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Life Upon The Wicked Stage

I didn't - seriously - plan on a 4 week semi-hiatus to pursue a dream of community theater. When I started rehearsals, I figured I could blog on off days, or days where I just had rehearsal and not work. Neither of those quite happened, never mind the days of getting up 4:30 to work, with rehearsal starting at 7 that evening, home at 11 to do it all again.

What did happen was something of a creative reawakening, at least for me; it's partly the chance to go back and do things I never felt I did enough of in my - gloriously misspent - youth, and partly it's a chance to be around people who do the things I like to do for the same reason - a love of doing it, just for the joy of seeing it through.

Annie is a show which covers a wide swath of ages among performers - we have children age 5 and up, and adults into their fifties and sixties (never mind our director, who's been at this for 40 years with no real sign of slowing down) - and so the experience has been a cross section of the life in performing. You see everything from the nergetic dreams of the young to the seasoned, even world weariness of the elders, all enthralled with playing dress up, pretending to open invisible doors, and sing cheerful songs about the Depression.

If I have never been quite so tired, I have also been never quite so happily at peace.

And so today, in preparation for opening night I have brought a fresh tube of mascara (I still need to stop for some foundation), I need to move a  button on my butler outfit, press my clothes, and make photocopies of script to use during the simulation of a radio broadcast. I am reminded of one of J in B's best creations ever - the drag name of Vera Similitude. It's fun trying to make everything so real.

All of this has gotten me thinking about performing, about the life we lead and how much of it is, indeed, a performance; these things I remember about the people who can be so dramatic - I really do find myself at home with theatrical people - remind me that the capacity for it carries over into life generally. Acting, oddly, is what makes me impatient with people who "fake it" in real life; for goodness sake, commit to your performance. Don't pretend. Good acting isn't defined by the audience not believing it.

I'm sure this experience has changed me, as experiences do - I have met a whole new group of people, deepened existing friendships, learned a few things about myself, and, at this late age, even learned a few things about acting and singing on stage (if only confirming that someone in my high school career clearly missed the fact that I am quite capable of a solo on stage. Take that, Mr. Vogelman). It isn't easy - what thing worth doing ever is? - and it requires conservation of energy... but for those moments, on stage, flying without a net (literally, as I tripped over someone in dress rehearsal), it is breathtaking and fun and joyous. Life upon the wicked stage for me.

And so, with performances getting under way, the end is in sight, one way or another. As yesterday demonstrated, I am getting back into the grrove of balancing writing back into the daily schedule of things. And though I've managed to keep my distance from a lot of daily news, I'm not completely out of the loop, and find myself, yet again, with a lot of things to say. And now, with the time to say them... and my creative juices flowing a bit more vividly than they were... this should get interesting. Well, I like to think it's been interesting all along. But a blog should make a fine stage, and spotlight - for some time to come.

Friday Evening Floralude

jinb
 

...And Some Say The Economy Will Recover When Employers Like The WaPo Stop Making Bad Decisions

More of the blinkered economic theories of Ezra Klein:

Some say [the economy hasn't recovered] because the European debt crisis took whatever confidence had returned and trashed it. Some say it's fear of new taxes and regulations. Some say recoveries are simply a bit uneven, and you have to wait out bad months to get to good months. Some say you can't underestimate the psychological impact of the economy's near-death experience, where storied banks collapsed and GM needed a bailout. Some say there's no demand for their product. But as things stand, there's a disconnect: It's not that businesses haven't recovered. They have. Profits are up. The stock market is up. Credit isn't perfect, but nor is it frozen. The problem is that they're not taking the next step and spending. The public sector stimulus hasn't given way to a private-sector recovery.

Eventually, they will take that step. Everyone agrees on that, as there's simply no other way for them to grow. The question is how do you get them to take that next step now, rather than months, or even years, from now? How do you make corporate American confident again?

The easiest way to do that would be for the economy to clearly recover, for growth to be strong and unemployment to be falling and the outlook to be rosy. A strong economy, after all, can withstand small shocks, and thus people wouldn't need to be so afraid of, say, Greece's budget. But the economy can't recover until the economy recovers, and to recover, it needs businesses to act like it's recovered. You see the problem.

If you don't see.... don't blame yourself; this strikes me as just about the useless economic assessment going, and that's kind of saying something in a moment of continued economic crisis. It's not that Le Klein's silly, exhaustive-ish, surely exhausting list doesn't offer some indications of analysis (it seems like a case of throw everything at the wall until something sticks), but mostly it's the trying too hard, missing the obvious, and the vast overgeneralization (the economy will be better when we all... just feel like it is?) that amazes me.

