Above are three self-portraits of Robert Crumb, as a four-year-old, an adolescent, and today.

Accompanying these illustrations in today’s Los Angeles Times Opinion section is an odd little piece written by his wife, Aline Kominsky-Crumb. Click here to see it; if you want to see the full versions of these cropped images, registration is required. Here is the entirety of the text:

As a child, my husband, Robert, already felt like an alienated old man (top left). He longed for the past, never having actually known what he was nostalgic for. It was as if he were born in the wrong time. He never felt part of the contemporary culture. You can see the roots of his alienation already beginning.

You can see from this drawing (middle) how out of sync Robert was — awkward, sensitive, nerdy. He was destined to suffer the cruelties of the outsider — especially in Southern California in the 1950s, where surfers and beach bunnies were the mode.

This image (right) is reflective of Robert as a mature artist — someone who has an eye for capturing himself with total honesty and has finally honed his scathing critique of modern society. We see the artist here in his pajamas at home. He has nothing to hide; it is all there.

Like most things about the LA Times, this baffles me.

(First, a few other things that baffle me about the Times:

1. Why doesn’t the newspaper that is situated in the entertainment capitol of the world have far better entertainment coverage than we get in Calendar — and for God’s sake, why is the writing in that section so deadly dull?
2. Why doesn’t the paper of record for the nation’s second-largest city have a metro section (rather than a “California” section)?
3. Why can’t the paper settle on a font? It doesn’t seem to be a problem for other newspapers — or even for me.
4. Why is it so riddled with errors? I have on file my favorite example: the day that the bottom half of Calendar Page 2 was advertising, and the top half was corrections. Other days have only come close to that achievement. Let us never forget the day they announced on page one the death of Allen Ginsberg, probably the most important American poet of the past 50 years — and misspelled his name.

I could go on in this vein, but I’ve already surpassed “a few.”)

What baffles me about this piece is that a) I don’t know what it’s doing in the Opinion section because it doesn’t offer an opinion about anything, and b) I just can’t figure out what prompted it. Is Crumb in the news and I missed it?

I haven’t been a fan of the Bond franchise since… well, I remember hating “Moonraker.” That was in 1979.

“Moonraker” typifies what disinterested me in Bond: the detached gimmickry of an outerspace conflict. It was an extraterrestrial epic in which nothing was grounded.

Much has happened in the series since then, not much of it good. Until now.

It is not just that the new Bond himself is a rehumanized model, although that goes a long way. The gadgets are gone. (This Bond’s most essential spyware? A defibrilator.) Minus the fantastic, something closer to reality reappears. That’s a good thing. While I don’t want my secret agents settling down in the suburbs, I do like to know that they can get cut and bleed and feel betrayed and heartbroken and be driven by ego and rage.
Best Bond yet? It sure felt that way today.

This is not as bad as some stage directions I’ve seen.

Thanks to Mark Chaet for sending this.

While I’m on the subject of “Godot,” Trey reminded me of this poem, which I wrote in the 90’s. It’s been published a few times — I don’t remember where. It seems especially pertinent at the moment.

Waiting for Godot to Leave

Well, he finally showed up
And of course he brought guests,
Uninvited ones,
And he ate all the h’ors d’ouevres
And he’s finishing off the punch
And he knows everybody who’s anybody
And goes on about them at great length
And he stuck his head up your dress
And he threatened to ruin me
And now he’s in the pool with our daughter
And he’s so fascinating and intimidating
And funny and awful and rude and overpowering
But just such a boor in the end.
No surprise, really.
Nobody ever lives up to their P.R.

At this point, having seen probably 10 productions of “Waiting for Godot,” having read the play several times, thought about it, weighed the various merits of differing performances, and having gone so far as to give my son the middle name Beckett, I think I’m qualified to discourse on the play.

The acclaimed Gate Theatre production currently at UCLA Live! is no good.

I say this with no glee, mirrored only by my absence in glee seeing it.

Although the play is many things, one thing it is not or should not be is ponderous. But that’s what we have here. In fact, here’s how ponderous: It started around 8:10, and wrapped up just shy of 11 p.m., with a 20-minute intermission. Given that Act Two was 55 minutes (I clocked it), that puts Act One at about an hour and a half. Tooooo… slowwww….

