If

If


If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream---and not make dreams your master;
If you can think---and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings---nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son! 


-- Rudyard Kipling


  via the greatest blog in the great white North


 See also Hopper quoting Kipling again at about 3:19

 

Parade

And then the rain -- True West

RIP Ernest Borgnine

 I spent too many afternoons watching him in reruns on our black and white TV.
 


One night on the late show, I found out he could bring you to tears in an amazing portrayal of loneliness and self hatred, when cinema could occasionally look on regular people and not make them into losers or buffoons. 

Then I found out what a scary sadistic beast he could be.

And here's what he had to say about the best movie he ever appeared in, The Wild Bunch. (He looks pretty great for a 90 year old).



RIP.

Happy 4th from the Overlook Hotel

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Love leaped out

Love leaped out in front of us like a murderer in an alley leaping out of nowhere, and struck us both at once. As lightning strikes, as a Finnish knife strikes! She, by the way, insisted afterwards that it wasn’t so, that we had, of course, loved each other for a long, long time, without knowing each other, never having seen each other… 

- Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

Mrs Bridge

From a review in the Guardian by Joshua Ferris of a great and neglected novel: 

No doubt much of what oppresses Mrs Bridge is an unsustainable domestic condition. The generation of women after hers – that of her two daughters – would have more freedom, more opportunity, and more perspicacity. But as Connell pursues this "carbuncular presence", and as it becomes the great preoccupation of the book, deepening and expanding, like the exhalations of a crouching beast, we come to know it as something universal, harrowing, and irremediable: an existential fear, the sour taste of wasted life, the wild desire to rectify that waste. How does one prosper against the threat that one might be skimming over the years, ignorant of how life should have been lived, might be lived, must be lived? What shall I do? What shall I do?

There is no certain answer, and in this uncertainty, the ironic distance between Mrs Bridge and the reader is closed. We no longer see her as victim of one or another comical shock, an object of pity or ridicule, or a hopeless case of repression and neuroses. She is Meursault without the epiphany of atheism, Molloy without the solace of scatology, Dr Rieux without the nobility of resistance. She is a reflection of you and me, an exemplar of our shared humanity and all the terror and opportunity it so briefly provides – so necessary to seize, and so easy to squander. 

Psychologists Discover How People Subconsciously Become Their Favorite Fictional Characters

Psychologists have discovered that while reading a book or story, people are prone to subconsciously adopt their behavior, thoughts, beliefs and internal responses to that of fictional characters as if they were their own.

Experts have dubbed this subconscious phenomenon ‘experience-taking,’ where people actually change their own behaviors and thoughts to match those of a fictional character that they can identify with.

via 

Pre-evacuation

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When I pulled my phone out from my bag, I had three messages from my daughter, calls just a few minutes apart. That's when I knew something was up. The thick arm of grey and brown smoke twisting over my neighborhood didn't seem as ominous as those three calls.


We'd been though a major wildfire only two years ago, and we were unscathed, unscorched and distant from the story. Smoke hung over everything then, too.  I rolled through the neighborhood, the light ocherous and pleasantly Satanic. A TV crew had set up in a parking lot of the local Montessori school. That also caught my attention, finally.


Through my daughter, I found out our neighborhood was on pre-evacuation status. This means you're supposed to be packed and ready to go on short notice. Perhaps very short notice. My mother also left a message, and my father called shortly afterwards. You forget the power of the TV news.


I like a crisis as much as the next man. Coincidentally, I'd just had a conversation with my daughter a few days ago about exactly this: what would you take with you from a burning house?


Easy: things you can't replace. Documents. And stuff you'd take on a short trip. But I didn't quite swing into action like a Roman general or a samurai or even a Scout Master. I looked west, in the direction of the fire. That told me nothing, but it didn't stop me or my neighbors from periodically peering through the smoke to see signs of danger or deliverance. A sudden hunger to go over to one of the people I'd never spoken with and start a conversation came over me. I regretted ignoring them, but then, I don't know how you break the ice these days in a place as self-conscious as mine. 


Still, as irrational as it was, I wanted some sort of social proof, a cue, even though I knew I could figure things out as well as they could. 


I went back into the house. The first wave was easy: negatives. Hard drives. Cameras and computers. My daughter asked that I grab her journals. My wife asked that I take her jewelry box and Hermès scarves. Passports, credit cards, bank and insurance information. Instruments. 


