TAM LIN 2007

For the fifth year in a row, TAM LIN will be presented in Manhattan. This time it will be in the form of a reading at NYCPlaywrights.

What's Al Franken been up to?

Running for Senate.

Al has a blog

Al, back in the day:

More pix

Bob Herbert's strawpimps

Those who wish for prostitution to remain illegal don't have logic on their side, and so must constantly imply that those who think it should be legal are somehow in denial about the exploitation of women and the international slave trade. Bob Herbert:

Those who think that most of the women in prostitution want to be there are deluded. Surveys consistently show that a majority wants very much to leave. Apologists love to spread the fantasy of the happy hooker. But the world of the prostitute is typically filled with pimps, sadists, psychopaths, drug addicts, violent criminals and disease.

Jody Williams is a former prostitute who runs a support group called Sex Workers Anonymous. Few women want to become prostitutes, she told me, and nearly all would like to get out.

“They want to quit for the obvious reasons,” she said. “The danger. The physical and emotional distress. The toll that it takes. The shame.”

More at the NYTimes
Just who are these people "who think that most of the women in prostitution want to be there"? Bob Herbert doesn't say - probably because very few people would make such a claim.

The real problem for those who want prostitution to remain illegal is, as Jody Williams says "the shame."

Workers are exploited all over the world. Herbert & co. don't use that as the reason for suggesting that work itself should be made illegal. When it comes to non-sexual work, they are able to think clearly. They are against the workers being exploited, not the work itself.

And that's what it comes down to. The anti-legalization people have a problem with prostitution because it is about non-marital sex, far more than they have a problem with the exploitation of women and children. It's about "the shame" because the workers being exploited are doing sex work. There is no shame in being expoited as a fruit-picker, although conditions might be every bit as horrendous.

Women and children aren't only exploited through prostitution - young girls are sold or coerced into marriage in places all over the world. And traditional marriage is based entirely on the idea of women selling men sexual services in exchange for food and shelter. It still happens all over the world. I think that's a horrible exploitive situation - and so I think the exploitation should end. I am not calling for the criminalization of marriage.

Bob Herbert demonstrates that when you throw non-marital sex into the picture, some people's brains just go haywire.

And why doesn't Bob Herbert write a column about all the men who create the demand for prostitution - and don't care whether the prostitute they're screwing is a sex slave or not? Surely a few of them read the NYTimes. I'll wager some of them write for the NYTimes.

Awesome - evolutionary psychology bingo

Right here at Punkass blog.

Racists say the darndest things

As soon as I saw the article about the racist remarks of James Watson (of Crick & Watson DNA fame) I rushed over to Gene Expression, the premiere web site for science-minded racists and sure enough it was topic number one.

Top racists Steve Sailer and Razib (aka Newamul Khan) are entirely predictable in their reactions in this comment thread which can be summed up by the headline of a Wired article: Angry IQ Tester: Watson's Critics Are Socialists!

That was exactly Steven Pinker's reason for dismissing the scientific opinions of Stephen Jay Gould when he criticized evolutionary psychology. As I've blogged before, Pinker has no qualms about being interviewed by Gene Expression. Well why not, they are huge fans of his.

But what did the Sage of DNA say that has so confused those poor misguided media commies?
First he said:

"All our social policies are based on the fact that their (African's) intelligence is the same as ours (European's) - whereas all the testing says not really,"

THEN he said

In a statement given to The Associated Press yesterday, Dr. Watson said, "I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said. There is no scientific basis for such a belief."

So, scream the GNXPers he was misquoted!

But his publicist, Kate Farquhar-Thomson, would not say whether Dr. Watson believed he had been misquoted. "You have the statement," she said. "That's it, I am afraid."

More at the NYTimes.
The GNXPers are so in love with Watson's racism that they completely overlook that fact that he's a batty old coot!

Yes, we've been expecting it for years

October 19, 2007, 11:48 am
Say What?
By The Editorial Board
More from President Bush's Wednesday press conference. File this under "Jokes that really aren't that funny."

Q: Mr. President, following up on Vladimir Putin for a moment, he said, recently, that next year, when he has to step down according to the constitution, as the president, he may become prime minister; in effect keeping power and dashing any hopes for a genuine democratic transition there.

BUSH: I've been planning that myself.

Check it out - and note the howls from the right-winger commentors: But if Bill Clinton had made the same joke eight years ago, you would have remarked on his delightful sense of humor despite all the abuse he had taken the rightwing conspiracy.

Might it be because the Bush people have demonstrated that there is nothing so mean, lowdown and illegal that they won't try to get away with it?

Iraq war contractor corruption scandal...

..will no doubt go down in history as the worst corruption scandal in the history of this country. Frank Rich:

The cost cannot be measured only in lost opportunities, lives and money. There will be a long hangover of shame. Its essence was summed up by Col. Ted Westhusing, an Army scholar of military ethics who was an innocent witness to corruption, not a participant, when he died at age 44 of a gunshot wound to the head while working for Gen. David Petraeus training Iraqi security forces in Baghdad in 2005. He was at the time the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq.

Colonel Westhusing's death was ruled a suicide, though some believe he was murdered by contractors fearing a whistle-blower, according to T. Christian Miller, the Los Angeles Times reporter who documents the case in his book "Blood Money." Either way, the angry four-page letter the officer left behind for General Petraeus and his other commander, Gen. Joseph Fil, is as much an epitaph for America’s engagement in Iraq as a suicide note.

"I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars," Colonel Westhusing wrote, abbreviating the word mission. "I am sullied."

More at the NYTimes

We've all been hip to this for years, but it's good to have a social scientist confirm it

In an idealized view of the fashion and art world, the gatekeepers of taste coolly evaluate the work they see according to Platonic criteria. Currid's conclusion, based on dozens of interviews, is less sublime. "There is very little that gets done in New York that is merit-based," a musician told her. "It boils down to the same maxim: 'It's all who you know.' " And in order to know the right people artists and designers inevitably gravitate to New York, because it's where previous generations of artists and designers, now powerful, gravitated to. The result is a classic case of what economists call network effects: success in the past creates success in the future.

From an aesthetic standpoint, "It's all who you know" may be a grim conclusion, but from the perspective of New York's economy it seems an entirely happy one.

More at the New Yorker

This explains why there's so much bad theatre done by people who get paid well for it - all the decision-makers are their pals, and you can't give your pals the red light.

Maybe I should change the name of this blog to Krugman to Mergatroyd...

But when you're great, you're great

What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

Partly it's a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job - to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda's recruiters could have hoped for - the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the "ozone man," but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, 'the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam." And so it has proved.

But Gore hatred is more than personal. When National Review decided to name its anti-environmental blog Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the message as well as the messenger. For the truth Mr. Gore has been telling about how human activities are changing the climate isn't just inconvenient. For conservatives, it's deeply threatening.

more at the NYTimes

The Good Deputy

Now that the JANE EYRE production is underway, it's time to start writing a new play. While JANE is all girly-girly - although I personally think that the concerns of women are universal concerns, NY theatre critics don't see it that way - this new play is manly. It's THE GOOD DEPUTY and it's set in the Old West with a primarily male cast. Any connection between the plot and Bush Co's adventures in Iraq are purely intentional, although hopefully not too obvious or preachy - I want it to be an entertaining story too.

The inspiration is based on my wondering what would have happened if Colin Powell did not do the bidding of the Bushies. We have some idea what might have happened, based on the experience of Joseph Wilson and the outing of his wife, spy Valerie Plame by douchebag of liberty Robert Novak at the behest of the Bush administration.

David Hare already covered the territory of the actual Iraq war buildup in his play Stuff Happens. He was very literal, though, with people playing Bush, Cheney, Rice, etc.

My play was also inspired by my friend Greg Oliver Bodine, the brilliant actor/playwright, who played a cowboy recently, as you can see in this picture. I plan to have him portray the Deputy. We'll be doing a reading at NYCPlaywrights next week.



Plus, I always like having an excuse to post a cute guy picture on my blog.

Frank Rich challenges the Krugman for best editorialist

Frank Rich:

I have always maintained that the American public was the least culpable of the players during the run-up to Iraq. The war was sold by a brilliant and fear-fueled White House propaganda campaign designed to stampede a nation still shellshocked by 9/11. Both Congress and the press - the powerful institutions that should have provided the checks, balances and due diligence of the administration's case - failed to do their job. Had they done so, more Americans might have raised more objections. This perfect storm of democratic failure began at the top.

As the war has dragged on, it is hard to give Americans en masse a pass. We are too slow to notice, let alone protest, the calamities that have followed the original sin.

Not meaning to brag, but I don't count myself among "the American public" who were fooled into the war in Iraq. I was one of the anti-war protestors. I still have video from the huge anti-war rally that I will eventually put online.

