March 6, 2008
the new black
At some point during the ’60s, Sammy Davis Jr. supposedly cried, “I’ve spent my whole life becoming white and now suddenly black is beautiful!”
The Clintons are to aspirational politics what Sammy Davis Jr. was to blackness. They sold out hope long ago because they saw it as an impediment to progress, and they weren’t completely wrong. Given the era in which they came up, theirs might well have been the best approach.
Everyone realizes that Obama represents a threat to their way of doing things, and therefore to their power. What’s less obvious is that he’s also a threat to their narrative about themselves. If he can really succeed at a national level without completely selling out his own authentic instincts, that makes them lesser creatures for poker caribestip pokerjugar card studplay 7 card studtorneos de poquerpoker texas holdem gratis,poker texas holdem,poker texas holdem onlinejuegos de poquer gratispoker del juegojuegos polli pokerjuego poker texascaribbean poker onlinejugadas texas holdemcartas de poker gratisjugar poquer webjuego de poker en españolpai gow poker paginas webjuego poker gratuitojuegos eroticos pokerapuesta onlineruleta online,juegos online la ruleta,ruleta de la suerte onlinejuegos azar lineacasino madridgames free downloadjuegos flash casinojugar apostar paginas webjuego gratis onlinecasino ruleta gratiscasinos alquilerjuegos segurosganar dinero casinoamerican rouletteganar dinero paginas internetjuego casino lineajuego seguro pagina internetganar premio portal internetjugar video pokerjugar cartas lineajuego casino portales internetcasino internacional portales webcasinos virtuales paginas internetcasino internacional onlinecasinos paginas webbaccarat en lineapremio gordojugar interactivo paginas webpremio paginas webcasino o netbest online casinosjugar gratis portales webapuestas en internet having done so — not in the judgment of others, but in the darkness of their own hearts.
A historian might point out that they, like Sammy, were subject to the culture of the time, but that doesn’t really remove the sting of watching someone achieve the same worldly goals you did while remaining unbent.
Like a lot of African-American performers in the ’60s, Davis briefly wore an Afro, the most obvious symbol of black pride, but he dropped it almost immmediately. It looked like pandering on him, and I’m willing to bet he found it uncomfortable. I fancy that he missed the showman’s palette of straighteners, relaxers, pomades, and perfumes he had come to associate with his public persona.
Because the Clintons were gifted and determined people, their transformation was complete. They can never go back and recover their authentic selves.
It’s hard for me to muster any sympathy for them, but I’m at an age where I’ve begun to appreciate the poignancy of looking back over what you’ve done and honestly assessing it. I don’t know if they’re still capable of honest assessment of anything. But if they are, they’re looking at Obama and seeing their unlived lives. And I feel their pain.
December 21, 2007
sad: comments
I’m still investigating other options, but it’s starting to look as though I’m going to have to shut down the comments section entirely. The number of spam comments has exploded in the past week or so, so that I’m getting as many as twenty a day, all of which I have to delete. Even in batch mode, that’s a lot of deleting. I’m pretty sure I’m now requiring registration to comment, so I’m not sure how the spambots run that particular gauntlet, but here they are.
My original idea was to leave each post open for comments for a few weeks before shutting it down, and I might still try that. But the amount of housekeeping that would entail runs counter to my slothful nature.
So if you try to comment on this and you can’t, just know that it’s not you, it’s them. And you can always write me by typing the word “holler,” pressing Shift-2, and then adding the URL address above, minus the WWW part.
Adieu, blogosphere. It’s been fun, but now it’s time for me to withdraw into my own little world to contemplate my navel. Again.
December 15, 2007
of the raking of books
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve taken three different loads of books to Half Price Books to sell. Probably about ten parcels in all, a parcel being either a liquor box or a grocery sack — they’re roughly equal in volume. I would like to say that I didn’t do it for the money, but I needed the money, scant though it was. (I used to work at Half Price Books, so I won’t complain about the pittance they pay, but I will say that even I was shocked by how low the last offer was.)
Mostly, though, I just needed to unload some inventory. It was starting to get oppressive.
I’m not nearly as manic a buyer of books as I once was, but I can still walk out of Half Price with six or seven volumes under my arm and think nothing of it. The money isn’t the issue; sometimes those books are only a few bucks apiece. The problem is that books are to be read, not owned, and keeping a personal library of books I was never going to read had begun to gnaw at me. I felt increasingly guilty about buying new books while their predecessors sat unread, and the booklover’s wall of denial had started to crack.
