CollisionWorks

I actually almost lost track of the days for a second there.


Or at least, I woke up believing it was Thursday again for some reason. Lucas Krech's (Not So) Random Ten confused me, then reminded me. Jeez, have to get back to see INLAND EMPIRE again before it closes.


Still stuck on a slow dial-up connection, frustrated. Here's ten from iTunes this morning:


1. "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" - Bobby Whitlock - In Their Own Words

Lovely a capella version of the gospel standard performed by Whitlock at the Bottom Line from when they did their live series of songwriters playing and talking about their work. Builds nicely as the other songwriters onstage and then the audience join in.


2. "Big Black Mariah" - Tom Waits - Rain Dogs

Sounds so basic and stripped down now -- when this album first came out this sounded so strange and "experimental." Well, it was the 80s, and nothing exactly sounded like this, especially if you'd missed Waits' transition to this style with Swordfishtrombones and it came out of nowhere (my father got me into this album; he had heard "Clap Hands" on the radio and thought, "What the hell is Beefheart doing now?").


3. "Baloo's Blues" - Phil Harris - The Jungle Book

Cut song not used in the Disney animated film, performed by one of America's favorite TV alcoholics of the 50s and 60s. Really nice swinging vocal on this -- really too actually "bluesy" to belong in the film; also, it would have stopped the film dead, pacewise.


4. "Missione Morte Molo 83 (alternate version)" - Piero Piccioni - Cinematica - Italian Soundtracks from the 60's and 70's

Short pleasant library cue. Almost doesn't sound like Italian scoring, really. When it started and I wasn't looking to see what it was, I thought it was some Pye, Deram, or Joe Meek single from England in the 60s, and I expected a weedy singer to start up. Instead I got Italian strings and had to look. Poppy, peppy, and short.


5. "I Got to You" - Sapphire Thinkers - From Within

One more obscure/forgotten pop-folk-psychedelic band of the late 60s that I was collecting for a bit there as I worked on Temptation. Someday I'll weed out the worst songs of all of those groups; there are SO many bad ones still on here. This is a pretty, pleasant one though. It'll stay. Mamas & Papas harmonies over a "heavier" backing.


6. "Dave the Butcher" - Tom Waits - Swordfishtrombones

Okay, iTunes, whatcha fuckin' with me for? Just had another Waits and mentioned this album, and you bring this Beefheart meets Weill instrumental up? It's like the sweetness of the last song needed an antidote.


7. "Comfortably Numb" - Pink Floyd - The Wall

Whoa. Forgot this teen-angst classic was in here. Ah, memories. Still love this one.

Lot more going on in the arrangement than I'd even noticed before, and I've listened to this more times than I can count (and on headphones). All kinds of strings and woodwinds over in the left channel during the verse. Hell, I can make out a specific oboe there, never caught that before. Ah, Bob Ezrin production/arrangement, nothing like it -- he's also responsible for the sound of The Most Depressing Record Ever Made, Lou Reed's Berlin, and he's in NYC leading the orchestra/chorus on the live version Reed's doing at St. Ann's Warehouse this weekend. Wish I could see that.

Ezrin's the guy who, when he needed children crying and screaming on Reed's song "The Kids," brought his two small kids into the studio and told them their Mommy was dead. Yeah, Berlin's a fun album. (I now see that, according the the Wikipedia entry on the album, Ezrin has said this is a myth -- but he's been perpetuating it more recently too, so who knows . . .)

Ah, that great guitar solo finale . . . always makes me think of Michael Mann films, as he's had his composers knock off this section to go behind bits of Thief and Manhunter. Probably used it as a temp track and asked the composers to stay close to it.


8. "On Lover's Hill" - John Leyton - Best of John Leyton

Ah, HERE's the weedy-singered 60s Brit pop song! Pretty and sweet. I dunno why, but I dig the kitschy 60s Britpop. I think this is Leyton post-Joe Meek; the production doesn't sound as idiosyncratic as Meek's bedroom productions.


9. "I Wanna Be a Boss" - Stan Ridgway - Partyball

A favorite song from a favorite songwriter (though his last couple albums were a bit of a disappointment), formerly of the band Wall of Voodoo. I used to play and sing this a lot myself for fun (it's good for hitting an acoustic guitar real hard on the chorus and bellowing the title). Favorite lines:


Now if I find a product I like
I'll buy up the whole company
And shave my face and grin and smile
And then I'll sell it on TV
And everyone will know me
I'll be more famous than Howard Hughes
I'll grow a long beard
And watch Ice Station Zebra in the nude!


