I got your new music right here.

Blame it on the holydays, or blame it on my favorite scapegoat — le media social. I do, and frequently -- not merely for convenience, but because it’s demonstrable (accent on demon) that the siphoning off of communicative impulses into Facebook and Twitter makes blogging seem downright long-form (aka antique).

Culpabilities aside, I firmly resolve, with the help of thy grace, to return to ye olde confessional mode soon. Meanwhile, here’s a fun bagatelle for you. One of my favorite composers in the aggressively moderne style is György Ligeti. Like many, my first exposure to this artist was via Stanley Kubrick, who used Mr. Ligeti’s often disturbing music to great effect in The Shining in particular.

Ligeti doesn’t make for pleasant background music; it’s full of quirks, such as flatulent squeaks and whispered words. Many’s the time I’ve been asked to eject his CDs or, more passive-aggressively, just asked “How can you listen to that?” And my response is that I don’t invariably hear scary movie music. Instead I hear whimsical, playful, even mischievous music.

Q.E.D.: this performance of Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre, as performed by the fabulous Oregon-based new music ensemble Beta Collide, in a video produced by Yachats company BlueDot Productions. Consider this proof positive that new music doesn’t have to be a solemn affair.

Mysteries of the Macabre from BlueDot Productions on Vimeo.

Theater High

A highlight of my recent trip to see my sainted mother in St Louis was a visit to the Rep to see a new play by Matthew Lombardo, High. As rolling premieres go, this production is something of a stampede; it had runs at Hartford Theater Works and Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park before moving on to St Louis Rep, and the plan all along was to wind up Nueva York — Broadway.

When my mother picked up the tickets, the box office took one look at her and decided to do some pre-emptive deprogramming. “You do realize it’s……gritty?”

This spurred me to go online and find out just how nitty this gritty could get. Apparently the fuss is about the main character — a potty-mouthed nun sans wimple (but avec rosary) who works in a Church rehab service. Enter the challenge of her life in the form of an equally battle-scarred addict, and a shady priest with a mysterious agenda, and the games begin.

How does a lurid three-hander get Broadway legs? By dint of its star, Kathleen Turner. The very idea of sexy Ms. Turner married to Christ yet speaking fluent gutter punk is too delicious to resist. The gambit worked for the Rep; we were there on closing night, and the place was packed.

We got to sit within spitting distance of Ms. Turner, whose legendary smoky voice has deepened to a near-baritone. The woman has gravity; she commands a stage presence you don’t always get from movie stars in live performances. Fortunately for the production, her costars (Evan Jonigkeit and Michael Berresse) are both excellent — as they had better be, to stand up to Ms. Turner’s incandescence. In fact all the production elements are superb; there seems to be nothing else for this show to do but open on Broadway.

It’s interesting to me that St Louis was part of this gradual slouch toward New York. Leafing through the Rep’s program, I was impressed to see ads for about a dozen more theaters than I knew existed in that town. Seth Gordon is now at the Rep, as its Associate AD, where he’ll be kick-starting a new play development wing; he was out of town while I was there, but I was privileged to have lunch with two other noted theater artists, dramaturg Megan Monaghan and director Tlaloc Rivas, both teaching now at U of Missouri. And Carter Lewis has been catalyzing Wash U’s playwriting program for several years now. Looks like I have to revise my assumptions about St Louis being a theater backwater.

Oh, about the box office’s warnings? The putative grittiness came down to occasional blue language, a brief but convincing display of violence, and a smidge of nudity. My sainted mother’s assessment? “I’ve seen worse than that on TV.”

All Hallows Eve

No doubt you’ve gathered that I love all things Hallowe’en. The cheesy cinematic frightfests, the symphonic renditions of the Dies Irae, the kids’ costumes, the scary cocktails and appetizers, the whole silly business.

Yet on the actual night of the 31st, you won’t catch me out partying. For me it’s a high holiday — a spiritual tide I want to hitch a ride on — and thus a time for meditation.

Though the usual concept of the holiday’s antecedents is that it was about frightening about away unwanted spirits, there’s more to it than that. The basic idea, for the ancient Celts, was that at this time of year, the membrane between the seen and the unseen was thinnest. Sure, you might want to take precautions about unwelcome spooks, but what about those you would want? Your ancestors, in other words, or the recently departed.

I have a few of both I’d like to hear from again. So later tonight, when the street noise has died down and the kids are back at home sorting through their plunder, I’ll be listening closely for a word from some people I very much miss.

Toward that end, here’s a little music, courtesy of Harold Budd and Brian Eno (from their album The Pearl) for all you October people.