My companion, the fiercely smart playwright and performer Trey Nichols, said that it was lacking in existential dread. Absolutely true. It was also lacking in comic rhythm. Beckett modeled the characters of Gogo and Didi after Laurel and Hardy; while I don’t expect Laurel and Hardy, I expect the comic spirit necessary to the parts. I also expect something to be at stake. Several years ago at The Matrix theatre in Hollywood, the late David Dukes, in addition to being a wonderful clown alongside co-star Robin Gammell, closed Act Two with a wrenching depiction of a man desperate to understand his place in the universe. The current Didi, played by Barry McGovern, seemed more like a man learning he might have to wait for the next bus.

Whom do I fault? Oddly enough, the memory of Samuel Beckett. Evidently his determination of how this play must be performed has been cast in stone at the Gate Theatre and with this director and at least two of the actors, all of whom he had personally worked with. This situation sounded hauntingly familiar, so when I got home I dug out my edition of Kenneth Tynan’s Letters , and there it was. (At the time, Tynan was the literary manager of the National Theatre.)

31 March 1964

To George Devine, copies to Laurence Olivier and William Gaskill, The Naitonal Theatre

Dear George:

Forgive me for writing, but I feel I must try to explain more clearly to you and Larry what is worrying me about “Play.” I wouldn’t do so if I didn’t feel that many of my qualms were shared by others.

To recap: before Sam B[eckett] arrived at rehearsals, “Play” was recognizably the work we all liked and were eager to do. The delivery of the lines was (rightly) puppet-like and mechanical, but not wholly dehumanized and stripped of all emphasis and inflections. On the strength of last weekend, it seems that Beckett’s advice on the production has changed all that — the lines are chanted in a breakneck monotone with no inflections, and I’m not alone in fearing that many of them will be simply inaudible. I suspect that Beckett is trying to treat English as if it were French — where that kind of rapid-fire monotony is customary.

The point is that we are not putting on “Play” to satisfy Beckett alone. It may not matter to him that lines are lost in laughs; or that essential bits of exposition are blurred; but it surely matters to us. As we know, Beckett has never sat through any of his plays in the presence of an audience: but we have to live with that audience night after night!”

Please understand me: I trust the play completely, and I trust your production of it, — up to the advent of the author. What I don’t especially trust is Beckett as co-director. If you could see your way to re-humanizing the text a little, I’ll bet that the actors and the audience will thank you — even if Beckett doesn’t!

Why have I seen “Godot” so many times? Because done well, it is an astonishing experience. The first time I saw it was as an undergrad, in a college production featuring my friend Joe Stafford as an imperious Pozzo. That was 20 years ago, but the performance has stuck with me — Joe embodied the comic boorishness of the role. And at the end, when the moon has risen and Godot has yet again not come, the lights drew down and pinlights of white emerged in the flies, signifying stars, and for a moment I lost my place in the universe. That’s an effect I’ve been swiping ever since, as with “Two Men Losing Their Minds” at Moving Arts in 2000.

Done right, with verve and with stakes, featuring characters who yearn for answers, “Waiting for Godot” is a transformational experience. Performed as a museum piece pregnant with significance, it’s a crashing bore.

…Or the most aggravating chick on the internet? You decide.

Just because playwrights are sometimes asked to participate in “talkback” sessions after a developmental reading doesn’t mean they should heed any of the suggestions.

The other night I went to the staged reading of a friend’s play. Good play, good reading. It’s amazing what you can learn about a play when you see it on its feet, performed in its entirety, and by good actors under the capable guidance of a good director.

In this case, all of the strengths of the play became clear: an arresting subject matter, strong characters, deft transitions, sparkling dialogue. It also became clear to me (as well as to the audience, it later turned out) that we need a little more insight into why one character committed the heinous act that catalyzes the play. I’m confident that that additional bit of clarity will complete the play.

I was impressed by the feedback from this audience; this is a developmental theatre, and most of the people speaking are playwrights with productions under their belt and actors used to working on new plays. By and large, when it comes to what makes a play work or not, they seemed to know what they’re talking about.

This hasn’t always been my experience, either as the playwright or as a member of the audience. I go into these things figuring that if they could have written the play better, they already would have done so. More than 10 years ago I decided that my personal mission in these instances was to be funny and entertaining, so that the theatre was glad it had invited me and so that no matter what anyone thought of the play they would at least see that I could be fun to work with. (Because, by and large, who comes to such readings? Actors, directors, producers, writers — people somehow or other connected with producing plays.)

