As I'm walking up Broadway with my ice cream cone, enjoying the blossoms and the tulips and my new shoes...
Man on the street: "Hey mama! That ice cream sure looks good! Can I taste?"
Me: "I'm not your mama."
Man: "Well, you could be."
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Sunday, April 22, 2007
On Religion
Although I usually detest seeing theater by myself, out of a sense of duty to a fellow producer, I went to see a play – or rather, a theater essay – called On Religion. I’ll admit that was immediately wooed by the notion of a “theater essay,” being particularly fond of the essay form in general, and I wondered how a play would perform such a thing. I was reminded of the traveling religious plays that were popular during the middle-ages and Renaissance. These plays were meant to both instruct and inspire religious feeling, and as I understand, they were quite entertaining. So, if we think about the play as a modern re-imagining of something like the passion play, On Religion did not disappoint.
I could tell you about the basic plot, I suppose, but plot takes a secondary role here. There are four players: a mother who is professor and a naturalist (not an atheist, she says), a father whom we can only call a post-modernist and a secular jew, a son who has decided that he is Christian and wants to become a priest (but whom I’d prefer to call a pragmatist), and a young woman who is going to have his child but has not agreed to marry him. The son dies, or has died. The mother grieves and does not grieve. But mostly, they talk around the kitchen table or conversely lecture and preach from the same podium. And by setting the audience on all four sides of the stage, one immediately feels as though she has pulled a chair up to the table. And in this way, it does engage you on that personal, intimate level of discussion like an essay does, slipping you in and out of different perspectives. Here we are. All together. Having a discussion on religion.
While pragmatism has certainly been on my mind a lot these days, I felt its presence most intensely in this “essay,” which is rightfully a piece of criticism that is also a performance. Although I initially felt most at home with the professor-mother’s arguments against religion and its divisiveness, I very soon understood how her son could react against his mother’s radical empiricism in favor of something else – especially when he sides with the atheists and makes the argument that there is no such “thing” as God, because God is not a thing… and also when he makes the very Rorty-esque argument that religions are like languages. We would never say that one language is more right than another language – they just offer different and unique ways to say the same thing. The son (Tom) is a pluralist. To him, religions are merely languages. In a turn that reminded me very much of William James, religions have value in that individual people are able to make use of them.
Indeed, in a modern world where “love” is deified and embraced, how can we deny religious feeling? Or are both defunct and empty – is kindness (an action, and not a feeling) the only thing we can count on? The play unfolds these questions subtly over the course of 2 hours, and I cannot get them off my brain… Not because they are fundamentally new questions, or ones I have not heard before, but because the way the play asked them without forcing answers. Leading the audience through the thought process of them, suggestively. I would compare the play toI Heart Huckabees, except that I feel like that might be an insult. Huckabees does an admirable job of leading the viewer through a series of existential exercises, but in the end forces an answer that feels like a non answer. It’s jokey and ironic and almost trivializes the investigation you’ve just been through. But On Religion does not do that.
Likewise, it does not take itself so seriously that one spends two hours contemplating the hopelessness of asking such questions. The father, for example, whose experience taking ecstasy is about the closest he has come to a religious experience, has a post-modernist sensibility that everything is ok as long as it makes you happy. And even the mother, superbly played by ex-punk rocker Marguerite Van Cook, conjures up a few blissful moments of neurotic hilarity. And in this sense, the secondary “family drama” allows for the play to act like a play instead of series of lectures and debates, which it more or less is.
And now, as is usual when I try to write about a piece of art that has moved me, I find that there is no replacement for having experienced it first-hand. Reminding me, as they play did, that cultural criticism is perhaps most effective when performed and not written in the dry tomes of a blogger/critic.
I could tell you about the basic plot, I suppose, but plot takes a secondary role here. There are four players: a mother who is professor and a naturalist (not an atheist, she says), a father whom we can only call a post-modernist and a secular jew, a son who has decided that he is Christian and wants to become a priest (but whom I’d prefer to call a pragmatist), and a young woman who is going to have his child but has not agreed to marry him. The son dies, or has died. The mother grieves and does not grieve. But mostly, they talk around the kitchen table or conversely lecture and preach from the same podium. And by setting the audience on all four sides of the stage, one immediately feels as though she has pulled a chair up to the table. And in this way, it does engage you on that personal, intimate level of discussion like an essay does, slipping you in and out of different perspectives. Here we are. All together. Having a discussion on religion.
While pragmatism has certainly been on my mind a lot these days, I felt its presence most intensely in this “essay,” which is rightfully a piece of criticism that is also a performance. Although I initially felt most at home with the professor-mother’s arguments against religion and its divisiveness, I very soon understood how her son could react against his mother’s radical empiricism in favor of something else – especially when he sides with the atheists and makes the argument that there is no such “thing” as God, because God is not a thing… and also when he makes the very Rorty-esque argument that religions are like languages. We would never say that one language is more right than another language – they just offer different and unique ways to say the same thing. The son (Tom) is a pluralist. To him, religions are merely languages. In a turn that reminded me very much of William James, religions have value in that individual people are able to make use of them.
Indeed, in a modern world where “love” is deified and embraced, how can we deny religious feeling? Or are both defunct and empty – is kindness (an action, and not a feeling) the only thing we can count on? The play unfolds these questions subtly over the course of 2 hours, and I cannot get them off my brain… Not because they are fundamentally new questions, or ones I have not heard before, but because the way the play asked them without forcing answers. Leading the audience through the thought process of them, suggestively. I would compare the play toI Heart Huckabees, except that I feel like that might be an insult. Huckabees does an admirable job of leading the viewer through a series of existential exercises, but in the end forces an answer that feels like a non answer. It’s jokey and ironic and almost trivializes the investigation you’ve just been through. But On Religion does not do that.
Likewise, it does not take itself so seriously that one spends two hours contemplating the hopelessness of asking such questions. The father, for example, whose experience taking ecstasy is about the closest he has come to a religious experience, has a post-modernist sensibility that everything is ok as long as it makes you happy. And even the mother, superbly played by ex-punk rocker Marguerite Van Cook, conjures up a few blissful moments of neurotic hilarity. And in this sense, the secondary “family drama” allows for the play to act like a play instead of series of lectures and debates, which it more or less is.
And now, as is usual when I try to write about a piece of art that has moved me, I find that there is no replacement for having experienced it first-hand. Reminding me, as they play did, that cultural criticism is perhaps most effective when performed and not written in the dry tomes of a blogger/critic.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
an earth day thought
I don't really drink soda all that often, and when I do I rarely pay attention to that strange almost undetectable scribble on the top of the can where it tells you the CRV value in particular states. For a moment, I was bitter thinking that this can is worth twice as much in California as it is in New York, until I realized that I could not remember the last time I took anything to the recycling center, if I'd ever done such a thing at all.
And then I remembered the recycling machines that used to be out in front of the PW Supermarket near my house in San Jose. I had completely forgotten them, but suddenly I could hear that distinctive, shimmering noise the machines made as they shredded cans and 2 liter bottles. I could hear the change pile up in the coin return, and my mom taking us for ice cream afterwards. In this memory, it is always summer. Blindingly summer.
As a kid, I felt very strongly about the importance of recycling and wrote poems about how we needed to save the earth. I also felt very strongly that things such as leprechauns and fairies were in danger of becoming extinct, but now I can't remember if their extinction was a product of our destruction of the earth, or my own growing awareness that they might never have existed in the first place. But that's another story.
I wonder now who is getting the money from my cans when I stick them in the recycling bag down in the basement, and I think of all the ice cream these cans could buy if only I could shred them in those machines out in front of PW. If those machines were still there...
And then I remembered the recycling machines that used to be out in front of the PW Supermarket near my house in San Jose. I had completely forgotten them, but suddenly I could hear that distinctive, shimmering noise the machines made as they shredded cans and 2 liter bottles. I could hear the change pile up in the coin return, and my mom taking us for ice cream afterwards. In this memory, it is always summer. Blindingly summer.
As a kid, I felt very strongly about the importance of recycling and wrote poems about how we needed to save the earth. I also felt very strongly that things such as leprechauns and fairies were in danger of becoming extinct, but now I can't remember if their extinction was a product of our destruction of the earth, or my own growing awareness that they might never have existed in the first place. But that's another story.
I wonder now who is getting the money from my cans when I stick them in the recycling bag down in the basement, and I think of all the ice cream these cans could buy if only I could shred them in those machines out in front of PW. If those machines were still there...
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Anxiety
Anxiety is one of those things I never will quite comprehend. It comes upon one suddenly. It grabs you and it pulls you down toward the center of your body. Toward your beating heart and suddenly you can hear your breathing in your ears. The blood courses through your veins with impatient vibration (I can feel it in the balls of my feet). It hums. And today I felt it as the phone rang and rang and rang at my parents house in Atlanta. No one picked up. Not even the answering machine. And when my mother picked up her cell phone, it was "hi sweetie... oh well... i'm in the hospital..." long pause "oh well, you know, i thought i was having a heart attack, but i didn't want to call and worry you because everything's alright... we don't really know. i think it was just a bad panic attack, that's all..."
But now what's making my heart beat in my ears is a sort of dread that I'm not being told the whole story. She sounds too cheerful like the time my parents told me weeks after the fact that our dog had died. They didn't want to spoil my vacation, they had said. But it was dreadful being left out that way. And I remember how I could feel the inside of my skull tingling as though it were hollowed out when they told me.
After we said our goodbyes I tried to go on with my day, but it's so cold outside and the rain makes it so dreadfully dark. A thousand terrible possibilties flooded my brain. I just wanted to be near someone and there was no one to be near to. My apartment empty and filled with the dull light of a lamp half burnt out. T asked me recently if I ever get lonely here, and I do. But today was unbearable, and all it did was rain and rain.
But now what's making my heart beat in my ears is a sort of dread that I'm not being told the whole story. She sounds too cheerful like the time my parents told me weeks after the fact that our dog had died. They didn't want to spoil my vacation, they had said. But it was dreadful being left out that way. And I remember how I could feel the inside of my skull tingling as though it were hollowed out when they told me.
After we said our goodbyes I tried to go on with my day, but it's so cold outside and the rain makes it so dreadfully dark. A thousand terrible possibilties flooded my brain. I just wanted to be near someone and there was no one to be near to. My apartment empty and filled with the dull light of a lamp half burnt out. T asked me recently if I ever get lonely here, and I do. But today was unbearable, and all it did was rain and rain.
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Everything is Complicated
At least, that's the name of the song by my good friend Scott Alexander. If you didn't see my cameo performance with Scott at the Sidewalk Cafe back in March, you can check us out on YouTube or at Scott's new website: http://www.scottalexandermusic.com/
Monday, April 09, 2007
The Coincidence
I cannot think of anything that I love more than a good coincidence. There’s something about the chance occurrence or accidental personal connection that fills me with immeasurable joy and the sense that all is right with the universe. I want to believe in coincidences more than I want to believe in reason or logic, because I think there is a part of me that believes that the random is more precise and more perfect than anything I could pre-divine.
These coincidences usually occur only when circumstances don’t seem to be going my way. Two weeks ago I stood outside the doors of a small club where my friend was already inside and the music was already playing and I was told that there was no chance that I would get in. Instead, five minutes later I followed Natalie Portman inside. Then, as I shimmied my way into the unfortunate corner where T was standing, and sipped my beer and swayed ever so gently to this girl-trio’s subtle melodies, I realized that I was watching Nora Jones since back up vocals for a singer-songwriter I had never even heard of before this night. A beautiful young woman named Sasha Dobson, who wore a gold bird around her neck, and a guitar over her shoulder.
This would have been enough. A night of almost-perfect music that I wasn’t planning on and almost didn’t see. And two celebrity sightings. But the next day as I googled this girl, Sasha Dobson, in hopes of prolonging those melodies in my ears, I learned that she grew up in Santa Cruz and is the daughter of Smith Dobson – the man who taught my brother jazz piano lessons as a child, and just a few years ago was killed in a terrible car crash. I spent at least one afternoon drinking tea in their living room with her mom and mine. This musician who I almost didn’t see play with Norah Jones in New York!
This discovery kept me mesmerized for days. I couldn’t help telling everyone I ran into, even though I knew that scenario could hardly be as entertaining to anyone but me. It was exasperating. I told it too fast. And people said: “That’s great Jess.” It’s an empty, if considerate response. After all, it’s my coincidence and not theirs.
All I can say, I guess, is that you ought to listen to Sasha Dobson, even if not by chance
These coincidences usually occur only when circumstances don’t seem to be going my way. Two weeks ago I stood outside the doors of a small club where my friend was already inside and the music was already playing and I was told that there was no chance that I would get in. Instead, five minutes later I followed Natalie Portman inside. Then, as I shimmied my way into the unfortunate corner where T was standing, and sipped my beer and swayed ever so gently to this girl-trio’s subtle melodies, I realized that I was watching Nora Jones since back up vocals for a singer-songwriter I had never even heard of before this night. A beautiful young woman named Sasha Dobson, who wore a gold bird around her neck, and a guitar over her shoulder.
This would have been enough. A night of almost-perfect music that I wasn’t planning on and almost didn’t see. And two celebrity sightings. But the next day as I googled this girl, Sasha Dobson, in hopes of prolonging those melodies in my ears, I learned that she grew up in Santa Cruz and is the daughter of Smith Dobson – the man who taught my brother jazz piano lessons as a child, and just a few years ago was killed in a terrible car crash. I spent at least one afternoon drinking tea in their living room with her mom and mine. This musician who I almost didn’t see play with Norah Jones in New York!
This discovery kept me mesmerized for days. I couldn’t help telling everyone I ran into, even though I knew that scenario could hardly be as entertaining to anyone but me. It was exasperating. I told it too fast. And people said: “That’s great Jess.” It’s an empty, if considerate response. After all, it’s my coincidence and not theirs.
All I can say, I guess, is that you ought to listen to Sasha Dobson, even if not by chance
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