Snakes. Why'd it have to be snakes?

Another sonnet.

I love me some Meryl Streep

"I think we are just getting closer and closer as an evolving species to being able to accept this," she said. "But look around the world. ... Women are living as we were in this country in the 19th century in many, many, many parts of the world. They're bartered, they are property, they don't have the rights we have -- it's very difficult for us to understand all those things. But we do have a sense that for us, that's in the past."

Still, she said, "those vestigial things are in every negotiation I have with people in my business," she said. "Three of the nominated films this year have 26 men and one woman [in featured roles] -- 'Slumdog [Millionaire]' and 'Milk,' and 'Frost/Nixon.' You know, we accept it. It's not unusual. But we would go nuts if three of the nominated films had 26 women and one man. It would be a very, very unusual thing.

"We're still not telling everybody's story in our country and that's where we are," she said.

more...

This guy's in love with you

This song is sort of cheezy-60s but I really love the big booming orchestra and the piano glissando - and check out the video - who knew Herb Alpert was so cute back in the day?

Running a playwrights group

So I've been running NYCPlaywrights for over eight years now. Which means I have attended almost every meeting since it began. That's alot of meetings, and that's alot of plays. And most of those plays suck.

Now some might argue that of course they do, NYCPlaywrights has no real standards when it comes to writer membership, other then evidence of sufficient sanity and the ability to pay $60. Except that I've been to see plays by other organizations by writers with stellar reputations and most of those plays suck too. The main difference is better marketing, better PR and a bigger war chest.

Much of what passes for artistic excellence is in fact just a bunch of hype. And I would submit that the career of Harold Pinter is a case in point.

The Pulitzer Prize going to Anna in the Tropics is another example. I wouldn't say it sucked in the I-want-to-rip-my-own-head-off-rather-than-sit-here-another-minute way that all too many plays do, but it was just lame. With that standard convention, the helpless suffering of women being mistaken for profundity.

Conversely, as Robert Graves once observed, probably thinking about all the hype that transforms mediocre garbage into box office gold, "A remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good in spite of all the people who say he is very good."

Of those who are involved in writing for the stage, any given person will fall into one of three general categories:

Those who can write for the stage

Those who can write, but not for the stage

Those who can't write for shit.

And that includes the loftiest masters of Broadway right down to the lowliest little nobodies meeting in Bumfuck Idaho.

Since I am forced to listen to so much crap at the Friday meetings, eventually I rebel and write a parody of whatever it is that is currently annoying me. There is one writer in the group who was on an Alzheimer's tear. Her mother had Alzheimers and so she was always bringing in plays about Alzeheimers. I mean, I sympathize with her plight but not enough to enjoy week after relentless week of plays on the topic.

Lately another member of the group has been writing a saga about a dominatrix. The writer is pretty good at writing an amusing scene - although some are rather violent for my taste - but she just doesn't have a cohesive enough grasp on reality to keep her narrative within the bounds of logic and integrity. So I decided to write my own version of the dominatrix play called Mother Lode. Although the other writer definitely has something over me when it comes to writing about the subject of dominatrixes - she claims to have actually worked at a dungeon in Manhattan. The best I can do is that an old highschool classmate of mine did occasional work as a dom about ten years ago. Then she became a librarian.

But the best part of the dominatrix saga is that in spite of all the kinky weirdness and offensive violence, the author refuses to use naughty words like "fuck" - her characters would say freaking instead of fucking. So my characters do too.

MOTHER LODE will be performed at this Saturday's NYCPlaywrights February Reading Fundraiser.

Haunted

Sonnets from the Portuguese XXX

I see thine image through my tears to-night...

from the blog of an independent film director

This guy knows lots of the same people I know in "legitimate theatre" - he shares this bit recently on his blog:

I was looking over cash flow charts and thinking today about how [his film] has been able to eke out a tiny bit of money on each movie we make. Not enough to pay the actors.

Of course not.

Since his films are not animations, it would be impossible for him to make his films without the actors. And yet he can't manage to pay them. This is what is known as "exploitation."

I couldn't find any of this director's casting calls mentioned in the blog Nudity Required, No Pay although if you've seen his films, that is clearly the plight of many of the female actors he uses for his various space westerns. He's partial towards beautiful robot-women getting naked. But since he knows a whole bunch of actors who don't mind being exploited, I guess he doesn't need to put up casting calls.

My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable

Well the end of the Bush administration didn't make everything better. Almost, but it did bring the end of Get Your War On, David Rees's cartoons inspired by the evil of the Bush Administration.

But now he can spend more time doing the actually funnier (although much less politically relevant) My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable.

My kewl new screenplay

THE CASSANDRA DIRECTIVE

by N. G. McClernan

EXT DESERT PLANET

This is an angry planet. OK maybe not an angry planet, but at least a somewhat disgruntled planet. But it has a lot of rocks and shit and that's kewl.

