the son says. "I didn't have to," says the dad. "I proved that you're wrong and I'm write." This totally reminds me of the conversation that I had with Ricardo about people like Katherine Kersten and Rush Limbaugh, who seemingly contradictory arguments are actually not contradictory at all - they are all about destroying the enemy at all costs. Here's the clip- it also has a great scene with Rob Lowe at the Hollywood empire: Here's the main character arguing his case in front of the Senate Committee. It made me think about the NRA lobby:

Tyranny of Corporate Media

We had a productive meeting this morning at Seward Cafe with Lisa, Rakel and myself. At 8 a.m. no less! I shared with the group my thoughts so far- about Aaron Swartz, about access to information, about what the future looks like. Lisa asked me: What do you want the play to be about? Harder to answer than I realized! I said when I was first thinking about this play, about a year ago, it was this idea of net neutrality. But then when I started talking about it, I realized I don't exactly have a firm grasp of what net neutrality is! And then I started talking about the SOPA/PIPA stuff that was going on as I've been talking about this piece. I told her about my idea of how in the future, everyone is connected through their brains- somehow wired to link them to the web. Lisa, wisely, said that perhaps I need to focus more. And I realize that I'm getting too wrapped up in plot. I need to take a step back. Anyway- I'm just going to copy some of the notes that Lisa took: Brainstorm List One The Tyranny of Corporate Media- What is it about? Corporatization of Media? Access to Information? Copyright? Fair Use? What the public wants vs. what is in the public interest? Corporate control of content? Pip Sopa/Net neutrality What do you want to take away from this? (we discussed that I'm more interested in raising questions than "explaining" or "teaching") The idea of corporations are people- what is the nth degree of that? Brainstorm List 2 What does the future look like? Darm basements no museums or libraries. No information sources think tweeting media/tech connection the environment is destroyed. one one percent of people are educated 99 percent of schools to be workers for products branding is everywhere entertainment is huge everyone lives in high rise apartments there are no cars b/c we've run out of gas the currency is the data in the interests of corporations There's no freedom of speech. And finally, these guiding questions: What can "we" the corporation do to make "you" (the audience) consume and produce media in our interest? How can we write your life. So! It's all still in brainstorming stages. Stay tuned. Lisa suggests the following source material: "White Noise" by Don Delilo The film "Thank You for Not Smoking" "Back to the Future, Part II"

Dystopia Play, thinking about Aaron Swartz

Benn thinking more about Aaron Swartz, and did a lot of reading last night. Incredibly intriguing story, especially about how his girlfriend at the time accidentally told the prosecutors about his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto (which was actually on his blog- weird they had never read it). Also, a very good piece in The New Yorker about how he had actually moved on from the idea of Open Access, so it's unclear what he actually planned to do with the downloaded articles. She really drives the point home that he really had some mental/emotional problems that were underlying causes of his suicide. The Open Access Manifesto is a great piece of writing, and I'm thinking about drawing from it for this theater piece I'm creating, as well as this idea of the martyr who fights against the system (even if it's arguable whether Swartz was really a martyr.) The good thing about making a play that's a dystopia, in the future, is that you don't have to be limited by "facts", but rather you're just exploring the idea of something, carried out to the nth degree. I'm interested in looking at this idea that we don't actually know the information- whatever it is- be it news, science, thought- because it's not available to us, and in my dystopia, people are so caught up with the vapid cultural spew that gets fed to them, they don't know what they are missing. I think of an Aaron Swartz type character who tries to call out against this, but is ultimately killed. Maybe it's made to look like a suicide. Of course than I just get all wrapped up into narrative again. Always narrative! I'm so tied to story. It's hard to loose myself from its clutches. Anyway, here are some of the things I was reading: Aaron Swartz's Guerilla Open Access Manifesto: http://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt Article by Quinn Norton, Aaron Swartz's partner: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/life-inside-the-aaron-swartz-investigation/273654/ New Yorker piece: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/03/11/130311fa_fact_macfarquhar?currentPage=2 And I want to check out this film: The documentary: Shadows of Liberty. I believe it's being played on Direct TV on June 21 on channel 375 at 5 p.m?: http://shadowsofliberty.org/the-film/ Also news, I talked to Maggie about maybe being a part of this. So if she joins, we have Rakel, Maggie, Romina and May, though Romina can't actually be in it. Need some more people, especially guys, I think.

