ALL THAT I WILL EVER BE

Melinda and I went to an amazing play last night - All That I Will Ever Be, by Alan Ball. It was great for a lot of the same reasons that people would say American Beauty and Six Feet Under, other Alan Ball projects, are great - it was dark without being despairing, topical without being preachy, simultaneously familiar and strange, funny.

I didn't know anything about it when I bought the tickets - just that it had been written by Alan Ball, and the program didn't have even the briefest plot summary, so I sat down as a blank slate. It was basically about a Middle Eastern hustler and the relationships he forms with clients. The hustler is played by this guy, Peter Macdissi:

It's a really meaty role, and Macdissi does a phenomenal job. The playhouse was pretty small, and we had good seats, so we were pretty close to the stage. A lot of the time, you see an actor in person and it's sort of disconcerting that they're so human-sized. One of the things that makes theater so special, and so difficult, is that the actors don't have huge projectors or elaborate settings to enhance their impact on the viewer... they're just people, standing a few feet above all the other people in the audience. Macdissi is a big guy but I felt like he just got bigger and bigger and bigger until he was gigantic, outsized, totally filled the stage.

I don't think that cinema can really come close to the intensity and physical charisma a good actor can project in theater - because it's so immediate, because it's a moment in time that can't be repeated or repaired, because there is a physical connection when a body is performing in front of you. Acting is physical, corporeal, and that is...thinned out, mediated, through film. This means that a bad play is ridiculous. But a good one grabs hold of you bodily and won't let you go.

There were only six actors, so several of them played multiples roles. Having the same person reappear several times in different guises, having pared-down sets with minimal props, forces the audience to to engage, to construct the dramatic world with the actors.

Meanwhile the hustler, who goes by the name of Omar, uses his clients to construct his own false realities - he tries to be whatever is wanted of him, because what he wants is to be someone else. Or because he finds his own identity as a foreigner, an alien, so slippery and unstable that he has lost track of it. We see him in several situations - in the retail job he has to ensure a regular, base income; a call to a client that develops into something like a relationship; a date with a woman who is not aware that he's a hustler; and a call to an older, male client who has spent some time in the land of Omar's birth. Although these situations are not interrelated in the butterfly-bats-its-wings-in-Malasia way, it is only by seeing the very mutable Omar in all of these situations that the viewer gains a real sense of who he is, what his life is like.

At one point, after a very touching exchange Omar offers to stay the night for no charge; his client says: Sweetheart, we don't pay you to stay, we pay you to leave.

And the last line of the play is: Why would I want to hurt you?

I wonder if the goal of the play was to investigate what it really means to give people what they want, to be what is wanted rather than what you are. Because although it seems like a compulsion for Omar, it's ultimately a self-destructive, very painful one. I also think that the play intentionally draws parallels between hustling and other relationships - retail, love, and family. It's hard to know when Omar is acting to please himself or his client; when he is in his professional or personal mode. And it's easy to see how others need Omar to construct their own fictions - less explicitly, and less consciously, than Omar himself.

I have great friends, and New York has great theatre

Some of Shelley's designs are going to be featured in Country Living Magazine. Congratulations Shelley! I think it will even be the cards that Shelley and Marisa made together, so congratulations to both of my friends. I have always had great faith in Shelley's ability to conquer the world of stationery, but it's nice to see faith give way bit by bit to empirical proof.

Also, I went to see Avenue Q the other day. It's a grown-up, dystopic, kind of rude and obscene spoof on Sesame Street - the characters are muppets grappling with early-adulthood issues of dreams vs. reality, purpose, responsibility. I didn't leave thinking or feeling anything I hadn't thought or felt before, but it's a Broadway musical that really eloquently captures a particular kind of disillusionment. Plus, there are some great songs - like "The Internet is for Porn" or "Everyone's A Little Bit Racist" or "Schadenfreude." Any musical with a song called "Schadenfreude" gets a thumbs up from me.

super short book reviews

White Teeth, by Zadie Smith: While I was reading White Teeth, I asked at least a dozen people who'd already read it what they thought, and everyone I asked said, "It's good," in the most unenthusiastic voice imaginable. Allow me to join the chorus.

