Profane haberdashery

Bartlebones' muthahfuckin' hat

I attended Friday night's performance of The Motherfucker with the Hat at the Studio Theater. At turns hilarious, shocking and poignant, the play continues the season's string of really outstanding productions. The ensemble cast is tremendous and Drew Cortese manages to walk the delicate line of making a potentially unattractive character sympathetic in his portrayal of Jackie, the lead role, a low-life drug dealer recently released from jail.

This play could easily have resolved to little more than a self-indulgent exercise in Nuyorican shtreet cred, relying solely on hackneyed representations of urban life. All the elements are there; the stock drug dealer, the unhappy upscale hedonist couple, the strong-willed Puertorriqueña girlfriend from the neighborhood. But despite being made up largely of elements you might find in the average music video, with a plot line to match, Motherfucker works. Somehow Serge Seiden's production manages to create compelling, if somewhat unattractive characters, and tell a story that resonates beyond the stereotypical caricatures of poor druggies from the neighborhood or yuppie materialists to which it could have all too easily devolved. The characters are complex, the story is compelling, the acting is capable of bringing tears to your eyes. You should go see that shit, Motherfucker. Through March 24th.

Mix-a-tune

In yesterday's post, I basically just shoved a couple of YouTube videos of an obscure German punk band from the '80s at you. No context, no explanation, just the videos and some ramblings about feeling old. I just wanted to play some jams, so that's what you got. But, as is always the case with your 'umble author, there's a back story.

At the end of last year, a buddy of mine from a more or less German speaking country suggested I read Jennifer Egan's magnificent Pulitzer Prize winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad. So I did. The book is about an aging punk rock record producer and what happens to the people from that scene as they are getting older. Frankly, on the basis of that description, I would have passed the book right by. Not another aging rock star book. But, a dear friend suggested it, and I have certainly done much harder things for friends. And as it happens, that book is tremendous. Not just because it is about people roughly my age, or because it's about music I appreciate, but because it's a really well crafted book. You should read it.

Now as it also happens, the Aryan who recommended the book to me is the guy who in my youth was always turning me onto the latest sounds, and I still happen to have a couple of artifacts from that glorious time, in the form of something that will swell the hearts of my contemporaries and will likely mystify the youngsters among you. That is, I have some MixTapes my friend made for me.

Exhibit from the Museum of Obsolete Media - a "Mixed Tape" 1990

See, before there were playlists, before there was digital music, before normal people had access to anything as exotic as a computer network, before there were even Compact Disks, there were vinyl "records" and record-able cassette tapes. Average people could buy blank tapes at the record store (or the grocery store, for that matter), take them home and record stuff. We recorded commercial broadcasts from the FM radio and "tracks" from 12 inch albums. We would spend hours recording mixtapes, queuing up the tape using only the << Back, Pause and Forward >> buttons, dropping the needle onto the proper cut and hitting the Record button at just the right moment to avoid odd snippets of the previous song or missing the beginning of the one you want. Such tapes were a labor of love, impossible to comprehend in today's Copy and Paste world.

On my favorite of these mixtapes from my Helvetic pal (pictured above) is exactly the kind of eclectic time capsule that made these so special. Now get yourself to YouTube and start listening!

Punk-in Chunk-in

How do you know you're old? Probably the best way is to have children, those metronomic little ticking time bombs; a constant reminder of your mortality. But surely the next best reminder of your increasing obsolescence is the music that got you off when you were a kid. Likely it still gets you off, and if it really got you off you're probably still willing to defend it against any challenge to its obvious superiority over anything "out there today." Well, you know, each to their own. Most music sucks when it's new - thank goodness young people have such bad taste. All I know is that Jingo de Lunch rocked. It sounded great when I was young and it still sounds good to me.

Good enough to listen to 44 minutes live!