Meanwhile, Steven Colbert appears in Maureen Dowd's column, improving it 150%

I'd like to thank Maureen Dowd for permitting/begging me to write her column today. As I type this, she's watching from an overstuffed divan, petting her prize Abyssinian and sipping a Dirty Cosmotinijito. Which reminds me: Before I get started, I have to take care of one other bit of business:

Bad things are happening in countries you shouldn't have to think about. It's all George Bush's fault, the vice president is Satan, and God is gay.

There. Now I've written Frank Rich's column too.

So why I am writing Miss Dowd's column today? Simple. Because I believe the 2008 election, unlike all previous elections, is important. And a lot of Americans feel confused about the current crop of presidential candidates.

For instance, Hillary Clinton. I can't remember if I'm supposed to be scared of her so Democrats will think they should nominate her when she's actually easy to beat, or if I'm supposed to be scared of her because she's legitimately scary.

Or Rudy Giuliani. I can't remember if I'm supposed to support him because he's the one who can beat Hillary if she gets nominated, or if I'm supposed to support him because he's legitimately scary.

And Fred Thompson. In my opinion "Law & Order" never sufficiently explained why the Manhattan D.A. had an accent like an Appalachian catfish wrestler.

Well, suddenly an option is looming on the horizon. And I don't mean Al Gore (though he's a world-class loomer). First of all, I don't think Nobel Prizes should go to people I was seated next to at the Emmys. Second, winning the Nobel Prize does not automatically qualify you to be commander in chief. I think George Bush has proved definitively that to be president, you don't need to care about science, literature or peace.

The right-wing bully machine

Krugman:

All in all, the Graeme Frost case is a perfect illustration of the modern right-wing political machine at work, and in particular its routine reliance on character assassination in place of honest debate. If service members oppose a Republican war, they're "phony soldiers"; if Michael J. Fox opposes Bush policy on stem cells, he's faking his Parkinson's symptoms; if an injured 12-year-old child makes the case for a government health insurance program, he's a fraud.

Krugman in the NYTimes

Nobel Al Gore

Hooray for Al Gore!

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and a United Nations panel on the environment won this year's Nobel Peace Prize for raising awareness about the threat of climate change.

Jane Eyre

My production of JANE EYRE is coming up in February 2008.

jane-eyre.org

The Law's Delay

In his be/not be soliloquy, Hamlet lists the following as possible reasons for suicide:
the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppressor's wrong,
the proud man's contumely
The pangs of despised love,
the law's delay,
The insolence of office,
and the spurns That patient merit of th' unworthy takes

Waiting for the US Copyright Office to cancel Edward Einhorn's unauthorized copyright registration on his derivative, and laughable "blocking and choreography" script on my play TAM LIN makes me understand why.

The fact that the Copyright Office granted Einhorn the registration is a clear sign there is something wrong with the U.S. Copyright Office itself. Because Einhorn NEVER had my authorization, and was not required by the Copyright Office to provide any proof of authorization whatsoever. Just the say-so of himself and his brother, the lawyer.

It makes the requirement of "authorization" meaningless. And it means that anybody with money can victimize anybody without money through this method - because once the registration is granted, it is up to the author of the original work to prove that it was not authorized.

My ex-partner Jonathan and I were involved in a lawsuit with Einhorn over this, with the expectation that Einhorn's ill-obtained registration would be cancelled during the course of events. It seemed reasonable to believe so. Apparently the US Copyright Office is far far more Kafka-esque than could possibly be believed.

And so The Strange Case of Edward Einhorn v. Mergatroyd Productions continues.

Edward Einhorn would like to believe that the case is over, clearly evident in this public exchange at Playgoer

Anonymous said...
Edward Einhorn? Watch out! He's gonna sue!

Saturday, August 04, 2007 11:55:00 AM
Edward Einhorn said...
I find that an oddly hostile (anonymous?) comment to appear after my posting regarding the Public. It's true that I was involved in a lawsuit a while ago regarding a play I was never paid for that also included some copyright issues. That suit was resolved and I was paid. But that lawsuit was a relatively small incident in my larger writing/directing career and certainly has no relevance to this issue.

I did not post the anonymous comment - apparently Einhorn's reputation precedes him.

With a wave of his hand like a latter-day Marie Antoinette offering dietary advice to peasants, Einhorn proclaims the suit "was resolved." Guess again Einhorn. It will never be resolved until YOU GIVE UP YOUR UNAUTHORIZED DERIVATIVE COPYRIGHT REGISTRATION ON MY PLAY TAM LIN!!!!!

Maybe you think that you have managed to sneak a "directors copyright" in the back door by the persistence of this ill-gotten registration. You think wrong. We will do whatever it takes, through whatever branch of government it takes - to get it cancelled. Because if you get away with this, what's to stop any creep with an agenda from trying the same thing?

Now why don't you go online somewhere and claim that I am defaming you, Einhorn? Oh, that's right, you've already done so, believing you can cow people into silence through their ignorance of the First Amendment.

I have never defamed you, Einhorn, because what I've said is either my opinion of you - which is protected speech - or THE TRUTH - and usually backed with court transcripts - which is also protected.

***

But perhaps I am simply being impatient. It's possible that we won't have to take further legal action, and that the Copyright Office, like any bureaucracy, is simply taking its sweet time. It's the law's delay - and I just have to ride it out.

I don't care what they say about me in the papers as long as they spell my name right...

Alas...

The play, adapted by N.G. McClearnan, follows the familiar story of Huck and Jim on a raft, even as it peers into Huck's internal struggle between right and wrong. Playwright McClearnan said she eliminated all but a few references to Tom Sawyer in the book because he "certainly was not a good boy."

"In fact," she said, "he was a big jerk."

While not evil, Sawyer causes problems for the freed slave, Jim, and jeopardizes more than a few people in his field of influence. So, for McClearnan, Tom's out and Huck's in.

The article is referring to my essay What about Lil Lizabeth?

Apparently the "as long as they spell my name right" quote is of unknown provenance...

Good News Delivered by Thunder

"Good News Delivered by Thunder" is the name of this song It's such a cool evocative name - I have to write a play with this title some day.

More on the album "Splendid Jubilant New Year - the Collection of Chinese Festival Music" - other great song titles: "Frantic Dances of Golden Serpent" and "Splendor Night Vision"

It's the Righteous Scorn Channel

Oh Paul Krugman, I just can't resist you!

Before the last election, the actor Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson's and has become an advocate for stem cell research that might lead to a cure, made an ad in support of Claire McCaskill, the Democratic candidate for Senator in Missouri. It was an effective ad, in part because Mr. Fox's affliction was obvious.

And Rush Limbaugh - displaying the same style he exhibited in his recent claim that members of the military who oppose the Iraq war are "phony soldiers" and his later comparison of a wounded vet who criticized him for that remark to a suicide bomber - immediately accused Mr. Fox of faking it. "In this commercial, he is exaggerating the effects of the disease. He is moving all around and shaking. And it's purely an act." Heh-heh-heh.

Of course, minimizing and mocking the suffering of others is a natural strategy for political figures who advocate lower taxes on the rich and less help for the poor and unlucky. But I believe that the lack of empathy shown by Mr. Limbaugh, Mr. Kristol, and, yes, Mr. Bush is genuine, not feigned.

Mark Crispin Miller, the author of "The Bush Dyslexicon," once made a striking observation: all of the famous Bush malapropisms - "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family," and so on - have involved occasions when Mr. Bush was trying to sound caring and compassionate.

By contrast, Mr. Bush is articulate and even grammatical when he talks about punishing people; that's when he's speaking from the heart. The only animation Mr. Bush showed during the flooding of New Orleans was when he declared "zero tolerance of people breaking the law," even those breaking into abandoned stores in search of the food and water they weren't getting from his administration.

What's happening, presumably, is that modern movement conservatism attracts a certain personality type. If you identify with the downtrodden, even a little, you don’t belong. If you think ridicule is an appropriate response to other peoples' woes, you fit right in.

And Republican disillusionment with Mr. Bush does not appear to signal any change in that regard. On the contrary, the leading candidates for the Republican nomination have gone out of their way to condemn "socialism," which is G.O.P.-speak for any attempt to help the less fortunate.

So once again, if you’re poor or you're sick or you don't have health insurance, remember this: these people think your problems are funny.

More of the column Conservatives Are Such Jokers at the NYTimes

Anita Hill defends herself against Clarence Thomas's smears

ON Oct. 11, 1991, I testified about my experience as an employee of Clarence Thomas’s at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

I stand by my testimony.

Justice Thomas has every right to present himself as he wishes in his new memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son.” He may even be entitled to feel abused by the confirmation process that led to his appointment to the Supreme Court.

But I will not stand by silently and allow him, in his anger, to reinvent me.

