History Re-visited and Re-viewed (1)

Reading a new book: James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (1995). I won't go through all the arguments, but, basically, he demonstrates the 'America as Hero' spin put on almost every event in our history. I don't know what he will eventually label as the 'cause' of this phenomenon because I haven't finished the book. He looks at the bits left out. Helen Keller became, later in life, a radical socialist. Woodrow Wilson not only guided us through WWI, but leads all presidents in foreign interventions (mostly in the Western Hemisphere) and resegregated the government back to pre-Civil War levels.
He asks: why is all of this white-washed (literally, in the chapters on racism) out of the curriculum? Can't high school students handle the truth (to fudge a quote from Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men)? What kind of citizenry are we trying to create? Why must college history professors spend whole sections of classes 'un-teaching' the lessons of high school?
Loewen also quotes Anais Nin: "We see things not as they are but as we are." As a historian, I think this is true. It gets me thinking about the filters and lenses that we accumulate over our lifetimes. High school is certainly one source.
Why do I have friends who seem to start with the assumption that the world is good and joyful, but I have a much more negative and fearful approach to the world I see? The question arises: are they seeing the same world as I am? The answer is: yes and no. They get the same data, but play it through more forgiving and more positive lenses. Intellectually and emotionally, it seems that we are what we eat. If I play my world through a dark lens, then dark nourishment and dark reactions are not surprising.
So, how can we (I) trade in these lenses for something more pleasant but still truthful? Tricky business, this rearranging world-views.
Recent viewings: Stevie, a play by Hugh Whitmore. Euridice, a play by Sarah Ruhl. Dexter, Season Two. Dark City. Maybe that tells more about my filters and choices than the rest of this entry.
That's enough for now. More soon(er).

Prophets and Money-Management

[Yes, I love puns. Sorry.] My main concerns today can best be expressed in two questions:

1. Is it EVER a good idea to loan family members money?
2. What will I say about Old Testament and Modern Prophets on Saturday morning to a Church group?

First, those of you who know me know that I am usually pretty cryptic (or just plain disdainful) about my youth. I make no secret that my father ran the family into the ground financially and emotionally with a series of bad decisions and bad behaviors. Into that authority-void, I stepped as a 15-year-old with a part-time job and a solvent bank account. I worked. I paid a lot of the bills. I tried to be the parent. And, when I got the chance to go to college (on scholarship and a lot of loans), I jumped at the chance and essentially ran away from home to get an education.

I have been running ever since.

Today, my brother, whom I love and worry about, has teleported me back 25 years, by asking me for a loan. His need is real, but my eagerness to remain untethered financially to the family I stopped saving years ago is strong. Can this turn out well? Someone will come out of this resenting someone for something. I hope I am wrong about that. I will probably take a leap of faith and loan him some money.

Second, what can I say to my Church's Men's Group about Prophets three days before the Presidential election? What should I say? What should I NOT say?

Prophets of the Hebrew Bible appear, on the surface, as wholly depressing and grouchy. No doubt. But I have found that they are often trying to slap a sleeping populace out of their stupor and their slavery to whatever idols they have recently created for themselves, and hope to make said populace reassert their relationships with God and each other. Community (big 'C') does not work if we stare nightly only at TV. I believe that our Golden Calf is really a flat-screen made by LG or Samsung. In an analogy I repeat often, if aliens landed on an abandoned planet (perhaps after a surprisingly inclusive Rapture), they would reconstruct our belief structure as the worship of TV and indoor plumbing. The glass/plastic god and the porcelain god.

Are there prophets around us today? Has God gone silent, or are we the numbed and zombie-like masses who can't understand the calls when we hear them? Facebook.com, of which I am a new member, is neither a Face nor a Book.

Question of the day: where are the voices, the original and troubling voices that challenge you and me to get up off the sofa and DO SOMETHING? Prophets are, by my definition, those who tell us truths we don't want to hear. Phrased another way, they do what some sermons used to do for me, which is 'convict' me; they cut into me and make me uncomfortable in my action and inaction. Some prophets speak with conviction, total self-confidence and persuasiveness. Their prophetic voice is only measurable by the discomfort they inspire and the awakening they can sometimes facilitate.

But we have to decide to wake up and not hit the cultural 'snooze' buttons (you pick yours from the myriad choices that modern society has dreamed up). Dreamed up. Interesting that we even talk about actions of our modern culture as if happening in a dream-state. To quote a Kate Bush song from Hounds of Love: "Wake Up! Look who's here to see you."

Collected Thoughts in October 2008

A lot since the last entry... my Augustana College 20th Reunion, the Spooky Trail, but first the promised theatre reviews:

1. The Constant Wife by Somerset Maugham (performed at the Boulevard Theatre, Milwaukee).

Basically a study of marriage dynamics, this play struck me as extremely 'period.' I feel this way usually when there are confrontations and assertions in the text of the play that probably made sense in some other context but are hard to follow in the current day and age. Plot? Man cheats on wife with wife's best friend. Everyone knows except the constant wife (named Constance !?!?!). Constance is finally confronted, only to reveal that she has known all along and had avoided acting like she knew so she could go on with a comfortable existence, since she had resigned herself to the transformation of her marriage from passionate to predictable. All of these twists and turns, complicated by the return of a man who loved Constance before her marriage, leave plenty of space for monologues on the role of women and men and honesty and love and passion and,... well, I think you get it. I liked all of the actors and the tones they struck, but I lost my program, so I can't (and won't) go through each one. In the end, a good performance of a mediocre text.

2. State of the Union by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse (performed by the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre at the Quadracci Powerhouse Theatre, Milwaukee).

Politically pertinent plays performed playfully. The setting is reversed from this historical moment: in 1948, the Republicans are desperate to find someone to help them break the Democratic streak in the White House. They happen upon a charismatic businessman whom they convince to make some preliminary speeches, to test the waters. In front of this backdrop, we encounter the man, his outspoken wife, the cogs in the political machine, his mistress who happens to own a newspaper, and a wide variety of business and labor types.

Lindsay and Crouse, most famous for writing the story for Sound of Music, give us a mostly-subtle love story rather than just bashing us with politics. The Rep actors did an excellent job selling the characters and giving them 'arc' or transformation throughout the action. Those who hate come to tolerate, those who ignore come to notice, those who have lost love manage to find it again. This play, which won a Pulitzer, was made into a film (starring Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn, and Angela Lansbury). I am anxious to see what Frank Capra did with the text and the characters. I hope he did as good a job as the Rep did.

3. Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare (performed by Milwaukee Shakespeare at the Broadway Theatre Center, Milwaukee).

To start at the end, what I really like are 'talk-backs.' I love it when the actors (and perhaps the director) come out after a performance and answer audience questions. Not every question is lit-crit-worthy, but many press the actors to verbalize their (character's?) motivations and their experiences. If I were Emperor of Things, I would make it a rule that every run of every play had to do these more often. This performance happened to have a talk-back, so it automatically starts with a B+. Hey, I'm emperor.

Anyway, this rendition of the play has the novel update of being recast as a 'reality show' in which the King of Navarre and his 3 friends are followed around by a Greek Chorus/Comic Relief group sporting TV cameras and microphones. No text is added to the Shakespeare, though some of the non-main-arc sections are heavily deleted. The result is a loud, hilarious, mostly-accessible version of the play. The disconnect between the Shakespearean language and the TV monitors evaporated for me almost immediately [ah, a victory for my high school English teacher's mantra of 'willing suspension of disbelief']. When the play-within-the-play leaked over into American Idol, I was temporarily irritated, but they recovered nicely. A difficult play was rendered cleverly accessible.

4. I Am My Own Wife by Doug Wright (performed by the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre at the Stiemke Theatre, Milwaukee).

Doug Wright irritates me. I read Quills, and, frankly, didn't like the play. So I went into this production with a chip on my shoulder, prepared to declare my ticket money wasted.

It wasn't.

Doug Wright still irritates me, because he has forced me to reassess, to change my original evaluation - which means, to quote that venerable philosopher, Fonzie, that I was wrrr..., I was wrrrrrr..., I may have been premature in my negative evaluation. This play was excellent, partially because of the real-feeling writing and partially because of Michael Gotch's absolutely virtuoso performance of this one-man play (with over 30 different characters). I was blown away.

Plot: Doug Wright writes himself into this play about how he negotiates the writing of a play about Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, an openly gay transvestite who survived Nazi Germany and the Soviet period of Eastern Germany.

Whoa. Yeah, I know. Amazing. Wright chronicles his evolution from naive admirer to horrified spectator to mature author in relation to the life she led. Life is not as clean and clear as characters and action often appear in plays. Wright's injecting himself as a character can look a bit narcissistic, but this allows for the two layers of action (Charlotte's navigating her life and Wright navigating his research and realizations). Really well-written and well-acted. I am glad that I am forced to give Doug Wright another chance.

More on the other stuff later. Drop me a note or a comment.

Reflections on a New York Vacation

Usually after a vacation, S and I make adjustments to our lives in accordance with something we learned in the experience of the trip. So, what of this one? S had a couple, particularly related to the two halves of the vacation (tennis and food/walking). From the tennis experience, she took away a desire for greater fitness. From the food/walking, she took away a desire for less life-clutter and better food [I am doing her points a horrible injustice by compression and rephrasing, but she can put them in her own Blog]. :-)

As for me, I am contemplating many things.

First, from the tennis experience, I learned that I enjoy experiencing tennis (in this case) in person rather than over the air waves. The TV-ification of sports and all other 'real' events has a couple of effects. On the one hand, it seems like democracy in action - people who can't afford the air fare to New York and the $200+ per day ticket prices can 'experience' the tennis matches on TV. On the other hand, events on TV are controllable, editable, chopped up for commercial breaks, and marketable as media commodities. The 'events' become 'bread-and-circuses' as well as ways to carry us between commercials and highlight products. Consumerism, while pretty rampant AT the events too, is semi-avoidable on the ground. In front of the TV, the marketing is interrupted by the event. At least when you attend the event and spend the money, you know that you are purchasing something. When you are 'watching' an event, it seems free, as long as you accept the commercials. I think the more obvious costs are better than the media-woven version of the event. Also, the 'real event' and the 'media-woven version' are not the same event. When watching a tennis match on the USA network from the hotel room, the experience was entirely different than being in the stands. It is like they are two totally different things. [Note for more on this topic, see Umberto Eco's Travels in Hyperreality - terrific book, that makes you redefine the nature of 'real.' My favorite essay is the one in which he flies from the 'real' Bourbon Street in New Orleans to the Disney version of Bourbon Street at one of the theme parks - and his comments on the experience.]

Second, professional tennis players are crazy fast and amazingly consistent. Without the pressure from the opponent's shots, they could stand out there and hit for hours without making an error. I need that kind of consistency in my game.

Third, fitness. I need to decide to do the hard things and lose some weight. If I could, I would be faster and probably play better.

Fourth, from the museum and food and walking parts of the vacation, I need to limit the number of things I try to do (as in hobbies/sports/activities), and just do a few of them well. In Greenwich Village, there is a tiny store-front cheese maker who makes 3000 lbs. of mozzarella cheese by hand each day. His cheeses are sought out by all of the major restaurants in Manhattan because of their uniqueness, their flavor, and their delicious peculiarity. That's all he and his family do. Make cheese. Make the best cheese in Manhattan. One thing. 50 years. While I don't know if that is the perfect model for me, I think that getting out and being active in a couple of things is better than trying to sift through the dozens of possibilities, waiting for one of them to strike my fancy or jump off the page. I need to decide. I need to commit. To something [leaders in the consideration are: writing, tennis, and joining the board of the Boulevard Theatre]. More than 2 or 3 things, with the addition of work, are more than enough to fill my days and consume my energies and creativity. Commit. That's the next step.

Coming next: critique of (reflections on) deconstruction as a movement or a way of life and reviews of 3 plays that we will be seeing this week. There will probably also be comments on the upcoming election and the notion of Biblically-based social justice. We will see where I end up going...

New York Vacation 2008 (Entry Three)

Saturday:
We tried to spend the remaining time in the morning going to the MOMA, but it did not open until 10:30am, which would have been cutting it awfully close with the airport [or so we thought]. So we walked through yet another street festival. It appears that street festivals in Manhattan on summer weekends feature four types of vendors, repeated endlessly: 1) pashmina dealers, 2) knockoff leather bag dealers, 3) cheap New York souvenir T-shirt dealers, and 4) street food of various ethnic backgrounds (usually Mexican, Greek, and Indian). We were taken on a scenic (?!) taxi ride through Queens on the way to LaGuardia [though I think he did avoid the tolls without costing us much time]. Finally, we ended up on a flight to Kansas City rather than Milwaukee because Midwest 'canceled' the flight because of weather. What they really did was combine two half-full flights to the Midwest and keep the non-stop money they charged the Milwaukeeans. Nice. They could have couched it as a green initiative, kind of like ride-sharing, but then they would have probably had to admit that it was a business decision and refund some money. Heaven forbid!

