Parabasis

Is It Okay To Boo?

By Isaac Butler

So asks Philadelphia theatre critic David Fox.  He even goes so far to consult Miss Manners (who, shockingly, says it's okay). While he probably wouldn't personally boo, he could understand ways that it could be acceptable:

If I were going to boo now, I’d establish clear ethical guidelines, including separating mere incompetence (which is just sad, and doesn’t deserve further censure), from egregious sins like grandstanding, upstaging and generally pandering. And I would maintain that booing during a performance is playing dirty – it dampens everything that follows. Instead, wait for the curtain call, which after all is by definition a forum for audience expression. Make sure booing implicates only its specific target. Performers often bow in groups, and there’s already too much collateral damage in the world.

Finally, I’d consider alternative punishment. Not clapping at all is similarly disapproving, and it’s more elegant. And there’s always the option of leaving early, which is showy and has the additional advantage of sparing an unhappy audience member further misery. A wise friend who is also a frequent early-exiter calls this his “life is too short” rule.

I've never booed at the theatre, nor do I really think it's acceptable, even if you're a pulitzer prize winning playwright and you don't like the critically acclaimed show you've just seen. And I've only ever left one show at intermission, and that was because I was bored and it was the last night in New York for the friend I was seeing the play with and we decided getting a drink and talking was more important for our friendship than being bored by a blindingly obvious French anti-war play in translation.  I almost never stand, regardless of what the audience around me is doing, as that should be a reward for something truly spectacular.

That being said... I have noticed something happening recently that's very odd, and kind of off-putting. I find myself doing this weird half-scoff-half-laugh at the theatre when the show is trying too hard (and failing) to emotionally manipulate me. I don't mean to do it. I'm not performing. It's an earnest response to what's going on on stage--a response of genuine contempt and anger--and I don't even know I'm doing it until it is done. Much as one does not self-consciously decide to laugh at a good joke, I don't self-consciously decide to scoff at hackneyed manipulation.

I understand that on one level this is bad behavior, because it distracts other people and could potentially break the spell for them and that's really the last thing I want to do. At the same time, we're supposed to be okay with authentic audience response, positive or negative. 

Have you ever booed?  or walked out? Do you ever scoff?

The Problems of Testing-Based School Reform

By Isaac Butler

This is not a subject I'm super-versed in, but I think Freddie deBoer's post at Balloon Juice about standardized testing, school reform and union busting is well worth your time. On the face of it, I agree with a lot of what deBoer says, with a couple of caveats. I think it is perfectly acceptable to say that you believe teachers should have a strong union and that seniority based hiring/firing decisions and difficult-to-circumvent lifelong tenure are not ideal set-ups if what you care about is teacher quality. 

Also, it should be said that, since deBoer's post is largely a response to Matt Yglesias's years of writing on this subject, and deBoer wonders at the end:

The question for school reformers like Yglesias is how much longer we have to wait for these reforms to show their long-promised, little demonstrated positive effectsThe school reform movement is decades old, as are voucher efforts and charter schools. The extant empirical evidence (based on the very metrics school reformers champion!) have failed to consistently show repeatable gains, despite the loud assurances of the movement. When do their failures receive the fanfare that public schools’ do, and at what point do school reformers drop their failing solutions? After all, accountability begins at home

And since deBoer talks about the need to cite evidence of someone's position, that Yglesias has in the past been against vouchers, although the latest post I could find that reflects his thinking shows he's mixed-to-positive about them and, more than anything else, in favor of more testing. And that Yglesias has often argued that underperforming charter schools need to be swiftly shut down. 

Obama's Strategery

By Isaac Butler

Mother Jones has an interesting article up about what they memorably call Obama's "Hope a Dope" strategy.  I highly recommend you read the whole thing. I want to respond to one little piece of it.  

I have two friends with whom I correspond daily about political and cultural issues. We've adopted a kind of unspoken rule, namely that what gets called "11 Dimensional Chess" is generally a poor explanation for things. It's too easy to excuse something as some kind of Grand Master Plan rather than look at the actual implications of what is going on.  Obama's defenders-- and I've been one plenty of times in the past-- tend to resort to "11 Dimensional Chess" explanations (or, as Andrew Sullivan would say "meep meep" explanations) because they're the only way many of Obama's actions since the midterms don't make you want to put your head through your desk on multiple occasions.

