Deeds & Words

“In heaven they serve beer for breakfast.”  Loudon Wainwright III

“Dad’s in a bad mood/Dad’s got the blues.”  Richard Thompson

Richard Thompson is a guitar god.

Loudon Wainwright III is more of a trickster god, like Coyote or Raven, bringing the audience songs, story-telling, acerbic humor.  When the two team up for duets, magical fire fills the air.

First of all, the venue; the newly renovated Uptown Theater in Napa.  This 1920’s era movie palace has been lovingly restored and is a thing of beauty.  The curved ceiling is painted, including odd medallions with portraits of women’s faces in them; all of the same type, but each slightly different.  I couldn’t tell if they were supposed to be old movie stars or just some idealized It Girls.  The colored glass chandeliers have an Arts and Crafts look to them, and the wall sconces, of rich burnt-orange glass, have the familiar V-shape from the 1930s.  Curlicues of lavishly painted plaster or wood grace the walls.  The stage is surrounded by detailed Art Nouveau designs. The seats were comfortable enough that I wasn’t consciously aware that I was sitting for a two-hour performance.

The $600,000 sound system didn’t hurt either. 

Wainwright played first.  From the first two lines of his first song (“All I can do is play this song,”) he engaged the audience.  He’s a story-teller and a clown, self-deprecating, insightful and wry.  His third song was a charming ditty about how, in the afterlife, you must be able to do all the fun things that were supposedly bad for you in this life; smoke, drink, have sex.  “In heaven, no one says ‘No.’”  The chorus contained the line, “In heaven, they serve beer for breakfast,” which drew a breaker-wave of applause from the audience.

He also writes songs that are thoughtful and personal, such as the touching “The First Loudon,” where he ruminates on what he knows about his grandfather, and what traits have come down through his father’s line, and the eerie “Dead Man’s Closet,” inspired by his father’s death. There is a disturbingly ambiguous line in “The First Loudon.”  Wainwright is looking at a photo and remarks on his grandfather’s “half-clenched fist.”  He says he doesn’t need a picture, because he saw that fist every day.  Later, he comments on his own half-clenched fist.  It’s a haunting line—is it merely the recognition of the hands, or an allusion to legacy of family violence? I guess to really know, I’d have to listen to his son’s Rufus Wainwright’s songs.

He also had a thoughtful and sweet song about the dynamics of becoming a grandfather.  At the other end of the continuum, he played the ukulele to accompany himself on the song “Lucky You,” based on the Carl Hiaassen book which has been turned into a play—and sang a bitter and hilarious number about a woman named “Susie” who works at the Durango airport and mistreated his guitar.  Usually, I don’t appreciate rants or songs that use the word “bitch” over and over; in this case, by the end of the song, I was leaning back in my seat laughing helplessly. My friend Kathleen leaned over and said, “I think we all know a Susie.”

At one point after an instrumental bridge in one song, he said, “Whenever I try a guitar riff in a Loud and Rich show, I feel like an idiot.” This drew tremendous applause.

A few minutes after that, Thompson wandered out and they played two blues numbers together.

Wainwright has two new CDs out.  One is called High, Wide and Handsome and he sang the title song.  The other is Songs for the New Depression and most of these are social-commentary.  “Cash for Clunkers” was the best audience sing-along.

Thompson is a bit more reserved, engaging more with his music, at first, than the audience. If you consider the performance as a triangle; performer, music, audience, Wainwright somehow went to the audience first, and brought us back to the music.  Thompson went through the music to get to us.  I know that’s lame, but I don’t know how else to describe it.  As the set went on, he warmed up, but there was always a bit of formality in his interaction that was missing from the trickster who played before him.

Thompson can play music that sounds like thirteenth-entury troubadour material to 1970s vintage hard rock; all on one acoustic guitar. He had just played a slow number—I’m thinking it was “Sunset Song”—when a person down front yelled out a song request.  I didn’t hear what it was.  Thompson said, “Yes.  Thank you.”  The guy yelled it again.  Thompson hesitated, and said, “Yes, I will.  There’s just this, this thing I want to do first,” tuned up his guitar and launched into “1952 Vincent Black Lightning.”  At one of the bridges, he went into the standard “Black Lightning” guitar riff, then shifted the tempo and played blues.  It should not have worked, but it did.  After a minute or so of blues magic he brought back the sweet, laddered musical phrase that is the intro to “Black Lightning,” and finished the song. 

