I like having the track “Germaine” from Sinéad O’Connor’s
Universal Mother album in random playlists, becuase it’s interesting to juxtapose it against whatever may follow it. It’s a brief spoken segment by Germaine Greer, and it serves as in intro to Sinéad’s album.
(It came up twice tonight in my iTunes shuffle, once preceding This Town is Wrong and once preceding The Three Great Stimulants.)
I do think that women could make politics irrelevant; by a kind of spontaneous cooperative action the like of which we have never seen; which is so far from people’s ideas of state structure or viable social structure that it seems to them like total anarchy — when what it really is, is very subtle forms of interrelation that do not follow some heirarchal pattern which is fundamentally patriarchal. The opposite to patriarchy is not matriarchy but fraternity, yet I think it’s women who are going to have to break this spiral of power and find the trick of cooperation.
— Germaine Greer
I actually frequently quote a part of this out of context, and I feel it’s “only slightly” misrepresentational. It can be hard to explain being a feminist white male, and when I need to reduce it to a sound bite, I cull this sentence:
The opposite to patriarchy is not matriarchy but fraternity.
— Germaine Greer
(Warning: long post.)
For my birthday celebration, I attended the first “serious cultural event” that I’ve been to in years; going to Seattle to see the wondrous Kate Mulgrew play Katherine Hepburn in the one-woman show “Tea at Five.” And my word, was it a good show.
I traveled with my friend Syd; it was fortunately quite easy to sucker her into doing the driving, which was my primary ulterior motive for getting someone to go with me. She didn’t even mind going on a Thursday night, either (it was the day before my birthday, but I got a $40 discount for being under 25 years old).
The Seattle Repertory Theatre is smack in downtown Seattle, within blocks of the Space Needle. Our seats were fantastic, much better than I thought they were going to be based on the Web site’s seat map — six rows back and off to the side, but “off to the side” just didn’t matter as much as I expected.
Now, I will happily admit that my initial reason for being interested in “Tea at Five” is because I’m a hopeless Star Trek fanboy, and Voyager is, by far, my favorite Trek series. Janeway rocks, and Mulgrew’s performance was always both precise and in-character. She utterly inhabited Janeway and that impressed me. Furthermore, I’d seen a few (relatively minor) non-Trek roles for Mulgrew, and it’s notable how non-Janeway they are — i.e., her stellar execution of the Janeway character is due to her acting chops, and not merely happy coincidence.
Plus, she does have a physical resemblance to Hepburn.
The interview with her in the Voyager DVD special features, however, moved me from mildly interested to feeling like my life would be poorer if I never had a chance to see the play. Two things are particularly interesting: one, the play was specifically written for her. (The playwright was watching Voyager with Mulgrew’s best friend, and said something along the lines of “she should play Katherine Hepburn some time.” Said best friend apparently replied with something like, “If you write it, I’ll make sure she sees it.” (In fact, the playwright, Matthew Lombardo, was apparently in bed with said best friend at the time, but it’s “not nearly as naughty as it sounds,” says Mulgrew.))
Second, at one point during the interview, she says something like: “‘Fun’ is a word I would hesitate to apply to this project. It’s been total, which is better than fun.”
So, this was a play I determined I needed to see, and she brought it to Seattle for my birthday. Very kind.
Now, I don’t actually know very much about Kate Hepburn either. I’ve seen (and loved) The Lion in Winter, and her performance is certainly impressive. That might in fact be the only role in which I’ve seen her (at least when I was old enough to remember; I think I probably saw “On Golden Pond” as a kid).
I wasn’t sure what to expect from a one-woman show; what the style would be like. The format worked spectacularly well. In the first act, I think it could best be described as the audience being treated a bit like a very good friend, who’s perhaps a bit uninformed, but gets a casual ongoing commentary on the goings-on of Hepburn’s life. At various points the phone will ring, you’ll hear one side of a conversation, and after she hangs up, she’ll talk about the person on the other end of the line. A package is delivered; she reads the note aloud. The wind blows, she goes to the window, peers out and muses.
Mulgrew owns the stage; she struts, she lounges, she lays on the floor and talks up at the ceiling.
The second act takes place later in Hepburn’s life, and it feels more like catching up with an old friend. A little more retrospective, a bit less interruption, and one hell of a perfect ending.
The play is funny, too. Beautiful humor; the kind that relies on just the right delivery, and she nails it.
All in all, it’s an utterly flawless delivery of a fantastic script. If you’re reading this and you can make it to Seattle in the next week, to San Francisco in June, or to Pasadena in August; you owe it to yourself to go. Tickets start around $30, and I guarantee you’ll have a good enough time to justify it.
For years, I have occasionally run into the quote “Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken,” attributed to Orson Rega Card. I’ve always been curious who this is, partly because it’s a compelling line, and partly because I’ve wondered whether there was a relationship to Orson Scott Card, who is undoubtedly my favorite modern author.
A few times I’ve asked mailing lists, and nobody’s ever known who he was. A couple times a year I run into the quote in some context or another and search Google, and all I’ve ever gotten are page after page after page from quote collections, containing only the single line. It’s been one of my life’s minor but longstanding mysteries.
Anyway, today I Googled it again, because I wanted to relate part of the story to the author of this post, and: lo and behold, they went and upgraded the Internet! It really does answer everything now!
Apparently, ORC is OSC’s grandfather, after whom he was named. (And Brigham Young is ORC’s grandfather, interestingly. I’d known OSC was devout and all, but didn’t realize he had such direct family ties to Mormon history.)
So that’s one minor mystery down for the count. Next, I just need to find out if the story of the physicist and the 5-gallon jug of distilled water is apocryphal or not…
When your only tool is… (inspired by the old adage, “when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”).
Some of my favorites:
- When your only tool is a shovel, every problem looks like the back of some guy’s head.
- When your only tool is a strategic bomber, every problem looks like a city
- When your only tool is getting hammered, everyone looks like you should nail them
- When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When that hammer is C++, everything looks like a thumb.
So I was walking through downtown Seattle carrying a 17″ monitor yesterday. It elicited some interesting responses, mostly just strange looks; one guy said, “Hey, is that for me?” One homeless gentleman offered to carry it wherever I was going for $3. But the best comment was from a lady crossing the street in the opposite direction, who looked at me with an excellent mock-serious expression and said, “You really should think about getting a notebook.”