"Moonlight and Magnolias" in Hickory, NC, at the Fireman's Kitchen, HCT

Bill Boyd on the left as Victor Fleming and Anthony Liguori playing David Selznick, take a truer than life run at the wickedly-wild world of Hollywood. Fiction always does get a lot more truth out than the most sober and consciousness meticulation can ever produce and this play is a great example of how that takes place.

I won’t go through the plot because that would strip the impact of the actors from the play, let’s just say that they they took a clearly implausible story, breathed life into it and created an enjoyable work of art.

Bob Smith as Ben Hecht and Connie Bools as MIss Poppenghul rounded out the cast. Hechct was the key character in the play as he wove a mixture of Jewish-Southern-New York innuendic folklore into the story of a book he had never read. Fortunately he had a LOT of help in understanding the screen play he wound up writing.

I was attracted to the Fleming character. He reminded me of some people I had known in the upper echelons of state government when I worked in Tallahassee. The Selznick and Heckt guys were sometimes pretty good, and the Poppenghul character was faithful to her role. The bananas and peanuts were weirdy-weird though, and the Jew-boy thing got off message and wandered badly - I kept thinking it would be woven into the story somehow and would provide an ultimate meaning, bringing some new light of understanding on the Civil War. Instead, it got forgotten - and that's not good writing. AND the pop-corn popper hanging on the wall WAS NEVER USED!!! - That is awesomely bad theatre!

Boyd and Liguori showed how life can be lived, way out there at the end of the world of reason, when the only hope you have left is that desperate promise of the greatest glory on earth. They also showed how ordinary these people can be who aspire to that perch - and how awful those wonderful jobs might really have been.

Clearly the most memorable part of the movie “Gone With the Wind” was Rhett Butler telling Scarlett O’Hara that he frankly didn’t “give a damn”. I remember back some sixty-two years ago hearing those lines in a movie theater in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and that genteel audience gasped "UHHHHHH!" in shock at those awful words. Well! Ron Hutchinson, who wrote this screen play, crowned that great quote by going even better than that. What was it? Heh-heh. You will be amazed!

Springtime in Hickory

This entry moved to The Dancing Trail blog. http://thedancingtrail.blogspot.com/2009/04/springtime-in-hickory.html

Poetry Alive with Ted Pope

Ted Pope took the Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse by storm Tuesday night, and when he was through reading, the place looked like a storm HAD hit. Paper was strewn all around the stage and lectern area and the audience was wide-eyed in amazement and holding on to their tables for dear life.

It was quite a show by a real showman. Even when the dreaded cappuccino machine cut loose with its randomly-awarded raspberry, Pope instantly incorporated THAT into the poem he was reciting at the moment as if he had practiced the timing of those events for a month, and had gotten it down perfectly!

How good WAS it? Well, I’m not a poet so I dare not venture into that web, but I can say that the first sheet of paper Pope wadded up and threw to the floor was very dramatic. Particularly since it struck the right note in the thought that was also then being delivered. And the next two or three added to the first event almost like visual and background alliteration. But then it became more like consonation and finally assonation, and eventually it was . . . well, I have a two-year old granddaughter and she started to come to my mind.

Also, Pope had no problem with stage presence or getting the audience’s attention. But I did sense a problem with the audience understanding who he really is because we saw only one part of Pope. The game face part. Now Elvis comes to mind. Here was a guy who could romp and stomp with the roughest and toughest, but sometimes Elvis would also coo a tender love song that caused young ladies to actually die right in their chairs, and he would also occasionally spin out an ancient lullaby that would bring tears to the eyes of old women. Then he was back on the stage again rockin’ and sockin’ and stompin’ and rompin’ and air-copulatin’ and sweatin’ and spinning’.

That’s why I wanted to speak to Ted after it was over. And when I did, I saw a nice guy with great talent. It is my feeling that if he could show a deeper side of his personality, if only for one poem, that it would enhance his performance immensely. If you get a chance to see Ted Pope, don’t miss it. You'll probably see me there too.

Prolepsis

Shadows cast by coming events. More to the point, intuitive awareness or those shadows before they are even noticed.

This is an early heads-up about a book that will change the world. New book? Of course. Actually it was first published in 1980, its eleventh version in 2002. It was written by a man who walked, and still walks the same earth as all the rest of us do. Just like Charles Darwin who saw nothing that anyone else had never seen before, but like Darwin, the writer of this book didn’t understand what everyone else understood. Darwin asked questions that no one else had ever asked before. And since these questions had never been asked before, there were no answers. He had to figure them out for himself.

So too this book which is called “The Nature of Order”, walks over familiar ground, sees all those things that we all know, but it asks the questions that we never thought of asking. We all have wondered about them - but we never asked them. And we never tried to answer them.

Christopher Alexander has actively lived in our commonly shared world of wonder for a long time. He was the driving force behind the great book which he co-authored called “The Pattern Language”, which has always seemed sufficient unto itself - until now. But that book was basically a statement of axioms which he had discovered and organized. This new book is a discussion of how those “axioms” came to be, how they work, how they are organized and how their fundamental composition can be used by us to shape a new world in which we might someday live and work.

I have read 88 pages of the first volume which is titled “The Phenomenon of Life”. Not always easy reading. Alexander is an architect, not a writer. He repeats a lot, but he has a lot to say. This first volume is some 475 pages, and is followed by volume two, “The Process of Creating LIfe”; volume three, “A Vision of a Living World”; and volume four, “The Luminous Ground”. And the books are expensive. What was he thinking?

Well, the book is not for everyone. I put the “Nature of Order” on my Blogspot page and found a grand total of nine people in the world who have also done that. I have corresponded with one or two. Strange people they are. Not like me. But interesting.

Prolepsis. Just so you will know.

Requiem for a Rassler?

A sad movie, from my point of view, which showed America slipping under an imaginary boundary separating "second-world" from "third-world" nation. It seemed to me a brutal story terribly told of trapped and tortured animals of the homo sapiens species, although not quite human in some awful sense. Strippers, on the one hand who only resembled human females in physical form but who were denied expression of the defining traits of femininity. On the other end of this tale are the "wrestlers", far removed from their Grecian prototypes and far also removed from the gestalt of human correspondence, retaining only that vestige visited occasionally by the normal male of "good-ole boy" bondage. Their common bond being their willingness to permit their "friends" to savagely and excessively rip their bodies apart for the amusement of their "fans". Once out of the glitter of the performing stage, these pitiful creatures were blown by the winds of winter along frozen landscapes decorated with destroyed buildings and decrepit trailer parks through a world which held them in smug contempt. All this for those few moments when they performed for their clearly emotionally-deformed admirers. Perhaps the worst part of it all was the premise that these gifts of life are being passed not from a Great Creator to an Adam-creature as seen in Michelango's great work and who can now commence on his own volition, but from a detritus of human wreckage left by a society which had collapsed and are "awarded" as a finger might point to the blame.

The real story of this movie, for me at least, is a call to examine our own lives to see how much we too strive to honor principles and serve masters who seek our souls and our humanity.

Academia Nut?

Went to Lenoir-Rhyne University today to see a photo exhibition. It was in the Visual Arts Center (VAC) which is listed as being on 8th Avenue NE, but really isn’t there at all. There are no signs on 8th Avenue to show its presence, and none of the five people (students?) I asked on 8th Avenue knew where it was. It was supposed to be at 643 and 1/2 on the avenue and there was 653 and the building next to it was 633 and nothing in between except a maintenance shop which was well back off the street. Turns out the VAC is behind the maintenance shop. Once there I found five parking spaces. They were all taken, of course.

Well, once in the VAC, which seems to be basically a converted construction shed, there were about 60 or 65 photographs displayed on walls. The pictures were black-matted on white paper and covered with cellophane-type material. Many of them appeared to be about 6X8 or 8X10 inches. A few were a little larger.

Two of the pictures were nice and two others were interesting. There was a lot of trouble with darkness in the pictures and only one or two were completely in focus. That’s not a big problem for me, but I do try to keep the out-of-focus parts in the background and not the subject as was often the case here. Colors seemed kind of jarring with lots of improvisation and not much harmony, saturation was completely missing. Tones were not usually organized and a lot of the photos were hung up in the two, three, four zonal range. There was no composition or even use of design elements, no stories were told. The only emotions emerging from the display were faint whiffs of puzzlement. Snacks were offered and “Barefoot” wine was available. The wine accompanied the photographs very well and the munchies were eleganté.

Well, I haven’t mentioned the photographer’s name and I won’t. The whole thing seemed so bizarre, especially with all these obviously well-educated people standing there, peering intently at the photographs, thoughtfully munching their goodies and knowingly sipping their wine, I felt like I had gone terribly wrong and missed the entire message. So I walked outside and came back in again. That didn’t help.

Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves in a vacuous kind of way. I felt left out. Some of them actually seemed to be floating there in front of the photos. I guess it is just an academia thing.

There IS such a thing as photographic art. And one of the things any artist learns early in that game is to show ONLY your very best work.

2nd South Carolina String Band in Hickory

To the Catawba Science Center auditorium to watch a performance by the “2nd South Carolina String Band” as they played music from the American Civil War period.


Stories were told and background information provided that made the music even more interesting. They talked about how Stephen Foster was going to name his great epic “The Pee Dee” instead of “Swaunee”, and his producer was the one who supposedly came up with the name change, although there is no official hook anywhere upon which to hang that allegation.

The auditorium was perhaps one-third filled and occasionally the crowd joined in clapping and singing. There was a lot of toe-tapping and head-bobbing throughout.

“The Ministral Boy to the War Has Gone” by flutist Greg Hernandez was a show stopper, but the biggest hit of the day was the finale, “Dixie” which was played by the entire ensemble standing and sung by the entire audience who were also standing. The band has a significant presence on the web. Just Google "2nd South Carolina String Band" or begin at http://www.civilwarband.com/about.shtml

Later to a “baseball” contest in which Lenoir-Rhyne University was easily out-played by the Mars Hill College team. We saw the first four innings of the last game, the second double-header played in two days. LRU lost all four games at home 22-13, 8-5, 13-9 and 14-3. We accidentally set in the Mars Hill fan section, and they seemed like nice people. (Easy to seem nice with a weekend like that!) We enjoyed the parched peanuts http://web.mac.com/fauxtaographer/iWeb/Blue%20Mountain%20Kitchen/Dips%20%26%20Fancies.html we had fired up for the occasion.

Lenoir, North Carolina. Living Proof

Lenoir, North Carolina is living proof that Alfred Hitchcock indeed is dead. For if he were still alive, scenes from Lenoir would undoubtedly rumble through the bedrooms of people across the world in the form of nightmare images. Memories rebroadcast in fitful dreams would crawl out of scenes etched from screens of television and movies that are part of the story that is told here - in that other universe called Lenoir.

The right word is somehow missing. "Wild" is not it. "Dangerous" completely misses the point. †here is the hint of another universe here that speaks of different laws and different measures of success and failure, different values of comprehension. Here there seems an air of finality. Somehow a judgement has been rendered. There is a sense of it all being over, of being tested and having failed, an understanding that the whole world is sinking into crumbles, falling from light down, down into darkness.

But then there is Pink here too. And the color Pink brings a counter beat, a ray not so much a hope of rescue as an intention to hit the bottom with dignity. No Drinking Please, and another pink bow. OK, so we go down. OK, but we will remember sunshine and I will still remember love, because it once was given to me. And somehow I do know this. That when it is all over, it will not be through. I will still smile at you. And when it is all over, then finally - maybe you will smile back at me. That's my love that I give to you.

And don't blame Lenoir. Go there and see for yourself. It is a nice town, a pretty place. There is beauty there and art and sunshine. It is not America but America IS Lenoir. It is good to see this in a small place where it can be comprehended and understood. And it is important that we know where we really are and can see where we are clearly headed.

Beer Tasting and Lecture in Hickory

Beer tasting at the Fireman's Kitchen. Pretty good event from about 7:30 till 9 p.m. Three lecturers pointed out some of the finer aspects of beer as the audience sampled some 7 or 8 different types. We began with a sweet light clear beer from the Caribbean, Then we went right into a brown ale, followed by an bitter beer, and on to an "export" Indian pale ale, then to stout followed by an Old Hickory Taproom stout, finally a Hefeweizen. At the end, they sprang a gluten-free mess on us that NO one drank but everyone acknowledged to be awful with wry faces.

The hors d'ouevs were smashing. All the way from roasted peanuts to pizza, including kielbasa, Italian sausage, chicken pieces, meatballs, cheese cubes, and little sausages cooked in drippy, salty, sumptuous sauce. And there was a LOT more including chocolate which went (I am told) extremely well with the last two stouts.

Lots of friendly people were present and conversations ran strongly all night long. I might point out that the beer samples were on the order or the two-ounce sizes, so there wasn't any singing or lampshade wearing - actually, it turned more toward an intellectual bent as indicated by many of the questions that were asked. We discussed things such as "original gravity", "•Plato", "apparent extract", IBUs, EBCs and EBCs.

Good evening, everybody learned a lot, and we all enjoyed the drinks, food, lectures, discussions and ambience.

Barefoot In The Park - Greenroom

Quick run down to Newton to the Green Room to see "Barefoot in the Park".

Lots of fun to see, the play went well, and was very good at times. Acting sometimes seemed like actors acting like characters they had read about somewhere. Sometimes they did very good, sometimes they acted good. There were a lot of short comments, pithy and salient quips, which appeared to be an overtone of the play, some of which were very funny, some of which just couldn't be completely heard.

The staging of the play however, was compelling and interesting. The entire stage was totally redecorated between acts one and two by people apparently coming out of the audience. There was a lot of this type of reward for those who went to the Green Room.

The four personalities revealed on stage were developed through vignettes which must have been Neil Simon's niche, but they didn't really catch fire, probably because of the acoustics in the auditorium. Laughter throughout the audience was scattered, probably more to the ability of the auditorium to deliver the short statements rather than to the comprehension of the audience. Yet it was a very entertaining evening and the venue was nice. After the play was over, the actors were out "front" meeting and shaking the hands of the patrons who were on their way out. Touch of class.

Hickory Museum of Art - Chagall Presentation

Vivian Jacobson presented a discussion and slide show about Marc Chagall Sunday, March 15, 2009, in the Hickory Museum of Art. The presentation was attended by about sixty people and seemed well received. A short discussion followed and included comments about the contributions from the audience about some of the effects of Chagall's work including other well-known personalities such as Martin Buber, Author Koestler, Toscanini and even Elvis Presley.

Ms. Jacobson had known and worked with Mr. Chagall during the last 11 years of his life and she commented about him both as a personality as well as from personal knowledge. She also made insightful pointers about some of his paintings. I was struck by the composition of many of his paintings. Many, perhaps most of his subjects were positioned in the center of the frame, there seemed to be no verticality to the figures except in the final sense that they were somehow balanced and stable, he extensively had white areas touching the sides or top of the pictures and he used color in a remarkably contrasty manner. Green was largely absent from the work we saw today and when it was used it was richly saturated, heavy in value and sparingly used, or else it totally dominated the picture. Blues were his main color, lushly tinted and shaded, and a reddish-brownish-orangish-ochreish color shared that rule of his pictures with the blues, although the blues seemed not so richly melded with other hues.

Another "bravissimo!" for the Hickory Museum of Art. Nice work Lisë.

Springtime Cometh - Yea!

Hadn't walked my doggies for three days. The 100-pounder gets restless when this happens and he had gone far beyond restless all the way down into the pit which lies far beneath ennui. Great soulful eyes of sadness finally got to me so we went for a quick walk during a pause in the rain. Since it would be a short trip we walked a different path, one we had never walked before.

I noticed something that looked strange - a dead end street with a construction barrier at the end of it. New construction? Wow. So we went down there to see. Unfortunately, it had been terminated some time ago, maybe a year or two ago.We wandered into the area to look around, since it had sidewalks on both sides of a nicely winding street and then the rain came back. It was time to head for home. Shortly after turning around I suddenly realized (as Horace Kephart says it is always "suddenly") that I was lost! How on earth (no pun intended) could I, a Master Navigator who had crossed the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans countless times get lost a couple of blocks from my home? But I had no idea which way to go. So we stood there, my doggie Mujib and me, in the rain looking soulfully at each other for suggestions.

Then I saw this view. A nice monochrome green tapestry with grass and daffodill leaves and dark fir background, decorated by the contrasting hues of Japanese magnolia and daffodils flowers under a dark sky which fully saturated the colors - hard to beat. I pulled my camera out and made the shot, then we went home.

Kephart says "sit down, chew on a twig, draw a map in the dirt . . .", well making a photo is even better. Some of the best shots of springtime are made in the rain. I get so tied up in making the picture that I often lose track of whether it is raining or not or ever where I am.

Corinth Reformed Church - Hickory NC -Organ Recital for Lent

The Corinth Reformed Church. One of the brighter spots in all of Christendom is found right here in Hickory, the Friendly City. During Lent, organ recitals are presented on Fridays from 1230 until 1300 hours. The one we went today was so good we will have to go back again - and again. After the recital we went to Bistro 127 for a "European Lunch" and - well, that's another of the brighter spots in Christendom, but more about that later.

Back to the Corinth Reformed Church. It is a powerful statement of mankind's attribution of God. From the outside it sweeps in from its outlying rooms and offices rising like a concrete crescendo into the heavens. A body incarnate into a single finger pointing to its object of adoration.

Inside, the central aisle leads straight to the altar but your eye passes that by, lifting with the stained glass brilliance dominating the far church wall, rising to the ceiling. The greatest contrast in the entire church is where the bright organ tubes lift out from their dark support, and together with the vertical stained glass they form a great cross. That cross is echoed by the arches which lead down from each side of the church to turn the arms of the cross into an loving embrace which seems to say God is good.

Sound waves play upon your chest as the organ springs to life. A great pulsing note of power calls the faithful to prayer. The organist, Mr. Edwin Weber, a fourth-year student at Lenoir-Rhyne University has begun his offering to his audience and to God. Six pieces he performs over the next thirty minutes. The sound waves come later again to play on your chest and face, and still later the floor of the church vibrates the soles of your shoes as in a quaking earth. While playing a Bach prayer, Mr. Weber looks serene as if posing for a portrait, gazing forward like one hypnotized. Later, during a Boellmann Toccata, he writhes and lurches forward and backward, from side to side, with elbows rising and falling like a pilot bringing in a plane filled with apprehensive souls to a safe landing through a stormy and windy night.

What a wonderful treat! How good it is to be a part of all this, even if only as a spectator.

© John Womack, 2009. All rights reserved.

Frost/Nixon

Big movie. Good writing. Excellent acting. All the more in consideration of the fact that the two main characters were the ones who had performed these same roles repeatedly in a long-running play. Sure they knew their parts and their roles, and had their timing down pat - all that of course - but HOW did they continue to pull that climax so razor sharp, and thrust the burning realization of who these two men really were as deeply into the audience again, one - more - time?

Most of the time I watch movies I am aware of the actors and tend to see them as people earning a living trying to pretend they are somebody they really aren't. Should have been easy to do this again in this movie because neither of the characters looked anything like their real counterparts. At first glance, Frank Langella seemed a poor choice for Nixon, but within ten minutes I had become entranced. When the movie reached its climax, he WAS Nixon.

Touching

This is the first report sent from my new iTouch. Greetings from this new world.

What is Really Out There

After viewing the “Heart of the Sun” at the Millholland Planetarium in Hickory, North Carolina, I began reflecting on the enormity of the universe. Perhaps I should say I am speaking only of what we think we know of the universe. My daughter, who is an astrophysicist and teaches astronomy in college says our concepts of the stars are only a map of the human mind - not what is Really Out There. She also points out that when we look at the heavens we react only to that which can be seen by human eyes which is just a tiny fraction of what is Really Out There. Much of her work is done with xray, uv, infrared, and oogly-googly stuff that finds no pegs in my brain to hang onto.

