To contact us Click HERE
JUST A QUICK COMMENT on the play seen last night, Other People's Money, a comic oleo, I think you could call it, on a very topical subject, by Jerry Sterner, about whom I know only what Wikipedia tells me, which is little beyond the epitaph on his headstone: "Finally, a plot."
The play is equally sardonic. You may know it from its 1991 film version, which starred Danny DeVito, Gregory Peck, and Piper Laurie — strange, how long ago that all seems now! I haven't seen the film, but last night's performance makes me curious to.
Not that the production we saw was deficient, crying out for Hollywood's more lavish resources. This was community theater, though one member of the cast is Equity; but the casting was good, the acting persuasive, the production resourceful given the small house and crowded stage facility.
The play's about a villainous New York corporate raider who's after a midsized Rhode Island factory, publicly held but tightly controlled by the family that founded it many years before. The company's small-town owner, whose father had founded the factory, yields to his second wife's pleas to let her daughter, at the beginning of her law career — his stepdaughter — to try to prevent the takeover.
Further complications involve the family dynamics and various interferences by employees, but the main action is in the emerging duel between the smart and idealistic young lawyer, Kate, and the villain, Lawrence Garfinkle. (Interestingly, his surname was changed in the film to "Garfield.") They are played here by Laura Lowry and Keith Baker, and I thought both were superb.
We went to the play at the suggestion of a couple of friends, with whom we often see theater; they'd heard this was very funny, and after the previous night's presidential debate a funny play was in order. Well, of course, corporate raiders are very much in play these days, and it was perhaps too bad that the one in this production is as funny, as darkly attractive, as he is. Oily, rancid, yes; you can almost see him twisting a Simon Legree mustache as he eyes the sweet young daughter. But his frankness, as he discusses the nasty business he goes about, is refreshing, particularly after the less "transparent" explanations Mr. Romney gave the other night.
• Other People's Money, a comedy by Jerry Sterner. With Larry Williams, John Craven, Joan Hawley, Keith Baker, and Laura Lowry, directed by Elizabeth Craven. Main Stage West, Sebastopol, through October 6.
3 Ocak 2013 Perşembe
2 Ocak 2013 Çarşamba
Other People's Money
To contact us Click HERE
JUST A QUICK COMMENT on the play seen last night, Other People's Money, a comic oleo, I think you could call it, on a very topical subject, by Jerry Sterner, about whom I know only what Wikipedia tells me, which is little beyond the epitaph on his headstone: "Finally, a plot."
The play is equally sardonic. You may know it from its 1991 film version, which starred Danny DeVito, Gregory Peck, and Piper Laurie — strange, how long ago that all seems now! I haven't seen the film, but last night's performance makes me curious to.
Not that the production we saw was deficient, crying out for Hollywood's more lavish resources. This was community theater, though one member of the cast is Equity; but the casting was good, the acting persuasive, the production resourceful given the small house and crowded stage facility.
The play's about a villainous New York corporate raider who's after a midsized Rhode Island factory, publicly held but tightly controlled by the family that founded it many years before. The company's small-town owner, whose father had founded the factory, yields to his second wife's pleas to let her daughter, at the beginning of her law career — his stepdaughter — to try to prevent the takeover.
Further complications involve the family dynamics and various interferences by employees, but the main action is in the emerging duel between the smart and idealistic young lawyer, Kate, and the villain, Lawrence Garfinkle. (Interestingly, his surname was changed in the film to "Garfield.") They are played here by Laura Lowry and Keith Baker, and I thought both were superb.
We went to the play at the suggestion of a couple of friends, with whom we often see theater; they'd heard this was very funny, and after the previous night's presidential debate a funny play was in order. Well, of course, corporate raiders are very much in play these days, and it was perhaps too bad that the one in this production is as funny, as darkly attractive, as he is. Oily, rancid, yes; you can almost see him twisting a Simon Legree mustache as he eyes the sweet young daughter. But his frankness, as he discusses the nasty business he goes about, is refreshing, particularly after the less "transparent" explanations Mr. Romney gave the other night.
• Other People's Money, a comedy by Jerry Sterner. With Larry Williams, John Craven, Joan Hawley, Keith Baker, and Laura Lowry, directed by Elizabeth Craven. Main Stage West, Sebastopol, through October 6.
The play is equally sardonic. You may know it from its 1991 film version, which starred Danny DeVito, Gregory Peck, and Piper Laurie — strange, how long ago that all seems now! I haven't seen the film, but last night's performance makes me curious to.
Not that the production we saw was deficient, crying out for Hollywood's more lavish resources. This was community theater, though one member of the cast is Equity; but the casting was good, the acting persuasive, the production resourceful given the small house and crowded stage facility.
The play's about a villainous New York corporate raider who's after a midsized Rhode Island factory, publicly held but tightly controlled by the family that founded it many years before. The company's small-town owner, whose father had founded the factory, yields to his second wife's pleas to let her daughter, at the beginning of her law career — his stepdaughter — to try to prevent the takeover.
Further complications involve the family dynamics and various interferences by employees, but the main action is in the emerging duel between the smart and idealistic young lawyer, Kate, and the villain, Lawrence Garfinkle. (Interestingly, his surname was changed in the film to "Garfield.") They are played here by Laura Lowry and Keith Baker, and I thought both were superb.
We went to the play at the suggestion of a couple of friends, with whom we often see theater; they'd heard this was very funny, and after the previous night's presidential debate a funny play was in order. Well, of course, corporate raiders are very much in play these days, and it was perhaps too bad that the one in this production is as funny, as darkly attractive, as he is. Oily, rancid, yes; you can almost see him twisting a Simon Legree mustache as he eyes the sweet young daughter. But his frankness, as he discusses the nasty business he goes about, is refreshing, particularly after the less "transparent" explanations Mr. Romney gave the other night.
• Other People's Money, a comedy by Jerry Sterner. With Larry Williams, John Craven, Joan Hawley, Keith Baker, and Laura Lowry, directed by Elizabeth Craven. Main Stage West, Sebastopol, through October 6.
Richard Diebenkorn at Crown Point Press
To contact us Click HERE
Eastside Road, January 1, 2013—THIS ISN'T MUCH of a photo, I know; I snapped it quickly with my iPhone; I just want to give you an idea of the unique combination of intelligence, repose, and beauty to be seen for the next two weeks in the handsome Crown Point Press gallery in San Francisco. The Press is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year, and this is by way of the opening celebratory exhibition, and who more logical to feature than Richard Diebenkorn.
The first time I saw a Diebenkorn print it was one of the series of drypoint etchings he made at Crown Point when the studio was in Richmond. I'd driven out there to pick up one of the prints to deliver to KPFA-fm, where I was then volunteering, so this must have been before summer 1964 when I went on staff. The etching was to be photographed somewhere for use as the cover of the program guide, which in those days was a small-format biweekly. I remember the print was a tabletop still life with a pair of scissors.
These were, I think, among his first prints: until then he'd been almost exclusively a painter and draftsman, alternating between representational imagery and the marvelous spatial abstract "landscapes" of the Berkeley and Albuquerque series. Later still, of course, he famously left the Bay Area for Santa Monica, where he settled in Ocean Park and painted the magnificent geometrical abstracts that went by that name.
In this photo you see three objects (excluding the partially captured objects left and right): a chair Diebenkorn left behind in the Oakland studio he used for a few years, which Crown Point subsequently occupied before moving to its present San Francisco location; a small framed self-portrait; and "Green," a magnificent etching from 1986. The paper hanging on the right-hand side of the photo, only partially seen, is a working drawing for "Green." I find this installation truly arresting, yet serene. The empty chair — I'm sorry the idiotic Republican convention last summer has spoiled that phrase for the time being — the empty chair positioned under the self-portrait brings the artist himself into the gallery, in a ghostly way, sitting (rare for him: I always think of him as standing, with the slightly stoop-shouldered powerful stance of a tall, well-built man), contemplating the working drawing, then the finished print.
In March it will have been twenty years since Diebenkorn's death, just short of seventy-one, of complications from emphysema, according to the Wikipedia entry. He had recently moved from Ocean Park back to the Bay Area, to Healdsburg in fact, a few miles from our Eastside Road, and his painting was as usual undergoing a considerable change in mood and appearance with the move: had he lived, we'd have a Healdsburg series perhaps, probably with a considerably different palette and content from the Ocean Park abstractions.
Three disturbing, powerful, rather enigmatic aquatints from 1992 may suggest disturbances interrupting the tranquil though extraordinarily thoughtful work of Diebenkorn's last decade. Called (by the artist) "Flotsam," "The Barbarian," and "The Barbarian's Garden — Threatened," they can hardly avoid being seen as representational and symbolic. They hang close together at Crown Point, allowing a close scrutiny which encourages contemplation of the changing forms and images, alterations sometimes subtle, sometimes less so, as the artist discovers, encourages, or suppresses edges and contours, re-configuring the light-dark balances, once even turning the rectangle the other way up. (You can see reproductions of these prints, and others in this show, here.)
Throughout the exhibition you're reminded of the essentially performative nature of Diebenkorn's work. This comes through quite literally as he alters his plates between trial proofs, or draws on them, or glues strips of tape or cut-out scraps of paper to experiment with various shapes. But it also pervades the viewer's engagement with the artist's process: a real colloquy develops, in which the time required by each stage of his work, both for its creation and for the viewer's perception of the rich content which is sometimes slow to reveal itself, the time itself becomes a fourth dimension of the work (the third being implied in all his work, which can hardly avoid being seen as landscape).
There's too much to be said about Diebenkorn and his work; this contemplation has often completely overcome me. Toward the end of his life I visited him on an assignment from a magazine that had suggested I interview him on the occasion of his move north. He was clearly fatigued; I now suspect he knew he didn't have that long to live. We spent a delightful hour talking about things, but neither of us wanted to commit to the project, each of us for a different reason. He was gracious and appreciative and very thoughtful: he was always, I think, a profoundly thoughtful man.
(Years earlier, when he had a retrospective at the old San Francisco Museum of Art on Van Ness Avenue, I interviewed him much more superficially. I mentioned his use of diagonals in his abstracts, and pointed to the crossed legs of one of his Seated Woman paintings, and he shrugged, and pointed out that one always sees the same things, whatever one looked at.)
I noticed a quote from Jasper Johns at the present SFMOMA yesterday:
There's also a lot to be said about Crown Point, and about its director, Kathan Brown, who has just published a memoir, Know That You Are Lucky, that I look forward to reading soon. In the meantime, this wonderful Diebenkorn exhibition will be up another couple of weeks, and I urge you to see it if you can.
• Crown Point Press, 20 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco; 415.974.6273; open Monday 10-5, Tuesday through Saturday 10-6.
Eastside Road, January 1, 2013—THIS ISN'T MUCH of a photo, I know; I snapped it quickly with my iPhone; I just want to give you an idea of the unique combination of intelligence, repose, and beauty to be seen for the next two weeks in the handsome Crown Point Press gallery in San Francisco. The Press is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year, and this is by way of the opening celebratory exhibition, and who more logical to feature than Richard Diebenkorn.The first time I saw a Diebenkorn print it was one of the series of drypoint etchings he made at Crown Point when the studio was in Richmond. I'd driven out there to pick up one of the prints to deliver to KPFA-fm, where I was then volunteering, so this must have been before summer 1964 when I went on staff. The etching was to be photographed somewhere for use as the cover of the program guide, which in those days was a small-format biweekly. I remember the print was a tabletop still life with a pair of scissors.
These were, I think, among his first prints: until then he'd been almost exclusively a painter and draftsman, alternating between representational imagery and the marvelous spatial abstract "landscapes" of the Berkeley and Albuquerque series. Later still, of course, he famously left the Bay Area for Santa Monica, where he settled in Ocean Park and painted the magnificent geometrical abstracts that went by that name.
In this photo you see three objects (excluding the partially captured objects left and right): a chair Diebenkorn left behind in the Oakland studio he used for a few years, which Crown Point subsequently occupied before moving to its present San Francisco location; a small framed self-portrait; and "Green," a magnificent etching from 1986. The paper hanging on the right-hand side of the photo, only partially seen, is a working drawing for "Green." I find this installation truly arresting, yet serene. The empty chair — I'm sorry the idiotic Republican convention last summer has spoiled that phrase for the time being — the empty chair positioned under the self-portrait brings the artist himself into the gallery, in a ghostly way, sitting (rare for him: I always think of him as standing, with the slightly stoop-shouldered powerful stance of a tall, well-built man), contemplating the working drawing, then the finished print.
In March it will have been twenty years since Diebenkorn's death, just short of seventy-one, of complications from emphysema, according to the Wikipedia entry. He had recently moved from Ocean Park back to the Bay Area, to Healdsburg in fact, a few miles from our Eastside Road, and his painting was as usual undergoing a considerable change in mood and appearance with the move: had he lived, we'd have a Healdsburg series perhaps, probably with a considerably different palette and content from the Ocean Park abstractions.
Three disturbing, powerful, rather enigmatic aquatints from 1992 may suggest disturbances interrupting the tranquil though extraordinarily thoughtful work of Diebenkorn's last decade. Called (by the artist) "Flotsam," "The Barbarian," and "The Barbarian's Garden — Threatened," they can hardly avoid being seen as representational and symbolic. They hang close together at Crown Point, allowing a close scrutiny which encourages contemplation of the changing forms and images, alterations sometimes subtle, sometimes less so, as the artist discovers, encourages, or suppresses edges and contours, re-configuring the light-dark balances, once even turning the rectangle the other way up. (You can see reproductions of these prints, and others in this show, here.)
Throughout the exhibition you're reminded of the essentially performative nature of Diebenkorn's work. This comes through quite literally as he alters his plates between trial proofs, or draws on them, or glues strips of tape or cut-out scraps of paper to experiment with various shapes. But it also pervades the viewer's engagement with the artist's process: a real colloquy develops, in which the time required by each stage of his work, both for its creation and for the viewer's perception of the rich content which is sometimes slow to reveal itself, the time itself becomes a fourth dimension of the work (the third being implied in all his work, which can hardly avoid being seen as landscape).
There's too much to be said about Diebenkorn and his work; this contemplation has often completely overcome me. Toward the end of his life I visited him on an assignment from a magazine that had suggested I interview him on the occasion of his move north. He was clearly fatigued; I now suspect he knew he didn't have that long to live. We spent a delightful hour talking about things, but neither of us wanted to commit to the project, each of us for a different reason. He was gracious and appreciative and very thoughtful: he was always, I think, a profoundly thoughtful man.
(Years earlier, when he had a retrospective at the old San Francisco Museum of Art on Van Ness Avenue, I interviewed him much more superficially. I mentioned his use of diagonals in his abstracts, and pointed to the crossed legs of one of his Seated Woman paintings, and he shrugged, and pointed out that one always sees the same things, whatever one looked at.)
I noticed a quote from Jasper Johns at the present SFMOMA yesterday:
Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.I don't think Diebenkorn would agree with this: or, rather, I don't think Diebenkorn would find any impurity in the situation: or, rather, I don't think "situation" is a word you could bring to Diebenkorn's participation in the activity Johns is discussing. "Situation" implies stasis, and Diebenkorn's work is constantly undergoing development, or, rather, since "development" implies improvement of some kind, his work is constantly in motion, the slow, meaning-accreting motion of contemplation and adjustment, the minute and informed change we must all accept and embrace if we are to continue to live.
There's also a lot to be said about Crown Point, and about its director, Kathan Brown, who has just published a memoir, Know That You Are Lucky, that I look forward to reading soon. In the meantime, this wonderful Diebenkorn exhibition will be up another couple of weeks, and I urge you to see it if you can.
• Crown Point Press, 20 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco; 415.974.6273; open Monday 10-5, Tuesday through Saturday 10-6.
1 Ocak 2013 Salı
Other People's Money
To contact us Click HERE
JUST A QUICK COMMENT on the play seen last night, Other People's Money, a comic oleo, I think you could call it, on a very topical subject, by Jerry Sterner, about whom I know only what Wikipedia tells me, which is little beyond the epitaph on his headstone: "Finally, a plot."
The play is equally sardonic. You may know it from its 1991 film version, which starred Danny DeVito, Gregory Peck, and Piper Laurie — strange, how long ago that all seems now! I haven't seen the film, but last night's performance makes me curious to.
Not that the production we saw was deficient, crying out for Hollywood's more lavish resources. This was community theater, though one member of the cast is Equity; but the casting was good, the acting persuasive, the production resourceful given the small house and crowded stage facility.
The play's about a villainous New York corporate raider who's after a midsized Rhode Island factory, publicly held but tightly controlled by the family that founded it many years before. The company's small-town owner, whose father had founded the factory, yields to his second wife's pleas to let her daughter, at the beginning of her law career — his stepdaughter — to try to prevent the takeover.
Further complications involve the family dynamics and various interferences by employees, but the main action is in the emerging duel between the smart and idealistic young lawyer, Kate, and the villain, Lawrence Garfinkle. (Interestingly, his surname was changed in the film to "Garfield.") They are played here by Laura Lowry and Keith Baker, and I thought both were superb.
We went to the play at the suggestion of a couple of friends, with whom we often see theater; they'd heard this was very funny, and after the previous night's presidential debate a funny play was in order. Well, of course, corporate raiders are very much in play these days, and it was perhaps too bad that the one in this production is as funny, as darkly attractive, as he is. Oily, rancid, yes; you can almost see him twisting a Simon Legree mustache as he eyes the sweet young daughter. But his frankness, as he discusses the nasty business he goes about, is refreshing, particularly after the less "transparent" explanations Mr. Romney gave the other night.
• Other People's Money, a comedy by Jerry Sterner. With Larry Williams, John Craven, Joan Hawley, Keith Baker, and Laura Lowry, directed by Elizabeth Craven. Main Stage West, Sebastopol, through October 6.
The play is equally sardonic. You may know it from its 1991 film version, which starred Danny DeVito, Gregory Peck, and Piper Laurie — strange, how long ago that all seems now! I haven't seen the film, but last night's performance makes me curious to.
Not that the production we saw was deficient, crying out for Hollywood's more lavish resources. This was community theater, though one member of the cast is Equity; but the casting was good, the acting persuasive, the production resourceful given the small house and crowded stage facility.
The play's about a villainous New York corporate raider who's after a midsized Rhode Island factory, publicly held but tightly controlled by the family that founded it many years before. The company's small-town owner, whose father had founded the factory, yields to his second wife's pleas to let her daughter, at the beginning of her law career — his stepdaughter — to try to prevent the takeover.
Further complications involve the family dynamics and various interferences by employees, but the main action is in the emerging duel between the smart and idealistic young lawyer, Kate, and the villain, Lawrence Garfinkle. (Interestingly, his surname was changed in the film to "Garfield.") They are played here by Laura Lowry and Keith Baker, and I thought both were superb.
We went to the play at the suggestion of a couple of friends, with whom we often see theater; they'd heard this was very funny, and after the previous night's presidential debate a funny play was in order. Well, of course, corporate raiders are very much in play these days, and it was perhaps too bad that the one in this production is as funny, as darkly attractive, as he is. Oily, rancid, yes; you can almost see him twisting a Simon Legree mustache as he eyes the sweet young daughter. But his frankness, as he discusses the nasty business he goes about, is refreshing, particularly after the less "transparent" explanations Mr. Romney gave the other night.
• Other People's Money, a comedy by Jerry Sterner. With Larry Williams, John Craven, Joan Hawley, Keith Baker, and Laura Lowry, directed by Elizabeth Craven. Main Stage West, Sebastopol, through October 6.
31 Aralık 2012 Pazartesi
Other People's Money
To contact us Click HERE
JUST A QUICK COMMENT on the play seen last night, Other People's Money, a comic oleo, I think you could call it, on a very topical subject, by Jerry Sterner, about whom I know only what Wikipedia tells me, which is little beyond the epitaph on his headstone: "Finally, a plot."
The play is equally sardonic. You may know it from its 1991 film version, which starred Danny DeVito, Gregory Peck, and Piper Laurie — strange, how long ago that all seems now! I haven't seen the film, but last night's performance makes me curious to.
Not that the production we saw was deficient, crying out for Hollywood's more lavish resources. This was community theater, though one member of the cast is Equity; but the casting was good, the acting persuasive, the production resourceful given the small house and crowded stage facility.
The play's about a villainous New York corporate raider who's after a midsized Rhode Island factory, publicly held but tightly controlled by the family that founded it many years before. The company's small-town owner, whose father had founded the factory, yields to his second wife's pleas to let her daughter, at the beginning of her law career — his stepdaughter — to try to prevent the takeover.
Further complications involve the family dynamics and various interferences by employees, but the main action is in the emerging duel between the smart and idealistic young lawyer, Kate, and the villain, Lawrence Garfinkle. (Interestingly, his surname was changed in the film to "Garfield.") They are played here by Laura Lowry and Keith Baker, and I thought both were superb.
We went to the play at the suggestion of a couple of friends, with whom we often see theater; they'd heard this was very funny, and after the previous night's presidential debate a funny play was in order. Well, of course, corporate raiders are very much in play these days, and it was perhaps too bad that the one in this production is as funny, as darkly attractive, as he is. Oily, rancid, yes; you can almost see him twisting a Simon Legree mustache as he eyes the sweet young daughter. But his frankness, as he discusses the nasty business he goes about, is refreshing, particularly after the less "transparent" explanations Mr. Romney gave the other night.
• Other People's Money, a comedy by Jerry Sterner. With Larry Williams, John Craven, Joan Hawley, Keith Baker, and Laura Lowry, directed by Elizabeth Craven. Main Stage West, Sebastopol, through October 6.
The play is equally sardonic. You may know it from its 1991 film version, which starred Danny DeVito, Gregory Peck, and Piper Laurie — strange, how long ago that all seems now! I haven't seen the film, but last night's performance makes me curious to.
Not that the production we saw was deficient, crying out for Hollywood's more lavish resources. This was community theater, though one member of the cast is Equity; but the casting was good, the acting persuasive, the production resourceful given the small house and crowded stage facility.
The play's about a villainous New York corporate raider who's after a midsized Rhode Island factory, publicly held but tightly controlled by the family that founded it many years before. The company's small-town owner, whose father had founded the factory, yields to his second wife's pleas to let her daughter, at the beginning of her law career — his stepdaughter — to try to prevent the takeover.
Further complications involve the family dynamics and various interferences by employees, but the main action is in the emerging duel between the smart and idealistic young lawyer, Kate, and the villain, Lawrence Garfinkle. (Interestingly, his surname was changed in the film to "Garfield.") They are played here by Laura Lowry and Keith Baker, and I thought both were superb.
We went to the play at the suggestion of a couple of friends, with whom we often see theater; they'd heard this was very funny, and after the previous night's presidential debate a funny play was in order. Well, of course, corporate raiders are very much in play these days, and it was perhaps too bad that the one in this production is as funny, as darkly attractive, as he is. Oily, rancid, yes; you can almost see him twisting a Simon Legree mustache as he eyes the sweet young daughter. But his frankness, as he discusses the nasty business he goes about, is refreshing, particularly after the less "transparent" explanations Mr. Romney gave the other night.
• Other People's Money, a comedy by Jerry Sterner. With Larry Williams, John Craven, Joan Hawley, Keith Baker, and Laura Lowry, directed by Elizabeth Craven. Main Stage West, Sebastopol, through October 6.
27 Aralık 2012 Perşembe
Other People's Money
To contact us Click HERE
JUST A QUICK COMMENT on the play seen last night, Other People's Money, a comic oleo, I think you could call it, on a very topical subject, by Jerry Sterner, about whom I know only what Wikipedia tells me, which is little beyond the epitaph on his headstone: "Finally, a plot."
The play is equally sardonic. You may know it from its 1991 film version, which starred Danny DeVito, Gregory Peck, and Piper Laurie — strange, how long ago that all seems now! I haven't seen the film, but last night's performance makes me curious to.
Not that the production we saw was deficient, crying out for Hollywood's more lavish resources. This was community theater, though one member of the cast is Equity; but the casting was good, the acting persuasive, the production resourceful given the small house and crowded stage facility.
The play's about a villainous New York corporate raider who's after a midsized Rhode Island factory, publicly held but tightly controlled by the family that founded it many years before. The company's small-town owner, whose father had founded the factory, yields to his second wife's pleas to let her daughter, at the beginning of her law career — his stepdaughter — to try to prevent the takeover.
Further complications involve the family dynamics and various interferences by employees, but the main action is in the emerging duel between the smart and idealistic young lawyer, Kate, and the villain, Lawrence Garfinkle. (Interestingly, his surname was changed in the film to "Garfield.") They are played here by Laura Lowry and Keith Baker, and I thought both were superb.
We went to the play at the suggestion of a couple of friends, with whom we often see theater; they'd heard this was very funny, and after the previous night's presidential debate a funny play was in order. Well, of course, corporate raiders are very much in play these days, and it was perhaps too bad that the one in this production is as funny, as darkly attractive, as he is. Oily, rancid, yes; you can almost see him twisting a Simon Legree mustache as he eyes the sweet young daughter. But his frankness, as he discusses the nasty business he goes about, is refreshing, particularly after the less "transparent" explanations Mr. Romney gave the other night.
• Other People's Money, a comedy by Jerry Sterner. With Larry Williams, John Craven, Joan Hawley, Keith Baker, and Laura Lowry, directed by Elizabeth Craven. Main Stage West, Sebastopol, through October 6.
The play is equally sardonic. You may know it from its 1991 film version, which starred Danny DeVito, Gregory Peck, and Piper Laurie — strange, how long ago that all seems now! I haven't seen the film, but last night's performance makes me curious to.
Not that the production we saw was deficient, crying out for Hollywood's more lavish resources. This was community theater, though one member of the cast is Equity; but the casting was good, the acting persuasive, the production resourceful given the small house and crowded stage facility.
The play's about a villainous New York corporate raider who's after a midsized Rhode Island factory, publicly held but tightly controlled by the family that founded it many years before. The company's small-town owner, whose father had founded the factory, yields to his second wife's pleas to let her daughter, at the beginning of her law career — his stepdaughter — to try to prevent the takeover.
Further complications involve the family dynamics and various interferences by employees, but the main action is in the emerging duel between the smart and idealistic young lawyer, Kate, and the villain, Lawrence Garfinkle. (Interestingly, his surname was changed in the film to "Garfield.") They are played here by Laura Lowry and Keith Baker, and I thought both were superb.
We went to the play at the suggestion of a couple of friends, with whom we often see theater; they'd heard this was very funny, and after the previous night's presidential debate a funny play was in order. Well, of course, corporate raiders are very much in play these days, and it was perhaps too bad that the one in this production is as funny, as darkly attractive, as he is. Oily, rancid, yes; you can almost see him twisting a Simon Legree mustache as he eyes the sweet young daughter. But his frankness, as he discusses the nasty business he goes about, is refreshing, particularly after the less "transparent" explanations Mr. Romney gave the other night.
• Other People's Money, a comedy by Jerry Sterner. With Larry Williams, John Craven, Joan Hawley, Keith Baker, and Laura Lowry, directed by Elizabeth Craven. Main Stage West, Sebastopol, through October 6.
The guns thing
To contact us Click HERE
I CAN'T HELP WANTING to add a few comments of my own to the gathering millions of paragraphs, though I know I can't really comprehend the problem, let alone comment on it rationally; and though I know whatever I write (or anyone says or writes, for that matter), reasonable people will find a way to find fault with it at best, with me even more likeley.
Still. Some points simply have to be addressed. I think the problem arises in three distinct areas — related, no doubt, but distinct enough they need to be considered and perhaps acted upon distinctly: Guns; Violence; "Mental Illness."
•GUNS: Whatever the "framers" may have had in mind with their Second Amendment, they made a mess of it. I've read and heard a number of explanations: that they were remembering the first battle for independence, which erupted over the British intent to seize weapons at the Concord militia armory (or was it Lexington?). That it was slaveholders who knew they needed their arms to prevent insurrection. That it was states-righters who feared the imposition of a tyrannical federal government which would have to be overthrown.
Whatever the reason for the drafting of the Second Amendment, it seems clear enough to English-major me that it expressly states that the right of the people to keep and bear arms will not be infringed, because a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of the state.
Note that there's nothing here about individuals having the right to keep arms to secure their own individual security. It's all about the community. (It's possible, even likely, that the right of individuals to have arms for their own private protection was simply not at issue, of course.)
(I leave the question of hunting equipment out of the formula for the moment; and I suggest that the concept of "sporting firearms" would likely have been thought odd by most rational men in the late 18th century. Unless you count duelling, perhaps.)
In any case it seems clear the "framers" might not have had automatic or semi-automatic weapons in mind.
What I would do: 1) ban the manufacture, importation, sale, and holding of large clips or magazines, over, oh, say six shells, before reloading is necessary. Do this immediately, by executive action if necessary.
2) Begin a Congressional discussion, with input from panels and commissions, on the question of the manufacture, sale, export, import, and holding of automatic and semiautomatic firearms, and perhaps even nonautomatic firearms over a certain caliber.
3) Simultaneously, a similar investigation into hand guns, which are responsible for a great many killings every year.
•VIOLENCE: The United States is addicted to violence — real violence, symbolic violence, depicted violence. Playful violence and serious violence. Ours is an adolescent nation, impatient and impulsive; and it is also a nation devoted to a sense of entitlement, thinking itself exceptional and all-powerful. We need to simmer down. I have no idea how this can be done on an institutional level. Clearly we should scale back both our desire and our ability to engage other nations and societies in violent action. We should also stop using depictions of violence as entertainment and commercial advertising. But it's hard to see how legal action can address the latter, or how political action can address the former.
We can, however, address the problem individually and in small local groups. Nonviolence was a potent force in the advancement of civil rights. Perhaps the most basic civil right is the right to security, from violence of all kinds but especially human violence. We should demand this right.
•"MENTAL ILLNESS": I set the term in quotes, because I believe it's a bogus term: health and illness are a continuum, and what one person considers pathology another may well see as mere eccentricity. Clearly a murderer is pathological. But to turn immediately to a concern for mental or emotional or developmental "health" or "illness," in the wake of a monstrously violent assault, threatens to be merely a diversion from action that should be taken on immediate practical issues like ammunition control.
Furthermore, it is unfair to the vast majority of those who are thought to suffer some form of mental illness. Some are violent; most are not. Of those who are violent, some may turn to firearms; most cannot.
Further: many who take up arms in a violent fashion seem to me to do so in what many would consider a perfectly rational manner; or, if not rational, then merely impetuous. A violently angry person is not necessarily mentally ill.
•AND THEN there are other questions: suicides; accidents.
There have been suggestions that the arming of good people will discourage the use of firearms by bad ones. I don't think we should ask innocent people, let alone the teachers of small children, to arm themselves and to kill intruders, not even armed ones. I think the current craze for the carrying of concealed weapons, even loaded ones, is antisocial on the face of it, and that any society that encourages such behavior is irrational at best, hypocritical in any case.
There. I feel better now.
Still. Some points simply have to be addressed. I think the problem arises in three distinct areas — related, no doubt, but distinct enough they need to be considered and perhaps acted upon distinctly: Guns; Violence; "Mental Illness."
•GUNS: Whatever the "framers" may have had in mind with their Second Amendment, they made a mess of it. I've read and heard a number of explanations: that they were remembering the first battle for independence, which erupted over the British intent to seize weapons at the Concord militia armory (or was it Lexington?). That it was slaveholders who knew they needed their arms to prevent insurrection. That it was states-righters who feared the imposition of a tyrannical federal government which would have to be overthrown.
Whatever the reason for the drafting of the Second Amendment, it seems clear enough to English-major me that it expressly states that the right of the people to keep and bear arms will not be infringed, because a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of the state.
Note that there's nothing here about individuals having the right to keep arms to secure their own individual security. It's all about the community. (It's possible, even likely, that the right of individuals to have arms for their own private protection was simply not at issue, of course.)
(I leave the question of hunting equipment out of the formula for the moment; and I suggest that the concept of "sporting firearms" would likely have been thought odd by most rational men in the late 18th century. Unless you count duelling, perhaps.)
In any case it seems clear the "framers" might not have had automatic or semi-automatic weapons in mind.
What I would do: 1) ban the manufacture, importation, sale, and holding of large clips or magazines, over, oh, say six shells, before reloading is necessary. Do this immediately, by executive action if necessary.
2) Begin a Congressional discussion, with input from panels and commissions, on the question of the manufacture, sale, export, import, and holding of automatic and semiautomatic firearms, and perhaps even nonautomatic firearms over a certain caliber.
3) Simultaneously, a similar investigation into hand guns, which are responsible for a great many killings every year.
•VIOLENCE: The United States is addicted to violence — real violence, symbolic violence, depicted violence. Playful violence and serious violence. Ours is an adolescent nation, impatient and impulsive; and it is also a nation devoted to a sense of entitlement, thinking itself exceptional and all-powerful. We need to simmer down. I have no idea how this can be done on an institutional level. Clearly we should scale back both our desire and our ability to engage other nations and societies in violent action. We should also stop using depictions of violence as entertainment and commercial advertising. But it's hard to see how legal action can address the latter, or how political action can address the former.
We can, however, address the problem individually and in small local groups. Nonviolence was a potent force in the advancement of civil rights. Perhaps the most basic civil right is the right to security, from violence of all kinds but especially human violence. We should demand this right.
•"MENTAL ILLNESS": I set the term in quotes, because I believe it's a bogus term: health and illness are a continuum, and what one person considers pathology another may well see as mere eccentricity. Clearly a murderer is pathological. But to turn immediately to a concern for mental or emotional or developmental "health" or "illness," in the wake of a monstrously violent assault, threatens to be merely a diversion from action that should be taken on immediate practical issues like ammunition control.
Furthermore, it is unfair to the vast majority of those who are thought to suffer some form of mental illness. Some are violent; most are not. Of those who are violent, some may turn to firearms; most cannot.
Further: many who take up arms in a violent fashion seem to me to do so in what many would consider a perfectly rational manner; or, if not rational, then merely impetuous. A violently angry person is not necessarily mentally ill.
•AND THEN there are other questions: suicides; accidents.
There have been suggestions that the arming of good people will discourage the use of firearms by bad ones. I don't think we should ask innocent people, let alone the teachers of small children, to arm themselves and to kill intruders, not even armed ones. I think the current craze for the carrying of concealed weapons, even loaded ones, is antisocial on the face of it, and that any society that encourages such behavior is irrational at best, hypocritical in any case.
There. I feel better now.
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