Lots of Thompson’s material is dark, whether it’s “Cold Kisses,” about a man secretly going through his lover’s things while she is out, comparing himself to the pictures of former lovers, or “Dad’s Gonna Kill Me,” a driving hard-rock song about the war in Iraq.  “Dad” is short for Bagdad. (“Nobody wants me here; nobody loves me here; Dad’s gonna kill me.”)   As Thompson put it, “All my songs are miserable, but at least some are slow and some are up-tempo.”

Continuing the social-commentary theme, Thompson played his song about Wall Street; “The Money Shuffle.”

For the encore, they played three songs together, included a Grateful Dead song and “Smoky Joe’s Café.”  These are distinct, disparate artists, but there is rapport and respect between them, and together they created synergy in the classic definition of that term. 

Great show.

Libertarians state that they are about personal, civil liberties (at least for some).  Their philosophy is that government should play a small, limited role in society and should not intrude on most day-to-day social and commercial interactions.  Human responsibility and the “free market” will adjust behaviors accordingly.  That’s their story, and they’re sticking to it. 

Some so-called libertarians, who claim to believe in personal responsibility and personal rights, do not support personal rights for women of reproductive age—or for anybody who wants to be married to someone of the same sex.  It’s not clear to me whether these people are really the religious right in some weird disguise, or just normal—that is to say inconsistent—human beings. 

Let’s talk, though, about the big government thing.  Whenever the government passes a law that provides for the common welfare (health insurance reform; financial reform), or addresses equal civil rights for someone, some libertarians cry about a “huge government over-reach.”  Their ideal is a government that does. . .  well, what, exactly?  Close to nothing. 

Fortunately, for discussion purposes, we don’t have to ask people to imagine what a country with a small government looks like, because we have a real live one we can look at.  Libertarians, meet Somalia. 

Somalia’s government is geographically small as well as administratively small.  The government controls a “few square blocks” of the capital of Mogadishu.  Outside of that, there is no government. 

Richard Engel, an NBC reporter who goes to lots of dangerous places: Iraq, Afghanistan, and so on, recently got back from Somalia and is headed there again.  He was on the Rachel Maddow show recently, and talked about what it was like.  Before I discuss what he had to say, though, I do want us to engage in an imaginative exercise after all.  Picture the city in which you live; or the nearest city of more than 100,000 people.  Imagine the city hall and three blocks in each direction.  Those are probably municipal and/or state buildings, some restaurants and diners, banks and ATM machines, bail bonds places, and probably about seven Starbuck’s stores.  Now imagine that beyond the boundary of those three blocks, in any direction, is complete lawlessness. It doesn’t just mean potholes in the streets.  No traffic lights, no police, no postal service, no libraries, no maintained parks, no water maintenance, no sewer maintenance, no trash removal, no fire fighters, no EMTs. 

That’s Somalia.  If you get in a car accident in Somalia, no one will come and help you unless you (somehow) have a working cell phone and can call someone.  Let’s hope that the local warlords don’t get to you first.  Engel said, “In Afghanistan, there is the military.”  In Somalia, don’t even expect the military to come help you because there isn’t any. 

But you could pay someone to help you, right?  A helpful villager?  Well, forget about using your travelers’ checks or your platinum card, or your folding money.  There is no financial infrastructure. 

What if you got sick because you drank some bad water or ate some spoiled food?  Is there a clinic you could go to?  Wait a minute, you’re thinking; nobody gets sick from water these days.  Think again.  There is no governmental arm of environmental health or public health in Somalia; nobody checks to see if water is clean or whether untreated sewage is running straight into the aquifer—or soaking into the ground right next to the standpipe you are waiting in line to drink from. 

This is not to say that no one’s in charge in Somalia.  Plenty of people are; local warlords.  They provide security for their villagers at a huge cost and serious curtailment of those villagers’ individual freedoms.  They raid each others’ territories—a free market reduced to its most basic level.  Engel pointed out that Somalia is the new Club Med for the Taliban and Al Qaeda.  “It’s like they can have their own country,” he said.  Then he corrected himself.  “They do have their own country.  Somalia.” 

Libertarians will say that this is how we all lived hundreds of years ago.  They’re right.  It was.  The problem is that they’re saying that as if it were a good thing.  People who look back to the feudal times tend to picture themselves as the warlord, not the thrall who had no freedom or individuality at all.  For me, I imagine being a woman in those times, and I don’t get a hit of golden nostalgia.  Go back to those days of “individual freedoms” and “free market forces?”  No thank you. 

