I saw Ayn Rand's play "Ideal" in New York two weeks ago with my fiancee and friends. It is directed by Jenny Beth Snyder at the 59E59 blackbox theater. Since the reviews of the play in the lamestream press have been what they've been, I feel obligated to say something.

I love the play and knew it well before attending. Since I had known the work only as a dry script, the main thrust of my interest was in seeing Ideal made real. In that respect I give the performance highest marks. To see and hear the play with the full immediacy and reality as the work was meant to have was very moving and was a special experience for me--one which I will never forget. We are very fortunate to have the benefit of a production to see--even Ayn Rand herself never saw the work produced.

The story: the extraordinary screen actress Kay Gonda is accused of murder and disappears on a quest to find purportedly a place to hide, but in fact to find a soul with the virtue of integrity. The progression of the play is a brilliant structure, a set of variations on a theme. In each scene the audience first hears a fan letter read aloud, a letter that had been written to Kay Gonda by an admirer. We then see the letter writer in the context of his life, and see his response to the arrival of Kay Gonda herself, in the hour of her darkest need. Her presence is what Gonda intends it to be: a test of man's devotion to his own professed ideal. With each visit we see a new character, a new motivation, and a new kind of response to the dilemma posed by Gonda's presence and predicament.

As Leonard Peikoff wrote in the introduction to the play, the theme of the work is "men's lack of integrity, their failure to act according to the ideals they espouse. The theme is the evil of divorcing ideals from life." The story is the quest of the stunning beauty and powerful ideal of Kay Gonda to find a soul who matches hers, who wants to live life in the way with the kind of idealism Gonda portrays on the screen. The climax of the story is the resolution of Gonda's crisis of being alone as an idealist.

Given this kind of theme and drama, it is no suprise that the snarky, faux-humble New York intelligentsia has unanimously desired to dismiss the play as silly and childish. There is psychological protection going on here. A man who has let his own ideals slip doesn't care to have it rubbed in his face--so he writes a sardonic, pseudo-intellectual review attempting to poop on Ayn Rand's grand and vaunted Romanticism.

The reviewers at the trashy New York Post, at the washed-up, bankrupt old socialist rag the New York Times, and the theatre-biz site backstage.com understand Ayn Rand's viewpoint about as much as she respected Stalin. Consider the ending punch by backstage.com's Snark in Residence David Sheward: ""Ideal" is far from ideal as a drama of real people in real conflict." It is against precisely that sort of "realistic" repudiation of ideals that Ayn Rand wrote the play, you moron.

Now what did I think of the production? I found it very powerful overall--very dramatic and intense. I loved hearing Ayn Rand's brilliantly terse and focussed dialogue.

From the point of view of what can be expected from our cynical, grey, pragmatic, unprincipled culture I think the production was as good as can be expected. I don't think the director or actors grasp Ayn Rand's viewpoint very deeply. But can you believe it--the play was performed with no postmodern irony, no anti-Ayn Rand parodying or snobbish double entendre. It was given straight, as it deserves to be.

Dan Pfau, Ted Caine, and Kim Rosen deserve to be singled out as the actors who best understood the meaning of the play, and therefore best put accross their characters.

Kim Rosen was, I'm afraid, miscast in the role of the bitter, nagging old mother-in-law, but she was razor-sharp in her role as Ms. Shyly--which is exactly what the play needs. In that role Rosen was excellent in her searing bluntness and in the piercing intensity of her gaze. That is what Ayn Rand would have wanted.

Ted Caine was a convincing Mr. Perkins--the dutiful husband who feably clings to his ideal, but only until he is confronted with the immediate and very real onus of acting on it. The scene developing his character was very powerfully done, which is Caine's achievement.

Dan Pfau plays the two roles that are most in accordance with the heroine's ideals: Mick Watts who is Kay Gonda's only annointed press agent, and Johnie Dawes, whose character is the culmination of the story. These characters have the remarkable and rare devotion to Kay Gonda's "like nothing you bastards ever dreamed of" ethos, even though both of these characters are psychologically defeated from the get-go. Pfau succeeded in conveying all the reality and complexity of these figures; he made them very ideally real.

Playing a pure character, a fully integrated and whole, healthy, strong, virtuous and ideal soul--like Kay Gonda--is something I have never seen an actor do successfully. Gary Cooper failed in the film of The Fountainhead. With thousands of years of religion behind us, people are unfamiliar with and cannot feel the feelings of a pure, uncorrupted, non-sacrificial ideal. But that is what Ayn Rand's worldview makes possible and that is what her work requires.

In this play, Jessie Barr played Kay Gonda as a traditional female heroine, with traditional female emotional suppleness and sloppiness. That was a disappointment because it seemed that Barr didn't understand Ayn Rand very well. But I admire her intensity even if she was missing the austerity and severity characterstic of an Ayn Rand heroine. It is important to remember that the character of Kay Gonda is, in essence, Ayn Rand herself. So an excellent way to understand the psychology would be to watch video of Ayn Rand, such as her interviews. Ayn Rand was not sloppy and "sensitive," she was penetratingly and passionately rational.

I'm reminded of the story I once heard about a visitor to Ayn Rand's apartment who asked about one of her cats, something to the effect of "is that Ayn Rand?" (She thought the cat had been named after its human mommy perhaps?) --to which AR's husband replied: "That can't be Ayn Rand, she doesn't have any claws." (!)

I thank Jenny Beth Snyder for directing this play. I thank her for taking it seriously. I thank Karina Martins for producing it. I thank her for taking on the herculean task of making it happen--as someone who has produced artistic events in New York I know how hard this is. I thank the cast for their efforts. And most of all, I pray that these efforts and similar ones will continue.

Democrats were willing to Kamikazee-dive the Obamacare bill into America because the passage is a matter of principle: a nationalized healthcare system is a 180 degree reversal of the Constitution. This bill completely destroys the principle of the sovereign, self-sufficient, self-responsible individual. It completely destroys the principle of independence and individualism that was the essence of the Founding Fathers' political outlook.

In place of the inalienable rights of man, in place of the the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of one's own happiness by one's own effort, the Democrats have attempted to establish a permanent welfare state. They have done all they could to turn the USA into the USSR--to establish an economy that is centrally controlled and ruled from the "top" down by politicians and bureaucrats wielding total power over citizens.

If this bill is permitted to stand, it is the end of the Land of the Free. Obamacare must be repealed.

I am pleased that 14 states' Attorneys General have filed suit against this bill and hope that the courts will find it to be unconstitutional--because it is.

According to the Bill of Rights in the Constitution--which is the supreme law of the land, preceding and superceding any act of Congress:
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." And,  
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

It can never be stressed enough that the government is permitted to to nothing except that which is expressly permitted by the Constitution, while private citizens are permitted to live their lives as they choose. Individuals are limited only by the fact that they may not violate the rights of others, which means no force or fraud. That is America's founding principle.

The Constitution does not grant the government the power to control the medical field. Therefore it is not entitled to do so.

If the courts fail to serve their Constitutional function as a check on the tyranny of Congress, then a new Congress must repeal the bill. Establishing a new Congress devoted to repealing Nationalized Healthcare is the responsibility of every American--a duty that we must dispatch beginning on November 2, 2010.

For now, I support further Tea Party demonstrations (peaceful ones) and suggest that everyone sign the various petitions demanding the repeal of Obamacare. We must demonstrate the sheer number of people who recognize that Obamacare is a monstrous attack on our liberty.

http://www.teapartypatriots.org/repealthebill/Default.aspx

http://repealitpledge.com/

http://treygrayson.com/repeal-obamacare

Here is an interesting article about the rates of job loss in various sectors of the economy since the 2007 start of the depression/recession, as measured by jobs listing agrregator Monster.com.

It shows that of all areas, the worst rate of loss was in arts & recreation. Notice that rates of job loss in utilities, manufacturing, and especially mining were much lower. This shows that Maslow's hierarchy of needs is indeed true: man's attentions and efforts go first to his most basic physiological needs such as breathing, eating and drinking; once those needs are met he is free to attend to a need for clothing and shelter, and so on up the hierarchy of needs to wider values of safety and security, friendship, and at the highest level, in the most successful society, he is free to meet psychological needs such as the need for self-esteem and art.

And when economic conditions become more dire, we see an opposite progression. Men have no recourse but to retreat down and attend to more evolutionarily primitive and more pressing and dire needs. They no longer have the resources to support that which is uniquely human, that which is creative as well as idealistic. Men are forced to concern themselves primarily with physical requirements and abandon, out of unfortunate necessity, the pursuit of spiritual values.

I would mention however, that there is the phenomenon of "escapism"--according to which people want to (for instance) go to a film or the theater to enter a world that is brighter and lighter than the one they face in daily life. That is certainly true, and it is not just as an anecdotal matter. This relates to the very purpose of art which is to sustain and nurture man's psychological health and his positive view of the world. Perhaps people still meet their need of art, but with minimal expenditure--through borrowed books or through various free offerings of music and public domain material on the internet.

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that investment in the arts comes to a radical halt when economic conditions become dire. I think that there is a connection between freedom and economic prosperity. Let's hope, for all our sakes, that the increase of government power we have seen is reversed soon in favor of a renewed respect for individual liberty as the founding father's intended. Then men will be free to prosper and once again turn their resources toward not only the basic necessities, but also to man's higher potentialities.

This summer I’ve made rapid progress on my book “The Head and Heart in Music.” I’ve drafted about half of the book so far.

“The Head and Heart in Music” upholds an ideal of the marriage in music of intelligence and passion. It presents a comprehensive theory of music built around the basic duality of cognition and feeling, of reason and emotion. It begins with a new theory of the survival value of music, continues with a theory of emotion as motion of consciousness, and culminates by connecting music to man’s moral nature. The latter part of the book draws on some Greek ideas including “ethos” and the Apollo versus Dionysus distinction. The book is against both prudishness and destructive rebellion; it is based not on religion but on the morality of the pursuit of one's own happiness and fulfillment in life on earth. Music is viewed as a part of the process of learning and growing throughout life, and as a part of the life course of the noble and heroic man.

In working on my book, I've been thinking a bit about what it means for art to be "classical." It's not a concept I'm very fond of in application to music because people think it means purely formal, the opposite of self-expression. It's a very problematic term. But if you think of classicism as it pertains to ancient Greece, you can see why people started using the word for music like Haydn and Mozart. The Parthenon in paricular is a good example since it has the same clarity, neatness of proportion, eternal and iconic nature, and clean rational structure as the compositions of these Enlightenment era composers. Here is an amazing video produced by director Costa-Gavras for the Acropollis Museum. I find it interesting not only because of the beutiful re-creation of the Parthenon, but also for the dramatization of the history of the structure in future eras--a history of horrible abuse by barbarians, christians, and muslims.