A collaborative Low
March 6th, 2018A behind-the-scenes reimagining of how David Bowie and Brian Eno (and even Tony Visconti) put together “Warszawa” on Bowie’s Low album. Surprising!
A behind-the-scenes reimagining of how David Bowie and Brian Eno (and even Tony Visconti) put together “Warszawa” on Bowie’s Low album. Surprising!
There will be no steel tariff.
It’s purely a political ploy to swing unemployed Pennsylvania steelworkers back to voting Republican in the March 13th special Congressional election.
Once that’s over, the issue will magically go away.
Supporting evidence: Zero reaction in the stock market today. Traders know this isn’t for real.
I don’t care about the Oscars.
And I can’t understand why anyone would — unless you were working on it, or had worked on a movie that got nominated.
I feel the same about watching pro sports, by the way: Why people would sit around and watch it is a real head-scratcher.
I’m not opposed to these things; I just really can’t understand. I guess I have a better understanding of watching pro sports — hey, somebody might do something spectacular while you’re watching! and I did watch some of the Olympics for that reason, but that was at the gym while I was doing my own spectacular feat, namely not dying on the elliptical machine — but, after the inevitable opening comedy monologue, aren’t celebrity awards shows just two or three tedious hours of watching famous rich people get up to receive even more fame and riches? Why is that entertaining? To me, it seems too close to the English class system, where haughty imperials “do their part for the local economy” by swilling down champagne while commoners get rations. The other day I came across a clip online from Jimmy Fallon’s show where he got some black people to talk to what they thought was a video chat with Chadwick Boseman, the actor who plays Black Panther; one after another, these people profusely thanked Boseman for making the movie and representing them on film. Y’know, I get it. I do. Really. As much as I can, as a white man. But my immediate thought was: He’s playing a wealthy monarch superhero, which doesn’t represent them, and he didn’t do it for them, he did it for millions of dollars. (Listen, I will gladly represent arty middle-aged German-American suburbanites onscreen for just hundreds of thousands of dollars.) Then — surprise! — it turned out that it wasn’t a video chat, that Chadwick Boseman was actually there behind the curtain! When he came out, the fan-worshipers were thrilled and at least one said “My king!” and crossed his or her arms in what I take to be a subject’s salute and genuflection re-enacted from the movie. This was even worse than mere celebrity worship — this was worshiping celebrity plus monarchy. I thought grumpily, “Our forefathers did fight a war against this sort of thing!”
Last week I noticed that a band I really like was playing locally tonight. I floated the idea of going, even though I wasn’t sure I truly wanted to go, given my dislike of the venue, only to have my friend recoil in horror. “Oh, no!” he said. “That’s the Oscars! There’s a party I always go to!” The last Oscars party I went to was about 20 years ago, and I can’t remember anything about it, except everyone else’s ginned-up excitement when some movie or other won or lost. Generally, when people tell me the Oscars are coming up, I’ll say, honestly, “When?” Not because I’m putting on airs, but because I don’t follow it and don’t know. The fact that I can live and work in the city that houses both Disney and Warner Bros., as well as a quintillion independent production companies, and that I’m in Hollywood two or three days a week, and I never know when the Oscars are, tells you about how difficult it can be for facts to break through. (Which may partly explain many evangelicals’ support of Trump.) If I cared about the Oscars, I’d know when they are. Supporting evidence: I know when Comic-Con is. If you like the Oscars, that’s fine, I just can’t understand. But if you don’t care about Comic-Con, well, that’s inexplicable.
Luckily for me, my wife feels the same way about the Oscars. I say luckily because that means that I have never had to gamely play along while we host an Oscars party. Tonight, she’ll be at work saving people’s lives at our local hospital. Our 15-year-old will be playing Fortnite or reading Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon (which he’d better finish in time for that book report!). I’ll either be at the gym or back here writing, and I admit to being interested in seeing how Rick does on “The Walking Dead” without his son “Coral.” During all of that, some people will win a little gold statuette saying they’re the best at acting like they are someone else, and others won’t win it, and some person will win a little gold statuette saying that he or she is the best at directing those people exactly how to act like someone else in the best possible way, and where to stand, and the day after that everyone will go back to doing everything else.
