Marilyn Munroe at the Actor's Studio - Picture by Ray Schatt

Marilyn Munroe was deeply concerned with her identity throughout her life. Babtised as Norma Jeane Baker and abandoned by her mother, she spent much of her childhood in foster homes. As a high profile actress people frequently confused her image with her true self. These factors combined with her quest for an inner peace hint at an answer to the attraction of Strasberg’s teachings.

Strasberg worked with all the heavies, James Dean, Paul Newman, Montgomery Clift, Robert De Niro, Steve McQueen, Jane Fonda, and Al Pacino. But he maintained that the two greatest were Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe.

At this time she also entered analysis but never fully managed to overcome her inner battle; she regarded “Marilyn Monroe” and her true self as two different entities.

On her death Marilyn Monroe willed the control of 75% of her estate to Lee Strasberg, including the licensing of her image, as gratitude for his mentorship and kindness.

Others who have been associated with the Actors Studio include Edward Albee, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, Dennis Hopper, Sidney Lumet, Norman Mailer, Steve McQueen, Sean Penn, Sidney Poitier, Tennessee Williams and Shelley Winters.

“The truth concerning the passions, verisimilitude in the feelings experienced in the given circumstances, that is what our intelligence demands of a dramatist.”
Pushkin’s aphorism

“Create your own method. Don’t depend slavishly on mine. Make up something that will work for you! But keep breaking traditions, I beg you.” Konstantin Stanislavsky

There is an interesting two-part documentary on the relationship between Munroe and Strasberg, which is well worth a few minutes of your time:

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The branch of the linden is leafy and green,
The Rhine gives its gold to the sea.
But somewhere a glory awaits unseen.
Tomorrow belongs to me.

Based on the Broadway musical of the same name and Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, Cabaret is centered around the figure of Sally Bowles, an American ex-patriot in Berlin in the 1930s, star-struck and naive and holding down a singing and dancing job in a cellar bar and cabaret.

‘I’m going to be a great film star. That is if booze and sex don’t get me first.’

Outside on the streets Nazi thugs beat-up and destroy anyone who opposes them. Inside the cabaret the show goes on; but we have to question for how long? The good times are coming to an end as the curtain of the swastika inexorably eliminates the light.

The film depicts Berlin’s poverty, it’s alcoholism and its decadence; and it goes some way to disclosing the Nazis false promises of beauty, tradition, order, pride, and their affinity with the world of nature:

Nature is so marvellously beautiful and every animal has a right to live. It’s just this point of view that I admire so much in our forefathers. They, for instance, formally declared war on rats and mice, which were required to stop their depredations and leave a fixed area with a definite time limit, before beginning a war of annihilation against them. You will find this respect for animals in all Indo- Germanic peoples. It was of extraordinary interest to me to hear recently that even today Buddhist monks, when they pass through a wood in the evening, carry a bell with them, to make any woodland animals they might meet keep away, so that no harm will come to them.
Heinrich Himmler

He woke up soaked with sweat, breathing stale and fetid air. A naked light bulb shone in his eyes and he found he was in a steel-framed bunk slung by chains from the wall, like a bunk in a troopship or a jail.

“. . . Everybody out,” a voice called, and there were other sounds: groans and curses, wretched coughing and hawking, a loud fart, the creak and bang of bunks being folded back and clamped against the wall. “Let’s go, let’s go. Everybody out.”

When he sat up a hand closed around his shoulder and rolled him onto the floor. He was wearing grey cotton pajamas that were much too big for him: the pants tripped his stumbling bare feet and the sleeves hung to his fingertips. Swaying and squinting under the lights, he rolled up the sleeves first, disclosing a loose plastic bracelet that read Wilder John C. He bent over to roll up the pants but was kicked from behind and fell to his hands, and he looked up frightened into the angry face of a Negro in pajamas like his own.

“Watch your ass, man. This here’s the corridor. You got no business hunkerin’ down playin’ with yourself; get up and walk.”

And he did. Steel-mesh panels were being drawn across the folded bunks to prevent anyone from using them: this was indeed the corridor, the place for walking. It was yellow and green and brown and black; it was neither very long nor very wide, but it was immensely crowded with men of all ages from adolescence to senility, whites and Negroes and Puerto Ricans, half of them walking one way and half in the other, the dismaying variety of their faces moving into the glare of lights and then into shadows and then into the lights again. Some were talking one another and some talked to themselves, but most were silent. He felt warm grit under his feet until he stepped on something slick; then he saw that the black floor ahead was scattered with gobs of phlegm. A few of the walking men wore dirty paper slippers, and he envied them; a few were smoking, with packs of cigarettes in their pajama-top pockets, which puckered the roof of his mouth. Then he saw that some weren’t wearing pajama tops but straightjackets, and he wanted to whimper like a child.

