The Porcupine Girdle

Not Anonymous

2011-11-12T15:43:00.007-05:00

The Chandos portrait of Shakespeare

The movie Anonymous, which opened in Canada last week, is only the latest ⎯ although perhaps the loudest ⎯ in a series of attempts to discredit William Shakespeare that reach back to the nineteenth century. Anonymous depicts Shakespeare as a fraud, a middling actor who merely served as the beard, or front man, for Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, whom the movie portrays as the real author of the plays. The film is directed by Roland Emmerich, who is best known for the disaster movies 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow, and for 10,000 BC, a film that gives an idea of the kind of distaste Emmerich has for historical accuracy.

And, indeed, Anonymous doesn’t disappoint in that regard. Emmerich shows us the playwright Christopher Marlowe alive and well on the day the Earl of Essex leaves for Ireland in 1599, when Marlowe had already been dead six years; he has a character say that Marlowe died when his throat was cut, whereas famously Marlowe was stabbed through the skull, just above the eye; he has audiences marvelling that Romeo and Juliet is written in blank verse, when blank verse had been the medium for drama for at least thirty years already, since Norton and Sackville’s Gorboduc in 1561; and most baffling of all, he offers no explanation as to how the Earl of Oxford, who died in 1604, went on to write a series of Shakespearean plays that continued to emerge at the rate of one or two a year for the next nine years, including some, such as Macbeth and The Tempest, that allude to specific historical events that occurred after Oxford’s death.

In short, Anonymous is a dishonest work. If it exposes anyone as a fraud, it is Roland Emmerich, not Shakespeare.

However, while he bears ultimate responsibility for the movie, some readers will rightly object that Emmerich himself is not responsible for the theory that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s works. True: that responsibility belongs to a man who rejoiced in the name J. Thomas Looney. Looney first proposed that Oxford was the real playwright in a book called Shakespeare Identified (1920). However, Looney was himself responding to earlier questions raised about Shakespeare’s authorship that had begun in the 1840s, and in particular those that had been advanced by Delia Bacon, who (surely not motivated by regard for her surname) had argued that a group of writers led by Sir Francis Bacon had written the plays. And those are just the two most familiar of many astonishing theories. Other candidates who have been proposed include Christopher Marlowe (who, in this theory, faked his own death), William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby, and, most recently, Sir Henry Neville. What all of these candidates have in common is that they were graduates of either Cambridge or Oxford University, which William Shakespeare was decidedly not. Moreover, all of them, with the exception of Marlowe, were also nobles.

Those facts point us to what ultimately seems to motivate all theories that call into doubt Shakespeare’s authorship. They are all based in snobbery. They are founded in indignant incredulity that the son of a small-town merchant could possibly have become the greatest writer of all time. The theorists try to couch their objections in supposedly irrefutable facts: they say the plays must be the work of someone who was well-educated in literature and law, someone who understood court manners, and someone who was well-travelled. But each of these points is easily answered.

The evidence of education that the plays show is hardly anything that would be particular to the university, where little literature, let alone dramatic literature, was studied. Universities then concentrated on subjects such as philosophy, theology, logic and natural science. Rather, the plays show evidence of some education in rhetoric and Latin, both of which were taught in ordinary Grammar schools. One of these was located in Stratford-upon-Avon, less than a kilometre from Shakespeare’s home, and he would have been eligible to attend it free, because his father was the town’s High Bailiff (an office equivalent to Mayor). And if Shakespeare had no formal education after he left that school, he would be in good company, for any list of candidates for second best playwright in English would have to include the great polymath, Bernard Shaw, who dropped out of school at age fifteen, and the intellectually brilliant Tom Stoppard, who ended his formal education at seventeen.

There is, however, evidence of fairly wide reading. But, demand the conspiracy theorists, where would someone of modest income find these books in the absence of a public library? Well, many of the books upon which Shakespeare’s plays depend (including some of the most important, such as an English translation of Plutarch’s Lives, a Latin edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and a few others, possibly including Holinshed’s Chronicles, the source for the history plays), were published by Richard Field. Field was a prominent London publisher and book-seller, who was about two-and-a-half years older than Shakespeare and had grown up about a block away from him in Stratford-upon-Avon. It was Field who published all three of Shakespeare’s long poems.

It is true that the plays show some sense of how the law worked (although there is little about actual law cases); but then the Elizabethan middle class was breathtakingly litigious, and we have plenty of evidence that William Shakespeare was frequently in court.

As for the insistence that the author of the plays would have to be a noble to be as familiar with royalty as the plays suggest, there are several quick answers: court intrigues and manners were all but universally imitated in the literature of the time; and anyway, Shakespeare was often at court as an invited performer. Furthermore, it would have been much easier for a middle-class writer to learn of courtly manners and speech than for a noble to imitate the language of commoners, which the plays also contain, and which is represented more convincingly than was managed by other playwrights of the time.

The most laughable objection is that plays that are set in Bohemia, Italy and Greece show that the author must have been well-travelled, whereas Shakespeare had never been outside of England. Well-travelled? The plays speak of the seacoast of land-locked Bohemia, and likewise suggest that there is a sea-port in the inland city of Milan; they put a thick, dark forest on the outskirts of Athens, where for centuries there had been no more than olive groves; and they seem innocent of the knowledge that there are canals in Venice. I could go on, but the point is that these are the works of someone with a vivid imagination much more than they are eyewitness accounts compiled by a world-traveller. (By contrast it has to be said that the plays accurately depict the geography of England.)

Other complaints concern the alleged lack of evidence that the actor Shakespeare was an author. For example, it is sometimes declared that we have no letters written by Shakespeare. Not true. We have a few, all prefacing his poetry and typical of the grovelling that writers of a lower class were forced to assume toward noble patrons. We also have first-hand testimonials as to his authorship from those who knew William Shakespeare, such as fellow actors and company share-holders John Heminges and Henry Condell, and from his friend and greatest rival as a playwright, Ben Jonson (for whom Shakespeare had acted). Those who believe these statements are evidence that a vast conspiracy was maintained amongst all those who worked with Shakespeare have obviously never worked in the notoriously gossipy theatre profession, let alone encountered the level of indiscretion that can be expected from a bitter rejected actor. And on that point, we can say that there are also statements from enemies, such as those who objected to the success enjoyed by a playwright of modest class and education, which likewise explicitly identify William Shakespeare as the author of the plays, the author with the actor, and the actor with the man who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon.

The bald fact is that no doubt whatever was raised from any quarter about whether Shakespeare had written the plays attributed to him until the 1840s, about 230 years after his death.

Why was such a doubt raised then? Well, we know that the nineteenth century saw an enormous growth in the status-obsessed middle class, and the identification of fine sentiment with aristocratic nobility. But a further reason must be that the authors of that age showed remarkably little feeling for theatrical language. Although theatre was popular, there was little real new literature to be heard on the stage; and the attempts to write new poetic dramas in the vein of Shakespeare’s resulted in many flat, turgid “closet dramas” that no one thought of staging then, let alone today. Accordingly, they overlooked the one point that stands most conclusively in favour of the actor William Shakespeare being the author of the plays attributed to him: his plays are better than the others produced during his lifetime because they were and are more theatrical. And why? Well, here is the crucial fact: of all his contemporaries, Shakespeare was one of the very few playwrights who actually lived every day in the theatre, where he learned how actors thought and worked and how audiences watched and listened. Shakespeare clearly loved the theatre, and understood better than any of his contemporaries its enormous potential to reach the secret recesses of the human heart. That he and his fellow company members realized that potential over and over again is not an achievement of which he should be robbed simply because some people cannot imagine how he did it.

The true Shakespeare is not anonymous.

Twelfth Night; or, What You Will

2011-07-11T12:26:00.002-05:00

These are the programme notes I wrote for the production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night I directed for the 2011 St Lawrence Shakespeare Festival.

The term “Twelfth Night” refers to January 6th, which is the day that commemorates the coming of the Magi, the first revelation of Christ to the Gentiles. So, in one aspect it represents salvation for those who previously lacked understanding. But there’s another aspect. For the Elizabethans, this day would have marked the end of the festival season, and so this accounts for both the mood of celebration that hangs over the play as well as the sense of melancholy that arises as the holidays come to a close. It might have felt to them a little like our New Year’s Day often does to us: the last chance to celebrate, which, because of the celebrations that have preceded, is a little more muted, as the “appetite is sickened by excess” ⎯ to paraphrase Orsino’s first lines. So, there are two ideas here: the melancholy close of celebrating a season of miracles, but also a sort of hopeful last chance for joyful miracles to arise.

It is that latter idea which is promised by the alternative title, “What You Will.” And this is one of the main businesses of Comedy: to help characters sort out what they think they would like to happen from what they really would like. It is, as Viola puts it, a hard knot to untie; however, only when it is untied can vitality and love emerge triumphant. The other main business of Comedy is a related one: to depict the development of self knowledge in some characters and to ridicule the lack of it in others. In this respect, Twelfth Night is an acknowledged masterpiece of the genre. It shows us excess in both the poles of dignity and festivity, and it encourages us to find a golden mean.

The country in which the story takes place is “Illyria,” which, if we are to be literal, is located in the former Yugoslavia. What is more important than geography, however, is that “Illyria” be depicted as a place caught between melancholy and joy, a place that is deeply devoted to music, and a place in which foreigners arrive to find that miracles are still possible. So, for this production, we are asking the audience to inform their idea of what “Illyria” might be like with a vague idea of post-1798 Rebellion, pre-Home Rule Ireland. This idea is meant to be less a representation of any real Ireland than an evocation of the “Ireland” of our literary imaginations: a place where festivity, melancholy, enchantment and the age-old anxiety about enforced servitude to false masters all combine to create what Yeats would call a “terrible beauty.”

Steve the P(i)M(p)

2011-04-21T10:10:00.026-05:00

You have a fiancé named Steve. Well, he SAYS he’s your fiancé, but some people call him your pimp. (And, if you are a straight male or a lesbian reading this, so much the better, because that will help you experience the feeling of a deeply ill-advised connection.) Steve was a little brutal and callous in his younger days, but you hope that he has calmed down a little since then. Certainly he seems strong and decisive, but there are moments in which you worry that he may be a little too controlling for your comfort. There were, for example, those kids that he and his friends beat up last summer, when they were making some noise out in the street. But you’ve decided for the moment to wait and see how things work out, because Steve clearly wants to move on to the next level of a more serious connection.

You are out in the car which was purchased with your money. In fact, everything is done with your money, and while you don't exactly begrudge spending it, there are times when you wish Steve would appreciate a little more the fact that it IS your money. Steve is driving, as he always does, and for the time being you are content to let him do so (although you are a little bothered by the presumption with which he has personalized the licence plates to read “HRPRS RIDE”). There are plans to run several errands, some of which are important. But he is often also stopping to give money ⎯ your money ⎯ to his sleazy friends, and you really aren’t sure why. And in one case, he stops at a gun store and brings out some enormous and expensive-looking weapons which he has purchased on your credit card. “Wow,” you say, “how much did THAT cost?” “Look, shut-up,” he tells you, “we can afford it, okay?” Similar things happen at several other stops and suddenly the prospect of all this money going out makes you begin to feel ill and to want to go home immediately. You tell him just that, saying “Steve, please, let’s not make any more stops or spend any more money, okay?” Without looking at you, he mutters “Uh-huh.” You press him for a more explicit answer, and he says “Yes, yes, alright! No more today.” But just a little bit later, he is pulling into the driveway of yet another friend’s house and you see him at the door writing a cheque on your account. When he gets back into the car, you say “Steve, I thought you told me that there would be no more?” And he turns to you with his cold grey eyes, a trace of a smirk on his lips and he says: “Well, it’s no more than I PLANNED.”

So, the question is: do you marry the guy?

That scenario came to me during the federal leaders debate, when Stephen Harper (or Steve, as he was back in his Reform Party days) said flatly that there were no more corporate tax cuts in his budget. And yet, as many sources will confirm, the Conservative plan has the corporate tax cut going from 18 per cent last year to 16.5 per cent this year to 15 per cent the year after. So what he meant was that there would be no more than he had already PLANNED. This kind of casual deceit, showing so much contempt for citizens, is absolutely typical of Harper. It is exactly what brought him into the situation in which his became the only government---not only in the history of Canada, but in the history of the entire commonwealth---to be found guilty of contempt of Parliament. Harper would have you believe that it was a “partisan” parliamentary manouevre, but the fact is that it depended on the decision of the very non-partisan Speaker of the House that the Government had indeed been guilty of Contempt of Parliament. And in case you believe that the Conservatives wouldn’t agree that Milliken was a non-partisan judge in this case, here is House Leader, John Baird (known to some as “Harper’s pit-bull”) on Milliken at his retirement: “Speakers from all around the Commonwealth look to you as their leader and their inspiration as someone who has conducted himself very professionally.” That doesn’t sound like the description of a man who has used his office for dishonourable partisan ends, does it?

Okay, so let’s suppose for the sake of argument that we all agree that Harper has shown arrogance toward clearly answering the people of Canada through their elected Parliament (keeping in mind that a clear majority of Canadians did, after all, vote for a party other than his). That’s a fault, certainly; but if he is really working for the good of Canada, we could consider it a “benevolent dictatorship,” couldn’t we?

However, the effects of this dictatorship are NOT benevolent, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the mismanagement of the economy, which is going to reap serious consequences as we are forced to spend a greater and greater portion of the federal budget on the servicing of the debt. This is no small deal: the debt now stands at over half a trillion dollars ($519 billion) and given Conservative policies is projected, by the Parliamentary Budget Office, to increase to $652 billion by 2015-16.

How did we rack up so much debt? Well, of course, by running deficits.

By now, every Canadian knows, or ought to know, so frequently has it been mentioned in the media, that after several years of running surpluses and reducing our overall debt under the governance of the Chretien-Martin Liberals, the Government of Canada is currently running a $56 billion deficit. However, there is a widespread view, one maintained even amongst some of Stephen Harper’s most ardent detractors, that the deficit that the Conservatives have racked up during their five years in office is due entirely to the global economic crisis that took hold in October 2008, and that no government could have avoided it, so that Harper and his finance minister, Jim Flaherty, are not to be blamed for mismanagement. While there is no doubt that the crisis would have caused some trouble, it is edifying to go back to the report of Kevin Page, head of the Parliamentary Budget Office to see what he had to say in November 2008 of the deficit the government was already running:

“The weak fiscal performance to date is largely attributable to previous policy decisions as opposed to weakened economic conditions, since nominal GDP is higher than expected in Budget 2008. Tax revenues are down $353 million year to date compared to a year earlier, due in large part to recent policy measures, such as the second one-percentage point reduction in the Goods and Services Tax and reductions in corporate income taxes.” Library of Parliament: Parliamentary Budget Office, "Economic and Fiscal Assessment" – November 2008 page 16 http://www2.parl.gc.ca/sites/pbo-dpb/Economy.aspx

In February 2011, in his Opening Statement to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance, Kevin Page basically reiterated this analysis, saying that when, as expected, the economy reaches its full potential by the end of 2016, there will still be a deficit of $10 billion because of policy decisions. In other words, the federal deficit is not temporary and circumstantial, but structural, because Conservative policy has the government spending more money than it can possibly take in even under ideal circumstances. (February 15, 2011, page 2, available on same webpage)

So, the point is that, in an effort to win voter support, Harper reduced the Goods and Services Tax by two points, which, while a somewhat popular gesture, is almost meaningless to the vast majority of Canadians. (Honestly, can you say that a 2 per cent sale would ever induce you to buy an item that you would otherwise consider too expensive?) But while meaningless to individual Canadians, that gesture deprived the Federal Government of billions of dollars of revenue. And the corporate tax cuts, while they ensure the continued financial support of the Conservative Party from those who run the corporations, likewise have generated no discernible benefit to the Canadian economy, as I will allow this economist to explain. (You might want to click through on the title to watch it on YouTube, because otherwise the framing of the video may be off.)

(Of course, it's true that economists can have differing views, and that Harper cites U of Calgary economist Jack Mintz as saying that corporate taxes would reduce jobs. But it's worth remembering that this is the same Jack Mintz that Harper attacked as incompetent when he supported a carbon tax in the Financial Post in 2008, so apparently Mintz is brilliant when he agrees with Harper and a dolt when he doesn't. Which is typical of Harper's attitude.)

Meanwhile, as the debt increases, we are becoming ever more vulnerable to the international economic troubles that have created havoc in one country after another.

So, my point is, if we are expected to be content being treated by our Prime Minister as a nasty pimp treats his hookers, shouldn’t we expect some actual protection in return?

In Memory of Suze Rotolo

2011-03-13T15:12:00.010-05:00

The cover of the 1963 album "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" shows Dylan moving through the snowy streets of Greenwich Village with a young woman at his side. It is she, rather than Bob who looks straight into the camera, and therefore straight at the viewer, and therefore, straight at the teenager I was at the time I bought the record (about 15 years after its release). To my mind at the time, she seemed to affirm our mutual enthusiasm for Dylan (albeit perhaps for different reasons), and this made me feel a sort of distant connection with her. The young woman is Suze (pronounced "Suzy") Rotolo, 19 years old and Dylan's girlfriend at the time. Rotolo died last month at age 67, not long after publishing "A Freewheelin' Time," her memoir of the years so iconically captured by that photograph. She certainly deserved to be on the cover of Dylan's albums. It had been Rotolo who had introduced Dylan to the poet Rimbaud and to the songs of Brecht and Weill, both of which Dylan considered important influences. However, having a relationship with a man like Dylan couldn't have been easy at the best of times; to try to ride the out-of-control bronco that was Dylan's rocketing career at the time must have seemed impossible.

Indeed, it wasn't long after "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" was released that Dylan and Rotolo broke up. In a way, the writing had already been scrawled on the wall before the cover photo was even taken. In the previous year, 1962, Rotolo had gone with her mother to Italy. It was clear that her family wanted her to put some space between Dylan and herself, and the tactic seemed to work when Suze decided to stay on, turning the scheduled short vacation into a six-month stay. Dylan felt the relationship was over, and he wrote one of his most moving songs, "Boots of Spanish Leather" (Spain standing in for Italy) to capture the sense of desolation he felt. As it happened, Rotolo did eventually come back; she and Dylan were re-united; according to her memoirs, Rotolo became pregnant but then had an abortion; then she and Dylan broke up permanently. At this point Dylan became quite deeply bitter and in that frame of mind, he wrote the scathing song "Ballad in Plain D" describing in the most thinly veiled terms how, in his view, Rotolo's family had poisoned their relationship. Dylan later regretted having written and recorded that song, and he never performs it anymore. However, the song "Boots of Spanish Leather" he does perform, and it remains an honest and thoughtful rendering of the growing sense of hopelessness that attends the apparent end of a relationship. Interestingly, Dylan never allowed any other private relationship to be photographed as frequently as he had permitted himself to be shot with Rotolo, and that fact helps to create an extra aura of precious innocence around this youthful relationship. For after this time, Dylan guarded his private life much more jealously, and so in most of his off-stage photographs, we see him alone, isolated, free from attachments: an existentially absolutely self-determined figure.

Here's a short film I put together using a 1999 bootleg recording of Dylan performing "Boots of Spanish Leather."

Toronto Subway 1949-54

2011-01-12T17:28:00.004-05:00

"The Toronto Subway Song" was a 78 record released by Ozzie Williams and his band in 1950. Here's a link about the record. (This is NOT the same Ozzie Williams who currently leads the Marion Street Band and who is Taj Mahal's son.) I happened to stumble across a recording of the song recently, just after I had been looking at the photos in the City of Toronto archives, and they seemed to cry out to be put together.

Lest anyone should look for a political message in this video, I probably should state explicitly that my enthusiasm for the Toronto subway as it is should in no way be taken as an endorsement of the current Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's absurd idea of extending it. Building subways in the mid-20th century still made a lot of sense, but the cost has since sky-rocketed, and sadly, no city anywhere in the world is starting a new subway now. Ford's notion (one hesitates to call it a "plan," because there is so little serious thought behind it) is a multi-billion-dollar pure fantasy that would cost three times as much and serve far fewer people than the light rail plans that he wants to scuttle. Ford's attempt to lead people to believe that he could back out of the light rail plans and destroy the city's streetcar system and build new subways instead was disingenuous at best. There is no evidence that he ever would be able to proceed past the first part of the plan: tearing up streetcar tracks and light rail systems.

A Fantasy of Clemency: Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband

2010-11-24T11:05:00.004-05:00

This is the program essay that I wrote for the 2009 Shaw Festival production of An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde. The run of the show is over now, so there seems no reason not to publish it here.

LADY STUTFIELD. Do tell me your conception of the Ideal Husband. I think it would be so very, very helpful.
MRS. ALLONBY. The Ideal Husband? There couldn’t be such a thing. The institution is wrong.
LADY STUTFIELD. The Ideal Man, then, in his relations to us.
LADY CAROLINE. He would probably be extremely realistic.
--- Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance (1893), Act II

On an evening in early May, 1864, the newly knighted Sir William Wilde, father to then nine-year-old Oscar and the most renowned eye-and-ear surgeon in Ireland, was giving a public lecture at the Metropolitan Hall in Dublin. As his audience arrived, they encountered a young woman named Mary Travers, who was distributing a pamphlet she had written under the name “Speranza,” in which she intimated that she had been raped under chloroform two years earlier by a Dr. Quilty and the incident connived at by Mrs. Quilty. Naturally, this caused a buzz: the Quiltys were barely disguised portraits of Sir William and his wife, Lady Jane Wilde, and “Speranza” was the pen-name under which Jane Wilde had become a celebrated writer.

It was apparently the stolen pen-name rather more than the suggestion of her husband’s outrageous misbehaviour that goaded Lady Wilde into action. Months earlier, she had disdainfully returned a letter in which Travers claimed to have been compromised by Sir William. “I really took no interest in the matter,” Lady Wilde later explained. “I looked upon the whole thing as a fabrication.” In fact, she knew all too well of her husband’s proclivities; Sir William already acknowledged three illegitimate children. As for Mary Travers, she had been long familiar to the Wildes as a patient of Sir William’s and a frequent guest in their home since 1854, when she was eighteen.

In that patriarchal day, Lady Wilde clearly saw what her course of action must be: she wrote to Mary’s father, informing him of “the disreputable conduct of your daughter at Bray where she consorts with all the low newspaper boys in the place, employing them to disseminate offensive placards in which my name is given, and also tracts in which she makes it appear that she has had an intrigue with Sir William Wilde.” She added that Mary’s “object in insulting me is in the hope of extorting money.” This was a mistake. Mary Travers found the letter and decided to sue Lady Wilde for libel.

The trial was a great sensation, covering dozens of full pages in The Nation, the major Irish newspaper of the day. Under cross-questioning, Mary Travers’s suggestion of being chloroformed evaporated, and when she admitted that her return visits to the office had included further sexual episodes, it appeared that the allegations of the doctor’s criminality were settling into something more like sustained impropriety. There was much anticipation that the disgraced man might take the stand to complete this defense, such as it was. But, because it was not he, but his wife, who was on trial, he never did.

That decision proved disastrous for Sir William, whose silence was taken as a tacit admission of guilt. Whereas the jury fined Lady Wilde a mere farthing in damages, Sir William’s reputation was ruined. Rapist he might not be, but the doctor was clearly a scoundrel and a target for derision. He removed himself first from public life and then from Dublin altogether, retreating to County Mayo, where he became an unwashed, ill-tempered, shrunken old man.

At the time of his mother’s libel trial, Oscar Wilde was ten years old, and although he had been sent off to school before the trial began, he could not have remained untouched by the scandal that was consuming his family name. One imagines at least that the affair must have helped to shape Oscar Wilde’s response to his own similar scandal and trials thirty years later. In that time, Wilde had come to know other public men whose careers were ruined by scandals. In 1885, a friend of Wilde’s, Sir Charles Dilke, one-time under-secretary for foreign affairs, found his career abruptly ended when he was named co-respondent in a divorce case. Then, in 1889, Wilde was given a more disastrous example: Charles Parnell, the great Irish statesman, a symbol for many of the hope for Irish unity, was discovered to have had an affair with a married woman, Kitty O’Shea. Parnell married O’Shea once she was divorced, but his career was shattered by the incident, and with it, some said, Ireland’s future.

When An Ideal Husband opened in 1895, it was by no means unique in its story of a public figure who is threatened with ruin by the exposure of a scandalous misdeed. Indeed, there was a vogue for such plays. However, Wilde’s play was original in two respects. Most noted was the startling wit upon which the play vaulted to popular success. The other point of originality was perhaps less obvious: that the disclosure of Sir Robert Chiltern’s past indiscretion, in contrast to other plays of this kind, does not automatically result in the end of his public life. Rather, Wilde revolts against the requirement of perfection in public men, and he has the character clearly based upon himself, Lord Goring, attempt to persuade Chiltern’s wife, Gertrude, to reach a merciful moral verdict about her less than ideal husband. Thus, forgiveness from a paragon of feminine moral purity is sought for a political and legal offence ⎯ selling insider information ⎯ as if it were a moral failing of mainly personal relevance.

So, was Wilde attempting in some sense to secure belated exoneration for Parnell, for Dilke and his father? Perhaps. But it is equally likely that he was already considering his own possible fate in the light of his father’s. That is to say, Wilde, now a famous man, dreaded the exposure of his own secret life, and hoped that his wife, Constance, and by extension, society, would prove forgiving should it come to that. Wilde had married Constance in 1884; by 1886, she had given birth to two sons. However, in 1886 Wilde also met Robbie Ross, the Canadian journalist who was to become Wilde’s first male lover and his closest friend. Wilde recognized his true sexuality, and his life changed utterly. With the end of repression began the most productive and brilliant period of his career. But he assumed the burden of a sexuality that was literally criminal according to the laws of the time, a dark secret that was at last dragged out into the light when the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, left a card for Wilde at his club on which he had written: “For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite” [sic]. Despite his family’s dismal experience, Wilde sued the Marquess for libel, starting off the chain of events that would lead to Wilde’s two years of hard labour for “gross indecency.”

The phrase “hard labour” hardly begins to convey the mercilessly harsh and humiliating conditions of the sentence: two years of solitary confinement, feeding on gruel, sleeping on a plank bed, being flogged for the most trivial infractions, all to punish the “crime” of having sex with men rather than women. “The system,” Wilde confessed, “seems almost to have for its aim the wrecking and destruction of the mental faculties. The production of insanity is, if not its object, certainly its result.” His few loyal friends feared, rightly, that the experience would break him. Bernard Shaw wrote a petition pleading for Wilde’s early release, planning to have it signed by people of high social standing. Not a single willing signatory could be found. Eventually, Shaw gave it up, explaining mournfully to Wilde’s brother that, given his own reputation as a degenerate crank, his solitary signature “would reduce the petition to absurdity and do Oscar more harm than good.” It seemed that the prevailing attitude at this point was best represented by the man who, as Wilde stood shackled in his convict uniform at Clapham Junction, waiting for transfer to Reading Gaol, declared “By God, that's Oscar Wilde,” and then spat in his face.

So yes, Wilde probably felt that clemency should be extended to public figures who had committed indiscretions, and perhaps An Ideal Husband should be seen as a fantasy along those lines. The reality, leading to his exile in France and his miserable decline and death at age 46, is so much more sordid.

Today, in the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris, the most visited site is surely the grave of Oscar Wilde. Molière, Sarah Bernhardt, Balzac and Jim Morrison all have their admirers, but hardly a moment in any season passes between opening and closing that there is not a clutch of visitors at Wilde’s grave. And while the grey stone of the art deco sphinx that serves as Wilde’s tombstone has been heavily defaced, it is not with any scrawling of taunts, but rather with lipstick kisses. It seems that Wilde has found his clemency after all.