#1. Take America’s greatest band — that would be Pere Ubu — and have them play in the corner of a Borders bookstore, to the tremendous indifference of the children present.
For Christmas, my longtime friend, playwright Trey Nichols, bought himself the recently released boxed set of David Bowie discs from 1977-1982, “A New Career in a New Town.” Last night we were finally able to coordinate our schedules so he could bring it over for us to listen to it together.
Listening to three Bowie albums in a row reminded me that no matter how much I love and appreciate an artist in theory, there’s nobody I love in toto. I admire a lot of Kurt Vonnegut’s work, and Philip K. Dick’s work, but I will never again read “Slapstick,” and I’d like back the hours spent trying to read Dick’s execrable mainstream novel “Voices from the Street.” Much as I like the Beatles (at times), I never need to hear, say, “Octopus’s Garden” again.
I had the great pleasure of seeing David Bowie on tour twice — on the “Serious Moonlight” tour in support of the “Let’s Dance” album, in 1983, in Philadelphia; and on his final tour, at Arrowhead Pond in Anaheim in 2004. Both times, with very different shows and very different set lists, he and his band sounded great. On “Stage,” though, an early live album reissued in this new boxed set, I don’t hear any of the sort of magic I heard onstage. Instead, these are almost rudimentary live versions of songs that are far more magical on their original recordings, as performed here by what sounds like an above-average local cover band. Ouch.
The next disc we listened to was “Re:Call 3,” made up of rarities of a sort: non-album singles, somewhat-different versions of album singles, b-sides, and ephemera. This was more like it, with different versions of some of my favorite Bowie songs: “Heroes,” “Breaking Glass,” “Fashion,” “Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps)” and more. It also includes the soundtrack version of “Cat People,” which I hadn’t heard in years, a 1979 folkie version of “Space Oddity” that I’m fine without, and, most interestingly, Bowie’s songs for Bertolt Brecht’s “Baal,” which I’d always heard about but never actually heard. Now that I’ve heard them, I can say unequivocally that I prefer Bowie the rock star over Bowie the musical-theatre singer; in the former, his femme operatic voice is balanced out by the hard punches of rock-and-roll, while on the latter all his fluty indulgences flit around unanchored in a way that would have me running for the exit.
Finally, we listened to Tony Visconti’s recent remix of “Lodger.” Visconti, who was Bowie’s longtime producer, has stated that he didn’t feel the album had gotten the credit he deserved, and now he’s taken a swing at producing a better mix in hopes of better serving the music. As an enormous fan of this album, Trey was able to point out all the subtle differences; being less familiar, I didn’t hear them. Listening to it — and enjoying it — did give me occasion to look up this very positive review from Pitchfork, which left me howling with laughter. Here’s just one wonderful excerpt:
The music is punky and dramatic and a little odd, with detours into reggae and near-Eastern tonalities (“Yassassin”) and nebulously exotic “world” sounds (“African Night Flight”), all filtered through the ears of a British guy with plenty of money and the imperial leeway to appropriate whatever he felt like. To this day, no musician has better mastered the hermetic intensity of cocaine, a drug that makes you want to have long conversations with everyone you’ve ever met without leaving your room.
Whether you care about David Bowie’s music or not, I strongly recommend reading the entirety of that review for the pungent wit alone.
Given that it was approaching midnight, we didn’t get to the other albums in the boxed set last night, and unfortunately we didn’t get to sit outside and have cigars while doing this because Los Angeles was uncharacteristically approaching freezing, so we’re looking to set another play date, in March. That’ll give us a chance to listen to what may well be the best three albums of Bowie’s career: “Heroes,” “Low,” and “Scary Monsters.”
I did not know Mrs. Weaver, who died January 18th, at all.
Until now.
I think it was her photos that caught my eye in the obituary section of the Los Angeles Times, a section I generally skip, as does everyone else probably unless they’re looking for the writeup of someone they knew. In both photos, one of her young, one of her old, she’s beautiful and radiant. In the younger one she looks filled with promise; in the older one she is filled with joy. Judging from her obit, she fulfilled a lot of that promise.
