Every year, no matter what, my play TAM LIN must be performed in NYC for Halloween. Just so Edward Einhorn knows he hasn't killed the play in spite of the fact that the US Copyright office has not yet cancelled his UNAUTHORIZED derivative "blocking and choreography" script registration. It WILL be compelled, eventually, even if I have to spend the rest of my life to do it."My fellow Americans," Bush said, "at long last, we have reached the end of the dark period in American history that will come to be known as the Clinton Era, eight long years characterized by unprecedented economic expansion, a sharp decrease in crime, and sustained peace overseas. The time has come to put all of that behind us."
Bush swore to do "everything in [his] power" to undo the damage wrought by Clinton's two terms in office, including selling off the national parks to developers, going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of hospitals and onto the street.
Economic data rarely inspire poetic thoughts. But as I was contemplating the latest set of numbers, I realized that I had William Butler Yeats running through my head: "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the center cannot hold."
I don't know what kind of nasty bug has been going around, but it has been playing havoc with my casting choices. I thought I had the NYCPlaywrights Autumn fundraiser finally cast just right, when Ann came down with this virus and had to bail out the very morning of the show. Luckily I had just the night before made the acquaintance of a very good young female actor and she filled in... for the most part.Frustrated by what they describe as difficulty in getting their work produced, enough female playwrights to make a standing - room - only crowd are planning to attend a town hall meeting on Monday night to air their grievances with representatives of New York's leading Off Broadway and nonprofit theaters.
The gathering was organized by the playwrights Sarah Schulman and Julia Jordan, who have rallied their colleagues to the cause, contending that their male counterparts in the 2008-9 season are being produced at 14 of the largest Off Broadway institutions at four times the rate that women are. More than 150 playwrights appeared at a meeting last month to discuss the issue, and all 90 seats at New Dramatists, the playwriting center where Monday night’s meeting is scheduled, are already spoken for, and there is a long waiting list.
At least he’s admitting that he got something wrong. That’s actually rare these days, especially among the people Greenspan associates with.
That said, praise also to Steve Goldstein at Marketwatch for this memorable line:
For a man who was once remarkably hard to decipher, Alan Greenspan is now as clear as an empty Lehman Brothers office.
Andrea Mitchell talked about a "remarkably negative" Obama ad -- negative because it shows McCain bragging about how often he sided with George Bush.
In 2000 there was a lot of yapping about the limited involvement of Bill Clinton in Al Gore's campaign. (In fact we've had some of that this year about both Clintons' limited involvement in Obama's.) Yet nobody finds it remarkable that the Republican Presidential candidate is running, actively and like hell, from the sitting President from his own party. In fact, they cluck over Obama's bad taste in bringing it up.
Well if you want to get technical, my acting debut was playing an elf doing the A-B-C dance in the Our Lady of Fatima first graders' Christmas pageant. So this is my adult debut - not counting the Brick Playhouse's Night of a Thousand Plays. OK, so this isn't my acting debut - except it's the first time I will perform in public in one of my own plays. I play the adulterous wife in my HAPPILY MARRIED in next week's NYCPlaywrights fundraiser. Which should be fun - playing bad guys is fun. OK, so it's only a reading. But still, it should be interesting. Rehearsal yesterday went pretty well. I am playing a few other parts too - for some reason most of our female actor members are very busy lately (or out of town at a film fest) and I had to fill in. Luckily it's minor parts and stage directions. I think I can handle that. It will be videotaped, so that should be amusing to watch.Oh wow! For years I have maintained that in a fair fight between a Polar bear and a Siberian tiger, the tiger would win. And yet not a single person I've asked: "Polar bear vs. Siberian tiger?" has agreed with me.
Well check it out - a little old COUGAR fights off a Grizzly bear - which is much closer in size to a Polar bear than a cougar is to a S. tiger. And look who wins bitches!
Bernanke also said there were now risks to the global financial system from unregulated credit default swaps. These are insurancelike products that allow big investors to hedge against potential losses. The market for swaps is thought to total $55 trillion, yet it's a "dark market," unregulated and without transparency, amounting to nothing more than contracts between two sophisticated parties.
