Parabasis

Shakespeare In New York

By Isaac Butler

I've long had this theory that while the rest of the country seems to suffer from a Shakespeare Problem-- which is to say, overproducing Shakespeare to the detriment of the rest of the classical repertory-- and while New York City is a great city of all sorts of kinds of theater, New York is generally a lousy town to live in as a Shakespeare Fan.  Aside from British imports, there's just not a lot of great Shakespeare here.

I grew up in Washington, D.C., which, by contrast, is a great town to see Shakespeare, and used to be a great town to see other classics as well.  When I was growing up, there were two (and eventually three) companies with "Shakespeare" in their name producing at least three of the Bard's plays a season.  On top of that, Arena Stage used to define itself as the place to see Ibsen and Shaw and Strindberg, and the Studio mounted productions of Chekhov with some regularity.  They take classical acting training pretty seriously down there too.

So while NYC is a great town for all sorts of things, it's not a great town for Shakespeare.

I recently decided to see whether this theory had any merit by looking at Stagegrade and Critic-O-Meter's archives to see how we've faired over the past few years w/r/t Shakespeare. Combined, the archives go back to roughly April 2008. They don't include, for example, Stuhlbarg's Hamlet or Patrick Stewart's MacBeth, as those were both earlier in the 07-08 season.  

So, as always, take these with a grain of salt. I've been hunting through the archives manually, and might have missed something. And these are only the plays that have gotten at least five reviews from the outlets we cover.  The plethora of other Shakespeare productions (like Shakespeare in the Parking Lot, etc.) aren't on this list. But that's actually part of the point. I'm talking about mainstream NYC theater here. And if there's shows i'm missing from that time, let me know in the comments and I'll try to put them in.

Let's see what the archives show:

NUMBER OF SHAKESPEARE PRODUCTIONS: 27

NUMBER OF SHAKESPEARE PRODUCTIONS MINUS IMPORTS: 16

NUMBER OF SHAKESPEARE PRODUCTIONS MINUS IMPORTS AND UK CO-PRODS: 13 

WHAT PLAYS ARE PRODUCED? (* = import, + = UK Co-prod):

All's Well That Ends Well

As You Like It *

As You Like It +

Cymbeline

Hamlet *

Julius Caesar *

King Lear *

King Lear *

Love's Labors Lost *

Macbeth

Measure For Measure

Measure For Measure

Othello

Othello

Romeo And Juliet

Merchant of Venice

Merchant of Venice

Merchant of Venice

Merry Wives of Windsor *

Timon of Athens

The Tempest

The Tempest *

The Winter's Tale *

The Winter's Tale +

The Winter's Tale

Twelfth Night

Twelfth Night

Missing from this list?

Antony and Cleopatra, Comedy of Errors, Coriolanus, all of the Henry's, King John, Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Pericles, Richard II, Richard III, Taming of the Shrew, Titus Andronicus, Troilus and Cressida, Two Gentlemen of Verona. 

Quick Dynamic Pricing Question

By Isaac Butler

I have a quick question for boosters of dynamic pricing. There are many claims made on behalf of dynamic pricing, the very claims that 99 asks about in this post. These are the subset of claims that are, to use a general, perhaps misleading term populist.  Claims about increasing access for low income audience members. Claims about increasing diversity. Etc.

In the comments to that post, I concurred with 99's questions and then added a subsequent concern: that of values.  That I find charging as much as you possibly can for a ticket ("obeying the market") to be in direct contradiction with what the non-profit theatre system was supposed to be when it was designed and created in the early 1960s. Namely, a charity.  I can rehash that argument 'til I'm blue in the face if people want to get into it, but let's set it aside for a moment.

Because there's a way to answer these concerns that dynamic ticket pricing boosters never talk about: Pay what you will.  If the point of dynamic pricing is really to increase access (as opposed to increasing top ticket prices for in-demand shows) why not actually adopt a system that does that? This system already exists, some theaters (including, recently, ACT in Seattle) have had great success doing it. They even have some numbers to back up that it works.  

There are even ways to do it while making it clear to the wealthier patrons that they should pay more money by, for example, listing what the real cost per ticket would be if your theater had to rely solely on ticket sales to pay for shows. 

The next time someone wants to sing the praises of the airlines way of doing business, I'd like them to just pause for a moment and explain why they're not doing pay what you will, as it accomplishes the goals they claim are the reasons they're going dynamic in the first place. It may be that this is a naive suggestion that won't work. But if it won't work, I want data showing that it won't work. 

"How Do We Get Our Plays To You?"

By Isaac Butler

Arena Stage's David Dower tries to explain on Arena's blog why Arena does not accept submissions and what the philosophy behind having a request-based rather than submission-based is.  It's great, sincere, honest writing and can be found here.I completely understand why more institutions don't want to engage with people on the internet. Doing so can shed way more heat than light. I admire David for being one of the few institutional players in this space who is consistently willing to do so in a way that feels honest rather than propagandistic. (Full disclosure: David's a friend and has hired me to do blogging for Arena before).

For any of you interested in how a literary office works, or what some of the currents buffeting the new play sector are on the administrative end, what are you waiting for, go read!

I've also written about open submission policies in the past. I don't think they work very well, even if they are well-meaning, and I'd love to know how many plays that get produced by theaters that have open submissions are by writers they met through them dropping a play in the mail. 

Ugh.

By Isaac Butler

According to The Comics Journal, this trailer for the latest from Frank Miller makes the book look "interesting":

 

Really? Have our standards sunk that low?

You know what would be interesting?  Actually interesting, rather than "Frank Miller has spent a decade since 9/11 writing some piece of neo-con caped crusader proto fascist bullcrap called "Holy Terror" set in New York"?  Maybe having someone like Frank Miller-- or really any superhero writer who wants to tackle urban crime fighting-- deal with the fact that crime is way, way, way down, historically, particularly in New York.  That would be an actually interesting subject matter for superhero comics to try to tackle. Particularly as it dovetails nicely with a crisis that America continues to face w/r/t what to do with our military now that the Cold War is over. 

When The Dark Knight Returns was first published in 1986, New York City suffered through almost 2000 murders and roughly 5,500 forcible rapes. There were 76,528 cases of aggravated assault reported, and over 90,000 robberies.  There were also 2 million fewer people living in New York then,  In 2009, there were 778 murders, roughly 2600 rapes, fewer than a third as many robberies and roughly 44,000 aggravated assault. So while The Dark Knight's overt fascism -- lest we forget, the book ends by celebrating Batman raising an army of teenage vigilantes to overthrow American democracy-- is still shocking today, the world depicted in its pages at least feels like a response to something real.  

Today, we have work after work perpetuating this cities-are-dirty-places-crawling-wtih-vermin-that-only-super-(white)-men-can-save-us-from mythos that's thoroughly stuck in the late 1970s and thoroughly boring.  With the exception of a handful of writers with crime writing backgrounds (Rucka, Brubaker, early Bendis before he started writing every crossover at Marvel) writers keep returning to this same well, with diminishing results.  Even Greg Morrison's Batman & Robin felt a bit old hat when it wasn't busy being batshit insane.

Norway Assemblage

By Isaac Butler

Gang, the warning bells are ringing louder than ever before. Bonhoeffer and Churchill, I believe, are in the ground right now trying to fashion little bells to ring themselves. America's blood is in the water and radical right wing Norwegians, radical communists and radical labor union leaders, organizers know it. They have people sympathetic to their cause -- the cause of destroying the Western way of life and they are using the best, most brave, most beloved of us -- the teachers, the firefighters and cops as shields.

 When you take the Marxist and you combine them with the radical from Norwegian Right-Wing politics, when you combine those forces, which is exactly -- we'll show you this week -- what is happening here, the whole world starts to implode. Does Russia push across this way? And what do we do?

 And they said it would cascade and sweep Scandinavia and begin to destabilize Europe and the rest of the world. "The Wall Street Journal" reported this week that, yes, indeed, radicals, Norwegianists, communists and socialists are working together.

 The coastal parts of the country—the great blue zone that voted for Obama—is clearly ready for war. The decadent Right in its enclaves in the south is not dead—and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column.

