What I've Been Upta

Attended a big mass audition in Memphis this past Monday.

Set out Saturday from Kannapolis for Nashville, where I was to stay with my parents. Got off to a late start in a rental car, and wound through the mountains in a dark cold pour of freezing rain. Do you remember the old Transformer type toys that had wheels which folded into the car's body as part of the car-to-robot transformation process? This car felt like its wheels were ready to fold up in just such a fashion. I finally got to my parents' house around midnight. Slept.

Sunday morning, awoke after my parents had already left for church. My brother and I had breakfast and walked the dogs, one of whom mistrusts strangers and wouldn't stop growling at me. After one walk together he mostly stopped growling... guess I'm part of the pack now. After lunch with the whole family I headed to Memphis. Trees like black twigs with silver highlights; ice flipping off the roofs of trucks. Ribbons of powdery snow rippling across the blacktop like sand on a windy beach.

Checked into my hotel, which was not the official hotel of the audition, but was a mere block from the theatre. The hotel had a groovy old lobby, narrow hallways, slow elevators and a colorful but creepy parking garage that would earn Dario Argento's location scout a bonus. A microwave in my room, but no fridge. No source for tea water, but the night clerk loaned me her electric teakettle. The internet flickered in and out, and my phone couldn't connect, so I was pretty much cut off from family.

Monday morning I went downstairs to get some lobby coffee, glanced out the glass door to the outdoor pool, and saw that the sky had dumped a load of snow all over Memphis, just in time for my audition. I attended the orientation meeting that morning (off to a late start since a bus of actors was caught in the snow) and got psyched up for my audition, for which I felt well prepared. Mingled a bit with the other auditionees. At 36 I was the wizened old crone of the bunch, shaking a palsied fist at all the twentysomethings.

Once upon a time I would have prepared for an audition by drinking Red Bull ("Can't fly without my magic feather" I was known to say) but now I sipped cup after cup of green tea. Meanwhile I perused the books-for-sale table; lots of challenging and new plays that aren't going to be produced by the theatres attending this audition. They're not doing new works by Maria Irene Fornes; they're doing Grandpa's Covered Wagon Christmas.

The moment arrived, and I auditioned like a green tea drinker instead of a Red Bull drinker. I overheard another guy's audition, and he sounded like a Red Bull drinker.

It seemed to be music theater's night, and most of the folks who auditioned and got many callbacks were singers... I chatted with/eavesdropped on other straight theatre folks, and many of them got no callbacks. The Red Bull guy I overheard was the only straight theatre person that night to get a bunch of callbacks. Back to the magic feather for me.

I attended my callback... it was mostly an informational session about the company, which I'd never heard of but have since discovered is a household name. It was a very, very enticing offer, except that it required being away from home for most of the year... and I'm a newlywed. After much agonizing I've concluded that Robert Bly be damned, I'm putting who I want to be with ahead of what I want to do. I'll just find something else to do.

Tuesday morning. Packed and loaded the car, incidentally glancing down the hall to the parking deck's lowest level to see that it was flooded ankle-deep with snow runoff.

Met an old college friend for lunch; one whom I haven't seen in years. She's looking good, sounding gloomy, so no change there.

Drove back to Nashville, getting into two GPS coffee snipe hunts. The first took me down an unfinished highway, off a ramp before the highway's end, into an area that was clearly a forest a week ago. The carelessly toppled trees and McMansion frames reveal that someone thinks there's still too much wilderness in Tennessee.

The second snipe hunt took me past a large, oddly shaped building. What was that, some office complex? Nope; it was one of the theatres that didn't call me back. After I found once again that "Sally's Fair Trade Organic Coffee, Comic Books and Bebop Jazz Cafe" was another figment of my GPS's overheated imagination, it started to snow again.

I got back to my parent's house, had a nice meal, and collapsed. Andrew Gainey, my late lamented voice teacher, appeared to me in my sleep to give me one of his spirited don't-let-'em-grind-you-down pep talks. Good timing, Andy.

The next day I slouched around my parents' house all day.

The next day I let William Gibson's Spook Country Audiobook chauffeur me home.

