To thine own self be true

Actually E-Coli Beach.
Only city council would go ahead in the style of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People and rush to open a dangerous attraction which health authorities and a Thomas Stockman will eventually call them on for its toxicity and unsuitableness for public bathing.

God help us one and all.

It’ll be ‘fun’ watching them drive themselves relying on GPS technology to get lost, take longer, busier routes, etc. Won’t it be ‘fun’ too to see how they make out reading highway signs, turn-off signs, and temporary signs for roadwork?

Would you want to be the gal smoking a doobie and holding a STOP sign at the bottom of a hill along deep canyons as a big semi powers toward you? Or in front of driverless multi-wheeler going down a hill when it misses slow-down curve signs?

The obsession to go humanless is a Theatre of the Absurd runaway train to disaster on all counts. The carnage that is about to be released on roads and highways will be astounding and truly horrific.

A well-done 1979 drama directed by the late great Otto Preminger adapted from Greene’s novel. clever dialogue by Tom Stoppard and well-acted by Nicol Williamson (whom I met at McNally when he was in town) and Richard Attenborough, John Gielgud, Derek Jacobi, Robert Morley, Ann Todd, and the African supermodel IMan (as Williamson’s wife).

Lots of intrigue of the Who-is-the traitor-to the Russians? variety. Spies and counterspies with many interesting scenes. Nice use of sets and color by Preminger. There are layers of twists with Williamson trying to stay together with his African wife. If you like British drama and Le Carre books, this is a worthy complement by the guy who invented spy thriller fiction literature before Ian Fleming/James Bond back in the 1940s.

Spoiler:  Preminger’s film chooses a realistic conclusion which may a letdown for romantics.

For me, there is always a magic about seeing a good live play. This summer I’ll take in the Free Will Players’ The Comedy of Errors which is one of the few Shakespeares I’ve not read or seen.

I’ve literally seen hundreds of plays going back to university days (in Winnipeg, in Edmonton at Theatre Three, the original and new Citadel, Studio Theatre, Vic Comp’s theatre beside the school, Walterdale, Northern Lights, and at Fringe. Drama would be my second-favorite genre (after poetry) of literature overall. (I once took a u-course in 19th and 20th century British and American Drama.)

I’ve acted in and directed plays in my teaching career and, before that, in high school. I once played Daddy in Edward Albee’s “The Sandbox”, Zeus in The Rape of the Belt, Jim in “The Gift of the Magi”, the mayor in “The Red Velvet Goat”, and the butler in The Importance of Being Earnest.

Plays depend largely on language, and I suppose that would be the main fascination, going back to first studying Macbeth and Hamlet,  (might as well start at the top) in senior high school. But it is also always interesting to see the imaginative visual designs of live plays or in film adaptations when images round out the naked words of a script. In particular, great speeches and quotations resonate for me. And, hence, my long-time interest, too, in film, particularly great films and classics.

What a positive delight of acting performances featuring James Mason, Vanessa Redgrave (near the start of her career), Simone Signoret, David Warner, and Denholm Elliott!

Wonderfully directed by the late great Sidney Lumet who brought so many plays to the silver screen in his long, distinguished career. Beautifully shot on location in pastoral Sweden using a house and lake setting. Well-rehearsed so that entire scenes are played out uncut with natural flowing continuity.

This is arguably Chekhov’s most powerful play with a near-perfect cast. A nihilistic 1896 (play debut)/1968 (movie version) knockout examining reality vs. dreams and illusions similar to Chekhov’s other classic plays. A would-be playwright and would-be actress are the central characters who influence all the other, mostly older, characters.

Chekhov, as usual, creates much conflict, characterization, and symbolism through short sentences and phrases. In Lumet’s skilled hands, the dialogue assumes an even more powerful influence.

One of the most successful cases ever of adaptation of a play to film (and the best, most memorable Chekhov movie adaptation), The Sea Gull speaks great truths about us all and how humans are often beguiled and frustrated in their idealism and dreaming. And, as always, Chekhov remains a master in presenting, developing, and arguing that central theme of human existence.

by being anti-book, anti-literature, anti-classics, and anti-critical thinking and reading.

