Tribune to a Genius: 7 Things I Learned from George Carlin

(An interview of George Carlin by Tim Russert in 2005)
Hello Fellow Seekers of Truth and Life,

I want to talk today about a figure who has influenced my creative life in a profound way. I remember the first time I heard George Carlin's material. I had just turned 18, and I found lots of points in the material. However, his material got very violent, which often disturbed me. I am the type of person who just hears about and sees horrible events happen in media and news, and it scares me, makes me mad or sad. It was almost as if listening to it too much would bring the catastrophes he was talking about into being. So I decided to give listening to Carlin's routines a rest.

Two weeks later, I was visiting my grandmother in Virginia. She had the TV on one Sunday morning, and the newscrawl underneath proclaimed that George Carlin was dead at 71 in Malibu. I remembered that was the same guy that I had been alternately amused, inspired and taken aback by just two weeks earlier. Although I didn't think much about it at the time, it turned out that this man's 50-year body of work would help give my ideas a framework, a means of expression that I hadn't known was possible.

First of all, the reason I am writing this is because we of the anniversary. Not only was this past Friday, the 22nd of June, the fourth anniversary of Carlin's death, but it would have been his 75th birthday. I meant to write this on Friday or Saturday, but it just got so hectic around here that I had no time until this afternoon to write. There are many passages I could write about the life and work of the late, great George Carlin. For simplicity's sake, though (or so I don't bore the hell out of you), I will make each of my main points in one of the following seven bullet points.
Here is my list of seven things I learned from George Carlin. To pay tribute to the common comedic form, I will present them from last to first.

7. Language is an amazing thing, have fun with it. Have you ever taken the time to take apart a word, and then wondered where it came from? The fact is, every word is an interesting and unique concept that came from somewhere. Language is something only humans can use and understand, it is the reason we don't spend all day grunting at each other.

Allow yourself to notice, and be amused by, the ways that words and concepts line up, contradict, make sense, don't make sense, sound similar, sound different, cover up and reveal things. Now if all this sounds too academic for you, remember that Carlin, the guy who took all of this language play into new territory, dropped out of school in 9th Grade. Clearly, you don't need to be an academic to do this.

To give an example, just yesterday, I was grocery shopping, and I picked up a bottle of Extra Virgin Olive Oil. This name baffled me. First of all, what does the term virgin even mean in this context? Is it uncured, unsaturated, not heated up? And second, have you ever come across a bottle of virgin olive oil, because I never have. Your only choices in the grocery store are olive oil and extra virgin olive oil, which leads to the third point. What does the extra virgin mean? I always thought that something could be either virgin, or not virgin. There aren't degrees of virginity, it's something you have or you don't, it's that simple. My grandfather first brought the term to my attention, but it is little phrases like this that George Carlin made we who listened notice.

6. It matters which word you use to describe an object or concept. Whatever you may believe, the words you use actually do matter. One of Carlin's running themes was his love of tearing down euphemistic language. When some idea or thought makes us uncomfortable, we try to soft-pedal description of it, so we don't experience the full brunt of what is happening. This is a natural human urge, we want to protect ourselves from the idea of harm. Often, we also want to ignore the idea that we could be wrong.

While this is a natural urge, it does us great harm. It is dishonest, and it hides us from dealing with life as it is, and often, it keeps us stuck in a place that may feel comfortable, but robs us of life force, insight and genuine compassion. For instance, we love to say "I'm getting older," rather than "I'm getting old," because we don't want to face the fact that we will grow old and die too. Such a thought shocks and frightens us at first, but it could also help us treat others with honesty and decency. After all, if we are going to die, too, that means everybody else will die at some point, so we share this "marked" fate, terror, and sadness with everybody else.

I'll give you a macro-example from the Carlin files. After World War I, soldiers would experience a condition of terror, anguish over past battles, regret, and a mental fraying over what they had seen and experienced. This was called "shell shock." A simple name, that told you what you needed to know, with vivid language that gave you the sensation. After World War II, the same state was referred to as "battle fatigue." That name seems to hurt less, like you just need a good night's sleep for it. Then after Korea, it was called "operational exhaustion," a highly mechanical term for a human condition. When soldiers were coming back from Vietnam, they got "post-traumatic stress disorder." This word dilutes the original meaning with several superfluous academic terms, when "shell shock" works just as well.

In fact, such a convoluted term hides a key reality of war from us. Even if you survive a war, it takes a toll on your psyche. I'll always remember one line of Carlin's: "I'll bet if they were still calling it shell shock, a lot of those Vietnam Veterans would have received the attention they needed." Think about the soldiers coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq now. What do they have? P-T-S-D. Now they don't even bother to come up with names anymore, they just give it a meaningless collection of letters. Since about the mid-1990's, our language has gone progressively more and more toward abbreviation. This is an example of how dangerous it can be.

