Hope I remain worth reading.

NECROPOLIS 1&2:
World Gone Wrong/Worth Gun Willed

Gemini CollisionWorks

December 1 – 18, 2012

created by Ian W. Hill
assisted by Berit Johnson

*Appearing courtesy of Actors’ Equity Association

A world where the leaders lie, cheat, steal and murder. A world where Art and Science and Beauty and Reason are no longer valued. A world where survival means selling out, and trying to do the “right thing” means failure as a human being. A familiar place? Yes, of course, it is the
fictional, 1940’s world of film noir, nothing like our own present world at all, right? Right? Or has noir come true, and we’re all living in a world gone wrong?

Combining a cast of 21 in precision choreography with slides and an entirely pre-recorded collage soundtrack to which the actors perform as if “dubbed,” World Gone Wrong is a celebration of the ability to stay true to, and fight for, one’s own convictions in a land where “moral values” is just a mask that hides greed, hatred, fear, backstabbing, and lies. World Gone Wrong is a film noir pastiche-play consisting of dialogue from over 150 noirs, as well as quotes from a recent U.S. Administration and other pertinent sources, combined into an original spellbinding, semiabstract, dreamlike tale of corruption, betrayal, and revenge as two men (who many be one man) travel through their own dreams in a city (which may be two cities) where day never comes, to avenge their own deaths in a landscape of iconic film noir figures.

1 hour 45 minutes

Sat Dec 1 @ 3pm
Wed Dec 5 @ 8pm
Fri Dec 7 @ 7:30pm
Sat Dec 8 @ 3pm
Wed Dec 12 @ 8pm
Fri Dec 14 @ 8pm
Tue Dec 18 @ 8pm

$15

So I've been gone for many months from here, but intending to return. Just haven't felt like I had much to say, or rather, what I had to say fit better on Facebook. But some people might actually venture here from Zack Calhoun's blog Visible Soul, where I was just cyber-interviewed, and if so, here's the deal about this link and where it's going . . .

I'll try and get back to making this blog interesting again by discussing the process for my August season as it's going on. This year, I'll be doing three plays, Removal, a new one that seems to be becoming some kind of farce; Blvd de Paris, a classic play by Richard Foreman I've been wanting to get to; and Invincible City, a text created through improvisation by myself and David Finkelstein of Lake Ivan Performance Group, which David has already transformed into a piece of video art. The last two pieces will play on a double-bill.

So . . . as I work on these shows, I'll keep some of my process journal going here as I used to. I always seemed to work as both a place for dialogue and as a kind of promotion for the shows, so I should get back to it. The last few years, the shows have been big and I've been tired (and/or lazy), but I'd like to get back to an account of what goes into making one of these shows.

I also have some longer pieces I've been working on that might finally get done and wind up here. I've been working on something called "So Big It Can Never Be Catalogued or Appraised: Thoughts on Pieces of Citizen Kane" (which is exactly what it sounds like), and I put in a proposal that was (just today) sadly rejected for a book in the great 33 1/3rd series of monographs from Continuum/Bloomsbury Academic. My proposal was for the Mothers of Invention album We're Only In It For The Money, and I did enough research, thinking, and writing about that work (and related ones) just for the proposal that I should probably just write the book anyway and post in in pieces here.

At the current moment, I'm in the dressing room of The Brick supervising a tech for the Democracy festival that opens tonight. When not writing this I'm going through David's video of Invincible City and transcribing it, so I should be getting back to that. By the end of the weekend, I'm hoping to have all these shows cast, but that seems . . . unlikely. I'll let you know when I do. So more on the current projects soon.

Amazingly, when I went to open a new posting window here for this blog, I got a "Restore from saved draft?" window from LiveJournal. Yup, there was an old "Friday Random Ten" that I had typed up but not finished, long enough ago that the playlist of unheard songs I was working through had 9,456 songs in it (it now has 8,655). So from sometime in the past, and as a welcome back to this blog, here's a Friday Random Ten from January 6 of this year . . .

1. "Noisy Summer" - The Raveonettes - Chain Gang of Love
2. "Reach Out (I'll Be There)" - David Llywelyn - Schwabing Affairs-Delicate Tunes From Swinging Munich Movies Of The 60's & 70's
3. "Kissin' Boogie" - Beverly Wright with Preston Love's Orchestra - Fine Gals, Fast Women & Wailin' Daddies
4. "Dinosaurs" - King Missile - The Way to Salvation
5. "Jeannie (I Dream of Jeannie)" - Hugo Montenegro, His Orchestra and Chorus - Seldom-Heard TV Theme Lyrics
6. "Insane Asylum" - Kathi McDonald - Insane Asylum
7. "Rip This Joint" - The Rolling Stones - Exile on Main St.
8. "Walkin' the Dog" - Rufus Thomas - Atlantic Rhythm & Blues vol 5 1961-1965
9. "She's Fallen In Love With The Monster Man" - Screamin' Lord Sutch & The Savages - Cameo Parkway 1957-1967
10. "Y.D.M.S." - UK Subs - Occupied

And here's a playlist of all of the above (or as close as I could find):

Current Location:	The Brick, Williamsburg
Current Mood:	optimistic
Current Media:	"Whirlwind" - Roxy Music - Siren

I did a Random Ten four or five days ago, meaning to finish and post it, but got caught up -- excitingly -- in the sudden definite go-ahead to bring back Gemini CollisionWorks's three August plays, ObJects, Antrobus, and Gone. So I've been having to work on scheduling the rehearsals and new shows, and trying to find actors to replace the ones who can't return -- 6 actors can't make it, and I have replacements for 3 of them; will be auditioning people over the weekend.

I'm going to try to keep up with updates on the shows, and with another Random Friday Ten tomorrow (well, today now), but I have to revise and get out the press releases and other stuff, and I may be stuck all day with that (as well as now having to go to the theater to meet a gas man to check our heater, which is making some impressively ominous noises.

So, in the meantime, here's 10 tracks from out of the 9,490 tracks on my ipod that haven't been played yet, with associated videos as I could find them...

1. "WHK - Rendezvous Records Spot" - Radio Spot - Psychedelic Promos and Radio Spots vol. 4
2. "In A Gadda Da Vida" - Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper - Frenzy
3. "Winter Afternoon by B.U. in Boston" - Jonathan Richman - O Moon, Queen of Night on Earth
4. "Snootie Little Cutie" - Bobby Troup - Ultra-Lounge 15: Wild, Cool & Swingin' Too!
5. "Baby, Scratch My Back" - Booker T. & The MG's - Soul Men/Play The Hits
6. "Colours" - Kaleidoscope - Kaleidoscope
7. "Creepy Street" - Walter Murphy - Cinemaphonic - Electric Soul
8. "Good Job with Prospects" - Actress - Circus Days vol. 3
9. "Fluff 'n' Fold" - The Launderettes - Every Heart Is a Time Bomb
10. "Geronimo" - Gianni Oddi - Easy Tempo vol. 2 - The Psycho Beat

And here's the whole video playlist of the above (with bonus track):

Now to give the cat his asthma medication...

Most of the brief four or five times I got to speak with him was spent with Pilsner Urquells in our hands, with me leaning in to try and make out his soft-spoken words, and him seeming embarrassed by his perfectly fine English (I'm sure, of course, a man of his precision in thought would have preferred to be as precise in his speech). I still treasure those times. With all the great tributes going around today, the fact of him as "STATESMAN" suddenly struck me again as it hadn't since I first met him. My talks with him had very much been conversations between two theatre professionals talking shop (he SO obviously loved being around actors, directors, and all the people, places, and paraphernalia of theatre!), and I had gotten so used to thinking of him as a playwright first and foremost again that his other great accomplishment had comparatively faded for me until now.

Which was, to no small extent, the purpose of Edward Einhorn and Untitled Theater Co. #61's Havel Festival at The Ohio Theater and The Brick -- to remind everyone of Havel's work as writer. We presented his complete work in that festival, including some previous unproduced works, and a number being presented for the first time in English (and some in new, improved translations). I was lucky enough to direct Temptation in the festival, and do a pretty spiffy job of it with a terrific cast.

