November 27, 2006 by webmaster.

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it.

It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work you have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.

No artist is pleased… there is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction; a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.
- Martha Graham to Agnes DeMille

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November 27, 2006 by webmaster.

Choosing the artists way brings with it a good dose of magic; there is magic in the art of acting, in the poetic shades the artist seeks, more often than not even the artists personal life has a strong lyrical quality. All this being true, it is still important for the artist, (in particular the performing artist) to think systematically about what they do and how they’re going to do it. There are a number of mind-frames that allow the actor to think forward about the decisions they make, to allow magic in their craft, but to seek due diligence and systematic effort in the act of getting their art to a waiting world. One of my favorite mind-frames is the idea of the actor as a small business. And as with so many small businesses they fail to grow not because of effort, hard work, or talent, but because of a simple misunderstanding about who’s doing the thinking for the small business and when.

So let’s look at that model of the actor as a small business: You have a front window, you have to make it look specific, you have to be clear to the customer base you seek and about what you represent. Nobody’s going to walk into a store if they can’t figure out what it’s selling. You have advertising costs, those headshots, resumes, and tapes. Don’t skimp on those costs, look at the successful companies you re-visit again and again, they are always on the move with their advertising, always looking for the next edge to what they’re reaching out with. Your small business has ongoing training costs; the most successful companies in the world have robust human resource departments. You’ll never progress just relying on old information, educating your staff is a full-time job; keep them on their toes. You have healthcare costs, it’s important to keep your staff fit and well cared for. They need to have a place to work out and stay healthy. And, like any small business that wants to grow, you have a plan for that growth. A simple five-year, three year, one-year, six month, and one month, plan of action that allows you to be systematic about your growth. Well, if it was that simple all small businesses would be mega corporations by now, but they’re not. The backbone of the American economy is the small business. Eighty percent of all business is small business. Yet most small businesses either fail outright or remain flat in growth, why? There are a number of reasons that a small business might not accomplish its goals, but the most common reason is the phenomenon of the Two Hats. In your average small business the owner is also the principle employee. In that capacity they are always changing hats, quickly one to the other. In the hurly burly of being both the owner and the principle employee the hats get mixed up, the owner acts like an employee, and the employee like the owner. Ever feel like you were working for your agent? Then you’ve felt the phenomenon of the Two Hats.

No small business can succeed when the owner and the employee get mixed up. When you’re trapped in that mix-up it becomes impossible to make strategic decisions. The small business stays on the ground making every decision a tactical one and rarely seeing forward to the strategic. I’ll wager that as an actor you try to get every job you are asked to audition for. Am I right? If you have, you have experienced what it’s like to make only tactical decisions when in some cases strategic ones might be called for. Tactical is on the ground and in the moment, it’s where the employee lives. Strategic is projecting forward to make choices that work in the long run; strategic is where the owner lives.

It’s a mind frame; it takes discipline to change it. If you expect to be rid of the phenomenon of the Two Hats you’ll need to do a little groundwork, in other words … get tactical. Get a pad of paper that lives with you wherever you go, (Do you admire the work of Baz Luhrman? He has a pad that hangs around his neck all the time.) Then get a pad of paper that lives at home. As you go through your day for the next month or two keep a list of the places you wear your hats. Your owner hat might be when you’re at acting class, getting headshots, or dealing with your representation. Places you have your employee hat on might be when you eat right to stay fit or have to go to the gym when you would rather stay in bed. Make clear distinctions about these hats and write them down. If you think that you will change and become aware of how this works by thinking about it, you’re wrong. You have to write it down and do so for an extended period of time if you want to change. At the end of the day, sit down with your pad from the world and write down on your pad at home the distinctions of owner and employee. By transferring from one pad to another you will not only redouble the learning experience, but you’ll be creating a clearinghouse to collate this information. Within a month you should have a pretty good idea where you are an owner, and where an employee. Keep up the list making and you’ll be a master of this discipline in no time.

Understanding your position as a small business clears the poetic mind to be creative. Understanding the Two Hat phenomenon allows for clear thinking. Clear thinking allows for distinctions between strategic and tactical decisions. Writing down and collating that thinking gives you the foundation to make good decisions. Making those decisions allows for even and actionable growth as an artist, a person, and a small business, and … growth is good!

? Carter Thor Studios

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November 13, 2006 by webmaster.

The New York Times Drama Section, November 30, 1947 - four days before the New York opening of “A Streetcar Named Desire” by Tennessee Williams:

Sometime this month I will observe the third anniversary of the Chicago opening of “The Glass Menagerie”, an event which terminated one part of my life and began another about as different in all external circumstances as could be well imagined. I was snatched out of virtual oblivion and thrust into sudden prominence, and from the precarious tenancy of furnished rooms about the country I was removed to a suite in a first-class Manhattan hotel. My experience was not unique. Success has often come that abruptly into the lives of Americans.

No, my experience was not that exceptional, but neither was it quite ordinary, and if you are willing to accept the somewhat eclectic proposition that I had not been writing with such an experience in mind-
and many people are not willing to believe that a playwright is interested in anything but popular success, there may be some point in comparing the two estates.

