Fat and burned, bloody and cursed

The last play I did in Birmingham was an outdoor production of Macbeth.

The director made it clear that we would be saying “Macbeth” freely throughout the production, defying the moldy old superstition that to do so brings a curse down upon any show that dares utter the dread name in rehearsal.  This cheered me, because I knew that if I went through the rehearsal period without saying Macbeth, I’d be unable to say it when the performance day arrived.

The costumer was a young woman who put all the Thanes (aka warriors) in topless outfits.  Her concept sketches revealed a fantasy of bare-chested beefcake barbarians.  Perhaps she had not noticed the doughy Alabama bodies of the men she was actually dressing.  Some of the younger guys were trim, sure, but many of us, including Your Correspondent, were too tubby and wobbly to inspire much fear on the battlefield.  Pasty saggy man-nipples melting over fuzzy guts; the evidence of our sedentary lifestyles certainly counteracted any Braveheart/300 fantasy our overseers might have had in mind.  And isn’t that comic gap between intent and onstage reality part of the joy of community theatre? 

Instead of shirts we got body makeup.  Intriguing swirly faux-tats, black and beautiful, sprayed on (no showering till after we close!).  Did I mention that we were doing this outside?  In the sun?

The day of the performance the costume designer had us Thanes pose for a few pictures.  Before each snap she urged us to roar like warriors.  We did our level best, and after she took the last of many pix, she sighed, “I love it.  So manly.”  This left me feeling a bit cheap, but that’s probably a small karmic down payment on any number of things I’ve done that’ve left others feeling the same way.

The show ended with a dope swordfight between Macbeth and MacDuff, and our Macbeth got a nasty hit on the forehead.  When I (and many others) detained him after the show to tell him how great he was, we (or at least I) assumed the blood streaming down his forehead was stage blood.  Nope.  He had to rush off to the emergency room, but was gracious enough to stand there and smile while we twittered at him.  He’s a preacher, so maybe that gives him a sense of self-sacrifice, I dunno.  Anyway, one cast member who had warned of dread results should we utter the cursed Name in rehearsal felt himself vidicated.

The show has marked me as well; standing in the sun with my bare shoulders covered in crusty black makeup gave me a memorable burn that remains as a peculiar constellation of freckly glyphs.  A fitting souvenir of my final Birmingham show. 

Good Timing, Andy

Good Timing, Andy

by Aaron White

Car felt ready to fold up.

Ice flipping powdery rippling blacktop like on a windy beach.

Night clerk loaned her teakettle.

Monday morning went to get lobby coffee, glanced out door to outdoor pool, and that had dumped a load all over, in for audition.

Table; challenging and new that aren't going to be produced by attending audition.

Auditioned like a green tea drinker a Red Bull drinker.

Chatted with, and many them got no.

Enticing offer, except required being away for year... and a newlywed.

Packed and loaded car, incidentally glancing down hall to parking level that flooded ankle-deep with runoff.

looking good gloomy no change there.

took down a highway, off a ramp before end, into an area that clearly a week ago toppled reveal that too much.

Hunt oddly building.

Good timing, Andy.

*******************************

I wrote the preceding poem by working through this blogpost as an assignment for a free online poetry class (which I'm taking though Coursera from Professor Al Filreis, whose podcast Poem Talk is essential listening).

For this exercise, I removed every word with the letter "S".

The results were promising but insufficient, so I removed all the "of"s and "the"s, most of which were now lacking referents and just cluttering up the place.

Still too much, so I removed first-person pronouns and my least favorite remaining sentence from each paragraph.

Still not satisfied, I removed all but one sentence from each paragraph.

Finally I went through each line and scapeled out whatever I pleased.

Then I lightly polished the grammer and punctuation, capitalizing words that were now the beginnings of sentences, etc.

I'm pleased with the results, not because I think I've created great art, but because the process of reducing the memory this way gives me a sensation of letting go.  The residue of this pivotal event reduced to tea leaves which may be read and interpreted, or rinsed out of the cup.  I hope you enjoyed it.

Cityscope

When I was a kid, the cities of Knoxville and Chattanooga, Tennessee seemed as big and funky as a city could be.  When I read fiction (as I did) about cities, I plugged the sights and sounds and smells of these mid-sized Tennessee cities into the books' descriptions of New York or wherever.  I grew older, and found that mid-sized cities seemed more placid and manageable as I grew in size and experience.  I assumed that the overpowering richness and immensity of The City had been, in part, a matter of my childhood size and inexperience, and I would never see the city as such an overwhelming thing again.

