Long and Short

I love shortform versus longform arguments – they usually fall down along these lines: shortform is popular, but shallow and hokey, and longform is more complex, but elitist and condescending. My friend has a great analogy that I'm going to invoke here, which is that shortform is like Lady Gaga, and longform is like Miles Davis. Now Lady Gaga (or really any large-scale, arena rock, top 40 artist) is “quick, fun, and the masses love it”. Lady Gaga is a far-out character in her own right, she has, it can be argued, built a majority of her following on her ostentatious and outrageous approach to fashion and self. (Fine, complain about the inherent chauvinism in that sentence if you must, but Gaga has built an empire on being a strange weirdo as much as Katy Perry has on being the bubble-gum girl next door, or any rapper in history has on being a from-the-hood “gangsta”.) Gaga's music (like Perry or Kings of Leon, et al) is not complex – it is fairly derivative and repetitive, but damn if it isn't catchy (I spent the better part of a week in a waiting room for a court case the summer that “California Girls” hit big, and damned if I didn't hear Perry crooning about melting Popsicles once an hour, and still enjoyed it.)

Now, the converse is that longform is more like Miles; its “complex, difficult, and there are a lot of people that can't appreciate it.” Miles probably never wanted (or intended) to create art that stood on the shoulders of his own persona, and probably just wanted the music to stand on its own. But his (very valid) point is that longform has (at the very least) the perception of being kind of art for art's sake. In another word: masturbatory. I've spent a number of nights in longform shows where I'd wager somewhere between 25-50% of the audience was other improvisers, or improv students. (At some shows, it may be even higher.) I've also spent nights in shortform shows that were completely occupied by people who weren't just non-improvisers, but had never been to any improv show before. Miles Davis' Kind of Blue (the best selling jazz album of all time) has only sold 4 million copies, whereas Gaga's The Fame has sold over 12 million, Kings of Leon's Only by the Night has sold 6.2 million, and Katy Perry's Teenage Dream has sold 5.5 million, in addition to 30 million copies just for the singles (outside of album sales), and is only the second artist in history to have an album spawn five singles (behind Michael Jackson).

Now the argument of Gaga v Davis is a (unfortunately) very manifest one, which is that longform tends to be a little self-obsessed. Self-important, even. Some of the more well-known longforms are very artistic, can be very “modal jazz”, obtuse, and self-aggrandizing, such as the Harold, which is such a dense form, that it is surprising that anyone ever does it well. But to make the assumption that all longform is weird and onanistic is to miss the point of longform – it is not impenetrable by nature, but by nurture. Longform is more complex than shortform, both for players and audience, and can be quite difficult, but can also be very deep, meaningful, and painfully entertaining. I have seen countless shortform shows that are just as self-important, self-aggrandizing, boring, and dense as I have longform shows – it's not the form that makes the show, it is always the improviser that makes the show. If you have elitist, vapid, and over-wrought players, you're going to have an elitist, vapid, and over-wrought show, regardless of whether you're doing “Freeze Tag” or the “Three Mad Rituals”.

Now, let's go back to music briefly. Fine, Gaga outsold Davis by 8 million copies, even with Blue having a 50 year head start. But let's compare: remember those numbers above for a bunch of the current big artists? Well, they don't even score on the list of the best selling albums – Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon is considered one of the best albums ever made, and has sold a whopping 50 million copies world wide, and is the second best selling album of all time (behind MJ's Thriller). And Moon is no Fame – it is very artistic, groundbreaking in sound design as well as songwriting, uses interview clips to break up songs, and is a dense (and also entertaining) album, yet still outsold Gaga more than 4 times over.

This tells me that audience's don't care about art/entertainment so much; “I may not know much about art, but I know what I like”. Sure, you may get some people who'd prefer to watch a few games than invest in a whole involved piece, but the fact remains that well-executed trumps for-the-masses every time. Look at movies like Kazaam to see something that was intended to be easily accessible, lowest common denominator popcorn fare, and is universally reviled. (As a fun project, go look at the lowest scored films on Metacritic, and, sure, you'll see Date Movie, but you'll also see Adventures of Pluto Nash (with Eddie freakin' Murphy), which also has the dishonor of being one the biggest flops in movie history. That list is a veritable rouge's gallery of cinematic failure in commercial film-making aspirations.) It is not by virtue of the medium, but the artist that makes the art impossible to watch.