I'll give you one example, from the article, in talking about why Obama didn't continue to take the fight to the GOP after that one speech he gave tearing into Congressman Ryan's plan to disinvest in America, screw the poor and elderly and transfer massive amounts of money to the already wealthy:

For many progressives, it was, once again, a face-palm moment. Obama was back to his above-the-fray, let's-be-reasonable mode—which has often infuriated lefties looking for him to mount a fierce crusade against the Republican ideologues who have been thwarting him since day one. But that's not Obama—and not just because of his consensus-seeking temperament. His choice to persist rather than fight is strategic: He and his aides firmly believe that he accomplishes more this way, no matter how the left may kvetch. "He's just not into the theatrics," says a one-time top White House official. "He starts off calculating what can be realistically achieved at the end and then works back from there to determine what needs to be done."

Hm.  Okay.  So if we take this quote at the end there and apply it to the debt ceiling, does it really work as an explanation? I'm not convinced. By this explanation, Obama knew all along that what he can "realistically achieve" was an all-cuts giving in to Republican hostage taking and he worked back from there.  So the weak negotiating position and grand bargain bullshit were all insincere smoke and mirrors designed to get us to where we are today, aka the Satan Sandwich.

I'm not too convinced, frankly.  But then again, I find few explanations (positive or negative) for Obama's recent actions convincing. i prefer to just look at and describe what happened: Obama started from a weak negotiating position and continued to negotiate poorly.  he was given several ways to gain leverage over the GOP in the negotiations like the 14th Amendment Option and chose to both belittle and ignore them. He was given an out by Mitch McConnell that would have saved this country from unnecessary budget cuts during a recession at probably minor (but potentially middling) political cost to Obama and he choose to ignore and belittle it. He regularly advocated for plans that would cut massive amounts out of the government including from entitlements, and he advocated for them after John Boehner and Harry Reid had pretty much sown up a deal that left entitlements alone in the short term.  It seems a far more reasonable explanation that Obama was trying to cut entitlements and trying to use the debt ceiling panic to compel both parties to do so.

The problem with the POV advocated in the quote above is that it also has a convenient circular, self-fulfilling logic to it.  If Obama is the one getting to decide what he can be reasonably expected to accomplish, than Obama is of course going to design a strategy that makes accomplish whatever that is seem like the only possible outcome.  So even if we assume that the one-time top White House official is correct, I just gotta say, I disagree with this idea. I voted for, advocated for and worked for a Democrat.  I want a President who is going work as hard as possible not to achieve what he thinks is possible, but rather the outcome that pushes progressive priorities as far forward as he possibly can.

I actually think he successfully did that with Health Care Reform. I think his strategy worked pretty well when he was dealing with recalcitrant members of his own party like Ben Nelson and egomaniacal centrist Republicans like President Olympia Snowe. I think this strategy has been a real failure in dealing with the Republican party that was voted into office in 2010. I should say that Obama and I have fundamentally different value systems. He believes that compromise is inherently good. I believe that it is one kind of process and also one kind of product that is almost never a good thing, particularly compared with collaboration and consensus, but that's a post for another day. 

Sadly, the option this leaves us is working as hard as possible to get Obama reelected and flip the House back to the Democrats. In other words, we have to reward bad behavior because we have little choice. It's hard to get inspired to do that, but in the short term, that's what we have to do. 

This Makes Me Incredibly Happy

By Isaac Butler

 

U R Doin' It Wrong

by Isaac Butler

There are very, very, very few moments of theater that I think have clearly delineated right and wrong ways of interpretation.  But it turns out that-- at least according to Isherwood-- the RSC has managed to fuck up one of them:

Consider the celebrated scene of oratorical punch and counterpunch after Caesar’s assassination. Brutus, leader of the conspirators, steps onto the pulpit to explain their motives, in a rare burst of prose in a notably verse-heavy play.

And yet as delivered by the clarion-voiced Mr. Troughton, this chunk of words sings like lyric poetry. It’s not a plain-spoken plea for understanding and fellow feeling, the utterance of a man who steadfastly believes in the reasoned rightness of what he’s done; it’s a slick serving of rhetoric from a calculating politician.

I'm sorry, that's just wrong. That's not the scene in the play. That's not the point of the scene in the play. That's not how it's meant to be delivered.  They fucked it up. Brutus isn't supposed to sing the prose like lyric poetry. It is supposed to be a chunk of prose that then fails in comparison to an extended and brilliant passage of lyric poetry from Mark Anthony.

