Like Making Fish In A Barrel

I can't find the login for the Curio Theatre Company's blog page, so I'm posting this here:

THIS WAS TODAY

Ok, normal day so far. Office full of buckets and cardboard.

A little... unsettling? But I'm sure there's a reason. 

And now there's a fish. Fun fact about fish: they are impossible to buy. Paul Kuhn caught this one from the Schuylkill.

Jasper is confused as to why his owner is surrounding the fish with sand. Harry is regretting writing a play that requires 30+ fish. Paul carries on. 

Nothing weird about this. 

Fun Fact about Plaster of Paris: IT DOES NOT SET. EVER.

Don't worry the Wilma will get a special thanks in the program for having the best dam postcards ever. I wrote dam because they're acting as a dam. Did I mention I wrote a comedy play? You should see it. 

And the worlds most tedious magic act is complete! The fish has disappeared.

History: Everyone worth their salt knows nothing happened before 1980.

           The Faulkner estate recently sued Woody Allen for misquoting Faulkner, presumably because Faulkner’s heirs ran out of booze money. The quote was something like, “History isn’t dead. It isn’t even history.” But here’s a way better Faulkner quote (that may or may not be true, but let’s all just assume it is): so Faulkner was a fan of the drink, but he never drank when he wrote. He would finish a novel in like a week or something, then he and his wife would go on a bender. During one such binge, his daughter came up to him and said, “Dad I think you should stop drinking.” Faulkner then put down his beer bong, turned to his daughter and said, “You know, no one remembers Shakespeare’s daughter.” 

            While that quote is both hysterical and unfathomably cruel, the neatest part for me is the insight into Faulkner’s motivation for writing: he wants people to remember him. And who doesn’t? This was the motivation for Ovid’s Metamorphosis, the poems of Horace, and the film Robocop. And those guys (especially whoever it was who wrote Robocop) will now never be forgotten. Unless we all die. Or their books burn up and we lose all record of their works. Or there’s some kind of alien memory virus that comes to earth and makes us all forget those three. Or youtube turns us all into drooling idiots by way of kittens. Specifically this kitten: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIMvntC6pBc. Who is that greasy little muffin? What was I blogging about again? I don’t remember. I’ll just look to the past to see where I should go from here.

            Ah yes, history. I remember a story I once heard about history: this guy was hanging out in France, and they made him emperor because he was good at boat fights. Then he got too big for his britches, and tried to walk into Russia and be all, “Hey broskies, I’m your king now!” The Russians then pointed out that no one can live in Russia, and everyone died. Years later some Austrian was hanging out in Germany, and they gave him an army for no reason. After taking over France, this Austrian decided he would walk into Russia and say “Hey broskies, I’m your king now!” The Russians reiterated that no one can possibly live in Russia, and then everyone died again. The moral of the story is that something about France makes people want to invade Russia. The sub moral is that you, dear sweet reader, are going to make the same exact mistakes that someone made years before.

            Unless, of course, you don’t want to be History’s bitch. History’s out there talking smack about you up and down the block. History and Biology are hanging out in the bathroom, smoking cigarettes and wearing leather jackets, and History says, “Hey Bio, watch as I make this new asshole invade Russia just like those old assholes.” And they laugh and laugh. At you. They’re laughing at you. Because right then and there you’re saying to yourself, “Gee, I feel like the smart money would invade Russia. I mean it really seems like the safe choice here.” Then History pretends to cough, but really he’s calling you a chump, and the teacher won’t do anything (there’s a teacher in the bathroom) because maybe he was really coughing (because of the cigarettes). So there’s nothing you can do. Wait, there is something you can do: DON’T BE A CHUMP! Make the dangerous choice of wasting… no not wasting, INVESTING… your resources into taking England. Yeah the Channel presents some problems, but half the fun of war is the inventions that come from necessity. Stand up for your self and yell, “You know what DAD—I mean-- HISTORY! I’m not going to do what you want me to do! I’m going to make my own choices! I’m going to be a human being and not just a pawn in your little game of checkers! I’m going to take England down, and eat ice cream out of the King’s gold hat, or die trying! Because I know one thing for sure History, if I walk into Russia, and say, ‘Hey broskies, I’m your king now,’ everyone will die. Because no one can live in Russia.” Then you punch History in the gut, and high-five Biology. Order is restored, because History is your bitch, not the other way around.

