Yesterday I came home from the reading of a friend’s play in Hollywood and traffic was once again snarled. This time Highland Avenue, which connects the city with the valley, was for some reason closed. Flashing traffic message boards advised “Seek alternate route,” which I did. None of them were good. What should have been a 10-minute drive became a 30-minute drive. I was finally able to make my way to Argyle, which connects with the 101. Normally the 101 is not my preferred route — in my 18-year-experience of driving in LA, the 101 is third only to the 405 (at all times) and the 5 (heading south, at most times) in being clogged in traffic. This time the 101 was a breeze, once I actually got on it.

While waiting in the middle of three lanes — the leftmost and center lanes being left-turn only (onto a surface street or the 101) I saw a girl who had just filled up her car at a  gas station on the right pulling her car into the right-most lane, which is right-turn only. I could guess what was coming. Sure enough, she pulled her car entirely parallel to the right-hand lane in an effort to cut in front of me and make a left. This is not only patently illegal, it is incredibly disrespectful to the 20 or 30 cars behind her who would like to make a (legal) right turn, even on a red light. Given my postings of the past three days, imagine my mood at seeing this. She looked at my imploringly, trying to use every ounce of her 20-ish cuteness to justify her behavior.

I rolled down my passenger window and saw her brighten, thinking I was going to accommodate her. Instead, I said, “Do you know you’re illegally blocking that lane, and cutting off about 20 people behind you who’d like to make a right? Have you even thought about that?” Her smile evaporated, the light changed, and not only did I not let her go, no one behind me did either. Maybe next time she’ll think first.

Here’s the AP story about the accident supposedly behind the snarl I just posted about:

LOS ANGELES (AP) – Traffic is finally moving again on the northbound 405 freeway near Sherman Oaks where a construction site crane earlier toppled onto the roadway.

The accident trapped the crane operator and triggered a collision between a big-rig dirt hauler and an S-U-V when the truck swerved to avoid the crane boom.

Firefighters managed to pull the operator out of the crane cab where he was trapped for more than an hour.

Fire spokesman Brian Humphrey says the operator was conscious and alert. A fire helicopter landed on the freeway to fly the victim to the hospital.

The accident, which happened shortly after one this afternoon, brought traffic to a halt on northbound Interstate 405 near the 101 freeway. The transition road from northbound 405 to the 101 freeway remains closed.

(That’s the update; here’s an earlier story from the San Diego Union Tribune. Again — couldn’t find anything on the Lost Angeles Times site.)

Before we get comfortable and attribute this one accident to the endlessness of my pilgrimage home, let me ask this: Why did it require 70 minutes last night, when there was no accident?

The accident didn’t create the snarl, it exacerbated it.

Hurricane Katrina didn’t create all of the problems it left — it exacerbated many that pre-existed. (People without adequate support systems, bad government on all levels, inadequate emergency response, and so forth.)

We’re going to see more accidents of all sorts. It’s past time to get smarter in how we manage our resources.

On that long drive home I realized two things I could do immediately: schedule some meetings differently, and start to use videoconferencing. We’re all going to have to become more clever.

This morning before leaving for my acupuncture appointment I had time to read the lead story in the Los Angeles Times: “No stopping climate shift, U.N. study says.” (As is typical for the Lost Angeles Times, the story isn’t findable on their website, so here’s a link to the San Francisco Chronicle’s coverage.) A quick scan leaves one with this impression: No matter what we do, the glaciers will keep melting, oceans will rise, and everyone — everyone — will pay the price.

The information wasn’t news, but to me the tone was. Just again last week, Al Gore had assured me via DVD that things were fixable. Now all the scientists he is always quoting were making Al seem… naive.

This topic was much on my mind as I left a meeting later that day in Santa Monica that was 22 miles from my office. I left the meeting at 3:20 and 70 minutes later had made only 3.7 miles of headway. (Mind you, I was driving — not walking. Walking would have been faster. Clearly.) Finally, having exhausted phone calls to friends, relatives, and strangers, and having triple-checked my email on my Treo, and having no further interest in being boxed in on all sides by other frustrated people, I pulled into the Westfield Century City mall to go see a movie. And of course the movie that was starting immediately was:

“Children of Men.”

