Oliver Sacks WAS the 1960s

I've always found Oliver Sack's books to be a mind-expanding experience thanks to the stories he tells about people like the man who mistook his wife for a hat, and the man who kept throwing himself out of bed because he didn't recognize his own leg, and the man who couldn't remember anything for longer than fifteen minutes, among many other case histories. All these neurological problems create a reality very different from the quotidian.

But that's nothing compared to what Sacks was up to in the sixties:

"I started with cannabis. A friend in Topanga Canyon, where I lived at the time, offered me a joint; I took two puffs and was transfixed by what happened then. I gazed at my hand, and it seemed to fill my visual field, getting larger and larger while at the same time moving away from me. Finally, it seemed to me, I could see a hand stretched across the universe, light-years or parsecs in length. It still looked like a living, human hand, yet this cosmic hand somehow also seemed like the hand of God.

All this on two puffs??? Where can you get some of that Topanga Wowee?

But Sacks was just getting started...

...one Sunday morning I counted out twenty pills (of Artane, a belladonna-like drug) ... there were no psychic effects... I heard a knocking at my door. It was my friends Jim and Kathy, they often dropped round on a Sunday morning. "Come in, door's open," I called out, and as they settled themselves in the living room I asked, "How do you like your eggs?" Jim liked them suny side up, he said. Kathy preferred them over easy. We chatted away while I sizzled their ham and eggs - there were low swinging doors between the kitchen and the living room, so we could hear each other easily. Then, five minutes later, I shouted "Everything's ready," put their ham and eggs on a tray, walked into the living room - and found it empty. No Jim, no Kathy, no sign that they had ever been there. I was so staggered I almost dropped the tray.

It had not occurred to me for an instant that Jim and Kathy's voices, their "presences," were unreal, hallucinatory. We had had a friendly, ordinary conversation, just as we usually had. Their voices were the same as always - there was no hint, until I opened the swinging doors and found the living room empty, that the whole conversation, as least their side of it, had been invented by my brain.

He has other hallucinations too that morning, and this might be the funniest part of the article:

"As I drew nearer to look at it, the spider called out "Hello!" ... I said "Hello yourself" and with this we started a conversation, mostly on rather technical matters of analytic philosophy. Perhaps this direction was suggested by the spider's opening comment: did I think Bertrand Russell had exploded Frege's paradox? Or perhaps it was its voice - pointed, incisive, and just like Russell's voice, which I had heard on the radio. (Decades later, I mentioned the spider's Russellian tendencies to my friend Tom Eisner, an entomologist; he nodded sagely and said: "Yes, I know the species.")

If you think these incidents scared Sacks straight, you would be wrong...

"I had been taught, as a child, that there were seven colors in the spectrum, including indigo... But few people agree on what "indigo" is. 

I had long wanted to see "true" indigo and thought that drugs might be the way to do this. So one sunny Saturday in 1964 I developed a pharmacologic launchpad consisting of a base of amphetamine (for general arousal), LSD (for hallucinogenic intensity), and a touch of cannabis (for a little added delirium). About twenty minutes after taking this, I faced a white wall and exclaimed "I want to see indigo now - now!"

And then, as if thrown by a giant paintbrush, there appeared a huge, trembling, pear-shaped blob of the purest indigo. Luminous, numinous, it filled me with rapture; it was the color of heaven, the color, I thought, that Giotto spent a lifetime trying to get but never achieved... I leaned toward it in a sort of ecstasy. And then it suddenly disappeared, leaving me with an overwhelming sense of loss and sadness that it had been snatched away. But I consoled myself: yes, indigo exists, and it can be conjured up in the brain."

So next, while on vacation, he shoots himself up with morphine.

"Within a minute or so, my attention was drawn to a sort of commotion on the sleeve of my dressing gown, which hung on the door. I gazed intently at this, and as I did so it resolved itself into a miniature but microscopically detailed battle scene... I saw hundreds, thousands of men - two armies, two nations - preparing to do battle...  I lost all sense of this being a spot on the sleeve of my dressing gown, or the fact that I was lying in bed, that I was in London, that it was 1965... after awhile the scene started to fade... it had been dusk when I took the morphine, it should be darker still. It was ten, I now realized, but ten in the morning. I had been gazing, motionless, at my Agincourt for more than twelve hours."

He goes on to recount other wacked-out drug experiences but really, how can you top staring at your own sleeve for twelve hours?

But finally he goes on to credit amphetamines for kicking off his career as a writer of neurological phenomena.

I was curious to see that Sacks has had his share of critics for his recounting of case histories, according to Wikipedia:

Although many characterize Sacks as a "compassionate" writer and doctor, others feel that he exploits his subjects. Sacks was called "the man who mistook his patients for a literary career" by British academic and disability-rights activist Tom Shakespeare, and one critic called his work "a high-brow freak show"

But the biggest critic of Oliver Sacks is my daughter. When she was doing a work-study program while at Rutgers in the late 1990s, Sacks came to speak at the college and my daughter had to be his go-fer. She reports that he was incredibly fussy - for instance, a room had to be cooled to just the right temperature or he could not inhabit it. I pretty much can't talk to my daughter about Oliver Sacks and his work due to her grumbling all during the conversation.

Which is a shame because who wouldn't be amused by this New Yorker essay from trip-master Sacks?

Mighty Krug-man shares a video

I got this video from Krugman's blog - it features himself and his wife Robin Wells talking about the ongoing fiscal crisis.

I work near Zucotti Park and although there are no Occupy protestors there, they've moved south and are camped out in front of churches. I will have to get pix soon.

I believe in Mother Eve

My friend Val took me to see MOTHER EVE'S SECRET GARDEN OF SENSUAL SISTERHOOD on Sunday, and I went mainly because it's been awhile since I saw Val and wanted to catch up with her. I did not have my hopes up - after all, this was a Fringe Festival show, and I had never seen a Fringe Festival show that I didn't loathe.

Well I was pleasantly surprised. This show was actually good. I have some problems with the book, but over all a fun, funny musical. Not only did I not hate it, I actually LOL'd in several places.

Granted I was the only one in the audience who laughed when they have one of the characters quote a line from cult-crap movie The Room - "Lisa, you're tearing me apart!" but still, there were plenty of other communal laughs.

Apparently they did the Midtown International Theatre Festival last year - and also, lo and behold, a web series even before that. Presumably it's gotten better each time.

But they need to fix the book, and I know how - (SPOILER)

- they need to put the reporter's come to Jesus moment (come to Mother Eve moment) after the Mother Eve expose scene. That way we don't already know that the reporter knows she's wrong, and then after the come to Jesus scene we can go right to the scene where the reporter saves Mother Eve - and they can drop the well-written but superfluous number, a space-filler in a meta-NAME OF SHOW-esque mode. Or rather we can go right to the scene after the reporter has a big show-stopping number called either "The Sensual Power of the Irrational" or "I Believe in Mother Eve."

Now the reason they don't do it in that order is because the reporter uses the Mother Eve aphorisms to help her boss figure out how to deal with his wife and then because the boss is happy, that gives her the go-ahead to publish the expose on Mother Eve. But it's not worth it - the important part of that scene is the reporter's Mother Eve training kicking in and to her amazement, it's effective - and that only works right after the reporter has done the damage and thinks she's triumphed over Mother Eve. It's much more dramatic that way. They don't need the issue of getting her story published as a plot point. Really the scenes with the reporter and her boss need to be fleshed out more anyway - they're pretty throw-away right now.

And they need to integrate the reporter character into the earlier scenes better. She's so obviously not a part of the Mother Eve group - she's a very bad under-cover reporter. She doesn't even sing until the end of the show, which is just wrong for a musical - she can sing unwillingly and without enthusiasm during the Mother Eve scenes, but she should at least sing - then her big show-stopping come to Jesus moment will feel right.

Not that anybody's going to listen to me.

Anyway, it is a good time as-is and many of the lyrics are quite witty and most of the tunes are very good as well. If you only go to one Fringe show, see this one.

Cute chunky play

I liked this Play of the Week selection for many reasons: Eric Percival's amazing take on "Pete from New Jersey", Larissa Adamczyk's comedic skills - in several places in this video she reminds me of David Hyde Pierce - high praise indeed - and the play itself.

