Theater! Acting! Music! Money!

I was in New York city this past weekend for two events that got me thinking about live theater and music.

The first event was the production of Richard III at the BAM starring Kevin Spacey. Much has been written about this world tour production and I agree with some of the criticism expressed by reviews in the Times and other places. Although I was fascinated by some of the choices of the production, I can't honestly say I really enjoyed it all. As a matter of fact, after watching the matinee, I was wishing I could have seen the evening performance to make sure my reactions were clear.

Spacey is always interesting and some of his vocal choices and delivery could be criticized but his physical discipline was beyond reproach. Watching his controlled contorsions while delivering such difficult text was worth every penny of the ticket price. Like a truly talented athlete or dancer his dedication to his craft is apparent in every move.

I saw a an innovative production of Julius Caesar done by the Yale Drama school just the week before that I actually liked better than Richard III, but that may be due to my cultural limitations and expectations. Like most Americans I haven't had massive exposure to the Bard's work and most productions I have seen haven't warranted enough curiosity to pursue opportunities to see more.

It occurred to me that these classic plays were meant to be seen multiple times in quick succesion to share a common experience and debate common reactions. How many times have we watched and discussed re-runs of episodes of Seinfeld or 30 Rock? That is what must have happened with these plays for decades among a curious public. John Wilkes Booth's interpretations apparently weren't revered enough by the public for him to bask in the glory of an actor's fame, he was jealous of his brother so he needed to become a real assassin.

Because today's productions are so expensive, and in some cases so rare, we are never acclimated to the idea that this art is for everyday people to breathe in and enjoy like a great meal. They are now mostly for the advantaged minority who are lucky enough to be exposed early on to real live theater. Today a family of four could eat well for a month for the cost of two tickets to see a broadway show.

I was 15 before I saw Hamlet as performed by Richard Burton and it was my first exposure to a classic play. I was stunned by it all and remember thinking how limited my life had been. I was embarrassed by my cultural ignorance.

At that same age I was well aware of most popular music and the demi-gods of Rock and Roll. That brings me to the second show I saw: The Million Dollar Quartet.

This 90 minute show features a wonderful arrangement of performances of classic Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis songs. The performers were all doing much more than imitations and displayed a sensitivity to the material that was complimented by true musicianship. This homage to pop music and its founding icons reminded me of how cheap and available this music was during my teenage years. 45rpm records were easy to buy and the music on the radio was free. It brought together a generation of kids who got to see that music could unite us beyond race. Elvis made us look beyond our own racial expressions to appreciate soul music from its originators. Ray Charles and Jame Brown became my heros well before the Beatles arrived on our shores and our radio stations.

Both Richard III and the Million Dollar Quartet were obviously worth my time, but the price of the tickets was so high I was left wondering why so few Americans today are exposed to these wonders of live performance. Adding up the audience members, times the cost of seats, and each performance garnered thousands of dollars for producers. I know shows are expensive to start up but I'm sure there is a Bialystock and Bloom getting rich somewhere.

The bigger point is that we live in a culture that is constantly demeaning the arts for arts sake. Because of a reduced tax base and budget deficits there is no desire to expose the masses in public schools to the best of our theater and music traditions. We would rather expose students to high profit games like football. More federal support for the arts and for arts programs in schools would mean much more diversity of expression, more freedom of speech, less religious bigotry and more students exposed to possibilities beyond avarice and greed. Maybe some are threatened by that but I see it as the only hope for an inclusive America. An America that can celebrate our best qualities and true talents.

The Difference Between As explained by Dale

I have devised this simple cultural test for aging boomers to help bridge the gap with the "younger" know-it-alls. The kids who look at us all as horribly old and wrinkled, smelly decrepit, confused fuddy duddies.

You would have had to really lived a life to get all of these references and they should give solace to those of us who have a hard time naming that actor or politician on TV.

It ain't age - it's the volume of unnecessary info that we are already storing. Be proud that you actually know so much stuff and watch the young squirm with blank stares as you ask them in 10 seconds to explain the difference between...