We see PUP, a retarded slob of a foot soldier who would be great comic relief except that he is also evil. A very good actor, maybe even a Shakespearean-quality actor should be wasted on cast in this role. He is dressed like a cowboy.

FROM HIS POV
We see a small silver spaceship land in the distance.

PUP
Whuuus that?

We hear LT. MANLY

MANLY
You're an idiot, Pup.

We see Manly and Pup from a middle distance. Manly is attractive, in a gruff manly damaged way, but not so attractive that he causes homoerotic panic in the target audience. He is dressed like a cross between a cowboy and a pirate.

ON the screen, her back to us, walks CASSANDRA, a beautiful woman, very thin except for her gigantic breasts. She is naked, but at first glance it looks like she's wearing a shiny black skin-tight jump suit because she has black shiny latext spray-painted over her body.

FROM HER POV
We see Manly smirking and Pup drooling. But then, he drools alot. His face breaks into a stupid lustful grin. Manly crosses his arms, wary.

MANLY

Can I help you Miss?

Cassandra speaks in a monotone and is completely incapable, as are all robots and aliens, of using contractions. The English language is beyond the capabilities of even the most sophisticated robots and aliens.

CASSANDRA

We will have sex. In the future.

MANLY

Come again?

PUP

Huhhuhhuh! She sayed yer gonna have sex!

MANLY

Pup, you're an idiot.

CASSANDRA

You do not believe me. That is the standard response from you huma - error 432 - from you boys.

MANLY

Why would I want to have sex with you?

PUP

Yew kin have sex wid me!

MANLY

Pup, you're an idiot. She's a robot. Cordoba class. Fully automatic with fine Corinthian leather, manufactured in the Terran city known as Newark.

PUP

No she ain't. She's a pretty lady!

MANLY

She can't use contractions.

PUP

She cain't use whuuut?

MANLY

Contractions! Didn't you hear her? Instead of "you don't believe me" she said "you do not believe me."

PUP

But that's the same thing. I don get it.

MANLY

You idiot. Don't is a contraction. She can't say it. Watch.

to Cassandra

Say "don't"

CASSANDRA

Do not.

MANLY

I said "don't." Say "don't"

CASSANDRA

Next you will say "Pup, you are an idiot."

PUP

She ain't gonna say it now. Yew jus told her 'dont say dont' - Ah hurd yuh.

MANLY

Pup, you're an idiot.

Manly and Pup look at each other in amazement.

PUP

How - how did she knew you wuz gonna say that?

MANLY

Why are you such an idiot?

to Cassandra

What could make you think I would fuck a hunk of junk like you?

CASSANDRA

I remind you of your dead wife.

MANLY

I don't have a dead wife.

CASSANDRA

You will tell me you have a dead wife. At some point in the future.

MANLY

I don't believe you.

Cassandra looks at Pup

CASSANDRA

And you will be killed by a nest of vipers. Mutant vipers.

PUP

Ah don' buhleeve that! Dey ain't no vipers, mutant or no nuther kind on this here disgruntled planet!

CASSANDRA

There will be when it becomes narratively convenient.

PUP

Whuuuu?

CASSANDRA

Now my master - error 786 - professor will come to this place and tell you that I am dangerous.

MANLY

I don't believe you.

In a moment, THE PROFESSOR appears.

PROFESSOR

Stay away from her! She's dangerous!

To be continued...

Clip about blogging

You've got to hide your love away

Where is my hot pink outfit with matching hat?

Actual footage of Annie Oakley

The next NYCPlaywrights fundraiser

coming up February 28

One of the best songs ever

Whatever happened to Lene Lovitch?

FIRE

Bruce is super sexy in this video...

Great run!

Well we just had our last performance of STRESS AND THE CITY and the actors and tech people I worked with really restored my faith in theatre people - a faith that was badly shaken by nasty experiences a year ago. It's really nice to be appreciated and to work with people who are consummate professionals.

And unfortunately it was a short run with only six performances and I feel like it deserved a much longer run, but between Equity rules and the actors' own busy schedules, 6 was all we could get and it wasn't enough to get a reviewer to come out.

And as always after a show, I feel a little depressed. The only way to handle that depression is to plan the next show, which I've already begun. Or rather showS - at this point I am planning to do both JANE EYRE and HUCK FINN this summer. More on this later...

Could this be another sonnet?

Right here?

The Cramps-What's Inside A Girl?

RIP Lux Interior

Ellen DeGeneres ~ I Love Jesus But I Drink A Little (HQ)

Obama Justice Department Re-Hires Attorney Fired By Goodling Because Of Lesbian Rumor

Just in case you've forgotten, already, how INCREDIBLY EVIL THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION WAS!!!

