Back on the horse that bit me (or something)

It is, in fact, astoundingly easy to feel like a failure as a writer. There is always another milestone of which to fall short. There is always another comparison to beat one a little further into the ground. This is the simplest thing in the world. I’m talking about writing because this is what I know, but substitute whatever art or endeavor you want. Drawing. Dancing. Running. Heart surgery. Waffle making. Life. It’s easy to feel a lot of things slipping away from you. Maybe they even do slip away from you – from me – every day, just a little further out of my grasp.

But that’s the easy part. It’s easy to fall off a damned horse. They’re practically designed for it! The horse is designed for itself, not for you.

I recently asked a friend to read my online dating profile, as, yes, I have slowly begun wading back into the pool of too-old photos and forced witticisms composing that world. This friend gave me some comments, and then topped off his remarks by admiring whatever success I’ve achieved in life. This, to me, sounded bizarre. After all, what have I achieved? It’s such an odd thing, to think of oneself this way. Even writing this paragraph makes me uncomfortable because there are so many questions packed into whatever my response could be. How do I take up the space in the universe to say I’ve done anything? How do I get my hands on that space – wrap my fingers around it and claim it and allow it to be mine. What was my friend even talking about?

It’s simpler if I haven’t achieved anything, because then there’s no question of what can or can’t be said. There’s no question of much, and so there’s nothing to doubt. And so there is the horse, its theatrically large rump, off which I have not so much slid as swan dived.

Well, fuck that.

I am super gluing myself to that horse.

Maybe that’s the trick: Just glue yourself so fast to that horse that it doesn’t even matter if you fall off – because you take the horse with you. If you get a bump on the head as you ride, maybe you slip a little, maybe you slide sideways in the saddle or even upside down, maybe you get some dirt rubbed into your face. Maybe you feel like a failure for a little while. But it doesn’t matter because you’re stuck on the horse the whole time anyway. I have stared at the ass end of a lot of horses after falling off again. I guess it’s okay if I climb up on one more. Even if the super glue doesn’t hold, even if I’m confronted with more horse butt. Hell, if the glue doesn’t work, maybe next time I’ll just staple myself to the saddle.

Theater review: The Nance on Broadway

Photos by Joan Marcus via http://www.lct.org/showMain.htm?id=219

There’s not a lot surprising about the plot of “The Nance,” but that hardly stops the play from being one of my favorite things I’ve seen so far this year. Chauncey Miles’ self-loathing as a semi-closeted gay burlesque performer of the 1930s runs too deep for the audience to imagine him riding off into the sunset, hand-in-hand, with Ned, the man he unexpectedly grows to love. Miles is too invested in hating himself (he’s a Republican, apparently shorthand even then, the play suggests, for minorities trying to shed their identifies), and Ned is too glossily good-looking and perfect, for their time together to last. But while they are together, while they manage to suspend themselves, briefly in time, their intersection is beautiful and dewey and hopeful.

The nance was a stereotypically camp gay character in burlesque, an outrageous queen who makes innuendo after innuendo without ever coming out and saying anything so crude as an actual come-on. Nances were usually played by straight men, but Miles is himself gay (he compares his performance to a black person acting in blackface). The combination of a gay performer in a gay role is particularly unfortunate at this time, when Mayor LaGuardia is out to save New York’s morals by cracking down on homosexuality, real or perceived. Miles swears this is simply a re-election ploy, that the administration has no real interest in the stage, and that all this will blow over.

The writing on the wall is writ large; if Miles can’t see it, everyone else can, including the audience. Even Miles’ brief outburst of outspokenness can’t change a course that feels inevitable from the first scene, when Miles and Ned meet at a lunch counter, a discreet cruising ground for the city’s gay male population. Miles is the world-weary city man; Ned is the naïve young man from upstate, fleeing a marriage that never should have been. Miles is older, and his version of love tends to end with breakfast and maybe a few dollar bills in the morning. Ned’s never heard of rough trade, has never even had sex with a man indoors. Miles’ cramped Hell’s Kitchen apartment looks like a small piece of heaven to Ned, and soon enough he and Miles are building what looks suspiciously like a life together.

Ned also becomes a burlesque performer, an accidental career change that somehow sticks, despite his wooden, terrified first performance. But Ned is young and built, and he plays role after role in a wide variety of sketches. Miles is always the nance, always flamingly gay. Thirty years before the Stonewall Riots, there is a price to be paid for that. Miles’ staunch attempts to stay mum on the administration’s odious scapegoating of the gay community fail when he himself becomes one of the targeted. Miles isn’t just angry, he’s wounded that the administration – the administration he’s defended and supported – would do this to him, of all people. Miles’ is world is crumbling, and he himself is struggling to keep his own internal world apart.

Some of the best parts, in fact, are the times when Miles externalizes his interior world onto the stage. We get these snippets of burlesque throughout the show, not just from Miles but from his fellow performers, the statuesque or lithe or (artificially) exotic women whose scanty clothing is as important as their comic timing, the burlesque manager who pleads with Miles to compromise, Ned himself, whose love for the stage blossoms as he embraces the city’s joys.

But while the stage matters to all of them, it means something even more important to Miles. His nance character is honest in a way his everyday life is not. The winking suggestiveness and the exaggerated mincing, the flirting with other male characters, the exuberance of the eyebrow wagging double entendre – Miles is safe to make these gestures on stage in a way he can’t do in real life. On the stage he can waggle his bottom at another man, remarking about finding an “opening” for the night at a cheap hotel. In real life, Miles can only make small, coded gestures at the Automat, make sideways comments that only approach their true subjects obliquely. When Miles loses the stage – the place where his internal life is lived out, simultaneously in and out of disguise – he loses his anchor. What else does he have left? What else is worth keeping, once that’s gone? If it was never quite believable that Ned and Miles would share their moment forever, that somehow the stage would save them from the outside, so-called real world, the loss of even the possibility is nonetheless a loss.

