To quote Simon and Garfunkel, hello blogger my old friend, I've come to talk with you again. Because actually this past year or so, I've been writing quite a bit, at the suggestion of my friend and acting teacher Michael Toomey. We met last summer (or maybe it was the spring? Let's say late spring or early summer) to work on some Shakespeare, at the time I had this idea (well I still have the idea it's just kind of dormant) to develop a piece exploring Hamlet through the lens of stand up comedy. I pitched this to Michael, and he basically said "Mike, why do you need to adapt Shakespeare's texts, can't you just write it yourself?"
And I haven't, at least not yet, but since that conversation I've been writing a lot more, mostly personal pieces not for public consumption exploring and understanding my own thoughts, but also some new poems... also not for public consumption, but maybe I'll put one up here sometime. Side note, did anyone reading this know me in high school when I published a body of poetry over live journal, most of which was awful? Good times but not really I was miserable in high school.
Anyway, I was reminded this thing I wrote in a few years existed, this blog, because the person I've been dating AKA my girlfriend has been reading Three Sisters for work, and earlier today we were talking about it and my experience playing Tuzenbach way back in 2013 for The Footlight Club and I remembered I wrote all these blog posts about the experience and I was like "holy shit, look at that, well this is interesting in a way I didn't think it would be at the time."
Because how could 23 year old Mike know in 2013 that 28 year old Mike would be interested in what he thought about Three Sisters? It's been so many years since I thought deeply about that play, I've done so, so much since then, including several break ups and relationships, starting a new life in a new city, finding my footing as a stand up comedian, a composer, and a writer, all this shit has happened and I feel so distant from that version of myself. But there he is, in those blog posts.
And here I am now, in this blog post, which maybe I'll look back on when I'm 33 and think "that's what I was thinking as a 28 year old?" Who knows.
I was really tickled by one of the lines in those Three Sisters blogs about how I didn't know if anyone would read it or find it useful or interesting besides my Mom (hi again Mom) because I do now, and hopefully my girlfriend does. And actually, not to toot my own horn but no actually I am giving myself a compliment, I had some pretty interesting insights into the arc of that character that I'd completely forgotten about, comparing him to Goethe's Young Werther and how he and Solyony are these mirror images of each other.
I wrote at the time that fundamentally they saw themselves as the heroes of there own stories, both romantic in nature, Solyony's vision of his story was epic and heroic whereas Tuzenbach's turns out to be a tragedy in nature, whether he means it to or not. That really resonates with me today. I think it's for us to relate to the world as the heroes of our own story, because we learn to relate to the world through stories in the form of films and television and I wonder if Chekhov or Shakespeare's audience was doing the same thing. Did they watch Hamlet, or Romeo and Juliet or The Three Sisters and imagine themselves as being analogous to those characters? David Wong writes at Cracked.com about how this kind of thinking creates a lot of dissatisfaction and misogyny, especially in men, who see stories about heroes accomplishing heroic things and being rewarded with beautiful women reduced to objects. Part of me thinks this is a fairly modern idea, and by modern I mean relating to the 18th century and romanticism, but then again story telling as a way of shaping how we see ourselves as a culture, a society and a people is a tradition as old as the spoken word, so who knows.
This relates to a lot of think pieces, you know the trendy ones about how millennial are garbage people who think there special because of course they are for being themselves? Which is something I'm guilty of, except wait I'm actually super talented, laugh out loud! Explicit arrogance! What is the tone of this piece supposed to be? Am I being satirical, self deprecating, or serious? Sorry I got caught in my head.
But I think that idea is in Three Sisters, Vershinin talks about it when he says that the sisters will pave a way for a new and better society. That these are characters are special and there lives are worthwhile, and Chekhov rather than giving us a straight forward dramatic story, shows the rhythms of people's lives on stage and how they give such great importance to everything they do, when in the end there just people and when the play is over, nothing is really different.
Having written this blog post, nothing is really different. I'm still not very good at ending my writing. But there is a document of me and my thoughts in this moment for you to read, and for me to read in the unknowable future, I'm curious to see what my thoughts are then.
