Interesting Headlines I Can't Really Read

liberation.fr: Agnès Varda sur la route des Oscars
I include this not because it's funny but because Catherine and I really loved this film, Les Plages d'Agnés (The Beaches of Agnés). It was the first of her films we'd seen although, completely coincidentally, we'd just seen The Umbrellas of Cherbourg a few weeks earlier (it was directed by her late husband, Jacques Demy). The Beaches of Agnés deserves to be in the running for an Academy Award: it's a beautifully shot, simply told and compelling film autobiography—I don't think it's out on DVD yet but I plan to get a copy when it is. That said, I should 'fess up that we've actually had another of her films, La Pointe Courte, sitting next to our DVD player from Netflix since August 17... I'm sure we'll get around to watching it... eventually...

lemonde.fr: Sexe et mort au "Vieux Carré"
Again, I don't have a joke here because this is something I'd very much like to see: The Wooster Group's take on Tennessee Williams' most autobiographical play. Yet another reason I wish that I was in Paris (like I need any more reasons!). There's no indication on their websites as to when it will be in NYC but I expect that Catherine and I will be there if we can.

elmundo.es: Oprah Winfrey: 'Dejo el programa porque ya me siento satisfecha'.
As long as Oprah feels satisfied, I'm satisfied. Otis Redding, on the other hand, still can't get no.

Wooster Group photo by Edward Mac Keaney

Europe Becomes More Fabulous

My friend, Modern Fabulousity, leaves Monday on a European adventure, with stops in London, Bulgaria and Romania. It's a swift trip—he's in Bulgaria and Romania for just a few days on theater business* and he's got a scant 24 hours in London. I'm selfishly hoping that he won't tucker himself out every day so that he can share with us some highlights of the sights, sounds and smells he encounters in his travels.

In his post announcing the trip, he asked for suggestions of non-touristy things to do and see in London. Being an inveterate coffee overachiever, I ignored the fact that he's only in town for a day and that he's already got tickets for a play (and, based on the website banner alone, ModFab was destined to be at this performance); I spat out a list of theaters and museums that I most want to revisit the next time I'm in London. Fortunately, he's got Fabbers galore there who can give him more appropriate advice on what he can do in less than a day (I imagine that even ModFab would be slightly less Fab—but no less Mod—if he goes 24 hours without sleep after a 7-hour plane ride... however, he might very well surprise me).

So now that I've calmed myself down and cut back to just one cup a day, my mind is clear enough to answer: where would I go in London if I had only one day?

In every city we visit, Catherine and I wind up in a museum (and often in two or three, when we can). London's Tate Modern has a fantastic collection of modern art (our preference) and the repurposed power station that houses it is, by itself, a spectacular experience; however, it's not a short visit: we generally limit ourselves to three hours at a museum—otherwise, we'd never get to see anything else—but this was one of a couple of times we could easily have gone much longer. On our last trip, we loved The Dalí Universe (a much smaller and, obviously, more specific collection) and were able to breeze through The British Library's rare books and manuscripts exhibits and sample a few of the audio recordings by famous Britons in about 90 minutes.

London, like New York, is a theatre-lovers paradise: both times we've visited, we saw a performance every single day. The artists' collective, Shunt, is a current favorite and, coincidentally, they have a piece running now. When we saw their production, Tropicana, they were performing in the vaults of the London Bridge; their latest project, Money, is being presented in a 3-story tobacco warehouse nearby and sounds like it's as awe-inspiring as the show we saw. We've also seen a couple of excellent productions at the ICA on The Mall; based on their website, they appear to be focusing more on music and film than theatre at the moment. While I might go for a concert if I'm only in a town for a day, I doubt I'd make the time for a movie, even one I might not be able to see on a big screen here in the U.S., but I might go for a nightcap at their bar.

