John and Paul joke about their trip to Rishikesh

This is a great clip.

John Lennon handles crowd control

DID RINGO VOTE???

Very unusual semi-formal interview with Beatles (sans Paul)

Westfield Massachusetts

Wikipedia entry.

They like their sonnets there.

Hardball - Dick Armey goes all Cavemen on Joan Walsh

YOU GIVE IT A REST DICK ARMEY!

What an INCREDIBLE TOOL!

What about Naomi?

Watch more IFILM videos on AOL Video

The inspiration for my daughter's name... from The Electric Company

Final two monologues

Lynsey Buckelew as "Jackie" from FOX FORCE FIVE


Mike Selkirk from POOH STORY

I post comments

Yet another article that tiresomely references Freud: What Do Women Want

I posted this:

The question I think is more interesting is "what do promoters of simplistic theories of human behavior want?"

In the case of evolutionary psychology it is almost always to get their readers to believe this: the problems of women as a group are not caused mainly by a social system that favors men, but by the essential evolutionary nature of women.

Bergner tips his hand with this sentence:

"Had Freud’s question gone unanswered for nearly a century not because science had taken so long to address it but because it is unanswerable? "

In other words, women's desires haven't been studied, not because male-dominated science was resistant to it, but because women are just too utterly inscrutable.

I recommend all readers here look for sentences such as that in any article that claims to reveal something about the essential sociobiological nature of women. It tells you so much about where the article's author is actually coming from.

STRESS AND THE CITY opens tonight - whoohoo!

Phoebe Summersquash as "Carrie" from STAGE DIVING



Bruce Barton as "Ted" from HAPPILY MARRIED

confirmation of the depths of Bush/Cheney evil...

Olbermann’s guest, the NSA whistleblower, got me to thinking: what other things that we already pretty much understand to be true will be confirmed as fact in the weeks and months ahead? This is the list that I’ve come up with so far. (Spoiler alert: this feels like something that will probably turn into a cartoon in the next week or two, so if you prefer to be surprised there, you might want to skip this one.)

1. The aforementioned spying on journalists. Of course they were spying on journalists. And there was that oddly specific moment where Andrea Mitchell, in the course of interviewing New York Times reporter James Risen about his reporting on the NSA and government wiretapping, asked if he knew anything about the administration spying on Christiane Amanpour — a question the network promptly scrubbed from the transcription.

2. Of course Cheney was running everything, at least for the first term.

3. Of course they made backroom deals with their pals at Halliburton, Enron, etc.

4. Of course they were lying about Iraq from the start.

5. Of course torture was sanctioned at the highest levels.

6. Of course Valerie Plame was deliberately outed in retaliation for Joe Wilson’s op-ed debunking the yellowcake uranium story.

7. Of course male prostitute turned fake journalist Jeff Gannon was having an affair with someone in the White House.

More at This Modern World

Final message from the Bush White House

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Final Message From the White House

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

More monologues

Lori Kee as "Helen" in THE HELICOPTER


Ann Farthing as "Trixie" in PERSONAL JESUS

STRESS monologue

Actors' Equity will not allow videotaping of Equity Showcase productions or even rehearsals, because the people who mostly vote on Equity issues are all over 50 and can't keep up with new technologies like Youtube. When the Equity rules about taping were written, only big corporations had video recording technologies, so the rules made sense - THEN. Now everybody has video technologies.

So to get around this Ludditish stupidity, I had to write completely separate monologues for the actors - the monologues are NOT in the plays, but the characters saying the monologues are from the plays in my STRESS AND THE CITY show.

This monologue is for "Mr. Black."

Mr. Black is based on an ex-boyfriend of mine who had major issues with his father, and really did keep the cremated remains of his dog in an urn. A golden urn - which I bought for him one Christmas. Before that he kept the remains in a box.

Yet even more rehearsal photos

More at the STRESS AND THE CITY web site

More STRESS pix

Lynsey Buckelew sometimes looks like an animation, she's so expressive - I crack up every time I see this picture. I just knew she would be great as the crazy Jackie character.

More photos at the STRESS site

More STRESS pix

More STRESS pix here
This one is from MR. BLACK, with Nick Fondulis & Lynsey Buckelew

Hey I invented a word

I just realized that I coined the adverb "sonnetarily" in one of my sonnets a few months ago, from my Secret Sonnet #3 - here's how it begins:


I possess not what is necessary
To win your love. In a world much better
I could seduce you sonnetarily,
With iambus, syllable and letter.


The only word that is similar if you do a Google search is the adverb monetarily.

How do we know these are adverbs? I'll let the Electric Company and Tom Lehrer explain on Youtube.

I Me Mine

Last time I checked you can't get Let It Be in any format, but thanks to YouTube you can watch the whole thing in pieces. I saw it in a movie theatre back in the day (no, not when it first came out - I was 9 years old!) and always thought that the part where John and Yoko waltz to "I Me Mine" was especially charming.

Beatles

Clearly John Lennon was the inspiration for Sesame Street

All You Need Is Love - The Beatles

The first ever live global television link. Broadcast to 26 countries and watched by 350 million people, the programme was broadcast via satellite on June 25, 1967. The BBC had commissioned The Beatles to write a song for the UK's contribution and this was the result.

Sadly true

Particularly once they reach thirty, these women are the most "review-sensitive": a chorus of critical praise for a movie aimed at (women over 25) can increase the opening weekend's gross by five million dollars. In other words, older women are discriminating, which is why so few films are made for them.

From the article about movie marketing in this week's New Yorker titled "The Cobra."

I maybe see 3 or 4 movies in a theatre per year. This year I saw 4 - Indiana Jones... ugh, Wall-E - pretty good, Man on Wire - good, and Milk - great.

STRESS rehearsal pix

We had a great rehearsal today of THE B WORD - check out the pix.


Lynsey Buckelew, Lori Kee and Nick Fondulis

more pix here

The Beatles - Prostitutes and Lesbians!

I love this interview segment with the Beatles

Charlotte Bronte on Rochester & Heathcliff

Mr. Rochester has a thoughtful nature and a very feeling heart; he is neither selfish nor self-indulgent; he is ill-educated, misguided, errs, when he does err, through rashness and inexperience: he lives for a time as too many other men live - but being radically better than most men he does not like that degraded life, and is never happy in it. He is taught the severe lessons of Experience and has sense to learn wisdom from them - years improve him - the effervescence of youth foamed away, what is really good in him remains - his nature is like wine of a good vintage, time cannot sour - but only mellows him. Such at least was the character I meant to pourtray.

Heathcliff, again, of 'Wuthering Heights' is quite another creation. He exemplifies the effects which a life of continued injustice and hard usage may produce on a naturally perverse, vindictive and inexorable disposition. Carefully trained and kindly reared, the black gipsy-cub might possibly have been reared into a human being, but tyranny and ignorance made of him a mere demon. The worst of it is, some of his spirit seems breathed through the whole narrative in which he figures: it haunts every moore and glen, and beckons in every fir-tree of the 'Heights.'

- August 14, 1848

welcome to our tiny club

I see that in addition to John Simon and myself, Johann Hari is not overly impressed by the work of Harold Pinter - welcome to our tiny club!

Although the bit about Pinter being a supporter of Milosevic is news to me.

There are two arguments against Pinter - one literary, the other political - and they are both hard to make, because in amongst the screw-ups Pinter has some undeniable achievements. Harold Pinter has one literary accomplishment: he imported the surrealism of Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Luis Bunel into the staid English theatre. As the critic Irving Wardle put it, in his first play 'The Birthday Party', Pinter showed "how a banal Blackpool boarding house could open up to the horrors of modern history." The play shows a man, Stanley, hiding out in a dank Blackpool boarding house, only for two torturers to track him down. His landlady, Meg, is oblivious to the violence smashing through her own home. At their best, his plays are like a nightmarish stress-dream: unbearably primal, raw expressions of menace and fear, whose meaning is always just beyond our grasp.

But with Samuel Beckett, you always know there is an elaborate existentialist philosophy underneath the darkness and chaos. With Pinter, if you turn on the light and switch off the atmospherics, you find... nothing, except a few commonplace insights: Torture is Bad and Resistance is Good. Pinter himself says "the most important line I've ever written" is when Meg's husband calls out, as Stanley is taken away, "Stan, don't let them tell you what to do." The playwright said of this unobjectionable, obvious platitude, "I've lived that line all my damn life. Never more than now." It's depressingly revealing: Pinter's staccato sinisterness does not illustrate a point; it distracts the audience from the fact his point is so banal.

Yet Pinter has been protected by an elderly critical establishment so invested in creating and building up his reputation that they cannot admit how feeble most of his plays now look. (I assume nobody at all takes the poetry seriously). When I saw 'The Homecoming' - a revoltingly misogynistic work - in the West End a few years ago, the audience kept laughing in all the wrong places. It literally looked ridiculous, yet it was given respectful - and in some cases fawning - write-ups.

More at the Huffington Post

I wrote to my congresswoman

Well I finally did it - I think moving to NYC was what inspired me - I wrote to my Congresswoman, Carol Maloney, asking her how I can go about getting a bill into Congress that would require the US Copyright Office to require proof of authorization for all derivative work registration.

Because although the US Copyright Office's website claims that authorization is required, it does not require proof and hence Edward Einhorn was able to get an UNAUTHORIZED derivative copyright on my play TAM LIN (he called his a "blocking and choreography" script) registered. Not only unauthorized, but completely unbeknownst to me until he used it a year later as the basis of a lawsuit against me for producing my own play.

And it gets worse.

It went to trial as Edward Einhorn v. Mergatroyd Productions in April 2006. You can read about it at The Strange Case of Edward Einhorn v. Mergatroyd Productions.


Judge Lewis Kaplan said in his decision that Einhorn's work was not eligible for copyright because it was:

insubstantial
registered for the purpose of instigating a lawsuit
unauthorized

and he ordered Einhorn to have it deregistered.

Einhorn was able to avoid this however by simply refusing to admit to the US Copyright Office that Kaplan's findings were correct. And his unauthorized derivative registration is to this day in the Copyright Office's database. The US Copyright Office's refusal to take the word of a federal judge over the perpetrator is another cause for reform - but none of this would have happened if the Copyright Office wasn't so lax about its own regulations.

I will get the US Copyright Office to change its ways if I have to spend the rest of my life doing it - and Einhorn's ill-gotten copyright WILL be deregistered one day.

Production notes for STRESS AND THE CITY

Rehearsals start today!

I founded NYCPlaywrights (along with my ex-boyfriend) back in November 2000, mainly as a way to have a community of theatre people to work with. Once you are out of school, you have to build a community yourself, or join one. I had actually joined one, and then my ex got into a snit with the bigwigs of that theatre group and I decided it was time to move on. So we started NYCP and gradually, a community came about. So that was a good thing. The other good thing about being part of NYCPlaywrights is that it forces you to write - once you are on the schedule, you have to show up with something to hand out to actors to read.

These STRESS AND THE CITY plays were all written to be read, initially at an NYCPlaywrights' meeting. (Although this show is produced by my company Mergatroyd Productions.) Here's a little background about each play:

• FOX FORCE FIVE - based on a true story, and in fact the character Amy, played by Phoebe Summersquash, actually is Phoebe, and Phoebe really did say to Jackie "we made out." I thought Phoebe was gay after that, but it turns out she is married. To a man. The part about calling ourselves Fox Force Five wasn't true - until AFTER I wrote the play. Bruce Barton, BTW, is an honorary Fox.


• PERSONAL JESUS - I was raised Catholic. I'm not Catholic anymore. I used to do clinic defense for a women's health center in South Jersey, and sometimes the protestors, Catholics and the born-again Christians, would clash about just exactly who this Jesus was, whether his mother was a perpetual Virgin, etc. That inspired this play.


• POOH STORY - everybody in the theatre world adores Edward Albee, except me and John Simon. It really embarrasses me to be in a group that has crusty old John Simon in it, but there it is. I thought it was high time for a parody of Albee's ZOO STORY.


• STAGE DIVING - I did go to a Sleater-Kinney show with my daughter, and I did marvel at the fact that everybody was wearing office casual clothing as opposed to the leather-based regalia of Ye Olden Days in the 1980s. The rest of it I made up.


• THE B WORD - based on a true story of what happened to me and my two brothers when we went to a playground in Camden NJ. Except it was a gang of boys and they punched my brothers, but left me alone. The Latino teenager who came along is completely true.


• MR. BLACK - based on my ex-boyfriend, and a story he told me about what happened to him before we met. He has some anger issues.
  
• HAPPILY MARRIED - is based on some people I knew recently. I was always being told that an actor was "happily married" but after watching her massage, cling to, and grope a man who was not her husband, on several occasions, well, all I can say is that I have a very different idea of what it means to be happily married than some people.


• THE HELICOPTER - did not happen to me, but could have - my daughter worked next door to the World Trade Center back in 2001. I've been working on this play off and on since 2002.

This production is very low tech, for a couple of reasons. One is of course that as of this writing (December 2008) we are in a world-wide financial recession and things are tough all over, especially in the arts. Low-tech is more affordable. But there are also very good aesthetic reasons for the low tech, and I want to quote Thornton Wilder on the subject. Wilder, you probably know, wrote Our Town, which many people, including me, consider a masterpiece. But here is a segment of the theatre world that disparages OUR TOWN, thinking it's sentimental and old-fashioned. They could not be more wrong. But many of these are, I suspect, people who think that theatre isn't valid unless somebody is getting his eyeballs sucked out, or some little girl is being crucified, both of which have been portrayed on the New York stage recently. These people, in my opinion, would be better off spending their time at a monster truck rally than theatre, so thuggish and petrified are their sensibilities. Fie on them, I say. Anyway, back to Wilder, who said in the Preface to a collection of his plays:

The novel is pre-eminently the vehicle of the unique occasion, the theater of the generalized one. It is through the theater's power to raise the exhibited individual action to the realm of idea and type and universal that it is able to evoke our belief. But power is precisely what nineteenth-century audiences did not - dared not - confront.
They tamed it and drew its teeth; squeezed it into that removed showcase. They loaded the stage with specific objects, because every concrete object on the stage fixes and narrows the action to one moment in time and place. (Have you ever noticed that in the plays of Shakespeare no one - except occasionally a ruler - sits down? There were not even chairs on the English or Spanish stages in the time of Elizabeth I.)
So it was by a jugglery with time that the middle classes devitalized the theater. When you emphasize place in the theater, you drag down and limit and harness time to it. You thrust the action back into past time, whereas it is precisely the glory of the stage that it is always "now" there. Under such production methods the characters are all dead before the action starts. You don't have to pay deeply from your heart's participation. No great age in the theater ever attempted to capture the audience's belief through this kind of specification and localization. I became dissatisfied with the theater because I was unable to lend credence to such childish attempts to be "real."


I began writing one-act plays that tried to capture not verisimilitude but reality. In The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden four kitchen chairs present an automobile and a family travels seventy miles in twenty minutes. Ninety years go by in The Long Christmas Dinner. In Pullman Car Hiawatha some more plain chairs serve as berths and we hear the very vital statistics of the towns and fields that passengers are traversing; we hear their thoughts; we even hear the planets over their heads. In Chinese drama a character, by straddling a stick,
conveys to us that he is on horseback. In almost every No play of the Japanese an actor makes a tour of the stage and we know he is making a long jurney. Think of the ubiquity that Shakespeare's stage afforded for the battle scenes at the close of Julius Caesar and Anthony and Cleopatra. As we see them today what a cutting and hacking of the text takes place - what condescension, what contempt for his dramaturgy.


Our Town is not offered as a picture of life in a New Hampshire village; or as a speculation about the conditions of life after death (that element I merely took from Dante's Purgatory). It is an attempt to find value above all price for the smallest events of our daily life. I have made the claim as preposterous as possible, for I have set the village against the largest dimensions of time and place. The recurrent words in this play (few have noticed it)are 'hundreds', 'thousands', 'millions'. Emily's joys and griefs, her algebra lessons and her birthday presents - what are they when we consider all the billions of girls who have lived, who are living and will live? Each individual's assertion to an absolute reality can only be inner, very inner. And here the method of staging finds its justification - in the first two acts there are at least a few chairs and tables but when she revisits the earth and the kitchen to which she descended on her twelfth birhtday, the very chairs and table are gone. Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind - not in things, not in "scenery." Moliere said that for the theatre all he needed was a platform and a passion or two. The climax of this play needs only five square feet of boarding and the passion to know what life means to us.

My play The Helicopter is a 9-11 play. But the focus is on one woman and her tragedy, and her co-worker's reaction. In spite of the big important historical international meaning of that day, my play actually focuses on something that happens every single day on this planet. Like Wilder, I'm trying to make a connection between the very specific and the very general - not verisimilitude but reality.

Social Engineering

Mike Selkirk, Earl Gatchalian and Ann Farthing perform.

Here is a clip from my 10-minute play SOCIAL ENGINEERING which was performed as part of the NYCPlaywrights Winter Holiday Reading Fundraiser.

The play is based on the right-wing of the evolutionary psychology school of thought on human differences, most famously explained by Charles Murray's "The Bell Curve." Especially people like Razib Kahn, who get funded by right-wingers to promote the idea that white people aren't more successful than non-whites through a variety of historical-cultural factors, but because white people are genetically superior. And they always try to play it off as pure science, rather than political ideology.

Soooo cool

That I can embed videos via Facebook now.



Nome on the flying trapeze again.

Hapworth 16, 1924

Wow, I am excited - The New Yorker has entered the digital age big-time. It now has digital archives of the entire magazine, online, accessible to its print subscribers. Which means I get to read the only thing by J. D. Salinger (that I know of) that I haven't read yet, the story "Hapworth 16, 1924" printed in the June 19, 1965 edition.

I was prompted by the way, by this article in today's NYTimes Still Paging Mr. Salinger.

Here's Hapworth, for subscribers

Shakespeare's sonnet #148

O me, what eyes hath Love put in my head,
Which have no correspondence with true sight!

more with analysis & interpretation here...

New STRESS AND THE CITY web site

STRESS is in da house.

John Simon & Me

John Simon is a crusty old coot, and a racist to boot - he once said on Theatre Talk that Suzan-Lori Parks was a social climber because she married a white guy.

So it feels weird to note that he and I are virtually the only people in theatre who are not impressed by the work of Harold Pinter, who has been canonized as one of the Great Men of the Arts, worthy of many hagiographies in The New Yorker. Although I, at least, like Pinter's politics. But I agree with Simon in his review of THE HOMECOMING:

It is widely considered the Nobel laureate's masterpiece; rather than as a drawback, its making no sense is perceived as a challenge.

Pinter's characters are either sorry nonentities or predatory jackals. Bad enough, but, worse yet, each turns with predictable schematism into his or her opposite. Then, often enough, back again. Even the dead revolve, not in their graves but in human memory. For the spectator, steadily foreseeable reversals become an unsurprising shell game.

Max, 70, a retired butcher, has three sons: the youngest, Joey, a demolition worker by day and aspiring boxer at night; the middle one, Lenny, a successful pimp in London's Soho with a high-class clientele; the eldest, Teddy, a professor of philosophy in America, home to visit with his wife, Ruth.

Max refers to his late wife, Jessie, as one at whose ``rotten, stinking face it made [him] sick to look,'' though not ``such a bad bitch.'' At another time as a paragon who taught her boys ``all the morality they know,'' which turns out to be low praise indeed. Sam, Max's chauffeur brother, first calls her a charming lady, and later mentions her having adulterous sex in the back of his car.

Logical Incoherence?

Surly Lenny tries to engage Teddy in a philosophical discussion.

``Do you detect a certain logical incoherence in the central affirmations of Christian theism?'' he asks amid recondite questioning. Teddy, like no philosopher one has ever met, finds existential questions beyond his purview.

Lenny reminisces about an old lady coming out of nowhere and asking him to move an iron mangle from her front room to a back one. When the mangle proves too heavy, Lenny settles, being in a good mood, for a mere jab to the crone's belly.

Ruth, who seems withdrawn and cold, nonetheless is an exemplary wife and good mother to her three boys. Max treats her alternately as a lady and as a whore. Soon she is playing erotic games with her brothers-in-law.

Typical of the writing is Ruth's description of America: ``It's all rock. And sand. It stretches . . . so far . . . everywhere you look. And there's lots of insects there.'' The latter sentence is duly repeated after one of those infamous, pseudo-pregnant Pinteresque pauses. Not even cigars can stay in character: pronounced excellent one moment, they are decried as wretched soon after.

More here.

I've been told on occasion that I "think too much" about plays. This is from people who generally think much too little - but only thinking too much is considered a fault in our world.

Santa Baby

Eartha Kitt died Dec. 25 2008. One of her best-known recordings was Santa Baby. My mother likes to tell the story of how my grandmother yelled at her for singing that song while doing the dishes, when she (my mother) was a teenager. I'd like to think that my grandmother didn't like the song for its crass materialism and whorish sex-for-cash message, but it was probably just because it was a sexually suggestive song.

My grandmother also had a huge problem with Elvis Presley, calling him "disgusting." This was well before the fat Elvis era.

Favorite lyrics of "Santa Baby"

Santa cutie, there's one thing I really do need:
The deed to a platinum mine.

A platinum mine???? Sheesh, she is not messing around - she goes right to the means of production.

I'm having an English Christmas

Look at the charming teacup and saucer a couple of English playwright friends of mine gave me for a housewarming gift. It prompted me to say "all the best stuff comes from England."

There are some exceptions, but consider:

Shakespeare
The Beatles
Eddie Izzard
Monty Python
Regency period clothing for men
The Brontes
Afternoon tea
Chupa Chups
Sherlock Holmes

So I have decided to have an English Christmas, with goodies from the premiere English food purveyors in Manhattan Tea & Sympathy.

Although I admit I have yet to have a craving to see Christmas pantomime. Although I do rather like Monty Python's Pantomime Horse as Secret Agent sketch.

Mary Tyler Moore & me

I've been watching some early episodes of the Mary Tyler Moore show - when the show first began airing in the 70s I was too young to appreciate it. And while I was watching it struck me how much Phyllis Lyndstrom (Cloris Leachman), Mary's friend and landlady, reminds me of an actor I worked with in the past year - incredibly bossy and full of herself, acting like she's large and in charge when in fact she's destructive. This episode gives a great idea of what Phyllis was like. It's eerie - I'd swear the actor in question modeled herself on this character.

Why this image?

Because any time is a good time to show a photo of Björk Guðmundsdóttir wearing her infamous swan dress.

You can't see it here, but her purse was shaped like an egg.

My favorite Bjork song: Human Behavior

If you ever get close to a human
And human behaviour
Be ready to get confused
There's definitely no logic
To human behaviour
But yet so irristible
There's no map
To human behaviour
They're terribly moody
Then all of a sudden turn happy
But, oh, to get involved in the exchange
Of human emotions is ever so satisfying
There's no map
And a compass
Wouldn't help at all
Human behaviour

Connections online

The kids today can't possibly appreciate what a treasure trove the Internet is - especially YouTube. When the Connections series came out, I did not have a video recorder and the series was not available on videotape yet. So I had to arrange my schedule around public television's schedule. And if you missed an episode, forget it.

Now you can watch the entire TV series CONNECTIONS for free any time you want on YouTube. I was born 40 years too early.

Is "Jane Eyre" the sexiest book ever written?

Asks The Daily Mail:

He pouts, broods and beats his way into our hearts, riding around the moors in leather boots and furry coats, looking ripe for rescue by our Jane.

He is clever, tortured and besotted, and Jane follows him around the house and calls him 'Sir' and 'Master' in scenes which, if I were not so well bred, I would consider rude.

A typical one goes like this: "You examine me, Miss Eyre," said he. "Do you find me handsome?" Jane has a ponder and comes back (no pushover she): "No, Sir".

It's a struggle, a battle, an epic; and when he finally declares his love to her (after naughtily pretending he was going to marry someone else), a tree gets struck by lightning in the garden. (This doesn't happen in my love-life, although I dearly wish it would). But ? and most people forget this ? Jane Eyre is a fantasy too rich for one hero. Charlotte wrote us two.

After she leaves Thornfield (to nearly die of exposure), she meets St John Rivers, who is later revealed to be her cousin. (In some ways, Jane Eyre is a lot like Dynasty.)

St John is a prim, sexy blond. (She probably cut a third hero, a red-head this time, from an early draft.) And, sometimes - particularly on winter Sunday afternoons - I find him more beguiling even than Rochester.

St John is a priest - a "cold hard man" he tells Jane - but he falls for Jane like an orange rolling off a fridge. She fancies him, too, watching him admire a picture of a beautiful girl and drooling: "He breathed low and fast; I stood silent."

That's two-love to lonely Miss Bronte. How spoilt she was in her head. But it's back to Rochester and his marvellous flaws, and the beautiful cry: "Reader," - say it with me - "I married him." Aaah.

That is when I collapse prostrate on the floor, like a piece of toast waiting for some Rochester-flavoured jam.

In Rochester, Charlotte wrote a hero no real man can ever touch. Jane Eyre should be subtitled Revenge Of The Parson's Daughter because she spoilt real love for us all.

He is the man in every film, book or TV series you ever wanted; the dark darling you can save from himself. Plus Thorn-field would be fab to redecorate.

And Jane is so ordinary, "poor, obscure, plain and little", that anyone could get him. He chucks the glamourous beauty Blanche for Jane. He falls, like a god, into our laps.

What about Jane Austen, you may squeak. What about Pride And Prejudice? Shaddap is my answer. Charlotte herself sneered that Jane Austen "ruffles her readers with nothing vehement" (ouch!) and tidy Miss Austen is a pastel to Bronte's lustrous crimson.

She's John Lewis to Charlotte's Selfridges. Who wants to hear about the city of Bath when you can have the wilds of Yorkshire? Who wants drippy Darcy ? a man so wet you could do backstroke in him ? when you can have Rochester and Rivers?

So Jane Eyre isn't the first book in the canon of love-starved fantasy. It is the canon. The only thing I can say against it is that it is indirectly responsible for Dame Barbara Cartland getting published.

I don't agree with quite a bit of this... but it is entertainingly written, especially the Rochester-flavored jam bit.

JANE EYRE reading

Today, for it is Winter Solstice.

Dock Ellis RIP

Dock Ellis, who infamously claimed he pitched a no-hitter for Pittsburgh under the influence of LSD and later fiercely spoke out against drug and alcohol addiction, died Friday. He was 63.

I keep trying to finish a play based on this guy and his tripping no-hitter.

Obit at the NYTimes

Partay tonight!

It's time for my holiday/housewarming partay for all my chardonnay-sipping brie-munching liberal friends tonight!

And yes, that's what the right-wingers call us, as they do in this stunningly UNprescient blog thread at the dread wingnut "Free Republic" (home of the "Freepers") entitled Obama Can't Win in November

money quote:

You can't win a general election with a coalition of America hating Bitter African- Americans and America hating Bitter white liberal elitist billionaires/millionaires, who buy brie, Chardonnay, and expensive rat politicians like the elitist Hussein Obama/Samma.

Krugman & Bush

Both Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert made a big deal out of Barbra Steisand making nice with Bush. But here's a weirder moment of Zen - Bush and one of his (other) harshest critics, Paul Krugman.

Hilarity ensues, says The Economist

The buffest Rochester ever

Our Rochester for the upcoming JANE EYRE reading, Jason Alan Griffin, is definitely the buffest Rochester of all time.

How big a douchebag is Steven D. Levitt?

He asks: What Do Prostitutes and Rice Have in Common? in the NYTimes:

When we talk about the demand curve for a good, what we mean is how the quantity consumed for that exact same good changes with the price of that good while holding everything else constant (such as the consumer's income, the price of other goods, etc). A moment's reflection makes it obvious that the customer who purchases the high-price prostitute would demand just as much or more of her services if she were willing to do all the same things but at half the price. Similarly, the customer who chooses the low-price prostitute would also consume more of her services if her price were halved. If this is the case, the demand for prostitutes indeed slopes downward, just like the demand for virtually every other good known to mankind.

So how is it that rice in rural China might violate this rule? How could it be that when the price of rice rises, people actually consume more of it? Two factors are critical.

First, rice makes up a large share of the total expenditures of these Chinese peasants. Second, if they were richer, these peasants would prefer to eat less rice and more of other things, like meat; it is just that they are too poor right now to afford much meat and they have to eat something. When rice becomes more expensive, one effect of the higher price is to make the peasants want to consume less of it (just as johns do with prostitutes who raise their prices).

Now I'm someone who thinks prostitution should be decriminalized. But even so, I recognize the nastiness of that life for the majority of sex workers, and to compare the "consumption" of a prostitute's services to consuming rice is so incredibly offensive. But even more offensive is some of the commenters on the Freakonomics blog - none of whom, I'll wager, have ever had to worry about selling their bodies to survive - or being sold into sex slavery by their own parents, or kidnapped into it - the fate of thousands or even millions of girls around the world.