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Friday, April 28, 2017
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Moments of Anticipation
I've realized I need to become less precious with the communications I share via this blog. Since coming back from Shakespeare and Company this February (wow hard to believe it's been that long) I've started to write a whole bunch of blog posts and then either stopped and not finished them or meant to go back to them or what have you.
Part of this I think had to do with how Shakespeare and Company dealt with the subject of communication in their training, in that they teach you to talk about things as succinctly and specifically as possible. This lead to a struggle in my writing to continue doing that, and when I've felt like I don't completely or succinctly communicate something in a first pass, I get frustrated and want to write it over until I get annoyed with writing it or move on to something else and then I have no writing to share!
That's silly. I have observed my writing process is that I'm most likely to actually get a blog post at the end of a writing session if I commit fully to writing down the thoughts I have in a given moment, ideally doing a quick pass of an edit, and then sharing it and moving on. The blessing and the curse of the internet is how easy it is to access quantity in a sense that it's removed from the expenses of physical media, so you can quickly and cheaply create things and so there are lots of things being created. Vast numbers of things, so many that it becomes counter productive at a certain point to spend too much time worrying about the quality.
But that's another blog post.
I'm pretty far into rehearsals for Caucasian Chalk Circle, we've been getting into the really rough and difficult parts of the "birthing" as it were of this piece of art. Is that an appropriate analogy? There's a lot of collective pain and suffering as we work through the gritty details and logistics of mastering the text, smoothing over the staging, sweating out blocking and staging. For many of us in particular a big part of this has been mastering our Spanish lines, I know it has been for me! I studied Spanish a good deal in school, so I'm not coming in completely ignorant to how it works, but back then I never worked very hard at it, or was ever a preternatural talent for the language, I don't think. So that's been very challenging. But also pretty cool and kind of rewarding. I really like the Spanish text and it's fun getting to work with different sets of actors on the same scenes but in different languages. It's basically equivalent to rehearsing two shows at once. On the hand, that sucks, you're rehearsing two shows at once and it's a lot of work. But also, I'm getting to rehearse two shows at once, so I feel like I'm growing perhaps faster or at least exercising new and different muscles than I normally do as an actor and that's really rewarding.
I talked in that last process about how creating theatre feels like giving birth. Obviously, I haven't ever and will never get the chance to experience that particular component of the human experience, which is honestly something I sort of regret. If I could do it, I would do it. Is that weird and over sharey? I remember talking to my mother as a younger person about her experiences birthing myself and my two brothers. She talked about doing it naturally, and that when I was conceived the philosophy was that the feeling of giving birth can be perceived as being pain but that it's not, it's something else and if you can learn to experience it as that something else pain killers become unnecessary.
So maybe this analogy is stretching it a little bit, but what the hell. For us as artists, what other people might perceive as the tedious, frustrating or painful work of putting something together maybe what sets us apart is that we're able to see the process of birthing work as that something else, something joyful.
This is especially true in theatre, where getting to that final result is such an ecstatic experience, sharing work with an audience, sharing moments with cast members, getting to relive and redo and retry each individual moment night after night and watch it grow and change. I find myself in a series of moments of anticipation as we're on the verge of those final contractions before we can share our creation with the world. I see all the beautiful things beginning to happen, I can see all the things I've already discovered and can already imagine the moments of discovery to come. It's an amazing feeling.
Remind me to make sure I get back into the habit of blogging about it, OK? Thanks.
Part of this I think had to do with how Shakespeare and Company dealt with the subject of communication in their training, in that they teach you to talk about things as succinctly and specifically as possible. This lead to a struggle in my writing to continue doing that, and when I've felt like I don't completely or succinctly communicate something in a first pass, I get frustrated and want to write it over until I get annoyed with writing it or move on to something else and then I have no writing to share!
