Max "Bunny" Sparber

THE TITLE SONG from a collection of supernaturally themed novelty garage rock music by Sailor Martin, Don't Go in the Garage. This song is entirely made out of two ukuleles, a harmonica, and sounds made with my mouth.

LISTEN TO "DON'T GO IN THE GARAGE":



DOWNLOAD "DON'T GO IN THE GARAGE."

More Sailor Martin.

DOLLY'S BAR was located at 1515 Chicago Av. S. in Elliot Park, and was a place of some notoriety. Let's begin with the official history: republished on several sites, including Neighborhoodlink and the site of a realtor, jerryfladmark.com, there is this sentence about the bar:

In the mid-1980's Dolly's Bar, a longtime neighborhood nuisance, was closed down because of neighborhood organizing and was replaced with Buri Manor, one of the nine properties built or rehabilitated in the area by Central Community Housing Trust (CCHT) since 1985.

How much of a nuisance was Dolly's? The Star Tribune, in a July 26, 1986 article, gives some more details:

A week ago, police reported an aggravated assault and robbery at the bar. In June, according to police records, a 29-year-old man was assaulted and stabbed. Since last October, police have reported 10 aggravated assaults, three simple assaults, a kidnapping and a robbery at the bar. "We've had quite a few stabbings and robberies," said Lt. Mike Fisher of the city police licensing unit.

As I dig up more information about Dolly's Bar, I will add it.

FROM A JANUARY 2, 1986 story from the Star Tribune:

Across the street, there's a deli with neon in the window. Next door, there's a place that styles hair in addition to cutting it. There's a messenger service that advertises its speed, though most of the neighborhood people move slowly. Somebody decided the store fronts should be colored forest green and white. And of course, there are the nice condominiums, turret-style brownstones.

On the Band Box side, the south side where thing's haven't changed yet, there's The Chapel of Hope to pray in, the American Legion Post 540 for bingo nuts, and a soaped window on the storefront called the Holy Temple of Lenny Bruce and Huck Finn Central.

YESTERDAY I WENT INTO EXTENDED PESSIMISTIC DETAIL about why I think the time of the paid critic is over. The truth is, I am only pessimistic about the future of the economics of art criticism. I am boundlessly optimistic about the possibilities of arts criticism on the Web, as long as people don't expect to make very much money from it.

Let's first talk about some of the disadvantages of the Web. Firstly, you will probably be writing for a much smaller audience. Or, at least, it will seem that way. I've been blogging nearly continuously for nine years, and on this specific blog for over a year and a half. Additionally, I'm one of the better known Web personalities in the Twin Cities and I have a long history of arts writing here. Yet I get about 150 direct hits to my blog every day and have about 170 subscribers. So, in a week, my content is probably seen about 2,000 times, and, for the most part, by the same 300 or so people. That's a far cry from the 125,000 issues, or thereabouts, that City Pages distributed when I wrote for them.

But, then, when I was writing for City Pages, I didn't actually know how many people were reading my theater reviews. I'd like to imagine it was 125,000, but based on the fact that there just aren't that many people who regularly attend theatrical productions in the Twin Cities, I would guess it was significantly fewer. Based on the infrequency of letters I got in response to what I wrote, it wasn't that many, or they just weren't inspired to take up pen and paper to complain. I did get the sense that local theater people were reading my reviews, and sometimes I got the sense that nobody else was. So maybe, even then, I was writing for the same 300 people every week, as I am now, and didn't realize it because my reviews were bundled in with other, more popular topics, and we printed so many issues.

And, if the disadvantage of the Web is that you're probably going to seem to have less readers in the short term, the advantage is that your writing online has a sort of longevity that print writing never had, sometimes in unexpected ways. I don't know that my 1997 review of Starship Troopers is especially notable (although I remain rather proud of my description of the film's climax), and I missed an important element of the film -- namely, that it is a camp spectacle, and an enjoyable one. But, if you do an Google Image Search for "Starship Troopers," for reasons I can't fathom, my blog comes up first. And so I regularly get visitors to that page from people who were looking for an image from the film, and that will continue for as long as the photo I selected hovers on the front page of that particular search. I originally wrote the review for a small Omaha newsweekly. It was published, seen by a few hundred or thousand people, and promptly disappeared, and if people wanted to reread it, they would have had to go digging through the paper's archive, which, at that time, was in a musty basement that I suspect may have had a hobo living in it who used the archive as his bed, blanket, and bathroom. Now that it's online, through the vagaries of the Web, it finds a new audience every day.

I realized a while ago that the disadvantage of losing professional arts critics is that we lose our institutional memory. The Star-Tribune had a theater and dance critic, Mike Steele, who wrote for the paper for 30 years; he brought to his writing an enviable length of memory, and it's a shame to lose that -- although we always do, in the way we did with Mr. Steele, who died a decade ago. And we won't be able to recover what he had to offer, as Mr. Steele had actually been to the plays he remembered, and was, therefore, was historians called a primary source. And when Steele was writing, the importance of that could not be overestimated, as the Web was in its infancy and if you wanted to know about the Guthrie's production of, say, The House of Atreus in 1968, the fastest was to get information was to call Steele, who had actually seen it. When I went to work for City Pages, I knew my limitations as a critic: Even though I had been an avid theatergoer me entire life, I had spent a decade away from the Twin Cities, and had only ever seen a small sampling of what the cities had to offer. So I worked my way through the City Pages and Twin Cities Reader archives, reading every theater review they had published, a process that took me about five months. Doing so made me a lot better informed than I might have been otherwise, but also made me a secondary source, and I had to rely on my memory of what other people had written, as I wasn't about to go digging through the archives again to find one review from a decade earlier. Archives were just too much work back then.

However, thanks to the Web, what we lose in terms of the institutional memory of a paid professional witness -- which is, in a way, the use of the arts critic to history -- we make up for with the Web's extraordinary ease in archiving. Since the start of the Internet, people have been publishing their arts reviews online, and they tend to just stay there unless they are deliberately removed. Unfortunately, a lot of newspapers do this as a matter of course, thanks to a rather short-sited economic decision in which they believed the best thing they could do would be to try to force people to pay for access to their archives. Nonetheless, there are papers with extensive online archives, such as City Pages. So we might not be able to find out what Mike Steele had to say about The House of Atreus, but if you want to know what I had to say about Arthur Miller's Resurrection Blues in 2002, well, it's not hard to find out. I fully expect that sooner or later all newspapers will follow suit. You have to know how to look for it, and you have to have a student or employee number (or, in some other way, be able to access Lexis-Nexis), but it is already possible to search the Star-Tribune and the Pioneer Press all the way back to 1986. Additionally, through the Twin Cities library, it is possible to search the Minneapolis Tribune's first 30 years of publication.

This is all sort of awkward and horrible right now -- for instance, the early issues of the Tribune are all PDFs, which is not a very flexible format. But the Web is going to be around for a long time, and more and more archival material will be added to it every year, in increasingly flexible forms. In the meanwhile, increasingly, all newly published material will go online, and most of it will stay online. That's going to be an invaluable resource for the arts critic of the future, who will, with the aid of a search engine, be able to quickly access a massive online archive of material related to whatever arts story they are currently working on. Although the time of the Mike Steele may be over, and that's a real loss, at least we will no longer permanently lose access to his memories when somebody like Mike Steele dies; instead, they will be preserved online, along with the memories of everybody else who decides to experience and respond on the Web to a work of art.

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I SPOKE TO CHRIS ROBERTS from MPR a week or so ago about arts criticism. Roberts edited some of my comments, along with several other interviews with arts writers and artists, into an interesting story abut the state of arts criticism in the time of the Internet, and kindly provided a link back to this blog. Apparently, the story got picked up by the Associated Press, and so, potentially, there might be a number of people who wander over here from the story, looking for examples of my arts criticism.

I haven't done much for the past few months, because summer is a fairly slow time for the arts, and because I have been invested in my own projects. I am meeting this week with somebody from the Walker Art Center to discuss a fairly in-depth project I wish to begin this fall, but, until that begins, I don't have much on my plate, although anybody interested can see some samples of my recent writing, and this site is full of samples of my critical writing about the arts, although often in the form of rather oddball projects, such as my reviews of William Shatner's film output in the 60s and 70s, or my series of essays about supernaturally themed novelty music.

But I did want to take a moment to expand on what I was saying to Roberts, because it will be informing my Walker Art project, and other arts criticism that I plan to pursue down the road. Fundamentally, I think the Web will transform arts criticism. I'm not just talking about professional arts critics migrating to the Web. I mean that the Web is such a dramatically different publishing platform, and has created such a social revolution, that criticism itself must change as a result. For one thing, I think we are at the end of the time of the professional arts critic, and that's what I want to talk about here.

Arts criticism as a profession is in decline. The numbers I have seen bandied about are that 50 percent of paid arts writing jobs have vanished in the past few years. I don't know whether this number is correct or not, but I am sure it accurately represents a trend, and that trend is to reduce the number of paid art critic jobs. Newspapers are cutting back dramatically, and they tend to cut the stuff that gets the least readers first.

And here's a second point: But for film and music criticism, arts criticism has never had that large a readership. When we critics were part of newspapers, it was quite hard to tell how many people were reading what we had to say, but now that we have moved online, it's a lot easier to get a clear metric, and that metric is: not very many. I suppose this shouldn't surprise anybody. I was a theater critic for print publications for a decade, and I would estimate the number of people seeing plays in any one week to be, on average, ten thousand at the very most. That's it. That's the audience for theater, and that's our readership. And, in fact, it's a little more complex than that. Theaters like The Guthrie in Minneapolis have a pretty big audience, and so I probably got more readers when I wrote about them. But I often wrote about theaters that had an audience of a thousand over the entire run of their show. How many people read my reviews of those shows? Not many, I would wager.

So why do newspapers even have theater critics? Well, I suspect the primary reason was that theaters buy ads, and just aren't going to be interested in buying ads from papers that don't run reviews of plays. And it was important for theaters to get reviewed, because good reviews were an important mechanism for building audiences -- and, the truth is, many small theaters are terrible at self-promotion and audience building. Without getting reviewed, some of them would get no attention at all.

Note that this wasn't really the case in the Twin Cities with the fine arts and with dance. Neither has done that much advertising locally, but for the Walker Art Center, which houses all sorts of arts disciplines, and generally gets reviewed. But smaller galleries and dance troupes in the Twin Cities have labored without much coverage or advertising, and have actually managed to flourish, probably because they have been pretty savvy about self-marketing. One of the better examples of this is the development of the art crawl, in which local artists and galleries collectively create an event, opening their galleries and promoting themselves as a group, and patrons of the arts spend a day or a weekend wandering from gallery to bar to music venue. Twin Cities artists have also been especially good at moving to the Web, and selling their art online. In this way, the Twin Cities fine art scene has managed to bypass one of the primary jobs of the art critic: To tell you how to spend your money.

It's not the only job of the critic, of course, but it's always been one of the main reasons readers look to critics. After all, they're going to a movie this weekend, and want to know if it's worth a damn. This is the role of the critic that I think is increasingly becoming supplanted, and will eventually be taken over, by amateur critics, most often on social media. Right now, if you're curious about how people like, oh, let's say the movie Bruno, you can go to Twitter, type Bruno into the search box, and get a plurality of responses. Now, there is a question here about how much you can trust the opinions of millions of strangers, and that certainly is the advantage of going to a critic like, say, Roger Ebert, whose tastes we know. But, then, I don't think Roger Ebert will ever be out of a job as a film critic -- he's the sort of person that every newspaper would syndicate. It's all the second-tier critics and local critics that we'd lose. Additionally, your friends are going to see movies, and respond to them through social media, and you know their tastes and know if you can trust them.

And, the truth is, the way critics experience art is often significantly different from the way a general audience might experience it. As a theater critic, whenever I saw certain cliches onstage, I felt like throwing my seat at the director -- for instance, the moment in a musical when the music stops and the entire cast starts clapping in time and singing the melody gospel-style. But this is an undeniably powerful theatrical moment, which is why it is so horrifically overused. As a regular theatergoer, I was sick of it, but the casual theatergoer might still find it powerful, and wonder what the hell my problem was when I complained about it. Critics are, in general, not really that good at telling you how to spend your money. They're weird, thorny animals with idiosyncratic tastes and they tend to take art quite personally, and they're often the sort of person who can ruin a perfectly enjoyable night out. I tend to prefer either puppetry or nudity in plays I see, preferably both, and am liable to complain if neither appears. If you're looking for a simple thumbs up regarding whether to go to a movie, survey your friends, don't ask a critic.

