Hear, hear!

“I greatly regret having reached that age,” the ecologist told broadcaster ABC on his birthday earlier this month. “I’m not happy. I want to die. It’s not sad particularly. What is sad is if one is prevented.

“My feeling is that an old person like myself should have full citizenship rights including the right of assisted suicide,” he added.

David Goodall, 104, a scientist ... he is forced to travel to Switzerland to express his rights. This is why my novel in progress is called LAST RIGHTS. 

Elizabeth Cotten

She plays left handed without reversing the strings!

Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry

Big Bill Broonzy

Mississippi John Hurt

Doc and Merle Watson

Pumpernickel

This morning's bread.

Good to the last bite

My cousin sent this.

Scrapple omelette

Made best one ever for breakfast. Salsa, three cheeses. Small slices of scrapple but more of them. A keeper.

Robert Coover

Just ordered his new story collection, GOING FOR A BEER, the title story absolutely brilliant, and it arrives Friday. Can't wait! This old man still has more dramatic imagination than just about anyone I've read in the short story form.

Chess

I was my high school chess champion, 1957. I haven't played in decades. I switched to Go early on at the Army Language School but haven't played that in decades either.

I am thinking of taking up chess again since there is such a vibrant, active community online. International. Give me a social life ha ha.

Picked up Bobby Fischer's book for a brush up. We'll see what happens.

Highlight of the morning

Terminal Rag

Hyperdrama in cyberspace

September 1, 1996	Theatre Central Presents	Vol. 1, No. 3

Hyperdrama and Virtual Development Notes on Creating New Hyperdrama in Cyberspace An Article by Charles Deemer If a year ago someone had told me I would spend the summer as a "playwright-in-electronic-residence," developing a new one-act hyperdrama in collaboration with a director in Santiago, Chile, I would have tilted my head in that special way reserved for people who aren't in possession of all their faculties. And yet that has been my wonderful summer of 1996. Yet I shouldn't be surprised. Hyperdrama and cyberspace were made for one another. Both, after all, speak "hypertext," the electronic nonlinear language that develops narrative as a network of options, whether they be choices on a help menu or decisions to be made by an audience member. I wrote hypertext scripts for a decade before the project in Santiago, which is my first hyperdrama script to be developed in cyberspace, and the new environment has made my job as a hypertext writer far less cumbersome, while at the same time providing all the immediate input and collaborative advantages that I remember from being a playwright-in-residence in non-virtual (which is to say, "really real") reality. Read the article. I am, of course, profoundly disappointed that a younger generation in the U.S. (things are happening in Europe) has not continued the development of live hyperdrama as a cultural storytelling form. This article was written twenty years ago! Those interested in hypertext here go into computer games, where there is considerable money to be made. Yet my original contention, that traditional theater is Newtonian and hyperdrama is quantum (go here), remains true as far as I am concerned, and hyperdrama is a superior form for mapping dramatic reality. With my design for a hyperdrama theater, which is not the only possibility, an artistic director with vision could give hyperdrama a home. Audiences have already responded to it. Where is this artistic director? Info

Info

An Old Man (poem)

An Old Man

An old man

Is a young man

Whose skin doesn't fit

An old man

Is a young man

Who talks to himself

An old man

Is a young man

Who takes naps

An old man

Is a young man

Whose eyes get sore

An old man

Is a young man

Whose smiles are sad

An old man

Is a young man

Whose old man

Was right

Olive bread for my cousin

She sent this. Looks good! She says it tastes even better.

Advice to an artist on choosing a wife (poem)

Watch a cyber performance.

Slow dancing

Put in some good work on the novel this morning. Been a while.

Joe Bianco's Northwest magazine

Sunday supplement to The Oregonian, a first rate "literary" insert, something to read all week, where many regional writers began their publishing careers, including myself. I had the privilege of editing a collection of essays published there over the years.

Joe Bianco, Editor, NORTHWEST

Perks

When this story was published in Northwest Magazine, Sunday supplement in The Oregonian, a cover painting gave it top billing. I tried to buy the painting but was too late. Also, the story made me something of a local hero in eastern Oregon, so much so that a patron of sorts offered me free use of a Wallowa lakeside cabin for several weeks in the summer, a generous offer I took advantage of for a number of years. In fact, I began writing my first hyperdrama there, the commissioned Chateau de Mort. In other words, this story brought a lot of perks.

