Two memoirists of passion (Books - Love is Where it Falls by Simon Callow & On the Move by Oliver Sacks)

In the last several months I read the memoirs of two fascinating, beloved, gay, British-born public figures.  One was published recently, the other 15 years ago.  One works in one of my areas of expertise - the arts - and the other in the other - the science of the brain.  The authors were actor Simon Callow and Dr. Oliver Sacks.  Their books are Love is Where it Falls (Penguin Books, 2000) and On the Move: A Life (Knopf, 2015).  Their books are forthright and generous, the authors deeply giving of themselves, and they are crack writers.  Knowing them now, as I do, it is fitting that these copies are signed.

She had, she said, been walking down Piccadilly, musing on the fact that it was Moliere's birthday and that not a single actor in England would know, much less care.  Musing on this sad reality, it had suddenly struck her that, yes, there was an actor in England who would know and care: me.  And so she had gone into Fortnum's and ordered the wine and had it sent to me, to celebrate, with my actor friends, the great playwright's birthday.  

So begins an unlikely romance between a fierce, 70-year old theatrical literary agent, Peggy Ramsay, and 30-year-old actor Simon Callow.  I find myself wanting less to write about the merits of this book than to quote from it.  These two live passionately and are attracted to each other so relentlessly, because their taste in art is not so much an aesthetic about life's decor as a deeply held principle about the way to live it.

We must feel, that is everything. We must feel as a brute beast, filled with nerves, feels, and knows that it has felt, and knows that each feeling shakes it like an earthquake. 

or

I do so passionately believe that the only meaning of life is life, that to live is the deepest obligation we have, and that to help other people live is the greatest achievement. It's in that light that I see acting, and that alone.

Oliver Sacks has written so humanely and observantly of his patients' lives (for instance here and here), and so openly of his peculiar fascinations, that this memoir, and this is the third of his books that might be classified as such, was a welcome departure.  Here, finally, Sacks scrutinized as deeply and wrote as openly about his own life - particularly his inner life. This was welcome not only in knowing more about so great a man and storyteller, but also because one read it in the context of his impending death (about which he wrote so beautifully here and here) and because one could feel in the narrative drive this desire to share it all before it was too late.

Early in Sacks's writing career, the great poet W. H. Auden said to Sacks

You're going to have to go beyond the clinical... Be metaphorical, be mystical, be whatever you need.

This is really where Sacks's writing succeeds so magnificently in combining what is true with what feels true in a story. I cherish his writing and hope to celebrate his life in a live program in the coming year.

Two formative men of the American Theatre (Books - A Life by Elia Kazan & Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr)

The life stories of two American Theatre makers monopolized my reading back in January: Elia Kazan: A Life, film and theatre director Kazan's hefty, probing memoir (Alfred A. Knopf, 1988) and Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh (W.W. Norton & Co. 2014), John Lahr's deftly paced, thoroughly researched, deeply perceptive biography of the great playwright. Two men could not have had a greater influence on the structure and build of action, the feeling of innocence and epiphany, the rhapsodic music of text, the themes of individuality and of sex that were the coming-of-age of the American theatre and film in the 1930s - 1970s, than Williams and Kazan.  Two men could not have been more superficially different - Kazan was the son of Greek immigrants, born in Turkey, a scrappy fighter, and relentless womanizer, Williams a grandson of an American preacher, delicate, gay, a virgin until twenty-six years of age - but fundamentally they were remarkably similar. Aside from their obvious love of theatre, both seemed dissatisfied with the restrictions of their world, were driven to create theatre to give veiled expression to a deep sense of personal failure, both felt outsiders and compulsively pursued relief in work or, failing that, one from drink and the other from sex. John Lahr's quotes a letter from Williams to Kazan:

Theatre - The Big Knife - Roundabout Theatre

Clifford Odet's 1948 The Big Knife takes a big slice out of old Hollywood.  A movie star needs to decide if the studio will own him or if he will own himself.  The lyrical idealist who wrote Awake and Sing is now bitter with the money he has taken from the movies, takes out a big knife, and tries to cut out his own liver.  It's not a pretty play, but it's a good one.  This production, directed by Doug Hughes, has a number of actors who can combine the ability to be vulnerable to their dying careers and their dying souls while singing Odets's theatrical 1940s vernacular.

Being private in public - Film: Amour (2012)

It really is as good as everyone says it is.  Amour directed by Michael Haneke with Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, and Isabelle Hupert depicts an elderly couple as the circle that encompasses their active lives shrinks to a point when one of them becomes ill.  The camera takes it's time, watching them as they eat their dinner, read, listen to music, wash the dishes.  The action is what takes place inside them.  These are actors who know that their job isn't posting billboards with their thoughts and feelings written all over them. Their job is to fill themselves.  Then they can do something or they can do nothing, any behavior will reveal them.  If only that were simple.  Among the many remarkable qualities of this film is the sense that these characters seem so private.  It is not just that they become isolated in their lives, they do, but when the camera is close up on the face of Jean-Louis Trintignant as he walks down the hallway of his apartment, I had the feeling he really was completely alone.  No camera.  He was in some private space in his head, subsumed by the events of his life, and the camera was an invisible witness.

A talent for wonder (Books - My Name Escapes Me by Alec Guinness)

In preparation for watching the recent film version of John Le Carre's  Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, I got the 1979, 6-episode, made-for-BBC version to watch first.  I know that I had seen some part of it before, but never the whole thing, and never with the amount of attention required to follow the amount of story telling conveyed through behavioral detail.  It is wonderfully slow paced, unlike anything one can see on television now - without the cutting back and forth every five seconds, between seventeen different cameras - lest we linger, lest we see the lie before us, get bored, and change the channel.  The music for it was very good too.  Ian Richardson's performance is wonderfully animated, but the real pleasure of it was Alec Guinness's close-to-the-chest portrayal of George Smiley.  He is one of those actors whose performances always make me think, well he's not really acting, that's just who he is.

Is art precious for its beauty, its value, or its usefulness? (Film - Summer Hours by Olivier Assayas)

The 2008 film Summer Hours is all about legacy. It captures the lives of three siblings around the death of their mother, Helene, who was the keeper not only of their childhoods and the objects associated with it, but also of the memory of her uncle, a well-known painter. Frederic, the eldest son and only sibling still living in France, wants to preserve the house, its objects, and its artworks for continued use and pass it along to the next generation. Adrienne lives in the U.S. and Jeremie in China, they wish to sell everything as they are unlikely to use the house, having more use for its profits. The film explores the challenges inherent in passing things along to future generations. When 75-year-old Helene wants to speak to Frederic about what will fall to his care after her passing, he finds it too difficult to discuss her death. When Frederic, in turn, speaks to his teenage children about the art in the house, they try to admire it, but are really more interested in their music and their friends. Writer and director Olivier Assayas has an admirably light touch. He has the confidence to write good scenes, get people to come together and really do what his scripts say they do, and to let his camera simply observe them. I make that sound easy but it's not. That is the work of the filmmaker. Friend Sheila and I were talking about just this the other night. The medium of film is not celluloid - although that might be the chemical substance its sounds and images are recorded on. Its not even the camera, although without knowing to use lenses and cameras one could not make a film. It is people. The children play a game during the film's opening and they are obviously children playing with an interest in winning a game - not posing for the camera. It takes talent to show people being people. Actors can be very interested in themselves. They admire their own faces and their hard won talents. Assayas has cast beautifully Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling, and Jeremie Renier know what it means to inhabit a character whose life is full of details you never actually get to show, but which must precede their behavior in the story if it is to make sense. In Summer Hours- the characters act, not meaning demonstrate, meaning they do things. They meet, they mourn, they eat meals together, they make decisions - and the camera observes. They don't force themselves on the viewer. They do their jobs and if you are interested you may do your's.

Assays's mise en scene is smart. His camera celebrates the warmth, the lush and somewhat worn beauty of the house in the final summer that it is filled with its contents and people. After the death of Helene, he and his cameras walk through as the art and furniture are appraised for their value, now the house possesses the same contents, but the light is cooler, grayer. Epicures eye the Corot and the Hoffmann armoire over their expensive glasses. The stoves must be lit for warmth. The long-time caretaker of the house peers in the windows of her old home. In the film's closing scenes, we see the house's contents lodged in the Musee D'Orsay as a tour guide lectures her group on the history of desk we have come to associate with Helene's home. It is summer again. The nearly abandoned house is filled with Helen's grandchildren who party in its now raw, unfurnished rooms and its unkempt garden, blasting french rap and getting stoned. The place is obsolete - or is it? Assayas is smart enough not to decide for us. Time marches on but French law allows one to donate art to museums in exchange for a break on inheritance tax. The art may no longer reside in the home of the family whose ancestors acquired it, however one could say that many more members of future generations get to enjoy it. Is the vase by a great sculptor most valuable as a highly protected and revered possession of a museum or as the container of flowers in a home where it might at any moment be knocked to the floor by children playing? These are the questions one is left turning softly over in one's mind as the film ends. I learned on the DVD extras that to celebrate its 20th anniversary, the Musee D'Orsay, rather than making a straight, PBS-style documentary about their collection, commissioned films by real filmmakers to celebrate their birthday. Summer Hours, Assayas's contribution, is a thoughtful, tender, and quiet gem.

Man as hyperbole (Books: How we Decide by Jonah Lehrer & The Road to Xanadu by Simon Callow)

I find myself with so much reading and writing for work (and such a desire to be out and moving when I'm not working) that I'm getting through fewer books this summer than I am used to. The two I'm devoting the most attention to right now are Jonah Lehrer's latest - How We Decide - which, as its title indicates, discusses the mechanisms of decision making at the neural and psychological levels. It's very readable and he employs lots of accessible examples, staying on the light side of the science. I'll do a post on the whole thing when I have finished it but I became a fan of Jonah's with his first book Proust Was a Neuroscientist and I remain one as I read this.

The second is a two-volume biography of Orson Welles by actor/writer/director Simon Callow which I received from friend Sheila about a year ago (and I'm just getting to it now?!). You may remember Callow as the Reverend Bebe in the fantastic Merchant/Ivory adaptation of E. M. Forster's A Room With a View (and if you don't, watch the film again because it is well worth it). I have just begun the first volume of the Welles bio - The Road to Xanadu - and Callow is about as erudite and enthusiastic a biographer as one could hope for. I especially like his opening insights.

If you try to probe, I'll lie to you. Seventy-five percent of what I say in interviews is false. I'm like a hen protecting her eggs. I cannot talk. I must protect my work. Introspection is bad for me. I'm a medium, not an orator. Like certain oriental and christian mystics, I think the 'self' is a kind of enemy. My work is what enables me to come out of myself. I like what I do, not what I am...Do you know the best service anyone could render to art? Destroy all biographies. Only art can explain the life of a man - and not the contrary. (Orson Welles to Jean Clay, 1962)

Aint' that the truth. If only more artists felt this way. Now the performing arts seems to have become synonymous with personal confession and careers are sustained via industries of image-building. Although Welles was no exception to this in practice, only in theory.

Hitherto, the only credible representations of him have been those offered by John Houseman in Run-through and Michaeal Mac Liammoir in All About Hecuba and Put Money in they Purse. Both men engaged deeply with Welles and were beguiled and frustrated by him in equal measure. Their distinctly different views of him, though highly personal, are based on close observation and intense engagement, and written with precision and insight; both men were denounced by Welles, their witness called into question. I was lucky enough to know them personally and what they told me about Welles has been the starting point for my book, which is thus simultaneously a synthesis and a deconstruction.

Not bad credentials for one great artist becoming the biographer of another.

And Callow's explanation for why newspapers were such an important source for his book:

He publically constructed himself from the earliest age - my first press clipping is headed ACTOR, POET, CARTOONIST - AND ONLY TEN - in a medium that he courted and denounced in equal measure; and the press returned the compliment. Together they concluded a sort of Faustian pact wherein Welles was meteorically advanced by sensation -hungry newspapers, to whom he pandered shamelessly, until at the height of his fame he fell foul of them; saddled with a preposterous reputation and a personality drawn by him and coloured by them, he found himself unemployable, his work overshadowed by his everexapanding Self. Even his body became legendary, out of control; whatever his soul consisted of protected from the world by wadding. Locked in a personal relationship as complex and curious as that of Lear and his fool, Welles and the newspapers needed and abominated each other in a co-dependency that only his death dissolved. It is no coincidence that his most famous work is the apotheosis of the newspaper film.

Holy moly - Faust and Lear in one paragraph. This promises to be a thorough if hyperbolic journey and I think I'm going to love every crowded page of it.

Anti-intellectual bias & pulp, world war & great acting (Books - Night Train to Lisbon & The Fall of Berlin 1945 and Film - Charlotte Gray)

I finished Swiss author Pascal Mercier's controversial book Night Train to Lisbon. So is it brilliant or is it craptacular (a word I just heard on NPR)? For my money it's neither, but it is an engaging story and I would place it into a sort of intellectual pulp-fiction category. The central character, Gregorius, is a teacher of Latin, Greek and Hebrew in a high school. He plays chess for fun. He is a rather staid and sedate creature of habit who has a chance encounter with a Portuguese woman in his home city of Berne, Switzerland. This leads him to discover a philosophical memoir by a Portuguese doctor which seems to speak directly to him and drives him to leave his job and visit Portugal to learn everything he can about the life of Amadeu de Prado, the author of the book - a brilliant intellect, devout atheist, iconoclast, member of the resistance against Salazar, the authoritarian ruler of Portugal until the mid-1970s. Most of the critics who thought the book bombastic crap were American. I wonder if that is because the book is neither fish nor fowl? The writing is low-brow, unimpressive - it gets the job done but no better than the average pulpy thriller and is a little repetitive. And yet, it is filled with lengthy italicized philosophical paragraphs, people who speak dead languages, play chess for fun, doubt the existence of god and say so, and the action is largely of an introspective sort - one man trying to uncover another man's past in order to somehow transform himself. America is many things but our culture has a largely anti-intellectual bent. If something here is "heady" most people want to know and prepare themselves for it, or they want to just have fun, but those two things generally aren't supposed to overlap. You know all that stuff like opera and films you have to read - in Holland where I have worked for many years it always surprised me to see people under 30 years old out on dates for fun at the opera. I almost never saw that in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Santa Fe (any of the American opera houses that I have worked in). To get back to the book, I didn't find Night Train to Lisbon terribly serious and I certainly didn't find it transformative, but the world it was set in was one of self-probing thought and love of literature and was very recognizable to me. The sudden change in this quiet, hypochondrical man was enlivening and what drove his curiosity drove mine and so I was engaged and entertained by it. Imagination, intimacy and language are described as Prado's sanctuaries by one of the characters in the book. That is the kind of place this book is. If you enjoy intellectual and bookish mysteries like those of Carlos Ruiz Zafon then you might also enjoy this book, although its pleasures are a little quieter than Shadow of the Wind. Speaking of pulp...

We saw the film adaptation of Sebastian Faulks's Charlotte Gray last night, which I borrowed from the library because Billy Crudup is in it. I haven't read the book but the film is every bit a trashy romance despite its setting in World War II France and England its action, which concerns a young Scottish woman who, speaking French, becomes an agent for the Brittish to aid the French resistance, and the serious choices Charlotte must make given her involvement with a Jewish family in Nazi-occupied France. The film was an interesting one to me for two reasons. The period is one I am very interested in right now. I am also reading Patrick Hamilton's The Slaves of Solitude set in a World War II London suburb and I'm reading Antony Beevor's The Fall of Berlin 1945, an excellent military and social history of the end of the war. And also because a completely predictable script rendered in a way I could only describe as flat, stale and unprofitable, was filled with such depth by its cast and the detailed direction of Gillian Armstrong. Cate Blanchett, Michael Gambon, and most of the cast were very good - specific and understated - but, as usual, Billy Crudup had that extra something that allows him to act circles around anyone else near him, whatever the material. He does his job - sure. He is committed to the world of his character, involved in his circumstances, aware of the technical requirements, moved in the right way at the proper times - but it is more than that. He lives in, but also around the character's life. He does more than embody his lines and actions as informed by his back story, he embodies his backstory. He is the circumstances you are witnessing and also the circumstances you haven't seen - things that came before, expectation of things to come, and probably things that are particular to Crudup's being and fantasy - things that are secret from us that we will never know, and yet are alive in Crudup's behavior which creates that which we experience in the film or play as his character. Whenever I see someone of those type of abilities work - Juliette Stevenson, Geraldine Page, Mark Ruffalo - I am reminded what it is I love about great acting. Ode to Billy over.

Now Lorrie Moore's latest waits in the wings and an interesting book entitled Identity and Story: Creating Self in Narrative a book about psychological research in the intertwined sub fields of self and narrative - an intersection I am obsessed with. Not to mention about 200 pages of homework to read by Tuesday.

20 favorite leading men and then 2 more

It's a rainy Saturday and classes start Monday so this off Sheila via Nathaniel's Film Experience Blog- 20 favorite leading men +2 (todays choices, subject to change). Care to join in the fun? Names or pictures are fine. Don't take too long.



Spencer Tracy
Jimmy Stewart
Gael Garcia Bernal
Johnny Depp
Billy Crudup
Dustin Hoffman
Campbell Scott
Denholm Elliott
Daniel Day Lewis
Stephen Campbell Moore
Oleg Menshikov
Matthieu Kassovitz
Romain Duris
Alec Guinness
Kenneth Branagh
James McAvoy
Marlon Brando
Montgomery Clift
Sean Penn
Mark Ruffalo
oh... and Buster Keaton and Liev Schreiber

20 Favorite Actresses Redux

In the great footsteps of fearless friend Sheila, I will amend my 20 favorite actresses (of this time) meme, to include my favorite performances of their's (of this time).

Lois Smith - That's a hard one. I really loved her in The Trip to Bountiful live on stage, I also have a fond memory of the first stage role I ever saw her in - a one act comedy called Bite the Hand by Ara Watson in which she played a World War II era whore with a heart.
Judy Garland - Judgment at Nuremberg
Vivien Leigh - hands down A Ship of Fools
Diane Wiest - that's a toughie, I loved her in Hannah and her Sisters but there is a special place in my heart for her stage performance in Harold Pinter's A Kind of Alaska, she was other-worldly
Julie Walters - gorgeous in The Wedding Gift, a sleeper also w/ Jim Broadbent - great flick!
Imelda Staunton - Vera Drake
Jennifer Jason Leigh - Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle
Vanessa Redgrave - Howard's End, she seems to float on air
Isabelle Huppert - Medea live on stage, which I saw televised in France
Kim Stanley - as Masha in the flawed but gorgeous Three Sisters directed by Lee Strasberg
Ellen Burstyn - Resurrection
Ingrid Bergman - Notorious
Emma Thompson - Carrington (that was hard, The Winter Guest is great too, and she is hilariously over the top in Peter's Friends)
Maggie Smith - The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearn (and I'll take her in A Room with a View any day)
Betty Buckley (as I said in the first post - her 5 minute cameo in Another Woman)
Jeanne Morreau - Jules et Jim - it's essential
Geraldine Page - The Trip to Bountiful
La Streep - Angels in America, Postcards from the Edge, Kramer vs. Kramer
Geena Rowlands - Opening Night
Juliet Stevenson - Truly, Madly, Deeply

Happy Birthday Monty

There is a Montgomery Clift blog-a-thon today over at Film Experience blog to commemorate his birthday. I don't have time to write a real post today but if you've never seen him at Judgement at Nuremberg or A Place in the Sun - or if you are interested in soul opening performances - he was a walking wound. Check out Sheila's contribution to the thon here.

Ghosts of Ourselves - (Books: Beyond Black - Hilary Mantel)

I've never read Hilary Mantel before and I found Beyond Black a smart, entertaining, provocative read. It is a blunt, funny story of a professional medium, Alison, who seeks to help others via what she hears from the voices of the dead. However, she is haunted not merely by these voices but by her own private ghosts who have imprisoned her in a relationship with her life that is no longer to her liking. She is weighed down both metaphorically and literally. She is a large woman, the classic portrait of someone who eats for comfort, insulating herself from the harshness of her life. She meets Colette, superficially her polar opposite, tight while Alison is free, hard while she is soft... but Colette is also painted into a corner by her past and as she becomes Alison's business partner, as well as partners in learning to live with themselves.

Alison was a woman who seemed to fill a room, even when she wasn't in it. She was of an unfeasible size, with plump creamy shoulders, rounded calves, thighs and hips that overflowed her chair; she was soft as an Edwardian, opulent as a showgirl, and when she moved you could hear (though she did not wear them) the rustle of plumes and silks. In a small space, she seemed to use up more than her share of the oxygen; in return her skin breathed out moist perfumes, like a giant tropical flower. When you came into a room she'd left - her bedroom, her hotel room, her dressing room backstage - you felt her as a presence, a trail. Alison had gone, but you would see a chemical mist of hairspray falling through the bright air. On the floor would be a line of talcum powder, her scent - Je Reviens - would linger in curtain fabric, in cushions and in the weave of towels. When she headed for a spirit encounter, her path was charged, electric; and when her body was out on stage, her face - cheeks glowing, eyes alight - seemed to float still in the dressing-room mirror.

In the centre of the room Colette stooped, picked up Al's shoes. For a moment she disappeared from her own view. When her face bobbed back into sight in the mirror, she was almost relieved. What's wrong with me? she thought. When I'm gone I leave no trace. Perfume doesn't last on my skin. I barely sweat. My feet don't indent the carpet.

'It's true,' Alison said. 'It's as if you wipe out the signs of yourself as you go. Like a robot housekeeper. You polish your own fingerprints away.'

While this is touted as a ghost story, and it is in two senses, it is also a story of horror (the personal kind), and it most reminds me of a buddy film.

Aside from the clarity of her descriptive writing, what I admire most about Mantel is how much, when the story gets going, she trusts her reader to understand through inference and accumulation of detail rather than laying every little thing out. The descriptions of Alison's touring show to the middle class 'burbs on outskirts of London are spot-on for dialogue and, at times, laugh-out-loud funny. They contrast noticeably with the harshness of Alison's past in a way that reminds me of the recent film Pan's Labyrinth - a beautiful, cruel film about a young girl who retreats into her fantasies to escape the horror of her life in revolution-torn Spain. In Beyond Black comedy bumps up against tragedy, the everyday against the supernatural and these categories refuse to remain distinct - messily overlapping and playing with each other.

Mantel's afterlife is imaginative, bitter, seedy, and amusing (it has some of the ironic flavor of Truly, Madly, Deeply if you know that fabulous film and if you don't rent it! Hearfelt acting by the fabulous Juliette Stevenson). There is an hilarious sequence toward the end of the novel involving Princess Di, Alison, and her bevy of neurotic medium friends (I won't say any more, but it's really funny). After reading Beyond Black I will definitely look for some more stuff by Mantel - any recommendations?

There is an American Culture - Elia Kazan

The next time you're tempted to reduce American culture to bad television, Disney schlock, and Vegas, or to say that it is really an amalgam of other cultures, or that it simply has no serious culture of its own, I suggest you read Richard Schickel's critical biography of director Elia Kazan and remember the great theater companies of the 1930s - most notably The Guild, The Civic Repertory, and The Group - where the artists' ideals and work were very much intertwined, and where Elia Kazan grew up as an artist. Remember the influential acting teachers who came out of The Group - Lee Strassberg, Bobby Lewis, Stella Adler, and Sanford Meisner, and the generations of American actors they trained the likes of Ellen Burstyn, Al Pacino, Geraldine Page, Lois Smith, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Rod Steiger, Marlon Brando, John Garfield, Kim Stanley, Shelly Winters and so many others. Think of the distinctly American voice of playwright Clifford Odets. And remember the great director Elia Kazan whose work included On the Waterfront, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, East of Eden,... and many other plays and films.

America does indeed have a culture and Richard Schickel's biography of Kazan places the story of his work (Kazan's autobiography A Life concentrates on the personal to the extent that he wished it known) in this rich context knowledgeably. He makes the smart choice of leading with the controversy over Kazan's lifetime achievement award by the Academy in 1999, which was greatly protested by many because he "named names" to the House un-American Activities Committees in its embarrassing witch hunts in early 1950s. I call this choice smart because despite the uncontested talent and influence of Kazan, this act has forever colored how he is remembered. Without addressing it straight away it would cast a pall on the way we see his work. So Schickel takes this subject on with forthrightness. He is good at giving the politics as well as the art context, and is very fair about making sure that hypocrites of all political flavors share the glory of that title. Reminding us that along with the romanticism of communist party membership or the seriousness of admirable social ideas in the economically strained early 1930s, came the responsibility for support of Stalin's despotism, which could be seen with equally critical eyes.

In fact he makes this the lead of his story - the frame through which we look at a complex man. It's also a smart choice because he goes right for the conflict as Kazan did. Kazan looked at the way strong love and strong ideals - influence ordinary lives. Schickel does the same with Kazan.
Kazan did, in fact, express regret for this act in his autobiography:

I thought what a terrible thing I had done; not the political aspect of it, because maybe that was correct; bit it didn't matter now, correct or not; all that mattered was the human side of the thing;...I felt no political cause was worth hurting any other human for. What good deeds were stimulated by what I'd done? What villains exposed? How is the world better for what I did? It had just been a game of power and influence, and I'd been taken in and twisted from my true self.

That passage could really be a monologue out of one of Kazan's films. Despite the fact that I feel strongly that Kazan's act was wrong because of what I know now about the HUAC and what I feel it did to the cause of free speech and free political assembly in America, Kazan does get to the heart of the matter here. If politics is not ultimately about making the lives of people better, it has no use at all. Kazan knows that his act both caused harm to people and did no good. This is deep self-probing - honest and probably painful - and is worth more than a facile pro forma apology any day. And as Warren Beaty said, when defending Kazan in 1999

I don't want to be reductive about his politics. Although you and I might feel he made a mistake, neither you nor I was around in that period. And although you and I might think we would not have made that mistake, we didn't have to make that choice.

This is a marvelously insightful and sensitive statement and it is not surprising it came from an actor because it is so descriptive of what it means to really get inside someone's skin and walk around in it. It is the way you have to contemplate the act of a person before you can play him.

In any event, it is this controversy which forms the frame of this dramatic and swiftly paced biography of Kazan by Richard Schickel. He summarizes the context of Kazan's formative years among the artists - particularly of The Group Theater - superbly. These are artists whose stories I could eat with a tablespoon, I just can't get enough of them, but he wisely gives us just enough to understand what role Kazan played and how he was influenced. Schickel is deft with summarizing the essence of things. I'll leave you with this nugget on Kazan's working method as a director:

Direction was not "what the Group director seem to think it is, a matter of coaching actors. It is turning psychological events into behavior, inner events into visible, external patterns of life on stage."

The Setting as a Great Actor - (Books: Dickens' Bleak House)

I continue to enjoy Dicken's Bleak House and it's made me think about how a writer sets the scene and how the readers uses it.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but when a writer uses those words so that you may sense the walls about you and smell the grease in the air, it is worth the expense because they do something a picture cannot. The picture may be efficient, but it is fixed. The writer, decides where you will be close now or far, that you will glide quickly over this wall, but that you will linger here among the old papers and dusty objects on the desk.

Everyone likes to concentrate on "what." What happened, to whom, what was said, but a scene is only an abstraction until it is happening somewhere. An actor playing a scene wants to know - who am I, where did I come from, what do I want, what do I say, what do I do... and so on (I, I, I...) - but what about poor old "where." You really know nothing about behavior until you know where something is happening. Science tells us that people are made not only by their genes, but by the interaction of genes and environment. The actor needs the same information, after all they are creating a person too. Without "where" there is a big missing piece. As a reader we also use "where" as we create the scene in our mind's eye. Some readers like to skip over long descriptions and get to the plot, and a poorly written setting only encourages that, stripping the scene of an essential that the reader may not directly know is missing, but they will sense it as their mind's eye will either conjure up nothing at all, or replace it with some one-size-fits-all setting that sits at the ready from some television program recently watched or whatever. If it is a bore to read, you end up saying, 'I wish you could just get on with it!' So it is a talented writer who makes you want to hang around while he sets the scene, who makes the setting the whole point:

Mr. Vholes's office, in disposition retiring and in situation retired, is squeezed up in a corner, and blinks at a dead wall. Three feet of knotty floored dark passage bring the client to Mr. Vholes's jet black door, in an angle profoundly dark on the brightest mid-summer morning, and encumbered by a black bulk-head of cellarage staircase, against which belated civilians generally strike their brows. Mr. Vholes's chambers are on so small a scale, that one clerk can open the door without getting off his stool, while the other who elbows him at the same desk has equal facilities for poking the fire. A smell as of unwholesome sheep, blending with the smell of must and dust, is referable to the nightly (and often daily) consumption of mutton fat in candles, and to the fretting of parchment forms and skins in greasy drawers. The atmosphere is otherwise stale and close. The place was last painted or whitewashed beyond the memory of man, and the two chimneys smoke, and there is a loose outer surface of soot everywhere, and the dull cracked windows in their heavy frames have but one piece of character in them, which is a determination to be always dirty, and always shut, unless coerced. This accounts for the phenomenon of the weaker of the two usually having a bundle of firewood thrust between its jaws in hot weather.

Notice, he offers us the point of view of a client in the second sentence. So we become a character temporarily to view this place. This means we are not idle voyeurs but look with a sense of purpose. We're an actor in the scene. Then he gives us another actor: he writes that the office 'blinks!' Did you ever know one could? The office is suddenly a character too.

I read this scene and feel like something has already "happened." I also feel like I want to go wash my hands.

The psychology of self - who are we, really? (Books: Dickens Bleak House)

Jonah Lehrer over at The Frontal Cortex tells us that Proust was a Neuroscientist, or he will when his book comes out in November, so how about Dickens, was he a neuroscientist too? I would say no, however he might qualify as a psychologist. Bleak House plumbs the notion of identity in a way I'm finding most satisfying. Secrets of identity - who a character actually is, their parentage, and disguising identity - are nothing new to 18th or 19th century literature, and the central character of Bleak House, Esther Summerson, wrestles first with her origins - where she actually comes from - and then with a change in her appearance, which while it doesn't have to define character, does influence it.

I'm struck by the way we create character through narrative, not just in books but in our lives. We are characters in our own stories as well as the stories of others. The Science Times had a piece on narrative and self a few weeks ago. The notion that we construct and envision ourselves through narrative (which is a useful concept), and that the brain has an affinity for narrative (which they do not sufficiently explain the scientific support for, if any exists). The article was not entirely satisfying on the science but introduced the concept well. We narrate ourselves to ourselves and to others as well. I think of people I know whose stories repeatedly stress how much harder their lives are than everyone else's, (creating the character of the poor victim), stories of how busy they are (creating the martyr). The more they tell these stories, the more true they become. There is a literal narrative created by what we say about ourselves. We reinforce that narrative each time we tell it, we can change that narrative, recasting ourselves, changing perspective like a cinematographer might changes the angle of a shot or the photographer the lens. Some psycho therapeutic are about just such processes of recreating narratives, as the Times article discusses. We learn who we are and about the central experiences of life through narrative. We learn what love is - hearing the story of the loved child, being cast as a character in that story. Later we struggle to create our own sense of character and are sometimes told stories of ourselves we don't recognize. Narratives can also be less literal. One action doesn't form identity or character, but a string of actions when linked are narrative. And the actors process of creating characters is not unlike our own process, although it's often more mindful. As an acting teacher I always felt character is not what you say, nor what you think of your character, which is an endless focus of discussions in class and rehearsal - but rather what you do. You can say what you want about a character and my suggestion would then be to write a book about it, but the audience at a performance experiences only what you do. Not just those things you think you should do, but rather all the things you do, whether at that moment you think of yourself as 'character' or as 'artist.'

