dylanbrody.com

In March I got to perform at a splendid event in NY, put together by Kelly Carlin and Tony Hendra to honor the memory of George Carlin. It was a huge thing for me, a moment of odd, personal closure. It was a beautiful and touching evening. I was thrilled to have been a part of it. And here, attached, is the part of it that I was.

CHARMED LIFE

In 1994, when Nancy and I were about to get married, we took a trip to the East coast so that she could meet my family. She gets very nervous on planes. I assured her that we live a charmed life, but that didn’t help. To distract her from the fact that we were hurtling through the air at hundreds of miles an hour, I used the flight time to teach her the basics of poker and to tell her about my grandfather. I was seventeen when he died and he was the one member of the family she would not get to meet. I told her how he taught me gin rummy first and then poker. I remembered – I remember still how serious he became over the card table. He admonished me to remember that poker is not a game of luck, it is a game of psychology, not the cards but the finances. It’s not about who gets dealt the best cards, it’s about who takes the chips.

In many ways, the timing of the trip was perfect. My Grandmother was in the very early stages of Alzheimers. At this point, the disease had only affected her enough to turn every conversation into a surreal nineteen seventies game show. “I went into that place with the buildings and the smell.”

“Manhattan?”

“Yes! And I was on forty-third street with that annoying woman.”

“Aunt Sarah?”

“No! Bad breath! Long boring stories!”

“Your best friend Katie!”

“Yes! And we saw that man! He used to horrible in New York and then he was horrible all over the country and now he’s going to be horrible from Space.”

“Howard Stern?”

“Yes!”

Congratulations, Grandma, you’re moving on to the dementia pyramid.

Her decline had made my mother hyper-aware of the genetic crap shoot she was facing. She pulled me aside and said, “Dylan, you have to promise me that if I ever start to show symptoms you’ll tell me so that I know when it’s time to take my own life.”

I said, “Mom, we just had this conversation twenty minutes ago.”

In order to defray the cost of the trip, I had arranged to have a stand-up gig in Atlantic City, a gig that was supposed to take place Friday and Saturday, pay about half of what I’d spent on airline tickets and that would provide me and Nancy two nights in a fancy hotel for romance.

When I called to do my final confirmations, though, I was told that the job did not, in fact, include a hotel room. Saddened by the turn of events, but still wishing to do the shows and collect the check, I made reservations at a cheap motel and my wife changed her flight plans so that she could fly home from Laguardia airport that evening.

She went to the airport for a seven thirty flight. I drove to Atlantic City for the gig.

My feature act was also disappointed to find out that he was not getting a hotel room. We were both disappointed to find out that this was due to a dispute between the show-runner and the hotel and that we would not be performing in the swanky hotel bar. We would be performing in front of a big vinyl banner hung on a wall of the parking lot in front of an audience that would be sitting in plastic folding chairs. Irritable waitresses took elevators to and from the bar to provide very slow drink service.

The show did not go well. The emcee, the feature act and I all found it difficult to maintain our rhythms what with the exhaust fumes and the occasional passage of cars searching for parking and slowing to stare in confused wonder at what appeared to be a performance art installation involving grumpy people seated in a parking garage and staring sullenly at morose, disillusioned, poorly lit public speakers.

After the unpleasant Friday evening shows, the man who had booked the show, the man who was in a dispute with the hotel, the man who had claimed never to have said he would provide a room for me or the other acts, screamed at me for ruining his show. He blamed me for not being funny enough to fully overcome the circumstance. I told him that I would not be performing a second night in his lovely Atlantic City garage. He told me that he would not be paying me for my services.

I considered sticking around for the night, seeing if I could make up for the lost income at a poker table but instead I went to the Motel Six, checked out, and drove back Laguardia airport to see if I could switch out my ticket for something sooner.

I was able to get a ticket for a flight that would take me home the following morning. I turned away from the ticket counter, planning to find my departure gate and sleep on the floor. As I turned, in the midst of this vast, bustling airport, I saw Nancy. She stood, a little confused, looking down at a piece of paper. Her flight had been cancelled. She’d been pushed back to a morning flight, the very one I was booked to take. She had been given a voucher for a room. In a very nice hotel.

It was a romantic night. There was a sense of destiny, of serendipity, of having a run of bad luck and still living a charmed life.

As we were leaving in the morning for our flight, my wife grabbed the two cans of Pringles from the honor bar. I asked her what she was doing. I told her there would probably be food on the plane. She said she didn’t care. She said it was in honor of my grandfather. After a week that had felt like a bad deal, she thought he would like it if we left with all the chips.

