CollisionWorks

Work progresses on the four shows for August. About half of the cast of A Little Piece of the Sun is set. I'm also finishing up the script for George Bataille's Bathrobe (that is, I have Foreman's dialogue in a file and I'm going through and creating the characters, setting, scenes, and stage directions as they come to me, bit by bit), typing in the script for Fassbinder's Blood on the Cat's Neck and giggling way too much about my idea for the design for the card/poster for that show (based on the original picture of Fassbinder holding a bloodied photo cut-out of a cat for the original production), and watching old serials and Universal monster movies as research for Spacemen from Space (done with the Universal pictures, actually, and I'm currently enjoying a palate-cleanser of movie watching with my favorite Hitchcock and Bergman films).

I also have a couple of grant proposals to get done in the next two weeks that are mostly there. Big thing now for each is to put together a DVD (different for each proposal) of excerpts from my recent work. Not so easy to choose.

We'll be going up to Maine for a little bit soon to relax and write the actual script, or what we can right now, of Spacemen from Space. First, I have to design and act in the next Penny Dreadful episode, and act in a couple of other readings/events I've agreed to.

Nothing else really, so here's today's Random Ten . . .

1. "Pictures of Lily" - David Bowie - Toying
2. "The Big Big Whoredom" - They Might Be Giants - Then: The Earlier Years
3. "Waltzin' With Sin" - Bob Dylan & The Band - A Tree With Roots
4. "Hey There Jim" - Jimmy "Bo" Horne - The First Days of Funk - volume 1
5. "Lagerfeuer (Oswalt Kolle: Dein Kind, Das Unbekannte Wesen)" - Peter Schirmann - Birds Do It
6. "'The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly" ad" - radio spot - Psychedelic Promos & Radio Spots, vol. 8
7. "Just Passing" - Small Faces - Immediate Singles
8. "Gloomy" - Creedence Clearwater Revival - Susie Q
9. "The Trap" - The Music Machine - The Bonniwell Music Machine
10. "I Need It Just As Bad As You" - Laura Lee - Soul Diva Sessions

And for special added value today, some recent favorite videos.

David Letterman reviews George W. Bush's career:

A commercial - YES, IT'S REAL - that made Berit and I giggle like 5 year olds:

And when all else fails, animals doing things they normally don't = amusingosity:

Haven't been to The Brick in weeks! Time to go over and check in tonight on the show that's going to open there next week . . .

Paul Julian was primarily a background artist for the Warner Bros cartoon studio from 1940-1951 (almost entirely, it seems, with director Friz Freleng's unit).

I knew the name from credits, but wouldn't have had the eye to pick out his specific work until this past week, when Joe Dante posted the 1964 short animated film The Hangman, which was designed by Julian (who also co-directed with MGM cartoon producer Les Goldman), at the Trailers from Hell site. I can now clearly pick out Julian's distinctive style when I see it, which I turned out to know already from several places.

First things first - The Hangman is an interesting little piece, now more so for Julian's design than for the content. It's a visualization of a poem by Maurice Ogden that is basically an expansion of Martin Niemöller's more direct and lovely verse "First They Came . . ." Ogden's piece is a pleasant bit of liberal art-tripe out to state a message rather than express a singular point-of-view. Very 50s-60s bourgeois-suburban-concerned (a point-of-view I poke a lot of fun at, but at the same time greatly respect, as I believe it is, in the long run, responsible for a great deal of positive social change -- it's just so damned EARNEST and soppily WELL-MEANING! -- we could really use an equivalent social stratum today . . .).

Julian's design of the filmed poem elevates it several steps (as does the fine narration done of it by the great - and formerly blacklisted - Herschel Bernardi) into true horror and dread. Very limited animation used very well, and a lot more entertaining than the majority of what was being done in the USA in the name of "serious, adult" animation in the 50s-60s.

The print of The Hangman on the Trailers from Hell site is excellent, but unfortunately will only be up there temporarily (if it isn't already gone by the time you read this). It can also be seen on YouTube HERE, in a version stretched horizontally and tinted towards the blue, but with some proper color balance still present, and HERE, in proper aspect ratio but in a massively faded-to-red copy (which is probably closest to how several decades-worth of grade school students have seen it in old Eastmancolor 16mm prints). Ick. Worth watching anyway.

