Stickerbook

As you know, Stickerbook is playing a gig in December:

Wednesday, December 6
7:30 p.m.
Mo Pitkins
34 Ave. A (between E. 2nd and E. 3rd Streets)

The cost is $5.

I find their music hallucinatory (you can hear a couple of their covers on their MySpace page); however, they describe themselves as "NYC's Most Kick-Ass All-Lady Cover Band ... as imagined by a 10-year-old girl"--in other words, hallucinatory. Their instrumentation includes saw, theremin, and accordion.

Just can't resist MySpace

I don't know what it is about MySpace, why it's so addictive, why it is even meaningful. Or, I don't know what it is about me--why I can't keep my hands off it. Maybe because it's new to me. My first MySpace page got mysteriously erased a month after I set it up. After wailing and gnashing my teeth I set up another one, which, took me less than 10 minutes to do. I had lost all my MySpace friends and had to start over. Now I am back with my full-fledged addiction.

Addiction? How often do you dream about MySpace? Two nights ago I dreamed all those little MySpace friends pictures were fighting kites and we were all in a big tournament together.

This morning when I booted up I found an unexpected friend request: I know who she is, although I have never met her, and, in fact I'm going to her next show (she probably found me through a comment I posted about her band). What a lift first thing in the morning!

Three or four weeks ago, after I rebuilt my MySpace page I went to Harold night at UCB. A performer I had seen for a couple of years totally knocked my socks off--so, on Wednesday morning I sent her a MySpace friend request, which she accepted. That's pretty much my main criterion these days for friend requests. She didn't ask me who I am, she probably doesn't care, and we've never met--but she's just as cool on MySpace as she is on the UCB stage.

On the other hand, there are a couple of performers I greatly admire but I won't send MySpace friend requests to them because I would be devastated if they rejected me. Devastated? Why? I've never met them. Well, I don't want to get rejected by someone I admire--whose talent I admire. One of them actually says in a blog post that if she doesn't know the friend requester, she will not accept it. I totally respect that, by the way, and I'm not going to all but ask to get rejected. (I'm in fragile state right now: We're having a big meeting in my divorce lawyer's office today. We're hoping to finalize the text of the agreement we made orally last June--in the hallway at the courthouse, no less. None of the negotiated points have changed, but getting the wording down on paper has taken five months and thousands of dollars.)

Some very good Harolds last night at UCB last night. (Yeah! Who the hell cares about divorce lawyers and their monstrous bills! There are good things in this life!) I spent this morning sending MySpace friend requests to the members of one of the teams, at least the ones I could find on MySpace. One of them accepted my request about 25 seconds after I sent it--he wasn't even online when I sent it. Anyway, a resounding "yes"--or at least a resounding positive mouse click from a cool actor--was a nice way to start this day.

What Tony is reading

In my continuing attempt to recognize when I am experiencing intuition (I am not only learning how to be a person, I am also learning how to be me), this morning I suddenly realized I had been reading enough about French on the subway while commuting to work for now and that I was starved for poetry--partly the reading of it and partly the writing of it. So, as of this morning, I am reading The Poem's Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody, by Alfred Corn. It's only 142 pp, which means I will probably get back to brushing up my French by the end of the week--unless some other intuition taps me on the shoulder.

At home I am now reading The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. The book is about the Battle of Gettysburg. I'm not a Civil War buff or a war novel buff, but I am finding this a powerful book. Shaara's descriptive language is simple and uncluttered and very effective--and I envy an author who can set up an entire battlefield, including who these men are, as convincingly and vividly and as efficiently as Shaara does early in the book.

Now get out there and write

"Writers aren't exactly people . . . they're a whole lot of people trying to be one person." --F. Scot Fitzgerald

Heart and soul

If you missed Sara Fishko’s piece on WNYC on Wednesday about Frank Loesser Hoagy Carmichael’s "Heart and Soul," here is a link to the podcast (7:13 minutes). Also, the lyrics are posted.

If you’re like me, you can't get enough of the first recording of the song, made in 1938, performed by Larry Clinton & His Orchestra featuring Bea Wain, none of whom had any idea that for 60 years the song would never ceased to be played somewhere in the world at all times, mostly by children plunking away at it in pairs on pianos in school lunchrooms [click here for stream].