In the portion of his book that addresses my role in the Senate hearings into his nomination, Justice Thomas offers a litany of unsubstantiated representations and outright smears that Republican senators made about me when I testified before the Judiciary Committee — that I was a “combative left-winger” who was “touchy” and prone to overreacting to “slights.” A number of independent authors have shown those attacks to be baseless. What’s more, their reports draw on the experiences of others who were familiar with Mr. Thomas’s behavior, and who came forward after the hearings. It’s no longer my word against his.

More at the New York TimesI mentioned the book on the Hill-Thomas incident, Strange Justice, back in July 2006, and about David Brock's reaction to the book, back when he was a right-wing hitman:

The biggest problem raised by the Strange Justice authors for the Thomas camp was the testimony of yet another woman, Kaye Savage, who had not been heard from during the first round of hearings. Savage made the claim... that she had seen Playboy pinups papered along the walls of Thomas's apartment in the early 1980s, when she and Thomas had been friends and Anita Hill was working for Thomas...

...Mark (Paoletta) phoned me back. He said he had posed my question about how to discredit Savage to (Clarence) Thomas, who knew I was at work on a review of the Mayer and Abramson book. Mark told me that Thomas had, in fact, some derogatory information on his former friend Savage; he passed it along to Mark so that Mark could give it to me. Quoting Thomas directly, Mark told me of unverified, embarrassing personal information about Savage that Thomas claimed had been raised against her in a sealed court record of a divorce and child custody battle more than a decade ago. Thomas also told Mark where Savage worked after Mark related that I was eager to hunt her down as soon as possible. Surely skirting the bounds of judicial propriety to intimidate and smear yet another witness against him, Thomas was playing dirty, and so was I.

Clarence Thomas - the perfect Supreme Court Justice to represent extreme conservativism.

the latest cover of the New Yorker

is awesome



The image is a little small but it manages to reference the Senator Larry Craig bathroom scandal, and Iranian president Ahmadinejad's claim that there are no homosexuals in Iran. The newspaper Ahmadinejad is reading is in Farsi - he's supposed to be in Iran.

I've run out of superlatives for Paul Krugman

And yes, Southern white exceptionalism is about race, much more than it is about moral values, religion, support for the military or other explanations sometimes offered. There’s a large statistical literature on the subject, whose conclusion is summed up by the political scientist Thomas F. Schaller in his book “Whistling Past Dixie”: “Despite the best efforts of Republican spinmeisters to depict American conservatism as a nonracial phenomenon, the partisan impact of racial attitudes in the South is stronger today than in the past.”

Republican politicians, who understand quite well that the G.O.P.’s national success since the 1970s owes everything to the partisan switch of Southern whites, have tacitly acknowledged this reality. Since the days of Gerald Ford, just about every Republican presidential campaign has included some symbolic gesture of approval for good old-fashioned racism.

Thus Ronald Reagan, who began his political career by campaigning against California’s Fair Housing Act, started his 1980 campaign with a speech supporting states’ rights delivered just outside Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered. In 2000, Mr. Bush made a pilgrimage to Bob Jones University, famed at the time for its ban on interracial dating.

Politics in Black and White

All Krugman, all the time

Yes I know this is getting ridiculous, but Paul Krugman is just that good - and now he's no longer behind the pay wall!

One of my pet peeves about political reporting is the fact that some of my journalistic colleagues seem to want to be in another business – namely, theater criticism. Instead of telling us what candidates are actually saying – and whether it’s true or false, sensible or silly – they tell us how it went over, and how they think it affects the horse race. During the 2004 campaign I went through two months’ worth of TV news from the major broadcast and cable networks to see what voters had been told about the Bush and Kerry health care plans; what I found, and wrote about, were several stories on how the plans were playing, but not one story about what was actually in the plans

And while the pundits are doing theatre criticism, the theatre critics are doing punditry, as when Charles Isherwood said:

Affection for the enterprise is hard to resist, especially since the majority of the writers are women, who are chronically underrepresented on local stages. I’m not sure Ms. Healy’s relentlessly quirky exercise in neo-absurdism will win many converts to the cause, but the play can be granted a little leeway as part of a healthy, even inspirational exercise in authorial self-determination.

It's no secret that what both Isherwood and Ben Brantley want is brutal manly masculine plays, and they always look at plays by women as BY WOMEN. Women are very much still The Other in NYC theatre. You can see it in the way that Brantley contemptuously dismisses another play by a woman:

But the story approaches these topical matters with a calm, open mind and a tidy, symmetrical structure that balances and parallels different points of view. It’s like the Platonic ideal of a Lifetime television movie.

Lifetime, you may not know, is a TV channel aimed at women. To compare a play to a TV show on a women's network is about the most dismissive thing Brantley could think of to say about it. The men who still run theatre in NYC - and the women who mindlessly accept the rules, abide by the the idea that men's experiences = human condition while women's experiences = silly and stupid and unkewl.
Mostly what this is about though, is what I will call the Goldin-Rouse effect. When the producer of art is known to be a woman, the art produced is automatically rated lower than art produced by men. Here is the Goldin-Rouse study:

Blind auditions for symphony orchestras have contributed to a substantial increase in the number of women who have secured these positions, according to Cecilia Rouse, assistant professor of economics and public affairs.

In a blind audition, a screen is placed so that the evaluator can hear but not see the performer. While screens in final rounds of auditions are still uncommon, the use of screens in preliminary rounds is now a wide-spread practice, Rouse said.

She used personnel records and rosters from several symphony orches-tras to track the hiring of women musicians as orchestras adopted the practice of blind auditions during the 1970s and 1980s. Her findings are presented in "Orchestrating Impar-tiality: The Impact of 'Blind' Auditions on Female Musicians" (Working Paper #376 of the Industrial Relations Section, coauthored with Claudia Goldin of Harvard).

"The switch to blind auditions can explain between 30 percent and 55 percent of the increase in the propor-tion female among new hires and between 25 percent and 46 percent of the increase in the percentage female in the orchestras from 1970 to 1996," according to the study, which was based on a final analysis sample of 14,133 individuals and 592 audition segments.

The study found that the practice of blind auditions increased by 50 percent the probability that women would advance out of certain preliminary rounds. "The screen also enhances, by severalfold, the likelihood that a female contestant will be the winner in the final round," the authors noted.

And as Elizabeth Spelke, in her mighty smiting of evolutionary psychology asshole Steven Pinker (you don't think he's an asshole? At a future date I will count the ways) noted that in general, females are less likely to be given the benefit of the doubt:

What about the average successful vita, though: that is to say, the kind of vita that professors most often must evaluate? In that case, there were differences. The male was rated as having higher research productivity. These psychologists, Steve's and my colleagues, looked at the same number of publications and thought, "good productivity" when the name was male, and "less good productivity" when the name was female. Same thing for teaching experience. The very same list of courses was seen as good teaching experience when the name was male, and less good teaching experience when the name was female. In answer to the question would they hire the candidate, 70% said yes for the male, 45% for the female. If the decision were made by majority rule, the male would get hired and the female would not.

A couple other interesting things came out of this study. The effects were every bit as strong among the female respondents as among the male respondents. Men are not the culprits here. There were effects at the tenure level as well. At the tenure level, professors evaluated a very strong candidate, and almost everyone said this looked like a good case for tenure. But people were invited to express their reservations, and they came up with some very reasonable doubts. For example, "This person looks very strong, but before I agree to give her tenure I would need to know, was this her own work or the work of her adviser?" Now that's a perfectly reasonable question to ask. But what ought to give us pause is that those kinds of reservations were expressed four times more often when the name was female than when the name was male.

So there's a pervasive difference in perceptions, and I think the difference matters. Scientists' perception of the quality of a candidate will influence the likelihood that the candidate will get a fellowship, a job, resources, or a promotion. A pattern of biased evaluation therefore will occur even in people who are absolutely committed to gender equity.

Theatre critics see mediocre plays all the time, by male and female authors. What I am suggesting is that they, like the professors in the above study, are more likely to give male authors of mediocre work the benefit of the doubt. I will provide one example, which I originally dicussed in my essay "The Last Manly Man Playwright":

the opening paragraph of Michael Feingold's review in the Village Voice:
Despite my admiration for Adam Rapp's writing, I've stayed away from his plays the last few years—no easy task, given his prolific output—because they were starting to give me the locked-in feeling of a gifted artist endlessly circling round and round the same material, looking for someplace else to go but uncertain what direction to take next. In Rapp's case, this sense of imprisonment was particularly grueling because of the relentless sordidness in his work: characters always at the bottom of life, actions always the harshest and ugliest.
Rapp is such a gifted artist that Feingold's been avoiding his plays!

And that sums up the theatre world in NYC in 2007. Which is why, over a hundred and fifty years after Charlotte Bronte adopted the gender-hazy pen name Currer Bell, it might still be a good idea for female playwrights to avoid revealing their gender as long as possible.