At the Trailers from Hell site, it is mentioned that Julian did the animated titles for several AIP films by Roger Corman. He's only credited with the work on Dementia 13, Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Terror, and Not of this Earth, but I'm pretty positive he also did the titles for Gunslinger and Swamp Women (aka Swamp Diamonds), which I know well from their MST3K versions (and which both also star the great, late, lamented Beverly Garland). UPDATE 5/3/10: Just checked back and many of the links in this are dead. I've replaced what I could, but while I found a BETTER, if still red, version of The Hangman, the Swamp Women titles now look pretty awful, and the Gunslinger titles start almost 8 minutes in at the link -- I've added links to the other Corman films as well, which also all start several minutes into the clips, and mostly look awful, sorry)

Some of the drawing in the Gunslinger titles doesn't look at all like his work, but most does, so it may have been a collaboration. These aren't exactly the greatest of films by Corman, but I've always been impressed that he thought enough of even his dopiest films to try and make at least some of the aspects of the production (titles, music, acting and screenwriting when possible) above-average for these sub-B-pictures. You don't hire someone like Julian to do titles for your movie unless you are somewhat serious about what you're doing.

Looking just at this later work by Julian, you wouldn't think "Warner Bros cartoons," and yet if you go back and look at his backgrounds for Freleng you will definitely see his distinctive style there (in his book on Bugs Bunny, Joe Adamson compares the painted skies by Julian in Bugs Bunny Rides Again to Turner, which would seem hysterically laughable until you look closely at the film and realize he has a point).

Even in something like Baseball Bugs, his line and color palette is recognizable. There's a lot of background jokes in this cartoon as well, not only the traditional use of names from around the studio, but there's also two billboards for "Filboid Studge" in the baseball stadium, which is a reference to a short story by Saki (H.H. Munro) - was Julian responsible for this literary reference? I would assume so (it's also the story of a poor painter being taken advantage of by a rich capitalist . . .)

Oh, and Julian was also the voice of the Road Runner - "Beep, beep!" as normally written, though it sounds more like "Meep, meep!" - which came from his warning sound to others as he ran down corridors at the studio.

After leaving Warners, Julian worked for UPA, the legendary studio founded in the wake of the 1941 Disney strike by a number of left-leaning animators, where a great deal of groundbreaking work was created that today seems important, gorgeous, and mostly pretty boring and unfunny (much of it wasn't meant to be funny, but the stuff that was wasn't either).

For me, UPA's high point (and yes, I know some could convincingly argue for Gerald McBoingBoing) is their famous 1954 version of Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, created after HUAC had pressured the studio to get rid of many of the "Reds" on their staff, including John Hubley (who went off and made some visually-beautiful, well-meaning, deeply boring and dated films such as The Hole, Moonbird, and the insufferable Cockaboody), Phil Eastman - aka children's book author P.D. Eastman (who had formerly worked at Warner Bros with Ted "Dr. Seuss" Geisel on the Private Snafu cartoons) - and writer/voice artist Bill Scott (later the co-creator and voice of Bullwinkle).

Julian seems to have picked up the slack at UPA, designing the Poe film as a precursor to The Hangman with maybe a hair more style and a hair less dread:

Julian's style can also be seen in an earlier, 1930s WPA-commissioned mural he painted in the Fullerton, CA post office -- or is it the 30s, WPA mural-style that can be seen in the rest of his work? What came from the time and what from his training? -- he studied at Chouinard Art Institute, a precursor to CalArts; I knew CalArts was always big in animation, but I didn't realize that its history in animation went back so far as to include some of the biggest first-wave names at Disney and Warner Bros.

Looking back at all this, I keep wondering about where the contemporary equivalent is today, or if there even is one. UPA was created as an alternative to Disney - which, as much as other American animation studios of the 20th Century are now known and respected, at the time was The Biggest Game In Town By Far, the one that set the standard, that everyone looked at and reacted to. Other studios didn't "do" Disney only because they didn't have the resources, until UPA came along and did something new because they wanted to.

Today, while there are many contrary voices in animation (animator and animation historian John Kricfalusi being the best), the contrariness is centered on the idea that the major creators today aren't doing their jobs as well as in the past, and the ideal style would seem to be some kind of mixture of all the best principles of the major 20th Century animation studios (including UPA). But what about the artistic "other?"

I know where it is in theatre, and in some of the other arts, but where's that voice in American animation today that quietly works and says with the work, "There are other possibilities"? Where would a Paul Julian fit in today?

Berit and I had a lovely couple of Xmas days away with our families. Hope yours was as pleasant.

Now, back home, back to kitties, back to work.

