More Autumnal Lunch Hour Perambulations

Ooh a Japanese Threadleaf Maple!


Another Japanese Threadleaf Maple, behind a fence


Look how nice and flowery


I thought this looked rather Italian


And this looks rather Roman

but I keep reading the New Yorker anyway...

The reason I have not yet become disgusted about the tenacious parity problem at the New Yorker enough to unsubscribe is the generally high quality of its non-fiction, for example this profile of Planned Parenthood by Jill Lepore. I almost missed my subway stop on this morning's commute I was so absorbed by it.

Unfortunately it's behind a pay wall so non-subscribers are out of luck unless they quick get the current issue on newsstands. But here are some fascinating items from the article:

On the day the (first birth control) clinic opened, Jewish and Italian women pushing prams and with toddlers in tow lined up down the street, Sanger recalled, "some shawled, some hatless, their red hands clasping the cold, chapped, smaller ones of their childrn." They paid ten cents to register. THen Sanger or Byrne met with seven or eight at once to show them how to use pessaries.

Nine days later, an undercover policewoman came, posing as a mother of two who couldn't afford any more children. Mindell sold her a copy of "What Every Girl Should Know." Byrne discussed contraception with her. The next day, the police arrived, arrested Sanger, confiscated an examination table, and shut down the clinic.

The first right-wing sting against Planned Parenthood. That evil freak Lila Rose would have been there, cheering on the cops.

A survey conducted of nearly a thousand members of the American Birth Control League in 1927 found its membership to be more Republican than the rest of the country. In a successful bid for respectability as a reform akin to prohibition, the league had attracted to its membership the same women and men who joined organizations like the Red Cross, the Rotary Club, and the Anti-Saloon League. The next year, Sanger was forced to resign as the league's president; its members objected to her feminism.

And I see a play title in this next bit:

In 1936, a federal appellate court heard U.S. v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries - a test case engineered by Sanger - and removed contraception from the category of obscenity.

And of course what article is complete without a typical idiotic statement from New York Times columnist David Brooks?

Unless Roe v. Wade is overturned, politics will never get better... Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Roe v. Wade decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since."

And what Mr. McBobo-ism is complete without an immediate rebuttal from people who actually know what they're talking about? Immediately after that quote in the article:

But Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel, both of whom teach at Yale Law School, have argued that this conventional narrative gets history backward. In an article published in the Yale Law Journal in June, they suggest that what happened after Roe was a consequence not of the Court's ruling, but of G.O.P. strategists' attempt to redefine the Party - before Roes. In their account, if there's a villain it's not Harry Blackmun; it's Richard Nixon.

And then there's this counter-intuitive fact, a bit later in the article:

Abortion wasn't a partisan issue until Republicans made it one. In June of 1972, a Gallup poll reported that sixty-eight per cent of Republicans and fifty-nine per cent of Democrats agreed that "the decision to have an abortion should be made solely by a woman and her physician." Fifty-six per cent of Catholics thought so too.

Although the article is well-researched and fact-based, Lepore does get a few pithy editorials into the article now an again:

Neither abortion nor birth control is, by nature, a partisan issue, and, from the vantage of history, it's rather difficult to sort out which position is conservative and which liberal, not least because this debate, which rages at a time when there is no consensus about what makes a person a person, began before an American electorate of white men was able to agree that woman's status as a citizen is any different from that of a child.

And:

...however divided the electorate may or may not be over abortion, as long as Planned Parenthood is the target the G.O.P. stands only to gain by keeping up the attack, because a campaign against a government-funded provider of services for the poor appeals to the Tea Party.

ah... acting

Wow, wonderful reading of JULIA & BUDDY on Wednesday night - I think it's finally just about there. Of course it could just be the wonderful acting of Claire Warden and Tom O'Keefe - but I do think the script helped. They brought a real "His Girl Friday" feel to the script that was fast and funny - and only took an hour to read. And Tom's Schopenhauer was the best ever.

Of course I could have done without the exploding candle in my apartment. Sigh. It's always something.

Tom is performing literally a block away at the Astoria Center for the Performing arts in A HARD WALL AT HIGH SPEED to very good reviews. Serendipity!

Speaking of New Yorker parity...

The magazine VIDA: Women in Literary Arts is on the case of the New Yorker - and other publications, with the feature The Count which has nothing to do with Count von Count, you big geek.

Here is their pie chart for how the New Yorker did in 2010:


Which translates into a 26% parity rate for the year.

Now the favorite excuse for why the parity for these various high-falutin' literary publications is half of what it should be in the twenty-first century is because women just don't submit work as much as men.

There are two problems with this argument as it applies to the New Yorker in particular - the New Yorker uses mostly the same cast of characters week after week.

Looking at this week's issue, and not counting the regular critics/columnists, and editor Devid Reminick, I see a bunch of people I recognize from other New Yorker issues: Ryan Lizza, Jane Mayer, Judith Thurman, Malcolm Gladwell, Jill Lepore.

It's a big insiders club. So the slush pile has little impact on gender parity.

Which may explain the second problem with this argument - the parity rate hasn't budged since at least 1971. Since I have handy access to the New Yorker archives I did a random sampling of four issues from 1971. Here's the breakdown:

February 13, 1971
Total bylines: 13
Female: 4
Male: 9
Parity score 30.77%

June 12, 1971
Total bylines: 12
Female: 3
Male: 9
Parity score: 25%

August 14, 1971
Total bylines: 11
Female: 2
Male: 9
Parity score: 18%

November 13, 1971
Total bylines: 19
Female: 3
Male: 16
Parity score: 15.79%

Average parity: 22%. So based on this random sample, parity has improved in 40 years by 4%.

But as is the case now, back in 1971 the same names pop up on the byline - Calvin Trillin, Edmund Wilson, John Updike. It doesn't hurt female representation that at that time Pauline Kael was movie critic and Edith Oliver was the off-Broadway theatre critic - both those spots are filled by men now.

But even discounting the in-crowd policy, are we to assume that women are only 4% more ambitious and career-oriented than in 1971? That would be odd, considering that 45% of all American women were in the workforce in 1970, the number was 60% in 2007. The rate for American men at the same time went from 82% in 1970 down to 75% in 2007.

So if the parity rate has changed so little in that amount of time, what can we conclude? That the New Yorker is an exclusive club that feels that a steady three men for every woman contributor ratio is just about right.

New feature - The New Yorker Parity Report

I'm certainly not the first person to notice the crazy lopsided gender ratios of high-end literary-type magazines like the New Yorker, as this article in Jezebel demonstrates:

The current issue of The Atlantic boasts five-and-a-half pieces by women (Katherine Tiedemann and Peter Bergen share a byline on this story, hence the "half") out of 18 total stories.

The Nation has four-and-a-half pieces by women out of 17 articles in its January issue. (Teachers' union head Randi Weingarten shares a byline with Pedro Noguera.)

The January Harper's is a little worse. It includes 21 bylined stories, but only three pieces from women writers: Lynn Freed, Deb Olin Unferth, and Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts. Barbara Dobrowska and Tom Littlewood translated a piece together, as did Clare Cavanagh and Adam Zagajewski.

A look at the page of contents for the January 13 New York Review of Books reveals 21 essays, including six-and-a-half by women critics: Mary Beard, Arlene Croce (who used to be the New Yorker's dance critic), Sue Halpern, Amy Knight, Margo Picken, and Ingrid D. Rowland; Econo-couple Paul Krugman and Robin Wells contribute a piece under a shared byline.

Among literary magazines, N+1's last issue had out of its 16 items only one piece of fiction, one essay, and one review by women contributors. (There is one un-bylined piece of commentary.)

The Believer is doing comparatively well. Out of 23 bylined pieces, its current issue boasts poetry by Tracy K. Smith, an essay by Unferth, a review by M. Lynx Qualey, and a conversation between John Ehle, Michael Ondaatje, Linda Spalding, and Leon Rooke. Two women (Thalia Field and Bianca Casady) are interviewed (by male writers) and three of the books reviewed in the issue are by women.

Although I'd take "Mag Hag", the author of the Jezebel article a little more seriously as a feminist if they didn't write: "A subscriber boycott is a pretty ballsy move, and I certainly hope it will make the editors there think differently."

Yeah, a "ballsy" move. Like something that someone who has balls would do. Who has balls again? Oh yes, men. Maleness=courage. Who doesn't have balls? Oh, right, pussies.

OMFG - with friends like that...