Speaking of Bronte, my adaptation of Jane Eyre will be produced this February.

Another awesome column from Krugman

The hits just keep coming: Sad Alan's Lament

I received an irate phone call from Mr. Greenspan after that article, in which he demanded to know what he had said that was wrong. In his book, he claims that Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary, was stumped by that question. That’s hard to believe, because I certainly wasn’t: Mr. Greenspan’s argument for tax cuts was contorted and in places self-contradictory, not to mention based on budget projections that everyone knew, even then, were wildly overoptimistic.

If anyone had doubts about Mr. Greenspan’s determination not to inconvenience the Bush administration, those doubts were resolved two years later, when the administration proposed another round of tax cuts, even though the budget was now deep in deficit. And guess what? The former high priest of fiscal responsibility did not object.

And in 2004 he expressed support for making the Bush tax cuts permanent — remember, these are the tax cuts he now says he didn’t endorse — and argued that the budget should be balanced with cuts in entitlement spending, including Social Security benefits, instead. Of course, back in 2001 he specifically assured Congress that cutting taxes would not threaten Social Security.

In retrospect, Mr. Greenspan’s moral collapse in 2001 was a portent. It foreshadowed the way many people in the foreign policy community would put their critical faculties on hold and support the invasion of Iraq, despite ample evidence that it was a really bad idea.

And strangely Greenspan showed up on The Daily Show tonight and Jon Stewart was ALSO brilliant! I will have a video clip ASAP.

I just love these liberal guys.

Anais v. Ayn - who gets the asshole license?

In my essay The Asshole License, I mentioned that the AL is almost never granted to women, but that Ayn Rand had one. An article in today's NYTimes confirms this:

Rand had a reputation for living for her own interest. She is said to have seduced her most serious reader, Nathaniel Branden, when he was 24 or 25 and she was at least 50. Each was married to someone else. In fact, Mr. Britting confirmed, they called their spouses to a meeting at which the pair announced their intention to make the mentor-protégé relationship a sexual one.

“She wasn’t a nice person, ” said Darla Moore, vice president of the private investment firm Rainwater Inc. “But what a gift she’s given us.”

The sexual dalliances of Great Men of the Arts are commonplace. Pretty much ALL of them end up having sex with their young admirers. If the Great Man is heterosexual, this fact will inevitably be mentioned, with thinly veiled admiration, in a Great Man of the Arts profile in the New Yorker.

The few acknowledged great women of the arts are not allowed such license, generally speaking, even in the liberal New Yorker. I once read a profile of Anais Nin in the New Yorker where the profile's author admitted to feeling pity for Nin for having dalliances with much younger men. I can't find that profile, but you can get a sense of the tut-tut-tutting over Nin that you NEVER get over misbehaving males in this review of a biography of Nin in the NYTimes.

Ayn Rand is granted an asshole license, I think, for several reasons. Foremost, because her area of accomplishment involved that most traditionally manly of enterprises, economics. Her beliefs were also distinctly right-wing. Libertarian, to be exact, but really, libertarians are conservatives who like sex. And she certainly never dreamed of challenging the Patriarchy in her work, and the hero of her most popular book, The Fountainhead, rapes the heroine.

Anais Nin is best known for her diaries and her erotica and her affairs. You can't get much more feminine realm than that.

So that is why the male establishment, which still runs everything including the New Yorker and the New York Times - and the females who mindlessly accept the values of the male establishment, refuse to grant Nin an asshole license, but do grant one to Ayn Rand - virtually the only asshole license issued to a woman.

Oh Paul Krugman, I want you to have my babies

Here’s how I see it: At this point, Mr. Bush is looking forward to replaying the political aftermath of Vietnam, in which the right wing eventually achieved a rewriting of history that would have made George Orwell proud, convincing millions of Americans that our soldiers had victory in their grasp but were stabbed in the back by the peaceniks back home.

What all this means is that the next president, even as he or she tries to extricate us from Iraq — and prevent the country’s breakup from turning into a regional war — will have to deal with constant sniping from the people who lied us into an unnecessary war, then lost the war they started, but will never, ever, take responsibility for their failures.

More (behind the paywall though)

go Kathy Griffin

I support Kathy Griffin's right to speak her mind.
She REALLY pissed off sanctimonious creep Catholic League's Bill Donohue. Kudos Kathy!

Good night sweet prince: and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest

Today marks ten years since the death of Earl Rich in a motorcycle crash. And I still haven't finished the online tribute I began for him nine years ago.

Earl Rich was a magical person. He was beautiful and charming and athletic and popular - but he was also well-read and sympathetic and open-minded. The emails that I included in my "Long Essay on a Brief Life" give a small taste of his many-layered personality.

I will take this moment to mention the strange phenomena I experienced the day he died, which will surely prevent me from ever getting a membership in CSICOP.

But I've been working on an adaptation of Jane Eyre, which also has its own paranormal occurance. I'll let Jane describe it - she begins by quoting her beloved, Edward Rochester:

"I was in my own room, and sitting by the window, which was open: it soothed me to feel the balmy night-air; though I could see no stars and only by a vague, luminous haze, knew the presence of a moon. I longed for thee, Janet! Oh, I longed for thee both with soul and flesh! I asked of God, at once in anguish and humility, if I had not been long enough desolate, afflicted, tormented; and might not soon taste bliss and peace once more. That I merited all I endured, I acknowledged--that I could scarcely endure more, I pleaded; and the alpha and omega of my heart's wishes broke involuntarily from my lips in the words--'Jane! Jane!Jane!'"

"Did you speak these words aloud?"

"I did, Jane. If any listener had heard me, he would have thought me mad: I pronounced them with such frantic energy."

"And it was last Monday night, somewhere near midnight?"

"Yes; but the time is of no consequence: what followed is the strange point. You will think me superstitious,--some superstition I have in my blood, and always had: nevertheless, this is true--true at least it is that I heard what I now relate.

"As I exclaimed 'Jane! Jane! Jane!' a voice--I cannot tell whence the voice came, but I know whose voice it was--replied, 'I am coming: wait for me;' and a moment after, went whispering on the wind the words--'Where are you?'

"I'll tell you, if I can, the idea, the picture these words opened to my mind: yet it is difficult to express what I want to express. Ferndean is buried, as you see, in a heavy wood, where sound falls dull, and dies unreverberating. 'Where are you?' seemed spoken amongst mountains; for I heard a hill-sent echo repeat the words. Cooler and fresher at the moment the gale seemed to visit my brow: I could have deemed that in some wild, lone scene, I and Jane were meeting. In spirit, I believe we must have met. You no doubt were, at that hour, in unconscious sleep, Jane: perhaps your soul wandered from its cell to comfort mine; for those were your accents--as certain as I live--they were yours!"

Reader, it was on Monday night--near midnight--that I too had received the mysterious summons: those were the very words by which I replied to it. I listened to Mr. Rochester's narrative, but made no disclosure in return. The coincidence struck me as too awful and inexplicable to be communicated or discussed. If I told anything, my tale would be such as must necessarily make a profound impression on the mind of my hearer: and that mind, yet from its sufferings too prone to gloom, needed not the deeper shade of the supernatural. I kept these things then, and pondered them in my heart.

In spite of the fact that Jane is making a Biblical allusion with the last sentence, she actually does NOT claim that the incident of extra-sensory perception was from God, but rather earlier in the novel, attributes it to Nature:

"Down superstition!" I commented, as that spectre rose up black by the black yew at the gate. "This is not thy deception, nor thy witchcraft: it is the work of nature. She was roused, and did--no miracle--but her best."

And strangely, I may even have Carl Sagan in my corner, for as he said in his book "The Demon Haunted World: Science is a Candle in the Dark", published in March 1997:

Perhaps one percent of the time, someone who has an idea that smells, feels, and looks indistinguishable from the usual run of pseudoscience will turn out to be right. Maybe some undiscovered reptile left over from the Cretaceous period will indeed be found in Loch Ness or the Congo Republic; or we will find artifacts of an advanced, non-human species elsewhere in the Solar System. At the time of writing there are three claims in the ESP field which, in my opinion, deserve serious study:
(1) that by thought alone humans can (barely) affect random number generators in computers;
(2) that young children sometimes report the details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation;
(3) that people under mild sensory deprivation can receive thoughts or images "projected" at them.
I pick these claims not because I think they're likely to be valid (I don't), but as examples of contentions that might be true. The last three have at least some, although still dubious, experimental support. Of course, I could be wrong.

Kurt Vonnegut, in "Breakfast of Champions" suggests something along the same lines - even closer to what I experienced:

Like all Earthlings at the point of death, Mary Young sent faint reminders of herself to those who had known her. She released a small cloud of telepathic butterflies, and one of these brushed the cheek of Dwayne Hoover, nine miles away.

Dwayne heard a tired voice from somewhere behind his head, even though no one was back there. It said this to Dwayne: "Oh my oh my."

I was about 43 miles from Earl Rich on Sunday morning, September 7, 1997. I was reading, or just daydreaming, sitting on the sofa in my living room. Behind me was a window looking out on the neighbors yard across the street. The neighbors had kids and often they could be noisy. I suddenly became aware of someone calling "Nancy.... Nancy... good-bye." I thought it was odd that one of the kids across the street would be calling my name, but I actually turned to look out and see if any kids were looking in the direction of my house. They were playing, not paying the least attention to me. I sort of shrugged, and thought of "Breakfast of Champions" and idly speculated about messages from people on the edge of death.

I was fairly absorbed the rest of the day. I was going to first rehearsals of the first play of mine to be given a full production. My play NEW RULES was to be part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. But driving into Philadelphia from Pennsauken, I had this really odd sense of melancholy, and I couldn't figure out why. That night I had a dream that someone was trying to tell me something.

The next day, Monday, I was going to lunch with some co-workers. Just as we were about to enter the restaurant I remembered my dream. I almost mentioned the dream to my friend Rebecca, but then thought - "how silly - who wants to hear about a dream about someone trying to tell you something?" So I didn't say anything. An hour or so later, I received a phone call from my friend Lorraine, who still worked at the company Earl worked at, and where I used to work.

She said that Earl had died in a motorcycle crash on Sunday morning.

I went into the bathroom and dry heaved, then went home. Only days later did I remember the odd sensations I had had the day he died.

I wrote this email to him on February 7, 1997, when I was about to take a new job and end my time as Earl's coworker:

No matter what else I feel about PTS, I'll always be glad I took the job, because I met so many wonderful pepole, and of course the ineffable, amazing, incomparable Earl Nelson Rich III. I've never met anyone like you, nor I guess ever will - a guy who gets along with raunchy, party-hearty dudes, yet who reads Nabakov and Pushkin. A guy who watches sports so he can talk to his dad. A guy who has the savoir-faire and charm of a social butterfly, yet blushes and looks faint when he's in a room with many women... a guy who's very democratic and unpretentious, and yet who has impeccable taste in clothing and accoutraments. You're so good at bolstering an ego, and so pleasant to be near, and give such good advice about both literary and personal issues (even though I didn't always take your advice!) I'll always think of you as the smart, beautiful, supportive older brother I never had (No need to dwell on the occasional bothersome incestuous urges!) I know I idealize you to an extent, but it's difficult not to sometimes. Maybe if we had continued to share an office we would've ended up getting on each other's nerves and I would've stopped idealizing you long ago,but who knows? You are capable of getting along with anyone. I hope I will always know you, somehow, even if only through occasional e-mails. The thought of you reminds me that the universe is capable of serendipitous sweetness. And truly, with all temerarious, unconsummatable, and rapturous folly, I do love you.

Your penpal

Nancy

Midsummer Night's Dream @the Royal Botanical Garden

We saw The Pantaloon's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Edinburgh Fringe this summer.

They did some interesting things with umbrellas, as you can see in this clip - using them as both props and as a sort of wings to hide the actors, and also to assist with scene changes.

They also took liberties with the text, which I usually don't like, but I thought it worked fairly well here. They seemed to be aiming at an audience of children, clearly, by the little interlude they have between the rude mechanicals scene (Act II Scene 1) and the first appearance of Puck (Act II scene 2) where they demonstrate how to be a scary tree - and a scary shrub - and invite the audience to participate.

Outdoor park performances of Shakespeare really can't be too literal about the text because of the vexations of the great outdoors. Too often the audience can't hear half of what the actors are saying, and since many in the audience are not familiar with Shakespeare to begin with, but rather happened upon the show while strolling through the park with their kids, understand only half of what they CAN hear. If that.

So I generally liked this production, what I heard of it. At the end of this clip, I became very chilled due to the combination of light drizzle and wind and the fact that it was already about 68 degrees F. The rest of the audience seemed to be better-acclimated and hung in there.

One quibble though - if you're aiming at children, you do have to be a bit literal about the casting and characters. I don't think children follow the changes that the characters undergo, from being a rude mechanical one minute, to a fairy the next, if you're going to use the same actors wearing the same clothes. There's only so much you can do with umbrellas.

Below is the section of the play they are doing in the clip.

QUINCE
... In the meantime I
will draw a bill of properties, such as our play
wants. I pray you, fail me not.

BOTTOM
We will meet; and there we may rehearse most
obscenely and courageously. Take pains; be perfect: adieu.

QUINCE
At the duke's oak we meet.

BOTTOM
Enough; hold or cut bow-strings.

Exeunt


ACT II
SCENE I. A wood near Athens.

Enter, from opposite sides, a Fairy, and PUCK
PUCK
How now, spirit! whither wander you?

Fairy
Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire,
I do wander everywhere,
Swifter than the moon's sphere;
And I serve the fairy queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green.
The cowslips tall her pensioners be:
In their gold coats spots you see;
Those be rubies, fairy favours,
In those freckles live their savours:
I must go seek some dewdrops here
And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear.
Farewell, thou lob of spirits; I'll be gone:
Our queen and all our elves come here anon.

PUCK
The king doth keep his revels here to-night:
Take heed the queen come not within his sight;
For Oberon is passing fell and wrath,
Because that she as her attendant hath
A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king;

Entire Midsummer Night's Dream here.

Text Message Breakup

I am so behind the curve. I just heard about Liam Kyle Sullivan. This video doesn't really get going until minute 3:30 - and BONUS - Margaret Cho appears!

But now I can't stop thinking in my head: "shoes shoes shoes GAY"

The Strange Case of Edward Einhorn v. Mergatroyd Productions

Einhorn v. Mergatroyd Productions

Although I've always been a booster of the Dramatists Guild, considering it good sense for playwrights to band together, I never thought I would end up working so closely with the Guild in its fight to protect authors' rights. But when a director registered an unauthorized derivative copyright based on my play, and then sued me when I produced the play, claiming I was infringing his "blocking and choreography script," I immediately turned to the Guild for help.

What happened was this: in October 2004 my partner Jonathan Flagg and I, through our company Mergatroyd Productions, produced my play TAM LIN off-off Broadway for the second year in a row. We hired Edward Einhorn to direct. Then we had differences with him and fired him. We planned to pay him for his services, but disagreed with him on the amount. He thought he deserved one thousand dollars, which he would have been due had he completed the project. We felt he deserved less.

I was actually in favor of paying him a thousand dollars just so he would go away and I would never have to have any dealings with him ever again, but Jonathan disagreed, because Einhorn hadn't finished the work. We had fired him in part because he had stopped working and, in the words of the judge, "basically sulked." After we fired him he emailed the cast and crew in an effort to sabotage our show. In the email he implied that we didn't intend to pay the actors and told them to demand their payment immediately. Fortunately the actors ignored him. And we did pay them exactly what we said we would, when we said we would. In fact, we've never had an issue with paying anybody, ever, except this one director.

read more

Blues Brothers

The first 20 seconds of this video make me so happy. That Dan Akroyd was a maniac.

It reminds me of what I was thinking, as I watched the Ladyboys of Bangkok do their show in Edinburgh. The program relied heavily on American music - except for a few Scottish folk tunes and The Proclaimers "I Will Walk 5,000 Miles." What I thought was, where would the world's pop culture be without African-American influences?

It isn't until you get out of the USA that you realize just how much we rely on Black culture here for our sense of style and cool.

Stuart Pivar - classic crackpot

Amanda at Pandagon reports that P.Z. Meyers is being sued by classic crackpot Stuart Pivar, because Meyers harshly criticized Pivar. Based on the complaint, available from Majikthese what seems to bug Pivar the most is that Meyers called him a "classic crackpot." Crackpots really hate to be called crackpots.

The crackpot's complaint was filed in New York’s Southern District Court. I certainly hope that Judge Lewis Kaplan gets that case - he's not one to mince words, as I found out in the strange case of Edward Einhorn v Mergatroyd Productions

No doubt Edward Einhorn HOPES that this case will get some kind of traction, since he has accused me online of defaming him, by merely writing about Einhorn v. Mergatroyd, as well as claiming that I was trying to "villify him". Villians always hate it when you call them villians. And pretty much every member of the Dramatists Guild, not to mention plenty of non-theatre folk, considers what Einhorn did to be villanous, and an abuse of the US legal system. But people can make up their own minds by reading my account of the case, which politely includes the URL of Einhorn's own laughable argument in favor of a director's copyright. Last time I looked, he had not extended me the same courtesy.

Einhorn's case against us should have been thrown out of court, since the basis of his lawsuit was an unauthorized derivative copyright registration of his absurd "blocking and choreography" script on my play TAM LIN. I expect the US Copyright Office to issue an official cancellation of Einhorn's travesty any day now.

