Last weekend, we headed down to the Newseum for a new documentary, BLACK AND WHITE AND DEAD ALL OVER.

Having attended Silverdocs (a film festival that exclusively shows documentaries) last year, and having watched dozens of them on our own, outside of the festival, we have become something of documentary snobs.  We talk a lot about whether the subject is worth the investment of time, whether the story is told in interesting ways, whether new facts were illuminated, whether the movie itself was enjoyable as a movie.  We have pretty strong opinions — and sometimes they differ from the critics’.

BAWADAO got a solid B from us.

It is subtitled “A Film About the End of American Newspapers”.  As a unifying features, it shows a map of the United States, with dots placed to show cities where newspapers have been severely curtailed or, in some cases, shut down forever.  The film cites various statistics, including the average age of readers (55, and growing older).

But that’s not really what the film is about.

BAWADAO is about the death of *investigative journalism*.  It’s about those reporters who invest months — sometimes a year or more — in developing a story, ferreting out injustice, exposing bad government.  Investigative journalism is very expensive for newspapers; it requires fronting salaries for months, along with the costs of the actual investigations.  It is the very opposite of tweets and Facebook and other social media news.

BAWADAO tracks two investigative journalists from the Philadelphia Daily News, telling their story — both the Pulitzer-Prize-winning series that they wrote and their precarious job position.  The film spends a *lot* of time talking about Philly papers, about how they’ve been bought and sold five times in six years, about how hedge fund managers make lousy publishers.

These are all part and parcel of the problem.  But ultimately, the film claims too much when it says it’s about the (absolute) end of (all) American newspapers.

The Newseum welcomed us to the screening, handing out totebags with the slogan from the movie (“Democracy dies in darkness”.)  The bags also contained a copy of that day’s Washington Post, a bottle of water, and a bag of SmartFood popcorn (you know, so we could enjoy popcorn and a drink at the movies.)

In fact, we’d already read that day’s Post (even though we’re younger than the 55-average-age.)  How about you?  When was the last time that you read a print paper?  How about a mainstream paper, online?  From where do you get your news?

As a writer, I am frequently asked, “What books most influenced your writing?”  I have my stock answers — Lord of the Rings, Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni books, a bunch of other old favorites.  But last week, I heard a segment on NPR that completely threw me for a loop, because it made me recognize a huge influence on my writing, one that I’d never consciously thought of before.

Pippin.

The musical (music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz; choreography by Bob Fosse).  About the son of Charlemagne, sort of.  About the quest for the meaning of life, sort of.  About sex, drugs, and rock and roll, sort of.

I first saw Pippin in the late seventies.  I was visiting my grandmother in Los Angeles, and she had tickets for a production at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.  For reasons long lost in the mists of time, my grandmother didn’t go to the show; instead, she sent my cousin and me.

I remember being absolutely, 100% enchanted by the performance.  And I remember being somewhat embarrassed by the show — there were scenes about men and women (and men and men and women and women) who were sexually interested in each other.  There was rather suggestive dancing.  There were somewhat revealing costumes.  I wasn’t quite sure what to say to Grandma when she asked what I thought of the performance.

But, in my heart, I loved it.  I loved the lyrics.  I loved the music.  I loved the costumes and the staging and the laugh lines and the sheer energy of the entire thing.  And most of all, I loved the message — all about what it takes to be free and committed and independent and bound and, and, and.

I can probably sing every single word of the musical, by heart.  I used to use the soundtrack as one of my writing pieces, because I knew it so well that it didn’t disrupt my creativity.

But it wasn’t until last week, it wasn’t until I was listening to the NPR segment — about the current revival in New York — that I realized something I’d never consciously thought about.  Pippin is about a person who goes on a quest.  And while he’s searching for the meaning of his life, he comes across a troupe of traveling actors.  He becomes one of them, only to find that his future does not lie with them.

And when I heard that, when I thought about that, I realized that I’ve told that story over, and over, and over again.  Rani Trader finds her Players.  Keara finds her Travelers.  Even the As You Wish Series is about women finding their true selves against the backdrop of contemporary theaters.