The Grudge

Back in 2004, I used to write movie reviews for the USM student newspaper, the "Student Printz". Because I occasionally feel lazy, and it seems a shame that all of five people ever read these, I've decided to repost them here, in the original versions that I emailed to my editor, Noel, all those years ago. 
Horror long ago became the bastard child of cinema: the desire to make truly frightening movies like the original “Night of the Living Dead” or “Psycho” is consistently traded off to put together movies that are designed to just jump out at you to scare you. Indeed, it seems that moviegoers are almost masochistic; these types of horror movies do surprisingly well in the box office and Hollywood does not hesitate to keep coming up with new ways of saying ‘Boo!’ “The Grudge”, the newest such entry into the fraternity of scary movies is certainly no exception. Without a doubt “The Grudge” will succeed in making most people jump, but it really just falls short of being truly frightening.

“The Grudge” follows the story of Karen Davis (Sarah Michelle Gellar), an American social worker living with her boyfriend in Tokyo. When one of her coworkers fails to show up for work, Karen is asked to cover her patient for a day. Karen arrives at the house only to find her patient all alone and the house in a complete state of disarray. She is hardly in the house for more than an hour before she hears strange noises coming from a taped up closet in the house. She opens the closet only to find a little boy, a book and a black cat. She’s manages just another few minutes before she runs into something far scarier than a spooky little boy: a ghost composed of enough hair to clog a manhole cover. Her brush with the ghost prompts Karen to unravel the mystery behind the strange occurrences in the house.

The story is told in a nonlinear style, not so much to give us new or necessary information or help advance the plot, but instead just to provide more opportunities for ghosts to kill people in different ways. Among the many victims in the movie are the couple who purchased the house, the patient’s daughter, and a police officer trying to find out how three of his partners died while investigating a murder in the house. The only story necessary to the plot is the one involving Peter (Bill Pullman), who is directly tied to the formation of the curse, and is the only one who doesn’t die from the “grudge”. The movie is a bit of an oddity: being based on a Japanese movie is pretty standard, but this is the first one to be directed by the same director from the original, Takashi Shimizu.

“The Grudge” has all the familiar horror conventions and enough of them to make the movie pretty scary: plenty of dark rooms, corners for ghosts to hide behind, and enough ghost fodder who are more than eager to go investigating strange noises. Japanese ghosts are nothing if convenient though: they call you on the phone to let you know they’re coming, they visit you at your workplace, and they even stash bodies in the attic for the police to find. Though the plot tends to drag in a few places, the scary and spooky events are paced well enough to at least keep you entertained.

“The Grudge” succeeds rather well as your typical October scare fest, but more than likely no one will remember it when they’re making their movie list next Halloween. Once you figure out how it’s pulling your strings, it loses its potency dramatically. If you’re in the mood for a good scare this October, “The Grudge” should meet your needs sufficiently, just don’t plan on being honestly frightened.

I Hate Improv Class

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(Author's note: I wrote this essay around February 2009.)

Since moving to San Diego, my once weekly fix of improv with my long form group has yet to fully satiate my improv hunger. I decided to sign up for classes at the local improv house. It's a short-form in the style of Comedy Sports kind of place, and even though I don't particularly want to do that kind of 'prov again, I was so hungry to do some improv, any improv, I was willing to go back to “class one” again. Additionally, I'm hoping that I can get a place performing at the theater regularly when it's all over with, and get some stage time and start building a group of improv friends to hang out with. (What can I say? I'm lonely.)

I signed up for classes no problem (though, to my surprise, almost the same price as a session of classes at the iO in Chicago, and only six weeks instead of eight), and as I was driving to the theater, I noted a distinct knot in my stomach. I was nervous. I was dreading going to class - I was honestly afraid of getting up on stage and making a damn fool out of myself. Now, I have never been afraid on stage. I have proudly stepped on to many stages and have been animals, people getting sexually molested, doing the sexual molestation, and inanimate objects (that are being used for sexual molestation). But this class, and as a matter of fact, every single class or workshop I have ever taken, I feel nervous right before the first one. I am constantly afraid that this class is the one where I will completely screw up, and no one will ever want to improvise with me ever again. And, I would argue that this nervous feeling has gotten worse the longer I've been doing improv.

