Tag: Paul Mullin

St. Peckinpah

May 26, 2011

“Come” she told me, “with your shame and your gringo.” I looked up & stepped toward
the old woman, black habit
standing under the sun-white arch of the church.
She was called Agatha, mistress of God.
And I would be called graverobber, trapped in a movie
trapped in Mexico, some hundred & eight miles from the border,
with a man’s head in a Scotch plaid hatbox. Fucking flies. And not a whorehouse in sight.
This is a dirty old town without clear pavement markings
& I drove right into the doorway of the little apostolic house of Jesus
before I noticed the labored eyes of Our Lord looking down on me.
I parked the sedan. It purred raggedly, panting exhaust
like a hole in a lung. Then the engine stopped altogether & I took my cue to get out
& get religion. Head, I’m taking you with me.
There’s nothing sacred about a hole in the ground. The Church
cuts off lips, fingers, the petrified genitals of saints made merchandise …
but me I’m seventy miles an hour
out of midnight, the village cemetery in Jalisco,
men shouting in Spanish on brown horses, women on horses
shouting & everybody’s got a gun.
Hypocrites, double-crossers … Head, you’re the only one in this country who’s not trying to kill me
& I appreciate that. Bygones are bygones, the past is the past & the past
wants us all to be happy. I’m going to stagger into the confessional
& stagger back out. Then we’ll go see Mr. Big
& his boyfriends. So don’t touch anything on the tables. So stop looking at me
with your goddamn fucking eyes.
David Penn
1995
“peckinpah”
by Omar Willey
(more…)

Posted at 12:45 PM in Poetry, Seattle, Writing | Comments (2)

Tags: David Penn, friendship, high school garage bands, Omar Willey, Paul Mullin, poetry, Sam Peckinpah, St. Peckinpah
Tony Kushner Cannot Support Himself as a Playwright

May 26, 2011

Is this true? Is it significant? What does it mean to Seattle in its struggle to become a world class theatre town?
I have to admit, for all my complaining about lack of institutional support for new work, especially outside New York City, I was still shocked when I read this in Scott Waters blog, Theatre Ideas (crucial reading as far as I’m concerned):

“I make my living now as a screenwriter! Which I’m surprised and horrified to find myself saying, but I don’t think I can support myself as a playwright at this point. I don’t think anybody does.” — Tony Kushner, in Time Out.

My question to you: if Tony Kushner, who I would argue is the best playwright in America today, can’t support himself as a playwright, can anybody? And if not, should Kushner’s statement be seen as an earthquake that might lead to the examination of the overall theatre business model?

Over a year ago, at Seattle’s Outrageous Fortune discussion, one of our Big House Artistic Administrators stood up in defense of his theatre’s relative neglect of new work development by saying, “We are looking for excellence and we’re just not finding it.” At the time, outraged as I was, I thought he was just talking about local playwrights. But now I understand he really meant everywhere and everyone. When Seattle’s Big Houses claim to want to address vital current issues, they go one of two ways: they mount one-person shows like I am Rachel Corrie and The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, or they yank a “classic” off the shelf and say, “Here, Glengary Glen Ross shows us something relevant about the recent mortgage meltdown that had its epicenter a mile and a half south of here at the WaMu Tower.” When, of course, it does nothing of the sort.
Somehow this nation can support hundreds upon hundreds of regional theatre artistic directors, managing directors, development directors and adjunct staff—a whole class of workers that can only be described as “artistic administrators”; but even our very best writer for the stage must go to film and television for his bread and butter.
We all nod sagely and agree the system’s broken. But if you want to fix it—do more than watch sadly as it dies the death of ragdoll—then I continue to suggest you follow the money and ask impolite questions.

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Tags: David Penn, friendship, high school garage bands, Omar Willey, Paul Mullin, poetry, Sam Peckinpah, St. Peckinpah
Lost and Found

May 23, 2011

Circle X Theatre’s world premiere of An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show, designed by Gary Smoot, was the most visually evocative production of any show I have ever written.   The tableaus and scenic effects were so unique and so profoundly stunning that it’s damned near impossible to describe them in words. So imagine how depressing it has been these nine years to think that the only two surviving images of the show were this…
And this…
Now don’t get me wrong: the incomparable Kellie Waymire ravishes us posing above as the troubled proto-supermodel Jacqui Potts*; and Blink Bodie (Kevin Fabian) flanked by his spokesmodels (Jamie Bullock & Daniele O’Laughlin) wrapped in Old Glory certainly hits the “American” part of the title on the nose. On the other hand, not only do both shots fail to tell us anything novel about the show, they also, more importantly, don’t tell us what we don’t know about it, thus piquing our curiousity enough to maybe come see. Compare them with this newly unearthed shot, again of Kellie as Jacqui…
This not only screams “sex”, but “mystery”, “exposure”, and somehow, oddly, “death” itself. If we had captioned this “Jacqui Potts about to enter the bardo realm by dropping acid and posing nude for the first time”, we might just have been able to get your butt in one of Circle X’s seats, mightn’t we?   Why we did not try to sell the show with the countless more evocative images than those first two, I will probably never know. The fact is, however, that because those two shots were used for publicity, they alone survived. Or so I thought for nearly a decade.
A lot of life got lived between 2002 and now^†, and the rolls of film that all of us knew were captured in that meticulous marathon photo call somehow disappeared somewhere along the way. I confirmed the loss when I started blogging here at Just Wrought and wanted to write about how I love to work with designers as early as possible in the development process. Even though I was living in New York City when I wrote ABOD and Gary Smoot lived in Los Angeles, we somehow managed to meet in Seattle over a long post-9/11 Thanksgiving weekend, and in the living room of Gary’s boss’s house we brainstormed ways to stage the bizarre effects I was imagining.
I described the process in my essay on designers:

We needed three isolation booths for the afterlife contestants. I wanted something straightforward and on the nose, similar to the glass boxes they used in Twenty-One. Naturally, Gary zagged off my zig. We went through a lot of ideas, including bubble packs for life-sized action heroes, file cabinets and morgue drawers. Finally he landed on simple genius, and of course had the skill and the luck to bring it together: three identical, perfectly white refrigerators, with plastic magnet letters to spell out each enclosed contestant’s name. When the intense gelled Fresnels were focused on them, the white surface utterly transformed into whatever deeply saturated color the lighting designer chose to call up. The “contestents” blithely climbed in and out of them, emerging unexpectedly from one after entering another, like so many peas in a karmic shell game. For the audience the layers of meaning dawned almost imperceptibly but no less forcefully for that: the three fridges were uniquely American icons of consumption, comfort, death and banality all at once, and as they were signifying these things, it was also obvious that they were nothing more or less than refrigerators, or isolation booths, or maybe some vast gentle joke played on everyone from patron to playwright. When Gary’s designing the sense of play never leaves the play, even if the play involves death at its very core.

When I wrote that I had no reason to believe anyone would ever again be able to see what I was trying to describe. When I called Gary to ask if he had captured any photos for his own records, he said he might have, but that he would have to dig for them when he had some free time. That’s Smoot code for, “It ain’t gonna happen.” Gary never has free time. Even so, a few months later he told me he had looked and hadn’t find anything. Now we were both bummed.
Then, a few months later, I was on the phone with Tim Wright, the current Artistic Director of Circle X, pitching him a new script when a mini-miracle occurred. Tim casually mentioned that he had the ABOD production shot negatives and if I wanted, he would send them to me! The rest was logistics. This past week I got the negs developed to digital at a respectable mom and pop photo shop, and spent most of Saturday uploading the images to Flickr and Face Book and tagging them with the names of old friends.*^†    I smiled all day as folks involved with the production chimed in to say hello, share memories,tag more photos and grab shots for the profile pics.
So you wanna see those fridges, and how well they worked? Well, in lieu of a few thousand words, here’s a few pictures…

*Deep inside information: It is a testament to Kellie’s wide-spectrum of talent and tireless dedication that she also helped to sew and hang the sumptuous red curtain behind her in this shot.
^†Not to mention death: Kellie Waymire died in 2003.
*^†You can enjoy the full set on Flickr, here…

Available Now

Buy Now

Posted at 12:45 PM in Poetry, Seattle, Writing | Comments (2)

Tags: David Penn, friendship, high school garage bands, Omar Willey, Paul Mullin, poetry, Sam Peckinpah, St. Peckinpah
Help! I Need a Word

May 18, 2011
Gentle readers, can you help me? I just invented a brand new art form about which I am very excited. Check it out: this art form employs the interplay of two or more persons seen and heard live by an audience. As far as I’m aware there is no art form like it. Remember, it has to have more than one person because the interplay is key, because as a fool once said:

Dialogue breeds risk like flowers bloom scent, and risk is the fabric of theatre. Because two or more people on stage can never know with certainty what an other is about to do, no matter how many times they have done it before, the audience attends the action with a sense of the innate exposure. “Anything could happen, and we are in the same damned room with these agitated people.” Risk is not a by-product of drama. It is the main ingredient.

So what do I call my invention? Please do not say theatre. I have been told by experts that that word actually means:
- “Whatever takes place in a theater.”
- “…But also anything which takes place outside of a theatre but sorta feels like it could’ve taken place in a theatre.”
- “…But also anything else I decide it is.”
I’m collecting suggestions below, most especially from non-theatre artists and non-academics, because I am really hoping to convince you to come see my new art form.
Thanks in advance!
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Tags: David Penn, friendship, high school garage bands, Omar Willey, Paul Mullin, poetry, Sam Peckinpah, St. Peckinpah
By the Whites of Our Eyes

May 16, 2011

While reading Brian Christian’s evocative new book The Most Human Human, which manages to explore an impressively wide and variegated territory while covering the secondary contest at an annual Turing Test competition to determine which human entrant seems most human, I ran across this random fun fact:

…. Humans are known to have the largest and most visible sclera—the “whites” of the eyes—of any species…. There must be some reason humans developed it, despite its obvious costs. In fact, the advantage of visible sclera—so goes the “cooperative eye hypothesis”—is precisely that it enables humans to see clear, and from a distance, which directions other humans are looking…. Chimpanzees, gorillas, and bonobos—our nearest cousins—follow the direction of each other’s heads, whereas human infants follow the direction of each other’s eyes.

