Death Of A Salesman

Philip Seymour Hoffman is only in his mid-forties, but he is playing a formidable Willy Loman in Mike Nichols' fine production of this classic play by Arthur Miller, currently on Broadway. I sat way up in the mezzanine, so if I had not known that Hoffman is on the younger side, I could not have told. He inhabits this magnificent American  loser very convincingly. This is a great role and Hoffman commits to it with his every fiber. He is fierce and doddering, self-delusional, angry, tired, frustrated, funny and complicated. He is very moving. Apparently, Hoffman played the character when he was in high school, he is playing it now, and it will be awesome to see what he does with it when he gets to be Loman's age, about 15 years from now.
I was afraid that the play would be a musty old chestnut, that it may not have aged well. Even though a bit of it feels slightly quaint (less so thanks to the sharp and sprightly direction of Mike Nichols) I was surprised that it is so moving, and so resonant today. This is a play about gigantic losers. About epic, spectacular failure. It goes against the grain of the American mythology of winning. As such, Death of a Salesman fits our age like a glove.
Perhaps in 1949 Arthur Miller was a bit of a killjoy and a kvetch for portraying a tragic vision of the little guy, always striving, always struggling and ultimately losing the battle with expectation and achievement (and taking everybody down with him). Not to mention a deeply accurate portrayal of the cruelties of capitalism, even for upstanding Americans like Mr. Loman. It was the post-war era and America was doing swell. There were big cars and big houses and people made a living. People like Willy Loman were indoctrinated and intoxicated with the possibility of success, material wealth and dreams of endless prosperity.
But now that we have been taken to the cleaners by the rapacious criminals of Wall Street and the spineless government that abets them, we must feel closer to Willy Loman than any audience ever before. He's struggling to pay a mortgage, struggling to pay for appliances, to hold on to his job, alone in the vast wasteland of selfishness and feral competition that is this country. He's full of hot air and not the greatest role model for his two loser kids, and a sexual hypocrite to boot. He is a man of today.
Mike Nichols shepherds this rather clunky play through humor, tenderness, orneriness and real pathos. He has a golden touch with tone. This production is swift and entertaining, and truly devastating: a great American drama (as opposed to some of the stuff I've seen lately, like Other Desert Cities or Seminar, meaningless drama lite). I was moved to tears at certain points. And there were plenty of accompanying sniffles around me.
As an innovation, Nichols uses the set design of the original 1949 production and the original music by Alex North. I agree that there is no point in modernizing this play. It works like a charm as it is. But until I read in the playbill that the set was designed more than 60 years ago (very expressionistic and realistic at the same time), I felt it looked cheesy, given the marvels of sets we are used to in this day and age. But it is a poignant choice and it grew on me, as it enhances the more poetic aspects of the play. The music by Alex North is perfectly suitable, cinematic and tasteful, but in my view, distracting. I could have done without music, which distracts from reality and sometimes competes with the actors' lines. I assume it exists because the action travels back and forth inside the memories of Willy Loman. The play does not heave to the conventions of unity of time and place, and the music and some projections of autumnal leaves aid these flashbacks and give Loman's reveries a dream-like quality.
The cast of splendid actors is uniformly solid: Linda Emond (she made me cry at the end), Bill Camp, John Glover, Finn Whitrock, quite impressive as Happy Loman, Glenn Fleshler, Remy Auberjonois. My biggest and only beef is with Biff, a difficult role, played by Andrew Garfield (The Social Network, and soon Spiderman MCXII). Biff is another major loser, but one who sees the self-delusion in his dad, and one who has seen the truth beneath Willy's crumbling facade of authority, the only one in whom flickers a feeble ray of hope, as he struggles to be his own man and pursue his own way. But this Biff seemed to me too wimpy, too soft in the middle, and sometimes Garfield reached too furiously. I kept wishing Ryan Gosling would materialize on stage. Biff should be more of a formidable antagonist, more of a threat, to that enormous dad of his, but this one doesn't cut the mustard. He is the weak link in a very strong production of a surprisingly good play.

Make Kony Famous?