Oh. Hi There.

Why hello blog. It's been a while. I think I'm going to begin writing here again about my current project. I'm creating a piece, and would like to blog about the process. It' sad to think the last time I wrote here was nearly three years ago. I've been doing theater pretty regularly since then, but never my own work. I've also been steadily writing more journalism type stuff. And I did a research project about Minnesota theater history, and some other stuff. The project I'm going to be working on is a dystopia. It' a world where all the information is controlled by a large corporation. Today I had my first brainstorming session with my friend Rakel. We kind of hammered out my ideas for characters and a skeleton of a plot. Here are the characters so far: Paige: sort of the central character Thomas: An anarchist- type. He tells Paige the truth about the corporation. He is murdered- but it's made to look like a suicide. Sally: A reporter. Tired of endlessly only reporting about celebrity gossip and trivial news, she follows her hunch about the murdered activist. Melody: A columnist/policy wonk. A mastermind of manipulating thought. One Percent: I don't have a name for him yet. Possibly Paige's friends, and maybe a jailor. Of course, I only have a cast of three currently, so I'm either going to need to cut down the cast list, have actors play multiple roles, or make some new friends quickly who can help me with this. What we talked about today is that it's the future, and everyone is constantly connected to the internet, except not through any device but rather, their brains are just automatically connected. All they have to do is think- or maybe tilt their head or give audible commands to weave through the internet. There's a relationship between Thomas and Paige. Thomas tries to convince her about the corporation. He takes her to an abandoned science museum. He says something- something controversial, and either Paige or one of her friends "report him" by making a status update about it. Because of what he has said, he is killed- because he's a "scarerist". When Paige tries to find out about him, she's labeled as a scarerist too, and put in a prison. There's a confrontation scene between Sally and One Percent. I imagine Melody only speaks in isolated monologues, directly addressed to the audience. That's all i have right now. It's a bit narrative-heavy I realize. I'm hoping that my other collaborators can help me tease out the movement/abstract elements, and I want to draw from news sources and also dystopian texts such as 1984. I'm excited.

Lesbians, Gurdjieff, in a garage

Last week I attended a little performance in the garage of Arwen Wilder and Heidi Eckwall's house. A work in progress, it was conceived by Arwen and co-created by Emily Zimmer and Arwen and Heidi's daughter, Ea (I'm not sure how old she is- maybe 4?) The topic for the play centered on a group of queer women- artists, writers, intellectuals, actresses- who were all weirdly obsessed by the guru Gurdjieff. The night I saw it Corrie Zoll was also in it, although there were other performers on different nights.

I first heard about Gurdjieff maybe 10 years ago when I knew a guy who was really into the teachings- he'd be on these Gurdjieff forums all the time and even went to a conference. Gurdjeff's main thing was that everyone was asleep, and he was all about being more aware of everything you do. He had several schools at various times and one of them was with a group of lesbian women who, at least according to one author, called themselves "the rope". You can read more about the group of women here.

Arwen played the Baroness Elsa Von Freytag Loringhoven, a Dadist and all-around eccentric who wore crazy outfits and allegedly gave Duchamp the urinal he used for his famous piece. Emily played an American writer who belonged to the group (unfortunately I can't remember the name- apparently she was famous enough to have a feminist bookstore named after her, which she resented).

When I asked Arwen how she came upon the topic, she said she was fascinated by this idea of this group of brilliant, strong women under the tutelage of this rather authoritarian man who was constantly insulting them and calling them idiots. Today I was doing a little google searching about the women, and it turns out that Margeret Anderson, who along with along with her lover of one time Jane Heap, formed The Little Review, which incidentally was the first magazine to serialize Ulysses by James Joyce.

