Mrs. Rosenfield Speaks

Another monologue from the NYCPlaywrights Worldwide Monologue Project complete. I said I'd get this one done in June and I did - with 30 minutes to spare!

This was the first time I tried a montage - it was fun. The Betty Boop clip is public domain - and there's plenty more available at online archives.

Only one more monologue left.

Ireland demonstrates the paradox of thrift

Krugman often talks about the paradox of thrift. Ireland is living it:

Nearly two years ago, an economic collapse forced Ireland to cut public spending and raise taxes, the type of austerity measures that financial markets are now pressing on most advanced industrial nations.

“When our public finance situation blew wide open, the dominant consideration was ensuring that there was international investor confidence in Ireland so we could continue to borrow,” said Alan Barrett, chief economist at the Economic and Social Research Institute of Ireland. “A lot of the argument was, ‘Let’s get this over with quickly.’ ”

Rather than being rewarded for its actions, though, Ireland is being penalized. Its downturn has certainly been sharper than if the government had spent more to keep people working. Lacking stimulus money, the Irish economy shrank 7.1 percent last year and remains in recession.

Joblessness in this country of 4.5 million is above 13 percent, and the ranks of the long-term unemployed — those out of work for a year or more — have more than doubled, to 5.3 percent.

more at the NYTimes

ok Krugman, I sure hope you are wrong this time - for once!

The Third Depression

siiiiighhhhh...

H/C trope

It occurs to me that JULIA & BUDDY is basically a Hurt/Comfort story.

Hurt/Comfort has been around since the dawn of fiction, as the too-restrictively named Television Tropes endless matrix demonstrates, but it really takes the world of fan fiction to come up with snappy terms like Hurt/Comfort.

H/C is also big in the fan-fiction subcategory of "slash" fiction, which I've blogged about several times - and I wrote a one-act play called THE SLASH inspired by slash fiction. I even used the cargo cult trope before I realized there was one.

The reason H/C is so popular in slash is because it's a good excuse to get two same-sex (usually male) characters together in a state of vulnerability.

The J&B plot is a H/C switch-off. At first Julia is hurting thanks to her panic attack and Buddy keeps her company, then Julia becomes interested in Buddy's resentful-maintenance man schtick and by the end of the play discovers his hurt and then comforts him.

Rehearals begin today.

Up Against It

I had no idea that Joe Orton's screenplay "Up Against It" which he wrote with the Beatles in mind, had been produced for the stage until today - there's a review in the NYTimes from 1989. Says the review:

Following the screenplay, the story chronicles the misadventures of three prodigal friends (Orton had eliminated the George Harrison role after the Beatles turned down the script) who are victimized in a flagrant battle between the sexes. They become involved in a plot to assassinate the first female Prime Minister of Britain. Wherever McTurk turns, on land or at sea, he encounters the entire cast.

The book is spotted with rude Orton remarks about Church, State and sex. In response to a statement that a priest has been wrestling with his conscience all afternoon, McTurk asks, ''Who won?'' Such moments are far outweighed by the alterations in the script and by the interruption of Mr. Rundgren's score. The show, which is set in the 1960's, also reaches far afield for anachronistic jokes. (In her acceptance speech, the Prime Minister gushes, ''You like me, you really like me.'') Mistakes are exacerbated in Mr. Elliott's comic strip-style production. Best known for his direction of plays by Charles Busch, he approaches Orton in a similar vein, turning absurdist farce into camp caricature and overplaying the war of genders to the point of misogyny.

One of the pivotal decisions was whether to attempt to imitate the Beatles. The show's response is self-contradictory. The three characters speak in insecure Liverpool accents. Two have Beatle hairdos and mannerisms, while the third, Mr. Casnoff, acts less like a Beatle than like a Rolling Stone. Roger Bart, in the guise of Ringo Starr, is the closest to having a Beatle-mien, but, in common with his colleagues, he is undercut by the circumstances.

As Joe Orton wrote in his diary:

"I hadn't the heart to tell (Beatles film producer Walter Shenson) that the Beatles in my script have been caught in-flagrante, become involved in dubious political activity, dressed as women, committed murder, been put in prison and committed adultery. And the script isn't finished yet." 11th February 1967

Joe Orton was played by Gary Oldman in "Prick Up Your Ears." He talks about the Beatles script in this clip.



A friend of Orton's discusses his murder.

Actor Bruce Barton performs in a current production of Orton's "Loot".

another very good article by Katha Pollitt

As Kansas City teacher and social worker Mustafaa El Scari tells the down-and-out deadbeat dads in his fathering class, "All you are is a paycheck, and now you ain't even that. And if you try to exercise your authority, she'll call 911." Excuse me, exercise your authority? Are men really so brittle that they can't imagine a more fluid, flexible, loving, egalitarian way of relating to women and children than "because I said so"? Can they really not take advantage of the expansion of female-dominated working-class jobs like nursing and food preparation? (Actually, aren't most restaurant cooks already men? And if nursing sounds too girly, how about physician's assistant, EMS tech, phlebotomist?) Why should it be that women can change but men cannot?

Perhaps boys just haven't had enough incentive. The old ways worked so well for so long, so much of life was rigged in men's favor: all they had to do was show up. It can take a few generations for the new reality to sink in. Unfortunately, society at large isn't doing much to help. American males are bathed from birth in pop culture that reveres the most childish, most retrograde, most narcissistic male fantasies, from misogynistic rap to moronic action movies. Where would they get the idea that they should put away the video game and do their homework? That social work or schoolteaching is a good life for a man? Girls get a ton of sexist messages, too. But even if they grow up hating their bodies and dressing like prostitutes, they know that if they don't want to end up waitressing, they've got to hit the books and make a plan.

Hit the books. Make a plan. Boys can do that.

at The Nation

who is the scientist?

Maybe I was too ready to assign the fault of gender idiocy to males based on age. I blogged here on June 2: "...And the few roles they write for women are extremely crappy - just wife or daughter or hot chick roles. Because in their minds, males are the default gender, so why would you write a play with, for example, a female doctor? Males can be doctors so there's no point in having a female doctor unless there's a reason for the doctor to be female, like she's also a hot chick..."

But it turns out that male is the default gender to 21st century kids too, when it comes to imagining what a scientist looks like... although girls, at least, are influenced by reality, while boys are not. As it says at Restructure:

* Among girls (14 in total), 36% portrayed a female scientist in the “before” drawing, and 57% portrayed a female scientist in the “after” drawing.