This 30 minute ramble of a video by Invisible Children is one of the most bizarre things I have ever seen. It made me both cry and cringe. Problem is, I cringed far more than I cried. And I cried.
The good intentions are beyond reproach, as usual. Who doesn't want to bring a monster like Joseph Kony to justice? Or better yet, kill the bastard. Its humongous viral reach is now beyond discussion. But I sat there utterly flummoxed as it unfurled, way too slowly and randomly, over 30 minutes of can-do American pizzazz. It was so gnarly, it captured my attention.
I agree with the video that the internet and social media are capable of giving the public across the world the power to exert pressure for change in an unprecedented way. So far so good. Then there is this ominous voiceover by Impossibly Handsome, Well Meaning, Not a Little Self-Enamored Dude that the next 27 minutes are an experiment and in order for it to work we have to pay attention. Treat me like a 6th grader, but okay, still with you. Next? Footage of the birth of this dude's son. A full minute or more of his cute little coddled son doing cute things, like fake bombing someone's ass with a special effect (they both love to make movies, the film will have you know). A lot of me myself and I and my golden child so far. Then finally, around minute 8, the actual story of Jacob the Ugandan kid. This is the part where you cry and want to give Invisible Children all your money, you want to go into the jungle and kill that motherfucker Kony by the most painful means at your disposal. This is all that was needed.
But then the silliness starts: we are going to stop African warlord Joseph Kony and Dude is going to tell us exactly how to do it: with posters and bracelets and a lot of enthusiastic high school kids asking the US government to militarily aid a foreign army. Hmmm... Oh, and by tweeting Rihanna and Lady Gaga, among other celebrities. Celebrities. Wow. I'm sure this and tweeting policy makers like George Bush and Condi Rice will bring Kony to his knees.
Then, in what I consider the most cringeworthy segment of all, Dude brings out his poor son again (there seems to be a daughter in there somewhere, but she is ignored) and supposedly explains to him about "the bad guy". You can self-aggrandize all you want, but why bring your child into this? It feels staged and willfully naive and is terribly unseemly. After all, you are talking about helping children who live in a nightmare of poverty, war, disease and violence. Get your spoiled kid out of the picture.
That the kid and his dad seem to have almost the same simplistic notions of morality is a little scary and quite telling, albeit unintended, I'm sure.  In the United States we live in a universe comprised of moral absolutes. The rest of the world understands life is a gray area.  But here is the kid talking about the bad guys in Star Wars, and it seems in Dude's worldview there is not much difference between that and a horribly complicated African civil war. The over-simplification of the American "bad guy" ethos is what gets the US in hot water most of the time, after all.
I could not help but notice every time they showed the International Court most wanted list, the second guy after public enemy number one Kony was also an Ugandan. Another Bad Guy. What about him?
The biggest problem is the marketing aspect of the whole thing. It sounds, smells and looks like one of those integrated campaigns that win advertising awards at the Cannes Lions every year. This one is glib, simplistic, banal, self-aggrandizing, willfully naive, tasteless and embarrassingly tone deaf. Don't get me wrong: the Dude has tried to make a difference with great amounts of passion and persistence for 9 years, and his operation is as buff and shiny and beautifully produced as a Hollywood movie. I don't begrudge him his commitment. In fact, I waver between admiration and queasiness, because I am trying to do something similar for a more modest social issue concerning kids (getting Mexican high school students in NYC to finish high school). And I had the same idea, being a creative person, to use creative tools and talent to raise awareness. A lot of what I saw in the IC video is admirable, and worth emulating, but I found most of the creative strategy and execution quite disturbing. More schools and mentors, education and support for Ugandan kids? Awesome. Bring it. Cheerleading the US to interfere with the Ugandan Army? Is that the only option? I'm not so sure.
I thoroughly despise the concept of "make Kony Famous". I find the posters that Shepard Fairey has designed to be so cool as to make desirable the icons of the "bad guys" (Kony, Bin Laden and Hitler, another reductio ad absurdum). Does Fairey have only one visual idea left? It looks just like his Obama poster!
I find the whole thing naive in the worst kind of way. And I'm not even discussing the realpolitik aspect of it, which I barely understand.
Clearly a lot of the money has gone to produce this highly polished piece of work, which is extremely well done, beautifully shot and edited, as is the website for the organization. These guys are communicators, not policy makers. They may have succeeded in bringing attention to the issue, but the fact they are being harshly criticized points to an extremely flawed communications problem.
In short: the campaign makes little sense. The posters of donkeys and elephants merging with a dove with a Kony 2012? Confusing. This might work stateside, but what does the rest of the world care for the GOP and the Dems? It makes it seem like Kony is a third party candidate, an option even worse than Santorum, which until now was inconceivable. Don't be surprised if some yahoos actually think Kony is  running for office. This beside the fact that it is way too American-centric, instead of aiming for a more global reach.
Buried in all that slightly revolting can-do all-together-now spirit is a tagline that makes sense: "the one thing we can all agree on". A global campaign could be built around this idea, beyond our pathetic two-party system. However, it's lost among all the aimless American self-congratulation. The bracelet? Let's not even go there. Tweeting Ryan Seacrest? Barf. And the idea of making this criminal famous? Abhorrent. This is the plan to bring Kony to justice: under cover of night we are going to paper our magnificent cities in posters. Now the entire world will know about Joseph Kony. Is this going to make him come out of the jungle waving a white flag? He is probably relishing the notoriety as we speak. Terrorists love fame. That's how they terrorize. Is this the best way to bring the guy to our attention, let alone the plight of Africa? No. It is the glibbest, the most vulgar, the most unfortunately attuned with our own farkakte, assbackwards American celebutard values, but that doesn't mean it's good.