10. "Wah-Wah" - George Harrison - All Things Must Pass

Song I like a lot and never think of. Not Phil Spector's best production -- as my old friend Johnny Dresden liked to say, by the point the Wall of Sound was becoming a Wall of Sludge, just a mass of undifferentiated tuned noise. This is from the original CD issue, and I've heard the reissue from a couple years ago is a LOT better, but it's not worth it to me to upgrade this one. It sounds like I remember the vinyl always sounding (I was REALLY into this album as a child).


I've been gradually fixing up the production photos from my shows and loading them into my Flickr stream, planning to share them here from time to time. So, a propos of nothing, a picture from my production of Richard Foreman's Film Is Evil: Radio Is Good, from February:





Here, The Radio Star (Alyssa Simon) is "comforted" by The Owner of The Radio Station (Moira Stone) after her vision of The False God (Bryan Enk), actually the Master Zookeeper in disguise.


Which reminds me, Bryan has a show at The Brick that Berit is running and helped design lights on -- the third in his series of adaptations of The Crow for the stage, this one in three sequential monologues. From what I heard, it sounded pretty good. Here's some info:


THE MURDER OF CROWS


Inspired by the work of James O'Barr
Written and Directed by Bryan Enk


Performed by
ADAM SWIDERSKI
BRITTON LAFIELD
and
JESSICA SAVAGE


Friday, December 15th at 10:30PM
Saturday, December 16th at 10:30PM
Wednesday, December 20th at 8PM
$5
Running time: 70 min.


The Brick Theater
575 Metropolitan Ave
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
L to Lorimer/G to Metropolitan


http://www.thirdlows.com/murderofcrows/

from The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice by Greil Marcus, 2006, in the section "American Pastoral: Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer":


In 1978, in The American Jeremiad, the historian Sacvan Bercovitch described the American artist as pulled back and forth between the urge to defy the country as it is and the urge to embrace it "as it ought to be"; the result was retreat, the artist taking refuge in the creation of "a haven for what Thoreau called 'the only true America'." That meant a place of concord and love where everybody knows everybody else: precisely what, in "the End of the Innocence," in 1989, Don Henley, unafraid of the wind he was blowing through fields of true American corn, so perfectly called "that same small town in each of us."

For David Lynch, though, the same small town in each of us has no meaning as a haven; it has meaning only as a cauldron. "I sometimes think I see that civilizations originate in the disclosure of some mystery, some secret," the philosopher Norman O. Brown said in 1960, "and expand with the progressive publication of their secret; and end in exhaustion when there is no longer any secret, when the mystery has been divulged." For Lynch, America as it ought to be comes into being when the secret takes over the town that stands for the country, when the secret is revealed and then suppressed, reburied in the town cemetery, the new tombstone carrying the same Puritan death's-head-with-angel's-wings that was chiseled on the old one.

As Lynch wrote in the booklet that accompanied the soundtrack album for Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, in big letters filling an entire page as if scribbling graffiti on his own movie poster, "IN A TOWN LIKE TWIN PEAKS NO ONE IS INNOCENT."


Again, the simple, obvious phrase that stuck on me like a shirttail on a thorn when I reread it earlier today on the subway, and kept me from reading further, having to think instead . . .


. . . pulled back and forth between the urge to defy the country as it is and the urge to embrace it "as it ought to be" . . .

Still here on dial-up, frustratingly. The last few days have felt slow, like moving underwater, without a car or high-speed internet. Funny, I lived without them for years, and now it's taking twice as long to do EVERYTHING as it had been -- I spent three hours on the subway yesterday going to and from a matinee show in Queens, which would have taken me less than an hour by car. Having more "thoughtful, slow" time again, but I'm getting behind in THINGS I HAVE TO DO.


And also in things I DON'T HAVE TO DO BUT LIKE TO DO, AND ON TIME, like Friday Cat Blogging and Random Ten.


Random Ten looks to be a day late as a belated Saturday a.m. feature this week, and here, after way too much work, are the kitties for the week. I had to clean up the photos and upload them without the use of Photoshop and high-speed, and on an old computer with completely inaccurate color balances that I can't fix, so I have NO idea what these "actually" look like (and for reasons unknown to me, they seem to have uploaded in smaller form than they were supposed to . . .). Hope they're okay.


First, "standard" Moni pose, dreaming of little flittery things she can kill:





And Hooker, in one of his less-enjoyable standard modes, apparently in the middle of changing the sheets on the bed, when he suddenly wants to play, and play rough:





And here's what happens whenever I start to pack for a trip -- I pull out my blue dufflebag, put it down on the bed, turn around to the shelves of clothes to grab a bunch of t-shirts or something, and turn back around to find this:

A late-night/early-morning random ten before bedtime, just to get it done. Headphones on, MST3K playing on the TV as always at this hour, helping with insomnia a bit. Have to try and get SOME sleep. But first . . .