I am still, to this day, stunned, confused, and angry at the lack of press attention for the Festival. Every press outlet in the city KNEW about this, and apart from a preview piece in the Voice -- mostly a general summary about Havel, somewhat boring and not a great promo -- and some reviews at nytheatre.com, there was next to nothing in the press about the Fest. There were, to be sure, a couple of dud productions in there, but otherwise it was work of high quality, and, again, the man's COMPLETE goddamned works were all being done.

I know Michael Feingold at the Voice was told personally four times about the Festival, twice before and twice during, and on each of the last three occasions he said he'd never heard of it and why hadn't he been sent something? Strange.

In any case, the Festival was still a marvelous time for us, and provided one of the most special nights of my professional life, when Havel came to see Temptation on the 17th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution.

My original post about that special night is HERE.

That's the personal stuff. For more on Havel . . . well, my Twitter and Facebook feeds are full of tributes and links to tributes, quotes, and speeches. You can find plenty out there.

But most of all, READ HIS PLAYS. Please. If you care to, and you can, PRODUCE THEM. I'm not sure any more of them are right for me (unless I restage Temptation sometime), but one of them must be the right one for everyone out there. THAT is the tribute he deserves most, to have his work live on, and alive, onstage.

Thank you very much, President Havel, it was an honor.

Current Location:	Gravesend, Brooklyn
Current Mood:	contemplative

Today, more of the same. Plus, as mentioned, preparing a script for online publication. There are events and shows I'd like to get to, but I don't think that's going to happen. So it goes. I think today's westerns to watch (if we can get them all in) will wind up being Support Your Local Gunfighter, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, and maybe The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, none of which I've seen.

Still waiting to hear back from the casts of our August shows, ObJects, Antrobus, and Gone, about whether they'd be available and interested in coming back and doing the shows again sometime early next year to make up for the performances we lost with Hurricane Irene. So far, 11 of the 21 actors have responded, and those positively, so that's a good start. Maybe this will actually happen.

There's 24,779 tracks in my trusty iPod. And yet, even after 5 years of using it constantly, there are 8,483 tracks in it that haven't been played. Here's a random playlist of ten from among those unheard tracks (with links to online versions of the songs, where available).

1. "I Got Loaded" - Peppermint Harris - The Aladdin Records Story
2. "All Last Night" - George Smith - My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama
3. "Crazy" - 999 - 999
4. "The Bloody Assizes" - Julian Cope - Fried
5. "Wind-Up Toys" - The Electric Prunes - Lost Dreams
6. "Someday You'll be King" - MX-80 Sound - Out of the Tunnel
7. "Packin' Up" - Delilah - Lost Deep Soul Treasures volume 3
8. "Just Play Music" - Big Audio Dynamite - Super Hits
9. "Absolutal Bastard" - Las Comadrejas - We Are Ugly But... We Have the Music
10. "All Night Operator" - Bryan Ferry - In Your Mind

Hey, cool -- for the first time in doing one of these Random Tens, I was able to find a YouTube for every one of the songs (okay, the Julian Cope is a demo version, but close enough). Here's a spiffy playlist of all the above (with bonus 11th track):

Okay, back to figuring out how to make NECROPOLIS 3: At the Mountains of Slumberland read like a real script.

Current Location:	Gravesend, Brooklyn
Current Mood:	rejuvenated
Current Media:	Lulu - "Morning Dew" - Rato's Nostalgia Collection 9

Also spent time today answering some more congratulations on the nytheatre.com thing and running errands -- post office, library. I'm getting in daily trips to the library, mostly in dropping off and picking up books in Richard Stark's Parker series, which Berit and I are going through like popcorn, though I don't think they'll have any immediate influence on any work I'll be doing.

By chance, I've been reading a number of memoirs, mostly of actors -- apart from Patti Smith's excellent Just Kids. That was the first one I read, and unfortunately it was so much better than the rest that the remainder of the memoirs have not looked so good. I've recently gone through Hal Holbrook's, Jane Lynch's, John Lithgow's, Diane Keaton's, Kristin Hersh's, Roger Ebert's, Tina Fey's, and the journals of Spalding Gray, as well as a combined bio of Carole King/Joni Mitchell/Carly Simon. Now I have a new one from Judi Dench. It wasn't intentional, but this will come in handy for my work on next year's play Removal, which is about a writer (or so it seems) looking back on his life and trying to revise it through obsessive revisions in his art. So these will be good to see how some artists do it, even when they aren't so enlightening or entertaining. Also, we've been watching Ken Russell's films in order, so I've finally gotten to see most of his early composer biographies for the BBC, which will also be a good source of inspiration.

I also have a nice stack of library books on branding, which are needed for research on another upcoming show, Invisible Republic #3, but I really need to get into those, and I probably won't be able to until after Xmas.

Tonight's viewing, while I was working on the scripts, was Sidney Pollack's Jeremiah Johnson -- meh; nothing wrong with it exactly, just . . . didn't grab me; Vincente Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town -- fun big Hollywood camp, with a great crazed car ride through Rome sequence (Berit, familiar with the automotive fatalities of Contempt and Toby Dammit, now calls out, "No, you're making a movie in Rome in the 60s, don't get into that car!" when the convertible shows up); and Robert Aldrich's The Legend of Lylah Claire, which was almost disappointing, though entertaining, in a bad-good movie way, until it got to the ending, which nearly made the whole thing a masterpiece -- I had heard that the last 2 minutes of this film were NUTS and either ruined it or saved it, depending on your point of view, and the psycho ending isn't even that long actually, but for me it made everything before it worthwhile. But whoa, is it nuts. Then it was the last of the available BBC Russell bios, the amazing Song of Summer. Really some of his finest work, though I still prefer the operatic, perverse Russell of 1970-1977.

Then, while internetting my merry way and enjoying some hot tea and cold aquavit, back to some of the TV shows we cycle around between on Netflix Instant. Tonight, a second season Mission: Impossible episode, a recent 30 Rock and now, as usual, several How It's Made episodes until sleep finally comes.

Tomorrow, fixing scripts, researching, and finally getting back to the Weekly Random Ten lists. And maybe some first words on Westerns. Berit and I have been watching American Western movies chronologically, starting with Stagecoach from 1939 and planning on ending with The Shootist (1976). We're up to 1972, and 134 movies of a 147-movie list, and I'm still not sure what I might do with what I've learned, or even what I've really learned. I just knew that it was important to know these movies better if I really wanted to GET movies and America and the 20th century in some important ways, but it's not something that can be intellectualized or verbalized so well. Or maybe that's the point.

Current Location:	Gravesend, Brooklyn
Current Mood:	awake
Current Media:	How It's Made episodes

I haven't touched this blog in 8 months, it appears. I think I'll be changing that soon.

With Facebook, Twitter, and other online media becoming such an immediate and satisfying way of communicating with vast numbers -- and where more often you are responded to, and you can SEE the responses, as opposed to a blog, where you often feel that you are sending messages out in bottles from a lonely island, most of which are going unread -- and given that a lot of the communiques I send are more suited to the shorter, telegraphic styles of those spaces, I've forsaken my LJ for Facebook, and to a lesser extent, Twitter. However, sometimes I've been thinking about something longer I'd like to say that doesn't fit those forms, and it seems to be time to get back to longer essays on theatre, film, art, music, and life in general. I have some longer thoughts about my own work, about my improvisational work with David Finkelstein of Lake Ivan, about Citizen Kane, and about the extensive watching of Western Movies Berit and I have been doing, that I've been working VERY slowly on, but which will show up here eventually, so I better keep the place alive for when they do make it to this location.

Also, Gemini CollisionWorks just received the honor of being named one of nytheatre.com's PEOPLE OF THE YEAR for 2011, which you can read about HERE, and as GCW doesn't have a website as such, I found myself linking here once again, but with nothing recent to welcome someone. So, I'll move back in with my weekly Random Friday music posts, and some updates on the works in progress for August, 2012 -- as well as any progress that's made in bringing back our shows from August, 2011, which has their run cut short by Hurricane Irene, leaving a depressing, unfinished quality to the remainder of the year that has only been alleviated by this nice recent honor.

So I'll be back tomorrow with SOMETHING. Now I have to go run errands after watching all the reaction to the honor on Facebook, and be ready to do a staged reading down at Coney Island tonight. See you soon.

Current Location:	Gravesend, Brooklyn
Current Mood:	thankful
Current Media:	Captain Beefheart - "This Is the Day"

Berit and I have had a couple of useful dinner meetings to toss around the direction of ObJects and Invisible Republic #3. While I'm writing only fragments of these before going into rehearsal with the casts (once I have them), I need to understand the basic framework of each show, and the worlds they show and are, before creating them around the actors (also, I need to "see" these people in the world before I cast any actors for sure). So B and I have a diner meal (for some reason, sitting in a diner/coffee shop of some kind always works best for these meetings) and she helps pull out of me what I'm trying to do with each show, and then we throw ideas about the landscape of each play back and forth until it becomes more and more complete. Once I see the world, the characters, and the overall tone (and have some idea of the structural framework), I can bring the actors in and the incidents begin to show themselves properly.

The older plays Gone and Antrobus are more traditionally written -- Gone is finished as well; Antrobus needs a bunch of work and maybe some rethinking, but I pretty much know what it is. Gone, which I wrote from 1990-2005, is short and difficult, but now has a cast of two of my favorite actresses, Alyssa Simon and Ivanna Cullinan, which pleases me greatly. Alyssa agrees with me that the play is "impossible" but is equally excited to jump into this impossible work as I am. So with this and the nearly-as-impossible Terminal Hip, two of the five plays for August are cast and can proceed.

There have been a couple of Theater-blog-related items that have come up -- that is, debates, discussions and such in the other blogs -- that I thought of jumping in, but my blood boils easily, and my private responses thus far have tended to be merely unpleasant and unhelpful. Rather, Matt Freeman has dealt, as usual, far more fairly with the issues brought up in posts by playwright Mat Smart and CATT (Collective Arts Think Tank) and is able to express pretty much the same feelings as I without using phrases like "they should drown in their own vomit like the stinking dogs that they are." Thanks, Matt.

That's more than I've posted in a while -- my weekly postings have not been happening as they should. In any case, from now on I'd like to at least keep the weekly Random Ten going to make sure I always check in that often. Here's ten tracks out of 2,463 in the iPod playlist of songs not listened to yet on that device:

1. "The Remedies Of Dr. Brohnicoy" - The Act - The Rubble Collection 10
2. "Saigon Rainstorm" - Peter Ivers - Nirvana Peter
3. "On The Air" - Peter Gabriel - Peter Gabriel 2
4. "Theme From 'Run For Your Life'" - Al Hirt - download
5. "Art School" - The Jam - Direction, Reaction, Creation
6. "Direct Hit" - Art Brut - Its A Bit Complicated
7. "Thriller" - Michael Jackson - Thriller
8. "My Baby Done Told Me" - The Robins - I Must Be Dreamin'</i>
9. "That Was My Girl" - Funkadelic - America Eats Its Young
10. "There Was a Time (live)" - James Brown - download

Here's the full video playlist for the above (with bonus track and a couple of substitutions where there were no YouTubes of the track I needed). On Facebook, this won't embed, so you can either see it at my original LiveJournal post or by going HERE.

Tonight, off to board op at The Brick again for the wonderful Something Something Über Alles. Tomorrow, same thing in the morning, then seeing my mother-in-law in the afternoon, then a party in the evening. Sunday, weekly improvisation work with David Finkelstein. Seems like a lot in between the times of figuring out what to do next.

Current Location:	Gravesend, Brooklyn
Current Mood:	worried
Current Media:	The Lounge Lizards - "Bob and Nico" - No Pain for Cakes