Category: Creativity

Creating something every day for 365 days

Ah, past glories…

Posted on by Dale

Fellow Lichtenbergian Jeff Bishop asked me for a photo to include in his new history/compilation book on Coweta County, and I found to my chagrin that I had very few physical photos of my regime as artistic director of the Newnan Community Theatre Company (as it was then known), and the online photos I had were of low quality.

Sic transit gloria mundi, indeed.

However, I did find this photo:

Here I am, singing Count Almaviva in my own translation of Nozze di Figaro, titled Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. This was in the fall of 2002, fourteen years ago.

Mercy, what an accomplishment! I had decided two years before that I would leave the position of artistic director at the end of the 2002 season,1 and I wanted to go out with a bang.  Figaro had been on my bucket list for years, but actually producing it was always sort of out of the question.

But it was clearly a case of now or never—when else would I have the chance?  Who would ever give me a shot like this?  Me, that’s who.

So over the course of 18 months, I worked and worked on translating the thing.  It was actually fun, working out the punchlines — this opera has punchlines — and the rhyme schemes.

Then we had auditions, and wouldn’t you know it, no one suitable auditioned for the Count.  I was forced, forced I tell you, to take the role myself.

I found a reduced orchestration, from the National Opera of Wales, and hired a tiny orchestra.  Dave Dorrell designed a gorgeous set of fabric drops that made the set changes easy,2 the usual gang of angels and elves made the costumes (especially the Act IV masquerade, in which the four principals found themselves dressed in their 18th century parallels). We pulled together the missing chorus members and got to work.

And how did this ultimate vanity project, an 18th-century opera buffa masterpiece, fare with the audiences of Newnan?  Sold out, start to finish, standing room only, thunderous applause.  It was exhilarating.

In order to identify some of the performers in some of the photos I pulled up, I dug out the program and was struck by my Director’s Comments.  I will leave them here:

I always thought that someday I should like to direct opera.  Perhaps one day I shall, but in the meantime, what we’ve done with Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro will serve.

What have we done?  We have taken the world’s most perfect comic musical work and approached it as if it were a brand new script intended for our audiences.  When I translated da Ponte’s libretto, I kept an ear out for natural sounding English and made sure that that the humor  was ratcheted up to the level where it would be funny to a modern audience, not just quaintly amusing. Likewise in our staging, we’ve applied all our experience as musical theatre performers to the score and text, pointing up the jokes and playing out the sheer humanness of the characters.

For they are human, splendidly and foolishly so, as the title of Beaumarchais’s original play suggests: The Follies of a Day.  Everyone sings in the Act IV finale, “Day of fools and night of madness,” and by that point, they all understand exactly what that means, about the others and about themselves as well.  And through them, we see ourselves.

Who hasn’t had to deal with the Count, convinced that everyone and everything is out to get him when he is the author of his own problems?  Who hasn’t been Cherubino, young and in love with love even as he is tormented by the sweet newness of it all? (And who hasn’t written really bad love poetry, like Cherubino’s Act II song, “Ladies, confide in me”?)

With any luck, we haven’t had to suffer like the Countess does, but if we have, she shows us how to get the courage to take charge of our own life.  Figaro and Susanna show us the value of humor in a relationship, even at the moments of highest stress in their lives.

And don’t we all hope that forgiveness and completeness are possible?  Don’t we all wish that our problems would resolve themselves in a shower of fireworks and joy in a moonlit garden?  There’s the ache in the brilliant comedy: despite what we think might happen after the curtain comes down and the sun comes up the next morning, for one moment there is redemption, summed up in Mozart’s perfect little world.

That’s our goal tonight, to bring you safely through all the lunacies of these wonderful characters to the final haven of the garden, and to send you out into our own night with that perfect joy now a part of your life as it is a part of ours.

Dang, I write good, don’t I?

—————

1 We ran Jan-Dec in those days; most of us were educators and opening a season along with school would have been stupidly stressful.

