CollisionWorks

I'd borrowed the first volume from a friend and read it, but not too deeply I think, when it came out. Callow does a bit more psychoanalyzing of Welles in the first volume, some of which may be a bit of a reach (but far less so than most biographers), but he's just as often on firm ground (it becomes very VERY clear that Citizen Kane is just as much, maybe MORE, an autobiography of Orson Welles as it is an examination of William Randolph Hearst).

I personally have been compared to Welles more times than makes me comfortable. Granted, I was inspired on a lot of his career path by Kane (like so many others) and my first "serious" film book was Charles Higham's The Films of Orson Welles (bought for me around 1977 by my dad in a small bookstore connected to the Bleecker Street Cinema, when we had gone to see a midnight double-bill of Modern Times and The Great Dictator but it was sold-out -- I still have the book, though it's coverless and falling apart).

Most of the time though, the Welles comparison seems to be because I do a lot of things, am portly, and have a deep voice.

That said, the more I read about him in Callow, the more I do feel a kinship with him, and an understanding, and often not in ways that make me comfortable. Reading Callow on Welles' failings can make me stop, reread a passage, and wonder, "Uh . . . is that me, too?" So two passages that I looked at over and over again are today's "Inspirational" texts, or maybe more "Warning" texts. There may be more from this book to come - I'm only halfway through my reread of it now.

In the section on the critical response to the "Voodoo Macbeth," -- and the reviews, even the good ones (of which there are surprisingly few for this landmark production), are astonishingly snobby, shallow, closed-minded, and racist -- Callow is able to make a damned good point about Welles' work by reading between the lines of even these silly reviews. As someone who sometimes regards my job (and general strengths) as a theatre director (and artist in general) as being more in the realm of "editor," "conductor," or "arranger/orchestrator" rather than "composer" or "creator," this brought me up short:

. . . This is an assertion which is constantly made about Welles, his productions, other people's performances in his productions, and his own performances: that they lack poetry. There seems to be some truth in it. He had a passion for verse, but he wanted to eliminate Poetry from the classical theatre, considering it an obstacle to the life in the plays, a veneer that needed to be stripped away. And yet he was no realist. He wanted the majesty without the poetry, the tone without the music. What he offered instead was Orchestration; colour and sound, largely devoid either of meaning or of melody.

Hmmmn.

No, not sure this is me, or anything I'm doing, but there's enough there that's close enough to make me have to look closer at what I think I'm doing, what I'm actually doing, and any gaps there may be in between the intent and the result.

A little while later, Callow discusses Welles taking on Marlowe's Faustus, a part I quite happily played myself almost 17 years ago. I've done my share of Shakespeare, but I've never felt quite as sympatico with Shakespeare's lines in my mouth as with Marlowe's (though I prefer the plays of the former CONSIDERABLY more). The only major Shakespeare role I've played was Hamlet, quite frankly in most ways an easier role than Faustus, and while I had all the internal work down on the man, I mean I KNEW my Hamlet as a person, inside and out, I could never really get the words out quite the way I wanted -- I knew the rhythms and cadences, the meanings and intents and WHAT I was saying, but the tone and timbre escaped me . . . I wanted (and needed) to be a brass instrument (a trumpet in Act Two; I'm not sure what in Act One, something more mellow, french horn maybe), and instead I was low strings or woodwinds. I got through it okay (by the last two performances of four) but it wasn't what I wanted to be there, or should have been.

When you have one of those voices that gets you noticed and complimented just for its natural tone, and which you are naturally skilled at using in a variety of ways, you can become overconfident that your voice can do ANYTHING (you may also at first, as I did, get tired of the compliments and try to avoid using "that" voice -- when I did Faustus the director had to keep pushing me to "use the beautiful voice!" which I had begun to regard as some kind of "cheat"; I grew out of that). Of course, without the proper work, a magnificent voice can't do things it wasn't built for (after Welles told Olivier that his voice would never be deep enough to play Othello, Olivier spent a year doing vocal exercises to lower it so that he could do just that). A virtuoso bassoonist, demanded to play a passage for trumpet, will probably give you something lovely and impressive to listen to, but just not correct.

So, yes, this passage also made me think . . .

. . . As far as the verse is concerned, Welles might have been born to play Marlowe. As a Shakespearean actor, he lacked access to the pressure of the verse, and to its breathtaking variety; intelligent and beautifully spoken though his performances of Shakespeare invariably are, he is inclined to fall into a sonorous, monochromatic mode. He lacks rhythmic flexibility. What he has is superb tone and a wonderful command of legato, perfect attributes for what has been called Marlowe's 'mighty line': great arcs of verse that soar and swoop, arias independent of character or situation. This essentially rhetorical writing suits him perfectly, and he fulfils it as few other actors of our time have been able to do, a notable exception being the late Richard Burton, another rhetorical actor. Both Burton and Welles when they play Shakespeare attempt to make him rhetorical; it soon becomes dull, as if a singer were to attempt to sing Mozart like Wagner. All the bubbling and varied life becomes subdued in the attempt to make a splendid noise. Marlowe was his man.

Again, hmmmmmn. Something to think about . . .

