Video is still waiting on me to have time to edit, and Zach is crushing the audio (he recorded as well as performed, because that’s Zach for you). Soon! I promise! In the meantime, here’s a Flickr set of stills from the night. That set includes one of the awesomest photos of my grandfather ever.

What Happens Next?

That’s always the question after a reading. What did you learn about the show? And what are you going to do about it? Possible third question, when are you going to do it? That last one is especially relevant to those us with day jobs reshaping grantmaking programs.

I still haven’t talked to everyone in the audience that I wanted to talk to. But I know a few things. The “dumbshow” with a lot of different phrases for the musicians to choose from based on the blocking developed with the director really worked. And it really underscores how much all of the performers have to be viscerally committed to the theatrical side of the piece. The way that subtle blocking gestures connect with the specific shapes of the music means that, yeah, this pieces needs a lot of rehearsal with some really great physical actors. Who are also top flight classical musicians. So that’s easy.

A lot of the new passages really worked, particularly the solo-cello-accompanying-dramatic-duet part. That was great. Big laughs. Also, re-structuring the accompaniment to get Puck and Oberon offstage when they need to be offstage, and let them be always, always in character, worked out.

Showing the audience who the fairies are as people, what they’re saying, and what they want as characters is still a challenge. Costumes will help, More control of lighting will help, and if we go that way, supertitles or prejections with text in (maybe based on hi-res scans of the first folio…). Most of all, long days in the rehearsal studio “fucking around with text” as our director Rose puts it, quoting from Slings & Arrows, will help. Victoria has suggested some really fascinating, and totally feasible (really) implementations of live animated projections to help show what’s going on. First finish then show, then get a budget, then I get live, projected animation. That’s exciting.

I need to give my brain some time off these next few weeks, but when I pick the pen up again I’m starting by working through to the end so I have a whole draft. When I need a break, I’ll sketch out what some of the fairy passages would be like if the text of the monologues were delivered by 4-8 offstage singers, adding another level of otherworldliness, and more comprehension of the language.

A lot of people had a really strong reaction to the Helena we’re building. Part of that is that Sarah did amazing work, and part of it is that the four lovers, in this version, are being built out in a way that they aren’t in the play. In the play, they’re interchangeable. Here, not so much. Here you can tell how they care about different things, and how their teenage sex lives give rise to a whole host of problems that basically propel the plot. Helena has a lot of depth, and is getting screwed by all of her friends, and her boyfriend, who loves her, is running away and confusing her. Hermia, as Elspeth put it in rehearsal, is “a bad friend”. Which is also a beautifully teenaged way to approach this situation. I’m really happy about those developments.

Oh – one other thing I learned. That level of sexiness, and that use of handcuffs, is totally appropriate for the show.

Late Update: I forgot to mention another great idea about creating a new silent mime scene, in which Oberon can do something really creepy, and seemingly malicious, early in the show. Which is great. I’m totally gonna write it, and I’m gonna hope it stays. It’s got Oberon, Demetrius, and Egeus, and it was Victoria’s idea. Twill be awesome.

They’re the second store of a bakery based in Hoboken, and the new place is at 530 Jersey Avenue, between Newark and Columbus. It’s right next to that recently demolished building that we’re all baselessly hoping is going to be a Trader Joe’s.

You Guys, It’s SO GOOD

And they do the best bread. And pastries. And everything else. The first thing I said when I saw the display of baked goods was “Somebody here went to pastry school.” I’ve been buying their baguettes almost every day for weeks. Their croissants and pains au chocolat are crispy, tender, fluffy – everything you hope for and rarely see outside of France. The way I knew they were for real, though, was the tarte aux pommes. It’s a baked tart with apples exposed to the top, without crust, and American bakeries tend to undercook this sort of thing, and give you apples that are pretty, but that haven’t taken on any of the darker, almost black color that indicates real caramelization, and that tastes amazing. Choc-O-Pain brown their apples properly, and it shows in the taste.

When I decided to serve rillettes sandwiches at the Summer’s Twilight reading this Saturday at Art House, I wanted to use the best bread in the city, and so I asked Choc-O-Pain to sponsor the show. Having them on board means that we’re serving the best food we can, that we’ll be able to pay musicians that much better, and that you, our audience, will get a first hand taste of the best new bread in the neighborhood.

I view this as a public service. You guys have to taste this stuff. And then you have to to 530 Jersey Avenue and buy lots of bread and pastry all the time, because I want that store to thrive.

DO NOT make me go without my daily dose of this addictive bread!

Thank you.

See you on Saturday.

Development Reading Time!

It’s time for another development reading of Summer’s Twilight! I’ve made a lot of changes since our last reading. Oberon and Puck have much more fleshed out characters. We open with a dumbshow, as is traditional with Shakespeare, and when our horny teenage couples mime… well, you’ll see.

We’re opening the evening with a set of other pieces of funny music, and pieces that bush the boundaries of music in theater. As always, I can promise you a really fun evening, and delicious and delectable concessions.

Art House Productions, who are an amazing Jersey City arts organization that do all kinds of amazing things, are presenting/hosting us for this show. I’m so grateful to them for their help, and am super glad to know them. Christine Goodman is an awesome Executive Director who’s a big driving force behind the arts in Jersey City. High-five her if you see her.

I’m really happy to be doing something big in Jersey City. I’ve been trucking over to Brooklyn to work for years, but Jersey City isn’t just a cheap neighborhood with a 15 minute commute anymore. The new restaurants, the new bookshops coming in, and the way we’re bouncing back after Sandy all seem to be telling me that this is the time. Now this area is ready to be something really special. It’s honestly quite exciting, and I’m glad to be some small part of it. Come join us and be part of it, too!

Now – the cast, which includes the cello/marimba duo New Morse Code:

Hannah Collins, Puck/cello
Michael Compitello, Oberon/Puck
Elspeth Davis, Hermia
Rose Ginsberg, director
Mila Henry, piano
Christopher Lyons, Theseus
Robert Maril, Demetrius
Sarah Matteucci, Helena
Shad Olsen, Egeus
Brian Pettey, Lysander

With special guests:
Elisabeth Halliday, soprano
Zachary Herchen, saxophone

Now, this is an old-fashioned thing to do. Very old-fashioned. Bronze Age Near East kind of old. You’d conquer something super far away, then put one up saying how far you’d conquered, and how awesome you are. Dennis’ accomplishments have more to do with technical theatre, raids in WoW, and teaching adults how to play Mario 3. When I read the text for his 30th birthday party, it was like a best man’s speech, but both very archaic and very modern.

Then I transliterated the text into Linear B, the alphabet of the Bronze Age Myceneans. These were the guys who would have fought the Trojan War.

Victory steles written in the Near East tended to be state monuments, and Linear B texts tended to be simple accounts of possessions. Neither was appropriate for a personal tribute. So I decided to write in the style of a Viking standing stone. They go more like this: “This stone was erected by Olaf to his father, Sven, mighty warrior, slain while off doing things”.

So the Stele has a Near Eastern origin, a Greek script, and a Norse prose style. And that lion looks pretty Assyrian to me, and the fish look kind of Egyptian. Hurray anachronism!

Now onto the design. Victoria Nece found a great Linear B font, and borrowed the horizontal lines from original linear B tablets – the lion, flowers, and fish just make it more awesome. Victoria also randomized the baseline of the text, which, when combined with the graininess of the stone itself makes the writing look much more hand-etched than, well, it actually is.

At the XOXO festival last year I met the guys from Etchpop in the Kickstarter booth. They’ve got a stack of floor tiles and a laser etcher that can read pdfs! So Victoria got to do her first bit of design to be etched in stone.

Everything about this project is either incredibly new or incredibly old, and I love that.

You can try to decipher the text yourself, but I’m not giving out the answers – for that you have to go ask Dennis. But if you do want to decipher it, do it fast. Dennis is a co-founder at Luminoso, a start-up filled with brilliant computational linguists. And once it’s up on his office wall, it’s only a matter of time.

Here are some more photos of the stele, courtesy of Etchpop, and a photo of Dennis grinning at the thing, courtesy of Victoria:

One of the first things I learned building ensembles at conservatory was this: the first thing you do, fire the brat. If you can’t turn up on time, communicate clearly and quickly, be sensitive to your collaborators, and perform well on the day of the show, I don’t care how talented you are. At least in classical music, this sometimes means firing an actual ‘diva’ opera singer – of any gender.

And that’s a great rule… but it’s hard to follow all the time. Sometimes you just want the amazing whatever it is that keeps you fascinated with that very poorly behaved genius. And that means you’re signing up for a certain amount of insanity and frustration.

So you start looking around for ways to limit the insanity. You try to create ground rules, conflict resolution policies, and clear expectations. You try to communicate what other people in the team are feeling, and how the brat’s bad behavior is damaging the project. Basically, you try to negotiate with the brat. But that’s like trying to negotiate with a terrorist or a House Republican.

Brats lack a super ego. They don’t have the ability to manage their own desires, to focus their own energies, or to think about their collaborators’ reactions before they say or do something. So everyone else has to cope with their behavior after they’ve done it. Brats waste everyone’s time, and raise everyone’s level of stress and annoyance by skipping that step.

When you have a brat on your team, your team does perform this function. You can’t prevent it. The only thing you can do is increase the efficiency with which the task is performed.

