Parabasis

Mustafa Barghouti on the Daily Show

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Some Good News For The Arts!

The House and Senate have passed a $12.5 million increase in the budgets of the NEA and NEH! (In case you're wondering, that's roughly an 8% boost). The budgets for both agencies will now be $167.5 million.

According to the e-mail I just received, this brings the NEA's budget to the highest it's been in 16 years. In 1995, the NEA's budget was $162 million dollars, but adjusted for inflation, it was $224 million dollars. In other words, this is a victory (particularly in this climate when the Republicans are looking for basically anything remotely demagogable), but it's not quite as big a victory as Americans for the Arts' might have you believe. 

We have a long way to go if we're to reach either the funding goal of $1 per capita arts funding ($300 million) or if we are going to restore the NEA to its funding height, adjusted for inflation ($470 million), but this is a start. 

Diversity in the Arts

Playgoer and Mission Paradox both have highlighted this piece by Michael Kaiser raising some interesting questions about diversity in arts orgs. I'm not part of the cult of Kaiser quite yet, I found his much-lauded piece on arts management, for example, to be a bit overrated. (I don't think the lack of good managers is the single biggest problem facing the arts, nor do I think that getting more and better managers and paying them better is necessarily the best way to take care of all the other problems facing the arts. The Roundabout and The New Group, for example, both "know how to find resources, attract audiences and other constituents and provide support to our artists" but they also do consistently awful work and surely although the main goal of any institution is to perpetuate itself and grow, doing good work has to be up there in the goal list too, right?)

My thoughts on it are going in too many different directions for me to quite cohere them yet, so I'm going to hold off for now and simply ask you, dear reader, what you think about it. Here's some sample graphs:

Having spent a great deal of my career working with arts organizations of color, I am as committed as anyone to the diversity of our arts ecology. I do not believe that we can have a truly great artistic community if all segments of our society are not represented well.

But I do not think I believe anymore in forcing Eurocentric arts organizations to do diverse works or to put one minority on a board.

When large, white organizations produce minority works they typically select the "low hanging fruit," the most popular works by diverse artists featuring the most famous minority performers and directors. This almost invariably hurts the minority arts organizations in the neighborhood, most of which are small and underfunded, and cannot afford to match the marketing clout or the casting glamor of their larger white counterparts. How else to explain the reduced strength of American black theater companies over the past twenty years?

Busy Busy Little Bee

Today is a crazy-busy day. I'm in phone meetings for the day job from 11AM-6PM and I have all sorts of other writing projects I need to get cracking on. So it's time to link-o-rama.

I believe this Matt Yglesias post meets the definition of Pwnage. (Also on Yglesias: Monkey Econ 101)

As per usual, Ta-Nehisi Coats has a beautifully written, thought provoking post on something. This time, it's on blogging and journalism. 

What does your playlist say about you?

I might have said this already, but welcome back to the theatrosphere, Scott Walters! People might not know this, since we argue nearly constantly, but Scott and I actually get along quite well.

Haven't you always wanted Hey Jude in flowchart form? Sure you have.

Some of you may know that I have taken up playing the ukulele as a hobby. And man do I love it. The openness of the tuning makes for really beautiful harmonics, and chords are quite easy to play on it. Also, the high pitch of the tuning makes dissonance really quite lovely, and it's basically built for seven chords.  I've always been hopeless on the guitar, but Gertrude (the ukulele) and I are really tearing it up.  The latest three songs i've learned are this, this and this. I've been trying since the beginning to tackle this, but it's hard on a uke.

Is Israel A Jewish Democracy?

Spencer Ackerman yesterday espoused a widely-stated left-leaning pro-Israel view that I've always found really, seriously bizarre:

If Israel doesn’t get out of the West Bank soon, demographic realities will force Israel to make the most painful existential choice of its life: whether to abandon Jewish democracy or whether to abandon Jewish statehood in favor of a binational homeland. Both of these options, in fundamental ways, represent the end of Israel. Not from an Iranian nuclear weapon. Not from a super-empowered Palestinian intifada. But from political failure and international diplomatic failure, the end of Israel can, actually, be achieved.