 A proposed New York City Norwegian Cultural center may be a meeting place for some of the scariest minds -- some of the biggest terrorist minds.

 My concern is simply that I didn't want America to become Europe, where the birth rate is so low the continent is fast being populated by immigrants, mainly from Norwegian countries, whose birth rate is very high.

 Right Wing Americans are starting to live by Norwegian law within our own U.S. law. 

A major threat to you and I is right here in the United States. Under the auspices of being “politically correct” and taking in “the poor, huddled masses,” we have thrown the door wide open to radical Norwegian Right Wingers. Norwegian Right Wing Ideology is not complete until it controls every single area of our society. In Norwegian Law, our United States Constitution would be finished. The freedoms women have would be a thing of the past.

In every way possible, Norwegian Law will not stop at your street-corner. It will try to come inside your very household. And we must do all we possibly can to stop Norwegian Law in its tracks before it invades ALL of the United States of America!

 Look, let’s be honest, if I see two guys that look like Sven Christiansborg and Lars Rasmussen, I'm gonna pull 'em over, and I wanna find out what you're doing.  The people that are coming in to our country are like a cancer and we need some chemotherapy now.

 This is a clarion call for the West to understand the radical threat to our freedoms from politicized Right Wing Norwegians.

 Look, I'm not a bigot. You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Norwegian garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Norwegians, I get worried. I get nervous.

 Repeat after me: Norwegian Right Wing Ideology is a 7th Century Death Cult coughed up by a psychotic pedophile and embraced by defective, tail sprouting, tree swinging, semi-human, bipedal primates with no claim to be treated like human beings or even desirable mammals for that matter.

 Close the Norwegiant Right Wing schools today. We are sleepwalking into a society that could be ruled by  Norwegian law within decades unless Right Wing schools are shut down and young Norwegians are instead made to integrate and accept Western liberal values.

 I haven't seen anybody coming out of a Catholic or Jewish school advocating violence against women or homosexuals, or wanting to murder innocent people in the name of their politics. Violence is inherent in Right Wing Ideology– it's a destructive, nihilistic cult of death. It legitimates murder. The police may foil plots and freeze bank accounts in the short term, but the battle against terrorism will ultimately be lost unless we realize that it's not just with extremist elements within the Right, but the ideology of the Norwegian Right itself.

 If the majority are moderates, why did the Right Wing community never take to the streets to abhor yesterday’s attack? Why is it that the only time we see Right Wingers protesting en masse is when the Right is allegedly insulted? I'll tell you why: because the Norwegian Right is the new fascism. 

A Quick Note On Blogging and Productivity

By Isaac Butler

There's been some talk lately about whether or not the facebooks and the twitters and the internets are sapping a lot of good creative productivity that could be going to better things. Much of this was kicked off by a series of hilariously out of touch link-baity posts by a guest blogger over at Andrew Sullivan's place who declared that blogging created nothing of value and then proceeded to write like he hadn't used the internet since 2004. 

What I have noticed in myself is that if I'm feeling creatively blocked on one front, I feel creatively blocked on them all.  Over the past couple of weeks, I've been struggling with a writing project, and it's lowered my output on all fronts.  This week, things have turned around. i've written almost ten thousand words in the last two days (up from a clip of 500-1500 a day for the previous three weeks) and thus my brain seems to feel loosened enough to allow for thinking up and writing blog posts.

Now, there's another issue in here, which is time management. Namely, if I spend all my time blogging, I may not have any left over for other writing projects. But as Ta-Nehisi points out, that has nothing to do with blogging and everything to do with me. 

"New York is no longer much of an artistic powerhouse..."

By Isaac Butler

So blithely asserts the writer Jason Farago at the Guardian in writing about the RSC's mini-season here in the Big Apple. His evidence? The closing of the American Folk Art Museum and the financial troubles of the New York City Opera. 

