Parabasis

The End of Unpaid Internships?

By Isaac Butler

Last night on twitter, Jason Zinoman and Mike Daisey got into an extended conversation about a recent ruling on unpaid internships and its implications for theater. Basically, a group of unpaid interns on the film Black Swan sued Fox Searchlight, arguing that the work they did amounted to unpaid labor. They won:

 it's the first time a major U.S. court has ruled that zero dollars for legitimate work does not a legal unpaid internship make. "Considering the totality of the circumstances," reads the ruling from federal judge William Pauley, the plaintiffs, Eric Glatt and Alexander Footman, "were classified improperly as unpaid interns and are 'employees' covered by" the the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) as well as New York's labor laws. The judge added: "They worked as paid employees work, providing an immediate advantage to their employer and performing low-level tasks not requiring specialized training."

At a minimum, 20th Century Fox, which is seeking to reverse the decision, will have to pay out the minimum wages earned in that period by the duo. The judge also added "class certification" to a group of Fox interns, and Turner, their attorney, told the Wire that the totality of the judgment "will have a much broader impact in terms of making corporations reexamine their internship programs."

One of the interns' lawyers commented on Jason's piece about unpaid labor at UCB earlier this year. 

It has long seemed to me that the unpaid internships in theatre are largely illegal. The question is whether anything will ever be done about it.  Back in 2010, when the IRS was making some noise about illegal unpaid internships, the great Adam Thurman wrote:

[T]his is typically how a big regulatory body like the IRS tries to solve a problem.  

They start by complaining about it loudly.  They consider this a warning shot to everybody before they have to become more actively engaged.  So you should take this issue seriously.  When the IRS starts publicly talking about something, that means that somebody with some clout has made it a priority.

Now let's be real, the IRS probably isn't concerned with Tiny Theater X, or Little Dance Company Y.  When they start cracking down it is going to begin with some bigger, more visible groups in the for profit and nonprofit sector.

They will probably pick one or two, smash them up against the rocks and hope that serves as an example for everyone else.

BUT . . . 

That doesn't mean that smaller organizations can not be impacted by this move against unpaid internships.

All it takes is for one unpaid, pissed off, "intern" to make a phone call to the local IRS field office and the ball is officially rolling.

You really don't want that to happen. 

So, you may want to fix your internship program.

Now, the IRS never did publicly crack down on a theater using unpaid internships to skirt minimum wage laws. And so Adam's warning has gone largely unheeded.  On twitter, Mike mentioned that he has played at theaters where his shows appeared to be entirely staffed by interns. 

The question is... what is to be done? I am of the school that if you do work for someone they offer you a wage and then you can positively refuse it should you wish to donate your labor. That if a theater company is charging for tickets, their labor should be paid. 

But this seems, in practice, to be unworkable.

Most indie theater I know, for example, can't afford to pay the folks helping them put together the set. But that set still needs to be put together. With the price of renting space to do a show in as high as it is in this town, there's often not a lot of money left over to pay folks. Yet even though that's understandable, and one way to look at it is certainly that you're just a group of people trying to get this show up, that you're a community, a family even, another way to look at it is that folks are being asked to donate their time and labor to building your company, and there is no guarantee that you will ever give them anything in return. 

But again.. if you had to pay everyone, maybe that set would never get made. You see a similar thing in online publishing. Huge, important websites are run at such low margins (or so they say, anyway) that they can't afford to pay many of their writers. 

I think on some level, we know this is wrong. And as a result of this tension, we have all sorts of frames and justifications to make screwing people out of their wages seem reasonable and ethical to the point where a millionaire rock star can demand that people work for her for free and be surprised when people are upset by it.

I would like the default assumption to be that we're paying people for their work, with very specific and narrow contexts where that's understandably not true. Right now, it often feels like in the arts we have the reverse. An assumption of not paying people, with narrow, specific contexts as to when that won't be the case. 

This scares me. It scares me even more when many of the "innovations" that people suggest w/r/t Equity (and particualrly the showcase code) amount to ways to not pay actors. The disconnect between the arts and labor movements-- a disconnect that some trace to HUAC-- is a danger to both. 

UPDATE: Howard Sherman gets into some of these issues over at his place. Check it out!

Speed Kills

By Isaac Butler

(updated below)

There are few things I've written on this blog that I'm more ashamed of than this blog post from a year ago about the cancellation of Community and my Uncle-in-Law's death. Basically, to summarize the story: My uncle-in-law died at the same time that Community's creator and show runner Dan Harmon was fired, and, while I loved the show, I found it totally bizarre  that people were lamenting Harmon's exit in the same way my family was lamenting Uncle Bill's death.

 That's an interesting thing to explore, I think. The way we grieve beloved shows and the way we grieve beloved people and how they relate to one another. It's actually territory Community itself has joked about when Troy says he wants to stage his death to look like a suicide protesting the cancellation of Firefly. So. So far so good, I suppose.

But then I took it a step further and declared the entirety of Season 3 a failure with the exception of two episodes. I took it a step further than that and accused the show of containing a poisonous strain of latent homophobia. And then a step further than that and said that Ken Jeong and Jim Rash were never funny.

The reason why I'm ashamed of this post is that it contains some moments of writing that I'm geniunely proud of, but the interesting premise i had-- that fan grieving processes are really fucking weird-- gets totally derailed by rage and transforms into a series of gratuitous attacks on a show that brought me great joy (and which employs an actress I've briefly worked with and genuinely like). It was almost as if I was saying not only is your grief misplaced, but this thing you love isn't worth it, either! 