And back to the Friday Random Ten, from out of the 26,108 tracks in the iPod, with links to songs and info:

1. "Synthesizer" - Electric Six - Fire
2. "Those Were The Days (Italian-Language Version)" - Mary Hopkin - Foreign Language Fun, Vol. 1
3. "Oh, What A Price" - Link Wray - The Swan Demos 1964
4. "Cage and Aquarium" - They Might Be Giants - Then: The Earlier Years
5. "The Big Surfer" - Brian Lord - Pebbles Volume 4 - Surf'n Tunes!
6. "Progress" - Mission Of Burma - Vs.
7. "(I Wanna) Testify" - The Parliaments - Testify! The Best of the Early Years
8. "Atlantis" - Les Baxter & His Orchestra - Ultra-Lounge 1: Mondo Exotica
9. "Stockings" - Suzanne Vega - Nine Objects Of Desire
10. "Misery Goats" - Pere Ubu - Datapanik in the Year Zero (1980-1982)

In the last two days we lost two very very different legends - well, except maybe for their outspokenness when it came to certain activities of the US government.

Eartha Kitt has left us. Oddly, my father and I had just been speaking about her yesterday briefly when her version of a Christmas song came on the stereo (and I don't think it was "Santa Baby," which isn't a favorite of mine, much as I love her), so she was somewhere fresh in my mind when I came home to read the tribute lines to her from friends on Facebook.

Here's a couple of videos of her in her prime from a TV appearance in 1962 (thanks flyswatter for leading me to the first one):

There are SO many great clips of her on YouTube it was hard to limit it to this - go take a look there if you want more . . .

And also gone is the great Harold Pinter. I believe he was the greatest living playwright we had (who would it be now? I don't think I could pick another . . .) , and the second greatest (after Beckett) whose life has overlapped mine, and, like Beckett, his work just got better and better as he got older (while his early works, as good as they are, tended to get overrated in the long run). I can say no more.

Pinter started as an actor, and occasionally relapsed - I would have LOVED to have seen his Krapp's Last Tape in 2006 - and I think his deep understanding of the practicality of what works for the actor is a huge part of his inimitable style.

Rather than an excerpt from one of his own works, here is Pinter as The Director in Beckett's penultimate stage play, Catastrophe (dedicated to Vaclav Havel), also featuring John Gielgud in his last filmed appearance, directed by David Mamet (and I have some minor problems with the liberties Mamet took with Beckett's play - let alone the entire concept of filming a Beckett play - but for the basic staging and performances, I'm grateful for this film):

Back to the world of The Brick and the shows I'm to get up this year now . . .

There's a couple of movie memes going around that no one's tagged me on, but have got me thinking enough to have to do them anyway and post.

So, a couple months ago a meme started where you name your favorite movie for every letter of the alphabet. It's hard with some letters, because you either have to search hard and include also-rans in some places, and pick between five or six for others, but I came up with a pretty good 26 that I can get behind:

A: The Age of Innocence
B: Bad Timing
C: Citizen Kane
D: Duck Amuck
E: Eraserhead
F: The Falls
G: Glen or Glenda?
H: How I Won the War
I: INLAND EMPIRE
J: Jackie Brown
K: Kiss Me Deadly
L: The Last Picture Show
M: Magical Maestro
N: Nothing Lasts Forever
O: Once Upon a Time in the West
P: Point Blank
Q: Quatermass and the Pit
R: The Rules of the Game
S: The Seventh Victim
T: Two or Three Things I Know About Her
U: Urgh! A Music War
V: Videodrome
W: Wavelength
X: X: The Unheard Music
Y: Yojimbo
Z: A Zed & Two Noughts

Maybe I'll do the "Twenty Favorite Movie Actresses" one next . . .

In the morning I have to get up early for tech for this month's episode of Penny Dreadful - once again I'll be running this week's tech solo, without Berit, as she's off on another show for Edward Einhorn/UTC#61 that will conflict with the Sunday matinee (so we'll each be running tech for shows starting at 2.00 pm on Sunday in two different theatres, immediately following going to a funeral for someone we cared for very very much that I don't want to discuss here, so we'll be in great shape to run board . . .).

So I might as well handle the regular Friday post right now.

