What Do Women Want?

In the Wife of Bath's Tale, from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, a knight who has committed rape is given a quest to save his life. He must find the answer to "What do women really want?" He spends a year and a day trying to find out. Eventually an old crone who forces him to marry her (but is actually a beautiful fairy in disguise) tells him that he can have her as an ugly old woman but faithful or beautiful and unfaithful. When he refuses to chose, but allows her to chose, he gets both, learning that what women really want is to make decisions of their own.

I thought of that story Sunday as I sat amid a huge audience of women in their 20s attending He's Just Not That Into You. The film pretends to teach women what men really are saying when they such things as "I'll call you." But what the film actually does is perpetuate those very stereotypes that women have come to accept:

• The not-so hot guys are the ones you should rely on.
• The really cute guys--who are married or in a committed relationship--are often liars and cheats. The blonde hunk, played by Bradley Cooper with a winning smile and persona, cheats on his wife, confesses to her his infidelity and then continues that infidelity while saying he wants to work it out with his wife. AND he lies about not having quit smoking, a sin the film--and wife--sees as equal to the infidelity. At the end, though, he gets his comeupance by being alone, just like the girl he cheated with and his ex-wife. [The film undercuts this high moral viewpoint toward telling the truth by having a multi-married woman say how much better she is than any of her three husbands--she was never caught.]
  
• Cooper's best friend, Ben Afflick, is in a seven year committed relationship with Jennifer Aniston but refuses to marry her. He's sensitive, caring, does the dishes, but just doesn't want to do the vows. After she finally realizes that a committed relationship is better than no relationship, he gives her ring and gets on his knees to beg her to marry him. A collective sigh went up from all the romantic souls in the audience. After all, just as Sex in the City showed, what women really want is to have a man sweep them off their feet and marry them.

No where in the film is there any woman who can stand on her own without a partner. It is only as part of a couple that women are supposed to find fulfillment. Only the girl who cheated with the husband and the wronged ex-wife are alone at the end--and being alone appears a curse, not a blessing.

What do women really want? It appears Hollywood thinks it is to let men make their decisions and determine the roles to play in their lives.

Greenfingers

I watched a most delightful film tonight with Clive Owen and Helen Mirren. Greenfingers (2001) is about a group of prisoners who are put on a gardening detail and how the experience changes them. The plot is "inspired by real events." Although it follows rather predictable lines, getting there is worth the trip. Owen has a way of drawing you in, Mirren is her usual cheeky self and David Blake Kelly plays a wry old serial killer with an enormous heart. The whole thing proved an enjoyable evening. I highly recommend it.

Trailer

Learning from the Sunday New York Times

Part of my Sunday routine is getting up early enough to go to Starbucks and sit and read through the Sunday New York Times. On a good day, I feel I learn a lot. Today was no exception.

Among the things I learned were as follows:

• Front page: "Unemplyment surges around the world, threatening stability"
• There's a fascinating photo of a nattily dressed young handsome businessman beside his great car with a sign reading, "$100 WILL BUY THIS CAR / MUST HAVE CASH/ LOST ALL ON THE STOCK MARKET." The picture could taken easily today.
  
• An article on Yves St. Laurent shows his book library shelves. What a great idea for a series of pictures... the libraries of friends and what they tell us about them.
• A disturbing article by John Markoff discusses the need for a new internet since the security of the one we use has been irreparably compromised. Gangs across the world can now commandeer over 12 million computers and make them into a supercomputer called botnet.
• Virginia Heffernan asks what makes a good Facebook update. Ultimately her answer is that questions make the most provocative updates and get the most response.
• The book review praises Samantha Harvey's The Wilderness about a man dealing with Alzheimer's from inside his mind.

Check out the Times.

Staging a Peter Max Midsummer Night's Dream

I am currently directing a production of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I’ve directed two other productions of it during my directing career, but all productions take on lives of their own.

My approach for this production is to set the play in a mythical America 1967, complete with 60s music, a couple of dances, Peter Max images, and 60s icons.

The fairies will be hippies living in the wood in a hippy van, which will be a set piece onstage. Regarding the fairies, I decided for the first time (for me) to use real wings. Oberon is a biker patterned after Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones. Theseus, Duke of Athens, is patterned on Richard Nixon, and his Amazon queen, Hippolyta, becomes Angela Davis. The mechanicals are modern workers. Bottom’s Pyramus and Flute’s Thisbe will be patterned on Sonny and Cher’s, “I Got You, Babe.” I'm currently shopping for a Prince Valiant wig for Pyramus.

Each time I’ve done the production, I have had the quandary of finding an appropriate ass’s head for Bottom that both looks good and is affordable. I spent lots of time online and finally narrowed the search down to the following two wonderful choices. Both were ordered online and arrived within a week.

The first mask is from Custom Heraldic Designs, a site specializing in numerous Medieval costumes and masks. This leather mask is expertly crafted, light weight, and is easy to wear. It is based on a Medieval manuscript illustration of mummers. It is the cheaper of the two.

The second mask, from Maskarade [630 St. Ann Street, New Orleans, LA 70116], is a beautifully crafted, much more substantial hard mask by Diane Trapp, with paper mache padded face and synthetic-fur donkey whiskers and a great tuft of black hair. This is mask we’ll probably use.

Our show will be presented during the last two weeks of March.

Post Technology

My British Lit students are currently creating blogs in a unit based on the works of Samuel Pepys. But in the last week, for two days, the internet and wireless connections at school have been down or intermittent at best. During one class I had computers in my room, but they functioned only as paper weights since no one could get online.

Today my colleagues spent our common planning period frantically trying to check mail, print up class materials (our printer is through the same wireless system as our computers), and look up things online. We all stared at the little icon indicating the computer was trying to connect, waiting for “Wireless Network Connection is now connected.” And it never came.

I realized I’m feeling the same sense of loss that I felt the day that I lost my cellphone. I realize how necessary it has become in my life to feel connected to friends and the world.