Honestly, having written it in what amounts to a fugue state, I largely forgot about it until the aforementioned Dan Harmon tweeted about his mother and mentioned the blog post. She apparently sent it to him. Relatively near when it came out. Which is to say, right after he got fired.

He tweeted about this months after the fact, towards the end of 2012. Which happened to be right when my wife and I had decided to rewatch Community in its entirety and had fallen deeply in love with it. It went from a show that I felt had a first season that was good (but a warm up) to a classic second season to a complete disaster of a third to a show that I adored from the get go. While the third season still felt at times uneven, (a) it wasn't to the extent that I thought it was and (b) I didn't mind, because I was getting so much pleasure from the good bits, that the dips didn't really register.

I was wrong, in other words. I was very, very wrong about the show in a very public way. (Seriously, in like 2 hours that post got more hits than anything else I've written including my review of Turn  Off The Dark). And looking back at that post, I wrote about it ways that feel almost deliberately hurtful to people who followed and loved Community, which was a weird thing to do, as I was one of them. 

Harmon himself tweeted that he felt like his show had gotten caught in an argument between a smart guy and God and, other than the smart part, I don't see a lot there i could disagree with. I tweeted an apology to him and said I wanted to write about the show again when I finished rewatching it. Which, I suppose, I am doing now. 

I think about that moment a lot. 

I thought about it when I finally watched the first season of Girls a few months back. I was glad I waited until the hullabaloo around season one had died down, so I could actually watch it, which it seemed almost no one else was doing when it first aired. What I discovered was that (with the exception of race) there wasn't a single critique thrown at that show that the show hadn't already anticipated and dealt with within the show. Girls was, in other words, smarter than almost every single person who wrote about Girls. It just saved a lot of that critique for the second half of the season because it's a carefully constructed and well thought out work of art.

I think about that moment now with the new season of Arrested Development which has garnered the usual amounts of rage that you get when you are a beloved nerd property and don't give people exactly what they expected. I am only a few episodes in. I'm taking my time. The new season is so dense with plot and easter eggs and jokes, it has pushed things so very, very, far that I know it won't work if I marathon it. In fact, I'm not sure I'm willing to form a judgement of it unti I've seen it twice. But I can say this: I admire Mitch Hurwitz's ambition as a story-teller. He has done that thing that you can only really do when you have a dedicated audience, and that's take huge risks and expect people to go with you. It reminds me of Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City (a book that, like this new season of Arrested Development, needs to be experienced more than once) or Talking Heads' Fear of Music or Soderbergh's later work. He's trying to push himself and the show as far as it can go, and if the risk doesn't pay off, at least he took it.

I think about it too with Mad Men which started-- as many seasons of Mad Men do-- in a way that feels listless and difuse, only to coalesce halfway through the season. And how worried everyone-- including me-- seemed to be that the show would lose its way or bore us. And how, like with Mitch Hurwitz, I admired that Matthew Weiner was willing to risk being self-indulgent if it meant he could experiment with this world he's made. 

Honestly, this moment I'm in-- and I still feel in it-- this moment of not wanting to rush, of wanting to think things through, slow down a bit, feels antithetical to blogging.  It feels antithetical to the culture of the episode review, of the instant reaction, of the constant fandom fear that the work of art you love, that you are making yourself vulnerable to, will betray you and hurt you in some way. Writing a review of a show episode by episode (something I've done on this blog many times) makes about as much sense to me now as writing reviews of individual chapters in Don DeLillo's Underworld.  

This is not a retirement notice. I have every intent of writing more on this blog, more frequently (I hope) now that I have finished graduate school and moved back to New York. I am reviewing two movies next week for Hooded Utilitarian. Yet at the same time, I feel that I've grown into a place that feels out of step with a piece of our culture, and I'm not sure yet how to resolve it. One of the weird things about blogs is that they take these thoughts off the top of our heads and freeze them amber. Of the other weird things is that we can always post the next day, "meh, I changed my mind." Perhaps the weirdest thing is how infrequently we do that. 

UPDATE: Noah Berlatsky, my editor over at Hooded Utilitarian, responds with some helpful advice here. 

Assumptions Shape The Narrative

By Isaac Butler

Sorry to break my long blog silence with something a bit grouchy-- especially since, well, it's my birthday-- but this morning I was listening to NPR's Weekend Edition, and they were talking about the recent news that Apple is declaring the original iPhone obsolete. It has been on the market for just six years. They will no longer provide customer support nor manufacture parts for it.

Scott Simon then said in passing, "in just six years the iPhone has gone from cutting edge to antique. That's just the pace of progress these days," before moving on to talk about whether such fast-paced obsolecense discourages us from taking "the long view."

That's an interesting question, I suppose, but  before we can even examine it, we should look at the assumptions in the above quote.  That's just the pace of progress these days makes it seem like Apple and its consumers are simply the victims of The Way The World Works. Progress here is simply a force, like gravity. 

In reality, Apple is a pioneer in forced obsolecense, in creating a world in which "progress" means new big products announced annually, many of which are actually just old the old products with just enough tweaks to require new kinds of cables or other accessories. Creating this new, hyperspeed definition of progress has helped Apple become the most profitable company in the United States. 

Apple's definition of progress has, additionally, had enormous human and environmental costs.  It has also had some benefits, but since those are more widely discussed, I don't feel the need to go into them right now.

All of this was a deliberate strategy, a series of choices made by a group of people as a way of maximizing revenue. And it worked. It's worked for long enough, and worked well enough, that it's easy to assume that that's just the way progress is these days, but that's an assumption. An assumption that ends up shaping the story (in this case by deciding it isn't one) right out of the gate.

We Have Moved Beyond Parody

By Isaac Butler

First it was discovered and announced yesterday that austerity economics is based on an excel spredsheeting error and now Brooks Brothers is introducing a Great Gatsby collection.

I pity satirists. 

More Intellectual Property Insanity, Scholastic Edition

By Isaac Butler

A county in Maryland wants to copyright all of its students' homework. 

Three Thoughts on Jonah Lehrer Apologizing

By Isaac Butler

(1) We should all be so lucky as to get paid $20K to apologize.

(2) Apparently, once you are in certain elite circles, you literally cannot fail. It's remarkable, really.

(3) Quick quiz: What of Jonah Lehrer's crimes against journalism wouldnt' be permitted if John D'Agata got his way? 

Art and Violence and Health Care and Misdirection

By Isaac Butler

It's ridiculous for we artists (and culture makers) to claim that art has real power when we want grant money and then turn around and say it's essentially powerless and has no effect on people whatsoever and is just stories and pretty pictures and kickin' tunes whenever someone gets mad at us about what we create.  I'm not saying there's a causal relationship between, say, Grand Theft Auto and Sandy Hook, or The Matrix and Columbine--although I can remember seeing the Matrix twice in theaters, once before Columbine and once after, the former with my girlfriend and the latter with my Dad, and finding it much more disturbing time #2 (it's also worth noting that Morpheus's postitioning in the Matrix re: the taking of innocent life is identical to Osama Bin Laden's)-- but it is worth noting at some point that a great number of narratives produced in this country for mass consumption position violence as either (a) redemptive, (b) a path to mastery of some kind or (c) both.

And at some point, we should really talk about that. And those of us who create narratives that include violence within them should think about it. 

Similarly, at some point, we should really have a conversation about access to mental health services in this country.

All of that said as a long  clearing of the throat, I'm with Kevin Drum on this one:

I know that lots of well-meaning people think that movies and videogames really are problematic, and that access to mental health in America is a scandal. And that might well be true. But every minute you spend talking about this stuff is a minute spent doing exactly what the NRA wants you to do. If you want to have any chance at all of passing gun legislation, that's what you should be talking about. Guns. End of story. The other stuff can wait.

 

Link Grabbag

By Isaac Butler

Hey Parabasites... I've been very ill with a stomach bug, holidaying and grading my ever-loving ass off lately, and am seriously backed up on work, so I apologize for the light state of posting around here.  In the meantime, I am going to try to regularly post links to some of the stuff I discover while researching procrastinating.  Enjoy!

Theater: Over at The Taylor Trash, we have some handy words of advice for the young, aspiring theater critic. Meanwhile, Alison Croggon, one of theater blogging's OG's is hanging up her spurs. There's so few of us left now! Meanwhile, Bitter Lemons writes about a recent article in the LA Times about the recent(ish) trend for shorter plays and concludes that plays must be getting shorter because kids these days can't write and audiences are now stupider than they used to be. Comments section fury ensues.

Literature: Roxane Gay has some unkind (and well deserved) words for Simon & Schuster's new selfpublishing venture.

Grant Morrison pens an epic--and it really is epic-- smackdown of Alan Moore over at Comicsbeat.  Morrison seems clearly in the right vis-a-vis both their decades long animosity for one another and the larger philosophical questions of influence, pastiche and originality. Alan Moore's schtick has long been to create work that openly builds on and gleefully steals from previous creators and then claim that he is a sui generis genius and everyone else is ripping him off. If one applied Moore's own standards for what "original" is to Moore's work, you'd have to argue that great amounts of it is deeply unoriginal, including Watchmen, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Lost Girls and Swamp Thing. That said, Morrison goes into such picayune detail about each slight that I'll applaud you if you can get through the whole thing in one sitting.

Charles Simic is now a blogger? Yes. And he's awesome. 

UNCATEGORIZABLE: Glenn Beck is hawking a toy Obama submerged in a jar of his (Beck's) urine. I'm more surprised by the fact that he's heard of "Piss Christ." McSweeney's brings us "Artisanal Baby Naming." 

 

Misreading Jonathan Lethem

By Isaac Butler

Mike Daisey brings to our attention this essay in the American Scholar trying to codify a kind of work that author William Deresiewicz calls "Upper Middle Brow":

 now I wonder if there’s also something new. Not middlebrow, not highbrow (we still don’t have an avant-garde to speak of), but halfway in between. Call it upper middle brow. The new form is infinitely subtler than Midcult. It is post- rather than pre-ironic, its sentimentality hidden by a veil of cool. It is edgy, clever, knowing, stylish, and formally inventive. It is Jonathan Lethem, Wes Anderson,Lost in Translation, Girls, Stewart/Colbert, The New Yorker, This American Lifeand the whole empire of quirk, and the films that should have won the Oscars (the films you’re not sure whether to call films or movies).

The upper middle brow possesses excellence, intelligence, and integrity. It is genuinely good work (as well as being most of what I read or look at myself). The problem is it always lets us off the hook. Like Midcult, it is ultimately designed to flatter its audience, approving our feelings and reinforcing our prejudices. It stays within the bounds of what we already believe, affirms the enlightened opinions we absorb every day in the quality media, the educated bromides we trade on Facebook. It doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know, doesn’t seek to disturb—the definition of a true avant-garde—our fundamental view of ourselves, or society, or the world. (Think, by contrast, of some truly disruptive works: The Wire, Blood Meridian, almost anything by J. M. Coetzee.)

Any garden-variety SAT crammer can tell you that any statement that contains "always" or "never" is likely false, and in this case, Deresiewicz makes a big mistake in lumping in Jonathan Lethem as someone who writes books that always let the audience off the hook. In fact, I'd argue that with few exceptions, Lethem's books end on profoundly disturbing, disruptive notes.

His work is deceptive, however, becuase it is actively fun to read. He's an exuberant, clever, perceptive, hip, maximalist writer.  But comparing him to other exuberant, clever, perceptive, hip, maximalist writers is actually helpful here. Lethem's books don't work like Michael Chabon's books, for example, which nearly always end on notes of redemption for their protagonists and come down firmly on the side of celebrating life.

Lethem is very, very good at subtly getting the guests in his books.   Whether it's taking his very High Fidelity protagonist in As She Climbed Across The Table and pushing him into Highsmithian obsession and self-destruciton or having Dylan Ebdus grow up to be a pathetic, self-involved jerk so haunted by the unhealable traumas of childhood that he is unable to see the world in front of him in Fortress of Solitude, Lethem's characters, the sites he creates for readerly empathy and identification, almost always end up in a bad state because of the very things that cause us to identify and empathize with them in the first place.  Even You Don't Love Me Yet, the most comedic of Lethem's novels, ends on an odd note, with the gradual realization that the protagonist of the novel is probably an alcoholic, little growth on anyone's part, and the reader realizing the novel's central relationship is likely doomed to failure. 

The book where this is the most overt is actually Chronic City, which I've written about here and here, and where the protagonist, a man named Insteadman, willfully chooses ignorance, a kind of tending of his own garden, rather than confront the difficult, shifting, self-contradicting truths he's brushed up against over the last four hundred pages. I don't think it's coincidental that Chronic City also proved the most critically controversial of his work. 

Part of the challenge with Lethem-- if you can call it that-- is that his style of writing often defaults to comedic gestures, Fortress of Solitude excepted. But we shouldn't mistake comedy with a lack of seriousness, or laughter with letting us off the hook. I think that's where Deresiewicz goes astray above. All three of his examples of "truly disruptive" work are dark and work through the mechanisms of tragedy. But tragedy is not necessarily more serious (or more accurate, or more disruptive) than comedy. 

Yet Even More Intellectual Property Insanity...

by Isaac Butler

 

Um... cake edition?  For reals?

Our Mythology Under Lock and Key

By Isaac Butler

I'm guessing 0% of the readers of Parabasis failed to notice that Disney has aquired Lucasfilm to the tune of $4.05 billion dollars (or roughly 63 Spider-Men).  Much attention has focused on the Mouse's decision to churn out a new Star Wars movie every few years, with people worried, after the prequels, about what little legacy of quality that franchise has left. 

I'm a little less concerned about that.  What I am concerned about is Disney's ongoing intellectual property aquisition strategy. 

Disney owns Pixar, Marvel Comics and Lucasfilm. This means they own Buzz and Woody, Indiana Jones, Luke and Leah and Han (who shot first, damnit). They own Captain America and the X-Men. They own Luke Cage and Iron Fist. They own Daredevil. They own Jareth. They own the gang from American Graffiti. They own the Brownies from Willow. On top of this, they continue to own the properties they've created as well.  Mickey and Minnie. Belle. Ariel. Ursula. 

Disney is also one of the prime movers behnd the Copyright Extension Act of 1998.  In fact, their lobbying efforts in favor of the bill were so intense that it got nicknamed The Mickey Mouse Protection Act (poor Mickey was about to enter the public domain and who knows what the grubby plebes would've done with him!). As I wrote about over at Howlround, the copyright term extension act insures that no works have entered the public domain since, and none will enter until 2019.

Now, 2019 is only seven years away (I hear you exclaim).  I don't want to be hysterical here, but I seriously, seriously doubt Disney is going to roll over and let Mickey enter the public domain that easily.  I would guess that, in the lead-up to 2019, we'll be looking at a serious effort on the part of Disney and other Intellectual Property-based companies to continue extending the copyright term another twenty years or so.

What this means is that Disney is hoarding up the closest thing 20th and 21st century culture has to folk tales and mythology, and locking them up in a safe where we can't touch it without getting sued. As artists, we should be deeply troubled by this. And for those of you who think that things like Fair Use and Parody exemptions will protect, you're wrong. It's not like a lawsuit magically goes away because it's spurious. It costs money to fight these things, as David Adjmi recently found out .  As This American Life discussed in the software industry, overly expansive IP laws combined with powerful, litigious companies are a toxic combination that squeezes out creativity and limits the possibility of what we can achieve.

This is what you should be worried about. Not what Star Wars VII might look like, but what our work begins to look like when our shared mythology is off limits.

Here's the thing though: there is no way to solve this problem without giving something up.  And that something is the amount of time our own copyright over our own work lasts. Fair Use is an ad hoc system cobbled together by appellate judges. It's chaotic and contradictory and not a lasting solution.  Parody exemptions don't work when you have to bankrupt yourself to prove them. The only way this problem gets better is if we creative folk fight to lower the amount of time that copyright lasts to something more reasonable and more fitting with copyright's original stated mission of encouragin creativity and the useful arts. 

That means that we as writers need to get used to our work going into the public domain sooner.  Possibly within our lifetimes. I know that it feels like we're giving something up. But for most of us, we aren't. The current copyright system only really protects the very wealthy and the very well-known, those who can still make money off their work decades after it was made.  The number of Van Goghs in this world are few and far between. Just like with our tax system, I don't think we want to be supporting a regime that benefits the few and powerful simply because we hope to one day be one of them.

Today in shameless self-promotion...

Read my thoughts on seriality, addiction, and Victorian novels over at Points: the Blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society. This is the first of three posts--next week, I'll look at The Wire's relationship to 12-step recovery culture, and then in two weeks, I'll write about daytime soaps and the relationship between gender and addiction.

Also, check out their backlog! There's some really fantastic stuff there.

Declassified

by 99 Seats

I have been crazy-super-busy of late, but I did have time to see ARGO. Which is a pretty fine film, all told, despite the very bizarre choice of casting Ben Affleck as a man named Tony Mendez (it's funny watching the movie hold back his last name as long as it possibly can). Affleck is a confident, assured director, the movie looks good and the story is pretty compelling. It also fits in the sweet spot for "based on a true story" type deals: the story is new and unknown enough that the outcome is in doubt the whole time, even if you kind of know that it's not in doubt at all. The supporting cast, particular John Goodman, Alan Arkin and Scoot McNairy, is all grand. So...yay, good movie!

But, of course, during the movie, I couldn't get the other spectacle of the week out of my head: Mitt Romney's attempt to "gotcha" President Obama during the town hall debate over the administration's shifting rationales for the attack on the embassy in Benghazi. It was clearly one of the most compelling moments of the debate and, even the campaign. And, ahead of the "foreign policy" debate on Monday, it's looking to loom large in the rest of the campaign.

The moment was interesting not just for the failed gotcha, or the live fact-checking, but also because it offered a quick glimpse into the fevered world of the far right. Romney was caught completely flat-footed by the facts. He was totally convinced that President Obama hadn't used the phrase "act of terror." This is a shibboleth on the right, something that, over the last few months, has become an article of faith. Except for the fact that not only is not true, it's easy to show that it's objectively not true. And yet, conservatives believe it. In fact, it's so important to their beliefs that they're now engaged in semantic hair-splitting to back up their larger point: for some nefarious reason, the administration is invested in covering up the circumstances of the Benghazi's attack.

Josh Marshall and Talking Points Memo have done really great work following this line of thinking on the right. They also note that, in the WaPo, David Ignatius is reporting that the CIA supports the "smoking gun" of the Benghazi myth: Susan Rice's description of the attack as at least partially springing from protests over the much-reviled Innocence of Muslims video, hastily arranged and not professionally carried out. Of course, there remains an ongoing investigation, so it's likely more facts will come to light.

But, after seeing ARGO, I think there's a larger point about how government works, especially in regards to national security, to consider. Because this isn't the first time the charge of "shifting narratives" has come into play for the Obama administration: similar charges were made about the story of the assassination of Osama bin Laden. I think it's easy to lapse into cynicism and paranoia about all of this, especially after the Bush years and their vast politicization of the national security infrastructure (threat level Orange, anyone?), but, beyond that, there's the very real question of how much honesty does our government owe us, particularly about actions outside of our borders.

For those who don't know, Argo tells the story of the rescue of six US embassy workers and diplomats from Tehran after the fall of the Shah and the taking of the US embassy there, when 52 hostages were taken. The film does a great job of capturing the chaos and unpredictability of that time, both here in the US and in Iran. Revolutions are messy, sometimes scary things, as we all know, and the Iranian revolution was no different (for another great take on it, you simply must read/see Persepolis, if you haven't). At any time, the US diplomats in Tehran could be captured, killed, tortured. A CIA agent develops a just-crazy-enough-to-work plan to get the 6 diplomats, who are hiding in the residence of the Canadian ambassador, out: have them pretend to be a film crew, complete with a whole fake movie. The play is indeed just crazy enough to work and so it does...at great personal and professional risk for all of the CIA agents involved. And when it does work, their great job is celebrated in their office for a few seconds and then classified and buried. In the film, that indignity is compounded by the official cover story: that the Canadians (CANADIANS!) pulled it all off on their own. (In addition to the casting issue, there does seem to be some legit controversy about the portrayal of the Canadian ambassador who is mostly seen nobly cowering in fear.) It's grimly noted that, if the CIA had taken credit, the remaining hostages would have paid the price. So no credit was given, an award was given in a secret, private ceremony and then immediately taken back and not conferred until the '90s. There's a great, stiff-upper-lip, all-for-country feel to the latter part of the movie. They don't do it for the glory, these CIA agents.

I'm kidding a bit, but it does raise the obvious question about current events: is it really so implausible that the CIA (and the FBI, which is investigating the Benghazi attack) would want a false story about our working theory of the attack to be the "official" word? Let's say you're the person who pulled off a successful, well-planned and coordinated attack and you hear that we're looking at a disorganized spontaneous attack. Maybe you'd lower your guard a little bit and not expect to get caught. I mean, I just watch a whole lot of cop shows and this is a pretty common ploy. Let's remember that this is still the investigation of a crime.

