OPEN TRENCH

The Human Condition Never Ends Haiku

2012-01-26T23:57:00.000-08:00

So many people--
China gives us iPads
Slavery all year.

Hooray for Good Things

2012-01-25T22:07:00.001-08:00

Huge congratulations to my friends Tecia E. and John. H. for working on The Surrogate, which was a huge smashola at Sundance.

This is such great news. I can’t wait to see it.

Tecia is a world class script supervisor and John is always great in everything. And then there’s Helen Hunt, who I am glad to see is taking on a big sexy role. She has so often been cast as the angry brittle one. It was high time for this warm leap.

Keep up the great work you talented wonders.

Mother China

2012-01-24T23:42:00.000-08:00

It strikes me again and again that China, with its one party system, can decide what to do, do it and then do it some more.

As long as China subsidizes what it needs for material gain, we will always lose.

And we cannot stop them from doing what they are doing.

Some say it is getting more expensive to do business in China. How much more? Enough to bring manufacturing to Michigan and Ohio?

So here’s a mash up. In order for our aggressively capitalist U.S.A. to be competitive, it needs to go socialist on business development in order to truly compete.

While China acts as one nation of over a billion people, we are almost 400 million divided by ideological internecine fisticuffs—most of it in the form of obstructionist passive aggression by Republicans in the House and the Senate.

Stop your bullshit. You want something to focus on? Look at China.

If it’s so important to you to get your dopamine on by winning “the fight,” pick a different fucking fight.

Time to Laugh

2012-01-23T22:57:00.000-08:00

The strange thing about recession is that thoughts become simpler. People are very much in survival mode which means there is not as much time for leisure, creativity and new ideas.

There is also less humor. It is easier to goof when the larder is full.

I would rather be rich and funny than poor and serious.

Feeling it Young

2012-01-22T23:16:00.001-08:00

By the time I was four years old I knew something was up, that it was very important and unique and that somehow it was beautiful.

Not to be hokey or anything, but it was the understanding that I was alive and that other people were alive and the earth was really interesting and strangely, I could look at all these other people living, creatures that they were, and I was one of them. I was inside one of these creatures and it was me. I imagine this was the first moment of a bit of consciousness.

I liked that feeling and still do. It makes you very aware and it increases your connectedness to nature and to calm, deep joy. It can also make you feel very separate if other people are not noticing, “the miracle,” or harshing you about it, I say sort of in awe and sort of embarrassingly with a bit of tongue in the cheek (my tongue).

I am not religious, but I was thinking today, since death is the ultimate destination, the ultimate outcome of every story, that no matter how you slice it, this death idea figures quite large in our lives, in our identities, in our fears, in our time tables. No wonder people have built up big things around it. Institutions with architecture, even. Death is so powerful. It always wins. So let them be religious (and perhaps quiet about it so they can notice it all?) When I accept death, I feel very calm. When I do not, I thrash.

My hands have become lizardy. At times, I look at my waist and I think, “How different am I, really, than a gorilla who has been let loose for a long weekend in the Krispy Kreme warehouse?”

But even those things do not matter so much.

(Upon rereading, I noticed that I typed waste instead of waist. Another good reading of that sentence.)

I haven’t changed much since I was four. I often want to get back to the granite rocks with the schist sparkles, in this copse of trees on the edge of the property line of my house where I first sat with these ideas, alone. I was happy to do nothing but sit and be aware of what was around me. To know this was a rare event. (Even if there are zillions of other living creatures in the universe, it is still mathematically rare that there are human mammals and even more mathematically rare, still, that you are actually one of those beasts.) I felt like I was getting away with something, sitting there, not doing anything but noticing. I did not want to get caught doing that. I felt afraid that it was wrong. But deeper, I knew it was the greatest, most enjoyable thing. Perhaps I felt that it was wrong to feel so good, like when you first discover masturbation or chocolate mousse. Then you grow up and people insist on all these other stories, with guns and tits and pecking orders and wins and losses and so many other items. You hang onto them for dear life. But really, it’s just the awareness that lasts.

You can do it all. The action and the awareness. It’s just kind of tiring. But I have also been thinking lately, maybe it's okay to be tired.

Wintry Mix

2012-01-19T22:31:00.001-08:00

I remembered the term. Wintry Mix. Well, I didn’t remember it. Adam, my husband, read it out loud from “the paper.” It’s sleet, snow, rain, all combined. It’s very fresh. People freak out about winter. All I think about is how much I love Iceland. How much I like clean air. I’m all for it. Plus, you know, you can’t become allergic to precipitation. Is it cold? Sure. But in about a month, all the flower shops will be filled with tulips and daffodils. I mean, if Holland can get into spring by the end of February and pass that tradition onto us and we can benefit, and we have, how much can you complain?

Use Safe Copy. Use it. It’s only fifty bucks a year. It backs up everything on your hard drive to an outside server. All your docs, music, pics, vids. It makes so much sense. Plus, it backs everything up in the same folders that you have. So it looks the same when you check it out online. And you can access the info from anything. Other computers, phone, pads of all stripes. I’ve been with this outfit for over a year and I love it. Effortless. Safe and amazing.

Safe Copy

Governor Brown and his bullet train from LA to SFO! Thank you! Come on now. Let’s do it! I want a bullet from LA to NY. Please? Could we please? I’d sit for the fifteen hours. Fly through Kansas at 250 miles per hour. Read some. Be thanking Allah I was on the solid ground instead of bumping through the thin air. Plus, the more we fly, the more we warm up the air, the more the air gets unstable, the bumpier the flights get. It’s a negative loop of pain. Get me off that hell tube. Get me on that train.

Henry Wolfe, my friend and talented musician, check out his music. He’s writing new songs all the time. Go to his sight. Download his songs. Buy the tunes online. You can do a search at the iTunes Store under his name. I especially love Buzzards. When it comes up on my iTunes cycle, I stop everything and only listen to that and do nothing else.

Henry Wolfe

I was making a reservation on the phone for a hotel today. I couldn’t tell if the person on the other end was at the hotel or a booking agent. I asked him to just tell me who he was. I was concerned because, you know, it was a random phone number and I could be handing over my credit card info to anyone. Plus, three different windows popped up for the same hotel in comparison. You know, that whole internet assault. So he tells me who he is. I could tell he was lying. Said he was with the hotel. I was annoyed that he was lying so I said I was going to call the hotel directly. I was cheerful and low key but I hung up. He called back and left me a message. He said, “Fuck you asshole. I’m watching you.” It was a threat. What small outfit was he the booking agent for? Expedia. Yes, Expedia, that little travel concern we’ve all heard of. I emailed Expedia to tell them what happened. I got a form letter apology within three hours. Onward. People are in distress these days. And Expedia, even, doesn’t care. Sad world. What next? I ask someone at Citibank to check on a fraud claim and they tell me to go fuck my mother?

Speaking of fucking your own mother…wouldn’t you have to actually get erect for that? What on earth would have had to have gone down in your sexual imprinting that made it so you could get an erection for such a journey?

I am doubling down on the piano and learning all the Gershwin Preludes. They are really beyond my level…but I am using whatever piano lesson techniques I have under my belt, my ease of reading music, along with my O.C.D. to repeat and repeat and repeat the fingering until it’s so in my hands, there’s no way I CAN’T play it. Interesting, playing an instrument. Great place to shove a lot of energy. Clears the mind. And it’s not really creative. It’s tasky. When you finally learn it and you add some feeling to it, that’s a creative thing. But more instinctual than anything else. I dig it. Plus, if you’re learning Gershwin, you can’t really say you are wasting your time.

I am doing so much career stuff right now that there’s little time for writing. (Coordinating. Selling. Yep, it’s like having a booth at the craft fair…except people don’t buy little things all day long. They wait forever and ever…and then finally, there’s one big sale.) Need to write more. I have to mix it up better.

Starting this horrendous habit of small pads with chicken scratch all over them all over my desk. Can apartment chickens be far behind?

If you really want to feel like you did when you were a kid…like all free and like it’s all new and fun, you just have to let go of everything. What made it so fun to be a kid was that you didn’t have a ton of experiences and a mountain of knowledge to weigh you down. You just lived. Of course, assuming you are an adult reading this, you can’t be irresponsible and chuck it all. You have to take care of things as an adult using experience and knowledge. Pretty much. And instinct. But any short or long periods you can steal for yourself to forget it all, you will find yourself laughing a lot and having a good time.

It’s January 20. Ground Hogs are getting nervous.

SOPA and PIPA

2012-01-17T22:18:00.001-08:00

SOPA and PIPA

These controlling loons.

Free speech. Lots of it. This is why we’re here.

Movies that Begin with M

2012-01-16T23:43:00.000-08:00

I really liked Moneyball
and Melancholia.

First, Moneyball.
Don’t you love getting screeners? This one came from S.A.G. And there we sat.

This is a movie about, primarily, looking at things in a new way and having the bravery to give that a shot in the midst of a group-think entrenched culture. Secondarily, it is about math. Baseball figures into it, too, of course. But that’s not the main thing here.

It’s sort of a dorky, nerdy movie with Jonah Hill pulling the statistics to teach Brad Pitt how to win by using pure formula. (Sort of cynical, sort of great strategy.) But what the deal is here…it’s the acting, the smart script, the directing. And isn’t that why you go to the movies? I know, many people go to the movies for fun and the script does not have to be that smart. Fine. Sure. But for the adults in the room, it is pleasant to have something well thought out.

With screenwriters Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, and director Bennett Miller (Capote), you have a good helm going on.

The movie is purely enjoyable. Well done. Suspenseful. And I am, you know, no big baseball fan. But now, I sort of am. Maybe.

Brad Pitt made some crazy pact with some crazy devil. He’s about my age and he still has all that hair? How?

Brad Pitt’s acting really is great. But when you have had a life looking like that, being what he is, no matter how bad things get for your character, you always sort of look like people are probably looking at you and so you’ll probably be fine. Extremely good looking people have a great resource, themselves. We all know people hand things to people like that. This is a prejudice, I understand. And underneath the symmetry and the eyes and the nose and the pout and the thick follicles on the pate, maybe real pain lurks. But it’s hard to take it too seriously. Strange how beauty conceals or deceives or who-knows-what.

And he has that wife…

But really, best acting Brad’s done, seems to me. The cast, all around, is solid and interesting. Jonah Hill is clear and has almost no false moments. Growing up, our little Jonah.

Moneyball, see it. Today.

I loved Melancholia and I don’t care who knows it.

This thing is poetic, doesn’t make exact sense, is a bit over the top, has a mix of Brits and Americans and other European Whiteys at an upper class wedding that makes it all seem like the U.S. and G.B. are one nation. Parents from one country have children from another. This just slips along.

But the bigger picture might be, “IF THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END, WHO CARES ABOUT ACCENTS!”

Wagner, two sisters of differing bad temperaments (Kirsten Dunst is a depressive, her sister, Charlotte Gainsbourg, the anxious one), Lars von Trier directing magnificently as a bright blue planet is about to swallow up the earth?

By the end, I wanted to kill myself. You will, too. You have to see it.

It’s so beautiful and bleak. Who cares if the first part of the story is a bit unbelievable. (The wedding.) Or that you don’t understand how the super depressed main character, Justine played by Ms. Dunst, could ever land a good looking seemingly normal lad like Alexander Skarsgard or be promoted to director level at her ad agency considering what a mess she is.

Is she just a mess, now, because everything has nastily come together? Realizing she doesn’t like her job or her husband and the world is coming to an end? I don’t think so. It seems like she’s been like this for a long time. So, you know, it’s sort of hard to swallow.

But Lars von Trier (Nazi or not?) is going for full romanticism here. Let’s let him have it.

You don’t get to see things like this that often, if ever.