Crushing Free Speech in Canada

2010-10-16T22:51:00.013-05:00

Inderpaul Chandhoke appears to be either too reckless or too incompetent to be trusted with administering Canadian law. Consider how arrogantly contemptuous the recent ruling of this Justice of the Peace seems to be toward the spirit of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Alex Hundert, who was one of those protesting during the G20 Summit in Toronto, and who has indeed been called a “ringleader,” has now been ordered that he may no longer speak to the media.

It's not that I think that Alex Hundert is right in his beliefs; I actually don't know enough about his opinions to make that judgement one way or the other. But THAT is the point. And even columnist Mark Steyn, whom I usually consider to be a scornful, right-wing jackass, understands clearly why Chandhoke’s ruling about Hundert is completely wrong-headed. Here's what Steyn writes:

“Mr Hundert is an idiotic anarchist, and I couldn't be less interested in hearing his political views, but that's the point of free speech, isn't it? I can't hoot and jeer at Mr Hundert's opinions if the government pre-emptively bans them - and thus in that sense the state is shriveling my freedom as well as his. An open-ended speech ban is not a bail condition pending trial so much as the Red Queen's 'sentence first, verdict afterwards'. But, as in Europe and Australia, the minor commissars of the Canadian state grow ever more comfortable in regulating "opinion and expression". The genius jurist who imposed the speech ban deserves to be better known: Step forward, Mr Inderpaul Chandhoke.”

To give the more often bombastically hardass Steyn his due, here he embraces one of the cardinal principles of liberal enlightenment politics. As Evelyn Hall famously summarized the idea in her biography of Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Inderpaul Chandhoke, on the other hand, seems to believe that it is his officially bestowed privilege to stifle any expression of dissent of which he disapproves. It may be juvenile to observe that if you take the “hand” out of his surname it reveals what his "hand" seems to be trying to do, but the observation is inescapable. This is not justice. This is not the Canadian way. This is one judge whom Canadians cannot afford to keep in place.

The Right Thing to Call Rob Ford

2010-09-06T17:31:00.018-05:00

Try googling Toronto Mayoral candidate Rob Ford* and one of the first things that comes up is a short clip entitled “Councillor Rob Ford in action.” Taken from a 2005 documentary film called “Hogtown: The Politics of Policing," directed by Min Sook Lee, the film shows a nonplussed Rob Ford standing off to one side at first while another councillor, Case Ootes, attempts to correct the misinformation that Ford has manipulatively spread to reporters. When Rob Ford himself joins the press scrum, he is shrill and defensive and flustered, but the real excitement comes when, after he attempts to shout down Globe and Mail reporter John Barber who is asking for a clarification about his inconsistent remarks, a member of Rob Ford’s entourage accuses Barber of calling Rob Ford a “fat fuck.” There follows a name-calling chase by Rob Ford of Barber, the like of which I haven’t seen since the schoolyard at recess when I was in grade five. It offers, I suppose, a glimpse of the fine, dignified mayoral style that we can expect from Rob Ford in office. Here’s the video:

Now, if Barber did call Rob Ford a “fat fuck,” it is not audible in the video. But let's assume, for the sake of argument, that he did; the question, then, is why Rob Ford is so insistently demanding that Barber explain the label.

I think we can assume right off the bat that there can be no objection to the “fat” part of the label, which, while a tad bluntly expressed, is not exactly a surprising assessment. Indeed, when I have been even a little more overweight than I am now, I have readily used the adjective of myself, and I have many friends who would not hesitate to self-apply the label, who are not nearly as overweight as Rob Ford is. After all, facts are facts, and as Orson Welles so memorably and honestly put it, “gluttony is not a secret vice.” So we can assume that Rob Ford knows full well that he is indeed fat and that he accepts that other people know it as well.

So the trouble must be with the word “fuck.”

Now here, I am inclined to agree with Rob Ford’s indignation, and to wonder why Barber chose such a word. After all, “fuck” has to be the very last word or image I would want to associate even fleetingly with someone so vile as Rob Ford is. So we must assume therefore that Ford is indignant because he wishes to be known by another noun. And what might that be? Well, as the record shows, he's worked very hard for some time to earn a number of other labels. for starters, how about:

Rob Ford the unregenerate bigot?

Rob Ford the bald-faced liar?

Rob Ford the selfish, insensitive bastard?

Rob Ford the homophobic jerk?

Rob Ford the casually homocidal and fascist automobile owner?

Rob Ford the drunken lout?

Rob Ford the would-be wife-beater?

Rob Ford the law-obstructing criminal?

But come to think of it, there’s the point in Barber's favour: the list is such a long one. There are so many legitimate labels to choose from where Rob Ford is concerned, that one can hardly blame an overwhelmed and bullied columnist for opting to go with the time-honoured journalistic vice of the alliterative phrase.

At any rate, I remain puzzled by one thing: who, just exactly, is intending to vote for this pathetic, shrill and stupid little brute?

*(As I understand it, the more times a name, such as Rob Ford, is mentioned on a webpage, the higher it will appear in the search results when “Rob Ford” is entered.)

Richard Dawkins and "The God Delusion"

2010-04-27T14:32:00.006-05:00

A friend of mine recently posted this video on his Facebook page, and I commented on it there. But because what I said returns to a thought I've had recurringly, I decided I would also record the thought here.

I am nagged by the feeling that Richard Dawkins, in his argument in favour of atheism, just makes things far too easy on himself. As Northrop Frye (in my view, a much more impressive thinker than Dawkins) once said (I paraphrase): "The problem with the question 'Do you believe in God' is that what people really mean is 'Do you believe in what I mean by the word God'." And Dawkins takes a very literalistic and naive and therefore very stupid idea of God ---an old guy in the clouds struggles with a snake in a garden and intervenes omnipotently but, 'for reasons unknown,' capriciously in human affairs--- and then shows just how stupid it is. Well...duh. Yes, that sort of thinking is superstition, and those people who stand by it are probably stupid. But what Dawkins wants, really, is to say just how stupid ALL believers are (you notice how he won't let go of that). Any idea more nuanced than the one he has just crushed is, in his view, "nebulous," and therefore he is still by far the cleverest man about.

But consider this: would it not be rather stupidly literalistic to say, for example, that Hamlet did not exist? A sophisticated thinker would be able to offer a dozen different ways in which Hamlet certainly exists, along with a few in which he didn't, and we'd get on with the discussion. If someone said we were being nebulous, we would say they were full of shit. Well, whatever else may be said of God, he is at least that, a character in a book---in fact, many books and many works of art; so it must be at least as stupid to say flatly that "God does not exist" as it would be to say that "Hamlet does not exist." Or, to look at it another way, there are adolescents who think they are very clever when they declare that "objectivity" or "truth" or "justice" or "love" or "mercy" or "honour" don't exist; and they don't, if you have no capacity for abstraction, and that's why intelligent adults seldom say such things. And again, one might say at least as much for the concept "God." Therefore, it is not really a discussion of existence, but of attributes; and this is where we can learn something from the sophisticated thinking of Northrop Frye, or Martin Buber or Charles Taylor or other modern, quite brilliant, believers.

In short, I just don't think that there can be any intelligent discussion of anything, religion included, without a little humility in play, and Dawkins, with his smug, one-dimensional, seven stage model of belief, comes precariously close to showing none.

Prisons and Higher Education

2010-03-20T14:10:00.009-05:00

Earlier this month, it was revealed that the Conservative Party of Canada intends to increase spending on our prisons ⎯ by way of creating more spaces, which is to say, imprisoning a higher proportion of our population ⎯ by 43%. This decision comes at a time at which they are insisting that our primary responsibility must be to cut back on government expenses and rein in the huge deficit: the budget is shrinking. So, when considered as a proportion of the latest overall budget, the increase in prison spending is even higher.

Naturally, if the circumstances were such that we desperately needed an increase of prison space to answer a corresponding increase in crime, this would be a very sensible and responsible manner of doing the nation’s business. But the true circumstances are far from this state of affairs. In fact, according to Statistics Canada Reports made available by the John Howard Society, the rates of crime in our country are lower now than they have been in decades.

Now, why is this the case? Well, there are many reasons, of course: improved methods of prevention, improved methods of detection, and ⎯ this is the one that the Conservatives and their supporters are reluctant to hear ⎯ less recidivism due to more enlightened concepts about the sentencing and supervision of felons.

The point about this last aspect of our judicial system is that is was set up in response to the recognition of a recurring phenomenon: patterns of recidivism demonstrated that our prisons were turning out people who were more committed to criminality than when they had gone in. It's actually a remarkably obvious point: spending extended amounts of time in company of people who have become career criminals ⎯ which most of the longest serving felons are ⎯ is more likely to inculcate a more sophisticated approach to criminality than to develop a determination to avoid crime.

In short, prisons tend to function as institutes of higher education in criminal techiques. Longer sentences are not harsher deterrents so much as they are like higher degrees: study longer and learn more.

By contrast, parole programs aimed more at the integration of convicts back into mainstream life based on their legitimately marketable skills are more likely to encourage a non-criminal existence. That’s also a pretty simple idea with which it would be difficult to argue directly.

However, as Stephen Harper has demonstrated, you can argue with it INdirectly, if you concentrate on anecdotes instead of statistics, and if you appeal to the fear of middle class property owners while ridiculing any opposing views as “soft on crime.”

Why would a person do such an irresponsible thing? Well, it probably doesn't seem irresponsible to them, because despite any evidence to the contrary, they feel deeply in their hearts that treating criminals more harshly MUST decrease crime, and they are so convinced that they are right about this that they have become incapable of considering any other point of view. Imagine that you have in your head an ideological conviction which plays a sort of brass-band marching tune that repeats endlessly, “Tough on Crime! Tough on Crime! Tough on Crime!” Well, then, you’d be deafened to reason, wouldn’t you? Demagoguery would be the inevitable consequence.

St Patrick's Day

2010-03-17T12:39:00.001-05:00

Conversation overheard in the line-up at Tim Horton's between two international grad students, a Muslim woman from North Africa dressed in hijab, who was clearly a very recent arrival to Canada, and a Eastern European Jewish man wearing a yarmulke, who evidently had been here a little longer. Both are baffled, but determinedly polite.

She: "Can you please explain what is this day, this Saint Patrick's Day?"
He: "He is Irish saint. Very important saint for Irish church."
She: "So it is a Christian holy day?"
He: "Ummmm....This is not so easy to say..."

St Lawrence Shakespeare Festival

2009-06-05T14:34:00.003-05:00

I'm just about to start rehearsals for another season at the St Lawrence Shakespeare Festival, in Prescott, Ontario (this year, the plays are Measure for Measure and The Taming of the Shrew) and this seemed like a good time to reminisce over the last three seasons.

Wynton Marsalis on the Arts

2009-05-01T13:42:00.000-05:00

Rick Mercer on Parliamentary Process

2009-01-15T11:06:00.004-05:00

I wonder: is there anybody making a more positive contribution to the general mental health of Canadian parliamentary democracy than Rick Mercer?

In North American culture, and in the USA especially, so many comedians attempting political humour tend to take the lowest possible road, making snide comments about personal aspects of politicians that have already elicited abundant sneering: e.g., Bill Clinton and the ridiculously protracted scandal over oral sex; Jean Chretien and his mangled syntax. Now, if these vulnerabilities had more than a merely tangential relation to their jobs, the mockery would provide a salutary correction. But improving the political culture is not the motivation lying behind these sorts of jokes. Instead, the low-brow commentary stands in for more difficult political commentary. It succeeds only because it is an easy, cynical way of flattering the audience: "We all know this about politician X; now let's have a good, comfortable, complacent laugh about the matter."

Well, that's exactly what Rick Mercer tends to avoid. I can't think of anybody who has made me laugh more often, with more sense of joy, than Mercer. But he clearly disdains mean-spirited laughter; and, even then, he is not invariably aiming for the loudest or easiest laughter. Sometimes, in fact, he is not necessarily going for laughter at all. With his rants, for example, he can sometimes tap into a vein of outrage that is very funny; but at other times, he is too level and earnest to elicit much laughter. And in the case of this particular rant, he is certainly not flattering his audience. He is making a criticism about our political culture; and the criticism is, quite justly, directed at us.

The Laggardly Death of William Zantzinger

2009-01-14T10:02:00.005-05:00

William Zantzinger, who "killed poor Hattie Carroll" as described by Bob Dylan in "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," is dead at age 69, according to the New York Times and The Guardian. The astonishing piece of news to me is that the man was only 69, whereas somehow I had imagined Dylan's song, because it has such an overtone of long-standing injustice, as describing an event that had taken place perhaps late in the nineteenth century, in the period of reconstruction following the American Civil War. Of course, that's part of Dylan's point: that such outrages against humanity, decency and justice had been around for a long time. But the original news story that prompted Dylan to immediately write the song had appeared on August 29, 1963. That the man lived for another 45 years afterwards is, alas, yet one more indication that "God's away on business" (Tom Waits).

The story reveals that Carroll was, in fact, the third person in a row whom Zantzinger had struck with his cane. So killing Hattie Carroll was by no means an isolated incident of violence. Nor did it mark the end of his criminality, for as The Guardian reports, in 1991, Zantzinger was convicted of fraud. He enjoyed yet another relatively light sentence, however, of 2,400 hours of community service and a $62,000 fine. Zantzinger's sentence for killing Hattie Carroll had been six months imprisonment and $625 of fines.

Zantzinger was apparently asked just a few years ago by Dylan biographer Howard Sounes what he thought of Dylan's song. Zantzinger called Dylan a "no-account son of a bitch" and "a scum bag of the earth." Fitting words for Zantzinger's epitaph.

The Very Real Achievement of Harold Pinter

2009-01-06T14:33:00.027-05:00

I’ve been trying to concentrate my main attentions on some other writing at the moment, but nearly a week later, I still feel somewhat provoked by a particularly nasty summing up of the career of Harold Pinter by John Doyle that appeared in the Globe and Mail on New Year’s Day. I’ll come to Doyle’s column in a moment, but I’ll begin with the sense of loss evoked in me by Pinter’s death.

Harold Pinter’s health had been in a precarious state for some time, so his death late in 2008 did not come as much of a surprise. Yet hearing the news of his passing nevertheless made me feel rather melancholy. Pinter was 78, so it was not as though death had taken someone at the height of his career, as it had with, say, Heath Ledger. And yet my melancholy was more than merely sentimental or nostalgic, the sort one feels for an old intellectual companion. Rather, it seemed to me that, notwithstanding his relatively advanced years, Pinter had left many things undone that, somehow, in my understanding, he should have done. Moreover it appears he was of the same mind. John Lahr tells us, in an excellent 2007 profile in the New Yorker, that, while visiting the hospital for a brain scan, Pinter told the lab technician: “You know what you’ll find in there? A lot of unwritten plays.”

Pinter had been blocked for several years from the late sixties through the early seventies, and again throughout most of the eighties. It seemed as if each block came after he had written himself through to achieving the finest possible expression of a certain sort of insight, the first block arriving after he had written The Homecoming (1964) and the second, after he had written Betrayal (1978). Blocked from writing his own plays, he turned himself mainly towards adapting the works of others, writing, for example, a first-rate screenplay of John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981); to directing, particularly the plays of his close friend, Simon Gray; and back to his first career, acting, doing particularly fine work in two Beckett plays: the titular character in Krapp’s Last Tape at the Royal Court in October 2006 (a show that reportedly sold out its whole run in sixteen minutes, so it’s fortunate that Pinter was apparently extraordinary in the role), and in the quite perfect 2000 David Mamet-directed film of Beckett’s very short play, Catastrophe, in which he appeared with Rebecca Pidgeon, and in his last performance ever, a silent Sir John Gielgud.

Samuel Beckett's Catastrophe, directed by David Mamet, and starring Harold Pinter, Rebecca Pidgeon and John Gielgud.

So, Harold Pinter by no means wasted the time in which he was not writing his own plays. But it is John Doyle’s contention, more or less, that he wasted the time in which he WAS writing those plays. Here’s a taste of Doyle’s New Year’s Day tirade:

“Harold Pinter was overrated. Oh yes, he was. A small handful of plays, all derivative and slight. Beckett for Dummies, that's Pinter's oeuvre. And he was pretentious, an indulger in reflexive anti-Americanism, anti-this-and-that to the point where he was absurdly serving on the Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic.”

Now I have no intention of defending Pinter as a great political thinker. He certainly said many things about the morally bankrupt insidious workings of capitalist imperialism that struck the nail squarely on the head. But then, even leaving aside Milosevic, he also voted for Margaret Thatcher in 1979, so it is not as though he represented any orderly critique in his person. What is not in doubt is that he was passionately engaged with politics; but, notwithstanding his local and occasional political insights, I would no more look to him (or, in a closely similar case, Neil Young) for a coherent political overview than I would look to other artists I admire for coherent religious views. I think, for example, of Bob Dylan’s born-again Christian period, which was followed by a flirtation with a Hasidic sect, or Van Morrison and Leonard Cohen’s hare-brained dalliances with Scientology before moving onto Buddhism, and so on: all these were weird ⎯ and from a certain point of view, I would insist, courageously weird ⎯ way stations on more profound spiritual quests, and stemmed from moments, I would say, when the essential mysticism of their outlooks was failing to find adequate expression in their creative work. The excesses into which Pinter’s political passions occasionally led him have a similar ⎯ and similarly forgivable ⎯ explanation. Truly creative brilliance cannot always contain itself in tidy packages. Unless we are narrow-minded philistines, we can hardly expect people both to be artistic geniuses and to show up for work in neat, well-pressed uniforms as well. Being a bit sloppy about politics is a different matter, perhaps; but I think the point still stands. So let’s leave Pinter’s political views to one side and concentrate instead on the work that Doyle sneeringly dimisses.

On that topic, it’s worth noting that even where Doyle wants to praise Pinter, on the matter of his adaptations, he ensures that the backlash lands squarely on the original works:

“The frailty and smallness of Pinter’s alleged originality as a writer is underlined by his gift for dramatizing, for film or television, the work of others. Given someone else's material, he was great at whittling it down, finding the essential narrative…”

And from here, Doyle goes on to praise Pinter’s adaptations of The French Lieutenant’s Woman ⎯ although he is scathing about the Fowles novel, which is, in my view, a masterpiece ⎯ and of the Aiden Higgins novel, Langrishe, Go Down, for BBC television. In short, as far as Doyle is concerned, Pinter was fine so long as he was streamlining unnecessarily complex works to make digestible ninety-minute to two-hour screenplays, but the only reason someone would praise the original plays is intellectual pretentiousness.

Now, it is not so much Doyle’s egregious lack of grace or taste in speaking of the recently dead that rankles me (there have certainly been cases, such as the death of Jerry Falwell, that had me speaking with contempt of the life and exulting at its passing), but rather the sense that what he says in the column is, to my mind, effectively a supercilious attempt to plaster over the open questions and lacunae that Pinter’s work had left purposely open.

By “lacunae,” I don’t mean to refer to those works that Pinter never wrote. It’s true enough that Pinter’s output was not enormous, although he wrote a sufficient number of plays to fill four volumes in the Methuen edition, with another two volumes devoted, respectively, to his poetry and non-dramatic prose, and to his screenplays. Beckett, whom Doyle wants to use as a club to beat Pinter, left a body of work that was no larger, really: the plays fit into one volume, the fiction wouldn’t need more than another two at most. But the real question has to do with whether Pinter saw or showed us anything really original in his work. I think he did, but I have to acknowledge that Doyle is probably speaking for many people in responding so truculently as he does.

To be blunt, Doyle’s assessment of Pinter is, in my experience, typical of that of many middle-brow people who speak about the work: the provocation of the confusion Pinter creates is somehow affronting rather than enticing, and so they leap to the conclusion that the playwright is practicing some sort of imposture. My use of the term “middle-brow” surely sounds like I’m tossing off a rather cheap insult, but I consider it a reasonably fair description of someone who earns his living as a television critic. I absolutely am not such as snob as to suggest that television is invariably aimed at the intellectually lowest common denominator in our society (although it sometimes is); but I think it is no more than stating the obvious to say that it is very seldom that one encounters the richest and most demanding artistic and intellectual experiences our culture has to offer on television. Could there be anyone who seriously disagrees with that statement? Notwithstanding many fine things to be found from time to time on television, the medium, especially with all the time and commercial considerations constraining it, will only allow for so much density or extension of thought. Naturally, I watch television fairly regularly; but I think I would go mad if I had to devote the majority of my waking hours to taking it seriously, as Doyle does. This is not to say that Doyle is a shallow or incompetent advocate for what is on the television; on the contrary, I think he is in possession of a rich band of critical insight that happens to correspond to what television programming offers when it is good; but the limitations of his mental energy become apparent when we see him face to face with work that is far too difficult to be confined to the small screen.

So here lies the nub of the problem: Pinter demands a great deal of mental work to comprehend ⎯ to a sometimes almost maddening degree. By mental work, I do not necessarily mean education; and I certainly don’t mean recourse to any specialized knowledge. What I primarily mean is the mental work associated with creative imagination. Like many modernists, Pinter consciously places much of the onus for completing his work with the viewer.

Think, for example, of the convention in the plastic arts, whereby certain subjects are repeated again and again. One of the most enduring subjects is that of “mother and child.” Now in the hands of an artist such as Raphael, the subject assumes explicitly religious dimensions: we see the Madonna with the Christ-child, and minute attention is given to achieving an optimal equilibrium between realism and symbology.

However, in the hands of a twentieth-century artist such as Henry Moore, we are looking at a greatly pared down rendering of the same subject.

Gone are the explicitly religious connotations; gone too is any sense of historical moment, of fashion, of specific identity, or even any reference to a specific narrative. Instead, the viewer is invited to engage with the many meanings that are implicit in the sculpture, to build these outward into external contexts, and then to allow these to collapse once again into an unmediated encounter with form and texture. The work of art encourages many interpretations, but it will not support any of them conclusively, because the lacunae and questions are left open. It is profoundly suggestive, but resolutely indeterminate. In short, as I suggested, it forces the viewer to do a great share ⎯ perhaps the lion’s share ⎯ of creative work. It offers the rough equivalent of playing a game of hockey oneself rather than merely watching it on the television.

Now, it is a hallmark of modernist and postmodernist art that its works are always derivative. The Modern period was, to that point, unique in the extremity of its self-consciousness about its place in history, so naturally, its most important and deeply affecting works of art always evince some self-consciousness about their models and predecessors. Beckett, for example, shows consciousness about his indebtedness to Kafka, to vaudeville, to medieval religious drama, and, certainly, to his mentor, James Joyce. Pinter may indeed have derived something from Beckett, along with (again) Kafka, John Osborne, Eugene O’Neill, Terence Rattigan, film noir and Sigmund Freud; but in that respect, he is exactly like every other great modernist artist. The modernist artist who does not make intelligent use of his or her predecessors, nor to some extent, self-confessedly derive his or her work from theirs (if it were even possible to avoid such a thing), is seemingly not worth our attention. Or, at least, I cannot think of one. Indeed, I defy you to name any artist who is so completely original a creature.

The point with respect to Pinter, then, is that while his work is, naturally, derivative, he altered the dramatic conventions that had come to him in particular ways that caused the individual spectator more work in the effort at comprehension, and thereby called a deeper and broader field of meaning into play as the context for that comprehension. In his greatest plays, a group in which I would include The Birthday Party (1957) The Caretaker (1960), The Homecoming (1964), No Man’s Land (1975) Betrayal (1978), One for the Road (1984), and Moonlight (1993), Pinter offers us human relations stripped not only of all the comforting distractions that the ordinary material world provides, but of the desperately cherished notion that life is, at bottom, somehow rational. The effect, if one allows oneself to play along, is vertiginous: by turns frightening and hilarious, these plays show us human beings engaged in competitive games and efforts to assert their identity in contexts in which their understanding of truth is always deeply uncertain, and their understanding of their own identities is at best mere bravado. In other words, Pinter’s characters try to look and act assured despite their repressed recognition that, as Pinter put it in his Nobel speech: “There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.” My mentor, Ronald Bryden, in his review of the original production of The Homecoming for a newspaper (either The Observer or The New Statesman, I forget which) memorably compared the action of the play to the activities of a group of apes engaged in a tribal power struggle, albeit these primates were using language instead of physical violence to assert their supremacy. This was a brilliantly penetrating insight, because Pinter’s interest in the essential patterns of human actions ⎯ as opposed to their apparent intentions and meanings ⎯ does tend to draw our attention to what is primal in human identity, in both the individual and cultural sense. Pinter’s dramas show us as Freud, in his most visionary moments, such as in Civilization and Its Discontents, saw us: as animals that struggle to belong within the excessively elaborate culture we have made for ourselves as a species.

Of course, to reduce the significance of his oeuvre to a few sentences in that way does nothing like justice to the range and complexity of Pinter’s work, but I hope it offers a corrective to the supercilious notion that Pinter was engaged in some sort of intellectual imposture or cheap con job. I believe that Pinter adumbrated the dark side of our own self-understanding, and it is to our great loss that he was not able, because of those times when he felt blocked, and because of the limitations of poor health and, finally, death, to go even further with this project.

A scene from Peter Hall's film of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming

Go, Iggy!

2008-12-10T19:51:00.015-05:00

Well, things on Parliament Hill are looking up since I last posted. It appears that the Liberals are now taking ample advantage of the opportunities Harper has presented them with his series of petty acts.

(To recap, these include, first, calling an early election in defiance of his own legislation, because he saw in the weak Dion an opportunity to gain a majority, thereby showing himself a rank hypocrite; second, deciding to sneeringly attack the arts in Canada because, evidently, he felt they were not friendly towards him, thereby losing credibility and support among Quebeckers, who take cultural identity very seriously, and condemning himself to another minority government; third, using the financial crisis not as an opportunity to be a statesmanlike, non-partisan leader, but as an opportunity to attack the opposition, thereby galvanizing their disparate antipathies toward his government into the united threat of a political coalition; and most recently, refusing to express regret or to attempt to work with the exasperated and disaffected majority opposition, and instead trying to end run them by refusing to allow parliament to meet for nearly two months while he attempted to whip up a national unity crisis by raising the bogus threat of separatism, in the process snuffing out his last ember of integrity as remorselessly as one might grind a cigarette butt underfoot.)

At any rate, the backlash from Harper's attack has resulted in the early resignation of Dion and the sudden promotion of Michael Ignatieff, a much more formidable opponent. Under Ignatieff, there is no risk that the idea of the coalition is going to look like an act of childish and petulant retaliation against Harper, as it did under Dion, nor as an attempt to wrench the Liberals out of the political Centre and toward the Left as it did (albeit probably unfairly) under Rae's guidance. Instead it looks just as it should: the threat of a group of intelligent, prudent patriots who are exasperated by an incompetent dictator's appallingly reckless egoism and petty partisanship.

For a taste of what Harper can expect now, have a look at THIS CLIP of Ignatieff in action.

Liberal-NDP Coalition versus Harper: What now?

