Catching Eels (excuses for not posting)

My rate of posting to this blog has slowed considerably as of late. Here are my excuses:

1. I've been working on my novel every day. (Usually at 5am.) Free time and energy are in finite supply over summer vacation, but I've done a good job at sticking to my plan of getting up early every morning to write. I'm making lots of progress, but I haven't been answering many e-mails or following blog discussions or much of anything else.

2. I've been scraping paint. We have a bathroom window, set right in the shower stall, that needs many layers of paint removed, before I repaint it. Turns out this project that I thought would take 2 days will take at least a week. I usually like household projects, but stripping paint sucks. I suppose I could look at it as a metaphor for revising a novel: I peel off layer after layer of accumulated gunk, trying to get to the really good stuff underneath. It's hard work. It requires great patience. No one is paying me to do it. It'll be aesthetically pleasing when I'm done. (Nah, that doesn't really help.)

3. I've been catching eels. And tadpoles. And little green crabs, jellyfish, frogs. The kids and I (and sometimes my wife) have been doing a good job at getting out the beach or ponds or wherever. The eel was really cool. I turned over a rock at the beach, up near the SalemWillows amusement area, and there it was. I've never even seen one before. I was able to scoop it up in my bare hands, but it was incredibly slippery. (I felt like a triumphant hunter landing a unique beast, until two little girls wandered by with five of them in their little bucket.)


That's about it. I'm a slacker.

Points off the board

Guess I spoke too soon about Lost Oasis getting another shot at the NYC audience. Turns out there was a scheduling problem, so it won't be part of the undergroundzero festival after all. Too bad--it seems like a good festival. You win some, you lose some I guess.

I don't have much scheduled, production-wise, for the rest of the year. There's a staged reading of Pieces of Whitey on August 16th, at the Cambridge Public Library (Central Square branch), and then after that dead silence. I know something will come up, but the quiet times are always a bit unsettling.

Inside New Dramatists selection process

Johnna Adams has posted about the New Dramatists open house/meeting. If you've ever applied, or are thinking about applying, you should definitely take a look. I've applied several times and haven't made the cut. Now I'm not quite sure I'm in the right place for it to be helpful for me, though it's tempting to apply.

Meeting this Sunday for AEA reform in NYC

This Sunday, July 8th, there will be a meeting with the Coalition for Code Reform at Classic Stage Company, 136, E. 13th Street (between 3rd & 4th Avenues, from 6-8pm. This group is actually trying to take action about something that playwrights and producers involved with Off-Off Broadway productions and companies and griped, complained and whined about for years--the Showcase Code. I wish I could be there. Pass the word.

Visit http://www.nyc99.org/ for more info.

Watch The Trailer for Michael Moore's 'SiCKO'

Here's the trailer for Sicko.

What I'm Watching: Sicko

Tracy and I went to see Sicko yesterday and were not disappointed. It definitely generated plenty of discussion and some serious thinking about where our country is headed and where we'd like it to go, and how we might make a difference. That seems like a pretty successful film to me.

I wish he'd talked a little more about exactly how we got into the health care mess we're in, and offered a few more ideas for how we might get out of it. But it's funny, entertaining, moving, and thought-provoking. Certainly not a perfect film, but that's not what I was looking for.

We've been pretty lucky with our health care coverage so far, but we've also had to fight with our insurers to get various tests for our son covered--some of those fights we won, and some we lost. People complain about long waits in countries with socialized medicine, but we've experienced that here, too (waiting more than a year for some evaluations). We've been lucky to have some resources to pay for tests that insurance wouldn't cover, but it's definitely been (and will continue to be) a strain on our budget. Lots of Americans aren't as lucky as us.

Expect to see the establishment come out hard against this film, because Moore's not just saying that socialized medicine is a good idea, he's also saying that there's lots of things that other industrialized countries do/offer (like better childcare for working families, more vacation time, cheaper college education) better than ours. People with money and power get what they need and more, in our country, but access for the working man is highly restricted. And oddly enough, there is no true labor party in our system (the Democratic Party is far from being such an entity).

It seems strange to me is that the discussion of politics, not just party politics, but real political ideas and viewpoints, seems to be mildly taboo in our culture. I don't know if it's just me who feels this way, but this seems a very dangerous thing.

Moore has me thinking about the big issues confronting the United States at the moment. My list would be:

• The war in Iraq and our outrageous military budget (we spend more on defense than all other industrialized countries, COMBINED. This week's issue of Newsweek lists our 2006 military budget at $560 billion. After us comes: UK $57.6 billion, France $55.4 billion, China $35.3 billion, Russia $24.9 billion, India $22.4 billion, Israel $11.3 billion. Why do we need to spend so much more?
  
• Our idiotic healthcare system. (A national healthcare system makes total sense to me. A for-profit, insurance-based system seems an idiocy that enriched a few people and corporations, with little incentive for actually making people healthier.)
• Race relations. (I actually spend time working on this already.)
  
• Money in politics. Campaigns should be publicly funded. Corporations should be banned from campaign contributions altogether, ASAP. The campaign finance system we have seems incredibly corrupt.
• Rising class divisions. The concentration of increasingly large amounts of wealth in the hands of a few people seems likely to cause increasing instability in our society.
• Global warming, use of fossil fuels, and our industrial food chain. These link pretty closely together for me.
• Our current paralyzing culture of fear.
  

In Sicko, a retired member of the British Parliament talks about how a people who are healthy, educated, and confident can be difficult to govern. I'd like us to be all three of these. Sadly, I feel like I'm poorly educated as to how I make those things happen. I'm pretty good at writing plays and novels. I've even written some political plays, but I can't say they've had a great impact yet. I need to think of ways I can use my talents (and limited time) to get more actively involved. It feels like our country will actually need a revolutionary change (hopefully peaceful) in order to solve these entrenched problems.

Anyway, go see the movie. It might get you thinking.

Playwriting Purge

I've signed up to do the latest Playwright Purge challenge (today is the first day). This is a group started by Mark Harvey Levine, that takes up a challenge similar to the one on the Playwrights Submission Binge (which focuses on marketing): write something every day for 30 days. (We're taking July 4th off and going until July 31st.)

You don't have to be a playwright to join up, and you don't have to write a play. I'm going to be working on rewrites to my novel. It's just a nice way to have a little bit of camaraderie and accountability (and fun) while also getting a little more work done. (This should be especially helpful in July.) There are about two dozen writers signed up so far (mostly from the Binge). Check it out.