Wankel rotary engine Heavens to Mergatroyd

The Wankel rotary engine is quite an ingenious device, and one which I wouldn't have ever considered, probably, except for tangling with a gigantic douchebag. As readers of this blog might recall, at the beginning of the year I mentioned that a local independent film director's casting call had been posted on Nudity Required, No Pay for which he had a hissyfit, apparently in part because I didn't mention him by name. But I guess if you have no sense of shame, you have nothing to hide. Anyway, eventually he and some buddies realized I could read their search strings to get to my blog and so proceeded to come to my blog via a wide variety of search strings, including at least one that was a threat of sexual assault. He also libeled me on his blog until I made him remove it.

One of the less offensive things he typed at me were variations on "wankel rotary engine" combined with "heavens to mergatroyd" although often mispelling both wankel and mergatroyd. Here's a screen cap of my Google Analytics report:



Not knowing what a Wankel rotary engine was, I hastened to Wikipedia and read up. So creeps can certainly have their uses. I learned about this excellent device thanks to one.

And as I've also mentioned on this blog, they can inspire art as well. My newest play "The Cassandra Directive" about a lesbian couple who end up performing in a Star Wars/Bladerunner/Romero- ripoff film by an independent film director is directly inspired by my dealings with this particular creep. I did a reading of the first two scenes at NYCPlaywrights last night, and the women who participated in the reading especially enjoyed it - because what woman hasn't had at least one unpleasant run-in with a middle-aged man with fratboy sensibilities?

I haven't yet figured out how to include a reference in the play to a wankel rotary engine as a "tribute" but I will, eventually. I'm thinking about renting space at Manhattan Theater Source to do a public reading of this play - apparently they are desperate for renters. Maybe I'll even get a discount. Should be lots of fun.

---

And speaking of giant douchebags - James O'Keefe's biggest humiliation yet:

Lindsay Beyerstein reports:

Talk about hubris... Dirty trickster James O'Keefe's foray into gonzo porn has ended disastrously for him. O'Keefe schemed to seduce CNN investigative reporter Abbie Boudreau in front of hidden cameras. The right wing media activist, who recently pleaded guilty to charges of attempted phone tampering, tried to lure CNN's ace investigative reporter to a small boat, excuse me, a "floating pleasure palace," stocked with sex toys, strawberries, champagne, hidden cameras, and Mr. James O'Keefe.

Over at Jezebel:

Boudreau, an investigative reporter, was tipped off by a rogue member of O'Keefe's organization that he planned to turn a professional meeting into a seduction on a boat. Although this plan required some confidence in O'Keefe's irresistibility, he had reinforcements ready:

Apparently all douchebags think that a sure-fire way to score with chicks is to have pictures of naked women all over the place.

Atheists know more about religion than believers...

Of course - knowledge is what makes us atheists.

Today's NYTimes:

Researchers from the independent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life phoned more than 3,400 Americans and asked them 32 questions about the Bible, Christianity and other world religions, famous religious figures and the constitutional principles governing religion in public life.

On average, people who took the survey answered half the questions incorrectly, and many flubbed even questions about their own faith.

Those who scored the highest were atheists and agnostics, as well as two religious minorities: Jews and Mormons. The results were the same even after the researchers controlled for factors like age and racial differences.

“Even after all these other factors, including education, are taken into account, atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons still outperform all the other religious groups in our survey,” said Greg Smith, a senior researcher at Pew.

I've been saying as much for years - most religious people have no idea what their religions are all about.

Bill Maher on a roll

I've had my issues with Bill Maher - he can be a real sexist douchebag - but on some issues he is right - and absolutely brilliant.

In this clip below he says something that's pretty radical and very true:

The rich, we're always told, are job creators. Except they're not. They're much more likely to save money through mergers, and outsourcing and cheap immigrant labor, and pass the unemployment along to you.

Watch:

Julia & Buddy music part 2

This summer's JULIA & BUDDY production for the MITF went pretty well but it was just a one-act. I am finishing the second act now. I did music for the opening of this summer's show and I quite like it, especially considering that I recorded it the morning of the show's opening. Here it is. I really like the romantic yet agitated sound of the piano coming in and out as counterpoint to the guitar lead melody line. Since it was so last-minute I didn't really finish it, knowing that only about the first 30 seconds would be heard before the show began anyway. I'm not sure what I'll do about that.

And what to do about the music for the second act? I decided to write a variation on Clara Schumann's Romance in E-flat minor opus 11. Why Clara Schumann? Why not? She's good and one of the very few women composers of the common practice period, with a longer and more successful career than Fanny Mendelssohn. And I like this piece in particular, the rumbling of the lower octaves at the beginning and the dah dah dah DAH repetition, and the interesting ending which sounds like a question.



Everybody in Clara Schumann's musicians circle wrote variations on each other's music. Clara wrote variations on Robert Schumann's work, Robert wrote variations on Clara's work, and Johannes Brahms wrote variations or Robert Schumann's work and dedicated it to Clara.

This German movie, Geliebte Clara suggests that Clara Schumann had a physical relationship with Brahms. They were certainly good friends, and at one point Brahms babysat for Clara while she was on tour - this was after Robert Schumann died in an insane asylum.

I sure hope so, at least after Robert died. Not only because Brahms was a cute younger guy, but also, Clara damn well deserved it, after having seven kids, working constantly and of course putting her husband's career ahead of hers - not to mention promoting Brahms's work too. I sure hope she was getting some of that hotty Johannes action.

The place of the nude in my blog

Wonders never cease - I dropped into the Spring Street sketch workshop again and was amazed that they had a male nude under 50 again. What are the odds?

Larger version of this drawing here.

This guy had a very distinctive, chiseled face, but his body was not chiseled at all. Oh well, can't have everything. And he did have awesome hair.

rational self interest, my preciousssssss

from Kung Fu Monkey via Krugman:

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

How to succeed as an Ayn Rand character

It's a libertarian paradise in Somalia!

Hotty Tchaikovsky

	You always see photos and painting of Tchaikovsky as an old man - and by "old" I mean early 50s (!) since he died at age 53. He looks like he's closer to 70 in his later pictures. Dayam.
	So it's hard to imagine that just twenty-fiveish years earlier he looked like this. Hello Drosselmeyer!

Well now that I've defiled the memory of poor dead gay Tchaikovsky let's have some of his music. Martha Argerich performs the Piano Concerto #1. Playing the opening to this is fun, like playing the opening of the Who's Baba O'Reilly.



Speaking of classic rock...

First day of Autumn

just in time for a new sonnet

New blog plan

Looks like Blogger isn't going to tell me what's going on - but my guess is that they disabled the ability to embed their blog into another web page via the PHP include tag, so I'll have to play by their rules. Until I get my domain reset to this blogger URL I have redirect at mcclernan.com - which is probably how you came here.

unique actor gig

Wow, this actor has created quite a niche for himself: TEMPUS FUGIT An Account of the Activities and Adventures of a Gentleman Physician. Initially his focus was on being a Regency doctor, which is how I discovered him, trolling for images of regency guys (which I've slacked off doing quite a bit lately since I posted so many hot regency guy pix that when I did searches the top results were mostly from my own web site) - but he also does Colonial doctor - not nearly as fetching, sartorially.

He looks quite fine, in spite of being a bit chubby, as Regency Doc.



It's easy to overlook the fact that Regency is such a hot look for guys not only for the clothing but for the hair - longish with sideburns, but no beards or moustaches.

But I do confess, for my money, it's Undressing Mr. Darcy.

Returning from a stroll about town, Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy prepares to undress... Is he a Rake, a Beau or a 'Pink of the Ton'? (Nearly) all will be revealed as our historical costume expert takes off the layers before your very eyes in this hugely popular presentation about the clothes of a Regency gentleman.

EVEN ODDS video clip

A video clip from Sunday's performance of EVEN ODDS. This is about two minutes, and the entire play is only six, probably the shortest play I've written. Kudos to Krista and Mike.