Transferring the Curse

Many years ago (I had bangs then) I was cast in a small supporting role in a Shakespeare in the Park production. I was in the first scene as a servant to a Duke. The man they cast as the Duke was a really nice guy whom I've seen do good work in a lot of parts, but for some reason Shakespeare just tripped him out. He'd start one of his speeches and suddenly slide into glossolalia: "That strain again! It had a dying fall. Hum, lumlum lum lum, fffm mum gum mmm mmm, sum pum sumthum bum gum gum bum bum." More or less iambic pentameter mumbling whenever he drew a blank on the lines, which was frequently.

He struggled with it, wanting to get it right but never quite nailing it. He'd fix one passage and forget another. I felt a mixture of sympathy and frustration... in later years I've done a bit of study on techniques for learning and speaking Shakespeare, but at the time we were both amateurs and I had no wisdom to pass on. Still, at least I knew my few lines and was able to spit them out whenever the discombobulated Duke came to the end of his Shakespearean scat-singing.

So opening night arrived, and whaddaya know? The Duke got his speeches out letter perfect. I was quite proud of him. And he turned to me for my first cue: "How now! What news from her?"

And I said: "So please my lord, um mum gum mum mum mum bum."

Somehow he had transferred the curse to me. When I hear the phrase "The magic of live theatre," this witchery is what comes to my mind.

Goonybird Cinema

H. G. Welles was famously unimpressed by Metropolis. And it seems to me that his criticisms were more or less on target... yet the film's aesthetics have enriched the world of film in ways that Well's own film, Things To Come, can't claim. Only a chimp could regard Metropolis as a worthwhile narrative, but whatever the film lacks from a literary perspective, the sets, costumes and such are rich in cinematic virtue. They suggest possibilities for purely cinematic expression that owe about as much to substantial dramaturgy as the average ballet.

Avatar is a proud descendant of Metropolis; dumb as it can be, but saved by technical brio. About all its got going for it is the range of possibilities it offers to future films; like Jurassic Park, no sensible person will want to watch it once its technical innovations have been absorbed by the film industry. The film boasts the most nuanced and expressive CGI animation I've ever seen (well, as nuanced and expressive as the acting on most Hollywood films, so it's little more than slick emotion-porn, but still, it's a step up from the faux-human acting in previous CGI attempts). The artificial environment of the film is a fine-grained engagement with the natural world which reveals the director to be more than a hollow technonaut, and for me this artful take on nature is the most exciting thing about this flick.

Problems? Most of the lines of dialogue could be changed to "I am a macho person!" with no harm done to the warp and woof of the film, the character aesthetics are straight out of Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell (this is not praise (god bless 'em for getting Wayne Barlowe to do the critters though)) and the just-add-water plot is marred not only by the usual paper-thin Joe Campbellianism that we expect from big loud Hollywood but by the hoary old White-Man-Impresses-The-Soul-Brothers-By-Having-Just-As-Much-Soul shtick that one would have hoped we'd be past by now. And lefty that I am, I'm uneasy about being asked to cheer the deaths of American Soldiers (yeah, I know that's not the denotation, but that's certainly the connotation. Well, maybe they're more like Blackwater, but still).

I never would have bothered posting about this film, though, if I hadn't read this post. I'm fond of the author, who gives me my weekly dose of vitamin fanboy, but "He's out to make a film that is timeless, mythic, and universal in its appeal so it should be no surprise that a story with such broad intentions would have roots in other tales that have been told many times over" stuck in my craw. It's the kind of misunderstanding that nerds generally use to excuse callow just-add-water Jungianism in their junk fiction. The logic goes something like this: "mythic, legendary stories are simple, so to tell a truly mythic tale you should strip it of complexities and idiosyncrasies." Wrong, wrong, wrong. Read Ovid. Read Beowulf. Read Malory. Lit Crit has a term: "roughen the text". This refers, as I understand it, to the ways in which texts are complicated in ways that require the reader or viewer to slow down, to get (one hopes productively) confused, to think it through, to engage the complexities nestled within the narrative. You'll find boatloads of roughening in genuinely mythic talespinning. Hollywood baby food is another story. Hollywood has taken to heart Ezra Pound's dictum: "The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention." The libretto of Avatar is not mythic; it is faux-mythic, lacking real insight into human motivations and history. Enjoy the spectacle, but take it seriously at real moral peril.