Dark Shadows rises from the vaults

Tomorrow I'll blog about what All Hallows Eve really means to me. But lest you think I don't appreciate the creepy/kooky/mysterious/ooky part of the occasion, here's "one from the vaults," as Dr. Frankenfurter sez.

When I was a boy, a new soap opera appeared on daytime TV: Dark Shadows. Because it came on right around the time I got from home school, my brother and I used to watch it while we had our afternoon snack. It was supposed to be a gothic romance, like Wuthering Heights or Rebecca. Only this was set on the spooky Maine coast -- the very area Stephen King would later mine so much from -- and though the show got the moody, claustrophobia-inducing atmosphere down pat, it was (pardon the expression) deadly dull.

And not just to kids, apparently. Ratings plummeted. Finally, in a desperate move, the show's creators took the show in a radical new direction ... and the rest is television history. Feast your eyes on that episode of the no-budget, semi-unintentionally camp horrorfest, Dark Shadows, where you were guaranteed a live blooper in nearly every airing.

Hilarity and Disparity at Portland Playhouse

Currently playing at Portland Playhouse: one of my favorite plays of all time, Telethon, by Kristin Newbom. This play focuses on three people with various forms of disability, and their two underpaid, undervalued caretakers, who are only minimally more functional, all within the context of a “treat” for the disabled charges, as all five as adjourn from an unspecified fundraising event to a Dunkin’ Donuts. Most of the play is laugh-out-loud funny, but watch out -- you're being set up.

SPOILER ALERT! If you don’t want to know what happens in the play, read no further.

All five characters are put through a process defined by American holidays that call for or allow dressing up in costume. Over the course of Halloween, Christmas and Easter, the Dunkin’ Donuts bears witness to the changes — subtle, blatant or nonexistent — in their lives.

Telethon’s climax comes, aptly enough, at Easter, a time that celebrates renewal; the two caretakers are about to undergo major reversals of fortune. They're so caught up in their own news that they hardly notice the turmoil they’re causing their charges: one of them seems stunned, another cries quietly, and the third goes to a pay phone and attempts to call 911.

The uproar ends the scene and we segue to the Fourth of July, but now the Dunkin’ Donuts is quiet. And as we take this in the empty stage, we realize those five people will never visit the place together again. The phone is still dangling off the hook and, weirdly, we hear one side of a conversation coming out of it.


Now: when we first presented this play in reading form during JAW, and again now in Portland Playhouse’s excellent production, people have been baffled by this final scene. Some have gone so far as to say the coda has no relation to the play! But you know … it’s always worth our while to assume the playwright had something in mind. Such as an imaginative leap. Or to jump a synapse from one epiphany to the next, and ask you to forge the connection yourself.

In the wake of love lost, of abandoned relationships and the sheer heedlessness of life’s relentless momentum, the emptiness of the stage in this final scene devastates me. The sense of revelation hovering on the fringes, yet always just barely beyond our grasp, reminds me of Beckett’s most moving works.

I therefore want to share the text of this final scene with you (I have Kristin’s blessing and that of the show’s director, Rose Riordan), in the hopes that when you see the play, viewing the footage of the parade described below and hearing half of a conversation that’s like a lifeline to another time, the scene will have the impact for you that it does for me.

Telethon continues through this weekend, closing where the script begins — on Halloween.

.................................................

4. FOURTH OF JULY

THE STAGE IS DARK AND EMPTY.

A FILM IS PROJECTED ON THE BLANK MENU SCREEN. SHAKY HOME
FOOTAGE OF A 4TH OF JULY PARADE IN A SMALL TOWN... PEOPLE ON
FLOATS. COSTUMES. WAVING. KIDS ON BIKES. DOGS. CLOWNS. A
MARCHING BAND. STARS AND STRIPES. THE WHOLE DEAL.

A WOMAN’S VOICE IS HEARD,
THROUGH THE DANGLING PAY PHONE RECEIVER:

Yeah, I know.
It’s strange how things happen.

Uh huh.

Remember that night out on the driveway?

No.
September.

Because the sunflowers had stopped blooming.
I picked the last three and brought them in.
They were a little mangled, but they looked okay.

Yeah.

No.
We had just come back from dinner.
You took us to that little restaurant in your old neighborhood.
What was it?

Yeah, Sam’s Wiener House.
That’s right.

Uh huh.

Nine wieners with everything on them,
six orders of fries,
four milkshakes,
a diet coke
and a sprite.
God.
The kids sat at the counter.
Spun around and around on the stools while we talked.