Another Random Ten from out of the iPod - like last week (and from now on, I think), I'm including links to more info about the songs, including, where I can find them, the songs themselves. Unlike last week, the majority of the songs (and even some of the artists) were unlocatable online -- enjoy what's here:

1. "Soultown" - The Forevers
2. "The Most Unwanted Song" - Komar & Melamid and Dave Soldier - The People's Choice Music
3. "It's So Nice (previously unreleased, demo)" - The Beau Brummels - San Fran Sessions (1964-66)
4. "Danny Alone (from "Edgar Wallace")" - The Peter Thomas Sound Orchestra - Film Musik
5. "Go 'Way Girl" - The Damascans - Quagmire 3
6. "Jezebel" - Teddy Boys - Garage Punk Unknowns
7. "Gonna Die With My Hammer In My Hand" - The Williamson Brothers & Curry - Anthology Of American Folk Music, Vol. 1B: Ballads
8. "Girl You Better Go for Yourself" - Anita Humes & The Essex - Girls Will Be Girls Vol.1
9. "Discrepancy" - The Music Machine - The Bonniwell Music Machine
10. "Love Attack" - Konk - Bright Lights, Big City

And yet once again, I can't find a necessary item to upload my new photos to the computer, so no pictures today. Maybe soon.

Penny Dreadful is winding down, and the episodes are getting longer and more complex as the many plot threads are being tied up. This week's is a doozy, and explains much. Hope to see you there.

Happy Halloween.

I'm awake, but not cheerfully - insomnia, up and down all night. In the end I got the full hours of "a good night's sleep," but not in a row.

This had nothing to do with any Halloween scariness, though on one of my times up in the middle of the night, puttering away online, I encountered THAT commercial from 1978 that caused me a few sleepless nights back then:

( Fats Wishes You a Happy Halloween! )

Oh, what the heck, let's continue the creepy horror trailers theme for today!
( There's only one thing wrong with the Davis baby . . . )

Meanwhile, back in the iPod, there 26,012 tracks taking up 72.27 GBs, with less than a gig for new music, and months of acquired music to put in. What tracks from today's Random Ten shall be dropped to make way for better things?

1. "L'Estasi Dell'Oro (from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly)" - Ennio Morricone - The Dinosaur Gardens Tribute to Il Maestro

Better known as "the music that plays as Eli Wallach runs around in circles for three minutes looking for Arch Stanton's grave." One of my favorite pieces of music. STAYS.

2. "Final Achievement" - In Camera - Return of the Batcave

Whoa. The opening of this is someone doing a low-rent Arnold Dreyblatt impression, apparently striking an electric guitar with a bow. Then it completely changes into a good little post-punk, post-no wave alt-rock song. Not great, but good enough and obscure enough to keep. STAYS

3. "Idiot Wind (original version)" - Bob Dylan - Blood On The Tracks - New York Sessions

Just got this recently and it was good enough to shove on the iPod ahead of the rest of the backlog. A very different version of a song I already love, maybe not as good as the released version, maybe as good, maybe better. Ask me next time I hear it. STAYS.

4. "Gloomy Sunday" - Sinéad O'Connor - Am I Not Your Girl?

From her album of standards, which I love. However. This song is slow and depressing in the wrong way for the iPod. This one is to be REMOVED.

5. "Louie Louie (medley)" - The Troggs - The Louie Louie Files

This is pretty cheesy. It's probably barely the original Troggs, much later than their 60s prime, doing a medley of various 60s hits. Almost charming enough in cheesiness to stay, but it the end I think this should be REMOVED.

6. "Who's Gene Autry? " - Johnny Cash with John Carter Cash - Legend

Pretty corny track from The Man. GOES.

7. "Glory Box (live)" - Portishead - Roseland NYC (Live)

Great song, made better in this live version, which is not what I would have expected from this band. Actually, EVERY song on this album tops the original version, while sounding almost identical to it; there's just some little bit of extra live energy to them that puts them over the top. STAYS.

8. "Electric In General (from Flower Power & Gunpowder)" - Jerry Finegold - Public Guy Private Dick-Selected Cuts From The Original Soundtracks

Neat hot instrumental that STAYS. Wish I knew where it was REALLY from - Finegold created soundtracks for NYC-area Z-pictures by just needle dropping tracks from other albums, and actually had the nerve to release a "soundtrack album" of tracks he'd just lifted outright from other places. Not even had replayed by new musicians, he just TOOK them! Some chutzpah there . . .

9. "La Vie En Rose" - Sam Butera & The Witnesses - Ultra-Lounge 10: A Bachelor in Paris

Good cheesy lounge version of the song. Not necessary, but STAYS, for now.

10. "Greyhound Blues" - D.A. Hunt - Sun Records: The Blues Years 1950-1958 vol. 5

Don't really know this song yet, and I need to live with it a while longer. STAYS while I get to know it and see if it keeps penetrating, or if it's one more REALLY good blues from the time and place that I have dozens and dozens of now, and can't keep all of them in the iPod.

Some political stupidity to link to . . .

So, have you heard the latest wingnut rumor about Obama? About his parentage? Oh, it's astonishingly mad. urbaniak breaks it down with his normal wit HERE. Yeeesh.

Meanwhile, a group of Christians decided to band together (after one had a dream in which God spoke to her and told her to do this - really) and DO something for our economy. What did they decide to do?

They decided to get together at the giant bronze bull statue down on Bowling Green - not Wall Street, as everyone keeps saying, but it's close enough - and lay hands on this symbol of Capitalism and pray for it to be healed.

It's not quite worship, and not quite a golden calf . . . but close enough to make you wonder how well these people had read their Bible. Oh, right, that's that "Old" Testament, the one that only counts when it's on about killing homosexuals. More words, photos, and video on this glorious non-ironic derangement HERE.

(you know, this same poor bull, right after the beginning of the financial crisis, had its prominent testicles painted bright blue - I'm not sure what event is more insulting to this proud beast . . .)

Oh, and Wil Wheaton, TV's Wesley Crusher, wishes you a very Happy Halloween in his own way . . .

We ALL float down here, Georgie!

Boo!

Kept thinking of posting more political quotes and links over the last couple of days, and then the sheer amount of insanity and stupidity just became overwhelming and I wasn't sure I could process it all in one place.

But. It's what I've been looking at and concerned with, and my theatre work has been supervising clowns and some slight working on the scripts of (and thinking about) George Bataille's Bathrobe and A Little Piece of the Sun - just blue-skying about casts, sets, effects, music, and so forth. And trying to find that original show that's just out of mind - like the mental equivalent of being on the tip of your tongue - abstract images dancing there, forming for a moment, then vanishing like a dream when you wake. Frustrating. What the hell IS it that's trying to get out?

Every now and then, between thinking of a show I want to do and looking at what's happening outside my head, I think the show I want to do is called Country of Assholes. Nah, too on the nose.

We rewatched the film of Peter Barnes' play The Ruling Class the other night, and I kept thinking we needed something like that for this time and this country, but I'm not sure that's my bag. Something to think about, in any case . . .

Anyway, here's some of my "favorite" quotes, links, and videos from the past couple of days, in case you missed some of these. I found them from all over the place, but a bunch came from toddalcott and flyswatter.

Bill in Portland, ME at Daily Kos points to a Fox News interview from March in which Chris Matthews suggests repeatedly to Henry Paulson that the events that have now played out may well come to pass, and repeatedly gets back the answer that "we're just going to have to wait and see how that plays out." Fine fine planning there. Apparently, as long as we have "confidence" in the markets and firms, everything should be alright. Yeah, this has worked out well.

Perhaps my favorite on-the-record quote in a long time was given to Forbes.com, in what many people, when first seeing, felt just had to be a parody from The Onion:

In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.

"It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."

Wow.

Yeah, that "Wow" is from Forbes, not me. Though I agree.

Nice to see that some of our Nation's reps have some backbone and righteous anger, namely (though I think they're not alone at this point) Peter DeFazio of Oregon, Marcy Kaptur of Ohio, and Jim McDermott of Washington:

( We should not be rolled by a Wall Street exec who is masquerading as Secretary of the Treasury. )

I'm still a bit stunned by the New York Times' account of the meltdown the other evening at the White House meeting to work out the bailout plan. Henry Paulson getting down on his knee before Nancy Pelosi? Barney Frank refereeing an "internal G.O.P. ideological war?" The hell--?

Doesn't it make you feel good to know that we're going along exactly the way Osama Bin Laden said he wanted and expected us to, way back in 2004?

mcbrennan - Cait - is not a mental health professional, but is a keenly-observant wordsmith who has some experience with the developmentally disabled, and has a "Modest Theory" (which she qualifies as "troubling, but half-baked") regarding Sarah Palin's "word salad" responses to some of the questions she's been asked recently. Troubling, certainly. "Half-baked?" Maybe not. Maybe a little more baked than that.

Didn't anyone around McCain know what happens when you snub Letterman, and then he finds out your excuse is bogus and you're off doing something else? Cher did this to him around 1988, and he did half a show about it that tore her to pieces. Can't make it, fine, but don't lie to the man, or you get something like this:

( 9:11 of a pissed-off Dave )

I really like Don Hall's summary of how conservatives focus on social issues so much as a smokescreen to avoid their incompetence with fiscal policy:

"Dad. It looks like you've really screwed up the check book and the power has been turned off. Maybe Mom should be in charge of the money."

"Wha? You're a gay abortionist!!"

And never mind about paying attention to tonight's debate, John McCain has already won it - haven't you seen the ads that say so? And it is so, if you say it's so.