But it also makes me feel old. Because I'm no longer pissed off. I am no longer willing to stand for hours in a broken down hovel with toilet paper stuck in my ears and beer all over myself. It was fun at the time. And the music still sounds really good to me - even when a lot of other music I listened to at the time has gone flat. Thanks Yvonne @ Company!

Carry me back to ol' Virginny

Carry me back to old Virginny,
There's where the cotton and the corn and tatoes grow,
There's where the birds warble sweet in the springtime,
There's where this old darkey's heart am long'd to go.

Oh, Northern Virginia (NoVa), despite your gleaming towers of Rosslyn and the metropolitan hipster vibe of Clarendon; regardless of your increasing population density and the steady purpleization of your electorate, you are still the offspring of the inbred, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, pre-Enlightenment cretins that still dominate RoVa (the Rest of Virginia).

Struggle up through the slime though you try, you will just keep being dragged back down into the primordial muck by the bigots, the racists and the gun nuts. The state is starting to look like a laughingstock with its whacked out retrograde politicians that are just downright embarrassing to anyone with an eighth grade education or better.

The latest affront to common sense and progress springing from the Ancient Dominion is the failure to pass an anti-dooring measure that would have made motorists who unthinkingly fling their car doors open in the path of oncoming cyclists at least partly responsible for the damage and injury they do.

Now it's bad enough that the Virginia Senate didn't pass the bill through the transportation committee, but what is particularly galling is the stated reason: they couldn't get their shit together enough to have all members of the committee actually attend the hearing. Half of the douchebags who allegedly sit on this committee couldn't even be bothered to show up to vote one way or another. So there you go, Virginia. You are one of only ten states in the Union (I realize many of you don't even recognize that you ARE in the Union) to extend exactly zero protection to people who get injured by thoughtless assholes who can't be bothered to look in the rearview mirror before throwing their car doors open into the path of fellow travelers. Well done.

Atruistic punishment

How could you hate her?

A fascinating, if somewhat perfunctory article on the BBC's website yesterday posits that the reason motorists hate cyclists derives from the game theory notion that society functions only because we are programmed to self police by punishing one another for behaving outside the bounds of accepted "morality." That is to say that humans have actually evolved to punish people perceived to have broken the rules. And for drivers, practically everything cyclists do is technically in violation of the rules, since the set of rules by which they operate is specific to cars. Cyclists can't, by definition, obey some of those rules. We can't go the speed limit most of the time, for instance.

And the rules we can obey, we often don't. Largely because the laws of physics play a much greater role in our mode of transportation. Since the calories we burn are derived from the energy our bodies have converted from food instead of from the refined essence of prehistoric organic matter (i.e., gasoline), we cyclists typically observe much stricter adherence to the laws of conservation of energy. That is, since it takes us a lot of personal energy to build momentum, we often go to extraordinary pains to maintain it. Drivers just push one pedal a couple of inches and hundreds of horsepower are produced, whereas a pedaler has to grind a crank round and round just to get up to a speed most motorists disdain and curse. Don't believe me? Do the math. So we often blow through stop signs. We're following rules - just not the same rules motorists have to follow.

We come by our own little set of rules by the exact same method as drivers have come by theirs - through trial and error, underpinned by a grave sense of self preservation and public safety. We do what we do because we have weighed the costs against the benefits, considered the possible risks and come up with a pretty workable set of operating principles. Just like cars. Even in a society where bicycles represent a meaningful proportion of the mode share (transportation geek speak for percent of trips made by bike), the transportation induced death rate is negligible. Can we say the same thing about our own society in which the car is clearly the dominant mode of transportation? No we cannot.

So when a person sitting in a type of vehicle responsible for over 30,000 fatalities a year can get all pissed when I scoot around them on a vehicle responsible for so few fatalities a year as to be not worth mentioning, I don't really feel that bad about it. When was the last time you heard about a motorist getting killed by a bicyclist? Just doesn't happen. Sure occasionally a cyclist runs down a pedestrian and kills them. Occasionally. How frequently do cars run down pedestrians? But I also understand when motorists, being the good egalitarians they are, and apparently in thrall to their limbic brain, go berserk and start shouting out their car windows and shout, "get off the feckin' road!"