When I did Ten Nights in a Bar-Room - Romero zombies in Temperance-landscape, a Punk friend said with complement that it was "Punk Rock Theatre."

This is the ideal.

To do in these works (my theatre, what I do, the Gemini CollisionWorks) what I find in the best Punk, the best Garage. What David Thomas of Pere Ubu calls the "Avant-Garage." Burn it all down. Smash what's still standing. Pick up the pieces. Look at them. See how you can put them together in different ways that make you understand better what they were in the first place. Start again. Do better. Destroy things better. Fail better. Rip it up and start again. Be angry. Be joyful. Always be angry with joy.

The thought been done occurring to me that the best rock 'n' roll - the perfecting of it - came in the hands of those American garage rockers of the 60s. That this was what RNR was supposed to be - the line that starts with "Good Rocking Tonight" and "Gee" and "Rocket 88" and "That's Alright Mama" down to a bunch of kids creating greatness in limitations and ignorance. Good rock been done made since then, but not actual rock 'n' roll. Not quite part of the original line. Like film noir - REAL film noir - only existed in USA filmmaking from 1941 to 1958 . . . everything else in the noir "manner" is a conscious imitation of a natural national style that unconsciously just HAPPENED. Maybe that's it then, real RNR only existed in the USA from 1951 to 1968.

The punks came in and reconstituted it, the garage ideal, the RNR ideal, but from an intellectual point-of-view - most of them were college educated or dropouts, or could have gone that path and chose not. Smart people trying to lose their smartness in energy and non-reason and volume. Closer to something basically human underneath. But always aware somewhere that this was indeed Art. Nuggets and The Stooges were the key, the hinge on which it all turned. What was it, transforming Outsider Art into Modernism? Not quite - you can't call something as consciously planned and created as Ike Turner's "Rocket 88" an Outsider work, no - but something like that . . .

This is a point of view, not a prescription for the Work. This does not mean violent and loud and messy always in action. Precise, clean works can be done from this mindset. Even "pretty" ones.

(when I directed my first play, several people described it to me as "exquisite," with one even saying it was like a "perfect little jewel box" - and it didn't entirely sound like praise to me - I was [relatively] young; I overreacted; I made my second production as loud and chaotic and confrontational as I could - it was appropriate for the show, but I know better now - sometimes the Work is just supposed to be a jewel box)

It is all about the place of the individual Work in the context of the larger Scene. It is about Reconstruction, not Deconstruction.

It is a mindset. It is important for all the collaborators to be on the same page. It is about a kind of energy, a kind of awareness. It is about operating the tools we've been given with care and respect and precision in a manner that will destroy those tools. We are using these old forms and filling them with a real human energy while we take them apart.

(I often use the example of Penn & Teller doing the classic Cups and Balls routine, where they do it "properly" and then do it again . . . with clear plastic cups so you can see - supposedly - how the illusion is done - and they do it so skillfully that while you can actually see the trickery, it's more impressive and amazing and moving than seeing it done "right" - THIS is what to aim for)

It can be Matt and Bryan's Penny Dreadful, or Jeff's Babylon Babylon, or Nosedive's The Master of Horror, or Robert & Moira's Lord Oxford, or Michael's Notes from Underground, or Bouffon Glass Menajorie or whatever show I'm trying to do this week - and not all of these were entirely successful, maybe, sure - but they all have that quality of self-awareness, that ability to share with the audience the smile and laugh about how dead these forms we're using are (aren't they? I mean, aren't they?), and then stun them with how real and sad and painful and human we can be in these forms.

This is what we're doing at our best in Indie Theatre, Off-Off-Broadway, whatever you call it. I just call it Theatre, the rest is just a marketing label.

(which is not unimportant - and the Punks were brilliant in their marketing using limitations as strengths - something to look at and think about and write upon in future . . . we now have to try to convince the audience that's out there and only thinks of what we do as a dead museum that it is being reinhabited with new energy and life . . .)

In other words, we're not playing around.

Inspirational Text for the Day #1.

Iggy Pop to Peter Gzowski, CBC, March 11, 1977:

I'll tell you about punk rock: punk rock is a word used by dilettantes and, uh... and, uh... heartless manipulators, about music... that takes up the energies, and the bodies, and the hearts and the souls and the time and the minds, of young men, who give what they have to it, and give everything they have to it. And it's a... it's a term that's based on contempt; it's a term that's based on fashion, style, elitism, satanism, and, everything that's rotten about rock 'n' roll. I don't know Johnny Rotten... but I'm sure, I'm sure he puts as much blood and sweat into what he does as Sigmund Freud did.

You see, what, what sounds to you like a big load of trashy old noise... is in fact... the brilliant music of a genius... myself. And that music is so powerful, that it's quite beyond my control. And, ah... when I'm in the grips of it, I don't feel pleasure and I don't feel pain, either physically or emotionally. Do you understand what I'm talking about? Have you ever, have you ever felt like that? When you just, when you just, you couldn't feel anything, and you didn't want to either. You know, like that? Do you understand what I'm saying, sir?

Do you understand what I'm saying, sir?