The Electric Hotel (book)

Pengo’s 2021 Summer Book Club

Last Christmas, my wife presented me with a copy of Dominic Smith’s historical fiction about the origins of the motion picture, The Electric Hotel. The New York Times calls this novel a “highly entertaining work about the act of creation” though by the time the word reached me, she, my wife, claimed it had been called the greatest book on the act of creation, which is to say ever, and that I found hard to believe.

As I have opined previously this summer, I do like works about the art of creation, but only when they are about other media; I like movies about painting, painting about dancing, dance about television, TV about theater, plays about writing, books about movies. But plays about theater are usually self-congratulatory and rife with inside jokes. Movies about movie-making can be awfully sentimental and hagiographic. Television programs about TV, don’t get me started.

There are exceptions, of course, and we all know what those are. But for every Sports Night there is a Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. For every The Player there is Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (don’t get me started on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.)

The greatest film about the art of creation is, of course, Big Night. This small, period film by Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott film is a beautiful tribute to the immigrant American experience and all the dreams and disappointments that it engenders. But it is first and foremost an epic tale about the creation of food, what it signifies, why what we cook and how we cook it is important, never more poignantly exhibited than the single, five-minute closing shot, virtually wordless, which involves the preparation of a simple breakfast of eggs.

Stanley Tucci, Tony Shaloub
"Big Night" (1996)

The Electric Hotel is like two books. One chronicles the very, very early days of cinema, when folks were happy to just watch short clips of cats doing tricks (yes, yes) and how in very short order unconscionable amounts of money were being spent to cobble together fantastic sights to tell stories of beautiful, horrible people. The other book is about the origins of the uses of film as documentary fact and also political propaganda.

The fact that we have not found any new uses for motion pictures in the hundred years since is actually quite demoralizing.

Each tale is presented as prelude to the narrative thread, the rediscovery of these ancient works by a young film historian in the early 1960s. This man is a cipher, it’s not his story and just as well little time is given to him. His presence is a constant reassurance that the films so elegantly described in Smith’s text will not actually be lost to fire, flood, or the natural decomposition of plastic nitrate.

But is it the greatest rumination on the act of creation ever set to paper? Actually, it may be. At least, it excellently represents the chaos of creation. So many biopics or “great man” histories create a familiar origin tale of those who were destined by the universe to become what they eventually, inevitably became. Against all odds! They rise and fall and rise again!

These fictional film makers, impresarios, side show and classical stage performers; they added their piece to the puzzle of how motion pictures work and what they could do with them. But there was no plan, no grand vision for what it would be. Lives are messy, and art is messy, it is only in hindsight that someone else decides whether any of it was worth doing.

On Virtual Performance

Last Spring, KrisP. Production, a professional company and actors studio based in Hong Kong, put out a call for original plays written specifically for digital performance, never intended to be produced on a stage, for a short series they call LIMITATIONS.

As it happened, I had just completed a short work as a class assignment that had the same stipulation, and so I submitted that. And it has been selected for production!

The Runner was written to be performed as a continuous live stream; cinéma vérité executed on a platform like Facebook Live. Inspired by the John Cheever short story The Swimmer it is about ageing, regret, masculine toxicity and includes certain supernatural elements.

I am very excited and intrigued to discover how they realize the material. I had played with the idea of producing the script myself this summer, but we have all, fortunately, been very busy. Will they produce it live? The call for submissions encouraged some kind of audience participation, which it has. And a “sensory” experience, which it does.

Hong Kong is a twelve hours difference from Cleveland. I’d love to watch some live, experimental short play performed over breakfast!

Timing "The Runner"

In spite of the Delta variant making its way across the U.S., many here (including, it must be said, me and my family, who are all vaccinated) have been behaving as though the pandemic is over. This is never so apparent as in the theater community, as Broadway has plans to open shows in a little over a month, and all our local theaters are now announcing their 2021-22 seasons.

With the great reopening of American theater has also come the great dismissal of so-called “virtual” theater. Some speak as though they would be happy never to see a play on a screen again. Or more to the point, that unless it is performed live in front of you, it is not even theater.

