Under CARD

THE CEILING


I don't think Watchmen worked as a show but, oh!, that opening. People are saying now, "Why do we have to learn about the Tulsa race massacre from a TV show based on a comic book?" It's a fair question, but this is probably a more common situation in America's past than we can conceivably recall. We are a nation built on black, bleeding bodies. Bodies that Matter, to bring up Judith Butler, but I digress.

Joker is another thing on people's minds lately. I don't reference it to relate the movie to protests and riots because I know that the point behind this time of unrest, unlike the climatic scenes of that film, is clear and attainable: value black lives. I bring it up because I'm sure those who've seen it know that I'm ripping it off a bit with my "CARD" aspect of THE ROOF. Why?

Well, it's not just for stylistic purposes. THE ROOF, as I've mentioned before, is a piece of live theatre. The audience is a character in the play. Perhaps a brighter mind than mine can conceive of how to actually pluralize the audience character so that the play can be practical, but right now the way I imagine it it is with the singular reader/audience/you interacting with actors in the play. This is like a video game role-playing game (RPG) where there is simply one real person and a number of non-player characters (NPCs). Here the NPCs would be actors.

Actors have lines but when we watch a play we don't see the inner workings of their minds. For this reason in THE ROOF, I wanted to avoid having the audience character speak, even in an improvised sort of way, because... Well, how the hell do you write that? So I needed to make my character a non-speaking role and I remembered the card from Joker that Joaquin Phoenix's character provides to people to make them aware of his condition. I think that aspect of the film is incredibly well done and the way for me to do something similar without feeling the pressure of making it an iota as impacting as the scene in the movie is just to make it a joke.

The sentiment of the joke actually comes from my feeling over the last few months. I am a high school teacher and as schools were closed because of the coronavirus pandemic, we have been on an elearning model from mid-March until about two weeks ago when this post will be published. As a teacher, it is difficult already to leave my job at work and in a lot of ways I don't want to do so, but there are times that you have to be emotionally on during the work day and be, well, less emotionally on during your time off. With schools closed, I felt like I was mentally working all the time. I don't mean to make light of the difficult times that other people have gone and are going through; I don't even mean to say that this was a more difficult time for me than anyone else. What I am saying, though, is that I had a similar thought to the audience character in CARD: I felt like I had so much to do in connection with the elearning model and yet each day would end with a long to do list still before me. I found myself neglecting my already largely non-existent life (please laugh at my joke!). Can I go to the comic shop this week? No, because I'm not done with everything connected with school yet! Can I speak to that person I see? No, because I haven't written my term paper yet.

The CARD states: "I'll never talk again." in quotes because it's a reference to Lady Gaga's "Speechless" from The Fame Monster. When I went to play it while writing CARD, I was surprised to see that this song is not quick to come up on Apple Music when you simply search "Speechless." That made me a bit sad; it's an important song to me even if I've never really felt like I sussed out the logic of the lyrics' metaphor. My audience character couldn't talk so why not have the vow of silence be a Lady Gaga quote? This is also a link to Waiting for Gadot where a Lady Gaga song plays during one of Pompo's interludes if I remember correctly. Speaking of things I've missed because of the mad rush of the end of the school year, it came up independent of the writing of CARD that I missed the release of Lady Gaga's new album at the end of May, when a friend mentioned his sister had bought it. Makes me feel like a fake fan, but then I think of Gaga Feminism by Jack Halberstam and smile.

Have I told you about Gaga Feminism? If so, it was years ago, so to borrow a line from Gaga, please say, "I know your story but tell me again." (The humble part of me wants to add that I identify with the speaker of that song and not the object of affection. You don't want to be around me when that song is playing because I can't sing and I'm going to be singing along. Sigh/laugh.) I didn't give you lines in THE ROOF so I don't mind giving you that line here. Gaga Feminism fittingly (and confusingly, since my bookshelf is organized by author's last name) was the first book on my bookshelf when I went to grab it. Halberstam uses Lady Gaga as a means to explore new feminisms of the future or the now or the whatever you want to call it. The book is from 2012 so I'm not sure how to relate it to 2020 (omg this effing year).