Beth gets interviewed

My friend Beth Herzhaft, the photographer, was interviewed by a magazine.

Part of an answer

"... inevitably one has to think of one's art ... as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgement of the gift you have been given ..." —Stanley Kunitz

Here is a link to PoetsHouse.org.

Nicole Bokat reading: What Matters Most

My novel-writing teacher, Nicole Bokat, has published her new novel, What Matters Most. I just wanted to let you know that she is giving a reading here in New York today:

Tuesday, November 21
7:30 p.m.
Barnes & Noble in Greenwich Village
396 Avenue of The Americas

How computers think

One of the features my blog host offers when you click and build your blog page is Google ads. And I thought, Google ads! Hey, I wouldn't mind fistfuls of cash! Where do I sign up! Oh, right here on the "layout" page. O.K. Click, click, click, all set up.

The first ads were for nonprofits, which is fine. I wish I still had those ads, but I'm not sure I have any influence on that.

One of my early blog posts had to do with my ruining the upholstery of my chair by spilling coffee all over it. The next day my blog was decorated with postage-stamp-sized ads for chair care, re-caning, where to buy chairs cheap--as if this was a blog for hardcore chair enthusiasts. Actually, only about three people read this blog and, if anything, those ads were aimed at me.

Then, because blogging is new for me, my blog talked about my blog--prompting ads with headlines such as "Make Money Blogging!" (oh, really? you mean with all those Google ads?). And, no, the ad about making $2,000 a day blogging did not tempt me in the least.

To tell the truth, I have not made one penny so far, but now I wouldn't remove the Google ads for anything: They are my my most attentive--in a cockeyed way--commenter.

After I put up posts about my struggle through the latest revision on my novel--my seventh draft in two years--the ads were for online writing programs, books about writing, 26 tips for better writing, and two antidepressants I had never heard of.

Just as an update, I got through a lot of revising over this past week and I am PLEASED (really? me?) with how my process is working again for me. It's almost as if by telling the whole world--well, three people--about all this, I was putting myself on the spot about fixing it. I am really looking forward to Thanksgiving weekend and reading my MS from cover to cover. The seventh draft looks like it's just about done.

This creative jumpstart has involved a mix of insomnia (against my will) and intentionally staying up late because I had good stuff to write. Either way, that tended to prompt my cat to tap me on the face the next morning reminding me that her day had begun and she wanted her breakfast--now. This, as you might have expected, prompted Google ads about insomnia remedies and substances to remove cat urine. Although in my case, the insomnia was the cure for not writing; so, I would never take an insomnia cure and I guess don't need to buy that book with the 26 tips. Besides, insomnia is probably a cure for something--sleepiness, at least. And as for the cat urine, I guess the mainframe at the heart of the Google empire saw the word "cat" and assumed. In describing this, I have now typed the phrase "cat urine" more times in this paragraph than I have typed in the previous ten years combined, I pretty much expect to boot up my computer tomorrow and find that I have created the cat urine edition of my ongoing rant. Now watch this be the thing that brings me fistfuls of cash ("Having made his fortune advertising a cat-urine remover, Tony Powell quit his day job to write novels. He also sits on the board of directors of the leading cat-urine-remover manufacturer in the United States").

One reason to be glad I'm not 29 anymore

And I would definitely pick the European trip over the new car--even through my credit card balance is busting at the seams.

Reasons to be cheerful

So, my pattern these days seems to consist of getting out of bed dead tired and heading for work, which I clump through like a catatonic clone--with the occasional epiphany on the way in that redeems the whole day. (Count my blessings, a whole lot of people here have been told they are being laid off in 30 days--outsourcing strikes again.) I then put up a blog post whining about how I’m creatively stifled or just plain have no ideas--I’ve done 30 revisions of a hard section in my novel and it’s looking futile, I don’t have any ideas for my sketch-writing class, blah blah blah.