Seems the case is a bit thin to me. And while I won't quibble with the second half of his article --although if one's curious about whether Romeo and Juliet's notices are mixed, this is the site to look at, not the Times--it's worth just noting for a moment that New York City is still the major American center of gravity for theatre, publishing and visual art and that the borough of Brooklyn (along with the city of Montreal) anchored the indie rock renaissance of the last decade. After all, this is probably one of the reasons a writer on culture like Jason Farago chooses to live here. 

Having now lived the better part of a year in another city, there are many things about New York that I find less than optimal. And there are plenty of other cities that also have great and important theatre and music and art. I'm not saying any of this to diss anyone else's town. Heck, I might even prefer it if New York City weren't such a cultural powerhouse. I'm not sure it's good to have most of our cultural worlds other than movies and television anchored in one city.  We're a big country, after all.  I just don't think one can just assert, sans any real evidence, that New York isn't a cultural powerhouse anymore. It doesn't make a lot of sense.  

Destroying the Village to Save It

by 99 Seats

Once more unto the breach, dear friends.

Chad Bauman, Marketing Director at the Arena Stage, has written a post detailing the history and importance, once again, of dynamic pricing in non-profit arts organizations. It's...well, go read it and then we'll discuss.

Did you read it? Good. Okay.

As you can tell from the above posts, both Isaac and I have pretty strong feelings on dynamic pricing, feelings backed up by the likes of Diane Ragsdale and Adam Thurman. Others have different feelings, as clearly Bauman does. I have the utmost respect for the Arena Stage (full disclosure: they have paid me twice to blog for them) and the work they're doing. Absolutely love them. But this...let's say this: I find Bauman and his post extremely unpersuasive.

So, first, some questions for Chad, if he wants to answer them:

- You casually say that the critics of dynamic pricing have been proven wrong by the experience of theatres in D.C., but offer no evidence to back it up. What evidence do you have?

    What kind of audience tracking have you done during the Arena's use of dynamic price?

    Are the low price tickets going to low income audience members?

    Are the people who wind up buying the high priced tickets coming back to buy low price tickets     for the next show?

    Has your audience racial/class make-up changed since instituting the dynamic pricing?

    Is your earned ticket revenue actually up over last year?

    If so, what are the theatre's plans for that increased revenue?

    Are the low price tickets going to new buyers or to repeat customers?

These are the concerns of the anti-dynamic pricing crowd. If you can't answer them, then you really can't say "the negative ramifications as foreseen by some experts" haven't been seen. You also, without saying if the earned revenue is up, can't say that the idea works.

Secondly, and more important, your piece is an argument for non-profits to behave in the same manner as for-profit entities that don't have the same responsibilities or nature. If we're looking to The Producers as our business model, what exactly is the difference between the non-profit and the for-profit world? That our top price is a little bit lower? Is that what we want to be true?

Your list of the options available to non-profits to weather the Great Recession seems to assume one thing: the work doesn't really matter. It's just about ways of maximizing profits for the same work you were doing before the downturn. Which is the great fallacy and mistake of the institutional mindset. The non-profit theatres decline in tickets sales and earned revenue and audience support was well on its way BEFORE the Recession hit. The same factors that led to that decline exacerbated the effect of the downturn: out-of-touch management, cookie cutter productions aping and importing work from outside of the community, over-reliance on one small segment of the population. A theatre could save itself by, you know, doing other things. Instead, it seems like the institutional response is "make more money from what we're already doing." And a total willingness to sacrifice access to bring in more money.

You say a non-profit is judged by "by their capacity to produce art, and to make that art as accessible as possible without sacrificing excellence or their ability to compensate artists at reasonable levels." How are you living up to that standard?

The (Proposed) Budget Deal Is Bad

By Isaac Butler

Following up on my post yesterday, I just thought I'd let Ezra Klein explain exactly how bad the budget deal being currently "negotiated" is:

What set off yesterday's debt-deal panic among congressional Democrats wasn't so much information about a new deal as a better understanding of the old deal. What Boehner and Obama appear to be discussing is the $4 trillion deal they were discussing a few weeks ago. In that deal, $1.5 trillion in immediate cuts would be followed by processes for making a further $1.5 trillion in deeper cuts -- many of them to entitlement programs -- and reforming the tax code to raise a trillion more dollars than it does now. The plan would also include some sort of enforcement mechanism that would make sure the future spending cuts and tax increases manifested.

Congressional Democrats spent much of yesterday complaining that this plan doesn't really have revenues while the White House spent much of yesterday swearing that it did. On this, congressional Democrats are mostly right. The revenue in this plan is approximately equal to the revenue from letting the Bush tax cuts on the rich expire -- which is something Democrats could do with zero Republican votes in 2012, when the Bush tax cuts are set to expire automatically. In other words, Democrats are demanding, as part of this deal, that Republicans agree to let them do...something they could do even if Republicans refused to agree to it.

The best way to understand the revenue in this plan, in fact, is that it's a concession to Republicans, not Democrats. It effectively takes the 2012 expiration of the Bush tax cuts and all of the leverage that gives Democrats off the table, but doesn't ask for more revenue in return. Rather, there's about 25 percent as much revenue in this plan as there is in simply doing nothing and letting the Bush tax cuts expire, and half as much revenue in this plan as in the Simpson-Bowles/Gang of Six plans recommended, and this plan also gives up Democrats ability to go for more revenue in 2012 when the Bush tax cuts expire. See thisgraph/post for a clearer comparison.

That's... um... terrible. The Democrats in this scenario would be agreeing to eat $3 Trillion dollars in spending cuts, including $1.5 trillion in entitlements, with the promise of "tax reform" at some point in the future that would raise a quarter of the revenue as letting the Bush Tax Cuts expire. The deal would also make the Bush tax cuts permanent, taking that issue (one on which the Democrat's position is way more popular than the Republicans) completely off the table. 

Speaking of Reboots...

By Isaac Butler

Some footage from the pilot of David E. Kelley's Wonderwoman TV show starring Friday Night Lights's Adrienne Palicki has leaked to the internet.  It really has it all... terrible acting, right wing politics, awful dialogue and interminable, borderline-incoherent, action sequences:

Footage from failed Wonder Woman TV pilot -... by kahramanlarsinemada 

Footage from failed Wonder Woman TV pilot by kahramanlarsinemada 

I'm no David E. Kelley fan, but might I suggest that the source material is at least partially to blame here? I'm all for having more female super heroes in my movies and on my tee-vee, but maybe we should start with some that aren't based on the bondage fantasies of a group of guys seventy years ago or, you know, create some new ones. 

Leave It To The Onion...

by 99 Seats

..to get the news exactly right.

People often say it about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, but when the comedians are doing a better job of accurately reporting the news...we're all screwed.

Let's Do A Little Thought Experiment, Shall We?

By Isaac Butler

Let's imagine for just  a moment that the debt ceiling/budget debate currently engulfing Washington was over a social issue instead of over economics and budgetary matters.  Let's say that the Republicans wanted to outlaw homosexuality or ban abortion and contraception or something similarly extreme. And all the very serious people in Washington said that Obama needed to compromise with people, and the work leaking out of his administration was that-- although he had embraced a socially liberal platform for the first half of his term-- Obama was now tacking to the Right on social issues.

And then word leaked out that Obama had offered a compromise position with the Republicans. And the compromise was something like outlawing abortion entirely, but leaving contraception legal. Or whatever the same thing would be for gay rights, maybe passing a law positively empowering discrimination against gays but leaving consensual gay sex legal.

Do you think for a moment that people on the left would be talking about how we need to have more faith in Obama? Or that people shouldn't be complaining about what Obama is doing? Or that-- because Obama had accomplished so much good over his first two years-- what he was proposing was okay?

I bring this up because, based on what we know of what Obama has offered the Republicans for the debt ceiling compromise, the packages he's backed are well to the right of the the Gang of Six recommendations and well to the right of Simpson-Bowles.  They include potential cuts to Social Security, a program that adds nothing to the deficit and whose financial problems are decades away and fixable by a small tax increase.  It includes cuts to Medicaid, a program that serves the poor and a huge number of children and is currently underfunded. It involves widespread disinvestment in America, an abandonment of the Democratic party's commitment to Keynsianism and an embrace of the kind of austerity policies that hobbled the early years of the New Deal and are currently wrecking England's economic recovery.  

Obama is pursuing policies that will cost Americans jobs and shrink the economy at a time when the economy and jobs are where the crisis is, rather than the deficit.  

Where is the outrage about this? Is it because progressives have come to define themselves via social rather than economic issues?  Is it because people (including myself) genuinely like Obama as a guy?  Is it because Health Care Reform and ending DADT have extended him enough credit that it doesn't matter what else he fucks up?

I'm genuinely curious. This entire debt ceiling fight has been a debacle on both sides of the aisle from start to finish.  Obama invited the Republicans to use the debt ceiling as a hostage so that he could get some cover to pursue large cuts to the Federal Government that we do not currently need. Obama is proposing "solutions" to a "problem" that are to the right of the budget compromises of George HW Bush and Ronald Reagan.  And yet the reaction from many of my Democratic friends seems to be that everything is Eric Cantor's fault. Eric Cantor is a dissembling psychopath, but Obama and Harry Reid bear more than a little responsibility for the utter shit show this has become. 

(NB: Just in case it's not clear: I am not saying that economics is more or less important than social issues, I actually find them deeply intertwined and both quite important. On social issues, Obama has way, way outperformed my expectations of him.  My point is not that what's going on right now invalidates his support for ending DOMA and DADT, or the first stimulus bill, or HRC, my point is that what's going on right now is a big deal and what Obama is doing undermines progressive goals on a very major issue in a very major way and that we should start taking that as seriously as we've taken these other things).

Remake, Reboot, Revive

by 99 Seats

On Twitter yesterday, Tony Adams asked a question I found intriguing:

Comic-fans, how does rebooting titles compare with the same plays being redone? Similar impulse? or totally different?

Re-booting is much in the air as DC Comics prepares to reboot its entire line-up this summer and fall. Ta-Nehisi Coates hosted an interesting "Talk To Me Like I'm Stupid" conversation on the subject a couple of days ago, too. For the non-comic book fans out there, a reboot is basically re-starting a comic at issue #1 and unraveling all of the recent changes to the continuity: marriage and children get erased, life-altering injuries get healed, entire characters get wiped from the pages of history and the story resets. So this fall, Thomas and Martha Wayne will again get shot in Crime Alley and their son Bruce will decide to become Batman to avenge their death, an infant Kal-El will get sent out into space from the dying Krypton, land in Kansas and grow up into Superman. It all starts all over again as if it never happened before.

Does this compare to remounting, say, La Cage Aux Folles again, a show that won Best Revival twice in ten years? Or Bus Stop, as this reading indicates may be coming down the pike? Is it the same impulse? I'd say yes...and not quite.

The underlying financial motive is very much the same: reinvigorating a valuable property whose value has degraded. Comic books tend to overwrought, complicated plots and, after a few years, there's so much baggage and mythology to manage, it can be overwhelming. You start to lose casual readers and the long-time readers need bigger and bigger events to hang onto. At the same time, you need certain characters to stay in place. So we get the comic book deaths, ginned up wars and crossover events that don't actually change anything, all kind of stunts. Sooner or later, though, you run out of string. A reboot is a great way to attract new readers. In the same way, a revival often takes something familiar and attempts to find a new audience for it, find people who didn't see it before and get them to engage, while at the same time, bringing in the audience that's already familiar with the material and just wants to see it again. It's a pretty safe business decision.

Artistically, though, there's something a bit different about a reboot versus a revival. Mostly in that, while the bones of the story are the same (kid gets bit by a radioactive spider, loses uncle, fights crime), the details are always new, because there are new writers involved. If DC Comics had handed a new artist the original script for Action Comics #1 and said, "Draw this," that might be a little closer. But they don't. The characters are updated and altered, reinterpreted for a new time. A revival often brings a new spin on the story, but within the confines of the original script. There's a lot that a director can bring to the table, but with most plays, it's hard to go too far.

The exception (as always) is Shakespeare. And that's the closest, I think, theatre comes to the realm of the reboot. Shakespeare's work can be malleable enough and the basic storylines are familiar enough that a clever director can truly reinvent the story, turn things on their heads, even mess around with the backstory or character histories in many ways. Comic books are a kind of modern mythology, larger-than-life stories with a few signpost events that have become part of the general culture. You can juggle those events a bit, to tell your story. Shakespeare, I think, occupies a similar space.

I turn it over to you guys for further thoughts: reboot, remake, revive? What do you think?

Clear Eyes. Full Hearts.

by 99 Seats

As I mentioned, I've been catching up on pop culture things* from the spring and that has meant a nearly marathon viewing of the fifth and final season of Friday Night Lights in hopes of being caught up by the final episode. That aired on Friday and I wasn't caught up, but I wasn't too far behind. Now I've watched it, pulled myself together and can write about it.

Isaac is a big fan of the show and still working his way through the season, so out of deference, I'll put all of my spoilers below the fold. Isaac, once you've finished it, come on down.

Submitted Without Comment

by 99 Seats

Because no comment could make it better. In any way.

Super 8

by 99 Seats

After my supremely busy spring, I'm just catching up on a lot of pop culture things now. I haven't really been to the movies or watched a lot of TV or even seen that many plays. I'm making up for lost time and finally caught J.J. Abram's Super 8 over the weekend. Here's the trailer, in case, you know, you forgot about it.

I have thoughts, but they will involve spoilers. So, if you're like me and spent the last three months under a rock or something, and didn't see it, you know...read something else.

The Response?

by 99 Seats

I find this deeply, deepy troubling and unsettling and quite upsetting for a number of reasons.

I'm a secular humanist agnostic. When I was a kid, I was a member of an ecumenical youth group, sponsored by the Presbyterian church near my house (where, incidentally, my dad and stepmom, both passionate, evangelical atheists were married, since it was the only church in town that wouldn't make them join to have the ceremony there). My mother has gone through various Christian denominations in her life. I'm fairly okay with religion, with religious expression, with faith and belief, even in public settings. I do get a bit tired of the constant thanking of God for winning awards and trophies, but mostly because it feels so insincere. And I do have my concerns about the power and strength of the religious right in this country.

This ad, this entire concept, though, just turns my stomach. Yes, things are bad in this country. Yes, we have some serious struggles to deal with. But we're not talking the 10 plagues of Egypt. It's not raining fire or frogs, we don't have cattle blight. We have a broken political system that's being used to enrich the already wealthy on the backs of the already poor.

Not to mention the entirely scary idea that the GOVERNOR of a state is leading this effort just cries out for a separation of church and state discussion. How far is this from declaring a state religion? I'm not uncomfortable with the need for politician to say "God bless you" and/or "God bless America" at the end of every speech, but this isn't that. This is the GOVERNOR of a state saying, "Pray to Jesus to take care of us."

Rick Perry will very likely enter the GOP Primary shortly and I believe he has a pretty good chance of winning the nomination. If he does, expect a re-run of Bush v. Gore. Not the recount case (well, maybe not) but the entire campaign. We will get another go-round of the Good Ol' Southern Boy with the charm and the "authenticity" against the Egghead-Professor-Elitist-Commander-in-Geek who puts funny sauces on sandwiches. Stunts like this prayer day will only further convince the press corps that Perry is a salt-of-the-earth, God-fearing fella and not a right-wing religious whack0.

It's going to be a long campaign.

Obama Makes His Case To Liberals

By Isaac Butler

I'll have more to say about this later, as I think it's fairly emblematic of the problems I've been having of late with the Obama administration, but I thought reader's might want to take a gander over at Greg Sargent's blog, where he lays out Obama's case to the progressive left. 

Carmageddon Outta Here!

By Isaac Butler

For my friends in Los Angeles:

 

I'm Just Going To Assume He's Joking

By Isaac Butler

The Prof links to a crappy, not very funny cartoon (That's a rip off of about 20 better New Yorker covers) on his site and declares himself "vindicated," I assume about NYC bias against the rest of the country.  I'm just going to assume he's joking, or else I might have to start posting Larry The Cable Guy routines as proof of whatever random thing I want to claim about the South.