Parabasis

This is Just Getting Ridiculous

Now Sarah Palin, when asked what news sources she regularly consulted pre-VP bid says "you know, all of them" and when pressed for more details says "Alaska's not a foreign country"... 

For the record, Governor, I regularly consult the New York Times and Harper's (in both its print and online formats), for arts news I regularly check in at Artsjournal, Playbill, Americans for the Arts' Cultural Policy Listserv and occasionally broadways stars.  Beyond theatre blogs, I subscribe to and read regularly man political blogs including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Matthew Yglesias, Obsidian Wings, The Washington Monthly, TAPped, Andrew Sullivan, Majikthise, Ezra Klein, Balloon Juice, Digby's Blog etc. and so forth. I also read articles that they link to.

This is off the top of my head, and I'm not a politician, I'm a fucking theatre director and blogger, ferchrissakes.

Go Read Some Pullman

Philip Pullman, besides writing the absolutely brilliant His Dark Materials trilogy has also pulled off the rather difficult trick of being a very public atheist and ardent secularist prior to Hitchens et al. making it trendy.  Here in the Guardian, he writes an excellent piece about the efforts to ban The Golden Compass and the movie that vaguely resembles it and is named the same thing. Go check it out.

Compare and Contrast

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Getting to a New New Deal

So... let's say that now that the Paulson plan has failed, the Dems decide "fuck it, let's do the right thing and use our majority to get it done".  Yes, this assumes two things: (1) that the Paulson plan will fail no matter what, that there's no way to add a couple of cosmetic things and get the votes from the GOP necessary to make it pass and (2) There actually are enough progressives in Congress to want "The right thing" to happen.

It seems to me there's a couple of ways to do this. The first is to try to get something as good as possible now which means as progressive as possible while avoiding a Republican filibuster, get all the Democrats to vote for it and then fiercely defend it in the news.  Digby's made a good case for doing that, that there are rhetorical maneuvers that the polls and the failure of the Paulson plan have left open to progressives.  Don't want the money to bail out wall st. fat cats who caused the problem in the first place? Fine, let's spend that money in health care, a new WPA etc. The Shock Doctrine for progressivism, in other words, use the crisis the way that Free Marketeers do to get us closer to Democratic Socialism.

The other way to do it appears to be to get something passed now as a stop-gap, work really hard to get a larger Democratic majority and a Democratic President and then do it then.

Of the two ideas, I think the latter is more likely to happen, but I'd put the likelihood of either happening at slim. Which is sad but there you go...

New Theatre Blog to Check Out

Aaron Leichter, frequent commenter here at Parabasis has a new blog devoted to theatre. It's called The Fifth Wall. Please go check it out!

The Under-300: Pride of Baghdad

Hey Parabasis Readers,

Having been on the freelance writing market for a little bit now, I've noticed that it's really quite important for job seekers to prove they can say things eloquently and insightfully in less than 300 words.  So to help build up those skills, I'm starting a new feature here called "The Under-300".  I don't know if it will all be reviews or not yet, but the goal is try to to write something concise, structurally sound and maybe slightly elegant.  my first attempt, a review of the Brian K. Vaughan / Niko Henrichon graphic novel Pride of Baghdad.

So here we go... The Under-300: Pride of Baghdad

My local comic bookstore proprietor informed me recently that Brian K. Vaughan’s Pride of Baghdad doesn’t sell very well, despite its author’s popularity. This is a shame; Pride is amongst the Y: The Last Man creator’s best works. Consulting my patented Critic’s Wild Speculometron 2000, I’m going to go ahead and say it’s the book’s premise that has done in its commercial prospects.  For 136 pages you follow around four talking lions that escape from the Baghdad Zoo during the early days of the United States’ invasion of Iraq.  Oh yeah, and they talk. About lion stuff.

Oddly enough, this kid’s book premise works wonders in this very-much-not-for-kids story, although for people following Vaughan’s work, it shouldn’t be that surprising. Brian K. Vaughan has made a career of taking what at first seem like highly suspect premises- All the male animals on Earth die except for a lame hipster magician and his pet helper monkey! A mediocre ex-superhero becomes Mayor of New York!- and pulling them off with wit, depth, feeling and a smidgeon of panache.  Pride of Baghdad is no exception. Vaughan and artist Niko Henrichon are experts at evoking the visual and storytelling vocabulary of children’s entertainment (especially Disney movies) while never letting you forget that the main characters are in the middle of a deadly situation that they cannot possible comprehend. 

Pride of Baghdad avoids didacticism while also communicating the tragedy of war as it is visited on the beings that must struggle to survive it.  It also studiously avoids the kind of forced relevancy and hipster trendiness that marred Shooting War. While Vaughan will probably always be remembered for his lengthier works, Pride of Baghdad shows that he can make a stand -alone volume vibrate with creativity and insight. 

