Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Since Kelly dropped it, I figure I'll pick it up.  The pseud
equivalent of sloppy seconds?

Danguy- Did Harlan hit on you in your dream, too?
I think Neil might have appeared in a dream I had only once, but more
in a peripheral sort of way; it was more focused on my first book tour,
and he called to give me advice.

Mary- You mention the Eddie Izzard quote generator and neglect to say
where it is?  You!  Cake or DEATH?!

Kelly- Thanks for the offer.  Bill^2 dropped me an e-mail, and he's
helping me out, I think.  Much gratitude to both of you.
  

    
OK, my life has a soundtrack:
"Should I stay or should I go?", the Clash, just came on the radio...
Come on & let me know,
should I cool it or should I blow?
  

    
Yep, a soundtrack of my life kind of day...
"You may be right, I may be crazy...
but it just might be a lunatic you're looking for"...
  

    
Unfortunately, my life's soundtrack seems to be by Eve6. Every time a
new CD comes out I'm either about to get my heart broken or am right in
the middle of the process.

I smelled you on my shirt today
Of course the hardest part is letting go
But you've got to or you know
You'll end up waiting by the 
Phone me once in a while
Let me know you're all right
Tell you again that I'm fine
Then we go about our separate lives.

 I need a happy, positive band to score my life, obviously...
  

    
Hey, did I mention the new Garbage CD to all of you yet?  If I
haven't, I will now, since we're all talking about music and
soundtracks (well, the last two of us were).  It's really, really good.
 The first one I've felt so compelled to buy.  Every song is really
good, and it's just so both cohesive and diverse from beginning to end.
One of my favorite lines so far?
"I smoke your brand of cigarettes and pray
that you will give me a call.
So no, of course we can't be friends,
Not while I'm this obsessed."
If you like Garbage, pick it up.  Even if you don't, it's at least
worth a shot, I think.
  

    
It was getting redundant, but the next three songs fit, too.
Painfully.
  

    
Not the song y'all mentioned, on the radio. 
Dern slippage. 
Dern incoherancy.
Dern it, I'm finding a nice hole to stick my head into.
  

    
New Garbage? As in album three? Damnit, I'm already doing too many
things this afternoon...

And yes, Eddie quote generator WHERE?!...

-Kel
  

    

"We weren't expecting such a run on cake..."
  

    
Well, then, I'll have the chicken.  Tastes of babies.
  

    

Here you go, one babycake. Would you like anything else?
  

    
JaNell--Mulholland Drive is the newest film by David Lynch, director
of such classics as Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man, Wild at Heart, and
best of all Twin Peaks.  

Neil has spoken about trying to collaborate with Lynch once.  It's
quite funny.  I love that all my favorite artists in the world somehow
seem to know each other.  I can't even tell you how wonderful it would
be to see what kind of story they'd make.  
  

    
I know, Adriana, but thanks for explaining anyway...
Errol just has been associated with Mulholland much, much longer, so
he popped in first.
  

    
Neil's "Strange Little Girl" stories seem to be over at
http://www.strange-little-girls.com/stories.html .
Along with matching fanfic stories...
  

    

These are wonderful.

Strange is very haunting.
I really like the wrap-around effect of Hearts of Gold.

And Love is evil.

"All of these things are true."


And they are all very Neil.
  

    
Let's see, on Biography is Semese Street!!!! Happy Happy Joy Joy

My mother is doing very well, happy and bored and trying to clean. I
feel like her mom, because I'm finding things to keep her busy.

I bought a lot of music lately, Nickelback has got to be the thing in
my cd player the most, with Everclear's "So Much For The Afterglow" a
close second. 
It's odd, basically I'm happy, things are good, the job, my whole
family's health is decent, but every onjce in awhile the is something I
see/hear/read, that sends a pang straight to my heart. That's when the
Everclear comes out, "They Can't Hurt You Unless You Let Them" works
for this. 