The coin toss wasn't in the original script - I came up with that during rehearsal. The fun thing about the coin toss was that we really left it up to chance - the coin did come up heads on the flip in this video clip. We decided that the kid had to win at least once - if he called it right the first time, one flip was enough - if he didn't the next one would be a winner, even if Dad had to cheat a little and sneak a little flip to make it come up the right way.

Amazing sexual ignorance

A play about a dominatrix was read at NYCPlaywrights a year or so ago, and during the post-reading feedback session I was amazed to learn that one of the playwrights in the room, a man in his early 50s, was completely unfamiliar with the term "golden showers."

Firstly, the sexual revolution happened before his time and books like "The Joy of Sex" had had multiple editions by the time he came of age. And in the past ten years there has been the Internet, where you could learn anything about any kink and then watch a video demonstration. You don't have to be into a kink to be aware of its existence, especially if you are a playwright and therefore at least literate and culturally aware.

So I was astounded to discover recently that another playwright of my acquaintance, also in his early 50s, was unfamiliar with the term "69" - I mean, that's not even a kink, that's pretty much plain vanilla sex, or maybe arguably French vanilla but still - how could you NOT KNOW what that term means after over fifty years on this planet? And not on this planet among the Amish - both playwrights are college-educated lifelong liberals and residents of blue states.

But also - aren't men supposed to be obsessed with sex? Aren't they supposed to think about it, like, every 7 seconds? Are they just thinking about the missionary position every time?

Actually the every 7 seconds thing was debunked. But even if you don't think about sex that often, wouldn't any healthy adolescent or adult want to know everything they could about sex, whether or not they wanted to do everything? I mean, sure there are some paraphilias that don't even seem sexual, or are repulsive, but I'm still fascinated by the idea that some people do find them erotic. Wikipedia has a list of paraphilias here. I mean "Emetophilia"? How could anybody get off on vomit? The thought makes me want to - oh nevermind.

And really, I don't recall making an effort to learn about golden showers or sixty-nine - the information was just out there and I picked up on it, by the time I was sixteen.

But this puts so much into perspective - for example the fact that the Delaware Republicans just nominated a woman who is against masturbation. I mean, if well-educated men from liberal backgrounds can be unaware of non-obscure sexual practices, what can we expect from people over 60 (and most Teabaggers are over 60 - and of course the Teabaggers ALL had to be explained the sexual meaning of "teabagger") in backwards red states?

That's probably why Bill Clinton's blowjob was such a big deal in the USA - probably an amazing number of people here have never even heard of fellatio.

Even Odds today

at the old Roy Arias

ERIC SR.
So how about getting some sleep?

ERIC JR.
Could you watch me while I’m asleep? And then if I start to die, you
could wake me up?

ERIC SR.
Well if you start to die, I’d do more than wake you up, I’d get you to
the hospital. Maybe they could save your life.

ERIC JR.
You think they could?

ERIC SR.
The odds are in your favor.

ERIC JR.
OK, I’m going to sleep now.

ERIC SR.
OK.

(Eric Jr. tries to fall asleep.)

ERIC JR.
Dad – you still there?

ERIC SR.
Yep.

ERIC JR.
Do you think you and Mom might ever get back together?

ERIC SR.
The odds are against it.

ERIC JR.
By how much?

ERIC SR.
About a ninety-nine percent chance we will never get back together.

ERIC JR.
But that means there’s a one percent chance you could.

ERIC SR.
It means don’t bet on it. Those are bad odds.

ERIC JR.
Oh.

ERIC SR.
Sorry. That’s how it is. You’re eight now – I think that’s old enough to
handle the truth.

ERIC JR.
Yeah, I guess so. I’m going to go to sleep now. This time for real.

ERIC SR.
OK.

Ridiculous Norwegian should

I have a generally positive view of Katherine Lanpher - she used to be Al Franken's sidekick when he had his radio show "The Al Franken Show" and she was bright and pleasant. But her professional career is basically being a suck-up to Important People and since we are still recovering from millenia of extreme patriarchy, that means that at least 75% of the time she's sucking up to Important Men.

But I love all things Al Franken-related, so I friended her on Facebook.

She's currently host of "Upstairs at the Square", an interview and performance program taped at Barnes and Noble Union Square, so I wasn't especially surprised when she posted this on FB:

Katherine Lanpher is reminded by a colleague of one of the many great quotes by Per Petterson at Tuesday's Upstairs show: "Fiction should open wounds, not heal them."

If you think about this quote for longer than the time it takes to nod knowingly and moo piously over your Starbucks cappuccino, you will realize it's idiotic.

But that tough vs. soft dichotomy, with tough always winning out over soft, is absolutely unquestioned in the art-lover world.

You really could make it into a kind of mad-libs. For example:

"Fiction should kick you in the butt, not pat you on the head."

"Fiction should yank out your entrails, not resection your colon."

"Fiction should rape your mother, not invent a cure for cancer."

It's so stupid, this idea that true art has to be all macho and tough. And it's so transparently a response to the encroachment of females on the former male bastion of the arts. How is a male author supposed to impress the chicks - and subsequently get laid by them - if there are all these women who are competing against the men for artistic stature? First of all, a woman is less likely to be impressed by an artist if she herself is an artist, and secondly, allowing the once rejected 50% of humanity into the club means there's alot more competition for status - especially groupie-level status.

The solution? Make art MORE MANLY. That'll keep those chicks out of the highest levels of artdom, at least for awhile.

But enough of my socio-political soap box. Let's just look at the statement itself.

First of all - "should" - since when? All art forms these days have virtually no rules at all. Fiction is all over the place - who is this guy to start suddenly dictating the terms?

And really, fiction has always been all over the place. "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" - is that opening wounds or healing? Twain addresses slavery, so I guess you could say opening wounds, and yet Twain writes the story with lots of humor and affection for his boyhood home, and Huck and Jim are friends, and Huck refuses to rat Jim out, declaring instead that he'd rather go to hell. Is that opening wounds? Healing?

What exactly does Per Petterson think is good fiction? Presumably his own. I haven't had a chance to read anything by him, but here's the last paragraph from the review of his "Out Stealing Horses":

This short yet spacious and powerful book — in such contrast to the well-larded garrulity of the bulbous American novel of today — reminds us of the careful and apropos writing of J. M. Coetzee, W. G. Sebald and Uwe Timm. Petterson’s kinship with Knut Hamsun, which he has himself acknowledged, is palpable in Hamsun’s “Pan,” “Victoria” and even the lighthearted “Dreamers.” But nothing should suggest that his superb novel is so embedded in its sources as to be less than a gripping account of such originality as to expand the reader’s own experience of life.

EXPAND the reader's own experience of life??? That sure sounds alot more healing than wounding to me. Sounds like he doesn't follow his own imperious declaration.

But since the healing/wounding dichotomy is a stupid unworkable metaphor in the first place, I won't hold it against him.

Instead I have a should for him - he should stick to writing fiction and stop with the lame-ass aphorisms about what fiction should be.

NYCPlaywrights - big turn out

We had a big turn-out at last nights NYCPlaywrights meeting, the first one after our summer hiatus. The turn-out was mainly due to my posting an ad on Playbill.com. I don't know how I managed to find seats for all 50+ people but I did. And for the first time I didn't run the post-reading feedback sessions, I let Bruce Barton do it and he did great. Also Renee Cole, our very own Lady Gaga impersonator, baked a batch of brownies herself for the group.

And most important to me, the first 20 pages of my first draft of the second act of JULIA & BUDDY went very well - of course much of the credit goes to Daniel Genalo and Claire Warden who were brilliant. Daniel's "impersonation" of Schopenhauer for this bit was especially hysterical: "I haff been a bad bad boy, Mistress Ilsa, I haff za desire uff pain." His version was much funnier than what I heard in my head while writing. Ah, the magic of acting.

I was very pleased that the audience thought my "video clip" scene from "The Cassandra Directive" was funny, and I got a much bigger laugh than I expected from Julia's wisecrack:

BUDDY
What did you think of my cowboy outfit? You want to do some role play? I’ll be the cowboy and you can be the Indian...

JULIA
And then what – you give me smallpox and steal my land?

