Fight Dirty - first draft of new song

Hey.

I think I've finally got a passable first draft for a new song for the Hobo Guidebook.

Pass it along- I think it's a silly, fun piece!

Every good hobo has a few tips on scuffling, should the occasion permit.

Gilly is no exception.  Here's his take on the fine art of coming to blows.

Lyrics

first verse
im a peace loving guy
dont want no ruckus or no brawl
but trouble comes
mebbe not today
mebbe not tomorrow
but sure as shootin
youll be pinned down
laid bare
bullied
youre a stranger
what can ya do

chorus
theres a point in everyones life where ya choose
will you be silent
will you respect yourself
its true
if ya got to fight
fight dirty

second verse
keep your back to the wall
their shoulders give it all away
before they swing
counter from the blow
feet apart and ready
just stick your thumb into their eye
i know its crazy
thats why it works so well
thats what you do

chorus

bridge (and me just being a goof)

third verse
for a group
how to fight
forget the flourish and the pride
heres what ya do
find the meanest one
scream and cuss and cry
aim for their groin to save your life
knife hidden in your boot tip
kick em til the blood drips
and run away

chorus

Modesto - first draft of new song

Hey.

As you may know, I'm using the quiet time while looking for acting work knocking out a rough draft of a one man hobo musical called THE HOBO GUIDEBOOK ( for more information and to listen to the title track, click here) While I was writing and rewriting verses for a song extolling the virtues of fighting dirty, this one popped into my head.

I'm trying to find a way to justify why Gilly became a hobo, and temper some of his silly, lusty behavior with something which shook him as a young man.  And then I thought about my childhood,  my experiences with Modesto, CA.

Modesto is the perfect place to be a child.  Lengthy exposure to its customs and sense of justice makes you angry and hunger for more.  Makes you lie on your back and stare at the chipped white popcorn ceiling and daydream about leaving for good and fostering a life infused with vitality, an impolite and demanding need to be heard.  That struggle to endure childhood and promise yourself that being a courageous adult  in a new city is a possibility, (even when you're poor and don't feel like you're worth a damn), it burns.  I spent a lot of time in bed as a kid, full of fantasy, writing scripts for the cosmopolitan life I hoped to live one day. 

It's a town where being biracial marks you as a cultural riddle, neither familiar or resonant with the white kids or the latinos.  You are your own ethnicity. You grow up strong, or else Modesto breaks you so harshly you give in and you cease desire.

It's a city so anonymous that the white man who assembled the first stirrings of the town was offered a chance to have it named after him, and he refused. Straight up refused.  And the locals muttered, "ay, muy modesto", Spanish for "very modest".  It stuck.

I'll be the first to tell you that the only reason I'm not living out my days there now is through a combination of three factors, three precepts which I learned long ago are the only way one can be successful for a lengthy period of time:

1)You must be prepared.   My parents and teachers raised me to love words, and to read as if books could save you. They were right. They encouraged and helped me constantly as a kid, supporting the artistic endeavors I undertook, teaching me to fight with every last breath for the chance to create things.

2)You must be lucky. And goddamn, I was and continue to be.  I'm not a smart or phenomenal artist by any stretch of description, but I was lucky enough to have these parents and teachers and scholarships and to meet other wonderful actors, directors, designers, singers, writers and musicians who helped me grow, gave me work opportunities which let me move on to new and more exciting locales.   I was lucky enough to be born a man. Wouldn't have lasted long in this world if I had all the same challenges I had and have now, but was a woman. It's a cruel doctrine of male privilege, especially with the arts.  I know this. I do not take it as a birthright.  I was lucky enough to finally, after spending a decade tumbling through demoralizing survival jobs, to find a career which complements my acting.  It's a pretty fucking charmed life.

3)You must be crazy.  You have to remain terminally unsatisfied.  Play ends, song's written, story's cooling its heels.  And it's done. You're scrambling for the next chance to stitch something together out of nothingness because there's this sharp, wicked truth in your heart which reminds you that you don't really matter. You are an amusement to people, and at best tolerated.

Nobody loves you, because you're the type of person who sings three seconds of a song you're writing over and over for hours until the exact, impeccable wording is revealed.  You're the type of person who will drop everything, passport in hand, to work on a project.  Nobody will love you because aside from the efforts you spend making things, your mannerisms and personal effects resemble a monk's.  You can pretend to care about people, and you may even help them from time to time, but you have a sickness. Ultimately, you are selfish, and any sane person who is filled with altruism, who seeks a broad, well-balanced life, will come to their senses and stop chasing success.

But that's not you.

Nothing gives you as much peace as the endorphins making things does.

