In the aftermath of the Chalk Circle

As an artist, I often find myself operating from a place of mild discontentment or dissatisfaction.  It comes from a place of striving for improvement, it's a positive drive despite sounding incredibly negative.  Perhaps it stems from being a goth at heart or maybe just from being a depressive artist.  It makes sense to me.  In any event, I typically end a performance or a run (or frankly, even just a cooked meal) without some consideration of my output and figuring out where there's room for improvement.  I take immense pride in my work and I never want to get lazy about it.  I did a show two years ago now (cripes, has it almost been that long?) called The Double with Babes With Blades Theatre Company and it is in no way an exaggeration to say that it changed my life.  In the two-year process I spent in the lead up to that production, I met the love of my life and learned an entirely new skill set from scratch.  I'm the only person, so far as I know, that has ever read that character in public and when I finally got to perform the role, I wasn't ever really satisfied with my performance. 

Last night, I closed The Caucasian Chalk Circle, produced by Promethean Theatre Ensemble and it was one of the absolute best experiences I've ever had in my career.  Considering that it was the first production of my 25th season, I hope that the point is adequately made.  It was a monstrously huge cast for Chicago storefront theatre; 15 people in the cast and a wonderful assemblage of weirdos it was.  Closing a show is always a sad event, but this has been particularly crushing for me; I've been on the edge of tears a few times today and last night and I haven't cried on a closing night in twenty years.  Part of it stems from the fact that, given the nature of the rehearsal process we had, and a number of small crises that we worked through, we established a very intense, emotional bond as a cast.  Casts are always small, short-term families, but this was even more so than usual.  Some of the people I had the pleasure of working with are people that intend will be friends of mine for the rest of my life.  Tonight though, I realized the big reason why this closing hit me as hard as it has.

I am completely satisfied with my performance.  I managed to give the exact performance I was aiming for.  It was what the piece needed and it was what I had hoped to achieve.  That was a profound realization for me.  It's not all because of me, mind you; I shared the stage with some immense talents and was supported by our director, Ed Rutherford.  The two amazingly talented actors who were instrumental in my performance were Sara Gorsky and +Anne Lentino (who I have fallen deeply, madly in actor love with) and together we were able to build a moment of despair and heartbreak in the middle of the chaos of the show.  A moment of quiet and pain shared between me and Sara.  In that moment, I was the actor I've spent the last quarter century trying to be.  It hurts that that moment is gone.  I've been there though, and I'm pretty sure that I'll manage to get there again; I have to get there again.  I can't accept anything less than that of myself.  It's a great feeling.  It's a terrible feeling.  I miss my friends, I miss Grusinia.

But you, who have listened to the story of the Chalk Circle
Take note of the meaning of the ancient song:
That what there is shall belong to those best for it
The children to good mothers, that they thrive
The carriages to good drivers, that they are driven well
And the valley to the waterers, that they may bear fruit.

Grungerpunk.

I understand why people like genres, or rather, why people like to apply genre labels onto things. There’s a value in having a common set of expectations, a common language, even the shared baggage that comes with defining art by genre. The problem is that they’re not actually very useful. They’re mutable, they change over time, they break down and end up being somewhere between quaint and wildly inaccurate.

Which brings me to grunge and cyberpunk, which, I discovered last night well past my bedtime after finishing a re-read of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, are basically the same thing. At least, so far as genre and influence go.

Stick with me while I try to form this into something that might make sense outside of my own, slightly sleep-addled mind.

Both cyberpunk and grunge are ex post facto genres, I say that because it makes me sound super-smart. It also happens to be true, neither genres came about out of any sort of deliberate agenda, neither genre actually existed until people decided after the fact and applied those labels after the fact (BOOM, ex post facto, bitches.) One can even argue that neither grunge nor cyberpunk are really genres, which is a stance I’m sympathetic towards.