The sort of life which I had had previous to this popular success was one that required endurance, a life of clawing and scratching along a sheer surface and holding on tight with raw fingers to every inch of rock higher than the one caught hold of before, but it was a good life because it was the sort of life for which every human organism is created. I was not aware of how much vital energy had gone into this struggle until the struggle was removed. I was out on a level plateau with my arms still thrashing and my lungs still grabbing at air that no longer resisted. This was security at last. I sat down and looked about me and was suddenly very depressed. I thought to myself, this is just a period of adjustment. Tomorrow morning I will wake up in this first-class hotel suite above the discreet hum of an East Side boulevard and I will appreciate its elegance and luxuriate in its comforts and know that I have arrived at our American plan of Olympus. Tomorrow morning when I look at the green satin sofa I will fall in love with it. It is only temporary that the green sofa looks like slime on stagnant water. But in the morning the inoffensive little sofa looked more revolting than the night before and I was already getting too fat for $125 suit which a fashionable acquaintance had selected for me. In the suite things began to break accidentally. An arm came off the sofa. Cigarette burns appeared on the polished surfaces of the furniture. Windows were left open and a rainstorm flooded the suite. But the maid always put it straight and the patience of the management was inexhaustible. Late parties could not offend them seriously. Nothing short of a demolition bomb seemed to bother my neighbors. I lived on room service. But in this, too, there was a disenchantment. Sometimes between the moment when I ordered dinner over the phone and when it was rolled into my living room like a corpse on a rubber-wheeled table, I lost all interest in it. Once I ordered a sirloin steak and a chocolate sundae, but everything was so cunningly disguised on the table that I mistook the chocolate sauce for gravy and poured it over the sirloin steak. Of course all this was the more trivial aspect of a spiritual dislocation that began to manifest itself in far more disturbing ways. I soon found myself becoming indifferent to people. A well of cynicism rose in me. Conversations all sounded like they had been recorded years ago and were being played back on a turntable. Sincerity and kindliness seemed to have gone out of my friends’ voices. I suspected them of hypocrisy. I stopped calling them, stopped seeing them. I was impatient of what I took to be inane flattery. I got so sick of hearing people say “I loved your play” that I could not say thank you anymore. I choked on the words and turned rudely away from the usually sincere person. I no longer felt any pride in the play itself, but began to dislike it, probably because I felt too lifeless inside ever to create another. I was walking around dead in my shoes, and I knew it but there was no one I knew or trusted sufficiently, at that time, to take him aside and tell him what was the matter.

This curious condition persisted about three months, till late spring, when I decided to have another eye operation, mainly because of the excuse it gave me to withdraw from the world behind a gauze mask. It was my fourth eye operation, and perhaps I should explain that I had been afflicted for about five years with a cataract on my left eye which required a series of needling operations and finally an operation on the muscle of the eye. (The eye is still in my head. So much for that.) Well, the gauze mask served a purpose. While I was resting in the hospital the friends whom I had neglected or affronted in one way or another began to call on me and now that I was in pain and darkness, their voices seemed to have changed, or rather that unpleasant mutation which I had suspected earlier in the season had now disappeared and they sounded now as they used to sound in the lamented days of my obscurity. Once more they were sincere and kindly voices with the ring of truth in them. When the gauze mask was removed I found myself in a readjusted world. I checked out of the handsome suite at the first-class hotel, packed my papers and a few incidental belongings and left for Mexico, an elemental country where you can quickly forget the false dignities and conceits imposed by success, a country where vagrants innocent as children curl up to sleep on the pavements and human voices, especially when their language is not familiar to the ear, are soft as birds’. My public self, that artifice of mirrors, did not exist here and so my natural being was resumed.
Then, as a final act of restoration, I settled for a while at Chapala to work on a play called “The Poker Night,” which later became “A Streetcar Named Desire”. It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention, and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his is not only convenient but unavoidable. This is an over-simplification. One does not escape that easily from the seductions of an effete way of life. You cannot arbitrarily say to yourself, I will now continue my life as it was before this thing. Success happened to me. But once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation. Once you know this is true, that the heart of a man, his body and his brain, are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict (the struggle of creation) and that with that conflict removed, the man is a sword cutting daisies, that not privation but luxury is the wolf at the door and the fangs of this wolf are all the little vanities and conceits and laxities that Success is heir to - why, then with this knowledge you are at least in a position of knowing where the danger lies. You know, then, that the public Somebody you are when you “have a name” is a fiction created with mirrors and that the only somebody worth being is the solitary and unseen you that existed from your first breath and which is the sum of your actions and so is constantly under a state of becoming under your own volition - and knowing these things, you can even survive the catastrophe of Success! It is never altogether too late, unless you embrace the Bitch Goddess, as William James called her, with both arms and find in her smothering caresses exactly what the homesick little boy in you always wanted, absolute protection and utter effortlessness. Success is a kind of death, I think and it can come to you in a storm of royalty checks beside a kidney shaped pool in Beverly Hills or anywhere at all that is removed from the conditions that made you an artist, if that’s what you are or were or intended to be. Ask anyone who has experienced the kind of success I am talking about - What good is it? Perhaps to get an honest answer you will have to give him a shot of truth-serum but the word he will finally groan is unprintable in genteel publications.

Then what is good? The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or even the love of another human being - anything that’s dynamic and expressive - that’s what’s good for you if you’re at all serious in your aims. William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. “In the time of your life - live!” That time is short and it doesn’t return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, Loss, Loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.

-Tennessee Williams

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November 13, 2006 by webmaster.

Welcome!

We are changing the format of the Essay-of-the-Week and Quote-of-the-Week postings to a blog.
Please let us know about your experience with this change.

Enjoy!

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