January 2013

Into the Wild
A Young Man Green and Lonely
When I reviewed Sean Penn's film version of Into the Wild in December 2007, it was natural to bring John Haines and his story into the review, particularly since Jon Krakauer quoted from John's magnificent book of essays, The Stars, the Snow, the Fire, as the epigraph for one of the chapters of his own book.  The similarities between John Haines and Chris McCandless were strong.
Miles David Moore

He had a bellowing laugh, one that shook him and everyone around him. He laughed easily. One of my few regrets is that I never knew Orson Welles. I heard him live, as a speaker, on a few occasions and I saw him, live, as an actor in a reading of his play, Moby Dick, in the early '60s in New York. Yet, I do know him... from his work, which is an especially intimate way to know anyone. And this is what I know.
Arthur Meiselman

Past and Future Joined
Talking with Brecht and Meyerhold
I've asked two esteemed new-thinkers to spend some time with us. In many ways their past work remains newer than tomorrow morning, possessing a freshness that even some productions done in the next year won't have.
Nathan Thomas

Comic Larry The Cable Guy utters the words "Lord, I apologize" during his standup act. These words usually follow some offensive, tasteless joke he has told to the audience. Of course Larry is not really remorseful for what he has said and the crowd realizes his lack of sincerity and applauds (me included). For what Larry has stumbled upon is the hollowness of the modern day public apology.

There has been a court trial involving a domestic partner and a physician. There have been magazine and newspaper articles written about her. An opera has debuted in London inspired by her life. And all of this has transpired just in the last several weeks. We must remember, Anna Nicole Smith died in 2007 but her hold on the public imagination has not diminished. It's all Anna Nicole all the time. And that's just as she would have wanted.
Les Marcott

High School Reunion

Old Hippy in Hollywood

Elliot Feldman

Tanzträume – A Film about Pina Bausch's Kontakthof
The year 2009 marked the loss of Pina Bausch, one of the greatest choreographers of our time. Just before her death, she appeared one last time on film, in the documentary Dancing Dreams, Tanzträume. This film is a better document of Bausch's personality and work than Wim Wenders's celebrated cinematic portrait Pina. Dancing Dreams shows Bausch in 2006-2007, restaging Kontakthof, one of her most poignant and disturbing pieces of dance theater.
Renate Stendhal

Alice Alice
Opera On Demand
During my eight years with Scene4 I only once reviewed a cultural event that never occurred. I am talking about the opera Alice Alice, an opera about the American heroine Alice Waters, who brought the revolution of California Cuisine from Berkeley to America and set out to teach the nation's children to love green salads. This poignant new opera – in fact the first "green" opera -- with music by Berkeley composer John Adams (of Doctor Atomic fame) had everything a newly commissioned modern opera could wish for. Alice Alice had only one little flaw.
Renate Stendhal

Happy Birthday
Gertrude Stein
Grab a party hat and a squonky horn, Dear Reader, you are entering the virtual birthday party for Gertrude Stein. At this time of the year, the Steiny Road Poet has often hosted an actual salon in Stein's honor by inviting poet friends to bring and recite one of their own poems to fete the great modernist writer.
Karren Alenier

A compilation of essays and talks by Indigenous leaders from First Nation cultures around the world, members of Bioneers who have spoken at recent conferences, this book presents 'How To' earth wisdom.
Griselda Steiner

Inherent in the title of Seth Kantner's second book "Shopping for Porcupine" is a subtle irony. If it were "Hunting for Porcupine" the meaning would be clear, but politically incorrect.
Griselda Steiner

A Life Not a Letter: for
Sir John Gielgud
I had a hard time writing a fan letter to John Gielgud. For years this was a running joke with my students. I'd arrive at class in the evening to the question, "Written it yet?" and leave class at night to their mock insistence: "Bring us the first paragraph tomorrow, you hear?" But no, I just couldn't.
Lissa Tyler Renaud

I recently saw columbinus at the New York Theatre Workshop, a "Living Newspaper"-style examination of the shootings at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999. One of the first things the actors do as they come onstage is to remind the audience (actually, re-remind, since the program had already made this point) that what they are about to see is based on transcripts, interviews, etcetera, etcetera. In other words, it's based on a true story. And I think: So what?