While most people would say that after they've been doing it longer, they've gotten more comfortable because they're more experienced. For me though, I feel that the longer I've been doing improv, the less of an excuse for screwing up I have. When I took my first class at the iO in Chicago, I was bold as hell (probably too much, my teacher Andy had me rope it in a little bit) because at that point I could have screwed up, and just said: "Oh well, I've only done improv at college". Now though, if I screw up, people can only say: "I thought this guy did improv in Chicago!"

A failure on stage is almost always the result of no support, etc. But I can't fault new players for messing up. A flub now will definitely support the theory that I have no business doing this. As a result, I find myself working ten times as hard for everything, just to keep my head above water (it also doesn’t help that I’m a bit of a perfectionist, and I’ve only liked maybe 5% of all the improv I’ve ever done). I feel the need, the absolute life-ending need, to prove myself every time I’m around a new group, and especially a new teacher/coach. I hate improv class for the exact opposite reason that people take classes: wanting to prove that I’m good enough. I’m a student! Shouldn’t I feel comfortable enough to make mistakes in class?

Unfortunately, I now wear my Chicago improv tutelage like a weight around my neck.

The Summer

 

Back in 2004, I used to write movie reviews for the USM student newspaper, the "Student Printz". Because I occasionally feel lazy, and it seems a shame that all of five people ever read these, I've decided to repost them here, in the original versions that I emailed to my editor, Noel, all those years ago. 

Though Hollywood is not known for consistently releasing good movies, most visitors of the Cineplex can at least look forward to the summer movie crop for some big budget, special effects-ridden movies to break the summer heat. Usually, even with a big budget, the movies can actually surpass the “eye candy” mark: the summer is where we got movies like Back to the Future, Star Wars, American Pie, Men in Black, Spider-Man and Raiders of the Lost Ark. But this summer, we were instead treated to not just a few, but an entire slew of empty Hollywood spectacles. While copious special effects can still leave an amazing movie (a la The Matrix), there comes a point when you need some meat with your popcorn.

For example, the summer opener, Van Helsing was little more than 2 hours of loosely strung together special effects and a hefty price tag ($175 million). The acting was mediocre to bad, and the plot was so bad that it seemed to have been written over a few hours. Two weeks later was the even larger budgeted Troy, starring Brad Pitt and Eric Bana, which was without a doubt modern cinema at its worst. First, you have really neat characters, with long, well explained back stories, then set them in a really neat story, and two and a half hours later, all you’ve done is a few short action sequences. With everything the movie had going for it, they ended up saying absolutely nothing, and doing next to nothing.

Of all the special effects extravaganzas, The Day After Tomorrow was without a doubt the most enjoyable, yet still ended up being very disappointing. Directed by Roland Emmerich (of Independence Day), the movie details the events of a storm spanning the entire globe, therefore requiring special effects for nearly half the movie (and not always good FX either). The characters were fun to watch and the plot was interesting, but the movie was so similar to Independence Day that it seemed as though we weren’t seeing anything new.

Perhaps the worst movie all this summer was Catwoman, which was basically a ninety minute movie whose sole merit was a scantily clad woman (in fact a male body double). The film showed complete ignorance of the source material (that is the DC comic character Catwoman). The director had the absolute brilliance to use the exact same song anytime Catwoman was about to do anything and make sure that Halle Berry wore the most form-fitting outfit for no particular reason. The real down side is that Berry was actually played a man (not kidding) during all the action and fight scenes.

The big word to sum up this summer at the movies would be disappointment. Though Hollywood did deliver with a few good movies we were all looking forward to (like Shrek 2 and Spiderman 2), nearly everything else from start to finish fit in the apparent summer movie theme of lackluster entertainment. This summer’s movies were almost all big budget special effects let downs, unoriginal adaptations and astonishingly unfunny, lame “comedies”. Though we can’t expect Hollywood to deliver funny, entertaining, special effects blockbusters all the time, summers like the past one remind audiences just how bad Hollywood can be.

The Worst Show

(Author's note: I originally wrote this article in August 2008.)

I recently had a very bad show. Bad and then some. And excuse the hyperbole, but it was quite possibly the worst show I have ever been a part of, which is saying something. What went wrong in this show, you ask? Well, what can go wrong in any show? People not listening to each other, ambiguous people, relationships, and locations, focus issues, low energy, direct and indirect denials, and an all around lack of playfulness. That this show was an iO graduation show, and that it is supposed to showcase everything we have learned in the last year (improv-wise) is itself perhaps telling.

Of course, the only thing worse than a truly horrendous show, is the backlash immediately after it. Because while a horrid (I will, in fact, use every synonym for bad I can think of) show lasts only twenty five minutes (despite the fact that it feels longer), the ripples of it can last much, much longer. This was one of those shows that everyone just sort of hangs their heads afterwards, and one that everyone knows was just bad. Even that one guy in every group who can find something positive about nearly every show (it's usually me). A show so atrocious that everyone immediately starts trying to come up with ways to fix it.
Let's run through the usual list: switch coaches, find a new practice time, required "hang-out/non-improv" time to achieve group trust/synergy, radical form changes, and a list of basics/guidelines/fundamentals/rules/commandments for what will make good shows.

It's interesting to point out that improv groups are much like bureaucracies: they are always fighting the battle they just lost.

This brings me to my point, and one that is especially resonant given that just seven days earlier, we had what was probably one of the best shows I had ever been in. Improvisation is a risky business. Perhaps the riskiest. Nothing is guaranteed, and every time you step on stage, you could easily be stepping on to your worst show, ever. Improvisers constantly tout that their artform is the purest, and the most interesting, because anything can happen. This is true, but to paraphrase a great scientist, the door swings both ways. This is the lure of the unknown, and the reason why improv is so interesting. Shows can be transcendental, entertaining, and intriguing.

They can also be boring, mind numbing, and unwatchable.

To paraphrase someone else, we deal in the unknown, friend. This is our business, and it is challenging, unique, and unpredictable by its very nature. We love it for the same reason we hate it.

So how do we deal with shows then? Can we do all the things mentioned above, and achieve success? Sure.

Can we not do any of the things mentioned above, and achieve success? Why not?

Sometimes we just have bad nights, things don't click, a smidgen of anxiety or apprehension slow a show down, and things just go awry. Not anyone's fault; just the name of the game.  When these shows come along (and they will) the only thing you can do is just keep on truckin'. Learn from your mistakes, keep working hard, and don't get too down.

Relax; after all, it can't get worse than rock bottom, right?

The Rule Breakers

When I was in high school, I tried out for the part of drum major for the band, which was an altogether fun experience – I didn’t get it, but it was fun nonetheless. One of the things I learned for the tryouts was how to spin a mace. A mace, for the uninitiated, is the long pole, about five feet in length, with a large silver orb on the top of it. The mace is largely ceremonial, probably its only original purpose was to be a shiny object sticking above a marching formation so that the members can keep rhythm. Somewhere along the way though, some drum major got tired of just holding this thing, and after probably attempting to use it as a sword, decided to start spinning the thing around. Modern drum majors will almost always be seen spinning this ungainly monster of a baton (or sometimes two) causing it to dance, spin, and fly through the air to the delight of the crowd.

The band director who was showing how to do mace-work (his term) explained that there are two approaches to mace spinning: an east coast and a west coast. The east coast, he explained, was all about performing the mace-work with ultimate precision; every single move should be text-book perfection according to the east coasters. The west coast he summed up with a simple mantra: “Hey, check out what I can do.” The west coast wasn’t concerned with doing things according to any “official” pattern; instead they did their mace-work for fanfare and showmanship (and a heavy dose of one-upmanship). In other words, do things so unbelievable that no one else can copy you. The east coast was like a game of Horse, and the west coast was an “And 1” tape. It wasn’t until I was in college that I realized that this didn’t just apply to mace-work, but to everything – music, food, scholarly pursuits. Maybe it’s the weather.

In improv there is still those two different rules of thought, what I like to think of as the rule-followers and the rule breakers. A rule follower is always trying to improve upon an idea: that form worked mostly, except for this, so let’s fix that for next time, or that didn't work at all, let's scrap the whole thing and go in a new direction. Followers are about form and technique, so they focus on drilling basics and fundamentals and attempting to follow the rules. These would be the same rules that were published in “Truth in Comedy” many, many years ago and have since become more of a burden on the improv world than they’ve helped. Mick Napier denounced them in “Improvise”, and there are even rumblings all throughout the iO that the rules are not all they’re cracked up to be. The problem? The rules are largely negative in their wording (e.g. “Never ask questions!”) and they make improvisers think too much. “Oh, am I doing this right?” “Is this following the rules enough?” Give a man a rule, and he will do his best to follow it.

