More of the Same

Well, having blown everything I had saved up or found to share yesterday, I got nothing today for the NEVER-TO-BE-MISSED Friday post that I HAVE to do.

Still have the same things to do, the shows I worked on will be running tonight, and the world is still a fascinating, beautiful, massively-fucked jewel covered with good ants building useful stuff and evil, oily things scurrying around stealing and dealing in the non-useful.

Dunno why all the poison and evil around always becomes "oil" to me. it's not literal, but in my head it's always a gummy, thick black poison that soaks into the earth and poisons it. When I directed my second production, Mac Wellman's Harm's Way at House of Candles in 1998, placing it in the "Old Weird America" I had been reading about in Greil Marcus and scoring it with the Harry Smith Anthology, I tried to get across to the actors the idea that they were in an America where all the evil had seeped into the ground and poisoned it, like an oil spill, and that it had begun to come up into their bodies, like plants leeching bad things from the earth, and they should feel a little sick and nauseous the whole time. I don't think I was able to convey this well to the actors at the time; they just seemed confused by this idea. But something like that came across.

I'm still pleased with that production, though I wouldn't have chosen that play on my own to do - I like Wellman, a lot, but I didn't like that play (it feels like a poet just beginning to become a dramatist - great language and characters but poor structure and momentum - hard to make one thing feel like it's actually supposed to follow the last). I did it because I was asked to replace another director and it was an opportunity, and I made myself fall in love with the play while I was doing it - I found my "in" to it, which was through "The Old Weird America" and I pushed that aspect of the play.

I met Mac while I was rehearsing it, and when I mentioned that I was using Marcus and Smith as touchstones for the play he was very enthusiastic about that approach (he was reading and listening to the same things at the time), and when he asked me the running time of the play, and I told him it was going 80 minutes but I was actually trying to slow the actors down and get it to 90 (which I said warily, for most playwrights I had talked to at that point wanted everything in their plays to be punchier and faster), he thanked me, and said most people did that play WAY too fast and it was over in an hour. And while I was doing the show, I loved it and thought I really GOT it.

But at that time when I was doing the play (and pardon me, those of you who remember me saying this before over two years ago), I thought I was looking at a pointillist work with too few dots, so the picture was illegible, and it was my job as director/designer to add the missing dots to make the picture clear. In retrospect, I wonder if the picture I saw in the dots was actually there at all - maybe it was actually an abstract that I was forcing to fit my personal obsessions - and my job should have been to intensify the colors of the dots that were there to start with, not add my own. I still don't know if I did the right thing by that play (people who dislike the play seem to think I did, and say I made a good production of a bad play - praise that gives me mixed feelings, to say the least).

Well, Mac appreciated the show when he saw it (which was a kind of embarrassing night, as we'd had big crowds for the rest of the run, and he came on closing night and it was nearly empty). At least he said he was "never bored nor horrified" by the production, which someone closer to him told me was actually high praise from the man. Maybe.

In any case, in the present day, I'm still using the Friday Random Ten as a way to find what songs to eliminate from the cramped iPod so I can put more stuff on.

It's even more cramped now that I shoved on the new Bob Dylan Bootleg release and the new album from Electric Six as of last night.

I still need to listen to the latter for real to see if I like it anywhere as much as their other albums, the Dylan - outtakes and rarities from 1992-2006 - on the other hand is amazing even at first listen. I also recommend - as I did - actually taking all the tracks and reordering them so they play in strict chronological order - the order they chose is good, but there's something nicer about hearing him struggle to find the new sound he's looking for in the Oh Mercy outtakes, hearing a bit of it come to him in the live tracks and abortive early-90s sessions, then really taking shape in the Time Out of Mind sessions (the bulk of the set is from this time) then finally hearing it with confidence in the Modern Times leftovers (oddly, nothing really here from the "Love and Theft" sessions - he must have used everything there was from then on that great album).

So here's what the iPod threw up today . . .

1. "Don't Crowd Me" - Keith Kessler - Ear-Splitting Punk

Standard good 60s garage rock that blows open with one of those guitar solos you get sometimes in the genre - inept but brilliant, passion outstripping technique - that makes this worth keeping on the iPod. Also has a great and truly unexpected false ending and final outchorus. Yup. this stays.

2. "The Maid" - The Ron-de-voos - Back from the Grave 7

And, by contrast, okay 60s garage rock that doesn't quite cut it. The guitarist is technically better than the one on "Don't Crowd Me," but doesn't sound like he cares. This one gets eliminated.

