Saturday, September 24, 2005

September 24, 2005 @ 12:32 PM The Rogue, Genet, and The Balcony I picked up a copy of Robert Brustein’s, "The Theatre of Revolt," from the resource table at one end of our rehearsal space. I can’t hope to summarize Brustein’s extended treatment of the theatre of revolt and of the relation between Antonin Artaud and Genet, but one or two sentences struck me squarely between the eyes: Genet has "the capacity to transform pathology into ceremonious drama through a rich, imaginative use of the stage. Genet’s plays take the form of liberated dreams, organized into rites." The Balcony is a rite, a ceremony, the closest analogy to which is, perhaps, a high mass. One of the challenges for the actor…especially a novice, which I count myself... is to recognize that there are ceremonies within the ceremonies, appearances within the appearances. At some point trying to winkle out the logic underlying the pieces of the ritual is nearly impossible. Who am I? Am I an actor participating in a ceremonial ritual? When I become "the Envoy" what do I become? Am I an envoy on a mission to save the social structure attacked by revolution? Am I, that is, an element piercing the illusions of the Balcony from outside? Or am I simply another customer of Madam Irma’s illusions playing out a sexual fantasy with a whore dressed as Saint Teresa? Or am I a combination of those possibilities? At Mass, when the host is elevated, is it important to settle the question of whether it is a wheaten wafer or the body of Christ? No, because what counts is the ritual of elevation, the rite in which Priest, Acolytes, and worshipers take part. So it is with "The Balcony." Perhaps. 1:38:55 PM    comment []

	Saturday, September 17, 2005

September 17, 2005 @ 8:53 PM Get Fuzzy I’m a big booster of Darby Conley’s cartoon strip, "Get Fuzzy." Satchel the dog is enchanting and Bucky the cat is wickedly loveable…in a depraved and irresistible way. I suspect that there is more of Bucky in Conley than we have ever suspected and I offer the following as proof. Some months ago Conley ran a short series of "rejected story ideas." I was rifling through my image collection earlier today and discovered that I had saved one of those strips, which I offer below. It perfectly suited the bloody-minded emotional mood I’ve been in lately. Here ‘tis: 9:06:10 PM    comment []

	Friday, September 09, 2005

September 9, 2005 @9:34 am The Curmudgeon Strikes Again I got some e-mail from the Curmudgeon very early this morning. It really is a "Letter From Underground." I think his liver may be diseased. "Once you drag government into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub there’s no point in being surprised if it leaves you to drown in the attic. Life in a state of nature (without a strong, efficient, well-run, intelligently managed government) is exactly what Hobbes said it was: Nasty, mean, swinish, brutal, and short. "I might not have the quotation letter perfect, but you get the idea. "These people are supposed to protect us against terrorists, as well as come to our aid in the event of a great natural disaster. Lots of luck. About the only thing they’ve managed to do is make airline travel annoying. I have a friend who bought metal-free shoes. They do not trip any alarms. He still has to take them off. "It surprises me that nearly everyone in America spent hours glued to the tube and still polls show people think the President did a good job "handling" the disaster. What were they watching, re-runs of Charlton Heston disaster movies? ************* "I learned a tough lesson a few days ago: Don’t strike up a conversation with an old guy. I was leaving a local bakery and made a casual comment to an old geezer who was dusting his SUV with his handkerchief. "I got his life story. "The lesson I learned: No one gives a rat’s ass about how it used to be when you were a boy. Don’t bore the world around you to death. That was then, and this is now. The distance between then and now becomes greater with each passing month of technology-fueled change. Shut up and learn about "now." ************* "A famous philosopher once said the bad art was corrupted feeling. Bad art can corrupt feeling, too. The principle applies to all art, including architecture. I would not normally obsess about this except for the fact that a local charter school has built a string of classroom buildings to house their little children that are bone ugly.(Amphiboly warning: the classrooms are ugly, not the kids. If I thought I could count on your knowing when we use "that" and when we use "who" the warning would not be necessary.) At any rate, I watched these classrooms being built (cheaply, I imagine) and they have all the charm of sheds assembled to house migrant cotton pickers. "Kids are sensitive to these things. Oh, well. Perhaps the classrooms have lots of brightly colored posters. Maybe something like, "Christ Curing The Esthetically Challenged." 10:49:00 AM    comment []

	Friday, September 02, 2005

September 2, 2005 @ 12:56 PM It’s Friday, so here as promised is word from the Curmudgeon. (What follows appeared in The Desert Leaf a year ago I offer it here in celebration of Labor Day.) Everyone loves Labor Day. It's a great three day weekend, with a paid day off. The weather's fine and the back yard and patio look as good as they have all year. If you're not going to the mountains, lakes or seashore... kick back, light the grill, and suck down a brew. You might also remember to thank the men and women of organized labor... many of whom were beaten, murdered, or run out of town so that we could enjoy the eight hour day, paid vacations, pensions, and guarantees that women and children would not be exploited in the workplace. You may have forgotten, but the eight hour day and the paid vacation are not part of the natural order of things. They represent labor union victories. I am now about to use a certain word. It's not a bad word, it's just a simple noun. I guarantee you I do not freight it with any nasty emotional overtones. Ready? Capitalism. Our economic system is Capitalism. It is a nifty system; it really works. But it is intrinsic to that system that it treats labor like any other raw material and will always try to buy it as cheaply as possible. It will go overseas for it; it will confine it in little cubicles; and it will buy a lot of it part time so it doesn't have to pay benefits. That's the way the system works...for labor. It doesn't work quite that way for other kinds of raw material. Sure, a contractor will try to buy cement cheaply, but he has to dicker with the cement guy, who will raise or lower his price until the two can agree to do business. In the sports world, when a college basketball star hires an agent to negotiate with team owners we think nothing of it. The agents bargain with the owners for the players' services and the athletes refuse to play until they have a contract. But if a group of carpenters gets together to do the same thing it's socialism...or worse. On the 2nd of November in 1909, during what became known as the "Uprising of the 20,000," female garment workers went on strike in New York. Many were arrested and a judge told those arrested: "You are on strike against God." Wow...who'd have guessed? There's nothing unpatriotic about the union movement; it's as American as apple pie. Boston carpenters walked off the job in April of 1825 in the interest of a 10 hour work day. Ten years later, children working in the silk mills in Patterson, New Jersey went on strike. Of course they had an outtrageous demand: A six day work week of eleven hour days. Sweatshops, eleven hour days, inadequate wages and wretched or dangerous working conditions are largely a thing of the past. The result is we tend not to notice or care about Capitalism's continuous attack on the power and even the existence of the union movement. This may not be a good thing. A union is the average hourly worker's only defense against the economic power of a system that always tries to buy raw materials at the lowest possible price. It's not dumb, if you're an hourly wage person, to remember you're just so much raw material to that system. The union maid and her guy aren't opposed to Capitalism. If you stop and think about it, the fact is that just the opposite is true. These folks simply want to behave exactly like all the other links in the capitalist chain of supply and demand. All they ask for is the right to bargain for the price they get for their labor and the conditions under which it is supplied. Why should they be the only players in the game denied that right? But for now, enough. Get the ol' hammock swinging, pop another brew, and dribble mustard from a hot dog on your shirt. Enjoy the day off with pay. It looks like we've all profited from the American labor movement, even if we've never belonged to a union. On Labor's special day let's all heed the old organizing slogan and "Take it easy....but take it." 1:05:23 PM    comment []

The Curmudgeon will be heard from soon. At the moment he is screwing around with his type faces, trying to understand the peculiar behavior of Firefox with respect to font sizes and appearances. 10:16:22 AM    comment []

	Thursday, September 01, 2005

September 1, 2005 @ 6:54 am Human Suffering I have long been critical of TV news-snipitry, but a minute and ten second clip on CNN perfectly caught and expressed the suffering caused by Katrina. A man stood holding small child by the hand. He simply said, "I’ve lost everything" and went on to describe how his wife slipped out of his grasp. Her last words were, "You can’t hold me…take care of the kids and grandkids" and then she slipped away. I couldn’t help myself. The tears just streamed down my face.   The Karamazov Return In the Brothers Karamazov Ivan tells Alyosha terrible stories about acts of gratuitous cruelty to children. One of the tales is about a small girl who freezes to death. When she is found there are frozen tears on her cheeks, and Ivan says that if his ticket of admission to God’s plan is that he accept that as justified, then he will return the ticket. Me, too.   The Plan The day after the hurricane some Louisiana official, I’ve forgotten who, asked everyone in New Orleans to pray. (Some of them have started to prey, instead.) What in the world made the official think that God was in a position to do anything? The stock answer to the problem of evil has always been, "God has a plan…in the long run everything will be for the best, everything will be justified." Oh. What is that plan? No one can say, God’s plan is unknowable. Really? Then how do you know there is a plan? 7:33:43 AM    comment []

	Wednesday, August 31, 2005

This is a quick test of the new category 11:11:06 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2005 Arthur Jacobson. Last update: 9/24/05; 1:47:23 PM.