_____________

I spent several hours one afternoon listening to Dar Williams’ OUT THERE LIVE album over and over again and weeping.  It had not been my best week ever.

It was 2004 and my literary manager called to tell me that one of the other people who worked at her company didn’t like anything I’d ever written and she had to drop me from the roster.  So, once again, I found myself an underemployed Hollywood writer without representation.

In the midst of this, I had done only a rough draft of a piece to record for broadcast that week.  Succumbing to the hollow despair of the middle-aged man in a career crisis, I began to feel that rewriting and recording for no pay was a sort of punishment for my own lack of success.  Instead of working on the piece I had intended to record, I listened to Dar Williams and wept and wrote an ancient zen parable which I will present now.

As Jin Sun Ki emerged into the chill morning air, the low hung sun reflected off the dewy grass and the stone steps.  His morning’s meditations left his senses keen, his mind alert.  He noticed the scuffmarks on the stones at once.  Although he would cultivate a frown over the discovery later, his first reaction was to smile lightly at the evidence of misbehavior.

He adjusted his course to take him around to the wide training lawns.  The younger novices stood in neatly ordered rows.  Having finished their jumping jacks and their sit ups, they now engaged in toe-touches, their arms spread wide and their movements unsynchronized.  Jin Sun Ki adopted a look of serious concern as he stepped up in front of the assembly.  He raised his voice effortlessly to spread over the field reaching every student all the way to the back.  “Apparently,” he began without preamble, “despite my specific words to the contrary, somebody here has decided to use the steps and pathways at the rear of the temple for skateboarding practice.”  He paused for a moment letting the words soak in as though the matter was incredibly weighty.  Then he went on.  “Would anybody here like to tell me anything about this?”

Sheepishly, one boy raised his hand.  It took only a glance for Master Ki to acknowledge him and give him the floor.  “It was probably Mark,” the boy said.

“Shut up,” Mark sniped.  “It was not.”

The first boy shrugged, his ears reddening.

Jin Sun Ki put up a calming hand, palm forward.  “Let me rephrase.  I am not interested in finger-pointing or accusations.  Does anybody want to take responsibility for having done this?”  He left a respectable pause in which the boys remained silent except for a bit of shuffling and weight shifting.  “All right then.  Following your morning training, you will all gather at the back steps.  Continue.”   He walked away and left the students to finish their exercises.

At ten a.m. the kids showed up at the back steps, sweat soaked and wobbly from the early workout.  Half a dozen buckets awaited them and in each bucket, several hand-brushes soaked in watery cleansing solution.  Jin Sun Ki stood at the topmost step and gestured silently toward the buckets.  His meaning came through clearly.  With a bit of a shared groan, the students took up the brushes and knelt on the cold, stone floor.  They began the laborious process of scrubbing the stones clean, eliminating the dirt and the scuffmarks from the wide space a bit at a time with their rough brushes.

Shortly after noon a twelve-year-old boy named Thomas unbent his back.  Raging against the injustice of the world he strode up the steps to the place where Master Ki now sat on the stones reading a mystery novel.  He waited for the master to notice him.  Jin Sun remained focused on his reading.  Thomas breathed loudly, hoping the master’s attention would be drawn to the sound.  He cleared his throat.  The master did not look at him.  At last he said, in a voice that trembled just a little bit despite his efforts to keep it steady, “Master Ki?”

Master Ki set aside his book and looked at the boy.

“Master Ki,” the boy repeated, “I don’t think this is fair.”

“No?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?” The master asked him.

“Well…” the boy slowed, having believed his thought would be obvious.  “The thing is, I didn’t skateboard on the stones.  I don’t even have a skateboard.”

“Uh-huh…?” Master Ki said, encouraging him to go on.

“Well, I don’t see why I should be punished when I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“You haven’t done anything wrong?”

“Nothing.  I didn’t mess up the floor.  I didn’t even try to tell you who did mess up the floor.  So, I didn’t do anything wrong and still I’m being punished.  That doesn’t seem fair, does it?”

Jin Sun looked out at all the boys, bent over the stones with their brushes.  He turned back to Thomas.  “If you’ve done nothing wrong,” he said softly, “then you are not being punished.  You’re just cleaning a floor.”  He grinned at Thomas for a moment.

Then Jin Sun Ki returned to his reading.

Thomas returned to his task.

I wrote this with the Dar enhanced tears streaming down my face.  When my wife got home from work she could hear the music coming from my office.  She knows I’ve been having a rough time lately.  She called up to me, “Hey, Baby!  You doin’ okay?”

