Parabasis

The Adolescence Issue: The Perks of Being An Underdog

by Kate Petersen

 

(Editor’s Note: Adolescence is, amongst other things, often the time that we discover habits, interests, obsessions, fandoms that will shape the rest of our lives. Below, in her customary lovely prose, Kate Petersen details her discovery of sports, The Phoenix Suns, and a love that bore unexpected fruit.)

 

I can’t remember the first Phoenix Suns game I watched, or when I learned who K.J. and Thunder Dan were. But there’s a good chance I was flopped on a beanbag in front of the old Sylvania in my next-door neighbor Andrew’s sunken living room.

But I can trace the underdogged roots of my Suns love to my first NBA playoff series, when I found myself rooting against Andrew’s Detroit Pistons and for the doomed Portland Trailblazers in the 1989-90 Finals. Portland got creamed.

Along the way, Andrew taught me what a pick-and-roll was, and zone defense, how to spot a 3-second lane violation. He taught me about the layup and the board, how to hate Pat Riley and the LA Lakers, the difference between Skybox and Topps cards, which we bought in five-packs at Osco. By age 10, my room and large swaths of my wardrobe had turned purple and orange.

The Suns played in downtown Phoenix, first in the Veterans Memorial Coliseum and then after 1993 in the new arena on 1^st and Jefferson. My dad took me to some games at both. He’d pick me up after work and we’d drive down the 51, hardly any traffic, listening to the pre-game show on KTAR and watching the warning lights on South Mountain get closer and brighter in the dusk. If we got there early enough we found a spot outside the tunnel on 3^rd St where a little group gathered before games to meet the players as they arrived. Just a little rope barrier then, and we leaned over it, waving our basketball cards, our hats and black markers. I got Danny Ainge’s autograph this way, and Joe Klein’s, various unremembered small forwards’.

One night, a guy wearing a janitor-blue shirt, cap and belted keys, passed into the staff entrance. No one stopped him or called out. After he’d passed, we all turned to each other, asking who that was, embarrassed we didn’t know. Later, inside, as the lights dimmed and the starting lineup high-fived down the dark court, my dad pointed: “There’s the janitor!” he said. “Frank Johnson. I’ll be darned.” For years, Frank Johnson’s been a fairytale in our family: Pay attention, don’t judge books on covers. That janitor might just be your back-up point guard.

There were other lessons I learned, too, growing up a Suns fan. Here are the big ones.

 

Wanting it isn’t enough.

Despite what sportswriters say, wanting a ring is not enough.

Sure, it’s a nice idea, that want and ambition are the key ingredient in a championship team. But as a Phoenix Suns, I know better.

Probably all sports fans come to understand that such want – variously referred to as heart, drive, grit—is actually some blend of its constituent parts: savvy and committed coaching, health and talent, and, I think, an accumulated, contiguous desire – desire with institutional memory. As The Team has given way to The Player in pro basketball (and indeed, all professional team sports) that institutional memory has gotten harder to build, sustain. This is hardly a new phenomenon. But teams, perhaps more than ever, are now collections of skill-sets and contracts, some that add up to more than others.

Because if all it took was want, Charles Barkley and the Cinderella Suns of 1993 would have found a way to box out John Paxson’s 3-point shot at the buzzer, gone back to Chicago, and gotten the fairytale ending right. But instead they became just the third notch in the Bulls’ three-peat.

And while Chicago burned their cars in victory, Phoenix, home of a nice-guy team with nice-guy fans, held a You-Came-Close parade. On the hottest day of the year, 300,000 of us showed up, three times the number officials expected. We went, stood in the shade of a parking garage and waved at our almost heroes as they went by.

 

The Doorknob Paradox, AKA Someone’s everywhere until you start looking.

In the years he played there, spotting Charles Barkley in Phoenix was a little like spotting a seagull at the beach. Everyone I knew had seen Sir Charles in the wild: in the supermarket, at some Mexican restaurant, waiting in line at the bank, taking his daughters to the orthodontist.

Everyone except me. Me who had a rotation of Charles Barkley T-shirts. Me who had a Barkley poster hanging over my bed. Me, whose favorite number #28 was quickly losing ground to #34.

One Christmas, my parents gave me a basketball doorknob with the idea it would be perfect for getting Barkley’s autograph. We kept it in the car, under the front seat, ready for a run-in in the freezer aisle or drive-thru window. It became my grail.

Last year, back in Phoenix for another Christmas, my fanship and the doorknob quest came up over dinner with my sister and her friend, who worked as a bar-back. “I see him all the time,” he said. “Bring it to me.” He’d get Charles to sign my doorknob.

I went home and dug through the boxes of seashells and news clippings in my old bedroom. There it was, perfect and blank in its weird 90s packaging. I handed it over.

I went back to school, didn’t hear. I saw Charles on TNT broadcasts, making jokes, getting skinnier on Weight Watchers. I wondered if that meant he’d stopped going to the bar. My sister and the bar-back dated, then broke up. And my doorknob, collateral I guess, remains at large in greater Phoenix, unsigned, stashed, I sometimes imagine, under a stack of towels or behind bottles of seldom-ordered liquor, or maybe in another car, tucked under another front seat.

 

The game turns out the same way, whether you watch it or not.

My dad first developed this theory in June 1976, when he found himself at the bottom of the Grand Canyon during the Greatest Game Ever Played (this one), chaperoning my sister’s Girl Scout troop on a rafting trip down the Colorado River. I heard this one as I got older, whenever a game fell on the same night as a choir rehearsal or school function. It’s the first rule of growing up, really: learning that the world doesn’t hinge on your participation in it. I think my dad’s version is also related to principles of Zen, and fate. Frankly, I’m still agnostic.

 

The best defense is a good offense. Kind of.

The accepted wisdom is that Phoenix has never won a championship because it’s never really learned to play defense. (Or, in related news, had a reliable big-man.) Like all sports axioms, it’s oversimplified, and true. Despite putting up decent defense numbers in parts of the past few seasons, Phoenix has appeared much more frequently atop the points-per-game and 3-pt field goal column. If you can’t beat ‘em, outscore ‘em.

In this way, Steve Nash seemed made for the Suns. Drafted first-round by Phoenix in 1996, Nash left but came back in 2004, and took the Suns’ up-tempo offense from a style to a science. ‘Seven seconds or less’ became the catchphrase for the Suns’ signature offense, and when it worked, it was so much more fun to watch than the old East Coast half-court slog. On a good night, the Suns could out-offense anyone. But when the shots weren’t falling, they were in trouble. Since I’ve been a watching NBA basketball, this up-tempo play has gradually caught on in the Western Conference, then the league. Though the Suns haven’t won a championship with it, you can see their trademark offense in the pace of playoff games and small, quick teams like the Oklahoma City Thunder.

 

Good guys don’t finish last. Or first. Sometimes they just finish.

And then they become a local restaurateur, or the spokesperson for the local pool supply company. Or the emcee who riles up the crowd when the mascot delivers free pizzas to section 314. Or the Mayor of Sacramento.

            Or, they go to play for L.A.

Since Steve Nash announced this summer that he’ll join Kobe Bryant and the Suns arch-rival LA Lakers on a sign-and-trade, and Nash’s co-captain Grant Hill signed with the LA Clippers, I’ve been wrestling with how to be a grown-up Suns fan. To reconcile my long-shot girlhood belief in the Good Guys in Purple and Orange with the adult in me who wonders whether to count as an underdog you eventually have to triumph.

I’ve been trying to make moral sense of the fact that Steve Nash, our shaggy selfless David of an MVP, 5-time league leader in assists and charity darling, will now play alongside Ron Artest/Metta World Peace, that famously thuggish and undersized Goliath (who’s also, to mix metaphors, the troll who prevented the Suns’ last attempt to get to the finals).

This summer, I’m being forced to accept that the thing on which I staked so much of my adolescent identity and affection has gradually turned over, moved on, been broken up and sold for parts. To admit that I’ve gotten old and cranky, can no sooner become a Lakers fan than I can become a Minnesota Timberwolves fan (Read: not soon). That some stranger is driving around with a piece of that old hope under his front seat, if he even still has it. That me as a Suns fan and Steve Nash fan may have just become a false position. That maybe all fanship is.

Was another season together really the answer for the 38-year-old Nash or the center-less Suns? Probably not. But tell that to my inner 13-year-old.

 

---

 

Kate Petersen's work has appeared in New England Review, The Rumpus, The Millions, The Collagist, The Arizona Republic and elsewhere. Her favorite Suns player before Steve Nash and Charles Barkley was definitely Andrew Lang. She becomes an unrestricted free agent next year. 