I find this distressing. Not only because I wrote and produced live performances during the recent shutdown. Not only because this thing really isn’t over yet, and anyone who thinks they may never again have to spend a year (or more) indoors again may be in for a world of disappointment. But also because as an audience member, the performances I saw, live and recorded, as well as though I participated in, gave me life and brought me hope. 

And as much as I have enjoyed the live, in-person performances I have already taken in during the past month, I am not so ready to dismiss the virtual performances that carried me through.

On Clichés

Writers use words to challenge or shape ideas and thoughts. If you can distill a big idea into a short story, or an original turn of phrase, you can move untold numbers of people. You can also make bumper stickers.

Jesus told stories to get his point across. Ancient tales provide useful or hackneyed metaphors, to poignantly comment upon or dumb-down contemporary issues.

I remember the first time I heard the fable of the scorpion and the frog, it was nearly thirty years ago, in the movie The Crying Game (1992). I can also remember the last time I heard it, which was during the second season of The Umbrella Academy (2020). I have heard it too many times in between.

The first time someone told me that the clinical definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result (not the actual definition of insanity, clinical or otherwise) was almost twenty years ago, in 2002. I remember who said it, too, because I was impressed by the expression. Almost immediately, though, everyone was saying it and it has become cliché. 

cliché n. 1. a phrase or opinion that is overused and betrays a lack of original thought.

The most quoted line from I Hate This (a play without the baby) is one that I did not write. During our experiences recovering from the loss of our first child someone told me, “A person who loses their parents in an orphan, someone who loses their spouse in a widow or a widower. There is no word for the parent of a dead child.” They went on to say that this is because in our society, the thought of losing a child is too horrible to bear. So we dare not name it.

That is certainly one way to look at it. In my script I do not pretend to have made that line up, and add my own personal conclusion:

I read somewhere that we use language to understand our world. Someone who loses a spouse is a widow or widower. Someone who loses their parents is an orphan. There is no word for parents of a dead child, so we do not understand who we are.

That’s the line everyone quotes from the play, “There is no word for a dead child.” It seems to neatly sum something up for people.

As a writer this fact is, of course, irksome. If the line that truly stands out is one that is not mine, did I say anything else that was memorable? Does the entire play revolve around that one line?

When I was trying to come up with an alternate title for the play for the performance in Chennai, people suggested variants on this one phrase. It gets quoted in the reviews. I don’t remember where I first heard this phrase. I have heard it used in many contexts since, most recently on an episode of Falcon & The Winter Soldier which was released on March 19, 2021, the twentieth anniversary of learning our first child was dead. We actually laughed, it was so absurd.

For those in the know, there is an entire series of “canonical” Doctor Who stories produced by the BBC for audio. Paul McGann, the so-called “Eighth Doctor” was only featured in one made-for-TV movie in the mid-90s but his regeneration (and his voice) has been part of many stories recorded for CD and digital download.

In an episode titled Jonah (July 2018) the Doctor is visiting an ocean planet, one which has been ravaged by the “Time War” and Bliss, one of his companions, has the following exchange with a native person named Murti:

Bliss: Is it steam powered or what?
Murti: Sorry?
Bliss: Ah, nope, nope, it's fine. I'll be fine. This is fine.
Murti: Sorry, was that a joke?
Bliss: I don't know. Do you have jokes on this planet?
Murti: Not really. Not anymore.
Bliss: Ah, of course. Um, have you, uh ... it must be... Have you lost any --
Murti: Everyone on this ship is an orphan or a widow or a widower or a sakshi.
Bliss: A ... what?
Murti: A parent who's lost a child.
Bliss: Ah, and what are you?
Murti: A little bit of everything right now.

Get it? This is a private joke for or on everyone who has ever heard or used this phrase before. Only it goes one better, because it is told from the point of view of someone whose language does have a word for a dead child, substituting the sentiment of the original cliché with its own poignancy. Count yourself fortunate you do not live in a society that has a need for such a word. 

The next script I write will include the following exchange:

One: I mean, it's like ... have you ever heard the story of the scorpion and the frog?

Two: Of course, everyone has.

One: Oh? Well. It's like that.

Playhouse Square will premiere "I Hate This (a play without the baby)" in Summer 2021. Details to come. 

We Play Ourselves (book)

Pengo's 2021 Summer Book Club

There are far too many plays about plays, and I should know. I have written a few. Plays about plays satisfy playmakers and play-attenders. Movies about plays are usually weird. See Birdman or Cradle Will Rock.

There are also TV shows about plays. Okay, there's only one TV show about plays.

But then there are novels about plays. And those, as long as they do not include William Shakespeare as a character, can be transcendent. I believe it is because while theater is about showing, and not telling, just showing stories about plays in plays or other visual mediums doesn't succeed at taking theater further than it already goes.

Writing about, telling it, telling how it happens, how it feels, is the only true way to describe it to someone who doesn't know. When it's put on the page, the totally bizarre art form that is live theater performance becomes explicable, if no less odd.

I'm thinking of Station Eleven or The Cabinet of Edgar Allen Poe or even Interview With the Vampire. Earlier this year playwright Jen Silverman published the novel We Play Ourselves, about the after-shock of a certain Off-Broadway opening night. I tore through it in less than a week.

What Silverman describes so perfectly is all the ugly parts about being an artist. The creative process can be messy, especially in theater which is by necessity collaborative. You have a drive to create, but also need to compromise, and then there is the deep, dark part of you that wants your work to be accepted.

I have never read a better description of receiving a devastating review for your new play than when the author writes, “You keep thinking you should be fine, because there was a moment very recently in which you had been fine, so why aren’t you still?“

This is also how you could describe a broken heart.

Last night, having finished the novel just before bed, I dreamed I was running a marathon. This is not in and of itself unusual, because that is a thing I do. But this was no ordinary race. The route led me up mountains and across giant misshapen stone sculptures. It should have been a difficult trek, but I was doing very well, fleet of foot and remarkably agile.

I was also, I was informed, in the lead! In a marathon? Amazing! There was, however, a blonde man following close behind me, and so it was no longer enough to run. I had to maintain my lead.

Then there was a place where the stone beneath my feet broke through and I fell, maybe fifteen or twenty feet, straight down. I feared I might break a leg, or damage the bones in my feet. But I landed soft, cushioned by the springy bending of my amazing knees. I was okay! But I had been overtaken by the blonde runner.

When I got out from under this giant stone mountain, I found myself in a middle school library, one that was very crowded. I didn’t know which was to turn or how to get out. It was clear the blonde man had made it through, but I could not. There was a conveyor belt for books, but I could not fit onto them. I could not make my way through the library. I was increasingly distressed as I ran through stacks and time passed and I was stuck in this labyrinthine building.

Eventually, a fun size candy bar appeared in my pocket and it read “Congratulations!” on the label but it wasn’t for me. Rather, it was an announcement that the blonde man had crossed the finish line, and I felt defeated.

At first, I had just been running. And I loved the race, the hills, the obstacles. I was unafraid and feeling good, just running. But once I heard I was in the lead, winning became important. I lost the joy of doing what I loved, and so I lost everything. 

“Choose your art,” a director warns the playwright protagonist of We Play Ourselves. “Practice your art, always, always choose your art over and above anything else.” Approval, acceptance, acclaim, success, riches, love. These can be happy side-effects of doing the work, whatever work that is. But they can never take the place in your heart for the work itelf. 

Process XXXIII

And so this brief summer semester draws to a close. I did my best with what I have. I read the responses from other students and found them both poetic and prosaic, in some cases intentionally academic. I thought, is that how I am to be writing? But I am a creative writer, and that is not why I am here. I research but also ruminate. I am content. I exist, as the man says, as I am. 

The season has been seasonal. It becomes torrid and we shut the doors and crank the a/c and I am unhappy to live like that. I would prefer the doors open, the heat and humidity to bathe me in sticky sweat. The rains, too, bring the clouds of steam into the place and that pleases me well. It is cool and damp. It is hot and humid. Either way, I love summer. I love summer a lot.

