Thought for the day

If you want to hug a porcupine, then you can't really complain when you get stabbed by the quills.

A view from over the bridge

He's Evil, He's Evil, He's Evil

We're not exactly talking "subtle" here . . .

Oh Richard, you bloated spider, you humpbacked scene-stealer you.  When will you ever be part of a play, and not a star turn?

Sigh. Judging by the production currently running at BAM?  Never.

As with every other Dicky Three-Eyes I have ever seen, with the exception of Olivier's movie, if you take away the lead actor from this Bridge Project production, everything falls apart. If a good play is a mountain range, then this is a single mountain towering over a collection of little hills.  A great mountain, but still a mountain, with nothing to contrast itself against.  A one-man show, in other words. 

The beauty of that? You get to see Kevin Spacey go to town. And it's a great town, complete with incredible physical contortions a la Mark Rylance in Jerusalem.  Who’da thunk that the two most memorable male performances on stage in the last year would be a couple of autumn chickens pretzeling their bodies for our enjoyment?  In Spacey’s case, he really makes himself into a human spider, twisting his leg and using a cane to scuttle-walk back and forth across the stage--and then, delightfully, scuttle-march to the beat of kettle drums.   

The major flaw? Because Spacey’s Richard is so blatantly over-the-top evil, everybody else on stage look blind or brain-damaged--so instead of saying to yourself, “Look what he’s getting away with,” you say, “Why are they letting him get away with this?” Which, when you’re doing a three-hour play, is like riding a roller coaster backwards, slowly but surely bringing you further and further away from the fun and excitement, until you’re so distant from the ride that all you can see is the architecture. Plus your back hurts a lot.  (Thank you, Harvey Theatre seats.) 

There are a couple of brilliant first-half multimedia moments, but sadly these are undercut by the interpretation of Richard as an obvious villain. Even the dumbest politico in America knows that you do NOT show rage or frustration on camera. It may get a “look what he’s doing now” laugh, but it’s a laugh that takes you out of the play. But then there isn’t really a play here. Especially in the second half, where even the comic shadings of the first two hours disappear and Spacey does nothing but give a lesson on how to vary your yells over three octaves and 65 minutes.

For the Shakespearean purists at this blog (cough), director Sam Mendes didn't cut a whole hell of a lot, so for the first time ever I actually got to see a couple of the women scenes that usually never get done when this play gets produced.  And now I know why.  And have to ask myself, "Did that EVER WORK?  Even in 1594? Really?  You had four boy actors who were THAT GOOD in 1594 that you wrote a lo-o-o-o-ong scene for them?  Wow, Bill.  Cocky in your thirties, weren't you?”

This is also the final Bridge Project presentation, which is odd for two reasons: because the last two projects have had two plays in repertory, and because those plays have had more than one star.  Or more than one  mountain (See above).  But it’s not up to the level of the last two, and not least because it feels like the bus and truck Richard (or as we used to say, referring to Transylvania, the angry peasant and pitchfork tour).

Bottom line: it  makes me want to live long enough to see someone play Richard like a male femme fatale. 

 Wait--

Songs for a Tuesday Morning: The smell of burning leather as we hold each other tight

Since I've been feeling more walled up than a Poe protagonist lately, here are three Wall Of Sound-related tunes, two produced by Phil Spector and one a loving homage to all things Spectorish.

"River Deep--Mountain High"  from 1966 barely climbed to 88 on the Billboard 100 and was one of the most expensive singles ever produced at the time, costing over $20,000 in 1966 dollars (that's $138,000 in Today Cash)--which didn't include Phil Spector's private arrangement with Ike Turner (Spector paid him $20K just to stay away from the recording studio while Spector cut the single and the album with  Tina Turner).  The failure of the single to chart depressed Spector so much that he didn't do another musical thing for the next two years except sing the phrase "Music critics suck" over and over again.

