evil I-25

so, i'm driving back down to denver last night, for callbacks for '18 holes,' and somewhere between windsor and the first loveland exit, the car in front of me runs over a folded-up, mangled old sign. it flaps up and i am on top of it before i can do anything about it. but whereas the thing burst out from under the car in front of me, when it got under my car (a ford exploder, mind you, with some pretty high clearance) it gets jammed into the frame right by the rear right wheel.

so i'm looking back out of my rearview, hearing this godawful scraping sound, and i see sparks flying out the back of my car.

lovely.

i pull off the freeway, and attempt to dislodge the sign, but it's jammed in there pretty good. finally some guy stops and gives me a hand (thanks, random stranger in the white pickup) and we get the thing free. of course, now i don't know if the brake line or fuel tank or anything unimportant like that has been damaged, and i'm not going to find out on the way down to denver.

so i didn't make it to the callback. :( i'm going to call the director today and see where they are at, if they are doing another round of callbacks or what.

ah well. at least the thing didn't fly up off the road into my windshield.

***

anyway, here's a dream i had last night. i think i might be under some stress...

03.11.08

I am leaving a late-night party of some kind that has gotten out of hand. It is a night of celebration all over the city, perhaps the world. But I left the place where I was and decided to walk home, although it was a couple of miles.

The city/town seems to be State College-esque, dark streets lined with older, conservatively built houses. I cut through a wooded area at one point, and slog through some mud, but I am of high spirits, and dial my phone to inform someone I am on my way home. I come out of the woods behind an old strip mall/office complex, a low, long building made of brick and steel, circa 1965. I circle around the building and am walking through its narrow parking lot along the street when I see the car for the first time. it is a long, older vehicle, perhaps a Taurus or something like that. It is careening back and forth across the roadway, with only its parking lights on, not changing speed or seeming to even attempt to avoid parked cars. I watch and begin to back away from the road as it continues its approach when I realize that it probably isn’t going to stop, and that it certainly wouldn’t stop just because a person was on the sidewalk.

The car finally slams into a triangle splitting the road into two, and comes to rest on the curb there. I tell my friend that I will call them back, hang up and start to dial 911 as the driver gets out. It is a big shirtless white guy, completely out of it, but with a drugged determination about him. He gets out and stumbles toward the building, where people have now come out to see what’s going on. I am at the far end of the building, and so I am not in his line of fire as I tell the police dispatcher there is an obviously drunken man who wrecked a car. But then he begins to harass the bystanders, berating them, asking what they’re staring at. He begins to get physical, shoving some of them around, and threatening them, and I duck around the corner of the building and make it clear that the situation is more urgent for the police. When I peek back around the corner, he is swinging a hoe or a rake or something at some people in the crowd, when finally the flashing blue lights pull up.

Next we see the man, now hastily dressed in a ripped green sweater and a t-shirt he found somewhere being pulled out of the basement of the building in cuffs. We (the crowd) commiserate on the situation, relating our versions of the story, pat each other on the back etc.

At some point, however, I am at a huge, sprawling chemical plant. I get out of the car, an old Thunderbird or some such, with a guy who looks suspiciously like a young Ray Liotta, and who holds a gun on some guy. We lead him toward the back of this plant area, which is seemingly abandoned, past several fences and gates that are wide open, and past a final row of curtain-like cloths that are hanging from a line a few dozen feet before we reach the back wall.

I hang back as my partner takes the guy back behind these flapping curtains, which don’t really cover up what is happening back there, and he shoots the guy in the head.

I remember I wasn’t really disturbed by this; it was an inevitability.

But I turn and am walking back toward the car when something goes wrong. The plant’s sirens and lights begin to flash as if there is a shutdown or something. A crew of workers streams out into the yard, which is a muddy, rocky, rolling area, and proceed to throw the football around. They are diving in the muck, sliding through the standing water, not caring.

But my partner is trapped somehow behind the curtains at the end of the plant’s grounds, and I have to get the car and drive up there and get him. I get in the car and start to ease my way past the workers and their game, across a gulley and up a rock face that protrudes from the muck. At some point I explain to the footballers what’s going on and they get out of the way gladly.

But by the time I get the car near where I need to go, the next round of plant procedures has started. There are sirens and lights a plenty now, and gates swing closed. The footballers, when I look back, have all disappeared, taken shelter somewhere. The car gets stuck and I proceed on foot, only to be stopped when a giant sprayer, like an agricultural watering system sprays out a huge burst of pink, jellied fluid, like a thick antifreeze, spraying down the whole area like a lawn sprinkler. I turn and flee, passing through several of these sprinklers, and make it outside the gates. I go back in several times, but I am beaten back by the jellied chemicals every time.

