friday phrases

my black backpack is the cat's pillow.

my russian friend's daughter is in russian commercials for heart medicine and clotted cream.

the play i'm in is a lot of fun to perform, and last night we had a talk-back after the show.

i'm meeting a new acting student tomorrow.

the 5th grade play is tuesday and we won't be ready, but it will be adorable.

the weather has been perfect this week.

yesterday i made rice and turkey with swiss cheese.

funny

i'm not one of those hilarious people. i might say one mildly funny thing a day. usually when i'm funniest is when i didn't intend it, like tripping while going up the stairs, or dribbling food on my shirt, or boogers. sometimes i'll say something funny and people will laugh and that's gratifying. but i think that in general i've always been something of a serious person. not so much dramatic necessarily, but introspective.

reaction

cold and impenetrable, the way people are. the way you try to make yourself. they're like, it's too much, i've got to draw the line somewhere, i can't be just absorbing all this stuff all the time, i've got to draw the line, there has to be a limit here somewhere. thereby cold and impenetrable. not even sure if there IS anyone else, that's how impenetrable. but there are other assurances, other things to turn to that make things OK. people who care what you say, sort of, for whatever reason, though it be selfish, ah yes, ah well, that's ok, that's all right. at least on some level they're listening. sort of.

123 favorite albums

i indulged myself. i went through my music and chose the albums i like the most. it came to 123 albums (though some are multiple-disc albums), which equals about five consecutive days of listening. here they are in alphabetical order.

A Tribe Called Quest: People's Instinctive Travels and Paths of Rhythm

Laurie Anderson: Home of the Brave

Fiona Apple: When the Pawn...

