Eleventh-hour Creativity

It's a good feeling to make art, and have that art be received well. It is a feeling I've not experienced often in my three and a half years living in Chicago. Which is not to say I've been making bad art. Far from it. I've been committing the more grievous sin of making very little art at all.

There were many reasons why I decided to come to Chicago. A city I was passingly familiar with, a support network, a girl. And the sheer volume of theater that happens on a daily basis. I wanted a place to explore, to figure out what theater actually means to me. I was fairly certain after graduation that I didn't want to be 'an actor'. I had no interest in headshots, memorizing monologues, or pretending to be the King of Bohemia. But did that rule out performance all together? I wasn't sure.

For most of my time here, I've been pursuing work in technical theater. Stage management and lighting design are my mainstays. These are jobs I know well. I get a certain particular satisfaction from doing them. I enjoy the charts, the lists, the mathematical precision. The power and responsibility. But the technical disciplines do lack that immediate feedback. The laughter, the silence, the gasp which escapes from the mouth of someone taken by surprise.

By coincidence I had seen the Neo-Futurists perform at Actor's Theater in Louisville the winter before I moved. This was different. This was a kind of performance I had not thought possible. I have forgotten many details about many plays I've seen, but I remember that show. I remember Jay's literal music videos, I remember Kristie's interview play about being edgy, I remember Noelle's costume/makeup change and her monologue about how difficult it is to just be yourself in front of over a hundred people. So when I moved here, I started volunteering with the Neos. This lead into a stage management gig, and then another, and now I've been on staff as a technician for two years. To paraphrase Mary, "I like it here, I love it here, I finally found a home. A home. A home away from home."

I'm currently taking the "Intro to Neo-Futurism" class. This is my second time through. And it's strange how quickly it all comes back to me; the songs which send images running through my mind, the way the words come in just the right order, the Saturday morning rewrite which puts all things in their places.

It's a good feeling to hear that your play accomplished what you wanted it to, and more. It's a good feeling to be drinking at the theater past three and have someone say, "Hey, I really liked your piece in class today." It's a good feeling to create. I need it. It calms me. I think it's here to stay.

Cannabis and Autism

While meandering about the internet today, I found this interesting pair of articles written by a woman who is mother to a young autistic child. The articles tell the story of J - the child - and his experiences with cannabis as medication for his disorder. Now, there are many places this story could have gone wrong. Mother reads internet forum, decides to grow pot in her closet. Bad. Mother spits in the face of Western medicine, buys street drugs for her child. Bad. Thankfully Mrs. Lee has gone about things in a reasonable fashion.

She was turned on the the possibilities of medical marijuana by a homeopath - proof that useful information can sometimes come from highly dubious sources. She first explored a prescription medication called Marinol, which is an FDA-approved drug containing synthetic THC. This proved effective, but J began to build resistances, which can apparently be common when dealing with synthetics. So Mrs. Lee pursued and obtained a medical marijuana license. (Rhode Island is one of thirteen states where marijuana is legal for medicinal use.) For more details, see the links at the top of this post.

I felt a bit of internal conflict when I first came across this story. If you have talked to me at all about medicine, you know I harbor intense skepticism towards what has become known as "complementary and alternative medicine," or CAM. Most practicioners of CAM are huckters, frauds, or quacks, particularly in regard to treatments for autism. Autism is a complex spectrum disorder, treatment effectiveness varies between patients, and nothing works across the board for everyone. Unfortunately this opens the door for the CAMmies to hawk their supplements, vitamins, diet regimens, chelation therapies, acupuncture, etc. without having to prove efficacy. So I walk very carefully around anyone promoting "natural" medicine.

However, I don't believe I have to be so skittish around marijuana. In the places where it's legal, it's being regulated. The main thing we're lacking with marijuana is large-scale efficacy studies. Because, you know, it's mostly illegal. Which is ridiculous, because it's not dangerous. It's illegalization is mostly the result of racism and is not based on sound fact.

I'm all for health care reform. So while we are re-regulating the insurance giants, creating a public option, un-yolking insurance from employment, and making the whole system more efficient, let's go ahead and do some serious research on the medical benefits of demonzied substances. We might be missing out on some seriously helpful stuff.

No One In This World Ever Gets What They Want

A few days ago, it was the first day of Chicago autumn. Or as I prefer to call it, "fall". I like fall better for some reason. Maybe because it's an active verb. (Curse you college acting classes.)

I love this weather. It's constantly cool and breezy, even when the sun is out. It makes me think of fireplaces and campgrounds, of sitting by a lake with a bottle of wine and holding hands. Nature is more appealing to me in the fall. Everything is quieter, more relaxed. The world is having a drink before bed.

If I were to anthropomorphize the seasons (and really, who doesn't want to?), fall would be a man in his 50s. An outdoorsman. A man capable of handling things. He would like to work in his garage, and chop firewood, and take walks around his large tree-filled property. Fall is a kind of twilight-time. It signals the end of things, but it is not itself the end. I look forward to that.