Consider: post-purge, I still own somewhere in the neighborhood of 750 books. (I probably got rid of at least half that many.) If I were to read one book every day, it would take me two years to get through the books I currently have sitting in my house.
Sure, some of them are reference books you’d never read all the way through, and some of them I’ve already read. (Not many, though; I tend to get rid of them once I’m done. I’m not much of a rereader.) The point stands: I have way more books than I can possibly read.
I’ve been acting like I’m eventually going to get around to them. Only someone suffering from a similar delusion could identify with my fantasies about being quarantined or put under house arrest, just so I’d have an excuse to get through some of these bloody books.
Bibliomania aside, there’s another reason I keep so many books around, and it has to do with keeping my options open. I mean, god forbid I should have to read a book that doesn’t exactly suit my mood of the moment. And furthermore, when I get an urge to read a certain book, I want to read it right now. Not an hour from now, after I’ve run to BookPeople to buy it, or two days from now, when Amazon delivers it. And don’t even bring up the possibility that it’s out of print and the library’s copy is checked out and I might have to wait weeks to read it. That’s just too horrifying to even think about.
All of which makes me a good American, which is to say I have a strong sense of entitlement and am easily discontented. Barry Schwartz can explain why too much choice is a bad thing — and I recommend his book on the subject – but given that I was born into the upper middle class of the most affluent nation in history, any limiting of my own choices is going to be self-imposed.
I remember coming back from Czechoslovakia in 1992 and realizing how battered Americans are by extraneous choices all day long, and I remember the revelation that followed: You don’t have to take everything that’s offered. Sometimes the best choice is no choice at all.
But if you’re going to make a choice, Schwartz says, the best choice is the one that you don’t second-guess.
One way to not second-guess your choice is to know everything about the ramifications of every possible choice so that you can know for certain which is the best one. Good luck with that.
But the other way is just to decide to commit to your choices and affirm them once you’ve made them. (Remind you of anything?)
I still find myself trolling my own shelves for something to read and then gathering six or seven books to take to bed with me, unwilling to commit to one until I’ve dipped into several of them. At times like these I’m pretty sure I’m less interested in reading than I am in being well read, and if I could just lay my hands on the books and have their contents appear whole in my head I would. This is reading as acquisition, not as interaction.
But the other night I actually opened a novel, Brian Morton’s A Window Across the River, and then read it through in one sitting. I had gone to the library looking for another novel of his, referred to as “near-perfect” in a review of the filmed adaptation, but it was checked out. So I settled for one with a plot I was less interested in.
It didn’t change my life or blow my mind or even make me think things I had never thought. It was just a well-written, unpretentious novel about believable people — New York artists, but still — trying to figure out work and love and whether one always has to trump the other.
And I sat up in bed with a book that was not my first choice and read until I was done, and not even the heavy reproachful slience of all those neglected books in the other room could stop me.
November 15, 2007
bigmouth strikes again
I stayed up till three this morning playing Scrabulous with Roy (we were separated by only ten points at the end, so I guess we’re well matched) and occasionally spraying gasoline on the Austin Improv thread about the UCB show, which provided me with an instructive moment.
Like a lot of people, I have a tendency to get nasty in chatrooms. (That’s nasty in the sense of rude and vituperative, not in the sense of asking if there are any teenage girls on the thread.) I’ve gotten a lot better, which is not saying much, but at least I no longer write things that I know will be hurtful.
So there I was, tapping out my little self-satisified sermons about What the Real Problem Is, proud of how I was shedding light on the subject without attacking anyone. I was covered, ethically speaking. Possibly even helping others. Just another concerned netizen, dousing an overheated discussion with a bracing pail of the cold water of logic.
Well . . . horseshit. Calming influences have even less effect on the net than they do in real life — having spent many years as the asshole who refuses to drop it, I know whereof I speak — and furthermore, it’s just plain arrogant for me to assume that I’m above the fray. My intentions are good, but so are everyone else’s, which doesn’t prevent them (and me) from expressing ourselves in ways that are practically designed to get people’s backs up.
Which happened again at the end of the night, when someone took something I’d written and described it in comically exaggerated (and therefore inaccurate) terms.
I guess my petard needed hoisting. Making fun of something someone said by comically exaggerating (and therefore misrepresenting) it is a favorite technique of mine, and no matter how much I try to expunge it, it creeps back in when I’m writing — it’s entertaining, dammit! — so it was appropriate that I got hit with it just as I was trying to disengage.
The irony is that yesterday I’d been studying the Five Precepts of Buddhism and realized that whereas the deal-killer for me used to be Number Five, refraining from intoxicants, nowadays my biggest problems are with Number Four, refraining from incorrect speech. (It’s not that I didn’t have a problem with incorrect speech previously; I was just drinking too much to notice.) Incorrect speech can be defined as that which is untrue, abusive, divisive, or idle.
It’s that last one that gets me. Because while my online chatter (generally) falls short of ill will, it’s not really necessary either. I’m sure that at some point something I’ve posted to an online forum has been useful or entertaining to someone. My writing is not completely without value.
And yet as a percentage of my total contributions, that subset is minuscule. And I have to ask myself: Is this the best use of my time?
That’s what a lot of my moral life comes down to these days, as I shuck off years of behavior based on shame and guilt and misperception and embrace my remaining days with increasing urgency: Is this the best use of my time?
More often than it used to be, the answer is yes. Because no is really starting to scare me.
a little help here
Elgar’s first cello concerto is the kind of music I would like to hear swelling in the background whenever I have to make a difficult decision, because it would make doing the right thing poignant and dramatic rather than just a pain in the ass.
November 11, 2007
what a piece of work
I keep getting drawn back into Hamlet. I listened to a recorded performance starring Simon Russell Beale on a recent car trip, and then reread it when I got back. Now I’m watching the 1964 Richard Burton version, a theatrical performance (filmed in front of an actual, coughing audience) that’s the basis for the Wooster Group’s current production.
The Burton production was directed by John Gielgud, apparently the definitive Hamlet of his day, who plays the voice of the Ghost. The set and staging are very spare — the actors play in modern street clothes — but the Ghost is represented by a giant helmeted shadow thrown across the back of the stage, which is gratifyingly spooky.
I don’t know enough to critique Burton’s performance, but I’m enjoying it. Though he’s a bit shouty. I do keep thinking that he’s a little long in the tooth to be playing Hamlet (he was 39) and then I realize that it’s just as much his whole persona as it is his age. Like his modern-day counterparts George Clooney and Clive Owen, Burton practically reeks of assured masculine self-confidence, which no amount of anguished cries or hand-wringing can completely dissipate. Burton is too handsome, healthy, and worldly-seeming to really pull off a part that’s so grounded in illness and indecision.
One thing that strikes me on this viewing (that I’m sure isn’t original with me) is the play’s sifting of the nature of reality. Unless I’m missing something obvious, there are four states of deviation from everyday waking reality in the play: death, sleep, madness, and playacting. Sleep is the everyday, nontraumatic version of death in the same way that playacting is the socially acceptable form of madness (i.e., the creation of an alternate reality).
So far Burton is playing Hamlet as having complete control over his flights of supposed madness. (I haven’t finished watching it yet.) But it occurs to me that one possible interpretation of the play is that Hamlet begins by feigning madness but lapses into genuine insanity by the play’s end — a reading bolstered by the fact that the Ghost appears to him and him alone in Gertrude’s bedroom, whereas previously it’s visible to other people.
In the Ghost’s telling, King Hamlet’s murder takes place as he sleeps, so that the everyday stand-in for death unexpectedly becomes the real thing. It seems like this transformation could be pointing to a similar transformation from feigned madness to actual in his son.
If I remember rightly, Stephen Greenblatt argues in Will in the World that one of Shakespeare’s contributions to modern psychological drama was removing explanatory elements from the existing plots that he reworked into his plays. For instance, in the original story of Hamlet, Hamlet witnesses the murder and must feign madness so that Claudius won’t kill him. Robbing us of that neat explanation allows all these other questions to bubble up and complicate things.
It would also be a different play if the audience were deprived of the soliloquy in which Claudius confesses to his brother’s murder. Then we could completely identify with Hamlet’s indecision, since he’d be torn between the possibility of failing to avenge his father and the possibility of murdering an innocent man.
I suppose the fact that Hamlet hesitates too long to do what everyone knows what must be done is what makes him modern, and why I identify with him. But I also feel a little sick every time the ending rolls around, which is a strange reaction to have to the single greatest work of literature in the language.
