The Tooth of Crime - Sam Shepard

Sam Shepard (1943 -)

Well, what's not to love about a post-apocalyptic rock fantasy that confronts the temporal nature of celebrity, mortality and rock and roll ?

The Tooth of Crime takes place at an unspecified deserted wasteland in the not too distant future after some form of Armageddon has taken place leaving a fractured society ruled by rock-and-roll gangs and policed by a system of referees following an esoteric rule system of points and penalties. "The Game" a form of rock-violence where the "Markers", or combatants, fight to secure territory by out singing each other is slowly evolving into a new game with new rules, indecipherable to the aging protagonist Hoss.

At one point Hoss was the undisputed champion of the Markers, but now age has caught Hoss in a maelstrom of self-doubt and as he awaits the arrival of whatever upstart is inevitably coming to take his place he fantasizes about hiding away somewhere, hanging up the towel and living out the rest of his days in quiet obscurity.

"...All the heroes is dyin' like flies they say it's a sign a' the times
And everybody's walkin' asleep eyes open - eyes open
So here's another sleep-walkin' dream
A livin' talkin' show of the way thing seem
I used to believe in rhythm and blues
Always wore my blue suede shoes
Now everything I do goes down in doubt
But sometimes in the blackest night I can see a little light
That's the only thin that keeps me rockin'- keeps me rockin'..."

As Hoss prances around screaming profanity at everyone, his rival can be seen slowly approaching in the distance. Hoss' doubt is waylaid for the time being as he revs himself up with testosterone and illicit substances, he's ready for a kill, he's ready to make his move, he can tear anyone limb from limb (with his lyrics?) ...but then the doubt begins to surface again...and as he oscillates between machismo and uncertainty he arrives at a plateau of self loathing. "...Maybe so. Maybe I am a loser. Maybe we're all losers. I don't care no more...I just wanna back off for a while. I can't think straight. I need a change. A vacation or something..."

At this point Hoss' character development is erratic and somewhat dizzying, he is a confident rock hero at one moment and a lethargic old man at the next, after a few too many songs and endless monologues we are ready to meet the illustrious nemesis. As Act I finally comes to a close he learns his rival, Crow, has finally arrived and Hoss decides to take a nap and gear up for the imminent battle.

Act II opens with a young swaggish Crow and a refreshed and somewhat rejuvenated Hoss circling around sizing each other up. They have decided to fight with shivs, but at the last moment call in a four piece band and a ref and decide to sing it out. As the ref warms up, doing yoga moves and stretching the cast ensemble begins mooning the audience and doing things that seem irrelevant and distracting.  Crow begins the first round singing an alleged story about Hoss and his humble beginnings. The scoring system seems somewhat indecipherable but apparently is based on getting a rise out of the other contender...so in a fight that seems somewhat one-sided, Crow is given infinitely more monologue space, the ref calls a TKO for Crow who is now the champion of... Nevada?

Hoss enraged by the biased calling shoots the ref and realizing his style is too old, he begs Crow to teach him the new style...(at some point Hoss' assistant Becky comes in and sort of goes to third base with herself while begging herself not to...as if someone else is in control of her hands...a flashback of Hoss? No idea...) but after thoughtful deliberation, realizes he is too old to learn and commits his last act of genuine individuality and shoots himself. At which point all his crew members crawl out of the woodwork and ask Crow if the old man finally did it, switching allegiance in less than a second.

Crow, rather than perceiving the prophetic lesson that the young will always grow old and inevitably be replaced, decides he isn't planning on filling Hoss' shoes, he's going to create new shoes and a new path for himself one so individualized it will never be challenged...the play ends with a lustrous solo from Crow who despite his swagger seems to realize this is all nothing but a game, he's won this hand but only grace will help him survive the next.

True West - Sam Shepard

Sam Shepard (1943-)

True West was actually not as horrible as I expected. It is a play about good old fashioned sibling rivalry. Simple and straightforward it seems to be more profound than the endless monologues, strange imagery and constant discussion of menstruation in The Curse of the Starving Class...

 Austin and Lee are brothers both on the crux of midlifing. Austin seems to have it together, he has been shopping around a screenplay he has written and plans to meet with a producer to discuss his options. While he house-sits for his mother he finishes up the last minute touches to his screenplay when Lee, his older, less successful/vagrant/kleptomaniac brother wanders in and seems to resent the fact that his mother has left his little brother in charge. He demands to borrow Austin's car so that he can joyride/rob throughout the neighborhood and after a prolonged refusal Austin finally acquiesces.

Austin is a neat, educated seemingly responsible writer with a family and house payments, while Lee has spent the last few months involved in petty crime and living a life of solitude in the desert. Lee's first assessment of his mother's house is to notice all the valuable items are locked away and inconveniently out of reach. Our first impression is that Austin has a bright future as a potentially brilliant writer...and we're not sure whether or not Lee will make it to the end of the play sober or unincarcerated

When the producer finally comes to discuss the screenplay, Lee who was supposed to be absently stealing comes home only to convince the producer to meet him for a round of golf the next morning. While on the driving range, Lee either genuinely convinces the producer he has a screenplay just as good if not better than his brothers...or somehow gambles him for the option to write a screenplay, resulting in the producer opting out of Austin's screenplay and instead giving Lee an advance to start writing immediately.

Lee tries to get Austin to write the screenplay for him, but Austin who is now seriously depressed, thrown deeper into the insecurities of an ineffectual midlife adamantly refuses and while Lee begins pecking out the screenplay on Austin's old typewriter, Austin begins to taunt him about his alleged brilliant career as a thief. "Maybe I outta' go out and try my hand at your trade since you're doing so good at mine."

Lee doubts Austin has the nerve to sneak into someone's house and even steal so much as a toaster, which Austin accepts as a challenge and in the next scene there is a variety of chrome toasters newly absconded and quietly toasting bread while both Lee and Austin who are now very drunk from what began as celebratory champagne drinking for Lee and despondent binge drinking for Austin slowly destroy their mothers kitchen. Lee who is frustrated by his ineptitude as a typist throws the type writer across the room destroying it, while Austin butters dozens of pieces of toast and litters them about the kitchen.

Slowly the kitchen has been transformed from a nice suburban home to the wild west with havoc and disorder and tumbleweeds of papers from the ruined and discarded copies of screenplays littering the floor. Lee finally gets Austin to agree to write for him, after many attempts, by suggesting that he will take his little brother out into the desert with him. Austin has turned down potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars simply to play follow the leader with his big brother.

When their mother returns unexpectedly the brothers make a weak attempt to explain the disaster the kitchen has become and then after a few snide remarks here and there begin fighting. Austin manages to get Lee on the ground in a stranglehold and as the mother leaves, refusing to watch them tear each other apart Austin is stuck with the decision to either let Lee go and risk getting strangled himself or to just stay put and wait for Lee's rage to subside.

Seven Plays - Sam Shepard

Sam Shepard (1943-)

Buried Child
First performed in 1978 and winning a Pulitzer Prize the following year Buried Child has been heralded as a work of extraordinary vision and force...We all know how I feel about plays though...and this one didn't really blow me away. The plot seemed somewhat simplistic and a little too obvious...also if the narrative hinges on a family secret that has never been discussed...maybe the secret shouldn't be the title of the play?


Act I: Dodge and Halie, now in their late sixties are essentially slowly waiting to die. Dodge, an old codger type with a drinking problem, hides in the basement in a state of existence only slightly elevated from being comatose. The first portion of dialogue is shouted, Halie from the top of the steps down at Dodge...something about Florida, something about horse racing...then Tilden, their oldest son comes wandering in from the fields with an armful of corn...and there's a big discussion/argument about the fact that no one has planted corn in over 12 years and so on. Then Halie wanders away to run errands, leaving Dodge with an admonition not to let Tilden out of his sight, to take his pills and not to drink the whiskey he has hidden between the sofa cushions. The scene ends with Bradley, the next oldest son, hobbling into the room with his wooden leg in a huff, noticing his father asleep on the couch and shaving his head while he sleeps...

Act II: We meet Vince, Tilden's alleged son, although no one seems to either recognize him or even remember he exists, and his girlfriend Shelly. Shelly serves as a foil for the narrative, she wanders around trying to get people to drink beef bullion and drawing out their deepest and darkest secrets...like the one about a buried child. Tilden, who is a Flowers for Algernon type minus the temporary cure, starts telling Shelly about the little tiny baby that just disappeared...while Dodge yells half-heartily "no. don't. stop." While the family secret slowly skin by skin is peeled away. Finally Bradley materializes to shout a bunch of threats and derisive comments around, circling Shelly like a vulture before finally putting his fingers in her mouth. (Oh yeah, Shelly is hanging out with the family alone because after everyone failed to recognize Vince he was coerced into making an errand to buy more booze for Grandpa...if he can't remember me sober maybe a little alcohol will help...)

Act III: Shelly, who is now completely at home at the veritable strangers house, has been wandering around during the intermission snooping through family albums. She is still clinging to the idea that somewhere buried deep beneath all the extreme weirdness there is a Norman Rockwell family waiting to be discovered. She starts talking to Dodge about the pictures she's seen and Dodge seems not to remember the life upstairs filled with the accouterments of a happy American family. In walks Halie with a priest, both of whom seem to be drunk and are still in the process of drinking and "tittering"...Halie is shocked to find Bradley's wooden leg exposed, his leg somehow being extremely embarrassing and she frenetically runs around trying to hide the evidence of his amputation..."You can't leave this house for a second without the Devil blowing in through the front door!" She exclaims while covering up his wooden leg...Halie is surprised to find Shelly loitering around holding a cup and saucer...there's a discussion about who drank the bullion...which seems somewhat irrelevant at this point...and then somehow the family begins arguing about the skeletons in the closet for Shelly's benefit "...I'm just trying to put this all together." Finally Tilden wanders back and then Vince shows up, drunk and exhibiting a Mr. Hyde personality. The gang's all here! Shelly who has served her purpose in dredging up all the secret family detritus after seeing Vince who now seems to be as crazy as the rest of his family, leaves and Vince is left to admire the estate he is now proprietor of as his grandfather rattles off his will and testament and then dies..and Halie is back upstairs shouting down a monologue about the rain while Tilden wanders in with the skeleton of the buried child:

"Good hard rain. Takes everything straight down deep to the roots. The rest takes care of itself. You can't force a thing to grow. You can't interfere with it. It's all hidden. It's all unseen. You just gotta wait til it pops up out of the ground. Tiny little shoot. Tiny little white shoot. All hairy and fragile. Strong though. Strong enough to break the earth even. It's a miracle, Dodge. I've never seen a crop like this in my whole life. Maybe it's the sun. Maybe that's it. Maybe it's the sun."

I don't know. Maybe I'm jaded from reading too many books from the 1970's...but this didn't seem Pulitzer material to me. I doubt if it would receive a Pulitzer today considering the fact that incest and infanticide is no longer as edgy as it was then. We've become immune to anything shocking from the horrific establishment of reality TV and a wider exposure to real life. That being said, a play about the failure of the American Dream...the family isn't a Norman Rockwell painting but rather a Francis Bacon with all the distortions and disillusionments that come from looking in the mirror and finding something truly hideous...feels a little overworked. Did we still think there was an American Dream in the 70's? I thought we had worked that out of our system with Theodore Dreiser. Denis Johnson's characters live in a hellish world where there is always a modicum of hope beneath the sludge of reality...which I think tends to be a more interesting plot line then: American family has horrible skeletons in the closet...the American family has been eroded and disillusioned.

Angels - Denis Johnson

Part of the American Dream is the ability to recreate yourself, the ability to face insurmountable odds and emerge victorious, to push our own sisyphean boulders towards the top of the hill and have the faith that they will roll forwards instead of back. 

This book is about everyone else. Those who must live the antithesis of the dream in the grim, gritty reality of life. 

Written in 1983, Angels is chronologically the sequel to Tree of Smoke and continues the narrative of broken people clinging to each other, nails gripping the edge of sanity through the maelstrom of the catastrophic. 

We meet Jamie on a bus, her two little daughters in tow, she is leaving her cheating husband, unsure of where she is going she goes, pressing forward with the hope that anything has to be better than the life she's leaving behind. 

"In the Oakland Greyhound all the people were dwarfs, and they pushed and shoved to get on the bus, even cutting in ahead of the two nuns, who were there first. The two nuns smiled sweetly at Miranda and Baby Ellen...but Jamie could sense that they found her make-up too thick, her pants too tight. They knew she was leaving her husband and figure she'd turn for a life of whoring. She wanted to tell them what was what, but you can't talk to a Catholic."

On the bus she  meets Bill Houston, drifting at this point, struggling with the aftermath of the Vietnam war and the ravaged crevices of his soul. Although an unlikely couple, Jamie and Bill find solace, to a degree, in each others company and the trip becomes waylaid in one rest stop and grungy hotel after another. Eventually after a clash over their diminishing funds they part ways and Bill heads to Chicago, where Jamie eventually follows only to be brutally raped. Bill eventually finds her and picks up the pieces of her increasingly shattered and broken personhood and brings her to the family estate in Arizona, a place littered with broken cars and hopeless people. 

In Arizona Bill and Jamie are now thrown together with the rest of the clan, Burris, James and a superstitious old mother with the signs of dementia percolating through her incessant chatter. James, who was somewhat the star of "Tree of Smoke" now has become a war addled abusive drunk. The hope and childish immortality of the young James have been replaced by an angry man stuck in a quagmire of suffocated ambitions, asphyxiated by his own flaccid ineffectual dreams, constantly reliving the horror of Vietnam in the banalities of everyday life.

"...as he walked beside the road he felt his anger burning up in the heat of noon, and saw himself, as he often did when he was outdoors on hot days, being forged in enormous fires for some purpose beyond his imagining. He was only walking down a street toward a barroom, and yet it seemed to him - it was not the first time- that he belonged in Hell, and would always find himself joyful in its midst. It seemed to him that to touch James Houston was to touch one iota of the vast grit that made the desert and hid the fires at the center of the earth..."

Eventually the Houston brothers come up with a scheme to rob a bank, a "foolproof" plot that can only go terribly wrong, and Bill finds himself in prison facing the death penalty while Jamie is sent to an asylum to get help with her substance abuse and to relocate herself into the realm of the sane, still hopeful that one day she will be that person with a piano in the living room, and daughters that sit at the dining room table with their homework. Her visions are not of grandeur but for the mundane normalcy of a life continually beyond her grasp.

Although Denis Johnson is an incredible writer, this was very obviously a first novel. While his other novels tend to situate themselves in the gritty interstitial realm between life and death, where even without hope there is still possibility, Angels seems fixated on death, every moment one extended prologue of the inevitable. As Johnson's work matures he dwells less on the finality of life and more on the beauty buried deep within the grime and detritus of everyday life for the marginal and all those whose dreams remain forever buried in the recesses of the heart.

Scoop - Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)

The book begins with two cases of mistaken identities. The first being between the notorious and prolific writer John Courtney Boot and his obscure country cousin, also a writer but as the author of Lush Places a nature column for The Daily Beast, a job which had been passed on to him by the widow on the death of its previous owner. William, although at first reluctant to take on such an auspicious column, with diligence and perseverance has slowly come to enjoy his column and the writing now comes to him virtually without effort, bringing us to the second case of mistaken identity.

William's sister Priscilla, as a joke one afternoon, carefully went through her brothers column about the daily habits and lifestyle of the country badger, one of his more "finished essays" and throughout substituted "badger" for "the crested grebe," resulting in a public outcry and communal rage at its publication with readers writing in with their horror and disapproval:

"His mail had been prodigious; some correspondents were skeptical, others derisive; one lady wrote to ask whether she read him aright in thinking he condoned the practice of baiting these rare and beautiful birds with terriers and deliberately destroying their earthy homes; how could this be tolerated in the so-called twentieth century? A major in Wales challenged him categorically to produce a single authenticated case of a great crested grebe attacking young rabbits..."

William anxiously prepares to defend himself to Lord Copper ("no man shall call me a liar unchastised. The great crested grebe does hibernate...") 

While William waits for what he assumes will be his dismissal, it is proposed to Lord Copper, a newspaper magnate and proprietor of The Daily Beast that the perfect reporter to cover the brewing war in the African Republic of Ishmaelia would be John Boot, and after receiving the tip he promptly tells his editor to quickly hire Mr. Boot at whatever cost and send him on his way. Lord Copper fails to specify which Boot he means and the editors after discovering William working for them hidden away in the bowels of the Nature section, quickly call him to London for his quick promotion and speedily dispatch him off to the African continent. 

While he waits for his passport and sundry items deemed necessary for travel to a foreign and inhospitable continent he is put up in a small hotel where the surroundings are dramatically different from his semi-poverty stricken room on his family's country estate.

"The room was large and faultless. A psychologist, hired from Cambridge, had planned the decorations - magenta and gamboge; colors which - it had been demonstrated by experiments on poultry and mice - conduce to a mood of dignified gaiety..."

Finally William arrives in Ishmaelia and despite his lack of experience and general ineptitude, somehow manages to get the "scoop" while spending a prodigious amount of the newspapers money for such necessary items as inflatable canoes, boxed Christmas dinners and a young German girls promised ability to get "tips" and infiltrate the top echelon of government power for stories to report home. News of his success quickly circulates and he becomes a sort of newspaper celebrity; as he returns to London the country is awash in awe for this young indomitable reporter who faced certain death to write the story of a lifetime. While the Newspaper quickly tries to capitalize on their young reporters celebrity status, William is anxious to get back to his quiet life of genteel poverty far from the hubbub of the city and quietly returns to his family estate. 

Lord Copper, to further capitalize on William's success asks his editor to ask the Prime Minister for a knighthood for his reporter, but again after first names are left unspecified, John Boot the author is knighted instead. The Beast hires John Boot and quickly sends him off to Antarctica to report and simultaneously cover up the misunderstanding.