Dry, by Augusten Burroughs: Reminded me of Edith Wharton. I really liked it. Despite all the pettiness, Dry is ultimately humane - the perfect reversal of how White Teeth, with all of its concern about the human condition, is ultimately petty.

one liners

The San Bernardino Sun published an article about my grandmother. I've copied the text below; he original is available here.

Woman had glam, zeal
Debbie Pfeiffer Trunnell, Staff Writer

SAN BERNARDINO - While her future husband was away serving in the Army during World War II, Clelta Inez Spelman did not sit idle.
Instead, the fashionable young woman and a friend opened a dress shop called Cover Girl on Ocean Avenue in the south end of San Francisco.
Then and later in life, as a young doctor's wife in San Bernardino, she was a hard worker.
"She took care of it all, from selling high-class fashions in the 1940s to working like a horse when we were children," said her daughter, Sandra Gail Bauer of Santa Ana.
Spelman died Jan. 4 at Redlands Community Hospital, 13 days after celebrating her 86th birthday.
She was born Dec. 22, 1920, to Grace Gatewood Winkler and Clarence Emmick, who at one time was an engineer on a riverboat on the Ohio River.
Spelman, named Clelta for an orphan her mother once cared for, was raised in Evansville, Ind.
Her favorite times in childhood were visits to her grandmother's farmhouse in Owensboro, Ky.
She used to talk about waking up on the farm and smelling hash - and biscuits and gravy - cooking in the kitchen, recalled Bauer.
Life on the small farm was harsh in the winter. It was bone-chillingly cold, and Clelta had to go outside to empty the family's chamber pots.
She graduated from Benjamin Bosse High School in Evansville and moved with her family to San Francisco when she was 18.
There, her family acquired a five-story apartment building next to Sutro Museum in Ocean Beach.
She lived in an apartment in the building and worked for her uncle, Eugene Emmick, who at the time owned most of the movie theaters in San Francisco, according to family members.
While working at a box office at one of the theaters, Spelman foiled an attempted robbery.
"She ducked down in the box office and the guy left," recalled daughter Heidi O'Connell of Sacramento.
During her time in San Francisco, Spelman attended UC Berkeley for a year and volunteered at the Junior Officers Club.
It was there that she ran into a young Army medical officer named George Spelman.
They played pingpong together, and it was love from then on.
While George was serving in the Army, Clelta and a good friend opened the dress shop, where she worked as the main buyer and seller.
Running the store also turned into a family affair.
Her sister, Retha Emmick, now Newell, considered the store her closet and was always coming in to borrow dresses.
Her mother would come in and sit in the store and encourage her daughter to be a stickler for the prices.
The store was so successful that Clelta and her partner opened a second San Francisco dress shop, also named Cover Girl.
She left her successful business behind when she and Spelman married on Christmas Day 1948 in Las Vegas, then took up residence in a rental home on Eighth Street in San Bernardino.
Eventually they settled in a home of their own, on Maywood Avenue, where they raised their three children.
In the early years, Spelman did much of the bookkeeping in her husband's medical office in San Bernardino.
The couple also purchased apartments next to his office, and she was active in managing them.
In addition to running the apartments, she got into the antiques business with Retha, and the two sisters put together an extensive cut-glass collection.
Clelta still dressed to the nines. Bauer remembers raiding her mother's closet and dressing in her fancy outfits.
"She was very, very glamorous,", "but eventually became aware of pedal pushers and wore them until the day she died."
The Spelmans traveled extensively to Mexico, Hawaii and Europe. On one trip, they bought a Mercedes-Benz in Europe and brought it back on the Queen Elizabeth 2.
The couple's greatest tragedy was the loss of their son, Roger, in an automobile accident when he was 32. One of Clelta's last requests was to be buried over her son's ashes in the family plot near San Francisco.
Her family described her death as a crushing blow.
"But it is a blow that seems to promise transformation into peace and strength from having had her," said her husband.
She is also survived by three grandchildren.

3

- My grandmother died this week. This doesn't seem like the kind of thing to discuss in a blog, so I'm not going to. It wasn't a surprise, but it's been a tough year with her going in and out of the hospital, and it's hard to lose her. I'm going home for the funeral on Monday.