Friday:
Walked through Central Park up to the Guggenheim, saw art [Louise Bourgeois, Rothko, Pollack, early Kandinski, and Ad Reinhardt [all black paintings]], went to Neue Galerie, saw art [Klimt and Schiele], went to Candle 79, ate art [hand-cut Spinach Pasta with veggies in a peach-cashew cream sauce as well as delicious Whale Tail Pale Ale from Cisco Brewery in Nantucket], went to Met, saw art [oh, boy, huge museum, uh, Rembrants, Picassos, Bracques, Dalis, Renoirs, Sargents [Madame X], Degas [Ballerinas galore], El Greco [including the one of the catholic cardinal that Francis Bacon used as basis for Pope with Sides of Beef], Caravaggios [Juan de Pereja], Greek [most of the marble statues of males with the penises knocked off], Egyptian [an entire transplanted temple that would have been under water because of the Great Aswan Dam], Oceania, African, and the list goes on and on], walked home, fell down. Eventually got back up and went to O'Lunneys for beers and some bar food. The conversation turned to reflecting on the vacation and the lessons (or some might call them 'take-aways') from the vacation [more on this in the next Blog].

Thursday:
Grand Central Station, Greenwich Village, Food Tour led by Rahim, our former NYU student who is going back to chef school and knows WAY too much about food preparation and is absolutely in love with the Village and SoHo opportunities for eating and experiencing food created and prepared in authentic and delicious ways [restaurant highlight was Monte's [must go back] and old and fabulous coffee shop down the street was Cafe Dante], Soho, Kate's Paperie [air-conditioned place to stop and rest the feet and cool the bodies before the next stage of the walk; yes, stages like the Tour de France], Moo Shoes store font [where Sherry wanted to get some Vegan-friendly shoes] was closed, walked up to Angelica Cafe and met Darwin [our cool waiter who seemed particularly fascinated that we have been married for almost 17 years], walked Uptown to see Empire State Building [saw it, felt our pain in the feet, waved at it, and kept walking; caught a glimpse of Famke Janssen], bought beers and Pringles from a deli, watched TV and went to sleep.

Wednesday:
Tennis - Tennis - Tennis. Medina Garrigues and Ruano Pascual versus Spears and Kops-Jones, Pennetta versus Safina, Del Potro versys Murray [saw it mostly on the Jumbotron while eating and trying to stay cool], Navratilova versus Novotna [exhibition, but still fun], Bryans versys Robredo and Roitman [third row at Armstrong - twenty feet away; over pretty quickly, but the Bryans stayed and signed almost anything the kids pushed at them, very cool.], Williams sisters versus each other [Venus played better, but Serena managed to win anyway], Nadal versus Fish [Nadal wore him down, and the match went until 2am]. Came home, hung out the do not disturb, and fell asleep.

Tuesday:
Tennis - Tennis - Tennis. Stosur and Raymond versus Erakovic and Kostanic-Tosic, Gonzalez and Monaco versus Soares and Vemic, Davydenko versus Muller [amazing upset, thought Muller eventually lost to Federer], Bammer and Jankovic [moved to Armstrong]. Went out and had convenient, cheap [by Manhattan standards] pizza and a couple of Heinekens, and came home and went to sleep.

New York Vacation 2008 (Entry Two)

Monday:
Bus to King Center for Day 8 of the US Open. Seats in Arthur
Ashe stadium, but wandered around during the 11 hours of tennis. Saw
Mardy Fish defeat Gael Monfils. Saw Rafael Nadal struggle with Sam
Querrey. Saw Dinara Safina frustrate Anna-Lena Groenfeld. Missed the
Bryan Brothers, but might catch them today. Saw some high-end doubles
on court 11 (a bleachers court), so we were extremely close to that
action. Good fun. Saw both Williams Sisters [both won easily]. And,
finally, saw Andy Murray, the hope of Scotland, beat Stanislas Wawrinka
in a tough match, though the 6-1, 6-3, 6-3 (I think) didn't match the
fight Stan (that's what the crowd called him) put up. During the day,
hung out with Kelly and her dad, Mike. Had fruit smoothies and talked
about their close encounter with Dementieva and Djokovic at Nippon, a
sushi place. During the evening session, sat next to 2 English ladies
(Marina and Linda) and watched Murray; they explained the tension in
the English relationship with Murray, who is outspokenly Scottish, not
British. Ouch!