Other Desert Cities

Due to popular demand (that is, my friend Scott asked), I will tell you what I thought of Jon Robin Baitz's play Other Desert Cities, directed by Joe Mantello and with a stellar cast comprised of Stockard Channing, Judith Light, Stacy Keach, Justin Kirk and Rachel Griffiths.
First thing that takes your breath away is the set by John Lee Beatty. It's the living room of a mid-century home in Palm Springs and it is so perfect in so many ways, that every time my attention flagged I just marveled at the set. The lighting is spectacular too, for there is a high window behind which you can see two palm trees, and the color of the desert sky changes completely accurately from morning to dusk to night. I could write an entire paean about the set decoration, but I don't even know how to call things. However, if you ever perused an Architectural Digest from the seventies, you will immediately recognize the style. Modern, cream colored, trying hard to be tasteful.  A living room that wishes to soothe and to offend no one.
And so it is with this wealthy Republican family, the all-American Wyeths, living their retirement glory days in Palm Springs. Stacy Keach, who is excellent, plays a retired actor who was chums with Ronnie and Nancy Reagan, the astounding Stockard Channing plays his wife Polly, who insists on brandishing a goyish Texas twang even though she's Jewish, the extraordinary Judith Light plays her fucked up ex-alcoholic sister Silda Grauman (both were in showbiz in LA), Justin Kirk (from Weeds) who gets better as the play goes along, plays their son Trip, who produces a reality law show were the judges are celebrities, and Rachel Griffiths plays their daughter Brooke, an unabashed liberal who has fled to the East Coast and written a memoir about a family tragedy that threatens to tear the family apart.
Brooke's role is tough to nail. Baitz wants to confound the expectations of what he knows to be his smugly liberal audience by making Brooke's parents very charming and funny while the daughter is a monster of whining. As played by Griffiths, the one element in the production that is a tragic mistake, Brooke is a pill, and she is so grating and unconvincing, that I almost switched party allegiance on her account. There are American actresses Griffith's age who could have better understood the passage from a California golden child to a depressive, insufferable East Coast neurotic. Mary Louise Parker, a talented actress I find hugely hammy, comes to mind. That I'd rather watch her than endure Griffiths' reaching for emotion, not able to find the sympathetic nugget at Brooke's core, is saying something. Martha Plimpton, Laura Linney, Cynthia Nixon, Edie Falco, Lily Taylor, we could go on. I did not believe Griffith's grief, nor did I believe her adopted East Coastness, too blunt and unsubtle. She seems to be trying really hard. And because she is at the tragic center of the play, if you don't believe her pain, the play is thrown off balance and all the artifice in it shows.
However, the greatest joy of the evening comes from watching a trio of amazing veterans who are truly electrifying: Channing, Light and Keach. They all find layers of nuance into the broadness of their characters: Peppy Palm Springs Society Matron, Over The Hill Hollywood Drunk, Ex Handsome Bad Actor. Channing in particular blew me away. Her Polly is a no non-sense wisecracker, trying to out-goy the goys, with the core of a lioness. Light is also fiercely funny, sad and brave as crazy Aunt Silda, and Keach is sweet and thundering, totally believable as an old Hollywood star, now swaddled in wealth and grief. They are all pitch perfect. Even Justin Kirk, who at the beginning is slightly grating, finds his footing, leaves the shtick behind and delivers beautifully in the second act.
The play is well written and has many funny moments. It straddles a very thin line between comedy and melodrama. For the most part, director Joe Mantello balances the jokes with the pathos admirably, which is no small feat. Sometimes the tone falls into his particular brand of shtick where all the characters speak in weird, affected cadences that try to be naturalistic and sound extremely theatrical. This is annoying, but it seems to go away as the play progresses.
My problem with the play is that the second act is one beat stretched to the limit, with a couple of bombshell revelations thrown in to spike it up. So Brooke wrote a tell-all where the parents come across as evil, selfish people who are just interested in keeping their political connections; but different points of view reveal the fragile nature of the "truth". The truth according to whom? There is a final twist in which Brooke learns she does not know the first thing about what really happened, and in the end the play is about reconciliation. I thought the ending was a cop out. Turns out that the parents did everything they did for selfless reasons. Republicans? Selfless? Oh, dear. Maybe it's the times, and maybe Baitz is a better man than I, but I find reconciliation with Republicans to be essentially impossible and thoroughly inadvisable. Who wrote this play, Barack Obama?
I commend Baitz for not writing the liberal screed his audience wants to cheer for. I commend him for going for nuance and complexity and attempting to shed light on the myths and versions of the truth that are at the core of every grieving family. But like they say in Mexican wrestling, when I go to the theater: "Quiero ver sangre!" I want to see blood!

