Most Israelis support direct engagement with Hamas, including the former head of Mossad. So really great job... in order to score some political points for John McCain, you went onto Israeli soil and compared most of them to holocaust enablers. Awesome job.
Let me also say... read some Matt Yglesias
(oh yeah, H/T for the poll results goes to Ezra)
Two thoughts on Shakespeare from other people got me thinking about this.
First off, I was reading the New Yorker profile of Mark Rylance where he said something along the lines of that in order to do Shakespeare right you have to think about his plays as being the interstiticials between serving beer and getting a prostitute.
Second, I was in Rapid Response rehearsal the other night and was saying that Shakespeare had this one writing habit that really irked me, namely the epic comparative metaphor. These sections usually sound something like well then you sir are a like a man who, having had his bottom spanked by a wild boar covered in bees, decides to wash his behind in a spitoon only to discover the secret of relativity buried inside! Dan responded that these sections were in fact written for Lords in the audience to transcribe while listening to them so that they could then deploy the witticisms at parties and pretend they came up with them. This was one of the main reasons why upper class men would attend these plays to begin with.
So now I can't help but feeling that maybe in this day and age, we "respect" theatre too much. Or maybe what I actually mean is that we respect theatre in the wrong way, which is to say treat it like the big formal occasion / semi-sacred rite / civic duty rather than something someone might actually want to see. Or as someone said on a panel at the LCT Lab a few years ago, we too frequently have "medicine theatre" as in take your medicine, Jimmy! Given that it's possible for people to be entertained and also have a deep experience and that many great tragedies are also on some level greatly entertaining I think it's possible to talk about theatre as something simultaneously valuable and enjoyable, at least as long as you don't think enjoyment is automatically suspect. (Anne Bogart has some interesting thoughts on this is And Then You Act which I'll post later when I have the book in front of me)
I don't necessarily know how to resolve these thoughts with the other side of my brain that gets furious when people talk during shows, or scroll through their iPHONES, or in some other way behave "disrespectfully" during a show. And I also wonder if the transcendently alive moments I've had while sitting in audiences would be possible if people were ordering beers and consorting with prostitutes and talking throughout the show. But I am also, I should note, fairly easy to distract and my sense of hearing has difficulty discriminating between foreground and background which hightens my awareness of disrespectful people in the audience...
This speech is just fucking bizarre. In order to make the case for his candidacy, John McCain gets all 1970s-prog-rock-concept-album and decides to describe the world in 2013 after his first term in office. Seriously, folks, this thing must be read to be believed. ... here is just a taste:
By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom. The Iraq War has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy, although still suffering from the lingering effects of decades of tyranny and centuries of sectarian tension. Violence still occurs, but it is spasmodic and much reduced. Civil war has been prevented; militias disbanded; the Iraqi Security Force is professional and competent; al Qaeda in Iraq has been defeated; and the Government of Iraq is capable of imposing its authority in every province of Iraq and defending the integrity of its borders. The United States maintains a military presence there, but a much smaller one, and it does not play a direct combat role.
The threat from a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan has been greatly reduced but not eliminated. U.S. and NATO forces remain there to help finish the job, and continue operations against the remnants of al Qaeda. The Government of Pakistan has cooperated with the U.S. in successfully adapting the counterinsurgency tactics that worked so well in Iraq and Afghanistan to its lawless tribal areas where al Qaeda fighters are based. The increase in actionable intelligence that the counterinsurgency produced led to the capture or death of Osama bin Laden, and his chief lieutenants. There is no longer any place in the world al Qaeda can consider a safe haven. Increased cooperation between the United States and its allies in the concerted use of military, diplomatic, and economic power and reforms in the intelligence capabilities of the United States has disrupted terrorist networks and exposed plots around the world. There still has not been a major terrorist attack in the United States since September 11, 2001.
What, exactly, does McCain think will cause any of this to happen? How will his policy of doing-the-same-thing-Bush-did-but-praying-it'll-work accomplish this?
Missing from the campaign coverage is this sentence: McCain says he hopes to bring troops home by 2013 in order to defang his "100 years" controversy without having to go back on having said it.
Campaign staffers could not be reached for comment to discuss whether or not they considered playing Temple of Sphyrynx over the loudspeaks when McCain was done talking.
(more from Kdrum, TPM, Matt Yglesias and TAPped)
The California Supereme Court has ruled the ban on gay marriage in California unconstitutional!
I wonder what McCain'll say about it? Think he'll call of a Constitutional ban on gay marriage like Bush did? Hmm...
In the meantime, I would say that I would prefer the word "marriage" (and some of the legal benefits) be dropped and the government certify "civil unions" between both inter-sex and same-sex couples. But if we're not going to do that, gay couples should be allowed to enter into the exact same legal arrangements as straight couples and get the same benefits and have it called the same goddamn thing. Anything less is degrading.
I forogt to mention in yesterday's post about public intellectuals that one of the few sources of namebrand public intellectuals in America is the New York Times' stable of columnists, particularly Thomas Friedman. He is also, of course, a buffoon. Glenn Greenwald welcomes Friedman back from his recent hiatus with this evisceration of Friedman's uselss and genuinely harmful demagoguery over Iran.
Next up... Tom Friedman interviews a cab driver in Oman who agrees that we should have a cold war with Iran! Or maybe he'll break down US Foreign Policy into three categories of things, all of which reinforce his worldview! Welcome back from your va-cay, Tom!
So the juggernaut that is How Theater Failed America is expanding with weekly Sunday post-show conversations! Awesome-sauce. Here is all the info! You'll notice that the June 1st Panel (titled You Are What You Watch) features Me! (Oh, and David Cote, Mark Russell, the head writer of the Daily Show, Morgan Jenness, Jim Nicola!)!
Hope to see you there.
It looks like Life On Mars will be remade for ABC by David Kelley as one of their two new shows in the fall (only two? yikes)! For those of you who haven't seen the original show, starring John Simm and Philip Glenister, I recommend it. It's great goofy fun, cheesy in all the right ways, with some pretty crackerjack acting from the leads (the whole series is also a total of 16 one hour episodes long, shorter than one season of the US show will be). I doubt the US TV show will go for the same tonal balance as the BBC one, as many of the aspects of the BBC show are resolutely unfashionable, but I'd be interested in seeing what they do with it.
Bush says that if we leave Iraq the US will be attacked by terorrists and announces that in solidarity with the men and women of US Armed Forces and their sacrifice he has given up golf. And before I thought he was out of touch. Clearly, he is a man of the people and should be trusted with our foreign policy! What a visionary! He's like Henry the Fifth!
Also, Spanish-language news superior to English-language news. Clearly, we should keep these people out of our country! They might fuck up the E channel's ratings and then where would white america be?
I had this thought earlier today... Where is the Milton Friedman of theatre?... and no, I don't mean a man whose disasterously misguided theories s will negatively impact trade economics, foreign policies and the sustainability of Democracy around the globe for decades to come... what i mean really is "where is theatre's ambassador the way Friedman was free-market economics' ambassador?"
When Milton Friedman died, all of his obits happened to mention that he helped make (or perhaps almost-singlehandedly made) economics a popular thing to talk about in the public discourse, rather than this gnomic discipline that no one wanted to really consider (obviously quite a bit of the credit for should also go to Keynes, but Friedman also existed in the age of television). Who will do that for theatre? I used to think it would be Frank Rich, but he clearly is wants to write about politics through the lens of a former theatre critic rather than use his critic-emeritus status to try to further popularize the form (this is not a criticism, just an observation). So if he's not going to do it, who will?
But then I read this from K-Drum and this from Ezra Klein and I realize that perhaps the issue has to do with the popularity and weight given to public intellectuals period. After all, the vintage copy of Robert Brustein's The Theatre of Revolt currently staring at me from my bookshelf was published by The Atlantic Monthly's imprint of Little Brown & Co. (which is another way of saying a major monthly magazine's division of a major publishing house). Anne Bogart's books are now published by Routledge, the top-line academic publisher and cost ridiculous academic prices to buy (they are, I should note, worth the cost, even if I bristle at paying $35 for a paperback with a badly digitized b+w photo on its cover that is less than 200 pages long). Although Harold Clurman's On Directing is considered a directing textbook today, in its time it was written for the casually interested theatre goer to explain what a director does. That we can only conceive of that book as a textbook for aspiring theatre professionals says a great deal about the status of public dialogue about theatre all on its own.
In politics, this can be traced to things like the internet and the Wingnut Welfare system and the democratization of the flow of information etc. etc. and so forth. Where before we might have Milton Friedman and Noam Chomsky and a few others, we now have a long long list of people to turn to for comment on an issue. In theater however it's not like we now have this huge number of semi-successful public intellectuals rather than a hand ful of household names. We don't really have anyone. When I was a kid, Frank Rich was the subject of a 60 Minutes segment. I can't imagine that happening for Ben Brantley.
I'm guessing there's some people out there who feel that this is completely unnecessary but I find it kind of interseting to muse about. Who would you want that person to be? What qualities would they have? Is such a person totally unnecessary?
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