The Macbeths and the Power of Positive Thinking

Nearly every performance of a Shakespearean play is a "cutting."  Some of this is to manage length.  But as someone who has put in the time with the source texts,  I can say there are things that get cut out of nearly every version -- weird redundancies, comic relief that feels odd to modern audiences, etc.  These are the low hanging fruit for the person making a cutting.  But cutting goes further than that, and can be an art-form in itself.

I have been working with MacBeth, as I had mentioned recently.  I have cut deeply, but hopefully not the unkindest cut of all.

Having read, re-read, and re-re-read (and so) the play, along with watching several film versions in quick succession, I came up with five elements of the play that different versions mix and match.

1) Scottishness
2) imagination
3) the occult
4) infertility -- and it causing homicidal tendencies
5) the psychology of guilt

Every version I have seen leaves some lines emphasized and others hallow.  This is unavoidable as the intellectual space the play takes up is more vast than the conventions of cinema can capture.  Perhaps theater cannot, either.  Such is the genius of Shakespeare, made more evident to me by working so closely with the text.

For example, the plays I've seen that are very, very Scottish leave the "dagger of the mind" speech hallow.  Who cares how imaginative Macbeth is if the play is spun to implies everything that happens in it is driven by Scottish clannishness?  A great enough actor could carve out ethos for the performance of the lines, but it still wouldn't fit with anything else.

To some extent, to make a performance of Macbeth is to choose what you need to lose so that the elements you are most interested in can work. The focus on my cutting is the nature of imagination, and how it can be destabilizing.  It is then set in the modern day with Macbeth working in a corporate-like environment, using the appearance of positive thinking and self promotion (uh, literal self-promotion).

I am removing the bits about the frustrations of infertility leading to homicidal tendencies, which I think is a defensible enough decision for what will be a high school performance.  This makes the removal sound like an easy decision, but it cuts out one of the best bits of the play, Lady Macbeth's lines about having a child:

I have given suck, and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me.
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.

I also have drastically cut out the Scottishness of what many actors call The Scottish Play.  Macduff's sub-plot is cut to almost nothing.  He is just a generic person who finds King Duncan dead and then fights Macbeth at the end.  I still give Malcolm the last speech of the play, but only to show the reality of Macbeth's failure and that other decisions would probably force me to add lines, and that is something I, on balance, tried to avoid.

I find that restraints can be great aids to creativity.  Even if they don't end up making the product better -- though they usually do just that -- they make the process more enjoyable.  In this case I consciously choose the following restraints, and would recommend them as a fun puzzle for someone working on nearly any Shakespearean play: 1) to add as little additional text as possible 2) re-arrange as little of the text as possible and 3) failing #2, if I needed to add text to the play to take it from other places in Shakespeare.

The biggest addition I make to the play is at the very beginning. I make Macbeth into someone who is listening to a motivational recording, and it is that which powers his imagination to see the witches (weird sisters).  By this logic, Banquo does not see the sisters. The lines Macbeth uses to pump himself up are taken from other Shakespearean plays.  Here is the opening:

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Scene 1
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(In something like a work or office setting.  Macbeth and Banquo at work.)

MACBETH
So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

(Gets up, put in ear buds to do his affirmations.  Another voice, perhaps a recording of a witch, or a witch off stage, says the affirmations, and Macbeth repeats.  Banquo non-verbally responds each time, shaking head and the like, as if to indicate what a dork Macbeth is.)

Voice
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

MACBETH
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Voice
Strong reasons make strong actions.

MACBETH
Strong reasons make strong actions!

Voice
No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en

MACBETH
No profit grows where is no pleasure taken!

Voice
I dare do all that may become a man

MACBETH
I dare do all that may become a man!

(Flourish.  Enter witches.  MacBeth can see them.  Banquo cannot.)

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Here is a link to the google doc.

After this beginning, the play unfolds in normal order and, as I said, I lean on cuttings rather than additions, with some characters merged together to save on the number of actors.  The motivational sequence happens again at the beginning of Act 4 before Macbeth sees the witches again.

Also, for the fun of it I have given titles to all five acts based on motivational slogans from our culture. I don't plan on them showing up in the performance, but just a bit of fun for the cast.


