Because Central High School just won the Class A football championship, making a very, very rare year of being "the reigning state champion in basketball, track and football," because Central's Sarah Ferguson made perfect scores on the SAT and ACT, verifying my assertion that Central is reputed for its jocks and brainiacs, I thought it appropriate to honor our only downtown high school for its achievements. It sits on the highest (northwest) corner of downtown Omaha, the site of the first Nebraska Territorial Capitol, as an historical sign notes. More to the point, looking north, as the photo below shows, it is on Dodge Street, our main east-west drag separating the city's north and south halves, Dodge and the Missouri River being the beginnings of our street numbering system. To the west (left) is one of my most favored sites, Joslyn Art Museum.
And here, in an earlier phase, is Central's model in the Lauritzen's Model Railroad Garden.
To finish off the models for this year, the one below shows Lauritzen Gardens' Visitors Center, which can be seen in the final photo in the Kenefick Park entry, and the Doorly Zoo's "world's largest glazed geodesic" Desert Dome, whimsically depicted with some giant animals crawling around the hemisphere.
After the morning cooking shows, I was busy roasting vegetables, two trays of carrots, parsnips, onions, turnips, and the biggest Brussels sprouts the checker and I had ever seen, with rosemary, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and Italian seasonings (the vegetables destined to be mixed with orzo and vegetable spaghetti sauce); also baking eight acorn squash, which pulp I mix with I Can't Believe and brown sugar for my idea of dessert; and baking French bread loaves, which kept me busy, after which I ended up watching a bit more of Peter Brooks' Asian-influenced Hamlet and then a 2007 Australian Macbeth.
I always end up back at Shakespeare somehow. And thus I take offense when someone in a TV column remarks that, once they got past the crude language, HBO's Deadwood was positively Shakespearean. Not likely, with all those "fuck" variants/repetitions. Good Will is considered the treasurehouse of our language, inventing hundreds of words and creating our most memorable phrases outside the King James Version of the Bible. The two are often said to be the two ends of the English language spectrum, representing the smallest (biblical economy) and largest (renaissance brilliance) of our literary vocabularies.
While there are certainly various versions of biblical stories, Shakespeare has the edge and edginess, which is probably why Nicholas Paton's violent, abridged version of Macbeth is almost entirely in night scenes, luridly lit with blood-red walls but also lots of candles, modern mobsters warring among themselves, the frequent murders by guns, wire garrotes, and--I suspect because of the Shakespearean lines--knives. ("Is this a dagger I see before me?" which shadowy omen commits Macbeth to an unsettling frenzy of stabbing the sleeping Duncan into a bloody sieve.) Paton accelerates the well-known arch of arrogant ambition and its comeuppance like his gangsters speed around in their Hummers and Escalades.
The movie opens almost as sensationally as Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, with three voluptuous, uniformed "schoolgirls" desecrating graves in a crowded urban cemetery. These are the young witches, a bit too nubile for Macbeth's epithet of "hags," who prophesy his rise to greatness, with some overlooked hints of his fall. After the noted banquet at which Banquo's ghost appears only to Macbeth (and attempts to wire-garrote him in vengeance), they will return naked for a drugged orgy with our Aussie Tony Soprano substitute. Their first prophecy was that he would become Thane of Cawdor. Cawdor is the name of a bar whose treacherous owner is killed, his place given to Macbeth for loyalty. Part of their prophecy has Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane. That would seem difficult, even given that Macbeth's posh little suburban place is named Dunsinane in a wooded area, but the vengeful gangsters now intent upon removing their violent leader for murdering Duncan and several others ride up with Uzis and other automatic arsenals in a logging truck with giant logs, the company name--you guessed it?! Birnam Wood. I did rather enjoy "Make all our trumpets speak" being a blast of the truck's air horn.
Similarly, Lady Macbeth, encouraging and covering for her husband, is first seen as a snorting cokehead, so that her later dementia ("Out, out, damned spot" over her illusory bloody hands, from guilt over Duncan's murder) seems drugged, as a doctor treats the nude lady--well, she's bare-breasted in transparent panties--with more of the same, and she ends up shortly a suicide in a bathtub of very red water to match the wall color, one bare breast photogenically out. All the naked women, witches and wife, would seem about right for a public sated with erectile dysfunction--careful of those four-hour erections!--and tampax ads, Las Vegas shows and celebrity dysfashion, "adult" entertainment. Sex can carry the day Shakespeare can't.
That the swift-moving violence in darkness akin to an endless Arctic night, set to a deliberately portentous score. all doomed darkness and crashing deathness, tries too hard should be obvious. I never did understand how the police, always using infrared green night photography surveillance, were involved in the corruption because the heavily Aussie accented lines of Readers' Digest Shakespeare were too much for my ears, though the famed soliloquies worked fine as voice-overs. But what to do when a drunken, demented Macbeth, after expensive leather jackets and printed crushed velvet, suddenly should dance in a kilt about the gang of thugs coming to kill him--seen on the house-controlling laptop screen--michty me! No wonder I was too worn out to write.
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