And We Shall March

Radio ALOUD / holding

This pilot radio program (never broadcast) is comprised of excerpts from three ALOUD programs: a December 13, 2005 conversation between "Six Feet Under" writer/producer Alan Ball and writer/funeral director Thomas Lynch; a public talk on April 2, 2003 by playwright August Wilson, recipient of the 2003 Los Angeles Public Library Literary Award; and an April 4, 2005 poetry reading by W.S. Merwin.

Guest Host: Alfred Molina.

Richard Price @ Aloud, 3.25.08

When I was in high school they made us read The Wanderers. I didn't like it. Had to read it again in one of my college classes, where we also had to watch the movie. Made it through about 1/3rd of it that time, then lied and relied on memory for the rest. Didn't like the movie, either. That might have been the end of my relationship with the work of Richard Price had it not been for Clockers coming out, and quite a few people mentioning it more than once. Eventually I checked it out, went !!!! and have picked up every book Price has written since. His other works include Freedomland, Samaritan, Blood Brothers and various Hollywood items, the most significant of which was being a writer on The Wire. So, yeah, he was placed in The Pantheon quite a while ago. Here's a recent news article about him.

I still don't like The Wanderers, though.

Price showed up at Aloud on tour for the new book, Lush Life. After the traditional Aloud overly-long intro, and here's again hoping that one day the organizers stop doing that, he walks out on stage, pops open the book and starts reading. The guy is an amazing reader. Funny, lively, slightly hostile, occasionally weary, shifting between tone and characters without stumbling into 'acting'. So now he's my new fave reader of his own work. He only read for maybe less than 10 minutes total during the event, but man did it wallop.

When he first sat down to begin the interview bits, he looked a little jumpy, as if he was expecting the audience to jump up and yell BOO. But after a few minutes he settled into it. My escort for the evening said "maybe he's late on a script." Ha. Thing is, Price said something similar to a chatty guy in the audience - "do I owe you a script?" Ha!

This fragmented write-up does not follow the flow of his talk. I'm grouping under general topics chosen, obviously, by Moi. Locals will be able to hear the full talk down the road on the radio, as it was recorded for broadcast. I can't remember what the turnaround time is between live event and broadcast, but keep an out here until it shows up. Unless, of course, it shows up here. I'm actually not sure if they recorded it for KPCC or for podcast, but it'll show up on one or the other.

On Location
Lush Life is set in the lower east side of NYC. Price said that usually he makes up his own city (which we fans know is called Dempsy, New Jersey), but in a way he's been trying to write about the lower east side for 25 years. He said its history is that of a place where "you crawl off the boat ... and the first thing you want to  do is get the hell out."

He thought about doing a historical novel about the area, but decided that's been done to death. It was his daughters who gave him the pointer in the right direction. Their landscape of the LES was here's where you get the good gelato, and they don't don't card at the Pink Pony (which I guess is a bar), stuff like that. They knew the now of the LES: the past of the place didn't register for them. So off he went to look around, and he found that the current LES was still a multiculural roil, but with the added touch of gentrification. "That place was chaos. It was like Byzantium."

Price said his younger self would have crawled through glass to live in the LES of the 1970s, a place filled with 20-something artist types who think they're invincible. But the lead character in his book is a mid-30s waiter dropping his hyphens who is starting to realize his artistic life maybe isn't gonna happen, yet he's living in the rapidly gentrifying LES of the current day, a place "where 30 is the new 50." He said gentrification is a big part of the LES. "There's a lotta people on the lower east side who aren't supposed to be there anymore. They're there, but they're not supposed to be."

"It's  like the Morlocks & the Eloi." (At that I said to my escort omigod did he just name check the Morlock? To which my escort said what's a Morlock. And of course the only answer to *that* was what do you mean 'what's a Morlock'? To which he replied  what? as if he hadn't said anything odd. At that point we got glared at by a woman sitting in front of us, so we shut up. For the record, we were whispering. Later I explained what a Morlock is. In great detail. The escort retaliated with a treatise on how what Price said about Transformers cannot, *in any way*, be construed as positive. That didn't stop me from making the attempt.)

Anywho, Price hung out with restaurant owners and various other types in the LES while doing his research, and of course, he contacted the local cops.

On Cops
He's not a cop buff. But for what he does, cops are the perfect entry. He compared it to staring at the ocean, when you think you know it by looking at the surface, as you think you know a neighborhood by looking at the surface. And then you get in the back of a police car "and somebody gives you a snorkel mask."

I liked this line - "Media is the tail that wags the police dog. They go after what the media picks up."

Which reminds me of a hypothesis I have of the final season of The Wire so far! AVERT YOUR EYES FOR SPOILERS but it looks to me like the paper hasn't yet picked up on any of the *actual* stories going on in the community. We'll see if that holds as I continue through the episodes. See, this is why I need James.

On Research
"You can call it research (but) I'm making everything up. What I see is like the starter's yeast." He said he takes in what he observes "so I can lie responsibly. You know, Jane Austen never left her village."

On Dialog
Take his dialog. Real dialog sucks, he said, filled with dead air and stumblings and mostly unsaid things. What he's trying to do in is his dialog is give the illusion of authenticity. "It's really hightened reality. You're compressing ... in a shapely way," he said. "All you owe to reality is the spirit and tone that people use, and then it's improv." He said he's not Margaret Mead with a pith helmet and clipboard because it's not about that level of detail. "It's not being a tape recorder."

On Validity
He was 16 when he read Last Exit to Brooklyn, and it imprinted itself on him. It was the first book he read that made him feel that what he knew/his experiences were valid grounds for literature. Cannon is fine and all, but this was the first time he saw concrete on the streets and recognized the buildings.

"You didn't have to be a dead Englishman or an Oakie or something" for your life to be valid fodder for literature.

On Getting There
"I'm on the bestseller list for the first time in 34 years. How's that for an overnight success?"

Price said he'd always wanted to be known as a writer. (I found that an interesting turn of phrase.) When a young man, he wanted to be known as the guy at open mikes, use the being a writer thing to pick up chicks. Unfortunately I can't replicate his 'being a writer to pick up chicks' because part of it was physical, but man was it funny.

When he was eight, he saw how is father revered his grandfather for his ability to write poetry. His grandfather ("Minsk Gothic" ahahaha) mimeographed his poems, and though Price didn't understand them at the time, he did pick up on his father's reaction. He knew then that he wanted to be a writer, too.

He went to Stanford sometime in his 20s, didn't last long there but when he left he also knew he would never go back to the Bronx. Yet he also knew he wanted to talk about the Bronx.

Apparently he also teaches writing. He said that in that aspect of his life he thinks the most important thing a teacher can do is to help the person figure out what story they want to tell, identify their urgency.

The Wire
Clockers came out at around the same time Homicide: Life on the Street came out. It turned out the editor for one edited the other; the editor decided to get the two of them together "like a play date." That gathering happened to take place on the night of the Rodney King riots. So they went off to watch the local riot together.

Price was intimidated when Simon asked him to come write for The Wire, even though he knew the show was deeply influenced by Clockers. One reason  he was hesitant was because Clockers stayed in the trenches, where Simon went beyond that to explore the bigger landscape. Once he joined up, more than once Simon would tell him to just do that scene in Clockers where...and he did. "So I was plagiarizing myself."

Selected Q & A
The first question was about The Wanderers. I blanked out.

The next question came down to when he's writing, is the dominant thought about the art or the potential sales? "What do you think I'm going to say?" Then he talked about how he likes having all control over a book. "My books are my life."

On the 'brown bag speech': That was David Simon.

A guy who clearly wasn't listening during the earlier parts of the talk asked about movie adaptation stuff. Price said nowadays he prefers doing his own work rather than some Hollywood Person's stuff.  "I can't write the other shit. I can't do Transformers." (Me: Omigod! Transformers!!! Escort: Do. Not. Start.) He said that for him the best approach for attracting the attention of the Hollywood People is to do what you want to do, put it out there, then see who responds to it. I got the feeling that's not the answer the guy wanted.

As for the title of the book, he didn't realize the actual content of those Billy Strayhorn lyrics until much later. He decided to keep the title anyway because he liked it.

When answering a question about his process, he gave what turned out to be my fave quote of the evening!

"Autobiography and talent are not Siamese twins. You can go out and you can learn. You keep looking at your navel and you will get hit by a bus."

I want to put that on a T-shirt and pass it out at comic book conventions.

In case you go romping off to a bookseller in search of his books, know that there are two creators named Richard Price. There's this one, and the one who is an anthropologist writing nonfiction about various aspects of slavery and such throughout the diaspora. Here's his LibraryThing! Though it is not uncommon for retailers to confuse the two every once in a while (check out the eye-rolling 'about the author' here), just so you know, they are not the same guy. But if you have an interest in the other topic, the other Richard Price is well worth checking out.

Octavia Butler @ Aloud Archive

Since I will not be able to get around to doing a proper write-up of last week's ALOUD talk with Ishmael Beah, I figured the next best thing might be to link to an audio of his talk. Because I am on dial-up, I keep forgetting that KCET archives some of the Central Library talks. Alas, they don't have his talk up yet. But they do have this one of the Nov. 2005 appearance by Octavia Butler! (Warning...link takes you directly to an mp3.) If you click on this link you can access a big archive of talks from Aloud, RedCat, Hammer and the Skirball. They don't put everything up, but lotsa goodness can be found - DJ Spooky, George Saunders, Robert Thurman...all sorts of stuff. Check it out, and check back there down the road to see if Beah is added.

I will say this about Beah's talk, which was fab despite the interviewer's habit of running her mouth too much. The very first question during the q/a came from a white woman who started by needing to compliment him on his maturity, composure and how the way he comported  himself at the event "wasn't what I was expecting this evening." She took a breath, I'm thinking if the next "compliment" out of this idiot's mouth is to to tell this young black man how clean and articulate he is I'm going to stand up, scream and throw my Franklin Covey at her, and the next thing she said was "but I haven't read your book."

My buddy, who was digging his elbow into my ribs during this woman's prelude of praise, had the best line about her! I'd steal it and post it here, but perhaps it's best if I refrain.

Elaine Pagels and Karen King Talking Judas @ Aloud

And we're back.

If i weren't already primed to pick up Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity, I would be after last night's fantastic talk by Pagels & King at the Central Library. They did it symposium style, pacing around a little bit while tossing to each other as they delivered an engaging lecture. Then there were questions. Some of the questions were excellent. Some of them made you wonder if the person had been on the phone or perhaps napping during the previous hour.

Rather than type up the pages and pages of notes I took ("My, you write fast," said the lady sitting next to me), and assuming if you're interested in this book you've probably already been following the mad press it's landed, how about just a few highlights:

• This codex, when originally found, was in perfect condition. But when the seller didn't get the price he wanted, he placed it in a safe deposit box in NYC for 17 years, where it dissolved into tiny fragments. On top of that, someone had the bright idea that putting those fragments in a freezer would help somehow. Thus, it took five years to restore it, and much of the original text was lost. King said the lesson to be learned: "Don't put your papyrus in a safe deposit box in New York for 17 years."
• The fact that this thing survived means it was treasured by someone, an assumption made based on the labor involved in copying a text back then. This one in particular was copied over and again and handed down for hundreds of years, and was referenced all over the place in other works, so the scholar types knew it was out there and were able to recognize it when it finally showed up. The way Pagels put it "It takes devotion to copy a text."
  
  • Other texts refer to this gospel as dealing with "the mystery of the betrayal" and that act which threw "heaven and earth into chaos."
• The papyrus has been carbon dated and the results came back legit.
• There's very little in the gospel about Judas the historical person.
• The Gospel of Judas is an extremely hostile document. Both said they were surprised at the level of anger in it.
• What makes this gospel so radical is how adamant it is that what eventually turned into 'official' Christianity is based on a huge misunderstanding. This author is saying followers of Jesus rejected Roman sacrifice, but then they turned around and brought sacrifice into the center of the religion, making the death/sacrifice of Christ the core of their worship and promoting the idea of martyrdom as a glorious act. To this author they are promoting slaughter, and a god more bloodthirsty than loving.
  
• In the gospel Judas starts out averting his eyes. He can't even look directly at Jesus. But Jesus teaches him and brings him along to the point where not only can he look upon Him, but he can look up to the heavens and see the temple. He gets it. The rest of them don't.
• Another surprising thing about this gospel is how the other 12 disciples are (my words) played as idiots. They never understand anything and have to be constantly corrected. They see Jesus feed the masses with a few fish and loaves of bread, then they ask for a sign. They ask for positions of power once they all get to heaven. They don't get the whole service thing. (King did this section. The way she presented it was very funny.)
• There are some things in the text neither of them liked at all. It's homophobic, and it reinforces the myth that the Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. "There's not a Roman in sight!" is how King put it.
• King said something so obvious I'm stunned it never hit me before. We are used to books, publishing, information being passed along via the page. Early Christianity was primarily an oral tradition. That's one of the reasons the growth of the cannon is long, and why to date the scholars still don't have the full details.
• As for reaction to the book among the religious set, it just came out so they haven't really been able to tell. "Some people are going to say 'put it back in the ground', some people are going to say 'let's take a look at this,'" King said. The sort of people who would like to bury it aren't the sort to show up for the tour talks and yell at them.
• "The Gospel of Judas, far from being bizarre and marginal, takes us right into the center of what Christianity would become," said King.

I can't wait to get this book! I've read all of Pagels' other works, but I've only read one of King's. I think I shall rectify that down the road. Should their tour come to your neck of the woods, and if you're interested in this topic, it's well worth heading out to see them.

Meanwhile, thanks all for the birthday wishes, auto responders are off, I'm making my way through the inboxes, and if you're waiting to hear back on a note, you will soonish.

“My Trip to Al-Qaeda: A Performance" by Lawrence Wright

Last night I passed up going to see the latest changes to the Stardust movie at a test screening in Pasadena because Lawrence Wright held the west coast premiere of his new work FOR FREE via Aloud at the Central Library. Yes, I skipped an opportunity to be Nitpicky Geek for something else, but it wasn't even a contest. I snagged free free free tickets for this event weeks ago.

Wright, one of the astonishing lyricists on staff at the New Yorker who sometimes turns articles into books, is also the man who wrote The Siege. In his words, the movie was a box office failure and the focus of protests from Muslims throughout America that became the most rented film in the country the weekend after the towers fell. This made him "the first profiteer of the war on terrorism." It also did enough of a job on his psyche to send him off trying to answer Why, and also, Why Me. (That's not as egoistic as perhaps it will across in this inadequate description of the show.)

Before they brought down the towers, Al Q blew up a whole bunch of other things overseas attached to America. One of them was a Hard Rock Cafe in South Africa, chosen because Bruce Willis, co-star (with Denzel!) of The Siege, is (was?) a part-owner of the Hard Rock chain. In that attack, a 12-year-old girl lost her leg. That's where the Why Me comes in. Wright said it felt as if Al Q were striking out against not just American culture, but at him personally, and his imagination. A child was not skipping down the sidewalk because of something he wrote. People died because of what he wrote. It bothered him, which, you know, kinda makes sense.

Wright's not a parachute reporter, a guy who shows up when things get hot, interviews six people and leaves. During his career he's done extensive work  exploring the worlds of Al Q, the Taliban and the various Muslim cultures in which he's lived. What he's done for this piece is blend reporting with his personal feelings about us, them and the gulf between. In the end it felt like a work of restrained advocacy, an attempt to get America to understand how great is the disappointment elsewhere of its failing to live up to those storied ideals that started the place to begin with, and the need for its people to remember what this country is supposed to be and find a way to get back there.

The information that rolled out in Wright's performance ranged widely, but the tight control he maintained to avoid straying into the realm of overwhelming/off point was impressive. I think the bare staging - guy standing and talking, occasionally sitting and talking - helped you focus on and follow the complex personal and social story he was telling. There were no fireworks in staging or in his verbal presentation. It was just a guy talking, and it absolutely slayed.

Highlights (to me)  me were his descriptions of what the female journalists he mentored in Saudi Arabia had to go through when attempting to do their jobs. For example,  Wright wanted them to do a one year anniversary piece on the young women killed during a fire at their school in Mecca, a story I was familiar with, but not in any great detail. During this tragedy a father sent his daughter back inside the burning building to get her robe and hijab and when she obeyed, she died in the flames. He said that there were 17 companies of firefighters who showed up to fight the fire, cops showed up, parents showed up, but less than a handful of officials from the religious authorities stopped them all from saving those girls locked behind gates for the simple reason that in fleeing for their lives, the girls were improperly dressed. The rules of the religion were put at greater value than the lives of a bunch of girls.

Here, that kind of anniversary story is a standard piece. You talk to officials to take a look at what, if any, changes have resulted from the event, you get input from survivors and relatives of the dead, you get some photos and put together a basic center package. But there, not so much with the assumed standard. Wright said that when he suggested to his journalists they dig around to find out what systemic changes came about because of the fire, his female reporters told him somebody got fired, and that was change. He suggested that they get the clips from a competing newspaper to read up for background. When they told him they weren't allowed to go into that building, he told them to go to the library for the clips, which would be on microfilm. They told him they weren't allowed to go to the library save one day a week, and even then they would not be allowed to make more than a few photocopies. When he told them just go to the families and interview them, one of his female journalists laughed at him. That was not how anybody did things here, man or woman. And even if they did, some people don't like to look back on depressing events, that reporter among them. Wright also shared how for a while in the immediate aftermath of the fire the Saudi Arabian press engaged in serious societal soul-searching. But that ended when the religious authorities brought down the hammer and shut off discussion.

If there had been a Q/A, I would have asked how that situation turned out. As he left it the implication was package he had in mind never got written. I was also keenly interested in the woman who seemed to take the lead on the reporting staff in challenging him his presumptions. I didn't get the sense that she challenged his 'right' of authority as editor/mentor, but something more fundamental. She constantly questioned his myriad of preconditioning he brought to her home as a male and a journalist of the West. By his description, she was strong-willed, not about to take any shit, and for the entire time he knew her, he saw only her eyes and her gold cat-frame glasses. She put him through some stuff and he respected her. I wanted to know what happened to her. For my own reasons, I want to know if she is still in the game. She had fire, but would she have been able to maintain it when her entire society seems out to 'get' that sort of woman?

What else... Wright also explored how and why conspiracy theories take hold so easily in cultures where information is not free and the oppression of those in charge is acute. He touched a little bit on how the repression of gender impacts a society at every level. (He had a fantastic line here, but I wasn't taking full notes and cannot replicate it.) The story of an uncovered woman trapped outside of a mall during prayer time as one of the religious police closed in on her, and how he couldn't do anything to help her without making the situation worse was devastating.

Wright dropped shocking details almost casually throughout, such as the significance of September 11 within Islamic history. It is on that date in 1683, some historians say, that the culture of Islam came up against the culture of the West and definitively lost, beginning a decline of cultural influence from which there has been no emotional recovery. ('Shocking' to someone like me who's a little vague on world history falling outside my immediate spheres of interest.)  While I remember reading about how the bin Laden family was rich, I didn't realize just *how* rich they were, or that Osama's father was a folkloric hero due to the road he built and the great mosque he built. He explained the very real threat the family represented for the royals in charge, particularly after ObL returned from the war against the Russians in Afghanistan. Because of this show, I realize I have *lots* more reading up to do.

But Wright also talked about the other side's point of view. He told how everyday Muslims where he lived existed in a rock/hard place sort of situation when it came to dealing with the fundamentalists. He described how one of the  primary architects of the attack on the towers, a man who played a minor role in the assassination of Sadat, was a doctor who originally just wanted to overthrow his repressive government. It was only after he was put through the grist of torture that he turned from a surgeon into a butcher fixated on America. When he touched on how American authorities appropriated some of the more culturally specific torture methods learned from the Egyptians (involving dogs and illustrated with scenes from Abu Ghraib up on the screen), he quietly made a point both condemnatory and horrifying.

Wright talked a lot about his dealings with members of Al Q, and how he struggled with conflicting feelings as he did so. Sometimes he argued with his sources,  not really an approach you're supposed to take when trying to get people to trust you and tell you stuff. It was weird how sometimes there was a note of fondness as he described these people he got to know, such as the Al Q operative and one of his best sources, who now works as a driving instructor in England. He shared how he wondered what he would do if he had gotten an interview with ObL, if he would have sat down at the table and turned on his tape recorder or if he would have tried to stab the man with his bread knife.

It was in this section where Wright got into suicide bombers and soldiers quite a bit, describing how they are called to death  because they are reacting from heart rage. This whole section was fascinating. This was a multi-media performance with photographs, film and news clips and grainy video clips up on the screen throughout. For this section he showed portions of an actual Al Q recruitment tape and described how the architects of Al Q tried to spin Islam's absolute prohibition against suicide into a technicality that didn't apply to what they were doing. (Even though I've read it, I didn't know that in the Koran a suicide is condemned to replicate their method for all eternity. That's wild.) He talked about how, during the war with Russia the Afghan soldiers largely viewed the Arab soldiers as insane because those guys made it clear they just showed up to to fight so they could die.

Though is a performance piece, it's not spoken word per se. In many ways it reminded me of Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, or maybe Gray's Swimming to Cambodia. His presentation is low key, perhaps to the extreme. But it fit his vibe, if that makes sense. It is a very personal work, though it might *seem* distant if you're used to the flash bang boom of what we have come to define as spoken word. It is highly educational. It is also entertaining, so the First Rule has been met, and at times it was funny. If it comes to a venue near you, go see it. To pass the time while waiting, consider picking up 'Noriega: God's Favorite' or 'Remembering Satan'. Those are the only two of his book output I've read so far, they're both excellent and I can recc them with complete confidence. His new one is in the pile in the back room, but I haven't gotten to it.

Well, that's the best I can do at 1:45 a.m. It all comes down to man was this a good show, and not just because it was free!

Catching Up

Now that I'm for the most part almost out from under the gun, we shall begin the attempt to return to regular service. Here's stuff I want to share in the upcoming days.

• More garden geekery, with photos!
• What happened when I went to get a real ax a few weeks ago, and couldn't find one.
• Attending the fantabulous Edward P. Jones in conversation with Susan Straight talk at ALOUD a couple of weeks ago.
• Why it's probably not a good idea to take the cover of Fragile Things and try to bake a nice piece of halibut in it.
• The frightful realization that gentrification is slowly making its way south of Jefferson.
• Playing the game we call What Is It? with author (and Woman of General Kick Ass) Mary Wine.
• The latest adventures of Glue Gun Girl, and what it takes to get me to actually LISTEN to what I  probably do not want to hear. (Hint... she said "I'm concerned you'll look like furniture.")
• Why Esowon Books is one of the most dangerous places in the Silver City.
• What it feels like to be allowed to have my Mom's rumored sense of humor revealed to me. (TENTATIVE. This is not a LiveJournal, so there's stuff I don't talk about in this space. If I can't figure out a way to do this one, I won't.)
• The Official Founding Mentor of BGF Central's general hilarity while setting up her Domain Of Creation on the mountain top.
• Cuddle Kitty (who is an onion head but I <heart> him anyway) and his visitor, the Outside Cat.
• Swapping books with the landlord.
• Almost getting away with telling Dearest Visiting Friends that the noise they heard in front of the house at 2 a.m. was probably fireworks and not gunshots. (a.k.a. The Night Kamikazes Flowed Until 5:30 a.m.)
• I have read the Transformers movie script, and you have not. (AMAZING what one can find on the internet(s) once you put your mind and effort to it.)

That's 14 days of entries covering the past few weeks. If I can roll them out, we'll be up to speed and back to Real Time.