In “Children of Men,” everything I’ve been seeing in the breakdown of our planet and our manmade infrastructure is evidenced in a dystopian future only 20 years from now. The scenes of urban combat look awfully familiar to anyone with a television set, as do the shots of “detainees” and rampaging young adults with guns, and the overall ick of sky and water. In “Children of Men,” pollution has choked the planet, and human infertility has become total. Where watching, say, “The Omega Man” could be entertaining because we had little sense that its future was around the corner waiting for us, “Children Of Men” is a bracing confrontation with a future that seems all too plausible.

I left the light entertainment of “Children of Men” glad for having seen it — glad in the way one is “glad” for having seen Picasso’s “Guernica” (which of course is visually referenced in the film, as is the cover of the Pink Floyd album “Animals,” for reasons that elude me). It was disturbing, surprising and gut-wrenching — precisely like sitting boxed in in L.A. traffic, but less so. I was happy to have made better use of my time. I rode the escalator down, got into my car, exited onto Santa Monica Boulevard —

— and found that traffic had not cleared one bit in the two hours I had been in the movie theatre. No matter which direction or what roadway, traffic was moving with all the speed of a snail on warm tar paper. At one point I called home and left a message saying that if I came across a motel with a lit vacancy sign, I was pulling over and checking in. Eighty minutes later, I finally got to my office. Total travel time: 2 hours 30 minutes to go 22 miles.

I’m not exaggerating.

I know the region had a major traffic and construction accident on the 405, but this is indicative of a pattern that is only going to get worse. Greater Los Angeles is on its way to becoming a city of isolated city-states (if it isn’t already) much like Italy through most of its history. Downtown will have nothing to do with Santa Monica.

But then, I’m not sure what Santa Monica, which is on the coast, will be like. Gore predicts that over the next 44 years the oceans will rise 10 feet, which will turn our Burbank home into very valuable beachfront property. The U.N. report says 7 to 23 inches within 93 years.

Whatever happens, it’s clear that we’re entering a period where great fissures are forming in our civilization. Robert Kaplan wrote about this in 2000 in his book The Coming Anarchy, and I remember thinking when I read it that it seemed the most prescient book I’d read since Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave. Toffler wrote about our shift out of the industrial revolution and how painful that was going to be; I wonder if he knew how quickly that shift would happen? Now every day I see signs of a fourth wave, a wave of collapse or retreat. If new technology is riding to the rescue, as the quote unquote president and some others believe, I hope it arrives quickly. Because in the meantime, there is often simply no way to get anywhere, and that seemingly little problem is indicative of many many larger problems.

Did you miss me? I’m back. Actually, I haven’t been away — haven’t been anywhere, actually, except up to Santa Barbara and back yesterday (more about that in a few seconds) — but I’ve been swamped. As you might imagine if you’re a regular reader of this blog, I read and write and teach a lot, and every once in a while my Normandy-invasion scheduling collides and the Allies don’t win. (Where exactly was this metaphor going?) In any event, now that rehearsals and my play reading of last weekend are over, and the semester is well under way (meaning I’ve caught up on reading for my own courses) and some things have moved off my desk, I’m back.

What was the highlight of the Santa Barbara day trip? Getting up to 90 mph each way, and boosting my mileage to 15.7 mpg. Still nowhere near the advertised lie, but closer.

Another day, another death learned of via the internet, this time of Ensemble Studio Theatre founding artistic director Curt Dempster, who died yesterday at age 71. Here’s the story as published by Playbill.

Dempster’s life work was new work by emerging writers, and he and his theatre have certainly helped a number of them emerge. As Playbill notes, Richard Greenberg, John Patrick Shanley, Arthur Giron, Jose Rivera, Eduardo Machado, and Leslie Ayvazian all got there start there. It has also been an important home for David Mamet, the late John Belluso, Christopher Durang and others. Ensemble Studio Theatre has never had a lot of what we often call “resources” (a euphemism for money) — the building itself is a crumbling eyesore too close to the water and therefore overrun outside by rats — but it has a lot of heart.

I met him only twice, and then briefly. The first was in July 1990 when my friend Shawn Garrett and I were thespian Johnny Appleseeds, traversing the entirety of Manhattan in hundred-degree heat and hundred-percent humidity on a mission to drop my scripts at every theatre in town. At the Public, Joe Papp looked at me as though I was a cockroach (a reaction I understood better in the years to follow as I grew to recognize the incompetence of my approach). At EST, Curt Dempster looked up from the overflowing stacks on his desk in a sort of nod while I left the scripts with someone else. Years later when my play “Anapest” was getting a workshop production, I was reintroduced to him.