This is not a hypothetical fear. Unless a settlement is reached before there are more Arabs between the Jordan and the Mediterranean — which is, I don’t know, ten years away? — it will be the case. Even before then, the Palestinian national movement would have very good incentives to stop pursuing the cause of an independent state, because they’d feel themselves to be the majority in a binational state. If they can force Israel to choose between its Jewishness and its democracy — a choice that risks overwhelming and perhaps untenable diplomatic isolation. (emph. mine)

The idea behind this viewpoint is that Israel currently occupies the West Bank. The population of Israeli Arabs + Palestinian Arabs is currently a minority, but only just barely.  Perhaps as soon as a decade, this will change. Israel can't import enough Jews to keep up with Palestinian birth rate. When that demographic crossover happens, Israel will then cease being a Jewish Democracy. It will either stop having to be Jewish, or become an apartheid state and anti-democratic.

Here's why this viewpoint doesn't make sense to me... from a Palestinian rights standpoint, Israel already isn't a democracy. Why does the population switch over suddenly make the Israeli treatment of people in the occupied territories worse when substantively that treatment won't change at all. While a minority, Palestinians already don't have rights.  They'll have the same amount of rights as a majority. But all of a sudden this is bad? 

To me, this all seems about creating a legal framework in one's head that allows one to resolve cognitive dissonance. What I'm surprised by is how commonly expressed and easily accepted this viewpoint is, given that it just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Israel's treatment of the Palestinians is wrong. It's not going to be more or less wrong when Jews are outnumbered by Arabs.  Israel has already sacrificed its democratic ideals to serve the purposes of Ethnic Nationalism (i.e. setting up a state for the express benefit of one ethnic group), an ideology that Ackerman and other left-leaning Zionists argue against so long as the Ethnic Nationalists aren't Jews.

Cutest. Thing. Ever.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention I got this via Jaime's Twitter Feed.

Beagle Puppy Attacks Rottweiler - watch more funny videos

The Women Of Afghanistan

I was about to write a post saying that in the debate over sending more troops to Afghanistan, you never really hear about women's rights issues when all of a sudden TAPped publishes a little piece surveying the field. Turns out that Afghan feminists are not united in how they feel about the American occupation:

From the United States, it's difficult to figure out who speaks for Afghan women, or even Afghan feminists. Malalai Joya, a heroic 31-year-old Afghani activist and politician, calls for an end to the occupation in her new book, A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice. "I know that Obama's election has brought great hopes to peace-loving people in the United States," she writes. "But for Afghans, Obama's military buildup will only bring more suffering and death to innocent civilians, while it may not even weaken the Taliban and al-Qaeda."

...Listening to Joya and Zoya makes everything seem simple. If these astonishingly brave Afghan women want American troops out of their country, then it would seem that feminists could, with clear consciences, join their fellow progressives in calling for an end to the war.

But there are also many seconding the message of Women for Afghan Women. "As an Afghan woman who for many years lived a life deprived of the most basic human rights, I find unbearable the thought of what will happen to the women of my country if it once again falls under the control of the insurgents and militants who now threaten it," the Afghan human-rights activist Wazhma Frogh wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed.

RTWT here.

Meg's New Friend First Rehearsal

I am sound designing Meg's New Friend, written by Blair Singer and directed by Mark "Mr. Excitement" Armstrong for his company, aptly titled, The Production Company.  It was a great first rehearsal (what I was able to attend of it, anyway). It's always interesting as a director to get a sense of another director's process, and the way they do things etc.

I was really struck by a few things:

(1) Mark founded a company called The Production Company because he wants to keep the group's focus on Production. A similar thing to 13P's "We don't develop plays, we do them" approach. The idea being that he saw all this great writing around him and wanted to create a space where it would actually be produced instead of read.

(2) Blair Singer quote: "People are hungry to see good acting in small spaces". I think this is one of the comparative advantages of Off-Off Broadway theater that's relatively seldomly remarked upon-- the intimacy of the venue is important. When you have some really good actors (or as Blair put it, "truth tellers") on stage, the smallness of the space really heightens the experience.

(3) Meg's New Friend is a play about a woman in a long term relationship who begins to fall for her boyfriend's sister's new boyfriend.  The new boyfriend is black. The other three characters are white. Part of what I really like about the play is that it is  a play about relationships, not about race but it doesn't ignore race either. Race is in the mix, but it's not the whole conversation. It's one of the reasons why I really wanted to do the play. This has actually really informed the sound design. There's a way in scene transition music where you could make this play about race, or try to comment on the race politics of the play. And it doesn't need it.

(4) Blair's real talent is for creating plays that feature universally decent characters. They have flaws, yes, but they're decent people trying to do the right thing. And yet there's still stakes, conflict and drama.  This is really hard to do.  It's much easier to do plays about fundamentally not-decent people (Labute) or insert spoiler characters who do fucked up things (Rebeck) to create conflict and stakes. 

(5) Similarly, Mark is very talented as a director at focusing on the human dynamics in a play. he really gets back to fundamentals like relationships, stakes, given circumstances etc. and is able to articulate those and bring those dynamics out in a show really well.

I'm really looking forward to this project! And looking forward to just being a sound designer. And to blogging about it, because as a designer i feel capable of writing about it in ways I don't when I'm directing plays.

Mad Men Blogging (All Spoilers)

So it seems to me that I was right at the beginning of this season when I said it felt like they had no idea where they were going and what they wanted to do this year.  The question is... is this a bad thing?

 Let me explain... this season has progressed thus far through three different movements.  For two or three episodes in the beginning, they basically treaded water, with the characters doing... not that much important and, as we can see now the writers setting up... very little for later on in the season.  It was just kinda dull.

Then we moved into a second act that was Balls Out Insane.  Every week seemed at least as strange as the Don In LA plotline, and you began to see a real David Lynch influence begin to suffuse the series. There were strange incongruous moments, shocking gore, suburban creepiness, the whole bit.  

Now we've moved through a final phase where they have to set up a big season finale.  And so they've decided to pull the pin on Betty finding out about Don's hidden past. To me, this feels like the writing room admitting defeat. It's a moment of "fuck it, we didn't really know what we wanted to do with year three, so let's go to plan B".  We've always known that Betty would find out about Don at some point.  They've been keeping that one on the back burner since the end of Season 1.  

So why deploy it now?  It doesn't really flow from anything else that's gone in this season. It doesn't have that feeling one gets from a well plotted work where things feel simultaneously surprising and inevitable. It just feels like they needed to do something to raise the stakes and finish off the year and they were sick of waiting around for Betty to discover The Box so they just did it.

In the meantime, they've set up other plot lines that they've discarded so swiftly they've become red herrings.  What happened with Duck? And with the competition between the two accounts men? And with Peggy's newfound sex-drive? They have two more episodes to go, and Sterling Cooper is secretly on sale and it's completely unclear what this year's season is even about which is kind of a big deal when you are doing a serialized realistic TV drama. 

That being said... I'm not actually sure that I mind and of this.  I think this season has been clumsily plotted and kind of haphazard, but this week's episode was really outstanding and having Betty discover the box has really raised the stakes (my heart was beating so fast I could feel it) and the fucking crazy episodes in the middle of the season were really bracing and exciting. 

It does, however, worry me for seasons ahead. It was clear watching (for example) both The Sopranos and Six Feet Under than they had no idea what they wanted to do with the shows after their first seasons. Both shows flailed around with the success rate declining steeply each year  until their final seasons, where the first went completely off the rails and the second brought it home brilliantly.  It's not clear that Matthew Weiner and his writers have figured out why we should still be watching Don Draper and Co. And by removing Joan from the Sterling Cooper offices, they've taken out some of the key dynamics (Joan + Roger, Joan + Peggy, Joan + Men, Joan + Women) and haven't replaced them with anything yet.

Some Questions

Women's health insurance rates are generally higher than men's. The thinking behind this is that women generally consume more health services (go to the doctor more often etc.). Is this sexist?

Rap concerts are more expensive to insure than other events. Is this racist?