Perk Up

Lately, it is only fair to admit that the Eldest is driving me a bit nuts. The spouse and I raised the kid to be outspoken, to sound off because her opinion matters. I don’t regret doing that, but I truly hope that she is simply ending the tail end of an obnoxious, sophomoric phase in which, basically, “everything sucks.”

Milk, not a great movie but a decent one, is “just a dopey biopic.” Now I admit, the movie isn’t as stirring as the great documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk, and Sean Penn seems to be confusing his Harveys, sounding more like Fierstein than Milk. It’s tough to play a charismatic, very funny guy, and Penn is actually kind of likeable for Penn, but at the end of the day, he’s still Sean Penn, and likeable isn’t really in the guy’s vocabulary. That said, Milk does touch a lot of buttons for someone who lived through a time when being gay inspired public jeers at best, and when you could be beaten to death just walking home at night. It also can’t help but bring to mind the looming horror of AIDS on the horizon; even though the people in the movie have no idea that it’s there…it is.

At the same time, there is something great about a person’s ability to inspire other people and to just plain get shit done. Sure, Harvey Milk became a spokesperson/icon similar to MLK. Both acknowledged that there were hundreds of people in the trenches that history will never remember. But being inspired is a rare thing, and it’s easier if you have a face to pin that to. And why not?

But to the kid, none of it matters. Dear Lord, I do sound like a crank. “In my day….,” etc. I know I was as solipsistic as she was, and I wasn’t nearly that smart. I had natural intelligence, but I didn’t push myself very hard; if it wasn’t in a play when I was 17, I didn’t want to know anything about it. So it’s hypocritical of me to blame the kid for not bothering to read a damn thing about the world, to have such a narrow viewing aperture.

But then again, I hope I wasn’t this big of a downer. A dance company from Israel was here today, one of the month’s ushering gigs. She and I can go for free to pretty much any cultural event that comes through the university, but when I asked her, she said, “I don’t want to have anything to do with anything from Israel.”

Now look. The government of Israel has done horrible things lately, as do all governments on a regular basis. But obviously one can’t know every dancer’s political views. I certainly don’t want the current or past U.S. government’s views to be projected onto me. Only about half the dancers are from Israel, and the work isn’t overtly and even subtly political; if anything, there’s an anti-corporate bias to it. In one memorable piece, a whole series of suited people thrash and flail in chairs until eventually all have ripped away their jackets, hats and shoes to stand, free, in tank tops and boxer shorts – except for one guy who stays buttoned up and repeatedly collapses on the floor. Meanwhile, these were the best dancers I’ve seen this year, and in a long, long time. The commitment, artistry, and athleticism of the movement hasn’t been matched by any of the other visiting companies, not because there haven’t been some really good companies, but just because this one was so good.

The Eldest’s “won’t see it” list goes on and on. She doesn’t want to see any movies because “they all suck.” Getting her to take advantage of a free seat to Yo-Yo Ma, her one-time idol, has been about as easy as pulling her teeth, and I still don’t know if she’ll do it. Overall, she just doesn’t seem to like much of anything lately. I can get that, but what I’m more worried about is that she seems to be disgusted, even contemptuous at the very idea of artistic inspiration.

As said, I hope it’s a phase, and I’m trying not to be too much of a jerk about it, as I imagine I was just as insufferable, probably a lot worse. But yoink….I’ll be glad when the kid gets excited about something again.

Same Great Taste

I’ve decided to start a blog solely dedicated to branding and the kind of stuff I do at work. For my stream of consciousness review of ALL the Super Bowl ads, go to http://brandingbroad.wordpress.com. I wrote many, many words today, and they are not polished, but I did accomplish my goal: to watch all the Super Bowl commercials and Not Get Drunk. Huzzah!

In other news, hope to be back soon with non-work related stuff, because that is much more fun to write.

Whoops

Didn’t mean to, but just managed to delete a bunch of very kind comments. Sorry to all. Please to forgive.

Between Lebanon and Persia…

Watched a couple of movies yesterday to hasten the cue along: Towelhead and Persepolis. The first I had meant to see on what I figured would be a very short run in Michigan (I think it was at the big theater for all of a week), and missed. The second I had been meaning to see last year, pretty certain it would win the Oscar for best animated feature but Ratatouille won instead.