Sunday:
We got into Manhattan and walked, and walked, and walked. Saw some interesting people in Central Park and along 5th Avenue, as someone had declared it Brazil Pride Day, or some such. Many people sporting their Brazil 'football' jerseys and colors. [Aside: New Yorkers, or the folks who party on the streets of Times Square seem to have be more comfortable with showing skin.] Ate at the Candle Cafe, one of the many vegan restaurant options here on the island. Delicious.

New York Vacation 2008 (Entry One)

So, we aren't really in NY yet [sitting at the airport waiting for departure]. But, I promised some reviews of recent media experiences, so here is the catchup.

Misanthrope at Boulevard Theatre (Bayview):
Mark Bucher adapted the classic Moliere play in at least two ways: 1) moving it to a modern Art Gallery and 2) changing the genders of some of the characters, making most of the love dynamics same-sex. On thing I kind of wish he had changed is the distraction in the dialogue rhyming couplets. I got used to it, but it was distracting at the beginning. David Flores, in the lead, was fabulous. He was bombastic and opinionated and self-righteous and witty. Perfect. The tension of his high-mindedness in the arena of intellect and art contrasted well with his oft-noted inconsistency in terms of emotions and love. Nice tension. Around Flores, the other members of the cast paled a bit, though, again, the wit and kitsch of some of the segments were hilarious [see the over-the-top poetry reading, which only proceeded after an emotional stripping down to red satin dancing trunks]. Enjoyable and a bit edgy. The same sex tension seemed a bit forced in places, but, overall, the play was, hopefully, a portent of things to come from Boulevard.

KT Tunstall concert (Pabst Theatre):
Firecracker. That's all I need to say. KT is a firecracker on stage. Constant motion. Also, I am a sucker for any accent from the British Isles (she's Scottish). There were a couple of new songs, but the bulk of the concert came from her 2 albums "Eye to the Telescope" and "Drastic Fantastic." I have listened to both albums enough to hope that she might have experimented a bit with the arrangements of the songs or maybe stretched herself a bit. [Like Tori Amos covering 'Smells Like Teen Spirit"]. KT clearly has the musical talent to do some of those 'outside the box' kinds of things, but, perhaps, she is still building a fan base. Martha Wainwright, the opening act, took a couple of songs to get warmed up, but got steadily better. Personally, I liked her monologues to the crowd between the songs better than the songs themselves. Martha is hilarious and tells funny stories.

Irish Fest (Maier Festival Grounds):
No Guinness. The music was good and the people looked like they were having a good time, but NO Guinness? I will probably not go again. Sorry, but there are some requirements. Whatever the reasons or explanations, it would be like not allowing black t-shirts at a Harley-Davidson festival. Whatever.

Lars and the Real Girl (film):
Why isn't Ryan Gosling a star yet? Maybe he is. Well, he should be. This film will be avoided by a lot of people because of the one-sentence summary: "Delusional loner comes out of his shell after purchasing a life-sized doll and treating her as if she were alive." I am sure that someone could come up with a better one-sentence summary, but that is the basic. However, the basic does not suffice for this film.

Rather, Lars and the Real Girl is a film about community and family and the healing of damaged people (and aren't we all damaged in some way?). Lars has some deep issues with social interaction, his mother's death, his dead father's sadness, and his sister-in-law's pregnancy. Until Bianca (the Real Girl) appears, Lars will work and go to church, but will not cross the driveway from his garage to have dinner with his brother and her wife. Bianca changes all that, and initiates some hilarious and strange moments along the way (Bianca comes to dinner, Bianca goes to church, Bianca reads to children at the hospital, Bianca gets elected to the School Board). Through all this, Lars's doctor, played by the superb Patricia Clarkson, counsels tolerance and sensitivity, since Lars seems to need Bianca to work through some issues, and ostracism will not help him progress.

That's the message of the movie. That's the deep current that needs to be shouted from the rooftops. What if you or I were 'having an issue' and needed to rely on the unconditional support of our community to get through it? Would we be brave enough to ask? Would our community (assuming that we even have one anymore) be brave enough to offer us the tolerance and sensitivity we might need? What would a world look like if the Larses in our lives could count on us? Am I ready to get past my own needs and selflessly, bravely help someone who really needs help? How can I learn that discipline? How do we encourage that kind of service in the current "ME" environment?

That will get us started. We have tickets to Monday - Wednesday US Open. We hope to see some interesting matches in the round of 16 and the quarter finals. More on that as it happens.