Anyway, since this article from back in January, the New Yorker appears to have changed its gender balance NOT AT ALL. I'm sure the New Yorker's not the only one. But I'm not ambitious enough to track all those magazines (and the Atlantic and Vanity Fair are pretty right-wing anyway) so I'll stick with the one I subscribe to.

The New Yorker Parity Report
A regular report on the gender parity - or lack thereof - of the current issue of The New Yorker based on table of contents by-lines
Includes fiction, non-fiction, poems. Does not include illustrations.

---

A score of 50% means that half of all writers in the issue are female.
A score of greater than 50% would mean more female than male writers. This never happens.

---

Parity change from previous week: +7.14%

November 14, 2011

Total writers - 21
male - 15
female - 6
gender parity score: 28.57%

Last week's score
Total writers - 14
male - 11
female - 3
gender parity score: 21.43%

Death Trap Fancy

Is the Era of the Motorcycle Over? asks Frederick Seidel in the NYTimes.

I hope so.

He suggests that young men are buying iPhones instead of motorcycles, because both have sleek glamor. I don't think that's why, but even if it was, that's fine - your iPhone won't kill you (no definitive connection between cell phones and cancer has been found) and it won't kill your friends. You can't say that about motorcycles. I knew two people who were killed thanks to a motorcycle - the first was Peggy, the sister of my friend Craig, who flew off the back of her boyfriend's motorcycle. The boyfriend survived.

The second was my dear Earl Rich who didn't see an oncoming pickup truck make a sudden left-hand turn in front of him until it was too late.

My brother Kevin was almost injured by a motorcyclist who was driving in the oncoming lane and whose boot got caught in the lane divider - the motorcyclist went flying across two lanes of traffic and landed on my brother's windshield. The boot, with foot inside, remained wedged in the lane divider. The motorcyclist died and if my brother had been on a motorcycle instead of a car, he would probably have been killed too.

How dangerous are motorcycles? The Traffic Safety website has the facts:

• Motorcycles are the most dangerous type of motor vehicle to drive. These vehicles are involved in fatal crashes at a rate of 35.0 per 100 million miles of travel, compared with a rate of 1.7 per 100 million miles of travel for passenger cars.


• Motorcyclists were 35 times more likely than passenger car occupants to die in a crash in 2006, per vehicle mile traveled, and 8 times more likely to be injured.


• Approximately 80% of motorcycle crashes injure or kill a motorcycle rider, while only 20% of passenger car crashes injure or kill a driver or passenger in their vehicle.

More fun facts on the web site.

The Traffic Safety site also mentions that more people over 40 and more women are driving motorcycles now. I'm sure that does nothing to help the cachet of driving a motorcycle now that it isn't something cool young guys mostly do. God knows plenty of men over 40 on online dating sites like to post pictures of themselves with their motorcycles - or even better just their motorcycles. Clearly over-40 guys believe it makes them look desirable to own a motorcycle.

Unlike the glory days of motorcycles, women are now much more likely to own their own vehicles - because they are more likely to have jobs. They aren't as likely to need a man to drive them around and have less patience to be driven around on a vehicle that permits neither conversation nor driving in inclement weather. Motorcycles are a luxury in which the costs have outweighed the benefits of coolness.

Seidel ends his paen to motorcycles this way:

In Dallas, at Advanced Motorsports, his motorcycle dealership, Jeff Nash, a gentleman and one of the great Ducati racebike tuners in America, and a racer himself, deplores the passivity of the young who would rather be home with their iPads playing computer games than astride the red-meat lightning of an 1198 Superbike blazing down a Texas highway making that unmistakable growling deep Ducati sound. Mr. Nash would go further.

Better to be out in the air astride just about any motorcycle alive!

But if he really wants young men to be outside, what's wrong with walking? What's wrong with skateboards? With rollerblades? With bicycles? All give you more exercise, make almost no noise, burn no fossil fuels, and are much, much safer.

No, the key to what Seidel really wants is the word "red-meat" - Seidel gives fuck-all for the great outdoors, what Seidel longs for is a return to manly macho. He should just come out and say it, instead of presenting himself as some kind of advocate of freedom and physical activity. It's his dissembling which reveals why he truly needs a motorcycle to make him feel all virile - because actually, he's a wimp.

Jesus hopped the A train

This post contains spoilers for JESUS HOPPED THE A TRAIN.

I read JESUS HOPPED THE A TRAIN and VENUS IN FUR at around the same time and I think JESUS is the better play. Which I would not have expected since JESUS is about violence and seems to include a plug for religion, while VENUS is about sex with a Greek goddess.

I had to finally read JESUS since I gave the play's title a shout-out in my MISTRESS ILSA play. Mistress Ilsa has a habit of using The Lord's name in vain in a variety of colorful ways: holy hopping Jesus on a pogo stick!; Jesus on the half-shell! etc. So she used the title of the play at one point. You can watch it here.

JESUS is more complex and the story is more interesting than VENUS, even though much of the play is composed of monologues.

The main character is Angel, who shot a Korean cult leader in the butt and is in jail for that. He meets up with another prisoner who seems genial and the victim of an unfairly mean prison guard. In spite of a public defender taking an interest in his case and trying to keep him out of jail, he's sentenced to a long time in jail - his lawyer tried to get him to lie on the stand, and because he found faith, apparently, he won't do it. His lawyer ends up disbarred.

And here's where I'm going to get on my soapbox about the over-use of the "reveal" - it seems like every contemporary play has to have one. JESUS has one, VENUS has one and the crappy play I saw in Astoria today, which I won't mention by name, has one - in this case that the protagonist worked for the flight school that unknowingly trained the 9-11 hijackers to fly. We had to sit through a dreary sitcom-esque thirty minutes before we got to that part.

Even though HAMLET is not absolutely perfect (see yesterday's post for details) it does not have any reveals. We know exactly what the issue is from the earliest scenes of the play. Hamlet is mourning his father, he sees his father's ghost, the ghost tells him that his uncle killed him. Everything that happens in the play stems from that.

And that's the way it goes with all Shakespeare's plays. Information is not always revealed to characters, but the audience is always privy to the information.

The big reveal in JESUS, about 2/3 of the way through the script is that the seemingly good, devout jailbird Lucius is a psychopathic killer who has killed at least eight people. At one point he describes torturing and killing a little boy. Suddenly the mean prison guard doesn't seem so bad.

It would have been OK except that we are supposed to believe Angel finds religion by having debates about God with Lucius - after he already knows he's a psychopath - and I find that absurd. Probably because I am an atheist and Guirgis is not - he's a little coy about it on his Facebook profile - under Religious Views it says "360 degrees" but I found a quote from him here:

I also think that religion gets a bad rap in this country and that non-maniac-type people who are religious or spiritual have a responsibility to stand up, be counted, and gently encourage others to consider matters of faith and to define for themselves what their responsibilities are and what it means to try and be “good.” It’s not about joining a team or a church or choosing sides or learning a prayer. It’s not about man-made concepts of good and evil. It’s not about doing “enough” or “too little.” It’s not about shame and guilt. It’s about You. It’s about the collective Us. Thomas Merton said, “To be a saint means to be myself.” What if that were true? What is it that we need to overcome in order to truly be “Ourselves”?

But the reason that religion gets a "bad rap" is exactly because it's about joining a team or a church and choosing sides, etc. If all religions had the vague, no-judgments attitude of the Unitarian Universalists it wouldn't get a bad rap. But Unitarianism is a tiny sect compared to the religions that tell you if you are on their team you won't go to hell - and some that go one better than that and tell you if you join their team Jesus will give you stuff.

That is what religion is mostly about to the mass of humanity: praying to get stuff. Except for some eastern sects who seek to end all desire - of course not wanting desire is a form of desire.

But it's because religions are so nasty that so many people these days, who are not ready to commit to atheism say they are "spiritual, not religious."

But Guirgis knows how to write a monologue and he found a way to have lots of monologues but still painlessly move the plot along and reveal character. Plus some of the interactions between the prisoners and guards are very funny.

So the upshot is that I found much to like about JESUS HOPPED THE A TRAIN, but the conclusion was unsatisfying and not believable. And the whole obvious religious metaphor of the Angel/Lucius names was a bit much too.