What do Steve D. Levitt and a douchebag have in common? What don't they?

Hall & Oates reunited

To sing a tribute song to Alan Colmes on the Daily Show.

Ooh, Sonnet contest!

Looking for adult sonnets! My sonnets can certainly be "adult!"

Oh wait, you have to be in Kansas.

And damn, I missed the Prairie Home Companion sonnet contest. And I must say, the finalists and winning sonnets seem very very lame to me.

I know my next sonnet will be one of my most romantic but I can't finish it because because because...

The next big thing...

Performed by Bruce Barton, Lynsey Buckelew, Ann Farthing, Nick Fondulis, Lori Kee, Mike Selkirk & Phoebe Summersquash

6 shows @The Penny Templeton Studio theater

Saturday, January 24 2009 8PM
Sunday, January 25, 2009 3PM
Saturday, January 31 2009 8PM
Sunday, February 1, 2009 3PM
Saturday, February 7 2009 8PM
Sunday, February 8, 2009 3PM

Fox Force Five

Is Emily New York enough to get into Fox Force Five? Maybe crazy coked-up Jackie can help.

Personal Jesus

Mellow Jesus and Angry Jesus answer prayers - that are mutually exclusive. Only the power of a Zen koan can help them now..

Pooh Story

Two people. A bench in Central Park. A Bear of Very Little Brain. A parody of a classic American play.

Stage Diving

Stephanie's Mom has come along to a concert with her, which is bad enough, but then Mom wants to relive the Clash's 1981 London Calling tour by diving off the stage.

The B Word

Gerry and Sandy bicker about the dangers of city playgrounds and prejudice until some bad kids come by and steal their bikes.

Mr. Black

Mr. Black has vowed to protect all abused creatures on Earth. His girlfriend is concerned where this will lead.

Happily Married

Kelly has had a crush on Ted, a cartoonist, for a long time. Now she has a chance to tell him what Hannah, his wife has been up to when she was supposed to be rehearsing.

The Helicopter

Helen and Bob are so intent on learning who will be promoted that they don't pay attention to the unfolding tragedy downtown until Helen learns her daughter is involved.

============

Well, the next big thing after the JANE EYRE winter solstice reading next week...

*sigh*

I wish I could write sonnets again.

Maybe there will be a Christmas miracle.

Speaking of The Nutcracker, you can now watch videos of various Nutcrackers at youtube, including the Baryshnikov version - Bary's looking hawt!

And it is de riguer for Clara to dance with the Nutcracker

The Royal Ballet does a nice version of the Chocolate, Coffee & Tea dances.

And here is its Trepak & Marzipan I loooove the Prince's outfit with the red jacket, white pants and boots. What does that remind me of?

And the Waltz of the Flowers

My first Nutcracker was 1979 at the Pennsylvania Ballet.

There is apparently a Manhattan S&M club called The Nutcracker Suite.

American Notes by Charles Dickens

Excerpt from Chapter 18

There is but one other head on which I wish to offer a remark; and that has reference to the public health. In so vast a country, where there are thousands of millions of acres of land yet unsettled and uncleared, and on every rood of which, vegetable decomposition is annually taking place; where there are so many great rivers, and such opposite varieties of climate; there cannot fail to be a great amount of sickness at certain seasons. But I may venture to say, after conversing with many members of the medical profession in America, that I am not singular in the opinion that much of the disease which does prevail, might be avoided, if a few common precautions were observed. Greater means of personal cleanliness, are indispensable to this end; the custom of hastily swallowing large quantities of animal food, three times a-day, and rushing back to sedentary pursuits after each meal, must be changed; the gentler sex must go more wisely clad, and take more healthful exercise; and in the latter clause, the males must be included also. Above all, in public institutions, and throughout the whole of every town and city, the system of ventilation, and drainage, and removal of impurities requires to be thoroughly revised. There is no local Legislature in America which may not study Mr. Chadwick’s excellent Report upon the Sanitary Condition of our Labouring Classes, with immense advantage.

more

JANE EYRE Winter Solstice Reading

Get more info about the JANE EYRE winter solstice reading here.

Cocoa & cookies wheee!

My pal Val on TV

She is very brave for doing this!

They couldn't see this coming?

The New Yorker review of the movie "Doubt"

This film, written and directed by John Patrick Shanley, who adapted it from his own play, unfolds in 1964, at a Catholic school in the Bronx. A jovial priest, Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), is accused by the principal, Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), of interfering with an altar boy. He denies it, she yearns to believe it, and we don’t care. Collectors of large narrative signposts will spend a happy couple of hours at Shanley’s movie, enjoying the window-rattling thunderstorms that he uses to indicate spiritual crisis, and the grimness with which Sister Aloysius, narrowing her red-rimmed eyes, delivers the line “So, it’s happened.” I didn’t know you could hiss, groan, and murmur at the same time, but Streep can do anything. She is, of course, wasted on this elephantine fable; if only “Doubt” had been made in 1964, shot by Roger Corman over a long weekend, and retitled “Spawn of the Devil Witch” or “Blood Wimple,” all would have been forgiven.