2 Fun story: I had in my head that I wanted the color palette to be a muted 50s kind of style, based on my favorite childhood book, The Color Kittens.  I didn’t have my original copy, so I ordered one from Amazon and was astonished to find that it was illustrated by Alice & Martin Provensen, the illustrators of William Blake’s Inn!

Oh, for…

Posted on by Dale

Here’s some stupid:

Fox News Asks Whether the Statue of Liberty is ‘Transgender’

For real.

Merciful Cthulhu, conservatives, that’s not how art works.  Here, let Wallace Stevens explain it to you:

I

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are 
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

It does not freaking matter if Bartholdi used his brother instead of his mother as the model for the statue.

Let me repeat that for the hard of thinking: It does not freaking matter if Bartholdi used his brother instead of his mother as the model for the statue.

He did his sketches, and he MADE THE THING THAT IS NOT.  Those of us who are sane, who know that art is newness, and that it is not in service to your ideology, know that it does not freaking matter if Bartholdi used his brother instead of his mother as the model for the statue.

How art works has nothing to do with your fear of other people’s dangly bits.

That is all.  Go read about art: Lichtenbergianism.com

Lichtenbergianism: a new frontier

Posted on by Dale

No, I haven’t written any more on Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy, and no, I haven’t done any more work on the book proposal.  But I did establish a new front in my battle for world domination.

As I posted the other day, I bought the domain name for Lichtenbergianism.com and started a trial website at Squarespace.  Within 24 hours I had ponied up for a business website; within 48 I had a new email address and a MailChimp account.  Soon I shall have a new Twitter account.

(The MailChimp account means you can sign up to have a digest email of the week’s blog posts sent to you every Saturday, i.e., you can procrastinate about learning how to make procrastination work for you!)

Now if I only had actual content for the website.  Hey, I’m working on it—every day is a glorious flood of SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION as I figure out what it is I have to offer and how to put that before the public.

Lichtenbergianism: WHAT HAVE I DONE?

Posted on by Dale

I have done a thing.

Why have I done this thing?  Because if I am seeking world domination, I have to have a platform.  Yes, I already have this platform, but I want to keep my private thoughts on a separate plane from my benevolent despot thoughts.

Here is the problem, though: WHAT THE HECK AM I SUPPOSED TO PUT ON THIS NEW PLATFORM?  Talk about an ABORTIVE ATTEMPT.  Just jump in there, man, and don’t count the cost.

As has been often noted, it’s not the jump that kills you, it’s the SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION.

So let’s think this thing through.

  • If Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy were ever published, of course we would want to tie it in to Lichtenbergianism.com as a marketing ploy.
  • The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published [EGGYBP] encourages you to have an online presence before your book is published.
  • I can begin to promote the idea of the book and any auxiliary services such as speaking engagements, workshops, etc., as part of the book proposal.
  • Especially if I were able to begin doing workshops and such even without the book being published, Lichtenbergianism.com would be the appropriate base.
  • With the new domain, I can keep emails about Lichtenbergianism separate from my other personas, e.g., my personal life, my burner life, etc.
    • This would also give me a separate Twitter account with which to begin seeking my minions for world domination.
  • Filling the new domain with… what, exactly?… would force me to concentrate on exactly what: blogposts, linked articles, tweets, etc.
  • Arrrgh!

You should tell me what to put on the new site in comments.  We’ll call it focus group testing.

In other news, I have done some serious work on getting the book proposal done.  Next up: get serious about finding an agent/publisher.

Easy, fun, and SWANKY

Posted on by Dale

Now someday it may happen that a victim must found you will find yourself hosting a little soirée for a friend’s book launch, and you will think to yourself how nice it would be to have those little plastic plates with the event  printed on them.  But you don’t have them, because a) they’re expensive; b) you only need a couple dozen, not 500; and c) you waited too late to even try to get them.

So you make your own:

Here’s how.