But it bears much more thinking about than VENUS IN FUR. Mostly because VIF is, as I said, a straight-up sexual fantasy.

first rule of writing: have something to say

(from "Breakfast of Champions")

The NYTimes review of the Kurt Vonnegut bio says some very annoying things, like:

“On the strength of Vonnegut’s reputation, ‘Breakfast of Champions’ spent a year on the best-seller lists,” Mr. Shields writes of that 1973 disappointment, “proving that he could indeed publish anything and make money.” Although he is clearly conversant with Kilgore Trout, Eliot Rosewater, Montana Wildhack and other “denizens of a zany Yoknapatawpha County for the Vonnegut faithful,”

I call bullshit on this statement. Breakfast of Champions is a great book.

and

...for the first part of his writing career Vonnegut successfully compartmentalized his familial and writerly personas. But eventually they began to blend, as Mr. Vonnegut made himself more of an explicit persona in his writing (sometimes melding with Kilgore Trout). He reached “a tipping point in the balance between fresh narrative and essayistic memoir,”

I loved when Vonnegut got autobiographical, that's some of his best writing.

The reason that virtually all of Vonnegut's books are worthwhile is because he always had something interesting to say. Here's an excellent little piece someone excerpted from Palm Sunday: How to Write with Style.

Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style.

These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bright, crooked or honest, humorless or playful– ? And on and on.

Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you’re writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead — or, worse, they will stop reading you.

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don’t you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show you or make you think about? Did you ever admire an emptyheaded writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.

So your own winning style must begin with ideas in your head.

1. Find a subject you care about

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style...

More at the link. I will chime in that in spite of all the claims to the contrary, Shakespeare isn't still popular because of the beauty of his language. I think it's because he had something to say; his plots were good and tight (although not always perfect - I even have a problem with HAMLET); and he wrote better parts for women than any other playwright, including Shaw.

Mortar but no Mystery

My Facebook friend Workshop Theatre Company posted a link recently to an article by Greg Oliver Bodine about Edgar Allen Poe. I can't say I agree with Bodine's suggestions that if Poe was alive now he might be a detective or a writer for a television crime show like "Law and Order" - thanks to his raging alcoholism Poe could barely keep his shit together well enough to ensure he got paid reasonably for his sporadic output - he made $9 for "The Raven."

But the quality of the article's insights about Poe is not of much consequence since no doubt its main purpose is to publicize Bodine's one-man show POE TIMES TWO, currently running at the Workshop Theatre Company. And Bodine's strength isn't really writing, it's acting.

I cast him as the Duke in the January 2007 production of my HUCK FINN and was so impressed by his acting that I wrote and produced an adaptation of "Jane Eyre" just so I could see what he would do with the role of Rochester - and I was not disappointed.

The tag-line for POE TIMES TWO is "Twin tales of mystery, murder... and mortar!" which is cute and alliterative, but only the murder and mortar are accurate: there is no mystery. At least, not mystery in the usual sense of a detective story. The mystery is "why do some people become homicidal maniacs?" And neither the original stories nor the plays solve that one.

The show is also being touted as scary, but unless it has changed quite a bit since the first production, which I saw in 2007, it really isn't. And I'm someone who scares pretty easily, so much so that the last entire horror/suspense movie I've seen is... never. I had my eyes closed for most of Jaws (which I saw in the theatre) and I fast-forwarded through The Sixth Sense and Silence of the Lambs - and I knew the outcome of both before watching anyway. I am a huge scairdy cat when it comes to this kind of thing, so if I wasn't scared, well, it's because it just ain't scary.

POE TIMES TWO is comprised of Poe's short stories "Cask of Amontillado" and "The Black Cat" performed solo by Bodine. The plays are very faithful to the originals except that each has a framing device in which the homicidal maniac is in the hands of the law and is confessing to the crime - in the case of Cask to a jury. In the case of The Black Cat, the narrator is already in prison (as in the original) but Bodine has him writing his confession down as a cautionary tale for others. I like the framing devices but if anything they work to reduce any mysterious aspect of the stories even further.

Bodine put together another show, WICKED TAVERN TALES that was performed by other people (and which I also saw) that includes those two stories and THE TELLTALE HEART. I think Bodine opted not to do HEART in his one-man show because it's performed most often of all Poe's stories. But there's a good reason why that is - because it's the best story.

It's interesting to note that the structures of The Tell-tale Heart and of The Black Cat are quite similar - a person is angry at someone, kills them and then the crime is revealed through a sound. The main difference in structure is that in Heart the killer confesses due to hearing the heart still beating after the victim's death, while in The Black Cat it is an actual cat's yowling that leads to the revelation.

The Tell-tale Heart doesn't work so well because it's a mystery - it works because of the psychological drama of the narrator recounting how he heard the heart relentlessly beating, which is presumabely his conscience at work.

All these tales are told first-person in the original works but only The Tell-tale Heart gives no clue as to the identity of the narrator. It's always assumed to be a man, but Bodine wrote the part for a female actor and deserves much credit for that refreshing and progressive innovation.

Cask of Amontillado is the least of the three tales, both in the original and in Bodine's version. It's just a nasty piece of work: the narrator, Montresor has unspecified grievances against Fortunato, so he lures him into a catacombs, gets him drunk and walls him up to let him die. Although the original is even worse - he gets away with it for 50 years, as he tells us. At least Bodine has him caught and punished.

But in any case, there is no mystery, it's simply a tale of pointless cruelty. Cask is performed first in POE TIMES TWO and I was so appalled by it I almost walked out during the change-over to The Black Cat. I thought "what was the point of that?" And I still don't know. I don't see the edification or the entertainment value in watching a guy tell us, without remorse, about a horrible thing he did. Even if he is found guilty for it. And the Montresor character is so relentlessly cold and heartless, there's very little even Bodine can do with it. He's pretty much one-note - arrogant and unrepentant.

But I didn't walk out and was relieved to find that The Black Cat was much better than Cask, although not especially because of the story, which is another dolorous recounting of cruelty, and made more appalling by the double cruelty of the narrator maiming his pet and murdering his wife.

The narrator of The Black Cat suggests that heavy drinking is to blame for his turning evil, which hardly seems to cover it, and during the play we see him sobered up and looking small and meek and vulnerable - his prison uniform looks like pajamas. Mostly he is consumed with remorse and Bodine works that like a true Master of Fine Arts. Not everybody has done the awful things that the narrator has done, but everybody knows what remorse - or at least regret - feels like - and Bodine provokes a performer-audience empathetic connection through his skillful and nuanced rendering of the character.

So POE TIMES TWO has artistic value - but no thanks to CASK OF AMONTILLADO and little thanks to THE BLACK CAT, except as a springboard for Bodine's excellent acting. Although I think he was even better in JANE EYRE.

Fun fact - in spite of Mark Twain's praise for "Murders of the Rue Morgue" he was generally not impressed by Poe's work, as revealed in this letter. Although he's even less impressed by Jane Austen and I have to agree with him there.

more musings on Zombie fail

I've had zombies on the brain - figuratively - lately thanks to Halloween. The continuing popularity of zombies, I believe, is due to zombie costumes being among the easiest to make.

It's certainly not because zombies are so badass - face it, zombies are the lamest adversaries ever, as I blogged about a year ago.

It's recently come to my attention that Cracked beat me to the punch by several months: 7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail (Quickly)

I pretty much covered their reason #1 in my post on the topic, but they cover it at greater length and more entertainingly:

As we touched on briefly above, if Homo sapiens are good at one thing, it's killing other things. We're so good at it that we've made entire other species cease to exist without even trying. Add to the mix the sheer number of armed rednecks and hunters out there, and the zombies don't even stand a chance. There were over 14 million people hunting with a license in the U.S. in 2004. At a minimum, that's like an armed force the size of the great Los Angeles area.

Remember, the whole reason hunting licenses exist is to limit the number of animals you're allowed to kill, because if you just declared free reign for everybody with a gun, everything in the forest would be dead by sundown. Even the trees would be mounted proudly above the late-arriving hunter's mantles. It's safe to assume that when the game changes from "three deer" to "all the rotting dead people trying to eat us," there will be no shortage of volunteers.

Plus, if we look at zombies as a species, they are pretty much designed for failure. Their main form of reproduction is also their only source of food and their top predator. If they want to eat or reproduce, they have to go toe to toe with their number one predator every single time. That's like having to fight a lion every time you to want to have sex or make a sandwich. Actually, it's worse than that: Most top predators are only armed with teeth and claws, meaning they have to put themselves in harm's way to score a kill. Humans have rifles.

More fun articles from Cracked (warning - it's a time sink)

6 most insane people ever to run for office

The CIA's 5 most mind-blowing experiments with LSD

6 Famous Geniuses You Didn't Know Were Perverts
I don't know if I exactly agree with the label "pervert" in some cases... but warning - you may have a hard time forgetting the image of Rousseau accosting women with his... well, anyways, you have been warned.