All evolved traits have costs associated with them. A peacock develops his tail to attract a peahen at great nutritive cost. In fact, he does so as a way of signaling, “I must be really special because I can squander resources on this utterly useless and even detrimental fancy fanny fan.” So likewise, there must have been costs to developing these large and prominent sclera of ours. The most obvious leaping to my mind is the fact that when I can easily see what other people are looking at, they can just as easily do the same with me. This is mutual mind-reading, plain and simple. And we have to assume that being able to read each others’ minds was ultimately more advantageous to our forbears than permanent obfuscation. We were stronger when we understood each other well. We still are.
As usual, I see implications for theatre. A while ago I posted here an essay explaining why solo shows are not plays, and therefore not, strictly speaking, theatre. I conceded, however, that they belong to the even older art of story-telling. Now, based on some of the newest science available, I am no longer convinced it really is the elder form.
Communication based on gesture, eye movement and even sympathetic neuronal patterning (more on that later when I abstract research on “mirror neurons”) may well have preceded verbal communication, which leans so heavily on semantic content. Put more simply, our evolutionary ancestors may have been “play-acting” long before they were “story-telling”.

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Tags: David Penn, friendship, high school garage bands, Omar Willey, Paul Mullin, poetry, Sam Peckinpah, St. Peckinpah
Time is Memory and Might not Exist

May 3, 2011

I like to book surf. If something I am enjoying references another intriguing book, I try to hunt it down. And if that second book mentions a third tempting tome, I go after that too, following the thread as far as it will take me. In his book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr cites some research described in What’s Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science, a collection of 18 short and eminently readable essays by scientists working at the cutting edge of their respective fields.
In a piece called “Brain Time”, David M. Eagleman recounts his investigations into how the brain reconciles multifarious streams of incoming data into a coherent perception of “now”: a feat much harder than it seems. Unlike fiber optics, neurons don’t communicate at anything near light-speed. Indeed, the signal from a pin prick to your toe takes considerably longer to reach your brain than one given simultaneously to your nose. So how does the brain register them as concurrent? Or as Eagleman asks:

Why didn’t you feel the nose-touch when it first arrived? Did your brain wait to see what else might be coming up the pipeline of the spinal cord until it was sure it had waited long enough for the lower signal from the toe? Strange as that sounds, it may be correct. It may be that that unified polysensory perception of the world has to wait for the slowest overall information. Given conduction times along limbs, this leads to the bizarre but testable suggestion that tall people may live further in the past than short people.

Also, different senses communicate to our brains at different speeds, which, if you think about it, isn’t exactly news. It’s why we start foot-races with gunshots and not light-flashes.
So how does the brain resolve all these variously arriving inputs into a unity? Well, the answer Eagleman postulates is as fascinating as it is simple. We understand the world by involving ourselves in it:

It has been shown that the brain constantly recalibrates its expectations about arrival times. And it does so by starting with a single, simple assumption: if it sends out a motor act (such a as a clap of hands), all the feedback should be assumed to be simultaneous and any delays should be adjusted until simultaneity is perceived. In other words, the best way to predict the expected relative timing of incoming signals is to interact with the world: each time you kick or touch or knock on something, your brain makes the assumption that the sound, sight and touch are simultaneous.

Eagelman is keen to emphasize that the perception he is investigating here is conscious awareness. Humans, like all higher animals, are completely capable of making “pre-conscious” decisions with their spinal cords, which is how you can remove your hand from the hot stove before the pain even registers. This difference between pre-conscious perception and consciousness itself leads Eagleman to stare down the ultimate question: what do we need the latter for anyway?

What is the use of perception, especially since it lags behind reality, is retrospectively attributed, and is generally outstripped by automatic (unconscious) systems? The most likely answer is that perceptions are representations of information that the cognitive systems can work with later. Thus it is important for the brain to take sufficient time to settle on its best interpretation of what just happened rather than stick with its initial, rapid interpretation. Its carefully refined picture of what just happened is all it will have to work with later, so it had better invest the time.

Humans don’t have sharp claws, or big teeth, or wings or echo-location. We have something ultimately much more powerful: clear, cogent, handily referable memories. We experience time as a stream because that’s the best, and perhaps only way to accurately record experience with the level of retrievable complexity that we require to be, well, human. In fact, Eagleman concludes by casting doubt on the notion of time as a scientifically sound first principle.

Most of our current theoretical frameworks include the variable t in a Newtonian, river-flowing sense. But as we begin to understand time as a construction of the brain, as subject to illusion as the sense of color is, we may eventually be able to remove our perceptual biases from the equation. Our physical theories are mostly built on top of our filters for perceiving the world, and time may be the most stubborn filter of all to budge out of the way.