5. Producing violent media doesn't make you coldhearted or cruel. As I mentioned above, I was initially turned off by Carlin's repeated wishes for people's deaths. As I grew, I also grew to dislike movies that were excessively gory or violent just for the sake of being excessively gory or violent. This made life tough when everyone around me was thriving on movies like 300 or Inglorious Basterds, and playing war-themed video games, while these were a big turn-off for me.

However, Carlin was different in that he didn't mind if carnage happened closer to him, where there was a chance he could be hurt or killed. I later saw this and understood the conscious nature of what he was saying, and the conscious nature of the audience's laughing in approval. While it still scared me that people could be so blaze about such material, I knew that the intent behind it was to call our attention to something. There was something inherently violent and ignorant in our human societies, particularly in the United States.


Remember this segment from Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine? This had to do with the scapegoating of violent media and video games in the wake of that tragedy. The reason I included it is this discussion of whether violent entertainment is really the boogeyman everybody claims it is. The fact is, there has always been some sort of violence and cruelty out there. Are supposed to just not  talk about it, and hope that'll make it go away? Carlin spoke of the dark urge to see someone hurt in people. If we don't address that, how will we ever move forward.

Whatever you may think of Manson or his music, listen to the last thing he says."I wouldn't have said one word to [the Columbine victims]. I would've listened to what they had to say, and that's what no one did." The people you hear on TV are constantly telling you how to think, and what to do. When you get hurt, in a small- or large-scale way, there is always someone there telling you what to think and do ("You need this product," or "Violence is rampant, and this group is to blame"). This is all to sell a neat narrative about the world, that you must always accept. Because of Carlin, and what Manson said above, I don't think the problem is violent songs, comedy routines, or movies themselves. I think the issue lies in intent. There is being shocking to pander and boost sales revenues, and then there is being shocking to prove a point, and offer insight, which I will talk about in the next point.
4. Take the things that piss you off, and convert them into creative insights about life. You may have noticed a lot of "angry rants" on this blog of late. Believe it or not, I think anger can be very productive for solving problems and helping people in pain. The problem is that people rarely deal with anger in a positive way. Most of the time, people deal with it in the most destructive way possible, by choosing scapegoats, rallying around "heroes" pinning all the bad in the world on the scapegoat, and then taking out their anger on them.
Unfortunately, people either handle anger this way, or cut themselves off from the anger entirely, trying to deny or destroy it. Another way would be to look at the anger, and keep asking "What is behind this?" You could explore what it is about the things that bug you or make you angry. Sometimes it might be insignificant, but other times, there might be something behind it. Carlin routinely talked about things that made him angry, exaggerating the anger for comedic energy, and it usually lead to some insight about life that you hadn't thought of before. Some people were threatened by this, but for many people, including me, this was the insight I needed to grow.
I've lately began making lists of things that bug me. One thing is people with earbuds in their ears all the time. Going to college, I see this all the time, people walking around with those blank looks on their faces, with the damned white headphones in, as if to say "I don't have to pay attention to anything." What bugs me the most is when I see people with headphones on skateboards and bikes. Focusing on this singular annoying thing led me to some creative insights. It led me to think about how people shut down reflexively, was there anything I did that was an easy way of shutting down, getting stuck in my own world. Here, an annoying occurence became an opportunity to reflect and grow. By the way, the things you complain about also apply to you, as I will discuss in a moment.

3. All people are hypocrites, and contradictions in people are a part of life. What was interesting to me is that George Carlin's career grew out of anger toward the Vietnam War, and the culture of Reagan, where it became good to do evil and evil to do good. However, Carlin was not kind toward the people in the government, the corporations. He hoped they were hurt-the same thing he attacked them for doing. As I watched his material later, I saw he was also lashing out at causes and groups usually defended vigorously by the Left of the 60's. Earlier in my life, I had believed that you had to support one set of ideas or another, but this changed my mindset. I realized that my own gut feelings mattered, and I shouldn't ignore them, or try to stuff them into a conventional wisdom box.
I had also assumed that because Carlin had this rough-edged, biting persona on stage, he must have been just bad to everyone he met. Not true. At least, not according to his memoir (which was transcribed by a friend of his after his death). In his memoir, he had only positive things to say about his fellow comedians at the time, and often worked with them anonymously to help their careers. He certainly said what he felt at a gut level, but some of it was brutal, some of it was very insightful. It was all very genuine. I also learned how to disagree. You don't have to accept or reject some point of view across the board. I used to believe that people had one persona about them, and that was what guided their life. I now know that what we say, and what we do, think and feel, often contradict each other. I have begun using this as a part of my life, rather than rejecting or trying to bury it.

2. Beneath race, gender, class, religion, nationality, et. al., there is a common experience we all share. You may have noticed that under labels, I will often include the phrase common experience. This is what  that refers to. I don't know a great way to describe it in words better than this: there are things in life we all have to go through, trials, joys, heartbreaks, and most importantly, those little awkward moments, and the little things you succeed at that make you go "Yes!" Let me let the late, great Mr. Carlin do the explaining.



Truer words have not been spoken.

1. Life isn't nearly as serious as it pretends to be. In life, there are many things, concepts, ideas, entities and processes that pretend to be so important, the most important thing in the world, in history, ever. They aren't. Part of Carlin's buzzsaw approach was exposing life, particularly human life, as a game. We really aren't as important, noble, or paramount as we make ourselves out to be. There will come a time when everything that is here now is dust, invisible particulate matter floating around somewhere. The room you are in, the laptop or phone you are reading this on, your house, your body, all of your possessions, all of that will disperse, and the same is true of me. It's a scary thing, isn't it? It often scares me.

However, our egos have become so inflated by the things of the world that we believe we are the only important thing. What can bring us up, can also tear us down, so the highs and lows of our lives lead to the same illusion of importance, permanence. What George Carlin did was to tear down this idea that human well-being is paramount. Ironically, this urge came from a deep, deep anger over the injustice faced by many people, and it led to many people, including myself, actually discovering something in life. George Carlin once said that each person, by him or herself, is an amazing thing, but once they start to form groups, that's when the bullshit starts. Beneath that statement lies lots of truth. There has never been, and will never be again, something that replicates you. It is imperative that you realize both that you are not as important as you believe, and that you can discover more than you ever thought possible.

This is why I wanted to pay tribute to the late, great George Carlin on what would have been his 75th birthday. Because he took comedy into a whole different dimension. He used to to make us realize things that you couldn't just tell a person. If you tried to tell them, it would end up a confusing mess. If you use humor, that opens people up, and that gives them an experience they can remember, and they can think back and realize, "I had never heard that before." This is what I hope to do with you, dear reader, of this blog, in my own small, humble way. If I can give you that, and you take that gift, open it, and are amazed by what is contained inside, then this blog is worth all the work I put into it.
I'll have more good stuff for you to sink your teeth into soon.

See ya, and don't forget to live!

"The Poetry of Pizza": A Transformational Moment

Poetry of Pizza ran from February to March of 2010 in the Cal Rep Theater.

Hello, fellow seekers of life and truth,

That's a nice opener, isn't it? I think I'll start using that, now. It adds a little more potency to the opening. Anyway, I've got another play-related post for you. This one is multi-dimensional, just like last night's was. Do you remember any moment in your life when things clicked, and your life was taken in a different direction? It may have been a big moment, where some dramatic event turned your life in a 180. Sometimes, though, there are small moments, where you just do one thing, and that one thing changed the way you look at life. After that, everything begins to shift. Two years ago, today, in fact, going to see the play The Poetry of Pizza did that for me.

I remember very clearly the night I went to go see this play, 2 years ago. It was a Wednesday night, March 3, 2010. Yes, I do remember the days of the week that most things happen. Why I know this is a whole different story. Like I was saying, though, I remember that very clearly, because that was the first play I saw as a student in Theater Arts. That evening, I was excited to go down to this theater, located on the permanently-docked Queen Mary. I remember getting going early, having eagerly anticipated this time out. Back then, I lived a much more solitary existence.

Now, I didn't know what to expect from this play. However, it turned out that this play grabbed two parts of me that I didn't know could go together. First off, the action in this play happens in 1998, three years before, well, you know what happened. I remember that time period. Back then, the only people who tweeted were birds, and the only facebook you could find was the one your grandparents were always showing you. Ah, but enough of my waxing nostalgic.

Anyway, Sarah Middleton, who was played by the woman I was studying under, is a 40-something, jaded professor of fine poetic works who has just relocated to Copenhagen. She is under the persistant guidance of her American friends, and the constant eye of a seedy Danish professor. One day, she walks into a pizzeria owned by a colorful group of Kurdish refugees. Sarah finds one in particular, Soran, who is an artist when it comes to these pizzas. When Sarah samples one of these delights, she is taken with this man.

Now, when she talks to him again, she finds out his troubled back story. Even though she is ten years older than he is, as Soran puts it he "feels older than his 34 years." It turns out he and his friends fled from Northern Iraq (an area called "Kurdistan" that encompasses parts of Iraq, Iran and Turkey) when Saddam Hussein began carrying out a murder campaign by poison gas attacks, and many other gruesome methods. This changes Sarah's understanding of Soran's depth. He has not been dragged into the pit of cynicism or nihilism, in spite of the terrible things he has witnessed in life.

