Hypnotized (Hopefully) by A Dream

"“It would...be a beautiful thing,” [Pierre Curie] wrote, “to pass through life together hypnotized in our dreams: your dream for your country; our dream for humanity; our dream for science.”

"The separation of radium from the alkalines required thousands of tedious crystallizations. But as she wrote to her brother in 1894, “one never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.” After four years, Curie had accumulated barely enough pure radium to fill a thimble."

- from "Madame Curie's Passion" in the online version of The Smithsonian Magazine

I recently read this article on Marie Sklodowska-Curie in The Smithsonian Magazine upon the urging of my mother.  Our Polish pride usually pulls us toward any article, TV show, film, or random insurance commercial remotely mentioning our heritage.  This time the source material, written by Julie Des Jardins, proved to be quite rich and thought provoking.

Mostly it has me thinking about how Marie Sklodowska-Curie suffered a great deal for her scientific work. She dealt with slow-and-steady radiation poisoning, long bouts of isolation, and the self-denial of many pleasures.  I won't go into describing the article any further than that.  Ms. Des Jardins does an excellent job all by herself in having written it.

However, it's the two quotes I posted in this blog that have me thinking...

As an artist always trying to strengthen, deepen, rediscover, or maybe even discover for the first time, his process, I am particularly struck by that second quote.  "...one never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done."  Having just closed Arms & The Man at Constellation Theatre in Washington DC I have to admit I am in the post-show-closing-malaise that happens to most actors.  I told a few friends recently that coming down off a show   I ask myself simple questions like:

"Did I really just do that...for 11 weeks?"  

"What's next?"

"Do I need to create a performance to feel complete?"

"What the hell happened to the rest of my life while I was lost in this constant commuting between Baltimore and Washington DC, between teaching and rehearsing, between bouts of performing as a teacher and Sergius Saranoff?  I mean...do I actually have a 'rest of my life?'"

"What's next?"

"What am I teaching tomorrow?"

"What happened to my plans to live and work in Texas?"

"What happened to my plans to live and work in Poland and Slovakia?"

"What's next?"

"Do I keep this bloody moustache I grew out for the show?"

"When did I appropriate all of those British-isms into my daily speech?  Did I do that when I lived in England?  Was that really 9 years ago?  Is there a future THERE for me?"

"What's next?"

"Should I find a doctor...a dentist...an optometrist...a chiropractor...a specialist for my left wrist...?"

"Should I move...again?"

"What's next?"

"Should I begin writing with Paul?"

"What do I do about these classes I have to take for teacher certification?"

"What about this personal life of mine?"

"What about all these people who seem very angry with me, that seem to be coming out of the woodwork every other day...and hour some days?"

"What's next?"

I sift through all these questions, and more, and find there's not even enough of whatever is my radium to coat a pinhead, let alone fill a thimble.


"What if...?"

There are several of those in my life...the "What if..." questions.  I could go into hundreds of those.  Here I have to quote the first non-academic show I ever did, The Lion in Winter.


"'What if' is a game for scholars.  What if angels sat on pinheads?  What if I were king?  It's your game, Geoff.  You play it."  

It is a fruitless game.

Still, I find myself drawn to thoughts of starting a family...and having a wife?  An irrational life mate?  A long-term girlfriend/partner?  Children?  


Maybe it's not a romantic partner?  A long-term collaborator?  

I left a good kind of that last one in Spišská Nová Ves, Slovakia back in May.  My friend, Peter, on the night before I left to head back to Poland, drunk on Slovakian Fernet liquor he said, in a broken Slovak and Polish, "My God!  Why is it the only person I feel like is my true artistic brother lives several thousand miles away in America?!"  I felt similarly.  However, I feel that connection with several "artistic brothers" around the United States and Europe.  

Are they elsewhere?

"What's next?"

That pesky question immediately comes up.  The search for who is next inevitably brings up the what.  It's best to take up John Lennon's advice here.