With this line of thought, Eagleman follows down a trail blazed by Henri Bergson and Kurt Gödel, whose evocative investigations of time have been all too often ignored or poorly understood by serious scientists and philosophers over the last century.
Implications for Theatre:
What’s more, Eagleman may have unwittingly stumbled on an answer to the most persistently nagging question of my chosen art form: why is live theatre so much more excruciating than movies or TV when it’s bad, and so much more powerfully transcendent on those much rarer occasions when it is good? Well maybe it is because film and TV do most of your brain’s work for you, pre-packaging all the various elements of sight and sound into a perfectly corroborated unified mega-signal. In the theatre, the data hits our brains like it does in real life—like it did on the savannah a million years ago— as an unreconciled rough draft. Our brains are working harder in the theatre to piece it all together. Film and television tell our brains stories; theatre makes our brains do the telling. (For my own theatrical explorations of time’s mutability, check out my play The Ten Thousand Things.)
David M. Eagleman’s bio says that in addition to serving as the director of Baylor College of Medicine’s Laboratory for Perception and Action, he is also the author of a book of fiction called Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. Cowabunga baby! Surf’s up!

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Tags: David Penn, friendship, high school garage bands, Omar Willey, Paul Mullin, poetry, Sam Peckinpah, St. Peckinpah
Art Picks up Journalism’s Slack Again

April 28, 2011

I went on record a while ago saying that I will not be doing reviews here at Just Wrought. However, in order to make a couple of larger points later, I will have to stipulate some things about Mike Daisey’s performance last night at the Seattle Rep’s production of his new one-man show, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. Here’s why: I was pressing my way out of the theatre after the show, doing my best to spare myself and Kurt Beattie the awkwardness that always ensues when we try to casually chit-chat, when I overheard an older and obviously well-off man say to his wife, “I’ll be interested to see how his [meaning Daisey’s] performance grows after a couple weeks. I mean, this was only just opening night after all.”
Yeah.
So let’s get something straight from the start: Mike Daisey’s performance was brilliant, alternatively hilarious and harrowing; funny and furious: one moment cannily manipulative and the next heartbreakingly earnest, and it only grew more compelling as the evening progressed. Frankly, I expected no less. Daisey is a brilliant performer. Full stop. What’s more, he’s a consummate professional, meaning that he will bring that brilliance to every performance he does of this piece or any other, night after night, week after week, venue after venue. To engage in speculation about whether Daisey’s performance will improve or decline after a couple weeks is to indulge in the worst kind of aesthetic fetishism, and worse: it lets you off the hook of the message.
Unfortunately, this hobbyist’s game has been getting played more and more here in Seattle. “Hans Altwies’s performance was brilliant the other night,” says the canny theatre-goer, making plain that she not only knows Hans Altwies by name, but also understands the nuances of his work well enough to gauge when he’s brilliant and when he’s not. Well, I got news for ya, knowing theatre-goer. Hans Altwies is always brilliant. Like Mike Daisey, Hans is a consummate theatre professional, and he’s going to give you the acting goods in great plays, okay plays and terrible plays alike. What’s more, Hans is not the only brilliant actor in Seattle: we have at least a hundred world class actors in this town—way more than we can sustain with a living wage. What we do not have in huge supply are shows that matter, right here and right now to our fellow citizens. (Yes, I understand Of Mice and Men is moving. But no, I do not agree that staging it yet again can make a wit’s worth of difference in most people’s lives.) The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs is different. In his show Mike is telling stories that you simply cannot and will not hear anywhere else—true stories about the lives of our fellow human beings who make, by hand, the “shit”—as Mike calls it– that we consume.
If you are reading this on a digital device (and how could you not be?) Mike provides a journalistic investigation that is as intimately connected to your life as the technology you are using right now. He did the risky leg work that no “professional reporter” was willing to do, and he got past the corporate obfuscation that no other journalist could breech. If you want to hear these stories in the next few weeks, the only way you can do it is to show up at a specific place, the Seattle Rep, at a specific time and listen to Mike tell them to you. If you say to me that the Rep’s tickets are too pricey, I will listen respectfully and sympathetically, but I will counter with a question of my own: how much did your phone cost? Was it more or less than a ticket to Mike’s show? And how can you really assess how much it really cost, unless you find out how it was made and by whom?

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Tags: David Penn, friendship, high school garage bands, Omar Willey, Paul Mullin, poetry, Sam Peckinpah, St. Peckinpah
The New You Boat (Mini-Act II)