Open your favorite program to make posters/brochures/labels/bookmarks.  I use Apple’s Pages because it has everything I need.

Create a rectangle the size of your label (clear mailing labels are what we’re looking at here.)  I got 2″x4″ labels.  To make it easier to select the rectangles later, make sure that the rectangle is filled with white.  (If you leave it just blank, then you have to click exactly on the border to select the rectangle, and that’s going to be very tedious indeed.)

Now fill it with your text blocks and images and whatever.

One reason I like Pages is that when you’re in “canvas” mode, little blue lines pop up to show you when objects are aligned/centered/etc.

Pro tip: once you get your one label made to your satisfaction, select everything and GROUP THEM so that nothing slides out of place.

Here’s the critical step: flip that sucker horizontally:

Think about it: you’re going to be peeling these off and putting them on the bottom of the clear plastic plate.  You’re going to be seeing the label from the other side.

Now:

  • Duplicate your label across.
  • Align the labels.
  • Group them.
  • Duplicate that row and position the new row.
  • Measure your label sheet and position everything to land on the labels.  My labels were edge-to-edge, but if there are spaces between yours you will have to ungroup the row of labels to position each one.
  • Print on a piece of paper, then hold it up to the light behind a label sheet to see if you got the positioning right.
  • Adjust if necessary.

Once you get all the labels where they need to be, here’s the tedious part:

  • UNGROUP everything down to the level where you can select each rectangle and turn off the border line.  In Pages, it’s called the stroke of the object.  Your mileage may vary.  You’re doing this because you don’t need or want the lines, just the contents of the rectangle.
  • I wouldn’t delete the rectangles themselves, because one day you’re going to want to do this again and will need those borders.  If you’re clever, you can LOCK the position of each rectangle so that they won’t slide around by accident and all you have to do is duplicate the contents.
  • Print the labels.
  • Apply them to the bottom of your plates.

Have your soirée.

your host, the author, some rando

And don’t forget to make your bar as hipster as you can:

And bookmarks.  Don’t forget the bookmarks:

Swanky!

(The book, by the way, is Another Farewell to the Theatre, by Marc Honea, pictured above.  It is published by The Lichtenbergian Press and was designed by me.)

Procrastination

Posted on by Dale

You know how when you upload your compositions to iTunes, but when you’re looking at the screen there’s no album cover, just the default icon?

That’s pretty sad.  It’s as if Apple is laughing at you, because you’re not a real composer.

Pfffft on that, I say, and so I design my own album covers.  When I finished “The Ballad of Miss Ella” last week, there was that default icon, and so I grouped “Miss Ella” with “Not Really Bad” and “Dear Diary” from my middle school theatre workshops and made a new album:

I’ll just keep adding to it as I go along.

New music: “The Ballad of Miss Ella”

Posted on by Dale

You might have been expecting further posts about Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy, and you would be justified in thinking that surely I had either a) written more on the book itself; and/or b) whined my way further into The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published [EGGYBP].

However, I had a deadline, which I have met by ignoring all those other creative bits.

Miss Ella is a performer extraordinaire who hails from New Orleans.1  She was a chanteuse at her own nightclub, the Kingfisher Club, and was forced to flee back in 2005 during that “unfortunate storm,” as she refers to it.  She managed to save her neon sign and her piano player and headed out into the world to share her gifts.

She herself was saved only through a miracle, and during the storm and ensuing events she found that she had been gifted with extraordinary shamanic powers, you guys, powers that she is now committed to using to the betterment of mankind.  Plus the singing.

I cannot tell you how honored I was when she asked me to write an opening number for her act, one that would serve as an introduction and explanation for her beautiful, empowering story.  I wrote one version for her, but she gently spurred me to try again2 and I’m glad she did, because this time I got it right.

When she told me last Friday that she had a show coming up and expressed a desire that the new version be in her hands STAT, I set to work.  One never wants to disappoint Miss Ella.