Act 1  The Secret to my Success
Act 2  Just Do It
Act 3  Fake It Until you Make It
Act 4  Believe You Can, and You're Halfway There.
Act 5  Never Give Up


This cutting is, first and foremost, a fun game to play.  Secondly, it allows me to work with a director whom I respect, and has served as my first project after leaving a job at a place that I will leave unnamed to protect the innocent.

The meaning of this version comes from a critique of our times.  Delusion, ambition, self-serving justifications -- all are fine as long you sparkle with charisma and show "positivity."  The universe should manifest what you desire. . . or is it that you should be able to manifest upon a passive universe?

Shakespeare had his suspicions about this type of social imagination.

Some notes on Rise of Skywalker (essentially spoiler free)

This isn't attempting to be definitive or systematic.  It is some notes I jotted in my journal after seeing the movie with my wife and father-in-law, and I share it for the sake of a friend.  It's basically the same trouble to send it just to him as to publish it openly, so if anyone else appreciates it that is a bonus.

1/ A criticism I saw of the movie online is that it feels rushed, more like a music video than a movie.  While I must admit the opening does have the feel of a music video, first that feeling moved by much more quickly for me than I would have thought based on the vehemence of those making the claim, and, second, I liked that feel.  I think the audience can be assumed to have absorbed this style and speed of story-telling.

I feel the story had to move along briskly because the Last Jedi wasted quite a bit of its run time, but that only makes me more impressed to see this movie stick the landing and wrap up the trilogy.

2/ One of the only ways this could be done was to bring back Palpatine.  At the end of Last Jedi the resistance was left with about a dozen people on the Millennium Falcon.  I remember saying "how the hell do you win from there? . . and in one movie, no less?"  Well, as I once read from treatise on the game Diplomacy, there is no better way to bury the hatchet than in someone else's back.  Or, you can go with the more traditional "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."  Once Palpatine was established, I found Kylo's motivations believable.  I think the machinations of the space wizards unfolded reasonably enough.

3/ This series has always been about overpowered space wizards, and the best way to tell stories about those space wizards is about their emotional conflicts and the struggle to gain self-mastery so they can be the versions of themselves that they want to be.  Escalating them from space wizards to space demi-gods doesn't really change the fundamentals of telling a good story within the franchise.  This movie deals with questions of identity, facing fear (including fears about identity, agency, and fear itself), and dealing with mistakes, even our most horrible ones.

4/ Being a child of this many years of special effects and in particular CGI, I can no longer be in awe of a power-set.  Following from this, I am no longer interested in the level of power-set consistency.  The text of the movie leaves some good answers for why the power-sets jump, but it really doesn't matter. Movies aren't consistent: Plot armor is a given in all modern action cinema, and you only have to a few episodes of Cinema Sins before you see how hallow these types of notes are.  If you want consistency, study engineering, or consider reading Hard science fiction.

Artisanal Texts

Somewhere between running errands to go to my last day of shooting the movie and getting to Chickasaw, I lost my phone.  When I got back into Norman, I retraced my steps through several stores and asked about lost and founds to no luck.

I decided to use this opportunity to down grade my phone.  It's something I've wanted to do for a while.

On the hand, I think I did so far less cost efficiently than I could have because I wanted to take a path of relatively low resistance, staying with my carrier, etc, etc. On the other hand, even including this purchase (a Nokia 3011 reboot), I have spent less on phones my entire life than the cost of a single new iPhone.  You people really set the bar low.  I may or may not stress out about why I don't have a pay-as-you-go plan at some other point, but that is not the point of the story.

As all of my contacts were saved on my SIM card in my now-lost phone, I was glad that I had used the major memory system to memorize several numbers.  One of the numbers I had memorized belonged to the best man at my wedding, Nat.  After confirming I did in fact remember the correct number -- I would stake a fortune on the digits; it is the order that might have been wrong -- we had the conversation below.  Nat's texts will be italicized.  Mine will be block quoted.  I've added footnotes because they are fun.

This is a 60 dollar dumb phone. [1] 

The last decade can suck it

I love it.  Fuck the system. 

I try.  I mean this is hitting keys more than once and everything.  Real horror-show [2]

Yeah.  Only horrible when going back to it.

When it was the only game it town, it was fine.

Know that every word I text is slowly, lovingly handcrafted, like texts were . . .two gens ago. [3]

Meaningful texts seemed like an oxymoron until now

Have I stumbled upon artisanal texts?

