Monthly Archives: July 2007

Man and Superman

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I have been extremely busy for several months and also as a result very tired in my limited spare time, and now I am way backed up on things I should have been blogging about as they happened.

Most important is to get the word out on things that are still around and won’t be for all that much longer. So.

On July 4 Dave and I saw the first preview of Shaw’s Man and Superman at Cal Shakespeare. Wonderful production, lovely weather, all in all a terrific evening. I was surprised and grateful to discover on reading the program that they were going to do what I would have thought to be impossible: include the “Don Juan in Hell” sequence and get us out of there in time to catch BART.

Man and Superman, like so many of Shaw’s middling late plays, is overstuffed with philosophical talk and also very long. Performed without cuts, the play can easily run four, four and a half hours — while we were waiting for the show to begin last night, the man sitting to my right was saying to me that the last time he had seen it, they had even done it with a dinner break between acts two and three.

In the third act, stuck in Spain during a motor trip from London to Nice, Jack Tanner has a dream in which he is Don Juan Tenorio, some time after he has been dragged to Hell. It’s a long and talky dream sequence, full of philosophical musings on the true nature of Heaven and Hell and other matters, and as much fun the play of ideas is, the overall story of the play is certainly coherent without it, so the play is often cut down to more manageable size by simply cutting this sequence. In the only production I’ve seen before this one, that’s what was done. And to make up for cutting such a wonderful sequence from the full play, the dream sequence by itself is sometimes performed as a one-act play under the name “Don Juan in Hell”.

That’s an easy but unsatisfying solution, shortening the play by cutting one of its most distinctive and colorful features, rather like the Japanese television station that is said to have shortened The Sound of Music for broadcast by cutting all the songs. So I’m happy to say that in this production they manage to include “Don Juan in Hell” and still keep things down to three hours and a quarter by (a) a lot of skillful trimming and condensing of the text all the way through, (b) having only one 15-minute intermission, and (c) having everyone speak their lines at a pretty brisk clip.

The production is terrific. The set and costumes are witty and delightful and uncomplicated. One beef: I know that the anachronisms in the philosophizing are part of the fun of the dream sequence, but I could have done without the Devil rolling in the drinks cart, mostly because the audience guffawed so loudly at the sight of Doña Ana opening up a can of Tab that it completely drowned out her line; but it was a first preview after all and maybe by opening night they figured out how to keep that from happening. And overall it’s a beautiful production visually.

The acting is terrific all around. Elijah Alexander is particularly remarkable as Jack Tanner/Don Juan, because just memorizing so many long speeches and being able to speak them so quickly and yet intelligibly and convincingly all by itself would have been quite a dazzling feat of technical skill, so that the fact that he gave such a dashing and delicious and funny performance at the same time is gravy. Peter Callender, whom Dave and I last saw giving a magnificently intense and angry performance in Permanent Collection at the Aurora, looked like he was having a lot of fun playing an intense and angry man for laughs this time around in the character of the wealthy Roebuck Ramsden. Susannah Livingston was terrific as the sweetly manipulative Ann Whitefield, but didn’t seem as well grounded in her character when she was playing Doña Ana in the dream, I’m not really sure why. Maybe the nerves of the first performance.

Anyway, it’s a production worth remembering and savoring and Dave and I are hoping to get back for another performance.

When Bears Turn Bad

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Hungry bears around Lake Tahoe whose usual feeding grounds were burned have been venturing into human territory looking for food. According to the Contra Costa Times

“We’re seeing a huge increase in the number of (bear) entries into homes,” said Ann Bryant, executive directive of the Bear League, which advises Tahoe basin residents on bear conflicts. “We also have never had so many calls to our office where people sight bears where they’ve never seen them before. The bears are bewildered.” …

The Lake Tahoe Wildlife Center in South Lake Tahoe received about six calls about bears a day, double normal levels, in the two weeks after the fire.

The number is down this week, but it’s still higher than normal, said Cheryl Millham, the center’s executive director. …

“When you have people that leave windows and doors open, the bears are going to be tempted,” Millham said. … One woman who called Millham’s center had placed ripening peaches on her kitchen windowsill and left the window open. A bear picked up the scent.

“The bear ripped off the screen, ate the peaches, and spit the pits back inside,” Millham said.

Or Sometimes It’d Be a Sarsaparilla Latte

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From the description of an ice cream float on the current dessert menu at Carrow’s:

Cool it down with two scoops of real vanilla ice cream and one of these old fashioned flavors: Root Beer, Orange Cream, or Caramel Macchiato

Takes you back, doesn’t it? Ah, those good old days of our childhood, when we’d clutch in our little hands that shiny new nickel we got from Grampa, take the horse-drawn trolley down to the soda fountain on Main Street, and ask the man behind the counter for a caramel macchiato.

Long-Held Popular Notion of the Day

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From today’s New York Times:

“It shows the power of data,” said Daniel Kaufmann, an author of the report and director of global programs at the World Bank Institute, a knowledge-sharing and training arm of the bank. “It begins to challenge these long-held popular notions — that the rich world has reached nirvana in governance.”

Nirvana in governance? What planet is he living on? On mine, the great majority of people are something less than ecstatic about those who are governing the rich world.