2008-12-05T21:18:00.009-05:00

A couple of friends have asked me whether I feel angry about Governor General Michaelle Jean's decision to prorogue Parliament until late January. The answer is no, not really. I feel frustrated at the whole situation, I suppose, but not really angry at Michaelle Jean. I think that she more or less followed constitutional protocol, which, as I understand it, declares that the Governor General is obligated to follow the advice of her first minister (i.e., the Prime Minister) before all others, so long as the PM does not openly counsel action contrary to the interests of the nation. And, unless Stephen Harper is a yet bigger fool than he has lately shown himself, in his private conversation with Jean, he won't have told her that he wanted a prorogation because (as Bob Rae aptly put it, he is "afraid to show up for work") but rather, he would have argued blandly that since the stability of the country and the demands of the majority opposition both demanded a sound financial plan, and since such a plan cannot be written overnight, a suspension of parliament was necessary. I'm quite sure that Jean, as a small-l liberal, was gnashing her teeth when she heard this, knowing that Harper was a disgusting hypocrite who only wanted to hold on to power; but perhaps she was hoping that the very fact that Harper was willing to have the country go ungoverned for two whole months (!) during a national crisis would demonstrate conclusively to Canadians just how bad a leader they were stuck with. In short, she may be expecting that, through his crass attempts to save his job, Harper would have destroyed his career. It's certainly likely that he will now NEVER win a majority, because he has alienated Quebec so far with his anti-separatist hysteria that they will be unable to ever convince them of his honesty again.

But, alas, if the Globe and Mail polls are accurate, the rest of the country has not, apparently, yet realized what a disastrous mess Harper has made with his egoistic approach to governing. Most of the country still blames the crisis on the coalition parties, not on Harper. That is a crazy notion that seems to be based on a fundamental misunderstanding of parliamentary democracy. I am not sure whether the saturating effect of American television is to blame here or not, but most Canadians apparently still do not understand how their system works; and when Harper's apologists speak of our government as if it were a republican system, crying out, more or less, that Stephen Harper was "elected" leader, and that to depose him would be a usurpation of the duly elected head of state, people seem to believe this. Yet, the fact is that we do not elect Prime Ministers or Premiers, we elect Members of Parliament, and those people, along with other party members, choose party leaders. The Governor General, in deputation for the Queen, is our head of state, and one of her jobs is to invite a leader and party of her choice to form the government. By convention, she invites the party which has had the most members of parliament elected, because the crucial point is that the government of the day must have the confidence of the house. So, in the case of a majority government, the choice is a no-brainer. But in the case of a minority government, the matter is not so straightforward. To take a theoretical example, suppose we had a parliament in which as many as twelve parties were represented by elected members, and one of them was an extreme-right party like the Nazis, which had, simply through a splitting of the centre-left vote, gained the most members of parliament---albeit still a minority, just a larger minority than the other parties, for whom a fascist government, naturally, would be anathema. Well, in that case, the GG might, quite legitmately, declare that she did not believe the Nazis held the confidence of the house, and instead invite a plausible coalition of non-fascist parties to form a government, provided they could sustain the confidence of the majority of the house. That's how it works. So a leader of a minority government is forced, in such a situation, to consult and co-operate so as to sustain the confidence of the majority of the house, and we thereby see democracy in action. At least, in theory that's what happens.

However, in this case, although Stephen Harper had secured the confidence of the house with his Speech from the Throne, he then promptly lost it by (a), refusing to offer or vaguely promise or even seriously consider a financial strategy consonant with those which virtually ALL economists and other world leaders declared was necessary given the financial crisis; and instead (b), using the occasion of the greatest financial crisis facing the country in eighty years and the opportunity presented by a lame duck Liberal leader to viciously undermine the other parties by removing the per-vote financial support which a previous bill had put in place. (The notion of that per-vote support was to level the playing field, so that a party that attracted very rich voters with promises of high income tax cuts (e.g., the Harper Conservatives), would not be able to buy elections by easily winning the financial support of the very rich and thereby buying the most effective election advertising.) Harper did this without consulting the rest of his caucus. His arrogant bet was that the Liberals were too weak and would never dare to risk an election by removing their confidence, and he certainly never dreamed that they would be angry enough at his combination of complacent ineptitude and mean-spirited pettiness to cut a deal with the NDP, let alone the Bloc. But he was wrong. He ruined himself through hubris.

Now, of course, Harper is in full panic mode. His request that parliament be suspended for two months is an outrageous abdication of responsibility, but under constitutional protocol, the GG could hardly be expected to deny the request. I only wish that there were at least a little more public indignation about his ostrich strategy during a time of national crisis, which, surely, with a little nudging, even the most partisan idiot can see represents an unacceptable dereliction of duty.

However, having said that, I am no longer eagerly awaiting the coalition to take over, as I was last weekend. I have regretfully concluded that, at this point, we are really better off sticking with a (presumably, for public appearances anyway) contrite Harper and his party for the next year, because as things stand, the Liberals have just got to get another leader in place before they can govern effectively. Stephane Dion badly screwed up his last best chance to redeem himself by botching the video response to Harper's attempt to portray the coalition as some sort of anti-democratic usurping force. Dion's was a weak and banal speech in any case (and it would have been so EASY to make Harper look like the duplicitous manipulator that he is!); but even setting aside the underwhelming content of the speech, the technical ineptitude with which it was assembled and communicated is simply inexcusable. After all, this was possibly the most important television address of his career, and yet Dion seemed to have handed responsibility for making the recording over to Laurel and Hardy. In case you haven't read, the thing arrived more than an hour late, at the wrong address, and in the wrong format, and in the video Dion is positioned before a bookshelf upon which, prominently displayed, is a book entitled "Hot Air" just to the upper left of his head. Was this deliberate sabotage, perhaps? That would explain something. At any rate, Stephen Harper must have been crowing with laughter.

But I was just depressed. Up until then, I had been rather hoping that, in January, when Harper tabled his budget, the three oppostion parties would give a vote of no confidence and then, when the inevitable election was called (it being no longer five or six weeks after the election, but a full three and a half months), the NDP and the Liberals would go into the election with a sort of non-agression pact that saw them making a pact in which one or the other removed candidates for ridings in which, by presenting the electorate with either a Liberal candidate or an NDP candidate, but not both, they could unseat a Conservative. Now, however, I think it would be a bad idea because the chance to allay the suspicions of Canadians was botched the other day, and the whole enterprise now looks likely to backfire. And on that note, I also believe that it's a really, really bad idea to have Bob Rae, of all people, as the points-person for this coalition. Personally, I like and respect Bob Rae, but we must be realistic: if he has an albatross around his neck, it's the perception of the flakiness of his Ontario Provincial NDP government of the early nineties, with, first, its year of wildly impractical overspending, and then, when it became obvious that this could not be sustained, its years of desperate cutbacks. There might well be mitigating factors, but as things stand, Rae is only going to bring the taint of suspected head-in-the-clouds socialism to the whole idea of the Liberals getting into bed with the NDP, let alone the Bloc. Certainly, the Liberals could benefit from making SOME headway with the left, but mainly they need to win back the centre which has, bizarrely, been wooed over to the Harper Conservatives. People look at Harper and they mistake his banality for moderation.

At any rate, I now believe that the best scenario for those of us of whom Harper has made enemies (such as people with some respect for the arts, some concern for the environment and some compassionate sense of fairness with regard to gay Canadians) is this: the Liberals limp along until May, and in the meantime take advantage of the golden opportunity to show up Harper as the small, spiteful, incompetent, duplicitous man that he is, and also to allow the Conservative government to begin to feel the pain of the financial cataclysm to come in the next six months. Then, in May, the Liberals might be able to perform a rebirth at the leadership convention, and after a summer of subtle campaigning Ignatieff might win the election when they call a vote of confidence in Fall of 2009.

Salutary Disorder

2008-10-09T10:08:00.002-05:00

On Sunday morning, at a rally in Kingston which preceded a blitz for the “Art is Your Story” project, there were two middle-aged men who were angered by the rather small, extremely mild and good-natured demonstration held by the fountain. They were both inarticulate in their objections, complaining bitterly that they were “offended” by the gathering, and they both declined to engage in further debate (and certainly not with me, another middle-aged male) and so walked away in angry huffs after separately hurling their complaints at a female photographer whom they incorrectly assumed to be the organizer, perhaps because she was a few years older than the students who were still gathered there.

Now, the voices of those who spoke could only just be heard over the roar of the fountain, so it was clear that what these two men objected to was not a disturbance of the peace but of their own complacence. They wanted the gathering stopped not because it interfered with any other activity but because the sight of people gathered in a public square to collectively make a statement of concern which they did not share was inherently an affront to their comfort. Implicitly, what they want is a world in which they are not required to hear dissent, to accept differences or to scrutinize themselves. They vaguely invoked the threat of the police, which would be merely laughable were it not that it conveyed what is, at its base, a deeply fascist attitude towards society: the world must not merely BE but APPEAR to be wholesome; dissent must be silenced and conformity to the status quo---the pleasant bourgeois blandness of the usual antiques and vegetable stands, untainted by (as one man said, with furious disgust) “politics”---should be enforced by physical coercion if necessary.

Well, all this goes to show exactly why the arts are so necessary and why they are so distrusted by some of those in power. The arts pose questions and doubts to those who believe they have all the answers; and they force alternative perspectives upon those who feel they have seen it all. They represent a salutary dose of disorder in our society which, understandably craving stability and comfort, by setting these so high a priority that pursuing them becomes a vice, is wont to settle into a morbid rigidity. Our society would be no more than an ossified hierarchy of privilege and intolerance were it not for the shifting perspectives and hard questioning and downright turbulence represented by art. In Classical Athens, where democracy and drama came of age together, this point was understood—at least until those who were frightened by any public airing of doubt and dissent had their way, and democracy and drama were crushed simultaneously to be replaced by an intolerant bland oligarchy. Let’s not drift towards the same reckless failure of imagination. Let’s not be silenced by those who want no more than bland conformity.

You Have A Choice

2008-10-09T10:04:00.000-05:00

Risk Management & the Canadian Federal Election

2008-09-14T19:16:00.003-05:00

The video below is "How It All Ends" by Greg Craven, an Oregon science teacher. In it, he makes a clear, good-humoured argument for acting to prevent climate change rather than remaining idle because of skepticism. The question that I would pose to Canadians in the light of this argument is what could possibly justify the risk of voting for Stephen Harper, the leader who dismissed the Kyoto protocol as a socialist scheme, and whose idea of a realistic program of action is one that unfolds over five decades?

Not Him

2008-09-09T16:49:00.003-05:00

I'd like to pass on this message from writer/performer Darren O'Donnell to those who live in the 905 region (just outside of Toronto).

The Harper Conservatives' Cultural Policy, Part III

2008-09-02T17:37:00.005-05:00

My friend Kevin sent me this video. Although I generally dislike the reducto ad adolphus sort of argument, this one, in the form of a "mash-up" made by an anonymous Canadian film-maker, is just too witty to resist. In my view, it is difficult to comprehend such senselessly destructive policies as Harper has been advocating as the product of anything but the most narrow, spiteful and paranoid mind. Hence, I think this clip represents fair and accurate satirical comment on the back room mindset of the Harper Conservatives.

The Harper Conservatives' Cultural Policy, Part II

2008-08-11T09:40:00.003-05:00

I was feeling a bit guilty for not finding the time to post for the last two months, but with the latest culture-hating activities of the Conservatives, my last post suddenly looks timely again:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080811.wculture11/BNStory/Entertainment/home

The Harper Conservatives' Cultural Policy

2008-06-10T16:32:00.045-05:00

Photo by Mike Morin from rickmercer.com.

I'm afraid that most of the Harper Conservatives simply don't get culture and never will. The evidence is there in Bill C-10, of course, which will be getting its third reading in the House this Friday, June 13th. The part of the bill that has become notorious amounts to a very short half-sentence in an enormously long bill. It basically says that in order for a film to be issued a "Canadian film or video production certificate" (the certification---heretofore concerned with where the film was made and who funded it---which is necessary to entitle a Canadian production to tax credits), the Minister of Canadian Heritage must be satisfied that "(b) public financial support of the production would not be contrary to public policy." (If you care to, you can read the whole bill here.)

The most obvious thing that is wrong with this proposed law is that a film or video production must be completed and in the can before the producers can know whether it will satisfy the Heritage Minister. Of course, to budget for and not receive public funding would be enough to bankrupt most small Canadian film and video companies; and naturally, other investors are going to be extremely leery of investing their money in any project that might have the rug pulled out from under it after the fact by the Heritage Minister of the day. So, not only will this create a substantial chilling of the consideration of any politically controversial topic, but, from an accounting point of view, it is contrary to all common business sense: everybody knows that you can't attract the small investors to a project until the major ones are on side. True conservatives deserve better than this daft idea from the government that bears their name.

But a second and more trenchant objection is that, from the point of view of jurisprudence, this is one of those vague laws in which a government gets greedy about taking all the power that it might ever possibly want to use in one grab. "Public policy"? What's that? Well, it is whatever they say it is. C-10, then, is, in short, a piggy law that any real democrat must despise.

Naturally, the current Heritage Minister, Josée Verner, has been robust in her defence of the law that bestows upon her a despot's powers of acting on caprice. Not long ago, she huffed impatiently:

We are far from censorship here. We are just putting forward an intention from our government and (from) the former Liberal government just to make sure that we will take fiscal measure to make sure that the Canadian taxpayers' money won't fund extreme violence, child pornography or something like that.

Apparently, she didn't actually add "Trust me," but she might as well have done so. "Or something like that" is one of those phrases that should send shivers down the spine of anyone who knows anything whatsoever about the history of what politicians have felt at times about the arts. But let's leave that aside for the moment and stick with "extreme violence" and "child pornography." Talk about inflammatory subjects!

But wait a minute. Has any film ever been made in Canada, that featured either "extreme violence" or "child pornography," and for which the producers applied for tax credit? Well, no. Never. Besides which, "child pornography" is against the law already, so given that example, the new law would basically say that it's against the law to do something which is against the law.

So, what are they worried about, really? Well, the only clue we're left with is "something like that," which, in the eyes of the Honorable Ms Verner or whoever her successors may be!, could mean almost anything that runs contrary to the views of the government of the day: gay marriage, abortion, the Kyoto protocol, Rick Mercer, or whatever.

I know that sounds as though now I am just being ridiculous, but here's the thing: the law DOES give them that power. Ergo, it is not me that is ridiculous, but the law. As I say, it is a piggy law.

But the main point that I want to make here is a new one---or, at least, as far as I can tell, it seems to have escaped all the discussion thus far:

WHY PICK ON CULTURE?

What I mean by this is: why not write a law that says that if any industry does anything which is "contrary to public policy" (or, better still, in violation of the Criminal Code---remember that old thing?), said industry will not receive any government funding or tax credits? Either the principle is a sound one or it isn't. So why not extend the law?

Why not, indeed. Because it is very clear that, while there has not yet been a film or video made in Canada that received funding while doing any of the heinous things Mr Harper and Ms Verner imagine, there have, repeatedly, been other sorts of companies that have taken public funding while violating all manner of laws, policies and public interests again, and again, and again. Who am I thinking of? Well, just consider for a second how the oil, or mining, or forestry companies would react to such a restriction. Demonstrably, if there are mad dogs that need to be muzzled in this country, those are the sectors of the economy in which you will find them, not in the arts.

So, I find myself forced to this conclusion: Stephen Harper's Conservatives have gone after the arts because they are galled by the freedom of imagination that artists embrace and represent. To a sensitive mind, this is obviously a deeply shameful situation, but I suspect that Ms Verner and many of her colleagues would be completely baffled by the suggestion that there was any shame at all in what they intend to do.

Gods and Puppets

2008-05-30T11:04:00.002-05:00

Gordon Craig argued that puppets are "descendants of a great and noble family of images, images which were made in the likeness of God." You can see something of what he means in this video: the amplified illusion, with all the torturous labour to perform it crudely visible, is so much more powerful than any more realistic enactment possibly could be. The awe it evokes is similar to that elicited by images of gods, which, although we know them to be human creations, call our dormant imaginations into play in ways that, breaking free of banality, seem superhuman.

Barack Obama

2008-05-22T13:04:00.009-05:00

Being Canadian, I naturally don’t get to vote in the U.S. Presidential primaries or elections, but just as naturally, I have an opinion. Because it is the most powerful office in the most powerful country in the world, everyone has some stake in who becomes the next President of the United States of America. And because the country is our closest neighbour, our largest trading partner, and our nearest relative culturally, Canadians have an even greater interest than most others in the question.

So here is my opinion. When the candidates were first named, it seemed to me that John McCain was obviously the best of a rather weak Republican field. For the Democrats, I assumed that I would favour Hillary Clinton, despite some slight misgivings about a couple of her past tactical blunders. At the time, I had little direct knowledge of Barack Obama, so the suggestions of his “inexperience” seemed credible. Over the course of the winter, however, I became convinced that Obama is by far the most promising candidate, for the following reasons.

The world is at a crucial turning point in which the ecological crises are and will be generating enormous political tensions all over the globe, and especially in the Middle East and Africa. Deforestation, lack of clean water and over-population will foment drought, famine, disease and social violence. It is naïve to think that this coming situation is any longer avoidable; the crucial question will be one of how it is managed.

In any attempt to meet this problem creatively and positively, the role played by the United States will be crucial. The world needs it to play a positive role of leadership, because we cannot afford to have so powerful a player working against the needs of the team. But if the United States continues to be riven on the domestic front by all the old dysfunctional suspicions and hatreds between the Right and the Left, between the rich and the poor, and amongst Black and White and Hispanic Americans, it will not be able to provide effective leadership. Likewise, if the profound hatreds and suspicions felt towards the United States by many in the world ⎯ particularly the Muslim majorities in the Middle East and North Africa, which are the greatest ecological and political trouble spots ⎯ continue to grow, then we can only expect the cataclysmic results of the inept invasion of Iraq to spread and worsen. Hearts and minds must be won over and united at home and abroad in order to begin to unite moral authority to the political power possessed by the United States. The nation needs to recover the high idealistic ground represented in its founding documents and overthrow all the years of self-interested conniving, petty ideological grudges and profound social disaffection that have resulted in all those many disgusting spectacles of moral failure which I hardly need to itemize here. The person who should be the next President of the United States is the person with the character and skills best suited to creating the conditions in which this nearly miraculous transformation can take place.

I don’t believe that John McCain, for all his courage, can do such a thing, because his domestic ideas are basically cut from the well-worn wishful-thinking of the Reagan era, and because he is too deeply distrusted outside of his own country to build any new bridges. I don’t believe that Hillary Clinton can do the job, because although she has had some good ideas, she is in her character a profoundly partisan politician. Her campaign style is further evidence of this fact. In the past, she may have been right sometimes in pointing to the workings of nefarious right wing conspiracies, but nothing she has said since the days of Kenneth Starr’s investigations is likely to allay the hatred of any of those who have been against her. If she gains the Presidency, it will represent, at best, a swinging of the pendulum back to something like its place under the leadership of her husband; but she will carry an even longer history of partisan grudges with her, with much less of Bill Clinton’s disarming charisma to offset the anger and distrust.

Barack Obama, by contrast, is as honest and forthright and as non-partisan a Presidential candidate as the United States has seen in more than a century. His rhetoric is inspiring not because it offers facile platitudes, but because he re-embraces the founding principles of his country from a stand-point that is fully-informed and truthful about the deep grievances and angers felt by many about the repeated betrayal of those principles by self-interested political parties. He is formidable in debate, but refuses to stoop to cheap shots, not out of weakness, but because he believes what he says: that such kinds of discourse represent much of what is wrong with the political culture of his country, and he would like to change this.

The notion of Obama’s inexperience is a canard. The eligible person with the closest experience of what it is like to be President in the post 9/11 world is Dick Cheney. Is there anybody who believes that his experience really qualifies him? George W. Bush, who is rightly considered a strong candidate for "Worst U.S. President in History," was the son of a President, and moreover had years of experience as Governor of Texas (where the experience he gained included signing more sentences of execution than any other politician in American history). The point I am trying to make is this: people gain their experience of decision-making in a certain sort of context; they come to believe through experience that certain kinds of decisions are the most effective. So, if you want a different sort of decision-making, you go to somebody with a different sort of experience: someone whose different experiences have created a different sort of character. That Obama understands American politics well enough to have come so close to the Amerian Presidency as he has already, while runnng a radically different campaign that refuses to practice the politics of fear-mongering, of resentment, of unfair insinuation, of character assassination or of venality, shows, to my mind, that he is eminently well-qualified for the office.

Finally, let’s consider the question of race. You would have to be profoundly self-deceptive to deny that race matters a great deal on both the domestic and the international stage. The feelings of disaffection from the American mainstream among young Afro-Americans is probably as severe a problem as the feeling of hatred and distrust of America amongst the Islamic nations. But imagine what the prospects might look like for a solution to this problem from the point of view of someone who actually represents the future. Try to put yourself in the place of a black twelve year-old---either an inner-city Afro-American or a Muslim living in North Africa---who has been taught that the founding principles of American democracy have become nothing more than hypocritical words used by rich, white patriarchs to secure political advantage. The effect of hearing these principles recovered, in a realistic, committed way, by a man who does not come from a rich, white background but who has attained a position of respectability and influence; who has a deep understanding of Islam that was fostered by being taught in a Muslim school; who refuses to gain advantage through low, partisan attacks; and who fearlessly speaks about difficult truths, would make an incalculably huge positive difference.

I’ll close with three videos. The first is a long one: about 40 minutes or so. It shows Obama making what I consider to be one of the finest political speeches of the modern age, a speech given in Philadelphia in March. He is talking about perhaps the most inflammatory issue in American society: race. He is honest, forthright, realistic, dignfied, statesmanlike and hopeful. In my view, only the most hardened cynic could listen and yet remain unmoved by what he says.

The next two are short music videos featuring songs by Will.I.Am, from The Black-Eyed Peas. I include them here in an attempt to capture something of the inspiration Obama instils in others. It is difficult to think of any other politician in recent years who could have inspired such heart-felt, unironic, admiring and hopeful tributes as these are.

Björk and Arvo Pärt

2008-04-10T09:23:00.016-05:00

There is something about this clip that makes me incredibly happy. It's not just that I like both Björk and Arvo Pärt very much. It is that two such fiercely uncompromising artists can seem so comfortable and lacking in pretensions in the company of one another. The way that Björk, without any evident embarrassment, makes the analogy to Pinocchio, and the cerebral aesthete Pärt listens, charmed, and agrees, says much about the honesty of both of them: it suggests that, however deeply idiosyncratic each may be, their strangeness is not motivated by affectation, but by a striving for artistic expression that is free from the temptation of trying to meet the expectations of others.

Of course, each pays the price for this in a certain resistance to their work from some listeners. In general, the resistance is understandable, I think, because the work demands certain kinds of attention that not everyone is prepared to offer at any given moment: to each his own. However, I find myself less comfortable when I hear outright dismissals of either of these two, because there often has been a sneering present in such dismissals which I actually find morally distasteful. I have come to believe that those who don't want to even try to take Björk seriously, citing her elfin appearance and manner, may be blinded to their own patriarchal prejudices; and that those, especially among classical music aficionados, who look down their noses at Pärt because his work is "too simple," have become deafened by the fanfare of their own pomposity. I emphasize that this is not to say that everyone should like what I like. However, disliking artists' work is quite different from disparaging the authenticity of their vocations; and these two have shown enough integrity in their different ways to deserve at least our respect, if not our enthusiasm.

As much as part of the pleasure of seeing and hearing this conversation lies in watching two musicians who are so unlike one another have a meaningful encounter, I am also interested by the idea that behind their work there stands a similar attitude towards the place of music in the modern world, which I think is manifested in two quotations that I recalled while watching the video. I read each of these quotations some time ago, and I can't remember where now, so I will have to paraphrase. Arvo Pärt once said that the ultimate purpose of all music was to return our ears to silence. Björk once said that people should either listen carefully to the music they liked at a decent volume, or shut it off and "just skip it," because the idea of filling the air with bland muzak was deplorable. In both cases, then, there is a sense that it is in the relationship to the absence of music that their work defines its purpose. I'm not sure I wholly agree with either of them (to Pärt, I would say that I sometimes I play a song to whip up my enthusiasm; and to Björk, I would say that sometimes a soft musical background can be, as Bob Dylan sang, "nothing, really nothing to turn off"). But in any case, I find both ideas stimulating, and one would have to admit that this is certainly not the way music is regarded by most of the commercial entertainment industry, with its frantic efforts to pry our attention away from competitors.

Anyway, with that, I give you the video.

I think the only thing that would make me happier about that would be if Arvo Pärt also interviewed Björk about her work. Oh well, maybe next time.

Paris

2008-04-07T05:22:00.005-05:00

I have been in France all winter, but I'll be leaving soon, and it seemed a good time to break my blog silence. Last week, a few of my graduating students asked me to contribute something to their final celebration, notwithstanding that I am still in Paris until later this month. This is what I sent them.

Polar Bears

2007-12-28T12:20:00.000-05:00

"And now Edgar's gone...something's going on around here."

(A "re-enactment" of the Gary Larson cartoon, because I couldn't find the original online.)

Let's get one thing straight. You know that Coke commercial where the family of polar bears is on a hillside, and the cub slips down the slope to land amongst the astonished flock of penguins? Yes, those penguins well might be astonished, because polar bears live in the Arctic and penguins in the Antarctic (except, of course, when they go on vacation). But never mind, I had a sort of inadvertent vengeance in that I was quite certain, until my friend Shauna proved me wrong, that this was a Pepsi commercial. Oddly, this branding error of mine seemed to offend her more than the zoological faux pas of the advertising folks. But I suspect that the polar bears would be with me on this one.

And, of course, I'm perfectly willing to let the notion pass when Gary Larson uses it. Because he's funny, see?

At any rate, the real reason I am making this post is because I just spent most of the morning figuring out how to download a video from YouTube and put a new soundtrack to it. My reasons for wanting to do this have to do with using film clips in the classroom, but the video I chose to teach myself with was one I was altering on behalf of a friend, and it features a polar bear cub called Knut in the Berlin zoo who was raised by a zookeeper after his mother had rejected him. Honestly, the soundtrack really HAD to be changed. The original video had possibly the most annoying, cloying song I've ever heard attached to it, which seemed a shame because when I was not put into a homicidal state, the cub was undeniably... Well, I only wish it didn't rhyme with "Knut."

Information R/evolution

2007-12-19T14:27:00.000-05:00

The title is not mine; rather it belongs to the video at the bottom of the post. But it's a phrase that makes me think immediately of the great Canadian scholar, Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980). The height of McLuhan's career was in the 1960s when most of his important works --- The Gutenberg Galaxy(1962), Understanding Media (1964) and War and Peace in the Global Village(1968) --- were all published, although his celebrity would really peak in 1977 with his cameo in Woody Allen's Annie Hall.

I think that perhaps the most important thing that Marshall McLuhan left us was not any single work, nor any single observation, but rather a particular approach to seeing the world. McLuhan looked at all media as technological extensions of the individual body, and he considered that the use of these extensions would change not only the world but us. Although people once had difficulty accepting such ideas, McLuhan's approach now seems like so much common sense. As W.H. Auden said of Sigmund Freud, "he is no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion." Most of us now accept that we are being changed by the media and the technology we use; although to say exactly how, and to what degree the benefits are in balance with the disadvantages is naturally more difficult.

One of the things I have been thinking of lately is the traditional association between architecture and thought. For example, Cicero used to memorize speeches by associating each section with a room, or hallway, or stairway, so that his process of thought would have a sort of architectural solidity (v. Frances Yates, The Art of Memory). But is there a means of memorizing, of assimilating information that would be more effective for us in an age in which the model for information exchange is no longer rooted in location, but in the internet, wherein the free exchange of ideas in all directions at once has delivered an information revolution with hints of evolutionary consequences? The internet certainly has immense advantages as a means of assimilating information over the traditional structural model, but to what degree can such a system of association convey meaning? Is it (not the content, not the individual sites and pages, but the system itself) perhaps just too close to the way we already think to bestow a meaningful structure upon our thoughts for repackaging and delivery to others? Is Cicero's architecture, or the idea of shelves, somehow still necessary as a foreign structure to impose on our thinking? Can we really, as the cliche has it, "think outside the box"? Or will boxes---however external to our favourite boxes the new, more innovative boxes may be---always be necessary to us?

At any rate, the point about the difference between the traditional structural basis for organizing information and the new non-located network approach is illustrated beautifully in the following video, Information R/evolutionwhich was made by Mike Wesch as part of the Digital Ethnography project.

Academy of Snivelling

2007-12-14T14:20:00.001-05:00

God give me patience, but I am sick to death of hearing academics snivel about how hard their jobs are. Sure, there are occasional frustrations, but the bitter, hard-done-by moaning and kvetching about being exploited that I hear in some quarters is just totally incommensurate with a considered, measured view of reality.

My own view, having been a professor for fifteen years, is that this is the best job in the world. I love it at least 95% of the time, and I earnestly wish that those who disagree would move on and let just one of the many, many people who would like to replace them do so: because being a professor is a job for those who are inspired and driven from within, not for those who arrive at work sullen and resentful, feeling the lash of the administration upon their backs. But before anyone accuses me of being a Pollyanna, let me describe what I think is the realistic view I alluded to above and which I believe should temper all of our opinions.

Before I earned my PhD (but, in some cases, after I earned my M.A.), I worked at some truly horrific jobs. I did these jobs for the same reason that the vast majority of the world works: because I needed the money, and because these jobs represented the best chance of making honest money that I could find at the time. Now, thankfully, in my case, the jobs were temporary rather than permanent necessities. I was struggling to pay off my tuition and just stay alive while not deviating from the important life goals I had set myself; and this perhaps made it a little easier for me to struggle through. But the more important point is that, temporary or not, as is the case with most people, I did these jobs not because I had any delusions that they would be fulfilling, but simply because I felt that I had no better choices available. Three jobs which were certainly among the worst were: (1) cleaning up the site of a burnt building---prying valuable hardware away from charred remains and, over the course of a couple of weeks, gradually filling several large dumpsters with burnt junk, and a couple of oil drums with valuable stuff; (2) working for several weekends in the laundry room of an enormous hotel, where the piles of often disgustingly filthy sheets and towels were filled with all manner of imaginable refuse, including vermin and insects, and were, I assure you, even for a fairly strong young man, unimaginably heavy once they had been put in the huge laundry bags which had to be hoisted onto hooks to go in the automatic washers; (3) playing a "leprechaun" at a zoo around St Patrick's Day, in a totally ridiculous costume and make-up, without having been given any script, nor even any specific instructions but to entertain people, though I received plenty of abuse and mockery both from officials of the zoo and from the customers. At each of these jobs I worked for pay that was at or very slightly above minimum wage.

Now, truly, these are the conditions in which many, perhaps most people the world over, reguarly work: filth, physical trauma and humiliation. It is even worth considering that---pace Karl Marx, a great thinker to be sure, but a man, it must be said, who seems to have never worked a regular job, instead sponging shamelessly off his industrious buddy Engels, even while Marx mocked him for his bourgeois preoccupations---this may be the natural state of most human labour: filth, physical trauma and humiliation. For example: anyone care to try hunting down and killing a woolly mammoth? Or digging for roots and grubs? At any rate, the jobs I worked at certainly made me see quite clearly that, in terms of being exploited for one's body or lesser skills, and enduring degrading health and safety risks, prostitution probably falls well short of the very worst possibility one might be forced to consider---if nothing else, the work of the prostitute takes less time and is generally much better paid, considered as an hourly wage.

So the occasional unpleasantness in academia to do with tedium or lack of appreciation hardly seems so much to bear, does it? Moreover, even if marking or teaching or attending committee meetings could be compared to menial labour in any way, it has to be said that the hours at which we are actually responsible for being at a certain place and doing a certain thing are miniscule compared to other jobs: the rest of the time, we drive ourselves to fulfill our responsibilities in the way which seems most appropriate.

Still, I imagine that some people will object that, given the sort of extremity I have complained of, no one would last more than a couple of weeks in the jobs I have described: although that would be refuted by the reality of the indefatigably cheerful Columbian immigrant I worked with in the hotel laundry, who had been there eight years by that time, and from whom I learned the true meaning of stoicism. But even were that so, let me offer you what remains the more poignant touchstone of moral perspective for me: the thought of my late father, a steel-worker who, for the thirteen years that I knew him, on at least five and more usually six days out of the week, would rise at 5:30am and not return home until after 6:00pm, often with cuts and burns on his hands and legs, and always with parts of his body still a little dirty, despite having washed thoroughly. And that went on day after day for years on end. Yet I never heard him complain. So I imagine that, to him, for me to complain of my job would be completely absurd and even inconceivable.

Finally, I want to add that to my mind, the worst offenders of all are those academics who complain about the lack of time they have to do their jobs, and yet waste a good half hour making exactly that complaint. There are too many outside the university who automatically think of academics as being lazy, spoiled, impractical, self-indulgent, carping, pretentious flakes. Let's try not to prove them right

Bob Dylan's Huck

2007-12-10T17:00:00.000-05:00

“Huck’s Tune” is yet another great Bob Dylan song that has not been released on any of his own albums, nor anywhere the average person would ordinarily look for it. Rather, it’s on the soundtrack to Lucky You, a rather forgettable minor film (a knock off of The Cincinnati Kid, it would seem) by a good director, Curtis Hanson, who is responsible for L.A. Confidential and Wonder Boys amongst others.

This, however perverse it seems, is Dylan’s wont. Take “I’ll Keep it With Mine,” “George Jackson,” “Things Have Changed,” “Blind Willie McTell,” “Abandoned Love,” and “Dignity,” all of which are among Dylan’s best songs, and none of which he cared to release on a regular album. Instead, they tend to show up years after the fact on some compilation or other. And don’t even get me started about the great songs which he couldn’t be bothered with recording through to the end, such as “You Need a New Lover Now” or finishing writing, such as “To Fall in Love With You.” For me, these latter works are like those unfinished Michelangelo statues (and anyone who thinks that’s an extravagant comparison is just a snob), which gain a kind of fascination because one compulsively finishes them in one’s imagination. Or at least I do. But as for the finished works that are allowed to sit in obscurity? I don’t know: maybe that’s Dylan’s version of the fresco painted by a great master on the wall of a private home; or maybe he simply doesn’t give a damn. Who knows? Probably not even Dylan himself. In any case, I suppose when you’ve got talent at the highest level, there’s a kind of honour in squandering it rather than over-valuing it and hoarding it in a miserly fashion, which bespeaks an unseemly sort of vanity.

Of course, this is not to argue that Dylan’s career has consisted purely of masterpieces, the acknowledged and the unacknowledged. There is certainly chaff amongst the wheat (e.g., most of Self Portrait to begin with). My point, rather, is that although, from a bourgeois standpoint, there have been many times when watching Dylan’s management of his own career has been as frightening as watching a drunk behind the wheel of a transport truck, from a strictly artistic point of view, he has simply done what he has felt like doing without respect to profit or prudence, and whether motivated by inspiration or irritation (e.g., again, Self Portrait, which, as the title implies, was simply his expanded truculent response to those he had complained of in “Maggie’s Farm”: “Well, I try my best / To be just like I am / But everybody wants you /To be just like them. / They say: ‘Sing while you slave!’ and I just get bored. / I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.”) So, chaff there may be, but, if “the word of God is,” as Northrop Frye suggested, “the aggregate of inspired words of art,” then the uninspired works don’t necessarily come from somewhere else, because, as Tom Waits said, “There ain’t no Devil; that’s just God when he’s drunk.”

At any rate, here is an amateur video of "Huck's Tune" which someone has posted on YouTube. The video is sweet, I suppose, although it makes me sigh a little because of its literal mindedness; but regardless, it's a handy way of hearing the song. I've transcribed the lyrics immediately below the video, and you may want to read those as you listen instead of watching the video. (By the way, those looking for seasonal content in this posting may find it in the first line of the fifth verse.)

Huck’s Tune
by Bob Dylan

Well I wandered alone through a desert of stone
And I dreamt of my future wife
My sword's in my hand and I'm next in command
In this vision of death called life
My plate and my cup are right straight up
I took a rose from the hand of a child
When I kiss your lips, the honey drips
I'm gonna have to put you down for a while

Every day we meet on any old street
And you're in your girlish prime
The short and the tall are coming to the ball
I go there all of the time
Behind every tree there's something to see
The river is wider than a mile
I tried you twice; you can't be nice
I'm gonna have to put you down for a while

Here come the nurse with money in her purse
Here come the ladies in red
You push it all in and you've no chance to win
You play 'em on down to the end
I'm laying in the sand getting a sunshine tan
Moving along riding in style
From my toes to my head you knock me dead
I'm gonna have to put you down for a while

I count the years and I shed no tears
I'm blinded to what might have been
Nature's voice makes my heart rejoice
Play me the wild song of the wind
I found hopeless love in the room above
When the sun and the weather were mild
You're as fine as wine, I ain't handing you no line
I'm gonna have to put you down for a while

All the merry little elves can go hang themselves
My faith is as cold as can be
I'm stacked high to the roof and I'm not without proof
If you don't believe me, come see
You think I'm blue? I think so too
In my words you'll find no guile
The game's gotten old
The deck's gone cold
And I'm gonna have to put you down for a while
The game's gotten old
The deck's gone cold
I'm gonna have to put you down for a while

Now “Huck’s Tune” is interesting to me beyond its inherent merits because of the way in which it seems to be set in a landscape of immanent apocalypse (and I do mean immanent: inherent in and subjective to the mind, and not imminent: likely to happen any moment) that is similar to the overtones of his last record, Modern Times. In Chronicles, Dylan writes about how, in the first years of his career, he regularly read Civil War-era newspapers, not for specific stories, but to glean a sense of the era for its ethical and mythological dimensions. In Modern Times, Dylan seems to be doing something similar, although his focus is on a different era. To a degree, it is related to what Ry Cooder has done in his latest, My Name is Buddy: Cooder went back for inspiration to the 1930s, when Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, Leadbelly and others were offering a sort of existential portrait of the individual worker cut loose from any firm social structure. Like Cooder, Dylan uses this frame of reference as an ominous precursor to the social conditions of the United States today, when the reckless capitalism of the right wing has systematically eroded any sense of common weal and therefore any confidence in a firm social morality. But Dylan has pushed the idea much further than this historical context, in that while he embraces various forms of American music from that time (including not only folk ballads and blues, but even crooner tunes and jaunty fox-trots), he also intimates that the songs are set not in the past or present or even in the future, but in a sort of parallel world that resembles the apparently post-apocalyptic landscape of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. And he is interested in the idea of being on a journey without apparent destination, and without the benefit of moral compass ⎯ listen carefully to “Ain’t Talkin’,” the closing song on Modern Times, in which, as the song progresses, the title seems more and more related to the refusal of speech (“ask me not what I know”) from King Lear. There seems little question that he is after something of a universal sort. To compare it to another play, it is as if Beckett’s tramps were forced, not to sit in one place to wait for Godot, but having given up on his arrival, to make their way, perpetually, and without pause, along the road in search of something unknown.

Bob Dylan considers what should be done when the wheels come off of Western civilization

“Huck’s Tune” seems to partake of this same context. Now, it may have been written expressly for the movie Lucky You, although it seems equally likely that Curtis Hanson was offered the unreleased song and then decided to name the character, a gambler, accordingly. But in either case, I think that Dylan surely (and Hanson probably) also had in mind Mark Twain’s boy hero, Huckleberry Finn, whose journey into moral maturity has come, through repeated allusion, to represent the American soul. Of course, that idea of Huck as the American soul comes with a sort of daunting baggage when one considers the end of the book, where the arrival of Tom Sawyer takes what had become an increasingly profound and earnest quest for a new moral code, and allows it to drift back into a puerile denouement that suggests a failed struggle (Twain’s failed struggle, if you ask me) to wrest spiritual destiny out of the hands of selfishness and ignorance. For the Huck of Dylan’s song, the quest seems to be for a redemptive love, but it’s confused by the gambling addiction. The woman in question seems as though she may be a bad gamble; but the irony is that the alternative is gambling for an empty reward (more money, which will only lead to more gambling). In the contemporary world, Dylan apparently sees a lot of confused and corrupted Parisfals on quests with no clear directions. As always, Dylan doesn’t pretend to offer any answers; he’s just thinking out loud about the dilemma.

My Day of the Dead

2007-11-22T14:17:00.001-05:00

It's been shamefully long since I've blogged, but all my writerly energies seem to be deployed elsewhere. However, today I wrote a poem. Now, I'm not much of a poet, really, so I've only ever written for myself or for good friends. But I've been in France for the last week, and right now I'm in Paris, and perhaps something of its famous inspiration took hold of me. It's not a good poem, by any means, but it does capture what I was thinking. Anyway, here goes:

My Day of the Dead

I chose a quiet day amongst the dead,
Strolling in the Cimetière Montparnasse.
Morbid celebrity gawking, was it?
Inverted autograph hounding, perhaps.

See, I played Ophelia at each stone:
For Samuel Beckett: a one-leafed tree,
For Charles Baudelaire: well, flowers, I guess
Whichever evil type’s in season, naturally.

For Serge Gainsborg: a narcissus,
(He could wrestle Margurite Duras for it).
And for Ionesco, who believed nothing:
Nothing at all, the silly git.

For Jean-Paul Sartre: a poppie’s eye
And for Simone de Beauvoir: une autre.
For Man Ray: roses, black and white
For Tristan Tzara: electric goat.

For Dreyfus: I say “J’accuse” again,
For his grave’s neglected, his spirit roams.
Perhaps below, where six million lie
Abandoned in the catacombs.

The Totality of Richard Bradshaw

2007-10-16T21:37:00.000-05:00

There are many reasons to admire the late Richard Bradshaw, who led the Canadian Opera Company for almost two decades, until his shocking and untimely death in August: he was a great conductor; he was a caring and visionary leader of the people who worked for his company; he was a charismatic and reassuring spokesperson for the arts; he was a shrewd and far-seeing business person; he was a seemingly tireless worker; and he was ambitious in a way that might have seemed almost un-Canadian, had it not been that he so clearly believed in the specific potential of his adopted country. And it is surely true, as I’m sure countless people have now remarked, that the Four Seasons Centre, the elegant, pragmatic and beautifully effective opera house that was largely the result of his determined work, is a fine memorial to the man.

However, the aspect of his work that I think I admire the most, perhaps because it is somewhat unexpected in one who was known chiefly as a conductor before taking over the COC, is his intense interest in the whole of the art of opera. In particular, I am thinking of Bradshaw’s lively interest in improving the theatrical direction and design of the COC’s operas. Bradshaw took some great risks with some of the directors he hired; but the risks were well calculated, and if they did not invariably work out well, more often than not they produced thrilling work. It was Bradshaw, for example, who offered Robert Lepage his first opportunity to direct opera, resulting in a brilliant double-bill of Schoenberg’s Erwartung and Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle. Bradshaw also invited Atom Egoyan and Francois Girard, best known as film directors, to work for the company.

The importance of these decisions to the advancement of the art of opera in Canada cannot be overstated. Before Bradshaw, far too many Canadian operatic productions had used the “park and bark” approach, in which the singers simply stand down front and sing straight out. The scenery and any action in such a view are a decidedly distant secondary concern, or a sort of largely superfluous background ornament, to the real attraction: the singer and the orchestra. In this traditional view, a few feeble gestures as to the setting along with some pretty costumes and some hierarchical lighting (follow spots on the leads, dimmer lights on the chorus) are sufficient to the task at hand. Any deeper concern with the mise en scène might be likely to distract, and is therefore to be suspected, if not deplored. Naturally, this attitude (I can’t bring myself to call it an “aesthetic”) is a product of the rather limited practices of stage-craft in the era in which opera came to maturity. Painted backdrops into which the performer could not possibly be integrated, and precious gas-light or lime-light instruments that needed to be always focused on the principal performers, were the norm in the nineteenth century. And when any closer concern with these factors did intrude, it had to do with making the setting “realistic” from an antiquarian perspective. But essentially, all such efforts were deliberately kept deeply subordinate to the main attractions: singer and orchestra.

To be sure, the singer and the orchestra are immensely important, and I am far from arguing that the hierarchy should be reversed. Rather, what I AM arguing, and what Bradshaw was implementing, was an approach to opera that takes the entire art form very seriously, and assumes that all the elements will be carefully integrated to create a single unified art form, with no hierarchy apparent within it. In this, of course, Richard Bradshaw was realizing the wishes expressed more than a century before by another Richard, Wagner, who in a famous 1849 essay, “The Art-Work of the Future” had argued for the “Gesamtkunstwerk,” the total art-work which would integrate music, song, dance, poetry, visual arts and stage-craft into a single work. Now, it is true that Wagner’s ideas of what might go into this total art-work were rather circumscribed by what he saw in his own time ⎯ the scenery, for example, would be based on the middle-brow illusionist paintings of the sort that illustrated literary fantasies in his day, a shortcoming it would take the less literal imagination and good taste of Adolphe Appia to overcome ⎯ but the idea was a powerful one, and compellingly argued.

At any rate, it is not as though the gesamtkunstwerk is a marginal or radical idea anymore: Wagner’s essay is one that virtually every student of opera would be required to read at some point. However, for all that everyone agrees in theory that such an approach to opera is a good thing, there are far too few people in charge who are like Bradshaw in their determination to go beyond lip-service and to see that their actual productions truly approach the ideal for which Wagner argued. The reason for this probably has to do with the opera business, which, because of the business of marketing the box office --- in which star singers are traditionally the main attraction, star conductors the next, and star directors and star designers are still widely considered something of an oxymoron --- remains deeply addicted to old-fashioned hierarchies. Indeed, the problem is great enough that, while all regular opera-goers would testify to the great thrill of seeing a production in which every aspect of the art form is fully realized, there are few who have become more than middling critics of direction, design or choreography, even as they make the most highly-informed and exacting criticisms of leading singers in specific roles.

Thus, while this is one of the most important aspects of Richard Bradshaw’s legacy, it is also one of the most vulnerable. I only hope that the search committee who faces the daunting task of replacing Richard Bradshaw as General Director appreciates the totality of the great artist and leader he was, and accordingly recognizes the commensurate importance of Bradshaw’s concern with realizing his chosen art form in all of its totality.

Aging and the Optimal Ratio

2007-07-20T11:28:00.000-05:00

I've decided that the secret to aging gracefully lies in the judicious exchange of waning nubility for waxing dignity. That is to say, in youth, one’s status and self-assurance may be based on physical attractiveness (i.e., nubility, and whatever the male equivalent is ⎯ not virility, really; and it's a measure of our society's sexist bias that whatever the term is, it is not so ready to hand as "nubility") and a carefree disposition; in old age, clearly, this is not a viable option, so one must stand rather upon the ground of impressive character and personal achievement. But the optimal ratio is, for each person, an elusive, unique and ever changing calculation, in the pursuit of which there are many more opportunities for humiliation than for attracting the admiration of others. Too late and too large a weighting of the first part of the ratio suggests a preposterous vanity; too early and too large a weighting of the second suggests defensive pomposity. It is essentially the same vice applied to different content.

This is why some gain status as they age while others lose it, and it seems to be only a lucky or skillful few who ever manage to maintain a more or less consistently high status throughout life. But, of course, an obsession with “getting the ratio right” is not only neurotic, it deprives one of some of the best chances to be a complete human being. Paradoxically, the most promising creative opportunities offered by life lie not in the straight and narrow path (yes, I'm mixing my metaphors: so what?), but in the ditches along the way---in exploring the humilations, as it were. So a little gracelessness can be a valuable commodity.

Those who play for a living ⎯ i.e., actors, musicians and other artists ⎯ tend to maintain the air of youth longer than those who have surrendered more fully to Freud’s “reality principle.” So we tend to be attracted to such people, at least in a facile way. But what is the price of such attractiveness? “Oh, you silly, silly man,” a distinguished woman blurted out to me after seeing me perform as Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream ⎯ apparently intending this as praise, for hearing herself afresh in the sight of my quizzical reaction, she suddenly began to compliment the work more precisely. But I suspect that her initial impulsive comment conveyed her most truthful response, and I certainly don’t blame her. When one plays that sort of role, one is consciously choosing to create delight rather than respect, and it would be absurd to complain when one is successful.

Of course, I don't mean to say that in playing that sort of comic role one is acquiring physical attractiveness (if only it were that easy); I mean, rather, that one is performing certain attributes associated with attractive youth --- untrammelled enthusiasm, innocence, suggestibility and unquestioning optimism --- each of which is attractive in itself, but which, collectively, are (however unfortunately) at odds with a dignity becoming to middle age. The incongruity is amusing within the context of a fictional world, but generally repellent in the real one. Still, the ability to meddle with the ratio in this way is probably as valuable a skill for real life as it is essential for the theatre.

Brian Bedford, who has played Malvolio in three different productions at the Stratford Festival

I think of the actors who have played Malvolio in Twelfth Night, a character who moves from one sort of overemphasis in the ratio (too much dignity) to the other (too much "nubility"). This lack of self-knowledge makes Malvolo both amusing and contemptible, because he basically moves from one ditch of ludicrousness to the other without ever so much as acknowledging the path that lies in the middle. But each of the actors who has enjoyed a clear success in the role is the sort of person in whose company, offstage, one feels completely at ease. Brian Bedford, for example, is a charming, attractive, dignified man who seems admirably at his ease in any sort of social occasion, managing to also put others at their ease. I suspect this is because of the self-assurance that arises from being a master player of the ratio as opposed to an anxious slave to some fixed notion of what is most appropriate. One gains a greater than average self-knowledge from being so well acquainted with the pitfalls of disproportion and is therefore able to make a liberal but judicious use of the whole of the available path between the ditches.

Embracing Discomfort

2007-07-04T18:31:00.000-05:00

Recently, I’ve heard a couple of allusions to theatrical origins in a way that has become quite common, along the lines of “since the first person returned to the cave with a hide and re-enacted the details of the hunt for the others...” This popular image is, I think, fair and intelligent speculation about theatrical origins: common sense suggests that theatre, in the broadest possible sense, probably began as instinctive communication about something of importance in a manner which is not far from Bertolt Brecht’s “street scene” ⎯ i.e., a person describes an accident to another person using a combination of narrative and re-enactment. As for theories of ritual origins, theatre and ritual may have shared some common origins, but the idea that theatre evolved from ritual is finally rather logically incoherent. Of course, the notion of instinctive re-enactment/narrative does not offer us much toward an explanation of the development of spoken drama, which is a much more complex matter; but, for that, see Jennifer Wise’s highly interesting and illuminating book Dionysus Writes.

But the real point of this post has to do with that image of the person returning with the hide of some large beast. For the image suddenly brought to mind something that I had read a couple of months ago, in Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee. It seems that when archeologists investigate the fossilized dumps of very early human settlements, they find very, very few bones of larger game, but many bones of smaller animals ⎯ mostly rodents, lizards, and that sort of thing. So the killing of larger animals, notwithstanding the popular image of Neanderthals bringing down tigers (or bears or wild boars or whatever), was an extremely rare event. And my assumption is that for a person used to killing rabbits or squirrels it would be an extremely stressful event at that, and one that would probably not be consciously sought out except on rare special occasions. The performance worthy aspect of bringing home the hide of large game, then, would be the triumph over the hunter’s initial terror at encountering a large predator rather an easy small victim.

At any rate, this seems only to confirm an idea that I have sometimes suggested to students embarking on an improvisation: as soon as you imagine something that you would very much like NOT to happen to you, you have the beginnings of a story. Of course, this means that to some extent, in order to be theatrically creative as an actor, one needs to be operating outside of a place of comfort. And yet, there is the paradox that, without a relaxed and well-centred mind and body, it is impossible to work in a creative manner. Hence, an actor’s best work is always going to occur in close proximity to some sort of optimal ratio between discomfort and relaxation. Too little of the former, and the work becomes insipid and listless; and it is this that is the more common problem with many actors: opting for an approach to a scene, even unconsciously, simply because it is in some way comfortable and not psychologically dangerous, rather than submitting to what the story has made necessary. The opposite problem, of too little relaxation, is the great difficulty that faces beginning actors, of course, and it usually leads to stage fright. But I think, in more experienced actors, who are unlikely to suffer stage fright, there can be a tendency to embrace discomfort without a sense of relaxation, and it is at these times, I think (and I am recalling a particular production I saw last year), that the work can become ugly and even repellent. Even in the most hideous moments on stage, I believe, we look for some sort of graceful artistry.

The Straightforwardness of Women

2007-06-10T12:20:00.000-05:00

Apparently, given at least one private response I have had to even the revised version of the last post, I need to clarify what I have said---or rather, NOT said--- in that post still further. It may be that I made a mistake in quoting Einstein in the title, because it seems that some readers more or less decide at that point what the posting is about, and this colours their reading of what follows. So, in a spirit of experiment, let's try out a different title.

Okay, first of all, what the previous post is NOT about is any real or imagined bafflement about women on my own part. Really and truly, it's not. Nor is it at all about women not being "straightforward" in explaining themselves. In short, this is not an extension of Sigmund Freud's "what does a woman want?" Rather, the post is about the obsessed fascination that leads some people (or some men, at least) to make certain kinds of art---working through the complexity of their own responses, attempting to apprehend or comprehend the essence of why a woman has captured their attention---in a way that is similar to the way other people can get totally absorbed by, for example, trying to solve a Rubik's cube: though, of course, in the case of the artistic representation of women, there is no real solution, because what one is dealing with is not a puzzle per se, but rather an extremely complex reality that eludes straightforward translation. Hence, the idea of spending one's life in its contemplation and in trying to comprehend the complexity in art rather than mathematics. Because, however fascinating and enigmatic we may find Leonardo da Vinci's painting of the Mona Lisa, I'll just bet that he himself felt he had only scratched the surface of all the thoughts and feelings that the real woman evoked in him.

So, again, let me assure you: while I do believe them to be complex, I don't really find women baffling at all, at least in general. Although I will go so far as to admit that I certainly find Condoleeza Rice's loyalty to George Bush extremely baffling. I mean, what IS she thinking, after all this time? And, on a more personal note, if you really must have it, I will admit also that I have found myself at a loss to explain in hindsight how it is that my interest in this or that woman has, on a couple of occasions, so totally trumped my better judgement. But, I guess that's really me being baffled by the complexities of Walker, isn't it?

The Complexities of Women

2007-06-09T08:23:00.000-05:00

(This is my second attempt at making this post; my first was apparently a little opaque...or, okay, even MORE opaque than this one.)