Let me interrupt for one second to mention film and music criticism. While these do tend to have audiences, the numbers of paid jobs in both these fields is also declining, because it is very easy to syndicate one writer's opinion rather than pay dozens of writers to write about the same thing. There just aren't that many local movies to financially justify having a full-time film critic, and, while there is certainly plenty of local bands that are worth writing about, they're always going to get less attention than national acts, and one article about a national act can be syndicated to whatever town the band visits. Additionally, in my experience as an arts editor, I have found it is especially easy to find people who want to write about film and music in exchange for free movies or CDs.

And that's another point I would like to make. You wouldn't know it to hear professional critics carp about the subject, but the truth is, a vast majority of arts criticism in America is done by unpaid or low-paid amateurs. This has always been the case. Small newsweeklies and college papers, as an example, tend to pay pocket change for a review, if they pay at all. Community newspapers, when they run reviews, usually run unpaid reviews. This has even been true at large newspapers -- I know of one where the theater critics worked other jobs at the paper, such as rewriting stories from the newswire, and then wrote art reviews on a volunteer basis, just because they liked it. And now, with the Web, there has been an explosion of unpaid amateur criticism. If you type "Bruno" and "review" into a search engine, I'm going to guess that roughly 80 percent of what you read will have been written by an unpaid writer, and some of those reviews are going to be on the first page of the results.

Here's the biggest complaint from professional critics: That amateur critics aren't as informed and therefore credible as professional. Also, they tend to be worse writers. I am sympathetic to this argument, although I will point out that there are a large number of professional critics who are truly, truly terrible at their job. But that gets at another function of the arts critic, which is to educate their readership. Historically, arts critics have had access to artists that the general population hasn't. We can interview rock stars, or go on the set of a movie, or talk to a curator, and, as a result, our criticism tend to be a lot more informed, and therefore credible, than just any shmoe off the street. And that's important, because there is a lot of art that is confusing or alienating on first blush, and there is a lot of art out there that demands a real investment of time and thought. I suppose the fear is that schmoes will not have the necessary access, nor the willingness to invest their time and energy, to understand the art well enough to have a credible opinion, and arts audiences will suffer as a result.

I just don't think this is the case. This is another area where social media is bypassing a traditional role of the critic. Artists are able to communicate directly with their audiences now in a way that has never before been possible, providing a sort of virtual access that was previously limited to a few professional critics. And there is a possible objection here, that what the artists and the arts organizations will be providing is primarily PR, and one of the things a professional critic is especially good at is seeing through the sales pitch. I don't know that this is the case with most critics, actually -- as an artist, I have frequently seen my press releases simply get rewritten when a review was published -- but certainly there are a few critics who can do this. Is this enough to justify paying them a full-time salary, especially if artists decide its not worth taking ads out anymore in failing newspapers when they can just communicate directly to their audiences via social media? I suspect not. Audiences will have to take responsibility for sussing out what is information and what is spin on their own, and, based on my experiences on the Web, a lot of people also have a knack for this.

The truth is, I am generally pessimistic about the future of the professional arts critic. I think the Web is knocking out the financial support for professional arts critics, and there is no new model in place that will compensate. As arts writers, we can complain about this, but it's just the fact of the world and our complaining isn't going to change things. I prefer to be optimistic. I don't think it's a calamity that the time of the professional arts critic might be coming to an end -- instead, I see a massive democratization of arts writing, an increased plurality of voices, and an increased opportunity for arts organizations to communicate directly with their audience, in a manner that requires the organizations also to listen to their audiences, because, metaphorically speaking, the Web is a telephone, not a press release.

But what does that leave for us writers who still want to write about the arts? I dunno, mac; you can keep writing. I think there is still a place and a need for informed, detailed, carefully investigated and acutely critical writing. Just don't expect to get paid much for it. And, in some ways, I think this is just fine. The Web isn't a marketplace so much as it is a commons, in which people freely provide their services. I make use of their services all day long; it only seems fair that I should pay some of that back by providing my own services. If I am going to read a hundred articles that I don't pay for in a week, maybe it would be nice for my to offer one article that I don't demand to get paid for, as a sort of virtual quid pro quo. I don't know why I would complain -- I still get into shows for free, and still get the same sort of access I used to get as a newspaper arts critic. I am simply not making the money I would have made as a critic, and, the truth is, the money was never all that good.

STORIES FROM the historic Minneapolis neighborhood of Elliot Park.

INTRODUCTION
THE NEIGHBORHOOD AROUND THE BAND BOX DINER, CIRCA 1986
BAD TIMES AT DOLLY'S BAR

TALES FROM CITY HOSPITAL
True stories from the Twin Cities' charity hospital.

PHOTOS OF CITY HOSPITAL
A DEEP CUT
ROVING MANIAC
PUBLISHER ASSAULTED

TALES FROM DREXEL COURT
Stories from a brownstone.

PHOTOS OF DREXEL COURT
THE YOUNG CRITIC
A TALE OF CRIME AND TERROR
CONVERSATIONS ABOUT A DEAD NEIGHBOR

HERE'S A TALE of a bar fight that leads to a beating that, in turn, leads to City Hospital. There isn't much to distinguish it but for the obvious joy the writer took in describing the increasingly disagreeable and rowdy state of the drinkers, especially considering that the victim was a fellow newsman.

Originally published in the Minneapolis Tribune, April 19, 1889.

MAY PROVE SERIOUS
D.E. Roselle, a St. Paul Publisher, Assaulted and Left Senseless

D.E. Roselle, the publisher of the St. Paul and Minneapolis Railway and Hotel News, was the victim of an assault last night about 11:30, which may prove serious. In company with another man, Mr. Roselle went into J.K. O'Brien's Saloon, on Hennepin avenue. There they met two other young fellows, well known in the city, and the four had several drinks together. Finally argument arose and Mr. Roselle seized a spice dish nearby, but before he could strike a blow he was hit in the nose by one of them men and knocked down. When he recovered himself he remarked, "That is all right," and bought another drink. When the trouble began his companion left him in the saloon. According to several witnesses one of the two men had started to take Roselle out in the street to whip him, but he was pursued not to do so, and a few minutes afterward they said they were going to take him to the Nicollet House. In a few seconds they came running back to the saloon, and a few minutes later Mr. Roselle was found unconscious on the sidewalk in front of the American Express office. His head lay on the stone step, and he was bleeding from a wound over the right eye.

Officer Bradigam was summoned and the wounded man was taken to the station. Police Surgeon Kelly was summoned, and he was unable to tell the extent of his injuries. The cut over the eye is about an inch long and the flesh was cut to the bone. The wound was probably inflicted either with a slung-shot or a pair of brass knuckles. There was another deep cut at the left side of the nose. The wound on the head may prove serious if the blow was sufficiently hard to produce concussion. This could not be ascertained last evening. He was taken to the city hospital in the patrol wagon. There were no witnesses to the assault, but there were a number who saw the two men leave the saloon with Mr. Roselle, and a few minutes later a son of Mme. Coe, the milliner, was arrested by Officers Bean and Brudigam. Several people, who saw the party in the saloon, identified Coe as one of them, and the second one is under surveillance.

It was rumored that Mr. Roselle had several hundred dollars in his pocket during the evening but nobody saw him display such an amount. At the station only $1 was found in his pocket.

FOLLOWUP: Mr. Roselle did not die from his injuries. He swore out a complaint against his two assailants, Edward Coe and Frank McCosker. The latter claimed that Roselle had been drunk and he had left him at the American Express office, while Coe, apparently looking after himself, claimed to have nothing to do with it and said McCosker had committed the assault. Roselle, in the meanwhile, insisted both were guilty and that one had held him while the other beat and searched him. I could not find mention of what became of the assailants -- presumably, they were convicted.

Roselle died a year later, suddenly and without much warning, but for a mild illness.

I GUESS SECURITY wasn't quite in place in 1888, the first year of City Hospital's operations, as evidenced by this tale of a half-clothed maniac roaming the city after escaping the hospital. I especially like the description of his madness as having been caused by "business troubles." I also particularly appreciate the story's vagueness about how the maniac got free: Having already stated that his wrist straps had been unbuckled, the story then states that the maniac somehow managed to unbuckle his ankle straps. Hmm. How might he have done that?

Originally printed in the Minneapolis Tribune, October 22, 1888.

WAS OUT ALL DAY
A Delirious Patient Escapes from the City Hospital

G.W. Gish, who was placed in the City Hospital on Wednesday in a delirious condition, escaped half-clothed yesterday morning and was at large until late afternoon.

The story, as told by the hospital people, is that Gish, who is the st. Paul agent of the Hall Safe & Lock Company, and who, having been missed since Monday, was thought to be the man drowned in Powderhorn Lake, was found by the police wandering about on the railroad tracks in South Minneapolis on Wednesday and was taken to the hospital, where it was found that he was suffering from acute mania, brought on by business troubles, and that the attendants were obliged to keep him strapped to the bed. Yesterday morning, about 5 o'clock, one of the attendants was bathing him and had unbuckled the straps about his wrist, leaving the ankle straps buckled. He left him a moment in this way and stepped into an adjoining room, when Gish in some way unfastened the straps on his ankles, got his overcoat, hat, and breeches from the closet and throwing them out of the window, leaped after them. His room was on the second floor, and after reaching the ground he dressed himself and departed. He was not found until the middle of the afternoon, when Officer Morrisey found him wandering about on the Manitoba tracks near the river. When found he was attired as above described, and in place of shoes had his feet tied up in some underclothing.

The police say that when his absence was reported to them it was stated that he had jumped through the second story window and escaped with no clothing except a blanket from the bed which he had wrapped about him. They do not believe he jumped through the window.

ONE OF THE DUBIOUS PLEASURES of living a few blocks from HCMC is that every news report about a violent crime or some other trauma ends with "The victim was taken to Hennepin County Medical Center." Suddenly, someone who was just a name in a news story is you neighbor. And that's pretty much the way it has been since March 27, 1888. As far as I can tell, this is the date the first of this sort of story showed up. There's not much too it: A dust-up in a bar leads to a Scandinavian being brought to the hospital with a cut hand. But the story is interesting for the writing style. In the Victorian era, newspaper writers really indulged in grotesque descriptions.

Originally published in the Minneapolis Tribune.

AN UGLY CUT
An Eastsider Has His Wrist Badly Gashed at a Saloon

Last yesterday afternoon a Scandinavian named Andrew Larson had his right wrist terribly cut in a saloon row, near Third avenue northeast and Monroe street. He was taken in the patrol wagon to the central police station, where Dr. Switzer dressed the wound, after which the man was taken to the city hospital.

The gash was a terrible one, the tendons and arteries being severed, and there was great danger of his bleeding to death before the arrival of a physician.

Who did the cutting and what the occasion if it was is not known, but one of Larson's companions named August Johnson, who showed signs of having been in a fight, was locked up to await investigation.

WHAT IS CURRENTLY the Hennepin Country Medical Center was once the Minneapolis City Hospital, then a charity institution. The hospital then located on Eight Street and 11th Avenue South, right on the Northeast corner of Elliot Park. Photos from the Minnesota Historical Society's Visual Resource Database.



City Hospital, Minneapolis.
Photographer: Charles J. Hibbard (-1924)
Photograph Collection 1911-1920
Location no. MH5.9 MP7.1 p90
Negative no. NP31539



City Hospital, Minneapolis.
Photograph Collection, Postcard ca. 1920
Location no. MH5.9 MP7.1 r103



Waiting area, City Hospital, Minneapolis.
Photographer: Charles J. Hibbard (-1924)
Photograph Collection 1920
Location no. R1.9 p55
Negative no. NP30866



City Hospital tennis court, Minneapolis.
Photographer: Charles J. Hibbard (-1924)
Photograph Collection 1921
Location no. GV3.18 p58
Negative no. 4951-B



Nurse's private room, City Hospital, Minneapolis.
Photographer: Charles J. Hibbard (-1924)
Photograph Collection 1921
Location no. R1.9 p56
Negative no. 4941-B

"FIRST PERSON THREE-WAY" LYRICS:
In comes rigging Jimmy
He is hung like a chimney
And gets paid fifty bucks a pop
He's notorious on the scene
For pounding like a machine
Until the girls they beg him to stop
Today he's with Cheryl and
A new girl named Carol
And they'll do it by the side of a pool
The director sets his shot up
In the just the right spot
To see that Jimmy is hanging like a mule

Amber won an ovation
For her double penetration
At the adult video awards
She's something on the camera
She has a dirty kind of glamor
That grows with the clothes she discards
She has a house in the hills
And a pocket full of pills
Which she shares with whoever asks
She has a taste for haute cuisine
Paid for by her time up on the screen
And she summers abroad in the Basque

Molly and her group
Get paid for making loops
That play in the adult stores
For a quarter in a booth
Molly goes down on Ruth
Until Ruth can't stand anymore
Sometimes on a dare
Molly will take a date there
And pay quarters while he sits to watch
She makes $100 in a hour
And credits the financial power
Of having breasts, ass, and crotch

Liza is retired
Although still quite desired
She still gets offers to appear in hardcore
Producers still make them
And sometimes she still takes them
When she is feeling old and bored
And misses the old scene
The drugs and the long green
And she misses being tough and flirty
She remembers how it thrilled her
Even though it nearly killed her
Before she retired at thirty

LISTEN TO "FIRST PERSON THREE-WAY":



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More plays of Max Sparber.

