10-27-10 let's pretend

Last night, my good friend JT reminded me how much I enjoy playing "let's pretend" by letting me take part in a reading of his new play. I got to act like a 70 year old abbot of a monastery who tries and convicts one of his charges of (spoiler alert) homosexual conduct with a being who may or may not be some kind of angel.

As JT's words worked through my body, I found my posture hunching, my hands snarling into the arthritic claws characteristic of my grandfather, passions and sorrows that were not mine, but were familiar to me, spilling into the light. An old man lived in my skin for an hour or so, and I walked away feeling... good, like I'd just built a table with my hands, when all I had done was let another part of humanity have a voice for a little while.

6-23-08 Central Park, hot as balls

A hot day, and Central Park has a green, growing smell that takes me back ten years to the first month I was in New York. Having spent most of my life in the desert, I was amazed at this smell, the moisture in the air, the different quality of life, everything.

Right now, I'm wandering through the park, looking for the area where I'll be rehearsing a Shakespeare Play I'm writing the music for, sweating balls and carrying my guitar around. I finally get tired of looking and sit down on a rock, reading the novel I'm also carrying around like a brick in my back pack, while the mosquitoes feast on my flesh.

6-8-08 Some days, it's just easy

I'm writing songs for an upcoming show, lyrics by a certain Mr. William Shakespeare, and the music flows easily from me today. Nothing is forced or difficult. My hands end up pleasantly sore, my fingertips aching from pressing the guitar strings. I finish one song, and pleased and delighted with the feeling, walk around the house, laughing to myself and shaking my head.

5-28-08 And they Struck the Motherlode

Rehearsed at a loft in Williamsburg, and it was full of funky, interesting people doing their various artistic things. Knick-knacks and bricolage art all over the walls, multi-colored paintings of bulls and people, black and white photographs of cats and slightly out-of-focus women looking longingly into the distance, a chess set with shot glasses for pieces, crates and crates and crates full of old records, men and women walking the corridors in various states of dishevelment, old, enormous rusted tools laid out attractively on ramshackle wooden shelves, unmatched but beautiful old furniture placed all over: all indicators of the certain type of young, artistic, person who would naturally gravitate to Williamsburg in the early years of the 21st century.

We were given the tour of the (surprisingly large) space that had been subdivided into individual rooms, and came upon the (again, surprisingly large) kitchen area, the cavernous nature and wooden floors of which caused one of our number to remark, "It reminds me of a mining colony."

"Yeah," I replied, "a colony where they mine for cool."

3-17-08 differently abled

"Actors are flakes," announces Katie as we leave her apartment into the gray Brooklyn morning to fetch some brunch.

We walk down the street as I consider this, past the flea market as the vendors set up their tables. "Well," I say, "actors are flakes, and musicians are emotionally retarded, and writers are neurotic."

Without missing a beat, she replies, "I'm surprised you don't need your own parking place."