"It's a Wonderful Proof of Life"

copyright 2010 C. G. Wagner

Sometimes I wish we lived in an age where I could commission a poet to describe what I've seen or experienced. (For instance, what about that one songbird that has claimed the uppermost branch of a tree on my street and cheers me every morning? I can't make out what he is, his colors darkened against the morning East.)

But that would be like hiring a stunt double for my soul.

Anyway, I probably don't want anyone, poet or psychoanalyst, peering into the mind behind the visions and the dreams. A screenwriter might be good, though.

The dreams that I remember, though the imagery evaporates quickly into shadows with my morning songbird, are often intensely action-filled, like "24," and strangely magical. It's as though I'd conjured a perfect mashup, with Russell Crowe's character "Terry" in Proof of Life cast as "Clarence" the angel in It's a Wonderful Life.

And my dreams are often populated by strangers. Who was the baby sister that "Terry" and I were trying to protect from the cartel in my dream last night? I don't have a baby sister. Could it have been Angelea from America's Next Top Model or that pill-popping former Miss USA who was on the Oprah show that repeated last night before I finally went to sleep? And could the villainous head of the cartel, operating from a high-tech brothel/carnival funhouse, have been Mr. Trump?

The random visions and ideas we are exposed to during the day try to organize themselves somehow into a narrative at night. It means nothing, really. So I'll just pass the nighttime popcorn and enjoy the "Wonderful Proof of Life."

love, hosaa
dreaming again

Speaking of mashups, for your entertainment... The Right Sh-Stuff:

Lost, or Losing It

I can get lost in an elevator, but usually I just get lost in thought. So today I simply sip an orange soda in homage to the mighty Waponi Wu.

George Benson, and the Memories Ensue

What do you want from a career artist? Familiarity and freshness. George Benson is all that and more. He reminds me why I love live music, because he loves it.

At the Kennedy Center's acoustically (if not visually) stunning Concert Hall, GB arrived in support of his latest album, Songs and Stories. He had plenty of songs in the 100-minute set, but not too many stories. One was about one of his first visits to D.C. in the spring of 1976, just a week before he would release his new album, Breezin'. During a radio interview, the DJ persuaded him to give a taste of the new release, so he played a bit of the title number. The phone lines in the studio began to light up, GB recalled. Encouraged by the reception, he played another, a tune called This Masquerade. And all the phones in the building lit up.

I don't remember exactly when I first heard George Benson, but it couldn't have been too long after the release of Breezin'. Did I hear it on the radio? Most likely. I know I wouldn't have heard it from my college classmates' stereos. Do you remember the spring of 1976? That was the year Bruce Springsteen burst onto the scene. And he played Grinnell. How the hell did I hear of George Benson?!

But I did. At least one other person at Grinnell did too. Ah, Scott: the only would-be boyfriend I ever actually had an "our song" for. Too bad the relationship didn't get that far, though. Every time I hear This Masquerade, I think of Scott, just out of habit. Cut to 2010, and old is young again, but wiser. The melancholy, the frustration are still there, but the misconnections talked about in the song are now tinged with the reflection that missed connections may never reconnect.

GB saved On Broadway for the encore. (Movie fans may remember it as the number to which the cattle-call dance auditions are held at the beginning of All That Jazz.) Familiar, but fresh and with a mature grittiness. He gleefully growled out the line, 'cause I can play this here guitar... and the crowd roared its approval. Throw in an epically insane drum solo, and it's like you've never heard the song before. And that's how he handled all the familiar numbers, both his and the covers.

I couldn't help but wonder how a career artist keeps playing this here guitar for 35 or 40 or more years. I think it's that he keeps growing by staying open to influences. Irish? He made his guitar cry like a bagpipe, then launched into a jazzy Danny Boy. French Caribbean accents also penetrated the jazz of the night. He took Moody's Mood to giddy new heights. And from the new CD, he performed a cover by an artist he admires, James Taylor: Don't Let Me Be Lonely Tonight.

But in the end, the sound was always recognizably, reassuringly George Benson. The Benson sound is as distinct in its own way as the Glenn Miller sound was in its time. Familiar, fresh, and new again in the shared experience of a crowd who came to remember and rejoice.

Futuring The Futurist

A friend asked whether the magazine I work for, The Futurist, would be going all digital soon, as so many publications seem to be doing.

At The Futurist, we've talked about the magazine going digital (I talked about it 10 years ago, but there was no technology for it). Right now, I'm still not satisfied with the technology, though I haven't seen it on the devices they're designed for (Kindle, Nook, iPad, whatever).

The e-magazine displays I've tried to view on my desktop or laptop are just horrible. I have to zoom in to read anything, and then I can't navigate the pages. Just yesterday I tried to read the Washington Examiner's supplement about the Cherry Blossom Festival and couldn't find the event listings. The pages were pretty but unreadable. That would never work for our magazine.

Also, what about readers who like print or can't use the latest technologies? Even our e-mailed newsletter, Futurist Update, is output in text rather than html in order to be accessible to the lowest-common-denominator technology.

So there you have it - why The Futurist isn't very futuristic. We also don't have the money to do a big risky technology switchover while the formats and platforms are still shaking out. Donations are desperately needed right now. (Here's a scoop: Our landlord is gently suggesting we move into a smaller suite. Like, within the next few months.)

Much Futurist content is already available on our Web site; when we switch over to the new (Drupal-powered) site, all content and archives will be available to members. We think this will enhance the value of WFS membership and thus increase membership, which will help support our products and services. That's the plan.

I've said before, and I'll say again: Don't mistake the container for the thing contained. We are a very tiny nonprofit association that specializes in content: information, ideas. It's what we do. It's what our members value. The container, be it a print magazine or a conference or a Web site, has to meet the needs of the largest number content users. Improving the container takes more time and resources than we've been able to devote.

And as I've said, donations (and knowledgeable volunteers) are always welcome. If anyone wants to donate free Kindles (or whatever the technology of choice might turn out to be for future magazines) to ALL of our members, I think I can say we'd be fine with that too! :)

love, hosaa
working on another d**n Saturday morning

P.S., the opinions expressed above are, of course, strictly my own.

Sunday and the 70s O's

A lovely morning to spend procrastinating with the newspaper. I'll get to taxes this afternoon.

First, there was an excellent article in the Washington Post on the impacts of the recession and other budget cuts on modern dance choreography by their staff dance writer, Sarah Kaufman: "Assessing the Future of Modern Dance" (in connection with which I will simply point out how great it is that the Post still has a resident dance writer).

When society tightens its belt, the arts are often the first "luxury" item removed from from public budgets, the ripple effects can be wide-reaching and long-lasting. But Ms. Kaufman does a better job of outlining these effects. Go read.

There was also a piece by columnist Hank Stuever on the comeback of music videos as media for promoting music: "The Vids Are Right." I will confess, however, that this is an art form that only interests me insofar as the next Clay Aiken CD, "Tried and True," which will be released June 1.

But the story that caught my eye and broke my heart was the obituary for legendary Baltimore Orioles pitcher Mike Cuellar. As I learned from the obit, the southpaw Cuellar, he of the unbelievably torqued windup for his crazy screwball pitches, was the first Latino to win the Cy Young Award, sharing the honor in 1969 with Detroit legend Denny McLain. Cuellar was one of the four titans of Orioles pitching in the '70s, along with Dave McNally, Pat Dobson, and that lanky blue-eyed dreamboat, Jim Palmer.

One of the inconsolably unforgivable things my mother did was toss out my Orioles memorabilia from that era (I'm thinking 1971-1973), among which was a small poster print of the Norman Rockwell painting of Brooks Robinson signing autographs. I might have had that autographed, I'm not sure. I was about 14 at the time and a little unclear on this whole autographing business. I did get the signatures of several O's stars on pages of a simple unlined writing pad that my mom happened to have with her.

Imagine if you will a Sunday afternoon in the bright breezy summer, Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. The O's were on top (despite their '69 Series loss to the Miracle Mets - I was the only one in my class who was rooting for the heavily favored O's). After my dad had done his duty by explaining baseball to me while we watched the snowy black-and-white images on the TV in his bedroom, my mom carried on the daughterly indulgence by driving us over to Baltimore for our first game. It was to become one of my favorite mother-daughter traditions for a couple of summers.

There is no feeling like that of peering through the tunnel from the concourse of a cool, concrete, parking lot of a stadium and seeing your first glimpse of a bright green field and pure white pillows of base pads glowing in the high overhead beams of sunshine, and of hearing the cracks of bats during the batting practice and the heavy, musty "poofs" of balls caught in tough but softly seasoned leather gloves.

And then there were men. Men! Grown-up adult men who were not fathers, uncles, teachers, preachers, or even (blech) big brothers. Baseball players in bright white uniforms, stretching their masculinity out for all God's glory. Ah, to the adolescent female heart it was all so perfect and splendidly tempting.

We got great seats at the box office - about a dozen rows up behind the third-base dugout and the home team of shining knights. We saw that several players were leaning up over the dugout and taking items from the fans to sign. So Mom dug around in her purse and retrieved the writing pad and gave it to me with a ball-point pen. I raced down to the MEN!

And somehow I was surprised that they paid attention to me. Mom later said she wasn't surprised a bit, as she watched pitcher Dobson, in particular, hone in on the willowy blonde youth heading down the aisle toward the dugout. Hee!

I remember collecting the autographs of good-hearted first baseman Boog Powell and the mischievously gleaming-eyed hurler Dobson. The one I remembered most was the wiry, quiet shortstop, Mark Belanger, who, as I reported to my mother, had beautiful long black eyelashes.

Ah, Belanger, my first sports crush. Oh what it did to me to watch him warm up at the plate while the pitcher was deciding how to play him. Slim hips stretch to the left, stretch to the right, square off, swirl the bat, tighten the butt, then swing away. And I must say, the third base side offered a very good view of the right-handed hitters.

The afternoon was a good one for Palmer; he not only threw a great game, but also had a homerun. (This episode obviously predates the designated hitter era.) As much as my mom teased me about loving Belanger's hips and eyelashes, I knew Palmer's piercing blue eyes had an equal effect on her.

So I remember and pay tribute to Cuellar as a man among the Men of baseball, whose outings I recall mainly from the snowy black-and-white screen of my dad's put-together-from-parts TV, but also from the treasured senses of a few warm days in the fields of young girl's dreams.

love, hosaa,
daydreaming of the tight, impossibly torqued spine of a bedeviling left-handed screwballer

"From Orchids to Octopi"

Okay, a play commissioned by NIH and performed before an auditorium of scientists doesn't set one's aesthetic expectations very high, but "From Orchids to Octopi: An Evolutionary Love Story" was inspired.

Performed at my beloved, beleaguered Art Deco landmark, The Bethesda Theatre (whose official Web site is apparently down right now), the play is in the late stages of early development (evolution!) before moving on to Boston. I didn't stay for the post-play discussion, though I probably could have benefited from it. I got most of the science content of the play, but not all. (But hey, I noticed I was the only one who laughed at the one line from "The Wizard of Oz" during one of the dream sequences - "People come and go so quickly here....")

Since the play was commissioned to celebrate the bicentennial (last year) of the birth of Charles Darwin, it's logical to include Darwin as a character in the play. What we see are two couples - Charles and Emma Darwin - and their modern parallel, the twenty-first-century Emma and Charlie, illustrating the evolution of relationships and love into a society of career conflicts and the demands and fears of bringing a new baby into the world.

21C Emma (played by Kortney Adams) is a painter commissioned to paint a mural honoring Darwin, so she throws herself into researching Darwinian theory and Darwin's life. Her impulse is first to find a design principle, but she is frustrated and confused by her dreams of the carnival freak-show that shows life and change as a game of chance.

Domestic scenes with the nineteenth-century Darwins (Wesley Savick and Debra Wise) entertwine and echo with those of 21C Charlie (Tom O'Keefe), an entrepreneurial chef, and wife Emma. There are equal parts tension and tenderness, and a surprisingly sweet treatment of the question, Is love an evolutionary imperative for survival because of the helplessness of the human infant?

The dialogue is smart not just in the science content, but in its playfulness. Stand-out for me was O'Keefe's depiction of the nasty, beligerent tuberculosis, an ever-evolving supermicrobe who demanded to be included in the mural tribute to evolution. (It is the vile TB bug who takes the life of 19C Darwins' young daughter Annie, played fetchingly by Kira McElhiney.)

The ideas bound across disciplines - not just the sciences, but also language and the arts, incorporating even what I will generously call "dance," though it is more accurately stage movement (the lithe and lovely Adams emulating the first species to grow a neck and stretch itself out to a form that is adaptable to new environments).

The set pieces comprised seven tall, multi-paneled columns that the actors switched around to create parlors, doctors' offices, freak-show attractions, scientific displays, and - evolving throughout the play - the beautiful mural of which Darwin himself becomes the centerpiece, integrated into the Tree of Life.

In the end, it is neither design nor chance that defines us, but inspiration.