As far as Towelhead goes, I can’t remember a “mainstream” American movie with an Arab-American protagonist. It’s pretty obvious that it was directed and written by the guy who wrote American Beauty; music, editing, general theme of desiring something young and forbidden is similar. The movie’s ok, but not good enough to overcome some ickiness, including Aaron Eckhart’s creepy relationship with the young girl (she’s beautiful but not much of an actress) and a scene where her father pulls a used tampon out of the toilet, which probably raises some kind of new squeamish bar. But really, we’ve seen all this before, except for the fact that we’re dealing with an overbearing Lebanese father (as opposed to an overbearing Indian or Greek or Slavic or whatever father).

Persepolis is terrific, an animated autobiography about growing up in Tehran at the time of the Shah’s ousting. When I went to college in the same time period (1978-80), for some reason Weber State in Utah (I was there my first two years) seemed to have a huge number of young Persian women – there were about 5 in my dorm, and there were only about 40 women in the dorm total. I never got to know any, to my regret. One, Mojdeh – she went by Mary as a sop to western laziness – was extremely beautiful. She never wore a hijab (the others in my dorm did) and seemed more aloof from the regular abuse that the other Iranians dealt with daily. I was a mess at this period in my life, but I’m still not sure why I didn’t ever strike up a conversation. I’ve always been fascinated by other countries, particularly those of the middle east. From the time I was a little kid I was drawn to Arab and Persian cultures with their gorgeous abstractions, rich colors, and general sexiness. But it was fashionable to rag on people from this part of the world. So while I had been raised to not indulge in outward baiting (thank you Mom and Dad), I wasn’t going to rock the boat with an open friendship with one of “those people.”

Another woman, Farzineh, did wear a hijab – I of course had no idea it was even called that until I made friends with Muslims in Michigan, for which there’s ample opportunity. One night, a friend whispered to me, “What do you think would happen if she took that thing off? She’d probably have a baby.” I laughed. Later that night, Farzineh pounded on my door with rage in her face. “What did your friend whisper to you? I know you were talking about me!!” I played dumb, then finally said, “Look, he said he wondered what would happen if you took your veil off.” (Yes, I called it a veil.) “And I laughed, because I’ve never seen you without it. That’s all.”

Later I did see her in the bathroom hijab-less. She was completely transformed, not a beauty but pretty and with beautiful hair. The low hijab that doesn’t show any hair, like a nun’s wimple, only flatters a few very specific face types. Longer faces tend to look awful in it; I had to play a nun once, and can testify. I told her how pretty she looked, partly because I was startled but also, I’m sure, out of guilt; I may have been a young jerk, but I really hadn’t wanted to hurt her. From then on, we always greeted each other with smiles, but I never did get to know her.

Persepolis does a brilliant job of taking away that layer of exotica and painting a great portrait of childhood and adolescense in turmoil. I’m sorry I never got to see Tehran back in the day. It must have been something, and the movie hints at that lost time. But what the movie shows in full force is show that raw emotion – parents’ love for children, childrens’ belief that somehow things will be ok, and true free-falling terror of being a teenager – is universal. Not an earth-shattering thesis, but one so true that, when stated well, can be stated again and again.

War Dance

Sick as hell, but got sick too late to get a sub for my ushering gig. I’m glad, because the performers, the Rubberbanddance Group, were terrific. Mostly Latino, young, incredibly talented, the group choreographs street moves against a big range of music, from Prokofiev’s Dance of the Knights to Spanish love songs to hip hop to La Traviata.

I don’t get modern dance a lot of the time; it often looks studied and overly earthbound. I get that it’s about using gravity vs. the way ballet defies it, but modern can often be so counter-intuitive that it just looks awkward.

The Rubberbands were beautifully graceful. They are about extremely supple spines and effortless strength. In their dances, you see dance as a primitive force, as the perfect way to do battle – simply by outdancing the other side. Their dances were like duels, between men, women, and each other. I couldn’t pick a clear winner but it was obvious that both sides were powerful, harnessing some primal force – barely. If there’s a revival of West Side Story any time soon, Victor Quijada is the guy to choreograph it. Nobody would laugh at these Jets and Sharks dancing each other to the death.

It was hard to find a clip that wasn’t destroyed by a lot of cutting; you really want to just sit and watch these folks move. This one doesn’t really do them justice, but at least it’s a glimpse.

Random weekend

Watched In Bruges Thursday night, and liked it so much I managed to get the spouse to watch it last night. He liked it, too. Very, very funny, but not a dreaded action comedy.