I have no idea how I will save my partner now.

monologue audition

so i went down to denver last night and did a monologue for the producers and director of gene kato's '18 holes,' a new play that won best play last year at the rocky mountain theatre association. this is a world premiere, and right on the heels of the premiere of 'the harvey project,' it would be pretty cool to be cast.

i did a monologue i have done several times before, one i am really comfortable with, from howard korder's play 'boy's life.' it's a monologue featuring phil, who is described as a 'nervous self-dramatizer,' and it has him telling the story of how a woman he was dating for two weeks broke it off after he told her he loved her. naturally, it was her fault. :)

at any rate, it is a funny piece, and one i can relate to on several levels, and its a character i can wrap myself around pretty smoothly, i think. so i should have no problems, right? i walked into the audition space, and there was no one waiting to read, just one guy at the sign-in table, and the auditors on their way out for a smoke break. i'm bullshitting with them, and i'm very relaxed, joking, confident, etc. then i get into the the room where i'm doing the piece, and BAM! i start into the monologue and i feel myself talking too fast, i feel my breathing choke up into the upper parts of my lungs, i feel my heart rate soar--wtf? i've done this many many times. i mean, i guess it's been a while since i've done an audition that wasn't for a bunch of people i know really well--openstage/bas bleu in fort collins--but still! it was weird.

not that i'm such a seasoned pro that it should be easy. i guess i am heartened by the tales of very famous, very good actors who never conquered stage fright. they say that right up until his death, every time henry fonda would perform on stage, he threw up in the wings just before going out.

thank god it's not that bad. :)

at any rate, i must have done something right--i just got the call to attend call-backs. wish me luck!

peace,
k

stones in his pockets

here's a link to a review i wrote last week of Stones in his Pockets, an irish tragicomedy that's running at the victorian playhouse in denver thru april 5.
somehow in the editing process, i left out that there is indeed a significant amount of tragedy in this story as well as humor. not quite sure how that happened. i blame the post and it's 650-word limit. (although the truth is i edited those parts out myself before i sent it in.)
it's a great show, however, with all the characters done by two excellent actors, seth maisel and austin terrell (above).

as for myself, i am auditioning tonight for a spot in a new play by gene kato, "18 holes." it's about golf not porno, which had me puzzled for a while. it is an interesting script, and i would love to do a play in denver, finally, although the parts for ahem, gentlemen of a certain age are scant.
i am just excited to do a monologue audition. it's been forever.

also, i am auditioning for the part of stanley kowlaski in a production of streetcar named desire next week(!!!) that should be interesting...i've been going to the gym a lot lately. :) i may not be able to act worth a shit, but i can play "shirtless" with the best of them, lol.

peace,
k

mistah harvey, he dead.

it's been over a week since the harvey project closed, and it's still kind of a weird feeling. it's always somewhat bittersweet when a show closes--you will miss it, but you're also kind of glad to be shed of it, ready to move on in your mind and energy.
it was really nice to see "nickel and dimed" last saturday, and to be completely unattached to any show--to not have rehearsals or performances t worry about. i don't even have any upcoming auditions that are weighing on my mind. not that i don't want to ever do anything ever again; it's just that between noises off and the harvey project, i've been in rehearsals or performances since early september.
and this show in particular was tough for me. i was the title character, and it is a new play, and so i think i took a tremendous amount of pressure on myself to make it perfect, and that just isn't going to happen. i was incredibly relieved when it closed last sunday, and proceeded to mindlessly go play some guitar and get drunk, responsibility-free.
anyway, just a quick note. will do more later.
--k

valentine's day

and here's my column that will be out this friday, sort of a post-mortem view of valentine's day.
enjoy!

CARPE DIEM 2-15

So here we are once again, on the ass-end of the winter holiday season. Long gone is the quiet dignity of Thanksgiving, where you can drink and eat and squabble with your family more in one afternoon than you might over an entire normal weekend. Also long past is the consumerific splendor of Christmas, the tacky rhinestone and LED sweaters packed away, the gift receipts long ago cashed in. Even drunken New Years’ seems a distant memory--though the acidic, gritty taste of revisited Jager probably still lingers for some.

And by the time this reaches you, even the Valentine’s Day “holiday” will be over, resulting no doubt in joy for some, ruined credit ratings for others, and perhaps even tears.

And why not? With the ridiculous expectations placed upon people for this, the most nakedly commercial holiday we celebrate—at least Christmas has some underlying higher theme besides “Buy Shit For Your Girl, Because We Said So, or She’ll Kick Your Ass”—how could anyone ever hope to get it right?

The diamond companies are certainly hoping that a slice of the clueless male demographic (that is, all of us) will be desperate enough for approval that they will shell out hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Add cards, flowers, dining, and other entertainment, and we’re talking about a holiday celebrating “love” that rang up nearly $17 billion dollars last year alone, according to diamondvues.com, a diamond industry website.

That’s a helluva price tag. Do we get breakfast in bed afterwards? How about a kiss on the mouth?