And sure, partly, this kind of sum up of "some economists say" is a good reminder about why we shouldn't consider economics to be an especially useful profession, but still; there are a number of bright, talented, thinking economists who do a much better job distilling the current waves of up and down, and reach more thoughtful conclusions than young Mr. Klein. And yet, there he sits, blogging away at the Washington Post - in their business and economics section, mind you - blathering away to beat the band.

I'm no genius, and this isn't the most fully formed theory, but this strikes me as a good start: we're not having a recovery because many people have not learned from the economic disaster we're still going through that we cannot return to the excessive levels of debt that were run up in the past 10 or 20 years (or arguably, 30-40), and unwinding that debt has turned out to be especially precarious and devastating across the world. In the US, the debt mistake was used to fuel a steep housing bubble, which rippled out into nearly every corner of the consumer economy. Undoing that, too, has proved difficult and often quite devastating. And if we can't go back to the familiar credit-driven consumer economy which masked other economic problems we have... then we don't have a great sense how to do it differently.

I don't begrudge Ezra Klein's success; he's a nice young man, seems like a decent-ish writer, thinks on his feet, etc. But he's not an especially good, or well trained, writer on economic issues. He was, up to a point, a relatively interesting writer on health care issues during his early blogging years and as an up and coming writer at the American Prospect, though even there he was often densely naive about aspects of the health care systems he didn't fully understand, a trait which simply got worse at the WaPo during the healthcare reform debate and made much of his later asessments of little real use, except to affirm the status quo. There is, clearly, a job in that, though why that's so continues to mystify me. It's not bitterness or jealousy... but I just have to come to the conclusion that we can't have an economic recovery driven by "reporting" as vague, incomprehensible, and vapid as Ezra Klein's. And if the Washington Post can't make the kind of business decisions that would help them provide better, more useful content, and improve the quality of the thing they're supposed to be selling... I'm not really sure we're going to have an economic recovery anytime soon. It's not that he's wrong... it's that he's proof of the kind of bad business decision making that got us to this mess, and keeps us there.

Friday Evening Floralude

jinb
 

The Problem Isn't Race, It's Journalism

In these hazy days of summer, it's always possible for controversy to bloom out of almost nothing, but the 24 hour disaster of Shirley Sherrod may be one of the fastest unravelings we've seen yet.

Lots of people started focusing on various racial aspects of remarks Sherrod made at an NAACP speech, but the larger lesson seems simpler: Andrew Breitbart, yet again, is not a journalist, and what he does should not be mistaken for reporting. When it is, and when his blog posts are presented as fact, trouble ensues.

In the six months since I wrote about Brietbart and James O'Keefe, the video making gadfly Breitbart continues to support, Brietbart has struggled to stay relevant. O'Keefe attempted to "infiltrate" the Census as a worker, to little avail, but little else on Breitbart's sites really broke through, and he's been sidelined as other web controversies (probably most pointedly, the whole JournoList blowup that was orchestrated by Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller) caught the blogosphere's imagination.

Given all that, it's probably unsurprising that Breitbart reached for an obvious  gotcha: incendiary remarks about prejudice from a black woman!  Discriminating against whites on her job!  The thing practically writes itself, once you carefully select the piece of tape you want to present.

What's remarkable, really, is not the overreaction of the usual suspects at Fox News, or the spasm within senior levels of government that forced Sherrod to resign within hours... it's that, it didn't take much longer for the people who actually practice good reporting skills to discover that there was much more to this than met the eye. They quickly made clear that Sherrod, in her full remarks, had used a moment of prejudice to show that everyone, black or white needs to move beyond them, and that the actual couple in question had become friends with Sherrod, and thanks to her work, had kept their family farm.

Of course, there's plenty of elements here to turn into this or that musing on the ugly state of race issues in our culture, again... but much of that seems shrill and beside the point. Breitbart will face greater scrutiny about his own racial issues (having ridden the demolishing of a primarily black led organization like ACORN, and now having chased Sherrod from her job, clearly... he's got some), but I think it's a mistake to overuse Sherrod's speech or the fallout from the misrepresentation of her remarks to overstate the obvious. This story, really, is about the cooler heads, on all sides, who let reason, and evidence, prevail.

I think Breitbart's overreach may be a crucial moment for web-based journalism, a clarifying moment to separate the real from the surreal, the factual from the fictional. The failure to do even basic reporting on the content of Sherrod's remarks strikes me as close to libel or slander, and it would make an interesting test case about applying libel law to the web, where boundaries, clearly, would be a help. And all of this is a good reminder that bad journalism has horrendous consequences - in this case, most painfully for Ms. Sherrod, forced out of a job and a career working on something she appears to care about deeply.

It's easy to let the heat, and emotions, drive the response to this story, and let anger and finger pointing and name calling rule the day. That's what make race, and stories driven by racial issues such an easy way to derail the discourse. But it strikes me that it's just this reliance on emotion over fact, not remembering to ask basic questions or check primary sources that give mess-ups like Breitbart all the room they need. We can do better. We should surely try.