- I saw Night at the Museum and found it thoroughly delightful - a childhood fantasy brought to life. Also Children of Men which I found pretty amazing. Worth a try, at least, although I heard plenty of people slamming it on the way out of the theater.

- I'm going to an SAR gala ball (that's Sons of the American Revolution) in February, and I was just informed that I need a pair of white gloves for the receiving line. I find this sort of delightfully absurd. Also, I don't think I've ever been to an event to which the word "gala" was attached, but maybe what I mean is that none of the ones I've been to have lived up to the word? It's like the thing about not wanting to be a part of any club that would have you as a member. I don't really know what gala is, but I'm pretty sure I'm not invited to it.

Buy The Cow

I have known for a long time that Ariana is an amazing poet. So I'm not surprised to see her getting a bit of the attention she deserves - but I am glad. When I saw a draft of The Cow a while back (a year ago maybe?), even knowing what to expect from her I was blown away.

If my esteem is not recommendation enough, here is her publisher Fence's blurb about the text:

To call Ariana Reines' poetry scatological doesn't even scratch the surface. "I COULD BE A DIAPER FOR THE DAY'S RESIDUALS," she writes, and, "She clasped the event to her and proceeded. Fucked her steaming/ eyehole and ended it." The Cow is a body in the way that texts are bodied—"Are you so intelligent your body doesn't have you in it."—but not in the way that allows the text to become desensitized, depersonalized, sterilized. Instead this text is filthy and fertilized, filling and emptying, filling and emptying, atrocious and politic with meaning. The Cow is a mother, a lover, and a murdered lump of meat, rendered in the strongest of languages. "I cannot count the altering that happens in the very large rooms that are the guts of her."

And two sentences of praise from a Known Individual (Ariana says she loves Richard Foreman but the one play of his I saw, Bad Boy Nietzsche, didn't move me particularly. Perhaps because I was a freshman in college at the time.):

“No doubt about it, this is strong and original work. Scary in the best possible way.”—Richard Foreman

And this is from an online review to be found here (see the Dec. 21 entry):

[...something about another book released at the same time, to which the author occasionally compares The Cow...]

Ariana Reines' The Cow is fiercer and wilder, embracing the persona of the eponymous ruminant, taking the consumption of (female) flesh literally. Brown flirts with obscenity, or more precisely our fascination with obscenity; Reines is viscerally, exuberantly obscene, yet somehow more in continuity with the hidden obscenity of the Real discovered by modernism and psychoanalysis—I think of Sianne Ngai's essay "Raw Matter: A Poetics of Disgust," but also of the primal scene of modernist poetry, The Waste Land, where the corpse planted in the speaker's garden turns out to be the mass grave of the (feminine?) nature that our civilization perches precariously upon: the cow with her vulnerable eyes and the cattle industry that produces and consumes her is the figure for this. The body is cracked open, violated, marked for death, taboo rather than sacred:

Earmark

She clasped the event to her and proceeded. Fucked her steaming eyehole and ended it. The cracked things was a doomed pidgin, it meant something.

Yesterday. A patience would be ideal. Make an art of it, sere notes winding their way through an air to have become the name of her going. Her name on the list, and some certain information they had.

After a time there is no more accuracy, after a time you can't get the note clean of what it might have been.

Under the skirt of Mother Ginger huddle little boys and girls. A holiday shit stain. His scholarliness justifies those flights

Of fancy you condemn in him. And the gummy hulls of words muzzle the chaw, a kind of cud that will not do. An umlaut could be a cousin's bone,

The poisoned nuance that started everything. It was from eating ourselves. It had to be

Someone else's sickness first, our silence, our good balance, our usefulness. There is something certain creatures long for. To be hacked up and macerated. That's having it come out and go into another body.

Eaten, gemmed with grease and herbs. Whose low language ruined our bowels. Whose lowing eventually meant nothing. We knew we were to become a ream of flesh. Another nothing.