Fatty Arbuckle and Minnesota Fats
Neal Diamond and Neal Armstrong
Zooey Glass and Ira Glass
Dr. John and Dr. Drew
Gary Cooper and Anderson Cooper
Strained through a leslie and Leslie Nielsen
Walter Pigeon and Charlie Byrd
Bob Crane and Bo Derek
Gene Simmons and Richard Simmons
Johnny Rivers and Joan Rivers
Zoot Sims and a Sim Card
Charleston SC and Charleston WV
James Dean and Jimmy Dean
Paul Newman and Cardinal Newman
George Clinton and Bill Clinton
Ma Perkins and Tony Perkins
Harrison Ford and Henry Ford
Chet Baker and Jim Baker


O.K. You get the picture. Rest assured, there are facts only you know...and you would probably win on Jeopardy.

Alexander King

Alexander King was one of my childhood heros. He used to appear with Jack Paar on the Tonight Show and tell stories about being an artist and an addict. He wrote three good books that touched a lot of lives. He also translated Peter Altenberg's "Evocation of Love." All worth your time if you can find copies. I have been on the road observing pieces of America and re-reading King's last book "I should Have Kissed Her More." It is about the people who might show up at his funeral. It is also an essay about preparing for death and how much he loved his life and his young wife. She was the kind of woman who would indulge him and take off her top just to let him enjoy her beauty while she was doing housework. She was beautiful and he was more than 30 years older but they were best friends.

Do you ever wonder if you’re going to last for one more day? I guess that's a meditation reserved only for those few who can actually imagine an end to their own time on the planet. It takes humility and a little humor to stay on that subject for more than a few moments. For most it is too morbid, too negative and maybe too sad. For some it is just simple reality. The thought has always been close to the surface in my life, even as a very young child. It has been part of what has driven me to follow my own path. Having been close to death a few times since childhood I have always felt that I have been given these bonus years as an unexpected gift.

When I am feeling good the old Native American phrase comes to mind: Today is a good day to die. I accept the unfolding wonders of the trip and try to keep my eyes wide open. Some days, when I am feeling lost, alone or abandoned, the awareness of death and the fragility of life hits hard, like a runaway truck loaded with shit bombs.

Even if I ignore the math and assume I will be a lucky one who lives another 20 plus years, I know, with my family history, the odds are not fantastic - at least from an actuarial standpoint. You can't wish the odds away and that is how insurance companies win when betting against your life. Hey, it's just business.

This cold truth can "harsh your buzz" and dampen enthusiasm. Maintaining enthusiasm amidst the slings and arrows of existence seems to be the one secret to a truly joyful life. That and maybe having a young partner. If you live your life according to common expectations about age you are already almost dead. A lot of people my age think old, act old and really feel old. I have a hard time relating to them and they don't seem to like me much either.

On the 23rd of March I had a birthday and as a present to myself I hit the road to do some exploring. I wanted have dinner with a few friends who are spread around the country. Most younger, some older. I also took the opportunity to talk with lots of different people, strangers, street musicians, store clerks, homeless philosophers and kids. Despite the crazy talk that dominates some media, I am most impressed by America's young people. Nice, intelligent and sometimes creative kids who want to do the right thing with their time on the planet. And they really don't buy into all the old divide and conquer social status stuff. Maybe that's why Alexander King wrote his book about dying for his young wife. He was filled with absolute joy having some time to share with her but knew it would be a short beautiful ride. He wanted to leave her with a few words of wisdom about how to move on and express his gratitude for it all. I've always wondered how she fared after he was gone. I hope she did better than expected and found another lover who worshiped her. We all should be so lucky.

American Reality

While buying a guacamole cheeseburger at a diner in Greenwich CT, the server indulged my bad Spanish and graciously explained the difference between some common Italian, Spanish and English terms. Nice.

A Guatemalan immigrant, he’s been working the kitchen trade for years. After learning English by watching television, and then working for five years in an Italian restaurant, he went from bi-lingual to tri-lingual. His fluency and depth of knowledge was impressive.

It was late and the joint was deserted so he gave us plenty of conversation and attention. I kept asking questions and he answered them all patiently and sincerely. I do that sometimes – old radio interview habits die hard and I’ve always wanted Studs Terkel’s career.

Studs said: "I want people to talk to one another no matter what their difference of opinion might be...That's what we're missing. We're missing argument. We're missing debate. We're missing colloquy. We're missing all sorts of things. Instead, we're accepting."