"L.A. XPRESS" LYRICS:
There's a magazine rack
Kept in the back
In full color
Under plastic wrap
With names like Adam
And adult press
And best of all
is L.A. Xpress

Kimya is 20
and a 32C
But then there's Ann
Who is a 44D
She's showing stockings
Beneath a vinyl dress
And she poses on the pages
of L.A. Xpress

Polly does BDS
She poses with a whip
While Lanie is a little girl
In pigtails and a slip
Some dress up in costumes
Some they just undress
When they pose for their pictures
in L.A. Xpress

Ginger is a nurse
with a kink for enemas
And Ilsa is mysterious
She won't say just what she does
It will cost you $50
If you want to try and guess
Her number it is printed
In L.A. Xpress

They all are waiting for you
All warm and yielding curves
And sometimes I think I'll call them
But I haven't got the nerve
There is pleasure just to see them
in the midst of erotic distress
Staring back from the pages
of L.A. Xpress

LISTEN TO "L.A. XPRESS":



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More plays of Max Sparber.

FROM NOVEMBER OF 2007. While working on a screenplay about my experiences with homelessness in Hollywood, it occurred to me that I had never formally expressed my gratitude to the people who helped me when I was in Hollywood, so I wrote this letter:

This is a thank you letter I should have written fifteen years ago. Please excuse its delay.

In 1991, when I was in my early 20s, I moved out to Hollywood as a naive and financially limited young man. I quickly ran through my money and wound up homeless, and, thanks to the Teen Canteen program of the Travelers' Aid Society, I was placed at the Citrus House, a homeless shelter then run by the Gay/Lesbian Community Services
Center, which I presume to be the predecessor to the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center, as you seem to offer the same services.

Even though I am not gay myself, the Citrus House provided me with essential shelter, as well as a variety of additional services that assisted me in getting back on my feet. I spent three months total in the shelter, which gave me enough time to find a job, save up money, and move into a longer-term transitional living program. I continued to have contact with the teen homeless community of Hollywood the entire time I lived in Los Angeles, including a number of kids who lived under bridges and in squats, and their circumstances were dire and desperate. Were it not for the Citrus House, I might have shared these experiences. Instead, I was given a tremendous opportunity to collect myself and work my way toward stability.

Additionally, while I had many gay and lesbian friends prior to moving out to Los Angeles, my experiences in the shelter, as well as with the community center (which continued to offer me assistance long after I had left the shelter), exposed me to the extraordinary variety of cultural and political viewpoints contained within the GLBT community. As an example, ACT-UP was especially active in Los Angeles at that
time, and there had been an explosion of gay- and lesbian-themed art. Much of this I might never have known about were it not for my experiences in the shelter, and it has gone a long way to shape who I am.

In the 15-some-odd years since my experiences at the shelter, I have gone on to be an arts critic and playwright with quite a few productions of original plays under my belt, many of which explore the experiences of people marginalized by mainstream society. My interest in this subject is certainly a result of my experiences in the
shelter, where I witnessed the sorts of disastrous effects of societal intolerance; I believe at that time one out of every four homeless teenagers was gay or lesbian, and I also recall that they often suffered tremendous hardships in other programs.

As the result of the success of a recent production of one of my plays, which received terrific reviews from both Variety and the New York Times, I decided to revisit my own experiences in Hollywood's homeless community, particularly in the Citrus House, in screenplay form. As I have been writing my script, it has occurred to me how
badly things would have gone for me were it not for the extraordinary generosity of LA gay and lesbian community, who sheltered me, fed me, helped me find work, and provided an exceptional variety of additional services. And it occurred to me that I had not expressed my gratitude in any formal sense, and that this expression of gratitude was badly overdue.

I am writing you because I see your name listed as the Chief Executive Officer of the LA Gay & Lesbian Center, but my letter is intended to a more general audience, and I ask that you share this letter with whoever you feel is appropriate. The Citrus House, and by extension LA's gay and lesbian community, very literally came to my rescue 15
years ago, and may have saved my life. And so I offer my thanks.

FROM JULY 11, 2008.

me: She was a strange woman.
I took acting classes from her when I was homeless in Hollywood.
She always called me Mac, because it was the name of an ex-husband.
Nobody thought she was alive.
I would walk down Hollywood boulevard with her, and people would run up to her and say "I thought you were dead!"
I think it's because she died in every movie she was ever in.
People just assumed she had to be dead.
She's in a few Blaxsploitation films as the villain.
I think it's because she was willing to incredibly screechy and crazy,
Brandi: People would actually say that to her? I thought you were dead?
me: Oh yes.
"I can't believe it's you! It's you! I thought you were dead!"
She would clutch my arm in terror.
She did not like to have people run up to her.
I wish I had asked Shelley about these movies.
Now she actually is dead.

A COMMENT I left on the communal blog Metafilter on February 15, 2008, in response to the story of a young writer who deliberately made himself homeless to see how hard it really is to pull yourself up by your bootstraps:

You know, I did exactly this experiment when I was 22, but by accident. I moved out to Los Angeles with not enough money to get by, crashed and burned in a few weeks, ran out of money almost instantly thanks to the high cost of living out there, and moved into a shelter. I was college educated from the University of Minnesota, straight, white, good looking, healthy, and willing to work. I mention being straight, because the shelter I ran into was run by the gay/lesbian community services center of Los Angeles and was meant mostly for the multitude of gay and lesbians teenagers who moved in droves to Los Angeles, many of them coming from a background of familial violence, many of them looking forward to a future of drug abuse, sexual violence, prostitution, and early suicide, statistically speaking.

I stayed in the shelter for three months, working at a video store and saving money for my own place. And I discovered a few things. Firstly, being white, straight, and college educated helps. Everything about me betrayed my middle-class, college educated background. Sometime in subtle ways, such as the fact that I knew how to tie a tie when going to a job interview. Sometimes in much larger ways, such as being able to fill out a job application, because I was functionally literate. And in one essential way, in that I was not broken by a background of abuse. I wasn't a raw nerve of mindless defensive reactions that were guaranteed to be counterproductive. I didn't respond to stress by hitting things, or taking drugs. I didn't grow hopeless and cut my wrists in the shelter bathroom. I didn't run out of money and start hustling on Santa Monica Boulevard. I didn't test positive for HIV, which others in the shelter did, including a young man who asked me to come along when he got the result of his test, and then asked me to come along afterward as he responded to the bad news by getting as drunk as possible and giving away all his money to panhandlers. Oh, speaking of which: I wasn't an alcoholic, or addicted to drugs. I wasn't mentally ill and treating my mental illness with whatever drugs I could get hold of; here were a few in the shelter like that. Quite a few. The inventory of advantages I had over others in the shelter was enormous, too long to list here, but unavoidable. They were hurt, many of them, really hurt, and until that hurt was taken care of, a lot of them were going to have a very rough time of it.

And yet, 10 months later, I was barely making it. $6.50 an hour is not enough to get a decent apartment in a good part of town in Los Angeles, so I was living in a transitional living program run by the Teen Canteen, another program for homeless teenagers. I made just about enough money to buy food, pay my rent, and see a movie or two every week. I got into debt quickly, because there was a riot in Westwood at the opening of New Jack City, and I happened to work there, and so I got pushed to the ground and sprained my wrist. Of course, insurance covered a lot of the costs of getting x-rayed and prescribed some painkillers. But I had a $600 deductible, and that was the sort of thing it would take several months of not seeing movies and eating ramen to pay off. I got a few writing gigs, which I what I moved to LA for, but because I was a beginning writer, they paid very little or paid nothing at all. So, yes, 10 months after becoming homeless, I had an apartment, but no savings, a little bit of debt, and a car was out of the question.

And, because I was still in a program for the homeless, I saw many of the people I had been in the shelter with of the course of the year, and for several years. I felt like I was just treading water, and could slip under at any moment, but, trust me, for many of them it was much harder. One roommate slipped back into a heroin addiction, which, of course, took up all his money, and when he was kicked out of the program ran to the kitchen to find a kitchen knife to kill himself with. He didn't find one, because I had hidden them under the sofa the night before, as he had attempted to kill himself previously and I knew he was getting forced to leave. Some dealt with naked, open homophobia on whatever jobs they worked at -- at least one I remember got beaten up by his coworkers. Some did all right. After all, a job? An Apartment? Those things can be found. But where would they be in ten years, and where would I be?

A decade later I was the editor in chief of an Omaha newsweekly, and a playwright with work produced in New York. I attribute both those things to my education, because both are based on having certain writing skills, and a certain discipline. I don't know what happened to the others. The fellow who was HIV positive seems likely to be dead. Homeless and HIV positive is pretty fatal. Others? Well, I know plenty of people my age who are not gay, formerly homeless, emotionally ill, and drug addicted who are just barely making it. It's pretty easy to get lost in the country. Hell, it's 10 years since I was editor in chief, or nearly, and I've had some real lows since then. And the only people who wouldn't know that this is an unstable place, and it's easy to get knocked off your perch by, say, a hurricane destroying your town, or an unexpected illness, or schizophrenia kicking in at 26, or a million of other miserable things that can happen in the course of your life, and you have no control over -- well, the only people who would think that are excessively privileged children without much life experience who jump into homelessness as a sort of dilettante prank, and learn nothing from it except that it is possible to pull yourself back up to some low-level, depressing baseline pretty quickly. That's not much of a lesson, and it certainly doesn't mean that anyone can be a CEO of a fortune 500 company years down the road if, gosh darn it, they just had the elbow grease to make a go of it in this wonderful nation of ours.

More from The Sparber Gallery.

THIS IS AN ARTICLE on my experiences with homelessness that I wrote for Pulse of the Twin Cities about three years ago. I won a Premack Award for Public Affairs Journalism for this story.

GIMME SHELTER

I was living in New Orleans just before Hurricane Katrina hit, just over a year ago. Like most residents of the city, I heeded Mayor Ray Nagin's warnings to leave the city, and went to Houston to weather the storm. I stayed at a shelter there, and the next day, with the flooding of the city, found myself suddenly homeless, along with the entire population of New Orleans. Even though my apartment in the French Quarter had not been damaged by the storm or the subsequent flooding, it would be more than a month before residents were allowed back into the city; by that time, I had returned to my home state of Minnesota. But that's how fast it can happen -- one day, with little warning, the world turns on you, and you don't have a home. You spend the next several weeks, or months, in shelters, or sleeping on friends' sofas, or living in your parents' basement.

I had been homeless before, in my early 20s. It doesn't require a cataclysmic act of nature to put you on the streets, especially if you're young and financially naive. I decided to move to Los Angeles at the age of 21, and dimply hadn't saved enough money for the move. I had never moved cross country before, and the cost of living in Minneapolis in 1991 was quite a bit lower than it was in Los Angeles. I had saved up enough money to get an apartment in Minneapolis, but Los Angeles was three times as expensive. I tried to find work, but, if just a few weeks, despite extreme frugality, I had worked my way through my resources.

At the time, near the famous corner of Hollywood and Vine, there was an organization called The Teen Canteen, which was set up to deal with the basic needs of homeless teenagers in Los Angeles. At that time, Los Angeles was something of a Mecca for runaway teenagers; I suspect it still is. Aside from providing free lunch every morning, bus passes, free haircuts at a nearby barber school, and some educational programs, the Teen Canteen also offered a shelter referral service. A mustached and well-muscled fellow named Mr. Rambo asked me a series of questions. Although I was in my early 20s, Rambo wanted to send me to a teen shelter, as I was young enough to qualify, 23 being the cut-off age. He made a few phone calls, and then came back to inform me that the shelter where he usually sent people was filled, but did I have a problem with homosexuals?

