I've Moved.

I blog over here now.
Sometimes I accidentally still say blogspot though.
My apologies.

Back to School, Back to School

To prove to Dad that I'm not a fool.

I got my
Lunch packed up
My boots tied tight
I hope I don't get in a fight

OOOOOOOOOOOO
Back to school
Back to school
Back
To...

School starts Monday.
Orientation was last Wednesday.
The enormity of what is about to happen to me didn't really sink in until my classmates and I found ourselves in the book store after orientation.
I realized that the first time I had gone to a college book store to buy my books for the semester was more than ten years ago.

Yikes.

And now I'm back in school, busting my behind to learn about how to run a theater.
I've already been doing homework/reading. And honestly, I'm excited about most of what I've been studying. One of the things that I forget/deny is that I'm really a nerd at heart. A major nerd. So learning is, like, awesome, really. And this isn't the artsy, open, no-right-answer kind of stuff I did in college and grad school. This is practical work. Work ethic is what matters most here, and I'm in need of refresher courses in that for sure.

I'm going to to try--try--to update this blog regularly with thoughts on school. I'm not sure I'll be able to though, as the work/school day will keep me away from home from 8am to at least 10pm every Monday through Thursday. I'm pretty much not going to exist as a non-school entity.

But please--say hi, send good thoughts, keep me posted on what's going on in the world, especially opportunities to meet up with you on the weekends. It will be greatly appreciated.

(And yes, this is yet another new use for this blog.)

From The Sky

P1010248
Originally uploaded by iagoali.

I took this a while back. I think I was on my way to San Francisco.

The world is still kind of amazing sometimes.

Look Closer.

P1020806
Originally uploaded by iagoali.

This is a silly picture. C. Denby Swanson forced me to take it.

Under Cover

P1020899
Originally uploaded by iagoali.

Sometimes, this is how my entire life feels.
Not necessarily at the moment, but sometimes.

Rose Rose Rose

P1020866, originally uploaded by iagoali.

I bought these flowers for my mom for Mother's Day. They arrived half-dead. I hope she got them exchanged like she said she would. Either way, I discovered the MACRO setting on my camera, which allows for shots like this.

Photos will be a new part of The Unnamed Football Project. I swear I'll keep writing about writing too. But the pictures need an outlet. They'll be coming steady, I hope.

Lots of career-type news is on the horizon. Start making your way back to this here blog.

Alaska is No Go...

...but Operation Alaska is still available. In the end, the cost of heading to the conference was just too much. The book will remain open for purchase over at www.lulu.com/kristofferdiaz, but proceeds no longer go towards sending me to Alaska. If this presents a real issue for you, let me know, and I'll make it up to you somehow.

I'm also including parts of the last post I made on myspace, just FYI.
I'll soon finish up the liner notes for Fly Girls (believe it or not), and I'll get back to writing about writing.
Once I get back to writing.

From myspace:

Aww Yeah, Suckas--I'm Going to be Published.

And not self-published.
Not that I have any problem with self-publishing (go to www.lulu.com for proof of that).
But my play The Trophy Thieves: A High School Love Story will soon be published for purposes of amateur licensing.

Some of you might have seen Trophy Thieves in one of its previous incarnations at NYU or The Gallery Players. For those who haven't, it's a one act about two high school girls who attempt to steal a cheerleading trophy from a high school library. And yes, it's just as ludicrous as it sounds.

This is the third book of mine published this year (including Fly Girls and Other Poems and Operation Alaska), and the first published by a real live publishing house. I've got two more publication possibilities in the pipeline (I won't tell you what they are just yet), and some potential theater development type stuff that could be in the works as well.

And oh yeah--I'm editing two books that will be released within the next month. The books contain poetry and prose written by students in my writing workshops here in Cleveland, and will be made available through the legendary lulu.com AT COST. In other words, we're not looking to make any more off these books--we just want to get the voices of these young folks out to the world.

OPERATION ALASKA: Now available.

www.lulu.com/kristofferdiaz

All proceeds go towards defraying the cost of my trip to Alaska this summer to develop The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity.

While you're over at lulu, you can still pick up a copy of Fly Girls and Other Poems.

Just keep in mind that Operation Alaska is only on sale until June 30th, 2007.

Do it now.

We're Pushing One Hundred Pages.

OPERATION ALASKA is kind of amazing.
It will be available for two months only.

Two monologues/scenes from each of the four plays.
The first chapter of the novel.
The beginning of an unfinished short story from the archives.
More than ten never-before-published poems.
AND an instant messenger chat transcript.