* * *

Another nutty movie we've enjoyed recently: The Fountainhead. Written by Ayn Rand, directed by King Vidor, music by Max Steiner. So you know it's gonna be a model of restraint and good taste. It didn't make me want to read Rand's doorstops, but it did make me wanna see more Vidor; the man had style, a style Pauline Kael described as "hog-wild expressionism." So he was a good match for Rand's spittle-flecked narratives. Laurie and I got a series of kicks from this film (Those dresses! Those suits! That old-movie hamming!) but found the overlong speech at the end a bit comical. It's the money shot for Rand, a propagandist first and foremost, and it goes on and on. Apparently Vidor wanted to cut it, but Rand insisted on keeping the whole thing, and the studio gave her a measure of respect they never dreamed of extending to, say, Faulkner. The speech could be summarized as "the first person to bake a pie was the first person to be hit in the face with a pie." It monkeys with the Prometheus myth in an odd way, turning the vengeful gods into grubby dumb humans. And while it's sometimes true that dumb people reject true innovators, isn't it truer to say that it's the gods, or fate or what have you, that grinds innovators down? The Prometheus myth rings truer than Rand's petulant appropriation of it, and her own continuing book sales should give her shade pause. If all those folks, not all of whom can be elite, love her so much, what does that do to her elitist position?
* * *

The great Eric Rohmer died recently, so to pay tribute we watched one of my favorite films, Le Rayon Vert, released in English variously as "Summer" and "The Green Ray." One of Rohmer's most improvised films, it excites me the way Altman does, finding life with the camera instead of constructing it for the camera. The star, Marie Riviere, shows us what real expressiveness is. I have no idea if she's an actor per se or simply an intuitive performer, but she's perfect for this film, which looks better with each viewing.

Time to unload some more cel-phone photos on you.


Tile from around the way.


Union Street, Concord NC.

Fixing up the gallery at Concord.
More Concord.
Down the street from the house.
Kannapolis at night.
Striking the Marat/Sade set.
The set.
Christmas in Nashville!
The old ornaments on a new tree.
Bespectackled mouse on a swing.
Stuff.
Folks.
Backyard.
Cat.
Graveyard at the mall.

Fit The Frame

Edit 1/13/13: Greetings, those of you who found this because you're searching for calendars to fit in Lang frames!  Your best bet is probably here.  Hope that helps!

I'm selling calendars in a mall kiosk part-time. It isn't what I thought I'd be doing when I was 36, but nevermind. I've learned a few things in the process.

Kid's calendars don't sell. I thought those Disney Princess calendars would fly outta here, but they just sit there, slowly warping on the shelves. I finally figured out why. Kids don't need calendars.

No one wants dog calendars. They want Their Dog calendars. When someone looks at a dog calendar and exclaims "That's my Missy! That looks just like her!" I know we've made a sale.

When women buy beefcake or cheesecake calendars, they always think they need to explain themselves.

There is a calendar publishing company called Lang that has a fiendishly brilliant scheme for locking in repeat customers. All their calendars are lovingly crafted kitsch art that're designed to look pretty on a kitchen wall and won't give you diabetes the way Thomas "No Shame" Kincaide will. But their secret weapon is the frame.

People ask for Lang calendars by name, and then tell me about the frame. Lang sells wooden frames that fit their calendars... and only their calendars. Some assembly required; women always say they bought the frame, but men always say they built a frame, as if they chopped down a tree and hand-carved it. And once people have that frame, they feel duty bound to stick their next calendar into it.

Once the Lang calendars were almost sold out (You won't find Lang calendars for sale at half price after the holidays... they'll all be gone) the Lang Frame Gang started fretting. I had customers express dissatisfaction with the few remaining Lang calendars, wander around the kiosk looking for something more appealing, and cry out "Nothing I like will fit the frame!" A common existential delimma, pithily expressed.

Do you suppose they bought the calendar they liked and decided to put the frame in the closet for a year?

Not on your life. They all bought Langs they didn't like. Gotta fit the frame.

Ne'r-Do-Well Narratives

If there's one thing I've learned from being married to a scientist, it is that science can't be usefully engaged in any depth without specialized knowledge. In other words, laypeople can no more process scientific matters in depth than people who can't do their five-finger exercises can play the Brandenburg concertos. Which makes engaging the climate change issues a bit frustrating.

