Help TJT and I spread the word!

Word-of-mouth, which is a basic, nurturing human activity, has always been the most effective way for TJT to “market” its work. Theatre – as opposed to entertainment products – depends on community. Conventional marketing methods methods, though we use them as much as we can afford to, have much less impact than having someone you trust share an exciting, moving or compelling experience with you.

More and more of us are recognizing that we must create alternatives to the consumption-driven, unsustainable culture of greed and isolation that gives rise to so much current suffering. The Group Theatre lived one of those alternative visions. Although it wasn’t able to maintain its original form for more than a few years, it was enough to change our culture. TJT’s work, most of it, anyway, arises from a similar vision. It tells us that the power to create isn’t owned by anyone.   We all have stories to tell and we don’t need the permission of producers, critics, media conglomerates or even large regional theatres to tell them.  Of all the stories we’ve told over the last thirty four years, none has seemed more timely, more necessary to tell as The Group Theatre’s story.

We can’t tell it without your help (sorry if that sounds like a pitch for donations – it’s not. At least not right now).  We have an intuition that the people who would understand, be moved and appreciate MAZE the most, don’t know we’re here. Whatever the reasons,  you, our community, have the power to change that.

Here's a sample email (with links).  You can copy, paste, customize and send to the people you want to come experience In the Maze of Our Own Lives, inspired by the Story of The Group Theatre.

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Dear _____________:


I recently saw a new play that you must see before it closes. It's called In the Maze of Our Own Lives and it's based on the story of the legendary Group Theatre who came together in the 1930s, during the worst of the Depression, and revolutionized American Theatre. Even if you're not familiar with the history, most of what you value in theatre and film can be traced to The Group Theatre's influence. The founders, who are characters in this absorbing play, included Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler and others, who, between them, taught and mentored Brando, Dean, Newman, Streep, Nicholson, Woodward and hundreds of others. Others went on to direct the premieres of major works by Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, William Saroyan and to produce iconic works like Porgy and Bess.


The play explores the stormy and creative relationships between Harold Clurman, Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, producer Cheryl Crawford and playwright Clifford Odets. Odets plays for the Group were the first in this country to give voice to America's poor, its working class and its growing Jewish and Italian immigrant populations.


Here's a link tom Brown Paper Tickets where you'll find everything you need to get tickets, directions, maps and schedules.


Click here for a five-minute long video on the creation of the work
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J-driie4-U

The play closes on November 13, 2011, so jump on this!


Sincerely,


[You]


FYI:


The buzz from audience members:

I saw "In the Maze of Our Lives " last week, and felt that I was actually a participant in a true and blood-passionate rendering of what that enormously generative , prismatic group must have been like… Corey Fischer has given us something real and rich; something to see and taste , to smack our lips and savor- Go and feel this wonderful piece of living theater! enthusiastically recommended!!

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The cast found that honest connection with each other that the Group Theatre must have had. I was captivated by their performance in a way that i have never been before. - D. L., Marin

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"I saw this play a few days ago and it is still resonating with me. I thought it was a thought-provoking , deeply felt work, not just about an important period in American theater, but also about the relationship of the artist to his time - how it shapes him or her, and how he or she can shape it, as well. The production was imaginatively staged, well acted, with some brilliant bits of dialogue and a nice mix of naturalistic and avant-garde theatrical technique. I recommend it, not just to anyone with an interest in American cultural history, but also to fans of well crafted, serious theater."  D .K.. San Francisco

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Sam Hurwitt, in the Marin IJ, wrote:

"In the Maze of Our Own Lives is an inspiring love letter to the act of making theater...Fischer's vibrant staging compellingly blends heightened theatricality and simple human behavior."

