Celebrated Montezuma Rye Whiskey & Me

The "whiskey mark" of the James Maguire Co." printed on a company postcard.

Just in time for St. Patrick's Day, a cousin on my mother's side posted information about our mutual great-great grandfather James Maguire and his whiskey empire.

I knew that my mother's grandfather Thomas Maguire managed his father's wholesale liquor business, but never realized what a big deal it was until this latest cache of information. Not only did James Maguire distribute liquor, he was a partner in a distillery in Bucks County, just a few miles from Bensalem where I grew up - the Philadelphia Pure Rye Whiskey Distillery. According to the Pittsburgh Dispatch:

Upon the tract of 103 acres at Eddington, Bucks county, which has just been purchased from Mrs. Morris, a wealthy Pottsville widow, will be erected an enormous distillery for the production of rye whisky. The plant will be operated by a new company which has just been organized with a capital of $3,000,000, and which will be known as the Philadelphia Pure Rye Whisky Distilling Company. Nearly every large liquor dealer in this city holds stock in the company.
Despite the fact that the organization of the company has been accomplished so quickly, considerable work has already been done, and the contract for the erection of the buildings will be awarded at a meeting of the Board of Directors tomorrow. Quite a number of bids have been received.
Under the present laws of Pennsylvania there can be no president of a liquor company. Angelo Meyers has been elected Chairman; Henry Van Beil, Secretary, and James Maguire, Treasurer. These gentlemen, with Samuel Humphrey and Louis Gilliams, constitute the Board of Directors.

But also, apparently there was a "Whiskey Trust" that was not to be trifled with, because as the article goes on...

"No, we will not be antagonistic to the Whisky Trust, because the trust does not make rye whisky. The principal advantakes to the stockholders will be in establishing a home industry, which will enable us to economize on shipping. We can probably secure sufficient grain from the farmers of Bucks county to keep us going, so we will not suffer from lack of material. Then, too, we are going to try some new experiments in the manufacture of whisky which are entirely original, and which, if successful, will have a tendency to revolutionize things."

Apparently this is what they meant by Whiskey Trust - according to this article it ended in 1895 anyway, so they needn't have worried.

Here is a description and images of the Distillery by way of the Philadelphia Library's collection of historical images from the Hexamer General Surveys from 1894. The Distillery was powered by four steam engines.





So it turns out that there is a market for pre-Prohibition era artifacts associated with the alcohol business. And it turns out that my great-great grandfather James had lots of artifacts celebrating the celebrated Montezuma Rye Whiskey produced by the Philadelphia Pure Rye Whisky Distilling Company, and many are for sale online. Here is more about those collectables.

A "token" - I have no idea what you'd do with a token that has the name and address
of the business as well as its most celebrated product. But there it is.

Pocket mirror case - I assume this is what the bottle looked like. 
Please note that the name "Montezuma" was trade marked.
'

Here is something more utilitarian. A small whiskey flask, with the name and address of the business.

Most useful of all - a shot glass emblazoned with
Montezuma Rye Whiskey James Maguire, Philadelphia

Fancy bottle and decanter?

Broadway show with the Prime Minister of Love

I think Justin Trudeau decided to make his visit to the Broadway show COME FROM AWAY a teaching moment for the Trump administration:

Mr. Trudeau’s celebration of a show about Canadians opening their borders and homes to foreigners in need comes at a complex moment for his country’s relationship with its southern neighbor. Beyond the Trump administration’s demands for reworking the North American Free Trade Agreement, its ban on immigrants from six predominantly Muslim countries, blocked on Wednesday by a federal judge, has set off a surge in asylum seekers fleeing from the United States to Canada, where they have largely been welcomed.

That's my Premiere Ministre D'Amour!

New Monroe auction

One of my favorite items in the auction.

Uh oh, what have I done? I was kicking myself for missing out on previous auctions of Marilyn Monroe stuff at Julien's auctions so I put myself on their mailing list. So I just got a notification of their latest Monroe-themed auction Marilyn Through the Lens - it's only photos, nothing quite as exotic as one of her prescriptions or handwritten poems, but still if I had an extra $600 I would be very tempted...

Another cool photo from the lot.

"Liberal" media has found the problem with Our Times: liberals

By way of David Auburn I saw this latest think piece from the genre "the real reason Donald Trump was elected is condescending liberals." This particular example of the genre is Outsmarted On the liberal cult of the cognitive elite.

First off, if there was ever a media outlet obsessed by being seen as the "cognitive elite" it is The Baffler with its relentless contrarianism. The Baffler is the undergraduate's New Yorker.

I've never found much worthwhile in The Baffler, which regularly publishes the brocialist ladies auxiliary leader Amber A'Lee Frost. While poking around in Baffler after I read the Outsmarted piece, I found yet another example of Frost's feminism bashing, ending in lines which could have been written by any of the anti-feminist attack bitches of the right like Christina Hoff Summers or Katie Roiphe:

As Mary Beard’s “public voice of women” has recently mutated into Bustle’s “industrialized confession,” the sudden profusion of women’s voices can be deceptively encouraging. Still, though, certain speakers and stories are privileged over others. And most troubling of all, the stories themselves are largely processed and packaged to conform to an age-old model of women’s victimhood—one that sells.

This is part of the brocialist mission to bravely stand against up against rape victims - something that Frost and her fellow handmaiden of the bros Liza Featherstone were cackling about a year ago on Facebook. How dare victims of a crime consider themselves victims!

Other examples of the blame liberals first genre can be seen in the New York Times - Are Liberals Helping Trump? and Trump Voters are Not the Enemy.

And Outsmarted isn't the only article in Baffler to attack liberals, not by a long shot - in the very same edition there appears an article called The Revolution Will Not Be Curated which suggests that Donald Trump is the understandable response to liberals "curating" too much. 

There's this real reluctance by media people to acknowledge just how racist and misogynist half the USA really is, so a new culprit must be found - liberals must be demonized in order to make Trump voters look good.

You know what's really condescending? Claiming adults couldn't help themselves for voting for a misogynist, racist, lying con man traitor. They would have voted to express their true values if only liberals weren't such meanies!

Finally the first of five Women in the Age of Trump videos

Geez, took me long enough. Marina Re is awesome here. More on the project.

Fanny Hensel wrote the Easter Sonata bitches!

"Yeah that's right - ME!"

‘Masculine’ sonata believed to be composed by Felix Mendelssohn was actually written by his sister, Fanny.

In honor of International Women’s Day on Wednesday, pianist Sofya Gulyak performed the “Easter Sonata” under the name of the piece’s actual composer, Fanny Mendelssohn, at the Royal College of Music in London. Long thought to have been the work of Fanny’s brother, legendary 19th century composer Felix Mendelssohn, the recital of the 188-year-old sonata marked the first time it had been performed under Fanny’s name in a public concert hall.

Described at times as “masculine,” “violent,” and “ambitious,” authorship of the “Easter Sonata” had been misattributed to Felix ever since the manuscript of the piece, bearing the signature of one “F Mendelssohn,” was discovered by a record collector in a French book shop in 1970.

It wasn’t until 2010 that the piece’s true authorship was confirmed. Angel Mace Christian, a Duke University graduate student, identified that the manuscript had not only been written in Fanny’s handwriting but also contained page numbers that were missing from another manuscript known to have been composed by Fanny.

OKAutism

Oh mon dieu Justin Trudeau!

J'adore mon Premiere Ministre d'Amour!

If he does a French version of this message my head will most surely explode.

Also this:

Video Of Justin Trudeau Celebrating Women’s Day Will Make Your Ovaries Explode

Robert et Mirielle, reunis!

For some reason the actors who played Robert and Mirielle in French in Action a TV show from the mid 1980s, did this skit playing the same characters.

I still don't know French well enough to understand what they are saying but they do mention "French in Action."

The blocking could be better.

We are suffering machines

There's a scene in the immortal Canadian TV series, "Slings and Arrows" where Richard Smith Jones and Holly Day are plotting to make the Burbage Theater Festival more commercial and they both admit they hate Shakespeare and want to minimize the use of his plays in the Festival.

Unfortunately this is true for a lot of people. But it's not because of Shakespeare's plots - people love his plots which is why they keep endlessly repurposing them, especially ROMEO AND JULIET. It's odd, how often I forget R&J when I'm thinking about Shakespeare's plays and it's because the plot of the play so freaking ubiquitous that the play seems like its own thing, not part of the Shakespearean canon.

In any case the reason people don't like Shakespeare is because they don't understand the meaning of many of his passages and also, it must be said, Shakespeare does go on and on at unnecessary length  as often as possible. Now if you love the language - and understand it - this is a plus, but if you don't then watching a production even of a crowd-pleaser like R&J or MIDSUMMER is all thou blah blah blah odds bodkin blah blah blah it is the east and Juliet is the sun blah blah.

For the most part contemporary American playwrights avoid gratuitous speechifying and heightened poetic language in favor of plain-speaking and getting to the point. When they do indulge in heightened language it stands out. Tony Kushner only does it a few times in ANGELS IN AMERICA, most especially when Prior Walter is in heaven and an angel is suggesting to him that he stay dead instead of asking for more life. In the HBO special version it's delivered by Emma Thompson who has done lots of Shakespearean work and she delivers it in, to my ears, a very Shakespearean way:

Life is a habit with you, you have not seen what is to come, we have. What will the grim unfolding of these latter days bring that you or any being should wish to endure them? Death, more plenteous than all heaven has tears to mourn it: the slow dissolving of the great design;
The spiraling apart of the work of eternity; the world and its beautiful particle logic all collapsed, all dead, forever. We are failing, failing, the earth and the angels.
Oh who asks of the order's blessing with apocalypse descending, who demands more life? When death like a protector blinds our eyes shielding from tender nerve more horror than can be borne? Let any being on whom fortune smiles creep away to death before that last dreadful daybreak when all your ravaging returns to you, when morning blisters crimson and bears all life away, a tidal wave of protean fire that curls around the planet and bears the earth clean as bone.

I like this speech but in truth it isn't entirely necessary - Prior has already given back the Book and declared he wants to live. Kushner was enjoying himself, getting a chance to play with phrases like "beautiful particle logic" and "protean fire" which most of the play with its standard American dialect does not permit him to employ.

For the same reason I used fancy language sparingly in my play NORMA JEANE AT THE PAYNE WHITNEY PSYCHIATRIC CLINIC. For the most part the play uses standard American mid-20th century phrasing.  But in the ninth scene - the entirety of scene 9 consists of a monologue slightly longer than two pages. There are three parts to the monologue - in the second part Norma Jeane talks about being molested as a child, in the third part she talks about what happened when her Aunt Ana died. Those are pretty much straight-up exposition. But the first part is me getting a chance to play with protean fire. I should mention that the very first sentence of this passage is a direct quote from Monroe herself, describing the screaming inmates of the ward she was in at the Payne Whitney.

They cry out when life becomes unbearable. And when life is not, it is always a stone's throw away from unbearable. We are suffering machines. When we become overloaded we self-destruct. But usually it doesn't come to that. Usually the machine chugs along for decades. Sometimes early on, a small glitch appears after the machine goes onto the factory floor. It doesn't cause a problem right away. But then things start to happen. Little breakdowns, they have to call in the maintenance crew. They go to work with their wrenches and their duct tape and put the little machine back on line. It does the work it was designed for at a good steady pace. But then one day the duct tape wears out and it reaches critical mass. It begins to emit smoke and buzzes and shakes and rattles and the maintenance crew comes running, they fixed it before they can fix it again, but no, not this time. The alarm bells clang clang clang. And finally the suffering machine breaks down completely and forever. The question isn't "why is anybody so sad," the question is why is anybody ever happy, with the odds stacked against it, when happiness is uncertain and suffering is what we have been created for. 

It's not a coincidence that the topic of both Kushner's and my passages here is LIFE ITSELF. My language isn't heightened as in Kushner's passage, I get my literary jollies through an extended metaphor, which harkens back to a previous monologue in the play in which Norma Jeane talks about the time she worked in a factory.

I don't think the reviewer in HuffPo noticed this passage was different from the rest of the play, much less anybody else in the audience. But I sure knew it. I told the actor playing Norma Jeane that while I preferred she spoke my lines as written throughout the entire performance, the only part of the play I insisted she say exactly as written was this one. As in poetry, it really matters which words appear in which order. And so during one of the performances when she said "...the question is why is anybody so happy" instead of "the question is why is anybody ever happy" it was like a kick in the head. It's only one word, but it changes the meaning of the sentence entirely and makes it stupid - nobody would say "why is anybody so happy." I guess I should consider myself lucky that an American audience sat in attentive silence during a speech that was more philosophy than exposition.

Also instead of "a good steady pace" she kept saying "a good and steady pace" but although not as elegant with the gratuitous and thrown in there, at least it has the same meaning. 

I'm not one to subscribe to the suffering artist theory. I don't think depression and anguish are necessarily the midwives of art. But it so happens that I was really suffering when I wrote this particular passage. And most of the time I believe everything in that passage, especially the last sentence. It is the truest thing I ever wrote.

Last-minute Sprinter

I thought we were going to miss Sprinter this year because it was so warm in February but then just in the nick of time Sprinter arrived this weekend when it got cold again. So Happy Sprinter!

And check it out, turns out Sprinter is a Canadian thing:

18 Struggles All Canadians Understand About “Sprinter”

Have I ever mentioned what a misogynist POS Doug Henwood is?

Here is Doug Henwood attacking Gloria Steinem, as per usual because that's what he and brocialist scum like his wife Liza Featherstone and buddy asshole Amber A'Lee Frost do.






Steinem didn't work directly for the CIA. She asked for funds to help Americans go to India. And this was in 1962. Henwood shared this video on Twitter which says exactly that.

Henwood, ever the shameless brocialist hypocrite was himself once a conservative. But you are supposed to forgive him for that. Because the never-ending brocialist campaign to smear feminism means that they have a much lower bar for brocialist behavior than feminist behavior.

(Henwood) received a B.A. in English from Yale University in 1975. As a youth Henwood was acquainted with Marxism, but for a period late in high school into his early years at Yale, he identified as a conservative, briefly joining the Party of the Right:[1]

And about his tender concern for poor Sigmund Freud - even other socialists recognize the problem of Freud:

Freud’s biological determinism contributed to the reaction. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), he wrote, “The psychological premises on which the system [of communism] is based are an untenable illusion” because “nature, by endowing individuals with extremely unequal physical attributes and mental capacities, has introduced injustices against which there is no remedy.”
While Marxists celebrate the social nature of human beings, Freud saw human beings as innately aggressive, so he feared mass democracy. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) he wrote that being in a crowd overrides the social constraints that keep animal instincts under control. And in The Future of an Illusion (1927) he warned, “These dangerous masses must be held down most severely and kept most carefully away from any chance of intellectual awakening.”
Virtually all research into childhood trauma ceased, and doctors were warned not to believe patient reports of childhood sexual assault. As late as 1975 the Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry (US) estimated the frequency of incest as one case per million.

If it turns out that Henwood is on the payroll of the Koch brothers or some other right-wing organization, I will not be one bit surprised. He is a cancer of the left.

You have to wonder why anybody cares what he has to say about anything at all, he's such a flagrant piece of shit.

Je suis désolée, Monsieur Urban

I took French in my sophomore year of high school and sorry to say I did not learn much.

For one, it was my first class of the day and I was often completely baked with smoking pot with friends on "the patio" which was a small area in the back of the school where smokers could smoke.

I used to think that the girl who was sitting in front of me in French class was giving me the side-eye, which would make me giggle like a maniac - which of course would result in her actually giving me the side-eye, which would make me laugh even more.

La pothead qui rit!

I also smoked cigarettes in those days too, like most of my high school friends.

Henry Urban was my French teacher and I can only assume he is dead by now although I scoured the internet for any proof of this and found none. The only thing I retained from his class is "j'ai aller au toilette" which is basically "I have to go to the bathroom." I asked for this most days I was in class, and it wasn't because of a bladder problem it's because I would have a cigarette in the ladies' bathroom.

In retrospect I think maybe he was fine with me smoking cigarettes in the ladies room since smoking is such a quintessentially French thing to do, especially in those days.

Now, of course, I'm sorry I didn't pay more attention in French class, and am doing my best to make up for lost time. If only Monsieur Urban could hear me now, I would say to him: "Excusez-moi, M. Urban, je voudrais aller au toilette pour fumer des cigarettes."

How proud he would be.

It's Frenchie-French time!

I had my placement evaluation by telephone and it was very interesting. The evaluator spoke to me exclusively in French and I understood everything she said to me. Granted she already saw my online writing test and knew my French was pretty rough, and probably spoke as simply as possible, but still, that was pretty exciting. I spoke back to her in a melange of French and English and it was clear that my understanding of past tense and my ability to distinguish between etre and avoir were both pretty pathetic. C'est la vie, je va apprendre! On y va!

But to my surprise, instead of placing me into level 102 (one step up from the lowest level, 101) instead I was placed into 103. Formidable!

So I immediately signed up for my class, which will be on Mondays from 6:30 to 9:30 PM beginning April 3, a month from today. Tres bon!

Now that I am getting even more serious about studying  French, I will have to change a few things - for example, I must give up the idea that it is necessary to both eat cheese and drink wine while I am watching "French in Action" - especially since I mainly drink California wine anyway, which makes it that much more obvious I am just using French as an excuse to drink wine.

I will have to learn more about France now. In addition to Paris, I may focus on the northeast, since that is where my French ancestors on my paternal grandmother's side come from, going all the way back to Andre and Elisabeth Dreyer - my distant cousin did not discover their birth dates, but their son Daniel died in 1740, so it's safe to assume they were both born in the late 1600s.

It should be noted that the part of France they were from, identified as Mittelbronn, Sarrebourg, Moselle, Lorraine, wasn't actually part of France when Daniel and Elisabeth lived there. It was in some weird grey area between sort-of-France and sort-of-Germany.

It looks pretty bucolic to this day.

Ancestral homeland right here

Most of my ancestry is Scots-Irish but it's nice to have this other aspect - and the best-documented too, going back to the late 1600s. No wonder I love wine and cheese so much!

Somebody ain't gonna be a mofo any time soon.

I keep trying to swear off men and just get used to the prospect of living the rest of my life in celibacy, but something always happens - like I spend time with an attractive man I want but inevitably can't have for one reason or another. And it makes me remember how nice it is to have a man you really want. But that is so impossible to find - my former therapist used to refer to the romantic prospects for women in New York City as "the wasteland" - that the sheer despair soon, once again, crushes your soul.

You get messages from creeps like this guy. WTF - "mommy"? Is that what 30-something white nerdy-looking guys are now calling women? Or just women older than them?

I didn't hear back from him after I responded in a manner his query deserved. Guess he doesn't appreciate my humor.

Ma vie française encore

Well now that I don't have to think about my play production 24/7 I can return to studying la belle française.

I am getting serious now - I took the Alliance Francaise placement test. The test involved giving directions and what I wrote, after I checked it by running it through Google translate, was pretty bad. At this rate I'll end up in the raw beginners class. The next step is a French instructor is going to call me and do some more testing over the phone. God only knows how that will turn out.

Mon Dieu!

Yay good review!

Probably the most attractive cast I'll ever have.
Jenna Sander as Norma Jeane, Matthew DeCapua as Dr. Mark Lewis
Photo by Renee Nicole Gray

It was a nice birthday present to have a pretty good review in the Huffington Post of NORMA JEANE AT THE PAYNE WHITNEY PSYCHIATRIC CLINIC. The critic's main beef was with my casting a 20 year old brunette to portray the 34-year-old blonde Monroe. I can live with that.

Favorite parts:

The Marilyn Monroe in THIS play can also hold her own, especially when she spits a pill back at her doctor, or hits back at her tormentor with some teasing of her own (”You let me out of here, and I won’t tell anyone your ‘secret’!”) I won’t give away anything that’s not already part of Marilyn Monroe lore, but let’s just say that, believe it or not, there IS a gay ending (”gay” as in “happy” as well as the modern-day meaning...)
The performances by Sander and DeCapua are excellent...

and

both writer/director McClernan and Sander both deserve credit for avoiding the larger-than-life, often cliched “Monroe-isms” that have been done so often by Marilyn’s many imitators, including drag artists. Both Norma Jeane and Marilyn, who struggled with their co-existing personas for so long, would have both no doubt appreciated that.

Today I submitted a copy of the play to the Woodward/Newman Drama Award, as seen at NYCPlaywrights. Hopefully they won't think I'm sucking up because Joanne Woodward is mentioned, glowingly, in the play:

          DR. LEWIS

At what point do you become her? Do you have blackouts?

          NORMA JEANE

Like in The Three Faces of Eve? Didn't Joanne Woodward give the most incredible performance you ever saw? I admire her so much. Can you imagine how wonderful it must be, to be Joanne Woodward? To have such a career and to play such roles?

This was the first speech that Jenna really nailed perfectly during rehearsals so I'm especially fond of it.

Merci Siri

Aw, Siri remembered my birthday. C'est tres gentile. Although French Canadian Siri pronounces my name "Nancy Clearnon." Usually she refers to me as "Nanette" because I asked her to.

The life and times of the Prime Minister of Love

Everybody is going on and on about what a perfect butt Justin Trudeau has.

But there's more to him than just a butt.

Final performance!

Jenna Sander as Norma Jeane, Matt DeCapua as Arthur Miller
From NORMA JEANE AT THE PAYNE WHITNEY PSYCHIATRIC CLINIC
Photo by Renee Nicole Gray

Well this show has taught me once and for all to never do a festival again. Every time I've done a festival, at least one person associated with the festival has been a surly asshole.

And for the amount of money I paid for this show I could have rented a theater myself and done more than just three performances.

But also, this theater is part of a community center which is a terrible location way over between 9th and 10th Avenues. And since the weather has been so warm they've left the door backstage open and both performances have featured a bunch of kids yelling near that open door, clearly audible from the audience.

I'm glad I was able to do this entire play from inspiration to production. It's hard to believe it's been two and a half years since I was first inspired to write about Marilyn Monroe.

Another performance tomorrow!

Matthew DeCapua as Dr. Lewis, Jenna Sander as Marilyn Monroe
Photo by Renee Nicole Gray.

The leading lady's boyfriend had this to say about our show, which he saw Monday:

"Although I am biased, I found this show to be superb. I highly recommend it. It provides unknown insight into Marilyn Monroe's (Norma Jeane's) personal life, and the history of mental health care. Not to mention the acting is PHENOMENAL. Truly. If you have the opportunity: do not miss it."

So sweet - it's so important to support your significant other's work, by showing up to their show and by liking their pix on Facebook. This one's a keeper.

We have another performance tomorrow!

NORMA JEANE AT THE PAYNE WHITNY PSYCHIATRIC CLINIC

Production photos!

We had a pretty good night for our first public performance of NORMA JEANE. I had a couple of blocking disagreements with the actors though, and that will be worked out by the next performance.

In the meantime here are some of my favorite production photos. Both of my actors are beautiful AF.

Jenna Sander as Marilyn. That's me in the front row clapping. Photo by Renee Nicole Gray

Jenna Sander as Norma Jeane. Photo by Renee Nicole Gray

Matthew DeCapua as Dr. Lewis. Photo by Renee Nicole Gray

Jenna Sander as Norma Jeane and Matthew DeCapua as Dr. Lewis. Photo by Renee Nicole Gray

Feminism is good for your health

So here's Gloria Steinem last month. She will be 83 in another month. Still part of the political conversation, still a great speaker. Steinem is of course a leader of "second-wave" feminism and an inspiration for all subsequent-wave feminists.

Meanwhile my mother, who is two and a half years younger than Steinem, lives in a senior citizen complex in South Jersey and her neighbors, mostly women, are conservatives - not all of them are political but they believe in "traditional values" and most of them oppose not only abortion but other equal rights for women. They seem really old and out of it, years older than Steinem.

I do think that Gloria has had work done on her face - her face is much too smooth for someone that age - but that's OK, I am certainly not going to judge her. It's freaking horrible getting old, especially for women in our culture, so I don't hold it against anybody who wants to hold off on looking like 80 for as long as possible - this is what Google comes up with when you type in "80 year old woman. But plenty of women who have had work done are still content to do their old person activities and withdraw from fighting for good causes, but Gloria is marching on, fighting for feminism. I hope I'm like that when I am her age. If I don't decide to go with the Dame Marjorie Chardin plan.

Meanwhile, Nora McCorvey, the Roe in Roe v. Wade, who switched sides and became a Christian anti-abortion activist is dead at 69.

NORMA JEANE REHEARSAL

...got a little wacky Friday night - I had two projects going on in one rehearsal studio - Norma Jeane and a video-recording of one of the finalists for "Women in the Age of Trump."

Because I enjoy being exhausted.

I prefer a man who lives...

A very brief reference to the song "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" is in my NORMA JEANE play and so I've been thinking about the song lately. It's frightfully clever, and not just the immortal line: "it's then that those louses go back to their spouses" although that is still my favorite.

The actual message of the song is horribly whore-ish, but it's excusable for the time period since trading sex for a man's money was exactly the basis of heterosexual marriage in an age when women were expected to quit a job when they got married - and this assumption, to my amazement held sway into the mid 1970s as a rerun of an episode of the Mary Tyler Moore show made clear to me.

But anyway, because I was always focused on "gives expensive jewels" in the opening lines of the song...

The French are pledged to die for love
They delight in fighting duels.
But I prefer a man who lives
And gives expensive jewels.

...I missed the humor in "I prefer a man who lives" - in other words did not die fighting a duel.

I belong to the blank generation

Richard Hell. He is now 67 years old.
It's just too hard to believe.

I followed a random train of internet links to this video of Johnny Thunders, whom you've probably not ever heard of. I only know who he is because an ex-boyfriend of mine was fascinated by the man, whose actual name was John Anthony Genzale Jr. and who died in 1991, which is pretty amazing, him living to be 39 when he was a notorious junkie. Although strangely enough he appears to have died of leukemia, rather than a drug overdose.

He was at one time in a band with Richard Hell but they clashed and Mr. Hell went onto record the immortal Blank Generation with The Voidoids.

Anyway, Thunders uses the term "douchebag" in the video which was recorded in 1984 and that prompted me to wonder when the term came into use as an insult. If I had to guess I would have said some time in the 1970s, but apparently it's been around for awhile, according to this article:

In the 1960s. The Historical Dictionary of American Slang traces the epithet douche to a 1968 collection of college slang compiled at Brown University, which defined the word as “a person who always does the wrong thing.” The insult douchebag is somewhat older. The 1939 novel Ninety Times Guilty includes a pimp named Jimmy Douchebag, and the Historical Dictionary of American Slang traces the epithetical usage to a 1946 journal article about military slang, which offered the definition “a military misfit.”

I think Jon Stewart probably did most to popularize it though. The term has always been hugely popular in New Jersey.

One year on the UWS

I got the keys to my new apartment one year ago today, as I documented on this blog.

I like living on the UWS. And luckily my landlord only jacked the rent by $50 this year, so that's OK. But even more so, my present landlord isn't a nosy creep like my previous landlord was - as long as I pay my rent on time my current landlord doesn't want to know anything about me. Unlike the creep in Astoria - actually he lived in Fort Lee. Anyway, I do not miss my old landlord in the least.

The Upper West Side is pretty much better than Astoria in every way, as far as amenities, location, etc. Astoria is famous for Greek food, but I really don't like Greek food - it's all silence of the lambs and retsina wine and olives and their desserts are all filo pastry drowned in honey.

And even though it's half the size of my old apartment, it doesn't feel that much smaller. And my cats like it just fine. And that's the most important thing.

More on Oliver Sacks' celibacy

Well I was right. After yesterday's blog post I started to wonder what exactly was the deal with Oliver Sacks' celibacy and the answer it turns out, has a connection to my play NORMA JEANE AT THE PAYNE WHITNEY PSYCHIATRIC CLINIC.

I found this fascinating article about Sacks in Vanity Fair:

...Because I’d become increasingly convinced that the single most important moment in his professional life had come not on the day he began giving L-dopa to those living statues at Beth Abraham, summoning them back to life, but rather in the months before that, when Sacks had had the audacity to perceive that some of the patients were in fact not like the others—that, harrowingly, outward appearances notwithstanding, these particular patients were alive on the inside, completely conscious and lucid but trapped within their inert bodies. No other doctors had dared to imagine such a thing—and, really, how could they have been expected to? The answer, I thought, in Oliver’s case, had everything to do with insights Oliver gained from his epic drug bingeing, and there was no way to tell that story without exploring the sexual self-censure that had led him to seek escape in drugs in the first place.

The reason for Sacks' self-censure was due to the homophobia of the time:

“When I was 21 and home from college, I accompanied my father one evening on his rounds. We were driving in the car, and he asked me how things were going. Fine. Did I have any girlfriends? No. Why didn’t I have any girlfriends? I guessed I didn’t like girls … Silence for a few moments … Does that mean you like boys? Yes, I replied, I am a homosexual. 

“I asked my father not to mention this to my mother under any circumstances: it would break her heart—she’d never understand. The next morning, my mother came tearing down the stairs, shrieking at me, hurling Deuteronomical curses, horrible judgmental accusations. This went on for an hour. Then she fell silent. She remained completely silent for three days, after which normalcy returned. The subject was never mentioned again during her lifetime.

The reason this connects to my play is because in it, Norma Jeane's opponent is a doctor who is homosexual but who refuses to acknowledge it. In part because at the time, homosexuality was considered a mental disease.

Rehearsal photo #1

The actors performing in my play NORMA JEANE AT THE PAYNE WHITNEY PSYCHIATRIC CLINIC - the beautiful and talented Jenna Sander and Matt DeCapua.

Jenna is wearing the coat I mentioned in the previous blog post from today. The collar on our coat is quite a bit larger, but you can definitely see the resemblance.

More photos to come.

We open in a week!

Marilyn Incognito

I don't know why it took me so long to realize that most of the items from the Lee Strasberg archives of the possessions Marilyn Monroe (Monroe left almost everything to Strasberg in her will) were auctioned off last November. And I had no excuse - I was aware of Julien's Auctions for awhile now and blogged about it too. I was familiar with many of the items since I used many of the letters up for auction as part of my research into my play NORMA JEANE AT THE PAYNE WHITNEY PSYCHIATRIC CLINIC (opening a week from Monday!)  and I had used items from previous Monroe auctions - things like her brief, undated & unsigned letter to Arthur Miller, which I paraphrase in my play. That letter, according to the auction results listed on the Julien's site went for $43,750.

There were a few items that were under a thousand dollars, including even some of Monroe's letters. It's probably just as well I didn't know about the auction, I would have been sorely tempted to buy some things at a time when I really cannot afford it - especially because I'm producing a play.


But the November auction contained two items posted here that were new to me, including this snapshot of Monroe dressed in a brunette wig. The Julien's catalog claims she liked to go about as a brunette (and of course she had naturally light-brown hair) in order to see how men responded to her. I had never actually read anything in reputable biographies about that - although she was able to and did go out - while blonde - without being recognized. But this photo is great.

 But the most exciting thing up for auction was this coat -  my actor Jenna, our costume designer Renee and I found a coat that looks very much like this in the thrift store down the street from me - and we had no idea Monroe owned one that looked like it.

I will have rehearsal photos soon and will post them here, for side-by-side comparison.

Oliver Sacks 1989

I have read much written by Oliver Sacks but I haven't seen him speaking much and found this profile of him from 1989, which would make him 55 - 56. And he is utterly charming and endearing. If he didn't get laid for 35 years it must surely have been his own choice, and not for lack of willing partners.

Here is Robin Williams portraying Sacks in "Awakenings."

More fun facts about Oliver Sacks

Interesting review of a book by the late Oliver Sacks' partner Bill Hayes. Now of course I knew Sacks was a devoted psychonaut (as well as a pain in the ass invited guest speaker at least according to my daughter) but the last bit in this excerpt was new:

“I just had an astounding alteration of perception!” he once blurted to his partner, Bill Hayes, shortly after they’d gotten stoned. “I opened my eyes, and in place of my body all I could see was my feet — my comically large, flat human feet.”

Compared with Sacks’s experiences as a young neurology resident, when he indulged in far more potent substances (he once got into a lively discussion with a spider about Bertrand Russell and Frege’s Theorem), this little episode may seem tame. But it’s exciting to think that the doctor’s brainstem, even in his 80s, was still throwing off sparks.

Sacks made it his life’s work to convey what it was like to inhabit exceptional, radically different kinds of minds, whether it was that of a surgeon with Tourette’s syndrome (one of the case studies in “An Anthropologist on Mars”) or that of the music teacher who was the title case study in “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.” Yet it wasn’t until the publication of his 2015 autobiography, “On the Move,” that Sacks wrote freely about himself. Only then did he reveal that he’d fallen in love with Hayes, a writer 30 years his junior, after three and a half decades of celibacy.

I knew Sacks was gay, although I don't think Sacks himself ever said so until his autobiography. But this is the first time I heard he had ever had a partner. THIRTY FIVE YEARS of celibacy. Wow and I thought I had it rough! I guess there's a lesson in there for us all.

Here is Sacks talking about his drug use history.

JC/DREAM

Well it looks like the Public Theater is going back to Shakespeare's hits for 2017, after 2016's decidedly hitless duo of TAMING OF THE SHREW and TROILUS & CRESSIDA. Although to be fair, at one time SHREW was a big hit, but it has deservedly fallen from favor, along with, equally deservedly, THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. Both plays are unredeemably offensive, but directors still try to work with them. In the case of the Public's 2016 production of SHREW, they used an all-female cast in an effort to conceptualize their way out of the misogyny.

So I am really looking forward to these two shows, especially the DREAM - I've seen so many versions of this in the park, and in fact don't think I've ever seen it done indoors, or even on a stage outdoors. So I'm curious to see what Lear deBessonet does with it.

A mystery solved. I think.

THAT'S WHY

I absolutely cannot remember the random train of thought chugging along in the back of my mind which pulled into Consciousness Station with an odd delivery today, but I suddenly realized what was behind this odd phenomenon that I had blogged about way back in August 2015 - the French consider Long Island City, Queens to be a desirable tourist destination:

Mr. MacKay told of a recent conversation he had with a French journalist who was keen to tour Queens.
“She said, ‘I’m so excited to see Long Island City. Everybody in Paris is talking about Long Island City.’ And I said, ‘Really?’ ” Mr. MacKay recalled. “She said, ‘Can you take me to Sweetleaf?,’ ” referring to a popular cafe in Long Island City. “I said, ‘Sweetleaf?’ She said, ‘Yes! Everybody in Paris is talking about Sweetleaf!’ ”

I found this completely bizarre at the time, having worked in LIC and been to both Sweetleaf establishments in LIC. One Sweetleaf is a crowded funky coffee shop, the other is a restaurant, which is nice but I don't remember being especially excited by it.

And then I remembered the movie "Julia and Julie", which was about Julia Child an American who hosted a TV how called "The French Chef." Lots of scenes were shot in Paris. And it's also about a woman living in Long Island City who reproduced all of Child's recipes from one of her cookbooks.

And I bet anything that's why the French are so intrigued by LIC.

Speaking of American movies and the French, I found this web site Pardon My Titres  amusing.

The inevitability of Daphne Merkin

If you read New York institutional media - the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review section, etc. you will inevitably come upon an article or book by Daphne Merkin, or as I have referred to her for at least 10 years on this blog, the dread Daphne Merkin.

I first mentioned her on this blog eleven years ago beginning with...

I've been noticing the mediocrity that is Daphne Merkin ever since I was first irked by her a few years ago in the New Yorker. She also writes for the New York Times magazine. Her trademark is a buzzing, incessant, helpless whine. 

You could get a more original, thoughtful, 21st century-style piece of writing on the sex lives of 50-year-old women in a thousand places on the Internet. From people who are getting paid nothing to write. 