In terms of food and drink, I'm afraid I can make better recommendations for Philadelphia than I can for London. I'm not referring to the old saw that English food sucks (I don't personally find it to be true) but to the fact that we visit Philly pretty regularly and have only been to London twice. Our friend, Andrew, and his partner, Pano, took us to a place near their home on Drury Lane that, according to Google maps, is called My Old Dutch but I don't think that's what it was in 2004. Most of the restaurants we've frequented in London have either been pubs or, on our last visit, chain restaurants. However, that was also the trip that we stumbled into the Punch Tavern on Fleet Street, where we were served a hot meal and a tasty pint or two that compensated pretty well for the cold and rainy afternoon outside. A local might certainly know the better kept secrets in the neighborhood but after pushing past one Pizza Express or Pret a Manger after another, it was absolutely perfect for us.

One of the joys of London, or any other large metropolis, is that just walking around the city is entertaining. Not only is it an inexpensive way to take in the sites but it's a great opportunity to see how people go about their daily lives; it's sort of the reverse of what I do in New York as I walk around and watch tourists enjoying my city. I'm not a shopper, so going into stores doesn't much interest me; but I always enjoy looking in windows, seeing what things cost and what makes it into a shop display. The one exception to this rule would be book stores, which I dearly love—especially used books. Unfortunately, the many book sellers that once populated Charing Cross Road have begun disappearing in recent years; still, there are enough specialty and antique stores remaining to make it worth an hour out of the day to wander the few short blocks between Charing Cross station and Leicester Square.

Those are my highlights for a day in London. Given a little more prep time and the proper guide book, I could probably come up with dozens more and better options; these are the ones that occur to me immediately. Perhaps I can convince my more widely-traveled friend, Caroline, to contribute her thoughts on this and other cities.

*I hope, of course, that he'll get to spend more of his time meeting other artists and actually watching performances than listening to panel discussions about theater. I find, invariably, that the person who gets to say the least on a panel is the one whose opinion I find most interesting. And don't get me started on the audience members: I dread the moment when the moderator "opens it up for questions:" this is code for "whoever gets the floor may now force us all to hear why they could have been on this panel, too."

Now you know why I made this a footnote: I can go on and on about why I'm not a fan of theater panel discussions.

Why I'm a Railfan

While some of the people in this Times article clearly have a passion for rail travel that far eclipses mine—at the very least, many of them have an enthusiasm for documenting trains that I understand but don't share—I would still say that I qualify as a railfan. Catherine and I far prefer taking the train over any other mode of transportation; fortunately, since the Northeast Corridor is both the most active and well-serviced passenger service in the U.S., we're able to indulge our preference.

In 2004, we celebrated our 10th anniversary with a vacation to Paris, Cornwall (where the Navy had posted Catherine's brother, Brooke, and his family for three years) and London. The key to the trip was, of course, planning and scheduling our train connections—a somewhat daunting proposition since I didn't know anything at all about how the system worked in Europe. I wouldn't say that visiting the Eurail website did a lot to alleviate my apprehensions—there are many ways to use the system and a variety of package offerings at different price levels. And since we'd be taking the Eurostar from Paris to London, I wasn't certain if that would be included in any of the passes I was considering (I suspected—correctly as it turns out—that it wouldn't).

After several visits to the site, I'd narrowed it down to a couple of options that I thought might be right for us and called Eurail: oh, what a difference a phone call made! After I explained our goals to the very helpful sales associate, she steered us to the perfect option: a pass that gave us four trips over two months (we only used three, including the train we took to Gatwick Airport to come home, but it was still cheaper than individual tickets) that also allowed us to purchase our one-way Eurostar ticket at the lowest price. I think it wound up being about $300 each so renting a car would probably have been cheaper but it would also have been far less relaxing—at the time, I found the prospect of deciphering maps, trying to figure out exits and entrance ramps to highways, and the inevitable "we're going the wrong way" moments too irritating to even consider. As it was, apart from the somewhat harried taxi ride from Waterloo Station (the Eurostar terminus at the time) to Paddington, we couldn't have asked for an easier journey (there were other trains leaving shortly after our target, if we'd missed it, but they all had more stops and would have gotten us to Cornwall well after dinnertime).

