I need to post this picture...

... because I don't like seeing the "Harold Pinter's dead" post at the top anymore... though I'd be happy to keep talking about the movie "Synecdoche, New York," which I thought was pretty good. It was loaded with ideas and images -- for example, buying a house that is on fire and that stays on fire while you live in for years, until you die.* Much more could have been done with all of this. It could have been sharpened up and made more visually vivid, but it had only a $12 million budget, so it's actually astounding that they got as much out of it as they did.

I'd like to make a list of movies about theater, which would include this movie and my all-time favorite movie, "My Dinner With Andre." There's also "Vanya on 42d Street." I don't want all the movies about the life of actors, like "There's No Business Like Show Business" and "Stage Door" and "All About Eve." (Put them on a separate list.) I want movies in which playwrights or theater directors delve into the meaning of theater. I'd add the Woody Allen movie "Melinda and Melinda," which we watched a few days ago. 2 playwrights -- one comic, one dramatic -- take the same story and spin out their scenarios.
___

* [SPOILER ALERT] ... of smoke inhalation.
___

I think that was the third footnote in the nearly 5 year history of this blog. I have been avoiding footnotes like mad. But why? And why, if my abstention has been so important, did I deviate here?

"Harold Pinter's dead... No, wait, he won the Nobel Prize."

That's a line in the movie "Synecdoche, New York," which we saw at the Sundance theater last night:

[In] Schenectady, the working-class city near Albany where Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a theater director, lives with his artist wife Adele (Catherine Keener) and their young daughter Olive (Amy Goldstein). Caden, who's had a critical success staging Death of a Salesman with young actors in the middle-age roles, is himself a premature old man; he hears mortality gargling at him everywhere. In the first scene, he wakes to a radio talk-show report about how the coming of autumn is a harbinger of death; from then on, Caden's life is one long fall. Reading the newspaper, Caden sees a headline about a playwright. "Harold Pinter's dead," he muses aloud. "No, wait, he won the Nobel Prize." He glances at the TV and sees his own animated form as part of a cartoon show, accompanied by the sing-song lyrics: "Then he died / Maybe someone cried / But not his ex-bride."

Today, I open the newspaper and see that Harold Pinter has died. He died yesterday, perhaps at the very moment when we heard the death-obsessed character in the movie say "Harold Pinter's dead." The movie is, in fact, all about death -- and life, too.... for contrast -- as Philip Seymour Hoffman shuffles through scene after scene, depressed, headed toward death, but working feverishly on his seemingly never-ending play -- his play and his life -- life being a big play and all the men and women merely players.

Harold Pinter, the British playwright whose gifts for finding the ominous in the everyday and the noise within silence made him the most influential and imitated dramatist of his generation, died on Wednesday. He was 78 and lived in London.

The cause was cancer, his wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, said on Thursday.

Mr. Pinter learned he had cancer of the esophagus in 2002. In 2005, when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, he was unable to attend the awards ceremony at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm but delivered an acceptance speech from a wheelchair in a recorded video.

Here's the video.

An actor, essayist, screenwriter, poet and director as well as a dramatist, Mr. Pinter was also publicly outspoken in his views on repression and censorship, at home and abroad. He used his Nobel acceptance speech to denounce American foreign policy, saying that the United States had not only lied to justify waging war against Iraq but that it had also “supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship” in the last 50 years.

His political views were implicit in much of his work. Though his plays deal with the slipperiness of memory and human character, they are also almost always about the struggle for power.

I wrote a post at the time: "The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them." I don't like that, but I will pass over it on this occasion. Back to art:

Mr. Pinter said he thought of theater as essentially exploratory. “Even old Sophocles didn’t know what was going to happen next,” he said. “He had to find his way through unknown territory. At the same time, theater has always been a critical act, looking in a broad sense at the society in which we live and attempting to reflect and dramatize these findings. We’re not talking about the moon.”

Speaking about his intuitive sense of writing, he said, “I find at the end of the journey, which of course is never ending, that I have found things out.”

Which of course is never ending... which of course is....

"Good night, my darlings, I’ll see you tomorrow."

Noël Coward's last words, from a review by John Simon.

Lots of good tidbits in the review. I like this one:

"To me, the essence of good comedy writing is that perfectly ordinary phrases such as ‘Just fancy!’ should, by virtue of their context, achieve greater laughs than the most literate epigram."

Presumably, many more tidbits in the book. The man corresponded with Virginia Woolf, T. E. Lawrence, Ian Fleming, Laurence Olivier, Marlene Dietrich, John Osborne, Harold Pinter, and many others.

I'd get the book myself if it were available in the Kindle format. For some reason, I'm devoted to my Kindle, even though it hasn't arrived yet. We'll see if it lives up to my ideation. I remember how I felt when I bought my Rocketbook. How wonderful it was... until I decided I hated it.

"The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them."

Harold Pinter on the occasion of accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature. Pinter, we're told, was "[d]ressed in black, bristling with controlled fury."

Mr. Pinter attacked American foreign policy since World War II, saying that while the crimes of the Soviet Union had been well documented, those of the United States had not. "I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road," he said. "Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be, but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self-love."

Audible Althouse, #11.

Hey, a new podcast! This time with theme music -- written by John Cohen, Brit Rice, and John Matlack, and performed by John Cohen (my son, John Althouse Cohen) and Brit. Per John:

John, Brit, and I composed the music together. (We had written a complete song, with different lyrics; then I fit your lyrics to the chorus of that song.)

Guitar and bass: me.

Vocals: me and Brit. (It's 3-part harmony with Brit singing 2 of the parts.)

Shaker (Ibuprofen bottle emptied out and filled with rice) by Brit.

Snapping by me and Lucas Etten.

Produced by Lucas Etten in his apartment.

Here's Johnny Matlack's website. He's a drummer and songwriter who's in Nashville, Tennessee now, but used to be here in Madison.

Anyway, the new podcast is about 37 minutes long. You can comment on it here. Topics: mellowing on Miers, writing an op-ed for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, cameras in the Supreme Court, "strict constructionism," "Curb Your Enthusiasm," hostile lawyer jokes, Harold Pinter's grim stories, how much people don't like Congress, the sex holidays, and how disturbed all my readers are about women who seek artificial insemination to become single mothers.

UPDATE: The theme music is copyright 2005, Tin Whisper Media Group. Also, Brit has a band called Polydream, which is making a recording called "A Rigid Shard of Balance." And he plays drums and percussion with Lucas Cates, who has a record, "Contradictory," due out in February under Popbomb Records. Look for both Polydream and Lucas Cates to tour. Brit has also remixed Star Wars music for Star Wars conventions.

"Usually enclosed in one room, they organize their lives as a sort of grim game and their actions often contradict their words."

Such are the characters in plays by Harold Pinter, who just won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

That description of his plays sounds very much like what I thought of when I was a child and first understood that adults read things that were entirely different from the stories given to children to read, and I tried to grasp what these stories for adults were.