Krugman's costume fun!

A couple of days late for Halloween but I couldn't resist posting these costumes from the NYTimes blog of the Mighty Krug-man.

This one is the best. costume. Ever!


My favorite part of this costume is the giant Nobel Prize medallion he wears.

Originally on Business Insider but I found it on Krugman's blog.

This costume is great too - the Confidence Fairy!


You have to be super-wonky to know who the Confidence Fairy is - she is the creation of Krugman to personify the right-wing anti-stimulus crowd's belief that we must lower taxes on business which will in turn give businesses enough confidence to hire and spend us all out of the recession.

Here's an example of how Krugman uses this character: The White House Believes in the Confidence Fairy.

She is often seen in the company of the Bond Vigilantes.

And please note she is holding "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand.

What is it about Ayn Rand and fairies? In my play Christmas Blessing about the Christmas Fairy of New York we discover that (SPOILER ALERT!) Ayn Rand is spending her afterlife as the Christmas Fairy of Minnesota, forced to bestow good cheer and warm holiday feelings on all altruists.

Knuckleheads

The winner of the NYCPlaywrights October Play of the Month, James McLindon, has the most impressive resume of all the winners yet - dude has had a gazillion productions. Here's his web site. He had to beat out over 70 submissions for the monthly theme which was "the supernatural." I never look at the resumes of playwrights who submit to NYCPlaywrights. But it was clear to me that this play was written by someone who knew what they were doing. And of course I'm a bit partial to Celtic mythology, as apparent by my adaptation of TAM LIN.

I very much enjoy the performances, especially Doug Rossi's leprechaun.

And my producer side was pleased too - I got to use not only Winnie the Pooh from my POOH STORY from Stress and the City show, but I got to use the little figurines I got when creating the JANE EYRE set. I was going to make the set model to scale to these figures and walk through the entire show with my production partner, with the figures of course representing the characters from the play. I ended up using chess pieces instead, which I should have thought of in the first place.

The set ended up being pretty good, I thought, but I was always annoyed with myself for spending the money on these pretty expensive figures. On several occasions I thought of just throwing them all away, but never could quite bring myself to. So I'm thrilled they actually came in handy after all.

down with Oxfordian swil- OMG who is that?

The movie "Anonymous" is just so much Oxfordian swill but dear baby Jesus they found the most beautiful man in the world to play young Edward de Vere - I may have to go and see this movie just for him. His name is Jamie Campbell Bower and I will certainly be following his career. If he ever ends up in a role where he wears Regency period clothing I may well faint dead away from joy. Although he's certainly no slouch in Elizabethan garb.

For actual information about William Shakespeare, try the The Shakespeare Authorship web site - they even have a bit on their front page about the movie.

Excellent: Ten Things I Hate about Anonymous. My favorite:

8. The snobbery. The movie reflects the Oxfordians’ intellectual pathology: They are victims of the syndrome Freud called “the family romance.”

The “anti-Stratfordian” case—the idea that William Shakespeare of Stratford didn’t write Shakespeare—is based largely on what you might call “negative evidence”: The lack of any surviving letters written by Shakespeare or reference to his books in his will. There are gaps in Hitler’s biography as well, important ones, but as I suggested in Explaining Hitler, these gaps don’t constitute positive evidence in favor of urban legends such as the one that claims Hitler was descended from a Rothschild. I called such stories “the family romance of the Hitler explainers,” after Freud’s characterization of the fantasy that one is secretly related to royalty or aristocracy, and pointed out that a “gap” is not necessarily evidence of absence, but absence of evidence, which, in Shakespeare’s case, the passage of more than four centuries makes even more likely.

Freud used the term "family romance" to describe the wish of the neurotic patient to believe that his apparently humble origins conceal a conspiracy to hide from him or her the fact of an exotic, usually royal or noble parentage and the way his or her true legacy was stolen. It’s so obvious the Oxfordians suffer from this pathological snobbery when you read the disdain they have for the “glover’s boy of Stratford,” Shakespeare. The Oxfordians are projecting their own self-inflating neurotic “family romance” onto Shakespeare. Their belief somehow endows them with a feeling of superiority over the vast majority of “mere” common readers of Shakespeare. It’s a sign of their nobility that they recognize the noble who secretly authored Shakespeare. But Oxford is as likely a progenitor of “Shakespeare” as a Rothschild was of Hitler.

You tell 'em!

Autumnal lunch break

I decided to get out and enjoy nature the other day for my lunch break, you know, before all the snow set it. And nothing says Autumn like red trees.



Here are some random daisies.




And a random seagull



I had lunch outside of the Starbucks on the water, as you can see...



But wow, the sparrows outside the Starbucks were cocky! Look at this guy - that's a tall cappuccino there, which as we all know is the shortest size that Starbucks serves*. This guy came well within arms length although if I tried to stretch my arm to touch him he would have been gone too fast. Not that I really want to touch semi-wild sparrows.

There were cranberries in my sandwich so I shared some with the birds and wow - you would have thought I was the second coming of Big Bird when I started handing out cranberries. I totally made their day. The woman sitting at the table nearby was throwing pieces of bread at them - which of course they ate. But most birds love fruit more than anything - with their high metabolisms they prefer high-energy foods.



*Technically not true - they do have a "short" even though they don't post that size on their menu board - but if you ask for it they will give it to you. Try it and see.

How Could a Commoner Write Such Great Plays?

The perfect scathing review of "Anonymous" in the NYTimes begins this way:

“Anonymous,” a costume spectacle directed by Roland Emmerich, from a script by John Orloff, is a vulgar prank on the English literary tradition, a travesty of British history and a brutal insult to the human imagination. Apart from that, it’s not bad.

But the ratings advisory at the end might be the best:

“Anonymous” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Swordplay, bodice ripping, bawdy speech and the cold-blooded murder of the truth.

hot guys help you check your breasts

Yaaaay!

Happy Halloween from Paul Krugman and The Onion!

Greetings…it's your favorite dead-itorial writer, Paul "Bearer" Krugman, here to talk to you again about some rather, shall we say, chilling developments in the national economy. Ah, yes, it is a very dark and stormy night indeed for our financial system, dear readers, the kind of night that sends shivers up one's spine and sends the national unemployment rate soaring to nearly 10 percent. So curl up under your covers, and keep the candlelight close, because I will now tell a tale of economic woe so terrifying it may just make your hair stand on end.

more at The Onion

I got a heads-up on that from Krugman himself.

NYCPlaywrights moving on up

NYCPlaywrights broke a record October 24 according to Google Analytics - 307 unique visitors in one day. And coincidentally - or not? - AKA New York offers us a discount code and free tix to the Alicia Keyes produced STICKFLY in exchange for posting their info online (which I will do as soon as they send it.)

I like them free tix.

Are John Lennon and Yoko Ono racists?

NOTE: if you are here via a link from extremist, lying, Google-bombing freaks Rebecca Scott, aka "The Mad Gastronomer" or  Mikki Kendall, aka "Karnythia" you can read my most recent response here.

Also, here are some various anti-racist things I've said over the years on this blog...

Thursday, December 30, 2010
A walk in the park

Thursday, December 23, 2010
don't ask don't tell" can now go to hell - plus ignorant Confederacy-loving freaks

Friday, July 23, 2010
David Mamet is a teabagger

Tuesday, December 1, 2008
Obama vs Bell Curve

Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Steven Pinker at Gene Expression

The theatre around the corner

Exactly one block away from my apartment is the Astoria Performing Arts Center - how cool is that to have a theatre one block away? It's in a church, but that's OK - theatre is a religion.

Even better, they are doing a play, A HARD WALL AT HIGH SPEED and the lead is Tom O'Keefe who I asked, months ago, to participate in the next reading, and hopefully final pre-production reading - of JULIA & BUDDY. It was just a weird coincidence that he's rehearsing/performing so close by.

I think Tom might have the perfect combination of qualities and acting chops to play Buddy. With any luck he can come along for the world premiere.

Watch part of his reel:

Martin Denton fesses up

I see that Martin Denton's most recent blog post on his Indie Theater blog admits to the small percentage of female playwrights in his Indie Theatre Now play collection. He writes:

Now, part of me really bristles at the idea of segregating work by one group or another: shouldn’t the sex of the author not really matter when choosing a play to read or produce? Unfortunately, it kind of does, though. Our friends at 50/50 in 2020 are working hard to bring about parity for women playwrights in American theatres, something that simply doesn’t exist right now. (Just look at the relatively small number of plays by women in Indie Theater Now versus plays by men for confirmation: the fact is that many more plays by men get produced each year, even in indie venues, than plays by women.) By calling attention to the fine work created by women, the hope is that this inequity might start to erode, bit by bit. I certainly hope so.

