Homemade Yogurt, Water Engines, My Childhood, and Some Movies

Wicker Man.  A camp treat.  The first hour is basically an upright, uptight police officer sleuthing around a island-bound Pagan commune, and having a succession of tantrums about how not-Christian everybody is.  It’s spiced up with loads of bawdiness, Thistle and Psych-Rock music, and all the fruits of the filmmakers’ research into pagan bric-a-brac roughening the texture of a straightforward mystery plot. 

It reminds me of a family vacation way back when, touring around the coast of Maine, and we spent an afternoon at some Unitarian island retreat.  Everyone was very friendly, but I poked around the bookshop (as I was wont to do) and found a book of party games for consenting adults, or maybe it was supposed to be about spiritual/emotional growth, who remembers.  One of the activities involved openly, honestly, unhesitatingly telling everyone in the group which of them you wanted to have sex with.  Then and now, this struck me as a really dim idea, and I was relieved, years later, to find that Birmingham-style Unitarianism doesn’t involve such games (or if it did, I wasn’t invited.)

So watching this devout Christian fellow stomp around a lovely, sunny island and treat a bunch of sweetly smiling pagans like war criminals was deeply satisfying to my inner prig, just because that’s what I would’ve loved to do on Unitarian Sex Camp Island all those years ago.  Take that, nice people who make your own yogurt! 

Of course the movie ends with the Pagans turning out to be dangerous because horror movies always gotta take things to the bottom of the slippery slope.  Exorcist can’t just let the girl go through a sleazy, angry adolescent phase and then calm down, which is what usually happens in real life.  Texas Chainsaw has to turn its white trash creeps into cannibals, instead of just beer guzzlers who cling to guns and religion (in fact the Sawyer family doesn’t seem to have guns or religion, though they have weapons, totems and mummification.)  And the pagans, of course, of course, have to do human sacrifice, instead of just having psychic faires and selling homemade candles.  Such is horror.

Also enjoyed an item called Safety Not Guaranteed, which has been criticized for being yet another underweight quirky-cutesy comedy, but it stays with me for a couple of reasons.  For one, it understands that time travel is really about memory and history, and puts regret and relationships at the center of the narrative.  Some of the B plot romantic stuff seems weakly integrated into the film at first, but the end thematically unifies everything.  Second, the film’s tense, obsessive protagonist reminds me of a guy who did the tech for a theatre venue I used to perform in.  He was acerbic, scowly, and had a diagram of an engine that runs on water posted on the door of his office, with some notes on how They are suppressing this technology for their own greedy gain.  I went to his house one night with a group of theatre nerds, and he showed us his enormous collection of unopened Star Wars toys.  After that I tried to be warm to him, in my ungainly way, to show that I appreciated that he’d opened this part of himself to me, but he seemed even colder than before.  I felt I’d failed a test.  This movie is about a woman who passes the test.  

Finally, watched the first half of something called Modern Girls, a truly lousy film from the early 80s.  It’s well worth a look, though, if you’re interested in the more outrageous elements of 80s style.  New Romantic duds galore, chunky plastic jewelry, hair chandeliers, neon pink and blue on black, it’s all here.  As far as plot, thematics, character work, dialogue, all that stuff, it’s hard to imagine how it could be worse, but oh, it’s fun to goggle at.  I was a boy in the early 80s, and all that stuff was on the cultural periphery of my life.  Now it makes me feel like a kid again.  Maybe it felt similar to the people who dressed like that.  God bless ‘em.

The Ewgrossorcist

One of the fascinating things about the same-sex marriage cases before the SCOTUS this week is that the anti-gay marriage crew isn't using the old-school arguments of "Ewww, gross" and "As it is written in The Book of Hezekiah, Chapter Seven, Verses Eighteen to Twenty..."  I guess those arguments don't have as much currency as they once did.

"Ew, gross" has, at various times, struck me as a robust argument regarding such topics as homosexuality, girls, and vegetables, so it's time to declare disgust and revulsion to be unreliable moral guides.

