You would think that it’s relatively easy to keep count of things that exist in whole units, especially when those whole units add up to only double digits. But today I took a break from working on my new play, tentatively entitled “Second Ice Age,” because I suddenly had the burning desire to figure out how many plays I’ve written. This was partially occasioned by my having to send out an updated bio to a conference I’m teaching at early this summer.

The last time I updated it, the bio that gets put into play programs and speaking notices and such says that I have written “more than two dozen” produced plays. That’s true. It’s also true that I’ve written many other plays that I’ve never sent out because I don’t think they’re ready, which means I’ve written more than 40 plays. I suppose in my mind, I will one day “fix” these other plays. (Or maybe I think that, like some wines, they’ll improve with age. Or just go really bad.) But… how many more than 40?

“The Bar Plays” was intended as a cycle of short plays — a cycle I may finish some day. I’ve written two of them so far. So I guess I should count that as two. Or, is it one unfinished play? Do I count the play I wrote in high school? (Hey, it was even produced.) It isn’t on my hard drive but I’ve got it on file somewhere. If I count that one, I’m now writing my 42nd play. (I think.) But I started writing it before play 41, so which one is actually play 41?

Of the 42 plays, about two-thirds are one-acts, some of them brief. But, I should note, some one-acts are “full-length” plays. Is a 60ish-page play (I’ve got at least two) a one-act or a “full-length” play? When it was done in L.A., “Uncle Hem” was full-length. In New York, it seemed short (because they played it too fast, I think. Which is precisely what one friend called to tell me.). When students ask me, “How long is a full-length play” or, more often, “How long is a one-act play?” I give them a variation of Edward Albee’s response. When asked by an interviewer how many of his plays are full-length, Albee, whose first success was with a one-act, said, “All of them.”

When I was an undergrad studying literature, it puzzled me how writers and then critics and academics couldn’t land on an exact number of how many stories or novels or plays or songs or whatever had been created by a particular artist. In cases concerning the passage of time and the lack of good storage, it made sense: Maybe Aristophanes and Chaucer and Shakespeare couldn’t keep track either. But why not Raymond Carver? Since then I’ve come to know that Carver’s stories exist in different versions, often substantially rewritten, sometimes retitled and sometimes not. As does the Bible. As does, it now seems to me, most things.
For years I kept a record of what I had written and in what order. Now I couldn’t tell you even where that is. I have two file cabinets stuffed with various printed-out or published versions of various things — the product also of short stories, and essays, and reviews, and correspondence, and failed novels — and boxes more in storage in the attic. A few years ago I found a computer disk that at some point I had marked “Lee’s Writing” (I like to think that I’ve come up with cleverer labeling systems since then) and found several completed short stories and plays that I had utterly forgotten about.

I am lucky in one regard: I’m not obsessive enough to be paralyzed by this. I have at least one friend who wouldn’t be able to leave his room until figuring this out. I won’t go too far down that rabbit hole, or I’ll never get to play 43. And I remember the beautiful last story I heard about the late Louis L’Amour. When he knew he was dying, L’Amour went into his writing study resolved to clear up all the debris. On every square inch of floorspace he had stacked manuscripts in progress, miscellaneous writing, correspondence, ephemera, drafts — the detritus of creativity, not all of it yet given shape. His wife came in and saw him standing there deciding how to make order of this before he died, and she said, “You leave that. I’ll take care of it.” And L’Amour left all that and went to his desk and back to his writing.

Our official sample ballots for the February 5th California Presidential Primary Election came today. In reviewing the slate of Democrats she could choose from, my wife, who is rather well-informed and who reads the newspaper and such, said in a quasi-outraged voice, “Who the Hell is Chris Dodd?”

You may recall that when he announced his withdrawal from the race, MSNBC.com called him “Chris Todd.”

He has served in the U.S. Senate for 27 years.

My good friend Trey asks about “There Might Be Blood,” which he and fellow friend Mark and I saw the evening of January 1st, “Have we exhausted this topic yet? This review from Salon really gets at the things we’ve been talking about quite eloquently. Thought you might enjoy….”

I’m not usually one to link to mainstream reviews (let alone to care what they say generally), but Stephanie Zacharek’s review on Salon.com gets right to the core of what’s frustrating and complete about what could have been an awe-inspiring film. The subhead: “This sprawling, ambitious film strives for boldness yet rings with false humility.”

The deadline for a 10-minute play festival that I wanted to enter passed just one minute ago. The topic: “The sense of smell must be an important element of the play.” In about 23 minutes, I wrote a new play called “Crotch Rot” and uploaded it. Will it be selected? Maybe not. But I wrote a new play and uploaded it at 11:59 and however many seconds. I say this to share with my students, whom I constantly advise when they say they don’t have a play that fits whatever imminent submission requirement: “Go home and write one. It’s not due until tomorrow.” (And it’s worked at least once:  I wrote a 10-minute play in 46 minutes to meet that particular deadline — and the play got accepted and produced.)

The news when I was at the gym this afternoon was that Hillary Clinton had the bad grace to almost cry today in New Hampshire when asked about the stresses of campaigning. This news was on all four screens, each of them tuned to a different channel.

One wouldn’t know that there’s a war going on, or a few other important things.

I feel about this the way I did about Bill Clinton’s sexual proclivities: I’d rather have a president who was getting some than one who isn’t. Similarly, I’d rather have someone who actually has working human emotions than one who doesn’t. (Say, Dick Cheney.) Or, better yet, appropriate emotions — emotions that don’t register umbrage when one dares to ask a reasonable question. (It is that umbrage that had led to the persistent smirk we’ve seen at press conferences these endless seven years.) Imagine if one might actually, wait for it, feel something before deciding to bomb the Hell out of people. Something other than excited glee.

(On a much smaller scale, and in the interest of full disclosure, I should say that when I have given speeches the last year in particular about how wrong I think my country has gone, I too have found cause to almost-cry.)

After the news clips, the other two shoes fell immediately, and sadly I saw them both coming. The first shoe was a parade of talking heads wondering whether Hillary’s emotional almost-outburst was “genuine” or “the latest campaign strategy.” I’m not a Hillary supporter, but this made me wonder what she’d have to do to catch a break. I think her best bet in this regard is to have Bill pick up some transplanted trailer trash again, except this time she’d have to divorce him (which I don’t think she’d hesitate to do in order to get elected; but hey, it’s her toughmindedness I like).

The other shoe was her lame response on CNN. Interviewed a few nanoseconds after the almost-crying-jag that became national news, she blew the opportunity. Rather than state the obvious, the honesty of which would have indelibly separated her from her husband and his personal legacy of profligate lying — “I have emotions. Nobody likes to lose. It’s been a tough week on little sleep. But I’m a fighter and I won’t rest….” — she pulled a Gore 2000 and transformed an enormous opportunity into a scripted bit of dunderheadedness. My paraphrase: “Some people find it hard to believe, but I do have emotions. But what really makes me cry is when a grandmother in [insert name of town in New Hampshire here] can’t afford her medication, or the [insert blue-collar job here] from [insert name of city in New Hampshire here] is laid off because of [name evils of Republican government or Republican policy here], blah blah blah.” It was so badly scripted I’m sure Mitt Romney was taking notes.

Why do so many doubt that Hillary’s tears are genuine? Because her campaign is so bloodless. My friend Doug says Hillary is the candidate of the Borg. Perhaps. But let us never forget: The Borg are able to assimilate you, and by that, they conquer. And there’s the difference.

Belatedly, George McGovern has decided that Bush and Cheney have to go. (And, I would add, we shouldn’t count on an election to take care of this, because I’m unconvinced this election will happen. One should never forget that people who can do anything tend to do just that.)

Among other salient points, McGovern makes this one:

Impeachment is unlikely, of course. But we must still urge Congress to act. Impeachment, quite simply, is the procedure written into the Constitution to deal with presidents who violate the Constitution and the laws of the land. It is also a way to signal to the American people and the world that some of us feel strongly enough about the present drift of our country to support the impeachment of the false prophets who have led us astray. This, I believe, is the rightful course for an American patriot.

Here’s another example, a sad one, of why print vehicles are now too slow for news.

The cover of today’s Parade magazine, inserted into my newspaper and probably yours, is headlined, “I Am What the Terrorists Most Fear,” and includes a photo of the interview subject:  Benazir Bhutto, who as we know was assassinated 10 days ago. The subhead is: “Is Benazir Bhutto America’s best hope against al-Qaeda?”

That now qualifies as a rhetorical question.

A learned a few days ago of the death on New Year’s eve of Bill Idelson but didn’t figure I’d blog about it until the Los Angeles Times ran an obit. Now they have, and you can  click here to read it.

