Role Playing Games

Of all the strange things! I end up watching Fellini's 8 1/2 right after watching the Social Network and then end up listening to some talk on NPR about that suicide from Rutgers. Not so strange? Lots of you were doing the same thing? The only strange thing is that I will weave a thread among goings-on so utterly disparate that they shouldn't have threads woven through them. Well, that's what I do. I have a track record to keep up.

So here's what's bugging me. The assumption during the discussion on NPR is that this guy is "gay." Apparently, it would be entirely wrong to suppose that maybe he doesn't see himself as gay, and that's the problem. As painful as it must be to be gay in "our society," I'm pretty sure that lots of people have sex with all sorts of genders and still fall short of self-classification in one category or another. Lots of people want to project roles which, if the truth were told, don't entirely become them.

And then the "Obama Administration" gets tagged with pushing for enhanced wiretapping powers and I get this powerful feeling of cognitive dissonance, like what? Hunh? Isn't that more characteristic of the Bush Administration? Isn't Obama the friend of civil liberties? It reminds me of an other thing the "Obama Administration" tried to pull off maybe a year ago, about executive privilege or state secrets or something like that. I wish my memory were any good.

I remember talking myself down then, that he (whoops, I said "he" and I really meant the "Obama Administration") was trying to bring something into the light of day; to engender debate about something which was being kept in the dark, purposefully, so that it could be exploited under the radar. Maybe it was a posture? Maybe it was a careful and clever political move; announce yourself on the side of your adversaries just to stimulate the right kind of above-board debate.

I'm sure the old wire-tapping law needs updating. But the way the debate was being framed made it sound as though they wanted to enshrine in principle the idea that no kind of information technology should be developed which it would be impossible for the government to pry into. Hunh??

Just because it was fairly trivial to tap into a circuit-based phone conversation doesn't mean that the government has some sort of fundamental right to keep that avenue open. What went from aligator clips on the very circuit which carried your voice, had to be abstracted to catching your conversation at the point of connection among increasingly complex and highly virtual switching equipment so that the encrypted and segregated digital stream between you and your interlocutor can be patched out to a government sanctioned eavesdropper.

But it was easy enough to do, and we already knew that the phone company kept track of how many minutes we had talked and to whom. It's the only way that we can trust them to bill us accurately. But now what about when talk is not only cheap, but utterly free??!!! Why would we want them to track us at all? Maybe so that we can remember who we talked to and what we said? I sure could use some of that.

On some television discussion, I heard the proposed expansion of the law likened to the notion that all bathrooms should be constructed with a built-in peephole for government use only, and only with a court order. Yucky, creepy, disgusting and ridiculous. If some important criminal or terrorist plotting is going to get done in a bathroom, let the government spooks go to the trouble of installing surveillance equipment, please! And then make them document its removal so that we may go about our business in privacy again. Just be careful about your roommates!

Same with any kind of digital communications developments. Let them break into your house or your computer and install the same kind of spyware which terrifies us all now, because it might get onto our computer by some kind of web-site drive-by, or some phishing expedition we fell prey to. The government doesn't need some kind of company-provided way in.

We need them to help us keep the bad guys out, and the bad guys always seem to find a way to use those built-in peepholes, and everybody mistrusts the government these days just as much as they do the so-called bad guys. But do you trust your spouse? Check with Fellini on that one.

If we can be comfortable that even the government can't get into our private and confidential information, then I think we can be a lot more comfortable about conducting our businesses by means of electronic technologies. The government should be helping us to get that done, and not getting in cahoots with the bad guys who want to sneak into our private affairs.

So, back to that poor supposedly gay fellow at Rutgers. I don't think we exactly want to ascribe the ability to make a person commit suicide to anther party apart from oneself, do we? Precisely the same societal confusion would attend this fellow if he were gay or if he were afraid of being considered gay when all he desperately wanted was to be attractive to the hot females who were immune to the charms of a violinist.

Back in my day, sexual experimentation was almost a political mandate. Now, you have to be committed to your role, even when you won't commit yourself for more than a night to your sexual partner-in-crime. Does anyone else see something wrong with this picture? Is it all just role play? Is actual leadership even possible?

Obviously I know nothing and want to know even less than that about this particular case. I'm not outraged at the breech of privacy - it seems fairly inevitable, given the gender-role extremes which our culture gravitates toward. Hotness in women is now some kind of imperative. Or has it always been? Fellini depicted a world-class film director capable to have any among the starlets he might cast. The Social Network depicted a callow nerd coder not allowed in to the network of cool. So he took it over, this network of cool, and then he had the sense to make himself sexually exclusive. Cool!

With the unerring radar of the socially autistic which we celebrate so severely now in our economic arrangements, Zuckerberg sat back and observed the animal behaviors of the best and brightest among us at Harvard. He heard what they said about themselves, and then observed their behaviors and placed his bet with the stuff which they, embedded within the social imperatives from which he had been excluded,  could not admit to themselves about themselves but were allowing themselves to be driven by anyhow.

I've made the case elsewhere that J.D. Salinger was precisely that kind of autist. Bill Gates surely is, as is his understudy Steve Ballmer. Steve Jobs, the lot of them, all make plays on the stuff we can't admit to ourselves about ourselves, and then they marvel that we allow them to accrue so much power. Imagine the amazement the ragheads (I wonder what nice things they call us?) felt when they saw the trade towers come down. How could it have been that easy? It couldn't have been that we built the towers that much too tall with that much excess hubris?

I suppose it could have been an administration plot, but why bother looking for that when you have their behavior all on record. The actions of 18 or so uneducated plotters were "allowed" to divert the national agenda of the most powerful economy on earth? Or is this what the power brokers had in mind all along? Come on people, it's not that complicated!

Anyhow, it makes me nervous now when all the educated and enlightened and politically correct people start calling for the prosecution of these college freshman for the commission of hate crimes. They all sound like Glenn Beck, sanctimonious about our collective values, while overtly talking about sending people to hell and back for transgressing them. I hate to see that kind of thing among liberals, but there you go!

I have to wonder why we can't get our act together. Why we can't be reasoned and reasonable and why the ones at the pinnacle of our society still want more and hotter and newer every day all the time. Why we want to have strong opinions about stuff we not only don't have any way to know all the facts about, but which we wouldn't be able to understand even if we did. I wonder, will we ever be able to trust our steroid soaked leaders, or will we always suppose that they are just the same as we would be with that much good fortune?

And anyhow, someday soon, not only will we take our privacy back, and not allow the Googles of the world to store that much private stuff about us to tempt the powers that be into snooping them. They posture against the Chinese so-called Communist single-party government which is all hepped up on conflating the sexual and the political as a way to keep people scared about exercising liberties. Maybe we will actually figure out how to trust one another. Yeah someday real soon. Meantime, let's all keep yelling at each other about how stupid and narrow minded you are.

Mother Jones

For a fun exercise, try to imagine Right Wing art. Can you? (No, I didn't say Right Wing Artists - that would be trivial)

Let's pretend for the moment that it is neither self-indulgent nor pitiful that I just made myself, alone, crêpes stuffed with stewed fresh peaches. My mother had pressed the peaches on me as medicine on her way out of town, because I don't eat enough fruit. Stuff that!

It would be self-indulgent were I to be seen at le Metro with enough money and charm and style for that. It might be pitiful were I to be depressed or lovelorn. As it is, they were, I assure you, far better than any you have ever eaten, nor did they cost a penny (The flour is ages old, I have no sugar but I do have ersatz maple syrup left over from my daughters' childhood. Perhaps the electricity will prove costly)

Now imagine a world in which museum pieces aren't all engendered in some time of flourish - economic and self-consciously cultural - where intellect stews and conforms and bursts forth with resplendance and beauty and brilliant power. Imagine that workers and trailer-trash actually were to have a chance, M&M style maybe, to take it to the top. Or how about a world without museums. How about that?

Imagine a world where Trotskyites don't spend all their energies debating doctrinal rectitude leaving such gaping lacunae in our Real World for Right Wing certainties hidden underneath their vague dark cloak that gets misnamed "conservatism". Where we really did understand what our government is capable to do to us and for us and where we might never doubt that the game is fixed and where our Dynastic leaders don't take their orders from some secret society and that they would never bring down towers for our own good and blame that on the least among us for some excuse to pulverize them. For us to do the dirty work and in our very own Name.

Sure, if you're taken in by Ayn Rand, you might think that realistic celebrations of powerful men can approach real artistry. You might find realist sculpture of the sort Tom Wolfe writes to be a fair imitation of art. You might prefer greatness celebrated or oversized egos taken down, but most people want art to get beyond pure demonstrations of talent to something approached by means of that talent, right? Whatever transcendence means I sure don't know, but it has something to do with the taste of fresh peaches, that much I know for certain.

Something already held in mind by the artist and then realized by her art places the artist in a superior position and so we might suppose that we don't have the talent even to think either; as well as lacking the talent to perform. School pretty effectively instills this lesson, no? I wonder whatever happened to actual education, without which we are not much more than apes?

The artist must be taken in by her own work and not in charge of it, right, and so even those museum pieces from our ages of glory are subversive at their roots. They challenge their age. It is as though a spirit were released and the artist its medium. And that spirit is never on the side of individual human greatness. Never. Unless sublimated  to Man as God, or beauty as truth or or or.

Most art - I'm pretty sure this is true - tends left wing once you move away from so-called realism. Think Ayn Rand's compatriot Tolstoy if you want art, and think the other Thomas Wolfe maybe if you want art and think white linens if you want your Southern Fried. The real always favors the powerful. Projections always favor the dreams of the downtrodden, for greater glory, for vindication, for something approaching beauty.

You might find the exhibition of extraordinary talent by way of its purest de-contextualized notes of grace to be artistic. Purest voice of striking clarity can take the place of hard wrought gems mined from the deepest parts of us. Even in church, there can be good music.

But inevitably, most such stuff feels either Stalinistic or like some sort of flag waving country music show in some Big Box Church which glorifies production values. It might be entertaining, but it ain't art. Unless it steadfastly refuses any message at all, and then I guess it's just entertainment, maybe like a ball game, and nothing wrong with that! Just like pornography and for the same or opposite reason, you know it when you see it, art. Whatever it's purpose, it stirs you, but in a way to uplift and stray beyond the pornographic commons.

The production of The Furies of Mother Jones over at Subversive Theatre has all the trappings of that country music show in Church. Fine spirit, stirring music, a transparent message about workers' rights. Clear realism devoted toward a crystalline message.

It ain't art, right? It's more like didactic presentations of the sort they were limited to under Chairman Mao because the little people couldn't be trusted to see through the racier stuff to the right kind of message. Everyone becomes self indulgent if given the slightest chance, and hell the blocking of pornography makes a pretty good cover for covering dissent. There's nothing terribly subtle about this one. There's no meaning below the belt and there's no culture at the bottom of a coal mine.

No question this show presents a good time. It doesn't depict a good time, but somehow it manages to be fun and stirring and uplifting for its audience. It sharpens the context for all systemic abuses, and gives the hand clapping foot stomping onlooking participant a refined view of how it feels to be at the bottom of the social structure, where the compulsive bottom shopping of each of us resolves into outright destruction of those lives closest to the manufacture of whatever it is that fuels the desires others of those of us with enough wherewithal to buy our tickets.

Every single one of us, each time that we seek out the cheapest gas for our cars, or the pennies less on-line conduit for our gizmos, or refuse to pay the union rate on the excuse that they're all fat and lazy; each one of us participates in whatever it is the global corporate compartmentalized sociopathic powers-that-be have to do to get it to us. We are the destroyers of lives, not any them.

We know the government regulators are both overpowered and in cahoots. We know that, even as we refuse to pay them any more than we can make just getting by ourselves. Getting by now includes that big flat screen and a couple of cars not to mention a jetaway vacation and lots of eating out. These are our birthrights as is our sense of style, which includes the political rectitude to sympathize with and rhetorically support the blasted working class.

But so whom are we to trust? I mean who are we? Are we trustworthy? Will we do a damned thing to assure that there is not more destruction to meet our bottom feeding shopping habits? Will we really continue to regard our priests and civil servants as special cases of people who should and must and will by God be above the base-line habits of the rest of us? We fully intend to punish them to the fullest extent of their pretenses. When they fall short of their pledge to honor. The rest of us are only innocent bystanders, members of some audience.

So, yeah, I'm not really sure that this is art, Subversive. It is necessary, it gets my blood boiling and it satisfies my pride in lack of any style at all. But then I've always been a lousy consumer, failing almost ever to get the best deal. (I paid far more than my fair share for this show too, trust me on that.)

But there is a difference between the right-wing didactic stuff and the left wing. The one celebrates celebrity and success and looking good and rising high and mighty. The other celebrates the little guy, the miner under ground, or the sweatshop worker who's just a blip on the power-brokering radar of those captain of industry superstars who get all the credit for pushing history forward.

And as anyone watching the film Titanic, which must have been derived from O'Neill's Harry Ape (and so which one's real and which one's art???), as anyone in those audiences knows, it's in the boilerroom where the real fun can be had. Among the working folk.

Lots of the audience for this show wanted to ride up in the freight elevator which can take you up to the Manny Fried if you don't want to walk those two flights up to the third floor. Normally, this is preferred only by older or infirm audience members, but somehow there was advanced billing that this time the freight elevator was an echo from the show. It was replicated on the set, and the audience could experience in ironic mirroring what it must feel like to be lifted from gloomy darkness to enlightenment.

We are all of us trapped underground. Tea partiers think the goons are all in the government and that freedom is freedom from government interference, never crediting that corporate power has long since overwhelmed the power of our civil servants. Freedom from means freedom to be exploited so long as we continue to make no distinctions according to scale. So long as we regard corporations as legal persons with rights and freedoms just like those we're just dying to trade away.

So OK let's say this show is less art than politics. That's what Subversive Theatre is for, right? But you know the music in the show makes a mess of that assumption. It might not be mass market art or the kind of aristocratic beauty which still gets aspired to and longed for and even lusted after.

It's the kind of art they celebrate in Appalachia, where the workers once had real lives and real music and real family tradition and where performance is always live and never even expects to be on TV. And it's cheap. And it's hardly realistic, moving back and forth in historical time and realistically depicting the projected nightmares of betrayers who try to hide their own guilt from themselves. The rats patrol the dug-up graveyards. The workers sing like superstars.

So, yeah, let's call it art and have a party. The workers will prevail. The teapartiers will wake up. We will see the sunshine someday soon just like those miners down in Chile. And if you really want to help them, see this show and take it to heart. Indulge yourself.

I Went to See the Mother . . .

But I never saw the play. Instead, I participated in it; a couple of times as a cop, once as a strike breaker, and for a few scenes as a coat rack. I didn't want to seem over eager, but the audience was of similar size to the cast, and they needed extras.

The Mother is written as a didactic play, a Lehrstücke according to Wikipedia. Brecht meant to break down barriers between audience and actor as between worker and consumer, or so I learned. And I had been all ready here to give plaudits galore to Kurt Schneiderman and his Subversive Theatre for something completely new and different! Hesitation always being the better part of valor . . .

But really, what a great way to get the audience's attention. You mill about the space, sometimes part of the action, sometimes sitting on the floor, sometimes getting pelted with (fake) rocks. As I like to brag here, I witnessed lots of experimental theatre Off Broadway back when that meant something, and in London; all back in my youth. Of course I remember no particulars, and it didn't change my life, apparently. I mean I'm not a theatre person and being a witness in the audience gives me no more authority than to claim that I know the law because my father is a lawyer. But I've witnessed uncomfortable experimental theatre, let me tell you. It was plenty unsettling, you know, just like the absence of a happy ending from a Hollywood movie. About as pointless?

But you aren't doing the same thing when you participate that you are when you are sitting in an audience. It's really hard to know whether to smile knowingly or appreciatively the way you might in solidarity or competition with your seatmates, or whether someone is watching you, and you should put on a show of trying to act.

A couple of times I was meant to act like a cop; a nasty. But I felt that if I was going to act like a cop I should at least show my own fear and ambivalence about what I was being ordered to do. There was no director, exactly, to tell me how to behave. But I did feel exposed and vulnerable, hoping mine wasn't the live bullet, that no-one's eyes were on me. I shot into the air over the protesters' heads. For real?

Sure, we got quickie instruction in what would happen and rough general indications of our roles. These were offered by fellow actors with whom we'd bonded by a bean-bag toss game before the show began. Or had it already begun?

These same actors had invited us in by including us in their foul language and general tired and jaded camaraderie as they got ready for the show. They weren't being paid to do this either, and maybe it wasn't all acting to feel tired and jaded. But they hadn't paid to get in, and presumably this was something they really really want to do. Act, um, on stage? Well, act anyhow.

But they acted grateful to us, and slightly pissed toward everyone absent, just as we "audience" members might have felt toward our absent crowd-mates. I was a little taken aback when someone asked me if I was OK after being pelted by fake rocks. Were they serious? Do I look that frail? Or was that person more properly still  in character than I was? I'd already sat down again to watch. I answered sincerely "I'm fine" as though the thought that I wasn't fine was a ridiculous thought. Oh!

And why weren't they just jumping at the chance to recruit me when I made eye contact after no-one was raising his hand to volunteer for missing roles? Do I look that old? That far from being able to act? Or you know, maybe it takes one to know one, like it's OK to say out loud on NPR that gay men might like Real Housewives, because of the implicit role-playing of those, um, real actual (NOT) housewives, but that no real man could stand the show. So, yeah, like women are all role-playing all the time, and can't not watch, so they said, like a trainwreck, other women making fools of themselves, but only gay men would do that? Well, it's an interesting concept, but a little politically incorrect if you ask me.

Affirmed in my manhood, still it's hard to know how to behave as an audience member thrust into the act. The play was about "the Mother," an illiterate woman who was worried about what would happen to her son if he continued to buck "the Man." It was about a teacher who couldn't see the good of literacy for people destined to remain denizens only ever of the working class. It was about co-opting workers of one stripe - a butcher, say - against workers of another and making them think that they were special for a day or a minute or the duration of a confrontation. At least you've got a job. We're rewarding you handsomely to take our side against the ruffians.

Take orders. Take direction. Or just do what comes to you or what comes naturally. The play's the thing. The mother gradually did learn to read. Unwittingly, she became the de-facto rallying point for the cause. She was that out of place, and who would attack a mother protective of her son? The teacher learned to value reading himself, and wanted to be called comrade in the end. I wished I'd had a role.

Well, I did have a role of sorts. I ran the elevator for the night, and I needn't have bought a ticket, but, well  I felt responsible to contribute, even though I'm unemployed, and don't always give handouts, but after the show there were, indeed, a few people who would have been quite challenged to take the two flights of long stairs back down. It felt like it should have been a part of the play, you know, a huge freight elevator with signs all over saying that other than the operator and his freight, people were not allowed. I tried for a paranoid joke as I crashed the gates down. You won't be getting out of here. It went over OK.

And then I brought the cage back up, in case there was someone left behind. And sure enough there was one of the actors, grateful for the lift. Er, I mean the descent. On the way down, he proceeded to tell me about how he had just had back surgery, and had gotten himself out of the hospital early because the show needed him. He'd done the earlier performances in the face of excruciating sciatica. This one nearly rigid with post-operative pain. And I'd thought that the cop complaining of his recent back surgery during the show was speaking a memorized line. A cop too lazy to work in the face of hurting striking workers. Making excuses.

I was struck that this actor's speech was halting - not what you'd think of as an actor's smooth diction. But he'd just delivered - led, really - this almost perfectly pitched and timed high speed projectile dialog. An argument. A staccato performance worthy of something David Mamet would produce. How does this work? The pivotal moment of the play, the catapulting into heightened consciousness of the importance of standing firm in protest, delivered by a man who couldn't strain his back?

Am I changed? Is my consciousness lifted? Could I have something to say if I were offered a stage on which to say it? Would I ever stand up against the Man? Well, I wouldn't pull the trigger if ordered. Not unless it was an act for the greater good and the director was shouting at me exactly what he needed me to do. This director, young Bob Van Valin, was so disarming, though. Really nice, like a tour director. So polite, when he wasn't being foul-mouthed and drawing imagineary lines we weren't to cross.

But in the end, good show old man!! Jolly good! (I'm affecting a little accent there, and, um, pretending Kurt's an old man)

Subversive Shorts Bee Lineup, AKA "A"

With a start, I realized that I should have been up in Toronto where all the real subversion was happening last night. Too late. I've been preoccupied with family matters, and numb to the world stage. Our own Seattle right around the corner, where acting up can make a difference. But then I watched a burning police car via over-the-Internets video and it looked so Canadian. Almost as if they have no interest in fanning flames of provocation. According to Michael Moore, they don't even lock their doors. And the cops with batons were equipped with bicycles, of all the crazy stuff. They were probably dialed in to the subversives' Twitter accounts. No-one looked very guilty. Not even the police. We're such hosers down below.

Subversion gets no satisfaction these days, and there are still unaccountably scant audiences down at the Theatre. Which only means that there's more room for YOU. These shorts are good!

I can't quite agree that this "A" or "Artaud" lineup is better than the one I saw last week. These short one-act plays were certainly engaging, but sometimes veered in the direction of a Saturday Night Live skit, which was what I fell asleep to last night, literally. Well, it was a re-run, so it wasn't technically "live", but it was live once! (Eat meat, it's what's for dinner, though you should eat stuff which was alive and not in industrial feedlot simulating life, as I learned the other time from the "B" lineup) It could just be the venue which keeps the crowds at bay - I'm pretty sure that if you threw these shorts up on a television screen, or a YouTube say, audiences would howl. Buffalo-born has made the world stage before!

Real theatre (sic) is face to face in a way, although I think if the actors were to make eye contact of the sort real people do they could never quite do the incredible job they did here last night. These actors were *in* to their roles. What a pleasure!

To run them down - not like police do, but like reviewers do - there were middle schoolers acting like adults negotiating gender politics as on the world stage of trade negotiations to our North (I might have my scale and venue mixed up). There was a traffic control disembodied voice posing as a very masculine God. There was celebration of the quiet choices of the abused women of the world, stood in for by an offstage silent smiling nun of ones imagination. The sister act-ed by a gay woman celebrant of absent judgement toward dronish subservients in a patriarchal structure of abuse which hardly becomes the Universal Church of Men. There really were bees composing Genesis, with some gender role reversals. Well, all you have to do is to imagine queens and drones and this was funny honey. Sweet. A Boorish banker opening an American do-gooder NGO-sponsored eco-tourism mecca down in South Africa with ironic twists. I mean, talk about ironic! You don't even know.

I don't know if life imitates art, or if the other way around, and how come it all coheres if only in this one mind, but each play plays on the others and on reality, so-called, and there's microcosmic shift which might be enough. It always has been. Did you think the world could change its mind all at once?

I'm not kidding, this was good stuff. The first short was acted out by students at the Performing Arts High School Magnet (another Buffalo invention), which is surely harboring some talent. Some good teaching. Some almost unbelievable presence on stage. The monologue by the gay sister of the sweetly innocent nun was performed so convincingly that I felt as though she stood for everyman, liberated, constrained, uncertain, freed, holding back from judgement herself, though she had every right to toss firebombs. On the model of silent women the world over who need honoring, but not, you know, worshipping.

And really, you should see actors channeling bees looking down on us humans-without-awareness. Divided as we are from the continuum of life. Genesis. Exodus. Who knows how the world will change? One awakening at a time? Person to person? The bees really are telling us something about our mono-culture, I mean the real bees, the ones we depend on for our pollination and our lives, and, um, I think we can't live without them, no matter the buzz down in South Africa which drowns out the thoughts of superstars. We didn't project our dreams on that screen this time, did we?

Right before the show I installed a new battery to the supposedly irreparable iPod my daughter's cat accidentally showered. People camped out all night to get the latest of these false presentations of seamlessness, interfaces without any way in. Willing to overlook flaws at the cost of a fatted service contract, as though they never crash. I will not refrain from opening smooth exteriors, you know, certainly not because I've been mesmerized by Word or words or acting.

The place where I bought the iPod battery represents a mission to protect landfills from poison superannuated electronic gear by demonstrating how easy it is to repair. Yeah, I know I'm being greenwashed, but, well, still I'd rather watch live theatre than participate in staged protest, and the "genius bar" just tells you they don't fix these things. I'm no sucker for guys in robes representing some mysterium.

Who knows how the world will change? The only thing that we do know is that it will, because the math doesn't work out the way we're going. Why not start here? Why not now? As my friend and I were walking out there was a full red moon just above the treetops, over the low buildings of this supposedly dying city. Now I just found out that I'd missed it's eclipse. The moon's, I mean, not the city's - for that I've been fully present. These menstrual pulls cannot be gainsaid by my manly artifice. My head was turned, as was God's, on stage, by flesh. Hey, I'm human. I'm implicated. She was hot!

Subversive Shorts!

None of us can know our own personal deficits. They are blind spots; lacunae, to borrow the title from a recent Barbara Kingsolver novel I admired. (I'm now savoring her nonfictional take on living close to the land, reading it slowly in imitation of the manner of eating which will provide the best reward, local and global, as she celebrates.)

We can know our deficits only by a kind of emotional triangulation from among the feedback we receive, trying to filter out that which is motivated by the lacunae in others; sometimes these are projections which might have nothing at all to do with us. We can try to modulate the ways in which we discourage useful feedback. Our resistances and sensitivities and bluster and anger. Our touchiness.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle must be the most intelligent book I have ever read. It uncovers much of what is really going on with our food culture. Just now, shopping at the local food co-op, I was distressed to learn from how far away my veggies had been shipped. But at least the Co-Op does provide that information now. I have been informed, and that's a start. The books wasn't meant as entertainment, but it's written well. Eat your spinach. As though it wasn't, well, yummy when well prepared and not repetitive to the point of evermore!

There is no delegating out my responsibility to make good choices, though good enough will nearly always be quite good by my lights. I have no real direct experience with the kind of fresh and lovingly raised food that Kingsolver celebrates and grows and worries over. I want to know why she will devote only a year and not a lifetime? Slowly. My standards aren't that high.

Last night I was among the ever more flush audience at Subversive Theatre for opening night of the "B" lineup, the "Brecht" series of their annual festival of short one-act plays. I liked them all. I don't know how to hoot as do the insiders, but I clapped loudly, only later learning that I should see the "A" or "Artaud" lineup if I want to see the good stuff.

The place felt cool; more comfortable than I remember. I remark on the irony now, that this theater has purchased an air conditioner, even as one of the shorts - a  post-apocalyptic play set in the future when air conditioning is illegal and ice, bizarrely, is the erotic toy of choice - might make it seem a Hummer of a buy. There are no perfect, no pure, no ideal choices. There is no escaping irony. None.

How would I know? How would I know which of these short plays and how, degraded women to make an ideological point? I could tell that some did to some women present. I can tell the difference among didactic and entertaining and emotive. There is no accounting, none, for personal reaction, though.

There was only one play which really moved me that way, theatrically and not in my mind alone: three characters, the mother and father of a soldier deployed in Iraq, at a coffee shop to meet his sweetheart. She would be travelling through Turkey, abandoning her Olympic hopes, to assist her lover in his escape from the travesty of this so-called War. The father celebrated his own service medals and couldn't face the shame of his only son, the deserter. The mother handed over her St. Christopher medals, finally resisting instruction from her Man - direct orders actually. She remained behind to sip her tea. Sending her husband home, startling when the barrista called her name in stentorian fashion. The absent husband's coffee finally ready post-departure. In her name. Old habits. Die hard. Go AWOL. With difficulty. The girl's parents care only for her Olympic glory. Echoes of the gods of the first piece.

The Medals play was the main course for me, meaning that it moved me to understand in a way which had a chance to change me. I recognize these in-formations of my own self. The ways in which I am inhibited from making change in the world around me. Barked orders, timid forays, checking my moves against the norms.

Oh, I mean that one short, but you know, it was that they were short which made them so easy to swallow. A kind of ratatouille when taken as a whole, or, no, different foods on a single plate, or no, courses, maybe as part of a gourmet dinner. My reach exceeds my grasp, of theater, of food, of what it is that will make people more certain in ways to do less harm.

Others among the shorts were meant more purely to enlighten. The vegetable side dishes. The vitamins. To teach the audience about our prison system, and how cruel it is to families. To teach about our petro-based agriculture. To demonstrate how that line to distinguish humanity from beastliness gets pushed ever farther back until we can justify even torture, on animal Prozac and Muzak and climate controlled comfort in their solitary feedlot pens. Not so unlike the assisted living facility where I recently moved my Dad. Why wouldn't you be happy there, Dad? You can't do anything for yourself. Anyhow.

It's hard to see all the distortions - how it might be that there is no choice but to raise animals this way for slaughter; to justify their suffering by making a fine and final distinction between animal and human. Kingsolver gently mocks the purity of vegetarians, since animal death is also implicated in vegetable growth in human cultivated plots. But many vegetarians might eat meat if the animal's end was that surprising to it; that unanticipated and the life was merely cut short instead of denied at the outset.

Which justification would you like for your daily bread? That it does, in fact, taste that much better when raised with love and locally and without having been distorted by breeding to make the long trip from grower to grocer? Or that you will feel better spending more and tasting less, always waiting for the prize in its true season. How much more would you spend?

I admired the cleverness of each of these pieces, but in the end, I guess, I still choose to be enlightened in a manner which entertains, which moves, which stops short of teaching, didactically, someone else's certainties. I would prefer to witness someone acting out what we all must go through to make the right choices; to fill in all our own gaps. Vitamins are only necessary in the first place because we breed out the complexities of the food we eat. I've been so informed.

I can have no idea how food might taste if we were to raise it properly, without industrial feedlots, allowing fuller genetic variation, and bringing harvests closer to their markets. I still rather suspect that the food I prepare with love still tastes that much better than the stuff I could prepare if limited to a radius of 50 miles in its true season.

I have this feeling that it's not all bad. That the present distortions will be rectified, that this is all the inevitable result of an oil-bender which can't last much more than the hundred years of its allotment. A mere human lifetime, give or take. I have a feeling that people will start to understand how our pleasures distort and destroy so many lives; animal, vegetable and even miracle by the displaced and outsourced decisions we leave to the marketplace. I suspect that we will learn to nuzzle one another again, and walk away from our wombs with views in which we hibernate to be born anew.

But I am absolutely certain that nothing will change without courageous re-presentations of what is going on. That line between pure entertainment and truly moving art has become so distorted now that theater must mock cinema, cirque du soleil enterprise in scope. Phantom of some former opera. So, I remain glad for Subversive Theatre, and for protests the world over, and for pure didactic instruction. I don't care if it's someone else's certainty, if they are moved to act. I am lacking in taste, I guess. My lacuna. I moderate my gluttony by small bites, chewed slowly, followed by drink and not only for the bodily satisfaction. I've been so informed.

I Am Hamlet

(Meant to stand in for a review of I Am Hamlet, presented on stage at the Subversive Theatre Collective, as Adapted and Directed by Joe Siracusa and performed by Brian Morey)

We all are, Hamlet, seeking that point of intention which dictates the act. Tricking it out. Glancing at audience to see its reaction, play within, some truth to quiet raging unknowns. The act so well rehearsed by the time it's committed; to memory, to reality, that the intention has long since receded beneath what are nearly autonomous motions and their representation emotionally. The play's the thing. The actor is beside himself, drawn along by certain knowledge of what comes next, that thing we lack, our dreams projected.

If there is a flaw to this production of Shakespeare; this spin, perhaps, off Shakespeare, but really, who can know his intentions - but if there is  a flaw, it is that the actor, even more than the words, exceeds his audience. The energy required to pay attention, to follow the words, is exceeded by the energy required even to believe that this is a one man show. That there aren't at least several persons beneath the rapid fire costume transformations, just for instance. I stared mightily trying to decide if Brian Morey was lip syncing to some professionally pre-recorded soundtrack.

He might have been. This is not just Shakespeare brought up to date, it is Shakespeare transcending date and time and place. This actor is a rock star, a female rock star, a male rock star, Avatar floating above the stage (the fog machine failed I later found out, as did the microphone for proof that there was no trick and still intention prevailed, which is beyond metaphorical requirements for acted out reality, please!) and the play within the play is film is television, is playing in my own head, the sole member, yet again, of an audience adverted, apparently, by the Buffalo News to stay away, on pain of what? Some realization of your mortality? I am growing, well, weary of presentations meant for crowds and then finding myself alone.

During intermission I was as rube from county (my actual role in life) among the theater hags, so called by themselves, who were the only other witnesses to this remarkable show this summery night. They were recalling costume and lighting and sound and stage malfunctions in their own storied pasts. I was focussed on my own mortality, staged malfunction recently so many times in Emergency Departments, in dealing with aging parents and romantically spurned children whose future cannot be rehearsed, whose future remains mystery, all futures weighing now like pendulous question marks, anon.

These skulls on stage were not the prompt to my own pounding heart, which seems to have a mind of its own these days, acting out, stealing from me my own mind's ability to pay attention, and so the words, enunciated almost beyond perfection as if there were some better way to recite Hamlet, and it turns out that there actually is, the words had to wash over me, and I had to let them, they were that far beyond my grasp.

How many times have I seen Hamlet, have I read it? Not even once, it would seem, or am I rescued by failing memory, failing to internalize the plot, the point, the theme, it's all new to me every time as Dad said last Thanksgiving when around the table we were sharing "the new" and he can't remember the conversation less than a minute previous. But I guess he still has a sense of humor.

This then is my life, and I am truly Hamlet, and if I must endure one more turn as audience to myself there it will end. There will be an end to it. I will have become the narrative, without sense or sensibility. Acted out by others, even though they might call me by some name I once did inhabit. Poor Rick, I am Hamlet. You would be too if you were to dare genuine theater. I dare you, voice echoing in an ever empty skull.

Eve Ensler's Necessary Targets at Subversive Theatre

Some days I do things which are plainly absurd. Today I bicycled down to the Niagara River to watch the kickoff event of "Boom Days." Boom Days are some sort of new Buffalo identity exercise, relating to the strange fact that each spring there comes a day when the "ice boom" is removed from the head end of the Niagara River.

The boom is placed to keep ice from clogging water intakes for power production from the drop down the same escarpment which provides the famous Falls. Enough water flows down this river to shrink our puny aspirations to the scale of that big red ball they dropped off the Peace Bridge.

There are mixed feelings about the overall beneficence of this boom, and so this is a kind of making lemonade when life hands you lemons thing. You can see the family resemblance to Buffalo wings. You can see the reachy punning. As if we were about to soar. As if these are boom times for Buffalo. As if our falling were only symbolic; yet another Blizzard Ball, in red, follow it down and drink and be merry.

I'd thought I would be joining some sort of crowd, but instead I found myself practically solo on the scene. A beautiful day, and I had the pedestrian-friendly breakwater which divides the river from the canal almost to myself.

I'd first scouted out the riverfront and determined that there wouldn't be any observers from the Olmstead Park, nor from the Frank Lloyd Wright boathouse at the Rowing Club. I'd pretty much decided that the whole thing was another mixup on my part until I saw the big red  Edward M. Cotter fireboat coming down the canal alongside the River. Then sure enough, there was the big red ball ready to be tipped over the edge. A lot of fuss just for me, don't you think?

That's about how absurd the situation was, presented by Eve Ensler's play, Necessary Targets staged at Subversive Theatre this month. American professionals credentialed and documented  in traumatic stress disorders get sent to Bosnia after the genocide, as if they could help. You don't realize until the moment the characters do how surprisingly absurd this premise is. As absurd as a ball drop event which nobody attends. You want to help. You want to participate, and you find yourself alone and unequipped.

A prominent and well published therapist is honored to be selected by the President. A younger counterpart is glad to find a way to escape her personal horrors, which we learn are ever present in the flashback of sleep when she stays home. The women they meet in Bosnia have lived through things so utterly unthinkable from the perspective of an upscale psychology practice Stateside - or even from that of  the shattered lives that practice helps - that it seems absurd to imagine that there could be any human contact across the divide. Suddenly absurd. These well-meaning travelers both find themselves over their heads. As if in a rapids heading for a falls.

Even the horrors of warfare can't compare to the horrors of atrocities committed by people just like us. Who can imagine neighbors gone wild with machetes and rape? In warfare, all the players are geared up for atrocity. The civilians learn quickly to expect it. But neighbors to neighbors right in front of our eyes, and even one's own children kill or get killed in the moments of mindlessness. Right upon entry, the lead practitioner, played with supreme confidence by Jane Cudmore, projects a contained version of the same sort of panic a wild animal must feel when corralled for the first time. It is not accouuntalbe that this troupe of actors has as little experience as the playbill says they do. There are other facts of life leaking into these performances.

I am not a well-educated theater-goer by any estimate, but I've seen a fair amount. I have never been taken so near my edge of comfort as I was by this production. I've been among the audience back in the gonzo days of street theater in SoHo before it was SoHo. The East Village before it was domesticated. But the raw emotions released on this stage made me realize why I could never do what these actors do. The strain to remain just this side of the edge of utter discomposure would be far more than I could take. I would need complete revitalizing sessions between each scene. I would need vacations.

Which can only stand in as metaphor for what was being portrayed. Women who were without place and without comfort and who could not come close to depending even on each other any longer, though each other was all they had. Because each of them was already beyond her edge of holding things together. Each of them was utterly beyond any limit for containing her once and former personality. Psychological talk of how good boundaries lead to good health dissolved like a face in tears once the "therapeutic" talking actually got started.

Yes, how utterly absurd to think that the world could possibly want or appreciate help from us, who are so preoccupied with some sort of politically correct decency of behavior and thought and process and education. Except that these Bosnian women were in need of someone to care for them as they had become; smelly ethnic symbols of pitiable lives. Still alive, still people, still trying to distinguish themselves from what their people had descended into for reasons unaccountable to us who strain in seeming raw anger against people who disagree with us politically. For whom "baby killer" is a reachy metaphor compared to what went on in actuality "over there."

"Baby killer" relates with the same abstract and purely metaphorical remove to the horror of rape as presented here. It has become an abstract problem of sexual continence, boy scout morality; something to be counselled away from by soothing priestly mannish voices. It's well known that Ensler doesn't shy away from the challenges to humanity of our sexuality. It is this which is ever front and center both for the deadened women, and by extreme remove at the core of the psychological practice which empowers the visitors from civilization to this ravaged wasteland. As if repression could contain this much feeling.

I would like - reallly I would - to find some way to participate in the life of this city of mine. I would love something which is less absurd than to patronize from some perspective of expertise or elite education. But the city seems sewn up from above. Expertise is already owned by an elite with closed ranks. Take a swan dive out into the rapids, or fly away to more welcoming places.

I suppose I can only bear witness. On the way back from the ball drop, I passed by that famous house rebuilt by the television inspired crew. Of course, there was a for sale sign. Who, when presented the chance, wouldn't want out from that particular neighborhood when handed the chance? No, wait, I think I'm too quick to jump the gun. This was just a sign from the builder who took the lead in the rebuilding, right? Someone used to building upscale mini-mansions for the better educated, lighter colored denizens of our suburbs. It was hard for me to imagine living there, among the blighted, blasted out remnants of our city before its descent.

As Eve Ensler stated in her presentation of this staged work, the real warfare is what comes afterward, among the women and not among the men. The part we saw on TV was the staged reality. The lived reality doesn't play well. The women are forgotten and, well, there are only a few psychologists brave or famous enough to stay beyond the established protocols of love.

We are our own necessary targets. This is how the visitors to Bosnia finally understood themselves. The tortured and tormented women needed someone to pummel and to hurt who would, however, remain beyond the beatings. Who would strain to understand that these acts of violence came from somewhere beside themselves. From the displacement which exist in each of us between our lust and our humanity.

Sometimes domestic tranquility spills over. Sometimes tears are inevitable. And sometimes they power change which is good. I had to leave as soon as the applause ended, since I could hardly trust myself to say the right thing or to behave properly in front of people who had exposed so much. But you should see this play. Follow the bouncing ball. It ends happily. It floats. The discovery of how stark our privileged lives really are is the only thing which can instigate real change. And no Sarah, YOU keep the change. Honest, I've got more than enough. I can spare it.

A Quick and Mild-Mannered Review of Harvest at Subversive Theatre

For me, attending plays at Subversive Theatre feels as comfortable as going home, somehow. There's no sense of  "going out;" no ritual of being seen (although I always see people I know). The productions are always expertly produced and cast, even if or when there may be things to criticize as somehow beneath the production values of better-funded more fully "professional" theater.

There is such an abundance of talented people, certainly in Buffalo, who would do almost anything for the chance to act on stage. You can apparently recruit them even for blatantly subversive productions. These are productions which are not only subversive of the oppressive norms of capitalist so-called democracy. But they are subversive of the norms of professional theater as well.

Although it's moving smartly in the direction of feeling almost like a conventional theater, the space has few of the creature comforts of homecoming. It remains plainly housed in a typical workshop warren as can be had cheaply among the surplus industrial factory space so abundant in Buffalo.

So, why do I feel like I'm coming home?

At its opening over a year ago, the space was almost impossibly uncomfortable. Noisy, echoing, and either far too cold or far too hot. Now, it actually begins to feel cozy. But they have started charging for tickets for shows which used to be stridently "free" (donations gratefully accepted). I guess I should be worried?

The production I saw last night of Langston Hughes' Harvest was, I felt, fully professionally produced, presented and acted. I missed Kurt's customary and fairly polished appeal to the audience for donations. I missed his explanation of the mission of this theatrical company. But then I feel like an indulgent parent, maybe, blind to what everyone else is wanting. I think they are smart in their new ways to grow an audience.

The play itself was plenty straight-up in its presentation of the capitalist dilemma from the point of view of those at the bottom of the supposedly naturalistic pyramid of suffering. The secret exposed: everyone at every level feels as though they suffer oppression coming down from above them. The farmers who oppress their pickers are themselves oppressed by the bankers and the taxman, and the sheriff who serves the farmers feels oppressed by the farmers themselves who finally, out of desperation to get their crops in or lose their shirts, take matters into their own hands with guns, and inevitably bloody results.

In nature, it is supposed, all creatures exist in a perpetual state of cringing fear, food insecurity, a pyramid of predatory eat and be eaten. The workers here must live out in the open under tents at best, subject not only to the serial and concurrent tyrannies of weather, disease,  children to care for; but even romantic love and its inevitable outcome. If that weren't enough, these cotton pickers had to endure the predations of their betters. Betrayals from within.

Sad, but inevitably true, I guess. Cotton pickers are no different from the unfortunate frog getting eaten by the stately heron. Well, except that the players on this stage are all members of the same species. The divisions among them are presented as purely artificial and absurd. At the very top is a remote and absent FDR; earnest, but feckless at ground level. A professor stops by and in the end says something like "Oh, I see what you mean. I'll tell my students." He'd thought there must be some way for folks to meet at the middle and split the differences among their grievances, for surely the farmers had some too.

Although the play was presented authentically, from the period of its writing, there is no mismatch with today's lived reality. Sure, it feels primitive and almost simplistic in its staging, which is the way it was written. Stark. Plotting the lines of division, and then measuring the tensions across them.

One still wonders if the explosion is necessary. As of tectonic plates these days, whose power just builds and builds until the very earth shakes, each release triggering the likelihood of more. Might there be a different model?

Getting eaten in the state of nature is also the role of the outcast, the weak, the genetically deficient. In the family of man, as in more local families, these roles are reserved and limited, supposedly. Our fear of one another enacts only the act of flight and fright in the face of voracious and unthinking predators who are themselves driven by unanswerable hunger in nature.

Subversive Theater is a refuge from all of that. Not much money lifted from my pocket. Free refreshments. Easy conversation between the acts. And even the reduction to almost nil of the distance between the performance and its audience. I guess that's why it feels like coming home.

Relentlessly, this company asks us just what is and what can be art. Must it only exalt the already exalted, who will inevitably be the absent playwright? The absent God. The good and refined taste of the privileged audience. Or can it invite the audience in to the struggle for understanding which is still common at the root of all artistic production?

In the end, it is the state of nature which is artifice, generated in our mind in reminiscence of a time too recent in our own past. When Natives, who were only imitating us, would scalp and pillage. When bears would attack from the woods. That state has been so fully tamed now that to invoke it is to invoke a fiction whose only purpose is to let us feel more fully manly. Very much like blue jeans do, or SUVs or athletic contests or libertarian posturing as if it were the clear-eyed truth. Women dressed for nakedness as prey.

The stage on which we play out our very public fantasies has grown old. No wonder I feel at home in this superannuated warehouse space, built as if to withstand a bomb blast. Any size shaking of the earth. Although that too is an illusion. The only real safety is on the streets.

Still trying . . . verily

I'm still trying to get some reading time in, still trying to keep up with some approximation of mastery of the Internet for the sake of business, still trying to find time to pack and move out of the house. I don't know how anybody pulls off life and love and making a living. I really don't.

I had a great Thanksgiving though, thank you very much. First to the ex-laws, where I felt perfectly welcome, but am never certain, since whoever's not there can be the subject of some damning by faintest praise. And no, that's not why I went! And I did my best to correct the record on behalf of yet another soon to be ex-law, but my reasons are simply to follow my daughter, whom I otherwise would never see. Despite being the servant driver-guild member of the family.

About which I really should get a clue, since servanthood never gets a person anything at all. But then on to the more in-law side of the family, daughter still in tow, or towed by, but in any case, I felt very privileged to sit beside my nephew who'd just written a paper on quantum computing, and could therefore explain it to me with admirable lucidity and poise.

I'm plain jealous is all. Also of my niece back from Ghana who will likely compile episodic epistles into epic culture crossing tales of considerable interest, just like my old classmate Mark Salzman did with Iron and Silk. You see, I'm just dropping names all over the place now, requiring some cred for my waning years.

I was among the lucky readers of Salzman's letters home, which got xeroxed and reproduced by faithful Professorial servants. Imagine the work we had to do back then to get read! Now, it's all reproduced all over the place, and can go from naught to bejillions in nearly a Catalytic jiffy.

Which is what quantum computers promise too! Sure, you know I'm going to shrug my shoulders and claim, "yeah yeah," in self-conscious rehearsal of the supposed impossibility of a double-positive becoming a negative. Why shouldn't double negation not have all the fun?

So, I'm still very trying, but since I was assured that quantum computers don't and can't change the basic laws of the Turing machine, I'm not terribly worried even still (yet?) about impending machine consciousness. It's not like they're just going to wake up some day and start thinking! Which as I've already explained now over and over again, is a social function which depends on language and distance between, much more than it does on computational prowess.

If you just collapse some exponential number of potential states, you might be able to break every cryptogram ever imagined, but you still won't be able to think. Though breaking cryptography is in itself an interesting enough prospect that our own vaunted NSA (No Such Agency, for those of you without ex-laws who work there) spends billions of our non-existent tax dollars working on it.

After all, they absolutely, completely, utterly totally must get there before you and I do.

So, picture this - and I hope you laugh as hard as I do silently to myself - junior minions handing up translations of, let's say, enemy transport transmissions of potential interest. Now these minions are generally selected for their never having been contaminated by excursions out and away from these our shores, nor into thinking which isn't politically corrected already. They might come from Ivy Leagues, and maybe even secret societies, but you won't find any freethinkers there, because first of all why would they want to sign their freedom away, and second of all they couldn't be trusted.

So, up the chain the snippet gets handed, to someone whos job it has been to stay employed despite the changing not only political winds, but also the changing linguistic winds, as in today Russian, tomorrow Chinese, and in the meantime Arabic.

So, that's a pretty good definition of job survival skills, don't you think? of a decidedly bureaucratic fashion, and these types will decide which snooped snippets are worthy of scrutiny, just in case, you know, somebody wants to fly a plane into some tower again.

As if advanced cryptography will help us distinguish between Atilla needs to take a dump and Atilla needs to dump a city. And I can practically guarantee that those bureaucratic folks would never be able to decrypt what I'm saying here, no matter how powerful their algorithmic thinking.

I'm just saying. Sometimes hiding in plain sight is the best way to stay invisible, although sure, these huge armies of translators will at least be able to scout out the larger patterns and learn who to focus in on. Just like hi-resolution cameras can do, and pattern recognition mass e-mail readers which the NSA would also never deploy. Employ.

But really folks, do you think it takes advanced encryption to hide your intentions? Do you think there's any defense against people who spontaneously come up with the same idea at the same time because it occurred to them for the same reasons, because, well we're all just herd animals anyhow? Schools of fish? Dispossessed and reading the very same signals of what, intention is it? to dominate their lives?

Git along little dogies? And I have coyotes almost every night singing out nearby, and still my cats do manage to survive the wild. I suspect we could too if we weren't so freaking determined to be authentic, each and every blue-jeaned one of us. Yeah Yeah Yeah!! (three times and you're outed as a positive-type thinker)

Like, look at me, I'm so special because I'm American and nice and born-again and you should be too, because nobody knows lovin' the way Jesus does? Which might be perfectly true, until you use that fact against people and then they just do things whose intention requires no decryption whatsoever to read. And Jesus would never do the stuff we do, hiding behind his name. And I don't care which brand or style you're talking about, the real one in your heart or the concocted one of 2000 year old bureaucratic fiction. Not a single one of those Named perps would carry on the way we do.

I mean, it's not so much what you say as what you do, right? We smile broadly and eat too much of the world's stuffing is what we do.

Catalytic Marketing

I like this term "Catalytic". I like it better than "viral" which has been used to describe the way that Youtube videos make their way around the Internet. I've watched it in action, when, say, college kids find a really engaging video and pretty soon it's all over campus. Pretty much like a virus.

It quickly becomes necessary to have seen the videos that everyone else has seen, almost reminiscent of the old days when there were only a few networks on TV and everyone had basic familiarity with the lineups. And then they become quaint and impossible to appreciate, because they made the next thing possible.

Of course, I never did have that basic familiarity with TV lineups say, so I don't feel so left out now either. I never did quite engage with popular culture, and even now, when people are getting their flu shots, or when they urge me to take some over the counter drug, I get that huh?? look in my mind, wondering what they're talking about or why they would say such things to me.

I pretty much assume those messages are for other people. I do watch the advertisements, but I guess as a subcategory of my lousy memory, they never stick with me. Although it does seem as though it's yet another case of the permanent memory of learning. I taught myself some ages ago that propaganda is all lies and that only stupid people pay attention to it.

If or when I get the flu and die, you can mock me out (we talk like that in Buffalo) about it, after the fact for certain.

At that school for gifted kids which I headed for a brief time, we expended a lot of effort to bring the kids up to a level of reading which would immunize them to all sorts of tricks of writing. As good readers, they were all able to catch the tricks which would push them toward unsubstantiated conclusions. It was always a little bit alarming to realize how many, if not most, of the naively-schooled kids when they started were utterly defenseless against such things. It took a lot of work to expose shoddy arguments. And then it would become second nature.

I think that Twitter is a case of viral marketing. Somehow it became a thing that everyone just had to do if they were going to be paid attention. And, yes of course, I still don't get it. I have a Twitter account, but I don't have very many followers. I guess I have a few, and I was supposed to return the favor and follow them back on the assumption that we all want exposure.

But I still really really don't get how it works. It seems as though it's a rapidly flowing stream of little messages, from among which how the hell would you pull the ones you're interested in? It's just another way for those at the top to rise further still, as far as I can tell, which makes it a part of that same vicious feedback loop which keeps the spammers spamming.

Well, someday someone will explain all this to me. Meantime, I'll just keep trying to get attention by making sense. Which, of course, I do realize I'm pretty clueless about also.

I think I must be missing some big chunk of feedback loop myself. When I write, I know perfectly well that I can't sense how someone else might read me. But it's not that easy to fix it up. At least it's not for me.

I think we all look with curiosity in mirrors as we pass them, to check out how we might look to the world. But I never really do get a clue. My curiosity is never satisfied. I look to myself like some Cubist construction which can't possibly make any sense.

No sense of style, a geek's sense of clash, I remember once - I still cringe at the memory - going out to the theater in really old clothes I'd found in a relative's attic. This was an elderly gent who needed help getting around, and I was a student who needed a cheap place to live. And somehow he still had in his closet his old finery from days long gone by.

Among old things in his attic, were some really well tailored clothes from another era, which fit me perfectly. He'd said I could, of course, take them, and I thought they looked really cool.

Now, given my sense that all advertisements are meant for other people, you can easily imagine how I thought I didn't look any more silly than people who sport wildly colored and striped running shoes, no matter what else they're wearing. Or sports clothes in general, for that matter, which I would plainly be too embarrassed to wear. It's funny how loud colors and bold racing stripes can make you disappear. They make me feel conspicuous. Go figure!

But I knew then, but was bullishly obtuse about it, that I was raising eyebrows with what must have looked like a theatrical costume. The waist was high, there were buttons instead of a zipper, elaborate cuffs and pleats, and a broadcloth wool flannel shirt.

As it happened, I actually think that look came into style a little later, but I was just a plain ass and cringe to think about it still. I think that's the way I write too. I can be so far inside the words sometimes that I have absolutely no sense of how someone else might read them. Only much later, or as the result of someone's offhand comment, can I be jarred into seeing it like it is. Like when you overhear or oversee someone caricaturing you, and you suddenly realize some little thing. Ouch.

It's all moderately painful. But also, maybe, related to what I'm trying to call "catalytic marketing" as differentiated or opposed, maybe, from "viral marketing".

Someone has to be a trendsetter. In the world of ideas, or the world of science, there is often a race to be the one out front. And if the discovery can be trued, then very quickly everyone's sense of style begins to quicken in that direction.

This is a catalytic process, and its results are fairly permanent. Unlike viruses, which kill off a bunch of hosts and then fall in to the background themselves once the population has made its adjustments.

I'm reading this book now, written by the former Chinese leader Zhao Ziyang, who ran afoul of party orthodoxy upon the events at Tiananmen square back in 1989. He was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life, but still managed to secrete and smuggle out his thoughts by overtaping childrens' cassettes. It's a fascinating look inside the pinnacles of power.

He likens the corruption which China so famously unleashed during the time of first opening of their economy, to a kind of inevitable virus against which there were no institutional defenses. There was simply too much power in the hands of the government officials who had been in control of state run industries, and too much money in the hands of newly liberated businesspeople. Across that disconnect was a kind of undeniable voltage, which would inevitably lead to corruption.

If you can buy at state controlled prices and then sell on the market, of course you will, because there's too much money to be made. Zhao was confident that the institutional structures would catch up. But the rest of the cabal in power could not abide his speaking out of step against their absolute authority, and so he was silenced almost completely and almost permanently.

You have to assume that one day pretty soon, a kind of catalysis will take place in China. Where certain kinds of information will make it through the censors, and power structures will start to break up in their brittleness.

Or maybe not, since the intellectuals there now have so thoroughly internalized a kind of patriotism which is for all the world reminiscent of Confucian quasi-religious honor toward their Center.

The patriotism of Chinese intellectuals is an almost perfect analog to our own intellectuals' commitment to "democracy" as an ideal which is almost perfectly tarnished inside the intellectuals' academies themselves. Where everything is rank-order and politically correct. Honor in the breach, I guess. There would be no place at all in any academy for people who talk and think the way they do around where I live. I'm not saying there should be. I'm just pointing out the obvious. And scholarship is not just a matter of the cultivation of taste and style. There are much more serious things at stake than that.

And so we ourselves, in these United States, as lots of smart people understand perfectly well, have perfected state control by a kind of drowning out by the noise of commerce, the dangerous thoughts of anyone who would rail against our system. It's almost as if the more clearly you are able to state you case, the more marginalized you become, to any political party. Think Noam Chomsky or Ralph Nader. Speaking straight will get you alienated from all strategists, no matter which side they're on.

However poorly our economic system does to provide for equitable distribution of wealth, it surely does a better job, for us inside our borders, than most systems which have been imagined. It would be crazy now to undermine the basics of free markets. Except at the extremes of size and power, there is no more rational way to line up supply with demand.

Which leaves us only to consider the optimal political arrangements for generating agreement about how to resolve the really big problems so that we can keep the market magic working.

Almost no-one on this continent would favor the Chinese methods. We celebrate free thought far too much, even while we throw sticks and stones at it. But as Tom Friedman and many others point out very effectively, we don't show any real promise about getting our act together to resolve the really really big issues, like global warming, or energy effectiveness, or healthcare.

Our political arrangements tend almost inevitably toward do-nothing compromises such as the one we're about to get with healthcare. We attempt to prevent harm to the bulk of the major franchises, to the point where no real forward motion is possible, and we end up with the same old same old, still tending toward catastrophe.

But a kind of catalysis can still occur. It happens all the time with marketing. Someone sees an actual use for something new, and it just catches on. I'm thinking of the really big things like telephones, and railroads, and automobiles, each of which was an abomination for many, or extremely improbable, but each of which very quickly became a fundamental necessity.

It's almost unbelievable to me, walking the streets of New York, how many people have Walkmans - whoops, I meant iPods - stuffed into their ears. I can't tell if it's a matter of style now, or if it really makes these people happy. Very few of them look happy, I must say, Perhaps they're getting the daily news.

This is the way our thinking will change too. And it will change, because it must. You really don't own your own mind, no matter how much you value free-thinking. Your mind is and will always be a function of commerce in so-called ideas. Your certainties can always be upset by someone more expert than you. If you're open minded, they must be.




Does "catalytic marketing" fit better than "viral marketing"?

Review of TWILIGHT: Voices of the 1992 LA Riots

At the outset, in the interest of full disclosure, I need to tell you the truth: I like to trumpet the accomplishments of my former students. It makes me feel successful, and well, all legitimate writers seem to have conflicts of interest these days. I want in to the insiders club too!

I dragged my good friend Bruce with me the other day to see Subversive Theatre's production of Twilight, a timely play exploring racism in America.

I get to Subversive Theatre as often as I can, although being unemployed it's a little difficult to cough up the price of admission. Well, sure it's free, but my minimum guilt coefficient demands that I donate at least double the cost of a movie ticket, and you should too.

The shows are almost always spooky timely, like Waterboarding Blues just when some truth came out about the Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush triumvirate. How we can deceive ourselves into thinking that the man's bidding is our own! Well, if you're a legacy child of the man, then I guess it is, and most of the people who get to be heard are legacy somethingorothers. I'm just a plain old bastard, so you don't have to listen to me, but I'm just saying.

Now we've got senators acting uncivil to a president who is quite civilized for a refreshing change. It's almost like they're offended by such an uppity holder to such an exalted office. I mean, considering the way the office has been so recently desecrated, what's up with that?? This man's an actual statesman, and he makes me proud.

I'm sure you've all heard about how Rodney King has now rehabilitated himself from a long bout with alcoholism. He won some celebrity boxing match against a cop! Irony acted out in real life is the very best kind.

This one-actor play over at the old Pierce-Arrow factory explores a set of interviews surrounding the scene way back in 1992 when South Los Angeles erupted in riots. It's not exactly comfortable material, although this scrappy theater is actually getting more and more comfortable, oddly enough, with better seats than the old church pews most protest theaters tend to use. They aren't quite as good as at the cinema or those new big box churches everyone goes to cry at now though.

Bruce taught Russian at the school where I taught Chinese, so we were pretty well prepared for some lefty theater, put on by our former student. (More disclaimers: No, I am not nor have I ever been a member of the Communist Party but I'd like to think I'd say so if I were!)

Well, I actually had to kick Kurt Schneiderman - the Theatre's founder and Artistic Director - out of school for non-attendance after I became its headmaster. There's some more real life irony when you think about it.

What we witnessed was a virtuoso performance by Victoria Pérez who was able to channel players in the real Rodney King drama and its lead-up to the riots in L.A.

It is my claim that Ms. Pérez can fill us all with hope by her enactments of this dangerously diverse range of people from that time; a Korean business man, the mayor, an angry radical young black man, the white pickup driver who was beaten on national TV by an angry mob and way more, though not the full set of interviewees from the original production.

None of these people were even close to Ms. Pérez' evident background; none of them was a Hispanic woman. None of them originally had the courage to get up on stage and explore a range of accents and emotions and positions not her own. None of them was flawless in his performances either, but considering her range, I'd say the performance I witnessed deserved at least an Oscar.

Portrayed on stage, and sometimes in video, were players in a real life drama who had been murderously opposed to one another in real life. They came together for me too, in my own person as an audience member, in a realization that we really aren't all that far apart in what motivates us or makes us angry or forces us to take any opposition to our personal point of view out of its context.

And then the next night I paid passing attention to our Buffalo Bills, who actually won a game! We have this terrible conviction that as a city we can manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and just miss our goal "wide right". I heard a few choice curses along the way yesterday, implying somehow that it's our team which lets us down.

Could it be that we too, this most Catholic city in the land, are working through a guilt abusively foisted upon us? Are we that afraid to say things out loud which are written in our souls? Will we wait until they erupt into more violence, or on the other hand must we really suffer inept black men at our city and state helms?

The discourse in this country has gone uncivil again. There is displaced anger on display, and more than hints of racism. Here in Buffalo, there were no videos of that recent unimaginable street beating, but we're happy about a helicopter now to intercept our secret lives at some magnificent magnification which can read a license plate from a thousand feet. Thank goodness we don't have to rub up against one another.

I think I'll take my theater real and work to get the irony out of real life. Subversive Theatre makes my day!