Whether either man is being sincere can be open to interpretation. You can still do a version of the scene in which two people square off using rhetoric as their weapons.  But in that case, Brutus' clumsily earnest rhetoric has to be a manipulative gesture, like George W Bush in the Presidential debates. It still has to be clumsily earnest, however.   That passage has rough rhythms and clunky wording for a reason.  This is an example of people using their ample skill to make a 101-level mistake. 

UPDATE: Clearly in the above post, based on the comments and e-mails I've gotten, I come across as waaaay more of a dick than I was meaning to be. I do not think that it is a legitimate matter of interpretation whether or not Brutus's speech reads "like lyric poetry." I really do think that the rest of the scene makes absolutely no sense if that's the case.  

However, what I meant to be a punchily written way to provoke some conversation about that has swiftly turned into what looks like me flame-onning at a show I didn't see.  So, while I think the tone of the above post is off, in a things-you-say-in-a-back-room-of-a-bar-but-not-in-public-on-the-internet-kinda-way, I do think it is perfectly in bounds to talk about shows you haven't seen based on the press around them. We do that all the time.  If I had written a blog post that was like "based on this Isherwood review, this play sounds fucking awesome!!1!!1!" no one would have a problem with the above. So people getting the vapors about it need to chill out and stop inventing new ways to keep people from discussing theatre critically.  The tone of the above is off, and I was more of a jerk than I meant to be, but I do not believe the actual content to be problematic.

I should also say that-- while I won't be able to see it-- based on the press accounts, this Caesar is actually the only one of the RSC's offerings that I'm interested in seeing.  Not only because I love (deeply love) the play, but because the production (judging from the reviews) seeks to offer what i want these days from a Shakespeare production...a  production that views it as a play rather than as a piece of literature, that understands that entertainment and genre are important, and has bold directorial choices without being overwhelmed by concept.  I'm sure there will come a time in my life when i'm interested in going back to crazy auteur shakespeare or literate museum shakespeare, but this ain't it.  

That being said, if I read the above blog post about my own work, it'd probably sting a bit.  And really, all I really wanted to do was talk about the funeral scene in Julius Caesar and whether or not that moment is really open to interpretation!  I say it is not.  Anyone who wants to debate me on that, let's do it!  Show me, using the text, how that scene makes any sense if Brutus delivers a beautiful speech where you can't tell that it's somewhat-clunky prose he's speaking. I think there are ways you can bluster past that incoherence, but that doesn't make the moment less incoherent. It's also a choice, I should note, that flattens the moral complexity of the play. If Brutus is just as much a conniving asshole as anyone else, than there really isn't an interesting and thorny question about whether or not killing Caesar was justified in which you the viewer have to consider a bunch of angles into a difficult problem. The play becomes a far simpler exercise in nihilism, which is a lot less interesting. 

Most of the Books I've Read This Year Thus Far

By Isaac Butler

This list is missing a few. But here we go:

Now Wait For Last Year	Philip K. Dick
They Live	Jonathan Lethem
Burning Down The House	Charles Baxter
The One From The Other	Philip Kerr
Half a Life	Darrin Strauss
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood	Mary McCarthy
MacBeth	Shakespeare
Take a Giant Step	Louis Peterson
The Woman Warrior	Maxine Hong Kingston
The Double	Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Raisin in the Sun	Lorraine Hansberry
The Amen Corner	James Baldwin
Memoir: A History	Ben Yagoda
The Dutchman	LeRoi Jones
Funnyhouse Of a Negro	Adrienne Kennedy
The Double	Dostoyevsky
This Boy's Life	Tobias Wolff
Dreams of My Father	Barack Obama
Civilwarland In Bad Decline	George Saunders
The Haunting of Hill House	Shirley Jackson
Joe Turner's Come and Gone	August Wilson
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom	August Wilson
The Grace of Silence	Michele Norris
For Colored Girls…	Ntozake Shange
Double Indemnity	James M. Cain
The Year Of Magical Thinking	Joan Didion
The Dog of the South	Charles Portis
The Violent Bear It Away	Flannery O'Connor
Understanding Comics	Scott McCloud
Half The Way Home	Adam Hochschild
Endless Love	Scott Spencer
The Talented Mr. Ripley	Patricia Highsmith
The Adderall Diaries	Stephen Elliott
Memoirs Found In A Bathtub	Stanislaw Lem
Vanishing Point	Ander Monson
Motel Art Improvement Service	Jason Little
Stuck Rubber Baby	Howard Cruse
The Big Blowdown	George Pelicanos
Erasure	Percival Everett
The Liar's Club	Mary Karr
The Ice Storm	Rick Moody
A Feast For Crows	George RR Martin
The Unwritten	Carey et al
Powers Vol. 1	Brian Bendis et al
You'll Never Know Vol. 1	C. Tyler
A Dance With Dragons	George RR Martin
The Journalist And The Murderer	Janet Malcolm
So Long, See You Tomorrow	William Maxwell
Where Did You Sleep Last Night	Danzy Senna
Mercury	Hope Larson