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

Is that advice?  I guess so.  Anyway, that kind of thing can't be planned...romantically, artistically, or professionally.  The opportunities present themselves and one must jump at them...and it's why I end up on Pierre Curie's quote:

“It would...be a beautiful thing...to pass through life together hypnotized in our dreams..."

It sure would be.  I look forward to being hypnotized by a dream rather than questions.

Perhaps I'm already in a dream and I don't even know it...

Why People Stand to Applaud

On June 16th, 2011, my friend Katie Molinaro posted the following note on Facebook.  It's called "Sit your ass down!"

I'll be the first to admit that at times I can be a tough one to please and when it comes to seeing theatre, I can be a pretty harsh critic.  Let me just make something clear right now:

Not every piece of work deserves a standing ovation. 

In almost every performance I see, there are usually 5-6 assclowns in the first couple of rows who find it necessary to stand up at the end and clap their little theatregoing hearts out.  These unnecessary ovation-ers make it difficult to see, causing the people behind them to unnecessarily stand and clap as well, making it awkward for me, the one person sitting and looking around uncomfortably.

Stop it.

We are forgetting what standing ovations are for! Truthful, brilliant performances that move you from start to finish, not "Oh, Karen did a great job! Yay! Go Karen! She was acting a stuff...let's stand!"  I can only recollect four times I was at a show that was so brilliant I was compelled to stand and trust me, those four moments have a special place in my heart.  I remember the show, the space and the overall experience of pure joy and honest connection with the audience around me as well as the actors on stage.  Because of this ongoing standing ovation trend, I have made new rules for myself. The only way you're gonna get my booty out of my chair is:

a) you start shitting gold flakes (impressive)

b) my seat is on fire

c) I have a wedgie


I responded with the following comment (please excuse spelling and grammatical errors):

I have met middle-aged people who have never been to the theatre, and find the experience so jarring when they finally do go they have no idea how to react...so they stand. I have met fundamentalist Mormon plural wives who go to the theatre once a year in rural Utah just as the one day of "vacation" they get away from their families, and they find the experience absolutely liberating...so they stand.

I don't know why people stand at the ends of performances sometimes. I find it more and more perplexing each time I go. So most of the time I don't care...because I'll probably never understand why they do it. I don't know if they're standing for me, the quality of my performance, or something deep inside them that hasn't been stirred in a very long time, or hadn't been touched at all until that very moment. And I don't care. I don't know why people stand at performances I've attended...performances I thought were at best competent, or mediocre with smatterings of "tolerable." If they feel so inclined to stand, they may stand and should do it proudly.

I attended Catholic church most of my life. They told us when to stand, to sit, to kneel. I'm not going to tell anyone they can't stand when they want to at the end of a performance. They're not in a church. And I'm not a priest. They can do as they please. I'm not that reverential to the rules of "Applause Protocol."

I just ask that they keep their Goddamn cell phones off.

- Mark Krawczyk: Devil's Advocate

Kegel's Porn Cops

So I posted this brief mention of it on Twitter and on Facebook, but what happened this weekend was this...

I try to teach my students the importance of enunciation. This weekend, for example, I worked with young kids on simple commercials. 1 child kept misreading "Kellog's Corn Pops" as "Kegel's Porn Cops." I can't make this stuff up.

What was even better was when the teenage girls in class started asking, "Wait...what did he say?!" They started laughing and almost fell out of their chairs.

I couldn't stop from laughing a bit and said, "Leave it...please?"

The young boy who said it replied, "Wait! What did I say?!"

One of the teenage girls blurted out, "Kegel!" while laughing nearly hysterically.

ALL of the teenage boys turned and stared at each other in confusion saying things like, "What the hell is a Kegel?! Why is that funny?!"

The boy who had said it looked really confused and yelled, "Why can't anyone just tell me what I said and why it's so funny? And yeah...what's a Kegel?!"

I said, "We're not going into that."

"Are the girls laughing because he said 'porn cops?'" one of the boys asked.

A 16 year old girl answered, "No. Not exactly...but that was funny too."