JaNell,....btw re: the xanga comment, they're all clevage pics,...lol

Jinx who should never do double shots of anything
Jinxie 
  

    
While I don't plug it as much as some people (just kidding JaNell) I
am a member of the Absolutely Barking Mad Blogring 
http://www.xanga.com/home.asp?user=Jinxy
I wrote something, and it's on there.

Jinxie
  

    
Well, I'm trying to get people over to read my stories...
but for the curious, there's a kindergarten picture on the JaNell blog
and a more current self-portrait on Excentrica...
no cleavage visible in either, you have to see me in person for that!
  

    
I finally got around to seeing the Chihuly exhibit at the Dayton Art
Institute today.  And of course the piece that was easily my favorite
was in the main museum and not even in the big ol exhibit.  The Fiery
Scarlet Tower, which is also one of the only ones that looked halfway
decent coming off the digital camera.  Got some nice ones of the
Perisan Ceiling as well.  Unfortunately no other pictures did anything
any sort of justice.  But I'm happy I went because pretty things are
good and if any of you are in the Dayton area in the next couple of
days, then go see it.  Sparkly.  Now then, must go read The Last
Hero...

Jen.
  

    
So I did want to say more about stagewalker's show "Hearts in Shadow" (okay,
only half of it is his), really I did.  Then the old topic filled up and
there were almost 100 posts in the new topic.

Three guys, four women in the stage cast (a few other people shown on
video).  As I think I was saying, all of the four short plays (including the
one written as a play) used a great deal of narration, three of them
narration by some of the characters themselves: combining that with video
and flash animation on the large back screen (and, in "Walls", on three
retractable muslin screens that scrolled down to various parts of the
stage), and, well, you get your Combined Art Form Entertainment: narrative,
stage play, video/animation, music (recorded, but I'm told it's also been
done live).

"We Can Get Them For You Wholesale", the touchiest piece at just this very
particular moment of history, went first.  All of the Britishisms of places
and newspaper and currency were retained from the story, though the actors
(probably wisely) did not attempt English accents.  The actor playing Burton
Kemble, the salesman, opened the narration; Peter Pinter narrated his own
thoughts in the privacy of his schematic bedroom as he considered who to add
to the assassination list to bring the prices down.  Video of his ex-fiancee
and her boyfriend in lurid imaginings; video of small girls tormenting a
small Peter Pinter; cash register rings as cartoon headstone after cartoon
headstone is added to the mental register and to the flash animation on the
screen over the stage.  Peter's fatally late realization comes in the dark,
and the audience may not have been certain when it was safe to start
clapping.  (Unasked for suggestion: after Peter's last semi-coherent scream,
bring the lights up for a few seconds to show his now very empty bedroom;
then fade the lights slowly?)

I went to wash my hands during intermission, downstairs, where I noted the
wooden lockers for other organizations hosted by the (very gothic stone)
Episcopal church: High Sobriety.  Teddy Bear for Beginners group.  Two women
washing their hands as I stood in line discussed "Wholesale": "I think I
would have found it really funny a month and a half ago."  "Yeah."  "But now
with everything...."  "Yeah."

The staging was snappy and the comedy played broadly but with great control,
probably more cartoonishly (for one thing, stagewalker said that before
Sept. 11 the plan had been to show pictures of people instead of cartoon
headstones on the screen) than it would have been if it had played this past
summer instead of now.

Next was "Scarecrow", a play written by Don Nigro and, I think, abridged,
which was probably to the good; it was superbly acted but I thought it was
just long enough.  Another supernatural tale of love turned to enmity.  A
controlling hermit mother, a teenaged daughter under her thumb who yearns
for freedom, a young man she meets out in the neighbors' cornfield who
becomes subtly more disturbing the more she falls for him and who is
certainly not what he seems.  All three narrate as well as play out scenes;
all three are on stage all the time.  It must be grueling to perform.
Beautifully staged, and Miriam Wolodarski as the girl was wonderful.  Jeff
Cohlman, as the boy who is not what he seems, I had noticed by the end was
the seducer in every single piece (he is Archie in Peter Pinter's video
fantasies), which is nice work if you can get it.  He was good.  I assumed
and hoped he'd be Eric in "Walls", and he was.

Intermission.  My old friend Mark Kreighbaum, hiding in the audience, does
not come up and say hi; I don't find out he was there (I was distracted!)
until he e-mails me after the show to say I looked well and he thought they
did well by my story.

It's clear why "The Arbitrary Placement of Walls" had to be staged after a
break--they probably needed every minute of the intermission to strew
furniture and piles of books and paper around the large stage.  To my eye,
actually, it's still pretty neat; but the actress playing Laura's mother has
to be able to tidy it in a matter of minutes, and I know you suggest things
in the theater!  Anyway the staging is so bare in the other three pieces
that it actually is something of a shock.

I can't say too much about this one, because I know the story too well.
After stagewalker told me that the lead actress was nervous that I'd be
there (!), I was self-conscious in my front-row center seat, which she
directly faced all the times she was sitting "in front of the television".
Trying to be invisible.  Anyway, as soon as she came out--this actress had
not previously been on stage, though she'd also be prominently featured in
the last piece (a heck of a demand after anchoring "Walls")--I knew the
playlet was in good hands.  Lisa Roth is her name.  The only Equity actor in
the show, by the program (not that the others were less talented).  It
seemed to me there were _so many of my words_ used in the narration, I
wondered if fewer could be used and more suggested.  But I'm prejudiced
against using too many of my own words, of course.  And it's a tricky story
mechanism to get across on stage.  There was a wonderful device where Laura
walked three times deliberately into the same spot, triggering the same loop
of Eric's ghost (Jeff Cohlman, that seducer)--unpleasant in the right way.
There even turned out to be a separate area off the main stage, curtained
off, for the only time Laura leaves her house, to visit Eric's hospital
room.  (That, they said, is where the band sets up when they use live
music.)  I was pleased despite hearing so many of my own words which you
_always_ want to rewrite.  Roth was really excellent.

Then the Chekhov piece, "The Little Apples", based partly on a Chekhov story
I think I may actually have seen adapted in a different show (that was
entirely of Chekhov's short fiction adapted into plays, which I attended on
my only date, if I recall, with the Chicago writer who, on reading "The
Arbitrary Placement of Walls" for workshop, told me "I not only can't
imagine why anyone would want to read this story, I can't imagine why anyone
would want to _write_ this story," and suggested I try to get more sun.  He
was a really nice guy, though, honest.  And I digress even more than usual).

This one uses a Narrator (Peter Pinter from Neil's story) instead of
character narration, in the story of a nasty rich orchard keeper (the
salesman from Neil's), his officious private security guy (that's not the
right term for old Russia)--the mother from "Walls", this time in a pants
role with a bushy moustache playing it for laughs.  And a pair of adorable
young lovers--Laura and Eric from "Walls", but this time in a happy healthy
playful relationship.  Until Trifon Semyonovich catches them with one, just
one, of his apples, and decides to toy with them.  Shirley Jackson would
have written a story like this, if she weren't Western, urban, and modern.
Cohlman and Roth again very strong in different roles, and Burrows
underplays his menace beautifully, in contrast to the cheerful comedy he
brought to Neil's.  The pants role was funny in the comic parts, but I'm not
sure the touch of sudden real sexual menace worked quite as well as it would
have had the buffoon actually been played by a male person.

So: funny with dark; dark; dark with a little funny; funny beginning and
dark end.

I could have written this shorter if I'd had more time.  Apologies.  Didn't
want to wait any longer--
  

    

Someone remind me when closing night is? Not this weekend, is it? Hey,
squeaks, when are you going?
  

