For Our Poems, Not Our Corpses

Jim Emerson, over at his wonderful Scanners blog, felt the need to defend Stanley Kubrick from the charge that he "hated humans," leveled by a writer for the Seattle weekly The Stranger in response to an SK film series playing there. Though no one seems to have taken the original piece, or its writer, very seriously, Jim seems tired of yet one more portrayal of Kubrick as filmic misanthrope, viewing his characters with disdain and/or disgust, godlike, detached.

I am personally tired of this easy cliche myself, which seems to attach itself at one time or another to most of my favorite filmmakers (Godard, the Coen Brothers, Cronenberg, even Lynch sometimes, and - oh, god - Greenaway, quite a bit), but mainly Kubrick. If you present the horrors of the world and of humanity in a distanced way, believing that they speak for themselves and that the best way to look at the worst things is to really LOOK at them, without flinching, and do this without editorializing ("THIS IS BAD! THIS IS BAD! THIS IS BAD!"), you are cold and unfeeling, apparently.

JE, in looking to refute the original charge, has found a document of great interest to Kubrick fans, that (as one of those fans VERY well-read about the man and his work) I've NEVER seen quoted or mentioned anywhere, and which is as good a statement of intent from SK about his work as he ever made.

It's a letter he wrote to the New York Times in 1972 in response to an editorial referring to A Clockwork Orange as being "the essence of fascism." Kubrick, an EXTREME anti-fascist, felt the need to respond. The full letter is behind the Times Select wall, but Emerson quotes it liberally.

Interested in Kubrick at all? The full post is HERE, and is REALLY worth it.

One quote from SK's letter that bounces around my head in particular:


The age of the alibi, in which we find ourselves, began with the opening sentence of Rousseau's "Emile": "Nature made me happy and good, and if I am otherwise, it is society's fault." It is based on two misconceptions: that man in his natural state was happy and good, and that primal man had no society.


NOTE -- possible title for one of next year's shows: Extremity (the age of the alibi).

Berit and I are in Portland, ME for a spell, relaxing, recouping, regrouping. I am starting to think about next year's shows for Gemini CollisionWorks. I would like to create one new original one for the June Summer festival at The Brick, and if I have August for my own shows again (or whatever month), have another three or four shows ready for that.

I am planning on making one of the shows a restaging of my 1999 production of Richard Foreman's 1966 farce Harry in Love: A Manic Vaudeville. I would also like to restage That's What We're Here For as one of the others, if I can get the majority of the cast back. I'll see if the play I'm working on, Spell, will be ready to go by the end of the year. Then, I'm planning on starting work on two other projects in January and seeing where they go. I want to have two groups of actors to work on two different shows, and just start rehearsals with no plans, no script. Maybe some visual ideas, thematic links, a handful of sound cues, and perhaps a title (see above). Meet two or three times a month at first, then more and more as the year goes on. Try to have the full shows completely ready to go, with all props, lights, costumes, etc. by mid-May. One show for June, one for August.

But for a couple of days, I'm going to enjoy watching things on my brother's GIGANTIC HDTV and home theatre system. Yesterday, he had me calibrate it for him to get the audio and video just right (he trusts and prefers me to do this for him), and I tested it with DVDs of INLAND EMPIRE, The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and Once Upon a Time in the West, and then an HD broadcast of Full Metal Jacket. Nice. I'm going to veg for a bit, I think . . .

Messin' With the Kids

A "get-well-soon" and a fond farewell.

Bo Diddley, on top of the stroke he recently suffered, has now been struck with a heart attack. He's recovering and in "stable condition," though it's been noted that to apply that last phrase to Bo may be akin to an insult.

There's a fine account from Idolator HERE, with my favorite headline on the matter.

I saw Bo here in Portland, ME, ten years ago at a great little place to see music called Raoul's, now gone, unfortunately (I also saw good shows from Jonathan Richman and John Hammond Jr. there). He may have been 68 then, but he put on one hell of a show. He's the only one of the rock 'n' roll "originators" I've ever seen live - my friend Johnny Dresden (your favorite crash-course guitar hero) has seen Bo as well as Chuck Berry and Little Richard, and says that Bo was the only one who didn't seem to be going through the motions, and was interested in giving a real show to THIS audience RIGHT NOW.

Idolator also posted a video of Bo on The TNT Show from 1964. DAMN! I've also included it below, with two other videos of the man from the early 60s (all also featuring "The Duchess," Norma-Jean Wofford). Enjoy, damn you, enjoy:

Hilly Krystal, founder of CBGB and OMFUG, has left this world, going down, if not with the ship, then soon thereafter.

A band he felt strongly about enough to actually manage as well as put on the CBGB stage was The Dead Boys. Here they are at CBGB doing their classic "Sonic Reducer:"

And hey, kids, do you want instruction in how to actually play "Sonic Reducer?"

Well, here's Cheetah Chrome to show you how!

Safety Tips from Anubis

Jason Grote, over at The Inauguration of the Jason Grote Dome, posted links to two comics he found online. He doesn't have much info on them, so I don't really know who did this one, but I wanted to share it:

A Quick One (While I'm Away)

Best unintentionally-funny headline I've seen in a while just came up in my blog reader, from the "front page" of the online New York Times.

Or was it unintentional? You decide . . . on this article about the Yankees beating Boston with the help of their new pitcher:

"Yankees Sweep Red Sox Behind Wang"