The First Stoplight in Wallowa County

Northwest (September 4, 1988)

Charles Deemer

FLETCH HAD WOKEN UP without an alarm clock at 5:30 a.m., give or take ten minutes, for so many years that neither Sunday off nor a bad hangover could keep him in bed past six. On this Sunday the hangover was worse than usual because he had been lucky playing cards last night at Mel's Tavern, putting together a rare string of winning poker strategies. Twice he drew successfully to an inside straight. At stud, in the largest pot of the evening, he bluffed Jensen into folding three visible kings in deference to his own two aces up, even though he had only a junk deuce down. And more often than not, he folded the two pairs on which he habitually raised — and lost. When the game was over, Fletch walked away from the table almost $50 richer, most of which he spent setting up whiskey at the Cowboy Bar down Main Street.

Fletch rarely drank hard liquor, which made his first gesture this morning tentative — but right on time. Or so he thought.

The first hint that something was wrong was that the clock read four, not five-thirty. The second was that he could read the time at all. His Big Ben came from a preluminous era when clocks had big hands and little hands instead of radiant numerical displays. Fletch's big hand had not reached the bed lamp yet, and so he shouldn't have been able to read the time. But read it he did.

Fletch's room was located above the selfsame Mel's Tavern responsible for his hangover — or at least that had financed it. Looking out the window to Main Street, Fletch saw the one thing in the world that should not have been there: a stoplight. A genuine traffic light, swinging lightly in the summer breeze, showing him a devilish green even as it showed Swede's Tavern across the corner a diabolical red. As anyone in northeastern Oregon could tell you, there wasn't a single stoplight in all Wallowa County. Since Joseph was in the county, Fletch must be looking at some alcohol-induced mirage.

Moving in the green glow to the window, he leaned on the windowsill and stared out at the light. He scratched his belly and stared for a long time — until suddenly, impossibly, the green light turned yellow, and the yellow light turned red.

Read the story. 

One of the best lines I ever wrote is in this story:

"Portland was a city that commissioned Beauty and got Portlandia, a copper statue of a scantily-clad lady holding a pitchfork."

Wallowa Lake

Cousin Robin snaps Sketch

Hosting from the kitchen

My last family I am in consistent contact with, a first cousin in LA, much younger, is visiting, and I always bake her a loaf of olive bread to take home, just out of the oven, and also cook some specialty meals, paella on Friday and a slow roasted chicken today, stuffed with leftover paella rice. Yum.

She is a diehard Angeles fan, fun for a Mariners fan like me, and a great theater goer, up here to see a Shaw play as well as visit, to Toronto in a few weeks for a festival, she goes everywhere to see plays. A USC grad in journalism, also fun for a UCLA grad like myself.

She heads home tomorrow. And that should be our hosting for the year ha ha.

We have a week at the beach vacation ahead!

War stories

Adventures in hyperdrama.

WATCH OUT, MAMA, HYPERDRAMA'S GONNA
MESS WITH YOUR PITTOCK MANSION! 

by Charles Deemer 

(originally published in Oregon Magazine) 

The moment I remember most, when theater became so real that an unsuspecting family called the cops to shut down the play, happened on a summer evening in 1986. 

In the play's story, drug dealers have crashed the
Brodey family party in the Pittock Mansion, which is
the Brodey home. The dealers aim to collect overdue
cash from the addict Brodey son, Jack. Undercover
narcs have gotten wind of this rare trip off the
mountain by these top dealers and have infiltrated the
party to wait for them. When they inevitably clash, a
gun fight results, with the dealers racing off into
the woods as the narcs shoot at them from a balcony.

Not your usual tea party at the Pittock Mansion.

Read the essay. 

What They Did (1973)

Unpublished short story, later collected in Selected Stories.

WHAT THEY DID

By Charles Deemer

Let us admit from the beginning that they went to the same bad, and not always for sleep; that they could make love to climax, they could embrace in other than the missionary position, and In full daylight, performing even your fellatio, even your cunnilingus, they could go to bed for sex and nothing else. Admitting this, we shall not describe their lovemaking. They did other things as well.

THEY PLAYED POOL 

every Saturday night at the Buckhorn Tavern. Joe had his last load of logs to the mill by early afternoon, his check was cashed by a bartender soon thereafter, and six or seven beers brought out a contented grin by the time he drove his rig home to Edna's awaiting wrath. He kept grinning while she swore at him, telling him that he was late and drunk besides, he had ruined the evening for her, they would be late to the Buckhorn, Mike and Helen would have gotten tired of waiting for them and gone home -- and what the hell was so goddamn funny? Joe's reply was to slap Edna on the fanny as he passed on his way to the bathroom. 

Read the story. 

Going For A Beer

In the past twenty years, I've read two short stories that blew me away: "The Moon In Its Flight" by Gilbert Sorrentino and this one, Robert Coover's "Going For A Beer." Neither uses traditional narrative strategy to tell the story. I consider each absolutely first rate.

Photograph by DAVIS & DAVIS, “HAROLD ANGEL” (1996) / MARX & ZAVATTERO, SAN FRANCISCO

He finds himself sitting in the neighborhood bar drinking a beer at about the same time that he began to think about going there for one. In fact, he has finished it. Perhaps he’ll have a second one, he thinks, as he downs it and asks for a third. There is a young woman sitting not far from him who is not exactly good-looking but good-looking enough, and probably good in bed, as indeed she is. Did he finish his beer? Can’t remember. What really matters is: Did he enjoy his orgasm? Or even have one? This he is wondering on his way home through the foggy night streets from the young woman’s apartment. Which was full of Kewpie dolls, the sort won at carnivals, and they made a date, as he recalls, to go to one. Where she wins another—she has a knack for it. Whereupon they’re in her apartment again, taking their clothes off, she excitedly cuddling her new doll in a bed heaped with them. He can’t remember when he last slept, and he’s no longer sure, as he staggers through the night streets, still foggy, where his own apartment is, his orgasm, if he had one, already fading from memory. Maybe he should take her back to the carnival, he thinks, where she wins another Kewpie doll (this is at least their second date, maybe their fourth), and this time they go for a romantic nightcap at the bar where they first met. Where a brawny dude starts hassling her. He intervenes and she turns up at his hospital bed, bringing him one of her Kewpie dolls to keep him company. Which is her way of expressing the bond between them, or so he supposes, as he leaves the hospital on crutches, uncertain what part of town he is in. Or what part of the year. 

Read the story. 

Children as props

The tragic deaths of the Hart children, whose mothers drove their van off a cliff in California at 90 miles per hour with them inside, has hit me hard. It has me thinking, too, about the political activism my parents involved my siblings and I in as children.

The Hart family, you see, was very politically involved.

 Read more.

Amadeus on stage and screen

From Winter, 1997, issue of Creative Screenwriting

Fine-Tuning Villainy

Salieri's Journey from Stage to Screen

by Charles Deemer

---

Peter Schaffer had to be convinced to adapt his stage play Amadeus to
the screen.  In an "Introduction to the Film Edition" of the published
stage script, he writes:

        "The cinema is a worrying medium for the stage playwright to
        work in.  Its unverbal essence offers difficulties to anyone
        living largely by the spoken word.  Increasingly, as American
        films grow ever more popular around the world, it is apparent
        that the most successful are being spoken in 'Screenspeak,' a
        kind of cinematic Esperanto equally comprehensible in Bogota
        and Bulawayo.  For example, dialogue in heavy-action pictures,
        horrific or intergalactic, now consists almost entirely of the
        alternation of two single words - a cry and a whisper -
        needing translation nowhere on the planet: 'Lessgidowdaheer!"
        and "Omygaad!"  Mastery of this new tongue is not easy for
        older writers." (pxiii)

Nonetheless, the playwright was persuaded to write a new screenplay
for his story about Mozart and his jealous rival Salieri, much of
which was done in secluded collaboration with film director Milos
Forman.  Shaffer himself realized many of the compromises he would
be forced to make: "...its operatic stylization would probably have
to go, and its language would have to be made less formal, though
not automatically more juvenile." (pxv)

Read the essay. 

Birth of rock and roll

On being in the right place at the right time ...

BIRTHING LITTLE RICHARD
Reflections on the Rise of Rock-n-Roll, Los Angeles, 1950-7

by Charles Deemer

(originally published in Oregon Magazine)

I became a teenager in the right place at the right
time. Although you could count on one hand the number
of blacks enrolled at Woodrow Wilson Jr. High or
Pasadena High School, Los Angeles County had large
enough a black population to justify the existence of
radio shows that played "the very best in Negro
entertainment" around the clock. One such show was
Hunter Hancock's afternoon "Harlematinee" on KFVD.

I'd discovered this radio show in Jr. High. In 1952,
when I turned 13, I already was part of a growing
vanguard of white kids listening to black music, and
we were going to change the popular music industry
forever. I was on the front lines for the birth of
rock-n-roll.

Read the article. 

The Stiff (1975)

A one act, my best dark comedy, I think.

The Stiff

a farce in one act

by Charles Deemer

THE CAST (4M, 2W):

President John Jones, the leader of the people

Mrs. Eunice Jones, his wife

Chi Chi, his mistress

Neck, the mortician

Charles, his assistant

Dr. Alberts, the doctor

THE TIME:

Any time

THE PLACE:

A back room in the Public Hall in a foreign country.

THE SET:

Upstage center is a table on which is a casket. A window, upstage left, looks out upon the square. Entrance into the room is stage right. Modest furnishings: this is the room in which the corpses of public figures are kept before being put on display to the people.

(AT RISE: DR. ALBERTS has his back to the audience, inspecting a body in the casket. Waiting expectantly are MRS. JONES, NECK and CHARLES. Mrs. Jones, who is in mourning, is dressed in black. She holds a black lace handkerchief over her sobs. The doctor turns and moves away from the casket.)

NECK: Well, doctor?

DR. ALBERTS: Your suspicions are correct. I find the organ to be tumescent.

(Mrs. Jones breaks into tears.)

CHARLES: Please, Mrs. Jones.

MRS. JONES: (struggling) It's sca— ... scan— ... it's scanda—

CHARLES: Now, now.

NECK: Perhaps you could give her something.

DR. ALBERTS: Comes, Mrs. Jones. You must try to relax.

(The doctor and Mrs. Jones start out.)

Read the play. 

Remembering Paul deLay

Remembering Peter Fornara

The most remarkable theater season I've ever seen.

RISK IN REP

Remembering Peter Fornara’s Remarkable Theater Company

By Charles Deemer

(To appear in Citadel of the Spirit, edited by Matt Love)

            At first glance, it’s a typical no-budget program put together by a struggling theater group: a sheet of paper folded once, cover on front and season calendar on back, with the play particulars (cast, crew, etc.) on the inside pages, everything typewritten and machine copied in black, white and gray. A simple graphic on the front cover, a neutral theater mask, adds a small touch of class.

The program belongs to David Olson, and he treats it with care because it’s an important artifact. Olson, who’s been Portland’s Director of Cable Communications for several decades, was a young actor in the 1978 theater season represented by this program, a participant in and witness to Oregon theatrical history. This is the program of the Fall, 1978, theater season of Peter Fornara’s The Production Company, an ambitious and remarkable season of plays that has not been matched by any Oregon theater company since then for its reach, risk, energy, achievement and circumstances of creation.

            The four plays listed on the cover begin to tell the story: Cabaret, Marat/Sade, Joe Egg, American Buffalo. These four plays – a dark musical set in Nazis Germany, an even darker music drama set in an insane asylum, a disturbing family drama and a tough-edged story of street thugs – would make for a remarkable season at any time because they lack the variety typical of commercial theater selections. All these plays are serious. All have dark visions of human experience. Today a theater company might add one of them, even two, to its season – but four “heavy” plays in a row? Never!

Read the essay. 

Dissent

It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.

Benjamin Franklin

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.

William Faulkner

Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president.

Theodore Roosevelt

Without debate, without criticism no administration and no country can succeed and no republic can survive.

John F. Kennedy

If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.

Henry David Thoreau

Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

Howard Zinn

Down through the centuries, this trick has been tried by various establishments throughout the world. They force people to get involved in the kind of examination that has only one aim and that is to stamp out dissent.

Pete Seeger

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.

Edward R. Murrow

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent.

Gore Vidal

We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder ‘censorship,’ we call it ‘concern for commercial viability.

David Mamet

The Harts and race

From the Washington Post:

But we cannot separate the dynamics of the Hart family tragedy from the realities of racism in this country. For the Harts, it seems likely that their whiteness netted them multiple passes despite all the warning signs. When a 12-year-old girl who looked as if she was 7 showed up at Bruce DeKalb’s door with missing teeth, he simply thought, “that was a little weird.”

This isn’t to demonize transracial adoption but, rather, to point out the dangers of the notion that black children must be saved and that becoming a white adoptive parent is inherently a sign of kindness and benevolence. This narrative turns black children into symbols, evidence of progressiveness used to feed the illusion that this nation isn’t racist, and that love is the express route to equality and justice.

Read the article. 

Early story

Half a century since it was published, remains a favorite.

The Thing at 34-03-15N, 118-15-23W

The Colorado Quarterly (Spring, 1969)

Charles Deemer

Falling into the generation gap, I miss Willie Mays' home run

I CAN HEAR THEM out there. They are, to ignore the language's index of elasticity, dancing. And they are dancing with each other, I am asked to believe, although the fact of the matter is that when I left the patio they were exhibiting their individual spasms of ecstasy over a separation of six to twelve feet. Now I ask you: is that dancing together? I will admit that they are — for lack of a better word — involved. Yes, they are involved. They are so involved that they neglect to admire the new patio, the excuse for this party in the first place. I finished it last Wednesday, designing and building the whole thing myself, setting it into a three-colored form of a navigator's compass, at the center of which a brass plate marks the exact location of the patio: 34 degrees, 3 minutes, 15 seconds north, 118 degrees, 15 minutes, 23 seconds west. Having been a navigator in the Navy during the war, I made that measurement precisely. Myself.

I retreated thirty minutes ago. I did not leave for the specific purpose of watching the ballgame. This I would have sacrificed in order to be an attentive host, but frankly it is impossible to be any kind of host, attentive or indifferent, unless one has guests. Whatever these kids today may be, delinquents, revolutionaries, or spoiled nouveaux riches (Jim tends toward the latter), they certainly are not guests. They rather are like some of my bloodsucking relatives, who expect everything they ask for immediately and for nothing. No, they need no host out there. Whatever they need, they need no host.

Read the rest of the story. 

Old dog

Blood tests reveal a number of organ issues with Sketch. We'll keep him comfortable for as long as we can.

Highlight of Mariners game

Mariners

Ah, for first three games, it looked like a new team with possibilities! Then two losses in a row reminding me of the usual problems. The king is dying. Gave up 8 runs, 3 HR,  in half a game on his second start! 

Ethnicity

Got my DNA results, and they surprised me.

36% Scandinavian
23% Irish/Scottish/Welsh

Actually I dig it! The Scandinavian countries are best governed in the world. Too bad the weather sucks, at least for a SoCal ,guy.

Retirement is ...

... listening to Mariners day game while baking bread.

Fuel for the right

Here we go. Didn't take long. This is from the conservative American Thinker:

The horrific cliff plunge of eight people off an isolated northern California highway, and now the revelation that it was likely intentional, ought to raise questions about political correctness, given the abusive backdrop. 

What we had here was a lesbian couple virtue-signaling with six adopted black children, who used them publicly for political purposes and then abused them back home, before eventually driving them all off a cliff in a Thelma and Louise-style dramatic climax. 

 The culture wars will keep this crash alive for a long time. The Thelma and Louise image also hit me, as noted in earlier post. Sad, sick.

I am curious what the Hart admirers have to say now.

The bottom line, if this verdict is true, is that old cliche, You can't tell a book by its cover.  One or both of these women murdered six children. 

Thelma & Louise?

The Hart family crash tragedy is full of social and political complexities. On the one hand, we have a poster family for progressive interracial child rearing, at least according to many admiring friends. On the other, we have neighbors with reason to believe child abuse by the poster parents. We have the parents bombarded with hate mail for issues of sexuality and race.

Now initial investigators from the Highway Patrol suggest an intentional crash. The vehicle came to a complete stop, then accelerated over the cliff. An image from Thelma and Louise.

Did one or both of the parents have a martyr complex? Righteous suicide?

Whatever it is, why involve the kids?

I am reminded of Korzybski: the map is not the territory. Our social lives are constructed maps. The images we present. The reality of ourselves can be very different.

Mother of all tournaments

Women's dance: final four all #1 seeds. Both semis go overtime. Final won by buzzer beater. Can't get more competitive than that.

Easter breakfast

Grits, eggs, scrapple, bacon. Fantastic.