The play is pretty well-written - not perfect but definitely better than most of the submitted entries.

But also it deals with a subject that is both hugely common and hardly ever addressed - women being accosted by men. Sometimes known as the "street hassle."

Young women especially have to put up with this kind of thing, and virtually no woman gets to the age of thirty without being on the receiving end of some weird or creepy come-on from some random stranger.

And it doesn't stop even when you're over 40 - I mentioned on this blog, a few months ago, being accosted by a guy - and I haven't yet mentioned another incident, which happened a month or so after the "Midnight Cowboy on Steinway" incident: as I was walking home from the subway wearing my business lady suit, some youngish guy comes up to me and tells me he's from Brazil and invites me to accompany him back to his place. At first I didn't understand what he was saying -  he did have an accent and an unfirm grasp of English. At first I thought he was trying to get a donation for a charity, since I am over the age when a woman is routinely accosted on the street. (I originally thought that men were just more polite in the NYC metropolitan area, when I first moved up here when I was in my late 30s - finally I realized I had just aged out of the constant harrassment zone .) Anyway, back to the boy from Ipamena - eventually he got his meaning across to me, and I'm like - wha? Of course I told him, politely, to go away.

The reason why the street hassle is rarely the subject of plays or TV shows or movies, even though it's practically a rite of passage for women is obvious - because men still completely dominate the media. Since men don't have to put up with this nearly as much as women, it's considered a non-issue and why would anybody care? Except women of course, who do things like create web sites devoted to trying to stop the street hassle, like Holla Back.

I should mention that the author of this piece says it's based on a true incident. Of course I was not surprised.

Terry Gross and Jon Stewart - amazing

How is it I missed this when I was a subway ride away from the 92 St. Y - and still get their mailings?

I used to listen to Fresh Air on a daily basis - now not so much - but I do watch the Daily Show all the time.

Best moment in this clip above - Terry Gross: "I thought you hated me!"

Apparently Terry Gross interviewed Jon Stewart over ten years ago and thought she "blew it" while Jon Stewart thought it was a good interview!

I tracked down the interview on the Fresh Air archives here. From May 31, 2000 it's about twenty minutes long.

Actually I think there's a bit of flirting going on in this interview. At about 8 minutes in, Stewart says to Gross "you don't find me amusing in the least."

Now actually, Gross laughed several times up to that point, so there's no reason to say that in earnest, unless, as Stewart says "I'm a needy son of a bitch." He also claims to be "naked on an air mattress in Hoboken."

Gross reassures him that she does find him funny.

What I think is that Terry Gross, who is not a lesbian as some people apparently believe, has a huge crush on Jon Stewart. You can see how nervous she is in the 92 St. Y interview.

And who can blame her?

You can get an idea of how tiny Terry Gross is at the end of the clip above, when they stand up - Jon Stewart is famously short, and Gross comes up to his navel.

She also interviewed Paul Krugman!

And I finally realized that the Fresh Air archives is a priceless treasure trove.
She also interviewed Caitlin Moran!

Another Ingres widget online

Back in February I blogged about the Ingres widget available on the Morgan Library web site - well lo and behold, the Metropolitan Museum of art has one too. And they have a much bigger Ingres collection. Check out this close up of Ingres' portrait of Jean-Joseph Fournier.

 This is just about the actual size of the original.

But you'll want to see the whole thing to enjoy this guy's Regency/Empire period clothing. Oh lah lah!

I must get back to the Met very soon. 

my girly side

There are some who would have you believe that I don't care about girly things like fashion - my daughter, for example and her friends went so far as to describe me as "butch" - and they are lesbians.

But actually I do like fashion, I just don't care about it as much as, say, the women on Sex and the City.

And I really like men's Regency period clothing - which I don't know if that counts as "fashion" being more of an historical and somewhat (ahem) fetishy predilection.

Mainly though there are two factors that have prevented me from being fashionable most of my life. One is the lack of disposable income. I've had a few brief time periods when I've had money but most of my life has been spent in debt and that includes now - I still have to pay the parental student loan I took out for my daughter's college education, plus the lamentable long-term results of irrational exuberance I suffered during my JANE EYRE production five years ago(!)


And then there's the fact that I am very particular about what I think looks good, and fashion designers and I for the most part disagree on this issue. For example, I think that wearing high heels is utterly pointless unless they will help you get laid.  I was just silently critiquing some woman's shoes on the subway this morning - they were peep-toe snake-skin high heels and I don't know if they were just too small or they were supposed to look that way but they were hideous - and not just for the snakeskin but because her ugly big toe sticking out of the front and the toe cleavage where her foot was jammed into the shoe, and the way the veins popped out of the top of her foot. I'm gagging now just thinking about it. Although she was with what I assume was her boyfriend and they were pretty lovey-dovey, so maybe they do help her get laid, but still, it's kind of a steep price to pay, in my opinion.

And I absolutely hate that one-shoulder asymmetrical look that is currently the rage. And I have been actually nauseated by some of the hideous patterns and colors that are used for women's dresses. And don't even get me started on those big ballony white sneakers that tourists, especially, love to wear. They should be outlawed.

But when I see something finally that I like - take these shoes that Joni Mitchell was wearing at the Newport Folk Festival in 1967 - I have been hankering for a pair of these shoes for literally years. I just can't seem to find them. You can't see in this photo (I can't find the original photo that inspired the craving so I had to use this one where she's hugging Leonard Cohen) but they are sling-backs with maybe inch-high heels. Ideally I will find a pair in black but as I said, fashion designers and I have very different ideas of what looks good and I can never find them in any color. But at least this is proof that I'm not entirely butch. Just "butch like Diane Keaton" as the lesbian fashion terrorist brigade proclaimed.

monologue project - one year in the making

I did a search on the NYCPlaywrights web site to see if perhaps we posted the Project Y monologue project call for submissions, and sure enough, we did. But it was over a year ago - their time-line for asking for scripts and then selecting and recording the five winners was an entire year.

Considering what kind of money they must have for their projects, it's really amazing how very little difference there is in the quality of the video recording, directing, etc. between their pieces and the NYCPlaywrights pieces. I expect this is partly due to the nature of Internet video - the dimensions of the image and the necessary reduction in image quality in order to speed up streaming causes the final product to lose a good deal of high-quality production values.

And of course NYCPlaywrights doesn't just do monologues - two of the 10-minute plays of the month are virtual short movies - BEAUTIFUL BOY and OCCUPY DISNEY. BEAUTIFUL BOY didn't come out as well as it could because I seriously underestimated how noisy the subway is - I guess I've learned to block it out during my commute. I should have had each actor over-dub the entire movie to fix the lousy sound. Oh well, live and learn. I think OCCUPY DISNEY, while still not exactly perfect, is a definite improvement on sound quality. It helps that we were in Union Square instead of on the N train.

And one more thing - and this is my own theory of Internet video, but I think that online video works best when you have close-ups of human faces. Most of the shots of the Project Y video are mid-ranges shots, where as I generally get right up in the actors' faces, as in my sonnet video.

Ray Magliozzi has a beautiful soul

Like Fred Rogers, Ray Magliozzi has a beautiful soul. But the beauty of Ray's soul is not nearly as obvious as Fred's. On the other hand he's more approachable - in many ways he's a regular guy.

I had already concluded in the past year that Ray Maggliozzi has a beautiful soul, but it was confirmed for me while listening to a podcast of Car Talk tonight.

Ray Magliozzi is Click and/or Clack, one of the Tappet Brothers - the nom de radio adopted by him and his brother Tommy for their show Car Talk.

His brother Tom, 12 years his senior, seems like a decent enough guy, and he might even be the more innovative and philosophical of the two. But Ray is the one who laughs the most, who gives the best advice about cars (especially in the last few years, since Tom has been increasingly showing signs of his age, to put it charitably) who has been married to the same woman for almost forty years. Or as he described it, in contrast to his brother who has been married at least three times, "one and done."

