ain't blogged squat

Hi. i feel like a stranger.

i've felt like writing a couple of things on here lately, but they were all doom and gloom: ohhhh, we're outta fossil fuels!, ohhh, we waste our food! ohhh, etc....
i didn't want my return to the blog to be so predictable, so here's something-- neither gloomy nor doomy-- that i've had on my mind here lately:

energy level/charisma as it pertains to onstage/in class performance. (teaching is a kind of performance i figure...)

i like the concept of acting. You know, like an actor. Like on a stage and stuff. If thinking about acting can make a great actor, then i'm there, dude. (but believe me, i can't act my way out of a bag.) Alright. So everyone's heard of Stanislavski's (or Strasburg's) The Method, right? Brando is a famous method actor. The (wildly reductivist) point is to conjure up your own emotional equivalent of your character's and put that feeling into your performance.

Well, i always thought that was a really cool approach until i heard a British actor talking about his acting one time--and british acting is some of my favorite. Evidently the brits don't really cotton to The Method. This actor's point (and i've forgotten who it was) was that you just can't trust to always pulling up that emotion when you're on stage (and as we all know its all about the stage. movies are for acting lightweights). His take was that acting is a rehearsed action. You figure out what it looks like, and then you do it over and over again.

Okay. Here's where i come in. I'm un-intentionally something of a method guy. I adhere to the blues school of performance: i depend on whatever is driving me at the moment to provide a performance's energy. The problem with this, of course, comes when things aren't going well. If i'm sleepy when i get to class--like i was yesterday--then class is sleepy. If i'm at a show and am playing badly, then i crinkle up into a little ball and wish i was somewhere else. The benefit, on the other hand, is that quite often you turn in a truly inspired bit of playing, singing, teaching.

The method vs. british argument in this is that brit acting gives you a predictable and normally postive result. The method says that no matter how good you get at the rehearsed response you end up with something that, at its core, will ring hollow.

In my intuitive criss-crossy world, i can even quantify these differences in terms of marxism, or white and black culture, or east meets west....but, you know, i'm gonna spare you that for now. Here's the question: Would you rather have a steady diet of Wayne Newton or, say...Bob Dylan, with his unpredictable ways, night after night?