I tried to get decorum back in the room and had the boy read the commercial out loud again...and again he misspoke with, "Kegel's Porn Cops" trying to correct himself as he went...and that's when one of the girls fell out of her chair laughing just repeating the word, "Kegel."

All four boys turned and looked to each other like a band of angry union workers and one of them stood up and said, "OK! Someone HAS to tell what this Kegel thing is!" 

I refused. We pressed on. I took my lunch break. I came back after an hour and the boys came up to me and said, "We looked up Kegel on our smart phones! That's what he was saying?!"

I replied something like, "Yes. Good. You're all very smart and better educated now. Congratulations."

"We all know what Kegels are!" one of them said as they high fived each other.

"Yeah. Great. The mystery of life is open to you. Wonderful. Now you can silently exercise too. Leave me alone." That was the last thing I said as I walked out of the room to hit the restroom before class.

I Was There

I work in Tyson's Corner, VA at a place called Youth Film Academy.


Nearby is one of the many Border's stores that just announced they would be closing due to their recently declared bankruptcy.


I sat in it today eating a cheap lunch I bought at a nearby 7-11 and decided to write this poem.


M

I WAS THERE

I was there when the empire fell

I wolfed down a sandwich
                while low, low prices were marked down
                while permanent fixtures were sold
                while consolidated shelves were dismantled

I devoured potato chips
                in the presence of other shoppers
                in and amongst aisles of magazines
                in the air-conditioned warehouse store

I would have inhaled a cookie
                but for the absence of pastries
                but for the absence of  employees
                but for the absence of a café

I was there when the empire fell
                I was full, and then suddenly hungry

Educational Conversations with H

One of the teachers, who I will refer to as "H," from my high school, Northern Burlington Regional High School,  posted the following as a description to a link on Facebook:

This program [a PBS reports episode] reports on the pressure that S. Korean students are under in school. I don’t think we want to totally emulate their system, but I have to laugh when public officials rant about teachers and teacher tenure. In their view the solution is to get rid of the bad teachers. Sure there are bad teachers, but the bad teachers are not the problem. They are the tip of the problem. Our culture needs a total attitude [change].

I responded by writing about what is actually necessary to change the results that come out of the American education system.  An interesting exchange followed.  I thought I would share it here.  Here are my thoughts:

No joke! The kids I teach when I work at universities are often, sadly, pitiful at most any basic academic skills, but their ineptitude is only outdone by their sheer arrogance and pride in what they believe to be their intelligence. I've had some substandard teachers in the past, but I got myself to learn the material despite their lack of ability to communicate the information. 

Working as an actor and teacher over the last few years has taught me a lot of what makes a strong teacher and student, and what defines the strongest relationship between the two. 

The problems I can identify in substandard teachers doesn't usually lay in a lack of knowledge of the subject matter, but in HOW they communicate (or are incapable of communicating) a thought, or series of thoughts. Ours is a society that shirks the responsibility of what once was a necessity for every student to learn throughout all levels of education.

Rhetoric.

Many of our teachers are unskilled in this, and so, many students never learn this...and this trend has been devolving for many generations, aided along by the rise of video, digital, and other technologies that take a lot of focus off of communicating clearly, effectively, and persuasively with the spoken word.

What this does to teachers who don't possess a natural "gift of gab," or "a common touch" that can jump from appealing to aristocratically minded types, to the more working class, is that it shuts them off from their students in total. The teacher becomes locked in simply repeating facts that have little to do with appealing to the imaginative and emotional lives of their students. I firmly believe that to educate a student one must teach them the information at hand, but, above that, one must show them learning will help their own self-esteem, their own sense of collaboration/cooperation with their immediate peers and communities, which will, in turn, help them build a healthy sense of themselves. 

Language, SPOKEN language, and how to use it in any subject or endeavor, is the ultimate teacher of this. 