Look at grunge to start with. The four bands I immediately associate with ‘grunge’ are Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden and Alice In Chains. While there are superficial similarities among the four, it would be hard to say that they sound anything the hell alike at all. None of them, to my knowledge, ever referred to themselves as being ‘grunge’ and indeed I’ve seen footage of members of three of the four bands scoff at the label (I feel confident there’s footage of the guys from Alice In Chains doing so as well.) Now, once grunge became A Thing, plenty of bands did set out to make grunge albums. I can’t think of any though. Because they almost certainly sucked (though I hold a certain affection for Soul Asylum.) When you get right down to it, grunge never existed. It’s not a musical style in the least, it was sort of a fashion statement, an affectation really.

Cyberpunk isn’t as clear-cut in that respect, but I think that’s just a fundamental difference between literature and music; music happens way faster than writing. I could produce an incredibly shitty album much more quickly than I could produce an incredibly shitty novel, and I will do both if my demands are not met. William Gibson didn’t set out to create cyberpunk when he wrote Neuromancer, though according to my Page-A-Day calendar (May 11, 2011) the word “cyberpunk” predates the publication of Neuromancer by two years. This adds nothing to my central argument but it’s an interesting factoid and I kept the damn page, so I might as well use it. Cyberpunk exists on a more solid footing within science fiction than grunge does in music, and again, I suspect that’s the in nature of the written word. Cyberpunk has some concrete reference points; mirrorshades, cybernetics, leather jackets, hackers, mega-corporations/governments and the visual-virtual rendering of cyberspace, et al, ad nauseum, what have you. There’s a lot of room to work in there, Neuromancer and Snow Crash are the two beacons of cyberpunk, the Pearl Jam and Nirvana (yes, I know it should be the other way around but I’m not in the grunge section anymore) if you will, and they are doing two very different things. Hell, cyberpunk can even withstand being merged Dungeons and Dragons (sorta.)

Here’s my finale. For as brief and passing as the two were, for as not actually genres as they may be, they both accomplished something rare and impressive; they altered the cultural DNA. They were mutagens, digging deep and shifting things permanently, irrevocably. Those Seattle bands caused mainstream music to turn on a dime, Eddie Vedder’s voice accidentally created the template by which any number of current, fucking awful bands use to excrete their hunger dunger dang music. Neuromancer’s influence is perhaps more subtle but even more pervasive, it’s seen in the shape the internet has taken, in the growth in augmented reality, every time someone on the internet makes a reference to ‘hacking the Gibson’ and of course, every 13 weeks when Keanu Reeves gets a residual check for Johnny Mnemonic.

They were moments, hard to pin down or define but they were important. They were vital. We would live in a fundamentally different world were it not for those genres, or movements, or whatever the hell you want to call them. We’re better off for having had them and with any luck I’ve been just coherent enough to make that point.

Things That Work Every Time

I'm a sucker for the media, I really am. I cry at movies, at NPR stories, good episodes of House, it's disgraceful, I know. It's because when I consume entertainment, I do it full-out. I apparently am a great audience member for live theatre for these reasons.

Last weekend I went and saw Adventureland which is an amazing movie that's marketed to downplay all the significant depth of the piece. There's a sequence in it that uses Unsatisfied from the Replacement's landmark 1984 album Let It Be and I realized that every time I've seen that song used in a film, it gets me (not crying mind you, just puts me exactly into the mood the film maker is going for). I'm not sure what it is about that song, beyond the fact that it's fucking awesome, but it's just so effective. It's yearning, it's disappointed, it's crushed but it's not angry, it's defiant. There's not another song that gets me like that.

I admit, I can only think of two movies off the top of my head that use the song, Adventureland and the underrated Airheads (yes, I think Airheads is underrated, wanna make something of it?) but I'm sure there are others.

Anyone else have a song that gets them like that?

Mission Statement

This blog has a very simple purpose (assuming Google unblocks it, since they think it's a Spam blog) and that's to be a repository for me to write about stuff, mostly stuff a I like. What sort of stuff? TV, books, music, radio, those elements that compose our culture, popular and otherwise. It's the stuff that is worth your consumption, indeed some of it will be the stuff you are wrong to not be consuming. Yes, it is elitist, but I don't see a problem with that.

Put your faith in my elitism and I shall lead you into the light.