As the two grow closer together, a variety of characters, American, Danish, and Kurdish, play out many bizarre antics, Seinfeld-ian in their humor and vulnerability. Sadly, one day, Soran asks Sarah, one day, to shave her, well, bush, as per Kurdish cultural custom. Scared of this, Sarah and Soran mutually decide they are just too different from each other to make it. Their friends are seen telling them to just "let it go." They both feel a hole in their hearts. In the end, Soran and Sarah decide they love each other so much, working through their differences  is worth it to them. In the last scene, the two are getting married in the Kurdish custom, and Sarah samples a very special slice of pizza. All the other characters, and evenly split cast of men and women, discover each other, and none of them are lonely.

Now, normally, this kind of "happy" ending does not work for me. It just leaves some part of the human experience out most of the time. Here, however, it was not blindly overlooking life. It was very life-affirming, and heartwarming. It was something I thought, "Well, that could never happen in real life." Maybe it could, though. People often believe that you need an ending that is as dreary and grey as possible, that takes any hope in your heart, and just squashes it, in order to get people to think. To me, this is not always true. I think The Poetry of Pizza really made that warmth in spite of the darkness and the division apparent.

Now, the woman you see in the photo at the top, was my first teacher at this school that I go to now. She told us that the man who had acted opposite her as Soran had lived in Kosovo back when the War and genocide were still going on in the late '90's. He didn't have to stretch too far to figure out his motivations as a character. Anyway, I only began to realize later how this play had subtly affected me. Theater suddenly became a place of community, of humanity, where you could explore all the pains and heartaches going on in the world, and tell truths in no uncertain terms, but with all the compassion toward a person standing exposed, vulnerable, on the stage. That night, I came to understand what the theater was really about, for me.

I'd like to show you a tribute drawing I did for this play myself, a few months later:

Sarah Middleton boards a flight from the U.S. to Denmark, shortly before the opening of The Poetry of Pizza.

You may notice I have a lot of aircraft and flying machines as subjects in my art. When I was younger, I was simply fascinated by air travel, and dedicated many a visual work to airplanes, helicopters, and such. Anyway, Sarah's looking out into the plane is meant to connote the beginning of a journey into the unknown. It is supposed to be slightly dated-looking, but close to our time, and reminiscent of memories I had of that period.

So my question is this: do works of art (especially plays, books, and movies) have to be dark in tone to convey a meaningful message? Or could it be (at the risk of asking a rhetorical question) that some happy discoveries in plays and films can change our understanding of life, and shift our sense of what is possible to do? I want to finish this post on that note. I'm sorry it took longer to get done than I anticipated; I was fighting off a fever yesterday and today. I will be back up to speed soon, and hopefully, I'll get some time to blog. Thanks for listening.

See ya, and keep wondering, folks!

"Quills" and Violence in the Media

(Photo Courtesy of The Daily 49er)

Hello, fellow seekers of life and truth,

Sorry I haven't blogged in over a week, but this week, in particular, has been a hectic one. You'll see why over the course of this post. As you know, I have become more involved in theater and play productions over the last year, year and a half. This discovery has been life-changing for me, although I still don't know where I will go from here. Thus, talk about the theater and the stage is something I use a lot on this blog.

Anyway, the reason I have been busy is that I have been rehearsing and preparing this week. Not for a production, mind you, but for an in-depth scene to be done in class. I had been rehearsing this for a few weeks, but this week we did a rehearsal sunday, monday, and tuesday night, to perform the scene Wednesday afternoon.

The scene comes from a play called Quills. The play is set in 19th Century France, when Napoleon was still in power. It presents a melodramatic, chaotic, bizarrely dark and moving fantasy account of the last days of the Marquis de Sade, who died in 1814. For the last decade of his life, he was detained at Charenton Asylum in Saint-Maurice. He was under the care of Dr. Royer Collard, the chief medical officer there, and the Abbe de Coulmier, the main administrator at the asylum.

The latter, as a minister, attempts to change the Marquis, curing him of his sin, and stopping his prolific writings. The asylum leadership is embarrassed by the Marquis's ability to circulate graphic vignettes of debauchery and vice, which are written with eloquent, lyrical verbage. These stories are of people who engage in pedophilia, abduction, rape, bestiality, and necrophilia. As per the Doctor's demands, Coulmier resorts to progressively more drastic measures, ultimately gouging out the Marquis's tongue, dismembering and killing him. Coulmier himself becomes quite deranged, and, to his horror, takes thrill in the Marquis's death. This is the most horrifying revelation of all: that a monster lies even in the most noble of men.