Duran Duran's Rio (book)

"Duran Duran's Rio"
by Annie Zaleski

Pengo’s 2021 Summer Book Club

Almost ten years ago, I met the biggest Duran Duran fan in the world. She was sixteen and went to Berea (now Berea-Midpark) High School. She had seen them in concert three times, was furious they were not already in the Rock Hall, and educated me on how Red Carpet Massacre (2007) and All You Need Is Now (2010) were the best albums they have ever recorded, at least until that point in time.

I have seen them in concert only once (though I have bought tickets to see them twice, which is story for another time) and must admit I haven’t kept up. She may have been right about that. But we definitely agree they should be in the Rock Hall. They still aren’t. They may never be. Rock critics have always dismissed the “Fab Five” and they are the ones who decide.

One rock critic does take them seriously, and that’s Cleveland scribe Annie Zaleski. You can find her work everywhere, Rolling Stone, A.V. Club, Vulture, Stereogum, she wrote the liner notes for the 25th anniversary re-release of REM's Out of Time album.

Bloomsbury tapped Zaleski for their "33⅓" series, which are little books about big records. In her edition, Zaleski examines the creation and cultural impact of the Duran Duran album Rio. I didn’t need her to tell me why this is a very important album to me. What I did need her to tell me is how.  

(Before I really dig in here I want to report how relieved I was to read, in the very first paragraph of Zaleski's introduction that she, who is a little more than ten years younger than I, was first introduced to this record in the 1990s. So, though much of what is to follow is steeped in nostalgia, it is the music itself that is doing the heavy lifting.)

Carnival EP (1982)

Sophomore efforts generally suck. There is an urban legend that Kurt Cobain wanted to call Nirvana’s second big label album Mediocre Follow-Up but the money people wouldn’t let him. That’s actually a good record, but that title (and others, including Verse Chorus Verse and I Hate Myself and Want To Die) was more inspired than it’s ultimate title, In Utero. And that’s the thing, artists - all artists - can get told what to, or second guess themselves.

You wrote a dozen songs, made them tight and perfect by playing them in clubs across wherever, for years, put it on wax, and it’s a hit! Then you have to go back into a studio and create something new and untested, from scratch, and right away, too.

But it was all happening so fast for Duran Duran, they were touring their eponymous debut album, and still writing, and playing in the studio, and seeing the world, and it was all fuel for a record that would be, had to be, even more interesting than their first.

Rio was released in 1982. The year I turned 14. The year I broke up with my first girlfriend. The year I stepped from young, innocent romance into something a bit more tremulous.

Of course, we didn’t get Duran Duran in the bedroom communities of Ohio that early. We didn’t have MTV that early. But some suburbs did, and they were requesting singles on WMMS. And my college-aged brother (where they did have MTV; Athens, Ohio was one of the first places that received it right away, in August 1981) had the vinyl and dropped it onto a cassette for me to listen to on his Walkman.

And then one day we did get MTV, in spring 1983. And that was a heady summer. Even at that age, in that place, at that time, there were nights. Crowded, unchaperoned parties. Small get togethers in basements or backyards. Late nights with old girlfriends, early mornings with new girlfriends.

Alternate "Rio" cover
(Patrick Nagel)

To me, Rio, the album, describes an entire summer’s night, from dusk to dawn, in that place, at that time.

1. Rio is walking into the party, seeing who is there, and who isn’t.
2. My Own Way is dancing, with absolutely everyone.
3. Lonely In Your Nightmare is the first possibility, a private conversation.
4. Hungry Like the Wolf is utterly failing to get off with that person you have had your eye on.
5. Hold Back the Rain is the second wind, an impossible rush of ebullience.
6. New Religion is making out with someone unexpected in the toilet.
7. Last Chance on the Stairway is, well … exactly what the title means.
8. Save a Prayer is that moment you discover something stranger than love.
9. The Chauffeur cuts either way. You are going home alone or you aren't.

