Thank You, We'll Call You

Busy and satisfying week, for the most part.

Between Sunday and yesterday, Berit and I auditioned 17 actresses for the 7 female roles we had to refill in the four August shows (and we saw one man for one of the 5 male roles in one of them, Sacrificial Offerings, and he was good for one of the parts, so, great).

We saw a lot of good people, and have wound up with a list of people to ask, though I'm waiting a bit on informing them as Berit is still asleep, and I want to have one last discussion with her before I send out the "we want you for the part, do you want it?" emails.

For two of the parts, in two different plays, there were four different women who were all REALLY good for the part, in wildly different ways. I think B & I decided on who we most wanted for Lyuba Kovalevskaya in Little Piece of the Sun, but there was a time yesterday when we were weighing three different actresses and Berit was saying, "I wish we could have a combo of bits of the qualities of all three." But (I think) we went for a way that was VERY different from the way we originally cast the role, as well as the way it was originally cast and played back in 2001.

And I also have to wait until B is up to hash out who we want for "The Mistress" in Blood on the Cat's Neck. Again, a wealth of choices for that part, of vastly different types.

I may just email the two women we want for The Brundi Twins in George Bataille's Bathrobe right now -- we know who they are . . . okay (he typed a half-hour later), they've been emailed.

Now I'm in a holding pattern on emailing people, as the next steps are dependent on the first answers I get -- as in, if the first people I ask to play one of the Brundis from George Bataille's Bathrobe and Lyuba in Little Piece say no, then I have to move around the people playing The Model and The Mistress in Blood on the Cat's Neck to other shows/parts to get the mix right. Let's hope for all the first choices being on board . . .

Wow, everything seems to be going fine and full-bore ahead on the shows . . . B & I are just waiting for the other shoe . . . ANY other shoe . . . to drop.

Yesterday was a nice big 14-hour day at The Brick for B & I, but work was done and shows were seen, and the two sellout/near sellout house we had were good and easy to get in and deal with. Berit's on duty again tonight, and I'm hoping she'll be okay with me staying home.

And as for this week's Random Ten from the 25,596 tracks in the iPod (nothing has changed there for a while, no time to keep clearing the thing out and refilling it, though I have an iTunes playlist of 322 to put on there once I clear out some dross), here it is . . .

1. "Tacoma Trailer" - Leonard Cohen - The Future
2. "Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2" - Esquivel - Four Corners Of The World
3. "I Need You" - Eurythmics - Savage
4. "I've Been Crying" - Tommy Louis - Lost Deep Soul Treasures 3
5. "Mucha Muchacha" - Esquivel - Space Age Bachelor Pad Music
6. "Met a Girl on the Corner" - The Orchids - A Taste of Doo Wop Vol.1
7. "53 Miles West Of Venus" - The B-52's - Wild Planet
8. "Yeh-Yeh!" - Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames - Mod & Beyond
9. "Ain't Gonna Worry About You" - George Tinley & The Modern Redcaps - Club Au-Go-Go 6
10. "Reject" - Green Day - Nimrod

Well, that was an odd collection of pop songs that for some reason could all sound kinda mournful and elegiac on a cloudy Friday morn, following a long week and a whole bunch of surprising deaths that probably shouldn't have been (surprising, that is), which now lead to me dumping a TON of video on y'all.

Well, Michael Jackson is gone.

I can't pretend immense fandom of his work, but I can damn well support the more-than-a-handful of brilliant, timeless pop singles he created and co-created, which (I hope) will long outlast what anyone knows or claims to know about his life.

I was only going to post two videos of him that are the way I'd prefer to remember him, but some Facebook comments came up on the man that I wanted to mention.

Scott Williams noted, summing up my feelings quite well, that he was "getting sick, both of the bathetic sentiment slobbering wetly across the media and facebook over the recent death of certain talented (but increasingly irrelevant) people, and over the mean-spirited (but mostly humorless) haters who think that acting like they don't care shows their "rebellious" side. If you're gonna be a hater, you gotta learn to be witty, too, or you just look like an asshole." (Scott notes later he was also referring to Farrah and Ed McMahon with this).

And an old friend of mine, who I won't name, comes close to being in the latter category, but JUST not quite, when she notes that she "understands the 'MJ as life soundtrack' thing for some folks but she was listening to P- Funk, The Who and the Clash. And the pedophile thing was a turn off. Sorry, but there it is."

