Walter Murch Documentary

Murch, a documentary about film and sound editor Walter Murch opened last night at the San Francisco Museum of Art. See a video clip here. Catch a sound clip of his lecture at SFMOMA here.

Bruce Lee: Interview with Pierre Berton

Part 1:

Part 2:


Part 3:


This video is no longer available because of a copyright claim by the Heirs of Bruce Lee & Concord Moon LP. Which is a shame because it was fascinating and I hadn't gotten a chance to see the 3rd part yet or transcribe parts of the 1st segment. I did however, get this little nugget which I will be coming back to in future posts. And who knows? Maybe the copyright dispute will be resolved. Ha!

Pierre Berton: Interesting- we don't in our world, and haven't since the days of the Greeks who did, combine philosophy and art with sport. But quite clearly, the oriental attitude is that the three are facets of the same thing.

Bruce Lee: Man. Listen. You see. Really. To me, okay. To me, ultimately, martial art means honestly expressing yourself. Now it is very difficult to do. I mean, it is easy for me to put on a show and be cocky, and be flooded with a cocky feeling. And then feel like pretty cool and all that. Or, I can make all kinds of phony things. See what I mean? Blinded by it or I can show you some really fancy movement. But to express one's self honestly, not blind to one's self, and to express myself honestly - now that, that, my friend is, very hard to do and you have to train. You have to keep your reflexes so that when you want to move you are moving and you are determined to move. Not taking one inch- Not anything less than that. If I want to punch I'm gonna do it, man, and I'm gonna do it. So that is the type of thing you have to train yourself to, to become one with the- You think and (snaps his fingers indicating movement and flow).

Pierre Berton: Yeah. That is very unwestern. This attitude.

Kiddies

People ask me how can I possibly get anything written. Still others hear I have three kids and look at me with a knowing glance and then say "well...I know what you're doing." I never correct these people because I've learned that to tell people what I'm really doing - like trying to write seven rough drafts this year or actually reading adult books (books that don't begin with Hola, my name is Dora and this is my friend Boots) - makes them uncomfortable with me as a mom, as an artist, and possibly as a human being. I don't know why.

Then again, theater artists get a little uncomfortable with me when I talk about my kids. I noticed that most women theater artists where I live don't talk about their kids. I had rented rehearsal space from one woman for several years before finding out she had a daughter. I knew pretty much everything else about her, but she never mentioned her daughter. I asked her why. Reply: people don't want to hear about that.

Anyway, I'm in the middle of staying up late nights - Marshall is on a two hour schedule. So I'm pretty short on REM sleep - and I found this wonderful post that I wanted to share. Enjoy.

Family Values

We are the first people who are leaving nothing for our children - and America is leading the charge. We are at war against our children. - Ariane Mnouchkine

One More NYC Event

A couple of years ago I read a blog called Just Another Soldier written by Jason Christopher Hartley. But then Jason's Commanding Officer found out about his blog and ordered him to take it down. So it was necessary to subscribe to get email posts. Every week or so an email would be sent out updating readers on Jason's progress or lack thereof in Iraq. There were times when we didn't get emails and I would panic and feel like my brother had gone missing. Here's my favorite post, originally sent as an email.

Anyway, Jason is going to be part of a panel presentation tonight at Housing Works Bookstore Café in Manhattan located at 126 Crosby (just below Broadway) at 7pm. The moderator is Anthony Swofford. Panelists will share their thoughts, stories, and photographs, followed by a question and answer period. More info here and here.

Here's a clip from Swofford's documentary, Operation Homecoming that aired on PBS.

SOSDD

If, on account of the political situation,
There are quite a number of homes without roofs, and men
Lying about in the countryside, neither drunk nor asleep,
If all sailings have been cancelled till further notice,
If it's unwise now to say much in letters, and if,
Under the subnormal temperatures prevailing,
The two sexes are at present weak and strong,
That is not at all unusual for this time of year.
If that were all we should know how to manage. Flood, fire,
The desiccation of grasslands, restraint of princes,
Piracy on the high seas, physical pain and fiscal grief,
These are afterall our familiar tribulations,
And we have been through them all before, many, many times.
As events which belong to the natural world where
The occupation of space is the real and final fact
And time turns round itself in an obedient circle,
They occur again and again but only to pass
Again and again into their formal opposites,
From sword to ploughshare, coffin to cradle, war to work,
So that, taking the bad with the good, the pattern composed
By the ten thousand odd things that can possibly happen
Is permanent in a general average way.