Definitely a step in the right direction.

VENUS IN FUR, on THE MOUNTAINTOP

NOTE: This blog post contains spoilers about both VENUS IN FUR and THE MOUNTAINTOP - the former is about to open on Broadway after a well-received Off-Broadway run last year, the latter is currently running on Broadway after winning the Olivier award in Britain last year.

I got a copy of David Ives' play VENUS IN FUR yesterday from the Dramatists Book Store - it's autographed - ooh.

Long-time readers of this blog may remember that I had Ives sit in on a meeting of NYCPlaywrights in 2007. I gave him a ride home from Midtown to the Upper West Side of Manhattan and as I was dropping him off we had an exchange that went something like this:

ME

I have a whole bunch of prop bullwhips in the back of my Prius - I ordered too many for a production of my play HUCK FINN - d'ya want one?

DAVID IVES

I already have one!

(David Ives exits.)

ME

(to the bunch of actors who came along for the ride so they could say they rode with David Ives)

Hah hah - oh that David Ives, he's so droll!

And then I heard about VENUS IN FUR and thought, maybe he wasn't entirely joking.

Well now that I've read VENUS IN FUR I think it's more than maybe - it's probable. Maybe he doesn't literally own a whip but I wouldn't be surprised if his fantasy is to be the M in an S and M relationship. Because VENUS IN FUR is a 90-minute sexual fantasy.

According to Did He Like It the play got all positive reviews when it had an off-Broadway run, although I think the thumbs-up symbol they gave the Variety review is completely mischaracterized - it sure reads like a pan to me:

Unfortunately, the magic of the moment is lost once Thomas picks up the part of the young man destined to become her sex slave. Tentative as Thomas, Bentley ("American Beauty") is downright wooden as his 19th century counterpart. And in this two-character play, he gets the lion's share of the intellectually weighted lines.

Hanging in there, Arianda doesn't let this get her down and delivers a wonderfully quicksilver perf, sliding in and out of her several personae as fluidly as Vanda slips in and out of her provocative costumes. (Fantasy S&M boots, bustiers, and dog collars courtesy of Anita Yavich, who must have had a ball shopping this show.)

What does it all mean, one might ask? Ives advances glib theories about kinky sexual practices as the enlightened route to male-female sexual liberation. But the academic tone makes it agony to sit through Thomas's lugubrious lectures.

I don't know if Ives made changes to the script since the off-Broadway production, but I didn't notice any lugubrious lectures, although that might be as much because I was reading the play rather than watching it.

What I did notice was how incredibly one-note the play is. A guy getting off on being dominated by a woman. And there's no doubt that this is a male hetero-centric work - Vanda wears a variety of traditionally sexy outfits but what Thomas is wearing doesn't matter, because for all Ives' attempts at making some kind of feminist point - and "glib theories" as Variety's critic called it is an accurate assessment - Thomas is the subject and Vanda is the object. Vanda is there to fulfill Thomas's sexual fantasies and she does. That's pretty much the play.

I'm not sure what Ives is trying to say with the ending, which goes like this:

(She takes a real fur stole from her big bag and puts it on)

THOMAS

Who are you?

VANDA

You know who I am so say it. Say it.

THOMAS

Hail, Aphrodite...

VANDA

Louder please.

THOMAS

Hail! Aphrodite!

(Lighting and thunder, louder. She takes a triumphant stance, facing him down the room with her feet planted, legs spread, hands on her hips.)

VANDA

"And the Lord has smitten him and delivered him into a woman's hands."

THOMAS

HAIL APHRODITE!

VANDA

Good.

(Lighting and a deafening crack of thunder. Blackout.)

Is she really Aphrodite? That's not as ridiculous as it might sound because in addition to the thunder and lightening that is heard off and on throughout the entire 90 minute play, she displays unlikely knowledge of Thomas's script - she's already off-book - and of Thomas's personal life.

So maybe suddenly the play becomes supernatural. It doesn't make any difference really - the only power we see this Greek goddess display is the power to turn this guy on - big whoop - any dominant woman in a black-leather bustier and thigh-high boots would have the same exact power. We don't get to see her do any impressive, actual, magic.

The same day I read VENUS I had read some reviews of THE MOUNTAINTOP and was struck by the similar use of the supernatural - in THE MOUNTAINTOP the maid who is visiting Martin Luther King, Jr. in his hotel room, after some slap-and-tickle, tells him she's there to take him to heaven. What is the point of inserting the supernatural? And at least in VENUS IN FUR, Thomas is just some guy with a fetish, so ending the story with the apotheosis of his object of desire doesn't make much difference to the story, such as it is.

The reason MLK is interesting is because of what he did, what he achieved. Having an avatar of a god come by could happen to any character.

Using MLK is just a cheap publicity trick, in my opinion, very much like using Madalyn Murray O'Hair's notoriety to come up with a fantasy riff on O'Hair that is far less interesting than her own life and achievements and must less sensational than her actual death. (I wrote an essay about that Screw Ethics, This is the Theatre.)

I was a little discomfited by the part in VENUS IN FUR where Vanda is transformed in Thomas's eyes from a schlub to an object of desire through the power of her acting. That happens in JULIA & BUDDY - though of course since it's my play it's the man who is the object of desire and the woman who is doing the desiring.

You can't expect to write a play that has nothing in common with another play - and I just identified the supernatural commonality in VENUS and MOUNTAINTOP - but still, I don't want anybody to think I was imitating Ives - I wrote that section of JULIA & BUDDY in 2009, before I knew anything about VENUS IN FUR.

And I must confess, I like my two-person play much better than Ives's play. I think my play has much more variety and the philosophical issues are much more interesting and important. Also, I believe that although it's clear that Buddy is the object of desire, there's more to him than just that. I think there's more balance between the characters. And with any luck, the audience will actually care when Julia & Buddy reunite at the end of the play. I hope to give the audience an emotional orgasm.

VENUS IN FUR gave me no emotional orgasm and I suspect the only people who do get one are those who share Thomas's kink.

And I suspect that Thomas is Ives's Mary Sue (as they call it in the world of fan fiction) because Thomas is completely passive - he wants to be dominated by a woman, but he makes no serious effort to achieve that end. She basically comes in and they play a few head games and then she dominates him. Autobiographical characters are almost always passive - things are done to them, rather than them being the agent of forward-action in the plot.

And in addition to being passive Thomas is also whiny, poncy, critical and self-absorbed. He's some creep with a fiancee who does a little sexual adventuring on the side. Why do I care about him fulfilling his kink? Especially when he could do that any time, day or night, at any of the several dominatrix establishments in New York.

I can't deny I did write a play like that.

interesting coincidence

I saw a NYTimes article on free will and experiments today. The experiments seem to indicate the absence of free will, in fact. I was especially interested because my play JULIA & BUDDY discusses this exact thing - experiments that seem to demonstrate what Arthur Schopenhauer was going on about - that the Will is what drives our behavior, not our conscious minds - i.e. "free will."

Our conscious minds only tell themselves they are in control.

I also blogged about it back in July.

But here's the coincidence part - right in the middle of the article there's this:

If I choose to remain indoors because I’m in the grip of a panic attack at the thought of going outside, then my choice isn’t free. Here we might say that I’m not just caused to choose as I do, I’m compelled.

JULIA & BUDDY is also about panic attacks - the philsophy professor Julia is having one when the play opens and this issue is dealt with off and on throughout the play. And in the first half of the play she can't go outside due to panic-attack induced agoraphobia. How strange.

Or maybe not so much - perhaps this example came to mind because the author, Gary Gutting, himself suffers from panic attacks. Certainly that's my motivation for mentioning panic attacks in my play. Although I've never gotten so bad that I couldn't go out of my apartment.

Perhaps philosophy-minded people are more inclined to panic attacks than other people? That's basically what I have Arthur Schopenhauer propose, in my play:

JULIA

Have you ever experienced a panic attack, Herr Schopenhauer?

SCHOPENHAUER

No. What is it?

JULIA

It starts with an awareness of binocular vision. And your life force begins to seep away. And you feel as though you are going to black out.

SCHOPENHAUER

You are suffering from existential displacement.

JULIA

Are you sure?

