Second Post of the Day

After reading this column by L. Brent Bozell I was all excited about the inaugural poem. Bozell is the self-appointed spokesman of people with plastic grapes on top of their TV cabinets, and his manufactured outrage is a handy guide to things I might wanna check out. It's evident from this column that he doesn't know what constitutes authentic avant-garde work (or that he thinks we don't), and that he conflates "being taken outside one's comfort zone" with "having grounds for offense," so I inverse-heed his words. I felt let down this time, though: the poem was true but banal (or banal but true, to phrase it a bit more charitably). I hate to come across like a wannabe Harold Bloom, but I'd prefer something that made us work a little harder.

Don't hate; Celebrate!

I was raised to rightly revile racism, but my hometown of Signal Mountain Tennessee is a White Christian Republican Pod-Person breeding ground, and while most White Christian Republican Pod-People are perfectly fine folks, some are Klansmen. I rode the schoolbus with the breed of such sad cases, and I have to wonder what all the white supremacists are thinking as the USA sees a black (or mixed-race, really, which hatin' honkies don't like either) man, who is clearly superior to any white supremacist on offer, become President. Part of me wants to gloat, but that's not really in tune with the proper spirit of the day, is it?

A lot of those racist kids tried to make friends with me, expecting me to be a fellow White Man. I of course gave those chinless wonders the icy-cold shoulder; I was an elitist, not a racist. But once we went to a high school with black students a lot of those klan kids discovered that class was a stronger bonding agent than race. They made friends with black kids and stopped wasting their time by trying to befriend me. By which time I was finally willing to be friends with them, but too late.

Second post of the day: Invaders From Mars!

There's some cool stuff in this Fifties fever dream, but most of it can be found in compressed form in this trailer. Most of the groovy bits are near the beginning and the end: the start is pure fifties Americana and the end is delirious. The picture takes forever to get to the good stuff, marking time with plotty plotting (much of which is charmingly absurd; no one thinks it's strange to throw a kid in jail and keep him there for no particular reason, while the scientist knows a little too much expositionary info about aliens... where does he get his info? From Science?). And the filmmakers assume we just can't get enough stock footage of tanks. Speaking of the military, I've never met a dull soldier, but all the soldiers in this flick are dull, dull dull. Yet once they enter the picture they take over from the little kid and cute lady whom I'd rather watch. The flick's so full of heroic soldiers rushing around and serving as collectivist proletariat heroes that I wondered if Sergei Eisenstein was an uncredited codirector. Finally they bust into the aliens' smoked-glass hideout (where the woman's blouse slips off her shoulder and her hair gets disheveled in the film's one concession to cheesecake sensuality). Alien sociology is pretty simple: Low-level alien slaves look like guys in green flannel PJs with zipperlike spines, tight hoodies and fly goggles. The boss alien is pretty creepy, though, as demonstrated by the trailer, and they have some kind of ray that keeps the pretty doctor lady frozen in a pained pulp-cover pose that the director seems to like as much as I did since he keeps cutting back to it.

Most of the film's final minutes is a double exposure: a closeup of the boy's garishly-lit running face, and a mostly-pointless series of flashbacks to previous bits of the film. The whole movie should have been done as a superimposed flashback.

Casting for Passion

When I was in college we had auditions for Pippin. I knew a freshman Music Theatre student who was hungry, mad hungry, to play Pippin, and I could see him in the role. He was trim, cute, and enthused.

I saw his audition. I don't remember which song he sang, but he was flat. Way flat. Throughout the song. He burned with passion and enthusiasm; you could feel the passion billowing out of him, throughout the room, but he was FLAT. Mrs. Miller flat.

And you know what? The director cast him as Pippin.

I didn't work on the show, but I kept hearing from insiders that our hero was having terrible trouble hitting the right notes.

One day I mentioned to him that I wasn't really a fan of Pippin. "Neither am I anymore," he replied.

Then the show opened, and he was perfect. On pitch, still burning with passion. He won deserved praise and adulation, and I witnessed young women shamelessly throwing themselves at our still-closeted hero. "You were so sexy," they'd moan. "Sexy sexy SEXY!" And he'd wince.

So while I am coming to appreciate how much technical precision and reliable consistency a professional performer must have, I learned an important lesson from our hero's casting. Casting for passion and working on technique will yield more invigorating results than casting for technique and trying to engender passion.

Why do I bring this up? Could it be that Your Humble Narrator recently gave an almost-stupendous-but-for-one-visibly-flubbed-line audition? Could it be that the director averted his eyes from Your Narrator after the flub, and missed a fine performance?

Perhaps.

P.S. Nowadays I think Pippin is a delight... guess I had to outgrow my own Pippinish, puppyish qualities before I could swallow its gentle ribbing of young-boy enthusiasm.

The Over Sea, Under Stone is Rising

I've already gone awry on my Read Your Own Books challenge by checking Over Sea, Under Stone out of the library. It's the first in the Dark Is Rising series by Susan Cooper. So far it's entertaining but a rather more conventional juvie tale than Dark, lacking the rich interplay between legend and modernity that helps make Dark so compelling.

Speaking of which, I decided years ago not to sacrifice two hours of my life to The Seeker: The Dark is Rising, the movie nominally based on the novel. A glance at the Hollywood-by-the-yard trailer was enough to shape that decision, but one early indicator that the film would probably suck was the screenwriter's avowal in pre-release interviews that Will Stanton, the hero of the tale, would be an outsider in the film, rather than a local. Midway down this article is a representative quote to that effect.

The problem with such a change is that Dark is about learning hidden layers of significance about familiar people and places. Continually Will is discovering that folks and locations he's grown up with and thought to be utterly ordinary have a deeper significance than he could have guessed. As a child I found this inspiring; the idea that subterranean streams of history and significance lay beneath the surface of one's humdrum neighbors and neighborhood was inspiring, and helped me appreciate my suburban town more than I might have otherwise. To rob the story of this element of learning deeper truths about one's familiar life is to rob it of the element that made it resonate with me all these years.

Also got my first taste of this Battlestar Galactica all my nerdbuddies are crazy about. I came in late so I can't pretend to evaluate the story beyond it's being a Dark Knight style consideration of W-Presidency issues in a genre context. I liked the acting, camerawork and spaceships though. It looks like a Stephen Youll painting come to life. Big Love is more my speed, though.

I have an audition tomorrow night, and if it goes well I may have something besides entertainment to post about soon.

Second Post of the Day: Act-Ing!

As an actor I'm transitioning from therapy to puppetry. Instead of trying to turn every Second Waiter role into a Forging in the Smithy of my Soul situation I'm thinking about how to use my body and voice to communicate with precision, wit, insight and economy. Not that one precludes the other, but I'm getting away from acting being a Spirit Journey and more about it being a communication.

More about my 2009 reading list

Okay, I mentioned An Alien Heat and Complete Albee Vol. 2. I'm also still working on Eno's Diary. Next up on my groaning-under-the-load bedside table:

The House With A Clock In Its Walls, a juvie fantasy I remember finding hypnotic as a kid. I was introduced to it by a freaky school filmstrip about kid's books, so bravo filmstrips.

A Life in the Theatre by David Mamet. A play of obvious interest.

Grendel by John Gardner. I remember being spellbound by this odd book in college. I recently reread Beowulf (in translation, natch) and wonder what I'll make of Gardner's philosophical novel now. I'd rather read this than watch the recent Hollywood film of Beowulf, with its ugly, stiff motion-capture animation.

The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy Boston. Why so much classic Juvie fiction? I think it's partly because I loved the stuff so much as a kid, partly because I'm excited by how clear yet rich the best of it is, and partly a blowback of my stick--in-the-mud refusal to read or watch Harry Potter.

Nova by Samuel Delany. Read in high school for a thing called Academic Decathlon. I recall it was exciting, but that's all I recall.

Make Your Own Damn Movie! by Lloyd Kaufman. I don't aspire to make a movie, but as my involvement in the performing arts and my interest in idiosyncratic fringe culture grows I want to keep my options open. And while I can take or leave Kaufman's movies, I do enjoy his anecdotes.

Peter Greenaway Interviews. I'm giving myself permission to only read as many as I want, though.

Hal Hartley Collected Screenplays Vol. 1. Why not?

Collected Plays of Edward Albee Vol. 3. What else ya gonna do?

Gravity's Rainbow. And you can keep your smart remarks to yourself. I'm totally gonna do it.

Also on the list: Kramer's Ergot 7 and a slew of M. John Harrison novels I ordered online, winging their way to my door. For crying out loud, DON'T TELL LAURIE I spent good money on more books!