I’m struck today by the juxtaposition of the once-in-a-generation photo op/merchandising bonanza of Britain’s royal wedding and the quiet American love story of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords making her first public appearance since January’s massacre in Tucson to attend the launch of the Endeavour space shuttle with her husband at the helm (the launch ended up getting postponed at the last minute due to a technical malfunction). Lots to ponder in these two love stories.

August 11, 2002, Santiago de Compostela, Spain—I am beginning to feel almost rested now. It seems that for about the last week of my ride I was actually too tired and dehydrated to realize how tired I was. I slept for most of my first three days here, and my brain is just now beginning to awaken from the fugue. I am definitely not the most physically fit pilgrim ever to get on a bicycle!

I just found out something else interesting about this pilgrimage—this is also a holy land for the new age pagans. I don’t know what the story is with the pagans here, but this does explain why along the way I have been seeing all sorts of satanic and witchcraft looking charms and trinkets in the souvenir shops mixed in with the catholic stuff.

The good news of this is that my soul is now saved no matter who wins Armageddon.

Just think of it. If I play my cards right, I might even be able to achieve a respectable business profit by selling arms to both sides at Armageddon, and of course be morally justified while doing it. Not only that, but maybe I will be able to take my money with me, too.

Now that I am almost awake again, I am starting to think of where to go next. I’ll probably stay here in Spain for awhile, as this is one of the cheapest countries in Europe and I can almost speak the language. I am going to try to leave the Holy Skinkmobile here while I see some more of Spain on either a bus or train with nice soft wide seats, then return here to pick up the bike. Then I’ll get the holy born again saint’s discount flight to Barcelona, where I can catch a cheap, easy jet flight to either Amsterdam or London.

I would like to try to get some more information on buying a boat in Holland for a future trip before I leave Europe. Another thing is that if I take the ferry from Holland to England, I will only have to go a few km out of my way to pass through Canterbury. This way I could get two holy pilgrimages for the price of one.

Talk to ya later

St. William

An LA Times article about yesterday’s announcement that Britain’s Prince William has gotten engaged to his longtime girlfriend Kate Middleton highlights a key difference between British and American society:

“With no royal or aristocratic pedigree, Middleton will become the first commoner in centuries to marry a presumptive heir to the throne. Her plebeian background has been mercilessly picked over and ridiculed by Britain’s snobbish tabloids, here in a land where many still turn up their noses at those who speak with the wrong accent, say “toilet” instead of “loo” or live in a house with an address number rather than a name.”

Of course, nothing like a fairy tale romance involving a royal prince to get the commoners’ minds off such mundane woes as the prime minister’s recent drastic slashing of the government budget. Still, one can only wish the young couple well. The short, unhappy life of William’s mother is certainly a cautionary tale on the collision between fantasy and reality.

Meanwhile, over on this side of the pond, we have that pseudo-princess of Republican royalty, Bristol Palin, shaking her booty all over “Dancing with the Stars.” I guess the baby’s back home with Levi. How ya gonna keep ‘em down in Wasilla after they’ve seen Hollywood? (And, as somebody commented awhile back when the brouhaha over gay marriage in California was in the headlines, “How could gays possibly do any more harm to the idea of marriage as a sacred institution than Bristol and Levi?”)

Social class is the electrically charged third rail in American culture that people tend to avoid. But examples abound of how classy behavior doesn’t correlate with either money or ancestry. That’s where the British system is more hidebound by tradition. We have the freedom to consider how qualities such as character and individual action define class, American-style. There’s a lot to explore there, as we muddle through these turbulent times.

One of the things I very much enjoyed while working on a London-based project several years ago was reading commentary about American politics in the morning news. The hotels where I stayed always had an assortment of complimentary papers, and I would feast on the opinion pages while eating breakfast. I began making trips over there around the time the Bush administration was aggressively hawking its lethal farce over why we had to invade Iraq to make the world safe for democracy. Early on, some younger generation British columnist wrote a devastatingly funny spoof of Donald Rumsfeld’s language patterns, something like putting them into haiku form: “The known knowns. The known unknowns…” I forget the specifics, but it had a combination of substance and ironic detachment that needed to come from outside (even though Tony Blair was in full-on lapdog mode at that point).

Anyway, I’d be curious to see what British op-ed columnists are making of the surreal spectacle of American politics this season. I had a hell of a time trying to explain why Arnold Schwarzenegger’s election as governor didn’t mean the entire population of California had decamped en masse for Cloud Cuckoo Land. How could you possibly hope to understand the contours of the Brown/Whitman race without having lived through what came before?