SCHOPENHAUER

Jah. It happens when you become aware of the two states of existence. The ordinary mass of humanity is only aware of one state of existence, the everyday world. But philosophers see another world - the world that is composed of endless fleeting phenomena in the ever-rushing stream of time. And sometimes the philosopher will see both states of existence at once, and this overwhelms the mind, which may result in disorientation and nausea and fear.

JULIA

Yes! Sometimes I get this sense of - I feel - eternity rushing through me!

SCHOPENHAUER

Existential displacement is the price of being a philosopher...

Maybe I was closer to the root cause of panic attacks than I realized... although I always assumed panic attacks were a fight-or-flight adrenaline over-reaction to stress. Hmmm....

I should say that Julia's description of a panic attack is not entirely typical. The "awareness of binocular vision" is my own personal innovation, so to speak, in panic attack symptoms. The first time I noticed binocular vision wasn't during a full-blown panic attack but during a job interview - and I got the job.

So I don't often get that symptom, but I thought it was a good metaphor so I used it. I'm more often afraid I'll black out. That's pretty standard panic attack symptomology. sigh

two sides of the same Coyne

I've been a fan of evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne ever since his superb take-down of the Thornhill-Palmer exercise in standard evolutionary psychology just-so-ology "A Natural History of Rape."

Coyne's article Of Vice and Men (the link opens up a PDF document) was an impressive piece and you know it's objectively good because it really pissed off the ev-psychs at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the Mecca of evolutionary psychology. (The EP Vatican is the London School of Economics.)

But I'm ambivalent about his blog Why Evolution is True because he so often refers admiringly to the Five Horses Asses of Atheism, Pinker, Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and Dennett.

I've blogged about what jerkwads they are before. I personally find them, one and all, an embarrassment to atheism.

Coyne claims that these "Horsemen" have eloquence in common. Perhaps, but each one is an asshole in his own special way.

Richard Dawkins is an anti-Muslim bigot, proven sexist, prominent booster of evolutionary psychology, and all-around nasty little man.

Christopher Hitchens supported the Iraq War and is a proven misogynist.

Sam Harris is also an anti-Muslim bigot and is perhaps best known for his defense of torture.

Daniel Dennett is also a booster of evolutionary psychology and a promoter of strict adaptationism, called a Darwinian Fundamentalist by Stephen Jay Gould. I know the least about Dennett, personality and politics-wise.

Stephen Pinker huge promoter of evolutionary psychology to the point of shading into the racist tendencies of sociobiology. And also a huge sexist. His idea of a "feminist" is Camille "women can't be geniuses" Paglia. Also a pal of gigantic douchebag and Wall Street booster Lawrence Summers.

Coyne himself, while showing evidence of anti-Muslim bigotry, is, as established by his Vice and Men paper, quite skeptical of the most outrageous claims of the evolutionary psychologists - and doesn't appear to be a sexist, although he's pretty traditionalist in his attitudes at times. But from everything I know about these six men, Coyne is far superior to the others. Why he insists on being a consistent booster for those assholes is beyond me.

And speaking of Pinker, The New Yorker did to his The Blank Slate, what Coyne did to the Thornhill-Palmer work - completely eviscerated it. It's such a joy to read - if you haven't go read it now: Doing What Comes Naturally.

Pinker is constantly inventing straw-man liberals and academics he can accuse of all kinds of awfulness, so it's always satisfying when the actual liberals at The New Yorker get a hold of his books and tell you how poorly-reasoned and all-around weaselly they are.

So I loved the New Yorker review of Pinker's latest book "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined". Unfortunately unlike the Blank Slate review this one is not available to read for free online. You'll either have to track down a copy of the New Yorker from a couple of weeks ago or subscribe and get access to the archives - I recommend the latter.

Anyway, here are some highlights from the review:

The homicide rate in New Orleans last year was forty-nine per hundred thousand, roughly what Amsterdam's was six hundred years ago. St. Louis's and Detroit's murder rates in 2010 were about forty per hundred thousand, around the rate of London in the fourteenth century... Do these cities lag behind in "the civilizing process" because they're poor or educationally disadvantaged? No, Pinker argues; the key factor is that they have large African-American populations. Low-income blacks in the U.S. are "effectively stateless," living in a sort of Hobbesian dystopia beyond the reach of law enforcement..."

...As Pinker's views on African-Americans and Southerners probably indicate, there is much in "The Better Angels of Our Nature" that is confounding. Those developments which might seem to fit into his schema - a steady rise in the percentage of Britons who identify themselves as vegetarians, for instance - are treated in detail. Yet other episodes that one would think are more relevant to a history of violence are simply glossed over. Pinker is virtually silent about Europe's bloody colonial adventures. (There's not even an entry for "colonialism" in the book's enormous index.) This is a pretty serious omission, both because of the scale of the slaughter and because of the way it troubles the distinction between savage and civilized. What does it reveal about the impulse control of the Spanish that, even as they were learning how to dispose of their body fluids more discreetly, they were systematically butchering the natives on two continents? Or about the humanitarianism of the British that, as they were turning away from such practices as drawing and quartering, they were shipping slaves across the Atlantic?...

Leaving out European colonialism is a typical Pinker trick - ignore any evidence that disputes your main point. And this section demonstrates Pinker's fishy math:

According to his own calculations, the Second World War was, proportionally speaking, the ninth-deadliest conflict of all time - in absolute terms, it was far and away the deadliest - yet the war lasted just six years. The Arab slave trade, which ranks as No. 3 on Pinker's hit list, was an atrocity that took more than a millenium to unfold. The Mongol conquests, coming in at No. 2, spanned nearly a century.

But let's say, for the sake of argument, that we accept that the Second World War was only the ninth-bloodiest conflict in the history of our species, and the First World War the sixteenth. Isn't this still a problem? The heart of Pinker's argument is that trends and historical forces associated with modernity have steadily diminished violence. Though he hesitates to label the Second World War an out-and-out fluke, he is reduced to claiming that, as far as his thesis is concerned, it doesn't really count. Accidents happen, and the Nazi's rise to power was one of them. A series of unfortunate events ensued, but it's important not to rush to judgement...

But that's all standard Pinker. Why anybody is impressed by the work of Steven Pinker is another vast mystery.

Don't Let Me Down

Well now I'm on a Beatles kick. Here's a very nice clear video of the Apple rooftop performance of Don't Let Me Down from Let It Be.



The Jann Wenner interview with Lennon for Rolling Stone in 1971 is pretty infamous. Lennon is very blunt and harshly critical of Paul, especially. The other day I mentioned that the Harrison documentary has Ringo giving Paul credit for making the Beatles get into the studio - this RS interview makes it clear that Lennon resented it quite alot.

This page has not only the interview but some audio clips from the interview.

The infamous Two Virgins album cover.



Another picture from that same photo shoot, a bit more explicit. I'd never seen this one until tonight.

McCartney appeared naked in print before Lennon (albeit only by a week*) - they were always so competitive - there's a shot of him in the White Album photo montage poster insert, which was later censored.

* The Beatles (aka The White Album) was released November 22, 1968, Two Virgins was released November 29, 1968.




JET! - very nice clip from 1976's Wings tour - McCartney is still young and hot, almost as hot as his Beatles days - except he is rocking a serious mullet.



And wow, check this out - McCartney doing I've Just Seen a Face live in 1975. This has always been one of my favorite McCartney tunes.



According to Wiki the original recording of I've Just Seen a Face has only acoustic guitar and percussion which is quite remarkable, and I guess the credit goes to George who is playing lead acoustic. It's a good song, but that falling bass line is what makes it. It opens the song and is repeated, but best of all it doubles with the end of each phrase in the lyric line, like this:

I've just seen a face I can't forget the time(dah) or place (duh) where we (dum) just met

She's just the girl for me and I want all the world (dah) to see (duh) we've met (dum)

Hm mm mm m m mmm.

The middle-section solo is also superb. It's a 2-minute masterpiece.



Adorable Lennon sequence in this short clip. That man was a natural comedian.

It's All Too Much

The George Harrison documentary focuses on all those big Harrison hits like "While My Guitar Gently Sleeps" and "Here Comes the Sun" but I think his best song is "It's All Too Much." I love the combination of the psychedelic intricacy of the instruments, the pretty melody and one of my favorite Beatles song lines of all time:

Sail me on a silver sun, for I know that I'm free
Show me that I'm everywhere, and get me home for tea

Interesting stuff about the song:

From the Beatles Bible

Notes by Alan W. Pollack

Wiki

Living in the Material World

Some naughty person has posted the George Harrison documentary to Youtube. Watch it before they take it down.