In one podcast Ray mentioned that he met his wife Monique (from Queens!) during a Peace Corps event. That was one sign of his character. And then tonight his brother mentioned that Ray and Monique lived in Vermont for a time because they were admirers of Scott and Helen Nearing. I had heard of the Nearings thanks to being part of the anti-nuclear power movement back when. As Wikipedia tells it:

In the 1930s and 1940s, Nearing and his eventual second wife, Helen Knothe, lived in Winhall in rural Vermont, where they had purchased a rather large forest tract for $2200 and a moderate sized farm for $2500. Nearing and Helen Knothe, who married in 1947, lived a largely ascetic and self-reliant life, growing much of their own food and putting up nine stone buildings over the course of two decades there. Cash was earned from producing maple syrup and maple sugar from the trees on their land and from Scott Nearing's occasional paid lectures.
Feeling a sense of dignity in the common man, and wanting to serve, Nearing wrote and self-published many pamphlets on topics such as low income, peace throughout the world, feminism, and different environmental causes.

I'd venture to say the Nearings are not the heroes of most auto mechanics.

Ray also mentioned that he's always loved working with cars. I will certainly concede that Ray Magliozzi has benefited from moral luck - being born at the right place, at the right time, with the right personality and inclinations, not to mention a stable family life and the progressive outlook of Cambridge Massachusetts. But that doesn't make his soul any less beautiful.

I am sure going to miss hearing him and his brother dispense useful practical information with abiding good humor on a regular basis once Car Talk signs off this autumn. Car Talk is a lot more than just an automotive advice program - I would go so far as to suggest that like Mister Roger's Neighborhood, it is an example of human beings at their best.

If there was ever an inter-galactic conference where every planet was allowed to send just one representative of all the planet's inhabitants, the Earth could not do any better than to send Ray Magliozzi as our representative.

No I was not exaggerating

 

Here it is again, the art card I blogged about back in June. I was not exaggerating when I said I had to look at this thing every damn day. This mind-fuck, which, at first glance is charming cartoon whimsy and at second, third, infinity glance is a grotesque melange of freakish body entanglements and dead fish.

I mean, I did not choose to stand here, facing this thing for 30 minutes on the way to work - I was standing here because there were no seats and no other place to stand. And I didn't even realize I was standing in front of it, until I looked up from my iPhone and there it was! Again!

When will it end?

everybody loves those Shakespeare sonnets

A Shakespeare sonnet got a shout-out in today's NYTimes:

Couplets that end Shakespeare’s sonnets often give lie to the old saw that they are throwaway rhyming lines written solely to satisfy the requirements of the form. The couplet that concludes Sonnet LXXIII is a case in point and sums up my feelings, both ecstatic and sad about the “handiwork of time”: This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,/To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

Here is the entire Sonnet 73...

That time of year thou mayst in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day,
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
   This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
   To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

It's a nice coincidence that a Shakespeare sonnet gets a shout-out in the NYTimes when I've just completed my video shout-out. Although I discuss Sonnet 147, which goes like this:

My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
Th’uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I, desperate, now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are,
At random from the truth vainly expressed:
   For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
   Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

Emma Brown

With all the reading up about the life and work of Charlotte Bronte that I did in preparation for writing an adaptation of Jane Eyre, how is it that I don't remember reading about Emma Brown?

I must have read about it, but it completely did not register in my brain that Bronte was working on a novel called Emma when she died, and she wrote two chapters. And it seems that a writer, Clare Boylan who died in 2006 finished the novel for Bronte and called it Emma Brown. I guess I'll get around to reading that, eventually.

In the meantime, here is Bronte's two chapters of Emma:

EMMA.
        

CHAPTER I.

We all seek an ideal in life. A pleasant fancy began to visit me in a certain year, that perhaps the number of human beings is few who do not find their quest at some era of life for some space more or less brief. I had certainly not found mine in youth, though the strong belief I held of its existence sufficed through all of my brightest and freshest time to keep me hopeful. I had not found it in maturity. I was become resigned never to find it. I had lived certain dim years entirely tranquil and unexpectant. And now I was not sure but something was hovering round my hearth which pleased me wonderfully.
    Look at it, reader. Come into my parlor and judge for yourself whether I do right to care for this thing. First, you may scan me, if you please. We shall go on better together after a satisfactory introduction and due apprehension of identity. My name is Mrs. Chalfont. I am a widow. My house is good, and my income such as need not check the impulse either of charity or a moderate hospitality. I am not young her yet old. There is no silver yet in my hair, but its yellow lustre is gone. In my face wrinkles are yet to come, but I have almost forgotten the days when it wore any bloom. I married when I was very young. I lived for fifteen years a life which, whatever its trials, could not be called stagnant. Then for five years I was alone and, having no children, desolate. Lately Fortune, by a somewhat curious turn of her wheel, placed in my way an interest and a companion.
    The neighbourhood where I live is pleasant enough, its scenery agreeable, and its society civilized, though not numerous. About a mile from my house there is a ladies' school, established but lately--not more than three years since. The conductress of this school were of my acquaintances; and though I cannot say that they occupied the very highest place in my opinion--for they had brought back from some months' residence abroad, for finishing purposes, a good deal that was fantastic, affected, and pretentious--yet I awarded them some portion of that respect which seems the fair due of all women who face life bravely, and try to make their own way by their own efforts.
    About a year after the Misses Wilcox opened their school, when the number of their pupils was as yet exceedingly limited, and when, no doubt, they were looking out anxiously enough for augmentation, the entrance-gate to their little drive was one day thrown back to admit a carriage--"a very handsome, fashionable carriage," Miss Mabel Wilcox said, in narrating the circumstance afterwards--and drawn by a pair of really splendid horses. The sweep up the drive, the loud ring at the doorbell, the bustling entrance into the house, the ceremonious admission to the bright drawing-room, roused excitement enough in Fuchsia Lodge. Miss Wilcox repaired to the reception-room in a pair of new gloves, and carrying in her hand a handkerchief of French cambric.
    She found a gentleman seated on the sofa, who, as he rose up, appeared a tall, fine-looking personage; at least she thought him so, as he stood with his back to the light. He introduced himself as Mr. Fitzgibbon, inquired if Miss Wilcox had a vacancy, and intimated that he wished to intrust to her care a new pupil in the shape of his daughter. This was welcome news, for there was many a vacancy in Miss Wilcox's school room; indeed, her establishment was as yet limited to the select number of three, and she and her sisters were looking forward with anything but confidence to the balancing of accounts at the close of their first half-year. Few objects could have been more agreeable to her, then, than that to which, by a wave of the hand, Mr. Fitzgibbon now directed her attention--the figure of a child standing near the drawing-room window.
    Had Miss Wilcox's establishment boasted fuller ranks--had she indeed entered well on that course of prosperity which in after years an undeviating attention to externals enabled her so triumphantly to realize--an early thought with her would have been to judge whether the acquisition now offered was likely to answer well as a show-pupil. She would have instantly marked her look, dress, &c., and inferred her value from these indicia. In those anxious commencing times, however, Miss Wilcox could scarce afford herself the luxury of such appreciation: a new pupil represented forty pounds a year, independently of master's terms--and forty pounds a year was a sum Miss Wilcox needed and was glad to secure; besides, the fine carriage, the fine gentleman, and the fine name, gave gratifying assurance, enough and to spare, of eligibility in the proffered connection. It was admitted, then, that there were vacancies in Fuschia Lodge; that Miss Fitzgibbon could be received at once; that she was to learn all that the school prospectus proposed to teach; to be liable to every extra: in short, to be as expensive, and consequently as profitable a pupil as any directress's heart could wish. All this was arranged as upon velvet, smoothly and liberally. Mr. Fitzgibbon showed in the transaction none of the hardness of the bargin-making man of business, and as little of the penurious anxiety of the straitened professional man. Miss Wilcox felt him to be "quite the gentleman." Everything disposed her to be partially inclined towards the little girl whom he, on taking leave, formally committed to her guardianship; and as if no circumstance should be wanting to complete her happy impression, the address left written on a card served to fill up the measure of Miss Wilcox's satisfaction--Conway Fitzgibbon, Esq., May Park, Midland County. That very day three decrees were passed in the newcomer’s favor:--
    1st. That she was to be Miss Wilcox's bed-fellow.
    2d. To sit next her at table.
    3d. To walk out with her.
    In a few days it became evident that a fourth secret clause had been added to these, viz., that Miss Fitzgibbon was to be favored, petted and screened on all possible occasions.
    An ill-conditioned pupil, who before coming to Fuschia Lodge had passed a year under the care of certain old-fashioned Misses Sterling, of Hartwood, and from them had picked up unpractical notions of justice, took it upon her to utter an opinion on this system of favoritism.