A friend drove out to Colorado to ski. He took the trip alone and when he got to the house that he had borrowed, it had no phone, no television, no wi-fi. There were six houses nearby but no lights ever came on. He had to travel eight miles for Starbucks, a newspaper and wi-fi. He described how totally alone he felt and cut off from the world. As a result, he cut his trip short by a week.

So here we are in the Age of Technology with one of its obvious flaws. One must connect with the internet in order to use it—and suddenly without it, our “global sense” disappears and we become isolated humanity.

Bill Clinton & Voodoo Commercial

A very funny commercial on the scale of Mr. Bean.

What were you doing while the President spoke?

Have you seen the Gigapixel panorama shot by David Bergman?
To try it for yourself, go here.




Amazingly, with the correct viewer, you can zoom in to view a closeup of everyone in the shot.
So while we see the president speaking, we can zoom into the thousands of others. We can also see YoYo Ma taking a picture...
And the cameramen on the tower opposite the president... distant crowds listening intently... and the band sitting below the president [in detail almost clear enough to read the music].

To read about the technology required to create the shot, read here.

But the implications of the picture are very disquieting. Have we reached the technology that our spy cameras can actually pick out individuals? What might a conspiracy minded individual do surveying the crowd, looking for plots? How might we use it? How many thousands of historians will pour over this photograph making connections that we can't even imagine right now? Historians have tried to show that Booth was near Lincoln when he gave one of his inaugural addresses. What happens when we can clearly see everything from Arthea's hat to the people in standing on the buildings with weapons apparently in hand to the young woman in the white hat and black coat walking toward the stairs by section 12?

It's a whole novel waiting to be written, all documented by Mr. Bergman.


The thought sends chills of a future I'm just imaging up my back.

25 Random Things About Me

Facebook has this exercise going where you write 25 things about yourself and then tag people who are to do the same. Since not everyone is on Facebook, I thought I would share mine.

1. I believe that God intended each of us to be the person we are and it’s our job to figure out what that is. God didn’t create throw-away people. One of our difficulties in life is when we assume that the roles other people see for us are those that we see for ourselves. As Lewis Carroll says, “Be who you would seem to be.”
2. I believe each day we should do something to make someone else smile. I didn’t do much politically to help win President Obama his position, but I did buy coffee for the first fifteen people who came into Starbucks that morning--and seeing their surprise and the smiles it brought was very rewarding.
3. Each morning that I awaken and see one of my cats lying on a pillow looking out the window and another at the foot of the bed, I know the day is going to be okay.
4. When I was in high school I read Ross Lockridge, Jr.’s Raintree County and I found myself swept into the 1840-1890 world of rural Indiana. It’s the only book that I don’t teach that I read three times.
5. I’m sorry I can never read To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time again. Such a power affirmation of the nobility of the human spirit.
6. I still find myself very connected to my small town Illinois roots. In many ways I find a portion of my soul responds to the Lincoln period and the people who created McLean County. A couple of branches came to that land in the 1830s and I feel I know them quite well… often better than the people I know who live there now.
7. My grandfather was a great storyteller. I loved all his family stories. As an adult I realize he was greatly influenced by some Twain’s writing, but I thought it all came from him. He’s one of the people I strive to be.
8. I am a social being. There are some people who help make my day positive by just taking a few minutes to have contact.
9. I can’t escape creativity. I have to draw and paint with Photoshop, just like I had to make miniatures or direct plays. The paper dolls that I now do are a way of connecting to the Creative Muse that lives within me. When she begins urging me to work or write, I give in because I fear someday she won’t return.
   
10. I’m in awe of the Facebook interface that allows all these people I know to come in contact with each other.
11. I used to tell my classes that I was a Romantic Existentialist. I guess I still I am. I believe that there are such things as good and justice, and I believe that our actions define who we are. If we want to be good people, we have to act like ones.
12. The most painful period in my life was separating from my wife of 25 years. I lost all the “friends” that I had. One aunt wrote me, “I will always love you as my nephew, but I never want to see you again.” Another friend wrote, “I hope you die in the gay ghetto you moved to.” It took me several years to reconcile what I thought friends were with the people I knew.
13. Whenever I’m a little down and not sure what direction my life should take, God sends me a former student to tell me what I have meant to his/her lives. One person described the seat they sat in and the color of the room, another discussed conversations we had years before in a museum. There aren’t many professions that one can say, “I made a difference today.” Teaching is one. If you have someone who made a difference, tell them. It might make their day—and get them to smile. [I had a friend who said, “It doesn’t jingle but it feels good.”]
14. I’ve learned that we as much out of life as we put in. Several years ago I read a book called the Drowning Room by Michael Pye, which gets its title from the rooms on 17th century Dutch ships where convicted prisoners were confined. Water could be poured into the room and there was manual pump which the prisoner had to operate. As long as they pumped, they lived. The book’s take was that that’s what our lives are like. We pump for long as we can.
15. When I was in my twenties I went to a fortune teller who told me I was a very old soul. And then she began naming my past lives—an ancient Egyptian, an ancient Greek, a native American warrior who died in battle, a minor Elizabethan playwright, an Italian Renaissance painter, a German banker at the turn of the century who had many children—all periods that I tend to do reading on. If part of the way we know our past souls is what we are drawn to, I’m sure I died in Pompeii and on the Titanic and rode the circuit with Lincoln.
16. I make friends with women more easily than men. Right now, I have 5 women I have coffee with each morning and 3 whom I drink margaritas with every Wednesday. They are all fascinating and I look forward to our conversations.
17. I love to sing. I sang in high school, but by college I thought my voice had deserted me, and so for the next 30 years I didn’t sing. My best friend had me join his choir and I discovered that my voice was still there. Now I cantor at church, sing with a church choir, sing in a local acapella group of 65. There is nothing I like more than to sing for others and watch them smile.
18. All the people in my immediate family are dead. Sometimes it’s hard being an orphan—even in your sixties.
19. I love the spontaneity of my freshmen. I have one class where one day I had closed the door to get class started and a student walked in as the bell rang. I looked at him and said, “Hey, kids, here’s ___!” The class immediately began loudly applauding and cheering, making the student feel special. We’ve picked that up so now it’s still a bright moment in their day.
20. I wish I were as wise as my students tried to make me. The older I get the more I realize how little I know. I’ll always been a student who relishes information.
21. When I was a kid, I lived two blocks away from a movie theater. Every week I went to a movie, and my mother always said that I never saw a movie I didn’t like. What she didn’t know was that I just didn’t want to tell others what I thought so they could make the experience less for me. Now I go to the movie as often as I can. I can usually tell during the credits whether I will love the movie or not. During the credits of “Milk,” I was in tears for the men who were being arrested in the gay bars. In “Whose Afraid of Virginia Woof,” hearing Elizabeth Taylor’s laugh for the first time hooked me in. “Diva” opens with a concert where the African American opera singer Wilhelmena Wiggins Fernamdez sings “La Wally” and from the moment she enters—all fluid elegance with a voice to match—I knew the film was going to be special.
22. I’m fascinated by the 1940s and 1950s. I was too young to appreciate much that went on, but occasionally I can place myself back there. Bradbury in Dandelion Wine speaks of an old man who becomes the kids’ time machine. Maybe that’s me.
23. I don’t like to eat things that have eyes that can look at me as I eat them. The only exception is lobster, which I adore. I have to do a disconnect when I eat them, however.
24. The triple-bypass of a few years ago forced me to think about my mortality. I hope I have a greater appreciation of life because of it. Certainly I know as long as other people remember me I’ll have a little immortality.
25. I love the worlds that I've gained from reading. One of the worst things I went through was for three years, as I struggled with depression, I couldn't read. Reading is indeed a gift.