It’s been a long, strange trip getting here, too. We’ve all heard the legends of Saint Valentine—there were actually at least two or three martyrs named Valentine or Valentinus—but the stories are so sketchy that in 1969 the Roman Catholic Calendar of Saints removed the feast of Saint Valentine, saying that too little was known about him. Other than he died on February 14.

His wife probably killed him when he showed up at home that night empty-handed.

Scholars even disagree as to whether the earliest mid-February celebrations were meant to celebrate romantic love or fertility. For instance, it’s probably not a coincidence that the Romans, and even pre-Roman societies celebrated Lupercalia on February 15, a fertility rite that involved sacrificing goats and a dog, a feast, and naked nobility running around in the streets whacking people with strips of skin cut from the sacrificed animals, that were meant to ensure an easy childbirth.

Those kooky Romans.

At any rate, this alleged holiday has morphed quite a bit into the way it is celebrated today. We can blame one Esther Howland for popularizing the exchange of Valentine’s Day cards in this country. In 1847, Howland, the daughter of a bookstore owner became the first to mass-produce and sell Valentine’s Day cards. Beginning in 2001, the greeting card industry has been giving out an annual “Esther Howland Award for Greeting Card Visionary.”

Gosh, thanks a ton, Esther. If there is any justice at all, she’s slowly turning on an arrow jammed through her heart, roasting over a super-heated vat of rich, dark chocolate.

The point of all this is not to deride love, or those who are in love. Cynical as I may sound, I believe in love. I happen to believe it is different for everybody. Much like the concept of God, perhaps “love” is too abstract, enormous, mysterious, and fraught with baggage to be reduced to a meaningful soundbite. It certainly won’t be given useful meaning through the cynical machinations of industries that are designed to capitalize on another complex human emotion—guilt.

Lots of people have diamonds. I’d venture to guess that not many of them have love.

Which is more important?

***

super duper tuesday

once again its been a while since i've posted. starting to sound like a broken record. here's my column from last week, at any rate.

CARPE DIEM 02-08-08

Ah, Super-Duper-Cali-Fragilisitic Tuesday. Watching the coverage makes me want to give myself a lobotomy with an ice pick and a ball-peen hammer, but I just can’t tear myself away.

There’s no shortage of whack-a-doo stories out there as pundits scramble to make sense of a completely mad day in a completely mad year for American politics. But even as the heavy-hitter media elites attempt to sift through the voluminous mounds of spin that the campaigns and their lackeys have left in steaming piles, they are also working hard to cover their own bets [read: asses] especially after the media debacle following the last round of primaries, when Clinton’s campaign was declared dead in the water.

Here are a few of the more off-the-map nutty storylines:

• Even though Obama raked in 562 delegates and 13 states Tuesday night, compared to Clinton’s 582 delegates and 8 states, the media declared the night a “disappointment” for the junior senator from Illinois. It seems that many pundits are scrambling to distance themselves from their love affair with Obama by now setting course 180 degrees away from him. Now it’s Obama who’s finished, washed-up, kaput. Here’s a headline from Wednesday’s Washington Post: “Obama Wave Wanes.”

It’s all over.

Only, it’s not.

Of course, given the recent hype surrounding his candidacy reaching epic, Kennedy-esque proportions—literally, in the sense that Ted Kennedy came out in support of him—any primary result not including a total and complete humiliation of Clinton at the polls could seem like a poor showing. The establishment hates that it’s not decided yet—and, really, hates that it’s not decided in favor of Clinton—because that means more days and weeks of uncomfortable questions about that very establishment, and what direction voters want the next president to take the country.

• Speaking of which, here’s a good one: Clinton advisor Mark Penn was quoted on the Talking Points Memo blog as claiming that Obama has become the “establishment candidate.” Apparently Penn reached that conclusion because of recent endorsements Obama has gotten, and is now attempting to both spin Clinton as an underdog, and undermine Obama’s outsider cachet. I guess Hillary’s eight years in the White House, seven years in the Senate after carpet-bagging to New York to get elected, K Street lobbyist connections, votes for more-stringent bankruptcy laws that favor credit card companies, supporting the Patriot Act, and, oh yeah, authorizing the Iraq war and all get wiped away the moment a nearly irrelevant Kennedy supports Obama.

• On the Republican side, John McCain won convincingly, putting away 511 delegates, compared with Romney’s 176 and Huckabee’s 147. Funny thing is, the Republicans don’t want him.

Huh? Well, lots of them anyway.

Even with that kind of widespread support for a war-hero Senator who—inexplicably—continues to speak of Iraq as if it were an overseas province of Empire America that we will occupy—inexplicably—for at least a century, many in the social conservative wing of the Republican big tent are denouncing McCain. Colorado’s own James Dobson stamped his little feet and said that he wouldn’t vote for McCain, because he’s “...convinced Senator McCain is not a conservative, and in fact, has gone out of his way to stick his thumb in the eyes of those who are.”

