Keepin' My Head Above Water

by 99 Seats

Sorry to be radio silent of late. I've been juggling a couple of different projects, all at the same time, like this one coming up on Tuesday and this one that kicks off on March 7th (you can read more about that here). Plus the usual scrapping and fighting, jivin' and survivin' that comes with the territory. By next week, I should be back to more regular posting of nonsense for y'all. In the meantime, though, here are some quick hits:

- I think most folks have read Josh Conkel's great piece, but this follow-up and this back-and-forth with Tommy Smith and Young Jean Lee is really worth reading, too. It's a great view on the whole situation (via).

- Scott Walters has been doing some great stuff lately. Go and check it out.

- I didn't weigh in on the whole Intiman thing because, like Isaac, I don't live in Seattle and don't really have a dog in the fight. Others, of course, do. I do want to say this, as briefly as I can: I think there's an interesting corollary going in the theatre to the financial crisis and the banks, where the big institutions seem to consider themselves Too Big To Fail, and the relationship to the community at large is pretty much the same. In good times, the theatre's investment is in itself, really, growing staff and building buildings, while keeping the artists and tickets at the same level (or even increasing ticket prices and finding new ways not to pay artists), but in bad times, those same artists and that same community is expected to shovel money at that institution...so it can go right back to doing what it was doing before. As they say, we privatize successes and socialize losses. How's that working out for everyone else?

- A somewhat related point and I honestly don't mean to be a jerk about this, but I think it's worth saying, out loud: as we're all still grappling with the aftershocks of Rocco's Big Speech, there's something I noticed that sticks in my craw a little bit. Back in the big battle over dynamic pricing and ticket pricing in general, a whole lot of people were very happy to use economic reasoning and terms to justify theatres charging a lot for tickets and to say that, if there was a market for it, there was no harm in charging exorbitant amounts of money and to even go so far as to say that ticket prices were the best method for raising money. "Theatres should operate as businesses," was the mantra and all of us on the other side were wild-eyed, woolly-headed whacked-out artists who didn't know the first thing about economics. A lot of that same set of people (and in some cases, the exact same people) were the first to say that using economic terms to discuss closing theatres or cutting administrative staff was wrong and that theatres aren't businesses and shouldn't be held to the same standards. So...well, classify that under things that make you go hmm.

- Speaking of Rocco and #supplydemand and Too Big To Fail and, well, everything else, Diane Ragsdale continues to write awesome posts on all of that and you should read it.

- Oh, and I'm not watching the Oscars on Sunday. Could care less. You?

Okay, back to the grindstone. Keep on keepin' on.

Comments

[Josh]

There were TV shows about working class people? Man, there was crazy stuff happening before Reagan.