On Tuesday, September 11, Brian Stack, the doggedly self-promoting mayor of Union City, NJ, where I live, held an unveiling ceremony for a 9/11 memorial planted on a triangle of inhospitable public real estate dubbed "Liberty Plaza," bordered by two major urban roadways that are dangerous to cross to get to the site. The memorial itself is a fairly generic slab of polished dark-grey stone etched with a picture of the twin towers and the usual boilerplate about "we honor" and "we will never forget." At the bottom of the stone, in letters as prominent as the eulogy to the dead, is a citation that this memorial was commissioned by Mayor Brian Stack, etcetera, etcetera.
Michael Bettencourt

It is sad to see that less and less people care about the arts and support them seriously anymore. The artistic works of this time might disappear if the current trend of western interest only pays attention to the demanding profits of science and technology. The arts of a free people fuel the flame of their freedom.

โอกาสทางการศึกษาในประเทศไทยนั้นจะเ ห็นได้อย่างชัดเจนที่ว่า พ่อแม่พยายาม
ที่จะส่งเสริมให้ลูกชายและลูกสาวเรียน ให้สูงที่สุดเท่าที่พวกเขาจะทำได้ การรับ
เอาหลักสูตรจากประเทศอังกฤษทำให้นักเ รียนไทยเรียนภาษาอังกฤษตั้งแต่ชั้น
Janine Yasovant

Happy Birthday, Wystan
Sitting here, sipping a beer. Sending you my best wishes on the centennial of your birth (February 21, 1907). Sure, I don't know you well enough to call you Wystan. I've only met you through your poems. Yet, like so many of your readers, I feel as if we're on a first-name basis...as if we're friends chatting about God, opining about Freud or gossiping at a dinner party. After all, through your work, you've been so intensely...intimately present in our private and public lives.
Kathi Wolfe

Well, I've been having quite the season. Rode my electric-assist bicycle through five miles of mobbed streets by the side of our RAV4 EV, being driven by my partner Rich, in the Alternative Vehicle section of the City of Alameda Fourth of July Parade.  (Leaving the sparkly red/white/blue decorations to flutter on the car just to let fascist fuckers & Republicans know they don't own the country.)
Claudine Jones

Click On A Cover to Access the Kindle Edition

COMING IN APRIL...

The authorized version of Lester Cole's
HOLLYWOOD RED

One of the founders of the Screenwriters Guild ( now the WGA) and the most unrelenting and outspoken member of the blacklisted "Hollywood Ten", Lester Cole was a protege of the legendary Cecil B. DeMille, a roommate of Cary Grant, a pal of Humphrey Bogart, a gadfly to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and then there were... the women in his life.

Scene4 Books is proud to offer the authorized reprint of this controversial autobiography. Timely! Provocative! Startling! Now, after 32 years, a witness to the nightmare of what we did and what we almost did again.

Few Americans remember the dark days of the House Un-American Activities Committee. From 1938 to 1975 it traveled like a carnival throughout the country, breaking up families, turning friends into enemies, destroying reputations and lives. This is the intimate, inside story of one of the "Hollywood Ten", screenwriters and directors jailed for defying HUAC's nightmare of enforced orthodoxy.

"...the best 'inside' book yet about Hollywood under HUAC, a book that brings the whole period, and what came before and after, into frightening clarity, but also a book that is moving, exciting, funny and blessed with humanity."

— Carl Foreman, Director and Screenwriter whose films include High Noon, The Bridge On The River Kwai, Guns of Navarone, Young Man With A Horn.

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