slam BAM thank you ma'am

slam BAM thank you ma'am
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

Met up with Rahul last night for some Beckett at BAM -- his first, which is all kinds of risky for me, because Beckett productions skew to the very very good or the very very bad with very very little middle ground.

Mitigating my risk was knowing that John Turturro and Elaine Stritch were in the Endgame cast, and we were soon to learn of two others (whose names I'm having trouble ferreting out from the BAMbill) who nearly outshone the two knowns.

Just nearly. The performances were pitch perfect across the board (nearly: Elaine disappointed just a smidge, playing the part a little too hard, but I think maybe my expectations are too high for my favorite dame.) and R generously guffawed where expected, giggled on cue, and had periodic extended laughing fits, all good signs that I hadn't led him too far astray with the suggestion.

But it was a safe bet really: R and I met in a hostile office environment where we quickly and almost subversively discovered that we found the same crazy absurd realities funny.

And that we were the only ones laughing.

Followed the performance with an astonishingly comforting Italian/Spanish/Portuguese meal in a Brooklyn basement that felt like a Spanish cava (is that a wine cellar? maybe it's a wine... anyway: we were in a wine cellar.) sharing astonishing, comforting stories about misadventures with one-eyed grandmothers and other excavated memories.

And then the subterranean ride home in which R demonstrated his unnerving knowledge of the NY public transit system's coming and goings, listening like a Pawnee guide to the incoming rail cars from a central spot and dashing to the appropriate platform when the train came rushing in, to take us back across the river to my swank corporate crib, already chasing into the next early morning hours but still, done too soon.

playing chess with duchamp

a found poem

scored by lines
of laughter and loss

[he] underwent
a long and strange
psychoanalysis

in shorter and longer fictions
sought to free himself
to find his own voice

soon infiltrated
he fled Paris

played chess with Marcel Duchamp
(he beat Beckett badly)

took up residence
in a small village
where no one spoke English

and he had nothing in English to read


Found in the Boston Globe »

All the words shown here appear in the same sequence that they appeared in the Globe article; I took liberties and deleted select words in between. The one addition is shown in [brackets]. With apologies to Leland de la Durantaye, the author of the original piece.

beckett at the gate

beckett @ the gate
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo.

"The greatest weapon the English ever gave the Irish was their own language."

Placard at the Writer's Museum in Dublin

Beckett Festival on in Dublin to celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth. Caught a great showing of Play and Catastrophe this evening -- also the last night of the Festival. More on that later. Earlier today read up on Beckett in the Writer's Museum and learned that, having emigrated to Paris, he had difficulty returning home to Dublin -- to the point of experiencing physical pain and sickness.