Neither of those brief encounters matters, but given the legacy he’s left I can’t help saying I met him however briefly, and that I’m grateful for what he created.

A memorial service is being planned; watch the EST website for details. The home page has a simple but tasteful tribute, which says that at EST he built “the premier developmental theatre of the United States of America.” It’s hard to argue with.

For the second year in a row, I have discovered through the wonders of the internet that someone I was once close to has died.

It’s a bizarre feeling.

In this case, it’s Bill-Dale Marcinko, whose name will mean absolutely nothing to just about anyone reading this. And when I say I was once “close” to him, I guess what I mean is this: Back in the 1970’s long before the birth of the world wide web and the ways in which it interconnected everyone, when I was trapped in the backwoods of southern New Jersey with no transportation and a fervent desire to be elsewhere, when most of the people I knew and was close to were people I corresponded with and never met, I knew Bill-Dale Marcinko. Like me, he was a guy who published fanzines. I read his, he read mine, we found something to argue about via the mail — if you weren’t in a fan feud, you really weren’t anyone — we sniped at a then-seemingly-important group called The Fans of Central Jersey, and we actually met up once or twice at conventions. That sort of thing ended for me when I got more involved with women (not girls), and graduated from fanzines to “real” zines (like The Comics Journal), and became a reporter, and adorned myself with the outward trappings of growing up without ever fully growing up inside.

Now I find out that Bill-Dale was burned to a crisp in his house in late 2005. He was 46. In reading the various notices — and here’s one and here’s another — it sounds as though college was the high point for him, and that afterward it was a long slow slide that left him living alone in the house of his deceased parents, taking daily deliveries of pop culture ephemera from UPS, and building a Collyer-esque clutter that ultimately barred firefighters from saving his life.

Is this tragedy? I don’t know. Historically, tragedies concern a fall from great heights (one of the reasons “Death of a Salesman,” which concerned an everyman yet called itself “a tragedy” was revolutionary — much as I don’t care for it). Think Oedipus, or Macbeth. Marcinko’s height was putting out three issues of a xeroxed fanzine densely packed with text, one with an actual raisin hand-taped into each copy. Did he have writing skill? No less so than whoever is behind TMZ.com or Entertainment Weekly. But it didn’t lead anywhere larger for him.

In one of the zines I was producing during this period, I ran cartoons from a friend of my good friend and mentor Richard C. Roesberg. (Who sometimes comments on this blog.) His friend was a phenomenal artist (and I don’t use the adjective lightly) and a clever wit; I got two 3-panel samples of a strip he was going to do about Albert Einstein and his wife and I published them both, but no more came, no matter my cajoling. His friend was also someone who daily became more and more unhinged, until for some reason he moved out of the interior rooms of his house in Philadelphia and moved into the spaces behind the walls where the closets connected up. And then he killed himself.

I don’t know anything more about Bill-Dale Marcinko’s life since 1980 or thereabouts, but I will say this: Last winter in my mother’s basement I came across my copies of the three issues he put out of his fanzine and during a purge of accumulated junk from my early life I couldn’t throw them into the refuse pile. I shipped them back to California, where I now live, and where I still have them, and where I will keep them.

Sadly, just as I predicted to friends weeks ago, here’s the immediate outcome of Saddam Hussein’s execution, as reported by the AP:

———-
Execution sparks Arab support for Saddam
Status as martyr hero grows as new gruesome gallows video appears

Updated: 2:02 p.m. AKT Jan 8, 2007
CAIRO, Egypt – The execution of Saddam Hussein has sparked a wave of support for the former Iraqi leader around the Arab world, with some proclaiming him a martyr and comparing him to heroes of Arab nationalism — raising resentment against the United States and Iraq’s Shiite-led government.

A new video of Saddam’s corpse, with a gaping neck wound, was posted on the Internet early Tuesday, carrying the potential to fan the flames higher.

The video, which appeared to have been taken with a camera phone, pans up the shrouded body of the former leader from the feet. It apparently was taken shortly after Saddam was hanged and placed on a gurney.

As the panning shot reaches the head region, the white shroud is pulled back and reveals Saddam’s head and neck.

His head is unnaturally twisted at a 90 degree angle to his right. It shows a gaping bloody wound, circular in shape, about an inch below his jaw line.

There is blood on the shroud where it covered his head.

Praise overshadowing atrocities
Praise for Saddam has only grown since his Dec. 30 hanging, eclipsing what had been a greater acknowledgement in recent years of the atrocities committed by his regime.

On Monday, one Egyptian paper, the independent Al-Karama, splashed Saddam’s photo over a full page Monday, with an Iraqi flag behind him, declaring him an “Arab martyr.”

“He lived as hero, died as a man,” another Egyptian opposition newspaper, Al-Osboa, proclaimed in a headline, showing a photo of Saddam at the gallows.

The praise has angered Iraq’s government and Kuwait, which Saddam invaded in 1990. On Monday, Kuwaiti lawmakers slammed Arab countries that described the former Iraqi leader as a hero and demanded the government reconsider ties and financial aid to them.

Anger over the execution could fuel support for Iraq’s Sunni Muslim insurgency. It could also complicate the United States’ efforts to rally Arab nations’ help in reconciling between Iraq’s warring Sunni and Shiite communities and ease the country’s bloodshed.

The gallows scene
In large part, it was the unruly scene at the gallows that catapulted Saddam to hero’s status. In video footage smuggled out of the execution room, Saddam’s Shiite executioners are seen taunting and cursing him, while the former leader — his head unbowed — retorts, “Is this manly?”

For many, the scene came to symbolize dignified Arab resistance in the face of humiliation at the hands of a Shiite government seen by some in the region as illegitimate, backed by the U.S. military presence and closely allied to mainly Shiite Iran.

———-

Wouldn’t it have been better to leave him relatively well-treated, powerless, humiliated, and on display in captivity for the rest of his natural life? Wouldn’t that have made a greater statement about what we represent/ And in the long run, given what this execution will lead to, wouldn’t it have been far far less costly in every way?

And please don’t say “we” didn’t execute him. “We” were behind it every inch of the way.

…to dear old Captain Noah.

My friends in South Jersey and environs will appreciate this clip of Philadelphia children’s show icon Captain Noah, which I just found on YouTube.

When I was a kid I was in daycare for the year before kindergarten when my mother went back to work. The lady who ran the daycare from her home always kept the television tuned to Captain Kangaroo, a show I hated. Compared to the animated adventures of Popeye and assorted pals over on Captain Noah’s ark, I didn’t give a hoot about whatever Mr. Greenjeans and the talking clock were up to. One day I stood up and made a plea to please, please, please change the channel to Captain Noah, giving every good reason on Earth, most of them I’m sure having to do with Popeye. The woman put it to a vote — and I was the only child who raised a hand for Captain Noah. That was my first lesson in democracy: that sometimes the just cause loses.

It’s somehow fitting that Gerald Ford died just a couple of days before John Edwards’ announcement that he’s running (again) for president. Ford was the accidental president — someone who was never elected president or vice-president, and whose lasting accomplishment was proving with a pardon that there are indeed two levels of the law: one for the president, and one for the rest of us. I used to wonder if the Republicans so outraged by Clinton’s lying under oath (as I was) ever stopped to realize that this was where the two-tiered view of presidential justice began.

Where Ford was accidental, Edwards made a fortune in litigating large settlements out of accidents. In the abstract, I’m glad that we have a system that allows for injury claims, and I view this as part of our system of checks and balances. In practice, neither this nor one term as a senator qualifies one to be president. (Especially when just two years ago one was a vice-presidential nominee and provided zero assistance to the ticket — including in one’s home state.)

While I’m on the subject, I am as enchanted as everyone else with Barack Obama’s speeches. But my view of leadership involves making hard choices in the face of adversity and often against the headwind of public opinion. If fellowship and togetherness are your panacea, what remedy do you have when not everyone in the world wants to hold hands and sing Kumbaya?

And while I’m on the topic — Churchill never would’ve stood for this:

From MSNBC.com:

Scottish soldiers forced to share kilts for now

Shortage means 1 for every 15 soldiers due to contract snafu

At least each of the Italians gets a uniform to himself.