River Deep, Mountain High

This next one is not as Wall-of-Soundy as RDMH, but it's definitely memorable for its subject matter alone.  Written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King and recorded by The Crystals in 1962, the song was supposedly created after Goffin and King discovered that Little Eva (the singer on their "Do The Locomotion") was being beaten by her boyfriend, and when they asked why she put up with it, she replied that it was because he loved her.  (Shades of Carousel.)

He Hit Me And It Felt Like A Kiss

And finally, on a (thankfully) much sillier note, we have this hot and sweaty duet between Fee Waybill and Re Styles from The Tubes' second album, which was arranged in Wall Of Sound style by Jack Nitzsche.  It's one of my favorite songs, and it totally deserves to be in a John Waters movie somewhere. Or have John Waters direct a video of it.

Don't Touch Me There

And I'll fall for her like an anvil through greased air

Noir sonnets: The Dame

She’s beautiful the way a knife is sharp.
   She makes me drunker than a fifth of scotch.
One smile and she can play me like a harp.
   Her heart’s a gun, and I’m the latest notch.
There’s nothing that’s beneath her or above her.
   She’s silk and silver, with a soul of sludge.
When she says “I” she means her and her lover;
   When she says “We” she means her and her grudge.
She’ll screw me till my life’s totally effed--
   She’ll say "I'll always love you" to my face--
Then hit the road and make me think I left
   (But keep the door cracked open just in case).
      She’ll find a way to make me hers for life,
      Then stab me so I never feel the knife.

Copyright 2012 Matthew J Wells

La Sol y La Luna*

The sun always wears
a pair of black four-inch heels
The moon goes barefoot

Copyright 2012 Matthew J Wells

*I know, I know--"sol" is masculine, but for the poem to work, they both have to be feminine; and I'm also riffing on this great restaurant in Austin, so it's not only bad grammar but a bad pun.

The Undead of Winter

It pretends to be warm but it’s not really warm, like an ice goddess in a fur coat. 

It feels like the world is coming alive, but it’s not, it’s still dead, it’s just putting the lie in alive, and I walk hand in hand with it because I want to believe it, because I feel the promise in the air, and frankly?  Because there’s nothing that makes me feel more alive than walking arm in arm with 60 degree Fahrenheit weather . . .

And life is what this femme fatale is after, my life, my warmth.  She leans in for a kiss, and I close my eyes, and like a door slamming in my face just as I walk up to it, a hard sub-freezing wind will blow it all away, will hit me like a thousand little nails, will slice through shirt and flesh to pierce my heart, the teeth of something that hungers for the warmth of my blood.

All I want to do is curl up into a ball, a ball of down, pun intended, with all my branches bare and my roots dried up and gasping.  And then the ground grows moist and I start to bud, and just as a shoot of green appears, it’s sliced away by an Arctic blast, to the sound of bitter laughter in the wind.

It’s not really warm.  I keep telling myself that, but the sun on my skin laughs at me and says I'm insane, of course it's really warm, would I feel this way if it wasn't?

All right, I think, it's warm, yes, warm, but it's heartless warmth, it's bloodless heat.  I keep telling myself that, but I have so much energy that my body is laughing at me, and saying that I'm delusional, how can warmth be heartless, how can all this energy be bloodless?

And I give in.  It’s a forgery of spring, but it’s such a perfect forgery that I don't notice it--I don't want to notice it--because it gives me what I want.  Until it doesn't.  

It’s a warm kiss that turns into a cold bite, and when it does, I think, “Thank God I’m so withdrawn that I can’t feel it.”

But I can feel it.

I do feel it.

I always feel it

Feel it in my bones

Feel it reach into my bones

The cold seductive touch

Of winter in my head

That says hearts do not beat

They are not allowed to beat

Or else they beat too much

For something cold and dead

Somebody knows me far too well . . .

I just received this as a holiday gift:

Thank you, J.

Let the SuperDickery commence.

