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[krazyclue]

Single White Male, Shut Up Already

I'm waiting off-stage at the Solo Creation Festival at Son of Semele in July of 2017. My character is homeless, so I have bought a jacket (at the Buffalo Exchange for $50) and suitably defiled it; I've poured oil on it, rubbed it on the garage floor, even dragged it behind my car. The stench is so powerful I get a headache waiting to go on. I have researched homelessness in Los Angeles, and the history of a few blocks of downtown Los Angeles centered on Main Street near the "infamous" Cecil Hotel where the story takes place. I run internal monologues, remembering the faces of the people I have seen on skid row or the hundreds of tents on freeway overpasses all over this city.

I have plenty of time to think. The opening show is about forty minutes long, and since my entrance is from the back of the house, I wait in a small space hidden behind a black curtain. Sarah (now Seven Graham; she has since transitioned; I only use the name Sarah and pronouns she and her because that's who Seven was at that time) is telling her story called Angels are Intersex, about people whose bodies and sex characteristics are more ambiguous than the typical definitions of male or female, and the emotional as well as physical pain they can experience when they are forced into the binary of boy or girl despite these differences.

At that time, Sarah was not an experienced performer. While she occasionally forgot a line as we all do, her performance makes up in its endearing honesty for her rawness as a performer. It is her first time on stage. The audience loves her, and standing backstage, I understand why. She is so genuine, and her piece is both moving and funny.

And As I listen to her, as the audience laughs and cries with her as she goes through her experience, I am suddenly hit with an acute dose of imposter syndrome, clearly resulting from having too much time to think.

Standing there in my smelly jacket, my beard and hair wildly unkempt, I feel like a complete phony. A fraud. For a moment, I don't want to go on stage. Self-loathing thoughts creep in: You grew up in the South Bay, you've been through some shit with being the class weirdo and not especially liked by the other kids, and you've struggled through some very dark moments throughout your adult life, but you're still from a comfortable middle-class background, and you're pretending to be a homeless guy? What in your experience equates to being homeless? When you were 17 and thought you were being oppressed because the cops broke up a kegger? Who do you think you are?

I steady myself. I take a few deep breaths and fight off the urge to disappear out the back door of the theater. When the moment comes, and my opening music cue plays, I throw myself through the back door and onto the stage before I can stop myself. My twenty-minute piece that was supposed to be ten goes by in what feels like 30 seconds. One moment I walk on stage, and suddenly I come out the other end, me again, not quite sure what just happened. Maybe it was good, perhaps it was terrible, I don't care. But for a moment--a quick, tantalizing here one second and gone the next moment--I lost myself. That is, of course, what acting, and storytelling can be: a way to go beyond yourself, to become immersed in someone else's experience even if it's very remote from your own. I want to continue to do (even though I am not performing anymore): lose my identity. If only for a few fleeting seconds…

Many creative people experience what I described above when I did my solo show: the cycle of negative thoughts that kicks in whenever you try to make something. Often, they overcome it, sometimes they do not. I have frequently found it insurmountable, and it has killed momentum on several projects. Even after completing the short version of my solo show, and receiving some very positive feedback for it, I found those thoughts returning when I moved on toward finishing the one-hour version for a theater festival. I drowned in them. The script needed more research; I had no business writing it in the first place; There are clichés throughout.

Several solo shows about homelessness were produced that year, most of which involved the actor portraying multiple roles, either to, as many of the shows claimed, humanize the homeless or perhaps showcase the performer's range so they could score an agent. Or both. My performance started to feel like just another one off the assembly line. Eventually, it collapsed, and I never completed the longer version of the project because I was undone by the question of whether I had the right to tell that story in the first place.

The irony about the homeless project failure is that the play is about mental illness and loneliness. My own experiences were laced throughout it because I didn't want to address them directly and publicly during a performance. It was not an intellectual exercise about homelessness in Los Angeles; it was also very personal. I didn't want to stop with myself, so I went further into research and reportage.

A large part of the play (its title was The City Underneath) resulted from conversations with Jessica Lynn Johnson, a mentor/director who shaped my notes into something more coherent, bringing in imagery and ideas that hadn't occurred to me. If I did a project like The City Underneathagain, I would write it and produce it but not perform it. I'd only perform a solo show now only if the piece was written by someone else. I could even be the ultimate multi-tasking director/bartender/gofer/therapist/chauffeur/wrangler/barista on someone else's production, but I wouldn't mix performing and writing again; it's too much for me.

