MeyerBros

i’m thinking of publishing a book or two, but i’m not sure how i want to go about it (or if there’s a market for it).

One of the books would be A Novel (with pictures), a short picture-book that I’ve been working on over on our wiki pages. That one would have to be done nicely and in full color with just the right paper and binding and all that. hard cover. i’m not sure how to pull that off, but it could be a lot of fun.

The other has the working title: “Not As Good As Some Of My Other Stuff, But Worth The $3″. It would be a compilation of some of my shorter works (poetry with some short prose or short-short plays). I would try to sell it for $5 or so, you know, for ironic effect and money in my pocket.

if nothing else it’s fun to think about.

a short puppet-chat by eric abram and mary rebecca

once upon an old grey time
with blue highlights
and a round, round ball
lived the monkey-mother sock-puppetest of them all
and he was sore afraid
“do not be afraid” the dandelion cried
for i will bring forth eleven babies
without taking off my shoes
and God cried a sad tear
like she never did before
all hail, all hail
it fell in a pail *plunk* and another *plink*
And that’s the end of my show! DONK!

oooo… I was with you right until that last bit.

(Sidenote: I was going to post this as a comment on Eric’s post, but then it got long and I decided to make it my own post. A review of his post, if you will.)

Some great questions, points, musings… But the “edification of the artists involved” part I question. At the New York Times, there is an ombudsman (yes, he’s a man), and he is the person who speaks for the readers (ie, the audience) - not for the paper. Speaking for the paper (ie, the artists) would be the editors in their editorials (like the Artistic Directors in our letters and director’s notes to audience). So the way I understand it, an ombuds for a theatre would be someone on staff who would express views of the audience (”the people”), not views of the artists.
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the SSDC and the DGA are entangled in an all out (sometimes legal) battle over copyright issues. everyone, surprisingly, wants to be paid for the work that they do.

i’ve been reading the latest issue of The Dramatist, a magazine that i recieve as a member of the DGA. i love this magazine as much as i hate it. every issue is thrilling, inspiring, angering, pathetic, self-centered, energizing, smug and insulur. what more could you ask for in a publication. i am reminded with every issue that New York is the only important place in the world (with the occasional minor exception of Chicago), playwrights are the only important people in the theatre, and nearly everyone is out to get me. i can also read back-to-back articles by Marsha Norman and Richard Nelson, the former listing her simplistic rules of playwrighting (which she teaches at Juilliard) and the latter arguing that such rules are the bane of playwrighting (which he teaches at Yale). neither one, you will notice, is too far from the center of the universe, which is Broadway. and neither one dares question the centrality of playwriting in that universe. this is, after all, “The Journal of The Dramatists Guid of America, Inc.” the issue concludes with a playwright’s legal battle against a former director in copyright issues. i disagree with both sides of that one article. that’s a lot to disagree with, but as a young anabaptist radical i consider myself up for that sort of third-way challenge.
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my reviews of “snakes on a plane”, “a man without a country” by kurt vonnegut jr., and a South Bend Tribune review of “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” as performed at New World Arts.
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i don’t like auditions in the first place. scenes are bad enough. no one can really perform with the script in their hand, and how am i supposed to judge who can get beyond their audtion habbits in the rehearsal process and who can’t?

i would love to just do composition work - semi-scripted, self-created unique mini-scenes with as much or more physical as verbal focus. i didn’t have anything planned today, and nothing came to me on the spot, so we read scenes.

monologues are worse. i don’t even see you interact with another person. and some people just suck at preparing their own material. you can never tell - even though you know within the first ten seconds whether the audition is any good, you don’t know til six weeks later wheather the actor is any good.

so i wrote a monologue. an audition monologue. not particularly better than anyone else’s, but i did enjoy writing it. read on for the full text:
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i wrote this little play for a holiday playwriting contest in indy. it’s cheerfully called “happy goddamn holidays” and follows their guidelines of being sarcastic and not warm-fuzzy. i also managed to condense what first copied into text edit as a twelve page script into under six pages (also a guideline of the contest) without cutting a single line from the play. ask me how i did it. go ahead. ask.

i did not, however, manage to pull it in under the requisite five character limit. i’m hoping they’ll take it in under my five actor interpretation of the rule. we’ll see…

i just posted - over at eric.meyerbros.org - some clarifications.

i just thought i ought to clarify that quite often i dont mean what i say. here are some things i have said and some things i have not actually said and wont say but things that might at some point be said - and my clarifications regarding such said things. inspired in part by Chuck Mee and in part by Peter Handke but mainly by Michelle Milne, who doesn’t let me get away with these things.

i hope to keep building on them. so if you have any ideas you can write your own or post a comment here or there offering an adage to be clarified.

this is an expiriment in reviewing a book in the style of the book itself. don’t trust it. in fact, i wouldn’t bother reading it. it goes bad by the end of the first paragraph, and paragraph three is entirely innapropriate. some of the comments might be interesting though. you could just skip to them.

this isn’t right.

this is right. it’s the only way to do this, get it all over with at once. it’ll be great. self referential and everything, just like A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, except more so because it’s a review written in the style of the book. maybe even from the perspective of the author. no. yes. or as me writing as the author or the other way around. a self aware review mixed with vacation memoire about a memoir book. it’ll be the best thing i’ve ever written. it is the best thing i’ve ever written. you’re going to love it. you do love it. you hate it. i can tell you hate it. you’re never going to talk to me again. i’ll become depressed and and start drinking too much - random sex without condoms - AIDS - and then you’ll feel sorry. why don’t you like me anymore?

i really wasn’t that impressed with several things. AHWOSG, for one, and the eiffel tour for two. also versailles and AHWOSG again. the book just wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. i wasn’t sure it went anywhere. the eiffel tour and versailles certainly did not go anywhere. they were big.

i should probably also mention that i haven’t had much sex in a while (with or without condoms) and even masturbation has been lacking. and while i know i will be judged by all of you for saying that, it doesn’t really matter because i could be lying. i am lying. maybe i’m lying. if i am i apologise, but still think you deserve it.

the point is, the book didn’t do much for me. neither did the french revolution. french cheese on the other hand… and oh the fondue… etc.

orgasmic, you might say.

is this pornography? how will we know? can we define the destinction between art and porn? can dave eggers define it? bobby meyer-lee? who’s definition would we go by?

how about mental illness? who defines that? who has it? what should we do about it?

racism?

this is an apology for this post. i’m very sorry. i’m not sorry. blame dave.

i was just reading a play over at Charles Mee dot Org when i suddenly finished reading it and followed a link of his to somewhere and then to Illegal Art dot Org.

Charles Mee is one of my inspirations in thinking that just maybe Copywrite/right/rite is overdone and has a tendancy to hurt artists more than it might help them sometimes. PROGRAM NOTE: Charles Mee’s work is made possible by the support of Richard B. Fisher and Jeanne Donovan Fisher. And I think that’s great. And I think, being an artist, I would like to be paid. I would like for my work to be made possible. In the meantime I’m going to do it anyway. Impossible Art.

But you really should - and I would like you to - very carefully - turn off your pop-up blocking software and follow THIS LINK.

i like this conceptual design site. or what they make, more accurately. the way they break down functional expectations and then rebuild them. very interesting.

in other news: i wrote a peace play because it seemed like the right thing to do. i’m now in the editing phase. the working title is Another Pseudo-Allegory with Angels and Devils and Some Inappropriate Language in Six Parts: A Peace Play (download .rtf file). Thanks to Aristotle for his help with the structure.