There is a kind of sadness in late September, a grey mood, a slowing-down of things. One remembers what they meant to do in the past months but never got around to. One looks forward and sees cold white death. For the meantime, they live quietly in the dusk of fall.

The other seasons are fine. I like the endurance test of winter, the cautious optimism of spring, the warm summer nights. But fall is my true love. Fall and me, we're forever.

And that is beautiful.

The Origin of Stupidity

This video has been getting some play on the old FB, and more recently on MetaFilter, so I thought I'd toss together some of my thoughts about Kirk, Ray, Darwin, and the manufactured controversy of ID/creationism vs evolution.

Backstory: Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort (a goofy creationist duo) are releasing a new version of the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. Their version is prefaced with a 50-page introduction by Comfort, who is most famous for claiming that bananas are verifiable proof of God's existence. They've released a video to promote their anniversary edition.

The video contains a slew of the usual creationist/fundamentalist canards: Christianity in under attack, Christians everywhere are persecuted, college will make you an atheist, our kids are being brainwashed by atheistic evolution, etc. Criss responds to these with scathing wit, so I won't do so here. Instead, let's ask the question: Why should creationists feel the need to release an anniversary edition of the Origin?

After hearing Kirk give a summary of the book's new introduction, I can tell you why: they are out of ideas. Every single 'attack' made by these loons against evolutionary biology has failed utterly, so they are reduced to spending their money on producing free books with a truth-free introduction. (Said introduction is apparently being rewritten by Comfort, and is not currently available for dissection. Expect more on this later.) Here's a sampling of what will be touched on in the introduction, according to Kirk:

- a history of evolution
- a timeline of Darwin's life
- Hitler's connection to evolution
- Darwin's racism
- Darwin's misogyny
- Darwin's thoughts on God

I'm not sure how they can screw up evolutionary history or Darwin's biography, but I'm sure they'll find a way. The Hitler zombie rears its ugly head here, as was to be expected. And then we have three ad hominem attacks on the man himself. As if Darwin's personal poilitics matter when considering the validity of evolutionary theory. The introduction goes on to cover the 'hoaxes' of evolution:

- nothing created everything
- the structure of DNA
- lack of transitional forms

I'll go ahead and repeat Criss here. Evolution is not abiogenesis. The structure of DNA is a hoax... how? Everything is a transitional form. Even you, Kirk.

Criss suggests taking as many copies as you can, tearing out the toilet paper, and giving them away to friends and family. I'm going to keep one with the introduction for my own amusement. Hopefully we can take this misguided effort and turn it into something useful.

Usher Redux

This is the second time I've played Roderick Usher on stage. The first time was in college. We had a studio theater program that allowed students to write, produce, and direct their own work a few times a year. A friend of mine had chosen to lump a bunch of Poe stories together under the banner of "The Masquerade", and I was given the part of Roderick Usher. The production was ambitious to a fault. We had costumes, complicated lighting, and the Red Death who spoke entirely in sound cues. It was fun to do. We had a waltz. I still have my crushed green vest.

Now it's September of 2009, and again the House of Usher is falling. It started falling, at least for myself and the rest of the Fool Collective, about six months ago. Looking at my calendar now, I can see our first rehearsal was on April 2nd. You might think this is a lot of work to do be doing for a 17-minute show, and you might be right. But it's part of the Fool Collective process to play a long game with whatever project we're tackling. For myself, and for those interested, a brief outline of said process:

• Get together a group of phyiscal performers. For Fear this was a combination of people we'd worked with before, and people we had been in workshops/classes with. We ended up with five boys and two not-boys.
• Start with meetings/chats. We met throughout April just to talk about fear, death, depression, and whatever else seemed appropriate. Much of this is archived on the show blog.
• Generate ideas via text and physical exercise. Most of our early rehearsals fell into two camps: we would be given a writing/thinking assignment and told to either blog it or bring to rehearsal, or we would be given a physical assignment to present to the group. These things influenced each other. Chairs were tossed in the air and landed on their legs. A light bulb was swung by the cord, faster and faster as a body descended into a box.
• Collect the most interesting images and swirl them around in your head until you have an order. We were helped(?) on this step by the addition of the Poe story. Originally we were just doing a show about the fear of death. Having a specific text in which to base our physical abstractions gave us a clear direction to pursue.
• Create sounds and lighting which support the images you've created. The Fool Collective likes to use practical lights, personal lights, multiple speakers systems, and atmospheric soundscapes. We try to transform a theater into a different place entirely. There are no seats in the House of Usher.
• Rehearse it over and over until each moment has a purpose, and there is an overall clarity of focus. This does not mean, necessarily, that things will be clear to the audience. You find that out during previews. Or after.

Things will change during the performance run, of course. The different audiences will cause moments to be shorter or longer, and our cycling cast of narrators will lend their varied specialties to each run. Hopefully we have made something which will at least elicit reactions from the audience. At most, it will communicate something about the cyclical nature of life and death and perhaps reveal some novel elements of The Fall of House of Usher. I'll let you know what I think after performing it upwards of sixty times.