Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Breaking Anne




'Breaking Bad' scribe on her 'deeper' take on 'Anne of Green Gables'

CASSANDRA SZKLARSKI, THE CANADIAN PRESS 04.28.2016



Screenwriter Moira Walley Beckett, for the upcoming CBC television show "Anne of Green
Gables", who also a writer for the series "Breaking Bad", poses for a picture in front of studio
in the CBC building in Toronto, Friday April 29, 2016. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Mark Blinch



TORONTO - The former "Breaking Bad" writer in charge of CBC-TV's "Anne of Green Gables" adaptation says she's on the hunt for "a 12-year-old female Bryan Cranston."

Emmy Award-winning writer Moira Walley-Beckett notes her version of the Lucy Maud Montgomery classic includes "a very, very demanding role" for a yet-to-be-cast leading lady.



Beckett's spin on the coming-of-age tale will be "deeper" and won't shy away from Montgomery's references to a dark and difficult past.
"Anne is damaged, she never wasn't. I'm not reinventing the wheel here in that regard," Walley-Beckett says of delving into lesser known aspects of Anne's tumultuous life pre-Green Gables.

"There's this one line that she says: 'Am I talking too much? Everybody always tells me that I do. It seems to cause no end of aggravation.' When you look at that, what does that mean? What's happened in the past?




"What's happened in the past ... is that she's been smacked across the face for talking too much or she's been punished. And I want those real aspects to inform this modern Anne."

There will be flashbacks to Anne's younger days, as well as backstories for her elderly sibling caregivers, Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert.




"I'm hoping to bring many, many more layers to the story that we love," says Walley-Beckett, who will executive produce with Miranda de Pencier of Northwood Entertainment.

"That's sort of my mantra for this whole project: Why are these people the way they are? What's happened, what's come before and how does that inform how they're dealing with the situation?"

Walley-Beckett is known for dark and twisted tales, most notably her work on the meth-making odyssey "Breaking Bad," starring Cranston.




She won an Emmy for the devastating "Ozymandias" episode — the third-to-last one in which (spoiler alert!) Hank is killed, Walt Jr. finally learns the truth and Walt kidnaps baby Holly, among other things.

The Vancouver native followed that up with Super Channel's "Flesh and Bone," centred on an emotionally damaged ballet dancer.




Both featured desperate, disturbing characters but neither show is all that dissimilar from Walley-Beckett's plans for "Anne," she insists.

The story will still be set in 1900s Prince Edward Island, but it will explore contemporary issues including sexism, bullying, puberty, empowerment and prejudice.

"What I'm interested in about Anne are the realities of her situation," says Walley-Beckett, who moved to Los Angeles about 15 years ago.




"What's her original wounding and what is the baggage that she's carrying in this situation and how has she been affected by the detriments of her life so far? ... You've got to think of her sort of as a rescue dog — as this pup who's been kicked around for years, been in shelters, been abused, hasn't had a safe place to be, hasn't ever been nurtured, and suddenly has an opportunity to find a forever home."

Producers are embarking on a worldwide search for their star.




Open casting calls will be held in Toronto on May 7 and 8, Vancouver on May 14 and 15, Charlottetown on May 28, and Halifax on May 29 and 30.

More casting calls will take place in the United States and Europe. Production is expected to begin this summer.

On the web: http://www.theannesearch.com



Sunday, May 1, 2016

A story of lust and unspeakable sin





The Snow Hen of Jostedal

A story of lust and unspeakable sin

Part 1: GENESIS

Once there was a little legend walking about, that we will name Jostedalsrypa.

Why such a long handle, you may ask? when it would be a lot easier to name him (her!) Junie or Jolie or some such other two-syllable name?

Because Jostedalsrypa is a myth.

Jostedal, as we will now call her (given that the other name is just too long to remember) is sometimes called the Snow Hen of Jostedal. I first encountered her yesterday, though her myth (reality?) goes back to the 1300s, when the Black Plague was harvesting Europe with a scythe as lethal as the Reaper’s.