The upcoming manly season at Workshop Theater Company

Around last year at this time I had an argument with the people who run the Facebook page 50/50 in 20/20 - I pointed out that Martin Denton's play publishing site had a very tiny percentage of female playwrights represented. The 50/50 people defended Denton on the grounds that he was a friend of theirs and a nice guy who didn't hate women at all. This didn't contradict the fact that only 17% of the plays on his site were by women, and eventually he copped to it.

One of the people following the 50/50 group, Kathleen Brant, a producing director of the Workshop Theater Company posted something on the thread to the effect of "our group does plays by women." I checked their web site and at that time they had a higher than usual percentage of female playwrights represented in upcoming productions - still not 50% of course, but then we know we can't expect 50/50 for another eight years (nine years at the time.) Because God and Nature have endowed men with the ability to write plays better than women write plays, and this will only change in 2020.

So I congratulated Kathleen Brant on this feat. But that was last year. It looks like this year it's back to business as usual. Looking at the Workshop Theater Company's upcoming schedule, all the playwrights named as receiving productions or staged readings between now and February 2013 are men

Actually, I think that 50/50 in 20/20 is optimistic. I think Caitlin Moran has it correct:

"For men born pre-feminism, this is what they were raised on: second-class citizen mothers; sisters who needed to be married off; female schoolmates going to secretarial school, then becoming housewives. Women who disengaged. Disappeared.

These men are the CEOs of our big companies, the big guys on the stock markets, the advisors to governments. They dictate working hours and maternity leave, economic priorities and social mores. And, of course, they don't feel equality in their bones - sexism runs deep in their generation, along with a liking for boiled puddings, and spanking and golf. Their automatic reaction is to regard women as "other." The entrenched bias against the working, liberated female will only die out when they do."

The same thing applies to theatre critics and producers and theatre organizations. So we're stuck with this "women as other" concept - which translates into the attitude that plays by and about men are of universal interest, while plays by and about women are of women-only interest. (Interesting statistic from the big theatre-gender study Opening the Curtain on Playwright Gender: An Integrated Economic Analysis of Discrimination in American Theater - plays written by men about women were more likely to be produced than plays written by women about women.)

Of course it isn't only men in that age-group who buy into the concept. Plenty of women agree with it - or at least go along with it, so that the men who run things will allow them to be part of the female auxiliary of the boys club.

And don't expect them to suddenly find enough plays by women to fill 50% of all production slots any time soon - because if they suddenly did that now, it would be an admission that they were NOT doing it prior to now.

This means that plays by men will continue to be done much more often than plays by women because it will take that long for these people with their regressive attitudes to die off in the next twenty years or so. Which takes us out to 2032, not 2020.

PROOF

I've slammed my share of popular plays (OLEANNA, SIGHT UNSEEN, and especially TALLEY'S FOLLY) but I don't hate all popular plays - and I've praised a few - OUR TOWN and PAINTING CHURCHES - but I've been critical more than I've praised.

 I'm going to have to write a piece about PROOF because in many ways it is a perfect play. I have an audiotape version and I've listened to it several times just to admire how finely-structured the plot is. And I even got to see PROOF on Broadway - my ex-boyfriend took me for my birthday one year.

It doesn't make for an especially dynamic movie, unfortunately, but I predict it will have a long life in theatre because it has a tiny cast, two decent roles for women and a tight, well-crafted plot.

Also - and I don't know if any critics have said this - but PROOF is sort of reverse Ophelia - what if, instead of falling apart after the death of her father and then killing herself, Ophelia falls apart but then gets her shit together by solving a famous mathematical puzzle?

I realize that a favorite theme of the theatre is the helpless suffering of women, but too bad - PROOF is what we call progress.

speaking of sonnets

Working on the video of my monologue The Dark Lady Sonnets, which is based on my entry in this year's Shakespeare Birthday project, reminds me of the weirdness surrounding my sonnets when I posted them online over the course of a few years.

For most of the time I was posting them I put them on a separate page, so you had to click the link that said "sonnets" to read them. Nobody had to read them, even accidentally. And not only did I not mention anybody by name in the sonnets, you'd have to personally know the people in question, and my relationship with them and be a very close reader of the sonnets to have any idea what I was talking about, because the references were pretty obscure - because that's the way art works.

This is all pretty much ancient history, except that about a year ago I received an email that addressed the topic. It was an epic jeremiad, actually - the author was mad at me because I criticized the concept of his one-man show, which involved tricking the audience, kind of like the Royal Nonesuch in "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." But somewhere in the middle of the epic he wrote:

...YOU also need to understand that your dealing with your emotions arouses emotions in other people - emotions that are equally as valid as your own. So they deal with it in THEIR own ways. And, if it includes making light of things that make them uncomfortable--yes, even making fun of you--so be it. Not everyone likes having erotic and sometimes insulting poetry written about them, whether it explicitly names them or not.

Now as my friend Bruce said when I described this to him: "why do they care?"

Why indeed? Especially since the person who wrote the email, and the person who most prominently attacked me  - she posted some insulting "poems" about me on a couple of occasions  - were not mentioned in the sonnets. I don't even know the woman who attacked me. They are friends of the people mentioned in the sonnets. How did the sonnets become the concern of these other people?

And as for the people mentioned in the sonnets, why did they tell other people I wrote about them, and why do they pretend to care what I think of them? They certainly made it clear to me they had no regard for my opinion.

Well, I was going to write a long analysis of mob psychology, and how pathetic it is to make enemies out of strangers so that other members of your middle-aged gang will think you're cool, but I saw something by Anne Lamott on Facebook today, and I'm going to quote that instead:

You own everything that happened to you.
Tell your stories.
If people wanted you to write warmly about them they should've behaved better.

British is your only dialect...

...for sonnets.

Say what you want about British slang with its knicker/knacker/knackered zaniness, it doesn't matter what they say so much as how they say it: British people tawk fancy, and everything sounds more intelligent and refined when they are clipping their Ts and eliding their Rs.

Claire Warden is one of these British type people and she made my sonnet "The world my love is composed" sound amazing. And of course she made Shakespeare's sonnet 147 sound amazing too, but it's a tad more difficult to make my sonnet sound amazing. I'm only allowing British people to read my sonnets aloud from now on.

An interesting aspect of British dialect is that it's changed since Shakespeare's time, which is why Shakespeare meant for these lines from sonnet 147 to rhyme:

My reason, the physician to my love, 
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept, 
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve 
Desire is death, which physic did except. 

But making the word love sound like "loove" or approve sound like "apruv" - and probably they neither sounded like that but both rather had a different vowel sound entirely - is just too much, so the rhyme is allowed to disappear.

Claire isn't only a great voice and great actor though - she's very athletic too, and recently went skydiving for her second anniversary with her husband (the official second anniversary gift is supposed to be china.) And in a very unusual production of HAMLET this summer for which she was cast as the Player King, she rocked her amazing costume, as you can see in this image from her web site clairewarden.com:

You can click it to see a larger version. She's an all-around, versatile, consummate performer and why she hasn't been hired for the most recent James Bond movie I'll never understand.

She's also been doing readings of my JULIA & BUDDY since the earliest days of readings at NYCPlaywrights, so of course I want her to perform in the world premier of the full-length version, which will be coming along any day now.

In the meantime, I had her do my monologue "The Dark Lady Sonnets." It contains two sonnets because, obviously, that's what  contemporary audiences are clamoring for - sonnets.

HAIR 1969

Ever morbidly, my thought on observing these young people in the cast of HAIR is: not a single one of them is less than 60 years old now. It hardly seems possible.