1. "The River" - PJ Harvey - Is This Desire?

Berit's the big PJ Harvey fan in the house, though I like most of her music myself. This is a slow one, and I generally like her loud nasty ones, but this is pretty and pleasant and perfect for a quiet late night.


2. "Teenage Dream" - T.Rex - History of T.Rex -- The Singles Collection

Oh, cool. Also perfect and mellow for a pre-sleep mix. I love T.Rex, and luckily don't actually know all of the songs I have from this extensive compilation backwards and forwards yet (except for those on Electric Warrior and Dandy in the Underworld, the only albums of Bolan's I had for years), so whenever they come up on random it's like hearing a rare favorite on the radio unexpectedly. Whatever happened to the teenage dream? Still trying to figure that one out myself.


3. "In the City" - The Jam - D.I.Y.: Anarchy in the UK - UK Punk I (1976-77)

Well, there goes the mellow. Don't mind when it's something this great. Green Day wishes they could do this.


4. "Gimme Shelter" - The Rolling Stones - Let It Bleed

Oh, dear. This is one of my favorite recordings of all time, and how can I say anything about it? The perfection of the ominous slowed-down-Chuck Berry riff at the opening? The amazing sound of Jagger's harmonica? Merry Clayton's backing vocals and solo moment?

No. All of it is one, and too physical, too tactile to try to get across. It makes me afraid and comforts me at the same time. Produces hallucinatory images.

I wound up in the middle of the Tompkins Square Park riot in the Summer of 1988, fireworks going off, horses running, snipers on rooftops. Bad craziness. My friend Vanessa, who told me to come down and take photos, and who had been in riots before, grabbed me when the cops started beating people randomly on Avenue A and threw me into a bar on 9th Street off the park that had sealed itself up tight (she knew the doorman and was able to talk me in) and I stayed in there for some time as the screaming filtered in from outside, drowned out mostly by what I assume was a tape the bartender was playing which included this song and Jagger's "Memo from Turner" from Performance. Far too appropriate.

Vanessa eventually came in when she though the coast was clear out there, and brought me out to "safety," and I started west down 9th Street, stopping to photograph a helicopter hovering just over the rooftops at the corner of 1st Avenue, then turning to snap another shot of a large group of cops in full riot gear in front of P.S. 122. As I turned away to go there were shouts, and I turned back to find the cops splitting up and rushing at people all around, three of them coming at me. Thinking if I stood still and didn't run I would be identified as a "civilian," I did so, and was shoved against the metal gate of the fabric store on the corner (it's a pizza place now) and beaten with nightsticks. I put on an English accent and started yelling that I was a tourist, and that made them hesitate enough for me to start running away down the sidewalk. Another cop started chasing me on the other side of the parked cars, and as I kept yelling my tourist claim, he slowed up and called after me, "Wrong night to come to town, mister!"

My right thigh and the underside of my right arm spent many weeks going through an astonishing series of color changes -- I never KNEW the spectrum that skin was capable of. I now have a large oval patch on my thigh where the skin is either numb or feels of pins and needles most of the time (sometimes cold and painful ones). I didn't associate the weird nerve thing with getting beaten there until Berit asked me a few years ago if they were connected, and I realized the numb patch is exactly the same as the bruised area from the beating. I don't understand how one could lead to the other, but the coincidence seems a bit much.

I've never printed my photos from that night, just a contact sheet. Maybe sometime I will. I want to look at that photo of the cops before they came at me for real.

This song brings every feeling of that night back, and then gently pushes them away again. Shelter.


5. "Thunder and Rain" - Alan Dean & His Problems - Joe Meek Presents 304 Holloway Road

From the sublime to the ridiculous, albeit the gloriously ridiculous. Early 60s Brit-pop, heavily compressed, mono, hysterically-pitched, everything on its sleeve. Back to the real world.


6. "You're Driving Me Insane" - The Missing Links - Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts From The British Empire And Beyond

More Brit-pop, later, more garage-y, psychedelic-y. They've been listening to The Yardbirds (but who wasn't?), but aren't trying too hard to imitate them. Good idea. Doing fine on their own. Primitive and basic. Reminds me a bit of The Monks.


7. "Donegal Express" - Shane MacGowan & The Popes - The Snake

Fun vulgar number from post-Pogue Shane still sounding like his old band. Could he not?


8. "Chains of Love" - Pat Boone - Back to the 50's vol. 6

Oh, jesus fuck a shit souffle! Well, this is what I get for not going through all of the compilations I download carefully. Pat Boone, for the love of pete!

