Ten Recommended Posts from 2021

The most-visited posts for the year generally surround events which prick an immediate interest, or address a pertinent subject. But all year I record what’s going on, professionally, personally (to a limited degree), stuff I’m inspired to comment on, books I’ve read.

The History of Underground Comix

Taking a graduate level course in Comics Studies and Queer Theory was an attempt to rectify an ancient wrong, and in the process I learned so much about where we have gone and where we are going with the artform.

"Always"

People liked Diana, the Musical. A lot of people, I have seen them say so on Twitter. It will be remembered. There was once a musical about a controversial member of the British royal family which history has chosen to forget.

Twenty Years On

This blog entry. I can’t believe I wrote this. I am so glad I wrote this. I do not remember writing this, but I must have because it is entirely accurate and I want to re-read it every year until I die.

The Frantic Four

Regret is a useless thing (see below) and yet, there is nothing I regret so much as how little I wrote as a high school student. When I did attempt to write, my efforts were colossal failures, but I wish I had more of them. One thing I did do was to script a (highly derivative) superhero satire for a local comic book store.

Prom 2021

When the historic Cleveland Heights High School received a major and beautiful renovation several years back, we took pride in the fact that our eldest was a member of the first class to enter and to spend four years in our “new” building. But if the past five years (or five weeks) have taught us anything, it is not to project too far into the future.

Music Television: Forty Years On

Reading Annie Zaleski’s book Duran Duran’s Rio led to a musical reconsideration of that album, a masterpiece from a band which has generally been minimized to their image. Having said that, their image (and that of so many others represented on MTV) also made an indelible impression on the person I was to become and absolutely shaped the generation we call X.

To Maine By Canada (1996)

There was a period in my life when I was never entirely on vacation. Any road trip was not merely an occasion to take in the local theater scene, but to learn from it, to be inspired by it, maybe even to steal from it.

On Regret

Two roads diverged … Sorry, could I not travel both? Some thoughts on dreams deferred.

"Rememberings"

The memoir by Sinéad O'Connor was a reintroduction to an artist whose work I had always admired, and an opportunity to better understand her decisions, which have always seemed bizarre to the general public. The work has meaning, fame does not. Life is important, too. 

On Submissions

“Suit the play to the submission, the submission to the play, with this special observance that you closely read the application.” - HAM III.ii

Ten Most Visited Posts of the Decade

The Great Lakes Exposition of 1936

This blog began as an investigation into the year 1936, the Cleveland Centennial. Since then I have written posts both professional and personal, all in the service of my own work as a playwright.

I am not a wildly popular blogger. Some things do go viral, but in general any given post averages somewhere between fifty and one hundred aggregate views. I could look back to the year 2010 and find most posts have, in the past ten years, received a total of thirty, forty, fifty views.

Touchable.

The most viewed posts run the gamut, from dry, investigative work, to personal or opinionated essays on my work in theater.

It stands to reason that those which were written eight years ago have more views than those written two years ago. But Eliot Ness stands out as a person of great interest, garnering almost twice that of Chef Boyardee, which ranks second.

1. The Death of Eliot Ness (2011)
   detailing the death of a one-time Cleveland Safety Director
2. Chef Boyardee (2011)
   the true story of an icon you thought was fictional
3. Ohio Criminal Syndicalism Act (2010)
   a forgotten anti-First Amendment law targeting organized protest
4. Tony Brown (2011)
   a local theater critic ghosts and how history will pay the price
5. Funky Winkerbean (2012)
   what happened to you, man?
6. Styles Court, Styles St. Mary, Essex (2012)
   photos of location shots for David Suchet's "Poirot"
7. Single White Fringe Geek (2018)
   how a negative review was a blessing
8. Randall Park Mall (2012)
   a 1976 editorial from the Plain Dealer about northeast Ohio's glorious future
9. The Famous History of Troilus and Cressida (2018)
   my concept for an outdoor production of "Troilus and Cressida"
10. The "Santaland Diaries" Diaries (2017)
    notes on one six performance week of the David Sedaris classic

For the record, this is my 1,305th post for this blog since January 1, 2010. The Eliot Ness post has been visited almost 10,000 times, the "Santaland" post nearly eight hundred.

What will the next ten years yield? Will we still be blogging then, or may I deliver my messages directly into your brain?

Read my own list of Ten Best Blog Posts of the 2010s!

Ten Best Blog Posts of the 2010s

Self (2010)

I do not recall celebrating the end of the first decade of this century, we just kept calm and carried on. Today, however, there are all kinds of folks asking, "How did you spend the past ten years?"

Ye, gods. I shudder to think. That would be called my 40s, and they flew by. What on earth did I do with them? I don’t feel like I’m any different, anywhere different than I was in 2009.

But the end of that year was when I was awarded a Creative Workforce Fellowship, which was an important step in my journey as a professional playwright

My primary goal in having received the fellowship was to write a play inspired by the events of 1936, and to that end I began this blog, Cleveland Centennial. Most of 2010 was spent chronicling my research, then this blog became a general repository for my thoughts and experiences regarding playwriting and theater.