He explained the the Gay/Lesbian Community Services Center of Los Angeles ran their own shelter for gay and lesbian teens, who made up a disproportionately high percentage of runaways, but often had a hard time in usual shelters. They were at risk of violent attacks, and, as a certain percentage of them turned to male prostitution, and some were addicted to drugs, they also were at risk for contracting AIDS. Of course, the shelter could not turn away homeless teenagers who were not gay, but, generally, they didn't have to, as straight teenagers were steered, or steered themselves, to the other shelter. I was desperate, and didn't mind the idea of staying at a shelter for gay and lesbian teens, and so Mr. Rambo drove me down to a little facility near Santa Monica Boulevard called the Citrus House.

The building was small and nondescript, with a high chain-link fence around it (they locked the fence at night, and strictly enforced a curfew). It was divided in half, one side of the building for young men, the other side for young women. The latter was generally pretty empty, for reason's I have never been able to ascertain, but the young men's side of the building was sometimes so full that the staff would take advantage of the times when the women's side was empty to house the spillover of young men there. Of course, on the rare occasion that a young woman would actually show up, all the young men had to be moved back to their side.

The shelter had several rooms per side, each featuring two or three bunk beds. There were chores, including regularly cleaning the building, and there were mandatory educational classes, including several on preventing AIDS. Youths were allowed to stay in the shelter for two months, although their stay could be extended, based on need. I stayed three months. Most stayed several days. It wasn't too hard to get kicked out of the shelter. Regularly violating the curfew would do it. Not finding a job would do it. AIDS testing was mandatory, and, if you tested positive, you were moved to a completely different shelter. I was with a young man when he got a positive test back. We walked around Hollywood for the rest of the afternoon, occasionally stopping into bars to get cocktails, which he treated me to. We didn't talk at all. He didn't want to talk, he just seemed to want company. That afternoon, he packed up his belonging and took a bus to a different shelter. He was obese and alcoholic, and he had a very slow-witted quality to him, and I have often wondered what happened to him from that point on. I told him to feel free to contact me, but he never did. I imagine he's probably dead by now.

There were guards at the Citrus House. They stayed at the shelter all night, armed with stun guns. When youths were kicked out the shelter for violating the rules, the guards accompanied them to their room to collect their belongings. Once a young man got violent. He had been a bad match for the Citrus House anyway, as he was openly homophobic, and spent one evening at dinner making veiled threats toward the other youths in the shelter. For some reason, when he was kicked out, he decided to wrestle with his guard. She was a short, squat, solidly built woman, and she pulled him outside, hit him with the stun gun, and carried his belonging out to him while he was still writhing in the street.

If we didn't have a job, or worked late, several of us in the shelter would go to a nearby In and Out Burger, just across the street from the Klasky Csupo office where they produced The Simpsons.We would each order a soda, but for one especially stingy young man, who would order water and squeeze complimentary lemon wedges into it, adding sugar to make free lemonade. Several of these young men were male prostitutes, and they chatted about malingering on Santa Monica boulevard, looking for clients. Several of them had stories about getting picked up by movie stars in limousines. I never believed them, because they were terrible liars, and you couldn't believe most of what they said, but, in the following years, a number of the celebrities they mentioned were caught in scandals involving cross-dressers and limousines. So perhaps movie stars do prowl Santa Monica Boulevard in long black limousines, looking for teenagers to pay them for sex.

The shelter required that its residents find a job. Many didn't, and were kicked out. They required you stay off drugs and alcohol. Many didn't, and were kicked out. Mind you, they didn't test for drugs, and there was no real problem if you wanted to get a cocktail when away from the shelter, which I often did. But the youths at the shelter frequently showed up drunk, or high, and were escorted out of the building. One young man, a redhead with enormous hearing aids, was found with a gun in his locker. He was kicked out. A young couple moved in for a few days, a boy and a girl in their mid-teens. He broke up with her and moved out, and she slashed her wrists in the shelter bathroom. Sometimes a group of teenagers would move in for a few days, and a few days later would be gone, and I had no idea where they went. Once I saw at least five young men from the shelter all piled into an old car. They pulled up to me in the street and informed me they were going to Las Vegas for the weekend. I never heard from them again.

A few people in the shelter just found other places to stay. There was a young man I became friend with who was illustrating a weekly cartoon about his experiences, and the local gay/lesbian newspaper picked it up to run it, and there were nibbled of interest from gay/lesbian newspapers in San Francisco and Sacramento. I believe he got involved with an older man and moved in with him. For three months, all these teens came and, quickly and usually without ceremony, went. I was quiet but friendly, I went to work in the afternoon, came home at night, played table tennis, did my chores, and saved money to get my own apartment. I was an oddity in the shelter. I had a college education, which was rare. I was working, which was rarer. I obeyed the rules, which was beyond rare. I didn't talk about myself that much, but I listened a lot, and, since the other kids in the shelter liked to talk, they enjoyed having me as a listener. I had a counselor at the shelter, a friendly woman who kept my money in a safe for me and helped get me set up to move into a transitional living program, so that when I moved out of the Citrus House my next apartment would have affordable rent. On the day I left the program, she gave me a gift certificate to Target for $50. I used it to buy cleaning supplies and crackers. I was quite hungry. I was a vegetarian, and the only food they had in the shelter for vegetarians was some canned vegetables and macaroni and cheese. I left the shelter weighing 125 pounds. I am 5' 11''.

The day I moved out of the shelter I promised myself I wouldn't be so careless again. I was done with homelessness. It had been an instructive mistake, but one I would not repeat. From that point on, I would never be homeless again. But, you know, you can be as careful as you want, and then, one day, a hurricane whips up in the Gulf Coast, a city floods, and there you are, in a shelter again. We're all precariously perched on the edge of homelessness, just one medical emergency, financial misstep, or weather emergency away from sleeping in a strange bed, getting fed by strangers, and struggling to piece our lives back together.

More plays of Max Sparber.

THIS IS A STORY that I have rewritten ever since I was in my early 20s, when it happened to me. The barest bones of the story are as follows: I went to LA when I was 22, went broke, and lived in a homeless shelter run by the Gay/Lesbian Community Services Center. Later, I was in a program for homeless teenagers started by Shelley Winters. Later I was beaten up in a riot in Westwood, the day after Ridney King was beaten. Later I witnessed the LA Riots from the roof of an apartment building in Hollywood. Later I returned to Minneapolis.

It's not an enormously complicated story, but it means quite a lot to me, and so, every so often, I have revisited it, in the form of fiction, and memoir, and, most recently, as a series of songs titled This Is Hollywood And just now, this past week, I have decided to try and make a play out of it, or, more properly, as I am putting the music into it, a musical, of a sort. I thought for quite a long time about how to represent these experiences onstage. I didn't especially wish to write a long monologue with music. Nor did I wish to dramatize the events in some way. Finally, it occurred to me that perhaps the best was for me to write this would be to, instead, assemble it, in the manner of a collage. The elements of the collage would be drawn from the various ways I have attempted to write about this subject in the past, and also from memories that I would jot down, and also from bits of conversation that I remember, and from any other source that seems appropriate.

This appeals to me, as I don't really wish to superimpose a formal narrative over this story. Autobiography doesn't lend itself especially well to narrative, or, at least, mine doesn't, as the events of my life never seem to congeal into a logical storytelling structure. In fact, there sometimes seems to be several stories going at one, and they don't connect, and they don't rise and fall the way stories are supposed to. The don't climax when you would want them to, if at all, and it's very hard to find the transformative moments, when the story turns dramatically from one thing into something else. They just aren't there, or, if they are, they would be unremarkable to dramatize: A thought on a bus ride, a conversation on the telephone, an online form being filled out.

If narrative doesn't work for telling this story, maybe collage will. Over the next few weeks or month, I will be locating the various tellings of this tale that I have attempted previously and putting them on this blog. When I feel I have assembled enough, I'll go through and paste them into a script, although I suspect it won't look very much like a typical stage script. And that's fine. It's my story. I'll tell it in the manner than seems best. I might try telling it again at some point, until I feel I have told it enough.

More plays of Max Sparber.

IN 1995, a few years after I returned to Minneapolis after having lived in Los Angeles for three years, I wrote a novel summarizing my experiences there, and also my participation in the Minneapolis anarchist community. "Novel" might not be precisely the right word, as what I wrote was hardly novelistic, containing nothing resembling a plot or a clear focus. It was more of a rambling fake memoir, in which I recast some of experiences as fiction, rewrote others, and invented a lot of it. It wasn't terrifically good, and, oddly, the parts of the book that were most autobiographical were some of the segments I wrote most poorly. Nonetheless, it was my first attempt to address artistically my experiences with homelessness and Hollywood, and I would substantially draw from the work I did here when I wrote a screenplay called I Only Sleep With Celebrities a few years ago.

I played a little game of literary transvestism with this book, as I would later do with the screenplay, rewriting the main character in this story as a young woman. There were two impulses that lead to this. The first was that I wrote a long middle section set in Omaha, and this part of the book was a semi-fictionalized tale inspired by the experiences of a young woman I met in Los Angeles. She showed up at my door one night, believing my apartment belong to one of her old friends, and, when she discovered her mistake, asked if I couldn't put her up anyway. She stayed the night and told me a long, rambling story about her own experiences with homelessness, and then her experiences returning to Omaha and having a baby, which died. The whole thing was just a terrible ordeal for her, and she decided to come back to LA, and here she was. So I lifted a few details that I remembered from her Omaha experiences, glued it onto my own experiences, and made the book's protagonist female. I decided to keep her female in the screenplay just because, when given a chance, I will write for women rather than men, for quite a few reasons, including the fact that they just tend to interest me more as characters than men do.

I won't be publishing the entirety of the book to this blog, but it's a lot to slog through and isn't terribly good. But there are passages of it that I wish to put into my script for This Is Hollywood when I write it, and those I will simply cut and paste into this blog entry.

1.
I wind up staying in the shelter for almost three months, and I probably see a hundred boys come into the shelter, and I would say at least ninety-five get thrown out for violating the rules. When you consider that the life span of a male prostitute in Hollywood is something like three years, this system seems really fucked up. There is almost no place for them to go, because it is difficult for queer kids to squat, the squatter scene is incredibly homophobic in Hollywood, so many of these boys wind up living with older men for a while, and then live in shelters for a while, then sleep on the streets, wind up in the hospital, whatever.

2.
This is what the shelter looks like: It is a yellow town house, two-stories tall and divided in half, and it is right behind the Gay/Lesbian Community Services Center. It is surrounded by a high chain-link fence that is closed and locked during the day. There are three bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom in each of the two halves of the shelter, and three bunkbeds in each room. The right side of the building is supposed to be for young women (you must be younger than 24) and the left side for young men, but there has never been more than six girls in the shelter at the same time, so Connie and me live in one room together and the other two rooms on our side are filled with guys. Sometimes the shelter is totally full, especially when the weather is really bad, and sometimes there are only seven people in the entire building. Except for Connie and me, there are only two people (both guys) who are in the shelter for longer than the several months when I am there. There is also a rotating staff of about eight live-in councilors.

3.
Everybody here is marked by the clothes they wear. Most of the time it is possible to figure out everything you need to know about a person by the clothes they are wearing. Connie points out to me that male prostitutes all dress pretty much the same, in shorts and a T-shirt, and when they stand on Sunset Boulevard they take a certain pose and stare out into the street. Sometimes, when cars pass, they touch their crotch. I never noticed this before, but once she points it out it is impossible to miss. I can't ride a bus up Sunset without seeing hundreds of hustlers, and whenever a new boy comes into the shelter I can tell immediately if he's a hustler. I begin to recognize junkies by their clothes and their posture, I recognize queer activists by the way they dress, I recognize lipsticked lesbians (who don't really stand out in a crowd) by the way they accessorize. Some of the male prostitutes I meet in the shelter say they started in high school, and some of them come from the Midwest. I wonder if any of the boys I went to high school with were hustlers? If so, they kept it a secret really well.

What is it like to be a male prostitute? I can't imagine, even though some of the boys in the shelter talk about it openly and without embarrassment. I am uncomfortable about this, I am uncomfortable with the stories they tell (about who has picked them up, about what parties they've been to, about how much they charge and for what). One boy told us a story about watching television in a hotel room, and the news was about the police finding the body of a male prostitute by the side of the highway. Apparently it had been cut up and put in a trashbag and thrown out the window of a speeding car. This boy had just been picked up, his john was in the bathroom taking a shower, and the boy couldn't help thinking WILL I BE KILLED AND CUT UP TONIGHT? That story stayed with me for a long time period, and sometimes I would dream about it.