Saw Benjamin Button today. It started feeling pretty Forest Gump-y to me early on, and the music was awfully swoony for David Fincher. I told the spouse afterwards that it was like a smart version of Gump, he agreed, then looked it up, and sure enough, same writer. Interesting premise, and Brad Pitt is much better when he’s buried under make-up and special effects. He does that thing that all actors who are better at being crazy – he’s great in Fight Club and Burn After Reading – do when they’re doing Heavy Roles, which is just dial things way, way back and stand there and look all soulful. The movie’s sad, but it’s a manipulative sad, not a desperate, blaze of glory sad like Last of the Mohicans or Atonement. So….that’s out of the way. Certain to be nominated for Best Picture, but I hope David Fincher doesn’t ever make anything else like it.

Just read about this preacher in Seattle at Mars Hill church. He’s all macho and cusses, insists that women submit to the authority of their husbands, that questioning is wrong. What an asshole. Yes, I love intolerance, heretic burning, and women being barred from the pulpit. I love people who spend more time concentrating on Paul’s most sexist and homophobic commands while basically ignoring the much less sexy things like not judging lest you be judged and giving away everything you have to the poor and forgiving people. I could write at length on Macho Christian Assholes and probably will at some point, but tonight’s not the night.

Going to take a bath and try to finish the two books on the reading list. Gulliver’s mid-section is proving, as expected, a tough go, and the next book on the list, Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk, is sort of like being trapped with a bunch of St. Luke’s moms in a Starbucks except they all have British accents. Books like this, I thank God for skimming. Trusting Gulliver will pick up again with the Horse folk, which someone on list very cleverly compared to Planet of the Apes . If only they’d called the remake Ape, Where’s My Dude?

Staying Power

Watching the last of our annual New Year’s day chumfest, Moving Violations, starring John Murray, Bill Murray’s brother, Sally Kellerman, and Jennifer Tilley as a rocket scientist. Yes, a rocket scientist. See, it’s funny because Jennifer Tilley doesn’t seem very smart. I want to watch Paranoid Park, dammit. But the spouse does cling to tradition sometimes.

Anyway, the only interesting thing about this dreadful piece of shit, which is bad but not marvelously bad like previous spouse gems Cheaper to Keep Her and Viva Knievel, is that Don Cheadle has a tiny, tiny part as a guy at a fast food drive-up window. This movie was made in 1985. Boogie Nights, Cheadle’s big break, was more than 10 years later.

Cheadle’s tenacity – and the guy can act, but this is a good 10 years in the trenches, playing shit role after shit role – brought to mind my housemate at Cornell, Jane Lynch. The Cornell MFA Acting program, now defunct, was small and aiming to be elite. After all, once Yale Drama School started cranking out Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, William Hurt, and Sigourney Weaver, all the Ivies wanted to get in on the act. I was thrilled when I was accepted in 1983, along with 7 other people.

Jane was in the class before me; the class before that had graduated Jimmy Smits, and I think the year before that was Catherine Hicks, who most recently has been mooing it up on Seventh Heaven. Jane had a great speaking voice, lots of ambition, and was a good character actress who had gotten used to playing leads. The year I came in, the 3 women admitted, including moi, were all pretty leading lady types, and one of us, Barbara Kearns, was gorgeous; she looked like a red-headed Sharon Tate. We all competed, and I can’t imagine Jane was thrilled at having to compete with all of us on looks; I know she thought, rightly so, that we couldn’t compete with her on talent.

When I got cast in the lead for a Restoration play, the big show of the second semester, I know she was pissed. I imagine she felt that she had more talent in her pinky than I had in my entire body (the ratio was probably more like 2:1), and there’s no question I got the part because I looked pretty spectacular in the costumes. I got terribly sick a couple of weeks before the show and took 2 days off from rehearsals. When I was up and about, I couldn’t find my script. Jane had taken it, learning my lines, just in case. She was cast in the same show, as my spouse’s crazy mother, but she always seemed extremely affronted that I’d gotten the plummy role while she had to dress up in the old lady clothes.

The play wasn’t my finest hour; my confidence was shot, I didn’t work well with the director (I found out in New York that my strength was sketch comedy; I was never able to demonstrate a huge emotional range, but I gave great deadpan, which wasn’t enough for this particular role). In fact, a friend came up from New York to see it and told me that night that I shouldn’t come back for a second year because the program was killing my talent. Thanks to him, I ended up taking a leave of absence and moving to New York to sublet his sister’s apartment for $265 a month. I never went back to Cornell.