He’s a closet librul, folks. Watch out he doesn’t give your daughters abortions or your sons The Gay.

What this apparently means is that the religious wing of right wing, which has enjoyed the fawning flirtations of every Republican nominee in recent memory, is finding itself without a suitor—and prom night is coming up soon.

It’s only going to get nuttier from here, folks. Strap in tight, and keep your hands inside the car at all times.

***

harvey project review

and we got a review for the play i'm in, The Harvey Project. it's exciting to be reviewed no matter what, although this one is a little surface. the other problem with this show in particular is that it is a new play, and the people in charge of Openstage Etc. saw fit to offer the cast up as sacrificial lambs after every single show for a talk-back.

now, i have nothing against talk-backs. they can be fun, and often you get a truer sense of what an audience is seeing, since it's not your friends telling you what they thought of the show--it's strangers. but since this is a new play, and since people have been explicitly invited to offer their opinions of it, we are getting an awful lot of not-useful information best sent directly to the playwright. people want to critique the story ad infinitum, and the plot, and the length of the scenes, and we have no control over that. and so it becomes an exercise in listening to people bitch about things we cannot fix, even if we wanted to.

and last week we were blessed to have half a dozen or so recent graduates from CSU's theatre department bestow the deep vastness of their knowledge upon us. there's nothing like a recent college graduate to tell you everything you never wanted to know about everything.

i never knew so much as i did when i graduated; thank god i know less and less every year.

anyway, i think the atmosphere of the talk-back might influence reviewers. the fact that there is a talk-back might even change people's opinions of the show, and make them less open to what they are seeing out there, rather than thinking about clever things to say about the meta-picture.

or i could just be whining...

come see it either way, two more weekends, starting tonight.

peace,
k

closer review

had another theatre review run in the denver post (at least the online version) today, for the play closer. it's being put on by a new company, Uncorked Productions, made up of five veterans of Denver's theatre scene.

it was a really great show, from the same script as was made into the 2004 film starring jude law, natalie portman, julia roberts, and clive owen. worthe checking out, especially as tickets are $12-15, very cheap for denver theatre. here's an excerpt from my review:

There's a kids swimming-pool game called "Sharks and Minnows" in which the person who is the shark attempts to tag the other kids — the minnows. In some versions of the game, when a minnow is tagged, he or she becomes a shark and joins in chasing the remaining minnows.

Watching Uncorked Productions' staging of "Closer," directed by Brenda Cook, is an awful lot like seeing a late-stage version of the game, when it might as well be called "Sharks and Sharks." Watching these characters devour one another emotionally carries all the morbid fascination of a feeding frenzy: It's horrifying and riveting all at once, and you can identify with both predator and prey.

fun stuff. :)

february??

yah, so it's like, February somehow. i'm not entirely sure how that happened, but oh well. i'll take the calendar's word for it. i've been caught up in doing a show, the harvey project at openstage etc., and that has taken a lot of time. it was so nice to have an actual evening where i didn't have to do ANYTHING or go ANYWHERE last night. took me a long, way over-indulgent nap, played some guitar, and had a nice visit a bit later in the evening. :)

you know who you are.

had a good time at the coopersmith's superbowl party on sunday too. that was the first time i went out and got truly ripped in a while. been quitting the cancer sticks lately and sunday was actually my two-month anniversary. so, quitting keeps me out of the bars and away from the booze. it seems like, somehow, alcohol might just have some sort of effect on my judgment. i'm not sure if anyone else has ever noticed that...

at any rate, i didn't fall down, as far as i know, and i didn't fall off the nicotine wagon either. plus i got to catch up with a bunch of friends i haven't seen in a while, due to my monkish existence as of late.

i've been working on revising my play that i 'finished' a few months ago, trying to get it to where i want it. i have a feeling that if i allowed myself to, i would be one of those people who endlessly revise shit to the point where they never finish anything. can't let that happen. i'm going to wrap it up, for good or for ill by the end of this month. barring any specific advice from someone who, like, wants to pay me a million dollars to turn it into a movie, i'm going to move on to something else.

also, i have a gig at lucky joe's tomorrow night, and so havebeen practicing guitar a lot more than usual lately. i don't know--when i'm in a play, it seems like the music falls by the wayside. as if there is a limited amount of artsy-fartsiness available to pour into projects like these. ah well.

if that's all i have to complain about, i guess i'm doing better than most. :)

peace,
k

carpe diem

hey--it's been a while since i posted, but here's my column from saturday. will get some more stuff up here today, i hope.

not that anyone's reading, lol.

CARPE DIEM 1-18-08

Americans are completely schizophrenic. Reading about two unrelated political incidents this past week, it occurs to me that when we look for entertainment, only so-called “reality” will do. But when it comes to the real world, we devour the cheesiest, most transparent of fakery and come running back for more.

Consider the Bush Administration’s bungled attempt to sell a Gulf of Tonkin-like incident with five Iranian speedboats last week. After initial reports claiming that U.S. warships received a radio transmission warning “I am coming to you. You will explode after a few minutes,” Pentagon officials are now backtracking, saying they never claimed the radio message originated on the speedboats. Experts have said that the heavily accented voice did not have an Iranian inflection. And recently released Iranian video footage depicts a very different exchange between the vessels.

Of course, it’s hard to believe these guys would attempt to manipulate the press and the public with an overblown, phony incident. Just ask Colin Powell.

Next up we get Mitt Romney, winner of the Michigan primary. Last week it was revealed that a down-home, aw-shucks meeting between the Mittster and an unemployed, single mother was actually with the mother of one of his staff workers.

Repeated inquiries were made to the offices of Jesus, but as of deadline He had no comment on whether Romney’s magical Mormon underwear protects him from the sin of bearing false witness.

But on the entertainment side of things there is a definite tug in the direction of relying on real people for amusement. You can’t turn on the television without seeing some new dipwad “reality” show featuring mom’s basement-dwelling troglodytes who own video cameras but lack pride, and who are willing to maim themselves, eat any sort of disgusting concoction involving maggots or testicles or both, or even more horrible and retch-inducing, date Tila Tequila.

But wait! There’s more! American Gladiators is back, proving that steroids, lycra and mullets never really go out of style. And Bret Michaels, former Poison front man—and apparent recipient of some bizarre, experimental facial surgery involving, let’s say, epoxy, shark cartilage, and formaldehyde—is on Rock of Love 2, in which he attempts to narrow a field of 20 airhead bimbos down to one lucky skank. Of course, American Idol has also returned, certain to provide face time for a whole new crop of self-deluded lunatics to begin the process of mental dissolution under the nurturing eye of a national TV audience.

Couple this tiny sampling of “reality” with the perverse, voyeuristic delight we take in peering into and judging the lives of stars we adored as recently as five minutes ago—epitomized by the utterly loathsome TMZ, but repeated ad nauseum all across the airwaves—and what you’ve got is a strange sort of sickness. At the heart of our obsession with witnessing the real breakdowns and faux pas of famous people is a slimy, shameful need to bring them down to our own imagined level.

When we like them we lovingly scream, “You’re better than us!”

When we don’t like them anymore we spitefully scream, “You’re no better than us!”

The bottom line is this: if we are unable to believe anything we see on TV--aside from real people doing inane, idiotic things--if we are so over the whole scripted entertainment thing, which uses talented actors, writers and directors, why are we so helpless to see through the decidedly low-rent, B-movie garbage that our leaders and would-be leaders throw at us every day?

What the hell is wrong with us?

###

dancing with the primaries

bill kristol digging for the truth.

here's my column from saturday. :)

Carpe Diem: Primaries as Entertainment

Kurt Brighton

1:05 a.m. MT Jan 12, 2008

OK, there is a lot happening in the world of entertainment this week.

First, the biggest entertainment story has to be that of the new “American Idol” contest.

Er, I mean the New Hampshire primaries. Since the national press and the candidates insist on treating this ridiculous process like it’s a grand-scale “American Idol” or “Dancing With the Stars”—only with slightly more talented performers—we should look at it that way too. What’s the difference between the deep and probing analysis we get of Hilary’s tears versus the examination of Marie Osmond’s “faint” on “Dancing With the Stars?”

You enjoy endless blather about Sanjaya’s hair? Hey, how about that Obama guy! He’s got a funny name too! Plus, it turns out that Obama is really Jesus, Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy all rolled into one, crushing his cowering opponents with a calm, reassuring smile, preparing to lead an unstoppable, inevitable juggernaut, an inexorable movement that will forever change the face of...

What?

Oh. Turns out he didn’t actually win New Hampshire.

Nonetheless, some of the greatest entertainment value coming out of this outdated, hokey, and endlessly spinning process has been watching major media players crack their vertebrae trying desperately to backpedal on their premature announcement of Hilary’s passing into irrelevance. Polls had given Obama an 8- to 10-point edge going into Tuesday, and there was speculation that Hilary might be forced to drop out of the race. The Boston Herald even ran the headline “She’s So Yesterday.” Whoops.

Even more entertaining has been listening to the wise old grayheads of the D.C. establishment try to explain how they—er, actually, all the OTHER wise old grayheads—could have gotten it so wrong.

Apparently, it’s a chick thing. Bill Kristol, the smiling leader of the neo-conservative loon movement—who also managed to get everything about Iraq spectacularly wrong—summed up the general consensus among Terribly Smart People when he said, “It’s the tears. She pretended to cry, the women felt sorry for her, and she won.”

Ah. Well, no wonder all the serious-minded men had no idea what was going to happen. Those kooky wimmen with their emotions and all. You get them involved and the next thing you know, you’re crocheting doilies, holding hands and singing Kum-Bye-Yah or some damn thing.

This is just getting good, and I’m not talking about the candidates themselves. The fun is going to be watching the media attempt to dust themselves off and reclaim their self-appointed mantle of Wisdom once again. Of course, it’s hard to sound wise when you’re burping around a heapin’ helping of crow.

---

And with the accidental hilarity of the real news, it’s truly a shame that the Writer’s Guild of America strike is still going on—the fake news would have a field day with this. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have returned to the airwaves, but without their writers the humor they are squeezing out of what are essentially 23-minute, off-the-cuff monologues is decidedly thin.

But each of them is making a go of it, skirting the Guild’s rules by not even preparing a monologue for themselves. And, as each of them made crystal clear, their sympathies have not changed. In his typically self-deprecating style, Stewart announced that while the show may be back, during the time the strike carries on it will not be “The Daily Show” we have come to know and love, but rather “A Daily Show.”

For his part, Colbert’s blowhard character made light of the situation by insisting that the way the teleprompter worked was by reading his thoughts and putting the words in the little box so he could say them. When he was told that the words were actually written by his missing team of writers, he said, “You mean those guys on the fourth floor smoking opium bongs and playing Guitar Hero? I find that a stretch.”

Here’s hoping they’ll be back soon—their bongs await.

###

dora for president!!

separated at birth?

here's my latest column from saturday. :) read the original here.

Carpe Diem: Dora For President

By Kurt Brighton

If you have yet to experience firsthand the joy of owning your very own child, a test drive will quickly reveal to you the short yet complex list of their wants and needs.

While visiting family for the holidays, I got to take my nephew for a spin one afternoon and I have to say, I don't see what's so hard about this whole parenting thing.

I'm not serious of course. Like puppies and Jehovah’s Witnesses, children are great entertainment—as long as someone else is eventually going to claim them. Keeping one around the house on a permanent basis would surely get messy.

I caught John Alex—who is nearly 3 although he has the lung capacity of a veteran Broadway performer—on a particularly good afternoon. He was enthralled with his brand-new Dora the Explorer DVD, and I was able to sit on the couch and read, just tossing in the occasional over-enthusiastic response to what I surmised he might be saying. I could half-watch him as he squirmed around on the floor watching the TV, playing with his farm animal toy set and occasionally performing a grinning somersault at the sheer joy Dora and Diego bring him.

But as the DVD played on, and then for a second time, and I struggled to shut out the brutally repetitious, often moronic statements Dora would make (um, the bear is on the freakin' TALL MOUNTAIN, Dora. You just SAID so!) I found myself struck by a sad and unfortunate parallel:

The way this show is presented has an awful lot in common with the way we do politics in this country.

Nothing against the makers of the Dora show. I'm sure that clear, unambiguous repetition of simple ideas is exactly what the diffuse, near-feral brains of pre-school-aged kids need in order to begin learning, and more importantly, to begin thinking for themselves in logical steps.

But listening to the simplistic choices the characters asked and then immediately answered (“Is it the green one? Or the red one? It's the green one!”) I began hearing the cadences and stilted nature of politico-speak in their phrasing, and also in the limited palette of answers necessitated by the way the questions are put.

Rudy Guiliani with his 9/11 Tourette's Syndrome: “On 9/11, I personally 9/11'ed, and then freedom flag America 9/11 this great country 9/11.”

Hilary Clinton with the most stiff, awkward delivery style since, well, the last two serious Democratic candidates: “I am leader. I lead. In the Senate, I led. I will lead. Experience. Leader. One who will lead.”

Mike Huckabee's rote bible-thumping: “Jesus, yes. Dinosaurs, no. God—good. Me, like God. Me, God. Like you. Jesus. Worship. Values.”

These people, like Dora and Diego, don't really speak in complete thoughts at all. They repeat words and phrases that are meant to reinforce the words and phrases they've already spoken, planting not-at-all subliminal benchmarks that we are meant to latch onto without benefit of our critical minds. We are supposed to associate them with certain images, and they hope that these images will evoke certain feelings in us.

In a way, we're being trained. Trained to hit the right button, pull the right lever, picture the right image as we cast our vote for a candidate the reality of whom has little to do with those images.

Again, for a 3 year old, that might be fine, and even productive. For adults meant to
critically assess the relative views and potential for leadership that candidates may possess, it's ridiculous. But this is the only “dialogue” available to us as we approach the brutal stretch of primaries that will determine who will become our next leader.
We the public are not without blame, of course. Simple equals good. Us no like think too hard.

But the press and the candidates themselves are culpable in a much more concrete way, as both groups prefer to couch everything in a simple, yet dramatic framework that lends itself to endless speculation without any critical look at the underlying issues that are really important.

Speculation about pantsuits, haircuts and divorces.

