A couple of weeks ago, we were out to dine with some friends in a downtown Atlanta hotel restaurant. As we were leaving, I made a pit stop in anticipation of the drive home, and in the men’s room one of the urinals was dead.
I knew it was dead because it had been bagged and tagged. And on the great big red bag, in great big letters was johnnycovers.com.
Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Yes, that’s a thing. Do we live in a great nation or what?
That’s it. I don’t really have anything more to say about it.
I have two favorite Christmas gifts this year. One, from my lovely first wife, is a simple brass bowl, a singing bowl from Tibet. Nothing to look at, but when you strike it the tone resonates for a full 1:50 minutes—probably longer if you were truly listening in a quiet room. It’s astounding.
The other is at the opposite end of the spiritual scale:
My son gave me a silicone ice cube tray that makes ice cubes that are two inches on a side. Other than being just hipster-awful, they are a gift from the gods. I think all right-thinking people would agree that if we were able to identify the individual who invented half-moon ice “cube” makers for refrigerators, no grand jury would indict us for whatever violence we inflicted on him once we dragged him out of his house and through the streets. Nasty, awful things that block the flow of tissue-restoring fluids from the glass to your throat—truly a crime against civilisation.
But these… They are majestic in their grand simplicity. One drink, one cube: less dilution, perfect chill, and no blockage of life-giving liquids, ever. Truly, a wise child to give so marvelous a gift.
I went to see The Hobbit, and it was everything I thought it was going to be: a beautifully designed but completely overblown piece of self-indulgence on the part of Peter Jackson. As soon as it was announced that Jackson had assumed directing duties and that the movie would now be in three parts, I knew what we were in for, and indeed, that’s exactly what we got.
There’s this idea out there that Jackson is a natural “story teller” of some kind, but nothing I’ve seen in LOTR or in The Hobbit (or God help us, King Kong) indicates anything but that he is completely unable to resist stopping the plot cold while he shows off his cleverness in some ludicrous “action” sequence.
Two thoughts on the matter: after The Return of the King won the Oscar—after—Jackson went back and shot that stupid skull avalanche in the Paths of the Dead. Note: he didn’t edit it back into the film from the cutting room floor, he called the actors and the crew back to New Zesland, shot it, and inserted it, a scene that adds nothing to the plot or the characters, nothing to the mood of the sequence, nothing to the film. It was the very definition of completely unnecessary “whizbang/stupid,” and that’s the sum of my impression of Peter Jackson’s vaunted ability to tell a story.
Second thought: the dwarves’ escape from Goblin Town is ten minutes of video game/pinball excess—fourteen tiny figures fleeing across rickety bridges, collapsing paths, etc. etc. Their progress is hardly impeded as the camera swoops over, around, and through the cavernous space. (I can only imagine the thing in 48 fps/3D… oy.) Thousands of goblins/orcs swarm over everything, yet never seem to have the least effect on the outcome. In fact, nothing has an effect on the outcome; by the end of the sequence, not one thing has changed. It’s one big messy nothing-burger. (Cf.: the collapsing stone arch in Moria…)
Compare this to the Escape from the Death Star: four different groups of characters who are all trying to get back to the Millennium Falcon without getting caught. There’s suspense, action, and all of it is wrapped up in plot: rescue the princess, shut down the tractor beam, get the Death Star plans to the rebels. Once we hit hyperspace on the way to Yavin, things are different than they were ten minutes earlier.
But Dale, you will object, a) the Goblin Town sequence had no such built-in plot point; and b) Lucas was working without the benefit of the technology we have now.
My point exactly: a) no plot point to drive? Then skip it. Give us a workman-like “flight through tunnels” with some twists, perhaps ending with one last bit of swordplay at the back gate (which, quite curiously, Jackson decided to leave completely unguarded)—and get them out of there. Maybe take the time to give us some dwarf banter that might help define which one of those beings we’re supposed to know and like.
And b), that’s the mark of a “story teller,” isn’t it? To use that amazing technology in service to the story—that’s the trick. Peter Jackson seems unable to do that. I have dire fears for the next six hours of this movie. What do you want to bet that Bilbo’s cleverness in smuggling the dwarves out of Thranduil’s halls in barrels will be jettisoned in favor of yet another whizbang/stupid fight sequence?
As for Parts II and III, I intend to enjoy them—but only with a fast-forward remote in my hand.
Yes, it is true. I have been cast as Arthur, King of the Britons, in the first non-touring production of Monty Python’s Spamalot in Georgia, at the Newnan Theatre Company.
And yes, that means that my triumphant return to the Newnan stage is exactly as I left it: singing the lead role in a musical comedy as a clueless aristocrat.
Am I being typecast?
I had an odd moment last night at Newnan Theatre Company. Second night of auditions for Spamalot, learning a dance sequence on the mainstage. I happened to look up, and there on the ceiling were some letters of the alphabet, chalked onto the black paint.
It took me a moment to realize that it was my handwriting.
These were the positions of the wings and drops for Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, my farewell piece as artistic director of Newnan Community Theatre Company, aka Newnan Theatre Company. Other than an uncomfortable wedging of Coriolanus into the space one night back in 2008, Figaro was the last time I performed on that stage, and that was ten years ago.
From the sublime to the ridiculous…
So, the founder of Domino’s has a sad.
One of the more offensive comments rightwingers make about employers not wanting to provide their female employees with perfectly legal medication as part of their healthcare is that if women don’t like the religiousy beliefs of their employers, they are free to seek employment elsewhere.
I have a counter-offer: if Tom Monaghan’s deeply held religiousy beliefs conflict with the law of the land, he is free to sell off his interests and go do something else.
A while back, I bought a CD called Nouveaux “Brandebourgeois,” i.e., New Brandenburgs. The conceit is that this musicalologist Bruce Haynes has grave-robbed J.S. Bach’s other works to piece together six more Brandenburg Concerti such as the man himself might have written if he had gotten the job in Brandenburg and become a court composer instead of a church composer.
A brave attempt, but fruitless. The more I listened, the less they worked. As a composer, I have found that themes know themselves what they’re for: a sonata, a choral work, a symphony, a fugue. It doesn’t do to try to force a song theme into a symphony, nor vice versa.
And so even when I didn’t know the original pieces, the fake concerti never took flight. All those cantata themes were just not agile enough to dance through the intricacies of the Brandenburgs.
A lesson to us all, I’m sure.
I can see how my new resolution could rapidly turn ugly.
Today’s shooting in Newtown, CT, is already prompting the usual handwringing, and I for one am sick of it. If I were President Obama, I would call the usual idiots from the NRA to the White House and tell them in no uncertain terms: “No more dead children. You write the laws to make sure that happens, or I will. Your choice.”
But I digress.
Mike Huckabee, who often plays a sane person on Fox News, took a stance on the tragedy today. It’s pretty clear, he says, that the problem is that we’ve taken God out of the schools. “We don’t have a crime problem, a gun problem or even a violence problem. What we have is a sin problem,” he intones.
Let me get this straight—and I want it noted that I deserve full credit for not using the full range of expletives and naughty words at my command—am I to understand that because this nation renders unto God/Caesar what is theirs, that God thinks it’s appropriate to send a crazy person to take a gun and kill children?
Does anyone else have a problem with this?
update: Jesus.
I haven’t been getting blog posts out of my head onto the page for a while—a long while—and so last night I decided on a plan of action:
So here we go. Fragments.
Today we have Bobby Jindal, the up-and-coming-Republican-who-totally-does-not-look-like-Kenneth-the-Page,[1] totally solving the birth control issue. The birth control issue, you may recall, has nothing to do with women being afforded the opportunity to control their reproductive systems, but is all about the religiousy[2] freedomy stuff. Corporations should not have to violate their religiousy freedoms by offering birth control when it conflicts with their deeply held religiousy beliefs.
First of all, before we get to Jindal’s Gordian solution, I have to say that I was unaware that corporations had deeply held religious beliefs. We all know that they’re people, at least since 1886, but do corporations pray? More on that in a moment.
Jindal, in the meantime, wants to help everyone out. And it’s so easy! Just make birth control available over the counter instead of by prescription! So easy! Now corporations don’t have to violate their deepliest held religiousy beliefs and provide contraceptives to their female employees—those slutty slut sluts can simply go buy it themselves! Thereby placing a financial burden uniquely on their female employees not borne by those other employees, i.e., men!
Oh, wait.
Here’s the deal on corporations’ deeply held religiousy beliefs. It’s bull. All of it. If the owner of Job’s Christian Widgets does not believe in birth control, he does not have to buy it. She does not have to buy it. Whatever.
But he/she does have to provide it in Job’s Christian Widgets’ health insurance as a matter of health. And why is this not a violation of Mr./Mrs. Job’s own personal deeply held religiousy beliefs? Because providing health insurance (which employees are at least in part paying for) does not keep Mr./Mrs. Job from worshipping freely. At all. Ever. In any way.
Matter of conscience, you say? Bushwah. Let us presume that Mr./Mrs. Job is a good old-fashioned Southern Baptist. Leaving aside the fact that Southern Baptists didn’t give a rat’s ass about contraceptives until about 40 years ago, we can guess that he/she is still completely opposed to the consumption of alcohol, and yet there is no movement afoot to support stripping JCW’s employees of their ability to have a cold one after work. (Or the deeply religiousy Mr./Mrs. Job themselves, for that matter. The corporation, on the other hand, might have difficulty doing shots with the gang after the shift.)
Mr. Jindal’s brilliant solution is just one more rightwing “tails we win, heads you lose” proposals.
—
[1] Totally a GHP alumnus, Theatre 90
[2] My new word. Religiousy : Religion :: Truthiness : Truth
Today, in driving up through the back highways of middle Georgia, I passed a tiny church labeled BIBLE TRUTH TABERNACLE.
There’s lots to unpack here—there’s the traditional Southern Baptist/evangelical biblical inerrancy strain, with its claim that the Bible is absolute and infallible, the inerrant Word of God. That belief is possible only if you exclude all knowledge of church history, of Aramaic/Greek originals, of the Council of Trent, etc., etc. Too much has changed with that collection of texts to believe that King James took dictation from Jehovah.
There’s the subset strain that regards the Bible as a rulebook, God’s rulebook: “God said it, and I believe it.” That one goes squirrelly as soon as you’re forced to examine even just the Pentateuch alone with anything approaching an attention to detail. (The same can be said of treating the text as history or science—it just cannot be done without a lot of crippling cognitive dissonance.)
Have said all of this, here are my thoughts on the BIBLE TRUTH TABERNACLE, admitting that it is all my fantasy and not based on direct observation. In other words, just like the inerrantists.
The pastor/preacher of the BTT is probably also the founder. He—it’s always a he—believes not only that the Bible is TRUE, he believes that he understands that TRUTH. He reads the text closely—indeed, he reads it cover to cover every year—and as he reads, he sees the TRUTH—he constructs the TRUTH—and he transmits the TRUTH to his flock every Sunday morning and every Wednesday night.
But here’s the rub, of course: he has no knowledge of the historicity of the text, as an object of time and a subject of change. It is completely outside his ken how that book developed—or even that it did develop. It’s as if he were a lab experiment in religious thought—everything he thinks he understands about his religion is practically sui generis.
I don’t even need to impute any kind of restrictive/negative social attitudes towards the leader of BTT—although I would be astounded if he were a supporter of gay marriage, for example—to posit that much of what he has perceived to be TRUE isn’t really.
My model for this is Miss Sally Clovis [name changed to protect the innocent] at Newnan High School. Poor woman, she was a holdover from an older time, and the only reason why she was allowed in the same room as the college bound students was that Richard Smith had decamped to The Heritage School that year.
The text we were studying was the Romantic poem “The Prisoner of Chillon,” Lord Byron, about a martyred family in the 16th century. The narrator and two of his brothers were chained to pillars in the dungeon of the Castle of Chillon on the shores of Lake Geneva, and the two brothers die while the narrator lives. (Their imprisonment was due to something about freedom. It was political in nature.)
But Miss Clovis told us that the poem was about family—even the title was a clue, seeing as how it had the word chillun in it.
Well.
Even at seventeen—or perhaps especially at seventeen—I knew how hysterically wrong that was. Sally Clovis had no French, and no context of European sociopolitical thought 1790-1830, and so she interpreted what was right in front of her as best as she knew how—and went splat on the unyielding Windshield of Pedagogy.
[To be fair, I don’t think anyone but me even understood how wrong she was. I still use her as an example (not naming names, of course) of how GHP prepares students to take charge of their own learning: when I saw that I was not going to be taught English Lit, I knew it was up to me to learn it myself. My classmates just saw a year off.]
Anyway, that is how I envision the pastor of BTT: he reads with no context, no exegesis, no sense of history or theology. What he sees, he filters through his own experience. When he runs into material that is resistant to immediate literalization, I’m sure he perseveres, works on it, gnaws on it, until he sees the pattern, sees the TRUTH. It feels good, when God reveals to him His Words, the meaning of His Minds—he rejoices in the opportunity to share the TRUTH with his church—he is blessed.
Very mock-worthy, very pitiable, indeed. But as these ideas formed in my head, zooming up through middle Georgia, I found myself rebutting myself almost immediately: why not? Why not the chillun version of the TRUTH? He is merely limiting God differently than I limit god, his misunderstanding differing from mine in ways that each of us would find inexplicable. We all name the Tao—it is unavoidable—and if his naming connects him to the Mystery, to the Void, and comforts him, why should I find it risible or distressing?
I’m sure I’m condescending to the man. I’m working on that. No, I don’t believe his understanding of the Mystery is “correct,” and I’m equally sure that his beliefs are restrictive and damaging, but how can I privilege my interpretation of his sacred text over the only way he has to approach it? What are my alternatives other than to set up my idol next to his and pray for flames to consume him?
Discuss.