            So what does this mean for those of us who have decide to pursue the creation of theatre as we perpetually move toward our inevitable demise? I would say this: please don’t let history make you its bitch. Please don’t march back into Russia. Try England this time! Or maybe some sort of non-war option! Hoping to be remembered in the future is a sham. Sure no one remembers Shakespeare’s daughter, but soon we won’t remember Robert Lowell, and then a few years after that we won’t remember Shakespeare. Just do something neat now. Use history, but never worship it. And if we keep invading Russia, everyone will die.

            To accurately quote Faulkner, “You aren’t dead. You aren’t even you. Now hold my legs so I can do a keg stand.”

            

Blood: A post about blood.

            Blood’s pretty gross when it’s not inside a person. And even then it has to be inside them in the right way, because if it’s inside someone’s stomach or throat, that’s still pretty gross. Blood is only acceptable to me when it’s inside veins.

            Blood serves many purposes in theatre. It helps audiences and actors to get oxygen to their various muscles, so that they can stay alive during a five hour-long performance of Romeo and Juliet. It helps maintain body heat during summer performances of The Importance of Being Ernest where the air conditioning in the renovated church you’re sitting in has broken down. It helps get CO2 out of the body, which helps the tree grow in that new play that some college freshman wrote where the stage directions ask for an oak tree to grow in the middle of the stage for no reason. It is an essential component to sexual stimulation, which is helpful during Applied Mathmatica Comedia Del Farte Theatre Company’s fringe production: Doll’s Broken Home: A Postmodern Deconstruction of A Doll House, which contains no fewer than 27 gratuitous sex scenes. It could be said that without blood, there could be no theatre.

            What’s great about blood is that it’s universal. Everyone has it pulsing inside them. Right now as you read this, there are millions of little red inner tubes sloshing around your body. And that’s happening in everyone. So when you meet the king of Sweden, and he’s acting all hoity toity and shit, you can sit back and smile to yourself, because you know his secret: he’s full of blood. Or when you’re up on stage, and your blood decides that now is the time to see if it can go fast enough to break the sound barrier, remember that everyone in the audience has that same red goop in them. Theatre is one of the best times for the blood in you to talk to the blood in everyone else. Maybe that’s why we do theatre: so we can attain some sort of universal blood recognition.

            In old-school religious sacrifices, God told the Levites that they can keep the meat of the sacrificial lambs, but the blood and fat belongs to him. This little factoid is not only the entire basis of the theological treatise I am currently writing entitled God’s Just A Big Fat Vampire, but it is also a neat reminder of what was considered sacred in old school metaphysical rituals. Blood mattered when trying to interact with whatever it is that exists outside of the physical world. I will pose the following to you, dear sweet beautiful reader: theatre is an attempt to interact with that stuff that ain’t physical. Theatre is one of many rituals in which we tie God to a post and say, “Just because you don’t want to talk to us, doesn’t mean we aren’t going to listen!” That may sound sacrilegious, but think about it: there’s only one God and there’s like thousands of us! We should team up and make him tell us his secrets! Let’s pool our blood together (not literally because I think that’s how people get diseases) and water-board God on stage with it!

            Anyway, my real point in all this is: the next time you see a play where blood is put in the wrong place, or blood is treated in a less than sacred manner, please take a moment to think about how that makes you feel. Blood’s an important tool, so let’s treat it with the respect it deserves. 

Ephemeral: When do things end? Amiright?

            When you ask a theatre creator why they choose theatre over any other artistic medium, there is an 85% chance that they will use the word “ephemeral” in their defense.  This is because they are assuming that you will not be listening, because if you have the time and energy to ask a theatre creator anything, you probably are just passing time before your trust fund matures. That said, next time you hear someone say something like “theatre is relevant because it is ephemeral/transient/inherently impermanent,” you should leave the conversation and go watch some porn, because your time will be better spent.

            In this essay, I will be mocking the notion that ephermerality (a word that spell-check says I coined and so you must site me every time you use it!) is an indicator of value. I will start by discussing other things that exist only for a limited time, cigarettes, puppies, and orgasms, and pointing out that their value comes from something other than their limited life span. Then I will proceed to blow your mind by pointing out that things like film also share in the ephemeral, because fucking everything you experience does, because you are an ephemeral being, and can only experience things within the limits of mortality.  So now that you know what I’m going to say, I think I’ll go ahead and say it.