The Times article quotes Joan Didion on her experience of the dichotomy of who she thought she was and who others saw, in her ruthless look at herself The Year of Magical Thinking. Esther in Bleak House must face a similar duality when she, in a single chapter (no spoiler here, I'll hold back the plot details), both finds out where she has come from (which we know earlier) and finds her appearance greatly changed from what it had been. It's an amazing juxtaposition of two key elements of identity - who you think you are and what others see, and yet it is still not completely defining. One's identity is something more, there is a core that supersedes those elements. Esther demonstrates her confident knowledge of that core and, as such, that thing we call 'character.' I'd often thought of that word as dated, but here I see it as meaning 'a certainty of who you are,' and this story's theme of identity make it feel quite contemporary.

Lament for a Genius - (Jeff Buckley - Live at the Green Mill)

My friend Sheila over at The Sheila Variations had a great memorial post to Jeff Buckley the great rock troubadour, who died ten years ago, remembering a concert she and I attended together at the Green Mill in Chicago. Not only the best live performance I've ever attended -period - but most influential one for me as a an acting teacher and director. My memory of that great evening was that it started with a depressed woman with very talented hair singing songs of doom to open the show. Every bit of her exuded gloom - her diction was depressed, her outfit was depressed, never mind the songs. She invited JB up on stage to do the final song with her. He reluctantly gave up his position at the bar where he'd been drinking a too much tequila, still in his overcoat, slunk up to the stage, and sat on the floor with his back to us so that she would have the limelight for the end of her set.

When JB and his band got up on stage they tuned and suddenly photographers were everywhere, shooting pictures which made Buckley very self conscious. I should just say that I'm going to take the liberty of imagining some of the thing's Buckley thought, and I could be way off. The tour was for the release of his then new album - Grace. He riffed vocally for a while with no words - just 'ah' - until they stopped taking pictures, he seemed to hate the photographs, The first several songs he could not find his footing, he would sing a piece from the album and would feel it was lifeless and just moan to us "God this sucks. I'm so sorry. I wish I could give you all your money back." It was agonizing to watch. He was a performer that was all about being with the music at this one moment in time that would never come again. His tour was about publicity and performing the same pieces over and over again like he did on the recording, but because he'd said some stupid thing to Rolling Stone or MTV - some really influential media outlet in music they threatened would cost him any future publicity- he was kicking himselft and censoring himself and just couldn't get past it. He was not meeting his own standards. He apologized after every one of the first few songs and then, I believe it was on Leonard Cohen's Halleluiah, he started the song and then quieted the band and began riffing a capella - I believe it was on the line "it's a cold and it's a broken Halleluiah" - I think he just couldn't stand not being with the music any more. He improvised for at least five or ten minutes on that phrase until he finally found his way to the moment he was in - disappointed in himself, in the conflict created by career and art, in love with the music, and finding that new moment in a song he's performed 100 times. I've always thought that that was the job of the artist - not just a live performer, but a painter or a writer too. It's the part of the work that is hardest in some ways. I'm obsessed with artists' creative processes, how we awaken ourselves to the moment we're in rather that the moment we think we should be in - because of our artists' expertise - about the right words or the prettiest notes - we get sidetracked and start trying to get out of the lousy moment we're in (which is the actual pay dirt) and instead get to some "better" thing we think should be there to make the song or the character or the sentence good, right, funny, brilliant - or in some way appealing to our vanity. That struggle is a tough one - it's a daily war for an artist - and the thing that always amazed me was that he fought that battle right in front of us. When I think of the really great performers I've seen - Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in concert (Alex Ross at The Rest is Noise who always has great writing on music, has some excellent posts on Hunt Lieberson), Kim Stanley on film, Billy Crudup in Waking the Dead, Geraldine Page in almost anything at all - that's what they all do. It's an act of courage really - to strive to be your imperfect self in front of everyone.

The rest of Buckley's concert was like being under a spell. It's sad that there is not more music to be heard from him, more of that haunting voice, great taste in songs (he sang Pink Floyd like Rock ballads, Edith Piaf, Benjamin Britten - stupendous stuff), and that we can't see him continue to wage that battle. I'm sure it would have been beautiful.

And what is more fitting than having him sing his own lament (let's see if I can figure out how to post this recording and slide show). Hah! I've succeeded, it's above. "Remember me, but ah, forget my fate." How apt.