voodoo from Petra
Feb. 22nd, 2009 04:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabAs with several others, the infamous ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
petronelle hit me with five things she wanted to know about me.
1. BSG Comics *skip if you don't want minor S2 spoilers*
I know so little! I mean, I know so little about the genre of BSG comics that may or may not be out there in the world, except for the fact that mine is coming out in April. On the other hand I can certainly talk about the experience of writing said. I work for a publishing house called TokyoPop which specializes in English-language manga. They hired me to write one of three novellas for a BSG collection called "Echoes of New Caprica," with stories set during the missing year on New Caprica betw S2 and S3. My assignment was to write about Roslin as a schoolteacher, and the prompt they gave me initially was ripe with paranoia and self-doubt and moral ambiguity: all the things we love about Laura and the show. So I was tasked to assemble an outline, which for the purposes of manga really ends up being a frame-by-frame list of detailed imagery, aka, a long-ass outline for a hundred page manga, right? Outline goes to Ron Moore's staff, they respond that it is too full of moral ambiguity, that they don't want Laura to have self doubt, and that Laura's paranoia suggests a weakness in her that they consider character assassination. Thanks, Ron Moore. So I started again and wrote a much milder story where Laura has her moments of insecurity but is mostly a strong leader, and the good guys win in the end. Then they told me to "ramp up the paranoia." So I did, and got back (again) that they didn't want so much paranoia because it's a sign of weakness. I sent my editor the initial pitch assignment and said, "just to clarify -- I'm not writing this anymore, right?" and he agreed, yes, it seemed like NBC was changing their minds with each draft. They suggested I throw in a Centurion substitute teacher in one draft; I tried that and they didn't understand it. Then, in a hysterical fit of creativity I chatted withchr0me_kitten and somehow landed on a solution, and, anyway, there's a character based on our dear shiny kitten in the book now, and that character happens to also save everybody's ass. Thank you, C! So, in conclusion, the novella I ended up producing was pretty far from where I wanted to go, and severiously watered down as far as BSG-style ambiguity and darkness, AND has some cheap narrative tricks they made me throw in (hello, Officer Infodump) BUT there's still some edgy stuff I like. Anyway, you'll tell me, in April, when you purchase and read it. As of course you will.
2. Grokking Darren Nichols
In short, I went to performing arts camp for seven years. Okay, it was clown camp. I mean, it was an arts camp but I studied clowning. Many of my compatriots went on to clown college (dude! Jacques le Coq is not a charm school! It's serious business! It's like the Sorbonne of clowning!) and for most of my life I found myself surrounded by alternative theater types, improv troupes, mime ensembles (yes, I also studied mime), and generally anything that could e performed in a black box or outdoor stage with minimal lighting, suggestive props, and bauhaus-type soundtracking. We wore a lot of turtlenecks.
Later, in college, our theater department was headed by a man named Allen Kuharski, a polish actor/director who wore turtlenecks and scarves and was known for seducing and fucking his favorite male disciples. His theater program -- therefore, my school's theater program -- was built on the shoulders of Stanislavsky and Brecht, tying in elements of black-box clowning and the Polish and Eastern European theater tradition. We did a lot of things that could be referred to as "surreal tragicomedy" and a lot of things in translation from the original language into a more ironic English version.
My best friend throughout college was a kid named Michal Zadara, a quadrilingual genius direct from Warsaw. He majored in the directing program, also studied dramaturgy, and, being Polish himself, translated and adapted that good old Stanislavsky type theater into pomo American commentary on politics and race, or whatever. Now he's back in Poland doing political theater, something we don't have here in any real capacity, and lecturing to other groups of theater students about the power of interpretation and form and physical movement and language to subvert and rework traditional narratives. He also wore the hell out of a scarf.
For the most part, neither one of these dudes, nor anyone else in the theater program, had much of a sense of humor about how seriously they took theatric subversion. In other words, Swarthmore could have put on an R&J with the cast dressed as chess pieces, no problem. And Allen would have prided himself on the subversiveness. Mike would have just as easily set fire to the stage if it made his point (say, during a violent retelling of Hansel and Gretel).
In conclusion: seven years of clowning (serious business!) and then four years of Polish subversiveness makes for a profound understanding of Darren Nichols. And some deep love for him and what he thinks he's doing, and the inevitable vision of the moment he sees the absurdity of his situation and decides it's not a poetic absurdity (absurdism is actually a powerful device in subversive theater, except when it's just total nutbar; the line is VERY FINE) and has a creative breakdown.
Mike once said to me that pure form was the most beautiful way of seeing the world. No emotion, no fuzzy logic, just the movement of shapes through space to tell a story. I was in love with him at the time, and he with me, and we spent a good amount of time having fistfights, wrestling and crying and arguing politics and art. "What if we were just pure form?" I asked him, because the emotional bond between us was so great I couldn't imagine our story existing any other way. He got all moony. "Wouldn't that be beautiful?....." he mused.
I clearly need to write another Darren story or nine.
3. David Tennant
4. The Sunny Part of CA
5. Fandom of Three! (Falsettos, HI PETRA AND LEIGH, have some soup made from chicken that though unexotic is antibiotic!)
... to come in a subsequent post. Tennant is too big for one Sab to handle in one sitting, LA is not fit for human existence, and Falsettos is going to require the tale of a young Jewish girl growing up in NY, starting therapy at age six (= me).
petronelle hit me with five things she wanted to know about me.1. BSG Comics *skip if you don't want minor S2 spoilers*
I know so little! I mean, I know so little about the genre of BSG comics that may or may not be out there in the world, except for the fact that mine is coming out in April. On the other hand I can certainly talk about the experience of writing said. I work for a publishing house called TokyoPop which specializes in English-language manga. They hired me to write one of three novellas for a BSG collection called "Echoes of New Caprica," with stories set during the missing year on New Caprica betw S2 and S3. My assignment was to write about Roslin as a schoolteacher, and the prompt they gave me initially was ripe with paranoia and self-doubt and moral ambiguity: all the things we love about Laura and the show. So I was tasked to assemble an outline, which for the purposes of manga really ends up being a frame-by-frame list of detailed imagery, aka, a long-ass outline for a hundred page manga, right? Outline goes to Ron Moore's staff, they respond that it is too full of moral ambiguity, that they don't want Laura to have self doubt, and that Laura's paranoia suggests a weakness in her that they consider character assassination. Thanks, Ron Moore. So I started again and wrote a much milder story where Laura has her moments of insecurity but is mostly a strong leader, and the good guys win in the end. Then they told me to "ramp up the paranoia." So I did, and got back (again) that they didn't want so much paranoia because it's a sign of weakness. I sent my editor the initial pitch assignment and said, "just to clarify -- I'm not writing this anymore, right?" and he agreed, yes, it seemed like NBC was changing their minds with each draft. They suggested I throw in a Centurion substitute teacher in one draft; I tried that and they didn't understand it. Then, in a hysterical fit of creativity I chatted with
chr0me_kitten and somehow landed on a solution, and, anyway, there's a character based on our dear shiny kitten in the book now, and that character happens to also save everybody's ass. Thank you, C! So, in conclusion, the novella I ended up producing was pretty far from where I wanted to go, and severiously watered down as far as BSG-style ambiguity and darkness, AND has some cheap narrative tricks they made me throw in (hello, Officer Infodump) BUT there's still some edgy stuff I like. Anyway, you'll tell me, in April, when you purchase and read it. As of course you will.2. Grokking Darren Nichols
In short, I went to performing arts camp for seven years. Okay, it was clown camp. I mean, it was an arts camp but I studied clowning. Many of my compatriots went on to clown college (dude! Jacques le Coq is not a charm school! It's serious business! It's like the Sorbonne of clowning!) and for most of my life I found myself surrounded by alternative theater types, improv troupes, mime ensembles (yes, I also studied mime), and generally anything that could e performed in a black box or outdoor stage with minimal lighting, suggestive props, and bauhaus-type soundtracking. We wore a lot of turtlenecks.
