La Mancha Man

I’ve been traveling the rituals and festivals of Spain in a big, over-giant book. There’s more than a hundred celebrations—when do those people work?—including a festival for married women and a festival for single ladies, a festival for mayors’ wives, even a festival for night favors. !

Many of the celebrations involve burning something—burning brooms, burning statues, burning trees, burning bulls. In fact a lot of the festivals involve bulls, from the running of the bulls, to various forms of taunting, including enticement of bulls to jump into bodies of water. Apparently since the earliest Minoans, bull sport is kept alive on the Mediterranean in the country of Spain.

The most remarkable aspect of all this pageantry is the absolute cleanliness of the elaborate costumes. Through the muddy countryside to dusty city streets, right down to the detail of white socks on the children, these people are clean. Whether they are men in white lace skirts in Saint Fatbelly’s Festival, or a clown being “stoned” with potatoes, the colors are true and the whites are white. The only exception is the Tomato Battle, of course.

Spain’s motto is PLUS ULTRA, “Further Beyond!” Indeed. The origin of Don Quixote makes a lot more sense after reading this book. He is the ultimate Mancha Mancha Man!

Homeland Security

We were so distracted by Homeland Security we took our eye off home and land security. The Federal Government gave us a Greenspan that stretched our credit limits to the subprime.

If it comes down to growing my own vegetables I'll starve. The fastest way to kill a plant is to give it to me. Plants are basically vegetable matter stuck in dirt instead of a pretty water vase. Disposability overcomes their nutritional value in my hands. I can wither a houseplant at a glance. Imagine what I could do to a whole food crop!

Demolition—that’s the business to be in right now. Mashing down houses abandoned by residents, stripped by bandits, ruined hulls too expensive to fix versus the cost of bull dozing.

And secondly—fixed-term marriages. A five-year, or a twenty-year marriage. Sort of like a savings bond, it gains interest as it approaches maturity. As the officiate, you get paid for the marriage license and divorce fees up front at the beginning, which bites off any cost of inflation for the happy/unhappy couple, then the marriage dissolves at the designated time. It’s really just an elaborate prenuptial agreement, where all current and future assets are divided upon at the commencement, instead of argued over at the termination, at which point they can either recommit or leave it be.

Marriage isn't what it used to be when it was invented. People live longer now. You say "I do" and you're going to keep “doing” for like 50 years or so. And how much of that really works out? (If we had to go to high school indefinitely we’d never graduate.) Whereas, if a couple can commit to five years, just five years, they might make it longer than they think. A time-limited marriage would force them to learn to commit, instead of taking the relationship for granted, and then wandering off from each other.

Mum

I have a Scottish friend who wrote a story about a boy and his mum. What’s a “mum”? my kids ask, then, Why does he say “mom” that way?

“Mum” is not American English. It does not mean “mom” and it has nothing to do with keeping silent. (In America, very little has to do with keeping silent.) However, most grown Americans do recognize “keeping mum” as an idiom of the British Isles. We just have no idea how to practice it.

Director Niall Johnson has made a film of that title, KEEPING MUM, to demonstrate the expression to those on the West Atlantic. Despite the cast of Her Majesty’s Royal Regulars, this is not a stiff British flick. Any hint at Jane Austen is annihilated by the role of Patrick Swayze as the sleazy golf professional. “I see your wife,” he tells the vicar and adds a glance loaded with double meaning.

Yes, this movie’s primary concern is the vicar’s wife, who is nearly about to have an affair with Patrick Sleazy. In-between her nearly about-to’s, Mrs. Vicar hires a housekeeper, whom she subsequently learns offed people, before multiple decades in an institution for the criminally insane. Question is, is Mrs. Housekeeper at it again?

There is another twist, but I’m not going to spoil it. That’s what the movie’s all about, after all: keeping mum. My public library was forethoughted enough to have this film on the shelf. Perhaps your local institution has been so forethoughted as well in its collection. Check it out.

Jellicle Cast

In 1962, Lillian Hellman said Broadway was a bore. In the last five years, ballet has been in a slump—infused too much with choreographers that come from modern dance. And yet from 1982 to 2000, CATS was the longest running Broadway show.

Hellman’s complaint was the modern playwrights, more concerned with commercial viability than art, too afraid to produce a flop. Of course CATS dropped back to an established writer, T. S. Eliot, and his poetry of the 1930’s, conjoined with the contemporary popularity of composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber.

I saw CATS in Chicago, then later from a catwalk in a smaller town. We weren’t very well dressed when I saw it in Chicago—we had on everything we owned, but I’m from the south in the January wind off Lake Michigan. We’d been walking around Chicago, beautiful Chicago, crisp, blue sky, shrieking wind that must have blown the trash elsewhere, clean streets with snow parked on the curbs, and us skating the sidewalks slick with ice. My ears were still ringing with frostbite.

Second time I saw CATS I dressed all in black, showed up at a stage door at a designated time. The door slid open and I crept in, climbed a ladder, and stealthfully walked out on a lighting rail over the audience. If you moved too much, the lights shook, and you could see that on stage. I had to be very still. Those catwalks are sturdy, built to hold the heavy ellipsoidals and freshnels, but they’re not designed for people to walk around on them during a show. I didn’t pay five hundred dollars for my seat, and I wasn’t wearing formal attire, but the sound swelled up into the ceiling, and I swear I had the best seat in the house.

I have two cats, or rather, they have me. One is every color God could think of, splotched in a Picasso pattern. The other believes she is the queen of Siam, but has the ring-tail of a tabby.

I’ve always thought of CATS as a celebration of non-menstruation. There is absolutely no bloating or cramping evident in this fine display of skinniness backed by exquisite muscle tone. The splendors of exercise and diet must render those dancers not about to have kittens. “They had to get real stretchy people,” my kid says. Yes, real stretchy people. And the costumes are amazing. Precision tailoring to accentuate the human form while wearing a cat suit—brilliant. I mean cats do have that sensuality, well, mine don’t, but the flirting, the stretching, the flexibility—even my dear little cats have that in common with their rogue cousins, and with the tremendous performers of CATS, who make cat life look so easy, while they make human dance so beautiful.

Poof

The machinery isn't working well today--I heard that line in a movie called PROOF and thought it was useful. I can remember what I wanted to write about, but I can't remember how I wanted to say it. It's not good if I can't remember how to say it.

I watched a movie version of PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN. It was dull as the book. Stephen Dedalus reminds me of Henry David Thoreau, who over-intellectualizes something as organic as growing beans.

There was a time in our human history, maybe at the very start of human history, when life and art were one. We began to separate them, though, as we began to examine things out of context, much as visual art in a modern sense is sterilized into pale galleries instead of being integral to the architecture where its individual meaning can be lost and/or it informs on the larger structure. There is merit to examining text and context individually, depending on whether the interpretation provides greater meaning.

Thoreau takes beans out of context. "I want to know beans!" he says. But the way he did it, it was like putting navel lint in a Petri dish and expecting it to give you a dissertation on the last digit of pi. Poor Thoreau, he had no idea what Emerson was talking about (who does? but E says it all so beautifully) so Henry David had to fabricate his own intellectualism by doing something freaking farmers had done for centuries, but academically reinvent it by writing about it. Just because you write something down doesn't mean that you've given it meaning, and Thoreau did no more than duplicate a farmers' almanac.

In my next life I'm going to be a nuclear physicist. I would have been one in this life, but I was scared off by the math. Math is a language. It is a way of talking about concepts. Numbers have personalities, else why would they have different values or characteristics. The movie, PROOF (Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins), is about a genius mathematician whose equations dissolve into poetry. He begins to go over his proof, line by line, those algebraic letters reform into English words. The other characters call him crazy because he does this--it isn't MATH anymore! Nobody recognizes him as poet.

It doesn't matter if a writer writes about writing. Nor does it matter if a writer uses a thin metaphor to write about writing. All elements as they approach their limit change form. Matter turns into energy. Solid into liquid into gas. Life into death. It is elemental and beautiful, it is aesthetic and utilitarian. You can't make life or art more than they are through academics or any other means because that will send you on a tangent and you'll never reach infinity--art, life, meaning, beauty will disappear in your hand.