That said, this isn't as bad as it could be. If it was actually at double time all around, it might be a good peppy pop number -- but at this draggy pace it's SO dopey I can't keep it in the iTunes. When it's over, it goes.


9. "Queen Bitch" - David Bowie - Hunky Dory

Okay, another favorite. What else to say? You know, you know it. You don't, you should. Someday I'll upload and share the cover I did of this around '92 or '93 - one of the best recordings I ever did, even if I was REALLY sick and feverish and I played the damn riff BACKWARDS. Still worked. I was in bed for days after.


10. "You Know I Know" - John Lee Hooker - The Ultimate Collection: 1948-1990

From Berit's collection, another artist I love and don't know as well as her, and a song I'm not sure I ever heard before, and it's great. Damn I do love the man. Damn I wish I could sing along with this at the top of my lungs right now.


Okay, one or two more for just myself, and so to bed . . .

Oh, I am such a sucker for the peer pressure of an internet meme . . .


Since three of my online friends have posted their results from this online quiz (albeit only two publicly), I might as well add mine:













No comment.

I was a Monster Kid.


I may have somewhat of a reputation as a "serious" person and theatre artist now, a thoughtful, well-read (if not "intellectual") artsy-type, with a perhaps unusual penchant for VERY VERY LOUD rock and roll as my main eccentricity. But I was THAT kid.


I was the kid who lived for movies starring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaneys Junior and Senior, Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and John Carradine, and, even more obscurely, Lionel Atwill, Max Schreck, Evelyn Ankers, and J. Carroll Naish. I was the kid who bought makeup kits and messed up my face with latex scars and foul-smelling fake blood, whose dad helped him cast a flat "Frankenstein Monster" head out of plaster (not "Frankenstein," he was the DOCTOR, dammit!) and built all the Aurora model kits of the Universal horror films with him. I was the kid with a Super-8 movie camera doing bad stop-motion imitations of The Blob with Play-Do, cans of "Slime," and Evel Knievel action figures. I was the kid who knew the names Ray Harryhausen and Eiji Tsuburaya (even if I couldn't pronounce them), and who sometimes wanted to be just like them when I grew up. And when not wanting to be them, who wanted to be another Lon Chaney (Junior or Senior), and play monsters in movies when I grew up, and who forced my bored kindergarten classmates to endlessly re-enact the movies I'd seen on TV over the weekend, with me as the starring monster. Which led directly, I think, to theatrical acting and directing today.


And it all started in one place . . .





Famous Monsters (or Famous Monsters of Filmland, sometimes) magazine, known to some of us kids as just FM. It was edited by Forrest J Ackerman (aka 4SJ or 4e, or Dr. Acula, or . . . ten million other nicknames/pseudonyms), who turned 90 years old this past Friday. Ray Young at FLICKHEAD hosted a Blog-a-thon in Forry's honor on that day, but my theatre commitments got in the way of being on time with anything then, and most of what I wanted to say has been said by other people in the Blog-a-thon (there were many of us Monster Kids, and we all grew up much the same). Still, as I wouldn't be who I am today, doing what I am today without them, I have to say a few things about 4SJ and FM. But just a few, and mostly about myself.


So check out the rest of the Blog-a-thon at the link above, and you can read more about Forry here.


And more about Famous Monsters here and here (this last including a wonderful gallery of all the covers of FM).


As for myself . . . as a small child, sometime in 1972 or 1973, I was poking through a pile of magazines in my grandparents' attic in Rye, NY -- probably ones that belonged to my dad or uncle from the previous decade, when the covers of two magazines caught my eye. One is above (issue #20, November, 1962), and this was the other one (#23, June, 1963):





Art by Basil Gogos on both, though I certainly didn't know that yet (didn't take long for that to sink in, though; his art was as much the look of FM as the distinctive logo). These two issues of Famous Monsters threw some kind of switch in me. I can't remember if I had any interest in monster movies before I saw these -- I think I was into Star Trek by that time, but maybe not -- but after reading these over and over again, monsters were all I thought about.


Luckily, at that time, monster movies were plentiful on the TV. Between the local NYC channels 5 (WNEW), 9 (WWOR), and 11 (WPIX), the back libraries of most studios were being run continually, and there was ALWAYS a classic horror/SF movie on SOMEWHERE, it seemed. I remember channel 9 had the RKO library and others, channel 11 the Universal films, and channel 5 a catchall of various oddities (I think they showed all the William Castle films, and things like The Manster and Frankenstein 1970, and maybe some Roger Corman films). The local ABC affiliate (channel 7) had most of the Hammer films, but unfortunately almost always aired them in the middle of the night, and I remember trying to stay up to watch Horror of Dracula several times and failing, and being sleepwalked off to bed by my great-grandma Duering around 3.00 am (I finally saw it when I was in my mid-20s and was horribly disappointed; the stills and descriptions in FM were much more exciting). Channel 7 did however frequently run Roger Corman's Vincent Price/Poe movies on their Monday through Friday 4.30 Movie show, so I got to see those many many times, running home from school to try and not miss a second.


