wed 26 nov 2008 03:31:34 — witte de withstraat
a play in one act i hope
about koriander. some people love it and some hate it. this was made clear to me by my friend hg. but i can't really even sense koriander, neither taste nor smell it. (korianderzaad is another thing, the kind that comes in the little bottle. i like that a lot.)
i started trying to write a one act play for the stage. at least i hope it's one act. it starts out: "Last night at Isabel's. A play in one act, I hope. By S G Collins". the characters are vicky, lorelei, and amelia, plus potentially one guy who delivers chinese food, but i didn't get to his bit yet so i'm not sure. more on that later.
now this past saturday, jk kinda outdid himself with the cooking. it turned out to be his best dinner that i've ever tasted. marina took off early from work to come help in the kitchen, thank god. also her friend micky was here, she was put in charge of chopping the koriander, and discovered she hates koriander. pani helped briefly too. marina calls out to me as i'm holding the knife, "collins do you want us to go get more beer while you peel and chop the ginger?" -- i'm like "fuck no, let me go buy the beer!"
at some point i got out my a1e and started filming various episodes of dinner. some of it was kinda funny cuz micky was playing the role of micky.
after dinner i ended up around the corner having drinks at what hg calls "agabar", because aga, a polish acquaintance of his, runs the place. gt from upstairs came with us. turns out they are part of the rebellion against the rookverbod, so we were smoking in the bar just like the old days.
on sunday i wasn't so sure about the footage from saturday. it was crying out to be edited together in a way that might be quite bizarre and amusing. but i was afraid that anyone seeing it might think we were just ridiculing micky. there was no compassionate, gentle way to put it together.
then on monday early morning micky was sposed to get up and fly back to sofia. instead, she tore her up air ticket into tiny pieces and flushed it down jk's toilet, and hopped back into bed. she had decided to stay in amsterdam and try to make her way here. that's kinda brave i guess. but maybe she ought to have told the people who were waiting for her at the airport in sofia. gee ya think? mh the guitarist was with her, and felt a little overwhelmed because of the need to try and help the girl multiplied by his lack of sleep. early monday evening, she and marina were here discussing how she was going to find a place to live, when gt knocked on the door and came in for a cola. now micky is staying in a room in gt's flat. so that all happened kinda quick didn't it.
the other thing that happened is that i found in my notebook an email address for that nieke, and wrote to her, and she wrote back. cool. she thought i was writing cuz i didn't remember who she was, so she reminded me who she was, and that she was writing a book, inspired by something we talked about in the doorway of the cave. i was glad to hear that she is writing, because i had a feeling that's what she is supposed to be doing. but if she thought i didn't remember her, that means i must have appeared (ie been) really drunk the two times i met her in person.
i'm not being particularly vivid tonight am i. i'm being mechanical. something about my current writing exercise is making me this way. so much of it is about pure dialog, and i am being wicked distillatory (?) with the dialog.
pani tells me she doesn't think grotowski's plays had any dialog at all.
last night i read one of eugene o'neill's first one act plays, from like 1913 or something. i figured i would like o'neill, cuz didn't he do that theater in provincetown? but the thing i read was crap. maybe i should try reading another one, maybe it won't be crap.
i'm also trying to read the cork plays by conal creedon. i'm slowly starting to warm up to the stuff. i guess the trouble is that 85% of creedon's velcro is pure local color, and since i'm not from cork it doesn't catch me. but then his novel "passion play" has been translated into bulgarian! how the hell did they do that?