Keanu A-Z News Reports
Wednesday, June 20, 2001
Berkeley Rep extends 'Laramie' for nine more shows waits, Keanu catch Beckett at ACT
[SF Gate 20/06/2001]
ALL FOR 'NOTHING':Preview performances of Bill Irwin's one-man realization of Samuel Beckett's "Texts for Nothing" last week drew Tom Waits and Keanu Reeves on separate nights to the Geary Theater, where the show opens tonight.
Reeves called the box office at the last minute for a single ticket and was every inch the down-to-earth, no-Hollywood-bullfunkie star after the show, graciously signing autographs and posing for snapshots for a few lucky audience members.
So is Keanu heading into a Beckett phase? I can hear it now: "I can't go on.
I must go on. Wh-o-o-o-ah."
Monday, June 18, 2001
Crashes are part of racing, part of fans' interest
[The Sporting News 18/06/2001] snippet
I've always wondered about the validity of accusations that people attend auto races in the hope of seeing crashes.
It's a pop-culture cliché. Example: Keanu Reeves' character in the movie Parenthood goes tumbling in a spectacular wreck at the local drag strip. One of the track staff approaches him afterward, and says, "Can you come back and do it again next week? The fans loved it."
The most radical of the old "Roman circus" accusations don't bother me that much. Certainly, there are twisted human beings who take pleasure in watching people die. It would be dumb for me to suggest that none of those people ever go to auto races. But I'm convinced that's a radical fringe element that's not great in numbers.
The question then, for me, is this: How much of the appeal of auto racing is derived from the thrill of witnessing a wreck?
The crashes themselves probably don't account for racing's widespread popularity. Stunt-driving exhibitions attracted some spectators in the decades after World War II. They featured precision exhibition driving in new sedans, and also spectacular staged wrecks of junkyard-refuge cars. However, those shows never amassed the kind of interest that racing did.
I'd suggest that's because a larger number of fans were interested in competition. Critics of the sport might say that racing competition offers more of an adrenalin rush for spectators when a wreck occurs spontaneously, or that morbid interests are stimulated because there's a greater genuine risk of injury to the race driver than to the stunt driver.
Races I've seen that stand out in my memory include three with smashing conclusions, one that resulted in injury:
The 1976 Daytona 500, when David Pearson and Richard Petty crashed while battling for the lead coming off the fourth turn of the final lap. Petty's car stalled in the infield grass, while Pearson kept his car running and limped across the finish line to win.
The duel between Emerson Fittipaldi and Al Unser Jr. in 1989. It ended when the two drivers' cars touched wheels in Turn 3 of the next-to-last lap, sending Unser spinning into the wall while Fittipaldi motored on to his first Indianapolis 500 (news - web sites) win.
Davey Allison's victory in The Winston, NASCAR (news - web sites)'s all-star event, at Charlotte Motor Speedway in 1992. The cars of Allison and Kyle Petty collided as they crossed the finish line. Allison, a half-car in front, spun. His car slammed into the wall, driver's-side first, and instead of celebrating in victory lane, he was airlifted to a local hospital for treatment of a concussion and bruises. However, other races have achieved classic status for other reasons: the three-abreast photo finish of the first Daytona 500 in 1959; Unser Jr.'s victory over Scott Goodyear in a side-by-side showdown at Indy in 1992, the closest finish in the history of the 500; Dale Earnhardt (news - web sites)'s charge from 18th place to victory in the final two laps at Talladega last October; the epic duel between Jim Rathmann and Rodger Ward at Indy in 1960; and Bill Elliott's remarkable showing in the 1985 Winston 500 at Talladega.
This season, marred by the death of the legendary Earnhardt in the Winston Cup season opener, has seen record-level television audiences for Fox and, seemingly, rejuvenated interest at the gate. Is that coincidence, or cause-effect?
It's probably a little of both. The Earnhardt story has been of enormous interest to broadcast networks and national publications. NASCAR racing has been in the face of hundreds of thousands of fans and potential new fans. Some may have responded in hopes of seeing another crash, or even another driver death. Some may have responded out of curiosity, without regard for or even in spite of the subject of the coverage. And some may have been repulsed.
