Today I designed two little graphic thingies.
The first is for the t-shirt we give out to those students who managed to accumulate 100 AR™ points during the school year:
The other was a quick invitation to the Red Parrot Café, a morale booster I do in the media center: first thing Friday morning, teachers can come in for a nice, cold drink of Sunny D, complete with a splash of grenadine and a paper umbrella.
Not much, but hey, it was creative.
Today was a little creative in an unexpected way: I started a new blog. And no, you can’t see it.
Mike Mitchell, who teaches PE at Newnan Crossing, approached me a couple of months ago with a proposition: he and I should collaborate on a book, 100 Things to Do Before You’re 60. I had plenty of things to keep my busy and told him so, but still, it’s a good idea.
However, now that William Blake’s Inn has stopped for a moment, I figured we might tackle it. But how? At work, we might go days without seeing each other. How could we possibly keep up with the amount of work it takes to write a book?
And what should this book look like?
Yesterday, I had a scathingly brilliant idea. Mike is fairly conservative, and I, of course, am not. He’s an ex-military PE teacher; I’m an effete intellectual. Why do not do it like a dialog between us, sort of like those silly newspaper columns where two opposing writers take turn making comments? We could tackle serious issues, we could do some funny stuff, we might even agree.
So of course I decided to set up a blog for us to work on together. One of us can post a Thing to Do, and then we can both comment. Great way to get stuff out there, and we can edit later. And no, you can’t see it. It’s our private workspace for the time being.
I think this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
80 days to go.
Here’s a quote from a recent article:
“Any show, however classic,” Mr. Warchus said, “is just a document of where the creators got to in the time they had , after which the process stopped, they crossed their fingers and waited for the reviews. If the response was good, that was it. If not, the process continued. As here.”
Mr. Warchus, unfortunately, is the director of The Lord of the Rings, the musical, which flopped in Toronto for $25 million, and is now in previews in London, for another $25 million. Bless his heart.
Still, his point is valid. In my recent post about what we did and did not accomplish for the backers audition, that was my main point: we ran out of time and assistance. We didn’t finish, we just stopped.
And I know that’s the truth no matter what. It won’t be any different even with the fabulously funded world premiere version. At some point we will simply run out of time to accomplish our ideas, even if they were fundamental to the vision.
The difference between us and Mr. Warchus is that none of us are going to lose $50 million and be revealed as ludicrous visionaries to the theatre world.
81 days to go.
Today was the study: sorting into piles, shelving, filing, archiving. Clearing off surfaces. Realigning possibilities.
One thing I archived was all the William Blake stuff. This is very strange, not looking at any work coming up that has to do with William Blake. On the one hand, there’s no point in doing any more thinking or creating or orchestrating until we are sure there’s a definite leader for the WBOC. (Which we are not at this point.) On the other hand, it’s a little unnerving to think that all that could start up again, perhaps immediately, perhaps later in the summer.
Still, I have other things to do. I pulled up my Day in the Moonlight folder and took a look at the very little there is in there: the script, some notes from Mike, some midi files from Mike, a couple of lyrics I’ve started. Not a lot at all.
I had decided to sit down and reread the script for Moonlight, but if I ever printed it out, I cannot find it. Add it to my list for tomorrow.
I know I need to make Moonlight next on my list. After all, Mike has theatres waiting for the musical version of the play. Still, I have that orchestral texture running through my head, and it’s pulling me toward the symphony next. Moonlight requires actual songwriting, music and lyrics, and that’s a whole different brain. What’s a busy quasi-composer to do?
Happy birthday to me. In celebration, I only cleaned up the backyard. The bulk of the William Blake stuff, still in the basement, will have to wait until some other time.
I also read: Unspun, and part of Thinking in Circles, and now I’m delving back into Out of Our Minds. A quote from a research consultant has struck me. Speaking of the characteristics of a creative organization, David Liddle says:
“It is first and foremost a place that gives people freedom to take risks; second it is a place that allows people to discover and develop their own natural intelligence; third, it is a place where there are no ‘stupid’ questions and no ‘right’ answers; and fourth, it is a place that values irreverence, the lively, the dynamic, the surprising, the playful.”
Well, I think he just described the Lacuna workshop group. There were only six of us who were there week after week, Marc, Molly, Melissa, Laura, Carol Lee, and me, and I think we did an incredible job of creating the two pieces we staged from nothing. We all contributed, we all took off in different directions, we all built on what the others brought. We took essentially in each case a plotless poem and created a visual staging that I think intrigued and delighted our audience.