There was a young master who taught Tae Kwon Do for a while at the studio where I study.  One night, a long time ago, before I was a master, before I was even a black belt, but not long before – brown belt, red belt, in there somewhere – advanced enough that he expected a great deal of me, Master Seo asked me how I was and I said, “Eh…  I’m tired, sir.”

This twenty-six year old became very stern and ordered me into the office.  He had me sit down.  He stood behind the desk and lectured me.  He said, “Dylan, never share your weakness.  Everybody is tired.  Everybody is scared.  Everybody has enough weakness of their own.    You are a martial artist.   You share your strength.  Tired?  I don’t care.  Scared?  I don’t care.  You, all the time, say ‘yeah!  I feel great!  I feel good!  I feel strong!’  You share your strength, your good feeling.  Makes everybody feel better, stronger.  Soon to be black belt.  This is your job.   Your responsibility.”

So, I was sitting in my office weeping and my wife shouted, “You doin’ okay?”  and I thought of Young Master Seo.

I shouted back, “Yeah!  I’m fine.  I’m just. . .  cleaning the floor.”

Since my office is carpeted, she shouted up the stairs at me, “Do I know what that means?”

“Nah,” I yelled.  “Just . . .  I’m writing a new piece, I think.”

“Oh, good!” My wife said.  “How’s it coming?”

“It feels good,” I said.  “It feels strong.”

“Excellent!”  She said, appearing in the doorway of my office.  “I like to hear that.”

When my wife smiles, it is very difficult to hang on to much sadness.  It occurred to me that for perhaps the five-thousandth time, the martial arts had saved me from sliding into depression.

She took a book that she’d left open to mark her page and went downstairs to continue reading.

I returned to my task.

Click for the JK Taekwondo Website

{INTERESTED IN STUDYING martial arts?  I would urge you to check out JK Taekwondo with locations in Burbank, Reseda, Glendale and Lamont}

A few months ago I performed TRUE ROMANCE at Alan Olifson’s Word Play at the FAKE GALLERY in Hollywood.

I suspect this piece, in a new incarnation, will wind up being the final track on my next CD, recording this fall for winter release.

A CALL TO ARTS

By

Dylan Brody

When I was a child, my father taught a film course at Skidmore College.  Every Wednesday he would bring home a movie to screen in our living room so that he could make notes and plan his lesson before taking the boxed reels to the campus for Thursday’s screening and Friday’s class.  He ran each term chronologically so the course would start with a silent comedy and silent drama, move on through the Marx Brothers, a nineteen thirties romance, usually a Fred Astaire musical, a Hitchcock picture, a fifties musical.  A representative of the European auteur tradition always closed out the course.  While kids at school discussed last night’s episode of Happy Days, I reviewed Breathless in my mind’s eye.  With subtitles.

Those were heady nights for me.  Before the advent of On Demand downloads, before TiVo, before DVD stores, before laser disk came and went, before that first consumer VHS machine with the switch-lever that clunked clockwise to the “play” position, in those long ago days when a plastic knob on the television snapped past snow-filled bandwidth toward the next of three available channels, my father set up the projector in the living room and the history of cinema flickered by on the bare white wall.  I watched them, laughing, weeping, fully engaged.

After each film, my mom and dad drank coffee and I listened to their conversation.  They would start out by discussing aspects of the film-maker’s craft.  The editing, the pace, the shooting style.  Then they would move on to the part of the conversation that they clearly found more important.  They would piece together the underlying message of the film.

I was very young.  This part of the conversation almost always came as a surprise to me.  Although it came to this every week, I was like the audience in a comedy club, fooled each time into believing that this time the comic really means it when he says, “but seriously, folks.”  How could my favorites, the laugh-aloud comedies possibly be examined for an underlying message, as if they were the same as classic literature?  Sure, with some of the politically charged material I could see it, Battleship Potempkin, even Stalag Seventeen with its wartime self righteousness wrapped in suspense and mystery, but the surreal antics of the Marx Brothers?  How could Buster Keaton’s pratfalls or Charlie Chaplain’s adorable tramp possibly have been constructed to convey something of real importance?

Inevitably, as they discussed and examined the story and structure, a through line came to light.  Once it was pried loose of the trappings, the message was obvious and I felt a childish shame at how easily I had been taken in by it.  I had been fed an idea and I had internalized it without even realizing that it was imbedded in the material, woven into the fabric of an emotional experience.  Chaplain, Keaton, the Marx Brothers all taught about the plight of the underclass, the struggle of the immigrant, the power of humor to undermine fatuous authority, the absurdity of social convention, the dangers of blind obedience, the potential for greatness that lies in the least of us.  Viewed through the academic lens, films that had seemed to me to be pure entertainment slipped into a new focus and revealed a complex artistry, a multi-textured fabric woven as tightly and as meaningfully as those medieval tapestries whose images hold carefully plotted morality tales.

