Through those experiments in combining and re-broadcasting massive sets of data as an “author” (perceiving center) I came to long for software tools which would make the process easier. One thing I began envisioning was a web-browser which worked laterally across chunklets of information. You’d have your regular browser options like right now, but then have the ability to circle a section of data, zoom in on it and navigate right from that sub-component directly to contextless information culled from other sources which matches or somehow elucidates further the selected data. Associative search. And then you’d have on top of that the ability to capture and transmit story-streams out of your browsing experience. A narrative history - controlled entirely by the user, whose rights are sacrosanct - which can be exported in any number of formats: video, picture streams, audio-files automatically sorted and collected, text descriptions of media reference points splayed out like a GPX stream through physical space.

This style of browsing essentially eliminates the need to actually go and visit a web-page on this or that domain. (though original sources can still be accessed as archival artifacts complete unto themselves) All the little bits and pieces are immediately culled and available without having to “go” anywhere. You get the gist of information this way. You feel the flow. You surf the web without getting covered with seaweed.

I didn’t really grow up with sports as a social bonding ritual in my family. So I never have really been able to tap into the sense of well-being other people seem to have engendered in their hearts through sports affiliations. Sports metaphors are always lost on me. When employers have tried to motivate my by appealing to my “team spirit”, the exhortations have fallen flat.

But what is modern sports if not operatic, ballets of coordinated human action and the simple aesthetic joys of pure beautiful movement? To on the one hand glorify the more classically-recognized performing arts and to villify on the other sports and sports spectacles as somehow unworthy of special study would be foolish given the nature of the undertaking upon which I have embarked.

Here’s what I’ve learned about sports though, just from factual observation at the one or two Orioles games I’ve been too - coupled with other experiences of mass spectacles, dance clubs, parties, concerts, etc. People have some inbuilt needs which relate to our being, at heart, basically just big monkeys. We need special monkey times.

Special monkey times basically means that we need to be able to get together in a big group and yell. We need to be able to see each other at big inter-tribal gatherings and smaller clan-specific occasions, compare ourselves with one another, show off, lust after each other and so on. Dancing, getting wasted, cheering. It’s comforting and refreshing to be able to surrender your individual identity into that of a huge group. Have you seen the videos from Denmark, of the starlings or some birds forming a tremendous shifting cloud of aerobatic intent. It’s the most mathematical thing I’ve ever seen. I felt like I was looking into the future, the first graphical depiction of what the internet really is. A bunch of beings coming together for some common purpose, even if that common purpose is only coming together and its benefits are strictly practical and utilitarian: trading and reproduction (a kind of trade).

Sports and huge public spectacles, then, give people a chance to do that, to fulfill our basic needs as special monkeys in a weird and sometimes way-too-civilized world. We need to see people being able to bash the shit out of each other. Putting it into a protected, stylized ritual context helps to teach principles of the prevailing order and create a mechanism whereby people can blow off dangerous monkey steam which otherwise might explode in disruptions and disturbances of other kinds.

Haptic response is a component of robotics as well. It’s the system of sensors and feedback which tells a robot hand not to squeeze a glass so hard that it shatters, but makes certain it holds on tight enough so as not to drop it. Proprioception is connected somehow to this in the human body.

Connected closely, no doubt, to the Rota Fortuna and the Cosmic Machine, I’ve seen with eyes closed. It governs repeatable patterns, processes and functions, especially those which recur according to a cyclical (wheel-based rotation) pattern.

One of the set pieces we carpenters were tasked with the construction of by our scenic designer was that of the mythic instrument of death: the guillotine.

“Ol’ Red,” I’ll call her now, for the sake of anthropomorphizing this created object, this constructed actor in the parlance of Eileen Blumenthal’s spectacular puppetry book. For the guillotine itself was a character in the story. “Madame Guillotine” is exhorted in song by the revolutionary masses of the chorus. A spotlight illuminates her exalted presence onstage as her blade descends to sever head (Reason) from shoulders.

Ol’ Red was painted red by us after a photo found on the internet of a historically re-constructed guillotine somewhere else - in a museum I want to say. Red for obvious reasons, I should say. The blood you’d be spilling would stain your raw lumber anyway. So may as well paint it that color. In cases like this, excuse my pun, it can be best to go with the flow.

The machinery of the guillotine itself was completely functional. You could put your head into a stock made out of wood and have an angled blade rapidly descend towards your neck. Except we never had a real blade. We had a quarter-inch piece of luan with a sheet of siding cut along an angle to simulate the old theatrical French blades of the revolutionary market square. Ours couldn’t sever a head, assuredly, but it could inflict a nasty flesh wound.

So we carpenters built in fool-proof (or actor-proof, as is sometimes said in the biz) wooden stops to arrest the descent of the false blade several inches above the actor’s tender neck. It meant you did’t achieve the satisfying illusion of the blade coming all the way down for a nice chopping effect. But it’s theatre and sometimes fake ends up being more real. No one wants to have deal with an actor whose head has actually been chopped off onstage. Unless, that is, your stage is the world and you just threw down the aristocracy with mass theatrics. Then it might make sense.

Charles [Ludlam] wanted to do a quick-change act and Irma Vep is a quick-change act. Charles was a magician as well. He was into magic and into the Magicians’ Society and not into giving away how jokes are done. He was so into that - he had such an ethic about these magic tricks, sleight of hand and so forth. Quick change is, in fact, sleight of hand and we got really fast at it.

The best part of it is that each of these sorts of technical challenges is unique. You’ll apply a basic concept over and over, but its specific execution is always slightly (or vastly) different. Mostly this means you have to experiment. You might not necessarily know exactly what the best way to do something is until you actually attempt to do it and you get a sense for what succeeds and what fails spectacularly - in that way that only live theatrical accidents truly can.

The craft of technical theatre is an excellent place to learn and to apply mathematical and scientific concepts in an extremely practical manner. I wish that I had this sort of education as a child. I’ve heard the Montessori system is largely geared that way: lessons are geared around a student’s central guiding interest. Math and science applied to teach kids about dinosaurs for example, how big they were, what they would have eaten. I never considered technical theatre at all as a possible career before I just sort of fell into it. It’s harmonizing so many diverse things I’ve chased after or grown up alongside but which I never really saw how they all fit together.

Thanks to technical theatre, I now approach problems differently. I look at the required function and seek out the simplest #whatworks strategy to accomplish it in reality. The essence of science: experimenting with something until you get it the way you want it, instead of giving up or never making an attempt in the first place. In that way, science is a methodology of striving, an exercise of the will upon the field of reality.

That’s not to say that the occult or the paranormal isn’t real and doesn’t exist. My own experiences in both point towards the contrary, though I’m still not able to nail down - and probably wouldn’t want to at this point - the exact boundary-line between the *psychologically* real and the *actually* real. I just know what my own perceptual system tells me. It delivers information about the behavior of other perceiving centers and existential patterns. If we had the instruments, we might be able to reify things which today are only occult or paranormal. As ambient computing melds with synaesthetic biofeedback and artificial intelligence, we might begin to see such things reveal themselves before our very eyes.

But until then, I’ll take any day the falsity and illusions of the theatre where we don’t have to wait around wondering or asking for proof of something intangible. We can see it happening before us. We can build the machines - the deus ex machina - to make the impossible possible, if only for a moment. And that moment, served with right intention and right action - informed by Beauty, Truth, Love and Grace - is probably good enough.

Just read something in an excellent puppetry survey by Eileen Blumenthal about there having been families of puppeteers in China who passed down “secret manipulation techniques.” Theatre, it seems, is often a family business - most probably on account of the all-consuming nature of the craft. It sucks up every last morsel of your life.

What’s the connection between opera and Bohemian Grove? I’m sure Stanley Kubrick didn’t simply dream these elaborate scenes of decadent Venetian masked-style carnivalesque entertainments for the super-wealthy. The rites of Baal, of Jabuhlon. These are just guesses, but a master mason told me once about a celebratory puppet show performed during an initiation dinner. The rites at Eleusis, Skull & Bones, fraternity hazing. Surely, Bohemian grove requires caterers, port-a-potties and event technicians. I wonder what they pay hourly?

But my point is, when you’re causing basically the same event to occur within time space over forty different times with roughly the same results, well it’s a different experience from every day reality where once will have to do. Get it right the first time, get in, get out, get paid and don’t leave your bag or your tools behind.

And plays are generally written to be performed many times by many different troupes. That’s usually considered the mark of a successful stage play: that it has endured and has been performed so many times.

But when we turn suddenly to the cinema, we see a different aesthetic taking hold. Most times when I hear about *yet another Hollywood remake* my brain just completely shuts off. It seems like the masterminds behind Tinseltown must have finally dried up all their new ideas. Endlessly rehashing the past.

Ultimately, there are only so many plots. One theatrical researcher claims there are only thirty six basic types with sub-types [See: 36 Dramatic Situations]. It’s a morphological approach to drama, paralleled in folkloristics by the Aarne-Thompson index of fairy tales. And it’s no wonder as the two fields are closely united: fairy tales and the theatre, images that loom up before us in our imaginations, writ large as shared spectacle. Look, this is what’s inside of us. Let’s parade it around.

Many playhouses have extremely restrictive rules around photography, sound and video recording within their spaces. Sometimes its a rule enforced by the actors’ unions or the scenic designers who created the illusion within the space in the first place. But I feel as though that might go a bit deeper - point towards something about preserving the holiness of the moment, of people communing together for some mostly forgotten shared sacred purpose.

Movies and television are different. They are the land of the dead in some way. Moments frozen in time which can only - nay, must! - be replayed again and again endlessly for all eternity. A celluloid hell, or a utopia if you’ve created a perfect cinematic work. And yet you can’t just walk into a movie house with a video camera and expect proprietors of those establishments to be happy. The holiness of the moment? Maybe the guardians of the lands of the dead. Don’t steal our secrets, asshole. Don’t look back, Eurydice.

What is acting? I mean it first in a theatrical sense, but am immediately thrown back onto the general sense of it. The way one acts within the world (that which is not the “stage”) is one’s behavior. We can break that word down: behavior. To be and to have. One’s possession of one’s own self. One’s awareness of the effects of one’s actions upon others. Acting. Having an audience. People see you up there. To them, you have the potential to become something that maybe you are or aren’t to yourself. I don’t have the experience within that world to definitely say one way or another.

But there is something I’ve seen in the faces of people I’ve worked with: people who I consider to be consummate professionals – whatever else they are, who knows. Do you ever trust an actor? Do you ever trust a non-actor? Hard to say. Judging people according to the similarity to their characteristics that of oneself, however common, may not always necessarily be the best idea.

Especially because, I think, something fundamental to that of what it is to be an actor is eliminating oneself to nothing. That is, on the one hand. You’re only eliminating, maybe, a part of oneself. And that only temporarily. And you become, then, completely this other thing.

Leafed through a book on puppets I got from the Enoch Pratty Free Library, noticed distinctions between ceremonial and religious puppets and sacred fetish objects and those deemed strictly “theatrical.” Those which have a sacred purpose are believed to have the power of embodying – of giving a physical body to inhabit to a spirit, an ancestor or a god. Theatre – modern theatre, anyway mostly doesn’t concern itself with such things nowadays. It’s more about: can you stay open? Can you get asses in seats? Are people laughing? Are people enjoying themselves?

You don’t worry about things like the enthousiasmos of the Ancient Greeks: the literal experience within oneself of an indwelling divinity. Whether that happens or not is up to the actors and those experiencing the production. It’s not brought up as a matter of course, as a rule of initiation for the neophytes into the order. But order, I believe, on some level theatre is and must always be. For it is a complex system, a tradition of what is and what should be. What has been and what will be. This is how we do it and this is why. This is what we know works and what should be avoided at all costs. Not quite the masons, but a guild, a craft fellowship mostly overlooked and almost outside of time. For the media – in all its variations - exists only in the imagination. Which is why the actor must reduce himself to nothing. In order to pass through that infinitely tiny gate, the gap between imagination and reality. The doorway is wide, but narrows as you grow closer to it. The few who arrive at its gate without a prayer on their lips. They may not know the words, the language or the ritual. But they find themselves before the Great Judge of the Audience and they kneel before its myths. The cue light is my god. Not my God, but it rules my experience of the moment. Would that I had a cue light and a stage manager and a technical director wherever I went. I would make so many less foolish mistakes and have such a clear path to follow. Stage master as psychopomp. Anubis, leader of the souls of the dead into the afterlife, the Land of Living Imagination. What do you want your life to become? What’s worth anything? People laughing? Who are they? I don’t know them.

I try to do it right now for myself and not for them, but to perfect the situation. This is what’s supposed to happen and I have the ability to make it beautiful, to be – you could say – an agent of god’s grace (maybe not God’s – but who knows!) for a bunch of people who paid twenty to forty dollars to see me get or not get right my small part in the night’s or the afternoon’s drama.

And if you’re in that Golden Room, that perfect state of being Within the Way, completely Of and Because the Moment, then the last thing you want to do is ruin the Rush of That Is Which Is Happening. Then and there. To be thrown viciously back into the real world of people being unprepared for the Realities and Eventualities which we all face moment-to-moment. Noone and nothing is perfect. Not even the stage with all its rehearsals and disbursals. Amd many they are and few with a moment’s rest!

* * *

Top of Show Pre-Sets

- Vacuum backstage area. Sweep & mop main stage.
- Unlock weapons. Get ear protection. Load clips. Prop pistols to stage.
- Test lights in mask.
- Hazer main switch to “on”.

Act I: Scene 1

- Turn blue running lights on after door slam @ visual cue
(Transition)
- Strike wolf from stage, close French doors @ blackout (warning: “killed the wrong wolf”)

Act I: Scene 2

- French doors blow open w/ stick @ cue light
- Put on costume. Center mask.
- Intruder break-in sequence @ cue light (warning: “that was Victor too”)

1. Switch “on” eye lights in mask. Step into SR (stage-right) door frame.
2. Step across to SL door frame
3. Push open doors @ glass break audio cue
4. Turn to look at B.
5. Eyes “off”, pivot and exit at shoulder tap from C.

- Intruder chase-across sequence @ B. exit
- Hand-off fake body to B. @ end of chase-across
- Remove costume
- Load clips into weapons. Chamber a round in each. Put on hearing protection.
- 3 shots fired @ cue light (warning: “Great Scott!”)
- 1 shot fired @ cue light (warning: “send your soul to hell”)
- 1 shot fired @ cue light (warning: “Lord Edgar needs me”)

Act I: Scene 3

- Hazer secondary switch to “on” @ line, “Sleep is dead”
- Puppet flies out on stage @ painting raise. As curtian closes, turn off eye lights

Intermission

- Hazer secondary switch “off”
- Replace wall panel
- Lower painted backdrop
- Set mummy case at center-stage
- Load mummy # number 1. Pre-set mummy #2
- Replace painting

Act II

- Main curtain open to half @ headset cue
- Pull drop to half position @ cue light
- Pull drop full out @ cue light
- Remove mummy #1 @ case door close. Stow off-stage.
- Place mummy #2 in case @ B. exit
(Transition)
- Pull mummy case to up-stage wall position
- Strike palette

Act III: Scene 1

- Remove mummy #2 from case. Tie case to wall
- Take rose from C. Hand off dulcimer
- Book case revolve sequence @ cue lights

1. Rotate on-stage to reveal C.
2. Rotate one and a half times to “off” position
3. B. runs through, one full rotation. Stop. Lock in “off”
4. Rotate on-stage to reveal C.
5. Rotate off-stage @ floor thud

- Pound on inside of mummy case after C. exit. Stop @ “you can hear her pounding”
- Intruder tapping on SL doorframe at “saw w/ my very eyes”
- Prep guns
- 1 shot fired @ cue light (warning: “Edgar, is that you?”)

Act III: Scene 2

(Transition into)
- Move hazer to center position. Hazer secondary switch “on”
(Curtain call)
- Curtain in @ headset cue. Curtain out @ headset cue.
- Crew bows after cast. Curtain in @ red light cue

Post Show

- Hazer primary and secondary switch to off. Return to fireplace position.
- Clean and lock up all weapons.
- Re-set for top of show (if matinee performance)

RFC Chess Academy

Date: Saturday November 14, 2009
Time: 1:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Repeats: This event repeats every week.
Location: A Good Book Too, 525 N. Monroe Street, Baltimore, MD 21223*
Phone: 410-499-4299
Notes: Come Learn from the “Pawn Master”, How to Play Championship Chess !!!

*Do be aware that this is kind of a rough neighborhood with lots of boarded up buildings, etc. I was a little nervous about locking my bike up there, but it turned out fine.

In any event, when you sharpen a pencil with a knife, you get a rough-hewn sort of point. This is all well and good for marking up sticks of wood, but I’ve been doing more detailed crew work for a live which has demanded that I change my pencil-sharpening strategy. It might sound trivial, but my stage manager ‘made’ me start using an actual full-on pencil sharpener to mark up my action sheet with cues and notes. I like to think of this in symbolic terms: that stage work and carpentry work demand two different types of sharpness, two different (but overlapping) forms of acuity and attention to detail.

I’ve been finding, working in theatre, that its the little things like this - most frequently overlooked - which point towards the biggest differences. Mimicking even small habits of skilled professionals puts you into the mindset and context of the work those people do.

“We don’t call them bullets,” the Fight Master explained. “We call them blanks.”

The difference is the projectile element. The way a gun works, basically, is that a firing pin is rapidly driven into the rear of a brass cartridge, causing explosive gas to be ejected from the casing. With a gun that fires bullets, the gases from the explosion propel the bullet down the shaft of the barrel. The blank firing guns we use, semi-automatic pistols, are different. Their barrels are plugged at manufacture and gases escape through the top of the gun.

