This time last year I was bemoaning what had been done to the UCLA Live program, beginning with the termination of the theatre programming and culminating in a parting of the ways with its visionary director, David Sefton. Since then, I’ve seen scattered events and haven’t been impressed.

Today I got the new UCLA Live catalog in the mail.
It’s a disheartening document.

There’s not one must-see event.

David Sedaris. Again.

A silent film. Again.

The same mixture of “roots” music and world music, jazz, and classical. Again.

Some dance. Again.

No theatre.

The best series in LA has become the blandest series in LA. Yes, I’d like to see They Must Be Giants. Yes, I’d like to see Joan Didion. But that doesn’t make a series. Those are isolated events — and they’re interesting, not provocative. Not thrilling.

Here’s what we used to get:

The Berliner Ensemble’s “Arturo Ui.”

David Thomas, Pere Ubu and “Disastodrome.”

Socìetas Raffaello Sanzi’s “Genesi:  From the Museum of Sleep.”

Merce Cunningham and UCLA Dance doing some strange collaboration with the ghost of John Cage.

“Shockheaded Peter.”

“The Black Watch.” Which I didn’t even like — but I respected it.

Now we’ve got as little as they can afford, or conceive. Or both.

Really really sad.

UCLA Live’s new executive and artistic director, Kristy Edmunds, starts in the fall, and, as this recent dance review in the LA Times mentions, it’s not a moment too soon. Audiences have abandoned the series, and that includes me.

For a look at how God is managing the 2011 Rapture, click here.

Clearly, most of us have been buying our cellphones at the wrong place. While I don’t think that crack would be right for them, I can foresee the Apple Store’s campaign of bundling your iPhone with psychedelics.

As I’m sure you’ve heard, the Rapture is coming tomorrow (or, depending upon where you live, it’s starting tonight). I’m already making plans.

First, I’m going to take a friend’s suggestion that we scatter unwanted clothes and shoes arranged in “lifted up” fashion on sidewalks and lawns around town. I urge you to join me in this. With more advance notice, I might have staged this into a worldwide art project. There’s no time for that now, but there’s still time for each of us to participate in our own small way.

Secondly, I’d like to indulge in a little Rapture looting. I missed my opportunity during the LA riots, but not this time. I’d like to outfit a home music studio, and I’m also looking for fishing, boating, and camping equipment. I’d especially like a small powerboat with a trailer and a pickup truck. If you know the addresses of people with these things who are likely to be lifted up during the Rapture, please email them to me privately; I will consider paying small finder’s fees. Within a 25-mile radius of Burbank, CA is preferred, but I’m willing to travel up to 100 miles if the left-behind equipment is in tip-top condition. Thank you.

Just for the record: I don’t care what Arnold Schwarzenegger does with his private parts — that’s his business. It’s the public-policy hypocrisy that’s galling, because that’s our business. For example: vetoing gay marriage because it might somehow ruin the sanctity of his own. (And this from a guy who made his millions in gay-friendly Hollywood, too.) Even worse was the fiscal state he left California in, as detailed here by George Skelton. Please click and read that and then do some basic math:  by cutting the vehicle license fee, which was purely an election move, Schwarzenegger created a budget hold of $4 billion that grew into $6 billion annually. Multiply that by seven years and you get about $35 billion. Now, what was the size of California’s budget hole? About… $35 billion. So what did we get for our $35 billion? Enormous cuts to programs and services (most ruinously to our educational systems, especially the higher-education system that was once the pride of the world). Oh, and enormous ego gratification for the movie star who made it all happen.

Today, I got a contact lens. Not contact lenses, a contact lens.

Overall, my vision is good. I’ve had a very minor prescription for eyeglasses since I was 21, but I don’t wear them the glasses often because I don’t need to. At night or in dimness, things get a little blurry, so I wear them in the theatre, or to drive at night, but that’s about it.

The past few years, though, I’ve been  giving a lot of presentations — speeches or remarks, accompanied, sometimes, by Powerpoint. The glasses have been a pain because I can’t read with them on, and I can’t see the audience in the dim without them. So today I went to my optometrist and he prescribed one — one — contact lens. (So, in other words, I’m paying twice what I should for the little lens carrier.)

My optometrist is a large bearish man of what I take to be Russian extraction, with fingers the size of cudgels. So while I wasn’t thrilled by the prospect of my sticking my fingers into my eye, I was less excited about him doing it. But everything went off without a hitch, and he said I proved to be a good subject for contact lenses. (Or lens.) One thing he did note as he swapped out about 500 different lenses until finding the right fit:  how very sensitive my vision is. A little too much adjustment this way and it was fuzzy, that way and it was smaller, the other way and I got a glowing 3D effect that reminded me of how much I hated “Avatar.” I was like the Goldilocks of contact lenses. In the end he got it right, but not before I was reminded again that I do have my own way of looking at things.

 I’m an admirer of Herzog’s films (see here and here and many other posts on this blog), and his documentaries are special treats. Like the Bush administration, Herzog never allows himself to be held back by the facts:  every insight is a product of his distinct imagination, delivered in his doomy Deutschland monotone. Herzog can imagine things we can’t; in his vision, nature is chaotic and insane, and to look animals in the eye is to address our continual war with them. (He also seems to think they are winning, or will win.)

For those interested in Herzog’s dystopian view and its mordant delivery, Slate has done us all a favor. They’ve compiled some of the choicest great moments in Werner Herzog voiceovers. (Although I’m sad that they couldn’t find a place for “Lessons of Darkness,” Herzog’s extraterrestrial look at the Kuwaiti oil fires set by Saddam Hussein, a film that’s an enormous shudder-inducing accomplishment.) But if you’re looking for a primer into the Herzog documentary method, Slate’s overview fills that function nicely.

Hm. Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich, and Ron Paul. Makes it really hard to decide which one I’d most like to see them nominate.

Last week when I was reading the international response to our extermination of the dangerous pest known as Osama bin Laden, I was sadly unsurprised to see so many British editorials bemoaning U.S. action. Winston Churchill, for sure, was having a very unpleasant day in his justly commodious afterlife. Somehow or other, the civilization he had bequeathed to his people, rescued from the evil dictatorship others were hell-bent on inflicting upon it, had turned into a nation of quislings.

Imagine, then, how thrilled I was to see this yesterday:  an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal from Andrew Roberts, a British historian of World War II, apologizing for his countrymen, who seem far removed from the bulldogs of past glory. Quoting Churchill, who was chary of “the long, drawling, dismal tides of drift and surrender,” Roberts wonders whether the British “can be counted upon for much longer.”

It continues to astonish me that in some circles the sentiment carries on that we somehow did wrong by Mr. bin Laden. I can’t explain it, because I can’t understand it.