New Digs, and name change coming (probably)

Hey, I'm back.

I suppose somewhere back in Blue Lake, in the confusion that was 2009, I lost track of the purpose of this blog, or lost the will to maintain it... nowadays I'm seeing a use for it, so here we go again...


A quick rundown: I've moved back to Denver, and have just gotten myself into a house. The house itself is in reality nothing more than a new investment strategy of my mother's. She was able to buy the thing and now, she's my landlord... There's a degree to which it is a sweetheart deal for me, of course, although for the first time as a renter I have to behave as if I actually own the place, and I will be paying all of the bills, taxes, upkeep, etc. As of right now I'm in the exhausting process of moving in--repainting the office, stripping forty years of paint off of the old brick fireplace, and getting ready for all of my stuff to arrive on Monday and Tuesday. I'll try to get some photos up soon...

I'm also trying to lay the foundation for a career as an artist, starting with a couple of theatre projects: THIRD BASE!, my comedy collaboration with Jerry Lee Wallace; and a shadow-puppetry adaptation of the Book of Jonah. To support this, I'm forming a production company of sorts, although I'm not going to incorporate in any formal way — yet. I'll be applying for fiscal sponsorship through Fractured Atlas. The process of creating a producing identity for myself is making me examine my whole life and career in a new light, something I hope to touch upon in these pages soon. And it's probably forcing me to take the name "Circo de Nada" away from this blog. Because this is the name I've wanted to have for a theatre company for a long time, now. And the time has come to start my company. More on all that later... for now I need to get back to scraping paint and installing puck lights under my cabinets.

Talk to y'all soon.

At Sea, post #1: Feeding Myself

The transition in my life from grad student to self-employed professional continues to be an adventure...

Being a full-time student at Dell'Arte means not having the time, energy or mental capacity to cook for yourself. So for three years, I basically ate pasta and sandwiches; granola or just bananas for breakfast; sometimes just a bunch of corn chips, a handful of whole, unpeeled carrots and a cold, pre-cooked sausage. It's turned into a rut that feels hard to escape from.

So these last two weeks, I've embarked on a campaign to get myself back into the kitchen. I bought a chicken last week and braised it; it provided five dinners. I also made a risotto — one of the most sensuous acts one can commit at the stove — with porcini mushrooms and fennel. It came out pretty good. But it is agonizing, after three years of dull simplicity, to plan and shop for these things, and it feels incredibly expensive, especially with the economy and my current state of self-unemployment. I'm really feeling the inflation of food costs. And while I'm still a committed carnivore, I'm trying to reduce my meat consumption and restrict myself to sustainably-raised, free-range meat. Michael Pollan's blog in the New York Times a couple of years ago was an eye-opener; it both alleviated my sneaking guilt at being a carnivore and made some thunderous points about the environmental impact of eating locally versus organically. I've long admired Alice Waters' local-food ethic and the Slow Food movement as worthy pursuits, both culturally and economically. So I split my shopping between the local food Co-op and the local Safeway, eschewing the WinCo that most students at my school shop at, and try not to fall into elitism about it all.

The chicken I bought last week was raised in California on a free-range farm. It weighed a little over four pounds and cost about $14 at the Co-op. If I had gotten the Free-range organic chicken, I would have paid $18. Conversely, the Premiere Brand sausages I often eat — also a NorCal product, but from conventional slaughterhouses, cost around $5 for a pack of four, and those will satisfy my desire for meat for four lunches or dinners. Was it worth nine extra dollars for the experience of chopping vegetables, separating the chicken, browning and braising it? Do those dollars cover not just the single extra meal, but the satisfaction of tasting the work of my own hands, the convenience of microwavable leftovers, and — not least — the relative comfort of the chicken while it lived?

Can any of this be expressed on a balance sheet?

Will eating well — locally, sustainably, and attentively — make sense next month? I don't know where March's rent-check is coming from...