3. "My Heart Is a Flower" - King Missile - The Way to Salvation

Silly but good. This stays. Closer to an actual "song" than a lot of their stuff (Berit's the fan of theirs with the albums - I like them, but not as much).

4. "Just Because I'm Irish" - Julia Sweeney & Jonathan Richman - You Must Ask the Heart

Trifling little novelty song, but short and charming. It stays.

5. "Midnight Train" - The Shamrocks - Pebbles Volume 12 - The World

Garage from abroad. Hard to decide if it stays or goes. Pretty standard garage with nothing special except an above-average vocalist. Almost sounds like Canned Heat. Nope, not good enough to stay.

6. "Hey Mister" - Fever Tree - Mindrocker 60's USA Punk Anthology Vol 12

Ooh, Fever Tree is one of my favorite obscure 60s garage discoveries (I used two of their songs in my production of Temptation) but this one . . . beautifully sung but a loping, stupid song. I dunno. The singing nearly saves it, but it kinda ambles to nowhere. I think this one goes . . .

7. "Land Ho!" - The Doors - Morrison Hotel

Hey, one of those Doors songs I actually like! It wouldn't be on the iPod if I didn't like it in the first place, so it stays. For years I had huge animosity towards The Doors - what am I saying, I still do, pretentious silly little fucks. Then I realized that among all the crap - the Lizard King/Mr. Mojo Risin' posturing - were quite a few lovely little pop gems, like this rewrite of "Shortnin' Bread."

8. "Socks, Drugs & Rock n' Roll (live KCRW 1998)" - Buffalo Daughter - Rare On Air Vol 5, KCRW Morning Becomes Electric 1998-99

Wait, isn't that supposed to be "Morning Becomes Eclectic?" Isn't that the name of the radio show this is a sampler from? Oh, well, whatever. Strange "alternative" very-90s song - beepy, jokey, spiky, jangling post-Fear of Music guitars and a bridge that sounds like Cibo Matto. Pleasant, but nothing special. I think I'll leave it on the iPod, though, cause I don't have many songs like this and it makes a nice change-up.

9. "Goin' Too Far" - Boys From Nowhere - Eat A Cherry...Rare Punk, Psych + Glam (but Mostly Punk)

More garage, this one from a WFMU fundraising premium. Good, but not great.

10. "High Wall" - The Fabulous Wailers - Orgy of the Dead

Okay, here's something amazing - a great saxophone-led instrumental, slow and creepy, courtesy of Frank Cwiklik, who used it in the stage adaptation of Ed Wood's Orgy of the Dead that I was in. It was the big climactic dance number, and while I wouldn't normally use a track so prominently used in a show by a friend (a rule I broke by accident when I forgot that a cue I used near the end of Everything Must Go was the climactic cue from Frank's Bitch Macbeth), someday I'll have a place in one of my shows to put this moody, beautiful piece.

Oh, and something I need to mention I've been forgetting . . .

Occasionally, I get offered swag for being a blogger. Amazing considering I probably have a regular readership in the low three figures. Maybe. The VERY low three figures, at best. I don't take a lot of the swag usually, admittedly because I'm not interested in a lot of what I'm offered, but sometime because I feel silly about it, even if slightly interested.

However, even though I felt silly about it, I took a free copy of Leonard Jacobs' book Historic Photos of Broadway: New York Theater 1850-1970 because I'm a nostalgic SOB who loves feeling part of the continuum of American Theatre, and I LOVE old theatre photos.

Didn't mean I'd necessarily like the book, though, and when I saw in the intro that it was comprised of 240 photos, that seemed like a low number to me and I expected to be disappointed.

But if they're the right 240 photos, and these are, you have a good book, which this is (though I could have done without the one illustration in there - I wanted photos and nothing but).

Leonard - who writes The Clyde Fitch Report - does a great job of captioning, explaining, and expounding upon the photos. There is maybe at times at bit much of a suggestion of "oh, these wonderful lost times so unlike what we have now," but whatever, it a book for nostalgia. He gives some additional props to the figure after whom his blog is named, which seem maybe a bit out of proportion compared to some other figures mentioned, but what the hell, Fitch was important and while getting known again now, hasn't had the same rediscovery that Dion Boucicault has (somewhat) had.

In any case, I've gone through the book three times now, a skim, a fast read, and a detailed read, and it's been a fine read and view each time. Sound interesting to you? Check it out.

Here's a video trailer for the book, featuring a handful of pictures from it (not exactly my favorites, except the last two):

( Historic Photos of Broadway: New York Theater 1850-1970 )

More when something happens . . .