Joe Cillo

I hadn’t been to a live performance in a theater in over a year.  Since I am totally vaxed and masked and meet the guidelines set by The Marsh, I decided to attend Marga Gomez’s Spanking Machine last night. Everyone obeyed the safety protocols throughout the performance.

Gomez is the perfect act to open at the Marsh to a live audience in over 18 months.

I’ve been following Ms. Gomez’ performances for decades.  I believe I saw one of her earliest performances at Theater Rhinoceros.  Even then, I thought she was unique and very funny.  Also poignant and very physical in portraying various characters.  Last time I saw her was at the Central Works theater in Berkeley.  She was acting in King of Cuba by Cristina García, a full-length play in which she appeared as Fidel Castro.  Since I hadn’t seen her in years, I wondered if I would recognize her.  However, as soon as she came on stage in typical Castro military garb, I knew it was her.  She has said that Spanking Machine would be her last solo performance.  She wants to write for other actors.  Hopefully she will appear in other people’s plays.  Whatever she does, I’m sure she’ll be a huge success.

In Spanking Machine, Gomez as Gomez talks about friendship with Scotty the boy in the third grade of her Catholic school who became her best friend and the first boy she ever kissed which made them realize that they were both gay even at that young age.  She knew it, but he didn’t- then.  She relates their friendship as being very sweet, poignant and devilish in that they were bent on pranking big people.  Spitting on them. Shooting them with water guns in subways, and doing other mean things children cook up to harass adults.  They, of course, as kids, think they’re hysterically funny.  However, if you misbehaved in class, you were threatened to be sent to the principal’s office to face the spanking machine.  The children didn’t exactly know what this machine did but all feared it.  Anyone who came back from suffering its effects did not want to talk about it for fear they would be sent back to face it again.  It was a threat that hung over them all through their school years.  Upstage on the set is a cardboard box with a black block letters on it that read: Spanking Machine.  We think that we are going to actually see this device.  But, of course, we don’t; however not seeing it, we can only imagine it as the traumatized children can.

She and Scotty lost contact with each other for 40 years until one day, she gets an email from him.  Gomez, as Scotty, types out his email, verbalizing the text in the raspy asthmatic Cuban-accented voice she gives him.

Gomez creates her characters not so much physically- well, that too- but relies more on voice.  He tells her he lives in Miami and invites her down for a visit.  She somehow gets the impression that he’s very wealthy.  Turns out differently as we find out during her stay in Miami.   He now lives with his wife and mother-in-law- a Cuban thing- who do not appear in the piece.  However, Margo gives us glimpses of their characters through her vocal delivery.  To indicate different situations and physical locations, she announces a costume change and will change to a tropical blouse for her Miami visit, a bomber jacket when she becomes truly comfortable as- what she comes to realize- a dyke.

Gomez doesn’t shy away from speaking about the sexual abuse that she suffered not only from men but from women as well.  She gives anecdotes about responding to an interesting man’s invitation and visits him in his apartment to see his collection of tropical fish only to hear him lock all the doors in his apartment. After managing to escape, she came away with a water-filled plastic bag of guppies when she was promised exotic tropical fish- one of the reason she agreed to visit him.  One of her male abusers has an extensive ceramic collection which in a wonderful depiction she doesn’t hesitate to destroy in order to get him to release her.  At one point she relates graphically how she was sexually abused. Thankfully, the necessary revelations about other bad stuff- sadistic treatment of brown kids by Irish nuns: Sister Kevin McGillicuddy (?) for one, for instance, are scattered among humorous anecdotes.  Her only props are a table, a tall stool,a chair and a shopping bag containing a few items. Through her verbal delivery alone she allows us to magically see the scene.

Spanking Machine does not run smoothly.  It has stops and starts. It as though she takes time to gather herself to talk about the trauma she has undergone throughout her life as a gay, dark-skinned Cuban, Catholic girl growing up in New York, whose only friend in the third grade was Scotty the first boy she ever kissed.

Marga Gomez’s one woman show Spanking Machine, is at The Marsh in San Francisco on Valencia Street between 21^st and 22^nd through October 23.  Tickets and information can be found at the Marsh web site: TheMarsh.org

Joanne Engelhardt

forallevents.com/

Best of Enemies

Directed by Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville

This is a rehash of the 1968 political conventions and the debates between William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal that were aired as part of ABC’s alleged news coverage.  I vaguely remember watching some of these when I was about fourteen years old.  These debates varied in length between about 8 and 22 minutes.  They were not very long.  I am quite sure I did not watch all of them, but I did watch the famous ninth debate when Buckley lost his temper and threatened to sock Gore Vidal in the face.  I don’t remember too much else about this and at the time I was ignorant and had a very limited perspective on the country and what was happening to us as a nation.  I remember checking Buckley’s book, Up From Liberalism, out of the library and carrying it around for some time.  I didn’t read the whole thing.  I started it, but Buckley is pompous and rather boring.  I didn’t warm to Gore Vidal either.  Vidal represented an iconoclasm and counterculture to which I had no exposure growing up in a small, backward, conservative town in Ohio.  I like him much better now that I have become an iconoclast and counterculture figure myself.  What I say here is not what I recall or influenced in any way by my own very vague memories of these events.  It is based strictly on what was presented in the film.

This film is interesting and presents a clash of two strong intellectual personalities.  They were both members of the east coast elite.  Buckley was well-to-do and educated in his early years in England.  Vidal’s family was military and political.  I wish the film was a little better than it was.  These two men had a deep visceral hatred for one another that lasted their entire lives.  They represented polar opposites in values, lifestyle, and vision for the country.  I didn’t really grasp the source of this rancorous hatred.  I understand they are different, they have different points of view, etc.  But difference does not entail that they must hate each other with such implacable animosity.  They seemed to need each other as enemies.  There was a peculiar bond of rivalry that they seemed to revel in.  I think there was some mutual jealousy as well as morbid fascination.  There was no foundation of good will or mutual respect.

Buckley was a grandiose, well defended person who hid behind this pose of intellectual superiority.  Vidal detested this.  He could see Buckley for what he was, namely, an authoritarian, narcissistic bigot, and he knew how to needle him.  He knew how to get under his skin and expose that ugly, violent, spite and disdain for those he considered beneath himself, which was almost everybody.  Vidal was not intimidated by Buckley’s intellect.  In fact, he mocked it.  Buckley wasn’t used to being challenged on his own turf, especially by someone for whom he had little more than contempt.  The fact that Vidal was able to bring Buckley to the point where he completely lost it in a public forum was deeply wounding to him and he never recovered from it.  But Vidal had been wounded long before, and throughout his life, by the narrow minded prejudices and righteous exclusion that Buckley embodied.  However, Vidal was accustomed to being insulted and disdained for what he was and was much better prepared for the attacks from Buckley.

These so-called debates reflected a cultural and political divide in the United States that existed at the time, but which has deepened and intensified ever since.  The election of 1968, and particularly the Democratic Convention in Chicago of that year, can be seen as the beginning of a long downward spiral in the United States, politically, culturally, economically, philosophically, and in terms of the media’s role in informing and educating the public.  We are now living in the shadow of that long process of cultural and political degeneration.  We have gone from William F. Buckley to Donald Trump.  Gore Vidal is all but forgotten.

The subject of this film, I think, is rather difficult, because these two men were primarily writers, who expressed their ideas in books and long essays and arguments.   A film does not and cannot capture all that has been laid down in pages and pages of print.  So the portrait of these two men and their rivalry is somewhat truncated.  Buckley, however, also had a presence in television and for that reason is probably better known.  It takes a lot more effort to read a book, and I think Vidal’s reputation and legacy has been hampered by that, in contrast to Buckley.

The film is a good, intriguing introduction.  I come away from it feeling more curious than informed.  I think I might read Myra Breckenridge.  It might give me better insight into Gore Vidal, who for me is the more remote of these two characters.  Buckley is a much better known quantity, although the film gave me some curiosity about his later years, particularly the despair and depression he expressed in his late interview with Charlie Rose.

