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!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Democracy on the Lurch - Wall Street Pepper Spray Incident
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

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.

Hot Man in Regency Period Clothing of the Week - forgotten hottie edition

I heard a harp piece by Elias Parish-Alvars on a classic radio station today. The harp was his thing. I couldn't believe I'd never heard of him. I really liked the music.

So I looked him up and not only is he a respected, if little-known harpist he was also a hottie - of course the Regency era get-up always helps any man, as you can see by this very nice pencil sketch:



You can see a larger version here. Well worth it to see the pencil lines in detail.

Several of his pieces are available on Youtube. Here's one:



Poor guy died of pneumonia when he was only 41.

Rosh Hashanah

Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year - and it started at sundown yesterday. It seems strange to start a new year in the early days of Autumn, rather than the dead of winter, but plenty of other cultures have done it. The Celtic new year is Halloween, the middle of Autumn.

My ex-husband is Jewish although not observant by any stretch. But his parents were Conservative Jews, which means, as far as I can tell, they attend Synagogue regularly and have separate dishes for milk-based and meat-based meals and celebrate all the Jewish holidays. My ex and I used to attend the big holiday meals, for Rosh Hashanah and Passover, and wow did I love the food. My mother is an awful cook (and my daughter assures me I have inherited this trait) and our family never went out to restaurants so I was very deprived, food-wise, growing up. I never had cheese that was not pasturized-processed pre-sliced American Cheese until I was 15. That's also how old I was the first time I had a bagel. So traditional Jewish food was new and exciting to me, and my first experience with a bona fide ethnic cuisine.

Although one of my favorite Jewish dishes, kugel, at least classic kugel, is basically glorified mac-and-cheese, as this Alton Brown recipe demonstrates, but there are many variations, including with raisins and with broccoli. Mmm yummy.

make that absinthe please

I was taken to Beekman Bar and Books last night by a very congenial, continental and erudite gentleman - he's even read Russell's Principia Mathematica - how many people can make that claim? - and I lost my absinthe virginity, finally.

So what is absinthe like? It's very... anise-y. Like Italian Christmas cookies. I liked it, even though I'm not fond of anise as a flavor. My date had Scotch, and he insisted I try a sip. I did not tell him what I really thought of the taste - that it reminded me of paint thinner. No, I just do not get Scotch. I bought my ex-boyfriend a 30-year-old bottle of Glen Morangie scotch for Christmas seven years ago, and that reminded me of turpentine.

Give me a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc instead, any day.

I don't remember why I became so fascinated by absinthe, now, but I put a reference to absinthe in my adaptation of "Jane Eyre" although it's mentioned nowhere in the original. That's very unusual for me - I rarely take liberties with my classic literature adaptations unless absolutely necessary. Perhaps I was inspired by Rochester's often referring to Jane as a fairy, and absinthe is known as "le fee vert" - the green fairy.

Beekman Bar and Books is right near the United Nations, so I got to have a walk down memory lane... or Dag Hammarskjold Plaza to be precise. I haven't been there since my ex-husband and I hitch-hiked to New York so we could participate in a No-Nukes rally in Central Park. After that we joined up with a hard-core No-Nukes faction to do a sit-in at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza and we all got arrested for civil disobedience. Good times.

I'm not sure why DHP was selected as a good location for a sit-in. It isn't even within viewing distance of the UN, although the neighborhood is full of various national consulates and the like. When they arrested us they put us all on buses parked by DHP and made us wait a couple of hours while they processed us.

I was pregnant at the time and after we were released on our on recognizances I desperately had to use the bathroom but was turned away by the nearby bar - nothing as fancy as Beekman B&B, but the proprietor was apparently too genteel to permit a the scruffy likes of us to use the facilities - so genteel that she claimed they didn't have a bathroom and when we enquired what she and her patrons did when nature called replied "we drink our piss!" Welcome to New York.

Dag Hammarskjold Plaza sure looks different when it isn't full of hippies though...