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Last night I made polenta and tried to revive the Marinara sauce recipe that Micah Ciampa taught me years ago. I bought some Italian sausages from the co-op butcher to serve over the polenta, some tomato paste and a couple large cans of Contadina tomato purée. I chopped an onion and sautéed it gently in olive oil. I added minced garlic; I put in some paste, not noticing that it was double-concentrated. I opened the package of sausages and noticed that they were Premiere Brand, which was not how they were labeled in the display case... I opened the cans of purée and only then noticed that they were not purée but "sauce," already full of tomato concentrate, garlic and onion powder, spices... I put them in anyway (might as well use them up.) I browned the sausages, thinking I'd use half the sauce with them and freeze half for later, keeping the sauce vegetarian... but when I went to deglaze the sautée pan with some vermouth, I put in way too much, and had to pour it off, along with a bunch of the sausage grease, into the main sauce pot... Of course I completely spattered the whole stove with red-tinted grease.

It's like I don't know how to shop or cook anymore.

I'm out of practice.

The polenta was pretty good, though...

Crawdaddy and change

So, Paris is receding in memory and a new year has begun.

I spent the first two weeks of the year working on puppets, costumes, sets and props for Crawdaddy's Astounding Odditorium, a new show that debuted this past weekend and is now moving to Calgary, Alberta, for the International Festival of Animated Objects. Last spring I built a fat suit for a workshop production of the show, which then parlayed into a paying gig this month; Xstine Cook, the production designer, had to go back to Calgary to head up the festival, and left me in charge of her puppets (and everything else that had yet to be built/made for the show.) It was a great experience, working with a really talented team of painters, puppeteers and actors, many of whom are good friends from Blue Lake.

Above is a photo of me doing open-head surgery of the show's main puppet. The show as a whole both enacts and portrays an old freak show, and this puppet is one of the featured "freaks." This is actually only one of six versions of this character that appears in the show; this one is wearing a straight-jacket for a send-up of Houdini. In other parts of the show, he's fried in an electric chair, strapped to a dartboard, ripped limb from limb... he's the indestructible man! The character was designed by Xstine (pronounced "Christine") and worked onstage by David Ferney. The original production featured him only as a hand puppet, with David's arm inside his neck, but the straight-jacket, electric chair and dartboard prohibited having a hand inside. The head is made from molded latex and is both very strong and very flexible; it also didn't talk very well with just a string pulling from behind. The jaw never closed without the pressure of a hand inside, so he couldn't talk properly—he just sort of flapped his lip. So my first and biggest job was to recreate the effect of a human hand! I thought it would take a day, but it took me a week.

Latex essentially has no structure, but it has a shape. I first tried stringing elastic through the roof of his mouth, but that only pulled part of the mouth shut. I'll spare you the whole process, but tell you that the solution called for steel to overcome the latex. Ultimately, I carved a lower jaw out of wood, glued it inside the lip, and then attached a system of L-brackets and a spring to the wood. The spring pushed the mouth closed, and a cord run through the middle of the spring both pulled the mouth open and kept the spring from popping out. A steel hinge worked as a trigger on the spring. The biggest problem was that very intense glue is needed to hold all this stuff together, and the best stuff takes 24 hours to dry. So most of the components had to be assembled over the course of days, and it still felt like there was no guarantee that it would work. I'm not sure I found the best possible system, but the one I found works OK.

There were lots of other projects in this show — it may well be the most technically demanding show I've ever worked on — but this was the biggest headache. Sadly, the show no longer needs me, so I don't get to go to Calgary... though I had four months out of the country in 2008, so I'm not really complaining.


So, what's next? There may or may not be a school tour of the shadow-puppetry project Ferney and I were working on last fall, and in March, he and I will head back into writing/rehearsing his one-man show The Misunderstood Badger which I'll be directing. In May, Jerry Lee Wallace (another Dell'Arte grad) will open a self-produced clown show at the Arcata Playhouse. This show will feature the big debut of my solo clown piece, for my clown Ferdinand the Magnificent, which I then hope to tour on the streets of major west-coast cities next summer. It may also go to a festival or two back east... I'm also digging back into music, working on expanding my ragtime and bluegrass chops, and ....

I'm starting a band!