Last week we went to New York, and it made me feel the way those Tennessee cities used to make me feel.  It's exactly what New York is cracked up to be.  I'm grateful.

Beauty

Let's call her Lana.  She was Beauty.  Around the time I started high school I auditioned for a play at the Chattanooga Little Theater (as it was then called) titled The Masque of Beauty and the Beast.  I got the role of the banker.  Remember the banker in Beauty and the Beast?  Neither does anyone else.  My character was little more than a plot point, so after a scene or two I went backstage to a tiny little alcove and happily worked the tape recorder that triggered the musical cues, never to be seen again by the audience until the curtain call.  A future Public Radio announcer was Beast, and girls in the audience always wanted to talk to him after the show.  We got a lot of letters from children who saw the play (presumably these letters were school assignments, but we enjoyed them anyway) and Lana got a lot of mash notes from young boys.

Lana was indeed a lovely young woman with a stage presence like a steady candle flame.  A willowy blonde, she wasn't quite to my boyish tastes (I was more drawn to Beast's outgoing girlfriend and the heavyset bookish girl who played Beauty's narratively nonessential sister) but she was an ideal icon of storybook beauty.  In real life she had a kindly sass and a willingness to engage others, qualities I admired and envied.

Years later we met again.  She was answering phones for a mail-order company where I was wasting time as a security guard.  An obscene caller had been terrorizing the operators by calling up and asking them to have sex with him.  Lana brought this to an end by replying to his request with "Yeah, sure.  Where are you?  Let's do this."  He never called again.

Enter the Age of Facebook.  Someone started a memorial page for the deceased graduates of our high school.  Someone else reported that Lana had committed suicide.  I tried to verify this, and was able to find a death notice.  I cannot and will not square what I know of her life with what I read of her death.

Blogging Behind Your Back

Let's call him Steve.  He was a pink-faced, bleach-haired college boy with hellzapoppin' energy.  Everyone in attendance at the coffee shop open mike standup comedy scene was grateful for his presence.  He spat out his anecdotes about fast food mishaps with an idiosyncratic flair, one arm gesticulating, both feet shuffling, a spastic marionette with a voice that sliced through aural clutter.  His twisty punchlines within punchlines unfolded in startling directions.  Fast food joints were a recurring subject, though he had less fat on him than I had in my knuckles.  Most of the regular or irregular performers at the Wednesday night open mikes could charitably be called weak; a few were solid.  Two regulars could really deliver the goods.  Steve topped them all, while inspiring them to fresh heights.  Steve was a comedy machine.  An HBO special someday?  Not too farfetched.

He repeated his material from show to show, but hey, who didn't?  That's how comics refine, and besides, for us regulars it was like hearing favorite songs.

Steve was really supportive.  I tried my hand at standup, and after my first night he told me I delivered the strongest first standup session he'd ever seen.  Maybe he said that to all the boys, but it made me feel floaty.

(Side note: one thing I learned from doing this is that when you do some weak standup, and a solemn-faced young woman approaches you to say "You were really funny," what she's really saying is "I am really lonely."  So be nice to her.)

I remember once he introduced a friend of his at the open mike, and proceeded to hang his head in embarrassment for said friend as the friend (oh, let's call him Chuck) delivered a puzzling attempt at humor.  He was a likable, gangly guy, but his jokes seemed like improvised remarks in the noble tradition of Mort Sahl only dumb.  I only remember one thing he said:

"It's hard to be a Christian in the South!  Everybody takes the Lord's name in vain!  Why don't they take someone else's name in vain instead?"  This is an oldie but a goodie on the Christian Comedy circuit, but that first line was perplexing.  Did Chuck mean southern Saudi Arabia?  The Southeastern US probably presents fewer challenges to Christians than anywhere else in the word 'cept maybe the Holy See.

After a while we began to wish Steve would cook up some new material, even if it wasn't as strong.  Once Steve delivered a new joke, but I'd first heard it from my friend J'miza.  I recounted this to J'miza, who muttered "That nigga loves to steal jokes."  (Steve's whiteness might bear a mention here.)

The open mike shows and I drifted apart as I got more involved in community theatre (tediously documented on this blog's back pages) and I didn't see Steve for a while.  Eventually my friend Chauncey told me, "I saw Steve doing a show out of town last week.  He's still doing the same jokes about fast food."  I began to wonder who had written Steve's original material.  Had a ghost writer crafted the stuff?  If Steve wrote it himself, why wasn't there more where that came from?

And then, years later, I got a Fecesbook friend request from Steve.  I accepted, and discovered that:

• He's a defense attorney
• He's a Ron Paul fanatic
• His Fecesbook posts aren't jokes.

I found his Paultard banner waving a bit tedious, but my own idées fixes are probably less than delightful to some of my FB friends.

He offered up a free downloadable album of his comedy.  I eagerly downloaded it, but found it less delightful than I'd remembered.  I find recordings of most standup to be a bit underwhelming (Minnie Pearl is an exception for some reason) so it may just be the lack of his physical presence.  I noticed, though, that a spirit of "Afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable" rippled through the comedy; not consistently so, but it was there.  A lot of ethnic humor that didn't engage other cultures; not that a comic can't play that game, but a white male child of privilege might want to be thoughtful about it in a way Steve didn't seem to be.  Some slut shaming.  Some virgin shaming.  Some low-on-the-economic-totem-pole shaming.  All's fair in comedy, or so I thought in the mid-Oughts, but it wasn't sitting too well with me half a decade later.

And my lack of laffs wasn't directly tied to my politically correct objections; heaven knows I can still enjoy some down and dirty comedy.

I wound up deleting most of the album.  I kept a few golden bits to remember him, and then, by.

Steve posted an article about how his firm, with himself involved, got a man off charges of murdering his wife.  Were they saving a poor man who'd lost his spouse, only to be falsely charged with her death?  Or were they getting a killer off?  I don't suppose I'll ever know, but I suppose it was their job either way.

Anyway, this past week saw Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day.  For the benefit of the not-impossible future reader of this epistle who isn't a scholar of corny sociopolitical brouhahas, the owner of Chick-Fil-A came out and said that he donates a portion of profits to anti-gay causes.  His choice, but some gay rights supporters called for a boycott, and in return conservative person Mike Huckabee called for "Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day."  It became a thing.  Lots of anti-gay types, many of them politicians, showed up at their local branches of Chick-Fil-A to gobble down some mall food and photo-op it up.

Steve, who had seemed to be slightly sympathetic to bullied gays in his standup, posted something to the effect of "This Chick-Fil-A food is as delicious as freedom!  Long live Christianity and Chick-Fil-A!"  And no, it wasn't a joke.  He didn't go for that brand of irony.  Fed up, I commented "Kil Mor Homos" in response.

He deleted my comment, and I finally defriended him.  Was I trying to goad him into giving me an excuse?  Maybe.  I'm sure he'll be fine.  I'm sure I will too.  It's a long way from being the most regrettable relationship conclusion in my 38 years on this earth.

We Need To Blog About Kevin

We saw We Need To Talk About Kevin last night.  Having read and enjoyed the book I was surprised by the film's fragmentary retelling.  The novel tells the story of a woman whose son committed a school shooting.  It's an epistolary novel in which the Mom reflects to her now-absent husband on how she always believed her son was a damaged soul.  This reflective narration allows for plenty of chronological flexibility, but Mom unspools each memory or thread of incidents in a carefully detailed and closely argued fashion.  In one of my favorite passages, the Mom, whose blend of wit and misanthropy recalls Humbert Humbert, details her loathing of a McMansion her husband bought the family.  She goes on and on about every last repellant detail of the bloated McGormenghast, and it is hilarious.  Mom is a hoot.

She's also, in another Humbertian nod, an unreliable narrator.  Is her son really as monstrous as she describes him, or is her misanthropy the root of the boy's damage?  It's a Turn of the Screw-style riddle without a provided solution.

In the movie the Mother's voice, along with her vinegar wit, is mostly excised.  No voiceover or soliloquies here.  And since the film shows what the book tells, the filmmaker (Lynne Ramsay, whose painterly and elliptical filmmaking here is a tour de force) must make a hundred little choices about how to show the boy's defiance and seeming wickedness.  He comes across as thoroughly reptillian, which tilts things in the Mother's favor.

The film is also more fragmentary, skipping through chronology in a succession of quick cuts, as if George Roy Hill circa Slaughterhouse 5 dropped acid with Antonioni circa Zabriskie Point with an assist from Resnais circa Last Year at Marienbad.  Oh, you know what I mean, quit bellyachin'.