April 25, 2011

Continued from Mini- Act I
Mini-Act II
by
O.C.C.A.M.
(The following countdown takes place in darkness.)
CAPTAIN: Seven.
COMMANDER: Seven.
LIEUTENANT: Seven.
ENSIGN: Seven.
BOSUN: Seven.
HELMSMAN: Seven.
SEAMAN: Seven.
COMMANDER: Six.
LIEUTENANT: Six.
ENSIGN: Six.
BOSUN: Six.
HELMSMAN: Six.
SEAMAN: Six.
LIEUTENANT: Five.
ENSIGN: Five.
BOSUN: Five.
HELMSMAN: Five.
SEAMAN: Five.
ENSIGN: Four.
BOSUN: Four.
HELMSMAN: Four.
SEAMAN: Four.
BOSUN: Three.
HELMSMAN: Three.
SEAMAN: Three.
HELMSMAN: Two.
SEAMAN: Two. One.
(Lights up.)
ENSIGN: ¡Ping!
COMMANDER: What?
ENSIGN: Something.
COMMANDER: What?
CAPTAIN: Ensign explicate.
ENSIGN: I… I… scanning… scanning…
COMMANDER: What? Something? What?
CAPTAIN: A ghost? A glitch?
ENSIGN: Gone.
SEAMAN: Go then, Commander-Man, your switch. Punch the button, bastard.
CAPTAIN: Belay below. Avast bastion blasts awhile awaiting a future–
ENSIGN: ¡¡Ping!!
COMMANDER: Again?
CAPTAIN: Ensign extrapolate.
ENSIGN: Close. Closing closer.
COMMANDER: Captain?
CAPTAIN: Aye.
COMMANDER: Shall I?
SEAMAN: Aye, knew you eyed three key live/kill. Use or lose.
CAPTAIN: Hold fire. Helmsman, do die for your New You depth invasion evasion.
HELMSMAN: Aye, aye, I do die for declination dot mark dash dot dash mark dash.
CAPTAIN: Seaman, a head engine’s awful.
SEAMAN: Rot sure negative, Captain. Fear/desire drive died dry of new U launch lust lost and found foundering.
CAPTAIN: Silence. All hands and semenful silence.
(Silence.)
ENSIGN: ¡¡¡¡¡¡¡Peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-eeeeeeeeyingyangyangyangyingyingyingyangyangyingyang!!!!!!!
CAPTAIN: Lieutenant, tend the Ensign. Bosun, man the scanner.
LIEUTENANT: I eye, consummation containment crypt cracked.
BOSUN: Breach leaking New U blue-black.
LIEUTENANT: Imminent wave array decay.
COMMANDER: Recommendation.
LIEUTENANT: You knew New You’s posited position predicates primary protocol.
SEAMAN: I aye. Kill/die.
ENSIGN: Oh!
CAPTAIN: Ensign, report.
ENSIGN: Oh come!
CAPTAIN: Ensign, repeat.
ENSIGN: Oh come! Oh come!
BOSUN: Captain, I eye sounds bounding, but something–
COMMANDER: Something else?
BOSUN: Something other. An indistinguishable, inextinguishable echo goes over the whole hollow hull.
ENSIGN: Awe comes!
HELMSMAN: Captain. I eye dying drift dive decline climbing to asymptote of total imp lotion. Shall I continue to die for
you? To dive, perchance to–
BOSUN: Blow the whole hallowed held hull.
CAPTAIN: Hold held course coordinates: invasion evasion.
SEAMAN: Who knew you New You to fool? Where do you New You to go?
CAPTAIN: No one. Nowhere. Need to know only. Nothing knows again new again now, all hands and semen, knew you of New
You to live/let live another daze of all days to fight another night of all lights.
SEAMAN: Live/let live’s long gone. On or on or on and on.
LIEUTENANT: Knew you New You, when nothing’s something sees through Schrodinger’s cat can, all’s over and out with an
ever-rending boom through the Chinese Room.
ENSIGN: Awk’em! Chink the Chink Clink! Awk’em! Awk’em!
CAPTAIN: Knew you, damn you, to extricate, Ensign, and excogitate escape from stated state.
ENSIGN: Aye I one woe wallowing whale’s wail waking mermen and maidens mating making oracling orcas cause calls across all
of us: “Awe comes occaming all ye fate-fools of faded faithfulishness. Be not be afraid/brave I eye-tide in/out tidings of
great joyfoolish noise.”
BOSUN: Behold low hell hellos!
ENSIGN: Aye!
BOSUN: Pain pang pings pound!
LIEUTENANT: Chink the Chink Clink!
SEAMAN: Blast a bastard button, pusher! On or on or on and on!
COMMANDER: I eye I catch as cat can can’t!
HELMSMAN: New You course closing on imminent infinite atmospheres asymptote!
CAPTAIN: I eye from one breach breaking wave good-bye.
ENSIGN: Occam’s rays–
BOSUN: Heard me.
ENSIGN: Occam’s rays–
LIEUTENANT: Hurt me!
COMMANDER QUARK: There’s something–
CAPTAIN QUASAR: –nothing but a little–
SEAMAN MESON: –push would scuttle but a little–
COMMANDER QUARK: –blasting bastion of–
BOSUN BOSON: –sounds truly–
CAPTAIN QUASAR: –human in–
HELMSMAN HADRON: –and doubt of all–
LIEUTENANT LEPTON: –this–
SEAMAN MESON: –that–
COMMANDER QUARK: –never was–
CAPTAIN QUASAR: –always will–
HELMSMAN HADRON: –not stroke–
BOSUN BOSON: –one when we’re–
ENSIGN NEUTRINO: –Occam’s razored!
(Blackout.
End of “The New You Boat.”)