At least Dora and Diego eventually get to where they're going. For us, I'm afraid we're already there. Welcome to modern politics, “Access Hollywood” style.

creation museum

okay, you gotta see this. The article is from the Beast, aka Buffalo Beast. This guy went on a road trip to the creation museum in northern kentucky, under the guise of Dougie, a special guy who writes for an equally special newspaper, The Special Times. And Dougie, aka Ian Murphy, played the whole thing in character, as a drooling, special needs reporter who loves dinosaurs and jesus equally.

after obtaining press credentials for their fictional paper, the reporter and his team descended on the unsuspecting creationists:

"The event we were covering was a quick shot across the Kentucky state line, the grand unveiling of a 60,000 square foot bellwether of our culture’s sheepish intellectually depravity: The Creation Museum. The poured concrete brainchild of Ken Ham, world-renowned creationist douche and president of the Christian apologetics ministry “Answers in Genesis,” this “museum” aims to depict biblical narrative as historic reality. 27 million donated dollars worth of animatronic dinosaurs and humans palling around in the Garden of Eden—madness."

Dougie even got to interview head creationist loon Ken Ham:

'The interview was going well. Ham was spouting nonsensical creationist rhetoric, and I was in full-blown retard mode. We were like long lost twins. He continued averting his gaze, however. My assumed detriments reminded him of man’s fall from grace. It was time to test this man of God.

“What about car-bon dating?” I asked.

Ham shot Bunting an icy stare, as if accusing him of corrupting my impressionable mind with science—or was it worse? Did he know? Was a half-wit’s mention of a scientific dating method too unbelievable, even for someone willing to swallow Genesis in its entirety? Bunting spun around to compose himself and suppress an impending fit of laughter. The cameraman disappeared.'

read it and laugh. lots.

###

writer's strike

here's my column from last week. hopefully this week's will be up on the FCN site shortly.

CARPE DIEM 12-29

It’s a hard lesson that has been learned ad nauseum over the years in any number of “negotiations:” in order to get someone to do what you want them to do, hit ‘em where it hurts. Historically, it’s usually been the people with the deep pockets who are able to pull this off.

But the striking Writer’s Guild of America has taken the lesson to heart, and despite being out of work for the past seven weeks, has declined to issue a waiver for its members to work on either of the year’s two biggest awards shows. They have also denied a request for free use of film clips from movies and past awards shows on which Guild members worked.

As of now, the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes will go on in some form, according to organizers. But without the support of professional writers and Hollywood glitterati sympathetic to their cause, it remains to be seen what sort of presentations the studios and their self-congratulatory awards shows will be able to pull off. What the waiver denial means in real terms is that there will be no scripted monologues or presentations at either show—at least none written by Guild writers. It also means that the star power of each show will be severely dimmed.

For instance, prior to the strike Jon Stewart had been tapped to host the Oscars again. But given his sympathy for the striking writers, it’s unlikely that he would cross picket lines to host a show that is essentially a four-hour advertisement for movies that will put more money in the already overstuffed pockets of the heads of Hollywood’s major studios. And if Stewart somehow did end up crossing the picket lines and hosting, as a Writer’s Guild member he would be prohibited from writing--even for himself. He’s but one of a long list of front-of-camera talent that has shown strong support for the writers’ strike, as has the actor’s union itself, the Screen Actor’s Guild.

Needless to say, the spectacle of A-list actors crossing picket lines to attend the shows would not escape notice in the bitchy little fishbowl of Hollywood.

But the duration of the strike and intransigence of the studios and networks to even negotiate in good faith with the scribes who generate all that money is making some people antsy. Late night hosts Jimmy Kimmel, Conan O’Brien and Jay Leno announced last week that they would be returning to air on January 2—without writers. As Guild members, the hosts are forbidden from writing monologues for themselves, but can talk off-the-cuff and conduct interviews with celebrities. Stewart and Stephen Colbert followed suit shortly thereafter, announcing that writerless shows would begin airing on January 7.

But all the talk show hosts expressed a certain amount of distaste for the arrangement, despite being able to circumvent the Guild’s rules. With their shows dark for the past seven weeks without writers, the three aforementioned hosts have no doubt been under tremendous pressure from the networks to put SOMETHING on the air to fill that pesky space between commercials. They have also watched as their non-writing staff was laid off. According to several reports, the hosts themselves picked up the tab for their crews’ salaries in the interim. That’s a reported staff of 100 for Leno and 80 for O’Brien who have been without work as an indirect result of the strike.

It remains to be seen if the writers’ refusal to participate in Hollywood’s big annual moment of auto-fellation will get the studios to return to the bargaining table. For now, the shows will go on, somehow. And although you can expect your talk shows to come back, don’t expect miracles from the hosts, most of whom regularly employ writing staffs of 20 or more.

