I’ve complained lots of times in my life about the post office (and if you know me, you know my favorite sobriquet for the service is the Post Awful). Why? Because, obviously, I love it. I have eagerly awaited the mail every delivery day of my life as long as I can remember. I remember the thrill at age 10 of getting the latest jiffy pack of vintage comics ordered from comics dealer Robert Bell delivered to my door in southern New Jersey from the impossibly distant Hauppauge, NY. (And can still remember specifically one of the comics received that way, Fantastic Four #54.) I discovered RBCC (Rocket’s Blast Comic Collector) in an ad in Marvel comics, thereafter receiving that magazine in the mail. That introduced me to all of fandom, and to several important close relationships, and to publishing my own fanzines, and to getting paid to appear in print. And how did I get paid? Most of my life, right up to this point, it’s been through the mail. The same as my father, who also haunted the mailbox.

So:  just so you know, all my complaints about the post office are those of a lover who has discovered romance and expects it to be as deeply fulfilling every time as it once was. I’m excited to arrive home and find that either The New Yorker or a comic book has  arrived in the mail, and I’m disappointed when it hasn’t. It’s a misplaced disappointment — the post office has nothing to do with publishing timetables — but love doesn’t truckle with reason.

What brings this on is a depressing exchange I had recently with a good friend. Depressing because I found myself confessing at length that I had no use for first-class stamps, no matter how attractive and perfectly suited to my own interests. My rational side explained the situation; my emotional side was revulsed by my own argument. What occasioned this was yet another plea from my friend to go out and buy some of those cool first-class stamps that the post office is now constantly issuing (in the hopes of boosting sales). Yes, I bought a pane of the DC comics stamps and admired their beauty. Yes, I bought a pane of the Marvel comics stamps (although I was puzzled by the choice of some of the characters depicted). But in each case I then found I had no use for them. So when my friend recommended buying the new stamps of classic TV stars, here was my unfortunately smartass reply:

Please let me know how to load these into the Pitney Bowes machine at my office. ‘Cause I would love to be printing these out on statements, payments, etc. (Which provides the entirety of my outgoing first-class mail.)

Yeah, nice, huh? Not my proudest moment. For 30 years and more, it has been hard to drub out the unfortunate early influence of reading so much Harlan Ellison; it pains me to see it there again, and deployed on a friend.

My even-tempered (and revered) good friend responded this way:

Lee, Those stamps are for when you send love notes, birthday cards, or words of wisdom.  The artistical postage adds immeasurably to the effectualness.

Yes. And then here was my response, which included other friends by now on this thread:

Love notes don’t require postage. If they’re to my wife, they’re distributed here at  home. (If they were to someone else, I doubt I’d want my return address, or other proof of origin, so they wouldn’t be mailed.)

I don’t send birthday cards. Did anyone on this email get one? I think not.

Words of wisdom. Well, as proved with this communication, I send these electronically. (In this way, or on my blog.) [Note:  this is more of that Ellison influence.]

As we all know, I love the mail. And I — I! — barely use it. I like the idea of trains, too, but other than subways, I haven’t ridden a train in about 10 years. And then it was too slow and too costly. (This, however, is a US problem. The trains in Europe are remarkable — inexpensive, fast and convenient.) I think the roundtrip from Los Angeles to San Diego on the Sunliner, with restricted hours, and requiring leaving one’s car somewhere, is almost $100. For that, I’ll drive the 125 miles each way.

The one non-business first-class communication I do still send — the sympathy card — I can’t imagine adding a Simpsons stamp to.

I bought a pane of those Marvel comics stamps and found I had almost no use for them. When postage went up, I was still trying to use them — and now had to buy “helper” stamps.

Sorry. I like the idea of them, but stamps are a utilitarian product, and for me at least, they no longer have any utility.

Feeling sad,

Lee

So there it is. I am one of the people killing the post office. And I love the post office — and am willing to admit it this once. This is merely the latest of my ungrateful crimes:

• I love newspapers, but I’m not buying them
• I love books, but don’t go to bookstores
• I love music, but don’t go to music stores
• I love my community, but I buy almost all non-grocery items online

When was the last time I mailed a letter? I can’t remember. Worse, I haven’t gotten around to reading the last one I received (!). As someone who believes in personal responsibility, its flip side must hold true, so I don’t believe in suffering free-floating guilt. I wish people weren’t getting massacred all over the globe, and I’d like to fix that somehow, but because I’m not doing the killing myself, I don’t feel guilty. With these other, smaller, matters I am partly culpable. But in a society in which convenience, formerly costly, has also become cheaper, in which the digital download of intellectual property is faster and less expensive and less polluting than the physical object, I don’t hold out any hope for the tangible future of books or newspapers or music or stamps. Feeling bad won’t change that.