But there is also the larger picture. A lot of the current dissatisifaction with the administration from the left comes in the realm of "national security," how wars are prosecuted and how the government decribes it. I'm not arguing that the government has complete latitude to tell its people untruths (again, see the Bush years for the worst of that), but...isn't there some room for, well, less than truthiness, in service of larger goals, that may not be obvious to us here? I can see how attractive the charges of "liar" are, especially to the GOP, whose standard bearer has, shall we say, a bit of a problem with that. But I can also see how compelling the desire to "get to the bottom" of things is. It's just not always appropriate. Argo hasn't really entered the political conversation (and it shouldn't...it's a pretty apolitical movie), but it does reflect our time. Carter lost the 1980, in no small part, because of his perceived weakness on the Iran hostage crisis. Having the Canadians take credit for a major coup must have added fuel to the fire, but still, they took the hit. I'm glad that the Obama administration is standing up with some passion (I don't think he needed an anger translator for that section of the debate), but I'd also like them to articulate a little more clearly how it fits into his vision of how government works.

Let's Not Get Hysterical Here...

By Isaac Butler

BoingBoing points our attention today to leaked documents from AT&T that state that " if a customer is flagged 4-5 times for copyright infringement, AT&T, Comcast, Cablevision, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon will block access to unspecified "popular sites" until the customer completes an 'online education tutorial on copyright.'" 

That seems like a pretty shitty way to treat your customers, AT&T!  But BoingBoing decides to get a case of the vapors over this, calling the practice "send[ing] you to Copyright Reeducation Gulag," and quoting their tipster "David" as calling it "Soviet...  continuous surveillance that judges you via a faceless bureaucracy without appeal, and punishes you by blocking access to information until you come back from re-education camp. "

Guys. Chiill out.  I'm all in favor of loosening and adjusting copyright laws to encourage creativity and, you know, recognize fucking reality, but let's not get hysterical here. Your being asked to wade through some bureaucratic bullshit and fill out a few forms because you tried to watch Downton Abbey six months early is more akin to AT&T forcing you to go to the copyright DMV.  It's a minor hassle and inconvenience. The gulag on the other hand...

Art and 9/11

By Isaac Butler

As it is 9/11, I thought I'd point you to this essay I published last year about Laurie Anderson's "O Superman," and September 11th. I touch on a point briefly in there that still bugs me which is, essentially, the failure of art to directly essay the event.  There are works of art, even quite good ones, where 9/11 is a presense (And Then We Came To The End for example) but I'm having trouble thinking of a single work of art other than John Adams On The Transmigration of Souls that actually suceeds even on a craft level.

Is it that art about 9.11 is impossible? And if so, why?

Laura Miller at Salon took a stab at this question last year, and says that the deeper problem is that 9/11 is essentially meaningless:

I realize that sounds inflammatory, but hear me out. The terrorist assault on New York and Washington, D.C., was historically momentous. Two thousand, nine hundred and ninety-six human beings died, most of them leaving behind devastated loved ones. Those deaths became the pretext for two wars, a major curtailment of civil liberties in Americaand human rights abroad, an orgy of patriotic chest-thumping and genuine soul-searching, the expansion of a largely unaccountable intelligence and security apparatus, the demonization of billions of peaceable Muslims by opportunistic demagogues, and so on and so on. Don’t even get me started on the economy. But all of these things constitute our response to those 3,000 murders and the hideously spectacular way in which they were achieved. They don’t change the nature of the deaths themselves, which were abrupt and unanticipated, as is the case with most disasters.

I think she's on to something. 

I find it almost impossible to write about 9/11.  The Laurie Anderson piece linked to above is one attempt. My other was here on this blog two years ago, where I talk about walking down Broadway towards the World Trade Center site the day after they reopened the zone to the public. 

The relentless desire to turn 9/11 and the deaths that occured that day, the horrorshow that gripped my city for what felt like months, into a symbol is distasteful. It isn't a symbol. It's a thing that happened. Real people died. Real lives were destroyed. Real people rushed in to help and still can't get compensated for their lasting health problems. And in the face of how we behaved as a nation in the wake of 9/11, the way that 9/11 hysteria still grips us (see: Mosque, Ground Zero), the smugness and self-satisfied tributes to our own nobility in the face of the disaster gall me. I am sorry, I truly am, for those who lost loved ones on that day.  Despite being in New York City then, I cannot begin to fathom what that was like and I hope the last eleven years have brought them some modicum of piece and healing.

So let me instead leave you with this.  It was an odd happenstance that Slate was hosting a week-long dialogue between John Lahr and August Wilson when 9/11 happened. It was by far the largest platform theater people had to address what was happening in our culture. I try to reread it every other year.  You can find it here. Here's August Wilson, sounding a moment of hope amidst the despair:

 America has always responded with great courage in the face of adversity. Whether we acquire a new sense of morality to guide our technology, whether we shoulder the grave responsibility to the annals of truth and the rigorous vigilance it demands, whether we achieve the cultural or spiritual maturity necessary to turn this evil and despicable act into a force for good, I don't know. I know that fate has decreed this defining moment to be in our hands and what we make of it will emerge in a baptismal spray that names and defines the kind of world my four-year-old daughter, given her three-score-and-ten, will live in for the next 66 years. Freedom from political tyranny and religious oppression are among the great gifts this country gives to all its citizens. If we add to that our pioneering, trailblazing spirit, that aspect of the American character that forges the new, if we don't squander our inheritance, that faith in man's ability to render out of his experience an indelible purpose blazoned with the high ideals of human conduct, then I think we can conquer any thing, person, or idea that would deny us the highest possibility of human life.

I hope this day is peaceful for you. 

