The Life of Reading Shakespeare

All is True? For real?

2011-03-11T10:55:00.000-08:00

During an early performance of Henry VIII (subtitled All is True), the Globe Theater caught fire and burned to the ground. No one was hurt except for someone whose pantaloons caught on fire and had them extinguished by a neighbor's bottle of ale.

I guess it's just as well. Shakespeare had more or less retired at this point. It was the second to last play he wrote, and it's co-authored by John Fletcher, who goes on to be a famous playwright of the era, but most famous of course for his association with Shakespeare and his appearance in Shakespeare in Love as the boy who loves Titus Andronicus.

Probably many Americans have learned the vast majority of their English history from movies. Camelot, The King's Speech, Robin Hood, A Man For All Seasons, The Other Boleyn Girl... anytime there is a dramatic interpretation of historical events, we know that there are going to be innumerable inaccuracies, and that's okay. Movies are meant to entertain... so are plays. But you would have hoped that Fletcher and Shakespeare would have been able to at least include some of the interesting things about Henry VIII's life...

Movies have always told me he was a dangerous and lusty monarch who left the Catholic church so he could get a divorce and then marry Anne Boleyn who he then had executed on false accusations of treason. This play is clearly a very careful handling of history in order to make sure that the King, who had died only 65 years before it was performed, would not be besmirched.

All of Shakespeare's histories are propaganda, but at least the one's chronicling the War of the Roses are terribly entertaining propaganda with geniuses like Falstaff, and heroic, banner-waving speeches ("Once more unto the breach, dear friends!"). This play is straight up boring, because you keep expecting Henry to get all horny and evil, but he really doesn't. He hits on Anne and turns on his first wife, Catherine, but everything is so tepid. The only really noteworthy thing about the play is that it was the last one performed at the Globe, which is sad.

I wonder if he had never written this play... is it possible that the original Globe would still be standing? I'd happily trade this play for the chance to see that massive wooden structure in whatever disrepair it might be after 400 years... yikes. Can a wooden building even last that long?

I've been trying to come up with something to say about this play for weeks and I'm sorry to say that this is the best I can do. At this point I just had to write something and move on. I'm approaching the end of Shakespeare's works and it's starting to make me kind of sad/reluctant. I've still got The Two Noble Kinsmen, some poems, maybe Edward III (partial authorship), and a play that was recently attributed in part to Shakespeare: Double Falsehood.

Misfortune is Fortune (at least in Television and The Tempest)

2011-01-22T10:23:00.000-08:00

There’s a story about an Indian man who finds a very nice wild horse. “That’s lucky,” everyone says.

“Maybe,” the man says.

He gives the horse to his son, who gets thrown off while riding it and breaks his arm. “That’s unlucky,” everyone says.

“Maybe,” the man says.

They send a war party against another tribe, but the man’s son, whose arm is broken, has to stay behind. Many young men were killed. "That's lucky."

"Maybe."

That’s a lovely piece of folk wisdom I learned from Northern Exposure.

Early in The Tempest, Prospero discloses to his daughter the truth about their situation, that he was the deposed Duke of Milan, her response is:

O the heavens!

What foul play had we, that we came from thence?

Or blessed was’t we did?(1:2:59)

Miranda knows immediately that all events have the potential to prove foul or blessed, depending on how long you give them to play out. Prospero’s betrayal and banishment aren’t finished running their course until the end of this play. He manufactures a storm to revenge himself on his brother, who overthrew him, and the other lords who had a hand in his banishment. But by the end of the play, his intentions change. Ariel instructs him in forgiveness:

Ariel:

His tears run down his beard, like winter’s drops

From eaves of reeds. Your charm so strongly works ‘em,

That if you now beheld them, your affections

Would become tender.

Prospero:

Dost thou think so, spirit?

Ariel:

Mine would, sir, were I human. (5:1:16)

In a quest for vengeance, Prospero finds forgiveness. Much like the episode of 21 Jumpstreet where Penhall tells the story about how when he was a kid he got picked on by some douchebag bully. The guy ate his lunch, smashed his toothpick rocketship science project, and crashed his uncle's car with his prom date still in it. All the other cops tell stories about the bullies that picked on them when they were kids too, Johnny Depp has an especially touching story about getting beat up every day in 4^th grade by a girl played by the Thor-obsessed little sister in Adventures in Babysitting. But Penhall doesn’t feel better until he goes and confronts his old bully at his house as an adult, only to find that he’s a cigarette smoking, little loser who shouts at his miserable wife and clearly has no joy in his life at all.

The rarer action is

In virtue than in vengeance. (5:1:27)

I might be pulling out some old Catholic School brainwashing here, but the lesson seems to be that forgiveness is vengeance. Despite being opposites, they accomplish the same thing: closure from one series of events and progress into another.

Forgiveness is vengeance. Fortune is Misfortune. Fair is Foul, familiar themes here.

In the very first episode of My So Called Life, Angela Chase and her friend, Rayanne, meet these two guys outside a bar. One of them grabs Rayanne and starts kissing her. Angela narrates: “something was actually happening, but it was a little too actual.” And she steps in to prevent a rape or abduction, the cops come, and it’s this whole little thing. But the next day, they go to school and laugh and laugh about how great it was. Granted they’re ridiculous teenagers, but you can relate. As the people say: someday we’ll look back on all of this and laugh…

There’s a horrible habit that writers have of telling each other that any thing interesting that happens in their life is “good material.” Every time I tell a writer about something, like the time that I got hit by a car, they say, man, that’s great material and I want to tell them to shut up. It’s not material. It’s my life.

Here’s a naïve thought: the power of writing is in universal truth, and its benefit to the world of readers. Your gut-wrenching break up is useless to the majority of humanity, unless you can find the universal truth in the story. When you know things like Shakespeare knew things, about the human condition and the way emotion works, and you lay those ideas into stories, then they resonate. Strike like lightning and thunder forth many Mississippi’s into the future.

I suppose I’m surprised when people think that getting hit by a car is great material, because you can get hit by a car at any moment. People get hit by cars everyday, right?

But if you knew who I was rushing to see when I got hit, or what happened between us in the next few weeks after the accident, then the story might get interesting. If I told you about pulling the quarter-inch shard of windshield out of my thumb the next morning, you might understand the way an event like that, unfortunate as it is, leaves glorious scars.

What I remember most was lying on the ground, having been thrown fifteen feet through the air, my helmet smashed to pieces, the driver of the car – an EMT – cradled my head and neck, and I thought I might never walk again. Never play soccer. Never ride a bike. And I felt just fine. Like I was going to be a new me, and that new me was someone I was looking forward to meeting. Because if you’re a new you, then it’s a new world… well, new to thee.

So is it possible to think of that misfortune -- of getting hit by the car -- as a fortunate event? I’m not foolish enough to label it one way or the other.

But I guess it did turn out to be decent material. For the moment anyway.

The Winter's Postamorous Adoration

2010-12-21T10:13:00.000-08:00

I had a girlfriend whose favorite Shakespeare was The Winter’s Tale. Now that I've read it and I think about her, I see the play’s about women ruled by the foolish whims of a man who lives too much in his imagination for a short time.

King Leontes of Sicilia is being visited by his oldest and dearest friend, King Polixenes of Bohemia. The King works himself into a jealous frenzy, thinking that his old friend has wooed and impregnated his wife, Hermione. He convinces himself of this over the course of a single scene and orders one of his servants to poison Polixenes. He begins the day in love and ends it out of love. (As Benedick would say: "man is a giddy thing.")

Leontes’ servant, Camillo, cannot bring himself to kill Polixenes and instead confesses the plot. Polixenes takes Camillo in his service and runs to Bohemia. Leontes considers this an affirmation of guilt. He puts Hermione on trial, and has the baby girl (whom he thinks to be Polixenes’ progeny) taken away by another servant to be abandoned in some wild place.

Because of his unfounded, jealous rage, Leontes’ son dies, Hermione dies of grief, and the baby, Perdita, is abandoned by the servant who is then eaten by a bear. Luckily, Perdita is discovered by a shepherd who raises her as his own and then years later she falls in love with the Prince of Bohemia and the two have to escape to Sicilia out of fear of the king’s wrath. In Sicilia, she meets her long lost father Leontes, all things are laid bear and a happy ending is achieved in fulfillment of some prophecy or other.

Of the 35 plays of Shakespeare that I’ve read so far, this is the only one which actually brought tears to my eyes while I was reading it. In the end there is a perfect revelation, which I probably should have seen coming a mile away.

Leontes’ queen, Hermione, who died of grief when her daughter was stolen and her son died is honored in the final moments of the play when they bring out a statue of her. The moment the statue comes out, you know that it’s the real, living Hermione, who has been in hiding these 15 years and not dead at all, but she steps down from the pedestal, upon which she has been cast. The amazed Leontes touches the statue’s arm and exclaims:

O, she’s warm! (5:3)

Despite his massive vocabulary, Shakespeare can land on a perfect moment and capture it in 3 monosyllables. Leontes' queen returns to him. After his earlier buffoonery, it's more forgiveness than he ever dreamed was possible.

How many men have cast off love when they had it? Driven away a good woman with accusations of inadequacy, and then, seeing them go… misunderstood themselves.

The girl who loved The Winter’s Tale moved from Minnesota to California to be with me, and she was constant in her love even though I was not. When she left California to return to Minnesota she had convinced herself that I never loved her. I refuted that accusation, but not passionately. The relationship had to end, and it was easier to allow it to end if I didn’t own up to the affections I had squandered.

Even though it was right and I was relieved when we split up… in the moment when she walked out of the door, my heart broke. Somehow I hadn’t seen that coming.

For weeks, months afterward, you imagine that she might come back. You might be forgiven, and the small moments of bliss that were once ours would confederate, like matter drawn into a black hole, until we became a burning hot singularity whose only motion can be to explode into a new universe.

When the King is looking on what he thinks is the statue of Hermione, he feels pain, but wants it to continue:

For this affliction has a taste as sweet

As any cordial comfort. (5:3)

These are the delicious regrets of failed lovers. The lost queen, was literally put on a pedestal.

Whilst I remember

Her and her virtues, I cannot forget

My blemishes in them, and so still think of

The wrong I did myself, which…

Destroyed the sweet’st companion that e’er man

Bred his hopes out of. (5:1)

I am guilty of the same postamorous worship of every single girl who has come and gone. You can’t reconstitute lost love. The only hope is in new love. And a new love with an old lover demands reformation beyond reasonable expectation.

But maybe not beyond Shakespearean expectation.

The Winter’s Tale also has a troublemaking rogue named Autolycus, who steals and cons, and finds himself elevated in the robes of a gentleman. He learns of the plot of the lovers to escape to Sicilia and here is how he reasons what course of action is best suited:

If I thought it were a piece of honesty

To acquaint the king withal, I would not do’t. I hold it

the more knavery to conceal it, and therein am I

constant to my profession. (4:4)

But his knavish actions play a key role in the reunions and prophetic fulfillment that ornament Act V. The Shepherd who found and raised Perdita is able to disclose her true parentage to her father, Leontes, and the Shepherd and his son are rewarded with gentlemanhood. Upon seeing this, Autolycus promises to amend his life. Does he? I don’t know. I like to believe that he did. There’s hope for the rogue, that in his treachery -- being constant to his profession -- he might stumble into redemption, and forever after find himself in the employ of a more honorable nature.

Taking stock, I think I’m still who I was, despite efforts to improve, but there’s hope for we -- the men of wandering nature -- that from our errors and the mishmash of broken romances past, we will emerge clean. And come to life like a cold statue, touched, and found to be warm.

Scraping away some winter

Stop Bullying: The Secret Theme of Cymbeline

2010-12-04T15:52:00.000-08:00

I’ve never really been bullied in my life.

I think this means that I am a bully.

There was my roommate my first year at boarding school. That whole year I was so afraid of being hazed that I treated him terribly in an effort to feel strong and not completely vulnerable in every aspect of my life. Even though he was a good guy and became one of my best friends, I was horrible to him. I physically bullied him, pushed him around, and at 14 I was foolish enough to think that exercising dominance over this small corner of my high school life was important enough to warrant such wretched action.

His name was Tito and he was from Chicago. Tito wasn’t his real name, it was the name that the seniors gave him and it stuck because we all preferred to conform to norms established by upper classmen rather than stand up for our own. He didn’t just take all of my behaviors lying down. He and Mike Osecky put icy hot in all my underwear one night, they read my journal (which promptly led me to stop using a journal forever), and then when he walked in on me… well, you know… I was so sure he was going to tell everyone about it to get back at me for being an asshole. But he didn’t tell anyone. Not until a year later, and by that time, we were good friends and nobody cared because you’ve got to be some kind of auto-erotic ninja to make it through four years of living in a dorm with high school boys to not get caught squeezing one off.

So, I guess I sort of understand bullying a little bit. And in the way that we all feel a little sympathy for the villains I have a tiny amount of sympathy when I suspect bullies are battling their own lack of self-confidence, when they’re fighting for a little control over a small section of the world. There’s nothing worse in life than feeling that circumstances are entirely beyond your control. Which is why I was so stunned in Cymbeline when Cloten, the bullying son of the wicked stepmother/evil queen was killed off-stage in a fight with one of the disguised, kidnapped sons of King Cymbeline and his head was brought back on stage.

As if he were Macbeth, or a traitor from one of the histories -- as if he were a villain of such profound historical consequence that the audience was going to cheer -- he was abruptly beheaded. Cloten was an idiot and his evil mother made him feel like he was entitled to marry princess Imogen and become king. He wasn’t clever enough to create these ambitions for himself and it was this entitlement that escalated his quarrel with Guiderius to bloodlust:

GUIDERIUS

Have not I

An arm as big as thine? A heart as big?

Thy words I grant are bigger: for I wear not

My dagger in my mouth. Say what thou art:

Why I should yield to thee.

CLOTEN

Thou villain base,

Know’st me not by my clothes?

GUIDERIUS

No, nor thy tailor, rascal…

CLOTEN

…I am son to th’ queen.

GUIDERIUS

I am sorry for’t: not seeming

So worthy as thy birth. (4:2)

Cloten goes on to threaten to cut off Guiderius’s head and stick it on the gates of Lud town, so it’s not like Guiderius isn’t justified in his action. And of course, Imogen needs to find Cloten's body and mistake it for her lover, Postumous's body -- sending her into a downward spiral, so that she winds up serving the Italian general in battle against her father. Eventually she is unmasked as is her still-living lover Posthumous, and her long-missing princely brothers, and the sinister plot that made her seem like a slut. So the beheading of Cloten is necessary for the intricate house of cards that makes up the plot of Cymbeline. Still, I feel a little sad for poor, stupid, bullying Cloten.

Now that I think about it, I suppose even though I didn’t get hazed badly back in high school, the mere threat of it was a form of bullying… and then I got punched another time in my life and that’s got to count as an incident of bullying.

That was at Space Camp. You have to be some kind of geek to get bullied at Space Camp.

It went down like this. We had a simulated mission and the kid on our team who was the pilot forgot to follow the script and lower the landing gear of the shuttle as it was coming in for the landing. Our totally hot counselor, Frances, told us it was the only thing that went wrong with the whole mission, and that it probably would have resulted in the shuttle crashing and everyone dying. Not the most tactful thing to say to a 12 year-old kid, I suppose. The kid started crying and then later in the day we went to the Imax to see “Destiny in Space” and I was about to sit next to him when his big, fat roommate grabbed me and punched me in the stomach and said: “I’m sitting there!” I said, “God, fine!” and moved a couple seats down to sit next to my roommates.

It wasn’t like it was a terrible or scarring incident. These days I use it mostly as a self-deprecating anecdote to amass geek cred. People always think it’s cool that you went to Space Camp as a kid, but it’s actually really lame, and this is the most exciting thing that happened while I was there. But I guess it proves I have been bullied, and I’ve committed bullying. So like all stupid things in life, there’s no black and white here, just a bunch of grey.

It’s like that line in “A Night at the Opera,” Lassparri is beating up Harpo, who works as his costumer, and Groucho walks in, “Hey, you big bully, stop picking on that little bully.”

That’s me. The little bully. Darting in and out of the operatic incidents around me, pulling the strings and wisecracking in the wings, but never demonstrating any brash heroism or fierce pride. For those are qualities that land one’s head on the end of a pike.

Pericles + Oliver < Fagin + Thenardier

2010-11-28T11:14:00.000-08:00

When I was eight I played Oliver Twist in the Lakeside Players summer production of Oliver Twist. I was cast in the role of the boy to whom things happen, who stumbles into a world of rich character, and through fortune of birth and the sacrifices of the Artful Dodger, Nancy and Fagin, I undo their world of romantic villainy and am awarded for my inaction with a life of comfort to which I’m entitled because of my utterly saccharine goodness.

It’s a testament to the anti-magnitude of the role that my only memory of it is the scene where I ate a hot dog that the Artful Dodger shared with me and I bit off more than I could chew and had to hold up my finger indicating that she (Dodger was played by a girl) should wait for a second so I didn’t choke before I said my line. That moment is a pretty decent microcosm of my entire acting career.

Oliver is such a boring character. In the way that Cosette diminishes in the tragedy of Eponine’s unrequited love in Les Miserables, he vanishes in the shadow of personages of theatrical merit. Executors of large, emotional lives, tragic inner lives, and impossible wants.

This might seem an odd parallel to draw with Pericles, who is a hero, a man of consequence and valor. But for all his activity, he’s not a complex character… or even much of a character at all. He’s smart and brave and he goes on adventures that demonstrate how smart and brave he is. He solves riddles, runs from an incestuous king who wants to kill him, gets shipwrecked, wins a tournament of knights and marries a princess, gets separated from his wife and daughter, thinks they’re dead, finds them again and lives happily ever after as king.

He sums himself up in the first scene when he is presented with a riddle that he must solve or die:

Like a bold champion I assume the lists,

Nor ask advice of any other thought

But faithfulness and courage. (1:1)

My Riverside Shakespeare says that “lists” means “tournament grounds.” Pericles is a guy who needs only these two tools to tackle all of the problems he faces: faithfulness and courage.

There’s something to be said for a nice, simple, heroic story about a man being brave in the face of hardship. I like a simple story on occasion. There’s that movie The Rock, where Nicolas Cage plays an FBI chemist who has to help Sean Connery and Michael Beihn break into Alcatraz and stop Ed Harris from launching chemical weapons at San Francisco. Nicolas Cage has to be brave in the face of hardship and save the day and his pregnant fiancé. It's simple AND it kicks ass.

Pericles is the Michael Bay/Jerry Bruckheimer Shakespearean play. But it is only partially Shakespeare’s. It’s thought that he outlined it, and gave it to George Wilkins to write. Unhappy with the product, Shakes re-wrote the final three acts.

Of course it’s in these final three acts that we see some awesome verbal acrobatics as Pericles’s daughter, Marina, somersaults her way out of being raped by the Thénardier-like: Bawd, Boult and Pander who buy her off of some pirates thinking that they’re going to make a mint by selling her body. Here’s what she tells Boult to turn him off:

Thou hold’st a place for which the pained’st fiend

Of hell would not in reputation change.

Thou art damned door-keeper to every

Custrel that comes inquiring for his Tib.

To the choleric fisting of every rogue

Thy ear is liable; thy food is such

As hath been belch’d on by infected lungs. (4:6)

BURNED.

These are the lives around Pericles. The riddle he has to solve at the beginning is presented to him by a king, and the reward for solving the riddle is the princess’s hand in marriage, but the answer to the riddle is that the king is sleeping with his daughter, so if you solve it, he will kill you. And if you don’t solve it, you will be killed too. When Pericles figured it out I was super-excited, I thought he was going to then find a way to rescue the girl and we were going to have this evil king as the monumental villain and we would meet the girl and the whole play would be a fascinating exploration of how he marries and saves this abused princess… WRONG. Pericles RUNS away and the king tries to have him killed. It’s like he wanders into potentially interesting situations, flirting with dangerous lives, rife with dramatic fodder, and then he gets shipwrecked and we never get to any of the fascinating villains aside from the three who try to pimp his daughter.

But it’s a bigger sea that just his own play in which Pericles finds himself shipwrecked. If there were a panel discussion of Shakesperean title characters who would have a question for Pericles? When he’s sitting beside Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Henry V… He’s Shakespeare’s proverbial one-legged stepchild. Cousin Oliver from the Brady Bunch has more cultural gravitas than Pericles.

Still, the play is apparently very effective in performance. In much the same way that The Rock is effective in performance. Personally I doubt there was anything effective about my performance of Oliver Twist. I remembered all of my lines which is good. At that age most of us aren’t capable of much acting, so they cast you based on the outstanding qualities of your personality. In my case, I think those qualities were large brown eyes and a decent, boyish smile that indicated an inherent innocence, optimism, and blandness onto which the audience could paste whatever absent qualities were dramatically prescribed.

I guess I don’t mind that I was that person at age eight, but it wasn’t long before I wanted to be fiercely independent and clever, with the self-assurance to live beyond the realm of Christian morality.

It’s interesting to note that in the novels Oliver Twist and Les Miserables the villains come to much grimmer ends. Fagin is hanged, and although Thénardier gets money from Marius and goes to America… he becomes a slave trader there and well, no one wants to cheer for that.

We all want a chance to flirt with villainy, to waltz off the stage like Thénardier and his wife with the audience’s affections pickpocketed away from even the monumental Jean Valjean. Or to dance into the Sunset arm in arm with Fagin like Dodger at the end of Oliver… “Once a villain, you’re a villain to the end!”

But what if you’re Oliver? Then what are you to the end? A guy in a coffee shop reading Shakespeare?

Beats the gallows I guess.

Hakuna Matata: It Means Screw Everyone Who Took Timon's Gold

2010-11-06T07:39:00.000-07:00

First off, I have to own up to the fact that I missed my year deadline on reading all the complete works. I was supposed to be done on Halloween, but as you can see, it is past Halloween and I've still got a number of plays to go. I got really busy. And I got distracted by a couple of other pieces of reading material. One of which was Freedom, which I wasn’t going to read because I HATED the Corrections, but I was enticed by the fact that several of the main characters went to Macalester. It’s not bad (I say with a grumble). Anyway.

Speaking of St. Paul, I used to work at the Minnesota Children’s Museum, and my absolute, all-time favorite thing to do there was Storytime. 10:30 and 2:30 everyday, we’d swing open a giant wooden book on the second floor atrium, set up a little easel, and yoink 4 or 5 awesome children’s books from our library to read aloud to a group of rapt youngsters. The point of the activity was to provide a model for reading aloud for families, but I didn’t see it that way. I liked to put on a show.

I liked to channel Bill Irwin for an interpretation of The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Or fall over in fear at the revelation of the monster in Go Away, Big Green Monster, by Ed Emberley, or stomp my feet and shake my fist along with the children to re-enact the mocking monkeys in Caps For Sale. These books have physical actions and building rhythms, they have call and response, and opportunities to ask the kids questions to which they can yell out “NOOOOO!”

I love kid’s books, but there’s one to which I wouldn’t ever dare expose those impressionable young minds: The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. It is a story of absolute and utter abuse where the boy takes and takes and takes from the tree, even physically assaulting her -- and the tree is happy to be assaulted! Happy to be taken from and chopped down and abused, so long as the boy comes back!

I think it’s a dangerous book and it demonstrates the perils of one-sided, unconditional love. But even though I hate it I found myself wishing that Timon of Athens could have been a little more like that maligned tree.

Timon of Athens is one of the plays Shakespeare wrote that may never have been performed in his lifetime. It has no love story to distract us from the main plot. The only female characters are prostitutes. It’s about a rich guy who spends all his money throwing parties for and bailing out his friends. Then he runs out of money and none of them help him out. He gets banished from Athens and becomes a hermit and a misanthrope, but he happens to discover gold buried in the ground and thieves and artists come back to try to take it from him. He gives most of it to Alcibiades, who is marching on Athens to conquer it for his own vengeful purposes. Timon never forgives anyone. He’s pissed off and complains and then he dies. The end.

There’s something Gatsby-esque about the giant parties Timon throws and the way he is completely abandoned by everyone when the parties stop. Nobody loves you when you’re down and out and all that jazz. If Shakespeare had given Timon a Daisy to long for, then this might rank among his stronger plays. But there’s no Daisy. Timon can’t even relate to Apemantus, the churlish philosopher, who shares his disdain for humanity:

TIMON: What wouldst thou do with the world, Apemantus, if it lay in thy power?

APEMANTUS: Give it to the beasts, to be rid of men… the commonwealth of Athens is become a forest of beasts. (4:3)

These guys should be bros, but Timon just wants to get rid of him too:

Mend my company, take away thyself. (4:3)

When he is visited by the only character comparable to the boy from The Giving Tree -- his honest steward Flavius -- Timon recognizes him as the only honest man in the world and gives him gold and this directive:

Go, live rich and happy.

But thus condition’d: thou shalt build from men;

Hate all, curse all, show charity to none,

But let the famish’d flesh slide from the bone

Ere thou relieve the beggar. Give to dogs

What thou deniest to men. Let prisons swallow’ em,

Debts wither ‘em to nothing; be men like blasted woods,

And may diseases lick up their false bloods! (4:3)

Timon seems so generous and happy early, and when he’s betrayed he does not have the capacity to forgive. Even when Athens is in direst need, he wishes them all to hang themselves from his own giving tree before he’ll lift a finger to Athens’ defense:

I have a tree which grows here in my close

That mine own use invites me to to cut down...

Tell Athens, in the sequence of degree,

From high to low throughout, that whoso please

To stop affliction, let him take his haste,

Come hither, ere my tree hath felt the axe,

And hang himself. (5:1)

The bitterness and misanthropy of Timon is so tyrannical that it’s impossible to care about him in the end. He has no dead Cordelia to mourn with wild howling. There is no moment where we recognize goodness in him, he’s just filled with hate. He was generous with his fortune, but it was not because he was a generous person, it was because he was a fool with money.

Timon the misanthrope is an old story, and Shakespeare maybe knew better than to ever allow it to be performed. Like The Giving Tree, he might have known it was a character who could be interpreted to unfortunate ends. Why present the world with a model of dangerous behavior and attitudes when there is no redemption for them in the end? The Tree may have been an idiot for allowing herself to be so used by the boy, but at least the boy did come back and love her in the end and they were happy.

I was raised Catholic and so my model for unconditional love was Jesus. The bloody, crucified Jesus whose 6-foot-tall statue haunted the hallways of St. Mark’s Catholic school. His magically-roaming, forlorn eyes made me hurry uneasily past that statue even when I returned to the school as an adult to substitute teach for a few weeks. We were raised to believe that life without sacrifice and suffering isn’t heavenly. This lesson was mixed in with the better lessons about being good to everyone, forgiving, and living a life of service and compassion, but still. Bloody Jesus… He’s just as bad as that dang tree.

It’s no wonder that the first time I fell in love I thought I could just hope and be good and sacrifice and that would win out. There are more important things to fall in love with than devotion. Love is a biological tool, and the science of it deems that strength overshadow alacrity for forgiveness.

But compassion still has its place. What good are the great abuses we commit against each other if they don’t give us a chance to find redemption? In television writing we joke that the theme of every single story of every single television show is redemption. Redemption is the cleanest. It’s a word that implies an entire story: fall, fight and forgiveness. Timon is never redeemed.

Instead of finding gold or an abusive Boy in the wilderness, what Timon really needed was to find a hippie-ish warthog sidekick to show him the delights of impoverished exile. Hakuna Matata, motherf-----s.

Coriolanus 2: Judgment Day

2010-09-30T18:19:00.000-07:00

Coriolanus is a great soldier who is pressured to become a politician, the politicians think this is a bad idea, and slander him to the point of turning the mob of Rome violent against him. Coriolanus leaves and joins his former enemies, the Volscans. They march on Rome, and just before he marches in and destroys Rome, his mother pleads with him to make peace. He does, but then he is betrayed by the Volscans who incite the people of Coriolone – a city which he conquered and for which he was named – to rise up against him and murder him.

Coriolanus’s fate was to die in order to make peace. Kind of like the Terminator at the end of T2. Arnold lowers himself into the molten steel in order to destroy the last chip and prevent the rise of Skynet. “I know now why you cry…” And he melts with a thumbs-up. I know now why I cry too, Arnold.

I love the character of Coriolanus’s mom. She’s a classic stage mom. After he returns from war, she encourages him to run for consul, the highest office in Rome:

I have lived

To see inherited my very wishes

And the buildings of my fancy; only

There’s one thing wanting, which I doubt not but

Our Rome will cast upon thee. (2:1)

Coriolanus is a soldier and a snob; he disdains the common people and doesn’t want to be consul:

I had rather be their servant in my way

Than sway with them in theirs. (2:1)

Then, when the other politicians turn the public against him by pointing out that he doesn’t like them (true) and is a danger to them (false), his mother encourages him to keep trying by lying and apologizing, she compares it to taking a town in warfare with false and gentle promises in order to prevent bloodshed:

now it lies you on to speak

To th’ people; not by your own instruction,

Nor by the matter which your heart prompts you,

But with such words that are but roted in

Your tongue, though but bastards, and syllables

Of no allowance, to your bosom’s truth.

Now, this no more dishonors you at all

Than to take in a town with gentle words,

Which else would put you to your fortunate and

The hazard of much blood.

I would dissemble with my nature where

My fortunes and my friends at stake requir’d

I should do so in honor. (3:2)

Coriolanus agrees. He goes to the people, and they quickly accuse him and rouse his constant temper. His angry, defensive outburst leads to his banishment and then the quest for revenge by joining with the enemies.

And of course his mother confronts him at the last second and pleads with him not to destroy Rome, but to make peace. A good decision, but it does result in his murder:

Our suit

Is that you reconcile them: while the Volsces

May say, “This mercy we have show’d,” the Romans,

“This we receiv’d”; and each in either side

Give the all-hail to thee and cry, “Be blest

For making up this peace!” (5:3)

Coriolanus listens to his mommy:

O my mother, mother! O!

You have won a happy victory to Rome;

But, for your son, believe it – O, believe it—

Most dangerously you have with him prevail’d,

If not most mortal to him. (5:3)

Moms want the best for their sons. I guess sometimes they’re overbearing and try to control their children’s lives. I have no experience whatsoever with this. My mom and dad were both much younger than I am now when they first became parents and even though they fumbled their way through parts of it, I would say they did a pretty decent job. As 3 of 5, I got space my other siblings might not have had.

I moved out of our house at 14 to go to a boarding school (by my own choice), and their influence in my life decisions declined even further.

As a kid we used to drive our station wagon to Chicago once or twice a year to go shopping at Water Tower Place, or visit the Museum of Science and Industry, and when we drove home we would drive through Evanston, Winnetka, Lake Forest, turning an hour drive on the expressway into a three-hour tour of the mansions and large homes of the North Shore. My parents ingrained in me a middle class fascination with wealth and the opulence it affords. Then when I was 14 we drove the wood-paneled station wagon into Lake Forest (where my boarding school was) and they left me there, to mingle with and wonder at the BMW-driving, international-traveling, blue-blazered classmates of mine.

One weekend I came home from school and told them about how we helped our Geometry teacher get her car unstuck from the snow and she drove us to Ben and Jerry’s to get a Vermonster. It was the description of the giant ice cream dish that got them. The treat’s structural integrity dissolved as Wager, Tito, Reiser, Leo Kim and I soldiered our way to the elusive glass bottom that we glimpsed only momentarily every time we scraped our spoons against it and swallowed another flavor-miasma that nature never intended. They laughed and laughed and when someone else came over to visit – Uncle Dito or Aunt Sylvia – they’d say: “Gabe, tell that story again, about the car stuck in the snow.” And I’d tell it again, and every time I told it, it became more elaborate and ridiculous and I dropped in more ten dollar P-SAT words to show off.

It became clear soon after that storytelling was in my nature.

Sarah Conner wanted the best for John Conner, so she trained him to be a soldier and stuff and he defeated the army of the robots. Coriolanus was a soldier and his mom wanted him to be a politician and he achieved greatness, but it cost him his life. My parents wanted me to be whatever I wanted to be, so I do this and call it work. It ain’t exactly bringing in the harvest, but it's all I got to try to make a difference. I don't think there are any Volscians left in the world to get betrayed by and I'm no damn good at fighting robots either.

Hos Before Bros: The Cautionary Tale of Antony and Cleopatra

2010-09-21T09:33:00.000-07:00

Occasionally some damn fool decides to test the infallible wisdom of ages and for a moment puts his ho before a bro. The result is always tragic.

Just this weekend I saw The Town. Affleck has a perfectly good bank-robbing thing going with his best friends, but he puts it all at risk for a hot bank manager whom he took hostage and falls in love with.

Then there’s Romeo and Mercutio, we all know what happened there once Romeo started making the sweet love to Juliet, in Merchant of Venice, Bassanio makes Antonio put his life on the line for him, which is ultimate bro-ness, just so that he can court Portia – lucky for these bros, Portia is a litigious ho, and saves Antonio from his pound-less fate.

But really, all these fools should have learned from the original cautionary tale: Antony and Cleopatra.

Antony is ridiculously in love with Cleopatra. Who can blame him? She’s hotter than hot and queen of Egypt. Then he hears that his wife has died and his friend Caeser is in trouble because Pompey wants to kick his ass. Antony runs to Caesar’s aid, and like a true bro, marries Caesar’s sister, Octavia, to demonstrate that he’s down. But Cleopatra is way too smokin’ and Antony is on the next ferry back up that Nile. Like he tells her:

You did know

How much you were my conqueror, and that

My sword, made weak by my affection, would

Obey it on all cause. (3:11)

Of course, you can’t do Caeser’s sister thus, so Caesar brings a load of hurt to Antony’s front door. For a quick minute, Antony thinks he was betrayed by Cleopatra, and he has a lucid moment, free from her spell where he realizes he’s so whipped, he can’t even recognize himself anymore:

Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish,

A vapor sometime like a bear or lion,

A tower’d citadel, a pendant rock,

A forked mountain, or blue promontory

With trees upon’t that nod unto the world,

And mock our eyes with air. Thou hast seen these signs,

They are black vesper’s pageants…

That which is now a horse, even with a thought

The rack dislimns, and makes it indistinct

As water in water…

My good knave, Eros, now thy captain is

Even such a body. Here I am Antony,

Yet cannot hold this visible shape. (4:14)

Antony stabs himself out of shame, learns that he wasn’t betrayed, apologizes to Cleopatra, and then dies. Then Cleopatra kills herself by getting bitten by a snake.

I don’t really have a good personal anecdote to bring this whole thing together. Once I waited to date a girl until she had clearly rejected my buddy who was interested in her, but then she got mad at me for moving to Minnesota and slept with some other guy at a Halloween party. The bro code is so ingrained in my sensibilities that I would never, ever allow a lady to undo my male friendships. Although, truth be told, I sort of avoid that whole thing by having lots of female friends. And hos before hos... that doesn’t even make any sense.

But I mean, maybe… maybe for Cleopatra. Maybe for the sexiest woman in the history of the galaxy. Maybe I would think about it. There’s only one way to find out. Sexy ladies, you know where to find me… same place I find you. Here, on the internet.

I’m sure I could pass the test though. You see, unlike these other idiots (Romeo, Antony, Affleck) I listen to the wisdom of the ages. And I’m going to know better. Thanks to my boys Lennon and McCartney.

I should have known better with a girl like you.

That I would love everything that you do,

And I do. Hey, hey, hey. And I do.

Too bad they didn’t stick to the bro code themselves, although Oh, Yoko! is a pretty awesome tune.

ANIMECBETH!

2010-09-13T08:37:00.000-07:00

Years ago, No Refunds Theater Co. was having a fundraiser called The Great Moments of Kung Fu Theater History. I wrote a little animated piece for it and my brother was working on it, but it was never completed because it was way too complicated for one person to animate. That piece was called Animecbeth. Here is the script for it as well as the promo video I made back then for our website.

Great Moments was the last piece of live theater I had a hand in before I moved to California. I stayed up the entire night before the show and got sick drinking Starbucks Frappuccinos while editing a video yearbook retrospective of our past work. I completely lost my voice and felt like I was going to die by the time we finished the show. It's one of my favorite memories, and one of the things I was most proud of being a part of. I always used to complain that there was too much work and so little money in live theater (especially back in MN), but I miss it, and I miss all my friends from that time of my life. Working hard with good people. You can't beat that.

I may write some more on Macbeth if the mood takes me, but I'm feeling pressed to make it through all the plays by Halloween, so this entry may have to suffice. FYI I wrote this before I had any schooling on screenplay formatting, so excuse the crudity.

Animécbeth

(Open on Intro Montage.)

NARRATOR

Last time on Animécbeth. The weird sisters gave Macbeth a stunning prophecy...

WITCHES

Hail Macbeth, Thane of Cawdor!

(The witches perform some fancy some fancy magic looking thing ala Power Rangers)

MACBETH

Wha-?

NARRATOR

Then the prophecy came true!

DUNCAN

Macbeth, I make you Thane of Cawdor…

MACBETH

Oh!

(Macbeth powers up. Super Mario-ification sound effect)

NARRATOR

Lady Macbeth put on the pants of the family:

LADY MACBETH

Come, you spirits, unsex me here!

(Lightning strikes, she becomes more masculine and powered up.)

LADY MACBETH

Macbeth, you must kill the king so you can be king, or else you’re a wimp, I wanna be queen! AHHHHHH!

MACBETH

Kill the King, oh my gosh! (Close up on Macbeth) Oh, no!

NARRATOR

Macbeth went along with the plan…

MACBETH

Is this a dagger I see before me?

(Duncan is sleeping, but he wakes up.)

DUNCAN

Macbeth?

(Macbeth looks surprised, pan down, we see the dagger)

MACBETH

(nervously)

Uh, ha ha…

DUNCAN

Huh? Uh, ha ha…

MACBETH

(slightly more jovially)

Ha ha ha.

DUNCAN

Ha ha ha.

MACBETH

HA ha ha!

DUNCAN

Ha ha ha!

(They continue laughing. Until suddenly the door bursts open and Lady Macbeth comes in looking all CRAZY like Medusa!)

LADY MACBETH

AHHHHHHHH!!!

DUNCAN

AHHHHHHH!!!

MACBETH

AHHHHHHH!!!

(They all stop screaming. And look, Macbeth has stabbed the king. He dies)

MACBETH

Oh no!

NARRATOR

And then Macbeth became King.

MACBETH

Huh? Okay!

(Macbeth give the okay sign)

NARRATOR

What troubles lie ahead for our Scotsman? We shall see…

(Macbeth walks with Lady Macbeth to dinner. Macbeth goes through increasing states of stress and worry throughout this short.)

LADY MACBETH

I’m so glad you’re King now.

MACBETH

I’m happy and sad too. I’m two different things at the same time… Oh no!

LADY MACBETH

And did you ever see such a fine royal feast?

(Macbeth looks at the table and its feast. There is BANQUO’s GHOST sitting in his chair.)

MACBETH

Oh no! Look a ghost, Ah! Everyone run! It’s the end of the world!

(Mumbling from guests increases.)

LADY MACBETH

He he he, what a funny joke! That’s my husband, quite the actor. He’s always making jokes of one kind or another!

MACBETH

Oh, quit my sight! Ah! Run!

LADY MACBETH

Oh, don’t worry everyone, he’ll stop in a minute.

MACBETH

Ah, everyone run! Ahh! Ghosts! Oh, the fright and horror, Ahh!

LADY MACBETH

(Gets enraged)

All right! Everyone out! Out! OUT!

(The room clears out, LADY MACBETH looks at her hands, there seems to be blood on them)

LADY MACBETH

Huh?

(Insert some sort of action visual transition ALA the bat symbol flying out and back.)

(Macbeth is in the woods to meet the Weird Sisters.)

WITCHES

Double, double toil and trouble

Fire burn and cauldron bubble!

Fillet of a fenny snake

In the cauldron boil and bake.

Eye of newt and toe of frog

Wool of bat and tongue of dog

For a charm of powerful trouble.

Like a hell broth boil and bubble!

Aha ha ha ha!

MACBETH

Hey you!

WITCH 1

By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes!

WITCHES

Ha ha ha!

MACBETH

Oh, you secret, black and midnight hags. What is it you do? Oh, no!

WITCH 2

Adder’s fork and blindworm’s sting!

WITCH 3

Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing!

WITCHES

Double Double toil and trouble! Ha Ha Ha!

MACBETH

Oh, you’re so weird! What is that Evil Magic? Oh, no!

(An apparition appears from their cauldron. First a severed head with a helmet on, then it poofs and it is a scary baby, and then it poofs again and it is a cute little furry ANIMAL like jigglypuff with a branch in its hand.)

ANIMAL

Dunsinane!

MACBETH

Oh, it’s cute! ...And horrible!

ANIMAL

Dunsinane!

MACBETH

Ha ha ha—Huh?

(Insert some sort of action visual transition.)

(Back at the castle.)

MACBETH

No one born of a woman can beat me until Birnham wood comes to Dunsinane, and that’s impossible. I’m like invincible! OKAY!

(Enter DOCTOR.)

DOCTOR

Your highness, you might want to see the queen, she’s been acting funny!

(Enter Lady Macbeth, she looks crazy and is washing her hands.)

LADY MACBETH

Out, Out damn spot! Out I say! Oh, there’s blood on my hands, get it off, get it off!

MACBETH

Huh? Oh no!

DOCTOR

If she washes her hands for much longer, she could DIE!

(Enter Servant.)

SERVANT

My lord, there’s a woods out there!

(Pause. Macbeth thinks.)

MACBETH

(Timidly)

Is it… Birnham Wood?

SERVANT

YES!

MACBETH

Oh no!

DOCTOR

My lord, the queen is dead. She killed herself of insanity and oversanitation, I’m calling it: INSANITARICIDE!

MACBETH

(Quickly)

Huh? Oh, out out brief candle, life is but a poor player, a walking shadow who struts and frets his hour upon the stage, it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing…(pause. Blinks) Oh NO!

MACDUFF

Macbeth!

(Macbeth powers up and leaps through the roof of the castle. There are trees moving toward the castle.)

MACBETH

Macduff!

(MACDUFF jumps from the trees.)

MACDUFF

Ah! Macbeth, you deserve my fury! You killed the king! And my family!

MACBETH

You may be right, but you may also be dead soon!

(They power up, their shirts fly off, we pan up over their rippling 18,000 pack stomach muscles. They collide in a fury of quick punching.)

MACBETH

Ha! You may as well know, Macduff, that no man born of a woman can defeat me, so deal with that!

MACDUFF

You should know that I was cut prematurely from the womb! Ha ha ha.

MACBETH

You should also know that I can’t be defeated until Birnham word comes from Dunsinane!

(Macbeth is surrounded by the men hiding in the trees. He stops smiling. Blinks. And then looks around, he looks dejected)

MACBETH

Oh NO!

(Macduff smiles, laughs and punches off Macbeth’s head, Macduff lands on the ground and Macbeth’s head lands in the grass. Soldiers in the trees cheer. Close up on Macduff.)

MACDUFF

Who’s the meanest?

SOLDIERS

Macduff!

MACDUFF

Who’s the prettiest?

SOLDIERS

Macduff!

MACDUFF

Who’s the baddest mo-fo, low-down around this town?

SOLDIERS

Macduff!

MACDUFF

The shogun… of Scotland.

(A rainbow crosses the sky and flowers bloom. Roll Credits.)

Ian talks about his single person animation effort on the short.

A few days later, he found he had actual work to do that paid him money, so he had to throw in the towel.

Here is the trailer for the remounting of Great Moments.

It features footage from the original one-night production.

I cut this after I'd moved to California.

King Lear is Very Old, Not Very Wise

2010-09-09T16:23:00.001-07:00

Some people say that they have no regrets. That if they could go back they would do it all the same. Live the same life over again, make the same decisions, see the same sights and love the same people.

You have to be the smuggest, most self-deluding jackass in the universe if you think that your life is so amazing that it couldn’t be improved upon.

Take the movie Groundhog Day. Only after repeating that single day over and over for about ten years does Bill Murray achieve a level of fulfillment and satisfaction that makes him truly happy… And that’s just to perfect a single DAY!

All I know is that when I get to my deathbed, if someone is stupid enough to ask me: “Any regrets?” I’m going to say: “Hell yeah, I’ve got regrets. I’ve got boatloads of 'em. Regrets of Titanic proportions, things I should have said, people I should have fought for and years when I should have worked harder. And I’ve got minuscule raindrop regrets, days I should have turned left instead of right, nights I should have gone out, mornings I should have slept in, restaurants at which I never should have eaten. If I could do it all over again... I'd do it differently.”

But for all the things I regret, mine is a raindrop life, and my mistakes don’t nearly approach the scale and horror of King Lear’s disastrous regret.

I think we all know the story of Lear, he was ready to divide his kingdom between his three daughters as long as they satisfied him by professing their love for him. Goneril and Regan, the wicked older sisters, spew a bunch of bombast at him about the totality of their love, and Cordelia, the youngest sister can only be sincere and says she loves her father no more or no less than a daughter should love her father. Lear disinherits her and she marries the King of France. Lear’s wicked daughters kick him out in a storm, and Cordelia comes to find Lear when he’s broken and sad. Then they all die.

There is also the amazing subplot in the play about the Earl of Gloucester, whose bastard son, Edmund, conspires against his brother Edgar to take all the lands and title from their father. Edmund is a villain of Iago-like cunning, with a twinge more humanity than Iago because he desired pieces of a noble life: property, respect and possibly even love. Not to mention that before dying he attempted to stop his last act of villainy, which was to have Cordelia murdered.

Edmund forges a letter from his brother, Edgar, inviting him to conspire to murder their father and share in the inheritance:

“This policy and reverence of age

makes the world bitter to the best of our times; keeps

our fortunes from us till our oldness cannot relish them. (1:2)

The letter claims that Edgar doesn’t want to wait for his father, Gloucester to die before getting his inheritance, because you need to be young to enjoy it. This is an echo of the Duke’s speech in Measure For Measure, and clearly must have been a thought on Shakespeare’s mind. He came into money and prominence late in his life, when he was probably suffering from an STD and -- as he feared -- he did not live to enjoy a long retirement.

Gloucester’s reaction is to blame the stars for the treachery he perceives, both here and in Lear’s actions:

These late eclipses in the sun and moon

Portend no good to us. (1:2)

And after he exits, Edmund reflects on the foolishness of this subscription to prescribed destiny:

This is the excellent foppery of the world,

That when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeits of

Our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters

The sun, the moon, and stars, as if we were

Villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion,

knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance;

drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc’d

obedience of planetary influence; and that we

are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. (1:2)

Lear partakes of this submission to the natural elements when he is out in the storm with his fool:

Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! Spout, rain!

Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters.

I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;

I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children;

You owe me no subscription. Then let fall

Your horrible pleasure. Here I stand, your slave. (3:2)

Lear created this storm for himself. His foolish stepping-down and division of his kingdom cause all of the turmoil. He has the power to come in from the storm, but he does not.

Lear and Gloucester represent an old and foolish way of thinking that certain things are meant to be. Whereas the younger characters in the play are willing to own their free will and go after the things they want. Cordelia’s unwillingness to play her father’s game in the first scene is a perfect example of youthful defiance of the laws of nature and the rule of the old. Whippersnappers.

I may have quoted the following quote before. It’s been important in my life, and I find it appropriate to bring up again here:

Practically, the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe; and it may be that they have some faith left which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they were. (Walden, Henry David Thoreau, p. 9)

It was on a walk along the Mississippi River with the first girl I fell in love with that she referred to this line, and I recognized it and completed it. It's no coincidence that the two of us had read Walden. Millions of people have read it, and we were nerds. It's maybe not that incredible that we both remembered the quote. It has some notoriety. But in the moment, it seemed like perfectly accomplished destiny.

What's amazing is that I think back on this walk and this particular love. And even though I feel so strongly that I would do things differently in my life if I could. It's possible that this culmination of youth and literacy would not be recreated nor have an equivalent in other, imaginary iterations of my life.

Would it be worth giving up a few minutes of near perfection to take that chance?

Or is reconciliation the preferable medicine for our regrets?

Lear: ... If you have poison for me, I will drink it.

I know you do not love me; for your sisters

Have, as I do remember, done me wrong.

You have some cause, they have not.

Cordelia: No cause, no cause.

...

Lear: You must bear with me. Pray you now, forget

and forgive. I am old and foolish. (4:7)

Lear screws up and is forgiven before the whole thing falls apart forever. It could be that admitting he was wrong -- the beauty of mercy from the most important person in his life -- could so eclipse his errors that this became the perfect moment of his life.

In Breaking Bad last season, in the episode called "The Fly," Walt laments that he lived past the perfect moment. The moment when his criminal endeavors could have provided for his family enough and the positive perception the people he cared about had of him was still intact. Lear, like Walt, lives too long. Maybe by moments, maybe living past his first line of dialogue was too long. The problem is that if you don't live long enough to screw up, you don't live long enough to enjoy forgiveness. Reconciliation. The mercy of others who have seen our flaws and still find us worthy of affection.

I am 32. I talk about regrets as if those I now possess will be insurmountable in the decades of life that remain. I am young yet, and foolish. I will only grow less young than I am. Hopefully I will grow less foolish too, but I'm not banking on it. It's okay to lament past choices, but the key to mastering regret lies not in time travel and not in parallel universes, but in future action.

10th Grade Gabe Goes All Intertextual on Measure For Measure

2010-08-31T09:19:00.000-07:00

Gabriel Llanas

English 10

Mr. Elieff

April 22, 1994

Measure For Measure Intertextual Essay

In order to demonstrate the wisdom of Shakespeare in his play Measure For Measure I will break off a piece of intertextual analysis up in this mug as we were asked to do for this assignment.

The Duke in this play is a meddler who is too chicken to enforce his own laws in Vienna and leaves the responsibility to Angelo and Escalus. But then he comes back disguised as a friar and messes with everybody. He shows that Angelo is a hypocrite for being lustful even though he tried to execute Lucio for that same crime. And then the Duke himself tries to marry the most virtuous nun-in-training Isabella.

Guys like the Duke think they know it all and can push everyone around and then act like they’re so smart and heroic. The Duke (disguised as a friar) gives some terrible advice to Lucio while he is sitting on death row for having sex with his fiancé out of wedlock and getting her pregnant. Lucio is waiting to hear how is sister did when she went to beg for his life from Angelo and the Duke tells him:

Be absolute for death: either death or life

Shall thereby be the sweeter. (3:1)

The Duke basically goes on to say that Claudio should want to die because life sucks so much. Then at the end, he says this interesting thing:

Thou hast nor youth nor age,

But as it were an after-dinner’s sleep

Dreaming on both, for all thy blessed youth

Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms

Of palsied eld; and when thou art old and rich,

Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty,

To make thy riches pleasant. What’s yet in this

That bears the name of life? (3:1)

The Duke is saying that when you’re young you want the riches of old age, and when you’re old, the riches are no good because you don’t have your youth. Life is pointless because you can never have everything that you want. Or as Sebastian the Crab would say: “The seaweed is always greener, in somebody else’s lake.”

Debbie Downer in the house.

Now check this, E-Dog. When I was in 5^th grade I read the Chronicles of Narnia, and in the last book they talk about Queen Susan, who wasn’t invited to live in Aslan’s land at the end of Narnia, because she was no longer a friend of Narnia. She could not remember it. When the others would talk about it she would say, "What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.” (Lewis, The Last Battle, p. 154)

Then Polly observes:

"She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one's life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can." (Lewis, p. 154)

Susan lives in the small overlapping time in life when your youth is at its apex and you have all the trappings you need to be happy. The Duke thinks there is no overlap, and that you are always wanting one or the other. The outlooks are nearly similar, but if the Duke really believes there is no overlap then he is doomed to melancholy.

I just got my braces off, I possess a headful of mad-wavy hair that the young ladies can’t get enough of, I may have acne and no car or driver’s license, but I don’t give a care. It’s like Bill and Ted say: “The best place to be is here, and the best time to be is now.”

Or even better look at what Oscar Wilde wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray:

“You have the most marvelous youth, and youth is the one thing worth having… Someday when you are old and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and passion branded your lips with its hideous fires, you will feel it, you will feel it terribly. Now, wherever you go you charm the world. Will it always be so?... Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!” (Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, p.186-187)

This speech leads to Dorian Gray living a life of lechery and sinful abandon that gets reflected on his magical painting while his youth is preserved on his face. Susan is kept out of what is essentially heaven in the chronicles of Narnia and Lucio who actually did break the law is saved from punishment by the Duke, who seems to have orchestrated this whole thing just so that he could appear benevolent and hook up with the virginal Isabella.

As you may be aware I sit on Judiciary Board, and when Sasha and her roommate Karin came before the J-Board for disciplinary action, I was all up in that case. Sasha – as you know – is a grade-A hottie. The two of them had snuck off campus one weekend and gotten busted. They got off pretty easy with a dormed weekend when they could have gotten suspended, but I made a point of being the strongest advocate for fully pardoning their trespasses. So when it came time for their dormed weekend guess who was playing truth or dare up in their dorm room until lights out?

Somewhere there’s a painting of me dissolving into monstrosity.

I guess I don’t blame the Duke for playing everyone like he did. I mean, he’s probably just a sucker with low self-esteem who needs to flex the few muscles he has every once in a while in order to impress the ladies. So what if he’s not going to get invited to Aslan’s land. Between you and me, Mr. E, I’d rather kick it on planet Earth with the Susans and Sashas and milk these silly days for all the sweet young nectar they’re worth. Peace.

The End of Magic

2010-08-23T13:52:00.000-07:00

All’s Well that Ends Well lives between an era of fairy tales and the age of science and rationality. Within the play there is a mystical power in virginity, and love that conquers riddles and performs feats believed impossible.

Helena is in love with Bertram. The problem is that he is a nobleman and she is a lowly physician’s daughter. Bertram goes to attend the king of France at court. The king is deathly ill. Helena devises a cure from medicines that her father instructed her to use and goes to the court to cure the king, her reward is that she can choose any husband for herself and the king will force him to marry her. She chooses Bertram, who resists, but marries her and promptly runs away with the intention of never consummating the marriage. He later challenges her to two tasks saying he won’t call her wife until she can get his precious family ring off his finger and get pregnant with his child. Helena is smart and tricks him into giving the ring to a hot girl named Diana, and then sleeps with him when he thinks he's sleeping with Diana. In a fairy tale ending, Bertram swears he will love her and we are maybe expected to believe that they are going to live happily ever after.

Early in the play, Helena has an argument with Parolles about virginity. She begins:

Man is enemy to virginity; how may we barricado it against him? (1:1)

Parolles responds in tirade that she is being foolish:

Loss of virginity is rational increase, and there was never virgin got till virginity was first lost. (1:1)

There is no defense for it, man is its enemy and it is natural that he will conquer virginity so that the world will be peopled with further virgins. The circle of virginity. But nearing the conclusion of their argument, we have a mysterious incomplete line. Helena says:

Not my virginity yet: [….] (1:1)

There is debate about how much of the text is lost here, because the proceeding line picks up an entirely new thought. All that is known is that something is missing, and we have no idea what it is.

So what should we make of this missing line? I'm going to jump to a conclusion that serves my present purposes and could be completely wrong. Helena is resolving not to lose her virginity yet. I would think that the missing lines unfold the plan that yet requires her virginity. Namely, she must cure the king of his ailment and marry Bertram. These are monumental tasks, and she needs virgin magic to achieve them.

After Helena cures the king, Lafew observes:

They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear. (2:3)

Helena’s virginity brought about the miracle to which Lafew refers. The idea of virginal power persists in this play at the end when the virgin girl Diana goes before the king to argue in Helena’s stead. She is the one who corners Bertram and sets up Helena's arrival as the mastermind behind this plot to win Bertram's love. Why doesn't Helena administer these arguments in disguise the way that Portia wins freedom for Antonio at the end of The Merchant of Venice? I shall tell you. It's because Helena loses her virginity to her husband in the middle of Act 4. With her virginity go her magical powers. The brilliant miracle-worker utters a mere 13 lines in her husband's presence in the lackluster final scene of the play.

Loss of virginity is the loss of magic. I remember this from something else I read.

In the last book of The Prydain Chronicles, The High King by Lloyd Alexander, Taran, Assistant Keeper of the Oracular pig HenWen, defeats the forces of Arawn, Lord of Death, and in a somber twist, the magic that had ruled their age dies out and has to go away (much like the way the elves go to the Grey Havens at the end of The Lord of the Rings).

Unfortunately for Taran, he is in love with the enchantress Princess Eilonwy who must also go away since she has magical powers. Happily it is revealed that she can wish away her magical powers by using a ring she was given in one of the earlier books. Without her magical powers she’ll be able to stay and marry Taran. Throughout the series, Eilonwy also carried around a magical golden bauble that was in part the source of her powers, much like a wand.

Here is the passage where she loses her magic:

Wondering and almost fearful, Eilonwy closed her eyes and did the enchanter’s bidding. The ring flared suddenly, but only for a moment. The girl gave a sharp cry of pain. And in Taran’s hand the light of the golden bauble winked out.

Eilonwy blinked and looked around her. “I don’t feel a bit different,” she remarked. “Are my enchantments truly gone?” (Alexander, The High King, p. 246)

I once dated a girl who, like me, had waited for a long time before having sex. She said she didn’t know why she waited so long and that one day she just looked around and was like what am I holding onto this V-card for?

I was a virgin for a long time, first because I was waiting to be in a relationship with someone I loved, then because I was too hapless and self-conscious to know how to coax someone into physical intimacy. And then I went back to my old fallback of waiting to be in love. The whole virginity-losing process could have been helped along so well if I would have just started drinking beer at an early age like a normal American.

As it happens, it all worked out and I was in love when I first had sex. The girl had warned me that sex is a strange beast. I was a bit brash, and too excited to get on with it at that point to pay her warning much heed. I loved her, I was more than ready, and I downplayed any possible fallout.

Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear. (2:3)

In the way that Eilonwy’s bauble blinks out and she doesn’t notice her enchantments are gone, sex doesn’t change you in the instant. Gradually, it unlocks so much that didn’t exist before. It shined a light on the empty spaces of my life and filled them with hope and opportunity. It was great. Until my heart got broken and it all fell apart.

You go to a very dark place when you grow close to someone, imagining a parallel future on and on to golden horizons. And then she diverges. Leaves you. You feel foolish for not having anticipated her needs. You feel like a moron for wanting her when she doesn’t want you. You feel weak when you realize how reliant your happiness was upon her presence.

Helena's heart breaks before she even attains love. But she fights back. Tricking her husband into sleeping with her, and then appears in the end trusting that he'll honor this loose promise:

I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly. (5:3)

Almost with a vengeance does she win his husbandship, which may turn out to be a bitter one.

Maybe her scarce stage-time at the end of the play is intentional. As one of his last (possibly last) comedy, All’s Well That Ends Well isn’t bright. It’s littered with the difficulties of maturation, and it comes as Shakespeare’s mind was leaning into the great tragedies, Othello among them.

Othello tiptoes so close to being a romantic comedy, Iago’s plot of convincing Othello of Desdemona’s infidelity is nearly the same as Don John’s plot to convince Claudio of Hero’s infidelity in Much Ado About Nothing. But in Iago’s universe there was no wit as fierce as his to undo his mischief. Otherwise that play might have ended well for the Moor. What subtle turns kept All's Well That Ends Well from ending in a manner most heinous?

The period is placed firmly on this comic chapter of Shakespeare’s writing with the King’s epilogue. Which makes it plain that this play, where the low class women were able to rise in ranks and in fairy tale fashion conquer men of nobility, is nothing more than a great fantasy. The actor who plays the King removes his crown and says:

The king’s a beggar, now the play is done;

All is well ended, if this suit be won,

That you express content; which we will pay,

With strife to please you, day exceeding day.

Ours be your patience then, and yours our parts;

Your gentle hands lend us, and take our hearts. (epilogue)

A play is similar to a seduction. Disbelief momentarily suspended, at the end, the crown of the seducer is removed revealing a person with flaws alike your own. They lend you their gentleness, in hands and in speech, and then take your heart. Or at least a small piece.

Got Out of My Dreams, Got into My Car

2010-08-17T09:08:00.000-07:00

When I was in college I was an idiot with almost no understanding of relationships or how to interact with the opposite sex. And I thought I was in love with a girl I knew from high school. For four years I shot myself in the foot every time a quirky, cute and wonderful person expressed interest in me (they found my childishness endearing when in fact it was stupidity). I was rude or awkward, curt and ridiculous. Ah, the good old days.

Then one night I had a dream about the girl I thought I was in love with. A glorious dream filled with golden light. The kind you wake up from feeling invigorated, confident and reckless. I got into my car and drove 1200 miles to New Orleans. To a southern university where the testosterone flowed like water. I saw her across a field littered with plastic cups and other dander shed the night before when there had been a G-Love and the Special Sauce concert held there. I ran to her, and she threw her bony arms around me. My God she had a smile that could start a car.

She was happy to see me because we had been friends, but I had no skills. And abandoning shyness for boldness made me feel like a stalker. My impromptu road trip must have appeared calculated. She had a "guy she was into" at the time. He seemed like a douche. I spent most of my time there reading Alex Garland's novel The Beach, and feeling like a tool.

That was the last time I acted on something I learned from a dream. If I would have read sonnet 61, I would have known that all that sunshine and gold I dreamed of was the result of my unfounded adoration and had nothing to do with a psychic reciprocation of affection.

Is it thy will thy image should keep open

My heavy eyelids to the weary night?

Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken

While shadows like to thee do mock my sight?

Is it thy spirit that thou send’st from thee

So far from home into my deeds to pry,

To find out shames and idle hours in me,

The scope and tenor of thy jealousy?

O no, thy love, though much, is not so great;

It is my love that keeps mine eye awake,

Mine own true love that doth my rest defeat,

To play the watchman ever for thy sake.

For thee watch I, whilst thou dost wake elsewhere,

From me far off, with others all too near.

There is much speculation and debate about who the fair young man was to whom Shakespeare addressed his sonnets. One popular theory is that it was Henry Wriothesley, The Earl of Southhampton. Henry’s relatives wanted to pressure him into getting married to a specific young woman, and they may have commissioned Shakespeare to write these sonnets to him specifically because he was already a fan of Shakespeare’s poetry. Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were both dedicated to Southhampton. This is why the first series of 17 sonnets (and several others throughout) recommend that the young man ensure that his beauty persist in the world by having a child.

In this era it was expected that men would be sexually attracted to young men, and expressing that attraction was no more taboo than expressing a sexual attraction to a woman. Sodomy was certainly viewed as a sin, but so was adultery. It can probably be assumed that both were popular pastimes of Shakespeare's contemporaries.

The sonnets are fascinating as an autobiographical puzzle. One outstanding characteristic of the sonnet was that it was meant to be vague, so that it would not stand as evidence of adultery or impropriety in an era when such trespasses could be prosecuted criminally. This leaves us with a maze of metaphors and loose allusions to navigate. Could Shakespeare have been in love with this effeminate young man who was reluctant to get married? Yes. It’s also possible he concocted this poetry out of his imagination in the interest of supporting himself and his estranged wife and children during the time when the playhouses were closed due to the outbreak of the plague.

Before I left New Orleans and that girl I thought I was in love with, I gave her a copy of the 30-page short story I’d written for her. It was about a quixotic high school kid in a cape named Tobin Grasshopper and his friend Gordon Godoy who are both in love with a girl named Neriya. They decide to start writing her love poems and leaving them in her locker. She's weirded out and it gets messy when Tobin goes crazy and shoots Gordon in the middle of the school.

Please take a moment to roll your eyes.

Part Cyrano, part Wes Anderson, part utter piece of crap. It was one of the best things I’d written up to that point in my life. Not for any of the actions or pacing or plotting. Not for the characters, but for the few small lyrical snippets I’d come up with to describe the character of Neriya. That was the one emotion I really understood while I was typing away in the computer lab in the basement of the Dewitt-Wallace Library at Macalester: the admiration of beauty.

I would quote something of the story here, but the floppy disk it was recorded on has long since found its way to the bottom of a benevolent trash bin.

My point was that genuine emotions are necessary to create poetry, but they do not have to be specific to the present details. Even a crappy story I wrote at the lovelorn age of 21 demonstrates that real emotions can be applied to fiction. Surely Shakespeare, the greatest writer of all time, was capable of deceiving a young patron of the arts in order to support himself for a quick minute when the going got tough.

But I don’t think this was the case. I think Shakespeare really was in love with the young man. I think William was gay. He clearly didn’t mind living away from his wife for most of his adult life. On the other hand he also had plenty of sex with prostitutes, so feel free to disagree.

There’s no way for us to ever discover the truth until we develop safe time-traveling technology. But I’d rather think he was gay and was writing some of this amazing poetry from a place of actual passion and desire so that I wouldn’t feel like such an ineffectual hack when I write love letters that should be honest and beautiful, but mostly suck balls.

Also, I know people have heterosexualized his poetry over the years by changing pronouns, and those people should be maligned for their homophobia. Unfortunately, I think I just lumped myself into this category since I totally took his poem and applied it to the affections I had for a member of the opposite sex.

Sorry, William... unless of course you weren't gay at all. Then shame on you, you big faker.

The Dishonest Poet: Sonnets 1-17

2010-08-06T08:30:00.000-07:00

I had planned on being a teacher since I was a junior in high school and I determined that it was impractical for me to become a spy. This realization is its own chapter in my life that culminated with the worst planned prank in the history of prep school malfeasance, a stolen VHS copy of Forrest Gump, and the loss of virginity (not mine) in the back of a station wagon. But in December 1999, standing in the Registrar’s office at Macalester College, about to sign up for my last semester, I realized I didn’t want to teach. I wanted to write.

My parents’ recent divorce had filled me with clichéd angst and a conventional disregard for convention. There was something domestic and permanent about becoming a teacher in the Midwest. I felt like I was marrying someone while already planning the divorce.

The problem was that during the fall semester I wrote three pretty good short stories. One about some kids who fill their house up with water, another about two old friends who try to rob a 24-hour donut shop in LaCrosse, WI, and the last was about what would happen if they changed the formula for water.

No one warned me that an English minor is the most useless thing you can get out of your college education, so I erased all the education classes from my registration and quixotically signed up for: Advanced Fiction Writing and Writing the Autobiography and Personal Essay. That spring I wrote over 200 pages of original material. All of which sucked balls.

But I loved writing fiction. Even in the autobiography class I wrote all about my evil twin brother Dante, confessing all the most embarrassing chapters of my life on his timidity and naïve mischievousness.

My favorite moment of that spring semester was the day when they brought some mildly successful poet to talk to all of our classes, she was getting recognition at a literary event that evening at the school and she talked about writing poetry and we read some of her poetry and it was all terrible (except for one or two of the poems we read that she had collaborated with her 7-year-old son to write – I’m not kidding). But I was not overly hubristic, and was perfectly willing to accept that I might have absolutely no barometer for judging poetry.

She came to our advanced fiction class and she started talking about how she could never write fiction because she could never be dishonest with her writing. And I snapped. She had just called fiction writers liars. She just called me a liar. And if there is one thing I am not (was not) it is a liar.

“I think poetry is honest, and I don’t think I could ever write anything that was made up.”

“Writing fiction isn’t just making things up,” I said. “It’s finding truth in fictional events.”

“But the events are fictional and there’s something dishonest about that.”

“So, everything you’ve ever written is true and we’re all liars?”

Diane Glancy, our professor, stepped in before I could inform her that her 7-year-old son was a way better poet than her. But the damage was done. From that moment on I would hate poetry with all of my heart.

This has made the reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets the least-anticipated undertaking of my Year of Reading Shakespeare.

Who will believe my verse in time to come,

If it were filled with your most high deserts?

Though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb,

Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts:

If I could write the beauty of your eyes,

And in fresh numbers number all your graces,

The age to come would say, “This poet lies;

Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.”

So should my papers (yellowed with their age)

Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue,

And your true rights be termed a poet’s rage,

And stretched metre of an antique song;

But were some child of yours alive that time,

You should live twice: in it, and in my rhyme.

The first 17 poems are all weird. They’re about trying to convince some young man to procreate. I mean look at this one. It’s great at first. Shakespeare says if he could capture the young man’s physical beauty in words then everyone would call him a liar in the future. But if the young man had a child, then there would be genetic proof that his words were honest.

Weird.

For one thing, Shakes, kids don’t always look like their parents, sometimes they look way different and goofy. But my favorite part here is the fear he has that in the future someone will say: “This poet lies.”

William Shakespeare’s words are so exaggerative and complimentary, they are so evocative and opulent that no one human could ever achieve the prettiness they describe.

So yes, William, I say this poet lies. This poet embellishes and prettifies and intentionally misleads. And it’s all good. Honesty ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

It behooves the written word to write the world better than it is. How else is it supposed to compete with television?

Troilus and Cressida and Nintendo

2010-08-02T08:16:00.000-07:00

There was an old Nintendo video game called Trojan. I borrowed it from my friend Rocky, we probably traded for Contra or Metroid, which were the two best games in my collection for a long time. The final boss in Trojan was Achilles. As I was fighting him, I couldn't help but think how stupid it was that you didn't have to stab him in the heel to kill him. Even then I was a stickler for mythological accuracy.

There was also a video game called Kid Icarus, about a boy with wings, more like cupid than like Daedelus’s son. I never even played that one.

I’ve always been pretty good at video games. There was a Saturday once when I was a kid when I rode my bike to the Power House, which was the first place in Kenosha you could rent video games, I rented Ninja Gaiden 3: The Ancient Ship of Doom, took it home and cleared it in a single sitting. I rode back an hour or two later and they let me trade it for something else (Solomon’s Key maybe?). To this day I’d be willing to challenge anyone to a playoff of Bionic Commando, which I can clear in just over 30 minutes.

My whole life I’ve wanted my video game prowess to take me somewhere. The way Alex Rogan gets called up to space to defend the frontier against the Kodan Armada in The Last Starfighter. If only our virtual glory could translate to tangible glory that would endure for generations.

The Trojan War and its glories survive today in epic poems, video games, books of mythology and Brad Pitt movies, but I swear to God, until the moment when I cracked open my Riverside Shakespeare and started reading the introduction, I had no idea that Troilus and Cressida was a story of the Trojan War.

It is aptly labeled one of Shakespeare’s problem plays. There is no record of it ever having been performed at the Globe, It may have only been performed twice in Shakespeare's lifetime. It has been classified by different people as a history, a comedy, a satire, and a romance. It’s a sad, cynical, lyrical and incomplete account of the Trojan War that shifts focus from the story of the sundered lovers Troilus and Cressida to musings on the pointlessness of war, the inconstancy of fame and concludes with the inglorious murder of an unarmed Hector by a wrathful Achilles and his gang.

Troilus and Cressida were the clichéd tragic lovers of Shakespeare’s time (the way Romeo and Juliet are now). They fall in love, make all sorts of vows, but then Cressida’s father defects to the Greek camp and he makes them trade a Trojan prisoner for Cressida. She is sent to the Greeks, and promptly falls in love with one of them, betraying Troilus.

At the end of their story Troilus has his brains battered out during some battle, but this play ends before that even happens. I learned about it from As You Like It when Rosalind delivers her speech about how no one ever died for love (see my previous blogpost).

The message of the play seems to be that the Trojan War felt as futile to the soldiers fighting it as Vietnam. In fact, the Trojan War might be more retarded than all of America’s wars put together. As Thersites says:

All the argument is a whore and a cuckold, a good quarrel to draw emulous factions and bleed to death upon. (2:3)

In Shakespeare's time Helen of Troy had been overly romanticized by Christopher Marlowe in Dr. Faustus, as you'll remember from Shakspeare in Love:

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

But Shakespeare’s discussion of her kidnapping here is a philosophical debate about when enough blood has been shed that it becomes ridiculous, unnecessary and perilous to continue fighting. If a kidnapped queen isn’t worth fighting for, is anything?

What I see here for the first time is Shakespeare’s inability to romanticize something for the stage. If you'll allow me to completely imagine the circumstances surrounding the writing of this play, I would hypothesize that he felt commercial pressure to write another tragic love story and delved into the familiar topic of the Trojan War only to find it was far too distasteful to romanticize.

He was perfectly capable of penning works of nationalism and propaganda like Henry V, to laud the glory of English military prowess, but he found the prospect of glorifying the unnecessary warmongering of 7 years stalemate over a kidnapping to be entirely distasteful.

In the play Six Degrees of Separation there's an awesome speech about painters losing their work:

"I thought, dreamt, remembered how easy it is for a painter to lose a painting. He paints and paints, works on a canvas for months, and then one day he loses it - loses the structure, loses the sense of it. You lose the painting."

The same goes for writers and the ease by which they can lose a script or a story. Sometimes you get lost in a topic. Sometimes the world you’re entering is too messy for wise fiction and in order to tell the story in an interesting way, you need to simplify it so much that the complexity the subject demands is impossible to achieve. Shakespeare's theater was called The Globe, but it was merely a stage, and not all things in life can be effectively addressed in microcosm.

Imagine if you saw Romeo and Juliet today, and if the play was riddled with labored discussions of the futility of the feud. If Tybalt was a whiner, too proud to act, and the play ended with the death of Mercutio. That’s about the level of closure we get with Troilus and Cressida.

Ulysses has the most ironic speech of the play, when he basically lays out Andy Warhol’s thesis that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. Achilles wonders why all of the Greeks are cheering for Ajax to fight Hector instead of Achilles and Ulysses tells him:

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,

Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,

A great-siz’d monster of ingratitudes.

Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devour’d

As fast as they are made, forgot as soon

As done…

For Time is like a fashionable host

That slightly shakes his parting guest by th’ hand,

And with his arms outstretch’d as he would fly,

Grasps the comer…

Then marvel not, thou great and complete man,

That all the Greeks begin to worship Ajax;

Since things in motion sooner catch the eye

Than what stirs not. (3:3)

The whole speech is a set up. Ulysses and the other Generals have pretended not to care about Achilles in order to motivate him to fight (at the start of the play he had been lounging around in his tent for months). Of course, the irony of the speech is that time does remember some people. It remembered Ulysses, Hector and Achilles. It remembers Shakespeare.

Given the tone and the difficulty of this play, I might also conject that this is Shakespeare tiring of history. Tiring of past glories and advocating the practice of time to move ahead. We romanticize the past, and effort to regain the glories it teaches us are due to the executors of bold and clever warfare.

But that’s just a projection on my part. I have wisely left my video game glories behind. They were quiet victories anyway, occasionally more enthusiastic if my brother or sister were there to witness the defeat of Dr. Wiley, tossing Bowser into a pit of lava, or blasting Mother Brain into oblivion. They were clean glories too. No actual bloodshed, no philosophical discussions of the merits of participating. No PTSD or perilous odysseys home in the epilogue.

I wonder if the Trojans and the Greeks would have traded all the future scribblings about their exploits for a quiet life. To sip coffee and read books on summery terraces like I'm doing now. Would they have preferred imaginary heroism to the real, messy deal?

I’m with the bard on this one. Better to write about battles than be there for them. Unless the battle is against 8-bit-processed, pixilated villains wielding axes and hammers and poisonous boomerangs. But even those battles are best left to the nimble thumbs of the young.

Now that I watch this ending, maybe you did have to hit him in the foot to kill him. Still, it's not specifically his heel, so whatever.

As the Animals Like It

2010-07-19T09:37:00.000-07:00

We used to have two cats: Cat and Pepper. They were strays. Pepper was a tabby with speckled coloring. We found her when she ran up to our mom as we came out of church one Sunday morning. Family legend has it that she leapt into my mom’s arms. Cat was a stray that used to live under our porch. My brother Ian built him a house out of chicken wire and hay. I don’t know where he got a hold of chicken wire or hay, but we used to put a bowl of milk in the little house, so Cat slept in it. Cat was a big gray fluffy thing with a white chin and chest. His full name was Claude Cat, but when i was a kid I thought it was Clawed Cat.

We must have had them for about 9 years and they died one winter within a few weeks of each other. Pepper first, and then after a month or so of declining health, Cat died too. In our family we know that Cat died of a broken heart.

In As You Like It Rosalind disguises herself as a man and goes into the forest of Arden to escape from her uncle with her faithful cousin. Either her man’s dress or being in the woods gives her the liberty to demonstrate her sharp wisdom.

While in disguise she runs into Orlando, a wrestling ex-pat from the same city as her and the object of her affections. Orlando is in love with Rosalind and has been writing bad poetry about her and hanging it on trees all over Arden Forest. Rosalind can't reveal her true identity to Orlando for fear of jeopardizing her and her cousin's safety, so she tells Orlando that she will tutor him in how to overcome his love by pretending to be Rosalind and behaving irrationally until he falls out of love.

During one of their lessons he says he will die if he is rejected. Here is Rosalind’s response:

The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person, videlicet, in a love-cause... Leander, he would have lived many a fair year though Hero had turned nun, if it had not been for a hot mid summer night; for good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont, and being taken with the cramp, was drowned, and the foolish chroniclers of that age found it was Hero of Sestos. But these are all lies: men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love. (4:1)

I’ve been watching that BBC series Life, which means for the past few weeks, I’ve been watching animals have sex in the craziest ways. There are these Darwin Beetles with gigantic jaws. The female of the species waits at the top of a tall tree and the male has to climb up the tree and battle all the other males, knocking them off the tree on his way. When he has vanquished all his foes he gets to the top, mates with the female and then throws her over the side and off the tree too.

It’s like this in most of the animal kingdom. Battles over mates culminate in pain and agitation… but even in the cruelest natural locations, denied love usually doesn't end in death.

All the wisdom of pop music instructs me that love hurts. And all the romantic endeavors I’ve braved over the years have left contusions, some gravely injurious, gashing wounds with sloppily-healed scars atop. But some injuries are barely detectable, of surgical precision, and the great affliction is an absence. A stolen organ – whose previous operation was suspect anyhow.

Rosalind teaches Orlando the truth. No person ever did die from love. But even her organs are susceptible to affliction. When she first learns that Orlando is also roaming the woods, she curses her male disguise and asks her cousin about him. Her cousin tells her “He was furnished like a hunter.” Rosalind’s response:

O ominous! He comes to kill my heart! (3:2)

There are river dolphins in the Amazon that get in fights with one another and become covered all over their bodies with bright pink scar tissue. The more glorious pink they are, the more astonishing they are to the female of the species.

Rosalind is treated to a lesson in the nature of love herself later on by Silvius, the shepherd.

Phebe: Good shepherd, tell this youth what ‘tis to love.

Silvius: It is to be all made of sighs and tears…

…It is to be all made of faith and service…

It is to be all made of fantasy,

All made of passion and all made of wishes,

All adoration, duty and respect,

All humbleness, all patience and impatience,

All purity, all trial, all observance (5:2)

The way the play finishes up all of these characters land on their feet (they always do in Shakespearean romantic comedies). Sylvius loves Phebe and although he suffers her denials of love for most of the play, she is tricked into marrying him. Orlando and Rosalind have to suffer too, but eventually Rosalind’s male disguise is taken away and they marry in bliss.

There is some virtue in suffering for love – both for pink dolphins and for the comic heroes. They are toughened and beautified by the trials of it. The right to mate is a hard-won battle, courtship is treacherous. And only the happiest of cats find that their lives have no meaning when they're sundered from their partners. At least that's what we believe in my family.

Julius Caesar and the Cruelty of Children

2010-07-09T09:40:00.000-07:00

When I was maybe eleven there was another kid around my age named Nick who lived on the corner. One day he came over to play with me and my friends. I didn't like him. He was new to our street, his older sister drove a Honda CRX and his mom was a single mom. I had gotten it in my head that he was a bad kid. So when he came over to play with us I threw pinecones at him. I didn't say anything, just threw pinecones. One after another after another. He started to yell, he didn't throw any back, he just yelled for me to stop it. He got angry, he was almost crying and then he went away. He didn't come over to play with us anymore, which is what I wanted.

I wish I could go back and punch myself in the face for being such a little asshole. I was an older kid on the block too, and I'm sure most of the parents thought I was a good kid, a role model. But I was cruel. I was insensitive. I was just as stupid as every other kid in the world.

Brutus is a character of high moral standing in Rome. But when he’s recruited into the conspiracy to assassinate Caesar, he lends righteousness to the cause. As Caska points out:

O he sits high in all the people’s hearts:

And that which would appear offence in us

His countenance, like richest alchemy,

Will change to virtue and to worthiness. (1:3)

When Brutus stabs Caesar, the famous line “Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar” (3:1) is a recognition on Caesar’s part that if even noble Brutus is against him, then he must have deserved it.

Marc Antony admits that if Brutus can give him good reasons for Caesar’s assassination, then he will accept it.

If Brutus will vouchsafe that Antony

May safely come to him and be resolved

How Caesar deserved to lie in death,

Matk Antony shall not love Caesar dead

So well as Brutus living. (3:1)

Brutus even convinces the Roman mob that it was necessary, that Caesar was guilty of ambition, which is dangerous to the republic.

There is tears, for his love; joy for his fortune;

honour, for his valour; and death, for his ambition.

…

I have done no more to Caesar than you shall do to Brutus. (3:2)

They’re appeased until Mark Antony comes out and with his “Friends, Romans, countrymen,” (3:2) speech he turns the mob against Brutus and the conspirators. Brutus should have known that it would happen. Before the assassination was carried out, he hesitated:

Since Cassius first did whet me against Caesar

I have not slept.

Between the acting of a dreadful thing

And the first motion, all the interim is

Like a phantasm or a hideous dream:

The genius and the mortal instruments

Are then in council, and the state of man,

Like to a little kingdom, suffers then

The nature of an insurrection. (2:1)

“Genius” here means the spirit, or the mind. “The mortal instruments” are the body or guts. I think his guts told him not to do this thing and the chaos that follows Caesar’s death shows that Brutus should have listened to his mortal instruments. Cinna the poet is torn to pieces by a mob, civil war erupts.

In the end, Brutus is forced to pay for his misjudgment by thrusting himself upon his own sword and dying. He gives his life in apology, realizing to late the folly of assassination.

Caesar, now be still

I killed not thee with half so good a will. (5:5)

It was a mistake, and his death, along with the deaths of the other conspirators was an action that might set Rome right again.

I wonder if the real Brutus felt this way. Was he contrite? Maybe in real life he didn't get a chance to kill himself in redemption, maybe he never had the opportunity to apologize or make up for his mistake. Maybe it wasn't until 1599 when Shakespeare wrote the play that Brutus ever had the chance to say he was sorry. It's pretty late, but at least it got said.

Back then I even thought I was a good kid. I thought the things I did were right. I thought Nick was bad and that I was doing the right thing by keeping him away from my other friends. I needed someone to teach me a lesson.

What I'll never understand is how come Nick didn't tell his mom that I threw those pinecones at him. He should have told her and she should have talked to my parents. And I should have been forced to go apologize to him. We might have become friends afterward.

Over the Fourth of July I was in Kenosha, and I rode my dad's bike past Nick’s old house four times. I went past it on purpose every time hoping maybe he was visiting his mom for the holiday or that she would be outside working in their yard and I could ask about him. I go past that house every time I’m in Kenosha. I don't ever see anyone there. She might not live on the block anymore. We moved away in 1993. Certainly his sister’s CRX is gone. He's 30 years old now.

I'd like to tell him I'm sorry. Not that an apology would make anything better. It is a few decades late. But he deserves an apology. Yeah. He at least deserves that.

Say it ain't so: Shakespeare is racist

2010-06-25T17:13:00.000-07:00

I didn’t read The Merchant of Venice very carefully at all when I was in high school. Otherwise I probably would have been horrified by how racist it is.

Here’s Shylock:

Signior Antonio, many a time and oft

In the Rialto you have rated me

About my moneys and my usances:

Still have I borne it with a patient shrug,

(For suff-rance is the badge of all our tribe)

You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog,

And spet upon my Jewish gaberdine,

And all for use of that which is mine own. (1:3)

Shylock is just a businessman trying to make a ducat in the uncircumcised man’s world. The Christians think it’s wrong to loan people money at interest, but Jews aren’t allowed to own property, so what else can they do? And now Antonio and Bassanio come to him to borrow cash, and this is what Antonio responds to Shylock’s accusations:

I am as like to call thee so again,

To spet on thee again, to spurn thee too. (1:3)

Shakespeare lived in an England where Jewish people were expelled from the country unless they converted to Christianity. A converted Jew was drawn and quartered after being convicted in a plot to poison the queen. Shylock is a comic villain, like Don John and Malvolio. He was probably played in a red wig with a false nose and was meant to be laughed at and ridiculed.

Now, it’s possible that we should read The Merchant of Venice the way we read Huckleberry Finn, with an understanding that the author lived in a racist time and used words that we find offensive today. But there’s a difference. Huck Finn is a character better than the world that he lives in, we can see that Mark Twain’s intention was to criticize his America by telling the story of someone who sees the hypocrisies around him and decides for himself what is right.

Here we are confronted with a play where the wise heroine dispenses justice and waxes eloquent on the nature of mercy, and then refuses to demonstrate any in her judgment. Not to mention that she’s racist herself. When Portia talks about her suitors, she dismisses each one with a racial stereotype.

The Frenchman:

If a throstle sing, he falls straight a-cap’ring, he will fence with his own shadow. (1:2)

The Scotsman:

He hath a neighborly charity in him, for he borrowed a box of the ear of the Englishman, and swore he would pay him again when he was able. (1:2)

How does she like the German?

Very vividly in the morning when he is sober, and most vividly in the afternoon when he is drunk. (1:2)

Okay, so the Arden and Riverside footnotes say these are all racial stereotypes of the era, but other than the drunk German one, they’re over my head.

Portia’s suitors have to choose between the three caskets if they want to marry her. One casket is gold, one silver, and one lead. If a suitor chooses the one with her picture inside then she has to marry them. So, the Prince of Morocco arrives. He is described as a “tawny Moor all in white.” Here’s what he says:

Mislike me not for my complexion,

The shadowed livery of the burnish’d sun,

To whom I am a neighbor, and near bred. (2:1)

Mislike him not? Um, are you a white Venetian frat boy who wants to marry Portia for her cash money? No? Then I think you’re out of luck. Of course, the Moor chooses the gold casket, which is wrong, and this is Portia’s response:

A gentle riddance, -- draw the curtains, go, --

Let all of his complexion choose me so. (2:7)

Blacks, Jews, Scottish dudes, Frenchies, Sheakespeare’s characters are racist against everyone. But here’s the thing: I think that’s okay.

People are racist. It sucks. I think like alcoholism or drug addiction, the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem.

I live in a city where there are tons of Armenian people. I was at the grocery store waiting patiently in line to pay, when an Armenian employee opened up a second register. I was the next person in line, but she didn’t wave to me. She waved to the Armenian guy behind me to come over to her register. My first thought was “That’s cool. They’re both Armenian. Gotta look out for your own.” Then I was like, “hold on, that’s exactly why it’s not cool!”

That’s pretty tame racism, but I’m biracial and usually people look at me and aren’t sure what I am. That’s the benefit of a non-descript ethnicity, people don’t hate on me out of the fear of hating in the incorrect way.

I know Shylock goes on this anti-racism diatribe:

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? (3:1)

This is a great speech for equality, but in the context of the scene Shylock is using it as a justification for revenge. It continues:

And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. (3:1)

We all want to believe Shakespeare was the best guy ever. But this play is not a tragedy about Shylock’s loss of his daughter and religion that Pacino’s Shylock transforms it into. It’s a comedy and the audience was meant to cheer when Shylock is forced to convert to Christianity. I find it fascinating and heartbreaking that the only way to stomach this play in performance today is to contradict the original intention.

How troubling are our flawed heroes.

Every genius in the world wants a grain of salt, and every victory beckons a blind eye. If you dig too deep, you’ll find drugs and hate and infidelitous text messages. How many Shoeless Joe Jacksons and Bill Clintons pepper the annals of human greatness?

Our heroes are human. Shakespeare painted complex portraits of humanity. In order to do that he had to be a complex portrait of a human. He was flawed. I mean, didn’t he have Syphilis?

But then again maybe I’m wrong (maybe = probably).

Maybe Shakespeare’s genius was so advanced that he wrote a subversive comedy that could be played only one way in his time, all the while knowing that its subtext would survive to an era of improved tolerance. A day when at least we make a show of respecting everyone. Where performance is inverted so that conspiracies of spiteful xenophobia are locked in our lead caskets and the mask of compassion struts across the public stage to clamorous praise. Virtuous ornament is the false nose and curly red wig of the day.

Which era is more dangerous?

I’ll take the silent hate myself. If the problem is out there for everyone to see, it’s so much harder to ignore.

Richard II and Andrés Escobar

2010-06-21T14:38:00.000-07:00

In 1994, the US defeated Colombia 2-1, the first World Cup win for the US in 44 years. It helped the US to a glorious second round appearance in the first World Cup held on American soil.

It was a marvelous victory. I was 16 when that game was played, and my soccer mania was at its apex. That day I had played soccer all afternoon at a camp run by a group of British players who were on the UW Green Bay Soccer team. And my dad and I were running clinics at elementary schools teaching basic soccer skills to kids aged 5-8 every morning, because we believed that American soccer could be better and we were doing everything we could to contribute. The next year Major League Soccer was launched in the US and expectations and execution by the men’s national soccer team has been on the rise ever since.

One of the goals in that match was an own goal accidentally knocked in by Andrés Escobar who was brutally murdered in Medellin after Colombia were eliminated in the first round, thanks to their loss to the US. Pele had previously predicted Colombia would win the entire tournament.

Lords, I protest my soul is full of woe

That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow. (5:6)

In Richard II the King of England is deposed and murdered and there are 8 plays which chronicle the fallout of this deed.

Bolingbroke (the future Henry IV) suspects that King Richard II was involved in the murder of his uncle, and he wants to get to the bottom of it. The play opens on his conflict with another nobleman, whom he accuses of being involved in the plot as well. The King – perhaps out of guilt – prevents these two nobles from satisfying their honor and dueling it out. Instead he banishes them.

Bolingbroke’s father dies and predicts a lot of bad things in Richard’s future, and so Richard takes all of his property (which should pass to his banished son) and uses it to fund a war in Ireland. Richard is a terrible king, he is extravagant and wasteful and no one really likes him, but he’s the king, so what are you gonna do? Well, if you’re Bolingbroke, you raise an army and come back to England, and demand that he return your property and title and lift your banishment. And then you force him to abdicate the crown and you quietly have him murdered so that you can be king.

Richard is put in a tough spot when he hears that Bolingbroke has returned with a big army, but his spinelessness is only matched by his eloquence when he turns on the pessimism:

No matter where – of comfort no man speak.

Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs,

Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes

Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.

Let’s choose executors and talk of wills. (3:2)

But even though Richard sucks and no one is going to be sad that he’s no longer king, everyone seems to know that a king is anointed by God and deposing one treacherously is going to invite some divine reckoning. The Bishop of Carlisle prophesies:

The blood of English shall manure the ground,

And future ages groan for this foul act,

Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels,

And, in this seat of peace, tumultuous wars

Shall kin with kin, and kind with kind, confound. (4:1)

This proves true as there is civil unrest for the next many generations. Fathers fight against sons, sons against fathers and brother betrays brother one after another. King Richard himself warns Bolingbroke that he’s inviting bad times on England:

And though you think that all, as you have done,

Have torn their souls by turning them from us,

And we are barren and bereft of friends,

Yet know my master, God omnipotent,

Is mustering in his clouds on our behalf

Armies of pestilence, and they shall strike

Your children yet unborn and unbegot,

That lift your vassal hands against my head,

And threat the glory of my precious crown. (3:3)

But Bolingbroke goes ahead, has the king and his advisers killed and starts the snowball rolling. At the very end of the play he expresses some regret:

Lords, I protest my soul is full of woe

That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow. (5:6)

Is he really full of woe? Probably. Every one wants to win honestly and to achieve a greatness that they deserve, but most of us will take victory however we can get it, which is dangerous.

The universe finds a way to balance itself. And retributive discord is the weight of celestial choice.

The day Andrés Escobar was killed my family and I were going to Chicago to see the second round match between Germany and Belgium at Soldier’s Field when the news came over the radio.

There was a moment of silence before the game began, and later in the day my dad asked me: “If you could change it, so that the US loses that game, and Escobar doesn’t get shot, would you?” It seemed like a terribly unfair question, but I thought about it, and before I could answer, he said, “You shouldn’t have to think about it.”

I used to have a T-shirt with a quote from Bill Shankly, a famous British Football manager that said: “Soccer isn’t a matter of life or death, it’s much more important than that.” Soccer players often say that a big game is a kind of war, and if they’re American they’re dutifully reprimanded for the insulting comparison. In other countries they’re more understanding of the extreme simile.

We didn’t kill Andrés Escobar. I don’t think American soccer is under a curse or part of some cosmic balancing act as a result of what happened to him the way the usurping House of Lancaster is in the Shakespearean histories. So is it wrong to think that when the US does lose games that other innocent lives are saved? In the next World Cup we lost to Iran 2-1 in a brutal game in France. What might have happened if the result had gone the other way? Impossible to know.

A goal was stolen from us by bad officiating when we played Slovenia, but Slovenia is a tiny country. The repercussions of soccer victories there could be life-changing, nation-saving. If Colombia had won the World Cup in 1994, what could it have meant to the citizens of that troubled nation?

Didier Drogba of the Ivory Coast, became the first African player to ever score a goal against Brazil in the World Cup yesterday. He is playing with a broken arm. It is said that he once prevented civil war in Ivory Coast by asking that an important match be played in the north, even though he is from the south of Ivory Coast. It is likely that he will one day run for president of his country much like George Weah of Liberia, 1995 World Footballer of the Year.

Soccer is an important force in the world. At 16 I may have been reluctant to surrender the memory of Tab Ramos and Tom Dooley racing around the Rose Bowl with American flags draped over their shoulders for anything, even the life of someone I never met. But my dad helped me put that into perspective.

There are more important things than being kings of world soccer. If someone had taught Bolingbroke a parallel lesson, maybe England would have avoided a great bloody brouhaha for 86 years.

I guess no matter how hard we try, men have a tendency to take some things way too seriously.

Andrés Escobar

I just read King John, now I want to go see Robin Hood

2010-06-15T18:16:00.000-07:00

Did you see Robin Hood?

I didn’t. I heard it was boring. But I’m thinking about going to see it because it takes place at around the same period in history as Shakespeare’s King John.

Shakespeare’s King John is the self same evil Prince John of Robin Hood lore, younger brother of Richard the Lionheart. You remember him, he was played by a skinny lion in the Disney cartoon, by Claude Rains in the Errol Flynn version, and of course by Richard Lewis in Robin Hood: Men in Tights.

In some of these versions of the classic tale, Robin Hood is depicted as a commoner who stands up for his fellow commoners. Sometimes he is depicted as a nobleman, Robin of Loxley. Sometimes he is even depicted as an American who built a baseball field and made friends with the Sioux before growing gills.

I just checked the world’s most reliable source of information (Wikipedia) and learned that in the new Russell Crowe movie he is a commoner who assumes the identity of a nobleman. This tricky elevation to nobility twist resonates with the Shakespearean character of Philip the Bastard of Falconbridge, who becomes Sir Richard Plantagenet when King John recognizes him for who he really is... the bastard son of Richard the Lionheart.

King John begins with some difficulties at court. It’s the early 13^th century AD and France and England are at it again. You see, John became King after his brother –Richard the Lionheart – died, but he wasn’t technically next in the line of succession. The next was their middle brother Geoffrey (who was never king, because he died in the middle of Richard’s reign). However, Geoffrey had a son named Arthur. And France believes that Arthur should be King, and they’re ready to go to war over it, because the French are never happy unless they’re getting their asses kicked in something (this is called Ennui).

King John sends a messenger to France to tell them that he’s not going to be pushed around (“Be thou as lightning in the eyes of France” 1:1). And Eleanor, his mother, gives him some advice:

This might have been prevented and made whole

With very easy arguments of love,

Which now the manage of two kingdoms must

With fearful bloody issue arbitrate. (1:1)

A few seconds later the play gets really interesting when two brothers show up. One says that the other is a bastard and has no claim to their father’s lands. King John and his mother take one look at the bastard and observe:

Mine eye hath well examined his parts,

And finds them perfect Richard. (1:1)

And sure enough, Philip the Bastard is the bastard son of King Richard the Lionheart. Taking his mother’s advice in favor of arguments of love, the King is quick to knight him and take him into close counsel. After all, his brother was a stalwart hero of England, and his offspring will hopefully demonstrate the qualities that England sorely wants in a time of national crisis.

Although the Bastard is knighted Sir Richard Plantagenet, it’s interesting that his name never changes in the script. In most of the histories the characters’ names change when their titles change. Richard III begins his play as the Duke of Gloucester, and the dialogue is labeled as Gloucester until he finally becomes king and the script changes to K. Richard. But the Bastard remains dutifully: Bastard.

He goes on to inspire the people of England, to lead them in battle and to quip in colloquial asides to the audience. He is utterly likable and heroic, and he never complicates the issue of succession despite his tenuous claim to the crown as the son of the great King Richard. He is humble enough to revel in the position of honor that was unexpectedly bestowed upon him by his uncle, King John, to whom he shows unwavering loyalty. The Bastard even given provides the rousing, nationalistic speech at the very end of the play:

This England never did, nor never shall,

Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,

But when it first did help to wound itself.

Now these her princes are come home again,

Come the three corners of the world in arms,

And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue,

If England to itself do rest but true. (5:7)

King John dies, having been poisoned by a monk, and his son, Henry III takes over as King. This speech brings closure to the play, because it assures us that the Bastard is interested only in the preservation of England and not in generating civil strife by using his hard-won soldier’s popularity as fuel for a campaign for the crown.

What seems odd to me is that this Shakespearean creation of the Bastard son of Richard the Lionheart never stood as a model for Robin Hood in any of the different versions of Robin Hood I’ve seen.

Robin Hood was a folk hero from long before Shakespeare’s time and the bard must have been familiar with him and the way in which Bad King John was always cast as the villain in these tales.

I wonder if there is a reason Shakespeare would tiptoe up to a folkloric hero like this and not introduce him in this story? Given his harshly biased portrayal of Joan of Arc in Henry VI Part 1, one might suspect that there was a great disdain of characters who were rebellious against British Monarchy. We know Elizabeth attended many of Shakespeare’s plays, if not all of them, and it wouldn’t be ridiculous to think that he was compelled to promote the greatness of the monarchy and to minimize romantic notions of rebellion.

Of course there is also the theory that Elizabeth herself is one of the actual writer’s of Shakespeare’s plays, but I haven’t done sufficient research into the authorship debate to scoff at this theory publicly.

Robin Hood isn’t the only interesting omission in King John. John is perhaps most famous historically for being pressured into recognizing the Magna Carta, which limited Royal power by stating that even a king was bound by law. This monumental event should have taken place somewhere in the middle of Act 5. Was Shakespeare intentionally avoiding bringing attention to this important accomplishment?

The evolution of constitutional law and the redistribution of wealth are modern ideas that we might like to ascribe to Shakespeare, who is often credited with unparalleled wisdom and wit. But the fact of the matter is that he was a popular playwright and poet in a certain era. If he were around today he might be writing sex comedies for Jonah Hill. They’d probably be really good sex comedies, but I doubt they would mention the Magna Carta either, which was old news even back in the 1590s.

In any case, now I feel like going to see Robin Hood, but I’ve waited this long… Maybe I’ll just get Prince of Thieves from Netflix. It’ll be nice to see an American kicking some English ass instead of drawing even on the luckiest goal in history.

I guess we'll take whatever we can get.

A Midsummer's World Cup Dream

2010-06-08T14:53:00.000-07:00

In 2002 the World Cup was played in South Korea and Japan. Which meant that the earliest games of the day were broadcast live starting at 2:30am. At the time I was working three jobs from 6am until 8pm and playing pick up soccer nearly every night.

Ducks can sleep with only one half of their brain at a time. They have one eye open and one half of their brain awake to watch for predators. I’m pretty sure my brain developed this ability during the 2002 World Cup. I saw every one of those games.

With half my brain asleep, watching soccer on Univision became a more immersive experience. I could hear the roar of the crowd in the hum of my ceiling fan, and feel the eruption of heat from the dancing fans after each goal in all the warm Wisconsin breezes that came in my open bedroom window like wind off fairy wings.

Wondrous things would happen. Turkey went up one-zero over Brazil just before half time. The US nearly won its group by defeating the host country, South Korea, only to be undone by a goal in the 78^th minute. The Korean team celebrated by re-enacting the famous disqualification of a South Korean ice skater at the hands of Apolo Ohno in Short Track at the Olympics earlier that year. Vengeance.

I loved soccer so much.

Boys love sports. And we dream of being pro ball players. It’s a hard day when you have to admit that you're never going to make it to the big leagues. And yet I wonder… maybe I shouldn't give up on that dream just yet. Stranger things have happened.

Take Nick Bottom for example.

Bottom is nothing more than a humble weaver, when he’s recruited to act in a performance for the noble Duke Theseus’s wedding. Not just act – mind you – he’s taking the lead role of “Pyramus, a lover that kills himself most gallant for love.”

That will ask some tears in the true performing of it.

If I do it, let the audience look to their eyes: (1:2)

Nick’s enthusiasm for this opportunity is apparent when the bellows-mender is reluctant to take on the female lead, Nick Bottom asks to play that role as well.

Let me play Thisbe too.

I’ll speak in a monstrous little voice: “Thisne,

Thisne! – Ah, Pyramus, my lover dear! Thy Thisbe

dear and lady dear!” (1:2)

Of course he can’t play both of the romantic leads, that would be ridiculous, but when he hears there’s to be a lion in the show –

Let me play the lion too. I will roar, that I will do

any man’s heart good to hear me. I will roar, that I

will make the Duke say: “Let him roar again; let

him roar again!” (1:2)

Bottom wants nothing more than to do a good job in this, his debut performance, but Puck comes across the ramshackle troupe in rehearsal and transforms Bottom’s head into an the head of an ass. And fate carries him to the sleeping place of the Fairy Queen, Titania, whose husband has spread a love potion on her eyes so that she might fall in love with the first creature she lays eyes on. She wakes and sees ass-headed Nick Bottom and she declares her love to him. Nick takes it all in stride when she swears she loves him:

Methinks, mistress, you should have little reason for

that. And yet, to say the truth, reason and love

keep little company together nowadays. The more

the pity that some honest neighbours will not make

them friends. (3:1)

Nick is not amazed or thrown off. He is simple and even if he suspects Titania might be messing with him, he doesn’t seem to care. Stranger things have happened… probably.

When Bottom awakes, his old head intact, and the love of Titania evacuated, he attributes the night’s miracles to dreamwork. But his confidence is elevated because of the brush with immortality and the love of an important lady, and his theatrical ambitions skyrocket:

The eye of

Man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen,

Man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive,

Nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I

will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this

dream: it shall be called “Bottom’s Dream,” because

it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end

of a play before the Duke. (4:1)

When we’re young we have to establish the limits of reality. I remember believing that dinosaurs had existed just before I was born. And then we establish the limits of our individual abilities (I was never going to sing opera or slam dunk). The world seems to get smaller and smaller as we age and focus our ambition. Hats off to the Nick Bottoms of planet Earth who are unafraid to tackle new opportunities with gusto.

Seeing Edson Buddle play in this World Cup is going to be a particularly satisfying experience. He is a 28 year-old forward with only three international appearances under his belt. But he scored a plethora of goals for the LA Galaxy early this season and last weekend he scored 2 in the US’s final warm-up before playing England. 2 goals in 3 appearances. 28.

Roger Milla came out of retirement at age 38 to play in the 1990 World Cup for Cameroon, who qualified for the first time ever that year. He scored 4 goals and led his team to the quarterfinals. Pele listed him as one of the 100 best footballers of all time.

I’m 32 now. I’ve got 4 years until Brazil 2014. I'll be a full two years younger than Roger Milla was when he made his World Cup debut.

This year, the World Cup is coming to us from South Africa. The games are going to start at 4:30 am pacific time. It looks like my old skills of watching the games with half of my brain are going to be called into action again.

But maybe this year the sleeping half of my brain can dream a little harder. Or with a transformative visit from a meddling Puck, I can take on a different head. And instead of just feeling like part of the crowd... in my room a soccer pitch will grow... until the walls turn into the stadium all around. And I’ll be on the field, serving up crosses that sail through night and day and in and out of weeks; only to be headed home by Buddle and Messi and Torres.

My soccer will be a roar, and it will do any man’s heart good to see us score. I will roar and make the world say: “Let him roar again; let him roar again!”

Love at First Star Wars Reference

2010-05-29T16:51:00.000-07:00

I fell in love with a clown at the Mall of America.

In the middle of the Mall there’s an amusement park. Rollercoasters, water rides, ferris wheels and costumed characters. Nowadays, it has a Nickelodeon theme – last time I was there I rode the Sponge Bob rollercoaster – but back in the day it was called Camp Snoopy and the characters that roamed the park were the Peanuts gang.

During the month of October, they liked to augment the cast as part of the Halloween Celebration: Camp Spooky. There were some ghoulish characters (a ghost, a scarecrow and a swamp creature), but they also added things like a princess, a knight and a jester.

This was during the brief stint in my life where I was flirting with the misguided notion that I might have an acting bone somewhere in my body, and I figured that any acting experience was going to be good experience. I tried out for the knight, and in the improvised part of the audition, I played it cowardly (not unlike Sir Andrew Aquecheek in Twelfth Night) I shivered at the mere mention of anything creepy or unpleasant and they ate it up. I got the job.

When I showed up to be fitted for my costume I ran into a girl outside of the Peanut Gallery Theater. She was tall with short brown hair and little eyes like Chinese Checkers.

There was nothing extraordinary about her physically. You encounter a lot of this in the Midwest: girls who seem plain at first glance, but have an air of absolute sensibility about them. They are healthy, happy, level-headed, and they have modest culinary ambitions. They make excellent charades partners, enjoy watching baseball, and they boast odd, unexpected skills (in this instance: clowning). These girls are the perfect elixir to the aimless romantic boy.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m the jester. Who are you?”

“I’m the cowardly knight,” I told her. And then simply because I’d been marveling at the fact that there were all sorts of real trees planted in the park I observed: “Isn’t it weird that they have real trees in Camp Snoopy? I thought they were fake up until now.”

Her checker eyes lit up. “You know what I heard about these trees? I heard that when Star Wars Episode One premiered, that a bunch of people hid up in them overnight so that they could be the first ones in line to buy tickets. Imagine all those nerds camping out in trees! Isn’t that awesome?”

My jaw dropped. My eyes glazed over with sugar and all the splendid lights around her head stretched into candy laser beams.

“Yeah...”

I went on to tell her that I had a long history with Star Wars here at the Mall of America. When they re-released the original trilogy in 1997, some friends of mine from college came down here and stood in line all day to get tickets and our friend Patrick even convinced the theater employees to let him help clean the theater before our show so that he could sneak in and save amazing seats for us (sixth row center). Patrick works in politics now.

She said she had worked as a professional clown, and had gone to college at St. Thomas. The St. Thomas Tommies are the hated rivals of my college, Macalester (the Fighting Scots), but I didn’t care. There was something very preppy and American about the Tommies, and I’d come to know several attractive St. Thomas students while I was doing my student teaching at the Museum Magnet School and Expo Elementary. I found them to be perfectly tolerable. Even if I hadn’t, all that history of conflict was just that: history. I adored my clown.

You see, sometimes it doesn’t take too much to fall in love.

ROMEO

If I profane with my unworthiest hand

This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:

My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand

To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

JULIET

Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,

Which mannerly devotion shows in this;

For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,

And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.

ROMEO

Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

JULIET

Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

ROMEO

O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do!

They pray: grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

JULIET

Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.

ROMEO

Then move not, while my prayers’ effect I take. (1:5)

And then they kiss.

I think it’s essential in movies and plays, that the moment when two people fall in love be big and real and important. For Romeo and Juliet they have this moment, when they first see each other, they dance together and they share a sonnet.

This may seem like a ridiculous thing to say, but the poetry is always Shakespeare’s strength. Nearly all of the stories he used for his plays come from other source material. R and J is based on a famous legend of sundered lovers who employ a sleeping draught to feign death and escape together that appears in many iterations going all the way back to the third century. Shakespeare takes these stories, he turns them around, he introduces new characters, he streamlines the action, fixes the endings and dresses the dialogue in perfect language.

Writing is re-writing as we say.

There’s another tragic love story that comes to mind as I re-read Romeo and Juliet. Of course, I’m talking about Han Solo and Princess Leia in The Empire Strikes Back. I think the reason that Empire is widely regarded as the best of the Star Wars movies is due entirely to the escalating sexual tension between the scoundrel and the princess as they dart in and out of asteroids barely avoiding the clutches of Darth Vader. And the payoff is just too delicious and tragic to be ruined by prequels. Captured by Boba Fett, and in the Empire’s clutches, Han is being lowered into the carbon-freezing chamber when Leia realizes she might never have a chance to say it to him again, and she steps forward:

LEIA

I love you.

HAN

I know.

Bad. Ass.

Oh, how we boys dreamed of noble demise. The heroism and the sacrifice afforded those of us who would one day battle the forces of evil in intergalactic warfare.

But there would be no room in the annals of chivalric wooing for a cowardly knight that October. Oh my clown, my jester. I wandered more than once to her section of the park and watched her juggle, and perform tiny magic tricks to the wonder of nine year-old park-goers on their way to inhale funnel cakes and plunge a hundred feet on the log ride. We rode the merry-go-round with a group of unsupervised youngsters, who comforted me as the up and down motion made me queasy and nervous, but they dragged me away from there to find the princess because as children they understood the cruel, controlling nature of destiny better than anyone.

I didn’t have a car at this time in my life. And I had to take the 84 bus from Grand Avenue and Snelling in St. Paul all the way to Bloomington to get to work those days. One night after the park closed, she saw me looking at the bus schedule and said, “You don’t want to take the bus do you?” I told her I didn’t. “Well, you should get a ride home with us.”

“Us?”

“My boyfriend is coming to pick me up. We live in St. Paul too.”

Sigh.

It never would have worked anyway. I don’t know. What do you think? A jester and a guy like me?

Love's Old-Fashioned Labour's

2010-05-21T09:41:00.000-07:00

Take Highway 33 west from Baraboo. Go over Wildcat Mountain, across the Kickapoo River and about a mile outside of Ontario, Wisconsin you’re going to see a tire swing and a horse with a little star on his forehead. Turn right. That’s where my brother lives. At the Buddhist retreat center.

His neighbors are cows, Amish people and all the wild animals of western Wisconsin. Mostly coyotes, wild turkeys and deer, but in the past few years they’ve had some new neighbors: Cougars. Cougars haven’t lived in Wisconsin since 1910. In general they don’t share the same turf as wolves since the two large predators have the same diet. So it’s been important for residents and visitors of the wilderness to brush up on their wildcat safety.

If you come across one, stand your ground. Cougars see the world in a pretty simple way. If something runs away from you, it is food. If it doesn't, it’s not food. The thing you want, makes you chase it.

I had a friend who really liked going to rock shows. He was dating this girl, and she really liked going to rock shows. And they broke up. “It was too easy,” he said.

Easy only works for so long in love. There needs to be a pursuit. There has to be a labour, the more Herculean, the better.

Love’s Labour’s Lost is about the King of Navarre, who decides that he and his three buddies are going to retire from the pleasures of the world and dedicate themselves to academic study for three years in order to achieve immortality.

This, of course, means they’re going to fast from romantic conquests as well. This pursuit lasts for about five minutes until the Princess of France and her three ladies in waiting show up and the gents all fall in love with the ladies and concoct a ridiculous plan to woo them, by sending them gifts and then pretending to be Russian visitors. The ladies are not fooled. They trick each of the boys into declaring their love to the wrong girl. The boys are embarrassed, but the ladies find their folly amusing and just when it looks like things might turn out all right, news comes that the king of France, the Princess’s father, has passed away. The sobering news forces the Princess’s hand:

We have received your letters full of love;

And in our maiden council rated them

At courtship, pleasant jest, and courtesy,

As bombast and as lining to the time. (5:2)

Bombast! The Princess calls their love a merriment, insubstantial. She and her ladies will retire to France to mourn for a year, and they leave the boys with tasks to demonstrate their love is genuine. They must live in hermitage, and remain devoted to the women for a year, except for Berowne, who asks Rosaline for an assignment.

Mistress, look on me.

Behold the window of my heart, mine eye,

What humble suit attends thy answer there.

Impose some service on me for they love. (5:2)

Rosaline imposes this:

You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day

Visit the speechless sick, and still converse

With groaning wretches; and your task shall be,

With all the fierce endeavor of your wit,

To enforce the pained impotent to smile. (5:2)

Rosaline tells him to be like Patch Adams and bring joy and laughter to sick and dying people. If he can do it, she will know he’s worth loving. And if not, then she’s not interested.

I like this about Rosaline – not the Patch Adams bit specifically – but that she challenges him to be compassionate, to experience life, and to think about her as his motivation for being good. Maybe it’s old-fashioned, but I think a woman should expect her man to be better than he thought he could be.

Ever since I was in kindergarten and I kissed Cori Jenkins in the tee pee during nap time, I’ve been pursuing girls. Like one of those lions, who acquires a taste for human flesh, I saw girls and was utterly fascinated. I wanted them to want me. Of course I was too terrified to do anything about it for decades, but all their feminine attributes were mysterious magnets to my imagination. Soft skin and pig tails, crystalline eyes and ever-moist lips. Their voices and the secret society they keep with each other, impenetrable and so much more mature than the desert island of boys in which I meander.

I really loved that Kevin Costner Robin Hood Prince of Thieves movie that was out in 1991. (Wow. Seriously? 19 years ago that movie came out? Yikes.) I was in middle school, and occasionally given to watching MTV that summer, and I am unashamed to admit that the Oscar-winning Bryan Adam’s song “(Everything I Do) I Do it For You,” is still one of my favorite movie songs ever.

Love doesn’t need to have specific labours or assignments imposed, but the general idea -- that a man should do everything better and always improve for women -- is a solid one. The cougar analogy is not good, because the prey/hunted thing is demeaning, and because the word cougar has a modern definition which negates all of the old-fashioned ideas I argued for today. But what do you want? I learned about cougars this week.

I look around me and I see that girls are better than boys, and I want to be better to win their affection. This is why I never became a Buddhist. My older siblings are both Buddhists, and I used to think about practicing because the Buddhists were always happy and they throw great parties. Also, it's a terrific way to travel across Eastern Europe, going from Buddhist Center to Buddhist Center. But when I asked Ian and Katie about it, they said one of the things you need to do is let go of your ego.

"Hmm." I thought, "No thanks."

I was gonna need that ego to impress the ladies.

Ian and I at the Buddhist Retreat Center in western Wisconsin.

We just finished chopping down some trees for firewood.

(The trees were already dead).

My little sister Cassie soaks up the many enlightening splendors of America's Dairyland

A Comedy of Suspended Disbelief

2010-05-13T16:08:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite Hollywood stories is about Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. The screenwriter, David Seltzer, was on vacation, and got a call from set. It was the director. Mel Stuart. He was shooting the last scene of the movie, and they needed something for Willy Wonka to say to Charlie while they’re flying away in the great glass elevator. Seltzer -- who hadn’t thought about the script in months, who was not going to be credited because he’d been called in to doctor Roald Dahl’s script (and Roald Dahl was so angry that he never saw the movie) -- Seltzer came up with this: “Charlie, don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted… he lived happily ever after.”

Classic.

When confronted by a dream, it’s best to go with it.

A Comedy of Errors is a play of incredible coincidence. Citizens of Ephesus are not permitted to travel to Syracuse and vice versa. A merchant from Syracuse comes to Ephesus and is going to be put to death unless someone pays a ransom of 1000 francs. Also come to the town that day are Antipholus of Syracuse and his servant Dromio of Syracuse. Little do they know that they each have twin brothers (precisely the people that the merchant has come to find) who live in Ephesus and who are also named Dromio and Antipholus. Naturally, Antipholus of Ephesus’s wife gets very confused when she runs into his Syracusan counterpart. There’s a courtesan, a mix up regarding a gold chain, and a rotund cook who is in love with Dromio. All essential elements of comic acceleration.

When Antipholus of Syracuse meets Adriana (his twin brother’s wife) he makes this decision in an aside:

To me she speaks; she moves me for her theme.

What, was I married to her in my dream?

Or sleep I now and think I hear all this?

What error drives our eyes and ears amiss?

Until I know this sure uncertainty,

I’ll entertain the offered fallacy. (2:2)

He decides to suspend his disbelief. It’s the same thing asked of any theater-going audience: to “entertain the offered fallacy.” He doesn’t know it at the time, but it’s his decision to stick around, to lose himself and sink deeper into the confusion of the mad Ephesians that saves his father’s life, identifies his mother (the local Abbess), and reveals his sundered twin brother.

My brother (not twin) is a Buddhist. Buddhists don’t believe in coincidence. This has to do with the interconnectedness of life and how enlightenment is being able to have a universal perspective and junk. All events are related by cause and effect. Nothing happens without some previous happening prompting it and all future events are linked to the events of this moment.

It’s true that two sets of identical twins is very convenient for comic storytelling. Shakespeare’s employment of the mistaken identity device matures with his later comedies, Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and maybe it’s unfair for me to call it coincidental (an abhorred adjective in all modern story construction), since it’s part of the set-up. You suspend your disbelief at the opening of the play and accept the established relationships of the world and your prize for doing so is hilarity and entertainment.

There is always a prize for believing in things.

I fell in love one night. I kissed a beautiful girl and she kissed me. It was May in Minnesota and after leaving her -- before I could go into my crappy basement apartment that night -- I had to run away for a while. Falling in love is too big for a basement. It’s too big for brick walls or any man-made architecture. So I ran down the street. I started slow, and then went faster and faster.

Soon I was jumping off of ledges, and vaulting over fire hydrants. I grabbed tree branches, swung like Tarzan and landed in stride. For blocks, then miles, deep into the residential jungle between the Mississippi River and St. Paul’s Cathedral, until I collapsed in exhaustion on someone’s lawn.

That’s when I heard a small flittering noise. Like ant footsteps or tiny drops of rain. I looked closer at the blades of deep green grass around me. It had been a humid spring, and the color was rich, even at nighttime. The blades were flickering. I noticed the same thing on a nearby bush. The leaves twitched in little jerky movements.

It wasn’t raining.

It wasn’t windy. But everything was moving.

And then I realized… the leaves were unfurling.

I looked again at the grass. It was growing.

Down the entire silent street. The air was still and moist, and every flower flowered, every tree bloomed. Everything was waking up. And I was there to see it.

I was time-lapse photography. I was the fastest man alive.

There are periods of great wonder in life and you will know them by miraculous bookends. They present as fallacies. But when offered, it’s best to go with them.

It only took a headfirst dive into the dream that someone so beautiful could feel feelings for me. All the best things that have happened in my life grew out of that night’s confession and a warm spring kiss. Like Antipholus, there was mischief and fallout, and great piles of misery in the proceeding chain of effects. But I believe it will turn out happily once I get to the ever after.

2000: The Christmas of Our Discontent

2010-04-25T10:50:00.000-07:00

My first full-time job after I graduated college was as a third shift security guard at Kenosha Memorial Hospital. Job responsibilities included monitoring the ER, ushering newly-deceased bodies to the morgue, and securing leather restraints on combative patients.

When you work third shift you feel like an incredibly boring vampire. There were days when I would go to sleep in the morning and not wake up until 9pm. Seasonal Affective Disorder in the house.

We had some serious characters come into that ER. One morning a drunk woman crashed her car into a public school and was brought in crying for shame, thinking she had hurt some children and that it was her son's school. She was too hysterical to hear us repeatedly tell her that it was Sunday and the only thing she’d hurt was her ‘85 AMC Eagle.

One night there was a head-on collision. In one car there were three illegal immigrants hopped up on coke and in the other car – I swear this is true – a neo-nazi and his girlfriend. He was covered in swastika tattoos and he was the only one involved in the crash without a scratch on him.

But Christmas Eve was the worst.

I have a large family and between divorces and other sporadic dramas, we're sometimes required to attend five separate Christmas celebrations. So that year, I went straight from the Christmas party with my extended family at the Grandpa Llanas house to work and then it was on to my mom’s right afterward for a quiet Christmas morning with my brother and sisters.

I was running on 2 hours of sleep in 32 hours when at around 3 AM Christmas morning a drunk woman came in to the ER. She’d fallen off her bartstool repeatedly in one of Kenosha’s hundreds of bars, so they called an ambulance for her, and she was pissed. We strapped her wrists and legs to the cart to stop her from punching the doctor, and then took turns standing guard over her. Here's a small sampling of the pleasantries that came out of her mouth for the next four hours:

“You f*%#$*g nerd, I know you want to f*@# me, you virgin c*#$%*@*ing f#*#%t.”

Her mascara and eyeliner were smeared into glops and blurs, but they seemed poorly applied in the first place, almost like stage make-up. I tried to imagine what kind of mood she had been in when she’d made herself up the night before. What did she think was going to happen when she got ready to get sloshed on Christmas Eve? Was it her plan to wreak havoc on the lives of innocent hospital security guards?

Maybe she meant to be a villain.

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover

To entertain these fair well-spoken days,

I am determined to prove a villain

And hate the idle pleasures of these days. (1:1)

Richard III is a villain. Exhausted by the frivolities that his recently elevated brother enjoys as King Edward IV. Richard opens the play with the infamous declaration: “Now is the winter of our discontent” (1:1) and then lays bear his grievances. He’s a hunchback and ugly and everyone else has got lovers with which to frolic except for him. So to pass the time he's going to get his brothers to kill one another so that he can be king.

What’s amazing is that he talks like this about himself:

But I, that am not shap’d for sportive tricks,

Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;

I that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty

To strut before a wanton ambling nymph; (1:1)

As if he has no skills with the ladies. But in the very next scene he manages to win over the Lady Anne with nothing more than pretty words.

Your beauty, that did haunt me in my sleep

To undertake the death of all the world,

So I might live one hour in your sweet bosom. (1:2)

In Henry VI part 3, Richard kills Anne’s husband the Prince Edward. And then kills Henry VI, her father-in-law. But he tells her if she can’t forgive him that she should stab him in the chest. She presses the sword to his skin.

Nay, do not pause: for I did kill King Henry –

But ‘twas thy beauty that provoked me.

Nay now dispatch: ‘twas I that stabb’d young Edward –

But ‘twas thy heavenly face that set me on. (1:2)

She drops the sword and marries him.

Richard can spit some mad game. If he dedicated himself to amorous endeavors instead of bloody thoughts, things might have worked out for the house of York. A major misallocation of skills on his part. Overlooked talents.

The Tudors eventually emerge as the power in England, and as the victors they write the history. It’s widely believed that they slandered Richard’s character and that they were the ones who generated the image of him being a hunchback and a machievel. Portraits of Richard III were actually altered to make him seem ugly (one eye narrowed and his shoulder raised).

Shakespeare based his character of Richard on the Tudor account, but it’s almost more interesting to think of him as being an attractive young man, a normal guy who just suffers from terribly low self-esteem. He thinks he’s deformed and inadequate, like the 40 Year-Old Virgin. He doesn’t know what he’s capable of until he applies himself. If only someone had kicked him in the ass before he started down the path to the dark side.

After I left the hospital that Christmas morning I stopped for a moment at Simmon’s Island. Lake Michigan was frozen and glazed with powdery snow. I walked out a little ways onto the ice. Never in my life have I trusted ice. Every year in Wisconsin or Minnesota someone falls through on some lake or river and drowns in freezing agony. And Lake Michigan is a wild body of water with a will of its own. When I was young its undertow regularly pulled unsuspecting kids out to sea in the summer months, leaving abandoned Huffy bikes on the shore near Pike's Creek like so much well-preserved flotsam. But still I walked out to what I deemed the precipice of security and stared at the sunrise.

Richard III's villainy may have been cosmically necessary. The houses of Lancaster and York feuded and killed one another for decades. It began with the unnatural murder of a king, and the imbalance in the universe (the winter of discontent) had to be righted. Richard was the final balancing factor. He finished off his traitorous, usurping bloodline by being traitorous and usurping, making way for the better men of the House of Tudor to rule over more peaceful days.

Villains emerge to kick us in the ass, to call into action the better angels of our nature. When we know what must be done, but are unable to progress, they secede, they rebel, they terrorize. They drive us out onto the thin ice, farther over the freezing water than we ever thought we should go. Because it's only there -- on the very edge of safety -- when all things are at risk, that we can see the empty dangers of the future. And we know that it's time to quit our crappy security job and write a damn play.

Cause there's always going to be a drunken Tudor slut falling off a barstool who shows up to hurl insults at you. So you might as well let her insult something you're proud of, otherwise what the hell's the point of being out on the thin ice anyway?

Why the F would anyone want to be king of England?

2010-04-18T11:35:00.000-07:00

I've been in one real fight in my entire life. I went to a boarding school for high school and one year I had this roommate, let's call him Aaron. Aaron and I had been friends, we founded the LFA Chess and Checkers club together, we played pick up soccer and went on van trips to Hawthorne Mall. Then we became roommates and I hated him. Aaron was from Texas and outweighed me by about sixty pounds. He used to invite people into our room at midnight to play Monopoly when I was studying for History tests, he peed in my gatorade once and I drank it. And he knew I was crazy about this girl and he asked her to the winter formal.

So I tried to fight him and he kicked my ass. Or more accurately he didn't even have to kick my ass. We just wrestled and I never stood a chance. I couldn't throw a punch, because he had pinned my arms and gotten me onto the ground in the first five seconds. He laughed and told me to chill out. He laughed more when he saw how serious I was. I kept struggling for another ten minutes or so, until I was exhausted, but he was too fat and too strong and I was too big of a nerd.

Sometimes, even if you're a nerd and a pacifist. You have to fight. Especially if you're the King of England.

Henry VI Part 3 continues the War of the Roses, where the house of York makes a claim against the house of Lancaster for the throne and war ensues. At the beginning of the play. King Henry VI, who is pious and peace-loving is cornered and relinquishes the inheritance of the throne to York and York’s family as long as they allow him to continue his reign in peace.

I here entail

The crown to thee and to thine heirs forever,

Conditionally, that here thou take an oath

To cease this civil war (1:1)

York accepts. This pisses of Henry’s wife, Queen Margaret, who raises an army to kill York so that her son, Prince Edward, can be King, which is his birthright. Before she even comes knocking, York is persuaded by his sons to go back on his word and kill Henry and take the crown for the House of York. There’s a bunch of battles. York gets killed and his son, Edward, claims to be King Edward. This gets a little confusing because Henry’s son is Prince Edward. And it’s also confusing because there are in fact now two kings of England. King Henry VI and King Edward (the IV I think?).

People change sides and get married and in the end there’s revenge and heads on poles and King Edward (of York) kills Prince Edward. Richard of Gloucester kills Henry VI and begins to put his Machiavellian plan into action to take the throne from his brother in the final installment of the tetralogy: Richard III.

Richard figures prominently in this installment. He holds a severed head on the end of a pole at the beginning of this play and speaks to it, begging it to tell the tale of the victory the white-rose-wearing men of the house of York won against King Henry and the House of Lancaster:

Thus do I hope to shake King Henry’s head. (1:1)

Later on Queen Margaret rallies her soldiers (the armies of Lancaster and the Red Rose) to arms at the battle of Wakefield:

Off with his crown and, with the crown, his head (1:4)

Queen Margaret wins at Wakefield and captures York and the Queen orders:

Off with his head, and set it on York gates (1:4)

And then Warwick, finding Clifford injured to the point of death outside the city gates:

Off with the traitor’s head (2:6)

King Edward:

For Somerset, off with his guilty head. (5:5)

Obviously there is some association here with Alice in Wonderland, especially when you consider the oft-employed imagery of staining the white roses with blood or painting the roses red throughout Shakespeare’s Henry VI series:

Why do we linger thus? I cannot rest

Until the white rose I wear be dyed

Even in the lukewarm blood of Henry’s heart. (1:2)

Maybe it’s because I saw Tim Burton’s 3-D mess, but I am none too interested in talking Alice. It’s a little more interesting to think about all these calls for decapitation as something out of Highlander. When they cut off a nobleman’s head there’s lightning and brouhaha and then they are infused with the dead man’s power and youth.

There can be only one King of England, right? That’s why Richard has to kill Henry in the end even though he doesn’t fight and doesn’t want to be king.

Decapitation is symbolic. As King Edward observes when they have Henry VI captured:

But Warwick’s king is Edward’s prisoner.

And, gallant Warwick, do but answer this:

What is the body when the head is off? (5:1)

Like chess, capturing the king should mean victory. Unfortunately, the Herculean task of overthrowing a monarch is more aptly analogous to beheading the Hydra. In all the mess of a headless state many new heads emerge, each in turn wonting a good severing. After Henry relinquishes his inheritance, he essentially puts the crown up for grabs. This is how they end up with King Edward and King Henry and Prince Edward and Richard of Gloucester lurking and plotting.

John Wilkes Booth played Richard III many times and was a Shakespearean actor of renown. It makes sense that he would believe that assassinating Lincoln would somehow undo the Union. He learned his history from the original theatrical Machiavel. But the fact that he commits his assassination after the war ended demonstrates something else: vengeance is futile.

Almost every player in the War of the Roses has some blood they wish to avenge. The Earl of Westmoreland:

I’ll have more lives

Than drops of blood were in my father’s veins. (1:1)

Clifford slays York's innocent youngest son:

Your father slew my father; therefore die. (1:3)

Warwick is embarrassed by King Edward and switches sides to revenge his honor. Queen Margaret taunts York with a handkerchief dipped in his son's blood before revenging the murder of her lover, Suffolk. And the entire war was begun as vengeance for the generations earlier deposition and murder of Richard II by Henry's grandfather.

Revenge has a wicked momentum. Just ask the Hatfields.

Henry VI, for his part, is not interested in vengeance. He is happiest when he's being held captive by the Yorkists:

My crown is in my heart, not on my head;

Not decked with diamonds and Indian stones,

Nor to be seen. My crown is called content;

A crown it is that seldom kings enjoy. (3:1)

Henry tries to surrender and stand aside, but Lord Hastings makes it plain that words and treaties won’t settle this conflict:

Away with scrupulous wit! Now arms must rule. (4:7)

When one’s rivals are warlike, even the most pacifist of men must be prepared to fight. And Henry was always going to have to pay the price for his grandfather's crimes against the Yorkists. He's the King after all, his head is the most important one to have off. And you can't cut it off yourself with words. He should have fought, even if he was going to lose.

I fought Aaron. Presumably it was over a girl. A girl who I never asked out. Who I liked in secret and with ineffectual gestures like fasting for Ramadan and writing terrible poems. When you fight for a girl, your chief rival is her affection. She's the one who needs to be confronted on the battlefield. Not your 220 pound, mo-hawked roommate.

For me, fighting Aaron was actually about fighting Aaron. It was about revenge. And revenge doesn't get you anywhere with the ladies.

Words Are My Only Weapon

2010-04-08T16:24:00.000-07:00

The first professional writing I did was as a columnist for the Kenosha Midweek Bulletin. Every week I would comb the internet for inspiration and then spew 800-word satirical diatribes against the Bush administration. Once I wrote about him being replaced by a digital version of himself like Gollum in the Lord of the Rings. Another column was about the invasion of Iraq as a remake of an old television series that I vaguely remembered as a kid like they're doing with V now.

I was not a very good journalist. I always went for the most extreme opinion that I could and I used incendiary, disrespectful language. Luckily there was a forum in the Bulletin, called Sound Off!, where anyone who liked could call up and leave a 30-second message that would then be printed in the paper (provided it passed standards and practices of the Kenosha News Organization) and my detractors had ample opportunity to dismantle my arguments.

There were lots of angry calls. Almost every week someone would demand my immediate deportation to France, or call me a snot-nosed punk. I think my favorite was the one where someone told everyone else to relax because Gabe wasn't real, he's clearly that Jared guy from the Subway commercials. You can see below that I actually do look like him in the picture that ran beside my column every week.

The point is. I never inspired anyone to make any intellectual comments. I never started a dialogue. For three years I wrote for that paper, and I think the only person my column ever made any difference to was me and my Grandma who clipped every single column for a scrapbook.

In Act 4 of Henry VI Part 2, Jack Cade and his lower-class companions lead a rebellion against the young king. Cade claims to be the rightful heir to the English throne. While rousing his followers, he proclaims the miraculous math that will rule his kingdom:

There shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny. The three-hooped pot shall have ten hoops, and I will make it felony to drink small beer. (4:2)

After a few hurrahs, Dick the Butcher, one of his followers and friends lets loose this famous Shakespearean quote:

The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers. (4:2)

Soon after this, an accountant is brought before them, and when it is discovered that he can read and add and sign his name. Cade determines his fate:

O, monstrous!

…

Hang him with his pen and inkhorn about his neck. (4:2)

Literacy can be a weapon of inequality. Education and book-learning are methods of oppression that elevate some and leave others behind.

Jack Cade’s rebellion against Henry VI is also against education and the tools high-fallutin' lords and ladies use to control the common. It's a bloody, inhumane rebellion that unsettles the monarchy so that York can march on the King and make his legitimate (and also bloody) claim to the throne. But despite Cade's ignorance, there’s something that makes his soldiers (the butchers, tailors, blacksmiths and laborers of Cade’s army) sympathetic.

It's knowing that in the conquest of France (see Henry V), they were the ones who perished on the battlefield, and that in Medieval England they were utterly disenfranchised and the nobility, who played at governance, did not care for them except as a political tool.

Cade and his rebels are terrible people who are terribly oppressed. Oppression drives some to desperate methods and foolish rationalization.

In the American politic we have seen public discourse disintegrate since the signing of the constitution. Two years ago we had Sarah Palin thrust upon us. The poster-child for ignorant populism. Now the Tea Party, in all it’s glorious ridiculousness, threatens to drag the Republican Party further and further from it’s illustrious past. Toward a base element. A kindling.

In all the popular clamor against my radical columns, I was sometimes lumped together with other liberal journalists, such as Molly Ivins. It seems strange to me in retrospect that people would ever associate my satirical bombast for actual journalism. I was just a smartass punk with a laptop.

But I couldn’t help it. I never felt more powerless than I did the night Al Gore lost Florida. I wanted to take arms against what I perceived as outrageous injustice. I wanted to fight and rebel. But luckily I’m a writer and words are my only weapon. So my thoughts could not be bloody. I sought only character defamation and the extraction of my enemies’ argumentative teeth. Parliamentary dentistry.

The saddest part is that Cade’s rebellion, was initiated by the Duke of York. Who wanted him to assault the King’s claim to the throne, and weaken it. Cade succeeded in seeding the doubt in people’s mind that Henry’s monarchy is tenuous, inherited from a traitorous murder (York’s great grand uncle or something was King and was murdered by Henry IV).

Cade was tricked. Manipulated by a nobleman and a politician. York layed out his plan in soliloquy:

And for a minister of my intent,

I have seduced a headstrong Kentishman,

John Cade of Ashford,

To make commotion, as full well he can,

…

I know no pain they can inflict upon him

Will make him say I moved him to those arms.

Say that he thrive, as ‘tis great like he will,

Why then from Ireland come I with my strength

And reap the harvest which that rascal sowed. (3:2)

That’s the way of it for we, the low players. It is our small movements that loosen the lids on jars of political jam across history. But the preserves, the power, the control, the sweet spread inside, is reserved for the lords. Men of a better ilk. Men who can read and write their names and perform complex calculations of character manipulation.

Cade gets his in the end. He is slain by a gentleman named Alexander Iden who brings his decapitated head to Henry, and earns himself knighthood. Violence begets violence. Slander begets slander.

My column-writing career is long-over. I just hope I made a few people laugh. Somewhere in the rhetoric and fury a good point or two was lost. I’m sure I didn’t change anyone’s mind. I felt weak at the time, and I wanted to pick a fight. I think that’s okay, because conflict forces us to grow. And I was the one with the most growing up to do.

Fat Gabe in his Barcelona jersey.

Photo taken circa August 2001.

Joan La Pucelle de Llanas

2010-03-31T11:12:00.000-07:00

In 1999 the Llanas family had a gigantic family reunion in Lubbock, Texas. For three days we ate barbecue and danced the two-step while listening to stories about the three Llanas brothers Bibiano, Marcos and Amador who left Mexico after Pancho Villa was assassinated. On Sunday morning we went to mass in a church that the women of the Llanas family helped build. My little cousin, Ali, who must have been two at the time, ran up to the altar in the middle of the mass. The priest said: “Keep an eye on her, she looks like she wants to be the first female Pope.”

I have 3 sisters, 3 stepsisters, a mom, a stepmom, a grandmother who was raised in a lighthouse, and another grandma who keeps my grandfather alive by the sheer force of her love.

Oh, for the strong female protagonist! The Pippi Longstockings, Harriet the Spies, Stargirls and Norma Raes. When I read Anna Karenina, I had to quit a hundred pages from the end because I could no longer bear to see her too brilliant individuality melt and resolve itself into a silly dew because of the wandering affection of Vronsky (that rogue!).

That Joan of Arc is a fascinating historical personage is a ridiculous understatement, but I make it nonetheless. I may have first learned who she was when I saw Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure in 4^th grade, but I think I never really understood that what she did was real until I read the scenes in Henry VI Part 1 where her deeds and French character are utterly assassinated by the English playwright.

She is called Joan La Pucelle and she appears to rally the French against the occupying British forces. Obviously, she is a villain to the English and therefore a villain in Shakespeare’s play, but there are peculiar deviations from actual history in this play that are downright un-Shakespearean. Meaning they serve to over-simplify characters and flatten the impact of important moments instead of his usual tricks of shrinking time and re-sequencing events for heightened dramatic impact.

The problem is that the trial of Joan of Arc is unbelievably well-documented. The transcript was used in the movie The Passion of Joan of Arc and it demonstrates almost exactly the questions that were asked of Joan and what her answers were. Thirty years after her execution (and 130 years before Shakespeare penned the play) these documents were used to demonstrate her absolute innocence, the corruption of the Catholic officials who sentenced her to death, and establish the case for canonization.

In the play Joan convinces the Dauphin to accept her leadership by fighting him. Charles yields:

Stay, Stay thy hands! Thou art an Amazon,

And fightest with the sword of Deborah. (1:2)

According to the records of the Trial of Joan of Arc, she convinced the Dauphin of her mission by disclosing to him the three private requests he had made in prayer to God. And during the trial she said: “she herself bore her standard during an attack, in order to avoid killing anyone. And she added that she had never killed anyone at all.” (The Trial of Joan of Arc, p. 82, trans. W.S. Scott) She was an adviser and a military strategist. She was the rallying cry for France. She may never have swung her sword in assault at all.

There’s a scene late in the play, when Joan’s capture seems imminent and she conjures fiends from hell, and asks for their help to defeat the English.

You speedy helpers, that are substitutes

Under the lordly monarch of the north

Appear, and aid me in this enterprise.

ENTER FIENDS

This speed and quick appearance argues proof

Of your accustomed diligence to me. (5:3)

What the hell are demons doing in a historical play? The only historically accurate thing about their appearance is that they don't actually help her defeat the English.

It’s not the only time in this particular series of plays that demons are conjured. The ambitious Duchess of Gloucester conjures a demon in Henry VI Part 2 to ask him about the future. Silly women, always conjuring demons.

But it gets worse for Joan of Arc. Her father shows up before she's executed and she denies him:

Decrepit miser, base ignoble wretch!

I am descended of a gentler blood.

Thou art no father nor no friend of mine. (5:4)

But according to the transcript of the trial: “She answered her father was named Jacques Tart and her mother Ysabeau.” (The Trial of Joan of Arc, p. 64 trans. W.S. Scott).

Then, according to Shakespeare, she claims to be pregnant by the Dauphin in order to avoid execution and when that tenders no mercies, she claims it was actually Alanson who loved her. So it turns out the English were right in accusing her of witchcraft and whorishness. But according to records in The Trial, she was examined during her imprisonment and found to be a virgin, which alone should have disqualified her from being convicted of witchcraft according to the laws of the 15^th century church.

It’s possible Shakespeare had purely slanderous sources for his historical information. It’s also a popular theory that Shakespeare wrote only the portions of Henry VI that are good, and that other playwrights wrote the unfair and problematic passages. I think it likely that as a young playwright, Shakespeare was still making mistakes and accepting the direction of his patrons or the audience, who would have wanted Joan to be demonized. For God is British and could not possibly have been on the side of the French.

The slander against Joan, reminds me of the sometimes slander against Pancho Villa. I watched an A&E Biography on Villa once and although factually accurate, he was painted with a villainous brush. A tempestuous, egotistical murderer.

To my great grandfather and his brothers, Villa was a hero. He gave them cause to fight and to hope for lives better than those dealt campesinos. It's true he was greatly flawed and not nearly as cool as Zapata, but what do you want? Not every revolutionary leader can be a saint.

After the revolution, the fight he inspired in my ancestors brought them to Texas. That fight lingered in my grandfather, who raised his family in Wisconsin, where he would have good work for almost forty years. The fight sent my uncles and aunts and my father to college. It teaches and serves and leads and creates. It's sending my little sister to medical school. A strong female protagonist. It might not be the papacy, but these days papal dreams hardly seem the hallmark of virtuous ambition. I guess some villains never change.

Henry VI Part 1: Fathers, Sons and Soccer Practice

2010-03-25T08:29:00.000-07:00

There’s a story my dad used to love to tell. He coached my first soccer team when I was six years-old. In the middle of a game the ball rolled up to me and I kicked it as hard as I could. It went sailing into the air and down the field, over other kids’ heads. I ran straight to the sidelines and said: “Dad! Did you see THAT?!”

When we were young it was impossible to go to a place in Kenosha where my dad was unrecognized. The grocery store, restaurants, the gas station, if we all went as a family to the high school track to run around or hit tennis balls off the backboard there was always some adult I’d never met who would say: “Hey, Ernie!” and my dad would say, hey Rick or Mike or Rusty or Booker. He was a firefighter and a softball player and such accomplishments are enough to cement a father’s heroism in his young son’s hopeful mind.

George Bush and George W. Will Smith and Jayden Smith. Henry V and Henry VI. Fathers often cast long shadows from which their sons struggle to escape. Check out this eulogizing by the Duke of Gloucester to the late great Henry V that opens Henry VI Part 1:

England ne’er had a king until his time.

Virtue he had, deserving to command;

His brandished sword did blind men with his beams;

His arms spread wider than dragon’s wings;

His sparkling eyes, replete with wrathful fire,

More dazzled and drove back his enemies

Than midday sun fierce bent against their faces.

What should I say? His deeds excel all speech.

He ne’er lift up his hand but conqueréd. (1:1)

A mere 20 lines later, Gloucester describes the young Henry VI: “an effeminate prince whom like a schoolboy you may overawe.” (1:1) Granted, Joan of Arc is one of the major characters in this play, so describing someone as effeminate might not carry the same derogatory meaning that such knights normally ascribe to it, but it ain’t like he’s talking dragon’s wings about the heir to the throne.

Shortly into the play the French rebel, the houses of York and Lancaster argue and pluck red and white roses to start the War of the Roses, and the great military hero of England, Talbot, is abandoned in battle because of the civil discord.

Talbot is the scourge of the French. And while fighting Joan la Pucelle (of Arc) he and his son, John Talbot, are killed. They had been separated for 7 years by war, but Talbot called his son to the battle to teach him the family business:

O young John Talbot, I did send for thee

To tutor thee in stratagems of war (4:5)

When he sees that they are badly outnumbered, he tries to send his son away, but John refuses to fly:

Is my name Talbot? And am I your son?

And shall I fly? O, if you love my mother,

Dishonor not her honorable name

To make a bastard and a slave of me! (4:5)

Before Talbot dies, his son’s body is brought to him:

And in that sea of blood, my boy did drench

His over-mounting spirit; and there died

My Icarus, my blossom, in his pride. (4:7)

Icarus is, of course, the average son of Daedalus from Greek mythology. They flew on waxen wings to escape Crete and foolish Icarus flew too close to the sun and fell into the sea where he drowned. A cautious tale of venturing from beneath your father’s shadow.

But there are also accounts within this play of the sons who outdo their fathers. Standing watch at Orleance is the Master Gunner, who leaves his son on the watch in his stead. And when the opportunity arises, the son fires on Talbot and Salisbury, and he kills Salisbury.

Later on in the battle of Roan, the dying Duke of Bedford mentions Pendragon:

Not to be gone from hence, for once I read

That stout Pendragon, in his litter sick,

Came to the field and vanquishéd his foes. (3:2)

If you don’t know who Pendragon is, that’s okay. It’s only really important that you know that his son was King Arthur. Another son who outshone his father.

The opportunity is there, but Henry VI’s cards have been dealt. The evil of the early imagery of the play bodes poorly for the young king. “Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!” (1:1) Day and night, like York and Lancaster, the warring factions of heaven.

What’s interesting is that this trio of plays was written before Henry IV parts 1 and 2 and Henry V. So, it's possible that for the audiences attending Henry VI that the legend of Henry V is as perfect in their minds as Richard the Lionheart and King Arthur. His father was not a human. He was a myth, a folk hero. A giant among kings.

Eventually, Shakespeare humanizes Henry V in those other histories. He shows his flirtations with criminals and drunkards in Henry IV parts 1 and 2. And even in Henry V after he conquers France, there’s the courtship of Catherine, when he bumbles through the French language in declaring his poor, soldier's love. It’s important that the legend of the father dissolve so that the son may achieve a unique success in life.

For my part, my father was humanized to me in two parts. The first of which relates to soccer.

My dad coached a soccer team with another woman before my parents got divorced. I was in college and I would sometimes come to practices and run little clinics on heading or shooting. There was a moment I observed between my dad and this woman when we were working on trapping. He was throwing the ball to her and she was trapping it while sixteen nine year-old girls ran around doing the same thing. Amidst all that giggling and the flying soccer balls. I saw my dad throwing the ball… but it wasn’t like watching my dad. It was like watching me. He was awkward and stumbling exactly the way I was around a girl I like, having no idea what to do. It was chemistry. I saw that connection and felt pangs of confusion. A strong want to combat the momentum of events. But I'm a midwestern boy, and despite my mother, I buried that confusion. Cause we hope ignoring such things makes them go away. But they don't. Eventually my parents got divorced and this woman became my stepmom.

My dad became a person entirely in my eyes soon after my parents were divorced. One day he had this weary look on his face. There was some superficial stressful thing that froze him for a moment. And he rubbed his eyes and scratched his head with both hands and said, “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing.” He wasn't really saying it to me. And he wasn't really saying it about this stressful thing that had happened. He was saying it about everything in the world.

You can forgive a person for almost anything when they admit that. Because even though they don't know what they're doing, at least they're trying.

Fathers can overreach. They wrongfully conquer sovereign nations and leave the mess to their sons. They fall in love with other women. They believe they can fly. Sometimes their sons suffer for it. But sometimes they do the right thing and sacrifice their mythological legacy for mere humanity, and it's okay. We're still going to run to them on the sidelines after we send that ball flying through the air. They're still our fathers, even if they’re only men.

"Titus Andronicus" at Theatre of Note

2010-03-15T08:48:00.000-07:00

I went to see Titus Andronicus Saturday night at Theatre Of Note in Hollywood.

I am going to say a lot of critical things about this show, but a foreword: I REALLY LIKED IT. It must be a hard play to land tonally, and they did it effectively if not very originally.

It was derivative of Julie Taymor’s movie Titus. From the unfit anachronisms in costuming and staging, to the Alan Cummings-esque Saturninus. Although, despite the similarity between this Saturninus and Mr. Cumming’s (clear sexual deviousness, spineless whining, and George W. Bush-like entitlement) he turned in one of the best performances of the cast.

Unfortunately, the choice to play Saturninus as a whiny punk makes Titus’s handing over the empery of Rome to him the first act of madness in the play. Clearly, Saturninus is a moron and a crybaby and in contrast to the cool and professional-looking Bassianus, he is unfit to hold the rule of Rome. But despite the action being crazy, Titus isn’t played as crazy in the first scene. In this production he hardly seemed affected by the horrors of war from whence he came. He was cool, clean and concise in his action. And he doesn’t go insane until after he chops off his own hand (a terrifically acted scene by Dan Mailley).

I wouldn’t feel bad with Titus seeming together in the first scene, except that I made the mistake of reading the director’s notes before the show started. Thomas Craig Elliot, the director, wrote:

“Every time the action of the play seems too far-fetched, too implausible, I once again read stories about genocide in the Balkans, of hacked limbs in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, of rape used as a weapon of war. I read stories of veterans who have failed to reintegrate into society – stories of former comrades killing each other over twenty dollars, of husbands strangling wives in their sleep, of unprovoked brutal rape and murder.”

Come on. Seriously? The violence and horrors of this play are so over the top and intermingled with Aaron’s playful malevolence as he executes his plans against the Andronici, that it’s frankly an insult to veterans of actual warfare to draw any parallels between your little production and the theater of combat. Not to mention that now instead of enjoying your play, I was made to feel guilty for enjoying it. As a former Catholic, I have a particular aversion to this strategy. A note to directors: try not to make your audience feel bad about having fun at your play before the house lights come down.

Not that it wouldn’t have been interesting to make a choice to have Titus actually dealing with the issues of PTSD and reintegration, but he bore no characteristics of PTSD that could be detected by a layman, and the Taymor-inspired anachronisms in costume and design defeated any potential linkage to serious issues of modern times.

I’m really tired of anachronisms. Sometimes you need to be consistent onto yourself. I really get nothing out of seeing the servants of Saturninus don a Third Reich armband, hunt with machetes and then see the Goth army rallied via text message. I'm not joking. A blackberry. Shoot me in the face.

That being said, I was still able to laugh at Aaron’s unbelievable ability to manufacture villainy upon villainy and to care for nothing but furthering the cause of evil. And like I said, overall, I liked the play a lot.

It doesn’t sound like I did, does it? I have that problem. I’ve never been one to heed Thumper’s advice: “If you can’t say something nice. Don’t say nothing at all.” I like bunnies.

85% of the performances were outstanding, and theater being the actors’ medium, I’m happy to forgive any directorially folly in favor of the sweat and efforts put forth by the cast. Aaron, Saturninus, Titus, Tamora, Demetrius, Lavinia, Marcus… they were strong, at times frightening and dangerous, and appropriately moving.

I would recommend that you go see it, but sadly Saturday was closing night.

8th Grade Gabe: Much Ado About Extra Credit

2010-03-11T09:38:00.000-08:00

Gabe Llanas

Mrs. Duda

8th Grade English

March 11, 1992

Extra Credit Play Review

Much Ado About Nothing

The Racine Theater Guild's performance of William Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing was a fine performance indeed. It bore all the hallmarks of excellent and educational theater and was very funny also. In this extra credit essay, that I was asked to write to make up for the C that I was unjustly given because of the analysis of a very short poem that I did in class, which was every bit as good and meaningful as Mike Matteucci's analysis of "Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me Too," I will talk about my thesis of the play in some supporting paragraphs, and then a conclusion.

The play is a very good play. In it some soldiers come home from war and Leonato throws them a big party. Benedick and Beatrice argue with each other. They are very smart and witty. But it was hard to understand what they were talking about. Then after a few minutes, it was like someone dropped a babelfish in my ear, and I was able to understand the language of the Bard.

Benedick's friend Count Claudio falls in love with a girl named Hero and wants to marry her, but he's a chicken. So Don Pedro makes a very smart plan to wear a disguise and talk to Hero for Claudio and woe her for him. The plan works even though Don Pedro's wicked brother, the evil Don John the Bastard, tries to make mischief on everyone. Then everyone tricks Beatrice and Benedick to fall in love with each other, which was obvious that that was going to happen, because Benedick talks about women at the beginning of the play: "I will live a bachelor" (1:1) which is obviously foreshadowing that he will eventually get married. But then Don John tricks Claudio into thinking that Hero had intercourse with another guy so he doesn't want to marry her. And the friar comes up with a great plan to pretend that she died of grief, and after she is fake dead they find out everything was a lie.

Most of the people feel bad, Benedick and Beatrice really do fall in love, and then everyone gets married and is happy. As you can see there are a lot of plot things that happen throughout this play, which make it very good.

My brother, Ian, told me that if I was going to go to a play that I should ask a girl if she would like to go to the play with me, because girls like culture and arts. So I called seven girls. Nicole said no, Jenny had a basketball game. Marian had a basketball game too, Laura wasn't allowed to go on dates (even though I told her we would just be going as friends), Jessica thought I said Dave when I called, so she thought I was Dave Ruffalo and I was really confused because apparently she and Dave Ruffalo went out for five days last year and then he kissed Erika in a game of spin the bottle and they broke up and I never kissed Erika or even played spin the bottle, so it was really confusing. Michelle said she was going to her grandma's, and when I asked her how come she wasn't going to the basketball game, she said they didn't have a basketball game that night, which was curious. Finally, I went next door and asked Molly if she wanted to go and she wasn't home, so I asked her mom, and her mom said yes, Molly would go to the play with me.

I wore a tie and some slacks and my grandpa's Navy trenchcoat, and Molly wore a nice coat and a plaid dress that sort of looked like our school uniform, but wasn't. My sister Katie made me buy her flowers, which cost 4.99. I did not want to buy flowers because new comics come out on Tuesday and the new X-Factor has part 5 of the X-tinction Agenda and I have to buy two copies of it.

My palms were very sweaty and all Molly and I talked about was Weird Al Yankovich. She thinks he's dumb and I disagree. I thought taking a girl to the play was a bad idea. But then the play started and it was pretty good. especially the part with Dogberry the police officer who kept telling everyone to remember that he had been called an "ass."

My mom picked us up after the play, and I let Molly ride in the front seat and I sat in the back next to Cassie's car seat. I don't think it was a date because we didn't hold hands or kiss or hug goodnight and plus I don't even like Molly except as a friend.

Now I will talk about Benedick. He changed during the play from thinking he would never get married, to falling in love with Beatrice and getting married to her. He says something at the end of the play:

In brief, since I do purpose to marry, I will think nothing to any purpose that the world can say against it, and therefore never flout at me for what I have said against it; for man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion. (5:4)

The footnote says giddy means changeable. Man is a changeable thing. Which means that people can change. I don't know that I ever want to change. I kind of like things like they are now. School is very easy and summer vacation is fun. I'm afraid about going to high school next year. I don't know if people will be all grown up. I don't want to have to ask girls to dances or go to parties where people are drinking alcohol. I like to be friends with the kids in the neighborhood, who are mostly younger than me. We play Nintendo and Ghost in the Graveyard, and it's sad to think that you won't always have the same friends.

Mrs. Duda, you gave me a C when I did my poem analysis in class, which was by Robert Frost and was called "Precaution" and went like this:

I never dared be radical when young, for fear it would make me conservative when old.

You said it wasn't long enough, but I think it's deep enough. I think no matter what we start out as when we're young, we're going to go out there and live and be some different thing. In science when we studied cells, we learned that all of the cells in our body are regenerated every seven years. So in seven years not a single part of me will be the same as it is now. And then in seven years after that, I'll be all new again. Even cooler than that, I read in some book about the police that people's memories aren't even real memories. You recreate your memories every time you think about them. So the more you think about something the more and more imaginary it becomes. because you keep changing it a little bit every time you remember it. So not only are you a different person with different cells in the future, but your memories are different too.

Benedick was right, man is a giddy thing. It doesn't take long to be totally changeable and totally different than what you were before. And I think this is how you know that William Shakespeare was very wise when he wrote Much Ado About Nothing. Because Benedick says something deep like that, but also you get to laugh at Dogberry, when he talks about everyone remembering to write down that he was called "an ass."

Hamlet vs. Me

2010-02-23T22:25:00.000-08:00

We're about to get underway with preproduction of Kung Fu Hamlet, a play created over half-priced wings at the Green Mill on Grand Ave. in Saint Paul by my No Refunds Theater Co. cohorts, Matt Dawson, Chris Howie and myself. We've done the show several times in the past to universal acclaim. It's like Cliff's Notes on crack.

There’s this episode in the last season of Northern Exposure where Chris in the Morning is doing a verbal defense of his dissertation on Casey at the Bat as a metaphor for the inevitable decline of western global dominance. The University of Alaska has sent two professors of literature to conduct the defense. One is a traditionalist, who believes in Chris’s analysis is symptomatic of the destruction of aesthetic appreciation of classic literature. The other is a deconstructionist who loves every word Chris utters and hates everything white and Eurocentric about culture. The two profs hate each other and almost wind up in a fist fight.

Late in the episode there’s a dream sequence where Chris is a soldier, pinned down in a tiny building with the remaining members of his regimen: Van Gogh, Beethoven, Poe and Shakespeare. He gets a call over the radio, “What? They just took out the western canon! Melville! Talk to me!”

Shakespeare grabs his rifle. “They’ve gone too far!” And he rushes out the door only to be gunned down!

Chris catches him, “No, Shakes, no!”

And Shakespeare groans, “’Tis a far, far better thing I do…”

Chris says, “Shakes, that’s Dickens.” But Shakes’ eyes roll back in his head and he dies.

Chris grabs his gun in a fury and runs out the door. Firing like mad, he dodges explosions and rolls across the ground, crawling. He hears footsteps and jumps to his feet pointing his rifle at his enemy – And it’s HIMSELF!

He’s assaulting and defending the classics at the same time.

In the end he takes the two professors out to a baseball diamond, recites the poem and strikes one of them out. Illustrating that what the poem is really about is the feeling of striking out. It's about baseball, and the opportunity for greatness on the line with every at bat.

I don't really see Kung Fu Hamlet as an assault on classic literature. Hamlet is a story that Shakespeare told better than anyone else, but like many of his plays, it had been told before.

There was a Nordic Tale recorded in Latin in 1200 AD about a prince named Amleth who pretends to be crazy in order to outwit his uncle who has murdered his father and married his mother. Amleth kills a spy in his mother's bedroom and is sent to England to be secretly executed, but he outwits everyone, murders his uncle and becomes king.

I feel that stories need to be retold, they need to be kept alive, and sometimes they need to have a little kung fu sprinkled on top to make them really kick-ass.

Twelfth Night at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery

2010-02-22T09:38:00.000-08:00

I wanted to do another post about Hamlet, but every time I thought about it I was gripped with a passionate malaise and I wound up writing a bunch of nonsense.

Strange.

I went to a production of Twelfth Night at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery this weekend. It was pretty good.

They screen movies at the cemetery at midnight during the summer months and I've never been. I'm not much for midnight movies anymore. I tend to fall asleep. Also I don't really enjoy watching movies while sitting outdoors either. There are all sorts of discomforts -- moisture, critters, chilliness -- and I'd rather be inside and warm and cozy. That's a sure sign of aging, isn't it?

But Twelfth Night was being performed in a little theater that was a converted chapel. It's a nice space for this show. The seats were set up around the perimeter and all the action was in the middle. It was a matinee, so there was a little column of light cascading in from a stained glass window, not unlike the light that falls into the map room in Indiana Jones and points the way to the well of souls.

The comedy in this production was pretty awesome. Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and the mayhem they caused was fun, but it was really Charles Janasz as Malvolio who stole the show. His oppressive grimace was spot-on and watching him piece together the contents of the forged love letter was like watching Chico interpret Harpo's whistle-narrated semaphores telling him that they have to stop Groucho from being seduced by the blonde bombshell before Margaret Dumont catches him and the sweet kid who's depending on them will lose her family hotel/sanitarium/opera house/department store.

Actually, the production was like a Marx Brothers movie in a lot of ways. You sort of had to meander through the underwhelming Olivia - Viola - Orsino love triangle in order to get to the marvelous comedy. The same is true in a number of Marx Brothers movies where Zeppo or Allan Jones has some yawntastic love story that you tolerate because the goofy is so very pleasing.

There was also live music accompanying the show (in addition to the Fool plucking away at intervals). But there was a hipster quality to the costuming and style of the show and that spilled over into the music, which worked all right for some of the tunes, but when it came to the end of the show... well, frankly it was sad. And Twelfth Night is not a show that should leave you sad. I guess that's what happens when Malvolio is the character we love the most and in the last scene he marches off stage in tatters proclaiming that he will be revenged upon everyone.

The last line of the play should be filled with joy and revelry and a promise for future delights:

But that's all one, our play is done,

And we'll strive to please you everyday. (5:1)

But the odd, ethereal melody made it a little bit disconcerting. I sort of didn't want them to strive to please me everyday if this was the music they were going to use. Moody indie-rock was an appropriate selection for the scene in the kitchen when the fool plays for Sir Toby and Sir Andrew. It is set up thusly:

FOOL: Would you have a love song or a song of good life?

TOBY: A love song, a love song.

ANDREW: Ay, ay, I care not for good life. (2:3)

I don't know though. Sir Andrew does have a good point. As John Cusack says in High Fidelity: "Which came first, the music or the misery?" Love and melancholy are too closely intertwined. Maybe it's more appropriate in modern times that even in a happy ending, we are sad. It's not like the Fool falls in love at the end of the play, so if he's going to sing a song, it should be a minstrel's lament. He's a wayfaring clown, and it's his lot to wander and witness the bliss of everyone his comedy touches. But he has no access to that bliss himself. Like Michael Landon in Highway to Heaven, his wings are constantly eluding him.

Maybe they'll be there, around the corner, in the next town, on the next stage, in the next session of comic romance where he facilitates love and mocks misery with his sad bastard music and his rocky wit.

OPHELIA!!!!!!!!!

2010-02-18T08:39:00.000-08:00

My younger sister Rachel used to write me emails in ALL-CAPS when I was in college. Email was relatively new technology at the time -- I had yet to sign up for my first hotmail account (mcninja64@hotmail) -- and so proper electronic correspondence decorum was not yet widely established.

I had a pretty rotten spell in college, feeling isolated and missing my glory days in high school where I’d been prefect, star soccer player and egomaniacal dictator of an extra-ineffectual student government. I knew Rachel looked up to me, cause I was her big brother. She went to the same prep school that I went to on the same scholarship I’d received. She and I used to play soccer together in the backyard of our house for hours and hours in the summertime after we’d watch reruns of Wings on USA. I tried to be a good role model, I did. But for some stupid reason, when it came to those emails, I was a real jerk.

One night -- when I was feeling sad about some misery of my own making – I got an upbeat email from her, in all-caps that spoke excitedly about something or other in her life and told me to be happy or cheer up or something, and I replied and went on a tirade about how the all-caps were annoying and how she didn’t understand that life wasn’t always fun and happy and that sometimes you had to just be mad about things. It was angsty and cynical and I’m sure I felt like I was teaching her an important lesson about the real world. But I was being a bad big brother. She must have been fourteen or fifteen at the time. Her emails came less frequently after that. Fewer exclamation marks. Unenthusiastic subject lines. Proper capitalization.

Why do we hurt the ones we love?

Hamlet abuses Ophelia, tells her to get to a nunnery to avoid bearing children who may be boys, for boys will be sinners and dishonest like he is. He says horrible, nasty things to her, then he kills her father and unlike Othello, it is not the unnatural nearness of the moon to the Earth that makes Ophelia mad. It’s the natural douchebaggery of man.

But then, after she dies and Hamlet sees Laertes and his modes of grief, he leaps to, not to be outdone.

I loved Ophelia – forty thousand brothers

Could not with all their quantity of love

Make up my sum. (5:1)

How could he dare say such a thing! Laertes was a pretty good brother. He was looking out for Ophelia’s virtue in cautioning her to stay away from Hamlet and his many tenders of affection. He loved Ophelia.

We’ve been in Hamlet’s position too. When you’re in love with a girl, and all your emotions are tied to hers, you think that it’s more profound than any love her family could provide. But of course that’s wrong.

I made a depressing mistake once and read the online journal of my ex half a year after we’d seen each other last. Searching through the archives, I found the chronicle of the night she left. How she drove from my arms to her dad’s embrace, and he held her and comforted her and made her feel safe. That used to be my job. But I didn’t do it right, I wanted more things for myself. She would always have his arms. And her mother’s. And she would have the ears of all her friends who despised me for taking her away from them.

My love was inferior.

If Hamlet could have found Ophelia’s blog and read the strange, floral ramblings she executed after he murdered her father, he might have learned the same lesson. Not that it would have mattered. At this moment in the play Hamlet has already declared his thoughts to be bloody. He’s killed Polonius and orchestrated the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. His virtual insanity smacks of actual insanity as his corrupt moral compass wavers. Too close to the magnetic destination of his vengeance.

When revenge is the motive, there will be innocent casualties. When we can’t cope with our own dissatisfaction, love’s umbrella breaks down. And someone always gets hurt.

Why do we hurt the ones we love?

They just happen to be the closest thing.