This is a rare article. A major magazine doing a feature on a college theater program. It's cool to get a glimpse in. If you know of any other such articles, let me the know the name and date. Or send it to me and I will put it up here. Thanks.
ps. I am making this sized as big as possible so it can be read and enjoyed. But if the big size is a problem for anyone, let me know. The next size smaller is too small for my taste. But I am flexible...
Yay!!! It's finally time! I got my act together long enough to actually clean the playroom and take semi-decent photos! Go me! (exclamation points!!!!!!!!!) I feel like I've been promising this post forever, but in my defense my kids sole reason for being seems to be to thwart me. Better late than never right? Right?!
So lets get on with it shall we, before some poo-related catastrophe get's in my way? Lovely.
The latest in a long parade of screen Abes, coming right on the heels of Benjamin Walker’s ax-swinging, martial arts version in “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,” is Daniel Day-Lewis, who, though he grew up in England and Ireland and had to learn about Lincoln almost from scratch, plays the lead in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” which opens Friday.
Mr. Day-Lewis, 55, has already won two best actor Oscars, and his performance here, tender and soulful, convincingly weary and stoop-shouldered, will almost certainly earn him a nomination. He’s neither as zombified as Walter Huston in D. W. Griffith’s 1930 biopic “Abraham Lincoln,” nor as brash and self-assured as Henry Fonda in John Ford’s “Young Mr. Lincoln” (1939), nor as stagy and ponderous as Raymond Massey, a year later, in “Abe Lincoln in Illinois,” in which he sounds, during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, a lot like the television evangelist Harold Camping proclaiming the end of the world once more.
Tall and thin, with big hands and a long neck, Mr. Day-Lewis physically resembles Lincoln more nearly than many of his predecessors — more, certainly, than Kris Kristofferson, who in the 1995 television movie “Tad” had to wear platform shoes to boost him to Lincolnesque stature. Yet the first time Mr. Day-Lewis opens his mouth in the movie, he’s also a little startling. His Lincoln speaks not in Massey’s stentorian baritone, or in the echoing, ballpark-announcer tones of the Disneyland animatronic Lincoln first heard at the 1964 World’s Fair, but in a voice that is high, earnest and folksy.
Mr. Day-Lewis is famously fussy about what parts he takes, sometimes waiting years between films while spending time in both Ireland and America with his wife, Rebecca Miller (the daughter of Arthur Miller, whom he met while filming “The Crucible”), and their two sons. (He has a third, older son with the actress Isabelle Adjani.) For a while he seemed to give up movies altogether and apprenticed himself to a cabinetmaker and a cobbler.
Mr. Day-Lewis is even fussier about what he calls “the work”: his process of preparing and then inhabiting a part. For “The Last of the Mohicans” he taught himself to build a canoe, shoot a flintlock and trap and skin animals. For the opening scene of “My Left Foot,” about Christy Brown, an artist with cerebral palsy, he taught himself to put a record on a turntable with his toes; he also insisted on remaining in a wheelchair between takes and being fed by the crew.
He learned to box, naturally, for “The Boxer,” in which he played a prizefighter and former member of the Irish Republican Army and in the process broke his nose and damaged his back. To play the gang leader Bill the Butcher in “Gangs of New York,” he took butchering lessons, and to play Abraham Lincoln he half-convinced himself that he was Abraham Lincoln.
Mr. Day-Lewis, who has a deep voice and a British accent, not in the least Lincoln-like, prefers not to talk much about his method of acting. He doesn’t entirely understand it himself, he says, and doesn’t want to. “There’s a tendency now to deconstruct and analyze everything,” he said during a recent interview in New York, “and I think that’s a self-defeating part of the enterprise.”
He added: “It sounds pretentious, I know. I recognize all the practical work that needs to be done, the dirty work, which I love: the work in the soil, the rooting around in the hope that you might find a gem. But I need to believe that there is a cohesive mystery that ties all these things together, and I try not to separate them.”
Mr. Spielberg, who had never directed Mr. Day-Lewis before, said of working with him: “I never once looked the gift horse in the mouth. I never asked Daniel about his process. I didn’t want to know.”
They did talk a lot about Lincoln, however, not just on set but also starting in 2003, when Mr. Spielberg first approached Mr. Day-Lewis. The script then was very different — less presidential and more about the Civil War, Mr. Spielberg said — and Mr. Day-Lewis didn’t care for it. He also said he thought that the idea of playing Lincoln — or of his playing Lincoln, anyway — was preposterous.
Six years later Mr. Spielberg came back with a new script: by Tony Kushner, loosely based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” and covering just the last four months of Lincoln’s life. That’s when he pushed the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, through Congress. “I found it quite intriguing,” Mr. Day-Lewis said. “I thought it was a great idea — for someone else.”
Even after accepting the part, “I thought this is a very, very bad idea,” he added. “But by that time it was too late. I had already been drawn into Lincoln’s orbit. He has a very powerful orbit, which is interesting because we tend to hold him at such a distance. He’s been mythologized almost to the point of dehumanization. But when you begin to approach him, he almost instantly becomes welcoming and accessible, the way he was in life.”
Mr. Day-Lewis prepared for the part not by splitting rails or doing sums on the back of a shovel but mostly by reading. He started with Ms. Goodwin’s book, pored over Lincoln’s own writing and finished up with the Carl Sandburg biography. He also spent a lot of time studying the photographs taken toward the end of Lincoln’s life by Alexander Gardner. “I looked at them the way you sometimes look at your own reflection in a mirror and wonder who that person is looking back at you,” he said.
All told he spent about a year studying and thinking about Lincoln. “There are always practical decisions to be made about any character you’re playing,” he explained. “But I always try to find my way toward, and into, a life in a manner that allows me to think those decisions make themselves.”
The voice was one such decision. There is historical evidence, in the form of contemporary accounts, that Lincoln had a high-pitched voice, and Mr. Day-Lewis has a private theory that higher voices carry better in crowds, and that made Lincoln such an effective orator.
“All these things are variables, luckily for me,” he said, smiling. “No one can categorically say this is or isn’t what Lincoln sounded like.” For any part, he went on, he listens for a voice, and generally he hears it at some point. “That to me was a genuine breakthrough for Lincoln,” he said, adding that being able to reproduce a voice after you’ve heard it is another matter and so, sometimes, is holding on to it.
To hold on to Lincoln’s voice, he used it all the time, between takes and even after the filming was over. Mr. Spielberg said he couldn’t remember for certain whether Mr. Day-Lewis used his Lincoln voice in their private conversations but then added: “I just came to see him as the character. I assume he didn’t change the voice. Why would he?”
Jared Harris (better known to most Americans as Lane Pryce in “Mad Men”) plays Ulysses S. Grant in the movie. He recalled that like other British cast and crew members on the set, he was asked not to throw Mr. Day-Lewis off by speaking in a British accent, so Mr. Harris too stayed in character.
“It was sort of an extended improvisation,” he said in a telephone interview. “You didn’t go up to him and say, ‘Hey, did you see the Pirates game last night?’ It was important for him to retain the attitude, if you like, and the dialect he had created. So we would sit there and joke, for example, about the Vicksburg campaign.” He added, “At the end of the day sometimes we’d ride back in the car, and he’d stay in character but talk about ‘Mad Men,’ which of course he couldn’t know about, because television hadn’t been invented then.”
Mr. Kushner said that Mr. Day-Lewis warned him that once shooting began he would no longer be speaking to him, only to Mr. Spielberg. He also recalled a day early in the filming when they shot possibly the movie’s most important scene: a speech Lincoln gives to his cabinet explaining the importance of the 13th Amendment.
“Everyone’s jaw was on the floor,” he said. “It was one of the great things I’ve ever seen. To do that, you have to be there, in that moment. It’s not psychosis; it’s sustained concentration. Is all that necessary, the staying in character? It makes sense to me.” He added: “I’ve never seen a great actor do a major role that didn’t cost a lot. They’re sacrificial animals of a sort.”
Mr. Day-Lewis said that he felt a “great sadness” when the movie was done and that he still feels connected to it. “I’m woefully one-track-minded,” he said. “Without sounding unhinged, I know I’m not Abraham Lincoln. I’m aware of that. But the truth is the entire game is about creating an illusion, and for whatever reason, and mad as it may sound, some part of me can allow myself to believe for a period for time without questioning, and that’s the trick.” He laughed. “Maybe it’s a terrible revelation about myself that one does feel able to do that.”
Keep your eyes peeled people, the playroom reveal is coming this week! I've decided that I'm never going to do the couple of things I've been meaning to "finish off" in there so this is a good as it gets. I'm just waiting for the gods of good photo's to bless me with a bright day that happens to coincide with the room being tidy and I'm golden!
You get bonus cousin Jamie in this photo. No need to thank me.
So bear with me, it's another short "parenting is frigging tough" opinion piece from me today. For those of you who wish I'd just get back to painting stuff already I promise it's coming, but there's just something I need to mention first.
I once lost Em in her own bed.
The bed had bars.
An achievement, I know. let me explain.
I went in to check on her after a particularly "vigorous" bedtime wind-down (once they're old enough we operate a"go the hell to sleep,I'm not coming back in here unless you're actually dying" policy) and she wasn't there! The place looked like it had been ransacked! I freaked out, obviously, checking the windows and all the other rooms, thinking someone had somehow gotten into our seventh floor apartment and snatched her. It was terrifying, and all the while I was thinking "this is all my fault, maybe she was shouting because she was scared and I ignored her, I'm a terrible mother"!!!!!!!!
And then I went back into her room and recognised the pattern of her pyjamas peeking out from amongst the destruction that was her cot.
There she was, panned out, snoring gently, covered by her blankets and all the toys and cushions she could reach to pull into the cot (another bad-mammy move!) completely oblivious to the fact that she had just scared at least ten years off of my life.
I've lost Max too of course, more frequently and dangerously. He's a sneaky, fast little guy and now I have another kid I need to watch too, so either he's wilier or I'm paying less attention. Honestly it's probably a little bit of both.
Twice I have been in play centers, turned my head to check Em and looked back to find him gone. Both times strangers found him outside on the footpath. And I felt like crap, of course I did. But you know what, I was doing my best, and accidents happen. I was just lucky that he was found safe and well, with nothing more than a taste for freedom and an industrial strength leash to show for it.
The lady who's son crawled into that gorilla enclosure wasn't so lucky. He ended up in a terribly dangerous situation, and I can't even begin to imagine what she felt as she watched what was happening.
And for that, good people, she should be pitied, not vilified.
His dad was there too, the kid shouldn't have been able to get into the enclosure at all, the zoo didn't have any choice, of course they didn't, and yet SHE is blamed.
There is no-one to blame. This was a terrible accident, that is all. And anyone talking about how the gorilla was "protecting" him or that they should have risked tranquilizing him instead?! Let's just stick your kid in there to take the kind of abuse I saw on the (uncut!) video and see how you feel about it, shall we?
It's very easy to be an expert when you're sitting safely at home. You know, without a giant, agitated gorilla dragging your small child around?
And what's been enraging me even more about this is that a couple in Japan left their child in the woods on purpose, causing him to be missing for SIX DAYS and all I hear in the media is "oh they must feel terrible", and "sure who hasn't tried to scare their kids by pretending to leave them?"
Eh?!! ME!! I haven't!!
I don't get it, why the complete opposite reactions? I mean, at one point I was listening to a talk show on the radio where they literally went from one topic to the other, and the reactions were a total attack on the mom from the zoo, and then concerned pity for the parents of the child in the woods, and at that point he hadn't even been found yet for crying out loud! They thought he was dead!!
So why the difference? Why the complete hypocrisy?
Well, I don't want to seem cynical folks, but I find it very interesting that the mother was the focus in the zoo case, while the father took responsibility and gave the interviews in Japan. It would seem that a father's outrageously crappy parenting is a mistake, but a mothers mistake is unforgivable.
I'm so tired of this crap. Really.
So that's it, mini rant over. I'm not foolish enough to think my opinion means much either, but I just felt like I had to send some positivity that poor woman's way, 'cos she for sure is getting more than her share of the opposite.