Other Credits
Playwright: Melinda Lopez
Director: Diego Arciniegas
Set/Puppet Designer: David Fichter (Puppets? Didn't I mention the giraffe?!)

For more information about "From Orchids to Octopi: An Evolutionary Love Story," visit http://www.undergroundrailwaytheater.org/ or Central Square Theater.

Asher Lev, "Observant Jew"

Back from seeing the dramatization of Chaim Potok's novel, My Name Is Asher Lev, at the Round House Theatre in Bethesda. [N.B.: spoiler alert]

Round House's productions this season have touched a great deal on artists, the meaning of art, and the role that art and artists play in our lives. Just as in Permanent Collection, their previous production, "Asher Lev" deals with conflicting ideas about art.

"Asher" is the epitome of artistic and personal questioning. What does it mean to declare "My name is..." and to whom are you declaring it? We come to question who we are as we look in the mirror to study our own images, and we wonder what it is that we can express to the world through our own perceptions of ourselves--and the world.

Asher (played by Alexander Strain) stands between two worlds; as an "observant Jew" he must honor his heritage, his mysterious but palpable ancestors, as well as his parents and their ethic of devotion and duty to their people. But as an observant artist, he must reach beyond that experience to find his own truth. That Asher begins to explore the sensibilities and imagery of the Other--particularly the image of crucifixions pervading Christian art--horrifies and offends his parents just as much as his drawings of nudes do.

In one scene between Asher and his father (played by Adam Heller), Asher tries to explain the difference between "naked girls" and "nudes." The discussion pulls up short of comic absurdity, just at the point where Asher's father, hailing his own master's degree in political science, matches Asher intellectually: the son accuses the father of aesthetic blindness, and the father accuses the son of moral blindness.

The bridge I see between those blindnesses is the nude itself, so well presented by the same actress playing Asher's mother (Lise Bruneau). It is through our bodies that we sense the world, feel our emotions, express our feelings. Asher the artist sees the nude and begins to see, to feel, the emotions of woman; likewise, his exposure to Christian imagery of sacrifice (the crucifixions he studies) informs his understanding of his mother's suffering.

The pivotal image in the play is one we do not see except through Asher's vivid narration and the stunningly effective lighting design's (Dan Covey) sculptural renderings of the actors. Asher's masterpiece paintings to be displayed in a Manhattan gallery, unbeknownst to his Brooklyn parents, depict his Jewish mother on a cross; the audience sees only Asher's parents' horrified response to the paintings as the mother raises her arms and twists her body in a silhouetted reflection of what she sees.

Asher Lev narrates the story throughout the play, facing the audience more than his fellow characters; this bothered me at the beginning because of our old creative-writing-class dictum, "show don't tell." Yet, as an adaptation of a novel told in the first person, the play honors the ancient art of story telling. It is Asher's story, after all. And the staging kept the narration moving.

The actor playing Asher's father also plays his mentor, the father's antithesis, paralleling the opposites-casting of the same actress playing Asher's mother and nude model. (The roles are listed in the program simply as "Man" and "Woman.") The actors thus become our bridges of understanding the two moral worlds, illustrating that it is never so simple as good versus evil.

And that is what art does. We feel the world and express it through our bodies and souls. But we cannot afford to simply be observant Jews; we must also be listening Jews (and gentiles and all else).

The Thursday night preview audience, traditionally a sparse and low-key group, gave the performance a standing ovation. My neighboring fellow subscriber said it was the best thing she'd seen at Round House. I would certainly put it up there with "Drawer Boy" and "Lord of the Flies," two of my favorites since the company moved to Bethesda. I thought I might dig out the book again (it's been on my own shelf since I retrieved it from my mom's collection nearly 30 years ago), but I think I want to let this moving rendition live with me awhile longer.

Other credits:
Aaron Posner, playwright
Jeremy Skidmore, director
Tony Cisek, scenic designer
Ren Ladassor, costume designer
Matthew M. Nielson, sound designer
Co-produced by the Delaware Theatre Company

Addendum: 27 March 2010
A little disappointed that the Post couldn't send a staff theater critic and didn't run a review until the weekend. Round House Theater reviews typically come out on Wednesday (Thursday at the latest). This is Saturday, when people have already made their plans for the weekend. Oh well. There's still time. Go see this play!

Washington Post review by a freelancer: Nelson Pressley reviews 'My Name Is Asher Lev' at Round House Theatre



(production photo by Matt Urban)

Video preview (on WaPo - embedding seems not to work for me)