That's silly. I have observed my writing process is that I'm most likely to actually get a blog post at the end of a writing session if I commit fully to writing down the thoughts I have in a given moment, ideally doing a quick pass of an edit, and then sharing it and moving on. The blessing and the curse of the internet is how easy it is to access quantity in a sense that it's removed from the expenses of physical media, so you can quickly and cheaply create things and so there are lots of things being created. Vast numbers of things, so many that it becomes counter productive at a certain point to spend too much time worrying about the quality.
But that's another blog post.
I'm pretty far into rehearsals for Caucasian Chalk Circle, we've been getting into the really rough and difficult parts of the "birthing" as it were of this piece of art. Is that an appropriate analogy? There's a lot of collective pain and suffering as we work through the gritty details and logistics of mastering the text, smoothing over the staging, sweating out blocking and staging. For many of us in particular a big part of this has been mastering our Spanish lines, I know it has been for me! I studied Spanish a good deal in school, so I'm not coming in completely ignorant to how it works, but back then I never worked very hard at it, or was ever a preternatural talent for the language, I don't think. So that's been very challenging. But also pretty cool and kind of rewarding. I really like the Spanish text and it's fun getting to work with different sets of actors on the same scenes but in different languages. It's basically equivalent to rehearsing two shows at once. On the hand, that sucks, you're rehearsing two shows at once and it's a lot of work. But also, I'm getting to rehearse two shows at once, so I feel like I'm growing perhaps faster or at least exercising new and different muscles than I normally do as an actor and that's really rewarding.
I talked in that last process about how creating theatre feels like giving birth. Obviously, I haven't ever and will never get the chance to experience that particular component of the human experience, which is honestly something I sort of regret. If I could do it, I would do it. Is that weird and over sharey? I remember talking to my mother as a younger person about her experiences birthing myself and my two brothers. She talked about doing it naturally, and that when I was conceived the philosophy was that the feeling of giving birth can be perceived as being pain but that it's not, it's something else and if you can learn to experience it as that something else pain killers become unnecessary.
So maybe this analogy is stretching it a little bit, but what the hell. For us as artists, what other people might perceive as the tedious, frustrating or painful work of putting something together maybe what sets us apart is that we're able to see the process of birthing work as that something else, something joyful.
This is especially true in theatre, where getting to that final result is such an ecstatic experience, sharing work with an audience, sharing moments with cast members, getting to relive and redo and retry each individual moment night after night and watch it grow and change. I find myself in a series of moments of anticipation as we're on the verge of those final contractions before we can share our creation with the world. I see all the beautiful things beginning to happen, I can see all the things I've already discovered and can already imagine the moments of discovery to come. It's an amazing feeling.
Remind me to make sure I get back into the habit of blogging about it, OK? Thanks.
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Getting Better At Stuff, Thoughts on Self Criticism
I've been thinking a lot about how to be better, as a person, a friend, a cast member and especially an artist. I think I deserve a pat on the back for everything I've accomplished this year. Did you notice the weight I've lost? Or the work I've put into this blog? Did you know I've been trying to better myself as a musician and find more focus for composing? Or that I've slowly started doing my own podcast? Probably you've read about all the acting I've been doing. Since Rosencratz and Guildenstern ended, I accomplished one of my goals which had been to book some more film work and I've had several roles of varying smallness in a music video, a promotional video for a friend's company, a student film and an independent feature, all of which was from being on the lookout on Craigslist and New England Film. I've been making it out to a ton of theatre. And I helped my improv troupe find our way to our first paying gigs since I've been in it with my contacts I made doing theatre, and generally have been trying to improve as an improvisor and troupe member.
So let me stop and do that pat on the back thing. *Pat pat pat*. OK now there's still more I could and should be doing. Like, I've lost about twenty pounds, alright! One of my big weight loss goals was strictly getting my BMI to a healthy place and now I've done that. How? As I said to a friend when asked that, "I don't know working out a lot and being twenty three". That is to say going to the gym regularly, in addition to the weight I've put on a noticeable but not grandiose amount of muscle, eating less and not as terribly (fewer starbucks pastries and burritos) combined with my increased metabolism did most of the work. But I'd like to lose more weight, like ten or fifteen pounds, hopefully. Since getting around 205 though, my weight has more or less flat lined. Which is partially to be expected, usually in weight loss the first twenty pounds or whatever are largely water weight and drop off pretty easily. After that it becomes more challenging. If I want to lose the rest of that weight, I've got to get serious about my exercise routine, like working out at home on days that I'm not able to make it to the gym while making a point to still get to the gym at least three times a week and really work out when I get there not just for twenty minutes and then call it a day.
