Tuesday, July 29, 2003

Well, well, well. This blog has been well and truly dead for months now. It's interesting to me how these things work in cycles--for the longest time, this place served as my public journal, then it became a repository for links which were cool or strange, then it became somewhat political and flame-oriented, slowly devolving into just random pictures and links without explanation until it was finally here...cold and empty, drifting in cyberspace. Folks were starting to dicker over salvage rights. Not pretty.

Now that there's no chance of hangers-ons still looking, it's time to start up again, I think. First, an update on where I've been...I still live in Brooklyn, in Carroll Gardens where I am very happy in my apartment. I'm still married--as a matter of fact, today is my 3rd wedding anniversary, a milestone I'm proud and pleased to have passed. Three years isn't much to some, but it's what I have so far--and I have to say that a lot of folks don't get to three. Yeah, I know--it sounds silly, but three years can be a lot in our ADD-flooded culture.

Over the last six months I have been working intensively on creating a show with HBO, and those efforts have been going very well--it's exciting work, and the people I've gotten to work with so far are stellar. It's been challenging, learning a whole new idiom, and to some extent it has been humbling, because things take me a lot longer than I initially thought they would...one of the reasons this part of my life has gone by the wayside.

Other projects: a few months back, I was the artistic director for TEN STORIES: A Humble Offering To The Manhattan Skyline, a very cool project that involved dropping the roof of a Brooklyn brownstone in a park on the East River, and then setting plays on it, silhoutted by the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges. I'd missed producing big, sprawling projects with lots of moving parts, and it was a great environment to be back inside of again.

This spring I helped my friend Suzanne's new show, YOGA BITCH, find a venue and get itself rolling. YOGA BITCH is an autobiographical solo show, about Suzanne's exciting bout with cult-like yoga immersion in colorful, decadent Bali--lots of pissdrinking, cattiness and revelations. I'm quite fond of it, and it was directed by my wife, whom frequent readers know directs my shows...it was terribly instructive to see someone else's show go through the wringer I go through, and it feels good to be helping to promote an interesting theatrical form that doesn't get a lot of play.

Tonight I celebrate my marriage in the tradition of my people, by getting in a metal tube and hurtling over the ocean at 800 mph. We are traveling to Edinburgh, Scotland for the Fringe Festival--they have the largest such festival on the planet, and for the month of August I will be in residence there, performing 21 DOG YEARS, seeing other folks shows, writing and developing new work. It's a very exciting trip--Edinburgh is the epicenter of DIY theater, and this festival has immense variety, with a ludicrious number of performances happening all month long. Check out the main site for the scale of the festival, and here is my show, which you can purchase tickets for right there on the site through the Power of the Internet.

Well, I'm off--there's a lot to finish off before this evening, not the least being a block of new pages in this script. My next update will be from on the ground in Scotland.