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I saw the theatre deparment's Marat/Sade last night, and it's very good. I'd definitely recommend it if you enjoyed reading the play at all. The acting is generally very good, especially Sade and the herald. The pacing is a little slow at first, but it definitely picks up, and the music and songs work much better in the live performance. And although this production seems generally to follow the same script as the film did, it's interesting to see how they stage it differently to give the play a slightly different spin.

So it looks like I got my MySpace terminology wrong. You don't want to invite me as your friend, you want to add me to your friends. As far as I can tell, what you want to do is be logged in under your new profile, then search for me (using my email address jjesson@mail.utexas.edu). When you're on my page (it's the one with the picture of a book by Mailer, a shot glass, and a beer), click on "Add to Friends." That should work.

MySpace users, does that sound right?

UT's Theatre and Dance department is starting its production of Marat/Sade tonight. Most of the cast is made up of the graduating class of actors in the graduate theatre program, so the acting should be very good. I don't know how the production will be, but I'm going to see it tomorrow night, so I'll post an update here after then.

In addition to UT's theater department, a theater in Harlem is currently performing Marat/Sade, and the New York Times recently ran an article about the production.

The play's producers spoke about how they see the play relating to the world today:

Mr. McElroen said he wanted to convey the obscenity of violence, the abuse of power, the degradation of human rights and the perversion of revolutionary ideals as relevant not only to post-revolutionary France but also to “what’s going on in the world today.” He continued: “We’re always going to have the haves and have nots. Just look at what’s happening with the real-estate boom in Harlem. Folks are always going to be faced with oppression. If you look at history, you see how absolute power corrupts absolutely. And there are obvious parallels to what is going on in the Middle East.”

Following on Chris M.'s exploration of the multiple meanings of the word "rough," I thought I'd post this audio file, which is a 2-minute clip of the author Tobias Wolff talking about the difficulty of writing. The clip is from a freshman orientation at Stanford, where Wolff teaches. I know it's not the world's best university, but Wolff is a very good writer, and he has some funny and true things to say about writing. "Call me Ishmael," of course, is the first line of Moby Dick.

YouTube, of course, has the opening credits for the TV show Weeds. Playing over the credits and montage is the song "Little Boxes," sung by the folk singer and songwriter Malvina Reynolds. It's a song about cookie-cutter suburbs in the mid-20th century (the Wikipedia article says she wrote it about Daily City, just south of San Francisco, while another source on the web claims the song is about the Levittown housing development on Long Island), but Weeds has applied it to 21st-century Southern Californi

Patti Smith's hero, Egon Schiele: http://cybermuse.gallery.ca/cybermuse/search/artwork_zoom_e.jsp?mkey=864.

Here is footage of Iggy Pop's concert in Cincinatti, where he threw peanut butter on the crowd and walked on the audience's hands.

In the latest New Yorker there's an article about New York city's "bicycle zealots," people who advocate for bicycle lanes and other changes to urban streets to make it easier for bicyclists. It's an interesting article. What might be of particular interest to a couple of you is that the Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping shows up in the article as a bystander at a "Critical Mass" bicycle event:

The blond man was Bill Talen, a performance artist who goes by the name Reverend Billy and calls his congregation the Church of Stop Shopping. “One time, I was arrested at a Buy Nothing Day Parade,” he said, recalling a distant Friday evening. “We went in and exorcised a Starbucks cash register, and, sure enough, I got thrown in the holding tank at Fifty-fourth Street. And the cops that arrested me were really upset that they were missing this.” He opened his arms and turned, as though surveying his parish. “And I felt their erotic love of harassing the bicyclists. It was like they couldn’t date their favorite girl.”

I won't bring it into class, but here is a link to the poem "Music" by Frank O'Hara, which Jim Carroll mentions reading in Wednesday's selection:

". . . I read 'Music' by Frank O'Hara and began thinking about the Plaza Hotel. That poem always reminds me of the Plaza Hotel" (154).

Poetry fans, check it out.