Also, channel 13 (PBS) showed massive quantities of silent films, and I got to see Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, The Golem, Metropolis, and many many films starring Lon Chaney over and over again -- something that, judging from what others have said in their blogs, was not-too-common across the country at the time.


Soon after finding those two issues, I discovered that Famous Monsters was still in business, and I got my first new issue, #101, at the Post Stationary store (aka "Lou's" for its beloved owner) in Cos Cob, CT in late '73. And I got most of the issues from then on until it folded (in that incarnation) ten years later. And soon enough, not only was I learning about these monster movies, I was learning about the other people out there like me who loved these movies, and about Forrest J Ackerman, the editor of Famous Monsters, who WAS the magazine, whose personality infused every word of every article in it, and who seemed to be The King of Monster Movie Fans.


Ackerman was at the same time, even to me as a child, both a stodgy, square, horrible pun-pushing, old-fashioned big silly guy who could embarrass you, and a nutty, encouraging uncle who shared your interests and made you feel okay for liking these weird things that the other kids didn't. 4E lived in what appeared, from the photos he would publish, to be a magical house in "Horrorweird, Karloffornia," filled with a treasure trove of memorabilia from fantastic films of the past: models, costumes, props, makeup pieces, etc. from seemingly every horror/SF film ever made. And if you ever visited L.A., you could just give him a call (at MOON-FAN) and he'd show you around the place. He was somehow genial and goofy in his persona, but you also got how SERIOUSLY he took these genres that he loved, and I think this was a good introduction to the idea of taking the WORK seriously, but never taking yourself seriously -- a good way to try and maintain sanity when creating. He also made it seem perfectly alright for adults to take horror and science fiction seriously, which meant you could (and should) do the same as a child.


Luckily, as opposed again to some of what I read in other blogs, my parents and teachers were cool and encouraging with my interests (my folks were divorced by this point, but still, not differing on this with me), and I even attended the Famous Monsters Conventions in NYC in 1974 and 1975 (of which I have next to no memories). So, horror and "sci-fi" (a much-hated term coined by 4SJ) was pretty much my life for most of my childhood, until my dad sat me down one evening and made me watch Citizen Kane, and a whole new world opened up for me.


But while I went from wanting to be Lon Chaney Jr. to wanting to be Orson Welles (which I'm still working on), I was still the kid who went down to Lou's every month and bought the new issue of Famous Monsters. And I'm still the guy who can summon up the names in the credits for dozens of monster movies from memory (and who gets frustrated because it probably was once hundreds of movies, and I've lost so much of my personal database over the years). I'm still the guy who uses Ronald Stein's music from Roger Corman movies in my oh-so-"serious" plays for tense moments, and who used to show Super-8 movies behind a friend's band in the 90s, movies I still had (and still have) from ordering them from "Captain Company" in the back pages of FM, Castle Films abbreviated versions of the Lugosi Dracula, Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, Psycho, and Man-Made Monster (the latter being one of the first films I can remember seeing as a small child on channel 11).


I'm the guy who was a slightly-older kid in 1979 who went down to Lou's and got the new issue . . .





. . . took it home, and discovered I had won a short-short-story writing contest in the back, and there was my silly little story (which I was ashamed of even then, and NO I don't want to see it again, if you're tempted to find me a copy). The contest had given the first and last sentences of a story, and you had to fill in the middle (a technique I've wound up using quite a bit over the rest of my life, including on this blog entry). I was amused years later to see a photo of Forry and Stephen King together in an issue of the "new" Famous Monsters where Forry had dug out from his files a story little "Steve" King had sent Ackerman when King was 11 himself, and which 4e finally published -- in the photo, Forry is handing Stephen King a copy of the very issue in which my story appeared!


Silly as it was, seeing that story in print -- actually, more importantly, seeing MY NAME in print: "Ian W. Hill, age 11" in white on black Helvetica (and when DID I decide to use my middle initial, anyway?) -- somehow gave me the feeling that all my ego dreams of writing, acting, directing were POSSIBLE, could be achieved. Being in Famous Monsters meant something, some kind of approval, and gave me the feeling I could do it again, could actually make making things like this my whole life.


So happy 90th, 4e, and I hope you achieve your goal in being the George Burns of sci-fi and staying with us another 10 years at least! Someday I hope to shake your hand and thank you personally for my life. Everything I have in my life, everything I love, goes back to finding those two issues in the attic, and the encouragement that Famous Monsters and Forrest J Ackerman gave me to pursue what I loved. So here I am.


