serpent swallowing tail

Nick Manhattan's Weblog

Carlos and I headed back to Brooklyn via a road trip with Gabriele north up Interstate 35 and then east on Interstate 80. We visited family along the way. Carlos took a walk on Halloween night through the small town of Milo, Iowa. As always his presence overwhelmed. Mingling with the little trick-or-treaters and their guardians, Carlos again seemed to be asking that silent question that he always poses when entering any reality.

What are you strange people doing here?

Halloween is definitely a strange one. How this All Souls Day ritual devolved into trick-or-treaters walking from house step to house step with their un-costumed parent guardians in the background on the sidewalk seems a ripe metaphor in some way. "Birth of a Salesman" maybe.

In Brooklyn here many times kids appear on the doorstep in one of those 99 cent masks and nothing else. Their mothers will also be there with a bag open: "This is for one of my kids who is home sick." So our guardians teach us the masks we must learn to wear to survive in the "free market" that rules all our exchanges. And some learn that there is no Santa Claus before others.

Before leaving Dallas Kat took me to one of the better neighborhoods. She wanted to show me Charley's Lemonade Stand. We had imagined doing a photojournal of all the lemonade stands across the country. But just to imagine all these Lemonade Stands, each both the same and different from the next, might be a richer experience than actually searching them out. They may already be part of some nostalgic past never to return.

Our non-profit world of theater and art often looks much like these lemonade stands. Or we resemble those costumed children trick-or-treating, with their guardians and patrons somewhere in the background as we practice a make-believe capitalism.

We are of course more than that. In much the same way that children eventually become the guardians and caretakers of their aging parents, theater and art have become the ethical guardians of that purer, more innocent form of commerce in which our parents had actually sought to instruct us as children. We sometimes forget that the first definition of commerce is something that may have little or no relationship to money:

commerce 1. social intercourse: interchange of ideas, opinions, and sentiments.

We also need to remind ourselves that theater is a gift before it's a product. If we use Charley's Lemonade Stand as our model of success, we have become the wise and ethical guardians of our social intercourse.

The exercises have tried to examine not just the specific aesthetics of a certain script, Pericles, but the actor's relationship to the larger machine of theater, and then theater's relationship to culture and community.

We have been studying fame and its relationship to identity and image. Specifically, is there a way to attain the power of the Icon elsewhere than in that so boring realm of Blockbuster and Brand Name? We have a sense that Charley's Lemonade Stand serves as an Icon for his neighborhood, but we want to know how large that neighborhood really is.

I have the actors' signatures with me in Brooklyn. I am interested in trying to create a talisman out of them. When a signature becomes an autograph, it has become a cultural fetish. But it needs a context to achieve the emotive power necessary to become a talisman. Only when the John Hancock is placed within the Declaration of Independence does it become a talisman with an emotive power that goes beyond its pen and ink reality.

The alchemy practiced in Theater creates Temporary Autonomous Zones, a series of Declarations of Independence. We can discover the mystery and purpose of our short lives in these rehearsals. We learn the why and how of making our mark in the world.

The Pericles script was merely the inspiration for the actors' exercises, which were geared more toward the exploration of the whole of one's life in theater. I'll complete the studies of the Interviews with Carlos, but the emblems and shields you are creating for the NOMAD MONAD box are meant to be part of your personal Grand Opus. Your device will evolve as your life in theater evolves. Be as attentive to it as Pericles was.

It kept where I kept, I so dearly loved it.

Pericles, the Phoenician Sailor, takes to the sea and the sea takes to him, as he moves from tempest to new land to tempest to new land. What better metaphor for this journey than the non sequitur hyperlinks of surfing the Web.

With this Weblog I hope to start to address an audience that goes beyond the inner circle that we have had so far. Expect a redesign of the site with that in mind. The Dramaturgy Project will extend beyond this production, but with the hope that everyone involved stays attached to it. Please email me links to the interesting, strange new shores you find in your surfing and I'll try to incorporate them into the journey. Best from Brooklyn, Nick


Friday November 12

Face Reality  A false Muslim prophet once proclaimed that mirrors (like paternity) were abominations. For they confirm and multiply the earth which we inhabit. Grotesque error. Unauthorized parody.

Easy to see how man has become overly enamoured with his own image. Once we would look elsewhere for guidance in our reality. Our totems were the bear, the eagle, the wolf and we sought the reflection of ourselves in these other equals.

I find it impossible to choose my favorite William Blake quote, even for a day. But a quote of his used in Jim Jarmush's film Dead Man often haunts me. Partly because it was spoken by the Northwest Indian character, making it seem more Native American than Blakean. But mostly because when Gabriele and I went to London for two months this spring, we took Charles Wain's The Crow with us to study/perform. Now we'll be at it forever.

