The Boy In The Plastic Bubble

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DRAMA DESK DEPT.

Ito acts out your greatest fears, so you don’t have to.

In the face of coronavirus, we laugh, yet, because it is in bad taste, we cry too; that’s catharsis. “That’s Aristotle! That’s theatre!” Ito says it all with the eyes, like Keaton. (Ito has been getting into Aristotle lately; and Buster Keaton, too. And agitprop theatre….hmmmmmm....)

The View sat in on his rehearsal — just ONE rehearsal, before the big performance that night. (The View graciously agreed to keep on wearing Kenny’s kimono through cocktails, so that the bag would be free for Ito’s evening show.)

In the evening show, he struggles to connect with the world through the thick, communication-destroying plastic bubble. At the climax, he seems trapped.

It’s 2:45, and things aren’t going well. Half-way through the chaotic rehearsal, he stops and asks me “How’m I doin?”

I tell him I want to observe, I don’t want to misspeak, but he insists. So I advise him to back off. Less is more. Small gestures for the camera…don’t act it, think it. Don’t LITERALLY chew the scenery. My market-oriented, establishmentarian advice enraged the enfant terrible. But it rekindled his fire.

He says his “happening” was all about social distancing. The official re-View, however, is that it was a transparent attempt at showing off. He snapped back “That’s theatre!” Touche. So much for critics.

Common Sense, From The New Yorker

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Don’t take it from the View, who rants and grates; take it from the New Yorker.

It may just be whistling down the empty concrete canyons of Manhattan. But this fine and persuasive piece from Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, just may have a chance to find readers, with all the good-read time people suddenly find on their hands.

Common Sense like this might make the difference in New York, and New Jersey, and a bunch of very literate states, which are meant, by the founding calendar of the wizards of the ancient holy city of Philadelphia, to be pre-selecting their electoral college representatives this year. Leave us hope the remaining primaries and caucuses are not cancelled.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/reality-has-endorsed-bernie-sanders

(Though, given the mischievous malicious misgovernance on display in the past two weeks; and remembering the historical run of things; canceling this year’s election entirely, not just the primaries, is no dark horse. It’s got an even chance of being the Next Logical Step. Who, after all, except Bernie himself, would lift a finger to prevent it?

“The election this year is absolutely off the table,” I can just hear the Old Bay rasp.)

The Musonia Music School Mystery

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LOCAL COLOR DEPT.

At the north end of Valley Village, Laurel Canyon Blvd. turns into one of those cinder-block automotive/Smog Certifier/brakes-and-wheels sprawl strips that make Los Angeles the Hell of mankind’s past futurists. But just off the boulevard, Beautiful Valley Village prevails in all its quiet, Hollywood Regency romance.

Tiara Ave. is a very pretty street, one of those streets draped with the green fronds of Drake elms, the signature of LA’s mid-century rustic sophistication. But just one lot in from the fumes of the body shop on the corner, there is this unsettling anachronism, this puff of whimsy, this shimmering folly, this remnant of a film shoot that went bust; or an Utopian cult of Neo-Pythagoreans that disappeared one day in the 70s; or a Mafia front for a reefer and call-girl ring; or a flinty New Englander’s attempt to bring the music of Charles Ives to the West; or a former porn studio.

Whatever it is, here it sits, in exactly the same state of tidily clipped, faded abandonment now, as when I first found it while walking Clio some twenty ODD years ago, when we first moved here. I’ve never seen anybody go in or out, not even bassoon-case-toting Oompah-Loompahs.

For all the View’s ken, Musonia may be a world-class conservatory, a West Coast Juilliard I never heard of. Maybe at certain times of the week, there is a parade of black-silked musicians, or crowds of milling Villagers outside under the elms, dodging kids on skateboards and sipping mulled white wine while waiting for the Shostakovitch after the break, because that’s the real test.

Or is Musonia a proud consortium of Latvian gentleman songsters, with roots dating to 12th century Riga, whom Brahms once conducted, and who became established in the Valley in 1947 because of the Iron Curtain? I JUST DON’T KNOW.

One so wants the story to be beautiful and inspiring; yet one fears so much it won’t be.

Maybe that’s the definition of “mystery.”

Another Sucker Punch To The Face As The World Reels

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I know there’s no way anybody can think about or follow all the chaos; but I happened upon this in the Guardian:


https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/27/trump-pollution-laws-epa-allows-companies-pollute-without-penalty-during-coronavirus


Corporations can now pollute freely. Seriously, an insecticide refinery, or a pig or poultry CAFO, or a nuclear power plant, can now unplug that old 1961 outflow pipe, or chop up that levee, or flip off that scrubber, and just let flow, let seep, let gas-off, free of penalty, free of fine, free of justice. Because coronavirus. And not temporary, but forever, it seems.

So add the EPA to the list: the State Department; the General Staff; the Justice Department; the Treasury; the IRS; the Federal Reserve; the U.S. dollar; the very notion of money itself; the Department of Education; the Department of the Interior; the Department of Agriculture; the National Park Service; the ICE; the CDC. You can name a dozen more, from NATO to the Post Office. All destroyed, ripped out, hollowed out, demoralized, sabotaged, de-railed, re-missioned, in limbo, savaged by cuts, captured by lobbyists, hijacked and weaponized to destroy American life. So much damage; none of it in any way principled, none of it in any way relevant or consistent, none of it in any way about real problems, none of it based on sound economic vision. Just a shrapnel bomb of bullshit, none of it in any way “conservative,” none of it about economy or about the values society; but all of it enabled by the toxic Congress of corporate pigs and a crabbed, complicit, reductionist, authoritarian judiciary.

Ya think Joe Biden – — who? where? — will fix this? Ya think he can fix this, wants to fix this, or even thinks any of this is a problem? Ya think all we need is more hands across the aisle, or “unity?” Unity in what? FOR what?

UPDATE: Right on cue, the man whose campaign slogan is “nothing shall fundamentally change,” reassures America, again, that nothing shall fundamentally change.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/30/coronavirus-exposes-deep-flaws-profit-system-biden-doubles-down-opposition-medicare

In the next four months to four years, in fact right now, the entire apparatus of the world — work, money, family, economy, wealth, health, law, transport, energy, war, agriculture, Nature, the search for God, indeed, purposeful living of any kind, is being reinvented. We all know this. Every day, in every way, civilization is a matter of personal choice.

Coronavirus has given us pause. The pause that refreshes. The election only seems to have gone away. Bernie Sanders is blacked out, but he’s out there fighting, if only you knew to go online and search for the ideas that might help save us. Democracy has only disappeared on television.

I know I’m a crazy person locked in a dark room on a sunny day. But PLEASE… are these “the blessings of liberty, for ourselves and our posterity?”