Compulsive Love and Schrodinger's Rapist

Watching male fantasies like "Compulsive Love" makes me feel like I'm watching science fiction - male fantasy land is a planet that does not abide by the same conventions of human behavior as those on planet Earth.

Case in point is the end of the trailer for Compulsive Love in which a woman on a bicycle is chased down by the protagonist whom I shall call Ratface. And her response, on discovering that Ratface is trying to chase her down is NOT to start pedaling faster to escape, rather her response is to STOP and wait for Ratface to catch up so he can give her his oafish elevator pitch:

            Ratface 

This is crazy, what I just did... you... hey I'm Aaron. 

Yeah, that always happens on this planet. It's stuff like this that makes you wonder if the assholes who harass women on the street actually do think they're going to get lucky. Current theories hold that when men accost women on the street, they couldn't possibly be so stupid as to believe that such behavior will result in their getting laid, so it must be a display of male dominance and aggression.

But maybe scenarios like this are evidence that a certain subset of men actually do think that behaving like an aggressive asshole is a surefire way to pick up chicks. In any case the set up in this trailer is ridiculous, but if you've already set up a planet where unattractive men get sex with lots of women, the sky's the limit.

It's possible that the straight white men responsible for this bullshit are completely unaware of the fact that all women live in the fear of Schrödinger’s Rapist.

In this superlative blog post, someone with the nom de Internet of Sweet Machine explains. This should be required reading for all men on this planet.

When you approach me in public, you are Schrödinger’s Rapist. You may or may not be a man who would commit rape. I won’t know for sure unless you start sexually assaulting me. I can’t see inside your head, and I don’t know your intentions. If you expect me to trust you—to accept you at face value as a nice sort of guy—you are not only failing to respect my reasonable caution, you are being cavalier about my personal safety.

So a man running after you like a dog in heat in order to try to pick you up - yeah that's sure to charm any woman.

But on Male Fantasy Planet sexual assault - and the fear of sexual assault - don't exist, and in fact this aggressive asshole is portrayed as a victim of women. The series tag line is "PUNCHED IN THE FACE BY LOVE AND THE WOMEN WEARING THE BRASS KNUCKLES."

On Male Fantasy planet men are the victims of women, no matter how stupid or idiotic the man behaves. And on this planet the word "love" means "sexual attraction based purely on physical attributes."

Well it must be tough to be a straight white man on Planet Earth - no wonder they have to resort to these fantasy scenarios - gets them away from the harsh realities of real life.

Straight white male fantasy web series "Compulsive Love"

Lots and lots and lots of women  feel compelled to have sex with this guy
- in male fantasy land. I feel compelled to offer him a piece of Cheddar.

I didn't have to be told that the people responsible for "Compulsive Love" were a bunch of straight white men. The casting of the series made that crystal clear.

 However, I was also empirically correct.

Only in straight white man fantasy land does a scrawny, wimpy rat-faced man with a high-pitched voice have lots of sexual adventures with lots of women, without having to pay them.

I ended up watching the trailer because I have 62 mutual Facebook friends with one of the people responsible for this. I couldn't actually watch  an episode because they're all locked (behind a pay wall, I assume) but I'm guessing I would be as appalled by an episode as I am by the trailer purely based on the casting alone. The trailer shows rat face in sexual situations with more than one woman, which is unbelievable - hell I can't imagine even one woman wanting him - which automatically lets me know that this web series is most emphatically not aimed at straight women. And presumably they are not prostitutes since he spouts something about love at the beginning of the trailer. If they were prostitutes and he just kept falling in love with prostitutes - that I could believe.

This is why gay male and straight female playwrights should be wary of working with any project dominated by straight men, especially as directors. They are completely resistant to casting the male object of desire using an actor who is actually hot.

I worked with two straight white male directors and can testify to this. Oliver Butler directed a play of mine ten years ago, and although I was impressed by much of his work as a director, I was very disappointed by his casting choice for the male lead in my play. The character was supposed to be a very hot guy and instead Butler cast a very average-looking guy. Because as far as straight men are concerned, any male actor, as long as he isn't actually physically deformed, is good enough to play a hot guy.

And then there was the dread Edward Einhorn who, in addition to being a litigious and ego-inflated asshole, also tried to cast a seriously effeminate man as the title character in my TAM LIN. And I don't just mean the actor was effeminate in real life - that would have been OK - I mean he was incapable of acting non-effeminate in the role. A role in which he was the object of desire for a mortal woman and the Queen of the Faeries in mediaeval Scotland.

Einhorn seemed actually surprised when I vetoed his casting choice. Although maybe that was due to Einhorn's utter contempt for the creative rights of playwrights as much as anything else.

More evidence: I read somewhere that the Mad Men series creator Matthew Weiner was reluctant to cast Jon Hamm in the lead because - get this - he was too attractive.

Being "too attractive" is of course never an issue when casting female actors. At least not for the straight white men who still completely dominate the media.

Obviously the straight white men responsible for "Compulsive Love" had the same initial impulse as Weiner when it came to casting their lead, but unlike Weiner, were unable to get over themselves. Because if they put a hot man in the lead, it would have ceased to be the fantasy world they prefer; women might have wanted to watch the series, and that would have given it girl cooties and made it less kewl; and it would remind the series creators of the uncomfortable fact that in real life women prefer to have sex with hot men.

Compulsive Love is being promoted as a "romantic comedy" and as I noted a couple of days ago, the genre was destroyed when it became dominated by people who don't actually like women.

The true meaning of Valentine's Day

It's the misogyny, stupid

Writers at Vulture dot come just cannot for the life of them figure out what killed the romantic comedy. Amanda Dobbins is mystified. What happened, when "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days" was so good?

Well I haven't seen that movie, so I don't know if it's so good - it looked cheesy to me, like so many Hollywood romantic comedies, so I couldn't be bothered.

Really the genre has gone downhill since His Girl Friday, from 1940. And the female lead in that movie was originally written for a man - that should give you a hint why it was a successful romantic comedy - the woman wasn't a complete loser. 

