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Like many of you, this blog needs some time off to recharge. It's been a really deeply difficult December, and so in January I hope to return with both barrells a blazin' with politics and theatre stuff to rock your worlds (and the comments section). Until then, though, here's hoping you are eating well, resting up, and enjoying time with your loved ones. See you in the new year.
by Mark from Mr. Excitement News
I really like John Edwards. His campaign platform is most similar to my own views and if I was just basing my decision on that, which is what a lot of people do, he'd probably be my guy. But I don't just vote to feel good about what my personal priorities are. Voting is about effecting change in my community. Real people's lives have a lot vested in who wins elections and the 2008 presidential race (given both the last seven years and the incredibly insane Republicans that are running) is especially critical. And I don't think John Edwards can win the general election.
I know, he polls well in hypothetical matchups against different Republicans. All our candidates do. But, as Ezra Klein points out:
The polarizing effects of the process are the larger truth that voters have to grapple with. How will Obama look after nine months of sinister insinuations about his heritage, religious loyalties and racial background? How will John Edwards look after the airwaves are blanketed with sneering ads focusing on his mansion and his record as a trial lawyer and his pricey haircuts?
John Edwards has given the right-wing smear machine much ammunition to use against him, from superficial stuff like the $400 haircut to more serious hypocrisies, like his investments in Fortress, which foreclosed homes of Katrina victims. Plus, he's not shown a great ability to reframe and fight back--in retrospect, he really got played on the whole blogger controversy in a way that doesn't bode well for his ability to reframe and turn the attack around in a general election.
And the reason this stuff is all so important is that Edwards has chosen to accept public financing of his campaign, meaning that his campaign will have go "go dark" during critical summer months. During that time, the Republican candidate (who won't have to go off the air) would team unofficially with pro-GOP 527 groups (like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth) to run an incredibly ruthless smear campaign against Edwards. Basically, by the time he went back on the air, they'd have him wearing ladies underwear in a cave with Osama Bin Laden and his campaign-staffer-love-child.
[Crossposted to Mr. Excitement News]
Say what you will about M.I.A. (i'd say she's conceptually awesome, but her flow needs some work) when she teams up with Diplo, they're fucking unstoppable. Easily the hot indie summer jam...
There was no music video for this one, but this one wins the coveted "song of the year most likely to reduce Isaac Butler to emotional jello" (previous winner = "I'll Believe in Anything" by Wolf Parade)
Possibly the greatest rock band recording today lets their hair down and goes max instead of min for a Jon Brion produced horn awesomeathon:
Panda Bear. Skateboard samples. Jangly guitar. To quote The Mustache of Understanding... suck.... on... this:
The National aren't a band I've had particularly nice things to say about in the past, but man is Boxer a great album (thanks John Devore!), and this song is one of the best on it, although more aggressive in tone and less openly beautiful than most of its album mates. The lyric "you get mistaken for strangers by your own friends" might be one of the better summations of social alienation i've heard since Talking Heads sang that they hate people when they're not polite.
I bought the album based on this video. Unfortunately, the album is a bunch of incomprehensible prog shittiness, but this song is fucking awesome:
It's hard to hate Arcade Fire (Despite the thorough mediocrity of their latest album) when they keep doing cool shit like this:
Even after the Pitchfork-induced hype died down, I still really dig this band. I listen to this most times I'm on the elliptical machine at the Y:
For extra fun, hit "play" on all of them at once and adjust their individual volumes until your ears jump Jonathan-Livingston-Seagull-like into a higher plane of existence.
By Isaac Butler
Today in the Guardian's Arts Blog (not the theatre one) comes this article defending "high art", and I thought i'd poll my readers on this one...
Money graf:
Life is too short to watch [pop television shows], when you could be listening to Schumann, trying to get to grips with Beethoven's Late Quartets, learning Italian so you can read Dante in the original, or wrestling with Ford Madox Ford. Have you ever read The Good Soldier? If not, treat yourself for Christmas -- it's an odd and wonderful book. Skip EastEnders and that nonsense with Bruce Forsyth and read Ford instead. The Good Soldier is short, but the Parade's End tetralogy should keep us going into the new year.I'm really not a candidate for the judiciary (or is it the asylum?). I have heard of Gazza and the Beatles; I adore Bob Dylan; I dabbled with Britpop; I like some new movies; I am learning how to operate a DVD. But it does irritate me that "high art" (bad term, admittedly) lovers in Britain can't make a quorum. I bet they can in Germany and probably in Connecticut, too. Germans are more serious than we are; American intellectuals more rigorous, more self-confident, less preoccupied with demonstrating that they know who the Killers are. The great majority of popular culture in the UK is worthless, moronic, meretricious, self-serving, anti-democratic, sclerotic garbage: it's the enemy of thought and change: it should be ignored, marginalised, trashed. There I've said it.