The Arcade Fire: Neon Bible

Joan Armatrading: Joan Armatrading

Joan Armatrading: Walk Under Ladders

Louis Armstrong & Duke Ellington: The Great Summit

Mulatu Astatke: Ethiopiques, Vol. 4: Ethio Jazz & Musique Instrumentale

The Avett Brothers: Emotionalism

The B-52's: Time Capsule: Songs for a Future Generation

J.S. Bach: St. Matthew Passion

The Beatles: The White Album

Pierre Bensusan: Musiques

Bjork: Live Box

Bjork: Medulla

David Bowie: Hunky Dory

Billy Bragg: Must I Paint You a Picture?: The Essential Billy Bragg

Kate Bush: The Kick Inside

Kate Bush: The Dreaming

Kate Bush: Hounds of Love

John Cage: Prepared Piano Sonatas & Interludes

Ben Charest: The Triplets of Belleville

The Clash: London Calling

Cocteau Twins: Victorialand

Elvis Costello: My Aim is True

Elvis Costello: Imperial Bedroom

Crowded House: Crowded House

De La Soul: 3 Feet High and Rising

De La Soul: Buhloone Mind State

Iris Dement: Infamous Angel

Thomas Dolby: The Flat Earth

Bob Dylan: Blood on the Tracks

Duke Ellington & John Coltrane: Duke Ellington & John Coltrane

Eurythmics: Be Yourself Tonight

Donald Fagen: The Nightfly

The Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

Djivan Gasparyan: I Will Not Be Sad in This World

Glover Gill: Waking Life

Girl Talk: Feed the Animals

Philip Glass: Glass: Saxophone

Philip Glass: La Belle et La Bete

Jose Gonzalez: Veneer

Boris Grebenshikov & Aquarium: The Favorite Songs of Ramses IV

Tommy Guerrero: Soul Food Taqueria

Guided By Voices: Under the Bushes Under the Stars

Robyn Hitchcock: I Often Dream of Trains

Iron & Wine: The Creek Drank the Cradle

Joe Jackson: Jumpin' Jive

Rickie Lee Jones: Pirates

Rickie Lee Jones: Pop Pop

Louis Jordan: Five Guys Named Moe

Robert Earl Keen: No Kinda Dancer

The Kinks: The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society

K'naan: Troubadour

Latin Playboys: Latin Playboys

Los Lobos: Kiko

Lyle Lovett: Pontiac

The Magnetic Fields: The Charm of the Highway Strip

The Magnetic Fields: 69 Love Songs

Taj Mahal & Toumani Diabate: Kulanjan

Manu Chao: Proxima Estacion: Esperanza

Wynton Marsalis Septet: Live at the Village Vanguard

MGMT: Oracular Spectacular

Charles Mingus: Mingus Plays Piano

Joni Mitchell: Court and Spark

Joni Mitchell: Hejira

The Modern Lovers: The Modern Lovers

Van Morrison: Astral Weeks

Van Morrison: No Guru, No Method, No Teacher

My Morning Jacket: Z

Joanna Newsom: Ys

Liz Phair: Exile in Guyville

Pixies: Doolittle

Prince: Purple Rain

John Prine: In Spite of Ourselves

The Proclaimers: This is the Story

Sergei Prokofiev: Piano Concerto #3

Giacomo Puccini: La Boheme

R.E.M.: Murmur

R.E.M.: Life's Rich Pageant

Radiohead: Kid A

Radiohead: In Rainbows

Gilda Radner: Live From New York

Lou Reed & John Cale: Songs for Drella

The Replacements: Let it Be

The Roches: The Roches

Roxy Music: Roxy Music

Roxy Music: Live

Todd Rundgren: A Wizard, A True Star

The Rustavi Choir: Georgian Voices

Santigold: Santigold

Michelle Shocked: Short Sharp Shocked

Shonen Knife: Pretty Little Baka Guy

Nina Simone: The Soul of Nina Simone

The Smiths: Meat is Murder

Elliott Smith: Elliott Smith

Patti Smith: Horses

Devon Sproule: Upstate Songs

Steely Dan: Pretzel Logic

Sufjan Stevens: Greetings from Michigan

David Sylvian & Holger Czukay: Flux + Mutability

Talking Heads: Sand in the Vaseline

James Taylor: Greatest Hits

Television: Marquee Moon

They Might Be Giants: Then

Tom Tom Club: Tom Tom Club

TV on the Radio: Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes

TV on the Radio: Dear Science

Suzanne Vega: Suzanne Vega

The Velvet Underground: VU

Rufus Wainwright: Rufus Wainwright

Tom Waits: Rain Dogs

Tom Waits: Frank's Wild Years

Wilco: Sky Blue Sky

Lucinda Williams: Car Wheels on a Gravel Road

Stevie Wonder: Songs in the Key of Life

X: Beyond & Back: The X Anthology

XTC: English Settlement

XTC: Skylarking

Neil Young: Harvest

Frank Zappa: Apostrophe/Overnite Sensation

Frank Zappa: Hot Rats

Frank Zappa: The Yellow Shark

mother's day

i wouldn't say i'm estranged from my mom. but i'm not exactly close to her either. i get the sense that we should be closer. we have been closer in the past. i have a lot of love for her. but the last few times we talked i ended up feeling kinda shitty at the end of the conversation. of late she has been casting aspersions upon the play i'm currently in, THE GOAT by edward albee. it is her right to cast aspersions and in truth i would expect nothing less. indeed, neither would albee-- he'd probably be proud. 

i wonder if i'm getting more sensitive as i get older. in terms of my acting, this may be a good thing; but in terms of life, this overbearing sensitivity is crippling. why should several negative comments about THE GOAT cause a rift of apathy between my mother and me? 

my mom was a really good mom while we were growing up, for the following reasons: she told me i was creative and imaginative, instilled creative confidence in me; she was positive and loving and almost never lost her temper; she taught me how to pray-- a skill that, though my spiritual leanings have changed, has always served me well; she read THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE to us once-- to my brother and i, at night before we went to bed, for how ever long it took to get through the whole thing, maybe a month?

i love my mom very much.

phrases in english

poem about paris

waiting for friends to come over

samples and flow laced over drumbeats

all the fans on, air hot

drenched in sweat

mopping the floor

homemade samosas

walk to gas station

pockets filled with chocolate

painting of apartment building

cat sacked out lengthwise

things hidden

i don't want to talk about it

that won't stay up

postcards stuck to the side of my dresser

holding on to things from fifteen years ago

shelves with pictures

wet paper towel sucks up dust

a tree softening a harsh corner

you never write to me

beads hanging on a hook

empty gift bag

belt hanging on a doorknob

emptied recycling bin

lamp stays on

beer at 5 pm

we hugged a tree

picture of the sky

picture of shadows

bee lady

there once was a bee lady who kept bees.

she'd get them at night, after twenty planets appeared.

bea/lady

i guess my aunt lady has always sort of vaguely or subconsciously reminded me of bea arthur. just something about her panache. as i think about it, they really have nothing in common. aunt lady is much more bubbly. maybe it was because she was tall and witty. i don't know. anyway bea arthur passed away this week. and last night i dreamt that she was aunt lady. all i remember of the long dream is that i was following her from one house to another house around the corner and there were high stone walls and she zipped across the street quickly before a huge bus came to the intersection. what stands out most is the high stone walls, as if we were in an old european city, the kind with narrow lanes and hidden stairways.

timeline

five years ago i was living at the guest house at my parents'. i was doing 'night of the iguana' at san pedro playhouse and driving my dad's ford F150.

ten years ago i was living at cathy's house in truckee. people were worried about Y2K and i think my only job was at the health department, plus KITUS.

fifteen years ago i was living in new york city and working at cooper's coffee bar on columbus avenue (i don't think it exists anymore). i was working on the play we were about to do in the summer with KITUS.

twenty years ago it was the spring of my junior year of college. mom sent me a care package that brought me to tears. it included an earth day t-shirt and a Goofy watch. i was in tunc's production of 'the learned ladies' and had decided to stick it out instead of quit school. i came very close to quitting, but yury convinced me to stay.

twenty-five years ago i was a sophomore in high school, in love with dave, paige, alex, traci, yvonne and kirk. i didn't want them to graduate.

thirty years ago i was at the end of sixth grade. i wasn't very happy, but i probably looked ok.

thirty-five years ago i was still pretty happy, though many of my creative impulses were being squashed. i danced and sang "jesus christ superstar" on the splintery back porch of our house on callaghan.

forty years ago they probably brought me a cake with one candle in the middle. i was very big and white and showered with love.

i am 41 years old today.

oh, all the times i've started over, had a sense of renewal and knew that things would be better from here on out. sometimes the energetic resuscitation lasted a week, sometimes a few days. i hadn't counted on entropy. as jaded as i may be, by now, i start over again today! ...with full knowledge of entropy's wiles, and of my own habits, comforts and changeabilities. 

as a kid i would get pissed when i wanted something and my mom would say, "maybe for your birthday." usually by the time the birthday rolled around, all the things i'd wanted had been forgotten. "what do you want for your birthday?" ... "uh... i don't know. i forgot." 

so, at some point shortly after i became an adult, i began to espouse the "every-day-as-birthday" theory, in which that kind of self-centered happiness which allows one to buy gifts for oneself takes over. not only to buy gifts, but to allow oneself a lot of love, mostly in the form of potential-- the idea that there is something wonderful happening, in just a minute, around the corner... NOW. this is the ideal i strive for.

it's fuckin good to be alive.

to mr. harrison

people can't resist talking about you. usually they talk about you. they talk about you when they're sipping margaritas after the show. they're dipping chips in salsa and talking about you, how you had your hand on that kid's ribcage, sitting too close, or how you ran the department like a cult. with fascinated energy in their eyes, people wonder about the workings of your brain. they say, "i can't believe i'm talking about him!" then they keep talking about you. they say, "he made us feel like we were part of something special," and then they keep talking about you and how your tactics were exclusionary and abusive. but they keep talking. "what was he thinking?" they ask aloud. 

after you left i tried to be you, in my mind, for a few months, comparing my every action and activity to how you would do it, measuring myself up against the example i had of you in my mind. i tried to engage the students as you did, to intimidate them, to idolize them, to set them hard against each other like books between bookends on shelves. then one day when i walked into the office i collapsed from the load. i was being pressed down from above and i was being pulled down from below. when i finally sucked myself up from the floor, fighting gravity like those girls in wicked, i looked to my right and saw the bank of file cabinets, full of all your documents, and had a bright, if still heavy, idea. 

i emptied out your file cabinets into trash bags and i had students throw the bags into the dumpster at the edge of the teacher's parking lot. i got rid of all those manuals, lists, contacts, monologues, directions, instructions, recipes, secrets, plays, procedures, spells. i threw them all away, and the next time i walked into the office, there was a breeze passing through, and roger said he'd take that carpet out and put in some nice tile.

i liked roger a lot.

weather like a saturday

there's a young dog in our neighborhood who has been barking, on much the exact same high note, since 8 this morning. it's driving david crazy. it's not driving me crazy, but it is causing tension in our home. it's not it's fault there's tension. it is the scapegoat of some other source of tension. and it's not it's fault in general. dogs are made to bark. it's the owner who is at fault, for allowing the dog to bark, or for abandoning it in the yard all day, or for whatever reason the dog just can't seem to stop barking.

i finished my taxes and sent a box of cds to a friend. i love making cds for people, it's one of my favorite things. i have been in my room most of the day working on my lines for the goat. i have only 10 more pages to go.

yesterday we saw a movie, "sunshine cleaning." it was an ok movie, the preview was better. i felt the movie was uneven and there was too much unexplained, unsupported, or perhaps there was content which at one time existed but was subsequently edited out. also, there were things in it that were kind of hackneyed. not overly original. but there were some good performances.

i kind of ignored easter, seems like for the first time. i'm sure i've sort of ignored it the last few years, but this year i really did. no candy or nothin'. not even a peep.

good new music acquired on the recent trip to seattle:

MGMT - "oracular spectacular"

Tunng - "good arrows"

qualities

with so many things you want to be, which are you to choose?

vulnerable

assertive

honest

empathetic

absorbent

energetic

productive

ruminative

intuitive

kind

self-confident

organized

flexible

selective

all-inclusive

aware

goll-damn it's beautiful today. the weather is cool and sunny. it hailed two hours ago (i missed it, was fast asleep). the sky is now white and blue.

rehearsals have started on THE GOAT. it occurs to me occasionally while i'm working on this play that this character, martin, is a great deal smarter than i am, on several different levels. chief among them is his ability to mentally navigate through a quagmire of confusion, joy, sorrow, infidelity, outrage, and wonder. and he navigates like a mo-fo, instantly steering from one to the next, to the next, in the space of mere lines. the challenge this presents to me as an actor is prodigious-- not only to feel and justify these split-second changes but also to make the changes clear and understandable on some level. i'm not complaining-- i relish a challenge; and the director and my leading lady are impeccable. it's time for me to memorize the hell out of myself.

in other news:

david and i are preparing for a trip to seattle, to attend my friend dave's wedding party. we already have a full slate of activities for the extended weekend (thursday through sunday): see my friend beth, see david's friend ade and go to his show, visit with another friend of david's on friday then go to a special screening of 'showgirls' that evening (my friend dave is an expert 'showgirls' commentator), see another of my friends for lunch on saturday, and attend dave's wedding party on saturday evening. we come home sunday afternoon. david and i have never been on a trip like this together. it will be fun. right now there are a few more logistics to take care of, like our rental car and printing maps and such.

long-range plans:

-work on TAKE ME OUT

-work on UNCLE VANYA

the long-awaited (yeah right) answer

ugh! blast you apathetic anti-intellectuals!

the previous post contained bits from chekhov, bulgakov, and (the word 'lepidoptera' gives it away) nabokov.

who can guess the three authors randomly sampled here?

"Say, did Varlamov pass by here yesterday or not?" robber off the balcony by uttering just two words: 'Hang him.' To been moonlike. Then snow began falling, slowly and vertically. They no sooner disappeared than the prankster Dymov, with the first was extremely tempting: to hurl himself at all these lamps some rocks, walked blue silhouettes with hoods and small lanterns. 

"Why illegitimate? Their father and mother were married did likewise. Scraping with his right hind paw, he dropped the knight recognized in all of life's phenomena, be it the smile of a bonbon in even borrowed a hundred roubles from him and still had not to wake him up. Seeing what condition Stepan Bogdanovich was in, circumstances under which they had been first apprehended in an indi-hall. "So I'll take care of that... Today I'll be seeing Pekar-that he was full. Then Pilate filled his own cup, and the guest did the exotic lepidoptera. Then, after the war, when he had managed again to the general's death, everything changed.

whaddaya call it... a mash-up? cut-up? thing-up?

She rested on an army cot, her hide: a small deal dresser with buffalo-hide decorations sold easily for he raised his right hand as if I were about to disagree.

"A while? How about it?"

Took him on as an apprentice when he had just turned twelve. He said later that, no lie, there was something funny about them-- visit his mother. The whole house knew it. She was cheerful even the last 84 days of her pregnancy on food mixed with matter to who knows you. I've been thinking it over. I want you out of here.

taken randomly from Grace Paley, Raymond Carver, and Georges Perec

corny-corn-corn

as corny as it is, i really like the stephen sondheim song called "being alive." its narrator is a person who wants someone in her life, even if that person messes everything up... sitting in her chair, ruining her sleep... because having someone you love mess up your life is better than having no one you love at all.

as i live in this new-ish relationship (going on 10 months now) i must often remind myself of this kind of beauty, the beauty of having someone mess up my routine, drink the last of my milk, wake me up inopportunely, make irritating noises. all this is much better than living in a bubble, as i was accustomed to doing.

i took david to a family gathering last night and was almost perfectly comfortable. i must give my sister credit for being so warm and welcoming and at the same time, casual about it, as if it were meant to be, and there's nothing particularly 'special' about it. these small steps are little revolutions, slowly incrementally changing the way things are done.

in other news...

my sister-in-law has a beautiful poem on her blog today. i will hereby usurp it. it is by mary oliver and i believe it may be called "praying."

It doesn't have to be

the blue iris, it could be

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones; just

pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try

to make them elaborate, this isn't

a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which

another voice may speak.

events that are recent

recent events.

just completed the Forum Theatre Project, this year entitled Borders and Walls. a high-quality group of people assembled to discuss the texas/mexico border wall and to gather stories of immigrants and others involved in the issue. lots of discussion. for the final two weeks, the group met to put together a narrative and to improvise situations having to do with the border and an oppressor and an oppressed. finally, we performed this narrative, unscripted, and other improvisations having to do with oppressors/oppressed. at the end of the performance of the narrative, the audience was invited to intervene and change the outcome of the story.

i think the whole thing went really well. the ultimate goal of the project was to encourage discussion and thought, and i'm sure that we were successful in this goal. also, even though i was surprisingly rusty in an improvisation role, i really enjoyed working with the fine group of people that was assembled, and on such an important topic.

now i turn my energy to edward albee's 'the goat.' we had our first read-thru today and i am already thrilled at how much power and potential this play and these actors have. very exciting!

horoscope

"One often meets one's destiny on the road taken to avoid it," says a French proverb. Sometimes, in fact, you can't even get properly aligned with your highest potential unless you try to escape it. Only by seeking an alternate route are you led into the circumstances that ultimately activate the fullness of your gifts.

-Free Will Astrology by Rob Brezsny

true west pic

this is from a dress rehearsal of TRUE WEST, AtticRep, december 08. with rick frederick as austin. photo by siggi ragnar.