Here’s actor Bostin Christopher’s take on how he got cast in my play “He Said She Said,” which opens next Saturday here in Los Angeles. My quick response:  Yes, I wrote it with him in mind — and yes, he still had to audition for the role.

Why?

Because the director, in this case Ross Kramer, had never seen him. Never even met him. So while I had the benefit of seeing Bostin’s work in a variety of venues the past two years, it would have been a lot to ask someone else to cast him sight unseen. That was my thinking anyway. And how much do I trust this director? I didn’t even go to the auditions.  I’ve worked with lots of different directors, and I can’t think of another time in 30 years of getting produced that a play of mine was auditioning in town and I didn’t go.

So here’s the thing:  Bostin is terrific in my play. Unsurprisingly, he’s doing a good  job of playing a role that I wrote with him in mind. As for the female role, I saw that one very differently than how Rebecca Davis is playing it (and how Ross is directing it), but now that I’ve seen this take it’ll be extremely hard to see it any other way. Until, that is, I do. Nobody wants his play to be done just once.

What playwrights do want, though, is for their plays to be done well, with a director and actors bringing things to the production that add to the experience.  Playwrights who get productions in which people detract from the experience know exactly what I’m talking about. My first production was in high school and went fine; for my first production in college I was saddled with a female lead whose habit it was to deliver every line like a crazed magpie: “Got any MAG-a-ziiiiinnnnnes?” Some years ago in New York a director decided that my play about artists in hiding from the government actually was about a lesbian subtext that he freely invented — and directed for accordingly. (On opening night, the cast and I, by now thoroughly creeped out by this guy, ditched him for our own party elsewhere.)

I’ve got more such stories — you do this long enough and you collect them. But I’ve also had many productions that left me awash with gratitude. To fly in somewhere, especially a small town, and see how hard and how well they’ve worked on your play, how much they’ve committed and achieved, leaves you humbled.  Whatever alchemy produced the run-through I saw of this new play of mine the other night, I’m grateful for it.

Tickets are now available for that extra-long, extra-wide one-act festival that opens (or, begins opening) next week here in Los Angeles. (The one that has me out at rehearsals and tech rehearsals and dress rehearsals and so forth at all hours.)

My play “He Said She Said” is part of “Passions,” which is a “Keystone” event; I’m directing “Move” by Trey Nichols on the same night; I’m directing “The Incident Report” by EM Lewis as part of the “Special Presentation” called “Flight”; and word has it I’m writing one of the segments of the “Spotlight” event “Arachnatopia” at the Natural History Museum. (Which means I’d better start writing it.) Can’t follow all that? Go to this link and… just buy all of it.

Hope to see you there.

Yesterday a friend and I went to Long Beach to see the Brian Eno installation, “77 Million Paintings,”  at the University Art Museum of California State University Long Beach. The genesis of the 77 million paintings enumerated in the title — which, Eno later said during his lecture, would actually be 77 million cubed —  is described well in this piece by the LA Times’ Reed Johnson. In short, a video mosaic of 12 individual screens pulls images randomly from grouped sets contained in databases held by three different computers, generating an ongoing series of freshly executed video “paintings,” which are sonically supported by a soundtrack of  sound loops on six separate tape decks, resulting in randomized musical accompaniment. The intention is to remove deliberation and intention from the artistic process; the result is mesmerizing. As my friend and I found, it was quite easy to get lost in the neverending self-generating inventions of the computers and the tape decks. For one brief period, I felt detached from space and time. I’ve had this feeling before with some art, in various disciplines, but only rarely.

Later, we attended Eno’s lecture at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center (also part of Cal State Long Beach). After 30 years of following the man’s career in all its phases — rock star, record producer, artist, writer, thinker — this was our first chance to see him in the flesh. Eno proved to be thoughtful, puckish, droll, and concerned, in equal measures. I would characterize the first third of his lecture as an admonishment to let go. (This should be expected from an artist whose visual work is created largely from computer generation.) He started by reminding us of something we’ve known for 566 years, since Copernicus:  that not only we are not at the center of the universe, we are off in a small corner, in one of a billion billion solar systems, and we exist as only one of innumerable species just on this one planet, where only an estimated 10% of species have been cataloged. In other words,  Get over yourself. Again, this viewpoint should be expected from someone extolling the virtues of random, unemotionally generated, art.

