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12.30.05 The Year In Revue, Part VI: Theater No one is reading this—oh yes, I keep an eye on those web stats—so I can feel free to wallow in the least popular subject I cover in these pages: theater! One indication that readership is down at this time of year: I only got one complaint that I'd misspelled review. I did that on purpose (really). If you Google the phrase "year in revue," you get, "Did you mean year in review?" However, I meant "revue" in the sense of, say, "Side by Side by Sondheim," a revue that uses songs from throughout Sondheim's career. My revue hearkens back to, well, things I wrote about earlier in 2005. It might not be exactly proper usage, but, y'know, my blog, my rules! Without further ado: 5. "Owners" (written by Caryl Churchill; Shotgun Players, Berkeley): Trish Mulholland was marvelous in English playwright Caryl Churchill's wickedly funny 1972 work about a rapacious female landlord and her husband, a butcher who fantasizes about chopping up his ambitious wife like so much beef. 4. "Mamma Mia!" (written by Catherine Johnson, with music by ABBA; Cirkus Theater, Stockholm): I saw "Mamma Mia!" in its San Francisco engagement a few years ago, and found it a little too cheesy and silly, even though I'm a diehard ABBA fan. But seeing it in Sweden, performed in Swedish, just felt so right. 3. "Well" (written by Lisa Kron; ACT, San Francisco): This saga of mother-daughter tension boasted wonderful performances by Kron and Jayne Houdyshell as her mom, whose illness didn't stop her from working to integrate her Michigan neighborhood. Perfectly pitched—I knew I was going to love it when Houdyshell came out on stage carrying a Meijer's bag. 2. "Avenue Q" (written by Robert Lopez, Jeff Marx, J. Whitty; John Golden Theater, New York): The most lovable show on Broadway, "Avenue Q" made me feel all warm and fuzzy with its story about young puppets finding love and a Purpose in life on a set that looks suspiciously like "Sesame Street." Lest you think it sounds too sweet, bear in mind that it includes incredibly catchy songs with titles like "The Internet Is For Porn," "It Sucks To Be Me" and "Everyone's A Little Bit Racist." 1. "The People's Temple" (written by Leigh Fondakowski; Berkeley Rep, Berkeley): Few plays are truly unforgettable, but I know I will always remember this one. A theatrical experience of this caliber only comes along a few times in a lifetime. "The People's Temple," the story of the Rev. Jim Jones and his movement based on oral histories collected from survivors, friends, relatives, and journalists, is the kind of play that draws you in from the very first moments, and leaves you spellbound until you stand up three hours later, dazed and shaken by the powerful thing you've just witnessed. Honorable mentions: "The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?," ACT, San Francisco; "Glengarry Glen Ross," Jacobs Theater, New York; "Cabaret," Shotgun Players, Berkeley; and the best play to feature a friend of mine in a role as a vicious killer with a phony Swedish accent, "Psycho Beach Party," Whole Art Theatre, Kalamazoo.
Edited to add: Click on this link at your own risk. Jesus + the Black Eyed Peas + camels = AIEEEEEEEE! Thanks (I think) to Flasshe for passing this on. I wanted to recommend a couple other books I've read recently, both really excellent birthday presents from two dear friends. If your significant other or friend has a subscription to Mojo, owns numerous Rhino Handmade reissues and a bootleg copy of Todd Haynes' "Superstar," you need The Rock Snob's Dictionary. Actually, I am a bit of a rock snob myself, but I still learned a lot from the book, which is so witty and fun that I only let myself read a few pages a day so it would last longer. (It can also serve as the source of fun quizzes—can your favorite rock snob identify Jobriath or David Peel?) One of the book's two authors, David Kamp, is a former writer for the late, lamented Spy magazine. The other, Steven Daly, was the founding drummer for Glasgow rock band Orange Juice, a fact that is, amazingly, omitted from his bio in the book. Steven, why would you not brag about this unassailable Snob credential? OJ's compilation The Glasgow School got a 9.3 from Pitchfork.com! If there ever was a book that made me feel like it was written just for me, it is Lynne Truss' Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door. If you need a post-Xmas gift for that special curmudgeon in your life, buy it now. Hand is also a rare case of an American publisher knowing its audience; unlike most British imports, this one contains English spellings like "colour" and "centre," and does not edit out references to Brit icons like Martha Woodford (a character on BBC radio program "The Archers") and "Blue Peter" (a popular children's show). Sure, we Americans might have to Google them to figure out what they are, but that's OK—we don't want to be patronized! If the following sounds good to you, then you are the target audience for this book: "Sometimes I have a little dream that it is eight o'clock on a fine wintry morning, and as I leave my house to walk to the station, I notice I'm feeling rather lighthearted. No one about. No cars. No noise except the faraway hum of a milk float. Mm. Nice. The street is clean as if washed by recent rain. I walk briskly, humming to myself, cross a quiet road and arrive at the station in good time for the 8.49. As I buy my paper (putting coins in a slot), I notice that the concourse is empty, utterly empty, and I begin to think well, this is a bit too good to be true, but never mind, they cleared Times Square for Tom Cruise that time, didn't they? And Vanilla Sky was rubbish. I buy a ticket (no queue), board the train (no other passengers), and feel blissfully happy. "Now, this may be a dream, I think, as the train begins to move. This may even be—and that distant milk float was rather a giveaway—a long-forgotten episode of The Avengers that has somehow lodged in my brain and is now repeating itself as a kind of benign near-death experience as I lie unconscious at the bottom of some stairs. Either way, I don't care. Somehow, overnight, other people have been eradicated, expunged, annihilated, or just ordered to stay indoors and keep out of my bloody way. And you know how it feels? It feels right."
12.27.05 The Year In Revue, Part V: Books Every year, I resolve to read 52 books. So far this year, I'm up to 51, and I'm halfway through a rather unchallenging paperback mystery I started pretty much so I would be sure to reach my goal. Why count? If I don't, I have a tendency to get caught up in reading more disposable things (the newspaper, Entertainment Weekly, Defamer). Keeping track is a constant reminder of the importance of books. The best work of fiction I read in 2005 was Peter Lovesey's Diamond Dust, which was a book club selection. Some of the people in my group didn't enjoy it, but those who liked it really liked it. It's one of those books where even the slightest discussion of the plot would constitute a massive spoiler; I'll just say that it's one of the best police procedurals I've ever read, and leave it at that. As for nonfiction, my hands-down favorite is the book I finished last night, Dan Savage's The Commitment. At first glance, Savage seems to have a pretty traditional home life; he is a Seattle newspaper editor and columnist, supporting a stay-at-home partner and their 6-year-old son. Well, traditional except for the fact that Savage is gay. He chronicled his adventures in adoption with partner Terry in 2000's The Kid. In The Commitment, he and Terry are about to celebrate their 10th anniversary together. Dan's mom is bugging them to get married. Dan and Terry think they'd rather just get commemorative tattoos; after all, gay marriage isn't even legal in the state of Washington. D.J. just thinks it's gross—the child of gay parents, adopted at birth, loves his two dads and wants them to stay together forever, but he also thinks boys shouldn't marry boys. (D.J. also happens to be a skateboarding metalhead; take that, anyone who assumes the child of two gay men would inevitably turn out to be a lil' disco lover who spends all his time dressing his Barbies! Dan and Terry enable D.J.'s interests by buying him an Iron Maiden lunchbox and allowing him to play his Black Sabbath CDs in the car.) As I read the last 50 pages of this book, tears were streaming down my face (and that almost never happens!), but I also laughed out loud over and over again. This book is so touching, so honest, so real and just incredibly entertaining and funny. I became infuriated that Dan and Terry aren't allowed to get married here. However, I really do think that situation will change in my lifetime. As Dan points out, gays aren't going to go back in the closet. The more "out" gay people you actually know, the more likely you are to support gay rights; heck, even Dan's dad, a Republican who voted for W twice, is perfectly OK with his son's relationship. Besides the "I laughed! I cried!" recommendation, this is one of the rare books that inspired me to take action; I joined the Human Rights Campaign, which works on behalf of gay marriage and many other initiatives in support of the LGBT community. I even put their little symbol on this page (the yellow "equality" sign in the left-hand column). Those of us who believe in equal rights for all should stand up and be counted.
One of my Christmas gifts (from James, of course) was the "Night of the Lepus" DVD, a cheesy early-'70s horror movie about a small Arizona town that comes under attack by a bunch of giant mutant bunny rabbits. The killer rabbits are played by actual-sized cottontails, which rampage around tiny model sets. The rabbits and their victims are never in the same shot, to preserve the illusion (there are, however, lots of shots of the bunnies' toothy mouths covered in extremely fake-looking, bright-red "blood"), except for one scene, where the wascally wabbit is obviously played by a guy in a costume. I'm sure the director of this low-budget flick never envisioned a future technology that would allow viewers to pause a crystal-clear image to study it for signs of phoniness. "Lepus" at least has some kitsch value as a so-bad-it's-good movie. (Coincidentally, it was released the same year as another critter classic, "The Doberman Gang.") Most of the films that come out these days, though, are just plain bad. At least movies like "Lepus" and "Doberman" have a certain loopy charm; corporate, high-budget pix like "The Longest Yard" or "Bewitched" are soulless, joyless exercises that will probably never get any love from the bad-movie connoisseurs of the future. What will? I was browsing one of my favorite sites, Rotten Tomatoes, to find out how the nation's critics rate the films in current release, when I somehow wound up on the page for "Alone in the Dark," a January '05 bomb that starred notorious party girl Tara Reid as a brainy archaeologist (!). I couldn't stop laughing at the capsule reviews (Jack Mathews of the New York Daily News: "'Alone in the Dark' is no better than whatever you might pick up while wearing a blindfold at Blockbuster, even if you happen to reach into a trash can"). The film gets an almost unheard-of 1% fresh rating. I realized that I have to see this movie. The trouble is, I can't bring myself to walk into my local video store to rent a copy. Unlike something like "Lepus," "Alone" is too new to have any sort of bad-movie cachet. I know I shouldn't care what the employees think of me, but they all have such exquisite taste—when you walk in there they're always screening something like "Take the Money and Run" instead of the current big release. Maybe if I rented it along with, say, "Gigli," "Showgirls" and something directed by Ed Wood, to demonstrate my awareness. This is just the type of situation Netflix was invented for; I almost want to start a subscription for the sole purpose of clandestinely renting "Alone in the Dark."
Ever since I saw that Josh posted a link to my blog on his site, I've been feeling the pressure to come up with something worthy of his plaudits (and the jump in traffic I will no doubt get as a result of his recommendation). So allow me to introduce you to one of our local treasures, San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Don Asmussen. Don writes a twice-weekly strip called Bad Reporter; occasionally it may be a little too inside baseball for non-Bay Area residents to fully appreciate, but most of the time, he mashes up pop-culture trends and political happenings that are well known to all Americans. Witness his brilliant parody of the film "Syriana," called "Syrianta." I don't really know anything about Asmussen—I couldn't find any inteviews with him on the web—but I did go to a book signing in Berkeley way back in 1997, when he was promoting his San Francisco Comic Strip Book of Big-Ass Mocha, and remember thinking he was quite a good-looking guy. (You can see the way Don depicts himself in the illustration on his extremely out of date web site.) Enjoy!
12.22.05 The Year In Revue, Part IV: Film Every year around this time, there are usually a handful of movies I'm just dying to see. It's Awards Season, after all, when the studios release their prestige pictures and we're finally given a break after months of unnecessary TV-show remakes ("The Dukes of Hazzard"), cheapo horror flicks ("House of Wax") and sequels no one asked for ("Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous"). Currently, however, everything now playing inspires a big yawn. I'm kind of interested in the Felicity-Huffman-plays-a-trannie picture "Transamerica" (opening tomorrow in San Francisco), but that's about it. Maybe I'm still going through "Lord of the Rings" withdrawal. I only saw about 30 movies in 2005 and of those, there are just two I would categorize as extraordinary: "Murderball" and "Good Night and Good Luck." There were a couple of fun comedies, "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit," and good documentaries, "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" and "March Of The Penguins." But on the whole, not much tempted me to part with my $9.50. One regret: I really should have seen the damn "Star Wars" movie. I'd seen the other five in the theater; I should have seen the series through 'til the end.
12.20.05 The Year In Revue, Part III: Radio Instead of coming up with a new list, I'm just going to link to last year's, because I'm still listening to all the same shows—but I'll make one little change. I tune into "All Things Considered" every afternoon (I'm listening to it now, in fact), but 2005 has been such a crummy year that it just depresses me. For instance, their series of Hurricane Katrina reports was excellent, but there were days I just found myself slumping in my seat, overwhelmed by the horror of all those people affected by the natural disaster. So, uh... good job, guys, but I can't say I enjoyed it. My current radio addiction is KFOG's "10 at 10," which plays "10 great songs from 1 great year!" every morning, with no commercial interruptions. You never know what you're going to hear on 10 at 10. Will it be a prime piece of cheese like Eddie Money's "Take Me Home Tonight" (1986), or a brilliant, obscure track you loved at the time but haven't thought about in years, like Sparks' "I Predict" (1982) or the Call's "Everywhere I Go" (also '86)? Certain artists seem to pop up with great frequency—the Police/Sting, Men at Work (!), the Cars and local heroes the Tubes are all 10 at 10 regulars—but what makes this show so addictive is the odd, the offbeat, the one-hit wonder. The terrestrial radio music scene is usually predictable and boring, so thank goodness there's one place where you can tune in and hear the likes of Diesel's "Sausalito Summernight" or Prince's "Dirty Mind" and go, yeah, that really was a great song! I should mention that 10 at 10 regularly visits the '60s, '70s and '90s, but what can I say, I'm an '80s girl, and when the wheel stops anywhere in the Reagan Era, I know I'm going to enjoy a yummy dose of morning nostalgia.
For most of the day today, interbridge.com was down, which was an experience much like getting locked out of your house or car—you just sort of stand by helplessly, with that so close, but yet so far feeling. None of the e-mails sent to me at interbridge were able to reach me either, so when everything finally came back up in the late afternoon, of course I was deluged with e-mails of the "Hey, did you know your site is down?" variety. Sigh. Here is a link to brighten your day: Cute Overload
12.17.05 The Year In Revue, Part II: TV Top five shows of the year: 5. "The Inspector Lynley Mysteries," Mystery! (PBS): I gave up on Elizabeth George's novels a few years ago because they kept getting longer and longer (the paperback of 2004's A Place of Hiding was 800 pages), and I got tired of Thomas Lynley's upper-crust angst. The TV versions condense George's doorstops to brisk 90-minute-long, self-contained episodes. Sharon Small is a bit too pretty to play Lynley's dumpy working-class partner Barbara Havers, leading to a bit of sexual tension between the two (believe me, there's none of that in the books). Still, these clever, well-made British mysteries were a lovely summer diversion. Since George can only churn out so many enormous books, coming episodes of the series will feature original teleplays. 4. "30 Days" (FX): Usually, summer reality shows are insultingly brainless, but "Super Size Me"'s Morgan Spurlock proved that there is a market for intelligent, thoughtful programming during the warm months with this excellent six-part documentary series. Spurlock challenges people to drastically shake up their lives in 30 days—in the show's best episode, for instance, a small-town Christian spends a month living with a Muslim-American family in Dearborn, MI, and is forced to confront his prejudices. Happily, FX picked up a second season of the show so there will be more to come; for those who missed the first season, it should be out on DVD in 2006. 3. "Monk" (USA): After a couple of sterling seasons, "Monk" got pretty lame there for a while; "Mr. Monk Takes Manhattan," in which the show's San Francisco-based protagonists act like rubes in the Big Apple, kicked off a lackluster third season. But 2005 saw a comeback for "Monk"; even the most diehard fans have to admit that Traylor Howard's Natalie has proved to be a worthy substitute for Bitty Schram's Sharona (Schram allegedly left the show after a salary dispute). Tony Shalhoub is so good as the obsessive-compulsive detective, and if you complain that the mysteries aren't so hot, you're missing the point. 2. "The Daily Show" (Comedy Central): What is this show doing at number two on the list? After all, it's been my favorite program since Jon Stewart took over the anchor desk in 1999; I am proud to say that I have not missed a single episode of the show in at least five years. OK, so that's either a noble achievement or weirdly compulsive. I finally saw the show "in person" on Aug. 24. 1. "The Colbert Report" (Comedy Central): Only one show could dislodge "TDS" from its place atop my list of favorites, and that's a spin-off from "TDS." Whether he's defending Christmas in his War Against Humbuggery, warning America about the ever-present threat of bears ("godless killing machines without a soul"), helping his viewers "Better Know a (Congressional) District" or debating the most "Formidable Opponent" of all (himself), Stephen Colbert is currently hosting the best (as well as the grippiest) show on television. Not content to simply be a Peabody Award-winning pundit, Colbert is also the author of the Tek Jansen novels, as well as several works of nonfiction, such as Don't Buy This Book if You Don't Have any Balls and Don't Buy This Book if You Don't Have any Balls (For Kids). Stop operating heavy machinery, because you're about to take two maximum strength tablets of Truth—every night, on "The Colbert Report"!
Janet was kind enough to send me this fab photo, taken at the Hob Nob, conveniently located between Racine and Kenosha, WI:
The Hob Nob is the home of "Fantastic Food, Swanky Cocktails, Fine Wines, and Decadent Deserts (sic)." If you're in the mood for Oysters Rockefeller, Snails Bourguignonne, Steak Au Poivre or Australian lobster, and you happen to be in the greater Racine/Kenosha area, now you know where to go.
12.12.05 The Year In Revue, Part I: Music I don't think I have ever loved a song as much as I loved the Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?" back in 1984. I remember sitting on the floor of my bedroom in front of my stereo, listening to a tape of a John Peel broadcast that one of my pen pals had just sent me from England. Peel was debuting the song, which was released as the B-side (!) to the much slighter "William, It Was Really Nothing." I couldn't believe that a song could be that good, and it was seven trance-inducing minutes long! The funny thing is that now, I find it to be rather melodramatic and monotonous—really, "I am human and I need to be loved/ just like everybody else does"? Still, if you were a teenager in 1984, it was so profound and beautiful. Back then, I discovered fantastic new artists all the time; besides the Smiths, there was Roxy Music, Devo, David Bowie, New Order/Joy Division, Kate Bush, Game Theory, R.E.M.... and in the '90s, Liz Phair, Nirvana, Pavement, Elliott Smith, Bob Mould... an embarrassment of musical riches. The '00s have been a lot less productive in turning up new favorite artists, which I suppose isn't that surprising considering that I'm older and more jaded and have so many other things on my plate, like remembering to buy dog food or pay the property tax bill on time. Those life-changing musical experiences have only happened three times so far in this decade—when I first heard the Dandy Warhols in 2000 (shame their latest CD is pretty much a dud); seeing the Polyphonic Spree in 2003 (though their live show leaves their rather tepid recordings in the dust); and now, in 2005, the discovery of my new favorite band, Queens of the Stone Age. The best 15 bucks I spent all year was on their latest CD, Lullabies to Paralyze, which I have listened to approximately eighty zillion times in the past six months, and I am still not sick of it. I'm a sucker for music with big guitars and bigger hooks, and the Queens' highly melodic brand of hard rock hit me like a bolt of lightning. There are other current bands I like—the New Pornographers, Ted Leo, the White Stripes—but there is only one I love, and that's QOTSA, baby.
Even here in Babylon by the Bay, the Christmas season brings with it an overload of "family" entertainment, from "Christmas Carols" to "Nutcrackers" to gospel musicals. Luckily, Berkeley's Shotgun Players have learned the art of counterprogramming. No wonder there was such a huge stand-by line outside the Ashby Stage last night; Shotgun's current show, "Cabaret," is defiantly R-rated, the event of choice for adult theatergoers this month. Because the Ashby Stage is tiny, only about 100 seats, this is a remarkably intimate "Cabaret." The lingerie-clad showgirls are practically (sometimes literally) in the audience's lap. The sinuous, sinister Emcee, played by latter-day Michael Stipe look-a-like Clive Worsley, is close enough that you can see his blue eyeshadow. It's quite an experience. The director, Russell Blackwood, is best known locally as the auteur of the Hypnodrome, which presents Grand Guignol-style theater. He adds a couple of his signature touches to "Cabaret"—there are some convincing blood and bruises during a fight scene, but the bit that generated the biggest ewww from the audience was a bit where Sally Bowles (Kimberly Dooley) makes herself a "prairie oyster," which involves drinking a mixture of raw egg and Worcestershire sauce. Now that's suffering for your art. Dooley's Sally is so bubbly and charismatic that you can understand why her bisexual American roommate, Cliff (Cassidy Brown), would fall in love with her. But at heart, she's a superficial party girl who refuses to open her eyes to what's going on outside the walls of the Kit Kat Klub. The storyline that really tugs at the heartstrings is the doomed romance between Cliff's landlady and one of her tenants, an elderly Jewish man who runs a fruit stand. If you're suffering from holiday blues or stress, as so many of us are at this time of the year, there's no better place to go this month than the deliciously decadent world of the "Cabaret."
My new mission in life is to view the film "Dangerous Men." Oh, you lucky people in Irvine, CA! "My Humps"—is it really "proof that a song can be so bad as to veer toward evil"? I once again present my Mary Worth/BEP crossover comic in case you missed it back in November. Listen to the "Fresh Air" interview with my personal hero, Stephen Colbert. "Move over, Oprah; tonight, every member of my audience receives a priceless gift: The Truth!"
One of the main reasons I started this blog was so that I could write about all the movies, plays, performances, etc. that I saw. That seems to have slowed down lately; we don't go out quite as often as we used to. Maybe twice a week, and I don't write about everything. When I do, though, it's usually something that's really grabbed me. As regular readers know, one of my favorite local performers is monologist Josh Kornbluth. He now hosts a weekly show on our local public TV affiliate, KQED, where he interviews notables from Rita Moreno to Jarhead author Anthony Swofford. (The programs are available as downloads on the web site.) However, to get the full-on Josh experience, you must see one of his live performances. Now that the incomparable Spalding Gray has passed on, I don't think there's anyone better at putting on one-man shows that are both hilarious and poignant. Having seen Josh's most recent works, "Love & Taxes" and "Ben Franklin Unplugged" (as well as the filmed version of his "Red Diaper Baby"), I jumped at the chance to attend a one-night-only live performance of one of his oldies, "The Mathematics of Change." Like so many of Josh's monologues, this one starts with his father, who was convinced Josh would someday be the greatest mathematician in the world. (Dad, a Communist, also expected that Josh would grow up to lead the revolution, so he obviously had very high hopes.) Everything went according to plan until Josh arrived at Princeton, where he enrolled in calculus class. It was there that he "hit the wall"—the former math whiz could not understand what the heck his T.A. was talking about during his lectures. Personally, when it came to mathematics, I "hit the wall" at long division. Nevertheless, there was so much in this show I could relate to. For one thing, it sounds like Josh, an early admissions student, found himself adrift at the esteemed university. He obviously felt like he couldn't go to his T.A. for help. Having attended a similar college (OK, not Ivy League, but esteemed nonetheless) at a young age, I know what it feels like to go from being a big fish in a small pond to being thrown into a sink-or-swim situation (indeed, part of Josh's monologue deals with a swimming class he was forced to take at Princeton). Luckily for us, Josh left Princeton after a couple of years and wound up being a performer instead of a mathematician (or communist leader). If by chance anyone reading this is going to be in Philadelphia in January, Josh will be performing "Ben Franklin Unplugged" there. Celebrate Ben's 300th birthday with Josh!
12.5.05 Let's All Go to the Movies "Movie people have become groggy, gloomy and grumpy to a degree as unprecedented as the nasty economic fix they find themselves in... "There was a time... when Americans trooped off to the movies 75 million strong every week. After television established itself, that number was cut by two-thirds. Though 25 million tickets per week was obviously not a magic number, the industry adjusted to it. By raising admission prices, making sales to TV and cutting overhead, it bumped along, cheered by the fact that throughout the '50s and '60s, in good years and bad, that 25 million figure remained stable. Then... someone discovered that admissions had sagged to around 17 million. There were, it seemed, new depths to explore... "Far worse, what was left of the movie audience appeared to be a highly volatile crowd... [E]veryone decided that since the audience was mostly kids they would give them kid stuff. The failures of this policy litter a critic's memory, but virtually no one else's. The youth market somehow got the impression that it was being exploited by desperate old crooks and stayed away... "[L]ast year presents no easy formula for commercial success. For every one of [the] winners, one could name quite similar movies that were losers at the box office. And the lack of patterns, of easy generalizations, fills the typical movie executive with existential despair. He finds himself living in a universe of pure chance, exhilarating to some philosophers perhaps, but not to him. Instead, he is filled with enervating dread which he expresses, at least for the moment, in the deepest case of paranoia I've ever observed among producers. They are lashing out at everyone who could possibly be blamed for their failures—critics, exhibitors, the unions, stars, directors, the goddam recession. Worse, they are filled with a profound desire to do nothing, to wait until some trend emerges so they can once again pretend to be rational merchants making rational judgments on a rational market... "Sorry, gang. This is really what your favorite old author, Paul Tillich, called a shaking of the foundations. Things will never be what they once were. What you should do is get serious about the new, readily available technologies that could radically reduce the cost of every sort of movie. You could also cease to go along with a cowardly rating system that seems to satisfy only those people who like to moralize about movies without ever going to see them... "But the movie business never has been notable for courage, vision or intellect. And, no doubt, it will somehow stagger through another year—perhaps several more—in its present form. But it will have to change... It will finally have to cease all pretense of being a mass entertainment industry and start to operate as what it has, in reality, become—a purveyor of (presumptive) art to a relatively small, near-elite audience in which failures should be the honorable failures of striving artists, not the corrupt ones of businessmen who guessed wrong on the latest fashion line." —Richard Schickel, Life magazine, Dec. 31, 1971
I am not denying the fact that I wrote bad poetry when I was young. I did. I will, however, say that I never wanted to write poetry; I much preferred fiction, but if you're taking high school creative writing classes, poetry is part of the program. Some kids, though—OK, let's be honest, some girls—just loved to write poetry. They filled notebook after notebook with their free verse, all about the tragedies and hardships of teenage life. Of course, it never got any exposure beyond the high school literary magazine, which I'm sure most of those now-grown women feel is a good thing. One of the bad things about being famous is that your youthful mistakes never really go away. Even if Paris Hilton becomes a U.N. ambassador at the age of 55, her grainy night-vision sex videos will still be floating around on the 2030s version of the Internet. And if 22-year-old "Joan of Arcadia" star Amber Tamblyn someday becomes as dignified a thespian as Dame Judi Dench, she will probably be confronted with copies of her book of poetry, Free Stallion. Free Stallion, newly published by Simon & Schuster, boasts a blurb from Lawrence Ferlighetti, of all people ("A fine fruitful gestation of throbbingly nascent sexuality awakened in young new language"). Some commentators are giving Tamblyn's collection a thumbs up ("Her verse is a sight better than Jewel's," writes one blogger) but based upon the sample poem published in the paper this morning (along with an interview in which the actress reveals herself to be quite a thoughtful young woman), I'm not ready to declare her the heir to Robert Hass just yet. An excerpt from "Banana": No, it's not my face I will believe that Amber has "made it" as a poet when one of her poems is read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer's Almanac. Until then... meh. |
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