Alternate Title: Pretension Wars
by Danny Baird
There’s a beat-up, red SUV that I see every day while I walk to work. Proudly displayed is a bumper sticker that says “Read Infinite Jest.” When I first encountered this text, I read it as the pinnacle of ostentatious pretension: the revelation of an intellectual resumé on the back of a car. Fuck you, dude. I have read many books. You’ve read Infinite Jest? Big whoop. Fuck you.
I hate this car.
Learning to Learn
by Danny Baird
I'm terrible at languages (English excepted, of course.) In elementary and middle schools, I took a Spanish class once a week and only excelled when it came time to sing "Cumpleaños Feliz." In high school, I avoided my language requirement. I knew it would bring down my GPA and I was paranoid that I'd lose my scholarship. I signed up for Latin under the guise of "Improved SAT scores," but really took the dead language so I could avoid a living one. Latin is unspoken. You can't fail publicly in Latin. Also, you can reverse engineer much of the vocabulary from English. (This is exactly the opposite way that people hope to be better at English by taking Latin. That irony isn't lost on me.)
A Poor Credit History.
by Danny Baird
I have a fraught relationship with credit. Over the past 4 or so months, I've been working like crazy to pay off the intense amount of debt I've accrued in my post-collegiate failure to adult. It's been draining. Working a 40 hour week, making a fuckton of tips, and then being unable to impulsively spend that money on booze and amazon prime? It's a nightmare. The money disappears with no tangible reward.
I have to remember that I put myself in this position. I'm the reason I've so much debt to pay off... and as of today I'm one step closer to conquering that indebtedness. On this auspicious day, the day I finally close one of my two credit cards - the day my credit becomes manageable - I'd like to reflect on some of the cool, worthless, amazing things credit allowed me to do:
Reasons for sending a draft to a friend.
by Danny Baird
Edit or approval? Why did I send that draft your way? What does that say about me?
I have really smart friends. Friends that, given a quick email, are totally willing to give me "edits" on things I've written. I often take advantage of these friends and my writing has benefitted immensely from their input. Recently, though, I've tried to be aware of my motives in send them my work.
Do I want edits, or do I want approval? Approval is fine, it's necessary in some cases. You can't publish your work without approving of it However, approval should (in most cases) come from the writer, not the reader. If I'm send an email to a friend asking for their thoughts: it had better be with the intention of taking their edits, not in search of a pat on the back.
That's is a new standard I'm setting for myself. This will have two benefits. One: I'll start learning some self respect. Two: I won't waste my friends' time. Their time is my my most valuable asset.
Danny Baird is a writer and theatremaker from Baltimore, Maryland.
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The amount I have, The amount I need.
by Danny Baird
I have the audacity to get my cartilage pierced - Do I have the audacity to wear it in public?
I have the audacity to think I'm better than my serving job - Do I have the audacity to demand more?
I have the audacity to be out - Do I have the audacity to be proud?
I have the audacity to write about my experiences - I don't have the audacity to publish them.
I'm an audacious person, but I could afford more. I have the audacity to dream - do I have the audacity to achieve? There's a limit to everything, but I pray everyday that I could dare to be limitless.
Danny Baird is a writer and theatremaker from Baltimore, Maryland.
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A question from a coworker...
by Danny Baird
“I don’t know what I’m doing… but I’m doing a lot of it.”
My coworker wants to know exactly what it is I do. I’m only part-time at my job in Annapolis, and am happy to be so. I seem to be the only person who doesn’t want full time hours and to live under one of the restaurant’s eight-tops. I made the mistake of identifying myself an “writer” on one of my first days at the restaurant. It don’t mean "mistake" in that I identified wrongly. I mean to say that I drew attention to myself. I love attention, but I only want it when I’m being funny or charming or my hair looks really good. I didn't want it like this.
In the New York hospitality industry, calling yourself a “writer” wouldn’t draw special. Arts adjacent folk populated the serving & hospitality gigs I’d had in the big apple. People ask what you do all the time, of course, but one word answers suffice; “actor,” “writer,” “dancer,” “theatremaker,” “avante garde coloring book designer.” There’s such a glut of art in the City that the decision to make it seems less revolutionary, more pedestrian.
Subwoofer as Cruel Catharsis
by Danny Baird
Standing under a tent whose name might be What (but also could be Who) I found Artaud in Tove Lo.
I've been playing with EDM in theatre for a while now. Love for the New York club scene and the revelation that was "Here Lies Love" led me to matriculate in an electronic music program after scooping up my BFA. Something about my experience at Bonaroo clarified my passion for the form. Uniting music & technology to overthrow the senses felt like the theatre Artaud had theorized - a theatre as impractical as it was enchanting.
I've a bastardized reading of Artaud. I ignore whatever I believe to be "fredian nonsense;" all talk of the unconscious being the wellspring of art & truth & other bullshit. Admittedly, one could argue (comfortably) that such whimsy is the centerpiece of the Theatre of Cruelty. I choose to focus on the end game of Artaud: an overwhelming of the senses that leaves one more open to [insert the goal of your theatre piece here.]
Why EDM then? There's a lot of ways to overwhelm an audience: fill the theatre with live rats, pump in the smell of brimstone, put Liza Minelli onstage. The profoundest differences, in my opinion, between electronic music and traditional are the Limiter & the Subwoofer. The limiter allows for instruments to be their absolute loudest by hard-compressing the nuance out of the audio, creating a wall of sound. One can apply limiters to natural instruments, but as you compress the audio to extremes the organic faults that make acoustic music sound so beautiful oft become unlistenable. With electronic music using synthetic, digital instruments, everything feels LOUDER without necessarily being literally LOUDER than amplified acoustica.
The subwoofer grants access to a world of sounds unknown to music. The booming bases they allow are the sounds of cataclysm made musical. Tectonic plates warring with one another, the grinding of warring glaciers: these sounds are accessible to the producer of electronic music. A drum core of hundreds could hardly could hardly compete with one 808 obsessed DJ and the Bonaroo speaker system. The unnaturalness of these low tones, more akin to war than music, chief that overwhelming of the senses Artuad desires. Music becomes physicalized, brutalized; no longer listened to but experienced.
In Here Lies Love, the roaring of a chopper turns to music, turns to silence, turns to tears. At bonaroo, the dropping of the bass evokes ecstasy - unearned decadence. I'm not saying that all EDM is inherently Cruelty. But, when their methods and interests happen to align, Artaud's impractical dreamings come closer to reality: a forceful cleansing of all but the present moment.
Danny Baird is a writer and theatremaker from Baltimore, Maryland.
EMAIL | WEBSITE | WORDPRESS | OTHER POSTS
Works In Progress
by Danny Baird
I had a bit of a bender yesterday. After crossfit, I went into DC and availed myself of boozy brunch, drinking games, and mystery shots. Twelve solid hours of drinking were sopped up by one of the best burgers I've ever experienced (and a very disappointing Jumbo Slice digestif.) Besides all the alcohol, it was a remarkably tame day. Not quite debauched, but definitely the sort of day my mother would disapprove of.
Now, in the aftermath, I find myself wearied, hungover. I'm surrounded by piles of papers representing the half-done work of a hundred incompletes. I'd love to say that I'm charging into the hordes of the unfinished, brandishing my waterman and cappuccino as a sword and shield in my art-making crusade. I'd love to say that. I'd be lying though. I'm incapacitated by self-doubt, unworthy of my fountain pen excalibur.
A Submissions Application Epic.
by Danny Baird
It seems perverse to describe your baby in 40 words. You pick only the most glittering adjectives. You plot the fuck out of it. You wax poetic on the importance of it in the contemporary political landscape. You make all your verbs active because your creative writing professor would smack you if they knew the shit you got away with nowadays. Your description borders on manic. It runs closer to 300 than to 40 words.
Back to the drawing board.
You stick to plot. You run 39 words. Success! It's incomplete though. You haven't mentioned that your baby is a musical and that musical uses electronic music and is theBomb.com. That stuff isn't important right?
You Could've Done Something Else.
by Danny Baird
A gentleman in Ugg boots and an oversized flannel approaches the Starbucks counter. He opens his empty wallet, sighs showily, and pulls out a credit card belonging to his wealthy father. His gal-pal, dressed in a LuLu Lemon uni-suit and gucci slippers, clicks her tongue disapprovingly as she pulls out her fiancé's AmEx. They are both fresh off class at BDC, or Alvin Ailey, or Circle in the Square. It's hard to keep up - the busy life of an artist is as expensive as it is tiring. Head raised to the sky, he decries his penniless existence to Dionysus above:
"Every-time my wallet is empty - I just remind myself that I made theatre my mistress... I couldn't have done anything else."
No. Here's the deal, bitch: You absolutely could have. EASILY. You could've gotten a job at Target in BumbleFuck, America, opened a world of warcraft account, and spent the rest of your days as a elf-mage/cashier-stockperson. It would've been easy.
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