Also in the piece was a performance of Macbeth, performed by Ea and Emily. Arwen said the idea for that is that she is fascinated watching her daughter "play" and how that activity is so different that "acting", because when Ea plays, she believes what she is doing 100 percent. Apparently in Gurdjieff's teachings he talked about performance not as theatre really, but as a way of being.

There was also a section where Ea interviewed Emily about her character, which was very delightful. There have been several living room performances in Arwen and Heidi's living room, and there is always an interview section, which sometimes are short but can also go on and on forever, depending on Ea's mood.

Anyway I really enjoyed the performance. I hope that they continue working on it- I'd love to see what becomes of the ideas.

Techiti Tech

Oh my goodness The Keys Experiment opens at Artery 2010 in one week. Ah! Getting a bit nervous to say the least. Trying to keep cool about it. I had a good meeting today with Dixie Treichel at The Soap Factory working on the sound design. There were like a million people there working on their Artery pieces, which is great. There's this amazing energy in that space. Fiona MacNeill, the curator, says this year has an A List of artists, and she's not wrong. I'm honored to share the bill with the likes of Annie Rollins, Jaime Carrera, and Kats Kats D Fukasawa, who I met for the first time today, and many other very talented artists. I kind of think of Artery as the fringe alternative. Like the Fringe Festival, there's a sense of the eclectic, but I think audience members are more guaranteed to see some performance that is really pushing the boundaries in terms of form and content (I speak of my fellow artists, not myself- I obviously can't be the judge of whether what I'm doing is worth seeing or not).

I've decided, as I did when I did the show at the Red Eye, to err on the side of simplicity. I've decided against the video projection idea, even though I have images and archive footage to use, because I would rather spend my energy working on the movement and text, and choreographing the piece in the very unique space (I'm performing in the Video rooms toward the back of the gallery). Dixie brought me some sound mixes for one of the new scenes, which I'm really excited about although she hasn't quite finished with it yet. The new movement sequence is the largest new section, although there are also a few new monologues (one by a girlfriend of one of the Conscientious Objectors, and a couple of new Ancel Keys monologues). There are a couple of aspects of the space that are challenging- probably the main difficulty being that there are limited outlets and we can't hang the sound speakers. But I trust Dixie completely and I think she has the thing figured out (in all tech matters I must defer decisions to my collaborators who actually know what they are talking about). Another difficulty is finding the time to rehearse. While the nice thing about doing a one woman show is that I don't have to coordinate schedules with other actors, I have found it's stressful to coordinate rehearsal times with my team of artists helping me (director, choreographer, and sound designer) plus the Soap isn't always available, and often there is a lot of commotion going on.) I think we've nailed some times down to meet in there, though, so hopefully I'll feel a bit better once we hammer out the details of how I'm going to do this thing.

Soap, Camp and Bedlam

Well last week I kind of got back to the real world following my month-long hiatus during the World Cup. It's been a brutal wake up call to reality, but I managed to get some writing done and work on my show.

Here's a piece I wrote for MN Artists about The Mystery of Irma Vep. I decided that since I had the time, I wanted to instead of just writing a review go a little bit more in depth about the style of the piece. I look at the Camp Style, and how the play exemplifies the goofiness of the genre while at the same time offers layers of deeper meaning through its many literary and cultural references.

While I was working on the MN Artists piece, I was greatly saddened to learn that Bedlam has been given notice to move from their current space. The Star Tribune broke the story, and I then I spent last Thursday and Friday morning madly completing an article containing little bit of the backstory of Bedlam's history, and tried to write also about the situation right now. I'm really sad to be losing one of my favorite venues in town to see shows and hang out (I would argue the building has the best deck for having a drink in summer), but hopefully the theater itself will survive and keep its multifaceted programming.

In the meantime, work continues with my one-woman-show, the Keys Experiment, which I'll be performing at the Soap Factory on July 30. I'm very grateful for having had the experience workshopping the piece at Red Eye, and I've been working lately on adding a few scenes. I met with my sound designer Dixie Treichel on Saturday and she's concocting a new soundscape for a movement section I'm going to work on this week. Also, there's an article in Lavender Magazine about the show, written by John Townsend, which I really appreciate him writing.