* Among boys (17 in total), 100% portrayed a male scientist in the “before” drawing, and 100% portrayed a male scientist in the “after” drawing.

It looks like a visit to Fermilab has no impact on boys’ gender stereotypes about scientists, but it has a strong impact on challenging girls’ gender stereotypes about scientists. For girls, there was a 58% increase in female scientist representation in their drawings; for boys, there was a 0% increase in female scientist representation in their drawings.

Of course people like Steven Pinker would have you believe that everything is a nice level playing field now, and discrimination against women in the sciences does not exist - and virtually every problem women have in science careers is due to innate mental inferiority. Or as Pinker's evolutionary psychology disciple Lawrence Summers put it, in his infamous speech to a group of women scientists:

in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic (lesser female) aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.

The Julia and Buddy theme song

This was fun - I haven't created a song that had a higher percentage of original work since the JANE EYRE waltz two and a half years ago. The only thing in this clip that isn't me playing is the percussion.

Summer Solstice 2010 - henge fest

Apparently you are allowed inside the fenced in area of Stonehenge on the Summer Solstice...



National Geographic piece about Stonehenge



Carhenge

JB casting

JB is ready to go - we found our Julia - Kat Chua.

Toy Story 3 - Awesome

I knew Toy Story 3 was going to be good - it is great! The bits with Ken and Barbie are awesome - and they aren't even the best part. The audience I saw it with applauded twice during the end credits.

Who are the crazies in your neighborhood?

So far my apartment building has been fairly satisfactory. There's an in-house laundry room, which is convenient, and for the most part things are quiet and efficient. Every now and then my neighbors across the hall do some serious blazing and my apartment smells like skunkweed during those times, but at least it's not cheap incense.

But I guess any large multi-apartment complex is going to have at least some crazies.

There's a wizened 60-something woman who told me, not long after I moved in, that she lived in this apartment building her entire life. That's difficult for someone like me - who has averaged one move every two years since I was 18 - to imagine. She seemed a little odd then, but I didn't officially classify her as crazy in my mind.

Until today. I'm coming home from work and I'm waiting for the elevator. Wizened lady gets out. I enter elevator. I turn around to press the button for my floor and I notice wizened lady is holding the elevator door open. I stared at her for a moment wondering what the hell she was doing - she glared at me.

Me: What?

WL: What do you mean "what?" How about a thank you?

Me: For what?

WL: For holding the elevator open for you!

She finally let go of the elevator door after I told her to.

But the best crazy is the crazy teabagger on the first floor. I only know about this one because I sometimes take the stairs instead of the elevator in the morning and the teabagger's door is facing the stairway exit. There is an ever-changing exhibition of crazy on the teabagger's door. It's easier to show a picture than describe it:



Click here to see a larger image for all the teabaggy goodness.

J&B performance dates

Finally got the JULIA & BUDDY performance dates.

Performance #1 - Tuesday, July 13th, 6:00p
Performance #2 - Saturday, July 17th, 7:00p
Performance #3 - Sunday, July 18th, 2:30p

The lovely and talented Daniel Genalo has agreed to reprise the role of Buddy, which he performed at NYCPlaywrights last month, but Claire Warden, the fabulous Brit can't do it - she has to go off and get married and honeymoon in Paris this summer. At least she expressed how very bummed out she is about not doing it - she really loved playing Julia - that's so gratifying for a playwright.

Time to schedule auditions.

Isn't that nice?

Renee Cole, one of the actor members of NYCPlaywrights, baked this cake for our last meeting of the year before summer hiatus. How about that? It was delicious too.

Nobody gets down on NYCPlaywrights harder than me, with my rants about old men, etc. But I really have created something - I'm not always sure exactly WHAT - but these meetings do have an impact on people's lives. And I read somewhere that even belonging to a group that meets once a month increases a person's quality of life. And we usually meet once a week. This past year people have begun bringing snacks to meetings, including wine. We've sometimes had three bottles of wine contributed to a single meeting - I usually bring cheese and crackers to go with the wine. And while snacks aren't necessary to a group that meets to read plays, it's a very nice thing - especially for hungry actors.

And not EVERY meeting features me freaking out at some clueless sexist old man. Why some meetings come and go without me making a single scene!

Cultural materialism & me

I have done a terrible job of maintaining my Cultural Materialism web site, especially since that site probably gets more hits than all my other sites combined. Every now and then I'll get an email from somebody concerning the site. And somebody did me the dubious honor of helping himself to all the Marvin Harris videos from my site and posting them on his youtube channel without giving me any credit. I had to go through alot to convert those videos from VHS to digital format too. I have to do something about this.

UPDATE: dayam - my cultural materialism web site is on the curriculum at the University of Manitoba.

Dumbarton Oaks first movement - video

Since I first mentioned Dumbarton Oaks on this blog Youtube has come a long way and you can get virtually anything from it - including this performance of the first movement of Dumbarton Oaks.

My post was Love and Art and Dumbarton Oaks which was the inspiration, along with Shakespeare's sonnet #151 for my sonnets.

Looking back at the archives from March - April 2008 I am really amazed at how chipper and postive I sound, since I was in the most incredible anguish during that period. I don't know how I managed to get myself out of bed every day back then.

qu'est-ce que c'est?

That's just what you are

Lookit how young Jon Stewart is!

McAllistrum's March

Ah the elusive McAllistrum's March. The Chieftains do the definitive version along with the Belfast Harp Orchestra - a short, lo-fi clip of the into can be heard here. This video is only one guy, not a whole harp orchestra, but the audio is much better.

Ja!

That does it - I'm moving to Sweden:

In this land of Viking lore, men are at the heart of the gender-equality debate. The ponytailed center-right finance minister calls himself a feminist, ads for cleaning products rarely feature women as homemakers, and preschools vet books for gender stereotypes in animal characters. For nearly four decades, governments of all political hues have legislated to give women equal rights at work — and men equal rights at home.

more at the NYTimes


I better learn the national anthem:

Du gamla, du fria, du fjällhöga Nord,
du tysta, du glädjerika sköna!
Jag hälsar dig, vänaste land uppå jord,
din sol, din himmel, dina ängder gröna,
din sol, din himmel, dina ängder gröna.

Du tronar på minnen från fornstora dar,
då ärat ditt namn flög över jorden.
Jag vet, att du är och du blir vad du var.
Ja, jag vill leva, jag vill dö i Norden!
Ja, jag vill leva, jag vill dö i Norden!

Rudimentary web site

Already online for Julia and Buddy - go me.

Julia & Buddy - first production

World premiere at the Midtown International Theater Festival.

The movie Agora - quite good!

The clip above is from Agora - the movie was made in English, with mainly British actors, judging by the accents, even though it was made by a Spanish company. The clip above is in English with Italian subtitles - I couldn't find any other non-trailer type clips.

In this clip we see Rachel Weisz as Hypatia and Oscar Isaac as Orestes, once Hypatia's pupil and now her friend. He's now Roman prefect of Alexandria, and a Christian convert, although probably only because it was politically expedient.

Hypatia is conducting a simple and elegant physics experiment involving gravity and motion. One of the most impressive aspects of this movie was the way it gave a coherent account of Hypatia's discoveries concerning celestial physics, culminating in her work on the elliptical nature of the Earth's orbit around the sun.

The movie isn't exactly a laugh riot, but what humor there is, is usually supplied by Orestes, as in this scene. It's not hysterically funny, but it got a laugh - she explains her reaction to the experiment and he says "What does that mean?"

It was the timing and the way he said it - and like I said, this movie isn't exactly a big comedy, especially since Hypatia is murdered at the end.

It's not a perfect movie - there should have been at least one other female who got a speaking role. The movie definitely does not pass the Bechdel test. I mean, they didn't even give Hypatia any female slaves in this movie to wait on her when she was taking a bath - she had two male slaves attending her. This seems very unlikely. Since they took the trouble to invent the character of Davos, Hypatia's slave who loves her, they certainly could have given her a female friend or relative or servant to speak to.

Really Hypatia hardly has any personal life at all, something which the character actually comments on. But they could have given her a little more time as a person and less as an icon. They didn't need quite so many shots of conflict as they used.

Speaking of conflict though, one of the very surprising and admirable aspects of this movie is the way it faithfully represents the savagery and power politics of the early Christians, and the conflicts between Christianity and paganism, Christianity and Judaism, and even Christian vs. Christian. The prefect Orestes is almost murdered by a mob of Christians for not being Christian enough for their liking. Very realistic!

Hypatia becomes a sort of atheist martyr, one of the only hold-outs against Christianity which is being forced on all the pagans - the Christians didn't try to convert the Jews, they just drove them out of Alexandria.

I was surprised at how affecting her martyrdom scene was - I cried. And although it was partly sadness at seeing a good person killed, it was more than that. In this movie, Hypatia represents the human quest for knowledge - she's sort of the living embodiment of the Library at Alexandria, the fabled repository of the wisdom of the ancient Greeks and Romans. And once the Christians destroyed the Library, getting rid of Hypatia was the next step. So the tears were also about witnessing the triumph of ignorance, misogyny and mob-rule over intellectual curiosity. Something that routinely happens in schools and workplaces, in my experience.

The movie also looked great - great zoom in and out shots from the cosmos to the Earth and back. Alexandria looked great and historically convincing, and the costumes were great. And Rupert Evans is absolutely smokin' as Synesius, Bishop of Cyrene. He's a beautiful man, and with long hair he's like the patron saint of lust. See next post for more details.

Hotty McHotstein

So thanks to the movie Agora I discovered the actor Rupert Evans.

And then I discovered he was in a Victorian-era movie - oh sweet baby Jesus, he could not be any hotter.



This picture comes from something called "Fingersmith" which appears to be mainly about a lesbian relationship. But how could any woman be a lesbian within ten miles of this man? Just look at him!



He's so beautiful it blows my mind.

WATCH THIS INFORMATIONAL VIDEO

I suspect that quite a few people who visit this blog are secret "pot" blowers. They should WATCH and LEARN.

The Menaissance Festival!

Sady at Tiger Beatdown has outdone herself this time:

The chicks today, they get to do so many things! Why, they can vote, and attend colleges, and even drink and smoke in public! These chicks: An alarming number of them have jobs! And, like, financial autonomy, from the jobs, and hence a socially assured position of power from which to negotiate the terms of their relationships and lives, thereby making them not entirely dependent on the funding and/or goodwill of men for their continued survival and status, and so they're all able to make decisions and expect fair treatment and… dude, it's a mess, I tell you. Because it turns out, after like fifty-some years of this business, none of these chicks is impressed enough by your penis!

"Excuse me, madam, I happen to have a penis," you say. (Because you do. A trans variety of gentleman has no place within the Menaissance!) "Would you, perchance, like to hear about all of my thoughts and feelings as they relate to this penis, and also how important it makes me, and furthermore how it qualifies me to boss you around?" And the chicks today, they don't particularly care to listen! They used to listen. They used to have to. It was, like, their job.

Hence, the Menaissance: From "Men," meaning dudes, and "aissance," meaning "making asses out of themselves." What happens, apparently, is that a dude watches a few too many episodes of Mad Men and reads one too many Raymond Carver stories and takes at least one beer commercial just a bit too seriously, and then he decides to engage in some HISTORICAL RE-ENACTMENTING, buying books with titles like The Retrosexual Manual: How to Be A Real Man, and playing dress-up in his special Don Draper costume that he got at Banana Republic, and getting his hair did at special man-focused man-salons which ensure their manliness by putting Elvis memorabilia all over the place (because women HATED Elvis, duh), and also probably pretending that he likes how scotch tastes and that cigars don’t make him want to barf his rare steaks back up onto his pseudo-vintage-trouser-encased lap, and in all other ways attempting to embody some wacky vision of pre-feminist manhood that, unless he is actually ninety-seven years old, he has only ever seen on TV.

now I see what I was doing wrong...

Who writes these eHow articles? They have one for How to Write a Sonnet which contains this list in a call-out box:

Things You'll Need:

* Godiva or Whitman Chocolates
* Dictionaries
* Thesauri
* Roses
* Boxes Of Chocolates
* Pencils
* Erasers
* Notebook Papers
* Pencils
* Pens
* Spiral Notebooks
* Word Processors
* Pencils
* Pens

Well now I know what I forgot - the boxes of chocolates and the roses. And I did not have enough pencils.

a movie about Hypatia? wow

Why didn't I hear about the movie they made - Agora about Hypatia of Alexandria??? Turns out it opened in a limited release in the U.S. on May 28, 2010 but it was made in Spain in 2009.

Of course the Catholic Church is mad about it - because the movie truthfully reports that Hypatia was murdered by a mob of Christians.

The Spanish Catholic Observatorio Antidifamacion Religiosa (Religious Anti-Defamation Observatory) protested against the film for "promoting hatred of Christians and reinforcing false clichés about the Catholic Church."

Two views of Hypatia:

Socrates Scholasticus

THERE WAS a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time.

And John, Bishop of Nikiu

AND IN THOSE DAYS there appeared in Alexandria a female philosopher, a pagan named Hypatia, and she was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music, and she beguiled many people through (her) Satanic wiles.

It reminds me of this scene from the 2005 movie Cassanova - Bishop Pucci, played by Jeremy Irons, and his flunky arrive to see a balloon in flight (minute 4:47 in the clip below):

PUCCI

(making sign of the cross)

Witchcraft!

FLUNKY

Actually, Your Reverence, I believe it's because hot air rises, overcoming the gravitational force of -

(catches a look from Pucci)

Witchcraft.



Looks like AGORA is playing this weekend in NYC - whoohoo!

WTF to do with all these old men???

NYCPlaywrights has been plagued by an infestation of old men. And I have to do something about it.

I don't dislike them simply for being old, but the older men are, the more they remember a time when men had total dominance, even in the West, over women and nobody complained about it. It was simply accepted as the natural state of things.

But it isn't nostalgia - they aren't nostalgic because in their MINDS nothing has changed. They write plays in allegedly contemporary settings that seem straight out of 1950s sit-coms. And the few roles they write for women are extremely crappy - just wife or daughter or hot chick roles. Because in their minds, males are the default gender, so why would you write a play with, for example, a female doctor? Males can be doctors so there's no point in having a female doctor unless there's a reason for the doctor to be female, like she's also a hot chick.

And none of them can write for shit - I don't just mean the content - I'm talking about the form. They just have people sitting around yammering at each other, about old guy stuff.

My theory is that they consider NYCPlaywrights to be a really cheap hobby. Most of them have plenty of money, but they are also incredibly cheap. And NYCPlaywrights will take anybody who can pay the membership fee, pretty much.

I think what I need to do is have a higher membership rate for all men over 60. It's already bad enough that we have way more young female actors than young male actors (and young male actors, if they are any good, get ALL the good roles) and way more male playwrights than female playwrights. I must fix this.

I blame my dad

My poor father died six years ago today. He was 71, which isn't especially young, but I'm sure he would have had at least another ten years if he didn't get lung cancer. It was no surprise that he did get lung cancer, he smoked constantly throughout his life from the age of 12. He tried to taper off by the time he retired, but the damage was already done. Ever since I was a kid I fully expected him to die of lung cancer.

My dad was a great guy. He never made alot of money - at least not a lot considering he had six kids to raise, and sent all of us to tuition-charging Catholic school. But he sure worked for his money. I cannot remember a single day he ever took off from work - he had a rock solid routine of going to work, working, and coming home.

But even more importantly, he really liked being a dad. In nice weather he would come home from work and play in the backyard with us kids - whiffle ball and volley ball - things like that. And all the kids in the neighborhood would come over and play too - my dad was like the neighborhood recreation captain. And he was completely fair - he never gave his own kids an advantage on scoring or strikes - he was a perfect umpire.

Only years later, after we were all too old to play whiffle ball in the backyard did it occur to me that my brothers and sisters and I never played games with any of the other kids' dads. Not a single one of them.

And not spending quality time was the least of it for some of the other kids' dads. Some dads were actively harmful: the girls in the house behind us were sexually molested by their father. My best friend's father was an alcoholic, and while he was nice enough, in spite of the drinking binges, he really didn't have any interest in speaking to children - not even his own children, let alone neighborhood kids. Plenty of people I know had such bad relationships with their dads - my sister-in-law's father hasn't spoken to her in ten years, my ex-husband's father barely ever spoke to him, an ex-boyfriend's father used to savagely beat him.

The older I get the more I realize how incredibly lucky my siblings and I were to have such a good dad.

But in addition to being kind and fair to kids he respected women. He was fairly conservative, and a devout Catholic, so he wasn't exactly a feminist. But even so, he saw women as human beings, and as individuals. He didn't treat me and my sisters any differently than my brothers - everybody was welcome to play whiffle ball. And he expressed pride and admiration in our accomplishments.

Again, growing up I didn't realize how rare this was. Only as an adult did I discover how much utter contempt so many men have for women. I never saw my dad leering at a woman - not in front of my mother or any other time. He never made lewd comments about women. He would never dream of having a girlie magazine in the house. Some might attribute this to his religiosity, but I don't think so. I've known plenty of men who were religious and yet didn't respect women.

And most men seem to feel that the role of any woman in his life is to express admiration for him and his accomplishments. Her accomplishments aren't worth mentioning - that's not her job, to be admirable, her job is strictly to admire. That is why I'm a complete sucker for any man who freely expresses admiration for any woman's accomplishments.

My dad was also very honest, to a fault. He didn't go out of his way to insult or criticize anybody, but he was not a bullshitter. You knew where you stood with him, and so did everybody else.

So that was my dad - he respected women and admired their accomplishments, liked kids, had dignity, was honest, and except for cigarettes, had self-control. I grew up expecting men to be like that, and so few of them are. So many men, it seems to me, are sniveling, whiny, lecherous misogynist creeps - especially all those middle-aged men who play with their expensive toys and get lap-dances and try to hook up with 20-something women - and then whine that women are gold-diggers.

I expect something different - I blame my dad.

my only blog post about SEX AND THE CITY

Based on this review, SATC seems to really polarize people. Most of the commenters agreed with the hostile review, but a percentage of the commenters were hostile to the reviewer.

I watched about 15 minutes of the show once and that was enough for me - the incessant voice-over was just too annoying. And from everything I'd heard, the show spent an insane amount of time on shoes. I certainly never considered it a feminist show since it was about a bunch of rich shallow fashion-obsessed dummies.

And yet... it is rather suspicious how much hostility is displayed towards the show and the movies. As several of the review commenters pointed out, the silly male fantasies of the James Bond franchise never seemed to inspire this much vitriol from anybody. Some even claim James Bond is cool.

Here's the thing - the feminist pioneers were a smart, fearless group of women, not afraid to speak out, risking hell and hostility to break down barriers.

But not all women are like that. There are plenty of timid, not-too-bright women (and there probably an equal number of men who are the same way) who don't think very hard about anything at all. They like pretty clothes and they like sex - because everybody likes sex.

But here's the thing - traditionally women were not supposed to like sex. Or if they did, they better keep quiet about it. Their job was to be the object of desire, either for a husband or a john. They didn't get to have their own desires - female desires were inconvenient in a world where women were traded between men.

I don't think some of these know-it-all critics of the SATC franchise realize what a big deal it is for lots of women to admit that they like sex and seek it out for pure pleasure. Yeah, feminists broke those barriers down 50 years ago, pushing for jobs and birth control. That got a LOT of press. But it takes decades for the rest of the world to catch up with pioneers.

So this is the first step for the slow women - admitting they like sex. For the dim women, buying a lavish wardrobe is all they require for a sense of empowerment.

So SATC is an easy target. But the most hostile critics of the show almost always tip over into expressions of misogyny, often while claiming to be feminists. Lindy West does it several times, especially in her hostility to the oldest of the four women, Samantha:

What is the lubrication level of Samantha Jones's 52-year-old vagina? Has the change of life dulled its sparkle? Do its aged and withered depths finally chafe from the endless pounding, pounding, pounding—cruel phallic penance demanded by the emotionally barren sexual compulsive from which it hangs? If I do not receive an update on the deep, gray caverns of Jones, I shall surely die!

Now menopause is a serious subject and impacts virtually all women. West whines about how shallow the movie is, yet references to menopause make her spit bile. And what makes her angriest, apparently, is that the movie takes a note of reassurance - Samantha is still having lots of great sex. No doubt this is a comfort to the movie's target audience. And it's certainly no more of a fantasy than so many Hollywood movies in which saggy middle-aged men are paired up with beautiful 20-something women.

West really tips her internalized-misogyny hand here:

This will not stand. Samantha, being the prostitute sexual revolutionary that she is...

If the Samantha character is having lots of great, unapologetic sex at 52, that does in fact make her a sexual revolutionary to many women from more backwards areas of the US or the world. But West suggests she's a "prostitute" (and the strike-out indicates that this is what she really thinks but is just going along with the movie's conceit that Samantha is a sexual revolutionary.) Calling the character a prostitute makes no sense - she does not charge for sex. What West really meant was a slut. Slut-shaming is a favorite hobby of sexists everywhere - usually the same ones who adore James Bond for his tom-catting ways.

That West calls Samantha a prostitute indicates either that West doesn't bother differentiating between a woman who has sex for money and a woman who has sex for pleasure because all women having non-marital sex are the same, or more likely, she wanted to call Samantha a slut, but she dimly realizes that "slut" is out-of-bounds these days - although more for prudery than double-standards sexism.

The review concludes:

At sexism's funeral (which takes place in a mysterious, incense-shrouded chamber of international sisterhood), the women of Abu Dhabi remove their black robes and veils to reveal—this is not a joke—the same hideous, disposable, criminally expensive shreds of cloth and feathers that hang from Carrie et al.'s emaciated goblin shoulders. Muslim women: Under those craaaaaaay-zy robes, they're just as vapid and obsessed with physical beauty and meaningless material concerns as us! Feminism! Fuck yeah!

But as several commenters pointed out, in fact many Muslim women do wear couture under their burkas. Because within the horrible hard-core patriarchal societies in which they are trapped, it's the best they can do.

And there is definitely a connection here - while the Muslim women are literally constrained by their burkas, the fans of SATC are mentally constrained by their own lack of imagination and ambition - to them, any woman who admits to liking sex and who spends lots of money on her wardrobe is a raging hard-core feminist.

So I would have to say that SATC is feminist - it's feminism for stupid people. And that doesn't excuse the subtle or not-so-subtle misogyny from the SATC critics.

UPDATE: just today the NYTimes ran an article about the virtual female slavery of forced marriages in Afghanistan. And this kind of thing happens in plenty of other places all over the world. And for that reason SATC is revolutionary to so many people - women exercising agency over their own sexual desires - neither being forced to sell themselves to a "good provider" in exchange for sexual services, as in traditional Western marriage - or being sold to someone for a life of sexual slavery by your parents when you are a teenager - or younger.

Steampunkpalooza!

The first USB flash drive that is piston-powered with a smoke stack.

the Steampunks Great Exhibiton!

Looks like I just missed the Steampunk World's Fair in Piscataway.

Here's the Steampunk Empire

The movie Time After Time has to be one of the best Steampunk movies ever.

Hardcore Steampunk guy

haiku

Some people inspire sonnets, others inspire haiku.

Your big announcement:
ANOTHER PLAY ON THE WAY!!!
Thrilled I mentioned you.

Pantsless on the Net
The biggest douchebag ever.
Even DIL looks skeeved.

No visits Newmark?
Hard times for part-time actors.
You do love tacos.

Notes: the plural of haiku is haiku

how the Japanese pronounce haiku

Wow, I am now fashionable

Well eventually everything is in style, or back in style. And now, according to the NYTimes, I am:

“There is definitely a movement to a very lengthy look, especially among the young,” said Nevena Borissova, a partner in Curve, a progressive retailer with stores in New York, Los Angeles and Miami. Ms. Borissova favors radically stretched-out skirts and dresses that “drag on the floor, with raw edges, and worn with combat boots,” she said.

Bonus - the article begins with a reference to the Jane Eyre prequel "Wide Sargasso Sea."

I've been wearing this look for the past five years or so, and the first time I saw it was back in art school, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where big boots and long skirts were all the rage.

How do you write a good 10-minute play?

Ten-minute plays are popular these days for basic economic reasons: they are relatively cheap to produce and if you do an evening of 10-minute plays you can count on a decent attendance because most writers will invite friends and family.

But that doesn't mean a ten-minute play can't be a great work of art. I will admit I've sat through 10-minute plays that felt like an hour. But why were they bad? What went wrong? Or more importantly, for the plays that do work - what went right?

Here is a guideline I first created for a show of 10-minute plays I produced in 2008 called 10 Min Playfest

* Does the play pull me in right away?
There are only 10 minutes - the play has to pull you in right from the start.

* Does the play surprise me?
If the play is about something I've heard a hundred times already, I'll be bored. Or if it unfolds in predictable ways, I will be bored.

* Does the play make me laugh or well up? Or both?
Art must have an emotional impact.

* Does the play have a dramatic struggle?
People sitting around bickering is not a dramatic struggle. So many people don't seem to understand that.

* Does the play have vivid characters in compelling situations?
People sitting around bickering is not a compelling situation. Especially if the characters are called "man" and "woman." If the playwright can't be bothered to come up with a name for a character, it's usually a sign that the character is as generic as the label. This is especially true of a 10-minute play where you really don't have time for generic supporting characters.

* Does the play show more than tell? "Show, don't tell" has been said a million times and yet maybe about 20% of all the people who write plays - including lionized, famous playwrights - seem to get this.

* Does the play blow my mind through sheer funky originality?
This is the Holy Grail of ten-minute plays. I've seen only a handful of ten-minute plays that have blown my mind.

Here are three 10-minute plays that I believe work very well:

* ALMOST WATERSHEDS by Micharne Cloughley
* LOVERBOY by Michael Jalbert
* SINGERS by Thom Weidlich

more...

After keeping us waiting for a century, Mark Twain will finally reveal all

Wow, interesting...

The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century.

That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography. The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist.

more...

Lascivious yammering

I recently saw the first half of Sheila Callaghan’s play LASCIVIOUS SOMETHING. Luckily it was a comp - I was so bored by intermission I couldn’t stand the thought of sitting through any more of it, so I left. Why was I so bored? Because there was so much yakking about what the characters (or other people) did some other time, somewhere else. Those sounded like interesting times, I would have liked to have seen those times and places enacted. Instead what I saw on stage was a bunch of people mostly sitting around in a kitchen telling tales.

I was told by somebody who sat through the entire thing that I missed the best part – when Boy (actually a girl) plays a young August (the man in the play – an actual man), writing and editing aloud for the audience, his last letter to his mother.

Oh joy, watching somebody write AND edit a letter on stage. And this was a highlight. I guess the author wanted to mix things up a little - instead of yet another long-winded remembrance of things past - "did I ever tell you about the last letter I wrote to my mother?" - she has somebody else play somebody writing a letter - in the past - to a character not actually in the play. Ooh how cleverly distancing. As if the play needed any more distancing.

I’m not saying that an intrinsically undramatic scenario can never be made to work – I am a fan of the film “My Dinner with Andre” - but it’s pretty rare. Maybe if one of your characters is as personally fascinating as Andre Gregory – but none of the characters in LASCIVIOUS SOMETHING was that. They were mostly irritatingly inscrutable.

The NYTimes review says:

Ms. Callaghan spends an inordinate amount of time having Liza and August dance around each other and around August's pregnant young wife, Daphne, a willowy Greek beauty played with cool charisma by Elisabeth Waterston. Throwing in the married couple's psychosexual games with an androgynous teenager (Ronete Levenson) does little to clarify the relationship dynamics.

But if Callaghan didn't have the (utterly enervating) psychosexual games going on, then even the clueless people who like this play might realize how talky-talky and dull it actually is.

I was pretty disappointed in Callaghan - after the reviews I read about Callaghan's THAT PRETTY PRETTY I was very interested in her possibly pushing back against the angry young man play trope that has taken over NY theater. Well... maybe her next play. After all, if critics can give Adam Rapp many many chances (as I wrote about) why shouldn't Callaghan get them too?

Speaking of "My Dinner with Andre" it turns out the entire movie is available on YouTube.

Here is part one:

grown-up Pippi?

Very interesting piece in the NYTimes:

An old colleague of Mr. Larsson’s has said they once talked about how certain characters from children’s books would manage and behave if they were older. Mr. Larsson especially liked the idea of a grown-up Pippi, a dysfunctional girl, probably with attention deficit disorder, who would have had a hard time finding a place in society but would nonetheless take a firm hand in directing her own destiny. That musing led to the creation of Lisbeth Salander, the central character in Mr. Larsson’s trilogy.

I relate to this because one of the three plays I'm currently working on, CELIA, has a character that is my idea of what Tom Sawyer might be like when he grew up - and fell in love with his uncle's slave.

I always loved Pippi Longstocking - she was a fun super hero for girls long before the Power Puff Girls.

You gotta love the PPG theme song:



Fighting crime, trying to save the world, here they come just in time, the Power Puff Girls.

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie

Well it turns out that today is Mousiepalooza - an actual mouse got into my apartment and both cats were ecstatic. Neither of them has seen a mouse in at least 5 years.

I'm very happy it's gone since I did not look forward to the prospect of cleaning up mousie guts. Although they seemed to look at it as a toy rather than food. Mr. Fuzz kept catching it and carrying it around like a kitten, and then letting it go so they could chase it some more. Willow might have seen a mouse in her youth since she was semi-feral. Mr. Fuzz has never seen one I bet - the closest he's ever gotten to a mouse are the real-fur mousie toys that he always wants to play with.

This real mouse event might well be the happiest day of Mr. Fuzz's life. The most real prey he's gotten in the past is the occasional fly.

But nothing gold can stay, as I told Mr. Fuzz - I finally had to trap the mousie and let it go outside - I didn't have the heart to watch the cats kill it or even (gasp) kill it myself. I blame Robert Burns:

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty
Wi bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murdering pattle.

I'm truly sorry man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth born companion
An' fellow mortal!

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
'S a sma' request;
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't.

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's win's ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,
An' weary winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.

That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou's turned out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld.

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still thou are blest, compared wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

And that cranreuch cauld is a bitch!

Burns was quite a babe, and a ladies man - they were all about Burns at the Edinburgh Writers Museum which I visited a few years ago. You can see a plaque on Google maps right near the museum (between the Cashmere Factory Outlet and Heritage of Scotland on Haymarket St.) which reads:

In a House
on the East side of this Close
ROBERT BURNS
lived during his first visit
to Edinburgh 1780

Here is the cutie Robbie Burns



They were also big on Robert Louis Stevenson at the Writers Museum - here he is:



I know an actor who could totally play Stevenson if they made a movie about him. Pretty uncanny.

the pointlessness of Cringefest

Does anybody besides me find the concept of Cringefest utterly unnecessary? It bills itself as a festival of Bad Plays, Bad Musicals and Bad Films.

It is totally unnecessary because not only do bad plays get rave reviews all the time - they actually win awards! A play I saw a year or so ago, about zombies and women having hot flashes was a mess. So of course it won an IT Award.

Off-off Broadway is the worst for this kind of thing, but even Broadway is not immune - the 2003 Pulitzer went to ANNA IN THE TROPICS, a completely mediocre work.

No, with all the sincere garbage out there, I see no point at all in ironic garbage.

Buddy & Julia

The script is done and ready to go!

Steampunk and steamboats

One of the best aspects of Steampunk in my opinion, is that it encourages men to dress up in adorable quasi-Victorian clothing. I've been looking for an image to give to the costume designer for the production of my play CELIA - and I'm thinking waaaay in advance since I haven't finished writing the play yet but I don't care cause it's fun - as a model for the clothing style for the handsome young gentleman, Tom, in my play. I couldn't find anything very good until I stumbled on this excellent Steampunk Fashion site and found a whole page of men's fashions. And this is just about the perfect look for Tom:



Mmm. come to mama!

I see that Gentleman's Emporium, a web site I blogged about a couple of years ago, has branched out into Steampunk fashions.

Sam Clemens looks rather dapper in this photo taken around the same time that CELIA is set.


But his brother Henry was the real cutie of the family:



Poor Henry died from a steamboat explosion. Sam Clemens made the news, long before he was famous, in a description of his grief:

We witnessed one of the most affecting scenes at the Exchange yesterday that has ever been seen. The brother of Mr. Henry Clemens, second clerk of the Pennsylvania... arrived in the city yesterday afternoon, on the steamer A. T. Lacy. He hurried to the Exchange to see his brother, and on approaching the bedside of the wounded man, his feelings so much overcame him, at the scalded and emaciated form before him, that he sunk to the floor overpowered. There was scarcely a dry eye in the house; the poor sufferers shed tears at the sight. This brother had been pilot on the Pennsylvania, but fortunately for him, had remained in New Orleans when the boat started up.

Clemens wrote to his sister-in-law:

Long before this reaches you, my poor Henry, - my darling, my pride, my glory, my all, will have finished his blameless career, and the light of my life will have gone out in utter darkness. O, God! this is hard to bear...

MoDo rides again

I used to have much more to say about NYTimes op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd - part of my focus was on the fact that she was the only women op-ed columinst for the NYTimes out of 9 - but they got Gail Collins. And 2 women out of 9 is what passes for gender parity in a world still run by men.

So I slacked off the MoDo beat but could not help but notice her annoying ways today, when I saw her proclaim in her column:

Men, generally more favored by nature as they age, can be single at all ages.

Now you can understand why the old men who run things would favor the "it's nature" argument about the way our society runs, but you'd think MoDo would be less eager to promote such a view. But then again, I've always maintained that she got and keeps her job by sucking up to the old men who run the NYTimes, so it's not surprising that she would support their views.

That men are favored "by nature" as they age is such an obvious lie - unless you consider baldness to be a sign of nature's favor.

Viagra was not invented by "nature."

The fact that there was a double standard that said men could get with much younger women, but women could not get with much younger men is not the result of "nature" - it's the result of men running things to suit themselves. Only in the past 50 years have women even begun to get and keep their own money (and that's only in some parts of the world - in other parts of the world little girls are still sold in marriage to old men.)

Prior to the 1960s most women could not get work that paid well enough to support themselves, much less a husband too. Until the law changed the custom in which jobs were segregated by gender women had extremely limited career options. Limited career options was not the work of "nature."

The fact that women are increasingly LESS dependent on men and as a result of legal changes, and are choosing younger men more and more is not the result of an amazing 50-year evolutionary phenomenon - it's the economy, stupid!

MoDo is obsessed with women having it all - she thinks women can't have it all by "nature" which is why she always found Hillary Clinton to be so galling - Hillary was married to the POTUS - and IMO a pretty damn sexy guy - and yet still had a career as a lawyer - and now she's Secretary of State. This goes completely against MoDo's incredibly blinkered regressive unimaginative concept of how the world should be - or rather how things are in "nature."

But MoDo's new Kagan obsession proves that in MoDo's world, no woman can win. If you are like Hillary, she hates and envies you - if you are single like Kagan she has an op-ed pity party for your spinsterhood.

Aphrodisiac

Although Bow Wow Wow's "I Want Candy" is their greatest song (and one of my favorite songs of all time) "Aphrodisiac" is great too. And it's so nice to see those styling punked out guys after spending a day with the financial services blueshirts.

Why do they dress so drab and conformist-like, those financial services men? My theory - they think if they look too stylish or interesting it will scare the money away.



But check it out - all these years I thought "I Want Candy" was a Bow Wow Wow original - but no, it was recorded by The Strangeloves in 1965. Watch them perform it - groovy.

putting aside for a moment the question of why a woman would choose to go to a strip club for her birthday...

Although the experience seems to have been so wrenching I doubt she'll do it again:

I told my boyfriend I wanted him to buy me a lap dance, and he obliged. I “picked” my candidate, although I don’t remember deliberating very much. She was young, young, young, couldn’t have been more than 19 or 20. And she was sweet, or she acted it. The lap dance was bizarre–I didn’t enjoy it. I don’t know why I thought I would. It seemed so strange to be just sitting there, doing nothing, while this person rubbed her body all over me. This young woman was gorgeous. She had long straight hair. Her makeup was perfectly applied. She was thin and looked like she worked out a lot. Her skin was incredibly soft. She smelled amazing. She made jokes and was complimentary to me.

When she was done, I asked her how much I owed. She smiled sweetly and said “Oh, it’s 10 dollars.”

I felt like I had been punched in the gut.

Later, as I cried my eyes out on the couch in my apartment and my boyfriend soothed me, I tried to make sense of it. Here was this incredibly beautiful woman, who did everything, everything that a woman was supposed to do to make herself appealing to men. She was thin, she was compliant, she was beautiful, she spent probably hours every day shaving and lotioning and applying makeup and picking out clothes and pouring what was surely substantial cashflow into maintaining her appearance. She was, in a word, perfect. And then, this perfect woman would go to work, and rub her impeccably maintained and beautiful body all over any patron, at his or her request, no matter whether she liked the person or not, for TEN FUCKING DOLLARS? I mean, TEN DOLLARS? Less than I would spend on a pair of shoes. Less than I would spend on a motherfucking hamburger.

I was able to buy access to this woman’s body and (very convincing) pretend affections for less than I would spend picking up a couple of last-minute things at the grocery store. It was worth almost nothing. Less than an oil change. Less than someone cutting my hair. Less than getting a decent tailor to hem a pair of pants. Less than a bouquet of roses.

And that’s the day that I realized we were all the victims of a sick joke. A despicable charade where so much is demanded of women, so much compliance and poking and prodding, so much effort to make ourselves beautiful and radiant and perfect, so much forcing of square pegs into round holes, just so we could meet it all, do it all, get close to the apex of perfection and still be worth nothing.

And she doesn't even know about the women actors out there who get naked for the gratification of creepy misogynist middle-aged douchebag filmmakers for abso-fucking-lutely free. She'd cry a goddam river over that.

oh these classy young men

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From Belle to Outlaw

My Hero, the Outlaw of Amherst

Growing up in New England, I’d known about her life, or the romantic version of it — how she was a recluse, how she dressed in white — for years. And I’d read many of her nearly 1,800 poems. I was a bookish, verse-writing odd-fit kid with authority issues, looking for a hero. By a hero I mean someone you admire but, more than that, identify with and somehow want to be. In Dickinson I found what I was after. So it was a big experience for me to go to that house that day, and be where she had been.

As I’ve since learned, she’s a hero, or an object of fascination, to many people, which is why she periodically takes a star turn in culture, as she is doing now. She’s the subject of two books, a novel titled “The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson,” by Jerome Charyn, and a new biography by Lyndall Gordon, called “Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds,” due out next month. And through June 13 the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx has an elaborate exhibition devoted to her, with a re-creation of her Homestead garden, a selection of handwritten manuscripts and a marathon reading of her poems.

Google Maps tourism - Haworth

It's fun sometimes to tour around various places in the world via Google Maps, especially if you can't afford to actually travel anywhere. I decided to have a look at Haworth, where the Bronte sisters were from.

Although the Bronte Parsonage Museum is on the map, the Google photo truck did not go down Church Lane past the museum, so the best you can do is peek down Church Lane from the corner of Church and West.



That electric blue shape in the front of the photo is the cab of a truck. Modern cars look so out of place in these tiny quaint English towns. Here is The Black Bull, where Bramwell Bronte used to get his drink on.



There isn't huge amounts of Bronte references in the neighborhood, but there are a few, like Ye Olde Bronte Tea Room:



The Villette Coffee House



And - I'm not sure what they sell here, Eyres 'N' Graces.

MOTHER'S DAY - the finished video

This is good - I'm on track to finish one a month - the last one will be done in July.

amoureuse

98th sonnet

You were great! beep beep beep!

The fun of making movies at random locations in the city is you never know what's going to happen - I don't mean an actor using naughty language - that's guaranteed to happen - I'm talking about the random praise from strangers.

I'm doing another monologue for the NYCPlaywrights Monologue Project - this time it's Chris Shaw Swanson's MOTHER'S DAY starring Claire Warden, fresh off her triumphant ENGAGING SHAW run.

The New Dramatists doorway sure looks like it's a church.

J & B - the next level

Photo: GB and Charlotte (not Julia and Buddy)

Wow, I had a great reading of my new play JULIA AND BUDDY tonight - I think it's just about ready to roll out - probably in the Midtown International Theater Fest.

Daniel Genalo, who did great work this weekend in my NEW RULES was Buddy and he had great chemistry with NYCPlaywrights member Claire Warden as Julia. Claire is brilliant, as the NYTimes agrees. And also her British dialect is a huge plus - Received Pronunciation is her native mode and to American ears it makes her sound smart without having to belabor the intelligence issue.

During the feedback I was told that this version of the play - which I began a year ago - is MUCH better than previous versions, and I think I know why - I tried to shove heaping helpings of Schopenhauer down the audience's throat in other versions. But it's so obviously unnecessary with Claire - with her plummy mode of speaking, she sounds smart reading from the phone book.

BRONTESAURUS!!!!

Bronte action figures - oh my god this is SO AWESOME!!!

Boomerang book-throwing action!

I sure do want some of that "barrier-breaking feminist vision" power for myself.

More at Salon.

flowers

Sometimes you just want to look at pretty flowers.

Other times you want to learn flower facts

Then sometimes you want flower power.

New Rules clip

Alex is a 3.5 on the Richter scale

New Rules cast

Such a photogenic group - and they worked their asses off to get the tricky stunts and pratfalls in NEW RULES right - kudos!

The cast: Daniel Genalo, Amanda Thickpenny, Doug Rossi and Mike Durell (kneeling)

And now a word from the president

click here

more presidential cussing - yes that is actually Obama, from his audio book.

Pulitzer Prize for Drama 1918

The first Pulitzer Prize for Drama was awarded in 1918 to Jesse Lynch Williams for his play WHY MARRY? which can be read online here, although you are better off just reading the synopsis here because the plot description alone makes it clear that this is a total rip-off of the work of G. B. Shaw - at least all his plays about marriage and the "New Woman."

This explains why the play is never performed anymore - why do a Shaw-wannabe when you can do the real thing? I guess since Shaw wasn't eligible for the Pulitzer, not being American, they gave it to Williams in his stead.

I googled to see if critics of the time realized the total debt Williams owed to Shaw - I only found one review snippet so far, but Lawrence Gilman definitely got it:

We wish that Mr. Jesse Lynch Williams had not seen fit to disillusion us about Bernard Shaw when introducing to New York, with a journalistic preamble, his comedy Why Marry? One can understand Mr. Williams' anxiety to make quite clear and unmistakable to us the difference between his own outlook as a dramatist and the outlook of Mr. Shaw...

Yeah, Gilman was wise to the situation. Although it's funny to read him describe Shaw as being in his autumnal years, when Shaw, by dying at age 94 in 1950 outlived by decades Williams, who died in 1929 at age 58, and Gilman who died at 61 in 1939.

Best Shaw impersonation ever from Monty Python's "Oscar Wilde" sketch - also known as the "your majesty is like a stream of bat's piss" sketch. Terry Jones plays the Prince of Wales, John Cleese is James MacNeill Whistler, Graham Chapman is Oscar Wilde and Michael Palin is Shaw. Watching this sketch as a teenager was my first introduction to all four personages. So I always think of Shaw as blowing raspberries.



Shaw was a TOTAL ham. His comments about Mussolini are rather, ah... interesting.

ex-gay Christopher Hitchens

The misogynist semi-rightwinger Christopher Hitchens, in his forthcoming autobiography, explains why same-sex incidents are all but inevitable in an all-boys boarding school - unless you just aren't attractive enough to find a partner.

The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson

a novel - interesting idea but I'm not sure how I feel about it.

I do rather like the cover though...



and now for more of why a nobody from Amherst MA still inspires such interest...

Wild nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile the winds
To a heart in port,
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee

some interesting thoughts about "Wild nights!"