Let's Rant Today

We haven't done it in soooo long, it's starting to feel like this Enchilada has lost her kick, but we can always count on someone to get a rise out of us, so here goes:

Yesterday, attending a performance of Other Desert Cities on Broadway, the guy stuffing the seat in front of me is wearing a white baseball cap. Every time he moves his head, instead of the stage, I see a huge blob of visor, flap or however you call it. This has happened before. Usually people take off their headgear as the lights go down, and in case they don't, one only has to ask politely and people will comply.
I had a feeling that with this individual it wasn't gonna be so easy. Who wears a white baseball cap to a Broadway play at 8 pm at night? In the sweetest voice I could muster, I said:
ME:
Sorry to disturb you, but will you please remove your cap when the play begins?
HUMAN STUFFED DERMA:
NO! I WILL NOT REMOVE MY CAP!
ME:
It is disturbing my view.
HSD:
You will see just fine.
ME:
No I won't.
HSD:
I DON'T FEEL COMFORTABLE TAKING OFF MY CAP!
ME:
Even in the dark?
I considered calling the usher, but there were plenty of empty seats around me so I switched seats and I let it go, not before saying:
"I want you to know that this is extremely rude and in bad taste. I asked you politely". 
Then I muttered "stupid people with caps" and "asshole" sotto voce, for dramatic flourish.
Now, if the guy had said, "I have a protuberance the size of Nairobi that will distract you far more than the lousy cap", or "you really don't want to have my naked pate with random hairs in front of you, lady, it's a horror show", or seriously, "I have a medical condition and I can't do that for you", I would have been empathetic.
But where the hell do neurotic New Yorkers get off with this sense of entitled self-pity? ME ME ME! I am special, so screw anybody else. Whatever happened to manners? Back in the day, you had to remove your hat any time you went inside. Those were the rules. Hey, back in the day people would go to Broadway in evening attire, not jeans and sneakers. I wished I could channel Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey and give this whiner a piece of my mind. I hate that show (oh yes I do) but Maggie Smith is God's gift to mankind. She is immortal.
Next:
I am addicted to Farmland Dairies Skim Plus Chocolate Milk with Omega-3. I have a bowl (or two) of that with Cheerios every night and I credit this diet with losing 7-8 pounds since the Summer. Roll your eyes as much as you want. The milk is creamy, tastes strongly of chocolate, and last time I had a cholesterol screening, my good cholesterol went up. Heaven. Now, this baby does not come cheap: almost six bucks for a half gallon. I guzzle it like a Hummer guzzles gas. Alas, the last two times I bought it, it had changed. Gone was the creaminess, gone was the chocolatey flavor, now it was plain mediocre milk with a faint taste of chocolate. The price, however, remains the same, if it has not gone up. In the Morton Williams in front of my house, prices rise by the hour. Anyway, you bet I gave them a call. And spoke at length about my disgruntlement to the answering machine. Very politely, but not, as devastatingly as Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey.

