GRABBINGSAND

In May of 2001, I directed my first show outside of college. That’s a gap of seven years, if you want the math. Well, let’s call it six and a half. My last directing gig at Berry was a restaging of The Actor’s Nightmare during my graduating semester, a play I’d put on the previous spring.

In 2001, I directed Romeo & Juliet for Theatre Noble. Or Noble Theatre. It depended on who you asked, really. Much like North Fulton Drama Club does now, most of Noble’s performances were staged outdoors. Just where these outdoors were varied from show to show. Their first Shakespearean foray was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, staged on the square in Roswell. I was not involved, but from what I recall, their biggest complaint was the tremendous amount of noice from the busy highways running along two sides of the square. In the fall of 2000, they took on Hamlet. I was cast twice in that production, both as the Ghost of Hamlet’s father and his nemesis, Claudius. That one took place at old Mill Park, still near Roswell Square, but down a sidestreet and away. Hans Meyer, who had directed me earlier that year in GSU’s production of Stephen Dietz’s Dracula, had the title role.

That next spring, I was given the directorial reins to Romeo & Juliet. Most of them, anyway. Exact titles aside, I took the production to heart and saw it through. Hans was Romeo, another title role. Our Juliet was perhaps a little shy, but that worked more often than it didn’t. The always excellent Zip Rampy was Romeo’s father, though in retrospect, I think he would’ve been better suited for Juliet’s papa.

For the most part, I saw the performances I wanted to see, found the emotions I wished to uncover. The stumbling blocks were lessons I’ve never forgotten. Little things. Never let an audition fool you into a false sense of ability. Anyone can get one thing so right, only to let everything else fall far short. Stick to your ideals as much as is reasonable, but be ready to compromise without taking the change personally. Also, keep an eye out for the health and safety of your actors. Stage combat is great, so long as it doesn’t leave an actor with a painful limp or worse.

The other day, during another of our preparatory house-cleaning/house-clearing sessions — we’ve new carpet arriving in a week or so — I found a pair of CD-Rs. The cue-to-cue music and preshow music from Romeo & Juliet. Without hesitation, I set those aside to import. I remembered most of what I put into the preshow, but not everything, so I knew the rediscovery would be worthwhile.

What I found after a first re-listen was that I was still mostly satisfied with the choices I made. Pre-show music serves a few purposes. Practically, if you start a set of songs at a given time before curtain, then each progressive track is a kind of countdown. “Five songs to go.” With any luck, the preshow will serve to ease the audience’s bodies into their seats (physically) and their minds into the emotional space you’re hoping to create. Big philosophical talk, I know, but I do believe it works.

The pre-show for Romeo & Juliet is basically a mixtape. From Romeo to Juliet? Maybe. Maybe the other way around. There’s a lot of hope and longing going on here, tempered with a wry sense of humor. Otherwise, I would’ve never opened the set with Travis’s take on a Britney Spears tune. The practical charm of “Frank Mills” (from the musical, Hair) has always slain me, particularly the way that Shelley Plimpton sings it. It’s “Loss Cat” for lost love and I adore it. “It’s Not The Spotlight” is very Juliet, at least how I read the girl. From there, we roll on to Cat Power, Cowboy Junkies and Tori Amos doing a triple-set of covers. That all three original songs were established by male singers is no accident. “I’m On Fire” remains my favorite of the set.

At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet
and a freight train running through the
middle of my head

If that ain’t love … the kind that distracts with impunity and ignores reason entirely.

I’ll let you make your own decisions and assumptions about the rest of the set. Music does nobody any good unheard, so I’ve uploaded the pre-show as a mix. Feel free to take it and give it a listen. The playlist is as follows:

1. “Baby Hit Me One More Time” - Travis
2. “Frank Mills” - Shelley Plimpton
3. “It’s Not The Spotlight” - Beth Orton
4. “Satisfaction” - Cat Power
5. “Sweet Jane” - Cowboy Junkies
6. “I’m On Fire” - Tori Amos
7. “So This Is Goodbye” - Stina Nordenstam
8. “Here There and Everywhere” - Emmylou Harris
9. “Seeing Other People” - Belle & Sebastian
10. “Love Is Blindness” - Cassandra Wilson
11. “Willing To Wait” - Sebadoh
12. “You Had Time” - Ani Difranco
13. “The Stars Will Steer Me” - The Prayer Boat

Download: Romeo & Juliet Pre-Show Mixtape Thing

I’m trying a new upload service thing. If the link gives you any troubles, just let me know. Otherwise, download, listen and let me know what you think.

One More Thing: If one slightly romanti-tragical mix is not enough for you, Beth at A Cup Of Coffey has a metric tonne of melodic heartbreak on tap this morning.

This is a recycled post. Or maybe a composted post. You decide.

Off and on, I’ve been commenting on Phil Kloer’s book blog on the AJC. Honestly, it is the first AJC blog that didn’t leave me blind from involuntary eye-rolling. And Phil is a decent fellow besides. He interviewed me (via phone) a few years back when the blog phenomenon was still in its infancy. 2001, maybe? I was on LiveJournal then, not even my own domain, much less a blog like now. Phil’s resulting article focused on some of the more soap opera-esque machinations of LJ interactions, so my contributions were left on the cutting room floor. Thankfully.

Phil’s book blog has hit on the topic of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series more than once. With the impending movie, this is to be expected. Also to be expected are the very violent reactions that the books engender with a certain segment of society. I’ve met these reactions where I could, but I think it is time to consolidate those thoughts into a single post. Here goes …

The Pullman trilogy is incredibly well-written and life-affirming, provided one approaches the books with an open mind. I was raised in the Methodist church, and I found nothing in these works of fiction that threatened my faith.

Many, many people and collectives will cry foul about the upcoming movie, just as they’ve complained about the books, but we must not forget that the world of His Dark Materials is not ours. Pullman makes this perfectly clear by providing the reader with an Oxford that seems familiar, but only just.

In his world, electricity is replaced with something called aether, a kind of “magic on-tap.” Texas is its own country, not a state in our Union. And the frozen north is ruled by armored, talking polar bears. And so, it is only reasonable to consider that the Heaven of Pullman’s fiction (and the angels that have siezed control of it) is not the Heaven of our Sunday morning sermons here in the real human world. This is a great leap of perception, I know, but these leaps are necessary to enjoy most any good work of fiction.

Or is it? After all, we’re all well aware that tornadoes in Kansas rarely serve as effective transportation to anywhere, much less the land of Oz. And when Captains Kirk, Picard and Janeway all consider fondly their days at Starfleet Academy in San Francisco some centuries from now, should we go ahead and purchase property along the Bay for the financial well-being of our children’s children’s children? Government contracts can be sweet, so United Federation of Planets contracts must be unimaginably profitable, eh?

The realities of fiction are not our own. Why must so many of us be reminded of this?

Now, does Pullman take issue with organized religion in the modern world? Yes, he does. And his fiction is affected by this, of course. Authors write what they know. But the focus of this series of books is not so much the good or bad points of religion, but the resourcefulness of his incredibly human protagonists in a very dangerous (imagined) reality. For comparison, Harry Potter in his first book was nowhere nearly as complex a character as Lyra Belacqua is on the first page of The Golden Compass.

(Dearest Potterphiles … and you know who you are … you’ve got to admit that the Potter books were missing a certain level of risk and menace until Cedric Diggory met his fate in Goblet Of Fire. After that, the stakes were much higher and Harry got a hell of a lot more interesting.)

It seems like we’re surrounded by Dons Quixote, all swinging thier lances around for one more run against yet another windmill. And so, you get the forwarded emails telling parents to steer their impressionable children away from Golden Compass like it was a beehive on fire. You get invitations from Facebook groups centered around the boycotting of Golden Compass, like I received today. Why? Because the film pushes The Atheist Agenda! Actually, as we get closer to the film’s release and as it becomes more and more apparent that director Chris Wietz has toned down to a low murmur the more overt questioning of religion found in Pullman’s books, the accusations are changing in tone to match. Now, the film is hiding its origins in pushing The Atheist Agenda.

So what can anyone do? Educate where you can. Enlighten when possible. And think for yourself. But if these helpful tips fall on deaf ears, just let it go. If people wish to reach for the hall closet and get up in arms over the spiritual goings on in a fictional world, then let them do so. If these crusaders of righteousness have done all they can to relieve the suffering in their community, to feed the hungry, to cure the sick and to clothe the naked, then I would imagine that they have plenty of free time set aside to swing a sword or two at an imaginary foe.

