Breaking the Law - now and then

Kelli and I watched this episode a couple of days ago, in honor of Farah Fawcett, and it is just great.  It is really trying to be so provocative, I think, and yet it is so kind of sweet and innocent. It has everything: The male prison guard who's sexually abusing the inmates - by leering; the Nurse Ratchet-like female guard who shows she's a scary dyke - by glaring; the horrible prison conditions, in which the poor inmates are forced to pick potatoes (I mean, potatoes? who thought that up?), and yet all the inmates are beautiful and clean and wake up in their bunks in full make-up with their hair all silky, blown, and feathered.  And last but not least there's the shocking discovery that the prison is really a prostitution ring, though the prostitution seems to mainly involve dressing up in nice evening wear and going to a neverending cocktail party.

There's something so sweet and charming about the whole thing.  It makes a fascinating comparison to The Wire, which Kelli and I finally started watching this week, too.  Times have changed...

Biz of the biz

I had a big day today.  First I had a bunch of largely productive callbacks for Midsummer.  

Then I went to my first real theater audition in more than five years.    It was an interesting experience. I think I did well.  I tried to prepare better than I did the last time I did this.   This comes from watching so many hundreds of auditions over the last 5 years.  I had never realized before what a difference it made when people weren't well prepared.  I mean, it didn't always make a huge difference to see somebody come off book, though you can't help but be appreciative of the effort. But it always made a difference in the level of detail they brought to the reading, and their ability to take take adjustments and actually do something with them.

So I tried to be really ready.  Even though it's been a while, I've been in this business long enough to know it's out of my hands now.  I enjoyed it, now it's over.  Of course, we'll see how it goes when I start doing these a lot more and start feeling the percentages again.

That's probably the toughest adjustment I have to make.  I've been pretty used to not having to audition for a really long time now, I'm afraid I'm spoiled.  I loved it, and kind of started thinking it was my right being where I was in my career.  So I have to keep reminding myself that Alvin Epstein is still auditioning for stuff at 85, and get off my freakin' high horse...

Anyway, very tired after the audition, which lasted over two hours (that would be a good sign, except it lasted that long for everybody), so now I'm chilling, cleaning up the kitchen and relaxing to my Boards of Canada station on finetune.com.

Wish we had a nice warm Multiverse

When I was younger, just out of college, full of promise, and really had never had anything bad happen to me,  I fantasized about the Multiverse.

I had always been a bit of a physics dilletante: I read all the popular books about physics and boasted to people that I had actually been able to put my mind around the duality inherent in relativity.   I remember becoming especially enamored by the Multiverse. 

This is a concept that is based in lots of unbelievably esoteric mathematics, but to my simplistic brain, it basically reduced itself to the idea that quantum mechanics doesn't allow for a precise description of where and what a particle is doing at any particular moment, but that there's a cloud of probability around each potential event.  The Multiverse theory says that maybe there's not really a cloud, but that each time the state of a particle can have several different outcomes, the universe splits into different alternate universes where each outcome exists in a separate universe - so an infinite number of universes exist where every single outcome of every single event is the reality of a particular universe.  So there is a universe where Gore won the election, etc.

I began to imagine, when I was 20 and everything in my life was so fucking good, that maybe the way the universe worked was that each individual soul in God's multiverse followed the best possible path - so that in my multiverse I would enjoy the best, most satisfying and enlightened life - for everybody else, maybe a terrible thing would happen to somebody - they would get killed in a car crash, get cancer, something like that, but in the universe where their basic consciousness actually resided they lived to a happy, maybe perfect and eternal life - so that all other beings in your awareness of the world were only shadows of their actual selves, and so the apparent suffering so present in the world was not really being suffered by the souls of the people, and were instead sort of object lessons to intensify your experience of the world.  In their actual universes, they were the ones who were enjoying health, success and happiness.

Wouldn't it be nice. Sadly, the events of the last year have led me to abandon this fantasy - or if its still true, I am a cipher in somebody else's universe... the number of bad things that have happened directly to me or to people really near me seems to make this vision of the multiverse just simply untrue. Now, I guess I still haven't been run over by a truck, or been given a death sentence, but things are rough enough that I can hardly pretend that life is a barrel of roses...

Gender Bias In Playwriting

I was driving home from a meeting with Spiro at the Lyric, trying to get something going for next year, when I heard this fascinating little piece on Talk of the Nation. 

There's also a NY Times article on it today.