Here then is “The Ballad of Miss Ella,” subtitled “The Spirit Is Coming in Me”: score [pdf] |

—————

1 Actually she’s from Pascagoula, MS, but she does not often refer to those early days.

2 I believe her exact words were, “Here’s a YouTube.  I really like it, don’t you?“

Easy.

Posted on by Dale

I’ve been reading The Fire Starter Sessions, by Danielle LaPorte, as one of the potential competitors for Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy.  It’s not really a competitor, but it is a very good “get off your butt and do what you love” kind of guide, so I’ve been reading it and journalling answers to the worksheet questions at the end of each chapter.

The worksheet for this last chapter, “The metrics of ease,” though, has me flummoxed.  Here are the questions:

  • What exactly needs to get done in your life and livelihood?
  • What’s your competency level for each activity?
  • Which of those activities actually makes you feel strengthened?
  • Which of those activities doesn’t really light your fire?
  • What can you do to develop these strengths and interests?
  • What three actions will you take this week to condition and nourish your true strengths?
  • What three actions will you take this week to decrease your time spent on activities that drag you down and don’t feed your true strengths?

Well.

I’m kind of reading this book to get a grip on how much I really want to be some kind of workshop leader/TED Talk sort of thing, and so this chapter stopped me cold.

What exactly needs to get done in my life and livelihood?  Empty the dishwasher, walk the dog, clean the litter box, cook some meals.  Honestly, that’s about it.  The rest of it—blogging, composing, writing, volunteering, Camping with the Hippies™—is completely optional.  If I stopped tomorrow,1 it would not make a sound in the forest.2

So then the rest of the questions become moot, don’t they?  Do they?  Should I forget that I literally have no obligations other than to wear pants and not smell in public and pretend that she’s asking about what I wish I were doing? (Or do I?)

Understand that I am not indulging in self-pity.  I am honestly at a loss as to how I should answer that first question in terms of planning my third career.

More work is required.

—————

1 I am not stopping tomorrow.

2 For those who are just joining us, I am retired, in the sense of “Governor Nathan Deal moved the Governor’s Honors Program from the Department of Education where it had been for literally 50 years to his own Office of Student Achievement and didn’t care to move the director of the program with it.”

Mousie Music

Posted on by Dale

The other day, the incomparable Berkely Breathed put up on his Facebook page the following strip:

His apology is directed to the equally incomparable B. Kliban:

This reminded me that years and years and years ago—the heyday of Kliban’s cat comics—a melody popped into my head for these lyrics.  It’s nothing like the cartoon would suggest, but it was catchy and enjoyed a certain vogue amongst the young people who hung about at the theatre in those days.

It has occurred to me that I ought to drag it out (of my head—it’s never been written down that I remember) and see if it would work for my “hero’s theme” for my Unidentified Music Project.  It’s certainly catchier than any of my ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS in the linked blogpost.  The trick will be to see how flexible it is for variations.  More work, as we say, is required.

Here:

“Love to Eat Them Mousies” | pdf |

P.S. To the estate of B. Kliban: I have no intention of using these lyrics in any way, so unsharpen your pencils and put your cease & desist letters away.  Your copyright is not threatened, at least no more than the intertubes has already threatened it.

About those goals…

Posted on by Dale

I’m using a piece of software called Scrivener to write Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy, and a very good piece of software it is, too.

One of the many tools it offers is the ability to project word count goals and to see how you’re doing in the current session.  If you tie your session goals to your putative finish date, it will tell you how many words you need to rip out in that session in order to stay on track.

Because of one Camping With the Hippies™ or another, I’ve been a bit slack in writing:

::sigh::

7,500 words for today in order to “finish” by tomorrow. That’s okay.  I have to reset my total word count goal upwards anyway: each chapter is working out to be around 2,000 words, and that’s before I go back and work in charming illustrative anecdotes from all the Lichtenbergians.

N.B.: I could too do it, if I wanted to.  So there.