Author: David Gorsline

236 words

Theodor Geisel built The Cat in the Hat from a word list for 6- and 7-year-olds, as Lynn Neary reports. The book is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and it’s Dr. Seuss’s birthday too.

“Seuss was used to inventing words when he needed them, so to stick to a word list was a huge challenge for him,” [Philip] Nel [author of The Annotated Cat] says. “And, in fact, his favorite story about the creation of The Cat in the Hat is that it was born out of his frustration with the word list. He said he would come up with an idea, but then he would have no way to express that idea. So he said…: ‘I read the list three times and almost went out of my head. I said I’ll read it once more and if I can find two words that rhyme, that will be my book. I found cat and hat and I said the title will be The Cat in the Hat.'”

Kubrick with a large-format camera

Arthur Lubow submits an instructive profile of aptly-named photographer Jeff Wall, whose lightbox-mounted transparencies are measured in feet, not inches.

Men Waiting, with its cast of 20, its two-week shoot and its on-the-street location, is a small-scale Wall production. Not long before, the artist devoted a full year to In front of a nightclub — a picture of young people standing outside a Vancouver club at night. The shoot took so long because the club Wall found, on a heavily trafficked thoroughfare, could not be photographed as he wished. There was no place for him to stand with his tripod and large-format camera. So he had the club exterior — the columns and grille-work of the facade, the gum-spotted sidewalk, the concrete curb — reconstructed in a studio. One assistant worked for six months dressing the set. “Of course, you can’t see everything he did, but that doesn’t matter,” Wall says. “There is dirt and moss growing in the cracks where the bottom of the building is crumbling, but you can’t see it. The discoloration of the sidewalk is extremely accurate, and it took many layers of application. My son and his friends came and chewed gum. That was their job for two weeks.” He placed his strobes in the precise locations occupied by the street lamps and other lights that shine opposite the real nightclub. Concealed in a van with blacked-out windows, he and his assistants parked outside the actual club on several nights and, using a telephoto lens, took 300 or 400 snapshots of the kids gathered there. Wall scrutinized the photos for characters and clusterings he liked, then he hired 40 extras from a casting agency. Dividing them into two groups and giving them general directions, he photographed them over the course of a month on alternate nights. (“People’s metabolism is different at night, their coloring is different,” he explains.) For each group he finished with only one frame that satisfied him. “You only need one,” he points out. Using digital technology, he combined the two photos of the crowd with a third one of the building into his final picture.

Who’s to say?

When I first read about Gordon Bell’s MyLifeBits project (warning: annoying animation on the front page), I was more than a little torqued.

MyLifeBits is a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks. There are two parts to MyLifeBits: an experiment in lifetime storage, and a software research effort.

The experiment: Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime’s worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, IM transcripts, television, and radio.

And when I read an article by Bell and Jim Gemmell in the current Scientific American, I got spun up again (warning: Sci Am links rot quickly). Come on, already: the digitialization of “everything”? How reductionist, how naive.

Bell seems to think that only those items that are convenient to archive are worth archiving. That is, word-oriented documents, and a scanty bit of audio and video. There’s a look-Mom calculation that demonstrates that 60 years worth of accumulation can fit comfortably in a terabyte of storage, and yet this calculation doesn’t provide for any storage of feature-length movies, and for only one MP3 per day.

Bell doesn’t just short-change the other senses, he ignores them entirely. He’s not interested in capturing the smell of just-baked chocolate chip cookies, or of the artificial fog from a Rosco machine, or of an ailanthus tree. He’s not interested in capturing the feel of your cat’s fur, or pine bark, or a hot shower after a morning’s exercise. He’s not interested in capturing the taste of wedding cake, or of a good zinfandel recommended by your cousin from California, or of blood, sweat, or tears.

And for those of us seeking to emulate Bell, it helps to retain a personal assistant; in Bell’s case, the digitizing of past records was accomplished by “several years” of work by hired help.

The Bell and Gemmell article brushes off privacy and security issues with some hand-waving. And yet… and yet… when I read Emily Nussbaum’s story (via Arts & Letters Daily) about the embrace by the under-30 crowd of all things social online, about the “let it all hang out” attitude of high-schoolers, I begin to wonder whether Bell isn’t a visionary just a little ahead of his time. From the Nussbaum piece:

THEY HAVE ARCHIVED THEIR ADOLESCENCE

I remember very little from junior-high school and high school, and I’ve always believed that was probably a good thing. Caitlin Oppermann, 17, has spent her adolescence making sure this doesn’t happen to her. At 12, she was blogging; at 14, she was snapping digital photos; at 15, she edited a documentary about her school marching band. But right now the high-school senior is most excited about her first “serious project,” caitlinoppermann.com. On it, she lists her e-mail and AIM accounts, complains about the school’s Web censors, and links to photos and videos. There’s nothing racy, but it’s the type of information overload that tends to terrify parents. Oppermann’s are supportive: “They know me and they know I’m not careless with the power I have on the Internet.”

As we talk, I peer into Oppermann’s bedroom. I’m at a café in the West Village, and Oppermann is in Kansas City—just like those Ugg girls, who might, for all I know, be linked to her somehow. And as we talk via iChat, her face floats in the corner of my screen, blonde and deadpan. By swiveling her Webcam, she gives me a tour: her walls, each painted a different color of pink; storage lockers; a subway map from last summer, when she came to Manhattan for a Parsons design fellowship. On one wall, I recognize a peace banner I’ve seen in one of her videos.

I ask her about that Xanga, the blog she kept when she was 12. Did she delete it?

“It’s still out there!” she says. “Xanga, a Blogger, a Facebook, my Flickr account, my Vimeo account. Basically, what I do is sign up for everything. I kind of weed out what I like.”

Maybe it’s true, maybe each one of us is nothing more than a list of our favorite movies and a blogroll. Jeez, I hope not.

Superstar

Via The Morning News, an upload of Todd Haynes’s notorious Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. The video is a little artifacty and it’s of the expected dubious provenance. But the 43-minute film, which tells the story of 1970s soft rock chanteuse Karen Carpenter’s demise due to anorexia-related issues, and which uses Barbie dolls for actors, is not bad—and at times, rather good. And dang, the woman could sing.

Getting work

Via kottke.org, Jenna Fischer explains her way of success in TV comedy (and plugs NBC’s The Office, gently):

So, how did I get The Office? … I developed a relationship with [Allison Jones, casting director] — not because I met her at a party and we “schmoozed,” but because I had proven to her over the course of many years that I was a reliable and serious actor capable of providing a consistent body of work.

Works that way in the amateur ranks, too.

On difficulty

A post at Via Negativa on John Ashbery and other things points to one by Reginald Shepherd on the degrees of difficulty in poetry, and a lot of the post works for other art forms as well.

Semantic difficulty can in turn be broken down into difficulty of explication and difficulty of interpretation. Some poems present both kinds of difficulty, some only one or the other. In the case of explicative difficulty, the reader cannot decipher the literal sense of the poem: “What is this poem saying?” One encounters this in Hart Crane’s “At Melville’s Tomb,” and he wrote an extensive explication of the poem for Harriet Monroe, then editor of Poetry. In the case of interpretive difficulty, one grasps what is being said on the literal level, but doesn’t know what it means, what it is meant to do. John Ashbery’s poems, usually syntactically and explicationally clear, often present this interpretive difficulty. To say that one doesn’t know what a poem means, if one understands its literal sense, is to say that one doesn’t know why it’s saying what it’s saying. The reader asks, “Why am I being told/shown this?”

It is semantic difficulty which readers are usually experiencing when they say, “I don’t understand this poem.”

In theater, this translates to the comment one hears in the lobby at intermission, “I wish they would put something in the program to tell us what this play is about.” It’s perfectly clear what, say, Waiting for Godot is “about,” what the story is: two hoboes hanging out by a withered tree expecting to meet someone who doesn’t show up. But the bemused audience member wants to know why he’s being told this particular story. (Of course, my perennial frustration is with audience members who, when presented with the fence of a difficult play, balk and refuse to jump it, even with the carrot of a program note suggesting an interpretation.)

And as well:

Formal difficulty is a particular case of what George Steiner, cited by Shetley, calls modal difficulty…. In the case of modal difficulty, a reader asks, “What makes this a poem?”

Some of the experimental work of the 1960s might fall into this category.