To most people reading this, Bill will be known for either or both of two credits: a recurring role as Rose Marie’s boyfriend Herman Gilmscher on “The Dick van Dyke Show,” and for having written the “Long Distance Call” episode of “The Twilight Zone,” wherein a toy telephone provides the link between a boy (Billy Mumy) and his dead grandmother. Bill also wrote and acted in many other television shows, and for years ran a writing workshop from his house that at least a few of my friends signed up for.

He was also one of my professors in graduate school at USC, where he made an indelible impression. Ostensibly, Bill was teaching sitcom writing. In actuality, Bill was teaching Thinking For Yourself 101. He wasn’t interested in seemingly clever puns — I remember him ripping a fellow student apart for writing a scene about a gorilla in a cage in a suburban household that included the very bad line of dialogue, “But there’s a gorilla in our midst!” (This was around the time of the release of the film “Gorillas in the Mist.”) He was interested in the reality of the situation and your take on it. Both elements were important: There’s a reason that good sitcoms reflect the word blend they arise from — situation, and comedy.

On the last day of class, at the height of the reign of Bush the First, Bill decided to go for broke. He stripped away the outer shell of the lesson — the “writing” part — and left only the cold hard center of the “thinking” part. Bill let us know how he saw the world, in terms of the powerful and the powerless. This went over about as well as one would imagine with a much younger generation succored (or suckered) by Reagan/Bush, and in particular with a group of 12 or so who wanted to write junky pun-laden television with creamy caramel centers. Bill didn’t even expect them to agree with him — he wanted them to argue, to defend their positions, to think for themselves in the way he thought writers should — but they turned cold and a pall fell over the room. At the end of class, two of us hung around to console him. I didn’t come of age during McCarthyism, and I wasn’t writing the nakedly enlightened humanism evidenced by “The Twilight Zone,” but I liked to think I thought for myself, and I could surely see the dynamics of the room, and I generally side with the underdog, and in this case that was the aging writer who hadn’t had any reason to risk his self-image in such a personal campaign with disinterested students — except of course he had to.

I will never forget Bill for that lesson. Or for another.

When my play “Guest for Dinner” was produced in the USC MPW one-act festival — a festival that oddly enough I now find myself executive producing — Bill came to see it at my urging. He brought his wife, the actress-producer Seemah Wilder whom, through further odd circumstance, I would wind up producing in a play about 10 years later and whom I hadn’t remembered as Bill’s wife until reading these obits the past week. “Guest for Dinner” had been produced at Stockton College when I was an undergrad and it had been a sensation, with extra chairs required for every performance and big laughs and a sense of minor celebrity in the making. If anything, the USC production had better acting and better direction, and was clearly working better than at least two of the other plays in the festival. (The fourth play, by a fellow grad student named Peter Chase, was very strong.) On opening night, as people streamed outside filled with what to me seemed like excitement, I asked Bill what he thought. He said something short, friendly, and noncommittal like “Congratulations.” But I wanted to hear more, and said, “No, what did you really think?” And then he told me. Within the space of about two minutes, he ripped the play to shreds. I guess my face betrayed my shock and disappointment, because when it was over, Seemah gripped my arm warmly and said, “Well, I liked it.” I thanked him for his honesty and walked away, licking my wounds. As I thought about this later, I grew to agree with Bill that the play didn’t really work: The writing is self-conscious, the motivations at times weak, the conflict muted. These are mistakes I like to think I haven’t repeated, and as for the play, I allowed one further production and haven’t sent it out since.

People who teach writing aren’t there to be your friend — at least, the good ones aren’t. They also aren’t there to feed their own ego by destroying yours. They are there to teach you something about writing. It’s not always an enjoyable process, either for the provider of advice or the recipient. Given my personal experience with him, I have to think that Bill really cared about what he did, and I’m in his debt.

These Cinefamily people who are programming the Silent Movie house in the Fairfax district continue to impress. I just put two of their offerings into my jam-packed January schedule (and we’ll see if I can make it to either one of them, but I’m hopeful).

On Saturday evenings this month, they’re running a Guy Maddin festival. I’ve never seen a Guy Maddin film, but I’ve heard about these offbeat flicks from the sage known as Richard Roesberg, as well as others. I would have liked to seen tonight’s offering, but my schedule didn’t permit:

Tales From the Gimli Hospital w/ The Heart of the World (short)
This micro-budget wonder was Maddin’s first feature. Upon the film’s release, its baffling originality knocked the socks off of
audiences everywhere, and prompted them to ask aloud: who the hell is this genius, and where the hell is Manitoba? We’re still not sure about the latter, but the former is a question better answered by this film. A deadpan, dreamlike frame-tale about a sordid necrophilic love-triangle between quarantined Icelandic Canadians, Gimli’s carefully-parsed insanity is a testament to the consistency of Maddin’s vision. Like his later features, it’s densely packed with techniques that humorously and reverently reference dead technologies. Mediums are skewered. Revenge is exacted. A damn good story is parlayed. Obsoleteness is rendered obsolete.
Dir: Guy Maddin, 1988, 35 mm, 72 min

Next Saturday night, though, I hope to catch this one:

Careful w/ Oldilon Redon: Or the Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity (short)
Possibly the best film ever made about turn-of-the-century Alpine incest and avalanche-related repression, Maddin’s Careful showcases his masterful strangeness in scene after crackly, dizzying scene. Set in an ominously quaint village whose citizens whisper so as not to disturb the massive mounds of snow that threaten to bury them all, the story here concerns a roster of impossibly wholesome youngsters who fall victim to the Oedipal hysteria their cloistered lives foster. Maddin utilizes an unmatched repertoire of campy formalities (toy-like sets, theatrical histrionics, anachronistic visuals, deliberately clunky overdubbing, faux-tinting…). As its catastrophes escalate in number and scope, Careful begins to recall an art-house version of the sort of convoluted disaster films in which body counts multiply exponentially the closer we get to the final reel. Absorbing the thick sense of unease that blankets this gory, hilarious psychodrama is an essential experience, because it’s a thousand percent pure Maddin– inexplicably unhinged, and impossible to forget.
Dir: Guy Maddin, 1992, 35mm, 100 min.

If you’re going to make the effort to go out to see something, it should be something made better by going out. These movies seem to fit the bill. As do these, of course, which I plan to take my kids to:

Sherlock Jr. & Keaton Shorts
Mishap and mayhem arise when the inimitable Buster Keaton, playing the part of a dejected projectionist, falls asleep at the reel. The silent swain returns to the theatre after being thwarted in love by a rival who, neglecting to uphold the chivalric code of love and honor, frames the naïve projectionist for the crime of a stolen pocket-watch. What follows reads like a series of cinematic puns—the framed subject, Keaton, becomes cinematically framed as dreaming lets loose the imaginative, fantastical stuff of detective fiction in this beguiling early twentieth-century example of a film within a film. While it may be impossible to disentangle the reel from the real in the space between the projection booth and the silver screen, you’ll have to follow the infamous chase scene through to waking life to see whether Keaton’s trademark deadpan antics can restore balance to the comedic order. The feature will be preceded by classic Keaton shorts and accompanied by a live musician.
Dir: Buster Keaton, 1924, 35 mm, 44 min.

I love “Sherlock Jr.” more than any other film and yes, I’ve seen it many times. But there’s nothing like seeing it the way God intended: in a movie house, with live accompaniment and a live audience. This is the sort of experience that must be savored while possible.

Finally, here’s something I wish I could see, except I have class that night. (Well, I’m teaching — we’ll see if I have any class.)

The Stone Rider
This obscure gem of German Expressionism features two frequent Fritz Lang collaborators: it stars Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who most famously played the eponymous villain in Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler, and was based on an idea by Thea Von Harbou, Lang’s wife and the screenwriter of most of his silent masterpieces. Klein-Rogge plays a fearsome nobleman whose malevolence is transformed by the unexpected love of a young girl who arrives at his castle bent on avenging her sister’s death. Alas, their love is ill-starred, as Klein-Rogge’s violent streak cannot be suppressed, and the villagers decide he must be eradicated. Dark, moody, striking, and virtually unseen, The Stone Rider will deliver the goods for silent film connoisseurs, as well as neophytes.
Dir: Fritz Wendhausen, 1923, 16mm, ca. 80 min.

Note the appearance, of sorts, of our friend Dr. Mabuse, who as the uber-Cheney is at the secret center of all machinations. This film, sadly, appears not to be on DVD (yet?); neither our friends at Amazon.com nor the saviors at Kino come up with anything.

Oh, but to be a clone or a time traveler when there are so many cultural choices from which to choose.

Don’t be distracted by all the hullabaloo surrounding a supposed presidential election. Not when there’s actual new change in the offing.