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In the SF Bay Guardian, Robert Avila wrote an advance article before the play opened

"A subject as grand and complex as the Group Theatre — which spawned many famous productions, plays, and artistic careers for stage and screen, influencing theater and film making, theater training, and American literature at large — would present any playwright with a supreme challenge. This first run-through was proof Fischer and his colleagues had captured a coherent narrative with several key, interlocking strands in two well-shaped acts together totaling not much more than two hours. Although Fischer would eventually cut another 25 pages from the script before rehearsals were over, the play and the staging — which uses an appealing mix of media, original music, and ensemble movement to create a delicate dialogue between one company and its historical subject — was coming across persuasively."

All photos above by Ken Friedman

Corey and "In the Maze..." in the media

Read Sam Hurwitt's review in the Marin IJ
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"In the Maze of Our Own Lives is an inspiring love letter to the act of making theater...Fischer's vibrant staging compellingly blends heightened theatricality and simple human behavior."
-from Sam Hurwitt's review.

From Left: David Mendelsohn as Lee Strasberg, Michael Navarra as Harold Clurman. Nancy Carlin as Cheryl Crawford, (background: Cassidy Brown as Morris Carnovsky and Joshua Roberts as Clifford Odets in In the Maze of Our Own Lives. Photo: Ken Friedman

Get Tickets. Blog readers, enter discount code ACT for $12 tickets for Friday-Sunday, 10/18-30
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Published 2011-10-01

Encore: Corey Fischer

by / Elana McKernan

Read the profile on Corey in Theatre Bay Area

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Listen to Corey on KPFA's Living Room with Kris Welch

My New Play (on The Group Theatre)

In the Maze of Our Own Lives, which I've written and directed, inspired by the story of The Group Theatre, opened on October 20, 2011 at TJT in San Francisco and will run until November 23. It’s the most ambitious project I’ve ever taken on, and, in many ways, is a culmination of my work up to now. It’s an offering that I want everyone I know to share.  

You can see the full schedule, get tickets and see a video we made last summer during a workshop for the play at Brown Paper Tickets

Robert Avila, one of the Bay Area's finest theatre critics and writers has just written a feature on the play for the SF Bay Guardian.

I co-founded TJT in 1978 when I was exactly thirty-three years old.  On my last birthday, I was sixty-six. For what amounts to half my life, I’ve been able to work within a single artistic home, something rare and wonderful in the world of  American theatre.

But all homes are temporary and TJT, that dream made real, is about to end – at least in its current form. Many of you have already heard this news and know why we’ve decided to close the company at the end of the 2012, thirty-fourth season.  If you haven’t, there’s a brief account on the TJT website, http://www.tjt-sf.org.

The founding members of The Group Theatre created  a community of trust that allowed them to “build a dream”  together and, from it, make a new kind of theatre – one that could shape a still-young, American culture. The plays they produced – particularly those by Group member Clifford Odets – became touchstones for generations of American writers: Arthur Miller, Alfred Kazin, Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, among others.

For me, the great discovery of my five years of research has been that the Group’s story is, perhaps, its greatest and most far-reaching gift to all of us who followed. As I came to know the landscape of that story, I recognized its contours in the turbulent history of all the American ensemble theatres whose work inspired TJT’s: The Living Theatre, The Open Theatre, The Free Southern Theatre, Bread and Puppet, Teatro Campesino, and more. I saw that before 1931, when Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, Cheryl Crawford and about twenty more young theatre-makers started the Group, there had been no ensemble theatre in this country.  I felt as though I had found my ancestors.

When my travels through the 1930s began, I had no idea that TJT was approaching its own end as an ensemble theatre or that In the Maze of Our Own Lives would launch its last season. Life, in all its brilliant, ironic and poignant artistry, has rhymed our story with the Group’s. There’s a hard-won wisdom embedded in that story: the closing of any single theatre is not, as Harold Clurman put it, a catastrophe.  So it is with TJT.  He continues to say that the real catastrophe would be the loss of the values, the impulses, the inspiration and the energy that gave rise to the Group, to the dream of a theatre that could be “a dwelling place for the whole family of decent humanity.”  

Neither did I have any idea, when I began work on this play, that  a new movement like  Occupy Wall Street and all the gatherings it has inspired around the world would be embodying so many of the same hopes for real democracy that motivated the Group. 

In the Maze of Our Own Lives is an offering to the ancestors and to the future. In 1978. Albert Greenberg, Naomi Newman and I made TJT’s first original piece of theatre, Coming from a Great Distance, the first piece of modern Jewish ensemble theatre in this country, as far as we know.  At the time, I knew almost nothing about the Group Theatre.  Much of what I’ve learned as we crossed the great distance from then to now is embedded in this play and this production. 

It is said that the last words of the legendary figure, the Baal Shem Tov, subject of TJT’s 1978 play, were, "I am going out one door, to come in through another." May this work be the “other” door through which the soul, spirit and story of The Group enters. In these times, we can’t live without it.

In the Maze of Our Own Lives would not exist without the enormous collective contribution of the cast, designers, musicians, staff, crew, our families and supporters of all sorts.

Maze card design by Julie Giles

Dance of Exile photo by Irene Young

In the Maze of Our Own Lives photos by Ken Friedman

Tell Congressional Republicans: Don't turn America into a deadbeat nation!

Tell Congressional Republicans: Don't turn America into a deadbeat nation!

David Mitchell: Hope and Genius

Most reviews of Cloud Atlas start by discussing David Mitchell’s dazzling narrative surprises, his “Russian-doll”-like use of nested or linked  stories that form a larger, over-arching, meta-narrative blah blah…Sorry, I don’t mean to get snarky and I’m really making fun of myself, since I say things like that all the time in all sincerity. But I think that this line of reflection misses Mitchell’s essential greatness which, imho, greatly transcends, though is certainly served by, his technical brilliance, namely, his profound engagement with that oldest of human stories: the struggle to free ourselves from the cruel, oppressive – and usually literal – enslavement to which we subject  our fellows and ourselves. 

In Cloud Atlas, he plays variations on this theme, first, in its mercantile and violently racist forms in the nineteenth century colonial South Pacific, and then through the corporate greed of the recent past and present, a hellish future bio-tech-enabled slave society,  an finally, and even further post-apocalyptic future where small communities try to protect the fragile remnants of human culture from stronger predatory tribes.

What amazes me is that I finished reading Cloud Atlas  feeling stirred, hopeful  and invigorated; not at all what the description of the content in the last paragraph might lead you to expect. But that’s Mitchell’s genius. His vision is so deep, so inclusive and his love of language and people so palpable that in his work, hope trumps despair, no matter how difficult the truth he tells may be.

His earlier novel, Ghostwritten, reads like an previous incarnation of Cloud Atlas.  Even though I read it after reading the later work, I found it compelling in its own right as I did Mitchell's recent, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which made its way onto the New York Times Bestseller List and a number of best of 2010 lists. It's a more formally contained work that stays in a single time and place for the most part. Given that they happen to be the port of Nagasaki in the late eighteenth century and that the central characters are a repressed Dutch clerk working for one of the world's first multinationals (the Dutch East India Company) and a beautiful and brilliant Japanese midwife disfigured from burn scars creates challenges of the kind that Mitchell seems to thrive on.  The Dutch merchants were more or less quarantined by the xenophobic Japanese of that imperial era to a tiny, artificial island in the Bay of Nagasaki and only permitted to set foot on mainland Japan by special permission. The  tension between two different peoples energizes Mitchell's story of the consequences of encountering an "other" with love or with fear, with curiosity or with a need to subdue.

I don’t believe that his work is all that “difficult” or “not for everyone”  any more or less than any other distinct piece of art, which is always subject to personal taste. But good storytelling is simply that. And if you hang in with Cloud Atlas. beyond the first two sections and begin to trust that Mitchell is not just messing with you (he isn’t!) the powerful current of his storytelling will carry you away

Bob Dylan's America: Forty-Eight Years later

In which my recent reading of  Bob Dylan in America by Sean Wilentz and listening to the new release of Dylan’s 1962-64  Witmark Demos  provoke further reflections on an American bard.

I’ve been listening to Bob Dylan since the night I first heard his voice in 1962. It didn’t sound like any voice I'd ever heard and it just about knocked me to the ground with its raw and undefended power. I was 17,  a high school senior living in the small Southern California resort town, Palm Springs, where I knew no one who shared my passion for the folk music that was being “revived” in big cities across the country.

I’d learned to play guitar during summers spent at an arts camp in the nearby San Jacinto Mountains where kids and adults could study visual arts, music, dance and theatre. It  was certainly ahead of its time: a cultural oasis and one of the few places that would hire blacklisted artists like Pete Seeger. He ran a two-week long folk music workshop there every summer from 1956 until sometime in the 1960s.  At fourteen I started learning a little blues guitar from Texas legend, Brownie McGee, who, with the equally legendary harmonica player Sonny Terry, taught at the folk music workshop for several years.  During the nine months of the year, back in Palm Springs, I had to make do with Folkways LPs of Pete, Brownie and Sonny and other newly re-discovered bluesmen and women from Texas, the Mississippi Delta, and other mysterious places. 

    

I also spent every weekend I could at my aunt’s house in L.A, a three-hour Greyhound Bus ride from the desert.  In LA, I had friends from the camp who also played guitar and listened to the same music that I did. I had an uncle, the black sheep variety, who smoked and drank and would take me to the only folk club in L.A. at the time, the Ash Grove, where we might hear Lightnin’ Hopkins or Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, or someone wonderful I’d never heard of.  My uncle would let me drink beer and smoke cigarettes while he told stories about being a young radical in Chicago during the depression.

On those L.A. nights when neither friends nor uncle were available, I stayed home at my aunt’s (my uncle’s older sister), happy to play records on her hi fi. Moreover, at 11 o’clock on Saturday nights,  an FM  DJ named Les Claypool Jr.  played folk music into the wee hours. His show was a mix of Folkways archives, fifties headliners like Pete, The Weavers and Josh White, and a few of the emerging "folk" singers like Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Tom Rush, but nothing as commercial as the Kingston Trio or the Brothers Four. I loved almost everything he played and would record his shows on a reel-to-reel Wollensack monaural tape recorder. That night, Claypool said something in a sceptical tone about the cut he was about to play from a debut album by an young unknown from the East Coast with a pretentious pseudonym, but I wasn’t paying too much attention. Then I heard that voice I’ve come to know in a way I know very few others sing: “Well, there’s  one kind-uh favor I’ll ask a you....”  And everything changed.  Can you imagine the pure strangeness of that moment?

I couldn’t picture the singer. Young? Old? Black? White? If it hadn’t been for the absence of scratches, hisses and pops, I could almost have imagined he was an obscure bluesman from an archival field recording by one of the Lomaxes. The weathered sounding voice rang with vitality. It took pleasure in itself.  That was – in those days – unusual. Cool was still cool. Most white folksingers still accepted the performance conventions of traditional folk balladry  and were pretty dead-pan, even stone faced. Musical performance west of Broadway was a pretty contained affair. When Elvis moved his lower body on national TV for the first time, it was treated as a full blown explosion of uncontrollable Dionysian sexual madness that had to be immediately contained.  The cameras were instructed to never tilt down below his belt buckle. Handlers and guards were brought in to attend to the screaming and fainting adolescent girls.

I’d heard the traditional, if irregular, blues “See That my Grave is Kept Clean” on a Folkways re-release of the original Blind Lemon Jefferson field recording, which is actually more mellow and contained than Dylan’s version. What I heard that night was sung at a pushed-up pulse driven by a relentless guitar groove in drop D tuning (that’s when the low E string is tuned down a whole-step to a deep, ringing D).  I heard a voice that confounded all the categories I’d learned that were supposed to make “good,” "pleasing,” “beautiful”  sounds.  The voice was singing with such apparent vigor about  all that frightened me the most:  graves and coffins, death come too soon, white horses as ghostly omens. I was shaken by the contradiction.

Nearly fifty years later, I’ve been reflecting a lot on Bob Dylan. One of the reasons for this is the recent publication of Sean Wilentz’ magisterial study, Bob Dylan in America along with the release of Dylan’s remastered demo tapes that he recorded on the fly between 1962 and 1964 when he was writing songs faster than he could make records. In the liner notes to the Witmark Demos, we learn that  executive Artie Mogull would let Dylan lay down demos in his office anytime he wanted.  In a process that had changed very little for a century, the low quality tapes would be hand-transcribed into proper musical notation by a music copyist and a one-of-a-kind acetate disk would be made from the tape. The disk and a copy of the lyrics and music would then be sent to any singer that Mogull felt might be interested in recording the song.  The list of unlikely pop stars who recorded covers of early Dylan songs is worth its own study.  Dylan’s first album, the one that I can still listen to endlessly, was a flop when released, selling around 5,000 units. But before he recorded his second album, a hot new folk-pop trio, with a very lovely blond singer and two cool guitar players with neatly trimmed goatees recorded one of Dylan’s first original songs, Blowin’ in the Wind.  Yep, Peter, Paul and Mary, packaged by the legendary Albert Grossman who also managed Dylan. The immense success of that record launched Dylan into a rocketing trajectory of growing celebrity that didn't slow down until he hit the inevitable set-backs and retrenchments of his mid-career years.

As I listened to the forty-two tracks on the Witmark Demos, some sounding as if they were being sung and played through for the first time, I was deeply moved by the enormous range of material this twenty-two year old had taken into himself.  You can hear so many tributaries of wild American poetry, history and song coursing through his voice, through his fingers on the guitar, through his breath pushing into his mouth-harp, through the sounds, the vowels and consonants he shapes with both care and abandon and, always, deep generosity.

Reading Wilentz as I was coming to the end of my first listen-through of the Demos was like continuing a conversation I hadn’t realized I’d begun. Though Wilentz is a fully-credentialed big-time academic – a professor of American History at Princeton and author of several major tomes on the origins of American Democracy – his writing is passionate, conversational, erudite and down-to-earth.

He reveals rather than manufactures connections between Dylan and his cultural, spiritual,  musical and philosophical ancestors who include so many more than the obvious ones we expect to find.  This doesn’t diminish the importance of Dylan's love for Woody Guthrie or the extent to which he modelled much of his early work on Woody’s.  But I had no idea, for example,  that Aaron Copland was as important an influence on Dylan as Wilentz suggests.

Wilentz does no less than locate Dylan in an American cultural landscape that is darker, stranger and more inclusive than the sanitized, conventional version. In Dylan's America, which I have no trouble recognizing, there's a figure-ground reversal going on. The marginalized are now at the center.  The ones to watch and listen to are the dissenters, the prophets and the rebels in their various changing  forms as poets, reformers, preachers, minstrels, vagabonds or outlaws.   Wilentz shows us how the founding fathers, and Civil War poets,  how Ovid, Dante, the Bible, Milton, Blake, Whitman, Poe, Aaron Copland, Roy Rogers, Brecht, Kurt Weill,  Bessie Smith,  Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso, Da Vinci, Ferlinghetti, Guthrie, Leadbelly, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Frank Sinatra, Blind Willie McTell,  Bing Crosby, Mother Mabelle Carter, Charlie Chaplin, the Sacred Harp, Robert Johnson, Sholem Alechem all appear in  Dylan's America, often masked and anonymous,  paraphrased, disguised, or transformed, but always honored. 

In this version of American culture, there’s no attempt to cover up the raw racial wounding that remains unhealed since the times of slavery.  I wonder if what I first heard in Bob Dylan’s voice in 1962 was a preview of his approaching immersion in the American shadow,  which sometimes seems to be an elemental curse coming from the nation's origins in theft and violence.  Today I listened to the 1967 release, John Wesley Harding, for the first time in at least a decade.  Though the songs on this album have always moved me more deeply than many of his others, I had never felt the particular mixture of  anger and grief in them as I did this time.  They had a weight to them that went beyond the personal.  

Listen to this deceptively romantic waltz:

I pity the poor immigrant


Who wishes he would’ve stayed home

Who uses all his power to do evil

But in the end is always left so alone

That man whom with his fingers cheats

And who lies with ev’ry breath

Who passionately hates his life

And likewise, fears his death

[...]

I pity the poor immigrant
Who tramples through the mud
Who fills his mouth with laughing
And who builds his town with blood

And, the last verse of a lyric that Dylan set to melody and form of the old labor ballad,  I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill:

I dreamed I saw St. Augustine Alive with fiery breath
And I dreamed I was amongst the ones
That put him out to death
Oh, I awoke in anger
So alone and terrified
I put my fingers against the glass
And bowed my head and cried


When I listen to these and so many of Dylan's other songs today, I hear American grief, rage and frustrated love howling through the bones of our history. 

photos:  from top: Sam "Lightnin'" Hopkins, Ash Grove flyer, 1964, both from Ash Grove, Music Foundation Web Site.

Against Forgetting

I’ve been helping a couple of young filmmakers with their writing and have discovered some missing bridges on each of their cultural access roads.So I do what I can to improvise zip-lines to help these young dudes across the often barren gully of dead pixels into the forest of the living past from which I find so much inspiration.

Albert Camus

I tell them stories. What else? The time, in 1965, I hitchhiked across Algeria, where, by the way, Camus’ The Stranger is set. Who was Albert Camus? Well, he was a Frenchman born in Algeria who believed that the universe has no predetermined, God-given meaning, but that people can choose to give their lives meaning – or not – by their actions. His novels are about people who mostly fail at that and suffer the consequences, which might have had to do with what he experienced growing up as part of the French colonial establishment that was destroying Algeria, and later, as a member of the French resistance against the Nazis. Anyway. From Algeria, I got to Tunis and then crossed by boat to Sicily where I got very sick and finally, after a shorter boat ride, found a youth hostel perched on a rocky cliff at the very tip of the Italian peninsula above a village called Scilla.I recognized the name from my senior comp lit class as a place in Homer’s Odyssey. Ulysses has to navigate between Scilla, the rock and Charybdis, the whirlpool.

Scilla

I wanted my to convey to my young auteur the numinous sense of discovery that came when I found an ancient name persisting in a landscape where I now stood. The key to that feeling though, which grew through the week I spent resting under shade trees overlooking the straits of Messina and the whirlpool that almost sunk Ulysses, had been given me in the twelfth grade by Mr Sussman, adamant that we drink from those wells to which he dragged us. Homer. Dante. Shakespeare. He had no investment at all in being liked or admired. He threw stinging missiles of chalk at anyone who dared doze in his class. He was on a mission to inoculate us against what he foresaw, even back in 1962. He had to give us a strong enough dose of terza rima, iambic pentameter, and epic repetition, of character and fate and choice and wonder to instill resistance to the packaged emptiness he saw coming.

There were other teachers who followed him. I was blessed to come up in a time before semiotics and new internet memes 24/7 took over the humanities; a time when wisdom, albeit insecure, was still a possibility, when an assistant history prof with no publications to his name could assign The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann as the primary text for a year-long, required undergraduate course on the History of Western Civilization.

In the weekly meetings with my young filmmaker, I find myself blurting synopses of everything from the Spanish Civil War to One Hundred Years of Solitude as if they were sandbags I was desperately tossing onto a crumbling levee. (I’ve been watching Treme.)

The other evening I discovered that a 35 year old young woman I know, a gifted student of psychology and its intersection with spirituality, had, until the other day, never heard or heard of Joni Mitchell. Further questioning revealed her fairly patchy sense of what happened in the time we call the sixties (ca. 1964 – 1977). The analogous years for me and my cohort (I was born in 1945) would be 1934 – 1947, the years that include the depression, the Second World War, the start of the Cold War, and the seeds of both the conformism and the rebellions of the fifties.

My own sense of the “present” as part of a larger narrative, could not exist without the presence of the past. In that sense it’s akin to the Buddhist notion of dependent arising; nothing can come into existence independent of myriad other factors which condition its being. There is no “independent arising.” In other words, everything that happens is connected in space andtime. Here, I must thank my wife for introducing me to one of America’s great working historians, Manning Marable. An idea of his says it all: in order to have a shared future, people must understand their common past.

The Group Theatre at their first summer work camp in 1931

That’s why I’ve been transforming four or five years of research into a play that tells the story of The Group Theatre, who not only changed American theatre forever, but were part of that era, the thirties, the meaning of which, the particularity of which, is also in danger of being glossed over and obscured by generalities and clichés. In learning the stories of that time, I’ve begun to wonder if it was the only time in American history when the assumptions underlying our free-market economic system were seriously questioned by a majority ofthe population. This is also why, at long last, I am watching, on DVD,The Wire and Mad Men, having missed them on their original cable TV presentations. I’m enthralled, especially by The Wire, and understand why the new mayor of Reykjavik, Iceland will hire no one to work for the city unless they have seen all five seasons of that show.

scene from The Wire

Nothing like it has been attempted in any form that I know of. In fact, that project, along with several others of near equal stature have developed a new medium as unlike network television as a Phillip Roth novel is to a 1950 issue of ReadersDigest. The Wire takes around sixty hours to weave a richly detailed, painfully coherent tapestry of stories that form a narrative of American urban life as tragedy, farce and morality play, with the authority of a documentary. As in the best of Shakespeare, we become complicit, at least empathically, with the worst villains, and we see the flaws in the heroes. And the lines between the two are often ambiguous and mutable. About two thirds through the opus, it becomes clear that no matter what battles are won or lost, the community that is inner-city Baltimore is at the mercy of a system so structurally unjust, so clearly distorted to serve the greedy and powerful who are thus so invested in its suffering, that there’s little chance it will ever end unless everything changes.

There’s an article in last week’s New Yorker about the impact of a private, secular TV/radio network in Afghanistan. Since there was no TV, only Taliban approved radio, until nine years ago, the new media is having a huge cultural impact. On the new commercial TV station, men and women are seen talking together, women’s faces are revealed, they read the news, voice opinions, even sing. These are capital offenses under the Taliban version of religious law. But two thirds of the entire population of the country are watching the Afghani version of American Idol even if they have to crank up the village generator to do it. The article argues that this sort of programming is causing the largest cultural transformation in the country since the end of the Taliban regime in 2001-02.

But the U.S. is inured to television and I fear that the brilliant new work now seen on HBO, Showtime, AMC and other cable sources may only reach a fraction of our huge population. This time, I’m less than hopeful of a new consensus that might tip us toward the level of change that we experienced in the thirties or that may be happening in Afghanistan right now. Fortunately, I know a few stories that tell me I could be very wrong.

Carl Safina and Friend

Many of us seem to be wondering if the horrific act of environmental terror wrought in the Gulf of Mexico by BP and all who colluded with their practices might be the tipping point that will catalyze a new level of outrage, action and change.  The activist, scientist and writer Carl Safina, in a video talk online at TED makes the most powerful and perceptive statement on the disaster that I’ve heard.  He connects it to the moral dimension of every choice this country has ever made about its sources of energy, beginning with slavery! You can see this essential talk at http://tinyurl.com/carlsafina

Robert Bly

As the enormity of the BP criminal catastrophe continues to grow, a phrase has been echoing in my mind: The world will soon break up into small colonies of the saved.  I wasn’t sure if it was a paraphrase or an exact quote. I imagined it was from a poem. Auden perhaps? Not from 1939. Not from Yeats’ Prophecy. A few moments ago I finally found the source!  It’s the last line of a poem I once knew well by a poet who for some years I counted as a friend and mentor, but with whom, sadly, I have not managed to stay in touch over time and distance, Robert Bly. Here it is, as powerful and unsettling today as it was over forty years ago

Those Being Eaten by America

by Robert Bly

The cry of those being eaten by America,
others pale and soft being stored for later eating
And Jefferson
Who saw hope in new oats
The wild houses go on
With long hair growing from between their toes
The feet at night get up
And run down the long white roads by themselves
The dams reverse themselves and want to go stand alone in the desert
That is why these poems are so sad
The long dead running over the fields
The mass sinking down
The light in children’s faces fading at six or seven
The world will soon break up into small colonies of the saved

Robert Bly, “Those Being Eaten by America from The Light Around the Body.
Copyright © 1967 and renewed 1995 by Robert Bly.
Reprinted with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Whether taken as metaphor or observation, that last line spurs my growing  desire to stock the lifeboats, the wagons, the starships, the mountain monasteries, the desert wadis, wherever the “colonies” will wait out the interregnum, with the stories that are the carriers of the cultural DNA I’d like to imagine a human future will need.

Recent “discoveries” that might interest you:

Siri Hustvdt

Siri Hustvedt writes novels and non-fiction. I hadn’t known of her until I heard her interviewed by the heroic Terry Gross on Fresh Air upon the publication of Hustvedt’s most recent book, The Shaking Woman, a History of my Nerves. I was immediately interested by the story she told on the air about her own neurological journeys, first with migraines (I, too am a migraineur) and, later, with a never-to-be diagnosed condition that caused her to shake with seizure-like paroxysms when she read and spoke in public. I immediately read the book, a complex but highly readable blend of memoir with an impressively researched history of neuropsychiatry from its pre-Freudian origins to its current focus on brain chemistry and neuroplasticity.  I came away in awe of her writerly powers and her hard won expansiveness, which I confess I also envy.  I went on to read her two most recent novels: The Sorrows of an American and What I Loved. The former is close to a fictional companion to The Shaking Woman but yields its own pleasures.  What I Loved reminded me of the novels that formed me as a young man, full of rich lives deeply carved by painful losses, lived by characters whose triumphs lay in their capacity to love and to create. This one has a first-person narrator who remembers the story as an old man, so there’s a recurring waft of longing and well-seasoned grief moving lightly though the telling. But any danger of sentimentality is balanced by the narrator’s astringent observations of the New York art world (he’s an art historian and critic and the protagonist, his best friend, is a painter and sculptor) and his rigorous engagement with the process of seeing.  Siri H is now on my unwritten list of writers and others I claim as kin, a secret guest list for a dream-salon in paradise.

I’d never heard of singer, songwriter and guitarist Dayna Kurtz until I clicked a link in a newsletter from writer Steve Almond. I’m not the only one who is mystified by her lack of fame in the U.S.  It seems she’s well known in Europe though.  Could be the lame old “hard-to-categorize” excuse since her vocal range is so unusual – and unusually expressive.  She often sings in a tenor range or even down to a light baritone, but can also break upwards to a clear mountain-stream soprano as easily as an antelope leaps. She sings her own songs and covers an eclectic mix of others. Even made me listen to “Those Were the Days” all the way through – and enjoy it.  Her Klezmer-Apocalyptic “Day of Atonement 2001”  is the most moving response in an art form to 9/11 I’ve come upon. She has  American roots music – African, Balkan, Celtic, Acadian, Flamenco, Polka, and more – growing from her kishkes and flowering in her voice and guitar fingers.  Go listen and if you can, kick in something to help her complete the American release of her latest CD, already released in Europe. Also read her "comments" which have much to say about the lives of today's artists.

I have a shelf full of novels by Steve Stern, Lorrie Moore, Gary Shteyngart and David Mitchel  I want to tell you about in future posts, but right now, I'm off to rehearse a reading for the
Bay Area Playwrights Festival of a brilliant new play about the Czech composer Leos Janacek, inspired by his magnificent second string quartet, Intimate Letters. There are seven other provocative new plays being read this coming weekend and next (July 23 - August 1, 2010) so click the link a few lines back for details. The Janacek play (I'm rading the role of Janacek) is Tva, Kamila.