So we can dance and lose it, lose it, lose it, lose it

I’m building something new and strange, that I can’t talk too much about.  Software construction is much like creative writing; it’s a lonely process, and one fraught with mistakes and false starts and encouragements and setbacks, none of which can be shared publicly until the result is ready for mass consumption.  The process of creating it has been expensive, and emotionally challenging, but I stand the chance to make a great deal of money if my talent matches my ambitions.

I am building it for the same reason that I wrote Zombie Vixens from Hell and The Hermit Bird and Silent Hill: Homecoming and every other large and important creative thing in my life; namely, the thing already exists in my mind and I am arrogant enough to believe that the world will benefit immensely from having the thing that is, at the moment, only real to me.

After all this is over, even if I am wrong and the world does not need what I am making, I will remember that, unless I had built it, I would never have known if I was right or wrong.

It’s hard.  It’s expensive.  And time is ticking into the past, never to be recovered.

And yet, despite the expense and the time and the minor disappointments… yet again, I believe that can I see the future of things, the same way I did with all those plays and songs and scripts and games that I’ve worked on.

Commandment number one of Captain Beefheart’s Ten Commandments for Guitar Playing is this: “Listen to the birds.  That’s where all the music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from.”  So I did just that.  I went outside and I recorded a blackbird and then I came back and pulled that sound apart, frequency by frequency.

Mother Nature, she’s not wasteful.  Three quarters of the genes in mice exist in humans, and only two percent of our genes differ from us to the apes. All those strands of DNA, matching, mating, reintegrating, but the underlying patterns are the same. The algorithms for finding the common subsequences, the music of us… we are all the same.

You listen to a guitar riff on the radio, play it back, change it, recombine it, improve it. Imperfect copies of imperfect copies of imperfect copies, until the original Xerox isn’t even recognizable.

I can hear things now.  Things that other people can’t hear. Patterns, relationships. How sounds flow into other sounds. How frequencies beget frequencies.  I know where music comes from.

Everything will be possible; all the sounds that might exist, will exist.

I want the world to be able to hear things, the way I can hear them.

And I ain’t asking nobody for nothing if I can’t get it on my own

Living as I am in the shadow of Los Angeles, I spend a lot of time in the company of television stars and writers and producers and their outsized egos. And it’s quite the habit for people out here to tell you who you are and where you came from. When everyone lives to be on camera and on stage, everyone is no better than who they seem to be.

Let me tell you who I am.  I grew up in a small town called Sissonville, West Virginia. For years I slept on a bunk bed, suspended from the ceiling, that my stepfather constructed from a sheet of plywood and a few two-by-fours. There was a junkyard behind the house. I used to go out there with a slingshot and shoot at the tentworms that spun sticky webs. The roads were poor. I remember that a big truck came through and paved the broken streets one day. Within a week the pavement flaked and chunked apart into pieces, making the roads mostly undriveable. We were poor.

I made do, with my imagination and with my brothers and sister. I invented and recorded radio shows with my tape recorder. I made up sketches and stories and little plays. I watched reruns of old comedies on one of the three television channels that we received. Eventually I got a cheap computer, a Vic-20. It plugged into the television. I learned how to make games on it.

I remember my father and my mother fighting, before they were divorced. Once she slapped him and I remember Dad on top of her, holding her down.

I remember learning to play baseball. My stepfather taught me. I remember learning to walk in the back woods, and how to avoid sliding down the mountains and hills. I know how to skip rocks and shoot guns and how to blow things up with bottle rockets and bang caps.

I remember my first fight. I wrestled the kid down but didn’t punch him. He left me alone after that. Come to think of it, all the kids who ever threatened me, left me alone after I went after them.

I know how to chop and carry wood, and how to sharpen a pocket knife. I know how to hoe corn and carry tomatoes and dig septic tanks. I know how to catch crawdads by hand without getting pinched. I remember the wooden toys that my grandfather carved for my father to play with.

I have walked in the woods and heard nothing and heard it loudly.

I suppose it struck me today, as I was being lectured about what I was and what I wasn’t, that perhaps I forgot that I am somebody, that I have a colorful and unlikely past.

I know who I have been. And I know where I came from.

And as I am starting to learn, precious few people in this traffic-jam town remember who they have been, or where they came from.

I’m only watching the game, controlling it

I know I do I, this is forever

The Doll, by Miro Galvan, has started rehearsals.  This is a little two-person show happening next month at the Little Fish Theater in San Pedro.  My character, Marko, is a forty year-old lonely man who has decided to acquire a live-in love doll as his primary companion.  The show is being directed by the able James Rice and it stars the lovely and talented Analeis Lorig.

Currently I’m wrestling with where my character is coming from.  Based on my first read of the show, nearly everything the character has to say is cynical, self-interested or abusive.  The show seemed quite dark to me.  And this show is apparently supposed to be a comedy.  So if I abused this poor sweet doll on stage the way that Marko sounds in my head, everyone would want to lynch me by the end of the show.  I needed help.

