Just Wrought

Leveraging Just Wrought’s Obscurity as a Feature, not a Bug

 

Okay. So yesterday’s experiment with blowing the dust off of Just Wrought’s mic went… well… not poorly—experiments can only be said to go poorly if they don’t yield data, and this one definitely did that. The data I took away from yesterday’s post “Testing… Testing… Is This Thing On?” is that not many people are going to hit my blog for information about what I’m up to during the Covid – 19 Corona Virus Crisis. Blogs are so 12 years ago. I get it.

But now that I know Just Wrought is (for now) a place where only people who really care what I’m doing go, I can shift its use from one-way information flow, to a two-way back-and-forth. For instance, I’m about to make a move in the space of virtual performance, but before I do, I’d love to sort of test drive the text of the crowd funding release to work out all the kinks, and answer all the questions that might come up.

The Pitch:

Help me pay actors to record my short stories.

The Gist:

I retired from theatre, particularly play-writing, seven years ago to pursue other sorts of writing and story-telling. In that time I have written a wild, weird quasi-memoir called The Starting Gate (published in 2016), a novel (yet-to-be-published) inspired by my time working as the only male executive assistant in the senior executive suite of Washington Mutual Bank during the run up to the Great Recession, and countless essays, poems and short stories. I. And am sad to admit that I have given those short stories (if you’ll forgive the lame proto-pun) short shrift. That I,s, I do sometimes post them on line and I do read them at my monthly literary reading Loud Mouth Lit (which I founded 3 ½ years ago), but other than that limited exposure, they sit on a virtual shelf gathering virtual dust, perhaps never to be read again.

I’d like to change that by paying professional actors, first with my own money and then with yours, to record these stories and ultimately offer them back to the public as audio book quality recordings.

Here’s how I see it working.

I open an Indiegogo campaign, with a goal of raising $7,000 dollars. This is how I raised the money to publish my book The Starting Gate, so I can vouch for it as a tried and true method. The pitch will contain an explanation of my plan essentially paraphrasing what I’ve written above. I will set contribution levels as follows:

Story Patron

Give me $10 and I’ll give you a story, recorded by professional actor local to the Pacific Northwest.

Collection Patron

Give me $25 and I’ll give you all seven of the stories I hope to record with local professional actors.

Book Patron

Give me $50 and I’ll give you all seven stories, PLUS a free copy of the paperback edition of my book THE STARTING GATE (a 15$ value.)

First Edition Patron

Give me $100 and I’ll give you all seven stories, PLUS a free copy of the limited first edition hardback version of my book THE STARTING GATE (a 25$ value and there are only 20 of them left), PLUS I will record a sonnet of your choosing by William Shakespeare, written back during a similar epidemic which closed all of the theaters in England.

Casting Patron

Give me $500, and you’ll get everything you get for $100 but also I will give you the option of nominating a professional Pacific Northwest actor whom you wish to record one of my stories.

Commissioning Patron

Give me $1,000 and you’ll get everything you get for $100 but you also get to commission a brand new, original story from me based on beginning parameters that you help provide. And I’ll let you cast the actor, too, if you want.

 

For every $1,000 I raise, I will record a story, paying a local professional actor (whom I worked with back in my theatre daze) at least $500 to do so.

Why not the whole thousand? Well, there are several expenses associated with this endeavor in addition to the actor’s fee, such as:

• The director’s fee. (This would be for the services of the incomparable book artist, Lyssa Browne, and whose studio, Cedar House Audio, the stories will be recorded.)
• Post-production costs. These range from paying a sound designer to do the final mix, to any other costs associated with bringing you a professional audio book quality offering.
• Administrative costs. Indiegogo, just like every other crowdfunding platform, charges a fee for its services. In this case, it would be ~5%, which is ~$50 off the top of every $1,000 raised. Other hidden fees around distribution will also apply.
• Promotion costs. I would only be spending money to promote this if I had a little extra left over after everything else got paid.
• Paying forward. In the unlikely event that there is money leftover out of the $1,000 per story I’ve budgeted, l will plow the surplus forward into the next story. I honestly don’t anticipate this being a problem, but I am ready and eager to deal with it if it arises.

 

So that’s my initial sketch of my plan. What do you think? I welcome any and all of your feedback in the comments.

 

Also, what should I call this project?

Testing… Testing… Is This Thing On?

 

It has certainly been a minute or two since I last posted here at my old blog Just Wrought. (Damn! Four years ago, Father’s Day!?) But I am considering blowing the dust off of it. (Metaphorically of course. I would never do anything as rash in this current crisis as literally blowing dust.)

I need a reliable platform from which to communicate, and, alas, very recently I have been hearing about problems with Face Book deleting posts for apparently no reason, and, let’s face it, all of the major social media platforms are utterly non-transparent and frankly a bit suspect when it comes to user data. When I post something here, I can see how many people have looked at it, and therefore have a much crisper insight into how well I am reaching people.

If you’re interested in my future offerings, some of which will be old-school style, essays, and some of which will be more like opportunities for actors, writers and other arts professionals to make a little extra spending money, then by all means, click “reload” a couple times on the ol’ browser, and heck, if you’re tempted, maybe even send a link of this post to a friend or two.

If I get enough hits here at Just Wrought, I’ll know I can use this as my primary form of communication on the internet. (Though of course, I will always post pointers to it on FB, Twitter, and Instagram.)

So if you’ve made it this far, and you like what you see, and you want to see more, say hello in the comments. And watch this space. I will have news on a special project I’m developing soon. Very soon.

Love,

Paul

Food for the Minotaur

The city is white.
The strand is white.
The sky is blue paler
than the ocean is blue.

The sail that just broke 
the horizon is white. 
It’s white, right? 
Tell me it’s white.

The king will tell you 
The same damned thing: 
You are the king. 
We are… everything.

The sail is black. 
It’s always been black, 
going all the way back. 
It’s black

*

“Evil” is a shorthand:
a convenient knot on a string
Every day we dress the children
in white cotton for the king.

We say, “children”, but we mean 
something else, surge of protein:
most will survive. 
When was the last sail you’ve seen 
that wasn’t white?

It’s white, right?

The sail is white. 
The sail is white. 
And life is woven light. 
Monsters are movies. 
Life is mood.

Face down on the sand 
is a what not a who.

And whos that are whats 
are food.

*

Your heart is a labyrinth
where the minotaur lives.
The bull-king's heart is weak and wormy,
compromised by compromise.
But this is only what must be
because this is what you want.
You're free.

* 

You cannot be forgiven. 
I cannot be absolved. 
Ours hearts are ash, lungs 
saltwater, and stomachs stuffed 
with children seethed in belief.

Our labyrinth is formed in curves not angles.
That singing is sirens, not angels.
All the forever we’ve lost is now.

Exit/Entrance/Exit/Entrance... Imagination

 

This week I started my new job working for the City of Seattle, Department of Transportation (aka SDOT). This coming Sunday evening, I’ll be reading a story I wrote called “Exit Interview” about getting laid off from my old job. At the time I conceived it, the plot was mere imagination, but I knew the ax would eventually fall. Additionally, the story morphs into being about the end of my life, and then, more eventually still, about the end of the world. And again, I used my imagination but I have a pretty good general idea of how these things will go.

So why am I reading this story on Sunday evening (with the help of the truly excellent Brandon Simmons)? And why, in support of Bernie Sanders campaign to become the next president of the United States of America?

So many think he doesn’t have a chance. Others think he’s inured to the injustice of American racism, puffed up on a cloud of clueless White progressivism.

What do you think?

Do you think he has a chance to become our next president?

Here’s my suggestion: use your imagination; because like me— like all of us— you have a pretty good idea of what will happen otherwise.

 

 

The Poster is ready for OPENLY WE CARRY / CARRY WE OPENLY

Oh, I know I’ve said it before, but I can only hope to say it again and again: there is nothing like that new poster smell!

It says, “Oh, this is coming, baby!  Coming fast!”

 

Tired of Being the Other

Well over a month ago my good friend Bob Williams posted something on Face Book that set me back on my heels and caused me to realize that back when I was doing theatre, and most specifically, when I was sitting at the casting table, I often did not pay close enough attention to the biases of the people making the decisions, myself especially.

Bob has been a dear friend and treasured collaborator since we first started hanging out and doing improv together at the University of Maryland back in the mid-1980’s. He’s been a cast member of some of my favorite productions of my plays, including Annex Theatre’s An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show and “White Boy can Take a Punch” in Brown Box Theatre’s Hoodie’s Up. Bob’s a terrific actor and a deeply generous person and not exactly known for living on a soap box (unlike some of us - *cough*). So I feel strongly that his words deserve special attention and bear repeating. To that end, I asked Bob if I could republish his Face Book post here at Just Wrought, and he kindly acceded. Part of me is sorry it took me so long to get this up on my blog, the other part isn’t sorry at all, since it’s good sometimes to reemphasize a call to action that may have been otherwise quickly forgotten.

 

 

From Face Book, posted, August 19 at 11:37pm

My main Point last night at the forum on artistic freedom and artistic responsibility at the Seattle Rep was that, 50 years after the civil rights act removed the signs that told us that Black people were Colored and White people were not, no color at all,(What if the signs said "Black" and "Bleached"?) we still have a culture that normalizes White as neutral, or of no particular ethnicity. And that informs how we cast roles in the arts community and how we see ourselves as a people.

If a White actor is seen as ethnically neutral, they can play anybody. And non Whites are only seen as their ethnicity. A White guy can play everyman and I can only play Black man, and if a writer does not specify an ethnicity for a character, the default setting is to see that character as White, straight, able bodied, Christian. Should the actor with an eye patch only show up for pirate roles?

Two guys walk into a bar...

What color are they? Did one of them use the ramp to enter?

Our default cultural setting says "White unless specified as other."

After all I didn't say two Asian guys walked into a bar.

So many people in the Bagley Wright Theater last night are tired of being the other. And we are getting tired of explaining how it is still employed, or having to explain that it still exists.

This is how you get Jake Gyllenhal as the Prince of Persia and the Last Samurai starring Tom Cruise.

Or the film honoring Navajo code talkers "Windtalkers" starring Nick Cage.

Or the film about Indian ballplayers coming to America "Million Dollar Arm" featuring mostly Jon Hamm.

Or Cotton Club starring Richard Gere.

Or Mississippi Burning with very few Black characters.

Or Ghosts of Mississippi with barely a line spoken by a Black actor.

Or Matthew Broderick as the main character in "Glory"

Or Matthew Broderick as Simba, King of the plains of Africa, and Jeremy Irons as his uncle.

It's this rich history that in no small part brought us to The Mikado controversy, and brought all of us to the forum last night.

White people can be anything (even Japanese), our shared culture tells us that.

Edgar Rice Burroughs gave us a template:

Abandon a White baby in the jungles of Africa. Now come back 20 years later and where's that baby? Anywhere he pleases. He's Tarzan, King of the whole damn place.

And the IMDB page for this second animated feature Disney chose to set in Africa,(Disney's Tarzan) Has a sea of White headshots on the cast listing. (Seriously, go look.)

If you are producing this "2 Guys in a Bar" play are you open to guys of different ethnicities? Do either of them have to be a guy? Can two PEOPLE walk into a bar? Do they both have to walk?

Mostly I wanted to show the room these two photos, taken Saturday at the lower Queen Anne Bartell's drugstore, a couple hundred yards from where we had gathered. Aisle 12: Ethnic care.

And the products on Aisle 12 in the other shot. How many ethnicities are represented in the ethnic care aisle? Where should I look for soap, Ethnic cleansing? (Seriously, go look. Take your time, it will still be there. Aisle 12.)

White/Colored, Ethnic/ non ethnic, how far have we really come?

Thanks Kathy Hsieh for calling on me and facilitating a discussion. Thanks Annie Lareau for showing us how it can be done right. Thanks Andy Jensen for reminding us all that not every family looks the same and thanks Pamala Mijatov for making Annex one of the places where these issues don't flare up, and for reminding us what a local treasure Courtney Meaker is.

I'm getting older, and I'm getting tired of walking some of my White brothers and sisters through the baby steps of "Your people aren't the only people that are people."

Related articles

Theatre Requires Hope Beyond Logic

'Mikado,' 'Othello' spark public forum at Seattle Rep

Performing Race and a Dangerously White Production of The Mikado

The Misuses of Art

 

 

An essay called “The Uses of Art” has generated a lot of traffic here at Just Wrought in the three and a half years since I posted it.¹ I’m not sure why it’s so popular, maybe because it’s short and quick and has the kind of easily scannable list that’s very attractive on the internet these days.  I’m still quite proud of the piece, even though I should probably admit now that I just sort of tossed it off from accumulated old notes. Recently, however, my thoughts have gone in a converse direction, towards those employments we generally assume art can be put to that it really can’t, or at least not very well: the misuses of art. A few months ago I began brain-brewing a list (by no means complete):

 

• Persuade through rationality
• Sell itself
• Self-evaluate
• Maintain objectivity²
• Manage its own knee-jerk radicalism
• Recognize its own inborn conservatism
• Successfully proselytize for any particular religion or political party
• Know its own strength
• Pay its own way
• Know its own weaknesses
• Maintain its subversiveness beyond a generation
• Properly define the parameters of its success.
• Effectively manage its infection vectors³

 

Stark Choices from New Knowledge

Ms. Jolie’s piece in The New York Times echoed for me with a play I wrote a few years ago about the race to decode the human genome, thus gaining access to all sorts of new information which we now have to face with sober eyes.

 

KELLIE:  . . .   You discovered the Breast Cancer Gene. 

FRANCIS:  The BRCA 1 sequence.  Helped to discover.  Yes.

KELLIE:  My mom died of breast cancer.

FRANCIS:  I’m sorry to hear that.

KELLIE:  Ashkenazi Jew.

FRANCIS:  Then you must know Ashkenazi Jew’s are several times more likely to develop the mutation

KELLIE:  Yup.  And if they have it they face an 80% to 90% chance of getting breast cancer in their lifetimes, particularly at a young age.  And you must know that some women who test positive—and I can’t say as I blame ‘em—elect to under go prophylactic mastectomy.

FRANCIS:  Yes I do know that.  May I ask: have you tested for the sequence?

KELLIE:  No.

FRANCIS:  You should.

KELLIE:  I know.

FRANCIS:  You shouldn’t wait too long.

KELLIE:  I’m not in a rush to chop my tits off.

Related articles

Why Curt Dempster Commissioned Me to Write THE SEQUENCE

BRCA testing: what does it all mean?

What is the BRCA1 breast cancer gene fault?

Angelina Jolie's Double Mastectomy Choice Increasingly Common, Still Medically Murky

The Cartoon Physics of Art

 

“You haven't shown any sign at all of respecting what I have to say or even wanting to hear it. I'm not gonna go stand under that safe.”

This from a gun-loving former Facebook friend in response to my invitation to join an on-stage conversation about how to reduce gun violence in this country. I actually get this sort of response frequently from gun lovers, because whenever they come trolling at my virtual door with whatever twisted logic their addiction has tortured them into accepting, I always invite them to join a future evening of theatre that I am planning, so they can put their counterfeit rationalist money where their soon-to-be-no-longer-virtual mouth is. I think the reason for their reluctance is related to something I touch upon in an explanation I posted here on Just Wrought about why I delete cloaked commenters:

…I know it's considered the custom of internet country to post anonymously, but there is no tradition of it in the theatre. In the world of live performance, one says one's words in public and stands by them with [one’s] body. So as a rule I won't be accepting any more anonymous posts. Stand and deliver, people!

What’s particularly disappointing in the case of my gun loving former Facebook friend is that he’s an experienced— and damned talented— actor. Therefore he lacks the excuse offered by so many other trolls who claim that I have the advantage of them onstage, being show folk myself. (I suspect my friend may also belongs to that vast majority of performers who believe, sadly, that the world owes them their next show, instead of vice-versa.)

In the past few years I have produced or been a part of quite a bit of theatre that deals with the immediate and difficult issues of our times, especially involving gun violence. I’m deeply proud, for instance, that my short play “White Boy Can Take a Punch” was part of last May’s magnificently uplifting offering, Hoodies Up!: The Trayvon Martin Protest Plays. My Living Newspaper production company, NewsWrights United  also covered one of Puget Sound’s most egregious gun massacres in our second edition, The New New News, staging the manhunt for Maurice Clemmons after he murdered four cops in cold blood.

Here’s what I learned from the above experiences: theatre is one of the safest places to explore the implications of real life tragedy. As uncomfortable, challenging, frustrating, even humiliating, sometimes boring, often righteously indignant or unrelentingly Leftist as theatre can be, it is also uniquely illuminating, uplifting, life-affirming and much more respectful of our many differences as citizens than nearly any other communications framework I can think of.

So my friend who claims to be so worried about the Acme safe falling on his head also knows that according to the rules of his Looney Tunes metaphor, if such should befall him in a theatre, he would instantly be able to open his eyes, stand up, dust himself off and again join his battle against his wrong-headed road runner adversaries. So he’s bluffing, essentially.  My friend doesn’t really want to avoid danger, or even pain. No, he’s too much of a gun-toting tough guy to want to spare himself those risks. What he wants to avoid is humiliation. And no one who steps into the theatre for a conversation can be guaranteed to duck that. Audiences are can be harsh, and humiliation, along with its nobler twin, humility, are deeply woven into the fabric of what we offer, and what we receive in return.  If one seeks, at all costs, to avoid disgrace, then one is wise to always avoid the stage, and not just when it is serving in its noble capacity as a crucible for societal discourse. 

But here’s my ultimate question for my friend, and for anyone who holds the doomed gun advocate’s position: given that humiliation is an unavoidable risk of wider life, isn’t it wiser still to serve yourself an inoculation of it in the safe space that art offers? Otherwise, aren’t you running the risk, out in the big scary world beyond, of being more tempted to “protect” your point of view with that all-too-deadly, non-cartoon gun you’re clutching?

More to come.

 

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Reach for your Culture

Reach for your Culture

Some say Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels was the first to proclaim, “When I hear  the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun.” Others say it might have been Göring or Himmler.* One thing’s for sure: once one Nazi blurted the banality, it didn’t take long for the rest of them to parrot it. Originality and wit were never hallmarks of the Third Reich. Some years later, the English satirist Malcom Muggeridge did what English satirists do best, and turned brown-shirted thuggery on its head: “When I hear the word ‘gun’, I reach for my culture.” And in case you were wondering, that’s what America needs to do next.

The United States has now fully entered the long reaping season that our gun addiction has sown. We have watched in paralyzed horror from Columbine through Virginia Tech through the Café Racer massacre, mere blocks away from my own house in Seattle, right up to and through the seemingly ultimate abomination that was the Newtown Tragedy. I say “seemingly ultimate” because we all know Newtown will not be the end, but rather only a particularly vicious chapter somewhere in the middle of a book we seemed doomed to keep writing.

I have occasionally over-indulged myself with ranting on Facebook about this national sickness, and I have almost always regretted it. Gun-loving friends (and not-such-friends) prefer to shrug and pout, posture and taunt, flicking out comebacks like, “What are you going to do? Pass a law? You think that'll help? Good luck.” Until now I haven’t had the time, inclination or clarity to properly respond. But here goes:

No, I have limited interest in politics per se.  Political solutions are necessary but not sufficient. As the gun-addicts love to remind (and threaten) us, outlawing handguns and assault rifles will merely turn gun-addicts into outlaws.  (I am personally okay with that, by the way.  Addicts need to find bottom.) We have to go deeper than politics to change our entire society.  That’s where art comes in. Art can do all sorts of things that politics can never— and should never— hope to.  Artists can and must, analyze, prophesy, seduce, synthesize, convince, cajole, ridicule, probe, scour, purge, alienate, repatriate and heal. To make that short list shorter, we must employ all the uses of art to win our country back from this insanity.  We must surround the sickness with non-violent culture, like a healthy white blood cell engulfing and dissolving a pathogen.

I’ll be posting more essays as part of a larger conversation about how art can be key to disintegrating America’s gun cult. I am a playwright primarily, so mostly I am brainstorming potentialities of theatre, but I am equally eager to hear anyone and everyone’s thoughts on other creative tactics. Including gun-lovers. I love you too, sick and frightened as you are. I encourage you to join the conversation that will lead to your rehabilitation and your country’s ultimate recovery.

More to come.