I'm a Monster Kid.

No reason to be up, but been up for an hour, trying to go back to sleep with no success. So lemme get my Friday blog responsibilities out of the way, as two cats bug me, wanting attention (especially Hooker, who's plopped himself behind my left elbow on the lukewarm radiator, occasionally dragging a paw of claws across my arm, demanding an ear scratch, making his quiet wheezy-purr sound).


1. "Ode to Divorce" - Regina Spektor - Soviet Kitsch

Not my favorite RS (that would be "Back of a Truck," best song I've heard in years), but good. It always takes her a moment to get over my learned response reaction to female piano-playing singer/songwriters (mild nausea, which makes no sense, as I like some Tori Amos and all the Fiona Apple I've heard). She's real good, and at some point that realization kicks in when her lyrics, or singing, or arrangements just go someplace special. Here she finally cuts loose vocally, and a cello comes in, and she's got me.


2. "Already There" - Bell - Perfect Math

My old friend Vanessa's band from Seattle; their one minor regional radio hit. Good song that somehow reminds me of both "Pretty Vacant" and "King's Lead Hat" (which, knowing V, would not be an unlikely combination for her to be influenced by here). I miss Vanessa, who I last saw around '98 when Bell toured to NYC to promote this EP, but I miss this band almost as much.


3. "Toi L'ami" - Richard Anthony - Foreign Language Fun, Vol. 1

"All My Loving" en français. Cute, pleasant, with a completely out-of-place "country-sounding" guitar solo.


4. "Along Came Jones" - The Coasters - Atlantic Rhythm & Blues vol. 4 1957-1961

Love love love The Coasters, but I'm not sure what the metaphor is here (if there IS one, but given Lieber & Stoller's penchant for hiding deep meanings in simple-sounding "comedy" songs, there's GOTTA be one . . .). If I had more of my favorite Coasters songs, I probably wouldn't have this one on the iTunes, but someone lifted my 2-disc Coasters collection from me a few years ago at the theatre I was living/working at -- the best Coasters collection ever assembled, now out of print, dammit -- and I'm stuck with just the handful of tracks I have on other R&B/doo-wop comps.


5. "Highway Toes" - Christopher Guest - The Best of The National Lampoon Radio Hour

Guest viciously parodying James Taylor, live from National Lampoon's Lemmings. At first I thought it was real James Taylor and steeled myself for annoyance (even before Guest does his perfect imitation, they've got the musical intro down perfectly - John Belushi on bass and Chevy Chase on drums, interestingly enough). I know I have some Taylor on the iTunes, I think because I listened to a couple that I did in fact like as a random respite from the large amounts of loud violent guitar-based rock and roll on here, but Taylor's another singer/songwriter I've had to get over feeling immediately "icky" about.


6. "Everybody's Laughing" - The Spaniels - The Doo-Wop Box III, Disk 1: "The Hits"

Ah, lovely doo-wop. Great song, great vocal, great rhythm. Simple. Not a classic. But good.


7. "Davy the Fat Boy" - Randy Newman - Guilty: 30 Years Of Randy Newman: The Studio Recordings

I used to like this song a lot more, but it's nice hearing it again after a few years. Last song on Newman's first album, with an overdone Van Dyke Parks arrangement. Nasty and cutting.


8. "World Before Columbus" - Suzanne Vega - Nine Objects of Desire

A favorite song from a favorite album (the one where I finally felt Vega got everything right). This love song was "spoiled" a bit for me on finding out it's written for her child -- there's so few actual good not-so-sappy man/woman love songs out there (desire songs, sure, lust songs, oh yeah, real love songs not to make you vomit? not so much) -- but you don't have to read it that way. Hard to not do that though, once you know who she wrote it for. Oops, sorry.

One of the best-damned produced albums there is. Mitchell Froom, married to Vega at the time (very much a "post-marriage-and-first-child" album), responsible for that. Their previous record, 99.9 F°, was a bit overdone - Froom seemed to be a little too enamored of the odd sounds he got from working with all the Tom Waits band alumni on Elvis Costello's Spike. Much simpler and appropriate here, with some of the best piano and drum sounds I've ever heard on record.


9."Old Kentucky Home" - The Beau Brummels - Triangle

Woah, haven't heard this one yet - downloaded the album, liking the band. It IS the Randy Newman song, for gods sake. Great version. Kind of at a strange, hysterical pitch, but good. Short, too. Did they cut a verse?


