new theatre review: the house of blue leaves

After a year of renovation, the distinctively circular Mark Taper Forum re-opened to the public with an excellent performance of John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves. Read all about it at the Front Page Online:

A Bravura Performance in a Renewed Taper Forum

the trials and tribulations of bifurcated garments

In the headlines today, a judge on the Florida Supreme Court ruled that banning underwear-exposing – and imposing fines and/or community service on offenders – is unconstitutional. I’d toast the outcome, except I can’t quite get over the fact that any city would even think of banning pants – pants! – let alone actually do it. Pants! I’m with a lot of people in thinking that exposed underwear and ill-fitting clothes isn’t stylish, but still, as with anything, if no one gets hurts, it’s not an issue for ethics and laws. So if people want to wear pants badly, looking as if they’re going to trip any second (or go potty – I can never figure out which), let them. Pants! For [expletive deleted]’s sake.

But while we’re on the topic of pants, this little tidbit caught my attention a while ago: US Letter-Carrier Going Full Kilt Ahead. As the Associated Press puts it, “A 6-foot-tall (1.83-meter-tall), 250-pound (113-kilogram) letter carrier is campaigning for the right to take off his pants.”

But before you start picturing your letter carrier delivering your mail in a glorious full monty, happily flip-flopping away as he places your precious missives in the box, here’s the next sentence: “Dean Peterson wants the U.S. Postal Service to add kilts as a uniform option for men.”

Kilts! Crazy? Loony? Consider this: ziiiiiiiiiip – yipes!!! Ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow!!!!

Or, as Mr. Petersen put it in a letter to various Postal Unions around the country, “Unbifurcated Garments are far more comfortable and suitable to male anatomy than trousers or shorts because they don't confine the legs or cramp the male genitals the way that trousers or shorts do."

He has a point there, even if he does indulge the penchant for men who struggle against the tyranny of pants to call kilts unbifurcated garments. I suppose that’s a more manly word than kilt or – eek! – skirt. (Nothing says manly man like unbifurcated garment. As in, I’m too manly for bifurcation. What is bifurcation, anyway? Some sort of two-way kinkyness? Kidding. I know that bifurcation is the process of fabricating double-headed forks.)

Seriously, though. Petersen has a point. Granted, utilikilts has gone from pricey to you want HOW much for one of those?, but the idea of not keeping the equipment confined, at risk of zippers or, much more common (I’ve never zippered myself) just feeling the squeeze that comes with putting a body part at the constricting intersection of multiple pieces of fabric, is appealing. The rest is just cultural acclimation.

So good luck, Petersen. I can’t speak for all guys, but this guy is with ya.

new column: cry me a river, rich man

Trying to find someone who knows something about the economy in today's political climate is a lot like living in the land of the blind and trying to find a one-eyed man. With headline after headline of increasingly disastrous economic news - global in scope with Wall Street at the epicentre -it's become obvious that the dominant economic model that more or less began with Ronald Reagan, and continued on even through the Clinton administration, is severely flawed. Deregulation, creative financial maneouvres - it just goes on.

But the problem isn't simply with specific elements of the economy, but how the economy functions as a whole, starting with bedrock principles. Critically, there seems to be two parallel economies: one based on labour, and one based on money itself. The former, of course, is the easy-to-understand economy, based on concrete economic transactions that everyone participates in. But the money economy is arcane and cryptic, filled with such strange beasts as hedge funds and securitized mortgages. This is an economy based on numbers and abstract calculations - and when it fails, it takes everything else down with it.

Into this comes the myth of Republican fiscal conservatism, that is, fiscal responsibility. Why the Republican party still has any credibility on economic matters is a mystery to me. The budget for the Iraq war was kept separate from the national budget, a strange way to do accounting. Tax cuts for the rich have never trickled down, acting instead to shrink the middle class and polarize the rich-poor divide. Deregulation of financial markets made possible Enron and the like. It just goes on. For a more primal example of how Republicans are out-of-touch with economic reality, one doesn't necessarily need to get into the highly technical aspects of modern economics. We can return to a discussion of first principles, such as: what is wealth? Without necessarily saying that Democrats are shiny beacons of hope, in comparison to the aristocratic, let-the-eat-cake mindset of Republicans, it's at least clear that in the game of Lesser Evil, Republicans are not the ones to get us out of this mess. And so, in answer to the charge that non-Republicans are jealous of the rich folk's success - jealous enough to steal their money - I say:

Cry Me A River, Rich Man

capsule review: a history of violence

In the film’s press conference at Cannes, David Cronenberg expressed his intention to make viewers of A History of Violence complicit in the film’s violence, to make them question the entertainment value of morally repugnant acts. Yet it’s a gambit that fails precisely because Cronenberg never succeeds in letting viewers know they’re being played. The film, a self-described commercial feature based on a graphic novel, is a fairly standard tale of a man trying to escape a history of violence only for that history to catch up with him. A more existential take would have examined the bad faith Tom Stall, played by Viggo Mortensen with his typical intensity, exhibits by attempting to erase his past, but Cronenberg ultimately indulges the very violence he hopes to condemn. It’s telling that, while the innocent are merely threatened with horrible death, it’s only the bad guys who actually die brutally. It’s the old exploitation flick stand-by; give a moral imprimatur on immorality by presenting “deserving” victims, people easily cheered to their death. Violence solves, or at least provides closure, to the characters’ problems, emptying Tom Stall’s desire to reform of meaning. At the very least, the lesson is that it’s very easy to be a pacifist after the war’s been fought.

Cronenberg certainly displays some of the directorial brilliance that makes Eastern Promises such a gem – a willingness to take his time, to let the camera linger long enough for audiences to pick out important details for themselves – although he often goes further than is necessary. The sex scenes, rather obvious in their aim to contrast Tom the peaceful man with his original (true?) identity as a frighteningly efficient killer, are potent and raw without being overdone. (But as with the film’s superficial analysis of violence, the addition of sex in the mix – the relationship between sexual arousal and killing is left unexamined. Sex and violence go together like “bacon and eggs,” Cronenberg said at that press conference. I say: Really? Why?) For all the film’s technical accomplishment, especially in the shots establishing the cast’s chemistry, interpretive complexity ultimately comes from outside the film. Sure, you can go Rober Ebert’s way and read all manner of things in the film, but it’s all meta-level stuff that stems from viewers who care to ask questions. The film just sets the pins up, without even bothering with throwing a bowling ball down the lane to knock them down. Unforgiven handled identical themes with greater depth and acumen.

quick update

I was on vacation for the past week and a bit. I'll be getting back up to speed within the next few days. Judging from friends' reactions to the RNC convention - outright shock and unmitigated fury - I can safely say I'm glad I had a news blackout. As news of McCain's VP choice slowly seeps into my info-sphere, the old gloom is setting back in too. I mean, c'mon, a right-wing extremist? Most laughable: Republicans went after Obama for being an inexperienced unknown, even though the "inexperienced" part stems from a willful distortion of Obama's record. (See here.) And what do they do? They trot out an unimpressively experienced unknown, a predictably regressive candidate who appeals to the very people who gave the US, and the world, George W. Bush. Ugh.

I miss that news blackout.