Children can usually be depended on for their candor, and I've heard numerous youngsters on their way to a grandstand seat voice the hope that they see a wreck.
That was not my attitude when I first began attending races. In fact, I was a little fearful until I began to realize the drivers were not going to crash every time they roared into the first turn.
My conclusion is that crashes may have a greater appeal for more fans than "purist" race fans realize, but it's not nearly as important as racing's most strident critics would suggest.
Yes, there are the highlight video tapes of crashes such as And They Walked Away, but I'm not sure how many are sold, or to whom. If I were reaping the profits from souvenir sales for a driver such as Jeff Gordon or Dale Earnhardt Jr., I wouldn't swap them for rights to a crash-highlights video.
In all the racing I've done, I've never had a wreck as spectacular as Reeves' in Parenthood, and I'm not interested in thrilling fans in that manner. However, I don't doubt for a second that such incidents are attention-getters.
All things considered, I'm OK with that.
Sunday, June 17, 2001
Buddhism beyond Tibet
[SF Gate 17/06/2001]
Hollywood has shown quite an attachment to Buddhist themes over the last seven years. But have you noticed that most of those movies are about one relatively minor sect, and one particularly photogenic follower of that ancient philosophy?
Can you say "Dalai Lama?" Can you say "Tibetan Buddhism?"
Since 1994, we've had "Seven Years in Tibet," the lesser Brad Pitt vehicle; "Little Buddha," with Keanu Reeves playing the enlightened one; and "Kundrun," the Martin Scorsese movie about the young Dalai Lama.
And those are only the big budget films. There has also been "The Cup," about a Tibetan soccer team; 'Windhorse," about the brutality of the Chinese occupation of the Dalai Lama's homeland; and "Himalaya," currently playing at a theater near you.
Of course, there are some good reasons for this infatuation with Tibet, such as the heroic struggle to preserve Tibetan culture and religion. On the other hand, there are lots of other heroic struggles to preserve cultures and religions around the world.
As Orville Schell points out in his book, "Virtual Tibet," what Hollywood really loves about the remote mountain kingdom is it's the perfect place on which to project all our escapist fantasies about Shangri-La. It's so far away that we don't really have to deal with it, and so exotic we don't really have to understand it.
How about see some other movies with another take on the teachings and culture of Buddhism?
If so, Michael Wenger has seven more films to show in an ongoing series being shown at the Asian Art Museum in Golden Gate Park. It's called "Real to Real: Buddhism and Film."
Many of them are not obviously "Buddhist" films. For example, The next one on the schedule, "Blue," by Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, stars Juliette Binoche, who plays a young woman who loses her husband and daughter in a car crash. It'll be shown this Friday (June 22) at 7:30 pm.
So what's Buddhist about "Blue?"
"It's about suffering, and how a person goes into retreat, gets through it, and becomes a wonderful and generous person by following her heart," says Wenger, the dean of Buddhist studies at the San Francisco Zen Center. "Ultimately, it's about liberation."
All of the films in the "Real to Real" series begin with an introduction by a different speaker, and conclude with an audience discussion. Among those coming up are Rina Sircar introducing "Burmeses Harp" on July 13, Reb Anderson on the Bill Murray film "Groundhog Day" on August 10, and Maxine Hong Kingston talking about 'Monkey Makes Havoc' on September 7.
Last month, I checked out "Aje Aje Bara Aje," an engaging 1989 Korean film by director Im Kwon-Taek. It's the story of two young Buddhist nuns - one who stays in the convent and leads the traditional monastic life, and another who goes out into the world for some misadventures with a strange assortment of Korean men.
This film casts light on a one of those old Zen koan, a cosmic inquiry that predates "Millionaire," the $64,000 question, and has no final answer: "Your soul stayed here, and your body traveled," the abbess Korean abbess asks. "Which one was you?"
"It's about the tension between living a monastic life, or going out and applying Buddhism in the real world," said Professor Robert Buswell, a Buddhist scholar at UCLA who spent five years training as a Zen monk in Korea.
Other existential questions are explored in "Groundhog Day," a movie where Bill Murray plays a television reporter who keeps reliving the same day over and over again.
"In some ways, it's about karma," says Wenger. "Everyday we may lead a life that we think is monotonous, but every little decision we make has certain effects.".
Friday, June 01, 2001
THE FADE OF AQUARIUS
[Yahoo Daily News 01/06/2001]
Here's to the Boomers
NEW YORK -- As surely as Run-DMC became high art after the rise of Vanilla Ice, as brilliant as Keanu Reeves appears in the wake of Ben Affleck, it requires the relentless entropy that embodies American popular culture to make us appreciate the baby boomers.
"The biggest, richest, most demanding and self-referential generation in American history," Zev Chafets called them recently in New York's Daily News. "Everything we touch" -- Chafets counts himself among the bearded fortysomething crowd -- "we turn to trivia. What baby boomer has become a great civil rights leader, philosopher, public intellectual or moral authority? Who is a candidate for sainthood? Who, for that matter, has written a novel that will last? The truth is, we have dedicated ourselves to only two goals: making money and amusing ourselves."
Hypocritical, boring and annoying the boomers surely are and always will be, but perhaps we professional boomer bashers -- I've spent much of the last decade asking them to please, please die or at least shut the hell up -- have gone too far.
Certainly those of us who came along after 1960 have every right to take the Class of '68 to task. They had the chance to change the world, to make revolutions both social and political, and very nearly pulled it off. They gave up the ghost just shy of the finish line, trading in their Molotov cocktails for three-piece suits, leaving their unfinished business and their skyrocketing divorce rate to Gen X. Little did they know, or care, that such an opportunity might never again present itself.
Nonetheless, boomers won some important battles while they were losing the cultural war to their uptight Protestant parents. A self-interested protest movement to evade the draft not only caused the United States to pull out of its absurd misadventure in Vietnam, it made it all but impossible for the Pentagon (news - web sites) to rely on 18-to-21-year-old cannon fodder for future acts of aggression. They hardly ended racism, but they settled for a middle ground called "tolerance" -- don't like 'em but don't lynch 'em -- that Gen Xers have for the most part followed up with genuine, no-comment acceptance of people who look different.
Their only worthwhile novelist is John Irving, but most of their our-music-was-better-than-yours hyperbole grates because it's so damned true. Rock was never better than when it was for and by boomers -- Hendrix, early Stones and cool primordial garage punk like the Seeds and Standells are nothing short of divine -- and never any worse: Janis and Zeppelin and later Stones and everything they play on your local classic rock station.
Boomers failed miserably, but they had a good time doing it; whether you call them hedonists or existentialists, they set an example for generations to come. Maybe you'd like to spend the rest of your days sucking on a bong or maybe you wouldn't, but who can deny the appeal of open sexuality, great music and cool vibes -- all paramount boomer ideals? Yes, yes, yes: Free love begat AIDS; Woodstock and Altamont were one and the same. But just because they couldn't figure out how to sleep around without breaking hearts or spreading viruses doesn't mean that such things couldn't be done or shouldn't be attempted.
Let us also mourn the retirement of the Uber Boomer, William Jefferson Clinton, for he was a president who tried to govern with a peaceful, easy feeling and tried to sleep around without consequence, and predictably, yet unfortunately, failed miserably. Like the generation of whom he was the first president, Clinton squandered the chance to change everything. Rather than do good he did little, but what little he did he did well.
Clinton presided over eight years of expanding economic opportunity and personal freedom, and though he sucked up to big business, he tried to look squeamish about it. He barely made an effort to cure the sick among the poor but felt for their plight. When his voracious sex drive got him in trouble, he lied where truth would have done better; still, his tacit acknowledgment of his sins made it easier for parents to talk about sex with their kids. In a country still cursed by Anglo-Puritan rectitude, that's no small accomplishment.
You don't buy any of this? Consider the deluge that followed: A right-wing junta of illegally installed corporatist polluters who consider recession a good way to cut payroll costs. Clinton and the boomers were no great shakes, but what comes next makes them sorely missed.
So from this Xer and sworn enemy of all things tie-dyed, here's to you boomers. Your kids, on the other hand ...
(Ted Rall is the author of two new books, the graphic novel "2024" and a collection of his syndicated editorial cartoons, "Search and Destroy." Both books are available from your local bookstore or online through Amazon.)
