I died 8 months ago.  But I needed to put a proper end to my story.  As I aged, I forgot how to be honorable.  I chose lies and broken promises instead.  Self gratification became my only goal.  Most of that came from pretending to be a young girl online looking for cyber sex.  For hours on end.  I didn’t care how my actions were perceived or what harm the lies did to others.  I didn’t care if I was caught.  

I became the epitome of everything I put down in others.  

Maybe my soul can find peace that I didn’t have.

A Bit of a Rant

One of the things I've begun to notice around the comments on the Rex Parker Does The New York Times Crossword blog is that the defenders of Mr. Jazz Hands readily list his actions (I'll not call them accomplishments, not yet). The rhetoric lacks awareness of the consequences of these actions. It is unreasonable and foolish to ask the Mexican president to write us a check to pay for a wall they don't want. Enforcing that would require a military invasion, Taxing Mexican imports would only force Americans to pay for the wall that most uf us don't want either. It won't stop illegal immigration, it will merely force the Coyotes to become sailors and change thier entrance points. And it won't stop all of the undocumented housemaids and nannies from raping and murdering innocent college boys so they can steal thier drugs.

Several times I've read about internment camps built or being built in the western half of the country. Who are we going to put there? Undocumented aliens? Lying newspaper reporters who don't agree with the newspeak rhetoric of the administration? Muslims? Indian motel owners? Korean convenience store owners? African Americans? Native Americans who oppose Mr. Jazz Hands's pipeline? Scientists who insist that global warming is real? The five million lllegal voters whom you can tell who they are by looking at them?

You can criticize Z all you want but he is always ready and willing to back up everything he says with reasoned arguments.

Z once linked an article from the New York Times Review of Books. Umberto Eco (there's a familiar crossword name but do you know who he is?) writing on Ur-Fascism. That killed a good half hour to read. I learned a lot. See, I've never been particularly political but that article opened my eyes. When I read that article first, I took it as a warning. Now I'm taking it as a prediction.

All the folks who are straining at the gate to get Obamacare, AKA the Affordable Care Act repealed are doing it without regard for the millions and millions of Americans who will lose thier healthcare. Ultimately that will bring about more expense in lost productivity than the cost of the healthcare itself. The oligarchy doesn't give a shit about Hoi Polloy, the proletariat, the peons and peasants who do the work to support this country. Feed them porridge and put them to work twelve to sixteen hours a day. If a few are lost, there are more to replace tham who will be truely grateful for bowls of porridge and something useful to do with thier day beside lolling about in smoke filled living rooms and basements watching game shows on TV.

So lets make America great again. How? Like it was after the Civil War? Like it was when a fourteen year old colored boy coud be lynched for appreciating and complimenting a white woman by whistling at her? Like it was when gangsters machine gunned down a bunch of rivals in a parking garage over illegal alcohol trade? LIke it was when the banks failed and folks were left with thousands of good things to eat, each of which was a bean. Like it was when everyone was being paid a fair wage for a fair day's work before the unions arose to ensure that? Yeah, America truely was great.

Oopsie!

I saw Frank Zappa in concert in Sydney in 1971. It was very strange. A good friend of mine, Norman, bought up a whole row of tickets about six rows back from the stage and gave them out to all his friends. I was given two.

The night of the concert, I stopped at Tummie's, my favorite bar and restaurant, for a drink or two before going. I was hoping to see a chick I knew to invite her to the concert. No luck, but a waitress in the bar introduced me to a pregnant girl, saying that she had been recently dumped by her boyfriend and might appreciate the attention and the diversion to break her out of her depression. What the heck! So I agreed, asked her and she accepted.

I got to know her a little during the drive to the concert and decided I quite liked her even to the point of asking her out for a later date. We arrived at the concert a little late. The only remaining seats in our row were between Norman and his sister, Diane. I sat next to Norman, my date sat next to Diane. I was really enjoying the show but every time I checked on her, she seemed tense. When intermission came, she asked me to take her home. I was seriously disappointed but did as she requested.

After a long silence, she finally told me why she wanted to leave. It turned out that Norman's sister, Diane, was the girl her ex had left her for and her ex was sitting on the other side of her.

Way to go, Daniels! Lets just divert this damsel in distress from her depression and make a good impression in the process!

Need I say I never saw her again? I never got to see Zapp again either.

Recently, in the comments to the Rex Parker does the NY times crossword puzzle blog, someone mentioned the wooden acting in the library scene in Gone With the Wind. That produced a bevy of comments. Another person speculated that I might have some thoughts on that subject. As it happens . . .

When I used to work the Southern California Renaissance Faire™, at one point I became interested in  stage acting and got involved with a group called A Crye of Players. That got me looking closely at the way Shakespear wrote his plays. It dawned on me that the Elizabethan actors employed what I would call the "Itsey Bitsey Spider" school of acting. Something more like Ian McNiece's form of oration as the News guy in the HBO series Rome. His gestures come, perhaps, from Aristotle's The Art of Rhetoric. Ther is very little stage direction beyond entrances and exunts in Shakespear's plays.

In high school, my girlfriend and I did the "Good morrow Kate" scene from Taming of the Shrew. We were told to ham it up and have a lot of fun by the teacher. For the life of me, as a high school student, I couldn't figure out what she meant, Nothing was called for by the script. Well, maybe a little tongue waggling at the line: "What, with my tongue in your tail?" Which line had been omitted from our prepared script handed out by the school. We got a paperback copy of the play as I'd managed to lose mine so we added the line back and got the only laugh from the class (and a gasp from the teacher, Mrs. Schwimley) when we did the performance. I have seen that scene performed in many ways since, mostly as slapstick buffoonery which I just don't get. Sure, it makes the scene visually interesting but most of the grabbing, tugging and pulling just seem to run contrary to the expectations of a first meeting between a man and a woman.

From my RenFaire days I also knew that there was no TV or radio for entertainment and music, unless one made it for oneself, was difficult to come by. The main evening entertainment, say around the dinner table, was conversation, the wittier the better. In Shakespear, most of the really good action takes place off stage and is reported by actors dashing on stage. I submit, Shakespear's theater was primarily conversational. Really, really dull to a modern audience unless they are lovers of rhetoric, poetry and language generally.

I've heard actors swear that Hamlet's "Speak the speech, I pray you . . . " speech advocates something akin to Method Acting, I just don't buy it.

I'm not going to go into performance practices in the intervening years because I haven't studied them. I'm going to jump to moving pictures. Simply put, silent movies were all about pantomime. The characters couldn't talk so they had to express the dialogue through gesture and "body language". Not very convincing forms of acting though early audiences, being rather naive, ate it up. Perhaps the very best actors of that era were Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keeton with their deadpan performances.

With the advent of talkies, the overstated gestures and postures slowly melted away. Eventually, Konstantin Stanislavsky and his method turned up. The Actor's Studio, espousing Stanislavsky's teachings, soon followed. This gave actors the ability to try out new things without the pressure of commercial productions. Acting began slowly to improve but not every actor embraced the "Method".

I remember reading and article written by Richard Burton about his love for Elizabeth Taylor and how much he learned from her. During the filming of Cleopatra, Burton was being very much the stage actor. In scenes he played with Liz, he would think that she wasn't doing any acting at all and that the results weren't going to be very good. Later, watching the rushes, he felt she had blossomed. Eye movements and tiny ticks in closeups spoke volumes to him and he began tempering his acting accordingly.

Many actors had stage experience then, the early days of the talkies. Gone With the Wind was made in 1939, twelve years after the advent of the talkies and ten years before the creation of the Actor's Studio. It is no wonder that some of the acting was a bit wooden. It has taken many years for films to reach the present level of sophistication in acting. The actor's needed to learn and the directors too. The current crop of performers have an entirely different set of examples to draw from.

As Yoda might say, "There is no acting, only doing."

Australia, The BLT And Me

For a while in the early 1970s, I used to visit friends who lived in Forster on the coast of NSW about 200 miles north of Sydney. They had a private beach. They had free-range chickens. They had a couple of acres planted as a vegetable garden. It was a lovely place to be and they were lovely people to be with. Sometimes, it seemed like I was commuting between there and Sydney on weekends.

I recall one Sunday, when I was driving back down south, being rather hungry. There was a café I knew of on the way and I stopped there. I'd had a sudden craving for a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich, something I hadn't thought of in years but there it was, bright in my imagination. Of course it wasn't on the menu there or anywhere else I'd eaten in Australia. I'm not sure anyone had even thought of it. When the waitress asked me what I'd like, I asked if they could make a BLT. She, of course, had no idea what I meant so I explained and asked if she thought they could make one. I was very specific as I described it saying that all the details were important, especially that the small bone-like thing needed to be removed from the bacon and that the bacon needed to be over-cooked to the point of crispness. She went to the kitchen to ask if it could be done and returned to tell me that I'd have my sandwich shortly.

I don't remember what sort of lettuce they used but I suspect it was romain. The sandwich was very good, the bacon done just right so that it broke as I bit into it instead of having to tear it with my teeth which would have pulled the sandwich apart. Satisfied after my little lunch experiment, I headed back down the road.

That craving was one of those odd things I get from time to time where something will stick in my mind and will stay there until it's satisfied but then will not come up again for a long long time.

Some time later, a month or two maybe, I stopped at that café again to get a hamburger with no beetroot. As I looked over the menu, I was surprised to discover they had added "the BLT" with a nice description of "mayonnaise, crispy bacon, tomato, and lettuce on toast."

Now I wasn't the only American in Australia at the time, not by a long shot. I'm sure I wasn't the only Yank to have a nostalgic craving for a BLT. I'm not silly enough to think I introduced the BLT to Oz but I know for sure that I introduced it to one café along the highway between Forster and Sydney. When I returned to to Australia in 1989, I did notice the BLT on the menus of various places I ate the featured sandwiches.

Test number 2

Trying this out again.
This should be my cryptic crossword 007:

Puzzle test

Aww, Look . . .

After aborting a world wide jaunt with my grandfather in 1965, I returned to London where I stayed for a few months. I had barely enough money to survive though I did find a flat in Ladbroke Grove. It was on the first floor (that would be the second floor to Americans). My window opened onto the roof of the covered entryway to the building. I used to sit out there, watch the traffic go by and smile at the surprised faces of top-deck bus passengers as they noticed me.

I was nineteen years old and, as I said, money was short. Every few days I'd take the number 23 bus to the American Express in Haymarket to see if there was any money from home. On the way back, I'd walk up Regent street to the Boots Chemist and go upstairs to where they sold books. I'd browse the science fiction section and usually manage to pocket one or two (you do what you have to do). Then I'd walk to Oxford Street and catch the 23 back to my flat. The conductors on the busses were usually around my age. When asked for the fare, I'd often say, "Four pence," the cheapest fare there was. I didn't always feel that I could get away with that but usually it worked. Possibly the tacit fellowship of poor youths was responsible. Anyway, that ploy was taught me by students around my own age whom I'd met in Trafalgar Square, the same ones who helped me find my flat.

Arriving home, I'd put up my books and take my beer bottle, it held two pints and had a wooden plug with coarse screw threads, down to the pub around the corner and have it filled for less than two shillings. Then on to the fish and chip shop for my daily meal which I would drown in malt vinegar and cary home. If the day was reasonably fair or at least not rainy, I'd sit out on my "balcony" with my meal, my beer and my book.

Riding on the bus, I always wanted to sit on the top level at the front where I could see out the front windows. Failing that, I'd sit in the rear-most seat on the left at the back. There was a heater there that protruded from the wall of the bus which I'm sure was welcome in the dead of winter when it can be very cold in London. For some reason, that seat was almost always empty.

One particularly dreary, drizzly day, on my way home, I was sitting in the rear seat when two women came up the stairs and sat two rows in front of me. The were in the middle of a conversation about several of their friends, calling them names that implied that they were of less than pristine virtue. Their language was not exactly appropriate for family audiences either. It occurred to me that they had just come from a pub where they had had more than their share of beer. Abruptly, the woman sitting on the aisle said, "I want a wee." She stood up, moved back to the row of seats in front of me, hiked up her skirt and pulled down her panties and squatted, one hand on the back of the seat in front of her and on hand on the seat behind her saying, "I've got to have my wee." And she did. While she was draining herself she asked rather loudly, "Why is everybody looking out the windows?" and a moment later added, "It's raining outside, it's raining inside." None of the other passengers even stirred.

When she was finished, she stood up, pulled up her underwear and went back to where she had been sitting as if nothing had happened. When I looked down, I saw a rather large puddle surging back and forth with the movement of the bus. I put my feet up on the edge of the heater to keep them dry. A few minutes later, she looked back over the seats at me and said, "Aww, look. He's got his little shoes up!" Not long after that, they disembarked. The odor was beginning to be noticable and it was not long before I was the last passenger on the top deck. Finally, I had to go downstairs and sit on one of the sideways seats.

The conductor, who was a big burly West Indian, went up the stairs, and very quickly came back down. "Somebody's wet my bus!" I was grateful I was only  two stops away from home.