Some Interesting Thoughts from Digby

Digby muses about how this is a ripe opportunity for a new New Deal here. She has a lot of interesting thoughts on the subject, and (non-existant) Lord knows, I'd be in favor of such a thing. What I think her post neglects to seriously consider is how much progressive willpower there actually is today in the House and Senate.  I'm pretty sure the answer is "not nearly as much as would be necessary to create a new New Deal" but I'm open to being wrong about that. I'd certainly like to see some writing on her part that considered who is actually in Congress a little more closely.

We're in Trouble.

Broad strokes outline here folks... The bailout bill didn't pass.  It wasn't a great bill, but it was a lot better than a lot of the alternatives on the table from the far right-wing whackadoos. Keep in mind these were the people who were saying in the press this weekend that they would rather risk a Great Depression than violate their free market principles, principles that have been thoroughly disproven in countries ranging from Argentina to Chile to Russia to Poland to South East Asia and, most recently, right here in the United States.

They are, essentially, religious zealots, with the religion being free market economics and the messiah being Milton Friedman.

There's some reasons why this spells real trouble:

The chances of getting a better bill (better from a progressive standpoint) than what was voted on today are slim.  As Paul Krugman has pointed out, the Democrats need the Republicans to vote for this.  If they don't get significant bipartisan cover, the Republicans are going to demagogue the bill and score points off of it, and ride the bailout to the ballot box... And keep in mind, no matter what the action is, it'll be unpopular even if its the best possible bill... and it won't be the best possible bill, because compromise is the name of the game.

Because of the aforementioned religious zealotry on the part of Free Market Republicans, these are people that cannot be negotiated with.  There's nothing to do there, they have to be frozen out of the process.  So what does that leave?

It leaves going to some mix of low-hanging fruit in the GOP plus getting a few more Dems to sign on. The main camps of Dems that didn't sign on were members of the Congressional Black and Hispanic Caucuses (Cauci?) and Conservative / Blue Dog Dems. Most measure that are going to bring Black and Hispanic members of the Democratic side in are not going to be appetizing to the GOP.

What this probably means it that whatever symbolic measures are put into Bailout 2.5, its going to lean more Rightward, with the Dems hoping to pick up both Blue Dog votes and centrist GOP holdouts.  That's bad news. It means the next draft of the bill will almost certainly get worse instead of better.

The other possible strategy is to go after really upping the Democratic vote count, but then you'll lose a few more Republicans, which means you'll end up losing more Democrats as the bipartisan cover option disappears...

man, am I glad I'm not an elected representative today. 

Question of the Day

Exactly how fucked are we?

Compare and Contrast

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Gotta Get a Gimmick

UPDATE: Please read Jason Robert Brown's quite-clarifying comment to this post, which answers the questions I've laid out here. 

Robert Simonson at the Times passes on some not-entirely-accurate information in  this profile he does of the band for 13. For those of you who don't know, 13 is the new musical by Jason Robert Brown (with book by Dan Elish and Robert Horn) chronicling a particularly difficult year 13 in the life of a young mensch in the making. Much ink has spilled about the fact that the performers -- including the band-- are teenagers.  

Simonson's article also makes a big deal out of the fact that the "The orchestra performs onstage in full view of the audience."

The problem is, this isn't entirely true on either point.

Most of the band are teenagers, with the exception of the piano/conductor, who is Broadway composer, orchestrator and music director Tom Kitt (Broadway World page with photos here).  Having seen the show, I can attest that quite a bit of the more complex parts of the score goes to the piano part. This isn't surprising, JRB is a piano-based composer and the same can certainly be said of his score for The Last Five Years. But still, it's worth mentioning that one of the key players in the band isn't a teenager at all. (There is also a teenaged keyboardist, FWIW... I should also note that the program bills Tom Kitt as just Music Director, but other websites etc. bill him as Piano/Conductor and I'm pretty sure in listening to the show when I saw it there are both piano and synthesizer parts).

And then there's the issue of them performing in front of the audience. Reading Simonson's article, you'd think they're onstage and visible the whole time like in Passing Strange, although Simonson never explicitly claims that.  But they actually only appear briefly in a couple of segments, once at the beginning, once at the end and once or twice in silhouette. I remember thinking that keeping them hidden was by far the biggest mistake in the production, for all the reasons that Brown et al. discuss in the Times profile. (For what it's worth, when the band appears onstage, Kitt is tucked into the wings where no one can see him although his hand peeks out from the wings every now and then).

Might I Suggest...

That we allow pastors to say whatever they want from the pulpit and then tax religious organizations like they're the businesses they so clearly are?  If they want to set up a separate 501(c)3 organization to do charitable work that's fine, but let's just get rid of the tax exemption and then they can say whatever they want from the pulpit. Hell, they're already violating the no-politics-from-the-pulpit rule on both the left and the right. Barack Obama and Sarah Palin have both made campaign appearances in churches. Let's just get rid of the tax break and go from there.