Many people will have heard that Albert Einstein once quipped: “Some men spend a lifetime in an attempt to comprehend the complexities of women. Others pre-occupy themselves with somewhat simpler tasks, such as understanding the theory of relativity.” I think it’s fair to say that this quotation is received by many people with a smirk (or even a sneer?), as if it were merely a vaguely sexist glib remark rather than a well-considered statement of belief; yet, my own suspicion is that it correctly describes an important aspect of the relationship between biological instinct, evolution and civilization. It seems clear enough, for example, that many male artists have a sort of primordial level of fascination toward women that is probably rooted in biology, and which embraces heterosexual desire, although it also quite clearly extends well beyond that sort of attraction. Now, I could delve here into the whole question of whether or not, and to what degree, this fascination appears to be reciprocated by women for men, or note where it appears to find its equivalent in same sex desire; but, really, trying to navigate all the "essentialist" and "constructionist" aspects of the argument (the Scylla and Charybdis of all contemporary discussions related to gender) would only bore and frustrate both me and you, gentle reader. Instead, I just want to observe that, at least with regard to some male artists, Einstein was right about this (as about so many other things): it is precisely the refusal of this primordial fascination ever to be fully ironed out into two-dimensional rationality or comprehended within an orderly equation that creates a kind of complex tension into which a tremendous amount of creativity often flows. Perhaps we could even think of it as the centripetal expression of the same instinct that, in its centrifugal expression, leads others to ponder the expansion of the universe and the curvature of space-time: the difference being that the intensity of the subject position in the former instance makes a satisfactory objective resolution of the complexities far more elusive than in the latter. In that respect, it’s another kind of “uncertainty principle,” I suppose, though one that can have all the beauty of a Zen koan. And, in the spirit of that thought, I offer you, as a gloss on Einstein’s comment, this film that I found on YouTube:

The Spirit of Emma Bailey

2007-05-24T14:37:00.000-05:00

On Monday of this week, Emma Bailey, a lovely, funny, talented young woman, until recently one of my students (she graduated in 2005), died in a car accident, just outside of London, England. She was just nine days shy of her 24th birthday. Emma had gone to London to do her M.A. at Central after graduating from Queen's, but she had stayed to pursue professional work --- and, incidentally, to have a good time and to live life to the fullest. That she was successful on a large scale with this latter aspiration, at the very least, was made evident in her blog, The Emm, in which she recounted her daily adventures and thoughts in a hilarious, irreverent way. You can find one of my favourites among her many posts, "Pretty Fly for a White Girl," in which, in her typically self-deprecating manner, she recounts an audition for a hip-hop video, here. Anyone who has met Emma can imagine both how she looked at each moment of this audition, and how hard she laughed about it afterwards. This was one of Emma's great talents: the ability to laugh at herself, and in so doing, to encourage others to laugh at themselves as well. She was as passionate about life as anyone I've known; but I think she felt that it was just too rich to be taken entirely seriously, and was too full of pleasures that could be taken immediately to mope for long over what it had denied her. She would often make self-deprecating remarks about not being a thinker, but the truth is, she had a very active intellect and imagination; what she was not, was a brooder. Instead, Emma showed the rare gift of being able to turn just about every other moment of life into a sort of celebration.

At any rate, naturally I have been thinking about Emma pretty steadily ever since I heard of her death; and I was puzzled when, for no immediately apparent reason today, I suddenly had the theme from Zorba the Greek playing in my head. It's been many years since I've seen the film, although it's been only a few since I read the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, and I know that, at the time that I did (while in Greece), that catchy theme song kept popping into my head. Now, to see any connection whatsoever between the large, white-haired old man who is the title character of the novel, and young, pretty, vivacious Emma seems most unlikely, I admit. But, thinking it over, I realized that there was a connection, at least for me: the way that Zorba teaches the narrator to "seize the day," to enjoy life in the moment, was more or less the same sort of reminder that Emma represented for me. For example, Emma never seemed to let the fear of looking foolish stop her from doing anything. And Zorba says: "Every man has his folly, but the greatest folly of all ... is not to have one." He also extols, as Emma did (with poutine, with the Oilers --- although she'd clobber me for putting them in this category) the virtues of simple pleasures: "How simple a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. All that is required to feel that here and now is happiness is a simple heart." And, of course, as Emma did, he loves to dance. For Zorba, it is the best expression of vitality's defiance of the claims that death and despair make upon our hearts.

So, I suppose, it was my effort to conjure the spirit of Emma Bailey by dwelling on comforting thoughts of the way that she had enjoyed each moment of her life to the fullest, had indeed lived each day as if it would be her last, and the way that these thoughts fought with my sorrow at her loss, that brought to mind Zorba and his dance at the moment that the narrator feels, almost, that he has lost everything. I wish I had a film of Emma herself dancing; but, for me --- for today, at least --- this may be the next best thing.

Photos from That Night Follows Day

2007-05-07T22:48:00.000-05:00

Astonishingly, Tim Etchells himself found and read my last post within a day of my writing it, and he very graciously emailed me to thank me and also to send me a few of his own photos of the show, which he gave me permission to share on this blog. These will give a much better idea of what the show was actually like than my own blurry Q&A photo. The eight-year old girl I mentioned in my post is second from the left in the first photo, which shows the younger children taking a turn confronting us adults as a sort of half-chorus.

Letter from Belgium III

2007-05-06T15:38:00.000-05:00

I’m just about to leave Belgium in a few hours, but I thought I’d write, before I did, about one of the two plays I’ve seen since I last posted. Both plays were part of the Kunstenfestivaldesarts (yes, one word, in that amusing way beloved by Teutonicinfluencedculture everywhere). This particular play was That Night Follows Day, directed by Tim Etchells (he who is mainly associated with “Forced Entertainment,” in England), produced by Victoria, a Flemish-language theatre company based in Ghent. It was performed entirely in Flemish (barring a couple of somewhat startling English profanities---e.g., "motherfucker" and "fucking asshole"---but with surtitles in French and English) by seventeen children aged 8 to 14, and it was one of the most arresting and provocative pieces of theatre I have ever seen.

The set was designed to resemble a school gym, but essentially the entire play was presentational, the children speaking to us in a frank, sometimes simple, but sometimes more accusatory manner which resembled, vaguely, “Self-Accusation” by Peter Handke (which I recently read on the recommendation of my friend and colleague, Kim Renders). The play began with the seventeen children (eight boys and nine girls) moving into line (heels on a painted line) facing the audience, at first silently. They were relaxed, unaffected, natural, gazing out at the audience in a way that seemed, from the beginning, to challenge all the layers of affectation we had accrued over the years. Even the youngest, a tiny, adorable eight-year old girl, possessed an apparent comfort and self-assurance for the possession of which I know some adults would kill. Then they begin speaking, at first in chorus (these first lines are taken verbatim from the website: http://www.kfda.be), although they would eventually separate into individual voices:

You feed us. You dress us. You choose clothes for us. You bathe us. You lay down the law. You sing to us. You watch us sleep. You make us promises and sometimes hope we will not remember them. You tell us stories you hope will frighten us, but not too much. You try to tell us about the world. You explain to us what love is. You explain to us the meaning of war. You kiss us while we are asleep. You whisper when you think we can’t hear. You explain to us that night follows day.

Tim Etchells with three of the performers, answers questions. (Sorry, there were no production photos on line that I could upload, but look here: http://www.kfda.be/en/node/39)

As Tim Etchells explained at the Q&A afterwards, the assertions were meant to be, in a way, questions, which asked: “Do you do this? If so, why do you do this?” Now these first assertions were fairly innocuous. (Although, how could any of us be entirely comfortable with either “You make us promises and sometimes hope we will not remember them” or “You tell us stories you hope will frighten us, but not too much,” in which surely we conceal something even from ourselves?) But when it comes to “You tell us an edited version of the truth. You leave out information. You pick and choose what we should know,” there is more discomfort. And, after all the “You tell us ‘keep quiet.’ You tell us ‘stay still.’ You say ‘no!’” (this latter assertion building to an enraged chorus that makes one see how the rearing of children is as surely a mutilation of nature as the pruning of a cherry tree), one can’t help but twitch a bit as we move from “You say ‘the neighbours are just a bunch of bastards’” (the adorable tiny eight-year old girl) through to “You say ‘Whites are assholes. Blacks are stupid. Foreigners are lazy.’” For, as much as we might cluck and frown over these ideas ordinarily, presented as such, it is clear that that they are part of a continuum that leads inexorably from our incautious and ungenerous utterances.

Perhaps what was most refreshing in the show was the almost total absence of apparent self-service and affectation among the performers. I don’t mean to say that children are naturally devoid of such characteristics ⎯ indeed, I would say they display these qualities more nakedly than adults (perhaps because more ingenuously). But Etchells has somehow persuaded these children to simply come forward and say what they had to say as if they meant it; and the raw effect was to bestow a sense of depth and uncanny authority upon the children. In fact, the only time when there was the least hint of "falseness" was, just barely, when they were behaving obstreperously, "as children do."

But my main point is that there was no assuming of some vague “performative” quality with no purpose but to revel in “performativeness,” which I have seen destroy so many productions which dabble in “big questions.” Instead, every word had a specific meaning, and although the whole was totally extirpated from any naturalistic context, it was, nevertheless, a stark and thoughtful performance of one of the central truths of our civilization: how we pass on, independently of genes, what we already are to the generations who are to be.

Letter from Belgium II

2007-05-04T18:05:00.000-05:00

A typical canal view in Ghent

Over the last few days, I’ve been in Ghent and Antwerp, both of which I admired, though Ghent was especially winning. It seems to have all the beauty of Bruges, but to actually operate as a real city, as opposed to some degraded Disneyland-like version of its former self. For one thing, the city is bigger, and yet does not have nearly as many tourists. What it does have, being a university town, is large groups of young people, and that gives the place a strong sense of vitality. Antwerp is also an extremely interesting place, and while not quite so picturesque as Bruges or Ghent (mainly, I suppose, because canals are not so integrated into the core of Antwerp as they are in those other two), it certainly has its fair share of historical buildings. Antwerp is probably at its best in the evenings when the night-life you’d expect from one of the major fashion centres of Europe comes alive.

As I’d hoped, I was able to see the production of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, which was directed by Robert Lepage, at La Monnaie in Brussels the other night. This opera is nominally based on the series of paintings by William Hogarth, although the libretto, written in part by W.H. Auden (the libretto is a little reminiscent of some of Auden’s plays), moves quite a distance from anything Hogarth painted, and Lepage’s production moves further, leaving eighteenth century London almost completely behind.

Instead, Lepage has set the opera in 1950s Texas (the opera was written in 1951), and a photo of a house in the middle of a field that appears in the programme (itself a clever pastiche of a 1950s Life magazine), which I think is a still taken from the James Dean/Rock Hudson/Elizabeth Taylor movie Giant, is a good clue to the centre of gravity Lepage has chosen. The first scene takes place with an oil rig pumping away against a beautiful sky (the clouds moving slowly all the while), and Nick Darkness, the Mephistopheles of the tale, climbs straight out of an oil well, glistening and black. If this is the home in place of the country squire’s estate Auden offers, it makes perfect sense that where Auden moves the action into the fantastic and dissolute world of London to corrupt his hero, Tom Rakewell, Lepage moves into the desert, to the world of Hollywood films and Las Vegas. The brothel scene is shifted into a cheap Hollywood movie, Tom becoming a film star.

One of the best devices is when a small grey mass appears out of a hole in the floor of the desert and inflates to become Tom’s obligatory silver movie-star trailer. (Sorry: no photo available. By the way, this is also where we see all that is left of 18thC London in this production: Tom in a period frock coat, in make-up outside his trailer, with a powder wig on a nearby mannequin.)

In a perfect piece of reconceptualization, where Auden has Nick tempt Tom later in the libretto with a machine that turns stones into bread, Lepage has Nick use a television set, where the fraudulent transformation of uselessness into wholesomeness resonates convincingly, especially when we see a series of faux commercials with a Tom-like little boy advertising the virtues of the bread. The gambling scene takes place on what is apparently the rooftop of an abandoned casino in the desert; there is a terrific pool scene; and the madhouse scene at moments approaches the frightfulness of Brook’s Marat/Sade.

For all that, I have to admit to not being much more won over by Stravinsky’s music for this opera than I was when I listened to a recording of it a few years ago. I like some of Stravinsky’s other work very much, but it seems to me that he didn’t find a form of music which was as witty, brisk, dynamic and (if I may) as unheimlich as Auden’s inventions for the libretto. And, where the music in an opera is not everything one would have it be for the story, there is not much that a director can do. There were times when I desperately wanted to pick up the pace, because Stravinsky himself, it seemed, was not keeping pace with the story by providing a commensurate range of musical ideas and rhythms. It’s not that I think it is BAD music; it’s just that, for Stravinsky to match what Auden (and Lepage) had done, it would have to be on the level of his Rites of Spring or the Firebird Suite.

One other complaint I would make is a general one I have often made about opera: there is still a rather hidebound aesthetic, shared by both some of the performers and some of the audience members, which holds that beauty of tone is more important than drama or clarity or theatrical style. In other words, although this opera was in English, and I could understand most of the singers perfectly well, I could not understand the soprano (Laura Claycomb as Anne) at all and instead I read the French surtitles. This was seemingly because she was determined to perform the role not only as it if were some traditional melodic, lyrical part, straight out at the audience, without any sense of irony, but also because she felt that what the character was saying was irrelevant next to the question of how beautifully she sang it. And some in the audience clearly agreed, because the applause whore (I’m sorry, but there it is), was given her due. Dagmar Peckova, as Baba the Bearded Lady, had a much stronger grip on the nature of her role (and of the opera, and of Lepage’s wishes for the production), but again, could have used a little more clarity of tone and diction; but at least she was trying to be a part of a whole art form, rather than just being in it for her own exquisiteness. This is not just a problem in Brussels, of course, but is a battle that is being waged in opera everywhere. I suppose the problem with any revolutionary overthrow of the reactionary tastes is that many of those who buy subscriptions would not have it any other way. But I hope it is not unfair to question the honesty of their aesthetic preferences. The man next to me was, in the third act, fidgeting like a bored four-year-old (I was hard-pressed not to hiss at him: “sit still! It’s almost over”). But all the same, he shouted his “bravo” to the soprano (and if we’re going to get picky, it should have been “brava” anyway). Would he have done so, if, instead of congratulating himself for being a cultured man and paying 100 euros for a ticket to hear a sublime soprano notwithstanding his secret boredom, he instead expected an engaging and thrilling show and refused to inform his experience with ritual snobbery? I doubt it.

Letter from Belgium I

2007-05-01T12:54:00.000-05:00

(Caveat: although I am writing from my own laptop in the hotel lobby, the instructions on this blogger are all in Dutch, so please forgive me if I screw this up.)

I have been here in Brussels for a conference since Tuesday. (I was giving a keynote lecture called "Hopeful Monsters and Doomed Freaks: Evolutionary Overtones in Canadian and American Drama" which I gather will be published sometime early next year.) The conference actually ended on the weekend, but I am taking an extra week to stay in Brussels and make excursions abroad, so I thought I would provide a brief update.

Naturally, when I arrived last Tuesday, the first thing I did was stroll around the neighbourhood, keeping an eye out for any theatre posters. In an inauspicious beginning, these were the first two that I saw. Naturally, I was less than thrilled at the prospect of sitting through either of these.

However, I found out a bit later that the hotel where I am staying, and where the conference was being held, is actually in a suburb, Ukkle (I think of it as named after a ukele-playing uncle) to the south of the main city. So, instead, on Friday, the one evening I had free (after the Canadian ambassador's reception) last week, I went with a couple of friends in search of some theatre downtown. What we ended up going to was a sort of conceptual-installation-variety-performance which was based on the conceit that this was a force created to prevent the Flemish and the French sections of Belgium from killing one another. (Brussels is officially bilingual, although more French than Flemish; and all the other regions are separated into either Flemish or French, with a tiny German section in the East. But plenty of English seems to be spoken, too.)

The show was better, perhaps, in concept than in execution. There were lots of soldiers with guns, a tank at the entrance, then a supposed hospital bed where one lay down and listened to people speaking in French and/or Flemish about their feelings about the tensions between the two groups. In another room, there was a band that sang, in Flemish and French, songs that sounded a lot like the 80s new wave band, The Psychedelic Furs. There was a dance performance that we had missed already. And then there was the performance in the photo below, which basically consisted of one man, on the left, in a black suit, who sat at the table and read, aloud in Flemish, Franz Kafka's "Letter to My Father" while another man, in his pyjamas, loafed on the sofa, read silently the day's Frankfurt Times (I checked the date) and drank beer. That was it. No movement to speak of, except for a woman in a black dress who entered twice and uttered a line --- presumably representing Kafka's mother. The marble floor on which we were sitting started to feel very, very hard.

And that has pretty much been it as far as actual theatre has gone so far, although there was an execrable one-woman performance that was offered as part of the conference, about which the less said the better (the performance, not the conference, which was mostly quite interesting.)

Anyway, with the conference over, on Monday I walked around Brussels, including trips to Le Musees des beaux arts (interesting photography exhibition, some nice Reubens, although I'm afraid he doesn't do much for me, and about a third of the collection seemed to be on loan, and the 15th & 16th C section was closed, which meant no Bosch and no Brueghel, which was exactly what I wanted), then went on to the comic strip museum, which was edifying, at any rate; then I tried to go to a recommended restaurant with a name something like Spanokapita, for which I had to follow a road with a name something like "The Road of the 6 Jetsons" (this is the sort of world I live in) --- but it was closed when I got there, so I ate at a random place, which served this amazing piece of fish (though my guts were in turmoil that night, so...who knows what caused that). Then I did plenty more wandering and returned home with my feet badly blistered and fell asleep reading.

Then, yesterday I went to Bruges, which is very beautiful indeed in parts, but in the main areas is ridiculously crowded with tourists. It made Niagara-on-the-Lake, which I think of as the most tourist-plagued place in Canada (though that may just be because I've had to suffer through it during too many summers), look postively pastoral. This is something that I should have anticipated, especially in that today is May 1st, so it was undoubtedly a 4-day weekend for many people. I guess because we don't celebrate May Day in Canada this was not in my mind. Off the main areas, though, in the residential streets off the canals, it was very pleasant and very pretty. To my frustration, the Groeningmuseum was closed on Mondays (imagine my surprise to discover that this is not a museum dedicated to the creator of The Simpsons). So, again, no Bosch for me. I'm thinking about heading for Ghent tomorrow, so I can at least see some van Eyck. Since I have not seen nearly enough of the great Flemish painters, by way of retaliation, I am working on a joke about all the spray-painted graffiti I HAVE seen, which will contain some allusion to the great phlegmish painters. Details to follow.

Today, I spent the morning reading and writing and nursing my poor feet, and then this afternoon went in search of Art Nouveau architecture. The Horta museum, dedicated to the architect who pretty much invented the style, was closed (May 1st), but I saw some great buildings, took a few photos, and drank beer at a sidewalk cafe while eating the best chicken club sandwich in Christendom.

Given that it is May Day today, most theatres are dark, but I am hoping to go to the theatre tomorrow night. So far, however, most of what I have been able to find seems to be extremely talky, and after the experience with Kafka's "Letter to My Father" (which at least I know) I worry that my French is just not so good that it will withstand a whole evening of a static play made of nothing but talk. I'm sure I would end up with a headache, having understood about half of it. (Of course, you're thinking: "what about your Flemish?" but I don't like to show off.) What I need is something with lots of pretty pictures and music. Speaking of which, what I HAVE discovered is playing, which would be perfect, is a production of Stravinsky's opera "The Rake's Progress," and it is directed by Robert Lepage! (When I was in Milan a few years ago, I saw a production of Lepage's "Polygraph" which he had directed---odd to go half-way around the world and see the work of Canadians.) Apparently, this was playing throughout the conference, but nobody seems to have known about it. There will be some gnashing of teeth when people find out, I expect. Unfortunately, it appears to be sold out according to the La Monnaie/Theatre Royal website, but I will find out more about that tomorrow, and report on how that turned out in my next post.

Middle-Aged Brando

2007-04-19T15:53:00.000-05:00

And here he is in Last Tango in Paris. Proof, if any were needed, that his mastery of film acting was unsurpassed. I assume that this monologue was improvised, as I understand was most of his dialogue in the film.

Young Brando

2007-04-19T15:42:00.000-05:00

Evidently, based on the age slated for him (23) and the Broadway credits Brando mentions at the end, this screen test was shot in either the Summer or early Fall of 1947, before he'd been cast in A Streetcar Named Desire. He mentions playing Marchbanks, the young, delicate poet, in Bernard Shaw's Candida; and as difficult as it is to think of that when you see him playing Stanley Kowalski, you can just about imagine it when you see him at the end of this clip, gentle and boyish.

Two videos

2007-04-14T16:51:00.000-05:00

Once again, I'm a bit too busy to post anything of my own this week, but here are a couple of related videos which, in combination, are pretty amusing.

Barker Poem

2007-04-09T10:29:00.000-05:00

At the Queen's Department of Drama's "Somewhat Formal," I read a poem by the English playwright Howard Barker at the end of my speech, and a couple of people have asked me for a reference, so I thought I would reproduce it here. I hope this constitutes fair usage. I notice that Peter Hinton has also been using the poem as a means of helping to suggest the outlook inherent in his programming for the National Arts Centre English Theatre. Here's the poem:

"First Prologue to The Bite of the Night"
by Howard Barker

They brought a woman from the street
And made her sit in the stalls

By threats
By bribes
By flattery
Obliging her to share a little of her life with actors

But I don't understand art
Sit still, they said
But I don't want to see sad things
Sit still, they said

And she listened to everything
Understanding some things
But not others
Laughing rarely, and always without knowing why
Sometimes suffering disgust
Sometimes thoroughly amazed

And in the light again, said
If that's art I think it is hard work
It was beyond me
So much beyond my actual life

But something troubled her
Something gnawed her peace
And she came a second time, armoured with friends

Sit still, she said

And again, she listened to everything
This time understanding different things
This time untroubled that some things
Could not be understood
Laughing rarely but now without shame
Sometimes suffering disgust
Sometimes thoroughly amazed

And in the light again said
This is art, it is hard work
And one friend said, too hard for me
And the other said, if you will
I will come again
Because I found it hard I felt honoured

The Proffice

2007-04-07T17:39:00.000-05:00

Do other professors --- of physics and philosophy, for example --- have to put up with this sort of insolence from their students? I doubt it. Pretty funny, though --- especially if you know the people involved.

Naturally, every year, there are plots hatched of vengeful counter films in which the profs lampoon the students; but they're too smart for us. They do this just before graduating. Of course, we could always fail them and THEN humiliate them. Hm....

Osama's Bonanza

2007-03-19T12:36:00.000-05:00

So, according to Lawrence Wright in his book The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Knopf, 2006), apparently Osama bin Laden was, when a child, a great fan of the western television series, Bonanza (which originally ran from 1959 to 1973, with seemingly perpetual reruns). Let us imagine young Osama eagerly tuning in:

Now, this is a rather striking image in itself. But let me explain why I consider it not merely bizarre, but significant. I am convinced that no one, not the most heinous monster, is content to think ill of himself (and I'm going to stick with a "he" here for this particular argument). Even if “no man is a hero to his valet,” every man is a hero in the story he tells of his life within his own imagination, the notion of the gleeful villain being purely an invention of melodrama. That being the case, the sources of a man’s self-understanding --- the myths and stories chosen as favourites, the sources in which the very nature of "heroism" are defined --- are crucial to understanding his nature. So, how exactly did Osama bin Laden, as a boy, feel about Bonanza? How did he position himself in the stories?

Well, pondering the Ponderosa through Osama's eyes, thoughts of Lorne Greene as Ben Cartwright suddenly jogged my memory of a brief account of Osama bin Laden’s father that I had read in a biography of the son on the Frontline website some time ago.

Lorne Greene, Queen's University alumnus and Ben "Pa" Cartwright on Bonanza.

To make the point clear for those who have never seen Bonanza, I’ll start with a description of Ben Cartwright from a website devoted to the show:

"Ben Cartwright, a man whose quiet strength and perseverance has always been a steadfast and stabilizing influence on his sons.
A man who values family and moral justice . . . A man who stands fast when faced with adversity . . . A man who never allowed the wealth that he had accumulated to overshadow his beliefs.
He is a man who is no stranger to tragedy, a man who became a widower three times. After each of these devastating losses, the love he felt for his sons helped him overcome his pain and continue building his life’s dream, the Ponderosa, the largest ranch in the Nevada Territory.
Ben Cartwright never forgot his simple beginnings. A generous man, he has sheltered and helped many people, rich or poor, from every walk of life. He reaches out to his neighbors, never failing to offer them support in times of trouble. A tolerant man, who never judges another, who looks at a person for what they are on the inside, not by what they appear to be on the outside.
A righteous man, he firmly instilled his strong faith and unwavering convictions in his four sons. But he was also a gentle, loving father who knows instinctively how to give each one the guidance they need, to console in just the right way, a man who understands each son, who loves and  accepts them no matter what circumstances they face.
Ben Cartwright, a man respected and admired by all who know him. He is the bonding force of the Ponderosa, whose deep voice and wisdom touches everyone." (Source)

And now a description of Osama bin Laden’s father, from a biography of Osama written by a friend of his, and reproduced on the Frontline website :

"His father Mohammed Awad bin Laden came to the kingdom [of Saudi Arabia] from Hadramout (South Yemen) sometime around 1930. The father started his life as a very poor laborer (porter in Jeddah port), to end up as owner of the biggest construction company in the kingdom…
…[Awad] bin Laden was so supportive to King Faisal [of Saudi Arabia] that he literally paid the civil servants' wages of the whole kingdom for six months....
The father was fairly devoted Moslem, very humble and generous. He was so proud of the bag he used when he was a porter that he kept it as a trophy in the main reception room in his palace. The father used to insist on his sons to go and manage some projects themselves.
The father had very dominating personality. He insisted to keep all his children in one premises. He had a tough discipline and observed all the children with strict religious and social code. He maintained a special daily program and obliged his children to follow. At the same time the father was entertaining with trips to the sea and desert. He dealt with his children as big men and demanded them to show confidence at young age. He was very keen not to show any difference in the treatment of his children." (Source)

The place in which Mr. Greene is currently rolling as I write this.

So, what lessons did young Osama take in at his father's/Ben Cartwright's knee? And which of the three sons did he most identify with: Adam, Hoss or Little Joe? Well, my guess is that it was not Adam, if only because Adam was gone from the series by 1962. But what part of the mythology embodied by Bonanza left the series along with Adam's departure? Well, consider this episode that someone has helpfully edited down (sometimes it seems you can find absolutely ANYTHING on YouTube) in which the venerable Ben Cartwright is bent on "taking the law into his own hands," and Adam, the rational liberal, attempts to reason with him. Try substituting the Islamic Holy Land for the Ponderosa ranch in your mind, and see how it plays:

But, it seems to me that the pseudo-liberal resolution arrived at in this episode was not exactly characteristic of Bonanza, and that the more frequent moral would be something along the lines of what Kenny Rogers declared in "The Coward of the County": "sometimes you've got to fight to be a man." And, indeed, it seems that after a time there was not quite room enough in Bonanza for the point of view represented by Adam, for the character lasted only three seasons, Pernell Roberts leaving the series in 1962 because of his disagreements with the writers. (To get a sense of what these disagreements were, it is important to note that Roberts was something of a liberal activist in real life, politically known for publicly embarrassing NBC about their lazy habit of hiring caucasian actors to play natives.) But it almost seems as though they could not allow Roberts to go without teaching his character a hard lesson in one of his last episodes --- one of the more famous from the series, number 94, “The Crucible." I’ve combined two different website sources to create this synopsis:

“After completing a grueling cattle drive, Adam Cartwright takes a trip into the wilderness for some peace and quiet, Instead, he is robbed and stripped of his weapons and clothing by a pair of vicious outlaws. Left to die in the middle of nowhere, Adam attempts to make the grueling journey to Signal Rock on foot. Along the way, he meets prospector Peter Kane (Lee Marvin), offering to work Pete's claim in exchange for the man's mule. Alas, the mentally unbalanced prospector turns out to have an altogether different agenda in mind. He holds Adam prisoner and tortures him to prove his theory that anyone could be driven to kill, even a man as rational as Adam.” (Source 1 & 2)

In subsequent seasons, then (those which appeared after Osama had turned five, in 1962), Ben Cartwright represented absolutely the most authoritative view on show: wise and unopposed in his no-nonsense idea of hard-nosed, stand-alone justice --- the Texan ideal (although, yes, the Ponderosa is supposed to be in Nevada). So, am I suggesting that Osama bin Laden became a terrorist because Pernell Roberts left Bonanza? Well, I don't think I'd like to go that far. But I will say that all of this brings me to consider that, in terms of personal mythology, there is perhaps very little separating the ideas of Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush except the accident of geography: for each seems determined to consider the world his own personal Ponderosa.