**For those who are in Modesto, or a town like Modesto, here's my advice**

This advice is only for those who are unhappy.  If living there brings you comfort, love and care, you've already won.  If you are unhappy, you need to ask yourself:  what can I sacrifice in order to have the life I deserve?   The only thing I remember from former Mayor Lang's economics class in high school was the concept of opportunity cost.   Essentially, what you lose when making a choice.  I saved for over two and a half years in order to have the funds to move to New York City.  Damn near broke me in the process. I was crazy enough to do it, lucky enough to be able to do it, and mentally prepared to adopt for a spartan lifestyle all for the ministry of a better future.

Also, know that moving doesn't change who you are.  I'm still a pretty plain, humble guy in New York City. I'm still chubby, still dress like an alien just discovering the concept of clothes. I'm still painfully shy when I'm not making things and have to behave with the world. I just get a chance to make more things more often.  I get to act Off-Broadway on a weekly basis.  Every day is growth and experience.

Here's the song!

lyrics
ive travelled all across this nation
but the one place
ill never shine again
its a whitewashed town
modesto
california
place where you settle
'mong the culdesacs
grey women
ruddy men

chorus
and part of life is lettin' go
grab a shovel
fill the earth
and you dont look back
youre not as brave as you think you were
dont have the strength or the money for a new attack
why are you still breathin'
weight of ruin upon your back
its always modesto
in your heart

second verse
arrived there
with my wife and darling son
held my tongue at the notions
neighbors plied
took a job at the winery
it wasnt fun
my families faces
my only comfort
while the noose was tied

chorus

bridge
ran as fast as i could
when i got the phone call
by the time i arrived
the intersection
choked with glass and rubber
two sheets on the sidewalk waving
in surrender

chorus

Yelling in Theatre

Hey.

Saw a great deal of theatre last week, and I wanted to talk about a far too common practice which happens onstage.

Yelling.

It's a flare gun, people.  Do it once, quickly and in an unexpected place, and it is riveting.  As a spectator, your hair will rustle from the back of your head with fright and that primordial cocktail of adrenaline served upon our steady neurotransmitters will crackle inside us.

But keep yelling for an extended period of time, or yell over and over again throughout a play, and it's just painful.  Squeezing and grasping the trigger for a weapon that's spent. And you end up breaking the tool. Wind up with Hamlets who sound like gym coaches.

Why do actors yell?

1)They don't trust the space.  In New York City, a majority of the theatres (if we're talking Off and Off-Off Broadway) are black box in nature. Now, I started out in Los Angeles, and there were plenty of actors there who only possessed film training and would whisper during a play, their efforts awaiting a kindly boom operator who would never appear.  But that's not the case with NY actors. It's the opposite problem. If you're working a 45-seat house, you can trust the audience to hear you if you have sufficient vocal training.

2)They want to be "real".  Yes, in the real world, people yell.  And, when they do, we tend to tune them out after a time. Any subway rider can tell you that. It's a coping mechanism we've adopted to shut down when faced with constant yelling.  Besides, theatre isn't real. You're not really a king or getting murdered on stage.  Theatre is the human experience ideally and artificially expressed.  People responding in an articulate, complicated fashion.

3)They don't have a wide enough variety of tactics to play in a scene.  This is the big one.  This is why acting is different than real life.  In real life, I only utilize about four tactics when interacting with people before I give up:

 - to tease
- to comfort
 -to compliment
 -to charm

But me in a role?  That's the time when I can seduce or punish or devastate or bleed someone dry or mock or betray or reconcile with them or annoy or stab them with only the words I say. 

Verbs. Devour them like crazy.  Don't hide behind adjectives in any medium - acting, songwriting, stories, poems, whatever. Verbs used with passion and play deliver powerful art.  And if an actor doesn't feel supported by their choices, (and I'm speaking from painful experience in my twenties here), one quick fix is to yell. 

Don't use the quick fix. Challenge yourself to explore tactics in rehearsal and performance, especially ones which frighten you.

Randy- first draft of original song

Hey.

I wrote this song basically as a dare.

See, my good friend Ryan McCurdy had himself a  pretty dysfunctional relationship during the rehearsal for RICHARD III.  It was eating at him, but he pushed through it, and we made some wonderful theatre.

So, here it is. Also, thanks to Winnie Lok for the inspiration behind the song.


lyrics

first verse
i met randy
at a burger shop
ordered medium rare
with a pickle on top
hes the strong and silent type
let the conversation drop
but i knew hed find a way to get
attention

prechorus
and now were side by side together
but are we symbiotic
are you are a parasite
you leave me feverish and weakened
i want to help you
but youre not helping me at all

chorus
randy
youre killing me
your love is blind
randy
your ministrations are unkind
and i dont know how
to change your mind

second verse
tell me
randy
why this cold betrayal
i have nothing
its a sorry tale
just thinking about you
leaves me dizzy and pale
i cant sleep or eat
sure is hard to pay
attention

prechorus
chorus

bridge
ive got a friend named winnie lok
heart like a furnance
mind sharp like a ticking clock
and a wit as sweet
as licorice candy
she named
she named
she named my tapeworm
randy

prechorus
chorus

But I for one, have love maligned/I'm not for whom it was designed

Hey.