However, this is an ideal that cannot always be reached. That is why on the other side with the student, a simple, yet very difficult lesson, must be taught, again and again, from a very young age, and that is the value of Humility. This humility must not just be taught as a subservience to a teacher, or authority figure, but as a reverence to the material at hand, and a respect to the person attempting to transmit, or SHARE, this information with the student.

It's in this exchange between teacher (skilled and open communicator) and student (reverential and respectful listener) that has the potential to create a loving, caring, nurturing environment for both to communicate and listen to lessons and questions. Above all, it creates Love...as holistic and stupid as that sounds, that is what is essential. To be clear, I'm not talking about romantic love, or an environment that doesn't challenge the student (or the teacher) but a love that is built between two mutual respects...for teaching and learning, and learning and teaching. 

To bring it to it's base elements I guess what I'm saying is clear is:

Respect

Humility

Clarity (through Rhetorical practice)

Love

Thoughts?

H offered up the following as a response:

“Above all, it creates Love...as holistic and stupid as that sounds, that is what is essential.“

Mark, thanks for this quote. Yes, we all know we have ineffective, and even “bad” teachers, and that needs to be corrected, but our real problem is our attitude towards learning, as I think you spoke about. Effective teachers love their subject area. They think it is extremely exciting and important. When they exhibit that love and interest, most students pick up on that. Also, IMHO the learning process is about a relationship between teacher and student. We often do not develop that relationship. In defense of teachers, it deflates their enthusiasm when they are repeatedly bombarded with indifference and lethargic behavior. As in most aspects of our lives, it’s our attitudes.

What is the answer? I don’t know but I bet it is not to constantly rant about “bad” teachers, attacking tenure (I don’t think we need it, but we do need some type of due process. Once you get a teaching job, getting fired is a death sentence for your teach career, unlike other occupations.) begrudging teacher salaries, reducing pension, and health care. We do not get the top 10% of college graduates wanting to teach now, how will these actions get us closer to that goal?

OK, I’m just ranting now, and taking away from your very insightful response. 

I offered up the following as a response to that:

I didn't think you were ranting at all.


I have been thinking about this conversation for a few days now (clearly) and am thinking about even more since some of my old friends have been posting mini-rants of their own about the fact that the documentary WAITING FOR SUPERMAN was snubbed by the Academy Awards and wasn't nominated for Best Documentary. I haven't seen the film, but in reading about it I've learned that the film heavily scapegoats teachers unions, promotes charter schools, and touts there are fairly simple solutions to all of the complex problems facing the American educational system.

One article I came across (http://www.thegrio.com/reviews/why-waiting-for-superman-wont-fly-with-some-audiences.php) offered a great quote by H.L. Mencken that summarized my thoughts on all of these issues before I heard about the documentary:

"For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."

Ultimately, even the thoughts I offered up aren't meant to be a simple solution. They are meant to be part of a guiding list of principals that teachers, students, and administrators can take as thoughts as to how to re-engage the balancing act that has to constantly keep happening in any school, or local, state, or federal educational system.

I'm sympathetic about what teachers at the high school level and below just to get jobs, or preserve them. I'm even more sympathetic about them when a documentary like WAITING FOR SUPERMAN comes along and offers a slick set of solutions that may work for one community, but not, by any stretch of the imagination, one country in total. I think the problem, the trap that people fall into when thinking about how to "fix schools" is the same one I realized I fell into when thinking about it.

Everyone wants to start with the product. How do we know kids are college ready? How do we get better test scores out of them? And many other questions of this sort are asked, but they are focused on the end of the line.

The focus should be on the other end of the problem, i.e. the process of learning/teaching, and, even before that, and going back to my first set of comments, how we prepare both students and teachers for engaging each other TODAY. Yes, this isn't what a government policy maker would want to hear, but it's where the conversation about education ultimately has to start, where the process has to start, so that the product at the end of it all validates that process of education/learning.

What is troubling for me in any article I read, or conversation I have about education is that a lot of solutions I hear these days start to sound like schematic outlines for how a factory assembly line should work. Come up with one system. Put it in place. One size fits all. Essentially, one comes up with a system that works for all to pump out the right product. If that's the case, then we have to start taking into account the modern assembly line's dictum of "planned obsolescence." The product has a limited life, and eventually parts of the product have to be replaced and evolve into other parts. However, when one has one "one-size-fits-all" assembly line design for all one bit of unplanned obsolescence tends to happen, and that is the obsolescence of the system in total.

Take a look at General Motors and the large lumbering dinosaur that it became. It was too big, too diverse, too complex to turn itself around quickly. It's system collapsed and needed outside help to be saved. Essentially, that's what we did with policies like "No Child Left Behind." We tried to create a product-oriented assembly line that fit the whole country.

What happened? Creativity in education stagnated. Schools closed. Teachers were blamed. Students lost out. And the list of consequences goes on, and on...

We need a durable system of education, and that is defined as a system that has a complete local connection between educator and student, and the ability of both to evolve and adapt to the demands and needs of each other ultimately.

That only comes about through diverse solutions for different communities. Scapegoating exclusively teachers won't solve this problem. Offering up a new blanket national system won't eradicate it. It takes constant adjustment and evolution.

Let The City Fall

I met up with a friend and colleague of mine, Dara, earlier this week on Tuesday.  We discussed the poem No Second Troy by William Butler Yeats. 

WHY should I blame her that she filled my days

With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great.
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

We discussed what it meant, how it could be presented (or performed), where to take breaths, what words to stress, etc.  I had never heard of the poem, and had to admit to her that I don't read as much poetry as one would like.  Anyway, I thought the poem should probably be performed as a Mickey Rourke type of character sitting at a bar trying to figure out why this woman had caused all these problems in his life, making these poetic realizations about her in the moment.  I think my exact words to Dara were, "Think of it as a sequel to Barfly!"  She just stared blankly at me and then smiled while replying, "OK Mark." 

Somehow that's what I feel most responses to my conceptual ideas are these days.  Still, one should be so lucky to have a night spent discussing poetry and conceptualizing it for performance.  There aren't enough of those days lately.

Another thought came to mind later as a general idea for performance.  A dark stage slowly being lit as a female lounge singer sings the Swedish band Cinnamon's song "Me As Helen of Troy."  She'd sing the song in the soft, gentile way it's originally sung (maybe even a bit more sultry), and then a man watching her from the crowd surrounding sitting at cabaret tables would stand up and start speaking the words of Yeat's poem.  And then...  Who knows?  Sounds like an idea for a devised theatre piece. 

Here is a link to the video for "Me As Helen of Troy" if anyone is interested:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZKxdYscpvw

I'd Like My Own Poison Pill, Thank You

So many people like this Julian Assange guy and I can't figure out why.

Here is a man sitting on tons of sensitive material, releasing it whenever it pleases him, redacting information seemingly at random and revealing the names and identities of hundreds of informants around the globe, putting the lives of military personnel and (even worse) civilians around the world in jeopardy. Now, he's threatening to release a "poison pill" of files if he's detained too long, or extradited to Sweden.

It's one thing to want true transparency in international relations and to expose the ineptitude of American diplomats, but to sit on sensitive material and to release it at one's leisure, or to use it as an ultimatum, or blackmail, to save his own ass, and, barring that, just as revenge for extradition, makes me think this guy is not an innocent. He seems to be only interested in either saving himself, or promoting his own interests and has ended up making himself a walking contradiction of what Wikileaks was supposed to stand for in the first place; an unofficial check and balancer to local and world dealings that could expose true corruption that could be a detriment to everyone.

It wasn't meant to be an organization formed to be used as a bargaining chip in court to save one person. This isn't a revolution of empowering the people and encouraging transparency. It's just another moment in history when a minor megalomaniac is using a stockpile of virtual wealth he fell ass backwards into and he's not afraid to abuse the information as much as the diplomats who stupidly reported it.


If this is the face of the next people's revolution I'd rather take my own poison pill.


What a joke.