Clinton Is Pissing Me Off

As a voter registered in the state of Michigan, nothing is pissing me off more than hearing Hillary Clinton repeatedly insisting that the voters of Michigan were “heard,” and that what we said was that we wanted her for president.

Back in February, I might have voted for Hillary Clinton in the so-called Michigan primary.  I chose not to vote at all, however, because neither of the other two candidates I saw as viable (and in serious competition for my vote) were on the ballot.  They played by the rules established by the party, whether or not they agreed with the decision, and whether or not I agreed with that decision.

Sure, I could have voted “uncommitted.”  But I thought not showing up to the polls sent a better message.  Well, I guess I was wrong.

Dear Senator Clinton:  Get this straight — Michigan did NOT vote for you.  And to try to pretend otherwise, and strong-arm the party into recognizing a non-primary is to play the same type of bullshit politics that you’re claiming to be against.  Play the game by the rules, or work to get the rules changed the next time around.  But don’t try to change them midstream, and then claim that we gave you the right — nay, the duty — to do so.

This is not about me being a rules freak.  Rules are meant to be changed and/or broken when circumstances dictate.  However, Hillary Clinton’s ego is not one of those circumstances.

Oh, but there’s more:

At the recent mother-daughter dinner in D.C., she claimed that she has it tougher because she’s a woman.  (Of course, it shouldn’t surprise me that she’s playing the sex card when she thinks it’s to her advantage, just as her flunky, Geraldine Ferraro, played the race card when she thought it was to Clinton’s advantage.)

Now, no one is debating whether or not women still have a long way to go on the road to equality.  But to pull that out now, when it’s convenient?  Puh-leeze.  She’s a dick, no matter what her chromosomes tell her.  And dick-ish behavior elicits dick-ish responses, no matter the sex of the instigator or the respondent.

A few days ago, I was about to post a commentary, saying that any Democrat who refuses to vote in the general election or votes for John McCain out of pique (”my candidate didn’t win, so I’m not going to play anymore”) is a loser.  Thank goodness I didn’t — I’d have to eat my words.  Hillary Clinton, all her New Hampshire tears and protestations notwithstanding, is not in this for the American people.  She’s in this because she wants to win.  At any price.

Did you figure out I’m cranky today?

How I(’m hoping to have) spent my summer, Part II

A week after learning that I didn’t make the finals in any of my Big Four applications, my summer is looking surprisingly better.  Not because I have replacement plans; in fact, it’s because I DON’T have replacement plans.

I’m now looking forward to an endless summer with no end to long, lazy days in sight.  The kind of summer I had as a kid, when — instead of waking up every day and thinking, “What do I have to do today?” like I do now — I wake up and ask myself, “What to I get to do today?”

This is better than sour grapes.  Life without a bit of envy.  I’ll get to play tag and hide-and-seek and swim and putter around my garden and write what I want and eat what I want, when I want to eat it, and let the watermelon juice drip down my chin without caring who sees it.  I get to go to the beach and take a long bike ride and read a book and write a play and buy ice-cream sundaes at Scooter’s and barbecue on the deck.  I get to race a couple of triathlons, feel the breeze and the sun on my skin and take business calls from the hammock.

Awesome.  Life is gonna be good.

How I (would like to have spent) My Summer

Well, the tally is officially in:

• New York Summer Play Festival:  No, but made it to the third round (roughly the top 100 out of 1,000 submissions).  And one of the best rejection letters I’ve ever received.

• National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center:  No, but made it to Semi-Finalist (for second time in a row). 

• Sundance Theatre Lab:  No.  Just a flat “no.”

• Blue Mountain Artists Colony:  No.  But a lovely letter (on blue paper, if I remember correctly).

Sigh… No, no, no.  No.  Not how I’d hoped my summer would go.

Of course, there’s one “Yes,” but that has to remain under wraps for the time being.  But instead of rejoicing about that one “yes,” I’m swinging between frustration and motivation.  These are the times when I don’t even feel like a minor writer.

Then again, I’m doing that swinging in Los Angeles, where the weather is quite lovely and the margaritas are very… pink.  Back home on Wednesday.  There better be sunshine…

Rejection Season

Ah, spring:  when the birds start chirping, the flowers poke their fingers through the warming soil, and the mailbox is stuffed with rejection letters.

Today I got my second skinny, theater-related envelope in the mail, in as many weeks.  This time from the O’Neill Playwrights Conference.  Last week it was from the Blue Mountain Center (an artists retreat in upstate New York).  And there are still two more major applications outstanding, about which I still haven’t heard a yea or nay.  So we shall see…

At least it’s nice to get a firm rejection.  This is also the season when you start learning that the play scripts you’ve submitted to theaters will not get produced next year because those same theaters have begun announcing their seasons — and your play isn’t in it.

But I really, really can’t complain about the O’Neill.  This is only the second time I’ve applied and both times (with different plays) I’ve made it to the Semi-Finalist level.  So, who knows, maybe the third time’ll be a charm.  And they’ve certain been very pleasant in all of their communications to me.

Likewise, it does appear that I’ll have at least one world-premiere production next season (more on that when the details are finalized), so again, I can’t complain too much.  In fact, I’m really quite pleased.  I just don’t like rejection — and, no matter how nicely put, a “no” is still a “no.”

Oh well… now I know that I’ll be able to spend more time this summer in the garden in Michigan.  And I’ll be able to spend some time with my mother after her hip replacement surgery, without having to do too much schedule juggling.  Yup… things are lookin’ up…

Tuesday, April 4, 2008

Even on a cloudy day, things always feel sunnier when your sinus infection has cleared up.

Thursday, April 3, 2008

I don’t want a life “fit for a king”; I want a life fit for a human being.

Monday, March 31, 2008

I write for an audience of one.

Tilda Says It Best

Thanks to Alistair, I read the keynote speech that Tilda Swinton gave at the 2002 Edinburgh International Film Festival. For me, in the late 1980s, Derek Jarman’s films were a revelation; here’s a favorite slice of what the memory of Jarman inspired Swinton to say:

“The dead hand of Good Taste has commenced its last great attempt to buy up every soul on the planet, and from where I’m sitting, it’s going great guns… Things have got awfully tidy recently. There is a lot of finish on things. Clingfilm gloss and the neatest of hospital corners. The formula merchants are out in force. They are in the market for guaranteed product. Financial returns…

“It’s the spirited that hold the [poker] hands in the long run, it always was… the irreverent, the cheats, the undaunted and inspired rulebreakers, not the goodygoody industrial types with their bedside manners and managerial knowhow. It is all done with smoke and mirrors and it always will be. Not with memos and corporate steering groups. Not with statistical evidence or test screening audience feed back. Don’t they know the basic laws of being in an audience? That we say we want to know more about the villain, but we don’t really: that we say we like happy endings but our souls droop without the bittersweet touch of something we might recognize — as we bend in from our fascinating and complex mortal world into the virtual dark and back again…

“I have always wholeheartedly treasured in your work the whiff of the school play. It tickles me still and I miss it terribly. I forage for it now in the films I make with Lynn Hershman. The antidote it offers to the mirrorball of the marketable — the artful without the art, the meaningful devoid of meaning — is meat and drink to so many of us looking for that dodgy wig, that moment of awkward zing, that loose corner: where we might prize up the carpet and uncover the rich slates of something we might recognise as spirit underneath. Something raw and dusty and inarticulate, for heaven’s sake.”

Here’s my 2-cents:

If the vast majority of us in the theater world are doing it practically for free — no, rather, paying for the “privilege”…

If you consider how much we spend on training, headshots, applications, traveling to auditions and rehearsals, submitting scripts, buying paper, printer cartridges and makeup, etc., etc., etc….

If we could be making much more money and have a more stable financial life as a barista at Starbucks, as a stockbroker (even in the current financial meltdown), as a nanny, as a neurosurgeon…

Then why the fuck are we wasting a single minute doing any kind of theater other than the sort that we want to make? If it’s art, and if we’re going to pay for it ourselves in innumerable ways, why oh why are we letting the marketplace determine the kind of work we do?

Because no matter what kind of art we do or make, some will love it, some will hate it, some will be desperate for change and some will beg for more of the same. And if the stars have lined up — and a starlet’s latest entry into rehab or the most recent idiocies of a presidential candidate’s supporters haven’t taken over 100% of the world’s brain waves — people might even talk and think and wonder about what we’ve done or made.

And if they don’t talk or think or pay attention, despite your best efforts to present it to the world? And if that matters to you — and I mean really, really matters to you, your sense of self and your sense of yourself as an artist? Then maybe you should ask yourself why you’re doing all of this.

Art does not come from outside approval. It comes from an internal drive, desire, need, psychosis… you choose the word that fits best… but however, whatever you call it, it comes from the inside out, not the outside in. While art and popularity may coincide temporally, they do not come from the same source.

Movie Quote Quiz, Part I

Damn! I just took a look at Marisa’s blog, and crap on a cracker if I didn’t get tagged with this Movie Quote Quiz thingy.

Man, this was one game of tag I’d wanted to avoid. I’m the absolutely worst when it comes to remembering lines from movies. It’s like the joke-telling gene — some people store them up and can rattle them off, ad infinitum. Me, I’ve got two jokes: something about a chicken and the road and… give me a second… aw crap, see what I mean?

I also lack the movie-line gene. Hmm… gonna have to think about this one, Marisa. I’m not saying I won’t do it. But I’m also saying I might strike up a bargain.

Hey, how ’bout those 5 DOZEN KRISPY KREME donuts I just won?! Want ‘em?

Wondrous Irony

Something out there has a sense of humor.

So, last night I’m out to dinner with Andrew. I think I’ve seen him once, briefly, since the turn of the new year. In all of the catching up on who’s-doing-what and chatting about writing, I told him about the eating right and the exercising, the fat loss and the sporting events I’d signed up to do this summer.

Also that evening, one of his roommates was holding a fundraiser to take a bunch of Chicago Public School kids to Mexico. I’d planned to go, but after a long week what I really wanted to do was stretch out on the couch with a book. So instead of going to the event, I gave Andrew some money to make a donation for me.

I’ll let Andrew’s e-mail take it from here:

So I used your 25 dollar donation to buy you raffle tickets at the event. (unlike the alcohol charges, 100% of the raffle tickets went to the cause)

And you won a prize!

But this is what’s hilarious. Because what did Mr. “I lost 20 pounds and now I’m training for a triathlon” win?

Wait for it…

5 DOZEN DONUTS from Krispy Kreme! Oh, that’s amazing. Anyway. I have the coupons and can bring them on Monday to the reading.

Awesome.