Later, in college, our theater department was headed by a man named Allen Kuharski, a polish actor/director who wore turtlenecks and scarves and was known for seducing and fucking his favorite male disciples. His theater program -- therefore, my school's theater program -- was built on the shoulders of Stanislavsky and Brecht, tying in elements of black-box clowning and the Polish and Eastern European theater tradition. We did a lot of things that could be referred to as "surreal tragicomedy" and a lot of things in translation from the original language into a more ironic English version.
My best friend throughout college was a kid named Michal Zadara, a quadrilingual genius direct from Warsaw. He majored in the directing program, also studied dramaturgy, and, being Polish himself, translated and adapted that good old Stanislavsky type theater into pomo American commentary on politics and race, or whatever. Now he's back in Poland doing political theater, something we don't have here in any real capacity, and lecturing to other groups of theater students about the power of interpretation and form and physical movement and language to subvert and rework traditional narratives. He also wore the hell out of a scarf.
For the most part, neither one of these dudes, nor anyone else in the theater program, had much of a sense of humor about how seriously they took theatric subversion. In other words, Swarthmore could have put on an R&J with the cast dressed as chess pieces, no problem. And Allen would have prided himself on the subversiveness. Mike would have just as easily set fire to the stage if it made his point (say, during a violent retelling of Hansel and Gretel).
In conclusion: seven years of clowning (serious business!) and then four years of Polish subversiveness makes for a profound understanding of Darren Nichols. And some deep love for him and what he thinks he's doing, and the inevitable vision of the moment he sees the absurdity of his situation and decides it's not a poetic absurdity (absurdism is actually a powerful device in subversive theater, except when it's just total nutbar; the line is VERY FINE) and has a creative breakdown.
Mike once said to me that pure form was the most beautiful way of seeing the world. No emotion, no fuzzy logic, just the movement of shapes through space to tell a story. I was in love with him at the time, and he with me, and we spent a good amount of time having fistfights, wrestling and crying and arguing politics and art. "What if we were just pure form?" I asked him, because the emotional bond between us was so great I couldn't imagine our story existing any other way. He got all moony. "Wouldn't that be beautiful?....." he mused.
I clearly need to write another Darren story or nine.
3. David Tennant
4. The Sunny Part of CA
5. Fandom of Three! (Falsettos, HI PETRA AND LEIGH, have some soup made from chicken that though unexotic is antibiotic!)
... to come in a subsequent post. Tennant is too big for one Sab to handle in one sitting, LA is not fit for human existence, and Falsettos is going to require the tale of a young Jewish girl growing up in NY, starting therapy at age six (= me).
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-02-23 01:50 am (UTC)As for Darren, yes, no wonder you understand him so deeply. Any time you feel so moved, I promise I'll be right there shouting "Huzzah!" and laughing at the bits that are meant to be comic.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-23 01:54 am (UTC)In conclusion: seven years of clowning (serious business!) and then four years of Polish subversiveness makes for a profound understanding of Darren Nichols.
That is priceless, hee. Aw, I love Darren. I understand the reasons why I shouldn't or why other people might not love him, but I totally totally do. Actually, I have self-protecting denial of my love for him, cause I identify with so many things about him that I know put me on the side of ridiculous people that I don't really want to admit how close I feel to Darren's vision.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-23 08:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-23 08:31 pm (UTC)Also, I miss you and haven't seen you in ages.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-23 09:26 pm (UTC)Also, GREATLY looking forward to seeing you talk about Falsettos.
Falsettos
Date: 2009-02-23 11:06 pm (UTC)Re: Falsettos
Date: 2009-02-23 11:10 pm (UTC)