Ideas can be shy, the best of them, the good ones.
And there’s a difference, do you agree, between the mental white-noise that goes on, and an actual lightbulb moment? And they come in different shapes, sizes and guises, they come from who-knows-where. And you never quite know … whether it’s minced recycled lower mind you’re dealing with, or elevated inspiration. All you can do is follow and find out.
I’m writing a book, I’ve got the page numbers done. – Steven Wright
I heard a story from Peter Whelan once. He was a British playwright. I’d just been commissioned to write a play at the time. Here’s how the dialogue went:
Peter: I was working on a play. This was on commission too. I didn’t have the ending. It just wouldn’t come. Then, one day I was walking along in Leicester Square, and I had this idea. And the idea was so tremendous, so extraordinary, that I actually staggered. Staggered I did. At the enormity, the profundity, the grace.
Me: Wow.
Peter: So I rushed home – and do you think I wrote it down? I didn’t. No. I went to bed. Slept well too. And in the morning …
Me: (Aghast) … It wasn’t there?!
Peter: No, it was still there, it just wasn’t any good.
He got through in the end, and he wrote some smashing plays.
I love being a writer, what I can’t stand is the paperwork – Peter de Vries
That stuff about the perspiration/inspiration ratio …
Writing: the coal-face alright, when it’s just you, the subconscious and the keyboard …
One day in about 1973 I drifted into the Tate Gallery in London, and wandered around the rooms.
By J M W Turner
In one room there were two men standing in front of a large canvass. One man was dressed as a museum guard and he was talking softly, and the other man was listening with close attention. As I approached I began to hear what was being said. It was a commentary and an examination of the painting.
I came closer. The guard was focussed on the civilian who was rapt. I stood still and began to listen too. By degrees the guard included me in the monologue (he was the only one who spoke), and the group morphed from a duo to a trio. The speaker was knowledgable, and took pleasure in sharing his data with a wiling audience.
After some time, and it could have been two or three minutes or it could have been twenty or thirty or it could have been a span of a different measure, the first listener began, slowly, to disengage. Organically, the guard began a transfer of his entire attention by degrees, onto me. And then, with invisible seams, the first man quit the gallery and the trio became a new duo.
The guard spoke with enthusiasm, with passion and admiration. I was rapt. And lucky. To have been wakeful enough to recognize a source of bright insight. The guard (if that’s what he was) spoke effortlessly on all aspects of the painting, connecting the medium, the subject, form, color, and all the rest of it. And I was a dry sponge, delighting in the sensation of quickened synapses as unguessed at magnitudes, hinted at in unexpected ideas, poured over me.
A new man approached in the gallery and the morph which had occurred when I joined, was repeated, as, by degrees, I disengaged. I stepped quietly away full of new respect for this expertise. As I left I turned and saw the first image of two men standing in front of a large canvass repeated with new casting.
Another Turner
I was a schoolboy then, attending Pimlico Comprehensive on Lupus Street (an extensive experiment in concrete and glass, now demolished), one excellent feature of that institution was its proximity to the Tate Gallery, a five minute walk. I went back there — many times — but I never again found the guard who knew so much about art.
It’s called The Writers Room and it’s on Broadway and Astor Place on the Washington Square/East Village border In New York City. It’s convenient as everywhere is in Manhattan to (among just about everything you could want in a city), subways, eateries, and hookah emporiums. It’s 2500 square feet of loft space, vacant as you see in this iPhone snap taken against the light, in the early morning. Once the writers arrive, the window spaces go first.
Before I was an actor I washed dishes in an ultra-chic French restaurant in Deauville, France; I planted Olive trees in Crete, Greece; and back in London, I waxed a limousine that once belonged to Idi Amin.
Seeking greater job security, I trained for the stage.
When I graduated I became an actor/something else. The something else was, in phases, painter, driver, barman, all the way to that most traditional of acting auxiliaries, waiter; later: actor/writer
The hyphen has flipped.
I have an interesting writing project, and am working as a writer for hire. So for now have now become writer/actor. I like it. Ready to become writer/somethingelse if necessary.
Creative and commercial considerations prevent me from going into detail. Seriously, I know that it’s not a good idea to let the steam out of the bottle before the soufflé has risen. Have you ever had an idea and you told someone and the next thing you knew there it was all over the Internet?
Looking towards the Empire State Building
This is the distracting view from my favorite window at night. The Writers Room is a great place to work because where acting is agreeably social, writing is solitary. It’s good to see other people tapping at their keyboards. The rule of the room is silence and people are pretty scrupulous about it, but you can talk in the kitchen where there is coffee.
So does this mean these pages will no longer chronicle the jobbing actor experience? Possibly …
I believe the time is ripe for a slightly oversized — alright, moderately oversized, British/Australian detective on the telly. Precisely the category of work that all jobbing actors understand partakes of the jackpot. This could be where the New Year resolution to eat more Kale comes into play …
Have you ever made a New Year’s resolution and lost it soon after?
Me too.
The end of January and the beginning of February is the Celtic festival of Imbolc. Sacred to Brigid, patroness of Poets, Bards and Smiths, it is a festival of new beginnings, of plans for the coming year, also of elevated states — inspiration. This may be where we have gone wrong. After a season of frolic and frivolity, and celebrating at the solar festival of Yule, it may be an idea to let the party spirit subside for 5 or 6 weeks until Imbolc — Easing into it, do you see?
Here are my predictions for 2015:
The bees will need protection.
Increasing numbers of people will want greener fuel.
Those put here to make Nostradamus look good will defend the indefensible.
It’s just back of an envelope arithmetic, and a bit of rambling thought.
Also, the tone of this item is a bit … discouraged … What I mean is … I was young when The Greatest Generation had settled themselves back at home. Things seemed to be going well. There was a belief that we had done it.
Now, not so much. Environment, government, corporate, endless war … etc.
I hesitated to post it, but if you do go ahead and read it, please also visit the fresh new page called But Wait! There’s This … for a brief and particularly inspiring item. A counterpoint to this one. Anyway back to my (mildly) gloomy theme …
Consider a trillion dollars
$1,000,000,000,000
A 1 with 12 zeros after it. To see that in graphics go here.
Meanwhile I’m reading a book.
It’s called Amnesia.
Book cover, courtesy Amazon
I’m reading it aloud. I’m doing this professionally for Recorded Books in New York City.
It was written by Peter Carey. Peter Carey is a multiple Booker Prize winner. He is one of Australia’s leading writers. The book is not yet on general release.
(To me) The most interesting part, given that Peter Carey has superior prose and story-telling skills expertly deployed throughout, is the bit that tells the story — interwoven with a discouraging but plausible hypothesis of what really happened — of the 1975 deposition of the Australian government by the Queen’s representative in Australia, the Governor-General.
It was a new perspective to me. … And yet, now you mention it …
Gough Whitlam was a great Australian. He passed just last month. He was Prime Minister of Australia from 1972 to 1975 which was when he got the Royal Elbow. His government instituted some basic civilized minimums: universal healthcare, equal pay, significant support for the arts, the end of conscription … and … free tertiary education.
Yes, that’s right. Let me just say that again: FREE college.
College is no longer free in Australia, nor in the UK, and not in the USA. But $1 trillion would pay for more than 20 million US college years.
If 20 million 6’ males (perhaps drawn proportionately from those nations currently engaged in warfare) were stacked lengthways end to end they would just about girdle the earth at the equator. That might not be a comfortable posture. But they wouldn’t be able to fight many wars.
Australian actress Cate Blanchett makes an eloquent thank you speech here.
Oh, and …
German universities have recently extended their free university education for German nationals to overseas students.
My college was paid by the British taxpayer (whose ranks I later joined). Personally, I would prefer that my tax coin went to fund education rather than trillions of dollars worth of armed conflict, or some forgotten media/security complexity.
Just saying …
I wonder what could be done with a trillion dollars (or two) in the way of: clean energy, organic vegetables, cleaning up the oceans, universal health care?
Part slice-of-life, part tone-poem, shyly spiritual.
I play the Stage Manager in Palm Beach Dramaworks’ production, a role like no other.
Well Paul Newman (whom I once had the privilege of playing for and meeting after the performance), and Spalding Grey, and Helen Hunt and numbers of distinguished others have played that Everyman, the Stage Manager. None of whom I am like. And yet we’re all actors.
And there is Dylan Thomas’s poetic masterpiece written in 1954, Under Milk Wood.
Do you know that poem by that good man of New England, Robert Frost, Trial by Existence?
Emiley Kiser and Joe Ferrarelli. Photo: Alicia Donnelan
And from a cliff-top is proclaimed
The gathering of the souls for birth,
The trial by existence named,
The obscuration upon earth.
But For sleight-of-the-eternal in the guise of the everyday, Our Town has it, I think.
Emiley Kiser, Joe Ferrarelli and the company. Photo: Alicia Donnelan
What could be more quotidian than delivering milk or making breakfast or even getting married?
And what more metaphysical than:
– Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it, every, every moment?
– No, the saints and poets maybe. They do some.
Memory, Presence, the Ephemera that is theatre, the forward march of time …
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting …” — William Wordsworth
Or … “What’s that unforgettable line?” — Samuel Beckett
The company, opening tableau. Photo: Robin McGee
Kenneth Kay and Josh Stoughton. Photo: Alicia Donnelan
“Some say that the art of the theatre, born for and bound to the moment, must, like a soap bubble or nocturnal meteor, dazzle, then burst to leave no trace. Free yourself from this dark thought! The very fact that your art is a child of fragrance, of the spirit, of a mood, of personality and imagination, and not something of wood or stone, or even a thought fixed in black and white, but a sprite forever swinging free on beauty’s vine, the fact that it lacks tangible form, renders it immune to the gnawing of time’s worm. And that is what life truly means: to live in memory …. to rest in people’s minds free of the mildew and rust of age …. and this lot has been granted to you.” — Henrik Ibsen
Dan Leonard, Patti Gardner, Emiley Kiser. Photo: Alicia Donnelan
“To live vividly in the memory of others seems to be a great thing. In terms of art, it always seems to me that there is something unique and electric about an artist connecting with an audience in live performance. The memory of these moments get parked in a different part of our mind. People speak of them with real reverence and clarity even many years after the applause has faded. To be remembered like that, in any aspect of life, is probably the nearest we have to time travel.” Jonathan Pytell — pytell.com
“We all come here and we don’t know why. We all go in our turn and we don’t know where. And if you’re a bit better off, be thankful. And if you don’t get into trouble and make a fool of yourself, well be thankful for that, because you easily might.” — Henry Ormanroyd in When We Are Married by J B Priestly
The company at the funeral. Photo: Robin McGee
Kudos to my fellow actors in our production like no other. Cast list here. It has been quite a ride. Company members have come and gone, rehearsals and performances have been fraught with incident. All borne with good humor and grace by that fine collection of human beings, the cast and crew of Our Town. Theatrical companies become families within three days. But in a company of this size we are a community.
The company. Photo: Alicia Donnelan
“Backstage was chaos distilled into a very small space.” ― William Alexander, Goblin Secrets
Robin McGee
Note to self: this is one where the less ACTING the better …
N.A.R. (No Acting Required)
— John Voight …
“The most exciting acting tends to happen in roles you never thought you could play.”
― John Lithgow …
“When you most succeed, you do so by seeming not to act at all.”