The main piece I’m using is a Walther P22 S and looks like this:

The back-up, in case that one misfires and I can’t correct it in time for the next gun cue, is a Smith & Wesson SW1911 S.

All of my firing is done backstage according to a cue light operated by the stage manager who is watching the show in the booth at the rear of the house. She watches the action onstage and uses the cue lights to deliver timing messages at pre-determined points throughout the show. She syncs up the action on-stage with the technicians backstage and operating lights and sound. It’s a complicated enough job as it is, which is why on a show that involves the use of firearms, typically one person will be put in charge of the care of the weapons.

The less people who have access to weapons in a stage environment the better. The less chances for accidents and unauthorized use. Stage weapons, you see, still look like real weapons. Though the barrel is visibly plugged, robberies could still be easily accomplished with such a piece - especially if the weapon was fired. That shit is loud and shocking if you’re not ready for it.

I wear ear protection, plastic over the ear headphones I also use with power saws while working in the shop. The rest of the crew backstage knows to put earplugs of their own in just before we reach that cue.

At the top of the show, I get the guns from locked cabinets (blanks are stored separately) and load both clips. I wait until about 3 minutes before the first big gun cue comes up in the show, load both clips into their respective pistols, and chamber a round. That is, I pull back the slide, cocking the weapon, bringing a blank up into the line of action of the firing pin. The hammer is drawn back.

“Treat these as though they were real guns.”

Good advice.

Because, for all intents and purposes, it is a real gun. And what does that mean? A gun, if you look at it logically, is a type of tool. It is a machine designed for a specific purpose. And that purpose is not “killing” as a lot of people like to think. That purpose is to fire a round. If its a blank firing gun, firing a blank round is its purpose. If its a regular gun, a projectile round is fired. But either way, you’re utilizing the same set of behaviors and techniques when you operate the equipment. So, even though you’re not firing a bullet, you should act as though you are. Because if you ever use a real gun, and you’ve built up a set of behaviors based around using only blank guns that you know won’t hurt people, then you’re going to do a lot of fucking stupid and intensely dangerous things.

Main rule: never point it at anyone. Whether or not its loaded, whether or not there’s a round in the chamber or any in the clip. Even if you know for 100% certain there’s no chance of any projectile being fired, you *just don’t do it*. I’ve read theatre websites saying that you shouldn’t even fire a blank gun at someone on stage. You always are supposed to point it up-stage of them. Supposedly the audience can’t tell the difference. I don’t have any experience firing weapons onstage though, so you’ll have to accept that as hearsay for right now.

Second rule, you don’t hold the gun with your finger on the trigger unless you are in the act of firing. You rest your index finger on the metal part that comes down from the barrel and connects with the handle. That way, if you accidentally squeeze or something surprises you, or you slip or any number of a million possible variables, you don’t end up firing without intending to.

This isn’t just a good rule with guns either. We use it in my chess class. You don’t touch a piece on the board unless you’re going to move that piece. Once you touch a piece, you have to move it. Once you let your hand off the piece, you have to leave it there. No takebacks. In working with guns, that is compressed into the split-second motion of pulling a trigger. No takebacks. If you’re in a show firing blank rounds, you fire too soon or too late and you won’t be synced up with the action. If you’re out in the real world firing live bullets, well the consequences could be significantly greater.

At the end of each performance, my last responsibility is unloading and cleaning both blank-firing pistols and both un-loaded non-firing period revolvers used onstage. Since guns are precision instruments, machines built to exactly specifications, you have to make certain that you keep them under optimal operating conditions.

This is a subject I’m hoping to gain more experience in during my theatrical career. And I think gun safety is a great topic in general. Guns have this ridiculous mystique built around them (thanks, in part, to film incidentally!) that becomes almost superstitious. Actually learning how to handle a gun appropriately and effectively removes a lot of the untruths that are built up around the subject and teaches multi-level situational awareness, as well as an appreciation for fine machines and their maintenance. Nevermind the practical benefits of learning how to shoot, for example at a range, increases one’s ability to focus one’s will and action, being able to operate under conditions stressful (to our animal bodies) with skillful precision. A man who can shoot is a man who can hit the mark in Life in so many other ways. Used appropriately, it can become a tool for mastering yourself and harmonizing one’s actions and relationships. We must learn how to handle anger and violence, not through avoidance, but through channeling these natural instincts into socially-appropriate situations where we can be clear-eyed about our actions and motives.

Reminds me of a remark I heard recently, while studying at a nearby chess academy: an older lady was dismissive towards the game:

“Chess is a war game,” she said. An understandable viewpoint. The game, after all, depicts two armies lined up to do battle. The game of chess doesn’t encourage violence though. It replaces it. It channels it into an outlet where one can sit down, look at one’s actions and their consequences and see the results played out in front of them. They don’t have to get out there on the actual battlefield. The microcosm is right there in front of them.

Before I sign off, thought I’d share two of the better links I rounded up on the subject of gun safety in theatre. Enjoy!

• On the prop use of firearms written by a stage weapon rental company my summer theatre uses
• Guns on stage

Years ago I worked as a landscaper and gardener for a yuppie organic company in Seattle. Most of our work was what I would call “yardening”, as opposed to actually garden work. While we didn’t cut people’s grass (our crew truck never carried a lawnmower while I was there), most of what we did was plant maintenance, lots of pruning and cleaning up planting beds. When you work with the same basic types of plants many times across many different clients’ yards, you can easily start to see what kinds of conditions plants like. Does this one like full sun or partial shade? The plant will tell you the answers to questions like that by its behavior. But you have to know the signs. You have to understand its methods of communication. They may be different from ways you and I speak to one another.

Planting this spring with a friend, we had to figure out likely spots in the back yard to put in certain types of plants. I found myself moving about the yard, standing in a particular area with a seedling in my hand. My mind would go blank and images would arise. Images of other times I’d seen that same type of plant. Sensations of what that space was like, light levels, moisture, the conditions of the plants I worked with.

While it’s hardly foolproof of a method (some seedlings I put down had to be moved later), it points towards something larger about how the human mind works, how our experience of life is organized. When you work within any given domain of knowledge - whether its plants, or something like chess (another hobby of mine - not to mention a part time job as afterschool chess coach) - you start to develop a lexicon of situations. Typical patterns or configuration of events, actions, behaviors, etc. This and this tend to go together. That and that tend to go together. While it may not be a causal connection, necessarily, clustering is a powerful organizing function with many applications.

In working with plants, it provides you with a vocabulary of how to care for, work with and steward living things. In chess, you start to see the same situations over and over again. Pawns lined up like this. Rooks and bishops cornering each other like so. And you learn how certain situations tend to play out. The difference between simple pattern-matching, however, and actual wisdom and experience is profound, to say the least. If you’re just seeing the same things come up again and again in your experience, and you’re playing through with the same tactics and methods you’ve always used in those situations - well, you shouldn’t be surprised if the same results also show up. Moral of the story? You’ve gotta change what you’re doing to make something new happen.

Also check out Jason’s new album, Illegal Activities. Well worth your time!

“In ancient Greece any man who had been supposed erroneously to be dead, and for whom in his absence funeral rites had been performed, was treated as dead to society till he had gone through the form of being born again. He was passed through a woman’s lap, then washed, dressed in swaddling-clothes, and put out to nurse. Not until this ceremony had been punctually performed might he mix freely with living folk. In ancient India, under similar circumstances, the supposed dead man had to pass the first night after his return in a tub filled with a mixture of fat and water; there he sat with doubled-up fists and without uttering a syllable, like a child in the womb, while over him were performed all the sacraments that were wont to be celebrated over a pregnant woman. Next morning he got out of the tub and went through once more all the other sacraments he had formerly partaken of from his youth up; in particular, he married a wife or espoused his old one over again with due solemnity.”

From the Golden Bough

I really don’t want any magic mumbo-jumbo in the technical documents produced by the aeronautical engineers who are trying to work out how a 617 ton Airbus A380 will actually get off the ground and stay off the ground in a controlled manner for the duration of its 9,000 mile flight. That’s just not funny or helpful. Same goes for the civil engineer’s bridge, the politician’s environmental action plan, or the prostate surgeon’s procedures.

Magic and animism works well-enough for me as a way to describe the quirky personality traits of a cranky laptop, for example…

And later on in the conversation at that site comes another tidbit:

I was at Ubicomp and apart from being pleased that people were talking about animism and magic (things I’ve been looking at lately), I was initially a bit surprised at Sterling’s strong stance against it. Then I interpreted his criticism, as you explain, as being against the use of magic as coersion. His point is that that there’s enough history of the developers of technology cloaking the functionality of technology for there to be concern that animism and magic as a metaphor would make it too easy.

Interesting subject. Would like to collect more quotes and resources on this subject if anyone has anything to contribute! It’s in research for an article on ambient computing I’ve been asked to write.

“Under this metaphor, the computer is populated with little people (LPs) who are specialists at particular procedures, and “hire” other LPs to perform subprocedures. LPs are normally asleep, but can be woken up to perform their task. Whenever an LP needs a subprocedure to be run, it wakes up and hires an LP who specializes in that procedure, and goes to sleep. When the hired LP finishes executing its procedure, it reawakens the caller. A “chief” LP serves as the interface to the user, accepting tasks from outside the LP domain and passing them on to the appropriate specialists.

[...] The little-person metaphor has been quite successful as a device for teaching the detailed workings of the Logo language.[10] Sometimes the model is taught through dramatization, with students acting out the parts of the little people. Not only does the model provide a good tangible model for the otherwise abstruse idea of a procedure invocation, but it turns them into animate objects, allowing students to identify with them and to project themselves into the environment. “

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately about especially European folk customs which are related to at least the spirit of Halloween, or at least to dressing up and acting foolishly. January 5th, the day of my birth, is Twelfth Night in the Christmas season, traditionally associated in England with the practice of mumming. Mummers dressed up (and still do, where the tradition survives) in outlandish costumes and perform a dramatic scenario related to the mythological slaying of the Dragon (evil, darkness), by St. George. Stock characters are typical to mumming, one of several elements the tradition shares with the Italian commedia performances. Mummers would don their costumes and disguises, get tremendously boozed up, and - so the stories go - appear uninvited at the homes of lords and nobles to crash their parties with impromptu performances of their ritual folk custom. The proper response was to give them food and drink, and maybe a small cash donation. Afterwards, money gathered would go to a big party put on by the mummers, to which they would invite their victims/audiences. {See also: Wren Day}

From a blog called Transpontine:

In January 1414, a plan was put in place to use mumming as a means of overthrowing the state with a focus on Eltham Palace, where the royal family was spending Christmas. The abortive insurrection was associated with John Oldcastle, a former friend of King Henry V, who had embraced the doctrines of the Lollard movement and been imprisoned as a heretic in the Tower of London before escaping. The Lollards criticised the wealth and corruption of the Church, anticipating the later Reformation.

In 1414, it was proposed to use a Twelfth Night Mumming as a cover to seize the King and his brothers at Eltham Palace. However the King was tipped off and returned to London. When the Lollard supporters gathered in the following week in St Giles Fields (near to the current Soho area) they were routed and many were exectued.

The Saturnalia was another inversion festival which the Romans practiced around roughly the same time of year, if a few weeks earlier. In it, social roles were inverted (however temporarily), where slaves and masters would switch places, etc.

It was a time to eat, drink, and be merry. The toga was not worn, but rather the synthesis, i.e. colorful, informal “dinner clothes”; and the pileus (freedman’s hat) was worn by everyone. Slaves were exempt from punishment, and treated their masters with (a pretense of) disrespect. The slaves celebrated a banquet: before, with, or served by the masters. Yet the reversal of the social order was mostly superficial; the banquet, for example, would often be prepared by the slaves, and they would prepare their masters’ dinner as well. It was license within careful boundaries; it reversed the social order without subverting it.

The John Canoe or Jonkonnu parades of West Africa, the Carribean and parts of the United States bear a striking similarity to this particular vein of folk theatrics:

Essentially, it involved a band of black men–generally young–who dressed themselves in ornate and often bizarre costumes. Each band was led by a man who was variously dressed in animal horns, elaborate rags, female disguise, whiteface (and wearing a gentleman’s wig!), or simply his “Sunday-go-to-meeting-suit.” Accompanied by music, the band marched along the roads from plantation to plantation, town to town, accosting whites along the way and sometimes even entering their houses. In the process the men performed elaborate and (to white observers) grotesque dances that were probably of African origin. And in return for this performance they always demanded money (the leader generally carried “a small bowl or tin cup” for this purpose), though whiskey was an acceptable substitute.

Closely allied with these traditions were the charivari or shivaree, ritual events in which community members appoint themselves as correctives against what they consider to be anomalous or aberrant behavior. Consider also the “rough music” of 18th and 19th century England.

Rough music is noisy, masked demonstrations usually held at the home of the wrongdoer, involving the banging of frying pans, saucepans, kettles, the rattling of bones and cleavers, the ringing of bells, hooting, blowing bull’s horns, and utilizing any other kitchen or barn utensil with the intention of creating a cacophonous noise to the discomfort and lingering embarrassment of the subject.[1] During a rough music performance, the victim may be ridden upon a pole or donkey, and his crimes may be the subject of mime, theatrical performances, recitatives, along with a litany of obscenities and insults.

Of course, lynchings and activities of the Ku Klux Klan fall pretty squarely into this last category as well, so the whole thing is necessarily quite a mixed bag. Fascinating subject though, regardless, the notion that there is some kind of holy power associated with a masked and costumed mob of people. {See also: Devil’s Night and Mischief Night} Interestingly, in the Carnival season of late Renaissance Italy, masked men were not permitted to carry weapons of self-defense, as they were considered to have revoked personal responsibility by wearing a mask. That is, if you can’t be recognized and identified, you can’t be held socially responsible for your actions. That explains, in a round-about fashion, why all the local 7-11’s and Rite Aid stores in the area had hand-lettered signs asking patrons to remove all hoods and masks before entering the premises.

“Smart games and toys work by adding enough complexity to their behavior that their actions are no longer predictable, which users then accept as part of the fun. With AIBO, Furby, Musini, and video game AIs, we — the users — cede our desire to predict the actions of our technologies in exchange for more “entertaining” behavior.”

I know what he’s talking about is a bit different here, but the thing this immediately makes me think of is how annoying this sort of thing would be in real-life situations I find myself in. For example, what if I was using a screw-gun, a hammer, or a knife which was capable of acting in unpredictable ways? The outcome could be hazardous, to say the least.

Of course, he’s not talking about all devices working this way, just some and some only sometimes. He says, later in the article, “…user experience design will have to be more sensitive to respecting, creating, maintaining, and selectively breaking expectations.”

Parallel to the practical stuff, I’ve been - as you may know - engaging in heavy historical, cultural and theoretical research relating to the domain of theatre and folk theatrical traditions in particular. I’ve got a never-ending list of books coming my way from the Enoch Pratt Free Library, which I have been assiduously annotating with stickies, then copying down quotations onto note cards for later use, and photocopying longer passages. Over the course of two months, the direction of my research has begun to make itself plain simply on account of the types of information I have gathered this way. The path reveals itself the farther you walk on it.

This past Monday morning, I went on a free historical tour of Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre down on Eutaw Street, lead by the docent there, an older man full of information who was plainly in love with the Hippodrome and the institution of theatre itself. We even managed to get a couple of ghost stories out of him, which is always fun. Theatres tend to be full of ghosts. The Hippodrome tour fits in as part of the next phase of my Monument City project. In that, a friend and I completely documented the historic monuments and memorials around the city: photos, GPS coordinates, mapped locations, location notes and historical write-ups for each location. We’re planning to do the same thing for all the old theatres from back in the heyday of Baltimore Theatre - which, at this point, I’d probably peg somewhere in the 1880’s to 1920’s or so, kind of at the height of Vaudeville, melodramas and the touring circuit. The Hippodrome, newly restored as of five years ago, is kind of the crown jewel of this collection. It’s too bad that “union rules” forbade us from taking photos inside. (It’s funny to me how unions are invoked with this almost superstitious quality in circumstances like these…)

Meanwhile, I’ve been practicing my back-cross, a juggling move which I’ve been attempting for over a year which I’ve only recently been able to land. In three club juggling (though I guess you can do it with balls), you’re juggling your normal pattern when, suddenly, boom, a hand goes behind your back and you throw a club behind you catching it in your opposite hand without messing up the overall pattern. Devastatingly tricky, but my practice time is beginning to pay off.

In fact, everything I’m doing is starting to pay off, individually, and all the various streams are coming together quite nicely. It’s a peculiar life situation to be in, to be honest. I feel like I’ve spent so much time up till now striving to figure certain things out - which I’m now figuring out - that it becomes time to find a new way to define yourself, the quest, the struggle, the goals. Spent so much time developing my “personal power” or my “inner flame” which is now burning brightly… but what do you do with it? What do you apply it to? And how do you learn what the right application of force is, of pressure? So much craft work is all about developing “the touch.” The skill is in the hands, in using just enough, but not more than enough. Letting the tool do the work, having these things become extensions of not just your body, but of your consciousness, your will. How do you develop that? How do you teach others to develop that? I’ve been reading a book about the journeyman artisans of France, the compagnons, who go on an extended Tour de France - not the bicycle race, but a voyage of discovery and mastery of their chosen skill. One of the emblems which aspirants on this journey will wear is that of the Labyrinth. It symbolizes both the difficulty of the journey inward to find the treasure hidden at the center of the maze, but also the journey one must take back outward from the center in which one becomes able to transmit that wisdom and experience to others who are just taking up the journey afresh.

In any case, I’ve redone both my root drive of this domain, timboucher.com with that in mind, along with beginning a cultivation scheme on the travelingperformer.com domain. With that one, my plan is to create highly-compressed “data-digests” on very micro topics related to my current field of study. For example, this first one is a list of all the types of traveling performers I could think of, along with hazarding a definition of what a performer actually is or does. Intending to put together many highly focused topical “lenses” like this, which hopefully will provide a nice conceptual framework for me to do further research and interest others in these topics.

Also check out circuscharacters.org for similarly-themed information, presented in a more extended essay format.

Technical Theatre Skills

I am well-versed in…

1. Stage & scenic carpentry
2. Working as a stagehand or stage tech for live events: moving scenery, running props, lightboard operation
3. Scenic painting, backdrop painting and portrait painting

I am a newbie but gaining experience in…

1. Lights and electrics: hang and focus, as well as basic residential electricity
2. Sound & A/V
3. Working as a production assistant/assistant stage manager

Performance Skills

1. I have acted bit parts in two shows, one at a regional theatre and one at summer stock.
2. Learned how to waltz for one of the above roles, and could probably pick up other steps pretty easily.
3. I can juggle up to four balls or three clubs, and am a beginner at partner juggling/passing.
4. Got a unicycle over the summer, but I’ve not yet mastered it.
5. I can play basic folk guitar, mostly rhythm work with some finger-picking.
6. I’ve gotten pretty good at that sort of old-timey talk-singing (”talking blues”) typical to performers like Woody Guthrie.

Research, Writing & Administrative Skills

1. Well-versed in writing essays, articles and creative non-fiction for the web using a combination of print/library sources and the web, supplemented by in-depth first-person interview and data collection.
2. I’ve been running a successful and profitable blog for close to seven years.
3. With a partner, I researched, wrote and developed the website Monument City, which is a comprehensive digital catalog of historic monuments and memorials in Baltimore City.

Computer Skills

1. Years ago, I taught PhotoShop, HTML, CSS, basic Javascript, ASP and PHP at a job re-training and placement company in Baltimore. Though I don’t code extensively anymore, I have an active understanding of programming and scripting languages and techniques.
2. Have worked as a graphic designer (print & web), web developer, coder/programmer and e-commerce associate at a variety of small companies around the US, along with freelance web development projects on the side.

Other Skills

1. I’ve worked extensively with dogs in a daycare environment, as well as on the retail end of the organic/holistic pet food and supplies industry.
2. I’ve worked professionally as an organic landscaper & gardener, and have installed several urban backyard gardens for friends.

Also attended a YouTube play festival over at the Annex Theatre, an independent arts venue and living space in Baltimore’s Station North Arts District. I liked the basic concept of the festival, that of staging YouTube videos as live-action performances. Some of it was beautiful, some of it was indecipherable, some of it idiotic in a good way, some of it in a bad way, and a few bits in it really had the kind of dramatic power in them that make you remember why you go to live events in the first place and don’t just sit around watching YouTube forever. My favorite was probably the one about the fat Mexican kid falling into the river and cursing his friend out, followed by the Neda getting shot one…

Watched also “Les Diaboliques” this weekend, along with Ingmar Bergman’s excellent (though not maybe as good as “Seventh Seal” or “Wild Strawberries”) “Tinsel & Sawdust.” According to the jacket of that DVD, Bergman kept up parallel and largely separate careers on the stage and with film. This movie tells the story of a traveling circus owner, his mistress and their miserably poor circus coming into a town where the owner’s wife and children now live. Some great stuff comparing and contrasting the worlds of circus life and “legitimate” theatre, as the traveling troupe and an established theatre troupe in the town get mixed up in all kinds of inter-character intrigue. Really worth watching.

Also caught part of the Penn State game this weekend at the bar. Sports has never been my thing, but I’ve begun viewing it lately from the traveling performer lifestyle/professional entertainment business and culture. There’s a lot to be drawn in historically, since most of the folk theatrical research I’ve been doing has been around festivals, fairgrounds and religious holy day celebrations. Sports and aesthetic competition have always been intertwined with such things - sometimes inseparably so. It will be an interesting fish to fry.

My next heavy research topic though will be opera, now that I’ve got a nice foothold into the domain, some of the terminology and a bit of a frame of reference worked out for it all. In the meantime, I’m doing a historical tour of the Hippodrome Theatre tomorrow as part of Free Fall Baltimore, a city-wide thing that includes many performances and events all through the Autumn (such as the Peabody Opera Potpourri performance I attended last week).

One of the things I really want to start looking at is audience make-up and interactions around operas versus other kinds of “lower class” performance rituals. Haven’t got a hell of a lot of exposure yet but have begun seeing some consistent trends: that opera audiences are usually quite talkative and vocal with one another about their opinions during intermission, etc. Maybe not more that theatre audiences, but definitely moreso than movie audiences. Which makes the adaptation of opera and some of the stage rituals to a cinematic establishment at times a bit odd or jarring.

On the homefront, I’ve begun work on a Halloween costume which I might be able to find other performative uses for. I finally snagged myself a maybe five foot plastic jointed skeleton from a temporary storefront that used to house a Circuit City but now sells fake blood and any number of cheap “sexy” Halloween costumes from China for $19.99. I was gonna replicate the clown being chased by a skeleton bit from a 1930s circus photo I found, but decided to modify it to fit in the front. My idea was to wear all black (including a facemask) and attach its limbs to mine in various articulations, thereby enabling me to make it dance or move around - like a marionette or other kind of puppet. I’ve been thinking of the “laughing skeleton” archetype you see in the medieval Danse Macabre/the Grateful Dead paraphernalia, or also in that awesome movie, The Last Unicorn - that skeleton which guards the clock that’s a portal to another dimension. You know what I’m talking about, right?

Tonight I modified all the joints, so that each end of each one has a wire run through it which then ties it to the corresponding joint, also wired. This way, if any of the plastic joints fail, the whole act doesn’t fall apart. Next will be putting together some kind of harness to give me the types of articulation I’m after for. I’ll post videos of all this when I’ve got it all done. Would be awesome to find a way to use the skeleton in a juggling routine!

Not everyone, I’ll wager, is at tonight’s event for the reasons I am. A skinny middle-aged Jewish woman stands up a few seats over from me. She seems to be the only person in the place giving a standing ovation. The second act has just ended (the night was three one act French operas by different authors). Scattered shouts of “bravo” burst forth from a cluster of seats down-house and to my right. I get the feeling people are just yelling that word not because they know what it means, nor because they feel that deeply about the performance. They’re yelling it because that’s the word you’re supposed to yell at the end of a fancy performance. They saw it on tv or something.

Not that I’m one to talk. My only prior exposure to a full-length opera before this has been on the big screen: Wagner’s “Das Rheingold” at the Charles Theatre a few weekends prior to this. At that, I ate popcorn and drank a coke. Does that happen at regular operas? I have no idea. I squirmed in my chair. I’m guessing that happens at operas not infrequently.

I am in the Friedberg Concert Hall, a lovely theatre at Peabody, probably unknown to many area residents. I would guess the seating capacity is somewhere over five hundred - and that’s without taking into account the balcony above me. The place isn’t packed, but it has a marvelous feeling of fullness. People are expecting something. This is a special event. Some people are dressed up. I waffle over whether or not it’s appropriate for me to wear a winter cap inside a theatre with statues of muses lining the walls. I decide its not okay, until I get to talking with the black ladies behind me during the first intermission about how cold it is in here.

“There must be an air vent above us,” one of them says. I agree and put on my hat.

During the second intermission, the Jewish lady is standing again, this time shouting.

“What’s she yellin’ about?” one of the black ladies quips.

She is yelling to catch the attention of the Asian pianist who performed the musical accompaniment for the second piece. Evidently she knows him and she wants everyone in the immediate vicinity to know this.

“Have you guys been looking at the words?” I ask my new friends after discussing the merits of the work presented this evening.

“If I wasn’t reading the words, I don’t think I could follow it,” one of them responds. “Can you tell what’s going on?”

“It just looks like a bunch of people walking back and forth,” I admit.

But that’s what I’m looking at, maybe what I’m looking for even. The staging: how actors move about in the performance space, their general physical attitudes, their gestures, their expressions, their faces. It’s a relief, for once, to not have to bother myself with what people are saying. Most of what people say - I realize while watching this three operas without understanding much more than a smattering of the tongue they were written in - simply doesn’t matter. In real life, there are all kinds of cues that go alongside conversation, fleshing it out into much more than just the words. In theatre, clever directors and players can amplify these alongside-helpers with the aid of props, costuming, blocking, etc.

But here at Peabody - a music conservatory, and a good one at that - what we have are singers. They are students and they have, most of them, been focusing most - I’m sure - on the musical aspects of their performances. A few are natural all-around performers, whose skills will only be honed through engagements with a live audience tonight. But for many, it seems that their bodies as instruments have scarcely been considered. I’m not talking about dancing, mind you - nothing so extreme. I’m talking about vitality, about lively movement, about passionate expression.

“It was a little wooden,” I admit to my new friend while miming ‘The Robot’ after she has revealed the first act wasn’t passionate enough for her.

I’m imagining what it would have been like to see some of the old commedia shows without knowing Italian. A little like this, I think, except a lot more physical action is my guess. The various stock characters have highly stylized systems of movement and expression typical to each character. Basic rules each one improvises around within a sketched out scenario posted before the performance. Musically, tonight’s opera is nothing like that. Two different animals. The music is complex and carefully composed. You’re supposed to be listening to the music, not picking apart the staging. I know that, but I can’t help it. I work in theatre.

It’s like that joke: how many guitarists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? You pick some high number like, twelve, and then say: one to screw in the light bulb, eleven to stand around and say, “I could do that!”

I’m no opera singer, I’m sure. Watching, I couldn’t help but wonder how one could take the basic story being pantomimed by the actors, wholly separate it from the music, and distill it down into a compressed nugget of dramatic action. I didn’t read the English translations of the lyrics, but I had read the synopsis in the program before the acts commenced. This gave me enough of a foothold into the plotlines to decipher the rest.

Copeau, among others, advocated for a long apprenticeship of the actor in which speech was altogether forbidden to him. Upon reaching such and such milestone and proving his mastery of pantomime, he was then allowed to gradually add in utterances of gibberish to punctuate his action - but not actual words. It’s a restriction which historically was levelled by censors of the French government against second and third tier theatres, forcing their performers to become only all the more creative an articulate as a response. The gibberish could become a kind of praying in tongues, when combined with the ritual attributes of pantomime, creating a kind of universal language of human experience which can be transmitted to any person regardless of race, age or orientation within the space-time axis.

This, I believe, is the bedrock of the underlying Great Work of which opera (itself meaning “work”) is but one of many shards broken off a tradition as old as humanity itself. Maybe older if we can be so open-minded as to peer into the animal kingdom and label performances such as mating dances and territorial displays as a kind of proto-theatre. Which I believe we can. We should be able to make a kind of theatre that even animals and birds and insects could understand. An opera that beings from other dimensions and galaxies would be able to understand and appreciate. Why not?

The dream was sad.
Some illusions are beautiful.

*This was a few nights ago now…

An “investigative consumer report” is a detailed form of a credit report that involves interviews with your neighbors or acquaintances about your lifestyle, character, and reputation.

Investigative consumer reports may be used in connection with insurance and employment applications. You’ll be notified in writing when a company orders such a report. The notice will explain your right to request certain information about the report from the company you applied to. If your application is rejected, you may get additional information from the credit reporting agency (CRA). However, the CRA does not have to reveal the sources of the information.

I’m guessing mostly what they look for is criminal background information in this case, but it makes me wonder just how much of that vast information-gathering network out there is put to use, all those agencies stockpiling data on consumers’ patterns…

While the actual Baltimore Opera Company has gone belly-up in the past year, you can still catch an opera or two screened occasionally at the Charles Theatre, the local art house cinema located just north of the train station. I’ve heard of this phenomenon in other cities as well though, showing operas produced for film distribution at artsy theatres. Trick is, they charge you twenty bucks - twice the price of your average movie ticket. Though, of course, the cost comparison you’re supposed to make as a consumer is with an average opera ticket, which can be many times more expensive.

So was it worth the twenty dollars? Absolutely, though I personally have to maintain my position that staged live events like opera, musical theatre or regular dramas look stupid on the big screen. Playing on the stage, the performer adopts certain attitudes, gestures, postures, faces, tones of voice and inflection to project the sound of their physical body out into the space of the house, hitting the perceptual instruments of the audience members. When you translate a lot of those exaggerated faces to the big screen, something is off. Something looks wrong, it throws me out of the moment, instead of sweeping me up into the arc of the drama.

It’s interesting to note, conversely, that stage performances and the screenings of films share a common legacy: the vaudeville house. Once upon time, in this great land of ours, there existed a loose network of ‘road-houses’ as they are called, theatres (often referred ‘houses’) which catered to touring companies. Itinerant troupes at the turn of the 20th century would criss-cross the continent on a rigorous tour schedule, powered either by the locomotive networks, good old-fashioned wagons or the nascent automobile. The main faire was typically melodramas or vaudeville, the forerunner to the variety show so popular in 1960’s and 70’s America.

Vaudeville houses catered largely to the rising urban working class, country folk who’d moved to the big city to take factory jobs. Automated assembly lines allowed companies to produce goods non-stop, relying on rotating shifts of employees in a cheap and expendable labor pool. These same city dwellers, on their off hours needed something to spend their wages on: entertainment. Vaudeville houses were often noteworthy as sources of entertainment at almost any time of day. (An abandoned theatre on Howard Street in Baltimore still has signs outside that say, “CONTINUOUS PERFORMANCES AT POPULAR PRICES.”) Short acts would rotate performances on-stage throughout business hours so thrill-seekers would always find something watch - not unlike the way that your typical strip club operates today.

Movies as social phenomena were born in this performance environment. Your typical early film was a short piece set to live musical accompaniment and sandwiched between live acts like jugglers, singers or actors performing popular pieces. In Italian, there’s the intermezzo, in French, the entr’acte - brief interlude acts between scenes or between bigger sections of a performance.

In that sense, opera coming back into vogue on the big screen makes a bit more sense. The old Town Theatre (future home of Everyman Theatre), was once a stop for touring Vaudeville acts. Eventually it became a burlesque house, a parking garage and finally a movie theatre. Many old stage theatres across America have suffered similar fates, either morphing into movie theatres or strip clubs (like the old Gayety Theatre, now the Hustler Club), being modified beyond repair or torn down altogether.

With a failing economy, we’re seeing a new wave of theatre closings and companies failing across at least the Eastern seaboard: like Foothills in Worcester (the town of my birth) or the aforementioned Baltimore Opera Company - maybe migrating back to the big screen is a good way to preserve and present to a wider audience a lot of the cultural treasures and wonderful traditions that have become wound up inextricably with things like opera, ‘legitimate’ theatre and other dying performance genres.

In person, I’m sure that many of the facets of Valencia’s “Das Rheingold” which bothered me would have instead been impressive and perhaps even awe-inspiring set to Wagner’s thunderous music. But on screen, I just can’t escape that cool stage tricks and techniques just look lame or cheesy. When I as a consumer of entertainment at movie theatres am used to seeing fully-articulated killer robots blowing people to smithereens (and eating their corpses!), how can I ever accept the giants Fasolt and Fafner’s welded metal cage-costumes with immense jointed metal arms and legs hanging limply down as technicians push the apparatus from in the shadows below? And Loge zipping around on a Segway scooter? Is opera in such a state of decay that it needs to resort to flim-flammery like that? Probably, though I don’t know all that much about it - yet. This was my first opera, and I’m not even sure whether or not to count it since it was just a recording.

It did seem, however, that the elaborate machinery and staging of characters into various devices which allowed them to seemingly float around was just a thinly-veiled disguising of what opera singers I’ve befriended refer to as the “park and bark” tradition of classical opera performance: you basically come out on-stage, stand in your appointed spot, sing your guts out, maybe wave your arms around and then go back off-stage. Not a whole lot of acting, not much emphasis on movement. Exactly the opposite of what people in the industry are saying is the new trend: singers who can move, who can act, who can dance, who can do it all. It’s more along the lines of what you’ll find in the world of musical theatre, of Broadway performances; you could even draw the line back further towards things like Vaudeville and even further to the commedia dell’arte.

Or that’s the line of research I’ve been following lately in my spare time, and I’ll wager that outlook has significantly colored my experience of Wagner’s fantastic almost three hour opera which centers around a dwarf who cheats nature spirits out of their gold to craft a magical accursed ring which drives its owners mad with power and ultimately leads to the fall of the gods. The story’s cool, some of the acting is great, a lot of the singing is magnificent. But I kept getting hung up on directorial choices of how the work was translated across media into film. That and minor technical post-production glitches which, though small (like a square that appeared accidentally at the end of a line of subtitle or an actress’ part being mis-labeled during closing credits/curtain call), made me skeptical of the twenty dollar cost of admission.

There is a way forward though, I think. And like a lot of things right now, the path leads simultaneously backwards. I predict that a hybrid form of entertainment will overtake us all culturally within a few short years, one which successfully blends the best human elements of historical performance traditions with modern media techniques and still-emerging immersive computer technology. Wagner’s operatic work warrants that kind of speculation, I think, as his artistic vision spoke of a “marrying of all arts” within the imaginal space of the theatre. In two weeks (Oct. 25th and 27th), they play the next installment the saga, which is rumored to be three times as long as “Das Rheingold”, with two intermissions. Sounds like my kind of party.

“It’s like your a citizen now,” an employer and friend said to me.

“You’re selling out,” a co-worker announced over drinks after work.

In a way, they’re both right. (”Oh, that’s a cute little phone,” another friend exclaimed.) After about three years of a blissfully cell-phone free existence, I decided it was time I finally manned up and made myself available for more regular and hopefully more profitable employment. I had also gotten very used to making do without one. The thing I’ve found about self-denial is that you can basically habituate yourself to anything. No cell phone? No problem. You find other means to coordinate activities with other beings. And you accept certain limitations of technology capability, social activity and systems of behavior as a result of making what amounts to - outrageously, I might add - the ‘extremist’ consumer decision, nowadays, of not having a cell phone.

Not having a cell phone means you never have to get all excited about doing something only to have your friend or whomever call you at the last minute to cancel. Not having a cell phone means not getting broken up with over text message during a staff meeting at work. Not having a cell phone means you are where you are, with the people you’re with, doing what you’re doing. And while things and people elsewhere may have real importance and meaning, they can’t intrude into the here and now unless your heart conjures memories or imaginings of them or they appear at your doorstep.

Maybe it is extremist. Not having a cell phone now means, in many cases, that you can’t get a certain job, or that you won’t land a certain apartment you’ve had your eye on uptown. You’ve got to be accessible, ready and able to buzz into activity with non-local electronic facsimiles of humans while temporarily suspending contact with whomever is actually sitting there in front of you. Using a cell phone is like going into a private trance. The world evaporates as your center of attention levitates towards magnetic satellites whirling around the earth… or something.

I could go on and on with the philosophical metaphors, but what I really mean here is business. That’s why I got a cell phone - to get down to business. I shopped around locally-available carriers. There seems to have developed over the summer a hot and heavy telecom advertising competition over the poor-people’s cell providers. Packages that offer things like pay only for the days you use (phones that function like parasitic parking meters, constantly needing to be fed credit card quarters) or the opportunity to pay a monthly fee in advance with no long-term contract, credit check or termination fee.

Those options are what drew me to Cricket, a provider operating within selected urban areas which - to be honest, I didn’t know a whole heck of a lot about when I signed up. The last cell phone I had (whose glorious multi-media destruction is documented elsewhere on this domain), a rep of the provider actually had the gall to tell me that they couldn’t guarantee service in a building. **Oh that’s good! Cause I never go in those!**

Simply moronic. And of course, I still had to pay an early termination fee on my contract - despite that they had let the cat out of the bag that implicit within their service is an un-stated clause that you should already know, duh (stupid!): that they don’t guarantee service.

So when I sank a heavy rock into the back of my last cell phone and it emitted a little blue streak of toxic smoke like I had just killed a baby dragon, liberation was mine. Freed from the bonds of a technology which no longer served me, I rejoiced and drank a beer.

I pissed on a cell phone once in a bar bathroom. I convinced a friend that management had given him the phone so they could control him, and somehow miraculously, mysteriously and ridiculously, he actually handed over his phone so I could go piss on it. I brought it into the bathroom, immediately dropped it in the bowl, zipper down he walks in the door and says, “Um, do you think we could just go break it in the alley?”

“Too late dude, already pissing on it.”

Cricket, though, is all about respect. I’m sorry, they spell it, “respeKt” with a capitalized letter “K” thrown in for emphasis.

“We’re down, bro.” Their marketing messaged boiled down into one convenient misspelling. Because, what do they mean by “respeKt”? Maybe it’s different from *respect.* Maybe I’m the one misunderstanding something.

Cell phones are like jealous lovers. We end up needing each other too much, more than is healthy for us.

See, I was lured in with their circus tricks. Offer a bunch of promises up front of a free month of service and a fifty dollar mail-in rebate to cover the cost of the phone. Get the rube in the front door, where once they’re in you can continue to fleece them. I’m not some yokel though. Having broken their sacred icon once alread, I understand what maybe the occult essence of these phone companies perhaps better than some. I was ready. I kept all my screen shots. I saved all my web pages. I recorded their promises. I have it all documented. Once, twice, three times and then again for good measure. I knew where this was going.

But I was hoping it would be different this time. Why do products marketed to poor people always have the worst features and most restrictions? I was hoping to have found a company that at last understood me and my demographic segment, that respeKted me. At last! What a relief!

So, when I emailed customer support asking why my billing date for actual use of my phone shadily started six full days before I even received my phone in the mail and why I hadn’t received my promise rebate, you can say that I was hoping for a response, but not expecting much.

Thank you for your inquiry, an automated email alert from a no-reply robot notified me of receipt of my message with a copy of what I’d written (and backed up elsewhere).

A customer service representative in your area will contact you within 48 hours. Or thereabouts. I don’t have the actual wording in front of me - but rest assured I can get it. (That’s how much I truZt and respeKt phone companie5. ) Of course, no email response. Why even hire customer service agents if you can just use FAQ’s (they have one that answers “Why didn’t I receive a free month of service?”) and email robots to reply to actual human people.

So a couple weeks later, I notified customer service of the oversight, re-stated my request for information and assistance and stated that not being replied to *at all* was simply an unacceptable level of customer service. Two weeks will be up, I think next week - at which point I will reassess how to approach the situation.

I recently had the pleasure of attending an informal focus group (aside: “What is that, some kind of religious thing?” a friend asked when I brought up the event) for a friend of mine from college who is in the prototyping stages of releasing a line of designer organic products. I don’t know how the subject came up, but someone made a really interesting statement at our round-table (which was videotaped to add to the awkwardness - I felt like I was on “The View”) about how it seems that the only way she can ever get customer service “these days” is to tweet about a company.

Imagine that: living in an age where you’d have to post information about a company in a public place to get them to respond to you as a human: something they should be doing already as a privilege in-built to the provider-client business relationship. It’s a partnership. It’s not supposed to be a corporate algorithm for squeezing money out of people in exchange for inferior service.

Not that the actual call quality of Cricket is bad at all. I’m actually pretty happy with the quality of the technology. It’s nothing special, and I can’t use it outside my city really - but as a work phone that doesn’t matter to me. I suspect that my telecommunications needs will change in the near future, but that’s why I got a provider with no contract. I just want, at this point, to make sure I get what was promised when I signed up. It’s nothing major. It’s nothing that’s going to cost some corporation a billion dollars and will require them to get a bail-out. But the fifty or a hundred bucks at stake mean a couple weeks worth of groceries for me as a poor starving humanimal trapped on the ground floor of society.

More than that, few people “these days” ever stop to think of what cell phone technology really entails on many levels. On one level, we’re talking about being continually bathed and bombarded in electromagnetic microwave radiation in our pockets and separated only from the delicate complex instruments of our brains by a thin sheath of blood and bone. On another level, you run afowl of the endless warrens of hidden trick fees designed to punish the user, to thwart his reason with byzantine idiocy, to break him down psychologically, to make him look and feel stupid. *How dare you agree to purchase goods or services from us, puny mortal!* {Lightning bolt explodes} *That will teach you!* (All laughing)

And that’s leaving completely aside the third head of this monster, the perfectly out-in-the-open collusion between telecom giants and the omni-would-be-presence of the anti-terrorist-crazed Federal government. To pick a cell phone company is, in part, to pick a legal instrument by which the government (and who knows who else…) has in-built authority and immediate access to monitor individuals and their inter-minglings. Certainly, many of these same technologies could also be painted in pro-capitalist hard-on jargonography as the technological hope of a generation: the doorway to a technological future that opens upon a vista of untold imaginative and profitable possibilities.

Somehow, of course, through all this seems to get lost the actual experience of the human. Person-to-person quality interactions. Does your cell phone facilitate or obfuscate them in a cloud of radioactive blue smoke spelling out the letters, “R-E-S-P-E-K-T”?

See also: Punch & Judy origins

There’s another great image in a book I found on the circus. It depicts a clown with a contraption on his back which, when put into use makes it look like a skeleton is chasing him. It’s sort of this harness that attaches and juts out from his back, with a then obviously home-made skeleton with jointed limbs. It’s a routine widely used in American circuses of the 1930’s or so. It’s a fantastic image, I think, because it overtly depicts the hidden (occult) side of clowns: that it’s death chasing them as they laugh and cavort despite it all that makes them funny, pitiable and terrifying all at once.

I love painted descriptions of the character of Harlequin though. Just something about them.

There’s a line of research I’ve been meaning to follow related to the figure, in Italian, Arlecchino. One source I read said that Harlequin is a hold-over depiction of the god Mercury. Another said that he was essential a devil from the medieval religious Mystery Plays, who escaped and managed to have sort of a solo-career or at least a successful spin-off series. Curious to research other origins of Harlequin and related mythological and spiritual figures across cultures. If anyone has any links or scholarly info on this subject they’d like to share, please email me!

“…it would be rather foolish of me not to think of this having a mystical signature.”

Which leads me to my main topic of discussion? When you see or experience something you take to be of specific of vague mystical importance, what are the usual signs? How do you know its something special versus just your ordinary typical B.S.?

Tony Robbins has huge teeth. While a colorful statement, the core factual content is indisputable for any happy soul who has encountered him in person. The man’s a Goliath. And like any fortuitous confluence of native talent and marketing genius, the philosophy he hawks is of similarly gargantuan proportions. That you can make yourself happy, lucky, loving – or whatever you want – pretty much all of the time. He walks across flaming coals to prove that you can too.

Tony Robbins came to my high school (neighboring high school, actually) and put on an enormous stage show, wherein he spun a huge wheel (the Rota Fortuna, Wheel of Fortune, in esoteric-Tarot symbolism) and awarded prizes to whatever portion of the auditorium was cheerly with the most fervor. More factual statements. The grand prize was a gleaming motorcycle which some random kid won. I’ve heard rumors that the kid didn’t actually get the motorcycle in the end, but I can’t substantiate that.

Tony Robbins, however, is *not* a charlatan. Or at least not according to the editors of my high school newspaper and the principal who made me remove that word from an otherwise quite livid editorial on the event which I had written for the school newspaper. And understandably so, on account of libel & slander laws which restrict freedom of speech as to prevent non-factual defamation of a man’s character – never mind the widespread community and business support upon whose back Robbins had been paraded into our midst in the first place.

Robbins performance, as I recall through the midst of over ten years lapsed, was a near all day mandatory assembly for the two upper schools in my district. In it, Robbins moved about the stage with the force and energy typical to his persona, while teachers and community leaders swayed and cheered in what I would describe as near-religious ecstasy, a zeal which was in turn imitated and amplified by the assembled mass of students. Or most of them anyway. A small band of ne’er-do-wells, skaters, druggies, artists, musicians and myself occupied the far back of house-right. When the wheel spun, we had been instructed by Robbins, everyone was to stand up and scream. And remember kids, this is being filmed, was the implicit warning. Not only was attendance mandatory, but so was enthusiasm. We’d each been required to sign a release form before attending which said we authorized Robbins’ company to use our likenesses for corporate purposes.

So we turned to passive resistance, the only course left to the desperate and powerless. We wouldn’t cheer, we wouldn’t jump to our feet and feign enthusiasm, no matter how much we were chided by lunch aides and gym teachers posted to guard and prod our section. We refused to participate. By that time, I’d stopped participating in the ritual of the Catholic Mass, even though my father still made me attend every week. I would stand when you were supposed to stand and sit when you were supposed to sit, but I wouldn’t kneel. I wouldn’t mouth the words, I wouldn’t take the sacrament. Not if I didn’t mean it; a strong statement in a highly religious family. If I wouldn’t kneel before a church I didn’t believe in, there’s certainly no way in hell I would bow before a mere man – no matter how large his physique or teachings – simply because I was told to.

The intervening years have seen me through a deep exploration into the nature of human experience, what it means to be happy, to be righteous and to live a good life. Some people call it spirituality. Robbins comes out a 1970’s philosophical and psychological tradition known as the Human Potential Movement. Proponents of this movement sought the complete and perfect human, individuated in the Jungian sense, self-actualized according to Maslow’s pyramid. The idea was that each human being could become something simply amazing. In many respects, this is a throwback to the Renaissance ideal of the universal man, the polymath, the courtly jack-of-all-trades whose genius applied systematically, transcending everything that he touched. Leonardo Da Vinci (currently celebrated in an exhibit at Baltimore’s Maryland Science Center) is the quintessential example of such a figure: a true artist whose skill and intellect towered over that of the thronging masses.

In that regard, I’ve actually come through the years to a very similar philosophical stance as that put forth by Robbins: that happiness is a choice. Not, necessarily, that we can (or should desire to) always perfectly control our emotions, but that we have, first and foremost, Free Will which we can apply as conscious beings to situations we find ourselves in. And that we can make choices and exhibit behaviors which will create conditions favorable to only our own happiness, but to the harmony of those around us and with our environment. The Good Life. An ancient Greek philosopher named Epictetus said that we couldn’t control anything outside of the sphere of our moral purpose. What he meant was that you might not be able to stop the police from coming and locking you up, or you might not be able to stop an enemy from chopping your legs off. But the one thing that could never be taken away from you is how you respond to situations. Freedom of inner choice. Bob Marley might have called it emancipating yourself from mental slavery.

As I’ve grown more involved professionally with the business and craft of the stage, I’ve even come to appreciate Robbins methods. His skill in simple dramatic character revelations, his technical mastery of a crowd, and his ability to cunningly surf a tidal wave of human energy is certainly impressive. Apart from the post-hippy offshoots of 1970’s America, we could easily draw Robbins into a proud tradition our nation has always relished: that of the itinerant preacher and performer. We could find his historical equivalent many times over in the religious revival, the morally-uplifting Chatauquas, the traveling tent shows and even the small time circuses. The realm, in other words, of the charlatan.

It’s a self-consistent world, that of the charlatan. So far, I’ve managed to trace its roots back at least to the 1200’s in medieval Europe. Bands of traveling minstrels, jongleurs, jugglers and troupes of actors – it is said – when they ran out of other material would resort to putting on medicine shows to fill their purses with villagers’ coin. Closely related, the term “mountebank” comes from the Italian for someone who jumps up on a bench in the market place or village square to draw a crowd, put on a show, and sell his wares – however intangible they may be. Complete with quack doctors and miracle curative elixirs, their shows foreshadowed a social and cultural phenomenon which would criss-cross our developing nation in touring circuits some six hundred years later.

If I’d had these facts before me during high school, I would have written a much more compelling persuasive essay. I would have been able to show, historically, what a charlatan is and precisely how Robbins fits into this great historical theatrical tradition. But I suspect my principal and editors still would have qualms over the whole thing, for the word charlatan suggests fraudulent behavior, false claims, and a swindling of rubes out of their money. Such things I would have had a harder time backing up with facts. Was Robbins duping people with his claims? We he saying things he knew to be patently false in order to sell a product? There would be no way to back accusations like that up rhetorically, without investigating the nature of happiness. I’ve done that, and have experimental evidence in the laboratory of my own life to back up his claims: happiness really is a choice. And not always an easy one, but following such a diversion would lead us surely into another essay…

Maybe a better question to follow, then, would be: is the charlatan always a liar? I would have to answer a resounding no. As science shows again and again, sometimes the placebo is just as effective as the cure. Sometimes moreso. Sometimes laughter really is the best medicine. Does that make the clown a liar? The comedian or comic actor? Certain parts of medieval Europe thought so. Legal codes in various municipalities provided for the immediate arrest, branding and expulsion of all manner of bards, minstrels, actors, charlatans, mountebanks, vagabonds, rogues and other itinerant performers. The tips of their noses would be cut, or their cheeks sliced to indicate their social status as outlaws wherever they roamed with their tricks, shows, and small amusements in tow. They operated outside of the feudal manor system of labor, owed no allegiance to land or lord and in many cases could be outright murdered with no legal repercussions – not unlike the indigent homeless person or the street-walking prostitute of today. Likewise, the whore might fake orgasm without diminishing the animal pleasure of the john. And the stage actor might be simply playing a written part, but the substance and depth of experience and emotion which go into animating it bring the character fully to life for the audience. And that doesn’t make them liars, necessarily, it makes them showmen. Shaman. One who uses ritualized performance to transcend ordinary reality, invoking unseen beings and bringing down extraordinary dimensions of possible experience into a realm accessible to audience and participants alike.

This imbues the charlatan, the mountebank, the huckster, the quack doctor, with a kind of numinous almost mystic quality – presiding, like any good trickster, exactly at the cross-roads of Reality and Imagination. That a precise boundary-line between the two can never be drawn is exactly, I think, where Hope springs from. As humans, maybe our strength comes from this: that we can dream up anything we want and make it so. How “real” our dreams become depends entirely on how skilled we are as performers, as artists. Can we convince ourselves of the substance of our chosen realities? Can we challenge, entertain and inspire others to do the same in the process? If so, maybe we can transcend the shadowy stigma which has followed the charlatan down through the centuries. Or maybe what is needed is simply acceptance, not transcendence. Maybe the playground of Reality is good enough. Maybe the way we move through it, how we sing, dance, play or act is ultimately what matters. Maybe the charlatans are right.

View Poe’s body before the internment. Noon-11pm, Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum, 203 N. Amity St.

After a quick flurry of emails, texts and phone-calls, I coordinated with a friend and fellow historical co-conspirator to see just what kind of carnival tricks the City of Baltimore would be playing with the memory of what has become, more or less, its patron saint.

Not knowing this at the time (I tend to pride myself on running off into the void without all the details at my disposal), but yesterday marked the 160th anniversary of the renowned literary figure’s death. The rather theatrical premise, I guess, was that Poe’s “body” would be available for public viewing at his former residence (now deep in the ghetto), followed this weekend by a funerary procession and “interment.”

I’m not exactly sure if they’re going to bury the fake body we saw (for the cost of $5 cash) laid out in an upper room of his tiny house, but who knows… From a Yahoo article:

But on Sunday, Poe’s funeral will get an elaborate do-over, with two services expected to draw about 350 people each — the most a former church next to his grave can hold. Actors portraying Poe’s contemporaries and other long-dead writers and artists will pay their respects, reading eulogies adapted from their writings about Poe.

“We are following the proper etiquette for funerals. We want to make it as realistic as possible,” said Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum.

Everything except actually having the body, of course, as far as “proper etiquette for funerals” goes. The forged body they do have was commissioned from a local artist:

Jerome said he’s gotten calls from people who thought he was going to exhume Poe’s remains and rebury them.

“When they dug up Poe’s body in 1875 to move it, it was mostly skeletal remains,” Jerome said. “I’ve seen remains of people who’ve been in the ground since that time period, and there’s hardly anything left.”

Instead, Jerome commissioned local special-effects artist Eric Supensky to create an eerily lifelike — or deathlike — mock-up of Poe’s corpse.

Personally, I thought it would have been funny if they had an actor laying in the coffin who would, at suitable intervals, begin to stir and freak out assembled visitors… but I guess that wouldn’t necessarily fall under the “proper etiquette” category they were going for.

Outside the house, I talked to a couple local guys, one of whom said he “did work” for the house, gardening and whatnot. I said I heard something about them having Poe’s body in there. He said he didn’t know, but that would probably “show a film” about him once we were in there.

“A film? I want to see his body!”

No body though, and when we did get to the actual viewing room, there were three or four girls in I’d say about their early to mid-twenties sitting round, holding court. I asked what the story was, what was going on here. Noone replied, I edged forward towards the body.

“Well, isn’t that something?” I whispered.

When we got back outside, I broke the news to Poe’s neighbor: “Man, they didn’t even show us a film! What a scam!”

We did, however, get to sign a guestbook which will supposedly be put into a time capsule. I promptly entered a text link after my name to monumentcity.org, our own technological effort at making the history of this fair city come alive.

I guess there’s always The Anointing of the Sick and Veneration of Relics to look forward to… Also as advertised in this week’s issue of the City Paper:

“With the Catholic Daughters of the Americas, Court #2257, at the St. Francis Xavier R.C. Church. 1501 E. Oliver St., Baltimore, MD 21213. Fri, 10/16 from 7-9pm. For more info, call Bernadette 410-323-9094.”

From a sitting position: Palms resting lightly on thighs, feet flat on floor. Tap your left hand, tap your left foot. Tap your right foot, tap your right hand. Go back to the beginning and repeat. Try to keep the pattern consistent, maintaining that sequence of percussion, varying speed and then switching directions.

Report your findings below and I will share mine.

Have a strong feeling this is not the last we’ve seen on this subject. Expecting many wrinkles ahead as local law in Montana grapples with the situation and internet speculation abounds.

A self-described New York City anarchist has been accused of tweeting the location of police officers to protesters trying to evade them during the Group of 20 economic summit in Pittsburgh. [...]

According to the criminal complaint, officers acting on a tip arrested Madison at the Carefree Inn on Kisow Drive in Pittsburgh. The complaint said Madison and another man were found in a room in front of computers and telecommunications equipment, wearing headphones, and surrounded by maps, contact numbers and police and emergency scanners. The men were communicating with protesters by cell phone and Internet, including Twitter, the complaint said.

My thoughts are: if the police are allowed to use electronic and other methods against individuals asserting their basic rights, shouldn’t regular people be able to use those same types of methods in their own defense? There must be some basic power or authority that the ordinary citizen has as a check against police and military powers. The courts are all well and good and the Law is the Law, but as state institutions, the courts are always going to be skewed in favor of the police and their actions simply by association and mutually supporting structures.

I’ve often considered a similar subject here in Baltimore with the blue light cameras used by police to visually monitor “troubled” neighborhoods, in lieu of actually having beat cops patrolling the streets, being part of the community and making positive change through the example of their character. If police can have cameras pointing into our neighborhoods, what if we went out and took photos, GPS and other information about the cameras and posted it in a public place? Stories like the above in New York (along with a measure of common sense) lead me to believe that such a monitoring action by the public of the police would land one immediately in a whole mess of trouble. I’m not sure that that’s right, but I’m also not sure what else to do…

Suggestions? Comments?

Convinced by that, I’d looked at a couple neighborhood tool stores to price them out. Nobody sold the RTX locally, so I figured I’d look out at the big chain stores while I was in the county. Target sells Black & Decker brand, but was out of the RTX. Walmart was selling it for $27.99. I bought it and a Dremel 105 Engraving bit to work with on my newest give-away for the Hampden Chess Club, an engraved piece as a gift to any passerby who ends up sitting and playing a game with me. I noticed, while I was still performing my due diligence as a consumer, that the Dremel bit I’d bought was 3/32” wide. Made a thorough scan of the RTX packaging, read the tech specs section several times, but didn’t see anything that would indicate the collet (the receiving piece the bit slides into before getting screwed down with the threaded collet nut) was any other size. Confident in my internet reviews, I assumed everything would be fine.

But, of course, it wasn’t. Things of this nature never work out quite so simply. The collet turned out to be 1/8. Not way off, but enough that the bits simply wouldn’t work. Figuring I would just get take the $4.99 hit and buy a differently-widthed Dremel bit, I hopped online to find the right model number, but couldn’t find what I was looking for. I read around a little bit about replacement collets for the RTX and found a guy saying they were extremely hard to come by.

Ended up at the ACE Hardware in Waverly on my way out to Beth’s DIY Workshop on Harford Road, and found that for $9.99 I could buy a pack of Dremel collets of different widths. Who knew if they would fit into the RTX now though, I had my doubts. Bought em anyway, took em home and they fit fine, accepting the 105 Engraving bit just right.

All told, I’m happy with the performance of the RTX as a tool. Never actually worked with a comparable Dremel before, but the RTX has a nice feel and weight to it. Engraving onto small curved pieces of plastic is a bit more difficult than I thought it would be. But I didn’t need the lettering to be perfect. Wanted it to have that hand-made look. That said though, I’m not happy that I had to spend an extra ten bucks at the hardware store to take advantage of the alleged inter-operability of the Black & Decker rotary tool with the Dremel equivalents. At the very least, I think Black & Deck could humor its customers and include at least a 3/32” collet and a 1/8” collet which seem to be the most common sizes. One more collet, how much would that cut into corporate profit, versus the customer satisfaction of knowing that you haven’t been tricked into buying something more complicated and expensive than it seemed at first.

If I had it to do over again, I would probably recommend just going for the Dremel tool in the first place if you’re looking for a small electric rotary tool option – if only for the reason that they seem to control the actual products available in the physical market-place, at least in the stores I sampled around Baltimore.

“Well, I know the guy that represents him.”

“This is the best painting in the show,” I continued, pointing to the smaller piece in the upper right hand corner: an expressionist painting of soldiers beating up naked people. So simple, so stark, so accurate – I felt – to the spirit of the world at that moment.

The show had gotten me into that mood. As I walked through, I kept passing glimpses of symbolic images, snippets of phrases laced into artworks. Things I’d been thinking about, but things I’d just blindly assumed I was the only person focusing on. Seeing it all in one place, it seemed like we were telling a story, or that we were being told a story, and maybe trying somehow – however desperately – to participate in it.

“Oh that’s wonderful!” he said. “I’ll tell him. Are you an artist yourself?”

I almost didn’t answer yes. I usually like to be evasive in these kinds of situations. I didn’t want to appear that I’d been digging for some kind of recognition by making my comment. Just a joyous outburst I had to share after staggering zig-zaggedly around the place.

“Yeah I am…”

“Do you have a card?”

“No, I don’t think so,” I fumbled through my pockets. “Oh wait, yes I do,” I said and handed him one of my little seed packets I’d been making last year as give-aways. Most were about two and a half by two inches or so, made out of nice natural colored papers, folded, hand-cut and assembled to become seed packets. The seeds I’d got on eBay, wildflower seeds which were advertised to attract “song-birds, hummingbirds and butterflies.” On the fronts are stamped a nice-looking evergreen tree, and then hand-painted in two colors are a line across the top that says “tim boucher” and a line following that, “grow.” They fold in the back, and usually feature an animal foot-print stamp and an inspirational statement, saying or very short poem.

No contact info though.

Two summers ago, I heard actors at my summer theatre talking about whether or not its okay for career actors to have obviously visible tattoos. Some people suggested it would limit the roles one would be able to take. Tattoos have a certain image in culture, which a director may or may not want. But looked at on a deeper level, the subject points towards the aesthetic and perhaps spiritual question of how much of one’s own distinguishing and perhaps uniquely marked “self” can and should be eliminated in the attainment of the Philosopher’s Stone, the fulfillment of the artistic process, mastery, perfection, apotheosis.

Just before this, they’re talking about how the commedia performances arose out of the crowded and noisy market-place. They’re basically talking about the yelling merchant meets the carnival barker meets the quack doctor of traveling medicine shows - which, as a sidenote, were not only popular in the 1800’s of American history, but also in Medieval Europe!

[...] such a figure is a charlatan, otherwise known in English as a mountebank, with Italian cousins known variously as cirumadori and ciarlatani as well as montimbanchi. A banco is a trestle stage, which the charlatan would mount … and on and off which his acrobatic assistants could leap up in their capacity as saltimbanchi (saltimbanques in French). The charlatan himself has antecedents: he is a shaman, an astrologer, almost a magus whose incantation puts the audience into a kind of trance from which only the waving of money can release them.

Antonio Fava in his schools teaches that the charlatan can be of seven kinds:

1. The medicinal quack selling patent cure-alls [...]
2. The mystical pedlar of exotica, supposedly from the Far East
3. The inventor with an amazing patent device
4. The religious fanatic declaring ‘the end of the world is nigh’
5. The sex-monger offering forbidden pleasures
6. The magician and illusionist
7. The pathetic type, a virtual beggar but with a specialism, as in The Beggar’s Opera

All such types wandered from country fair to city Carnival throughout the sixteenth century, setting up wherever they could draw a crowd that might escape the attention of civil or ecclesiastical officers.

From one of my favorite etymology sites comes this nice summation of the term mountebank:

“a doctor that mounts a bench in the market, and boasts his infallible remedies and cures” [Johnson], 1577, from It. montambanco, contraction of monta in banco “quack, juggler,” lit. “mount on bench” (to be seen by crowd), from monta, imperative of montare “to mount” + banco, var. of banca “bench.”

Love to have finally found the connection to the word “samtimbanque” which has been haunting my brain for at least ten years since I first saw Picasso’s paintings in art history class.

I’ve only really leafed through it casually so far, but Rudlin’s book also implies that some of the “masks” or archetypal personas or character-types on the commedia actually come (at least in part) from imitating specific animals. There’s even a direct line he draws by way of quotation of another author, suggesting that humans imitated animals while hunting them. Connects neatly with some of what I wrote about humans following seasonal migration patterns of animal herds, and that a great deal of Medieval European cultural traits can be traced back to those migrators then settling into territorialized pastures… Saxon law seems to be a good way to research elements of that more specifically, especially as compared to something like Bedouin culture and traditions of the arch-nomads so to speak….

Also found a 1927 book I’d like to check out called Hawkers & Walkers in Early America, which seems to be about some American equivalents to the commedia described above:

This volume tells the tale of strolling peddlers, preachers, lawyers, doctors, players and others, from the beginning to the Civil War. Contents: Yankee peddler; rise of the Yankee peddler; Yankee notions; peddlers in little things; peddlers and big business; decline of Yankee peddling; workmen of the road; healing and justice take to the highway; artist as an itinerant; peddlers of the word; terpsichore perambulant; Puritan beings to smile; circus and theater start on tour; queer customers; local vendors and street cries; commercial wanderers of waterways; carriers of good and the mail. Illustrated throughout.

Traveling weirdos - it sounds like they’re saying - are what made America, in no small measure, historically what she is today.

But observe, ladies & gentlemen, the cover of the new Dan Brown novel, “The Lost Symbol” and the logo of a peculiar group in the news called the American Police Force, whose crest-like logo (featuring a double-headed eagle, two fleurs-de-lis, a center cross and some other heraldric shapes I’m not sure the name of looks) more European than American. But who knows, I haven’t been following this story! My old pal Cryptogon has though. Quite an odd story too, though I’m not that into conspiracies as a literary genre these days…

Good catch though, JT.

UPDATE!

The crest is from a variant of the Serbian flag - zuh?

The video depicts a mass of people joining together to raise up a human tower, or castell. The point of the exercise, rather poetically, is to raise up a child to the top of the tower to “kiss the sky.”

Via Wikipedia:

The tradition of building human towers originated in Valls, near the city of Tarragona, in the southern part of Catalonia towards the end of the 18th century. Later it developed a following in other regions of Catalonia and even Majorca, and currently has become very popular in parts of Spain. [...] A castell is considered a success when stages of its assembling and disassembling, can be done in complete succession. The final assemblement occurs when everyone has climbed into their designated places, where the enxaneta, the last person, often a child has climbed up to the top, and has raised one hand with four fingers erect, said to symbolize the stripes of the Catalan flag.

This part strikes me as very beautiful as well:

Aside from the people who actually climb to make upper parts of the tower, others are needed to form the pinya, base of the castell, to sustain its weight. These people, often men [2] act as a ’safety net’ if the tower structure collapses and people from the upper parts of the tower are then able to fall on them, cushioning their impact when compared directly hitting the ground.

I played a lot of chess this summer, and on occasion we would build towers made out of chess pieces. The most successful usually had rooks nearby one another as bases - but in the example above, it sounds like the pinya is made up of pawns - though maybe not necessarily.

Evidently, there are groups or teams, collas, who build these towers on a semi-regular basis during patron saint celebrations of cities. Apparently when forming a pinya (base) even people just attending the event can “throw themselves into the castell” as an active participant.

A strikingly beautiful testament to the human spirit, and an undertaking I would love to see done on Ground Zero. It seems like the perfect antidote to the negative energy of the 9/11 event.

The information I have is that there is reference to a double headed eagle being witnessed by an English expedition to Central America, Guatemala, in the early 18th century in Aaron Crossley’s book, Peerage of Ireland 1725. I believe the bird was found alive when captured, but was dead at end of ship’s voyage. A second double headed eagle was spotted, but escaped.

The most simple explanation of the symbol of the double-headed eagle, I think, is that which is complete unto itself. That is, it needs no partner or counter-part to be complete, as such divisions have been united within one being.

MP3s: mp3s for me now are like candy or popcorn or something or like a really cheap buffet or something. Best consumed occasionally, whereas listening to a record has all the power of a lower sacrament: you’re nourished, you’re sustained, you’re uplifted. Vinyl records are my go-to, mp3s are situational. Anyway, my mp3 collection now is not as rock heavy as it once was if we’re watching percents. Assuming we are, torrenting massive sets of audio data - entire catalogs of artists and broad samplings of eras and genres - has really skewed a random sampling of my files. All of a sudden there’s heavy on the pickin, from old Blues and country-tinged folk, to some real wailin’ (often hard to listen to if you’re not seeking something from it) in a collection I put together of indigenous world ritual music. Next biggest block is probably from the Funky16Corners collection my friend gave me.

Reading: Just finished Rowbotham’s Troubadours and the Courts of Love. Almost done with Theatre and Revolution: The Culture of the French Stage. Just picked up in State College Samuel Avital’s Mime Work Book. About to start another book I got from Normal’s here in town, The Medieval Theatre by Glenn Wickham. Recently read Shop Class As Soul Craft which was decent, but I wish there were more sustenance in it. Don’t know how to phrase that exactly… but it set me in a good direction either way. Contemporary cultural support on some similar or interlocking subjects as my own lines of research…

Watching: Feasting on Bergman, intently watching Hitchcock, studying Buster Keaton (with some Pee-Wee thrown in for comparison against the basic underlying character type). Re-watching Stop Making Sense for the billionth time. Keeping it at arm’s length as background noise right now. Random Etienne Decroux mime videos on YouTube. Instructional chess and juggling videos when I have the chance.

Leisure activity: Brushing up on my chess game, playing chess by email and once in a while on the streets of my neighborhood next to a sandwich board I made labelled “HAMPDEN CHESS CLUB (all welcome)”. Working on my back cross in three club juggling, doubles-every as preparation for other more complex tricks and partner work, thumb spins, simple flair, etc. Bicycling, fixed gear free wheel.

Researching: Writing a first-person narrative exploration of the history and culture of traveling performers. Tying together strands associated with minstrels’ guilds common as an extra-state protection system for lifelong wanderers. History of guilds in general, great artisanal and crafts traditions – especially Renaissance and contemporary. Connections between guilds, corporations, civic and labor unions. Gaining practical skills and experience in modern day equivalents of same. Working, bartering and volunteering all over town in exchange for learning basic electricity, some electronics and welding. Hopefully getting into some machining and fine metal work, in addition to freelance crew work, theatrical carpentry and working as a stagehand. Hoping to write into the story some good historical pieces on old Baltimore theatres. I think I know where to start.

Reading a really interesting book right now, also, about the history of the French theatre from around the Revolution onwards, and one of the key points they make in this book is that public pageants, spectacles and events take on themselves a kind of theatrical character - as much as anything that occurs on the actual stage.

Speaking of Hollywood schlock, though, what do you guys make of this 2012 movie that’s coming out?

Is Daniel Pinchbeck somehow behind this? I hope so! May the end of the world be only simulated in the media…

One of the only other details I remember: there had been some flooding in this theatre. And it may have been attached to, sort of as an annex of another bigger theatre in the same town.

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Current home of the Hampden Chess Club, an open-air society dedicated to the friendly pursuit of excellence in the game of chess. Most commonly occupied by members of same on random weekend afternoons and early evenings. Schedule varies, membership informal.

Shares a common intersection with Chesapeake Pawn (home of many questionable DeWalt tools I sometimes eye up, Sandy’s (a local place to buy Ravens jerseys), Grano an Italian pasta bar with a very nice owner, the True Vine (uber-hipster record store = limited selection, depending what you’re into), Squidfire (another t-shirt store?) in the old Hampden Atomic Comics location, and Redman’s Hall, a place which as far as I can tell contains no actual “red-men” in relation to Native American Indians, or what-have-you.

Mostly neighborhood white dudes as far as I can tell. They seem to sit around and drink beer is my guess. Apparently they might have “bangin’” shrimp salad, but its a club to which I’ve never been invited.

Also on this corner is a subs & pizza place called Philly’s Best (even though this is Baltimore), and they also carry some Indian dishes… though I’ve never tried any. Some Chinese place I don’t know the name of and probably won’t ever venture into, and The Golden West, which is really the frosting on the cake for a variety of reasons…

To use an art school word, it’s a real juxtaposition. Lots of different things happening culturally and within the neighborhood, even with many different nationalities. It also kind of divides part of the hill in the neighborhood topography. The one way street comes down the hill from Griffith’s Tavern, down past the Foreign Legion on the right and Red Men’s Hall immediately after that. The niche I set up in is kind of the back of an old church which is now mostly abandoned except for some offices in the basement. I figure it’s a good place on the sidewalk not in the way of thoroughfare, but still in the action, and there’s no business interest right there on my side of the sidewalk who might complain. Cops drive by all the time and seem not to notice. A couple beat cops at Hampdenfest stopped to look, but only because one of them wanted to play a game.

“You must have fun when you get stationed at events like this.”

“Huh, what?” the cop is watching the game.

“This must be fun, to work these things,” one of the UMBC kids I was talking to said to the cop.

“Oh, I have fun no matter what I do…” he walks off with an approving look. “Whatever keeps me outta trouble.”

A double shooting happened on this corner recently. During high commercial evening traffic hours, excerpted from the Baltimore Sun:

Will Bauer was having a late dinner at Grano Pasta Bar on The Avenue when the shots were fired on the street outside.

Some customers hid underneath tables, while others cried out in fear. After about a minute, nearly all the patrons scurried to the back of the establishment before police arrived and it became apparent that the two people shot were not seriously injured, he said.

Bauer, who lives in Hampden, and several other residents and business owners said Tuesday that they don’t believe crime is a serious problem in their neighborhood and that they think the shooting was an isolated incident.

I’m not trying to change the world or anything, but David Shenk, author of an excellent chess history, entitled “The Immortal Game”, writes on the history of chess as the pre-cursor game chaturanga and shantraj:

In a critical departure from previous board games from the region, these games contained no dice or other instruments of chance. Skill alone determined the outcome. “Understanding [is] the essential weapon” proclaims the ancient Persian poem Chatrang-namak (The book of chatrang), one of the oldest books mentioning the game. “Victory is obtained by the intellect.”

This was a war game, in other words, where ideas were more important and more powerful than luck or brute force. In a world that had been forever defined by chaos and violence, this seemed to be a significant turn.

I’ve also never had a problem here, and I’ve been out on this corner usually between the hours of 5-9pm weekend nights, and a couple weekday nights this past month since I’ve been back in town. People, for the most part, have been cool with me. That or they just ignore whatever they think I’m doing. I like to think at this point that I’m just becoming background noise.

“This is like something you’d see in Paris,” one of two upper middle class ladies said today, just after I got set up. They were very excited, but not ready to commit to a game. Some people take pictures, but never play. It means different things to different people. That’s the nature of public spaces though, they can become a stage for us to create meaning as a community.

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Many afternoons and evenings I have come to this place to juggle. It’s a good place to practice, wide open grassy spaces, trees for shade, close to my house, some interesting foot, bicycle and car traffic. It is, after all, a neighborhood round-about. At its center stands an enormous white flagpole. A park on its eastern spur towards Falls Road contains a monolithic memorial to servicemen and women from this very neighborhood who gave their lives in the defense of this country.

Responses to juggling here are varied. Small kids will typically squeal in delight and scream out some variation on the word “juggler” or “juggling.” Sometimes I hear people gasp audibly from open windows of passing cars. Not infrequently someone in a passing car will yell out a command as they drive by: “Throw it real high!” or “Next time with torches and fire!” These have been, for the most part, overwhelmingly positive. One day recently while drilling lefty straight doubles, I was approached by a neighborhood resident and invited to apply to become a part of the local Mayor’s Christmas Parade - something I might do if it fits in with my schedule.

People ask things like how I got into it or how hard it is to juggle. I always say it just takes lots of practice. I don’t have a gimmick or a routine worked out here though. I’m not trying to “achieve” something. I’m just working on my skills. Its just so happens that its more convenient to do that in public, and it also acclimatizes you to interacting with passersby. Parks are good practice for street performers. You can work on your craft, see what people in the area respond to as far as tricks or are interested in conversationally. An observant juggler can pick up a great deal of information quickly. Juggling is all about patterns. You juggle in one place many times, you start to see how the neighborhood juggles, how its inhabitants play with and against patterns inherent in that time and place.

This place is a circle. Sometimes people drive round and round it several times in a row. I don’t know if they are gawking (I don’t really check) or if they are lost. Maybe both. Maybe neither. The flagpole is kind of an axis mundi of the neighborhood.

[...] a ubiquitous symbol that crosses human cultures. The image expresses a point of connection between sky and earth where the four compass directions meet. At this point travel and correspondence is made between higher and lower realms. Communication from lower realms may ascend to higher ones and blessings from higher realms may descend to lower ones and be disseminated to all.

Though that may be kind of a high-falutin thing to say about an overwhelmingly blue-collar neighborhood, it still applies. Every region has its sacred sites and places, somewhere you go to sit and think, somewhere you pass through on your way somewhere else. This is one of mine.

In other words, put more simply: you can use the internet to embed poems in physical space, accessible - for now - through digital devices. And from there my thoughts spiral through infinity as I progress my mind’s vision of technology’s march unfolding across the next twenty years…

* * *

And if you’re into old writing of mine at all, this wandering piece has some really cool sci-fi scenarios involving GPS described amidst a lot of verbal flotsam and jetsam.

1. I open Google Maps to the vicinity of where I would like coordinates.
2. I use my right click mouse button and select “center map here” from the drop down button.
3. I past this javascript code that I keep saved somewhere convenient on my computer into my browser’s URL address window.
Here’s the code:

javascript:void(prompt('',gApplication.getMap().getCenter()));

4. I click the “go to the address in the location bar” button usually to the right of the address.
5. A popup appears showing the coordinates of the center of the map like this: (43.60336, -110.7362)
6. I right click on the coordinates the copy and click either “OK” or “Cancel”
7. I then paste the coordinates into google’s “search maps” text box, remove the parenthesis and click “Search Maps”
8. A popup appears with a marker for the centered spot. The popup has the coordinates in both Decimal Degrees and Degrees, Minutes, Seconds.

Quoted from a forum post by David B. Robert founder of ProximityCast.com, which seems to be a site for deriving related business information according to a specified location. Would be nice to get historic landmark information added into sites like his, such as is documented by our fledgling Monument City project.

I’m not sure I entirely understand why Google’s map application doesn’t simply offer you that option, without having to go through a back door script. Thanks to David though, as this will no doubt come in very handy with my own upcoming geospatial keyword explorations!

PS. If you read through following comments on that forum, Google Maps does have some add-ons which you can implement into your customized Google Maps interface. The thing is though, you have to sign in and create a user account. I’m not sure exactly which online Google-based information “identity” I would want to associate this information with, my relatively private personal info-persona, or my more public one? Saving and compiling geographic information about a particular user reveals quite a lot of valuable information…

“I love computers and what my cell phone provides in terms of synchronous and
asynchronous communications, but I don’t want or need an augmented layer to do my reasoning for me. I get my reasoning skills from doing research and reading. I don’t want a program written by someone whose education is not known, whose political or religous views are not known, in place as a filter or informational source between me and the world at large. Maybe I’m a cynic but more and more of what I hear and see and read is suspect. I want my own reasoning and filters, and I want them to be broad.”

To paraphrase, Rowbotham explains the eventual decline of the troubadours (who were actually usually themselves most typically of the nobility and the first degree of knighthood, the cavalier or chevalier) according to a religious conflict they got mixed up in. He finds a common root between the troubadour tradition having been adopted from the East, and the later Albigensian or Cathar heresies springing up in the same regions of especially Southern France. He says that the lifestyle of the troubadour lords, traveling from this castle to that, throwing lavish parties and “going through the world” as was their custom formed a ready home for the “Dualist” doctrines of lay Albigensian missionaries.

While I wouldn’t lay quite the scholarly authority to the Wikipedia page on Catharism as I would to Rowbotham, this description seems to follow pretty closely with the basic formula of the gnostic myth I’ve explored on this site over the past few years:

They did not believe in one all-encompassing god, but in two, both equal and comparable in status. They held that the physical world was evil and created by Rex Mundi (translated from Latin as “king of the world”), who encompassed all that was corporeal, chaotic and powerful; the second god, the one whom they worshipped, was entirely disincarnate: a being or principle of pure spirit and completely unsullied by the taint of matter. He was the god of love, order and peace.

According to some Cathars, the purpose of man’s life on Earth was to transcend matter, perpetually renouncing anything connected with the principle of power and thereby attained union with the principle of love. According to others, man’s purpose was to reclaim or redeem matter, spiritualizing and transforming it.

Read symbolically against a modern “Da Vinci Code” view of history, we might say that the “fallen matter” in this instance jives with certain readings of Mary Magdalene as “the whore” - a story more plainly told out in the Simon Magus myth, who “liberates” a whore named Helena, who becomes his loyal follower and companion…[see also:compagnon]

More specifically: “Helena” means light, so light (the female principle) - aka, the divine sparks [see also:raising the sparks] - becomes stuck in gross matter, and must be liberated by the masculine principle. And then I guess you tie that in somewhere with the troubadours’ many “lady loves” and the muse required by the classical poet for divine inspiration to strike…

Rowbotham, meanwhile, points more towards the dualist part: focusing on the rather more existentialist interpretation that if Evil is a natural, normal part of existence, then there’s no real reason to be virtuous. (*The whole thing, at points, begins to sound rather like the acid-fueled Free Love & Revolution spirit of the 1960s.)

You can contrast that, of course, with what modern writers say regarding the Parfait, the “perfect” among the Cathars, who had undergone a fairly gnostic-seeming sacrament called the consolamentum:

They lived simple, peaceful, devotional, chaste lives of poverty, often travelling on foot in pairs like the disciples, preaching and working in simple trades like weaving to earn their living. To their followers the Elect were living saints. Touched by the Holy Spirit, they were God’s ambassadors in an alien world. The contrast with bejewelled, warmongering, sybaritic, indolent, lascivious Churchmen living on forcibly extorted tithes was difficult for the slowest peasant to miss.

The Elect were not an ordained priesthood, though their Catholic critics never seem to have fully understood this (and even modern works still refer to Parfaits as “priests”). They did however minister and preach, and they also controlled the Church, electing their own bishops. They received from the Believers unquestioning obedience. As vessels in whom the Holy Spirit dwelt, they were adored by the faithful, who would prostrate themselves before them whenever they asked for their prayers.

Historically, the Church hates being one-upped, especially when it’s busy burning and torturing people!

PS. Compare above description of Cathars to that of the Sufis, the mystical sect of Islam whose central tenets revolved around an intense, even romantic and erotic love (ie, desire for union) towards the Godhead:

The chief aim of all Sufis is to seek the pleasing of God by working to restore within themselves the primordial state of fitra,[15] described in the Qur’an. In this state nothing one does defies God, and all is undertaken by the single motivation of love of God. A secondary consequence of this is that the seeker may be led to abandon all notions of dualism or multiplicity, including a conception of an individual self, and to realize the Divine Unity.

Thus Sufism has been characterized as the science of the states of the lower self (the ego), and the way of purifying this lower self of its reprehensible traits, while adorning it instead with what is praiseworthy, whether or not this process of cleansing and purifying the heart is in time rewarded by esoteric knowledge of God.

Regarding the larger issue of the Albigensian Crusade and the Catholic Church’s growing need to stamp out organized heretical movements (proto-Reformations?):

The Catholic Church had always dealt vigorously with strands of Christianity that it considered heretical, but before the 12th century such groups were organized in small numbers, around individual preachers or small localized sects. The Cathars of Languedoc represented an alarmingly popular mass movement,[4] a phenomenon that the Church had not seen for almost 900 years, since Arianism and Marcionism in the early days of Christianity. [...] The Inquisition was established in Toulouse in November 1229, and the process of ridding the area of Cathar heresy and investing their remaining strongholds began. Under Pope Gregory IX the Inquisition was given great power to suppress the heresy. A campaign started in 1233, burning vehement and relapsed Cathars wherever they were found, even exhuming some bodies for burning. Many still resisted, taking refuge in fortresses at Fenouillèdes and Montségur, or inciting small uprisings.

Troubadours, meanwhile, seem to have been preaching something rather more life-affirming than the burn and learn Catholics or the renunciate Cathari parfait - something along the lines of Love Conquers All, Omni Vincit Amor, Love is All You Need… Troubadour lovers were required to venture forth into the world at large, proclaiming in song their love and devotion to their lady love to all who would listen. Which inevitably leads to a whole lot of fucking…

Sorry to be course, but even Rowbotham in 1895 spends close to a whole chapter talking about how the intimate access allowed to Troubadours - whose entire purpose and craft was designed to woo women and keep them wooed - to families was unheard of in the very conservative medieval era and that fornication and philandery were just about rampant amongst the troubadours. I mean, they were basically rockstars if you think about it. Roving the land, getting drunk with strangers, singing love songs, boning local chicks. They might as well be describing freaking Motley Crue.

But we’re actually talking about an old-school French heretical sect, one which was rounded up and slaughtered because their notions of love was deviant from the norm. Joseph Campbell explains the significance of the troubadours to the history of Modern Love (for better or worse)™:

The troubadours were the nobility of Provence and then later other parts of France and Europe. In Germany they’re known as the Minnesingers, the singers of love. Minne is the medieval German word for love. The period for the troubadours is the 12th century. The troubadours were very much interested in the psychology of love. And they’re the first ones in the West who really thought of love the way we do now — as a person-to-person relationship.

Before that, love was simply Eros, the god who excites you to sexual desire. This is not the experience of falling in love the way the troubadours understood it. Eros is much more impersonal than falling in love. You see, people didn’t know about Amor. Amor is something personal that the troubadours recognized.

The troubadours recognized Amor as the highest spiritual experience. With Amor we have a purely personal ideal. The kind of seizure that comes from the meeting of the eyes, as they say in the troubadour tradition, is a person-to-person experience. That’s completely contrary to everything the Church stood for (in medieval Europe).

You know, the usual marriage in traditional cultures was arranged for by the families. It wasn’t a person-to-person decision at all. In the Middle Ages, that was the kind of (impersonal) marriage that was sanctified by the Church. And so the troubadour idea of real person-to-person Amor was very dangerous.

Well, that about expends the energy impelling me to post all these connections. One last thing I’ll leave you with as I continue my research is this excellent link on Romantic Love and the Cup of God. Puts all these streams into perfect order much more succinctly and beautifully than I have done here. Cheers!

“The theatre is an enclosed, isolated world with its own rules and laws, its own traditions and disciplines, and however accurately it may appear to mirror real life it is, in fact, obstinately and justly cut off from it.”

- Richard Huggett, Supernatural On Stage

Chess has its own momentum. The development of a game is governed according to firstly the rules of motion of each piece, and secondly by the position of the various pieces of the board. No information is hidden from either player. Except maybe your opponent’s intentions, but a skilled player learns to effectively read those according to the language spoken by pieces moving on the board.

Theatre, of course, operates almost entirely according to what is hidden and what is revealed. In a play I saw recently at my home theatre, called “The Rabbit Hole,” one of the main characters is only experienced by his absence: a young son who has died by a tragic accident before the action witnessed by the audience even occurs. The actors though, operate almost like chess pieces though - each moving according to their character’s particular emotional dynamic, their own rules of motion which govern their course through life. The same thing occurred to me this spring while working on Chekhov: one of the characters is always talking about billiards. Suddenly I realized the people in this drama were working the same way: one would come careening into the next, transferring the effects of their energetic motion to the next, sending them sailing off in another direction. People bumping into each other in loosely organized chaotic patterns, constantly unfolding themselves. Yielding what? Who knows? Entertainment, truth, meaning? Take your pick. It’s happening every moment across all boards and stages whether players are acting consciously or not.

I’ve spent several days the past couple weeks developing a local outdoor chess club on a streetcorner in my neighborhood. The idea was spawned this summer while working summer stock theatre in cape Cod. After shows, we were all trying to wind down, but were limited in our ability to go out and explore by our exhausting schedule. So I whipped out my chess board one night, kept playing and before I knew it people were playing almost every night, and we even put together a tournament - though we never quite found the time to find out who the reigning champ would be. Almost surely it wouldn’t have been me. I’m a social player, competitive to beginner-intermediate level challenges. But I still have moments where I get completely blindsided by someone who obviously has their whole situation laid out ahead of them and is probably tut-tuting me internally over my choice of moves and my lack of insight into the True Principles of the Game™.

But that’s how you learn, that’s how you develop as a player whether its chess, stagework, or any other domain of human knowledge, activity and tradition. You start out at the bottom, you work your way through the shit jobs and WTF situations until you start accumulating the range of experience to know what should happen, how it should happen, why it should happen and when. And by then you’re equipped with the ability to make it happen, and so you simply do. The barriers between intention and action become lower and lower until you’re operating - optimally - in a kind of continuum of unity. At least that’s what the goal looks like from where I’m sitting.

Today at Baltimore’s own Velocipede, a wonderful cooperative bike shop, I volunteered for four hours, learned how to true a wheel and disassemble, clean and reassemble a derailer. We never quite got our shit working how it needed to be, but I learned a great deal about what to look for when doing this kind of mechanical work from the patience and attentiveness of those I was working with. An excellent time, and I’m planning on going back tomorrow night for their hub workshop. I feel like at this point in the world, it behooves any free man or woman to take it upon themselves to learn a craft, learn a trade - learn many crafts and many trades - so that they can not only sustain themselves, but improve the life experiences of those around them, adding value to their community wherever possible. Towards that end, I’ve also made arrangements to meet up with the wonderful lady who runs Beth’s DIY Workshop on Harford Road (about a five mile bike ride from my house in Hampden/Medfield). Beth runs an open workshop where she teaches classes on everything from power tools, building boxes, plumbing, hanging doors, residential electric - and I’m hoping welding. If I can learn to weld, I can then go and work with another guy in town in his metal shop who make swords for stage combat and does fight choreography. But right now its about accruing value with people, learning skills and just genuinely sharing my passions and abilities with those around me. I’m assuming - and I have tentative evidence to back it up - that this will take me where I need to go…

“I don’t think it’s that weird.”

We began walking back towards the car.

“Good,” I said, adding mentally: maybe this can go somewhere.

Rain fell lightly. A man in a yellow coat walked two Golden Retrievers not far from us.

“Let’s walk diagonally through here,” I nudged.

“I don’t think he’s coming over here.”

She was right. Muffling my guilty conscience, I wondered if this would have been harder or easier without her here. Maybe I wouldn’t have gone through with it had I not had someone to show off to. Look how weird I am.

The car was warm. We kissed.

“Thanks for coming with me.”

She didn’t mind my bragging. We worked in theatre, after all. Closing night of the season. What came next was anybody’s guess. This incarnation of the company would scatter to the wind, never to reassemble. I wanted to mark it somehow, the summer I finally learned how to swim after twenty-nine years of needless fear. The summer I learned to throw doubles and juggle with a partner… I’d spent all summer trying to “skill up”, as my friend liked to say – as though life were a video game. Does love work the same way? I’d often wondered. Over ice cream, at the beach, silently driving to work each day. I was getting a lot of practice.

The leading lady was a whore. Not literally, but she played one. The classic trope: rich white man saves soulful prostitute. Though this time everybody dies; dark side erupts, everything goes down in flames. Lesson learned? Who cares – the show was a bore. I was glad to see it go, though I would have let the summer linger. Stay down at the beach a little longer…

When I gave the leading lady her flowers, she was touched. Until I told her they were from a graveyard. Dismay.

“It’s a tradition,” I offered. Confusion. She didn’t have time to respond, and rushed out to curtain call clutching them in her hand, bowing, crying.

“What’s with the white flowers?” she demanded later on.

“It’s an old tradition,” I told her. “A superstition. On closing night, you’re supposed to give the leading lady a bouquet of flowers from a cemetery.”

A pause. She didn’t question it, seeming touched that I considered her to be the leading lady.

Leading lady or no, she’s not the one who taught me to swim. Sometimes its the people behind the scenes who matter most, even if nobody on the outside knows it.

“What do you think it is?” she exclaimed in delight.

Each step we took that night, our footprints became illuminated. Bioluminescence, something in the sand speaking to us.

“Maybe they’re little jellyfish. Maybe every time we step on them, they’re dying - crying out.” On their beautiful deaths we danced, marsh water licking at our feet. Up on the dunes we laid down, under shooting stars – the smiles of a summer night.

I stuck my tongue out when I was learning to let my feet up off the bottom. A habit I’ve had while concentrating ever since childhood. I remember drawing at the kitchen table with my older brother, tongue out, trying my hardest. And years later, letting go, trusting in my own buoyancy. I asked myself in the water: what’s the worst that could happen? Going under unexpectedly, saltwater up my nose choking, panic setting in. And then pushing myself into that same space on purpose, again and again. Going under. Her watching patiently – laughing where appropriate. Letting me take my time. Giving me the space to practice. Maybe love is a learnable skill. You just put your face in the water, kick your feet up, let your body do the rest. Let it all work as one, limbs and trunks together in a fluid language of union. Freedom, surrender. Waves crashing, rising up with them. Hurricanes only come towards the end of summer. The ebb and flow of her hair…

This isn’t the strangest thing I’ve ever done, letting go of fear.

White flowers plucked from a knocked over vase, “We miss you so much,” a card read on a nearby bouquet.

“We think of you every day.”

The next part of this story might sound made up, but it is not. Before I ever got Shane’s email, I was relieving myself at a meal break at work this summer. You know the state you get into then, total relaxation, an emptying of the mind… and the name “Durgee” suddenly popped into my head. At first I associated it with Durga, the Hindu goddess, a topic I hadn’t even considered for a while - but the mind has a mysterious way of floating subjects up out of the subconscious at random intervals. However, shortly thereafter I checked my email and found a letter from none other than a Shane Durgee, who has been reading my site ever since the Pop Occulture days - which seems like forever ago to me. Mandala OS in action? You tell me.

A packaged arrived a few days later and I immediately began devouring Shane’s book. The plot revolves around a small-town loner near the Adirondack mountains of New York who has lead a typically mundane sort of redneck life, working boring jobs, smoking the occasional weed, contemplating suicide regularly until he has a seeming paranormal encounter on a camping trip with what he believes to be an East Coast Bigfoot.

Durgee’s Coast to Coast AM inspiration shines through in this short (210 page) romp as the main character experiences the ostracization of friends typical to anyone who believes in paranormal experiences and eventually falls in with a New Age Bigfoot cult - with surprising results. Though the writing drags a bit at times, and some of the plot twists jump maybe a little too far too fast, the book is great fun and neatly summarizes the psychological process of self-discovery which contemplation of paranormal topics may ultimately lead to. Bigfoot becomes a stand-in, almost an angel or avatar really, for God and a mirror reflecting each character’s inner compulsions.

My favorite bit of writing in the book comes from a passage around page 39 wherein the main character is contemplating the origins of human memory within the womb:

Either way, that memory must be a pleasant one of floating around in a warm universe with an unseen protector and provider monitoring your every move. Safe and dumb in the belly of God until, suddenly, the serenity of that darkness is flushed out, the memory sent spiraling into the core of your being, the seedpod of your personality, as the light of the other world chillls you and the atmosphere of earth enters your lungs. That first memory of bliss is not destroyed by the chaos of birth nor padlocked away in some psychic chest, but instead it becomes a ghost haunting our cells, never to inform our actions, but always there to remind us that when we’ve finished shitting and breeding, we can grow old and retire to the sweet reward of oblivion. Heaven is as warm and as dark as Hell.

The beauty of this book is in its interweaving of philosophical insights like that into the very mundane shitty world the main character lives in. And to paraphrase a line out of Durgee’s debut, the world should look away from its dollar breakfasts and take note of this book!

Note: The “Q” below was a question I posed to clarify the subject after receiving his initial email.

* * *

Q.: ”if they looked like humans, how do you know they were aliens ?”

And again in the summer of 2008, while vacationing with my family, I saw another group of at least half a dozen non-human beings mingling with humans at an aquatic park north of Quebec city. They went from one playground to other ones, often not too far from me and my family. Again, they were all looking the same as if manufactured/cloned. Imagine this : (at least) 6 adults looking like sextuplets ; 3 males, 3 females, exact copies of themselves with the same congenital odd cheeks and jaw, looking out of place (and almost out of time by the way they were dressed) and trying to behaves like 3 normal husband and wife couples hand in hand. This event have prompted me to open up about their presence in the hope of finding others witnesses like me or people with open mind and interesting questions.

Sincerely,

Tim Boucher

PS. See also the cultural tradition of traveling craftsmen, or journeyman for inspiration.

1. Journeymen find their way to Estonia (Baltic Times)
2. Using the Journeyman Tradition to Fight Cultural Insensitivity
3. On the Road – The Traditional Journeyman Years of the Craftsmen
4. Journeymen in Germany (via ohio.edu)

Just re-watched Terminator 2 after several years. Great movie, so much better than T4 (why Skynet couldn’t intercept simple radio signals from a sub, I have no idea…). But it strikes me that, through sending these figures back in time, Skynet was sort of doing the same thing: seeking cause and effect relationships within events, hitting the “undo” button enough times that it could fork back to another board position and have the game end differently.

I’ve heard it said somewhere that the reason the Soviets lost the Cold War was that they were playing chess while American strategists were playing poker. In chess, the whole “game state” is available to both players at all times. There’s no hidden information, and so the computer can perform its calculations to perfection – even if it takes a while for it to crunch the numbers. As a poker player you never know exactly what the situation looks like. You cannot see the opponent’s cards, and you don’t know what cards are about to come on the table. (Ben Mack talked about this in my interview with him) and this hidden information changes everything. Or that’s the theory anyway. The 2009 World Series of Poker apparently featured a 2009 Poker Bot Competition with contenders from the University of Alberta winning first and second place. Where were the Russians on this one?

A few years back at my summer stock theatre, legend has it, that a girl in our scene shop was operating a table saw, lost focus, and in the blink of an eye lost two fingers. OSHA and the insurance company, I’m told, came down hard. And rightfully so, but all the insurance in the world isn’t going to protect you as much as simply being prepared, holding your concentration and staying present in the moment.

Sometimes even that’s not enough though. You can be doing everything right – or so you think – and something still goes wrong. It’s never something you can predict. Speaking of table saws and injuries, about four or five months after I’d started working in my scene shop in Baltimore, I was – I thought carefully – cutting down a piece of plywood to use as backing on a shelf. Everything was going smoothly until, WHAM! With no warning and in a single instant, the board had caught on the blade, which spun it in a nice tight arc, hitting me squarely in the crotch, dangerously close to my “special area” to quote Ralph Wiggum (though I can’t remember which episode that’s in). I must have made some kind of sound, a quick exhale or muffled cry of pain – I’m not sure. But my TD and fellow carps came in quickly in response, asked me what happened and waited to make sure I was okay. I had to go to the bathroom to make sure I wasn’t bleeding out of anything. I wasn’t, but I was more humiliated than anything else. My TD explained that you’re not really a carpenter until something like this happens to you. It’s like an initiation ritual. We inspected the underside of the board, which had a nice toothy curve cut into it. I asked what he thought had happened, and found out that I’d apparently let the board torque too far towards the fence (the board runs across the table parallel to the fence to ensure a straight cut) which pushed up against the blade, causing it to react as violently as it had. Lesson learned. Now I respect the table saw in a way I never did before. I stay absolutely present with it. And when using it, I turn slightly to the side with one leg forward protectively. No need to make a mistake like that twice.

So how do you stay present? On one level, you pay absolute attention to everything you do, to every detail and every step of the procedure at hand. It seems to me like a meditative act – which explains why working in the shop, and building in general can be so relaxing and pleasurable. The whole world is reduced to what’s in front of you. At the highest level – when you’re totally and utterly “in the zone” - you can experience a kind of union with the materials, with the task, with the machinery and tools. You become like an acrobat, spinning through space, finding points of balance, intuiting connections and weight distributions, stewarding raw materials through some sort of alchemical transmutation into things, objects, furniture, set pieces – whatever the situation requires.

Staying present isn’t something you achieve all at once. It comes in waves, little islands. You’ll have moments where you attain the feeling described above: and your work will show it. Something will just work. You’ll pull off something you’ve never done before. You’ll figure out a solution without anyone telling you what to do. Over time as you gain experience, these little moments start getting strung together, end to end. Until all of a sudden, you can not only enter this state, but maintain it throughout an entire work shift, an entire day, or the life of a whole project. This is how I managed to pull off painting a thirty-one by six foot backdrop in a day and a half. I just came with it, the steps all laid themselves out before me and all I had to do was sort of dance my way through as the next one lit up. It was effortless, without struggle.

As of this writing, the time I’ve spent on stage is a lot less than the time I’ve spent working in the shop. From what I’ve experienced though, the same basic principles apply across both domains. The best actors to work with are the people who are extremely present within the moment. Not only do they maintain the course of how the show is supposed to go (staying on script, remembering their blocking, music and choreography), but they are able to adapt to changing circumstances. If something goes wrong – something breaks for example – or somebody skips a line or misses a cue, they roll with the punches and can ad lib as necessary. They intelligently and gracefully react to what’s happening, rather than just rushing forward to complete the scene. Have you ever been in a conversation where someone is clear just waiting for their chance to talk? They’re not even listening to you. They might be present – after a fashion – but they’re unaware of anyone else’s presence. Acting, just like life, demands an awareness of and respect towards other perceiving centers: other actors, stage manager and technicians, director notes, conductor tempo, the audience. This requires being able to see yourself and your actions from the outside with a certain objectivity and artfulness, to take cues from other people’s reactions, to make sure you’re reaching them and having the desired effect. Easier said than done, of course. But this is why people practice. These are some of the benefits of the many disciplines of performance – which I think, if approached correctly, can lead to experiences of personal growth equivalent to something like a yogic or spiritual discipline. Learning to act on stage can help you learn how to act off stage. Learning to sing out can open your heart up to the world. Learning to make a straight cut on a table saw without getting your fingers - or other body parts – lopped off can teach you how to control your body and your mind and master any situation with grace, beauty and efficiency.

“Not to sound pious,” he said - which immediately sounded pious, “but we get paid to do this. I think that’s pretty incredible.”

And he’s right. It’s all totally worth it. All the mopping, sweeping, cleaning toilets, whatever they have you do. I’ve learned a great deal from working in theatre about ideals such as Duty and Service, terms which were very abstract to me before but which have become very concrete. Mainly because within the environment of the theatre, you can immediately witness the repercussions of your actions. If you build something wrong, it breaks. It impacts everybody, you look stupid, and hopefully you learn to not do that again, to improve yourself. Not looking stupid, of course, shouldn’t be your first motivation for anything when it comes to theatre or to the greater artistic process which is enshrined within theatre. That should come directly from the Great Work itself. It’s the end from which everything else derives.

As my pre-show cleaning responsibilities mounted, my stage manager asked me, “Have you ever worked with kabuki performers?”

“No,” I said.

“I have. With kabuki performers, the entire cast comes early – they race to see who can get there first – and they all get down on their hands and knees with soapy water and scrub the stage. All by hand.”

I ruminated on this anecdote every day as I swept and mopped and vacuumed. It’s all about the psychological preparation and the spiritual discipline embodied in the act of cleaning. You are slowing down to take the time to physically and personally “touch” (with a mop or broom, or whatever) every area of the stage upon which you be entering into on behalf of an audience an entirely other world. Cleaning the stage clears your mind, your soul, your heart. It readies you for the Work.

Timothy Leary used to talk about something called set and setting when it comes to psychedelic journeying. Set refers to the mental and emotional state that a psychonaut is bringing with them to the experience. It has to do with attitudes, ideas, beliefs, intentions, habits, typical ways of doing things and experiencing oneself and the world. If you go into a psychedelic experience with a healthy positive state of mind, you’ll generally find that reflected in your experience. Same thing with negative states, negative sets bring bad trips. It’s a near certainty. Setting, of course, deals with your immediate environment in which the trip takes place. Who is with you, the relationships and history between people, where you are, what you’re listening to, lighting and so on. Theatre and psychedelics both bring about otherworldly perceptual experiences. They are, in some sense, ritual excursions into the imagination. The types of personal preparation, cleansing, and readying yourself and your space for one of these types of experiences is easily translated to the other. Same thing goes for occult, New Age and more traditional religious practice: it often involved banishing rituals, getting rid of negative energy, burning sage, cleansing yourself with water, putting on white clothing, prayers of protection and guidance. Our inner and outer worlds are so intimately connected that I’ve found the easiest way to manipulate your inner world is through ritual action in the real world around you. You give your inner experiences perceptual hooks, frameworks upon which they can organize themselves. Wax on, wax off. Clean that stage. Wipe it down, reach every nook and cranny. Turn everything upside down and set it right again. And find a good place to dump out the dirty mop water when you’re done.

* * *

Come listen to some music tomorrow, Friday, August 14, at 7 PM under the bridge at Wyman Park!

It’s going to be a beautiful summer evening tomorrow so come out and see us! We are trying some new stuff.

I was “riding” (ie, falling from) my unicycle the other day. Somebody said to me, “Are you practicing?” I nodded. They meant riding the unicycle, but I meant it in the other sense, the religious sense. Spiritual discipline. That’s what the unicycle has become for me in an extremely concrete way. Finding your center of balance, falling gracefully, maintaining the machine which supports you, experiencing moments of sheer frustration followed immediately by exhiliration and success. I figure somewhere down the road it gets easier, you learn how to ride. For now, I enjoy the sweat and struggle.

When the girls set up our prop table for the first show of the season, they used brown butcher paper and then used a marker to draw lines around each prop and named it. This made me unhappy, so I set about putting together the next one. We painted the table tops black, and then used white artist’s tape to outline where each object should go. Then, in all caps, you write the name of the prop which “lives” in that particular box.

“Why are you doing it that way?” one of the girls asked me.

“That’s how I’ve always seen it done,” was my response.

I was able to cook up a few rational reasons for it afterwards: high contrast in the dark between black and white makes things easier to see, all caps are high impact, easier to read quickly. But the “how it’s always done” part, the tradition is almost just as important. For that’s what theatre really is, is a continuing set of practices derived to produce specific results. Some things work, some things don’t. Some work better than others, and some rules are best thrown out the window. Safety rules to me, are sacrosanct. They are priority number one, because if safety fails, all other progress towards the Great Work fails immediately.

The ghost light is both a practical and spooky superstition, as the name implies. Traditionally, theatres at night will put a 1000 watt bulb on a stand downstage (closest to the audience) in the center. It’s closest to the edge of the stage, closest to the orchestra pit and obviously prevents people walking through or across at night from making a misstep at night and possibly injuring themselves or dying. Stops them from becoming ghosts. But it’s also said that the ghost light exists so that the ghosts themselves – theatre ghosts have their own special categories and rules, it seems – can see in the dark. Or so that they can put on their own shows late night when no one is around. Theatres, traditionally, are also “dark” at least one night a week – usually Monday. This simply means that there is no show that night. Lore states the reason as being so the ghosts can use the theatre that night to host their own performances. Ghosts of actors doing shows they’ve done over and over again, coming back for one final moment in the limelight (lime, it was discovered, burns a brilliant white, hence the term’s use in theatre). Which reminds me of paranormal research I’ve done on the types of hauntings: one type being a kind of imprint left by an event in time. Like a historic battle. People will sometimes see soldiers in twilight marching across a line of trees at battlefields like Gettysburg. Or a murder or trauma will cause such a discharge of psychic energy that it leaves a mark, a stain on a place which becomes like a broken record, and continually recurs. No wonder theatres are haunted.

Also on the morbid side, it’s considered good luck traditionally to give the director or the leading lady after closing night a bouquet of flowers stolen from a graveyard (though, never give flowers before a performance – bad luck! Real flowers are also never used onstage, according to superstitious tradition). The rational explanation being that actors are poor, and freshly-dug graves a ready source of free flora. But is there something else hidden behind such a tradition? Some forgotten, but still felt connection between the theatre and the spirit world? Actors could be considered in some sense shamans crossing between the worlds, bring audiences with them, acting out catharsis for the collective, taking the pains of the whole upon themselves for the purposes of transmutation, transfiguration. That graveyard flowers are given on closing night, I suppose, would also simply symbolize the death of the show, that it’s all over – the fat lady has finally sung – and ought to be put to rest, so new life can grow.

Yellow and green are said to be unlucky for historical reasons. In medieval morality plays, a green vest or a yellow tie might indicate that a character was actually the devil in disguise. In hearing such things, it occurs to me that if I am to write a first-person historical account of the roots of performance traditions, I will need to travel to those places where the history actually occurred. In order to get the level of detail and emotional context I desire, in order to find the spirit of the place. My santero told me years ago, as part of my original Dilogun consultation with him, that I would have to cross the ocean in order to find my true home. I’m thinking Europe generically would be the place to start, France, Britain and Italy to be more specific. Though I’ve taken a special fondness for the Portuguese culture that lingers on the edges of waspy Falmouth, Massachusetts.

Peacock feathers onstage are said to be capable of destroying entire productions. No one really knows why. I suspect Ma’at may be the cause, or similar. Some ancient Babylonion or Sumerian goddess whose wisdom and magic lies hidden in the bird, and whose rites required certain sacrifices before an altar which, if not made, or if made improperly or thoughtlessly would result in catastrophe. That’s just a guess though. Some things I will need to dig deeper in order to find the answers to. Some of these things will never be explained, but it will be in the process of discovery that more important things will reveal themselves.

You’re not ever supposed to complete a performance without some kind of audience in attendance. So if you’re rehearsing, it is customary to leave out the last line or lines of a play. Likewise, small audiences are typically invited to attend a dress rehearsal. This, to me, hearkens back to the mystique surrounding the stage door. The backstage area is ground zero for the accumulation of what’s most easily described as the “magical power” used in a stage performance. If you keep the side door open while outsiders are milling around, you risk tainting the aura, or having all the precious manna dribbling out, waning like the Full Moon emptying itself. To enact a full performance, in essence is to enact a ritual. Whether or not it is specifically religious, the psychological and perhaps spiritual import of it is the same. Catharsis was the end goal of Greek theatre, the release of pent-up energies in a collective setting upon the altar of a fixed social context with a specific moral lesson. So to run through a show without an audience is to miss essentially the key purpose of drama and stagecraft.

Though I’ve read that Dionysus is the patron deity of theatre – which makes sense, considering the wine and debauchery that actors tend to engage in – I also discovered today an interesting story about one of two patron Catholic saints of theatre, the one in question being St. Genesius, the other being St. Vitus. Evidently, Genesius was a comedian who converted to Christianity. The story goes that he was performing a farce baptism onstage, was struck with a revelation during the performance and refused to continue. As a result, he was tortured, torn with hooks, beheaded and burned onstage. The Romans, it seems, had very specific theatrical tastes. Anything for a laugh, I guess.

“Okay,” I told him, speaking through my computer, which I’d been using as my phone ever since I smashed my cell with a rock years ago. I wasn’t really sure where this was all coming from, and hence had no problem backing down quickly from whatever arcane initiation he was advising against pursuing.

“Maybe it was just a spirit guide,” his voice floated out of the computer, “just introducing itself.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.”

“Listen, this is the orisha who governs liminal spaces. Have you been doing any major pathworking?”

“No,” I admitted, not knowing if what I’d been doing would fit his definition of pathworking. “Just lots of research.” That wasn’t exactly true – there was a lot of experimentation as well.

“Research wouldn’t do it,” he clarified. “I’m talking like going to graveyards and digging up skulls.”

I was relieved. “Oh, no, definitely not.” That much was true.

“This is the orisha who decides whether witches live or die. This is an area where you must seek the guidance of spiritual elders.”

I believed him. His voice sounded so earnest, pleading, and yet he wasn’t trying to get me to commit to anything, or to give anybody money. In fact, quite the opposite. The reason I’d contacted him again, after many months without communication relates to a dream I had during a peculiar series of what might be considered spiritual experiments.

In the dream, there were four interlocking fields. The fields were not an abstract thing. The image that appears associated with it in my mind’s eye is the interior of a hut. There was a teacher, more of a voice with a sort of presence, as opposed to a physical entity. The four fields, it explained, where they came together, is the ground at which the phenomenal world comes into existence. Only it wasn’t explained quite in those words. But that was the teaching. And there was a mouse… And the voice told me its name, one of those words you hear in a dream that seems like something important, so important that when you wake up, the effort you expend in remembering it completely buries it. Something with a bunch of k’s, r’s, a’s.

When I spoke to the santero on the phone, he was very serious. I had emailed him out of professional curiousity, merely to see if the dream called to mind elements of the West African Yoruban religious tradition he was an initiated priest in, Santeria. I’d expected only an email back with maybe a little bit of info, but instead he insisted I call him right away. He started the conversation by listing three African-sounding names with which I was unfamiliar at the time and which immediately left my memory as soon as I heard them.

I said no to each one in turn, and when he was done decided that of the three it was the most similar to the first. Thus began the above conversation. I found the santero originally years ago on the web while trying to locate someone who could do a traditional Yoruban divination for me. My initial conversation with him years earlier had been the same, him trying to dissuade me from following this course of action, that the religion wasn’t for outsiders, and that if I were to do it, I had to follow whatever the spirits told me to do. For unlike the advice given out by divinatory systems like the Tarot deck, which most Westerners interested in the occult dabbled with, the Dilogun readings he did were revered as literally the voices of the ancestors. I agreed, shortly thereafter visited him for a paid consultation and found the experience to be quite extraordinary and entirely worthwhile. That, however, is a story for another time and included here only as context for why I trusted the advice of this man, one of a stable of assorted strange characters and references whom I turn to occasionally for help tracking down esoteric information.

I promised the santero I would take his advice, thanked him profusely and signed off, closing my computer to meditate on the conversation. The past few weeks had certainly put me into a peculiar head-space if nothing else. But it was intentionally done, these experiments, these artistic projections into waking dream-spaces. Liminal spaces indeed. It was while I was studying for my ham radio license that I got involved in this line of experimentation. I was, I guess you could say, trying to sandblast my mind or soul or something. An extended vision quest mediated by technologies both ancient and modern. I was attempting to see the future, connect with the past and inject my own code directly into the swirling data-stream of the universe. My tools were: an old crystal CB radio borrowed from a friend, huge amounts of white sage leaves, incense and frankincense. I would tune the CB radio to channel 9, the one I’d been instructed truckers talked on. It was mostly static, but it was the static, the white noise I was seeking. The sage was burned to cleanse and disrupt negative energy, the incense to sweeten. It was a neo-primitivist ritual, I guess you could say. On top of that, I would layer randomized audio samples from my computer of indigenous spiritual and ritual music from around the world. Magical songs, songs sung for a reason, to affect the nature of reality itself, for healing, to bring game, to contact the dead. Mixed in with those were prayers and chants in as many languages as I could find, scattered throughout with the sounds of amateur radio: blips and bleeps, CW transmissions (Morse Code to the layman) and endless variations of static. Then I would load up anywhere from three to eight videos from YouTube on a variety of topics: anything related to the above. Spiritual subjects, arcane esoteric topics juxtaposed alongside instructional videos relating to radio and communications technologies.

And then I would just sit back and let it all wash over me. Oh, that and I was stoned. Out of my fucking mind. But maybe you already guessed that, based on the above description. The point was, I guess if there was a point, was to overload my perceptual filters to such a degree that something miraculous would happen. Something unexpected. Something like ancient deities from other cultures contacting you to teach you things in your sleep.

I didn’t tell any of this to my santero though. How could I over the phone? It was too much to explain, to put all into simple words my methodologies of occult experimentation. So I called up my palero for a second opinion. A palero is a priest in a neighboring African religious tradition, that of the Kikongo. It’s called Palo Mayombe in Spanish. And the tradition is much more commonly associated with straight up black magic. That’s why I liked this guy, he’s okay with that. Always good to have a counterpoint to any advice get in the far out realms of the fantastic and strange. My palero also happens to be a a well-known web artist who operates under a pseudonym to keep his real life corporate office persona separate from his internet weirdo persona and his secretive black magic persona.

“Well, I guess the key thing,” he said after I explained what my santero had told me and what I’d been actually doing, is “how do you feel about it?” He was referring to the dream and to everything else.

“I feel fine. Good even,” I told him. “The dream wasn’t a negative thing by any means and his reaction to it all surprised me.”

“Well,” he paused. “Then I wouldn’t worry too much about it.”

Something happened in art though, as a movement. Modern art, I don’t want to pin down exactly in history where it drifted away from this… it doesn’t matter. But it used to be that if you could paint realistically, you were it. Is your draftsmanship better than the guy next to you? Then you’re a better artist, period, because you’re representing things as they are. A badly drawn hand is a badly drawn hand. I had teachers in art school who certainly adhered to these principles, but in retrospect, not enough. Being young and brash, I wanted to break all the rules before I learned them thoroughly and made them mine to command. I wanted to run off and do that modernist or postmodern or whatever thing where you run out and express yourself or… something. And you don’t need to be able to draw a realistic human figure and you don’t need to be able to mix paint colors, etc etc. Or applied to another realm, you don’t need to learn how to play that guitar your mother bought you, you can just fiddle with knobs and pedals and create this wash of purely expressive-emotive sound. I mean, that’s all well and good, but it’s exactly that mentality which lead me ultimately to stop painting and playing music for over five years. I just reached this sort of breaking point, a wall which I simply couldn’t get past, no matter how much I struggled emotionally to express myself, leaping over inner hurdles left and right. I just exhausted myself.

While it can quite expressive and beautiful, juggling is so concrete that it can become mind-numbing to that inner creative voice which wants to stand up and shout. The last thing that voice wants is to be put under the shackles of learning how to execute an exact physical motion by drilling it hundreds and hundreds of times in a row. That’s where you’ve got to learn how to find some kind of sick joy in the academic processes of repetition. That’s what I learned from juggling.

While you’re feeling artsy, also check out the City Paper’s history of a gallery run by a friend of mine in Baltimore.

Building for the stage gets you into the mindset of conquering physical problems with the simplest, most elegant solution that fits the requirements of space, the materials available, and the specific usage of the set piece. When judging a wall you build for the stage or a staircase, you don’t think, “Will this last for a hundred years?” You worry only whether it will last for a week or a month’s worth of shows. Will it endure the immediate rigors of heavy use? Because more than likely, at the end of the production that which you spent hours laboring over will be immediately disemboweled at strike, broken down and stripped for component reusable parts, or in some cases scrapped altogether. If it’s something like a generically rectangular platform or a flat (basically a wall piece) or a nice length of two-by-four or plywood, you might be able to put it into stock and reuse it some day for some other show. Sometimes you’ll end up re-using particular pieces of wood or a well-built door frame time and time again. But more often than not, your work ends up in the scrap heap as soon as the show which required its construction is over.

Maybe this is what turning thirty means on some level: achieving the willpower, focus and concentration necessary to build something that’s not just usable for the here and now, and isn’t just re-usable for a while, but something that will be put together so well that it will outlast me in the end. And not just that, not just longevity, but that thing which is built might have such subtle and lasting beauty that it inspires and instills peace of mind in all who use it or come into contact with it.

What such a near-mythical object might be, might consist of or what its function might be, I’m as yet uncertain. Maybe I will come up with some late night invention that fills an as-yet undreamt of need. Maybe I will build a tower that reaches up into infinity… I’d like someday, I think, to build a house, a home, a place for a family which would outlast me, and whose beauty and harmony would radiate outward. But that’s not something I can build with carpentry techniques alone, though their mastery gives me a reflecting pool within which to experiment with the mastery of myself, my ability to build harmonious structures with other people and with the place, time and environment.

“You know, Workman’s Comp isn’t going to cover this if you hurt yourself,” the producer laughed one day good-naturedly.

“Yeah, I figured,” I responded, undeterred, though I kept falling.

Actually, maybe juggling blindfolded is harder than riding a unicycle. But I’ve made even less progress with that than I have with the unicycle… so I’ll have to come back to that.

The story of how I got my unicycle is worth relating. Every day all summer, we drive four miles back and fourth from West Falmouth where the inn is to Falmouth proper where the theatre is so we can work three shifts building and painting set pieces and running shows. Along our route, Route 28, is a hospital auxiliary thrift store. Having lived in other places with such facilities, I take this to mean probably that these are the belongings of people who’ve died at the hospital. Outside, there is a daily rotation of such items for sale at 50% off. One morning I spotted a small unicycle resting along the roadside by the For Sale sign. On my way to work in the company’s white van, I figured we could stop by after lunch and I could check it out. But when we came back hours later, it had vanished. I went inside and asked the old ladies working there about it, but it was too late. So about two weeks later, we drove by again one morning on our day off, headed to do laundry and spotted another bigger unicycle. Without thinking, I opened the car door (it was a good thing we were stopped in traffic), ran out and grabbed it.

Inside on the checkout line, a middle-aged woman looked me up and down and said, “You look like you’d be good at that.”

I didn’t respond, as I didn’t know quite what she meant by it.

“Maybe it’s the hat,” she said.

“Oh, you’re the one who’s buying that?” the old lady at the counter said. I also picked up a Muddy Waters CD from near the register. For sixteen dollars and eighty cents, both were mine. The old lady made me promise that when I learned how to ride it, I would come back and show here. I’ve not yet been able to keep my promise. But I’m getting there.

You have to lean farther forward than you think. But you have to lean with like your hips or something. Some lower part of your torso that I’m not accustomed to isolating or operating in this way. But you’ve got to keep your back up straight – and most importantly, keep even speed and pressure on the pedals. Or else you’ll wobble. You’ll also wobble if your seat isn’t at the right height. Raise it if you have to. I still don’t know how to do it though, I can only go through about three or four rotations of the wheel before I either lose my balance or fall or realize, “Oh my god, I’m actually doing it!” and then get excited and fall. But I’ve never really fallen and eaten shit on it (yet), though I’ve had the seat go in an unexpected direction and crush my balls a couple times. You also end up with bruises high on your inner thighs from where you’re squeezing the seat to stay up on the damn thing. I guess I don’t understand it fully either, but its this thing of mastery of self, of the ability to harmonize oneself with a tool, a machine, an extension of the body, of the mind and an expansion of what one thinks is even possible in the first place. The brief moments I’ve been able to stay up on it and roll across the deck have been these absolute moments of freedom though, of this flowing perfect state where my mind is empty of all conceptions, ideas or judgments and I’m just there, in it. This is what I’m really trying to learn, and its something you can experiment with – I’ve found – in almost any area. It has to do with unity of focus, concentration of effort, harmonizing of will and action. The secret of all arts. Plus you look ridiculous doing it, people give you that, “What the fuck?” face and that cracks me up. Maybe I just like being esoteric…

At a parallel point in my personal history, perhaps two years before, I lay asleep one night in Seattle – no drugs this time. Woken up in the night, at around maybe four P.M. by a voice which I plainly heard, but I wouldn’t describe as specifically audible. It came accompanied with images, of a road with a bend in it that I couldn’t see around. It told me - I believe it to have been my grandfather on my mother’s side – that my life was about to change in a way I wasn’t expecting. I went to sleep eased of whatever emotional burden I was carrying at the time.

This instance was in line with the above, but occurred more plainly in dream. It was the night of the Full Moon. I had been dedicating myself to Song and to the River in my waking life and in this dream world, I went away from all that to the wings of some stage I didn’t recognize. Fractal images of folded actions and compressed interactions revealed me going somewhere to help a bunch of people I didn’t know put on a musical production. My brain associated it with Godspell, the only theatrical production I’d ever been involved with. In highschool, I played in the pit band. Our brains tend to do that with psychic or premonitory content: it clothes whatever information is being downloaded from the future in the language of the past. It can be, for that reason, difficult to decipher. But these images were umistakeable, for upon waking I checked my voicemail to find literally six messages, three from my mother, three from my sister who was on Cape Cod with a college theatre company. Someone had dropped out of their tech/stage crew two weeks into the season and they wanted to know if I could come up right away and take over her role. I’m a creature of habit, and was reluctant to leave my own little sheltered world where I knew what to expect – even if I was becoming bored with it. But the insistence and clarity of the dream, combined with the insistence of my family found me a few days later on a bus headed north, with a few clothes stuffed into bags for the summer, my hat and my acoustic guitar – everything I needed for one more foolish venture.