One of the commenters on the Dobbins story actually suggested that "Knocked Up" and "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" were "successful romantic comedies." That should be a big clue as to why there's a problem with the genre - because that kind of "romantic comedy" celebrates misogyny, and pairs ugly, slobby man-babies with hot but uptight women. If "How to Lose a Guy" seems good in comparison to the "romantic comedies" of Apatow and the like, maybe it's because at least Matthew McConaughey is an attractive man.

Why is the romantic comedy dying?  Because it's a genre run by people who hate its target audience. 

NYCPlaywrights online

I've been getting a lot of inquiries lately about people wanting to "join" NYCPlaywrights and attend meetings. Probably thanks to the February Play of the Month and my posting photos from the reading review of the semi-finalists last week.

I'm tempted to start up the meetings again, it's nice to see such enthusiasm... but then I remember the bad old days, and I don't mean just when the founders of Playsmiths, who were members of NYCPlaywrights, decided to start their own playwrights group by attacking me on Facebook (for reasons that have never been clear to me other than that I didn't agree with them on the quality of some plays) and then absconding with the NYCPlaywrights mailing list.

No, it isn't really that because that kind of thing only happened once in the 11-year history of the NYCPlaywrights membership/meeting period, and it certainly didn't hurt NYCPlaywrights membership - if anything the membership started growing even faster after that.

The real problem as I've blogged about here previously is the old man issue. Retired men were on track to becoming the majority of NYCPlaywrights members, and it was awful. It wasn't only that they wrote plays I hated - all genders and age groups write plays I hate - it was that their plays were hate-able for the very specific reason that  their attitudes about race and gender had stopped evolving by about the early 1970s.

There was one old guy who wrote a play with the favorite old-guy theme of an old guy getting involved with a much-younger woman. That was annoying enough, but then there was a never-ending scene where the old guy lead character explains how he made a bundle in numismatics. To this day a former member of NYCPlaywrights has only to say the word "numismatics" to get us both laughing.

And every single time we did a reading of that numismatics scene, he always got feedback where people told him that they were bored senseless. And he would go home, change one or two sentences, make us sit through the scene yet again, and then wonder why he got the same feedback.

And then there was the old guy who wrote a play with a character who was basically a Stepin Fetchit. He was mystified by the negative response he received for that character.

But it isn't only old guys. What old guys had in common with almost everybody else who was a member of NYCPlaywrights was that they didn't do readings to improve their plays - they did readings so that everybody would tell them how great their plays were. And some of them were truly shocked when they got feedback that wasn't 100% positive - because all the play readings they'd ever done before had received 100% positive feedback - from audiences that consisted entirely of their friends and family.

I used to talk myself blue, suggesting that when member playwrights had readings, they sit in the back and observe the audience. This is the best form of honest feedback - Jeff Sweet wrote a very good article about it. But invariably they sat in the first row, slack-jawed, staring at the actors during the reading, and then asked for verbal feedback afterwards.

I finally realized what a huge waste of time and money it was for me to rent space on a weekly basis for people who couldn't write a decent grocery list. People would actually suggest to me that I "get better writers" to join the group. Well people always have advice for situations they don't know the first thing about - there are very few good writers anywhere, and then NYCPlaywrights was charging a fee, which was expensive for younger people struggling to pay rent in Manhattan, but very cheap for retired old men from the suburbs of Long Island and North Jersey, looking for a hobby and a chance to imagine that the young female actors who showed up to read might be impressed by their old-man plays and offer to become their mistresses.

No, I don't think I'll put up with that again. NYCPlaywrights can stay as an online phenomenon.

Black History in a nutshell

The Library of Congress is calling it African American History Month instead of Black History Month which is probably more appropriate - I don't think that the focus is on the history of all peoples of African heritage - which really means all humanity if you want to get technical and subscribe to the "out of Africa" theory like most scientists do.

There are lots of other good resources for this history month, such as the Smithsonian's and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History - the founders of Black History Month (so if they call it "Black History Month"...) so I won't go into the timeline or the Civil Rights movement or all the Black leaders and artists and inventors etc. Instead, I will say this - the more I read about the history of Black people in America from many different sources, the more I realize:

Black people built America; and then gave it a beautiful and vibrant culture, including inventing jazz, blues, rock and roll and hip-hop - in other words the entire world's favorite music; and then gave us one of the best presidents of all time, and all of this while being treated like absolute shit - up to and including 300 years of being classified as property. There is no achievement to match this in the history of the world. America owes a debt to Black people that it will never be able to repay.

That's what we should be thinking about for Black History Month.

Music theory notes

My music theory course is over, and before I begin the next level it's time to review some of the more interesting things that I learned in the first course:

Major vs. minor

The real deciding difference between any major and minor key (like C Major vs. C minor) is the third degree, also known as the mediant, also known as the third note of the standard chord triad. For instance, the C Major scale triad is C - E - G, but the C minor triad is C - Eb - G. Wikipedia has a helpful graphic to demonstrate the differences:

C MAJOR

c minor

Three minor flavors

While there is only one major scale there are three possible minor scales:
The natural minor scale looks like this:

i - iiº - III - iv - v - VI - VII

But apparently the natural minor produces a not entirely pleasing sound and so there are two variations:

Harmonic minor - the third is augmented and the seventh is minor and diminished.

i - iiº - III+ - iv - v - VI - ♮viiº

Melodic minor - (compared to natural minor) the second is no longer diminished, the third is augmented, the fourth has gone from minor to major, the sixth has gone from major to minor diminished and the seventh is minor diminished.

i - ii - III+ - IV - v - viº - ♮viiº

Equal temperament vs. just intonation

This was a real revelation, that thanks to the piano, just intonation could no longer be used to tune instruments, at least when the instruments were being played with piano accompaniment. However, apparently when string quartets are tuning without a piano, they are more likely to go with just intonation. Wikipedia has an entry.

Diatonic vs. Chromatic

The reason for all this business with diminished and augmented intervals is due to the fact that Western music references two completely different systems - the old school 7-note diatonic system (think of it as only the white keys of a piano octave) and the new school 12-note chromatic system (the white keys and the black keys of a piano octave.) It took quite a bit of time for me to get it, but eventually I did.

C Clef

Turns out there is another clef besides G and F - I've always been too piano-centric in my music to realize this.