Popular

The song "Popular" from the musical WICKED is some serious genius. Not only is the music charming and perfect for the Galinda character, but these lines are so true:

When I see depressing creatures 
With unprepossessing features 
I remind them on their own behalf 
To think of celebrated heads of states 
Or specially great communicators - 
Did they have brains or knowledge? 
Don't make me laugh
They were popular - please
It's all about popular. 

Writer Stephen Schwartz disparaged the song as "shallow" but I think that he deserves a Tony just for writing lyrics with the word "unprepossessing" in them, alone.

Fishy laundromat

Gah! The management company that owns my building suddenly decided with no warning to lock up the laundry room in order to "improve" it. And the note they posted on the laundry room door doesn't even say when this massive inconvenience will end.

So I had to throw on a bra* and some shoes and schlep my dirty clothing to the laundromat under the subway line where I have the option to wait through the wash cycle either in the laundry itself where there are no seats, the humidity is 110% and there's a guy on TV screaming about a soccer game.

The alternative is sitting outside the laundromat and breathing in the fishy air wafting over from the fish store on the corner.

Grrrr I hate my building's management company.

*just kidding about the bra - these laundry people will just have to suffer through my party hats. And besides everybody knows that bras and feminists are natural enemies.

OMFG Caitlin Moran!

I adore Caitlin Moran and her new book which I just bought and devoured, "How to be a Woman." She is brilliant and so is her book.

But first let me get the bad part out of the way: she uses "balls" to mean courage, and at one point suggests that women need to "grow lady balls."

Well, she's not perfect. But she gets virtually everything else right, perfectly right, and so I will forgive her for it. But only her. Nobody else gets away with it.

And I learned so much British slang, half of which I still don't know what it means. But at least I now know that knickers are underwear and knackers are testicles, but to be knackered doesn't mean that you've been teabagged. It means your are worn out.

There were so many funny bits, but actually it's when she's at her most strident - and she is proud to be strident which is awesome - that she is the most brilliant:

In the 21st century, we don't need to march against zero-size models, risible pornography, lap-dancing clubs and Botox.  We don't need to riot or go on hunger strikes. There's no need to throw ourselves under a horse or even a donkey. We just need to look at it in the eye, squarely, for a minute, and then start laughing at it. We look hot when we laugh. People fancy us when they observe us giving out relaxed, earthy chuckles.


Perhaps they don't fancy us quite as much when we go to bang on the tables with our fists, gurgling "HARGH! HARGH! Yes that IS what it's like! SCREW YOU, patriarchy!" before choking on a mouthful of chips, but still.


I don't know if we can talk about "waves" of feminism any more - by my reckoning, the next wave would be the fifth, and I suspect it's around the fifth wave that you stop referring to individual waves and start to refer, simply, to an incoming tide.

Sublime. And she says gets high heels perfectly right:

"...there are only ten people in the world, tops, who should actually wear high heels. And six of them are drag queens. The rest of us just need to... give up. Surrender. Finally acquiesce to what nature is telling us. We can't walk in them. WE CANNOT WALK IN THE DAMN THINGS. We might just as well be stepping out in anti-gravity boots, or roller skates.

What I always say is that if high heels were so great, men would still be wearing them. And not counting the platform shoes period of the 1970s, they haven't since the days of the 18th century European aristocracy.

Moran applies the "do men do it" test to other things:

It was on the "are boys doing it?" basis that I finally decided I was against women wearing burkas. Yes, the idea is that it protects your modesty and ensures that people regard you as a human being rather than a sex object. Fair enough. But who are you being protected from? Men. And who - so long as you play by the rules and wear the correct clothes is protecting you from the men? Men. And who is it that is just regarding you as a sexual object, instead of another human being, in the first place? Men.

And talking about cosmetic surgery:

...you can tell if some misogynistic societal pressure is being exerted on women by calmly enquiring: "Are the men doing this, as well?"

If they aren't, chances are you're dealing with what we strident feminists refer to as "some total fucking bullshit."

This is some excellent sociology here:

Most sexism is down to men being accustomed to us being losers. That's what the problem is. We just have bad status. Men are accustomed to us being runners-up, or being disqualified entirely. For men born pre-feminism, this is what they were raised on: second-class citizen mothers; sisters who needed to be married off; female schoolmates going to secretarial school, then becoming housewives. Women who disengaged. Disappeared.


These men are the CEOs of our big companies, the big guys on the stock markets, the advisors to governments. They dictate working hours and maternity leave, economic priorities and social mores. And, of course, they don't feel equality in their bones - sexism runs deep in their generation, along with a liking for boiled puddings, and spanking and golf. Their automatic reaction is to regard women as "other." The entrenched bias against the working, liberated female will only die out when they do.

Yep. But she isn't just a trenchant commentator of social conditions, she's really funny. When she writes about her siblings, in particular, she reminds me very much of David Sedaris:

I was interested in absolutely everything to do with Buck. Just looking at his face was interesting. How he stood, near a door = interesting. The way he held the obviously lightweight and plastic gun as if it were heavy = interesting. The theme song takes on such an unbearable load of yearning and Buck Rogersness  that - 28 years later - I still feel stirred when I hear it.
Obviously these are all some big-assed feelings to be dealing with, and so I did what we always did when an event of some import was going on. I grabbed Caz - then five- and pulled her into an airing cupboard with me. Like the Mitfords used to - except theirs was probably much larger than ours and didn't smell of Bold, mouse droppings and farts.
"Caz" I said, pulling the door as shut as I could and assuming an expression of deep portent. "I have something incredible to tell you."
I pause, staring at her.
"I... am IN LOVE with Buck Rogers. Don't tell Mum. "
Caz nodded.
My burden lifted, I opened the door again and gestured for Caz to leave. I watched her cross the landing and go down the stairs. I heard her opening the front room door.
"Mum. Cate's in love with Buck Rogers," she said.
I learn then, in that moment - as mortification burns across me like hot ash - that love is agony, all crushes should remain secret, and Caz was an untrustworthy, fainthearted son of a bitch.
All these facts stood me in good stead, subsequently. I learned alot in the airing cupboard that day. Just 20 minutes later I was stuffing frozen peas into Caz's pillowcase while whispering, portentously, "And so the war begins."

Although she does often combine humor with incisiveness, as in her description of modern porn:

One thing that the Internet is stocked with, shelf after shelf, clip after clip, and none of them more than six minutes long - the average time it takes for a man to come. This is 21st century heterosexual porn:

Once upon a time a girl with long nails and a really bad outfit sat on a sofa, trying to look sexy but, but actually looking like she'd just remembered a vexing, unpaid parking fine. She might be slightly cross-eyed, due to how tight her bra is. 
A man comes in - a man who walks rather oddly as if he's carrying an invisible garden chair in front of him. This is because he's got a uselessly large penis, which is erect and appears to be scanning the room for the most sexually disinterested thing in it. 
Having rejected the window and the vase, the cock finally homes in on the girl on the sofa.
As she disinterestedly licks her lips, the man leans over and - inexplicably, weighs her left breast in his hand. This appears to be the crossing of some kind of sexual Rubicon because 30 seconds later she's being fucked at an uncomfortable angle, then bummed while looking quite pained.* There's usually a bit of arse-slapping here, or some hair-pulling there - whatever can ring in the variety in a straight-forward two-camera shoot in less than five minutes.
It all ends with him coming all over her face, messily - as if he's haphazardly icing a bun in one of the challenges on Minute to Win It.
The End.

...essentially the Internet vends a porn monoculture... this is the Microsoft Windows screw; crushing every other kind of sex out of the market.

Oh and so much more. Plus, she has epic eyebrows.

Emma Brockes of the NYTimes liked it too - I discovered Caitlin Moran thanks to this review.

Buy her book and read it and love it. And here she is on Youtube - enjoy.



She mentions Andrea Dworkin in this clip - fun fact - I was once related by marriage to Andrea Dworkin. Fairly distantly - her father was a cousin of my ex-husband's father. But still. I met her parents at a family wedding. They were very nice - and seemed quite proud of Andrea.

* If you found the phrase "she's being fucked at an uncomfortable angle, then bummed while looking quite pained" confusing, join the club. That's some of that British slang I was talking about. The author is not being ridiculously redundant here - I mean of course she's going to be bummed if she's  at an uncomfortable angle and pained, right? But no, to "be bummed" apparently means to have anal sex. 