I really do think there's something wrong with David Mamet

And not just because he's now a right-winger. Not even because he's so far right that he is an admirer of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. No, I think he has Alzheimer's and I predict that within the next five years it will be announced that he has it.

I've said that before, but I'm even more convinced now, since I discovered that his arguments against - and raw hatred of the Left - are so poor, so extreme that he is even embarrassing conservatives.

A Facebook friend posted a link to a review of Mamet's The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, in the American Conservative magazine. Scott Galupo writes:

Turgid when it’s not imperious, utterly lacking in fresh insight, full of breathtakingly stupid generalizations, The Secret Knowledge is, for a writer of Mamet’s caliber, nothing short of embarrassing. What is this thing?

Like I said - they're embarrassed. And no wonder:

The 63-year-old Mamet thinks he has a lot to say—there are stale-tasting gripes about feminism, affirmative action, abortion, and a jaded riff on the impracticality of liberal-arts education—but really he ends up saying the same thing over and over. In short: Capitalism, free markets, and families are part of the naturally evolved order of things, and liberals can’t do anything except screw up that ecological balance.

Well I called it over a year ago after I saw RACE - I said it was like a play written by a Teabagger. Except it wasn't LIKE a play written by a Teabagger - it IS a play written by a Teabagger. An extreme Teabagger. And I am convinced that he had Michelle Obama's thesis, scurrilously touted by right-wing talk radio as a hate-whitey polemic, in mind when he created the Susan character.

But since David Mamet is a Great Man of the Arts I'm sure he rarely hears criticism from anybody he deals with on a regular basis, and he gets most of his information, by his admission, from talk radio - right-wing talk radio. So as far as David Mamet can tell, he's the greatest thinker ever, people are lining up to kiss his Great Man of the Arts ass. So why shouldn't he just spout whatever comes into his head without any second thought?

And since he very likely has Alzheimer's, what comes into his head is a big jumble:

No, Mamet ventures far out of his comfort zone in this book. With startling self-assurance, he informs us that “polar bears are not, in fact, decreasing but increasing in population; the earth is not, in fact, warming.” And: “Carbon dioxide is not harmful to the atmosphere. There have, in the past, been periods, much colder than today, when the CO2 in the atmosphere was twenty-five times what it is today. Carbon emissions offer no threat whatever to the planet.”

How can Mamet possibly know this with such certainty? How much has this “reformed Liberal” thought about climate science at all? Whatever one’s opinion of global warming, and of the environmental movement more broadly, is it not obvious that Mamet is clutching a new holy book and believing everything in it as a matter of course?

Elsewhere Mamet declares that “Most legislation aimed at eliminating unhappiness and discontent has resulted in misery.”

“Most”? Really? A fair-minded liberal reader could be forgiven for wondering if Mamet would include, say, Social Security and Medicare. Sure, the old-age pension and healthcare programs have serious long-term financing problems that may come to bankrupt us. But have they resulted in “misery”? If so, why are they so darn popular?

And this is coming from a writer for the American Conservative.

Well it's common for old rich men to suddenly decide that it's time for those damn kids to get off their lawn, and I hadn't heard, but I'm not surprised by this bit of information from this same review:

Coming as it did on the heels of playwright Tom Stoppard’s denunciation of the British nanny state and self-identification as a “timid libertarian,”

So Tom Stoppard is an asshole too now. And speaking of Libertarians, those assholes at Reason, while having a few minor reservations, think Mamet's book is swell:

Readers on both sides of Mamet’s current political stance can take issue with his social conservatism. He is, among other things, an unbending proponent of traditional gender arrangements; and yet who even on the left can deny the miseries that have attended the decline of the two-parent family?

The decline of the two-parent family, as has been well-documented, is a function of poverty and of divorce. Mamet is divorced, naturally - right-wing men never have a problem with divorce in practice no matter how much they demonize it, or try to blame feminists for it, in their intellectually bankrupt theories.