When such things were not so easily acquired via the internet, one of my prized possessions was Duran Duran's Carnival EP, featuring four club mixes of tracks from both Duran Duran (1981) and Rio. I came across it, in all places, in a record store in Rockland, Maine.

Zaleski mentions this album, pointing out how the tracks are not just extended, but in fact remixed, pushing drum and bass forward in Hungry Like the Wolf, or that My Own Way is an entirely different recording.

How to describe possessing your own, unique version of something? That you can’t just dial up, the moment you want it via the internet? I guess you really can’t.

Flood's Cove, ME. July 1983
(Me, far right. See the bird?)

My senses were overwhelmed that summer. I was an early-bloomer, when it came to dating. I had my first serious girlfriend when I was thirteen. Now, two years later I was seeing someone new and we were navigating the boundaries of our bodies. And I was introduced to pot, which she did not know about and would not have approved of. So, already. Secrets.

When I had been in Maine, in late July (for my birthday, as it was, as it always shall be) I was gripped by what the kids call FOMO, I was skittish and squirrely and unpleasant, I wanted to be home. I needed video games and videos, and I needed her. I also needed a turntable for the Carnival EP I just bought.

The family returned to the cove for Labor Day weekend, for a wedding. That was odd, the air was crisp, no longer summer. The leaves were beginning to turn and I had never seen the cove like that.

Just before we drove to the service, I put on my Walkman and took a walk through the woods to Beatrice Bay. I was wearing a jacket and tie, not my usual attire for this trek. I stood on the rock overlooking Bremen Long Island, across the narrowing Muscongus Bay. It is a sacred space, that rock. The ancestors come and go, the rock remains.

I listened to Save a Prayer (that first trippy eight count, which then explodes across your mind) as I looked past the green waters to the evergreens and wide and brilliant sky beyond. I felt that I was a different person than I had been even six weeks earlier. I didn’t imagine I was an adult, but I knew I was completely a teenager.

"There's been nothing like Rio since." - A. Zaleski

Process XXXII

Burned all my notebooks
What good are notebooks?
- Talking Heads, “Life During Wartime"

Maisie Williams & Zach Wyatt
"I and You"
(Hampstead Theatre, 2018)

And now, Whitman. I had not yet read Song of Myself. My familiarity with the piece has been circuitous, most recently through Lauren Gunderson’s play I & You.

I read Gunderson's play a few years ago, when it was published in American Theatre magazine. As everything was shutting down fifteen months ago, Hampstead Theatre posted their production on Instagram for free, and we watched that. The plot revolves around two teenagers who don’t really know each other, writing a paper on Whitman ... but that’s not really what it’s about, and it would be telling to say any more.

But to date my most intimate connection with Whitman’s poem is jazz pianist Fred Hersch’s interpretation of the work, Leaves of Grass, featuring vocals by Kurt Elling and Kate McGarry. I do not know where I first heard of it, or why I acquired a copy, but it was regular bedtime music as I sat in the dark, tapping on my laptop as our single digit-aged children drifted off to sleep in their new bunk bed. It was a magical time.

My Early American Poetry class has been provided with recordings of Whitman's poem, read aloud, with annotations which are helpful. I sat on our new patio, listening to scholars discuss and interpreters read this most American of poems (is it?) as I pass my free-writing notebooks into the fire bowl, to burn.

The symbolism may be a little heavy-handed, but do I care? These were for writing, not reading. The only text I hope to leave behind is what I intended to. And oh! There are journals in the attic, over ten years of personal thoughts from my mid-twenties to my late thirties. When I thought I should leave behind a record. Those also have to go. 

I had an illusion that future biographers might want to know what was going on in my head. I no longer entertain such thoughts. The only people who will have to deal with these things are my offsrping.

Divesting my parents’ home, I came into possession of their letters. And their parents’ letters. I cannot destroy those. I just can’t. And so they remain, for my children to deal with. The least I can do is to take myself out of the equation. They won’t need to make a decision about my personal writing, because it won’t be there.