Let me tell you a story.

Early September, 2012.  About a week after my father died, and I'm flying to Vegas for my brother's wedding.  Bought a ticket at the last minute.  Sitting in the back row in the window seat, and a couple joins me for the middle and aisle row.  The man has slightly frosted blond tips, wears thick, garish sunglasses inside the plane - never takes them off - and speaks only once during the six hour flight to complain how he's never flown anything other than business class in his life until now.

He's not the story.

Fuck him.

The story is his companion.  Her name is Amanda; she's a paralegal and very tan for the East Coast.  Even after her skin cancer scare (which left her with a five inch scar across her right arm), she's got an eager, friendly quality about her.  We chat almost the entire flight while her male companion sleeps, and as she drinks more and more throughout the trip, she begins to over share.  Tells me that this excursion is a third date for a whirlwind romance between her and the slightly snoring gentleman to her left.  She really thinks he's the one.  Even started joking to him about the two of them getting married.  She even looked up wedding package rates.

But she's only kidding. 
She's a kidder. 

But she says she's not getting any younger, she's 26, and she wants that true, abiding love so badly.  She knows he'll grow to love her just as much as she loves him.  It has to work.  He's from Israel, she's Jewish.  He comes from money.  It's right.

And despite my foul, foul mood, I'm really trying to help her. I keep gently saying, Amanda, you have it to take it as it comes, give it time.  If he's right, you'll know.  But her raw need will not be mollified.

Plane lands, I wish her well.  Meet up with my brother and my sister-in-law.  Tell them what happens, and get a little snarky about it, as I'm prone to do. Puzzles me how someone can be so deluded and self-destructive and corroded by wanting so desperately to be loved, by anyone.

Did my time in Oregon, made it back to New York City.

And I thought about that whole experience with Amanda.  What should have been obvious then only came to light after I did my grieving and I put some time behind it all.

I'm just as broken as her.

Nothing in my life fills me with a hot, burning torrent of self-loathing as much as me trying to be like the normals and date or love or just put myself out there, stripped of all the distracting tricks and games I make with my voice or words or music or whatever is fuck is considered art.

Because the raw, unadorned me is clumsy and boorish and offensive and ugly and nauseating and doesn't want any of the selfless, nice things people are supposed to want like families and property values and pets and marriage and settling.

I want to make things.  Lots of things.
I want the person whom I love and who loves me to make things too.
I want them to be smarter than me and funny and strong.
I want them to find some unit of value within me. To think I am beautiful, even though I am not.
I want them to kick my ass.
I want them to never hate me .I've been hated in this life, and only in those times have I wished for death.
I want them to like what I make, and I want to love and support the making they do.

That's it.
But that's not what this life has afforded me. 
Not a question of deserve.  Because we don't deserve a damn thing.  

One more story.

1994.  November .  I was in a Masonic youth group, and one of the required functions that happened ever so often were group dances with the girls from another Masonic youth group.  I loathed these, but I had to go. I was the one of the key leaders of our group.  I didn't enjoy them because I danced like a cat on fire. I didn't enjoy them because as awkward and shy as I am now, I was even worse as a child.  Wearing black turtlenecks with thick, dirty glasses and terrible, misshapen teeth. 

We arrived at the dance (held in a town several hours away), and the other members of the group hit the dance floor.  I had brought a copy of Studs Terkel's amazing collection of interviews: WORKING.  While the music played, I buried my nose in the book and held my breath to calm my nerves.   Around the first hour, one of the chaperones noticed me, grabbed my book, and told me I'd get it back once the event was over.  And why don't I just go out there and ask a nice girl to dance?

Unprotected, I stood there, tears flooding my eyes.  The first chance I could, I stepped outside, took off my glasses and began to sob.

She startled me when she whispered, You ok?   I snapped back to face the voice (without my glasses, my vision is atrocious), and she laughed softly.

And we talked for about half an hour.  About school and our respective Masonic youth groups.  And it was the first real conversation I'd had with an adolescent girl ever. 

And just as intense as it was, it ended.  She left.  I sat there for about ten minutes, feeling good and right.

But then I realized I never asked what her name was.

 I put my glasses back on, walked back into the cafeteria where the dance was.  But by then, it had ended, and everyone was milling back to their respective cars.  And, since I didn't have my glasses on, I had no clue what this wonderful woman looked like.

And I never found out who she was.