The section with Astrid Kirchherr and Klaus Voorman which starts around minute 15 is especially enlightening.

There's a great quote from Ringo, although he isn't the first person to acknowledge Paul's leadership role in the post-touring Beatles saga (around 1:04:00):

RINGO

We have to thank Paul that we made as many records as we did because John and I because we lived in the same area be hanging out you know, sort of it's like, beautiful day in the garden in England and the phone would ring and we always knew it was him - "he wants us to work!"

Mr. Fuzz and his mousie problem

Mr. Fuzz has a mousie problem, which means I have a mousie problem too. Our problem is that all the pet supply stores are starting to substitute fake fur mousies for real fur mousies.

Do they take Mr. Fuzz for a fool!?!

He can certainly tell the difference between acrylic-fur and actual fur and by god he demands actual fur. He won't play with a mousie made of fake fur.

And when I say "play" that's only part of it. He also has a ritual every time he eats from his food bowl, which is twice a day - first I have to throw the mousie a few times so he can chase it. At some point, sooner if he's hungry, he decides that's enough chasing and he takes his toy to his bowl. He then rolls the mousie around in his bowl of (soft) cat food. Then he chews the mousie, eats some food, chews the mousie some more. The he eats some of the fur. Often he'll throw that up. Then he leaves the skinned, chewed-up black plastic mousie chassis somewhere in the apartment.

He can eat his food without a real-fur mousie, but it is not the same. Sometimes when we are out of mousies, he and I scour the apartment for any possible hidden mousies. Which is especially annoying in the morning when I need time to get ready for work. But we make a good team - for example, I'll pull the sofa out from the wall and he goes around behind and looks under the sofa. We have about a 40% success rate with this technique. And I have to at least try - he's so disappointed when he doesn't have any mousies for his meal-time ritual I feel bad and want to help him out. Sometimes he subsitutes Q-tips for a mousie, but obviously that's hardly the same thing.

And if we lose all sources of real-fur mousies - THEN WHAT?

Underground art exhibit

Almost ten years after the World Trade Center attacks they finally opened the south-bound Cortland Street Station. This makes my commute a little bit quicker though not exactly easier. There is no access to the street from that side of the tracks so you have to go under the tracks in a tunnel that must go pretty far underground judging by all the stairs you have to climb back up to get to the street. That will certainly get your blood circulating first thing in the morning!

But luckily there's a permanent art exhibit under there, which helps. There is a series of ceramics-based murals in the passageway called Trade, Treasure and Travel, 1997/2011 by Margie Hughto - follow this link to see more info.

I took this picture with my iPhone.

yacht variations

I've been sending JULIA & BUDDY out to various theatre groups in the hopes that they decide to produce it, but I suspect that it won't get picked up. Theatre groups don't want romantic comedies, they want raw, edgy brutality and characters who wallow in squalor and despair. And lots of manly-men behaving badly. JULIA & BUDDY is not cool like that.

So I suspect that I will end up producing it myself via Mergatroyd Productions. I think this might be the first production where I actually break even, since I always pay my actors (and you might be surprised at how often actors are not paid for off-off Broadway productions) but this play has only two characters and minimal set requirements. It's true the second half of the play takes place on the deck of a yacht, but as I say in the production notes:

There are two main categories of yachts - engine-powered and sailing. But yachts come in many sizes and styles in both categories so the production designer has quite a bit of leeway in how to represent the yacht for scenes 5 and 7. The author’s own preference is simplicity - a railing to represent the edge of the yacht deck can stand in for the entire boat.

Really an engine-powered yacht would work best - they tend to have much more spacious decks as I discovered first-hand when I visited a marina near work the other day during my lunch hour.

There are lots of deck options available, although most of the yachts I saw had sofa-bench type furniture, built into the front deck of the yacht. Here are two examples - this one seems to have a sort of red sofa-bed:



And here is a sort of blue padded bench:



Notice the "grab-bar" style railings. Most of the yachts were these slick white stream-lined models but I especially liked this unique boat, named "Justice." It is obviously built for comfort, not for style or speed. The front deck has both a built-in sunken sofa in the tip, and after that a deck with lounge chairs.



In this photo you can see the pilot's booth just behind what looks like four yellow futons on the roof of a curtained room.



It also had what looked like a sun-deck and a porch. It's an adorable boat. But it's a little atypical for the purposes of the set of JULIA & BUDDY.

I think my set model will be the upper deck of this boat, the "Gloria" - simple, squared off, and can be easily suggested just by the railing and deck chairs. I estimate it will cost me no more than $200 to create a decent set for this section of the play.

Bringing the hammer down - the appropriate uses of Godwin's law

Godwin's law states:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.

I invoked Godwin's law yesterday during a Facebook comment-thread debate with a cousin of mine, a hard-core conservative who became offended when he saw my support for Occupy Wall Street. His response was to start posting all-caps comments on my Wall and on my comment threads, the basic message of which was "I DON'T WANT TO LIVE UNDER COMMUNISM."

This is the nuanced response of a typical conservative - if you criticize Wall Street it means you want communism.

I suggested to him that he might want to turn off caps-lock because it looked like he was screaming. He responded "I AM SCREAMING!"

Before Facebook I might have exchanged a total of 20 words with this cousin, who is a few years my senior, during my entire life, and I don't think I've actually seen him, in-person, since his wedding to his first wife, some time in the early 1980s. So I had no idea he had turned into such a right-wing extremist when I accepted his Friendship, as I routinely do with all relatives, on Facebook.

His view is basically that not only Occupy Wall Street, but the United States government, itself, is evil. I pointed out to him that the government wasn't too evil for his mother to take Social Security survivor's benefits when his father died, leaving seven children and a stay-at-home mom. Not to mention welfare and food stamp benefits for a time. I suggested to him that he put his money where his mouth was and pay back the US government since if he thinks the government is evil he should pay back the money the government shelled out. And if he didn't do so, I suggested that he STFU.

His response:

What makes you think that the fact my Mom got government assistance when I was a kid erases my right to my own opinion as an adult! Millions of Germans had parents who benifited from the Nazis. Are they, therefore Nazis or Nazi simpasizers?

Clearly my point was his shameless hypocrisy, not that he wasn't entitled to his own opinon, and I considered for a moment actually wasting my time explaining this to him, but instead I brought down the hammer. I cited Godwin's law and ended the thread.

To a certain extent I understand why comparisons to Hitler and Nazis are so popular. Everybody knows who they are and everybody (except of course modern neo-Nazis) agrees they were very bad. Or as TV Tropes points out:

...Hitler has pretty much displaced the Devil as a personification of ultimate evil...

If you compare something to the Khmer Rouge you're going to lose 95% of everybody, especially Americans with our traditionally awful grasp of history.

But Godwin's purposes are worthwhile: "Although deliberately framed as if it were a law of nature or of mathematics, (the purpose of Godwin's law) has always been rhetorical and pedagogical: I wanted folks who glibly compared someone else to Hitler or to Nazis to think a bit harder about the Holocaust"

Where do I enlist?

Although Krugman has some quibbles with the chart depicted.

Krugman's on a roll, each column is more smokin' than the last.

Panic of the Plutocrats

It remains to be seen whether the Occupy Wall Street protests will change America’s direction. Yet the protests have already elicited a remarkably hysterical reaction from Wall Street, the super-rich in general, and politicians and pundits who reliably serve the interests of the wealthiest hundredth of a percent.

And this reaction tells you something important — namely, that the extremists threatening American values are what F.D.R. called “economic royalists,” not the people camping in Zuccotti Park.

Consider first how Republican politicians have portrayed the modest-sized if growing demonstrations, which have involved some confrontations with the police — confrontations that seem to have involved a lot of police overreaction — but nothing one could call a riot. And there has in fact been nothing so far to match the behavior of Tea Party crowds in the summer of 2009.

RIP Ginger Snaps

I only knew Ginger Snaps - real name Melissa Hayes - through Facebook. But it still counts as a friendship. I just found out that she died October 5 in a car accident.

Ginger and I had our share of comment-thread debates. Most especially about the issue of Muslim bigotry. Like many hard-core atheists, most notably the big-name atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, Ginger Snaps used atheism as an excuse to indulge in anti-Muslim bigotry, under the guise of defending free-thought from religion. We clashed on that several times.

But we agreed on the issue of atheism. She was a dedicated, unflinching atheist but in spite of that had religionists as Facebook friends - she was interested in a variety of points of view in spite of her own firmly held views. I admired that about her.