I married Isis on the fifth day of May

One of my favorite scraps of dialog of all time in a song comes from Bob Dylan's Isis:

She said "Where ya been ?"
I said "No place special."
She said "You look different."
I said "Well, I guess"
She said "You been gone."
I said "That's only natural."
She said "You gonna stay ?"
I said "If you want me to, yes."

Unfortunately there is no instance of the original recording from the album Desire available online, and no other version, including Dylan doing it live, can hold a candle to the original. The secret, I believe, is the emphasis on the percussive aspects of the piano.

You can hear a brief clip of the original at Rhapsody.

And speaking of Dylan, it's John Lennon and Bob Dylan in a car.

another play of the week

This was probably the best of the four July plays of the month, but even so, as always I enjoy the actors feedback more than the play itself.

Nancy McClernan is anti-racist and egalitarian

Nancy McClernan is anti-racist and egalitarian, but a target of Google-bombing Tumblr zombies.

A year ago I disagreed on Facebook with some people who called John Lennon and Yoko Ono racists for a song they wrote 41 years ago. And for that, some nutty extremists defamed me as a "racist."

Now anybody who knows me, or even reads this blog, knows I'm an anti-racist and pro-egalitarian. I also have plenty of non-white friends and colleagues who will testify I am anti-racist. But such things don't matter to a mob of crazies with too much time on their hands and push-button technology to enable their mindless mob behavior.

Anyway, I certainly wouldn't ask one of  my non-white friends to come forward and reveal their real names on my behalf - they would end up a target of these wackos too.

I predict that Tumblr will eventually be sued into extinction when they've allowed one anonymous coward too many to spread lies and hate at will. But in the meantime, anybody in the world can be smeared by these mindless idiots. You too.

These Tumblr zombies are like the people who regularly attempt to ban Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because Twain used the word "nigger." Which he did because that's how people referred to their slaves in the antebellum South, which was the time-period HUCK was set.

We refer to people who can't allow a bad word to be used in any context because they don't understand or are hostile to art as "Philistines."

However, Mark Twain wasn't perfect and I wrote an introduction to my adaptation of Huck Finn in which I discuss why Twain ruined the last third of his novel - by having the character Jim forget all about his family. Go and read it.

New Yorker Parity Report - July 30, 2012

Looks like The New Yorker is doing things differently now - it no longer provides a permanent link per issue date to its online table of contents, so I can't provide a link to it from this blog as I have been doing since October 2011.

Now you have to link directly to the online copy of the magazine, which only subscribers can view.

So the New Yorker parity report will look a bit different from now on, as you can see. Now you can count the authors and determine the gender imbalance yourself by looking at the table of contents image... but I'll still do the math.

And they were SO CLOSE to parity for July 30, 2012. But since the reckoning is done by the bylines, and I do include poetry, they failed - the three male poets skewed the gender balance once again.

---

The New Yorker Parity Report

The New Yorker, July 30, 2012

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: +13%

Total writers:13
male:8
female: 5
gender parity score: 38%

Last week
Total writers: 20
male: 15
female: 5
gender parity score: 25%

handy info-graphic for wine drinkers

You'll have to go here to be able to read it.

 

Trippy, man

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

The Dunning-Kruger Effect explains so much about theatre... and everything else.

But this part especially struck me:

Dunning, Kruger, and coauthors' 2008 paper on this subject comes to qualitatively similar conclusions to their original work, after making some attempt to test alternative explanations. They conclude that the root cause is that, in contrast to high performers, "poor performers do not learn from feedback suggesting a need to improve."

While running NYCPlaywrights, so often bad playwrights would bring in the same script again and again, with the most negligible of changes in spite of all the feedback - usually feedback that they themselves requested.

Eventually what they do is stop asking for feedback from strangers, and just ask for feedback from friends and family. Because all they want is praise - they don't actually want to learn - or perhaps I should say they are constitutionally unable to learn - from the feedback.

This also holds true for theatre groups, where everybody knows each other and nobody would dream of giving actual honest feedback, because the rule of all groups is "go along to get along." That was one way that NYCPlaywrights was different - there was never really an insiders-outsiders situation, which really pissed off a lot of people - it was completely contradictory to their expectation of how a writers group should be run. The fact that I personally gave honest feedback, and didn't insist that other people provide "constructive"  feedback was considered extremely offensive to many people.

But playwrights who are the best schmoozers are likely to get a shock once their work is reviewed by people who are not family or friends or members of their clique.

And the NYCPlaywrights method was quite effective as these testimonials demonstrate. It wasn't just about me being a big ole meanie.

Although I did write this play, inspired by a former member of NYCPlaywrights.

The Romney campaign is based entirely on lies

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Democalypse 2012 - Do We Look Stupid? Don't Answer That Edition
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

The Republican party has never been quite this shameless. It really is breath-taking. As Jon Stewart - once again doing the Lord's work - demonstrates here, everything that Obama said in the speech that the thugs have taken out of context was ALSO SAID BY ROMNEY.

The problem is that the US is so full of stupid, ignorant people that they don't realize that teachers, roads, the Internet, Medicaid, Social Security, etc. etc. etc. comes from government - and ultimately from taxes - they apparently all believe it comes from the free enterprise fairy.

But those of us who remember the swift-boating of John Kerry who lost the 2004 election to the Worst President in History (and he already had that title in the bag during his first term) worry that although these people are too stupid to figure out the difference between government services and the Invisible Hand of the Market, they do have the ability to feed themselves and flip a switch in a voting booth.

It is heartening though that Romney is doing his best to make a complete fool of himself.



And what about his tax returns? Oh, right, you people don't need to see them.

Gigantic

The lyrics of the Pixies' song Gigantic have a very modern poetry vibe to them:

And this I know
His teeth as white as snow
What a gas it was to see him
Walk her every day
Into a shady place
With her lips she said
She said

Hey Paul, Hey Paul, Hey Paul, let's have a ball [3x]

Gigantic, gigantic, gigantic
A big big love
Gigantic, gigantic, gigantic
A big big love

Lovely legs they are
What a big black mess
What a hunk of love
Walk her every day into a shady place
He's like the dark, but I'd want him

Hey Paul, Hey Paul, Hey Paul, let's have a ball [3x]

Gigantic, gigantic, gigantic
A big big love
Gigantic, gigantic, gigantic
A big big love

Gigantic, gigantic, gigantic
A big big love
Gigantic, gigantic, gigantic
A big big love 

You don't get too many songs that start out with "and."

Gigantic was from their Surfer Rosa album, which was a big influence on Kurt Cobain (from Wiki):

One notable citation as an influence was by Kurt Cobain, on influencing Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit", which he admitted was a conscious attempt to co-opt the Pixies' style. In a January 1994 interview with Rolling Stone, he said, 

"I was trying to write the ultimate pop song. I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies. I have to admit it [smiles]. When I heard the Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily I should have been in that band—or at least in a Pixies cover band. We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard." 

Cobain cited Surfer Rosa as one of his main musical influences, and particularly admired the album's natural and powerful drum sounds—a result of Steve Albini's influence on the record. Albini later produced Nirvana's 1993 In Utero at the request of Cobain.

Black Francis of the Pixies says that the sound of Gigantic was influenced by Lou Reed:

The song's voyeuristic lyrics mostly revolve around a woman's observation of an attractive black man making love to another woman, culminating in the oddly light-hearted but sexual chorus: "Gigantic, gigantic, gigantic / A big, big love". Francis later commented on the title of the song and the chorus (in the music magazine SELECT), saying:

"A good chord progression, very Lou Reed influenced. I'd had the word 'gigantic' in my mind just because the chord progression seemed very big to me."

 Pretty impressive pedigree for a song - influenced by Lou Reed, influenced Kurt Cobain.

Cobain's "soft and quiet and then loud and hard" is an excellent description of much of the Pixies' work, and Lou Reed's influence notwithstanding, it's actually a lot like classical music.  Rock/pop music tends to stick with one mode, or at most build up to a climax, but classical music is always going quiet-loud-quiet. It adds to the drama.