At first I feared that such examination of the work would ruin it for me, but seeing the joy of my father as he laughed through the comedies, the enchantment as he watched the musicals, it became apparent that the analysis did not undermine the aesthetic experience at all.  It enhanced it, deepening the impact and further drawing the viewer into an active engagement with the material rather than a passive reception.

Exposed to this process from an early age, I developed habits of critical thinking in my role as an audient.  I developed an ethical, almost moralistic approach to writing and performing my own work.

Often, this put me in an uncomfortable position, voicing my thoughts, my ideas, my view of the world to people with whom I disagreed, people with whom I stood at odds.  I felt that my only hope of survival and success was to be so funny in performance, so skilled in wordsmithery that the work would be enjoyed for its aesthetic value and that the underlying messages could come through as subtly as the anti-war message buried brilliantly in the hilarity of Duck Soup. I knew that whatever I presented, a message would be in there somewhere.  If I did my job right, it would carry on the frequency of laughter to an unknowing audience.  If I let the seams show, though, if the message overpowered the aesthetic, my work would become didactic and uninteresting.  I strove to ride the delicate balance despite the fear, the vulnerability, the natural anxiety of the creative process.

Like so many artists, I traveled to Los Angeles to set up shop.  I believed that as a skilled artist with talent and a growing body of work I would surely find support for my endeavors in this city at the center of cinema and broadcast media production.  It never occurred to me that my experience at the cinematheque living room was unique, that my approach to the crafts of writing and performing was entirely my own.

I have often said that “entertainment” is a word people use when they don’t want to take responsibility for what they say through their art.  I have come to believe that, while pithy, this is a bit unkind.  I suspect that people who strive to create “mere entertainment” actually do not realize that they are saying things through their work.  Comics who say, “it’s just a joke,” to excuse racism or cruelty or outright lies do not realize that jokes have power and resonance and consequence.  They do not act with any malicious intent, they simply act out of ignorance.  The Entertainment Industry into which I plunged expecting to be recognized and rewarded for my artistic excellence is not in the business of soothing the egos or funding the dreams of visionaries.  Quite the opposite.

The Entertainment Industry — as its name should have told me had I been paying attention — is an industry trading in entertainment. It is a profit-seeking construct selling the product of craftsmen.  Writers, actors, comics, dancers and so on, all serve to provide materials for widespread release and high-margin sales.  Men and women in offices choose multi-million dollar projects that will generate more in sales than they cost to produce.  They are not equipped to judge an aesthetic or to unravel stories to find the underlying messages.  They certainly are not geared to handle the anxiety of the creative process.  Gambling with magnificent budgets creates a whole different sort of anxiety.  They cannot help but seek out a level of confidence and reassurance somewhere in the mix.  These executives pick up that slack by seeking formulae that they know will sell, by making and remaking scripts and updates of scripts and sequels to updates of scripts that have sold well in the past.  They do not  hate art or fear new ideas.  They do not know that they trade in art.  They do not know that movies and TV series contain ideas.

Artists, seek approval to ease the anxiety that comes with creation and self-expression.  Believing that the money of the studios represents approval and success, we  allow ourselves to be turned into entertainers.  We set aside our visions, our ideas, our commitment to craft and aesthetic in hopes of getting a green light from men and women who say things like, “It’s not show art. It’s show business.”  We rewrite scripts to make them more “edgy,” or more “whimsical,” or more of whatever the buzzword of the year is.  We forget that this is the buzzword of the year because it is the way a critic described the unexpected independent hit of last year.  We hear the irritating aphorism, “If you want to send a message call Western Union,” and we think we should write more vapidly, not more cunningly.  Don’t be fooled.  Improve the aesthetic and the message will sing in the undertones.  Feign pointlessness and you make points you do not intend, you find targets at which you do not aim.

As the tramp swings at the cop, laugh.  But also remember that Charlie Chaplain faced fierce opposition from wealthy fascists and Nazi sympathizers in the American west.  Remember that the Marx Brothers worked the road, the stages of New York, honing and refining every sketch-scene to hair-trigger comedic precision so that they could say, “we know this will slay ‘em,” in order to get their subversive brilliance on the silver screen.

Develop your craft diligently.  Refine your vision scrupulously.  Dissect and edit and examine your work ruthlessly.  Share the best of yourself and stand naked in the light protected only by the knowledge that if you are judged harshly, at least you are judged on your own, unfiltered essence.