Now Showing At A Theater Near You

Agnieszka Holland's Oscar nominated In Darkness.

Plus why the Oscars suck and why they are essential to world peace.

Now Showing At A Theater Near You

A very eerie and elegant The Woman In Black, a not so great Hugo and a freakishly good Meryl Streep in the pedestrian The Iron Lady.

On DVD:
A grossly underrated The Ides Of March and a great Demián Bichir in a not so great A Better Life.

Plus, my customary annual rant about the Oscars.

War On Religion

I'm starting it. Who's with me?
I'd like to deflect all those accusations by Republicans that Obama is waging a war on religion. I'm the one who's doing that, so send all your queries to me.
Every day I wage my silent, thankless battle about the spreading idiocy of religion of all denominations in public and political life, where it has no place.
For instance, it was rather amazing to see a panel convened by Sean Hannity asking 20 clergymen of different religions how they feel about female contraception. What do you know? They all have extremely strong feelings against it! They get to opine and decide, without consulting women, whether women should have access to contraception. This is the height of reason and fairness. There was not one woman in the panel. An Anita Bryant conservative witch would have come in handy, but not even. This is what religion does: it writes a blank check for self-righteousness, downright imbecility and barbarism and people just go ahead and cash it. Then they pat themselves in the back, to boot.
Let me put it this way: I hate religion. I hate what it does to people.
Faith is another matter. You want to believe in an afterlife, heaven and hell, God, limbo, nirvana, by all means; it's your right, knock yourself out. I read Astrology Zone religiously every month. We all need that old black magic somehow.
But why do we all have to believe in God? And if we don't, why are we perceived as morally deficient? Why do men get to decide that women should sit at the back of a bus, or not play sports or drive, or not have a right to decide what to do with their own reproductive systems? Because this is abuse of power and only something as irrational as religion can warrant such a thing.
I would argue that, more often than not, those of us who hold reason in higher esteem than faith are far more ethical than those who shelter their morally revolting attitudes behind the front of religion. Church going and breast beating and following  irrelevant stone age laws, or in the case of fundamentalists, deeply distorted, maniacal interpretations of religion, give people a pass from true piety, true charity, true love and true morality.
It makes no sense to decry the termination of an embryo as against the sanctity of human life, and at the same time cheer every time someone is fried in the electric chair. It makes no sense to believe in a guy who said you should love thy neighbor and then demonize and persecute gays, or people from other religions, subjugate women and keep the poor and the gullible in ignorance and darkness.
When it was invented thousands of years ago, religion was useful as a civilizing tool. In those days it was linked to the seasons and the tides and the movements of the sky. It helped people understand their place on Earth and in the universe. It helped create relatively functional societies. It laid down some necessary laws (like "thou shalt not kill", something it has not heeded itself). It also encouraged artistic expression. Fine. But it becomes dangerous the moment it acquires political or economic power, which is when it starts acting like a bully.
If it is as pure and lofty as it claims to be, why should organized religion concentrate wealth, or dictate policies? It should aid the poor, comfort the needy and be an individual source of solace, not be a stick with which to control and abuse people and cheat them out of their money and their human rights.