(And has anyone ever made the observation that the Bhagavad-Gita is also about a supernatural being urging an indecisive prince to overcome his moral qualms about killing his relatives? Probably.)
November 6, 2007
bustle in my hedgerow
I’m hesitant to jinx it, but I’m doing sitting practice in the morning more regularly than I have for a really long time. I have no idea why I’m suddenly doing it after literally years of browbeating myself for not doing it, but so far so good.
Just as the starting bell struck this morning, I became aware of a lot of movement just outside my window. My house backs up onto a parking lot used by the businesses next door (and not by me), so I’m used to a good deal of activity happening mere feet away from me even when I’m in, say, my own bedroom: tradespeople tromping around, car doors slamming, inventory and trash being carted in and out.
What I was hearing definitely wasn’t human, though. Sometimes it’s hard to tell, especially when a nocturnal animal is making roughly the same creeping progress through your dead leaves that a psychotic killer would if he were intent on ratcheting you up to maximum terror before offing you, but in this case it was obviously the frenetic, random-seeming movement of an animal. It sounded like a big one, based on how many leaves were moving at once.
If you’ve never tried to meditate, you will not be impressed by this at all: I didn’t get up to look. I wanted to, believe me, especially since a couple of nights ago I had confronted what looked like two 30-pound raccoons in that same back lot and was very curious to see if for some reason they were out during the day. (Raccoons are the worst to confront, because they’re not scared of you. They sort of make a token gesture of retreat and then look back at you like what’s your fucking problem? At which point you realize that you really didn’t have a Plan B and just sort of assumed that your species status would carry the day. It doesn’t.)
Being proud of not getting up and going to the window would run somewhat counter to why I want to meditate in the first place. But it might at least suggest some progress being made, since I can very easily remember a time when I would have not only gotten up but fully justified it. (”Well, I have an obligation to see what’s going on back there! Harrumph!”)
Instead I sat for the full thirty minutes, completely distracted the whole time, and only got up and looked when I was done.
It was grackles. A lot of them.
Speaking of which, I think we need a specific word for a group of grackles, so I’m opening the floor to nominations. Mine are screed, plunder, and insurgency.
November 5, 2007
jazz for squares
Somewhat related to the previous post: one of the ways in which improv has blown my mind is that it’s showed me new ways to think about music. I really didn’t think that was going to happen anymore. It’s not that I thought I was never going to be surprised or delighted by music again, but I figured my templates for dealing with it were pretty much set.
I am not a jazz guy. I like it and appreciate it but for the most part have not been much moved by it, and since music is for me primarily an emotional experience, if I don’t feel it I don’t get it.
A couple of weeks ago, inspired by watching Bird, I downloaded the Massey Hall concert. For non-jazz fans: this is a live recording of a quintet consisting of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach. It’s difficult to convey the accumulated weight of those names, but suffice to say this is the all-star jazz team of all time.
So I’m listening to it like I usually do jazz, which is to say a little distantly, and “Night in Tunisia” is playing, and at the end there’s a moment where they go back into the main theme of the song, and I had this flash of them as improvisers. I wasn’t thinking about the music as an abstract entity, I was thinking about five people on stage paying close attention to what everyone else is doing and playing, and jazz suddenly made sense to me. Thank you, improv!
this is a journey into sound
Last night I accompanied the graduation shows for Asaf’s solo improv class and Shana’s scene study class. It was fun, though playing two shows in a row is a really good way to highlight the limitations of my sonic palette. I’m not a one-trick pony, exactly, but I’m in the single digits.
However: there were times last night when I was approaching the musical improv much more like I approach it onstage; that is, there were a few moments when I just let my fingers fall where they might and then worked with whatever came out.
When I first started accompanying improv, I thought that being a better musician would allow me to come up with more different ideas and more accurately execute the ideas I did come up with, and both of those are true. But that’s also the musical-improv equivalent of standing offstage thinking, “In the next scene, I will be a pirate who threatens a young girl with ravishment and then repents my evil ways.” Entertaining? Quite possibly. Improv? Not so much.
The idea of practicing diligently every day just so I can nail “Hot in Herre” when pimped to it (as opposed to fumbling around and mangling it, as I did last night) fills me with ennui. Traditionally, the ideal improv accompanist is someone who is not only technically gifted but who also has a huge catalogue of songs at the ready AND has an improviser’s sensitivity to what’s happening onstage. Good luck with that. Dave Asher in Chicago fits this description, which is why he’s one of the few improvisers at iO who actually gets paid. (Locally, our best and brightest is Michael Brockman, for whose presence Girls Girls Girls is forever in my debt.)
I would love to play as well as Brockman, but I’m not remotely interested in listening to and learning the week’s 20 most popular downloads just in case someone mentions them onstage. (Not that he does that; he doesn’t have to. But I would actually have to sit down and learn those songs in order to play them.)
There’s a double standard, which is completely understandable but insidious nonetheless: improvisers who would cover their faces in shame if someone started doing Shakespeare monologues or Austin Powers impersonations in a scene are still thrilled when recognizable pop music makes its appearance. And I get that, I really do. I just don’t have the skill set and don’t want it, at least not to do that.
What I am interested in, and which I got a small taste of last night, is actual musical improvisation: really being in the moment and responding to whatever just happened. This is difficult with scoring, which can’t turn on a dime the way a scene can — or, rather, it can, but it loses its emotional impact when it does so — and it’s even more difficult for me, given my limitations as a musician. But I feel like there’s a lot of interesting possibility there.
Improv’s relationship to music is between twenty and fifty years out of date. On the one hand, you have the traditional piano accompaniment, which is an enjoyable theatrical convention — but that’s all it is. Solo piano music hasn’t been popular for many decades now, so while it’s music, it’s not the music that most people listen to.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have the integration of recorded, multiinstrumental music into shows, as intros, outros, and for specific prearranged sections. I saw a great show called Indra’s Net in Chicago where the format was the leadup to and aftermath of an event that affected the whole community. (In the show I saw, it was food poisoning at a barbecue.) The leadup and aftermath were straight improv scenes, but the event itself was staged as a comic ballet to recorded music.
But recorded music can’t be changed by what’s happening onstage. At the same time, improvising music with multiple musicians is incredibly difficult, and there’s the additional problem of volume.
There’s a huge unexplored expanse of territory between music and improv, and anyone who starts wandering around in it now may well be considered a pioneer ten years hence. Sara Farr has been doing really interesting soundtracking for Get Up using prerecorded music and sounds, in which the improvisational element lies not only in what choices she makes from a huge library of material but also in the performers’ relationship to the music. (For example, at the top of the show Shana and Shannon ask the audience to pick a random number and Sara plays the corresponding file, which then inspires the audience suggestion.)
My personal bet is that the sound improviser of the future will be someone adept on both kinds of keyboard, blending prerecorded samples and files with spontaneous musical creation as seems appropriate. And what seems appropriate to some people will probably err more and more toward continual soundtracking. The fact is that we’re getting to the point where an improv scene is one of the few places where music isn’t playing constantly.
And now that I think about it, maybe I’m missing the point entirely. Maybe instead of figuring out ways to shoehorn music into some of the few remaining silent spaces in the world, I should be more concerned with keeping them that way.
November 2, 2007
rules of the game
A friend has written me telling me he expects me to post every day in public, which is interesting. His take on it is that NaBloPoMo is a game, that I’ve signed up for the game, and that therefore I need to play it. A legitimate point.
But one of the perks of getting older is that I no longer feel like I need to finish everything I start. I can’t tell you how much of my life I’ve reclaimed by learning how to put a book down when I realize it’s going nowhere. More cruelly, I have far less problem bailing on a conversation, or even a friendship, once I determine that the connection has gone dead.
Another benefit of aging is realizing how often I play by someone else’s arbitrary rules instead of taking a second to think about what I actually want or need in a situation. I think this is pretty common: we’re bludgeoned with so many nonnegotiable agreements every day of our lives — when was the last time you read the fine print on the licensing agreement that pops up whenever you install new software? — we just assume that this is how things work. It is, but only because we agree to it.
So posting every day just because I signed up on a whim on a particular day last month doesn’t strike me as a moral imperative . . . particularly since I didn’t make the promise to anyone but myself. Sure, it’s a game. But it’s one I make the rules for. And my rule is that I’m going to write every day this month. Not for you. For me.
I’m pretty sure everyone will find a way to muddle along even on those days my brilliance goes unrefracted through the ether. And for my part, I’ll get to write about things that are important to me, like who I’m fucking and who’s fucking me, without worrying about who might get upset, or hurt, or offended.
I must be cruel only to be kind;
Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.