On the way home I wondered aloud how well these theories that can work so well  in visual art and music would work in long-form narrative. Having read (or tried to read) Samuel Beckett’s novels and some of William S. Burroughs’ longer pieces, I unfortunately believe I know too well. In such cases, even a little plot can go a long way. Organic writing — which I practice and preach — benefits from pruning and shaping. Effects can engage an audience, but only for so long; the best effect is an emotional verisimilitude, however achieved, that transports people into a deep level of caring about what happens. That occurs in better productions of “Waiting for Godot” because Didi and Gogo are present and we can relate; it never happens with “The Unnameable,” which is a true chore to read. When he’s collaborating with, say, Robert Fripp, Eno is free to produce an album of electronic feedback loops, but when he’s producing records for U2 or Coldplay, he must serve the song. To his immense credit, he never claimed in this talk that he was abandoning all oversight; rather, he talked about intentional balance, moderating oneself along the continuum between surrendering all control, or controling all elements, depending upon the desired outcome. I think that’s about right.

If you’re interested in “77 Million Paintings” and cannot make it to Long Beach, where it runs through December, here’s some good news:  a beautiful software-and-DVD version exists. Here it is on Amazon.com.  I bought a copy at the museum, and at about 35 bucks, it’s a steal. The package includes the software to run these self-generating images on  your computer, with accompanying soundtrack. In addition, there’s a beautiful booklet with notes from the artist, plus an interview DVD. Get it and surrender all control to it.

• President Obama’s health-care speech last night (great job!) and his killer tactic of inducing that thick-necked GOP jerk to yell out “You lie!” That alone will have swung enough support. Once again, other people have misunderestimated you, sir president. We watch and learn.
• The Gallup-originated “Strengths-Based Leadership” test I took today, which sized me up as having strengths in Strategic, Activator, Individualization, Responsibility, and Input, resulting from oddly dichotomous choices like “You believe in ghosts” vs. “You like chocolate.” More on this tomorrow, I think, when my neck isn’t killing me. I also would have preferred that the test conclude in words of the same form — all adjectives or all nouns or all gerunds or all something the same. These qualities — Strategic Activator, etc. — sound like mistranslations from the Chinese, like Glorious Serving Sword of Destiny.
• My second night of rehearsals with my cast, and hearing my rewrites for the first time. Short version:  New opening line sucked (and my actor rightly asked for the old one back); new purposely bad poem is deliciously bad and probably earns a laugh right where I planned because, as I suspected, the actor has the chops to get that laugh and got it right away; still very glad to have the director and actors I have. The director has better ideas than I do, so again, I’m glad he’s directing and I’m not.
• How “lack mentality” drives me crazy. Brief definition:  “I lack [fill in the blank], so I can’t do [fill in the blank].” It’s just reflexive with people. (Most people?) Once you’ve trained your ear to hear it,  you hear it all the time. Why not instead:  “I want to [fill in the blank], so I have to [fill in the blank].” That’s more actionable; you can actually do something about it. I think today I heard the lack mentality about six times. In one case, I’m concerned that an important arts institution is going to go under — or at least suffer greatly — because of all the lacking going on.
• My thrill at getting a new script by one of my favorite playwrights. In fact, right now I’m going to go read it in the jacuzzi because, for some reason, my neck is killing me.

Yes, today is 9/9/09, the day that a bunch of 40-year-old albums by a certain band got re-released in various CD re-packagings, to the delight of millions around the world.

For others among us, it was another day in the countdown toward the new Pere Ubu album, “Long Live Pere Ubu!” Even if it turns out I hate it, I guarantee it’ll be far more artistically provocative than any other new music coming out this month. Yes, the Beatles were provocative. Forty years ago.

The new Ubu album brings together two things I’ve been interested in for a long time:  the band Pere Ubu, and the inspiration for their name, Alfred Jarry’s “Ubu Roi.” “Ubu Roi” was an adolescent prank — a play written by a high-school kid to mock his teacher. I wrote a novel in a similar tone when I was the same age, but my novel’s still in a box somewhere while Jarry’s play radically changed its artform. (Do we get to have Ionesco, or Theatre of the Absurd as a whole, without Jarry? Probably not.)

Fittingly, Pere Ubu the band has been every  bit as influential as “Ubu Roi,” and even more doggedly uncommercial. One of the bonus features on an Ubu CD is a series of documents, including one that references an album’s sales as numbering about 6,000. This for a band with a three-decade history and a sound that influenced Nine Inch Nails, the Pixies (and, therefore, Nirvana), Joy Division, REM, Thomas Dolby, Hüsker Dü, Henry Rollins, Bauhaus, and innumerable others including the entire industrial-rock movement, a band rightfully recognized in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (albeit in an undeservedly small corner), where one of singer David Thomas’ instruments is proudly displayed:  a railroad spike with accompanying ball peen hammer. And if you listen closely enough, you can hear that very instrument on some early tracks where it is played to perfection.

This FAQ about the rationale behind the concept and recording of “Long Live Pere Ubu!” speaks to some of the many reasons I love this band. Imagine this sentiment, by David Thomas about the resurgent appearance of the monstrous Pere Ubu wherever you look, being uttered by any other recording artist this long in the game:  “Regardless of whoever or whatever it is that you personally choose to lionize, it’s more than likely that such a person or organization is Père Ubu. Every talking head that you see and admire on the tv is Père Ubu.” Thirty-four years on, 20 years past the last gasping relevance of the Rolling Stones, Pere Ubu retains the industrial crackle of original thought. That makes every new CD by them a release worthy of anticipation.

I have to do some rewrites on my new play tonight so that I can hear them at tomorrow night’s rehearsal, but I thought I’d procrastinate first. (I am a writer, after all.) So I turned on the television.

First, I saw an episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit!, which dealt partly with all the millions of people in Africa suffering from HIV and AIDS because they can’t get access to condoms.

When that was over, I caught the tail end of a documentary on another channel concerning the closing of a GM factory in Ohio. The crew followed about a dozen different long-term assembly plant workers around the shop floor on their last weeks, right up to closing day. You have never seen so many grown men cry.

Then on a third channel I caught the last 20 minutes of a documentary about a son who just couldn’t take his mother any more and killed her. The documentary is from the point of view of his older sister. I caught the scene where she asks their father why he never intervened in what I take to be his now-slain wife’s endless criticism and abuse. He says that if he’d suggested therapy, the mother would have divorced him, and so he didn’t know what to do, the daughter says that doesn’t absolve him, so the father bolts up from the interview and storms out of the house. The next scene is the sister visiting her brother in prison.

After this, I was afraid to see what I’d find elsewhere on TV. So now I’m writing the play. Who says theatre isn’t escapism?

My new one-act play, “He Said She Said,” goes up next month here in Los Angeles. (Details to follow.) Today was our first table reading. Between that, and a drinks meeting I had with my director just over a week ago, I’m reminded again why it’s better if playwrights don’t direct their own plays. At least, this playwright.

I am a director, and depending upon the rightness of the material for me and whether or not I screw it up, I think I’m a pretty good one. But I don’t think I have the sort of insights into my own plays that good directors have. That’s because, having written the play, I can’t discover it.  In this case, I thought I had written a simple short play in the style of story theatre. Listening to my director talk about it, I realized that what I’d written was closer to a short story narrated in first-person. This may seem like a fine distinction, but it’s not:  Short stories plant images in your mind for you to conjure, while stage plays put them on stage for you to see. This was going to require more directing that I had realized, and probably some changes in the text to eliminate redundancies. (The narrator telling us something, and the actors then doing it. Which unless done for comic effect would be like hearing a skip in a record. It should be one or the other.) I wonder, had I been directing this, how far into the rehearsal process we would have gotten before I discovered this. With good actors (which I’m lucky to have), pretty quickly, I think, because they would have told me. But I hadn’t discovered it already, and my director had. So he definitely earned my attention early on. When someone is being smarter than you, you should listen.

While this play is in rehearsal, I’m also directing a new one-act in an evening of plays by my good friend and former student EM Lewis. We had our first script meeting last week and I think it was like the meeting above, but now I was in the other chair. The current draft of the play is 18 pages, and the discussion took 2 hours, 17 minutes. She is a fine writer. The play has strong characters and good conflict and wonderful dialogue; all those things I like. But there were things I didn’t understand about the play, and to be able to present a vision of it, I needed to understand it. The fault may have been mine, or the playwright’s, or more likely there may have been no fault but rather a case of things that work and things that don’t work, depending upon your line of attack on the play. With “Hamlet,” is Hamlet deranged, or is he crafty, or both? Making that initial decision determines the playing of everything that follows. It’s always that way with all plays — at least the good ones. Bad plays have no creative ambiguity; they are resolutely what they are.

Next week I start on the other two of the four theatre projects I’m doing this and next month. My friend Trey Nichols has been commissioned to write a one-act play for the same festival; I’ll be helping him shape the material with a small cast (three or four actors) and co-directing with him. And I’m also involved in a project at the Natural History Museum where, if I’m understanding this correctly, six or so of us are writing short environmental scenes that interconnect into a larger play about their new spider exhibit. I know which character I’m writing, and that character’s basic storyline (which I pitched), and the actress playing that role (Liz Harris, a good actor I’ve worked with many times).

In “My Dinner With Andre,” Andre Gregory relates to Wallace Shawn that daily life dulls us to our own existence, and that we need to break our patterns to re-engage. I think that with four theatre projects all at the same time and all with different frameworks, I’ll be very conscious for the next two months.

In which the film version of The Road gets an early review every bit as devastating as the apocalypse that catalyzes the novel.

Between 1907 and 1915, the photographer of Czar Nicholas II traveled his nation taking photographs of pre-Revolutionary Russia. In color. Here are 28 of them — including one of Leo Tolstoy — and they are stunning.