Spacey the III

Don't think I haven't noticed that my posts involving Shakespeare are suspiciously popular.
All ye who intend to "borrow" this for your term papers, use quotation marks or relent!
In any case, this is a review of the production of Richard III currently at BAM, starring Kevin Spacey and directed by Sam Mendes.
Kevin Spacey is a great actor. Richard III is a great villain and William Shakespeare is the greatest writer that ever was. So how's the production? Good, but uneven. Mendes has conceived a very sparse production with contemporary overtones. The costumes are modern Elizabethan (and rather boring), the stage is mostly bare, surrounded by many doors symbolizing the many victims of this proto-mass murderer. For Richard is a political serial killer, reminiscent of a Stalin, or a Mao. Thirsty for power, he kills what he fears, and because he kills so much, he fears everybody, so he has to dispose of everybody.  Homicidal tyrants have existed since day one, but it takes Shakespeare to make one into a character that clearly defines a complete psychological space.
Richard is deformed, prematurely born; it is said of him that he had teeth before he had eyes. To hear him tell it at the beginning of the play, everybody's happily carousing in times of peace,

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up...

(Has anybody ever written so beautifully about ugliness?) Since Richard cannot carouse, he has to scheme. He is physically a monster, and perhaps because of the cruelty of nature and society towards him, he is cruel himself. Poor Richard lived long before political correctness and bleeding hearts (a phrase that comes from this play!). One can imagine the bullying he endured. The play hurls spectacular insults at him, but fortunately Shakespeare is not from the age of pitiful self-justification. He is not as cheap as to want us to feel sorry for the guy. He makes him human, and therefore one ends feeling a pathetic sort of pity for him. What a waste of intellect, what deformity of purpose, which is what one always thinks about people who use all their mental energy for destruction. Think Assad Jr. now in Syria, or Ghadaffi, or any totalitarian monster of our age. There is a wonderful soliloquy when Richard is finally visited by conscience, which expresses the psychic isolation and engorged ego of the sociopath:

Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What do I fear? myself? there's none else by:
Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am:
Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why:
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack. I love myself. Wherefore? for any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O, no! alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself!
I am a villain: yet I lie. I am not.
Fool, of thyself speak well: fool, do not flatter.
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.

I shall despair. There is no creature loves me;
And if I die, no soul shall pity me:
Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself?