In October 2006, Leslie Hagen, who was working as the liaison between the Justice Department and the U.S. attorneys’ committee on Native American issues, was informed that despite her “outstanding” job performance reviews, her contract would not be renewed. In April 2008, NPR reported that the Justice Department was investigating whether Hagen was fired after a rumor reached former Justice Department official Monica Goodling that she was a lesbian.

When the DoJ Inspector General report on Goodling was released in July 2008, it concluded that Goodling was motivated by Hagen’s perceived sexual orientation and “that Goodling’s actions violated Department policy and federal law, and constituted misconduct.”

Last night, however, NPR reported the good news that Obama Justice Department has re-hired Hagen for old position:

Last year, the Justice Department posted Hagen’s old job again. The department conducted a national search. Applications came in from around the country. After several rounds of interviews, Hagen eventually won the job.

The paperwork makes it official as of Monday, Feb. 2. Hagen now has her old position back, but this time it’s a little different. Her contract no longer comes up for renewal every year. Now, the job is permanent.

NPR’s Ari Shapiro notes that “it is not a perfectly happy ending for Hagen” because “nobody official from the department ever apologized to her for what happened” and she still owes thousands of dollars in attorney fees that the Bush Justice Department refused to pay.

Hagen’s rehiring is only the latest move in an effort by President Obama and new Attorney General Eric Holder to provide a “a clean break with the past policies of the Bush administration.” Not only does Holder say that the Department is “no place for political favoritism,” but he is also expected to embark on “a broad doctrinal shift in policies” from the Bush administration.

NYTimes - still operating with unexamined sexist attitudes

It's nice that I'm not the only one who notices that a "liberal" bastion like the NYTimes is incredibly sexist. The same goes for The New Yorker:

...I am not reading Novels for Women. I am reading Nonfiction by Men.

I started with AMERICAN SUCKER, New Yorker film critic David Denby’s rueful accounting of how his marriage and then his finances fell apart.

I moved on to BEAUTIFUL BOY, west coast journalist David Scheff’s rueful accounting of how his marriage fell apart and his kid is a meth addict. This, it emerges, is very hard for Scheff, and his new wife and new children. Presumably, it’s hard for the drug-addicted son, too.

Next, I picked up NIGHT OF THE GUN, New York Times writer David Carr’s rueful and, post-James Frey, investigatory accounting of how he and his girlfriend were addicts and he wound up raising their twin girls, only he was still doing crack, which he would occasionally purchase while his daughters slept, bundled up in the dead of winter in the backseat. Then he got married and landed a series of great jobs. Then he got arrested for drunk driving again and still sounds like kind of a mess (albeit a mess with a job at the Times).

After Gun, I decided I’d enough of reading about well-connected white guys of a certain age detailing their screw-ups in endless, sheepish detail (and even with the sheepishness, there’s a certain wolfish gleam to the writing, a whiff of boastful braggadocio, of Look at what a big, huge mess I made of everything, like a cadre of oversized Dennis the Menaces posing in front of broken cookie jars).

But then, dammit, I got pulled back in by Dwight Garner’s approving review of David Lozell Martin’s LOSING EVERYTHING, a novelist’s rueful accounting of how his marriage broke up and he went crazy and lost all his money and ended up broke and homeless and diabetic and with horrific gastrointestinal problems, too.

A few questions about the dirty-white-boy books (and yes, as far as I can tell, the genre of the male midlife drugs-sex-and-losing-everything confessional is populated entirely by white guys.)

Are journalists more likely to have their lives implode, or just more likely to have their accounts of said implosions published?

Why is the Times so fascinated by these stories (two of the four that I read had their first lives in the pages of the Sunday Times Magazine)?

What would happen if a woman wrote the same kind of confessional memoir about busting up a marriage, shucking her kids and spouse like old clothes, diving into drugs or porn and/or ending up homeless? My guess is that the critical reaction (curated, as it is, mostly by middle-aged white guys) would not be nearly as approving.

But why guess?

Here’s what the New York Times had to say about Katha Pollitt, who confessed to much milder sins (Google-stalking an ex) in her collection of essays, LEARNING TO DRIVE. “She has decided to wave her dirty laundry (among which she found unidentified striped panties) and confesses to “Webstalking” her longtime, live-in, womanizing former boyfriend. (Take that, you rat!),” tut-tuts the paper. “It’s hard to tell if she’s coming into her own, trying to sell more books or has lost it entirely.”

Here’s the Times on Elizabeth Hayt’s I’M NO SAINT, A Nasty Little Memoir of Love and Leaving. “Managing to combine psychobabble and designer name-dropping, Hayt charmlessly recounts her coke habit, eating problems, abortion, Botox injections, struggles with motherhood, aversion to 12-step programs and hollow promiscuity…. a graphic account of one woman's capacity for greed, vanity and loveless physical intimacy.”

So, just to be clear, if you’re a lady and you ‘fess up to an unhealthy online interest in an ex, you may have “lost it entirely.”

If you’re a dude and you write about, say, smoking pot with your prepubescent son, scoring coke with your daughters asleep in your car, or spewing uncontrollable diabetes-related diarrhea all over your son’s back seat, well then you, sir, have written “a bruising survival story,” or a “brave, heartfelt, often funny, often frustrating book.”

If you’re a chick who sleeps around and lives to tell (and sell) the tale, you’re greedy, vain and charmless. If you’re a guy who spends nights on end looking at Internet porn and days investing in drug companies that overcharge cancer patients for their cures, then you’re “formidably smart.”

More at A Moment of Jen by way of Katha Pollitt's blog

STRESS AND THE CITY production photos

More on Facebook

John and Paul joke about their trip to Rishikesh

This is a great clip.

John Lennon handles crowd control

DID RINGO VOTE???

Very unusual semi-formal interview with Beatles (sans Paul)

Westfield Massachusetts

Wikipedia entry.

They like their sonnets there.

Hardball - Dick Armey goes all Cavemen on Joan Walsh

YOU GIVE IT A REST DICK ARMEY!

What an INCREDIBLE TOOL!

What about Naomi?

Watch more IFILM videos on AOL Video

The inspiration for my daughter's name... from The Electric Company

Final two monologues

Lynsey Buckelew as "Jackie" from FOX FORCE FIVE


Mike Selkirk from POOH STORY

I post comments

Yet another article that tiresomely references Freud: What Do Women Want

I posted this:

The question I think is more interesting is "what do promoters of simplistic theories of human behavior want?"

In the case of evolutionary psychology it is almost always to get their readers to believe this: the problems of women as a group are not caused mainly by a social system that favors men, but by the essential evolutionary nature of women.

Bergner tips his hand with this sentence:

"Had Freud’s question gone unanswered for nearly a century not because science had taken so long to address it but because it is unanswerable? "

In other words, women's desires haven't been studied, not because male-dominated science was resistant to it, but because women are just too utterly inscrutable.

I recommend all readers here look for sentences such as that in any article that claims to reveal something about the essential sociobiological nature of women. It tells you so much about where the article's author is actually coming from.

STRESS AND THE CITY opens tonight - whoohoo!

Phoebe Summersquash as "Carrie" from STAGE DIVING



Bruce Barton as "Ted" from HAPPILY MARRIED

confirmation of the depths of Bush/Cheney evil...

Olbermann’s guest, the NSA whistleblower, got me to thinking: what other things that we already pretty much understand to be true will be confirmed as fact in the weeks and months ahead? This is the list that I’ve come up with so far. (Spoiler alert: this feels like something that will probably turn into a cartoon in the next week or two, so if you prefer to be surprised there, you might want to skip this one.)

1. The aforementioned spying on journalists. Of course they were spying on journalists. And there was that oddly specific moment where Andrea Mitchell, in the course of interviewing New York Times reporter James Risen about his reporting on the NSA and government wiretapping, asked if he knew anything about the administration spying on Christiane Amanpour — a question the network promptly scrubbed from the transcription.

2. Of course Cheney was running everything, at least for the first term.

3. Of course they made backroom deals with their pals at Halliburton, Enron, etc.

4. Of course they were lying about Iraq from the start.

5. Of course torture was sanctioned at the highest levels.

6. Of course Valerie Plame was deliberately outed in retaliation for Joe Wilson’s op-ed debunking the yellowcake uranium story.

7. Of course male prostitute turned fake journalist Jeff Gannon was having an affair with someone in the White House.

More at This Modern World

Final message from the Bush White House

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Final Message From the White House

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

More monologues

Lori Kee as "Helen" in THE HELICOPTER


Ann Farthing as "Trixie" in PERSONAL JESUS

STRESS monologue

Actors' Equity will not allow videotaping of Equity Showcase productions or even rehearsals, because the people who mostly vote on Equity issues are all over 50 and can't keep up with new technologies like Youtube. When the Equity rules about taping were written, only big corporations had video recording technologies, so the rules made sense - THEN. Now everybody has video technologies.

So to get around this Ludditish stupidity, I had to write completely separate monologues for the actors - the monologues are NOT in the plays, but the characters saying the monologues are from the plays in my STRESS AND THE CITY show.

This monologue is for "Mr. Black."

Mr. Black is based on an ex-boyfriend of mine who had major issues with his father, and really did keep the cremated remains of his dog in an urn. A golden urn - which I bought for him one Christmas. Before that he kept the remains in a box.

Yet even more rehearsal photos

More at the STRESS AND THE CITY web site

More STRESS pix

Lynsey Buckelew sometimes looks like an animation, she's so expressive - I crack up every time I see this picture. I just knew she would be great as the crazy Jackie character.