 

The Adolescence Issue: Being Other People

By Dorothy Fortenbery

(Editor’s Note: I’m very happy to welcome back Dorothy Fortenberry—a writer I’ve known since my adolescence—to kick off this issue. Here she talks about the ways we yearn to remake ourselves again and again. Dorothy Fortenberry is a playwright from Washington, D.C.currently living in Los Angeles. Her plays have been produced in New York, LA, and Chicago, and her essays have appeared in the magazines Real Simple and Brain, Child.) 

 

I'm in the backseat of a car, a car driven by, for the first time, a peer – okay, not a peer, he's in high school and I'm in 8^th grade, but still –  not someone's parent. Another kid. Another kid is driving, drove six blocks from the high school I don't yet attend to the nearby pizza parlor.  We just finished watching the high school play. We are going out for pizza. I am in the back seat, contemplating for the first time not wearing a seat belt, quizzing myself about what to do if anyone orders beer[1]. Most of all, though, I am struggling to act cool, to act like I do this kind of thing all the time, even though I've never done anything like it before. Because in the back of my head, I hear a voice saying, “It will all be different now. You will spend hours in this car and get pizza hear every Friday. This is the first day of the rest of your teenage life.”

I'm at a concert. I'm sixteen and I read a review of an album in the “Weekend” section of the newspaper and it sounds like music I would like, so I'm there. I asked my mom to drive me to Virginia to a bluegrass club I've never been to across from a mom and pop waffle restaurant whose awning reads “Wafle Hut.” I have no memory of what my mom did during the concert – drove home, right? She must have driven home – because I'm there by myself, but I don't mind because I love the music. I buy a t-shirt, the last of the hand-painted ones since the band just signed with a major label and won't have to make its own shirts anymore, which makes me both lucky and prescient. I'm in love, with the music, with the lead singer who's married to the guitarist who took her name because that's how feminist we are in 1996, and with the notion that this is what you do. It's why there's a Weekend section, to learn about new music and go to concerts and buy shirts and lose your heart to bands.

Senior year, a month to graduation, and I'm running. I taught myself to run using a schedule ripped out of Seventeen magazine and pinned to my bulletin board. It started with “Walk 9 minutes, Run 1 minute” and by the end of 8 weeks, you were supposed to “Run 9 minutes, Walk 1 minute.” Insanely, I actually followed it, and more insanely, I signed up for a charity 5K with my friend. She's a better runner than me and on the field hockey team and the softball team, but for whatever reason, I am flying past her this morning. I am running along the Potomac River at 8am and I am faster than I've ever been and I know: This is my new life. This is who I will be at college. “Do you have any hobbies?” “Oh, I'm a runner. Do you run?”

After the pizza outing, of course, I never ride in that kid's car again. And, after the concert, despite becoming a fervent fan of The Nields[2], I never read about another band and then see it live, on a whim. My first 5K is my last 5K, and whoever I am in college, it isn't “a runner.” When I think about being a teenager, I think about how much it was like visiting a city that you think you might move to. You go out to coffee and imagine, “if I lived in this city, I'd have coffee at this shop every day.” But if you actually do move to that city, you probably never go in that coffee shop again. While visiting, you get off at a subway stop and think, “Ah, if I lived here, this would be my subway stop,” except probably it wouldn't be. Probably it would only be your friend's subway stop and the easiest way to get to your friend's place might be the bus.

I don't miss a lot about being 15 because I have a fairly nice adult life and a very good memory, but I miss the misapplied certainty about what the future would hold. I miss the internal narrative voice telling me that anything done once could and probably would be done forever. I still make little pacts with myself like, “now that I bought this nice sunscreen, I will be a person who moisturizes daily” or “oh look, I'm early to something, maybe I'll be early to everything now.” But it's not the same. My promises now are only ever in the realm of self-improvement, so they're more New Year's resolutions than prognostication, and I don't ever keep them. The worst part is I don't ever even believe I will.

 

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[1] They don't. I'm relieved and a little sad.

[2] I know. No one's perfect.

 

The Adolescence Issue: Introduction

By Isaac Butler

America today has the longest adolescence of any society in the history of the world!

Freda, my now-late therapist, was fond of aphorisms.  She had a loose colleciton of them, little sayings she had made up, little statements that summed up her view of the world.  And one thing that view contained was that it was about time we all grew the fuck up. 

It's odd though, because she was also obsessed with the idea of development, with the idea of people embracing constant change, of working towards growth, of living with the tension between being and becoming. At no point in our lives are these aspects of our existence more foregrounded than during adolescence.  We try on different identities and call our peers posers for doing the same, we shed groups of friends or are cast out of them and find new others to compliment our new selves, our relationships with our parents, our bodies, our communities, our Gods, these all change, regardless of whether we rebel or go deeper into our fixed identities.

Our adolescence feels particularly fraught these days. Something, we know, must be wrong. People aren't "acting like adults" at an early enough age.  Teenagers themselves are a problem, either too dumb or too hooked on video games or too sexual or not sexual enough or too religious or not religious enough or lazy or too hard working or something. Something is wrong and whatever it is, it's the fault of those younger than us.

Obviously I'm skeptical of all of this. I think the unmoored quality of so many in their twenties can be traced not to their immaturity but the crumbling of the assurances that protected their parents coupled with crippling, paralyizing debt. I'm not sure it's a bad thing that it takes us awhile to get our shit together and commit to a specific life. And I think we find that liminal time when the world cracks open and abrupt change is not only possible but a significant force in our lives to be frightening to consider and to reconsider.

We've gone through so many selves to get to who we are today. This week, we'll be looking at a few of those selves, along with some pieces about how our culture portrays this time and the people who inhabit it. Hope you enjoy. 

Next Week: The Adolescence Issue!

By Isaac Butler

 

Next Tuesday, Anne, Ramona, Meshuggeneh and I set sail on the asphalt rivers of America, travelling back to my beloved Boerum Hill. Over around these parts, we'll be having another Issue. This time, the theme is adolescence! We have some great writers lined up including M. Bartyzel, Danny Bowes, Rob Weinert-Kendt, Kate Petersen, Jennifer Fossenbell and Dorothy Fortenberry. 

We'll be talking about everything from Kenneth Lonnergan to Mix Tapes to Pump Up The Volume to what makes for a good YA protagonist. Join us as we examine this most liminal of times. 

Narrative Illogic in "The Dark Knight Rises" (The Only Spoilers Below Are For The First Five Minutes)

By Isaac Butler

I just want to quickly double down on a point I made yesterday about how important the frame of a piece is to the audience's acceptance of narrative illogic.  Yesterday, I saw the new Batman film. I was not a fan. I don't want to belabor this point, actually. I have no desire to ruin the fun of the many friends of mine who enjoyed it. And I didn't hate it. And I didn't find it hateful. And there's good stuff in there (it actually gets Catwoman right, for example).

But in amongst all the stuff are a lot of things that make no sense. Actually, most of the movie doesn't make a whole lot of rational sense. Most of what the characters do is done to support the plot, but the plot also has some really really huge holes in it. Again, i don't want to belabor this point, although if people wanna argue it in the comments, I'll get into it there. 

I'm pretty sure that there are all sorts of things in The Dark Knight that similarly wouldn't make sense if I stopped and thought about it, but I was so swept up by TDK that up until the prison boat scene, I didn't really question it.  Similarly with Louie, the frame that CK has created both supports the illogic of the show and actively takes advantage of it.

I think, therefore, one of the reasons why I so disliked-- and didn't buy-- The Dark Knight Rises has to do with some of its framing.  First, one of the things we always learned in directing school is that one of the most important tasks of a director is to ensure the audience that they are in good hands. Even when you are tricking them or keeping them off balance, you want the audience to know that someone is in control so that they can relax and actually view the thing you're seeing. In literature, of course, we talk about the "contract with the reader" and establishing it quickly at the outset and violating that contract only with good purpose. 

The Dark Knight Rises fails to do this. In fact, it puts its worst foot forward.  The opener on the plane with Aiden Gillen might be the weakest (on both a writing and filmmaking level) five minutes of Christopher Nolan's career. And I say this as a booster of and apologist for Nolan's work. Each beat rings falser and weirder than the one before it, from Gillen introducing himself as "CIA" to no one thinking that the dude with the super-amplified voice might be Bane to Bane's voice sounding the same whether the hood is on or off and not appearing to come from anywhere to the utter incomprehensibility of the action sequence. Gillen's performance is also very bizarre. Like many actors who are exquisite at playing a blank slate, he's awful when he has to go large.

This is too bad because there's a lot of great stuff in the first act of the film that comes immediately afterward.  There's lots of problems with that section too, but there's so much panache and things of genuine interest that I ended up forgiving them, but the problem is the broken first few minutes really primed me as a viewer to look for things that weren't working and by the New York Stock Exchange section, they had mounted up enough that I stopped engaging with the film.

Beyond that, the film's overt claims to realism undercut it's ability to get this stuff past me as well. The first film is so heavily embued with allegory and Joseph Campbell and montages that that stuff didn't bother me. The second film has such a larger than life presense in the Joker and takes place in a Gotham that's so extremely cartoonish in its Gothamness that whatever problems there were didn't bother me. The third film is set more firmly in our world than the other two. In the third, Gotham is squarely New York City. The day to day realities of the city are overtly more aligned with the day to day realities of NYC. By setting it in a more real world it becomes harder to overlook the stuff in it that doesn't feel real.

Narrative Illogic in "Louie"

By Isaac Butler

One of the oddest aspects of the TV show Louie is the way that a certain kind of narrative sloppiness has reached feature-not-bug pervasivenes within the show.  The first season of Louie spends a great deal of energy making sure we know Louie only has one sibling, his brother.  By midway through the second season, he has two sisters.  When one of them drops off her daughter for the weekend, Louie, the daughter and the brother hang out, only the brother appears to no longer be his brother, despite being played by the same actor.  Louie crashes a motorcycle at the beginning of season three only to drive it in the second episode. There's a whole disappearing-reappearing jacket thing in the episode where Louie wants to buy a house.

(I do not include on this list that Louie's ex-wife is black. Simply put, I know interracial couples whose children have pale white skin and blonde hair. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.)

Patton Oswalt has penned for Slate a stirring defense that I find almost-- but not quite-- convincing:

 Louie has not foregone narrative logic; he’s embraced illogic. I’ve known Louis C.K. since 1990 and, like all great comedians and even greater story-tellers, he’s sloppy with the details. And he’s got a filmmaker’s innate sense of visuals over logic. Over and over again, both onstage and in one-on-one conversations, he swears his shaky allegiance to the factual, chronological nuts-and-bolts of the recounting of a story, or even the remembering of a life. There he is in this episode, on the motorcycle from the season premiere—the one he crashed into a truck—which he absolutely should not be riding. Then there was the episode last season where he was checking out the new apartment and his jacket disappeared and reappeared moment to moment. He’s jettisoned daily order for a larger, emotional truth. I know that sounds cheesy, and very new-agey, but it’s an old-fashioned notion, one Louis refuses to let die. Robinson Crusoe strips down naked, swims out to his shipwrecked boat, and then fills his pockets with goods. Ray Davies is purposely oblique about being “glad [he’s] a man / and so is Lola …” Ozu’s domestic interiors have zero spatial congruity from shot to shot. But we recognize the great, human storytelling, and feeling of trust and confessional, in all great works and, guess what,Louie is a sloppy, illogical, great piece of work.

This paragraph actually attempts-- with less success- what Louie is doing, which is to say use panache and ability to jump over some serious holes.  Robinson Crusoe doesn't conform to our ideas of what a novel should do because those ideas hadn't been invented yet.  Much of the book is actually an achingly dull religious tract, and the same events are revisited multiple times in different narrative modes with key details changed or elided.  Lola's deliberate entenre-laden ambiguity is completely irrelevant to what the show Louie is about. Louie doesn't use narrative ambiguitiy to any productive end.  If Lola contained a verse about meeting the titular character in a bar and then a later verse that said that actually they met five years later in an ashram, it would be a little closer to what the show is doing. I'm also not totally sure that the spatial incongruity of Ozu's films is relevant here, but I'll have to leave that to someone who knows Ozu's films better than I do.

Anyway, what I am convinced by is that clearly the narrative illogic of Louie doesn't matter. It doesn't matter to me or impact my enjoyment of the show, and it clearly doesn't matter to critics or audiences. What I'd like to figure out is why it doesn't matter. Pretty much any other mainstream narrative work that was this sloppy on basic issues of narrative detail would get slaughtered by critics.  In fact The Killing regularly got mocked for having moments that seemed narratively inconsistent or illogical (for ex: a scene where Linden uses a fake name in front of someone and then answers a phone within earshot with her real name).

I think it's a mixture of three-and-a-half things.  One of them is affect related. Louis CK is just a really likeable guy and an oddly charismatic screen presense.  Simply put, he is so fucking charming even in his self-lacerating misanthropy, that you root for him, and this rooting for him transfers onto the show. You want to cut the show a lot of slack as a result simply because you like him and by extension it.  Second is a more transactional operation. The rewards of following the show down the paths that CK carves out outweigh whatever the problems are with the show.  There's a fear-- a fear I share-- that a more "well crafted" show would lose the vitality and originality of CK's voice. So it gets a pass on this stuff, a not dissimilar pass to the one that Kevin Smith got until it became absolutely clear that he actually just isn't very good once you get beyond the bracing piety-destruction of his foul, foul mouth.

 Third-- and I think this is most important for those of us who create-- the show creates a frame that makes this illogic a non-issue. Louie as a narrative project constantly changes all sorts of rules on you. Sometimes it starts with standup. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it ends with it. Sometimes there's no standup in an episode at all. Sometimes it begins with its credits, sometimes it doesn't.  As story might take multiple episodes to complete, or five minutes. The show changes to fit the needs of each individual story, whatever they are.  

These kinds of change-ups regularly happen in literature, sometimes happen in film and very rarely happen in television (think, for example, of what a big deal the Three Trips episode of Mad Men was... it was a big deal because it was rare). Within the lower-rated end of TV comedy, this kind of rule-shifting is happening more frequently, But still, even within that, very rarely do the actual given facts of a show change.  Community might vary wildly in terms of style from episode to episode, but the show wouldn't abruptly make Jeff's father a regular and well-adjusted presense in his life.

Finally (this is the half thing) it's also worth thinking about which details are allowed to change. They turn out to be the details that don't matter that much. I mean, if Louie suddenly had three kids (or none!) that'd be a very strange shift that most people wouldn't accept. But the given rules of the world: Louie is single and divorced. He has two kids. He is a stand up comic. he has frought relationships with the rest of his family. He has friends who are other professional stand up comics. These stay consistent. 

UPDATE: Over on twitter, Jason Zinoman writes in to say a few words about how the illogic helps on top of the ways it doesn't detract.  He says that the narrative illogic "underlines the fact that Louie is from one subjective flawed POV to an extreme much more so than Girls or Curb Your Enthusiasm," that narrative illogic supports C.K.'s surreal brand of humor that traces back to his earlier, less-autobiographical material, and that the illogic "often serves as a jolting surprise... [which is] essential to comedy. But also to his brand of genre blurring [and his] worldview."   Jason also adds that it's dangerous to give CK a lifetime "free pass" on this stuff, as it could easily slip into indulgence.  "How many play debates end with `but it's abstract'".  I think that all makes a lot of sense. 

Roger Federer Is Not A Character

By Isaac Butler

Pity the poor profile writer saddled with churning out a few thousand words about Roger Federer. Not only will she be laboring in the shadow of David Foster Wallace (never a comfortable place to be) but she will also be contending with who Roger Federer is, or, rather, what he will reveal about himself, which turns out to be almost nothing.

It is in that spirit that I link to this valiant effort by New York Magazine's Geoffrey Gray which, all things considered, is about as good a traditional profile of Roger Federer as we're likely to get and in which we learn basically nothing about him (although for folks who don't read about tennis a lot, there's a ton of valuable info about how the game has changed). To briefly set it up for the uninitiated... Roger Federer is widely considered the greatest tennis player of all time but over the past couple of years he's started losing spectacularly in matches that he was winning handily because the wheels suddenly would go off the wagon. The assumption has been that something mental and unrevealed-- what commentators call "going away"-- was happening. The article is about Federer's attempts to reexamine and retool his game. My favorite part of the whole profile is when Gray, one assumes exasperated with frustration, has the following interchance with R-Fed:

In Madrid, Federer revealed the conclusions of his tennis soul-searching. After analyzing all the elements, he found there wasn’t much wrong with him. “That wasn’t a bad tournament,” he said. “I played great. I could’ve been in the finals and had a shot at the title.” So he didn’t change much.“Just little things,” he said; so little he can’t describe them, even when pressed. “I don’t even know what they are … Sometimes it’s just a mind-set.”I asked Federer about his greatest weakness. He seemed confused by the question.

“I mean, I can’t cook or anything,” he said. He pondered the admission. “I guess if I would learn it then I could cook, you know? So it’s not even a weakness, it’s just something I can’t do.

 “Do I have weaknesses?” he went on. “Sure. Many of them.”

I pushed him to name one, anything.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Honestly, I think you also have to be happy sometimes with what you have instead of always trying to look for more. I’m [more] a believer in working on your strengths than actually working on your weaknesses.”

It's difficult to believe that anything Federer says in the above is anything but disingenuous, just as it seemed disingenuous when he won Wimbledon, regained the number one ranking, ended his over two year drought of Grand Slam wins, cemented his Best Ever reputaiton and seemed like he didn't care about it (when asked how it felt, he responded "familiar.")

But here's the thing... we the tennis fans seem to want to make Roger Federer into more of a character than he actually is, by which I mean we want to do the normal art-making process with him. We want to reduce him to a few key traits and then blow those traits up to larger than life proportions.  Janet Malcolm has a quote about this somewhere in The Journalist and the Murderer, my copy of which is currently in a box so I'll paraphrase. Her point ist hat when we read nonfiction and a person "feels real" what we actually mean is that they feel like a character in a novel, because the novel has so shaped our view of human psychology that's our benchmark for reality. But the problem, of course, is that very very few real life figures are actually well-suited to this quasi-novel characterization.  Which is why creative nonfiction is rife with little ellisions, hyperboles, exaggerations &c to try to make peopel into larger characters than they are. 

Roger Federer is uniquely ill-suited to this process. He has an interesting backstory, but around about the time the public noticed him, he stopped being a very interesting person. He's given us glimpses of hidden interestingness (his sobbing when winning or losing key matches) but they are few and far between. There's a closed door between Roger Federer and the outside world. It seems that he either is spectacularly well adjusted, has little inner life or does not want to show what inner life he has to the public.

 My vote is on some mix of 1 and 3. And that is okay.  We want people who are great at something to also be interesting people. Roger Federer is not a very interesting person. He's not a tormented genius like John McEnroe or a wounded, misunderstood soul like Andre Agassi. He's not a flamboyant, angel-stanced pioneer like Arthur Ashe, nor a cold, arrogant fox like Bjorn Borg. He is simply the best ever, who has remained the best ever even as the game has changed out from under him, and we can love him for this, can't we, even as he stubbornly refuses to be the kind of person off the court we so desperately want him to be. 

We're All Fucked: The "Election" Films, The Wire and The Future of Democracy

By Isaac Butler

I wrote a thing for the good folks at Hooded Utilitarian about the Hong Kong gangster saga Election/Triad Election, The Wire, and democracy.  The essay is completely spoiler free about the Election films, which, taken together are one of my favorite films of the aughts and are both available on Netflix Instant for the first time in awhile:

Many pixels have been spilled documenting David Simon’s perspective on our crumbling institutions of government.  As he told The Believer, societal institutions are like the Gods in Greek Tragedy, inexorable, powerful forces that undermine individual agency.  The truth teller in a Simon piece is always the head that’s eventually going to be on the block. Attempts to improve the overall situation are doomed to succeed only on a small level, and only for a brief period of time, but are still noble and worthwhile.  Simon believes in individuals. Individuals may, in fact, be the only thing in which he’ll invest his faith. This forms a tension with his Democratic Socialist political leanings and this tension is part of what makes his work so electric and alive when it is at its best.

The perspective of the Election films inverts this equation. In To’s Universe, individuals are the problem and institutional tradition’s bulwark against individual will is the only thing standing between order and chaos. The problem in the Election films is that post-Millenial capitalism, with its empowering of individual will, embrace of selfishness, and temptations of money has eroded these institutions to the point where they are a hollow, symbolic shell...

You can read the whole thing here. 

Danny Bowes on the End of Nolan's Batman

By Isaac Butler

Friend of the room Danny Bowes has a piece up in the motherfucking Atlantic!!!1!!!11! about the end of Nolan's Batman trilogy and how this is good for the character.  Read it here!

I look forward to seeing what the future holds for Batman, so long as his origin story isn't a significant part of it. We get it already!

Intellectual Property Insanity: Theater Edition

By Isaac Butler

It turns out that, even with all sorts of moves taken to deflect such a possibility, David Adjmi is now forbidden from allowing subsequent productions of or publishing his play "3C" due to a Cease and Desist letter from the producers of "Three's Company."  Full report from Patrick Healy here. 

I've written about intellectual property issues and theater many, many times, most recently for Howlround (you can read that sadly prophetic entry here). As writers seek to speak to a culture that is made up in large part by other cultural artifacts, these occurences are going to more, not less, common.  The tragic thing here is that C+D letter is almost certainly specious and the show would almost certainly qualify for a parody exemption except that Adjmi and co. are simply too poor to fight the action in court.

As with Patent Trolls, these sorts of IP claims rely on picking on relatively powerless people who cannot fight back. In this case, it also certainly looks like an attempt by a wealthy corporation to insist that only it has the right to interpret its own work.  As the reviews note, 3C is a riff on Three's Company that tries to assay the anxieties towards homosexuality and identity and its core. I can't help but wonder if a more innocuous take on the material would've been ignored.

It's very sad and very chilling and a very strong reminder that we theater artists need to get on the rethinking intellectual property bus, even if it means giving up some things that we think are protecting us. 

A Kind of Holding One's Breath

by 99 Seats

I haven't written much about politics here lately. That's partly due to the personal stuff going on in my life. But it's also partly due to what Nate Silver notes here: in terms of the presidential election, nothing much is changing. It remains a close race, with some structural advantages given to President Obama and some structural disadvantages clinging to Mitt Romney. Oh, there are dust-ups and whatnot, but when the dust settles, nothing has changed.

Obviously the fall presidential election is massively important and, maybe even more obviously, presidential politics are not the only significant politics happening. But they take up a lot of oxygen and every single twist and turn is reported breathlessly. So now we get a half a news cycle about the NAACP booing Romney, followed by half a news cycle of when did Romney leave Bain, when it will probably be time for more shenanigans about Eric Holder and the completely fabricated "Fast and Furious" mess or some other foreign policy "gaffe." It all feels a bit like wheel-spinning to me.

We're waiting, waiting for the actual campaign, for the debates and, in a way, for the day itself. There don't seem to be a lot of convincable voters out there, so the question that looms seems to be who will get their voters out. And, more disturbingly, how many of them will actually be allowed to vote. It's also intriguing/disturbing how little policy seems to actually matter in an election everyone acknowledges as important. Maybe it will in the fall. Maybe not. It just feels like a long way to wait.

Craft Is Not The Enemy, But It Ain't Everything.

By Isaac Butler

Michael Cunningham has written the first (lengthy) part of a two part series going behind the scenes into the Putlizer Fiction jury for 2011, which he sat on.  You can check out part one here.  I am really glad that Cunningham wrote this, and I am also really glad that he is as honest as he is about the process, his criteria for selecting books, his insecurities etc.  That said, the piece reveals some problems within the process and, frankly, I think his criteria are both faulty and symtomatic of larger problems with the world of literature today. 

Cunningham is understandably upset that the larger Pulitzer committee (which is made up of journalists who review the three finalists selected by the jurors in the various fields) did not award one of the three novles chosen by the jury, nor did they request a fourth option, as apparently they can do. Cunningham's essay doesn't really examine, however, whether there were any problems with the choices they made as a jury. And if you look at the choices, the committees refusal to award one of these three particular books kinda makes sense.

The three choices were The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, Train Dreams by Denis Johnson and Swamplandia by Karen Russell. 

The Pale King is, of course, the final novel by Wallace, left unfinished when he committed suicide.  Cunningham brings up that all sorts of master works (including The Cantebury Tales) that were left unfinished when their authors died, but The Pale King is particularly unfinished.  Wallace left behind a stack of pages that he felt were good enough to send out to agents to get an advance on the book.  That is not what the reader in fact gets with TPK.  Intsead, the reader gets some of those pages and some other pages and expanded notes and loose pieces assembled over the last couple of years by Wallace's longtime editor.

TPK is also a book were the individual pieces function in relationship to one another. It's a series of interconnected vignettes that exist in mosaic, lacking a central narrative. In such a case, it's hard to say the book is authored by Wallace, as its organization is entirely determined by its editor without the author being around to consult on it. It also has several sections, including one that is nearly a hundred pages long, that don't work and would clearly be revised and shortened by Wallace, who was an inveterate rewriter. Were I on the larger committee, I could understand why awarding Wallace the Putlizer posthumously would feel like a nice gesture, but inappropriate in this case.

Train Dreams was actually published a decade ago in The Paris Review and is really a long short story, not a novel. I could again understand the committee balking at awarding it the prize.

 That leaves the third candidate, Swamplandia, a first novel by a  writer of promise and, well, as Cunningham himself says,  it has potential (and great moments) in abundance and some problems:

Karen Russell’s “Swamplandia!” was a first novel, and, like many first novels, it contained among its wonders certain narrative miscalculations—the occasional overreliance on endearingly quirky characters, certain scenes that should have been subtler. Was a Pulitzer a slightly excessive response to a fledgling effort?

However, it seemed very much like the initial appearance of an important writer, and its wonders were wonderful indeed. Other first novels, among them Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces,” have won the Pulitzer. One is not necessarily looking for perfection in a novel, or for the level of control that generally comes with more practice. One is looking, more than anything, for originality, authority, and verve, all of which “Swamplandia!” possessed in abundance.

I haven't read Swamplandia. I cannot speak to its strenghts and weaknesses, but if Cunningham is saying that its weaknesses were obvious, perhaps the committee felt like those overwhelmed the strenghts that he perceived. 

Some key as to why these three were picked lies in Cunningham's own admission as to what he focused on as a judge:

I was the language crank, the one who swooned over sentences. I could forgive much in a book if it was written with force and beauty, if its story was told in a voice unlike anything I’d heard before, if the writer was finding new and mesmerizing ways to employ the same words that have been available to all American writers for hundreds of years. I tended to balk if a book contained some good lines but also some indifferent ones. I insisted that every line should be a good one. I was—and am—a bit fanatical on the subject.

Earlier on, he lists what he feels the essential qualities of good literature are:

Fiction involves trace elements of magic; it works for reasons we can explain and also for reasons we can’t. If novels or short-story collections could be weighed strictly in terms of their components (fully developed characters, check; original voice, check; solidly crafted structure, check; serious theme, check) they might satisfy, but they would fail to enchant. A great work of fiction involves a certain frisson that occurs when its various components cohere and then ignite. The cause of the fire should, to some extent, elude the experts sent to investigate.

I agree with this, but I would add a specific point that I think Cunningham would not...  there are all sorts of books that lack several things on that list, and books that consistently lack quality sentences that are still far superior to works that meet the checklist of craft.  In those cases, what these books are actually doing is of such value and is so particular and so vividly realized that it trumps these concerns.  (I'll also note that narrative is left entirely off his list, which is revealing).

This is, of course, the point where I'm supposed to reach for Philip K. Dick, a writer who was able to do amazing things with his often incompetently written work, but one needn't go to him when there are dozens of other examples of great writers with occasional-to-frequent bad sentences, including Patricia Highsmith, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Dreiser and Edith Wharton. Furthermore, one can compose a piece in which the sentences are beautiful but the work itself doesn't, well, work. This is the difference between good/great Annie Dillard (Total Eclipse, say) and bad Annie Dillard (Expedition to the Pole). The sentences in both are identically great, but one piece is beautiful and brilliant and coherent and overwhelming and interesting and strange and honest and the other is a turgid mess. And of course, this being subjective, there are people who will say different about both. My students, for example, tend to hate all Annie Dillard. 

I believe craft is very important.  I am not a craft-is-the-enemy type of person. As an artist, you should be striving to make your work ever better and working to expand your toolbox so that your work can do more. One hopes that writers are working on crafting great sentences. Certainly, on the book I'm working on, I'm working on doing this, and working fairly hard at it. But it worries me  that Cunningham is so overly obsessed with sentences, because there's all sorts of things one misses when that's all they pay attention to. Particularly with the rise of the "lyric essay,"-- a form where, often, the nothing your essay has to say gains value by being said beautifully and where structural thorniness is its own reward regardless of what it has to do with content-- I worry that we're starting to value composition above all else. Furthermore,  as craft can be taught easily while the ineffable action of a work cannot, I worry that we've started to judge work on the very checklist Cunningham articulates here as being inadequate rather than recognizing how few good-to-great books actually obey most of the craft works we're teaching.

On a related note, here's Zadie Smith talking about the future of the novel, and how all the focus on a particular kind of "good" craft has "had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked."

I have a great professor at Minnesota who is fond of pausing in the midst of a love-fest over a book he's assigned to say "what would you say if one of your peers brought this in to workshop?" so that we can see that we'd in fact tear it apart for not following "the rules."  The lessen here is not that there are no rules, not that you should just throw together a bunch of bullshit and ignore issues of craft. But simply that it's not the only thing that matters. And  context matters too, of course. My posts here on Parabasis are, in general, uncrafted (they're not even proofread!) because I think spontaneity is kind of important to this form. Published work elsewhere is carefully considered and written much more slowly. 

UPDATE: Cunningham has also posted part two of the series, which discusses how hard it is to find the book that history will judge as great. This happens to not be what the Pultizer Prize is awarded for (the guidelines are for "distinguished fiction" on American themes) and also happens to be a problem we've discussed very recently here. I think at the end of the day, Cunningham and I have vastly different ideas of what makes for good to great fiction. 

Heckling

by 99 Seats

Somewhat apropos of Isaac's last couple of posts on trolling and bad public behavior, there's this thing that happened with Daniel Tosh. For those who don't know (or are allergic to clicking), Daniel Tosh is a comedian who is most known for making fun of people on the internet, usually using fairly "edgy" jokes, i.e. basically saying semi-racist/homophobic/sexist things with a wink. Tosh has a history of making rape jokes, including this wonderful bit. At a recent show, he started in and a blogger who happened to be in the an audience member shouted out that rape jokes are never funny. Which, of course, inspired Tosh to make rape jokes at the woman in question. She left feeling threatened, mortified and upset and tried to get her money back. A friend of hers blogged about it on Tumblr* and this set off a Tumblr/Twitter storm and eventually, Tosh kinda sorta apologized.

Like I said, Tosh has a history of this kind of stuff and I have at least one close friend who's been waging a campaign against him for years. After this, she literally unfollowed any friend on any social media platform who "liked" Daniel Tosh. Which seems pretty reasonable.

But. Hearing about it, made me think of this:

I had actually just re-watched this and was struck again by it. Now, as I've mentioned here before, I'm a huge fan of Louis C.K., his comedy, his show, his whole thing he's got going on. This is also, obviously, a staged event (the actress there is, of course, the amazing Megan Hilty, late of Smash), not an actual person. But he does A) make a rape joke, B) an AIDS joke and C) wishes her dead. For talking during his show. The great coda after gives some explanation for the vitriol...but does that correct it? Also: this episode aired nearly two years ago. I don't recall there being any backlash, any demand for apologies or explanations. In part, I think Louis C.K. gets a pass because his comedy isn't usually offensive and, again, this is fiction, not an actual person. But it's an insight into the psyche of a comic. Which is a pretty dark place.

Let me be very clear: I'm not defending Daniel Tosh. What he said and much of what he does is disgusting. Same goes for a lot of comedians who play the game of "edgy" material when they seem to mean exactly what they say. But I wonder if the Louie bit above lives in that land that Isaac mentioned here: this comes from someone I admire and like. Does it make me a bad person to laugh at it? Does it make Louis C.K. a bad person? How do I decide that Louis C.K. gets a pass, but anyone who likes Daniel Tosh isn't someone I want to know?

If I'm completely honest, I'm not sure.

Update: And then I wandered over to Twitter to find that two comedians I much admire, Louis C.K. and Patton Oswalt, have both jumped in this to defend Daniel Tosh. So...it just gets thornier.

*Updated for clarity. It wasn't a blogger, but a friend of the blogger.

Reading In Good Faith

By Isaac Butler

There was one thing I wanted to totally digress about in re: that awesome Erin Kissane essay about trolls, but it's not actually really related to trollery, but rather to reading and how we read online, so as to not be diverting from her point, or taking away from it, I thought I'd put it in a new post.  I.e. this one.

Okay here goes.  Erin writes:

 I think most people find it difficult to hear criticisms of things they love. We often translate “I do not like X” into “you are a moron for loving X” and “I find Y to be troubling and kind of sexist” into “you are personally a sexist slimeball for liking Y, and I think you should be shunned forever.”

This essentialization of taste is pretty pervasive. The only way to defang it is to accept the idea that you can like troubling things without being a bad person, and that it’s a million times better to accept that some loved things are troubling than to go to the mat in their defense. It’s tremendously relaxing to accept that things you like can be imperfect, and that pointing out their imperfections doesn’t reflect on you. It’s also rare.

That's some truth right there. Nothing gets everything right. It's simply impossible. And it is very hard not to essentialize taste and not to take criticism of things you like/love personally.

I do think that this cuts multiple ways.  Erin doesn't really talk about this in her post, becuase it's not the point (her post is about trollery, this post is not) but... we should be able to frankly discuss what is problematic about a video game/novel/play/film both aesthetically and politically without people feeling personally attacked or like we are equating them with those problems. At the same time, there is a kind of lefty holier-than-thou thing that's fairly common on the internet where people really are using political concerns to say that people who like something are bad people (or stupid people) or that pieces of writing that have problematic qualities reveal some hidden evil in the part of their writers.

I've been on both ends of this. I've written (or said) that people who like the films Wanted andWatchmen are bad people even though I have very close friends who like both, for example. And I've certainly read things in bad faith, or been accused of writing something that I just plain didn't write. This issue is not nearly as big a problem as a bunch of assholes trying to threaten an internet cultural critic with rape and violence until she stops talking about sexism, but it is a real thing.

Woven, sadly, into the internet is suspicion. It's a part of the blogging DNA.  This kind of skepticism has been very helpful at times, but it also leads to people never giving what they're reading and responding to the benefit of the doubt. And if you can't agree to the basic terms of the writer-reader contract, there's no point to reading something. If you're not looking for what the action of the piece is but are instead looking for the ways it could fail you or hurt you, you are definitely going to be failed and hurt.

Earlier this year, an essay I wrote was published online. It's about my relationship with my older brother, who is both adopted and a person of color. The beginning of the essay references us wrestling as kids. I'm four in this part of the story and Bill is eleven.  I mention in the piece that he's looming over me and he's much stronger than I am and he beats the bejeesus out of me. One of the commenters talked about how I was using negative stereotypes of large, aggressive, physically dominant black men.  It then launched into a line-by-line "takedown" of the essay as being unexaminedly racist and revealing what a racist I was.

But here's the thing... the essay hadn't revealed that he was black yet. And, obviously, someone you are wrestling with as a little kid who is seven years older than you is going to seem like a giant. And much of the essay is about performing various problematic attitudes towards race our culture has and then contradicting and undermining them.  But you have to actually read the piece to get that. And a combination between its new title (added by the editors) and its subject matter (transracial adoption and what it reveals about how we think about race in America) primed the reader to read it reactively. 

I also can't help but think that its platform exacerbated this as well. Not the site it was published on, but rather the fact that it was published on a site at all. This kind of reactive reading-- which is really just reading in bad faith-- is par for the course on the internet.When we read this way, it becomes impossible to respond to the problematic aspects of a work in any kind of constructive, engaging dialogue. 

Which is also not to say that everything must be responded to constructively. Sometimes you need to make a ruckus. Sometimes there are people who are beyond reaching, beyond engagement, and then they become, essentially, foils. Certainly, I don't think constructively engaging the folks who designed an online flash game where you can beat up Anita Sarkeesian is a good idea. I am definitely not saying that better ways of explaining to trolls what trollery is will improve their behavior. There's a difference between engageable people-- where sometimes, perhaps shifting your own rhetoric will have really great results-- and nonengageable people. 

But I worry as more and more things move online that more and more readers will read reactively and defensively, wondering in a self-fulfilling way, when am I going to be hurt by this? so that they can get the pleasure of righteous indignation. There really is a difference between a piece of writing that exists to be hurtful (or is so problematic as to be beyond the pale like that John Simon women's tennis essay)  and something that is an earnest attempt at something that has problematic things going on, and learning to discern between the two is a diffcult, ongoing task. 

 Oh, also, Gus has a good post up about how not to be a dick on the internet.  Check it here. 

I Got the Troll Patrol on the Gat Patrol

By Isaac Butler

One of the pervasive problems with online discourse is, of course, the troll. We've had our share of them here in the theatrosphere, but it's nothing compared to what happens in other parts of the internet, particularly what happens to women when they gain any kind of prominence for trying to tackle sexism. You may have heard of Antia Sarkeesian. She started a kickstarter to do a set of videos about sexism in video games.  The response from the trollery end of the video gamer world was horrific.  Seriously, seriously horrific.

This raises a number of questions about what to do about it.  Total badass Erin Kissane has some grreat thoughts on the subject here. Amongst other things, she discusses why ignoring it doesn't work, which is one of the most aggravating aspects of trollery.  Ignoring trolls doesn't work (they'll either declare victory or escalate) and paying attention to them is exactly what they want. So what is to be done? I'll let you click on over to Erin's place to find out.

Part of what makes the essay so great-- beyond the fact that she manages to actually pull off quoting Martin Luther King Jr. twice-- is that it's observant and smart about things beyond trollery.  So check it out, darnit!

Martin Pakledinaz: The Lost Inteview

By Sam Thielman

(Editor's Note: I am very pleased and honored to be publishing this interview with Martin Pakledinaz, conducted by Sam Thielman in 2011. Sam Thielman is a staff writer for Adweek and a frequent contributor to Newsday's books section. He has written about the theater for Variety, Newsday, Back Stage and The Washington City Paper, among others. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and too many comic books.)

Martin Pakledinaz was a very talented costume designer who worked on a truly incredible number of Broadway shows. He died Sunday at his home in New York, according to the AP, which is a great loss to the American theater. While I was working at Daily Variety, I wrote the same feature every year before the Tony Awards: a long article on the designers nominated for the prize. It was the plum assignment to end all plum assignments; for "research" I had to see every popular show on Broadway so that I could interview every designer within a few days of the nominations and file the feature quickly, but the interviews themselves were, if anything, even more rewarding than the shows. Set and costume designers are necessarily articulate about their craft in a way that directors, actors and writers are discouraged from; Martin Pakledinaz, in particular, gave me one of the best interviews I’ve ever had last year before the 2011 Tonys.

 He was in the early stages of his battle with cancer, but he was still working on Anything Goes and The Normal Heart simultaneously. Isaac has graciously given me space to post, in his memory, the mostly-unexpurgated interview, starting with our conversation about Anything Goes and going on to The Normal Heart and his own illness. I've edited it here and there to make it legible and included bracketed clarifications where needed, but this is mostly the text of our conversation as it occurred, from just after the small talk ended to just before we started talking about whose Broadway Cares auctions were more fun to watch, Daniel Radcliffe's or Hugh Jackman's. Please enjoy it. I didn't know Martin well, but I think, given his enthusiasm about the charity Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, it wouldn't be inappropriate for me to suggest a donation to that charity in his name, if you're so inclined.

 Sam Thielman: Tell me about [Anything Goes].

Martin Pakledinaz: I enjoy clothing through the centuries, and I enjoy studying it, as opposed to clothes that need stylization because of the subject matter or because of the dance. [Director/choreographer Kathleen Marshall]'s dance kept to the time pretty closely. Often with '30's dance shows, if there's a huge amount of movement that's fabulous, but that's not with the period, and then you have to have the fullness in the skirts. But with Kathleen's moves, we can just go with skirts from the period—they just look like 1930's women, and then they do a tap number. I'm inspired by design, but I kind of make it my own on this kind of show. Working with Kathleen on a real level, she really understands the time and she doesn't… imprint on it. We might do a visual thing, but it's so pure for her—she goes back for the time.

ST: That sounds very difficult.

MP: One of the things that was hard and beautiful was finding our way into it, because the revival was so successful. But if anything I was inspired by the original, because Tony Walton's design was so original.

ST: Do you ever have to break period?

MP: One wonderful number that I got to work on, which I had to break the period for, was the opening of Rob Ashford's Thoroughly Modern Millie. I don't know if you saw it, but [in dresses from the period] they can't open their legs—and I just saw [the choreography] and I went, "Girl…"

ST: So the less acrobatic dancing in Anything Goes gave you greater license.

MP: I knew when I could [make a tighter dress]. With the Angels' getting on-the-boat things, if [Kathleen] had said, "I need a fan kick," I'd have to have made them differently. If she'd said, "I need them to kick and touch their noses," I'd have said, "Well, I guess I need to put a slit in there. 

ST: That's really great. Do you ever have to put, I don't know, a gusset in the crotch for the guys, a la the old Chuck Norris Action Jeans?

MP: [laughs] Actually, they're '30's, so they're a little loose. I have dancers like that in a suit, in men's things. This won't sound pretty, but I say, "Do a deep squat. Do a lunge, and do this, do that," and if you're lucky enough to have the time and the right tailor, you're fine. You only need a gusset if you're doing something really insane.

ST: Please tell me about Sutton Foster's dress.[1]

MP: I tried to make a dress that maybe people who don't know what the show is would see, and they’d think that she'd be doing ["Blow, Gabriel, Blow"] all in white. You know, rather than do it a choir robe, or something where it was obvious she'd be taking it off.

ST: Where did the idea come from?

MP: I was inspired by a silent film called Madam Satan. It's about a good wife who goes in disguise to see if she can win back her husband, and she wears that sort of stylized devil dress. So it was inspired by that. And I knew we could always show off Sutton's legs. 

ST: What did you change?

MP: We knew we wanted fringe—that was part of our research. It was a journey, because when those were being made was when I went away [to have brain surgery]. It was clear even at the sketch stage that I was making something. When I came back, I was a little softer because I was in surgery.

ST: You also have The Normal Heart this season, right? How was that process?

MP: It's great to be able to work on it, but I lived a lot of those years. I was never one of those heroes. Every speech [in the play] I have my own imprint on. And the fact that it's still… you know, it's not just about AIDS. It's about governments not acknowledging people. You can make it about the time and you can make it about "we gay men," but this African-American woman was looking at the poster, and she said, "What's this about," and I told her, and she said, "I'm a little offended that there are no people of color here," and I said, "You know, if you look back, you'll see that we're not the community you thought we were."

Maybe it's about Koch, who was a monster—which you can quote, I don't care. But it's about the community, which is in part responsible for the spread of the disease. All of these other major cities like San Francisco [where the city contributed $4 million to fight AIDS] had dealt with it. In New York, they were given $9,000.

ST: It must have been a terrifying time to be gay.

MP: When it happened—and it's one reason I get so emotional—no one knew what was going on. And when you see the play, you'll see all the fear. And we were ashamed to talk about it, and no one would stop having sex. [cries]

 ST: How did you portray that fear in the costumes?

MP: John Benjamin Hickey plays a character who, when we meet him, is healthy, and he's beautiful and dapper. And in the final scenes we see him, and just through direction and acting and the clothes we have to show that he's ravaged. That's a subtle thing—even changing a shirt in the middle. You know, when you're not feeling well you just dress differently. And we have this guy Wayne Wilcox—guys these days really maintain themselves, and there was no gym culture in the 70's, and it was about finding things that hopefully evoke; the shirt collar is falling down around his neck. We've all seen people who are lost within their clothing a little bit. 

ST: What was it like to work on two shows that are so different?

MP: I had the astonishment of Anything Goes, and the joy. I'm happy I've done [The Normal Heart], but to be honest, I'm a wreck at the end of the night. The other day I had to say, "I need to take a night off." It brings back memories. I'm sort of at peace with what's happening to me, but... you have no idea how firm the commitment of the community to me is. One of my favorite charities is Broadway Cares. They don't just acknowledge the community, they really help it.

ST: And you had Joel Grey working with you on both shows, presumably going through something similar.

MP: He's been a huge support. […] Joel and I have gotten even closer. I have a little Buddha made out of quartz that he bought me before the operation.

ST: It must be very strange to be going through so much personally at the same time.

MP: I think it's good that people know. For a long time, it was just Martin's Mysterious Illness, which was not good. Now I'm working on The Normal Heart, which I lived through, and I'm in the early days of cancer. 

- - -

From here, the two of us basically start talking about our favorite Broadway Cares post-show prop auctions, and the transcript isn't very interesting to anyone who hasn't seen a bunch of these. Again, I would like to humbly suggest that anybody who really dug this interview would make a donation to Broadway Cares Equity Fights AIDS in Martin's name. I don't normally ask this sort of thing, but he really spent a long time talking about it in a largely unrelated interview and it clearly meant a lot to him.

---

[1] Here is Sutton Foster doing "Blow, Gabriel, Blow" in the bottom layer of the costume we're talking about. This was a really wonderful show to see live, and you can probably dig up a bootleg in which she starts off in the white number that Martin is talking about here, but I didn't have the heart to post anything where you can't hear Foster's beautiful voice. People spent a lot of time snobbily proclaiming that this or that person they'd seen play Reno Sweeney was better, which misses the point so spectacularly that I get depressed thinking about it.

David Brooks, Literary Scholar

By Isaac Butler

Okay, so Charles Pierce has written such a glorious takedown of David Brooks' latest column that I won't even really try, you can go check that here. It's hilarious. No seriously, read it. And if you want to wonder why Brooks' latest is so imminently takedownable, just check the opening graph:

Henry V is one of Shakespeare’s most appealing characters. He was rambunctious when young and courageous when older. But suppose Henry went to an American school.

Um... didn't Brooks and his cohort invest a lot of energy right after 9/11 into telling us that George W. Bush-- educated in American schools-- was Henry V?  And sure enough, didn't he go right in and declare war on a country that didn't post a threat to us using a legal figleaf, just like Henry V? 

Seriously tho... if you read the column, it should be pretty clear to you that Brooks hasn't actually read Henry IV parts 1 +2 or Henry V any time recently. Maybe he rewatched the Branaugh movie or something. Who knows. In it he wonders at how the American education system would slowly deliver to Henry the message that the way he act sin the world isn't acceptable and he would either rebel and become delinquents or slide into mediocrity.  Pierce has a lot to say about how stupid this column is, I'll just quote one graph:

Look, I like you people. I really do. But do I have to go on with this? Either Brooks is stoned to the gills, or the Times gave every editor in its payroll a free trip to Neptune. And actually, what Henry did was withdraw to the tavern, get roaring drunk in evil company, fuck whatever tavern wench happened to fall in his lap, and in all ways engage in pursuits that an unstoned David Brooks otherwise would find appalling among those people who eat government cheese in their double-wides while watching Cops and having the sexytime without his permission. This is behavior, of course, that bothers Brooks not at all when engaged in by the world's proper owners. Sucking up to the Plantagenets. Wow. You have to love a courtier pundit who tries to curry favor with a ruling elite that lost its power in 14-goddamn-85

The thing that bugs me here is... and maybe you have some idea about this, dear reader... why bother with the Henry V stuff, anyway? It doesn't make any sense in the context of American education, and it doesn't make any sense in the context of Henry V's biography either.  Henry is hanging out in bars with a grotesquely obese alcoholic letch starting in mid adolescense.  That's not a dude that's spending a lot of time in school, no matter what the school is like. Henry IV Part 1 gives us a few basic options for explaining Hal's turnaround at the end of the play and none of them come from education. Either (a) Hal's solliloquy at the beginning of the play ( I know you all, and will awhile uphold/ The unyoked humour of your idleness:/ Yet herein will I imitate the sun,/Who doth permit the base contagious clouds/To smother up his beauty from the world,) is accurate and he is just pretending to be a delinquent so when his moment really comes he'll shine brighter or (b) the tongue-lashing he gets from his father motivates him to really change in Act IV or (c) the external threat to his life as represented by Hotspur's conspiracy causes him to get his shit together or (d) his rivalry with Hotspur spurs him on to prove that he's the better man or (e) some combo of these. 

Obviously there are more explanations possible than that. Perhaps he tires of Falstaff's company or his father reaching out to him unlocks something within him etc. and so forth. I'm just saying that none of these explanations have anything to do with the kind of social engineering Brooks is fretting about here. Seriously, why did he go to Prince Hal? It really makes no sense. 

My guess is this: Brooks is doing his usual playing-dumb-because-he-thinks-you-are-schtick. He's guessing that you only vageuly remember the contours of Prince Hal's evolution into Henry V and he's trying to use this to, well, trick you. Because basically every David Brooks column is about finding a way to sneak Republican water-carrying in under the guise of ho-hum center right fairmindedness. So here he's hoping you just sorta remember that Hal was kinda a delinquent and hung out with a fat old dude and then he reformed and became totes awesome by invading France and winning. 

Pulling Out Of Here To Win

by 99 Seats

Man, this post is way, way, way overdue. I actually meant to write about this stuff on the blog about a month ago, but events kept getting in the way. And then I meant to write it last week, but there was too much stuff going on. And then I meant to write it yesterday, but by then, I was tired from everything else. Today, though, today is quiet and relatively peaceful and I have some time to myself. So here it is.

I've left New York City.

On Tuesday morning, I got on a plane for Los Angeles. I'm writing this from my sublet in central L.A., sort of Thai-town, sort of Little Armenia, sort of Los Feliz, if any of those words mean anything to you. They mean only a little bit to me right now. But mostly they mean "home."

So how the hell did this happen? Like Hemingway's quote about going broke, gradually and then suddenly. I've been kicking around making this move for a while now. My reasons are about one-third professional, one-third personal and one-third that place where the personal and the professional overlap and become the spiritual.

On the professional tip, I don't think it's a surprise to anyone that I've felt fairly frustrated by the NYC theatre scene. I've been banging my head against its doors and ceilings for nearly two decades now and, honestly, I'm tired. I'm tired of busting my ass, gathering resources, calling in favors, stretching fifty-cents to make a dollar and then at the end of it, having a lot of bubkis to show for it. That's overly harsh. Let me soften it a bit: I don't know what else to do. One of the reasons I've been largely absent on this blog for the last few months has been an absolute torrent of work. I stepped down from the leadership of The New Black Fest and basically did project after project. Between about last November and this spring, I wrote two full-length plays (one a three-act bear), a longish one-act and two ten-minute plays. One of the ten-minute plays received a full production and three week run. The other ten minute play had a quick and dirty production for one night in a bar. The longish one-act got about a week of rehearsal, then a one-night presentation. About a month later, we got another whack at it, with another week's rehearsal and three performances, in a semi-staged manner. The two new plays got a few hours of rehearsal and then one-off readings. I also got a workshop presentation of another full-length play, a week or so of rehearsal for that, two performances, semi-staged. Oh, and a friend of mine who runs a community theatre in Rochester put together a reading of a group of my short plays. I think I'm even leaving some things out...Wait, I am. I also wrote a short holiday-themed piece for a reading series and two short pieces that I read myself, one at another reading series and one at a special event honoring a friend and colleague. Basically, from November until May, I had a deadline every week. Most of the work I did I consider some of my best. I grew as a writer. And many of these events were well-attended and well-received. All of which is, and should be, satifying enough. I'm doing better than a great number of writers I know and I am blessed for the opportunities I have. But.

My disdain for soccer is well-known amongst my friends. In particular, I'm dismissive of soccer because of the possibility of a 0-0 tie. That can't be a satisfactory result, no matter how brilliant your defensive plays are. As I joke (and I may have even stolen this joke from someone), those guys ran around for 90 minutes and I scored as many goals as they did. And I just sat here drinking a beer.

By the same logic, the guy at my local bar who sat there, every night for the last seven months, drinking cranberry and vodkas had as many productions as I did. I was just more winded.

At a certain point, you start thinking it's you. I can say all I want about structural this and structural that, and none of this doesn't mean those imbalances aren't true, but there's a certain point where you have to consider that nobody here really wants you. Or you don't know how to make them want you. And if that's the case, why keep digging this hole? I'm careening into my late thirties. If there's time to make a change, it's now.

I've always tried to be honest about my skills and abilities: I can write some pretty good dialogue, turn a good phrase here and there, and make a pretty decent joke. I prefer naturalism and realism to experimental theatre. I like contemporary stories, usually with a "ripped-from-the-headlines" feel. I'm attracted to the worlds of genre fiction, but I like tweaking it ever so slightly. The current trends in theatre run pretty much counter to all of that, unless you're a big enough name or can land a big enough name to make it to Broadway. I don't come with the kind of pedigree that opens doors on its own. I've felt stuck in a limbo. And sometimes, even my closest friends and colleagues have basically said, "You should be writing for television, not theatre." Generally in nicer terms than that. So...I may not actually be a playwright.

And if not, well, then, why not try my hand at another medium? At another city? So, to paraphrase the single worst phrase in modern sports history, I'm taking my talents to Venice Beach.

Please don't see this as "taking my toys and going home" or slinking out of town away from a trail of failure. I don't. I see it as a moment of clarity. I think I know what I'm doing, maybe for the first time in a decade. That's a good thing.

Personally...I've never lived more than an hour and a half from New York City. While those kind of roots are comforting, they can also hold you back. I wanted to see who I was without the back-drop of New York around me. Especially before I could never get out, never live anywhere else.

And thus and so, Flight 1691 brought me here, to a neighborhood that is really nothing like anything I've known. The closest equivalent is the farthest reaches of Queens, but that doesn't cover it. It's all just so slightly foreign. Mostly in good ways. I'm starting to like it.

A few nights before I left, I got some friends together at a bar and one of my closest friends and colleagues came by. The bar was in my old neighborhood of Inwood and he came all the way from the depths of Brooklyn, and so had to leave on the early side for the two hour ride back home. Right before he left, someone played Bruce Springsteen's gorgeous anthem "Thunder Road." And we belted it out lustily. This song fit my spirit and the time just perfectly. New York isn't exactly full of losers, but the feeling of breaking the bonds that hold you back and leaping out into the free air, that is what I felt. What I'm still feeling. I want to leave you with that. Even though I'm not leaving you at all. I'll still be sending dispatches from L.A. I do plan to take a whack at theatre out here and I know you're all just dying to hear more about TV writing. But for right now, close your eyes, listen to The Boss and think about driving down a sunlit road, the top down and a bright clear sky above you...

The "Brave"ry of Keeping Mom Alive

By Dorothy Fortenberry

(Editor's Note: Playwright, teacher and overall badass Dorothy Fortenberry sent me this great piece on Pixar's new film Brave. I know we're not doing an issue right now, but I thought it'd be nice to have some other voices on here from time to time.  Anyway, hope you enjoy it. )

Over a post-movie cupcake last week, through more than a few tears, I said to my husband, “The thing about Brave is that the mom is there. She's THERE.” In a world where Disney has seen fit to dispatch with the mothers of Snow White, Cinderella, Ariel, Belle, Pocahontas, and Bambi, there is something revolutionary about a film where the mother not only lives, but behaves like a real character – making choices, making mistakes, and fighting bad guys. It's not as formally inventive as Wall-E or as elegant as Up, but for pure politics, Brave is truly something special. I also think it can't be a coincidence that Brave opened the same week that the Atlantic published Anne-Marie Slaughter's article “Why Women Can't Have it All.” (Or, apparently, as she wishes it were called, “Why Working Mothers Need Better Choices to Be Able to Stay in the Pool and Make It to the Top.”) 

Both the movie and the article say things that shouldn't be surprising, in fact, that should barely be interesting, but we live how we live, so they are.

To address concerns that both have provoked:  yes, they are totally and unapologetically about elites. Slaughter is working in a tiny, rarefied slice of the world, and she acknowledges it: “I am writing for my demographic – high-educated, well-off women who are privileged enough to have choices in the first place. . . We are the women who could be leading, and who should be equally represented in the leadership ranks.” Brave is a movie about a princess, and her mom is, as expected a queen. They don't really challenge their privilege and if there are repercussions for women farther down the ladder than Merida, those are way beyond the scope of the film. And, look, I certainly hope we'll soon see Pixar release a movie whose main character is a female marmoset or geologist or spatula, but I don't think it's an accident that they went traditional on this one. When you've made twelve movies in a row with male protags, you take your change where you can, and I would bet that the American families consuming Brave in their air-conditioned movie theaters have more in common with a medieval princess than they do with dirt-eating serfs. I think Slaughter might be both too optimistic and too pessimistic about the power of elites when she says that “We may need to put a woman in the White House before we are able to change the conditions of the women working at Walmart.” But I will say that the one person I know with an important, high-powered job who also telecommutes regularly in an environment that supports family-related flexibility works for a bunch of women at Planned Parenthood. Whose CEO is a woman and a mother and the daughter of a powerful woman, so, maybe, there you go.

Beyond merely portraying life of elite women, Brave and Slaughter demonstrate a central truth parenthood that is, like, the most obvious thing ever, but yet, we never see it in fiction: this stuff takes time. The actions of parenting can be pushed and squeezed somewhat, and if you have a job you can do at 8pm, maybe you can take your kid to the pediatrician's at 2, but, all of it takes time, and time is a finite resource. Slaughter's prescriptions for pushing back at the barriers mostly sound great to me – especially undercutting the culture of “time macho” in which people work late hours at the office because people work late hours at the office. I'd love to live in a world in which family time was respected for both men and women, and where we videoconferenced and teleconferenced and worked (sometimes) from home. But if we define “having it all” (a phrase that Slaughter now admits she never want to hear again) as “never having to worry or make any compromises,” then no one, male or female, will never have it all, and Brave shows why.

The story begins and was deftly marketed as a classic hero's story in which the spunky, rebellious, and brave Princess Merida defies her parents' wishes that she marry a prince and goes off on her own. But the strange and wonderful thing about the movie is that she never goes more than a day's journey from her castle. Instead, to undo the curse that she unwittingly placed on her mother, she stays put and teaches her mother how to adjust and adapt to her new form: showing her how to eat, helping her with her changed body . . . I don't think it's too much to say that the main action of this hero's quest is PARENTING. And it takes time, it's laborious and funny and surprising and physical and, above all, time-consuming. There is a certain amount of sheer labor that goes along with parenthood that cannot be outsourced or scaled back, even as there is much that can, and Merida's plans to, dare I say it, have it all are disrupted by this unexpected need to care-take. She thought (and we thought) she was riding off into the sunset for adventure, but instead she is nurturing someone she loves, because adventures are better if you have someone to share them with. My hope, of course, is that by the time Merida reaches the age for considering kids of her own, the kingdom will have instituted family-friendly leave policies and she'll be able to take a few years off before re-joining the adventure track.

It makes me hopeful that Slaughter's piece is stirring up conversation, and I want to believe it will stir up actual change on the part of employers. It makes me even more hopeful to have an action heroine who is also a compassion heroine, in a fairy tale where personal fulfillment and family commitments are reconciled. Now, I only have two more desires: that men's struggles to be equal parents are shown honestly and not bumblingly, and that someone re-release Nora Ephron's first film This Is My Life -- the other best depiction of the challenges of working motherhood, adolescent girls, and what happens when your mom turns into a completely different beast.