Laughs are important to a romantic comedy of course. I will have to do even more, but at least I have a few already. I'm relieved that the hard part of this play is over - getting the whole thing down on paper. Now the editing begins. I think for once I may have underwritten the first draft - usually I overwrite and then edit the hell out of most of it. That's actually better - it's easier to take stuff out than to put stuff in. That's my motto as a technical writer too.

The "Cassandra Directive" has taken on a life of its own. What started out as a brief parody of a lame-ass low-budget sci-fi rip-off movie not only appears as a video clip in JULIA AND BUDDY, I've started writing another play, about two women, roommates who are acting in a lame-ass low-budget sci-fi rip-off movie called... "The Cassandra Directive." The great thing about this is that the play is practically writing itself - I have the entire basic plot worked out in my head and it's like taking dictation. They should all be this easy.

David Hume could out-consume Schopenhauer and Hegel

The Bruces' Philosopher Song



One of the highlights of my trip to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival lo these three years ago was seeing the statue of David Hume:



But clearly there was some serious flattery going on here. Hume was a tank. I don't doubt he could out-consume Schopehauer and Hegel together.

There's even a page on Facebook called Friends of the Corpulent David Hume.

I didn't see anybody doing it, but apparently it's considered good luck to touch the toe of this Hume statue.

I've been thinking about philosophy alot lately because I finally completed the second act of JULIA AND BUDDY and although I managed to extract Schopenhauer out of act one of the play, for the most part, he's all over act two. I'm doing a reading of the play at tonight's NYCPlaywrights meeting (first one of the season) and I will mainly be listening for whether or not I need to get rid of more Schopenhauer references. I tried to keep the references light and irreverent:

JULIA

I find Schopenhauer a great comfort when I’m depressed. He's one of the very few philosophers who really gets it – how miserable life is.


BUDDY

Come on, he was a weird guy.


JULIA

It isn't just Schopenhauer. The early Hindu philosophers said basically the same thing. The whole pain of desire thing.


BUDDY

Pain of desire. That sounds kinky.


JULIA

Get your mind out of the gutter.


BUDDY

But that is my mind's natural habitat.


JULIA

Schopenhauer used to keep a copy of the Latin translation of the Upanishads next to his bed and read from it every day.


BUDDY

I bet he never got laid.


JULIA

He probably went to prostitutes. That seems to be what all upper-class European men did back then. That’s why they all had syphilis.


BUDDY

He probably went to a dominatrix.


(Schopenhauer impersonation.)

"I haff been a bad bad boy, Mistress Ilsa, I haff za desire uff pain."

It's a work in progress.

Pretenders & Violent Femmes

James Honeyman Scott of the Pretenders discovered Violent Femmes when they were playing outside the venue that Pretenders were going to play that night - Chrissie Hynde invited them to do a short opening set that night. Then Scott died in 1982 at age 25 of a drug overdose.



I got to see Pretenders live in Philadelphia in 1982 with their original line-up, which also included Martin Chambers and Pete Farndon - Farndon died in 1983 at 30, also of a drug overdose. Unfortunately I can find very little video footage of their live concerts from that time, and none of them performing Mystery Achievement - this TV show performance of their cover of Hynde's one-time boyfriend Ray Davies' "Stop Your Sobbing" will have to do.

Candlelight Vigil - 09-10-2010

Monks, media and crazy screaming man!



It turns out I had something white after all - I had a white sweater. Not everybody wore white, but I've never seen so many New Yorkers wearing white.

Wine recommendation du jour

I picked up a 2008 Gnarly Head pinot noir because I liked the label and it was cheap - and to my surprise it's really good! I highly recommend this, and not just for the cool label

testimonials - solicited or not

Well I've started to collect nice things that people have said about NYCPlaywrights, to post on the web site and help promote the group - I have emails scattered about in various places and don't have enough time to find them all, so I could have more than what I have... but what I have is pretty good.

Certainly not everybody has liked the way I've run NYCPlaywrights - for its entire history the emphasis has been on honest feedback, not the usual "constructive" happy-happy talk that many groups promote. I wrote an article about that for the NYCPlaywrights web site.

Actually, the approach of NYCPlaywrights is even more extreme than that - the philosophy of NYCPlaywrights is that the most important feedback is body language, rather than verbal. An article by Jeff Sweet on that subject is also on the NYCPlaywrights web site.

A former member of NYCPlaywrights sent me this recently:

I'd been in writers workshops of various stripes for a few years, but was still getting the hang of the many slippery elements that combine to create good theatrical entertainment. I wanted to hear my work in front of a New York audience to get a feel for where I was in the process, but had no idea where to begin. Someone pointed me at NYC Playwrights and I joined after my first meeting.

When the actors picked up my script, I was trembling with fear that I'd hear nothing but the lines and dead silence. But even on a cold reading, these actors were so skilled that the audience fell about with laughter (which was fine, because it was a comedy, and the floor was carpeted). I left feeling a huge jolt of confidence (or maybe it was the ten cups of coffee I had beforehand).

I continued to sign up for time and had my work read at a number of meetings, very grateful for the audience reactions and feedback (some of it brutally direct -- I'd much rather hear a real reaction than a sugar-coated compliment that's meant to make me feel good -- and some if it slightly off-track but genuine anyway). I used this "live theatre lab" to reshape pieces and make them stronger. Additionally, I met a bevy of talented writers, actors and directors at NYCP, some of whom I've worked with on productions since.

For the first time, I started submitting work to festivals -- and getting acceptance letters. In the last two years I've had nearly two dozen short plays produced around the country. It really all started for me by having a live audience and a place to be heard at NYC Playwrights. Thank you, Nancy!

Stuff like that makes all the work and hassles worth it.

A few years ago, another (former) member of NYCPlaywrights gave me a copy of his published script with this inscription:

Nancy, this play got published mostly because of NYCPlaywrights and your personal input! Many thanks, (his signature)

Unlike the previous testimonial I don't have explicit permission to cite this one because shortly after I was given the script the writer decided to repay my good will towards him with absolute contempt and unprofessional behavior (such as being abusive towards the stage crew - I have that in writing from the stage manager) - and when I called him on it, responded by refusing to communicate with me in any way, for any reason, ever after - which led to more unprofessional behavior since he refused to respond to all business-related communications too. So I have no qualms about using this - he owes me at least this much - and I have it in his own handwriting, and signed too. So suck it.

This testimonial is not only used by explicit permission, I have permission to quote him by name - Trey Tatum, playwriting curator of the Tank said he was a huge fan of the NYCPlaywrights web site and said

you guys run it really well - exhaustively researched resource

Three testimonials are nice, but I know I can dig up some more.

Internet fun - non-dating site division

Roy Edroso gets a shout-out from Tom Tomorrow:


Cute boys with cats - yay!
Featuring that cutie Ben Whishaw from "Bright Star"



And oh boy, thanks to the Wayback Machine I found my first web site in the archives - all the way from 1997:

Whooah there fella!

Fun with Internet dating.

First... "Steve" emails me:

we could get laid and see if we get along. I really like your face. and well I always run around for freelance photogr assignments would be nice to relax...

Me, thinking I'm dripping with obvious sarcasm:

that's a hell of a smooth line you have there

Not obvious enough however...

well i am free tonight and i could drive to you. I biked all day - had a long day photo assignments. I think it comes down to chemistry as a building block of something or a way to just cross paths and exchange stories. where are you?

I need a shower but I am intrigued.

However, within a minute of that email I get another much better email from, let's call him Alex:

Before I even read your profile I knew you were a writer. Maybe it's the quirky intelligent look, or maybe just the glasses, I could tell.

Someone should post your picture on Wikipedia under the keyword "writer."

Tell me, writer, are you as attracted to younger men as I am to older women?

I guess I'm going to end up bagging some 20-something guy one of these days, just to be done with it, if nothing else. Eat your heart out, all you middle-aged men desperate for a much younger woman.

Apparently I really do look like a writer - a woman at work whom I hadn't met came up to me one day and said: "I bet you are a writer - you just look like a writer. I could see you winning the Pulitzer prize."

