Stimulate Me

It's 18 degrees out and there is NO HEAT in my apartment. I'm wearing two sweaters and hugging a hot water bottle. The cat refuses to budge from the under the covers on the bed.


Sunday, we're going to DC for the inauguration and I'm really excited about it, especially after reading Obama's DREAMS FROM MY FATHER, a beautifully written memoir that really inspired a lot of hope in me for our President Elect. Just the very fact that he lived in a walk-up tenement in East Harlem in the early 1980s is wonderful. I mean, can you imagine Clinton or Bush or Carter or any prior president having that kind of history? I doubt if Clinton or Bush have ever even BEEN in a walk-up tenement.

So now I'm wondering if there is any hope for some arts funding from the US government with Obama in charge. In the memoir I just read, there's a very moving description of a Chicago performance of Ntoshake Shange's FOR COLORED GIRLS, which might be well known among theater aficionados and students of African-American literature, but it certainly isn't any big splashy Broadway-style play - it's in verse and doesn't even have a narrative - so maybe, just maybe, the guy has an appreciation for small-scale experimental arts and there is hope for an Arts Stimulus Plan?

The Institute for Policy Studies describes a plan for 1% of the Economic Stimulus Package to be used for the arts. With estimates for the stimulus plan running from $600 billion to $850 billion, 1% would provide an influx of $6-$8.5 billion to the arts. The thought makes me want to run up and down the room shouting in joy. What a relief it would be to not have to choose between making art and making rent. At least for a few years. How wonderful it would be for public art projects, arts in schools, historical archiving, small theater companies and libraries to get some economic acknowledgment after years of tightening the already-excruciatingly-tight belt. There's an online petition for the 1% idea that about 4,000 people have signed at iPetition including Barbara Ehrenreich, one of my heroes. Not sure whether an online petition will really be effective, but it can't hurt. And if you're stuck in a life-sucking job staring at a computer listlessly most of the day, you can be even more effective by actually writing or calling your congress person More great ideas are at Sarah Browning's blog.

I also really love this article in Truthout Yes, We Can Make the Stimulus More Stimulating where Dean Baker proposes some beautiful measures to make the stimulus plan more effective. Number 5 is Funding for Writers/Artists/Creative Workers:

In the New Deal there was both a federal arts project and a federal writers project. These programs employed thousands of young artists and writers. A creative stimulus package can extend this idea for the Internet Age. Suppose that President Obama made $10 billion a year available for state and local governments to support various types of creative and artistic work. This could include music, movies, writing books, even journalism. The one condition for support is that all material be made freely available in the public domain....

This funding would be sufficient to employ 200,000 people a year at an average of $50,000 each. This would put an enormous amount of creative work in the public domain that people all over the world could download at zero cost. In the first year or two, we could have this program administered through public agencies, but in later years we can have people choose for themselves which work they want to support through a tax credit. The cost would be approximately $10 billion a year.

And number 7 in the article, Pay for Shorter Work Weeks and More Vacations, is even more radical:

The United States lags the rest of world in that its workers are not guaranteed any vacation time, sick leave or family and parental leave. In Europe, five or six weeks a year of paid vacation is standard. Also, all West European countries guarantee their workers some amount of paid sick leave and paid parental leave.

Arts and vacation in the US - how civilized! I'm going to email everyone I know and then run up and down the room shouting in joy. Just to get a little warmer.

Taking It to the Street

My old friend T. Scott Lilly has been posting all of these photos of us in Theater for the New City's summer street theater way back in the late 1980s. Seems like a lifetime ago, especially since there's hardly any vestige left of the East Village in the 1980s. It's like a dream that never existed but then like Dorothy in THE WIZARD OF OZ, occasionally you find yourself at one of the bars with the first names (Mona's, Blanche's, Joe's, Sophie's...) and you look around and think, wait a sec... you were there, and you were there, and so were you...

I think I'm 16 in the photo below. It looks like HIT THE ROAD, the street theater of 1989, which mystified a lot of first generation immigrants and street kids with little knowledge of underground American history since it was about hobos. That's me on the far left, with Joe Davies next to me. Joe was one of the founders of the Caffe Cino, the first Off-Off Broadway theater, but I didn't know that as a teenager the 1980s. To me, he was an old teddy bear who smelled a little and was a bit unintelligible because he badly needed new dentures. He was in a perpetual fight with his landlord over his rent controlled apartment. The landlord would turn off the water so Joe was forced to shower at the theater. I lived in the basement of the theater when I was 16 and there was only one shower. In the women's bathroom. Nothing wakes you up like getting up to pee and stumbling onto a large naked old man. Joe ended up getting work as a token clerk and I loved seeing him at the 8th Street station. I heard he moved to Florida and recently died. I really miss him.



The one below is a publicity shot for CONEY ISLAND KID, the 1988 summer street theater. We're all gathered around George Bartenieff in a bad wig, who's playing Ronald Reagan. Alex Bartenieff, his son is on the bottom left in the Santa suit. I'm next to him in a shedding silver beaded dress. My good friend Sheridan Roberts is flying up in the air on the far right, held aloft by George Liker, a decidedly odd bird who was in Street Theater for two years. I think he was (is?) part of the Living Theater. Scott Lilly, who posted these pictures on facebook is in the boxer's outfit, playing the Coney Island Kid. This was one of the best Street Theaters, about a family getting evicted and ending up in Coney Island. They squat an old funhouse and the Coney Island Kid busts out of an old publicity poster.



Street Theater is still going strong at TNC, but it's an art form that's dying in New York City from the combined effects of lack of public funding and the squeaky cleanliness of the new New York where god forbid a raucous performance break out without a permit and police presence. I'm not talking about Lincoln Center Out of Doors or Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte - I'm talking about a bunch of performers traveling from place to place with a stage they erect, taking theater into places where it normally doesn't exist. Street Theater is usually political to the point of being agit-prop and a free-for-all of dance, mime, clowning, musical theater and whatever else the performers can come up with to compete with the usual New York City panorama - you know - Mister Softee's insistent little ditty, screaming babies, giggly teenage girls, winos with Terets Syndrome, the works.

In the height of the Great Depression, Mayor Laguardia created a Portable Theatre Drama program that produced plays through the Department of Public Welfare. Imagine that - theater for public welfare - bread and roses! During the summer of 1934 and 1935, five portable stages toured thirty parks six days week, becoming the precursor for the Federal Theatre Project and Hallie Flanagan's aim to bring "theater mindedness" to the greater American public. The following photo is from The Federal Theatre 1935-1939: Plays, Relief and Politics by Jane De Hart Mathews and shows a street theater in Saint Mary's Park in the Bronx - it looks like UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, which was their first production. TNC's street theater performs at Saint Mary's too.



Though the Federal Theater Project succumbed to anti-Communist hysteria in 1939, Street Theater became a staple of the experimental theater movement in the 1950s to 1960s with Bread and Puppet Theater and the Public Theater most famously taking shows to the street. The Public might be better known for the Shakespeare productions they performed on a flatbed truck throughout NYC but they also did more experimental plays like a musical adaptation of TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA written by the team that wrote HAIR with danceable salsa and funk. It was at the Delacorte a few years ago and I thought, wow, what it must've been like to have seen that in a housing project in the Bronx in the early 1970s.

Now, besides TNC, there's Circus Amok's amazing gender-bending campy vaudeville circus led by hirsute wonder Jennifer Miller who worked at TNC years ago. There's also the various free Shakespeare groups - Gorilla Rep, Drilling Company's Shakespeare in the Parking Lot, and Kings County Shakespeare, though I am not sure if they still perform in parks. Last summer, Waterwell toured their THE/KING/OPERETTA to parks in the Bronx, Brooklyn and the Lower East Side. TNC is the only theater I know, though, that actually erects a stage right smack dab in the middle of the street. With the latest financial debacle heralding a possible new depression plus the isolation of all our lovely 21st Century innovations, maybe it's time to bring back this tradition. Who's street? Our street! Free theater for all!

New Years in New York 2009

It just started to snow outside, beautiful big flakes, the kind that always remind me of the snowy day 15 years ago when I got out of my parents car with my wailing kid Miles strapped to me. We were in a rush and I had to pick something up at my apartment, so I was trying to ignore the high pitch blare that was emanating from about chest level, not an easy feat. It was snowing, those big beautiful flakes, and as I fumbled with my keys at the front door, a snow flake fell on Miles' face. He blinked in surprise, took in a deep breath to let out yet another howl, and this time a snow flake fell in his mouth. This made him look up at the snow and as some more flurries fell on him, he began to laugh. All this was in the space of seconds - the kid went from a scary red-faced, snotty scream machine to happy chortles in the amount of time it took for five snowflakes to descend on him.

I'm about to run out and see if I can find some inexpensive sparkly thing to wear tonight. As usual, New York's got about a billion things to do. I always think it's crazy that some people will pay $300 for dinner and some champagne. Don't they know the best parties are the cheapest? But we're broke so I think even $30 tickets are out of the question, though Rubulad and Shanghai Mermaid both sound like they'll be great fun tonight. I think we are opting for a starving artist night out. Midnight fireworks at the Brooklyn Promenade perhaps? Some friends are coming over, so I guess we'll make some dinner and then maybe run out to catch NUTCRACKER RATED R, a dance/theater piece at Theater for the New City that mashes up the old Nutcracker ballet. Apparently in this one, Clara is a bored teenager and her uncle Drosselmeyer takes her back in time to NYC circa 1983. The choreography looks great and it sounds like a lot of fun - I am imagining a big guy in a pink tutu playing the Sugarplum Fairy doling out sweets to some wacked out club kids.

Wonder what they'll make of the 1980s in New York City? I looked at the cast list and doesn't seem like anyone was here then. The other night Matt and I went to Webster Hall for Gogol Bordello with some out-of-town friends. He took us around to show us all the new bars he's built for the place and we stumbled onto a party with a 1989 prom theme. It's wild that the 1980s are being romanticized now - hey, I was supposed to have graduated in 1989! And it was definitely not all campy fun. But I do like what a writer in the New York Times said in an article about the film RENT - he was comparing RENT with his memories of the East Village in the 1980s and he mentioned a sense of urgency that doesn't exist now. To me, that's why we all miss the 1980s, particularly the East Village of that time. Everything seemed more possible - there was such neglect in the neighborhood, it was all up to you what you would make of it - but it was also obvious that this vacuum wouldn't last. Maybe that is romantic then - this sense of something fading even as you live it.

Gogol Bordello was great fun as usual. The dance floor flexed up and down in a scary way as everyone pogoed to the music. I took one very blurry picture of Eugene Hutz saying something that no one could understand, but sounded great nevertheless.


The snow stopped now... guess I should throw the cat off my lap and get myself outside before the afternoon is over. Goodbye 2008, hello 2009!

Rubulad
The End of an Error Masquerade Ball
Rubulad Home Base
338 Flushing Avenue, at Classon, Brooklyn
B61 bus to Flushing Avenue
G train to Classon station
10p doors, 11p show; $20 before 11p, in costume, or way late, $30 otherwise

Shanghai Mermaid
1930s Weimar/Shanghai party
Galapagos
16 Main Street, Brooklyn
8p-all night; $35 advance, $40 door
galapagosartspace.com

Nutcracker Rated 'R'
closes 1/3/09
Theater for the New City
155 First Avenue
Weds-Fri 8p, Sat 3p & 8p; $20 adults, Sat matinee Pay-What-You-Can
theaterforthenewcity.net

End of the Year, End of Take Two

This blog has languished for a year and a half as I struggled to establish Take Two. It's over now, after 11 plays and films featuring about 60 actors, some of whom I've admired for years. Getting people there was always a struggle, though at the end, it did seem like I could expect a very small audience without working too hard at it. And funding became a huge ugly monster of an issue. It's Christmas and I'm totally flat broke after Take Twenty-Two, the summer trip to Taiwan with my family, and the huge bust of the capitalist system in the last few months. My sentiments about Christmas this year are fully expressed by the feline below.



So blogging - well, I've been writing in this journal, mostly complaints about money that no one would be interested in. But I did manage to go see WALTZ WITH BASHIR the other day, courtesy of IFP's lovely membership program that allows starving artists like moi to see films for free before anyone else gets to.

Ari Forman's film is an animated first-person documentary about his journey to unearth long-suppressed memories of the massacre at Sabra and Shatila after being goaded by a friend's eerie nightmare. When I say animated, I don't mean there are animated sequences that illustrate a particular point or give levity to a historical lesson that would otherwise be really dry. The whole thing is animated like a comic book or a really great graphic novel, including Forman's memories and surreal dream of the massacre, the memories of his fellow veterans, and interview sequences that looked like they were drawn straight from video footage. Though it was beautifully done and certainly emphasized the storyline of the documentary, I did feel that the animation was one more step more in removing the audience from the brutal reality of the subject. I understood the poignancy of the film, but it didn't leave me angry or sad or upset in any way, and I'm the kind of sucker that cries while reading the New York Times. I wonder if the film would have packed a bigger visceral punch if there was more of the unvarnished footage that was glimpsed briefly at the end. On the other hand, the subject is so dark that maybe it would have just been unbearable to watch. At any rate, Forman is one gutsy director, who does the politically unthinkable, connecting the Jewish trauma of the Holocaust with the blithe viciousness of Israeli policy towards Palestinians. It's unfortunate that the film will probably preach to the converted, rather than people who are resolutely blind to the human rights abuses and atrocities committed by Israel.

Ari Forman, director of Waltz With Bashir and his doppelganger in the film:



Speaking of human rights abuses, I've been depressed about Taiwan and how there seems to be a total media blackout in the West on how the KMT seems to be quietly removing anything that might make it difficult for China to absorb the island like it never existed as its own entity. It's making me question the importance of national identity - does it matter that I consider myself Taiwanese-American? Does it matter that others consider themselves American or Senegalese or Jamaican or Mexican? The thing is, that Taiwan lacks identity in the Western world. When you think Senegal - okay I don't know THAT much about Africa - but I get the picture of African drumming, I think it used to be French, I think of grasslands. I'm refraining from googling Senegal so this could be totally wrong - okay, Senegal is probably not the best example since it's also a bit hard to define - but Jamaica or Mexico is easily identified by distinctive music, traditions and food. But Taiwan? The only thing anyone in America connects it with is cheap manufacturing.

Take Two Begins June 12th

The idea began with the desire to get some momentum going for our company, Direct Arts. Too broke to put up a show, we figured what we could do was mount a regular reading and screening series. Thus, Take Two! was born.

From now until we're too pooped to party, every 2nd Tuesday of the month, Direct Arts will present a reading and a screening of a short- and a full-length theater and film piece at Bar on A, 170 Avenue A & 11th Street, from 6pm-8pm.

The format of the evening will be one short piece followed by a full-length piece. Networking will be encouraged during intermission and after the event. The goal is to 1) provide a forum where people in both the theater and film industries can connect, 2) showcase work that explores the intersection of different ethnic and social groups, while 3) providing a showcase for some really great fringe indie artists.

The inaugural Take Two will set a precedent for this (hopefully) catalytic monthly event, with a screening of Nanobah Becker's short film CONVERSION and a reading of my script OBSOLESCENCE, with a phenomenal cast including Wai Ching Ho (ROBOT STORIES), Kathy Shao-Lin Lee (RED DOORS) and Omar Koury (BROWNTOWN).

Navajo/German filmmaker Nanobah Becker graduated from the Directing MFA program at Columbia University in 2006. Her senior thesis project, CONVERSION, won prizes at a host of native American film festivals including Best Short Film at the Cherokee International Film Festival, before being selected for the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. inspired by an actual 1950s incident, CONVERSION tells the story of a catastrophic meeting between Christian missionaries and a Navajo medicine man in Ojo Encino on the Navajo reservation. Becker is currently working on a feature screenplay called FULL in which she explores traditional Navajo thinking about gender and sexuality through the story of a young, queer Navajo man trying to make it as a DJ in NYC.

Victoria Linchong's screenplay OBSOLESCENCE was also inspired by an actual incident. She was in a traffic jam on the FDR Drive, when she was amazed to see an old Chinese woman walking down the yellow line on the highway, oblivious to traffic. The script came to be about urban displacement in its story of a used bookseller who attempts to redeem his failures by helping an old Chinese woman suffering from dementia find her family. Meanwhile, the old woman's daughter confronts the past she renounced as she searched for her missing mother. OBSOLESCENCE passed the first round of the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, was a "top contender for the Berlin Film Festival Talent Campus and is now a finalist in the Boston International Film Festival, where the grand prize is up to $500,000 towards full production. This first reading of the script will feature a fabulous multi- ethnic ensemble cast: Lori Tan Chinn, Casandra Kate Escobar, Robert Fitzsimmons, Wai-Ching Ho, Omar Koury, Kathy Shao-Lin Lee, Rosanne Ma, Jackson NIng and Tana Sarntinoranant.

So come one, come all - Tuesday, June 12th 6-8PM at Bar on A, corner of 11th Street and Avenue A. FREE!