But anyway, back to Jane. I think that after she graduated, she went to Chicago for a while, then ended up in New York. We didn’t stay in touch; it’s not like we were friends, just housemates, along with Hugh Palmer, a terrific writer who got me involved in the early days of Cucaracha Theater, but that’s a different story. A couple of years after I’d moved, I saw Jane as the mother in the stage version of The Brady Bunch. The cast was interviewed on New York 1 and all of them remarked on how nice it would be if families could really be all caring and loving like the Bradys, except for Jane, who said something to the effect of, “My family was just like the Bradys, and it was wonderful.” I had only seen Jane with her parents once, but I hadn’t been struck by things being particularly blissful. But nor were they something out of Sam Shepard. It was a very Jane remark; she tended to exaggerate. Her worst insult (she threw this one at me a few times) was, “You were acting up a STORM!!!”, spoken with a disdainful sneer.

Then Karl, my first husband, started to get sick and I obviously had plenty of stuff to preoccupy me. I didn’t think much about Jane, keeping tabs on her primarily through Hugh, who ended up moving to L.A. I did see her on some kind of glass cleaning commercial at some point. Then she showed up as a nurse on the previously mentioned 7th Heaven, and for a while seemed to have kind of a lock on bit parts on WB shows.

Then the spouse brought home Best in Show one night, and there was Jane. She’s absolutely wonderful in it, and that’s very much how I remember her, though she hadn’t yet come out (but honestly, it was kind of like when Clay Aiken came out). So she’s a lot more secure then back when we lived in Ithaca, and a lot funnier. But then again, I’m not competing with her any more.

I always thought I’d be so jealous if someone besides me made it big, and yet there was Jane being completely awesome, and I was thrilled. Since then, I’ve caught her in The 40-year-old Virgin, Talledega Nights, and the other Christopher Guest movies. Jane did it. She really, really wanted it, and she stuck with it, and she’s got a helluva resume.

So here’s a little shout-out to her and Don Cheadle for gutting it out. Because acting as a profession sucks even more than writing; at least writers get better with age, but even when actors do get better, there are fewer and fewer roles, especially for women. Survivors rule.

Real Swift

Thanks to all the folks who checked out my words about the spouse. Next time: nude pictures!

Over the years I’ve been part of an online book club. I’m fortunate in that I can leave the bulk of current events to DP; I don’t know if one house could sustain two people going full-tilt at the daily mail, and certainly not two with histories of depression (mine the classic inertia, his more grounded in anxiety; we try to time our afflictions, not always successfully). Though he’s a great source when I need books on 20th century political history or any U.S. history, he obviously doesn’t have as much time for contemporary fiction, and non-U.S. history pre-20th century. (I am a history nut as well; there’s a non-fiction reading group for that, as well as the amazing Ann Arbor library.)

Anyway, in a publishing world where there’s a ton of crappy fiction released constantly, the group has helped me find some gems. Sebastian Barry’s A Long, Long Way, Atonement, Never Let Me Go – OK, the last two weren’t exactly secrets, but I doubt I would have gotten to them if not scheduled on the list. There are also some real clunkers, including a ghastly book called The Dive from Claussen’s Pier, but every 3 or 4 months a classic gets thrown into the mix, good for a non-English major like myself (I was theater, I read all the plays, which isn’t that impressive since there aren’t that many). I made it through the first 50 or 60 pages of Gargantua and Pantagruel last year before the poop jokes and giant body parts did me in. I mean, I’m glad I read what I did, but there’s only so much time in the day. Unlike some list members, I don’t hang on to the bitter end no matter what. If I’m not feeling a book, I bail.

What I am feeling right now is a reread of Gulliver’s Travels. I love Swift. When I teach argument, I always have the kids read Modest Proposal, and I delight in its ability to freak people out 300 years after it was written. What I like about it even more is that it’s not overly challenging to read, and it’s easy to show that great writers communicate simply and precisely – good for students who think the Harry Potter and Twilight series are the height of fine literature.

I’ve never read the complete Gulliver, just the 2 famous ones, with the Liliputians and the Brobdingnagians. I’m reading a version annotated by Isaac Asimov, who I think must have been a bit of a nutter. Every single measurement is lovingly explained in a paragraph-long footnote in which he either marvels or gasps at Swift’s accuracy or arithmetic lapse, respectively. That said, the historical footnotes are pretty swell, and I’m finally getting my Tories and Whigs straight. Yeah, I know, I could have looked this up on widipedia, but one has to make choices in life.

I’m finding the book to be tough to put down, a pleasant surprise, mainly because I’m always pleasantly surprised when a book is like that. I gather that section 3, which looks to be a big mishmosh of stuff, is weaker than the other 3, but I shall gut it out if need be to get to section 4, which has the horse characters with the name I’m not even going to attempt to spell from memory, but which is supposed to be particularly brutal. I have no idea who the targets are, but I do like a good ass-whuppin’ as much as the next pacifist.

So if you’ve never read Gulliver’s Travels because you remember a couple of weird cartoons from when you were younger and you think it’s going to be sort of dumb, I encourage you to prove yourself wrong. There is so little decent satire available right now; most people aren’t even quite sure what it is. Read another pissed-off Irishman’s (did you know the spouse if half-Irish? The other half is French. You can imagine the appetites….) reactions to his savage times from a few centuries back.

The Old Man and Me

After relatively lighter fare – including an embroidered but basically true account of a failed assassination attempt by one of the blankets - the spouse is back in his role as the modern Weeping Prophet with a fine but despairing piece on the state of the world as of 12/28/08.

If you look at the last week of his blog, even though it consists of a low-for-him 3 posts, it in particular pretty much sums up life with the Red State Son. Sometimes – often, in fact – he makes me laugh until my face hurts. Here, his blog audience definitely misses out. Anyone who reads DP’s stuff knows how funny he is. To my everlasting gratitude, he’s not like those movie trailers where the 3 funniest lines are wrapped up in 30 seconds and you have to yawn through the other 89 and a half minutes. It’s rare for a day to go by where he doesn’t say something that absolutely slays me, and, since the audience of me and the kids tends to be appreciative, at times the riffs go on for a solid 10 minutes.

I think the bigger thrill for me is that we both know I appreciate his humor as much if not more than just about anyone he’s ever known. DP has a corny side and a crude side that aren’t really my cup of tea, but he has one of the greatest senses of the absurd of anyone on the planet, and I apparently have one of the greatest appreciations of same. I’m glad he’s not one-note in his comedy, just like he’s not one-note in anything else. Like me, his sensibility is an insane accumulation of found objects, and I find his mix endlessly fascinating. Lord knows we haven’t been perfect parents, but our kids have grown up in a hell of a rich cultural and intellectual environment. Crazy and chaotic at times, no doubt, but plenty of fodder for their own artistry (and, no doubt, therapy sessions).

Spouse’s middle post, about Smarm King Ray Combs, points to his storied past. I never heard of Ray Combs before I met my husband – or of Christopher Hitchens, Michael O’Donoghue, Noam Chomsky, and a whole bunch of other people. Mr. P has a good memory and loves a good story, a trait obvious and necessary for any good writer. What possibly sets him apart is that he’s incredibly verbal. My husband talks about 3 times as much as he writes, so all that stuff you read over on his site has been run through its paces out loud about 25 times by the time you get to it. Should he expire, I’ll be able to deliver a reasonably accurate biography. If nothing else, it will be long.

I used to mind the spouse’s loquacity and penchant for reliving his past ad infinitum, but that’s when I thought that marriage was about…something different than it is. Talking everything through is part of who DP is. He will point out that I’m no slouch on the verbal front, but he knows he talks A Lot. Most of the time, I like it. And, after all, I like to sleep a lot and he puts up with that.

Today’s post represents a big part of life with the man, and, given that this was an election year, it was a much bigger part over the course of 2008. Folks, it was a rough year on the Michigan front. When we met, DP wouldn’t touch politics having gotten so depressed over the Gulf War that he swore off the subject for years. I am at least partly (and I think pretty heavily) responsible for encouraging him to get back into the fray; he was so good at breaking down any current world situation into digestible pieces, I hated to see him devoting all of his talents to appreciations of the Beverly Hillbillies and the Monkees. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that but….look, I don’t really need to say more, do I?) So I have myself to blame more than anyone else for the inevitable sturm, drang, angst, malaise, and all other matter of unpleasantness that results from keeping an eye on the world. DP dives into a mess of stinking entrails on a daily basis. What can you say to the kind of questions he raises? Anything sounds pat.

So I just hold tight to the rope; he always finds his way back to me and whatever solidity and solace I can offer. Dawn Powell, the great great writer who the spouse introduced me to, ends her great great book The Locusts Have No King with this quote: “In a world of destruction one must hold fast to whatever fragments of love are left, for sometimes a mosaic can be more beautiful than an unbroken pattern.”

And the nice thing is, we have so much more than fragments. Or at least, we have really Big fragments.
Happy New Year, Old Man. Let’s keep doing this for a couple more decades. OK by you?

2 Things Hollywood Teaches Us This Xmas

1. Hitler was bad.
2. So are narrow-minded jerks.

Thank you!! And I’d been so confused….

I realized last year that, despite a dearth of quality materials – this ain’t New York, folks – I still love going to the movies. Last year was the first in ages, possibly ever, that I’d actually seen every single Oscar-nominated movie before the Oscars. This in itself is a bit of a sham, given that I know that the Oscars are a stupid, archaic ceremony with about as much validity as the sheet I filled out for my high school’s annual “Best of…” poll. (I won “Sexiest Voice” senior year – that’s what was voted on – but the 99% Mormon faculty changed the award to “Best Voice” for print, which caused a lot of people to shake their heads as I wasn’t a particularly good singer. True story.)

Anyway, yesterday, after predictably getting no takers on my offer to go to several different movies, I was free to go catch the rousing Valkyrie on opening day. Sold-out performance, folks, with lots of macho fellows, one of whom nearly hit me in the face with his elbow when he left the crowded theater at movie’s end. Today, Doubt was the entertainment, in which I fully expected to watch Meryl Streep in the process of leaving no piece of scenery ungnawed.

I was pleasantly surprised with both movies. Valkyrie, in addition to the King of Jumping on Things, features a whole bunch of British actors in all their glorious eminence grise-ness: Kenneth Branagh, Terence Stamp, and Tom Wilkinson, who I just can’t get enough of. The movie cribs a lot from the much better Sophie Scholl from a couple of years back, including a verbatim swipe of the line, “You may hang us, but soon you will be hanging from the gallows.” (Then again, maybe a lot of people said that to the Reichstag. I mean….why not?) There’s a lot of stunning camerawork, not all of it the predictable overhead shots that demonstrate that Germans are really good at precise formations (high five, ancestors – oh, except for the Master Race stuff); one profile shot over Wilkinson’s shoulder is unexpected and stunning. The movie has a nice reverence for machinery, which also comments well and not too overtly on the regime, the story’s interesting, and all in all, it’s rip-roaring – ok, reasonably good – entertainment.

Cruise, I’m not afraid to say, is a hell of a good movie star, and he does the stern, charismatic guy with an eye patch and lots of sang-froid very well indeed. The guy is aging beautifully, and he doesn’t have the Please-Love-Me neediness of so many other actors who’ve driven huge box office in the past without fabulous reviews. I changed my tune on Cruise after Magnolia, in which he gives a truly amazing performance. He’s good in Collateral and Minority Report, and he’s good if not great in this. It’s not a huge acting role anyway; he just needs to rock the eyepatch, which he does.

Now of course the movie elides over the fact that the character seems to have clearly bought into the whole Aryan Superman construct pretty much hook, line, and sinker. But overall, not a bad effort. I prefer it to Doubt, which I saw today courtesy of “Cynical? Who, Us?” Miramax, the loathsome Weinsteins releasing yet another picture that would never, ever be made if it weren’t certain to get nominated for at least 3 oscars before slipping into deserved obscurity.

Meryl Streep is marvelous, doing more with her back in the first few minutes of the movie than most actresses can do with 2 hours of faces and hands – though I seem to be the only person who thinks she’s not doing Mommy Dearestf II. She’s so focused, and so living it…I don’t get the universal hue and cry about how over-the-top she is. But then again, I love opera. Philip Seymour Hoffman is good, too, though not given nearly as much to sink his teeth into. Viola Davis, a character actress I don’t recognize, is pretty great in her brief time onscreen. Amy Adams, so great in Junebug, has the thankless job of playing the Nice Nun. Blargh. The script couldn’t be more predictable, as is the shooting, editing, and thesis.

I HATE what passes for good theater any more – Doubt was a play first. It’s all just crap, crap, crap, freaking TV movies stuck inside of prosceniums. This reminds me: Kander and Ebb’s version of The Visit, my all-time favorite play and the basis for my novel Fly, got cited as one of the 10 best plays of last year – but didn’t play on Broadway, just some regional theater. I have long been afraid someone would discover The Visit and do something with it. before I could get the book out. The fire is under my butt: this is the year I have to try to get Fly published or give up on it. Please remember to encourage me.

By the way, I’ve not said a word about Christmas, which was lovely. I love my family, immediate and extended, and am deeply grateful for more blessings right now than any one person deserves. So: Thank You.