From your mouth to the Pulitzer judges' ears honey.

Although another woman at work came up to me and said I was the spitting image of her friend Jennifer.

When blogging and Facebook isn't enough...

Well I've blogged about the "ground zero mosque" controversy and I've argued with teabagger friends of friends on Facebook, but now it's time to do more - I'm going to be part of the New York Civil Liberties candlelight vigil this Friday.

The NYCLU and our partners in the New York Neighbors for American Values coalition are hosting a candlight vigil in Lower Manhattan on Sept. 10 to support religious freedom and the rights of Muslim Americans to build a community center at 51 Park Place.

It's conveniently on my homeward commute so I'll just pop in right after work. I'm also taking a video camera in case there's some teabagging hostility aimed our way.

The only problem is the dress code - the NYCL site says "Please wear white and invite your friends and neighbors." I've certainly invited friends and neighbors (well, Facebook friends) but I literally do not own a single piece of white clothing except socks and underwear. Who knew vigils had dress codes?

Goodnight sweet prince

Today marks 13 years since the death of dear Earl Rich. He was such a special person - I've never known anybody like him. Motorcycles are the devil.

Jobs!

Well FINALLY! I've been saying we need a jobs program for two years now and Obama has come through.

President Obama, looking for ways to jump-start the sagging economy and create new jobs, called on Congress on Monday to approve a far - reaching plan to rebuild and modernize the nation's transportation networks - roads, rail and airport runways — over the next six years.

With Democrats facing increasingly bleak re-election prospects, Mr. Obama used a Labor Day visit to a union festival here to lay out the plan, which the White House says could begin creating jobs as early as 2011 if Congress moves quickly. But prospects for a hasty passage seem unlikely, given that lawmakers have only a few weeks before they go home to campaign and Republicans have little interest in giving Democrats any pre-election legislative victories.

"Over the next six years," Mr. Obama promised "we are going to rebuild 150,000 miles of our roads — that's enough to circle the world six times; that's a lot of road. We’re going to lay and maintain 4,000 miles of our railways - enough to stretch coast-to-coast. We’re going to restore 150 miles of runways and advance a next-generation air-traffic control system to reduce travel time and delays for American travelers - I think everybody can agree on that."

Republicans are expected to block this every step of the way, because, well, Republicans are evil. And stupid as David Cross explains:

EVEN ODDS

web site now online



First rehearsal today. This is a very short play so I had the luxury of telling the actors to take their time and think before they spoke their lines.

This is the first I've done that in over two years. I've been trying to avoid what happened in a full-length play I directed over two years ago.

For that production I told the actors to take their time, and one of the actors went completely overboard. He took forever to say his lines, so much so that a friend who came to see the show always referred to him after not by character name or real name, but as "the one who took so long to say his lines."

After the first performance I begged the actor to speed it up but he refused. And to this day I'm sure he thinks he did the right thing - no matter what the audience thought.

in the Paul Cadmus tradition

And speaking of men being aesthetically pleasing, I finally made it back to the Spring Street sketch club and to my amazement and delight, the model was not only male, he was young and not bald. And he had a very nice little body... well, not all of it was little.

I sketched about ten versions of the model, Adrian. The one in this post is my favorite - you can see a larger version here.

One of the many reasons I found the play SIGHT UNSEEN annoying was because of the idiotic monologue given to the Patricia character, where she proclaims how much she loved modeling for the hero of the play. Clearly Donald Margulies has never done any artist modeling - particularly life (i.e. nude) modeling. I have and nobody would say how much they loved it, I don't care how much they worshiped the artist, as Patricia is supposed to do. Sitting for long poses is hell. Any time you see a drawing or painting of a nude, you are looking at an image of somebody who was uncomfortable, if not in actual pain. The model in the picture above is no exception - and I think I captured his discomfort here.

And then there's the fact that you have to sit there naked in front of a bunch of people, while they scrutinize every inch of your body over the course of several hours. Few people are comfortable under those circumstances. I was getting paid, of course - the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is not run by douchebags - and also I feel that all artists should do life modeling at least once if they are going to draw naked people themselves. Otherwise it's hypocrisy. So I had no problem with doing it, but that doesn't mean it's fun - it's damned uncomfortable. Here's a quick sketch somebody did of me in those days although obviously it could be anybody, red hair notwithstanding - and really, my hair was actually never that red.

Ah memories - I also dug up a portrait I did of my boyfriend John, age 22 (I was 21 at the time) in semi-punk regalia. I have to say, it's pretty much a perfect likeness of him from the time.



A larger version here

Another pillar of male privilege starts to crumble

Some men are starting to get the message that they can no longer be as ugly as they wanna be.

At 4Voo, a seven-year-old Canadian company, sales have tripled over the last four years, according to Marek Hewryk, the founder. Its products — all targeted to men — include a lipstick-shaped concealer called Confidence Corrector ($34); a Lash and Brow Styling Glaze, applied with a mascara wand ($23); and even an eyeliner ($19).

This has everything to do with women, as a group, having more money now than ever before in the history of money.

It used to be - and still is in too many parts of the world - that men bought and sold women - their daughters usually. Usually women were sold into marriage, legally, although kidnapping women into sex slavery or selling your daughter into prostitution is becoming increasingly popular.

Men were the sexual consumers, women were the sexual commodities. Now that many women have money and aren't forced to marry the highest bidder, women are becoming sexual consumers, which means that men now have to work on their appearance, as women have always done.

There's still plenty of resistance of course. I am convinced that the current trend of young men growing big ugly beards is essentially a declaration by men that no, they won't be valued according to their appearance - that's degrading to men, to be judged according to their aesthetic appeal, the way women have.

It's just a matter of time before even the beardos have to face reality.

Now if we can just cure male pattern baldness.

KRGTHULU 2!

Now everytime they mention Krgthulu at Eschaton, I get hits on my blog for my post on Krgthulu.

I was intrigued to learn, via Krgthulu's blog, that he rides the NYC subway system. Should I ever bump into him there in the subterranean world, I don't know if I should say "hey Paul Krugman, nice job" or just point and shriek (with happiness) "Krgthulu!"

The Immortal Beloved letters

So what exactly did Beethoven write to his "immortal beloved"?

This, by way of Google books reproduction of "Beethoven's letters (1790 - 1826) from the collection of Dr. Ludwig Nohl."

Morning, July 6, 1800.

My angel! my all! my second self!

Only a few words to-day, written with a pencil (your own). My residence cannot be settled till tomorrow. What a tiresome loss of time! Why this deep grief when necessity compels ?—can our love exist without sacrifices,and by refraining from desiring all things? Can you alter the fact that you are not wholly mine, nor I wholly yours? Ah! contemplate the beauties of nature, and reconcile your spirit to the inevitable. Love demands all, and has a right to do so, and thus it is I feel towards you, and you towards me; but you do not sufficiently remember that I must live both for you and for myself. Were we wholly united, you would feel this sorrow as little as I should. My journey was terrible. I did not arrive here till four o'clock yesterday morning, as no horses were to be had. The drivers chose another route; but what a dreadful one it was! At the last stage I was warned not to travel through the night, and to beware of a certain wood, but this only incited me to go forward, and I was wrong. The carriage broke down, owing to the execrable roads, mere deep rough country lanes, and had it not been for the postilions I must have been left by the wayside. Esterhazy, traveling the usual road, had the same fate with eight horses, whereas I had only four. Still I felt a certain degree of pleasure, which I invariably do when I have happily surmounted any difficulty. But I must now pass from the outer to the inner man. We shall, I trust, soon meet again; to-day I cannot impart to you all the reflections I have made, during the last few days, on my life; were our hearts closely united for ever, none of these would occur to me. My heart is overflowing with all I have to say to you. Ah ! there are moments when I find that speech is actually nothing. Take courage ! Continue to be ever my true and only love, my all! as I am yours. The gods must ordain what is further to be and shall be!


Your faithful

Ludwig.

Dude did not stint on the exclamation points.

Monday evening, July 6.