Oh, and in the midst of all this, we've now escalated to our forces and Pakistan's actually shooting at each other. This is going to go well. (h/t VetVoice)

Oh, don't worry - The Department of Homeland Security is working on a little something called Project Hostile Intent, a "pre-crime" detector to determine who best to pull out of line and ask a few questions. Neat, huh?

As Glenn Greenwald notes, though, there's no reason to be at all paranoid about the fact that a U.S Army Brigade has been newly assigned to "the Homeland," in probable defiance of The Posse Comitatus Act. One brigade couldn't do any major "martial law" action, and if it could, it wouldn't have been made public. It's just probably illegal and a damned bad precedent.

At times like this, music may soothe the savage breast. The iPod is now almost jammed up, after adding a bunch of newly-acquired Bowie live tracks and a good deal of Dylan/The Band's basement tapes. Less than 100 MB free in there now - have to do a cleaning, get rid of some of the 26,181 tracks. Here's what comes up random this morning - the iPod appears to have decided We're All Devo . . .

1. "Time Out for Fun (muzak version)" - Devo - E-Z Listening Disc
2. "Imitation Situation" - The Sixpentz - Mindrocker 60's USA Punk Anthology Vol 13
3. "Climbing the Walls" - They Might Be Giants - The Else
4. "It's Making It" - The Lollipop Shop - Just Colour
5. "Night By Night" - Steely Dan - Showbiz Kids: The Steely Dan Story
6. "I Saw Her Again" - The Mamas and the Papas - Rato's Nostalgia Collection 8
7. "Jet" - Paul McCartney & Wings - Band on the Run
8. "Words Get Stuck in My Throat" - Devo - Pioneers Who Got Scalped: The Anthology
9. "Winos on Parade" - Marga Benitez & The Mello-Tones - Winos on Parade
10. "Alias Pink Puzz - LP Radio Promo Spot # 2" - Paul Revere & The Raiders - Psychedelic Promos & Radio Spots, vol. 4

Maybe a nice relaxing game would help. Here's a commercial from 1975 that I actually remember (h/t Boing Boing Gadgets), and now wonder how the hell this was ever actually released to market . . .

( BALL BUSTER! Fun for the whole family! )

Or maybe, for relaxation, I'd like to look at some great hairstyles of the past that I miss:

Which takes me mentally - through flashing on the 'fro of Don Cornelius - to a video Adam Swiderski linked to today on Facebook, noting its coolness. It makes me happy, too, and I hope this fine fine superfine track from The Commodores can make you move and smile this dreary Friday:

( Machine Gun )

. . . and you can bet your money, it's all gonna be a stone gas, honey. Love. Peace. Soul.

A mixed bag of things to post:

After getting back home Sunday night from seeing Ten West at The Brick (great show, unfortunately only in town for the weekend and closed), I finally got to see Todd Haynes' movie (or "Suppositions on a Film Concerning Dylan") I'm Not There for the first time and was completely blown away and then spent yesterday morning with the bonus material from the 2-disk set on and going in the background on the computer as I started writing this -- as I was rewatching the film with the director's commentary on, I wound up stopping my writing; couldn't concentrate on both.

The film completely knocked me out and I recommend it highly, though I have no idea how it'll play anyone other than a Dylan-obsessive who can also sit there and tick off with glee all the 60s movie references as they go by (8 1/2, Petulia, Performance, lots o' Godard, Blowup, etc. etc.). Berit digs Dylan, but not to the same degree, and wouldn't get most of the film refs, but seemed to like it (she had the same reaction to much of it she had when seeing some of the real footage of Dylan in No Direction Home, re: the fans who turned on the man when he went electric and the press - especially the British press - who were always trying to figure out what his hustle was - "What a bunch of assholes!").

In any case, the movie = amazing.

I wound up glad about one thing I didn't think I would, as well. The movie is named for a great GREAT Dylan song from the Basement Tapes sessions which has been known from bootlegs for 40 years but never officially released until the soundtrack album. The song is actually named ("mysteriously" as Haynes says of its subtitle in one of his comments on the DVD), "I'm Not There (1956)". It's a beautiful, fragile song - simple, hypnotic, heartbreaking, and - crucially - mostly unintelligible. You catch bits of words and thoughts but they just fade in and out of understanding as the "whirlpool" of a song (as Haynes puts it, I think quoting Greil Marcus) goes by. Dylan was probably making up the words right as he sang them, so who knows how much sense they were making anyway.

