girls gone wild at Pandagon

So people yelled and screamed at Kos for running the infamous pie ad and Twisty complains that a "sexy" graphic is used for a heading on cancer at NewScientist.com.

But when Pandagon runs a titty ad promoting another liberal web site, nobody seems to notice.

Is it because blogger pals don't like to criticize each other? Or perhaps because headless titties say "liberal blog" more than a "sexy" naked body says "cancer?"

I emailed the people responsible for the ad. They said the ad designer is female, and besides, they need the attention, and the ad gets attention.

So it's all OK. They don't hate women, they're just trying to get attention through titty-flashing.

I would argue that this is even more offensive than "Girls Gone Wild" ads. Because GGW is all about females raising their shirts to show their titties - that's truth in advertising. But the site you go to by clicking on the titty ad has no girls going wild. None at all.

I'll never get to be part of the liberal blogger in-crowd by saying this, but that's life in the big city I guess: to constantly be on the march against signs of Patriarchy-coddling, but to ignore a clear example of pandering at Pandagon is flat-out hypocrisy.

My hatred for The Darwin Awards - and how Google punished me for talking about it

I really hate The Darwin Awards. As I said on one Amazon review: "The Darwin Awards are a pseudo-scientific excuse for the callous to profit from the tragedies of the unfortunate by marketing to the smug and self-satisfied."

If you aren't familiar with them, the Darwin Awards are given to people who have died in "funny" ways. Although it is claimed that recipients deserve their Award because they are morons who did us all a favor by removing themselves from the gene pool, in fact the Darwin Awards aren't very strict about who qualifies.

For one thing, the Awards are given to older people who either have already reproduced or are unlikely to reproduce in the future. So the Awards don't actually have anything to do with cleansing the gene pool.

But you say, it isn't supposed to be scientific - it's just good fun.

Although it claims to exclude children, children have been nominated for Darwin Awards because they did something dumb (as kids will do) and died as a result. Think of the chuckles parents get reading about their kid's death in the Darwin Awards. Hardee har har.

Finally, plenty of the deaths nominated for the Darwin Awards are simply someone's extreme bad luck. But if the death is unusual or colorful enough, the cretinous ghouls who participate in The Darwin Awards nominations will go for it.

Now it's one thing to chuckle guiltily over a wacky death. But The Darwin Awards is way beyond that - it is a money-making endeavor that profits from tragedy. But not just profits - exacerbates the tragedy by literally making a public proclamation that the world is better off without the person.

In my opinion, there is no nominee, be they ever so stupid who deserves death or digraces humanity more than the callous, sadistic vultures who participate in the Darwin Awards.

In summation - people involved in the Darwin Awards are the scum of the earth.

So I wrote several negative reviews of the Darwin Awards on Amazon.

So what happens? Google punishes me for it. When I Google my own name, an ad appears for The Darwin Awards III, edited by scum of the earth Wendy Northcutt.

I just emailed Google asking them to ensure that this doesn't happen again. They better get on it damn soon too. I don't want my name to be associated in any non-criticism way with those freaks.

---

UPDATE: I got a response from AdSense - they're going to see if this situation violates their policy.

Exit, Pursued by a Lawyer

From today's New York Times...

FAIRYLAND was in turmoil. During a tech rehearsal for the October 2004 Off Off Broadway production of "Tam Lin" — a play about a clash between mortal and immortal worlds — a real-life clash threatened to derail the show. Exactly what happened has become, literally, a federal case, and the sides agree on very few details. Did the playwright, Nancy McClernan, insist that the director's staging was incompetent? Did the director, Edward Einhorn, refuse to alter it? Did the producer, Jonathan X. Flagg, smash some furniture on the set? One thing's clear: the morning after the tech rehearsal, after two months of unpaid work, Mr. Einhorn was fired.

In the time-honored way of the theater, Ms. McClernan and Mr. Flagg figured the show must go on. With the help of an assistant (who eventually received the program credit for direction), they supervised the remaining rehearsals, either largely restaging the play or retaining most of Mr. Einhorn's contributions, depending on whose side you believe. In any case, "Tam Lin" opened, ran for its scheduled 10 performances and closed. But the drama was not over. Soon playwright and producer were embroiled in a lawsuit that could ruin them personally and has huge implications for directors and playwrights everywhere.

The main interest of that suit, which Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan has scheduled for trial in April, is not whether an artist deserves to be paid for work his employers deem unsatisfactory. What's really at stake is something much larger, because Mr. Einhorn claims in his complaint that his staging contributions to "Tam Lin" — contributions that his former collaborators say they excised — constitute a copyrighted work of intellectual property, owned by him, and that the defendants must therefore pay for infringing the copyright. When the lawsuit was filed, in October 2005, a new run of the play was already in rehearsal, this time directed by Ms. McClernan herself, who had always intended to make "Tam Lin" an annual Halloween event. Because Mr. Einhorn says that even these new performances represented unauthorized use of his work, the potential tab, based on the maximum allowable statutory damage of $150,000 per infringement, is now up around $3 million, not including several other remedies he is requesting — along with his original $1,000 director's fee.

...No wonder playwrights are worried. Even the usually unflappable Paul Rudnick is rethinking his options. "From now on," he said, "I'm only going to have my plays directed by lawyers."

The entire story here.

Our press release on the matter is here.

The article fails to mention that the 2004 production of TAM LIN wasn't the first - the Deptford Players did a staged reading in 2002, directed by Lorree True, and my company, Mergatroyd Productions did the play as an Equity Showcase in 2003, directed by Synge Maher. If Einhorn claims that my work, even when I directed it myself, belongs to him, why can't the other two directors make that claim?

Another thing the article fails to mention is that there's usually very little money to be made off-off Broadway, especially when you have a cast of 10 and you pay the actors, as we have in the last two years. We've never made a dime.

I can't say any more because the trial is pending. But once it's over, I'll have plenty to say about Edward Einhorn.

You can read about his lawyer/brother David Einhorn here and here (PDF)

Friday Cat Music Video Blogging

Starring "Spike"

Bird IS the word.
Watch the video here Quicktime MOV format (5.3 MB)

Learn more about The Trashmen here.

Get the best of The Trashmen (including Surfin' Bird) here.

The Times on my case

Now that I've called the NYTimes 'slow and stupid' my lawyer tells me that a story about my case vs. a disgruntled, and in my opinion (the case is still pending) way over-reaching director will be in this Sunday's NYTimes Arts & Leisure section.

More about it here on Sunday. I love the title of the article though, "Exit, Pursued by a Lawyer"

Waiting for the slow stupid people to wake up

Tom Oliphant made an astute observation on The Al Franken Show today. He said that generations of scholars will be pondering the utter failure of the fifth year of the Bush Administration.

The Bush Administration is inching its way towards absolute power, but the slow-witted drones at the NYTimes and the Washington Post are in complete denial. As Media Matters for America points out:


Despite scandals, poor poll numbers, Wash. Post, NY Times see only good news for Bush

Summary: Articles in The Washington Post and The New York Times painted a surprisingly sunny picture of the political environment for President Bush and the Republicans; downplayed Bush's dismal poll numbers and growing scandals involving prominent members of the Republican Party.
Downplaying President Bush's dismal poll numbers and growing scandals involving prominent members of the Republican Party, articles in the January 26 editions of The Washington Post and The New York Times painted a surprisingly sunny picture of the political environment for Bush and the Republicans.

The New York Times article, a preview of Bush's State of the Union address and his 2006 agenda by Richard Stevenson, began:

Having stabilized his political standing after a difficult 2005, President Bush is heading into his State of the Union address on Tuesday intent primarily on retaining his party's slim majority in Congress this year and completing unfinished business from his existing agenda.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?

The Bush Administration, in plain sight, without shame, has decided that it does not have to abide by the law. And furthermore, they have declared they have the right to spy on anybody in the world, because anybody they spy on will automatically be designated a terrorist or a terrorist sympathizer.

And if you object to this FASCISM, you will be designated a terrorist, by Bush Administration official media henchmen Chris Matthews and Sean Hannity.

Only the slow stupid people DON'T expect Bush to abuse whatever power he has. And he's grasping for more power all the time!

And he has three more years to try to devolve this country into a right-wing hellhole.

He must be impeached for the good of this country. And Dick Cheney too.

WAKE UP slow stupid people!!!

Twisty Rocks Out

Free rock tunes from the 90s right here.

Google Videos

My faves...

Beatles video for "Revolution

Beatles video for "Strawberry Fields"

Beatles Penny Lane Video

Beatles video for "I Am the Walrus"

Beatles video for "Something"

Cup stacking world record

Jon Stewart to Tucker Carlson: "You're as big a dick on your show as you are on any show."

OK, this one is pointless and stupid, but kinda of fascinating and funny.

It's a crazy Numa Numa world

Harmless office fun

Evil televangelist Robert Tilton has gastro-intestinal issues

The ever popular Tom Cruise Kills Oprah

Non-Google video Bush Speechologist

Reverse Midas

Everything Bush touches turns to shit.

Krugman

So what does it mean that the Bush administration is apparently walking away from responsibility for Iraq's reconstruction? It means that the administration doesn't have a plan; it's entirely focused on short-term political gain. Mr. Bush is just getting by from sound bite to sound bite, while Iraq and America sink ever deeper into the quagmire.

Vanity Fair editor praises Norah Vincent

No surprise, David Kamp, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, praises conservative asshole-about-town Norah Vincent for dressing like a man and telling us about the world of men.

The worst aspect of the review was to hear how swell it is that Vincent explored the world of white trash men, or as Kamp has it "unglamorous male milieus that are well off the radar of most journalists and book authors."

White trash men are the salt of the earth, you see, exchanging manly handshakes, "worlds away from the 'fake and cold' air kisses and limp handshakes exchanged by women" and they revere their wives while visiting strip clubs. They make homophobic remarks, but no doubt Vincent finds it refreshing proof that they aren't pussywhipped by political correctness.

There are few things more irksome then Norah Vincent. One of them is some Vanity Fair fop praising her for her anthropological studies of white trash men. I spent the greater part of my life getting OUT of the white trash world and I don't need a privileged fuckhead like Vincent to tell me what it's like.

Judging by her web site Vincent's biggest fans are anti-abortion old fart Nat Hentoff, famous hypocrite Andrew Sullivan, and the world's biggest asshole, Camille Paglia.

The Times of Harvey Milk

San Francisco board of supervisors member Harvey Milk on the left and mayor George Moscone on the right.

The Times of Harvey Milk is an incredible documentary. I watched it the other night for about the sixth time in two years, and it never gets old. It well deserves its Academy Award. The film is about the assassination of Harvey Milk by Dan White and the later miscarriage of justice in White's trial.

Milk was the first openly gay elected public official in the U.S. He was elected to the San Fransisco board of supervisors in 1977 after running three previous campaigns for the position. Dan White was also a newly-elected member of the board of supervisors. On the day of the assassination, November 27, 1978, White was disgruntled because he found out he wouldn't be re-appointed to his seat on the board of supervisors after voluntarily resigning. He clearly acted in a pre-meditated fashion, having the presence of mind to avoid metal detectors and bodyguards, brought plenty of ammunition, and reloaded in-between killing Moscone and Milk.

It seems that White didn't kill due to homophobia so much as paranoia that members of the board of supervisors and the mayor had conspired against him. In a term that came into popularity years later, White "went postal."

The jury's verdict, however, must have been due to homophobia. Rarely does someone convicted of going postal get a sentence of seven years for manslaughter. Add to that the fact that White killed two public officials and you get a sense of just how outrageous the White verdict was. Critic Roger Ebert complained that the film doesn't put enough emphasis on the prosecution's incompetence, and doesn't include interviews of the jurists, but unless the prosecution deliberately bungled, there's no other conceivable reason that an assassin of public officials would have gotten such a light sentence, except for homophobia. White's defense was that he didn't know what he was doing because he suffered from depression. (One of the alleged symptoms of this depression that the defense offered was White's switching from a health-conscious to a junkfood diet, which later caused the public to believe that White's lawyers had pleaded the Twinkie defense.)

As Janet Maslin said in her 1984 review of the film in the NYTimes:

If Mr. Epstein can't fully explain what happened, he can certainly tell the story with urgency, passion and, finally, indignation. Toward the end of the film, a young black man asks rhetorically what sort of sentence he might have received for such a crime. Another interviewee speculates that Mr. White's staunch support for middle-class values and opposition to the homosexual community's growing power contributed to his light sentence (he was released from prison last January). And a third man suggests how pivotal Harvey Milk and his cause may have been to the verdict: ''I think if it were just Moscone who'd been killed, he would have been in San Quentin for the rest of his life.''

A web site devoted to courtroom sketchs of the Dan White trial is here.

The key to the greatness of The Times of Harvey Milk lies not only in the importance of the subject matter, but the artfully conducted and edited interviews with a group of people who knew Harvey Milk. They all come off as really likeable people, and are shown both marvelling at Milk's antics and mourning his death.

If you haven't seen it, do yourself a favor and check it out. For more information, go to the Telling Pictures web site.

Friday Kittenwar Blogging

My cat fights the kitten wars under the nom de guerre "Mr. McFuzz" He prefers to keep his real name a secret, unlike the feminist bloggers mentioned in the post I link to in the post below this one.

Real women

Ann Bartow has an interesting post about feminist bloggers over at Sivacracy.

I know something about the perils of blogging under my own name. The abuse I received from some "readers" is part of the reason this blog doesn't have a "comments" function operational right now. Siva is considering bringing back comments, and I'm thinking about how I will handle the trolls, as I continue to field the occasional harassing phone calls and e-mails that didn't stop when the comments did. The feminist "real name" bloggers give me courage, and they give me hope, and I applaud and thank them for that with all my heart.

That makes me feel proud.

Echidne breaks it down

Great snake-goddess Echidne, clearly a patron of economic theory, breaks down the gender wage gap for all on her righteous blog Echidne-of-the-Snakes

Check it out, and feel free to post comments and help beat back the right-wing troll infestation.

World Jump Day

World Jump Day is coming July 20, 2006

Go to the web site for more details at http://www.worldjumpday.org/

The noble Al Gore

At this point in his career Al Gore reminds me of one of the pro-Republic senators who tried to stand up to the emperors in I, Claudius.

He made a great speech on January 16:

The FBI privately labeled King the "most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country" and vowed to "take him off his pedestal." The government even attempted to destroy his marriage and tried to blackmail him into committing suicide.

This campaign continued until Dr. King's murder. The discovery that the FBI conducted this long-running and extensive campaign of secret electronic surveillance designed to infiltrate the inner workings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and to learn the most intimate details of Dr. King's life, was instrumental in helping to convince Congress to enact restrictions on wiretapping.

And one result was the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA), which was enacted expressly to ensure that foreign intelligence surveillance would be presented to an impartial judge to verify that there was indeed a sufficient cause for the surveillance. It included ample flexibility and an ability for the executive to move with as much speed as the executive desired. I voted for that law during my first term in Congress and for almost thirty years the system has proven a workable and valued means of affording a level of protection for American citizens, while permitting foreign surveillance to continue whenever it is necessary.

And yet, just one month ago, Americans awoke to the shocking news that in spite of this long settled law, the Executive Branch has been secretly spying on large numbers of Americans for the last four years and eavesdropping on, and I quote the report, "large volumes of telephone calls, e-mail messages, and other Internet traffic inside the United States." The New York Times reported that the President decided to launch this massive eavesdropping program "without search warrants or any new laws that would permit domestic intelligence collection."

During the period when this eavesdropping was still secret, the President seemed to go out of his way to reassure the American people on more than one occasion that, of course, judicial permission is required for any government spying on American citizens and that, of course, these constitutional safeguards were still in place.

But surprisingly, the President's soothing statements turned out to be false. Moreover, as soon as this massive domestic spying program was uncovered by the press, the President not only confirmed that the story was true, but in the next breath declared that he has no intention stopping or of bringing these wholesale invasions of privacy to an end.

At present, we still have much to learn about the NSA's domestic surveillance. What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the President of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and insistently.

A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not men. They recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our Constitution - our system of checks and balances - was designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law. As John Adams said: "The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men."

An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate legislative directives of the Congress or to act free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central threat that the Founders sought to nullify in the Constitution - an all-powerful executive too reminiscent of the King from whom they had broken free. In the words of James Madison, "the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

Read the entire speech at The Raw Story. The article includes links to video of the speech - Al Gore is hot when he gots his righteous anger on.

Irritating women of the NYTimes

The ever irritating MoDo, the Smurfette of journalism.

And Judith Warner, who illustrates why some women with loser husbands cling to evolutionary psychology rather than get a well-justified divorce:

My husband, on the other hand, on the rare occasions when he wields a suction hose, makes a quick and efficient job of it. This occurs about once a year, generally on vacation, and with a great deal of self-congratulatory huffing and puffing. It is usually followed by a nap.

My husband claims that our mutually grating differences in housekeeping style (or lack thereof) can’t be explained in the terms of sex differences; they’re just reflections, he says, of unique, nonspecific-to-gender differences in our own individual personalities. (I am a spaz; he is not. I am fussy; he is “lazy.” See the pediatrician Mel Levine, I say, on “The Myth of Laziness.”)

And yet, I have read (in the British press, I believe; the good stuff is always in the British press) that men and women actually do differ in their abilities to discern, say, chocolate-cake crumbs on an Oriental rug. Men don’t see them: they’re too busy seeing the Big Picture because, as the hunters in the hunter-gatherer equation, they needed the skills necessary to scan the distant horizon. Women do see them: they are better at seeing details, because — you guessed it — it is their evolutionary heritage to have the skills for doing things like spotting berries.

An evolutionary biologist I met last fall at the University of Connecticut told me that this is total bunk.

It pleases me — for mental health reasons, let’s say — to believe otherwise.

Judith Warner comes from the whaddayah-gonna do-men-are-big-lazy-self-centered-lugs-but-they-can't-help-it-and-we-love-'em-anyway school of "feminism."

She's kind of Erma Bombeck for the 21st century. Except Bombeck might have been more feminist.

5 weird things about me

While many of the authors of blogs I read seem to think I'm interested in learning 5 weird things about them, I really am not. And I assume nobody wants to learn 5 weird things about me.

But now here's something we hope you'll really like.

Plus Rocky and Bullwinkle die and are reincarnated.

Bush - incompetent or evil?

Conservatives generally hate for the government to help anybody out. They prefer to let God, in the case of religious conservatives, or Darwinian survival of the fittest in the case of the libertarians handle all problems.

So George W. Bush is their perfect president. By his utter incompetence he has ensured that government assistance is doomed to failure.

The real question about George W. Bush is, is he sincerely incompetent, or evil and just trying to look incompetent, or some combination of both?

As Paul Krugman notes today:

It's widely expected that President Bush will talk a lot about health care in his State of the Union address. He probably won't boast about his prescription drug plan, whose debut has been a Katrina-like saga of confusion and incompetence. But he probably will tout proposals for so-called "consumer driven" health care.

So it's important to realize that the administration's idea of health care reform is to take what's wrong with our system and make it worse.

And the question about Bush supporters is - are they stupid, evil, or both?

In which I scoop the Village Voice

"Bush Declares War Against the Times" says the cover of the latest Village Voice, referring to an article by Sydney Schanberg entitled The Messenger Takes a Beating about criticism of the NYTimes' decision to wait over a year before revealing what it knew about Bush's illegal spying.

On this blog on Friday December 30, I put up a post entitled "Bush declares war on NYTimes" on the same subject.

I also blogged about Wikipedia on December 7 in a post entitled Beware Wikipedia - the Voice's cover article is about Wikipedia.

Go me.

Blogging the kids

For some reason, many of the women bloggers who read the same blogs I read, liberal, feminist blogs, feel the need to blog about their kids. Sometimes even including photos of the kids.

Maybe it's just me, but I have to wonder if anybody but relatives want to read about some blogger's kids. It's like having some stranger come up to me and ask me to look at their wallet photos of their kids or ask me to look at their kid's report card.

They usually post about other things besides their kids, but if I see a blog full of posts and pix of kids, I'm not going to stay and search for their smackdown of Bush. There are too many blogs out there that specialize in Bush smackdowns that spare me the latest stranger's kid's newsflash.

I'm not anti-kid. If somebody has kids, swell. Kids are important. I have a kid myself. I even blogged about her once - but that was only because her photo was in the NYTimes during the transit strike. And the post didn't include some cute thing she said. The cutest thing she said lately was that it's well-known that lesbians get off on watching two guys go at it. This was news to me, and completely counter-intuitive to my understanding of sexual orientation. Kids really do say the darndest things.

But rarely is it interesting enough to share with the world.

Friday ABC floating dog blogging

Watch the floating dog float here.

Katha Pollitt kicks ass again

Katha Pollitt kicks ass again with her latest column in The Nation, "Girls Against Boys?"

When the HELL is the New York Times going to wise up and HIRE KATHA POLLITT as an op-ed columnist??? Gail Collins, the Times's op-ed editor doesn't think women are as comfortable as men writing opinion stuff. And the Times's token women op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd says that " As a woman... I wanted to be liked - not attacked." Typical Dowd, mistaking her personal obsession - wanting to be liked - for some sort of innate female trait.

I say the Times should retire Dowd's faux feminist ass now and replace her with Pollitt. If the Times is only able to have one columnist to represent 51% of humankind, they could AT LEAST choose someone who isn't an embarrassment to women. Someone who isn't incredibly shallow and obsessed with the quest for popularity and getting invited to Kool Kidz' cocktail parties.

If the Times hired Pollitt, she would automatically be their BEST columnist with the possible exception of Paul Krugman.

In her latest column, Pollitt examines the fears of David Brooks clone John Tierney and his fellow wingnuts. It seems that because there are now more girls than boys in college, Western society is on the verge of collapse thanks to the wilting wangs of manly men too intimidated by educated females to reproduce.

Pollitt's actual comments are more nuanced than that, but then she has an editor and gets paid to opine.

I'm looking forward to her next column, in which she plans to address ongoing sex discrimination in employment.

The secret of Wal-Mart's success: indentured servants

A judge approved a class-action lawsuit against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. by employees in Pennsylvania who say the company pressured them to work off the clock, claims that mirror those in suits filed around the country.

A California jury last month awarded Wal-Mart workers $172 million for illegally denied lunch breaks, while Wal-Mart settled a similar Colorado case for $50 million.

In Pennsylvania, the lead plaintiff's suit alleges she worked through breaks and after quitting time -- eight to 12 unpaid hours a month, on average -- to meet work demands.

''One of Wal-Mart's undisclosed secrets for its profitability is its creation and implementation of a system that encourages off-the-clock work for its hourly employees, ...'' Dolores Hummel, who worked at a Sam's Club in Reading from 1992-2002, charged in her suit.

More at the NYTimes

Go geek girl

The poster girl for classmates.com is supposed to be a geek and you're supposed to be amazed that she married that popular boy.

Looks like geek girl gets herself plenty of that popular boy action.

Letterman to O'Reily: I have the feeling about 60% of what you say is crap

In case you missed it.

The Letterman - O'Reilly video.

The crap comment comes near the end of this clip.

HELLCAB

I saw HELLCAB, an off-off Broadway show Saturday and I really liked it. This is highly unusual. Normally about ten minutes into an off-off Broadway show I want to rip my own head off.

The lousiness of much off-off Broadway can be attributed to Sturgeon's law, which says that 90% of everything is crap.

But some of it - the head-ripping bits - are due to the desperate desire on the part of hipster theatre people to demonstrate that they are free of "political correctness." This leads to any number of stupidities, excessive vulgarities and wanton cruelties, because while the anti-PC crowd knows better than to come out and be explicitly racist or sexist, they have to be obnoxious to show that they aren't being pussywhipped by politeness or empathy or sensitivity.

Rising Sun Performance Company's HELLCAB was refreshing because the lead character, a taxi driver in Chicago, is a liberal who cringes when a black guy says that a recent immigrant is not a real American, and again when a businessman calls a passing woman a "nigger."

The author, Will Kern, doesn't feel the need to be funny as a method of declaring his freedom from political correctness, so his scenarios are genuinely amusing.

HELLCAB has some definite flaws though - primarily the ending, which seems overly-sentimental and tacked-on. But most of the time I was totally engaged.

The premise of the play is simple - a day in the life of a cab driver. Of course it isn't a typical boring workday. The cab driver picks up sex fiends, druggies, a pregnant woman on the verge of giving birth, a wacked-out puppet man, New York sports fans and a rape victim.

I think there's a synergy at work in the show, between director, writer and actors. Why else would one of the play's funniest lines be "I have to have my pants"?

The play's primary focus is the reactions of the compassionate cab driver, played by Nic Mevoli, to being interrogated, insulted, grossed out, groped and dragged into passenger disputes.

Mevoli is a great find. The show's director, Akia, told me after the show that she had Mevoli in mind when deciding to redo the play - Rising Sun did another version a few years earlier. That was a good call. Not many off-off Broadway actors are as engaging as Mevoli. He begins with a downtrodden everyman vibe in his performance, and as the evening wears on, he morphs into a young Harrison Ford, extremely charismatic and able to communicate worlds of emotion through a raised eyebrow or a sidelong glance.

I went to the play at the request of Reagan Wilson, a HELLCAB cast member who is also an actor member of my group NYCPlaywrights. Reagan was great in three distinctly different roles - a lawyer, the pregnant woman, and a party girl on the way to meet her boyfriend. The other actors I saw were also great.

I hate so many off-off Broadway plays I was starting to think there was something wrong with me. This show made me realize there are good shows, it isn't just me, and there is hope for off-off Broadway after all.

For more information about HELLCAB, which will run until the end of January, see Rising Sun's web site at http://www.risingsunnyc.com/.

Oleanna Essay

For years it annoyed me that critics and audiences were missing what David Mamet was saying with his play Oleanna, so I wrote an essay about it. One of the few people who read it, Laurence Cantor an actor in my playwrights group, told his sister about it. She teaches a course at SUNY and had her students read it. I'm so proud.

Here's an excerpt from "History is Written by the Winners"

While I'm sure that even feminist groups are capable of doing bad things, I have never heard of a feminist group using blackmail to ban a book. I'm not saying it's impossible - but I am saying that there's no evidence this has ever happened in the history of feminism. If there was, Katie Roiphe would have shouted it from the mountaintops by now.

This is a problem for Mamet, because political correctness as it is actually practiced would not serve his message. Silly speech codes and public demonstrations are not sinister enough and would probably make a better comedy than a tragedy. So Mamet invents the feminist version of the International Jew, a skulking, ruthless, extremely powerful cabal, able to arrange John's personal destruction through nothing more than hearsay from a mentally challenged undergraduate.

The entire essay is here.

Bush-Hitchens script at Gothamimage

I love this script from Gothamimage - the Bush dialog is especially inspired, and Hitchens is creepily realistic.

Excerpt:

President Bush:
Ok... bimbo. You don't believe in God, but you do believe in ME right? In Moi? Go on, say it, say Moi-uncle or Moiuncle. Haha.

C. Hitchens:
Car c'est à toi qu'appartiennent le règne, la puissance et la gloire, pour les siècles des siècles.

President Bush:
Que pasa, Lumpy?

C. Hitchens:
Yes, I believe in you. Do I have a choice? Thine is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever and ever, or at least I until patch things up with old lefty friends and maintain my green card status and ...

President Bush:
Why speak French? Don't be a Snobby Slimey Limey Hoochy - an SSLH?

C. Hitchens:
Habit, maybe. You used the French word "moi," so I decided to engage. In any event, you may find a measure of French to be quite useful in your Court, if for no other reason than to protect many simple ears from hearing your complicated thoughts, such as they are. Sometimes leadership compells one to protect the rabble in the marketplace from itself. Also, speaking French pisses off all the right people.

President Bush:
What marketplace? Barney Rubble? Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, Mr. Flintstone? Ha, so "Moi" is French? Gotta stop using that one. No wonder Jackass Chiracass was confused when I kept calling him Mister Moi. Anyway, your excuse sounds cool, Dweebacle. You can go now. Game time. Glad to help.

C. Hitchens:
Dweebacle? That's ghastly.

President Bush:
Ghastly? Not me pal. He who smelt it, dealt it. Watch what you eat Hooch. Don't you know there's a war on???

Help lamer wingnut cartoonist find the funny

Amanda wants you to help Chris Muir find TEH FUNNY!


See the whole cartoon pastiche here

Who is "Risen?"

Friday New York Times Cat Blogging

DNA Offers New Insight Concerning Cat Evolution

About nine million years ago - two million years after the cat family first appeared in Asia - these successful predators invaded North America by crossing the Beringian land bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska, a team of geneticists writes in the journal Science today.

Later, several American cat lineages returned to Asia. With each migration, evolutionary forces morphed the pantherlike patriarch of all cats into a rainbow of species, from ocelots and lynxes to leopards, lions and the lineage that led to the most successful cat of all, even though it has mostly forsaken its predatory heritage: the cat that has induced people to pay for its board and lodging in return for frugal displays of affection.

This new history of the family, known as Felidae, is based on DNA analyses of the 37 living species performed by Warren E. Johnson and Stephen J. O'Brien of the National Cancer Institute and colleagues elsewhere.

Of course the article includes the obligatory anti-cat slam with the "frugal displays of affection" line.

The Mystery of Vanity Fair

I have only a short blogroll, and James Wolcott's blog is on it. He writes well, he's witty, he's liberal and he loves to mock right-wingers. He did claim to be a friend of the loathsome Camille Paglia (I use loathsome for brevity's sake, in place of "misogynistic", "pretentious", "shallow", "anti-Semitic", "self-infatuated", "empty-headed", "crackpot" and "friend of Rush Limbaugh") but he only mentioned her the one time, so I forgave him, especially with all the Pajamas Media hilarity he's conveyed lately.

His most recent blog post promotes his bread and butter job at Vanity Fair magazine, but sorry, James, (Wools? Wolly? Cotty? one wonders what the wags of the Vanity Fair set have jocularly dubbed him) that's where I draw the line.

Once or more a year, I really don't keep track, The New Yorker has a "fashion" issue. Half the magazine is wasted on stupid glamor ads and even an article or two about fashion.

It seems to me that subscribing to Vanity Fair would be like getting the fashion issue of the New Yorker every month.

Vanity Fair, like the New Yorker, is part of the Condé Nast family of publications, but so is Glamour and Vogue and Bride's, Elegant Bride and Modern Bride (what, you can't be both an Elegant AND a Modern Bride? And what's with all the fucking Bride magazines anyway? Are there really enough Brides to read them all? Or is the bifurcation of brides into elegant and modern part of a clever plan to force modern, elegant brides to purchase two magazines to cover all their archetypal bases?)

You have the New Yorker for fiction, non-fiction (including some of the best political and medical reporting around) reviews, arts and culture listings and cartoons - on a weekly schedule. If you want fashion you go to your Glamour-Vogue-Bride option. Having Vanity Fair trying to cover both New Yorker territory and G-V-B3 territory is the opposite of the clever modern/elegant bride scheme. So who is Vanity Fair aimed at? Someone who is too cheap to subscribe to both the New Yorker and one or more of the fashion mags? Hardly what advertisers are looking for, is it?

I mean, how can anybody over 40 care about fashion anyway? Once you hit 40, unless you're Madonna and you work out 12 hours a day and spend whatever it takes to maintain an unnaturally youthful appearance, nobody's all that interested in looking at you, and that includes men in spite of all the "men age better" bullshit you hear. They don't age better appearance-wise, they age into wealth.

But even if you are under 40, do you really need to buy a magazine to figure out what to wear? On a monthly basis? Even if you're wealthy enough to afford to buy designer fashions?

Not only does Vanity Fair care about fashion, it indulges in - nay, sets the standard for the Best Dressed List. The Best Dressed List, like the word loathsome, encompasses so many things I hate: celebrity worship, plutocraphilia, fashion obsession, and gossip-column discourse.

THIS JUST IN: The New York Times reports today that many of the Best Dressed Lists don't even have integrity!

"Everyone has a best-dressed list now, to the point that it has become empty and meaningless," said Amy Fine Collins, a special correspondent for Vanity Fair and one of the guardians of what is generally considered the most authoritative of American best-dressed lists. It was created in the 1940's by Eleanor Lambert, the fashion publicist. The list had such prestige that those selected, women like Nan Kempner, Babe Paley, Carolina Herrera and Lynn Wyatt, referred to themselves as B.D.L.'s.

Before Ms. Lambert died in 2003, she passed it on to four editors of Vanity Fair, Ms. Collins; Aimee Bell, a senior articles editor; Reinaldo Herrera, a contributing editor; and Graydon Carter, the top editor, with the idea that the magazine would continue publishing an annual list. For two years it has done so.

But Vanity Fair's 2006 list has been put off, at least for a few months. The sending out of ballots to nearly 2,000 fashion editors and journalists, normally completed by now, has not yet begun. The reason?

"There were too many other lists," said Ms. Collins, a member of the B.D.L. Hall of Fame, a distinction given to those elected so often that their sartorial superiority goes without saying. "Six or seven years ago you wouldn't find any others, but when Ms. Lambert disappeared, it became wide-open season. It opened the door to the idea that best-dressed lists are a universally interesting journalistic undertaking."

Vanity Fair's list will return once it can regain an element of surprise, Ms. Collins said. She said she suspected the other magazines had attempted to "jump the gun on Vanity Fair." But she is having none of it. "What the others represent," she said, "are special favors to the darlings of whatever magazine is in question. Or it looks like they are doing favors or payback to P.R. people."

When our very Best Dressed Lists have become empty and meaningless we are truly slouching towards Gomorrah.

As if I needed another reason to hold Vanity Fair in low esteem (besides that they also publish war-monger turncoat Holocaust-denier-supporter - ah fuck it, loathsome Christopher Hitchens), I see that they feature that stalker Jennifer Aniston on their cover. Well, I'm sure Vanity Fair featured Aniston first, before imitation rendered it empty and meaningless (and obnoxiously ubiquitous.)

So why DOES Wolcott write for Vanity Fair? They're full up at The New Yorker? He can't really be interested in fashion can he? Cause based on the pix I've seen, he's well over 40 and ain't nobody looking at him for a hobby. Maybe fashion is some sort of genteel erotic fetish?

ANISTON! I said QUIT IT BITCH! No means no! I'm getting a court order to keep your face out of my life!

BoBo's world

via Atrios

Lonnie Latham, senior pastor at South Tulsa Baptist Church, was booked into Oklahoma County Jail Tuesday night on a misdemeanor charge of offering to engage in an act of lewdness, police Capt. Jeffrey Becker said. Latham was released on $500 bail Wednesday afternoon.

Latham, who has spoken out against homosexuality, asked the officer to join him in his hotel room for oral sex. Latham was arrested and his 2005 Mercedes automobile was impounded, Becker said.

more...

India's sex police

In a society where dating is frowned upon, public parks remain among the only places where couples can avail themselves of intimacy, from talking to necking and petting with abandon under the arms of a shady tree. Even if it is in broad daylight in a public park, romance before marriage remains taboo in small-town India, which is why the spectacle in Gandhi Park turned out to be such a big deal: to be outed in this way, on national television, is to bring terrible shame and recrimination on yourself and your family.

So alarming, in fact, was it for Amit Sharma and his girlfriend of two years that the pair ran away from home hours after the incident, only to return more than a day later after their parents went to fetch them from a nearby town where they were hiding and agreed, in principle, to let them marry.

A couple of days later, Mr. Sharma, 22 years old and unemployed, described the jarring episode. The police swooped down on the couples in the park "as though we were terrorists," grabbed them by their collars, hurled abuses and separated the men and women. He could hear his girlfriend, Anshu, crying and could hear the police yelling at her: "Your parents send you to college to study! What are you doing here?"

"I pleaded with the police, 'Please let us go,' " he recalled. Eventually, they were all let go. No one was charged with a crime.

That afternoon in Gandhi Park, even a young woman sitting alone was not spared. The woman, who gave her name only as Priyanka, said she was waiting on a park bench when the shouting of the police and their targets interrupted her thoughts. Getting up from her bench, Priyanka said she walked in the direction of the commotion when a police officer, Ms. Gautam, as it turned out, pounced on her and accused her of being a prostitute.

More at the NYTimes

Hopefully this won't give our homegrown religious nutjobs any ideas...

January is anti-women's month at the NYTimes

Tom Tomorrow asked, not long ago - Stupid or lying and featured David Brooks.

But anybody who reads his crap knows the answer - David Brooks, unaffectionately known as "Bobo" in the liberal blogosphere, is stupid as dirt.

He treats us to his typical stupidity in today's NYTimes:

(Linda Hirshman's) third mistake is to not even grapple with the fact that men and women are wired differently. The Larry Summers flap produced an outpouring of work on the neurological differences between men and women. I'd especially recommend "The Inequality Taboo" by Charles Murray in Commentary and a debate between Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke in the online magazine Edge.

I LOVE the fact that Brooks links to the debate between Pinker and Spelke because Spelke DEMOLISHES Pinker, who maintains that males are wired for the abstract more than females. Does Brooks even READ what he cites???

And of course he has to cite Charles Murray, whose deeply flawed but highly publicized The Bell Curve was debunked by many, including Nicholas Lemann in Slate.

But how much influence does Brooks have on his clone John Tierney? Is it a coincidence that right after Brooks wrote his idiotic column, Tierney wrote one about how it's not good for a woman to earn too much money or no man will want her?

The only surprise in Tierney's article is that he didn't cite any evolutionary psychology to support his opinion. Perhaps he feels that the absolute truth of evolutionary psychology is so entrenched in our minds that nobody would even question whether "Male Pride and Female Prejudice" is a symptom of a culture that until very recently didn't allow women the chance to earn a decent wage. No, surely this is an eternal reality in the big empty mind of John Tierney - because that's how things were when he was growing up, you see, and he lacks the knowledge or imagination to understand the fluidity of social attitudes.

Sorry Tierney, you STILL have to come up with some evolutionary psychology flimflam to bolster your opinion.

Oops, I skimmed through Tierney's article too quickly. He DOES cite David Buss, a major evolutionary psychologist. But the evpsychs all got the same memo:

Helena Cronin's policy paper to the British government, reprinted as an editorial Pity the Poor Men way back in 2000 goes a step further than BoBo - she proposed that the British government take steps to ensure that women are not able to earn more money than men! Cronin cites David Buss's infamous 37-country study to back her case for enshrining the beliefs of evolutionary psychologists in the British bureaucracy.

Brooks was harping women's essential inferiority last January. Tierney hadn't been given his own op-ed at that point, but Nicholas Kristof took up the slack by claiming that feminists just didn't care about sex slavery, while Christian evangelicals did and got faux feminist and David Horowitz's pal Donna M. Hughes to agree with him on behalf of feminists.

Echidne, Amanda at Pandagon Tom Tomorrow and Atrios all have something to say about the Brooks article. It's a virtual BoboFest2006!

Required reading: The Case for Contamination

The NYTimes's Sunday Magazine has a superb article on Cosmopolitanism - nothing to do with the drink or the magazine.

The title of the article is The Case for Contamination written by Princeton's Kwame Anthony Appiah.

The article is a long and multi-faceted call for the de-sanctification of cultural traditions that Twisty recently made, albeit a tad more succinctly in her immortal blog post Fuck Culture.

You should read the entire article, but I can't resist posting what I consider some of the article's highlights:

Our guide to what is going on here might as well be a former African slave named Publius Terentius Afer, whom we know as Terence. Terence, born in Carthage, was taken to Rome in the early second century B.C., and his plays - witty, elegant works that are, with Plautus's earlier, less-cultivated works, essentially all we have of Roman comedy - were widely admired among the city's literary elite. Terence's own mode of writing - which involved freely incorporating any number of earlier Greek plays into a single Latin one - was known to Roman littérateurs as "contamination."

It's an evocative term. When people speak for an ideal of cultural purity, sustaining the authentic culture of the Asante or the American family farm, I find myself drawn to contamination as the name for a counterideal. Terence had a notably firm grasp on the range of human variety: "So many men, so many opinions" was a line of his. And it's in his comedy "The Self-Tormentor" that you'll find what may be the golden rule of cosmopolitanism - Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto; "I am human: nothing human is alien to me." The context is illuminating. A busybody farmer named Chremes is told by his neighbor to mind his own affairs; the homo sum credo is Chremes's breezy rejoinder. It isn't meant to be an ordinance from on high; it's just the case for gossip. Then again, gossip - the fascination people have for the small doings of other people - has been a powerful force for conversation among cultures.

The ideal of contamination has few exponents more eloquent than Salman Rushdie, who has insisted that the novel that occasioned his fatwa "celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotch-potch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world." No doubt there can be an easy and spurious utopianism of "mixture," as there is of "purity" or "authenticity." And yet the larger human truth is on the side of contamination - that endless process of imitation and revision.

That's almost the very end of the article and gives the big picture view, but the article is just as great in dealing with specifics:

The preservationists often make their case by invoking the evil of "cultural imperialism." Their underlying picture, in broad strokes, is this: There is a world system of capitalism. It has a center and a periphery. At the center - in Europe and the United States - is a set of multinational corporations. Some of these are in the media business. The products they sell around the world promote the creation of desires that can be fulfilled only by the purchase and use of their products. They do this explicitly through advertising, but more insidiously, they also do so through the messages implicit in movies and in television drama. Herbert Schiller, a leading critic of "media-cultural imperialism," claimed that "it is the imagery and cultural perspectives of the ruling sector in the center that shape and structure consciousness throughout the system at large."

That's the theory, anyway. But the evidence doesn't bear it out. Researchers have actually gone out into the world and explored the responses to the hit television series "Dallas" in Holland and among Israeli Arabs, Moroccan Jewish immigrants, kibbutzniks and new Russian immigrants to Israel. They have examined the actual content of the television media - whose penetration of everyday life far exceeds that of film - in Australia, Brazil, Canada, India and Mexico. They have looked at how American popular culture was taken up by the artists of Sophiatown, in South Africa. They have discussed "Days of Our Lives" and "The Bold and the Beautiful" with Zulu college students from traditional backgrounds.

And one thing they've found is that how people respond to these cultural imports depends on their existing cultural context. When the media scholar Larry Strelitz spoke to students from KwaZulu-Natal, he found that they were anything but passive vessels. One of them, Sipho - a self-described "very, very strong Zulu man" - reported that he had drawn lessons from watching the American soap opera "Days of Our Lives," "especially relationship-wise." It fortified his view that "if a guy can tell a woman that he loves her, she should be able to do the same." What's more, after watching the show, Sipho "realized that I should be allowed to speak to my father. He should be my friend rather than just my father." It seems doubtful that that was the intended message of multinational capitalism's ruling sector.

And most gratifying for a feminist:

So liberty and diversity may well be at odds, and the tensions between them aren't always easily resolved. But the rhetoric of cultural preservation isn't any help. Again, the contradictions are near to hand. Take another look at that Unesco Convention. It affirms the "principle of equal dignity of and respect for all cultures." (What, all cultures - including those of the K.K.K. and the Taliban?) It also affirms "the importance of culture for social cohesion in general, and in particular its potential for the enhancement of the status and role of women in society." (But doesn't "cohesion" argue for uniformity? And wouldn't enhancing the status and role of women involve changing, rather than preserving, cultures?) In Saudi Arabia, people can watch "Will and Grace" on satellite TV - officially proscribed, but available all the same - knowing that, under Saudi law, Will could be beheaded in a public square. In northern Nigeria, mullahs inveigh against polio vaccination while sentencing adulteresses to death by stoning. In India, thousands of wives are burned to death each year for failing to make their dowry payments. Vive la différence? Please.

I do have a minor cultural materialist quibble. Appiah actually sounds like a cultural materialist when he makes the argument that changes in social customs are generally not the result of arguments and reasoning:

Consider the practice of foot-binding in China, which persisted for a thousand years - and was largely eradicated within a generation. The anti-foot-binding campaign, in the 1910's and 1920's, did circulate facts about the disadvantages of bound feet, but those couldn't have come as news to most people. Perhaps more effective was the campaign's emphasis that no other country went in for the practice; in the world at large, then, China was "losing face" because of it. (To China's cultural preservationists, of course, the fact that the practice was peculiar to the region was entirely a mark in its favor.) Natural-foot societies were formed, with members forswearing the practice and further pledging that their sons would not marry women with bound feet. As the movement took hold, scorn was heaped on older women with bound feet, and they were forced to endure the agonies of unbinding. What had been beautiful became ugly; ornamentation became disfigurement. The appeal to reason can explain neither the custom nor its abolition.

The idea that arguments, reasoning and logic are not the engines of cultural change is solidily cultural materialist. But he sort of drops the ball when it comes to explaing what does cause cultural change, this time in reference to social acceptance of homosexuality:

One of the great savants of the postwar era, John von Neumann, liked to say, mischievously, that "in mathematics you don't understand things, you just get used to them." As in mathematical arguments, so in moral ones. Now, I don't deny that all the time, at every stage, people were talking, giving one another reasons to do things: accept their children, stop treating homosexuality as a medical disorder, disagree with their churches, come out. Still, the short version of the story is basically this: People got used to lesbians and gay men.

There was a reason that people "got used to lesbians and gay men" at the time they did. Marvin Harris naturally addresses this in his Why Nothing Works (AKA America Now). I also have a video of Marvin Harris discussing varieties of cultural acceptance of homosexuality worldwide on my cultural materialism web site.

But since Appiah is not an anthropologist but a philosopher, I can easily forgive him for not delving further.

According to the article, this essay is adapted from "Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers," to be published later this month by W.W. Norton.

I've already ordered my copy of Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers

Savinsucks.com

I love the web site SavinSucks.com which is devoted entirely to the issue of Peter Sachs's right to express an unflattering opinion.

Mr. Sachs registered the domain name 'savinsucks.com.' The Savin Corporation didn't like it and threatened to sue. You can read all about it on the web site.

The best part of this web site is when Sachs, who is also an attorney, makes Savin's attorney of record, David Einhorn of Anderson, Kill & Olick, P.C. look like a fool:

However, if you are so certain that your client will prevail, I encourage you to bring an action against me. I am confident I will prevail on summary judgement. In fact, I am so confident that I have just registered the domain name "andersonkillsucks.com."

Read the entire letter in PDF format here.

Shakespeare under the picnic table

New Years Eve always reminds me of Shakespeare. Because my worst New Years Eve to date was spent on a Philadelphia train when I was semi-homeless and heading for my ex-husband's apartment with the complete annotated works of William Shakespeare under my arm. My ex-husband wasn't home so I had to go back from whence I came. I was too tired to lug Shakespeare back again so I left the set of books under the picnic table, out of the freezing rain and went to catch a bus, only to have my last five dollars stolen when I gave it to somebody who said he had change.

When I got back late New Year's Day, there was Shakespeare, under the picnic table. I was greatly relieved. This was in the days before easy access to the Internet, before you could just go online and read the complete works of Shakespeare for free.

I fell in love with Shakespeare years before I became a playwright - I wanted to be an illustrator then. I had been exposed to Shakespeare in high school but Julius Caesar is not really the right way to get teenagers interested in Big Bill. I mean, in theory I could see that it was a good play, but who really cared about a bunch of guys in togas babbling about the ides of March?

I was nineteen when I saw the BBC's version of As You Like It on public television. I just couldn't believe how great it was, and in ways I didn't expect. The female characters, especially Rosalind and her cousin Celia, were witty, affectionate and fun, and they win in the end, and the story, though fanciful and even silly in spots, had some great banter and fun situations - like when Rosalind dresses as a boy and then makes hottie Orlando woo her as Rosalind. It really blew my mind.

So I was excited to get A. L. Rowse's "The Annotated Shakespeare" for Christmas that year. It's a handsome three-volume set not only annotated but copiously illustrated too. Thanks to the Internet (how did we make it before the Internet?) I find that Rowse was a big deal in the world of Shakespeare scholarship. He has an entry in the Encylopedia Britannica's Guide to Shakespeare. He died in 1997 and I was surprised to read that he was gay because throughout his Annotated work he really emphasizes Shakespeare's heterosexuality, which I think is still pretty disputable - I think Shakespeare may well have been bisexual.

Less suprisingly Rowse was a Stratfordian - that is, on the question of the identity of the author of Julius Caesar and As You Like It and others he believed that it was a guy from Stratford-on-Avon, the son of a glover and sometime wool merchant. Rowse's family was working class and those of us from non-exalted backgrounds tend to be resistant to Oxfordian (partisans of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford) arguments which are mainly based on snobbery - 'how could Shakespeare know so much about royalty and the law and anything that takes any thought whatsoever when he was working class?' There is an excellent web site, The Shakespeare Authorship Page that answers arguments from Oxfordians, Marlovians, Baconians and all the others.

Another good Stratfordian whose work I discovered via public television, is Michael Wood. His book "Shakespeare" is a companion to his four part series In Search of Shakespeare. He not only demostrates that there is plenty of evidence that the guy from Stratford wrote the plays, he makes a good case that strife between the new Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church had a big impact on Shakespeare's personal life and work. He also provides a reproduction of the "Grafton Portrait" (see above) and speculates that it might be a painting of a young Shakespeare. The young man in the Grafton has alot in common with later portraits of Shakespeare: the big forehead, the heavy eyelids, the sensitive mouth and pointed chin.

There is a belief in the theatre world that the plays of Shakespeare are so great and so popular because of the language. I think this is wrong. Very often the language is so poetic or plain obscure that only people who have spent time studying the plays - like (ahem) reading annotated versions - have a real appreciation of what's being said. And it isn't just not understanding; there are times when what's being said is confusing or misleading.

For example, when Hamlet sees the ghost of his father for the first time he wants to go after him. But Horatio and Marcellus try to hold him back, and he says:

Unhand me, gentlemen. By heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me!

By "lets" he means (as Rowse helpfully annotates) "hinders" and that made sense to the Elizabethans, but it means exactly the opposite in contemporary usage.

No, I think there are two main reasons for Shakespeare's popularity in the modern repertory. First because of his plots. He borrowed many of his plots, but always added his own details to increase the excitement. That's why West Side Story and Ten Things I Hate About You to come up with just two off the top of my head, are considered remakes of Romeo and Juliet and Taming of the Shrew, in spite of using none of Shakespeare's language.

The other reason for Shakespeare's popularity is that he wrote decent parts for women. You can't say that about plenty of contemporary playwrights. Shakespeare's work stands out from so many playwrights for the sheer variety of female parts - from clever Rosalind to innocent Ophelia to crafty Lady MacBeth to stalwart Mistress Quickly to sadistic Goneril. Men still get far more and more various parts of course, but that's to be expected for a time when women couldn't even act on the public stage. Shakespeare had more of an excuse than contemporary playwrights.

Bush declares war on NYTimes

The NYTimes revealed the Bush gang's illegal spy network and Bush & Co. are out to get them and the whistle-blower.

The Justice Department has opened an investigation into the leak of classified information about President Bush's secret domestic spying program, Justice officials said Friday.

The officials, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the probe, said the inquiry will focus on disclosures to The New York Times about warrantless surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

More at the NYTimes

My guess is that the Bush Administration thought they had an understanding with the NYTimes - clearly the Times was in league with the Bushies on the Iraq War - but when the Times revealed it cut a deal with the Administration before the election not to reveal the spy network, the Bush Crime Syndicate declared war on the NYTimes. This Justice Department investigation is the declaration of war.

Read Media Matters for America's 'Top 12 media myths and falsehoods on the Bush administration's spying scandal'

Scalia's distinguished acting career

As a playwright I'm always interested in theatre-related trivia. Not enough people are aware of Antonin Scalia's acting accomplishments, as revealed in a New Yorker article in March of this year:

Scalia was an excellent student, a debate champion, and an enthusiastic actor. (He played the lead in "Macbeth" and the angel Gabriel in "The Green Pastures," which a school publication described as "a humorous characterization of the Negro interpretation of the Bible." Another student was "De Lawd.")

Why OUR TOWN is great

There is a segment of the theatre world who consider Thorton Wilder's play OUR TOWN nothing but a bunch of sentiment and nostalgia. You would think that people who care about theater would tend to be more sensitive, perceptive and empathetic than the general population. But you would be wrong.

But those of us who pay attention recognize that OUR TOWN is every bit as abstract, philosophical and intense a portrayal of the human condition as WAITING FOR GODOT.

Part of the problem of OUR TOWN is that it is popular and frequently done by amateur outfits and community theatre. This automatically makes it mind-poison to those who consider themselves cutting edge and who crave novelty for its own sake to satisfy their jaded sensibilities and fill up their vast stretches of free time.

GODOT is popular too, but it ranks higher in the theatre world's hipometer for a few reasons. One, because there are no females in GODOT, and Samuel Beckett's storm troopers scour the world looking for any attempts to cast females in any of the four roles of GODOT. This abhorrence of the feminine fits very comfortably in today's theatre world. Theatre people at the present time are very anxious about feminization. The fear is that although literature has "chick-lit" and film has "chickflicks" - concepts that safely ghettoize and stigmatize art aimed at the majority (51%) of the human race - the entire theatre world is in danger of becoming chick. This is why the current fashion is for plays that reject anything soft or humane, culminating in THE PILLOWMAN with its torture death of a little girl.

The other big strike against OUR TOWN is that it portrays non-disfunctional families. This is an absolute taboo in contemporary theatre. Critics and playwrights and directors, who mostly come from the upper class, like nothing so much as a good wallow in the squalor and disfunction of the bourgeoisie. OUR TOWN gives them the exact opposite of what they crave.

This is not to say that there is no pain and suffering in OUR TOWN. In fact, the pain and suffering are so affecting exactly because the characters who experience them have been shown to us in their mundane existences. Existences with facets that are familiar even to members of the upper class, like parents and siblings and breakfast and love.

But to be a hipster, as you must be to be a respectable theatre person in New York, you must divorce yourself from common human emotions, especially soft, sympathetic, "feminine" emotions.

That's why GODOT will remain more respectable than OUR TOWN - it's about the human condition, but it's not overly emotional about it. If OUR TOWN is done right, and you aren't a block of ice, it will make you cry. And boys don't cry.

It's a fact that the New York theatre world is longing for its very own Quentin Tarantino - young, male, macho, violent, opposed to feminine weakness.

There are plenty of young men who heed the call. As the founder of a playwrights group with an open-door policy, I've seen my share of them.

Case in point: a former member of my group wrote a play called ANATHEMAVILLE which is supposedly his response to OUR TOWN. He did a production in the past year, and it was reviewed by Martin Denton in NYTheatre.com. As he says:

Venters uses the classic play Our Town as point of departure and framing device. Venters co-opts the structure of Thornton Wilder's play, most of its famous scenes and images (i.e., he gets two characters up on ladders talking about life near the end of Act I; shows us his young couple on a date in a 21st century shopping-center version of a drug store; etc.), and even makes use of a narrator (Uber-Mart greeter/security guard Leo stands in for the earlier play's Stage Manager). Venters's notion, I presume, is to juxtapose the idyllic American way of life supposedly depicted in Our Town with the crass present-day plastic life epitomized by mass-marketing goliaths like his Uber-Mart.

Alas, here's where Venters starts to go badly astray, for he makes the wrong assumption about Our Town (i.e., that it's sentimental claptrap) and indulges in parody—of the Wilder play, not of life in Wal-Mart-Land.

I'm glad that Denton understands how wrong Venters is about OUR TOWN.

I didn't see the production, I only heard a table reading a year before, so perhaps the script changed somewhat - although I doubt it. In the table reading, one female character recounts her childhood sexual abuse, and it is played for laughs - she's raped in "funny" ways with various articles of food. When I expressed my disgust after the reading was through, I was shocked to find that nobody else had a problem with this. The problem was me - I was taking it too seriously, according to them.

The playwright was not only a young attractive white male, he had tattoos and various facial piercings. No way my opinions would count against such a paragon of hipness.

I am grateful that of the two reviews I found for the show, both slammed ANATHEMAVILLE. I think it's more because of the flagrant self-indulgence of the play, which came in at four hours with two intermissions than the wanton and pointless cruelty. And of course Ben Brantley of the NYTimes never got to see it - he might have loved it as much as he loved PILLOWMAN.

Another show that was just as bad for many of the same reasons was recently produced by another former member of my group. APATHY was not as universally panned as ANATHEMAVILLE, because apathy, being devoid of those unsightly feminine emotions is just too fucking hip. But believe me when I tell you this play is a huge reeking turd. In fact, I'd say it's worse than ANATHEMAVILLE because at least that play was trying to say something about Wal-Mart, albeit in an absolutely incoherent manner.

APATHY is about a bunch of assholes sitting around being mean to each other, pointlessly and endlessly. The play's hero is a fucktard who makes prank phone calls to his senile grandmother. Plus, oh joy of joys, half-assed rock tunes, which makes this into a "musical."

The author provides the best review on his web site which says: "Apathy: The Gen X Musical is full of the kind of people who'd annoy the hell out of you if you were dumb enough to attempt a friendship with them. But at a safe emotional distance, they can be very entertaining."

I agree - if you think having a root canal is entertaining.

These people are just wanking off, and nothing that they do will be remembered in ten years. Because while posing as too cool for soft "feminine" emotions may make you popular with the idiots who decide such things, it will make you write nasty forgettable plays.

OUR TOWN does not shrink from empathy, even for females and the middle-class. And unapologetic, abundant empathy is the critical ingredient for a great play.


More about OUR TOWN

PBS web site

OUR TOWN at Amazon

The video version with Spalding Gray as the Stage Manager, my favorite.

Aaron Copland wrote the score for the 1940 movie version of the play. It has a beautiful, haunting theme.

- - - - -

Some critics had second thoughts about THE PILLOWMAN:

Charles Isherwood of the NYTimes

and

Charles McNulty in the Village Voice

TIME TO IMPEACH GEORGE W. BUSH

Before he has created an unstoppable dictatorship

Jonathan Alter: "We’re seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator..."

The Nation: the I-Word is Gaining Ground

Alternet: A Time to Impeach

Vote to Impeach Bush

Impeach Bush

Impeach Bush Coalition

ImpeachPAC

Jennifer Aniston is stalking me

She's everywhere! I take a drive through the city - on billboards and taxis and the sides of a bus. I go to the supermarket - there she is again, by the checkout lane. I go home to escape but it's NO USE! All the blogs I like to visit - there she IS! And this time she brought that Everybody Loves Raymond guy who I've always hated!

I can't take it anymore! Leave me alone, Jennifer Aniston! What have I DONE to deserve this??? I don't care about your love life, and I don't want to see your movies or your TV shows.

Please go away.

Krugman on the tax cut zombies

Here's how I see it: Republicans have turned into tax-cut zombies. They can't remember why they originally wanted to cut taxes, they can't explain how they plan to make up for the lost revenue, and they don't care. Instead, they just keep shambling forward, always hungry for more.

more at the NYTimes

Bush Spy Ring 3 - NYC cops join the chorus

We will spy too, disguised as you!

Undercover New York City police officers have conducted covert surveillance in the last 16 months of people protesting the Iraq war, bicycle riders taking part in mass rallies and even mourners at a street vigil for a cyclist killed in an accident, a series of videotapes show.

In glimpses and in glaring detail, the videotape images reveal the robust presence of disguised officers or others working with them at seven public gatherings since August 2004.

The officers hoist protest signs. They hold flowers with mourners. They ride in bicycle events. At the vigil for the cyclist, an officer in biking gear wore a button that said, "I am a shameless agitator." She also carried a camera and videotaped the roughly 15 people present.

more...

When David Brooks is You

When Big Brother Is You
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 22, 2005


Let's play "You're the President." Let's put you in the Oval Office and see what kind of decisions you make in real-world circumstances.

Because you are president, you are briefed each day on terrorist threats to this country. These briefings are as psychologically intense as an episode of "24," with descriptions of specific bad guys and their activities.

But if the briefing says "Bin Laden determined to strike in the United States" you won't become unduly concerned.

This has had a cumulative effect on your psychology. While many of your fellow citizens have relaxed as 9/11 has faded into history,

you will take more and longer vacations than any other President in history

you don't have that luxury. Your briefings, and some terrifying false alarms that haven't been made public,

unless they can be used to pump up your re-election campaign or deflect from political embarrassments


keep you in a perpetual state of high alert.

So much so that you will refuse to read newspapers, preferring to get all your information from yes men

You know that one of the few advantages we have over the terrorists is technological superiority.

because your yes men told you so.

You are damned sure you are going to use every geek, every computer program and every surveillance technique at your disposal to prevent a future attack.

Unless the geek is gay.

You have inherited the FISA process to regulate this intelligence gathering. It's a pretty good process. FISA judges usually issue warrants quickly and, when appropriate, retroactively.

But the FISA process has shortcomings.

It doesn't allow you to monitor groups simply because you consider them political enemies

First, it's predicated on a division between foreign and domestic activity that has been rendered obsolete by today's mobile communications methods. Second, the process still involves some cumbersome paperwork and bureaucratic foot-dragging. Finally, the case-by-case FISA method is ill suited to the new information-gathering technologies, which include things like automated systems that troll through vast amounts of data looking for patterns, voices and chains of contacts.

Over time you've become convinced that these new technologies, which are run by National Security Agency professionals and shielded from political influence,

just like FEMA, the EPA, the Commerce Department, the FDA, the CIA, the NOAA, and the military

help save lives. You've seen that these new surveillance techniques helped foil an attack on the Brooklyn Bridge and bombing assaults in Britain. The question is, How do you regulate the new procedures to protect liberties?

Your aides present you with three options. First, you can ask Congress to rewrite the FISA law to keep pace with the new technologies. This has some drawbacks. How exactly do you write a law to cope with this fast-changing information war? Even if you could set up a procedure to get warrant requests to a judge, how would that judge be able to tell which of the thousands of possible information nodes is worth looking into, or which belongs to a U.S. citizen? Swamped in the data-fog, the courts would just become meaningless rubber-stamps. Finally, it's likely that some member of Congress would leak details of the program during the legislative process, thus destroying it.

Your second option is to avoid Congress and set up a self-policing mechanism using the Justice Department and the N.S.A.'s inspector general. This option, too, has drawbacks. First, it's legally dubious. Second, it's quite possible that some intelligence bureaucrat will leak information about the programs, especially if he or she hopes to swing a presidential election against you. Third, if details do come out and Congressional leaders learn you went around them, there will be blowback that will not only destroy the program, but will also lead to more restrictions on executive power.

You will choose this option. You will ensure that the paper I write for helps you get re-elected by refusing to share what it knows about your choice with the public.

Your third option is informal Congressional oversight. You could pull a few senior members of Congress into your office and you could say: "Look, given the fast-moving nature of this conflict, there is no way we can codify rules about what is permissible and impermissible. Instead we will create a social contract. I'll trust you by telling you everything we are doing to combat terror. You'll trust me enough to give me the flexibility I need to keep the country safe. If we have disagreements, we will work them out in private."

These are your three options, Mr. President, and these are essentially the three options George Bush faced a few years ago. (He chose Option 2.)

And then he bragged about it it in a speech.

But before you decide, let me tell you one more thing: Options 1 and 2 won't work, and Option 3 is impossible.

Options 1 and 2 won't work because they lead to legalistic rigidities and leaks that will destroy the program. Option 3 is impossible because it requires trust. It requires that the president and the Congressional leaders trust one another. It requires Democrats and Republicans to trust one another. We don't have that kind of trust in America today.

Because you have used the political capital gained during the aftermath of 9/11 to divide the country through smears against opponents, homophobia, religious intolerance, denial of global warming and a systematic attack on the social safety net to please your corporate masters.

That leaves you with Option 4: Face the fact that we will not be using our best technology to monitor the communications of known terrorists. Face the fact that the odds of an attack on America just went up.

Confidential to GWB & DC - please remember my loyalty after you've used this inevitable second attack to gain absolute power.

Best fun links ever

At least one of these fun links WILL make you laugh:


How to Dance Properly - I first saw this on Majikthese.


Engrish.com - I just don't know why these bad Japanese to English translations are so funny, but they really are. And they have a cumulative effect - the more you read, the funnier they are.


Tom Cruise Kills Oprah - I don't know how I missed this suckah when it first came out.

Bush Spy Ring 2

It's my country and I'll spy if I want to
spy if I want to, spy if I want to,
The FBI too will be spying on you.


F.B.I. Watched Activist Groups, New Files Show

The F.B.I. had previously turned over a small number of documents on antiwar groups, showing the agency's interest in investigating possible anarchist or violent links in connection with antiwar protests and demonstrations in advance of the 2004 political conventions. And earlier this month, the A.C.L.U.'s Colorado chapter released similar documents involving, among other things, people protesting logging practices at a lumber industry gathering in 2002.

The latest batch of documents, parts of which the A.C.L.U. plans to release publicly on Tuesday, totals more than 2,300 pages and centers on references in internal files to a handful of groups, including PETA, the environmental group Greenpeace and the Catholic Workers group, which promotes antipoverty efforts and social causes.

But it turns out the NYTimes sat on the spy story for the 2004 election!
Read about it in the LA Times

An Open Letter to Paul McCartney

Look, Dude. What the hell is this dealie with Fidelity Investments all about?

Why, Paul, why? I was out there defending you, bro. Any time there's an argument about who was better, or who was more important to the Beatles, the de rigueur hepcat response is "John". Well I was always jumping right in there speaking up for you - you, the genius musician who can play any instrument. Even Lennon admitted as much - when they asked him "is Ringo the best drummer in world?" he said "he isn't even the best drummer in the Beatles." He was talking about you Paul! And you were responsible for Sgt. Pepper, and you kept things going when John was happy to lay around in bed for peace or taking heroine with Yoko. And besides, you're a good guy - a good husband, a great father, and a caring son. Now you're a knight and a billionaire and millions of people love you.

So WHY are you allowing Fidelity Investments to parade you around like a cheap whore? Sure, they make a big deal out of how great you are, with their service marked motto over your head "The key is, never stop doing what you love.SM"

Is that what you really love Paul? Shilling for a bunch of money-mongers? Cause you can't be doing it for the cash. You don't need Fidelity's money! You're the fucking First National British Bank of McCartney, dude - you can virtually print your own money: put out a record, paint some pictures, write a fucking book called "All about me and John Lennon." Or just sit there and collect those Beatles and Wings royalties (I bought Band on the Run twice - first on vinyl, then on CD) and proceeds from Linda's vegetarian meals. You make money no matter what.

So why are you shilling for Fidelity Investments? Investments aren't about creating new wealth through hard work and talent, which is what the Beatles did in their heyday. Investments are about sitting back and watching the dough grow while the lackeys do the work. Is that really what you want to be associated with? It's so goddamn unseemly.

And it can't be the publicity you need. You'll be 64 this June. You know everybody's gonna make a big deal out of that. Just sit back and wait for it.

So shape up and show a little more decorum. There's only two Beatles left and Ringo's always been too much of a good-time Charlie to stand for anything. Have a little intergrity and be content with the incredible wealth and planetary fame you have. Or I swear the next time somebody's praising Lennon at your expense I won't say a word. You'll be sorry then!

The Mighty Krugman on right-wing non-ethics

From Krugman's op-ed column:

First, if the latest pay-for-punditry story starts to get traction, the usual suspects will claim that liberal think tanks and opinion writers are also on the take. (I'm getting my raincoat ready for the slime attack on my own ethics I'm sure this column will provoke.) Reporters and editors will be tempted to give equal time to these accusations, however weak the evidence, in an effort to appear "balanced." They should resist the temptation. If this is overwhelmingly a story about Republican lobbyists and conservative think tanks, as I believe it is - there isn't any Democratic equivalent of Jack Abramoff - that's what the public deserves to be told.

...

And inquiring minds want to know: Who else is on the take? Or has the culture of corruption spread so far that the question is, Who isn't?

I have to wonder who will be exposed next. Please let it be Christopher Hitchens.