Should you feel like getting your lights Punched out, and you’re in NYC, go see Gretchen Van Lente’s curatorial slate of actors human and non-. (Like this beauty in blue.)  One of the things that’s so hardcore fun about puppets is their variety; custom does not stale, etc., and that’s worth the entrance fee all by itself.

From Clive, friend and patron of puppetry, the theatre, and Under the Poppy, comes this genial fellow, whose holiness lies cheek-by-jowl with his taste for the vivid; not always the case, right, with your garden variety saints, some of whom would possibly prefer to be flogged by thorns than hang out with the backstage crowd.  So all hail St. Simeon el Salo!

People often ask, “Where do you get your ideas?” which I always find curious: where instead of how. “How” seems more understandable: as if there might be a method, or a discipline, or a certain mindset that could be acquired; the way one acquires the mindset of a meditator, say, which certainly takes great diligence and patient practice.  A person who’s done sitting meditation for twenty years is going to have a very different mind than when s/he first hunkered down cross-legged.  So “how” seems very valid.

But maybe “where” is the better question: it’s certainly more mystical, and maybe that mystery brings it closer to the real limbic – or do I mean liminal – state where – yes, where the ideas germinate, or float in, or infiltrate, or seep. So maybe it’s the better, truer, more practical question. Someone asked me the other day, “How come you decided to write a historical novel about a whorehouse?” Where did that whorehouse come from, with its black poppy signage?  Where the passionate heroes? Where the silent madam? I had no answer because I don’t know; I never know; I never do any of this consciously.

Desire pulls the strings. Maybe meditation is the best model after all. Where do you get your ideas? Yes.

So heartening, to see performances like this – this kind of fecund, skewed, delightful conversation between disciplines – in a time where, on the surface, all is stasis, contraction, a cultural hunkering-down.  Um, no.  Let’s blow the doors off, artists, let’s climb out the holes in the roof and look around, let’s test ourselves, let’s have some fucking fun.

Being a Detroiter is a real asset in this endeavor, or so it seems to this native, at least.  We are experienced at making much out of little, we see the gleam in rust, we can operate in the dark, we know our way around.  And we can, do, and will continue to make our own fun, out of ephemera, concertina wire, velvet rags, and strings of all kinds.

(OK, this has been the Manifesto Moment of the day.  Back to the script-writing …)

… and feathers and shadows and sex and violence, and all the cool things that make up puppetry: Eileen Blumenthal knows all about them.  I’ve mentioned before how incredibly helpful (and surpassingly fun) her book Puppetry: A World History was to me during the research of Under the Poppy. (And I still read through it for refreshers, and just plain kicks.)

She recently took part in a discussion at UConn with John Bell, where I would dearly have loved to be.  Hey, Detroit Institute of Arts!  We have the Paul McPharlin collection, why can’t we have Eileen Blumenthal here, too?

…we here at Under the Poppy offer the following advice:
Banned Books Week (September 26–October 3, 2009) celebrates the freedom to choose for yourself what to read, even if that choice might involve books that others consider unpopular or unorthodox. Support banned books!  Buy one, write one, take one out of the library, exercise your right to rebel and read.

Would you not like to A) go back in time and watch this performed live, in the shadow of those fantastic sets, or B) make yourself small enough to frolic in the paper doll version?  Or yes to both?  What visual wit.  “The Gashlycrumb Tinies” have been bubbling up lately, prompting me to remember and renew my admiration for and delight in the work of the great Mr. Gorey.  (P.S., Puggy would have loved it.)

Well, in mid-October, after a stop in Heidelberg.  But the prospect of puppet theatre has me giddy already; and the sheer odd beauty of the streets. And the puppets in the streets …  The Charles bridge, Ta Fantastika Theatre. The capital of Bohemia!

This is so startling: and so other-worldly: and so puppet.  Check out the whole scene at LAOperaRing.com.