She’s a Brick
It’s the 50th Anniversary Year of LEGO and there’s been a lot of great coverage on Gizmodo.
I used to play with Legos almost exclusively when I was a kid. I had the Space sets and various second-hand assortments of generic bricks. My favorite pieces were the little four-way maneuvering thruster pieces that came with the Space set — facsimiles of the thrusters on the actual Apollo command module.
An interesting thing I read in the above Gizmodo article: There’s an internal corporate law that states that no Lego sets are allowed to include guns. I had never known that or even thought about it. But it’s true — I can’t recall a Lego set containing a gun of any sort. Cannons yes (Pirate set), guns no.
So that’s where this brilliant company called BrickArms comes in. All they make are tiny guns for your Lego minifigs. So you can finally reenact WW II in Lego form. But the best thing — the very best thing — is that they make little Lego Terr’ist minifigs that you can order:
They’re called “Lego Bandits”, but we all know they’re ready to join the Lego intifadah and get their jihad on.
What would be really neat is that you could have them be arrested by the Lego CITY FBI, swap out their bodies for orange minifig jumpsuits and put them in your own little Lego Gitmo. Fun!
Boolean: I like Facebook a lot, but the relationship dealies (“In a Relationship”, “It’s Complicated”, etc., etc.) are things I don’t like. You’re taking human relationships (friendship, romance) and making them boolean. “Are we friends — YES or NO”. Honestly, some people are more acquaintances than friends. Some people I would call up because I want to see Wall-E with them. Some people I don’t. There are a lot of shades of gray. By proclaiming you’re in a relationship/not in a relationship, you’re taking an analog situation and making it digital — taking something qualitative and making it quantitative. That’s creepy to me.
I think using Facebook to specify whether you are married is OK though because marriage is boolean. You’re either married or you’re not. It has very state-specific connotations. But even then it’s very weird to me because you’re taking a private joy (or private humiliation in terms of a breakup) and making it public. As public as a blinker on a car signaling that you’re going left. Why bother?
Study
I spend as much time dissecting and analyzing other peoples’ work as I do writing. I’ve always been into taking things apart and figuring out how they tick. This started with the Commodore 64 I had when I was a kid. It wasn’t enough to play the games — I loved examining their code to see how they worked.
This was back in the day when computer magazines came with programs printed in them that you typed in manually and ran. Kind of like a super-analog Usenet — the method of downloading was typing.
I used to spend hours typing in programs, running them, then modifying the code to see what would happen. I would write new code to add features or adjust existing features. For instance, I added joystick support for a version of C64 PONG that used the keyboard.
So I spend a lot of time these days reading stuff, breaking it down on paper, and turning it around in my head. I’m currently reading the plays of Sarah Ruhl — they’re funny with a sense of clarity and emotional punch that I love. I’m also re-reading Stephen Adly Guirguis’s plays because they’re awesome. I just re-read Paul Auster’s Timbuktu and am currently re-reading McCarthy’s The Road, and I have to sit down sometime soon and reverse engineer the outline for Juno.
I think storytelling is about re-imagining the everything that we have personally experienced — taking bits and pieces from the world around us and fusing them together into something new. It’s good to see what’s out there and understand how people do what they do. I’m like a friendly, very curious Borg. I use my nanoprobes to assimilate hamburgers and knowledge.
Hot Hot Heat
Knicknacks: It has been hot here in LA, hotter than it was in NYC. You know what helps the heat? A Snickers Ice Cream Cake. These are meatloaf-sized Snickers ice cream bars with a cake-like granular matter embedded inside. Perfectly sized for a family of four or for one sumo wrestler.
They are great. Not as great as the ice cream bars, but it’s pretty wonderful to sit there with a couple of people and dissect one of these things together.
Yes, my web site has gotten a little skull-intensive as of late. But I think that’s OK — one skull is a direct descendant hailing from the heritage of the other. And besides, I love skulls. When I come into a pile of “found” money I plan to buy one for my desk. It’s good to be reminded of where you’re headed. Oh shit, no pun intended!
I saw a yarmulke lying on the sidewalk yesterday. It was dirty and mooshed, and it made me a little sad to see it there. But I think I was the wrong person to rescue it.
Or maybe I should’ve.
On a Mission: My mind’s wrapped up in a project of mine; I have rewrites that I’m doing at the same time, but this project feels like something really important. Like I’m tinkering in the basement working on an invention that’s more than a transparent toaster or a beer hat. It means something special to me.
Usually I write something because it’s interesting to me or it’s funny or I like the story or the characters. It’s rare when there’s something special about it that I can’t put my finger on. This is something like that. I’m being vague about it because I can’t understand it myself. I grasp it, I get what it means, but there’s something magical about it in a far-away sense, like a Christmas morning that could come at any time. It’s weird.
A New York Groove (Part Two)
I was in NYC doing a workshop so I spent most of the time in the studio. We used a room at Tisch, which was conveniently located across the street from a McDonalds. You know that I’m a junk food junkie. McDonalds breakfast food is some of my favorite breakfast food of all time.
On the same floor as the studio was a room devoted to clowning. It is called the Clown Room. There were people clowning all day in the clown room. I’m not joking. They looked kind of like beardo-ish hippies and were making weird noises and tumbling.
New York City is so huge that it makes sense that somewhere in it is a room devoted to clowning. There are probably two or three, actually.
We got to see Hamlet at the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park. This was seriously the most fun Hamlet I’ve ever seen. The design set Hamlet in an unknown time period — everyone was dressed in 1920s sort of military/regal duds, kind of like the Monopoly Guy. The set was built to look like a prison with Hamlet on the inside, and there were numerous visual/audio references to warfare going on outside the walls. Also, our friend Hoon was Rosencrantz. Normally bald, this time he had hair.
This guy, Michael Stuhlbarg, was a wacky Hamlet. He made weird sound effects and galavanted all over the place doing fun things. It was a nice turn from the standard brooding, cheer-up-emo-kid Hamlet. This makes me realize that if I ever get an opportunity to mount a Hamlet, I would like my Hamlet to be a crazed, hilarious psychopath who lashes out violently at any moment both physically and verbally. That would be ideal for me.
Sam Waterston was Polonius. He was SO GOOD. He was my favorite part of the performance. I had this idea in my head of how he was going to deliver his lines and I was sitting on the edge of my seat waiting to see if reality matched my imagination. He was grandfatherly and goofy and fun, and when Polonius was killed I almost sorta lost interest in the whole endeavor. The best part was when Hamlet asks Polonius if he’s ever been in a play — the audience hooted and clapped, a reference to Sam Waterston’s own turn as Hamlet in 1975.
This was my first time seeing Shakespeare in the Park and it was pretty much a perfect moment. It was an outdoor theater; a storm was brewing above, and every now and then thunder and lightning would boom. When Hamlet died, rain started to tap-tap-tap down… And at curtain call it miraculously stopped.
Afterwards we waited to see Hoon and comment about his hair. And Dan knows Andre Braugher (he was playing Claudius), so we got to meet him. And at that point the clouds opened up — BOOM — and dropped sheets of rain on everything. I got soaked to the bone.
It’s a surreal thing to be huddled under a tiny umbrella running through Central Park with Andre Braugher while rain’s coming down in buckets. I don’t know if that’s just life or if the Big Narrator decided to let the story go off the rails. It was memorable, for sure.
A New York Groove (Part One)
I just got back from New York City. I have a few tales to tell — this is part one.
I took Virgin America this time. A couple of neat differences are the entertainment system (with some pretty great touchscreen games), fairly comfy seats, and the fact that you can use your touchscreen to order food which is delivered to your seat.
So I order a sandwich and the airline attendant brings it to my seat… And accidentally gives it to the woman across the aisle from me. If I were handed a sandwich that I didn’t order, common sense dictates that I would tell the attendant that this sandwich wasn’t mine and probably belongs to someone else.