Excuse me while I plotz.  This profile could have been written, less adroitly perhaps, by one of those forensic psychologists at Quantico. Its modernity blows me away.  Everything is I with this man. He is alone and apart from human society. A classic sociopath.
Well, Spacey goes to town, emphasizing Richard's duplicity and his terrible need for attention. It is a powerful performance, a bit shticky, in my view, very Spacey-like, which is not bad, since he is the master of dripping sarcasm. My biggest problem with this characterization is that he screams like a maniac. Many times, the screaming obscures the words. This is unfortunate, because Richard is one of the most verbally compelling characters in all of Shakespeare. This is one Richard hell-bent on garnering attention, full of mercurial fury, but it would be more interesting if he would connive more quietly and let his fury seethe inside his crooked frame. As you saw above, Shakespeare goes to beautiful lengths to describe his physical weakness, which serves as a stunning contrast to his robust capacity for evil. It should surprise everyone at court that this pathetic cripple harbors such gigantic homicidal tendencies, but Spacey is not a wee man, nor is this a quiet performance. He wears a polio brace and has a crooked leg and a bent foot, the iconic hunchback, relies on a cane and is totally misshapen. As he ambles up and down the stage he looks suitably grotesque, but it would be far more chilling to see his power come, not from throwing tantrums, but from a powerful tsunami of a mind inside a shriveled frame. After more than three hours, the outbursts get annoying and lose effectiveness. I will confess, this reminded me of my Mom and Dad's dueling parenting techniques. Mom was a frequent hell-raiser, while Dad was a quiet seether. Guess which one sent me into paroxisms of fear? One look from my Dad's silent anger was enough to make me wither in my chair, whereas my Mom's operatic outbursts eventually caused my sisters and me to roll our eyes.
Less is always more.
Spacey shows off his verbal dexterity and riffs around with the rhythms interestingly and at breakneck speeds, if not always eloquently. Still, he has some incredible moments, as when, in a mediatic event reminiscent of the putrid piety of today's Republican candidates, he pretends to pray in church (holding a Bible as a prop, of course) as he orchestrates his usurpation of the throne. Here, he reminded me of Newt Gingrich. Richard has members of his clique actually beg him publicly to become king as he feigns modesty and surprise. This is done through a live video feed on a big screen so we can see what Spacey does best, which is to show us what he's thinking through the most minimal gestures. At one point, he coyly averts his eyes, but there is more than false modesty in this tiny act; there is a weariness which encompasses everything that has happened up to that point and everything that will happen next. Mendes equates Richard's appetite for power with the megalomaniac personality of a totalitarian dictator. It makes perfect sense for our day and age.
Spacey is valiantly over the top for the entire play, giving a physically generous, possibly quite painful, exhausting and unsparing performance that has him sweating buckets, and in a clever use of his real sweat, Richard is constantly wiping his brow, which adds a layer of sliminess to the character, sweaty like a Tricky Dick.
Alas, just as Richard's monstrous ego takes up all of the play's space, Spacey takes up all of the stage. Most of the actors are nowhere near his level. The men are mostly inconsequential. The women fare better, but except for Gemma Jones, excellent as Queen Margaret, and the actress who plays his poor mother, the rest of the actors are left in the dust, and this smacks of headliner vanity to me. Why are the two young princes Richard kills portrayed by young women? The horrifying shock of their murder is grossly diminished by this arbitrary piece of casting.
Still, for the most part, the production is visceral and bracing. Mendes has some cool visual ideas, particularly towards the end, when Richard and the good Richmond share a dream, sitting on opposite sides of a long table as all the spirits of the murdered appear to haunt one and inspire the other, and a fantastic coup de theatre when a finally dead Richard is hoisted up from a meat hanger, feet first, to dangle like a piece of butchery, himself reminiscent of all the blood he spilled.
So how is Richard human? We know he has suffered, he is unloved and worse, incapable of love himself. Shakespeare was too cool to change Richard's nature just to appease the audience. He shows how human nature is, not how it should be. There is something heroic in Richard's determination to stay true to himself, in his relentless quest for some sort of social redress. He has never known love, how would he change? I am I. He is pitiful for his ignorance of human restraint, for his incapacity for mercy. He knows what he is, and this must be so painful.

God Damn!

I am lucky to have such fabulous friends that they give away tickets to the opera.
To 6-hour operas, to be exact. So I dropped everything I was doing to see the new Met's production of Gotterdammerung, by Richard Wagner. This, as far as I could gather from the program, is the last of the operas in the Ring cycle, which lasts about 17 hours total. Apparently the guy had not yet heard of "cut to the chase".
To be honest, I could care less about German mythology*. There is always some magic potion to blame for all the chaos. It's not a character flaw; not someone made a tragic mistake but somebody drank the wrong brew without knowing.  Siegfried, who is in love with Brunnhilde, takes a magic potion and falls out of love with her and in love with another woman. Disaster ensues.
I was curious to understand why Wagner is an endurance contest for both audiences and singers alike. I believe I have the answer now.
The new production by Robert Lepage has been very controversial, because it is very modern. It's hard to describe, but the stage is dwarfed by a huge contraption of wooden planks that move as the scenes change. Projections of water, fire, a forest, are screened on the planks.  Apparently, at the beginning the machinery was clunky,  causing great grief to the humans on stage, but now they seem to have worked out the kinks. I liked it, once I got used to it. But after 6 hours, the novelty wears off. And I'm thinking, if you have people sitting for 6 hours, you may want to change things a bit. Keep 'em entertained.