Reviewing over one thousand unique entries, and in chronological order, here are my Ten Best Blog Posts of the 2010s.

My Last Harvey Pekar Story (7/12/2010)
The day my five year-old son taught me how to mourn.

The Hobbit (12/11/2011)
Researching the events of World War One led to reconsideration of a book I thought I knew.

On the Scary (10/4/2012)
A winding discourse on what scares us, and how the worst monsters are real.

Before Sunrise, Before Sunset (9/18/2013)
Experiencing the first two installments of Linklater’s trilogy inspired a new work.

Guardians of the Galaxy (8/10/2014)
Our doomed desire to pass deeply felt emotions onto others through our favorite tunes.

Brian Chandler Cook performs "I Hate This" (9/9/2015)
Witnessing the transference of your story to another.

Theater of War (1/9/2016)
My job, in a nutshell, and the last book I ever loaned my father.

Objectively/Reasonable (3/7/2017)
The Cold Civil War begins, and everyone is forced to choose a side.

Single White Fringe Geek (10/8/2018)
The single most helpful review I ever received was negative.

My Own Private Dramaturge (6/8/2019)
How we carry the wisdom of our fathers, sometimes literally.

Read the Ten Most Visited Posts of the Decade!

Assessment

A great deal of 2013 has been spent either willfully not-writing, or bemoaning the fact that there is no time available to me for writing, or that the act of realizing the result of previous writing (engaged in rehearsal process, say) was justification for not writing at that time.

Writing that has come, does so in fits and starts. For two years writing meant this blog, researching Cleveland history and reporting on that. Then came the work, carving out time in the afternoon on weekends for the creation of specific projects. Staring into the screen, typing and editing. Facebook and Twittering.

Then, nothing. Not for a while. Like exercise, it takes a will. It's not that I do not like writing, I do. It is not that I do not take great joy in writing, I do. It is just tiresome procrastination, like anything that feels good while you are doing, the default pose of not comes much easier, especially when you feel "justified".

That was a long day or I deserve to veg or here is a nice drink or what are my friends up to on Facebook or I'd rather go running or there's cleaning to be done or look I have children or anything else at all.

I do not like to write at night. I cannot concentrate, I would much rather be washing dishes or folding clothes, listening to podcasts or watching TV. Writing in the morning on any given weekday just seemed pointless. There is no time to actually accomplish anything.

Then I remembered something I used to tell my wife when she was going through an extended period of not writing at all. I said, get up a half hour early, and write for a half-hour every day. She said, that's not enough, and I pointed out it would be a half-hour more than she was currently doing.

For I don't know how long I have been getting up at six. She has a new job teaching, and gets up a four quite often, and would wake me at six. Two months ago, when we moved into our new bedroom, and I got my own bedside table and lamp (this was new, our bed used to be in a corner and I got the wall) I asked her to bring me coffee at 5:30, and I would get my half-hour.

This is fair. I have been bringing her coffee every morning since 1995.

I have a steno pad and pen, and I write, longhand, whatever. It does not matter. Just words on the page. This is very hard for me, but I do it. Even if it's a paragraph or a sentence, I can just shift gears and write something else at any time, it doesn't matter. With my hand. My laptop is not allowed in the bedroom -- today is a rare exception, I was blogging last night, and here I am again.

Blogging is not to be confused with writing.

Lo and behold, I started writing a new script. I have to be sure not to make the morning writing about PRODUCING WORK, because then it would all just stop. But some paragraphs are in verse, about characters, very playful, silly writing. I typed some of it up earlier in the week, and that made me happy.

I wrote for a half-hour this morning before starting this blog post. And if the half-hour is up, and I cannot write, I have a stack of books from the library to read until my time is up. This is my current morning ritual, and it serves me very well.

On Adaptation

ad·ap·ta·tion [ad-uhp-tey-shuhn] –noun
1. the act of adapting.
2. the state of being adapted; adjustment.
3. something produced by adapting: an adaptation of a play for television. - dictionary.com

In a theatrical adaptation, material from another artistic medium, such as a novel or a film is re-written according to the needs and requirements of the theatre and turned into a play or musical. - Wikipedia

When it rains ... it's nice. From the creative doldrums of early 2011 I have found myself in the enviable position of working on three commissions at once. For some of my colleagues (well, most of my colleagues) this is every day stuff. But it's new to me and I am grateful, for the work, for the validation, and for the expansion of my skills.

All three projects are different, though none stray far from what I am comfortable with, though all are in one way or another adaptations, which is to say, I am not creating work that springs entirely from my own mind.

One is a straightforward, abridged interpretation of a classic novel into a one-hour drama using five actors (whew.)

Another is a collaboration with another playwright, interviewing teenage subjects for creative interpretation into monologues to be performed by teenage actors.

The third is a collaboration with a public speaker, crafting her life stores into a solo performance.

Not bad, right? And yet it has been a challenge to keep my mind focused. It is a constant struggle to keep myself from spending time doing other things, like bloggi

See also: On Adaptation (revisited)

UPDATE 07/30/2026: The second and third projects never came to fruition. The first was "The Mysterious Affair at Styles."