Once I directed a pub crawl version of Sean O'Casey's "The Plough And the Stars" in Boston. Plays performed in bars are an Irish tradition, and the scene from O'Casey's play about the 1916 Easter Rising was even more appropriate because it took place in a bar while the uprising commenced outside.
Anyway, I cast an elderly gentleman for the role of Peter, an ineffectual loudmouth and "lemon-whiskered oul' swine". He was about 70. I don't know why he wanted to schlep all around the city doing plays in bars for not much money, but it might have had something to do with the fact that there were four or five 22-year-old women in the cast playing spirited agitators, bar wenches, and prostitutes. He must have thought, "Good odds."
One night as reheasal was breaking up he tried to get the young ladies to go home with him. They politely declined, and he said:
"I have alcohol."
...and they politely declined again. I filed the exchange away. Did he think that alcohol would tip the scales?
The other night I had my annual Los Angeles birthday dinner at the Irish bar Tom Bergin's in Los Angeles. One by one, my friends came bearing gifts of alcohol, particularly Jagermeister. I got three bottles of Jager, which is my biggest birthday haul of the substance to date.
"I thought, 'I could be original or I could get you something you'd use'," one friend said. Indeed, we killed two of the bottles right there at the table as the long-suffering waitstaff rejoiced that it would be a year before they saw me again. (We tipped the living shit out of them.)
I also had Jagermeister at my 20th birthday on Martha's Vineyard. A lot of it. I threw up most of it. But I was poorer then and I was drinking it without any food. The other night we were able to drink it with dinner, and I didn't have a hangover the next day. In this world the poor are even denied vices.
Here is my friend Gabriela with the evening's take, which included a bottle of wine in a Chinese suit. I consider myself lucky because I think my friends and family would have shown up even if there had been no alcohol.
(I could be wrong about this - I'm no longer a 22-year-old woman.)
While Bob Dylan has done just fine without relying on my opinion, I am worried about his legacy as reflected in a section of lyrics that has always made me want to pop an aneurysm.
Dylan's beautiful love song "Sara", from his 1976 album "Desire" (which includes "Hurricane") is his second most well known song about his ex-wife. He name-checks the first in "Sara" in a self-referential move worthy of rappers:
I can still hear the sounds of those Methodist bells, I'd taken the cure and had just gotten through, Stayin' up for days in the Chelsea Hotel, Writin' "Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" for you.
Here's the line that bothers me. It comes near the end of the song:
Now the beach is deserted except for some kelp And a piece of an old ship that lies on the shore. You always responded when I needed your help, You gimme a map and a key to your door.
I think the most important lines are the last two, but he painted himself into a corner by falling in love with "when I needed your help", because what does one rhyme with help?
If I asked you who was at the restaurant, for example, and you said, "No one but the bar towels," I would punch you. Don't get cute with me, pal. Life is too short. Kelp.
When you say that something is deserted, you mean that it is devoid of humans or living things. So you could say that a house is deserted except for some mice. By mistakenly introducing kelp, Dylan became responsible to list every other non-living thing on that beach, and should have also said:
Now the beach is deserted, except for some kelp, sand, crabs, lobster parts, Pepsi cans, french fries someone forgot about, a Butterfinger wrapper, a murder of cormorants And a piece of an old ship that lies on the shore.
If Dylan could have just let go of "help", he could have been faithful to the beach imagery throughout the song and maintained the integrity of the powerful final lines of that quatrain. Here's a dazzling substitution:
Up to the sandbar, the cormorants WADE And gaze at the PEPSI CANS that lie on the shore You always responded when I needed your AID, You gimme a map and a key to your door.
or, just as powerful but not employing the kelp logical fallacy:
Out in the harbor, the musk seals doth YELP About how ST. FRANCIS would give to the POOR You always responded when I needed your help, You gimme a map and a key to your door.
Not only are these suggestions lyrically sound, but they also impress the listener with a deeper understanding of the song, as well as of the desires of cormorants. You might have an issue with "doth yelp", pointing out that it would be better to have said "yelped", but as my "All That Jaws" collaborator Brian Descheneaux has observed, there is a precedent in Dylan's lyrics for padding the verb:
Outside in the cold distance, a wildcat DID GROWL
I encourage you to submit your own versions of the kelp stanza, and I will present these worthy alternates to Dylan the next time I see him.
I traveled 55.2 miles to the wastes of Ventura this evening to see a sneak preview of "Razor", an interstitial Battlestar Galactica episode.
Why did I consume 3.5 gallons of expensive gasoline to see a TV show on a movie screen when I could have watched it on television on November 24? Because I cancelled cable after The Sopranos ended. Most days I don't regret it.
I and about 300 other educated, thoughtful people gathered for this special screening at a movie theatre. None of us was dressed as a Cylon. No one quoted BSG dialogue in line. None of us appeared to be living with our parents. Most of us were drinking.
The two-hour episode, which fills in certain gaps in the story and sets up Season Four of the Sci Fi Network show, dealt with events on the Battlestar Pegasus following the Cylon obliteration of the 12 colonies.