            I’ll be the first to say this: I freaking love cigarettes. It’s not just that I’m addicted to them either, I genuinely love them. Especially now that you have to leave whatever it is that you’re doing to go smoke them. I sit on a computer all day, pretending to work, but then the itch creeps in, and I have to get up to walk away from the deadening glow of my screens, and enjoy the splendor of the out doors to smoke some tobacco. You know what sucks about smoking? It ends. Cigarettes last about seven minutes, sometimes longer if you’re smoking 100’s, and that’s it. Ephemeral. Imagine, ladies and gentlemen and everyone in between, that you could smoke forever. You have to live outside gently away from youtube, facebook, tumblr, and the general blogosphere, with a smooth relaxing smoke forever. Certainly this is not everyone’s cup of tea, but for a heavy smoker like me, that sounds delightful. But sadly, fire destroys things, and so every cigarette must come to an end. It’s there and then it isn’t. The halcyon peace of your smoke break is shattered when the flames reach the filter. There is no more tobacco left, simply ash in the can. It’s done. There is no more. Go inside buttface, you’re break is done.

             Starting with cigarettes was a silly choice, I’ll grant that, but I hope to get you back with this section: puppies. Look at this puppy trying to stay awake even though he’s so tired: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6A2-AuhiwI. Oh my goodness! He’s so tired, but he can’t sleep like that! He needs to lie down, but he doesn’t know any better! Because he’s a puppy! Puppies don’t know yet how to be dogs! I eat a lot of Chinese food, and one time I found a thin piece of paper in a cookie they gave me, and written on it was “Wisdom comes from experience.” I don’t know why I brought that up, probably because of my latent (or overt) racist personality, but the point remains: puppies are cute because they have no wisdom! They don’t know what they’re doing! The try to leap too far, and it’s adorable. They slip on linoleum floors, because they haven’t learned how to be careful. Wisdom comes from experience, but the wise are never cute like a puppy. Ephemeral. There’s this question that a philosophy professor once asked thinking that he was clever, “When is a beard a beard?” The idea is how many hairs does it take for a man to say he is bearded, and not just stubbly? Or how many grains of sand does it take to make a pile? Is it one, two, or eight thousand? (Those are your only options, pick one.) The reason why I bring this up, is only to ask: When is a puppy a puppy? How old do they need to get before they reach dog status? For the sake of this essay, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you accepted that there is a point when a puppy is no longer a puppy without questioning this premise for a second. Now don’t get me wrong, I love dogs, but dogs are no puppies. But it’s ok, because theatre people will tell you that there’s an awesome something that happens or something when things only last for not forever. The point is: THEATRE PEOPLE HATE INFINITE PUPPIES! Punch them when you meet them, for this reason alone.

            Orgasms: who doesn’t like them? Some people, I’ve heard, but I don’t write for outliers. For the most part orgasms are great! I had an incredibly evangelical upbringing, and as such when to many a bible camp. Now religious folk like to separate sheep and goats, and males and females, and wheat and chaff. My point here is two-fold: Christians like binary separation, and I spent many a summer in the company of young men. One “cabin meeting” that I had to experience, included a bunch of 13 year old boys talking about what heaven is like. One guy (I don’t remember his name but he wore a baseball cap, so if you see a guy with a baseball cap, assume this is the guy I am talking about) asked this question: “If heaven is like, the greatest experience ever, then how awkward will it be to talk to girls? Cause I mean you’re just constantly coming up there.” This cap clad bro was recognizing a universal truth: we all want to be orgasming all the time. (Now’s the point where I look like I’m shooting my argument in the foot, but really I’m not because I went to rhetoric school.) If we were orgasming all the time, or had infinite puppies, or eternal cigarette breaks, would they cease to have value? I one time read a book called Candid, and they go to the El Dorado, and gold has no value because it is abundant. Is supply and demand a factor in issues of value? Shit was this essay a waste of time? I have to think about this for a bit.

            Ok everyone, I spoke with my sister, she’s a doctor, and she assures me that I don’t need to worry about the eternity of things, because I am going to die one day. And because of my smoking, I will be dying sooner than most. I then talked to my brother who totally went to grad school, and he told me that every artistic event I perceive is seen through the lens of me. I don’t know what that means, but I’d be willing to bet that since I am existing in a limited capacity, I can only experience films through an ephemeral lens. Even though the movie does not change over time, I do, and so too does my interpretation. I’m always interpreting a film as if it is happening right here right now, because that’s the only way I can experience things, right here and right now. When the movie ends, so too does my experience of the film. I can watch it again right after I finish it, but I can’t step in the same river twice, sooo… Since I can’t experience anything in an infinite way, essentially everything I experience is ephemeral. Smokes, puppies, orgasms, plays, novels, films, and really good hamburgers.

            The point in all this is as follows: when a theatre head tells you that theatre is relevant because of its transience, or because it is ephemeral, please realize they are saying nothing. Everything ends, but that doesn’t mean everything is valuable.