You grieve! dearest of all beings! I have just heard that the letters must be sent off very early. Mondays and Thursdays are the only days when the post goes to K. from here. You grieve! Ah! where I am, there you are ever with me: how earnestly shall I strive to pass my life with you, and what a life will it be!!! Whereas now!! without you!! and persecuted by the kindness of others, which I neither deserve nor try to deserve! The servility of man towards his fellow-man pains me, and when I regard myself as a component part of the universe, what am I, what is he who is called the greatest? — and yet herein are displayed the godlike feelings of humanity! — I weep in thinking that you will receive no intelligence from me till probably Saturday. However dearly you may love me, I love you more fondly still. Never conceal your feelings from me. Good night! As a patient at these baths, I must now go to rest [a few words are here effaced by Beethoven himself]. Oh, heavens ! so near, and yet so far ! Is not our love a truly celestial mansion, but firm as the vault of heaven itself?

He would have really loved email...

July 7. Good morning!

Even before I rise, my thoughts throng to you, my immortal beloved! — sometimes full of joy, and yet again sad, waiting to see whether Fate will hear us. I must live either wholly with you, or not at all. Indeed I have resolved to wander far from you till the moment arrives when I can fly into your arms, and feel that they are my home, and send forth my soul in unison with yours into the realm of spirits. Alas! it must be so! You will take courage, for you know my fidelity. Never can another possess my heart — never, never! Oh, heavens! Why must I fly from her I so fondly love? and yet my existence in W. was as miserable as here. Your love made me the most happy and yet the most unhappy of men. At my age, life requires a uniform equality; can this be found in our mutual relations? My angel! I have this moment heard that the post goes every day, so I must conclude, that you may get this letter the sooner. Be calm! for we can only attain our object of living together by the calm contemplation of our existence. Continue to love me. Yesterday, to-day, what longings for you, what tears for you! for you ! for you! my life! my all! Farewell! Oh! love me for ever, and never doubt the faithful heart of your lover,

L.

Ever thine.

Ever mine.

Ever each other's.

The editor of Dr. Nohl's book seems to think that the Immortal Beloved is Countess Giulietta Guicciardi, on the grounds that Beethoven dedicated the "Moonlight Sonata" (Piano Sonata No. 14 in C#minor) to her, but she's only one of several possible candidates.

Fun fact via Wikipedia: "The work ("Moonlight Sonata") was very popular in Beethoven's day, to the point of exasperating the composer himself, who remarked to Carl Czerny, "Surely I've written better things."

I would suggest it was popular because like "Fur Elise" it is relatively easy to play effectively even for so-so pianists such as myself.

The Moonlight Sonata

Even Odds

Eight-year-old Eric is worried about his own mortality - can gambling and beer help?

Mike Durell and Krista Hasinger will perform in my next short play. Web site coming soon.

emotional orgasm

I guess I'll have to do some explaining when I attempt to use the term "emotional orgasm" - if you Google it, the results are all about sexual orgasms with an emotional component.

That's not what I mean. I am talking about catharsis, basically, but I like the expression "emotional orgasm" because catharsis is a little too one-size-fits-all.

Not all sexual orgasms are equally intense - they are not all quite the level of the "cleansing" experience of the classical Greek term.

I've seen the epigram "This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel" quoted on many occasions and I'm sick of it. It's from a letter written by Horace Walpole (who?) I don't know if Walpole meant for this to be interpreted as an either/or proposition, but that is the way it is interpreted by those who quote it.

The implication is that you either think or feel. This is clearly how many people in the arts see it, and they have all firmly come down on the side of thinking. That's why so much art - particularly theatre, which I'm most involved in - consists of dry little exercises in erudition and irony. The playwright wants to show off his or her cleverness. And that's really all the play is about. How many knowing asides can the playwright squeeze into the plot? How many famous names can be dropped? This does not give the audience an emotional orgasm - instead it allows the audience to watch the playwright masturbate. And so many playwrights are such egomaniacs that they truly believe that that's what the world really wants - to watch them have a wank - and pay good money for it too.

The idea that you either think or feel is a bullshit dichotomy, that owes much, I believe to our culture's obsession with pushing everything into either a feminine or masculine box. The apotheosis of this way of thinking is in the theories of the evolutionary psychologists, particularly Simon Baron-Cohen (relative of Sacha Baron-Cohen):

Dr. Baron-Cohen builds on this theory, suggesting that low levels of testosterone result in a female, "E type" brain (for empathy); medium levels yield a balanced brain; and high levels a male, "S type" brain (for systemizing). Medium levels account for the fact that some girls are systemizers and some boys are empathizers.

In the evolutionary psychology universe you are either a male systemizer or a female empathizer - thought vs. feeling. (An excellent refutation is available in the just-published Delusions of Gender.)

Men of course, naturally want to escape the stigma of being feminine, and so obviously they are not going to choose to be "those who feel." They sit back and laugh at this comedy of life - and when it comes to playwrights the laughter is most often of the smug, self-satisfied variety.

Not only men are like this, plenty of women want to escape the shame of femininity. These women are most likely to join with men in deriding an emotional focus as weak and stupid.

This thought vs. feeling dichotomy is why, for example, a former member of NYCPlaywrights wrote a play that was a parody of OUR TOWN. I mentioned it in my essay Why OUR TOWN is Great. Even Martin Denton, who usually loves everything he sees, had a problem with that parody.

What I believe Venters was trying to do was kill all those soft, weak, feminine emotions on display in OUR TOWN and replace it was some kind of misbegotten critique of American life. Something hard and "edgy" and merciless. Something to demonstrate that this playwright is a thinker, not a feeler. Not like that gay Thornton Wilder.

I believe it's no coincidence that three of the greatest American playwrights of the 20th century, Wilder, Tennessee Williams, and Tony Kushner are gay. Their gayness allows them to step back from the standard macho bullshit of American masculinity - the masculinity that has turned David Mamet into a right-wing asshole teabagger.

Their gayness allows them to be "weak" and empathetic, to dare to step away from shallow intellectualism and towards what really makes a play work - abundant empathy.

That's why Shakespeare's plays work so well - he was able to have empathy even for the villains of his plays. Shakespeare wanted to evoke an emotional orgasm from his audiences.

The first time you see HAMLET, if it is done right, you will tear up when Hamlet dies at the end. Because you have watched Hamlet wrestle for three hours with issues of mortality, and after all that you watch Hamlet himself die. But even more so - Laertes poisons Hamlet with the envenomed sword fairly early in the big death scene - and the audience knows, before Hamlet does, that he's a dead man. So the entire scene is watching Hamlet be poisoned, watching Hamlet watch his mother die, and then watch Hamlet realize that he himself is about to die.

Watch Derek Jacobi do it here:



To be a proper playwright you have to aim at giving the audience an emotional orgasm. The play isn't about you showing off - the play is about you connecting to the audience, and taking them beyond thought into their innermost, visceral core. And they will love you for it. Not that smug self-satisfied love that comes from an audience congratulating itself for getting the various shallow intellectualisms of a typical modern play, but the love of an audience who has truly felt something intense.

That's why the sexual analogy is appropriate - a skilled lover gives themselves to their partner - and that's what a skilled playwright does - the partner in this case being the audience.

A skilled lover doesn't just stand there wanking, and then expect to be loved for it.

It's all about the emotional orgasm.

music theory

There's so much to blog about - Frank Rich's latest column, Krugman's latest, Beckstock, how much I can't wait for Autumn, etc. etc. But I just feel like talking about music theory today.

First - I finally discovered the term for "classical" music. The term classical has always been problematic because it has several meanings. The first is, according to Wikipedia:

the art music produced in, or rooted in, the traditions of Western liturgical and secular music, encompassing a broad period from roughly the 9th century to present times."

But then it gets to the goods:

"The central norms of this tradition became codified between 1550 and 1900, which is known as the common practice period."

THAT is it! "Common practice period." That's what most people mean when they refer to classical music. I don't think the term is ever going to catch on, but I'm glad I finally learned it.

Music geeks of course know that the Classical period of music is a subset of the common practice period, preceded by Baroque and followed by the Romantic period. The Classical period was a mere 90 years, from 1730 to 1820.