"Credit default swaps are not traded on an exchange. They aren't traded through a central counterparty, which means if one of those firms fails, among the consequences would be that the banks and others who had purchased credit insurance would be forced to write down tens of billions of dollars of value," Bernanke said.
I need to expand my horizons eh? Condescend much?
If I had known you found *mildly* dissenting opinions objectionable I would have never contributed here. I had this delusion your were hip liberal dude.
Luckily, I have my own blog and am not a prisoner of your moderation purgatory.
You're welcome to come and debate me on my own blog any time - I have no plans to censor you - I don't need to - I can out-debate you on any of these topics, any time.
...I'm going to close the comments now because I think this is a meaningless argument and I've got better things to do. Luckily for you, you've got the entire rest of the internet to tell everyone what a big ol' Nazi I am. Keep on sticking it to the man!
Let me start this off by saying, I would object to this sideshow whichever political party it involved. Having vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin drop the ceremonial first puck at the Flyers' opener Saturday night was problematic not because it was Palin — Flyers owner Ed Snider’s decision under the flimsy excuse of "honoring" hockey moms — but because it is injecting politics in a place it should not be.Ah Philly, my old home town.
The biggest problem: when Palin came out onto the Wachovia Center ice Saturday night — greeted by resounding (almost deafening) boos from the Flyers crowd.
Some voters told reporters that they didn’t want Obama to run, let alone win, should his very presence unleash the demons who have stalked America from Lincoln to King. After consultation with Congress, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, gave Obama a Secret Service detail earlier than any presidential candidate in our history — in May 2007, some eight months before the first Democratic primaries.
"I've got the best protection in the world, so stop worrying," Obama reassured his supporters. Eventually the country got conditioned to his appearing in large arenas without incident (though I confess that the first loud burst of fireworks at the end of his convention stadium speech gave me a start). In America, nothing does succeed like success. The fear receded.
Until now. At McCain-Palin rallies, the raucous and insistent cries of "Treason!" and "Terrorist!" and "Kill him!" and “Off with his head!” as well as the uninhibited slinging of racial epithets, are actually something new in a campaign that has seen almost every conceivable twist. They are alarms. Doing nothing is not an option.
... what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama "launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist." He is “palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is "not a man who sees America the way you and I see America." Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops.
By the time McCain asks the crowd "Who is the real Barack Obama?" it's no surprise that someone cries out "Terrorist!" The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama's middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers's Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.
That's a far cry from simply accusing Obama of being a guilty-by-association radical leftist. Obama is being branded as a potential killer and an accessory to past attempts at murder. "Barack Obama's friend tried to kill my family" was how a McCain press release last week packaged the remembrance of a Weather Underground incident from 1970 — when Obama was 8.
We all know what punishment fits the crime of murder, or even potential murder, if the security of post-9/11 America is at stake. We all know how self-appointed "patriotic" martyrs always justify taking the law into their own hands.
George Soros, the prominent financier, avoids using the financial contracts known as derivatives “because we don’t really understand how they work.” Felix G. Rohatyn, the investment banker who saved New York from financial catastrophe in the 1970s, described derivatives as potential "hydrogen bombs."
And Warren E. Buffett presciently observed five years ago that derivatives were “financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal.”
One prominent financial figure, however, has long thought otherwise. And his views held the greatest sway in debates about the regulation and use of derivatives — exotic contracts that promised to protect investors from losses, thereby stimulating riskier practices that led to the financial crisis. For more than a decade, the former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has fiercely objected whenever derivatives have come under scrutiny in Congress or on Wall Street. “What we have found over the years in the marketplace is that derivatives have been an extraordinarily useful vehicle to transfer risk from those who shouldn’t be taking it to those who are willing to and are capable of doing so,” Mr. Greenspan told the Senate Banking Committee in 2003. “We think it would be a mistake” to more deeply regulate the contracts, he added.
