Fashionable? Who Knew?

As seen on the streets of New York.

(with thanks to Bill.)

Processing the Pentateuch

As a happy coincidence, the project to read the entire Pentateuch coincided with a series of Stanford lectures on the Second Punic War. The context for something this old and foreign is invaluable. It’s worth remembering that the Levant and North Africa in the several centuries BCE were Phoenician territory. (Canaanites, Hittites, Minoans, etc.) The mention they usually get in History class is “maritime people, invented cuneiform,” and not much else. Their rarely-mentioned religion forms the background against which both the Greeks and the Hebrews must be seen. The primary custom to note was the Cult of Baal (the thunder-god,) which apparently involved the sacrifice of children (preferably first-born boys,) by burning them alive; probably important as a display of being able to dispense with the most valuable thing you had. The secondary Phoenician practice was the Cult of Astarte. While eventually developing into the Greek Aphrodite, this fertility goddess was worshipped through ritual prostitution, which seems to have been fairly inclusive.

Knowing all of that, the text of the ancient jews takes on a slightly different color. Simply as a matter of text one thing that jumped out is that the four-character name for the deity doesn’t actually make an appearance until Exodus, which means I’m not sure what. (read the footnotes carefully) In fact, restoring the original name into the euphemism traditionally substituted by translators makes the reading both more immediate and strangely older. What was striking was the amount of information that is already assumed. Much like the Pauline Epistles, you can almost learn as much about the story by noting which things are chosen as forbidden as by the actual instructions. For instance, that Leviticus feels a need to include not one, but two complete prohibitions of sacrificing children to Molech (i.e. the Baal Cult) speaks to what must have been its prevalence. Passage after passage almost cries out for a clause that says “as opposed to what you’re used to doing, which is . . . “ The near-sacrifice of Isaac becomes no longer one of extreme commitment, but of a more humane prohibition of human sacrifice (with the implied, “from now on. . . .”)

There does seem to be an awful lot of emphasis on animal sacrifice. It begins to make more sense if the whole thing is cast as an instruction manual for an ad-hoc mobile civilization. There are instructions for hygiene, dispute resolution (despite what a modern might think of some of the nature of the disputes,) property rights, organizational structure, feeding the priest class, and even the geographic layout of the campsite down to order of march. If it’s not heretical to say so, one can almost see the sacrifice quota as taxes and fines.

The only thing I don’t really get was the intent of Deuteronomy. It’s part summary, part valediction, and part press release. One wonders if the intended audience wasn’t originally different. (After all, these were originally read aloud, not published as we think of them now.) - that and the whole scapegoat thing.

One page added to generations of scholarship.

Thinking about Chekhov

Sometimes geography pays off. When I found out that the SMU theater department (“Division of Theatre”) was performing Chekhov’s The Seagull, the arduous five-minute walk seemed worth it. University theater is always an odd bird: spotty performances, unpredictable directing, a bizarre mix of audience, but the facilities are great. What a change to have comfortable seats (and a scene budget that these guys would kill for.)

No point in dwelling on the execution; the usual heavy-handed student issues, yelling-and-screaming at points, odd pantomime, pretty much in the top half of what you expect from this kind of thing. That said, Jessica DiSalvo’s Masha was a rare and pleasant treat of understated inebriation, and Lydia Mackay (good union member, her) might make me reconsider my position against breeding with redheads.

Right. It’s the content that’s important. There’s no doubt that much of what made this piece powerful in the original gets lost in translation. (Plot précis: party at country estate – kept writer seduces teenage “actress” – she goes off to big city and destroys herself – heartbroken young lover channels despair into reasonable success as writer – girl returns, bringing the whole thing up again – young writer kills himself.) Still, many of the themes still reverberate throughout the piece with a surprising power. (Corruption, as it were, being the grist of the title.)

What you have here is a roomful of characters intersecting at different points in their lives, and all wanting to trade in one way or another. There is the young girl entranced by how wonderful it must be to live creatively, and the older writer describing the obsession and self-loathing actually involved. There is the child trying to grapple with following the acclaimed parent – and how shallow the actual reality of fame really is. There is the poignant old man looking back on a life of missed desires, and finding solace in the hopes of loved ones around him. There is the middle-aged woman still in love with the man she wanted instead of the man she married, and then watching her daughter repeat the same. And then there are a couple of stock petty-bourgeois that can’t get beyond the rut of the immediate.

The whole thing makes you think about regret and disappointment and living up to a romanticized fiction. The grass, it seems, is greener for everyone. In the face of the complex world of the outside, the simple pure things we loved when we were young are still the most powerful ones. If only the simple beauty of the unsuspecting heart could adapt the world to its’ own image. (Proust and his four walls again.)

“We were happy, weren’t we Constantine?”

Yes, for a moment, we were.

IsoTimic Dallas

"Walkable" means something in the real world. This is the IsoTim contour map from 20 minutes to 45 minutes for Chez Moi on foot. Note the path distortion for a) the freeway bridges on the right border and b) the fenced country club at the lower left.

For the New Urbanist junkies out there: There are FOUR trendy retail areas and no less than THREE independant film theaters within the 50 min contour. (Not to mention the college campus.)

[taken from personal observation]

Collage: Homage de H.G.Wells

Well Scrubbed

The Clean House by Sarah Ruhl (I seem to be seeing a lot of her) played at the Performance Network Theatre in Ann Arbor this week. While not as linguistically complex or daring as her one-act Euridice, the script gives director David Wolber and designer Monika Essen a chance to shine. The whole work is really not at all about the what, and totally about the how. The premise is as simple as it is odd: Brazilian maid for two married doctors decides her gifts lie with comedy instead of cleaning, she-doctor’s sister takes over cleaning to assuage her OCD, he-doctor leaves for an older woman, older woman dies of cancer and everybody reconciles. Sort of a conflicted romp through post-feminism with a lot of flashbacks.

It’s the little things of execution that make it interesting. First are the props: the whole piece is punctuated throughout with text. Text on the back of furniture, text on costumes, text projected on the back wall, text jumping down on signs from the fly and back up, and a whole extended scene with live subtitles (kudos for the guy running the slide projector.) It’s running commentary that helps leven the mood of what could have easily become fodder for the Lifetime Channel. Knowing when and how to whip out the written commentary displays a mastery of planning and the best disciplined crew I’ve seen in one of these houses with uncomfortable seats. There are masterful blocking touches as well. Things occur in concurrent time in different settings, and there is well managed interaction between the two – down to the catching of an apple that either results from countless practice or natural talent that the cross-town Tigers could use. Flowing from character to character makes for a much richer experience and helps the story immeasurably.

Not that the director and crew deserve all of the credit. Barb Coven’s “Lane” (of apple-catching fame) is the strongest of the cast; she plays the wronged surgeon with an amazing restraint – inhabiting the character will a full pathos that never succumbs to the temptations of the yelling-and-screaming school. In this hospital-heavy town it almost seems like eavesdropping. The rest of the cast is solid, steering the middle path between silly and pathetic with admirable dexterity. The only issues to note are periodic breakdowns in pacing during the odd flashback / imagination scenes that probably could have been cut down or done without.

Of course, lest you forget you’re in Michigan, the company makes sure to plaster their union memberships in forty places in the playbill.

Ah, text.