Hallelujah... just read the cards

The introduction is a little off-putting, but stay with it. Handel's music will never be the same for me.

The Battle for Christmas

During the last few weeks of the semester, I taught two works dealing with Christmas: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and A Christmas Carol. While I was teaching the two works, I read Stephen Nissenbaum’s The Battle for Christmas, which details a fascinating history of Christmas in America. Briefly some of his information is as follows:

Mumming—costumes and masks

Nissenbaum begins by showing how the Puritans from 1620 through 1750 made the celebration of Christmas illegal. The New English Puritans objected to the drunken sense of misrule that was going on in other English areas. The Puritans recognized that December 25 was only accepted as Christ’s birth date after the 4th century. The Church at that time merely usurped the Roman Saturnalia. The early celebration varied in length, but was essentially designed as a period for workers to let off steam. Mumming, with its sense of carnival, included masks and costumes. Men often dressed as women; women as men. They selected a “Lord of Misrule.” During the celebration charity was given to the poor, with the poor going from place to place demanding drink (wassailing).

One of the signs of the conflict between Catholicism and Puritanism was the removal of “red letter days” which were the days of the saints practiced by the Roman Catholics.
Between 1730 to 1800, Christmas entered the mainstream.

Irving Creates Traditions

One author whose works helped create the sense of traditions was Washington Irving who in 1819 wrote about the celebrations at an English country manor, Bracebrige Hall. Irving admitted that he had never seen some of the traditions he described.

The Cult of Santa

The cult of Santa Claus did not exist in the Colonial Period. St. Nicholas did exist, but he was a patron saint of New Amsterdam. Irving refers to him 25 times in his writing. He is viewed as a patrician saint in a broad hat and smoking a clay pipe. On December 6, he rewards and punishes the children. A poem in 1821 refers to him as coming on Christmas Eve, traveling in a sleigh pulled by a single reindeer. In 1822 Clement Clarke Moore composed “A Visit from St. Nicholas.” He’s described a pedlar and smokes a short pipe. Gentlemen smoked long pipes; plebeians smoked short ones. St. Nick’s sleigh flew and had eight reindeer.

Santa’s transformation continued during the 1860s as Thomas Nast began drawing his Santas. His most famous—and defining image-- came about in 1881, complete with long pipe.


In Pennsylvania, the Belsnickle (from Pelz-nickle “St. Nicholas in fur”) was based on Knecht Raprecht (“Rupert the Servant”) who wore high boots, a white robe, often black mask, and enormous flax wig. He frightened people, creating mischief and demanding gifts, following in the traditions of the wassailers and the mummers.

One of the major changes of Christmas occurred in the 1800s when the poor were replaced by children. After 1826, theatrical productions, which before were not presented on Christmas Day, became popular Christmas-fare for children.

Commercial Christmas

In 1769, a man sent mittens for his wife to a dyer. Nissenbaum lists it as the first instance of a commercial gift. By 1806 the first advertisement with Christmas presents appears in the ad of a bookseller. By 1820s Santa appears. During the depression of 1830s, more ads with Santa appeared.

The Christmas Tree

Nissenbaum explains that the Christmas tree finds its origins in the practices of German immigrants during the 1830s. In 1835 a female author describes the tree of Charles Fallen, a German immigrant Harvard professor. The top of a fir tree or spruce is placed on a table, with toys on each branch and dozens of wax candles. Traditionally the tree was not seen by the children until New Year’s Eve. An 1836 illustration shows a table top tree with fence around the base, doll house, soldiers, food and toy horse. Candles are lit on each branch. The trees probably didn’t appear earlier than 1810. In Germany they seem to have been introduced in Strasboarg after 1750.

Southern Partying

In the Antebellum South, planters took December as a season of major eating and boisterous carnival spirits including guns, firecrackers and hard drinking, a way of letting off steam. People’s drinking started before breakfast. Traditional fox hunts allowed friends to visit. Slaves could use the time to rest, sleep, travel to visit friends, attend revival meetings, even make wares they could sell. The freeing of slaves created havoc with the previous traditions. Nissenbaum’s book proved very interesting reading.

Check it out: Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas. NY: Vintage Books, 1996.

Check here to see my collection of 365 Santa Clauses.

I Am a Weeper

Are there things that make you cry?

I am a weeper. Art can move me to tears.

Julia Keller, in her Chicago Tribune article, “Our Sob Stories,”
January 8, 2009, discusses how entertainment can make us cry. In an adjoining story, artists were asked what art made them cry. The two articles made me think about which artworks touch me.

