Love's Labors Lost: Things To Do NYC

August 9, 2008

Things To Do NYC

If I'm moving to NYC, I don't want to get stuck into the same routine I can find here. When it comes to NYC, I always hear two things: it's the city that never sleeps, and you can find anything. I'm going to put that to the test. So, here's a list of things I want to do within my first six months to a year in NYC.

1. Find some all-night haunts.

I'm a night owl, and I tend to keep vampire hours. But I'm not crazy about bars. I just need a hole in the wall away from home where I can chill and write without being bothered.

2. Go to goth clubs.

I need a mix of the old and new: Bauhaus as well as Marilyn Manson. DIY goth wear as well as Hot Topic. Ghosts and faeries as well as vampires. See my pic? That's what I should feel comfortable looking like there.

3. Visit a rave.

I want to lose myself in digital music. I don't even need glow sticks. And the DJ had better be kick-ass. If everything sounds the same (and I'll know), I'm gonna be pissed.

4. Get involved in some avant-garde theater productions.

Not as an usher, and not at the box office. I want to put the actual show on. Whether that means being a gopher on the set and/or helping strike, so be it. But I don't want to just take money or show people to their seats.

5. Find a playwrights' group/support group.

I'm an artist. Sensitivity is my birthright. I need groupies/moral supporters to help keep me on track instead of getting lost in (shudder) work. It's also cheaper and more fun than therapy.

6. Work someplace really interesting.

Like a sex museum. Or a "haunted" mansion. Or something. Basically, I want people to choke on their drinks when I tell them, and I want to have to lie to my parents about what I do for a living. No, not a stripper. But I would be interested in conceptualizing a burlesque sort of Cirque du Soleil performance.

7. Make friends with rich people*.

It's not what you think. I'm not looking for a back door into wealth. But I've been around broke people my whole life. So I know how to handle hardship. It's handling success that's going to be a problem. I'd like to know how to do that before learning the hard way who my real friends are.

*I define rich here as someone who can afford to own two or more homes.

8. Share a kiss on the Brooklyn Bridge beneath the moonlight.

This one is hard to explain. So I won't.

9. Have a torrid love affair.

It may or may not lead to (ick!) marriage, but I could use some overwhelming passion in my life.

10. Go to a fetish ball.

Ever since I saw it on HBO's Real Sex series, I was hooked. Mystery, intimacy, ritual. It's all so . . . theatrical! Whips and chains and handcuffs! Leather boots and pants and collars! "Yes, Mistress!"

2 comments:

anonymous8/11/2008 2:34 PM
Just saw this and thought of your journey.
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RVCBard8/11/2008 5:10 PM
LOL! And I didn't even get past the title yet.
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Words, Words, Words

. . . a lot of it [fostering rather than smothering students' playwriting] has to do with finding a way to construct a dialogue about ongoing work that empowers the writer. A lot of it has to do with making sure there's a diversity of voices around you. A lot of it has to do with thinking of the writing program as a brain trust for writers, not as some infantilization in which the dramaturg gets the power. And basically trying to find a place where everyone's aesthetic in the room grows larger rather than smaller. There are many ways to do that. It's really not a hard thing to do.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Here is what seems to me an elementary truth that must precede any other: namely, that the theater, an independent and autonomous art, must, in order to revive or simply to live, realize what differentiates it from text, pure speech, literature, and all other fixed and written means.
--Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/15/1931

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all I need for an act of theatre to be engaged.
--Peter Brook, The Empty Space

My work is characterized by one thing above all --- invention. In theatre we imagine the world, we do not record it, we are not documentary makers. I hold all social realism and journalistic theatre in contempt. It is a sordid habit. And the social realists have the impertinence to pretend they are 'telling the truth…'
--Howard Barker, interview

Women and writers of color are still seen as threats because, in essence, when a woman or writer of color is defining a play world, there's another definition of what our society is, and that's very threatening.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Through this experience [working on " . . . and last week it was a mountain"] I learned the importance of the life and the dynamics under the words, and began to see the power of working from the silent space within - the emotions, the images, the experience and the feelings - rather than relying on the words.
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

How does it happen that . . . the Occidental theater does not see theater under any other aspect than as a theater of dialogue?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

All conventions are imaginable, but they depend on the absence of rigid forms.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'. Nor do I claim to tell the truth or enlighten people. We are suffocated by writers who want to enlighten us with their truths. For me, the theatre is beautiful because it is a secret, and secrets seduce us, we all want to share secrets. That is also its politics, if it has any politics at all. And modern democracies hate secrets, they want everything transparent. Obviously the critics collaborate in this desire to expose everything to the light of day, they are the police force, after all.
--Howard Barker, interview

I think that form is content . . . I've always been more interested . . . in the formal devices and the structure rather than in the subject matter . . . I really am a follower of Viktor Shklovsky, who said that in some ways the subject matter doesn't even matter. It's whether or not we see the subject matter anew that matters.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

I am well aware that the language of gestures and postures, dance and music, is less capable of analyzing a character, revealing a man's thoughts, or elucidating states of consciousness clearly and precisely, than is verbal language, but who ever said the theater was created to analyze a character, to resolve conflicts of love and duty, to wrestle with all the problems of a typical and psychological nature that monopolize our contemporary stage?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

The mediocre artist prefers not to take risks, which is why he is conventional.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

"Transcendence became my life theme. I wanted to be lifted beyond everyday circumstances and everyday reality."
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

I actually think of writing for the stage as not writing . . . It's about structuring, about gaps between the language that are really filled in by the collaborators and the process. It's all about indirection rather than a direct statement . . . It's like a three-dimensional chess game in a way. If I say this, will the director go in this direction? If I say this, will the actor respond? And one of the delights of the process is actually not having your intention fulfilled, but finding out at times that other people's interpretation or intention is actually more interesting than you originally thought of.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

The person who has an idea of what this language is will be able to understand us. We write only for him. --Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/28/1932