But this much I do get (kind of). The "sun" (our star) is really a quite small star. It is located in an obscure part of a small galaxy we call the "MIlky Way". Galaxies are swarms of millions to trillions of stars and they can be hundreds of thousands of light years from one end to the other and farther than that from each other. The Milky Way is part of a collection of galaxies which is called a local cluster. There are many other local clusters, and together they make up a conglomeration of galaxies called a super cluster.

This is not the only super cluster. There are a lot of super clusters. One source estimates there are 100 super clusters within 1 billion light years of the planet Earth. That would only account for about 7% of the total number of super clusters. For a better explanation see http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/superc.html

Reflection leads us to understand then, that In one of these billions of super clusters there is a tiny local cluster of only about 10 to 20 galaxies, and one of those small galaxies is one that is called the "Milky Way", and off in a corner of it is what its residents call a “solar system” and in that is the planet they call Earth.

Now we are also told that Earth was created by Yahweh, or Allah or the Almighty God. He - and He is definitely a HE - ask any priest or Imam or rabbi - is accompanied by the Devil (another He) to keep the people there straight (they evidently have their masculine hands full). Somewhere around there also is heaven with its precious gold and lovely hymns, and hell with its burning brimstone and piercing screams.

Well, science begins with the premise that it does not know and it keeps saying “that’s funny” as it fumbles around with what it finds to play with. Religion begins with the premise that it does know and it can’t be distracted by What is Really Out There. When the two run together they can boggle the human mind. But What is Really Out There both with regard to science AND religion has GOT to be amazing - no matter how oogly-googly it may seem to me right now.

© John Womack, 2009. All rights reserved.

Heart of the Sun

To the Millholland Planetarium tonight to see a story about the sun.
Lots of good shots, good explanations by a member of the Catawba Valley Astronomy Association. Some instruction about sunspots, impressive auroral displays and almost too much gee-whiz information.

Also some outstanding views of the night sky, especially the DARK night sky over Hickory (which is never seen because it is never DARK over Hickory - but if it were, this is what it would look like) and that was amazing.

Then a little intro of a laser show coming up tomorrow afternoon.

All this after a little social with beer or wine and some nice crunchies. And of course, the displays were all available to wander around and view: the Mars Lander, lots of information about Mars in particular, lots more about astronomy, and the nature displays were open as were the light displays. Very enjoyable evening.

Spring is Here! (dammit)

By virtue of the authority invested in me,
as Grand Determiner of Significant Events -
I hereby declare that SPRING is HERE!
Let appropriate celebrations commence!

March Came in Like a Lamb. I'm not Lion.

Well, March sure came in like a lamb today. All white and soft and fleecy and fluffy.

Bueno, que llegó en marzo como un cordero el día de hoy. Todos de color blanco y suave y esponjoso y fleecy.

No "Doubt" at The Hickory Community Theatre

Wow. The world may be filled with doubt but there is absolutely NO doubt about the Hickory Community Theatre. And there can be no doubt about the actor and actresses who played the roles of the characters in the screen play or about the director, Pamela Livingstone, or about the writer, John Patrick Shanley, or about the 100 or so residents of Hickory who showed up to watch this magnificent performance in downtown Hickory at the "Fireman's Kitchen".

After the performance was completed, about forty or fifty of us spectators remained in the "Kitchen" (really an intimate cabaret) as the actor and actresses changed into civvies and came back out on the stage, set down and engaged in a discussion about the play, the characters, the actors, the audience and the feelings involved. This went on for about thirty more minutes. Two couples in the audience, when we all were asked, said they had seen the movie. Both agreed the movie was "great" but this play, one said was "stunning". The other couple said they loved the movie but what they saw tonight was "devastating". (If you haven't seen the movie or the play, those are both compliments.) I made the photo from our seat at a small table for four before the play began, and we watched it unfold from this distance. The best seat in the place? No doubt.