THEATRE

The first work that comes to mind is Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. In Act III, Cyrano wins the love of Roxane by his words as he stands under her balcony in the shadows. He—and I—weep when Christian climbs to take the kiss that Cyrano has won. In the last act, having spent 15 years visiting Roxane every week but unable to confess he was the man she loved, Cyrano comes one last time. He has been mortally wounded, but comes to her from his death bed to say one final goodbye. And as he reads the last letter he had written for Christian, she realizes that it was him that she loved. This clip, from the 1990 French film, shows the power of Rostand’s words, whether you understand French or not. [If you want to read the scene in English, try here.]

I have directed Our Town twice. During the rehearsal of the second production, my father committed suicide. The final act of the play took on special meaning as I pondered what lay beyond. Wilder sees our post-existence as a waiting, a “waiting for the non-eternal part of us to burn off.” And when Emily decides to return to view her 12th birthday, all the pain of failing to see what’s around each of us draws heavy tears of loss. Here is one production's take on that scene.

One of the most powerful productions I have seen (four times and counting) is the musical Les Miserables. Much of the production has me in tears, partially from the power of Hugo’s story of sin and redemption and the equally powerful music.
These clips, from the 10th anniversary production, move me immensely.

I Dreamed a Dream

Do You Hear the People Sing

One Day More

Empty Chairs

FILM

Movies find me an easy mark. This year’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Slumdog Millionarie, and Milk all had me reaching for Kleenex.

For years I showed Katherine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter and wept at the pain she shows as Eleanor of Aquitaine losing the one man she loved, Henry II.

Then we have Titanic. With the images of the ship sailing out to sea, my fountains started and since I had read volumes about the tragedy, each nod to a real person that Cameron added, evoked the tears. From the time the ship began sinking until the end, my vision was pretty much blurred. As I was looking back at images, I find even the trailer (I have to admit MANY trailers) gets to me.

Even a parody trailer can do it. This is a sequel to Titanic I’d love to see.

When Brokeback Mountain came out I wrote here in my blog about the film. With the death of Heath Ledger, the film becomes even more poignant.

TELEVISION

Last season’s AMC's Mad Men, often brought tears—whether it was the pain of watching Joan accept the rape of her fiancé or Don’s inability to say in words the depth of feeling that he conveys in subtlities. BBC’s Torchwood had an episode where Jack meets the man he took his name from and as the two grow close, he realizes that Captain Jack has to die. For those who know the series, that episode along with the character’s relationship to Lanto moves me.

MUSIC

As a singer, I often find music touching my soul. Listen to Judy Collins sing Song for Sarajevo (I Dream of Peace).

One of the songs my choir sang at concert was Flanders Fields by Paul A. Aitken. I had to fight while singing it not to react.

Finally, perhaps it’s the Irish in me that is always moved by a well done version of Danny Boy. Here’s one done by Michael Londra from his cd Celt who gives one of the most touching versions I’ve heard of it.

What works move you?

Can I Have a Napkin Please?

What a great moment! A guerrilla musical (complete with wireless mikes going through the court's sound system) breaks out in a food court in LA. Improv lives.

Do you hear the people sing?

The more I teach my students about history, the more I realize that we as humans keep repeating past mistakes. The power of Les Miserables and the musical Les Miz is that it speaks to us quite eloquently about the need for justice and right in our world. "Do you hear the people sing?" seems an apt rallying cry for this election.

Cleopatra in the Arts: a preview

I recently finished a 2009 calendar using some of the images I created for my Dressing Cleopatra book. I was pleased with how they work as a calendar. For a preview of the complete calendar check here. Be sure to wait for the preview to load.

Let me know what you think.

Change

As many people have been sharing this, I wanted it here. It says it all.


Thanks to www.Ultimateimprov.com.

Morning Surprise

Today, as I do almost every morning, I hurried downstairs to my garage which is located at the back of a connecting building. I used the remote to raise the garage door and went to get in the car. Through the window—aided by the overhead light—I saw what I first thought to be a dead body slumped behind the steering wheel of my car. Trying to overcome my shock, I opened the car door to discover a middle-aged homeless man sleeping in the car. I’m afraid I rudely awoke him, screaming for him to get out of my car. When he finally did and started to leave, he stopped, looked at me and said, “I didn’t take anything.” As if that made it all better. And then he walked out of the garage and down the alley.

My friends tell me I should have called the police, but I decided I was already running late and didn’t want to add another 30 minutes to my schedule.

My garage is large enough for only one car and I have many boxes of assorted books, former school papers, and video tapes. All the box lids had been opened and some of the items were on the ground. In the car I found my intruder had left a flashlight behind. And the door to the interior of the building (which I never use and keep locked) was unlocked—the way I assume my visitor got into the space.

Oak Park, like many American cities in today’s economic climate, is host to many homeless. They often spend the night at the church beside my building which houses PADS. I see them peopling the parks, I see them panhandling near the Starbucks I visit, on one occasion I went up to the back entrance that I tend to use and found a guy urinating believing he was hidden from sight. Friends tell me stories of finding someone sleeping on their porch or in their condo lobby entrance. I, like most people I know, don’t see a solution to this continually growing social problem. All I know is that they are there, like so many walking ghosts.

This morning, I was totally freaked out—I think I still am. Sometimes a sense of security is little more than empty words.

Male Menopause

When I was 50, my older brother died of lymphoma. He had been separated from his wife, but rejoined her in the last months of his illness. His death was one of things that led me to 2 years of depression—a chemical inbalance which was both genetic and situational. As I neared my brother’s age, I kept asking myself, “Is this who I am? Is there where I’m meant to be?” And in a long painful process for both of us, my wife of 25 years and I separated.

Sunday, as I prepared to watch Mad Men, I talked to a good friend who told me about an acquaintance whose husband of 25 was leaving his wife that day. He’d apparently had an affair with another woman for 18 years and had finally decided to leave.

In Mad Men: A Night to Remember, that night, the main character and his wife—the image of the1950s perfect couple—face his adultery and her sense of being trapped by the two children and the suburbs. I identified with it as an archetypal situation.