TIll lately we knew of no other, and between us we seemed
To have what it took - the adrenal courage of the tiger,
The chameleon's discretion, the modesty of the doe,
Or the fern's devotion to spatial necessity:
To practise one's peculiar civic virtue was not
So impossible after all; to cut our losses
And bury our dead was really quite easy: That was why
We were always able to say: 'We are children of God,
And our Father has never forsaken His people.'

But then we were children: That was a moment ago,
Before an outrageous novelty had been introduced
Into our lives. Why were we never warned? Perhaps we were.
Perhaps that mysterious noise at the back of the brain
We noticed on certain occasions - sitting alone
In the waiting room of the country junction, looking
Up at the toilet window - was not indigestion
But this Horror starting already to scratch Its way in?
Just how, just when It succeeded we shall never know:
We can only say that now It is there and that nothing
We learnt before It was there is now of the slightest use,
For nothing like It has happened before. It's as if
We had left our house for five minutes to mail a letter,
And during that time the living room had changed places
With the room behind the mirror over the fireplace;
It's as if, waking up with a start, we discovered
Ourselves stretched out flat on the floor, watching our shadow
Sleepily stretching itself at the window. I mean
That the world of space where events re-occur is still there,
Only now it's no longer real; the real one is nowhere
Where time never moves and nothing can ever happen:
I mean that although there's a person we know all about
Still bearing our name and loving himself as before,
That person has become fiction; our true existence
Is decided by no one and has no importance to love.

That is why we despair; that is why we would welcome
The nursery bogey or the winecellar ghost, why even
The violent howling of winter and war has become
Like a juke-box tune that we dare not stop. We are afraid
Of pain but more afraid of silence; for no nightmare
Of hostile objects could be as terrible as this Void.
This is the Abomination. This is the wrath of God.
W.H. Auden

Betrayed by George Packer
The Redirection by Seymour Hersh
In the Now by John Colapinto
i-D Magazine here and here.

Books of the Mo'

Finished reading An American Childhood by Annie Dillard and went straight into Pilgrim at Tinker Creek also by Dillard. Previous bouts with Dillard include Holy the Firm and The Writing Life. She obsesses about the impossibility of seeing, of knowing, of being fully alive.

...it is not you or I that is important, neither what sort we might be nor how we came to be each where we are. What is important is anyone's coming awake and discovering a place, finding in full orbit a spinning globe one can lean over, catch, and jump on. What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch - with an electric hiss and cry - the speckled mineral sphere, our present world. - From An American Childhood.

My mind is hooked on Annie's unrelenting prose. I put down one book and open up another to keep the flow going. And it works. She spills from one book to the next. There is no end to her.

But I can see stretching out before me a long list of books that this reading is making necessary. Dillard mentions On The Road by Kerouac and I'd been meaning to pick it up and read it again having last month ploughed through Cormac McCarthy's The Road (which is one of those books that is so good it ruins you for reading anything else for a long while - that is until I picked up Annie). Oprah announced last month that The Road is her latest bookclub selection, so now there is a softcover edition. I intend to read my copy (a really ugly hardcover) again as soon as I'm finished with Dillard. No McCarthy isn't finished with me yet. The only cure for reading The Road is to read it again and again. It's devastating.

I've realized lately that I don't read a lot of plays. I do when I'm teaching and looking for scenes for students or when I'm pitching for directing work. But typically, I tend to read books. I tend to be inspired by novelists instead of playwrights. I don't know what that means. Well, not true really. Most of the plays that get produced aren't really that interesting to me. I don't see much exploration in terms of narrative and structure or subject matter. Probably my favorite playwrights at the moment are Naomi Iizuka and Jason Craig. Naomi captures voice and place and plays with form in unconventional ways while Jason frustrates the entire venture, what he's doing shouldn't even work, but it does - ah the magic of theater. Oh. And there's Chuck Mee.

See This Show

If you're on the east coast be sure to check out Dream of A Ridiculous Man at Manhattan Theatre Source today and tomorrow. Adapted by Matt Freeman from a Dostoevsky short story and directed by Matt Johnston. All shows are at 8 p.m. and tickets are $15. More info here.

The Benjamins

It is funny about money. And it is funny about identity. You are you because your little dog knows you, but when your public knows you and does not want to pay for you and when your public knows you and does want to pay for you, you are not the same you. – Gertrude Stein

To walk in money through the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath money, no least single object anywhere that is not money. Money, money everywhere and still not enough! And then no money, or a little more money, or less money, or more money but money always money. And if you have money, or you Don’t’t have money it is the money that counts, and money makes money, but what makes money make money? - Henry Miller

Money changes everything. – Cyndi Lauper

Money And The American Dream

Phoebe
Money. It does come back to money…the American Dream? I wish it didn’t. But it does.

Facilitator
Benjamins, why do they call...oh cause of Franklin. How important is MONEY? How does MONEY influence the way you go about your day? How much money does it take for YOU to get by today?

Phoebe
I hate money! Why can't everything be free?

Queen of the Fairies
There's never enough. You think you know how much is enough and it isn't. On the other hand you can make it last longer than you think. I mean, how much do you really need?

Phoebe
Old money - my father comes from a long line of Bankers.

Facilitator
If something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing for money.

Phoebe
Cheap. Stingy

Queen of the Fairies
It feels good to have your own. It feels shitty to have to ask for it. It feels shitty to owe.

Phoebe
I'm terrified of debt - how could I not be?

Queen of the Fairies
You need it for food, lodging, transportation, some but not all entertainment, some but not all education.

Phoebe
Bryn Mawr. Major: English. Minor: Art History.

Queen of the Fairies
You really don’t need it for real friends.

Phoebe
American Dream my ass.

Queen of the Fairies
You need it if you have health problems, illness, injury.

Phoebe
Don’t get me wrong…it’s a wonderful thing, that people thought they could come to America to escape oppression…it’s a wonderful thing. I don’t buy that whole Horatio-Alger-pull- yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-bullshit is all.

Queen of the Fairies
You can get arrested for not having enough or having too much, although that's not the charge.

Phoebe
Homeless.

Mike
People say money is a necessary evil, but I think it is an unnecessary one created by us. Once people bartered, here’s a chicken for that shovel, and all was good.

Blackout.
Money and How It Gets That Way
Opening night of the opera. Night crowd of people. Raining. Faces, upper bodies obscured by umbrellas. They cross upstage left to upstage right, forming new crowds and configurations.

A
This couple from New York City, they were married and they lived very frugally. They lived their life. Did their thing. Took the subway and lived in a small apartment. They didn’t have any children and they died.

B
That’s tragic.

A
But early in their life they met a man and they gave him $50,000 dollars to invest.

B
They had $50,000?

A
That isn’t all. That man they gave their money to? That man was William F. Buckley-

B
William F. Buckley? Wasn’t he kidnapped?

A
I believe so. Held hostage in some way. And never found which is tragic too. But this was before.

B
When was this?

A
The early sixties. They gave William F. Buckley their money and after the couple died, people discovered this couple was worth $750,000,000.

B
It seems impossible. Where do you find someone you can trust? Then? Or even now?

A
To hand over $50,000 to.

B
Well that’s interesting.

A Yes.

B
All that money. Where did it go?

A
I don’t know. Charity maybe.

B
Such a waste.

You May Already Be A Winner

Facilitator
If you were to win the 7.5 million dollar lottery, what would be the first thing you would do? What would be the fifth thing you would do?

Phoebe and Rose. Sound of Mike going Woo-hoo!