The first house you bought.
The dog you had before the kids were born.
That tattoo you got in the army.
Your job.
Those guys you had to fire.
Your brothers and sisters.
The town where you grew up.
The Sunday morning flea market.
Your grandmother’s farm.
The stack of Penthouses and bag of weed you had hid in her shed.
How your parents died.
Your first girlfriend.
What was her name?

Oh yeah.

You knew just when to leave.
Before the kids threw up from too much spinning.

I offered to pay.
You said it was your treat.

On the way back you showed us the best trick or treat house.
The one where the guy dressed up in stilts as Uncle Sam?
Remember?

Yeah.

When we got back we stood there in the driveway.
The kids rode their bikes around and around
And the sky turned from blue to orange.
You only had a few minutes before you had to go.

You looked so sad that night.

We want to make sense of it all.
Want to grasp onto some kind of reason for the hurt.

It all goes by so quickly doesn’t it?

They are ripped from us.
All of them.

They come into our lives.
The people we care for
Or who take care of us.
The ones we love and look after.
The ones who love us back
Despite it all.
And then they go.
Sometimes in a flash
Without any warning.
Other times in a long and lingering dance.

Yet the wars continue.
One grows into the next.
Kings and queens are killed and born again.
Discoveries, great works of art and riches are made, displayed
and forgotten.
We learn to spell.
We memorize the vocabulary words and dutifully we take the tests.
Our tiny world builds upon itself.
Accumulates.
Like soap bubbles in the bath.
We gaze at ourselves, naked
And we wonder-
This world we are creating,
is it -

What?

Oh, that’s okay
I should go too.
Yeah.
Okay.

I will.

Take care.


DIALTONE.
THE FILM WINDS OUT.


END OF PLAY.

Confessions of a defector

For the second year in a row, I celebrated my 75th birthday at the Wordstock Festival. If you have to work on your solar return, Wordstock’s a grand place to do it: a swirling, teeming whirl of book lovers, exhibitors, publishers, book purveyors and of course authors.
Ironic indeed, therefore, that I came home on Sunday evening, exhausted but proud, to gifts that included a brand new ….. wait for it ……………. Kindle.

Yeah, a Kindle. You know, Amazon’s “wireless reading device,” the one whose advent of recent years was widely heralded as the death knell for books and bookstores both. And I got not just any Kindle, but the new improved model: smaller, lighter, faster and greyer than its ancestors, with free wifi and 3G built into it, making it reputedly of use where in the wide world.

With all the zealotry of a convert, immediately I popped for a sleek black leather cover for the device that actually has a night light built into its spine — an ingenious, marriage-saving innovation.

First downloads: Atwood’s latest, The Year of the Flood; Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs; and Between the Acts, Woolf’s brilliant and underrated novel that it’s time I revisited.

But the irony is not lost on me: I came straight from a festival where a constant topic of conversation concerned what happens to hardcover books in the digital age, and I gleefully launched into downloading virtual books.

The issues surrounding Kindles and their kin are legion. Most obviously: if you can already get many books steeply discounted by shopping at Amazon, and then the Kindle download costs close to half of that, who is making money anymore? If you guess it’s not the authors, you would be correct. One commentator has called digitalization of extant texts “the greatest act of piracy since Francis Drake sailed the Spanish Main.” But old or new, everyone takes a hit, from publisher to vendor.

One apparent winner in the digital death match (apart from the makers of e-book readers) is the consumer, who gets more for less. And therein lies the hope of the whole endeavor. If people can instantly gratify their impulses to get and read a certain book or newspaper or magazine, perhaps they will do it more often, and ultimately spend more money.

Sounds good. But then what happens to bookstores, which need to hold onto a vast inventory to be of any use? For that matter, what happens to festivals like Wordstock or the Brooklyn Book Festival, events that lure noteworthy authors with the promise of selling a lot of books?

Naturally enough, the answer is that they will have to gradually reinvent themselves and create new or augmented reasons for being. For instance, it’s great that I can start reading The Year of the Flood this instant. But nothing compares to trotting down to the Schnitz, as I did last month, to hear her and Ursula K. Le Guin chat about writing. And I will certainly have read Armistead Maupin’s new book Mary Ann in Autumn by the time he arrives at Powell’s (on November 12) -- only if I read on the Kindle, what will I give him to sign?

Anyway. There is a groundswell of thinking about the rights of everybody involved (see this, for example) — so much so that I’m tempted to go to law school (not really) just so I can part of hashing it all out. But as my own behavior attests, the genie is out of the bottle; one day books in print may be yet another artifact we refer to nostalgically as “sooooooo 20th century.”

Actually there are downsides for readers in this as well as upsides for writers -- but that’s another post. To be continued...

Talk about leading by example....