Curiously, the headline and lead paragraph of this article manage to say the exact opposite of each other:

World Bank Report on Governing Finds Level Playing Field

Africa, often stereotyped as a place of epic corruption and misrule, emerges in a World Bank report as a continent of great variety, with some countries — Tanzania, Liberia, Rwanda, Ghana and Niger — making notable progress over the past decade, and others — Zimbabwe, Ivory Coast and Eritrea — moving backward.

In other words, about as far as possible from being a level playing field, no?

Granted, the overall point of the article is that corruption is getting to be as bad in wealthier countries as it is in poorer ones, but even so, spinning that as a “level playing field” when what you mean is that the playing field is increasingly non-level everywhere takes some remarkable contortion of thought.

Lazy Weekend (Sort Of)

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I don’t in any way want to sound like I’m complaining, because it’s been a lot of fun, too, but it’s been a very busy ten weeks for me, what with my job as a technical editor which continues to be both very satisfying but also very challenging and sometimes tiring, and with a lot of weekend events, many requiring a lot of planning for — two Billy Club gatherings (including May Day, for which I was in charge of organizing the construction of the maypole and the rituals around it), two Body Electric workshops (which were both extraordinarily full weekends but also terrific), and Pride Weekend, which was not only a long busy weekend but for which I started making plans a couple of weeks in advance.

Each year, for the Saturday and Sunday that encompass the Pride Parade and the two-day mega street fair that is increasingly a bigger deal than the Parade itself, I am sort of an office manager for a hundred or so volunteer safety monitors. I and a several others work together to get them checked in and out as quickly as possible, provide coffee and a simple breakfast buffet (bagels and cream cheese, muffins, fruit), give them a place to stash their sweatshirts and backpacks while they’re working, and get them their identifying T-shirts and their handbooks and radios and bottles of water and bags of trail mix and whatever else they need to have with them on the route.

Fortunately I am a great one for taking notes, and last year went very smoothly, so I was able to read through my notes and simply plan to do 95% of it the same way we did it last year. For the most part, this year went even more smoothly — at least from my administrative point of view. Outside where the party was going on, there were an unusually high number of incidents requiring attending to, from a bloody fight between a couple of homeless men to a marcher who was assaulted while separated from the rest of her contingent because she was having an asthma attack to the usual dozen or so problems involving marchers with motor vehicles who affect not to have heard about the basic safety rules they agreed to follow when they signed up to march.

Of course I took notes again this year on what worked well and what didn’t, so I’ll have them to look back on next year. I still have the final report to finish up, but other than that, I’m done with the Parade for another year.

So this past weekend was the first relatively lazy weekend I’ve had in a while. It wasn’t even as lazy as all that, as Saturday afternoon was a meeting of some members of the Billy Club who are hammering out a proposal for a fresh mission statement and values statement. But Sunday I slept in, played some Civ IV, went to lunch with Dave and Terry, and walked back home from the café, stopping at Central Perk for a couple of hours to read and write. (I’ve been reading Walter Karp’s The Politics of War, about the politics leading up to the Spanish-American War and our entry into World War One.) Then off to do a small load of laundry, dinner with Dave, and bed.

True to His Word

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“If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of.”
— George W. Bush, Sept. 30, 2003

I have not the slightest doubt of that.

iTopia, Limited

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I learned a new word the other day: iPerbole.

This review of the iPhone (plus this addendum) seems more cool-headed than most, though — neither all gee-whiz about it nor venting hatred of everything Apple just because it’s Apple.

They tell me a few things about the iPhone that make me more certain that I’m better off without one, though, at least until some improvements are added.

The iPhone can display, but not edit, Microsoft Word and Excel documents and Portable Document Format files. Conversely, iTunes doesn’t provide you with a computer-editable copy of any notes you jot down in the iPhone’s Notes program (although it does back them up automatically).

One of my main uses for a PDA is as a portable notepad, but I have to be able to send my notes back and forth between the PDA and my laptop and modify them in either place, or it’s not any more useful to me than carrying around a paper notebook and pen (which I often do anyway).

Switching between iPhone programs happens almost instantly, but moving data between them is just about impossible without copy or paste commands.

Ugh. For me, anyway, an important part of processing my email is quickly filing away any info I may want to refer to later, which means cutting and pasting into my note organizing software or into Address Book or whatever, so that I can get the email message out of the inbox and into the archives.

Spending time online will, however, expose the sluggishness of AT&T’s barely-faster-than-dialup Edge data service.

The USB modem I bought to use with my laptop uses 3G, which is much faster, about as fast as a low-end DSL connection.

Typing a Web address or an e-mail message reveals another awkwardness: text entry. Without a real keyboard, you have to tap on an onscreen substitute that offers no tactile feedback and puts punctuation and letters on separate screens.

I’m a touch typist and have found that I get frustrated writing on a PDA, whether it’s by way of Graffiti or a touch-screen keyboard or whatever.

An awful lot of my computer time is spent during my long commute by way of BART and CalTrain, or while sitting at a café somewhere, where opening up my laptop usually isn’t any hassle. So as beautiful a piece of equipment as the iPhone certainly is, it doesn’t seem to suit my needs right now well enough for me to justify the price and the two-year commitment.