Still, there’s something to be said for distance and perspective. Forest overview, as opposed to getting stuck amidst the trees. I’m starting to feel like the election of a bunch of rabid Tea-Partiers to Congress this year might be the best thing that’s happened to the Democratic Party in a long time (other than Barack Obama getting elected president, of course). It will give us two years to make the case that matters such as facts, objective reality, and the importance of holding individuals and institutions to account for their actions are critically important. Republicans of various stripes are still trying to run on fumes of the fiction that the GOP has any shred of credibility left as the party of responsible stewardship of fiscal discipline and the economy. Hah! The jig is up.

The Altamont Pass is a hot, dry, boring stretch of land in the middle of nowhere, out Highway 580 past the Livermore city limits.  The only reason to go through there is to get somewhere else – either to Highway 5 if you’re after a straight shot from the Bay Area down to Los Angeles, or up into the Sierra Nevada mountains if you’re going camping.  From the looks of it, you’d never believe this is the same Altamont where the 1960s symbolically came to a violent, debauched end when the Rolling Stones headlined an ill-starred rock concert at a local race track.  It’s a very long way from Carnaby Street.

Nature being ultimately redemptive, however, Altamont in recent decades has been noted more for the striking sculpture and activity of its wind turbines. Despite being an early model for a functioning renewable energy supply, the turbines became a source of controversy not long after their installation because so many birds passing through the area were getting sucked into the sharp blades and killed. Now, Nell Newman, daughter of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward (and the driving force behind the organics division of the “Newman’s Own” food brand), is advocating for a sustainable solution to the problem.  Here’s hoping the powers-that-be in Alameda County step up to the plate.

The Bay Area has numerous idyllic hamlets nestled away in valleys, redwood groves and coastal inlets where people can enjoy the benefits of a rural lifestyle without having to leave urban creature comforts far behind.  Many of them are home to rich and/or famous folk who prefer to keep a low profile in their private lives.  The SF Chronicle ran a feature story today on blues musician Elvin Bishop and his magical garden over in Marin County.  Bishop has been a traveling musician since the ‘60s, and he was inspired to start urban homesteading after realizing how hard it is to eat well when you’re on the road.  I got a taste of this during the numerous trips I made over to London with work on the Lord of the Rings stage production—even when money isn’t a worry, you simply can’t eat nearly as well on the road as you can at home.  Restaurants have too much incentive to load their food up with more butter, salt and sugar than fits a healthy, sustainable diet.  It may taste good and sell well, but it takes a toll on physical well-being—which is generally the last thing anybody needs when they’re traveling.  Bishop seems to have struck a nice balance between success out in the world and living true to counter-culture ideals, Northern California-style. It’s always refreshing to hear about those who are getting it right.

The British election is a game-changer. In American terms, the closest analogy I can think of to the outcome is if the Republicans and the Green Party united to defeat the Democrats and try running the country together. Such an alliance is unimaginable here, at least for the foreseeable future. The British experiment provides an opportunity to watch how the conservative/liberal dialectic plays out in real time.

I grew fascinated with comparing and contrasting our political system to that of the Brits during the numerous trips I made to London while working on the Lord of the Rings stage production. Our societies, and the issues we face, are more similar than different, but America has a fundamentally different character and makeup than the U.K. We’re the wilder cousins, less hidebound by tradition, more inclined to experiment with new ideas and systems. There are pros and cons to the tradeoffs, and they’re endlessly fascinating to consider. In this instance, the Brits are way out ahead of us, in that their conservative party is now charting a way into the twenty-first century that includes working with ideas and principles well to the left of center. Wherever they head from here, there will be much to learn from the experience.

A town hall meeting on repairing California’s dysfunctional government was held the other night in the peaceful valley where I live. The state senator who ran the meeting and the panelists he had assembled were all smart, knowledgeable, down-to-earth and articulate about the systemic roots of the problems we collectively face. I have lived in California all my life, and it was instructive to have empirical data laid out supporting my perception that, in a relatively short amount of time, we’ve degenerated from top-tier status among the 50 states to appallingly low ranking in critical areas such as public education. The crowd that turned out on a rainy night to participate in the discussion ranged from rednecks to lefties, united in a desire to constructively work to fix what’s broken.