Holiday Movies, or, What A Weird Species Humanity Is

War Horse.  There’s nothing that brings out a sense of humanity more than an endangered animal.  Audiences all over the world will say “Ho hum” while human soldiers are getting slaughtered left and right, but when a lame horse is going to get put out of its misery, the handkerchiefs come out and they start crying “Not the horse!  Don’t shoot the horse!”  In the entire rest of the film, there is only one comparable moment where you actually feel for a human being.  It’s a close-up of Tom Hiddleston’s face, and in that one close-up is everything you need to know about the stupidity and waste of war.  But in true Spielberg fashion, this film is about survivors, not the fallen--it’s the horse version of Schindler’s List.  And it’s built like a checklist of emotional buttons: heartless landlord (check), precocious but sickly girl (check), horse-driven echo of the Christmas Truce (check), equine version of Ben-Hur as a galley slave (check), a boy and his horse love affair (check), horses charging machine guns (check and double check).  And every button works; it’s like seeing an ex, the one who broke your heart, and watching her get under every piece of armor you’ve built up to protect yourself--and she makes you hate yourself for loving every second of it.  In other words, it’s very Disney.  How Disney?  This movie is so Disney that (my hand to God) the goose does comic relief.  

A Dangerous Method.  This movie feels like somebody said, “I bet you a  million dollars that you can’t make a dull movie about carnal desire and sexual neuroses,” and David Cronenberg went, “You’re on!”  I don’t know whether it’s the too-literal translation of the Christopher Hampton play to film, or the fact that the Brit and the Dane are playing the Jews (and the Jew is playing the Swiss guy), or the fact that Cronenberg really needed that million bucks, but this is by far the dullest movie in which you will ever see a half-naked Keira Knightley get spanked, and spanked hard, by a bored Michael Fassbender. I mean hell--Fassbender has more energy and verve in the trailer to X-Men: First Class than he does in this entire movie.  And Mortensen underplays Freud so much that he’s within waving distance of Matt Damon in The Good Shepherd.  All Vincent Cassel has to do is show up and he steals the entire movie.  In other words, don’t go see this when you’re sleepy.  But if you do doze off, try to remember what you dreamed, because it’ll be five times more exciting.  And ten times more revealing.

Barry Lyndon.  The most beautiful badly-acted movie ever made.  Hands down.  It was at the Museum of the Moving Image as part of their See It Big series, and I swear to God, if this was a silent movie?  It would be right up there with Citizen Kane.

Hamlet in Elsinore.  A 1964 version of Hamlet which just got released on DVD this fall.  I watched it on New Year’s Eve with my friend Meir, and we both agreed that (a) Christopher Plummer’s performance in the lead partakes a little too much of the first syllable of his character’s name, and (2) Robert Shaw as Claudius is the shit.  Holy crap, is he good.  Also: Michael Caine, in his only filmed Shakespearean performance (I know; right?), makes a perfect Horatio.  There are some weird cuts in the script (especially in Act Four: second Ophelia mad scene?  Gonzo.) and Plummer, alas, spends most of his time on-screen auditioning to be a member of the Barrymore family.  See it for Shaw.

Pina in 3-D.  If you’ve seen Pina Bausch live, you need to go see this.  If you’ve never seen Pina Bausch live, then you REALLY need to go see this.  It deserves (and will get)  its own full-length review in the next couple of days, so I’ll just say two things here.  Every choreographed move in this film, as in Bausch’s work, springs from an emotional impulse.  Which makes almost every movement in this movie so human that it becomes a symphony of carnal music.  Go see it, and we'll talk.

4 lessons from 2011

1

If I speak your name

I’ll become untouchable

and not an option

2

Nothing like shared grief

to make a detached soul feel

like embracing life

3

Imaginary meals

can only ever feed

imaginary appetites

4

I want no part of it

but I will always feel hurt

if I’m not invited

Copyright 2012 Matthew J Wells