Wikipedia also has a good article on cadence, complete with audio samples of the various cadence types, including the most awesomely named Phyrigian half-cadence.

Schroeder is admirably clear-headed about life.

OKStupid pt 2

How about me you,a scarry movie and a bowl of raisins? ? ?

the original OKS posting

A bowl of raisins?

NYCPlaywrights - 10th year

I can hardly believe it, NYCPlaywrights, a group I founded with my ex-boyfriend will be ten years old this November. Time flies.

We started out with five people, including my ex and I, in a room rented from the National Shakespeare Company. Membership was free and in the first year we cut a meeting short once due to not enough plays being brought in for readings. But we never canceled a meeting in 10 years except for once, on September 12, 2001.

Well now there are 78 members including 25 paying members (writer members pay, actors don't) and now the biggest problem is too much work for the time available.

This is especially a problem with bad writers. Bad writers tend to be more prolific than good writers, because bad writers have no sense of whether something is bad, and so they assume everything they write is good. So they don't bother wasting time editing and re-writing, which leads to a great quantity of output.

Also, many of NYCPlaywrights' worst writers are old retired men who have nothing else to do but devote hours to their playwriting hobby. They tend to reserve the maximum number of minutes per meeting, for as many meetings as they can until I stop them, in order to force innocent people to listen to their works of incompetence, chock full of backwards attitudes about gender and race. Argh.

Anyway, so I spent the past month rebuilding the NYCPlaywrights web site after a Russian hacker attack. It was my own fault, I left the video tables open to SQL injection. I won't make that mistake again.

The earliest incarnation of the NYCPlaywrights web site back in 2001 (and which can be seen via the Wayback Machine) was a relatively simple affair, technologically. There was the javascript-driven quotes and there was the blog insert, but that's it. I still use HTML, javascript and Blogger, but now I also use CSS, PHP and a SQL database, not to mention Youtube embedded videos and the Google Adsense monetization campaign. Plus there's a whole members-only section that is interactive and database-driven.

That's some damn time-consuming work there.

Plans are brewing for a wine and cheese party for the November 2 meeting for the third hour. Whoohoo!

Intact Gallery

Artist Paul Cadmus loved him some naked men - as a fellow androphile I heartily approve.

Very interesting survey of "intact" (uncircumcised) penises in art, Intact Gallery.
The author claims that the ancient Greeks considered only the depiction of glans to be obscene, rather than the penis itself.

Plus a fascinating glossary.

Orchestra, Beethoven

There's a very good Wikipedia article on orchestras. And I didn't realize that Beethoven had been so instrumental (heh heh) in the development of the modern orchestra.

The Beethoven wiki says that he died during a thunderstorm. That is shown in the movie "Immortal Beloved" but I had assumed it was just a ridiculously melodramatic director's choice.

Like everybody else I am an admirer of Beethoven's work but I never really studied him. I am very interested now in his Late String Quartets which were described by composer Louis Spohr as "indecipherable, uncorrected horrors", while Schubert said "After this, what is left for us to write?"

Great Galloping Gottschalk!

I was first turned on to Louis Moreau Gottschalk when I was in college and went to see the Pennsylvania Ballet's "Carmina Burana" and they performed Great Galloping Gottschalk as an opening act. I loved it (so did the NYTimes) and I especially loved "Manchega."

I used the tune for the piano duet scene in my JANE EYRE in the 2008 production even though it was an anachronism - JANE is set in the 1820s and Gottschalk wasn't even born until 1829. But I wanted something that was catchy and up-tempo, with a certain flashiness, since this was a duet that Rochester plays with Blanche, Jane's rival - at least Jane thinks so because Rochester is trying to make Jane jealous. Rochester's kind of a jerk, really.

Anyway, I actually like the piano-only version best - you can hear a midi version here, although it's a little slow and creaky - I had to punch this up with GarageBand for the JANE show.

To my delight, I discovered a performance of Manchega from GGG on Youtube. The orchestration is very reminiscent of the Spanish dance from The Nutcracker, although the dance is very different - I especially like when the ballerina in magenta catches a ride from the ring dancers.



Ooh bonus - Souvenir de Porto Rico!

Unfortunately there are no clips on Youtube even close to the Pennsylvania Ballet's version of Carmina Burana, but I did find this orchestra version - THIS is the way Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi should be done - pyro-goddam-technics - move over 1812 Overture!

Hysterical comment on the thread under the video:

i walked in the house one day and this randomly started playing from my ipod. and i felt like i had jesus powers for a few seconds

GENIUS - and his point is well taken - is Fox News STUPID OR EVIL?

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the Kochtopus

Very important article in this week's New Yorker

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers' corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst's Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a "kingpin of climate science denial." The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

In a statement, Koch Industries said that the Greenpeace report “distorts the environmental record of our companies.” And David Koch, in a recent, admiring article about him in New York, protested that the "radical press" had turned his family into “whipping boys,” and had exaggerated its influence on American politics. But Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, “The Kochs are on a whole different level. There's no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I've been in Washington since Watergate, and I've never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times."

A few weeks after the Lincoln Center gala, the advocacy wing of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation—an organization that David Koch started, in 2004—held a different kind of gathering. Over the July 4th weekend, a summit called Texas Defending the American Dream took place in a chilly hotel ballroom in Austin. Though Koch freely promotes his philanthropic ventures, he did not attend the summit, and his name was not in evidence. And on this occasion the audience was roused not by a dance performance but by a series of speakers denouncing President Barack Obama. Peggy Venable, the organizer of the summit, warned that Administration officials "have a socialist vision for this country."

Five hundred people attended the summit, which served, in part, as a training session for Tea Party activists in Texas. An advertisement cast the event as a populist uprising against vested corporate power. "Today, the voices of average Americans are being drowned out by lobbyists and special interests," it said. "But you can do something about it." The pitch made no mention of its corporate funders. The White House has expressed frustration that such sponsors have largely eluded public notice. David Axelrod, Obama's senior adviser, said, "What they don't say is that, in part, this is a grassroots citizens' movement brought to you by a bunch of oil billionaires."

The hideous face of ignorance, bigotry and intolerance

The signs they hold make it clear - crazed, Fox News-fueled, Tea Party thugs equate an Islamic community center with "Sharia."

Opponents of the mosque insisted they fully supported religious freedoms, but that the location of the planned Islamic center represented an incursion on the rights of Americans who deemed Ground Zero a hallowed space. “It’s a disgrace to have a mosque at this sacred site; it’s a smack in the face,” said Kali Costas, a Long Island education worker who said she was a member of the Tea Party.

more at the NYTimes

It's just a matter of time before someone will be attacked by a gang of these thugs for not looking sufficiently "American" enough - it could be almost anybody - a Muslim, a Coptic Christian, a Sikh, an Indian or a Latino. I've been speaking to some of these thugs on Facebook and there is no conspiracy theory so far-fetched that they won't believe it.

And don't even get me started on that cowardly asshole Howard Dean. I am so disgusted.

the complete lack of integrity in the off-off Broadway review system

There are plenty of bad plays on Broadway and off-Broadway, as I've blogged about here - I was unimpressed, to say the very least, by LASCIVIOUS SOMETHING, RACE, and ANNA IN THE TROPICS, just to name three right off the top of my head. No, it isn't the quality of work so much that distinguishes Broadway and off-Broadway from off-off Broadway.

It's the absolute lack of integrity that makes off-off Broadway a joke.

Case in point - a Fringe Festival review at nytheatre.com - the reviewer is a Manhattan Theatre Source colleague of at least two people in the show.

Thanks to the Internet, these kinds of things are very easy to document - just a quick Google search will demonstrate, for example, that the reviewer is a fellow volunteer at Manhattan Theatre Source of one of the cast members. And they've known each other for at least three years - they were in a show together in 2007.

Nowhere in the review does the reviewer mention his connection to the show's cast and crew. Not that I think he's trying to hide anything - the issue isn't covering up lack of ethics - the issue is not having a conception of ethics in the first place, either the reviewer or the editor (if there is one) at NYTheatre.com.

And I am sure that the response to my pointing this out will not be one of embarrassment, much less a consideration of the issue of ethics, it will be confusion - they have no idea what I'm talking about. And then the outrage - how dare I be such a spoilsport, going on about pretentious things as integrity and ethics?

According to Andrew Bellware, Manhattan Theatre Source sucks, sucks, sucks, but that's no excuse. Reviewing a play that friends of yours are involved in - especially if you don't even admit your connection - is unethical. And the fact that NYTheatre.com doesn't use professional critics, but a loose collection of volunteers is no excuse either.

And it isn't only the easily-documented web of friends at Manhattan Theatre Source that is the issue - a friend of mine has written reviews for NYTheatre.com and she told me that once she was told to tone down a negative review because friends of a bigwig at NYTheatre.com were involved in the show.

It's a nice little system for people who are well-connected. They give their friends favorable reviews, the friends return the favor, and they all vote for each other for the IT awards. And nobody even attempts to pretend otherwise. They absolutely wallow in their lack of integrity. And then some of these same people write plays with ethical or moral themes. Well why not go for it? It doesn't seem to matter in the world of off-off Broadway.

You might as well work the corrupt system for all it's worth, right?

Romantic comedy disfunction

I've been thinking about romantic comedies alot lately since I'm working on Act II of JULIA & BUDDY, and for once I have to agree with Maureen Dowd - modern romantic comedies suck. And I'm not even talking about the hideous "men are lovable puerile slobs and women are controlling bitches" genre of the 2000s pioneered by "Knocked Up."

Both Maureen Dowd and A.O. Scott wrote about it - Scott being first in 2008. He noted:

And yet, while the romantic comedy has almost always trafficked in happy endings, that happiness is rarely accompanied by a sense of risk or exhilaration. When you think of, say, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn — or even Doris Day and Rock Hudson — you recall the emotional combat of two strong-willed, independent individuals ending in mutual conquest. Love, in those old pictures, was a dangerous and noble sport that required skill and cunning as well as commitment.

I'm talking about stuff from the last twenty years. There's a good article at The A.V. Club "The ugliest truth: 24 romantic-comedy characters who don't deserve love. I admit I've seen none of these movies because I read the reviews first and they sounded like they stank on ice - and the commentary here confirms it.

Sleepless in Seattle: Romantic comedies often depend on telling audiences what they wish was true. Case in point: in Sleepless In Seattle, the seemingly happy engaged Meg Ryan hears Tom Hanks talking on the radio, falls in love with his voice, and spends the rest of the movie re-arranging her life to find him. In the real world, these would be the mentally unbalanced actions of a disturbed, desperate person, a quixotic quest for a relationship that couldn’t possibly live up to expectations. While Seattle pays some lip service to Ryan’s strange behavior, she’s ultimately rewarded for her "courage" with the most ideal meet-cute imaginable.

As Good As It Gets: the romantic tension between Hunt and Nicholson never gets past the dictated-by-script phase, partly because Nicholson looks like a human-Sleestak hybrid, and partly because his newfound decency doesn’t make up for a life’s worth of vicious hostility.

You've Got Mail: Hanks, as the scion of a Barnes & Noble-like chain of heartless mega-bookstores, essentially wins over Meg Ryan, the proprietor of a boutique children’s bookstore, by putting her out of business. He's the friendly face of the McDonald’s-ization of our culture, and Ephron seems to encourage Ryan to put up a good fight before eventually yielding to the soulless comforts of a literary Big Mac.

Garden State: The myth of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl was pushed to its most egregious extreme in Garden State, where beautiful Natalie Portman "redeems" a self-pitying, thoroughly unlikeable wimp (Zach Braff) by inexplicably falling in love with him, in spite of his rancid self-absorption and unseemly level of pussitude. In fact, she enables his bullshit, taking out a bottle to preserve his single, precious tear when he finally works up the nerve to cry over paralyzing his mother back when he was a kid.

Woody Allen in anything: nobody is more responsible for turning neurotic, paternalistic, essentially self-centered men into supposedly smart, sensitive, even sexy objects of affection for women foolish enough to accept personality traits that would (rightly) seem obnoxious coming from much better-looking guys.

Technically I have seen Woody Allen movies - although not since the early 1990s, and after reading Mia Farrow's autobiography, the very thought of Woody Allen makes me nauseous, and I just don't want to watch even his old movies that I liked.

I was griping about the absurdity of the stalker-triumphant-in-love of the Pulitzer Prize-winning TALLEY'S FOLLY, and there was a link from the A.V. Club article that made me chortle Romantic-Comedy Behavior Gets Real-Life Man Arrested

The movie "His Girl Friday" is always described as a "screwball comedy" but I think it's one of the best romantic comedies ever made, which is pretty impressive considering that in the Broadway play on which it was based, THE FRONT PAGE, the Rosalind Russell character was a man, and according to the very good Wikipedia article on the movie, the only reason the gender was changed was: "...during auditions, Howard Hawks's secretary read reporter Hildy Johnson's lines. Hawks liked the way the dialogue sounded coming from a woman, resulting in the script being rewritten to make Hildy female."

The movie is charmingly modern in its view of the Hildy character - she wants to settle down and be a conventional housewife with the boring guy played by Ralph Bellamy, but Cary Grant's character convinces her that she would be much happier as a "newspaper man." And clearly they have much more in common than Hildy does with Ralph Bellamy.

Some fascinating stuff from the Wiki:

In her autobiography, Life Is A Banquet, Russell wrote that she thought her role did not have as many good lines as Grant's, so she hired her own writer to "punch up" her dialogue. With Hawks encouraging ad-libbing on the set, Russell was able to slip her writer's work into the movie. Only Grant was wise to this tactic and greeted her each morning saying, "What have you got today?"

Grant's character describes Bellamy's character by saying "He looks like that fellow in the movies, you know... Ralph Bellamy!" According to Bellamy, the remark was ad libbed by Grant. Columbia studio head Harry Cohn thought it was too cheeky and ordered it removed, but Hawks insisted that it stay. Grant makes several other "inside" remarks in the film. When his character is arrested for a kidnapping, he describes the horrendous fate suffered by the last person who crossed him: Archie Leach (Grant's real name).

A clip from "His Girl Friday" - the entire movie is available, at least for now, for free on Youtube.

Mrs. Browning's husband

also wrote poetry

10 Shameless Right-Wing Tributes to Ayn Rand That Should Make Any Sane Person Blush

Another excellent article by Roy Edroso. Dude can turn a nice phrase.

Yes, Ayn Rand, author of big books about noble capitalists who triumph over the masses, and tomes of "philosophy" like The Virtue of Selfishness, in which she beat Gordon Gekko to Greed is Good by decades. Rand always seemed like a good fit for conservatives, but until recently their fandom was a love that dared not speak its name -- either out of fear that the born-agains would be alienated by Rand's atheism, or that literate people would giggle at them.

What happened? The Republican collapse, and the arrival of an activist liberal administration in D.C., set conservatives scrambling for compelling new story lines to sell the public. Jesus, unfortunately, had been rendered inoperative by all the family-values Republicans caught in sex scandals. With Him out of the way, the atheist, market-worshiping Rand was their best bet.

The transition has been seamless. Glenn Beck regards Rand as a prophet. Tea Party people carry her name on signs. Rightbloggers talk, seriously it would seem, about Going Galt -- a phenomenon previously known as "early retirement," but now judged a political act of resistance against the socialism of our moderate Democrat president.

Mighty Mouse, Johnny Bravo and me

Since the world is still dominated by hetero men, you often see cartoon women who aren't bad, they are just drawn that way, like Jessica Rabbit. Cartoon pinup women with wildly exaggerated female characteristics are pretty common but male characters with exaggeratedly masculine traits are extremely rare - hell, a non-grotesque male character is rare. There are lots of Homer Simpsons and very few Johnny Bravos.

Mm, Johnny Bravo. I cannot lie - I am every bit as attracted to Johnny Bravo as (straight) men are to Jessica Rabbit. Like Jessica, Johnny is inhumanly proportioned - giant chest and arms, tiny waist and short legs... but I find him strangely... compelling.