I wish the film had shown more of the debates themselves.  The early debates were shown and the ninth debate, where the uproar occurred.  But the tenth debate was skirted with only scant mention.  It would have been interesting to see how they rebounded after that inglorious spectacle.  I think this film will be of special interest to those who are preoccupied with politics or who are interested in journalism and the information media.  Personally, I never watch television, except when I visit my dad.  And I am always shocked at the degradation that has occurred both in news coverage and in the popular culture.  This film is a measuring stick of that process of decline, like returning to the wilderness and seeing how much the glaciers have melted after many years.  It does what it does about as well as it could, but I think it is necessary to read in order to understand who these two men were and what this confrontation of personalities was really all about.

Joanne Engelhardt

forallevents.com/

Earthquake Storms:  The Fascinating History and Volatile Future of the San Andreas Fault.  By John Dvorak.  New York:  Pegasus Books.  2014.

Earthquake Storms is indeed a fascinating history, not only of the San Andreas Fault that runs along the western edge of California, but also of the State of California itself, the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles, the building of the Golden Gate Bridge, the California Gold Rush, the development of the oil industry in California, the growth of the science of geology, the increasing understanding of earthquakes, the development of the Richter scale, the Trojan War, paleoseismology, as well as the future of the San Andreas Fault and the prospects of predicting earthquakes, in addition to many other interesting side roads.  The book is well written, well researched and has depth as well as breadth.  It is a stimulating panorama that includes colorful depictions of the personalities whose curiosity and dogged persistence made the breakthroughs that moved our understanding of earthquakes forward.   Dvorak makes interesting connections between personal peculiarities and psychological needs of individuals and the influence it had on their work as a researchers and scientists.

Until the latter half of the twentieth century earthquakes were mysterious, apparently random events, that could be enormously destructive.  But people had no clue why they occurred when and where they did and what caused them.  The destructive potential of earthquakes has grown with the growth of civilization and the construction of large cities on or near the faults in the earth where earthquakes occur, and this in turn has stimulated the study of earthquakes and their causes.  Earthquake Storms documents this growing interest and understanding of earthquakes beginning in the nineteenth century with dramatic strides forward in the twentieth.  However, this understanding has not reached a point where earthquakes can be foreseen with the kind of accuracy that has come to forecasting the weather.  Dvorak cites a 2008 report by the Working Group on California Earthquake Probabilities that asserts a 31% probability of a magnitude 6.8 or stronger quake along the Hayward Fault, which runs along the eastern side of San Francisco Bay from Richmond, through Berkeley, Oakland, Hayward and Fremont, within the next thirty years. (p. 235)  Not exactly something you can make plans around, but it does emphasize the need to strengthen buildings and infrastructure for the inevitable traumas that will be visited upon them.

While this book is well thought out, well organized, and coherently written, it does have one major drawback, and that is a dearth of maps, drawings, diagrams, and illustrations that would make some of these concepts and descriptions a lot easier to grasp.  Dvorak does include eight pages of black and white photographs that are very interesting and helpful, but the book needs a lot more.  I would recommend another fifty pages of maps and illustrations.  I’ll give you an example.

When the North American plate began to drift over the Farallon-Pacific’s spreading central region, a transform fault formed, and then a peculiar feature developed at either end of that fault.  The feature, known as a triple junction, is a place where the boundaries of three tectonic plates meet.  In this case, two of the plates are the North American and Pacific plates; the third, which is actually what remains of the Farallon plate, has been given a different name depending on whether it is north or south of the transform fault.  At the north end, the surviving part of the Farallon plate is now known as the Gorda plate and the point where the three plates meet is the Mendocino triple junction, because the point is currently located near Cape Mendocino.  At the south end is the Cocos plate — a remnant of the Farallon plate — and the Rivera triple junction.  What is important here is that, because of the directions in which the various plates are moving, neither the Mendocino nor the Rivera triple junction is stationary; both migrate.  And they migrate in opposite directions, the Mendocino triple junction to the north and the Rivera to the south.  As time progresses, the transform boundary between the Pacific and North American plates lengthens.  And that brings us back to the San Francisquito-Fenner-Clemens Well Fault.  (p. 211)

Can you visualize that all right?  Maybe you don’t really need a map.  It should be no problem to anyone who is steeped in the geology and geography of California.   But how many people would that be?  This book is written, supposedly, for a wide audience.   But doesn’t Dvorak know that Americans are among the most geographically illiterate people in the developed world?  According to National Geographic and Roper surveys:

About 11 percent of young citizens of the U.S. couldn’t even locate the U.S. on a map.  The Pacific Ocean’s location was a mystery to 29 percent; Japan, to 58 percent; France, to 65 percent; and the United Kingdom, to 69 percent.¹

If people cannot even find the Pacific Ocean on a map, how are they going to visualize the Mendocino and Rivera triple junctions that are moving in opposite directions?   Dvorak does this all through the book.  He is very good at verbal descriptions, but he expects his reader to have encyclopedic knowledge of geography and a vivid imagination for the movements of large objects, how they interact, the stresses they create, and the outcome of these colliding forces that would be worthy of an experienced civil engineer.  It may be bad news to the publisher, but his book needs illustrations and photographs on nearly every other page, perhaps another hundred.  There are so many things that Dvorak describes very well in words, but they cry out for a picture that would simplify the cumbersome description.

Another example would be his descriptions of rocks and mineral specimens.

I draw attention to this particular component of the conglomerate because it is easy to identify.  About one out of every ten boulders, cobbles, or pebbles in the conglomerate is this purple rock peppered with pink flecks of feldspar crystals, which adds to its attractiveness and ease of identification.  (p. 205)

A picture would do a much better job of fixing the image of this mineral in the mind, and I think it would also make the point he is trying to get across more accessible as well.  In this subject material, which is very visual to begin with, descriptions of the movements of land masses and geographical features almost require pictures and illustrations.  He really needs to do a second edition, updated and improved with lots of visual imagery.

One lesson that you can’t help but take away from this book is that earthquakes are inevitable and the San Andreas fault, as well as many other faults all throughout California, are ticking time bombs that will certainly go off as major seismic events in the foreseeable future, with powerful and terrible effect.  The title of the book, Earthquake Storms, refers to another realization, first argued for by Amos Nur in the 1990s, that earthquakes tend to occur in clusters, or as Dvorak calls them, storms.  Once you have a major earthquake, the chance of having another one of equal or stronger magnitude is actually greater  than it was before the first event.   He likened a fault’s slippage to the opening of a zipper that catches on successive teeth as it slides down the chain.  Amos Nur has suggested that such a series of successive earthquakes over a period of decades may have contributed to the end of the Bronze Age 3300 years ago. (pp. 226-28)  Dvorak points out several examples of successive major quakes along fault lines within relatively short spans of time, including along the San Andreas.

It is also worth mentioning, Kathryn Schulz’s recent, excellent article in the New Yorker  that describes a much more monumental disaster waiting to happen on the Cascadia fault off the Pacific Northwest.  The Cascadia Fault, has been quiet for over three hundred years, in contrast to the San Andreas, which has been quite active in recent times.  In other words, the Cascadia Fault, while not considered overdue in a statistical sense, has been ominously quiet for a very long time, and when it does give way, could prove cataclysmic for the Pacific Northwest.  Schulz points out that faults have a maximum magnitude in the strength of earthquake they can produce that is based on the length and width of the fault and the amount that the fault can slip.  She does not discuss the science of this in any detail and Dvorak does not mention the earthquake magnitude potential of faults at all.  But for the San Andreas Fault, Schulz claims that 8.2 is the maximum magnitude it can generate — which is a pretty good shake that will wreak a lot of havoc.  But it pales in comparison to the potential awaiting in the Cascadia Fault off the Pacific Northwest coast.   If the Cascadia gives way in a really big way the result could be anywhere from 8.0 to 9.2, which would leave much of the Pacific Northwest, which is profoundly unprepared for such an event, in rubble.

Generally, I would heartily recommend this book, especially to well educated people who live in California.  But it could be equally relevant and illuminating for people all around the world who live in earthquake zones were it to be revised and expanded to include illustrations that would make the text much easier to follow and the conceptual arguments easier to visualize.

Notes

1.  National Geographic News, October 28, 2010.   http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/11/1120_021120_GeoRoperSurvey.html

See also the National Geographic/ Roper study from 2006 on Geographic Literacy.

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/roper2006/pdf/FINALReport2006GeogLitsurvey.pdf

2.  The Really Big One.  By Kathryn Schulz.  The New Yorker, July 20, 2015, pp. 52-59.

Joanne Engelhardt

forallevents.com/