Parabasis

Interesting Things You Learn While Bored

David Cote has a wikipedia entry. Charles Isherwood does not.

another obama song

will.i.am has done another Obama song, this one around the "We are the ones we've been waiting for" dealio. It's called "We Are The Ones".

I gotta say, I much prefer the song "We are the Ones" by The Coup, which features rapping about drug dealing and revolution and hip-hop albums by a band of far-left loonies speaking in preposterously fake British accents. Also, I think Bootsie Collins did the music (but I'm not sure). My personal favorite lyric? "Now philosophically you'd be opposed to one inhaling coke via mouth or the nose / but economically i must propose that you go eat a dick 'cause employment had froze"

Here's the Obama one.

Here's the totally awesome Coup one (not safe for work):

Prisons Follow-Up

More on our prison industrial complex (PIC) can be found here.

1%

The US currently incarcerates roughly 1% of its adult population. Sickening. This is where our bullshit macho "tough on crime" politics have gotten us.

Fixing Stoplights / Question of the Day

One last Allinsky point, to get us to our question of the day.

A major of part of Allinsky organizing, which he talks about briefly in Rules for Radicals is about choosing ones battles. He makes a number of points about this (don't organize to accomplish only one thing, you want to be fighting multiple battles and you need new ones to keep your organization going etc.) but here's the one I want to focus on:
Choose a series of escalating battles that you can win. Or, in other words, start small and grow.

The example he uses is from when he was organizing the Back of the Yards in Chicago. He researched the various things the community wanted to improve its lot. He found out that one of them (getting family medical services back into the neighborhood to lower the infant mortality rate) was in fact fairly simple to accomplish. So they set out to do that and once they got that done, used the momentum and the power generated from that to go after the next incrementally larger target.

The friend of mine who introduced me to Allinsky's writing calls this "fixing a stoplight". There are small things one can do to improve the community that can be built on. Power flows from power, afterall.

So here's how we get to theatre... there's a lot wrong with systems of doing business. Most of us agree on that. Many of these problems are very very large and fixing them will take a lot organizing muscle, innovation, grit etc. Think Showcase Code reform (There's a biggee) or dealing with the terrible real estate situation in New York.

But there's also problems that are stoplights that need to be fixed. Smaller things that a group of people could change for the better on the way towards fixing those larger things.

So... here's the question of the day, readers (and my fellow theatre bloggers, if they'd like to take a crack at it). What's one small thing that could be changed for the better through an organized effort in your theatrical community?

Leave answers in comments, on your blog, or e-mail me at parabasisnyc at yahoo dot com.

UPDATE: just in case it wasn't clear, I don't mean the question to be NYC-centric. If you're not based in New York, I'd love to hear one stoplight in your community that you could potentially fix if you had some organization.

Hilarious. Mildly Terrifying.

Cable Local network fakes technical difficulties to avoid showing portion of 60 Minutes. Smooth, guys.

UPDATE read the comment from Laura to this post for some on-the-ground reporting that calls into question Crooks and Liars' description of events. Yay blogosphere!

Following Up On That Last Post

If we are performing all the time, because we are always in relationships , whether social, institutional, or both, at the end of the day there is no "true self".  There are, I'd argue, "authentic" and "inauthentic" performances, but no real true self.  (A clear example I can think of of an inauthentic performance would be being in the closet, or in some way compromising your core beliefs for x reason).

Getting back to acting again, most acting methods center around finding some kind of true self of the character. But if what you've got instead in a series of performances, some authentic, some inauthentic (or in Iago's case, entirely inauthentic at all times-- thanks Patrick!) maybe there are some different possibilities that emerge?

I guess what some of this derives from is that most of our approaches to acting are based in understandings of the self and human identity and psychology that are largely from the 19th century. For many of us, there are plenty of different understandings that have come about since then that are useful, revelatory, appealing etc.  For example: and many of the older ideas (particularly those that flow from Freud) are based largely on the "self" as a primary unit instead of on relationships as the primary unit. And it's so ingrained that frequently when looking at character and performance, we look to the self and then the other, instead of the relations and then the individuals etc.

Identity, performance, blogging

Like any good postmodernist I've spent a lot of time learning about how identity is a performance, how we perform all the time, and how Judith Butler is God (even if her writing is... shall we say... opaque).  I've found over the years that blogging makes this rather obvious.  We choose before we write what we are going to say and how we are going to say it.  For example, I try to keep snark about theatre to a minimum on here. Which isn't to say I don't do it (I do) but I try not to do it too much. Although I do get snarky in private, over e-mail or with my friends, because sometimes you need to just let it out.  Similarly, I try to perform on the blog in a way that is more likely to engender some kind of discussion in the comments.  Clearly, I haven't learned how to do this all the time, as the comments section is not exactly a rollicking free ride of constant debate and analysis for every post. But still, it's something I think about when I sit down to write.

Most other bloggers I can think of have pretty easily defined personae.  Of those I've met, sometimes they match the person's "in the flesh" persona, sometimes they don't.... which can be... well... odd.

Blogging is just a particularly obvious form of the kinds of performances we give every day.  We don't act at work the way we do on a date, for another obvious example.  And directors, in particular, have to learn how to shape their performance in the rehearsal room.  I've learned that both from failures and successes in doing so. 

But if we are performing in every situation... how does this impact acting?  I ask this because most plays (not all, but most) I read I think initially that the characters in them are somehow... clearer, more exact, more transparent (I'm trying deliberately to not use the word "honest") than actual people.  Which is fine.  It's art.  It's not real life. There's a certain distillation that goes on there.

What I think this means for actors is that sometimes your character herself is performing and sometimes she's not, depending on the writer.  But I wonder what layers there are available for the actor in consciously looking at a character as a series of contextual performances depending on who the other character (the "audience") is...even when that's not overtly the case... And would this kind of approach to a character befuddle an audience trained to look for consistency?

As Atrios Would Say....

Time for another blogger ethics panel...

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