Right now it's just me and percussionist Erin Crites; our current repertoire
is pretty much just me ragging on the guitar and her on washboard. But we are also working on some New Orleans Second Line rhythms, and talking to other prospective members. The full product will involve a lot of junk percussion, and if I had to tell you what to expect, I would have to say "some kind of cross between the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Einsturzende Neubauten."

And I wouldn't be kidding...

The project for now is called "Helicopter." I'll keep you posted about new developments.

Wrapping it up

And here is the first fully-finished version of my Capitano.

The last steps in the process were adding the hair, which in this case is from an unshorn sheepskin, and adding a layer of shoe wax to set the dye color and protect the leather. A small amount of a special kind of tar is added to the wax to create a tiny bit of texture and patina.

Stefano is leaving Paris tomorrow for Marseille and later Venice, where he will deliver this particular mask to my teacher Giovanni Fusetti, as a gift to thank him for his help in securing this internship and for the enormous role he played in my training at Dell'Arte.

So, today was supposed to be my last day in the atélier. But as I was working on this mask, a frequent client of Stefano's arrived looking for a mask for one of his students to use in a fencing scene. And he became fixated on my mask! So, while I was intending to spend Monday and Tuesday at the Louvre, I will instead return to the atélier (Yohan will be there) to put out one more copy of the mask. Maybe the guy will buy it! If not, it will stay with Stefano as a gift. It's an extremely gratifying way to end the internship.

I fly to LA on Wednesday. Tomorrow I will do my last stroll through the streets of Paris, since I haven't been to Montmartre yet. Which means: no Louvre! (it's apparently an absolute nightmare on Sundays.) I was also hoping to squeeze in a trip to Chartres to see the cathedral there, but that and the Mona Lisa will have to wait until my next trip here. Tant pis.

This evening I went with Stefano and Yohan to a meeting of the Société des Createurs des Masques, a new organization of prominent Paris maskmakers who are collaborating to promote their work. The organization includes Jean-Marie Binoche and Erhard Stiefel, who makes masks for Ariane Mnouchkine (neither of them were at the meeting, however.) The group has launched a fascinating project: they're all creating a mask for the character of Richard III, and in May will present the masks (and in most cases, an actor playing the mask) to each other and to the public. The point is to demonstrate different interpretations of the character and different techniques (leather, wood, resin, papier-maché) for making masks. It's a pretty cool idea. Wish I could be here to see it...

The way leather moves

Carvings from Melanesia:

A contemporary painting from Papua New Guinea:


See the bottom of this post for context.


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Sorry it's been so long since my last post; there hasn't been much to report.

Since I finished the major carving on my matrix, I've been steadily working the leather onto it and making adjustments to it; but the process is spread out over a few days (because the leather needs two nights to dry between the various phases) and you can only do so much at one time. So I've been working with the assistants and the other intern to simply fill out Stefano's orders for other masks. This just means doing whatever needs to be done: posing the leather on a matrix; hammering and polishing it; cutting the languettes and setting the wire. Collectively we've produced 15-20 masks in the last week or so.

It's good to spend these last two weeks just working on leather. I take breaks now and again to look at Stefano's matrices—their designs—or to observe Stefano and the others as they work on particular aspects of the craft. But it's good just to work the leather and feel how it moves under my hands, through all the different phases of the work. How different pieces of leather feel and react to the work. The density and texture that vary within an individual piece. How it changes as it dries. How some pieces polish quickly and smoothly and others take a lot more work—or finesse.

I make a lot of mistakes, but there is constant improvement. I wish I had more time here to learn about the special cases that require particular skills: Dottore masks require a very precise cut in the region of the eye, or you won't be able to set the wire; Neutral masks have to be hammered and polished so that no hammer marks are ultimately visible, because they won't have dye to hide the marks and they require, aesthetically, an absolute smoothness. These are things I've merely been told—they won't let a rookie like me make my mistakes on those masks. I will have to actually learn them for myself later.