Except of course, for the breakers. Rule breakers cast aside simple notions like classes, workshops, and improv books in favor of a more customized approach: “Watch what I can do.” Even the greatest improv teacher in the world can only take you so far and at some point you have to be ready to come to a Zen level of connectedness with form, technique, and structure. At risk of sounding any more western (or Californian, heaven forbid) a “one-ness”. All improvisers are, for lack of a better term, artists, as the outcomes on stage are the result of our unified point-of-view and interpretation of the world around us.

The rules do have their place; they are the foundation for a basic appreciation and understanding of the art – but don’t be afraid to spin improv in your own way and maybe show it off, all the while screaming: “I dare you to follow me!”

The Chi-Connection

I don't think I need to tell you this Chicago is at the very least, one of the undisputed, reigning champions for improv. This isn't to discount what's going on in various other ports of call – every city I've visited has at least a couple of people doing great, challenging work – but I think everyone can agree that Chicago is the epicenter of what's going on. Now I'm an outed, unabashed Chicago-phile, and a lot of people may think that's just a strange knee-jerk reaction to this mecca of improvisation. This is not the case however, and my reasons for loving Chicago improv is also the reason that I love a lot of other place's improvs, but also one of the reasons that San Diego has been a troubling, frustrating city to do improv in.

Now a little background: when I was in Chi-town doing improv, I was also going to grad school at the same time. These two educations I was receiving simultaneously is, hyperbole aside, probably the single most important thing that has ever happened to me in my life. What was great about both of those schools is that while we did focus on specifics needed in each basic education, both had teachers that encouraged and espoused critical, independent thinking. It is not merely enough to teach students what is now – we must also teach them how to find the next what is. In grad school, emphasis was placed on analyzing problems and errors in judgment, or science, or ethics (or sometimes all three) and thinking about what they mean in the bigger picture, and my improv education taught analysis, creativity, self-reliance (and how to intersect all three). What I got out of the combined experience was the capacity to reason independently. I've found this exceedingly important as I remember a lesson my high school science teacher taught: there are two types of people who will not excel in this world, those who can't follow instructions, and those who can only follow instructions.

San Diego has been a tremendously frustrating city because the majority of the improvisers “in power” have no interest in innovation, and actively discourage other improvisers from independent work. An actual lesson that one of these teachers gave: some people try to continue doing improv outside of the theater after completing workshops, but no one ever finds any success, so don't even bother trying.

(While we're on this subject, two actual things I have been castigated and admonished for: “doing other projects”, and “motivating and inspiring players” (direct quotes). The first is because that theater doesn't endorse anyone else doing anything not within its own walls, and because they don't trust players who may have questionable allegiances, whatever that means (and also because you're trading on the implied authority of the first theater in other projects). The second is because, as it was explained to me, when I started doing longform in the SD, I motivated and inspired a lot of these previously shortform only improvisers into wanting to do more longform. That however came at a cost, as those players were now skipping regular rehearsals and showing up for shows tired due to conflicting interests with their other projects. Neither of these things are made up, because no one could make up that kind of logic.)

Now if a particular theater wants to run itself like the KGB, stamping out perceived enemies of the state who just want to do more improv, there's not much anyone can do to stop them, but I can still object to the attitude they take, especially towards younger, newer improvisers. This kind of discouraging, negative, and selfish view towards the craft stifles creativity, originality, and invention, not to mention breeding bitterness and animosity. As teachers, we have an obligation to encourage and engender improvisers to find and embrace the cutting edge. Teachers in Chi/LA/NY don't take a “go away, this is mine” mentality, they understand that the craft is more important than the individual (and also if you're good, you don't need to be defensive) but also that the next generation of improvisers are the ones who will solve the next piece of the puzzle. Try new things, see what works and what doesn't, build on what's been previously discovered, and add your contribution to the growing archive of knowledge – that's what science has done, and that's what most improvisers have done too.

If we are not teaching and – dare I say – inspiring and motivating our students and fellow players into pursuing more work, we are doing a grave disservice to them, not just as improvisers, but as teachers and human beings too. We are gravely failing our charges by not promoting independent work. Self-reliance and independence are noble character traits, not criminal trespasses.

(And to the teacher and coach who told me to not bother trying, the group I started just celebrated it's fourth year.)