Amanda Palmer, generosity, money and profit

I finally got around to watching Amanda Palmer’s fantastically popular TED talk. She makes an interesting argument, that asking people for things affords them the opportunity to be generous. It’s okay to ask people for things, because the asking itself is a kind of exchange. That opportunity for generosity is in itself something that can be given to people.

If you’re not familiar with her, Palmer is a musician perhaps best known for two facts: She’s married to fantasy writer Neil Gaiman, himself incredibly successful; and she raised about $1.2 million on Kickstarter to fund the production of an album. In other words, she’s not arguing about asking for things because she has no other alternatives, because the constraints of poverty leave her no other options. She’s arguing about asking for things from an entirely different place.

There’s a lot to be said for asking; hell, as a journalist, I ask people for things all the time. And you’d be surprised how often people respond to being asked for things, because in some ways it’s so unusual. Declaring your intentions to the universe, as well, has its own power. Saying flat out what you want is a gesture of honesty and openness, revealing yourself and your desires. I applaud all of that.

But I see some big flaws in what she’s saying. For one thing, while Palmer might be open about what she’s seeking, she doesn’t necessarily know what someone else is seeking when they give her something. More importantly, her argument assumes that merely the asking is enough of an offering on the part of the asker. And sometimes, it isn’t. Sometimes, it’s just a way of avoiding being generous yourself, of denying that other people need things, too. Palmer herself has given us an unfortunate example of that.

Asking is a powerful action. Palmer learned this when she worked as a living statue, shortly after college. She was asking for a certain contact then, for a moment of connection, and she’d often get it, in a way people don’t necessarily get as they go to their offices or go get their coffees or pick up some groceries after work. But I think what she neglects in this argument is that she was, in fact, also asking for money. This was how she earned a living. Maybe the connection was nice, maybe the self-described “intense” eye contact gave her some satisfaction. But she was doing this for the money, and to gloss over that is to omit her central purpose. (As an aside, I walk past a lot of people doing similar in Times Square just about every day. I don’t see them as peddling connection so much as I see them trying to make a very difficult living. I give them a wide berth.)

When she toured on the album funded through Kickstarter, she asked for local musicians to volunteer to play on her stops. Again, asking is powerful, especially if it’s someone like Amanda Palmer – famous, successful, charismatic – who’s on the other end of the request. Asking for free labor in the arts, alas, is nothing new. Writers get asked to write for free all the time, for the nebulous benefit of exposure, much the same reward Palmer’s musicians got (aside from beer, high fives and hugs she promised). There’s something to be said for writing for free. It’s not like I get paid for this blog, after all, and for many sites, the user-generated comments are as much a part of the content as anything else, helping foster community. We’ve all done it.

But I’d say most of us (at least not those who consider themselves professionals) don’t do it for, say, the New Yorker. Or the Atlantic. Or the New York Times. Why not? Because those outlets are in a very different position from, say, this blog (har har). Those outlets are looking to get something out of a writer’s work beyond the opportunity for generosity, to the cold truth of profit. This very topic flared up recently when an editor at the Atlantic asked a well-known freelancer for a 1,200-word piece… for free. The writer refused, and he posted his correspondence with the editor to boot.

What’s the difference between Nate Thayer doing a piece for free for his own blog and doing a piece for free for the Atlantic? The Atlantic has no requirement to pay Thayer, after all. They don’t have a contract, and the magazine’s obligation is to itself, not to anyone else. But the Atlantic is also in business to make money; it’s seeking something out of Thayer’s work. It’s seeking profit. The Atlantic wasn’t just ungenerous with Thayer – and again, the magazine has no obligation to be generous – it was seeking something out of him that it wasn’t willing to offer him in return.

And this is Palmer’s problem. It’s one thing to ask your fans if anyone has a couch to borrow for the night (or several couches, for her crew and band, as well). Is that exploitative? Meh. It’s cheap, sure, but there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. If someone lives in a mansion with several extra rooms – an example Palmer herself brought up – well, hey, a few more houseguests wouldn’t seem a problem. The family of Honduran immigrants, who gave up their beds for Palmer et al., would seem a different question; they don’t have the beds to spare, and Palmer is actually displacing them for her own comfort. But then, the family could just as easily offered her the sofa instead, so it’s hardly cut and dried.

Still, Palmer could just as easily offered to take the sofa, couldn’t she? And with $1.2 million to fund her album, she could also have paid the musicians who played along her tour something, even if just a small fee. Instead, she seems to be saying, merely responding to her request was reward enough for those musicians. But unlike the couchsurfing, Palmer is asking for something here that she then commercializes. In asking for Thayer’s work, the Atlantic was seeking to profit off him. In asking musicians to play for free along her tour, Palmer was also looking to profit off others. In a way, she was asking for money again, just as in her living statue days. And again, she glosses over the financial gain she derived from these people. If she’d been playing free shows, basement parties, benefits, what have you? That’s a completely different story. That’s the difference between cutting a check to your favorite charity and writing an extra check to your local power company, just because you like electricity and what the hell, you have the money.

At some point, then, Palmer seems to be saying you should just try to score as much free shit as you can because it’s cool that people are willing to give you stuff. Palmer’s not a charity, and to treat herself as one for the sake of her argument (i.e, for the sake of getting stuff for free from people) strikes me as oblivious and self-serving at best. Palmer did eventually begin paying those local musicians on her tour – but only after an internet uproar. Ironically, for someone who so lavishly praises the generosity of others toward her, she was remarkably slow to offer that same generosity to others.