When you screw up…

/ Steve Patterson / Leave a comment

…do it big:

NEW YORK Rick Karlin of the Albany (N.Y.) Times-Union has created a bit of a buzz in the newly race-charged race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama by posting on the paper’s blog, Capitol Confidential, the following:

“I suppose there could be lots of tea leaf reading in this one, but now its AG [Attorney General] Andrew Cuomo on Talk 1300, minutes after the governor came on. Cuomo, to be fair, has been on the radio show a few times, if memory serves me, but his take on Hillary’s win in NH is that that small-state primary with its retail politics is a good thing. ‘It’s not a TV crazed race. Frankly you can’t buy your way into it,’ Cuomo said. ‘You can’t shuck and jive at a press conference,’ he added. ‘All those moves you can make with the press don’t work when you’re in someone’s living room.’”

I’m betting Bill Clinton’s face just exploded.

Standing on the Eve of New Hampshire

/ Steve Patterson / 5 Comments

So the first real primary starts today, unlike Iowa (which for Republicans is like tossing names in a hat and which for Democrats is like Roberts Rules on acid), and it’s time to make a total ass of myself and handicap the candidates.

Democrats
Obama: Short on experience, good organizer, smart and sparkling with charisma. Winner.
Clinton: Long on experience and smart, but charisma of a sewer commissioner. Loser.
Edwards: Medium experience, smart, some charisma but ultimately lightweight. Loser.
Richardson: Long on experience, short on name recognition, so little charisma that I can barely remember what he looks like. Loser.
Kucinich: Can’t even spell the crazy bastard’s name. Loser.

Republicans
McCain: Long on experience and older than grandpa. Loser.
Romney: Artificial intelligence. Loser.
Guiliani: The more you know him, the less you like him. Loser.
Huckabee: Medium domestic experience, foreign policy moron, high on charisma, but completely crazy and believes in Adam and Eve. Loser.
Thompson: Needs frequent naps. Loser.
Ron Paul: Utterly bugfuck. Loser.

And there you have it. If I left anyone out, it means I couldn’t remember them. In other words: loser.

Morning Maniac Music

/ Steve Patterson / 4 Comments

“Okay people, you have heard the heavy groups. Now it’s time for morning maniac music. Believe it. It’s a new dawn.” — Grace Slick introducing the song “Volunteers” at WoodstockGoddamn I love politics. Some people dig sports, know all sorts of obscure stats on who played center for the Cowboys in the Seventies, etc. Other people play the ponies. There’s a vice for everybody, as Shannon Wheeler (who writes and draws the “Too Much Coffee Man” comic) puts it: you can’t escape addiction–choose yours wisely.

Just as every gambler taps out and every sports geek sees their team slaughtered now and again, those of us who love politics get used to being lied to and watching our ship slide toward the rocks. Don’t get me wrong: if there’s anything the last eight years has taught approximately 78% of the U.S. population, it is that it matters who wins. But for the true politics junkie, the journey is literally half the high. Which is why we get all wired on nights like tonight.

Because it wasn’t just that Barack Obama beat the supposedly unbeatable Hillary Clinton (or that other guy) or that Mike Huckabee (who?) beat the hair farmer from Mass. who spent $7 million dollars of his own bucks; it’s that they both won decisively. And there’s nothing more fun than taking the conventional wisdom and tossing it out the 27th-story window to watch it fall and shatter into, uh, 7 million pieces.

This isn’t to say Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States (and certainly doesn’t mean Huckabee will be). But it does intimate that 2008 may be one of those seismic elections where pretty much everything changes, the pros get smashed, and we wake up November 4th a little freaked.

It’s funny, because I’ve been through one of those. It sucked, unfortunately, but there’s no denying that 1980, when Reagan was elected, completely changed the landscape and left us with a legacy that we’re still dealing with. (I know Republicans liked to crown Bush II as the new Reagan, but I said all along that he was the new Nixon, and that’s what he turned out to be. I get one right once in awhile.) I was barely hatched when Kennedy won in ’60, but I watched the Democrats wander in the wilderness for years in search of a new Jack, just the way rock critics wistfully kept trying to find a new Dylan in the Seventies. There was one Jack Kennedy; there’s one Bob Dylan. End of story.

I know Obama reminds some people of Kennedy, and there’s a little bit of that New Frontier gleam in his eyes, but, in truth, Obama reminds me of Reagan. Not in any policy sense imaginable–there he’s, if anything, the anti-Reagan. But he’s got that rock star thing budding, that catch in the throat that he might be real thing, and he can speak. Really speak. Smack you in the head and nail the imagination speak. And even if you hated Reagan as thoroughly as I did, there was something goddamn infuriatingly likable about the guy that would just drive you crazy. That quality wins elections and changes political landscapes.

As for Huckabee, he might get croaked in New Hampshire, probably by McCain and Romney–though Mitt has that past the due date smell beginning to waft from him, but he’s poised to do well in South Carolina with the social conservatives, and if he rebounds out of there, he might have a chance. Which would be beautiful, man, because you will see the bloodiest civil war in a national party since McGovern won the Democratic nomination in 1972. If Huckabee somehow survives that, he’s gonna look like he’s been dragged behind a truck for a year, and the Democratic nominee, whoever that is, will cream him the way Johnson creamed Goldwater.