I didn’t recognize Keifer Sutherland until the credits. But I do that. I knew he was Kevin Bacony, but I knew it wasn’t Kevin. One gets dim with time…

But Kirsten Dunst’s breasts will wake you up. They could have called this thing Melons Cholia. (I tap my mike. Is this thing on?) It’s wonderful to see someone so beautiful in so much pain. She did a great job. With an insane witch of a mother (Charlotte Rampling) and loser nut father (John Hurt), divorced and seething, you could easily see how these two sisters ended up how they ended up.

There is this intense isolation. The world is ending and these simple rich people are all alone. And they have to face it.

I once worked for a man who had me open his mail during the whole Anthrax scare. He was very wealthy. The one percent of the one percent. He said, “I guess it doesn’t matter how much money I have, I could still be killed.”

Yep.

But even better: When the world is about to end, the truly mad turn sane. The vibration finally suits them.

Visually arresting. Emotionally reaching into poetic truth. Go.

Opinions Requested: Husbands, the Series

2012-01-12T22:29:00.000-08:00

Do you like this?

I’m feeling fencey.

Husbands The Series

I mean, in my marriage, I’m the tall cute Mormon one. But still…

I watched all episodes. They’re short. Funny, smart, good mood switching back and forth. Full negotiating. Light. At times even vulnerable. Shallow but more on that later. Shallow might be the new deep. Because deep is so often self serving.

My thumbs want to go up. They are tentative thumbs. Am I old?

Interesting Hell

2012-01-11T23:08:00.001-08:00

I’m the kind of person who is very sensitive to drugs. If I take a regular dose of Nyquil I’m out for 14 hours. If I take just one small red Sudafed, I stop eating for six hours and lose a pound. It’s sort of freakish.

This does not make me a good candidate for addiction, however, I have always liked to smoke stuff and so I have to not do that, so I don’t.

On Monday, I went in for a little procedure, no biggie, but it required that I take two Percocet, which is, of course, oxycodone and acetaminophen. The latter enhances the former, which is an opiate. I took two 325 milligram tablets.

Eight hours later, I took two Tylenol.

Then I stopped all that.

This is where the trouble came in.

When I take an opiate, like most people, I am high as balls and walk around wondering how the world ever got so pleasant. It’s like all the sights and sounds with none of the worry. Basically, it’s like living in a movie. Fine. That lasted about two hours.

Then, the nausea, then the come down, then the four hour nap.

Fine.

Then ten hours of sleep.

Fine.

Then, a depression so severe, a hopelessness so profound, I had to go, “Oh man…this is clinical depression. This is the end. I am bipolar. They say online here if you’ve been putting everything in order, that’s even a sign of suicidal tendencies.”

Then I thought, “I’m always putting things in order. Plus, that’s what I always do at the end of the year.”

So, I’m sitting on the brown sofa and I’m thinking, “You’re just super duper depressed and it’s probably the Percocet. So let’s do a little experiment here. No need to panic, like this is forever. Do what you do when things are simply awful.”

And this is what I did. Instead of panicking, thinking I was going to be depressed forever, because that’s what depression does to you, I just accepted it. I accepted that I was completely miserable and that my brain was in a state of hating itself and that the only thing I could do was to just be with it.

Within five minutes it was gone.

I have noticed, in general, that all things once accepted, dissipate. And now even things caused by narcotics? I guess that works, too, accepting away your chemically induced misery.

This is a powerful notion, acceptance. And though Western culture is pretty much held up by the three tent poles of goals, drive and acquisition, I guess you can do all those things accepting as you go along.

It can make even the worst opiate induced depression lift.

Learning to accept the unacceptable is a brilliant counterintuitive action.

Accept everything you loathe and it will go away. Perhaps.

Doing the exact opposite of what you are naturally inclined to do always brings about an interesting new twist. It wakes you toward the other side. You don’t hold on and, zwoom, you are somewhere better.

If you hate this blog entry, accept it, and very soon you will no longer see it.

Ten More Months

2012-01-10T22:44:00.001-08:00

So, as Mitt wins and gets this thing sewn up, we then have to face this creature for ten more months.

He’s craven.

The Republicans are getting the candidate they deserve---a slick, greedy guy who would sell off his own mother.

I do not know why I wake up every day surprised by what most people desire: endless wealth.

Along the way…look, we know the morality tales…

I am very interested in hearing the insider cash stories that Mitt hath lived.

This is not because I am against big chunks of cash, exactly. I don’t care so much how rich someone is. I am usually more jealous about fame. Plus, I’ve never been hungry or unclothed or unhoused.

I look at greed in a way that is curious. Like, why would you want to be bothered with all that stuff? It seems like a huge responsibility.

I’m in my middle years and I often look around and wonder how I can get rid of the stuff I own now. It’s all a nuisance and gets in my way.

Politics seems a big fight about how money is controlled. Will it be a sharing game or a might-makes-right game? Or to give the Right their point of view, Will it be a merit game or a lazy-tries-to-take-it game?

I don’t understand, since this country is so divided right down the middle, why both sides can’t just agree that this-this-and-this we’ll share and this-this-and-this will be full-on free market stuff.

But then again, societies get more complex over time, not simpler. So drawing it up and saying, “Yeah, we’re going to settle on these two lists and move on to other things. Like solving energy problems and population problems.” Besides, people like to fight. Anything for a fight. Maybe it’s an adrenalin surge followed by a dopamine surge that people live for and the money is secondary.

A lion licking its paws after taking out a wildebeest.

I try to stay out of the way.

The Tree of Life

2012-01-08T22:02:00.001-08:00

We sat through it. We had the WGA screener.

It won best damn picture at Cannes. It is visually incredible. Its narrative…honestly, it’s silly.

Let’s let The Atlantic do the work for me because I can’t even…

Review of The Tree of Life by someone else

My Third Fight

2012-01-06T00:17:00.000-08:00

My first fight was unremarkable in that I did not fight, but was choked, because it was seventh grade and I had a crush on D’s girlfriend and he did not like this. Additionally, he was living a mean streak at that little point in his life. I was tricked into going down to the woods to hang out, “Come on, Donald, everyone’s going”—and I was ambushed. What he did was, he choked me. And kept choking. Why choking? I don’t know. But it was terrifying and undeserved. He kept yelling at me that N was his girlfriend. Not mine. He wanted to choke that truth into me. I agreed. Okay. N is not my girlfriend. I’ll stop following her around. I left crying. I have seen D since. I do not recall him ever apologizing.

Strangely, on the way home from that episode, a guy a year younger than me, M, got in my face on the street. He said I called him a faggot at the carnival the week before. We had these carnivals that came through town. They set up in the ball field. My house was only two blocks away. Exciting times. And I was at the carnival every night. So M said I called him a faggot. I said I didn’t. Truth is, I never talked to him my entire life. I had always seen him around. He was pretty cute. In fact, D, above, was very cute. So two good looking kids on the same day decided to pummel me. So as M was trying to pick this fight with me in the street, about me calling him a faggot at the carnival, he steadily pushed toward me, backing me into a parked car along the curb. I was pretty pissed off because I had already been mangled by D down in the woods less than thirty minutes ago. So there I was backed up against a car and I decided to just haul back and pop this M right in the face as hard as I could. I hit between his eye and his nose. It took him by total surprise. He was so much bigger and stronger than me. I knew he’d kill me if he started to beat me. So I had to end it quickly. He cried. I ran. I saw him a week later in school. He said that it wasn’t me that called him a faggot at the carnival. He didn’t say he was sorry. But he sort of did. I had this feeling that no one would ever mess with me again.

But I was wrong.

D was tall and lean, with rock and roll hair. M was crew cutted and muscular, a much scarier person to face. And then there was M.A. My third and very brutal fight.

I guess middle school is the age when boys just want to pummel each other. About a year or more after I did not call M a faggot and D had choked me into tears, I was walking along, shopping or what-have-you, in downtown Suffern, my town, at that time a fine town of middle class things like banks and a stationary store. I was acting a little tough because that’s what I did a little bit at that time of my life. Then this not-good-looking kid, A., a year younger than me, who wore stained T-shirts, kept his hair cut like it was the early 70s when it was the late 70s, smoked cigarettes right in front of adults, and got terrible grades, you know, a dirtbag, he decided to pick a fight with me. It was along the lines of, “Hey, you’re a faggot,” in the 70s meaning of it, meaning, you’re square and uncool, like how M. thought I used the word on him at the carnival. By this age, I was well established in middle school, liked, and almost a foot taller than this A., who was one of the shortest kids in his class. I did not understand how he did not understand how futile this attack on me would be.

In addition, A. was at one time best friends with someone who I used to be best friends with. There was really no reason to fight. But clearly, A. wanted to kick some ass and for some reason he thought I was kickable. So he’s calling me a faggot and telling me he’s going to kick my ass and I’m thinking, “You’re a mouse. Just stop this.” Then I thought, “He can’t be for real. He’s a pipsqueak. Oh my God, does he have a knife? Is he going to try to knife me? Did he save up for a knife and he just bought it and now he needs to try it out on my flesh?” But he did not pull out a knife. He did keep up with the aggression. It was bizarre. He was friends with friends and he knew my younger brother well, he was, basically, in the ally sphere of my life. This whole thing was ridiculous. So I said to him, “A., stop it. Right now.” I said it like his older baby sitter, like a wise person who was setting someone straight. I even had this older brother compassion for him. I wanted to say, “Don’t be silly.” I didn’t say that.

I could not, in my rational world, understand why the hell he was doing this. And then he started kicking me. I ran away, toward the bank. It had a long hedge about three feet tall in front of the solid concrete. Solid building with columns. Almost romantic. I was laughing at how silly A. was being. Like a Chihuahua coming after a beagle. But he persisted. And he came around the bushes and he started grabbing my hair and then I started grabbing his hair. Total girl fight. (Sorry, girls.) Okay, professional wrestling? Anyway, we are grabbing each other’s hair and because he is so short, all he can do is kick me. This was no longer funny and I was no longer interested in being some sort of understanding big brother. And he keeps kicking me in the shins. It hurt like hell. But because he’s my brother’s age and friends with so many of my brother’s friends, I can’t help but think of him in this brotherly way and I keep saying, “Stop, stop or I’m going to put an end to this that is going to be awful.” And he wouldn’t stop. He was determined to give me as much physical pain as he could. (What the hell happened to him that day at home? What was wrong with him? I don’t know.)

So then, I gathered my strength, with his head of hair in mine, and I gave him one last warning, “You gonna stop?” And he said no and kept kicking. A little dirty mutt, tobacco stained fingers, hair flying.

So I took his head and I smashed it into the bank wall. Just once. But very hard. I meant it. This had to end. It must have been very painful because he stopped. And he cried like a little boy. He couldn’t believe I did what I did. I left him holding his head on the lawn. He was so pathetic and I felt so bad for him. But I had to move on. He lived. It was unfair fighting.

That’s how I fight…never. Or completely unfair.

That was the last time someone tried to have a fight with me. I don’t think A. went around and told everyone, “Don’t pick a fight with Donald Cummings, he’ll smash your head into a bank wall.” But I do think that once you do smash someone’s head into a bank wall, people sort of sense it and they leave you alone.

A. became a huge stoner and I do not believe he finished high school. Whenever he saw me in the halls at school, he just glared. I used to smile back at him. I felt sorry for him. And I was confused because he was such a skanky little ruffian and he had this regal sister.

You see, strangely, his much older sister was a big Broadway sensation at the time in a revival of a very famous musical. She was the lead. Everyone went to see her. In fact, it was the first Broadway play I had ever seen. And she is still in Broadway musicals today. It made no sense that this woman, who was basically doing something very close to what I wanted to do, had this sad little stoner, dirty brother. And I thought that if A. knew how much I thought of his sister, how into her and the musical she was in I was, he never would have gone after me that day. Maybe. And I wondered why his sister, with her success and her grace, did not come back to Suffern to fix this kid up.

Maybe she escaped the family with her great singing voice and was glad to never return? Maybe A. was her half brother or something?
What was wrong with these people? I never found out.