I am pushing my glasses up my nose.
Told with flashbacks and centered around the story of Kiwi colonist Kendra Shaw, "Razor" details the methods of the knife-wielding and ruthless Admiral Cain and how being unlucky in love is a really bad thing in space. We are reunited with the vintage Cylons familiar to people who watched the 80/20 hokey/thought-provoking 70's TV show and are treated to a significant scene featuring a being lying in a lighted tub of goop.
The episode was fantastic. People cheered. But Sci Fi has apparently sold its soul to the Xbox game "Mass Effect", and several commercials placed in and around the movie effectively torpedoed any interest this audience would have had in the game.
More than anything, "Razor" was a "Mists of Avalon" to Battlestar Galactica's Knights of the Round Table story; the actions of the lesbian battlestar commander and the sad fate of herself and the woman who loved her seemed like the producers' commentary on the perils of that lifestyle. At one point, Commander Adama mused that he might have made similarly brutal decisions as his counterpart but he "had a family".
That the treacherous Caprica Six enters the series as a network administrator also shines a light on where the producers' prejudices lie.
This is how I looked after 16 hours of formatting, installing, reformatting, reinstalling, restoring from backups, and wondering why I didn't choose some other profession.
The solution to my Leopard problem (and it isn't really a solution, but a workaround) was to format my hard drive twice and reinstall twice before the machine behaved with anything close to its normal speed. Each procedure took several hours, and I'm not a better person because of it.
Each time I clicked my mouse to be greeted by a 15-second spinning ball elicited a stifled cry of anguish. I heard myself say, "Why is it doing that?" and thought, "I've become such an end-user."
I'd complain to Apple, but who'd listen?
I try to remain positive and take solace in the fact that I don't work from my garage.
One of the cool things about my office is that I have outlets on the ceiling so, if I want to, I can use power cords to make the place look like the attic in Hellraiser.
I was being detained by TSA operatives at Sea-Tac Airport recently and one of them asked me, probably as a security question, "Are you going to buy Leopard when it comes out?"
"No," I said. My friend Wayne is the person who actually buys software. I just borrow it from him.
Wayne was the one who went to the Apple Store the day the new operating system came out and waited in line. He got a free t-shirt with his $129 DVD. He will never wear the t-shirt.
"What justified this purchase?" I asked Wayne, as if any of his impulse purchases are solid enough to hang justifications on.
"Well, you know how Macintosh Mail doesn't look like it's integrated with the overall pattern of Tiger?" he asked.
"I don't care, but Yes," I said.
"Well now it looks like the rest of the OS," he said.
"Big deal," I said.
"And iChat allows tabbed browsing," he added.
"OK I'll need to install it," I said.
Tabbed browsing was lacking in previous incarnations of iChat. It lets the user handle multiple instant message conversations in the same window, rather than requiring a second screen for numerous chats. To let me talk with multiple people at once I turned to Defaultware's Proteus, which had tabbed browsing but did not have a video component and had a very clunky history viewer. But the tabbed browsing was more important to me.
So last night I installed Leopard. Now my computer (a 1.5 Ghz 2004 PowerBook with 1.5 Gb of memory) runs slower. Also, Photoshop no longer works. I got Leopard for free, so I didn't do my homework.
Leopard does have a more integrated look and some of its base applications, like the backup program Time Machine, are very helpful. It is also nice to use iChat again, though I'd really need an excuse to use video with it. Looking up old conversations is much easier with iChat than with other programs.
The OS-level image viewer Preview is also much improved. For example, until I steal appropriate a Leopard-friendly version of Photoshop, I can now resize photos to specific dimensions in Preview where I couldn't in earlier versions.
But one of my mail programs, Microsoft's Entourage, now crashes on startup and I have to rebuild the database (hence two blog posts in one day because I'm unable to get any of my real work done while I fix my computer).
I will probably find other things to like about Leopard, but the overall effect of Apple's new Operating System, for someone like me who uses his computer all day, is just that it looks different. Its various perks are not worth the slowdown on an older computer, nor are they worth the considerable workaround required to make other applications work.
My only consolation now that I've wasted several hours of my day is that I didn't purchase it.
UPDATE 2 a.m.
Several kernel panics later, I had to format the drive and blast the computer back to the stone age (OSX.3). I am eagerly awaiting my beta tester check from Apple. Luckily I backed everything up.
Without knowing there was a movie coming out, I started reading Phillip Pullman's brilliant "His Dark Materials" trilogy, the first book of which, "The Golden Compass", has been adapted for film.
My education in fantasy stories has been limited by my dislike of most people who like fantasy stories. It is an ancient prejudice. But I've been lucky; I've enjoyed the "Harry Potter" books, think "The Lord of the Rings" is a masterpiece, and am very impressed with "His Dark Materials", which takes its title from this area of "Paradise Lost":
Into this wilde Abyss, The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave, Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire, But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight, Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain His dark materials to create more Worlds, Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend Stood on the brink of Hell and look'd a while, Pondering his Voyage; for no narrow frith He had to cross.
My brief exposure to fantasy stories has revealed that they all have things in common:
1. Children with dead or compromised parents 2. Guys in robes 3. A weapon to be used for good or evil 4. Betrayal
Based on this, I have written my own short fantasy story. It is called The Wondrous Bathrobe Tool by Marty Barrett
Hugh Hefner approached Gary.
"It's a shame your parents are dead," he said, "but these witches want you to be their leader."
"May I take my magic toothbrush?" asked Gary.
"That's not any toothbrush," replied Hef.
"His Dark Materials" is ambitious and uncondescending to young readers. It also has some bold things to say about organized religion and God, something I think "Harry Potter" and "Lord of the Rings" deal with obliquely, but Pullman puts right out there.
"But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one; you can never see any concrete proof that it exists but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of thibngs that couldn't be imagined without it."
If the movie trailer is any indication, "The Golden Compass" gets dumbed down in the adaptation, but I'll still see it; it still looks fun. Gandalf plays a bear, for example.
The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival
The American Cinematheque at Hollywood's Egyptian Theatre is a good place to see a movie. The audiences are of varied ages, and not so relentlessly young and hipsterish that I think I'm living in the land of Logan's Run.
The lady who sold me popcorn was older and sullen, rather than young and sullen, and looked a little like Janice from The Muppets. I felt like I was in Cambridge.
Recently I saw a double feature of documentaries presented by director Murray Lerner: The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, and Festival, which still spent a lot of time with Dylan but which also focused on Odetta, Johnny Cash, and dozens of other acts from the festivals of 1963-'65.
I enjoyed the first movie, released this year, because I hadn't seen a lot of the footage before. While the climax was obviously Dylan's "going electric" with "Maggie's Farm" in 1965, footage of the younger Dylan with Joan Baez tuning his guitar for him (no wonder they broke up), Dylan actually smiling, and Dylan interacting - albeit minimally - with the audience were fun to see.
The myth is that Dylan surprised the crowd with electrification in '65, and that he was booed. While we can hear boos from the audience, and while his acoustic encore is greeted with almost palpable relief, there were no cries of "Judas!" like he got when he took the act to England.
Director Lerner spoke between the movies.
"Remember, I was there," he said in response to the mythology that has been generated by Dylan's final performance at Newport, "and people swear to me that it was the audience booing or the journalists booing or people behind the stage booing. There were selected people booing, and it came mostly from the journalists."
Festival, released in 1967, was by comparison a much better movie. It was edited with audience and band interviews, and was more reminiscent of the Maysles Brothers' later Woodstock film than the raw presentation of chronological Dylan footage that made up Other Side of the Mirror.
My favorite parts of Festival were Odetta's performances. She brought the house down. And Peter, Paul, and Mary (especially Mary Travers) put on a great show, while Peter Yarrow seemed a little toolish and Joan Baez seemed in love with her voice to the detriment of the music. When I am an old man, I want to dress like Son House and Mississippi John Hurt, on alternate days.
Festival also featured cloggers, a jug band, and the Georgia Island Sea Singers. I can imagine that none of them knew what to make of Dylan, and Donovan, and Baez. Still, everyone seemed clean cut.
The biggest letdown for me was that Phil Ochs was not included. He was a Newport mainstay but was always overshadowed by Dylan. Very little footage of him exists.
I am looking forward to the release of Roy Karch's "Underground Tonight Show", a New York City cable access show from the 70's. It featured a drunken performance by Ochs in his decline that was still very good. The rights are still up in the air, so I am not holding my breath.
It rained all day today. I walked about a quarter mile from a parking lot, and I wondered what the sensation was.
Once I directed a pub crawl version of Sean O'Casey's "The Plough And the Stars" in Boston. Plays performed in bars are an Irish tradition, and the scene from O'Casey's play about the 1916 Easter Rising was even more appropriate because it took place in a bar while the uprising commenced outside.
The Comfort Suites in Tempe
While Bob Dylan has done just fine without relying on my opinion, I am worried about his legacy as reflected in a section of lyrics that has always made me want to pop an aneurysm.
I traveled 55.2 miles to the wastes of Ventura this evening to see a sneak preview of "Razor", an interstitial Battlestar Galactica episode.
This is how I looked after 16 hours of formatting, installing, reformatting, reinstalling, restoring from backups, and wondering why I didn't choose some other profession.
I was being detained by TSA operatives at Sea-Tac Airport recently and one of them asked me, probably as a security question, "Are you going to buy Leopard when it comes out?"
Without knowing there was a movie coming out, I started reading Phillip Pullman's brilliant "His Dark Materials" trilogy, the first book of which, "The Golden Compass", has been adapted for film.
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
The American Cinematheque at Hollywood's Egyptian Theatre is a good place to see a movie. The audiences are of varied ages, and not so relentlessly young and hipsterish that I think I'm living in the land of Logan's Run.