Out of fairness I want to engage the arguments that global warming isn't as big a problem as we've been lead to believe, but the few scientists in that corner are engaging complexities of data and interpretation that most folks, myself included, cannot follow. The rest of the denier pundits are laypeople like myself, so all they can do is craft narratives at me. Between data I can't interpret and Exxon-funded noise-machine narratives that I can interpret but can't take seriously, I'm left to fall back on faith that the majority of scientists know what they're talking about; a faith that listening to hours of scientists gossiping about their jive-turkey colleagues has shaken. Of course I could try to study the info in sufficient depth that I could overcome the knowledge gap. I could also learn to breakdance and make a baked Alaska, but don't count on it.

I figure warming or no, pumping out less pollution is probably a good thing. Some industry flacks say compliance with carbon regulation, etc. will be punishingly severe for our economy and way of life. They said the same stuff about emancipating the slaves and child labor laws. And they were right! Ending slavery and child labor clobbered our economy in the short run. Doesn't mean they weren't the right things to do.

* * *

One of my favorite aspects of Pride & Prejudice (which I finished recently) was the way Darcy changes his callow, classist ways, but does it mostly offstage. His changes are suggested bit by bit as he and Elizabeth bump into one another and she is constantly surprised by his improved behavior. Only near the end is the narrative arc of his changes explained, and it makes perfect sense as a believable process of self-improvement. I think this pleased me because it tracks with our observations of human change in real life. We see the evidence of change in unexpected fragmentary glimpses, and only later, if ever, do we get an account of the motivation and process behind the changes.

The most unsettling part of reading P&P was getting caught up in suspense over Lydia and Wickham's tawdry affair, only to remember that my frame of reference on such matters is rather different from Jane Austen's. In fact Lydia and Wickham's courtship and marriage wasn't all that different from mine with Laurie. To be fair we don't live under a dowry-based matrimonial system, from which (along with modern birth control) all the relevant liberalizations flow. I wonder which of our social structures will someday seem as bizarre and antiquated as dowries seem to us. I'd nominate employer-based health insurance for that honor.

* * *

Among movies we've seen lately: Marnie. I've seen it three times now. The first time I was a kid watching it with Mom. We both enjoyed it, but all the sexual stuff flew right over my head. I recently gave Laurie the capsule synopsis of it: Tippie Hedren is a safecracker with a crippling psychomelodramatic problem; Sean Connery hunts/heals her.

"Do they get it on?" asked Laurie.

"You know it," I said.

And so Marnie went to the top of our queue.

Two things about Marnie struck me this viewing:

1. Tippie Hedren is really, really good. She plays the type-A ice queen with submerged Freudian issues so well that she was indistinguishable from my last supervisor at my old office job.

2. Sean Connery's attempt at an American accent is such an utterly unique hybrid dialect that it resembles a new kind of speech. I love that. Bad accents that go beyond badness all the way to surprising newness are one of the best things actors can give us.

* * *

Another recently viewed flick: The Mothman Prophecies. I read a big chunk of the non-fiction(?) book this was based on. In it (IIRC) freelance journalist Jim Keel goes to a small West Virginia town where a diverse mix of insane phenomena (UFOs, monsters, Men In Black) are causing trouble. The MIBs, rather than being simply sinister, take comical cluelessness to the nth power; I remember being painfully embarrassed by their antics. I also remember being beguiled by Keel's blend of faux-hardnosedness and gap-jawed credulity. Since much of the narrative consisted of punishingly sidetracking anecdotes about how this UFO siting is similar to these other UFO sitings Keel has on file, that monster sighting is similar to these other reported monster sitings, etc., I eventually put the book down and didn't pick it up again. (If I've gotten any details wrong in this synopsis, that's entirely in keeping with the ambiguous nature of the book.)

The movie plays really fast and loose with the original narrative. The reporter becomes a top reporter for the Washington Post, gets a new name, a melodramatic dead-wife backstory, and an advisor on spooky psychic stuff. This advisor gets to be the self-appointed expert on Ultraterrestrials (as they are called in the book) so the reporter doesn't have to be a nut from the start. I would have preferred they stuck closer to the book: a nutty reporter who loves to trot out his knowledge of Fortean lore would be way more amusing than Richard Gere's glum character.

The supposedly hardnosed reporter is awfully quick to buy into far-fetched theories, though, which is hardly justified by the weirdness swirling around him. A real hardnosed reporter would try to Occam's Razor his way through such peculiar events.

The main MIB in the book, Indrid Cold, is mostly offstage but on the phone in this film, so all the wacky stuff about MIBs making public fools of themselves is snipped from the narrative. The film's awfully serious, in a furrowed-brow manner. The backstory with the dead wife comes to the fore as it appears she is, in some inexplicable fashion, hanging with Indrid Cold, unless Cold is playing some cruel Dopplerganger game. This subplot leads to some letting-go-of-the-past-and-the-dead stuff that I quite liked, but the films' top-heavy with dead-wife melodrama that the psychotronic source material didn't need.

Also the film goes for a David Lynchian weirdness, with David (Seven, Fight Club) Fincher visual stylings. The cinematography goes for sedate colors and fine-grained detailing, but then slips into highly formalized scene-to-scene and even shot-to-shot transitions. Disorienting camera angles and A Bout de Souffle editing create an uncanny mise-en-scene, but as the film progresses it piles on the cinematic funhouse gimmicks until it starts to feel like a demo reel of tricks, and each new trick seems like part of a predictably escalating succession. I haven't made a study of it, but it seems to me Lynch pulls off the uncanny with greater ease because he exercises a bit of restraint with the weird stuff. When he goes weird he doesn't simply use interchangeable tricks; the weirdness is more specific and deeply rooted in narrative than the tilt-a-whirl bamboozlement devices in Mothman.

A Season Three X-files episode titled "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" is clearly influenced by The Mothman book and is closer to what I would have wanted from an adaptation: uncanny, comical and open to a near-Marenbadian multiplicity of readings. It's more fun than the Mothman movie and will take less time, so give it a try.

(This subject of unofficial or accidental adaptations that surpass the official adaptations is one that preoccupies me: Pedro Almodovar's Bad Education is a better Lolita movie than either of the entertaining but insufficient Lolita films, Ang Lee's Hulk movie is a better Neon Genesis Evangelion adaptation than Hulk adaptation, etc.)

The Box. You Opened It, We Came.

Last night I had my first sip of wine in a while, and it got me rhapsodizing about the glory days... the BOXED WINE days.

In the late 90s I drank wine from The Box. Real wine was too 'spensive. I knew boxed wine was allegedly no good, and I didn't argue the point, but I figure that if it was good enough for me then it would be a shame to waste real wine on my cloddish palate. Later, of course, I learned that wasting real wine on my cloddish palate was the only way to refine my palate, but despite my college education I didn't quite grasp that I was capable of learning and growing. But that's another story.

When I shared an apartment with two other guys (and two of us weren't paying rent) it was boxed wine that smoothed over the many, many rough edges. Well, that and Neon Genesis Evangelion, which was specifically calibrated for tipsy twentysomething girlfriendless nerdboys.

I eased off the box once I moved across the street from V. Richards, which had a real wine selection, but the subject of The Box came up during a production of Angels in America II. I declared that if I ever became a DJ my stage name would be Chillable Red, in honor of a particularly Kool-Aidish variety (or is that varietal?) of boxed wine (as if there's any boxed wine that doesn't taste like sour Kool-Aid). Our Prior Walter admitted that in his college days his roommates and he would remove the sack (for those who haven't enjoyed The Box: inside The Box is a wine-filled plastic bag with a rubber nozzle) from the box, hang it on the wall somehow, and squirt cheap wine directly into their mouths as they passed it. That's the good life, for college boys.

I offered to bring a Box to the cast party. Everyone laffed except for Tom, who is from Sand Mountain.

I showed up to the party and Tom met me on the porch, eyes glowing with eagerness. "Where is THE BOX?" he asked. The Box was produced and we drained it to the lees, paying no attention to the many bottles of better wine that had been brought by our betters. The evening ended with Tom and myself trying to play jug music on the nozzle of an empty plastic bag. I think it was the last time I ever wallowed in boxed wine. A fitting blowout conclusion to The Boxed Wine Era.