Since that was our goal, to surprise and delight our audience, we succeeded wildly. As usual, though, we succeeded beyond anything our audience could expect. It’s like the fact in biology that animals are hardwired to respond to stimuli that go beyond anything they encounter in nature, e.g., a certain butterfly will be attracted to a shade of blue that is brighter/more vivid than any potential mate he might encounter in the real world. Our audience may have been delighted, but there was actually more there to delight them than they were even aware. (Did I just get my analogies inside out?)
The kinds of things we invented, Toast Heads, Ice Sprites, dancing hedgehogs, puppet walls, snowdrifts that turn into banks of flowers, a troupe of traveling sunflowers, stained-glass tortoises pulled by an angel, are truly and totally wonderful. A more polished version of them all will only amaze an audience even further.
This richness is due entirely to the six creative minds who cobbled it all together (with thanks to the other minds who joined in from time to time: Mary Frances, Kevin, Galen.) This bodes extremely well for the workshopping of the entire show, if and when we begin that process.
As Carol Lee said at one point, “This is hard, so much harder than just buying a script and doing that.” But as she also pointed out, what an incredibly enriching experience!
83 days to go.
No, not cleaning up at home. I’ll probably do that tomorrow. Today I cleaned up in my office at school.
I’m getting a Promethean board in the media center, and it involves a wholesale turning-upside-down of the entire media center. I hope it’s worth it. Part of what’s involved is moving where I work, on a table out in the media center, over to where the Promethean board is going to be.
Since I haven’t really used my office (nor the old Mac on the desk) in a couple of years, I decided that I would move my desk over to my new workspace rather than the library table I’ve been using. To do that, of course, I had to tidy up.
I began yesterday, hauling stuff off the shelves and throwing away tons of outdated stuff: Beginning Internet for Teachers; Using Filemaker 3.0; The Mac Demystified (don’t know why I had that one); old school improvement frameworks; the QCC; that kind of thing.
Today I continued, consolidating materials and tossing. It’s great fun. I am reminded of Wallace Stevens’ “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” among other Stevens’ poems, in which he uses the garden as a metaphor for creativity. He usually makes one of two points: first, the universe is a chaotic mess, a wilderness, and we humans organize as much of it as we can into gardens, and creative people are always looking for an exit from the garden, so that we can find more wilderness to organize. His second point is that gardens die and must be torn out and replanted in order to continue to be gardens.
So before I can move ahead into the wonderful future (?) of the Promethean board, I have to in many ways remove some of the old. This was certainly true of the technology stuff I’ve been throwing away.
84 days to go.
Mindful of the issues of using the complete title of A Visit to William Blake’s Inn, I began playing with ideas today in PhotoShop. (Yesterday I downloaded four or five new fonts to play with as well, although this particular font is one I already had called Fifteen36.)
That’s one solution, although I would want a much fatter (though still elegant) background font.
Looking at it now, here’s an idea: make the A Visit to lengthened, stretched into the distance, like William Blake’s Inn‘s shadow.
I downloaded the video that Jonathan shot last week. The sound is not the best, but our two staged works come across quite well. The music actually stands up to inspection. I can’t wait to hear it for real, one way or the other, with a chorus that has been rehearsed by someone who knows what they’re doing. (Dragging on “never part day from night” there… tsk, tsk…)
Just small stuff tonight: I went through my piano/vocal score that I used in January and last week and made all the corrections in the files that I’d been marking in the score. This included things like the missing word “boots” in the soprano line in Milky Way, or the inexplicable use of the word “mouse” instead of “cat” who guards my doors in Postcard. Others were more subtle, like using a Finale plug-in to add courtesy accidentals throughout Milky Way. (You’re welcome, chorus.)
Otherwise, nothing really strenuous tonight. There are some details from the Arts Commission meeting that I want to track down before discussing them here, but that was about it for the day.
We met to debrief the backers audition, congratulate ourselves, and prepare for the next phase.
We discussed whether to call the production A Visit to William Blake’s Inn or, as I had printed out in various fonts on the wall, William Blake’s Inn. I pointed out that we were talking three separate works here: Nancy’s book, my song cycle (both entitled A Visit...), and the stage show, the title of which was up for grabs. There was something to be said for separating the stage show from the other two.
Also, I pointed out that it’s nearly impossible to get the entire title balanced typographically. I know, since I’ve had to do it on flyers, post cards, posters, all kinds of things. There’s just no way.