    
Wow Martha... thank you!! That was an incredible review. I'm honored.
I like the idea of the lights up briefly at the end of Wholesale. I
need to think some more about it, and how that would work...
On Walls, my first draft had actually been a lot more like a
traditional stageplay or screenplay, but our Artistic Director was
concerned that we had lost too much of the sense of narrative theatre
that is C.A.F.E.'s trademark. If you like, I could send you copies of
both scripts so you could get a sense of what it might have looked
like.
And on that note, let me say that YOUR WORDS ARE WONDERFUL! I was
actually quite glad to be able to have more of them in there because of
the rewrite.

Madman - We officially run for this weekend and next weekend, and I
just got the word that we're extending one more weekend, so we have
three weekends left in toto.
Now, this is a lot of weekend to place inside such a small dog, but
I'm sure it'll work out nicely.
  

    
<Pam silently hands Will the apple-flavored Dreaming houka>

JaNell: I'm sorry; I phrased that badly.  I didn't mean to imply that
you were flip.  I meant that I had a hard time being that honest
*without* being flip--too scary.  And that you are braver than me,
because you can/do.  (BTW, I flippety-flapped past your blog today.)

Rocky: Sock puppets?  Do tell.  I really love the nights where I can't
remember dreaming, actually.  It always means that I slept better.  I
don't always remember my dreams, but when I do, they're like a movie in
my head.  Dunno why.

Adriana: I wander, too.  Mixed bag, just now.  I'll email ya.

DanW: Well, if you're suffering, it's always classier to do it with
good lyrics, at least.  Also, the show sounds just fabulous.  The
subtle "layering" of characters from piece to piece is a great device. 
It carries power even through second-hand telling (albeit extremely
talented second-hand telling.)  Three more weekends... hmmm...
  

    
Well, today’s opening day for FROM HELL and, according to his website,
Eddie Campbell graced the streets of LA for the premiere.  Best of
luck to ‘em, and I hope Alan and Eddie are getting residuals.  In
celebration of big fat Hollywood paychecks for graphic novelists, and
just 'cause it's Friday, I tender this little present.

I have a confession to make.  I didn’t give up on the Scary Trousers
story.  I gathered up my stubborn and played The Girl Detective.  Since
I’d been at the Book Soup signing in LA, I knew that West was in
possession of the videotape of the signing, and I tracked her down. 
Fangoddess that she is, she harkened unto my plea, and was ever so
gracious as to download the entire Scary Trousers moment onto a
website.

Complete with the requisite accents.

Therefore... Dah-dah-DAH!!!

Barking Mad Productions, in cooperation with Digital Goddess West, and
by generous permission from the Letters N and G, would like to
present:

              THE SCARY TROUSERS BIT

        Starring Our Very Own Gaiman Mob Don,
  With Special Guest Star Appearance by NightWalker
  As both the Mysterious Trevor and Lead Cameraman

http://multimedia.valencia.cc.fl.us/myClass/digital.video/NeilScaryTrousers.ht
m

(Warning: It’s a *big* file.  It may take a while to load.  My beta
tester-slash-husband said that it crashed twice mid-load before he
finally got it open.  So be patient.  It’s worth it.)

Love to all,

-P

[1] Really great Urban Yeti photo of Alan Moore and LA Times article
on FROM HELL here:

http://www.calendarlive.com/top/1,1419,L-LATimes-Search-X!ArticleDetail-42032,
00.html

Random Footnote [2]: For the truly adventurous, I highly recommend the
"silent film" version of the Scary Trousers Bit.  It’s just as
fabulous, with a slightly different flavor, without the sound.  I
swear.  I know this because, when I first got the link from West, I was
plagued by a terrible "audio problem," [3] and could *only* watch it
in silent mode.  He’s incredibly entertaining, just to watch.  His
voice and words (and sundry accents) can be so engrossing that you miss
some of the visuals.  When you turn off the sound, it’s almost like a
different story.

[3] Footnote to the footnote, for techno types: My terrible audio
problem, which drove me nuts, was resolved when I remembered that--the
better to hear him, my dear--I had pulled the speakers forward and,
umm... I think you get the rest.
  

    
Pamela rocks the house to its very foundation!!!