When all was said and done, when all the ploughing up to make graves and the burning down to make sanitary lodgings had passed, when the few people left on the earth were breathing little sighs of relief here and there,  Nordrik walked the sylvan glades and frosted peaks of Scandinavia. He looked up with tears of gratitude at Scandy’s burning skies and thanked the Norse gods that he had been –

But enough of this, it's getting in the way of the story.



Back to Jostedalsrypa. While this Nordrik (or Norhan, or Norvasken, depending on which scholar you quote) was beating the bushes for edible mushrooms, he heard a stirring sound.

Not like you’d stir your coffee, but more of a feather-on-leaf stir, very frail, a shaking of the bushes so minute that it might just be the stirrings of a bug.

With his ailegaard (walking pole), he gently parted the bushes. Nothing.

Then he kicked the quivering bush with his foot.

This provoked a whooshwhooshwhooshwhooshwhooshwhooshwhooshwhooshwhoosh
sound, akin to the whirring of doves spiralling upwards, of partridges flushed from the bush.





But the wings of this creature (if creature it was!) did not carry it far, as just a few feet off the ground it fell with a dismal thud.

He looked at the strange thing.





It was shaped like a hen. It looked like a hen. It flapped like a hen. It was partially camouflaged by snow, dirty snow that was half-melting and had formed around the hen as a sort of protective covering, an ice nest.

“I will call her Jostedal, after Lake Jostedal and the City of Jostedal and Jostedal Canyon," said Norrdka, lifting the terrified bird from the snow and marvelling at how heavy she seemed in his arms.

Her head jerked this way and that. A snow hen!  Imagine that. So those silly legends must've been true after all. She seemed to have the intelligence of a – well, of a hen. Her feet paddled the air. Still Norrdka trudged, wondering how she would taste stewed up with a side dish of mushrooms.

The Black Plague had left its survivors with a keen appetite.





Nothing that moved was ever wasted,  but because the Snow Hen was displaying nesting behaviour, the family  held back on eating her.  Everyone clucked with joy when  Jostedal produced her first egg. “But do not eat it yet!” cried Gromkin, the snow-crowned patriarch of the family and the one who had suspiciously survived the Plague by hoarding quail eggs in his pockets.

“Why, old man? Why not eat the egg as a side dish with the chicken and mushrooms?” cried Norrdka.

“I have a recipe for Chicken Eggskongg,” Mama chimed in.

“Hatch this egg. Nurture it. It will be extraordinary.”





Even those who did not agree with Gromkin decided they had better listen to him (he would whack them on the side of the head if they didn't), and keep the Snow Hen around as a renewable resource for food.  Meantime, they had this egg, which seemed somehow magical in their sight.

They could not sit on the egg, so after a meagre dinner of wood fungi they coaxed the chicken to sit down and incubate it. It took a lot of shoelaces to tie her down.


But something very strange happened in the night. 





PART 2: PARTHENOGENESIS

Norrdka wasn’t the first to discover what had happened to her.  It was the old man, Gromkin. He saw the two of them over in the corner. The old man had a stick in his hand and was poking at her.

Squatting in the corner with not a stitch of clothing on her comely body was a beautiful young maiden!

Could this be the Snow Hen of  ancient  tales and stories? How was that possible?  Were they all seeing the same apparition?

The beautiful naked maiden whom they soon dubbed Shnowen had grown a sort of covering of white feathers over its body. And to think they had nearly eaten her the night before!





“ARE YOU HERE TO GRANT US THREE WISHES?” shouted the old man to the perplexed-looking chicken-lady.

She turned her head this way and that and made low, barely-perceptible clucking noises.

“ARE YOU HERE TO LAY THE GOLDEN EGG?” he shouted.