Merkin actually responded via email to that blog post, to my great surprise:

This is the whiney and unfairly remunerated Daphne Merkin reporting in, having stumbled on your blog late this night instead of sleeping or finishing reading D.H. Lawrence's THE RAINBOW. Aside from insulting me, you sound like a generally unreflective and overly self-regarding person. >From glancing quickly at your bio, I gather your own "feminist" credentials are less than wonderful, since you seem to have abandoned one early putative interest (illustrating) for another ( playacting) on the basis of meeting a "beautiful young man." Your blog makes me fshudder on behalf of bloggerdom, seething as it is with envy and bravado and received wisdom. I hope your plays are better than this.

Even her brief email encapsulates everything I dislike about her writing - wrong-headedness about feminism, tiresome literary name-dropping and absolute banality. And why shouldn't I judge her email response to my blog post? She passed judgment on mine, finishing with "I hope your plays are better than this." I mean, well, yeah, considering a typical blog post takes no more than 30 minutes and a play takes years to complete.

I am interested in moving from French self-study to actual French classes, and who should I encounter on the French Institute web site but Merkin talking about sex. What does that have to do with learning French? Je ne fucking sais pas.

I really wish she wouldn't talk about sex, she has nothing original to say about it. I did some Googling to see what she was up to, and found this piece from a few months ago in Elle, What, Exactly, Is the Future of Sex? 

The Elle piece is hackwork - Merkin threw together a personal anecdote about watching a TV show about sex; combined with random literary references: St. Augustine for Chrissake, Foulcalt of course and rounded off with Carol Gilligan; seasoned with snippets of interviews with sex workers, and concluding:

Ah, sex. To each her own, and good luck to us all.

I've gone through a lot since I first blogged about Daphne Merkin: heart-break (twice), unrequited love (twice), depression, anxiety disorder, Tinder, cancer, unemployment (twice), financial catastrophes and the election of Donald Trump, but one thing remains unchanged: I still can't believe Daphne Merkin gets paid to write.

I don't find Merkin worth complaining about solely for her mediocrity - after all the hallmark of mediocrity is its prevalence. See Sturgeon's Law for details. It's because she has regressive, sociobiology-based beliefs. And the last time I wrote about her, it was to note that she was hanging around with professional feminist-hater Katie Roiphe. Which makes her feminist credentials less than wonderful in my unremunerated book.

Here's an example of writing about sex that's original and exciting and the author almost certainly did not get paid to write it: The Dickonomics of Tinder. The topic is the immortal phrase "Dick is abundant and low value" and here is Alana Massey blowing Merkin and her leaky old boatload of Gilligan, Foucault and St. Augustine right out of the water:

In my memory, those last six words emerged from the screen with their outer edges glowing like the inscription in the Dark Tongue of Mordor on the One Ring. I was transformed, nay, transfigured, by the message. 

Conversations were governed by the same rules as matches. Lead with a pussy joke about my cat? Dick is abundant and low value. Choose a meeting place that doesn’t account for my commute there? Dick is abundant and low value. Ask for nudes too soon? Dick is abundant and low value. Cancel twice? Dick is abundant and low value. Send an unsolicited photo of your lower body in your laundry-day underwear with your hand suggestively but not sexily placed over your semi and not even bothering to crop out your poor cat? Dick is abundant and low value.

But other things have also happened since I wrote about Merkin in 2006. One of the reasons I found that NYTimes piece annoying in particular was her obvious reliance on evolutionary psychology to explain social phenomena: 

"Men move away from older women, I would argue, almost instinctively, because they sense the impending shadow of nongenerativity like a negative pheromone."

Since Merkin wrote that piece "cougars" have become a thing. The online porno industry has made it clear that men enjoy watching older women get naked and have sex. And I can testify from personal experience that contrary to what Merkin wrote in 2006, plenty of men are fine pursuing older women. Now granted, this hasn't helped me much in finding a worthwhile mate, but the problem is certainly not men considering older women instinctively repellant.

It seems that each passing year brings more evidence that a pillar of evolutionary psychology - that men want younger and women want older mates is bullshit. This week I saw this NYTimes article about a French politician Emmanuel Macron married to his former high school teacher. It may still be unusual enough for a prominent man to be married to a woman twenty-four years his senior that articles are written about it (they've been married for 10 years now), but the fact that it's happening at all indicates that the old social rules are changing and at such a non-evolutionary pace that it proves this was never about "instinct" at all - it was about men's much greater socio-economic power.

Speaking of socio-economics, it turns out that Merkin struggles with depression. I know because somebody paid her to write a book about it. The reviewer in the New York Times loves the book but even he can't help notice the same things about Merkin that I have:

Merkin was born into circumstances of plenty, the poor little rich girl; she is not interested in universalizing, though she often does so almost inadvertently. In the earlier part of her memoir, her tight focus on her own story at the expense of anyone else’s can come off as self-indulgent, even self-aggrandizing...

I have no plans to read Merkin's book but perhaps she writes better about depression than she does about sex. Having been through a serious depression I can empathize and of course I'm inclined to feel bad for anybody going through hard times. It's tempered though, by the knowledge that in spite of being an uninspired writer on the topic of sex, Daphne Merkin continues to be paid to write about it, while many less-well-connected but superior writers are not being paid at all, and their work is less well-known than hers.

Now that's depressing.

The pleasures of comprehension

N'ai-je pas quelque chose de plus profond à penser?

So I've been studying French, informally for almost three months now, judging by my previous blog posts. Since the week of Donald Trump's election. And Trump has been even worse than I expected these first two weeks after his inauguration. He is ripe for impeachment already in my opinion. And I'm ripe pour aller vivre a Montreal.

Anyway, back to French. I'm in the middle of going through the online version of French in Action for the third time, and I am finally picking up on some of the jokes.

The two lead characters are Robert and Mirielle, embarking on a romance, and Robert is quickly obsessed with Mirielle. So in this episode he is portrayed as constantly thinking about whether or not he will see Mirielle at dinner at Madame Cortois' apartment. Madame Cortois is a mutual acquaintance. The phrase: "Est-ce'elle sera chez à les Cortois " ("Will she be at (the house of) the Cortois?")  is mentioned often throughout the episode. At one point the Mona Lisa whispers "je ne sais pas" ("I don't know') to Robert.

So finally at the end, an image of Rodin's "The Thinker" is shown and Pierre Capretz (founder of the language system that is the basis of French in Action and host of the show) says: "Regardez Le Penseur du Rodin. Il a l'air inquiete, tendu, nerveuse. Vous savez pourquoi? Il se demand si Mirielle sera chez les Cortois." which means "Look at Rodin's 'The Thinker.' He is anxious, tense, nervous You know why? He's asking himself if Mirielle will be at the Cortois'." MDR!

(According to my iPhone translator, "laugh out loud" is "mort de rire" which is literally "death of laughter" or less literally "to die from laughter." And according to this site, they DO say MRD instead of LOL. Wow. LOL.)

And then there is the episode where Aunt Georgette is having a bad time at a restaurant. I picked up during the first two viewings that she was upset because she wanted to order what the guy sitting nearby was having and they were fresh out... but I didn't pick up until the third time around that what she was ordering was "le tête du veau" - calf's head. Ugh!

Manhattan statuary

There are a ton of statues in Central Park and almost all of them depict famous men. So it was nice to learn about this statue today, Expansion by Paige Bradely. Although I'm not sure if it's in a permanent location or not.

There's an entire Wiki page devoted to Central Park sculptures.

Right-wing nuts of Canada

Speaking of dangerous right-wing lunatics like Alex Jones, the recent mass-murder in a Canadian mosque by a right-wing Trump lover has focused attention on the nuts of Canada:

That conversation among largely anonymous anti-immigration extremists exists in the broader context of a right-leaning talk radio culture in Quebec that has been critical of Muslim immigration and what it sees as a failure by Muslims to assimilate into Canadian culture. Talk radio of this stripe is rare elsewhere in Canada and is reminiscent, albeit far more mild, of the raucous right-wing shows in the United States.
The radio stations Radio X and FM93 are among those cited as giving voice to anti-Muslim activists. While their own commentary may be muted, they give a platform to less-tolerant voices from sites like Point de Bascule, which means Tipping Point, and Poste de Veille, which translates roughly as “Watchtower” and whose website shows a pirate ship with a jihadist flag as its sail approaching Quebec City.
One popular conspiracy theory links Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to the Muslim Brotherhood, a pan-Arab group that supports the application of Islamic law in Muslim communities.

Of course stupid people, the kind of people most taken in by insane conspiracy theories and irrational hatred of the Other exist in every society and even Canada has not been spared. Stupid people will always be a problem in any human society. 

It should be noted that the far-right, in its endless quest to demonize all Muslims immediately in the wake of the shooting tried to claim the shooter was Muslim himself. The Trudeau government had to force Fox News to take down one of its lies.

Iris Mack - even further down the far-right conspiracy rabbit hole

When I was working on my play DARK MARKET I blogged about a mathematician slash stock trader named Iris Mack. I was prepared to admire her but then I discovered her Facebook profile and her bizarre, incoherent political views, which included far-right and anti-vaccination conspiracy theories.  I wrote about her almost four years ago and haven't thought too much about her since then.

But suddenly there's all this interest in my Iris Mack blog post, judging by my web analytics, and someone commented on that post the other day:

Oh no.. an intelligent free thinking black woman who confuses you into butthurtism.. this typical reaction to individuals that dont fit in neat boxes exposes the complete hypocrisy and idiotic ideology of the left. Cheers!

That was odd and apropos of nothing. So I Googled around to see what ole Iris Mack was getting up to. Apparently Iris Mack is hanging out with the extremist most nutty alt-right freak of them all, Alex Jones.

Alex Jones, in case you don't know, is the king of fake news, the purveyor of reckless, insane, dangerous rumor-mongering, one step below even Breitbart. The kind of nuttiness that the Trump presidency has normalized.

Alex Jones almost caused a massacre:

Mr. Welch, the father of two daughters, said he woke up Sunday morning and told his family he had some things to do. He left “Smallsbury,” a nickname for his hometown, for the 350-mile drive to Washington with the intention of giving the restaurant a “closer look” and then returning home. He wanted to “shine some light on it.” As he made his way to Washington, he felt his “heart breaking over the thought of innocent people suffering.” Once he got to the pizzeria, there was an abrupt change of plans. Mr. Welch would not say why he took a military-style assault rifle inside the restaurant and fired it. According to court documents, Mr. Welch said he had come armed to help rescue the children. 

What did he think when he discovered there were no children at the pizzeria? 

“The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent,” he said. However, he refused to dismiss outright the claims in the online articles, conceding only that there were no children “inside that dwelling.” He also said that child slavery was a worldwide phenomenon

Where did he learn about the fake news involving Comet? 

He said it was through word of mouth. After recently having internet service installed at his house, he was “really able to look into it.” He said that substantial evidence from a combination of sources had left him with the “impression something nefarious was happening.” He said one article on the subject led to another and then another. He said he did not like the term fake news, believing it was meant to diminish stories outside the mainstream media, which he does not completely trust. He also said he was not political. While once a registered Republican, he did not vote for Donald J. Trump. He also did not vote for Mrs. Clinton. But he is praying that Mr. Trump takes the country in the “right direction.” 

What was he like? 

Mr. Welch was soft-spoken and polite, and said he liked the outdoors. He was cautious when speaking about what happened, sometimes citing advice he had received from his lawyer. He said he did not believe in conspiracy theories, but then added that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks needed to be re-examined. He has listened to Alex Jones, whose radio show traffics in conspiracy theories and who once said that Mrs. Clinton “has personally murdered and chopped up” children. “He’s a bit eccentric,” Mr. Welch said. “He touches on some issues that are viable but goes off the deep end on some things.” Mr. Welch likes to read. A favorite is “Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul,” by John Eldredge, about masculinity in evangelical Christianity. He said he did not do drugs but drank the occasional beer. He misses his children: “They are in my thoughts every second of the day.” He said he had grown religious in the last few years. Tattooed on his back are Bible verses: “Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”

Jones, perhaps realizing he could become the target of a lawsuit with his reckless disregard for reality, took down his "pizza gate" content, but not before a lot more people realized what a monster he is as well as his connection to Donald Trump.

Selling out your credibility to a monster like Alex Jones - oh how low you have sunk, Iris Mack.