So the sound opens with a simple drum stick beat and Kim Deal's bassline and lyrics, which is quiet and soft and simple. But Black Francis's wailing adds the perfect eccentricity and quasi-operatic touch. And then the loud part:

Hey Paul, hey Paul, hey Paul let's have a ball.
Hey Paul, hey Paul, hey Paul let's have a ball.
Hey Paul, hey Paul, hey Paul let's have a ball.

And this is where the song leaps into the stratosphere. One of the best parts of the video on this post is that it shows Joey Santiago making that cosmic dinosaur wailing sound, starting at 00:39.

It's so good but if it goes on much longer it will be painful, so the chorus comes in at just the right moment:

Gigantic, gigantic, gigantic, a big big love.

And repeat. Then it gets quiet again and Black Francis gets a solo - and then loud and hard again. And really that's it. Pretty simple. But effective. And Joey Santiago deserve sainthood for the miracles he performs with sound.

Strangely enough, Ferdinand Marcos gets some credit for the Pixies' sound:

Santiago was born in Manila, Philippines, on June 10, 1965, the third of six sons of an anesthesiologist. In 1972, however, when President Marcos declared martial law, the family emigrated to the United States.

Another big influence - George Harrison:

(Santiago) attributes much of his style to songs he enjoyed when first learning the guitar, such as The Beatles' "Savoy Truffle", where "George Harrison played that bent note that I fell in love with and later milked it for all it was worth." He used such techniques with the Pixies: Doolittle's "Dead" begins with Santiago's guitar "squawking" on an E-flat like "a wounded animal."

Another video done

Tim Lueke plays a teenager so well - it's hard to believe he's pushing 30.

And no, I didn't cast this based on the fact that the actors' names match the characters' names. It just worked out that way.

Farewell, Sally Ride

The death of Sally Ride at age 61 has upset me more than I would have predicted. But maybe I shouldn't be surprised about feeling so sad - she was a hero to millions of women.

Here she is on Sesame Street.

New Yorker Parity Report - July 23, 2012

Dammit, every time the New Yorker has a double issue, it throws me off my schedule and I forget to post the parity report for the next week.

We're back down to 25%. Same number of writers as last issue, but one fewer female writer, one more male writer.

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: -8%

July 23, 2012

Total writers: 20
male: 15
female: 5
gender parity score: 25%

Last week
Total writers: 20
male: 14
female: 6
gender parity score: 33%

as black as hell, as dark as night

With all the monologue recording I've done lately I decided to write my own monologue, and the amazing Claire Warden has agreed to record it for me in a couple of weeks.

I've inserted Shakespeares' Sonnet 147 into the monologue so I've been thinking about it quite a bit lately.

In most of his work, and in fact most of Sonnet 147 itself, Shakespeare is all about extended metaphors and clever wordplay. Sonnet 147 is mainly a metaphor comparing reason to a physician and love to a disease:

My love is as a fever longing still, 
For that which longer nurseth the disease; 
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill, 
The uncertain sickly appetite to please. 
My reason, the physician to my love, 
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept, 
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve 
Desire is death, which physic did except. 
Past cure I am, now Reason is past care, 
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest; 
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are, 
At random from the truth vainly expressed; 

 And then he drops all the intellectual niceties and practically screams the last lines:

For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

Like so much of Shakespeare's sonnets, even people who are very familiar with Shakespeare and his late-16th century mode sometimes struggle with teasing out the meaning. But anybody can understand those last two lines, no translation necessary. The last line could be from a heavy metal song.

You can see how variously the sonnet has been interpreted on Youtube.

A tram ride to Roosevelt Island

My iPhone video of the return trip we took back to Roosevelt Island from Manhattan. The trip takes four minutes more or less, since the video takes four minutes. You can see the reflection of my Chuck Taylors early in the video. The young woman in the red shirt is the tram conductor. She's in the shot at the end of the video.

The Misadventures of AWKWARD Black Girl

I found out about this web series via the NYTimes. This woman really gets web video. I watched the entire series in one sitting. It's 95% genius.

I Will Follow Him

Little Peggy March was only 14 years old when she had the number one hit I Will Follow Him, and she didn't have a whole lot of success in her career after that, but really, this song is so great that she deserves to go down in history for it, alone.

To my surprise it was actually a translation of a French song, "Chariot" that British singer Petula Clark (of "Downtown" fame) had a number one hit with in France the year before the American recording.

I found Clark's version on Youtube.



You can definitely tell it's the same song, thanks to the melody, with that distinctive:

dah DIH DIH, dah DIH DIH , da DIH DIH

But Clark's version is tres Continental, with lots of washy strings and even horns, and a hint of Latin rhythm, like rhumba. Unfortunately I can't find a "real" translation of the French lyrics so I had to rely on Google Translate:

Trolley, trolley, if you want me
To accompany you at the end of the day
Let me come near you
On the big wagon wood and canvas
We will go
Where one side will emerge
In the first reflections of the sky
Before the sun's heat
Under the last star

The plain, the plain, the plain
Will have no border
The earth, the earth will be our field
I like, I like
This old truck that pitches,
Pitching, pitching
If you want me
To sleep by your side always
The moon was in the money
Winter in the snow and wind
So tell me, I go with you
The plain, the plain, the plain
Will have no border
The earth, the earth will see our field
I like, I like
This old truck that trembles
Trembling, trembling
If you want me
Of my life and my mad love
Along the streams and woods
At the heart of the dangers and joys
So tell me, I leave with you.

Judging from the video that Clark made, the "chariot" or "trolly" looks like some Old West type covered wagon.

Now this may not be a great translation, but it gives a flavor of the song - it sounds as though the singer wants to travel around the countryside with the object of her desire. Whereas Little Peggy's version is much more, shall we say, monomaniacal...

Love him, I love him, I love him.
And where he goes I'll follow, I'll follow, I'll follow.

I will follow him.
Follow him wherever he may go.
There isn't an ocean too deep,
A mountain so high it can keeeeeep,
Me away.


I must follow him (follow him)
Ever since he touched my hand I knew,
That near him I always must be.
And nothing can keep him from me.
He is my destiny (destiny).


I love him, I love him, I love him,
And where he goes, I'll follow, I'll follow, I'll follow.
He'll always be my true love, my true love, my true love,
From now until forever, forever, forever.


I will follow him (follow him),
Follow him wherever he may go,
There isn't an ocean too deep,
A mountain so high it can keep,
Keep me away, away from my love.

She must follow him. He is her destiny. Not too much variety, lyrically, although you have to give the singer lots of respect - there isn't an ocean too deep it can keep her away. Dayam. Oceans are deep. I mean it's one thing to say "ain't no mountain high enough, ain't no valley low enough, ain't no river wide enough." But no ocean too deep? Who is she in love with, Jacques Cousteau? She's ready to get into a goddam bathyscaphe for this guy.

So it's not the melody and it's not the lyrics that make the Little Peggy March version so classic, it's the arrangement. What the arrangers did was take the original melody and mix it in with American doo-wop and voila - genius ensues.

The song opens with a drum kick and then goes right into the signature melody line in doo-wop style  - male voices, doing that distinctive "dah DIH DIH, dah DIH DIH , da DIH DIH"

And then Little Peggy chimes in. I find it a small but nevertheless significant choice to start the song out with "Love him" instead of "I love him." The L consonant is a stronger sound to start out with than the I vowel. And it just gets better from there.

The first lyric uses pop-rock instruments - a choppy guitar, drum kit and some kind of keyboard.

I will follow him.
Follow him wherever he may go.
There isn't an ocean too deep,
A mountain so high it can keeeeeep,
Me away.

The next lyric brings in the female chorus, and like Beatles backing vocals, they make all the difference:

Little Peggy: I must follow him 
chorus: follow him  
Little Peggy: Ever since he touched my hand I knew,
Little Peggy: That near him I always must be.
(Under the above lyric the chorus is going ahhhhhh-ahhhh)
Little Peggy: And nothing can keep him from me.
(More ahhhh-ahhh)
Little Peggy: He is my destiny,

chorus: destiny.