You think your job sucks...

Bethesda Roundhouse Theater this month mounts a version of David Mamet's Pulizer Prize winning Glengary Glenn Ross. Pretty tough stuff for our little community theater, and they've pulled it off really well. Of course this is the quintessential Mamet talk-a-thon, and it lives or dies by the ability of the cast to spew non-stop, rapid-fire, obscenity-laced vitriol at one another while somehow eliciting sympathy from an audience made up largely of elderly Bethesdans. No small task, I assure you. But this group pulls it off really well. The language is gritty and grungey frankly a bit over the top in terms of NSFW vocabulary and the staccato smart-guy lecturing. But these actors manage to deliver Mamet's overwrought dialog credibly, intelligibly and with just the right amount of nuance - it's not as easy to shout 'cunt' at someone while retaining sympathy for the shouter as you might think.

This is one of those text heavy plays that could just as effectively be presented in workshop fashion with just a few chairs and tables as props. But the sets in the Roundhouse production are meticulously assembled, making outstanding, subtle use of the rotating stage which in this instance seems almost to have been more of a liability than an advantage. But the two sets, a Chinese restaurant and the disheveled sales office play beautifully against each other, juxtaposing the silky chintz of Asian eatery decor with the gritty, rough shod boiler room in which these poor working schmucks are consigned to spend their working lives. This one is worth seeing if only to watch a group of veteran actors chew up Mamet's verbiage.

Runs through March 3.

All the world's

Scot McKenzie mesmerizes as KJ in The Aliens

Last week was theater week here at Mondo Blah Blah. I saw Young Robin Hood at the Roundhouse Theater, Bethesda's community theater, on Sunday. Robin Hood was something for the whole family, and not of much interest to me. But I support art in my local community so I can live among actors, directors, lighting technicians, stage hands and theater freaks of all kinds - my kind of neighbors. So I have season tickets and take what they give me. Sometimes art is interesting and sometimes not so much. It wasn’t bad, just predictable family fare, which is not really my thing.

Then it was Malkovich's Les Liaisons Dangereuses on Thursday night which I wrote about on Friday.

Then I saw The Aliens at the Studio Theater on Friday. Of the three, the latter was by far my favorite. Starring Peter O’Connor,  Scot McKenzie and Brian Miskell, all of whom were outstanding. This is tough material and it came across brilliantly. Written by Annie Baker. I will watch for her name.

Though I’ve only seen two plays at the Studio, both have been outstanding and I’ve really enjoyed them. The theaters are really small and intimate and the actors can get right up in your face, which was pretty uncomfortable when we went to see Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man. Having a black man sit ten feet in front of me speaking the most eloquent words about racism written in the English language was an intense experience. Theater at its best. The kind that makes you uncomfortable. 

Danger Valmont, Danger!

Go see Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the Shakespeare Theater. Directed by John Malkovich who in 1988 took the starring role in the film, this production is in French with English surtitles and despite the possible language barrier is a really entertaining way to spend a couple of hours. If you actually speak French, great; but if not, don't sweat it. You can just concentrate on the naked French ladies.

The cast is young and lovely and Malkovich has managed to portray these characters as a combination of 18th Century dandies with hoop skirts and sword fights, and modern day hipsters in skinny jeans, talking on cell phones, writing letters to each other on iPads. It could have been cheesy, but it's not. It's not the best thing you'll see this year, but it's good. It's fun. It's sexy.

And I promise - you won't see John Malkovich's ass this time.

http://www.welovedc.com/2012/12/07/we-love-arts-les-liaisons-dangereuses/

Polymorphia Schmolymorphia

Listen to this:

 

Penderecki: String Trio

It is a string trio. Not a quartet. That's in part what gives it the spare quality. Perfect for 20th Century modern music. It is by Krzysztof Eugeniusz Penderecki a Polish composer who later taught at Yale. I don't actually car much for this particular version. It's not bad, and the musicians are technically quite proficient, but I think they're making it too melodic, too warm; not sufficiently hard edge.