On Gigi

Gigi's great-aunt gives her ho lessons - this one is
on distinguishing good from crappy gem stones -
you get gems from rich guys in exchange for sex.

The big snow storm gave me a little extra free time, and I decided to check out the Academy Award-winning (1958) movie Gigi. Naturally I was reluctant to see it, since it features mega-creeper Maurice Chevalier singing "Thank Heaven for Little Girls" which opens up the movie. And it isn't bad enough the geezer is checking out young women, he has to make sure to (a) sneer at older women (women his own age) and (b) brag about how some men don't want to get married while all women - he suggests - do. Which, considering it was set in 1900 and written in 1958, was true, but not because women are more suited to marriage than men, as the Patriarchy insists, but because women up until the mid-1960s had little choice but to marry - the other options were spinsterhood or some form of prostitution. Which still only applies to first world countries. In some third world country right now a little girl is being sold by her parents to an old man for legal sex slavery.

It's an all-around revolting spectacle.

However, I read the synopsis at Wikipedia and decided to give Gigi a try. Because it turns out that Chevalier's character represents corruption, cynicism and dissipation - he plays the uncle of the leading man, Gaston who is only ten years older than Gigi - and Gigi appears to be a high school-aged student.

Apparently Gigi's grandmother and great-aunt are grooming her to be a wealthy man's mistress, which was surprisingly daring for a movie made in 1950s Hollywood. And eventually, against Uncle Creeper's advice, Gaston proposes marriage to Gigi instead of a less respectable arrangement.

Interestingly, Chevalier was involved with an older woman, Mistinguett when he was 23 and she was 35. But at least he wasn't in high school.

Anyway, so the movie rejects cynicism and prostitution for romantic and respectable love, and I did like Gigi's honest and unjaded personality, and Leslie Caron is charming. But it's still kind of boring, and the songs aren't especially catchy or well-performed in spite of the "Thank Heavens" notoriety.

And speaking of creepy old men - the music for Gigi was arranged and conducted by Andre Previn, the one-time husband of Mia Farrow and the adoptive father of Soon-Yi Previn.

More evidence of Mr. Fuzz's odd predilections

Look at this pretty black kitty cat in a box.

Why do black cats like to lie on dark fabrics? You'll reach out to pick up a coat or whatever on the sofa, only to find a black cat in the middle of it. But Miss Willow looks so cute, wherever she is.

Sitting by the window, watching the snow fall...

NYCPlaywrights hears from an Angry White Man

People rarely send messages to the NYCPlaywrights email address, much less misogynistic rants, but this landed in my "junk" email folder today:

How do you justify advertising things like artemsia which has a big sign saying women only? What if someone said no women? would you advertise for them? How about no blacks…white only writers…would you advertise for them? Don't answer…if you say yes, you're lying and if you say no, you've just proved my point…I just don't get it…never have..,.never will…and please spare me the swill about under-represented women in  theatre etc…everyone is underrepresented and promoting shit writing by women doesn't make it better.

I considered a variety of responses but after googling his email address and finding out that he asked a question of a psychic web site concerning the possible portents of a bird in his basement flying away when he opened a window, I decided maybe I didn't want to engage with him.

As I posted on the NYCPlaywrights web site...

NYCPlaywrights salutes the theater companies awarded the first "50/50 Applause Awards" by the ICWP. The winners were recognized for producing seasons in which half (or more) of the plays were written by women. 

If you are located near these theaters we urge you to give them your support.

• Cleveland Public Theatre, Cleveland, OH 
• Little Colonel Theatre, Pee Wee Vally, KY
• Nora Theater, Cambridge, MA
• Playwrights Horizons, New York, NY
• Symmetry Theatre, Berkeley, CA

Reading fun

Nice work from some great actors in the reading/evaluation of the NYCPlaywrights Play of the Month semi-finalist submissions. And we did the readings in my actor pal Kitty's awesome apartment which is a stone's throw away from the 45th Street Theater, where I produced my JANE EYRE ... and here it is only five years later and I'm almost completely recovered from the financial and emotional trauma of that production.

Kitty and her husband took advantage of low-rates to move into Manhattan, thanks to the financial melt-down rentpocalypse. Unlike me they bought their apartment instead of renting. The guy who lived there before them was there for 45 years.

They call me Dr. Worm

For some reason I can't stop listening to this song.

Your cocktail smelt of elderflowers

I just discovered elderflower liqueur, which oddly enough seems to be the new big thing in cocktails, but I discovered it via the Sunday Philosophy Club, the series of books by Alexander McCall Smith. In one installment, Isabel Dalhousie and some neighbors discuss making elderflower cordials, a non-alcoholic beverage. Apparently elderflower cordials are a big thing in Scotland, if Smith is to be believed.

So I became interested in elderflowers and discovered the St. Germain brand of elderflower liqueur - apparently it's quite recent in development and ridiculously artisinal:

Fine artisanal French liqueur made from 100% fresh, handpicked elderflowers. Subtle yet complex flavor that is low in sugar content, roughly half that of other liqueurs. 

The first of its kind, St-Germain Elderflower Liqueur is the creation of Robert Cooper, third generation distiller and former owner of Chambord liqueur. 

Cooper began developing St-Germain in 2001 after watching the surge in popularity of nonalcoholic elderflower cordials in top cocktails accounts in London, Sydney and New York. He knew a liqueur made exclusively from the fresh elderflowers would taste better, be more stable, versatile and truer to the flower’s unique flavor profile than the sugar and water-based cordials. Shortly thereafter, Cooper set out, using his savoir faire of fine liqueurs, particularly ones produced in France, to create St-Germain, the world’s first elderflower liqueur. 

Refusing to settle for cultivated, freeze dried or frozen blossoms, which is what the non-alcoholic cordials use, Cooper discovered that using 100% wild elderflowers, created a superior liqueur. The process of gathering the delicate blossoms for St-Germain is a carefully orchestrated sequence of events, which must be completed during the short three to four day span when the blossoms peak. In the Alps, bohemian farmers handpick the elderflowers and transport them via bicycle to depots, or private homes equipped with scales and special crates where they are meticulously guarded before arriving at the distillery to be used for the production of St-Germain.

Considering that the creation of this liqueur involves hand-picking and bicycle transportation by bohemian Alpine farmers, it's quite a bargain - you can get this massive fancy bottle of the stuff for under $30.

And the liqueur is so new that it's still possible to invent your own cocktail recipes with it, which I did - I invented what I call the Elderflower Citrus Mimosa. The classic brunch mimosa is typically made with champagne, but I actually think that all wines are too grape-y for elderflower liqueur - it's best with citrus fruits.

The Elderflower Citrus Mimosa

• 1 part elderflower liqueur
• 2 parts fresh grapefruit juice
• 2 parts club soda
• splash of orange juice

Serve over ice in a cocktail glass.

Delicious! And when people look at you quizzically when you mention "elderflowers" you can point out that they come from the same plant as elderberries, you know, as in "your father smelt of elderberries." If they don't get that reference they don't deserve any elderflower liqueur type drinks.

Hookah Row

Apparently the "hookah lounge" is all the rage now and yet somehow I had entirely missed out on this until this past weekend when I went to my Citibank on Steinway Avenue. Right next to the bank were five or six of these hookah lounges, all right next to each other. They each have their own theme - if you click on the photo you can see the one at the end of the hookah row appears to be a "Mexican Grill Hookah Lounge." It seems to be a fancy way to say "you can smoke in this restaurant."

Speaking of smoking, I'm old enough to remember when a good percentage of Americans smoked cigarettes - I smoked when I was a teenager and so did most of my friends. But now... I was walking home from the subway the other day and suddenly I was aware of this funny sensation around my nose - and I started to kind of panic about it, like "what's wrong with me? why do I feel this funny sensation around my nose?" for a few seconds and then I suddenly realized, oh, somebody a half-block ahead of me was smoking a cigarette.

Yes, things have definitely changed, vis-a-vis smoking habits in this country.

Dirt Candy

The menu display outside Dirt Candy.

I finally got to go to Dirt Candy recently -  it only took a month's wait for a reservation. For 9:30 PM.

Dirt Candy specializes in vegetables, and its owner/chef Amanda Cohen is something of a celebrity chef - she was even on Iron Chef against Morimoto - although he won. My daughter and her chef partner had been enthusing about this place for months so I thought it would be fun to check it out.

It was worth the wait, in spite of the fact that the entree I ordered (corn) was mediocre, because the fennel soup appetizer was amazing.

But even more amazing was the bottle of the Goldmuskateller we had with dinner. The restaurant blog provided a description that prompted me to order it:

Even by our standards, the Goldmuskateller is a weirdo, but a surprisingly friendly one. It’s got a strong musky smell that oozes out of the glass like a low-lying fog, making you think that a family of gigantic grapes just sat down next to you, but it’s cut with a sharp, crisp apple aroma that reminds you of biting into Autumn’s first apples. Then you take a sip of it and it’s something else entirely. This is a very hot wine, so when you taste it first you get a nice, mellow taste of honey and then you get slapped across the cheek with an astringent pine flavor, almost like you’re drinking nettles soaked in honey. It’s a pretty neat trick: you’re lured in by the smell of apples and musk, you get a taste of honey, and then your tongue gets lashed for being so cheeky. It sounds violent, but to be honest it’s really enjoyable. Rather than a mellow wine lulling you into an alcoholic stupor, the Goldmuskateller is a hot-blooded wine that kicks you awake.

Although we had the 2011 instead of the 2007, or 2010 listed on the site but based on this description they are very similar. I've never had a wine like it. I will definitely be tracking this down and buying it.

The restaurant blog has other good stuff. This spoof posting for "Man Candy" is pretty great - especially what looks to be the covers of actual manly magazines for men. I especially like the giant otter attack.

My Casino Adventure

Margaret Cho!

We went to see Margaret Cho perform at the Foxwoods Casino on Friday night. The casino is in Mashantucket, Connecticut so it was quite a schlep. But I had never been to a casino before and so was curious.

Margaret Cho was great, as always. And she did impressions of both her mother and an English woman, and I love those impressions. She also did quite a bit of banter with the audience, which was impressive - it's one thing to have a comedy routine, it's another to be spontaneously funny. I really am a sucker for people who are naturally funny (and can do impressions) - I consider them geniuses, especially stand-up comedians. Their minds just work so fast, and in a way that's far more wondrous to me than an idiot savant who can do instantaneous prime number calculations, or tell you what day of the week any date was for ten thousand years. I stayed with a manic-depressive boyfriend for much longer than I should have because he was the funniest human being I ever personally knew, as well as an autodidact, and it was never boring to talk to him. This made up for the fact that 50% of the time he liked to talk about killing himself.

Casino or mall?

Cho also mentioned that she had had a relationship with Chris Issak, which very much impressed me. I can understand if Cho, a bisexual, would be off men now - once you've had Chris Isaak it's pretty much downhill from there - especially if what she says in this New York Magazine article from ten years ago is true.

So I was impressed by Margaret Cho - the casino, not so much. I was flabbergasted by how much like a shopping mall it is, with crappy over-priced restaurants and knick-knack shops. Except that instead of Duane Reades and Gaps, they had a bunch of casinos.

Another thing that was different from any mall I had seen is that in between the restaurants, shops and casinos, they had what appeared to be facades of buildings, like the Western town facades they created for Western movies. There was a City Hall and some olde tyme shoppes.

Theatre Noir

The most interesting of these was something called Theatre Noir. If there is not a Theatre Noir there should be - what a great name.

One thing that really disappointed me was that I had heard that casinos hand out free drinks all the time - at least that's what I'd always heard about Las Vegas. Although since I was the evening's designated driver I couldn't take advantage anyway. But apparently they don't hand out free drinks, neither in the theater where Margaret Cho performed (although they sold drinks there) nor in the mall part. Apparently you had to go into one of those little shop-like casinos to get free drinks. Which I did not do.

When we decided to go to see Cho at Foxwoods, I naturally assumed that I would do a tiny amount of gambling, just to have the experience, but two things killed my desire - the first was the appallingly mall-like atmosphere, and the second thing was the thugs. As we walked around the mall after the Cho show, I was taking pictures with my iPhone. So there I was a full thirty feet away from one of these little casino/shops and I pointed my iPhone at the entrance of the casino. And these two security thugs screamed at me "you can't take pictures of the casino!"

Here they are, on the right, dressed in what looks like police uniforms. The one thug looks like he's getting ready to pull out a gun to shoot me:

Casino security thugs - you can click on the photo to get a better view

I mean, I know that casinos are all paranoid about people devising tricks to beat the house, because the house always wins etc., but really? Me taking an iPhone picture from 30 feet outside the casino/shop entrance is part of some plot to rig the system against the casino? Well to hell with that - I'm never going into a casino if they're such a bunch of controlling fascists. I have no desire to play games with money anyway. Sheesh.

And last but not least, there were no clocks in the entire mall. It was very creepy. I already knew that I wasn't a casino kind of person, but now I really know it. It's a nasty, depressing place, with all the style and class of a suburban mall and all the charm of low-level mafiosi.

Next time I'll wait for Margaret Cho to come to New York City.

Have I mentioned lately that I believe David Mamet has completely lost it?

David Mamet has once again been paid to embarrass himself by spewing more kooky wingnuttery. This time, in Newsweek, he's expressing his crusty-old-man paranoia that Barack Obama is trying to take his guns on behalf of our Marxist (yes he uses the word Marxist) gubmint, and meanwhile Obama has the nerve to expect secret service protection! Just who does this guy Obama think he is?

It's hardly worth me addressing the lunacy since those duties have been handled by Media Matters for America, and Salon and The Guardian and Andrew Sullivan and Michael Tomansky and Scott Lemieux. Although I do want to give Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Atlantic special focus. He writes:

I was absolutely stunned by this paragraph: 

The Founding Fathers, far from being ideologues, were not even politicians. They were an assortment of businessmen, writers, teachers, planters; men, in short, who knew something of the world, which is to say, of Human Nature. Their struggle to draft a set of rules acceptable to each other was based on the assumption that we human beings, in the mass, are no damned good -- that we are biddable, easily confused, and that we may easily be motivated by a Politician, which is to say, a huckster, mounting a soapbox and inflaming our passions. 

Which is also to say the Founding Fathers were also slaves, and by slaves I mean white guys who wore wigs. All jest aside, I find the process that produces this sort of work to be utterly amoral. I've said this before, but this is the kind of writing that would get you bounced out of any decent essay writing class at a credible university. Words have meanings. You cannot change the fact that Thomas Jefferson served in the Virginia House of Burgesses because it's unfortunate for your argument. Unless you have a name like David Mamet.

But I would argue that the real issue of having a name like David Mamet is that nobody is able to fact-check his essays, let alone tell him no, his services as an essayist are not required because he is incapable of reasoning coherently. And so what we will see for who knows how long - it could be years - is that this fear-filled old man with a failing mind will be allowed to share the evidence of his decline again and again, writing screeds that are universally recognized as incoherent and factually wrong. And writers like Coates will assume that Mamet is deliberately spreading lies out of pure amorality.

Eventually, though, even the secular worship of a Great Man of the Arts will finally be insufficient to hide the truth: Mamet isn't saying these things because he is amoral and cynical, it's because he can no longer tell the difference between fact and fiction.

Although knowing that David Mamet looks to Glenn Beck for answers should be enough to clue anybody in - just this week Jon Stewart spoofed the incoherent freakshow that is Glenn Beck's Weltanschauung. It's kind of Stewart's speciality.

How much longer will the humiliating display of David Mamet's decline go on before they finally stop parading him around like a pinhead to be gawked at?

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I love Balck Dragon

Behold the Balck Dragon. I have this at least once a week for lunch - there's a sushi place in the building where I work. It's supposed to be "black" dragon to differentiate it from the Green Dragon, which has avocado instead of eel. But they never change the label - week after week it's the Balck Dragon.

If you had told me when I was a teenager that one day I would love to eat eel I would have thought you were nuts. Of course I hadn't even heard of sushi until I was in my 20s and never tried it until I was in my mid-30s. Although to be honest I don't actually like classic sushi with raw fish - I prefer my fish cooked. 

But eel really is exquisite - although not in large amounts. For lunch once I had the "eel bowl" and that was just too much eel. But the amount on the Balck Eel is just right.

Behold its eely goodness up close:

Music education resources

• Good-ear.com - ear training.

• Ricci Adam's Musictheory.net - lessons, exercises, tools, products

• Teoria - music theory web - tutorials, exercises, reference, articles

• Berklee has online courses in music theory

• The Glossary of Analytics Symbols in music

• Music Analysis course - free at the MIT Open Courseware site.

• Also Introduction to Music Composition

• Standford University - Tutorial: Music Composing in Garageband

• It's the Virtual Keyboard!

Sybillll!!!!

I am just worn out from watching Downton Abbey tonight. What a heart-wringer!

There are three characters on Downton Abbey that I just adore.

Isobel Crawley, Matthew "in-the-money" Crawley's mother, is a wonderful person. Although she's semi-gentry she is forward-thinking and egalitarian and she is doing her best to help prostitutes, up to and including taking a former Downton Abbey maid, who became a prostitute, into her home, even though her uptight snobby maid refused to stay and work with a former prostitute. The snobby Dowager doesn't like Isobel which proves how cool and progressive she is. 

Oh boy do I love Doctor Clarkson. He's absolutely adorable, with his Scottish accent and his scientific method - also an egalitarian. No wonder he and Isobel made such a great team together working at the hospital during the Great War. And David Robb is extremely attractive for a man of 65. And I have fond memories of him as Laertes to Derek Jacobi's Hamlet. Maybe I should go back to Edinburgh and see if I can get me a Scotsman. 

And the third of my 3 favorite characters...

NOOOO! SYBILLL! WHY???

She was just so perfect - kind yet progressive, just like these other two. She also worked at the hospital. All the characters I loved worked in the hospital - and Thomas, one of the baddies almost turned good under the influence of these angels when he worked at the hospital.

Look at Sybil in this picture wearing her wonderful pre-historic pantsuit, like the awesome radical proto-feminist she was.

Oh noooo! Sybilllll!










Some people may think that Downton Abbey is all girly-girl and white bread, so I got a kick out of watching this guy's take on Season 3 Episode 4 of Downtown Abbey (spoiler alert!)

Sunday brunch at the Nomester's

You think you have problems...

One of the problems with doing theater is that a considerable percentage of actors are horrible people - when they aren't raging alcoholics. I've certainly had my own problems with  them.

Probably the worst was an incredibly arrogant and manipulative female actor: when she wasn't trying to undermine my relationships with everybody else in the production (I was directing my own play) or insulting the stage crew, she was trying to direct my play for me. This in spite of the fact that she herself had no directing experience. And she was so unashamed of her behavior that when I blogged about my disgust with her (but not by name), after the show closed, she emailed a whole bunch of people to tell them to go and read my blog. She actually wanted people to know that I thought she was an asshole.

Once I realized what she had been up to, I said to a friend of mine: "I bet she's going around telling people that the real reason I don't like her is because I'm jealous of her beauty." I know this sounds absurd, but that's how fucked in the head I thought she was. And what's more, I was right. Years later a friend of hers emailed me and said:

"...your jealousy when you have maligned female actress friends of mine, thinking they were treated better than you because of their looks..."

I knew exactly who was meant because the email writer and I only had one female actress acquaintance in common.

The email was good for a laugh, since I was not nearly as impressed with the female actress friend's appearance as she was herself.

So she was an asshole - but at least she wasn't an alcoholic. Otherwise I could have had a situation like Paul Rudnick's in the premiere of his I HATE HAMLET in his dealings with Nicol Williamson. According to Rudnick, Williamson:

...began murmuring directions, while onstage, to other cast members: “Is that what you’re doing?,” “God, that’s awful,” and worse. During scenes in which the script called for him to hover, as a ghost, and eavesdrop on the action, he would leave the stage.

I have kicked myself since my production with the female actor friend because I didn't fire her immediately after she tried to direct my play, but Williamson wasn't fired either:

In the Post’s weekend edition, a photograph of the duel filled the entire front page, under the headline “‘Hamlet’ actor storms off stage after co-star whacks him in butt.” There was coverage all over the world, and TV news crews stood outside the theatre every night. I learned to say “No comment” in many languages. 

Evan Handler wanted to bring Nicol and the production up on charges. A meeting was called, and the producers and I tried to determine a course of action. Should we fire Nicol? We realized that he had been brilliantly, maliciously sly: because of all the publicity, he now was the show, and no other star in his right mind would step into his role.

So your alcoholic asshole actors are worse than your non-alcoholic asshole actors. Although in either case, the assholes don't take any responsibility for their bad behavior - and don't even feel bad about it:

After the final performance, I had no intention of talking to Nicol. I was still too angry. As I was heading upstairs, to bid farewell to the more lucid actors, the door to Nicol’s dressing room swung open. He stood there, a soused, lunatic, fifty-two-year-old Hamlet. We stared at each other. Nicol finally spoke, and his tone was both kind and accusing. He said, “You knew this was going to happen.” And then he smiled and shut the door. 

So with all this mishegas, why bother to do theater? Aren't people in the financial services industry crazy enough for one lifetime?

I can't speak for Rudnick, but for me one of the reasons that I want to do my own work, in particular JULIA & BUDDY, is because it's the kind of play I want to see - and there are so few plays written that are the kind I want to see. Maybe it's Shakespeare's fault - I got turned onto theater through the BBC's production of AS YOU LIKE IT, with Helen Mirren in the lead, and not only are so few playwrights close to Shakespeare's level, they don't even try to do the kind of plays he did. How many plays about a pair of female cousins who go off to have funny/romantic adventures are even produced in contemporary theater? Pretty much none.

And pulling off a successful theater production - even if it is an off-off Broadway Showcase Code production - in spite of the expense and the hassle is in itself a great accomplishment.

Fun fact - Helen Mirren hated Nicol Williamson too:

When Williamson appeared in the 1981 film Excalibur, director John Boorman cast him as Merlin opposite Helen Mirren as Morgana over the protests of both actors; the two had previously appeared together in Macbeth, with disastrous results, and disliked each other intensely.

Yo, Kanter, I think the word you mean is "aura"

As seen on the Q train.

Miss Kanter "will not give you any false hopes only what (she feels) by the energy and power or your orah..."

100 submissions & sundry subjects

The NYCPlaywrights Play of the Month call for plays has now received 100 submissions.

And by some miracle I was actually able to find, through all the submissions that ignored the stipulation that it should a "two-hander" and all the submissions that ignored the stipulation that should be about love, seven plays that I could actually do readings of without puking.

Completely changing the subject, Krugman has a few choice words about Paul Ryan.

And although I think that Obama's second inauguration speech is beautiful and important, I did enjoy Jon Stewart's bits about it.

"...the first time a president has name-checked a gay bar at his inauguration since Rutherford B. Hayes reminisced about working at The Loaded Musket"

and

"by the way, Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall aren't just civil rights milestones, they're also what your most annoying liberal friend from college named her cats."

Both of these had me ROTFLMAO. Well OK, not really, but I did LOL.

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Another musical mystery solved

It's the major scale chord progression.

More about diatonic triads here.

...through Seneca Falls, and Selma and Stonewall

 Wow do I love this speech! And I got chills when he said (beginning at minute 13:25 in this video):

 We, the People, declare today that the most evident of truths, that all of us are created equal, is the star that guides us still, just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma and Stonewall, just as it guided all those men and women sung and unsung who left footprints along this great Mall to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone. 

 Amazing and unprecedented. I love my president today.

 And Rachel Maddow provides an excellent perspective on the bullshit Obama has had to deal with from the Republicans his entire first term - and how he finally got fed up with them:

 

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The odd predilections of Mr. Fuzz

Here we see one of the many odd predilections of Mr. Fuzz - sometimes he likes to lounge around on his back like a person. You would never see Miss Willow, my more normal cat, chilling like this.

Another of his odd predilections is that he can't really enjoy eating unless he has a mousie toy to roll around in his cat food. It has to be a real fur mousie, not a fake fur mousie and he can totally tell the difference. The best thing of all is to skin the mousie toy and chew up the fur, leaving a plastic chassis that I will later find on the floor somewhere. I guess I should feel lucky he doesn't try to eat the plastic.

He hates water. This is normal for most cats and I'm not saying Miss Willow loves water, but Mr. Fuzz doesn't even like to get a drop on himself. If he does he runs away in terror. To my knowledge he's never had a bad experience with water, and he likes to drink it. But it just cannot touch his fur. Which turns out to be convenient because all I have to do to get him to stop doing something naughty - like trying to eat Miss Willow's food - is to pretend I'm flicking water at him. I must have done it once with actual water, although I don't remember, but he sure does and that memory still causes him to panic at the sight of flicky-water hand.

His newest odd predilection is he likes me to carry him around the house on my shoulder. He just hangs over my shoulder, checking everything out as I walk around the apartment - and since there's only four rooms including a bathroom and a kitchen, it doesn't take that long. And it can't be especially thrilling for him, he's already gotten to the highest point in every room in the apartment, although sometimes I boost him up to the top shelf of the hall closet, which he can't reach by himself. He enjoys that, although he almost immediately starts looking around on the walls and the ceiling of the closet - I assume for a secret passage.

K-man raises interesting issues

Two Krugman blog posts of interest - first he celebrates the Republicans blinking in a showdown with Obama...

But it appears that the strategy has worked, and it’s the Republicans giving up. I’m happy to concede that the president and team called this one right.
And it’s a big deal. Yes, the GOP could come back on the debt ceiling, but that seems unlikely. It could try to make a big deal of the sequester, but that’s a lot more like the fiscal cliff than it is like the debt ceiling: not good, but not potentially catastrophic, and therefore poor terrain for the “we’re crazier than you are” strategy. And while Republicans could shut down the government, my guess is that Democrats would actually be gleeful at that prospect: the PR would be overwhelmingly favorable for Obama, and again, not much risk of blowing up the world. 

The key point to remember here is that Obama achieves his main goals simply by surviving. Above all, health reform gets implemented, and probably becomes irreversible. 

A good day for sanity, all around.

And he adds this for good measure.

And then he includes a video clip of the well-known moment in "Annie Hall" when Woody Allen pulls Marshall McLuhan out to smack down a Columbia professor. Now as much as I loathe Woody Allen, even I find this scene amusing. Allen does snark very well (I'm sure it helps that he wrote the script) and it was an innovative comedic idea.

And in fact, not only do I give credit to Allen for being innovative, I'll also give him credit for being prescient:

ALVY (Allen's character)

(Reacting again to the man in line) 

Probably on their first date, right?  

MAN IN LINE 

(Still going on) 

 It's a narrow view.  

ALVY 

Probably met by answering an ad in the New York Review of Books. "Thirtyish academic wishes to meet woman who's interested in Mozart, James Joyce and sodomy." 

(He sighs; then to Annie)   

Whatta you mean, our sexual problem?  

ANNIE 

Oh!  

ALVY 

I-I-I mean, I'm comparatively normal for a guy raised in Brooklyn.  

ANNIE 

 Okay, I'm very sorry. My sexual problem! Okay, my sexual problem! Huh?

Allens' description of the 1970s version of an online dating site profile is pretty close to what men actually do post. (In addition to "clever" phrases like "cunning linguist" *shudder*)

But it's interesting to note that in addition to Allen snarking about the guy behind them, they are talking about Annie's "sexual problem." The movie is supposedly based on the actual relationship between Diane Keaton and Woody Allen, and so I'm going to guess that Diane/Annie "sexual problem" is that she just realized she has a sexual relationship with Woody Allen.

Diane Keaton was someone who could have - and did have - a sexual relationship with both Warren Beatty and Al Pacino, so you can well understand why she would get restless after some time period with Woody Allen.

But the dialog does ring true in that many a woman, rather than admit to her boyfriend or husband that she's bored with having sex with him will instead say that the problem is her - that she has a sexual problem.

This truth about women getting bored of sex with the same person faster than men has been suppressed for millennia because monogamy and especially marriage has never been for the benefit of women, so women's sexual desires didn't have anything to do with that social institution. It was for the benefit of the man or the benefit of the woman's parents. And it would be bizarre if it was for the benefit of women - for millennia every culture in the world has been some form of patriarchy - if everything else was arranged to favor men, as of course it is in a patriarchy, why would something as important as sexual relationships be arranged for the benefit of women?

It's only "benefitted" women because until recently women had two options: marriage or a life of impoverished, celibate old-maid-hood.   

And men, even when married, have always had the option of mistresses and/or prostitutes. It's only women who have been forced into compulsory monogamy - or even polygyny.

But it is the genius of the Patriarchy to persistently claim - up to this very day - that marriage is somehow more beneficial for women than for men.

Keaton was well rid of Allen - if she had stayed with him*, it could have been her in Mia Farrow's position. Keaton eventually adopted two children, one a girl. She could have ended up unwittingly serving up fresh meat to gross old pedophile Woody Allen, instead of Farrow.

*and there's no doubt it was Keaton who broke up with Allen. In her autobiography Farrow reveals that Allen still kept Keaton's toothbrush in his bathroom, even while he was in a relationship with Farrow.

The Monkees: the music theory episodes

Thank god I did not imagine this after all.

I distinctly remembered seeing an episode of The Monkees in which one of the Pre-fab Four gets a lesson in music theory from a black musician.

The reason I'm thinking of this is because I got into a discussion about the term "downbeat" with my music theory teacher and told him about this episode. Here is a link to the episode, but only the relevant bit. The black musician is Charlie Smalls. He wrote the musical THE WIZ.

At the end of the episode ("Some Like It Lukewarm") Davy Jones and Charlie Smalls are sitting at the piano:

DAVY:

Tell me, why don't I have soul?

CHARLIE:

You do have soul, but I have to explain it to you rhythmically… Your soul would emanate on the accented beats one and three, where my soul emanates on the accented beats two and four. And to give you a good example of that, the Beatles play hard and funky on the one and three, really, Ringo plays the hardest one and three I've ever heard in my life. Now if you clap four I'll show you. 

(Davy and Charlie then clap and count to four multiple times while Charlie makes a sound like the opening measures of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. That album was less than a year old when this episode was shot, in March 1968.) 

DAVY

...Yeah right... 

CHARLIE

That's the whole thing. It swings. As long as it swings, it's soul... 

DAVY

...One and three is white soul...  

CHARLIE

Right, exactly...Motown soul, which would be - clap again...  

They clap again and this time the accent is on the two and the four... Then Charlie demonstrates "Brazilian soul" with a shaker and then the piano and then they sing a song together. Then they decide everybody has soul but it's just a different kind of soul.

Very little of the Monkees TV show sticks in my memory (not that I've made an especially careful study of it, but anyway...) but this discussion explaining that white music has a 1-3 beat accent and black music has a 2-4 beat accent certainly did. I'm just glad I found it on Youtube to prove I didn't imagine it.

But the strangeness does not end there. Because on the very next episode, Frank Zappa shows up as a guest and appears to be mocking Charlie Smalls' music theory.

I was amazed my music teacher hadn't heard about this episode because he adores Frank Zappa and his band has covered the work of Zappa.

(Fun fact - one of the people I hung out with in high school, Blake Lewin, used to do transcription work for Frank Zappa.)

In the beginning of the episode ("The Monkees Blow Their Minds") Zappa and Mike Nesmith engage in zany yet ironic high-jinks, and towards the end of the clip...

NESMITH 

(as "Frank Zappa")

...I wanted to know where the soul of your music was. Is it on the one and the seven, or is it on the one and the five. 

ZAPPA 

(as "Mike Nesmith")

The soul of your music is on the one and the seven, sometimes on the three and the five. The soul of our music, the Monkees' music lies somewhere in between the one and a half, the two and a half, the three and three-quarters and the giant C Major chord on the piano...

Then in a "match cut" as Zappa says, they are seated together at a piano, and Zappa makes a wry remark about the Monkees being "really tricky." And in a little bit Mike and Frank beat a car while a clip of Zappa's "We Are The Other People" plays.

It's cute, but mocking the Monkees is shooting fish in a barrel. But then it's always been my understanding that Frank Zappa was a self-impressed douchebag.

Here he is whining about his mistreatment at the hands of the Plastic Ono Band. Zappa, of course, is the ultra-cool hero of this narrative.

Ugly Australian man passes judgment on women

What is the deal with the Daily Show and its horrible advertisers?

First there is a movie called "Movie 43" and its advertisement asks: "what are all these huge stars doing in this movie?" The only stars I remember seeing in the ad are Richard Gere and Hallie Berry, and since I've never heard of either of them being a shining beacon of integrity or discernment, I'm going to guess that it has something to do with some asshole producers seeking to cash in on the all-powerful moron market offering them big wads of cash. Because really, what other reason could persuade someone to lend their name to such brain-dead swill? I've heard wisecracks from junior high kids that demonstrated a more sophisticated take on race and gender and social mores.

Disgusting slob fantasizing what it would be like
if women wanted to have sex with him.

But even more obnoxious than Movie 43 is an ad for what I assume is a television show that I will never watch. The show advertises itself by depicting an ugly overweight Australian man sitting on a park bench passing harsh judgment on women walking by.

WHO ARE THE ASSHOLES who these advertisers think might watch these shitty movies and TV shows? Maybe I was being idealistic but I assumed that the Daily Show viewers were cooler than this. Apparently advertisers, at least, believe there is a considerable segment of Daily Show viewers who are idiots, misogynists and oafish assholes. Gross.

I love my POTUS!

Color me impressed. A month after the Sandy Hook horror, Obama has accomplished, as the New York Times rightly observes, "Gun Reform for a Generation."

I agree with that editorial for the most part:

It is past time that elected leaders did something about it without worrying, as Mr. Obama said on Wednesday, about getting “an A grade from the gun lobby.” It has been a bipartisan betrayal of the public’s safety, the fault of Democrats and Republicans, and of a string of presidents who have said mournful things after the mass murders at Columbine and Virginia Tech and Aurora and Newtown but did not act. 

Wednesday was the exception. One month after the Newtown, Conn., murders, Mr. Obama presented a comprehensive set of initiatives that was, for a change, structured around what needs to be done and not what political tacticians think the president could get a dysfunctional Congress to pass. Mr. Obama can be frustrating at moments like this, and his delivery today was as professorial as ever. But he stepped up to the broader issue before the nation in remembering the tragedy at Newtown.

I disagree with the NYTimes complaint about Obama being professorial - that's one of my most favorite things about Obama. I adore his professorialiness.

How can you not love this press conference? Although in spite of his professorial attitude, many people, including Krugman had this response to Obama's message to the House Republicans:

Just about everyone has been characterizing Obama’s press conference with “My offer to you is this: nothing.” with an embedded excerpt from The Godfather, Part 2.

That press conference was mainly about the debt ceiling though. Here is the video for the historic gun control moment:

And there couldn't be a more loathsome opponent in this fight if you got them from central casting - crazy gun nuts who see ANY regulation as an assault on their rights. And as the New Yorker's Amy Davidson notes:

It takes the National Rifle Association to build a campaign for guns around resentment toward children—specifically, resentment toward two girls named Sasha and Malia. On Tuesday, a month after twenty first graders were shot dead in Newtown, Connecticut, and a day before President Obama was set to announce a set of proposals for curbing gun violence, the N.RA. released a video that opened with a cartoon image of an arm holding a lunchbox with the Presidential seal on it. “Are the President’s kids more important than yours?” it asks. Obama’s children, the narrator says, have armed guards at their school; why don’t yours?

And later on...

These measures, too, sound relatively modest. And yet Steve Stockman, a Republican Congressman from Texas, has already called them grounds for impeachment, saying “I will seek to thwart this action by any means necessary.” Edwin Meese, who was Reagan’s attorney general, asked by Newsmax about the potential use of executive orders, also said that if Obama “tried to override the Second Amendment in any way, I believe it would be an impeachable offense.” The President is presented not as a political opponent, but as a criminal. 

Only nutty extremists like the NRA and its zombies could have no shame in counting Ed Meese as part of their movement - Meese was quite possibly the worst Attorney General of all time.

But make no mistake - there will be a cadre of extremist gun-mongers who will try something extreme, violent and illegal. I only hope that the end result will be every single one of the extremist gun-monger cadre will end up in jail.