Enter the Brat Whisperer

Letting one person do this in a focused, more rational way will reduce the overall burden on the project. It will also eat up a lot of time from a hyper-competent member of your team. Brat Whisperers have to have social skills, patience, and responsibility in spades. It helps if they’re especially committed to both the overall success of the project and the Brat’s particular contribution to it. The Brat Whisperer will learn the special and peculiar ways of your particular brat, and act as almost a cut-out between the brat and everyone else. The Brat Whisperer is basically an external super ego, and provides a reasonable exterior that everyone else can kind of deal with.

Sometimes you have to consciously assign someone to be the Brat Whisperer, but sometimes prior connection or habit will naturally shunt the role off onto one person.

Being a Brat Whisperer sucks. It’s incredibly stressful and unrewarding. But it’s an important job, and it’s a hard job. So go out of your way to recognize the people who do it. They are, in the strongest sense, taking one for the team.

And when you’re staffing up for a new project, think carefully before you hire a brat. How much time will it take away form real work to manage this one? How likely is the brat to actually make a valuable contribution? It’s a big cost to pay, a massive distraction, and a huge amount of time lost to your Brat Whisperer. So before you hire one, make sure the brat is a fucking genius.

*This post was originally titled “The Diva Whisperer”, with much the same content. I was unhappy with the gendered nature of the term, and took to Twitter to ask for suggestions to replace it that were gender neutral. Thanks to Robb Blatt, Matt White, Melissa Dunphy, Steven Padnick, and Sara Eileen Hames for suggesting a bunch of alternatives (Rum Tum Tugger Herder?). Melissa’s “Brat” won the day, principally because it’s one syllable long and accurate. Runner up was “Drama Bomb” from Victoria Nece, which I love, but “Drama Bomb Whisperer” doesn’t have the same ring to it. Maybe it should be “Drama Bomb Sapper”. I don’t know.

This is a film of a setting of a poem inspired by a tweet by a robot. I love the internet. Jason Buckwalter and Kimberly Christie are thoroughly charming, and John Belkot did a great job directing this little film. Victoria Nece did the title sequence and color treatment that makes the ‘train platform’ complete.

I love strange, little poems. When you’re writing a ‘song cycle’ or piece of ‘chamber music’ per se, you often have to take ten minutes with this sort of text. Or when you write a song you have at least three. But part of the beauty of these poems is their size, and the quiet space they create around themselves.

One of my favorite things about the internet, filled as it is with brevity and low budget film, is the chance to do a piece of this scale and have it feel at home. This is how I read poetry, and how I love poetry, and for all that it’s hard to fit ‘being a composer’ into ‘the internet’, this works.

So thanks, Erin, Jason, Kimberly, John, and Victoria, for making this possible. I’m very grateful.

Read Erin’s poem.
Check out the handwritten score.

Jason Buckwalter, baritone
Kimberly Christie, soprano
Erin Watson, poet
Kevin Clark, composer
John Belkot, director
Victoria Nece, titles and color

Dude. Sweet. That’s his view. Greg’s sweet theatrical ensemble, The Fourth Wall, is the guest artist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks New Music Festival, and they’re playing an awesome program, including Crystal Tresses in the Sky on Saturday, February 9th, at 7 PM in the Davis concert hall on the UAF campus.

I don’t suppose any of you are in Fairbanks…. but in case you are….. check it out! … I guess? I mean, look at that view.

Here’s a video of Greg playing the piece from last summer in sweaty, sweaty Brooklyn in case you’d like a vibraphoney refresher:

Adam Huttler

Definitely read his post. I’ll wait. Basically, he walks you through the data-driven story of creating the House of Cards remake for Netflix. Users loved the original series, and those users also loved Kevin Spacey and David Fincher. So Netflix bet $100 million on a series remake starring Kevin Spacey and directed by David Fincher.

That’s right: Netflix bet $100 million on its first-ever experiment with algorithmically-determined original programming. It’s too early to say whether the bet will pay off financially, but early reviews suggest the show itself is pretty darn good.

This is pretty different from how we do it in the arts, right? Any artistic director with an ounce of integrity would cringe at the idea that market research should drive programming decisions.

Yet we’re fooling ourselves if we believe we’re entirely “above” such things. When a ballet company presents its annual Nutcracker it’s doing the same thing as Netflix, just in a cookie-cutter manner and guided by received wisdom rather than cutting-edge data crunching.

That’s Adam’s main point. Data-driven artistic decisions aren’t anything new. It’s just the actual use of honest-to-god spreadsheets and honest-to-god statistics that lets you do data-driven art in a more effective way that’s new. The suspicion about getting smarter, and of what may be perceived as ‘pandering’ made me think of two things.