“The use of letters,” says Gibbon (in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), “is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilized people from a herd of savages.”

This tragedy shall extend beyond schools today into future generations of brave new techno society, too. Schools and public education have sold out lock, stock, and barrel to the machines.

Trump. Trudeau.
Putin. Kim.
Iveson.
Driverless cars.
Robot cashiers.
Sex dolls.
Screens in schools.
Technocrats.
Non-stop advertising everywhere.
Guns.
Home solicitation.
Reverse discrimination
in the name of political correctness.
Hypocrisy.
Social media and trolls.
Mammon worship.
Egomaniacs.
Agendas.
Flagrant corruption.
Rudeness and insult culture.
Shallowness.
Pride in personal shallowness.
Terminal laziness.
Zero responsibility.
Naked greed.
Obsessiveness.
Materialism.
Nature-destroyers.
Phony baloneys.
Bs-ers and crap artists.
Carpetbaggers.
Barnum and Bailey dictators.
Lazy, selfish polluters.
Mindless commentators.
Mere blabbers who can’t stand silence.
Public cellphone-‘broadcasters’.
Death-lovers.
Serial killers.
Crime and law dodgers.
Wife-abusers.
Child-abusers.
Boozers and dopers.
Cheaters.
Mean, cold, cruel types.
Bigots.
Affluent cheapskates.
Holier-than-thou types.
Cowards.
Fearmongers.
Complainers and whiners.
Loquacious narcissists.
Evil autocrats.

where kids can’t experience one iota or second of the greatest expressions of the human spirit.

Putin Says Russia Has Not Left the G7–Not True

Trump says he’ll punish ‘the people of Canada because of Trudeau’s news conference

Opinion: Will America Lose Canada? (NY Times)

Trudeau’s Eyebrows at G7 Set Social Media Off (CNN)

Why Trudeau doesn’t have the high ground on trade (Washington Post)

Dear America, It’s Canada (Forbes Now)

having three evil power-hungry egomaniacs running the world is not good for the planet in the short and long runs.

These guys are ruthless, dangerous, evil, and prepared to destroy millions at the drop of a hat. They are the modern immoral equivalents of Napoleon, Stalin, and Hitler. And, ultimately, the three will turn on each other and become greedy for absolute power over the world .

It is hard for North American mortals to change anything except to support impeachment of Trump or to vote him out in the midterms and 2020. That might be the first major relief and counter-resistance that might occur in the West.

There are timeless reasons why Orwell wrote Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. There are reasons why there was a Cold War and why the Russians cannot be trusted going back to the Berlin Wall and the sneaky military moves that led to the near calamitous Cuban Missile Crisis.

If the American government and populace have any brains, they will protest any efforts of Trump to climb into bed with Putin. That is the obvious protest that needs to be made in the here-and-now.

With Kim Jong Un, the jury should remain out. No doubt he has harbored dreams of controlling the Asian world and becoming one of the three nutso kingpin-world leaders. At this point, minimally, his status has been confirmed as being at least ‘equal’ to Trump with a simple handshake.

Anyway, does the world need two or three guys running the whole show? Does the world need to be beaten into submission and made over by these greedy powermongers? And, is whole shebang, all about accumulating wealth on the backs of 99.99999% of the rest of the world?

Meanwhile, back at Screwball Central, people have fallen in love and become obsessed with their phones; they cannot and do not see anyone or anything else as important.
And the general runaway technological game plan is to do away with people to make more bucks making life more depersonalized, inhumane, and downright dangerous. I do not want to be on the roads when the driverless vehicles arrive here en masse.

Yes, the world seems to be in the wrong people’s hands and there is a profund, pronounced chill in the air of a different kind of Ice Age as the planet continues to play dodgeball with Nature’s revenge and random large objects from space tumbling about.

This stuff cataclysmically goes way beyond “skin of our teeth” and becomes ever-dwindling and declining “borrowed time” as the olde doomsday clock ticks on…