You're going to want this.

I'll Announce It Here Before Anywhere Else

Operation Alaska is a book.
It is a new book.
It will include the following:

*Monologues/other exciting excerpts from my plays, including: Welcome to Arroyo's, Guernica, Tyree (which no one has read/seen/heard yet, which makes this an exclusive first look kind of deal), and The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity.

*The entire new short play Shoes: A Monologue for Three Actors. This is a full ten-minute play, and you get the whole thing.

*A chapter (like the first chapter) of my just-finished novel version of Welcome to Arroyo's.

*Several brand new poems, not available in Fly Girls and Other Poems.

*Two of the consensus favorite poems from Fly Girls (poems TBA).

*And maybe some other tasty goodness from my archives.

It's really kind of an unbelievable thing we're putting together.
It will be available for a limited time.
It will be available through lulu.com.

The proceeds will be going towards a very good cause: sending a starving Cleveland artist to Alaska to do a reading of his new play.

More info will follow. And soon.

I'm Still Alive.

www.kristofferdiaz.com has been recently updated.
This page will be updated soon.
I swear.

Intermission.

I've been unable to update here for a while (even longer at www.kristofferdiaz.com).
I'll be diving back into the liner notes soon.
But there's a whole lot going on at myspace.

OPERATION: ALASKA

I can't tell you anything about it.
It's coming soon though.

The Stories Behind The Fly Girls, VI.

I am well at work on the second book. The best way to send me suggestions for poems is to go to the myspace page, but you can also go ahead and e-mail me. Or leave a comment here.

And don't forget to buy the first book.

31. Prehensile Toes and Von Zipper Sunglasses -- Written for the amazing Angie (seriously, she's insanely amazing), this poem came to exist in about fifteen seconds. I fell back on the haiku, as I always do when in doubt. As for the back story, it's about prehensile toes and Von Zipper sunglasses. I'm not sure I even know what Von Zipper sunglasses are. Damn Los Angeles.

32. Office Tension: A Sketch -- Man, I'm not saying I know anything about inter-office romances. But somehow, someone decided that I was the right person to write about such a topic. Seeing as how I know nothing about the topic from personal experience--NOTHING, I SAY--I decided to handle it with a sketch. The hope was just to catch that moment after the initial attraction, after a late night of getting to know each other better, let's say, when you see each other and realize you'll see each other everyday. I'd imagine that's kind of exciting.

33. Bounce Bounce Swish -- This was written in an exercise conducted by the infamous (not really) Aya Ogawa, who happens to be a genius and way smarter than me and makes art in ways I wish I could. She had several of us (including Christina Anderson, our fellow Van Lier Fellow) create poems based out of a series of phrases and feelings and items that we all came up with collaboratively, and this is what came out. Then we gave each other massages, but I had a broken thumb at the time, so I think she got only half a massage, really. Anytime I get to work Derek Jeter into a poem or play, I take advantage of the opportunity, so that explains a lot of this, I think.

34. Fly Girls: Three Sketches -- This was written for wray, who gave me a bunch of answers to one of the questionnaires I made available to, well, Fly Girls. There was so much there in her responses that I couldn't settle on one approach, leading me to come up with three quick first-impression sketches that, I think, complement each other in terms of tone and rhythm, if not content.

35. Love Song -- The request was to write a love song. And man, I hate to hear that as a request. I'm generally anti-love songs, not because I'm anti-love (if anything, I'm anti-anti-love), but because it's so damn hard to write a love song that doesn't sound like so many other damn love songs. I don't think I accomplished quite what I wanted to with this--I'm not sure that the real story I'm trying to tell comes across--but the feel of it was tolerable enough that I didn't want to slap myself for cheesily trying to squeeze the feelings of love into an awkward little box. I hope that people who buy this book use the pages of love song to scribble notes, draw pictures, and do whatever else one does when one is in love. Make those pages sing.

Man, those last two sentences don't feel like me at all.

myspace is crack.

And has little redeeming social value.
But still.
Come be my friend there.
You'll get special exclusive blog posts that might just end up in my next book.
www.myspace.com/kristofferdiaz

The Stories Behind The Fly Girls, V.

No time to waste. These liner notes are the definition of urban sprawl.

26. For Babygirl -- So like I said in an earlier post, there are times in life when you think you've got everything all figured out, and then some time goes by, and you realize that you didn't have anything all figured out. Sometimes it takes finality to wrap your head around how wrong you'd been. Sometimes it takes someone to tell you exactly why you were wrong before you can see it. and even then, you sometimes aren't ready to sit down and put into words what you're feeling. And sometimes, later on, it all makes sense, and you wish you had had the words when you needed them. Times like that, all you can do is hope you've learned the lesson.

27. Redenbacher at the Strip Club -- The assignment for this piece was, well, Orville Redenbacher at the Strip Club. Orville Redenbacher looked like this, in case you don't remember:


And he sold popcorn on TV. And that's all I knew about him. The image of Orville making it rain probably could easily have been played for laughs, which is why I took it in another direction. Man, I actually don't even know if this was a real dude or not. Either way, there seemed to be something inherently sad about him. I also happen to feel like there's somethign inherently sad about strip clubs. So the end result was only natural.

27. Shadow Song -- Shadows are one of those topics that poets and photographers revel in -- I think it's not easy to do something with shadows that hasn't been done before. So I didn't really try. This feels pretty straightforward to me--a love story between the shadows of two lovers. And since I'm using go-to imagery, might as well go all out: hence the beaches, and the mangoes, and the waterfalls, and the sunsets. This to me is a typical poetry piece, which is something I'm not entirely comfortable with. I dig the way it came out though.

28. Fly Girls: You Got Me -- A lot of these poems wouldn't exist if it wasn't for The Roots. I won't necessarily explain that completely, but it's true. This piece was written specifically about The Roots for a young woman whose wildest dream was jumping onstage with The Legendary and singing the Erykah Badu part on You Got Me. (And yes, I know some of you nerds will call it the Jill Scott part, but you're NERDS.) I do have a regret or two when it comes to this piece: I don't think it really does justice to how amazing The Roots are in person, and I kind of wish I experimented a little more with rhythm and sound and style as I wrote it. Someday I'll do a more formal tribute piece for them.

29. Eulogy -- I fucking love Eulogy. I love it. I don't think anyone else does, but I do. So there. The assignment was to write about a box of unlabeled CDs. That was it. So I went sad with it. And I love it. It felt a lot like a play as I was writing it, but without any of the obligations I'd generally associate with writing a play, like, you know, finishing it. Or filling it out. Or making it all make sense. It's a sketch almost, and it's way more satisfying for me that way.

30. Mabey -- I knew a girl in high school who always spelled "maybe" wrong. This might not have been such a huge problem if she wasn't always writing me notes about she and I and us, and trying to seriously address our dating situation while butchering the English language. It irked me, and it stayed with me, and when it came time to write this poem (for the amazing Angie) about that strange feeling of being really annoyed by someone you care about, this approach was a natural. I'm not sure where the microfiche came from, but who doesn't love microfiche?

More soon.

website update

I'm having trouble getting access to www.kristofferdiaz.com to update it. I'm hoping it's just a problem with my hosting company. Should be updating over there this weekend.

Should be updating here this weekend as well. Ten more liner notes.

The majority of this weekend will be spent locked in my apartment, trying to finish a screenplay. Or two.

The Stories Behind The Fly Girls, IV.

We're about halfway there, folks.

A quick update on the book: It's currently the 5,358th ranked title on lulu.com, which is actually not bad at all. I'm only about halfway towards my original sales goal though, and things seem to be slowing down. So please--PLEASE--if you've purchased the book, and you dig it, spread the word. And please--PLEASE--if you've purchased the book, and you dig it, share that information with me. I'd love to post some of the responses folks are having to the poems.

That said...let's do some liner notes:

21. Lunares -- This is a lot of people's favorite, and it's certainly one of mine. Cindylu is one of those great friends that I don't actually know, have never actually met, but am still amazingly inspired by her. I've already mentioned Travel Hailu in a previous post, so you get a sense of the basic organizing principle for this one--haiku. Cindy asked for a poem about lunares (or birthmarks), and I went ahead and didn't research the history of the phrase. I ended up coming kind of close though, and with a poetic term like that, and form like haiku, it's kind of hard to go wrong.

22. Jellyfish -- This might be the weirdest poem I've ever written. I was told to write about having sex with a jellyfish. So I did. Write about it. Not do it. I took it as a challenge, and my main character ended up taking it as a challenge too. The rest is history. Bizarre history.

I just thought of something else about Lunares -- it has found its way, in excerpted form, into Tyree, which is, as loyal readers know, the sequel to Guernica. That's all.

23. Fly Girls: Read Me -- This was based on RGV's answers to my questions about dreams and fears and all that good stuff. She was kind of close to a lot of my own inner workings, so the piece just sort of poured right out. I did sneak in some of her personal stuff--references to her relationships with men and her need to allow herself weakness. I really enjoy writing from a woman's perspective, both in poems and in plays--even when they take me to places pretty distant from myself. Maybe especially then.

24. Munchies -- Man, just remember that not all these poems are autobiographical. Some of them are. This one might be. This one also might not.

25. Good Loving: A Sketch -- Someone said to write about good loving, and I almost wrote about the H-Town classic Knockin' The Boots, but opted to go in the sketch direction instead. The term good loving (and its dirtier cousin, good lovin') always feels raw and filthy to me, but there was a strong need not to go full-out in that direction in this one. And besides, thinking about the rawest, filthiest moments I could imagine or remember, they always came back to being madly, wildly, truly in love with the other person involved. And that lead to this.

More soon.

New Monologue

This monologue was written, by me, over at myspace.
It was written for Stephanie, who happens to be one of the best young actors in NYC.
She gave me a topic, and I ran with it in another direction.
I think she liked it.
You kind find out more about this kind of stuff over at the myspace page.

And...you can suggest a topic for me to write about.
You might even get a monologue out of it.

So this one is written for Stephanie to perform, but I don't think she'd mind if other women chose to perform it in auditions too.
Or other guys--we don't discriminate.

What I'm saying is, you all have my permission to audition with this piece if you so choose.
Just make sure you credit me if anyone asks.

My left shoe and my right shoe are the same shoe but opposite. Same purpose, same style, and completely at odds. My right shoe can't possibly do the job of my left. And I love my shoes, both of my shoes, and I love them together, and I think they love me, but I don't think they love me together.

No wait. That's not--

My left shoe and my right shoe are the same shoe, but opposite, and I need both of them, I mean, both of my feet are soft on the underside. Both of my feet are in danger of being sliced by stray shattered glass if I walk around with them unprotected. My left shoe protects my left foot. My left shoe can't protect my right foot. That doesn't mean I have any less respect for what the left shoe can do.

That's what I told him. I don't think he, like, got it.

"I'm not a shoe," he told me, and I told him "I know you're not a shoe," and he said "I can protect both of your feet, all of your feet, tops and bottoms, and your legs, and" -- and then he went in great detail describing all the body parts of mine he wanted to protect, and he took a lot more time protecting certain parts than other parts, you can guess. And I told him it wasn't about protecting my feet or my ass or my tits, and that the fact that he went from my feet to my ass to my tits just proved the point I was trying to make in the first place, because, because, because well, she wouldn't have jumped from my feet to my ass to my tits.

And I told him "look, I don't mind that those are the parts you plan to protect," and I didn't tell him that I knew that when he said "protect" he meant "violate" or maybe not violate, but something dirtier and more boy than "protect", and I didn't mind that, because he is a boy, and I like him being a boy, so the feet, the ass, the tits--protect away, right? "But you protect those parts, and the other parts need protecting. I don't expect you to be responsible for my overall protection, the overall protection of all my parts, but my parts still need protecting. Feet, legs, ass, tits, you got 'em covered. But I've got other parts. I need another shoe."

"Shoes don't protect anything other than feet."

He's astute.

I told him "I know shoes don't--this isn't about shoes. You. And She. Are the exact same to me, for me, around me, to me. You give me something and she gives me something and it's the same and the job overlaps, but you do it one way and she does another way and all together you and she protect me, top to bottom, head to toe, right foot to left foot." And that's what I was telling him, that I needed them both, and I realized that this could be problematic to understand, but that's why I brought up the shoes.

"I'm not a shoe." He was pretty adamant about this point.

"I know you're not a shoe!" And I took my left shoe off, and I threw it at him.

Other News.

1. I've got a special, myspace exclusive writing project going on in the spirit of Fly Girls and Other Poems. If you've got a myspace page, go check it out: www.myspace.com/kristofferdiaz

2. Spread the word about the book, folks.

3. I am still, slowly, working on non-poetry writing projects. The long-awaited novel is about two-thirds finished. The Unnamed Football Project (now known as Skill Positions is still in the early planning stages. I'm also about to dive into a monologue/possible ten-minute play--you may or may not hear more about that.

I think that's it, for now.

Liner notes probably won't be updated for a few more days, for those of you taking notes.
On the notes.