Move to Brooklyn, buddy.  You're ready now. 


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[1] I didn't want to pull up the "$" symbol because that requires going through another menu.  Having to type out each letter extra slowly also forced me to seek extra terseness in my writing.

[2] I was hoping he had seen A Clockwork Orange and thus knew that lil' bit o' Nadsat slang.  At the slow . . . pace . . . I . . .was . . . going it sure seemed like a hilarious punchline.  It was no one's fault the joke didn't land, and I certainly wasn't going to text an explanation!

[3] My phone is on 3G.  I guess it will be a useless brick when 3G is phased out (or ends because of outside factors). 

Shaving Update: I Contaminated the Experiment Further

On May 29th, I started out to see how long I could make a Gillette Mach 3 blade last simply by cleaning the blade by moving my thumb backward over it (a bit of stropping action and putting some of my skin's oil on the blade) and then trying to get the blade very dry between uses through a combination of shaking it dry, patting it on a towel, and then putting it in a plastic baggie.

I grew fond of that blade as it had gone with us to our trip to Italy.  Through the stresses of air flight there and and back, the part of the blade connecting it to the stick broke.  After that time, I merely held the blade between my thumb and index finger to shave.  I did so for months. 

But all good things must come to an end. . .

The flat part that contains the blade popped out one day in the middle of a shave.  I tried to shave with just the flat part, but couldn't get a grip on it.  So, thoughtlessly, I gave up and loaded a new blade onto the shaving stick, the first in six months.  I left my old blade a shaving-cream covered mess and went on with my day.

It was only later that I realized I could maybe fix the told blade with superglue.  When I went to look examine it, I came to realize I could have just popped the thing together, no glue needed.  I felt guilty about having started a new blade.

I cleaned off my old blade and shaved with it two more times over the next few days, but each time I felt quite uncomfortable razor burn.  I am pretty sure this is because I had left the blade sitting in shaving cream for nearly a whole day.  And so that's how I ended my time with that blade.

I'm still pretty happy with six months out a blade, and we'll see how long I can make the next one last, especially now that I know to keep my cool, clean and dry the blade and see what kind of repairs I can make.   The blade experiment is dead . . . long live the [new] blade experiment!

Videos on Simple Mechanisms

I have gathered an interest in mechanics and simple machines.  Time will tell how far this interest will move into the shop and become objects, but the result of this interest is that I have some video that may serve to instruct and amuse.

This video shows how to make a wheel with hand saws, and then make a groove so the wheel can be turned into a pulley.

Next, another video in the same series that makes wooden gears and uses them to in a simple hand generator.  The whole series is fantastic.  PhilipStephens007 is my favorite maker [1].  I assume his actual name is Philip Stephens.

Here are some other wooden mechanisms that can be made once you have reinvented the wheel.  Next, a video cued to up a master-level endgame. . . AND.

Also, here is a a generator set up using old CDs to make the wheel.  It is of the hot glue school of building, which I am the last person to knock.  I love to see things repurposed.  I try to do it with an attitude, calling it junk punk.

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[1] The first video of his I saw was making a foot powered scroll saw.  I thought it was just about the manliest thing I had ever seen -- a throw-back to when manly meant being useful, rather than complaining loudly or sometimes looking muscular.

His latest, reusing chipboard, left me inspired.

Also, my goodness!

That Artistic FIRE

After I wrote a piece on r/leanfire where I came out as someone capable of FIRE (financially independent/ retire early), albeit on a lean (under $40,000 a year -- um, in my case, much lower) basis. I wrote a follow-up piece where I talked about getting a gig as a studio teacher for a motion picture. While it sound much more glamorous than it is -- think being huddled near a space heater in a side room in an old farm house in rural Oklahoma -- I got the gig because I knew someone in the local art scene who knew someone else.  I may not socialize all that much, and I will do so even less now that I am on financial lock down, but I do tend to spend my time with artists.

When I look for inspiration, however, the successful practitioners of FIRE tend to come from STEM backgrounds. (Appears I'm using all sorts of four-letter words today!)  I can think of two reasons why STEM comprises so much of FIRE: 1) higher earnings 2) familiarity with measuring things quantitatively.  While the first factor is very important -- never underestimate the importance of resources, though those with resources might, ever confusing privilege with virtue -- it does not explain the first, and still my favorite, practitioners of FIRE I was exposed to, Jacob Lund Fisker of Early Retirement Extreme, whose income for the first leg of his financial journey was quite modest by American standards.  Instead, Fisker is a learning machine, able to rapidly pick up frugality skills and stick to a budget that is, well, extreme.  He has a mind well-suited to FIRE.

On the other hand, the artistic types I know tend to be bad with money.  A big part of it is explained simply by being American in a time where that means a multi-generation acceptance that "no one" has any savings.  Another part of the artist's problems with money is a disdain and distrust for numbers and wanting (or affecting) to be above worldly concerns.  If there is anything resembling a call to action in this piece, it is that it doesn't have to be this way: artistic people can be good with money. I want to see these two worlds bridged. It is my relative financial freedom that allows me to take artistic opportunities.  And art, broadly defined, is my best answer to the question of what to do with all the free time financial independence creates.  Paraphrasing a line from the movie Groundhog Day, I ask myself, at various levels of desperation, depending on my mood and the day, "what are you going to do with your eternity?"

Looking back at my second piece mentioned above, I'm surprised by my delirious passion.  Part of it was that dangerous social media buzz of getting a lot of likes for a piece -- one more reason to not have comments on this blog, where I now retreat in order to work on myself.  Another reason was the odd energetic lunging my mind goes through when my sleep schedule is knocked off, as it was for me to wake up at 3:30 AM in order to drive down to rural Oklahoma to huddle near a space heater in an old farm house so that I can now turn into a story to impress people and play 7 degrees of Kevin Bacon [myself > Nick Stahl in What Joshia Saw > Arnold in Terminator 3 > Kevin Pollak in End of Days > Kevin Bacon in A Few Good Men.]  It was in that delirium that I posted this list of things I thought I could do in the short-to-medium term:

• Go through a friend of my wife to do seasonal tax preparation work.
• Finish a "cutting" of Macbeth so that a friend of mine can produce it as a high school play.
• Record lectures where I show how I can teach (say AP Euro, or things on literature). The goal is to eventually have some tutoring sessions be on ideas, rhetoric, or Great Books curriculum, not just the test-prep arms race
• Read stacks of children's books so that I catch my wife on Goodreads, and beat her yearly total just this once. (Right now she's up 149 to 121).   [Update: 149 to 156]
• Do my homework, receive my mentorship, and then start my tutoring business -- I'm willing to do test prep, while supplies (open slots on days I want to work) last.
• practice sharpening blades and tools, such as wood planes. It's the next "self-reliance" skill I want to acquire.

And while all of those things are true enough -- with the tool sharpening being the one I feel I might procrastinate on the most -- I don't like how much it was performing . . , I think showing off.  Anti-social media is a hell of drug.

I have already read over twenty children's books to take the lead over my wife in the yearly Goodreads count.  I suppose I should add that my wife is a 6th grade (English) Language Arts teacher who is taking classes to become a librarian.  To stay current in her recommendations to students, the vast majority of books she reads are young adult literature.  Furthermore, this year she read 50 children's books for an annotated bibliography assignment. Me reading children's books is a subtle act of trolling, but also an attempt to inject into conversations (at, say, family gatherings) the idea that the quality of what is read should be taken into account.  I must also add that if I absolutely hated reading the books, I would have abandoned the project, seeing as self-discipline is not a strength of mine.  I like that children's books don't wallow in mean world syndrome, showing more maturity than entertainment fare I watch most adults swallow.  I've read books that promote imagination, going outside, enjoying the seasons, and even making sure you give a middle child special attention from time to time.  I had been working on my visual literacy and trying to learn how to draw, starting with cartoonish figures -- so I have appreciated the illustrations as well.

I am probably most excited about my Macbeth project.  If I can't come up with an idea better, I will expand on my Macbeth cutting in next week's writing.  The project has hit the point where I have to get it polished -- that last 20% that takes 80% of the time and energy, because there always has to be a flip side to the promise of the Pareto principal.  Hooray for those 80% gains from 20% of the input, but at some point, if you care about the product, there has to be grind.  But that's good for me.  It builds character, or at least keeps it from atrophying.  More on this later as well: I'm not made to be a drop-out (to be honest, I cracked up (eventually) on my sabbaticals), and I failed at being an honorary goldbricker. It looks like semi-retired is the best I can do.