Weekend, What Weekend? (It's all the same damn day, man)

Once again, something told my inner workings to get me up at 6.00 am, so here I am. Five hours of sleep. Cloudy eyes and brain. At least the coffee is fresh and the milk isn't spoiled.

Spell Act II looked good last night, but needs - as actress Moira Stone pointed out when I didn't think of it - another run on its own before running the whole furshlugginer thing again - we've worked it less as it was still being written later in the process.

Also, there is one bit of writing in there, a speech of Moira's, that just won't do and must be re-written. I'm happy with everything else in the play now - various levels of happiness, but happy - but this speech just makes me cringe and shrivel up inside. It's anything I ever learned from Paddy Cheyefsky at his worst, when a character just becomes the mouthpiece for the writer - or as my friend Sean always used to say, imitating Eric Idle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail whenever a piece of drama did this, "Message coming in for you, sir!"

It's a pain, because the character really does have to make the points she's making at this moment in the play - and it's not like there isn't a "message"-quality to the whole work - and the speech drives the dialogue to a good place by the end . . . but it's just TOO much. I'll figure it out. Everything Must Go will get my attention this morning, Harry in Love this afternoon and evening, and I'll rewrite the speech late tonight or early tomorrow.

(of course now, everyone's going to look at all the other times in the play that Moira is spouting her beliefs and figure one of them is the speech I must have rewritten . . .)

Okay, I have to write some more, so let's get the Friday Random Ten done with and I can get back to that . . . here's 10 out of 26,096 in the iPod this morning:

1. "Nightclubbing" - Iggy Pop - The Idiot
2. "It's Going To Happen" - The Undertones - Life in the European Theatre
3. "Promo #1—The Luminous One #1" - Hoyt Curtain with Keye Luke - Battle of the Planets soundtrack
4. "I'm Bad Like jesse James" - John Lee Hooker - The Ultimate Collection: 1948-1990
5. "We'll Bring You Flowers" - Rabble - Rabble
6. "Spider Baby Main Title" - Ronald Stein - Not Of This Earth! The Film Music Of Ronald Stein
7. "Now Who's Good Enough" - Elite UFO - Back from the Grave 8
8. "Party Sequence" - Barry Mann & Cynthia Weill - Angel, Angel, Down We Go soundtrack
9. "I Will Go (demo)" - The Beau Brummels - San Fran Sessions (1964-66)
10. "Sticks and Stones" - Manfred Mann - The Best of the EMI Years

No new cat photos today, sorry. I can assure you, the two of them are adorable.

Oh, hey - that last song reminds me -- I'm quite pleased to discover that - once all my shows are open and there's something like personal time again - a film I've been wanting to see for over 30 years is finally becoming available on DVD next week, Peter Watkins' Privilege, from 1966 (released in the USA in '67), starring Paul Jones (lead singer of Manfred Mann, a group I've wound up becoming quite fond of in the past year, to my surprise - didn't know they were so good) and one time "it"-girl Jean Shrimpton.

I first became familiar with this film when I saw stills from it in a book about science-fiction films that I had when I was pretty small, and the images were quite striking and evocative. Later, in my early teens as I really got into The Patti Smith Group, my father pointed out that she covered "Set Me Free" from the film on the Easter album, and mentioned that - I think I'm right about this, correct me if I'm wrong, dad - one of his teachers at Philadelphia College of Art had recommended it to his students for the production design.

It's about a rising youth rebellion in England that is diverted by Them-As-Has-The-Power (primarily the Church of England) into becoming a nationalist-religious movement, with the use of an immensely popular messianic pop star as "leader." The film has had no distribution since the 60s, and Universal Pictures, which has had the rights to it, has rebuffed all attempts at release. The director's own battered 35mm print has been the only one available for occasional screenings.

So now it's on video. I saw the trailer on Amazon, and it turns out that, of course, there is another trailer and several clips on YouTube. And . . . well, it looks like something to watch alright, but it also looks a bit like a lot of the art that was innovative and happening and coming from from Swinging London in, say, 1966-67 does now - um, rather dated. A particular whiff of the English documentary/kitchen sink/angry young man-style (which was already being viciously parodied by SCTV in the late 70s in "Look Back in a Bloody Rage") comes through, the whole Ken Loach/Mike Leigh thing (the Brits are my favorite filmmakers when they go all stylized and perverse - Nic Roeg, Ken Russell, Michael Powell, Peter Greenaway, Dennis Potter, Alex Cox, hell, Alfred Hitchcock for that matter - but they always wind up getting shoved aside for the ever-faithful kitchen-sink drama tradition over there).

Well, I still want to see it - it looks like a cross between the realistic and stylized English film traditions, and it's been many MANY years of dreaming about it.

Here's six related videos from YouTube, inside the cut:

( And did those feet, in ancient times, walk upon England's mountains green? )

Okay, off to solve writing issues . . .