Please note the slight difference in the lyric, from I will follow him, to I MUST follow him. And maybe this is reading more deeply into it than is proper, but that female "DEST-in-NEE!" (with drums for punctuation) gets me every time. She is obsessed with this guy, but even in the middle of her obsesiveness there's this awareness of the adolescent ridiculousness of such an obsession. That "DEST-in-NEE!" represents that awareness. And if anybody knows about obsessive desire and the accompanying ridiculousness it's me - I could write a book about it.

So right after the higher consciousness of "DEST-in-NEE" the obsessiveness returns, stronger than ever, with the male doo-wop underlying the refrain:

I love him! 
I love him!
I love him!
And where he goes I'll follow!
I'll follow!
I'll follow!
He'll always be my true love!
My true love!
My true love!
From now until forever!
Forever!
Forever!

The next lyric is really interesting because in spite of the American doo-wop, suddenly strings appear, like in the French version. Well, not quite like the French version. The American version is show-offy - but then it has to be, to compete with the female backing vocals which will remain for the rest of the song:

I will follow him (follow him),
Follow him wherever he may go,
There isn't an ocean too deep,
A mountain so high it can keep,
Keep me away, away from my love.

Notice the violin flourish under "Keep me away"

And then the dramatic pause, which the French version has, but it's not quite as dramatic. And then the refrain returns with the violin doing this emphatic whiiz, whiiz! sound very much not like the French version.

I love him! (violin: whiiz!)
I love him! (violin: whiiz!)
I love him! (violin: whiiz!)
And where he goes I'll follow! (violin: whiiz!)
I'll follow! (violin: whiiz!)
I'll follow! (violin: whiiz!)
He'll always be my true love! (violin: whiiz!)
My true love! (violin: whiiz!)
My true love! (violin: whiiz!)
From now until forever! (violin: whiiz!)
Forever! (violin: whiiz!)
Forever! (violin: whiiz!)

 And now maybe the best irony - the violin becomes soaring and melodic under the lyric, in a very counterpoint classical music style.

I will follow him (follow him),
Follow him wherever he may go,
There isn't an ocean too deep,
A mountain so high it can keep,
Keep me away, away from my love.

And then the chorus jumps in, right in the middle (without the opening "I love him"s) and all the instruments and vocals are going full tilt until it's basically an opera and Mozart would be proud.

Doo-wop:dah DIH DIH, dah DIH DIH , da DIH DIH
Chorus: And where he goes I'll follow! I'll follow! I'll follow
Soaring violin
Little Peggy: I know I'll always love him, I'll love him, I'll love him
Chorus:                                                    I'll love him, I'll love him
Doo-wop:dah DIH DIH, dah DIH DIH , da DIH DIH
Soaring violin
Little Peggy: And where he goes I'll follow, I'll follow, I'll follow
Chorus: And where he goes I'll follow, I'll follow, I'll follow
Doo-wop:dah DIH DIH, dah DIH DIH , da DIH DIH
Soaring violin
Little Peggy: I know I'll always love him, I'll love him, I'll love him
Chorus: I know I'll always love him, I'll love him, I'll love him
Doo-wop:dah DIH DIH, dah DIH DIH , da DIH DIH
Soaring violin
Little Peggy: And where he goes I'll follow, I'll follow, I'll follow
Chorus: And where he goes I'll follow, I'll follow, I'll follow
Doo-wop:dah DIH DIH, dah DIH DIH , da DIH DIH
Soaring violin

Fade out


Next time I will analyze the Pixies' Gigantic.

Jason Zinoman defends the poor beleaguered misogynist comedians

Jason Zinoman uses a favorite tactic of our male-dominated traditional media - get a woman to defend the Patriarchy. He quotes Tammy Pescatelli on the Daniel douchebag Tosh controversy:

I can’t defend Daniel’s words because I didn’t see the joke, but sounds like he was trying to make a funny situation out of an embarrassing one,” Ms. Pescatelli said. “Look, we’re at work. I’m trying to make a living making people laugh. I’m a mother. And this is what I’ve got to put up with?” 

This is how editors who want to attack feminism generally do it - hire Caitlin Flanagan or Katie Roiphe to write an article on a subject having to do with women. You can be sure they'll manage to turn the issue, no matter what it is, into an object lesson on How Feminism Has Ruined Everything, because that's their schtick. They really wouldn't have any careers except for their reliability at attacking feminism - and attacking feminism is considered acceptable if a woman does the attacking.

It's quite amusing to see Zinoman and the comedians he quotes jump through hoops to defend rape jokes. Zinoman even tries the  "everybody's doing it" defense:

Make no mistake: The reason there are so many rape jokes is that they work. As Mr. Tosh now knows, telling them carries a potential price, but so does changing the unfiltered, anything-for-a-laugh ethos of comedy clubs.

This was news to me - the fact that there are "so many rape jokes" in stand-up comedy and that "they work." When discussing the Tosh issue on Facebook one of my friends said she stopped going to stand-up shows because they were so misogynist. I didn't know what she meant, but then I get my stand-up comedy on Youtube and my favorite comedians tend to be women. I guess this is what she meant about the misogyny.

Prior to this controversy, the only rape joke I was aware of was Sarah Silverman's performance in The Aristocrats, in which she claims she was raped by Joe Franklin. But it was brilliant and not offensive and here's why - Wikipedia describes the premise of the film:

"The Aristocrats" is a longstanding transgressive joke amongst comedians, in which the setup and punchline are almost always the same (or similar). It is the joke's midsection – which may be as long as the one telling it prefers and is often completely improvised – that makes or breaks a particular rendition.

The joke involves a person pitching an act to a talent agent. Typically the first line is, "A man walks into a talent agent's office." The man then describes the act. From this point, up to (but not including) the punchline, the teller of the joke is expected to ad-lib the most shocking act they can possibly imagine. This often involves elements of incest, group sex, graphic violence, defecation, coprophilia, necrophilia, bestiality, child sexual abuse and various other taboo behaviors.

The joke ends with the agent, shocked and often impressed, asking "And what do you call the act?" The punchline of the joke is then given: "The Aristocrats".

Please note the term "child sexual abuse" - in other words, child rape. The brilliance of Silverman's approach is to take the premise of the alleged hilarity of "taboo-breaking" like child rape and play it straight. Putting "The Aristocrats" concept into that context is not only consciousness-raising but also funny - funny at the expense of other comedians, especially Joe Franklin, who threatened to sue her.

Here's why Tosh's response was objectionable, and not excusable based on "comedians say the darndest things." Zinoman makes the point and then quotes Pescatelli for backup, that this is some kind of working conditions issue: "I’m trying to make a living making people laugh. I’m a mother. And this is what I’ve got to put up with?” 

You are trying to make people laugh. Sometimes you fail. Just because some insults are excused on the basis that they are funny doesn't mean that all insults are therefore funny.

Tosh's alleged comment: “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by, like five guys right now?” isn't part of his act. Someone interrupted his act and he responded by making that remark. Just because somebody makes a living as a comedian does not mean that every single thing they ever say is excusable because it's "just a joke."

But even more so, what Tosh said can best be compared to a white comedian in a nightclub in the South in the 1950s responding to a black man's heckling by saying "Wouldn’t it be funny if that boy got lynched by a white mob right now?"

White people have been lynched too, but it was much, much more likely to happen to a black person - and the perpetrators were invariably white people.

Just as rape, which, although it can happen to men, is most likely to be committed against women - by men.

Now maybe Zinoman and all the other Tosh/rape joke defenders would have no problem with a white comedian in the 1950s South saying it would be funny if a black man was lynched by a white mob.

But if they do have a problem with that, then they have to explain why that's not OK, but it's fair game to say it would be funny if a woman was raped - especially considering that rape happens much more often than lynching ever did.

I would suggest that the men who make these rape jokes are defending what they consider their rightful place at the top of the hierarchy. Just as if they were a bunch of white Southerners in the 1950s laughing at lynching "jokes."

The Onion has the best response yet to the Tosh controversy - I got this link via Katha Pollitt on Facebook:
Daniel Tosh Chuckles Through Own Violent Rape
'You Just Gotta Laugh,' Reports Comedian Through Blood And Tears

Pahk the Cah

Another video completed for the NYCPlaywrights Play of the Month. I'm getting pretty efficient at processing videos any more.