This all confirms what I've said about OLEANNA - Mamet's creation "The Group" which controls Carol throughout the second half of the play, is a smearing caricature of feminism. But all the liberal Mamet fan-boys wouldn't hear it - Mamet was merely pointing out the dangers of political correctness. Well I'm sure they still don't want to hear it - and anyway, as long as Mamet is a bona fide Great Man of the Arts he will hang onto that asshole license the rest of his life, and any and all outrages will be forgiven. We've seen how that worked with Roman Polanski. If he can remain a Great Man of the Arts in good standing, with all the attendant perks and privileges, anybody can. And the eternally irritating John Lahr, that worshipper of all manly brutal manly playwrights, shows how it's done in his New Yorker review:

Is Charles guilty? Will Jack’s ingenious defense, revolving around the sequins on the black woman’s dress, work? The plot, such as it is, demonstrates the contention of Mamet’s Times piece, that “just as personal advantage was derived by whites from the defense of slavery and its continuation as Jim Crow and segregation, so too personal advantage, political advantage and indeed expression of deeply held belief may lead nonwhites to defense of positions that . . . will eventually be revealed as untenable.” In reality, Mamet would be hard pressed to defend his weasel words; onstage, where his story turns on racial profiling by blacks, he can make it seem plausible, if not persuasive.

He calmly acknowledges Mamet's outrageous racism in comparing slavery to some unspecified objectionable positions that some black people may hold. And the most he can say about it is that, well, at least Mamet makes it plausible on stage. And we'll never know if Mamet would be "hard-pressed" to defend himself - certainly John Lahr is never going to press him.

But mark my words - what this business with David Mamet is all about isn't so much an intellectual embrace of the principles of Conservatism, it's the sign of a cranky old man who is losing it. One more piece of evidence, a short article about Mamet's wife's music tour, also from the New Yorker:

The rest of Pidgeon’s tour was more mannerly. Its main complication was trying to conduct a life in two places. “I’m calling home a lot, but sometimes I don’t have time,” Pidgeon said. “Or the clock’s not right for West Coast time. My husband refuses to have a cell phone, or an answering machine in his office, and he turns off his phone when he works. So when he does call, he’ll call me all day until he reaches me. And then he says, ‘Where have you been, don’t you love me anymore?’ And of course there’s no way I can get him, so he doesn’t know I’ve called twenty times and let the phone ring and ring. ‘I called you back,’ I say stiffly.

I'd hit the road too if I was his wife. I hope for her sake she has a hot young man on the side, someone who's considerate and who is comfortable with modern technology, unlike old man Mamet.

homophobia hurts everybody

Brief but interesting article in the NYTimes about male friendships which makes it clear that homophobia doesn't only hurt young gay men:

Despite stereotypes of teenage boys as grunting, emotionally tone-deaf creatures who bond over sports talk and risk-taking, she said, their need for intimate friendship is as potent as it is for girls. Boys in early adolescence would speak candidly about those friendships to Dr. Way and her researchers, acknowledging the importance of having a best friend who was both repository and guard for their most private feelings.

But as the boys grew older, the intensity of those relationships faded. Boys feared being seen as “too girly” or even gay for expressing attachments to one another, even just for feeling them.

She leaned forward with evident urgency: “This is not some academic read I’m doing. The boys are aware of the power of their relationships. They are overtly saying, ‘I want him, I need him, I miss him — no homo!’ And then they grow up and become depressed.”

What Edward Einhorn did to my play TAM LIN and why all American authors should be concerned - part 8

The intrepid graduate student Kat Reynolds is working on a thesis that discusses theatre copyright issues and she asked me to discuss the TAM LIN case with her. This prompted me to review the case myself, which I have been doing off and on for a couple of months now.