More photos at the STRESS site

More STRESS pix

More STRESS pix here
This one is from MR. BLACK, with Nick Fondulis & Lynsey Buckelew

Hey I invented a word

I just realized that I coined the adverb "sonnetarily" in one of my sonnets a few months ago, from my Secret Sonnet #3 - here's how it begins:


I possess not what is necessary
To win your love. In a world much better
I could seduce you sonnetarily,
With iambus, syllable and letter.


The only word that is similar if you do a Google search is the adverb monetarily.

How do we know these are adverbs? I'll let the Electric Company and Tom Lehrer explain on Youtube.

I Me Mine

Last time I checked you can't get Let It Be in any format, but thanks to YouTube you can watch the whole thing in pieces. I saw it in a movie theatre back in the day (no, not when it first came out - I was 9 years old!) and always thought that the part where John and Yoko waltz to "I Me Mine" was especially charming.

Beatles

Clearly John Lennon was the inspiration for Sesame Street

All You Need Is Love - The Beatles

The first ever live global television link. Broadcast to 26 countries and watched by 350 million people, the programme was broadcast via satellite on June 25, 1967. The BBC had commissioned The Beatles to write a song for the UK's contribution and this was the result.

Sadly true

Particularly once they reach thirty, these women are the most "review-sensitive": a chorus of critical praise for a movie aimed at (women over 25) can increase the opening weekend's gross by five million dollars. In other words, older women are discriminating, which is why so few films are made for them.

From the article about movie marketing in this week's New Yorker titled "The Cobra."

I maybe see 3 or 4 movies in a theatre per year. This year I saw 4 - Indiana Jones... ugh, Wall-E - pretty good, Man on Wire - good, and Milk - great.

STRESS rehearsal pix

We had a great rehearsal today of THE B WORD - check out the pix.


Lynsey Buckelew, Lori Kee and Nick Fondulis

more pix here

The Beatles - Prostitutes and Lesbians!

I love this interview segment with the Beatles

Charlotte Bronte on Rochester & Heathcliff

Mr. Rochester has a thoughtful nature and a very feeling heart; he is neither selfish nor self-indulgent; he is ill-educated, misguided, errs, when he does err, through rashness and inexperience: he lives for a time as too many other men live - but being radically better than most men he does not like that degraded life, and is never happy in it. He is taught the severe lessons of Experience and has sense to learn wisdom from them - years improve him - the effervescence of youth foamed away, what is really good in him remains - his nature is like wine of a good vintage, time cannot sour - but only mellows him. Such at least was the character I meant to pourtray.

Heathcliff, again, of 'Wuthering Heights' is quite another creation. He exemplifies the effects which a life of continued injustice and hard usage may produce on a naturally perverse, vindictive and inexorable disposition. Carefully trained and kindly reared, the black gipsy-cub might possibly have been reared into a human being, but tyranny and ignorance made of him a mere demon. The worst of it is, some of his spirit seems breathed through the whole narrative in which he figures: it haunts every moore and glen, and beckons in every fir-tree of the 'Heights.'

- August 14, 1848

welcome to our tiny club

I see that in addition to John Simon and myself, Johann Hari is not overly impressed by the work of Harold Pinter - welcome to our tiny club!

Although the bit about Pinter being a supporter of Milosevic is news to me.

There are two arguments against Pinter - one literary, the other political - and they are both hard to make, because in amongst the screw-ups Pinter has some undeniable achievements. Harold Pinter has one literary accomplishment: he imported the surrealism of Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Luis Bunel into the staid English theatre. As the critic Irving Wardle put it, in his first play 'The Birthday Party', Pinter showed "how a banal Blackpool boarding house could open up to the horrors of modern history." The play shows a man, Stanley, hiding out in a dank Blackpool boarding house, only for two torturers to track him down. His landlady, Meg, is oblivious to the violence smashing through her own home. At their best, his plays are like a nightmarish stress-dream: unbearably primal, raw expressions of menace and fear, whose meaning is always just beyond our grasp.

But with Samuel Beckett, you always know there is an elaborate existentialist philosophy underneath the darkness and chaos. With Pinter, if you turn on the light and switch off the atmospherics, you find... nothing, except a few commonplace insights: Torture is Bad and Resistance is Good. Pinter himself says "the most important line I've ever written" is when Meg's husband calls out, as Stanley is taken away, "Stan, don't let them tell you what to do." The playwright said of this unobjectionable, obvious platitude, "I've lived that line all my damn life. Never more than now." It's depressingly revealing: Pinter's staccato sinisterness does not illustrate a point; it distracts the audience from the fact his point is so banal.

Yet Pinter has been protected by an elderly critical establishment so invested in creating and building up his reputation that they cannot admit how feeble most of his plays now look. (I assume nobody at all takes the poetry seriously). When I saw 'The Homecoming' - a revoltingly misogynistic work - in the West End a few years ago, the audience kept laughing in all the wrong places. It literally looked ridiculous, yet it was given respectful - and in some cases fawning - write-ups.