10. "Uninhabited Man (live)" - Richard Thompson - Live from Austin, TX

Recent, unfamiliar, okay-but-not-great song from one of my favorite singer-songwriter-guitarists. Don't know it so well. Frankly, sounds like a lot of other stuff of his I like better. Oh, right, there it is, the bridge is different and really good. That's right. That's what saves this one. Nice drumming.


Pleasant start to the day. A relaxing, singer/songwriter day, I guess . . .

Last Friday, the 17th, Václav Havel came to The Brick theatre in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to see my production of his play Temptation. He brought his wife, the actress Dagmar Veškrnová, and a number of other guests, including the Czech Ambassador to the U.N., Martin Palous, the Consul General Halka Kaiserova (both of whom I'd met before), a number of other Czech dignitaries and friends who I didn't really get to meet . . . and former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. The performance was followed by a party celebrating the 17th Anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, at which the band Uncle Moon performed a set of songs by The Velvet Underground.


Oh. My.


It was quite a night. There are a few stories to tell, but those'll have to wait (and I can discuss Thursday and Sunday's performances as well). I'm getting requests from friends, family and cast for pictures, first and foremost.


So here's a bunch of photos of the evening, mostly, for whatever reason, unflattering ones with lots of closed eyes and/or silly facial expressions, but these are what I have:




Here, towards the end of the night, as Mr. and Mrs. Havel are leaving, they stop to pose with actors Timothy Reynolds, Christiaan Koop, Eric C. Bailey, Jessi Gotta (with Roger Nasser barely visible behind her), and me.




At curtain call, I come out in fireman gear (as suggested by a stage direction in Havel's play), to welcome the playwright and guests to The Brick and the party - and he gets a round of applause . . .




. . . and then joins the cast (here, Fred Backus and Jessi Gotta) on stage to accept that applause.




Marie Winn, who did the English translation of Temptation that I used, was there that night, and I got to speak with her and have her sign my copy of the published text of the play (as mentioned before, I had Havel sign my working draft of the script last week). To the rear, Havel and his wife are visible, at left (barely), my father and stepmother, at right, William Neiderkorn, composer of music for several plays in the festival.




I thank Havel for coming and he thanks me for the production.




Marie Winn talks to Havel and Albright. Ambassador Palous to the left.




Before the set, Havel says a few words to those assembled.




I had actually gone outside the theatre shortly after thanking Havel -- it was REAL hot in there from the massive crowd, and I'd just been stuck up in the tech booth (even hotter) running the show for 2 and three-quarters hours, plus running around plenty beforehand dealing with crowd control, seating issues, keeping the cast from finding out (not very successfully), etc. I was sweaty and worn out, the place was uncomfortably crowded, so I went outside for some air and to hang with friends, cast, and fellow bloggers (George Hunka, James Comtois, and Matt Johnston were there).

So I don't know what Albright was doing, adding a few words to what Havel had said or joining Uncle Moon for a kickass version of "All Tomorrow's Parties." I choose to believe the latter.




Don't know who's on the extreme ends, but otherwise, left to right, it's Halka Kaiserova, Madeleine Albright, Vaclav Havel, Edward Einhorn (festival director), and co-directors of The Brick Michael Gardner and Robert Honeywell.




Outside at the end of the night, the same group as at the top, plus Aaron Baker and the Ambassador to the right. I've just welcomed Havel to the great borough of Brooklyn. He's telling me that he'd like to get to Brooklyn more, but he REALLY doesn't like going over bridges, so it's very uncomfortable for him. I am looming ridiculously into his personal space as he's VERY soft-spoken and I wasn't even sure he was speaking to me at first. Mrs. Havel, who appears to be holding Excalibur, is shaking hands with Timothy -- she made a special point, it seemed, to thank and praise all of the actors in the show.




I'm telling Mr. Havel that I also don't like driving over bridges, but I've had to do it so often now I'm used to it. Neither of us is considering that there are indeed tunnels between Manhattan and Brooklyn/nearby Queens.

It may have something to do with the mind-control scanning coming from Fred Backus and Alyssa Simon, at rear, with the glowing cyborg eyes. Aaron Baker, a talented "blocker" of psychic attacks, is aware of this and is amused.




Either the glowy-eyed Alyssa has turned the focus of her psychic attack on my gut, or I'm taking in that Mr. Havel is saying he's never gotten used to going over bridges, that he's 70 now, and the fear only gets worse with age -- and I'll find this out someday. This is not reassuring.


More soon. The two quotes that come back to me most about the evening are: Walter Brandes coming up to me to tell me that Madeleine Albright had told him (and he paused a moment to reflect on how odd it was to say THAT) that Havel had turned to his wife during the show to remark that this was a much better production of the play then had been done in Prague.


Whoa. Nice ego-boo there.