First, the “old baseball guys” in Michael Lewis’ statistical classic, Moneyball. In the presence of great statistics and sabermetrics, many of them resist and cling to their old ways of doing things. These old ways relied on one look at each player, not aggregate data, and on weird and unrelated things, like faces and body shape instead of on base percentage. One of the “old baseball guys”, though, switched sides. He says they used to do it the old way because they didn’t have a better way. They had to make decisions based on crappy data, because it was the best data they had. Now that we have better data, it’s important to change.

Second, Bill Clinton comes to mind. He often got a lot of flack for pandering to the voters based on polls. Often from the very voters to whom he was pandering. This came up in a This American Life piece in the 2000 election about undecided voters. The president was listening to data, listening to the desires of the American people, and trying to enact it, and was criticized for pandering. On the one hand, you want a leader to have the courage of his convictions. On the other hand, this is a democracy, and we place a little emphasis on the will of the people if you know what I mean. It’s an understandable reaction, and it’s not entirely stupid.

But it seems like a response from an age unused to data. There are stories from the very dawn of statistics in the early 19th century of ‘statistical fatalism’ that are kind of astounding. Say for instance that the data show that there are 50 murders committed every year in Paris. On December 30th, only 49 have yet been committed. People were scared of being the “50th victim,” and stayed home. It seems insane. I made up the number 50, but the story is true. Since then, we’ve learned as a society how statistics actually work, and stopped doing that sort of thing. I feel like we’re in a similar moment with big data. We haven’t really understood the cultural implications of the new science we have available.

For-Profit and Non-Profit

And to Adam’s next point on which I’d like to comment:

What exactly is the dividing line between respecting your audience’s taste and shameless pandering?

With all the hand-wringing over dwindling arts audiences, should it be blasphemy to suggest that we try harder to give them what they want? That’s what every other business on earth does, after all. Of course, a mission-driven arts organization is, in theory, serving a higher (or at least different) purpose as well. If you’re going to descend into full-bore populism, why stop at the Nutcracker or House of Cards? Why not produce another Jersey Shore and actually make a buck or two?

This is a real challenge, but a false dichotomy. I’m certain we can pivot towards greater respect for our audience’s taste preferences without compromising our artistic integrity.

We expect for profit business to pander in order to make a buck, and we expect non-profit arts groups to do something “higher”. Balancing the tug of “full-bore populism” down the road to Jersey Shore, with the impulse to higher things is definitely both a challenge and a false dichotomy. The falsehood becomes more apparent when you look at both approaches in the context of better data, and better analysis.

The distinction between the “profit motive” of a for-profit business and the “mission motive” of a non-profit charity was very stark before big data came around. As a society, we feel that both organizations fill needs – for gainful employment, for self-driven free enterprise, for consumer products, etc., or for cultural products and community service that we feel aren’t being adequately served by for profit businesses, but which we nonetheless want. That’s they key phrase: but which we nonetheless want.

Both kinds of organizations are driven to give people what they want.

Before we had big data, we had to make some guesses about what exactly we should do, and how exactly we should do it, but in the end the metric for success was the same: the happiness of the customers and/or community. Now that we have better tools for figuring out what people actually want, we shouldn’t be at all surprised that for profit and non-profit practice are converging.

The main lesson here, though, is the same as that of Moneyball – don’t fetishize your old methods. They’re familiar, but they were compromises even when they were invented. Look at the goal you’re trying to achieve, and look critically at the new tools for ways that your own judgment can interface with all these spreadsheets. There is a role for human ingenuity, but it doesn’t give numinous talent the same unquestionable primacy anymore. And that’s okay. Just learn to use excel and you’ll be well on your way.

Churches in a lot of cities host short lunchtime concerts. It’s a great way to make a cultural contribution and engage office workers in their neighborhoods. But in how many cities would you get a recital of multimedia contemporary saxophone works? That’s why I love Baltimore (Woo Ravens), and one of the many reasons I love Ian.

Here’s a recording of Ian doing the piece on his own senior recital at Peabody. Did I mention that Ian’s also a fantastic recording engineer, and helped keep Ruckus NYC up and running? Fantastic guy. Go see his show if you’re around Baltimore. And if you’re not around Baltimore, drive.

I was looking for creative satisfaction from the food, but various circumstances pushed me to just be exhausted and weak. It wasn’t like making art, even though at home my cooking feels like art.

I also wrote a fake letter to the editor from Mrs. Trellis of North Wales, complaining about being unable to find the novel I reviewed in the previous issue. This was Victoria Nece‘s joke, and too good to leave out of magazine. Victoria, btw, contributed the first ever piece of software in #24MAG. It involves kumquats.

Issue 4 is the most beautiful yet. I strongly encourage you to read it, and to buy dozens of physical copies.