I love the otherness of acting, the ability to literally and figuratively don masks.  But I never realized just how deep that love was, just how early I learned to tell that story…

(Incidentally, the revival of Pippin sounds ***amazing***, with circus performers interspersed with the acting company.  ::eyes New York with longing::)

So?  How about you?  Ever had a deep epiphany about what you write or what you read?  Care to share it?

This past weekend, we went to this year’s final session of What Makes It Great, a program where music educator Rob Kapilow dissects a specific piece of music.  This class was on Schumann’s Piano Quintet.  The first half of the class involves Kapilow going through the piece in detail, explaining the steps that Schumann took to develop a unique composition, focusing on composition, dynamics, etc.  The explanation is illustrated by students from Curtis, who play snippets as necessary — sometimes as Schumann wrote it, sometimes as Kapilow revised (to demonstrate various points).  After a brief intermission, the quintet performs the piece straight through.  The evening wraps up with a short Q&A session.

We’ve gone to more than a dozen of these classes (a different musical composition and different performers in each one), and I learn a lot each time.  Alas, the learning is relatively short-lived — I don’t know a lot about music theory, and I don’t have a good memory for the specific facts of each lesson.  (After this class, I compared the situation to watching baseball — after a game, I certainly know who won and lost, and I remember the major plays, but I don’t remember the structure — precisely when each reliever came in, which pitch sequence he used to get the batter out, etc.)

The Schumann class was interesting musically, but I was most taken with the interaction of the performers.  As a quintet, they performed without any conductor, trading off who had the lead (sometimes, phrase by phrase).  During the classroom portion of the evening this actually resulted in a minor flub — the pianist and the first violinist weren’t able to play one phrase together (but they got it on the second pass).

Apparently, Kapilow does a lot of consulting with corporations, where he discusses leading from within and group success without designated leadership.  I enjoyed watching the concrete example of the quintet.  And now, I’m thinking about how this applies to my writing.  Not so much the structure of my day-to-day professional career.  Rather, the way it fits into SINGLE WITCH’S SURVIVAL GUIDE.  In that book, Jane Madison has created a school for witches.  I’m sure it won’t surprise any of you that things don’t go all that smoothly.  A lot of the book is about Jane learning how to be a leader.

I think I might buy the quintet, to listen to as I work through the rest of this novel!

So.  Anyone else have examples of leaderless groups succeeding at relatively complex tasks?

I was going to take some time to write about my new writing regimen, and how productive I think it’s going to make me.  And then I was going to take some time to write about how I went to my first baseball game of the season last Thursday, and I enjoyed every minute of it, except for the bits when I thought my frozen fingers and toes were going to fall off.  And then I was going to write about how I am settling in to my new computer system, with all my files on my laptop and a tangle of cords that Mark is helping me sort out.

But none of that really feels fresh or meaningful or important.  Instead, I’ll write about how my friend Tiffany Trent came to visit.  We stayed up way too late on Saturday evening, eating pizza and drinking wine (yeah, it felt a bit like college, too!), talking about books and publishing and friends and publishing and reading and publishing and inspiration and publishing and…  Well, you get the idea.

On Sunday, we headed down to the National Gallery, for its major exhibit on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.  This exhibit, you might be aware, was *savaged* by the New York Times — according to them, the art is mediocre, and only banal fools would waste time strolling through the galleries.

Well, I’m a banal fool.  I’ve been one twice, as a matter of fact.  Last week, I visited the exhibit and spent most of my time reading the extensive curatorial notes on the walls.  This time, I really focused on the paintings, on what stories they told, about how they told them.  Once upon a time, I wrote several short stories based on PRB paintings.  One of them is broken beyond repair, and another isn’t great writing.  But I have a special place in my heart for a third.  And I have ideas for a lot more, now that I’ve really studied the exhibit.

So, I might be writing some short stories soon.  You know.  After I finish all the other writing commitments on my stack

So, a good weekend.  And now I have some writing obligations, so I’m off to follow the new regime.  Did you have a good weekend, yourself?  Did you see, say, hear, or learn anything wonderful?

This past weekend, we went to see the play HUGHIE, at the Shakespeare Theater.  We have very much enjoyed most of the O’Neill plays that we’ve seen (by no means all of the man’s work, but most of the “big” plays.)  We always find ourselves with lots to discuss afterwards.

