I haven’t been a fan of Roger Ebert. Until now. He’s been sick with cancer — and hopes he’s getting better — and has had ugly, deforming surgery. But nothing is going to keep him from his film festival.

I like to think that if something like this happened to me, I’d still go to the San Diego Comic Con. Unlike Ebert, all the media wouldn’t turn out to photograph me in my post-surgical state.

Good for him. Character before beauty.

I’m of two minds about critic Charles McNulty’s piece in today’s LA Times in which he bemoans — but not quite — David Lindsay-Abaire’s upset win of a Pulitzer for “Rabbit Hole.”

McNulty wishes there were more support for cutting-edge theatre. Me, I wish there were more support for good plays, whether they’re cutting edge or not. I also think that Mr. Lindsay-Abaire was, until recently and with this play, somewhat edgy, at least in the eyes of most. Here’s how Wikipedia valiantly summarizes “Fuddy Meers,” a play I greatly enjoyed in a terrific production at the Colony Theatre a couple of years ago:

Fuddy Meers is an American play by David Lindsay-Abaire. It tells the story of an amnesiac, Claire, who awakens each morning as a blank slate on which her husband and teenage son must imprint the facts of her life. One morning Claire is abducted by a limping, lisping man who claims her husband wants to kill her. The audience views the ensuing mayhem through the kaleidoscope of Claire’s world. The play culminates in a cacophony of revelations, proving that everything is not what it appears to be.

Among his influences, Lindsay-Abaire lists playwrights John Guare, Edward Albee, Georges Feydeau, Eugène Ionesco, and George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, 1930s screwball comedy films My Man Godfrey, Twentieth Century, and “anything by Preston Sturges, Frank Capra, the Marx Brothers, and Abbott and Costello.” Walking a fine line between grave reality and joyous lunacy, the world of his plays is often dark, funny, blithe, enigmatic, hopeful, ironic, and somewhat cockeyed. “My plays tend to be peopled with outsiders in search of clarity.”

I’m willing to bet that that list of influences would lure most of us into the theatre. It just sounds like fun. Quality fun.

“Rabbit Hole,” which concerns a family struggling to recover from the death of a child, is not in the same vein. In addition to his obvious talents, it turns out that Lindsay-Abaire has range.  He’s been quoted as saying he doesn’t care how he won the Pulitzer (in a decision that overruled the panel recommendations), he’s just glad he won.

McNulty seemingly wants us to support playwrights because they are daring.  I have seen those sorts of plays — lots of them — and their unconventionality often translates into a conventional dullness. I became a playwright because of the lure of theatre of the absurd, but somehow experimentation led to an alternative theatre movement split largely between “language plays” that are ironically devoid of meaning, and camp theatre revolving solely around one meaning. Neither provides the shock of the new.

There are theatres (mostly small ones) doing new plays that shock and entertain; he’s listed a few of them. I hope that if any of those playwrights goes on to write a good, strong play that happens to win a Pulitzer, we don’t condemn it for being too conventional.

Janeane Garofalo, Henry Rollins, and Marc Maron doing non-standup at The Silent Movie Theatre (?).

I would go see this if a) it weren’t tech week for that one-act festival you’re invited to, and  b) I weren’t then out of town at the state Democratic convention.

Life in comics may be hard for comic-book characters such as Captain America and Thor (both currently “dead,” both sure to return at some point). But as evidenced by the good health of Cap co-creator Joe Simon, 93 years old and still going very very strong, and the long lives of many other Golden Age greats, doing funnybooks keeps you going.

Pirate con in New Orleans.

For one thing, it seems that the city has already been raped and pillaged.

Thank God we won’t have to wait for another election!

Newsweak (cq) has a web-only interview with Gore Vidal, one of the last remaining great American writers of that generation.

How fitting that the only other survivor is his arch nemesis, Norman Mailer. (Philip Roth, who is still doing astonishing work and having a remarkable late-career revival, was born in the following decade.)

I know that Vidal would like to be remembered as a great writer. But he isn’t one. An entertaining figure? Certainly. An entertaining writer? Sure. It’s hard to remember why I read so many of his novels, once upon a time, except they were so much fun. But “great”? I don’t think so.

“Creation” is the novel he says he wants to be remembered by, and that is the one I intend to reread. I remember it as being epic, and although I don’t trust Vidal’s opinions (as when he came down on Aaron Burr’s side) I’d like to relive his origin of so much of our philosophy. Even if I don’t agree with the characterizations.

This seven-minute clip seems to be from a documentary I haven’t seen (yet).

Vonnegut’s mordant humor is well-served by his wry reading voice.

I really miss this guy.

Actually, I’m not sure that’s possible. You could imitate him, but not be him, nor would you want to. (Especially because he’s dead.)

But if you want some useful writing tips from Vonnegut himself, click here. I can’t guarantee your writing will come unstuck, though.

You will notice in reading his advice, by the way, that much of it is oriented toward helping the reader. I love him for that. (Just as playwrights who bore the audience infuriate me.)

Some things just make me smile.

This video is one of them.