So I wrote a response to her and then didn't have the balls to post it directly to her on Facebook (I'm too Scandinavian at heart to deal with conflict I don't have to), though I surprised myself with being so red with anger:

You seem to be on the edge of a false dichotomy here, XXXXX. Some of us were listing to MJ, and all of the above you named, and a lot more, and whatever else, and a lot more whatever else. One does not preclude the other. And I sure as hell don't see his hideousness (which goes beyond "issues") being ignored anywhere, we're all well aware of it (though, hey, anyone remember the anti-semitic lyrics he wrote and got in trouble for at one point? "so-called chosen, frozen?" yeah, that seems to have vanished down the memory hole . . .)
UPDATE: D'OH! Speaking of memory holes . . . Daniel McKleinfeld points out on Facebook that I am misremembering my anti-semitic remark controversies -- it was PUBLIC ENEMY that had the "so-called chosen, frozen" lyric . . . MJ had the "jew me, sue me" lyric . . . ick . . . that's what I get for not listening to the little voice in my head that was saying I was making a mistake here . . .

And lots of personal things (about even some of the artists you name) were as big turn-offs -- look into the life of Keith Moon, which sure as hell isn't all good-natured fun as often presented, for a long list of unforgivable, immoral and criminal behavior. Or how about Mr. Peter Townshend's collection of child pornography?

Or the actually-convicted-of-crime geniuses that are Ike Turner, James Brown, Arthur Lee, and Chuck Berry, to name a few (where are the white folks? do they get off with a slap on the wrist and "boys will be boys" when they do hideous things? like Keith Moon did?).

But I will listen to "I'll Be There" and "Billie Jean" with as much pleasure as I do "Rocket 88" or "I Can See for Miles" or "White Man in Hammersmith Palais" or "You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks" or "Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing" (or for that matter "Song for Michael Jackson to $ell"). Sorry, but there it is.

His main criminal act for me personally was becoming artistically irrelevant the older he got, but then so do a LOT of artists.

Two other comments sum up much of my feelings on this, a balanced view from Matt Zoller Seitz and a fairly negative one from music critic Chris Morris which discusses the basic coldness and hollowness of even Jackson's better work (h/t Jim Emerson). In this, I agree with Morris' observations, but not necessarily his conclusions (I believe that "warmth" and "fullness" are nice things to have in art, but by no means automatic virtues, nor the absence of them automatic debits). And Crooks and Liars posts two amazing comparison videos of The Jackson 5 doing "I Want You Back" on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1970 and (unfortunately, a brief fragment) at Madison Square Garden in 2001.

And of course, The Onion has its own last word.

And - spending more time on the man than I would have ever thought myself caring to, and probably more than I've ever spent before all put together - here's three videos of MJ in ways I'd like to remember him, from Free To Be... You and Me (with Roberta Flack), the famous (and yes, COLD) performance from the Motown 25th Anniversary show, and a fan-made video that puts together the vocal tracks on "I'll Be There" with a TV lipsync of the song . . .

As for Farrah . . . I actually missed a lot of her cultural impact. For some reason, though I watched endless hours of bad 70s TV, Charlie's Angels never actually made it in there (at least while FF was on the show; I think I watched it in later seasons). I remember her instead, and happily so, from The Burning Bed, Extremities and Myra Breckinridge, the latter of which is one of those "bad" films I will defend tooth & nail, in which FF plays an apparently dumb blonde, who winds up with more layers than the title character figures on, and whose humanity and kindness winds up shaming Myra into realizing how cruel she has been . . .

Also gone, a man whose music is quite a bit closer to me than MJ's was, and who had his own odd and famous (to his cult audience) problems, Mr. Sky Saxon, lead singer of the great band The Seeds:

And as for Ed McMahon, let's end on a laugh . . . a piece of video that makes me crack up every single time I see it . . .

C'mon You Homosexual Demon!

Meanwhile, back in the clean world . . .

My friend - and author of one of the plays I'm doing in August - Mr. McKleinfeld, has had some GarageBand fun I wanted to share.

Here's a particularly hideous piece of video news:

And here's Daniel's remix of same:

Enjoy! Happy Pride Week!