But as both Einhorn and Pivar demonstrate, far too many people believe that free speech, in the form of expressing an opinion about another person, is an actionable offense, if the object of the opinion doesn't like the expressed opinion. Clearly more needs to be done to teach people about the meaning of the First Amendment.

Surely this Pivar case will be laughed out of court, along with Bill O'Reilly's case against Al Franken also tried in the Southern District Court of NY.

Tell it like it is, Krugman

Just the other day I was talking with my coworkers over lunch and we were discussing the 2008 presidential election. I said I thought John Edwards had the best shot, and someone else said "is it because he's a white, male, Christian and therefore electable?" Another coworker, new to the company, whom I'll call "B" said "and from the South." I said "exactly - the only way a Democratic candidate can be elected in this country is if he's from the South - ever since Kennedy. That's because so many people from the South are really gung-ho about being Southern, in a way that I've never seen any Northerners be about the North. I never thought of myself as a "Northerner" in opposition to the South. If anything, you'd think people from the South would rather think about themselves as Americans, since to say you're a gung-ho Southerner evokes the Civil War and the fact that the South seceded from the North in order to avoid the abolition of slavery they thought was coming, and then they proceeded to attack the North!

It turns out B is from North Carolina although she doesn't have an accent because she's spent so much time up here. She disagreed that a certain sub-section of people in the South are gung-ho about being Southern. I said I was sorry for saying that about the South, the way you do when you don't want to get into a fight with someone at work. But she herself disproved her own point a little later on - the subject came up again, and she said "the South will rise again" and I thought she was kidding, or being ironic, or whatever. So I said "yeah, and then we'll kick their ass again!" - several of my great-great grandfathers fought for the Union. And instead of kidding back, she said, pretty seriously "no, I don't think so." Clearly she has plenty of "Southern Pride." And it's easy to find plenty of gung-ho Southerners online: Unreconstructed Confederate Pride lists John Wilkes Booth as a "hero" - Southern Loyalists has a problem with the Fourteenth Amendment - Confederate American Pride plays a sickening, tenderly-sung rendition of "Dixie" - that charming ditty expressing nostalgia for the plantation system to name just the first nauseating three I found.

So anyway, what about Paul Krugman? In his latest editorial, Seeking Willie Horton he writes:

Ronald Reagan didn’t become governor of California by preaching the wonders of free enterprise; he did it by attacking the state’s fair housing law, denouncing welfare cheats and associating liberals with urban riots. Reagan didn’t begin his 1980 campaign with a speech on supply-side economics, he began it — at the urging of a young Trent Lott — with a speech supporting states’ rights delivered just outside Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964.

And if you look at the political successes of the G.O.P. since it was taken over by movement conservatives, they had very little to do with public opposition to taxes, moral values, perceived strength on national security, or any of the other explanations usually offered. To an almost embarrassing extent, they all come down to just five words: southern whites starting voting Republican.

In fact, I suspect that the underlying importance of race to the Republican base is the reason Rudy Giuliani remains the front-runner for the G.O.P. nomination, despite his serial adultery and his past record as a social liberal. Never mind moral values: what really matters to the base is that Mr. Giuliani comes across as an authoritarian, willing in particular to crack down on you-know-who.

The Republican Party has disgracefully gone from being the party of Lincoln to the party of racist-panderers. I don't know how anybody can admit to being a Republican these days.

Ladyboys of Bangkok

We saw the Ladyboys of Bangkok do their show at the Edinburgh Fringe. You haven't lived until you've seen Thai Ladyboys dressed in kilts singing Auld Lang Syne - all the Scots around us were misty-eyed.

You can watch their promotional video here but it doesn't include the kilts section, alas.

We were suprised to see the big circus tent venue filled mostly with middle-aged women. We had expected more gay men to be into the Ladyboys. The Ladyboys are apparently popular for "hen parties" - I'm so happy that that phrase has not caught on big in the US!

Tip for unsuspecting American travelers - don't ask where the bathroom is - they'll look at you funny. It's always called "the toilet."

The New Globe

The highlight of my trip to MOEAS so far is taking the tour of Shakespeare's Globe. It's an awesome thing. I videotaped the whole thing and will have excerpts here ASAP.

Katha Pollitt delivers a righteous smackdown

To Michael Ignatieff and all the other Iraq war proponents

Once, just once, I'd like to see a repentant war proponent acknowledge in a straightforward, non-weaselly way that Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Scott Ritter, Code Pink and, yes, The Nation--to say nothing of the millions around the world who demonstrated so ardently against the war--got it right. But no: "Many of those who correctly anticipated catastrophe did so not by exercising judgment but by indulging in ideology," Ignatieff writes. "They opposed the invasion because they believed the President was only after the oil or because they believed America is always and in every situation wrong."

Excuse me while I set myself on fire. I remember the run-up to the invasion very well, and "It's all about oil" and "America is always wrong" were hardly the major arguments on the table. Since Ignatieff must know this--surely he listened to Mark Danner and Robert Scheer when he teamed with Hitchens to debate them at UCLA--his calumny is not only self-serving, it's disingenuous.

Let's review. You wouldn't know it from Ignatieff's piece, but Bush's stated reason for war was not the liberation of the Iraqi people; it was that Saddam Hussein promoted terrorism, colluded with Al Qaeda, possessed WMDs and presented an immediate threat to the United States. Long before the war there was quite a bit of evidence that none of this was true. Were Hans Blix and Mohammed ElBaradei ideologues who hated America? Remember the yellowcake, the aluminum tubes, the Niger documents the International Atomic Energy Agency determined were forgeries? It was possible to say, and many did, that Saddam was a murderous tyrant but that unilateral pre-emptive war against a country that presented no threat was a dangerous upending of settled international law.

Thank you Katha.

Off to MOE

So I'm off to Merrie Olde England in a few days and blog posts might be scarce - or not, depending on my Internet connection situation.

If anybody from England reads this and wants to recommend places to see - please do!

I'm also going to Edinburgh, so technically I'm off to MOEAS. I will have a report from the Edinburgh Fringe presently.

Damn, McCartney!

McCartney rocks the mullet in '73.

I was recently listening to Paul McCartney's "My Love" which he released on his "Red Rose Speedway" in 1973. I've heard this song dozens of times, and I never got the naughty reference until now.

And when the cupboards bare
Ill still find something there with my love
Its understood , its everywhere with my love
And my love does it good.

So when there's nothing to eat in the cupboard...

DAMN McCartney!

Not that I'm all that suprised by the naughty reference, the Beatles often put semi-veiled sexual references into their work. Like the "tit-tit-tit" backing vocals of "Girl" or "the man in the crowd with the multi-colored mirrors on his hobnail boots" from "Happiness is a Warm Gun" or "four-afish and finger pie" probably the oddest one of all, considering it's in the nostalgic "Penny Lane." And that last one is pure McCartney.

Yeah, everybody thought the Stones were such bad boys. The Beatles were just more subtle about it.

On second thought...

To hell with those other guys. I'm gonna marry me that Paul Krugman! I don't care if he's already married:

The bill is so good that it has Republicans spluttering. “The bill uses children as pawns,” declared Representative Pete Sessions of Texas. Yes, the Democrats are exploiting children — by providing them with health care.

The horror, the horror!

From A Test for Democrats

Oh that righteous scorn!

The Tierney Fallacy

Here it is, in the words of John Tierney:

If nothing else, the results seem to be a robust confirmation of the hypothesis in the old joke: How can a woman get a man to take off his clothes? Ask him.

He says it's an old joke, and I believe him, but I still think that this "hypothesis" should be called "The Tierney Fallacy" in his honor.

John Tierney is a huge fan of evolutionary psychology, and has been, as I blogged just the other day, for at least nine years. And I believe it's because he thinks that it WILL confirm all the old jokes.

The odd thing is that the "study" he cited - and I find it impossible to take anything authored by David Buss seriously - actually goes against the standard traditional stereotypes that David Buss normally trades in. As Tierney reports:

The results contradicted another stereotype about women: their supposed tendency to use sex to gain status or resources.

“Our findings suggest that men do these things more than women,” Dr. Buss said, alluding to the respondents who said they’d had sex to get things, like a promotion, a raise or a favor. Men were much more likely than women to say they’d had sex to “boost my social status” or because the partner was famous or “usually ‘out of my league.’ ”

Dr. Buss said, “Although I knew that having sex has consequences for reputation, it surprised me that people, notably men, would be motivated to have sex solely for social status and reputation enhancement.”

Damn right it surprised him, one of the tenets of evolutionary psychology is that men have sex, with the youngest most attractive women they can find, purely for pleasure, while women want to have sex with older men to get at that sweet status and money. And not because for millenia men have set up a system where women couldn't hold jobs and had to marry well to survive, they believe it's an innate preference.

Really I am surprised that Buss is able to admit just how much his latest study contradicts all his beliefs about human sexuality, since he believes that any social situation proves natural inclinations. I never tire of quoting from David J. Buller's demonstration of Buss's amazing ability to discount nurture in sexual behavior (From his book Adapting Minds):

...in a well-documented study, the anthropologist William Irons found that, among the Turkmen of Persia, males in the wealthier half of the population left 75 percent more offspring than males in the poorer half of the population. Buss cites several studies like this as indicating that "high status in men leads directly to increased sexual access to a larger number of women," and he implies that this is due to the greater desirability of high-status men (David Buss 1999 "Evolutionary Psychology the New Science of the Mind").

But, among the Turkmen, women were sold by their families into marriage. The reason that higher-status males enjoyed greater reproductive success among the Turkmen is that they were able to buy wives earlier and more often than lower-status males. Other studies that clearly demonstrate a reproductive advantage for high-status males are also studies of societies or circumstances in which males "traded" in women. This isn't evidence that high-status males enjoy greater reproductive success because women find them more desirable. Indeed, it isn't evidence of female preference at all, just as the fact that many harem-holding despots produced remarkable numbers of offspring is no evidence of their desirability to women. It is only evidence that when men have power they will use it to promote their reproductive success, among other things (and that women, under such circumstances, will prefer entering a harem to suffering the dire consequences of refusal).

But something so blatantly wrong as this will not stop the EPs, and certainly not the mental midget John Tierney, from considering Buss one of the world's foremost authorities on our "nature."

EPs are normally amazingly evidence-proof though, and so what WOULD John Tierney say if I told him that I've been unable to get men to undress on demand? That I am not truly a woman? Or a "natural" woman? I've been impregnated and given birth in the standard female fashion - isn't that enough? Ain't I a woman?

Is it that I'm too unattractive? But he and the joke don't say "attractive" woman, they just say "woman." Does the joke, and Tierney (but I repeat myself) expect us to automatically assume the adjective "attractive?" I certainly don't believe that anybody considers me a babe, but I HAVE been able to convince men to have sex with me, even offer to marry me in two cases. Do the joke and Tierney expect us to infer they mean "desperate" men? I admit that few of my lovers have been mistaken for hunks, but they weren't THAT bad. Other women had sex with them too. One man with whom I did not have sex was married to someone else when he propositioned me. He was a newly-wed, actually. But then, he was German, maybe that's not so weird over there.

But oh if only what Tierney believes were true. How painfully I desired my co-worker, "C", and how much would it have alleviated my pain to make sweet sweet love to him. I haven't seen him in over ten years and I still have erotic dreams about him.

My dear departed Earl knew how much I longed for him - knew how much many other women desired him, and never took his clothing off (is it necrophilia to get happy at the thought of his getting naked, right now?) for any of us. If he had done so, on demand, he'd have caught his death from pneumonia, not motorcycle crash.

And the sweet kind gentle sensitive coolest-straight-guy-in-the-world actor for whom I've carried a torch for months now - I'm just this side of burning offerings to his graven image - and who recently broke up with his girlfriend - if only I had such power over HIM! But I KNOW he'll say he doesn't think of me that way, or something less crushing, like, we're working together on a project and it would be too weird, or some other tactful thing - he's so charming and tactful. So I can't ask him.

IF ONLY women had such power over men, I would not be unpacking my heart onto a blog post, I would at this very moment be ripping every shred of fabric from his body.

WILMA!

Discussions of evolutionary psychology crop up now and then at the Pandagon and Echidne blogs, and I always like to participate because basically, I know alot more about evolutionary psychology (EP) than most people, even those who subscribe to its theories, and it makes for an easy debate victory.

Well why wouldn't I know more than most people, it was introduced to me, back in the 1980s under the name "sociobiology" (EP promoters sometimes claim there are differences between EP and sociobio, but I've yet to find anything solid) through the work of the mighty cultural materialist Marvin Harris, whose biography I hope to finish writing before I die.

I've also been arguing about EP with media types and EP bigwigs (like Steven Pinker,) since I picked a fight with John Tierney before he had his own op-ed column, way back in 1998, when he was promoting one of its various theories of female inferiority. He actually responded a couple of times, I think mainly because email was still a bit of a novelty and our media overlords found a piquant charm in communicating directly with the rabble - that wore off soon enough. I must look for that exchange in the archives one of these days.

In a recent thread at Pandagon, while arguing with an EP defender, I said that the EP view of human society seems to have been largely informed by The Flintstones. A bit hyperbolic, right?

Guess again.

During another discussion of EP, someone referenced "The Female Brain" by Loanne Brizendine, without irony as an authoritative source for understanding the Mysterious Female. I knew it was standard EP wackiness, but imagine my amazement when I discovered that at long last, evolutionary psychology has now become impossible to paradoy.

From a publishers statement, posted at Amazon:

Brizedine is not above reviewing the basics: "We may think we're a lot more sophisticated than Fred or Wilma Flintstone, but our basic mental outlook and equipment are the same."

I am sorely disappointed by Gail Collins

And my expectations were not that high in the first place when I heard the second XX entity permitted to have a regular opinion column at the NYTimes Op-Ed Smurf colony would be Collins.

Gail Collins was found to be non-threatening enough, and conventional enough by The Powers that Be to get the post of Op-Ed editor at the NYTimes, and I knew she said this, in defense of the male newspaper establishment's problem with female opinions:

There are probably fewer women, in the great cosmic scheme of things, who feel comfortable writing very straight opinion stuff, and they're less comfortable hearing something on the news and batting something out."

But I thought, well, she can't be as bitchy and as shallow as Maureen Dowd, can she? Could ANYbody?

Well. She's not quite as bitchy as Dowd. But let's just say toddlers would be perfectly safe to wade in her journalistic outpourings.

Her first column, about McCain and Hillary Clinton, was respectable if not exactly exciting. Her next was about how Hillary isn't folksy enough - which goes over some of the same ground as the previous column.

Then she goes after the Edwardses:

“I’d have to think about it,” he said during a press conference later that day. This was actually his second answer, the first being a short, utterly unrelated disquisition on food safety inspections. The Edwards campaign has devoted immense effort to beating back the image of their candidate as The Man With the Expensive Haircut. They don’t want to make August the month for The Man Who Would Take Away America’s Citrus Fruit.

How's that for meta-editorials. She seeks to turn August into Citrus Fruit month for Edwards through this very column. I hadn't read anybody else going on about tangerines - but then I don't read People. So by column three she's shading into Dowd territory.

But in her latest, she reveals she isn't just boring and unoriginal, she's also lazy. It never ceases to amaze me how NYTimes writers make a great living out of doing half the work that poorly-paid or non-paid bloggers do.

In her latest, Collins goes on about the 'fat is contagious' meme, the meme that is perhaps the ultimate source of Dick Cavett's pearl clutching and smelling-salts huffing over the sight of fat people on TV.
Collins starts out like this:

8 p.m. — “Friends.” In a much-anticipated reunion special, the gang has all bought condos in the same strangely affordable Manhattan apartment building. Tension mounts as Phoebe and Rachel notice that Monica is putting on weight. Well aware of the new study showing that obesity travels through friendship networks, they evict her. “The body mass of the many is more important than the survival of the one,” says a saddened Ross. “ Even if she is my sister.” Later, the rest of the group reminisces about good times past with their now-shunned buddy. Nicole Richie guest stars as Chandler’s new love interest

But unlike lazy-ass homework-shirker Collins, Amanda at Pandagon points out that the study actually found that the contagiousness of fat friends DOES NOT APPLY TO WOMEN.

Hoyden About Town asks: Yet another case of “male” being the default for “human”?

I think that's about right. I would maintain that it's because Gail Collins subscribes to this traditional view, that male = human, female = other, that she wouldn't notice the study points out that it's primarily a male-friend phenomenon. And that's why she's had such a successful career playing ball with the Big Boys.

And so Paul Krugman remains the only excellent op-ed columnist at the NYTimes. And Collins is a semi-Smurfette.

Your suspicions were correct all along...

Dick Cavett IS a tool:

"It was only a few years ago that I first noticed an obese person in a commercial. Then there were more. Now, like obesity itself, it has gotten out of hand.

This disturbs me in ways I haven’t fully figured out, and in a few that I have. The obese man on the orange bench, the fat pharmacist in the drug store commercial and all of the other heavily larded folks being used to sell products distresses me. Mostly because the message in all this is that its O.K. to be fat.

As we know, it isn’t.

It isn’t, mainly, because of the attendant health issues. The risk of several cancers, crippling damage to joints, heart attack, stroke, diabetes and sleep apnea —a much under-publicized life-threatener — defies sense.

So why is it so prevalent in our culture and in the media? Could it be that the ad agencies — always with our best interests at heart, of course — are making use of the appalling fact that obesity in the United States has doubled and rapidly redoubled to the point where one-third of the population is imperiled by gross poundage? Fat people, the commercial-makers may feel, are entitled to representation. What’s wrong with that?

Everything."

More swillage

Like right-wing scolds everywhere, and Cavett uses that favorite phrase of the Right "politically correct" in order to plead dispensation for his toolishness, Cavett finds it pleasing, comfortable and self-esteem-enhancing to tell people whose appearance he dislikes to shape up or get the hell out of his world.

Fat Michael Moore has done a thousand times more to try to improve the health of Americans than Dick Cavett has ever dreamed of - as if Dick Cavett would ever dream of something so noble and non-pretentious as that.

Dick Cavett likes to pretend it's about his humantarian concern for the health of the obese, but what it's really about is Dick's delicate sensibilities and how those fatties have trampled upon them. Boo hoo!

My new favorite movie

Well I raved about Idiocracy, but SiCKO is my new favorite movie. It is a great movie in every way. If you haven't seen it, go see it, and then you can read the rest of this post, which contains a spoiler.

SPOILER ALERT



So in the movie, Moore mentions the web site set up by bitter hate-filled rightwing creeps called Moorewatch, in order to constantly attack Moore.

They almost had to shut it down because one of the guys who runs it JimB, was being hit with MEDICAL BILLS for his wife.

So Michael Moore sent him a check to cover the amount, anonymously, but then mentioned it in the movie.

So I'm wondering - how are these bitter, hate-filled rightwingers going to react? I did not expect it would be to rethink their bitter hate-filled ways. I thought maybe they would respond by pointing out that Moore has lots of money and did it as a publicity stunt. But instead their main tactic was to attack Moore's supporters.

JimK, it seems, is an independent libertarian - I don't think he used the term libertarian, but by his stated beliefs manifesto, that's what he is. But here's the really really weird thing - he looks like Michael Moore.

Maybe the bitterness comes from the realization that Michael Moore made a great success out of his life through promoting his (righteous, in my book) political causes, while a guy who looks like Michael Moore is a loser who has to accept charity from Michael Moore. But at least that charity didn't come from no guv'mint.

I didn't mention the best part of the movie - if you don't get a little misty-eyed, you are made of stone. You will know what I mean when you see it.

All the critics of Michael Moore seem to have one theme - he's not a saint, so why should anybody care what he says?

Crazy Dictator Syndrome

If I put a little more effort into it, I could probably have other people produce my plays more often. Currently a group out in Pueblo Colorado wants to do my adaptation of Huckleberry Finn, but that’s it.

I’m currently working on an adaptation of Jane Eyre that I plan to produce myself. Producing theatre is a big money pit, but it’s worthwhile to me because I get to have control over everything associated with my play, and more importantly, I get to avoid people with an advanced case of crazy dictator syndrome.

I work for Corporate America which has its share of people with authoritarian personalities. But those dictators have nothing on the crazy dictators. While dictators may have arbitrary, stupid, pointless rules that must be followed, or else, what truly distinguishes crazy dictators is that they have secret rules that must be followed or else.

I have two competing theories for why the world of the arts has such a high percentage of crazy dictators. One is that the world of the arts is to an extent a dumping ground for the insane and the incompetent. Which is probably not an entirely bad thing for society. A badly written play doesn’t kill the way a badly performed operation does. Although I’ve seen plenty of plays that made me want to rip my own head off, but it hasn’t come to that. Yet.

My other theory is that the crazy dictators are aspiring or practicing artists who find themselves in a bureaucratic position of an arts organization and they resent the hell out of it. Of course they have to keep the job, because arts administration pays much better than actually doing anything artistic. Also, chances are they got the job because they know some bigwig associated with the arts organization who had to pull a few strings and it would seem ungrateful to quit too quickly.

So they’re gonna keep the job so they don’t have to work for Corporate America to pay the bills, but they sure as hell are not going to become some dull gray efficient little bureaucratic. They are still an Artiste, and as we all know, Artistes don’t concern themselves with details, and hierarchies and time schedules.

So they approach the issues of details and hierarchies and time schedules with what must surely be deliberate incompetence.

I recently worked with a crazy dictator, and from the very first meeting with him I sensed that things would not go well, by the way he refused to discuss details about the theatre in which my group would perform. I kept asking questions, and I kept getting these vague responses and shrugs and “we’ll sees.” He did make some vague mention about a platform on wheels that we could use, but since he wouldn’t give me anything definite about the platform, like, say its dimensions so that I could determine whether or not I could use it in my set, I ignored the platform suggestion.

Now the Artiste crazy dictator abhors a rigid hierarchy, as long as everybody knows that the crazy dictator is at the top of the heap. But it isn’t enough to be at the top of the heap. The crazy dictator wants to believe that those below truly want the crazy dictator to be on top, out of admiration and affection. And so it is doubly difficult to challenge the crazy dictator because to even hint that you aren’t thrilled to submit to him is to admit that you don’t adore the crazy dictator. He will mark you as one of the Ungrateful.

The crazy dictator I mentioned, we’ll call him Mal, must have got it into his head somehow that I did not admire and adore him, and he responded by being continually bad-tempered and nit-picking. I worked hard to make sure my group – we were part of a festival so there were lots of groups – observed all rules and were as courteous and considerate as possible. But there were those secret rules, which Mal would only reveal to us after we broke them. Through the use of secret rules he was able to remain in a constant state of indignation towards us.

Of course, as is common with dictators, we were held to much, much higher standards than the dictator himself. Like the time that he scheduled us to rehearse in the theatre, and then left us out in below-freezing weather while another group – friends of his – used the theatre to rehearse during our scheduled time. Whether this was sheer incompetence and carelessness on his part, or yet another screw-you is hard to determine. Crazy dictators are a lot like George W. Bush in that respect. I think that Mal technically apologized, but in such a way that it managed to sound like an accusation.

And when a flat that was part of the set almost fell forward and crushed the audience (members of the crew held it up until intermission, but it ruined our scene changes), you can't prove that the carelessly-placed C-clamp was deliberate sabotage. But at the very least, it sure was carelessly placed. I heard that one of the actors bumped into the flat, but it was hard not to, since Mal insisted that we had to have the platform – the one that he mentioned at the beginning of the production, but then wouldn’t give me details about – in the extremely narrow area that constituted “backstage” of our set. It seems that Mal believed that he acquired the platform for our benefit. Even though I never said I wanted it. But in his mind, no doubt, I was capricious and ungrateful, and he was going to make me pay for that.

I’ve heard from lots of other people about nightmare arts administrators who want to make sure that all the artists they know suffer for their art. And I personally had contact with two other crazy dictator arts administrators in the past year. That makes a total of three, counting Mal. The total number of arts administrators I’ve dealt with in the past year – also three.

Sure, they’re irritable in part because they don’t like having a desk job, but at least they aren’t working for Corporate America, which has an even lower opinion of artists than arts administrators. I work with a group of people who are typical, I expect, of Corporate America. Occasionally I go to lunch with them in an attempt to seem semi-social, and I suffer through their deadly dull conversations about the latest consumer items they purchased, and what a great deal they got on them, because occasionally I’ll hear some useful gossip about the big bosses. I did make the mistake of discussing my theatre work once, resulting in the following conversation:

Them: So why do you do theatre?

Me: I really love it.

Them: How much money do you make?

Me: None. I lose money.

Them (ignoring me from now on): lose money? Why would you do something that loses money?

Them: must be some kind of hobby.

Them: yeah, I guess so. So I got one of those automatic pool-cleaning gadgets. Forty bucks.

Them: Forty bucks? You can get it at Costco for thirty-five.

But like I said, it’s probably just as well for society that these unfair, irrational people, these crazy dictators, end up in arts administration. Look what happens when they get real power, like in North Korea. Or the present US administration.

GO MICHAEL MOORE!

Michael Moore is MAD AS HELL and he isn't going to take it any more!

on CNN - he rips Wolf Blitzer and the MSM a new one!

Via Alicublog

The Abbess of Barking

I'm off to Great Britian soon, so I bought a map of London. I was doing a little research on Regent's Park, and read that:

The area was originally part of the vast forest of Middlesex and was called Marylebone Park after the village and manor nearby. There were thick woods, particularly going up the slope towards Primrose Hill. But on the lower ground the woods were more open and were perfect for deer.

This caught the eye of King Henry Vlll. In 1538, he seized the park from the owner, the Abbess of Barking, and turned 554 acres into a hunting chase.

The "Abbess of Barking"! This struck me as an hysterically funny phrase. I immediately checked with Google, and to my amazement, couldn't find any evidence that anybody had ever named their dog The Abbess of Barking. What is wrong with you people?


Barking "is a suburban town in east London, England and the main district of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barking

English places gots funny names, har har.

This is what I imagine the Abbess of Barking looks like: