“I greatly regret having reached that age,” the ecologist told broadcaster ABC on his birthday earlier this month. “I’m not happy. I want to die. It’s not sad particularly. What is sad is if one is prevented.“My feeling is that an old person like myself should have full citizenship rights including the right of assisted suicide,” he added.
| September 1, 1996 | Theatre Central Presents | Vol. 1, No. 3 |
Notes on Creating New Hyperdrama in Cyberspace An Article by Charles Deemer If a year ago someone had told me I would spend the summer as a "playwright-in-electronic-residence," developing a new one-act hyperdrama in collaboration with a director in Santiago, Chile, I would have tilted my head in that special way reserved for people who aren't in possession of all their faculties. And yet that has been my wonderful summer of 1996. Yet I shouldn't be surprised. Hyperdrama and cyberspace were made for one another. Both, after all, speak "hypertext," the electronic nonlinear language that develops narrative as a network of options, whether they be choices on a help menu or decisions to be made by an audience member. I wrote hypertext scripts for a decade before the project in Santiago, which is my first hyperdrama script to be developed in cyberspace, and the new environment has made my job as a hypertext writer far less cumbersome, while at the same time providing all the immediate input and collaborative advantages that I remember from being a playwright-in-residence in non-virtual (which is to say, "really real") reality. Read the article. I am, of course, profoundly disappointed that a younger generation in the U.S. (things are happening in Europe) has not continued the development of live hyperdrama as a cultural storytelling form. This article was written twenty years ago! Those interested in hypertext here go into computer games, where there is considerable money to be made. Yet my original contention, that traditional theater is Newtonian and hyperdrama is quantum (go here), remains true as far as I am concerned, and hyperdrama is a superior form for mapping dramatic reality. With my design for a hyperdrama theater, which is not the only possibility, an artistic director with vision could give hyperdrama a home. Audiences have already responded to it. Where is this artistic director?    |
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| Joe Bianco, Editor, NORTHWEST |
Read the story.The First Stoplight in Wallowa CountyNorthwest (September 4, 1988)Charles DeemerFLETCH HAD WOKEN UP without an alarm clock at 5:30 a.m., give or take ten minutes, for so many years that neither Sunday off nor a bad hangover could keep him in bed past six. On this Sunday the hangover was worse than usual because he had been lucky playing cards last night at Mel's Tavern, putting together a rare string of winning poker strategies. Twice he drew successfully to an inside straight. At stud, in the largest pot of the evening, he bluffed Jensen into folding three visible kings in deference to his own two aces up, even though he had only a junk deuce down. And more often than not, he folded the two pairs on which he habitually raised — and lost. When the game was over, Fletch walked away from the table almost $50 richer, most of which he spent setting up whiskey at the Cowboy Bar down Main Street.Fletch rarely drank hard liquor, which made his first gesture this morning tentative — but right on time. Or so he thought.The first hint that something was wrong was that the clock read four, not five-thirty. The second was that he could read the time at all. His Big Ben came from a preluminous era when clocks had big hands and little hands instead of radiant numerical displays. Fletch's big hand had not reached the bed lamp yet, and so he shouldn't have been able to read the time. But read it he did.Fletch's room was located above the selfsame Mel's Tavern responsible for his hangover — or at least that had financed it. Looking out the window to Main Street, Fletch saw the one thing in the world that should not have been there: a stoplight. A genuine traffic light, swinging lightly in the summer breeze, showing him a devilish green even as it showed Swede's Tavern across the corner a diabolical red. As anyone in northeastern Oregon could tell you, there wasn't a single stoplight in all Wallowa County. Since Joseph was in the county, Fletch must be looking at some alcohol-induced mirage.Moving in the green glow to the window, he leaned on the windowsill and stared out at the light. He scratched his belly and stared for a long time — until suddenly, impossibly, the green light turned yellow, and the yellow light turned red.
"Portland was a city that commissioned Beauty and got Portlandia, a copper statue of a scantily-clad lady holding a pitchfork."
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| Wallowa Lake |