The Other Blanche

2007-03-16T11:47:00.000-05:00

For years now, I have been deeply curious about what Jessica Tandy might have been like as Blanche when A Streetcar Named Desire first played on Broadway. Tandy was the only one of the major players from the Broadway production, directed by Elia Kazan, who did not recreate her role for the film, also directed by Kazan. Instead, the role went to Vivien Leigh, who had played the role in London under the direction of her husband, Laurence Olivier. Leigh was a much bigger star than Tandy, of course, having won an Oscar for her performance in Gone With The Wind; and in the end she won another Oscar for her performance as Blanche, which is certainly memorable, although to some viewers nowadays --- to some of my students, at any rate --- it seems just a little too mannered. Kazan confessed later on that he actually preferred Tandy in the role because she was subtler. So did Karl Malden, who played Mitch; although he also emphasized that when he discussed this question with Marlon Brando, Brando had said he preferred Leigh, because she had brought a sexual energy to the role that Tandy had lacked.

I had always assumed that there was no objective evidence left for us to make a comparison, but the other day (while in fact looking to see if there was any video of the country-rock band, Tandy --- evidently not yet), I came across this clip on YouTube of Jessica Tandy recreating a bit of her performance in a monologue that was filmed for a television special on Tennessee Williams. Of course, this was probably filmed almost three decades after the original production: Tandy is grey-haired and a very different woman, and there is no Marlon Brando or Kim Hunter for her to play off. But still, it's interesting, and gives some clue to how the production must have differed from the film. Whereas Vivien Leigh gave the impression of being a sort of panicked song bird battering against the window of a room, struggling to escape from Stanley and everything he represented, Jessica Tandy seems more like a dignified, beautiful creature speaking about the instrument of its imminent extinction. She also seems more formidable than Leigh --- her struggle with Stanley must have seemed more like an even match, which would probably strengthen the play quite a bit. But, one can also see Brando's point about the sexuality: while it's easy to see this Blanche as a schoolteacher, it's a little more difficult to imagine her seducing a school boy. She seems too much in control of herself for anything quite so impulsive.

On a side note, it's also interesting to hear Tennessee Williams' voice at the beginning of the clip. It's easy to forget sometimes, just seeing him frozen in photos (like that great Yosef Karsh portrait above), that he was almost as broad a character in his own way as was Truman Capote (e.g., "collEEsion cohwrse"). And on a side note to my side note, I am very eager to see what Daniel MacIvor does with Williams in his new play, His Greatness, which is about the last year in Williams's life, and a new draft of which Daniel finished just the other day, according to his blog (see the bottom of this page).

Anyway, here's the Jessica Tandy clip:

Harper's Newspeak and its Enforcers

2007-03-14T17:52:00.000-05:00

I think, from here on in, I am going to allow my blogs to drift as far away from theatre as my mind happens to be at any given moment. And in this case, I have as my topic another passion, my hatred of bullies.

The bully in this case is one Dr. Irwin Itzkovitch, Assistant Deputy Minister, Earth Sciences Sector, Natural Resources Canada (who has very thoughtfully posted his photo and email on the government website). To be sure, he was carrying out the wishes of his odious master, Stephen Harper --- but rather more zealously than conscionably, as you shall see. A couple of months ago, Harper's Magazine (a favourite of mine) published some of Itzkovitch's email correspondence, and while it made me laugh, and then sneer, eventually it made me burn with indignation. If there is one thing that I hate even more than a simple bully, it is one who is putatively acting in my name, as a citizen of Canada. I began to think that, in spirit, though of course not degree, Itzkovitch's acts are of a piece with the sort of attitude popularly typified by Adolph Eichmann: unquestioning, boot-licking obedience to one's masters and ruthless intolerance towards underlings. And once I'd thought that, I didn't really feel comfortable just letting this go with a sneer anymore. So I wrote to him. Anyway, for your reading pleasure and moral indignation, I offer to you first the original correspondence as it appeared in Harper's, then my email to Itzkovitch.

From a September email exchange between representatives of Natural Resources Canada and Andrew Okulitch, a scientist working at the Geological Survey of Canada in an emeritus capacity. Irwin Itzkovitch is an assistant deputy minister under Minister of Natural Resources Gary Lunn. Vanessa Nelson is an executive adviser. Okulitch was fired but reappointed two weeks later. The Conservative Party won control of Canada's government in January, after twelve years of Liberal rule. Originally from Harper's Magazine, December 2006:

FROM: VANESSA NELSON As per the Minister's Office, effective immediately, the words "Canada's New Government" are to be used instead of "the Government of Canada" in all departmental correspondence. Please note that the initial letters of all three words are capitalized. Thank you for your cooperation.

FROM: ANDREW OKULITCH Why do newly elected officials think everything begins with them taking office? They are merely stewards for as long as the public allows. They are the Government of Canada. Nothing more. I shall use "Geological Survey of Canada" on my departmental correspondence to avoid any connection with "New Government." The GSC, steward to Canada's earth resources for 164 years, is an institution worthy of my loyalty, as opposed to idiotic buzzwords coined by political hacks.

FROM: IRWIN ITZKOVITCH Given your strong though misdirected views of the role and authority of the Government as elected by the people, and your duty to reflect their decisions, I accept that you are immediately removing yourself from the Emeritus Program. I wish you every success in your future.

FROM: ANDREW OKULITCH Although your knee-jerk response seems typical of Ottawa "mentality" these days, to give you the benefit of the doubt, it may have been mandated by our nervous minister. Of course, it is not a particularly rational decision, and perhaps you might reflect upon it. We of the GSC are used to taking the long view. Ministers come and go, but my talents will always remain available to the people of Canada.

FROM: IRWIN ITZKOVITCH This is not a knee-jerk reaction nor was it dictated by anyone. My decision stands and I await confirmation that it has been executed by the responsible GSC management.

FROM: ANDREW OKULITCH I have just received the clarification of the usage policy for the term New Government, stating that the new wording is required only in documents prepared for or on behalf of Minister Lunn. This limited usage is consistent and appropriate. We would appear to have been victims of an unfortunate misunderstanding. My intransigence about the term was in protest about its misapplication, not a call for civil disobedience. I do understand the need to obey ministerial directives once I am given them clearly. If I can help calm the waters by issuing my own clarification and apology, I would be glad to do so.

FROM: IRWIN ITZKOVITCH Your reaction was and continues to be unacceptable for anyone associated with Public Service. My decision stands. As of yesterday you are no longer an emeritus scientist.

FROM: ANDREW OKULITCH I concede that my memo was intemperate and deserving of a reprimand. It was, however, prompted by misinformation sent out by your staff. I don't expect that anything I might say now will change your mind, so I'll conclude with a few facts you will now have to live with. I'll come out of this a champion of common sense (except when it comes to sending memos), someone who tried to defuse a situation with humor and made an effort to restore calm. You'll come out as an intemperate, irrational manager who lacks the strength of character to reverse a hasty decision. Do you really want to be remembered as the only assistant deputy minister who sacked an emeritus scientist over such trivia? It is never too late to repair an unfortunate situation if everyone approaches it with an open mind and good intentions.

To: Irwin.Itzkovitch@nrcan-rncan.gc.ca
From: Craig Walker
Subject: Correspondence

Dr. Itzkovitch,

Because I have been busy with other things, I have only just read your correpsondence with Andrew Okulitch published a couple of months ago in Harper's Magazine.

I imagine your emails must look very different, reading them as reproduced in an international publication rather than reading them upon your computer screen from the seat of power. Now it is there for all to see that in one swoop you managed to act as both a bullying tyrant and a craven toady. Shame on you. If you do not have the bare common sense to be at least moderate in your implementation of a government policy that any objective judgement would have to admit was, at best, rather vulgarly self-serving, you have no business holding any leadership role. I suggest that you resign before you disgrace yourself any futher.

Sincerely,
Craig Walker
Professor of Drama,
Queen's University

Second Person, Singular

2007-03-11T12:05:00.000-05:00

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this…

Or, at least, you would not ordinarily volunteer for anything that resembled the excruciating predicament of audience involvement. But here you are all the same. Excited. Nervous. Curious. That pretty dark-haired, dark-eyed girl speaks to you by name and asks if you have remembered to bring your pass. You hand over the little folder for her to check. It has a title, Everyman, and has the name of a theatre company, Single Thread, but apart from that, it looks less like a theatre ticket than a passport (to “the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns”?). Then she takes your coat and hat and gloves and locks them away in a chest. (A coffin for your clothes?) She chats with you in a friendly way, but she knows that you’ve come here to die. So, she’d like to make you comfortable, but there’s only so much, really, that she can do.

She takes you downstairs into the basement of the church, where there is a single theatre seat that faces a closed door, and she leaves you there, alone. Then the sounds begin that will continue intermittently throughout the next (last) hour of your life: strange music, fragments of speech, mechanical noises --- odd, peripheral sounds, like rats scuttling in the walls of your mind, dragging fragments of the daylight world behind them like long vaguely nauseating tails.

Then a glow appears behind the door and muffled voices are heard, and still you wait, wondering whether you should open it or not. But at last you do. And it has begun.

There, in a white room, is the girl from the lobby. And you feel relieved to see her in this new world at first, like Alice does in seeing the White Rabbit she has followed. And the room is full of other people, some of whom you know from the real world, but they seem to be a little out of their senses, acting like profoundly autistic people, except for a gaunt and pale figure in a dark suit in one corner, and an attractive but intimidating woman in another who is reading. And, in another corner there is a little puppet theatre, where, after a moment, a rather silly finger puppet show begins, enacting the opening scene from the medieval morality play, Everyman, in the vaguely modernized text by John Gassner. It’s amusing but trivial, and could become tiresome. But, when the woman slams the book shut, the tone in the room becomes much more intense. Because it is around that time that they start speaking to you. Death is coming after you. And you are forced to move from room to room, from Fellowship’s basement apartment, to the middle class suburban dining room of your Cousin and Kindred, to the somewhat claustrophobic and almost disgusting room of Goods, stuffed full of appliances and toys, like the squalor of the student residence room of an overindulged grown child.

But still, through all this, you are thinking about what is being done. About how Liam Karry, the director, has made his choices. About how each of the actors has played impressively, with commitment. About how the experience is a little like death itself, in that we know in a general way what is in store for us, but really nothing about the specifics. And you are thinking, recurringly, about how self-conscious you are of the experiment, much as you were when you read Jay McInerney’s novel Bright Lights, Big City, which was written entirely in the second person singular (opening with the line "You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this...")

But then, suddenly you are pushed through a door and you are left in complete and utter darkness. And there is no sound at all for a moment. Nothing. And for a moment too, you have no idea where to go. Because of the maze of rooms you’ve been through already, you really would have no idea how to make your way backwards through the darkness, even if the door had not closed behind you. So you grope about yourself and realize that you are in a hallway. Then, out of the darkness ahead of you, you hear someone crying out in pain, calling for your help, quietly at first and then more loudly and urgently.

And so, having no other choice, you make your may forward, gropingly, until you come to the room where Good Deeds lies, on the ground, and with a little horror you recognize that he is on a crucifix. And, although this again makes you think about (and admire) the director’s choices, you suddenly also realize that, in that dark hallway, when what you had to do and what Everyman had to do were one and the same thing, the nature of your involvement changed. You lost your formerly inescapable sense of detached irony for a moment, and you were in the midst, playing along in earnest. And this will be your guide for how to approach the rest of the journey. Good Deeds and Knowledge will be of great help in this, because the actors play their roles with a degree of earnestness that makes you ashamed of your petty irony. And when you encounter Confession, you have been emotionally moved enough that you find yourself solemnly wishing that you knew how to utter contrition in a manner commensurate with the moment --- that, in effect, your upbringing was not Protestant. So that, by the time you are taken down a long, dark, dank tunnel, and left in your grave to lie and listen to the faint, remote ticking and rattling of a world beyond your darkness, you have, indeed, thought upon your own mortality.

And when, at last, the light literally at the end of the tunnel begins to glow, and you follow it to the room in which you recover your clothes and then climb the stairs through the cellar door ("the most beautiful phrase in the language") up into the snowy night, and the cold fresh air strikes your face as you see your breath appear in the moonlight, you are overwhelmed by the exhilarating feeling of just how good it is to be alive.

I lifted a couple of production photos from Alex Dault's page on Facebook. So sue me. The one at the top is of Annie Briggs as Confession. If you are going to get down on your knees and make yourself abject before a woman, you really do want her to be someone like Annie Briggs. In the photo immediately above are Adam Wray and Fernanda Fukamati as Kindred and Cousin. They were wearing clothes when I went through, so I can only surmise that they have exaggerated ideas of the degree of formality my dignified presence requires.

NOTE:
I apologize for how long it has taken to make this posting. In fact, I would have made it a month ago, immediately after I saw the show, but I was sworn to divulge nothing about the show to anyone for as long as it was still running (36 performances for 36 individual audience members). But my imagination can be stubborn, and because it was this posting it wanted to make, it refused to offer up any alternatives. And then, when the run of the show was over, I had so many obligations to fulfill that this had to go on a back burner. But I intend to allow much less time to elapse before I post again.

Invidious Casting

2007-02-04T13:07:00.001-05:00

Can the casting of roles be invidious? At first glance, it appears that, race apart, the notion of offensively unfair discrimination cannot, perhaps must not, apply to casting. (I leave aside the question of race, which, it seems to me, is at least in our age mainly irrelevant to casting, except where the script explicitly makes it of absolutely crucial relevance. Native Son, for example, would be difficult for me to stage to my satisfaction with a white actor playing Bigger Thomas; but on the other hand, I’ve directed Daniel David Moses’s Brebeuf’s Ghost, which is about the impact of White European culture upon Aboriginal American culture, with a more or less all white cast, no aboriginal actors being available, because I think that the play is really more about the collision of ideas than race, per se.) To take some obvious examples, if a script requires a character to be beautiful, it is difficult to make do with someone homely; if references are made to a character’s anorexia, it would confusing to cast an obese actor; and if the character is a domineering alpha male in the Coriolanus mould, the audience might rightly complain if, oh, say, Wallace Shawn were cast. Unless, of course, the production is making a point of the very unsuitability of the characters for the roles in which the characters are cast---unless, that is, the casting is purposefully ironic. But more of that in a moment.

Either way, seen in this light, it would appear that theatre is one of the few places in which it is still permitted and even necessary to make the various sorts of value judgements which are, with very good reason, ordinarily regarded as invidious and therefore unacceptable in civil society. Choosing secretaries based in part on their looks is morally offensive; choosing Cleopatras is not. Indeed, in the theatre many kinds of stark personal assessments are essential. Consider the measurements that are taken in wardrobe: waistlines and inseams are set forth as cold, hard facts. Furthermore, in a conversation between a director and a costume designer about appropriate costumes, to ignore the fact that a particular actor is, say, slope-shouldered or thick in the waist, or whatever, on the grounds that to speak of it would be impolite, would be to open the door to various inappropriate choices which could result in the demoralization and even humiliation of the actor. It is awful enough in ordinary life to feel that one is playing a role for which one is unequipped (think of the dyslexic child called to read aloud, the innumerate student called to the chalkboard in math class, the klutz forced to bat in gym class); it is still more awful on the stage, before an audience that feels very much at its ease making judgements about the actor's person while it complacently sits in the darkness, itself more or less unobserved and safe from any reciprocal judgements.

As for personal feelings, it is patronizing to assume that the facts of an actor’s physical being must be left unmentioned before her or him. The body is the medium through which the actor works, and it must be known for what it is as thoroughly and truly as the carpenter knows a hammer. That is to say, the fat actor knows that fatness will be an aspect of any character in which he or she is cast, and so on; not to know so is to be not merely self-deluded but also a bad actor.

Moreover, because, at least in theory, theatre takes the entire field of human relations as its subject, and because, at its base, it is an attempt to expose what is by the light of what might be, it is essential that it not be limited by mere etiquette from making its meanings. In short, theatre has far more important concerns than the worry about whether it is on its best manners.

Maude Mitchell as Nora and Ricardo Gil as Dr. Rank in Mabou Mines' DollHouse.

That, at least, is the argument that I would make ordinarily. So why, then, was I bothered by the use of dwarfs (the word is not, by the way, dwarves: Tolkien must answer for that) in the Mabou Mines adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll House --- or Mabou Mines DollHouse as they prefer to call it --- currently playing in Toronto at Harbourfront Centre? (It ends today, so if you are about to see it this afternoon, read this later.) For those who have not heard, let me explain that in this production, all the male characters are played by dwarfs; the females are mostly played by unusually tall women. The point of all this is hardly obscure, and indeed is based on an ideological perspective that, in the last thirty or so years has become so utterly commonplace and unexceptionable as to be regarded as a simple truism: the patriarchy is a construction of figuratively little (i.e., weak) men to protect themselves against figuratively large (i.e., powerful) women. Fair enough. And yet the way the male dwarfs were used in the production bothered me, because clearly, they were meant to be inherently risible in their efforts to assert their authority. (I exclude Hannah Kritzeck, the young female dwarf who played Emmy Helmer, because she has clearly been cast because, while she looks age three, she brings to her role all the skill of a clever and talented ten-year old, which is apparently her real age.) Now, this is something that I have only heard one other person confess an unease about, and indeed, the dwarf actors themselves are presumably comfortable with the fact (it is patronizing to presume them to be unwittingly exploited), so it might be that mine is a rare, and perhaps even misplaced, concern. But, for all that, it is mine, and I am interested in delving into the roots of it.

I should perhaps begin by confessing that A Doll House is probably my least favourite of all of Ibsen’s plays (although there are at least a couple of his very early verse plays that I have not read). About a year ago, I saw Peter Hinton’s production of the play at the Saidye Bronfman Centre in Montreal, and left feeling that if such a strong production could not teach me to love the play, then nothing ever would. But I would say that if I am unenthusiastic about the play, the evidence suggests that Lee Breuer, who directed the Mabou Mines production, hates it outright. Both Ibsen’s society and Ibsen himself appear to have been targeted for satire here, for the entire play is presented as a grotesque parody. Not only are its melodramatic aspects underscored --- literally so, for as with real melodrama, the action is accompanied by continuous overwrought music --- every exchange, every character, every emotion, every idea, and every gesture is deliberately over-stated, so that the ironic intent of the exaggeration is unmistakable.

Some people---some very intelligent, insightful friends of mine, I might add---have said that the production pays off one’s patience in its final moments; but to me it was more of the same. If Breuer’s method of over-statement was the equivalent of driving at 80 kilometres an hour in a 50 zone, in the last twenty minutes, he accelerated to 120, but it was still the same method: the underscored melodrama became opera, the characters were multiplied by dozens of puppets, Nora not only became “her real self” but literally naked and even bald. The final image is of Nick Novicki, the actor who plays Torvald, in a sheet which has served as a toga but now resembles a diaper, wandering through the auditorium, bleating out Nora's name in a babyish manner: the infantile nature of the patriarchy has been mercilessly exposed.

Well, of course, all of this was not quite like anything I had ever seen before. I thought it bold, sensational, spectacular and extraordinary.

But it also seemed to me simplistic, crass, contemptuous and sophomoric.

And I found myself wearied and vaguely nauseated ---in the way one is after too much dessert--- by the production's incessant, deliberate falsity. This seemed to be a species of irony intended for those with no appetite for subtlety. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the production seemed to me banal --- in the sense of the word that Hannah Arendt meant when she suggested the evil of men like Eichmann was banal --- not that what was done was not extraordinary or astonishing, but that it seemed empty of any real depth of thought or transcendent intention.

So, having said all that, the question arises: would I have felt more comfortable about the casting of dwarfs in a production which, on the whole, I had liked better? Well, yes, probably; but that would be a production which I regarded as a good deal more thoughtful than this one, and there’s the rub. I can’t imagine a truly thoughtful production that would attempt to elicit our derision for certain characters by having them played by people who suffered from deformities. There was indeed, at least one funny moment to do with their stature: when Nick Novicki as Torvald asked haughtily “Are you saying I’m small?” Moments in which we see a preposterous lack of self-knowledge are usually rather funny. But that still leaves me with my discomfort that these characters were only ever presented to us as ridiculous. If the idea is that any notion that the men who played these roles might have dignity and authority is inherently preposterous because they are so small, then it is an idea that I reject, of course. And yet the production made it difficult to reach any other conclusion except this. Again and again, it seemed to say: "Look at the dwarfs try to be important! Ha ha ha!"

And that, I suppose, I consider an example of invidious casting.

The Fabulous Invalid and Robust Alternatives

2007-01-14T22:36:00.001-05:00

It's been well over a week since I last posted; those pesky classes have been keeping me busy, believe it or not (we just finished the first week back in classes at Queen's University). Anyway, by way of making amends, here're a few observations I discussed at some length in my first class of the new year.

Naturally, the theatre changed a great deal over the last century, and it can be interesting to look at some of the specific ways in which this change has occurred and to consider the reasons for and implications of the changes. Consider the example of Broadway, "the fabulous invalid":

In the 1927-28 season, there were 264 new productions that opened on Broadway.
In 1930-31, only four years later, it was down to 187 new productions.
By 1940-41, it was down to 60 new productions.
In 1967-68, it had not dropped much further, for there were 58 new productions.
But by 1989-90, there were only 35 new productions.

Now, this may look like a straightforward if disheartening tale of decline. But we need to look further past those simple numbers and think about the explanations. We can interpret some of those numbers fairly plausibly by saying, for example, that in 1927 the “Talkies” had come along and in 1929 the Great Depression, and that these had taken a bite out of the audiences. In the 1930’s when the Great Depression was in full swing, radio had become the central medium. Yet, by that token, it seems odd that after television took off in the 1950s, Broadway should still be doing so well near the end of the 1960s. To be sure, one might answer that this was also a time of great prosperity, and increasing leisure time and tourism, but still, the subsequent decline through the 1970s then becomes a little confusing at first glance.

But one Broadway show is not exactly the same as another, and it's interesting to see what happens to the breakdown of the genres of Broadway entertainment. Those 58 new shows of 1967-68 comprised 14 musicals and 44 non-musicals. But those 35 new shows of 1989-90 comprised 12 musicals (of which 6 were revivals) and 21 non-musicals (plus 2 “special attractions” which fit into neither category). So while the number of musicals was relatively undiminished at that point, the non-musical shows were still in decline. But a glance at the theatre listings of last week's Sunday Times (7 January 2007) showed that there were 35 shows currently playing on Broadway (four of the thirty-nine theatres were dark while they were in turn-over). Of these, 27 were musicals (a full 23 of which were either revivals or at least two seasons old), and only 8 were non-musicals (4 of which were revivals). Now that is a very significant change in the character of Broadway.

Now, one of the related stories to this transformation of Broadway lies in the demographic shift which has occurred in the audiences---whether this is cause or effect is, I am sure, impossible to say for sure. It was reported in the New York Times last month (and thanks to Michael Murphy for pointing this out to me) that "The latest demographic report from the League of American Theaters and Producers, the marketing umbrella agency for Broadway, shows that during the 2005-6 season, 19 percent of Broadway theatergoers were from New York City, down from 31 percent in 1980-81" ("The Great White-Bread Way," NYT, 10 Dec 2006). So Broadway has really become mainly a tourist attraction. It is no longer "New Yorkers' theatre" to which others visit. It is now a theatre principally for others.

Meanwhile, the traditional (and by traditional, I am thinking back as far as Classical Greece) use of theatre as a unifying and defining event for a specific community has been displaced from Broadway to the outlying regions of North America. Consider the example of Canada, where, prior to that watershed 1967-68 Broadway season, we had a handful of really important theatres: those that had been established in the 1950’s, including the Stratford Festival and Theatre du nouveau monde; and a few others that had been added in the 1960’s, including Shaw Festival, Manitoba Theatre Centre, Vancouver Playhouse and so on. But none of these produced much Canadian drama to speak of. The theatre in this country was, largely, a foreign theatre.

But 1967-68 was a watershed season in Canada for other reasons, for it closed off the national centennial celebrations and left the country with a strong interest in nationalism to fuel theatrical aspirations. And it was in the years following, we saw founded in Canada an immense number of important theatres which made a huge contribution to the national drama, such as: Confederation Arts Centre, National Arts Centre, Great Canadian Theatre Company, St Lawrence Centre, Theatre Passe Muraille, Factory Theatre, Tarragon Theatre, Toronto Free Theatre, Blyth Festival, Thousand Islands Playhouse, Alberta Theatre Projects, Prairie Theatre Exchange, Globe Theatre, Theatre Calgary, Persephone Theatre, Belfry Theatre, and so on.

And it is here, in these smaller regional theatres---not just in Canada, but in the United States too, of course; though that is somewhat outside my expertise---that the traditional functions of theatre are being upheld.

I've got more thoughts about this, but no more spare time to explore them at the moment, so I'll have to leave off there.

Tractatus Logico-Westernicus

2007-01-03T20:05:00.000-05:00

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Talk low, talk slow, and don’t talk too much.” — John Wayne

Apparently, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was a great fan of movie westerns. Which pleases me, because I am a fan of both. I imagine that what appealed to Wittgenstein in the western was partly the economy of the sparse dialogue, which is so characteristic of the genre and is roughly parallel to the terseness of Wittgenstein’s own style; and perhaps it was partly too the way in which metaphysical questions are, in the best westerns, evoked, engaged and explored by the action and the cinematography without any attempt to settle them in an explicit verbal way. To be sure, there are trite westerns, just as there is pretentious philosophy, but the best of each expand our horizons, help us to take a broad perspective.

As a side note, I don’t know how well it is known, even now, that Ludwig Wittgenstein and Adolph Hitler were classmates when they were about twelve to fourteen years old, at the Realschule in Linz, Austria.

It’s astonishing to think of; and one wonders if Hitler’s irrational hatred of Jews took some root in what must have been the depressing evidence of his own mediocrity when he found himself sharing a classroom with young Ludwig. In any case, Wittgenstein is presumably the boy alluded to in Mein Kampf: “In high school I did learn to know a Jewish boy, whom we all treated cautiously, only because various experiences had taught us to doubt his reliability.”

Now Hitler, there was someone who talked loud, talked fast and talked far, far too much.

Historical Questions for New Year's Eve

2006-12-31T15:31:00.000-05:00

I was out having drinks with my friend Danyal last night, and I was telling her about how earlier this week a news item had declared that a researcher, after combing through the human bones and litter in the basement of an abandoned Tuscan church and then conducting DNA and chemical tests, had conclusively proven that Francesco Medici (and almost certainly his wife too) died of poisoning in the late 16th century---likely at the hands of his brother, Cardinal Fernando. Thus, a more-than-four-centuries-old rumour was confirmed. This led us into a sort of (admittedly somewhat nerdy) parlour game for while in which we thought of different things we would like to find out from history. I was thinking about this again today, and I occurred to me that, given that New Year's Eve is a time for looking back, I should record some of these for your amusement, gentle reader:

What was said in the fifteen-minute conversation between Charlotte Corday and Jean-Paul Marat between the time she was left alone with him while he sat in his bathtub (v. the famous David painting) and when she actually stabbed him to death?

What was the acting of Richard Burbage, David Garrick, Sarah Siddons, Edmund Kean and others really like?

Did Jane Austen really talk in the way that she wrote?

What were Jesus, Buddha and Mohammed like, as public speakers? Is it blasphemous to wonder if they used notes?

What did Salome's dance look like?

Why, given that Hannibal, the legendary Carthaginian general, spent about sixteen years in Italy with his army, ravaging the country, did he never in all that time build siege equipment so that he could take the city of Rome?

How sexy really was Cleopatra? If the artists who portrayed her were competent and she had to make up for a none-too-prepossessing appearance, how exactly did she do that? A demonstration, please.

Did Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid really die in Bolivia, or did they make it back to the USA?

If we can only see one of all the many lost Greek tragedies, can we please just see the most amazing of them? Is the very best of the Greek tragedies actually one of the extant group?

Was Shakespeare bisexual? Was he Catholic or Protestant?

Who were the dark lady and the fair young man of the sonnets?

What the hell was the book publisher Warburton's cook thinking when she used all those single copies of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays to line her pie pans?

What really did happen to Ambrose Small, the Canadian multi-millionaire owner of the Grand Theatres chain, who one day in Toronto in 1919 simply disappeared off the street in the block or two between his bank (where he had just deposited a check for $1 million) and his office? For that matter, what happened to Ambrose Bierce, the author of "An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge" who disappeared in Mexico just a few years earlier? Was someone, after all, just collecting Ambroses?

Moose Marsh

2006-12-27T21:47:00.000-05:00

Let’s face it: most of the classic ballet stories seem pretty dumb when you remove all the dancing and just look at the little synopsis they give you in the programme. And, of course, all those old ballets are so terribly Eurocentric, built on corny European folk-tales (Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty), drawing on European stereotypes (beautiful princesses and handsome princes), and featuring Europeanish fauna (swans, fauns and, uh...firebirds?). This past summer, driving along highway two, and with nothing better to occupy my mind, I asked myself: why not early Canadian ballets? Ones with dumb Canadian stories, embarrassing Canadian stereotypes and exclusively Canadian (or, at least North American), fauna? Where, in heaven’s name, were they? Determined to rectify this nationally mortifying cultural lacuna, I set to work, and so it is my pleasure to offer you the synopsis of Moose Marsh:

Act I: The Garrison

Pokinfunatus, a Huron maiden who works in the tavern and household of the sorcerer, Comte Frontenac, is admired for her startling resemblance to a patronizing racial stereotype by all the voyageurs who pass through the garrison on their way upstream; but she is especially beloved by Ti-jean, a French-Canadian trapper who is no slouch in the offensive stereotype department himself, and who supplies venison to the Comte’s kitchen, where it is prepared for the hungry and loutish voyageurs who regularly stop at the Frontenac garrison. Comte Frontenac is engaged to an aristocratic woman named Showerilde (legal disclaimer: any resemblance to Bathilde, from the ballet Giselle, is purely coincidental) but has become bored with her. Having spied Pokinfunatus as she brings large platters of meat from the kitchen, he uses his black magic to disguise himself as one of the voyageurs, and in this guise demands that she dance for the voyageur team. As the tom-toms play an appalling pastiche of “aboriginal music,” she does so, the Comte and the voyageurs shouting their boorish encouragement while Ti-jean looks on anxiously. Pleased with Pokinfunatus’s performance, Comte Frontenac declares that he will marry her. Pokinfunatus raises a pretty eyebrow at this and is about to retort, when suddenly she is interrupted by Ti-jean, who declares the Comte to be a fraud who is already engaged to Showerilde. Pokinfunatus immediately rebuffs the Comte with a withering arm-crossing and tongue-clucking. The red-faced Comte vows vengeance upon them both and when Pokinfunatus snorts contemptuously, saying “talk to the ‘how sign’”, she is suddenly made to vanish in a puff of smoke. Enraged, Ti-jean attempts to attack the Comte, but he is restrained by the other voyageurs who, heavily inebriated and to be frank, somewhat slow on the uptake at the best of times, still believe the Comte to be one of their own. Ti-jean, in hopes of both finding Pokinfunatus and conclusively exposing the Comte’s imposture to the other voyageurs, puts on a tuque and a preposterous beard and as the voyageurs depart he joins the group, slipping unnoticed beneath the large canoe as it is portaged across the stage in the famous “canoe dance” (a challenging piece choreographed for eight males who in a series of dazzling arabesques and pirouettes, create the impression that a 600lb canoe is floating, while being able to see nothing but one another’s feet).

Act II: The Enchanted Marsh

In the event, it has proved unnecessary for Ti-jean to expose the Comte to the voyageurs, because he is quickly expelled from the team because of his incompetent paddling and his maddeningly incessant complaints about the mosquitoes and blackflies and the blisters on his pale aristocratic hands. Fleeing the voyageurs’ brandished paddles, Comte Frontenac escapes into the woods, pursued by Ti-jean. However the Comte eludes Ti-jean, who, now lost and exhausted, comes to the edge of an enchanted marsh where he collapses. As dusk falls, a pack of porcupines (the female corps du ballet) emerge for an evening dance on the shore, a performance that involves a good deal of skill not only in imitating the extremely short-legged gait, but, especially during the linked-armed sequence, in the dexterous avoidance of one another’s spiky tutus. (Perhaps it is needless to remark that any less than fastidious observance of port de bras here will have painful consequences.) After a preliminary dance, a pack of beavers (the male corps du ballet) arrives, and the two rodent choruses pair off for a series of virtuosic displays of waddling. Lurking near the back of the pack of porcupines is one with an improbable long black braid and a jagged-hemmed suede mini-dress (looking a little peculiar, to be sure, draped as it is over all those quills), by means of which clues Ti-jean recognizes Pokinfunatus. She shyly comes forward—although Ti-jean suggests that it might be best if she did not come too close—and explains that they have been bewitched by Comte Frontenac. She says that the many women who have refused the Comte’s embraces have been transformed into porcupines (“My sweet unembraceable you,” he had snarled); the beavers had all been young men whom the Comte had coaxed into clearing tracts of land on which they were promised they could settle, but, when they had finished, he invited them to his tavern and, once they were drunk, transformed them, with his trademark heavy-handed irony (“Come along, you eager beavers! Bwah-ha-ha-ha!”), so that he could seize their farmland for himself. The marsh emerged from all the half-finished glasses of beer that were left at the tavern, most of which, she adds with a certain distaste, were almost certainly corrupted by back-wash. Now each evening, they all gather by the edge of the marsh and wait for the moonlight, when they will briefly resume their human forms. The conversation is interrupted when suddenly the beavers begin slapping their “tails” (danced by means of the highly taxing “rapid-squat” technique) to warn of the approach, through the marsh, of a giant Moose. The Moose boastfully attempts to intimidate the beaver-males by means of a series of giant leaps which they cannot possibly match with their short rodent legs, but Ti-jean, abetted, at least in appearance, by his thigh-high leather boots, surpasses the Moose by leaping back and forth over its back and winning the applause of the chorus. Suddenly the envious and humilated Moose charges Ti-jean, who deftly leaps over a beaver dam which the Moose, in his rage, is tripped up by. Having the Moose at his mercy, Ti-jean declares that, having noticed that the Moose’s antlers are improbably pristine and fuzz-free in a manner with which only an aristocrat would bother himself, he believes the Moose to be the Comte in disguise, and threatens to have the Comte’s head stuffed and mounted back in his own dining-room unless he reveals himself immediately. Comte Frontenac reveals himself at the very moment that the moon rises and the rodent-dancers begin a transformation back to their human shapes, a process which, Comte Frontenac declares, he will allow to be permanent when the dawn comes. A celebratory dance ensues, and the Comte, moved to penitence by the joy of the others, offers to dance with each of the maidens in turn to choose one of them to be his wife. This, alas, proves an imprudent promise, for the maidens have not quite divested themselves of all of their porcupine traits. However, the Comte, nothing if not a man of his word, persists in dancing with one partner after another, until, bristling like a sea-urchin, he falls into the marsh of beer dregs and backwash and drowns disgustingly. Ti-jean and the beaver-men —very carefully— lead Pokinfunatus and the porcupine-maidens on a dance back towards the garrison.

(And listen, before anyone asks: no, I really don't have "a thing" about porcupines, although I will admit to finding it mildly fascinating that something so funny-looking can also be so terrifying, and also to having woken up with nightmares for several nights running about a decade ago, immediately after I was forced to use pliers to remove half-a-dozen quills from my dog's mouth...ONE...AT...A...TIME. Make what you will of that, Dr Freud.)

Hatfields and McCoys

2006-12-22T15:39:00.001-05:00

One frequently hears an argument made about the relevance of the theatre in the modern age, even from rather arcane artists like the director Peter Sellars, to this effect: “it is our responsibility, in our contemporary multi-media society, to do more than move audiences to feel (which a well-produced tv commercial can do in 15 seconds). We must instead move them to some kind of change perhaps even some kind of action.”

I take Sellars’ point about the futility of merely concentrating on invoking emotions. Stimulants of that sort can be had terribly cheaply. Furthermore, living in our sophisticated media-savvy world, many of us have become so used to this sort of manipulation that we are, if not altogether inured to it, at least ready to shrug off emotions within moments—a sort of necessary aphasia for minds overwhelmed by a media-saturated world.

On the other hand, I have my serious doubts about the suggestion that we should undertake to move people to action with the theatre. For if we consider this to be the main purpose of theatre, frankly, there are far better vehicles for doing so. The television or the internet, for example, used deftly, will reach far more people more immediately than any theatrical production. Moreover, even more troubling, to me — and perhaps to others — is the question of whether the director (or playwright, perhaps) must then decide ahead of time what action, exactly, she wants to make people take. If she does, isn't that pretty manipulative? And, in these terms, would that mean that the best production was that which was most lucid in its propagandistic intentions? (Anyone for the Soviet “boy-meets-tractor” plays?) And if she doesn’t, isn’t that pretty irresponsible? (“I shifted people out of their apathy: some of them became missionary doctors and others suicide bombers...”)

Having said that, of course, one must accept that there have been many people who felt, or at least have said that they felt, that this was, indeed, the task of theatre. Bertolt Brecht, for example, seems to suggest this in his theories; and who can doubt that he is one of the Twentieth Century’s most important playwrights? At the same time, we see, ladies and gentleman, in the other corner, wearing the black trunks, the number one contender, Samuel Beckett. If we look into Beckett’s plays with the question of what sort of action they are advocating in mind, we are likely to conclude that he wants nothing from us other than complete inertia. Some of us will not be comfortable resting with such a means of measuring the validity of theatrical work, then. Naturally, others are, and it is perhaps this which has led some commentators to conclude that all theatrical scholars or practitioners had to fall into one of two mutually exclusive camps—the Hatfields and McCoys of twentieth-century theatre: Brechtians or Beckettians.

I, however, repudiate that conclusion, happily having a foot in each camp. But that does rather force me to come up with some answer to the dilemma of how to reconcile Brecht’s (apparent) insistence on action-advocacy with Beckett’s (apparent) complete indifference toward anything of the kind (but cf. his Catastrophe). Well, I think the answer lies in this: what theatre does, better than anything else, better than any other art form, better than any other form of communication, is pose questions about the relation between the individual and society. And it is my belief that this is the crucial imperative facing us theatrical practitioners (and scholars): to identify the questions we want to ask —sometimes very old and yet perennially vital, sometimes very new and startling— about what sort of people we are, what sort of people we want to be and what sort of world we want to share.

Favourite Actor

2006-12-19T23:47:00.000-05:00

Occasionally I am asked to name my favourite actor, and the question seems to throw me into a mild panic, perhaps because I have never sat back to consider methodically the question: what are the elements that combine to make an actor a favourite? It's difficult to consider the question apart from the characters the actor has played, of course. (Who can tell the dancer from the dance?) But, supposing one can, where a single character has been played by multiple actors...? In the case of the many actors who have played James Bond, for example, I can say confidently that Sean Connery remains my favourite. But why? It obviously doesn't merely have to do with how "realistic" the actor is (that, for better or worse, would probably go to Daniel Craig), and even less, I think, with how physically appealing the actor is (Pierce Brosnan would win out there, I guess, though this may be thought tepid praise in any case, coming as it does from a heterosexual man). Rather, I think it has something to do with rather more abstract qualities which we find compelling. To draw an analogy, I'd say that just as we may find Louis Armstrong's phrasing of a particular song deeply memorable and indeed, compellingly imitable, so do we admire the music an actor brings to certain characters. Considered in these terms---and without even entering into the parallel column of assessment, which would have to do with the physical equivalent of music: the dance of facial features and bodily posture---I am beginning to suspect that my favourite actor of all time may be the late Mel Blanc --- the man who provided the voices of Foghorn Leghorn, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, Porky Pig, Tweety, Sylvester the Cat, Wile E. Coyote (Genius), the Tasmanian Devil and every other bit character in the Looney Tunes cartoons. The truth is that I remember more of the subtleties of his inflections, delight in the details of more of his deliveries, relish in more of his comic timing, and find more joy in his flamboyance than in the work of pretty much any other actor I can name. Now that's compelling work. So, here's to Mel.

Subsidies and The Supposed Right-Wing Intellectual Deficit

2006-12-16T13:57:00.000-05:00

(As will become apparent, there is a sort of pun in the title of this blog which inevitably arises from the complaints made by conservative commentators such as that to which I have provided a link below.)

Every so often, I feel compelled to wearily answer the neo-conservative, pseudo-Darwinist suggestion that the natural way of things demands that theatre should respond to the market economy, and accordingly, if it cannot survive on the free market, it would be better to atrophy and die.

Really, this is tiresome silliness. For example, let's look at the idea that theatre's “natural” state is to be commercially viable. The fact is that, historically, no theatrical activities which posterity has considered “important” have ever been totally self-sustaining. From the time of classical Athens, when the support of wealthy benefactors to pay the costs of the productions along with the Periclean theoric fund (to subsidize playgoers) was necessary, through to Elizabethan England, when Shakespeare's company depended on the patronage of the crown and various wealthy supporters (the equivalent of subsidy rather than corporate sponsorship, because the decision was not made—or at least not entirely—with regard to concerns about whether the support would “enhance profit”), through to any current leading theatre company, the necessity of subsidy to abet the creative communal focus embodied by theatre has been accepted and embraced. Theatre is a communal art form, and its presence always has been vital to the health of any literate community, a point which may be demonstrated by a long string of historical examples.

Now one response to this point is to argue, along the lines suggested by Adam Smith, that it is the “invisible hand of the market” which best expresses the will of the community, and that in such a perspective, arts subsidies must be considered an abomination. Indeed, this reasoning runs, the only real resistance ever offered to the will of the market economy comes at the hands of so-called “elitist intellectuals.” In short, the suggestion is that, protecting any aspect of a culture from the rough and tumble of a free-market economy is inherently elitist, and is a notion fostered purely by “left-wing cabals.” Inevitably, at this point, the finger points toward universities: what are they teaching there, anyway? (And here, of course, is where I feel the two sides of my career moving together to be galvanized into a coherent defence). Along these lines, there have been a number of recent suggestions, in the United States especially, that academia at large has been insufficiently respectful of conservative ideas

For a sterling example, of this sort of argument, CLICK HERE.

But this suggestion of “unfairness” is based on specious reasoning. No natural, nor any other sort of law suggests that there should be any absolute apportionment of right- and left-wing ideas in academia. Rather, plausible ideas are presented for consideration and —here we smile gently at those cherish Adam Smith’s reasoning— must be considered in the rough-and-tumble of free debate. The reason that theories of a flat earth do not have currency nowadays is not because of any conspiracy against such ideas, but simply because they do not stand up to sustained logical scrutiny. Similarly, if neo-conservative ideas have less currency in academia, it is probably because their flaws are more easily exposed upon any deeper consideration.

Now, to be fair in this matter, rather than relying on any biased characterization, let’s turn to an actual advocate of neo-conservative philosophy. For example, consider this quotation from a neo-conservative explication of the free-market philosophy of Frederich von Hayek, one of the central thinkers in the neo-conservative pantheon:

“The price mechanism of the free market serves to convey information about supply and demand that is dispersed among many consumers and producers and which cannot be assembled or coordinated efficiently in any other way. The abysmal failure of command economies, or of command devices in mixed capitalistic economies, vindicated the prediction originally made by Ludwig von Mises in 1920, and later promoted by Hayek, that only a free market could coordinate an efficient allocation of resources into productive industries. Hayek thus shared with Hume a profound conviction that 'we should be sensible of our ignorance.’” (http://www.friesian.com/hayek.htm)

This is a good example of the half-wittedness (I'm afraid I feel I must choose between that pejorative and “disingenuousness,” which seems to be worse because it implies moral turpitude rather than merely incompetent thinking) of the “free-market” advocates. In this model, the monetary unit (for example, the dollar) is taken to represent a perfect embodiment and expression of the will, the determination of the people. But they aren't thinking things through. Because they need to answer: why, in any realistic ethical model, should the person with more dollars in his wallet have an opinion inherently more valuable than that of the person who has less dollars in his wallet?

This is what I mean by “half-wittedness.” There is, in such neo-conservative assertions, a total refusal or inability to recognize that linking political franchise to buying power entails a momentous ethical problem: that capitalism inevitably ensures an inequitable and insensible distribution of financial means with regard to individual identity, and that this inequity is an abomination in the sight of democratic principles (not to mention any sensible awareness of how the common weal might not be identical to personal profit). Why, for example, should the opinion of Bill Gates inherently matter more than the opinion of, say, Jared Diamond, the writer I alluded to in a previous posting, who wrote Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse? Gates spent most of his career discovering ways of harnessing the current discoveries about computer programming for maximum personal profit; Diamond spent most of his career understanding how the world has found itself in the environmental crisis it is now in, and in trying to recognize what history has to tell us about how to avoid ultimate catastrophe. Gates has his reward for being shrewd and a little ruthless in finding himself a multi-billionaire; but should we also offer him proportionately more say in how our society should be run than Diamond, who, ultimately, has concentrated all his brilliant intellect on just that very question? Who should have more of a say in the future of our civilization? The richer or the more thoughtful person? Those who believe with a faith that seems quasi-religious, in the clarity and purity of the free market, will say Bill Gates. Those who believe that the convictions of individual persons, and not their relative spending powers, should determine social policy, will answer differently, for they are looking for ways for individually non-profitable and yet socially-beneficial ideas to be heard above the roar of commercialism.

In short, there can be no doubt that completely state-controlled economies, such as the Soviet Union, amply have shown their limitations; but so, again and again, have the unfettered activities of free-market economies. The reason that academics tend to favour social-liberalism is not that they believe it to be a perfect answer for our problems, but merely that they believe it to be less bad than any other system heretofore suggested.

I will return to the question of public subsidies for the theatre in a future posting. I bet you can't wait.

It's been one of those weeks...

2006-12-14T17:58:00.001-05:00

Actor Relay

2006-12-12T19:34:00.004-05:00

This is a story that I like to tell my acting students, because, as you will see, they get to join in the relay. There are many ways of tracing the relay route, but this one is the most direct that I’ve been able to discover.

When I was a young actor, working on my first theatre job at age twenty-one, as an apprentice actor at the Stratford Festival of Canada, the person who taught me most about acting Shakespeare was an actor whom I had idolized for a number of years already, a leading member of the company, who is now, alas, no longer with us, Nicholas Pennell (1939-1995).

One of Nicholas Pennell’s first jobs as an actor was working in radio in the early 1960s, and it was there that he met a very elderly actress who had appeared at one point in silent films, such as “La Belle Russe” (1914), named Evelyn Russell.

Evelyn Russell told Nicholas that, even before her work in silent films, she had been working as an actress in the theatre. And one of her first jobs ever was taking small roles in the repertory company playing at the Lyceum Theatre in the late 1890s, which was still led at that time by the great actor-manager, Sir Henry Irving (1838-1905), then near the end of his long career.

One evening in June 1864, when Henry Irving was twenty-six, right at the beginning of his career as an actor, just having changed his name from John Brodribb, he met an older actor named William Henry Chippendale (1801-88), who, some years later would play Polonius to Irving’s Hamlet. But on this particular night, Chippendale spent the whole night until dawn, coaching Irving in playing Shakespeare.

Chippendale had worked with many of the great actors of his day, including William Charles Macready, but he based most of his lesson to Irving on an imitation (based on his own experience, nearly forty years earlier, when he had worked with the man himself) of the great Edmund Kean (1787-1833). (Incidentally, it was Chippendale who presented Irving with the sword which Edmund Kean had used as Richard III, a sword which was passed on from Irving through Ellen Terry to Sir John Gielgud and finally to Lord Laurence Olivier, who donated it to the Theatre Museum in London.)

When Edmund Kean was only twenty years old he was working at the Belfast Theatre. Kean had been on the stage on and off since he was four years old, working in various circumstances, including the circus; but at the theatre in Belfast, he was able to improve his work mightily, chiefly it seems because he was working in close contact with the leading tragedienne of her day, Sarah Siddons (1755-1831).

Although she came from a family of actors, Sarah Siddons had not always been a great performer, and this is seen in the record that in her very first job, at the Drury Lane Theatre, at the age of eighteen, she was not judged a success. But this undoubtedly had something to do with the actor with whom she had been matched (out-matched?)--- from whom we can assume that, however harsh the lesson, she learned much that she was gradually able to assimilate --- the actor sometimes called the greatest in history (although how can we know?), David Garrick (1717-1779).

David Garrick had come to London at the age of nineteen with his older friend and tutor, Samuel Johnson; but it was not until he was twenty-four, and appeared on stage as Richard III, that he was recognised as a great actor. In this, he undoubtedly owed something to the older actor who had coached him, Charles Macklin (c. 1699-1797)

Macklin, famous for playing Shylock as a tragic figure, was a volatile and pugnacious man, whose face had been disfigured by boxing, and who once killed another actor in a fight over a wig. But he was once young and green, of course. In his twenties, he got his first important professional work at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and then Drury Lane, then under the last years of the management of the actor-manager, autobiographer and gossip, Colley Cibber (1671-1757).

Colley Cibber’s first job as an actor was in his early twenties when, only a season or two before "the actors' revolt" (which would provide a great break for Cibber) he was invited to join the company led by the most admired actor of the Restoration, the actor-manager Thomas Betterton (1635-1710).

Thomas Betterton had been one of the new young actors to be hired by William Davenant when the theatres had reopened in 1660, after the interregnum. But also acting alongside Betterton was at least one actor who had some years of experience, one of the great actors of the early Restoration years, Charles Hart (1625-1683).

Charles Hart had been a boy player in the King’s Men before the London theatres had closed in 1642; his most famous role had been as the Duchess in The Cardinal by James Shirley. Playing the title role in that play was the most important actor of the later Jacobean era, Joseph Taylor (d. 1652).

Joseph Taylor had joined the King’s Men as a young actor more than thirty years before, in 1619. In the company at that time the actors John Heminges (1566-1630) and Henry Condell (c. 1576-1630), were still working, and Taylor had been hired, it seems, to replace the ailing Richard Burbage (1567-1619), by whom he had supposedly been coached.

These actors had been the partners and the fellow actors of William Shakespeare (1564-1616).

And I don't know about you, but I get a kick out of that.

Going to Disney: A One-Act Play

2006-12-08T19:41:00.000-05:00

The office of a reasonably well-informed Hollywood studio film producer with a conscience (hey, it’s just a play) sometime in the late 1990s. The producer is working at his desk when the intercom buzzes.

PRODUCER. Yes?

VOICE (on the intercom). Your three-o’clock appointment is here to see you, Sir.

PRODUCER. Send him in, by all means.

A handsome actor/director in his forties, dazzlingly good looking, with a devil-may-care (or is that a dangerously fanatical?) look in his eyes enters.

DIRECTOR. Hey, how are you, buddy.

PRODUCER. Holding up, thanks. Nice to see you. I understand that you’ve got a couple of projects you’d like to pitch as follow-ups to, uh...that Scottish thing...about the guy with the mullet who cuts a swath through the English and then there's that torture scene where he has his guts pulled out...

DIRECTOR. That’s right. So, I’ve got two new ideas, but I’ll try to pitch em fast, because I’ve got to meet some friends at the bar for a drink or ten, ha! And then I’ve got a lot of driving to do right afterwards.

PRODUCER. I see, well then shoot.

DIRECTOR. Okay, so the first one is about Jesus, okay? But this is the REAL story. This is the way it REALLY happened.

PRODUCER. I see, a story for today’s world: the oppressed beginnings followed by the teachings of love and forgiveness? The plea to transcend all the petty vengeance and violence that afflict society? The sermon on the mount with its exhortation to non-attachment and all that?

DIRECTOR. Yeah, well maybe a bit of that. Not so much, really. Mostly just how the Jews, you know, how they did all that horrible stuff to him.

PRODUCER. Oh, I see, the uh, Jews....

DIRECTOR. Yeah, maybe we even start with them hauling him off for the trial.

PRODUCER. But I thought that the Catholic church had really repudiated that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus in Vatican II...

DIRECTOR. Vatican II! Ha! They're not REAL Catholics! Bunch of wimps. Who cares what they say?

PRODUCER. And I thought too, that it had been demonstrated by historians that it was extremely unlikely that the Jews would even have been permitted to hold a trial during Passover.

DIRECTOR. Oh, so now you want to rewrite the Bible? What, are you an atheist or something?

PRODUCER. Well, no, I just—

DIRECTOR. So, anyway! These Jewish guards haul Jesus off for the trial and they whip him with these chains, right, and then they throw him off a bridge and nearly drown him in the water.

PRODUCER. Is that in the Bible?

DIRECTOR. Hey, artistic licence.

PRODUCER. Okay... Go on.

DIRECTOR. And then, the trial is like a whole bunch of snarling, sneering, yellow-teethed, hook-nosed, powerful, rich Jews in fancy-looking but goofy outfits, Caiaphas and them— and other Jews maybe spitting on him, eh—

PRODUCER. You really want the spitting, do you?

DIRECTOR. Damn straight. And then Caiaphas and them, they want to see him done to by the Roman soldiers, so they go to watch.

PRODUCER. They watch? Do any of the gospels say—?

DIRECTOR. Look, I told you already, artistic licence. And I'll stick Satan in among the Jews, cause, well, you know...

PRODUCER. But what about Jesus's mother Mary, and Magdalene? They'll be Jewish too...

DIRECTOR. Yeah, but we'll dress them up to look sorta like nuns. Not real Jews.

PRODUCER. Ah.

DIRECTOR. So, anyway, then we see them take Jesus and beat him and beat him and beat him and beat him. And maybe some more spitting. And they get a flail—but not just an ordinary one, eh, this one’ll have fish-hooks or something on it—

PRODUCER. Is that in the Bi— ?

DIRECTOR. (Getting carried away.) And then they’ll whip and whip and whip and whip! And his flesh’ll rip and rip and rip and rip! And blood will just come spurting and gushing and spurting and gushing. Splat, splurt, gush! And then maybe some kicking and some more beating, maybe a little more kicking, bit of spitting—

PRODUCER. I see, well—

DIRECTOR. And THEN! Then nailing and nailing and nailing and nailing! Close up you know, so you can really just about feel the nails yourself, slamming right through the palms—

PRODUCER. Okay, I think I kind of—

DIRECTOR. And the feet too!

PRODUCER. Naturally.

DIRECTOR. And then, SLAM! The cross slides into the hole, and up it goes, and there he is! Maybe an eye gouged out, and there’s like flesh hanging off of him everywhere, and blood, blood, blood all OVER the place! Really, really bloody! Real bloody, for sure.

PRODUCER. Uh-hunh. So it seems you want to focus quite a bit on the torture this time out.

DIRECTOR. Well, yeah. I mean that’s basically the whole idea of Christianity, right? The whole thing comes down to that: he suffered for us.

PRODUCER. Just the one idea, you think?

DIRECTOR. What do you mean?

PRODUCER. Well, I mean, there were, after all, lots and lots of people tortured by means of crucifixion, so in that respect, it’s not so unique... You know, Spartacus and all that...

DIRECTOR. What?

PRODUCER. Well, I’m just asking...I mean, is that really what you want to make a whole movie about? That one thing? I mean, how about some of the other aspects of Jesus?

DIRECTOR. I’m not following you. Look, maybe I should explain this again—

PRODUCER. No, no. That’s fine. I think I get it. Lots of torture and suffering...

DIRECTOR. And blood. Don’t forget LOTS of blood.

PRODUCER. Okay, then. Uh...sounds, um... inspirational.

DIRECTOR. Oh, yeah.

PRODUCER. And what else do you have for me?

DIRECTOR. Well, okay, my other project is a thing about the Maya.

PRODUCER. (Surprised, albeit visibly relieved) The Maya? I see! Mayan civilization! The great classical achievement in the new world, the scientific and artistic advances, inventing the calendar, studying the stars, building astounding works of architecture—

DIRECTOR. Yeah, yeah, them. But I want to focus on a bit later.

PRODUCER. Oh, you mean the period Jared Diamond talks about in Collapse, when their agricultural practices had caused deforestation and destroyed the land and undermined the economy, then all the great cities collapsed, and they started making human sacrifices...Hmmm. Tragic stuff.

DIRECTOR. Well, sort of, except that I’m going to take them at their prime, right, they’ve still got plenty of corn or whatever, but in this picture, they’re making human sacrifices, already! These are really, really nasty people, killing all sorts of Indians for no reason. So it’s this that brings down the hand of God on them. Anyway, who wants to know about forests and agriculture, right?

PRODUCER. Perhaps.

DIRECTOR. Yeah, and so because they are basically devil-worshippers, its pay-back time. They kill and kill and kill and kill—

PRODUCER. Lots of killing, then.

DIRECTOR. Yeah, but in LOTS of different ways. Beheading, disembowelling, stabbing, skull-crushing, impaling, hearts ripped out while they’re still beating— pretty much the whole gamut of entertainment. And then there’s this scene with all these bodies lying in this pit, just dumped in there like firewood, you know?

PRODUCER. God. How awful.

DIRECTOR. Oh yeah.

PRODUCER. It sort of sounds like the Holocaust.

DIRECTOR. The what?

PRODUCER. The Holocaust. You know, in World War II?

DIRECTOR. Whoa! What are you, a Jew?

PRODUCER. I beg your pardon?

DIRECTOR. I just mean, you know, suddenly, you sound Jewish, when you say that stuff. “Holocaust,” and all that.

PRODUCER. What, are you saying it didn’t happen? That six million Jews weren’t murdered?

DIRECTOR. Oh, listen, lots and lots of people were killed in that war. Lots and lots and LOTS. So, a few Jews along the way, maybe, yes. Stuff happens, eh?

PRODUCER. Right. So, uh, how does the movie end?

DIRECTOR. Well, see, suddenly there’s this eclipse—

PRODUCER. So these Mayans actually, literally bring the wrath of God down upon them for their heathen ways.

DIRECTOR. You betcha. But here’s the clincher. Guess who shows up at the very end, to finish the job?

PRODUCER. I guess I’ll go way out on the limb and say the Spaniards?

DIRECTOR. That’s right! Spanish missionaries! CATHOLICS! Pay-back time, boys! Here come the conquistadors!

PRODUCER. And the decimation of the New World civilization.

DIRECTOR. Yup. A little foretaste of the apocalypse.

PRODUCER. You know what? I don’t think we can get behind these projects.

DIRECTOR. Alright, to hell with you, then. I’m going to Disney. Leni Riefenstahl at least got a fair hearing from old Walt.

END OF PLAY

Afternote: Perhaps it's worth mentioning, lest people should think this an unfair portrait, that everything expressed by The Director in this fictional play, including both the coarseness of the imagination and the historical opinions, is based upon or construed from some sort of documentation: either captured on film or in various interviews. And yes, Walt Disney did screen Leni Riefenstahl's films and grant her an interview in 1938 (after kristallnacht and a few years after she had made her Nazi propaganda films); he was, as far as I know, the only major studio head to do so. She claimed that he told her he admired her work, but that he couldn't hire her without damaging his reputation.

And, speaking for the opposition...

2006-12-07T20:10:00.000-05:00

Coincidentally, a friend sent me a link to this Honda ad today, in which we're offered a vision of the beauty of "making things work" from the perspective of commerce. It easily might have been created as a rebuttal of sorts to what I quoted from Hardwick---though not enough to shake me loose from my agreement with her. At any rate, it certainly does make a good case for the delight of watching pure efficiency in action. The text that follows introduced the link:

"Read the info first, then watch the clip.

And you thought those people that set up roomfuls of Dominos to knock over were amazing. There are no computer graphics Or digital tricks in the film. Everything you see really happened in real time exactly as you see it.

The film took 606 takes. On the first 605 takes, something, usually very minor, didn't work. They would then have to set the whole thing up again.

The crew spent weeks shooting night and day. By the time it was over, they were ready to change professions.

The film cost six million dollars and took three months to complete including full engineering of the sequence. In addition, it's two minutes long so every time Honda airs the film on British television, they're shelling out enough dough to keep any one of us in clover for a lifetime.

However, it is fast becoming the most downloaded advertisement in Internet history. Honda executives figure the ad will soon pay for itself simply in "free viewings" (Honda isn't paying a dime to have you watch this Commercial!)

When the ad was pitched to senior executives, they signed off on it immediately without any hesitation - including the costs.

There are six and only six hand-made Honda Accords in the world. To the horror of Honda engineers, the filmmakers disassembled two of them to make the film.

Everything you see in the film (aside from the walls, floor, ramp, and complete Honda Accord) is parts from those two cars.

The voiceover is Garrison Keillor. When the ad was shown to Honda executives, they liked it and commented on how amazing computer graphics have gotten.

They fell off their chairs when they found out it was for real. Oh, and about those funky windshield wipers. On the new Accords, the windshield wipers have water sensors and are designed to start doing their thing automatically as soon as they become wet."

Click Here to Link to Honda Ad

Making Things Work

2006-12-07T12:19:00.000-05:00

Here's a paragraph from the great American critic, and editor of the New York Review of Books, Elizabeth Hardwick, which I see as related to the question I was considering in an earlier post, "On Seeing More Than One Knows":

"Perhaps the worst thing our theater has done is to convince everyone that drama is the art of "making things work" on the stage. This is a legacy from commerce: The thing may not sell—that in the end is the Eleusinian mystery before which we are all silent—but it must work. From the top to the bottom, the most lavish to the dustiest little loft, they are all sharpening and shaping, maiming and taming. The disturbing sense we have of repetition, déjà vu, of having been there before: this is the pay for making it work. Things work because they are like other things that work. End Game [sic] and Happy Days by Samuel Beckett cannot be said to work at all, in the sense of our theater. Only a mind free of the obsessions of conventional forms could produce works of such formal beauty."

Sorry I Laughed

2006-12-05T16:47:00.000-05:00

Laura Rocca, Lydia Wilkinson, Jenny Melo and Arianna Pozzuoli in a happier moment in the Queen's Unversity production of Les Belles Soeurs. Photo by Tim Fort.

My favourite response to create in an audience is to make them laugh and then make them sorry that they laughed. Perhaps this sounds sadistic, or manipulative, but in my view, it is where the best possibility lies for audience members to feel that they have grown or been changed in some way as a result of seeing a performance. Laughter usually implies a certain amount of detachment, and apart from the inherent good of how great it feels to laugh (“the best medicine” as I recall Reader’s Digest called their dismally unfunny humour column), it suggests the possibility of an ironic perspective. But, to then see something which makes one reassess one’s initial reaction, to regret the laughter, is, in my view, not to negate or withdraw the initial reaction, but to add another level of perspective to it, to grow inwardly, to achieve a "perspective of perspectives" (which I know was how Kenneth Burke defined irony, but please ignore the confusion). I suspect what I am saying here is comparable to Soren Kierkegaard’s argument about how irony provides a transition from the aesthetic to the ethical (though it’s been so long since I read him that I can’t be sure of that).

But, philosophical analogies aside, it’s really quite thrilling to feel an audience collectively amused and then appalled—the emotional equivalent of feeling your stomach drop or whatever as the roller coaster passes the crest and begins its descent. The first time I can recall encountering this phenomenon was watching Neil Munro perform in Trevor Griffiths’ play Comedians when I was a teenager. I was exhilarated by the experience at the time, and I suppose I’ve always kept my eyes open for genuine opportunities to recreate it. Perhaps the best chance I’ve had —or at least the one I recall most vividly— occurred during the university production of Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles Soeurs, just a few years ago. The character of Rose is loud, crude and somewhat funny, but Tremblay has given her a monologue in which she speaks of the suffering she endures in her marriage. It would be fairly easy to perform the monologue in such a way that the audience continued to laugh, and it would be relatively easy to perform it so that it was serious throughout. But the most powerful approach seemed to be to have Arianna Pozzuoli, the young actress playing the role, begin the monologue almost as if it were stand-up comedy, then, by breaking the timing, break off the laughter of the audience, only to suddenly reveal an inner pain that caused them to fall into a deeply aghast silence, as they found themselves plunging suddenly from amused condescension into nauseous empathy. I think it really was an existentially enlightening moment for many, if not most, of the people who saw it, the full depth of Tremblay’s intentions surging through their hearts and robbing them of breath. God bless Arianna, who nailed this trick perfectly night after night; because, over the last few years, this moment has probably been spoken of to me more than any other single moment in anything else I’ve done.

Ronald Bryden

2006-12-04T19:46:00.000-05:00

My mentor and friend, Ron Bryden, died about two years ago last week. He was a great critic, and if you want to get some idea of exactly how great, take a look at Shaw and His Contemporaries: Theatre Essays by Ronald Bryden, ed. Denis Johnston (Mosaic Press/Academy of the Shaw Festival, 2002). Anyway, I came across a letter from him today, which set me thinking and eventually prompted me to to go in search of this piece which I wrote for his memorial service at the invitation of his daughters---two truly lovely women:

I first met Ron more than two decades ago when, as a young undergraduate, I was cast in some of the Drama Centre’s productions at Hart House Theatre. Ron had been teaching at UofT for a few years by then, but he had only just been appointed the Director of the Drama Centre, and naturally, there was a great deal of excitement about his appointment. People always seemed to be talking about what he had done and quoting certain things that he had said and written---probably with more enthusiasm than accuracy—--and the effect was that Ron had assumed a sort of legendary status in my mind before I ever met him.

When I did finally meet him, of course it was immediately clear what it was that people found so fascinating about him. I’m sure we’ve all found ourselves in awe, at one time or another, at that Miltonic mind of his, with its encyclopaedic knowledge not just of the theatre, but (as it sometimes appeared) all of Western Culture. And then there was the way he spoke: so beautifully, in well-formed prose, combining in conversation the same elements that characterized his writing: the raconteur’s gift for telling a story as vividly and succinctly as possible, along with that startling acuity of insight which made him such a brilliant critic.

But I think what most impressed me about Ron at the time—an impression confirmed again and again over the next twenty-odd years—was that, for a man so accomplished, he seemed to be so gentle, so warm, and so utterly lacking in any discernible pretension. It was surprising sometimes to discover over the years just how well acquainted Ron was with this or that famous person, because he gave little hint of this in his conversation. In fact, while he was always happy to speak warmly of his family, I seldom heard him talk of himself—and whenever he did, fleetingly, in any story he told, there was never any hint of self-aggrandizement.

On the other hand, neither was he guilty of false modesty. I recall one occasion, about fifteen years ago, when I was a Junior Fellow at Massey College and was sitting in the common room, alone, reading the newspapers after dinner. Suddenly the door to the Master’s lodging opened and out walked Ann Saddlemyer (then the Master of Massey College, and a distinguished professor), with a group in tow that included Ron, as well as Claude Bissell (the President emeritus of University of Toronto), Pauline McGibbon (the former Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario), Douglas LePan (winner of the Governor General’s Award for fiction and poetry), Robertson Davies and Northrop Frye. The next day I saw Ron in class and said to him: “You certainly were in august company last night!” And Ron looked at me and said (deadpan but with a touch of feigned indignation): “Well, so were they.” Ron was being witty, of course, as he so often was; but I think there was something of principle here too. He was, as they say, “no respecter of persons”; rather, he treated everyone with dignity.

One can see this idea cropping up all over his life. A number of years ago, I came across a piece that Ron had written on Peter Brook’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Eventually, this became a hugely celebrated production, of course, but at first, Ron was one of only a select group of critics who praised it warmly. As I remember, what Ron had loved about it more than anything else was the way the production broke down barriers—between the audience and the actors, among classes, among ages, even among cultures. And this same idea, essentially, was characteristic of Ron’s attitude towards the classroom. I think now of a graduate seminar in post-World War II British drama that I took with Ron, in which I am sure we students said many callow and fatuous things; and yet, notwithstanding that everything Ron said was so wise and so much to the point, there was never the sense that our views were of any less value to him, or that he suspected he would hear little of interest said by us about an area which he knew better, perhaps, than any other person living.

This gentleness and warmth seemed to be present in every other context I encountered him—whether as a writer, a director, a scholar or as a friend. Now, the way I speak of him comes, I know, embarrassingly close to hero-worship, though, naturally, I am aware that Ron was capable of being irascible or forgetful or so on. But those are qualities he shared with all of us. What was exceptional in him—the reason that I always have and always will regard him as my mentor—was his magnanimity of spirit; his immense erudition that always remained uninfected by any snobbery; his generosity and kindness; and his passionate engagement with the world.

I miss him very much, but my life has been immeasurably enriched by having known him.

The Waist Line

2006-12-03T23:41:00.000-05:00

Attife, attife, ute ibe orfe
ouldntce etge oughthre uthre athroombe orde.
— Ezra Tonne

I. The Burial of the Bread.

April is the cruellest month, bringing
Bikinis out of cold storage, filling
The shelves with sun-screen,
Reminders of skimpy beachwear.
Summer exposed us, gut hanging over our speedos.

And the children were frightened . He said Merry
Christmas, and when he was done, he looked
At his mountainous belly, and felt fat.
“I feed much of the time and get stout in winter.”

Doctor Atkins, famous dietician
Died of a stroke, nevertheless
Is known to have the fastest fad diet on the internet.
Here, says he, is your plan:
Avoid the sign of the starch: potatoes, bread and rice
These you are forbidden to eat
Or you will want death when you’re by the water.

Unreal beach!
I had not thought gluttony had betonned so many.

You, hippopotamus manqué — tu resemble une pear!

II. A Pillow Chest.

The chair she sat in, furnished a groan,
collapsed on the marble, where her ass
smacked down, heavy with fruit pies
double the weight of seven average folks: abracadabra
resounding heaviness upon the table too
as the ripple of her flab rose to strike it.
‘Jugs, jugs!’ said those with dirty minds,
as her withered dugs of time
leapt out, leaping, no longer thus blouse-enclosed.

‘My hunger is bad tonight. Yes bad. Eat with me.
Eat with me. Why do you not eat. Eat.
What are you drinking, now? What drinking? What?
I never get offered what you’re drinking. Drinks!’

But
O O O O that Shake n’ bake bag
It’s so appetizing
so tantalizing.
What shall we do now? What shall I eat?
Shall I rush out as I am to the pub down the street?

If the kitchen’s not closed
we shall order nachos and beer.
HURRY UP, PLEASE, IT’S TIME.
I’ll have the buffalo wings
And I the cheesy garlic bread.
HURRY UP, PLEASE, IT’S TIME.
HURRY UP, PLEASE, IT’S TIME.
Good pies, though... Good pies at the diner
at the twenty-four hour diner, good pies
So, merrily we roll along, towards
Good pies, ladies, good pies.

(I wrote this a while back to amuse my friend Gabrielle, who is a T.S. Eliot scholar.)

Bilingual Cautionary Note

2006-12-02T18:39:00.000-05:00

After watching the Liberal Party leadership convention for most of the day, I've got bilingualism on my mind, I suppose. I suppose, too, that if I were a real grown-up, I would not find this so amusing (although I have the consolation of knowing that my friend Jodi Essery, a woman of substance if there ever was one, does too):

Porc-epic

Porky Pig

On Seeing More Than One Knows

2006-12-01T17:24:00.000-05:00

For various reasons, I’ve been thinking a lot over the last few years about the difficulty of audiences coming to the theatre prepared to see only what they know already, when all the time what one really wants, if one is serious about making theatre, is to get them to see something which they have never, up to that point, properly considered. This is, I suppose, a problem which confronts every artist of every type to some degree; but I suspect that the problem is tougher for makers of theatre because, being engaged in an ephemeral art-form, and usually requiring, for financial reasons, an audience of some size, theatrical practitioners have to worry more about being immediately apprehensible. It is perhaps easier, in these terms, to be innovative in the sense of providing a startling spectacle of some kind than it is to encourage people to see and ponder an idea which is truly new to them.

Perhaps the most dismal circumstances in which one may encounter this disinclination to see anything other than what one already knows is at the hands of a reviewer. The main job of theatre critics is (or should be) to foster the intellectual climate into which the work enters, and if there is an implicit suggestion that one needn’t disturb one’s preconceptions any more upon entering a theatre than one does in lazily allowing the most conventional sit-com to drift across one’s television screen, then the public discourse remains flat and arid; the theatre-makers are dropping their seed upon stony ground.

I think we (everybody who cares about theatre) need to look for more ways to stimulate public discourse, to insist that theatre matters. In short, I suppose I want more people to share my carping dissatisfaction with productions that are made merely to please the makers’ egos or to pleasantly divert the audience from the tedium of real life. To be sure, those aspects always have to factor into the work, but it would be nice for people to at least want, if not to expect, more. I can think of nothing quite so depressing as that feeling I have when leaving a dully conceived, unimaginatively written, ploddingly directed and indifferently performed production, and I realize that I am in the company of people who are actually incapable of having even wished for something better. All creativity begins, I suppose, with the observation: “this could be better.” And having people leave the theatre thinking creatively is what the art form is all about, isn’t it?

The Master Builder 2

2006-11-30T09:02:00.000-05:00

One of our young readers writes to ask: "do you really think that as we master building we can't help but build masters? Are you scared of your computer and the robotic vacuum cleaner? And what DO you think is our central obligation to life?"

Actually, I didn't mean mastering building / building masters in a Sorcerer's-apprentice-runaway-technology sort of way, which I think is basically over-simplified sci fi paranoia. What I meant was that the vast extension of our reach through various achievements---technological and otherwise---leaves us, as a race, more dependent on the co-ordination provided by leaders than ever. And, in the vast abyss of ignorance which is the collective sum of the awareness of the masses, this all too often leads to various sorts of appalling idol worship or to an arrogant but ignorant insistence that one needs no master but oneself. But this latter sentiment is always an illusion, because what is the self, torn free of all of its influences and context? One is always led my somebody or some idea; what’s imperative is to choose well. As Bob Dylan says, "you gotta serve somebody."

As for central obligations, I think Ibsen’s right that they have to do with honouring the sort of person one believes it is best to be, but with the caveat that this must embrace the fullest manageable respect for the full continuum of life. In short, as much as Nietzsche may have been right to mock the tyranny of insipid mediocrity inherent in the emphasis on meek conformity to bourgeois morality, one's choice instead to assert oneself ought to be made with cognisance of and respect for all the many others whom one may effect. As we can see, to merely assert one's strength in pursuit of one's own satisfaction results, for instance, in leaving succeeding generations at the brink of ecological collapse.

The Master Builder

2006-11-29T14:07:00.000-05:00

The Theatre Kingston production of Ibsen's The Master Builder, which I directed from a script that I had adapted fairly heavily---not only modernizing the text, but condensing it and even changing the story somewhat, particularly in the third act---opened last week, and I am extremely satisfied with it. However, I have my doubts that what I saw in the play is readily evident to everyone who sees the production. That's fine, really, in that a work of art can remain somewhat baffling and still be fascinating. But, at the same time, I don't have any aversion whatsover to the idea of explaining my work---although I prefer to do so once I have already finished directing, which is my way, really, of discovering what I REALLY think about a play. So here's my attempt to explain what I've done with The Master Builder, starting with the director's notes I wrote for the program:

Director’s Notes:
"2006 is the centenary of the death of Henrik Ibsen, the playwright who arguably exerted more influence on the nature of modern drama than any other. Ibsen had an instinct for finding the dramatic qualities inherent in all those questions that lie at the core of what it means to be a fully-realized human being in the modern world. He bluntly asked such questions most notoriously in his so-called "social problem plays," such as A Doll’s House, Ghosts and An Enemy of the People. But, beyond all such questions about issues such as, respectively, equity in relations between the sexes, the effect of corrupt patrimony hypocritically wrapped in public respectability, or the readiness of many people to sacrifice the common weal to selfish interests, lay one very basic sort of question: having considered all the circumstances in which we find ourselves in the modern world, what sort of people do we now want to be?

In his late plays, including The Master Builder, John Gabriel Borkman, Little Eyolf and When We Dead Awaken, Ibsen turned toward the spiritual dimensions of this question. In particular, he was absorbed by the difficulty of how, having achieved greatness of a kind in an agnostic world where traditional spiritual guidance inevitably seems so ineffectual, one is able to avoid the corrosive effect of self-delusion. In treating such a complex problem using relatively simple artistic means, Ibsen’s last plays invite comparison with Shakespeare’s late Romances or with Beethoven’s late string quartets.

But, as one as always does in Ibsen, one also encounters echoes of some of the great thinkers who shaped the twentieth century—sometimes Charles Darwin, for example, or Karl Marx, and especially Sigmund Freud. And in the case of The Master Builder, one finds particularly vivid reminders of Friedrich Nietzsche, Ibsen’s contemporary, who taught the Twentieth Century that "Life simply is will to power," arguing that human nature has always directed us to dominate and to reshape the world to fit our own preferences, and that our central obligation to life is therefore to assert our personal strength to the fullest degree possible. Looking back over more than a hundred years, haunted as we are by memories of some who felt they knew just what Nietzsche meant and who tried to act on it accordingly—and I’m thinking of all those many ideologues, with the architects of the Third Reich only providing the central tragic example—it is easy to see in The Master Builder a parable of the twentieth-century human being. For, as we continue to master building—in this or in that sense—we inexorably find ourselves involved in the process of building masters, and it is here that we will discover the continuing relevance of the story of Halvard Solness and Hilda Wangel."

And here's a section taken from an email I wrote to a friend who had asked me a question about the production:

"My sense of what I was doing with Hilda---and whether, for most viewers, I have actually succeeded in doing this or not is another matter, of course---had to do with my thinking about what the various young women said to have been involved in Ibsen's real life as he entered late middle age had done for or to him----at least, according to his imagination, and as distilled into the character of Hilda Wangel. Now, I had not STARTED with the biography, of course, I had started with the play. But reading the biography, contrary to the expectation that it would make Hilda seem more real if I had a sense of the real life model, only reaffirmed my initial response to the character. My feeling was that Hilda's operations as a free agent in the play were much less important than the specific ways in which she was operating as a resonator of thoughts and desires already within Solness: a point that is made repeatedly in Ibsen's script. Furthermore, I felt that the character was a little on the thin side: not so much embodying the convincing illusion of an autonomous human being (as we see, for example, in Hedda Gabler and Nora Helmer), but merely an IDEA of a young woman as seen by a middle-aged man. I was intrigued by the ambiguity that seemed to be latent in the work as to whether this "middle-aged man" was always just Ibsen (i.e., an indication of the limits of his imagination with regard to young women at the particular moment of writing this play---in other words, the ways in which the young women with whom he was involved were stirring but ultimately enigmatic to him---which, frankly, seen in this light would be a weakness in the play), or often Solness himself, as suggested by numerous enigmatic lines and reinforced by the long duologues between the two characters that stand at the heart of the play (seen by this light, not a weakness, but a central idea in the play). Basically, I decided to take that latent ambiguity and bring it right up to the surface, so that the question of whether Hilda had ANY identity independent of Solness's imagination was implicitly posed.

Odd, in a way that people should find this so disturbing (and in saying this, I hasten to add that it disturbs me fairly deeply myself, which is precisely why I was determined to experiment with it), because, after all, it would not bother us to hear it asserted that Hilda had no existence independent of Ibsen's imagination, would it? That would seem the natural way of things: fundamentally, a play's charaters are all phantasms of the playwright's imagination; much as the characters who appear in our dreams are----whoever they may resemble---ultimately phantasms of our own minds. At any rate, I had decided to make the play much more a play of the mind, a psychomachia like the medieval play Everyman if you like, but with a hint of expressionism; and if one does this by stripping away almost everything that does not pertain directly to Solness, one ends up with something much like the structure of my adaptation (Aline Solness's dolls, for example, being one casualty).

I furthered this by never letting the play emerge from Solness's office, so that it becomes less about Solness's emergence into the outer world---office to sitting room to outdoor garden----than the struggle and gradual failure of others to exert an influence on Solness: Brovik, then Kaia, then Herdal, then Aline, and finally Ragnar---with Hilda, a sort of exception in Ibsen's hands, being no exception at all in mine, because it's not clear that in putting himself into his own hands he is doing any more than choosing to surrender all his loyalties to his anima or his shadow self or whatever you want to call it. I find all sorts of support for this shift within the play itself---perhaps chiefly in the idea that Solness moves from building churches (monuments to an external guiding presence) to homes (the humanist shift to emphasis on the human scale) to the awkward compromise of his own home with its own church tower (a monument to himself alone) to "castles in the air"---surely a repudiation of all the external world. And given that it is Hilda who abets him on this journey into his inner core, it is fitting that she seem to play a role like that Wisdom does to Everyman: the guide and (nearly in the case of Wisdom) final companion on his journey to his ultimate destination.

The crucial difference with the journey of Everyman, of course, is that I see Solness's journey as a probably demonic one---a perspective that I am quite sure I share with Ibsen; if I am wrong about this, I am wrong about everything in the play and probably much of the rest of Ibsen's work. I think that Ibsen foresaw Nietzscheanism, one of the central lines of thought in late humanism (should we call it post humanism? comprising both modernism and postmodernism?) as a potentially dangerous force when in the grip of already egoistic, paranoid and self-deluded minds (and the mind of each of us can be at least a LITTLE like that at times). As I suggest in my notes, I think that twentieth-century history tragically proved him right."

Well, I guess it's pretty obvious that I'm an academic.

On the Name of the Blog

2006-11-29T13:58:00.001-05:00

"From this expedition [in 1609] Champlain learned much regarding the geography of eastern North America, and he brought back with him to France, to present to King Henry IV...a girdle of porcupine quills made from the Canadian porcupine..."

—From Pioneers in Canada by Sir Harry Johnston (1912)

I am irresistably attracted to the peculiarity of this image of a porcupine girdle. Now, what is probably being described is a sort of belt in which porcupine quills were woven decoratively, but it would still have been an odd item to see in 17th-century France. I guess what I like most is the suggestion of something strange and somewhat enigmatic brought from Canada to the rest of the world.

In some ways, I regard this as a natural sequel to the metaphor that I used for the title of my first book, The Buried Astrolabe: Canadian Dramatic Imagination and Western Tradition (McGill-Queen's UP, 2001), which was based on an astrolabe which the explorer Samuel de Champlain allegedly (though there was an article in The Beaver not long ago which disputed the notion that the astrolabe was Champlain's) lost in 1613 during a portage, and which was only discovered buried in a farmer's field in 1867. If I write another book on Canadian drama----and I've been thinking about it---it may well be called The Porcupine Girdle. How's that for perversity.