You know what the film really reminded me of?  Anime movies based on long-running series.  These movies tend to toss linear narrative out the window and rely on a kinetic parade of highlights from the story in the original TV series/comic.  Lots of details are alluded to but glossed over in the assumption that you've engaged the source material and know the context of details that are plopped down into the movie without explanation.  If you want to see an example of what I'm talking about, by all means check out Evangelion: Death and Rebirth, the adaptation of the Neon Genesis Evangelion TV show that makes utter hash of the narrative, on the assumption that you've seen the show and just want a fancy recap before the screamy, spastic, let's-throw-every-idea-we've-got-onscreen-because-we-may-never-get-another-chance-before-we-have-to-go-back-to-hackwork-for-hire film it precedes: End of Evangelion.

Anyway, I liked the film on its own gawgeously photographed terms, but I had a few quibbles.

• No spoilers, but there's a big tearjerking surprise in the novel's conclusion that the movie flattens out by choosing to remove the Mother's narrative.
• The film decontextualizes some of the novel's elements so vigorously that they seem like little more than accidental residue.  Mom's seeing her son's TV interview; Mom's work as a travel writer.  These things are alluded to in the film in a fashion that left my wife, who didn't read the book, confounded.  I don't think my wife was alone in this.  I know the director didn't want to elaborate things in the rational manner of the book, but I'm not sure the bewildering surrealism of the way these elements of the novel irrupt in the film seem like anything more than arty intrusions to viewers who missed the book.
• One of my favorite parts of the novel involves the pre-shooting teen psychopath boy befriending a witless hanger-on, and their attempt to frame an innocent schoolteacher of student molestation.  Author Lionel Shriver turns this into a screamingly funny passage about how it takes brains and guile to be a successful villain; brains and guile that hangers-on can't muster.  I missed this, is all I'm saying.  The film pared things down, and some fun sequences got lost.
• One last thing.  There's a sequence in the film where the boy takes a bow to an imagined audience in the gym just before his crime.  It's shot like something out of Triumph of the Will, which makes sense as a cinematic look at the connection between self-glorification and brutality, but as a matter of taste I'd have preferred a found-footage style presentation that replaced the Wagnerian lighting with a verite smeariness.  The subtle irony of the film's approach to this shot might be lost on people who don't get the Triumph of the Will reference, while a Who-does-this-daydreaming-little-foreskin-think-he-is? presentation might puncture the self-dramatizing more deflatingly.  

I think "deflatingly" is a good way to end a sentence or a blogpost.

Do Not Mistake the Pointing Finger For the Moon; or, From Mediated Life to Life.

In the late 90s I was enraptured by an anime miniseries called Please Save My Earth.  Never mind the story; the people who made the show certainly didn't.  It was adapted from a long-running comic book series (that screaming you hear is nerds yelling "It's not a comic book; it's MANGA!") that had way too much made-up-as-she-went-along plot to fit smoothly into the adaptation, added to which the story in the comic wasn't yet finished when the anime was made.  The first episode of the six-episode show had a leisurely pace, but as it went on the tempo picked up, with incident trampling over incident until, at the end, we got a montage of unaddressed plot threads that felt like a "Next time on Please Save My Earth" trailer and an effort at poetic, rather than narrative, resolution.  This failure/refusal/confounding of linear narrative resolution, no matter how clumsy, prepared me for literary modernism in a way my literature classes hadn't.  The ending burst like a seedpod, flinging unresolved plot threads and dimly glimpsed story points all over, and I found it more entrancing than any tidy conclusion could have been.

So I was really into this show.  At one point in it there's a shot of a tree with its leaves wafting in the breeze; it had no narrative significance, but it was pretty to look at while the heroine narrated at us, and perhaps it suggested a context to her affairs that a more conventional picture of her face wouldn't provide.  For some reason this animated image of a tree resonated with me, perhaps because I lived in a neighborhood full of trees.

Every night I would come home from my second-shift job and walk the dog in the dark.  One of our neighbors had placed a light under a tall tree; the light shone up the shaft of the tree, illuminating its entire length up to the canopy of leaves.  I think I would have overlooked it if I hadn't had that animated image of a tree awakening me to the way trees exist on their own beside our lives; the numinousness of trees suddenly mattered to me after a life of living around them, and that illuminated tree became a nightly touchstone for me.

So.  I've progressed from cartoon trees (that in retrospect looked more like wobbling green bubble gum blobs than foliage) to trees with dramatic lighting, to just liking trees in general.  I regard this as progress: from the mediated experience to the thing itself.