The risk of AIDS for these boys is incredibly high, and as a result everybody who uses the shelter is required to get tested. Connie and me were with a boy when he got his result back - HIV positive - and it was terrible, terrible. Connie and me wanted to do something to make him feel better, but what can you do? We bought some alcohol and we spent the afternoon drinking it in the parking lot of a bank, and we didn't talk at all. We didn't know what to say, and everything we tried to say sounded bad and wrong. He didn't seem to mind, he didn't want to be alone and he wanted to get very drunk, so we did this. Then we helped him pack his things, because if you are HIV positive you are required to leave the shelter, they send you to a hospital. We walked him to the bus, and we never saw him again, and I don't remember his name. I never knew him well, and I am sure he is dead now.

4.
The first time I met Erin she was working the concession stand at an art house theater near Melrose Boulevard, and she told probably the strangest story I had ever heard, which had something to do with her crashing a party at the house of a man who produces movies for Walt Disney Pictures. If any customers wanted concessions Erin ignored them.

CUSTOMER: (To Erin.) Do you work here?

ERIN: Yes.

CUSTOMER: Could I get some popcorn?

ERIN: Yeah. Go ahead.

CUSTOMER: Go ahead?

ERIN: Just go behind the counter, go ahead and get some popcorn.

CUSTOMER: Should I put my money in the till?

ERIN: Sure.

CUSTOMER: (Going behind the counter) How much will this be?

ERIN: What do you think is fair?

I can't believe what I am seeing. I guess at an independent theater you can get away with shit like this, because at the theater I work at I would be fired quickly if I lay down on the floor when I was supposed to be working.

In fact, Erin got fired from this job about a day later. Erin had more jobs than any person I ever met, she could never keep one for more than a couple of weeks.

5.
I live in the shelter for a little bit more than two and a half months. The program is not supposed to last that long, but Lanie is okay about letting me stay as long as I need to so I can save up some money and find a decent apartment. I decide to live in a transitional living program run by the Teen Canteen. They rent about six apartments out of a huge pink apartment building near Koreatown, and then they sublease the apartments to qualified applicants for incredibly little money (about $150 per month). The only disadvantage is that I will have a roommate, and I will not be able to pick who I want to live with. This is not such a big deal for me, and the woman who runs the program (Dottie) tells me that most of the time I probably won't have any roommate at all. There are as few women in the transitional living program as there was in the shelter. Dottie thinks that it is easier for single women without children to get apartments together in Hollywood, because for some reason landlords are more trusting of women and can sometimes be talked out of damage deposits, paying last month rent up front, that kind of thing. Dottie knows a lot of young women in programs at the Teen Canteen who live together, three, four to an apartment. Also, if a girl wants to she can usually find a guy who'll let her live with him. This is what Dottie says, and she also says many of the girls who have been in the program leave or drop out after a couple of months.

6.
Sarah Valentine was living there before I moved in, and she is a horrible slob, so the place was just disgusting when I got there - cockroaches, stinking garbage in the sink, rotted food in the refrigerator. The cockroaches are really the worst, though, because I am frightened of them. A friend of my mother once had a cockroach crawl into her ear, and it was painful because it kept flapping its wings and hitting her eardrum. At the hospital they had to drown it in liquid and pull it to pieces inside her ear in order to get it out. I am so afraid of getting a cockroach in my ear when I go to sleep that I have little wax plugs to put in my ear canals.

Dottie warned me before I moved in that my roommate was manic-depressive, and because of that Dottie is forgiving of Sarah when she fucks up. I soon find out that Sarah is not just manic-depressive, she's also a drug-addict and an alcoholic, although she doesn't do any of that in the apartment. Sarah is involved with the Gothic-punk scene, and so she wears black constantly and listens to tapes of bands like Morticia all the time, very loud. I can't stand that shit, so it's almost a relief to go to Hollywood and sleep on the floor of a squat. Also, sometimes Sarah Valentine behaves just terribly, especially when she's drunk. She can never remember my name, and treats me like she hates me, probably because I called Dottie and complained about how dirty the apartment was. Dottie told Sarah that if she doesn't keep the apartment clean, she'll get thrown out. Sarah Valentine got angry at me for that, and confronted me, which was horrible because she was drunk.

SARAH VALENTINE: Why do you hate me, Sally?

ME: I don't hate you, and my name is ANNA, not Sally.

SARAH VALENTINE: You hate me, or you wouldn't be trying to get me thrown out.

ME: I'm not trying to get you thrown out, but I have to have the apartment clean. If you make a mess, you have to clean it up!

SARAH VALENTINE: Bullshit! I did something to make you hate me.

ME: I don't hate you, Sarah, I barely know you. I wish you wouldn't confront me like this when you're drunk.

SARAH VALENTINE: You're just VINDICTIVE, Cindy.

This continues for two hours, and I swear I'm going to smack her. She is just impossible as a roommate.

7.
Finally Dottie decides to evict my roommate. I don't like the way Dottie is doing it, but I'm happy she's doing it anyway. My roommate has become totally crazy because she lost her job, and I've been afraid to go to the apartment. I sneak out while my roommate is still asleep and go to work. Because of this, I am totally exhausted all the time. I told Dottie about this, and she was upset.

It turns out my roommate Sarah Valentine had also been making long distance phone calls to her family back in Idaho on the telephone at the apartment, which you are not supposed to do, and had charged almost a thousand dollars worth of phone bills. Then Dottie stopped by the apartment and saw the damage Sarah had done, and she just flipped. She told Sarah she was going to be thrown out, and Sarah had some kind of a panic attack as a result. Sarah Valentine is so afraid of going back to a shelter or being on the streets that she said she would cut her wrists if Dottie threw her out. Dottie believed Sarah because Sarah has marks all over her arms from where she's used a razor blade to make scars spelling people's names. As a result, Dottie had to promise that she wouldn't throw Sarah out, even though it was a lie.

On Tuesday night at the apartment I get a telephone call from Dottie. She's going to evict Sarah Valentine tomorrow morning at 7 a.m., and she's calling to tell me in case I want to be out of the apartment. I get upset, because it seems unfair that one of the two nights I sleep at the apartment would be when Dottie decides to do this, I don't want to see Sarah Valentine get thrown out (I'm afraid it will be really horrible) and I am exhausted and want to sleep late. But Dottie tells me I can leave early, and if I come back a couple of hours later it will all be done and I will have the apartment all to myself. This sounds good, so I agree.

I cannot fall asleep for a long time that night, because I am afraid of what is going to happen. I am actually so afraid Sarah might kill herself that when she is asleep I take all the knives and forks out of our utensil drawer and I hide them under the sofa, so that she won't find them and cut herself with them. I am imaging what will happen the next day, and I am imagine it will be bad. Dottie told me that she is coming to the apartment with a cop and a locksmith - the locksmith in case Sarah decides to try and come back, and the cop because Dottie wants Sarah to be arrested. Dottie is so concerned Sarah will kill herself if she winds up in a shelter that she wants my roommate put in jail with a suicide watch, and maybe wind up with psychiatric treatment.

8.
I was watching television one night and there was a really disturbing newscast about a woman who went crazy and started shooting at people on a bus. She had killed two people and then stopped to reload, and all the passengers had jumped out of windows, forced the emergency exit open. While I was watching this Tracy came home, totally panicked. I WAS ON THAT BUS, she told me. She was in the front of the bus, and the woman was shooting people in the back of the bus, and it was hard for her to make out what was happening. She could hear the shots, which sounding like something was popping, and she could hear screams. When the bus driver stopped the bus and opened the front door, and then ran out it, she followed him.

We watched the news, and we saw the police storm the bus with flash grenades. The whole bus was lit up, because flash grenades are supposed to blind people. The women started shooting at the cops as soon as they climbed in the front door, so they killed her. At this point Tracy got up and went to the living room and lay down on the sofa, and pulled the covers over her head. I watched the rest of the newscast, and the reporter interviewed some of the other people who were on the bus. They all said the woman was acting really crazy the entire bus ride, pacing and talking to herself, talking about how the Jews were trying to kill her, she said that the CIA was listening to her thoughts with a little microphone they surgically implanted in her ear. She was fifty-five years old, and had been chronically homeless for close to fifteen years.

When I came home from work at the movie theater the next night, all the books were gone, everything Tracy owned was gone. Dottie told me she had gone back to live with her parents in Colorado.

9.

There is a girl who lives down the hall named Saji, who used to live in this apartment. She lived here with her boyfriend Sammy, and they used to smoke pot with the riot grrrls all the time before we moved in. Saji started working at a dance hall where she was paid to dance with the men who were members of this club, and the stories she tells about this job are pretty awful. There is one guy who comes in his pants every time he dances with the girls, but most of the men are more polite and masturbate in the bathroom between dances. I am pretty sure Saji also works as a prostitute. Anyhow, when she got this job her boyfriend Sammy got all crazy and jealous, and she decided to break up with him and asked him to move out. Sammy didn't handle this all that well, and tried to attack her, so Saji had to hide in Erin and Ida's apartment. Sammy then tried to kill himself by jumping down the stairwell from the fourth floor, which didn't work, and he smashed his collarbone. He refused to go to the hospital, he just sat on the floor outside the riot grrrls' apartment and screamed in pain, screamed because he was crazy and angry. Sammy is living with his mother now, but he still comes by and hangs out with Saji - which I can't believe, because he sounds totally dangerous to me.

10.
IF YOU DID NOT WITNESS THE LOS ANGELES RIOTS, then it is impossible to imagine them, and it is impossible to describe them. How can you imagine standing on the roof of your apartment, looking out at one of the largest cities in the world, and seeing the entire city is on fire. A thousand buildings are burning, new buildings are catching fire every second and exploding like bottle rockets. There is a line of fire, a line of building burnings, that climbs North along Vermont and then turns West at Sunset, and it is moving towards downtown Hollywood, towards you. There is so much smoke that every fire alarm in the city is ringing, ringing tinny electronic warnings, and the air is heavy and thick and choking. The skies are filled with helicopters.

How can you imagine going downstairs now, to watch television, and seeing that your old neighborhood in Koreatown has turned into (basically) and armed encampment. The grocery store a block from your old apartment building is sealed off by shipping trucks in front of the glass front doors, and the clerks who used to ring up your groceries are on the roof with semi-automatic rifles, being interviewed, and panicking. There are saying WHERE ARE THE POLICE? WHO IS GOING TO PROTECT US? They are saying I DO NOT WANT TO SHOOT ANYBODY, BUT I WILL NOT LET THEM BURN DOWN MY STORE.

More plays of Max Sparber.

EDITED REPRINTS of a gmail chat discussions upon a dead body being discovered in the apartment next to us, May 18, 2008:

CHAT ONE:

12:36 PM me: Well, it's starting to seem that the nasty smell in our hallway is a dead human.
B: Really?
me: Yep. A neighbor. Old guy.
12:38 PM B: Oh no. Are you going to have the landlord check?
12:42 PM me: He went in about a half hour ago.
B: Oh, so it really was. That's horrible.
me: Oh man, I wish they hadn't opened that door.

CHAT TWO:

12:27 PM me: You know that "nobody found him until the neighbors noticed the smell" story?
A: Oh yes, quite well.
12:28 me PM We're the neighbors.
12:35 PM me: I want less decaying human smell in my life at this moment.
A: uggghhh... well, it shouldn't take too long once the body is pulled out of there.
12:42 PM me: Ewwww. This is so horrible.
12:45 PM me: The smell at this moment is completely overwhelming.
A: omg I can't even imagine
12:48 PM me: The hallways is full of cops now.
"You wanna see the dead guy?" one asked the other.
12:49 PM A: lol Like they've never seen one? Ohh
12:52 PM me: Mr Souris.
I never knew his name before today.
He lived across the hall from us for two and a half years.
A: aww
12:53 PM me: Nice old fellow.
But he was obviously on his last legs.
12:58 PM me: Actually, while I feel sad for the guy, it's really fascinating.
A: I agree.
1:01 PM me: The smell is going away.
A: Good news!
me: Thank god.
I gagged on it a few times.
A: :S
me: You could hear the guys in the hall gagging.
A: oof
me: They'd be like, "Can we get this door GAAAWK ... get this door open?"
1:02 PM A: The sound of someone gagging makes me gag.
me: Yeah. It's a pretty strong reflex.
1:18 PM me: Now it smells like a beautiful spring day in here.
A: that was fast!
me: It's like magic.
They used an ozone machine.
It went from "dead guy" to "may afternoon" in, like, two minutes.

CHAT THREE:

4:42 me: I learned an important lesson today.
S: What is it?:
4:43 PM me: If there is a rotting smell in your hall, it might be your next door neighbor.
S: Uhhhh.
Was your neighbor dead?
me: For two weeks.
He died in the shower.
4:44 PM It was still running.
And very hot.
S: OMFG!!!!!
Did you find him?
4:45 PM me: No, thank God.
S: What happened?
me: The manager came up and knocked at the guy's door. Then he called to him. Then he went in.
4:46 PM S: Oh, god
Did you call the manager?
me: At that moment, the smell of decomosition got so strong that I thought I was going to have to leave the building.
Yeah, I called the manager.
The police came.
They talked about it in the hall.
S: Jesus.
That is sad.
No one missed him.
4:49 PM me: They weren't sure who his next of kin was.
But maybe he hated other people.
S: I can't even imagine such horror.
me: I'm not going to assume he died sad and alone.
S: Well, good point.
me: Maybe he went out the way he wanted, alone and in his own space.
He seemed like a good chap.
4:50 PM When I passed him in the halls. For two and a half years.

TWO SUBMISSIONS TO "OVERHEARD IN MINNEAPOLIS":

Policeman at scene of old man’s death: So, do we know if he had any next of kin?
Second Policeman: Not yet. Do you want to see the dead guy?
Policeman: (Thinks for a moment, shrugs.) Sure.

Policeman at scene of old man’s death: Well, he died in the shower, so pretty much everything just ran down the drain. So you’re not going to have to do any remodeling.
Apartment manager: We’ll have to remodel anyway. He’s been here so long that we remodeled around him. We didn’t want to displace him.
Policeman: Well, it’s pretty clean anyway. Although when we moved his body, it burst.

A SONG from my musical about teen homelessness in Los Angeles in the early 90s, This is Hollywood.

"IF THEY MADE A MOVIE OF MY LIFE" LYRICS:
If they made a movie of my life
Would they include this night with you?
Would it be forgot
And left out of the plot
Would I leave it out too?

You're one of several girls I've known
Who shared bed and then that was it;
But is this a distraction
From the narrative action.
Where would this fit?

In the story they tell of me
Would these details ever be missed?
Our walk together in Koreatown;
You held my hand then, Lara Brown,
And later we kissed.


If they made a movie of my life
Would they bother with this little scene?
Life is full of messy facts
And in the middle of three acts
What does it mean?

We're just two minor characters
And our scene's too small for this movie
And what do you think that they would do
If they made a film about you?
Would they include me?

LISTEN TO "IF THEY MADE A MOVIE OF MY LIFE":



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More plays of Max Sparber.

YESTERDAY I COMPLETED the first major task that needed doing in writing NSFW; specifically: I wrote and recorded 15 songs for the play. I'm still going to go back and fiddle with the recordings a little -- in many of them, I mixed the guitar part poorly, so it's sort of a faint noise in the background, and so I'll fix that and report the songs, but that shouldn't take very long.

This is not a typical musical, in that the songs don't further the story, or even particularly comment on the story. Instead, the songs are meant to be those on a self-produced CD that the play's band, NSFW, released and have been performing live for a few months. The main story of the play is that of the band breaking up, live and onstage, as the result of personality conflicts. The songs are meant to tell a separate story: That of how the Internet has transformed our social experience, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Ideally, the music should be able to stand alone, were it actually recorded as an album instead of as a series of very rough demos; in fact, I would like to encourage anybody who performs this musical, if it is ever performed, to do exactly that.

Now I need to sit down and write the script, which should be a relatively fast process. The play is unlikely to take longer that 90 minutes, and 30 or more will be consumed by the music. I sketched out several ideas for scenes on this blog; they may or may not be used in the actual script, but they were useful for thinking about what this thing might look like in script form.

I use on online script writing software site called Zhura to write my scripts, and have set up a page for NSFW, which you can find here. I will be posting whatever I write on the script to this blog as I write it, but, if you like, you can also check in on Zhura and see the entire script. I don't know precisely how long it will take to write -- I have, in the past, written an entire script in three days, and that required quite a lot more writing, so the first draft might go relatively quickly.

MORE NSFW!

A SONG from my punk and glam rock-inspired play about the Internet, NSFW.

"LEAVE ME LONELY" LYRICS:
Don't you ever leave me lonely
Don't you ever leave me lonely

I'm a punk
Who talk too much and far too loud
You tell me
You can pick me out in a crowd

Don't you ever leave me lonely
Don't you ever leave me lonely

I talk tough
And I yell and I like to fight
You tell me
You're in the mood for a row tonight

Don't you ever leave me lonely
Don't you ever leave me lonely

I get distant
Go online for weeks at a time
You tell me
You like me even better online

Don't you ever leave me lonely
Don't you ever leave me lonely

Why do I talk
Why do I always act such a fool
But you say
Whatever whatever whatever is cool

Don't you ever leave me lonely
Don't you ever leave me lonely

LISTEN TO "LEAVE ME LONELY":



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A SONG from my punk and glam musical about the Internet, NSFW.

"1337 AS FUCK" LYRICS:
Fuck off n00bs
You fucken suck
I am 1337
1337 as fuck
Ain't no Web
For the shy
You must be 1337
1337 as I

It's the wild west
You get 1337 or you get gone
If you come here
Make sure that your guns are drawn
Come out shooting
Or get off of my fucking lawn
Fuck off n00bs
You get 1337 or you get gone

Hey you n00bs
Get ready
You'll been pwnd
By the 1337 like me
This ain't home
This ain't the street
Ain't no rules
But be 1337

This is war
Come out armed or not at all
It's the Web
The strong will rise the weak will fall
This ain't church
It's the world's biggest brawl
It's the wild west
Come out armed or not at all

Fuck off n00bs
You fucken suck
I am 1337
1337 as fuck
Ain't no Web
For the shy
You must be 1337
1337 as I

LISTEN TO "1337 AS FUCK":



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A SONG from my glam and punk-inspired musical about the Internet, NSFW.

"STARING AT A VDU" LYRICS:
Don't make me join the workforce mob
Little boxes filled with little jobs
And everyone with a monitor in view
Everyone's connected to the Internet
Filling out spread sheets with loss and get
Every single one staring at a VDU

I don't want a job like that no no no
I don't want a job like that no no no
I don't want to spend my life
Staring at a VDU

I can't look at the Web no more
Is this what it was invented for
Is this what we were meant to do
Hours coding forms in HTML
To track what we buy and what we sell
And every single one of us staring at a VDU

I don't want a job like that no no no
I don't want a job like that no no no
I don't want to spend my life
Staring at a VDU

Is this what the Web was meant to mean:
A cash register and copy machine?
Is this how we were meant to use it too?
Who told us that we should live like this
What do we gain what do we miss with
Every single one staring at a VDU

I don't want a job like that no no no
I don't want a job like that no no no
I don't want to spend my life
Staring at a VDU

LISTEN TO "STARING AT A VDU":



DOWNLOAD "STARING AT A VDU."

MORE NSFW!

A RATHER entertaining crime tale of a thwarted attempt to break into a Drexel Court flat. Reprinted from the Minneapolis Morning Tribune, November 25, 1911.

WOMAN THWARTS BURGLARS TURNING KEY WITH PINCERS

Mrs. Lillian Baker Keeps Door Shut, While Daughter Calls Police.

Leaning breathlessly against an outer door of her flat in the Drexel court, 712 East 14th street, Mrs. Lillian Baker twice turned back in the lock the key which a burglar from the outside was turning with a pair of pliers. While Mrs. Baker was thus engaged the burglar's companion flashes an electric flashlight over the transom of another door and tried to frighten Mrs. Baker's daughter Dolly, who was telephoning to police headquarters.

The mother and daughter were awakened by the sounds of two men trying to enter the rear door. The lock on the door was reinforced by a bolt and proved too much for the burglars, who turned their attention to the front of the flat. The got into the hallway and turned their key in the door. Miss Baker stood bravely by the telephone and summoned help while her mother guarded the door and turned the key back each time the men on the outside twisted it around. The burglars left shortly before the arrival of the patrol wagon full of detectives.

A SERIES OF PHOTOS of my apartment building, Drexel Court, from the Minnesota Historical Society Web page. When I get a chance, I'll snap photos of the building as it is today from the same vanatage points.



Drexel Court from corner of Park Avenue and Fourteenth Street, Minneapolis.
Photographer: Edward Prichett
Photograph Collection 9/1895
Location no. MH5.9 MP3.2j p60
Negative no. 24561



Drexel Court, Fourteenth Street side, Minneapolis.
Photographer: Edward K. Prichett
Photograph Collection 10/1895
Location no. MH5.9 MP3.2j p59
Negative no. 24557



Rear view of Drexel Court, 712 East Fourteenth Street, Minneapolis.
Photographer: Edward Prichett
Photograph Collection 1897
Location no. MH5.9 MP3.2j p61
Negative no. 24562



Rear view of Drexel Court, 712 East Fourteenth Street, Minneapolis.
Photographer: Edward Prichett
Photograph Collection 1897
Location no. MH5.9 MP3.2j p62
Negative no. 24568



Rear view of Drexel Court, 712 East Fourteenth Street, Minneapolis.
Photographer: Edward Prichett
Photograph Collection 1897
Location no. MH5.9 MP3.2j p63
Negative no. 24556



View on Park Avenue looking toward Drexel Court Apartments, 1001-1017 Park Avenue, Minneapolis
Photographer: Joseph Zalusky
Photograph Collection 5/1933
Location no. MH5.9 MP2.1 r324
Negative no. 60282

A TALE OF A BOY who lived in my apartment building, the Drexel Court Apartments. Reprinted from the Minneapolis Tribune, January 12, 1907. I am glad to hear that there was at least one other person in the history of the Drexel who was an obnoxious audience member at theaters and liked to kiss actresses.



MINNEAPOLIS TOT THRILLS AUDIENCE AT BIJOU THEATER

Edwin Rystrom, aged 2 1/2 years, known at the Drexel Court flats, 1015 Park Avenue, where he resides, as "Buster," made a quick leap into fame at the Bijou Opera House on Thursday evening, during the Billy B. Van musical comedy production number known as "Patsy in Politics."

Eddie attended the show with his mother. He went merely as a spectator, with no intention of convulsing the large audience or setting the gallery wild. But he did both.

Early in the evening he left his mother's side and wandered down the aisle, and soon cultivated the acquaintance of members of the orchestra. He became especially chummy with the cornet and clarinet players, going so far as to hint and the possibility of his inviting them to his next "birthday party."

Eddie is a chubby little child, his bright face fairly beaming with good nature. His big blue eyes invite speedy friendship. His cheeks are rosy and his hair is blonde. He wore a white suit and white stockings.

It was in the second act that Eddie made his grand entrance and captured the crowd. His first bold advances were made when "Patsy," who in the play is a candidate for supervisor, was passing around campaign cigars. As the result, a papier mache "properly" cigar falling over the footlights to the young intruder. He clapped his hands in glee and immediately struck up a conversation with Patsy.

"Smoke up; smoke up," said Patsy.

"Ain't dot no match," came back the answer in a clear little voice heard all over the house.

Then followed a broadside of repartee in which the juvenile acquitted himself creditably with the comedian.

But the real dramatic climax was yet to come.

At the close of a musical number the chorus girls hop off the stage, each holding the foot of the girl ahead. Patsy catches at the foot of Miss Rose Beaumont, who plays Glorianni Bird, and missing it, falls down clown fashion. This stunt tickled Edwin immensely, and he shouted his glee with all his might.

Patsy quickly stopped the dialogue of the play, and again turned his attention to his young friend. "That's right, my boy; bawl me out before all these people; give me the ha ha; I can stand it."

"No, 'ou didn't stand it," came from the little fellow in the orchestra pit; "'ou tumbled down."

The audience, which has been holding its breath, gave way to a heart laugh in which it was joined by Patsy himself.

"But it's mean of her to tip me up," said the comedian, when silence had been restored. "What shall we do to her when she comes back for treating me that way?"

"Kiss her," piped the little star.

"You're like all the rest of the boys in Minneapolis, but I'll fix it for you," said Patsy.

A little later Miss Beaumont came back on the stage. Instantly Edwin threw up his arms in a pleading gesture. The next moment he was in the arms of a member of the orchestra and being passed over the footlights, to in turn be received into the arms of Patsy, who held the young Thespian to the lips of Miss Beaumont. Eddie made good.

Then Patsy took him over to one side of the stage, placed him in a chair, talked to him, and smooshed down his clothes in a fatherly fashion. A signal to the orchestra filled the stage with capering comedians and whirling chorus girls. Eddie, far from being embarrassed, greatly enjoyed the scene, and when Patsy placed his stage hat on the boy's head, the latter went him one better by placing the long stage cigar between his lips.

This sent the audience into a delirium of delight, and when Patsy danced off the stage with the youngster in his arms, a sirenous encore brought the two back, and a cute little bow was the result. Through another song the little fellow sat watching the gay scene before him with utmost rapture, and when he had received a final kiss from Miss Beaumont and was passed back to his mother, he said"

"Gee, mamma, I'm coming again."

A SONG from my punk and glam-influence musical about the Internet, NSFW.

"1978" LYRICS
I have an iPhone
Loaded up with punk rock
Loaded up with tough pop
Now
I walk through the city
Listening to Talk Talk
Hearing Blitzkrieg Bop
Yeah
In my head it is always 1978

In my head I
Stare at television
Skull is full of Bad Brains
Yeah
Fuck that new stuff
I've made a decision
It's CBGB again
Now
In my head it is always 1978

In my head I
Dress just like the Stooges
Stripped all down to my cock
Yeah
I have an iPhone
Loaded up with Iggy
Loaded up with punk rock
Yeah
In my head it is always 1978

LISTEN TO "1978":



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A SONG from my punk and glam rock inspired play about the Internet, NSFW.

"FACEBOOK PROFILE" LYRICS:
Mark said he wanted to go out with style
The end was coming but wouldn't be here for a while
Mark decided what he wanted to do
With the pills the doctors and the blood they drew
Mark said he wanted to go out with style

Mark walked into the Lake of the Isles
Those who saw him swear they saw him smile
He turned to the shore and gave a salute
He was carrying a cocktail and he was wearing a suit
Mark walked into the lake of The Isles

John now maintains his Facebook profile
He adds new photos every once in while
There's Mark in New York there's Mark in Brazil
Didn't he look good before he fell ill
John now maintains his Facebook profile

LISTEN TO "FACEBOOK PROFILE":



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ANOTHER song from my punk and glam rock-inspired musical about the Internet, NSFW.

"PUT IT ONLINE" LYRICS:
4th and center
He saw a girl in a street
He couldn't look at her
He looked down at his feet
He took a picture
He didn't know what to do
He took a picture
I bet you've seen it too

Put it online
for the girls to see
Put it online
for the boys to see
Put it online
For everybody to see online

It's a photocopy
Of a band with a show
They went together
Two weeks ago
He took a picture
Although he didn't know why
He took a picture
To remember it by

Put it online
for the girls to see
Put it online
for the boys to see
Put it online
For everybody to see online

She left a message
To tell him goodbye
She left a message
And he didn't reply
He took her message
And he wrote it all down
He took her message
And he spread it around

Put it online
for the girls to see
Put it online
for the boys to see
Put it online
For everybody to see online

Why'd she leave him
She don't like to say
Why'd she leave him
It was gonna happen anyway
Everything they did
Everything everytime
Everything they did
He put it online

Put it online
for the girls to see
Put it online
for the boys to see
Put it online
For everybody to see online

LISTEN TO "PUT IT ONLINE":



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MORE NSFW!

IN THE SPIRIT of radical transparency, I thought I would take a moment to explain my songwriting process for this project. I've been using this process, or variations thereof, for about a year, and I like it, although the resulting recordings are quick and dirty and ill-formed. I like it this way, but the MP3s I put on my blog are far from the sort of polished product that ends up everywhere, even on demos, because it has become so easy to add a superficial gloss to a recording that just everybody does it.

I have rejected this for several reasons. Firstly, I am not impressed by mechanically produced superficial perfection, and find it unnecessary and distracting, and it is the same complaint I have about a lot of the arts nowadays: That in their attempts to make something as shiny and as impressive as possible, they have hidden the process of creating it, and, since I find the process fascinating, I find that a pity. So I try to create songs that are recorded in as close to the moment of creation as I find comfortable -- so there are a lot of songs I have recorded in which you are hearing the music the very first time I have ever sung it. It's why I will sometimes leave jarring musical edits in, or leave in the clicking noise made by turning off the recording, or the sounds of my moving in my seat or my instrument banging against something by accident, which the microphone happened to pick up. Those are the sounds of the process, and I like to leave them in, although I suspect these are the exact reasons why people politely avoid discussing the fact that I write songs and quickly switch topics when I bring up the fact.

Additionally, I have been trying to incorporate the blogging model into everything I create, which seems an especially useful model for this play, dealing, as it does, with Web culture. Blog entries tend not to be exceptionally crafted formal compositions, but, rather, top-of-the-brain writing, done quickly. They're not generally intended as writing for the ages, but rather as fast and clear communication, and blogs tend to benefit, not by a few outstandingly crafted pieces, but by a constant accumulation of ideas, developed over time. In my own experiences, blogs work better as scratch pads than as scholarly monographs.

Songwriting, like a lot of creative work, tends to get treated as something pretty special -- perhaps because it is possible to make an enormous amount of money off one song, over a period of decades, and nobody wants to admit that someone made a million dollars for 20 minute worth of work. Bands tend to release an album per year, at most, and those will usually have about 15 songs on them. I suspect, if you were to actually sit down with the band, you would find a lot of the material on the album was originally generated in a single weekend or two. Pop songwriting, in particular, is not terrifically sophisticated, and shouldn't be. This is why you can have a story like the Rolling Stones running into John Lennon and Paul McCartney in the street, where the Stones jokingly begged the Beatles for a hit single, whereupon Lennon and McCartney retired to a corner of their studio, dashed off "I Wanna Be Your Man," and gave the Stones their first chart hit.

There's more to creating a hit song, of course, including hours or weeks in the studio, but the basic mechanics of writing a two-minute song just aren't that complicated, especially when you're working in a stripped-down idiom, as I am with this project. A chord sequence, a few verses, a chorus, and you have a song, and I've been trying to write with as few chord changes as possible, although sometimes I get a little out of control and throw in some harmony parts. I've been trying to come up with a process by which I can write a song as quickly as I write a blog entry, without concern for whether it is the greatest song ever written, or if people will go back and listen to it again and again; instead, I just want to communicate whatever idea I have had for a song as clearly and as cleanly as I can. My ideal would be for it to take exactly as long to write a song as it does to listen to one, but that's not likely to happen. Instead, it takes about an hour to write and record a song, and this seems reasonable.

There is one last reason for why I do it this way, and it's one I will be articulating in the play. A lot of my creative direction in the past few years has been to move away from the sort of work a small group of highly paid professionals would do, and instead to create, and try to encourage the creation, of work that anybody could do. It's a big part of the reason why I have started to document the process I use in writing things. There's a lot I have to say about this, and it's not the point of this essay, so I will leave it at that, except to say that part of the reason I like my recordings to be loose and junky and unfinished is because I want people to say, oh, I could do that too.

So here is how I go about doing it. Firstly, my equipment: A ukulele, a Mac G5 Tower, and a Blue Snowflake Microphone that plugs directly into my computer's USB port.

Secondly, the software I use: An old version of Garageband and iTunes that came bundled with this Mac and a free program called Audacity. I write my lyrics on Google Docs, and, as I am generally writing the lyrics as I am recording the song, I'll have the document open on my monitor while I record.

The actual songwriting process is pretty simple. I open Garageband and set it up to record a new basic track (I turn the metronome and the "snap to grid" features off). I then record a chord pattern directly into Garageband using my ukulele and the microphone.

For this project, the next step is always the same: I go to track info and select a guitar filter for my ukulele track. I have very few filters on my version of Garage Band, but that's all right, as I am just looking for something distorted and noisy -- usually I use the filter called "British Invasion" or "Classic Rock," but sometimes I'll use "Glam" or "Arena Rock," which are really distorted. This serves two functions. Firstly, it makes my ukulele sound like an electric guitar, and, secondly, distortion is your friend when you're playing fast and sloppy. Playing that would be egregiously mistake-filled suddenly just produces an enjoyable sonic wall.

Now, I write my first set of lyrics. Generally, I'll sort of have a sense of what the song is going to sound like, as I usually sort of hum over my ukulele when I am coming up with the basic chordal riff. I often don't know what the theme of the song is going to be when I start this process, and it generally begins by me spitting out something that sounds sort of tough. I compose this verse pretty quickly, and then I'll try recording myself singing it. Sometimes my phrasing is just too awkward and I'll do it again, or a few times, but if I feel that I have communicated the melody and rhythm of the song successfully with my first take, that's the take I'll keep.

I generally add a filter to my voice as well, and it's almost always "Male Rock Vocals," which gives it a slight echo. I never go back and try to autotune my voice. I don't care if every note is right as long as the melody is communicated.

Now I start building the songs. I'll come up with a riff for the chorus, and lyrics, in eactly the same way, and I'll just tack it on to what I have already recorded. For speed, if a riff or a chorus repeats itself, I'll just copy and paste it. I continue to write the lyrics as I am composing. Sometimes I like to add some harmony, which I do by simply adding more vocal tracks, usually with some additional reverb added in, so it sounds a bit different. And I often fiddle with the stereo, some some of the song plays more in one ear, although I almost always put the vocal track right in the middle, so you hear it equally from both sides.

Once I have recorded the songs and I think it sounds all right, I'll export it to iTunes. There, I will convert it into an MP3 and drag it to my desktop. I then open it in Audacity and do exactly three things to it. Firstly, there is usually a little bit of extra recording on the end of the MP3 of silence, and I'll clip that off. Secondly, I'll go under the effect menu and select "normalize." Finally, I'll select "Amplify" under the effect menu. I find, with the version of Garage Band I use, it comes in to iTunes a little sharp sounding and a bit too quiet, and this seems to solve the problem. I then export it as an MP3 and upload it to my blog.

Quickly, there are two things I do in order to put it on my blog. Firstly, I use an free online flash MP3 player (you can find it here), and, to use it, you must host the player file, a Javascript program, and the MP3 file somewhere online. I host all of it on a Google Sites page. Secondly, I put a version online for download, and I store them at Mediafire, which offers free and simple file hosting and downloads.

And that's it. There are a lot of little niggling details, and I would prefer it if there was just one program that would do this all, instead of a half dozen (and they're all sort of idiosyncratic and non-intuitive, so you have to play around with them to see how they work.) But once you've done it a few times, it starts becoming habit, and you can start writing and posting new songs as quickly as you like.

Is it the best way to record and post songs online? Probably not, but it's the one I use, and, for my purposes, does the trick. When you're looking to quickly and cheaply produce a lot of original content, you go with what is cheap or free and works, rather than what might produce something that seems superficially perfect. As far as I'm concerned, that's how rock and roll works anyway, at least in its own mythology. Anybody should be able to pick up a guitar, turn the amp up until the instrument seems to be shouting in anger, and scream a few rhymed lyrics over the top of it, and have a perfectly serviceable song. This isn't classical music. This is rough, fast, cheap, out of control music that was always meant to be a bit silly, a bit anthemic, and a bit disposable. It's supposed to be the way rough, noisy people tell their own story. At least, that's my take on it, so those are the songs I am writing, and that's why I am producing them in this way.

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A SONG from my punk and glam rock musical about Web culture, NSFW:

"JILL TURNED ON THE RADIO" LYRICS:
Jill turned on the radio
She didn't like a thing she heard
The droning of the melodies
She couldn't stand a fucking word
Another boring love song
Another teenage star
Jill turned off the radio
And Jill picked up her guitar
She sang ooh, ooh ooh

Jill knew only two chords
And Jill couldn't keep the beat
But she had a computer and a microphone
And she could record and could delete
Jill wasn't sure what to sing
But she figured what the hell
With the shit that's on the radio
Jill figured she might as well
She sang ooh, ooh ooh

So there were clicks on her recording
There were places where the microphone popped
So what if her music was made up
Of fitful starts and stops
Jill wasn't making pop music
Jill wasn't looking to sell
But Jill she had a guitar
And so Jill figured what the hell
She sang ooh, ooh ooh

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ANOTHER SONG from my punk and glam inspired musical about Web culture, NSFW.

"THE KIDS ARE ONLINE" LYRICS:
How are the kids? They're just fine
In the middle of this decline
Where are the kids? They're online now
They're looking for a way to get kicks
With downloads of a Slick Rick remix
And lists of cult films from netflix yeah

Hey ho 24 hours to blow
And you ain't dressed up and ain't noplace to go
And there ain't no jobs and ain't no dough nohow

What can you do that don't suck
And don't cost more than a few bucks
To get away from all the daft fucks yeah
What do you with all your time
In the middle of this decline
There's always something to do online now

Hey ho 24 hours to blow
And you ain't dressed up and ain't noplace to go
And there ain't no jobs and ain't no dough nohow

This ain't a world for our teens
Just the same drags and bad scenes
But there's another world on PC screens yeah
How are the kids? They're just fine
In the middle of this decline
Where are the kids? They're online now

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A FIRST-DRAFT OF A SCENE from my play NSFW.

DANNY NO: So what's your deal, Melanie?

MELANIE MISFIT: Answered an ad in Craigslist. The ad said you shouldn't already be able to play an instrument, and I didn't, so it seemed perfect.

DANNY NO: If you couldn't play an instrument, why did you think you wanted to be in a band?

MELANIE MISFIT: Boredom. I just didn't feel like I was doing anything interesting. I don't know. It was impulsive. The ad seemed funny, I guess, so I answered it. Let me back up a moment. You know, we don't make any real money off this, so I have a day job, and it's the same job I have had since I was 21, and I hate it. I file dental records. I work in an office with 25 other women, and all of them are middle aged, and all they do is gossip and talk about their kids and bring pies and cookies in to share, and they're all just getting fatter and fatter. And I know fat is supposed to be a feminist issue, or whatever, but I don't want to look down the road and see myself at 45 years old, and the only thing I have in my life is a husband I can barely stand, and some obnoxious kids, and a job I hate, and adult onset diabetes. And that was the road I was on. So I saw an ad on Craigslist saying a punk band was starting, I thought, fuck it.

DANNY NO: Were you a fan of punk?

MELANIE MISFIT: A fan of music, yeah, so, yeah, punk is music, and I listen to it. I don't know that I'd say I'm exclusively a fan of punk. I don't know that I'd say NSFW is a punk band. We're inspired by punk, sure.

SUZIE SKIRMISH: We're punk.

MELANIE MISFIT: Maybe. It feels weird for me to say it. I mean, punk started, when? 1978? Somewhere around there? If we're going to pick a really old style of music, why don't we just start a dixieland revival band? But, you know, Suzie really, really wants to call us a punk band, so we let her.

SUZIE SKIRMISH: Come on. We're totally punk. Tell the man where you got your name.

MELANIE MISFIT: All right, well, that was pretty punk. Suzie has a book called Fucked Up and Photocopied, which is all posters for punk shows. We just grabbed band names we liked and made them our last names. So, you know, The Misfits.

IDA SCREAMER: I was going to call myself Ida Idol for a while, after the Idols. But then we remembered Billy Idol, and we didn't want people to think I was trying to pass myself off as his sister or something.

MELANIE MISFIT: It took us, like, a month to remember that there was a guy named Billy Idol, too. So what kind of punk band are we?

SUZIE SKIRMISH: We're a fucking punk band. I don't know why you always act so embarrassed about it. Three chords and a lot of shouting.

MELANIE MISFIT: I guess I just never understood why you want to do all this music about the Internet and also have a punk band. I mean, it's not like CBGB's was a Web page, or Blondie started on MySpace.

SUZIE SKIRMISH: They would have, though. They totally would have. What could be more DIY than the Internet?

MELANIE MISFIT: Well, I don't see it, but whatever. I always felt if we called ourselves punk, we risked limiting ourselves to a niche audience, and that wasn't what we were about. We're all sort of products of the Internet. I mean, all three of us are bloggers, and we spend almost all of our time online, and we experience our relationships through social media, and a lot of our language comes from the Web, and all that. But wee weren't hearing any of that stuff coming through in the songs we were writing, and so we decided to write our own songs. Pop music about the Web. That's what really interests me, more than saying we're part of this genre, or that genre, or whatever. I mean, I don't even really think about punk songs when we sit down to write.

SUZIE SKIRMISH: Oh, Jesus, don't talked about Juke Box Hero.

MELANIE MISFIT: You know, Suzie, you mind if I just talk for a little while without you interrupting? Is that possible?

SUZIE SKIRMISH: Juke Box Hero is the stupidest song ever written, Melanie.

MELANIE MISFIT: I don't agree. I think it's perfect.

DANNY NO: Juke Box Hero by Foreigner.

MELANIE MISFIT: Fuck yes.

SUZIE SKIRMISH: Oh God, here we go.

MELANIE MISFIT: I don't know what your complaint is, Suzie. It's about a guy who goes to a rock show, hears a guitar play, buys a guitar, teaches himself how to play, and goes on to be a rock and roll star. You should like it. It's DIY.

SUZIE SKIRMISH: It's so fucking hair metal!

MELANIE MISFIT: So what? It's rock and roll. It's what rock always promised. It's what punk always promised. I mean, what's that line about the Velvet Underground, that only, like, a thousand people ever saw them play?

DANNY NO: But all thousand went out and started their own bands. Brian Eno said that.

MELANIE MISFIT: That's what we're singing about. Except it's not a boy buying a guitar, it's someone getting online and starting a blog, and they write something, and all of a sudden ten thousand people, or a hundred thousand people, or a million people read it. Suzie is right, it's super-DIY. You can make yourself a superstar online and you don't need any money. You just have to tell your story. For me, that's totally rock and roll, and that's what Juke Box Hero is about. So you should like the song, Suzie.

SUZIE SKIRMISH: Well, too bad, because I really, really hate that fucking song.

MELANIE MISFIT: Well, I don't know what to tell you, except get used to it, because every time we sit down to write a song, I'm trying to write a Juke Box Hero for the Web generation, and so, no matter how punk you want our band to be, there's always going to be a little bit of Foreigner in everything we do. So what do you think about that?

SUZIE SKIRMISH: I think that the next time I start a band, I'm not going to post an ad on Craigslist.

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I SUPPOSE MY THOUGHTS ON THIS aren't terrifically complicated. If you're in it for the money, forget it. If you write a play, there is very little likelihood of it getting produced. If it does get produced, it will probably be produced by a small company with almost no money to speak of. If they pay you, it will be a smallish amount at best. I have had three plays produced this year, two of which I was hired to write. I made about the same amount as I would working my regular job for a week. And that, I would wager, puts my in the top 10 percent of earners among Twin Cities playwrights.

It's understandable that people want to get paid for their work. Theater is a lot of work, and many of us have studied it in college, and spent years honing it as a craft, and we charge people to come see shows, and this seems like the same sort of model that other professions use. They make money. We should be able to as well, shouldn't we?

Maybe we should, but I wouldn't hold your breath. There are theaters in America that actually turn a profit. I would guess most don't. Theaters tend to use a non-profit model, and rely heavily on grants and individual donations, and, even then, typically barely make ends meet. Most theater in the United States is done by very small companies on shoestring budgets. They don't pay their cast. They often don't pay their directors, or tech crew, or anybody else. And, whether you're a playwright, and if you get a play produced, these are the people who are, most likely, going to be producing your plays. They don't have a lot of money to pay you, if any.

I can't say whether this is desirable or undesirable. It's just the way things are. Let's look at the Twin Cities. I pick Minneapolis and St. Paul as an example for a few reasons. Firstly, a fair amount of new work gets produced here. Secondly, it has a thriving regional theater community. And, thirdly, it's my community, so I can write about it with a little bit of authority. I have had plays produced here, and have written about theater here, on and off, for almost a decade. There are a number of professional and semi-professional theaters in the Twin Cities, but an overwhelming majority of performances produced in this town are by small, mostly broke companies that rent space in venues that seat 100 or less -- at any moment, I would say this sort of company is producing about 70 percent of the theater in Minnesota.

The Twin Cities are a bit atypical, though, in that a lot of people get paid for their work. They tend to get paid peanuts, but, nonetheless, Minnesota has a strong base of donors who regularly give to arts organizations, and so a couple of hundred dollars often trickles down, here and there, to the artistic staff.

So let's look at Omaha, where I have also done theater and been a critic. While the dominant regional theater company in Minneapolis is the Guthrie, which pays its actors, the dominant regional theater in Omaha is the Omaha Community Playhouse, which doesn't. And while they pay playwrights, neither theater company produces that much new work by area playwrights, if any. Both Minneapolis and Omaha also have professional children's theaters, but while the Children's Theatre Company in Minneapolis hires and pays local playwrights and produces original material, The Omaha children's theater has an on-staff playwright who produces a few adapatation per year, and otherwise does not produce new work by regional playwrights. And, in Omaha, that's it for professional theater. There are two semi-professional theater companies, and I know both to be struggling financially (and both share a 100-seat theater), and there are a handful of additional amateur companies that get by with almost no budget at all. There is a company in Omaha that produces new plays by regional playwrights, but the quality of the material they select, and the quality of their production, is historically pretty low, and they can't really pay a playwright more than pocket change, if that.

I'd say this condition is pretty typical for regional American theater, and that's your market as a playwright. We could bemoan the state of theater in America, but, the truth is, I don't know how it might be different, unless America suddenly goes theater crazy one day and starts flooding these companies with money, which doesn't seem likely. If complaining about it isn't going to get us anywhere, then all we can really do is address the world as it is.

This is one of the reasons I have decided to start writing plays that can be produced cheaply, and why I have decided not to charge small theater companies to perform them. There are a few other reasons as well, one practical, one theoretical, which I will discuss in greater detail in future essays. The practical reason, in a few words, in that I think culture trickles upward -- that you tend to smart small and cheap and build your way up to big and expensive, and you work your way up from small audiences to large ones. The best thing I can do, in these circumstances, is to encourage small theaters to produce my work, and hope that by doing so I can start working my way upward. The philosophical reasoning is a bit more complicated, so I'll just sketch it in here: I think the Internet has started to break the business model in which we pay for art, and, because I end up getting so much art and culture for free, my part of this bargain is to also provide new content for free -- to pay back into a public artistic commons, if you will.

For now, however, my main point is that, if I'm going to try to get produced by the small amateur theater companies that produce a vast majority of the theater in America, they're already going to have so little money to offer me that I might as well just give it away to them. I'll map out the specifics of how this will work when I start having plays that I wish to offer in this way, but this is the train of thought that I have been working with. And, to be clear, I won't be using this model with everything I write, and I will still charge large and for-profit companies to produce my work, and I will still charge when I get hired to write. But there are three plays I am now working on that will be made available, for free, to small theater companies, under the terms that I will map out, and I wanted to explain some of my reasoning behind this.

More plays of Max Sparber.

ANOTHER SONG about my punk and glam rock-inspired musical about the Internet, NSFW.

"THIS PARTY IS OVER" LYRICS:
Jamie she had cancer
Or so she said online
But when she then logged off
Jamie was doing fine
Millions followed her posts
Concern spread worldwide
When it got too much for her
Jamie claimed she died
This party is over

Donna she was 16
36-28-36
She hit on men in chatrooms
She was looking for some kicks
Mike he was suspicious
Wanted to find out what he can
Donna was married and 50
Donna she was a man
This party is over

Jim set up a camera
Jim he ate some pills
Jim he lay down then
Jim was looking for some thrills
Everybody watched then
As the cops bust down Jim's door
Jim he was not moving
He told you he was hardcore
This party is over

Kitty fell from a window
Dan was shot in the thigh
You can watch her as she tumbles
You can watch him as he writhes
The comments call them fakers
The comments say they lie
But there are hundreds more on YouTube
One must actually show somebody die
This party is over

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A NEW SONG for my play NSFW.


"BARELY LEGAL" LYRICS:
Staring at the iBook screen
She's just another small town teen
Don't really give a damn
She's lonely and bored and she owns a Web cam

Ooh baby
Ooh ooh baby
Doubled over one way
Or down and spread eagle
Ooh baby
Ooh ooh baby
Don't you know your power
When you're barely legal

There's a man online from Arkansas
Who can't believe the things he saw
She promises a little but then she gives more
But daddy's knock knock knocking at the door

Ooh baby
Ooh ooh baby
Doubled over one way
Or down and spread eagle
Ooh baby
Ooh ooh baby
Don't you know your power
When you're barely legal

Mommy's crying and dad's in a rage
These ain't the things that girls should do when they are her age
Maybe it's naughty and maybe it's obscene
What the hell is there to do when you're bored and 18

Ooh baby
Ooh ooh baby
Doubled over one way
Or down and spread eagle
Ooh baby
Ooh ooh baby
Don't you know your power
When you're barely legal

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