The play this movie is based on is good, but how could Shanley not get how uncinematic it is? I could see how static it was going to be when I saw previews last week before "Milk" but I wasn't a bit surprised. The play itself is quiet and thoughtful and leaves the audience wondering if the priest was guilty or not - which is all wrong for a movie. And actually, I had my own problems with the ending of the play, but nobody else seems to agree with me on that.

Alas...

I cannot write any more sonnets until I find out what happened to my studio monitors... a Muse is a funny thing...

what was I thinking?

I checked back into Match.com again recently - I was all psyched about being in NYC so perhaps I was the victim of irrational exuberance, much like the financial markets - and wow I forgot how many unattractive men there are out there in the 40 - 50 year old age range. I mean, not just ugly, but SCARY ugly. And so many of them want women in the 20-30 age range. It would be funny if it wasn't so stupid.

Men really start to look worse than women in middle age. It's because so many of them think that the cardinal virtue of being a man is being all-natural - none of this hair coloring for them - if they even have hair. The bald ones seem to believe that bald is beautiful. And what's up with the gray beards? Why would anybody have a gray beard? It makes me sick to think about getting near one. And so many men are slobs and couch potatoes. At least most of them have gotten the message that long nose hair is truly revolting and are trimming it.

And so many of the men online make a big deal about wanting a good kisser. It struck me as odd, this obsession with kissing - I mean, that's what they call "first base" isn't it? Then I remembered - of course! Prostitutes don't like to kiss their clients. These men can't get kissed by pros, so they are looking for a woman who will kiss them, for free, because they can't even pay a prostitute to do it.

Then some 48-year old douchebag contacts me, noticing that my preferred age-range is 25 - 48, and says "what would a cultured lady like you do with a 25-year-old?"

So many good come-backs for that one, I was overwhelmed, and just didn't bother answering, in disgust. And I could have a 25 year old, virtually any time I wanted. But I have this horrible curse - I actually have to LIKE a man before I can get involved with him. And I like so few of them. So when I do meet one I like, I usually go nuts for him.

It's hard not to despair and become a nun. Luckily I'm an atheist.

Wow my relatives are boring

I can write this because none of them have any real interest in me or what I'm up to and will probably never read this blog. They friended* me on Facebook, but that's presumably for the sake of completeness - they no doubt friend every McClernan.

*yes, friend is also a verb now, much like "befriend" without the be. I can hear the curmudgeons wailing about it now. Well hey, English is a living language get used to it!

My family has never been close, especially on my father's side - my mother never liked my dad's siblings, and they did not like her, and it filtered down to the children, I guess. I don't recall ever having a conversation with any of my paternal cousins and I know nothing about them. And thanks to Facebook I still don't know about them except the most mundane aspects of their suburban existences.

Although I guess I should give my cousins credit for being on Facebook at all, plenty of people our age are total Luddites, but do they really think people want to know that they are baking cookies, watching the kids, watching TV, going through circulars (!!!) getting a new dishwasher etc. etc. etc. I mean, some of my New York friends (and I) will occasionally write something mundane too, but will follow it up with something amusing or weird or interesting or inscrutable. Here are recent status updates for my Facebook friends:

Carl has a donut hangover

Lori is remembering the infamy of this date.

Tom is in the hoopty with Ogelthorpe tearing ass around the galaxy

Jonathan is a monkey

Cheryl is about to enjoy the blending of many traditions that is "The Klezmer Nutcracker."

Jessica wonders what if the hokey pokey really is what it's all about?

I notice that some of my cousins are members of a Facebook group called "We Love Alcohol" and I'm not surprised - they must have something to take the edge off the monotony!

Bill Ayers speaks

I was wondering when this guy was going to speak up for himself...

In the recently concluded presidential race, I was unwillingly thrust upon the stage and asked to play a role in a profoundly dishonest drama. I refused, and here’s why.

Unable to challenge the content of Barack Obama’s campaign, his opponents invented a narrative about a young politician who emerged from nowhere, a man of charm, intelligence and skill, but with an exotic background and a strange name. The refrain was a question: “What do we really know about this man?”

more at the NYTimes

Winter Holiday Reading

Rehearsing another fundraiser this Saturday - the NYCPlaywrights Winter Holiday Reading. This one includes my play SOCIAL ENGINEERING, which is related to the blog post here a couple of days ago, the reference to Obama's 1994 critique of Charles Murray's "The Bell Curve." One guy in my play is very much a Murray-ite, like razib of Gene Expression - he's getting paid by a right-wing think tank to spread "scientific" justifications for racism and sexism.

For some reason we had a big influx of plays in which prostitutes are featured prominently - almost half the plays. Yes, we put the ho in ho-ho-ho for the holidays!

Hey!

Where are my keyboard amps??? Also known as "powered studio monitors."

Cute guy drawing

By Ingres at the Met