This Economics PhD student, Emily Glassberg Sands, did a study on gender bias in the playwrighting business, and found, not too surprisingly, that there is some.  But some of the results were really interesting.  

When she sent sample scripts to Artistic Directors and Literary Managers, the same script, but half with a male nom de plume and half with a female one.  The same script scored higher, particularly on its likelihood for success, when they thought it was written by a man.  The funny thing, though, is that this bias was primarily manifested by the female ADs and Lit managers.

Another thing she found out was that respondents found the same female characters more sympathetic when they thought the play was written by a man.  What to make of that? 

I felt good karma, because I had just been pitching two plays I want to do to Spiro, and they're both by female playwrights.  Let's hope it comes around.

Once

We watched Once last night - it won the best song Oscar in 2008.  It's a sweet, sad, beautiful film that manages to be about reaching for your dreams and having unfulfilled desire at the same time.  I'd heard about its natural documentary-style simplicity and wanted to see it, and finally managed to.

Every time they started singing I got all weepy.  What I love about this film is the naive joy these people have in making art.  It's like breathing - there's a directness and total lack of ego in the way they play and sing, even in the way they act.  They are totally focussed on what they are making and you can see how it feeds them just to make it.  When you see artists making art for the simple love and need of making it, and not out of the needs of the self, it is so moving.

I miss that.

Mr. Elegant

For the next two weeks, I will be obsessed with this man:

Yes, Roger.  Wimbledon has begun.  And Mr. Federer has the chance for an unprecedented 15th major title.  

Until last year it was all about Justine.  I loved Justine Henin.  She was beautiful to watch, incredibly complicated and mysterious - totally my type.  Now she is retired and there's nobody on the women's side who comes close to grabbing my interest.  But Roger's pursuit of tennis history.  That is something I can get excited about.

More news

So the Mousavi claim seems to be false. Check out the Huffington Post. Excellent blog on what is going on. I keep thinking of '89 and Tianamen Square and thinking about how much the world has changed since then. We are actually helping by being able to connect with the people through the internet. It's freaking amazing.

Here's a compelling video and and great post from Huffington:

10:54 AM ET -- Rage against the machine. An Iranian-American writes: "In my spare time, I make short documentaries and music videos, and my 22 year old cousin in Iran asked that I make a video for him with his favorite song. I just spoke with him and he told me that his friends and him are watching it before they go out to protest. He was stepping out the door to protest when I spoke with him just a few minutes ago. A lot of Iranians from Iran rely on huffingtonpost.com for their information. If you could somehow post this on your website and get this out to the youth in Iran, it would mean a lot."

An eerie calm

This one's really beautiful, and so sad:

Rumors on Twitter the Mousavi has been arrested.

Guess i spoke too soon...

Went to the gym and stayed glued to the treadmill to watch intense images of demonstrations in the streets. Big crowds, not huge but that's mostly because the security forces appear to have cordoned off the places where people were supposed to demonstrate so they are having to improvise.

From #iranelection on twitter:

AllisterF RT @mashable: Shocked and moved by the YouTube videos coming out of the #iranelection crisis:http://bit.ly/vPDLoless than 10 seconds ago from TweetDeck

  

Sleepless

So I'm up at 6 again.  For some reason, no matter how tired the rest of me is, my brain seems to be crazy active at 6.  Usually I'm steaming about recent events and wondering what I'm going to do next.  This morning I've been thinking about this guy:
Things are not looking good.  Got the following tweets from #iranelections: 

1. 
   iranelectionsGC Update: Mousavi and Karroubi did not show up to today's session, GC to confirm election outcome very soon.about 1 hour ago from web
       
2. 
   iranelectionstoday's 4pm demo has been called off. Editor of Etemad Melli Qoochani has been arrested. Mousavi and Rafs to issues communiques soon.about 1 hour ago from web

Indications are that it's over.  I guess we'll know later in the day whether people come out any way for the demonstration.  What I keep thinking, and what keeps me from going back to sleep,is that in spite of all the comparisons to 1979, things are so fundamentally different.

Khamenei is not the Shah.  People may not love him or his politics, but as a theocrat he wields such tremendous moral authority in that society that it's hard to fight.  When the fight is about Ahmadinajad it's one thing, but when the Supreme Leader puts himself at the center of the conflict, essentially saying, "if you keep this going, you're not defying the president-elect, you're defying me", it's a whole different ballgame.  