More at the Huffington Post

I wrote to my congresswoman

Well I finally did it - I think moving to NYC was what inspired me - I wrote to my Congresswoman, Carol Maloney, asking her how I can go about getting a bill into Congress that would require the US Copyright Office to require proof of authorization for all derivative work registration.

Because although the US Copyright Office's website claims that authorization is required, it does not require proof and hence Edward Einhorn was able to get an UNAUTHORIZED derivative copyright on my play TAM LIN (he called his a "blocking and choreography" script) registered. Not only unauthorized, but completely unbeknownst to me until he used it a year later as the basis of a lawsuit against me for producing my own play.

And it gets worse.

It went to trial as Edward Einhorn v. Mergatroyd Productions in April 2006. You can read about it at The Strange Case of Edward Einhorn v. Mergatroyd Productions.


Judge Lewis Kaplan said in his decision that Einhorn's work was not eligible for copyright because it was:

insubstantial
registered for the purpose of instigating a lawsuit
unauthorized

and he ordered Einhorn to have it deregistered.

Einhorn was able to avoid this however by simply refusing to admit to the US Copyright Office that Kaplan's findings were correct. And his unauthorized derivative registration is to this day in the Copyright Office's database. The US Copyright Office's refusal to take the word of a federal judge over the perpetrator is another cause for reform - but none of this would have happened if the Copyright Office wasn't so lax about its own regulations.

I will get the US Copyright Office to change its ways if I have to spend the rest of my life doing it - and Einhorn's ill-gotten copyright WILL be deregistered one day.

Production notes for STRESS AND THE CITY

Rehearsals start today!

I founded NYCPlaywrights (along with my ex-boyfriend) back in November 2000, mainly as a way to have a community of theatre people to work with. Once you are out of school, you have to build a community yourself, or join one. I had actually joined one, and then my ex got into a snit with the bigwigs of that theatre group and I decided it was time to move on. So we started NYCP and gradually, a community came about. So that was a good thing. The other good thing about being part of NYCPlaywrights is that it forces you to write - once you are on the schedule, you have to show up with something to hand out to actors to read.

These STRESS AND THE CITY plays were all written to be read, initially at an NYCPlaywrights' meeting. (Although this show is produced by my company Mergatroyd Productions.) Here's a little background about each play:

• FOX FORCE FIVE - based on a true story, and in fact the character Amy, played by Phoebe Summersquash, actually is Phoebe, and Phoebe really did say to Jackie "we made out." I thought Phoebe was gay after that, but it turns out she is married. To a man. The part about calling ourselves Fox Force Five wasn't true - until AFTER I wrote the play. Bruce Barton, BTW, is an honorary Fox.


• PERSONAL JESUS - I was raised Catholic. I'm not Catholic anymore. I used to do clinic defense for a women's health center in South Jersey, and sometimes the protestors, Catholics and the born-again Christians, would clash about just exactly who this Jesus was, whether his mother was a perpetual Virgin, etc. That inspired this play.


• POOH STORY - everybody in the theatre world adores Edward Albee, except me and John Simon. It really embarrasses me to be in a group that has crusty old John Simon in it, but there it is. I thought it was high time for a parody of Albee's ZOO STORY.


• STAGE DIVING - I did go to a Sleater-Kinney show with my daughter, and I did marvel at the fact that everybody was wearing office casual clothing as opposed to the leather-based regalia of Ye Olden Days in the 1980s. The rest of it I made up.


• THE B WORD - based on a true story of what happened to me and my two brothers when we went to a playground in Camden NJ. Except it was a gang of boys and they punched my brothers, but left me alone. The Latino teenager who came along is completely true.


• MR. BLACK - based on my ex-boyfriend, and a story he told me about what happened to him before we met. He has some anger issues.
  
• HAPPILY MARRIED - is based on some people I knew recently. I was always being told that an actor was "happily married" but after watching her massage, cling to, and grope a man who was not her husband, on several occasions, well, all I can say is that I have a very different idea of what it means to be happily married than some people.


• THE HELICOPTER - did not happen to me, but could have - my daughter worked next door to the World Trade Center back in 2001. I've been working on this play off and on since 2002.

This production is very low tech, for a couple of reasons. One is of course that as of this writing (December 2008) we are in a world-wide financial recession and things are tough all over, especially in the arts. Low-tech is more affordable. But there are also very good aesthetic reasons for the low tech, and I want to quote Thornton Wilder on the subject. Wilder, you probably know, wrote Our Town, which many people, including me, consider a masterpiece. But here is a segment of the theatre world that disparages OUR TOWN, thinking it's sentimental and old-fashioned. They could not be more wrong. But many of these are, I suspect, people who think that theatre isn't valid unless somebody is getting his eyeballs sucked out, or some little girl is being crucified, both of which have been portrayed on the New York stage recently. These people, in my opinion, would be better off spending their time at a monster truck rally than theatre, so thuggish and petrified are their sensibilities. Fie on them, I say. Anyway, back to Wilder, who said in the Preface to a collection of his plays:

The novel is pre-eminently the vehicle of the unique occasion, the theater of the generalized one. It is through the theater's power to raise the exhibited individual action to the realm of idea and type and universal that it is able to evoke our belief. But power is precisely what nineteenth-century audiences did not - dared not - confront.
They tamed it and drew its teeth; squeezed it into that removed showcase. They loaded the stage with specific objects, because every concrete object on the stage fixes and narrows the action to one moment in time and place. (Have you ever noticed that in the plays of Shakespeare no one - except occasionally a ruler - sits down? There were not even chairs on the English or Spanish stages in the time of Elizabeth I.)
So it was by a jugglery with time that the middle classes devitalized the theater. When you emphasize place in the theater, you drag down and limit and harness time to it. You thrust the action back into past time, whereas it is precisely the glory of the stage that it is always "now" there. Under such production methods the characters are all dead before the action starts. You don't have to pay deeply from your heart's participation. No great age in the theater ever attempted to capture the audience's belief through this kind of specification and localization. I became dissatisfied with the theater because I was unable to lend credence to such childish attempts to be "real."


I began writing one-act plays that tried to capture not verisimilitude but reality. In The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden four kitchen chairs present an automobile and a family travels seventy miles in twenty minutes. Ninety years go by in The Long Christmas Dinner. In Pullman Car Hiawatha some more plain chairs serve as berths and we hear the very vital statistics of the towns and fields that passengers are traversing; we hear their thoughts; we even hear the planets over their heads. In Chinese drama a character, by straddling a stick,
conveys to us that he is on horseback. In almost every No play of the Japanese an actor makes a tour of the stage and we know he is making a long jurney. Think of the ubiquity that Shakespeare's stage afforded for the battle scenes at the close of Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra. As we see them today what a cutting and hacking of the text takes place - what condescension, what contempt for his dramaturgy.


Our Town is not offered as a picture of life in a New Hampshire village; or as a speculation about the conditions of life after death (that element I merely took from Dante's Purgatory). It is an attempt to find value above all price for the smallest events of our daily life. I have made the claim as preposterous as possible, for I have set the village against the largest dimensions of time and place. The recurrent words in this play (few have noticed it)are 'hundreds', 'thousands', 'millions'. Emily's joys and griefs, her algebra lessons and her birthday presents - what are they when we consider all the billions of girls who have lived, who are living and will live? Each individual's assertion to an absolute reality can only be inner, very inner. And here the method of staging finds its justification - in the first two acts there are at least a few chairs and tables but when she revisits the earth and the kitchen to which she descended on her twelfth birhtday, the very chairs and table are gone. Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind - not in things, not in "scenery." Moliere said that for the theatre all he needed was a platform and a passion or two. The climax of this play needs only five square feet of boarding and the passion to know what life means to us.

My play The Helicopter is a 9-11 play. But the focus is on one woman and her tragedy, and her co-worker's reaction. In spite of the big important historical international meaning of that day, my play actually focuses on something that happens every single day on this planet. Like Wilder, I'm trying to make a connection between the very specific and the very general - not verisimilitude but reality.

Social Engineering

Mike Selkirk, Earl Gatchalian and Ann Farthing perform.

Here is a clip from my 10-minute play SOCIAL ENGINEERING which was performed as part of the NYCPlaywrights Winter Holiday Reading Fundraiser.

The play is based on the right-wing of the evolutionary psychology school of thought on human differences, most famously explained by Charles Murray's "The Bell Curve." Especially people like Razib Kahn, who get funded by right-wingers to promote the idea that white people aren't more successful than non-whites through a variety of historical-cultural factors, but because white people are genetically superior. And they always try to play it off as pure science, rather than political ideology.

Soooo cool

That I can embed videos via Facebook now.



Nome on the flying trapeze again.

Hapworth 16, 1924

Wow, I am excited - The New Yorker has entered the digital age big-time. It now has digital archives of the entire magazine, online, accessible to its print subscribers. Which means I get to read the only thing by J. D. Salinger (that I know of) that I haven't read yet, the story "Hapworth 16, 1924" printed in the June 19, 1965 edition.

I was prompted by the way, by this article in today's NYTimes Still Paging Mr. Salinger.

Here's Hapworth, for subscribers

Shakespeare's sonnet #148

O me, what eyes hath Love put in my head,
Which have no correspondence with true sight!

more with analysis & interpretation here...

New STRESS AND THE CITY web site

STRESS is in da house.

John Simon & Me

John Simon is a crusty old coot, and a racist to boot - he once said on Theatre Talk that Suzan-Lori Parks was a social climber because she married a white guy.

So it feels weird to note that he and I are virtually the only people in theatre who are not impressed by the work of Harold Pinter, who has been canonized as one of the Great Men of the Arts, worthy of many hagiographies in The New Yorker. Although I, at least, like Pinter's politics. But I agree with Simon in his review of THE HOMECOMING:

It is widely considered the Nobel laureate's masterpiece; rather than as a drawback, its making no sense is perceived as a challenge.

Pinter's characters are either sorry nonentities or predatory jackals. Bad enough, but, worse yet, each turns with predictable schematism into his or her opposite. Then, often enough, back again. Even the dead revolve, not in their graves but in human memory. For the spectator, steadily foreseeable reversals become an unsurprising shell game.

Max, 70, a retired butcher, has three sons: the youngest, Joey, a demolition worker by day and aspiring boxer at night; the middle one, Lenny, a successful pimp in London's Soho with a high-class clientele; the eldest, Teddy, a professor of philosophy in America, home to visit with his wife, Ruth.

Max refers to his late wife, Jessie, as one at whose ``rotten, stinking face it made [him] sick to look,'' though not ``such a bad bitch.'' At another time as a paragon who taught her boys ``all the morality they know,'' which turns out to be low praise indeed. Sam, Max's chauffeur brother, first calls her a charming lady, and later mentions her having adulterous sex in the back of his car.

Logical Incoherence?

Surly Lenny tries to engage Teddy in a philosophical discussion.

``Do you detect a certain logical incoherence in the central affirmations of Christian theism?'' he asks amid recondite questioning. Teddy, like no philosopher one has ever met, finds existential questions beyond his purview.

Lenny reminisces about an old lady coming out of nowhere and asking him to move an iron mangle from her front room to a back one. When the mangle proves too heavy, Lenny settles, being in a good mood, for a mere jab to the crone's belly.

Ruth, who seems withdrawn and cold, nonetheless is an exemplary wife and good mother to her three boys. Max treats her alternately as a lady and as a whore. Soon she is playing erotic games with her brothers-in-law.

Typical of the writing is Ruth's description of America: ``It's all rock. And sand. It stretches . . . so far . . . everywhere you look. And there's lots of insects there.'' The latter sentence is duly repeated after one of those infamous, pseudo-pregnant Pinteresque pauses. Not even cigars can stay in character: pronounced excellent one moment, they are decried as wretched soon after.

More here.

I've been told on occasion that I "think too much" about plays. This is from people who generally think much too little - but only thinking too much is considered a fault in our world.

Santa Baby

Eartha Kitt died Dec. 25 2008. One of her best-known recordings was Santa Baby. My mother likes to tell the story of how my grandmother yelled at her for singing that song while doing the dishes, when she (my mother) was a teenager. I'd like to think that my grandmother didn't like the song for its crass materialism and whorish sex-for-cash message, but it was probably just because it was a sexually suggestive song.

My grandmother also had a huge problem with Elvis Presley, calling him "disgusting." This was well before the fat Elvis era.

Favorite lyrics of "Santa Baby"

Santa cutie, there's one thing I really do need:
The deed to a platinum mine.

A platinum mine???? Sheesh, she is not messing around - she goes right to the means of production.

I'm having an English Christmas

Look at the charming teacup and saucer a couple of English playwright friends of mine gave me for a housewarming gift. It prompted me to say "all the best stuff comes from England."

There are some exceptions, but consider:

Shakespeare
The Beatles
Eddie Izzard
Monty Python
Regency period clothing for men
The Brontes
Afternoon tea
Chupa Chups
Sherlock Holmes

So I have decided to have an English Christmas, with goodies from the premiere English food purveyors in Manhattan Tea & Sympathy.

Although I admit I have yet to have a craving to see Christmas pantomime. Although I do rather like Monty Python's Pantomime Horse as Secret Agent sketch.

Mary Tyler Moore & me

I've been watching some early episodes of the Mary Tyler Moore show - when the show first began airing in the 70s I was too young to appreciate it. And while I was watching it struck me how much Phyllis Lyndstrom (Cloris Leachman), Mary's friend and landlady, reminds me of an actor I worked with in the past year - incredibly bossy and full of herself, acting like she's large and in charge when in fact she's destructive. This episode gives a great idea of what Phyllis was like. It's eerie - I'd swear the actor in question modeled herself on this character.

Why this image?

Because any time is a good time to show a photo of Björk Guðmundsdóttir wearing her infamous swan dress.

You can't see it here, but her purse was shaped like an egg.

My favorite Bjork song: Human Behavior

If you ever get close to a human
And human behaviour
Be ready to get confused
There's definitely no logic
To human behaviour
But yet so irristible
There's no map
To human behaviour
They're terribly moody
Then all of a sudden turn happy
But, oh, to get involved in the exchange
Of human emotions is ever so satisfying
There's no map
And a compass
Wouldn't help at all
Human behaviour