But HUGHIE was ultimately unsatisfying.  It’s a two-person play, with voice-over narration of some stage directions.  One of the actors (in this case, Richard Schiff (“Toby” from West Wing) has 90% or more of the dialog; the play actually presents substantially as a one-man play.  And it’s less than 50 minutes long.

For this, we paid full price — our tickets, as season ticket holders (and therefore, at a slight discount) were $83 each.  (We also chose to pay for parking — another $16 — rather than fight the subway on weekends, when many stations are closed and trains are regularly spaced at 20-minute intervals but can get off-schedule by as much as an hour.)

I felt cheated.  I felt like I was watching an (excellently crafted) acting exercise.  I felt like I was taking part is an experiment — how little can we deliver for “full” value.

Don’t get me wrong — Schiff did an excellent job.  His character is a small-time gambler, and a lot of the language he uses is 1920s slang, which he made sound absolutely normal and natural almost 100 years later.  After the show, we were able to discuss the motivation of Schiff’s character, and the value of the other person on the stage; we could also discuss a third person who is never present, but who is the subject of most of the discussion.  We debated whether the projections (from behind, on several surfaces that were paintings or windows for most of the show, but then started to depict dream-like images for short scenes) added or detracted from the performance (and mostly, we concluded, they detracted).  We talked about the great sound design, where off-stage noises were made to see quite real.

But ultimately, we felt like we were being gamed by the theater.  That sensation was increased by the fact that the dramaturg’s notes in the program discuss how HUGHIE was the progenitor of many other 20th century one-act plays, such as those by Beckett or Pinter.  I wish that the theater had chosen to stage another less-than-an-hour-long play, to balance the one that it did select.

I’ve questioned the strength of my negative feelings.  After all, I didn’t come home from STRANGE INTERLUDE (a four-hour play) saying, “Wow, we got a lot of minutes for our bucks on that one!”  And I didn’t question the value proposition for other long plays.  And we *did* have some things to discuss after the show.  And we went out to one of my favorite restaurants for lunner (you know, that meal between lunch and dinner) afterwards.

But less than 50 minutes?  That’s too little for too much.

Last night, we went to see GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS, at one of the local theater companies (Roundhouse Theatre.  Incidentally, is there *anyone* who thinks that live productions are more authentic or better-produced if one sees them (in the States) in a theatre, instead of a theater?  Many of the local companies use the British spelling, and I find that unbelievably affected!)

In any case.  GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS.  The Washington Post reviewer noted that GLENGARRY is the second-most trenchant American-theater comment on our nation’s capitalism (with DEATH OF A SALESMAN being the first).  I’m not sure that’s true, but I’m quite intrigued by comparing and contrasting Mamet (essentially a series of dialogs with a few other exclamation points, more or less the way real people talk and manipulate each other, foul-mouthed) with Miller (a “well-made play”, with careful construction of scenes and poetic language that carries its own literary power, but has little relationship to how real people talk in real situations.)

RoundHouse did a great job with GLENGARRY, and the lead, Shelly, was played by one of my favorite local actors.  He did a tremendous amount with facial expressions, conveying entire *speeches* just by the way he turned his lips.

I didn’t remember the play being so sort (75 minutes long), and the ending sort of took me by surprise.  I suspect that I’ll be re-watching the movie sometime soon.  (I remember that the Alec Baldwin role was wholly created for the film, and I remember Jack Lemmon as Shelly, but a lot of the rest has faded…)

Oh – and the *set* was one of the most impressive that I’ve seen on one of DC’s stages — possibly *the* most impressive on one of the small local stages.  The first scene takes place in a Chinese restaurant, and the second scene takes place in a run-down office.  The transition between the two was accomplished by multiple intricate turntables, rotating in different directions so that the restaurants set broke, spun out, and was reconstituted as the office.  They *could* have done the same effect with one huge turntable, but I suspect they didn’t have the space or machinery, and their solution was simply brilliant (receiving a round of applause from the audience.)

And one more “oh” – the actors delivered their lines at the necessary fast pace, but they *didn’t* use typical “Mamet-speak” – that rat-a-tat-tat delivery made so famous by Joe Mantegna.  I preferred the more naturalistic delivery.

Now, I just have to get all that sailor-talk out of my mind, to go write like a lady!