“Take out the cynicism,” Jim informed me.  And so I hit upon the idea of playing every line that Marko says, exactly the opposite from my interpretation of the text.  If the text is bitter, he’s feeling loving; if the text is flighty, he’s calm, and so forth.  Playing Marko this way, is, to say the least, a fun challenge, in the sense of an acting exercise.

Analeis is immensely talented.  It feels good to be challenged to turn in higher quality work.  I can’t merely phone it in, as I have done in lesser shows.  And since this is a little teeny two-person show, the eyes are on me and her the entire time — no down time.

She’s good.  And that is refreshing.  Actors who are good totally raise the level of everyone else.  It is refreshing to be challenged; it is refreshing to be able to use my own ideas.  I feel now that I can’t come in and just wing it — I had better come in with strong opinions and creativity about how to make Marko work.

Ein Wesen und ein Ding

When I was thirteen, I was the first kid in school to use a word processor to write his homework assignments.  This would have been 1983, some decades before every child in school was required to have an iPad.

At the time, there was quite a kerfuffle about it.  One teacher I recall had a problem with it.  She was of the opinion that “just letting a computer do your homework for you is cheating.”

Another teacher wanted a detailed discussion of what I’d done, since he had never seen the output of a word processor.  After I explained to him that the computer only printed the words I put into it, he said: “So it’s a bit like a typewriter.  If it only outputs the words that you put into it, then it will be acceptable for this class.  But I’m not sure if your word processor will be acceptable when you go to college.”

I am, and always will be, a huge geek.  A happy advantage of being a huge geek is that you can, sometimes, see the future.

Bosh bosh bosh, loads of money

Imagine these four in a room, arguing.
Imagine these four in a room, arguing.
                              A jail cell somewhere near South
                              Croydon.


                                        SHERLOCK
               I will likely have us out in three minutes if you would all
               stop using all the room's oxygen.


                                        SPOCK
               Unlikely.  Your weapons and ours were confiscated.


                                        SHERLOCK
                                   (indicating his brain)
               I carry my weapon here.


                                        DOCTOR WHO
               Excellent!  You're a telepath!  I need you to visualize the
               TARDIS's control panel.  The red recall lever.


                                        HOUSE
                                   (flatly)
               Narcissistic personality disorder, narcissistic personality
               disorder, Asperger's syndrome.


                                        SPOCK
                                   (to House)
               Are you a doctor?


                                        DOCTOR WHO
               Actually, I'm the Doctor.


                                        HOUSE
               And I'm Sherlock Holmes.


                                        SPOCK
               Fascinating.

Alas for poor MacBeth, he found a shallow grave

The Los Angeles branch of Actors’ Equity is currently promoting several new plans to replace the current 99-seat theater code.

The road to unemployment is paved with good intentions.  Well intentioned though the plans may be, they break the business model of 99-seat companies in Los Angeles, and make it impossible to produce new works.

In place of the current code, they are proposing three new items:

The Los Angeles Self Produced Project Code.  This is for actors who “are part of a collaborating group and are not employed by any producing entity.”  If you’re any kind of company, profit or non-profit, you can’t use the SPPC.  In other words, if you use the SPPC, you are completely uninsured.  Make sure not to trip on anything backstage when working under the SPPC.  Expect that a lot of producers will tell actors “you’re a producer now!” and use the SPPC to get Equity actors to perform, for free, without the protections of any kind of employment agreement.

The Los Angeles Membership Company Rule.  This rule grandfathers in all the repertory companies that existed as of yesterday, February 6, 2015.  Since existing repertory companies are exempt from the new 99 seat rule, it creates a secondary market for existing money-losing membership companies in LA.  So now any producer can buy up a dead theater company that exists only on paper, and use it to bypass all the worst elements of the new 99 seat plan.  Because grandfathering.  This rule exists because the repertory companies lobbied for it; it doesn’t benefit anyone except the owners of these companies.  New membership companies, of whatever sort, will never qualify for the Membership Company rule, and new blood will not enter those existing companies.

And finally, we have the new 99 seat code.  Most of the new code is the same as the old code, with one major exception: all performers get paid minimum wage for all rehearsal as well as performance time.  Currently this is $9 per hour.  While this sounds superficially reasonable, in practical terms this increases the total cost of shoestring theater by between 25% and 50%.  Shows with small casts go from breaking even to losing money, and shows with large casts, like musicals or Shakespeare, suddenly become guaranteed financial sinkholes.

I created the following spreadsheet to try to understand the financial impact that the proposed plan would have on a new production of a new work in LA.  I have three theoretical shows of three different sizes.  In every case, with reasonable financial assumptions, every show I budget loses money under the proposed Equity plan.  Here’s the spreadsheet; feel free to download and experiment with it yourself.

In show A, by my math, a show with four Equity actors that rehearses for 40 hours and plays a total of twelve shows, needs $2,736 to pay actors.  If the entire rest of the show (that’s theater rental, staff, costumes, tech, insurance AND publicity) costs $10,000, and if the show earns $15 revenue per ticket and sells the house to 70% of capacity for each show, the show still loses money.

Actors Equity can set payment minimums, but they can’t make a show profitable. If the proposed Equity plan goes through, a great deal of experimental theater in Los Angeles will vanish.

No we’re never gonna survive

In addition to McKee’s and Egri’s books, I have found one other book to be tremendously useful in creating believable, rich characters with strong motivations.

It’s the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, currently in its fifth edition.  Some call it the DSM for short.  The fourth edition is more punchy and more direct, and a lot of diagnosticians prefer the old to the new; but for a writer’s purposes the version doesn’t matter.

Open up this thick book to a random page, and you have a complete and fascinating description of character traits for a random character.  Let’s do that now: “Has deliberately engaged in fire setting with the intention of causing serious damage.”  How cool is that!  That’s a friggin’ one-hour crime drama right there, and the character is already mapped out for you on the page in loving detail.

Let’s go again.  “Preoccupation with one or more perceived defects or flaws in physical appearance that are not observable or appear slight to others.”  What, you can’t see my extra nose?  You can take that character trait and run a hundred different directions with it.

Oh, one more, please!  “Recurrent thoughts of death (not just fear of dying), recurrent suicidal ideation without a specific plan.”  In a sentence or two, you’ve established a protagonist and given him a problem that needs solving.  Neat, quick, and punchy.

The DSM works brilliantly as a rogues gallery, or as a source for richer and more complicated characters.  The DSM gives us believable, immediate problems for our characters to solve.

You could write for ten lifetimes and still not run out of story ideas if the DSM were your only source for characters.

Thank you.  Thank you, DSM 5.  I love you.

I used to be the only boy you’d be found with

We’re experiencing a small outbreak of the measles here in California.  As of this writing, it’s only 100 or so cases, but measles are highly contagious.  It’s likely that a bunch more people will get sick.

In 1935, Muzafer Sherif conducted a series of experiments on the autokinetic effect.  If you’re placed in a dark room with only a single point of light at some distance, you will notice that that point of light seems to sway or diverge from its position over time.  Sherif placed individuals and small groups of people in rooms and asked them to tell him how far the light was moving.

Over time, groups of individuals modified their opinions after hearing other’s opinions.  One person says that the light is moving two inches, the other person says it is moving a foot; the first person changes his estimate so that the light is now moving four inches, and the second now changes his estimate accordingly.  The groups reached a group consensus on how far the light was moving.

The kicker, of course, is that the light wasn’t moving at all.  The people in the experiment were adjusting their own stated perceptions based on the opinions of others in the group.  This was one of the earliest experiments in social proofing.  Solomon Asch conducted some similar, fascinating experiments in the 1950s.

In college I took an infamous class called “Thinking about Thinking.”  In one lecture, Robert Nozick talked about a practical joke he played on an expectant mother who was of the crystal therapy set.

He said, “Sloppy thinking tends to congregate.  Where you find one bad idea, you’ll find others.  I was once speaking with this woman who lectured me at length on the healing power of crystal structures.  On a sudden whim, I told her that I was doing research that proved that a child’s personality was determined by the structure of mineral nearest the baby at the moment it was born.  Ergo, you have to make sure the right type of rock is present whenever a baby is born.  The woman didn’t question me.  She listened carefully and told me that the research was fascinating and that I should continue it.  She didn’t tell me, as was the case, that it was an utterly silly idea with no basis in fact.”

Now the Internet of infinite ideas has a dark side.  And it’s a dark side that is historically novel.

The Internet aggregates sloppy thinking.  And it does so at a magnitude impossible before its invention.

Facebook’s recently updated algorithm reinforces content that your friends have already liked.  It doesn’t matter whether the content is correct or not; it only matters whether the content is Liked and Shared.

Facebook is the rule, not the exception.  Regardless of whatever bizarre crackpot notion you might entertain, there are a hundred people on the Internet who have already started an online forum to discuss and support and social proof you in your weird assumptions.

Before the Internet, all your social proof had to come from local friends and family and neighbors.  People within earshot.  And so your chances of getting a diverging variety of proofing opinions was far higher.  But today, with the modern Internet, amateur groupthink replaces scientific consensus, and everyone with an open browser is a self-anointed expert.

Real experts address epidemics very differently than random people on the Internet.  John Snow’s chart suggests that the water supply near Broad Street in London was the source of  an 1854 cholera epidemic.  Jonas Salk’s 1952 polio vaccine was scientifically tested in the Francis field trials before it was made available to all schoolchildren.  And in 1983, Harald zur Hausen described the HPV viruses that can cause most cervical cancers.  His work paved the way for development of a vaccine.

I suggest that social proof of nonscientific principles predisposes a population to epidemics.  In other words, endemic misinformation is a necessary precondition for “eradicated” diseases to make a comeback.

via xkcd