However, Marc suggested making the logo such that William Blake’s Inn was the major visual component, with A Visit to not as noticeable above it. His point was that he hated to lose the idea of “a visit” in the title. We agreed with that. We also thought perhaps a professional graphic artist might have more flexible ideas.
I filled everyone in on what I knew about the Cultural Arts Commission’s role at this point, which is not much. We have a volunteer to head up the project, although whether she has volunteered to be über-producer or just the Scotland coordinator, even I am not clear. The Commission meets tomorrow, so we’ll know more then.
We defined what our role was going to be in this venture: we propose the budget; we workshop the piece and develop the script and visual materials; we work with the designer(s); we cast the show; we rehearse the show; we produce the educational materials for schools (book studies/music).
The organizing committee’s roles: produce the show; find space and resources; organize volunteers; raise money; pay bills; publicize the show; handle the Scotland connection; handle the Willard exhibit;
We think we really need to hire a technical director (TD) to supervise (and perhaps design) the sets and costume construction. We will need to pay the musical director. We should pay the director, though I blush to say it. We will need a real lighting designer and a sound engineer.
I’ve already defined the next three phases somewhere, but I’ll restate them here. During Phase 1 (Aug. 2007-May 2008), Lacuna will workshop the show and propose the budget; the Organizing Committee (WBOC) will begin organizing, raising money, lining up space and resources. During Phase 2 (Jan. 2008-Oct. 2008), Lacuna will design the educational materials and assist with the construction of costumes, etc.; WBOC will continue to raise money, begin to publicize, line up the Scotland and Willard things, start the construction process. During Phase 3 (Aug. 2008-Oct. 2008), Lacuna will audition and rehearse the show; WBOC will publicize and organize whatever needs to be done leading up to opening night.
All of this is a grand, fuzzy outline which we’ll have to clarify in many, many conversations with the WBOC. So off into Limbo we go!
88 days to go.
Now that last week has settled down, although it’s not completely, still, I’m finding it difficult to stop and think about what we did and did not accomplish.
Clearly, we accomplished our main goal, which was to interest someone, anyone, on the Cultural Arts Commission in heading up the organizing committee. And several people told me that they now understood what the possibilities were in creating a stage work from my song cycle.
On a personal level, I was able to impress quite a lot of people with my music. That’s not unimportant. When we set out on this journey, Marc wondered whether my pushing William Blake’s Inn as I was doing would be indelicate. Previously in my life, I would have agreed with him. (Yes, I was actually quite insecure about my music, and we could politely call it modesty.)
But I have come to the realization that self-promotion is what artists do, if they’re smart. All kinds of examples spring to mind: Beethoven’s mammoth concert in which he premiered his 5th and 6th Symphonies and the 5th Piano Concerto; or Schubert a few years later, finally putting some of his stuff into a concert after friends exhorted him to, but not daring to attend the concert himself; or, God help us, Wagner, terrorizing everyone in a 500-mile radius into doing his music exactly as he wanted it. “Art isn’t easy,” Sondheim reminds us in exactly this context.
So one accomplishment is a healthy self-confidence on my part. (It helps when your singers are complaining a week later that they can’t get the music out of their heads. Of course, the same complaint could be made about “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” or “At the Copacabana.”)
A very interesting thing I learned about our process, and I don’t know that this is an accomplishment or a failure, is how wasteful it can be. We wanted eight Toast Heads (three banners, two pennants, and three band members); we built six (ditching the pennants, the fabric for which had been bought); we used three. We made the band instruments, but didn’t get them finished and didn’t use them, or didn’t use them and so didn’t finish them. We replaced the wooden poles at the last minute because of their weight. The angel’s gown went unused, although we worked with it several ways. The turtle lights didn’t really work, and might have if I had thought of the much cheaper battery-powered tealights rather than the Radio Shack-inspired lights/wires/switches.
Have we learned enough in doing this to control more tightly the expenditures associated with the experimentation? Or is this something we just need to build into the budget?
Another thing I learned was that we have to decide how to handle the actual design and construction process. We brainstormed very well, and we came up with all kinds of visual prompts. But when it comes time to build everything, we will have to hand over to someone working drawings, costume plates, blueprints, all those things which will allow someone else to build our vision.
Do we have designers take our visual prompts and turn them into the drawings for the tech crew? Do we do it ourselves? Or is it going to be more fluid than that?
Those are all the thoughts I can force to the front of my head at the moment. I’m sure I’ll come back to this forum soon with more.
88 days to go.