Write about what you know is the old maxim. Still, even though intellectually, I believe we should also write about what we don't know about, I keep getting stuck emotionally on whether I have "the right" to tell a story. I'm going through it right now with another project, but I am bored with the whole dynamic, so I am pushing through it. Slowly.

I want to tell stories. More importantly, I want to hear them. I don't want an identity. I'd rather misplace it somewhere or disassemble it for spare parts. Especially since I am currently a "White Cis Male," the least interesting thing in the world to be, and a group that hasn't exactly been underrepresented. Many of the solo shows I have seen deal with reclaiming identity—often, identities and experiences that have been marginalized by people who looked like me. It makes perfect sense that queer people or black people, or Hispanic or indigenous people, or any number of groups excluded by mainstream culture want to tell their own stories because they have been expected to shut up for hundreds of years. Or ignored and treated as extras in someone else's story. "White" was the default against which everyone else was judged.

Some years ago, Center Theater Group (CTG) made a video about a play called Single White Men when it came to Los Angeles, during which people on the street were asked to define precisely what single white males were. One person says they can move around without being harassed, and another says they are "cocky, arrogant bros." Redneck comes up. Jock. When I googled the phrase "single white male," one of the results was "white shit overlord"--wow, and to think I won the best citizenship award in the seventh grade.

Single White Men is intended to be a dissection of white masculinity, and it was written by Young Jean Lee, an Asian American woman. She began the piece by asking what it means to be a white male and then used the responses to create the play through workshops and readings, her usual writing process through collaborations with people outside her own identity. It was undoubtedly audacious of her to write it in the first place. And here's where I part with some critics: they insist she shouldn't have written Single White Men at all, that even trying to write the play was indefensible.

"Young Jean Lee has no more business writing a play with the title and subject matter known as "Straight White Men" than a white male has the right to craft a play called "Straight Asian Females," wrote one reader in the comments section of Christopher Isherwood's review of the play. They continued, writing, "in both cases, agency and ownership of identity are stripped away by someone with an agenda. In both cases, assumptions and arrogant generalizations are inevitable."

Hilton Als, a champion of Lee's previous work, accused her in the New Yorker of writing characters in Single White Men that, instead of real people, were "...presented like silhouettes in a shooting gallery--" that were "easy marks..." But you can probably see that coming from the title itself. If Single White Men fails because it deals in tropes instead of portraying real people, then that's a case of bad writing; it's not a question of anyone having a right to tell the story or not.

Of course, Young Jean Lee has the right to write about straight white men if she wants. And she has made a career of writing plays that make their audiences uncomfortable, even squeamish--she isn't targeting white males. She wants to analyze the idea of identity itself. She often begins her process by asking herself what subject would make her most uncomfortable to write about--for instance, black identity and politics in another play called The Shipment. It's also a bit of a condemnation of this culture that Lee became the first Asian-American woman to have a play produced on Broadway--with a show called Single White Men.

This is a difficult time to write about people and cultures different from your own. For anyone. Maybe we shouldn't do it, especially white people—remember the reaction to American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins, written in the voice of a Mexican woman fleeing her country and entering the States as an undocumented immigrant? Early reviews were ecstatic, heavy hitters like Don Winslow and Stephen King wrote blurbs, and the book was anointed by Oprah. Cummins got paid an enormous advance for the book.

But then came the backlash, and it was not unjustified. Mexicans and other Latino groups pointed out the many inaccuracies in the book, found flaws in the perspective of its protagonist that seemed imposed by an outsider, and questioned why a white writer was given so much attention and praise when Hispanic writers have been for years ignored.

These are examples of writers who did their homework, confronted their subject, and probably relied on collaborators from within the community to make their work come alive and reach beyond any simplistic boilerplate logos. Lynn Nottage interviewed more than 100 people for her play Sweat and wrote something convincing about the multi-ethnic residents of a small Pennsylvania town--but she isn't from that state; she likely has a very different cultural and political perspective than the people she was writing about. Still, when Sweat was performed in Reading, Pennsylvania, the people in the audience wept because they recognized their story on that stage.

I admit there are stories I cannot tell. I'm not trying to suggest that white writers should be allowed to go on a cultural safari or that, instead of hearing someone else's truth, I want to insert myself into every narrative like some middle-aged version of Dora the Explorer. Evan goes to India! Evan goes to China! Fuck off, Evan, you are not V.S. Naipul! I want to hear someone else's truth, not just find mirror images of myself everywhere. I am also not invalidating anyone who wants to talk about their background or experiences; hearing such stories might grant us a measure of empathy for other people, a rare quality in today's us vs. them political and cultural environment.

But I also want everyone and anyone to have the ability to write about others outside their own experience and identity without immediately or reflexively being told they have committed some sort of sin. Criticize the work as warranted but saying that stereotypes or assumptions are inevitable because we have written about someone of a different background than our own—that is flat out wrong and very dull besides.

Because I wonder: what happens after everyone has stated their truth and reclaimed their identity? Do we stay inside those boundaries, me here and you over there, and never push past them? Or even attempt to do so? We can become a collection of abstractions instead of people who can have a dialogue with each other and find commonalities as well as differences. We stay locked away from each other in our respective camps, neatly tagged and labeled. The worst instinct is when we hear a story only to be told that we cannot possibly understand it anyway because of our cultural biases and unseen prejudices. So why are we bothering talking to each other at all? We shouldn't just stay locked in our own echo chambers, only engaging with work that reaffirms our own experience: I'd rather see work that breaks down barriers between neighborhoods instead of building more of them.

Write about what you don't know because of a gut feeling that tells you that you need to tell that story and learn more – if that is where it starts, then you can write about experiences very far removed from your own. IF--you do the work. If you research thoroughly and exhaustively and allow the project to shift as you discover new things. You may need collaborators to help you realize that story; you might recognize the project needs to be redone entirely based on what they say. You might be called an opportunist or be accused of cultural appropriation even if you do all that work. It might even be true.

Despite good intentions and a committed approach, the work still might not be any good, but that's true with any project. I still don't think it's a question of anyone's "right" to tell a story; you have the right to tell any story that moves you, and if you still decide you aren't qualified to write it, then write something else instead. Or make the coffee or run the lightboard, whatever. But also remember that sometimes it is your turn to just listen and let someone else have their moment.

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Italian in Name Only

I am a mixtape of European influences, but the two biggest are Italian and Irish, so it's maybe ironic that I've never been much for family. Not hostile toward it, more like disinterested.

 Italians and the Irish have the reputation of being devoted to their families. If there's nothing quite like a good Catholic upbringing mixed with poverty to convince people to have loads of children, then being middle-class and an only child is the antidote. Never wanted children, never wanted to be part of a family, didn't even really have a notion of them. I just never thought about it.

 Not until lately anyway, and I do not mean in the sense of having children myself. I mean of being suddenly conscious of a growing need to know what my origins are, to see how I somehow fit into the larger concept of a family. When my ancestors arrived in America, what they did once they got here, and how that differs from or mirrors what other families have found. This desire might have something to do with the pandemic and all that time spent alone when the world was shut down—the isolation making me want to reconnect and do so on a deeper level.  

Most of my knowledge of Italy is from the movies, design, and fashion. My understanding of Ireland is even more limited since I spent my only visit there wandering between pubs listening to white guys with 'dreads spinning drum'n'bass. I don't speak any Italian beyond a stray "Ciao, Bella" or "Vaffanculo." I know the second one because English soccer fans used it in a taunting chant whenever they played Italian teams ("Where were you in World War 2? VA-FFAN-CULO!!"). My father spoke fluent Italian when he was a child but forgot most of it in adulthood.  My immediate family is small and spread by time, distance, and some animosity; I know very little about most of the members of my extended one. If I have cultural heritage, it's hard to know what it is.

 I am not at all sure what made me start to think this way. It could have been watching the HBO adaptation of My Brilliant Friend, based on Elena Ferrante's novels. The show is a portrait of two women growing up in 50's Naples. We see their lives against a backdrop of a country coming fitfully to life after the devastation following the Second World War, its progress held back by repressive patriarchy. Grim moments often give way to more ecstatic ones before doubling back again the other way, leading to emotionally vivid set pieces that capture the personal and historical in the same scene. The score by Max Richter alone can induce yearning and seeing the young, very inexperienced cast gradually develop into compelling actors makes the whole experience unforgettable, like the best work of the Italian neorealist cinema.

 But My Brilliant Friend is set in Naples, and my family is from Tuscany. Italy, like the States, is a country of regions that do not always like each other, the north versus the south, and my ancestors would have been culturally different from the show's characters. Still, carried by the show, I find myself more and more drawn to thinking about Italy—I have roots in Germany and France as well, but for some reason, Italy is the country for which I feel the strongest connection. 

 Possibly I am entirely led by my stomach. Early in the pandemic, I started getting into Italian cooking, going carefully through a copy of Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hasan, who you might call the Julia Child of that countries' cuisine. I have a copy of Silver Spoon too, a compendium of real recipes from Italian families, from which I've made a few dishes, and I have my grandmother's pasta maker, and somewhere on an index card her hand-written ravioli recipe. It took all day for her and my grandfather to make that recipe; she stirred the slow simmering meat and prepared the ingredients, and my grandfather painstakingly sealed each ravioli with a fork.

 My German grandfather may have loved his pig's feet and pickled herring, but that obsession thankfully was not passed onto me, nor, as far as I know, to anyone else in my family. I might like a good stout too, even some Irish stew on occasion, but it's Italian food that captures my imagination. I am only beginning to know how each region has shaped that cuisine and the influences that created so many varied dishes. 

 I have not kept up with my family. I hardly know most of them, and outside of my parents and my uncle, I am not in touch with any other relatives. I forget the birthdays of even the closest friends and family; I must mark them on a calendar, or I'll miss the day altogether. My uncle has become something of the family historian and has been sending emails to nearly a dozen family relations. While I do recognize many of the names, there are far more that I do not remember and at least two I only know of by reputation. There are also people I met on that list, only once or twice, and those I saw most often were back when my grandparents were making their famous ravioli to go along with the Thanksgiving turkey, and that was a long time ago now.

 Those emails coincide with my awakening interest in my origins. I know a few more names now: my great grandparents Enea and Italia Lorenzetti emigrated here in 1916 and had two sons; my grandmother's dislike for Enea, a man with old-world beliefs who thought women shouldn't drive, my grandfather's brother, who threatened to walk out if Enea told them how to run their business; a rift with the Catholic Church because a priest wouldn't baptize Enea's and Italia's daughter unless they paid him an indulgence, and that the girl died soon after.

I've seen family photos, the people captured in those images ghost-like in those black and white pictures, and since I am such a mongrel, I do not look at all like them. Of course, I'd like to know more, but really, what I want is a better sense of what Italy is and why I feel so drawn toward it, not only the particulars of my one family's experience. I will start getting to know my family, but that is only the beginning of reconnecting, not its conclusion.

As I read and study (and hopefully get to make that first trip to Italy after the pandemic canceled my trip scheduled for last October), I want to know Italy without romanticizing it. You can convince yourself that life is better "over there" when it's probably the same or worse. Okay, maybe better too, possibly much better. But I don't want to become an obsessive Italy fan. Or fall for obvious cliches—about how Italy is a place where people know how to live. Italians are all passionate and stylish, speaking with their hands, operatic and over the top, and all the other hot-blooded Italian tropes. I'm sure there's some truth there as well.

But Italy also had one of the worst Covid-19 outbreaks and still struggles with a government, often in disarray, that cannot impede the dominance of the Camorra clans in Naples. And Italy still hasn't quite overcome the legacy of Mussolini: a far-right movement led by Matteo Salvini remains threateningly close to taking power, a rise aided by racism and xenophobia. I do not want to idealize or unfairly condemn the place, but rather know Italy and its' people for whatever they are, so I can see how it shaped myself and my family. I want to take pictures in the streets, wander without a plan until I got lost and needed one. Maybe discover my operatic personality.

 Coming out of this lockdown, old age not quite here but getting closer, as in just around the corner smoking a cigarette close, with the world isolated from itself, without any family of my own; maybe that is what sparked this need to connect with a sense of place, a sense of family. That's what being "white" can mean—it's when you've become so absorbed into American culture that your ancestry seems like it started around about 1980 (in my case anyway). I used to joke that my cultural heritage was shopping malls and Back to the Future movies at the multiplex.

 I think that has some advantages to being part of a well-defined community or coming from a large extended family. If you have no family, you won't be assigned an identity by what they think you should be. You won't have as many expectations about your choices before you get to choose for yourself.

 The problem is that you also have no sense of history or your heritage or how your small part fits into it the larger story. You are isolated. You can claim America, the nation of immigrants, but you make a claim not knowing where your people came from, and that might be the worst side effect of assimilation: forgetting the past. I've never known much about mine. I regret letting so much time slip before realizing family and heritage are so important. Now I am going to do my best to embrace my past, whatever it may be. 

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The Day After

The verdict is just, but I do not feel celebratory. As I watched the verdicts read on CNN, Chauvin's eyes darting frantically, a cutaway on the screen showing people standing near the very spot where George Floyd was murdered, jubilant that justice for once was met, what I felt in that moment was sadness. Anxiety. And empathy: of course, for the Floyd family, because this verdict might ease their loss but does not erase it, but weirdly, even for Chauvin, who deserves every one of the years he will sit in prison, but I still couldn't look at him. I wondered what legacy he had left his own family. I felt no joy. I felt the weight of it, wondered where my own or anybody else's worst instincts could lead them in such a tense time, and still saw him as justly condemned. Chauvin had a demonstrated pattern of abuse, 17 complaints filed against him, several for excessive force, and he finally had to pay the price. And unfortunately, so did George Floyd.

 Mostly I felt for George Floyd, who is at peace as they say, but who spent the last 9 minutes and 29 seconds of his life in the most excruciating pain, calling out for his mother, his pleas unheard, his breath slowly crushed out of him. Witnessing all the other shootings and everything else going on right now, the divisions so stark and overwhelming, we might conclude that it's over, that the experiment is done, that we are not capable of doing better as Obama says, but are just the sum of our fucked-up history. I feel heavy with it even if I know you cannot let those thoughts consume you because they lead to inaction. Capitulation. And an easy way out because believing change is still possible means you have to get up and do the work. Giving up is easy.

 I started the day by reading the first two parts of A Tradition of Violence, a 15-part investigative series by Cerise Castle published by KnockLA. It's a densely researched and well-sourced article about an open secret—criminal gangs within the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. These gangs harass and target black and brown people, identifying themselves with hand signs and tattoos, groups with names like The Executioners or The White Whities or The Lynwood Vikings. They gain their bones by how much harassment and excessive force they dole out—all of it seen as justified by them, the righteous cowboys versus the savage Indians. This has been going on for fifty years.

 The evidence demands an investigation, a cleansing of the department from top to bottom. Still, it just keeps happening, the County paying out millions and millions of dollars of settlements, an honest reckoning still not in sight. It's not news to anyone, even for white boys from the South Bay. And again, I feel a weight, a heavy sadness. How do we change this when this is only one example among so many across the entire nation?

 Maybe this is the beginning of some real change, but it doesn't quite feel like it yet. The loss of George Floyd has still not been brought back into balance because it never really can be, not entirely anyway. Black Lives matter, and yes, all lives matter too, but that isn't the point, and spare me the blue lives matter; there are more good cops than bad rhetoric. If that's true (and honestly, I'm not entirely convinced one way or the other, as there are always thousands of shades of grey in these situations), then all those good cops need to step up and open their mouths. The culture of silence has got to go, and they must hold themselves accountable for their actions as any citizen is supposedly required to do when they cross a line.

 We all need to speak up, but especially the cops, all those good ones we are reassured outnumber those like Chauvin. Speak up. Hold yourselves accountable. And me too. And you. Everyone needs to open their mouths and condemn this. The verdict today is not enough; typing those words is not enough. It's a start, but the weight is still there.

 I cannot see a resolution. I have no idea how we fix this situation, and strictly speaking, as one blessed to have only observed this dynamic without having ever experienced it first hand, I cannot be joyful today. I hope this can be the beginning of something, a fundamental change in our thinking and our culture, but the work is still awaiting us, and it is overwhelming. Our reckoning is still underway, and the outcome is far from certain.

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PART TWO: Free Los Tres! is a play about a confrontation between 3 activists and an undercover federal agent in 1971. My article explores why the story was forgotten and how it was found again. #theatre #LAThtr #LosAngeles #BoyleHeights #writing #history

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Free Los Tres! is a play about a confrontation between three Chicano activists and an undercover federal agent in 1971. My article explores why the story was forgotten and how it was found again. #theatre #LAThtr #LosAngeles #BoyleHeights #writing #history

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My latest article. 11:11 #theater company opens Famous--about sexual abuse of young actors by powerful men in #Hollywood--in newly renovated space. Already on work on next piece about Boyle Heights and an important event in local Chicano history. #LAThtr #theatre #LosAngeles #writing #performance 

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An Audition

This is either flash fiction or the start of something longer. I’ll say nothing more; it’s boring when a writer explains their own work, but this is different from what I usually produce. 

He rose as usual by the first light of dawn, although he had not slept much through the night. He didn’t need much sleep, found it an annoyance, something that got in the way of his work. And there was always work, more and more of it, no matter how hard or long he tried to shorten the stack of books he read, which instead only got taller even as he read 9 or 10 books simultaneously, and miraculously understood all of them too.

He went to his closet and selected an outfit without looking at it. He didn’t need to, they were all the same: a white shirt, and then a medium length coat, wool trousers and heavy boots, everything else charcoal black, like his short-cropped hair. He preferred the cut baggy and didn’t bother with a belt, and the clothes while not dirty or unkempt, were obviously well used. For Breakfast…well, he didn’t have time for Breakfast, not yet at least. He needed to get back to it. His work was the only thing that mattered now, the very thing that had driven away everyone else away, including his wife and children. Well, not everyone—just the humans. There were plenty of others he needed to deal with, although mostly they had claws or scales or fur and long teeth, and what passed for conversation with them was thankfully quite brief.

