Creating something every day for 365 days: only not today
Recovering from illness and a full day back at work. I did get email from John Wilson, the gentleman in Scotland who will be responsible on that end for bringing students to Newnan for William Blake’s Inn. So that part of the job is revving up. It’s also GHP time, with interviews starting next weekend. So that job is revving up.
So much to do, so much to do, and so little brainpower with which to address it all.
I was determined to get something done today. I even got out the mug I made at GHP nearly twenty years ago, my “get in the composing/translating/writing mode” mug. However, this talisman failed. I just didn’t get anything done.
Part of the reason was that I started the day with a long massage from my former massage therapist James Leipold. The man is a genius, and when he left Newnan last year to attend chiropractic school, I was bereft. When he called and said he was in town, I jumped at the chance, especially since my left arm had been keeping me awake with its tendonitis. So that was way worth it, but it knocked out the entire morning.
I did force myself to sing through William Blake, the first time I’d done that in a long time, and maybe the first time I’d done it paying strict attention to the bass line. Hmm, a couple of lines that got my attention for sure. Not badly written, but oddly placed for a bass line and hard to hear. The one at the end of “Tale of the Tailor” in particular is going to be tricky: above the tenor’s melody and then dreadfully modal on top of that, the kind of thing that would take a good five minutes of Masterworks practice just to nail down those intervals. (And then it still wouldn’t be right…) I also found a misprint in the vocal score.
I walked to the post office to mail some back issues of Dramatist’s magazine to Mike Funt. (If he’d join Dramatist’s Guild like he needs to…) I also bought stamps to mail First Look postcards.
I read Nancy Willard’s essays on writing in A Nancy Willard Reader, including one where she keeps a diary on where the time goes when she’s writing or trying to write. Picked up a great Rilke quote: “If the angel deigns to come, it will be because you have convinced him, not by tears, but by your horrible resolve to be a beginner.”
I communicated with the Lacuna/Mame gang. I opened a WriteRoom file to write the First Look article and even typed in “article to promote First Look” in it before walking away.
Otherwise, nada.
However, it occurs to me that I need to talk about last night’s performace of the Cirque du Soleil. It was as usual breathtaking in its beauty. Isn’t that an odd thing to say about a circus? But that’s the thing that strikes me about the Cirque shows: they are deliberately beautiful. The first time I saw a Cirque performance live, the overwhelming impression I had was, “So this is what it’s like to be creative when there are no limits.” It occured to me then how much my own creativity had been limited by money and resources. This is not to say that I’m capable of the kinds of design you see in Cirque, but certainly over the twenty-something years I designed for NCTC, it was a constant thought in my head: do I have the money to make this, and do I have someone who can build it?
Usually the answer was no, and over the years you develop your own restrictions. You fail to dare to dream. Sometimes the limitations could be inspiring, like the set design for 1997’s Midsummer: we had about $100 in the bank, and everything in the set was what I could find upstairs. But more often, you just stop thinking outside the box.
An aside: when NCTC first moved into the Johnson Hardware building, the first set I designed was Streetcar. I found that I didn’t know where to begin, because for thirteen years I had started every set design for the Manget-Brannon space by sketching in those damned poles: thirteen foot squares defined by nine-inch beams. Did I hide them? Incorporate them? Try to ignore them? When we hit the new space, with an actual 26-foot proscenium, I had nothing to anchor the design. I was lost. You assimilate your limits.
Every three or four years, I’d go for what I called “one of Dale’s shows,” where I just let loose and went as far as I could in every direction: Heartbreak House, The Illusion, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. I’d push the boundaries of what everyone around me thought was possible, and I think everyone benefitted from it. But it was always a huge trek from beginning to end. There wouldn’t be anyone else around me who “got it,” which meant that the source of the vision had to come from me. Everyone was willing to do what I told them, but I had to tell them. (Not absolutely true, of course: Marc in Illusion and Pericles; Becky Clark with the Winter’s Tale costumes; Dave Dorrell with the Figaro set.)
So it is my deepest hope that with the Lacuna/William Blake experience, we’ll be able to move forward together and have multiple sources of vision.
Back to Cirque and the ideas I stole. The show, Corteo, was, as I’ve said repeatedly, a model for William Blake. Ostensibly a funeral (albeit one in which the honoree was the main character), that idea only popped up now and then, and if there was a plot, I failed to discern it. But things kept moving, of course, and the design was impeccable. Fellini appeared to be a major influence, from the first somber cortege that dissolved into random and surreal “events.” Characters were introduced who ran throughout the piece, sometimes literally. Angels flew in and out. The cortege kept reforming and dissolving. And always, of course, the actual circus acts with their dazzling performers, physically beautiful and athletically astounding.
So I got ideas for angel wings, stage groupings, group movements, choreography. And I’m not giving up on flying people yet.
My best intentions were to wrap presents, make a cheesecake, and do a few more measures of Make Way. But after wrapping presents, which took longer than I thought, I still needed to do some shopping, which took longer than I thought.
I made a nice soup. Does that count? No music, though. And I also worked up a guest list for the First Look on January 10.
I did not get the last six measures of Milky Way done. I did, however, get the Deer and Lava Flow™ display put up in the front yard:
But I do have a liberal rant, to wit:
The Times has an article about a memorial put up in northern California Here’s a photo.
Needless to say, people have gone nuts. One lady, whose son is at West Point and will be heading to Iraq after graduating next May, does not consider it a memorial. “The hillside is painful,” she said.
Another man called the display “a travesty” and said the people who put it up were “despicable and morally bankrupt.”
Why is it that any time anyone brings our Iraq casualties to our attention by individualizing them, the pro-war nutjobs go berserk? You would think that they would be pleased that everyone was honoring our dead, or at least they might pretend that’s what the memorializers were doing even if they weren’t.
But that’s not what happens. Every time someone reads out all the names of the dead or puts up thousands of crosses or stones or whatever, the überpatriots have a hissy. I just don’t get it. I mean, my elementary school has a big display in the front hall, with the names of all the soldiers from Coweta County who died in WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. Is that a “travesty”? Are we “despicable and morally bankrupt”? What if we added the names of soldiers from the first Gulf War? Or from this one?
What is the difference? I’m going out on a limb here and suggest that the pro-war nutjobs understand, even if they don’t admit it even to themselves, that our current Iraqi situation is itself “despicable and morally bankrupt,” and that calling attention to the deaths of the brave men and women who have given their lives in this debacle underlines that fact in ways that not even pro-war nutjobs can avoid. And they don’t like it. They like their country right or wrong, their wars just, and their dialectics black and white.
Thus they see every attempt to call attention to the nearly 3,000 troops who have died as an attempt to undermine the war effort, to stab their patriotism in the back and to paint the United States as a villainous imperial power. Somehow they never think that perhaps it was their patriotic duty to oppose this war in the first place, and if not in the first place, certainly by now. It should now be their patriotic duty to support our troops by making sure no more die in George W. Bush’s blunder, the worst foreign policy decision by any American President, ever. And when other people point that out to them, and to the rest of the public, they scream bloody murder. Because they understand that even if the memorial is absolutely sincere, it’s an intolerable intrusion of reality into their pony-based patriotism, and that’s what the rest of the world will see as well.