I don't want to wade into religious arguments, but I would note that the story of Sodom and Gommorah, often cited as an anti-gay narrative, is a deeply weird and difficult story that doesn't leave anyone except maybe Abram looking good.  It's kind of like a Golan-Globus movie, an overwrought caricature of the big bad city, with abject, comically demonized villains   Homosexuality sure doesn't get a clean bill of health in it, but the residents of the Twin Cities are also rapists and murderers who have ceased worshiping God.  It's disingenuous, or just stoopid, to say (as so many do) that it's the homosexuality that forced God's hand.

 So what kind of arguments are they making, there at SCOTUS?  Arguments that may seem to have that New Talking Point Smell, but if you look up any article by Maggie Gallagher from 2005 or so, you'll see the current anti-gay marriage case has been copied and pasted wholesale from there, or from wherever she got it.  Still, the fixation on procreation as the be-all and end-all of marriage makes me think the Maggie Gallagher argument on this subject may be like The Exorcist or stuff about nuns... If you're not Catholic, and I'm not, it's hard to see the point.  I think this is gonna be a win for same-sex marriage, and I'm pleased, both for the right reasons (people I care about will be able to formalize their relationships) and the wrong ones (apoplexy looks delightful on my ideological opponents).

Speaking of The Exorcist, I finally saw it, but (as I've suggested) I couldn't give myself over to it.  I can accept pretty much any narrative premise, no matter how goony, as long as the storyteller doesn't go bananas trying to persuade me that it isn't goony.  The filmmakers practically grabbed me by the lapels, screaming "No, the demon possession isn't a narrative device gesturing towards parental anxiety about their children's' pubertal misbehavior... it's about REAL DEMON POSSESSION, which is a real thing that happens!"  C'mon.  I saw a recently redone cut of the film; I understand the original release was more ambiguous.

Outside the Cage, Outside the Stage

I used to get The Actor's Nightmare all the time, as I've posted about before.  Then I quit acting, and I started to get a variant: I'd dream that I was in a theatrical production, and I wanted to get out.  I'd be desperate, not to remember my lines, but to quit the show without getting into some ill-defined trouble.

So why did I quit?  Not in the dream, but in real life?

There's many answers to that question, as there are many facets of the problem.

Recently, though, I read something that gave me a fresh perspective on the matter.  I finally bought a copy of Genesis's album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, and I was eager to learn anything I could about the backstory of the album's creation.

Sidenote:  My official position is that, post-college, I'd rather listen to Coltrane go to the toilet than waste time on english art-school boys of the 70s as they churn out maximum arpeggios per square inch and lyrics that play like Tennyson freestyling; but it's all a lie, a horrible lie.  I heart Progressive Rock.  Readers may remember Genesis for Invisible Touch, but long before they crafted slick pop songs with Phil Collins on vocals, they crafted ornate fantasy ballads with Peter Gabriel on vocals and Phil on drums.

I'd resisted getting Lamb even though it's reputed to be their finest hour (or 80 minutes) since I already own a few albums by the band, and one's pretty much interchangeable with the other for a non-fanatic. This one, though, really was different.  It starts in a gritty-ish urban setting, and while it eventually gets around to the usual fantasy material, the band manages some tasty atonal free-jazz, along with some stripped-down revisions of their prior lush sound.  It reminds me more than a bit of Abacab, a later album on which they made a clean break with Ye Olde Genesis and surfed a New Wave.  And while the Puerto Rican street tough who figures as their protagonist probably wouldn't listen to the synth-heavy Anglo plunkings of this band, that's not necessarily a fault.  Pynchon's characters mostly wouldn't read Pynchon's books.

Oh yeah but anyway, when they played this stuff live Gabriel put on a big theatrical show, with costume changes and stuff.  So poking around for info on this stuff, I found this website.  It's got a quote from Gabriel's wife at the time, pilfered from an authorized bio of Peter by one Spence Bright.  Take it a way, Peter Gabriel's ex-wife!

"He was angry, and it was a very powerful performance. He totally opened himself and put himself on the line to the world, but he wasn't in his relationship with me. I would say to him, 'Why can't you be like that for me?' I remember sitting in the audience and feeling completely turned on by this guy who I was married to. But he was not able to be that person outside the stage. And that is what has slowly broken down over the years, being able to take that part of himself into his everyday life."