Riding the Eurostar was a particular joy: Paris to London in just over 3 hours can't be beat.* It was an easy taxi ride to Gare du Nord, we sailed rather quickly through customs and were comfortably in our seats less than an hour after we left our hotel in the 7th arrondissement. Catherine had worried that she might get motion sick on the high-speed train but the route through northern France, where the speeds were greatest, was almost entirely over flat farmland—the ride was so smooth and she could see such great distances out the window that she never even felt queasy.

Coincidentally, while I wrote this post, Catherine has booked us train tickets to Boston. Amtrak is offering a special price: $49 each way on their regular service (which is fine with us: Acela shaves, on average, less than an hour off the four-ish hour trip but it costs more than three times as much). So for our 16th anniversary, we'll be seeing the Punchdrunk adaptation of Macbeth, Sleep No More. It's a whirlwind trip—we leave Penn Station at 10am on December 12th and come back the following evening at 5pm—but for just over four hours both days, all we have to do is sit back and enjoy the ride.

*Actually, it can now: in 2007, they finished upgrading the tracks in England and changed the London terminus to St. Pancras; the train now arrives a mere 2 hours and 15 minutes after it leaves Gare du Nord

Eurostar photo: Lauritz B., 300km-h.net

Recent Theater

For some reason, I had envisioned writing many blog posts in October... why I expected this, I have no idea. Sure, I went part-time at my day job (at least for the first two weeks of October; after that, we had a big job come in that kept me there pretty much all day during the last two weeks). And Peculiar Works was not technically in production this month (there's the master class we teach for Trinity/LaMaMa, of course, and the ghost tours we helped organize and cast for the Merchant's House Museum—but those don't really count). And, yes, I had rewriting to do on my play, Floydada, for the NYFA Fellows application that was due yesterday. And plays to see—there are always loads of plays to see, of course. But apart from that, what did I do with free time?

I'm such a slacker.

Anyway, here are a few thoughts some of the theater we saw in the second half of October:

The Playboy of the Western World
At some point early in The Pearl Theatre's very good revival of this most famous of J.M. Synge's plays, it occurred to me that I don't much care for The Playboy. I'm not entirely sure what brought me to this realization: the acting is fine to pretty good; the sets, lights and costumes are well-executed; and director J.R. Sullivan has a very light touch that complements Synge's humor well. But for some reason, the story just wasn't engaging me; I was interested in what was going on... but only mildly interested. It's not that the plot isn't intriguing: a mysterious stranger, on the run for murdering his father, shows up in a rural tavern just before closing and begs a room and a job of the lonely woman who runs it; almost immediately the entire village is abuzz about the man and he becomes something of a celebrity; then his father—who was not quite dead, you see—shows up, having tracked down his son so that he can be punished for his crime. It sounds like pretty compelling stuff, really. And yet, I was often distracted by ancillary activities on stage. For instance, I found myself thinking at one point: "They've pouring porter from a pitcher. Well, that makes sense, in a mid-nineteenth century, rural town in Ireland; I can see where they wouldn't have a tap. I wonder how long before porter would go flat in a pitcher? They can't have made it in that pitcher, of course; they'd make it in barrels and then tap the porter into the pitcher. Would they make their own porter or buy it from someone? If Synge were writing this play today, they'd probably be drinking stout. Which is a kind of porter. Is stout harder to make than porter? Maybe stout wouldn't work as well in a pitcher." I had similar thought processes about women running around barefoot while men wore jackets; suspender buttons on a pair of pants that worked as belt loops; and how, as technically well-appointed as the Pearl's new digs are in the basement at City Center, the play might have fit better in their old Theatre 80 St. Marks proscenium. The irony of all this is that I really do think it's a good revival. I just don't imagine I'll be going to see The Playboy again any time soon.