One item of interest, and concern is this article by Joan Channick at the Theatre Communications Group web site. She argues in favor of a director's copyright and this is especially alarming coming from her since she is very well connected, being both the managing director of the Theatre Communications Group, the Director of the U.S. Center of UNESCO's International Theatre Institute, and an Associate Dean at Yale School of Drama.

I will be responding at length to her article later, but for now this strikes me as a very odd oversight. She says:

Although there is no definitive precedent yet, the couple of courts that have touched on the issue seemed inclined to find that direction is copyrightable... The first was a divorce case involving the royalties for an artistic director's direction of a play in the theatre where he was employed... The second was the well-known case where director Joe Mantello alleged that the Caldwell Theater Company in Florida's production of Terrence McNally's Love! Valour! Compassion! copied his stage direction...

She provides a link to the article in the New York Times that discusses the TAM LIN case Exit, Pursued by a Lawyer so she can't plead ignorance of that case. And in fact, unlike the Mantello case, we did not settle out of court, and most tellingly, the court did not "seem inclined to find that the direction is copyrightable." But just because the TAM LIN case goes counter to her claim doesn't mean it should not be addressed. The fact that our case was actually settled when Judge Kaplan ordered Edward Einhorn to cancel his copyright registration is significant.

Her solution to the issue of the disputes that are caused through the tradition-breaking quest for the director's copyright is contracts. But she's dreaming if she thinks that would be the end of it - what playwright would sign a contract allowing a director to own intellectual property based on their play? A playwright would be an idiot to agree to such a thing; the Dramatists Guild is dead-set against such an agreement; and those pushing for a director's copyright will not be bound, I am sure, by that solution since it would be an end to the director's copyright quest. Except between directors and the aforementioned playwrights who are idiots.

Even though the Mantello case was settled out of court - and Mantello received the equivalent of a director's fee, which sure sounds like it refutes Channick's claim that this is an example of a court looking favorably at a director's copyright - I believe it bears a closer examination. Based on the discussion in the Columbia Journal of Law & The Arts that I quoted from at length back in August, it appears to me that Mantello sued the Caldwell Theatre Company of Boca Raton, Florida on the basis of standard theatre practices - the Caldwell said they simply followed what was described in the published Actors version of the Love! Valour! Compassion! script. But Mantello decided to do a little legal prospecting in the hopes that the court would see copyrightable intellectual property in his work. It appears obvious to me that in spite of Channick's claim, the court did not see that. And of course neither did Judge Kaplin in the case of Edward Einhorn v. Mergatroyd Productions.

The theatre is a world of traditions, and if it ever became common for stage directors to copyright their stage directions - which I don't think will ever happen, but if - I think a new tradition should be born - or rather, rediscovered - directing a play will be an extension of writing a play. I see no reason why that couldn't happen - stage directing is not nearly as impressive a feat as stage directors would like the world to believe - and it would finally put a stake through the heart of the director's copyright issue.

One final observation about Channick's article - she has a very unrealistic view of the Patent Office. She writes:

But unlike the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which scrutinizes and accepts or rejects registration applications, the Copyright Office does nothing more than see that registration forms are filled out correctly and the fee is paid.

Clearly she's not aware of the patent trolling phenomenon, which can only exist exactly because the Patent Office is so careless.

What? WHAT?!?

I've been working my way through the mid-1960s issues of The New Yorker looking for any last new Willie the Whaler ads. I don't have much hope of finding any so I haven't put much time and effort into the task. But it's still interesting whenever I finally do get around to looking, because old New Yorkers are fascinating time capsules.

For the most part the cartoons are pretty easy to get in spite of being almost 50 years old, but the one at the top of this post I just can't figure out. WHY is the man - presumably the husband, pointing at his wife and yelling "Come on, Gloria, for heaven's sake!" I mean, she's sitting there reading and smoking. Didn't people smoke all the time back then? In their homes, in their cars, at work, at the hospital. Is that little mark on the page supposed to be cigarette ash? Is that what he's pointing at? But then what's the joke? She's being sloppy and he's objecting - why would that be the subject of a cartoon?

No, it just doesn't make any sense.

Happy Autumn Equinox!

As of 9:04 AM today Summer 2011 is history. What a relief. Even though today was more like late summer - warm and humid - Autumn weather is a-coming. Here's my celebratory sonnet from last year.

Wiccans celebrate today as Mabon - pronounced "may-bun."

Good work Bill Steyert and friends

As I noted a couple of days ago, I was at the rally in support of the Park51 community center last year and met media star Bill Steyert. It looks like our efforts paid off. As Rachel Maddow says:

Considering how popular it was for alarmists to use Park51 as a bogeyman, it surely must have been utter chaos downtown when it finally opened yesterday, yes?

No: there were no protesters, and the center enjoyed a quiet event last night featuring an exhibition of photographs of children. Sharia!!!

Our work here is done.

Tower Tatts

The "Play of the Month" for NYCPlaywrights recommenced in September. The theme for September was 9/11 and you would have thought that the ten-minute plays sent in for this would be fraught, emotional pieces dealing with all the drama and anguish and shock of that day. But no, of course not. At least half the plays were your standard reminiscence pieces, with people sitting around talking, sometimes ten years later, about what happened on 9/11/2001 and how it effected them.

Out of the 30 submissions, only four were even close to worthwhile: a magical realism piece about flying out of office buildings; a realistic but unfortunately not well-paced piece about gay lovers talking by cell phone while one is trapped in one of the burning towers; a "quartet" of actors conducted as if in a musical piece; and the one we finally picked, TOWER TATTS, which worked best in spite of its odd tone.

The image above is Bruce Barton and Mike Durell, who performed the reading we recorded at the latest NYCPlaywrights meeting. Bruce played a raunchy dude, a some-time construction worker who is currently doing clean-up at the WTC site (the play takes place a year after 9-11) who likes to get bizarre, obscene tattoos painted on his body. Mike is the tattoo artist. The focus is on Bruce's bizarre character - Bruce channeled Tom Waits for the performance - so the play has a raunchy, almost cartoonish tone, but with a serious undertone, especially given what we know about how working clean-up at Ground Zero impacted the workers.

So the tone is very different from all the other plays we received, and that turned out to be a good thing. And at least we didn't get a single play in which one of the characters was killed during 9-11 and their loved one can't accept it so thinks they're still alive and we don't find out they've been talking to a dead person until the end.

I will post an embed for the video after I've finished the final edit.

but with a name like that...

I had a glass of Infamous Goose Sauvignon Blanc last night. But not while I was blogging about how the Man is keeping me down. When you are blogging about how the Man is keeping you down, you have to be sharp, alert and you need both hands to type.

Also, I sipped the wine, I did not guzzle it.

I actually bought the wine for the next NYCPlaywrights meeting because many actors, it turns out, like to drink. But I thought it wouldn't hurt to taste-test it.

I must agree with Gary and Allison:

This is a very drinkable, with characteristic citrus fruit (a bit heavy on the grapefruit notes) with fresh herb and grass with a finish of mineral and acidity. And it is $8.99 a bottle.

However, so are a lot of other New Zealand sauvignon blancs. There really is nothing to make this stand out from the crowd.

It really is good, it just is not memorable.

I especially agree about the heavy on the grapefruit. But I didn't read the review before I bought this - I confess I got it for the label alone. How could you not buy wine named "The Infamous Goose"?

how Bill Steyert is spending his retirement

Regular readers of this blog may recall I met Bill Steyert at last year's rally in support of the Muslim community center planned for a couple of blocks away from the World Trade Center site. I saw him mentioned in the NYTimes again, and there he is yet again in Saturday's NYTimes, protesting Wall Street.

Bill Steyert, 68, who lives in Forest Hills, Queens, stood near the barricades at Wall Street and Broadway and shouted, “Shut down Wall Street, 12 noon, you’re all invited,” as tourists gazed quizzically at him.
Talking to a reporter, he elaborated, “You need a scorecard to keep track of all the things that corporations have done that are bad for this country.”