What does that have to do with being a fake fan? It doesn't, but it reminded me of a beautiful idea from the book. Halberstam uses Gaga as a means of celebrating the fake, as "ultimately being gaga means being phony. ... Gaga feminism, or the feminism (pheminism?) of the phony, the unreal, and the speculative, is simultaneous a monstrous outgrowth of the unstable concept of 'woman' in feminist theory, a celebration of the joining of femininity to artifice, and a refusal of the mushy sentimentalism that has been siphoned into the category of womanhood" (xii-xiii). Okay, enough grad school. Or almost! Halberstam might already use this term, I'm sure it's not original and I read the book years ago so it isn't sharp in memory, but perhaps "faux-minism" for "pheminism"? What do you think?

You can't answer me. That's the point for the CARD. It makes the play run smoothly when people like Bruce are talking to you and you just keep staring. Do you listen to Marc Maron's WTF podcast? He does the same thing on that show: greets the listeners, gets vaguely specific with questions that might actually relate to a few people listening, etc. Are you thinking about painting your room? Have you gotten a new dog? It's a bit he does that isn't really necessary but it does speak to a real feeling of attachment between reader/listener/viewer and the person you're seeing/reading/hearing. It makes me think of when I saw a counselor in high school and she found it problematic that I found people I met on a forum to be friends. That's not problematic and being attached to artists or podcasters isn't either, but it certainly can be a bit disconcerting. You can think you really do know Mike Greenberg, for example, when you obviously don't.

There are times where such addressing of the audience is a little more important. In a way, Waiting for Gadot was me thinking about podcasts, and part of THE ROOF is me thinking about ASMR where the audience often is a character as well. Do you know what ASMR is? "Me either," I say after a pause when you don't answer. From what I can tell as a listener to ASMR to help me sleep, it is a bodily reaction to hearing certain sounds (called "triggers") on headphones that creates a pleasant or calming reaction and is often also joined by "tingles" which, if what I've experienced is what people are calling that, is similar to the feeling of getting goosebumps from a moving speech or great song. It's not the same kind of emotional experience as either of those but it seems to be a part of the peaceful effect of ASMR. Another thing ASMR does is what any sort of background noise does when you try to sleep: it helps shut off an overactive mind but isn't as irritating as a ticking clock or loud fan.

What does that have to do with addressing the audience? Well, nothing, and this is about to get annoyingly, um, technical? Nerdy? Dumb? Pick your choice. Do you know what the word "diegetic" means? (You can't answer.) I'm going to say maybe no, since Chrome doesn't even recognize it as a word. "Diegetic" simply describes things that are happening or exist to characters in a narrative and are not added for the audience to see. For example, in a comic book, a punch is diegetic, the characters see and feel it, whereas the sound "BAM!" is... well that's a bad example! The sound is diegetic to some extent because the characters hear some form of BAM! but the actual written word is non-diegetic because only the audience can see it. Trust me, this relates to ASMR.

People who make ASMR are often called ASMRtists (I'm not making that up!) and frequently try any number of different ways to make videos and audio that will trigger audiences in different ways. It's a medium that is still new but has been around longer than maybe you think. A number of ASMRtists have been creating content for years. I say this to return to the term diegetic--I haven't heard it talked about this way but I think there is an element of diegetic vs non-diegetic in ASMR videos. Some ASMR videos are simply the ASMRtist creating sounds without any extra context, perhaps occasionally talking to listeners or viewers at a low volume (even "listeners or viewers" is a bit confusing to me: I think ASMR is an audio phenomenon and I personally play a video and soon turn my phone over on the floor so that the glow of YouTube doesn't light up my room and simply listen to the audio for triggers. That said, I have watched some videos and experienced similar reactions from what ASMRtists call visual triggers, so there seems to be something there as well. Years from now maybe scientists can tell us what's happening.).