Over the years since I left my wife, now almost 12 years later, I have become convinced that we men go through a sort of male menopause. In some ways—if I can say this without it sounding flip—women are lucky in that their menopause gives them physical signs. For us men, the changes are hidden very deep in our psyche. Perhaps it’s partially spurred on by the fact that most women outlive men. Often, I feel, when a guy reaches the big 50, he realizes, “I may have only 20 more years or less—and if I should drop dead right now was could I say about my life?”

Women get hot flashes, sometimes lose muscle mass, and endure brittle bones; men buy a new car, leave their old life, find a younger woman, or begin harmful life choices.

A divorced female friend of mine whose husband followed the all-too-common pattern said, “He kept saying, ‘You don’t know how hard this is for me.’ The funny thing was that I did, and I even sympathized with his struggle of accepting his own behavior.”

When I was going through my struggles, I found little literature to help me or my wife. And over the years, I see example and example of the same behaviors. All I can wonder is whether these traits indicate a genetic disposition that many of us men experience. Certainly my sympathy for Don Draper in Mad Men comes from my empathy for his clearly recognizable struggles.

Mad Men - The Loss of Failure

AMC’s Mad Men is by far the best drama on television. I meet with a group of women every morning at Starbucks, and at least three times a week those of us following the show do the analysis of the characters and the plots.

Sunday’s episode of Mad Men, “A Night to Remember,” is about failing.

• Don Draper can look his wife in the eye and lie to the end that he was faithful. But does he love Betty as he says he does? My women friends say he does. I’m not as certain. I think he likes the protective coat of marriage and children—the sense of a “womb with a view” where he can come home and feel safe in the life he has created. Before he is thrown out, Betty finds one of his ad campaigns written on a napkin. It says, “What do women want? To feel close.” Don understands Betty, but in spite of his saying he loves, does he? I find it interesting that Don is so good at compartmentalizing his assumed identity that he doesn’t even leave clues to himself in his suits.
• Betty Draper has to face the failure of her marriage. She is trapped with two small children she doesn’t even appear to like. She loves the upward mobility of her life with Don in the suburbs but at the same time feels trapped in a world away from the working world where she thinks she wants to be. She seems to have as much of a problem with the fact that Don knows her better than perhaps she knows herself as she does with Don's being unfaithful. Her descent into the hell of her obsessions about Don and who he is proves uncomfortable to watch.

• Peggy , like Don, has created a persona—the successful Madison Avenue female ad agent--but when she agrees to help Father Gill, she fails at winning the committee over to her views because the two closed-minded church biddies care more about having a hand in the planning than they do in wanting to create a dance for the girls. And Father Gill once again prods her, trying to get her to confess what he knows—that she had a baby out of wedlock. [One of the priests I teach with was irate about Father Gill’s using information he has learned to deal with Betty.)

• Joan finally seems to be breaking out of that shell we have seen. She helps Harry out by reading scripts, making suggestions, and ultimately being a great asset to him. At which point, oblivious Harry passes her over and hires an ungifted but male replacement. When we see Joan with her future husband/doctor—is she putting him through school?—the most telling things he says are, “You should be sitting home eating bon bons” and “Were you going to get me some water?” The look of heartbreak that we see when Joan realizes her attempt has failed in getting her beyond being just secretary is one of the moving images of the episode.

• And finally, Father Gill, who ends the episode by taking off his collar and playing the guitar, seems to register a sense of failure at not having “healed” Peggy, finding solace in singing.

The show is set in 1961. The coping mechanism for many of these characters are cigarettes and Manhattans. One wonders what will happen when they all discover valium (1963), the drug of choice for many of my parents' generation.

It’s not too late to follow Mad Men. Check AMC’s OnDemand.

Some interesting reviews on last week's show:

• "Mad Men as a Work of Art"
  
• Feministe
• TV Show Blogs
• Sepinwall
• Cultural Learnings
  

Pinocchio Politics

At this third lie, his nose became longer than ever, so long that he could not even turn around. If he turned to the right, he knocked it against the bed or into the windowpanes; if he turned to the left, he struck the walls or the door; if he raised it a bit, he almost put the Fairy's eyes out.

The Fairy sat looking at him and laughing.

"Why do you laugh?" the Marionette asked her, worried now at the sight of his growing nose.

"I am laughing at your lies."

"How do you know I am lying?"

"Lies, my boy, are known in a moment. There are two kinds of lies, lies with short legs and lies with long noses. Yours, just now, happen to have long noses."

Pinocchio, not knowing where to hide his shame, tried to escape from the room, but his nose had become so long that he could not get it out of the door. [from Chapter 17 of The Adventures of Pinocchio by C. Collodi]

It’s unfortunate that politicians don’t suffer from Pinocchio syndromes and have their noses grow every time they tell a lie. It would make it so much easier to sort out today’s concept of “truth.” I’m beginning to believe that truth is any lie you say as long as you don’t get caught. Politicians stretching or distorting the truth is nothing new at all, but today it seems tell a lie, tell it often, and gee it becomes the truth.

Michael Cooper and Jim Rutenberg at The New York Times have an interesting article on our latest Pinocchio Politics (a term I've coined for this election). Read the article.

Chilling Continued

A couple of days ago I wrote about my concerns regarding the reported Sarah Palin suggestion that we need to ban some books at the public library. Discussion with students in class has reinforced for me how complicated I find the issue.

Not long ago someone sent me a picture of a young man being beheaded by the Al-Qaida. I won’t go into detail about the picture because I found it so disturbing that I think even the description might be enough to upset some people. [And so I censor myself in the description.] I wish the person who had sent it had done the same reasoning. I did not need to see the blade going through flesh. Even though I looked at it only briefly, it is an image that permanently etched itself into my consciousness.

The same might be said of watching Luis Bunuel’s Un chien andolu, a surrealistic/Dadaist film from the 1920s. In the film a woman is shown in closeup. A man’s arm and hand reaches across her and then in extreme closeup slits her eye with a razor (actually the eye of a sheep). One of the goals of the surrealist was to shock the audience. It does. The problem with the images, of course, are they don’t go away. Some 40 years later I can vividly recall the sequence.

During the mid 1990s, I found a video tape of Salo, or the 120 days of Sodom by Pier Paolo Pasolini. I knew from the publicity around it that the film would be shocking. I’m sure I was intrigued by that idea. “How shocking is shocking?” I thought. At the point in the film where young men were forced to eat excrement, however, I said to myself, “Did I EVER need to see this?” [The same I would ask about John Waters Pink Flamingo where a similar event occurs.] My therapist greeted my subsequent outrage with a simple, “Wasn’t it a good thing to only have to pay $5 to realize your own boundaries?”

I asked the students whether there were things they were sorry that they saw or read. Several referred to the violence of the film Hostel. From their descriptions I can see why we at least tout a rating system. Obviously for the students the rating system did little good.

For the students, the argument seems to finally boil down to (a) protect freedom of speech and let the artist do what they want; (b) censor by not attending, not buying, not supporting what you don’t want you or others not to see.

So where do I really stand on censorship? I, like many people, find the answer varied. I don’t believe we need to fear art. I don’t believe in the suppression of ideas. I do believe that not everyone needs to see all the seamier and more disgusting sides of life, that dark underbelly of our beastial human nature.

Certainly as a teacher, I support that there are many images and ideas that young people don’t need to see or follow. But does that mean we censor or do we just warn others that what they see or hear may be upsetting? And where do we draw the line?

As the King in The King and I maintains, “Tis a puzzlement.”

Dressing Cleopatra: The Cleopatra Costume in the Arts

I spent the summer writing a book.

On my website are five pages dealing with the Cleopatra costume on stage and the screen. Since November 2002, I have had 241,809 visitors to the site. This summer I decided to expand my research, include research into some of the Cleopatras from paintings and eventually publish a book starting with the information that I already had online.

So far I have a total of 160 pages with over 70 full page color artworks.

Writing the book was fairly eye opening. When I first started writing, I thought that historical accuracy of the Cleopatra costume was the desired goal and somehow deviations from that were "wrong." However, the more I saw some of the truly creative and innovative creations, I have come to appreciate all approaches—whether historical accuracy or the flights of fancy from some of the designers. A few of my 70 full page color artworks are seen below.

Cleopatra herself might have appeared in the first example. Here she is pictured beside a small black basalt statue believed to have been created during her lifetime. She wears a typical Alexandrian Graeco-Roman belted stolla and sea-green palla.

Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra was written in 1606. If the boy actor Edmans portraying Cleopatra were dressed as James I's queen, he would have a wheel farthingale, ruff, and stomacher.

Next is seen a Cleopatra that might have appeared in Dryden’s All for Love, during the Restoration period. Here she is made to represent Charles II’s mistress, the Duchess of Cleveland. Typical of the period were the beginnings of the standard tragic costume: crown, plumes and train.



Jumping to the end of the nineteenth century, we see “The Divine” Sarah Bernhardt in Sardou’s Cléopâtre. Artist/designer George Clairin painted her in this costume and Sarony photographed her in it when she came to the United States.

Into the twentieth century, we have Leon Baskt’s design for Ida Rubinstein in Fokine’s 1909 Cléopâtre for Diaghliv’s Ballet Russes ballet.


In 1945, Vivien Leigh starred in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra with Claude Rains as Caesar.


Valentina in 1947 designed an understated elegant dress for Katherine Cornell’s Broadway Antony and Cleopatra. Cornell was nominated for one of the first Tonys for her performance.



Perhaps the most famous and infamous Cleopatra was Elizabeth Taylor’s in 1963. Here are three of the over 40 costumes designed for her in what was at the time considered one of the most expensive flops in Hollywood history—it led to the firing of several executives and made Taylor a permanent star.

In 1999, Leonor Varela starred in a two-part made-for-television version of the Cleopatra story. The Mausoleum gown and mantle are made from iridescent gold tissue silk, varigated with gold, magenta, and green. The "electrum" combination Isis crown is a modified Greco-Roman style. The drawing is done in frontal based style, meaning that the “feather” section is turned toward the viewer even though it in actuality faced the viewer.



The twenty-first century Cleopatras have often been garbed in other periods. As the 2005 Glyndebourne Cleopatra from Guilio Cesare in Egitto, Danielle de Niese looks like a combination of Lulu and Velma from ‘Chicago.” She flirts with dark glasses, a cocktail, pink cigarette and umbrella.

While publication of the book may be a few months away, I feel like I took a class in Cleopatra this summer—and passed.

The Big Chill

In the early 1990s, a poster stating “Fear No Art” appeared. That image has stayed in my consciousness since then. I wonder often at the fear some people exhibit toward the visual art or the written word. Surprisingly for me, both educated and uneducated people seem to acknowledge the power of art to transform us, seemingly beyond our control.

In reading about Sarah Palin today, I felt a chill down my spine as I read this passage from Time:

Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them.
"The librarian was aghast." That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving "full support" to the mayor.

I’ve previously talked about the chilling effect that religion had on the time of Chaucer. Sarah Durant’s book, The Birth of Venus, deals with the climate created by Catholic Dominican reformer Girolamo Savonarola.

In 1481 or 1482, Savonarola was sent to Florence to preach. Immediately he began opposing the Renaissance attraction for pagan works and the perceived immoral life of the Florentine society and Lorenzo de Medici’s court. Becoming obsessed with the Book of Revelation, he spent from 1489 on trying to save souls from the Apocalypse he felt was immediate. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia:

Many persons brought articles of luxury, playing-cards, ornaments, pictures of beautiful women, the writings of pagan and immoral poets, etc., to the monastery of San Marco [where Savonarola was prior]; these articles were then publicly burned. A brotherhood founded by Savonarola for young people encouraged a pious, Christian life among its members. Sundays some of this brotherhood went about from house to house and along the streets to take away dice and cards from the citizens, to exhort luxuriously dressed married and single women to lay aside frivolous ornament. Thus there arose an actual police for regulating morality, which also carried on its work by the objectionable methods of spying and denunciation.

During the 1497 carnival, Savonarola organized fifteen story-high pyres in Piazza della Signoria, onto which his followers threw “carnival masks, rich feminine ornaments, mirrors, cosmetics, cards and dice, perfume, books of poetry and on magic, musical instruments, and worldly paintings where female bodies were displayed unclothed.” Botticelli, a very sensitive soul, was so impressed (or so scared) by Savonarola that he threw many of his paintings on the bonfires. Among the works burned were Boccaccio’s Decameron and the works of Ovid. The spectacle became known as the Bonfires of the Vanities.

Savonarola’s criticisms of the Church in Rome eventually led to his excommunication in 1497, and his subsequent execution by hanging in May 1498, after which his body was burned.

In 1933, it wasn’t the Church promoting the burning of books and ideas, it was German students. Nazi Minister of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels began an attempt to regulate the arts to bring them into line with Nazi goals. Organizations were purged of Jews and others considered politically or artistically suspect. On 6 April 1933, the German Student Association’s Main Office for Press and Propaganda called for a nationwide “Action against the Un-German Spirit,” eventually culminating on 10 May, in many university towns, in the burning of over 25,000 volumes considered “Un-German.” Students marched in torchlight parades, bands played, songs were sung, “fire oaths” were taken and the left was silenced one way or another. Some of the banned authors included Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, Alfred Kerr, and Americans Ernest Hemingway and Helen Keller.

Moying Li in Snow Falling in Spring describes the rampaging Chinese Red Guard of the Cultural Revolution in 1968 who break into her home and force her father to destroy his collection of “Western” books.

Book banning and burning follows much the same philosophy as that of the ancient Egyptians—if it’s not there to see, it didn’t exist. Pharaohs often had inscriptions from previous rulers recarved and their names inserted. Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, in 221 BCE, took the same tact when he ordered the burning of classic works and histories, fearing that they might undermine his authority.

A sobering poster from World War II from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum shows a book with the headline: “Books cannot be killed by fire.” And under the image of the book and burnings is the slogan, “Books are weapons in the war of ideas.”

To learn more about chilling of our minds, start here to learn the history of book burning through the ages.

And if you need any more frightening image of repression of art, check out the following images of the Hitler book burnings. Are these the past or our future?

Looking at China

In 1989, my mother went to China. Her tour group visited Tiananmen Square a week before the “June Fourth” incident. From her trip, she brought me a 3- inch lovely doll which she had watched being made. My mother’s fascination with the country has proved genetic. She would have been as fascinated with the pageantry of the Summer Olympics in Bejing as I was.

In preparing the curriculum for my freshmen world literature class at St. Ignatius College Prep, I knew I wanted to teach the charming book, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie. Balzac takes place during Chairman Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1968. Two “intellectual” teen-aged students are sent to the countryside to be re-indoctrinated. I’ve never taught the book, but have loved it since my first reading of it several years ago.

In doing additional research I’ve read Moying Li's Snow Falling in Spring, an autobiography of a young woman who grew in Peijing during the 1960-1970 period, which has provided many interesting first-hand details. As a child in the late 1950s, she witnessed her neighborhood’s abortive attempt to help move their country into the present by producing homemade steel, using pot, pans, and knives. Later as the Cultural Revolution started she watched gangs of teens denouncing adults and other teens, creating public humiliations, suicides, the destruction of books and break down of the educational system, and dissonants being sent off to concentration camps. There are incredible shades of Hitler’s Youth and the rise of the Nazis.

In my search for a video to support the unit, I remembered scholar of Polonysian literature once said about how it is a culture’s dreams and fiction that tells us about what they who they really are. I at first watched The Road Home, a recent Chinese film which deals with the widow of a teacher who wants the body of her husband carried home in his coffin so that his soul will know the road home. In flashback we learn of their courtship. The film gives a fascinating view of rural China during the same period as the other books. [I found a delightful touch, speaking of the connection between global cultures, in that in the educator’s house two posters of the movie Titanic hang—and are never mentioned or referenced.] I did decide that film might be a little too slow for class.

Being a fan of Chinese fantasy film, I happily stumbled onto the 2005 Warner Bros. release, The Promise [Wu ji]. The film is one of the most expensive ever made in China and has thousands of extras, fantastic sets, and magic realism. With the goddess Manshen’s flying entrance at the beginning, I was hooked. I’m a sucker for flying goddesses, fighting warlords in elaborate costumes who can fight unhampered by gravity, and a hero who can outrun time. It is an interesting tale about the inevitability of destiny and the power of love to defeat it.

I’m looking forward to starting the unit next week.

Raffo's 9 Parts of Desire

Years ago, Alice Roosevelt Longworth in an interview said that she was asked about all the wonderful things she saw in the years she was in the White House with her father’s administration and her cousin’s. She described a favorite poem in which a salamander living in the court of Nebuchadnezzar is asked to describe all the great things he had seen in the great king’s court. Upon reflection the lizard replies, “I didn’t notice any of it. I was concentrating on the flies.” I’m sometimes reminded that I am kin to that salamander. Perhaps we all are.

Last night I joined some friends and attended Heather Raffo’s 9 Parts of Desire at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. I went, rather oblivious as to what we were going to see, and I came away realizing how big the world is and how little I really know of it here in my sheltered Oak Park, Illinois, life.

Raffo’s play is a one-woman show of 9 monologues, inspired by a 1993 trip to Iraq. During that trip she saw huge portraits of Saddham Hussein and a painting of a nude woman as a tree. Wanting to learn more about the artist, she began interviewing her and then other Iraqi women. Their stories were woven into the 90 minute show. Raffo portrays, among others, a painter, a Bedouin, a woman who mourns the deaths of her family in a bunker, a doctor, and an expatriot living in London. Each character is vividly drawn with her own posture and appearance, verbal cadences and dialects. Raffo is amazing, often funny, often heart-breaking.