What Now?

By Isaac Butler

One way the Obama Administration marketed The Satan Sandwich was that-- by getting the deficit off the table for awhile-- they had created some room to do something about job creation.  This seemed completely absurd at the time, for a number of reasons. First, the jobs crisis was the actual crisis we've been facing all along.  Money is very, very cheap for us to borrow currently (the yield on a ten year bond is somewhere around 2.8%) and our unemployment is hovering around double digit territory. We should be borrowing more money now in order to boost GDP and create jobs.  The more people there are who are employed and making money and spending that money buying things and paying taxes, the easier tackling the deficit and debt issues will be in the future.

But besides the backwardness of the logic of dealing with a long-term problem in order to maybe sometime deal with a short term crisis, it was never clear what Obama wanted to do on jobs or how he planned to get it through Congress.  And it turns out on this issue, it's fairly clear that once again, Obama plans on offering no leadership whatsoever.  The first shot across the bow is this op-ed from Timothy Geithner, justifying the Satan Sandwich and rolling out some thoroughly unconvincing talking points.  And at the very end... oh yeah, jobs!

It is not enough for Congress to have prevented a disaster it brought on itself. Lawmakers should return in September prepared to act to strengthen the economy and get more Americans back to work. Doing so will help repair the damage this fractious debate inflicted on an economy that was already slowing, not just here but around the world.

Wow. Congress should do something. There's some bold fucking leadership.  After promising us that the debt ceiling fiasco would lead magically (via underpants gnome logic) to a sudden embrace of job creation, Obama's administration still seems to have no idea how to do it. But this is because it never made sense that job creation initiatives would follow.  Obama has signed on to the idea that our government spends too much money today, that Republicans shouldn't be pressured into agreeing to higher taxes and that we the government has to function like a household going through tough times. There is simply no way, obeying any of that logic, that we are going to get the big things we need to create jobs.  There's no way that we're going to get major investment in infrastructure, or bailouts of state budgets, or extension of unemployment insurance.  And when the GOP talks about "job creation" they only mean lowering taxes and loosening regulation.  

That, at the end of the day, is what is so shitty about the debt ceiling compromise. By spinning it as a victory and by signing on to everything it represents, Obama has ensured that nothing progressive can even be attempted w/r/t the economy, the deficit, taxes or jobs for the rest of his first term, if not the rest of his Presidency. The best we can hope for now is the kind of complete deadlock that leads to the Bush tax cuts being repealed in their entirety. 

Shocking News Of The Day

By Isaac Butler

Charging more for something drives people away from seeing it. But don't worry. I'm sure charging $75 for an off-broadway ticket has no impact whatsoever on how many people go to the theater. 

When Force Is Gone, There's Always Mom

By Isaac Butler

Hey gang,

My new essay "Here Come The Planes," about Laurie Anderson's O Superman and living in New York City was just published in this month's issue of The Fiddleback, an online literary magazine.  Here's a little sample:

From the fall of 2001 until the Spring of 2010, I didn’t listen to "O Superman" or really anything by Laurie Anderson. It wasn’t until I left New York to drive across the country with my now-wife that I played it again. We were all gone to look for America. We were all sorts of cliches. We didn’t care.

As the curving asphalt ribbon of the Pacific Coast Highway unspooled before us, I click-wheeled over to the song. The instant I pressed play it started to rain and we sat in silence and listened to it. And it wasn’t until I got lost in the ha that I realized how long it had been since I had heard it. How did that happen? How did a totem that I carried with me, loved so hard, like it was a person, like it belonged to me, like I made it, how did I abandon this thing for so long?