If the naysayers would only read the book, then perhaps they wouldn’t fear what they don’t understand. And more than that, shouldn’t “read the book” be the rule of behavior for any piece of entertainment that a parent chooses to place before their children? Change the subject and verb. Listen to the music. Watch the movie. Play the game.

Rather than being up in arms about something that might or might not harm your child — the threat of which has been manufactured for you by others — why not take the time to find out for yourself if the book / song / game is really bad. If you read for yourself and decide against it, well, then at least you’ve made an informed decision, instead of adopting a position foisted upon you by someone else. Someone else, for that matter, who isn’t in charge of raising your child.

So what do you think? Has my appreciation for a really good story blinded me from seeing the evil between the pages?

Update, Now With Further Reading:

God In The Dust, article in The Boston Globe by Donna Freitas, a Catholic theologian.

“The book’s concept of God, in fact, is what makes Pullman’s work so threatening. His trilogy is not filled with attacks on Christianity, but with attacks on authorities who claim access to one true interpretation of a religion. Pullman’s work is filled with the feminist and liberation strands of Catholic theology that have sustained my own faith, and which threaten the power structure of the church. Pullman’s work is not anti-Christian, but anti-orthodox.”

An interesting conversation between Philip Pullman and Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury

“What you learn, I think, after absorbing a really serious piece of fiction, is not a message. Your world has expanded, your world has enlarged at the end of it, and the more a writer focuses on message, the less expansion there’ll be. I think that’s why sometimes the most successful, “Christian” fiction is written by people who are not trying hard to be Christian about it.” (Dr Williams)

‘A near-miraculous triumph’ - Dr Williams contribution to The Guardian upon seeing the stage adaptation in 2004

“I read the books and the plays as a sort of thought experiment: this is, after all, an alternative world, or set of worlds. What would the Church look like, what would it inevitably be, if it believed only in a God who could be rendered powerless and killed, and needed unceasing protection? It would be a desperate, repressive tyranny.”

Tony did it. Rusty did it. Amber did it. So here’s some selections from last months search strings, along with a few explanations or comments along the way.

• low country shrimp and grits
• hampton bay replacement parts - Tons of strings much like this one. Maybe 60% of them.
• nina simone
• edward gorey
• jaan pehechaan ho translation
• home haircut
• aquaman drawings
• prince and the revolution photos
• i make a goddamn difference what about you
• 10 baby aliens - Followed, I guess, by nine ladies dancing?
• dan fogelberg
• neverwhere door
• there is no shame in being silent if you have nothing to say
• feel no shame for what you are
• life in every breath
• we need no priests to talk to god no phone to call her
• american mcgee’s alice game
• fred thompson jacqueline salinas - I keep waiting for this search string to bite D.A. Arthur Branch in the ass.
• life is finite
• i like to shop at the walmart i feel no shame
• do you see the rainbows in your dreams??
• gwinnett water phone number
• fulton county water ban
• belive in or not iam walking on air
• most folks call them green onions but they’re really scallions
• turn in water ban violators forsyth county
• how to unscrew flush mount dome light
• jaws not my scene and i don’t like star wars
• halloween went as a girl - No. Not I. Went as Superman once. And another time as “backwards clothes guy.” Seemed like an inspired choice at the time.
• who was supposed to play 1978 spiderman
• television were watching them
• pop music in england
• senator organa
• sayswap sucks - Indeed.
• rubber stamp johns creek
• coke zero damage brain
• jewel staite nude - Wha … ? Sorry to disappoint, searcher.

Somehow, each of these successfully directed some interested soul to this blog. It boggles the mind.

I made an Instructable.

That is all.

(Unless, of course, you use said Instructable. If so, then I will have to ask for a certain percentage of your end result.)

Person 1: Hey.
Person 2: Hey, how’ve you been?
Person 1: I’m great. Just finished reading a great book on my Kindle. You ought to read it sometime.
Person 2: Oh? Cool. Can I borrow it?
Person 1: Yeah. About that … I can’t.
Person 2: Can’t what? Can’t let me borrow the awesome book?
Person 1: No. Jeff won’t let me.
Person 2: … Who’s Jeff?

Jeff Bezos steps out from behind a nearby ficus.