I see these situations as an opportunity to set an example for my son who is growing up in a very privileged neighborhood. Kids in his world don’t often get to really talk to Americans who haven’t had all the advantages. Good people who work hard for a living.

My son has asked me about my lower middle class childhood, but it is so far removed from his own reality I don’t know how much of it can be understood. His class trip this year will be a week long vacation in Costa Rica. My only class trip was a bus ride across town to another crappy school.

I was once a kitchen helper. Making minimum wage among the minority kitchen crew was my introduction to the real world at age 16. It was hard, tedious work and the management was cruel, offensive and racist. I was the only white worker and had the least amount of experience. The experienced crew never made me feel unwelcome or anything less than a fellow victim of an angry white kitchen manager who was dumb as a stump.

The people in that kitchen, who had no reason to give me the benefit of the doubt, treated me with unusual kindness. They helped me learn at every turn and even fed me extra food, breaking the boss man’s strict rules, because they knew I might otherwise go hungry. We were all just people making minimum wage and trying to be nice to each other in an oppressive environment.

I learned a lot in that place and when I meet people like our server from Guatemala I delight in going deep to learn about their world. Survival in this economy can’t be easy for anybody and the pressures can be intense.

(While volunteering at a homeless shelter part of my work was helping people find minimum wage jobs. In my limited experience I think it may be harder today than it was when I was a kid.)

So now, I’m watching my son laugh and joke, and speak another language, with a man who made his way from a world of poverty over two thousand miles away, to find a new life in America serving meals in a town that is one of the richest in the world. American Reality.

There are a lot of really wealthy people in that town and I’ll probably never meet any of them. That is not a big deal to me. Few of them will ever meet the man in the kitchen who speaks three languages. Their loss.

Truly Funny Stuff From Netflix

Kevin Smith: Too Fat for 40

I rented this from NetFlix and was very impressed. If you like listening to funny overweight guys in oversized hockey shirts, buy some snacks and enjoy. He says he doesn't do stand-up but he is a real story teller with a perfect sense of timing. I imagine this is what it was like being there for Mark Twain doing his travel stories to packed opera houses.

Louis C. K. will make you laugh out loud too.

Listening to these guys for the very first time is a joy you know you can never experience again. Like seeing George Carlin or Bill Cosby for the first time when I was a kid while watching Jack Parr or early Carson.

The impact stays with you.

Part of it is the delight of discovery. The WOW thing. It is good to know that new talent always comes along and can still surprise me.

I Had that feeling with "Flight of the Conchords" too.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Spill

The BP oil slick has brought us horrible pictures of wildlife covered in oil and now BP will forever stand for “brown pelicans” in my mind. It reminded me of an old pelican I always watched for when I lived in Florida. He had dark dusty feathers and would roost on the pole next to my boat dock, scouting the water for food. Part of the joy of living near nature is you start to connect with the animals around you. That old pelican had a certain sleepy dignity I respected. Water skiers or loud noises did not easily spook him. If he were annoyed he would just take a little hop to another pole and settle down for more contemplation. He conserved his energy for the important business of diving for fish.

While I lived on the Gulf I was often alarmed by the variables of water quality within just a few miles. A lot of the problem was industrial runoff and some may have even been military. The Navy base had lots of important demolition training to do. I also saw recreational and commercial boaters who didn’t follow obvious rules about spilling gas and oil. The tourists often left garbage floating wherever they anchored to fish or swim. Everyone knew the strict rules and the Coast Guard and Marine Patrols did what they could to encourage responsible behavior and environmental safety but they couldn’t be everywhere. A couple of times we were visited by a strange “red tide” or unknown bacterial events that left lots of people with lung infections, flu like symptoms and dead fish floating in alarming quantities.

There were EPA investigators in the area but I never heard any real explanations. I had a dock on a lagoon within a short ride to the open waters. I needed a power lift to keep the boat up and out of the briny corrosive water of the lagoon. It was not water you would ever want to swim in, I was warned by old timers, but plenty of clear water, with happy dolphins was nearby. I was stopped sometimes for safety inspections and fortunately had all the right papers, fire extinguishers and life jackets. The boat cops were looking for evidence of drinking, and sober, responsible boaters were rarely inconvenienced for more than fifteen minutes by the officers. A lot of boaters resented the intrusion and those officers had an impossible task dealing with angry often drunken boaters. Too few officers and too many people with an attitude.

