Carl "Off-Broadway" Bindman (Reading Edition)

So One Battle After Another is a really good movie and I’d suggest seeing it if you like seeing good movies. If anybody were wondering my position on this important topic, there it is.

What I’ve Been Up To

First of all, literally a day after I got my work authorization renewed (after a totally chill and cool and chill delay), I joined my first Equity contract, which also happened to be my first gig at an Off-Broadway Theatre—in this case, New York Theatre Workshop.¹

Sydney was the name, and a 29-hour reading was the game. Featuring new and recurring characters from the newsletter, we (Miguel Bregante, Nanouli Shevardnadze, Zoe Feng, Michael Landes, Matias Ulibarry, and myself) took a swing at developmentally staging an almost-verbatim reading of a certain article from a certain newspaper as part of Miguel’s New York Theatre Workshop 2050 Fellowship. Reception: good! Process: delightful! This was, I might add, yet another piece of mine with an almost entirely international team. It’s a powerful thing, in a way that is both profound and kind of obvious, to be able to share perspectives and experiences and work together in our difference to build something that represents us as both individuals and a collective. Kudos to NYTW for facilitating that. Theatre practice as political praxis, baby! The community of immigrant artists are the future and we are coming to destroy the aching husk of the world of yesterday! (Once furnished with the appropriate visas and working documentation).

The piece was about a conversation with an AI chatbot. Readers of this newsletter will know this as a topic about which I have strong feelings, all of them bad. So it ended up being a genuinely useful time, on the level of personal growth, to be reminded that the work of staging demands taking stock of the self—that bundle of biases, contradictions, preferences, values, etc. that somehow adds up to an identity—and sifting through what’s useful for the process of telling a particular story and what is not. Problems of vibe-harshing aside, taking an adversarial attitude toward the material makes it really hard to enter a character, and it’s funny that I ran into that obstacle playing a journalist writing about a topic I dislike when I tend not to have similar issues playing, I don’t know, murderous kings speaking in blank verse. I feel like it has to do with form; the structure of strong characterization and the inherent metaphor of theatricality (broadly defined) provide some sort of insulation that makes it easier to play with any sort of material. But once I had remembered that my job wasn’t necessarily to have the high score on the leaderboard of correct opinion, it became easier to see that my personal need to be distant from the distasteful thing was impeding my professional need to be proximate to it and transform it for my own uses. Folks, the learning never ends. Unfortunately.

What I’ll Be Up To

Auditioning, of course. A short film I did last year is being turned into a feature and I’ve been asked to loosely hold some dates in January, which is pretty neat. I’m turning 30 in just under a month; might throw a party for myself which feels gauche but what isn’t these days and wouldn’t it be nice to have a party?

What You’ll Be Up To

Registering to vote in the NYC Mayoral election! Deadline for remote registration is Oct. 25th. Info here. And the election is, of course, November 4th. Why not get me a birthday gift and vote for Zohran? Zohran Mamdani? You know, the cutie with the suity?

Also, see you out in the streets on the 18th, yeah? Yeah.

Oh, and maybe you want to buy my bicycle?

Anyway! That’s me.

Love ya,

Carl

And now, the moment you’ve been waiting for, it’s the Carl Bindman Approved Independent Media Link List, or, Good Stuff About Bad Stuff:

House Arab | Bidoun

I was working at the magazine as a fact-checker and my parents no longer considered me a failure, not because they read or admired it, but because when they said its name to friends and relatives it sparkled on their tongues.

🆕 Never Post! A.I. and New American Fascism

Is a generated aesthetic the look of our times?

Remake America | Aziz Rana

If we want democracy to survive, we need a vision that’s going to be more compelling than the one the authoritarians are offering.

1. Real Carl-heads will know that the first newsletter announcement I ever sent (with Gmail!) was that I was performing in an Off-Broadway production. Three years of working in New York theatre have led me to the need to disavow that claim and issue the correction that it was, in fact, Off-Off-Broadway. So. There you go.

This is the Carl Bindman Newsletter, for members of my professional or personal networks whom I think should get the scoop and be kept in the loop.

This newsletter was written on Lenapehoking, the occupied land of the Lenni Lenape.