Do not seek out representatives of the Entertainment Industry in hopes that they will validate you with a green light and a paycheck.  Rather, seek them out with a plan to use their money well.  Seek them out with an offer of happy collaboration.  Seek them out with the work you know to be of great value and the intent to see it paired with the investment they can make in its distribution.  Seek them out and give them the validation they need.  Instill in them the confidence that can only come when you deem them worthy of a position on the team that brings your work to light.  Then do the work that shines.

Let us usher in a new Golden Age of the lively arts in this Golden Age of new media.  Some day, all of the celluloid, all of the video, all the old-timey DVDs and hard drive data will be transferred to nano-memory micro-crystals.  College students will down-draw us from the archives.  We will perform in awkward two-dimensionality on their retinas through optical in-feed implants.  Our EQ balanced voices will play oddly rich and pure through their aural-cortical stimu-brackets.  Let their professors say that we were brave.  Let them expose young minds to the back story in terms of our courage, the courage to speak truth to power, to mock bigots in a time of xenophobia, to promote acceptance in a time of exclusion, to encourage peace at a time when peace is derided as cowardice, as surrender, as treason.  Let the professors praise us in retrospect for revealing our intellects even as intellectualism came to be vilified by an increasingly Palinized nation.  If we do our job right, the students will rankle a bit.  They will stiffen.  They will resist such critical examination, saying, “Sure. But at the end of the day, they were just so good.  They were just so funny.”

END

In December I was thrilled to perform in Wendy Hammers’ (Jersey Girl Productions) holiday-themed Tasty Words show.

I closed the show with two pieces.  Each has its own clip below.

The first is, I believe, my first ever video recording of Xenophobia and The Jewish Druid.  That alone is worth the price of admission to this blog post.  No?

SEGMENT ONE

SEGMENT TWO

In December of ‘08 I went to the Sit ‘n’ Spin Christmas show.  Barbara Romen and Paul Provenza introduced me to the producers and brought be to the after-show party and opened the door to performance with the Sit ‘n’ Spin crowd at the Comedy Central Stage.  I’ve done the show several times now and was very pleased, this year, to be part of the Christmas show my own self.  Here’s the piece I did for your viewing pleasure.  Spencer Green of the Huffington Post described the piece as “Bob Newhart meets Bill Hicks.” I couldn’t be happier about that.

I like to support the arts.

I met a man on my way into 7-11. An unemployed magician. He said, “I got a quarter in my pocket. I can make it disappear.”

I said, “Show me.”

He snapped his fingers and said, “It’s gone.”

“Wow,” I said. “Where’d it go?”

He said, “Check your pocket.”

Sure enough, there was a bright shiny quarter amongst all my other loose change. I said, “How do I know it’s yours?”

He said, “Check the date.”

“1992,” I told him.

“Yep. That’s mine.”

So I gave it back to him.

He said, “You want to see another one?”

I did.

He asked if I had a ten dollar bill. I said, “All I have is a twenty.”

He said it would do. He took the twenty-dollar bill from me and folded it up real small. When he unfolded again, right in front of me, no abracadabras, no alacazams, it had transformed into a fiver. He handed it back to me.

I said, “Change it back, now.”

He said, “If I could turn fives into twenties, I wouldn’t need to be out here working for tips.”

“Oh!” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I was supposed to tip you.” I gave him the five. It was the least I could do for a struggling artist. Besides, for all I knew, that quarter he had transported from his pocket to mine might have been the only money he had.

He said, “Thanks,” and I went into the store to buy milk for my morning coffee.

As I came out, the magician approached another man. He said, “I got a quarter in my pocket. I can make it disappear.”

I knew what was coming, so I watched as closely as I could.  I swear, I didn’t see him do anything but snap his fingers.

I wrote a piece last week to do at the MOTH.  The assigned topic was “Disguises.”  Because of the way MOTH shows are structured, I didn’t get to perform that night.  I worked the piece a bit more and had the opportunity to do it last night at John Fugelsang’s Comedy Nation show.  Here’s that performance.

A couple of weeks ago I read my story “Arc” at Sit n Spin at the Comedy Central Stage.  This is the piece where I talk about immortality, Dustin Hoffdog, the matted mutt who never died and my brief and encouraging interaction with George Carlin.  Kelly Carlin-McCall, George’s daughter also read a story that night and her story was also about her father.  That gave my reading an extra sort of resonance for me, a connection to Kelly’s piece.  It felt a little bit like it made up for the time years ago when I offended Kitty Bruce.

Here’s the performance: