Jefe's House

If you liked The Golden Horseshoe: A Lecture on Tragedy, you’ll love the followup, Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead. Join me as I try to resurrect a hidden and dangerous history. Which of you will dare to enter the terrifying Ouija tent of the damned and open a channel to the Other Side for me, live onstage?

Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead is a surreal, 60-minute, autobiographical show about the impact of ghosts – the real kind — and of dream interpretation — the inept kind — on one’s past, present and future.  It’s tragic, and it’s also hilarious.

It’s also a work-in-progress. I’ll be performing it with limited set, script partially in hand, followed by a Q&A, one night only, with support from my friends at the historic Plays & Players in Philadelphia.   The Philadelphia City Paper’s ultra-cool Critical Mass arts blog sez it’s probably going to be good, and they’re probably right, so you should probably come.

City Paper Critical Mass Theatre Preview by Matt Cantor
“It’s a one-man show, but award-winning playwright Jeffrey Stanley isn’t the only one in it. At least, he hopes not. Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead is a 60-minute ‘autobiographical black comedy’ whose supporting cast is made up of ghosts  — if they’re willing to make an appearance, Stanley says. An adjunct faculty member at New York University’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts, Stanley is workshopping this free work-in-progress in Philadelphia — his new home — at the historic Plays & Players theater.

“Years in the making, the new play combines elements of earlier works, including another black comedy Stanley performed in New York at the Gershwin Hotel under the curation of Andy Warhol pal Neke Carson. Mix that with ‘inept dream interpretation,’ family history, and a Ouija tent, and the result is Beautiful Zion: A Book of the Dead. The play is ‘about communication between family members while they’re alive and maybe even after they’re dead,’ Stanley says. Expect humor, but also ‘a lot of death, a lot of suffering, a lot of human misery.’

One-man shows or otherwise, Stanley’s works focus on shared experience: in performing his CONT’D AT CITY PAPER>>

9" to 10" footprints with three claws. Note the apparent blood droplets at top left. Click images to see full size.

“I am not used to seeing the kind of tracks in my back yard like the samples I’m attaching here. Any ideas?  Looks BIG.  Gulp.”

So read the email I received last week from my close friend S. with 4 photos attached (the one above was also a Coast to Coast AM Photo of the Day on 1/27/11).  He lives in Franklin County, Ohio near Columbus, works in a highly visible profession and is too shy to post these images himself — but he’s also alarmed by the footprints he and his wife found in their back yard last week after the last big snowfall. Knowing of my keen interest in the ridiculous-yet-hard-to-explain, he sent them to me.

He’s been perusing BFRO’s site for sasquatch sightings in his area looking to make some kind of sense of this, but to no avail.

“The right track has blood on it — the right foot seems to indicate a foot injury,” his email continued.  “We are kinda freaking out.  We have spent hours combing through wild animal track books, trying to isolate and identify the tracks, hoping to come up with an explanation. WHOA.  Freaking.

S.”

He says the tracks crossed through his yard and stopped at a large tree.  Sadly there was no shivering juvenile squatch hiding in the tree when he looked up — but then where did it go? Did it fly away? Jersey devil? Mothman? My two cents — these aren’t sasquatch, Jersey devil or mothman prints; they’re clearly dogman prints. Perhaps it leapt from the tree onto another tree or onto his roof (he didn’t think to look there for more prints) and was gone.  (UPDATE 1/27/11: I just searched and found this regarding Ohio’s “Loveland creature,” a reptilian spotted in 1955 and 1972, so I’m switching my opinion from dogman to lizardman.)

They’re real. It’s not a hoax. Your theory?  He’s open to your explanations.

Apparent blood droplets, top left, spattered all along right foot path.

A Job-Killing Plan for Art and Culture?
by Christopher Knight, LA Times

If you gave me a buck, and next year I returned $18.75 to you, would you think that was a good deal?

I would. With savings accounts, money markets and even stocks yielding just a few percentage points on investments these days, a return in excess of 1800% is pretty staggering.

Yet, that’s what happens with federal support for arts and culture. It pays for itself 18 times over.

Federal support includes partial matches to state arts agencies, underwriting the National Gallery of Art and the Kennedy Center in Washington, the nationwide programs of the endowments for the arts and humanities and much more. My colleague Mike Boehm reports that, all together, federal arts and culture spending currently totals about $1.6 billion a year, not counting construction budgets.

Meanwhile, revenues to federal, state and local coffers related to that spending totals $30 billion annually — more than 18 times the outlay. The income derives from taxes paid by the 5.7 million workers in the nation’s culture industry, many of whose jobs are sustained by federal support.

Pretty good deal — especially when stacked up against agribusiness subsidies, military expenditures and other corporate financing from Washington.

Nonetheless, congressional Republicans are once again proposing job-killing cuts to the federal arts budget. They aim to slash it, even zeroing out tiny agencies such as the NEA and NEH, as a report last week from the Republican Study Committee proposed. In these scary, economically strapped times, what passes for an argument is their claim that “we can’t afford it.” But the numbers show the argument is just fear-mongering bunk.  FULL STORY AT LATIMES.COM>>

Surely you’ve heard by now that international theatre legend Ellen Stewart died last week on 1/13/11 at the age of 91.  By the time I got to New York in the late 1980s LaMama Experimental Theatre Club, which she founded, was already legendary.

I was thrilled to be a footnote in LaMama’s history years later in 2002 when a short play I wrote, a weak pastiche of a Broadway musical called “The Monkey of Oz,” was performed there as a part of a larger evening.

LaMama; March, 1965. Donald L. Brooks' play "Fly." From left to right top: John Brooks, Joel Thurm (stage manager), playwright Donald L. Brooks, JOEY LONDON (standing in the overcoat). Seated: Anthony Bastiano, Frances Mintz. Brooks generously altered the schedule of his play to allow for the 'Cino at La Mama' season after the Cino fire, canceling "Fly's" final performance to make room for Tom Eyen's Cino production of "Frustrata." La Mama’s site lists “The Fly” as opening Mar. 10th, 1965.

Then there’s my Uncle Joey, a wise and aged actor from back in the day who has often spoken to me about being there “at the beginning” as one of Ellen’s regular ensemble of actors who were fixtures there and at its immediate predecessor Caffe Cino.  He also happened by Caffe Cino on the morning of March 30, 1967, the day that Joe Cino had gruesomely hacked himself up with a kitchen knife, and he saw the blood-spattered floor shortly after Joe had been rushed to the hospital.  Joe’s suicide attempt was successful — he died a few days later.  Uncle Joey recounted how two years later in 1969 a play by Donald L. Brooks was produced about Joe Cino called Superfreak: The Death of Joe Cino, which depicted his suicide in all its gore.  This upset some of Cino’s associates and led them to organize a boycott of the show.  Ellen Stewart also joined the boycott and banned Brooks and the entire cast and crew from ever having their work produced at LaMama again. In Uncle Joey’s eyes this was the only black mark in Ellen’s career, because, he says, she never actually went to see Superfreak herself.  He considered it a powerful and meaningful show.  He tried explaining that to Ellen,  but she just smiled and walked away.

Still, he remained a loyal and unshakable Ellen fan.  A few years ago when an article about Ellen winning (yet another) prize appeared in The New York Times, Uncle Joey pulled from his obsessive, personal LaMama archive a similar article written many years earlier.  The articles make terrific companion pieces and nicely sum up LaMama.  I photocopied the two articles onto a single sheet and still use it today as a handout when I include theatre history as a component of my playwriting classes at New York University.

The first article is from the Village Voice, 1969, written by theatre critic Jerry Tallmer, the man who coined the term Off-Off Broadway in a 1960 Voice article.  The Voice also gave the first Obie award in 1965.

The second article is from the Times, 9/21/2007; no author given.

I quote liberally from them now:

Village Voice, 1969 (unsure of month and date)

CLOSEUP column by Jerry Tallmer

And From the Wings…

So now it is eight years and maybe 300 new plays presented by Cafe LaMama, and a new Off-Off-Broadway home at 74A E. 4th St. with two theaters stacked one above the other, the cement still wet on opening night, and Ellen Stewart recognized around the world as mama to a whole new generation of playwrights.

“My biddies,” she calls them, urging that every single one be named so that no feelings are hurt. That being impossible, we will just say she has started on their way “at least 100 playwrights, maybe 150″ of every conceivable variety, some of whom are already up in the big time.

Ellen Stewart doesn’t like much to talk in any detail about herself or the past. These facts do emerge:

She was born in Alexandria, La., “and spent my life in Chicago.” She is a handsome woman of enormous class and style and joy of life, and her speech is geechee – “Zthees is Cafe La Mama, dedicated to zthee playwright” — coming down to her by way of the Negro slaves along the Ogeechee River in Georgia who were her ancestors.

“I didn’t come from a hard-life kind of thing,” says Ellen, whose mother was a schoolteacher.  “I went to Arkansas State College in Pine Bluff, and after college I didn’t even teach school, which is what I was supposed to do. Shall we say, I drifted around, so to speak?  The truth is,” charmingly put — “I was kind of pretty, you know.”

And she became a mother. Her son, Larry Hovell, used to be a teacher and now works in advertising in Chicago. His is the father of her granddaughter, Sorata Ellen, 2.

“Oh,” says Grandmother Ellen. “I can give you one job. I worked in electronics. I went to Western Electric and I was too dumb to do anything in electronics so they put me in school at the Illinois Institute of Technology.”

It was around that time that a doctor told her “that I had some brains and that I would have more trouble, like a stroke, if I didn’t use them.”

So, in 1950, wanting to become a fashion designer, she flipped a coin. “Heads I go to San Francisco, tails to New York. Blacks couldn’t go to fashion school in Chicago.”  It came up tails and New York. She landed a job in the powder room at Saks Fifth; three months later they made her an executive designer. Seven years later she went off into freelance designing, the means by which she still supports herself with lines of playwear for Victor and Joseph Bijou of University Place.

It was in 1961 that she started to fulfill a lifelong dream by opening the first Cafe La Mama in a tiny basement on E. 9th St.  She had in mind for her first playwright her foster-brother Fred Lights, who is today a stage manager for NBC.  Subsequently driven from pillar to post by every form of city and union officialdom, she survived it all, moving, going on, moving, going on, at last receiving a big Rockefeller grant ($65,000) and a bigger Ford grant ($139,000) which have made this last move to E. 4th St. possible.

If lots of previously unknown people have been helped by Ellen, lots of people have helped her, not least Tom O’Horgan, the director who started with Ellen and who now has contributed $10,000 to LaMama out of his proceeds from “Hair,” and Jules Weiss, a retired builder “who has helped me in everything,” most particularly the renovation at the new building which is an old building going back to when it was put up for a German music society in 1863.

************************************************

The New York Times, September 21, 2007

La MaMa Founder Wins Prize

Ellen Stewart, founder and artistic director of the LaMama Experimental Theatre Club in the East Village, joined the Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim and the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meruon as winners yesterday of the $125,000 Praemium Imperiale arts awards…Given by the Japan Arts Association and announced at the Japanese Cultural Center in Paris, the accolades [are] for lifetime achievement in the arts in categories not covered by the Nobel Prizes…In a telephone interview from Italy, where she is working, Ms. Stewart, 87, who created her Off Off Broadway theater club nearly 46 years ago and has been its director ever since, said of the prize: “It caught me by great surprise. Although America doesn’t realize it, we are kind of known just about everywhere in the world.”

[images via caffecino.wordpress.com and playbill.com]

Arizona Shooting: Treating Mental Illness Before it Kills

Let’s Stop It Before It Claims Lives

by Dr. Harold Koplewicz, President, the Child Mind Institute

“In the mass shooting in Arizona Saturday there were heroes who prevented even more bloodshed…But there are others in this story who could have, and I believe would have, been heroes if they had the knowledge and tools they needed to stop Jared Loughner’s descent into mental illness.

“It’s heartbreaking to read the accounts of college students and professors who noticed Loughner’s bizarre and frightening behavior, shared their fears with others, but didn’t see a way to get Loughner effective help…It’s terrible to imagine a student actually sitting by the door of her classroom because she was so afraid of another obviously mentally ill student — and outrageous that it took more than a single day to resolve the situation. In fact, it took three or four weeks before her concerned professor, and others who had Loughner in their classes, were able to have him removed…What his professors didn’t do is acknowledge that he was a risk to both himself and others, and call the police. 

“Schizophrenia, if that’s what this is — or any of the other psychiatric disorders that can lead to psychosis — doesn’t develop overnight. There are warning signs, and those signs didn’t prompt the intervention they should have. ” FULL STORY AT CHILD MIND INSTITUTE>>

But alas, according to the New York Times (see below) the fuzz did visit Loughner’s home, but they can only do so much until a person commits a crime. Cops can’t arrest someone because they read Nietzsche or went to a lame party and decided they’d rather sit alone and read a dictionary, and drop them off at the psych center.  (And I hate when the media in this country do this; ‘he read books so he must be crazy.’  Yes, this guy is a maniac but are they suggesting that reading made him crazy?  Or are they suggesting that he was crazy, therefore he read books? Either way it’s a silly message to send our kids. The Clinton administration did the same thing after Columbine; the Dept. of Ed. sent out a guidebook for teachers to help them spot troubled students, and one of the warning signs was students who spend an inordinate amount of time in the library reading books!   Remember when studiousness and staying out of trouble was a good thing? Now it makes you odd, and dangerous.  I guess if you’re a violent bully on a daily basis then you’re normal.  I’m only saying, look elsewhere for the root of evil or of psychosis. Thankfully there are organizations like the above-mentioned Child Mind Institute that make some sense.)

Regarding Loughner and the fuzz, couldn’t the cops (including the campus cops who were extremely aware of his frightening classroom behavior) have gone to a next of kin, as in Loughner’s mom or dad, to strongly recommend that they have Loughner forcibly committed? Loughner wasn’t just reading intellectual books. He was acting dangerous and seemed to enjoy, and gain a sense of power from, making people afraid of him, like his classmates, former friends, and neighbors.

And now the Times article:

Police Say They Visited Tucson Suspect’s Home Even Before Rampage

By Jo Becker, Kirk Johnson and Serge F. Kovaleski; nytimes.com

“The police were sent to the home where Jared L. Loughner lived with his family on more than one occasion before the attack here on Saturday…The news of police involvement with the Loughners suggests that county sheriff’s deputies were at least familiar with the family, even if the reason for their visits was unclear as of Tuesday night.

“The account by Mr. Loughner’s friend added some details to the emerging portrait of the suspect and his family. ‘He was a nihilist and loves causing chaos…he was sick in the head,’ said Zane Gutierrez, 21… [Loughner] talked about reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s book The Will To Power and embraced ideas about the corrosive, destructive effects of nihilism — a belief in nothing.

“He added that Mr. Loughner ‘used the word hollow to describe how fake the real world was to him.’ …He also said that Mr. Loughner had increasing trouble interacting in social settings — during one party, for instance, Mr. Loughner retreated upstairs alone to a room and was found reading a dictionary.

“After his arrest for possession of drug paraphernalia in 2007, Mr. Loughner was ordered to attend a diversion program run by the county attorney’s office…But the program is primarily educational, focused on ‘the dangers of drugs and the dangers of substance abuse,’ rather than the kind of in-depth counseling that friends, including Mr. Gutierrez, strongly felt that Mr. Loughner needed.

“‘It got worse over time,’ Mr. Gutierrez said. He said he stopped talking to Mr. Loughner last March, when their interactions grew increasingly unpredictable and troubling….’He started to get really paranoid.’” FULL STORY AT NYTIMES.COM>>

Another update: As I predicted, there were plenty of other symptoms besides what books he read; in fact, there was an avalanche of warning signs right under everyone’s noses, even right under his family’s noses, yet they decided not to have him committed. Why? Why on earth not?  FULL STORY AT NYTIMES.COM>>

[image by me; baby head sculpture by Ron Mueck, Boston Museum of Fine Arts]

Brooklynite Theresa Rebeck

Today I’ll let Theresa Rebeck do my whining for me, via her smart discussion about her new play The Understudy now in previews at the Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia; a play in which she says “she has tried to strike a balance among three needs – to entertain; to tell the truth about our lives; and to let that spiritual thing called drama happen” (Philadelphia Inquirer).

“A lot of what happens in show business is just horrible,” she says, drawing on her experiences in film, TV, and theater, “and with next to no reason for it. Your life is out of your control. Constantly, you’re wondering, ‘Why did they pull the plug on that production? Why did they do that to me? What are people behaving like this for?’

“And after a while I came to see that the capitalist cruelty growing out of the drive for profit was behind it,” she says. “It’s a kind of senseless, dehumanizing, totalitarian force. The New York theater world is very often just as weird as the world of TV and film.”

Couldn’t agree with her more. Looking forward to seeing The Understudy.  Full Inquirer story by John Timpane here.

[image via philly.com]

Alright. I will blow my own psychic trumpet – if I can reach it.  Here goes…

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
Paris Hilton will become increasingly orange, and will be found dead from a cocaine-heroin cocktail overdose in the Malibu home of a close friend.

Martin Scorsese will make a new movie stereotyping Italians.

Robert DeNiro will phone in another comedy performance to keep the bills paid.

Woody Allen will make one more movie whining about the fact that his life is meaningless and his ego too fragile to take it just in case we haven’t been paying attention.  To prove his point, he’ll pull the negationist stunt of divorcing Soon-Yi and marrying one of his other children.

Charlie Sheen’s antics will continue to be hilarious. Oh, his TV show will also stay pretty funny.

Broadway will remain racially segregated, with investors maintaining that Separate But Equal works really well in theatre, so why tinker with it? Tourists will agree with them wholeheartedly.

Off Broadway will continue rolling out redundant domestic dramas about the trials and tribulations of white families, some of whom are struggling exploitatively with their homosexuality, some exploitatively with their children’s homosexuality, others with prescription drug addiction, still others with a general suburban ennui.  Hasn’t the gay community been stereotyped enough?

Off Off Broadway will remain the last bastion of truly cutting edge professional, noncommercially-driven theatre, which unfortunately most tourists either won’t learn about or will be too afraid to take their kids downtown or to Brooklyn  to see, or will continue in their mistaken belief that Off Off is synonymous with amateur.  To combat this, the tired phrase “Off Off Broadway theatre” will finally be dropped by the media and replaced with “independent theatre,” making it appropriately analagous to independent film.

BOOKS
Memoirs by overprivileged yet sheltered white ladies who traveled alone abroad for the first time, and had unlifechanging experiences which they contend were sublime, will finally stop being published.

SPORTS
NFL and SPCA legend Michael Vick, the OJ Simpson of animal abuse, will get caught in another imbroglio involving violent cruelty to a living thing weaker than himself, and it will involve illegal gambling. To help boost his reputation, Vick will open a Vick’s Pet Care pet-sitting service in Philadelphia.

JOURNALISM
“Aks” will become standard English for the proper way to spell “ask.”

The nonsensical “for all intensive purposes” will become an increasingly acceptable idiom, replacing the more traditional and more logical “for all intents and purposes,” which just sounds too old-fashioned even though it actually makes sense.

“Repel” and “repeal” will continue to gain acceptance as synonyms.

The nonexistent word “insiduous” will replace “insidious.”

No one will help us out of this mess, and schools will only reinforce these absurd grammatical changes.

AMERICA’S OBESITY CRISIS
The discredited 1970s’ 4-4-3-2 nutrition plan will be resurrected by the US Department of Agriculture as a normal, healthy diet given that most Americans adhere to it anyway. Did you know that pizza with everything is a healthy meal, containing items from the milk group, meat group, fruits & vegetables group, and breads & cereals group?  So is a Whopper.

WORLD
There will be continued violence in the Middle East. There will be continued violence in Africa. The sky will continue to be blue, the trees green.

European anarchist groups will continue to work together with increasingly sophisticated coordination, destroying the economic system, plunging us into their much hoped for post-apocalyptic, feudalistic society.  They will declare the date to be Year Zero. Farms will be seized and “collectivized,” after which mass starvation and gang violence will rule the day. Frazzled anarchist leaders will then call upon the police and military to restore order, and then they will request loans from multinational banks to rebuild all the roads, trains and hospitals they destroyed in order to liberate all of us.

POLITICS
Millions of working Americans will begin to feel and appreciate the benefits of Obama’s healthcare plan but will continue to complain that socialist Obama has screwed up the country.  Obama, unfazed, will prepare for a 2012 landslide reelection.  I also predict that I will be one of those voting for him again.

A major world leader will announce not only a cutesy belief in the possibility of extraterrestrials, but will insist with all seriousness during a press conference that he has seen ETs himself. The Vatican will immediately back him up. This will all be part of preparing us for 2012 when things are really gonna get all alieny up in here.

SCIENCE
Bigfoot sightings will become increasingly fashionable. A theoretical link between Bigfoots and the newly announced ETs (see above) will gain ground among top scientists.

Happy New Year, everybody. God bless us, every one.

[image via psychic-junkie.com]