I think the problem is that the singers have little to do but stand and sing. I was sitting way up there in Valhalla, so it was hard to see the acting. Still, it seems that all the energies were dedicated to figure out the staging of the machine, but not that of the singers, who are extremely static, screaming to the winds. Then again, if you have to sing for 6 hours straight, you may not want to be running around the stage.
I welcome less literal productions of operas, because Opera, a bizarre mix of the sublime and the ridiculous, can always do with less of the ridiculous. To wit, there is a plot point in this story, where Siegfried runs around with a schmatteh over his head. It's supposed to have magic powers, but it still looks like a schmatteh.
So now that technology allows for great magic onstage, instead of cardboard forests and cellophane flames, new productions should be fun. But, at least in this instance, something about the grandeur of the stage machinery stifles the colorful imagination of the story. The German mythology has very powerful images, like dragons, flying horses, water nymphs, women with shields, etc. A lot of that is left to the imagination through the singing, provided that you read the useful but pedestrian sounding supertitles. If instead of being dark and brooding and too intellectual, this whole spectacle would be more dreamlike, as is the quality of myth, I would have been more transfixed. But it felt a bit cumbersome, while this enormous work needs some agility. 
The Met orchestra, splendidly conducted by Fabio Luisi, sounded great, the singers as far as I could tell, were pretty awesome, particularly Deborah Voigt as Brunnhilde. That woman can sing. And sing. And sing. And the guy who played the meanie was amazing too. Major bravos for him.  Siegfried sang beautifully but the singer needs to get lessons in deportment. He moved like a slob from Jersey. 
I won't pretend that I did not doze off a couple of times. I was awake for all the good parts, including an awesome fight between two sisters (Deborah Voigt and Waltraud Meier), the part of the chorus, which is gorgeous, the beautiful music when Siegfried finally bites the dust, among others. At the end, Brunnhilde sings like for 15 minutes with little interruption. It is truly an amazing feat of vocal power.
But there were these incongrous plaster statues (the Gods) that looked totally kitschy, and at the end their heads blow off (or rather pathetically pop out like popcorn) in the most incredible display of self-annihilation by a director I have ever seen. For 6 hours we finally bought the planks and the projections and the drab  costumes and the stern minimalism and endured 6 hours of Wagner to reach the apotheosic conclusion and Lepage closes with the cheesiest effect, thereby undermining everything we saw and breaking the spell, in what I can only assume he mistakenly thinks is an ironic comment about the fragility of the gods. It was so ridiculous people were laughing, and not in a good way.
It was slow, exciting, ridiculous, magnificent, crazy and very, very long.
I'm glad I saw it.


*I resent that major Jew hater Wagner and his obsession with Teutonic myth. He can stick the braids and the horns and the breastplates up his ass. The music is great though.

Occupy Cable

I don't understand how The People don't send all the cable companies to the guillotine.
They are sheer incompetent evil. I got an offer from Time Warner Cable for a pretty good deal including cable, internet and phone for 89.99 a month (for the first year, then it's 3 million dollars a minute). I don't have cable and I'm paying more than that, so I decide to switch.
Any time you have to deal with any of these companies, I assure you, you will rue the day.
As we are getting ready to set up the switch, the other shoe starts dropping: there's a $25 installation fee, (okay), and another $25 FCC fee they never mentioned until after I had agreed to switch. Fine.
We set up an appointment. But I have to reschedule it because of an important conflict. This is when they actually start behaving like assholes. It turns out, that like a bad date, they are so busy, the next appointment is until 2045. But I have already asked my other company to disconnect service, right? So I'm screwed. They finally give me a date 2 days hence and then we are all so happy it worked out only for the guy to inform me that they cannot connect the phone that day, so it's gonna be another $25 for another appointment. I told them to go fuck themselves. They have been calling me about my missed appointment ever since.
So back to my regular company. Since I threatened to leave, they are offering me a sweet deal. Why can't they just offer a fair deal to everybody without all the drama?
I take the deal. The guy comes at the last minute of the three hour appointment window and sets up my new super fast modem -- which doesn't work. Why? Because the order was not set up properly. So he has to come again the next day. To be fair, this guy is pretty reliable. He comes the next day, at the hour he said he would, and sets everything up. Presto. Happiness. Today I try to call Texas and a voice informs me that my long distance service is not set up. AAARRRGGGHHH.
When private companies behave like inefficient public bureaucracies, something is very wrong. They charge an arm and a leg, plus the other arm and leg in absurd fees and taxes. Same happens with airlines and other American corporations that gauge the customers AND treat us like crap. What is up with that?