The Assember Dilator
31 Down Radio Theater has one of the more original aesthetics of any company working downtown. The Assember Dilator (which recently closed at PS 122) combines intriguing set design and imagery, an extremely rich aural soundscape, and a deceptively simple performance style to create a fascinating and disturbing science fiction thriller. It follows two characters: a scientist who is consumed with testing his new x-ray vision drug on himself and his assistant who obsessively joins him in the twisted medical trial. It's a familiar story about the nature of addiction and the loss of humanity it ultimately brings about, but the 31 Down artists have pared away all of the non-essential elements and have exaggerated and amplified (sometimes literally) what remains into a unique performance: you don't just watch this production, you experience it completely.

My only complaint about the evening was completely beyond the artists' control: PS 122 isn't giving out programs in an effort to be more green. I don't mind sharing or even giving back a simple one-page cast list at the end of the night but it's a disservice to the artists to ask the audience to visit your website if we want to know who's in the play—especially since some of us will have to wait until we get home to do it (not everyone has a iPhone).

Made in Heaven

There might be the kernel a good idea somewhere in this mess but Jay Bernzweig hasn't found it. That didn't seem to bother the sizable audience at the Soho Playhouse on the night we saw this very dumb play in which one conjoined twin comes out to his brother just moments before they are to propose to their girlfriend: they were all laughing uproariously at the most banal jokes and sight gags virtually from the first minute. Catherine said it reminded her a little of the silly British sex farces that were so popular 20 or so years ago; I think that's being kind to this piece (or slighting the comic genius of Natalie Needs a Nightie). Ninety-nine percent of the dialogue is ham-handed double-entendres and sophomoric references to sexual practices and physiology (the guys have three testicles but share a penis—that got a big laugh every time it came up*); the remaining percent was one actually funny joke that really isn't all that funny out of context (I've tried a few times to write it out here and it just takes too long to explain—you had to be there, as they say... not that I'm recommending that). The actors do the best they can with what they've got—for the most part, they just schtick it up; the rest of the audience thought they were absolutely hilarious so who am I to argue? The direction is... well, I guess it's better than the script; it's certainly no worse.

*Believe it or not, that's as good a joke as any we heard all night... and I wasn't actually trying to make it.

Malheureux Vélib' !*

In general, I'm a big fan of bicycles—unlike cars, they're economical, they emit no noxious odors or gasses, parking them takes almost no space and they're a great form of exercise. Catherine and I had a brief visit with friends staying on Fire Island this summer where the only means of transportation allowed, other than walking, is bicycles. We had a lovely, relaxing ride one morning through a couple of the townships there (it's not as far as it sounds since the towns butt right up against one another—less than two or three miles, I'd guess). In fact, we had such a good time that I've found myself pausing frequently to look at the price tags at Busy Bee Bikes, a couple of doors down from our building.

At the same time, I find many (but not all) bicyclists to be obnoxious: they speed (if you're passing taxis in New York, you're going too fast), they sail through intersections against the light while they weave perilously between pedestrians in the crosswalks, ride on the sidewalks, park their bicycles wherever and however they like (especially problematic at night when they aren't always easy to see—Catherine hurt herself pretty badly earlier this year trying to get past a clump of them on our block), and have no qualms about taking up precious sidewalk space. Busy Bee is especially bad about this last point because their wares are parked every day in two rows with only a narrow pathway between them—and that is frequently blocked by someone who has stopped to talk with one of the repair people. The air of sanctimony these particular cyclists give off doesn't do them any favors either: why they believe they're more environmentally-conscious than me, the pedestrian, is positively baffling.

In spite of my divided nature (or perhaps because of it), I've been an avid follower of stories about the Vélib' program in Paris. I love the idea of renting a bicycle for those short trips (the time limit per rental is 30 minutes); at €1 per day, it's even cheaper than a one-way subway fare.** So I was greatly disappointed to read that 80% of the bicycles in the program are missing or unusable these days. The cause is not surprising: they're stolen to be sold on the black market in emerging nations or taken by teenagers who either destroy them performing stunts or just vandalize them as a form of social protest.

