The General Idea

"Hello!
Welcome to the MalapropCast.
The purpose of this Blog is quite simple:

We are here to open up a discussion about the American Shakespeare Center's 'Almost Blasphemy' tour.

See? Simple as that.

This blog will be supplemented by/supplemental to a Podcast of the same name in which we'll try to include interviews with performers and audience members, cast performances of scenes, discussions of elements of the kind of theatre (no typo, that's how we spell the live stuff) we do. That, and I hope to include a good amount of personal posts and retrospectives on what it's like to be on tour.

Really, we're just here to play.

So come and play with us, wont you?"

...
Well, that was the case, at least.
I no longer work for the ASC, but i do still have the itchy fingers and pen of an amateur writer, and i like the idea of keeping this conversation going.
So i'm gonna.
I'll wax ridiculous about my life, my attempts to get work, and my over-mulled analysis of this world and city and business and, and, and...
You get the idea.



Friday, November 16, 2012

Because why wouldn't I love it here.

Absence really can make a heart grow fonder.
Yes, dear reader(s), I speak a kind of practiced, well tread truth.
I have been without my voice. I tried looking for it in work and teaching and travel but for all of that, I knew that I wasn't really settled until I was bellowing my brain into the vast, two way mirror of expression that is the blogosphere.
I cannot see myself unless someone is looking, and I cannot be honest to their view unless I can't see them, so here goes nothing.
Again.
In which we discuss:
Shameless (if slightly self-aware) use of tired sentiment to re-boot a pet project;
A retrospective on recent life happenings and what all I think pertinent;
The joys and terrors of transitioning into a metropolitan inevitability;
Why it is a transplant country bumpkin cannot help but love his new home;
The romance of want;
And, of course, feet... Or is it toes?
My hearts fondness for blathering about whatever I damn well please being the result of that catharsis' absence notwithstanding, I have missed this. I tried cooking and taking pictures, and may again, but I am not a photographer nor a cook.
Better or worse (much fucking worse) I identify as a writer.
I will keeping cooking and photographing, but they will always just be silly funtimes.
Whatever this is is, on some fundamental level, a necessity for me, so I'll share it with strangers to see if they like it.
Busy boy has been busy.
I was camping out with Shakespeare nerd-genius-babies for a summer which lead to teaching general-theatre-nerd-genius-babies, which gave way to pensive unemployment which lead to now; I'm a resident of the city I chose, about to start a job to pay the bills so I can live enough to make the career I choose.
This has all happened over the course of but a few fast months. So fast, I feel windswept and whiplash and worldly and weary and wacky and weirdly welcome.
Here.
The city.
My city. If you're asking anyone who lives here, I feel like they'll claim the place like an emperor of an ancient, well established dynasty.
A dynasty build on a heap of rat shit and exotic pornographies.
But how exotic they are.
How exotic everything seems to be here.
I make no show of being anything other than a doe eyed tourist, drinking this city's scummy cool aide like a man lost in a Dixie dry dessert of bible belts and buck hunting.
Some days I leave my apartment (and some days I don't. Some days I just hide behind my door and never leave. Desperate to conserve capitol and calories, I hibernate until I can begin my life as one of the gainfully employed) , and every minute I spend wandering these streets is a new adventure in why this place was the right decision.
Beauty lives here. Did you know that?
Of course this city is filthy.
Unrepentant. Unwashed. Ugly.
But in that is has found the grace of the Uncaring.
In Mellville's timeless classic Moby Dick (oh, christ, here we go), our narrator suggests that anything done 'cooly' is a thing done admirably.
This city is 'cool' in it's filth and depravity (scum and villainy, dear reader!) and for being so, it is beautiful.
That, and the people are impossible.
The architecture breathtaking.
The fashion questionable.
The food ravenous.
And the subway incomprehensible.
I'm lost in the pulsing, bilous bowels of a technorganic monster called a city, and I'm not sure if I'm a virus or just a persistent turd.
Persistent Turd; my next indie band.
Going to bed hungry is something new for me. I'm far from starving (calm down, mom), but I'm not the glutton I know myself capable of being.
But it's ok: I planned for this.
When I worked as a professional Summer Camp oddity, I was just as much the glutton I could be, and for so being, I put on my winter coat.
When I took happy advantage of my family's unquestioning hospitality, I was a more controlled kind of glutton, so I kept but grew no further my winter coat.
Winter has come, ye nerds of WinterFeels, and this summer son can smile for that I am layered thick enough to Revel in a tighter belt and a leaner cheek: it means I'm earning my place here.
If I can't walk into that audition room with some gleam of a starved, well honed attack dog, how will they ever respect my ruthlessness enough to want to pay me?
Maybe I'll just drink more coffee.
My feet hurt.
Not all the time.
Not until I come home.
Not until I let them tell me how terrible I've been to them.
So I'll sit on my little floor, turn on music, or maybe some Internet funnies, and GRIND MY SOUL until everything feels a little more balanced.
And then I lull myself to sleep with the sound of my neighbor-bar and my own steady, expectant breathing.
It's all still new enough that even a day fraught with fear and self doubt is made better for that, at time of writing, I am one of Three people on my subway train with either a computer, journal or phone (I blog on my phone. What, wanna fight about it?), all trying to capture something incredible about themselves to share with...
Someone.
Anyone.
Thanks for reading.
More soon.
Forcing a little perspective on the subway
Did i mention that i'm reading Moby Dick at the moment?

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