Remember That Girl Who Sat Next To You In Third Period English And Told You All About Some Popular Girl You Didn't Know And Some Boy On A Sports Team Who Was A BMOC?

... well apparently she, like, grew up and became, like totally, what we call a "journalist":

By contrast, Barber says Levi handled the news that he had gotten together with Bristol rather well. “It really surprised me. When Levi did find out, he was very mature about the situation. He was more happy that it was me with Tripp and Bristol than someone he didn’t like. I still wanted to be friends, but Bristol wouldn’t let me do that.” Barber admits that he then dropped Levi as a buddy. “I feel pretty low as a friend for doing that,” he says, adding he doubts he’ll be asked back as a groomsman this time around. 

Well, it sure beats "school board meets to discuss budget cuts that may affect students arts programs", doncha think?

Come on... she uses quotation marks and everything.

It's not that I'm opposed to gossip or that I don't think the ins and outs of the Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston saga aren't (mildly) interesting; but this is beyond "life is like high school." This is high school, literally; all the kids from Wasilla High, playing Gossip Girl on the national stage, with Shushanna Walshe happily transcribing every petty detail.

All we need to know now, Shushanna, is who you plan to take to Prom. Because I hear that boy on the soccer team can be such a dick.

(Toned, Tanned,) Fit & Ready

I didn't intend to take a week or so off from blogging, but there it is.

When I decided to do a little bit of community theater, I figured it would be a challenge to balance coffee shop, writing and rehearsing; I didn't realize nearly how much. And not just because the writing fell by the wayside, but also that by last Thursday, I was pretty weary of all of it, and I needed a break.

This post comes to you from Maine, where I have spent a long weekend with Mom, resting, relaxing, enjoying seafood and great ice cream (separately), saw The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo again because The Girl Who Played With Fire is only in limited release. And while I planned to start blogging a day or two ago, I realized that a full rest should be, well, full. And the time to start is when you are rested. And ready.

Those writing gears are hard to going again when you take a break from them. I always wonder if painters feel the same way.

Today, it's a beautiful day here, cool and sunny, a fine day to be on the road, returning to real life. Ready to take on the world once more. Just ask Barack Obama - a trip to Maine can do wonders.

It was odd, spending a week free from not just blogging, but also e-mail, and often even phone connections, much of the time. It is, for someone who's been deep in the interweb of interconnections (though not Facebook, still, not Facebook), at times disconcerting. Like "I know I should be worried about the e-mails piling up and the blog posts that aren't getting written... but this is also oddly relaxing and carefree." I was struck by how, when I did catch the news in small bursts, how little really changes day to day, week to week. No wonder I've been feeling stalled on things to blog about, how not to just restate the same things I've been saying for months.

So, I'm back. Or really, I'm just here. I'm always here, though I don't always write about it, and I know I should write more and do other things less. These past few weeks, though, have been almost literally like high school for me - the same balancing act of work and extracurricular activities, the nights spent at singing, dancing and blocking rehearsals. It's invigorating, energizing... it's awoken a part of me I think I just set aside as superfluous... and it turns out to be essential. The satisfaction of being creative, or performing, or being among other creative talents... it's refreshing. Even as it is also exhausting. You know the world is right when you fall into contented, deep sleep after a full day of work. That's what I've been having.

Once I get back, things don't get easier for a couple of weeks, until the show starts. So blogging will probably be spotty, sporadic. It's not ideal... but I think it will be okay, in the long run. I really do.

One last observation: there's a sense, I think, that the changes of the past few years are starting to sink in to the public consciousness. I think the new economic realities, painful as they are, and even the denial that's still out there, especially in government and elsewhere, have forced people to reassess what matters, what's important, and what we can let go of. And in a sense, it can seem, in the hot, hazy summer moments, as if things are stuck, unchanging, permanent. I tend to think, especially after a week of disconnection and reconnecting, that a lot of us are just taking a break, stepping back, gathering our strength. The next part, well, that could be pretty challenging, and who knows what might happen next? I don't. I barely know my lines. Or the tune. Or most of the choreography. But I'm getting there. At least, I'm ready to move again.

Friday Evening Flora-and-Fauna-lude

jinb
 

Friday Evening Fingerlude

jinb
 

It's Not A Woman Problem... It's A Funny Problem

The thing about the "there aren't enough women on camera or writing The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" brouhaha that developed this week is that it's really kind of beside the point. Anyone with a passing interest in feminist issues and TV comedy could give you 25 years of the exact same argument in relation to Saturday Night Live, David Letterman's work in late night across his whole career, or any number of others. This whole "Dudes Are The Ones Controlling Sketch Comedy" line is utterly true, utterly depressing, and the exceptions tend to prove the rule.

So why is Jon Stewart suddenly such a bellweather of sexist intolerance?

Apparently - to read the Jezebel piece which provoked much of the drama - the argument is that Stewart, somehow, represents some sort of liberal, progressive ideal on TV; that since The Daily Show (so I've heard) is popular with lefty leaning progressive types (who, we now discover, are mostly dudes) we should expect some sort of "higher standard.

And also, apparently, they hired some very attractive woman who's been doing these sort of odd sexually humiliating bits on other shows and on the web. I'm soryy... I just don't really keep up with the kind of stuff that makes it into Maxim or onto Spike TV or is really popular with straight teen bvoys who really like video gaming.

(I have this fear that these will be my nephews in  few years. Oh God, the fear and shame.)

In any case, I'd let this one pass, but I do think the problem - the point everyone is getting beside - is in the premise: this notion that Jon Stewart, or The Daily Show represent something wonderful for lefty politics and thus should be held to some sort of standard of expectation. In truth, and I said this back in 2008, I think The Daily Show has struggled since Barack Obama's election to figure out how a show written for sarcastic liberals can find a way to be both thrilled and critical of a Democratic Presidency... much the way Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect was brilliant satire... until just after 9/11.

I know lots of bloggers (Talking Points Memo is especially guilty of this) who let Daily Show pieces stand in for actual commentary on this or that issue of the day, and I generally think it's lazy and kind of weak to lean so heavily on the writing of someone else's professional staff; but I'm struck, very often, by the way that much of what Stewart's been doing lately is... not very funny. And also, more sadly, not necessarily all that insightful or deep on the politics we're living through, these days.

It may seem churlish and old fashioned to point out that what the Dauily Show does is not news, but I think that reminder is often necessary and not laid out frankly and clearly enough. Jon Stewart isn't journalist and what happens on TDS is not news and informational program - even if, which I also tend to look askance at, the claims that many people go to him first for information is true (at this late date, I think not).

Indeed, Stewart is no more news, and not all that different from, what passes for "prime time news and opinion" on MSNBC, meaning both Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow. All three have perfected (*along with, arguably, Ed Schultz of the earlier "Ed Show" as well) some sort of bizarre antidote to the rise of deeply cynical, sarcastic commentary that started in earnest from the right under Bill Clinton - Stewart et al now offer a similar, snark-filled, but somehow "factual" reading of the day's events meant to make conservatives look foolish and lefty opinions look brilliant. And as lefties do, they've struggled to figure out how to be both thrilled and unhappy with Democrats who don't quite live up to every (unrealistic) expectation. Which, as Obama's increasingly muddled Presidency wears on, is getting more and more challenging.

What we need, really, is more news, and better news content, done by reporters who will follow stories where they lead, not trying to protect one side or another or preserve a simplistic left/right view. We need less snark, less sarcasm, and less "why be so serious." We could use serious. And maybe it's unsexy and maybe it isn't funny and maybe it doesn't sell; I remain convinced that done right, serious can be interesting, even sexy, and still manage to inform.

I've never particularly seen the need, or the popularity, for the Daily Show. Stewart is, clearly, a charmer of a host, as cool and with it as Johnny Carson at times, or more likely, Jack Paar. But the show itself is little more than an extension of the news segment bit of SNL which itself is little more than the topical bits scooped up out of Laugh In. I'm more impressed, still, by the kind of smug seriousness in the satire of Stephen Colbert's Colbert Report which really climbs under the puffery of Bill O'Reilly types and finds the joke without dropping the facade. Stewart, really, has never managed to satirize the kind of puffed up solo anchor at a news desk seriousness he trades on to give himself authority, not enough to undermine it.

Given its progenitors, I don't then find it surprising that The Daily Show is like them: traditional joke writing done, as these things mostly are, by a bunch of guys - and pretty much only guys - mining familiar topics and setting up similar punchlines. Some of it is funny, always has been, always will be; and a lot of it, over time, is getting less funny, as fat jokes and fag jokes and much of what involves smugly feeling superior over an inferior other becomes mostly insulting and demeaning to someone. There are other ways to be funny. We could use more creativity in seeking that out.

But still. If I have a problem with The Daily Show - and I do - "you don't have enough women on staff" is really the least of it; not because the inherent sexism isn't so obviously a problem, but because the problem with The Daily Show goes really to the heart of what's been making it so popular, the snarky, sarcastic dismissal of so much of what we're dealing with in government and politics. Or maybe it's just that we're seeing the limits of topical political sketch comedy... or maybe, as with other shows, it's just the Daily Show moment has passed. I'm not sure we need to figure out which of these truest to know it's time to move on to something else. And maybe the solution is not a Daily Show with more women, but actually developing that new show whewre funny women rule. I know I'd love to watch that one.