Read a fascinating paper last night called “Can language restructure cognition? The case for space,” which is about how different frames of reference carry through both verbal and non-verbal tasks. It’s not a long paper, and once you get through the initial terminology it’s very readable. Check it out if you have an interest in these things. It’s from 2004, so if there’s been more work in that area and anybody wants to pass on a link, that’d be great.

You’ll notice I haven’t posted any Homework Takeaways recently. This is not because I finished my homework. I still have about half of “The Elegant Universe” to go, plus the extra credit. The science got a little daunting but after last night’s success with the above I’m feeling ready to take on the world, so to speak, so I’ll probably get back to that shortly.

At this point, my friend and I start talking about the calendar of releases I’ve got slated for the upcoming year, and ways to get news out about both Hot Mess and the as-yet-untitled-webseries I’m working on with this guy, as well as Millennial Ex, currently set to appear as part of a one-act play program on gay marriage and marriage equality in Scotland later this year. We chat, we laugh, we drink our drinks.

And suddenly I see it. Out of the corner of my eye. My friend has her back to the eccentrically-clad man at the next table; she can’t see what he’s doing. But he’s got his hand down the front of his jeans. Which are, for some reason, unzipped.

And he is working at it.

What the hell does one do in a situation like this? Report him to the workers? Point it out to my friend? He’s two feet away from us. And quite possibly, it now seems, batshit crazy.

So I kept talking. Like nothing was happening. To my friend. About my projects. While trying to lean as far back in my chair as I possibly can, so I don’t have to look straight past her at this potentially batshit crazy masturbating homeless-looking dude in the middle of a densely populated Starbucks.

A few minutes go by and I kind of tune out whatever’s going on behind my friend, because honestly, who needs to be tuned into that? It’s only when a mother and her daughter, a girl of around nine, walk by that I think, Oh, fuck, and glance back over there – but Mr. Handypants has retrieved his arm from the depths of his waistband (and crotch) and so again, I don’t say a word. No point. What could I possibly hope to accomplish?

About a half hour later, he picks up his cane and walks away past us and around the corner. My friend made a comment (I don’t remember precisely what she said) and it became appropriate for me to say, “Well, you didn’t see what he was doing half an hour ago.”

She looks at me. “What?”

“He was totally jerking off. Hand down his pants. Up to his elbow.” She stares at me. We discuss. The question of how I managed to keep a straight face through it comes up. I don’t know! I mean, he wasn’t hurting anybody, exactly, right? And do you really want to engage with a situation like that? I DON’T. Either way, he’s gotten up and walked away now, so we carry on with our conversation.

Except about ten minutes later, the guy comes back. Only he doesn’t go straight to his table. Instead, he stops at the chair next to ours. But in this weird, looming way. Glaring at us. And at first he talks almost too quietly to hear, but pretty soon we both hear what he’s saying:

“You two have been treating this like your own private living room for TWO HOURS. LAUGHING and GIGGLING and TALKING. It’s NOT your private living room. It’s a PUBLIC SPACE and you should BEHAVE LIKE IT.”

He lurched back to his table, sat down, and glared at us. My friend and I stare at one another for a split second before we both start laughing again. This does not sit well with Mr. Handypants, who yells, “What?! This is funny?! You think this is a joke?!”

Apparently that was the limit for my WASPish tact, because I shot back (almost before thinking): “No, what I think is a joke is being told I’m treating this place like my own private living room by the guy who had his hand down his pants five minutes ago.”

He looked at me and said, “What did you just say to me?”

And I said, “I don’t think I need to repeat it, I’m pretty sure you heard me.”

The situation quickly degenerates into him shouting about how my friend and I are treating Starbucks like our private living room, and me and she (she and I?) deciding that we are really pretty much finished with our discussion and it might be a good time to leave the coffee shop. As we ignore him, he decides that we’ve actually spent the last “two hours” (forty minutes max, seriously, I checked) laughing and talking ABOUT HIM.

Which was so far from the case as to make us both laugh again, which pisses him off, and as he continues to rant I have another babysnap and say, “Sir, I guarantee we were absolutely not talking about you; I think you vastly overestimate the degree to which the rest of the world is paying attention to you.”

