So, hello everybody and welcome to Siegel Talks here at the Martinie Siegel Theatre Center at the Graduate Center CUNY of the City University of New York in Manhattan and so Wednesday for us it's the eight weeks of talks with CEDA artists from around the world and the globe. We get conflicting messages. We hear that in Brazil and Latin American countries they said devastating losses. They're coming in over a thousand yesterday meanwhile in New York's state and New York City which is the epicenter in the world. It seems to be that hospitals are less full but a thousand two hundred prison wards are infected out of 9,000 we hear so which is quite an astonishing symbol and I wonder what Foucault would think about that fact. We are listening today to one of the significant artists of the 20th century, artists that defined and wasn't the epicenter of what is called as the New York School of the New York scene of performing arts we have with us Richard Forman. Richard Forman's work and I'm just going to say a little bit maybe also for our international viewers is a wits like the history of New York avant-garde experimental theatre in itself. He was influence and friends of the Living Theatre and Jonas Mack is Robert Wilson, the great Jack Smith. He was collaborator of Richard Schachner and together they once founded the 68 Collective and if you just look at the groups that were participating was the Mabu Mines, Marinus Monk, Performance Group, Richards Group that later on morphed into the Wooster Group, the ridiculous theatre company and then of course his own creation the ontological hysterical theatre in St. Mark's Church which is for everybody as a kind of a sacred place. You have been there, you had to see the work and like every spring it was like clockwork and you know that would be a good year in the theatre once you saw Richard Forman production. Generations of New York theatre makers also have gone through it and I'm just going to see a few whole David Hershkowitz from the Tarkas Theatre Radio Hall, Elevator Repair Service, a very early John Jesseram, the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, Pavaliska, NTUSA, Yehuda, Richard Maxwell, Yang Jin Lee, Nick Bernersa from the Assembly and many many many many many others went through his work. His work is... What I mean, what you mean is that those people you named were all interns at my theatre at one point. All interns, they all got their start. They were influenced. It was a little alchemistic kitchen, a laboratory and with work, gnostic work, work that was cabalistic in a way and and that defied meaning that was creating new forms you know perhaps closer to a French theory at the time where he also went very often to Paris and the Festival d'Auton but he also did work at the Lincoln Centre at the public and it was Richard's work for those who knows. He has been a signpost, a very very very strong one and before Hans Tieslemon wrote his book on the post-traumatic theatre 30-40 years earlier he was practicing that and anticipated a future. So it's a great honor to have Richard with us here today. He is no longer presenting. Performance work is still involved in it and creating video and film work so enough of me now but we talk to theatre artists here on Seagal Talks to hear how they experience this time of corona, how they think about how they create and give meaning or take meaning away and to hear from Richard from whom we now do not hear enough is a very significant conversation for us. So Richard I'm sorry about my long wordy introduction and words of course cannot ever capture your work and your vision, your ideas. So first of all welcome. Well I'm glad to be here. You have to start me by asking whatever you want to ask. When I made theatre I did not have the spirit say that. So is this beard from corona time? Not really started before but maybe I anticipated it because I anticipated a lot of things in my life. So where are you right now? Well you know for the last few years I've had difficulty walking and I haven't really left my loft. I mean I live in a big loft and I gotta say shockingly that nothing seems that different to me in my personal life because we've always called for food from outside. You know what can I say video is omnipresent. So nothing in that sense is that changed for me. Now of course the plague seeps under the door like fog like mist comes through the closed windows. So I'm certainly aware of it but how does my work reflect that awareness? I hope not very much because I think that most people who try to attack a problem like that directly end up making a kind of journalistic theatre which is fine. Everybody should prosper but I have no interest in that. I've always been making interested in making a kind of poetic theatre you know I guess you would say in which I'm making objects that are like solid beautiful diamonds that you cannot penetrate but the different facets of the cut diamond reflect things in the world that everybody can see and relate to. I believe that if I was making theatre I would continue to try to make things that were in fact on a certain level impenetrable. You mentioned Michel Foucault in your introduction. Foucault saw one of my plays and said the best thing that I've ever been said about my plays. Foucault said you know it was fascinating. I could tell there was some kind of rigorous system at work but I couldn't figure out what that system was. I'd like everybody to feel that way. I'd like everybody to be fascinated to sense that indeed there was some controlling intelligence but they shouldn't be able to psych it out. It should be an eternal mystery. I think everything in life that is interesting should be thought of as an eternal mystery. The code cannot be cracked. I shouldn't be in the theatre therefore because the theatre of course is based on the idea usually that well there's the audience there has to be communication to the audience and the feedback from the audience and I've never bought into that so I've said from the very beginning that I was a misfit in the theatre in a way and I think that was my value. A good friend of mine Howard Bloom who's written some wonderful books about the world described what I was doing. He said Richard you make diversity generators. You turn out diversity generators and I think that's quite accurate. So that's where I was and that's where I am today. Now in making film I'm not sure. Film is more of a mystery to me still and I'm not sure exactly what I'm trying to do when I make films. I can see that it's easier to penetrate than was my theatre because you well film just sort of engulfs you in a way that my theatre did not. My theatre was in essence behind a wall of glass and we even put up glass sometimes at the front of the stage and nevertheless I wanted to say to the spectator hold it hold it don't come in but I would build the set and items of the set around the audience so that at the same time I was saying hold it don't come in. I was trying to include people in that world for which the key perhaps was not provided. And that's what I would do now. I made a few forays into doing plays when George Bush was president. We did a play called King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe. That was about this sort of cowboy figure with his six guns. Obviously it was a stand in for George Bush and what I did not like about George Bush in those days. But even that the genesis of that was not the desire not saying how can I say something about George Bush in the world. I always worked by taking my notebooks which had all kinds of stuff that just came out of me looking for pages that I thought I could put together and then after that was put together and after it was staged sort of seeing a theme emerge and circling around that theme but never never starting out saying I want to do a play about this. I want to do a play about that. To me that's never been interesting. No so you had Pavaliska mentioned that when he was on Seagull Talks he referred to you and said you were the one who already put a glass screen between the audience. Yes funny because I did it one of the plays that the first play I did in Paris. You know they'd never seen anything like that and a lot of the audience walked out and so forth and it was in Jean-Louis Barreau's theatre. Jean-Louis Barreau when I was young had been a hero. So at the end there was a party and Jean-Louis Barreau came up and said oh Richard your theatre was very fascinating but I tell you something you cannot do theatre behind a wall of glass and of course he meant my style my stay-away style and ironic that in later years I did do theatre behind the wall of glass. Yeah and you know which now is perhaps one of the things people think about to create performances where perhaps actors are behind masks or behind plexi class like in shops where we go to. I'm sure even so you say you're secluded perhaps or monkish perhaps rabbinical existence of what you have now where you study the holy texts and images but COVID must be on your mind the virus what do you think? I think it's terrible that people would die. I think one has to bear in mind that it's still a tiny percentage of people that get sick and that die that doesn't make it any less awful that that's happening but I think that can't be the focus I mean life goes on and the intelligence should go on so I'm not interested in seeing I've never been interested in seeing plays that are about the current situation. The current situation always takes care of itself and presents it to people in various ways. The task of an intelligent person an intelligent viewer is somehow to separate oneself from those circumstances. I don't think those circumstances teach very much. I don't think it teaches very much that people are dying from this play. Yes of course it's terrible and I want there to be a cure like anyone else but the fact of death being more present than it normally is well it doesn't really teach me anything.  Maybe but not more now I refuse to have it be more now than it was throughout my whole creative life. Now that may shock people but I don't mind I've always been in the business of trying to shock people because I think that's what people need. People don't need a chorus of people saying oh this is the situation yes well is me what can we do about that. I don't think that's needed. I think shocks are needed and I never did shocks by very aggressive things like having people make love to each other on stage and so forth. I made shocks that again didn't often perceive as such but I think it was shocking to your system. One of the shocking things I did along with the glass walls that really made a lot of people uptight I always had a lot of lights focused on the audience which sort of blinded the audience and I thought a kind of blindness forces you back into dealing with the seeing problem of seeing the play on stage in spite of the fact that wow those lights are brightly shining on me so it forced perception to operate slightly differently kind of shock that was a kind of shock. Yeah yeah it really really was I think one of the great contributions of your theater is that it reinforced these new ideas I think of that late modernity or the postmodern modernity post-traumatic modernity that one becomes conscious of the process of interpretation and of seeing that it's not you see this and that emotions are manipulated things are explained that you try to at least I think to see they become conscious of what you see and and understand it's one one way of looking at the world. Absolutely absolutely that always concerned me one of the first things I did was an opera called Elephant Steps and at one point who was Julius Rudel who ran the New York City opera at that point he asked me what effect I wanted to have on the audience and I said well Mr Rudel the greatest compliment that I had was from somebody who saw the production that was I think it was in Hunter College at the time and she said you know Richard I really enjoyed watching your opera but more than I enjoyed that I enjoyed watching myself watch it. Julius Rudel lost interest in me at that point but I thought that was a great compliment. No no no it's a really really significant contribution in the way of Ronan Bart's idea that not the writing what you read is of significance the reader the interpretation the connections you make of the multiplicity of text the intertextuality and that you focused on the mind of the audience and not the mind in that sense of the director that you say I have to take meaning away instead of explaining the inexplainable you said let's make what's explainable unexplainable and I would make one correction yeah in my case yes not what's in the mind of the audience but what's in the mind of each individual spectator each individual yeah and I think it's a radical invention a significant one that radiated as you said like in diamond and diamonds are diamonds because more light comes out than comes in that's why they are brilliant that's why they are shining which if you would be still in the business as they say to make your show now is there something from the time that would touch you to say I might go this even if it's not connected do you have something some scenarios in your mind what you would do if you would had to open next month you know I thought about that when I knew I was going to have to give this talk and I have to say no for me it's like an iron curtain has come down in front of the theater and I can't imagine what I would do I suppose what I would have to do would be I don't think I want to proceed from the text anymore the text was always the most important element to me I always started with a text always but I suppose I would like to get five or six people in a room and just say to them look I have to make another play and maybe you could be in it but I just want to look at you I just want to watch you for a while and they would say hmm you want us to invent little scenes I said no no no I just want to watch you I mean do whatever you want to do and I would watch and try to see some little something that clicked in my mind that I would think maybe I could build upon like right now I'm watching you and I don't I don't know how well the people can see you but you are sitting there nodding your head slightly well that might be something you know maybe I could build upon that I don't know okay so the idea in in a very small group and observing and sharing a moment I don't know you know I always shy away from those normal friendly terms like sharing mm-hmm I think it's more like setting up a little not explosion I'm not interested in explosions but again I would return to the image of a diamond of it doesn't let you see into it but it refracts beams of light it might be fascinating I'm interested in fascinating I suppose not in sharing now one might say well but in this time of crises that's that's cold that's inhuman I don't think it is uh I don't think I cut off the human part of me as I say you know it's the it's doctors and scientists job to figure out a cure and to take care of people who are ill I don't think it's the artist's job to do things that would soothe those people or distract them what is the artist's job what do you think in this time we live I think the art of I think all times the artist's job is to make something that is both mysterious which means impenetrable that's another word for impenetrable mysterious yet fascinating so you are drawn into an involvement with that which is fascinating but you cannot explain I really think that is the artist's job now you may say well but that's not what Shakespeare did no probably not but uh that's not my problem I can only see it from the perspective of what 20th century artists are trying to do with the 20th century world I'm sorry we're in the 21st century see I mean I'm living in the past it's okay hmm are you even though you say your time now doesn't differ so much the pre-corona time you are I think in Worcester street in your loft in New York do you engage daily in making art now well yes because I'm making film which mostly means editing footage that I shoot very fast yes so I'm making art every day so tell us a little bit how does your day look like and what do you do in that editing well you know when I I've shot video very fast I generally shoot four days I get enough material you have a couple of actors together in one building or one wall yes like the material that I'm working on now it was some of my people but also people from Slovenia because years ago I was supposed to go to Slovenia and work with some actors but I got sick and I couldn't fly or something so they said well can you do it on Skype so I was looking at Skype and trying to direct the actors I felt it was kind of silly but I did it but then the actors said oh no we liked it it was interesting and we'd like to come to New York and really do a project with you well I didn't think they were serious but like four years later I got a telephone call and they said well we're all set we're coming to New York okay so I told the woman who is organizing it that we should get an Airbnb space and she found this incredible brownstone in West Harlem up in like 139th or something and it was full of antiques beautiful and we had that four story space for a week and I told the act I gave the actors tasks that were not unlike the tasks I used to give them in my plays it would be abstract things like okay now Max you go over to the table put your hands on it then think oh no my head hurts hold your head and slowly collapse okay but all kinds of things like that simple things and we did that and I got material and then came home took all that material and I've been editing it now for a year and a half it's all on the editing so four days of shooting a year and a half of editing yes uh it's all on the editing because the mysteries you're looking for you you just cover them yes between the images uh no because in uh final cut online I work in final cut pro still even though it's supposed to be outdated now uh you can do everything to the image you can make a different kind of light different kind of texture zoom in do different things and it's figuring out how to distort the image a lot of times like if you make it very bright just like I used to shine lights in the audience's eyes so it was bright but you couldn't really see the actors I mean you could but it was hard so working in final cut you can make the image sort of washed out and bright uh and you can do all kinds of things like that and it's doing that that engages me that I do for three or four hours every day so my day consists now of getting up at breakfast with my wife and then and looking at the the New York Times online looking to see what's happening in the world I'm looking up what Trump is doing and then going to work on my film and then I have lunch and then I rest a little bit and then in the evening my wife and I watch a film that's my life and that's satisfactory to me 83 I don't have the energy to do much more it sounds like a beautiful day to me if you mentioned Trump what do you think about contemporary America well I've never been shy about saying in print everywhere else but I've always had a very ambivalent attitude towards America there are many things about America I do not like I do not like the businessman culture that rules America uh and so Trump is just a radicalization to an absurd degree of that uh when I worked in Paris my dream was to go live forever in Paris and I almost did that but at the last minute it became difficult but I was it was lucky I think because I realized I would never really be a Frenchman and the battles that I had to fight making art being a battle at all times the battles that I uh sort of awkward American had to fight were here in America so I had to stay here and deal with all the things I hated about America because that's who I was an American the battle of producing in America or the battle of the artists in the world the battle of the artist trying to mold material that he got from his placement in America you know uh because Americans talk in a certain way Americans move in a certain way that's why I always told my my actors on stage I was not satisfied with the way the American language sounded when spoken by normal actors so I had two techniques I would tell the actors try to put your voice low in your register so you're always talking like that that sort of flattened out the voice and made it more interesting to me uh or I would give the actors an accent I would say okay look use some kind of phony German accent because that in the same way distanced the actor from what they were saying and made the words emerge as these clunky things that had a tactile interest so those are two of the ways in which I would battle uh my material which was my actors if you say it was uh you want to turn by the way by the way you you have an accent you're from where Germany German German German accent yeah I think Brecht always liked actors who had an accent and Heiner Müller always was point out that he believed that actors you know are more credible if they had an accent they were not representing the official language or were would wear words as he said like a Gucci clothes that was my theory very early yeah so do if you said in that battle to to make art in America which is one of the hardest thing and I don't know if people really realize especially in the European world how hard it is so do you see it as a contribution to society in a political sense that the artists work yes in this sense I don't see it in the political sense that it would be good to take clear Marx's point of view which I might agree with and you know make a play with that being very present this would be the case in Brecht but I think Americans the reactionary nature that's built into all Americans comes from wanting to know where they are you know they asked you used to ask you years ago are you a commie are you a good American what are you and Americans wanted to know where they were placed and wanted to feel secure uh because American culture was such a vast thing so I thought that in order to fight the American mindset uh I had to do things that as I've described were hard to penetrate and make made people not able to easily relate to them with their normal personality which was always a reactionary personality even if you were a liberal in America basically your mindset was somehow reactionary and the way to do that was through the style of the work I thought not through the content what did you find that was that worked I mean I think also theater makers now are looking for you know have to discover new forms as you did on your own but from your experience and from your decades of work what do you think one should keep in mind what is what is something that helps to penetrate that mindset in a way uh the only thing that one can say to artists the most important thing is courage courage to notice where your slight ticks might take you in other words when I was at the Yale drama school the playwriting teacher was a man by the name of John Gassner who was a wonderful wonderful wise man and he said to me once Richard you know what you do is very interesting but you have one fault you get something that you like in your plays and then you don't want to let go of it but you want to repeat it you want to repeat it and I went home and I thought boy Mr. Gassner knows and I must figure out a way not to to get rid of that tendency to repetition but then I thought well if that's where my instinct takes me then my task is to radicalize that and that's what I did I started in the very beginning I was making plays that just repeated a few words and a few basic movements and I would repeat and repeat and repeat and so I think what you have to tell people is have the courage to notice what your what your impulse or what the ticks in your approach to things are and find a way to radicalize that because that's who you really are you have the courage to do that and and in a way you do the opposite of what you were instructed yes of course of course because you can only be instructed in what's been done you don't want to do what's been done what's the point so you have to have the courage to do what hasn't been done in spite of the fact that people will not understand at least at first what are your earliest memories of theater what is the very first thing you remember that you saw where that was a kind of a theater uh when I was very young I think I was still in grade school the doily card opera company which was the English opera company that did originally Gilbert and Sullivan operettas when they were alive and is still doing them to this day and they came to New York doing a repertoire of like eight or nine operettas and my parents took me to see it and I had a profound effect upon me but the memory that I'll always have was the strongest memory it was done in the old saint uh zig-fil theater which no longer exists but was a beautiful old theater and had a curtain a show curtain in front that was an embroidered curtain and for some reason I always remember when the overture started the lights came up on the curtain and you saw these unicorns and whatever was in the embroidered curtain and that sense of tense anticipation was my strong first impression of the theater and that's sort of what I always wanted to get in the future that tense anticipation of what's going to happen what does it mean what's it's going to be and then I saw other things of course but I went to the theater when I was a kid all the time every Saturday I would come in from grammar school with my friend and we would see a show and every Broadway show that I saw I would walk out say to my friend John it's hopeless if that's what they want I can't be in a theater I hate all that stuff uh then occasionally I would see something that got to me for instance I was very impressed with what was a big flop uh Ruth Gordon actress who was a friend of Falkner's doing Falkner's Requiem for a Nun on Broadway and I was profoundly moved by that it was a big flop but I thought that was great yeah I also remember the original production that Kazan did of Kimina Rial by Tennessee Williams I thought when I was 13 years old I thought it was wonderful in later years I saw an interview with Kazan where he said well I I did I missed the boat with Kimina Rial because it was a very poetic text and I should have done it in a poetic fashion but I did it as if it was very realistic oh my god that's what made it great Mr. Kazan poetic interpretations that I saw in later years were terrible yeah I mean this the the tension that was the curtain I think from your manifesto of the ontological hysterical theater you said you stage uh static tensions of interpersonal relations um yeah in space you know and yes yes yes and um and then and then the objects are in it um would you advise or think to theater artists engage in film work and video work in zoom online work what's your take on it that's not for me to say you know I started making films only when I gave up theater and when I was a young man I went to theater all the time and I never saw movies you know my friends would go to a film on Saturday afternoon and I thought oh no that's that's not high class I'm going to the high class theater uh in later years I discovered how wrong I was and I became an aficionado of film but that was only much much later sort of after I'd stopped making theater maybe a little before but uh then in film I saw everything everything and also underground film because my friends uh early on were the so-called underground filmmakers who gathered around Jonas Meekus and uh to me that was a big revelation when I saw young people my age take little home movie cameras and make films some of which I thought were incredibly beautiful so um yeah I was a child of underground films in that way and like flaming creatures flaming creatures yeah I think you were there when the police interrupted it and no I wasn't there actually I did I did go to see flaming creatures like 13 times in a row I thought it was so transcendental you know no Jonas Meekus and another friend of mine Ken Jacobs were arrested I didn't know either of them in those days that's how I got to know them because there was article in the paper that they got arrested and we had been going to the film screenings but we called up Jonas Meekus and said is there anything we can do to help he said oh you can come down to the office and help file things and so forth and I didn't do that but my wife did but that was my contact with all those people so the police brought you together do you watch any online theater work now new production things or or archival work do you do you engage all right at now in the time of corona do you watch no I find it hard to watch theater in any form but theater form I mean all of my plays are recorded we'll put on tape and I hate it all because to me theater is despite the fact that I said no it's by the wall of glass or at least a postulated wall of glass theater dependent upon the flesh and blood presence of sweating people and to see that on video I think deadens it completely you know there's no more tension there's no more live bodies so I can't watch performances really on video on video or online is that evil of me no I think this is it's a significant you know it's a significant comment you know I mean there might there I we do hear reports of young students who say oh really great I don't need to go to the theater I can just watch at home of course and then I don't have to get out it costs less and I can study theater like this and it's not what you miss what you miss even in zoom if you're in the theater the the stage is wide and your eyes can turn to see that side of the stage this side of the stage and follow an actor even though I claimed that I tried to make theater where you watch the whole stage at one time but that's not the way most theater works I'm sure it's not the way most theater on zoom today works but you do not have the ability to turn your head and watch things as they cross your field of vision yeah and I think theater for the foreseeable future if it will be open it will be in a way like your theater like small spaces there's so smaller audiences everything that people kind of complained about and and it will be now in the forefront and I think your work has shown what is possible what is thinkable let it unbox the mysteries we don't understand and points that actually life is a mystery and as you say the dazzling one a beautiful shining one if one can can see you know occasionally I had to do my plays on you know on tour and they would put us in some huge opera house or something and it was absolutely absurd I mean you know I always tried to mitigate it but you know I had a lot of strings across my stage come out into the audience so I would put strings way out into the opera house often dotted with black paint to try to make a distance sort of disappear but it was always a real problem yeah yeah and they're often it's so much urge to have huge spaces to fill it theater universities build gigantic halls with a thousand theater two thousand and I think it's against you know what we have learned from act from great masters of theater of thinkers like you Peter brook Kotowski and others that it's this small space yes that is powerful in our talks around the world whether we speak to people now from Indonesia or from Guillermo Calderon in Chile and others who say we will go and work in small small spaces and yeah and this is what worked this is also an Indian colleague Abhishek who said we that's what we do we have no PR we have no money to do shows but we do them in small spaces and the government censors them if you want to know if theater has an impact ask our government they don't censor the films even if they are more critical themes yeah our staff nobody wants us to to to show it up do you feel that theater artists right now also should engage in kind of a social context and work to help out do soup kitchens to to you know help the healthcare workers do you feel well I think I have to stop producing art or is it a time to go deeper into it's a time to go deeper into but my answers have already indicated that I don't think there's any way to reach out to all those people who face danger every day and help the people who are sick or you know make food deliver food you know my hat's off to them and I don't see how art can contribute to them not real art maybe you can make things you know feel good I suppose you can make something the equivalent of hair where all the all of a sudden all the the hospital workers break into song or something and it makes the people feel better but that's to me that's not real art what do you read what do you how do you engage your mind yesterday or the day before from Indonesia the colleagues if we have to keep our engines warm today what do you do well I I look at a lot of film but I read for months but now it's worn out I've been reading and rereading this French author Modiano who won Nobel Prize a couple of years ago so I've been reading him why why I just found him completely seductive he you know why for bad reasons he made me think I was in Paris again he made me think I was walking the streets of the lesser known districts of Paris sitting in cafes in the lesser known places of Paris and just in a very romantic sense I enjoyed escaping that way in the last two days I've been thinking maybe I should start reading some Gertrude Stein again so I have pulled out some of her books tell us a bit about her if you have been often called a Steinian a grandchild or a collaborator or whatever what do you think of her what does she have to tell us at the moment you know this is a difficult question for me I always said that my two main teachers were Brecht and Gertrude Stein now it's been so long since I read Gertrude Stein that off the top of my head it's sort of difficult for me to answer but I know that again to me Gertrude Stein with that repetition nevertheless also held up her hand and said don't come too close and she uh I especially liked her theoretical work where she talked about you know what are masterpieces and there was no clear cut answer there was an answer that she if you delved into it you sort of discovered orientation what masterpieces were but both she and Brecht had a kind of alienating effect and I don't think I've ever seen a successful Brecht production I've never seen the Breller ensemble I don't know what I would think of one of those productions but the productions I've seen in America were all too user friendly ah with one exception one exception way back when I was very young I saw Eric Bentley who had been in Berlin studied with Brecht became an important American critic he did you know he did a production of The Good Woman of Setsuan with Uta Hagen and I saw that and I thought that was very good it was very cold it was very standoffish and it was hated it didn't last very long but I thought perhaps that was the most successful Brecht had seen I've never seen any good Gertrude Stein they always try to make her friendly in various ways no it doesn't work we are having a few questions we're getting from from our audience Robert Stanford wrote and said about musicals you say you also did musicals and plays they're such different formats what were your your your favorite ones and in the big question are musicals a way at all to deal with the times when we live in and perhaps perhaps you know when I did musicals I was much more of a normal theater kind of person I did not try to make things that would keep the audience behind a wall of glass so you did the three penny opera right yeah yeah uh and I did that in a way that a lot of Lenya didn't like it all because I did it in Lincoln Center which I thought was this big white elephant you know big white building it looked sort of like a pentagon looked like a war machine and I tried to make my version of three penny opera reflect that big overblown pentagon feeling now which is the exact opposite of what Brecht did in his little theater in Berlin originally where's a baroque theater you know it's like all the gold and plaster the opposite of a technical room for the so a lot of Lenya didn't like that but I thought I was being very true to Brecht's alienation sense yeah in a way people do bring it up there's this idea of the social distancing and the distancing and the Brecht's idea of a theater that you know do you see any new connection that could be drawn any new connection from that idea of that social distancing you know that right now we will not be able to be close you know I would just remember what I tried to do my work was radicalize that social distancing without any virus just you know behind a wall of glass or stay away don't get too close I don't want a theater that embraces you when I went to the Broadway theaters when I was a teenager and I hated everything I gave one example of what I didn't hate to me the whole content of those performances was the actors in one way or another even if they were playing a drama the actors were saying love me love me the director was saying love this piece come get closer we invite you into this piece I hated that I hated that no maybe that's my personality I don't know but voila there you are so I think that sure Brecht would be useful if people made the proper use of him today what do you think of I don't know when the last show what was the last show you went to see what do you think of contemporary also the avant garde or the experimental theater in new york oh I don't know what the last thing I saw was I mean as I said many of the people who are now well known in the experiment experimental theater I'd say at least 75 percent of them started in my theater as interns and did their first plays in my theater yeah uh trying to remember what was the last thing I saw any university in america or in the world would be proud to have the track records of interns or students you produced as I said I have nothing to teach to you and you're on your own you know which is the opposite of traditional teaching because we in america don't have really a university that's dedicated to truly experimental uh a theater we have one we have one which one uh travis precedent at cal arts cal arts okay that's fair yeah I think cal arts does adventurous things and it's open to doing adventurous things and I think travis is trying to encourage that yeah yeah I know he has been at the CEO that is that is true and it is not looking you know towards broadway and yeah towards the production I think that's what's so wrong with ART I think Robert bruestine said that you know any money that's been made in any connection with with broadway should go directly to the program or to students who for a long time even the acting students were forced to pay I have issues of 60 70 000 so it's a shocking way of a lot of educating and yes it's happening in small spaces like yours that you know the Richard Maxwell's young Jean Lee the Pavoliska's the radio whole ad they came out it's an incredible legacy yeah you pulled out yeah and better they do things that I don't know well I know the last interesting thing I've seen when I saw the original production of a group called object collection yeah it's group uh the person who has a sound used to be my sound man he's a composer of very aggressive music and his wife teaches costumes in Colombia but she does the texts and the staging and when I first saw their first production I thought I don't know if I hate this or I love this best possible response and I saw it again and I got to love it and uh I think what they do is very very interesting that first production they were saying this abstract text but perhaps because she was a costume designer all through the production there were piles of costumes all around the stage and the actors all the time were getting into one costume getting out of it getting into another costume it was great they don't do that anymore but I think their work is very interesting yeah it really really is here's a question from from London Patrick Kennedy who said you know he had a he directed some of your work in the UK yeah I know yeah you want to know when is the film coming out you're working on how can people access them I'll go I don't know I don't care I don't know I'll put it on video I suppose I'll put it on I have one other film on Vimeo called mad love which is not the Peter Laurie film and it's not the Andre Breton book it's my film mad love and this new film I'll put on Vimeo also so they can find it on your website or in general they just go on Vimeo and put yeah I just go on Vimeo yeah I don't care when it's out or not so for you is that could be for years your editing process and yeah yeah first interruption to that you have to bring something I suppose I suppose yes yes to an end yeah I mean there are examples there are a few examples of artists who never sort of released their work at the top of my head I can't think which ones but there were some and since you say you know inspired you watch film and maybe also for our you know listeners who now also watch their at home on criterion or other places what what do you watch what do you feel is meaningful oh we watch everything and especially these days my wife doesn't like the more challenging films that I like which ones do you like what are the more challenging films trying to think uh I used to be very fond of this french filmmaker Bruno Dumas you know I always respected Godard but I was not really convinced that that many of his films were that successful and he seems to share the same opinion actually you can believe what he says uh I'm sure there's somebody after Bruno Dumas but that's the last person I could think of he made very very interesting films especially his early films first five films plus five films well that's a good a good tip so what are you watching right now what did you watch last week or this week well because my wife she wanted to watch things with music so we're watching all the musby berkeley musicals uh the musical numbers are great but the question to sit through all these stories leading up to them which is not so great but the musical numbers are great I think Kennedy also asked do you have a favorite musical at all that American art form that is also not a favorite musical in the theater or in film in in theater he asked yeah uh in theater well I can't think of any that I'm crazy about no any Kurt vile I was always fond of Kurt vile for years I was fascinated with uh Mahagani I mean I did the three penny opera of course and there was somebody in France who said okay you can do Mahagani in my theater and then I got sick and I couldn't do it and he said okay Richard call me when you're better I want to do it and I want you to do it so I finally got better and I contacted him but his theater uh had lost its funding and so I could not do Mahagani but that was the piece I always loved that would be my favorite musical opera what have you okay the opera wonderful well it's uh something the world and truly lost that would have been fascinating um yeah coming closer closer to our hour with on howl run but um since you are the most successful as we pointed out school of in in the Americas of of new work of experimental work which you did without any formal curricula without any semester breaks and papers and writing you know what do you say an important thing I would never offer a critique of the work that the people did you never did no because often I wouldn't like it very much but I knew that that was me and uh people you know artists who are trying to do something I don't think need a critique they need encouragement they need encouragement this is really an important advice you know encouragement they're not not critique yeah you're you're ontological historical theater perhaps only the Gießen school in Germany can be compared to the influence you had so what would you say now um I'm I'm sure today what do I do I wish an artist are listening what what what do you what at twice do you have for um you know there's next generation of the people who would let's say you would be still working that the people who would be your interns your light designers your composers who would go on to great things what do you think this time of corona and this time of crisis that does existentially uh ask questions I mean we just had a mirror who found that from from Palestine who's theater who said you know the western world never had this unsecurity the uncertainty whether we daily live with like people in Africa we talk to say we live 400 000 people die of malaria we have now 100 000 close to 100 000 death in in the in America which is whatever five times more than the vietnam war socials but still what do you say to young artists who now engage with the world and well it's difficult in the theater because you have to get together with other people and I don't know if it's possible for you to find other people uh you know two three five that you could work with but then if you can find those people who you know pass the test and are not sick and are not contagious if they can come to your apartment and you make something in your apartment and you have a uh cd player that you can record a soundtrack you can record music and you just figure out what you can make in your apartment that's all the only way you do anything is by starting to do it you know uh I never you know I wrote manifestos and things well I assure you I never looked at them when I was making theater I never thought about them when I was making theater I proceeded purely by instinct purely by instinct when I wrote it was writing little snatches of dialogue purely by instinct not knowing what I was going to say and then I would assemble them and I would design a set I would design like 12 sets until I got one that I thought was sufficiently ambiguous whether it was taking place in a cafe or a church or what was it and we'd build a set and I'd make music in the soundtrack and we'd go into the theater and on the first day I'd say to the actors okay uh Joe you say the first line and you come in the door and you go and you try to sit down but then you get scared of the seat and you go against the wall oh no no he did it that's lousy let's instead Joe you come in you say the line through the open door then slam the door and we would just keep trying other things that my instinct would lead me to try then when we were finished I who am pretty smart uh could see that unbeknownst to me the play did have a secret coherence and did have a secret theme but I never planned it but I could see it most people who came to see the plays didn't see that but I could see it no this is a significant advice to trust your instinct to to do something and you start doing things when you start doing something and just just have an impulse and do it and see where that leads and do not be afraid do not be afraid to throw out a lot of stuff you know in my rehearsal I used to tell the actors millions of times every day I was like oh no that's stupid I'm not referring to you I'm referring to my choices that's stupid yeah and going back to your image of the diamond you'll find a raw diamond a stone not only that you lose up to 60 percent of the stone to make a yes you have to cut away that's what makes it yeah and Ernest Hemingway said the thing that a writer needs above all is a built-in shit detector because you turn out a lot of shit yeah you have to be able to tell that and throw it out yeah well Richard really really thank you for for taking your time and interrupting your day and your work and you know we all admire you and we we miss you well it's been a pleasure and your work is significant and important and you continue doing this I hope that you know that people will tune in and see your work on the Vimeo I think also I think Lincoln Center Library of the Performing Arts has your videos and all your work even so as you said there are a lot of my a lot of videos of my work is you find online but I hate online you know I hate it shouldn't it distorts the work you know and we can take the Stiegel Center proud in the fact that we got Richard Foreman to join Zoom he's now on it you know if some of his colleagues you know can send him the Zoom invite for for interrupting him even more and certain is that life will be interrupted and nowadays will be interrupted so really thank you Richard for listening thank you all our listeners for being with us this was I think an important message from from Richard who in a way has always worked in a way as if there is a coronavirus out there in a way perhaps he was a vaccination that the body of American theater got to got stronger and not that it changed the body but it was something that helped it to to to to become more strong yes well I'd like to think so I'd like to think so yeah and and tomorrow we will have Thomas Osfuber end up with us the great curator also started out as a playwright of the Berlin Festspieler who runs the Martin Kropius Bar where he has exhibitions out he runs the film Festspieler overlooks the Theater Traffin the Jazz festivals and and also his engagement here with the contemporary medias and and he is a close observer of their scene in Europe and in the world and we really are looking forward to hear from him what he did that should be good the changes that will be good so I hope you will all be with us thanks to howl around for for hosting us the DJ and Travis our single team Andy and some young and Friday Philip Hough will be with us and with two other one or two other partners Jordana from the Jack space so um hopefully you will again give us some time to listen and I'm busy everybody is how significant you know basically if anybody has any comments about what we've been talking about I wish they would email me okay at M M E D W A R D A madame aduardo which is the title of one of george batize erotic novels madame aduardo at earthlink.net wonderful and good that that is good and and if not send it to us to the seagull talks at gmail.com seagull talks and we will forward it so thank you again Richard and I hope to all see you all again tomorrow and hear you from you and stay safe and stay tuned. Goodbye Richard.


Well, first of all, I'd just like to start off by thanking you all for attending. There were some pretty good sessions up against this one, and it's the morning session, which means if it was me, I probably wouldn't have made it, actually. It's my own session. But since I'm giving a talk, I didn't have much choice. So Ruby Waves is, you know, another framework. I think hopefully as we go through this, you'll see that it has some different twists over what some of the other frameworks are offering in a different angle and approach to the problem. And that's really what I'm trying to kind of get across in this talk is if I had to pick one thing, it's that it's more of an architectural framework than an applications framework. And the focus is really around resource-oriented architecture, which I think is an extremely...  And that's because there's a lot of power to that paradigm. And Waves' objective really is, as it's grown up, is to sort of help you... help developers in general take better advantage and write more truly resource-oriented applications with fewer obstacles to doing so. Before I get into some of that, let me quickly just introduce myself. My name is Dan Yoder. I work with AT&T Interactive, R&D, out in Los Angeles, which is a lot of fun. Like a lot of people, we're really desperate for really elite Ruby programmers, so I'll leave my pitch at that, but it's a great place to work. Some of the things that we've been working on, a lot of interesting things around the Ruby community, mobile development, and rich client interfaces. So if you have a kind of an R&D bent and you like really nice weather, you know, get in touch. So that's me. And so let's just dive in. So this diagram, I think, is a really cool diagram. Well, not the diagram itself, but the historical significance of it. It was apparently one of the first attempts by Tim Berners-Lee to describe the architecture of the web as he envisioned it. I'm not sure what the date, if this is circa like 93 or 94, or exactly where it was. But one thing about it, and it's just neat because it's got, you know, some sort of historical significance, but one thing that's really interesting about it is that it's not an MVC architecture. And if you follow, and most of you in this room, you know, and it's even a little intimidating talking about this because it's a learning process for me, you know, are probably aware that there's really a whole very rich architectural domain and a lot of thought that was put in to the architecture of the worldwide web. And in fact, although some of the success of the web is probably a little bit accidental and good timing and some of those other things, the more you dig, the more you realize how much thought was really put into some of these things that, you know, at a casual glance can seem like they just sort of popped up as ad hoc solutions to problems. And for those of you who've read Roy Fielding's thesis on REST, you know, he was also a major influencer on the HTTP specification that we use today, and a lot of those things in there really were attempts to sort of round out an architectural framework, really, or as they call it, a style, which is also an important distinction. We'll focus on the web and HTTP mostly in this talk, but it's not obviously limited to those things. Now, because of the power of resource-oriented architecture, if you want to kind of get a feel for, you know, we've already seen the vast success of the worldwide web, but what we're also seeing now is the emergence more and more of running everything in the cloud, even databases, running, you know, all of your, you know, doing Amazon EC2 type of things. Things are moving more and more into the cloud and we also see lots and lots of APIs. Every week there's new announcements from Yahoo or Google or, you know, hopefully in the future from AT&T Interactive as well. About, you know, new APIs that you can consume in the cloud without having to really actually, you know, go out and, you know, buy something, install it and configure it. You just point into web service, get your credentials, whatever. And there you go. So the next question, though, is that a lot of people ask, you know, you say, well, you know, people are always asking you this when you do something kind of silly like try to write your own framework. You know, well, why? Why would I do this? Why would I use it? And, you know, you can say resource-oriented all day, but for a lot of people it comes a lot more down to what, what does that really bind me? Why are my apps running better? And the real answer is that you're leveraging what the web has already figured out. All of this thought that's gone into how do you do massive scaling with all kinds of disparate systems, many of which have different underlying semantics or assumptions about the way that they're expecting to operate. And the way that this all works is, you know, widely known as sort of loosely coupling and making sure that, you know, there's a certain amount of tolerance in the way that everything comes together. That's where the scalability comes. So resource-oriented architecture, scalability. If you're looking at an architecture and you're evaluating it based on its openness and its standards, compliance, and so on, you know, the web can, the resource-oriented architecture and the web sort of offers that as well. Over a thousand APIs are now out there published on a programmable web. This was a screenshot from last night that I took. So, you know, there's a lot of examples that reuse and packaging services for other people to consume is really working. It's an idiom that can work not only for big companies like an Amazon or a Google, but internally for the things that you're working on. So, you know, we're talking about scalability. We're talking about open standards. We're talking about reuse. And then maybe one of the biggest things that's easy to overlook is just this amazing amount of infrastructure that is already in place that will help you. Edge caching, proxy servers, a lot of very mature, stable technology that has been tested and proven to be robust. So when you're looking again at an architectural idiom or an architectural style, resource-oriented makes the most sense. But again, you know, a lot of web apps are really starting with MVC and then trying to make it and adapt it to be more resource-oriented. And Waze is kind of flipping that around, saying there's so much value in resource-oriented architecture we should be starting with resource-oriented architecture and then layering on the pieces that we specifically need in a given context. So the next question then comes up, well, that's fine, I can understand that, but I'm not going to try to get into a purist definition. This isn't really a definition up here because, you know, I don't know for sure. I mean, there's a lot of people that are, you know, people like Lloyd Fielding and Mark Baker that take a pretty rigid stance on what qualifies as a, you know, as a true resource-oriented application or API. But I think, you know, like with a lot of things, I mean, there's sort of a pragmatic aspect of this. If you do most of these things pretty well, you're probably going to start to gain a lot of the benefits over time of a resource-oriented architecture. One of the things that is probably worth sort of pointing out, one of the things that I, at least I, I struggle to understand is the importance of the content negotiation aspect of it. It's something that's only recently begun to really get, you know, the attention that it deserves over the last year or two. And so this is things like, you know, checking to see what's the content type and actually not just assuming that the content type and the accept headers that are being passed in by the client in the request are what you were expecting, but actually, you know, just saying, look, I know that there's a bunch of standard content types and I'm going to start trying to develop around the possibility that I may have clients connecting later on that will use them. They're standard media types. In many cases, they're not hard to support or add the support for it. So why not just do it and, you know, have, you know, the logic to go through. And this is a great example of where frameworks like Waze can help because there's actually sort of a complex little algorithm about proceeding through the possible things that the client is saying that they can accept and picking the one that they prefer. It's sort of the least common denominator algorithm. And, you know, it's quite a powerful specification, but it's not in wide use. And one of the goals of Waze is, again, to make that a little bit more accessible to developers so that it's not as painful to do this. Now, like I said, I'm going to start, really, in zero in mostly on HTTP as the focal point, although, again, you can imagine a framework and Waze over time, I think, to begin to support other schemes besides HTTP and HTTPS. But HTTP has the advantage of being a great case study because it's really one of the only protocols that was really designed around or with resource-oriented architecture in mind. So somewhere in the, I forget which section, it's like 5.1 or something in the HTTP specification, there's a line that basically says that HTTP is about methods calling or operating on a resource.  So it looks something like this in a naive implementation. You know, I just instantiate a resource based on a request and then I start calling the methods on it and the methods sort of look at the request and figure out what to do. The problem with this is that, you know, as everybody knows looking at this, I mean, this is an incredibly naive example.  Waze takes a different approach to trying to solve the problem Let's keep the idea of a resource class with methods intact and in fact, you know, let's look at the whole request because requests in HTTP are extremely, it's a very rich specification actually. There's caching, the content types, you know, the URI, the type of the body. And we can look at this in a way as a method signature. Now Ruby doesn't really have these kinds of method signatures. Ruby is very loose and flexible and that's partly why we all love it because you can do a lot of really crazy things in Ruby. But if we just take a step back and kind of put our computer scientists hats back on for a second and think of an HTTP request as having a signature and let's take... I'm not funny enough.   That's it, that's it. I was about to tell that one. The philosophy must be very funny. That was the thing. When I saw that talk, I thought, man, that's a compelling talk. I need to put something about Play-Doh maybe in my next talk. Anyway, so this, if you're familiar with the notion of, as I'm sure you are, of method signatures or function signatures, this looks, if we take get as an example and we say, look, you know, it's got a content type, right, that it's saying, hey, this is what, you know, I'm requesting. These are the formats that will accept it. Here's some options that I would like to pass on in and, you know, you can do that to put, post, delete and so on. But in Ruby, we don't really have those kinds of method signatures. We don't have method overloading. And so, in a somewhat weird kind of convergence thing where you realize, you know, all this was sort of implemented backwards, you know, of implementing things just for kicks and then realizing, wait a minute, now I can solve this other problem. And it's actually, there's probably a whole thing about how Ruby being fun causes you to go experiment and then discover whole idioms or paradigms that you wouldn't have actually thought about if you were trying to be too analytical about it and get your design correct up front. So, Functor is a gem that I just on a whim, a guy named Tofer Sill, I don't know, he's written a book, has some really interesting blog posts. I don't know if you guys have heard of him, but you should look him up. He wrote it without the Chris. And you wrote this thing called Multi.  I took that idea and I sort of just kept adding to it. And to understand a little bit about how Waves does things, it's important to kind of briefly go into what Functor is. So this is kind of the canonical functional programming example implementing the Fibonacci sequence using pattern matching on the argument. So in the Fibonacci sequence, zero and one are sort of seeding the function. And then from there on, we just take an integer, that's actually not quite correct because that could be a negative number, but we take that and we just implement the Fibonacci sequence in terms of the function itself. So kind of recursively there. So that's an example of how you would define a Functor object using the Functor library, but you can also define Functor methods. And this is where you start to see the time because I can implement the same kind of logic that we were talking about before, but now I've got pattern matching in the mix. Now here all I'm doing in this example is I'm just pattern matching apparently on the path. That's what this is implying. And so I can actually now have a couple of different get methods and different post methods that are operating on different resources or paths and returning whatever. Does that make sense to everybody? Okay, cool. Now, so then we build a little further from there and we define a notion of a Request Functor, which is just a Functor that we define, a Functor method on a resource that's intended to match a Request. Nothing too terribly tricky about it. And then we add to that because of the fact that as I noted earlier, requests in HTTP, it's a very rich expressive little DSL really that's there. And so we need a little bit more than just matching on the path. And so we add some DSL features that make it possible to do that. Using built-on Functor, these DSLs will just generate Functors, which in turn are really actually just methods and I'll show that in a little bit. So now here's what it actually looks like and again, this is still a very simplified example, just kind of building up here to the complex part. And I'm saying, look, on a get method, if the path says name, return FIDO because all of the dog resources apparently are named FIDO. The other thing we've done here is we've dispensed with a little bit of bookkeeping and mixed in a bunch of helper methods with this mix in from Waves, which generally you put in, you don't have to, but then you'd have to do all that stuff yourself. Now Waves, again, is an architectural framework, so there's a lot of things where, hey, this is the way that we're doing it, but you might well think of a better way to do it or have a different spin on things or add in different helpers. We have a layer called MVC, which makes it a bunch of MVC helpers in addition. So just to kind of give you an idea of the flexibility, it's an architectural framework. We do have a, there is a, well, I'll get to that in a second. So here we are on a simple example. Let's look at a little bit more complicated example. So it's the same basic idea. Here I'm matching on a URL that consists of, you know, slash location, but it's also saying, you need to pass me two query parameters, a lat and a long, and those need to be four digits long. So if that reg X doesn't match in the second line there for those query parameters, that actual request functor is not going to be run. So this way I can overload on the query parameters. I can also overload on the accept header. So if you're familiar with, I think some of the other frameworks use the thing where you check it and you sort of have, okay, if it was this format then do this and this format then do that. In ways what you would actually do is for each of the different formats you might specify different functors to actually handle that kind of scenario so that they're just distinct request functor methods. So there's a lot more to request DSLs. We're documenting frantically. We just pushed out the 081 release of waves actually this morning. So there's a lot of things you can do. You can do most of the typical things you'd expect, capturing path components, matching them against regular expressions. You can also do kind of wild card matching, saying, you know, match against 0 or to n or 1 to n or even 1 to 3 components if you know that it's specifically going to be 3 units. So there's a lot of flexibility there. You can do path generations same paths and rails. So there's a lot there. The documentation and some tutorials and so forth, some sample apps are actually on the website. So I'm not going to try to go through each one of these examples because there's a lot of possible combinations. But the main thing to think about here is that this is really a DSL intended, ultimately it does not at this time, still 0.8 and we're still building out some of this. It's intended to be able to match against the entire range of possible requests that can be expressed in HTTP. And that's sort of the key to being able to write truly resource-oriented apps is to really take that request seriously and inspect it and do interesting things with it. But at the end of the day, just to kind of hammer this point home, all we've done is define methods on a resource just like when it's actually instance methods on a resource class, but it's pretty closely, it's about as close of an analogy to HTTP as you can get in Ruby, or it might not be, but it's as close as I've been able to figure out how to get it. So I don't want to overstate our success there. But if you look at this here, we're just saying, hey, let me check to see if I actually have a method called get put post-delete on my story resource. This is from an actual sample app that you can find in my GitHub. I'm D. Yoder on GitHub, and there's an app there called Pages, which is an open source CMS based on, multi-tenant CMS based on waves. And so this is actually code I ran just to demonstrate that that actually is really just creating methods on a resource. Now, each application typically is going to need to handle more than one resource. And this is, I think, a big advantage of the resource-oriented model with waves, the way it works, and I'll get into why in a second. It's important to understand that there is the typical, unless you have a very, very simple app, which I'll show you one in a minute, unless you have a really simple app, usually you're going to have a lot of different resources, and it's not that different from having all the different controllers or models in an MVC type of framework. So you're not, you know, unless it's a really simple app, you're not just going to have the one resource that's going to handle everything.  And the way this is done is that there is a sort of proxy resource for the entire application that sort of says to the web, if you will, look, I represent all of these other resources. I'm their agent. And so if you want to get a hold of them, you know, send a request to me and I'll make sure that they get the message. And with these proxy resources, and for historical reasons and waves, they ended up being called maps by convention. You don't have to call them that, but that's what you'll see a lot. Because we used to have one big, what we call, it was like our routing file was a big map file, and then we realized, wait a minute, we can break this into pieces. So what we do is, you know, we say, hey, you know, just look at enough of the request that you can figure out where this guy goes. So for example, I might actually look at the first component of the path, and that will tell me, that kind of will tip me off which resource I'm going to. It could be a subdomain matching. Because again, we can match on anything in the request or we're getting there. We can definitely match on domains today. So I could say, well, if it's this subdomain, it's actually going to this resource, or if it's this path component. So I'm trying to do, like, you know, just enough, I don't want to look too much, because then I slow things down. I want to look just enough to figure out where I'm delegating this to. And then I'll send it off to something that actually does a little bit more detailed inspection of the request. Now, that structure is a little weird and takes a little bit of getting used to, and we had a lot of back and forth in arguing about whether or not moving away from the more conventional notion of just having all this stuff kind of in one place was good or bad. And I'm going to try to convince you that it was a good decision. There's three main reasons. One is that resources are just ordinary classes. So now I can do things like inheritance or mix in things. I can leverage the full expressive power that Ruby gives me to sort of support reuse and good modular encapsulated code design. Right? There's not a special kind of construct. They're just methods on resource classes. Instance methods on resource classes. So now I have inheritance in all of the power of Ruby if I want to use it or mix in. The other thing is, if any of you have ever dealt with large applications in Rails or any other kind of route based framework, one of the things that happens after a while is it starts to get really, really difficult because you get enough of these things in your app and it's hard to know where to insert the new one in or exactly which thing is matching that request.  By breaking this down and following just basic software design principles for this, we get really quickly to the point where, you know, hey, we've got five or ten request functors in a resource, a typical resource, or 15. And you can use the same metrics that you would use with any class to say, well, maybe we need to actually further decompose this resource into multiple pieces but it's a little bit easier to understand what's going on. And then, accidentally out of this, we actually picked up a little bit of a performance benefit because if I go back through this picture real quick, the map actually will take a look at a handful, like in this case I'd probably have four actual request functors in my map trying to figure out where to route things. And then, so I've made it most, you know, on average probably two or three comparisons there. And then I only have, you know, a handful in each one of these. So instead of, if I had maybe a hundred or fifty of these routes in a normal routing situation, I'm actually only, and I might on average say, look at, if I tuned it just right, I might be able to get it down to an average of like thirty comparisons when I'm doing my matching. In this case, I'm actually only going to match on, you know, eight or something like that. A few in the proxy, the map resource, and then a few more in the actual resource that I'm delegating to. Also, I'm a little bit remiss here at not talking a little bit more about the notion of foundations and layers. So, as I said, it's an architectural framework for resource-oriented architecture. Waves is. So, here's an, this is a very simple example of what I'm talking about.  And so, we've got foundations and we've got layers. A layer is just a module, basically it overrides the included method and then goes to town in many cases. It has license at that point to pretty much, if you're including a layer in an application, it may even be modifying the waves framework. Taking full advantage of the fact that it has classes and so on.  And compact is sort of the minimal version of that, right? So, in this version, we just say, look, this is bringing in a configuration. It's sort of setting up our map to begin with. And then we add a simple hello world rule and that's hello world in waves, basically. And what we're really trying to do here is say, look, we want you to have the ability to do resource oriented. We want to try to take the obstacles away from doing that and make it more natural to express resource oriented architectural implementations in your applications. But at the same time, I mean, we don't want to kind of restrict it to that and say, well, that's all you're allowed to do. So the layers and foundations essentially provide a way for you to then pick and choose the features that you really want to include in your application container. And we're decoupling that from the way that the resources are handling the requests. So, for example, we have an MVC layer that kind of comes in and then we add some additional helpers to the request to the resource so that you can use any of your request funders to call out to models and controllers very simply. So here's an example of how that would work. This is a slightly simplified version of what we call the classic being more around what the idioms that Rails and SunMBC have established. And one important point to look at is two, really. The first one is that we're saying, hey, listen, you're only going to load the code that you need at the time that you ask for it. So all of this stuff isn't sort of all into Waves course. When it comes up, if you don't use it, if you don't use the layers, you don't pay for it. You don't increase the size of your app's footprint because you just don't happen to need inflection in that application. Now, as a little sidebar, just the last couple of days, one of the things that one of my colleagues came up with is this thing called Hoshi that you should definitely check out. And it's a new, it's kind of a Markerby-like, but it takes some of the things that are tricky about Markerby and takes them out. The Classic Foundation today does not use Hoshi, but I put it in there just for fun. We will probably have it in there shortly. If you go to, well, I think I have a link here later. If you go to GitHub slash peep, I think you'll find the project there and the source. And it'll be released as a gem, hopefully shortly. Very cool stuff. So then the next thing we do is we include those layers into the application and in turn they go do their thing. So this guy is obviously really just sort of a composite layer. It doesn't really have a whole lot that it's doing. Like I said, this is a little bit simplified. Here we're basically layering in some of the intelligent code reloading features. Note on that, it takes a little bit of learning, but if you study the way that the Classic Foundation is set up, you'll notice how the code reloading is totally configurable. So if you don't particularly want to have a directory, say, called views and you want to call it templates or you want to call it foobar, you can actually set that up so that the app knows to load foobars from the foobar directory. It's a whole DSL for setting that stuff up and that's what that auto code guy does. And then we're bringing in MVC and inflection and some helpers for the views and so on. Those aren't the only features. Those are the big picture features. I know the description of the talk said I was going to walk through an app, but I still feel like I'm at the point of kind of introducing people to what we're doing that's a little different. I could do the five minute blog demo, but A, most of you have seen variations of that by now probably 30 times. And B, we have those. I mean, there's a sample blog app that's in the... If you install the gem and then you go look in the samples directory there, you'll see a blog app and we're going to have a whole bunch of sample apps coming out. Well, their pages is one of them. If you go to my repo and look at pages, you'll see one. So there's some sample apps coming out and hopefully between that and some tutorials that we're still in progress but that are rapidly kind of coming online. There'll be enough for you to be able to walk through building an app and picking even which sort of flavor of app you want to experiment with. So obviously, I'm not going to be able to go through that in the remaining time, but one feature here that I kind of want to emphasize that is a subtle one and it's a little bit difficult to talk about because there's not any specific thing that it does. But throughout Waze, and hopefully if you were looking at the source code, you would start to see this, is a desire to try to think before implementing something, how does Ruby already implement this? So Layers is a great example of that where we realize there's already an included hook for modules that gives you pretty much a license to go do anything. And once you're in there, you know, you've just been included, you know, you can go crazy. And so there was no need for us to think in terms of, okay, do we need a component API or a plugin API or something? All the pieces in Ruby are generally there. Inheritable configurations is another thing. We just define basically accessor methods for configuration values on a class. And since class methods are inheritable, that works out great. You can have a whole tree of configurations if you have a really complex set of deployment scenarios.   So everywhere in Waze, we're trying to make use of what Ruby already does because that's the main point of the whole thing. The whole reason I, you know, the whole reason I code in Ruby is because I love what Ruby does and not, so the framework's trying to stay out of the way as much as possible. So this is my nephew who just had his first Halloween and that's how I feel about Waze. You know, we're just getting going.  We're feeling pretty sexy and ready to go. Now that said, we have a long ways to go and we're definitely interested in, there's a lot of things on the roadmap. I'm trying to keep, if you go to rubywaze.com slash roadmap, you can see sort of the things that we're looking at working on. We have sort of a planned monthly release schedule that'll be coming out. So if there's things on there that you're particularly interested in doing, you know, let me know because, you know, there's plenty of, you know, plenty of help needed to get all those things done and the more people that are kind of involved in it, the better. So far, I mean, we've had some people come in and out, a lot of really good contributors, but the main thing about it is that they, you know, every one of them I think has, even if it wasn't something that's still sitting there and their legacy isn't always in the code, it's in the code that we rewrote because they had ideas that were better than the ones that we started with. So I won't go through this, the whole roadmap here, but this is kind of a snapshot of the things that we're planning and working on and one of the things that I found by focusing more on resource oriented is an architectural paradigm that needs more support within the Ruby framework world is that it seems to be taking us into implementing features that are a little bit neglected or there's not a lot of things done around them. You know, there's a thing called RAC Cache which just came out, which is a RAC middleware. Wage uses RAC if I didn't mention that.  So this stuff is starting to happen but the fact that there wasn't a RAC Cache module to begin with kind of gives you an idea of, you know, we're maybe getting into new territory so I apparently have to wrap up. I'm taking all my cues from this guy. I gotta go sit down with him, have him coach me. So we... What's the... I guess that's good that it's not a relative but I have no idea who she is though so she doesn't even know my name. You have to have the one gratuitous photo with a name like Waves. I've only begun to scratch the surface of what's possible with the imagery. So we're on GitHub. We're on Google Groups and Ruby Waves which we do, we check all the time. It's not terribly active because mostly we're on FreeNodeNet Waves, Waves channel. So we're... I'm on there every day.  And then the website RubyWaves.com So, you know, that's basically it. I wouldn't... We were missed if I didn't give a shout out to some of the folks Krishna over here, so there he is. Pete Elmore, a couple of my colleagues at AT&T Interactive and a number of other folks Nanorails Lawrence Pitt was CopaWaves who've all done a great job just like I said. They've left a lot of great ideas that are now baked into Waves because of their feedback. So with that, I hope you came away with a better idea of what Waves does and you'll check it out and maybe play around with some of this stuff and give us some feedback and maybe get involved. So, thank you.


You're not jaded. Everything really is just as phony and vapid as it looks. I say this because if you are listening to this, it's likely the result of a personal quest for truth which has led to a gradual peeling away of the lies our society is made of. Your ears probably found this recording because you're the sort of person who's been trying to make sense of the world in a sea of propaganda and deception, which often results in a growing disgust, not only with the power structures, with oppressed and tyrannized humanity, but with our entire civilization. This experience is very common for people like yourself, and it's very common because it arises from a clear perception of reality. From the very beginning human civilization has been built around serving the interests of the powerful, from religion, to the arts, to philosophy, to law. As the world has gotten smaller, and it's become possible to artificially manufacture culture with mass-distributed media, this has only become more the case.   Our news, our entertainment, our jobs, our legal system, our political systems, our education systems, our financial, monetary, economic, and commercial systems. The way our entire civilization is structured and organized has nothing to do with what's true and good and everything to do with keeping human organisms compliantly turning the gears of capitalism and empire. Mainstream culture is one giant scyop geared toward keeping people fueling the oppression machine. Not because of some grand conspiracy, though there's plenty of that too, but because the manufacturers of culture have a vested interest in preserving our unwholesome status quo. The media are owned by plutocrats who have a vested interest in making sure everything they're putting out sustains the imperial status quo upon which their kingdoms are built. The Pentagon has more influence over Hollywood than people like you or I ever will. Things get elevated to mainstream levels of attention and influence by people with the wealth and power to elevate them. And they're always going to elevate things which serve their interests by manufacturing consent for the status quo their wealth and power are premised upon, not things which harm their interests like material that expands class consciousness or highlights the depravity of the US centralized empire. So mainstream culture presents a fraudulent image of reality. It's written into the code of everything that's mass produced, not just in Prager University lectures on the evils of socialism or propagandistic news stories about weapons of mass destruction, but in sitcoms, in advertising, in clothing brands, in pop music, in textbooks, in trends. When it's not constant messaging that capitalism is totally working and the world is ordered in a more or less sane and truth based way, it's manipulations designed to shape our values and measures of self worth to make us into better gear turners. If you're noticing this ubiquitous fraudulence, it's not because you're becoming distant from the rest of society, it's because you're becoming more intimate with it. You're getting in real close. So close that you can see the nuts and bolts of it. See how the sausage is made. So if this is happening to you, don't worry.  Sure, a rejection of mainstream culture can just be pure, ego driven, look at me, I'm so special crap, but it's also what happens when you sincerely move in for a closer look at the mass scale psychological fabric of human civilization. This is what Terence McKenna was talking about when he said the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation. And it's what Jidu Krishnamurti was pointing at when he said, it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.  And that's not your fault.  So be gentle with yourself in your sense of alienation and take comfort in knowing that others see it too. But mainly learn to take comfort in the fact that just underneath the logos and screens and suburbs and Hollywood actors pretending to be people, reality is roaring. There's a whole world of wonder and authenticity shining ferociously from just beneath the surface. It's just got nothing to do with the artificial culture that's been mass produced by the powerful and funneled into our minds. Underneath all this social engineering and power serving control mechanisms, there's a whole life of raw terrestriality that is much, much older and much, much stronger than the lies of the machine. You can see it crackling everywhere, even in the densest parts of the matrix. You can see it in the sky. You can see it in the bushes and the pigeons. But you can also see it in the bus billboards and the skyscrapers, in the flashing signs and blaring screens.  You can see it even in those who are most asleep at the wheel, the most enslaved to the mind viruses of the machine, if you look. Once you learn to see it, you can observe nature winking at you, even from inside the most rage faced pundits and the most self-absorbed social natterers. It's there. In reality, this sense of alienation is just an awkward transition phase between buying into the imperial dream world and a deep, deep intimacy with humanity as it really is beneath all the obnoxious programming. Beyond the revulsion at the phony face puppets, something ancient, authentic, and exuberant is dancing. And it is much more real and more true than are discussed with this civilization. Look closer and you see the fraudulence. Look even closer and you see what's real. Your sense of alienation is entirely valid and based in truth, but we are not meant to stay there. Truth beckons us forward. Truth is beckoning us all forward. And these mind cages they have built for us aren't real enough to hold us in for much longer.