Here's the song, behind a cut, with video accompaniment:

( I'm Not There (1956) )

So a great deal of the beauty and mystery of the song - how ultimately unknowable it is - derives from its abstractness, never really comprehending what the words are, just kinda vaguely making them out. I figured then, that with a final official release - and a cover version by Sonic Youth on the same album - the words would be "settled" - Dylan or someone who could make them out from the master tape would give us the "correct" words.

Nope.

There are two sets of subtitles on the DVD, one of English for the hard-of-hearing, and one for just the song lyrics. Wonderfully, when the song finally comes up in the film itself, the two different sets of titles have almost completely different interpretations of Dylan's words. Then the Sonic Youth version plays over the end credits, and it's a third version of the words! Obviously, everyone's just been left on their own still to decide for themselves what the lyrics are (and I've found many versions online, no two the same, with some overlap here and there, all of which sound plausible if you listen to them next to the song).

For example, in this cut, here's three versions of a chorus-verse-verse-chorus sequence from the song, as subtitled three different ways on the DVD:

( But it's not too fast for Slim . . . )

Perfect.

Images seen recently to be shared - here's one I grabbed from Bryan Enk's Facebook page (hope that's okay, Bryan) that brings back fond memories of theatre on Ludlow Street. Yuri Lowenthal and me sitting on the garbage bins outside The Piano Store theatre as I give notes to the cast of my first production of Film Is Evil: Radio Is Good, Summer, 1998:

Meanwhile, ANYTHING is possible with the power of RADIO!

Howabout some videos, inside this cut?

( Recent Videos of Interest )

Enjoy.

When I was a fairly young film geek, my dad and stepmom gave me Manny Farber's classic collection of film writing, Negative Space.

I enjoyed a lot of it, but was often hung up by his negative opinions of films and filmmakers I held dear, who he could slight greatly with a brief, cutting remark. So I didn't go back to Farber much for years. Eventually, I did, at an age where I could defend, in my head at least, the artists I loved from Farber's disapprobrium while appreciating his insights, which were great.

His most famous essay, "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art" is one of the great statements of 20th Century criticism, and I can't recommend it highly enough (even if it too slams artists I revere - the argument is sound, if I think his examples are sometimes off).

Manny Farber died yesterday at the age of 91. The film geek world mourns.

A great overview of Farber and the many reactions to his death (and details of his life and work) can be found HERE at Movie City Indie.

Girish Shambu wrote a piece over two years ago on Farber's most famous essay HERE, and while he has the same problem with some of Farber's distastes for his favorites that I do, he starts a good discussion on the essay (with lengthy quotes) that continues into the comments.

Paul Schrader, film critic-turned-filmmaker, owns a painting by Farber, Untitled: New Blue, and made a short film about it, its creation, and Farber (backed by one of my favorite Philip Glass piano pieces, "Wichita Vortex Sutra"), which can be seen at his site HERE.

. . . [what] termite art aims at: buglike immersion in a small area without point or aim, and, over all, concentration on nailing down one moment without glamorizing it, but forgetting this accomplishment as soon as it has been passed; the feeling that all is expendable, that it can be chopped up and flung down in a different arrangement without ruin.

The three shows proceed.

Harry in Love is rehearsing very smoothly, which is to be expected for this already fully-written, cut, cast well, traditional comedy. The biggest hangup I've had was when I had to go over an incredibly tiny moment over and over last night - it's a gag I love and the timing needed to be ABSOLUTELY PERFECT for it to work at all.

The structure of the moment is that two people are yelling at each other heatedly and a third suddenly comes out with a pertinent but unexpected piece of information - there needs to be a brief beat of silence, and then the other three people in the room look at the person who's suddenly spoken up. So the brief beat and the look have to be timed just right, and, even more importantly, fall together with one "bump" like a period, to make the laugh work. It was getting the bump right - if anyone's movement trailed off rather than just fell into place, the moment didn't work, and it took a while to get everyone on the same page with the movement - if Ken Simon (the person I'm yelling with in the scene) made a double gesture (arm, then head) it didn't work (arm and head together worked); if Tom Reid, the person interrupting us, moved his head around, looking at us, during the beat and look to him, it didn't work.

So about 10 or 12 minutes were spent on this tiny moment, which seems like a lot, but then 10 minutes of play can go by in rehearsal without me needing to fix anything, so it all works out - there's a very specific rhythm to the play, a comic give and take that resembles, at various points, the timing of Abbott & Costello, Laurel & Hardy, Edgar Kennedy with Harpo & Chico Marx in Duck Soup, and Zero Mostel & Gene Wilder in the second scene of The Producers. So when we all get the groove going and get that rhythm, the play really takes care of itself. But we have to get that groove, which gets easier and easier the more we do it.

Spell and Everything Must Go are okay except I need to finish the scripts, dammit, which is proving much harder than expected. I keep saying that, and then I have a day where everything just COMES to me on one script or the other, for one scene or another, and I think, "Now I'm on a ROLL!" And then I finish that bit and the next one . . . doesn't happen. I have a schedule of pages set for myself now which, if I can stick to it, will have Spell done before this coming Sunday's rehearsal and EMG before next Tuesday's. I have some new pieces of Spell for tonight, luckily, but not as much as I'd like.

I also had to recast a role in each show (besides the recent addition of Tory to EMG), so Samantha Mason is now in Spell and Sarah Engelke is now in EMG, which are good additions to the groups.

Spell looks good and I feel good about it, as long as I can keep the writing at the same quality I've had. Still, it's a bigger work than I imagined - I guess wider is the more appropriate term; it's about more than I thought, and as comments/thoughts come in from this very smart and thoughtful cast, I have to deal with the issues that are raised, which is daunting and the writing problem at this point. And I've been putting off the six hardest scenes for last (out of 32 scenes in the play), hoping I can get a better intellectual grip on the material I have to deal with before setting them down (in brief, Cuba, Palestine, the Peoples' Republic of China).

I think there's a good reason I've never dealt with serious political material in my work before except on the very metaphoric level. In the past I've always said of political art that generally that I wasn't fond of it because generally it meant that either the politics or the art suffered from being combined with the other. And I'd rather see great art with shallow politics than the other way around (there is SO much lousy art whose politics I agree with, but that is SO annoying - I hate hearing something like my own point-of-view being espoused by Bad Art). It has been this current Administration of the USA that has made me feel I had to say SOMETHING about this country in my work (leading to World Gone Wrong, That's What We're Here For, and the staging of my versions of Hamlet and Foreman's Symphony of Rats).

So . . . {sigh} . . . maybe the trick is to just let go of the idea of dealing with some of this in Spell at the level I've been getting to in my head. Just letting the Art go where it needs to and use the material within it, not force the play to take in more than it wants to.

Everything Must Go doesn't worry me as much as it did briefly. I had a momentary loss-of-faith in my abilities for this one, but got over it. Great rehearsal the other night, in which two dance sequences came together - one to "Slug" by Passengers, the other to "Handsome Man" by Barbara Pittman. Really nice, and I'm VERY happy with them. I think I got to the point of figuring out how to work with the dancers of the company and choreograph in collaboration with them, and use their varied abilities and styles.

Unfortunately, during the rehearsal at Champions Studios, big clumsy me, working with my shoes off, kicked a radiator nice and hard, resulting in my right little toe turning several rather spectacular shades of purple - which has continued for two days now, with pain that comes and goes in odd ways (sometimes just the toe hurts if I put pressure on it, sometimes that's fine but it hurts if I curl it, sometimes there's no specific pain in the toe but the whole front of the foot aches).

In this cut, a picture of my toe as it was last night - I'd generally not hide this, but maybe some people don't want to see my injured, mottled toe . . .

( Maybe I'll Do a Photo a Day and Show the Progress . . . )

In the other world, the great film collagist and eccentric Bruce Conner has died at the age of 74. I was going to link to a whole bunch of videos of his work, but the fine fine superfine folks at Movie City Indie have already handled that better than I could, doing two wonderful posts about Conner HERE and HERE.

Excellent postings, those, and the first contains eight of Conner's films embedded in it, including his landmark A Movie (1958) and his videos for Byrne & Eno's "America Is Waiting" and Devo's "Mongoloid" - and a surprising collaboration with Toni Basil (or "Antonia Christina Basilotta" as she's credited here), "Breakaway," which features original footage of Basil dancing (most of Conner's work is made up of found footage) that gets into some NSFW territory (oh, just saw it's from 1966! so this was immediately post-Village of the Giants and pre-Head for Basil . . .).

Worth watching, all those films - though I can't say I've gotten through all of them yet myself. And here's A Movie inside a cut, as I'd like to have this handy and give you a taste of Conner's work, right here and now . . .

( A MOVIE by Bruce Conner )

Now I have to get back to not only my writing of the shows, but getting out the next section of press releases for them, which takes time as well. I also have to deal today with finishing up some business with The Costume Collection and separate matters with Fractured Atlas. And Berit and I need to have a proper sit-down about the postcard designs for the three shows and making up prop/set/costume/sound/special lights/projection lists of what we will need for each show.

Just a couple of weeks of GETTING STUFF DONE every waking moment, and it'll all be fine . . .