"The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow."

More Mug Shots  The coffee mug from The American Society of Crows and Ravens comes with A Murder of Crows on it. Didn't someone write a play about crowspeak once?

News on the King  Elvis is in first place for Time's Person of the Century. And remember that a vote for Elvis is a vote against Hitler.

I don't think we have much to worry about though. Scienctific fact has proven that Hitler is only one-third as popular as ELvis. I guess we should thank God that God is seven times more popular than Elvis. But unfortunately Microsoft is almost twice as popular as God.

Thank you again Tony for the Elvis Christmas Ornament. It's now hanging in the regal surroundings of the Brooklyn Elvis Shrine.

Monday November 15

Here's a handy search tool for "Over 60, novels, 20 important non-fiction works, 2 large dictionaries, poetry, etc. All copyright expired classic works amounting to over 300 Mb of indexed searchable HTML."

Match: Format: Scope

Key Words

The pull down at All Bibliomania has sections for Fiction, Non Fiction, Reference, Shakespeare, poetry, and Phrase and Fable. I have been using this hypertext version of The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable for at least three years. It had been on a noncommercial Web site for quite awhile. I can sometimes get lost for hours following the origins and meanings of phrases.

As far as the Shakespeare section of this Bibliomania site, it's incomplete. The better place for the hypertext versions and searches of Skakespeare's works is at this mit.edu site. But be sure to check out Mackay: Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds at Bibliomania. This classic work, first published in 1841, is about the madness of crowds and the universal human susceptibility to scams and hoaxes. You end up almost believing history is simply a series of manias, fads and hoaxes. An entertaining and informative read. I am lucky I found it. I discovered the Alchemists chapter of the book by doing a search at the site using keyword alchymy, not alchemy.

It's interesting how this site has become a piece of commercial property. Content or Advertising?   Over at CNN.com they have a section called First Chapters.

There are layered ironies in reading the first chapter of Deadly Persuasionthere. The chapter (the book) seems to be saying: We are the product within the product reading the product telling us not to read the product.

But first chapter, final chapter, the real message is always the same.

Content or Advertising? You can't really put the cart in front of the horse anymore. The horse and the cart have evolved into the automobile on this new digital highway.

"The wrinkle"  If you got an idea, Bob will pitch it for you and Hollywood just may catch it. At the bottom of the page is the Penny Marshall quotable:

"There's a lot of scripts where the girl wants to have a baby and hires a guy or offers money or something. There's like 12 of them I've seen."

So I should credit Bob for helping me think Big Time about my ideas. But now that I've got my next big idea, I'm still confused.

Should I pitch as a movie or as one of those Internet startup companies that are doing so well?

Make sure you don't miss the notes at the center of page. His name is Accountant. Sired by LMC Money and 659 daughter.

Friday November 19

The written word is one of our first technologies. And those strict rules of Webster evaporate again when we open up the OED and start trying to chase down the eponyms.

Years ago I thought it necessary to track down the root for that piece of hardware within the technical act of writing that is used to print those longhand scratches on our modern papyrus.

I loved what I found for the word pencil.

from Middle English pencel, artist's brush, from Old French pincel, from Vulgar Latin penicellus, alteration of the Latin penicillus, diminutive of peniculus, diminutive of penis, tail, brush.

So that story that hit on all the news wires earlier this year came as no real surprise.

"In a First, Male Mouse Is Cloned From the Tip of an Adult's Tail"

And now the Hawaiians have taken everything one step further. A new method, called the Honolulu technique--developed by Teruhiko Wakayama, has cloned clones from clones.

The celebrity promoting all this cloning business is Dr. Richard Seed. Of course, with a name like that, you're definitely screwed for life; i.e., destined. In these two recordings he sounds like two entirely different men. I wonder which is the real one.

Seed One       Seed Two

As our media, old and new, is replicating and mirroring everything as never before, our biology attempts to keep pace. Art Imitating Life, and Life imitating Art. The snake eating its tail.

Fame is culture's way of homogenizing uniqueness. Theater is able to practice its independence at least partially because it manages to stand outside the general unanimity. Within a culture that nourishes fandom, theater still seeks the intimacy of an audience. Becoming the most ugly duckling when placed on the same shelves as stars, celebities, and other brand names, theater's genuine place is outside the market. More gift than product, its very presence is its uniqueness.

News on the King  Adding signatures to the A.C.E petition has been suspended at the present time. The petition is a victim of its own success.


Back to Pericles Dramaturgy Project