The Engine

The Engine is the most romantic emblem of the last epoch. The defining character of its age, it encapsulated the rebelliousness and yearning for freedom that was caught, like a sparrow, in the bosom of young men. One wonders, in the Year of the Computer, where this rebelliousness and yearning has gone.

The engine's romance is stated succinctly by its power. There is a reason that inventors did not create a smooth-running, clean, and simple artifice, and that reason is that people like the noise. People like a heavy, complicated girth that roars, growls, and purrs threateningly. People like the spectacle of the sound. Push a button and it roars. The wall of sound is a monument to its pomp. It is unabashed. It is like a tiger who lacks the self-consciousness of his power. People are friends with this barrel-chested baritone with pistons festooned across his chest, clitter-clattering. Strap that to your back and hit it.

And here is the pie: when you are moving at a stellar speed, when you are tripping with ease and grace around elements and splitting the wind, the noise - the noise that is clattering and ricocheting off the blue arches of the sky - is in concert with your speed, part and parcel with your power. It is the mouth of the motion. The foot of the freedom. The stamp of the sprint.

An Amen

I thank you, God, for the piano.

My hands are together, raised to the sky.

My knees are on the ground, and I'm looking up in placid deference.

Thank you for that beetle with the black carapace

and those 88 clitter-clattering legs;

they sing in the wind when articulated like the crickets;

those eyes that peer at you with their whites from under a single stern brow.

Thank you for that noble, girthy elephant.

For that tiger.

I love you, Piano.

I want to make you scream and growl and chatter and gasp and sing.

The Birds of the Oxford English Dictionary

The Oxford English Dictionary is actually a historical record of events. It is a recording, or a collection, of the times that words were used in history, and what those words were then made to mean.

I bet the process of creating the Oxford English Dictionary was like assembling the animals for Noah’s Ark. I bet it was like trying to organize the world. Every little thing in the world, corporeal and incorporeal, has an aspect and a name and it is jumbling around in your mind and looking at you with a different face until you let it fall into place and fall into families. There’s the Things You Do and then there’s the Things. There’s the People, and there’s the Animals, and there’s the Buildings. There’s the Things You Were Doing and the Things You Are Doing, the Things You Did and the Things You Will Do. There’s the Sicknesses and the Sports. Those are the big animals. And then there’s the strange and unfamiliar things that other people have done that you have never heard of. Those are the small animals. Those are the little birds that you take extra time with, to examine their unique plumage, to appreciate that this bird only lives on a particular tree in a particular forest and only a particular people hear it. There are limitless numbers of those little birds out there.

Music is Different Kind of Animal

Music is an animal that looks at you differently every day. Sometimes it has its back to you and you are looking at its hide. Sometimes it sits with you quietly. Sometimes it sits in your lap and you get to examine an ear or a paw. And sometimes it stares you dead in the face and you feel its spirit echo with yours.

Singing is a different kind of beast from acting. When I’m acting, I focus on a need and the need is what drives me to open up. Muscles activate that I don’t typically use. Ranges in my voice open up that aren’t typically there. It’s the commitment to the need that turns my body on.

But when I’m singing that need is self-created. It is fabricated or mimicked at a very basic level, almost remembered. And as I sing more and more, the need and the act of singing become the same thing so that I am singing need, singing yearning. It is the need for communication expressed for its own sake, the flower that blossoms.

The Word

The word is everywhere. It hangs obscenely from corners like a pitch of gremlins. It chatters between the buildings on a skyline. It gilds the mountains like fur on a camel’s back. It lays in the concrete like tiny packages of gunpowder that pop and snap underneath my heels. It gathers in the black storm clouds and all the “k”’s and “v”’s clatter and strike their sharp corners together. It snuggles at the bases of middle-aged fir trees in the twilight stomach of the forest. It shoots from my mouth like a hammer. It drips from my lips when I’m unawares.

Acting is a Pseudo-Science

I think acting is, right now, to art what pseudo-science is to science. It has not yet graduated past the level of astrology. It is still addressed largely in obtuse, metaphysical terms. It’s rare to speak in specific units of meaning on how to act. There is not a strong, prevalent language for it for communicating the skill.

You’re not in bible study. You’re not talking about religion. You’re not talking about theology. Acting is simple. It’s not complicated. You’ve got to reduce acting down to it’s most simple elements and, if you are going to set up an exercise regimen to exercise something, exercise those. You’ve got to get away from the peripheral, orbiting space junk around acting and focus on the basic elements.

I appreciate Mamet’s school because it creates a simple language to speak on the essential elements of the art. I think it is a strong step in the direction of making acting a fully enrolled art.

Lovely Little Words

Lovely little words

Like leaves in a tree

When breath blows through them

They flutter individually

Giving a song and accolade