This particular play deals with a court case — although, as one astute attendant noted, refreshingly, it does not take place in a courtroom and thereby avoids the procedural scenes we’ve seen cooked up on television six nights a week. My least favorite idea from the house the other night was this one: to remove all question of guilt or innocence, begin the play with a declamation of guilt, and work backward to investigate motive, a la “Equus.” An intriguing idea — but not for this play, not at this stage. This play is finished (almost).

When I was a teenager I remember reading a thick collection of Isaac Asimov’s stories, each with an introduction by Asimov (modeled perhaps after the Dangerous Visions series edited and interminably introduced by Harlan Ellison). Asimov said that after he had written a story, while he might do light revisions, that story was done — and to rework it and rework it would be like chewing second-day gum. It was an image that stuck with me.

Rewrites are necessary. Almost always. In every first production I’ve had, I’ve wound up doing at least minor rewrites because in working with good actors and a good director I’ve found new things — things that work, things that don’t, and sometimes opportunities that were missed. Twice, I’ve found new and better endings, but I went into each of those productions knowing that each play needed a new grace note to truly finish it.

To rewrite is good. To get stuck in rewrite and restructuring would mean not only not completing your present project — it also means not working on your next one.

Restructuring an entire play, one that already works? That sounds like chewing second-day gum.

New episode of Orlando’s Joint just went up this morning. The funniest ep yet (even if I do have only one line).

The premise of the biography Franz Kafka: Representative Man is that more than any other individual, Kafka truly represented the 20th century in his personal alienation and with his portrayal of the faceless menace of bureaucracy. A fascinating viewpoint and one that becomes more compelling daily, given stories like this one (forwarded to me by good friend Tom Boyle):

Feds Want To Keep Torture A Secret

“If you feel you must give the Bush administration credit for its latest legal pivot in the war on terror, give it credit for having the cojones to actually tell a federal trial judge that the “interrogation methods” (what some reasonable people call “torture”) it has used on terrorism suspects is so vital to “national security” that the recipients of it may not tell their own attorneys what’s been done to them. ”

Click here for the rest.

Max Brod wrote that when Franz Kafka read his own stories aloud, he howled with laughter.

Whether or not he was a humorist, he was certainly a prophet.

For me the most thrilling part of Prime Suspect 7 last night was not Helen Mirren, although for quite some time she has figured mightily in various fantasties of mine. No, it was the reappearance of the actor Tom Bell as Detective Sgt. Bill Otley.

In the series’ launch back in 1991, Otley was the sort who blocks the way of anyone trying to get something done, in this case Jane Tennison (Mirren), newly promoted to being his boss. Otley undermined her at every turn until two things happened: Tennison confronted him (which I recall as “Well, I’m not going to have it,” or something like that), and Tennison began to get results. Both the threat and the effectiveness gained his respect, and the character began to change.

In last night’s episode the character returned after a 10-year absence, far worse for wear. Jane Tennison may be a drunk, but she looks relatively well-tended; Bill Otley looks like he was set afire with lighter fluid and a blowtorch. His hair is badly dyed and plastered to one side, his face mottled, his appearance skeletal, his voice a light wind from the grave. (The photo at top is not recent.) It appears that Bell was ill at the time of filming — he died shortly thereafter — so were it not for the impression his earlier performances made on me, my first assumption would be that it’s easy to be a sick and dying man playing sick and dying. Every indication is that in this case life informed art and vice versa.

In the show, Otley makes a point of breaking through the crowd at an AA meeting to grab Tennison and buy her a coffee. He apologizes for his earlier actions. He hadn’t forgotten them and had wanted for a long time to own up and apologize. Tennison is quite moved by his confession and later calls on him when she finds herself in need and with no one else to turn to. It’s a remarkable and heartfelt journey for both characters. And it reminded me of the determined efforts of a former friend years ago to make her way through the amends demanded of her by AA.

Like Mirren, Bell is utterly watchable. Charisma isn’t for sale at any shops I know of; one has it or one doesn’t. Bell had said, “If you act you need to have threat. Without threat, nobody notices you.” Mirren certainly has that quality. I don’t think that is the quality Steven Rea or Reg E. Cathey bring to their roles, but there’s something — something — that they do that makes them stand out as well. Cathey made an enormous impression on me in his initial run on “Oz,” so much so that I never forgot him. The same with Bell in the first “Prime Suspect.”

Who are the other actors playing characters in the police station? I have no idea. Is it because they’ve been given little to do, or is it because they’ve done little with it?