Lunch Lady Run Through

Yesterday I was invited to a run through of Lunch Lady at the school that is taking it to the Fringe Festival. Great great fun.

I was invited to take notes, as well, and while the show isn't mine as much as it is theirs, it was great to get my grubby little hands on it again. I wrote 5 pages of notes, most of them for very small suggestions, things like:

ADD – give it a beat before the laughter – you’re anticipating. Jordan – unstrap your shoe. Dean Dean – excellent authority. Nice villainy. Stephen – concentrate on final consonants. Jah Jah Jah: awesome.

But occasionally I would indulge in little notes to myself, like

Boom – Go! Can’t let that energy fizzle. Damn! My fault. I gave you no transition. Who wrote this crap?!

And this one, which me coming up for air and realizing both how wonderful and how surreal it is to see stuff from my imagination up on stage:

At this point, I saw the forest, and was pretty moved thinking about you doing this show.

They were very responsive to my suggestions, which, I was careful to tell them, were only suggestions - it is their show now, and any changes I suggest should be decided between them and their director.

After I gave notes, I asked if they had any questions, and it was like a dream. You know that fantasy about being interviewed by Johnny Carson (if you're old like me) or, now, Terry Gross, or, if you're Jimmy Rabbitte in The Commitments, Terry Wogan? I got to do that. "How long did it take you to write it?" "Are you writing anything else?" "Any ideas for a sequel?" It's a rarefied experience, one I was privileged to have. Also, it was a frickin' blast.

But is doesn't take long to get weary of talking about oneself - even if that one is me - and that was that.

They are doing a "send off" performance on August 1st, which is the day before we leave for Roderickville, but I'm going anyway. It's free, and it's at 7:30 at their school. If you're local and you'd like to go, let me know.

Editin' and Giggin'

Lunch Lady: Tater Tots of Love, the musical I wrote, will be performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in a couple of weeks. I spent the last couple of days doing some final requested edits on the accompaniment tracks, adding pick-ups to songs that start with no cue (tough on a singer if the music is prerecorded.) I tried adding pick-ups by recording a simple piano note, but that sounded bad because it is a different piano than the studio grand used to record the tracks in the first place. So what I had to do was find little piano fills in the existing tracks, cut them out, copy them, remove other instruments, tack them to the front of the music, and cross-fade for extra buttery smoothness. It was a tedious process, but an interesting challenge.

So I've not played out, solo, in a long long time. I've worked up a handful of songs in case the opportunity presents itself, but I've not sought the opportunities. (I'm not including the Yipee Jesus band I'm in. I'm talking solo piano/vox.) The whole family is traveling across many states to visit Roderick and clan very soon, and he's lined up a gig for us and some folks he knows. Yoikes, but yippee, too.

Then he sends me a list of songs they know, and it's, like, this endless, enormous spreadsheet. Double yoikes. No fair, Roderick! You guys are for real! Little casual gig my butt.

Looking forward to it, though.

Checking in:

The most creative thing I've done since the last entry:
Mostly I've been practicing piano.

The least creative thing I've done since the last entry:
Bought junk on ebay, mostly for my kids. Actually, mostly for daughter, cuz I am bribing her to clean her room and do her summer reading: Pride and Prejudice DVD for $1.25 (that's 50 cents per vice, plus 25 cents for Keira Knightly.) (Although I think my daughter's interest in the film leans a bit more toward the guy who plays Darcy. She, daughter, is of a certain charming pre-teen age.) Jailhouse Rock for daughter (Whodathunk an 11-year-old could dig Elvis in 2008?), a Jailhouse Rock poster, and, for me, two movies I really like though they are generally considered to be awful: Daredevil, the directors cut (see previous post. $1.04!) and A.I. (99 cents!). I love A.I. I tend to like big beautiful messes by brilliant directors. Julie Taymor's Titus comes to mind as well.

Hmmm . . . have to check that one out on eBay.

Stuff that helped:
Time. It's summer, and I have time to play the piano. The other night, I had the house to myself for the first time in forever. I figured I would play the piano for about fifteen minutes, and then check email, and then clean the kitchen. So I played for a little while, and then checked email, and suddenly everyone was home again. The fifteen minutes at the piano was actually three hours. LOVE THAT!

Stuff that hindered:
eBay is frickin' FUN, baby.

Current project:
Learning tunes for the Roderick gig.

Next project:
Stalled on BIG PROJECT and BIG IDEA, despite encouraging emails from several readers. Will return, perhaps as leaves change.

Guitar?:
Diddley. As in squat, not Bo.

What I should be reading these days:
Nothin'. Can't only read what's good for you. I'm committed to junk for a while. After the current book (see below), I want to read a good stack of comics.

Oh, crap. But I also what to read stuff highly recommended by friends, including Free Play, for my creative self, and A Brief History of Everything, for my philosophical self, and The Universe Next Door for my arguing - about - the - nature - of - existence - with - a - friend - with - whom - I - disagree - a - lot - and - he - keeps - referring - to - this - book - so - I - need - to - read - it - to - keep - up self.


What I'm actually reading these days:
Summer is a time for reading for fun. I'm halfway through The Book of Air and Shadows, and it isn't nearly as good as the first few chapters were. It's lost it's sense of humor, and the main character is misogynistic (and incredibly strong!), so we've waded into stereotypical territory. It's basically a thriller mystery in the genre of DaVinci Code, with more witty twists (in plot and structure) and much better writing.

Today I recommend:
This, but I don't know why. It came to me via a reader.

The Dark Knight. Superheros. And Me

Yeah, I loved it. Of course I loved it.

And yes, of course I saw it at midnight on opening, um, morning. And pretty much all I've wanted to do since is see it again.

When I got home, at 3:00 am, I spent hours online reading every review, story, and interview about it. And most of them were really good, although one of my favorite reviewers really hated it. The one who most closely hit the marks I would hit is my hometown reviewer, Frank Gabrenya. But Peter Travers nails it too, though he's crazy thinking that Aaron Eckhart stole the show. This one belongs to the Heath Ledger's Joker.

See? See what a huge superhero geek I am?

Let me tell you what a geek I am. After buying tickets to the midnight screening, I felt like I used to feel when I was a little kid the night before going to Cedar Point. I was so excited, even I knew what a dork I was being.

Okay, yes. This is great movie, comic book hero or not. But the truth is, I just love comic book hero movies, even the bad ones. I'm the guy who liked Fantastic Four and X-Men: The Last Stand. I enjoyed Ghost Rider and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. I even had a blast at the films that are so bad that they had to reboot the franchise to recover, namely Batman and Robin and Hulk (sans "Incredible.")

In fact, I own them all on DVD. Worse, I watch them. Watched Daredevil just now with the kids.

I know I go a bit too far with this. Not TOO too far. I always feel a little sad for the guys who dress in costume at movies. I have my limits, some pointless: I avoid wearing my Superman watch when wearing a superhero t-shirt. I don't have any kind of superhero bumper stickers, but I do have a super-s on this laptop, and Superman floor mats in my car.

Just before the final Harry Potter book came out - yeah, I love them, but I'm off topic for a minute - a friend who really loves them expressed his crazy enthusiasm by shyly asking "Do you sometimes feel lucky to be alive during the time that Harry Potter is being written?" And I knew what he meant. No other generation will get to read those books first, like no one will ever be able to see Hamlet without knowing the ending. And I caught myself wondering the same thing: Do I feel lucky being around for the great superhero renaissance of the early 21st century?

Nope. I don't feel lucky.

It's not luck, because it's not a coincidence. We, the folks my age, had been targeted as kids by TV shows like The Incredible Hulk and Shazam! and Spider-man and even those Captain America TV movies that made no sense (a silent motorcycle? Why?) I remember watching every single one of them, and loving them all.

Okay. So we hit college, had disposable income of our own, and the market granted our wish. Suddenly, comics were huge: lots of mainstream coverage, and comic book shops on every corner. Frank Miller and Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman came along and wrote well enough to give comics actual credibility (though the new word "graphic novel" always seemed like to desperate an attempt to be taken seriously.)

So now we're all in our thirties and forties, and a lot of us have money to spend on movies, and others of us are the decision makers in Hollywood, and here we are. It's bonanza time for superhero geeks, especially this summer.

In college I was on the bandwagon, spending embarrassing amounts of money on comics under the justification, widely held at the time, that I was investing. Yeah. Talk about escapism.

Back then, when I was reading a comic - or the stack of comics they held for me at Central City Comics every week - I disappeared. I completely forgot everything else that was going on. It was a similar feeling - not quite the same, but similar - to the feeling I would get as a kid, when me and other neighborhood nerds would pretend to be superheros in the back yard. There is a word for the vividness that children experience when imagining - I read about it recently, but I can't remember the term. There is much less a boundary between the real word and young kid's imagination. When children are in an imaginary world, they are really there in a way that we old farts can't, well, imagine. I can still vividly picture some of the adventures I had as a superhero. I was usually Spider-man, but one mission still stands out as if I was really there. I was Iron Man, and I gripped the top of a small picnic table that was in fact a small electric car like the ones in The Incredibles. Mine was speeding through tunnels toward the villain's underground lair while I held on for dear life.

Iron Man? Really?

Anyway, the brain grows, or, actually, shrinks, or at least culls, and the distinction between imagination and reality becomes clearer and clearer as we age, which is a drag. But in college, I could still get a taste of the loss of time and distraction when reading comic books. Now I re-live that with the movies, even the bad ones. But especially the good ones.

So, according to me, what are the good ones? I think a recent story in The Dispatch gets the top ten about right, though it went to press before The Dark Knight came out. I would put Iron Man at number one (two, now, post Dark Knight). The panel includes the animated Mask of the Phantasm, which isn't real memorable to me, and Spider-man 2 deserves a higher spot. I was pleased they included The Incredibles; it was on my unofficial top ten too. But if they are going to include superheros created just for the movies (not just those originating in comic books) then they should include The Matrix as well. Yes, it is a superhero story, damn it. You've got super powers, secret identities, saving the world, all the major tropes.

See? Geek!

One of the these days I'll post my list of favorite comic books here, as requested by a reader and friend who is looking to read the good ones. But I'm pretty clear on what my number one comic book will be, though Dark Knight Returns and Sandman will in the running.

So what happens when one of my all time favorite comics becomes a big-budget film? A hint at the answer arrived in the theater just minutes before Dark Knight.

I'll tell you what happens. Dorkgasm. It's geek-topia:

Back To School

Speaking of BIG projects my dear friend Lennie - dead as you are.  This weekend I took a rather big plunge myself.  Not into a project really, but rather, a (rather) large commitment to learning guitar and moving forward.  After thinking about it for quite a few months, I just signed up for the first of what will be 8 online classes with the Berkley School of Music to pursue their Guitar Masters Certificate Program.  I'm going to try out the first class and first semester and see if I like it (and if it's going to give me the type of learnings that I would like) and then take it from there.  I'm pretty excited about it actually.  The first class is one I desperately need and have been unhappy with my ability to teach myself.  This program will allow me to work on it wherever I am and within my ever changing schedule.  Cool.

Also, just booked a very important gig in August - the 16th to be exact - so Dead Lennie - get ready!  We're going to have good fun.  I'm going to send you some song ideas so we can think about doing some stuff together.  Start your practicing oh stone faced one!

The Book of Air and Shadows

There is nothing like a canceled dentist appointment - canceled by them! - to make a few free hours feel like a gift. And these couple of hours, while I wait to collect my offspring from various sweaty, over-programed activities, are spent with the book I chose, The Book of Air and Shadows.

Laura Miller is a book critic of a magazine I like, Salon.com, and she happened to be the subject of an interview on summer reading as I was driving to the library. She recommended the new novel by Michael Gruber, but she mentioned his previous novel in passing, and used the name "Shakespeare" in it's description. I'm a fan of Shakespeare, so I grabbed it.

A bit disappointed at first, if only because it looms large and pompous in size and cover, as does the author in his photo.

But I'll be damned if I'm not having a blast with this thing. It is funny and smart and mysterious. It's a PostIt note kind of book, a habit I developed with The Braindead Megaphone and Space Vulture, sticking PostIts at lines I like. So now a quick break to bask in good writing and log a few of the memorable lines just from this past hour of reading:

"It was dated 1602, right after Hamlet was registered and a year earlier than the First Quarto, raising interesting questions: were the differences mere transcription errors or did they mean that the author had changed his play after it was performed? It was the sort of thing that generates multiple orgasms among the learned." "The Mishkin genes do not work and play will with others. They either dominate totally or leave the field in a huff. Thus I look exactly like my dad, the Jewish refrigerator carton, while my brother and sister are blondie rails, recruiting posters for the Hitlerjugend."

". . .[E]ven after I was offstage and even after we'd done our three performances in the orange-juice-smelling auditorium, I still felt inhabited by Telegin, and this was wonderful to me, that a made-up person created by a man long dead could in a sense displace my own personality." ". . .I would say that Shakespeare's famous powers of invention do not show well in the matter of plots. All but two of the plays are ripped off, sometimes blatantly, from prior sources; and it was a good thin for him they didn't have copyright in those days. We go to hear his plays for the language, just as we go to opera for the music; plot is secondary in both, trivial really, but - and contemporaries picked this up as well - there is no one like him for seizing something out of life and putting it on the stage."

Death of Sloth

Last week I fell into the bad summer habit of staying up late watching movies and sleeping in too late, which killed creative output.

Sort of.

But two really good things did happen.

First, the BIG PROJECT has begun. When I first started this blog, the general goal was that by logging my creativity, I'd create more. The more specific plan was that it would spur me to work on the BIG PROJECT. But I didn't.

Then, in a spurt of frustration at my increasing sloth, I sat and worked on THE BIG PROJECT. So it has begun. More or less. Although, that was a couple of days ago.

I don't want to say too much about THE BIG PROJECT except that, well, I haven't written a musical in a while, and though it is somewhat weird to be a guy who writes musicals as a hobby, that's what I'm about to do.

But.

I got together with a friend for coffee and what I now call "the 'bou," and we got to talking about my projects, and I mentioned THE BIG PROJECT, which I had started, but then I also told him about THE BIG IDEA I HAD A LONG TIME AGO FOR A MUSICAL. And I found myself getting a lot more excited about THE BIG IDEA than about THE BIG PROJECT.

So now I'm thinking, maybe I should work on THE BIG IDEA?

There is a problem with THE BIG IDEA, though, which is that, um, it might sorta kinda be illegal. That's why it's been on the back burner.

But it might not! So research will commence. Research on copywright law. Also, research on copyright spelling.

But this week was death to sloth, as this week I started teaching, in a not-at-all creative sort of way, in that it's a class that somebody else had the idea for, but then he dropped out, so I'm covering, just for the money, and it's a study skills class, which is pretty damn not-creative-at-all, but that's okay, cuz I am really interested in how the brain works, but then I find out the kids - ready? the fifteen students range in age from rising fourth grade to rising ninth grade. Which means I'm teaching third graders and seventh graders. At the same time. Study skills.

But here's the question: Will the death of sloth and the onset of work generate more or less creative product? Stay tuned.

The most creative thing I've done since the last entry:
Well, I did start work on THE BIG PROJECT. Wrote the first draft of the opening number.

The least creative thing I've done since the last entry:
Have you ever washed your windows with Windex Outdoor? Spraying second story widows with a hose:It's pretty fun.

Stuff that helped:
I don't usually get ideas while exercising, but frustration at laziness caused forcing myself to get off of my butt and go for run caused some ideas for changes to THE BIG PROJECT that broke the block I'd hit before even starting.

Stuff that hindered:
Coming back from New Orleans exhausted gave me an excuse to sleep in. That became a habit.

Current project:
THE BIG PROJECT. Or THE BIG POSSIBLY ILLEGAL IDEA.

Next project:
The above, reversed.

Guitar?:
Nope. I did work on it enough before the trip that I've found myself missing it, which is good. This may be one of those "The blog reminded me to work on it" sort of evenings.

What I should be reading these days:
Having just read a big "should read," A Farewell To Arms, followed by some fun read, Ex Machina, both of which I'd like to write about, maybe next time, I'm in a sweet spot of summer of aligning my should reads with my wanna reads. I'm between books, but tonight I pick up either The Book of Air and Shadows or True Enough, which are crazy different, so we'll see.
What I should be reading is a book that Roderick not only loaned me, but bought and had shipped to me. I'm saving that for later in the summer, though.

What I'm actually reading these days:
I like comic books, particularly superhero comic books, and I often read comics between books I'm reading. It's my palette cleanser, if you will. My sorbet. This summer I've enjoyed bad comics and one pretty good one (though when I say "pretty good," I'm quick to forgive the flaws that seem inherent in the medium.)

Today I recommend:
If you live in my neighborhood, I recommend taking the trash out tonight.