So.  Back in 2000 or so, I was in a play which included a bit of flirting between my character and another.  The stage manager mentioned to me that I became a different person in that scene; "Your whole demeanor is different," she said, and she was right.  I became utterly free and open and flirtatious, in a way that was barred to me in offstage life.  The stage was a safe place to play at such experimental things as "flirting".  It would be years before I decided to take that onstage demeanor into my real life.

I few years ago I concluded that I couldn't sustain that energy, that power, in real life while bringing it onstage at the same time.  In performance situations (including auditions) I became enervated, lacking the will to give my first fruits to the 25-year-old white boys who handle the casting-call scut work in most regional theatres.  I had somewhere better to put my energy, my openness, my Eros.  I put it into my marriage.

Not long ago I dreamt of attending the theatre.  I was a cheerful audience member, enjoying a mysterious pageant upon the stage.  The actor's nightmare has been replaced by the audience member's sweet dream.

*  *  *

And speaking of sweet dreams, here's an old Yes song (more prog rock, I know) featuring Peter Banks on guitar.  Peter was the first of many people to leave/get fired from Yes, and is now the first former Yes member to die.  His death is more melancholy than the death of many other Yes people will be, because he never got to taste much success.  I've read a few interviews with him, and he seemed painfully aware of the missed opportunities in his career.  He made some interesting recordings, though.  Sweet Dreams.

Furies in Revolt.

Recently enjoyed a few movies.

The Furies stars Barbara Stanwyck and Walter Houston as daughter and father on a ranch, and if you're not leaping right this moment to add it to your Netflix queue on that basis alone then I don't know what's wrong with you.  Walter Houston's character is an icon of everything wonderful and terrible about the manifest destiny man.  Barbara, in the manner of daughters everywhere, dates a guy her dad can't stand, and there is drama!  There is also cruelty and payback, as Barbara and her on-again off-again city sharpie boyfriend scheme to rip Walter off.  I enjoyed watching the forces in play ping-pong off the walls at each other.

Mr. Arkadin, the Comprehensive version.  This is a lesser-known Orson Welles movie available in about 5 versions for some reason.  The story is a daffy thriller, and the style is peculiar... Welle's usual virtuoso stuff is all over it, but it seems a bit jerry-rigged as well, with a charming clunkiness counterbalancing the lusher elements.  For example, there's a bunch of sequences where the camera whips away from the action to end a scene, and I imagine it was supposed to be one of those whipes, you know.   But instead of blurring as the camera veers away, everything stays super-clear, so you see that the camera is whipping around to a parking lot or some other irrelevant detail, where Welles may have wanted no details at all.  It's fun that way.  If they ever make a Live-action Ranma 1/2 movie it should feel like this.

Women in Revolt.  Can someone explain to me why Paul Morrissey doesn't have a big a fan following as John Waters?  The three drag personalities at the center of this film are a near-perfect comedy trio.  Holly Woodlawn is manic and bizarre (she made me laugh till I was almost sick); Jackie Curtis is a flip verbal pugilist, and Candy Darling channels the glamour girls of midcentury tinseltown with a blend of archness and sincerity that I find absolutely beguiling.  Andy Warhol's cinematography is terrible, but this is one of my favorite viewing experiences of the year so far.

Also, I hated Peter Jackson's Hobbit.  I'll talk about that next time, maybe.

The Only Thing I Intend To Write On This Unless I Think Of Something Good

When I was in high school I had some friends who were Communists, outspoken Reds who enjoyed shocking people (this was the late 80s, early 90s, when Communism was a much spookier thing to many people) with their scandalicious stance on political economics.

Last I checked, they grew up to be committed Republicans.  Having tried on a pose to see if it fit, they retained the interest in politics while discarding the elements they had come to regard as unsuitable.

So let's talk about Holmies, the teen girl fans of James Holmes, the former grad student who shot up the movie theatre and rigged up bombs in his apartment.