And an email the next day from Alyssa noting that she was only then realizing how amazing it all was.


Yeah, Vaclav Havel and Madeleine Albright at The Brick. A scrappy little indie theatre at Metropolitan and Lorimer in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. More than anything for me, I'm just glad it happened to The Brick.


photos by Nils Hill, Yolanda Hawkins, and Eric C. Bailey

More randomness from an expanding iTunes in Gravesend, rapidly closing in on the 60 gig limit I've imposed on it (59.61), where I will have to start pulling stuff off to put more on.


Until then, this, with briefer-than-usual notes (I'm busy):


1. "You've Got More Things Going for You Than Teeth, Baby" - John Barry - Boom (original soundtrack)

I've downloaded a bunch of out-of-print movie soundtracks, generally 60s, generally "hip-and-cool," to keep as library music for my shows. I keep the tracks in iTunes if they're interesting and/or short enough. This is a tense Prisoner-esque, bongo and string piece, with some studio echo trickery. Good for a creepy scene sometime.


2. "Drums and Boys" - Honey Is Cool - Crazy Love

No idea where I got this. Probably from WFMU.org or Idolator. Makes me think of Cibo Matto. Swedish band. Drums, female singer, sparse "other" noises. Cool.


3. "Sax Twin" - Giuseppe Cannizzo - Kaleidoscopica

Actual Italian library music for films. I have a lot of this. I'm on a bit of an Italian-and-somewhat-all-European-in-general-but-I-guess-still-mainly-Italian library music kick. This is a pretty track that goes through several phases/modes -- at first I thought the title was a mislabeling, as it takes over a third of the song to occur before the "twinned" saxes enter; before that it's all flute and acoustic guitar.


4. "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)" - Marvin Gaye - What's Going On

A classic.


5. "Mink Car" - They Might Be Giants - Mink Car

TMBG "does" Bacharach. Impressive, they get the piano and horn stuff dead-on. Perfect chords. Still TMBG vocals and lyrics.


6. "Tijuana Gasser" - The Deuce Coupes - 32 Hot Rod Hits

Pleasant enough surf guitar instrumental. These just make me happy in any case.


7. "Jack Talked (Like a Man on Fire)" - Stan Ridgway - Partyball

Exciting.


8. "Sad Sunset" - The Spiders - G.S. I Love You vol.3 -- Let's Go Spiders!

60s Japanese surf-style pop, sung in English. Pretty, cool, and not-quite-right, and all the better for it.


9. "Falling" - Julee Cruise - Falling Into the Night

AKA the Twin Peaks theme with vocals. Hard to separate from that association.


10. "Love Shine" - Timmy Thomas - Why Can't We Live Together: The Best of the TK Years 1972-1981

A non-hit from a one-hit wonder (see title of compilation). Interesting songs from Mr. Thomas generally, but kinda . . . odd . . . lyric conceits sometimes. "Oh, girl, you and me, we're makin' love shine!" and that's pretty much all of the lyrics. Sounds like they're manufacturing a cleaning product.


Not the most interesting 10 this morning. Luck of the draw.

George Hunka requests that us fellow theatre bloggers (I guess I still am that) post the following announcement for a very interesting and worthwhile event going on tomorrow.


I can't imagine anyone interested in this who reads this journal who doesn't also follow George's essential Superfluities, but just in case, here ya go:


Here's the lineup for the panel discussion on blogging and criticism
that I'll be moderating tomorrow at CUNY's Segal Center:

* For a little international flair we can't do better than Alison Croggon of theatre notes, who will join us telephonically from Melbourne, Australia. Alison's an accomplished, prize-winning poet and playwright; she also edits the Australian literary magazine Masthead.

* From the associate producer's desk at Performance Space 122 and wearing his editor-in-chief hat for culturebot.org , Andy Horwitz will join us (in person) about the challenges of running a blog for the downtown theatre community, and his (and others') visions of what the blogosphere can do to support and energize this community.

* Also in person will be Matthew Johnston, whose theatre conversation and political frustration seeks to stress "the creation of a dialogue and encourage multiple perspectives in theatre and performance." Matt also writes reviews for nytheatre.com . He's directed plays by Sheila Callaghan and many others; most recently he was most cruelly abused by director, playwright, and cast as the stage manager for In Public.

Please join us at 6:30pm tomorrow, Wednesday, November 15, at the Graduate Center's Martin E. Segal Theatre, 365 Fifth Avenue at 34th Street. Admission is free – even as we run up the Segal Center's long distance bill to new astronomical heights.


I probably won't make it as I'm spending a couple days mostly off from the Havel Festival attending to those essential parts of life that get ignored for weeks as you put up a show, but I'm still very tempted to hear this group speak.