Word list

A theater rehearsal, in terms of the words exchanged, is a collision of specialized vocabulary and jargon from several different disciplines; as collaborators, we may stumble towards some level of mutual comprehensibility, but some dark spots of incomprehension remain. Kevin, the full-time assistant technical director of theater where RCP perform, wasn’t familiar with one of the items on the list below, collected from several weeks of Seussical rehearsals.

dance belt
I once heard this expression as the punch line to a joke in The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940, and I didn’t get it. It describes a brief undergarment worn by men to avoid, um, VPLs and other mishaps under tights. A close synonym, as two or three of us muttered to Earle when the costumer explained that we would be required to supply our own, is “jockstrap.”
color note
As used by music director Matt when rehearsing “Biggest Blame Fool,” the note of a chord that provides the particular bluesy quality, and hence the one that he wanted to make sure was sung with a little more oomph.
smart casters
Wheels bolted into the base of a set piece that can either swivel or be locked into place. Dawn has designed and Steve built a couple of huge pieces for the back of the set that aren’t going anywhere without smart casters.
sitzprobe
One of the few terms of art in music not taken from Italian. Refers to the first rehearsal that brings together singers and the orchestra, generally with no other technical or acting elements involved.
Anatevka
Strictly speaking, an allusion rather than jargon, Anatevka is the Russian village that provides the setting for Fiddler on the Roof, home to oppressed Jews who struggle on gamely. And hence, per director Haley, the idea of the plaintive mood that we’re looking for in the second half of “Here on Who,” when the Whos (and the Grinch, for some reason) sing to Horton that war is coming and the truffula trees are all gone, and he is the only one who can help them.
l’istesso
Per my copy of Randel’s New Harvard Dictionary of Music, “The same tempo; hence, an indication that the tempo is to remain the same despite a change in meter and thus in the unit of metrical pulse.” Which doesn’t give me very much information that I can work with: I just latch on to whatever Matt and the band are playing and hang on.

Choreographer Heide has kept her vocabulary, both spoken and physical, simple, for which we non-dancers in the cast are grateful. But there will still be something interesting to watch.

Orson’s Shadow

This imagined reconstruction of the unlikely collaboration of Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier on a 1960 production of Rhinoceros amuses, but fails to excite. To be sure, two egos as large as those of Olivier and Welles have not collided on a Bethesda stage since Shakespeare, Moses, and Joe Papp several seasons ago, and two more colorfully neurotic artists in eclipse (Welles’s truimphant Citizen Kane already nearly two decades in the past, Olivier on the verge of dropping his second wife, the forlorn Vivien Leigh) would be hard to find. But how much spark can a play generate when its first act climax is a hiring decision?

Wilbur Edwin Henry is particularly effective at capturing the bear at bay that was Orson Welles at mid-career.

  • Orson’s Shadow, by Austin Pendleton, conceived by Judith Auberjonois, directed by Jerry Whiddon, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Maryland

Vigils

“Plants grow and die at the same time each year, and that makes them easier to love.” So says one character in Woolly’s current offering by Noah Haidle, a bittersweet fantasy about love, death, and letting go; the play’s theatrical construction has hints of Tony Kushner and Craig Wright.

Widow (all character names are anonymized to role names) has spent the last two years of her life mourning the death of her firefighter husband. Her clinging to the past takes on physical form, as she keeps his Soul (the surprising Michael Russotto) locked in a box at the foot of her bed. Widow (the always-strong Naomi Jacobson) and Soul replay and replay scenes from their less-than-happy life together—their marriage was forced by an unplanned pregnancy, which subsequently ended in a miscarriage— in sort of a Truly, Madly, Deeply meets Groundhog Day mashup. Unable to control their memories, Soul and WIdow replay scenes of pain more often than those of happiness, and although each would like to utter the words that would undo the pain, each scene repeats as in the past. Soul’s replays are carried out in part by Body (hunky Matthew Montelongo) because Soul is now blind, as he waits out the time on earth before Widow can release him to the afterlife. (The significance and theatrical effectiveness of Soul’s blindness is, unfortunately, lost on me.)

The three are almost overmatched by the perfect J. Fred Shiffman as the adenoidal Wooer, a fireman friend of the family. Shiffman’s Wooer is an amiable dork, awkward at small talk, who simply loves Widow and wants her to move on with her life.

Lest it be thought a heavy show, the play is still a comedy, and fantasy elements keep the mood light. A show-stopping set piece at a high school reunion calls for the four principals to line-dance to an old Britney Spears song, just because. Alas, the Foy flying apparatus for Soul and Widow, however effective, is still a bit obtrusive.

It’s an interesting twist that Wooer can interact, to a limited degree, with Soul. Haidle, young but already skilled in the art of putting a play together, says in a playbill interview,

To write the things I am trying to write, you have to establish the rules very quickly and the audience will give you their time. They’ll go with you for about eight minutes. And in those eight minutes you can do anything, but you have to show them that they’re in a world that has rules. You establish those rules, and most importantly I think, and I don’t know how you do this, but I think you have to tell them when they get to go home.

  • Vigils, by Noah Haidle, directed by Colette Searls, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington