I awoke late but not that late, and not because I awoke late, but because I awoke and went back to sleep, realizing that I still had time to sleep, to let my mind and body rest rather than roll out of bed, shower, and become active.
I like being active.
And so it was that after I showered I got online and wrote with Gabriel, Helen, Amy, Richard, and Bob for an hour or more before I had to leave for a play.
Lynn wrote yesterday to see if anyone was interested in attending the Broom Street Theater’s production of Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus and I wrote back that yes, I’d be interested, and that I would call. I called before getting online but only got the answering machine, so instead did not leave a message and decided I would just meet her and whomever else there.
Just as I was about to leave, post writing, there was a ring at the door and I went downstairs — it was Lynn and a guy named Adam, whom she evidently knows from the French discussion group.
I gathered my jacket, got offline, and joined them, and to the theater we walked. We were the first guests inside; mine was the first ticket purchased. Soon thereafter Claire and Jack’s brother arrived (Jack was evidently tired or hung over or both) and then Gideon showed up. The theater is a small space with seating enough for 50-70 I would say, and shortly after 2p.m. the performance began.
In short: not particularly good.
The bad? They raced through the dialog. There was no cadence or rhythm. There was one volume: loud. There was some inconsistency in costume and design, such as the guy wearing sneakers. New Balance, to be precise. And with the high rate of speech came incomprehensibility at times. Did the actors know or understand what they were saying? Often it seemed as if they didn’t, but what was clear was that we often didn’t.
The good? A nice if telling musical accompaniment — lots of heaven, hell, sin and devil related music. Also good: Mephistopheles. Subtlety (perhaps more than the character, from a Marlowe drama, not Goethe, deserved) and range, along with more emotional impact and display than the lead showed. THe piety turned to pies in the faces of the Pope and his minions was great; the Nazis with dildos … also amusing.
In short (again): a bunch of good ideas, often poorly executed.
Afterward we went to the Weary Traveler for lunch or whatever, and as Lynn pointed out, after having recently seen the (excellent) German play (Glaube Liebe Hoffnung) she expected more from something like this.
I had to agree. I did, however, find myself as about the only defender of “parts” (even if I damned the whole).
We chatted for a long while at the Traveler. Gideon might be here in the fall, but his fiancee (soon wife) likely won’t be. There’s a potential housing situation there. Lynn will be off to Marbach later this summer, as will Hans. Claire hope to join Jack abroad for a while, depending on how Jack’s fellowship or grant application goes. Adam is a math guy, and we tried to explain — after explaining how math people don’t really consider arithmetic “math” — some cool real life things with math, such as chirality (handedness) and things like the möbius strip.
Then we all left; I came home.
In the evening I watched Jessica Hausner’s short feature (74 minutes) Hotel, which stars the beautifully symmetric (if little else?) Franziska Weisz (from Vienna) in a pseudo Lynch meets Blair Witch (Blair Lynch? appropriate since Lost Highway came up in discussion of möbius strips …) type story that has elements of the Wicker Man, assuming one takes the interpretation that the local witch figure is what does Weisz’s character in. The camera direction is mostly unobstructive; it maintains a certain cool distance except when it slowly moves in. This works fine except in the forest scenes, when the camera is clearly held, but without the aid of a steady-cam or similar, so it jiggles and moves quickly in and out of focus. After having watched it I can see — in my own view of improving it — how certain little changes could make it a better “narrative.” One might argue that it’s point is “atmosphere” or something like that, but it is so cool and distant, and emotionless, that the establishment of a dangerous atmosphere is almost negated by the emotional emptiness, and even that emptiness is more bland than an abyss, such that it’s not threatening. But I did like the movie — I just can’t recommend it to those with no patience, even though it’s short.
And — I’ll avoid discussing listening to Stone Temple Pilots, the Steve Miller Band, or Styx, all things I managed today — on that note I’ve returned to brunch writing in a sense, for Hotel has a quality similar to my prose sketches: after watching it, I feel as if it’s the skilled outline of a story waiting to be told. It’s not merely an outline, but rather like a skeleton that one turned into the semblance of a body not by giving it muscles and organs and skin, but by putting the bones n the right positions and tying them together, and then wrapping them in tape or plastic wrap or gauze or something so finely and silkily that the skeleton, while clearly not a full body, still had a formal perfection beyond blanched bones and ragged, jagged edges.
And that describes too much of my writing.