One way to do something different with ASMR is to do roleplay videos (I know what this sounds like, but go back up to where I talk about RPGs above rather than let your imagination run wild) where the ASMRtist (this is beginning to sound like "ancient astronaut theorists" from Ancient Aliens in my head) plays a character who is interacting with the viewer. An easy one to imagine is visiting an ear doctor, because this allows for a logical way to create a number of diegetic triggers for the listener. An ear doctor would logically play sounds for you or perhaps put a tool in your ear (yeah, I know what that sounds like). That said, virtually every roleplay video will include what can almost be seen as non-diegetic triggers: an ear doctor is probably not going to click a pen repeatedly or repeat words but an ASMRtist doing an ear doctor video might because these are two common types of triggers.

So what does that have to do with anything? Well it doesn't; I just wanted to talk about it. In these roleplays, though, ASMRtists consistently address the viewer and it's a bit of a weird experience. It's fine, I'm not criticizing it!, but it's something I wanted to avoid in THE ROOF. For example, let's go back to the ear doctor roleplay. The video might start with signing in for the appointment. The ASMRtist asks your name and you, what? I don't know. Diegetically the character you are standing in for says its name but do people play along with the roleplay and say or think their name or make up a name at this point? I usually just ignore it but that seems a personal choice; as ASMR is mostly just an audio thing to me I don't put much consideration into roleplay videos. Still, there is a great level of artistry that ASMRtists use in roleplays: costumes, backgrounds, and accessories.

Sometimes I wonder if ASMR videos are supposed to be watched in VR or at least how far away from your face do you hold your phone. It's not really my thing but that could be partially because I don't have a good answer to how to get visual triggers. (When I don't know the "right" way to do something I can obsess over it to the point of giving up, just ask my mother about wanting me to vacuum!) When it comes to writing a play, though, one of the beautiful things is that you can have ideas and not have the right way to do them. It's just writing now but I can't say I don't think it would be great if someone actually tried to do something with the ideas. In Waiting for Gadot, Pompo talks about how plays have always been in color and then the next scene in a live play is in black and white. It's just a dumb, crazy idea but I at least imagine it's possible to create that scene. In THE ROOF, let's just say I'm less sure.

When he read the second part of THE ROOF, my friend reminded me of an idea I had when first discussing the play years ago. I might have mentioned this here already but I don't think in this much detail(?). One way to conceive of the play is for the "you" character to be a drone recording footage. Suddenly you can have more than one person watching the play and still all getting the intended effect. I don't think that's a perfect answer, but I've also forgotten how exactly I had imagined it back then. What I do remember is being obsessed with performance theory and just thinking about how cool performance art is. I'm a writer, the shyest kind of artist, so it's maybe weird that I'm so excited by the idea of performance, but I think I've captured some of what interests me about it in Waiting for Gadot and hopefully I can do similarly with THE ROOF.

Imagine a performance on an entire college campus where students are interspersed with actors. Walking from class to class, parking at the garage when you get to school, you are moving in and out of the play. It's just an idea but for some reason it calls to me. I can't capture that idea in writing THE ROOF, but that flow, the moving in and out, scenes going on as you walk by, or even taking place without an audience at all are all things I think I can emulate in some way here on the blog. I'm talking all serious about dumb stuff like clicking from one blog post to another or choosing between two links but that's still something I've never done before. It's exciting! You just saw a very simplistic form of this with CARD interspersed inside 2 of THE ROOF. I haven't written it yet but in my head 3 is a party-like scene on the titular roof. There are at least four conversations going on all at once and the conversations themselves blend together like a collage to make the message I want to send with that scene but you have to walk around the roof to experience them yourself. It's like an open world game where you have to search the environment for all the unique monsters. I'm talking big again but you know it'll be small. Neil Gaiman said that in co-writing Sandman Midnight Theatre with Matt Wagner, Wagner really thought about his interest because he gave him like nine pages to just write dialogue for a party. I think that's required rereading in the next few days in prep for 3 of THE ROOF. See you then!