Before this, it was all about an enthusiastic wave of reform sweeping through the country - kind of like what happened here in the last election, with people really responding to the "Change" message of Obama.  Now, it's much more stark choice: revolution; and it just doesn't sound like Iran is able to go there just yet.

I guess we'll know soon enough.

We're all in this together

My newest favorite site it TED - Technology, Entertainment, Design, and it is AWESOME.  My friend Marianna told me about it, and I guess a lot of people know about it already, but it was new to me and it's blowing my mind.  It's kind of like poptech in that has a bunch of videos of presentations by all sorts of exciting and interesting people, but they're really nicely done and the site is beautifully organized.

This is one of Clay Shirky is fantastic.  It's incredibly relevant, given the events in Iran, and really mind-blowing.  He's talking about the transformation of media from 20th century norms to what is happening now, and he does it ways that are cogent, surprising and totally paradigm shifting.  He flows from the 2008 election, to the 2007 elections in Nigeria to the Chinese earthquake, and lays out a clear explanation of the way that new media are both completely new, and completely here to stay.  It is well worth the 17 minutes it takes to watch.

On lighter note, check out this one.  It's a close magic master doing amazing and hilarious things with cards.  Watch him seem to drop, fumble and futz a big messy pile of playing cards and miraculous deal 5 winning poker hands from it.  If you don't have a lot of time, I recommend skipping to about minute 18, and watch him deal cards that disappear right before your eyes.  

So Say We All - Vote!

This came across my Facebook page from Mary McDonnell, and it brought back the memories. It's the Tubey Awards from Television Without Pity.  I pretty much just voted for BSG in every category it was nominated for, but for those of you who know a little more about TV shows than me, it might be more complex.  I miss you, Kara!

Close Your Eyes

My spring has been strange, and tonight was a very strange night indeed.  I participated in an event that left me trying to think where in dramatic literature, or any literature for that matter, there was a corollary experience.  A man pretends that everything is fine and good, and promises a bright future to somebody so that they too can feel that everything is fine and good. But it's not fine and good, and the person he's telling is actually the person who is punishing him, and is the one who made it not fine and good. But they don't see it that way, and the man is bound by honor and duty to smile and reassure and make everything okay, even though he's losing everything.

The only thing I could think of was the end of Season Two of Buffy, where Angel has temporarily lost his soul and is opening a portal that will suck all of this reality into the demon dimension and thus end the world, and he gets his soul restored at the last minute, but it's too late, and Buffy has to destroy him to save the planet.  It's not really an exact corollary, but it's a great scene, so here it is:

Ceratops.

Call me a neanderthal, but this movie looks really funny.  Really stupid, but in a good way.  Of course, you fear that they put all the funny bits in the trailer...

...and Away

We went to Pixar's UP today.  I read a review of it in the New Yorker  by David Denby that made me need to see it.  It is an absolutely gorgeous film:  full of wit, and an achingly bittersweet understanding of the sweet pain of lost youth and opportunity, and the need to let go and look forward.   It's also got a really fun sense of silliness:  the evil minions in the film are all dogs, and they have all of that species' sweet and eager single-mindedness.  I was telling my son Spencer that the main take-away from the movie was "don't use dogs as evil minions" - you can't trust them not to go for the ball.

My favorite moment though, which I wish I could get a still of, is when the old guy, beautifully voiced by Ed Asner, has decided to rescue the kid and and bird, and throws all his old furniture out so that his house can float again.  In the earlier part of the film, he had created a steering mechanism with his old victrola and a crank - now he's lost all this and he is steering his floating house with two ropes wrapped around his decrepit old body - it's positively heroic, and stunningly human and frail at the same time.

It's a great film - see it.

Jos ei viina, terva tai sauna auta, tauti on kuolemaksi.

I went to the gym today, after staying up waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too late last night, and after my workout, I was sitting in the sauna (not with these guys!) when I started thinking,  what am I actually doing here?  What IS this sauna thing?  What does it really, actually do?  I know it's supposed to make me sweat and relax, but does it actually have any therapeutic value?

So here's a few things I learned on wikipedia:

• Records and other historical evidence indicate that the Finns built the first wooden saunas in the 5th or 8th century. 

• It used to be a holy place, a place where women gave birth, and where the bodies of the dead were washed. 

• In Finland, the sauna was thought of as a healing refreshment. The old saying goes: "Jos ei viina, terva tai sauna auta, tauti on kuolemaksi." ("If booze, tar, or the sauna won't help, the illness is fatal.") 

• Therapeutic sauna is the use of sauna for health purposes. It requires cycles of both hot and cold, in a predetermined manner to bring about therapeutic change.

• Sauna has also been found to reduce levels of stress hormones adrenalin and noradrenalin and to increase levels of ACTH, cortisol and beta endorphin. Sauna has been found to increase the hormone testosterone in men. Sauna also found to reduce prostaglandin F2alpha and protect against oxidative stress. It enhances activation of monocytes to bacteria and endotoxins.

• Sweat tests have shown pharmaceutical drugs are eliminated in sweat.  Narcotics, alkaloids, and barbiturates are eliminated in sweat, and elimination increased with heat.

So there you have it.  I don't imagine that my sitting in the sauna for 10 minutes once or twice a week is really doing anything for me, but I can pretend it does...

Yes you CAN (comment)

I was wondering why nobody was commenting on my postings, when I figured out that you couldn't without signing up for something. So I changed that! Now you can get in on the action!

Catching Up with Culture

Kelli and I watched Waitress last night. It's one of the those movies we should have seen, but of course, we rarely get to see much of anything, so we're always a year or two behind the times. But if for some reason you have not yet seen this film, go out and get it right now. It's just lovely. It's sweet but unsentimental, with a profound directness and simplicity that makes it much bigger than it's modesty would lead you to expect.

Keri Russell is really good, and I have enjoyed Nathan Fillion since he played the super-evil preacher in Buffy, all the way through Firefly. And Andy Griffith! And it's insight into the confused mess that is the human heart, into the indecipherable complexities of unwanted pregnancy and unwise but undeniable attraction are achingly real. And then, when you add to it that Adrienne Shelly, the writer, director, and one of the stars was murdered before the movie was completed, and you see her actual daughter walking down the road in the final shot, it just completely takes you apart.

Here's a link to Adrienne Shelly's Foundation.

Fearless.

So I decided recently that I hated all my music. Too many songs I couldn't get anything more out of, too many songs that reminded me of things that made me sad.

Then I discovered Pandora. I love Pandora. No more playing my old dull music. Just put in the name of a band that I kind of like and I get a whole radio station.

When I was driving back from Baltimore, all full of ideas and excitement, I started listening to my Radiohead station on Pandora. It was great! My mind was buzzing and the miles were flying by - Radiohead, Beck, The White Stripes, The Beatles, Muse...and this song.

I love this song. It exactly fits my mood right now - pretty peaceful, with a quite hum of new inspiration. I realized that I hadn't listened to Pink Floyd since I was a kid - like a 10 year old kid. Hard to believe. But my musical knowledge is like that - tragically spotty at best. So I just went to iTunes, bought the album, and I'm in the groove...

USO-Nellie!

Stephen Colbert has become famous for saying uncomfortable things in uncomfortable situations. He does it again here with a nice "Formidable Opponent" on his Middle Eastern USO swing on the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy. The Huffington Post quibbles that he has used much harsher rhetoric on the topic in the past, but I think he strikes just the right balance and very elegantly unravels the absurdity of the policy and its complete lack of a meaningful rationale.

On the minus side, the Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to the policy this week.  The Obama administration is having a hard time getting a move on with this one, and this doesn't help. 

Anyhow, pretty funny that George H.W. Bush introduces the segment!  Guess he doesn't mind how many times his son got skewered on the Colbert rapier.

Nice Haircut, Stevie!

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Formidable Opponent - Don't Ask, Don't Tell
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Stephen Colbert in Iraq

The Times they are a Changin' - Globe votes No

I don't know what to make of this. On the one hand, I support unions and the rights of workers to protect themselves from the draconian measures of businesses in service of the allmighty buck. On the other hand, this seems like such a desperate time, and the possibility that The Globe could disappear and leave us with nothing but The Herald is bad, bad news for Boston. Obviously, the paper, and all papers, have to totally rethink their model in the face of global change (pardon the pun) - but you actually have to be a living, viable entity before you can rethink your position.

I don't want to speak for the members of the Guild; I don't understand all the ins and outs of the decision, but on the face of it, 10% cuts seem better than 23% cuts and a dispute that could close the paper forever.

Here's the full article:

Globe union votes no - The Boston Globe

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The Future has been here for a while

So at the TCG conference the last day they had a speaker named Andrew Zolli.  He is  "a foresight and global trends consultant who analyzes critical trends at the intersection of culture, technology, and global society". 

He was really inspiring - gave one of those speeches where it's hard to describe what he actually talked about, but it fundamentally re-aligns something in your brain so that you see the world in a new way.  He talked about how and why you can't really know the future, because we aren't wired to be able to really focus on the slow moving issues that will fundamentally change our world, like climate change, but are drawn to less profound but more accessible imperatives, especially those with human faces, like catching Osama bin Laden.  He talked about how the shifting demographics of our country and our planet will create a world that is, in fact, more like the pre-industrial world in all sorts of significant ways; and that these changes create marvelous opportunities for the arts in the next 50 years.

Zolli is curator of a futurist organization called Poptech.  They have a cool website, which you can check out here.  There's a bunch of videos from all kinds of forward thinking people giving presentations.  They are a little long, 20-30 minutes, but well worth the time.  

Here is one I really like:  It's Elizabeth Streb, who is a choreographer, but she calls herself and "Action Inventor" - she pushes the possibilities of human movement to the limits.  Check out this video.  Watch the whole thing, if you can.  It's worth it.  But if you can't, go to 8:30 remaining to see the piece "Ricochet" where the dancers hurl themselves up against a piece of plexi like crazed acrobatic insects, and to 6:40 remaining in the movie to see the thing with the dancers and the swinging cement blocks.  It's really crazy great.

@ Yahoo! Video

He Did It

I am a huge fan of Roger Federer, and he's been so close to achieving everything for four years now.  And it's amazing how much you WANT him to achieve everything - he's such an artistic, beautiful player, and such a generous man.  It's rare and great for a good guy to finish first. People had just started to write him off, and now, he's back!  This victory means he's tied Pete for 14 major titles, has a career grand slam, and quite possibly is the greatest tennis player ever.  

One of the things I love about Roger is his ability to talk about his greatness in a way that recognizes his extraordinary gifts and his extraordinary efforts to reach the top, but still manages to be both honest and essentially humble.  It's a rare feat.

The overwhelming release of emotion as he won, and all that weight of the last 4 years was lifted from him, is something to watch.  I wish I could find a clip of him as they played the Swiss national anthem, and a simple tear slips from his eyes.  Feels good

I just got back from the TCG Conference in Baltimore.  As most people know by now, I am going through another big redirection in my career right now.  At first I wasn’t even sure if I should go to the conference at all.  Most of it is taken up with discussions of budgets, and audience development, and how we can get the young people’s butts into our seats.  Since I will no longer be asked to weigh in any of those things at ASP, I wasn’t sure what I would be doing there, and I was afraid I’d just wander around being really bummed out.  But Kelli, smart girl, convinced me that I would get to see people I really liked, and maybe get jazzed again about the possibilities of the theatre.  Boy was she right.

Most of the actual events at the conference were not really useful to me, but I saw some really dear people - Rick and Harriet and Bridget and my TCG buddy and new great friend Rachel May.  And the last day finished off with a wonderful conversation between Anne Bogart and Bill T. Jones, two of the biggest movers and shakers in the performing arts in the last 30 years.  Anne has the series “Conversations with Anne”, that she is now putting into a book, which you should all check out.  And this was one more of these.  There was a multitude of cools things in what they talked about - ever scientific, Anne was trying to pin down Bill T. Jones on the “rules” of postmodern dance; he was struggling with maintaining his outsider’s voice in the face of the rigid demands of Broadway; he even got her up out of her chair and gave her a quick introduction to basic contact improv.  Anne Bogart!  of all people!

But, for me, the most meaningful part of the conversation was when Bill T. Jones was talking about his childhood, and his introduction to the idea of performance. On Christmas morning, his mother would gather his very large family - 10 or 11 kids - under the tree, but would not let any of them open the presents.  Then she would start to pray, and she would pray for all of them; and for all their family and friends; and for the president; and the governor; and on and on until she became “happy” - full of the spirit and wild with the spirit.  And she would pray that the Lord would fill her until her face became a mirror and her soul...  And then she would fall down exhausted, and there would be a silence, and then she would say, “now, open your presents.”  

This was such a beautiful example of the juxtaposition of the sacred and mundane, and it filled me with spirit, too.  And I was so struck by this phrase, “until her face became a mirror” - it is the state we who would be artists aspire to, and I was so inspired by this story.  So I decided to take it as the name of my blog.