And I need to be serious about what I eat. As an actor, sometimes you find yourself surrounded by food, oftentimes with nothing really to do. When I was on the set of that feature film, I was there for maybe an hour or two before they ordered like ten pizzas, more than the cast and crew was able to eat and for the rest of the day there was just a bunch of pizza in addition to the sugary sodas and everything else the people on craft services had laid out. My part of the shoot took less than an hour, but was physically incredibly exhausting and mentally draining (it was a torture scene, maybe I'll blog about it at some point later) and then I was there all day with all this food, so I just hung out and snacked on pizza and drank more regular Coke than I normally would in a week, etc.
Point being to accomplish that goal I need to become focused. To become a better blogger, I need to focus and try to write at least once a week. To be a better podcaster, I need to make sure I come prepared and always be looking for ways to be doing better work. With everything I do, I need to be prepared to do my best work and be looking for the ways I can improve it.
This can be frustrating though, because putting time and focus into improving things is difficult and it's hard to keep sight of the big picture. With this blog, am I creating any tangible, immediate benefit? No, but I'm creating a series of reference points for my future self. I'm improving as a writer. I'm developing a good habit. And I'm engaging with the local community, which is something I know people appreciate. I'm struggling with similar issues with my podcast, but I think in addition to my comedic aspirations I may be able to start finding ways towards a deeper way of contributing to Boston theatre... keep an eye out for that.
And I'll just keep trying to focus on bettering myself, and recognizing everything I accomplish, one by one, it's all about keeping that balance.
So let me stop and do that pat on the back thing. *Pat pat pat*. OK now there's still more I could and should be doing. Like, I've lost about twenty pounds, alright! One of my big weight loss goals was strictly getting my BMI to a healthy place and now I've done that. How? As I said to a friend when asked that, "I don't know working out a lot and being twenty three". That is to say going to the gym regularly, in addition to the weight I've put on a noticeable but not grandiose amount of muscle, eating less and not as terribly (fewer starbucks pastries and burritos) combined with my increased metabolism did most of the work. But I'd like to lose more weight, like ten or fifteen pounds, hopefully. Since getting around 205 though, my weight has more or less flat lined. Which is partially to be expected, usually in weight loss the first twenty pounds or whatever are largely water weight and drop off pretty easily. After that it becomes more challenging. If I want to lose the rest of that weight, I've got to get serious about my exercise routine, like working out at home on days that I'm not able to make it to the gym while making a point to still get to the gym at least three times a week and really work out when I get there not just for twenty minutes and then call it a day.
And I need to be serious about what I eat. As an actor, sometimes you find yourself surrounded by food, oftentimes with nothing really to do. When I was on the set of that feature film, I was there for maybe an hour or two before they ordered like ten pizzas, more than the cast and crew was able to eat and for the rest of the day there was just a bunch of pizza in addition to the sugary sodas and everything else the people on craft services had laid out. My part of the shoot took less than an hour, but was physically incredibly exhausting and mentally draining (it was a torture scene, maybe I'll blog about it at some point later) and then I was there all day with all this food, so I just hung out and snacked on pizza and drank more regular Coke than I normally would in a week, etc.
Point being to accomplish that goal I need to become focused. To become a better blogger, I need to focus and try to write at least once a week. To be a better podcaster, I need to make sure I come prepared and always be looking for ways to be doing better work. With everything I do, I need to be prepared to do my best work and be looking for the ways I can improve it.
This can be frustrating though, because putting time and focus into improving things is difficult and it's hard to keep sight of the big picture. With this blog, am I creating any tangible, immediate benefit? No, but I'm creating a series of reference points for my future self. I'm improving as a writer. I'm developing a good habit. And I'm engaging with the local community, which is something I know people appreciate. I'm struggling with similar issues with my podcast, but I think in addition to my comedic aspirations I may be able to start finding ways towards a deeper way of contributing to Boston theatre... keep an eye out for that.
And I'll just keep trying to focus on bettering myself, and recognizing everything I accomplish, one by one, it's all about keeping that balance.
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Getting Back to Blogging
Dear Blog,
I'm sorry it's been so long since I updated you, especially compared to June and July when I'd been updating with such frequency. I guess it's beacause blogging for me is about processing, and when I have things to process I enjoy doing it in a public way, much of the time, while also flexing the old writing muscles which otherwise are neglected. Then again, since R&G closed I've had a lot to process. I've seen a bunch of theatre, gone on some auditions, did another reading of The Last Jews (which included my first visit to the Berkshires, my first King Lear, and getting to know my collaborators that much better) and performed a bunch of improv after over a month's hiatus.
None of which though has really satisfied me like I'd hoped it might, and one thing I've tried to avoid processing is dissatisfaction because that's much less fun to read about then vicariously experiencing an artist who is satisfied by their art, and ultimately that is the product I'm trying to manufacture for your consumption, dear reader.
Well goddamnit I'm going to update today (there are several unfinished drafts of things laying around) I'm over an hour early to a film shoot at CDIA plenty of time to tap on my iPhone.
And I have a topic worth processing, my first significant audition in some time is this Wednesday for Stoneham Theatre's production of It's A Wonderful Life for it's ensemble. I've never seen the film version, I should probably watch it. Or at least skim the screenplay. So they want a monologue... What do I do? I have a few that might work, like my ancient standby Tom from Glass Menagerie. Or that piece from Crossing Delancey I've never quite gotten to work like I wanted. I'm thinking of learning something new, before Wednesday, for a part in a show somewhat in my reach (I think) that would constitute kind of an important break, my first Equity show. So it's kind of stupid to learn something in three days and use this audition to test the waters. But you have to be working on stuff and trying it out and overall be taking risks.
So that's what I'm processing. I brought some plays with me to Waltham, where I am killing time before a shoot, writing this blog, watching a father and daughter feed ducks. I realized writing this, I need to get back into blogging for the sake of process and the experience and joy of writing. Writing and creative output is like mining a river for gold I feel like sometimes. You need to keep going back to it and you'll get ounces of dirt for every gram of gold but so be it, that's how you get at the good stuff.
Sunday, July 1, 2012
Where's my blog post? (negative spaces)
In the course of the imperfect experiment that is these United Stat... I mean my blog, I put up a blog post yesterday written from a negative place, posted it to Facebook with the heading "hopefully I don't regret this!" ended up regretting it, and taking it down.
Now, why exactly did I regret putting it up? Not because of any outside pressure, probably no more then 5 or 10 people read the post. But you know, I said some mean, pretentious and egotistical things, which granted were coming from an honest place, but were still fundamentally negative (and kind of bullshit anyway, honesty and bullshit don't have to be mutually exclusive). Basically, a confluence of experiences over this past weekend lead me to that negative place, stemming from a show I saw that just kind of depressed me, and which I related back to an observational exercise we did in my movement class, and then I became negative about that experience because I had a hard time getting into it. I related them I guess because on some level, it reminded me of the futility and impossibility of observation and artist renderings of what we observe in the outside world. Huh? How do I make this less convoluted... the show read to me as a series of false observations. Then, in that exercise when I was trying to observe people in Boston Common, I was struggling with that falsehood. And more complicated stuff with the voyeur/observed individual relationship that's created in that kind of exercise. And I think I could have done it better if I'd detached myself from the written component that was included. Essentially, I was trying to observe, instead of just observing. And became very self aware of my self in that act of observation, and of the people I was observing's awareness of my observing them. And my classmates had incredibly positive reactions to the exercise, which I had a hard time from my space of negativity not reacting to cynically and immediately questioning my own cynicism and just getting further and further into my head.
At the end of which, I wrote a post about the play, where I said some mean things. And about the class, where I said more things that I regretted saying. And the end of the day, the purpose of this blog is to spread positivity. Basically, the ethos is "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it" because people don't want to work with people who say negative things, but my thought is they will want to engage with someone who says positive things. And for my own self, I want to be someone who spreads positivity through my writing, which is why this isn't a theatre review or criticism blog. It's just a blog of my experiences, and in blogging I want to hold on to the positive experiences and not the negative ones.
This is kind of a lesson I learned from my previous blogging project, the Livejournal I maintained all throughout high school. I focused a lot on my negative emotions in that space, because I felt negative a lot of the time and it was kind of cathartic, I guess. But then I definitely hurt people's feelings. And you may not realize this about me, but I'm actually a very sensitive and emphatic person and as soon as I realize I've allowed the negative aspects of my being to affect someone, I feel terrible. And I don't want to feel terrible. I don't do art in order to feel terrible, I don't write to feel terrible, everything we do is an effort to feel the opposite of terrible. Right? Whatever that is for us individually, and whatever makes us feel that way.
So that's why that post went down. I'll maybe try and deal with the things I talked about in that deleted blog post later, like what bothered me about that theatre piece, even though I never said what it was. And next Thursday, we'll be doing movement pieces about our observations, so I'll have more to say on that then.
Now, why exactly did I regret putting it up? Not because of any outside pressure, probably no more then 5 or 10 people read the post. But you know, I said some mean, pretentious and egotistical things, which granted were coming from an honest place, but were still fundamentally negative (and kind of bullshit anyway, honesty and bullshit don't have to be mutually exclusive). Basically, a confluence of experiences over this past weekend lead me to that negative place, stemming from a show I saw that just kind of depressed me, and which I related back to an observational exercise we did in my movement class, and then I became negative about that experience because I had a hard time getting into it. I related them I guess because on some level, it reminded me of the futility and impossibility of observation and artist renderings of what we observe in the outside world. Huh? How do I make this less convoluted... the show read to me as a series of false observations. Then, in that exercise when I was trying to observe people in Boston Common, I was struggling with that falsehood. And more complicated stuff with the voyeur/observed individual relationship that's created in that kind of exercise. And I think I could have done it better if I'd detached myself from the written component that was included. Essentially, I was trying to observe, instead of just observing. And became very self aware of my self in that act of observation, and of the people I was observing's awareness of my observing them. And my classmates had incredibly positive reactions to the exercise, which I had a hard time from my space of negativity not reacting to cynically and immediately questioning my own cynicism and just getting further and further into my head.
At the end of which, I wrote a post about the play, where I said some mean things. And about the class, where I said more things that I regretted saying. And the end of the day, the purpose of this blog is to spread positivity. Basically, the ethos is "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it" because people don't want to work with people who say negative things, but my thought is they will want to engage with someone who says positive things. And for my own self, I want to be someone who spreads positivity through my writing, which is why this isn't a theatre review or criticism blog. It's just a blog of my experiences, and in blogging I want to hold on to the positive experiences and not the negative ones.
This is kind of a lesson I learned from my previous blogging project, the Livejournal I maintained all throughout high school. I focused a lot on my negative emotions in that space, because I felt negative a lot of the time and it was kind of cathartic, I guess. But then I definitely hurt people's feelings. And you may not realize this about me, but I'm actually a very sensitive and emphatic person and as soon as I realize I've allowed the negative aspects of my being to affect someone, I feel terrible. And I don't want to feel terrible. I don't do art in order to feel terrible, I don't write to feel terrible, everything we do is an effort to feel the opposite of terrible. Right? Whatever that is for us individually, and whatever makes us feel that way.
So that's why that post went down. I'll maybe try and deal with the things I talked about in that deleted blog post later, like what bothered me about that theatre piece, even though I never said what it was. And next Thursday, we'll be doing movement pieces about our observations, so I'll have more to say on that then.
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