*/indicates simultaneous dialog

Phoebe
*/I love the fact that it’s 7.5 million…um….. it’s funny I think I got distracted by what I heard Mike say upstairs that he would make some sort of “woo-hoo!” um…that probably it would be the like the first thing he would do...the very first thing he would do is pass out or freak out but I don’t think, I don’t think that’s quite what the question is asking – well, maybe it is but um…

Rose *The first thing I would do would be to set up some kind of annuity or —I think annui—something so that I would know that my mom would have income for the rest of her life and would not HAVE to work, would work if she wanted to. Um the fifth thing I would do [beat] would be [beat] I think to buy myself a condo. If I had that much money, I could wait.

Facilitator
Everyone needs food, clothing, and shelter. The lives of most people on earth are spent in getting these things. Unfulfilled needs lower on the ladder inhibit a person from climbing to their next step. Where does- do you think we have a need for Art? What place does art have in the world? Do you think it-

Phoebe
How important is Art if you can’t feed your kids? You just said-

Facilitator
Someone dying of thirst quickly forgets their thirst when they have no oxygen.

Phoebe
Are you saying we’d die without Art?

Facilitator
I’m just asking a question. Where does Art fit into the hierarchy of needs?

Rose
Wouldn’t Art qualify as a peak experience? An experience, or – um – a simulation of an experience – I think of myself when I – um- like when I hear music or –it’s like love, understanding, happiness, or rapture - or rapture - when all of a sudden something strikes you or, you, you feel like you get what that artist was trying to say like, like, uh, oh the guy that did those drawings that- Paul Klee! That's – especially when he was younger he did these great – they're just a lot of straight lines that almost looked like scribbles but there were these characters and there was a lot of humor in them and, and uh...I like that – when you feel connected to, to humor – and he wasn't even drawing – like this was drawn in 1910 I think. But you think 'God that guy's funny. I could have shared a joke with this guy and we both could have gotten it.' You know? It's nice – it's nice to uh...so it's nice in art, no matter what the form, when you see something kind of, sort of, you feel some sort of shared humanity, whether it's sense of humor or uh, uh....I don't know, you see, or pain or, or whatever you extract from it.

Facilitator
If there is a political message in a film, play, or TV show, how does that make you feel as an audience member?

Phoebe
I think art is bigger than politics. If you are somebody who believes that everything is political and I'm - I don't think I do believe that. I think you can make a good argument for it - but - maybe I just don't - I really don't want everything to be-

Facilitator
Why?

Phoebe
Because it's about power. Because it's about struggle. And I – I – I would really like to say 'Why can't we all just get along?' You know? Why can't Palest – the Palestinians have their land and their nation and the Israelis have their land and their nation and- Why can't they both just share the Temple on the Mount? You know? Why can't they?

Rose
They could give you plenty of good reasons.

Phoebe
But fundamentally - and I know this is a very naive thing to say - but fundamentally that's my ideal.

Mike
I'm not a very political person…um, as far as politics, [sound of male chorus chanting and yelling behind him] …Um…you know part of me wonders whether or not it's a good thing or a bad thing – but it's who I am.

Phoebe
Why can't people just co-exist? Why can't we just have our lives and have our art be about, you know, being able to hold your note longer or whatever it takes? You know whatever struggles you might have with your Art.

Mike
Why can’t it be about making soup? Can’t making soup be a peak experience?

Phoebe
Why does it have to be about living – something as simple as just living?

Mike Wouldn’t it be better to make a first rate soup than a second rate painting?

Phoebe
I resist the notion that everything is political because my ideal is that not everything is political.

Mike
[sound of male chorus chanting and yelling behind him]
Okay well. Making soup probably isn’t political.

Rose
Food Not Bombs?

Mike
Soup is political. Who knew? Uh, who's that guy who – that artist who took all those photos and had one photo of the, the, of the, the, of like the person with like the bullwhip in his butt – coming out –

Facilitator
Mappelthorpe?

Mike
Yeah yeah–Thorpe. And he, and he did that and people looked at it. He didn't say a word. He just put that up there. And that was political, just in taking that picture and putting it up there, uh, you know, was political. Um, and obviously his way of being political compared to like someone like Joan of Arc or a real politician or you know uh Castro in Cuba or someone like that is not as – is not as aggressive. It's a much – it's a much uh more back-end way or – (laughs) right, ha! So that image sticks in my mind – yeah-