COMING TO A THEATRE NEAR YOU

Neil Gabler, author of the book Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, discussed in an interview on ABC Radio this morning how movies and film have come to define the presentation of self in everyday life, the way people are seeing their lives as a script, a narrative, one long plot in a multitude of settings, indeed, their whole of life as a movie: sub-text and text. After a century of celluloid, after the decline of religion and ideology in this century in the West, the movies have come to provide millions of people with background material, with the metaphor, with the entertainment mix, to help them be the directors, producers, choreographers, writers, editors and, finally, the performers, in the most important movie of them all: the movie of their own life. Gabler says this theatre, or ‘movie metaphor,’ fits in with the emphasis on celebrity in our culture, on performance in politics and on individualism in our philosophy of life. -Ron Price with thanks to “Arts Today”, ABC Radio National, 10:05-10:30 am, 21 March 2000.

I have drawn on at least three of sociology’s many theoretical frameworks from time to time in writing my own autobiography: phenomenological, ethnomethodological and reflexive sociology. All of these frameworks draw on what is often called ‘the social construction of reality.’ Life is seen as one big drama, one dramaturgical reality, a world of images, images we incorporate, process and subjectively give ‘truth’ to. Gabler’s ‘movie metaphor’ fit in nicely here. Part of the overall thrust of my poetic autobiography is based on these theoretical frameworks and can easily incorporate the ideas of Gabler and his ‘the movie metaphor.’ -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, Unpublished Manuscript, 2000.

It’s a tiresome old phrase:
all the world’s a stage and
all the men and women merely players.
You run your ears and eyes over the words
so often as you scamper up the ladder of your days
that the words just roll on into oblivion, get caught
in the bin before you listen to the news, or shave,
or have your lunch: have you emptied the bin yet, dear?
But there is something useful here, mate;
there is, there is. Something to fit all the
glory, the boredom and the chouder into
one easy framework. Mind you, mind you,
have you ever tried writing a movie script?
Can you edit your life so as to always emerge
in celluloid safety? And how about that
toothpaste ad smile? I’m okay as long as
my false teeth are in and my wife is not sick.

Are you sensible enough to keep commitment right out?
What? Now this does require discussion. Too much!
God, get that out, write it out, scrub it. This is my movie!
The predictable wonder of my ordinary life:
unscripted, flawed, plausible: a movie? are you kiddin’?

The in-flight thriller tells likeable lies.
Expansive with airborne wellbeing
we lossen our belts and suspend disbelief
eagerly gullible to the technicolour manipulation
content with the violence, the predictable victory,
the lovers’ final torrid clinch. You’d have to scrub
the screen of the colossal lie. Is it a lie? Surely not?
To make my movie, mate. How can it be done?

I know! I know!
Come and see my two million words
of the most ordinarily ordinary,
the most humanly human,
enough script to make a dozen movies,
one soon to be screened at a theatre near you:
I think about, what, 2153 AD?

Ron Price
21 March 2000

Ken Burns and the TV Doco on Jazz: Directors of This Series: Some Views: A Context
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A GLORIOUS EMERGENCE

1937 was a big year for Dizzy Gillespie. It was a big year for the Baha'i community. 1937 was the year that the formal and organized teaching Plans of the Baha'i community began. In 1937 Dizzy went to New York. It was here that he met Charlie Parker who also came to New York three years later in 1940. The Seven Year Plan, 1937-1944, saw a secret musical energy or fire develop in the jazz world, especially toward the end of the Plan when Charlie and Dizzy played together. It was all part of an exceptional moment in jazz and they called that moment--swing. It was full of innovation, experimentation, improvisation, heart and soul, a new artistic emotion. Dizzy represented the intellectual core of this new music. By 1942 a new phase, a second phase, in the history, the life of jazz, had begun. The first phase had lasted from 1917 to 1942 or so Ken Burns and the producers and directors of this new TV series on jazz argued. The following prose-poem, I should add in conclusion, draws on the words of Shoghi Effendi in the collection of his letters: 1932-1946. -Ron Price with thanks to ABC TV, "Jazz: Swinging With Change-Episode 7," September 21st, 2003, 5:00-6:00 pm.

It was one of the most brilliant
episodes in the history
of the Formative Age.
The structural basis
of the Administrative Order
had been firmly laid
by these champion-builders
in the greatest collective enterprise
and the first half-century had ended.

It had been trumpeted in,
this new phase by a new sound.
It had been swung-in heart and soul,
a secret musical energy or fire which,
by 1942, saw the glorious emergence
of a firmly-welded incorruptible
Baha'i community, assuming
its rightful place at the forefront
of the world-wide spiritual army
of Baha'u'llah.

Ron Price
22 September 2003