Happy Birthday, Edward Albee

From the Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of playwright Edward Albee born in 1928. He worked a series of odd jobs including selling music and books, working as an office assistant and a hotel barman, and then his favorite job: a Western Union messenger, about which he said, "It kept you out in the air and it was a nice job because it could never possibly become a career."

During this time, he frequently attended modern art exhibitions, concerts, and plays in New York City and, inspired by the emerging Theatre of the Absurd, he quit his job and in three weeks wrote The Zoo Story (1958), a one-act, two-man play about strangers who meet in Central Park. It was at first rejected by New York producers, premiered in Germany, and then staged the next year in New York's Greenwich Village.

He wrote a few more one act plays and then his first full-length play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), the work for which he is best known. The title is taken from graffiti he saw on a mirror at a New York bar. In its first season, the play's profanity shocked some audience members, and one critic called it an "exercise in depraved obscenity," but it was largely popular with critics and audiences, ran for 644 performances, and won many awards. A film version starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton came out in 1966.

Happy Birthday, Jack Kerouac

I can't make heads or tails out of the man's work, but I'm told he's Terrribly Important, so here's something courtesy of The Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of Jack Kerouac, born Jean-Louis Kerouac in Lowell, Massachusetts (1922). He was part of the "Beat Generation," and he came up with the name. He said, "To me, it meant being poor, like sleeping in the subways ... and yet being illuminated and having illuminated ideas about apocalypse and all that." Later, Kerouac decided that "beat" stood for "beatific."

His parents were from French-speaking Quebec, and he did not start learning English until grade school. He skipped second and third grades, and as a 16-year-old senior, he ditched class in order to go alone to the public library and read what he wanted: Hugo, Goethe, Hemingway, William Saroyan, Thomas Wolfe, history books, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and books of chess problems. He was a good football player and received a scholarship to Columbia University, but he broke his leg in the first season and didn't play anymore. He dropped out of Columbia, joined the Merchant Marine and then the Navy, and was given a psychiatric discharge after only two months, having been labeled as a "schizoid personality." The next fall, he went back to Columbia where he dropped out again almost immediately, but kept his apartment near campus and it became a gathering place for young intellectuals. During that time, he met Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Carl Solomon, Neal Cassady, and others who would help found the Beat Movement.

He spent the next seven years hitchhiking around the United States and Mexico, and in 1949 he and his friend Neal Cassady drove a Cadillac limousine from California to Chicago, going over 100 miles an hour on two-lane roads until the speedometer broke. In 1951, he sat at his kitchen table, taped sheets of Chinese art paper together to make a long roll, and wrote the story of Cassady and their trips. It had no paragraphs and very little punctuation. Allen Ginsberg called it "a magnificent single paragraph several blocks long, rolling, like the road itself." It took him only three weeks to complete and became his novel On the Road (1957).

I Knew It When I Saw Him Dancing and Singing

The Prez is always happy, loose, and utterly serene after he's made the decision to go somewhere and blow some shit up. In the weeks leading up to Iraq, everyone commented on how the only person in Washington who wasn't strung out and sitting on the edge of their seats -- the only person who was, in fact, happy, loose, and utterly serene -- was The Prez. He's a happy guy again, no longer the peevish, garbled, shrunken man he was a few short weeks ago. I'm thinking the decision was made when he and McCain met the other day. McCain probably serenaded him with a snappy chorus of "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran!" and Bush said, "Say, Squirrelly, that's a fine idear ya got there. Bomb Iran? Sheeit, I bet that'll get me outta these doldrums! Hey Fallon, ya traitorous peacenik piece a crap! Yer fired! We're goin' in! Noo-clear combat, toe ta to with the rag-heads! Yee hawwwwww!"

I'm gettin' my drunk on. Who's with me?

Quote of the Week

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

- Steven Weinberg

Bleak Times Call For Bleak Measures

An obscure internet radio station led me to American symphonic composer Gloria Coates, composer of some of the most relentlessly bleak music ever composed. On the amazon.com page for one of her symphonies I saw a “listmania” item on the left side of the page. This is a user-produced feature of Amazon, sort of “If you like this, you’re gonna love the items on my list!” It was the title of the list that got the hook in me and kept tugging at me for the next several months:

BLEAK TIMES CALL FOR BLEAK MEASURES

Like I said, the words kept at me; this glib and self-consciously ironic collection of words seemed to carry the freight of more meaning than their creator could have ever intended. Nietzsche claimed that we need chaos in our soul to give birth to a dancing star. I believe we need bleakness in our soul to give birth to a dancing god. Most people don’t need the experience of bleakness; most people couldn’t stand the raw, uncut experience of bleakness, and do everything they can to keep it at bay -- through booze and drugs, through frenetic social activity, and of course through that most popular defense mechanism, regular visits to partake of the glass pipe at their local houses of worship.

I recently listened to Ingram Marshall’s Three Penitential Visions, as bleak in its way as anything Coates ever composed. But after playing Marshall’s piece through a couple of times, I realized something: Coates’ bleak vision only got it half right. She captures the bleakness like no one else can, but she never understands that there’s something beyond the bleakness. Ingram takes it and turns it right on its head, transforming it into a joyous “Yes-saying” in the epilogue, Hidden Voices. This epilogue, the last three minutes of which can almost make a crusty old polemicist believe in god, rises triumphantly as both the confirmation and refutation of all the empty bleakness that came before.

There are very few things more bleak than the unplugged acoustic torch songs of Tracey Thorne; her despair and yearning and hopeless need give us a world so bleak that we are only left with one genuinely philosophical question: slice lengthwise, or across the wrist? But then her husband, Ben Watt, had one brilliant, unforgettable idea: take her hurt, bleeding songs and lay a demanding techno dance beat on top of them. Her songs of doomed love and tainted pain became something that got into your head and your body, and told you that sure, the world and life and love and just being human was unimaginably bleak, but the backbeat wove it into something that not only told you what was on the other side of bleakness, it also told you what the cure was.

Which brings me to my point, finally. We find uplift and something resembling meaning not in despair, but on the other side of despair. It’s no coincidence that this important philosophical issue keeps finding its way back to music; we humans have some important unfinished business with music. Because, you see, we’ve forgotten what music is for. Music is what we get instead of God. Maybe it’s our “consolation prize,” in every sense of both those words.

On the other side of despair, beyond the bleak times and the bleak places inside us, waits a god who dances. A god promised by Nietzsche and so many others, and some may call him Dionysus and some may know him as Dancing Shiva and in the big continental sprawl of America they know him as Kokopelli, but they are all the same and they all continue to hand down just one simple commandment:

Shut up and dance

.

Koyaanisqatsi, baby

I responded to a diary on Dailykos.com with the comment below. I liked it enough to want to preserve it here. Maybe I can evolve it into an essay someday.

Life out of balance, crazy life, a way of life that cannot continue. We are witnessing the largest human-made alteration of the ecosystem ever, much larger than the destruction of the North American megafauna when the Paleo-Indians came over the land bridge. Is "the planet" in peril? Is "Nature" in peril? Of course not. The planet will be fine and Nature will do what it always does: heal and move on once the irritant (in this case, humans) is no longer there to irritate it. Lots of species will disappear thanks to our predations, for sure. What most people mean when they say "We have to save the planet!" is really "We have to save humanity, specifically our high-maintenance modern Western lifestyles and infrastructures!" From a purely selfish perspective, of course, we all root for this project to succeed (we all have a vested interest, after all). But from an objective, planetary perspective, should this project succeed, so that humans can screw things up in slow-motion in the future, rather than in fast-forward like we're doing now? Very problematic.

Quote of the Week

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. - Richard Dawkins