Truly irreplaceable items are few, when you get down to it. I'd like to have packed a few more things, but after all, you can buy nearly anything except your son's cartoons or your daughter's fifth-grade science project, or an early love poem  to the woman who's now your wife. (Did I write that? I guess I did.)


The house stank like the inside of a camp fire, but I found myself starting to dawdle.  Looking at the small pile of boxes and bags, I began to feel free. A large, silent part of me wanted to be shut of all the crap -- crap, I need to point out, that I bought, crap that I like pretty well and isn't too stupid, crap that isn't exactly crap -- CDs, books (too damn many books), DVDs.


But the utter simplicity of my pile. My kids' treasures. My wife's. My gun, my MacBook, my cameras. Two paris of pants, some shirts and socks. What else do you need?

Outside, I heard excited voices. People really dig a disaster. It happens during the winter, mostly, when we get a blizzard that wallops the town and suddenly -- everyone's cheerful, chatty, ready to go out of their way to help. We tasted a bit of drama, and it was sweet.


Now, of course, we need to keep the context here. Watching a fire shoot down the street and devour your house with its collectibles and mementos is not fun, and not an occasion for a smart ass like me to note how perversely we crave relief from our boring daily life. Exactly that is happening an hour and a half south of here. We're lucky, so far. We are only pre-evacuation, which sounds suspiciously anti-climatic and close to premature ejaculation.  It's odd to hope for a detour from a narrative closure. Weird how deeply those tropes are dug into the brain and imagination.


I have to resist some weird Romantic wish to see the whole place in flames and heroically build from that. I know that, instead, it would be months of calls to insurers, to contractors, to regulators, of depending on the kindness of family and friends -- a giant pain in the ass.


We still are on alert. We may be told to leave, but I've squirreled away most of my precious things. It rained a bit, a mixed blessing because with the water came lightening, and still more fires.


And I'm going to drink that fancy bottle of French wine. To the dregs.

Auditions 1: judging by the results, theater education sucks.

If you get a B.A. or a B.F.A. in acting, you should be able to act. That's a high standard, I know, but it only seems fair that if you pay a ton of coin for a degree, they should teach you something back.


But, okay: acting . . . it's an art after all. It requires all kinds of tricky things that no one can teach, not really. (That's why the best acting schools are so selective. The teachers must, I think, know that the prospective students either have the knack or don't, and they'd better have it coming into the program or all the exercises and work and productions aren't going to work).


So, let's lower the standard. It seems like asking too much to create a theater artist out of four years of liberal arts school. Maybe that's just a stupid proposition to believe in. But if you do earn that theater degree, you should be able to control your voice and diction and know how to move your body expressively. These are craft elements. They require no special aptitude. You just have to receive instruction and put in the time. They're basic, too. If you can't be heard, no one will be able to appreciate your performance or the playwright's work. If you move awkwardly, it's distracting.


Basic, right?


I spent a few hours learning that this is too high a standard. Dozens of actors showed up with very nicely produced glossy head shots -- almost completely irrelevant to me, other than as a device to help remember who auditioned. And with resumes. Listing BAs and BFAs. Even a few MFAs. And most of them sucked. They were brave. They were bold, and they deserve credit for that and for the work they put into learning their pieces. But the acting was mediocre.


That's to be expected, I guess. But what shocked me is how few of them had any craft. They mumbled. They stood there like dead fishes propped up in a frozen food case. Or they'd make little penguin gestures with their arms. And whatever they'd listed as training didn't seem to matter. Four year programs, two year programs, random classes from a series of teachers -- none of it mattered. If they were good, they were good no matter where they went or studied. If they stank, they stank no matter where they'd picked up their stench. 


Okay, maybe I'm generalizing. We didn't see students from some of the better known schools; I guess they could be better, or at least offer some good diction. You know, the basic price of entry. Not necessarily emotional truth or charisma, or shattering insight into the human heart. Just get the words out.


For the record, I saw some fine actors.


But it makes me think that arts education, or at least theater education in this country is a fraud, and thus, a criminal enterprise. You can't teach art. You can, however, create a place where the craft elements can be learned. Apparently, a lot of schools are absolutely failing. 


They should refund their students' tuition.

Women's Life Drawing Class at the Chase School of Art

Except for the clothes and the tats, art school chix haven't changed much.

pick up

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