It would be easy to say that it just isn't worthwhile to continue the program since the expenses are still greater than the advertising revenue that is supposed to support it. To their credit, the company running the program, JCDecaux, hasn't given up yet: they're continuing to explore ways to deter the thieves. I've no doubt they'll never be more than partially successful—as my father likes to say, locks are made to keep honest people honest—but I do hope that they'll find a way to make stealing the bikes difficult enough so that it's less worthwhile.

The joy-riding teenagers, on the other hand, are a more difficult problem. While I obviously don't condone their behavior, I don't believe they should be dismissed as mere hoodlums who are ruining it for everyone: it's disingenuous and it ignores the reality that, over the last 40 or more years, central Paris has become the domain of the wealthy and the comfortably middle-class, beyond the means—financially and geographically—of the poor and immigrant peoples. I don't believe that it was intentional racism or classism on the part of the urban planners who created the peripheral cities (banlieues) where these people must live (at least not by all of the planners), but it's not surprising that the inhabitants see it that way. Is it any surprise that these young men have no respect for this easy target, a symbol of bourgeois society they will probably never be able to enjoy? Simply making it more difficult to steal the bikes probably won't be enough of a deterrent to these underemployed and disenfranchised youths.

I hadn't intended for this to become a social commentary (except for my criticism of scofflaw bicyclists). More than anything, I hope that Decaux can find a way to make the Vélib' system work. As much as I loved riding the Métro, I'm curious to see if it will enhance one of my favorite cities in the world to navigate its winding streets on two wheels; I suspect that it will just make me appreciate more how relaxing it is to explore Paris on foot.

*Unfortunate [or Poor] Vélib'!
**Currently $2.25, unless you're on a pass; since I often walk to and from my work and since 90% of what Catherine and I do is less than a 30-minute walk from our home, I don't ride enough to make a pass worthwhile.

When Facts and Numbers Collide

Apparently, an accounting firm hired by a lobbying firm issued a report on the Senate's Health Reform bill that said exactly what the industry that the lobbying firm represents wanted the report to say. Then afterward, when other people began to look at those numbers and say, "Hey, wait a minute...", the accounting firm had to make a big ol' public statement so that everyone would know they had opted not to pursue any of the annoying little math problems that would disprove their client's position.

You gotta respect their doing this because, really: an accounting firm whose number crunching doesn't have even a shred of credibility isn't much of an accounting firm, is it?

Does this mean the Academy Awards aren't on the level?

The [Redacted] Word of God

I suppose it says something about me that I remembered this story as being Stephen's "The Craziest F***ing Thing I've Ever Heard" segment until I looked it up.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Tip/Wag - Conservapedia, Louvre & Honda Unicycle
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Michael Moore

For the record, TCFTIEH segment this week was actually this story; it also says something about me that the story about expurgating the known liberal bias from the Bible seems crazier to me than using part of a tooth to restore vision.

Of course, what the Conservative Bible Project is actually talking about is creating a new version of the Bible. Instead of using the NIV or the KJV or whichever one you currently use, you'd have an alternative version in which Christ does not ask God to "forgive them for they know not what they do" as he is being crucified because that verse was inserted later (you think I'm kidding about this?). Apparently, the CBP will go back to what I'll call the original source material—the ancient Greek and Latin texts—to see what may have been "lost in translation" (my quotes). I can live with that—that involves something in the realm of scholarship: you have to at least be able to read ancient Greek or Latin, I would assume. What actually frightens me is the people who will, when they can't find a way to change something in the Bible to suit their desires, will announce that they've "prayed about it" and God told them what changes to make. I don't mock prayer: I decry those who make a mockery of it, as I believe that would do.

The Slacktivist, as usual, has an excellent, well-articulated post on the subject.