Clinton’s strong in New Hampshire. She might beat Obama there, which would set up an epic battle in South Carolina, where Edwards will be a factor unless he gets so totally croaked in New Hampshire that he’s no longer viable. (I like John Edwards, but, ironically enough for a famously successful trial lawyer, he just can’t seem to close the sale.) So if this is a three-act, it looks like tonight we’ve seen Act I, New Hampshire could be Act II, and South Carolina could be Act III. No matter what, it was a great night for Obama, an exciting night for Huckabee, a chance at survival for Edwards (though not a strong one), a sobering night for Clinton, and a suck-ass night for Romney, who deserves it ’cause he’s an animatronic construct.

Goddamn, I love politics.

How the World Sees Us

/ Steve Patterson / 2 Comments

On my friend Patrick Wohlmut’s blog “i want to be sedated,” he recently wrote that writer’s fans apparently like a rough and tumble, pseudo-bohemian image. To wit:

My friend Steve Patterson should, by all rights, be extraordinarily famous. Not only is he a kick-ass writer, he has the kind of look that screams, “Hard Drinking, World Traveling, Gonzo Journalist.” It’s very appealing.This is extraordinary to me because, of course, I don’t know whatever he’s talking about. In my mind’s eye, I seem to be just another mild-mannered editor by day who tends to his garden and just occasionally writes plays where people jam guns in the mouths of other people and scream. Go figure. But, hey, if it helps sales….

Steve

P.S.: It should be noted that Patrick is also a certified kick-ass writer.

The Long Fade

/ Steve Patterson / 5 Comments

The other day, I heard myself ask another theatre practitioner, “So how many dimmer packs do you guys have?” And it kind of struck me what an utterly obscure question that is to the majority of people. “Uh, you mean a dimmer switch?” Kind of. I’m not even a lighting guy. I’ve hung a few lamps, moved some barn doors around, but the whole of black cables and gel combinations remains some weird alchemy to me.

But I do love the lights. When I go to someone else’s show, after I’ve finished checking out the program, I sometimes find myself looking at the grid and counting instruments, trying to figure what’s focused where. And I think that’s because I’m hooked on the fade. It’s just so damn beautiful when it’s done right. The way the color drains and carries your emotion from one place to another. And a perfect crossfade? It’ll sometimes take me right out of a play because I’ll be thinking: my God. Go back and do that again.

It’s curious because it relates to where you are when you write a play. Are you inside the characters, looking out, or are you among the audience, looking in? That shifts around for me. But when I write fade in the stage directions, I am most definitely in the audience, and I can feel those lights moving me.

A number of years ago, I saw a one-man show that had, at the end, the longest, most achingly beautiful fade I had ever seen. I mean, staging a fade that long was sheer nerve, somewhere between utter arrogance and genius. Here’s why: the piece was about a character with all these different opposing facets to his personality, and, as the light so slowly drained, the effect tired the viewer’s eye so it seemed that the actor’s face itself was shifting, rearranging itself, over and over. Forever changing without resolution, which was the point of the piece. What else so reflects the human condition but unstoppable change? Yet the act itself, essentially just slowly turning off a light, was so simple.

That image is still in my mind’s eye. It’s still changing. And so am I.

An Old Country

/ Steve Patterson / Leave a comment

“Let’s meet tomorrow if you choose beneath the bridge that they are building on some endless river.” –Leonard Cohen–I grew up in the Northwest. Mostly. I spent part of my childhood in California, a perfect time to be a sun-bleached child during the Sixties in a world of surfboards and motorcycles. But, really, I’m a product of tall evergreens and deep forests. We moved back to the Northwest–Southern Oregon–when I was eleven, and I came of age amid great rains and summers of stunning beauty. Oregon in the summer may well be the most perfect place on earth. In winter, it tests your soul with darkness, a constant dampness, and a war with nature that nature always wins.

The old saying goes: if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? It does. Forget your human conceits: the question is entirely metaphoric. I have heard a 200-year old cedar fall, split by storms, and it cares little whether humans are present to hear its freight-train death. The trees predate the whites, predate the Native Americans. They were here long before naked apes clambered among their branches and saw the rock-strewn coast, and they’ll be here when we’re dust and our cities are tangles of huckleberry and Doug Fir.

A friend of mine grew up in the desert. He has a sharp and clearly defined personality. But it seems that living here, one takes on a sense that everything is imbued with a deep sense of mystery and continuous change. That the world can’t be entirely understood, and that we’re but guests. I once went for a solo hike in the woods and realized I’d lost my way, the trail somehow obscured by madrone and bracken ferns. For a moment, I felt the most perfect panic, knowing that the gorgeous scenery held no solace and was entirely indifferent to my plight, and that if I didn’t find my way to the trail before nightfall, I would be but another animal swallowed by immense darkness. I sat and cried when I rediscovered the trailhead and never forgot how vulnerable I’d been.

In the Northwest, one realizes that nature is completely immune to your suffering. You are just one facet of its splendor and, ultimately, fodder for its ongoing survival.

Steve

Note: The photography above is mine. It shows the Illinois River in Southern Oregon, on the gateway to the Kalmiopsis Wilderness Area.