RTWT here. 

Fixing the Super-Hero Flick

By Isaac Butler

As 99Seats got us talking about rebooting the other day, I think it's worth checking out this article from the Times Magazine about how to fix the superhero flick. Alex Pappademas' prescription? Get interesting artists to make them. Let those artists make the movies they want to make. Worry less about fulfilling the checklist of the super-hero genre and worry more about telling good stories with superheroes in them:

I’m not naïve enough to suggest here that superhero movies would become some kind of hotbed of auteurist innovation if Hollywood stopped trying to please the comic-book cognoscenti. I’m old enough to remember the days when studios assumed that A) only kids liked comic books, and B) those kids were idiots, a mind-set that brought us movies like Joel Schumacher’s contemptible “Batman Forever” and “Batman and Robin,"both of which looked like “Starlight Express” on crank.

But I’m also old enough to remember when Warner Brothers entrusted the 1989 “Batman” and its sequel to Tim Burton, and how bizarre that decision seemed at the time, and how Burton ended up making one deeply and fascinatingly Tim Burton-ish movie that happened to be about Batman (played by the equally unlikely Michael Keaton, still the only screen Bruce Wayne who seemed like a guy with a dark secret) and an even-more-Burtonian latex-fetish fever dream of a sequel that I’m not 100 percent sure Batman was even in.

And you don’t have to go that far back for examples of comic-book movies that exploded the genre — less than 10 years ago, we got a Freudian-monster-movie version of Hulk by Ang Lee and Bryan Singer’s “Superman Returns,” with a blatantly Christ-figureish Man of Steel. Each of those films is, shall we say, a problematic viewing experience, but they also represent honest attempts by their makers to impose a personal sensibility on superhero myths instead of just playing to an audience’s preconceptions. Lee and Singer had a take on their material; you could waterboard me and I still wouldn’t be able to tell you what Kenneth Branagh’s take on Thor was. And he’s Kenneth Branagh! You know a genre sandbox has become a prison when a guy who’s never been shy about punching up William Shakespeare’s work is afraid to leave fingerprints on Stan Lee’s.

There's more to it than this, so I suggest RTWT. I'm not sure I'm fully convinced, but it's a good read.

In the meantime... how would you fix the super-hero film?

The 14th Amendment Option

By Isaac Butler

Well, it seems inevitable in retrospect that the Debt Ceiling deal was going to be as bad as it was.  Yglesias breaks it down here. Obama made his top priority compromise (I hope to have more to say about that, later) and Republicans made their top priorities no new taxes and spending cuts. SO now they've compromised about which spending to cut. Huzzah.

We had a hostage situation in which the Republicans voiced a willingness to shoot the hostage and the Democrats didn't. One lifeline that was extended to Obama and the Dems was the "14th Amendment Option" which was the idea that Obama should just declare the debt ceiling unconstitutional, raise it and move on. Or, perhaps, threaten to do so as a negotiating tactic, leaving the Republicans with the option of either getting nothing they wanted or getting some of what they wanted. 

Obama never used it, and the White House regularly dismissed the 14th Amendment Option as a viable option. This is likely, as Joe Klein says, because Obama probably would've been impeached. To which, unlike Joe Klein, I say... so what?  Here's what Klein says would happen:

If he had cited the 14th Amendment and simply ordered Treasury to pay the bills, he would have been impeached by the radical Republicans. This would have guaranteed that the next 16 months would have been overwhelmed by an even worse version of the silliness visited upon our nation by the poisonous Limbaugh-Tea Party nihilists.

This outcome would be substantively better for the nation than the debt ceiling deal. If the Republicans decided to grind the government to a halt over 16 months, the Bush tax cuts would be far more likely to expire simply due to inertia (remember, they automatically expire in December 2012 if nothing happens). So we'd have an impeachment battle we would win (thanks to Dems int he Senate), no economy-killing spending cuts, and revenue increases we need. If Obama manages to wind down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we'd actually get the deficit down to a manageable level. Not to mention, the GOP being consumed by their chance to impeach Obama will likely impede the rest of their agenda, such as trying to pass the Ryan budget etc.

That sounds like a pretty good way for the next year and a half to go. A lot better than watching Obama pull a Bill Clinton over and over again.