That third fight was the end of all that ugly middle school boy stuff. The skull against cement sound, just thinking about it, it makes you wince. Whenever I see that bank, or one like it, I do wonder if there was something wrong with me for having done what I did. It was outsized, to crack his head into the wall, and I could have maybe figured out something less severe. But I did not want a protracted painful engagement. I was improv-ing. I was expedient.

Gender and Desire

2012-01-04T23:30:00.001-08:00

I went to the Brooklyn Museum today with my brother-in-law to see the exhibit, “Gender and Desire.”

It was okay. Some enjoyable art. But this is the deal---when you lump a bunch of paintings together to make some sort of sociological point, it might be good for the museum, but is it good for the artists?

This collection, put together originally at S.U.N.Y. Buffalo, was someone’s idea. And that’s nice.

But is that idea bigger than the idea of each individual piece of work, so much so that the work is experienced in a compelling way? Were these the paintings that happened to be available and sort of “fit the bill” so they were procured?

I don’t know…

Will It Ever End?

2012-01-04T00:00:00.001-08:00

Don’t Vote For this Boob, ever.

Don's Early Home Movies

2012-01-02T22:36:00.001-08:00

Happy New Year and how fat are you?

The last few days around here have been celebrated by eating multi-grain healthy waffles from Trader Joe’s, covered with coffee ice cream, chocolate syrup and crumbled walnuts. Why? Well, hell, when you’re all in for the holidays, why the hell not?

And now, like everyone else, I am going to repent and starve and get a little cranky.

But this is the good news…New Year’s makes me want to clean out everything. Closets, inboxes, files, you name it. We dropped off a huge load of old clothes and things at the Housing Works Thrift store on 9th Avenue.

And I had this other thing on my mind. A cousin of mine wanted some pictures of his dad, some pics that I had from my aunt…and so it was time to get that finished, too. And then I thought while I’m at it, I might as well upload the precious ninety minutes of ancient footage I have that includes lots of extended family members…so my forty-five cousins and aunts and uncles and everyone else could always have access…you know, they’re in the lobby of some overdone hotel in Dubai and they can pull out their smart phone and go, “See that? There? That’s me in 1968. Some called it the summer of love. I called it the summer of diapers.”

Much of the footage is wonderful. Much of it is water damaged or light damaged or both. Most of the shots focus on my older sister, my younger brother and me. (I’m the slightly taller boy with the bigger skull.) The white haired lady on the rocking horse is my mother’s mother, also known as Nanny. In big family get togethers, the ones with the more dolled up hair are from my mother’s side, the Italian Porcellos and DeFranzas. The Americana looking ones from casting central are from the Irish side, the Cummings.

It’s all very sweet and looks very innocent to me.

Note to everyone, just fast forward as you go. This is not high art.
To extended family: If you take some time and fast forward, you will surely find footage of you from back in the day. Before Watergate, before Iran Contras, before Monica’s blue dress, before the Interwebs…(This is the same footage from the DVD’s some of you have.)

Happy Days are here again.

CLICK:

Don’s Early Home Movies

Merry Christmas, Friends

2011-12-22T21:06:00.000-08:00

Off to Florida. See you in the new year. Have the holiday you want. Please.

Doubling Down on Christmas

2011-12-22T01:04:00.001-08:00

Have you had enough Christmas yet?

Try harder. There’s tons more to come.

Loosen the belt.

Get plenty of rest.

Accept it as it comes.

The season is the season.

Earth Shall Be Fair and All Her People One

2011-12-21T00:00:00.000-08:00

Or

Jesus, Get Down off that Cross, We Need the Wood!

For holiday and personal reasons, we went to see Godspell.

Look, I did this thing in college. I went to that other school, right up the street in Medford, but there was this cross-theater exchange with Harvard and I did Godspell there…it was the 80’s. And definitely past its prime then…but when you’re a certain age, you just have to sing certain songs.

It was also the second Broadway show I had seen as a kid in nineteen-seventy-cough, cough. With Bobby Lee and others, who are, well, no longer alive. Going up on stage during intermission for wine? It all just seemed so daring to a math, science and music kid from the suburbs.

Godspell is loose. The script is a bunch of new testament parables. During rehearsals you usually play around and try to find fun new ways to do them. Game playing type stuff. Role playing, for sure. You mess around with funny props and newspapers.
Songs often get assigned randomly.

I was “All Good Gifts” and “On the Willows.”

So tonight, we go to Godspell, me, my husband Adam, and my old friend from college, Stacie, who did Godspell so much with her friends that they had Godspell-in-a-bag, ready at any moment, since they often did it at fifteen minute intervals all over Staten Island. Her song was “By My Side” and “Day By Day” when the usual Day-by-Day girl was sick.

Nostalgia. You with me?

So, there we were tonight. And I don’t know---part of it was the show, part of it was all that youth that is over for me, but I had a great time. Overcome, occasionally, with memories and some strong mid-life-man-in-row-B crying. But I was quiet about it and did my best to not disturb anyone.

So the good news is, the show is really enjoyable and if you have the chance to see it, you should see it. I mean, these kids are all so young and lovely and fun and energetic…but it’s focused, too. They have a ton of bits, all sorts of carnival acts, voices, characters, voices doing voices, mini-cirque-du-soleil action, lights, instruments, audience participation, all of it. You don’t get bored because it is so inventive.

The other great news is, they have changed the arrangements of many of the songs and not only is the instrumentation something you would recognize from the last ten years, but the harmonies are more intricate, smarter and densely suspended creating tension as it goes.

Everyone gets their song…but you don’t feel like you are watching a diva festival (okay, there is one guy…but he can’t help himself.)---you feel more like you are watching an ensemble that worked very hard and very well together under the direction of Daniel Goldstein, who must have made it a whole big fun experience, like rehearsals used to be, back in the day.

I love the music. I love the songs. I have my original Broadway piano book of Godspell from the 1970’s and I’ve played those songs thousands of times. They are pleasing. They have hooks. They make me happy. I was glad to be there. I may go back. Hearing songs that you like, live, by good singers is such a treat. On the other hand, I usually don’t go to plays more than once. (It's playing just two blocks away.)

And now the bad news: The play is not really a play. Oh well.
Hunter Parrish is gorgeous but he seems to be a little horse. Oh well.
The cloying Christianity is sort of over the top and empty all at once. Oh well.

Now let’s talk about Hunter Parrish. Why is he so pretty? Or what I mean to ask is, what must it be like to be that pretty? Circle-in-the-Square is, you know, a circle in a square theater…so the performers are up close and near you. Hunter was right next to me, often, and he has that easy smile, with those ridiculously perfect white teeth and that face, when you look at his face, especially the eyes, you come to understand all those articles you’ve read about perfect symmetry, features equidistant from a vertical meridian that goes exactly through the center of the nose and lips, that makes for an appealing mate. (Also, studies have shown that facial symmetry is directly proportional to good health. Is it because everyone gives you so much attention or is it a DNA linked thing? Go study it. Give me quarterly reports.) You look at Hunter and you sort of can’t believe his beauty and you have no question at all in your head: you know everyone wants to have sex with him. Even straight guys want to give him their man love.

But they won’t all get to. He is Jesus after all.

The cast of every race was a spectacular mix of types and funsters. But Jesus was this white blog-paragraph-long perfect specimen and what was Judas? Well, he was a colored man, a Negro. I use these terms jazzily and ironically to denote: sure, you have your clowns of every race and stripe running around singing, being apostles and all that---but in the end, Jesus is super pretty and the bad guy, though handsome enough, is black, black, black. Maybe the audience expects it and so that’s what they get.

We all know how the play ends…with Jesus getting crucified. It happens. And then I guess the musical stops and the religion begins.

But as Hitchens said, and I loosely quote “So what if the man Jesus of Nazareth truly did rise from the dead? What does that really mean?”

I Smell Dead People

2011-12-20T00:39:00.001-08:00

Look,
If there is a God or a force or a higher power, or whatever, who really cares?

I mean---I like the Quakers who are all, “God is in all of us.” Which really means, you know, we are the important ones.

Or I don’t even know. Though, I do feel like it is a miracle I am here at all, as well as the other people I spend time with, and don’t spend time with.

Such a cool thing, to be here, to breathe, to fill out forms, to sleep, to acquire, to lose, to listen, to eat, to wonder, to play music, to watch, to feel awful. And then you die. And people are so upset (me included, absolutely) about that notion: the end is near. Then there’s the agony of the void and not knowing what that is.

But basically, what the hell is so wrong with not knowing? I mean, if you love a few people or things or animals, that’s God or heaven enough. Why bother even thinking about religion? It’s just an ape-man relic. If you’re a smart guy, you spend your time figuring out new things. Like how to build a better mouse trap, iPhone or jet pack.

So with the Hitchens death, what I find so curious is how a man that intelligent spent any time at all on this subject of religion. If he was so sure that there was no meddling God, no hocus pocus, then why did he not just toodle off onto another subject?

Of course, I am being reductive and bloggy, so let me stop the typing and go to Al Gore’s internet and find a little something from Hitchens’ final days.

Here it is, below. The clip lands on the Enlightenment. I have to agree with his pitch. So that’s why he did it. Great thing, the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment went into the making of this country. It informed the founding fathers. It changed Europe. It made us more scientific. Bernstein/Sondheim/others wrote the musical. A joy, really. And Voltaire, as its novelist-marketeer, was funny. So why didn’t more people sign up for the Enlightenment?

Fear. Fear of change. Fear.

And as I always like to point out about fear---which is basically fear of death—why are we (and by we I mean me) so afraid of dying? I mean, there were all those years you were not alive before you were born, yet somehow, not being alive all those pre-years doesn’t seem to bother people. “Oh man, I’m so upset, I was not on earth in 1952.” So why a mess about 2092 when 1952 has already come and gone and you were pretty much in the same state then that you’ll be in the future? And you survived.

There is no time, anyway. And you had little say in your arrival and will have no say in your departure. Just go love someone and stop worrying so much.

I don’t know Hitchens’ feelings about love. But certainly, he enjoyed himself, his impulses, his thoughts, his writing, his imbibing, his appearances and his successes. Of course he did. And enjoyment is the easiest going form of love.

Hitchens was a big help in getting people to think about the foolishness of religion and to aid in their release of the silliness of all this culturally imposed magical thinking. In his small-big way. It would have been much more fun if he had been much more fun. His pomposity and his anger were, well, they were in the way. But I understand he needed both—the first to protect his position, the second for propulsion. With all his rationality, he did not figure out how to squelch his vanity and ego---which fed his addictions and ultimately killed him. But I accept all that. I must. I haven't come close to squelching my own ego and vanity and people in glass bathrobes shouldn't throw waffles...

Almost no one gets it exactly right. Except maybe Jesus. Happy birthday, baby. ;)

And now for the man who, you know, is totally dead, not with the angels, done, kaput, finished. Good thing we invented cameras.

Sidebar: I once said to a friend in Los Angeles who was going through a rough divorce and a whole lot of other horrors while we waxed on about spirituality as people on the Pacific rim tend to do in soft, lovely ways, “I think when you die, it’s just nothing. It’s just, nothing, it’s over.”
And she said, “Wouldn’t that be great?”

Hitchens, it’s over. Long live Hitchens.

Three K(C)oreas

2011-12-19T01:14:00.000-08:00

Now that His Most Bizarreness is dead, what will become of North Korea? A third generation dictatorship?

Hm. Sounds like the kid might not have the stuff.

I recently caught myself saying to a conservative friend of mine, “I’d give up democracy for a benevolent, intelligent king.”

I meant it.

But that must be because a very stupid part of me desires simplicity. We have evolved as a species to have collective power, not top down power, especially not top down from one lunatic.

But what bearing does any of my thinking have on North Korea? None, really. I mean, those people never heard of me. Furthermore, I do not have anything unique to offer.

We all hope, I imagine, for reunification of the two Koreas with the south in charge. Would it not be wonderful for a nation of oppressed people to suddenly have freedom, to join their former countrymen in a peninsular embrace and maybe have consistent access to food?

