A “noted naturalist” has suggested letting the panda die out:

Conservationists should “pull the plug” on giant pandas and let them die out, according to BBC presenter and naturalist Chris Packham.

“Here’s a species that, of its own accord, has gone down an evolutionary cul-de-sac,” Packham told Radio Times magazine.

 

With some scientists, the panda has suffered backlash since at least Stephen Jay Gould’s book “The Panda’s Thumb,” in which Gould complained that the animal, which is capable of a far more diverse diet, is dying out because it insists on eating only bamboo leaves. There’s a price to be paid for being picky, and recently conservationists have been picking up that tab.

I greatly doubt that’s going to stop any time soon. In the war for survival, the panda has the best survival tool:  marketability. Despite what some over-educated eggheads might make of its irresponsible overindulgence, the panda’s cuteness is irrefutable. For that reason and for all that that entails — in World Wildlife Fund brochures and children’s plush toys and effusions like this one — the panda will be here long after the chacoan peccary has slunk from existence.

His heirs are filing claims to many of the characters co-created by Jack Kirby.

Yesterday a friend and I went to Long Beach to see the Brian Eno installation, “77 Million Paintings,”  at the University Art Museum of California State University Long Beach. The genesis of the 77 million paintings enumerated in the title — which, Eno later said during his lecture, would actually be 77 million cubed —  is described well in this piece by the LA Times’ Reed Johnson. In short, a video mosaic of 12 individual screens pulls images randomly from grouped sets contained in databases held by three different computers, generating an ongoing series of freshly executed video “paintings,” which are sonically supported by a soundtrack of  sound loops on six separate tape decks, resulting in randomized musical accompaniment. The intention is to remove deliberation and intention from the artistic process; the result is mesmerizing. As my friend and I found, it was quite easy to get lost in the neverending self-generating inventions of the computers and the tape decks. For one brief period, I felt detached from space and time. I’ve had this feeling before with some art, in various disciplines, but only rarely.

Later, we attended Eno’s lecture at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center (also part of Cal State Long Beach). After 30 years of following the man’s career in all its phases — rock star, record producer, artist, writer, thinker — this was our first chance to see him in the flesh. Eno proved to be thoughtful, puckish, droll, and concerned, in equal measures. I would characterize the first third of his lecture as an admonishment to let go. (This should be expected from an artist whose visual work is created largely from computer generation.) He started by reminding us of something we’ve known for 566 years, since Copernicus:  that not only we are not at the center of the universe, we are off in a small corner, in one of a billion billion solar systems, and we exist as only one of innumerable species just on this one planet, where only an estimated 10% of species have been cataloged. In other words,  Get over yourself. Again, this viewpoint should be expected from someone extolling the virtues of random, unemotionally generated, art.

On the way home I wondered aloud how well these theories that can work so well  in visual art and music would work in long-form narrative. Having read (or tried to read) Samuel Beckett’s novels and some of William S. Burroughs’ longer pieces, I unfortunately believe I know too well. In such cases, even a little plot can go a long way. Organic writing — which I practice and preach — benefits from pruning and shaping. Effects can engage an audience, but only for so long; the best effect is an emotional verisimilitude, however achieved, that transports people into a deep level of caring about what happens. That occurs in better productions of “Waiting for Godot” because Didi and Gogo are present and we can relate; it never happens with “The Unnameable,” which is a true chore to read. When he’s collaborating with, say, Robert Fripp, Eno is free to produce an album of electronic feedback loops, but when he’s producing records for U2 or Coldplay, he must serve the song. To his immense credit, he never claimed in this talk that he was abandoning all oversight; rather, he talked about intentional balance, moderating oneself along the continuum between surrendering all control, or controling all elements, depending upon the desired outcome. I think that’s about right.

If you’re interested in “77 Million Paintings” and cannot make it to Long Beach, where it runs through December, here’s some good news:  a beautiful software-and-DVD version exists. Here it is on Amazon.com.  I bought a copy at the museum, and at about 35 bucks, it’s a steal. The package includes the software to run these self-generating images on  your computer, with accompanying soundtrack. In addition, there’s a beautiful booklet with notes from the artist, plus an interview DVD. Get it and surrender all control to it.

The L.A. Times predicts boffo box office for, wait for it, Michael Moore’s sarcastically named “Capitalism:  A Love Story.” (That is, unless the Illuminati derail it.)

So last night my good friend Larry and I went to the red-carpet premiere of “Capitalism: A Love Story,” Michael Moore’s new film. We didn’t dress well enough to get on that red carpet, but neither did Michael Moore and he got on it.

I am and I’m not a fan of Mr. Moore’s work. Actually, given that ambivalence, I guess I’m not. He’s a good entertainer, and I agree with some of his points, and I always enjoy it when truth is spoken to power. But I’m insistent on one point:  that it’s truth. As we know right from the beginning of Mr. Moore’s body of work, “Roger & Me,” he plays with the truth to comic effect or just to score points. This is fine with comedy; this is not so good with documentary. So I don’t know into what category these films belong; I like my documentaries to be grounded in truth.

To Michael Moore’s way of thinking, the near collapse of the American economy last fall was the result of a nefarious plot originally cooked up during the Reagan presidency and served to variation by everyone in Washington, DC since then. Evidently, every Treasury secretary, plus the major investment houses, plus the Congress, plus the banks, have all been in on it. They have colluded to:  strip important regulatory commissions, imbalance the tax code, privatize government functions, cripple labor unions, disseminate fear, and do whatever else it takes so that it can all result in their backing their armored cars up to the U.S. Treasury and leaving with billions of dollars in taxpayer money. Now, it’s almost irrefutable that all these things have happened to some degree; it’s the collusion that I question. Throughout the film, Moore insists upon cause-and-effect relationships that are impossible.  The Democrats can’t agree with themselves on anything — how did they agree to this scheme? If you’ve ever sat on a committee of any sort, you know what I’m talking about. To quote Jean Paul Sartre, “Hell is other people.”

Leaving the difficulty of interpersonal relationships aside, he draws bizarre conclusions. According to Moore, somehow or other, the tax code is to blame for Hurricane Katrina. I thought the hurricane was a natural disaster, but hey, I only know what common sense tells me. If he’s implying that the death and suffering that followed result from poor response, then I’m unclear what that’s got to do with his overall theme, especially while there’s plenty of other addresses one can situation that blame:  local, state, and federal officials. Even if all those authorities had had the best response in history, almost no conceivable amount of engineering was going to save New Orleans, a city that resides below the water level on a flood plain. The lack of government response was appalling. But is it irresponsible to live in a flood plain? Is it irresponsible to rebuild on cliff faces where mudslides are common? Or to build in forestry areas where wildfires routinely rage? Ultimately, we can’t afford a government response to all of this. In Michael Moore’s mind, if you walk into a building and it’s on fire, then clearly you caused this fire. Where there’s smoke, there’s blame.

Much of his film centers around the collapse of the housing industry. His reading:  The fiends ensnared people into finance schemes they couldn’t afford, then made off with all the loot while the economy crumbled. Well, yes and no. I know a number of bankers, and I have to tell you, they’d rather be collecting mortgage payments right now than trying to hawk underwater houses no one wants. During the real-estate bubble I saw two different things that Moore never touches upon: people who bought houses they couldn’t afford to use as investments, and people who refinanced their homes so they could pull out money and buy more stuff. I think those two scenarios covers almost everyone I know who owns a home. What sold most of those big plasma TV’s? The real-estate bubble.

I could go on in this vein, but it was exhausting enough trying to parse it all in real time during the screening as the movie flitted from one far-flung outrage to another in a desperate attempt to string them all together. It was gut-wrenching to watch farmers get evicted from their home, and it was appalling to learn that employers were collecting life-insurance claims on dead employees, and it’s sickening to see the state some people have been left in by the trampled economy, and it’s an outrage that CEOs of bellied-up corporations get rewarded with enormous payouts, and it’s maddening to be reminded yet again that every Western industrialized nation but one — ours! — has a national health-care plan. But every fault should start with the first question:  “What did I do, and what can I do about it?” And the first part involves acknowledging your own role in the ruination.

Imagine my thrill when David Thomas of Pere Ubu emailed me just now to thank me for this blog post. In return, I tried very hard not to sound like a sycophant.

I don’t have a lot of interest in pleasant music. Yes, I can hear that it’s soothing, but I can’t figure out why you’d want music to soothe you. I want music to snap me out of it, to communicate something new in an interesting, dynamic way that’s impossible to refute.

So, it’s easy to see why I like a lot of what I like:  Roxy Music, Talking Heads, David Bowie, the ubiquitously written-about (here, anyway) Pere Ubu, TV on the Radio, Frank Zappa, Sonic Youth, Van Dyke Parks-era Beach Boys, King Crimson, and the like. What are the common elements? Intellectualism, contrapuntalism, dissonance, and surprise. What else do many of them have in common? Brian Eno.

It’s impossible to track the music I like without repeatedly stumbling across the name Brian Eno. The best Bowie albums? (Lodger, Low, “Heroes,” Outside.) They all featured Eno writing,  producing, providing “atmospherics,” or a combination of all three. Same with the three Talking Heads albums truly worth owning, including the astonishing Remain in Light. Eno has had the immense good taste or good fortune to work repeatedly with the likes of Robert Fripp, Harold Budd, John Cale, Philip Glass, David Byrne, and many others, and I’ve gotten this far without mentioning another act he’s produced by the name of U2 because their music does nothing for me. Along the way, he invented ambient music and made a lot of money doing so.

Eno can’t “really” play music, although his ability to twiddle knobs on early synthesizer systems and tapeloop machines he stapled together in the early 1970s enabled him to play live with Roxy Music. As someone with lots of ideas and very little skill, Eno is the prototypical modern artist. The abstract expressionists couldn’t paint, Martha Graham’s dances don’t look like dance, there is some doubt that most of the current academically hailed playwrights can write a play, and Brian Eno can’t play an instrument or read music. When asked by one interviewer if he would have been a music had he been born at an earlier time, the 61-year-old Eno said no, because his instrument would’t have been invented yet. What instrument is that? “The recording studio.” There is obvious enormous benefit to the presence of a naif. Why does Eno’s 1974 album Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy still sound so fresh, and so wrong? Because it wasn’t  hampered by someone who knew how to do it “right.”

The past few years, Eno, who is also a painter, and is a painter in a similar way that he is a musician albeit with more training, has been doing installations of changeable art created by a random shifting interplay of abstract images, shown against a backdrop of ambient music. He’s now brought that show, “77 Million Paintings,”  to Long Beach, where I’ll be seeing it on Sunday with a friend similarly well-versed in all things Eno before, miracle of miracles, we’ll also catch a lecture by Eno at the Carpenter Center that evening. Yes, I got those tickets almost as soon as the event was announced; good thing, too, because the lecture sold out almost immediately. I’ve been following Eno and his work with great interest for 30 years, and this is the first time he’s made an appearance anywhere near me, so I wasn’t going to miss out. Expect more here after the event.

• President Obama’s health-care speech last night (great job!) and his killer tactic of inducing that thick-necked GOP jerk to yell out “You lie!” That alone will have swung enough support. Once again, other people have misunderestimated you, sir president. We watch and learn.
• The Gallup-originated “Strengths-Based Leadership” test I took today, which sized me up as having strengths in Strategic, Activator, Individualization, Responsibility, and Input, resulting from oddly dichotomous choices like “You believe in ghosts” vs. “You like chocolate.” More on this tomorrow, I think, when my neck isn’t killing me. I also would have preferred that the test conclude in words of the same form — all adjectives or all nouns or all gerunds or all something the same. These qualities — Strategic Activator, etc. — sound like mistranslations from the Chinese, like Glorious Serving Sword of Destiny.
• My second night of rehearsals with my cast, and hearing my rewrites for the first time. Short version:  New opening line sucked (and my actor rightly asked for the old one back); new purposely bad poem is deliciously bad and probably earns a laugh right where I planned because, as I suspected, the actor has the chops to get that laugh and got it right away; still very glad to have the director and actors I have. The director has better ideas than I do, so again, I’m glad he’s directing and I’m not.
• How “lack mentality” drives me crazy. Brief definition:  “I lack [fill in the blank], so I can’t do [fill in the blank].” It’s just reflexive with people. (Most people?) Once you’ve trained your ear to hear it,  you hear it all the time. Why not instead:  “I want to [fill in the blank], so I have to [fill in the blank].” That’s more actionable; you can actually do something about it. I think today I heard the lack mentality about six times. In one case, I’m concerned that an important arts institution is going to go under — or at least suffer greatly — because of all the lacking going on.
• My thrill at getting a new script by one of my favorite playwrights. In fact, right now I’m going to go read it in the jacuzzi because, for some reason, my neck is killing me.

I have to do some rewrites on my new play tonight so that I can hear them at tomorrow night’s rehearsal, but I thought I’d procrastinate first. (I am a writer, after all.) So I turned on the television.

First, I saw an episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit!, which dealt partly with all the millions of people in Africa suffering from HIV and AIDS because they can’t get access to condoms.

When that was over, I caught the tail end of a documentary on another channel concerning the closing of a GM factory in Ohio. The crew followed about a dozen different long-term assembly plant workers around the shop floor on their last weeks, right up to closing day. You have never seen so many grown men cry.

Then on a third channel I caught the last 20 minutes of a documentary about a son who just couldn’t take his mother any more and killed her. The documentary is from the point of view of his older sister. I caught the scene where she asks their father why he never intervened in what I take to be his now-slain wife’s endless criticism and abuse. He says that if he’d suggested therapy, the mother would have divorced him, and so he didn’t know what to do, the daughter says that doesn’t absolve him, so the father bolts up from the interview and storms out of the house. The next scene is the sister visiting her brother in prison.

After this, I was afraid to see what I’d find elsewhere on TV. So now I’m writing the play. Who says theatre isn’t escapism?

Seventeen years ago this weekend, a small group of us built a theatre. It’s called Moving Arts and it’s still running.

And then seven years after that, we built another, inside the Los Angeles Theatre Center, which we had to tear down seven years after that when we vacated the building. So I’ve built two theatres and torn one down. I hope some day in retirement to build one more, but I plan never to tear another one down.

Today the memories of building that first one came flooding back because a crew assembled again in that original space to take almost everything down and apart and rebuild the space. A long long time past overdue, the space is finally getting a rehab. My two younger kids and I arrived to find the risers disassembled, the ceiling fan apparatuses apart, all the drapes and carpet tossed, the bathroom stripped out, the seats unbolted and repositioned, and a nimbus of long undisturbed dust floating like the haze of Los Angeles over everything. It came as a shock.

I love building (and, now, rebuilding) theatres, so I’m glad I came to help out even if only for a few hours. I spackled holes, removed ancient twisted hardware, and painted. Somewhere in our archives we have a photo of my then 1-year-old standing in the window in November 1992 as we post our first (positive) review. That child is now off at college; his younger siblings are further along, so they also got to paint and spackle and drag trash around.

One of the things I tell students is that theatre takes place in a room. (Even when it’s staged outside, that room is implied.) It’s a form that insists on the isolation of space, defining a stage that is apart from an audience, urging us to believe in split universes, the universe of the spectators seeing into the world of the players. But we’re still in the same room. Actors who know how to play off audiences know that, and so does everybody else on some level.

So this is a room I’ve done a lot of theatre in. Hundreds of plays and rehearsals and auditions and workshops and readings over the past 17 years. I’ve grown fond of the place. I’m glad it’s getting a makeover that it has long deserved.