Perhaps Stewart and Colbert put it best in their joint press release acknowledging their decision to return to the airwaves:

“We would like to return to work with our writers. If we cannot, we would like to express our ambivalence, but without our writers we are unable to express something as nuanced as ambivalence.”

(For an overview of the issues involved in the strike, go here, or go to the writers blog about the strike here. Wikipedia also has an exhaustive breakdown of the strike issues.)

Happy War on Christmas, everyone.

###

dreams

hiya. here's a dream and some thoughts from last night/this morning.

1.04.07

a short and quirky dream I had just before waking: my friend L is at her job, but it’s not the shop where she actually works. It’s some converted older house, with a screened-in porch and broad old fashioned stairs that lead to a gallery on the second floor.

She is sitting at a table on the ground floor, with a newspaper spread open and scattered all over the table, as if she has read it several times already. On top of it, she has a roll of Lifesavers, the minty kind, out of the package and she is examining each of them one at a time, and explains to me in great detail the intricate differences between each one, and how one should go about eating them.

“I haven’t had any work to do for hours,” she said, “so I’ve been going over these. See, this one has a slight crack on the top edge...” -- how she could tell the top edge from the bottom edge, or any other edge for that matter escaped me -- “...so when you bite it, it will crack along there. Then there’s these two, which are stuck together, and that’s a bonus, but also very unpredictable. You never know what will happen.”

Not much happened after that.

***

I worry about copyright infringement in my dreams.
I worry that I might get sued for the images I dredge up.

No, but it is interesting and notable that when I do dream these days, the heavy, almost panicked sense of being lost, or more accurately of needing to find a place that I fear I can’t get to is essentially gone. This has been true for some time now. When I find myself in situations that are bizarre, and in which I sense that I am indeed meant to be somewhere else that is inaccessible, I sort of have a sense of just going with it, rather than a loss of control, and desperation to regain it.

I don’t know if this change correlates to quitting the restaurant or not, or if I consciously feel better about where I am in life during my waking hours, but it’s been pretty consistently that way for a while.

Come to think of it, houses and buildings always seem to figure into my dreams, almost as if they are silent characters waiting to be discovered, or with whom I must communicate on some other level. There is the older, wooden-floored house of the above dream, there is the decrepit factory of the “blocked passageway” type of dream, and I‘ve had a few involving a large, almost communal type of house, one where dozens of people live, or at least stay from time to time, passing through. A sense of family, but an extended one.

Ah, fuck it. I’m probably just insane.

***

AH! Now it’s come back to me, the other dream that occurred around the same time as the Lifesaver dream: I am in Florida, I guess, at a Magic Kingdom type of place. There is a new, much-anticipated display/ride/event about to be unveiled. As we approach (I have no idea who I am with, but I know them, in the sense of when you go to a concert with a bunch of friends of friends that you don’t really know, but who you shared a ride with) we can see that the thing we’re about to see is a long series of huge iron buildings, a la the Eiffel Tower, strung together in a line. They are somehow suspended above everything else, and there is a series of stairs leading up to the display.

This is a hot ticket, lots of people milling around, and I ask the guy walking next to me where we go to buy tickets as we mount the stairs. He says, “tickets? We don’t need tickets--I’m press.” And he flashes me his press pass, and I also notice his cameras strung around his neck. I say something clever like, “Oh, I love having press passes! I also get to--” and he kind of tolerates me but doesn’t really acknowledge what I’m saying, as we are now approaching the press area.

It is a screened-in porch, with astroturf carpeting, plastic lawn chairs and shitty little tables, all occupied by fat and cynical looking older people. My photog friend manages to squeeze into a single chair along one wall, crammed in with a bunch of other attendees. I try to do the same but there is no room. So I cross over to the far side of the room, looking for a chair I can grab, weaving between these people as best I can, though it is a tight fit. I reach the far side of the room and grab a chair, and make my way back.

But when I go to set it up, it turns out the chair is some terribly convoluted, arcane thing involving strange, origami-like foldings and unfoldings, and I quickly give up and instead sit in a shitty, broken lawn chair listing to one side that was already there. The long bridge of iron buildings is now being lit up by fireworks and a light display, but you can hardly see anything from the angle of the room we’re in. the other press people don’t seem to care--too cynical I guess.

But I want to see more, and I get up from my sunken, broken chair and lean in closer to a window across someone’s table, wondering if there is a place one can stand outside on the walkway to get a better view.

As I rise, I realize I am naked, of course. And an older lady with great huge Jackie-O sunglasses and a jet-black bouffant hairdo notices and points and twitters. I am not really struck by any kind of modesty, however, and decide to just waggle it at her in a playful way. I am feeling quite comfortable being naked. Her entire table laughs good-naturedly, and someone tries to aim a camera at my junk and take a picture. Just as the flash goes off, my hand covers the essentials. We all share a good laugh. Then I’m with L examining Lifesavers.

But I think I’m dressed. Hmm.

***