I'm Walkin' Here!

There are undeniably a whole wide range of issues that need to be dealt with right now in the world. They include everything from the obvious problem (and thank goodness relatively short lived residency) of the current occupant of the White House, his adventuresome debacle in Iraq, the complete lack of affordable health care in the U.S., hunger, homelessness, the ongoing and seemingly never-ending struggle of New Orleans to return from disaster, worldwide abuse of human rights... and more and more and more.

It's a damned depressing scenario and it colors almost every aspect of contemporary living whether your a big time mover and shaker or a small town nobody.

Three weeks ago (and I've been meaning to write about it ever since) I had the delightful opportunity to participate with a whole collection of people, some of whom I knew and most of whom were new to my acquaintance, in a three mile walk around the east side of Petaluma, led by our mayor, Pam Torliatt. There was no overtly political agenda in this, though it was possible (and people were encouraged)to chat with the mayor about their personal civic concerns as we padded along the walking and bike paths of this little town.

Over many years of my life, I've been in a lot of places with a lot of the basic problems of contemporary urban society, and the reality is that not only do I feel a responsibility to personally deal (as best I can) with those issues, but I actually thrive on the process involved in dealing with issues that demand our attention. I have regularly lived in a sort of confrontational mode with regard to such things, and that goes all the way back to my attendance at Viet Nam protests in Tucson from the time I was 16, to my joining the first Witness For Peace trip to Nicaragua in 1983, less than two years after my daughter was born (when every kid in Nicaragua seemed to be her age), spending many years in tax resistance against US war policy, going to jail in Livermore California to protest American nuclear policy, and serving as one of the founding board members of Dolores Street Community Services, an extension of our little liberal Baptist Church (no... that's NOT an oxymoron!) at the edge of San Francisco's Mission District... and, of course, well known to anyone who reads this blog regularly, working in New Orleans with Churches Supporting Churches and others to hopefully see the city come back to life sometime within the foreseeable future.

The thing is... this little three mile walk three weeks ago was a moving experience that I will not soon get over. There was no big agenda, there were no major speeches, no angry protests, and no substantial agenda. In fact, the only real agenda at all was the mayor's desire to get people out and moving through space with the idea that such activity would make them feel better, think better, most likely act better, and undeniably live longer; a pretty damn good agenda, it seems to me.

I still believe in the big important causes, and I still want to work, really work, for a change in the way we humans exist on this planet, but on that Saturday three weeks ago all those issues seemed to come down to the simple reality of walking. And walking can do a lot (last weekend, ECKS's daughter, Lia, raised $2200 and walked 60 miles for breast cancer concerns in the Breast Cancer Three Day) and maybe, in the sense of Gandhi's remark that "you must become the change you want to see in the world," the simple act of walking can, indeed, actually change the world.

It's a good start wherever it takes us and I'm quite grateful to Petalulma's mayor, and all the folks that walked, for introducing me to the idea. Someday soon... maybe tomorrow... maybe even today... I'll be active, political, intense, and challenging once again, but...

In the meantime... I'm walkin' here!

If you read one book...

In the front window of the Hotel Monteleone on Royal Street in New Orleans there is a quote from Truman Capote that expresses the sentiment that the real beauty of writing is not in the stories themselves but in the sound and feel of the words. There are times when I have that feeling, but they tend to be very few and far between. This morning, however, I finished reading one of those kind of books; a book so rich in language, so bathed in linguistic beauty, that the near horror of the storyline is completely eclipsed by the exquisite luxury of words pouring over you like a summer waterfall in a mountain stream.

The plot line of Cormac McCarthy's The Road follows a man and a boy on a never ending cross-country trek through a post-apocalyptic world of hunger, danger, and pain. There are no chapters to break the flow of the inexorable journey as the reader is taken along as a third companion through this world that seems at once too familiar and terribly strange.

Along the way, there are moral questions that are raised and sometimes answered. We are never told the source of the devastation, it just is. It is a story that you want to turn away from, but find that you can't. The reader must wrestle with the difficulties of this world, and these lives, like Jacob with the angel. On some level, by the end of The Road there is no turning back. The reader is forced, by taking the journey, to in some sense take a stand. This may be to seek a way to secure the future from such devastation, or it may be to hold the ones you love especially close.

Above all... the gift of The Road is the gift of language. The story is hard, but the language, and the spell it weaves, is lovely.

Read this book.

Happy Birthday Sam

It is the birthday of the man whom I consider to be the greatest contemporary American playwright (and possibly the greatest living playwright in the world), Sam Shepard.

This fact is extremely appropriate as a follow up to the last post about Godot being performed in New Orleans this past weekend. There is probably no contemporary writer more directly influenced by the traditions and styles that were launched by Samuel Beckett than Sam Shepard. In 1978 he received The Pulitzer Prize for his first major play, "Buried Child," which I had the delightful opportunity to see performed at San Francisco's Magic Theater (where it was debuted) a few years later. Seeing that play was the beginning of my fascination and admiration for Shepard, a man who has built an amazing career as a writer, director and actor in both film and theater. About 15 years later, I returned to The Magic for the debut of Shepard's play "The Late Henry Moss" and had the chance to sit two seats away from him and witness his director's technique as he made notes on performances and enthusiastically cheered his actors on.

Sam's plays grapple, over and over again, with the strange intensity of family dynamics and his writing (both in plays and in short form fiction) never ceases to knock me over and force me to reflect on what it means to take up space on the planet.

Both his acting and his writing have an ability to communicate the true essence of being an American male in the 20th and 21st century, demonstrating a groundedness, solidity and empathy, while struggling with heart and soul and angst.

On top of all that... he's been married for more than 20 years to the woman I consider to be the most beautiful woman alive, Jessica Lange.

Without Sam Shepard my life would be poorer and emptier and I would be more lost.

Nothing to be done...

This weekend on an empty street in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans and again the weekend after, in front of a deserted house in Gentilly, a group of actors will present my favorite play in my favorite city - Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett.

Two quotations about Beckett which I found on a Samuel Beckett website describe not only why I dearly love this curmudgeonly Irish playwright, but frankly come very close to worshiping him.

"The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don’t want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him.
He’s not fucking me about, he’s not leading me up any garden path, he’s not slipping me a wink, he’s not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he’s not selling me anything I don’t want to buy — he doesn’t give a bollock whether I buy or not — he hasn’t got his hand over his heart. Well, I’ll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty.
His work is beautiful. " -- Harold Pinter

" Samuel Beckett is sui generis...He has given a voice to the decrepit and maimed and inarticulate, men and women at the end of their tether, past pose or pretense, past claim of meaningful existence. He seems to say that only there and then, as metabolism lowers, amid God’s paucity, not his plenty, can the core of the human condition be approached... Yet his musical cadences, his wrought and precise sentences, cannot help but stave off the void... Like salamanders we survive in his fire." -- Richard Ellman

This is the real deal, and though I have seen Godot performed many times and in many settings, this is the production I would give my eye teeth to see. Put on by CreativeTime, an experimental dramatic arts group from New York City, in conjunction with a number of arts and education groups in New Orleans, these performances (which are free by the way) are being presented in what has to be the best possible contemporary context for this play; a play about confusion, torpor, and despair, but possessing within that context an amazing and incongruous hope in, and at, the base of life.

The mounting of this presentation, in and of itself, contradicts the first spoken line of the play, "Nothing to be done." This performance, and the energy, creativity, and life that has gone into its creation is SOMETHING to be done.

See it if you can... or, if you can't, at least grab a copy and read (or re-read) Godot this weekend. It might just be the most important piece of literature for our time.

Every Day's A Holiday with Mary...

Saturday night was the big Halloween Fundraiser at Petaluma's Phoenix Theater when I had the honor of becoming Bert (doesn't he have a last name somewhere?) the chimney sweep (among a host of other occupations... a bit of typecasting actually) accompanying Mary Poppins to the wonderful event.

Mary Poppins, I must say, besides being wonderful company for the evening, was indeed the hit of the party. It was amazing actually... Sort of like being a Disney character (which, I guess, in a way, we were). EVERYONE, and I really do mean everyone (well, with the exception of Ace Ventura, but that's another story), wanted to say hello or have their picture taken with Mary Poppins. While the dancing was going on, Mary would often simply take off and float through the crowd as I followed along, chimney brushes over my shoulder, trying to catch up with the girl on the winds.

At one point, as we were standing outside in front of the theater a group of teenagers came by and Mary approached to discuss, "when I used to take care of you." The funniest part of this interchange was that several of the kids were the first people all night who didn't know who she was. But one of them did, and he kept trying to enlighten the others. When I walked up, his eyes got big and he said (as so many others did) "Dick Van Dyke! Bust it out man! Chim Chiminey... Come on... Bust it out!" So I did, standing on the corner of Washington, I started singing Chim chiminey, kicking up my heels like I learned 30 years ago in theater class and join by a kid who is probably ten years younger than my daughter.

And speaking of my daughter... while I was busy kicking up my heels with Mary, she and her sweety were partying in The City... Can YOU guess who they are?

On top of everything... Mary and I even won the Grand Prize in the costume competition (and there was some stiff competition) with one of our competitors telling the audience, "Vote for Mary Poppins!"

It was a SUPERCALAFRGILISTICEXPEALIDOCIOUS evening!