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The States That Will Not Be Commanded

There is a class of human experience that answers to no direct order. You cannot tell yourself to fall asleep. The instruction arrives at a locked door. Sleep refuses the simple transaction of command and execution. Instead, it assembles itself once certain conditions are present, and those conditions include, strangely enough, the act of picturing yourself already inside the state you are trying to enter. Lying down begins it. Closed eyes continue it. Imagining yourself asleep, entering the self who has already arrived, completes the condition, and only then does sleep agree to appear.

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The Westborough Crusaders: The Trilogy That Took Forty-Four Years to Earn Its Novels

Some work waits for you. Not patiently. Not the way a dog waits by the door, loyal and uncomplicated. It waits the way a diagnosis waits in a family’s bloodline, silently present, expressing itself in symptoms you do not recognize until you are old enough to understand what your body has been trying to tell you. In 1982, I was sixteen years old, living in the Midwest, and I sat down and wrote eight episodes of a television series called The Westborough Crusaders. I did not know I was writing the first draft of a trilogy. I thought I was writing television. I was wrong, but I would not understand how wrong for another four decades.

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Hugh Laurie: Pandering in the Blues Ghetto with Let Them Talk

The Blues has lately become a “modern musical ghetto” for non-Blues performers like Cyndi Lauper and Hugh Laurie and their ilk who are bored with their current lot in life and so they take the next easiest route back to feigned admiration by “making a Blues album” as a one-off for fun.  Hugh Laurie’s latest musical miasma landed on September 6, 2011 and I am absolutely confounded by his mock singing style and his cynical delivery.  The guy cannot loft a tune, so why make an album?  Why did Hugh Laurie think we’d want to pay $10.00USD for his musical masturbation in the public square?

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Why I Love James Franco

The first exposure that I had to James Franco came in the Spiderman movie series. He went from serious to romantic, humorous to evil in the course of a few hours — back and forth, embodying the different moods of a person from one movie to another. I was quite impressed with him then and I was happy to see him in other movies.

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Android Actors Remove the Soul from Live Theatre

We attend live theatre performances because we love and appreciate watching the human body in motion.  We never know what will happen.  We risk danger and mistakes and anxiety in creating and witnessing the live performer — as the preplanned sometimes implodes into ingenuity, compunction and disaster.

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The Necessary Genus of Jerzy Grotowski

If you are in the theatre — and if you are not aware of the germinal revolution Jerzy Grotowski had against Theatre of the Status Quo — then you need to dig into his oeuvre to discover how this “painter of the mind” reconstructed the dramatic human experience through direct touch and consequential dramatic danger.

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Corey Haim Finds Fame in Death

Corey Haim died yesterday, and while we don’t yet know the cause of his death, we do know during the last few years of his life he was desperate, lonely, and out of socket.  His sad reality show — “The Two Coreys” — only elevated his mistakes and his worrisome life as evidenced in this flyer he paid to have published in a Hollywood trade magazine in an attempt to reignite his fading career:

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Woe of the Child Actor

There’s nothing sadder in entertainment than watching a child act on stage or on screen because we know that media adventure can and will only damage the future adult in the child.

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Know the Muscle

Beware of “The Muscle!”  Know “The Muscle!”  Fear “The Muscle!”

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Life Goes On with Chris Burke

Chioma Uzoigwe wrote this article.

Old stereotypes die hard. These four simple words reflect one of the truest aspects of human nature. It is difficult to erase in peoples’ minds characteristics that are socially proven, per se, to be true of a particular group of individuals. It is even more difficult for people to rid themselves of such ideas when they do not belong to the group they stereotype. Public perception changers, however, have the power to reverse common incorrect views. This paper will show that to be a successful public perception changer an individual must overcome adversity to prove himself as exceptional within the stereotyped group to which he belongs. This paper will additionally show that the power of a public perception changer lies even more greatly in his ability to supercede what mainstream society can do. One such public perception changer is Chris Burke, the star of the hit television show “Life Goes On” (1989-1993). In his lifetime, Chris changed the way the world viewed people with disabilities and broke ground as the first successful actor with Down syndrome to appear in a television series.

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