Now, I tend to be one who's response to the high art/low art dichotomy is "go Cheney yourself" and that we should focus on good art and bad art or, put even more democratically art we like and art we don't. What about you guys and gals?
by Mark from Mr. Excitement News
Apologies for the lack of posting today. I've been traveling and I'm blogging from Minneapolis. I took my daughter to see her her first play today - this was it. It was part of a series for preschoolers at the Children's Theatre Company. She enjoyed the performance (which was quite good, in fact) and it was really meaningful for me.
QOD: What was the first play you saw?
by Mark from Mr. Excitement News
Since I know all you Parabasites have talked a lot about the pros and cons of Knocked Up, I thought I'd link to Meghan O'Rourke's thoughtful feminist critique. What makes it so resonant is that she's no Apatow hater--she "laughed until she cried at Judd Apatow's goofy comedy"--but she pinpoints something that's missing from Apatow's women.
Knocked Up made time for men to explore their choices on-screen in almost existential ways; they ask themselves whom they want to be, they joke around, they assume the right to experiment. Women, by contrast, are entirely concerned with pragmatic issues. We never see Alison or her older sister, Debbie, pursue or express her own creative impulses, sense of humor, independent interests; their rather instrumental concerns lie squarely in managing to balance the domestic with the professional. It's as if women's inner worlds are entirely functional rather than playful and open.
It was hard not to be defensive of Knocked Up, and not just because it was so funny, but also because Apatow at least tried to show the parallels between men’s fears and women’s fears about adulthood. He grasped that women do have inner lives, but he just failed to write the female characters with the same understanding he brought to the male characters. He showed a glimmer of understanding that the endless rotation of work in a woman’s life is not necessarily something that women want but have embraced because they feel they don’t have a choice, whereas most movies and shows and commercials that position the men as boisterous children and women as disapproving authority figures seem to think that women are mysterious non-human creatures who get off on being fundamentally unlikeable.
Your thoughts?
By Isaac Butler
check out this interview with Chuck Mee in The Gothamist. Who knew that Queens Boulevard was partly based on blog entries?
by Mark from Mr. Excitement News
The lineup of plays for the 2008 Humana Festival has been announced:
Full-length plays are Great Falls by Lee Blessing (New York City), This Beautiful City by Steven Cosson (New York City) and Jim Lewis (New York City), Becky Shaw by Gina Gionfriddo (New York City), Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom by Jennifer Haley (Los Angeles), the break/s by Marc Bamuthi Joseph (Oakland, CA) and All Hail Hurricane Gordo by Carly Mensch (New York City).
Ten-Minute plays are Tongue, Tied by M. Thomas Cooper (Portland, OR), Dead Right by Elaine Jarvik (Salt Lake City, In Paris You Will Find Many Baguettes but Only One True Love by Michael Lew (New York City) and One Short Sleepe by Naomi Wallace (native of Prospect, KY, residing in Skipton, North Yorkshire).
The dramatic anthology, Game On, is written by Zakiyyah Alexander (New York City), Rolin Jones (Los Angeles), Alice Tuan (Los Angeles), Daryl Watson (New York City), Marisa Wegrzyn (Chicago) and Ken Weitzman (Atlanta).
The Civilians show has been buzzed about for some time. It's nice to see Gina Gionfriddo making an appearance, as well as blog-friend Marisa. And Carly Mensch is a name I've been hearing a lot, so this is an auspicious debut for her. Several other names on the list are unfamiliar, which is great.
[Crossposted to Mr. Excitement News]
CC: Atrios and Digby
(by Isaac Butler)
Can we please stop using the term "village" or "villagers" to describe the Washington D.C. establishment in politics and the media? It's really, really, creepy how all of a sudden everyone's calling them "villagers" or "the village" or whatever. It's even creepier when people get accused of having a "village mentality" when they write something that the leftist blogging establishment disagrees with. Writing about the small village mentality was illuminating... calling the establishment that term just reeks of simplemindedness.
by Mark from Mr. Excitement News
When Charles Isherwood penned the following criticism of August: Osage County, the blogosphere went crazy:
Mr. Letts is as yet more a skillful entertainer than a true visionary or a dramatic poet. “August: Osage County” is a ripsnorter full of blistering, funny dialogue, acid-etched characterizations and scenes of no-holds-barred emotional combat, but I would not say it possesses the penetrating truth or the revelatory originality of a fully achieved work of art.
Now, can you believe it, Martin Denton has come out and said the same thing!
It's extremely well-crafted, very involving and, in its singular way, a
great deal of fun. Is it grand theatre? Absolutely. Is it great drama?
Definitely not.
[--]
No, come to this expecting to find the author of gratuitously provoking works like Killer Joe and Bug
at the top of his form, or, perhaps more accurately, in expansive form:
this is a great big exciting breathless jaw-dropping adventure of a
show, but—let's be honest—an entirely superficial one.
I assume that everyone who vigorously condemned Isherwood will no doubt rush to throw down against Denton. I mean, it's not like you guys would just take any opportunity to fire off anti-Isherwood posts! These sentiments must not be allowed to stand!
[Crossposted to Mr. Excitement News]
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