Posted at 12:45 PM in Poetry, Seattle, Writing | Comments (2)

Tags: David Penn, friendship, high school garage bands, Omar Willey, Paul Mullin, poetry, Sam Peckinpah, St. Peckinpah
The New You Boat (Mini-Act I)

April 23, 2011

A note on the generation of the play…
The playwright Matthew Fielding died in 1984, having only completed the first act of his last play, “The New You Boat”. Unfinished works are a fact of life– or rather death– in the world of literature, but there are those that believe that this was no accident. Fielding mentioned no other work by name in his will, but the first act of the mini-two act play “The New You Boat” was specifically designated to be placed in the public domain where anyone who so chose could attempt to finish it. Also, in eerie contrast to his habit, Fielding left no notes on the work, no outlines for the second act, no references to its conception or development in his journal– nothing, but the perfectly formed first act. Finally, the script is rife with digital and quantum imagery as well as linguistic conundrums and self-referential, anti-algorithmic riddles that could have only be intentionally designed for one purpose: to confound an artificially intelligent creative consciousness.
Writing the first act of “The New You Boat” was a consummate act of defiance on Fielding’s part: a reaching back from the finality of death itself to throw down one last gauntlet before his late-life intellectual adversaries– the proponents of artificial intelligence. Most artists have an inherent antipathy and distrust of the scientific method. Matthew Fielding embraced it. He welcomed contending viewpoints from those who challenged the anthropocentric idea that only human beings are capable of consciousness and creativity. He was as willing to be proven wrong by them as he was eager to prove them wrong.
In fall of 1995, under the auspices of an unprecedented co-bequest of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Security Administration, an elite team of thinkers, scientists and artists called the Creative Cognition Development Group, was formed to meet the challenge of completing a master work of art solely using computer generated artificial consciousness. A mega-program, made up of literally billions of complex, interconnected algorithms needed to be designed, tested and implemented. It was. On January 1, 1999, OCCAM (Omni-interfacial Creative Consciousness Algorithm Matrix) was born. In a little over two years (roughly two-hundred times longer than experts believe it took Fielding to write the first half) OCCAM completed the “The New You Boat”.
We at the CCDG, on behalf of the late Matthew Fielding, and indeed, OCCAM itself, invite you to judge the results.
Mini-Act I
by
Matthew Fielding
COMMANDER QUARK: Accept no substitutes. This is the New You Boat. Rot your Roger. We’ll go wilco. Seaman Meson, state your state us.
SEAMAN MESON: Aye, aye, Commander. Fear/desire drive alive and churning our screw through the New You blue bluer blue bluer than blue black-blue blacker than blue bluer than blacker than bluer than bluer than blacker than bluest blacker-blue-black back to you new boat.
COMMANDER QUARK: Rot your that. Helmsman Hadron.
HELMSMAN HADRON: Aye, aye, Commander. New You of course bearing naught stroke one not one stroke one approaching asymptote of ascertaining our approach on points pertaining to why we lie below and die with always something shy of sky’s the limit asymptotically speaking of course… bearing… naught stroke one not one—
COMMANDER QUARK: Helsman—
HELMSMAN HADRON: Aye.
COMMANDER QUARK: Cut your jib and maintain prescient course.
HELMSMAN HADRON: I, Commander, will go–
COMMANDER QUARK: We’ll always go.
HELMSMAN HADRON: Wilco. Aye. Shall I dive for you?
COMMANDER QUARK: Aye, Helmsman, do. Dive for depth perception zero nautical knots naught stroke one.
HELMSMAN HADRON: Rot your that. Will do dive.
COMMANDER QUARK: Bosun Boson.
BOSUN BOSON: Aye the hull is sound the hull is true sounding truly true sounds sounding through function of faith further function of fear further function of falling facing turning churning our screw through the new you black and blue back to blue black to you new boat.
COMMANDER QUARK: Wheel go. And scuttle button?
BOSUN BOSON: Check, set, wired, tested, all systems go for detonating preset charges blowing bright holes in the hull holes opening hell holds flooding all held hells blowing all holes whole crushing us blinder than we already are.
COMMANDER QUARK: Rot sure. Ensign Neutrino.
ENSIGN NEUTRINO: Aye, communications check. All bands scanned reading random noise with single signal exception.
COMMANDER QUARK: Explicate.
ENSIGN NEUTRINO: Explication: constantly variable incessant inbeaming binary beacon begins again new… again now… again…
COMMANDER QUARK: Transcribe.
ENSIGN NEUTRINO: I eye transcript sans script: all in code.
COMMANDER QUARK: Crack it.
ENSIGN NEUTRINO: We’ll go. Cracking…
      Standby….
      In crypt cracked.
COMMANDER QUARK: Transcribe.
ENSIGN NEUTRINO: Sans script transcript crypt cracked: “Begin in crypt: Knew you u no u r Schrödinger’s Cat in a Chinese Box garbage day in and garbage day out. Only amplitudes abound, always anchors away angers awash encore’s a wish awhile awaiting a future in crypt. End in crypt.”
COMMANDER QUARK: Rot sure. Lieutenant Lepton.
LIEUTENANT LEPTON: Morale modems monitor multitudinous mutinies multifariously manifesting melanomic demonic mnemonic nominal monomaniacal numb mum hum.
COMMANDER QUARK: Recommendation.
LIEUTENANT LEPTON: Punch scuttle. Blow held hull holes. Collapse wave function. Annihilate boundlessly abounding anger-anchored amplitudes. Commence consummation devoutly to be wished awhile a waiting future in crypt.
COMMANDER QUARK: Duly noted, negated, belayed and belied. Standing course and orders stand still.
      Fire control command commander, I, Commander Quark, report all fire control systems all systems go set to blow ballistic bastions blasting out of the new you up through the black blue into the true you who new nothing mirvs spurt from seven brahmaning bridegrooms for seven continental eggs benedicted to break fast break hard over easy.
      Your new you crew stasis state us stated and standing for inspection, Captain Quasar.
CAPTAIN QUASAR: All hands and seaman: this is your captain.
      This night of all nights, eve of day of all days, it’s apt and auspicious to remember this mission’s vital import and portent.
      It’s not unreasonable to reason that the surfaces served have unremembered never knew you. In their seasonal celebration of crisp coming bright they overlook that new true black blue heavy water U light: salvo salvation of nations. You, New You, alone blow the glow coals that flash the steam that churns the turning screw through this bluer blacker than blue. New You knew alone the crypt code, held hull holes, and ballistic bastions basking below.
    Last day I asleeped from a recurring reality, an ornery ontogeny oven on conscious corrective: little legged spermed-eggs doing the Chinese roomboom. “Never knew you, New You.” Say they you away. “Never knew you, New Nothing.” But whenwhere nothing exists, nothing’s something liable to litter little nothings and break brittle little somethings into anything new you want. What’s to be? What’s to become? What’s to be becomes becoming through what little little legged spermed-eggs beg they never knew of New You.
      Tonight, Eve of all eves, a decision must be come to: a becoming to be come and gone. Always knew you that this point in space of time would come. One switch to give two options, two of which to give four, only one of which can be, taking three to key.
      Bosun Boson, man your switch.
BOSUN BOSON: I eye scuttle button, one push to blow held hull holes.
CAPTAIN QUASAR: Commander Quark, man your switch.
COMMANDER QUARK: I eye fire control set to blast bastions ballistic.
CAPTAIN QUASAR: Ensign Neutrino, appraise amplitude array.
ENSIGN NEUTRINO: I eye amplitude array all appraised: four singular states in play.
CAPTAIN QUASAR: Pray, Ensign, state states arrayed.
ENSIGN NEUTRINO: Off and off. On and off. Off and on. On and on.
CAPTAIN QUASAR: Translate arrayed stated states.
ENSIGN NEUTRINO: Live/let live. Die/let live. Live/kill. Die/kill.
CAPTAIN QUASAR: Lieutenant Lepton, commence crew key conviction config query.
LIEUTENANT LEPTON: I eye key config query commencing in sub conn descending rank order.
      Captain Quasar, select your suffrage.
CAPTAIN QUASAR: Live/kill.
LIEUTENANT LEPTON: Commander Quark.
COMMANDER QUARK: Die/kill.
LIEUTENANT LEPTON: Lieutenant Lepton: die/let live.
      Ensign Neutrino.
ENSIGN NEUTRINO: Live/kill.
LIEUTENANT LEPTON: I eye two to key live/kill.
      Bosun Boson.
BOSUN BOSON: Die/let live.
LIEUTENANT LEPTON: We’ll go two to key die/let live.
      Helmsman Hadron.
HELMSMAN HADRON: Die/kill.
LIEUTENANT LEPTON: Rot sure two to key die/kill. Three out of four suffrages be two to key. What say thee, Seaman Meson?
SEAMAN MESON: Suffrage me to live/let live.
CAPTAIN QUASAR: Nothing cums, Seaman, of nothing.
SEAMAN MESON: Rot sure, Captain.
CAPTAIN QUASAR: Recast, Seaman.
SEAMAN MESON: Rot your recasting, Captain. Resuffrage me to live/let live.
CAPTAIN QUASAR: Suffrage denied. Switch or surrender.
SEAMAN MESON: I switch off and off.
CAPTAIN QUASAR: No. On or on or on and on.
SEAMAN MESON: I eye but off and off.
CAPTAIN QUASAR: Damn you. You knew you damn new you to lose, never loose, the name of action. You knew New You to live/let live is nothing but not nothing. Switch one on.
SEAMAN MESON: No on.
CAPTAIN QUASAR (simultaneously): On, on, on, on, on, on, on.
SEAMAN MESON (simultaneously): No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
COMMANDER QUARK: Captain.
CAPTAIN QUASAR: I.
COMMANDER QUARK: Permission to break the stale Seaman mate.
CAPTAIN QUASAR: Explicate.
COMMANDER QUARK: I to eye switch conviction recon fig. from die to live/kill.
CAPTAIN QUASAR: Knew you to do this?
COMMANDER QUARK: Aye but only new newly now. Night of all nights.
CAPTAIN QUASAR: Eve of all ease of all griefs.
LIEUTENANT LEPTON: Three now to key live/kill.
CAPTAIN QUASAR: Then commence live/kill key confiq sequence.
LIEUTENANT LEPTON: Eye, Ensign Neutrino, key in.
ENSIGN NEUTRINO: Keying.
LIEUTENANT LEPTON: Commander Quark. ¿Quien?
COMMANDER QUARK: Keen.
LIEUTENANT LEPTON: Captain Quasar. Kin?
CAPTAIN QUASAR: King. Of all kin a little less than kind, of all knights a little more than dazed; wrecks raineth omni-pittance in salve ocean.
LIEUTENANT LEPTON: Key confiq complete.
COMMANDER QUARK: Fire control armed.
CAPTAIN QUASAR: Fire at will.
COMMANDER QUARK: Request countdown.
CAPTAIN QUASAR: I eye granite. Seven.
COMMANDER QUARK: Seven.
LIEUTENANT LEPTON: Seven.
ENSIGN NEUTRINO: Seven.
BOSUN BOSON: Seven.
HELMSMAN HADRON: Seven.
SEAMAN MESON: Seven.
COMMANDER QUARK: Six.
LIEUTENANT LEPTON: Six.
ENSIGN NEUTRINO: Six.
BOSUN BOSON: Six.
HELMSMAN HADRON: Six.
SEAMAN MESON: Six.
LIEUTENANT LEPTON: Five.
ENSIGN NEUTRINO: Five.
BOSUN BOSON: Five.
HELMSMAN HADRON: Five.
SEAMAN MESON: Five.
ENSIGN NEUTRINO: Four.
BOSUN BOSON: Four.
HELMSMAN HADRON: Four.
SEAMAN MESON: Four.
BOSUN BOSON: Three.
HELMSMAN HADRON: Three.
SEAMAN MESON: Three.
HELMSMAN HADRON: Two.
SEAMAN MESON: Two. One.
(Blackout. End Mini-Act I.)
Continue to Mini-Act II by O.C.C.A.M.

Posted at 12:45 PM in Poetry, Seattle, Writing | Comments (2)

Tags: David Penn, friendship, high school garage bands, Omar Willey, Paul Mullin, poetry, Sam Peckinpah, St. Peckinpah
Why Omar Willey’s “Why Theater Matters” Matters

April 4, 2011

Let’s get the over-arching irony out of the way first thing: my friendship with Omar Willey blossomed on line, through Face Book and his responses to my blogging here at Just Wrought; and had that been the extent of our relationship, then certainly a cynical dismissal of my recommending his recent essay “Why Theater Matters” would be eminently fair. After all, he argues herein for a theatre triumphant over the distance and disaffection with which our “on-line lives” infect us. Fortunately, our friendship has also blossomed in “real life” and real-life’s cooler cousin, theatre. Omar comes to my shows. Omar comes to everyone’s shows. If you are a Seattle theatre artist and you don’t know Omar, I can assure you that your ignorance is not reciprocated. Omar knows you. Omar knows your work. What’s more, Omar Willey and his colleague José Amador (whom I also have the honor of calling friend) have begun to review your work, over at the Seattlest.
In his essay, posted a few days ago, Omar offers an implicit explanation for his coming out of retirement (he reviewed theatre for KCMU-FM back in the 1990’s) and again lowering his lance at our windmills.

Simulacra. Pseudonymity. The theater … erases them. Theater restores the primacy of the human body. It restores presence. It restores the potential, the fear and the promise of the present, and gives an immediate response in the present tense.

… Theater remains a communal experience of people, persons seeing themselves with, through and in other persons in a unique, irreproducible moment. A self, communing with other selves. Being here. Now. And never to be the same person, the same place, the same way again…. Bridging the gap between friends and strangers, the sense of a marvelous, wondrous love and beauty that restores joy to life, shared together. How easily we forget it when we do not seek it.

This reminds me so much of a favorite quote of mine from Carl Jung that I would not be at all surprised if Omar knows it intimately. But just in case you don’t, here ‘tis:

…You go to the theatre: glance meets glance, everybody observes everybody else, so that all those who are present are caught up in an invisible web of mutual unconscious relationship….

Mankind has always formed groups which made collective experiences of transformation–often of an ecstatic nature–possible. The regressive identification with lower and more primitive states of consciousness is invariably accompanied by a heightened sense of life… .The inevitable psychosocial regression within the group is partially counteracted by ritual, that is to say through a cult ceremony which makes the solemn performance of sacred events the centre of group activity and prevents the crowd from relapsing into unconscious instinctuality… The ritual makes it possible for him to have a comparatively individual experience even within the group and so remain more or less conscious.

—Concerning Rebirth, circa, 1940

As I understand it, Omar and José threw their hats in the Seattlest ring because they saw a dearth of earnest, careful theatre criticism, not just here in Seattle but across the country. Of course others have noticed this drought as well, myself included. My problem has been caring. After over two decades of professional work as a playwright and actor, watching the importance of reviews plummet from marginal to minimal to finally negligible, I openly admit I have trouble seeing how criticism could help Seattle become a World Class theatre town. In a recent semi-private exchange on Face Book, Omar called my hand: “… I do wonder, Paul, if you don’t think criticism is key to helping us get somewhere, then what do you think will? Or do we simply understand criticism differently? Plays written about other plays or inspired by thematic ideas from other plays–these, too, are criticism, no?”
Let me respond now, weeks later:
Omar, in the context of your comprehensively inclusive understanding of what criticism can be, and what it can do, yes, indeed, I believe it can help us get somewhere. Of course, such an approach—steeped in the art form’s history but somewhat foreign to Seattle’s cultural ethos— will require leadership. It appears you and José are stepping forward to be those happy few to rally the critical flank of Seattle’s charge forward toward World Class. So even though I have already said it privately, please allow me to state again publically here, loudly and proudly…
Omar, José?
Welcome to the fray.

Posted at 12:45 PM in Poetry, Seattle, Writing | Comments (2)

Tags: David Penn, friendship, high school garage bands, Omar Willey, Paul Mullin, poetry, Sam Peckinpah, St. Peckinpah