Not this lady. She immediately began eating it. Or rather, her face seemed to absorb it as if by osmosis. She saw her opportunity and took it, devouring the sandwich and leaving no trace evidence behind.
I flagged down the attendant and played innocent and dumb — “Hey, um… Where’s my sandwich?” And the attendant realized that she had given my sandwich to the wrong person. There was no guilt or remorse on display from the sandwich-eating lady. And the attendant, feeling pretty dumb by this time, brought me another sandwich.
I didn’t care. I got my sandwich in the end, and sandwich-eating lady got a free sandwich from Richard Branson. The moral of the story is to be more like her — be bold. When life throws you a free sandwich, eat it as quickly as possible.
I decided to try taking public transit from JFK to Lloyd’s place. This actually turned out to be a lot easier and even quicker than I imagined.
There’s a new light rail that goes from all the JFK terminals to LIRR. It’s called AirTrain. You can then take LIRR to a station in Brooklyn, and then catch the train there to wherever you want. You can also take the A train directly from JFK.
It took about 45 minutes (the same length of time as a cab; less time than a cab if it’s rush hour), and the total trip cost around $12-13 (a quarter of the price of a cab).
Given these facts, I’m never going to take another cab again. Why would I?
It makes me wish LA had great public transit. Our buses are only good for observing crackheads.
I have a sort of nostalgia for the NYC subway. The musty humidity mixed with the whiff of tinkle makes me kinda happy in a way. It makes me feel like I’m going somewhere and I’m going to get there soon. Or the whole thing’s going to break down and I’m going to wait there for an hour. Either way it’s good because I don’t have to do any driving.
Year Zero in Chicago
This summer Year Zero has been selected for workshop development at Chicago Dramatists as part of their Many Voices Project (funded by the National Endowment for the Arts) and by Chicago’s Tony Award-winning Victory Gardens Theater for their IGNITION: Emerging Playwrights of Color Initiative (supported by the Ford Foundation).
Please join me for staged readings in Chicago this July and August, as well as planned events at both Chicago Dramatists and Victory Gardens celebrating playwrights of color.
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Public Reading on Saturday, July 19th, 7:30 PM Chicago Dramatists Theatre Many Voices 2008 Grand Prize Winner |
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Public Reading on Sunday, August 10th, 12:00 PM Victory Gardens Biograph Theater |
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Number One with a Bullet
My current favorite item for bribing myself: Snickers ice cream bars. Whoever invented these deserves the Nobel Prize for snackology. I could eat Snickers ice cream bars for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I could eat an entire box of them. They are the new bacon.
Next weekend is the last weekend of the Thumping Claw show. It’s been a good run — an interesting run to say the least — and I’ve learned a lot about my piece that will help me going forward.
It’s pretty great working with actors. Our piece was all about women — the cast was all female, our wonderful director is a woman, so I was the only man in the room during rehearsals. However, I always left my penis out in the hall, so that worked out pretty well. Except for the night somebody stole it. But we located it in the lost and found, so it’s all good.
(Although that is somewhat of a blow to your ego: When someone steals your penis, then decides they don’t really want it anymore and drops it in the lost and found bin.)
Anyway, working with actors and a director is great. Working on a piece is like being on an archaeological dig. When you have other people there helping you, the treasures are unearthed sooner and more easily.
Writing is predominantly a solitary process, so it’s a joy to get it out there in a roomful of other people and work the material. That’s where I have a great deal of the fun that occurs in my life. As I go into the rest of the summer and the other two theater projects on my plate, that’s what I’m looking forward to the most.
I think if I only wrote for film, the solitude would drive me insane. That’s one of the wonders of theater — it’s a collaborative process with the writer at its center. And it teaches you a lot about writing — even writing for film. Kind of like how sculpture will teach you things about painting, and vice-versa.
But working with people is the best part. It makes the material social, and that’s something that you don’t get anywhere else.
My Work in Print
Year Zero
Available from Samuel French and Amazon.com
Cowboy Versus Samurai
Available from Samuel French and Amazon.comFor a complete list of books containing my work, please click here.