Then I get to do something really nice (see The Project at The P.I.T., Harold Night--oh, I hope I have a chance to type up how great it was two nights ago! Best show I’ve ever seen 1985 do and fwand left me feeling like my brain had been tied into a pretzel--necrophiliac cunnilingus has never been so funny!); such as last night I had dinner with a novelist friend of mine. It was Ethiopian food, and we talked about cooking for Thanksgiving, the books we’re writing, life, blogs, other writers in our group, France, organic food, etc. What a nice dinner! Tasty, although, yes, bready, too. (Hmm, a five-word sentence with four commas.)

Then I went home, fed my cat, brushed her, got into bed with my Dylan Thomas tape and my cat curling up next to me, and by 9:45 I was well on my way to going gently into that--Sorry!--catching up on all the sleep I’d lost. At 10:30, after occasional dropping in and out of consciousness, I put aside the tape and was fully awake. I had to listen to music--a problem, because music gets me revved up, especially an eclectic CD I put together that has Haydn, Van Halen, Mozart, T.Rex--they actually do all go together.

Then two sketch ideas came at me, fully formed. It was midnight; I got out of bed and booted up my computer. It typed up a nice little sketch about a jazz combo rehearsing a song. This is the video sketch I was brooding upon in such a state of misery yesterday--I knew what it would look like, I knew who my dream cast would be (I knew that wouldn’t happen), but I hadn’t written the script. Well, now I have! Yay!

I then went on to do the fourth revision of a sketch about two guppies in a school. That sketch went over well last week, and I did not disagree with the suggestions--but how to write them up? Well, we’ll see how the latest revision is greeted. This is now a three-act sketch (about 5 minutes). It’s still introspective and absurd, but I incorporated a suggestion I got last week, which only made sense once I'd thought of a twist I could add. I think I’ve got something that is both touching and silly. Act 3 is about a minute long and has no dialogue--but I think it adds a dimension to the characters and the vision of life that the sketch explores. At 2 a.m. I crawled back into bed. Not really tired. Listened to the other side of the Dylan Thomas tape.

This morning I got out of bed dead tired and headed for work, which I have clumped through dead on my feet all day and I’ve been pretty happy about that.

So much depends upon

I am so desperate to speak with you that I could only come off as some kind of creepy stalker. Sorry about that, being driven has that effect on me; so, it's best that I not speak with you at all--a pain I carry inside of me that I would *want* to be invisible to you. I thought up a sketch this morning and I know who my perfect cast would be. I need some musicians too, and I know who would be perfect. Could I explain to you a desperation fueled by a creative urge so strong I can barely stand it? A transforming impulse trying to free itself from my creative starvation? An impulse that in all likelihood will vanish to the world with all the impact of the tap of one raindrop? I would pay to get this thing made.

But instead of shooting my video sketch, I am working on a piece of paper--a legal document--that has so far cost me into the five figures, which, by its nature (a confidentiality clause), no one will ever see. If only I knew how to charm people into working for free. Jim Jones could persuade 900 people to kill themselves, but he couldn't persuade them to make a silly 3-minute video sketch that got people laughing--and neither could I, at least not so far.

I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's see how my sketch goes over when I pitch it to my class. If it doesn't die there on the floor of the P.I.T. theatre on Saturday afternoon, maybe someone can help me put together a cast and a crew. A lot of actors would want this one on their reel; a lot of musicians would want this music on a CD of theirs. All I want is to have done it.

The Novelist's Curse!

I wish I knew how to write things that are short.

I've got to admit ...

... it's getting better. After whining yesterday about how it was Monday and I had had no ideas whatsoever for 48 hours, I went home, made a quick small dinner, and thought about going to sleep. I proceeded to spend 2 1/2 hours revising 73pp of Quarryville. The book seems to be in good shape, and I almost wonder if my brain was just resting for a couple of days in anticipation of being creatively productive. I put my MS aside--I can tell when pushing is not going to make anything more happen--and tried to sleep. I imagined I would fall asleep quickly and get up at 5 or so to type in my handwritten changes so I could print out fresh pages on Tuesday. Hah!

I have an eight-cassette set of Dylan Thomas reading his own work that I am listening to these days when I fall asleep. I haven't made it to cassette 2 yet; I keep listening to cassette 1 over and over (it's the one that has "A Child's Christmas in Wales" and "Fern Hill" on it). Dylan Thomas put sound over sense at times, and his language is startling, fresh, vigorous, dense, sonorous--it's going to be a while before I absorb sides 1A and 1B and move on. I did nod off and wake up at around 1 a.m. and turn off my tape player. But then I was wide awake all over again.

Toss and turn for an hour. At 2 a.m. I put on Elvis Costello's first album--by then I wasn't expecting to sleep and I wasn't expecting to write either. As I half nodded off, finally, I grabbed what I thought was the edge of my comforter--but it was my cat's foot, which she did not appreciate having grabbed in her sleep; 45 minutes later she came back to bed, pouncing on the side of the pillow my head was not on, thoroughly waking me up--turnabout is fair play. She then snuggled up next to me and promptly fell asleep. I hadn't quite fallen asleep anyway--the deep look into the troublesome section of my novel, the music in Dylan Thomas's masterly use of English, "Watching The Detectives" ("She's filing her nails while they're dragging the lake" etc.) had my brain too hyped to want to call it a day. I put on my Paul McCartney's greatest hits CD and at 4 a.m. I thought I should turn it off and at least pretend to try to sleep. Jenny got me up at 7:30--I was sleeping through my alarm. Fortunately my cat's insistence on breakfast spared me from sleeping till noon and having to explain that to my boss.

So, my goal for the remainder of this week is to revise/re-revise 50pp of Quarryville and write/co-write two comedy sketches. I have not written word 1 for my sketch class.

I'm not sure why I feel ...

... like a crumpled-up paper bag today. My sketch-writing class on Saturday at The Pit went well and the sketches I pitched went O.K. At the start of the class we wrote character traits and actions on tiny pieces of paper and folded them up. At the end of the class we were randomly assigned writing partners for the next week. The assignment is to write a sketch on our own and one with our partner--and we should start thinking in terms of something that could be a video. The springboard for the cowritten sketch was two little strips of paper, which I let Grace, my writing partner this week, pick at random. I am depressed because in the 48 hours since Saturday evening I have not had even *one* idea. None!

I have to digress: No one likes the title of my novel. It's called "The Golden Age of Quarryville." Quarryville is the fictionalized version of the agricultural town in California where I grew up. The book is a black comedy about the absurdity of human existence and it contains references to writings by Camus where he talks about the stars looking coldly down on us and so on. I call that my working title--it perfectly describes the book--however, not one person has told me they think I have found the right title yet. The manuscript is a little under 400 pages long, and I'm in my 7th draft. I've been working on this thing for two years. I think I've just about ironed out this one section that has wracked my life for the last 4 months. Almost done.

It's 5:42 p.m. on Monday and I'm tired because I stayed up late last night. I saw "Running with Scissors" on Sunday. I enjoyed it, partly from an adaptation perspective. Inevitably characters and scenes get dropped in adapting a book to the screen and some shaping of the story gets imposed. The book is richer--and Augusten Burroughs writes with a line that has a voice and that can sing. The movie has the great visuals, the music, the acting. I thought about fiction during the movie, which is based on Burroughs's memoir except you could experience it as fiction if you wanted to. It's got a "Royal Tenenbaums" taken up a couple of notches feel to it. I was thinking about fiction and my place in it. Steel magnates make steel, Donald Trump makes buildings, I want to make up things that are made up. Yeah, except at that point I had had no ideas whatsoever for 24 hours. My final comment on "Running with Scissors": The next time I see a Harold go off the rails, I will have to think about what it would be like as a movie--there's a good chance that it might not be as crazy as "Running with Scissors."

Then I went over in the dark and the rain to The Pit to see The Project. It was The Ghosty Teen Mysteries, Super Breakout, and Team Fernandez. I think every team was short at least one member and there were quite a few substitutes. No matter: Very strong performances; I'm glad I went. I could have said “Wonderful show!” to most of those performers--but I tend to be incapacitated in anything resembling a social situation and I was already starting to feel like a crumpled-up paper bag. I handed in my ballot and slipped out to the pleasant warm drizzle of W. 29th St. and headed for the subway. And maybe my regrets are ridiculous: What if they don't know they turned in wonderful performances and I didn't tell them? This morning I sent MySpace friend requests to two team members. They don't know who the hell I am. Doesn't matter, I suppose. But for that hour, I was captivated, charmed, entranced and those actors were brilliant successes.

I told myself . . .

. . . that I would not eat candy with lunch again today. But I did. I ate two of those new Hershey’s kisses with peanut butter inside and a mini Mr. Goodbar. Was it worth it? No. Because after eating that I wished I had had a dark-chocolate Dove instead. No more candy this afternoon! Stop!

On an up note I should add that only good things have happened to me all day.

What else Tony is reading

In addition to what I said about my subway reading yesterday, I am now including a new book by my friend Susan Shapiro. Secrets of a Fix-up Fanatic: How to Meet & Marry Your Match doesn't come out till 12/26/06; however, I've got a bound galley. Now, yes, I'm biased--I've known Sue for over 20 years--but this book is just smashing. Sue is such a sharp writer. Her new book is technically a self-help book, but it is so infused with her wit and candor and solid advice that the other self-help books should feel embarrassed to sit on the shelf with it come December. True, this book strongly resonates for me (I am two signatures on a document away from getting divorced and when I get myself together more I will want a significant other in my life again), but it is a thoughtful enough commentary on relationships today that I would enjoy reading it even if I was in an intact relationship. I wish I'd read it before I got married; things might've gone better.

What Tony is reading

Two nights ago I finished "In Cold Blood"; its last sentence is a perfect example of what attracts me to Capote’s writing: "Then, starting home, he walked towards the trees, and under them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat." That is my home reading. As of last night, for my home "reading," I am listening to an 8-cassette set of Dylan Thomas reading his own work. (The book I read prior to "In Cold Blood" was "The World According to Garp" and before that, "The Grapes of Wrath." I found echoes of "The Grapes of Wrath" in "In Cold Blood," at the very least the similarity of society outcasts roaming the country in search of food and work. Both books mention Pretty Boy Floyd, by the way.)

For subway reading I am alternating between "The Berlitz Self-Teacher: French," which I am reading in the vain hope that I can brush up my comprehension of French--if not the ability to speak French sentences--in advance of a trip to Paris in springtime with members of my writers group, and "City of Bones," by Michael Connolly, which is not helping me learn French at all.

Blog posts I'm glad I found

Matsuo Basho once wrote a haiku that (roughly translated) went along the lines of

The morning glory
is another thing that will
never be my friend

Speaking as someone who is difficult to get to know--that isn't my intention, I'm just slow about things--I can interpret the haiku to mean that the morning glory, by its fleeting nature, is not going to be around long enough to get to know the poet. Apply that metaphor elsewhere as you wish; find other interpretations of those 17 syllables. The reverse perspective is true, too: The morning glory is not here long enough for us to get to know it.

What then to make of improv performance? An art form whose basis is that it is made up on the spot and only exists at the moment of creation and then is gone--except for the afterglow in the performers' and audience members' minds. If you were a theatre critic of improv, it might be a bit like reviewing jazz performances or being a sportswriter. I'm in no hurry to attempt that. I would hate to observe, let's say, Harold Night at UCB from some sort of meta perspective--when it is best experienced like sunlight falling on your skin.

So, I want to mention a blog post written by a member of the Harold Team The Shoves on an afternoon just a few hours before their last performance. I'm glad to say that I saw The Shoves once upon a time (and Dillenger); I'm sure sorry I missed that last performance though.

I wish I was . . .

. . . a chubby-faced Hispanic girl with pimples kissing her boyfriend in the nook formed by the construction barricades in the 34th Street subway station oblivious to the morning rush hour crowds hustling by and screeching stopping trains.

Why? I don't know; maybe it's because I never did anything remotely like that and you don't get to try everything once even if you feel you might like to.

And if I was her, I might wish I was a middle-aged white guy sitting in a window of a downtown train on his way to a hyperstable white-collar job as a book editor who thinks you can live stuff and you can write stuff but you can't often enough do both.

even bad karma doesn't like bad karma

On Friday I sent a wonderful musical improv-er I know a note that followed up on a lunch conversation we had had a month ago. As four of us ate pizza it came out that I was the only person at the table who did not blog. In fact, I had no intention of ever blogging. Why would I? Well, a month later my MySpace page got deleted and I was pretty steamed. So, I started a blog--and not on that Communist left-wing MySpace.

In my e-mail on Friday I said that I don't know whether I can un-bad-karma my life (disappearing MySpace account being one of the more minor incidents). Maybe the positive step is to embrace that knack I have for making bad karma all around me. And I'll write a blog about it--yeah, that's what I'll do. And the name for my blog is inspired by the name the wonderful musical improv-er chose for her blog, which I totally dig--the name and the blog.

I then got on with a typical undignified Tony Powell day, which at work included smearing chocolate on my pants at lunch--at a time when I was down in the dumps about other stuff too lengthy to recount here.

Later that day she put up a wonderful little post on her blog (How to be a person). She veiled a lot of the possibly identifying information, although I suppose could guess and some of it. But even if I knew nothing about what she was talking about, who could resist her ecstatic words? It was like a handful of Walt Whitman lines about how great American is or a one of those Jack Kerouac paragraphs that has phrases like "Whooo wee! I told my soul!" in it.

That's a cheerful thing to read and the end of a dark week! if you're me.

I went home that night and discovered--quite spontaneously--a spectacular new way to spill coffee on my upholstered chair, which left a stain that now looks like somebody barfed there months ago. And my computer, which was right there . . .

. . . fortunately had a manuscript on it; so, the manuscript got splashed pretty good and my computer was spared.

Which brings me to a point: By working my way through these little penances I might be un-bad-karma-ing my life. And even bad karma wants to avoid bad karma. Perhaps there *is* a way of things turning out O.K.: I got chocolate on my khakis, but it was Friday--they were headed for the laundry anyway. My chair has a pukey stain on it--but my computer is just fine and the chair wasn't very expensive.

On Saturday before I headed off to my sketch-writing class I went online and saw that the wonderful musical improv-er had pulled down her ecstatic post. Ah, gee! Did something bad happen? Did someone in it recognize themselves and not like what was said? Was if my fault? (I know, I know, how could it possibly be my fault? Well, I have a knack for making bad karma all around me. A couple of weeks ago I had dinner with a friend: She got deathly ill over the appetizers and had to rush home. Probably the last warm night we'll see this year in New York. She assured me I did not bring her bad luck. I felt better that she said that--but I'll feel a lot better when she publishes her novel.) A few more lessons on how to be a person and I'll probably be O.K. We’ll all be O.K.!

I forgot . . .

. . . to eat the leftover papaya in the morning.

Blow Up MySpace

This morning I woke up and found that my MySpace page no longer existed. Still waiting to hear from MySpace--not holding my breath. All the depressing things going on in my life and now this.

My password is obscure, but maybe I got hacked. Still, I hate the idea of investing the time to create a page and then poof. I feel like an Orwellian unperson--hard to believe I'd get so emotionally wrapped up in what is really just a magnetic data record. I don't think the system is down, because other pages are up. I read the Terms of Service (who the hell reads through all that rubbish?). The only violations that might apply to me is I used a couple of last names in blog posts--and my *own,* on my page. Still, you'd think they would summarily delete the offending post, not the whole shebang. Plus other people use their names on their pages (for example, Porter Mason, the great New York improviser who introduced us for our student who on Sunday).

As crude as my page was, I had 10 friends, I had 3 blog entries that I put a lot of thought into. I figured out how to add a song. Yuck.

If I offended you, I'm sorry. If you'd asked me to censor the offending post or even take it off entirely, I certainly would have. I only write about people I care about and who I like.

So, I'm putting up this Google blog. I can't even find a TOS for them. Oh, this will probably get pulled the hell down too. I might put up a stub page on MySpace, but I certainly won't waste my time putting blog posts or pictures on it. I might put that Fastball song on, however; I'm not even young enough to listen to Fastball, but "Out Of My Head" is a nice tune and the lyrics seem to apply to me.

By the way, there's a wonderful little blog called Fessing Up. Linda, the blogger, put up a nice post about something her brother said. I can't improve on what Linda said; so, I'll just link to it thus.

Oh, and if you're on jury duty, hang in there. Society needs people like you. Society needs you.