All the military has to do is give up its allegiance and join the south. How hard can that be? Pride is stupid and wants to attach itself to the winning team. The old northern way is the losing ticket. On the other hand, is there not some embarrassment you would have to get over to suddenly become a citizen of a country that manufactures all those ugly rental cars?

I would like to make a pun at this point about Chick Corea*…however, the stretch would be outrageous and I am not that limber.

*I just found out that Chick Corea is a Scientologist. This world is confusing. Ah, choice…

I Don't Want to Fight, Ever

2011-12-15T22:07:00.000-08:00

I have posted this before. Time for it again. This is the time of year for choirs and stars and harmony.

It is so dark outside it reminds us of our blindness, before we could see. Or of death, the after-time. So sleep, sleep.

So many people have trouble sleeping. I never have. I do hope it is not because I wish death. I actually do not. But I am happy to take breaks from living.

Surrender.

I am more for harmony than anything else in music. Some people like drums. I find them grating. Some people like a good hook (melody). I do, too, but not as much as the play of notes against each other.

I wonder why this sort of musical focus is not more popular. But then...I like physics, France and pared down rooms.

It's good to see all these people who like it, too, singing with their earphones on. You have to find your people. Which is kind of great and kind of sad. People end up fighting because of their differences.

Oh ancient amoeba mother and bacterium Dad, was it always like this?

Funny---the convention in most writing is to find the conflict and then duke it out, covertly or overtly. And I do this.

So maybe I am doing the ol' "I'm so this'" when really "I'm so that" and want to be so this.

Never trust what anyone says about themselves in long form. They are usually the opposite and their mouths are trying to find the balance.

So maybe, maybe, I want to fight all the time.

Carnegie Hall

2011-12-14T23:38:00.001-08:00

Adam, my husband, sang in Carnegie Hall tonight. So proud. It was fab.

I love Poulenc and I don’t care who knows it.

Young Adult

2011-12-13T22:08:00.000-08:00

It brings me no pleasure to tell you how disappointing Young Adult is.

Who doesn’t love Charlize Theron?

And the Mr. Mudd people, I know them and applaud what they do.

It is a fantastic story idea.

However…

There was barely a true note in it.

Of course, if you know that going in, that it’s a great idea poorly executed and you just want to see them all do this thing then I say go for it.

(Note: I was not a big fan of Diablo Cody’s Juno, either.)

There is a brilliant switch of point of view toward the end, which is pretty refreshing and a great way to hinge a film. But then the roll out, too, is also unbelievable.

Oh well. It’s just a movie.

Note: The LA Bashing

2011-12-12T22:25:00.001-08:00

I have seen on T-Shirts, heard from others, been reminded of it many times---that people in New York believe people in Los Angeles are not so bright.

Two things.

One, this cannot be proven exactly, though, anecdotally, it can be witnessed.

But more importantly, it is easy to appear intelligent when you are looking backward and making judgments. New York is a backward looking town. Los Angeles looks forward and when you are jumping into the unknown, into the future, organizing a plan of attack using critical analysis often mucks everything up.

It would be wise for New Yorkers to begin to understand that anything that has already happened has actually already happened and any opinions about that are opinions about that. Fun fodder for the ambitious mind. But not necessarily new.

Christmas Fatigue---Two Coasts

2011-12-11T22:13:00.000-08:00

I stopped cutting my hair. It’s not like one of those guys who stops cutting his nails, like, I’m not crazy or anything. But it’s just winter. I discovered T-Gel shampoo which kind of mats the nest all down (thanks, Sister-in-law, unbeknownst) and it is winter so why not go for a winter bush?

Christmas fatigue wants to creep in. I won’t let it. Just keep heading toward the tree, looking at the baubles.

California dreaming.

Laura, our goldfish, is healthy and alive after four months in about a quart of water. The secret success for goldfish: underfeed. Do not feed every day. Put a little gravel in the bottom and plant a live aquatic plant in there. Change the water about every five days.

You can change a third to a half of it frequently (use a turkey baster). Use water that has been filtered and has been let to stand to room temperature.

My memory is going. I’m not close to the age for memory to diminish. Maybe I am. Or maybe I am so overloaded with thoughts and internet shenanigans, I am suffering from information abrasion.

Modern Family, getting soft at the end of every single episode, is sort of disappointing.

Warmth over style, sorry.

When in the West Village, eat at Annisa. You will not be disappointed.

Alligator hands.

I’ve heard that Arthur Miller can really write a play. Saw The Price tonight downtown. Great to see.

Hand to God runs one more week at Ensemble Studio Theatre. Check it out if you have the time. It’s great.

Got a pic of an LA hiking trail today. Sadism!

Occupied

2011-12-08T21:25:00.000-08:00

What is strange about these Obama years is time is moving so slowly.

The Bushy wars and the general loathing in his direction kept things bouncing along speedily.

The Clinton years, well, they were all about money, startups, sex and possibility. Plus, those were young days. They flew by.

People say as you get older time moves more swiftly. I think that depends.

When there is stagnation, there is a pall. I do not blame Obama for this pall. It all started with Reagan and now look at us. A bifurcated society. The middle ground decimated. Without a middle, the engine is missing a few very important gears. Then, the whole thing doesn't spin much, the tiny wheels have to do so much to get the big ones going and it just seems impossible and exhausting. Time slows.

Looking forward to the filling of the center. Picking up the speed. It’s more fun to move lightly and briskly.

Snowfall

2011-12-07T23:49:00.001-08:00

Kindle Fire Me Up

2011-12-06T23:10:00.000-08:00

I did it. I ordered one. It came.

The thing about this Kindle Fire is it truly is the right size for lounging on the couch and reading a book, the newspaper, a magazine. They figured it out. No wonder it is selling so well.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is, it’s so new, the apps for it aren’t there yet. No good app for google mail. No good app for lots of things. But they’re coming. I assume. In the meantime, the web browser, which is okay, not great, gets most things done within the confines of its not so sturdy set up. Again, it will improve soon. You feel it coming.

But really, this thing is all about getting away from the desk, getting into a comfortable chair, and reading, like you used to, back when they had that stuff they used to call paper.

The size of this thing, as I’ve mentioned, is pretty brilliant. Smaller than an iPad (and much ligther) but three times the size of a smart phone screen. It is sleek. Intuitive. Up and running right out of the box. And the kind gnomes at Amazon sent me my Kindle already registered. So basically, I was ready to roll once I hooked up to my Wi-Fi. (One just has to remember one’s password.)

The home screen is hideous---a sort of fake bookshelf, a cartoon version of brownish-gray Pergo constructed into this shelving. Too bad about that.

But the fun thing is, you can fill up those laminate book shelves with everything. Books, magazines, favorite web sites, apps, etc.

Additionally, you can get some free books and really cheap books and get books from your library for free. It goes on and on. So as much as Amazon has made this thing a cash-register-in-your-living-room, it is also highly functional for the library you’ve always loved.

The New Yorker App is amazing and you get to have that app if you subscribe to the magazine in its paper form. Probably the best magazine app I’ve seen so far on anything. This is because there are many choices for how you can access the look of the magazine. Page by page. Or by a list. Or by iconic overview. And it is easy to use.

I will get the New York Times app, too. But apparently there is all this linking that needs to be done from your existing digital account into Amazon. They give you the steps on the New York Times Site. But then, you pretty much lose your NYTimes app for your phone---not that that app was ever worth much—but one could still choose to keep that app if one wants to pay for a second subscription for that app alone. But who the hell wants to do that?

Much of the video looks not so great. Nowhere near the beauty of an iPad. Like Mexico to Canada difference. I don’t listen to music on devices, so I can’t say I even tried that. But video, music, all there, too. There’s a solid Netflix app and a solid Hulu+ app. Music looks like it must be easy. Okay, just tried it. Music sounds very good with head phones. You can upload all your pre-existing MP3’s either into the cloud or into the device for playing. (Remember when we used to only want intermittent white fluffy clouds? Now, all we want is solid cloud cover to make us happy.)

This Kindle Fire is pretty solid and a good size and a good buy at $199. It pulls together books and magazines and all your other media. For a bit of a neaty-pants like me, this means less old magazines around and less yellowing paperbacks.

Plus, while reading, you can look up any word at all. Fabulous. No list making. Immediacy.

The device is pretty useless, except for downloaded books, once you get away from wireless range. So trying to do anything but read a book on it on a plane would be next to impossible. Oh but wait—I hear planes are now all wired up.

(You can also download your ass of-- music and video, etc. etc...but what a bore.)

Entertainment in your house. You never have to go to the mall again for anything but clothes.

What will they think of next? Canned hams? A machine that separates cotton seeds from cotton? Will they upload our brains so we can live forever? Is that the magical creativity of religion, actually? It’s all been a wish, so we pretend it’s true until it is true, but we have to do it, push our brains into the forever realm, on servers, while they keep burning the mountaintops off in West Virginia to keep it all going?

I don’t think we are far away. They can scan my DNA and my memories, at some point, and get them to be virtual. My clone living in the chips. In the cloud, these clouds we have been fantasizing about for so long that we would just hop around on. Note: Must learn to play the harp.

I have the laptop, the phone and the Reader all within two feet of me conspiring to get me to become as digital as possible. Beam me up, beam me down, let’s all beam there together. It was fun being flesh based, for a while. Appointment with forever...

Two Sure Things: Christmas and Taxes

2011-12-06T00:17:00.000-08:00

The Orchid has returned for Christmas. After one year, she's at it again.

The Rich: Not a bad idea to tax them heavily. They are the most money driven people there are. They will always push to make cash. And if they are taxed handsomely, they will push even harder. They will have to. Their Beluga bill will require it.

Christmastime is Here

2011-12-04T23:23:00.001-08:00

The Descendants

2011-12-02T01:18:00.000-08:00

The Descendants

It’s being sold as a comedy. But for me the best thing about it is it is an elegy in paradise.

Payne is smart. We know this. And his tone is wonderful. I remember the first movie I saw of his---Citizen Ruth---I think I watched it three times. Abortion poster child as a schism/farce. Election, three times.

But back to The Descendants. I have to say, it started off with a voiceover and I was hoping that would go away quickly. It did. And it never returned. Thank goodness.
We could have done with none of it.

The movie unfolds in a way that is close to surprising. More importantly, it is shot and cut and acted so well, well, you’ll see.

The soundtrack is going to do for Hawaiian music the opposite of what Sideways did for Merlot.

Also, have you never been to Hawaii? You really should go as soon as possible. Nothing is more pleasant.

Friends, go the movies. And if you have a teenager next to you texting during the entire movie, don’t do what I did. Give her a polite but fatherly talking to early on. Do not wait until the movie is over.

These damn kids. Get off my lawn!

I give The Descendants one and three-quarters thumbs up. I would give it two if it felt completely fresh. But it is hard to find a fully fresh two thumber in a market driven, top down business where the artist must grovel for cash from corporate titans in order to make his dream come to life.

Occupy Burbank!

Floppy Hats and Muskets

2011-12-01T00:03:00.001-08:00

The Hatfields and McCoys…this is what the opposing political parties have become in the U.S. Hardened. Righteous. The fight will never end. But since it is this way, fight we must.

Today, a New York State judge has allowed that the gay marriages that have taken place in New York could be declared illegal by something called the Open Meetings Law…The Republicans who got together at one time with Cuomo and one time with Bloomberg to discuss and push through the marriage equality law apparently were supposed to invite all the other Republicans into these meetings, as if these meetings were ever intended to be anything more than they were…

Some upstaters are upset and are trying to turn back the clock. They are grabbing at anything. It’s good the judge is letting this go through. Let it fail, this fascist attempt, so the tightie-Righties can get their noses rubbed into it.

It’s a ridiculous notion but it is a real threat. The Prop 8 loons did it in California, though they did not null and void the marriages that already took place there when it was legal.

Will it ever end? I’m so tired.

How Much do You Agree with Michael Moore on OWS?

2011-11-29T20:53:00.000-08:00

Michael Moore on Occupy Wall Street

Do you agree with any of this?

I only agree with numbers 1 – 10. ;)

Apparently, this is going to be a big winter of planning. I imagine in 2012 we will experience a "Summer of Shove."

Get ready. I especially want the single payer health plan thing. Of course, once you do that (the thin edge of the wedge), you're heading toward socialism. And that has hurt Scandinavia, France, Germany and New Zealand how?

Greed. It's so boring. Especially when it kills people. Which it does. All the time.

Fakemas Tree

2011-11-28T22:27:00.001-08:00

A week ago, at Lee’s Art Supply on West 57th Street, I bought a fake Christmas tree. Six feet tall. Fifty-nine dollars. About the same price you would pay for a real one on the street.

It’s kind of great. The trunk is wood. The branches do look like branches, but spaced a little extra wide for that good ornament spacing hang. I think the tree is cute. Adam, my Recognized-by-the-State-of-New-York-Husband, thinks it looks like a cell tower.

At least he did before it was covered with ornaments.

And now to the good part. I love Christmas trees. The ornaments. The lights. The whole cheesy deal. When I was a kid and we would have the Christmas tree plugged in, and my favorite television show was on, I would rather look at the tree than watch the T.V.
I know. No big surprise. However, I do live a life of decorator spareness, so I feel this guilty pleasure, allowing myself to froth out on a Christmas tree, is an aberration in an otherwise brown-beige-a-touch-of-corral lifestyle we’ve been poking around in. Our spare living has been informed by our personalities and our personal histories. Adam is a lapsed Quaker and I have always been basically neat and do not like to shop. So we live uncluttered and open. And we like it that way. But when it comes to Christmas? Bring on the motley mess of lights and colors. I am all for it.

Each ornament has a story. I have these hanging guitars from my grandmother---lutes and cellos really—that are from the 1940’s or earlier. Heavy glass, they have been dropped many times and do not break. I have a few from the 1960s that my dad bought. Groovy shaped elongated spheroids with pointy tips at the bottom, frosted in white with glued on tiny stars, a white bell with curly gold sparkling twirls and tiny fake rubies. And then there are all the ornaments from all the vacations. Middle Europa wooden carved things, a Maryland crab in a crab trap, a great long hanging thing made out of Redwood from Northern California, a wooly sheep from Iceland, Mexicrap, a pepper from Santa Fe with Santa painted on it, a golden walnut from Idaho. And then all around California, there was always the chance to pick up some schnazoids along the way, you know how it can get…

Every ornament means something. I guess I am extra excited because we haven’t had a tree in a few years with this California-New York-Storage-Unit-where-the-hell-is-all-my-stuff-sort of thing.

My gushing joy, it embarrasses me. I don’t know why I think I should be so serious and unhappy.

Feeling Greasy?

2011-11-27T23:33:00.000-08:00

I thought so.

Just keep moving.

Off to Baltimore. Happy Thanksgiving

2011-11-23T00:34:00.001-08:00

Christmas Fun in the 49th State. Happy Thanksgiving.

2011-11-21T22:15:00.001-08:00

Thanks Mother J.

Three Years Late and Worth it: Synecdoche New York

2011-11-20T22:54:00.000-08:00

Finally, about three years late, I sat down and watched Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York . (Thanks Anne E.)

It takes some doing, and then you let yourself go with it and then, well, it’s a complete romp of brutal acceptance and sadness.

You can figure out the narrative by the end. But basically…well, I don’t even want to talk about what it is because if I do it will sound so trivial.

He made this movie based on the definition, sort of, of the word synecdoche. Look it up. But really, it’s about living-connection.

Jon Brion, movie music (and other music) genius is in attendance making it even more suspended.

Outrageous cast of talented wonders. Hoffman, Watson, Keener, Davis, Williams, Wiest.

Years ago, I was at one of those summer pool parties in Brentwood or Bel Air or some sort of town that started with the letter B. Charlie Kaufman was there, friend of close friends. And he was so kind and he had just come off his success of Being John Malkovich, a big fluke, really, and he was so grateful. A spec script that saw the sun. He was physically unassuming and bashful and fantastic.

(Is it completely tacky to mention this superficial connection? Fuck it. I’m tacky.)

And then to this…

I was sort of blubberpussing on the sofa. But then, I don’t experience time linearly, so this movie was for me, exactly. Because, really, everything is happening at once and he got that and he shot that. Balls to do it. Smart, sad and right. We’re all dead. He doesn’t even say we should live well because of that. Maybe nods to it, a bit.

After you see it, you might need to read about it. Or maybe, read about it before you see it. You got the Google.

Finally: Blood in the Streets

2011-11-17T23:03:00.001-08:00

You know, I’m seeing pictures of bloodied and battered protesters.

I was wondering when the kids were going to wake up and get out there and make a fuss. It’s happening.

Thanks, kids. No sarcasm here. I mean it. Thank you.

Blood in the streets. This is when it gets interesting. (Also a great time to buy stocks and real estate. Oh, the irony. Yet I do get sucked into self interest. Baby, I was born this way…oh wait, no---I was made this way by my society.)

Look, kids who protest and get a little battered make for great photo ops. They’re young and they will heal. It is easy to imagine that some of these kids want to get beaten. It’s the ones who can take it. The strong ones who get right in the face of the fuzz and say, “No, pig. You are not going to stop us.”

Funny, the world only understands pain. Even after Western enlightenment, reason is not held in great esteem. You concentrate wealth and then lie to everyone about some sort of “all boats” or “trickle down” theory, as if they hold any water or give any water, well, you are going to raise the ire of the many. This is just obvious. And yet—the greedy still want to concentrate the wealth.

Bad way to go.

The kids can take some physical abuse. And they are doing it. But why must it come to this? Maybe it’s because it’s just how it’s been done for a very long time…kids are the ones who also go out and do Righties’ wars. It’s tradition. Physical strength at its zenith is used.

Fight, kids…so maybe no one ever has to fight again. But maybe that’s a very optimistic thought.

Maybe the fight is what people want. Better to beat the kids into understanding what capitalism is all about (it’s good for them?) than to have peace and togetherness. Because Socialism, apparently, is evil. Ask any Dane. They’ll tell you. ;) Wink.

Magazine Trouble

2011-11-16T23:06:00.001-08:00

As if it isn’t enough that I have to smell the Dolce and Gabbana cologne in the sample horror of a magazine, I have to look at Matthew McConaughey’s airbrushed titties, too?

Why don’t they make magazines and newspapers on your computer that you just leaf through, like, uh, a magazine or a newspaper, in page order? All this clicking forward and back is a waste of time.

Lastly, and this has little to do with magazines, when I hear someone complaining about how expensive something is, I think they are actually congratulating themselves that they can afford it.

Bonus Round: Don’t eat prunes after you eat a dill pickle. Your tongue cannot make sense of any of it. Note: No picture of food included in this description.

Busy Busy Busy

2011-11-15T22:31:00.001-08:00

I was walking in Central Park today after a busy bunch of stuff and I thought, “This just walking around is a good way to think up some new things.” Not that that was a new thought.

New York City is a wild distraction. On any given night you can go see 5,000 shows/whatnots. Really. I almost did the research. Okay, I did not. It just feels like that might be the right number, if you include every small club and movie theater and art shebang.

In order to get your stuff done, your internal stuff, you have to ignore these things. And you have to find a way to get into nature so you can slow down and have a thought that is not on the To Do list.

So, this is part of the discipline. To ignore the millions of bright flowers yelling, “Smell me! Pick me!”

What really feels primary to me is nature. This is not corny sentiment or a romanticizing of the bark beetle. If you are made of the same thing as water and rock and tree and squirrel, and you are, then you might as well go sit with them and calm down.

Usually, when the mind clears and you think about how you’ve been thinking, you think, “Man, that was a lot of chatter.”

Middle Stage Tonight at Dixon Place

2011-11-13T23:45:00.000-08:00

Tonight is it. Going to be a good crowd. Party after at InterstateNYC. Probably not a good idea to show up without buying tix first.

Get to the Lower East Side…have someone wheel you there in their hipster pushcart. When was the last time you took a chance?

GET TIX

MIDDLE STAGE
Marian Fontana and Don Cummings, lunatics of life and stage explore what life means from dating to doctors with music, mayhem and a bassoon.

ROBERT DICK and JOSHUE OTT
Multi-flutist Robert Dick and visual improviser Joshue Ott create an immersive, improvised experience, unabashedly journeying from maelstrom to serenity via spontaneous emotional ports of call.

WHAT THE CONSTITUTION MEANS TO ME
written and performed by: Heidi Schreck
A story of one high school girl's baffling encounter with a Very Important Document.

GIFT OF TONGUES
created & performed by: David E. Johnston
with Brian Wolfe, Elizabeth Pupo-Walker and Emiliano Valerio. on drums and percussion
Performance artist David E Johnston and his electro-percussive band "Gift of Tongues" debut music from his dark new collection called "Songs of My People".

LIBERAL WHITE FEMALE
written by Felipe Ossa
directed by Jeremy Bloom
with Celeste Arias, Sandie Luna& Ruben Ortiz
Karen is interviewed for a position that might just be a perfect fit. But her would-be employers, Maria and Simón, are ill equipped to assess her true value. And Karen herself might have a thing or two learn about the human marketplace.

Monday, November 14, 2011 — 7:30 pm @ the new Dixon Place
161A Chrystie btw. Delancey & Rivington (F/V 2nd Ave; 6 Bleecker; JMZ Bowery)

Tickets $15.00 @ the door
but just $10.00 online, in advance GET TIX
1st come, 1st served, no reservations ('less you buy yr. tix online)

For more information, call (212) 219-0736, or browse www.dixonplace.org

Monday Night Show and More

2011-11-10T15:48:00.000-08:00

Come see my show Monday night. You’ll have a good time. Or you won’t. But at least you’ll have done something you usually don’t do. These sort of outings can wake you up.
MIDDLE STAGE

I believe in corporations because I like centralization. Let Williams-Sonoma make everything for my house under the guise of different companies. Trick is, just don’t let the king of Williams-Sonoma get so damn rich. How many houses full of silicon pot holders does he need?

I have an idea for a book: Lose weight like a chain smoker! (Without the smoking).
If you do what chain smokers do…which is something besides eating…in other words, keep yourself very distracted, and stay sort of obsessed and driven while denying yourself calories, you will lose weight. It works. Just make sure your meals are healthy, small and consistent.

I believe women rape, sexually, too. It’s a different kind of rape. They’ll do it for the power. Distant. Controlling. I’ve heard some talk about it--came from the horse’s mouth. Everyone gets their turn at destroying others. And then they pretend they don’t?

You’ll love this play. See it. It’s so well done.
HAND to GOD
The performance of the main guy is truly amazing.

Snow in October. Spring in November. This weather sure is entertaining! Variety is the spice, and perhaps the lunacy, of life.

Facebook, Why?

2011-11-09T22:49:00.001-08:00

Facebook, complicated Facebook, almost powder blue Facebook, why? Why are you still here?

I thought Google+ would do you in. I was wrong.

I thought people would get so bored. I was wrong again. They just got way into their food and started posting greasy pictures of their daily slop.

Then, I thought there would be an uprising as the pages became increasingly difficult to use, especially with the privacy levels, then the subscribing levels, which are different than friend levels and the lists and what the hell else?

But it sticks and sticks.

I used to love being a blogger because almost no one had the discipline to keep at it. And you put yourself out there. And it felt kind of courageous. Blogging, of course, is the online equivalent of ancient sea sponges. And the next leg up, you know, would have been the coelenterates, but Facebook went all the way to vertebrates and maybe even beyond. Why?

Why doesn’t something simpler replace it? Would it really be so hard to bail (bale?) and start over? I mean, almost everyone on earth dropped AOL.

I’m ready. Hale-Bop, take me to another world.

She Cain Forward

2011-11-08T22:50:00.001-08:00

Sharon Bialek, in looking to find another job or regain the one she lost, got a whole lot of Cain hand up her skirt, her head pulled down toward Cain’s crotch, and the demand, “You want a job, right?” At least that’s what she said.

It will be interesting to see if she is speaking with forked tongue or not.

I suspect she is telling the truth. But only because of math and anti-conspiracy sentiments. I do not believe that so many women would come forward, women who do not know each other, living in different places. It would take quite a cabal to get that going on.

And then the Right wingers, yet again whenever there is something inconvenient brought forth, attempt to believe it is media distortion. What on earth does the media get out of this? And if the media makes stuff up, why don’t they make up better stuff? Because they are too busy reporting what’s actually going on.

Discussion

2011-11-07T23:56:00.001-08:00

Liberals maintaining that racism is what drives most social discourse is actually a conservative position if you define a conservative position as one where you hold onto the way things have always been done.

Why calcify?

Liberals, undig, please.

The Stroke: Worth Revisiting

2011-11-06T22:38:00.001-08:00

A Blog Entry of Simple Truth

2011-11-03T22:33:00.001-07:00

I hate dryer sheets.

The Suburbs: Is it Safe for Dogs, Even?

2011-11-02T22:55:00.001-07:00

Two catastrophes happened within three days of each other.

Our cute pooch had to leave our apartment to live differently and otherwise, forever. It was a yapping-in-an-apartment issue that was causing insanity to both those in the apartment and those nearby. So, Connie, now back to Molli, has moved to New Jersey to live with my sister and her family. It is working out. Go Molli, go!

Not long after, there was the pre-Halloween snowstorm that was so freakish and devastating, that my sister’s little burgh of Cresskill, New Jersey is still without power, five days later. All sorts of things crushed. Messy messy world.

Will the dog survive under such conditions? Apparently, yes. It’s just dry kibble and water that propels her. So my sister’s family must trudge through dark nights and refrigerator-free days, training a dog to do its business outside, under the stress of television-free evenings.

It makes you wonder how long people will continue to live out in the woods with or without their dogs. It’s all tornadoes and crazy snow storms and freakish winds in the northeast. When I was a kid, we had about four blizzards the whole time, a couple of floody summers. Things truly have violently changed. What must my Republican appurtenances in the suburbs and country think about all this?

Or, do they not have time to think about all this since they must pass their days busily with their chain saws, making logs out of the trunks that have crushed their roofs, blown out the windows of their S.U.V.s?

As harsh as this sounds, you do wonder how many Escalades have to be pounded before someone admits to Global Warming/Severe Climate Change.

Homeostasis can be gentle. Or, it can be meted out. Right now, it is meted. It’s all physics and math, this mess. Why is this so hard to understand?

I wish the population of the great northern woods much strength in the oncoming years. But hell, what am I smugging about? The next super virus that hits the big cities, opportunistically rampant due to the population bulge, I will be running across that G.W. Bridge to New Jersey to go sit in the dark with my sister’s family and my former pooch, Molli, who, hopefully, will be house trained by then.

RSA Animate: The Divided Brain

2011-11-01T22:58:00.001-07:00

MIddle Stage @ Dixon Place, November 14 @ 7:30 PM

2011-10-31T23:59:00.000-07:00

Come see us, Don and Marian, in MIDDLE STAGE, the beginnings of a wacked comedy with guitar and bassoon at DIXON PLACE, Monday evening, November 14 at 7:30 PM.

Other acts for the evening include something by Robert Dick, Heidi Schreck in “What the Constitution Means to Me,” The Band GIFT OF TONGUES and Felipe Ossa’s “Liberal White Female.”

So, you know, variety.

Buy tickets here, for just ten measly bux. Or pay a little more at the door. The night is short, fun and Dixon Place is all state-of-the-art with the real downtown downtowness you’ve been craving since August:

Little Theatre Tickets

See you there.

MIDDLE STAGE

Completely Confusing

2011-10-30T21:11:00.000-07:00

The Earth + 7 Billion People = Freak Show

Dog as Parakeet

2011-10-26T22:19:00.000-07:00

The truth is, we had the cutest white-apricot tinged loudest, yippiest rescue malti-poo pooch this side of Paris. We could not believe we were stuck with her. We figured, well—she must go back---to be made into the dog of someone else, or sausage.

But Adam, My-husband-in-New-York, had a long talk with the rescue outfit that gave us this rejected designer pooch. So this is the deal (and we read so many books!)---every dog has his special kind of day and ours is dealing with profound separation anxiety. No surprise we ended up with THAT one.

So this is what the rescue guy said to do…in the pen where she is living with her great bedding and toys and water and all that---you have to cover it with a blanket. It has to be like the pen has nothing to do with the room that it’s in so the dog will feel like it has that tiny little world that is hers…that is safe…that has nothing to do with people or anything else. Total safety. It’s like Temple Grandin’s Cow Press!

Then, what you do is, you put the dog in, all covered like that, for five minutes. As soon as she stops the whining and barking and settles in, you time five minutes. You then give her a snack reward. Take her out for five minutes. Then do the same for ten and fifteen. Work your way up to twelve damn hours! Over a week or so.

This is fine.

And miracle of miracles…the yapping nightmare piped down. She has been sound asleep in there for a few hours, not a peep.

If only I had access to this information a little sooner—

I was making dinner tonight and she sat right on my foot. She was such a baby and so incredibly in need. I cried. But you knew that.

There's Something About Married

2011-10-25T23:46:00.001-07:00

You know, you wake up one morning and you’re married for almost a week and something is different.

No, it’s not just the dog that won’t stop barking, ever. Though, that is a surprising twist on what we thought our prize hound was going to be.

No, it’s this feeling of permanence. And I know that sounds silly---because I hear that people get divorced all the time. But there is a collective conscience around marriage that says…’til corpse do we roll.

And that is the tradition. That is the traditional marriage feeling. And you feel it. And it’s cool.

Now, why would anyone want to deprive a gay guy or a girl-on-girl girl of this feeling?

Not to be all self righteous here…

The day to day, ‘til it’s over. Enjoyable.

Now, today, I have a cold. Tell everyone to stay away. Except for my husband.

Another Wedding, Another Dog

2011-10-23T16:17:00.000-07:00

We revisited our relationship on our eighteenth anniversary. ;) And now, not only are we Multnomah-County-of-Oregon-Marriage-Rescinded and Recognized-by-the-State-of-California-Domestic-Partners, but as of Thursday, October, 20, 2011, we are Legally-Married-in-New-York. In attendance were Kathy Vance and John Bianchi, the couple who introduced us, and Don’s sister, Sally and her husband Tom Gundling.

When it gets recognized by the Feds, we can all have a big celebration. So help us, please, by doing everything you can to MAKE us LEGAL from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Gulf of Mexico to the North Pole. Write, call, talk to your cousin in Utah.

We rescued a pooch. We went to Connecticut by commuter train to meet the Adopt-a-lab truck. They are rescuing small dogs now, too. She comes from Missouri originally, rescued to Indiana. She made the road trip to just within a few feet of the Darien train stop.

She’s great…if you like really cute little pooches that are riddled with separation anxiety. We’re working on it. She is very affectionate. We are all figuring each other out. Buy stock in paper towels!

Her name is Connie.

Save the Date

2011-10-19T21:51:00.001-07:00

November 14, Monday.

New show.

All Original material. With music and slides.

Dixon Place

The New York Times: Diversity and Inclusion

2011-10-19T00:49:00.000-07:00

Invited by a friend of mine at The New York Times to attend the 15th floor conference center to watch, hear and meet the panel for

Same-Sex Marriage: The Road to Passage in New York State.

With City Council Speaker, Christine Quinn, NY State Senator, James S. Alesi (the Republican from Rochester who swung into support), and Andrew Cuomo, our governor.

This is what I gleaned:

1) James S. Alesi voted for what his constituents wanted. It was also an act of bravery, since bullies have been at him before, during and after.

2) Christine Quinn has a warm Long Island accent and is smart.

3) Governor Cuomo repeated again and again that lack of marriage equality was discrimination. Pure and simple. He never left that idea. He said politicians are scared and that politicians follow people, not the other way around, as we would like to believe. So you have to teach the people to think the right way and then they do and then you can vote for the new thinking. He viewed it as an education of others, that once all the hot emotions fell, the conservatives had nothing to back up their position---except discrimination. This was pure and simple for him. An issue of discrimination. And in a state of equality, in a country of equality, it had to go.
People cried.

4) The guy sitting next to me was something of importance at the bureau there. He smelled so much of garlic, my head started to pound.

5) The New York Times building is gorgeous. Go in it.

I was near the governor as he was leaving and shook his hand. I think he will run for president in 2016, though, he did not tell me such a thing. I thanked him for what he did. He has a good sense of humor. I would vote for him.

I think people should not eat garlic in the middle of the day---unless they suspect mutant daylight resistant vampires.

Dreaming of Notre Dame

2011-10-17T23:37:00.000-07:00

Some scientifically far fetched stuff, religiousy, paranoia-y, that is true-ish has come to light and demands more inspection.

Comets from the past that hit the earth have the same percentage makeup of elements that make up our proteins. So, Ron Hubbard, with his wacked idea of original sin coming from outer space and zipping into volcanoes…is not so far off. He might have “felt this” to be true. So Scientology, though wacky, might actually be “a hunch” that has some truth to it. Of course, they went too far with the story.

Sitting on a bus in the 1980s when AIDS was in full blown hysteria, I overheard a pair of African Americans who insisted it was a government plot to kill Blacks. Of course, this is not exactly true. But it was vaccination techniques in colonized Africa, according to an article in The Times today written by Donald G. McNeil, Jr., that caused a virus multiplier scenario. So perhaps the paranoia I witnessed in that bus bound for Jersey had some basis in truth.

We all feel things. Then we make stuff up. Maybe we shouldn’t make stuff up, even avoid narrative in general, and just try to talk about what our hunches are, specifically. We should all be more hunched and less rigid.

The North Fork

2011-10-16T23:10:00.000-07:00

What a great peninsula. Sticking into the ocean. Little towns. Sort of a nowhere but somewhere place.

It's very interesting. Nova Scotia feel meets a little bit of Northern California as this weekend was cool and dry and a section of the spit has cedars growing. Wine grapes all around, lavender, too. Lovely micro-climate.

Across the water, a short distance, is Gardiners Island. A land grant over 400 years old, given to the Gardiner family by the English Crown--well, they still have it.

It's all a pyramid scheme. It was good to be British back in the day.

Occupy Wall Street or The Remake of Footloose

2011-10-14T00:24:00.001-07:00

I am not compelled to witness either one.

However, I am more inclined to visit those guys down in Zuccotti Park who are making a statement or a ruckus or whatever it is they are doing.

But I am freaked out by the math. I think more people are against them than are for them.

But things could turn. If the protesters are greatly abused, people will stand up for them. And the consciousness could change. Though the martyr thing is a drag, it is effective. What else do powerless people have?

Vietnam ended.

Wall Street’s and Banker’s days could end, too.

Power to the people. Right now.

Republicans, Truly

2011-10-13T00:27:00.001-07:00

I want to write about the Republican presidential candidates, but there is so much lunacy going on, it is hard to know where to begin.

So I will scrap it and appeal to the few Republicans who read my blog and have not yet dumped me as a friend.

If you are a Republican and you have some sense and you understand that business is important but that people are, too, would you please try to win the nomination?
And if you do, will you entice the health insurance industry to work much more closely with the government, like they do in France, the best run medical system in the world? Please? Believe in Empiricism?

Just wanting to be rich, sharing nothing with anyone else, and making sure every unborn baby is born and gay people retain their shame is not enough reason to have a political party. There must be more to it. If you have more, please run for president. Who knows, you might end up my crossover candidate!

If Only

2011-10-11T22:12:00.001-07:00

Today, I had a root canal.

Beyond the horror is the stench. Beyond the stench is the knowledge that you are going to pretty much smell like that not long after you die.

I would like to download myself into a hard drive. Or up into the cloud.

I certainly find this mortal casing to be a chore.

This is not a call for help but an invitation to care less.

Things die every day.

So why so greedy and fearful, everyone?

Bread, butter, tomatoes, ham. Enough.

A Second Blog, Since they are So Cutting Edge

2011-10-10T22:36:00.001-07:00

Friends,

There is a second blog. Check it out.

I don’t know what it means yet.

Time will reveal its purpose.

What do YOU know?

Article Schmarticle

B.I.U.

2011-10-07T00:19:00.001-07:00

Beauty is underrated.

Facebook is All Things to All Humans

2011-10-06T01:35:00.001-07:00

And now with the subscribe button (imitating Twitter) and the lists (imitating Google+), you have to wonder what Facebook will imitate next.

Maybe little excel sheets or travel pods?

The subwebs of the web are getting filled with plaque and the web, itself, needs some cleaning.

I don’t have time to do it.

Facebook, when are you launching your own browser?

And then, when will Apps and Browsers merge?

I just want to talk to someone.

On the other end of it:

Steve Jobs, how dare you die before giving me hardware portability the size of a key that projects holograms? Selfish.

Tonight is It. Come On Over. It's Only Rain.

2011-10-05T01:59:00.000-07:00

The Play:

LIVE WORK SPACE

Tuesday and Wednesday, are here.

2011-10-04T01:22:00.000-07:00

LIVE WORK SPACE Tuesday and Wednesday Nights @ 8

2011-10-03T00:16:00.000-07:00

The Production Company proudly announces
the third play in our "First Look Play Reading Series"

Don Cummings' exciting new play
LIVE WORK SPACE

Two Nights Only! Tuesday and Wednesday, October 4 & 5 at 8 PM

Directed by Ben Campbell

featuring company members and guest artists
DAN ALEMSHAH KIMBERLY BAILEY JOHNNY CLARK
MADELYNN FATTIBENE DOUG KREEGER DAVID YOUSE

NO RESERVATIONS NECESSARY - FREE ADMISSION
The Production Company @ The Lex Theatre
6760 Lexington Ave., Hollywood 90038
...come on down and see what The Production Company is up to!

Penguin Rep: Great Place on Earth

2011-09-29T23:03:00.001-07:00

Friends, my friends are having a big auction for their great theater in Stony Point, New York. Jump on! Bid early and often. There’s even a trip to France. You name it. What are you waiting for? You know you’ve deprived yourself long enough. Live.

Penguins are forever.

This is a great place.

PENGUIN REP AUCTION

Stasis in Numbers

2011-09-29T00:29:00.000-07:00

Though I might have my arithmetic construct wrong when it comes to laying down my fraction of: dwindling old timey resources/population growth

I do believe this is what has put us in stasis.

The tiny members of the population that has easy access to hording will continue to horde. They were fear driven to begin with. They will pretend they must continue to have a whole lot of stuff in order for your dreams to come true. Do not believe them. They are cunning and nothing can plug up the holes in their hearts.

The rest of humanity, well----it just grows and grows. As it grows, there is not a clear way to support it.

I believe this is what can explain our current economic crisis. Not just government this or that, or monetary policies or any other human made what-not. I believe it is biology. I believe our fiscal numbers are reflecting our current biological state.

This may be because I am a bit of a biologist, the carpenter seeing the entire world as a bunch of nails.

So throw a mollusk at me and say, “Oh, please.” But then, think about it. Math works.

Question

2011-09-28T00:11:00.001-07:00

Will summer ever end?

LIVE WORK SPACE October 4&5 in Hollywood

2011-09-26T23:38:00.000-07:00

A Reading of

LIVE WORK SPACE

By Don Cummings

Tuesday October 4 and Wednesday October 5

8PM

THE PRODUCTION COMPANY
@ The Lex Theater
6760 Lexington Avenue 90038

with

Dan Alemshah Kimberly Bailey Johnny Clark
Madelynn Fattibene Doug Kreeger David Youse

Directed by Ben Campbell

This is to help form the next season of THE PRODUCTION COMPANY.

Your presence is invaluable.

I will be there both nights. Come on over. Love to see you.

Don

View Larger Map

End of Summer, Into Fall, The Berkshires

2011-09-25T22:43:00.000-07:00

Caregiver Farm, Cricket Creek Farm, Alpaca Farm, The House, The Woods at the end of Marion Avenue in North Adams/Williamstown. All of it.

Harvest. Eat. Grow again. As a species, we really figured it out?

The Album:

End of Summer, Into Fall, The Berkshires

Off to the Berkshires

2011-09-22T22:50:00.000-07:00

Enjoy your weekend. Some say rain. I say cozy.

Tigers

2011-09-21T21:06:00.001-07:00

Have you all seen this? Well, watch it. It’s the poster-vid for the famous day.
Thanks to my Recognized-by-the-State-of-California-Domestic-Partner, Adam, who alerts me to all popular trends, hits and viral loads:

When I came out, back in the 80’s, my father looked at me, in that stylish basement in Ramsey, New Jersey, with the curved floor Zenith, and said, “I don’t care if you make love to tigers. You’re my son. I love you.”

I had it easy and my father always used every chance he could to be a little funny.

My mother was a little more dramatic about it. “You’ll never be happy,” she said. But she was basing this on someone who she was very close to, perhaps even a few men that she knew, at a time when gay men weren’t, in general, the blithest bunch. She got over it all very quickly.

In fact, I told her first. She said I should tell my father later that night. It all happened so fast, in one day. I thought it was going to be all sobbing and wailing and blaming and heaving of Teutonic bosoms. It was not at all like that.

My parents were people in the world and they knew there were lots of gay people in it. My Mom also said, “I’ve known since you were about eight years old.”

Was it the puppets? Me being in charge of all things Christmas? Or my articulate sensitive nature?

Does it matter?

Gay military friends, protect and service each other.

Repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell Puff Piece

2011-09-20T23:23:00.001-07:00

It’s over.

Thin edge of the wedge.

Look out, Kansas. We’re coming for your children! In fagtigues.

HOMOS AT THE LUNCH COUNTER! Weeeeeeee!

Thank You Mr. Buffet

2011-09-19T23:08:00.001-07:00

What more could I add?

Miserable, Untimely Death

2011-09-18T23:05:00.000-07:00

I’m not one of those people who thinks death is strange. When I was a wee kid, I almost died from a bee sting. This was unpleasant. I went into a coma for a day. They say.
In 1998, I had this strange feeling I was dying. It was my appendix. After the operation, I had a gratitude experience that informed my adulthood from then on. Second lease. All that.
I like to live. I do. But I figure I will die. I hope I am very old when it happens. But really, only, if I am not alone. Or at least not too alone. Or at least with a little dog or something or a nurse that doesn’t hate me.

Death, in threes. Mid-September.

I sat at a cafeteria table at Tufts once singing the Great Green Globs of Grimy Gopher Guts song…not knowing that the woman at the end of the table was Kara Kennedy. My good friend, Ma we called her because she was older than us and she knew Kara, was kicking me under the table. And then the kicks got harder and harder. I was very annoyed. Kara got up and left the table. Ma said, “That was Kara Kennedy. The one you said you were going to get to marry you.” What is hilarious is that Ma (and I for a childish second) thought this was even a possibility. I did not know Kara Kennedy, but she certainly thought I was a loud, annoying infant. Which I was. And she did not marry me. Now she is no longer alive. So many people are no longer alive. It was strange to read that she died.

Then, I read on Facebook today, that a friend of mine from high school died. This is terrible. I had a very special class trip to Paris in the tenth grade which sort of informed me that I wanted to spend a lot of time in France. At the time I was sixteen. I think I slept four hours a night. I was staying on the top floor of the Pont Royal Hotel in the Sixth Arr. And so was Stacy, next door, with another friend, KK. All the other kids were on lower floors---somehow, we had the luck of getting the garret rooms. It was a party—but mostly just horsing around, like you do, when you’re young and innocent and insist on having a good time. I was so sad to hear that she died (See that she died) on Facebook. I have no idea how. Sounds like it was sudden. She really was one of those warm, incredible members of our species. Sadness. Stories ending. Paris will carry on. This Stacy, really, was unique. Often, people die and you think, “Yeah, okay—death.” But this one was a real drag.

And we saw the movie Contagion. We even Imaxed it because seats were available. Kind of documentary-like. Full on cast of amazing actors. It was enjoyable. No real conflict in the story. It was laid out more like a documentary. Well done, Mr. Soderbergh and everyone in it. Worse, could be ahead.

Mothers

2011-09-15T23:00:00.000-07:00

Mothers, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up Unvaccinated.

--This message is brought to you by the HPV generation, an infected bunch by what I like to call: The Human Paloma Picasso virus.

A Simple Horror

2011-09-14T21:41:00.001-07:00

Fifty-million, that’s 50,000,000, that’s Five times Ten Million People in this country do not have Health Insurance.

Maybe when it gets up to 100,000,000, there might be enough heft to vote for a public health plan?

What has to happen in this country to get people to vote for leaders who will help them?

We Interrupt This Blog

2011-09-14T00:43:00.000-07:00

To bring you the latest news:

People are still beating the crap out of gay kids.

Back when I was a kid, and I was gay, I was not ever beaten up. Not exactly. But I was abused, verbally, every few days. And because I was no shrinking violet, I responded by saying things like, “Fuck you.” Or, “Why are you talking to me like that?” Or even, “Sure, let me see your dick.”

But I had a special privilege because I had a little bit of popularity, a high G.P.A., a sense of humor and adventure and I was raised by very liberal, brave people. Additionally, I had many allies. I was protected. Even D.S. a great athlete, during senior year in gym, would pick me first on his team---knowing that we’d have a great time even though I was the worst player of anything on earth. He had a sense of humor about team picking. I was the recipient of his good jokes.

But there was taunting. And the taunting ultimately caused great depression. As it does. And then one has to fight, what feels like forevs, to pull out. And you do. And it’s fine. But I think the statistic is something like, you lose ten years of your life doing that. Of course, they are talking about the loss of years that you gain wealth and status by assimilating into the normative masses. But in our culture, those are real losses. And you do lean toward the normal over time. It just sort of happens to everyone.

I am all for assimilation. Especially since most people’s personalities are so grating. What the hell! Why not a little conforming? Why not some formality? And while you’re at it, why not put down that beer can, tuck in your shirt, shut your mouth and listen for a change?

I feel bad for natty gay kids. But they might conform a bit more so they are not so attacked. Maybe UNtuck their shirts? That being said, if some boy comes to school all glittery, nail polish gleaming, prancing around all goofy-like, well, shit---just give him a wide berth. He needs the room to do his jetés. I know I do.

Even as an adult, there is a bit of homophobia I still face. Very rarely, but I do. Some people just believe it is wrong or it’s a mistake. This dismissal is also a form of abuse. There is absolutely nothing I can do about that. Except dance.

Less Government, More Corporations

2011-09-12T22:20:00.000-07:00

The moronic notion that with less government one then enjoys more freedom is enough to make me want to spit out my corn-syrup-based-Snapple.

Does any one person believe they can build a large building or a highway or a postal service or a healthcare system? No matter what---it takes something very organized to do the large projects.

And look, corporations do some things very well. War machines. Monoculture corn. Cheap office supplies. Shampoo.

The government has classically done a bunch of things very well. The highway system. The post office. War machines. Monoculture corn.

Oh wait! There’s overlap. Remember Wenn diagrams?

Friends on the Right, you will never have ultimate power. Large groups of some sort will always have to do the really big things.

And don’t corporations already have enough? Just look at this hideous table situation outside this corporate restaurant. Must everything look like this? For you to feel safe?

Those Brilliant Terrorists

2011-09-11T22:03:00.001-07:00

If their intention was to bring down Capitalism, they did not succeed.

But they sure made a huge dent.

Poking us in the eye with those big planes into our big buildings was enough to make a lot of fearful idiots get into a useless war, the longest one we’ve ever had after the one we’re still in, and spend spend spend to bankruptcy.

It was brilliant on the part of those hateful animals. They spent almost nothing. We spent the richest-country-in-the-world’s surplus.