Dangerous Myths

By Isaac Butler

Roughly a week ago while I was on the road, the wonderful playwright Mac Rogers and excellent critic Jason Zinoman (both friends of mine, duh) got into a discussion about how poisonous the myth of the individual artist is.

They didn't put it that way, of course. Instead, in response to talking about the "We Built This" GOP meme, Mac wrote "As a playwright, I feel automatically threatened at the idea that my scripts are collaborative achievements. My director Jordana basically deserves a co-credit on BLAST RADIUS, but I didn't offer her one.The need to believe that my scripts issue forth exclusively from my visionary brain is hugely untrue, and hard to let go of. This is my playwright's version of a widespread American feeling: 'There has to be SOMETHING that only *I* did, or who am I?'"

Jason chimed in to say that journalists (who of course work with editors) feel it too. And then mac hit on something really perceptive: That scarcity has something to do with this. When there are a huge number of people vyeing for the few slots availalbe in an industry, you want to be essential. You want to be the only one that does what you do, and the only one who needs to be relied upon to do it.

I really do feel that the myth of the individual artist is seriously damaging to our creative capacity and our humanity. People deny the influences that helped birth them, screw over their collaborators, and tell obviously BS stories to create a myth about themselves.  And one of the reasons why people do this is that we want to believe that the individual is the core unit of creating art.  But even in art with only one person's name on it, that's simply untrue.

I am writing a book right now. Should I be fortunate to have it published, it will say "By Isaac Butler" on it somewhere. But the list of voices that make up my voice in that book would go on and on. It would have to include at least twenty authors whose work was important to the book's creation. The interviewees who participated in the book. The circle of readers I get feedback from. And to some extent, the reader, as the work of art is actually created in their minds as they read it.

And yet, the idea that an individual artist-- and only an individual artist-- created this is still there. I feel that this is intertwined with another dangerous idea, the idea that artistic innovation is the highest thing a work of art can aspire to, the top goal, and if you aren't reaching that, you're just a hack.

I suppose on some level what i'm saying is that there are certain modernist conceptions of what an artist is that we still labor under and that I believe those conceptions to be both ahistorical and wrong. Or at least dated.  Arists do not, as a rule, stand outside society, critiquing it and sanctifying it simultaneously with their creations. The audience is important to a work of art.  Innovation isn't everything, Groups matter. Substance abuse rarely leads to good writing. Etc.

What are some dangerous myths about art-making for you? What are the myths you confront that get in the way of our own ability to get work done?

 

If It Bends...

by 99 Seats

While I'm not wading into the very worthy conversation about the validity of comedy or tragedy, one thing that comes up often is why is there so little conversative comedy. The realm of satire seems to belong entirely to the progressives and the left side of the ledger. Last week, we had a pretty good example of this, and, I think, an object lesson on where conservatism loses its comedy mojo. Via Yahoo! News:

Two spoof Twitter accounts for President Barack Obama emerged from speeches at the Republican convention last week. The first, @FadedObama, was inspired by this line from Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan: "College graduates should not have to live out their 20s in their childhood bedrooms, staring up at fading Obama posters and wondering when they can move out and get going with life." As of Tuesday afternoon, it had been mentioned on Twitter 182 times and attracted 194 followers.

The second, @InvisibleObama, sprang (of course) from Clint Eastwood's interview with an absent Obama Thursday evening. That account has 66,797 mentions and 68,193 followers.

(Emphasis mine.)

The Yahoo! article says that the difference between the two was timing; the @FadedObama went up 13 minutes after Paul Ryan's speech while @InvisibleObama went up within seconds. Yeah, that may account for it. There's also a part of it about narratives: after Paul Ryan's speech, most of the conversation focused (rightly, I would add) around the many, many falsehoods and misrepresentations in his speech, not one small, throwaway metaphor, while after Clint's performance, well, the chair was the whole game, wasn't it? It was the key part of the event. But there's another part of this.

@InvisibleObama is funny. @FadedObama isn't.

I say this not as a progressive. I say this as a kinda-sorta funny person. I don't think there's any argument on this. Here's a typical @FadedObama post:

You know I'm going to fade. My hair literally faded during my first term

— Faded Obama Poster (@FadedObama) August 30, 2012

And here's an @InvisibleObama post:

On this Labor Day, take a moment to remember that today is the last day it's appropriate to wear invisible seersucker anything.

— Invisible Obama (@InvisibleObama) September 3, 2012

Actually, that wasn't fair. That was one of the funnier @FadedObama posts. I put my finger on the scale and it's still lost (sort of like arguing with an empty chair and losing, but I digress).

The @FadedObama Twitter feed is nothing but recycled Obama jokes and jabs: birther stuff, media star stuff, food stamp jokes, a Nancy Pelosi joke. Stuff that really only appeals to conservatives and re-inforces the conservative world view. And pretty much just stated outright. It's a collection of talk radio lines.

The @InvisibleObama feed? Yep, partisan jabs. But also a personality. And a personality that fits Twitter. The voice of @InvisibleObama is similar to the other Twitter faves, like @SarcasticRover: snarky, spiky and, well, sarcastic. But it's also a lot of regular comedy about being invisible.

Conservative comedy tends to be much more like @FadedObama: jokes that make conservatives laugh. Good satire, though, like good comedy, has further reach, builds better gags. Conservatives would do well to put comedy above party.

Intellectual Property Insanity, Hugo Awards Edition

By Isaac Butler

Copyright enforcement robots cut off the Hugo Awards livestream because it showed brief clips from television shows it had the right to broadcast. 

The Life of the Party

by 99 Seats

So, yeah, that happened. And yeah, we all watched it. Except for the folks who watched the US Open. And it was as bizarre, as unsettling, as disturbing as everyone said.  When I watched, I was confused, certainly. And then I got the gag and it was...lame, yes. Occasionally funny-adjacent, with built-in laugh and applause lines. But mostly, I was confused. And I still am. I'll get to that in a second. It did, though, show the exact problems with the modern Republican Party and modern conservativism that I was talking about.

Most of the post-show talk has hovered, probably rightly, around Mitt, his reaction and the decision process that ended with Clint Eastwood on stage, doing improv with an empty chair for eight minutes. It does say a lot about Mitt, his speech, our politics and our media that we're all talking about the appetizer and not the main course. But that's not what I'm wondering about, nearly 24 hours later. Here's my question: Why did Clint Eastwood do this?

Let me be clear: I'm a fan of Clint Eastwood, as an actor and a writer/director. I get the complaints that people have about his recent work, but I still like him. I'm under no illusions about his politics, though and never have been. I thought I knew his politics pretty well, in a basic way: he's a moderate Republican in the classic modern mold. Pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, pro-women's issues (relatively), environmentally conscious. And the record bears that out. He identified more as a "libertarian." Which is how most of my right-leaning friends identify and often with the same basic profile: to the left on "social" issues, big on a lack of government influence in their lives, hawkish on war. He's eschews labels and such, has endorsed Dems and Republicans, votes the person, not the party. And yet...he endorsed both McCain and Romney and, at the very least, agreed to introduce the guy who was going to introduce Mitt Romney at the RNC in a significant primetime slot. Why would he do that? I'm asking seriously. Mitt Romney is running as a pro-life, hard right on social issues, who is hawkish on war and "pro"-business. In terms of beliefs, there doesn't appear to be a lot of overlap there. What was Clint endorsing?

For the last few years, there have been near-constant conversations about the end of the moderate Republican, the person exactly like Clint Eastwood (and, frankly, like Mitt Romney of a decade ago). Giving a moderate a prime spot at the convention seems like the perfect time for a full-throated defense of moderate conservatism. Or at least to have a major American figure stand up and say, "I don't agree with Mitt on everything, but we share these values and that's important. This party can stand disagreement." That would have been an impressive thing that we'd all be talking about. Even if it wasn't about Mitt (pretty much like all of the other significant speeches), it would have been about something.

Instead, what did Clint say? A cheap joke about the "lefties" in Hollywood. An Oprah joke. A Biden joke. Jabs about Obama being a hypocrite, an attorney, his inauguration. A complaint about Obama not closing Gitmo. A complaint about trying terrorists in civilian courts, followed immediately by noting that Obama doesn't actually do that. A complaint about Obama both not bringing the troops home from Afghanistan AND about Obama setting a date for the troops to come home. He did also note that 23 million people are out of work. That was largely it. And the crowd ate it up. Seriously. I watched it and they all loved it, every second.

What does that say about what's important to the Republican Party. Not policies, reality, the problems facing the country. Jokes and jabs that get laughs and cheers. Substance-and logic-free attacks. And attacks that are mostly about things that are about how Republicans feel about things. Even if the bit had worked perfectly, cleanly and clearly, it doesn't seem like the substance would have changed.

I can hear the arguments winding up right now. "But...it's the convention! It's a big show! It doesn't mean anything!" Except...it does. Because the question still stands: why would Clint appear here? Why would he want to endorse someone who doesn't agree with a number of his beliefs? Why would he stand on a platform that calls for the outlaw of abortions, gay marriage and critical thinking? (No, really, the GOP platform speaks out against critical thinking.)

Parties are supposed to be about the things you believe, the way you want the world to be. Does Clint want to live in Mitt's world? Does Mitt want Clint to have a say in his? It doesn't seem like it.

But Mitt was glad to trot out a cardboard cut-out of a tough guy to make jokes and throw cheap shots and pretend that it's tough talk. And Clint was certainly happy to go along with it. I'm willing to bet that, for Clint, it had to do with the Super Bowl Chrysler commercial, which, in conservative circles, was seen as an endorsement of Obama. (Odd enough that we get the whiplash of Obama both being blamed for not keeping a factory open and for being blamed for saving Detroit in the first place, all by people who claim that the free market should have no interference from the government.) It doesn't strike me as impossible that Clint felt his brand was damaged by the Chrysler ad and wanted to make peace. Maybe not. Maybe he just wanted to do it.

Either way, given a national stage and audience, he opted for nastiness and cruelty, for an incoherent litany of things that largely add up to "We don't like you, President Obama." And his party loved it. Because, at the end of the day, modern Republicanism is defined by that: they don't like things. Period. They don't have solutions to problems, they don't have answers to questions. They're trading on dislike, disdain and anger. Lindsey Graham said as much. It's a party of pure id.

The other moment that should define the Republican Party was this:

That is the modern Republican Party. Doing something about global warming is a silly, silly notion that has nothing to do with helping your family. Which should come as a surprise to the good people of Louisiana. And Tampa.

Jamelle Bouie nailed the line of the night about Clint Eastwood: "This is a perfect representation of the campaign: an old white man arguing with an imaginary Barack Obama." I say take it one step further: Clint Eastwood's speech was the perfect representation of our politics. Tearing down someone who believes most of the things you believe in defense of someone who looks like you and makes you feel better about yourself. It's not a good place for us to be.

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.