Is government bureaucracy too big?  Sure, and too cumbersome and sometimes just plain silly.  But governance is a good thing—and an important thing.  Ask the descendants of Rosa Parks.  Ask any woman who now makes as much as her male colleague for doing the same work.  Ask anyone from the 1960s who is not on a walker or a cane, or in a wheelchair, now because they were given a vaccine for polio.  Ask anyone who had EMTs rescue them from their crashed vehicle or their burning house. Ask anyone who can come in from a hot sweaty run in their local park and chug a glass of water at their sink before cooling down with a pleasant shower. 

And if you really want small government?  Somalia welcomes you.

The Sonoma County Rep e-mailed me to ask if they could print out my comments and tape them in the window like they do with reviews.  I was delighted!  I’ll ignore the fact that this probably means that the show is not getting much attention from the Press Democrat or other news and entertainment sources.  I felt very proud.  The picture is not very good; mine is the second article, the one without the picture.  And they spelled my name right!

” Bottled water often comes from the same source as tap water, where that is available (often at a hundredth of the price), although it at least should be clean.  It is often undistinguishable from tap water.  In rich countries, it may have come from exotic sources like Fiji or Lapland, packed in glass or plastic destined to become rubbish, devouring energy on its travels and thus making it one of the least green and least defensible rip-offs on the market.”

The Economist, May 22, 2010

This figure showed up one morning on the outer wall of a building downtown.  I come to this part of town a lot, for meetings and things.  He caught my eye.  I didn’t know quite what he was gesturing about.  The building whose wall he graces, however, has many vacant offices right now (commercial property, remember?)  Maybe he’s a sales gimmick. 

A week or so later I came down again for another meeting across the street.  I looked up at him, and he had a companion.  I got no decent picture of the second figure, unfortunately, so you’ll have to take my word for it.  In fact, the second figure was doing something rather rude to this guy.  

A woman named Jennie T., who attends the same workgroup I was meeting with, came up.  She saw where I was looking.  “Well, that’s interesting,” she said.  “How long has it been there?” 

“I don’t know.  Do you see two figures?” 

She squinted, then moved to where I was standing.  “Yes. . . yes, I do.  And he’s. . . what’s he doing with his hand?” 

I said, “How come we can’t see the second figure from over there, but we can from here?” 

We both thought it was a mystery, and then we went inside for our meeting.  When I came out an hour and a half later, the sun had, of course, risen higher in the sky, and the second figure was gone.  Completely.  I crossed the street and looked at the wall from another angle; no second figure. 

So, I decided I was crazy and had drawn Jennie into my madness.

 Two weeks later I took an employee who was retiring out to lunch at a restaurant diagonally across the street.  As we walked over, I looked back.  “How many figures do you see?”  I asked her. 

“Oh, there’s another one!  I wonder when they drew that up there.  I’ve seen the first one; he’s been there a while.” 

The second figure stayed visible this time, but when I went back (monthly workgroup meeting) there was only the one.  Was it magic paint?  A trick of light?  Ninja artists clambering up there in the dead of night to secretly scrub away the lines of one figure, then add them back a day or two later?  What did it all mean? 

You probably figured it out much sooner than I did.  The main figure—my mystery man—is not a drawing or a painting.  He is a wire sculpture hung by nearly-invisible lines.  In fact, he is a few inches away from the wall itself.  Presumably the disappearing second figure (or figures?) is also wire.  

Guerilla art!   Well played, ninja artists! Keep up the good work!

Caution:  Spoilers.  Everywhere.  It’s a whole convention of ‘em.

Cathedral College is an elegant, castle-like edifice located adjacent to the National Cathedral.  The College of Preachers, as it was originally envisioned by the first Episcopal bishop of Washington, was founded to provide ongoing education for clergy after their ordination.  Today, the college offers a wide variety of programs on theology, global justice, healing and spirituality.

The Lost Symbol,Dan Brown;Doubleday, 2009 

There’s only one standard to use with a Dan Brown book.  Is it entertaining?  Measured against this scale, The Lost Symbol fails. 

I’ll pause here to discuss the good things, and there are some.  I had never heard of Albrecht Durer’s Melancolia, before I read the book, so I looked it up on the Internet.  What a cool engraving.  Thanks, Dan Brown!  It was nice to be reintroduced to magic squares, even though I’m not mathematical at all.  The guidebook-style descriptions of various buildings were very good; in fact, if Brown wants to take a break from novels, he could write Langdon’s Guide to Rome and Langdon’s Guide to Washington DC, and they’d sell like crazy. 

The puzzles were so elementary that even I could figure them out, which made me feel really smart. . . for about five minutes.  Dude, if I can figure out the puzzles, so can third-graders. 

Oh, and there’s a clever scene with Langdon and the Smart Gal Pal in a taxi. 

Okay.  That’s what I liked. 

Brown’s prose is poor.  His plots depend on any number of implausibilities and coincidences. So, what’s he got?  Why is he so popular?  Well, in the Da Vinci Code, at least, he had a great what-if scenario. 

Miracles don’t always happen twice, however.  The what-if premise of Symbol is just not that exciting.  The ultimate secret of the Freemasons, hidden in Washington DC?  Yawn.  Wake me when you find it. 

I’m sorry. . . are the Masons supposed to be scary?  I just can’t see it.  In the movie of Angels and Demons, the Illuminati seemed powerful and scary—even though they weren’t the bad guys, it was that other guy.  In Code, the Opus Dei seemed powerful and scary—even though they weren’t the bad guys, it was that other guy. In Symbol, the Masons seem. . . kind of staid, Ivy-League and boring. The Boy Scout honor camper society, Order of the Arrow, would have been a more mysterious secret society than these guys were. 

Brown doesn’t really have characters, but he has named people who perform functions.  Here are the functions in Symbol: 

Antagonistic Law Enforcement Presence:  Sato

Smart Gal Pal:  Katherine

Physically Freakish Villain:  Mal’akh

Wise Man/Magical Helper:    Bellamy and Galloway 

Brown writes short chapters and sets the action in multiple locations in an attempt to ratchet up the tension, but for some reason all this did was pitch me out of the book.  Langdon and Company seem to roam around the Capitol Rotunda forever while Langdon flashes back to endless mini-lectures about the Masons; while several miles away the Physically Freakish Villain models his tattoos for us and mulls over his evil plan; while a few blocks away from there, Smart Gal Pal wanders haphazardly around her gigantic storage unit/laboratory worrying about her brother and flashing back to her meeting with the Physically Freakish Villain, who was cleverly disguised (she doesn’t know he’s the PFV). It seems to go on like that for a very long time. 

Brown also sacrifices the chance to create a real character for short-term “gotcha” payoffs, and in this book these sputter and die.  Sato, the CIA Bureau Chief (spoiler alert) is Japanese!  And a woman!  And four feet tall!  Hahahaha!  Betcha didn’t see that coming!  What a shame some of that joke’s-on-you energy didn’t go into making Sato a real character.  How does a four-foot-tall Japanese American woman make her way to upper management in the CIA?  That might be an interesting little back-story. The Solomons, Katherine and her older brother who is a) Langdon’s friend; and b) a Mason; and c) missing, take up a lot of space in the book.  The Solomons are Rich and Powerful.  How did they get rich?  Peter and Katherine inherited the money; Solomons have been wealthy for generations.  How did the family get its start?  Brown doesn’t care.  Brown doesn’t know, or care, that it is background detail and not cute Mickey Mouse watches or Sumatra coffee beans that create character. 

The true identity of Mal’akh (spoiler alert) will come as a shattering revelation to the reader; at least the reader who somehow managed to skip pages 220-225, where it is made perfectly clear who he is. To put that in perspective, the book is 509 pages long. That’s a lot of time spent drumming your fingernails waiting for The Big Reveal that you already know. 

Oh, and Mal’akh has created a national security crisis—really—by threatening to show bootlegged video of real Masonic ceremonies on the Internet.  Oh, no!  Imagine our shock and horror as we. . . see grainy, poorly shot wig-cam footage of rituals we’ve already seen re-enacted on the Discovery Channel.  Has Mal’akh ever seen the Internet?  Oh, but it reveals that important people in government are Masons!  Somehow, I can’t seem to care. 

The work here is so poorly done that I have a conspiracy theory of my own.  Brown conspired with his hard drive and the bottom drawer of his file cabinet to pull out an old manuscript he wrote before the Da Vinci Code, tried unsuccessfully to update the technology and the science, and passed it off to an undiscerning public as a new manuscript.  Oh, ye who have eyes yet will not see. 

So, if you want an entertaining, challenging romp through our nation’s capital, solving historical puzzles, racing to beat the bad-guys, forget this book, and rent the DVD of the first National Treasure movie.  Yes, I’m recommending a DVD over this book.  It’s that disappointing.

Lots of research about a strange or obscure topic?  Check. 

Famous or exotic location?  Check. 

Moderately attractive woman who is a success in her (usually scientific) field?  Check.

 Guidebook-quality descriptions?  Check. 

Physically freakish villain with implausible motivation?  Check. 

Very short chapters?  Check. 

Mysterious talisman/amulet/puzzle/manuscript/jigsaw puzzle/ piece of jewelry?  Check. 

By carefully reviewing the legendary Checklist of Seven, a true adept who has risen beyond the status of initiate will see the Truth Revealed.  For the rest of you; I’m reading a Dan Brown book.  I’d tell you more, but it’s not for innocent ears.  This knowledge must be protected and guarded by the few, the select, the chosen, lest it fall into the hands of ordinary mortals, like the highly unlikely CIA director.

The Sig-O was a scoutmaster for 19 years, and this meant he spent one week every summer with his troop at scout camp.  Friday evening I would leave work early and drive up to see the final campfire and watch his troop get their merit badges and their awards (they always won awards).  Of course, at that final campfire, the staff also performed the compulsory Staff Skit. 

Staff skits had certain things you could count on; boys in drag, lots of topical references and in-jokes, and a high degree of energy. Those cool evenings under the redwoods, listening to the bullfrogs bell and watching the skit, are some of my favorite summer memories. 

I say this so that you’ll understand that when I say The Complete World of Sports, (Abridged), currently playing at the Sonoma County Repertory Theater (the Rep) is like a two-hour camp staff skit, I mean it in a really good way. 

Comedy is difficult. The controlled pandemonium that is  Sports is practically a triumph of engineering; a swirling, perfectly blended contraption of puns, physical comedy, topical comedy, improvisation and audience participation.  Yes, they bring up the lights and interact with the audience three times and even bring audience members onto the stage to assist in the performance at one point.  You can only do this successfully if you have complete faith in your material, your actors and your audience. 

Dodds Delzell, Ben Stowe and Chad Yarish are the three leads, playing sportscasters in the first televised “Abridge-athon,” in which they plan to cover every sport on every continent, throughout history, in just under two hours.  They claim this will be 3,000 sports—in fact they give an exact number that ends with a fraction, but I can’t remember it.  And I think they do it. The three of them are absolutely wonderful; each different and each great. 

Delzell is the ex-jock sportscaster, a sports-partisan whose cultural insensitivity and political incorrectness annoy other two.  Stowe is the “eye candy who knows nothing about sports,” and Yarish is the book-learned intellectual. In addition to these characters, they shift into various other characterizations with each bit. A bit of emotional tension is added as Stowe, who does not want  to cover the Olympics, keeps trying to derail the production so they won’t have to.  Yarish then informs us that they have gotten a note from their lawyers that they can’t call it the Olympics, so they must refer to their final “montage”—I know that’s not a stage term but there’s no other way to describe it—as “Olympish.” 

In addition to intense physical action, spouting thousands of words of memorized dialog, conducting lightning-fast costume changes (okay, well, it’s mostly props, but still) and clambering around on ladders backstage in order to appear in the cutout “screens” that adorn the back wall, our three stalwarts also sing. There’s singing! 

The laughter shifts through the audience as references resonate for different age groups or sport aficionados, but it never stops from the time the show opens. 

I attended a staged reading of this production, which included some of the blocking but few of the props used last night.  It was still funny, but our reaction was that it needed tightening, and the writers heeded that message.   Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor, who wrote All the Great Books, Abridged, and several other “abridged” plays, do extensive research. They have a gift for comic timing and great ears for dialogue, managing to make the performances seem spontaneous and even easy. 

There is some sexual material; a condom joke and a bit about gay athletes so parents, be aware. I think kids over eleven or so will find this show hilarious. 

As a bonus, the guys give us a standard with which to determine whether something is a sport or merely a game.  “It’s a sport,” Chad, decked out in Scottish golfing togs, tells us, “if it’s covered on ESPN.”  By their own measure, then, the writers committed an egregious oversight.  They included a cheerleading reference but they did not include cheerleading competitions and dance team competitions.  This is terrible!  And if I hadn’t been so exhausted from laughing when I left, I would have complained to someone about it.

Here’s an interesting post from John Crowley about voice recognition software and its persistent attempts to turn sounds into words.  Scroll down through the comments until you get to his response, where he gives an example:

“I  haven’t captured any yet. But back when I was using Dragon Naturally Speaking I was pausing for thought and on the screen there appeared a single word I had not spoken:

woman

I marveled at that, erased it, went on working; at another pause it wrote, all by itself:

womb

At which point I began to wonder, sort of freak out in fact; and later it asked:

whom?

Well whom indeed? I pondered all these things for a day, until at length I noticed — my office then was right on a main road — that trucks going by at certain hours made a certain sound… and yes it could be seen that they were being picked up. Why THOSE words, though, just for ME?…”

http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/142022.html