Say what you want about those angry cave dwellers, they outwitted us. And now we are broke.

The mouse killed the lion. Maybe not killed. But hobbled for sure.

For the personal tragedy they wrought upon so many people in the Northeast on that fateful day, they must be considered nothing more than monster pond scum. Certainly.

But pond scum has its own intelligence. Otherwise, we would not even know what pond scum is because it would not have survived.

Bleach is a fine pond scum killer. Let’s poor bleach on all of them.
But let’s not throw another dollar in their direction. Momma needs shoes. Bridgework. And high speed trains.

Sugar Mountain Follies

2011-09-09T00:06:00.000-07:00

Follies. We saw it. Tonight.

Bernadette Peters, Jan Maxwell, Elaine Paige, etc.

It’s always great to see a play about a bunch of washed up old broads. Singing.

I saw the last incarnation of Follies ten years ago with Blythe D. and Judith I.

This one was better.

Look—the talent was fantastic. Soup to nuts. Enjoyable. Choreography, singing, directing, all of it.

Just one little thing---it didn’t really reach me beyond a very well crafted machine. But as a machine, it worked very well.

Clever show, this is, with the younger versions of characters mirroring the older versions…or actually reverse imaging. And the way it swings into a follies show of the inner lives of the four main characters (when it comes to love). Of course, the double entendre of the word Follies is not to be overlooked.

Exceptionally performed by all.

Bernadette is too old for the role.

The year is 1971 and the hep talk of the time is dated.

The metaphors in the dialog, by James Goldman, sound like merchant class drivel. Diamonds and limos and such.

But the numbers---that’s the deal. It’s always about the music in musicals and the music in this one is fantastic. We all know it. So you do what you must, you sit how you sit, in order to get to the songs.

There could also be another reason why this did not reach me: Nostalgic Sentiment. I am terrified of it. I know my half Irish soul could be sucked into such a thing and never return. I must be cautious. In college, I remember getting very drunk or stoned or both, alone in my single dorm room and I was listening to Neil Young’s Sugar Mountain, “You can’t be twenty on Sugar Mountain,” and looking into a mirror and watching myself cry like a raving lunatic because I was all grown up and my childhood was over and I would never have the sweetness of youth nor the hope of forever again.

It was quite a scene. (I had just turned twenty). I was inconsolable.

But during that silly excrescence of tears and grabbing-backward, I realized, “Don, this is such bullshit. No more of this.”

Sometimes, it still gets me, time and what could have been. But I believe it is a trap.

It must be handled, the past, like a joke, not to be taken seriously or it all gets maudlin. Because however much that could have been never was, there are infinite universes of even more things that never came your way, besides.

It's Raining In New York

2011-09-07T22:31:00.000-07:00

As opposed to the LA scorch.

It's always good to be outside.

Heading Back to the Wicked East

2011-09-07T01:43:00.000-07:00

From the Roof of My House in Los Angeles

2011-09-06T00:58:00.000-07:00

This can only mean one thing: Sometimes there is something very nice looking right nearby.

Sitting in My House

2011-09-02T01:26:00.001-07:00

Strange, to sit in your house, with some of your own furniture even, after not living in it for two years.

It is incredibly comforting and feels like the past, the present and the future all at once.

I like what it is doing to my sense of time.

I wonder what it will do, ultimately, to my sense of enjoyment.

This stained Ikea pine table, with the one leaf that’s the wrong color, it’s looking pretty shabby.

It is Simply Time to Ask

2011-08-31T23:27:00.001-07:00

How many emails are usually sitting around in your inbox?

Me: 50

The long term ones for future use are filed into labels.

Question is, what is worth organizing?
Another question is, is search enough?

Enjoy Yourself. Your Life as You Once Knew It, is over.

2011-08-31T01:15:00.001-07:00

GIF.TV

Kids Gets Stuck Tubing in a River in Rockland County After Big Storm

2011-08-30T00:38:00.000-07:00

What else is new?

We used to dive off the top of an old iron bridge that connected our neighborhood to the Mahwah Ford Plant right into the Ramapo River after a huge flood. We did know where the big rock was and the big log.

Then, we wouldn't even use a tube---we'd body surf right down the swollen river to Devil's Ditch and pull ourselves out on the Western Edge.

When it was less roiled, we'd use tubes. Inner tubes we stole from the back of the Shortline Bus Terminal. Watch out for snapping turtles.

Ah, summer floods.

This kid---he should have waited two days.

Cozy Irene

2011-08-24T23:56:00.000-07:00

Have a Lovely Weekend.

Earthquakes and Elevators

2011-08-23T22:57:00.001-07:00

From my time calculation, I think I was in the elevator of my building when the earthquake hit today. I didn’t feel a thing.

Earthquakes are funny beasts. You only feel them in certain places. Location, type of structure, your own movement, all of it matters in the perception department.

I don’t mind earthquakes. Was in the huge Northridge Quake of ’94. That was a horror movie.

But I am glad I did not feel today’s East Coast Quake. One of the things I like about the East is the idea that the ground is super solid. It’s nice to not have been disabused of this false notion.

Quakes. The earth does what it does.

House for Rent

2011-08-22T20:29:00.001-07:00

Live on Mansfield—The Center of Los Angeles

A Consortium of Corporations Called U.S.A.

2011-08-21T23:40:00.000-07:00

Everywhere I turn, something is being sold that is either purely organic or sustainable or even better, magic.

It’s like you practically read signs along the turnpike, “OUR SLUDGE that we pour into your drinking water is completely organic. After we use this solvent to remove the lead paint from the surface of tons of Polypropylene Benzene washed engine parts, we wave a wand and it turns into omega-3 enhanced edible sludge. You could feed it to your autistic baby and it will be healed and grow up to major in macro economics at Harvard.”

Could all this bullshit be true?

People will sell you anything in this country.

Furthermore, my Android phone, what on earth are you made of? Are you the future replacement of all flesh?

I touch heat-carbon receipts and I can feel my liver curl.

Things that Start with B

2011-08-19T00:06:00.001-07:00

I am a Boy.

We watched Blue Valentine tonight. It was fantastic. You must.
(Why are so few movies this simple and this great?)
Click it, rent it, Buy it.
Blue Valentine

We are going to Baltimore today.

I have two cartons of Blueberries in the fridge. Why did I overBuy?

I had lunch with my ex-girlfriend of the 80’s, Barbara, at Le Pain Q. Comforting.

My ego thinks it can Beat your ego. It is so often wrong and scampers back home to steam its nostrils and to read magazines.

I just figured out how to turn my phone into a WiFi device. It was Big fun. I am paying for it. I like it legal and Businesslike.

I want to thank Boris Karloff for his early unionizing efforts.

Why Republicans only get further to the Right and do not moderate? Beats me.

As you get older, a Boy’s Balls go on a desperate downward voyage toward the iron core of earth.

When I was young, I had a Bunny named Edgar. He died on the Fourth of July, of thirst.

I would hate to be hit in the head by a Baseball Bat.

Bigger is only Better, occasionally. Tumors, Termites, Losses? I say Bring it down.

The Book of Mormon

2011-08-17T22:18:00.000-07:00

It's great fun for the whole family! Bring everyone.

Bottom line--If you like SOUTH PARK and every irreverant thing that it means, you will like this play. Plus, because it is not on television, there are no censors so they get to curse, full on, about everything.

It had a good message about faith, too, which, during these tough times, is not a bad thing. I felt the clunky turn of story during the entire thing. But I don't like story. Especially ones that have to adhere to Broadway tropes. But business is business and I'm getting older, and I don't want to miss out on any fun along the way. Plus, I read and see so many things, what the hell do I expect these days? Surprises? (I would have liked a couple, actually---but the surprises were all in the humor. Fine. Fine. FINE!)

In the end, there is nothing new under the sun, so you might as well go to things that light up the way you like them.
This one is smart and funny as hell.

And like most things on stage in New York, the level of talent was Jesus-like.

To me, the music is forgettable. But I do like the anthem, I BELIEVE.

If you can get tickets, go. I got them a few months ago at face value. Not great seats, but at least we were in the theater. Sit up in the Mezz.

Or go to your back yard and dig up some tablets and start your own damn religion. Maybe someday, they'll make an award winning money-printing musical about it.

Heard, Again and Again

2011-08-16T22:22:00.000-07:00

People of little consequence in New York make fun of LA. They say things like, “Everyone there is so vapid.” Or, “Everyone looks like they’ve had plastic surgery.”
All that silly stuff from a 1970’s Woody Allen movie.

But what do I hear on the streets of New York? And what do I see?

Young people looking very old, sporting their greed hard and furious:

“I told him to sell all the shares!”
“I helped her with her IRA.”
“Like he didn’t know how much it was? I told him.”
“I don’t care which way it goes. We make it on either end.”
“Sell it, Harvey. Sell it!”
“How much is it per square foot?”
“She’ll never make it if she doesn’t tell those fucks off. She just has to take it.”

Why don’t they just rename the island of Manhattan, “MONEYTOWN?”

ONE NATION DIVIDED TOGETHER

2011-08-15T19:30:00.001-07:00

All this fighting over the future of the country seems absurd to me. People don’t want to do what they don’t want to do and the middle way is dissatisfying to all, as well as, there does not seem to even BE a middle way.

So why not try this?

Everyone who believes in full-on individual rights, no taxation, strong Christian values and NASCAR, you get to be American-R’s.

And everyone who believes in the collective, strong taxation, a secular society and organic vegetables, you get to be American-D’s.

This is where it does not get tricky.

The R’s get to do EVERYTHING that they want to do how they want to do it.

The D’s get to do EVERYTHING that they want to do how they want to do it.

All you ever need do is state which one you are a member of and your taxationyou’re your healthcare and your food and your culture will be exactly that. An R life or a D life. Let us say, the Red team and the Blue team.

But there will be no color war. We can live with each other, intermingled, anywhere we want to go.

How will it play out?

There will be two forms of laws. Starting with the Constitution and current federal and state laws as they are---we will begin the split. The D legislatures and the R legislatures will pick it up from there. Each group will follow their own laws.

If an R wants to use a D road, they have to pay per mile. If the D wants to use a D road, their tax dollars will take care of it. If an R wants to use an R road, it pays per mile. If a D wants to use an R road, the R’s will keep track and charge the D government. The D government will foot the bill.

A D can pretty much use anything an R has to offer---and vice versa. But how one pays will depend upon new laws. Because this is really all about money, anyway, isn’t it? And allotment of resources?

D’s can charge D people much less for their organic yogurt. R’s will be charged at a higher rate.

D’s will enjoy national D healthcare. R’s can make their choice of which R doctor to use once they get hit by a car.

We did the whole Jim Crow thing, we can certainly do this. Separate, but let’s face it, not equal.

I imagine over time, certain states will just end up D states and others will end up R states. But maybe not.

As far as the military goes, it can be a joint affair, but it will be funded in proportion to the amount of D’s and R’s in the population and the desire of weapons. So, let’s say it is 50-50 out there in D and R American, well, if they agree on what is needed, there will be a 50-50 split in expenses. However, if the R’s want 60% more weaponry than the D’s, they will pay 60% more. Everyone wins. No one has to do what they do not want to do.

A D can work for an R and vice versa, and insist on their rates based on their own government rules. However, a D or an R can refuse to employ. It’s all negotiable.

If the R’s are way into war, let them do it. If the D’s want healthcare for all, let them do it. No one has to carry anyone.

The R’s do NOT want to work with the D’s. So let each run their own governments.

If this is the land of liberty, then let everyone live how they want to live. Let’s stop trying to get along, since we do not.

One country, two systems, interacting. The only thing that need change hands is money. No more fighting. Individuals can negotiate. If things go crappy for an R person, they can seek a church or community organization to help them out. If things go crappy for a D person, they can fill out a form and ask the government to give them money to retool.

Two Prime Ministers. One President.

Every six years, you can change from one group to the other.

Who’s with me?