"Gemmed with grease!" I can't recall the last time I came across a text so scarifying, so disgust-ed/ing, that also seemed so verbally alive. Like Brown, Reines is also concerned with the position of poetry and herself as a speaker within poetry, though the sheer force of her negativity seems just possibly to contain its own seeds of regeneration. From the last page of "Transport," toward the end of the book:

It's the same old story and you have to learn to speak the CLAMATO language of the elders or they will fuck you too.

You have to learn to speak the deciduous vocables of the true poets a beautiful whiteness.

The feet of white girls in flipflops. Fake hippie skirts from Forever 21. I hate the fop in me I want to eat a nipple of Venus because I am becoming a magnificent woman. Hurting culture want to bleed faggot

Leg wax high heel lipstick cuntface a marketing job designers wanting the best I want filthier but not to be homeless because I love myself too much bluebell cups in the rain a poetics of the music of the poolside therapy. Hate me. We are still thinking too much.

At this site, at this juncture, we are going to be we are becoming free.

Maybe Beckett is the more appropriate forebear to cite (the phrase "Go go" appears repeatedly, while its last words are "Go on. Go on"), and Stein if Stein were unable or unwilling to recuse herself as completely as she seems to from the matrix of heterosexual desire. Desire/disgust is the axis both of these books travel upon, Brown empahsizing the former and Reines emphasizing the latter. Above all I am impressed by their vulnerability, their angry nakedness.

I have it on good authority that the best price can be found here, at Barnes & Noble online.

The Magic Flute

Last night I went to see the Met's new production of The Magic Flute. I bought the tickets as a birthday present for Ariana, and a little bit as a birthday present for myself. It was just about the most magnficent staging of an opera I have ever seen - thanks to Julie Taymor.

I have felt for a long time that the strength of live theater is that, compared to cinema, it's impossible to re-create a scene from life. There's no way to make a set, especially one that needs to be changed every fifteen minutes or so, lifelike in every detail. Live productions are forced into abstraction. I've seen a few plays that really take advantage of this, but The Magic Flute is the first opera to do so - where it makes the most sense of all, since opera is prone to be both stylized and larger-than-life.

I spent a few minutes hunting for pictures online, and I didn't find the scenes I was looking for. I wanted to find an image of the Queen of Night, who sings her first aria wearing starry white robes while white flags flutter behind her like wings. Ariana suggested the genius of Taymor's costuming lay in her ability to allow the singers to emote while remaining perfectly still - in this case, the queen was severely immobile and her ghost-wings fluttered and swooped behind her.

I was also looking for a picture of the three spirits and their crane. The spirits were little boys, wearing little diapery underwear and powdered white from head to toe, with a porcupine mass of spiny white hair and long white beards. They had crane familiars, including a huge, ghostly white puppet whose skeletal wings beat slowly as it floated across the stage, fluttering feathers made of thin strips of cloth.

But these are the pictures that I could find, and they are magnificent. The whole performance was magnificent. This is Papageno undergoing his trials:

And this is Papageno dreaming of a Papagena:

This is from Alex Ross's review for the New Yorker:

"“Silent applause” is an apt phrase for what happens when a listener’s inward experience locks in synch with the experience of several thousand others. It’s the sense of a performance “rising and rising,” as Mozart said; of a jaded, lonely crowd made to grin like kids; of a world gone right. I hung on to the feeling as long as I could...

To the usual Masonic symbology she [Taymor] adds motifs from the Kabbalah, Tantric Buddhism, Bunraku, Indonesian puppet theatre, and so on. The Met stage has never been so alive with movement, so charged with color, so brilliant to the eye. The outward effect is of a shimmering cultural kaleidoscope, with all manner of mystical and folk traditions blending together. Behind the surface lies a melancholy sense that history has never permitted such a synthesis—that Mozart’s theme of love and power united is nothing more than a fever dream. But Taymor allows the Enlightenment fantasy to play out to the end...

That these sets could serve as the backdrop for some very scary Vegas magic show—David Copperfield raising the dead, perhaps—is part of the whimsical appeal of the production, which stops well short of taking itself too seriously...

Mark Dendy obtains some of the sharpest dancing I’ve seen on the Met stage; when Papageno immobilizes Monostatos’s would-be tough guys with his magic bells, they become screamingly gay Broadway hoofers...."

That pretty much sums it up. It was a real treat.