I watched a recent BBC production of Macbeth (2010, Patrick Stewart, Stalin-themed, bunkered horror movie). The character of Macduff received word his family has been killed by Macbeth (boo! hiss!). A character suggests he takes revenge on Macbeth, and asks if Macbeth has children. Macduff, still in shock, answers:
We have KNIVES for spreading the icing on the cupcakes, Macbeth. You don’t have to use your hands. JEEZ! Sink is over there.
He ha’s no Children. All my pretty ones? Did you say All? Oh Hell-Kite! All? What, All my pretty Chickens, and their Damme At one fell swoope?
“AHA!” I started laughing (glad to be on my couch and not in a theater with high-society hens and roosters clucking at me in disapproval). “All My Pretty Ones” is the name of an Anne Sexton poem (read it here) about packing away the mementos of her recently-deceased father, especially photos of when he was younger than her. I never picked up on the Macbeth connection, even though the poem has the phrase “hurly-burly”. Basically, it was pleasing to “get” a poem written 53 years ago.
The teaser for the BBC Macbeth with Patrick Stewart (watch the whole thing here). Kate Fleetwood’s performance as Lady Macbeth is eerie:
Anne Sexton reading her poem “All My Pretty Ones”. I don’t know where the piano accompaniment comes from. It’s not on the MP3 I have. It may be from her band (ya, I know) Anne Sexton and Her Kind.
YouTube served this up as a bonus: Ian McKellen in 1979 talking in an acting class about Shakespeare, brief moments of sublimity in art, and reading Macbeth’s famous “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy:
At the Screen Actors Guild Awards, Julia Roberts appeared in the following gown that defied us to judge her based on her status as a Legless-American. Look at me, admire my glamour she seems to say. I can be fabulous even with half as many limbs as many of you. Agreed, Julia, and thank you!
How do you think she manages to hover like that? Don’t want to seem racist or anything, but is that something all of her people can do?
Neal Conan mastered the soft NPR tone, but roared like a lion at the end.
I had been wondering what the hell happened to Talk of the Nation over the last few months, and why it seemed to be gone. Tonight I looked it up, and listened to the host Neal Conan’s sign-off for the show and his career at NPR. It’s spicy! [listen here, it’s worth it]
So right here, I form my own private compact with NPR and my member stations. I will listen and, yes, I will open my checkbook, but I need some services in return. Go and tell me the stories behind everything that happened in the world today. Explain why it happened, and how it affects our lives. Do it every day. Tell me what’s important, and don’t waste my time with stupid stuff.
I listened devotedly to Talk of the Nation for more than 10 years. I recorded many programs from the radio and recorded them to my hard drive before podcasts were invented. Every day at work it was Howard Stern then Talk of the Nation. Ray Suarez was a good host, occasionally getting exasperated with the topic and/or guest with hilarious results. Juan Williams followed Suarez and was less interesting. Suarez went to Newshour, Williams went to Fox News and pretty much lost his mind.
Neal Conan didn’t have much flavor to him, but I stuck with the program for years into his tenure. Then, between progressive radio starting up (R.I.P. Air America) and then podcasts I stopped listening to TOTN. Also, TOTN shifted to shorter segments. Instead of an hour spent on a single topic, an hour show was split into 2-3 topics. I liked the depth and the meandering that an hour on a single topic would sometime lead to. Kooks started creeping into the discussion. That made the program more fun.
I blamed that format change on Neal Conan, but given that NPR has dropped TOTN entirely (I don’t think the ratings were bad) for a magazine format, it may have been a top-down decision.
Thank you Ray Suarez, Juan Williams, and Neal Conan. Talk of the Nation was a good program and the work of your teams was an important centerpoint of many days.
I re-read Richard Ellmann’s biography Oscar Wilde for the first time since the late 1980s. It was Oxford professor (though born in the USA!) Ellmann’s last book and inspiring and depressing to read then. It had the same effect on me now. It is well-researched and won a Pulitzer prize in 1989 for biography, though not as beloved as Ellmann’s biography James Joyce. It ends shortly after Wilde’s head oozes with a syphilitic pop.
Wilde did a lot of inspiring work, was a master of epigram and paradoxes, wrote a severe, perfect play with a hard, gem-like flame (The Importance of Being Earnest), a pretty good novel (The Picture of Dorian Gray), a heart-rending work from jail (De Profundis), many enjoyable essays (The Soul of Man Under Socialism is a favorite).
Oscar Wilde (left) and Lord Alfred Douglas “Bosie”.
But knowing Wilde’s fall from grace was coming, that it would come somewhat from his inescapable love with a petulant dolt (Lord Alfred Douglas aka “Bosie”), made even the happy parts laden with dread. Times were unfair. Wilde was put in jail for sodomy and served two years hard labor. His imagination and reputation broken, he could never write as well again. The social esteem and artistic crowd he relied on so much shunned him. Life was less stimulating, and left him destitute in many phases, though admittedly he had extravagant habits.
Some highlights from the book. Wilde’s curtain speech after the premiere of Lady Windermere’s Fan in 1892:
“Ladies and gentlemen: I have enjoyed this evening immensely. The actors have given us a charming rendering of a delightful play, and your appreciation has been most intelligent. I congratulate you on the great success of your performance, which persuades me that you think almost as highly of the play as I do myself.”
A former lover of Wilde’s and a devoted lifelong friend (and dutiful friend after Wilde’s death), Robbie Ross, asked Wilde in 1895 about people finding fault with his curtain speeches. Wilde replied:
“Yes, the old-fashioned idea was that the dramatist should appear and merely thank his kind friends for their patronage and presence. I am glad to say I have altered all that. The artist cannot be degraded into the servant of the public. While I have always recognised the cultural appreciation that actors and audience have shown for my work, I have equally recognised that humility is for the hypocrite, modesty for the incompetent. Assertion is at once the duty and privilege of the artist.”
Despite this posture held regarding art, Wilde was a compassionate man. His aristos (Greek for “best”) attitude about art and beauty did not hold in concerns for fellow people. And he found beauty often in common things. But it’s thrilling to read from Wilde such heightened and astringent regard for art and others when he sustains it.
Degeneration by Max Nordau ( Entartung in the original German, Fin de siècle in French). Looks like a charmer, right?
In 1892, Max Nordau wrote Degeneration, a book bewailing the declining status of society and morality. Wilde, playwright Henrik Ibsen, composer Richard Wagner, and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche were all examined closely as emblems of madness and humanity’s ruin. I’ve not read the book, but it must have been a howler. I like all of those figures and it’s fun to ponder how much thought and angst was put into wanting to prophesy humanity’s downfall over 100 years ago. Of course, ruination DID arrive in the form of Miley Cyrus’ clumsy attempts at twerking in 2013. But let us cluck delightedly at the foolishness of our ancestors before scrambling once more for provisions to return back to our post-Cyrusian shelters.
Degeneration treated all men of genius as mad. True, at least, in Nietzsche’s case. Wilde’s comment: “I quite agree with Dr Nordau’s assertion that all men of genius are insane, but Dr Nordau forgets that all sane people are idiots.”
As 1900 came to a close (Wilde was not to live to 1901), in his death room, body revolting against itself, possibly from symptoms related to syphilis which he contracted in his 20s, Wilde said to a visitor: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.”
Wilde died and his bodily integrity gave out and possibly granted that both his body and the room’s wallpaper would need to be removed. Ellmann describes:
At 5:30 a.m., to the consternation of Ross and Turner, a loud, strong death rattle began, like the turning of a crank. Foam and blood came from his mouth during the morning, and at ten minutes to two in the afternoon Wilde died. (The death certificate says the time was 2:00 p.m. on 30 November.) He had scarcely breathed his last breath when the body exploded with fluids from the ear, nose, mouth, and other orifices. The debris was appalling.
Oscar Wilde photographed by Napoleon Sarony, a series of photos worth seeking out.
Gross, right? And having that image for more than 20 years after reading it meant that throughout re-reading Oscar Wilde I would imagine in a quiet moment Wilde’s body gurgling corrosively, building and sometimes trembling with ooze, waiting for Wilde to give up. Yet he held on, deflated after his trial and imprisonment, but not entirely crushed and a husk until surrendering a few years afterward. A few years with many more rounds of spats with Lord Alfred Douglas and estrangements and reconciliations and money wasted and sourced and wasted again.
Richard Ellmann near the end of the Epilogue of Oscar Wilde writes:
Even more than the hopeless loves of Yeats or Dowson or A. E. Housman, Wilde’s love affair provides an example of berserk passion, of Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée. It could have occurred only in a world of partial disclosures, blackmail, and libel suits.
I only know a few oddball phrases in French (a mish-mash of French lessons, Cyrano de Bergerac, Villette by Charlotte Bronte, and movie quotes) and definitely do not specialize in 17th century French poetry. So I had to look up Ellmann’s allusion en français. It’s from Jean Racine’s play Phèdre (1677):
Ce n’est plus une ardeur dans mes veines cachée: C’est Vénus tout entière à sa proie attachée. It is no longer a passion hidden in my heart: It is Venus herself fastened to her prey.
Art needs an agon, a struggle to achieve its identity. Had Wilde lived in a time when homosexuality was not regarded almost as severe a crime as murder, I wonder if his art would have been as good. He most likely would have lived longer.
Logging into a Starbucks WiFi presented this ad of Oprah with Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz talking about a “Business with Soul”. I know what they mean (probably “still liking humanity at the end of the shift” and “nourishing” used in a slightly retch-worthy way) , and I guess “soul” shouldn’t be such a culturally-laden word. But as a child of the 70s, to me this evokes Don Cornelius wishing viewers “Peace, love. and soul.” on Soul Train and an entire genre of music with deep feeling. And, to be honest, “Funk Soul Brother” by Fatboy Slim. It does not evoke Starbucks’ couture, maybe simply milieu, of various shades of brown and a single shade of green and the sense that the more imported something is the better.
I buy Kanye West albums and enjoy them. I have seen clips of the porno Kim Kardashian made with Ray J. Didn’t think we’d be mashing up Kanye music videos with the pneumatic Kim Kardashian’s sex tape, but here we are, United States of America.
The motorcycle has more personality than Kardashian. To give the video more depth, take it as a story about West loving his bike, but a woman keeps intruding AND RUINING IT:
What this video needs, what keeps it from being genius instead of studiously obnoxious, is a cut scene of Kardashian & West riding through the forest moon of Endor on the speeder bikes from Return of the Jedi. Imagine how awesome it would be to have Kim pressing her bubbies against West as they pass by Luke & Leia evading Storm Troopers! Play the song while watching the video below:
Since West’s Late Registration (2005), an album I’ve listened to a lot, I haven’t listened more than a few times to each album that followed. Since the media labeled him an egomaniac, and a lot of his songs afterward have been his ownership of being an egomaniac, the songs don’t stick with me as much. Meaning, as a fellow egomaniac, I hear Kanye West songs and the thoughts don’t seem to be that much different than my usual waking, self-aggrandizing thoughts. His music does not provide me a significantly different human experience. People go: “Wow, Kanye West is an over-the-top and daring asshole.” I go: “Uh, this is pretty much me strutting in the grocery store and glancing over magazine covers.”
I have never watched an episode of any of the Kardashian shows. I do see clips of them mocked on The Soup. Kim Kardashian seems vapid. I’m a little mystified by West & Kardashian as a couple. Like the rest of the world, I try contemplating them while NOT evoking West’s song “Gold digger”. I do have an admiration for Kardashian shaping her porn-driven notoriety into a huge industry over her toddling around in outfits while doing nothing at all of artistic or cultural consequence. She is a lucrative success with a longevity greater than Paris Hilton, who took the same path to less effect. West and Kardashian both have ambition, like the Macbeths, and impressive media savvy. Is that enough to sustain their relationship & parenthood? I won’t pay money for magazines or go beyond my usual trash culture grazing for updates. But when the zeitgeist membrane flicks along a milestone update, I will probably nod and go “Ah!”
As a palate-cleanser, here’s Seth Rogen and James Franco paying homage to Kanye & Kim in their video “Broken 3”:
I flushed away decades of membership dues to the ACLU and EFF and gave my DNA to a company to get ancestry and medical insights. The DNA was given as saliva in a vial. I had to tell you that because I know you sat there giggling while imagining me ejecting my baby batter into an envelope.
Like many (most? all?) white people I had hope of discovery of some exotic hereditary strain. A desperate mingling between a settler on the prairie and a native tribe member (who came from a people that migrated from Asia thousands of years before, but let’s go with “native”). A forbidden love so powerful it overcame pigmentation prejudice and tribal loyalties!
Yeah, I hear you. I’ve read Howard Zinn, too. If there were such a mingling, chances are good it was under an oppressor/oppressed dynamic. Don’t harsh my One World Romance, you consarned cynic!
Results came in. 100% European.
At least my ancestors traveled around the continent a bit.
I do tend to prefer being cold, as I run warm, compared to hot temperatures. And I can get motion sickness on boats. Coming from ancestors who were mostly homebodies makes sense, if totally pedestrian.
Nothing really alarming was revealed, health-wise. I have a higher than average likelihood of macular degeneration. So I’ve made my first-ever appointment with an opthamologist to get that checked out as a preventive measure.
Gladly I have less-than average Neanderthal DNA (not to seem species-ist or anything, okay, I did just go intra-hominid racist right there).
You (right), ready for action. Me (left) got a stick in my ass.
It doesn’t mean I’m better than you. Heck, it means I walk around all snooty with my higher brow while YOU are more likely to have greater skull capacity. So, there Ms./Mr. Big Brain! Also, as your knuckles already drag on the ground it causes you less bodily stress to pick up things off the ground. Lucky you! I’m so jealous…
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons) ran an ad in satirical news website The Onion. This ad is legit, but out of place, given Mormons are frequently criticized for not being “real” Christians.
It could be Mormons are marketing to demi-“ironic” hipsters (waving my hand at the screen) to lure them in. Like the paired Mormon missionairies patrolling outside shows of “The Book of Mormon” musical.
I loved, loved, LOVED TLC and eagerly watched the CORNY VH-1 docudrama “CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story” that came out this year.
How corny is it? Within 60 seconds T-Boz and Left Eye get signed at LaFace Records, step out from the LaFace building and go to the phone booth where Left Eye calls her dad to share the good news. Left Eye immediately learns that her dad has been shot and killed. The next shot is Left Eye drinking her pain away from a brown paper bag. It starts at the 8:35 mark.
No, really, HOW CORNY IS IT? So corny that Pebbles is setup as the main villain. You know, Pebbles who had the hit with “Mercedes Boy”? She’s married to L.A. Reid, co-owner of LaFace Records and auditioned, formed, then signed TLC and proceeded to pretty much take all their money for the first tens of millions of albums and massive tours. That’s not the corniest part. The corniest part is when she nods in commiseration at T-Boz and Chilli at the funeral for Left Eye. All is forgiven!
The performances are good, the recreations of the videos are really impressive. And if you ever want to see Atlanta Falcons’ Andre Rison wear a HUGE white fur coat while picking up on Left Eye THIS IS YOUR TIME! Your dream = manifested!