I spent Saturday evening and most of Sunday at the Musée du Quai Branly, which is the national museum of ethnography, and contains much of Claude Lévi-Strauss's personal collection of masks and other artifacts. It's a controversial museum; the extreme postmodern architecture is pretty bizarre right next to the Eiffel Tower, and they've made some bold (if problematic) choices in terms of how you approach the artworks. Here's a link to their official "map":

http://www.quaibranly.fr/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/plans/PLAN-RECTO-Anglais.pdf

It's certainly a more organic approach than the Classical museum architecture of, say, most American Natural History museums, and it's one that makes you get up close to the artwork. You have to go on this long 'journey' up a white ramp to get to the main collections, and there the walls are either black and invisible or sort of shapeless and beige, as if they're made out of mud. Most of the artwork is dimly lit, with very directional light. I suppose they want us to have the feeling that we are archaeologists or anthropologists ourselves. But half the time, you can't see all of the work, which becomes utterly maddening, and the whole thing actually has the effect of exoticizing the art and mystifying it, which feels like we haven't gotten over the whole "colonial" thing yet. It's pretty awkward.

But, oh my God—the artwork...

I was literally transfixed by the first things I came across: carvings and masks from Melanesia, a culture I know nothing about. The whole Oceania exhibit is astounding, and they have the biggest collection of Australian Aboriginal art I've ever seen. This consists of an enormous collection of traditional/antique stuff, but also a lot of contemporary art drawing on those traditions. There is also a big special exhibit of work by artists from Papua New Guinea of traditional themes and styles, bud painted with acrylics on canvas. Totally mind-blowing. There's one small room that is utterly filled with giant Orthodox iconography frescoes from Ethiopia, which is probably where I left my brain on Saturday night. There are enormous sections on Africa and the Americas, but honestly I couldn't handle it at that point, and I'm more familiar with that stuff anyway. So I sadly skimmed it. Sunday, I went back for the special exhibits (one on Japanese Modernism, the other of carvings and masks from the Arctic cultures of Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Siberia. Mindblowing. Mindblowing. Both of them. Then I went back upstairs to revisit the stuff I'd seen the night before.

The masks they have here are both totally different and practically identical to what I'm studying with Stefano; the Commedia and Carnaval traditions stretch way back through Rome and Greece to European prehistory. Of course, most of that history is just as unwritten in Italy as it is in Melanesia. As stultifying, rationalized western Realism conquers the globe, it's heartening to be able to touch the low-tech magic of masks and think that I have a chance of using them to illuminate modern existence.

Progress?

OK, progress. Now that the leather has dried for a couple of days, the "languettes" that held the leather onto the matrix are shaved down to paper-thinness with a very sharp blade, and the matrix is removed.
A stainless steel wire is glued around the inside perimeter and the languettes are then glued around it to hold it in place and hide it.



The languette dangling from the end of the nose is also shaved down (an excruciating process, with no margin for error); eyes are cut and the mask receives its base color of dye:


It still needs a patina layer over the dye, a mustache and eyebrows, and some varnish on the inside, but finally, it can be tried on... (psych, I don't have a photo of this! Sorry!)

Anyways, it doesn't fit.

The perimeter line of the forehead and temples is cut wrong, and the whole cavity of the eye socket needs to be cut deeper. The result is that the mask sits too far forward on my face, my actual eyes are more than an inch behind the eye holes, and the whole thing points downward slightly. So I will have to go back and work on the matrix some more. This is par for the course.

This particular piece of leather is kind of a mess; I didn't set the leather properly on the matrix to get the shape of the nose or eye sockets right, the tip of the nose is a mess, and there are lots of places where I scratched the leather with my fingernails or with various tools. So it's an acceptable first draft, and a good learning experience, but it's not a very good mask.

Yet.

A side note to those of you in Blue Lake...

...who might be reading this:

If you're studying mask design with Bruce, I would be extremely cautious about taking design advice from this blog. In fact, don't take design ideas from me at all. Stefano's work diverges in certain tricky, subtle ways from what we're taught at Dell'Arte and you'll be better served, right now, by listening to Bruce and the faculty around you. Know also that I think Stefano has serious doubts about the design of my mask, but that he's willing to let me try it and fail (or succeed, as the case may be.)

Thanks for listening.