We had a routine trip we liked to take to an unpopulated island that had a pristine white beach and was only accessible by boat. We would anchor off shore and enjoy a private beach for an hour or two. If you had any food on your boat seagulls would follow, hoping for a handout. Kids threw their crackers up in the air to watch the birds dive for crumbs. In waters near the shore a family of dolphins often followed our boat looking for food. Despite big fines levied against tour boat operators allowing tourists to feed cigar minnows to the dolphins, this behavior is still a concern. The dolphins beg for food and when no one is looking people will try to feed them or brazenly jump in the water to swim with them.

We want our relationship with the natural world but we show too little respect for the rules that will sustain a healthy environment. If so many lack the will to follow the simple rules that apply to the daily life of the Gulf, it is no surprise that we would allow unsafe off-shore drilling and then turn away from serious oversight of corporate power mongers who continually ignore their violations. How many fishing boats will be idle and how many families will lose their lifestyle because of this?

We may have reached the point of no return. We want our freedom, less government and demand fewer taxes. We want it all and yet we don’t want to pay the price to provide a responsible future for our grandchildren. How many destroyed family businesses, dead pelicans and poisoned dolphins will we have to see before we start taking these challenges seriously?

Better oversight requires better government. Better government requires better voters; voters who aren’t acting like petulant children every time we face a difficult task.

Living Outside The Box

In a recent attempt at frugality I cut my cable TV service to the minimum. Call me, "Mr. Basic Cable." No box, no remote, no DVR. Now it is just the plain old cable coming out of the wall into my set providing a limited number of channels. Even when I had more channels than I could count I found myself only watching a handful. If we could just pick our favorites, and only pay for those, then cable would be providing a more elegant a la carte system. But cable systems don't want that. They'd rather sell the higher profit "packages" they create. Even if they wanted to provide buyer choice, we'd be forced to have some sort of box (or a computer) to select our favorites. A box that would lead to all sorts of up-selling. When I called to cancel my expanded service they instantly offered some services I had paid extra for (DVR) for free. The box is their gateway to higher profits so they don't really like it when you can live without the box.

But (and there is always a really BIG but) human nature being what it is, now that I have returned that box, I am overspending on other items I could live without. As I'm about to walk away from a purchase I hear that little voice saying: "Go ahead, buy it. Look how much you are saving on cable." It is like starving yourself all week long and then pigging out on the weekend. You could eat a lot more wisely every day and be ingesting the same amount of calories for the week.

Ignoring the futility of trying to save money, I am still glad I cut back for other reasons. First of all, I am no longer tethered to the insidious DVR memory vault. Mortgaging my future free time because a pile of TV shows is waiting means I was constantly behind on another chore. Not a positive life choice. How free can you be if you if you have to set aside so much time. I've also noticed that the repetition of less than excellent shows has become increasingly relentless on almost all channels. If low budgets create higher profits then the incentive to offer more low budget material is always going to dominate the schedules.

The more channels and options I had the more I was stuck watching mediocre programming because it was always there waiting for me to choose the least objectionable show. And it was all so easy to record and store. Not having shows stack up in a never ending and never empty que means I now have to watch my favorite show as it airs or hope to catch it later on the Internet. The bonus: Finding shows online running with much shorter commercial breaks. A half hour show is often just 22 minutes and a 60 minute show is sometimes as little as 47 minutes. That is cool.

Having no cable box also means I can't order any Pay Per View movies or special events. Not a significant yearly savings but still no temptation to sit through movies that will eventually be online and cheaper through Netflix. That is another discovery that matters. Netflix is cheap and Hulu is free and both provide easy access to some of my favorites.

Netflix allows unlimited online viewing of many box sets of TV series as well as a wide selection of films. Hooking my laptop up to the TV and using the TV as an external monitor is all I needed to do. No special equipment required. And the quality (downloaded through a minimal wifi connection) is often better than the picture I get on some of my basic cable channels coming out of the wall. Go figure.

Sure, there are fewer options but those things I can't see, I'm learning I can live without.