“Do be quiet, Father,” Mother cautioned him. “She is perplexed. Besides, she has already laid an egg which may be of inestimable value to us.”

And lo, it was.



As Shnownen walked around the bare cottage pecking the floor and flapping her arms. a crack began to form in the egg. The whole family, all seventeen of them, gathered around it in anxiety and hope.

The crack was very slow to form, and Grandfather Gromkin wanted to whack at it with his splinggboln, but the rest of them held him back.

And just as they were all about to give up and serve up this egg with a side dish of roasted fowl, lo!

Out popped, not a genie or a monster or an apparition or a dybbuk or a djinn. It was a child.





It was as child so tiny and radiant that no one could believe it. “That’s achick,” declared Seventeenth Brother.

“It’s never a chick. It’s a homunculus.”

“An automaton, I’ve seen one of those, it was an old monk that could walk around.”

“Silence!” cried the magical child, who seemed to be made of purest gold.

“State your business,” bellowed the old man, who was very direct.

“I have come here not by accident, but by design. I am here to refine human nature. I see cruelty everywhere, I see grabbing at food that belongs to others, I even see people eating each other’s flesh.”





“NO! It never happened”

“How can you even think such a thing!”

“You must be evil. How can you abuse us like this?”
But the family felt a deep and secret shame.  The Black Plague had certainly brought out the worst in everybody.






“Here is the test,” the magic child replied. “For forty-seven days, you shall have no food. The doors of your humble cabin will all be locked. This is a test of your character and of your ability to be selfless, and will redeem you for the black sins you committed during the Time of Pestilence.”

“Forty-seven days? Whover heard of THAT? Why not forty days and forty nights?”

“Shhhh, Grandpa Gromkin, maybe he’s joking.”

“No. It’s not like that,” broke in one of the many anonymous brothers.  “It means forty days, like Noah's rain in the Scriptures, PLUS the seven days it took for God to create the Universe.”

Ohhhhhhhh.” They all relaxed a little.






The first few days were rather exciting, as the tiny golden child talked non-stop about many amazing things while Shnowen, now called Shwenon, picked and plucked and made hen noises. A few times Eldest Brother pursued her around the cabin, and no one could tell if it was for food, or some other purpose too dark to mention.

After a while, that bird began to look better and better.






Grandfather nagged the magic child day and night. “Are you sure you really meant FORTY-SEVEN days?” he asked him. “Maybe you only meant seven.” There was a faint clinking sound in the background as the family tightened their belts.


On the thirteenth day, they decided to kill the chicken.

Why not kill the chicken? They would not survive unless they did. But the axe and the knife and the other implements of cold-blooded murder were all outside, so they would have to corner and strangle her. This was a nearly-impossible task with a human-sized bird.





So they began to tame her. Here, chicken, chicken, chicken! Nice chicken. Because she was starving to death, she would do just about anything they asked of her, including the unspeakable act I mentioned before.

But I shall draw a veil over such evil.

One day, however, in spite of the brain fog of famine, one of them had an idea.

“Wait!” Sixteenth Brother cried. “If we can last out this wretched forty-seven days, imagine what this bird will be worth for us.”

“We can put her on display.”

“Make her do tricks!”
"All sorts of tricks." 

”And she’s beautiful, and naked. So you know how people will respond.”

“But forty-seven days. . . “

“Listen,” said Grandfather. “I’m close to a deal.”





For along with greed and pride and lust, and anger and envy, and all those other things we’re not supposed to do, Grandfather excelled at crooked wheeling and dealing. Soon he had bargained the child down to twenty-four days. With his mother held hostage, about to be roasted on a spit, he was in no position to argue.

The force-field around the cabin began to waver.

The family wondered if they could hold out much longer, as the chicken was getting skinnier and skinnier and sat listlessly in the corner pulling her feathers out. She looked bad and would not enchant or even scare anyone.

“Goddamn you, Snow Hen,” cried Norrdka, cursing the day he had ever found her. “You started this. You’ll finish it.” He rushed at her with every intention of strangling her.  But she was too feeble to resist, and collapsed with a drawn-out cry.




“NOW have we passed the test?” asked Fourth Brother hopefully. They had, after all, not KILLED the chicken. They had resisted killing the chicken, who had obviously died of natural causes.

“You failed it a long time ago,” the child answered. “What is more, there isno spell. You could have left the cabin any time you wanted to. So you committed yet another sin."
"What could that be?"
"Stupidity."

”Mountebank!” cried Grandfather.

“Look at your Snow Hen, once so beautiful and so full of promise. She has died of hunger and despair. Not only that, there is no meat on her bones to sustain you.”

“I could make a good stock,” Mother suggested.

“I could stuff her, you know, put her on display.. . . “





Silence!  You people do not deserve to be in the presence of magic, because your souls are dark and selfish and full of corruption. You abuse the thing you claim to love the most and keep her captive in terror.”

“No one will know.”

“YOU will know. The knowledge will suck the strength from your soul and blight all your days, and continue for seventeen generations."

“But this is why they made Jesus.! If we repent, he will take all our sins away."

“Not this one.” Disgusted, the child burst into a ball of flame that grew and grew and grew until it consumed the entire cabin.

There was but one person spared. As white smoke surged up from the chimney, a bird with dazzling white feathers emerged and grew larger and larger until she seemed to fill the whole sky. The Snow Hen of Jostedal had freed herself from the prison of human darkness, never to return.






POSTLUDE. The provenance of this piece is strange. Years and years ago, I saw a NOVA program on PBS about a girl named Genie, a "wild child" who had been tied up in a dark room for an incredible thirteen years by her sadistic brute of a father.

The girl couldn't speak, could barely walk, and was the size of a seven-year-old. While the public may have seen a horribly damaged child, the scientific community saw a blank slate - that is, blank except for a lot of dollar signs.

The documentary recounts the stampede of interest from scientist, linguists, neurologists, sociologists, and many other ologists who scrambled for research grants to "study" Genie. This was in 1972, and NOT ONE person believed that it would be preferable for Genie's welfare to be placed in loving foster care until she gained enough stability to work with the scientists. 

It did not even occur to them.

I can't recount all of this heartbreaking story because it's too complex, except to say that the girl was eventually abandoned by the scientists who had so greedily fallen on her when she was released from her thirteen-year prison. When she was finally de-institutionalized, she was taken home by two of the research scientists like some sort of shelter dog, then abandoned a few years later when the grant money ran out. 




At the end of this wretched story, Genie is "put away" in a nursing home, and that's the end of it. Since she's younger than me, she is probably still there, in another sort of prison. I did find a reference from some time in the '90s, when an observer insisted she was "happy and content" in the home she had never chosen. Certainly she has no power to object.

I recently watched the NOVA program again - I'll try to find a link to it, it's riveting - and then acquired a book called Genie: A Scientific Tragedy by Russ Rymer. I was sure this book would be spellbinding, but 50 pages in I began to wonder whose side he was on.

He spent pages and pages on the work of Noam Chomsky, a pop icon and pseudo-linguist who believes there is only one language in all of human experience. As far as I can see, this demented idea has nothing at all to do with Genie and her difficult, halting acquisition of language, but it helps the author distance himself from all that mess and align himself with someone trendy.

But there's something else here, and I have to admit when I first read it I groaned. "I've been diddled," I thought. He listed various "feral" children that had been found roaming the woods over the centuries, and the farther I got into the list the more sure I was that he was having us on, making the whole thing up as a way of disrespecting his readers and jerking the leash.





“Among the cases of wild children discovered over the last seven centuries, more than fifty have been documented. The list includes the Hesse wolf-child; the Irish sheep-child; Kasper Hauser; the first Lithuanian bear-child; Peter of Hanover; the second Lithuanian bear-child; the third; the Karpfen bear-girl; Tomko of Zips; the Salzburg sow-girl; Clemens, the Overdyke pig-child; Dina Sanichar of Sekandra; the Indian panther-child; the Justedal snow-hen; the Mauretanian gazelle-child; the Teheran ape-child; Lucas, the South African baboon-child; and Edith of Ohio.”


I think it was Edith of Ohio that did it. This HAD to be a mean form of satire designed to jerk the reader around. But like the diligent little Googlist that I am,  I did a search for each and every one of these names, and lo, they WERE mentioned somewhere, even if briefly, as part of a list of "wild" children. Most of them are considered myths, an extension of the ancient story of Romulus and Remus who were suckled by wolves.
I'm not sure quite how that led to the story of the Snow Hen, except that the name really grabbed me: it really seemed like something out of Hans Christian Andersen.

The arc of the story is pretty crazy, because there IS no arc: I literally took it word by word with no forethought at all, no sense of what might come next. At various moments you have to stop and try to shape the story a bit, and then of course edit it later for inconsistencies. But I did very little of this.






It occurred to me while making my lunch today that perhaps the Snow Hen is Mary, Mother of God, and the golden child is her son  Jesus Christ, holding those wicked people in the cabin accountable for their sins. He doesn't let them get away with anything, not even throwing the Bible back in his face.  I hope Jesus would approve.










That's what I've been trying to TELL you!




"A Princeton professor has posted his “CV of failures”—a résumé of jobs not won, awards not awarded, papers rejected. As it went viral, he added a “meta-failure”: “This darn CV of Failures has received way more attention than my entire body of academic work.”

Failure is in fashion. “Fail fast” is Silicon Valley’s motto, and failed startup founders readily share their lessons. Famous stars write of their early failures. A whole slew of TED talks celebrate the power of failure to get you to success. CEOs test prospective hires by asking how they failed. We’re told that secretly feeling like a failure, a.k.a. “imposter syndrome,” is a sign of greatness. Masters of the universe are out; vulnerability is in.





But these discussions of failure tend to come with a shallow moral: that after all the disappointment and heartache comes hard-earned success. The implication from CEOs and celebrities who boast of having been knocked down is that they eventually triumphed—and so can you! They use failure to burnish their success, to craft the story, to build the brand, to suggest empathy. Even that Princeton professor’s attempt at humility feels a little hollow when you look at his real résumé, a seven-page litany of publications, positions, and prestige.

We read about the failures that lead to victory. We don’t hear of the ones that end in defeat. They don’t fit our myths, our hero’s journeys. But that is how most of us mere mortals fail; without fanfare and without vindication. We try, fail, try again, fail again, grit our teeth, and move on. True vulnerability is admitting that you’ve failed, you’re still failing, and it hurts like hell. Being honest about this while you’re still in the thick of it is the real triumph."





This little snippet from a magazine called Quartz hits it right on the head.

All the maxims/memes about failure that litter the internet have always made me queasy and uneasy. Embrace failure! There is no failure, failure is just a laboratory for learning, it's the only really-really road to big fat dripping Success! Whoo-ha.

It's a dishonest message, in that they're not talking about real failure, are they? Costly failure. Humiliating failure. The kind you and I experience all the time. The kind you may never, in fact, recover from, because sometimes you just can't.




It's the same with "mistakes": they're great, they're courageous, they're part of the hero's journey! Make as many mistakes as you can, for goodness' sake. It's how you learn, it's how you triumph! 

But what about a mistake that's really a mistake?

What if you're caught pilfering supplies at the office? Trifling with the boss's wife? Speeding at night, after a couple of martinis? Mistake, mistake, mistake.

And what might the consequences be? Let's not think about that. These actions certainly will not lead you on to ever-more-glorious success.

You might learn something from them, but possibly from a jail cell.

I'm just sayin'.



Saturday, April 30, 2016

Spillage, bleedage, and the Wall of Sound





I hate to inflict this on you, because it's just about the ugliest pop song I've ever heard. But I post it here to make a point, or to illustrate a point I made awhile ago.

What I was trying to get across - OK. There is this idiotic song by Bobb E. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, and it is just about the worst example of a Phil Spector Wall of Sound technique (perhaps discovered by accident) called "spill" or "bleed".  He turned off the guitar track for the song, but the guitar could still be heard because all the mikes were jammed together in that suffocating little studio the musicians worked in, and the other mikes picked up the sound, or at least the reverberations of it.





It produced a so-called ghostly, eerie effect that caused a music professor to write a bullshit dissertation about it, but never mind. THIS record, I think, demonstrates the effect quite dramatically, in that the chorus is not just ghostly: it's a whiter shade of pale. It's barely there; it's a whisper. 

Why this effect was used on such an ugly song, played in "double-time" as they say in Musicville, I don't know. It sure needed something to soften it up and make it interesting.

This song isn't just a B-side, it's a C- or D-side, but it may have formed the flip-side of a Ronette classic like Be My Baby. Meanwhile, if you listen to it carefully, you hear ghosts singing, and it's quite chilling.

Not as chilling as Spector firing bullets into the ceiling during recording sessions, but still chilling.






All singing! All dancing! All bad!: Wedding of the Painted Doll




This was one of those posts that COULD have been among my best, if only. If only technology had allowed it.

For years I've been trying to find a decent-quality YouTube video of an extremely hokey number from Broadway Melody, often called the "first movie musical". Made in 1929, it was one of the first talkies, so nobody even knew how to record a conversation, let alone musical theatre. Everyone was still shouting into microphones hidden behind potted palms.

But that didn't stop producers from trying to cash in on the craze for "all singing! All dancing!" (All the time.) They went ahead, and for some reason pulled together some of the most mediocre performers who ever hit the stage.




My favorite number from this very strange cinematic artifact is called Wedding of the Painted Doll. Strange, because the choreography is a nightmare, and the dance performances awkward and amateurish. Who knows? Maybe only the sound mattered at this point, which was a man singing inane lyrics about - you guessed it - the wedding of the painted doll, in an annoying high tenor voice.




So I finally find a decent video of the picture part of this thing - they seem to appear, then disappear as they're taken down due to copyright restrictions, then pop up again. I couldn't make the kind of gifs I wanted because the THREE different programs I use to make gifs were all catawampus, or just not able to process the video. So I ended up with two sets of gifs from two different YouTube videos. One was extremely yellow, and cropped very badly for some reason, but much clearer in picture. The other one was framed right, but grainy and slow-mo. I had to use something called Facegarage (note the ugly watermark), which explains the rough edges of some of these.




This is interesting because the dancer in the middle "cheats" when she drops to a kneeling position: she puts her hand down to steady herself. Her "split" is awkward in that her knee comes up before it straightens. Very rough, and my nine-year-old granddaughter's dance teacher would surely yell at her for this.




This is meant to be the "parson", and he does some neat balletic things in this, though a bit later on he fluffs a move. Why, I wonder, were there no re-takes in this? Was the budget that low, or - more likely - did this have to be rushed out to meet the rabid public demand for "all-singing, all-dancing" talkies?




Here comes the bride, clomping down the stairs oh-so-daintily. Maybe the sound distracted people from such gracelessness.




The parson, once so nimble, fluffs a handstand. His left arm is wobbly and his right hand shifts, so he abandons the move like an off-balance figure skater and cartwheels off the stage.




And here the dancers are flipped one by one, until two of them are lifted and twirled around so fast it's amazing they can still stand.

And so on! The original video (which I've posted at the top) starts with a cartoon, so don't be daunted. The actual number begins at about the one-minute mark.

When mentioning the title of this number, it kept coming out Wedding of the Pained Doll. No comment on that.