California has long had a reputation as an experimental cauldron where new ideas get tested. When they’re successful, they tend to radiate out across the country for widespread implementation (when they’re not, they either retreat into the shadows or get added into the ongoing mythology about Left Coast Loonies). The idea coming into vogue now is that, after all the pyrotechnics and questionable ethics that have dominated American politics in recent decades, real change is going to have to come from the ground up. Read more…

A handful of years ago I was immersed in work on the script for a musical stage version of The Lord of the Rings that was being developed in London’s West End. The underlying premise of the adaptation was that we would be telling the ancient stories of Middle-earth in a new way. Keeping the actions, motivations and relationships of the characters true to what was known of them from the books would give the creative freedom needed to tell the main story in a fashion that drew on the strengths of the musical theatre form.

We were having difficulty developing the character of Arwen; I was annoyed that her dialogue kept making her sound like a whiny doormat for Aragorn. I scoured The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s other writings for source material that might help to flesh her out, but I came up with little other than the fact that, as an Elvish woman who would bear children with a mortal man, she would become the agent through which seeds of magic would carry over into the Age of the Dominion of Men. That helped to fill in her back story, but it wasn’t enough to address the problem of her portrayal in the narrative.

Casting further afield, it occurred to me that tracing the roots of the phrase “the horns of Elfland” might yield up something useful about Elvish culture that could offer clues to her persona.Tolkien used the phrase towards the end of his essay “On Fairy-Stories”, referring to some key tenets of the realm of Faërie. It’s also a central motif in Lord Dunsany’s enchanting novel The King of Elfland’s Daughter. It originates in an 1847 poem by Tennyson called The Princess, and I was lucky enough to find a copy at the Berkeley Public Library. The book had been published in 1900 and hadn’t seen the light of day in many a year. I blew the dust off the cover and brought it along on my next trip to London, hoping I might find a treasure trove of lore on Elves, their habitat and customs.

To my surprise, the Lord of the Rings character who emerged from the pages was Éowyn, the warrior maid of Rohan, not Arwen. Read more…

“Stories we tell will cast their spell
Now and for always”

NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF STORYTELLING, THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGES OF MUSIC AND VISUAL IMAGERY, OR THE MAGICAL ABILITY OF THEATRE TO SWEEP PEOPLE AWAY. AT A GATHERING IN LONDON FOUR AND A HALF YEARS AGO, DIRECTOR MATTHEW WARCHUS DESCRIBED HIS VISION OF HOW The Lord of the Rings COULD SUCCESSFULLY BE BROUGHT TO THE STAGE.

The answer lay not in a conventional formula, but rather in letting the story itself suggest, organically, how it might be done. The atmosphere in the books of an ancient world steeped in history and lore, with a vast breadth and depth of cultural traditions, suggested mystery and magic to be explored. J.R.R. Tolkien’s implication that the stories of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings depict events from an era of European history lost in the mists of time, surviving only in an ancient manuscript handed down through the ages, offered a context for the creative freedom needed to translate the tale into a different form. The Mystery Plays of the medieval craft guilds—Biblical stories in a wide range of dramatic styles that were performed across Europe during the Middle Ages—provided a model for morally substantive narrative combined with theatrical pageantry that actively involved the audience in the imaginative experience. This would be a new version of the old stories of Middle-earth.

The basic idea would be to draw the audience into a fantastic sensory environment and emotionally engage them in the central tale of a dangerous quest undertaken by two ordinary little folk who set out to defeat an evil power that threatens their entire world. The story needed to be told without irony, befitting its epic scale and mode. The challenge would be to remain true to the spirit and essence of the books while crafting an accessible narrative that would succeed on its own terms as a piece of contemporary theatre.

For Composer and Musical Supervisor Christopher Nightingale, music was central to the tale, both literally and metaphorically. In The Silmarillion, Tolkien’s introduction to his imaginary universe, Middle-earth is called into being in song, and each new act of creation—of Elves, Men, Dwarves—is a new theme in a divine symphony. Evil is introduced into the world as a discordant theme that disrupts the harmony. Nightingale realized one couldn’t theatrically tell the story without music. The songs and musical styles would need to convey the unique spirit and flavor of Middle-earth’s various cultures—familiar and yet alien, not pegged to any real-world counterparts. What kinds of songs would Hobbits sing? They would naturally have an earthy folk feel to them, but melodic motifs, rhythm, instrumentation, etc., might take the ear in unexpected directions. How to reflect the timeless magic of the Elves, who live and breathe exquisite artistic expression? What kind of music would Dwarves make? What would Evil sound like? How would that differ from the sound of Evil that believed it was acting for Good? Read more…