Anyway, in this scene, my role was as this Coulmier, and my "given circumstances" (to borrow a term from actor-speak) were that I had just taken away the Marquis's quill, his writing utensil, and I believed I was on the way to "curing" him. Here, I was being told the Marquis had used the wine he was given to write another story. The doctor was that I step up the physical pressure on the Marquis to stop writing, and I, being the charitable healer, had to defy him, to heal the Marquis my way. The scene involved a flashback to a conversation, and then another flashback to the Marquis writing. My main challenge was to stay reactive, but still, while all these flashbacks were going on.

Luckily, the director had this vision that the girl playing the Marquis using us all as life-size action figures, arranging us all in her liking. It made it fun to be part of her desires, and just go with it, in a way. The best ideas for this came in the last few days. Fortunately, it all ended up coming together well in the scene. Some people though parts of it didn't work, for other people, they really clicked. To a certain extent, that is just part of art: it will click for some people, but not for others. People seemed to think our scene was well-thought-out enough to constitute a worthwhile scene.

Now, when I went to see it the other night, that took the scene and the play to a whole new level. The actors, all grad students and professors of Theater, many of whom I had learned from or am now, had researched it much more meticulously than even I did for this. They pronounced all the French phrases deftly, while we had to go through them a few times to learn how they were really pronounced. Of course, they were able to go all out with the period dress, and they really hammed up the effects of their characters, the broken sadness, the chilling, frightening malevolence, as is the custom in the melodrama in which the play is written.

The playwright, Doug Wright, said that he played up the division between the good and the bad characters, that they were "either kissed by God or yoked in Satan's merciless employ." Even so, I was able to detect qualities in the Marquis, the diabolical one, that were positive, as well as ones in the Doctor, even in Coulmier, that were less than Godly. In spite of the Marquis's resistance to Coulmier, the two actually form a dialectic, in that one's existence actually gives meaning to the other's. There is actually a bond of sorts that connects them, which makes Coulmier's final act all the more painful to behold. All in all, the play pulled out all the stops, and it had more going for it than against it.

Now, onto the implications of Quills. This play had a lot to do with censorship of viciously sexual and violent content in literature. Our instructor asked us to consider why the playwright might have written a play in a given era. Now the play Quills debuted off Broadway on November 3, 1995. In 1989, a homoerotic photo exhibit, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, prompted fears that such expression would degrade society itself. The pressure on the N.E.A. in the ensuing years became an event known as the Mapplethorpe Controversy (after photographer Robert Mapplethorpe).

In the years to come, the debate over what should and shouldn't be seen in art and entertainment became more urgent, and had more dire consequences. On April 20, 1999, two juvenile delinquents in Littleton, Colorado decided to bomb their high school's cafeteria, and then turn guns on the other kids. 13 people were killed, including a teacher, and the two assailants themselves. In the wake of that event, people became concerned about the increasingly violent video games, movies and music that were cropping up. Now art was no longer violent for a purpose, it was violent just for the sake of gorging itself on the gore.

In a 2001 interview with the Advocate, after the movie Quills was released, Doug Wright was interviewed about violent lyrics, specifically in Eminem's music, for which he won an award the previous year. His lyrics were violently homophobic, "My words are like a dagger...that'll stab you in the head-whether you're a fag or a lez." Wright, who is gay, stated concern without scapegoating Eminem or anyone else. He believed that the words in question were a diatribe that had the potential to help move our lives forward. Quoting him,

"Look at something like the Columbine incident, and you see that volatile teenage minds will express themselves with the tools that they are given. Give them a paintbrush, and you might get a painting; give them a handgun, and you might get a massacre. What's really troubling about someone like Eminem is the very purgative nature of art. If he purges his own demons by creating this kind of rhetoric, then it has a certain societal value, you could argue. And yet how can we as a society educate him sufficiently so that the ultimate result doesn't defile us all, collectively?"

I grew up thinking that violent television, movies, and games were not a problem. Sometimes, it hit me wrong, and really bothered me, but I thought it was cool to watch action-packed sci-fi and superhero movies. I thought it was cool to listen to rappers like 50 Cent and Eminem, just for the sake of seeing what it was like. As I got in to my later teens, I got more and more bothered by the violence, the cruelty, of the words. When I was a teenager, if you didn't act like the other guys, you would get called a "fag," a "retard," and all insults were designed to trap you in gay-looking situations. That banter grew to bother me, once I passed the age of about 14 or 15.

I was disgusted by all the gory, horrible movies, video games, and such that other people seemed to think was a game. Seeing people hurt has always bothered me, but as I grew up, I felt like sticking to this drove me apart from everyone else. That said, though, I do not believe in not showing violence or sex to people in art, or literature, or music. Like I said, there is indulgence and gorging in the gore, and horror, and what not. That has an addictive, druglike quality to many people. However, there are some very violent works of art, film, and literature that have lots of artistic merit, and insight into the human condition.

The reason I chose to show the photo from Taxi Driver above is that I believe it is one such example. It was my favorite film when I was about 14. Travis, the hero, becomes raw, violent, and brutal, throughout the course of the film. However, there is this quality about him that strikes you like a boy of about 12 or 13. With an increasing violent or unstable streak in him, and yet, there is still a childlike, earnest quality to the way he acts.

Also, violent artworks are not necessarily supportive of it, or condemning of it. Quills itself offers actions that support both freedom of expression and suppression thereof. Though the Marquis is lionized as a hero of freedom of expression, when he passes a story of his through the asylum, a madman decides to act its content out on Madeleine, a 16-year-old maiden who is taken with the Marquis, and for whom he secretly feels smitten.

I wanted to show you this work of mine because it has to do with a horrible act of violence against the girl in this picture, who is dying, but because it is reminiscent of the fate of Madeleine in Quills. This comes from an idea I had that was about crime, justice, and the victim. To me, neither art glorifying the criminal nor the law is totally correct. Wright himself said that what makes this debate so potent is that "there is truth on all sides of it." I believe what good art does is show the truth on two opposing sides, in two opposing people.

I think Quills definitely succeeds at this. At the same time, it made me laugh with perverted amusement, made my nerves tingle with the creeps, and cringe with sadness and pain for the people involved. This kind of multi-layered reaction is connection to the human condition. For that, Quills is definitely worth reading or seeing. I'll have more material for you tomorrow. Thanks.

See ya, and keep wondering, folks!

To Be or Not to Be (In the Theatre)

As You Like It, as performed by CSULB's University Players (Fall 2011).

Hi there,

I've gone back to class today. This is both good news and bad news. First, it is good news because I will be able to interact more, and thus I will have more material for this blog. My daily interactions with people, and with new discoveries, are what power my creative work, and thus this blog. Over the last year and a half, I have gotten to enjoy going to college. It was like, at that time, it suddenly clicked like "Oh, so that's how this whole thing works, and that's what everyone enjoys about this." This was the ability to relate, connect with other people. I began branching out, and enjoying it.

The bad news, however, is that with all the work, I will not have as much time open for this blog. As I have gotten older, I have had steadily less and less time to devote to my drawings and other work. I have gotten more space in college, in between classes, to read and write stuff to myself. One thing about college is that you can have as much as four or five hours in between classes. This has given me some blocks of time where I can exercise my own gifts of expression.

The highlight of my day was going back to my theater class I am taking. I don't know whether to spell it thea-ter or thea-tre, like the old English spelling. Anyway, this was a course called "performance and rehearsal." What this means is that we, the actors, will prepare our scenes and material, and then, the second half of class, a group of directors (undergrads joining us from another class) will enter, and we work with them, we get their notes on the scene.

I'll tell you, when I got there, I got excited to see my friends that I knew there. Half the reason I enjoy being in the theater department is the kind of people that I have met there. Most of the time before I got involved in theater, my encounters with people on campus were passing. I couldn't really connect with anyone. In most of the lecture hall classes (most lower-division classes required are in lectures), you don't have any more interaction with the person next to you than "Is anyone sitting here?" So, outside of a few club meetings I went to, I had few long-term interactions with people where I went. Certainly, I hadn't had anything that moved my life.

I have only been involved in Theater and acting activity for a short two years now. In that two-year time span, my life and the way I live it have had a sea change. This very blog is evidence of that change. At the end of the Fall 2009 semester, I needed 3 fine arts units, so I was given a choice between Studio Art, which seemed like a natural choice, and Intro to Acting. I forget exactly what it was, but something in me was telling me that I should take the acting. So I signed up for it for the Spring of 2010, even though I had no idea how I would survive the first week.

When I went in, we began work off impulse and visualization. Again, the memory is slightly cloudy to me now, but it clicked with me. All the activities we did were to get us interacting, not just for its own sake, but to realize what drove our actions. About three weeks into the class, it started to become the thing. It crept in as the thing I looked forward to doing, come Monday and Wednesday afternoon. It slowly began to filter out into my understanding of others, too. When I viewed people living their lives as characters on a stage, it inspired much more of a connection from me to them. I could see people honestly, and with empathy.

Once I decided to go into the classes that the majors in Theater went into, everything began to shift. I was no longer the same guy I was before. So, over the past year, I have been adapting to my approach to the way I live my life. This was what I meant when I said that 2011 was "The Year of Living Creatively." It meant applying the way I look at acting, and the collaboration of roles, to the way I have interacted with the people I knew and met, with the knowledge that I find, and with what I knew to be true. Slowly, I have been learning to look at the things I used to avoid, to deny, to look away from.

However much I have come to love the theater, there are things about all this that make me nervous. First, I am worried about becoming just the caricature people paint of actors. That is, the prima donnas who only know how to make themselves look good. The fear of it has largely disappeared for me. I assuage myself by remembering that there are prima donnas in every field who have no appreciation for anything that is not themselves. Also, when you know and care for people that are doing it, the stereotypes lose their importance.

Also, there is this fear about commiting totally to a life in the theater. Even with this wonderful thing that has entered my life, I feel this combination of beign trapped, locked into one path (after all, what are you gonna do with a theater BA besides work in theater?), and feeling like this commitment is too much, too soon. I still have lots of things I want to do in this world. It isn't that I have no idea what I want to do, it's that I have so many ideas of things I want to do. Call me the stereotypical male, here, but I've got some commitment issues.

Another issue is the money. Now, you probably know of the term "starving artist." People in the arts do not make a lot of money, and they have very sporadic periods of work. In the case of actors, they always have to be looking for the next role, unless they have some long-term contract and even then, it's tentative. The only way such a career would be recognized as valid was if the actor got famous and rich. So that's a sad commentary on how we treat the arts. They're useless to the society at large unless you can make lots of money and become famous. As a result, the people that tend to make it big in acting are the most competitive, type-A personalities. Unfortunate, since there are many people that have that gift, that have some message in their being that needs to be heard, that aren't great at making it in this type of world.

So what can I do? I am torn between the world that I knew, the world of safe career paths, of clear trajectories, of clear problems and solutions, and that of creativities, where each person I meet isn't just a person, or a caricature, or just a cog in some big machine. Here, it is as if each person has their own micro world that they carry with them, that they share with their friends, lovers, and family. There are things about the world I knew that draw me in, as there are things about this new world that do. It seems that this new view of the world has been with me all along, just waiting for the right influences to cultivate it.

I have currently come up with the idea to major in communication studies, and minor in theater arts. Part of me feels like this is a lame-ass compromise, but I really love both departments, and it feels to me as if that is the deal that will work best. I really do love the communications department. I'll tell you why, simply because I had one lecture class there my freshman year (three years ago), and it was just damn fun and informative. I could have listened to the professor all day. It had a similar affect, albeit on a more subdued scale, as learning how to act. Now, the field of communications is much more broad, in that it can be communications in business, advertising, counseling, organizations, and culture.

I honestly believe that if people knew how to communicate better, the quantity of suffering in the world would decrease greatly. Oddly enough, the theater experience, because it is about an experience, is about communicating too. It is about showing the truth of you, the actor, and the director and the crew have pieces of their truths, their worlds, which the theater needs to operate. The whole thing is happening right in front of the audience. So you have that experience of the actors interacting with each other, elements of the play interacting, and them all interacting with the audience's feedback.

So theater relies on effectively communicating. It involves picking up the tempo of these interactions, which is what drives the audience's interest in the production. It allows the audience to look at the story, the setting, or the characters, think back to it and say, "Hey, remember that thing? You remember it? That just blew you away, didn't it?" It is in these experiences that we grow, that we become better and richer, as human beings in our understanding of each other and this world. It is that experience that I want to give people, in whatever field I go into, whether it's the theater, or something else. As my first acting teacher told me, "It'll never be a waste."

My perception of time unfolding has also changed since I began studying acting. Before, I went to school with the idea that I would some day earn a degree, and then some time after that, I would get a job, which would one day lead to a career. Now, it is as if each semester, every week, every day, has become something significant, alive, important in and of itself. I can feel the change happen. This can be frightening, because so much change is jarring, but there is something wonderful about the discovery. I still don't have a good idea where I'll be in the next five, ten years, but that's not that bad anymore. That's why I sign off each post with "keep wondering, folks," because being able to keep discovering keeps you feeling engaged. I think everybody should have a chance to do that in life.

Well, I've got a few ideas in the works, but like I said, I've got more schoolwork ahead of me now. I'll blog whenever I can, and we'll have a good time. I really look forward to being able to write on this blog. I'm really excited about the direction this is going.

See ya, and keep wondering, folks!

Impressions and Storytelling

Hi there,

Well, today, we're going to branch out in "the arts." Because this blog is not just about my visual art, although that is a huge staple of it. This blog is about visual art, performance, discussions of process, meaning, and even music, on occasion. My brother is the musical one of the family, so I mostly borrow his music, but I will borrow, and look at, these, on occasion.

My subject today is doing impressions of people. This is part of my exploration of performance and character at large. The embedded video above comes from an Inside the Actors' Studio interview with Kevin Spacey. One of my favorite movies when I was in my teen years were LA Confidential and Glengarry Glenross. So I grew up following a lot of Spacey's work, and I was amazed when I fould this video.

For some reason, I really admire people who are able to do these impressions really well. My older brother is one such influence. For a long time, I have done impersonations with him, often in a casual or joking way, paying attention to the surface-level details. It is only recently that I have begun to understand this impression style as a legitimate craft on its own. So let me share with you some of what I have learned about doing impressions.

First, you can do impressions, vocally, physically, or both, of all sorts of people. The most-sought-after candidates for this are actors, celebrity figures, media spokes people, and political figures. Christopher Walken is usually first among choices for impersonation. Some of my personal favorites are Jack Nicholson, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bill Clinton. People with heavy accents or very distinct vocal characteristics are easier to imitate. If a subject has a more neutral voice, it is much trickier, but if you know what to look for, it is possible.

I used to think that I didn't have an accent. I thought that people from Southern California didn't have any accent. I knew we tend to talk vaguely like Midwesterners, since that is where many early Californians came from. However, even if you do not have an accent that jumps out at people, you still have a distinct way of speaking and using language. I learned in a voice class I just took that it has to do with the way you pronounce verb and consonant sounds. If you are impersonating someone with a distinct accent, pronouncing these sounds without exagerration can really change your body chemistry, putting you in the frame of mind for the "character."

Anyway, the person you choose to imitate don't have to be well-known. You can do one of someone you know well, like a family member, close friend, or someone else. When you do, however, you might take a different tone with them, since you have to talk to them again. Here, it helps to joke affectionately about them, as I do. One of the people I enjoy riffing on is my uncle from back east, for example.

Voice acting professional Jim Ward shows some tricks of his trade.

Another level to this is the physicality of the subject person. Besides getting their voice down, what are their ticks? First off, what sorts of phrases or verbal habits do they have? This is what the above voice actor, Jim Ward, a well-known impressionist, picks up on above. He takes a subtle, defining characteristic of each of his subjects' delivery, such as Al Gore's sighs, or Woody Allen's nasal, twitchy tone, or Jack Nicholson's intense forehead involvement (I've learned that it's harder to incorporate this for us younger imitators), or Bill Clinton's using the "curled index finger" pointing to drive a message home. Then he puts the emphasis on that point, exaggerating it, and building from that mannerism. Now, sometimes, said mannerism could be a physical tick, or some word or phrase the person habitually says.

For instance, the uncle that I just mentioned, at every time where our family sits down to dinner with him, has us do this thing where he asks us all "What's the most embarassing thing you've ever done without telling anyone, starting with you?" He's got this low, grumbly voice, and invariably, whenever he does this at the dinner table, it is to someone across the table, so he will not have to participate.

There are also little phrases people fall back on. On this blog, I always open with "Hi there," and sign off with "keep wondering, folks." For instance, the current president, Barack Obama, at the beginning of nearly every thought, will say "look," or "let me be clear." These are good things to start off with. Then, if they have a tone that they usually take, such as hurried, or agitated, or that of the know-it-all, using that would give some weight to it.

This goes back to something the late, great George Carlin said in his autobiography, "The important thing in [doing an impression] is not just their voice, how they say things, but what the person would say." This is a staple of playing character types. Representing what your subject would say, or how they would say it, would be an interesting character study. I am fascinated by looking at people as characters. To show them openly and honestly, even if making fun of them, is the best way to do it. This does a service for your truth, and theirs.

This element of the truth is what separates just a casual, exaggerated impersonation from something that really looks and sounds like the person you're imitating. I like to talk like the person, but consider what they would say. This is where the storytelling comes in. You are telling a micro-story of what this person acts like, sounds like, and is like.

This is the same purpose behind acting. What are actors but storytellers. Their job is to tell the story of the person they play. They must tell the truth of the person's actions, speech and life. Being an actor, I have discovered, is a great job for people who love people-watching. I like people-watching, even though I have times when I get tired, mentally, and emotionally, from it. You can even get tired doing something you love.

Well, this is the first post of mine in the field of performing, formally or informally, a story. I have stories, large and small, that I like to tell when I draw, and when I do these impressions. My hope is that even though these stories are sometimes ficticious, they are not, in any way, false. I hope, when I tell a story, that it will be true, sometimes to fact, but always to life.

Anyway, what do you think? Do you have a story, book, film, play, or routine, that you really believed in? Did anything make you go, "Hey, that is really true?" Let me know, in the comment box below. See ya, and keep wondering, folks!