Black Out in Richmond
High winds blow out our power, send us to the movies.

Well, billion-eyed audience, many of you reading this in the Lower 48 are dealing with several feet of snow and icy winds. Here, we are flake-free, and sunny, but yesterda howling gusts clocking in at close to 50 mph overtaxed our power system and put some 43,000 people in the dark.

Amie needed wifi to tend to some bid'ness, so I was sent out to find some, and lucked out at Karsen's where I've wanted to go since the place opened. We were accommodated at the bar, plugged in, and drank fulfilling draught Guinness and ate on gourmet mac and cheese and spinach appetizers. Amie was reminded of the time we spent her birthday stranded in a London airport trying to return to Paris.

Then we went to the Byrd Theater see the much touted Charlie Wilson's War, written by my fave Aaron Sorkin, and featuring Tom Hanks and a Texas accent. And there was Julia Roberts, too, who betrayed her big guffaw laugh just once. Problem when Stars try to become Characters. Somehow I can believe her better as Erin Brockovich; a past and quite successful role which made Roberts, playing an ultra-conservative Texas socialite sneering, "Sluts!" at Charlie's partying entourage even more...textured.

Hanks, at certain angles, through no fault of his own, resembles Amie's brother Mark and that pulled us out of the movie's convention. Still, I found him agreeable company. However, a scene of Amy Adams marching in high heels up a corridor, auburn pony tail swishing, was worth seeing and put me in another kind of convention.


I also got a little West Wing rush, with Sorkin's Restoration comedy in- one-door-and-out-the other scene wherein Charlie Wilson is both trying to get weapons to Afghanis battling the Soviets through CIA operative Gust Avrakotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and determining with his staff how he can get himself out of a scandal involving a stripper and cocaine charges.

Wilson's office is run by a Greek chorus of muses that careen through the film like Charlie's quadriga -- the point, I think. They include Amy Adams (center, in the image from allmoviephoto.com) This scene was excellent and demonstrated Sorkin's live theater roots.

There's also Sorkin classic walking-and-talking while in the corridors of power scenes. The great Mike Nichols directed; but, I left the theater feeling Charlie Wilson was a bit perfunctory. The brisk, tight scenes just didn't add up for me as a pleasing whole. The film looked a bit and felt like a 1980s made-for-television movie, and seeing a dark-haired Dan Rather and newscast clips of the time completed the sense.

The ending of the film, where Wilson tries then to gin up funds for repairing Afghan infrastructure, and a quote from him saying how the U.S. "fucked up the end game" leaves the audience thinking: oh, that's why there was Osama bin Laden. The movie has gotten critiqued from both political sides as propaganda. Fact is, with a character like Wilson, nuance and ambiguity was part of his political life and personality. Of course, as Amie pointed out to me, at about the same time, Oliver North was running a secret government out of the White House basement to combat the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

Sigh. Much work to be done here on Colonial Avenue. Later, dudes.

Road Weary
Busy-ness, mourning, and synchronous entertainments

Another Roadside Attraction: Diana, Amie and me,
by Amie; road weary travelers on the way to Mississippi
for a sad occasion. This rocky wayside with gnarly vines
was a RaceTrac gas station in--I think--Tennessee.

Billion-eyed audience, I've not made an additional post this week due to general life and and busy-ness and sort of not thinking I have much to say that isn't getting flogged about in the blogosphere already. When blogging starts feeling like an obligation, or makes me tired just thinking about a way to interpret a current moment--and this, just something I do for "fun" in my copious spare time--then maybe I'm not prioritizing my time well. It ain't like I got nothing to prepare for.

My front burner projects are threatening to erupt into a fire. A book manuscript is due in May; there's a short Tesla-Twain play to be done for the Eureka Theatre of the Virginia Science Museum; I'm helping with a documentary for the Firehouse's 15th anniversary and also responsible for putting together a history walking tour as a raffle item for the March 29 gala; but also a June 7 bus/walk tour for the Valentine Richmond History Center. And then there's the day job --necessary for sustenance and utility payments.

So; I shouldn't really be blogging at all, and in fact, I'll have to post less -- once-a-week if I'm lucky. Thing is, I get annoyed by bloggists who just let their posts lapse without a word or explanation. The 'sphere is crowded by abandoned or half-hearted blogs, bobbing around, like ghost ships stranded in the Sargasso Sea. And I don't want to just stop. So. There I am.

Michael Clayton and Enchanted

Both Amie and I went back into thicket of work and our lives. We tried some entertainment and this worked somewhat; although after you experience has been affected by a singular event, funny how intimations of that event appear in places you'd not expect.

We went to the Byrd Theatre twice this past week and saw Michael Clayton, with two of our favorites, George Clooney and Tilda Swinton, and an otherwise fluffy entertainment
Enchanted, featuring the bare shoulders of red-headed Amy Adams--(here, from About.com)

who also sang sappy music. (Similar terrain was handled much better by Kate & Leopold, without the Disney hoo-haw and ironic send-up of itself) And she's in Sunshine Cleaning that my good acquaintance and Firehouse board member Megan Holley wrote.

Michael Clayton has that taught thriller quality that some good John Grisham-based movies possess and with its layers of subterfuge and corporate malfeasance that doesn't seem unbelievable. There was also a textbook example of an inconvenient whistle blower getting "suicided" with all the brisk efficiency of taking out the garbage.

But at one point Clayton is sent out to consult with a high level client of the firm who has just committed a hit-and-run -- uncomfortably close to home right now.

Enchanted is just goofy and though reaching for buoyancy just seems tired -- except for Amy Adams, whose bursting joy for her storybook life was quite good. The casting in the picture was also first rate: people looked as though they'd come out of an animated world. Timothy Spall reminded me of Smee from Peter Pan.

But, again, in a Times Square scene, the princess has to dodge cars that almost get her. Didn't expect that.

The Late Henry Moss...

Finally, at the Firehouse, the excellent production of The Late Henry Moss. Here two pieces of work sons (Justin Dray, Daniel Moore) try to both explain and hide from the death of their drunkard father (Bill Patton). This is a powerful evening of theater and one in which Shepard appears to be well aware of his Greek tragedy predecessors, and the death and transfiguration myths. Henry Moss is taken to the river of death not by Charon, but a nervous taxi driver (in this case, Scott Wichmann), and guided by the psychopomp of Conchalla, our Jen Meharg.

As director Morrie Piersol stated in the talk back Thursday night; the show wasn't chosen in specific for The Acts of Faith Festival, but fit in, anyway.