Dude gets around. I shouldn't be surprised his name keeps showing up, as I observed in my video of the rally last year, the press loves ole Bill Steyert.

Krugman is tired...

I found out about this image from Krugman's own blog.

Several people have noted the resemblance of Krugman to George Clooney - at least when Clooney is bearded, but Krugman is a tubby, nerdy version of George Clooney.

With a Nobel Prize in economics.

better neighborhoods and gardens

The neighborhoods around Astoria Park have quite a collection of well-maintained gardens. Some are quite striking and even beautiful.

Some lovely purple foxglove:



I couldn't help noticing that the pineapple post-topper is very popular these days:



And lions are perennial favorites for domestic statuary - they are so ubiquitous I'm not even going to bother posting any pix. Instead I'll post the unusual pug dog toppers pixture:



And the nesting bird toppers, which were pretty, but they had about ten of them lined up in a row and I thought it was too much - these statues are a little too busy for too much repetition:



I thought this small front-yard design was pretty striking but it had one too many statues - the Saint Francis in the back doesn't work, IMHO.



And these people went completely overboard with the statuary:

very charming video

Via the Mighty Krug-man



The Sesame Street version

make that Sauvignon Blanc please

I was defamed recently via Twitter. Which makes it sound like a joke, not an actual legal issue. What happened was I got into a short but nasty exchange of Twitter posts with a couple of actors I had blogged about. A third actor, someone I hadn't spoken to in two years, after he ripped off my theatre group mailing list to get his own theatre group started, decided to chime in by making a malicious statement about me. Since he has virtually nothing to gain by libeling me, I expect that his primary objective was to curry favor with the other actors, who are young enough to be his sons. I guess there's no male-bonding quite as effective as ganging up to attack a woman who has gotten out of line - it even spans generations. But while the other two actors said some truly nasty things about me, what they said was opinion. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions. Everyone is not entitled to their own facts. What the third actor said was that I "guzzle Chardonnay" while working on this blog. And since I post to this blog pretty much on a daily basis, as evident by the dates on the blog posts, he was in effect claiming I'm an alcoholic.
In fact I'm a very moderate drinker, so not only was his statement malicious, it was false. Which is the definition of libel. In this case he committed what is known as "libel per se" which is defined by the Legal Dictionary as:

n. broadcast or written publication of a false statement about another which accuses him/her of a crime, immoral acts, inability to perform his/her profession, having a loathsome disease (like syphilis) or dishonesty in business. Such claims are considered so obviously harmful that malice need not be proved to obtain a judgment for "general damages," and not just specific losses.

Claiming that someone is an alcoholic is covered under this definition. I recounted this incident to my friend Bruce, another actor, whom I've known for twelve years, and he said it was ridiculous to make such a claim - he'd never even seen me drunk. Which makes sense - I haven't been seriously inebriated since high school. And I sometimes go weeks without drinking alcohol. Now it should be noted that I've never seen this libelous actor turn down a drink - certainly not at the legendary Penny Templeton Christmas party of 2008 - but I would never in a million years claim that he guzzled alcohol while performing a daily task. It would be unethical to do so. But if you're going to rip someone off why stop there? Why not then go on to insinuate the person is also an alcoholic? Certainly if you pal around with people who have no shame, no principles and no personal integrity, you're not going to pay any kind of social price for such behavior.
Twitter really does bring out the worst in many people. Banal people for example - their tweets are mind-bogglingly banal. Bitchy people, well... I was already becoming fed up with this libelous actor before he ripped me off, after following him on Twitter and realizing that a goodly number of his tweets were bitchy observations about the fashion choices of strangers on the street. I already suspected that this person was petty and shallow but his tweets only made it painfully obvious. So we would probably have had a parting of the ways sooner or later. But I can do without being ripped-off and libeled.
And in any case, not only is he wrong about my drinking frequency, I rarely drink Chardonnay - I much prefer Sauvignon Blanc.

Hedgehog's dilemma

Oh Arthur Schopenhauer, you are always such a laff-riot!

The completed version of JULIA & BUDDY includes this exchange:

JULIA

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

SCHOPENHAUER

Existential displacement is the price of being a philosopher. So too,
loneliness is the price of being a philosopher.

JULIA

No, please. Don’t say that.

SCHOPENHAUER

Let me tell you a little story. One cold winter’s day a group of porcupines huddled together for warmth. But they had prickly quills, as porcupines do, and the closer they huddled together, the more they pricked each other. So they move away from one another - but then they grew cold again. And so they came closer, but they pricked each other again. And so it went, back and forth. At last they decided to stay together, but keep a safe distance. That is human society. Only the man who has some heat within himself can remain outside, where he will not prick others and where he will not be pricked.

I took liberties with the original - or rather with an English translation of the original, which I guess you can argue was already taking some necessary liberties.

The original English translation is available on Youtube. The reader is a bit more subdued than I expect the actor doing these lines will be. The parable of the porcupines starts near the end at minute 10:04.



Wow, I've just discovered the life this analogy has gone onto lead, thanks to Freud - it's known as the Hedgehog's dilemma and has its own Wikipedia entry. How is it I've never heard of this before?

what the Tea Party is really all about

The shameless evil of the Tea Party.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
CNN-Tea Party Republican Debate
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

But whaaaaah! I missed this episode which had both Al Gore and KRGTHULU! I mean, Tom Brokaw is fine, but I coulda seen the mighty Krugman in person again. I haven't seen him in person since September 2009.

Amen!

Wow, can I relate to this article at the LA Female Playwrights Initiative. Written by Cindy Marie Jenkins
Pet peeves of a literary manager - excerpt:

Submissions that don’t follow stated guidelines: Read the guidelines for submissions and follow them. One of the theatre companies that I work with periodically produces a 10-minute comedy play series. When we put out a request for submissions for this 10-minute comedy play series, the avalanche of stuff that we get that is neither 10-minute nor comedy is extremely exasperating. I’ve actually seen submissions of 50 page scripts. No matter who you are, guidelines apply to you, they apply to me, they apply to anybody submitting material for anything for which guidelines are out there.

Not including a cast list, unless it’s a one-person show: I see this all the time, and I cannot understand why playwrights would not include a cast list with their scripts. As a Literary Manager, I want to focus on the story, and not have to waste time trying to figure who all these random characters are who keep on wandering in and out of the scenes.

Unnecessary/gratuitous nudity: I’m not a prude. I have no problem with nudity. (Some of my best friends have been naked.) If there’s a reason for people to be naked in your play, that’s cool. HOWEVER, if the naked person doesn’t have anything to do with the story, don’t do it. IF it is necessary to the story, and there’s a way to stage it legally, that’s one thing. Gratuitous is entirely another, and we’re not interested.

An overabundance of stage directions: If pressed, I’d say that this is my #1 most frustrating thing. Having line after line after line after line of stage directions interrupts the flow and rhythm that I’m trying to discern from a playwright’s writing. Trying to get into a playwright’s story, trying to find out if the playwright is creating characters with individual voices, trying to see if there is something about the writing that would be compelling on a stage all get ground to a halt when I have to constantly stop reading the dialogue and read stage directions. I think that for some people, getting the action as they see it in their mind onto the paper or the computer screen is important because those writers need to have it written out in order for them to keep what’s going on organized. I understand that, and that’s fine. For writers who need that, I would strongly suggest removing those stage directions before sending their scripts out. Having massive amounts of stage directions in one’s script does nothing to help me decipher the quality of the story that the playwright is trying to tell. If no other information gets out from this blog post, I hope this does: have as few stage directions as is possible.