Jeff Bezos: Hi! I’m Jeff Bezos.
Person 1: Hey … Jeff.
Person 2: You’re Jeff? And you won’t let him let me borrow the awesome book?
Jeff Bezos: You can’t borrow the awesome book because your friend promised me that he wouldn’t let you borrow the book, no matter how awesome. Says so right in the terms and conditions. He can’t let you borrow it.
Person 2: Maybe I’ll just buy it from him. Or just owe him a beer later or something.
Jeff Bezos: That’s good. But no, you can’t buy it, not even with beer.
Person 1: Hey, what if I just read it to him. Out loud. You know, like an old radio drama or something.
Person 2: That’d be cool.
Jeff Bezos: It would be cool, if it were possible, but it’s not, so it’s just not cool at all.
Person 1: Oh.
Person 2: Oh.
Jeff Bezos: Glad I could clear that up. See you around.

Jeff Bezos steps back behind another ficus.

Person 1: See what I mean?
Person 2: Yeah. Hey, maybe you could just leave your Kindle at my place accidentally, you know? That way, I wouldn’t really be borrowing it.
Person 1: Huh. That might work. I’ll just leave myself logged in and forget to …

Jeff Bezos drops from the branches of a nearby banyan tree.

Jeff Bezos: Hi. I’m still Jeff Bezos.
Person 1: Hi, Jeff.
Person 2: Hi, Jeff.
Jeff Bezos: Yeah. The accidentally-leaving-your-Kindle idea? Can’t go for that one either. One of you would circumventing our security and the other would be encouraging the aforementioned circumventing.
Person 1: Circumventing. That’s bad, right?
Jeff Bezos: Very much so.

With a wink and a raised eyebrow, Jeff Bezos drops a smoke bomb and disappears like a ninja.

Person 2: :cough: Well. :cough: Look, I don’t want to make Jeff mad again.
Person 1: Me neither. It is a good book, though.
Person 2: I’m sure. I’ll just go buy my own copy of the awesome book.
Person 1: You sure about that?
Person 2: Yeah. Thanks, anyway.

And in the shadows, Jeff Bezos smiles.

(Inspired in no small part by this post at Dive Into Mark.)

1. “Pressure Suit” - Aqualung
2. “Peachtree Street” - Spirit Of Atlanta - You’ve never heard of them, most likely. This is homegrown (mostly) instrumental funk from 1973 on the Buddah Records label. Relatively rare if you don’t know where to look.
3. “Cakes (Instrumental)” - Marvin Gaye - Unreleased from the Let’s Get It On sessions.
4. “P.D.A” - John Legend
5. “Death Trip” - Iggy and The Stooges
6. “Montreux’s Theme” - Yes - Unreleased instrumental from the Going For The One sessions.
7. “State Of Things” - Turin Brakes
8. “To Each His Own” - Lyn Collins
9. “Forever Heavy” - Black Moth Super Rainbow - I’d never heard of them either, but they were included in a set of 40 free up-and-coming tracks offered by Rolling Stone through iTunes
10. “Faxed Invitation” - Underworld
11. “I Need Your Lovin’” - The Temptations
12. “Red Rover” - Lindsay Buckingham - From The Gift Of Screws, an album that doesn’t officially exist.
13. “Notice Of Eviction” - Saul Williams
14. “Hospital Lady” - Loudon Wainwright III - Yes, Rufus’s dad.
15. “Money” - Jesca Hoop
16. “Cracked Actor” - David Bowie
17. “Nineteen Ought Foor” - J Roddy Walston And The Business
18. “Voices Inside (Everything Is Everything)” - Donny Hathaway
19. “Don’t Stop Me Now” - Queen
20. “It Ain’t No Use” - Stevie Wonder

Post Rapture Journal - Page 1, originally uploaded by grabbingsand.

Spent some quality time in the garage today, deciding what was treasure to keep or junk to toss. I threw away so much. Lots of old letters, particularly. If I haven’t read them or re-read them in over five years, then why not let them go? But among the keep-worthy material was this gem … The Post Rapture Journal.

It is a four-page newspaper. It is meant to be an account of life on Earth right after the Rapture. In this interpretation, the faithful have not been swept into the air, but nave been simply disappeared, leaving the not-as-faithful to deal with the apocalyptic consequences. In a way, it works a lot like the Left Behind series does today. “Get your act together now!”

This belonged to my grandmother. I’m not entirely sure of its age, but I would guess that it is from the late 40s (based on the cars, mostly). On the last page, we’re told that additional copies can be acquired by writing John A. Leland at post office box in Jacksonville, Florida.

The only online mention I’ve found is a sermon account by Thomas A. Roan of First Congregational Church, West Tisbury, Massachusetts:

While I was in seminary, one of the adjunct faculty showed me a newspaper he had received as a sixth grader in Lexington, Virginia. It was entitled the Post Rapture Journal. This was a paper, which contained pictures, and articles about what it would be like after all of the good and righteous people were taken to heaven. One picture showed a young couple with tears in their eyes as they stood over a crib with nothing in it except a small child’s bedclothes. Their baby had been taken to heaven and they had not. Another pictured showed a man in bed and his wife was missing. She had been raptured and he had not. Finally, one picture showed a 12-car pileup on the interstate because all of the drivers had been whisked away to heaven. The professor had received this paper as he walked home from school and someone was handing them out. He told me that when the next Sunday came, and the minister asked if there was anyone who wished to accept Jesus into their hearts by the power of the Holy Spirit, he ran down the aisle as fast as he could and accepted Jesus into his heart with tears in his eyes.*

I was maybe eight years old when I found this in my grandmother’s closet. (I was a very nosey kid.) My mother didn’t want me to read it, afraid as she was that it might frighten me. And I suppose it did at the time. It wasn’t until later that I came to realize how little emphasis the methodist church would put on doom-saying. As a consequence, I’ve just never been a fan of end-time prophecy.

Eleven months ago, I posted about how so many mainstream authors were stepping into the comic book arena. In particular, the post was all about how Jodi Picoult was stepping in to write for DC’s Wonder Woman. Well, a few months later, we saw how big of an out-of-character trainwreck that turned out to be. Just goes to show that rankings on the bestseller lists have little to no bearing on how good that author will be when brought into a medium they don’t really understand, to write stories for a character they fail to comprehend.

Well, just in time for the holiday season, DC Comics has compiled the issues from Picoult’s run into an inevitable graphic novel. This is expected. What is surprising, however, is the cover. Picoult’s novels have a particular look and feel, right down to the modified Book Antiqua font used for her name. The graphic novel is following the same style guide, meaning that Picoult’s name is given more real estate than the comic’s title. Here’s how The Comics Reporter assessed the situation:

It’s nice that they put author Jodi Picoult’s name in larger type than the superhero she wrote in the comics collected into Wonder Woman: Love and Murder; what she really deserves is an apology. In the comic book version of a weird casting moment when someone is given a television or movie showcase that seems to outright work against the skill-set of the potential star, Picoult’s suggested ability with banter and wordplay is asked to brighten up what feels like an arbitrary, continuity-heavy re-launch, which is almost immediately dragged into an even more laborious and poorly conceived, continuity super-heavy plot …

Fixing the cover seems to be a simple enough task, so I’ve done so. Here you go, DC. (more…)

“Rain is rain, brother. It comes from the sky. It’s a wetness known as water - aqua pura. Mammals drink it. Fish swim in it. Little boys wade in it. And the birds flap their wings and sing like sunrise. Water! I recommend it.”

- from The Rainmaker (1956)

If Governor Perdue’s new rain policy fails, perhaps he has Burt Lancaster’s ghost on speed-dial.

(Come to think of it, it would be so awesome to have Burt on speed-dial. And Steve McQueen. No problem would be lacking a solution with those two on the case, even in non-corporeal form!)

I’ve a tendency not to close my old posts. The way I see it, if someone finds something worth leaving a comment, then the age of the post really doesn’t matter. The nice reward for this is when I’m not only reminded of older topics, but inspired to do a newer post on the same or similar subject.

And so, when a reader named Sarah left a comment on a post from last August, I took it as a bit of a challenge. Obviously, she’s yet another fan of that fabulous slice of Bollywood awesome known to some as “Jaan Pehechaan Ho” (from the Indian horror-musical (?), Gumnaan) and known to most as the hyper-kinetic movie clip that inspires Thora Birch to cut loose during the opening credits of Ghost World. But specifically, she was wanting to know the rest of the lyrics. In English. Hmm.

The title of the original post was all I knew of the translation. “If I knew you, living would be easy.” But what comes after? (more…)