There were closed windows at both ends of the corridor, covered with steel mesh: the light outside was drab – either an early grey morning or a late grey afternoon – and there was nothing to see but air shafts and windowless walls.

Near the middle of the corridor stood a Negro orderly in hospital greens, and he hurried toward him with a mouthful of questions – Look: where’s my clothes? Where’s my money? Where’s a phone: What’s the deal here? – but when he confronted the man he felt small and shy and all he knew was that his bladder was about to burst.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Where’s the bathroom?”

“Over there.”

And he followed the pointed finger into a bright stinking latrine where men squatted on toilet bowls or stood jockeying for position at a long urinal trough.

John Wilder is going on forty with a successful career in sales and a stable family; and he’s increasingly irrational, paranoid, and monstrously self-obsessed.

Yates, who is remembered for writing about the mundane sadness of domestic life in a flat emotionless prose, tackles new territory here, and the result is probably the weakest of his novels.

The novel is disappointing but not without its peaks, and Yates reminds us from time to time that he speaks “for weakness, for neurasthenic darkness, for struggle without hope and for the self-defeating passions of ignorance.”

He concentrates on alcoholism and insanity in this unrelentingly realist novel, but I could only empathize with the main character in flashes and was left wondering if the story would have been better narrated through the eyes of John Wilder’s wife. Yates gives her the first and last chapters, but she has little to do with the main part of the narrative, which leaves us trapped in the disintegrating mind of her husband.

WERNER HERZOG: Adventure! I cannot stand the term “adventure” nowadays, – I lower my head and charge, – it has degenerated into such an obscenity that you can go to the travel agency and book an adventure trip to New Guinea, to the headhunters, to the cannibals. So I really do not like this anymore. Why did Petrarch climb a mountain, actually? He was looking more into the interior, he was stunned by what he saw, the first one in modern time who climbed up a mountain. And you gave me the translation today, I only knew the original, he wrote it in Latin, but I have a translation now. And it’s very interesting, I have the letter here because he quotes, he quotes something important. He had a little volume of Saint Augustine, Confessions, with him and he opens the book, and he opens it by—randomly, he claims it, he swears to God that he opened it randomly at one spot in St. Augustine and it’s a very, very interesting quote. And he opens it—oh yeah, he got severe, serious warnings by a shepherd, an old shepherd, don’t climb mountains, because fifty years ago, this shepherd had climbed the mountain as a young man, never remembered that anyone else ever climbed it and regretted it deeply that he did that as if it were a sin, and it was a sin, and Petrarch had a feeling of that. Once up on the summit, he opens Saint Augustine, and he quotes Saint Augustine and I’d like to read it, because it’s a very significant statement. St. Augustine says, “And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolutions of the stars, but themselves they consider not.” So this is a very, very significant moment in the history of humankind. Number one, he should not have climbed it, there was something, an arch sin in it in taking all mysteries away from our planet, and tourism is one of the consequences in the long run. Tourists and tourism has devastated cultures, it has had devastating effects.

You see this is what annoys me so much about grammar freaks. They act as if language is rendered completely incomprehensible by the odd misplaced apostrophe or semi-colon. But the things they get their knickers in a twist about are very rarely anything to do with actual meaning.

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After Iraq, it is clear that American military might is no longer a sufficient gateway to power. America has to work with its allies. That is one of the great lessons of a post-neocon world. A few years ago, Condoleezza Rice said that in the Middle East, the Americans will do the cooking and the Europeans can do the dishes. Can you imagine the national shame for the French, who are so keen on gastronomy, to have America — the nation of McDonald’s — insist that they will do the cooking? That was hard to swallow. But in all seriousness, Europe needs to get back in the kitchen. America can’t do it alone anymore.

Gilles Kepel on the Future of the Middle East.

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How the mighty are fallen . . .

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Literary Kicks has a nice post about Francoise Sagan, her life, loves, her first novel and the movie of her life.

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“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

“The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”

Times Online reports from a paper published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal.