Thanks to The Grimmelman, these old (and one new!) Carissa's Wierd videos have hit my radar. (Warning: quality poor. Completists only.)

See Sympathy Bush for a fairly typical, if unusually audience-friendly bit of show (Is Mat standing up? Looking past the front of the stage?). Even a bit more audience-friendly is this "S with Mat Brooke" take (from 2008!) of One Night Stand. This one is the only YouTube video I've seen where I can get behind all of the comments (all four). They both seem sort of healthy and happy. Finally, the wovewy Wierd in the beloved Baltic Room in 1999. It's even a pleasure to watch, that one, with its colors and its lights.

Trawling around the internet for further Carissa's Wierdiana, I found this amusing nobbet:

At some point there came the infamous letter to The Stranger (May 10th, 2001), pointing out that the Stranger had plugged Carissa's Wierd 38 times in the last year and half. The letter wasn't written to cry overexposure, but to express concern that the Stranger wasn't doing nearly enough because, "...this situation is clearly unacceptable. Carissa's Wierd is still nowhere near as famous as they deserve to be. The Stranger is just going to have to try harder in the future." This was the spirit of the times.

[Three Imaginary Girls](http://www.threeimaginarygirls.com/imaginaryboycarissawierd.asp)

(The Stranger's not known for being easy to please.)

It was a time in our lives that came, and went.

Oh shizzle! Lincoln Center screened a Brian de Palma filming of The Performance Group's Dionysus in 69 last Saturday. This is the one theatre piece I've most wanted to see and never could. Did anyone catch the screening?

I never go in for this sort of thing, but, well, it's better than working, right? Esquire's "75 Skills Every Man Should Master" is surprisingly amusing and well-written. Some bits are tasteless, others are inspired. It occurs to me: this is where overeducated English-lit majors go.

Some gems:

 24. Know his poison, without standing there, pondering like a dope. Brand, amount, style, fast, like so: Booker's, double, neat.

 40. Speak to an eight-year-old so he will hear. Use his first name. Don't use baby talk. Don't crank up your energy to match his. Ask questions and wait for answers. Follow up. Don't pretend to be interested in Webkinz or Power Rangers or whatever. He's as bored with that shit as you are. Concentrate instead on seeing the child as a person of his own.

 58. Avoid boredom. You have enough to eat. You can move. This must be acknowledged as a kind of freedom. You don't always have to buy things, put things in your mouth, or be delighted.

 60. Be brand loyal to at least one product. It tells a lot about who you are and where you came from. Me? I like Hellman's mayonnaise and Genesee beer, which makes me the fleshy, stubbornly upstate ne'er-do-well that I will always be.

That last one is for my homies.

FREE TO A GOOD HOME said the wicker chair by the big bin on the corner. I touched it; it rocked back and forth. Uneven pavement there; the chair itself was steady. I couldn't use it, of course, but was getting ready to start thinking about whether I wanted it. When came a noise, like, "Noo!" It was the girl with the short pants on the bike that had passed me slowly, coasting and tapping the stone wall with her hand. "Do you want it?" I said. I have become much more easy with strangers in the last eight years. I said it encouragingly. "Oh, I was just thinking," she said—her accent, she's an immigrant like me—"because at work we just sit on these boxes, and it's." Without pity. Man I had nothing on that. I was thinking, Maybe would this be better than my other straight chair? But I hadn't gotten that far, cause I knew I couldn't use it. Was it unsteady? she wanted to know. No it wasn't! I told her cheers, yes really, and she took it and it was pleasant walking in the warm night under the crescent moon.

One thing I hate about yoga: sanctimonious instructors. You know what I'm talking about: always a tremendously precious tone of voice, which manages simultaneously to avoid disturbing any nearby rabbits and to condescend to us poor creatures who spend time in chairs, or—heaven forbid—with computers. These instructors, even when teaching beginners, manage to give every instruction as if it were something we, the class, already failed to do, because we're such mundane nine-to-five nitwits. We don't even live on a higher plane! These classes take forever to get started, because she's thinking about precisely the right way to communicate the full and sacred import of what we're about to experience—that is, if we manage to devote ourselves several hours a day to practice and avoid any other activities that might be construed as fun.

Two-thirds of all the yoga instructors I've known carry themselves with this attitude. It's tolerable, but unpleasant, and it doesn't help the work, in my opinion. For my part, it puts bitterness in my mouth. Just get on with the class: push us, but don't ask us to fit your mold. Focus on the practice of yoga, not the philosophical freight that you carry with it; that stuff can find its expression in the way you teach without stomping everyone's good spirit.

In the recent New Yorker profile of George Clooney, there's a nice little quote about how he deals with fans: graciously. He says, "You've got to offer these people a path back to their lives." The same goes for yoga: it's a profound practice—fine; it's not just a bunch of stretches, nor simply a matter of turning up—fine. But, O Instructor, you've got to offer us a path into it, from our lives, and back again.

I love yoga. Nothing else opens me up and loosens me out the same way. Nothing is so physically hard in such an easy way.

It's also a good chance for meditation and mental discipline. Over the years I've learned a lot of tidbits from teachers about how to approach the Mental Game of Yoga. One of the best was Geoffrey, who at different times gave me these useful slogans:

• 1. Don't blow past it.

  Sometimes it's easy to push your limb past a tight spot into a more comfortable one that looks "more stretched." But the value of the training is in that tight feeling. And sometimes it's possible to go "past" that place, into a pose that actually uses different muscles—hence, the ones that I felt, which were crying in pain, become relaxed. In each pose, I need to find the place where I, personally, can work usefully, without being too comfortable. This goes hand in hand with that motto that yoga teachers are constantly beating us with, "Don't try to look cool. Nobody cares." It's true! Nobody cares. Yoga seems to have a different culture than the martial arts, where there is an unacknowledged premium placed on looking tough.

• Don't do the pose with your face.

  We novices have a pernicious tendency, in yoga, to screw up our faces in pain. Somehow, our bodies seem to think that squinting and grimacing and and tensing our neck muscles will allow us to get an extra inch of stretch, or to endure it longer. It doesn't help, of course! Part of yoga's training is to help us relax our minds, even in difficult circumstances—a skill that I reckon will come in useful if I ever have to run a marathon, or escape from prison, or face a Bond villain's evil contraptions.

  There are several things built into yoga practice that aim to take us out of our bee-swarming heads—to relax our minds—and be more conscious of our bodies: there's the injunction to breath constantly and smoothly, there's the constant dropping of the head and neck in poses where seemingly every other muscle in the body is fully engaged, and there's this lovely slogan: Don't do the pose with your face.

Several years ago, in the throes of directing a theatre production for the Seattle Fringe Theatre Festival, I made an ill-fated attempt to create a blog where I would talk about my directing process, and respond to theatre-related stuff—productions and books. It died an unhappy death when I had no time to do anything outside of rehearsal and couldn't publicize the problems in rehearsal.

But the other day I came across this abandoned post, dated August 27, 2003. (Warning: this won't be interesting to anyone not already under the spell of Letters to an Unknown Audience.)

It seems to be a law of nature that almost no good writing about theatre exists. Writings about theatre are like unstable combinations of fundamental particles, I think, and they quickly disintegrate or become less meaningful. It's related to the fact that performance depends largely on the presence of the actor, making "performance documentation" a specious practice. Videotapes of theatre events are scant shadows of the original sense of time and space, and the opportunity afforded by live performance to choose what you look at.

When I initiated this site, I resolved to read one theatre book per week. So far I have read about two.

The first was Anne Bogart's A Director Prepares. Bogart is to be reckoned with, as a director. She's done a string of well-respected productions with creative perspectives on classic texts, always using a lot of what theatre people call "movement"—that is, her productions avoid becoming talking heads. She even developed her own, widely-taught, approach to generating movement, an approach known as "Viewpoints."

The book is divided into seven sections that deal with problems a director is supposed to encounter in rehearsal. The choices are interesting: Memory, Violence, Eroticism, Terror, Stereotype, Embarrassment, Resistance. These are interesting axes along which to view a rehearsal, and to my knowledge they haven't been dealt with by other writers on theatre.

In "Memory," she is confronted with the fact that Americans have no performative tradition from which to draw in creating performance material—or so she thinks, at first. By contrast, performers with clear ethnic roots, or with ritualistic religious backgrounds have memories of movements in their bodies, which they can revisit while developing gestures and actions for their characters.

But on further consideration, Bogart decides that she herself, and generally, an American, does have performative tradition and memory on which to draw, citing vaudeville, operetta, and the evangelical tradition.

My favorite chapter of Bogart's is "Violence." In rehearsal I am constantly working to elicit answers from the actors. Unlike talking over a set design, or building a piece of software, I can't just cycle between brainstorming and ciriticizing. Every idea needs to be held gently because the actor's delicate personal associations with it are the origin of his performance. But inevitably I get to a point where the actor and I directly disagree on the meaning of a moment. At that moment I do an act of violence, discarding the actor's coddled belief and substituting a new one. Then we have the hard work of rebuilding the associations that will allow the actor to actually perform it. Bogart urged me to get comfortable with that feeling of violence, and I'm slowly getting there. But it is a delicate balance: too much violence and the actor has nothing personal to motivate himself. Too little and he will slip out of phase with the rest of the piece.

I've become so artistically lazy since then!