Like most people who've thought about the situation, my first, second, third, fourth and fifth reaction to this particular fandom was YUCK.

And it's fair to say that if James Holmes had been a 50-year old black guy, the Holmies wouldn't have looked twice at him.  But some of them might grow up to be people who will.

Maybe some of them will grow up to work with Amnesty International, or domestic Prisoners' Rights groups that strive to ensure prisoners have access to legal recourse, counseling, education and employment.

They are practicing love for the despised and unloveable.  They are prepping to be angels of mercy for people the rest of us would just as soon bury.

Deadbeat Dads from Space and Pearls Before Swine

We saw a couple movies the other day.  Vanya on 42nd Street and Prometheus.

Vanya is essentially a performance of Uncle Vanya, not quite the gloomiest of Chekhov's plays.  I adore Chekhov; one of the delusions I harbored about acting was that it would involve doing Chekhov for a living.  If I hadn't learned better the hard way, this film's bonus documentary would have schooled me, since it involves the actors, including legendary performers and one genuine star, talking about how doing Chekhov for free without an audience was the last best hope any of them had to work on this material.

The film reminded me a bit of The Passion of Joan of Arc, the silent classic.  Close intimate faces, group compositions.  Obviously this relied on line readings a bit more though.  Intelligent, thoughtful acting.  What I want from theatre.  It saddened me to hear that, film aside, this group's ongoing exploration of Vanya was only ever performed for a coterie of A-listers.  It leads me to think the future of good theatre may be in private readings and such.

In fact, that's another association I had with this film: Almost a decade ago I was in a community theatre production of The Goat by Edward Albee, and a beloved figure of local theatre had missed it for health reasons.  Instead of a cast party, we gathered in her home and read the play.  I was astonished at the intimacy of it: we didn't need to project to the back of the house or make our expressions visible.  It was the difference between a blowtorch and a candleflame.  Vanya on 42nd Street is a movie about candleflame acting, not blowtorch acting.  It is also, of course, about Chekhov.  Codirector Andre (of My Dinner With Andre fame) says in the extra feature that Chekhov's plays are primarily about the sensation of being alive, which may be why I value them so.  Uncle Vanya is also about resenting the years wasted glorifying that which held one in virtual enslavement, so I can't help seeing it as being about the mug's game of professional acting.  Bitter?  Naw.  Although today I rewatched the demo reel of the only genuinely gifted graduate of BSC Theatre Department's Class of '96 (who graduated early in '95, and I missed her) on IMDB... She was such a remarkable performer, and her reel consists of minor TV appearances, microscopic movie appearances, and commercials for garbage.  She radiates so much humanity, sexiness,and humor, in these professional snippets, but she has been wasted by the entertainment/advertising industry.  She is pearls before swine.

As for Prometheus, I'm not sure what its titular titan has to do with the narrative, but I knew one of the main writers of Lost was involved in the film, so I wan't surprised that it included such Lost motifs as:

• Convoluted pulpy plotting that doesn't parse very smoothly
• Ensemble sassing
• Skinny pretty actors
• Pregnancy body horror
• The present witnessing the past as an immediate way to unfold the history of the environment
• New-ageyness that pines for simplicity yet grudgingly acknowledges complexity
• God talk
• Daddy issues, Daddy issues, Daddy issues

Spoiler Warning: I'm with the android.  Who cares what deadbeat Space Daddy thinks?  The Space Daddies are contiguous neither with God nor the heroine's actual Daddy, so I say she's a sap to go chasing after them.  Let the Aliens eat 'em and live your own life, gurl.  I did like the thing about the withered old immortality-seeking patriarch lurking secretly on the spaceship like the gender-bending patriarch of The Old Dark House, and his relationspaceship with his icy blonde Second was reminiscent of economic politics here in the town I reside in... for that matter, Uncle Vanya might be as well, with its self-absorbed old man toodling along and blithely exploiting the locals.

Oh also Ridley Scott has made a fantastic looking film, but I can't imagine the working class heroes of the original Alien sitting still for the operatic New Age bromides that underlie this flick.

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.