According to this piece, she loved to sing, was a skier and a horseback rider, a dancer, a valedictorian, earned a degree in English and a Phi Beta Kappa key and then, 30 years post-graduation, got a Master’s in reading instruction from Loyola Marymount.
She played golf and other games, indoors and out.
She married, and had children, lived a very full life, then died.
We should all be so lucky.
Again, I did not know Barbara Ann Weaver. But I would also say she was lucky in death. Because I don’t know anyone else who has ever gotten an obituary so beautifully written.
Here’s the opening:
“Barbara Ann Weaver, December 4, 1922 – January 18, 2018, rode her sorrel pony Skookum bareback over the wheat fields her daddy farmed in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, skied those hills on pine planks with her beloved siblings Fritz and Margaret, learned to read and write in a one-room schoolhouse on Coppei Creek, learned to dance as her aunt and uncles played at the community hall by the homestead on Jasper Mountain, graduated valedictorian of Waitsburg High School’s class of 1940, went to Washington State University on a scholarship and earned a degree in English and a Phi Beta Kappa key and made her professors cry when she couldn’t stay in 1945 to help teach all the returning GIs.”
Whoever wrote this has a thing or two to teach Cormac McCarthy, and I say that as a fan of Cormac McCarthy. Listen to the rhythm of “rode her sorrel pony Skookum bareback” and “learned to dance as her aunt and uncles played at the community hall by the homestead.” The whole thing is positively stuffed with active verbs. “To be,” with its variants of “is” and “are” and “were,” is the weakest verb in the English language; you won’t find one iteration of it in that entire long, plainspoken but poetic sentence.
Here’s another evocative example. Note how the line lengths and cadences vary:
“Raised eight children with boundless love, infinite patience, sly humor, and humble wisdom. Weathered many a storm through her steadfast faith in God. Read voraciously, watched ‘Days of our Lives’ loyally, completed the Times crossword diligently, played Scrabble and Bridge formidably, and generally enjoyed golf except when she was four-putted.”
Again: not one “to be” verb; instead, we get a clever anaphoric use of adverbs that pulls us right along from the divine to the commonplace. I like how it lands on the joke, and how that tiny flaw humanizes Mrs. Weaver and spares her from hagiography and our disbelief. This was written by a writer. Among all her other accomplishments, we can add this one: She merited the time and effort and tremendous skill someone applied to writing this record of her life.
Here is how the biographical section ends, before the list of those left behind: “Was, in short, a goddess who surprised us all by not being immortal. We feel so blessed to have known her.”
This is the most effective piece of writing I’ve come across in quite a while. Because it leaves me wishing that I, too, had known her.
A website form just asked me, “Is there anything else you’d like us to know?” So I answered: “Trump is terrible through and through.”
I just came back tonight from a weekend visit to see friends and relatives on the opposite coast. One relative was having cancer surgery; I learned that another now has cancer; a close friend may have cancer; and over the past several months, my 92-year-old mother has had a succession of small strokes.
At the same time, one great-nephew celebrated his third birthday, and another, formerly the youngest, is now six, and a third, now 13, was thrilled to confide to me that he’d gotten his first kiss from a girl earlier that day.
So I spent some time thinking about life and about death.
Last night at 6:30, my much-loved brother-in-law came home and announced that there was a skunk caught in his trap (I grew up in the woods), and to be aware of that skunk and not to go near it. I didn’t know where the trap was that we shouldn’t go near, and I forgot to ask why he had a trap in the first place — what was he trying to catch? — although I did remember he said he’d been trapping squirrels and shooting them and he’d been giving the squirrel meat to some foreign man locally, until the foreign man’s friend finally told him, in English, that the foreign man had now had enough squirrel to eat and didn’t want any more.
Late at night, at 10:30, after hours spent playing pinochle with my mother and sister and my 38-year-old nephew, I went outside on the porch of the house to check on the weather because I was hoping not to have to drive through snow on the way to the airport in the early morning. It was bitter cold — 38 degrees; bitter to me, after 30 years in L.A. — and raining, and I was confident that it would turn to snow.
Which made me think of this skunk (was it a skunk? I wanted to see) and even moreso reminded me of my father’s having told me when I was a boy that he’d come home and found that Sophie Paulsgraf, our neighbor, had left her dog chained up outside in the snow, where Dad saw the dog shivering and miserable, so Dad marched over to the Paulsgraf house and told Mrs. Paulsgraf that she ought to be ashamed of herself, whereupon Mrs. Paulsgraf followed him outside and let the dog into the abandoned car it was chained to, so it could sleep inside. Which brought me back around to the idea of this animal, this skunk perhaps, caught inside a trap, a cage, in the cold rain soon to be snow, all night, until morning and then whatever my brother-in-law would do with it.
I got my adult nephew to go look at the animal with me. I got an umbrella — he had a hoodie — and he got a flashlight. We didn’t draw too close — we were careful not to draw too close — until finally the beam picked out the markings of the animal, deep furry black with white tracings, an animal larger than I would have expected, about the size of an overfed midsize dog, and it was definitely a skunk. I told my nephew that I couldn’t bear the idea of leaving it in that wire cage all night, exposed to the rain and cold and snow. I assumed that left to itself, it would burrow under cover — but caught in this cage, there was no protection in the offing. At the same time, we couldn’t approach to release it, because we’d get sprayed.
“I can shoot it,” he said.
“Yes. Please,” I said. Because that was what my brother-in-law would do in the morning anyway; better to do it now, and spare the animal a night of torment.
My nephew, an experienced hunter, went inside to get one of his rifles. He came back out with it and started to load it from the porch, a safe distance where he’d shoot from, while I’d cautiously approach from a side angle, down below on the ground, training the flashlight on the skunk so my nephew could see the target, trapped in its cage, just off the edge of the driveway in the brush, the site of what had sounded like dozens of squirrel murders.
I watched the animal intently from about twelve feet of distance, heard a *pop* and saw the animal flinch. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. The animal had been hit, but was still moving. I said to my nephew, about his gun, “What is that? That you’re using?” I was afraid I knew.
“Air rifle,” he said.
“You’re using a pellet gun??” I said. “To kill a skunk?!?!” Growing up, I’d known kids who shot each other for fun with pellet guns.
He assured me that this was “high-powered” as he pumped the stock several times to work up air compression to take another shot.
He shot the skunk again.
“Still moving,” I said.
So he shot it again.
“Still moving,” I said.
So he shot it again. It lifted its eyes to look at me. “Still moving.”
He shot it again. The animal’s eyes caught my flashlight again.
“I’ll go get the other bullets,” my nephew said, while I mentally corrected him: These weren’t bullets, these were pellets. Bullets were what I had expected.
He came out with new pellets.
“What’s the difference?” I asked.
“The others had flat heads. These are sharp.” He showed me. The expectation: These would penetrate better.
I resumed my position and he shot the skunk again.
“Still moving,” I moaned.
He shot it again. Each time it got shot, the animal jumped. Clearly, it was getting hit. He kept shooting it, and it kept moving, and I kept repeating its movements back to him. I lost count after twelve direct hits.
“Dear God,” I said.
“I keep hitting it!” he said.
I tried to think of another way to kill the creature without getting sprayed, something quick, but I couldn’t come up with anything. I was surprised that it didn’t make a sound. Not a squeal, which I’d expected, not a grunt or a groan — nothing — but in my mind’s ear, I could hear it all.
My nephew shot it again. I saw the skunk spasm again, and this time I smelled its spray. Maybe it was dead. I’d heard that they always spray when they die suddenly, in the way that a hanged man will shit his pants.
But no, the skunk moved again.
By now, I was struggling to stay calm. “Can you maybe come down here and shoot him in the head? His head is pointing at me.”
“I’m shooting it in the head.”
“You’re shooting it in his flank. His eyes are staring at me.”
My nephew came down off the porch, away from the railing he’d been using as a gun rest during this very long, very slow ordeal. Now he took up a station beside me, pumped the air rifle again, and shot the animal in what we took to be his head.
We paused. That should have done it.
Then the skunk moved again, but more slowly.
“For God’s sake,” I said.
My nephew, reading my mind, explained why he couldn’t use a more powerful weapon at this hour in these woods and with these laws.
“Okay,” I said. “Please shoot it again.”
He shot it again. It made another movement. We repeated the pattern some more — “Please shoot it”; the shot; the skunk moving again — until finally, finally, there was another burst of skunk spray, an awful silent fog of odor that washed toward us as we backed away.
“I think it’s dead,” I said. “But let’s give it a minute.” We waited, then waited some more, then decided that it had to be dead — I hoped to God it was dead — and went inside.
This quick mercy killing had taken almost an hour. It was impossible to sleep after that.
My own test for cancer is in a couple of weeks.
It was the best of (theatre) times, it was the worst of (theatre) times.
I was going to write a long post about professionalism, and actually had most of it written in my head, but I can boil it down to this: Professionalism is like what Justice Potter said about pornography: “I know it when I see it.”
Just over a week ago, we had our tech rehearsal for The Car Plays, which is running now at Segerstrom Center in Orange County. (It’s sold out. Don’t even try.) I directed a play called “The Night Gwen Stacy Died”; here are a few words about my cast. We rehearsed over the holidays; for this 10-minute play, one of the actors would spend five hours on LA’s notoriously convenient buses (two-and-a-half getting to rehearsal; two-and-a-half getting back home), and another one of the actors would drive about an hour each way; the third actor changed her work schedule whenever needed; one of the guys rehearsed a few days after painful, extensive abdominal surgery (!); and our artistic producer drove two hours out of his way to check on our show when we decided we needed to rehearse all the way across town and down south in order to accommodate the guy who had surgery. Meanwhile, three people coordinated and scoured the area for the necessary costume bits and props. Oh, and the tech? The tech involved about four dozen people and 15 plays, and top-to-bottom was probably the most well-produced, well-run, efficient tech rehearsal I’ve ever seen in the 40 years I’ve been doing theatre.
Meanwhile, in the past two weeks I saw an improv show billed as featuring “the top improv teams in LA” where people had no idea how to do improv — low energy; no projection; no familiarity with the announced-in-advance script prompts, and I assure you, these were very well-known script prompts; and where the second team, given its prompt (“It’s a play”) rejected it (“Actually, we’re doing a documentary”), which is a complete no-no in improv. Rarely have 40 minutes seemed so long. Dying painfully of a gut shot would’ve seemed quicker. During the third of these internal skits, I leaned in to my wife and whispered harshly, “We’re leaving” and grabbed her and ran for the exit, past the audience, who consisted almost entirely of the other people waiting to do “improv” and a scattering of friends-of-the-performers who kept shilling for the performers in a recognizably false way.
The photo above is from a show I saw this weekend. You’re seeing the stage action from my seat. Some members of the audience dragged their chairs left and right in an effort to see something; I just gave up and decided I was attending a radio play. Before the play, the playwright introduced me to “the greatest director in the world”; judging just from that photo, I’m still waiting to meet him. I couldn’t quite figure out why this playing space had the absolute worst sightlines I’ve ever seen, until I turned around and saw that 20 feet behind us was an elevated stage! For some reason, the greatest director in the world decided to stage the play in a slightly elevated room across from the stage. This meant that, as you can see, we couldn’t see; it also meant that the actors’ words were lost to the depth of the room, and, given that there’s no light plot above a room (as opposed to, say, a stage), the actors were frequently in dim. It’s a real shame, too, because the play is better than that. But, the director and his cast found ways to bury the laugh lines too.
My best advice: Surround yourself with people who know what they’re doing. Whether it’s doing live performance or changing the oil in your car.
By the way, the young woman in front of me, in the center above, had beautiful ash-blonde hair, as well as an attractively smooth back, both of which I got to admire closely for an hour and a half.