The set Raffo moves around on consists of slabs of broken concrete, a partial Iraqi doorway boarded up, pieces of mosaic on the wall and mosaic patterned lineolium on the floor, a pool of water representing the river, bright yellow sandbags, and other debris, all surrounded by bare scaffolding, mood lighting, and huge plastic tarps. It is a world of both survival and destruction.

I was amazed by what I learned. One of the descriptions that astonished me were the genetic defects Raffo’s doctor describes—children born with two heads, ten year old girls developing breast cancer. [In 1991, according to an online source, the United States and Persian Gulf War allies blasted vehicles with armor-piercing shells made of depleted uranium as the Iraqis retreated from Kuwait.] Some sources speak of Iraq as another Chernobyl. Another source speaks of a baby with a head growing out its head and others with intestines growing outside the body.

Another character describes how Saddam’s henchmen had to learn to torture and cull crueltry from watching films. Torture, she says, is a learned behavior. She describes how young girls were kidnapped, raped, called prostitutes and then beheaded. Another character describes how an imprisioned woman is punished for menstruating by being hung upside down. Her three year old child is brought to outside her cell and put in a bag with hungry cats. The babies screams are recorded to play for the father who is locked away in another cell.

All evening I was reminded of Vladmir’s line in “Waiting for Godot”:

Was I sleeping while others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow when I wake, or think I do, what will I say of today? That with Estragon my friend I waited for Godot. … But in all that what truth will there be? We give birth astride of the grave, the light gleams an instant and then it’s night once more. I can’t go. What have I said?

I consider myself a literate person, but how could all that epic suffering have not penetrated my safe cocoon.

One of my friends commented as we left, “I feel assaulted.” I did too… and emotionally drained. But if I were to judge how much I learned about the Iraqi female experience, the performance was an incredible experience. The show has only a run until May 18, but I urge you to experience it. If not, check out Raffo’s webpage and get the book or audio version of the play. I am definitely considering it as one of the works to teach next year.

The Book of Air and Shadows

William Shakespeare was born and died on this day.

It seems appropriate that I just finished reading Michael Gruber’s 2006 adventure/mystery/quest The Book of Air and Shadows since Shakespeare is the subject of the book’s search. Avoiding spoilers, let me say that the book is cross between The DaVinci Code and The Maltese Falcon. Three main characters, a weightlifter intellectual properties lawyer, a wannabe filmmaker bookkeeper, and a blonde bookbinder with a past all search a lost and unknown manuscript by Shakespeare, alluded to in letters from a Jacobean gunner/adventurer/spy. The letters are given to the lawyer and then the owner of the letters is found tortured and murdered. The plot abounds with red herrings, Russian gangsters, Polish spies, classic chases, plenty of film noir plot twists, lots of enjoyable characters, and a literate narrative which utilizes three different perspectives. The book also plays some with time sequence. Gruber understands that inherent in the adventure/mystery/quest genre is that while the characters may have to face danger and violence, ultimately the good guys win. And our sense of harmony and order is restored.

One thing I found myself enjoying about the book was the examination of the role of religion in a Roman Catholic’s world past and present—whether it’s Shakespeare who is spied upon because of his Catholicism or several of the modern characters struggling with understanding the place of the church in their lives.

The second idea I particularly liked was Gruber’s argument that we have learned how to deal with things by watching films—and our response to many situations is just like the movies because they have taught us how to respond. In the book the two main characters are discussing this idea. The lawyer and the wannabe filmmaker are talking. The lawyer says:

“… Surely it’s the other way around—filmmakers take popular ideas and embody them in films.”

“No, the movies come first. For example, no one ever had a fast-draw face-to-face shoot-out on the dusty Main Street in a western town. It never happened, ever. A screenwriter invented it for dramatic effect. It’s the classic American trope, redemption through violence, and it comes through the movies. There were very few handguns in the real old west. They were expensive and heavy and no one but an idiot would wear them in a side holster. On a horse? When you wanted to kill someone in the Old West, you waited for your chance and shot him in the back, usually with a shotgun. Now we have a zillion handguns because the movies taught us that a handgun is something a real man has to have, and people really kill each other like fictional western gunslingers. And it’s not just thugs. Movies shape everyone’s reality, to the extent that it’s shaped by human action—foreign policy, business, sexual relationships, family dynamics, the whole nine yards. It used to the Bible but now it’s movies. Why is there stalking? Because we know that the guy should persist and make a fool of himself until the girl admits that she loves him. We’ve all seen it. Why is there date rape? Because the asshole is waiting for the moment when resistance turns to passion. He’s seen Nicole and Reese do it fifty times. We make these little decisions, day by day, and we end up with a world. This one, like it or not.”

While I’m fascinated with the character’s idea, I’m not sure it fully pans out. Look, for example, at this tintype of Billy the Kid, who stands with rifle and gun strapped to his leg. But, I do agree that movies have taught me how to respond in many situations, among them how to be in love. (See one of my earlier posts regarding what literature has taught us about the same.)

If you enjoyed Chinatown or The Maltese Falcon or The DaVinci Code or National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets, I think you'll enjoy Michael Gruber's book.

The Scarf

About three weeks ago, a reclusive elderly woman, who lived in a garden apartment in the building across from mine, died. Normally I might not even have noticed. Most of the time her blinds were closed and in the five years I’ve lived here, I had only seen her a couple of times.

So how did I know she had died? One afternoon as I returned home I discovered that the dumpsters in the alley were neatly packed with books, magazines, years of TV Guides, cheap furniture, some clothing. When I walked out to my car the next morning, homeless scavengers had torn open all the bags and scattered everything they didn’t take—as if the bags were filled with cloth popcorn which had heated and burst.

Last week the dumpsters were filled again, this time primarily with clothing. [See above.] Again the scavengers attacked. And for four days, when I came home, a lone woman’s scarf lay in my path each time I walked into the building.

Do you believe that some part of us remains with items we have loved and used? I guess I do. And each day when I walked past the scarf, I felt haunted by my deceased neighbor. That’s why I picked up the lonely scarf and hung it up in my garage. Each time I see it, I think of my lonely neighbor. Everybody deserves someone to remember them.