Anyway, she was a Facebook friend and she was sharp and cool and young and pretty and only 34 and now she's gone - more gone than defriending, more gone than blocking, she's just plain gone. Another friend of hers posted this tribute to her.

Several people posted messages on her Wall about her being with God and all that, which I think is disrespectful, knowing as they must that she was an atheist. Especially now that she's not here to talk back. Somebody said she now "sleeps with the angels." I replied "fuck angels" because that's what Ginger would want.

Lark Rise to Candleford

I found a fascinating, recently cancelled 4-season British TV series via iTunes Lark Rise to Candleford and after I spent a bunch downloading from iTunes discovered the entire series is available for free on Youtube.

It's quite well-done and quite addicting. The characters are very well-drawn and multi-faceted.

Here's Season 1, Episode 1, Part 1, including even the BBC announcement for the new series.

Typical of BBC series, there are some great British actors involved.

Occupy Wall Street 10-6-2011

This might be Krugman's best editorial ever!

Confronting the Malefactors

A weary cynicism, a belief that justice will never get served, has taken over much of our political debate — and, yes, I myself have sometimes succumbed. In the process, it has been easy to forget just how outrageous the story of our economic woes really is. So, in case you’ve forgotten, it was a play in three acts.

In the first act, bankers took advantage of deregulation to run wild (and pay themselves princely sums), inflating huge bubbles through reckless lending. In the second act, the bubbles burst — but bankers were bailed out by taxpayers, with remarkably few strings attached, even as ordinary workers continued to suffer the consequences of the bankers’ sins. And, in the third act, bankers showed their gratitude by turning on the people who had saved them, throwing their support — and the wealth they still possessed thanks to the bailouts — behind politicians who promised to keep their taxes low and dismantle the mild regulations erected in the aftermath of the crisis.

Given this history, how can you not applaud the protesters for finally taking a stand?

Steve Jobs was only 56???

Statement by Apple's Board of Directors

Chris Meloni is Tony Baloney

I don't think The Daily Show can ever top either the Confederate Pride episode or the immortal gospel-flavored go-fuck-yourself-Bernie Goldberg episode, but the Chris Meloni is Tony Baloney episode is pretty hysterically funny!

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Grubhub amusements

I see I'm not the only one who is greatly amused by Grubhub's ads, which are all over the NYC subway system. The artwork is definitely South Park-esque, and the design and copy is clever and/or wacky.

I wouldn't go quite as far as this blogger though, who has a post called The Semiotics of Grubhub.

But I did LOL when I saw this GH ad:



These office workers seem to be having a party in celebration of the fact that they can order burritos online, in all the classic office-worker ways - a tie headband, goofy dances and the ever-popular photocopy-your-butt, which the woman in the center is doing. It's just so dumb I had to laugh.

The sushi/s#!t ad is also a classic.



Well played, Grubhub. Although I still use delivery.com, mostly out of inertia.

this is what I want for Christmas...

It's the Men of the Stacks calendar featuring guy librarians. Whoohoo! They're all cute but Mr. January, above, is my favorite.

Zap & Faun

Between reliving the days of No Nukes protests in New York and working on my play PALMYRA NJ, I've been thinking of a couple of strange characters from back in those days - Zap and Faun. They actually never met each other, but I made them boyfriend and girlfriend in my play.

Faun was a hippie chick who liked to carry a large staff - ala Gandalf - around - I believe it was allegedly magic. I remember one time I was accompanying her to see her chiropractor in Philadelphia and construction workers bleated at her like sheep - I assume because of her staff. I don't know if Faun was her real name. I have a couple of sketches of her around somewhere, I'll have to dig them up.

I know that Zap was not his real name. I don't know if he used the name because he looked a bit like Frank Zappa or what. He was a straight-up junkie and used to rip off our spare change jar and puke all over the upstairs loft. My ex-husband was a freak magnet. Basically, if you liked to get high, you and he were gonna be best friends. Oy.

I wonder where old Zap and Faun are now? Zap is probably dead, but I have no way of looking up either of them since none of us ever knew their real names by the time they drifted out of our lives so many years ago. Well, wherever they are, they're gonna show up again in my play.

TOWER TATTS online

As I mentioned last week, we selected Adrienne Dawes TOWER TATTS for the September 9-11 Play of the Month. It's certainly original, and extremely raunchy.



The actors and I who participated in the readings of the semi-finalist submissions were really taken by surprise by the unusual, very atypically non-reverential approach to the subject. And by the time we got to the part where Weasel (Bruce Barton) suggests that Natty (Mike Durell) create a tattoo for him featuring Jesus "cradling an airplane against his lactating breasts" our minds were all well and truly blown.

We've done four of these Play of the Month selections now, and so far three of the winning entries have come from people with impressive resumes. Adrienne Dawes is one of the ones with an impressive resume.

The script actually calls for the characters to be in their 20s-30s but Bruce and Mike brought such enthusiasm and brio to the roles during the reading of the semi-finalists that I had to keep them. Bruce was channeling Tom Waits.

In search of Mozart and Beethoven

I saw a pair of entertaining documentaries recently, In Search of Mozart and In Search of Beethoven both by Phil Grabsky who did all the writing and directing. They appear to have nothing to do with the British historian Michael Wood's In Search of Shakespeare in spite of the similar titles. In Search of Shakespeare appears to be available, in its entirety, online.

Both films combine biographical information with clips of musical performances and interviews with historians and musicians. The Beethoven film was perhaps a bit more interesting than the Mozart, I think in part because the impact of the film Amadeus makes the life of Mozart a bit better known than the life of Beethoven. Although I had seen the film Immortal Beloved which covers the basic facts of Beethoven's life. But "In Search of Beethoven" suggests the identity of the Immortal Beloved is Antonie Brentano, rather than Beethoven's sister-in-law.

The Beethoven film doesn't mention the movie "Immortal Beloved" but the Mozart film does make a reference to Amadeus (as "the Foreman film") when somebody complains about its inaccuracies. I think they'd have to mention it, since so many people get their concept of Mozart's life and character from that movie.

One thing the movie got right was Mozart's love of scatology. This facet of Mozart's character was little-known right up until, probably, Peter Schaffer's play AMADEUS, which was the basis for the movie. If anything though, the movie under-plays how dirty Mozart could talk. There is an entire Wikipedia entry devoted to Mozart and scatology. Not only did he write dirty things to his family and friends, he wrote scatological music. And Mozart's family liked to talk scat too - the movie "In Search of Mozart" quotes Mozart's mother, in a letter to Leopold Mozart, concluding with the phrase: "shit into your bed and make it burst," a phrase that Mozart uses in his letters as well.

The take on the scatology from "In Search of Mozart" is that people just spoke like that in those days, and I think this may well be, especially since in that time they did not have the luxury of flush toilets or toilet paper and had to cart their excrement off-premises themselves, and so something they had to think about more than we do today. Interesting essay on the history of toiletry here.

The Wiki article has another suggestion - that this is just the way Germans talk - right up to this day.

The same article has a funny footnote about some people's inability to accept this aspect of Mozart's character:

Margaret Thatcher, who as Prime Minister of Britain was appraised of Mozart's scatology when she made a rare visit to the theater to see Peter Schaffer's famous play Amadeus. Director Peter Hall relates: "She was not pleased. In her best headmistress style, she gave me a severe wigging for putting on a play that depicted Mozart as a scatological imp with a love of four-letter words. It was inconceivable, she said, that a man who wrote such exquisite and elegant music could be so foul mouthed". I said that Mozart's letters proved he was just that: he had an extraordinarily infantile sense of humour ... "I don’t think you heard what I said," replied the Prime Minister. "He couldn't have been like that." I offered (and sent) a copy of Mozart’s letters to Number Ten the next day; I was even thanked by the appropriate Private Secretary. But it was useless: the Prime Minster said I was wrong, so wrong I was." Source: Hall's preface to Amadeus (Schaffer 1981).

One of the best parts of the Beethoven bio movie is the section on what they call "An Epic Concert" - Beethoven arranged an all-Beethoven concert in 1808, during which he premiered his 5th Symphony. Here is the program:

The Sixth Symphony
Aria: "Ah, perfido", Op. 65
The Gloria movement of the Mass in C major
The Fourth Piano Concerto (played by Beethoven himself)
(Intermission)
The Fifth Symphony
The Sanctus and Benedictus movements of the C major Mass
A solo piano improvisation played by Beethoven
The Choral Fantasy

The word is that the audience was too cold and tired to fully appreciate what they were hearing. But clearly it was once of the greatest concerts ever performed.