If you get the chance, find the version by the Janaki String Trio. I saw them perform it at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and they tore that mother apart. Their version is as cold as Warsaw sidewalk, as sharp as razor, as resonant as abandoned factory. Their sound is clear and precise, as the music demands. If you go in for such things, this is a genuine delight.

Caged

Just so you know, I considered leaving this entire post blank in tribute to John Cage. But I didn't. You may wish I had.

The very King of Cages

Triathlete water storage

I've been thinking about the 'umble bottle cage. That most utilitarian accessory that allows a cyclist to affix a container of water or other liquid (usually in "bottle" form) to a bicycle. Though usually mounted to the frame, on the seat tube and/or down tube, cages can also be mounted on the handlebars and for some reason triathletes seem to prefer them behind the saddle, like a couple of Truck nutz dangling behind the rider's buttocks. I guess the skin suit, aero helmet and bars don't look dorky enough. Well, to each their own I suppose.

The reason I have been thinking about cages is that the '86 Fuji came without any, so I found myself in the market. Actually, at first I put on a cage that I had left over from an old bike - I am nothing if not a borderline hoarder. But there was something wrong with the way the "normal" aluminum cage (like the one in the upper left corner of this post) looked with the slender tubes of the Allegro. The oversized aluminum tubes of the bottle cage seemed to compete in bulk with the elegant chromoly of the bike. So I set about to find the perfect bottle cage to complement my vintage (really? '86 is "vintage"? I'm old...) bike.

I had a sense that there was more variety available for modern bikes, since my late model Treks sport a set of carbon fiber cages (the teenage punk-ass sales clerk actually complemented me on using the same cages as Lance, which very nearly cost him the sale) and a plastic pair. And the modern styling of the plastic cages fits the large aluminum tubes of the '02 2000 and the giant carbon tubes of the '11 Madone. But the Fuji called for something different, and hopefully less expensive, since the whole bike cost just a bit more than a fashionable set of carbon fiber cages.

Honoré Barthélémy during 1919 Tour de France

The Fuji is a project bike; a bike I bought very much with the idea of learning bike repair, experimenting with different equipment and exploring alternatives to the way I have been riding for most of my adult life. And as I learned about different styles of non-racing bikes, I fell back to my original attraction, which was long distance cycling. I've long maintained the romantic fantasy of the long distance rider, the randonneur, the iron man on a bicycle crossing the world's most beautiful landscapes. And the aesthetic of this fantasy has something of the Heroic image about it. I imagine myself rolling through the Strade Bianche, all wool jerseys and goggles, drinking from an aluminum bottle with a cork stopper, eating paninni wrapped in wax paper. Of course when I actually rode across Italy it was on a state-of-the-art titanium touring bike there was a van following so I wouldn't be late to the picnic set up by the tour guides or the restaurant for dinner.

VO Retro cage MKII, with tab

Notwithstanding the inevitable disparity between self image and reality, as I built up the Fuji I found myself under the spell of the classic cyclotouring bike, the lure of the Constructeur. Of course the Allegro is never going to be a René Herse or an Alex Singer, no matter what accessories I hang on it, but I nevertheless decided to outfit it with classic, beautifully designed stuff that will continue to look and perform perfectly for the rest of my life. So I went where you go when that's the sort of stuff you want, and I outfitted the bike with the cage that made the most sense; the Velo Orange Retro cage MK II, with tab. It just looks timeless, is super lightweight, both visually and physically and is constructed with an ingenious design featuring a single cleverly bent wire. I have spent way too much time tracing the path of the wire around its complete path, reassuring myself that it is indeed made entirely from a single strand. Just lovely. Somewhere in the Design Museum there is an empty pedestal waiting for one of these.