He left his antechamber and entered the lab, all of it underground, a staircase leading up to the rest of the house he hardly ever entered anymore, except of course when his stomach got the best of him and he needed food. The room was ringed with cages and had the most overwhelming stench which he didn’t bother noticing. There were diagrams of the many places he had once visited, and maps and drawings of various animals covering seemingly every inch of this subterranean chamber.

Some of the animals were already awake, too, moving about inside their cages. He began to open the doors of some, releasing his favorite two birds, Esther and Samantha, a pair of parrots who’d emigrated from the Galapagos Islands just to see him. They took up their customary positions, one on each shoulder, and he began to assemble his quills and ink, waiting for the first supplicant to arrive. Other animals were moving too, and since some of them knew how to open their own cages, they began to slowly move about the edges of the room, always careful to steer clear of the working area at the center.

It wasn’t easy auditioning for evolution. It made one nervous. One false move, a slight barely perceptible weakness that the animal was unaware of, and that was it, extinction. Not that he actually terminated the animals, which didn’t make the cut—but he decided who did, and that was pretty much the same thing.

A bell rang from above. He was ready, and finding the string which when pulled would open the front door above, he yelled, “Come in! Come in, find the stairs, and let us see what you have for us!”

There was the sound of a door opening from upstairs, and then crash, bang as the supplicant either knocked something to the floor or ran straight into a wall. Nervous, he could understand that certainly in their position. “Never mind that,” he shouted. “It doesn’t matter, come down, we have many visitors today.”

At the top of the stairs appeared the most fantastic creature; it was combination of a winged fish and frog, although mostly fish truth be told. The creature was nearly as tall as him, perhaps five feet, maneuvered itself delicately down the stairs on its spindly tail, a sight which anyone should see—a rare natural phenomenon as it were. A walking fish. Not a bad start, he thought, a rare sight indeed—but he must remain sober, scrupulous. He could not be swayed by first impressions.

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Article I wrote/photographed about unique audio-tour of Lili Lakich Studio in Art District DTLA. 

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(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd9uexruXTk)

Teaser Trailer for The City Underneath, a brief historical tour of downtown Los Angeles accompanied by ghosts. There will be three performances of the show during the Hollywood Fringe Festival 2018--Saturday, June 10 at 3pm, Saturday, June 16 at 6pm and Sunday, June 24 at 530pm. 

This is an unusual experience for me--I am both writing and performing the project. The piece is directed and developed by Jessica Lynn Johnson.

 Tickets go on sale May 1. For more information: http://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/5008

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Article I wrote about the Hobgoblin Playhouse -- a temporary space for the Hollywood Fringe Festival with an interesting history. It will be torn down sometime later this year; if there are any ghosts in there, they will have to move.

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Wrote this article last week on my birthday. 

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The City Underneath "Hey, you wanna hear a story? Went to one of my old places, the Cecil hotel..." THE CITY UNDERNEATH is a solo performance piece about the history of Los Angeles, gentrification and ghosts. I wrote and perform the piece. It was co-developed and directed by Jessica Lynn Johnson, who has directed dozens of solo shows (http://www.jessicalynnjohnson.com) We are debuting a short version of the piece at the Solo Performance Festival at the Sons of Semele Ensemble. City Underneath is still a work in progress, but eventually this will be an hour-long piece, and will require substantial research into subjects like homelessness and the hidden history of downtown Los Angeles. The performances continue tonight thru Sunday (July 21-23) For more info or tickets, go to www.sonofsemele.org. City Underneath is playing with two other solo shows by Sarah Graham and Tim Venable. Please support us if you can! This is only the beginning of this project. We shall see what happens next. Photos by Ashley Steed. Logo by Whitney Eshleman.

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Link to article I wrote about satirizing Trump at this year’s Hollywood Fringe Festival.

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Article I wrote and photographed about Howlett Smith, a jazz composer who has written hundreds of songs and taught countless student how to sing.

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Let me tell you a long story about something that happened to me today. It involves discovering that there are still good people in this world, finding a higher power (namely Goddesses) and running out of gas. I usually tweet these days, but this won't fit on there, and if you think of this as a story rather than a post you might enjoy it. Or think I'm a dork or possibly both.

These past two weeks have been unusually awful. Not Aleppo awful of course, but really terrible, leaving me feeling depleted and robbed of the confidence I'd been experiencing lately. As usual on Friday before the direct deposit hits, I am broke and low on gas. But I have a very important appointment in Palos Verdes, so with the needle on empty, I decide to gamble and go for it. I think I should have just enough gas to get there and back. Wrong.

I run out somewhere on North Palos Verdes Boulevard right in front of someone's driveway – who coincidentally pulls up behind me about 30 seconds later. They are not pleased. I am frantically trying to get the car to start again. I'm pleading, talking to myself in the car--"Just give me 5 more feet!" I couldn't push it because this is happening on an incline. Fortunately, after a few minutes, the car sputters to life and I get out of the way before it dies again. Phew.

The closest gas station is more than 2 miles away. I grab the gas can and start walking. On the way I'm ruminating on various things – why Miranda Lambert is such a badass, why I would never live in Palos Verdes even if I could afford it and somehow my thoughts turn to the idea of a higher power. It takes awhile for me to get there, but after considering different options, I decide to throw my lot in with the Goddesses. I looked at the Gods model first, but I figure the Goddesses probably tell them what to do anyway ("Zeus, stop sitting on your fat ass watching football and go forge that river, I've been asking you all week.") I like women much more than men anyway, and who knows, maybe the Goddesses get better gas mileage, something I could really use right now.

So I start this little prayer. I don't say it out loud, I'm not crazy for Goddesses sake. But I tell them I'm going to believe in them and keep trying to be a better person as a symbol of that devotion. I am half-joking, but I figure why not, here I am, this loser walking up a hill with a gas can in his hand. Might as well call on the power of the Goddesses. Maybe Artemis will take a liking to me – I hear she's very attractive. I ask for nothing in return.

Literally less than five minutes later a truck pulls up next to me. The driver has seen the gas can and asks me if I need a ride to the station, still at least twenty minutes away uphill. I am wary that he might be an axe murderer, so I stop at the door of the truck and scrutinize him for a moment. I instinctively sense that he is okay, so I hop in the truck and off we go.

He was driving the opposite way down the hill, but decided to turn around and stop because he could see I could use some help. Better yet, he offers to drive me back to my car – saving me anywhere from an hour to 90 minutes of my time. He is a contractor on his way to visit a client, and he had the time to spare anyway.

I thank him and tell him he deserves good karma, if such a thing exists. Of course it exists, he says. We start a conversation about the lousy state of the world, and how much better it could be if we all stopped being so selfish, but instead looked to help each other out. Maybe developed a sense of community instead of just all this me me me self absorption (those are not the exact words, but I wasn't taking notes, so that's pretty much the gist of it.) I tell him that I intend to pay his act forward. I think the Goddesses might get mad at me if I don't, although I don't mention that to him. Let's just call it karma. He says that when he finally gets to heaven, he wants to be the guy that would have given someone the shirt off his back if they needed it.

This mundane encounter really helped me at a critical moment. The past few weeks have been exhausting, stressful and I've been experiencing some sleepless nights and heart palpitations. Creative projects are not going well right now. I have a history of not completing them and I often feel like a failure and a fraud. But unlike how I would have handled this in the past, I am not laying on the floor bemoaning my fate. I am getting through it, already thinking of solutions because the forward momentum I've felt for the past year has been so amazing and I won't let it go.

I can't believe sometimes that I've gotten so far from the days when I wanted to hurt myself or go out of this world. I felt like I was submerged under about fifteen feet of water, but I could still see the rest of the world up there around the pool, living their lives, celebrating their accomplishments and regretting their mistakes, but living, while I was totally isolated under all that water, barely capable of even observing what was going on. I do not feel this way anymore. There are moments, but now instead of plunging into a deep depression that might last several weeks, it's now more a matter of hours. And I'm getting things done, discovering talents and powers I didn't know I had.

What happened this morning wasn't exactly like Moses parting the Red Sea, but it renewed my faith and helped me regain some of the strength I need to get these thoughts, images and stories out of my head and onto film, paper or the stage. I am definitely not short of ideas, but I do need to find the focus to complete two or three of them while the others wait their turn in line. This encounter showed that there are really some good people left in this world, which might strike some as a corny cliche, but it's true, and we need to believe in that right now. We need it more than ever, because things are falling apart, and it's up to us – not some savior on a white horse – to put it all back together again. With a little assistance from the Goddesses of course.

I must also tell you the name of the man who helped me. His name is Rich DiMassa and he owns a company called Dents Out. He does everything out of his truck – dent, windshield and wheel repair. So if you're in the South Bay area, you should call him if someone side swipes your car at the supermarket or throws a rock at your windshield. I know, it's a plug, and it might seem a little tacky, but it's just one way to thank him. You can find him at 310-523-9455 or 800-437-0777. Please send him business. And that is not even the most important thing I need to do to repay him – the second reason is what I talked about earlier – pay it forward, treat others with kindness and help make the world a little, tiny fraction better. And I better not forget about the Goddesses either cause I definitely don't want them upset at me. Maybe a few of you can also consider doing this, whether you believe in a higher power or not.

In conclusion, I must state that any grammatical or spelling errors in this piece are my own. The Goddesses (and spell check) can only do so much. They give you a hint or two, but then you have to do the rest.

[krazyclue]

Hosted an informal table read of musical called DEPENDENT YOUTH I am co-writing with Lorne Stevenson, Jr. We got very perceptive notes and feedback. Script is still being written but we will be having a public staged reading early next year. We will be recruiting musicians to help complete the score and train the actors to play instruments on stage (perhaps accompanied by another band hidden discretely behind a scrim.) The project will be submitted to the Hollywood Fringe Festival 2017. Tonight’s fictional band included Lorne as Eric, the lead singer, Harim Sanchez as Phil, the guitarist, and Keri Lee Winser as Sarah, the drummer.  Bill Lee Brown played Eric’s father and a manager who makes Dependent Youth an offer. #theatre #musical #acting

[krazyclue]

We Build Pretty Mausoleums and Go Rollerskating

Maybe the second or third cadillac margarita put the idea in my head. At the time, walking from Manhattan Beach to Hermosa during the weekend of the big volleyball tournament, it felt like revealed truth. No one lives here. The Strand’s rows of multi-million dollar hotel sized houses, some spanning 3 or even 4 lots, are mostly deserted at night—I know because my friend and I peaked through the windows. We even dipped our toes in a pool or two, or so say the margaritas . And with only a few exceptions, there were no people. We have noticed this phenomenon at other times throughout the year, and so it wasn’t just a case of people being out of town or down the street at the bars. Some of these homes are so large they look like a Bond villains lair that might roll on enormous castors down toward the water, revealing themselves to be a cruise ship, and then sail away. And they are impressively lit—but nary a soul in sight. There are exceptions—a catered party in one home, with a piano player and dozens of people sharing a toast on the top floor, and two couples having dinner on the deck of another, big enough to hold hundreds. We see one man reading a book in an otherwise empty home. But mostly no one is around. I get hit by all these old recollections and memories, not all of them actually mine. When Hermosa Beach still had freaks and weirdoes, or when Black Flag (and Redd Kross and the Descendants too) practiced at an abandoned Baptist church logically called The Church, it’s former location now a very expensive gastropub themed eatery selling $16 hamburgers. Sitting on a bench across from The Lighthouse, you’d never think it was once the hub of the West Coast jazz scene and that greats like Chet Baker, Miles Davis and Max Roach among many others played there. I think of the time an old movie theatre called The Bijou closed, and my friend and I wandered into it during that closing night, and later, when I spent the night with her, telling myself to remember every detail I could, cause it was important; the shadows of the others come out to say goodbye to the Bijou, backlit by the light from the projector through which no film was shown, and her skin, and breath and voice. Don’t forget this night, ever. I’m not suggesting that times were better then, but maybe they were, cause I was younger and the nights seemed to stretch on forever the way they don’t as you get older. But when I dipped my toe in an infinity pool near one of these multi-million dollar mausoleums, or so the margaritas say I did anyway, my friend and I couldn’t help but wish to pull together an army of tattooed, love-beaded, half-naked freaks from past and present, tart the place up with graffiti and a few fires maybe, and just on the general principal that we were in Hermosa Beach, birthplace of Black Flag and a whole underground movement, fuck the place up, creatively speaking of course, no wholesale, wanton destruction for us, oh no. But since such fantasies are far better in theory than practice, and we are middle-aged anyway, we walked back to Manhattan Beach and got coffee at Starbucks instead. Maybe we can come see the pretty Mausoleums again some other night, and get jobs as caretakers at one, and remake The Shining, but this time at the beach with a parade of hot, young women rollerskating past—but that sounds like the margaritas talking again. I need that coffee. And this will never quite be my home again. Even as I engage with writing and acting with greater commitment and sense of purpose, I know something will be missing for me here, even when (think positive always) I have the money to afford a house on the Strand. Even if I could say, rebuild the Bijou Theater and The Church and every lost South Bay landmark of my youth, creating the exact duplicate of my perfect fantasy Hermosa Beach, something essential would be missing for me here. A sense of community perhaps, but that exists here undoubtedly, I’m just cut off from it. I am going to find what I’m looking for, even if it’s not here—and maybe, just maybe, that is where all the people have gone.