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Ice pack on my person because we’re living in hell

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Glad I had jury duty a year ago because if I told a courtroom full of people that some laws are meant to be broken and I couldn’t be impartial because there is usually context to justify most crimes today I’d be arrested on the spot

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Not even the simple pleasure of seeing a halfway decent movie in the theater remains

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THE BROTHERS GRIMM (2005) dir. Terry Gilliam

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Phil with The Seagull director Mike Nichols and other cast members, including Meryl Streep, Natalie Portman, Christopher Walken, John Goodman, Kevin Kline, Marcia Gay Harden, Debra Monk, Larry Pine, and Stephen Spinella.

Nichols’ production of Anton Chekhov’s 1895 tragicomic play ran in August 2001 at the open-air Delacorte Theater in Central Park, NYC. The tickets were free (as part of the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park series) and people camped overnight for the chance to see this show, which had phenomenal reviews. There was talk of taking the show to Broadway (they added a week of shows due to demand), but conflicting schedules prevented that production (Phil himself directed off-Broadway that fall).

PSH played the abstract playwright Konstantin Treplev. From John Lahr’s review in The New Yorker:

The most complex [character] is Konstantin (the prodigiously talented Philip Seymour Hoffman)… Although the character is a mere twenty-five, Hoffman plays him as a furtive, exhausted man-child—a combustible combination of panic and petulance… Konstantin’s wayward infantile feelings—his bitter and idealized love for his self-centered mother; his Oedipal rage at Trigorin (his mother’s lover); his intoxicated infatuation with Nina, who performs in his play; his fierce self-hatred, alternating with omnipotent arrogance—are eloquently parsed by Hoffman.

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Bob Dylan with Ronee Blakley, The Roxy, Los Angeles, 1977.

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“Ronee Blakley, looking like a cross between Greta Garbo and a Midwest prostitute, sat at the piano every night singing a long sad song with a heartbreak chorus which repeated over and over like a wolf’s howl. Her lips were pooched out like Marilyn Monroe’s, as though waiting for someone to poke a straw into the little round hole and offer her a milkshake. I told her I’d give her a hundred dollars if I ever caught her with her mouth shut.”

– Joan Baez on Ronee Blakley in her memoir, “And a Voice to Sing With.”

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Joni Mitchell with Ronee Blakely on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, 1975.

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sometimes you just need a good track

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Ronee Blakley playing the piano with Bob Dylan & Joni Mitchell, Rolling Thunder Revue 1975.

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Day Twenty Three

Now on to one of the finest movie soundtracks, and one of the finest songs from it.

“Dues”, like most of the songs in the Nashville soundtrack, is a really simple number. And, oddly it’s the simplicity which works for it. The simple but effective lyrics are good but the progression of the melody married to Blakley’s honest and earnest emotion turn this song into a veritable classic.

(Her bashful/proud “Thank you” at the end always gets me.)

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“Singers, musicians, and songwriters don’t want to use the word “acting” because we want it to be more real than that—we want it to come from us: naturally, truly, really. But the act of putting it across is a type of performance, because ten minutes before you go onstage and you begin singing that torchy blues song, you may just be drinking a glass of water and brushing your teeth and doing some deep breathing. When Bob Dylan sings “Tangled Up in Blue,” he’s not sobbing on the stage before he gets to that song. What you try to do is make it real, and what you try not to do is act. When it’s real, it’s because of the absence of acting—you want to be the thing.”

— The Rumpus Interview With Ronee Blakley, in which she talks about her time playing Barbara Jean in Robert Altman's Nashville.

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We must be doing something right to last two hundred years.