Then there's his stupendous hair, his kewl shades and his tight-fitting black tee-shirt, jeans and boots. More men should dress like that. (I'd actually prefer men to dress in Regency-period get-up as regular readers of this blog know, but the Johnny look is a much more realistic request.)

Johnny is sort of a blond Elvis kind of guy (and we all know that Elvis actually was a blond) and the look of his cartoon is sort of Elvis-goes-Hawaiian.



But since men still do run the world, even Johnny Bravo must bow to straight male hetero-normative prejudices. Although Johnny is very hot for a cartoon guy, women are always rejecting him, and he's supposed to be laughably narcissistic, which is why he's always saying "man I'm pretty." Whereas hot women in cartoons are always acknowledged as hot. Because your standard hetero man resents hot men. That's why Johnny not only doesn't get the girl, he's frequently assaulted and insulted by women - the revenge of the nerds.

Johnny Bravo once teamed up with the Scooby gang which was really funny. Predictably, he hits on Daphne but of course she rejects him and Velma wants him. But I was glad to see that Daphne was getting some Fred action.

Johnny: "you understand what that dog says?"

I should point out though, that in spite of the supremacy of the male gaze, there is a precursor to Johnny Bravo - Mighty Mouse.

Clearly he had the same physique:



And MM was hard-core hetero - episodes often ended with the girl mouse he rescued covering him with lipstick-smeared kisses.

When I was four years old I adored Mighty Mouse. I don't think I was precocious enough to appreciate his masculine physique at that point, I think I just thought he was cool because he could fly.

However - the first nude I ever drew was of Mighty Mouse. I knew what penises looked like because I had seen my mother changing my brothers' diapers, so Mighty Mouse got a teeny little circumcised penis, but even so, when my mother found the picture she freaked out. Now I can't say I drew this in complete innocence - I knew that nudity was not nice, but I didn't realize how shameful until I was caught drawing a picture of a naked anthropomorphic butch mouse.

blog overload

Oy, too much to blog about today! I spent hours arguing with teabaggers about the "ground zero mosque" - actually a community center 2 blocks away. The baggers have a new approach now - claim that because a Greek Orthodox church that was destroyed when the South Tower of the World Trade center fell on it hasn't been rebuilt yet, it's obviously bigotry against the Greek Orthodox and meanwhile we are allowing TERRORISTS! to build at ground zero! And of course it's really about zoning, money and swaps, that have nothing to do with religion:

The fate of the church, a narrow whitewashed building that was crushed in the attack on the World Trade Center, was supposed to have been settled eight months ago, with a tentative agreement in which the church would swap its land for a grander church building on a larger parcel nearby, with a $20 million subsidy from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. This would have allowed work to begin at the south end of the site.

But the two sides never came to final terms. After months of negotiations, the Port Authority, which is overseeing reconstruction at ground zero, ended its talks with the church on Monday, saying that the church had sought increasingly costly concessions.

Complaints, of course, abound on both sides.

The authority now says that St. Nicholas is free to rebuild the church on its own parcel at 155 Cedar Street, just east of West Street. The authority will, in turn, use eminent domain to get control of the land beneath that parcel so it can move ahead with building foundation walls and a bomb-screening center for trucks, buses and cars entering the area.

“We made an extraordinarily generous offer to resolve this issue and spent eight months trying to finalize that offer, and the church wanted even more on top of that,” said Stephen Sigmund, a spokesman for the Port Authority. “They have now given us no choice but to move on to ensure the site is not delayed. The church continues to have the right to rebuild at their original site, and we will pay fair market value for the underground space beneath that building.”

more from the NYTimes

In happier news 90 years ago today women got the right to vote.

It blows my mind that my grandmother was born before women were full citizens of the United States.

Ninety years ago today, women got the right to vote. Here's the text of the 19th amendment, which was ratified on August 18, 1920, by the Tennessee General Assembly: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." Tennessee was the thirty-sixth state to ratify, giving the amendment the requisite approval of three-fourths of the states; the amendment passed because 24 year-old legislator Harry Burn changed his vote, at the insistence of his elderly mother.

Several people have expressed an interest in the course I am offering this fall on how to write 10-minute plays, based on my article on the subject. Yay.

Conservatives are out to destroy the Constitution

Conservatives are out to destroy the Constitution, and the Republicans are promoting it for the sake of scoring cheap political points. And the utterly contemptible Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin, unofficial Republican representatives are riding the wave of hate, bigotry and ignorance for all they are worth.

One of the apologists of bigotry and ignorance, the NYTimes Ross Douthat, explains in his recent column Islam in Two Americas

This is typical of how these debates usually play out. The first America tends to make the finer-sounding speeches, and the second America often strikes cruder, more xenophobic notes. The first America welcomed the poor, the tired, the huddled masses; the second America demanded that they change their names and drop their native languages, and often threw up hurdles to stop them coming altogether. The first America celebrated religious liberty; the second America persecuted Mormons and discriminated against Catholics.

But both understandings of this country have real wisdom to offer, and both have been necessary to the American experiment’s success. During the great waves of 19th-century immigration, the insistence that new arrivals adapt to Anglo-Saxon culture — and the threat of discrimination if they didn’t — was crucial to their swift assimilation. The post-1920s immigration restrictions were draconian in many ways, but they created time for persistent ethnic divisions to melt into a general unhyphenated Americanism.

"...both understandings of this country have real wisdom to offer" - in other words, tolerance and hospitality is as wise as persecution and bigotry.

This is the way right-wingers think - they love "tough love." But Douthat ignores the fact that the same crowd that objected to those who failed to adopt "Anglo-Saxon culture" quickly enough also objected to the end of slavery, female sufferage and the Civil Rights movement. The same backwards group that always prefers bigotry and ignorance.

The most amusing yet revolting aspect of the way Douthat's mind works is that he apparently believes that the reason the forces of tolerance sound better is because they have better speech-writers. No you idiot - the reason they make finer-sounding speeches is because their ideas are better! It's hard to make bigotry sound fine - although Douthat does his best to argue that it is "wise."

My buddy Roy makes some excellent points in his latest Village Voice piece
Ground Zero Mosque Story Confirms It: Conservatives Are The Honky Party:

National Review's David Pryce-Jones said the mosque was "not about freedom of worship, it is a statement of supremacy and conquest" -- a seemingly approving reference to the notion popular among the mentally ill that the mosque is being built to celebrate the 9/11 attacks.

"Non-Muslims are not allowed any place of worship in Saudi Arabia," continued Pryce-Jones, "they cannot even approach within miles of the cities of Medina and Mecca." This refers to yet another popular though idiotic trope: That America should show only as much toleration of minority religions as is shown by theocratic Middle Eastern states.

Former National Review staffer Byron York, writing in the Washington Examiner, said Obama's clarification "pulls rug from under mosque supporters." This was unnecessary, York claimed, because "most mosque opponents concede the Muslim group's legal right to place the mosque in the planned site. They just argue that it's a terrible idea and have appealed to the organizers to cancel the project." ("Appeal" is an odd word for the torrents of abuse that have been visited on the planners, but it should be clear by now that these people have as little respect for language as they have for the Constitution.)

But we shall know the opponents of freedom of religion by their actions:

At one point, a portion of the crowd menacingly surrounded two Egyptian men who were speaking Arabic and were thought to be Muslims.

"Go home," several shouted from the crowd.

"Get out," others shouted.

In fact, the two men – Joseph Nassralla and Karam El Masry — were not Muslims at all. They turned out to be Egyptian Coptic Christians who work for a California-based Christian satellite TV station called "The Way." Both said they had come to protest the mosque.

"I'm a Christian," Nassralla shouted to the crowd, his eyes bulging and beads of sweat rolling down his face.

But it was no use. The protesters had become so angry at what they thought were Muslims that New York City police officers had to rush in and pull Nassralla and El Masry to safety.

"I flew nine hours in an airplane to come here," a frustrated Nassralla said afterward.

Most of the comments under the preceding story are just sickening examples of the bigotry and ignorance that is shockingly common in the USA.