He shoots back, “No, YOU’RE overestimating the degree to which the rest of the world is paying attention to you!” Um, okay, dude. By this point, my friend and I have our things on, we’re ready to go, and I don’t bother replying. The last thing I hear as we leave Starbucks?

“JUST BECAUSE I’M AN ASSHOLE DOESN’T MEAN YOU CAN BE AN ASSHOLE!”

Yeah.

That’s right.

…I f*cking love this city.

Sassy Singularity

In light of this, I’ve decided to make another piece of fiction available on Amazon. Restaurants Are Rated Out of Four Stars is a short story I wrote in 2008 for an anthology of fat-positive fiction.

If you read the story as posted on my blog (link above), please consider heading to its Amazon page and leaving a review. If you know someone who might enjoy it, either send them a link or

Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War

Here are my thoughts on this strange, lovely, nostalgic, shaking production.

The seventy-five minute piece is a story within a story, told from a distance of both time and space. In Russia a trio of pirate radio enthusiasts, intensely nostalgic and dedicated (to an underground revolution, or to a dead way of life?) in their reconstruction of a memory of the past they’ve lost, retell the story of folk heroes from before the robot war: the boy who, like Cassandra, warned of the comping apocalypse and was ignored, and his brother and the woman they both loved. In the end, as we know from the beginning, the brothers in question were in the midst of a continent now deemed uninhabitable. Their betrayals and their personal interest, and even their love are irrelevant, swallowed by time.

As the Russian team – the Host (Joe Curutte), Dr. Mischa Romanov (Marc Bovino), Anastasia Volinski (Stephanie Wright Thompson) and Alexei “Tumbleweed” Petrovya (Michael Dalto) takes the audience (both their purported audience, and those of us in the theater) through this old, familiar tale, we also become enmeshed in their daily life. What seems at first distant – stories of the olden days – becomes more sharply real as the play progresses, climaxing in a horrific phone call that sent a palpable chill through rows of audience members. But in the end, we understand their isolation – are their odds any better than two boys and a girl who grew up in America’s heartland before the robot invasion? How does a person keep living in the face of apocalypse?

The company captures the same unsettling dystopian aesthetic so many find attractive about works like 1984, or Margaret Atwood, or Terminator, both in the visual construction of a strange steampunkish set and in the attire and manner of each of the characters. Set designer Laura Jellinik and director Lila Neugebauer, along with the cast, fuse the look of the piece with its performed physical expression, with the industrial setting of the New Ohio adding to the atmosphere.

For me, the key to decoding a wider meaning for Samuel & Alasdair lies in its title – a personal history of the Robot War. The name of the war could almost be insignificant, aside from the directed energy pulses and thirty-meter-high alien robots bent on blasting humanity out of history. Every war has enemies, every enemy tries to wipe its opponant off the face of the map. Along the way, they destroy people and lives, and shape the world in new ways. Someone always wants to hold on to the past, even as they stare toward an increasingly frightening future. But this is the personal side of that war. This play talks about the side of the war where loves are lost and lives destroyed in an instant. This is what happens when the opposing side has no desire for or impetus toward peace.

Samuel & Alasdair is a substantial meal of a theater piece, for being only 75 minutes long; well worth both the trip to basement of The Archive on Christopher Street, and worth letting haunt the nooks and crannies of your brain for a few days after the metaphorical curtain goes down.

Check out their YouTube trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0PpnVBpFYQ

Sassy Singularity hits Amazon on Valentine’s Day and is a celebration of the single woman.

“Sweetheart” is about robots, intelligence, humanity and decision-making. But mostly it’s about a robot.

Sassy Singularity discusses women’s  strengths, in arenas that range from bars to blogs to Alaska to (you guessed it) robots!

For more information, check out Sare’s blog entry on the topic, and get ready for Download Day on Feb 14th!

Millennial Ex has just been awarded an honorable mention by Stone Soup; it was entered in their Double (XX) Fest 2.0. My first award-winning play, POST (“Write To Be Heard,” 1999) can be purchased for Amazon Kindle.

If you don’t own a Kindle and are interested in purchasing a copy of POST, please sign up on my mailing list to be notified when the play becomes available in other mediums. You’ll also then receive new blog entries directly to your mailbox.

There’s no throughline of sociopathy in Crowley’s character, thanks to a bizarre breakdown that includes his confessing to an one-night-stand-with-some-meaning-thrown-in with one of the interns. Not for a moment did I believe any of CJ’s confessions regarding having true feelings for “Nathan,” the intern, and given the enormous dose of self-confidence Crowley has given his character, there were times when director Michael Rau could have brought greater depth to the material – for example (and not that I was hankering for nudity), after CJ spends time bragging about his physical appearance and noting the fact that he sleeps naked, why does he only strip to his boxers when spanking himself for the camera? This lack of logic extends to things like CJ’s producer allowing him to remain on the air, and even to the sort of things he says while railing against his assistant. His “freakout” may be realistic, but it fails at providing a cogent dramatic through-line to the play.

CJ’s philosophy of money is entertaining – he wants his audience to have access to what he calls “righteous” money – money they deserve, and money beyond what they dream possible – but his repeated references to a non-present “woman guest” Suze Orman soon grow tired.

Righteous Money features a rich topic, perfect (metatextual) timing, and a lead performer who we very much want to like. In the end, though, it never quite achieves liftoff.

After a few days of thinking about their latest production, Mission Drift, I’ve come to the conclusion that this is because the TEAM usually veers away from distinct narrative in favor of ideological, immersive mood. Like the TEAM’s other productions, Mission Drift is a series of parallel stories, grasping for ways to explain what it’s like to be living in a certain kind of America.

Storyline number one is about a third generation hospitality worker in a large urban area. She meets a man who’s come into some money and is just passing through. He invites her to leave with him, she evaluates the pieces that make up her past.

Storyline number two is about two young marrieds, determined to move ever westward in an Orlandoesque state of immortality. Their story is a national one that both explains and questions American character on multiple levels: personal, commercial, geographical being just a few.

The play’s core is in Las Vegas – past and present- and therefore the overall presentation happens against the backdrop of casino gambling, nightclubs, and nuclear weapons testing.

This is a devastatingly political play, in the best sense of the phrase. Mission Drift describes something profound taking place in America today: a shift toward awareness of what one character exclaims midway through the play: we have lost the luxury of limitlessness, the luxury of a definable frontier. This is evidenced throughout human experience: wealth, commodities, personal relationships – the world is growing smaller, Mission Drift’s message argues, because we can no longer board a ship and travel for months and touch down upon virgin wilderness. The play suggests that America has been locked in a state of perpetual adolescence allowed by its boundless ability for expansion, and that it was the closure of the frontier that urged us to begin looking inward. As they move through incarnations, Catalina (Libby King, previously seen as the protagonist in Architecting) and Joris (Brian Hastert, who welcomed us so warmly, encouraging audience members to sing and interact with the performers as people entered the Traverse for Particularly in the Heartland) begin to look inward.

But the politics are difficult to grasp. What TEAM promotes is not so much a prescription for the future as a diagnoses of the circumstances that have brought America to the moment that is emerging: no longer a superpower, their productions are bathed heady nostalgia. What Bobby Kennedy and Scarlett O’Hara were, in their respective ways, to previous shows Particularly in the Heartland and Architecting, Miss Atomic (Heather Christian, who also played O’Hara) is to Mission Drift. She is a jazz crooner, a Last Vegas showgirl, Celene Dion and a Native American-impersonating spirit of the continent. Christian is the kind of musical performer you’d pay Broadway money to see in a Fosse musical. Her movement is specific, her voice under perfect control no matter its genre, and as the “world spirit” anchor of Mission Drift she propels the story along under tight control.

Director Rachel Chavkin and her team (no pun intended) have done another piece of incredible work with Mission Drift. The show has just been extended into February. Go see it.

For more fiction, you can access my short story Restaurants Are Rated Out Of Four Stars, and stay tuned for the multi-authored speculative fiction anthology Hot Mess, exploring ideas and themes around Climate Change - coming March 2012 on Kindle, in print, and more.