RIP Paul Newman

Sadly, Paul Newman has gone to that great picturehouse in the beyond. I loved watching Paul Newman on screen, and the one time I met him-- in the line for the men's room during intermission of Chicago the week after it opened on Broadway- he was a kind and gracious man. And let's say that creating Newman's Own was an act of supreme class.

I know he was in many movies and gave many great performances, but he never gave me more pleasure as an audience member than as Sidney J. Mussberger in The Hudsucker Proxy. He could make me giggle with even the slightest chomp of the cigar, or an arched eyebrow, and he was the perfect foil for Tim Robbins.

What's your favorite Paul Newman performance?

More Debate React

According to every single immediate response poll, Obama won the debate.  Wow. And by margins far more significant than I would have given it to him.

So how did he win it? I think it's through a combination of a few things. First, I had had a few before the debate, so i don't think I completely noticed what a jerk McCain was through the whole thing. i didn't notice that he wouldn't make eye contact with Obama, that he kept sneering, laughing and fussing about angrily at his podium. I think the voters saw that contrast, much like Gore's first debate against Bush.

Second, although as a Democrat already voting for Obama, I really really wanted him to go for the jugular, he chose a different path. At first I didn't understand why he was so calm and unwilling to "go there" during the debate.  But having read a few essays about it around the web, I realize something now... there's still a large swatch of the American people who aren't sure that Obama is a "ready" to tackle serious issues.  So he needed to go up there and project "Readiness" and "Expertise" and "Authority" and all of those things.  He was giving a performance for an audience that didn't include me, and it killed with them.  

To us theatre folk, this is an object lesson in knowing who you're speaking to, and why.

Compare And Contrast

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Quickee Debate React

I'd say that both candidates did much better than I anticipated. Obama ditched the professor and brought out the President, and McCain seemed pretty coherent and even managed to land a couple of good blows- even if they were based in total misrepresentation of the facts. This was by far Obama's best debate performance yet-- surprising how much better he gets when he actually disagrees with his opponent on a bunch of issues.

McCain did alright, he made his points clearly, he didn't stumble significantly. I'd say his segues to off topic tangents that were friendlier territory than the question asked were not nearly as deft as Obama's, but he did alright.

Ultimately, I'd call this an almost-tie: Obama won on points, but landed no knockout blows. He did a good job though, and I think he'll do even better in the next one.

Weirdly enough, McCain was very defensive in the first half of the debate. He kept referencing accusations against him that neither Leher nor Obama had made. In fact, if you weren't reading Op-Ed pages and blogs over the past few weeks, I'm not sure you would've known what he was talking about 20% of the time.

Josh Marshall concurs, calling it "pretty much a draw". I wish Obama had delivered some kind of Dementor's-kiss-style knockout blow, but I still say a draw works in his favor.

... adding that 538 says that several polls of independents give it to Obama by a significant margin.

Compare and Contrast

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A Solution to the Economic Crisis

Sigh... it's come to this:

more animals

Quick Debate Thought

You know, I don't want to participate in lowering expectations too far so that if McCain shows up and can form a complete sentence and/or tie his shoes, he appears to have "won" the debate. But can we talk for just a moment about exactly how royally fucked he is?  His gambit really really didn't pay off, and now he's been cornered into agreeing to participate in a debate he spent the last few days actively trying to cancel and not prepping for.  

Now, although he's a great public speaker, Obama is not a great debater. And although he's a terrible public speaker, McCain does a pretty good job in debates. Unlike Obama's somewhat Hamletesque solliloquies, McCain dials to a talking point that includes a subject and an active verb and steps on the throttle.  I vastly prefer Obama's way of handling himself (in case you were wondering!).  So we'll see what happens.

What am I excited for?  Well, dear reader... the follow up questions. In this debate, the candidates are allowed to ask each other follow up questions.  This should make things quite unpredictable and I think will work to Obama's benefit. Simply put: McCain lies. A lot. He also changes his position without claiming he's changed them. Hopefully, Obama will zero in on this.  I'm also looking forward to an exchange in the Vice Presidential debate that will go something like this:

MODERATOR: And what do you think we should do in Iraq, Governor?

PALIN: Well, I think that if you-- you look at the ground, at the facts on the (pause) and. And you see we have lots of different people who- they don't- you know- they don't so. They get a long. Don't get along. They you know sectarian hate.  And that's why I think it's important that we you know, it's interesting, we have to make a distinction about who our friends are and our enemies and these are bad people. You know just next to Iraq is you know Iran and you know he wants to wipe Israel off the map. And we have to be ready for that and have our readiness.

MODERATOR: And now a follow up question from your oppononent, Senator?

BIDEN: Yeah... uh... what are you talking about??

My Bank Failed Yesterday!

How was your day?