In 1997, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal agency that regulates options and futures trading, began exploring derivatives regulation. The commission, then led by a lawyer named Brooksley E. Born, invited comments about how best to oversee certain derivatives.
Ms. Born was concerned that unfettered, opaque trading could "threaten our regulated markets or, indeed, our economy without any federal agency knowing about it," she said in Congressional testimony. She called for greater disclosure of trades and reserves to cushion against losses.
Ms. Born's views incited fierce opposition from Mr. Greenspan and Robert E. Rubin, the Treasury secretary then. Treasury lawyers concluded that merely discussing new rules threatened the derivatives market. Mr. Greenspan warned that too many rules would damage Wall Street, prompting traders to take their business overseas.
"Greenspan told Brooksley that she essentially didn’t know what she was doing and she’d cause a financial crisis," said Michael Greenberger, who was a senior director at the commission. "Brooksley was this woman who was not playing tennis with these guys and not having lunch with these guys. There was a little bit of the feeling that this woman was not of Wall Street."
In early 1998, Mr. Rubin's deputy, Lawrence H. Summers, called Ms. Born and chastised her for taking steps he said would lead to a financial crisis, according to Mr. Greenberger. Mr. Summers said he could not recall the conversation but agreed with Mr. Greenspan and Mr. Rubin that Ms. Born's proposal was "highly problematic."
Ms. Born pushed ahead. On June 5, 1998, Mr. Greenspan, Mr. Rubin and Mr. Levitt called on Congress to prevent Ms. Born from acting until more senior regulators developed their own recommendations. Mr. Levitt says he now regrets that decision. Mr. Greenspan and Mr. Rubin were “joined at the hip on this,” he said. “They were certainly very fiercely opposed to this and persuaded me that this would cause chaos.”
Ms. Born soon gained a potent example. In the fall of 1998, the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management nearly collapsed, dragged down by disastrous bets on, among other things, derivatives. More than a dozen banks pooled $3.6 billion for a private rescue to prevent the fund from slipping into bankruptcy and endangering other firms.
Despite that event, Congress froze the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s regulatory authority for six months. The following year, Ms. Born departed.
So my best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this [this being women's less success careers in science and engineering] is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people's legitimate family desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.
In November 1999, senior regulators — including Mr. Greenspan and Mr. Rubin — recommended that Congress permanently strip the C.F.T.C. of regulatory authority over derivatives.
Mr. Greenspan, according to lawmakers, then used his prestige to make sure Congress followed through. "Alan was held in very high regard," said Jim Leach, an Iowa Republican who led the House Banking and Financial Services Committee at the time. "You've got an area of judgment in which members of Congress have nonexistent expertise."
I shall be told, I suppose, that my philosophy is comfortless - because I speak the truth; and people prefer to be assured that everything the Lord has made is good. Go to the priests, then, and leave philosophers in peace!
It took Charlotte months to persuade Emily to publish her work.No, not really. I can understand if a dramatist exaggerates in a play in order to make a point, but she should get it right in her introduction. According to Charlotte's own "Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell":
My sister Emily was not a person of demonstrative character, nor one, on the recesses of whose mind and feelings, even those nearest and dearest to her could, with impunity, intrude unlicensed; it took hours to reconcile her to the discovery I had made, and days to persuade her that such poems merited publication.
Sonnet 15
And all in war with Time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.
Sonnet 17
But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice; in it and in my rhyme.
Sonnet 18
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
Sonnet 19
Yet, do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.
Sonnet 38
If my slight Muse do please these curious days,
The pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise.
Sonnet 54
And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,
When that shall fade, my verse distills your truth.
Sonnet 55
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lover's eyes.
Sonnet 60
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.
Sonnet 63
His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,
And they shall live, and he in them still green.
Sonnet 71
O, if, I say, you look upon this verse
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse.
But let your love even with my life decay,
Lest the wise world should look into your moan
And mock you with me after I am gone.
Sonnet 81
When all the breathers of this world are dead;
You still shall live--such virtue hath my pen -
Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.
Sonnet 107
My love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes,
Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes:
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.
Circus of Heaven
The day the Circus of Heaven came to town
Local folks lined the streets in a Midwestern town
Waiting anxiously for the parade to begin all around
On the very last day
A unicorn headed the mystical way
Surrounded by what seemed a thousand golden angels at play
Behind were Centaurs, elves, bright fairies all in colours of jade
On the very final day
For what seemed only just a moment in time
Seven solemn flying silvered regal horses rode by
Seven golden chariots in tow, a wonder to behold
The Seven Lords of the Mountains of Time
There then arose where nothing really stood there before
A giant tent rising one thousand feet high frofrom the floor
Towns people flocked inside with their eyes all amazed
To greet the Seventh Lord of the seventh age
A fanfare rang out in an incredible sound
Bringing out the strangest visions perfect harmony round
Any dreams he asked would they like to have seen
>From historical or mythical scenes
Then there above their heads just as vivid as life
Each vision transported multitudes inventing light
Grecian galleons, the sack of Troy, to the Gardens of Babylon
A play of millions roared along
The gigantic dreams of Alexander the Great
Civil wars where fbrothers fought and killed their friendship with hate
All seen by Zeus performing scenes in the magical way
The day the circus came to town
Outside great animals as tame as the trees
Angels high in starlight dancing streets
Turning their colours with indigo and gold
Dropping violet, red and emerald snow
As the circus finally changed its invisible course
A new world to be found
On the dreamy ground we walked upon
I turned to my son and said
"Was that something beautiful, amazing, wonderful, extraordinary
beautiful?"
"Oh, it was OK. But there were no clowns, no tigers, lions or bears,
candy-floss, toffee apples, no clowns."
A man with a cat, on the other hand, “is secure with himself,” he said. “He’s sharing his space with a predator.”More Men are Unabashedly Embracing Their Love of Cats
Many women agree that guys with cats are extra special.
"They make the best boyfriends because they're totally cool with staying home and watching a movie," said Elizabeth Daza, 28, a video producer in Manhattan, who dated a cat-owning man for eight years. "Straight men with cats seem to be really secure and stable. They don’t need to be running around the park and proving their masculinity like the dog guys."
We also desperately need an economic stimulus plan to push back against the slump in spending and employment. And this time it had better be a serious plan that doesn’t rely on the magic of tax cuts, but instead spends money where it’s needed. (Aid to cash-strapped state and local governments, which are slashing spending at precisely the worst moment, is also a priority.) Yet it’s hard to imagine the Bush administration, in its final months, overseeing the creation of a new Works Progress Administration.
But by far the most intense (and screwy) psychological scrutiny was reserved for the close relationship between Branwell and Emily. After Charlotte had given up on him as a bad egg, Emily continued to stand by her older brother, calming him down and getting him to bed during his drunken outbursts. This aspect of the Brontë family life led to speculations about a possible incestuous aspect to Branwell and Emily’s relationship, especially in regard to its being the model for the relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. (One theory suggested that Heathcliff was in fact the bastard son of Mr. Earnshaw and thus Catherine’s half brother.) Of course, this theory clashed with yet another view that saw Branwell as doomed by his closet homosexuality, which may or may not have emerged during the period he spent as a live-in tutor to a young boy, Edward Robinson; his employment ended in disgrace after Branwell was dismissed with the threat of scandalous exposure if he tried to get in touch with any of the family. Branwell later retailed this scandal as an adulterous affair he was having with his pupil’s mother.
Edelstein has basically commissioned a cat to rewrite an anti-feline play. Martin is a fat cat, too, who leaves downtown theaters in stretch limos, so he evidently can't help identifying with Theo. "The bourgeoisie is us," he recently told The New York Times. It may not concern him that Theo is a walking cautionary tale, as relevant to Germany in 1911 as he should be to America after 9-11. We've never needed a good playwright to take the piss out of middle-class blockheads and flag-kissing nationalists as much as we do now. But indifference is the bonbon of privilege, isn't it?
I was glad to see the latest issue of The Dramatist is devoted to copyright issues.
Thought you might be interested in what's going on with my case...
As you may recall, Edward Einhorn registered an unauthorized derivative "blocking and choreography" copyright on my play TAM LIN, and then when I produced my play, used it to sue me in Federal Court, claiming my production violated his copyright.
Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered Einhorn to cancel the copyright because in his opinion the work wasn't substantial enough to copyright; it was registered for the purpose of instigating a lawsuit; and was unauthorized.
Then an odd thing happened - the US Copyright Office would only cancel the copyright if Edward Einhorn himself agreed with any one of Judge Kaplan's reasons. And since he refused, that was the end of it as far as the US Copyright Office was concerned.
At that point my lawyers basically threw up their hands and said, oh well, the Copyright Office won't do its job.
I sent a letter stating my case to the US Copyright Office a year ago and have not received a response to date.
But in spite of the legal stone wall I've run up against, it is not the end of the matter as far as I am concerned.
And this is not only about me. Any American author could find themselves in my situation because there are two serious problems with the US Copyright Office's derivative work registration system:
***************
1. The Copyright Office does not require proof of authorization
2. The Copyright Office will not cancel the unauthorized copyright unless the wrongdoer confesses to the wrongdoing, even in spite of a judge's orders.
***************
Also, in spite of the judge's order, Einhorn still holds an unauthorized "blocking and choreography" copyright registration, which should be of great concern to all American dramatists.
I plan to begin work on a project aimed at both canceling Einhorn's unauthorized derivative copyright and correcting the two serious problems in the US Copyright Office's system.
I hope that I can count on the Dramatist Guild's support in this endeavor. I plan to ask for the support of every American writers' organization.
(signed)
I cannot believe it - I finally got to see the pilot to Alias Smith and Jones!Over the past thirty years, Wall Street has honed the art of creating and selling financial products with an increasingly tenuous connection to reality. It has been an extraordinarily creative period—a modernism of money, with an equivalent trend toward abstraction. Relatively simple derivatives evolved into ever more arcane contrivances. The risk and the leverage piled up, and, in the short term, the billions rolled in. This is over now.
This weekend I was inspired to finally write my Christmas-themed ten-minute play (and of course it prevented me from house-cleaning.) Although I guess I should really be writing an autumn equinox play today.financial firms created credit by inventing exotic, little understood securities.
There was scant disclosure to regulators or investors, who mistakenly trusted bond-rating agencies. Credit has now frozen, as markets belatedly downgrade these assets.
Sat. Nov. 15 2008 8PM
One of the first songs I ever really loved on the radio was Popcorn by Hot Butter ->Listen to it here!
In my journey from hard core Roman Catholicism to rationality, one of my discoveries along the way was that rather than being united by their love of Jesus Christ, the various Christian sects hate each other. 
Finally, all those years of study, not to mention students loans is going to pay off - I'm taking the plunge and offering my services as a portrait artist. Not quite complete web site here.
Interviews show that Ms. Palin runs an administration that puts a premium on loyalty and secrecy. The governor and her top officials sometimes use personal e-mail accounts for state business; dozens of e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that her staff members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records.
Arguably one of the best songs ever written.
LYRICS
Take me out tonight
Where theres music and theres people
And theyre young and alive
Driving in your car
I never never want to go home
Because I havent got one
Anymore
Take me out tonight
Because I want to see people and i
Want to see life
Driving in your car
Oh, please dont drop me home
Because its not my home, its their
Home, and Im welcome no more
And if a double-decker bus
Crashes into us
To die by your side
Is such a heavenly way to die
And if a ten-ton truck
Kills the both of us
To die by your side
Well, the pleasure - the privilege is mine
Take me out tonight
Take me anywhere, I dont care
I dont care, I dont care
And in the darkened underpass
I thought oh god, my chance has come at last
(but then a strange fear gripped me and i
Just couldnt ask)
Take me out tonight
Oh, take me anywhere, I dont care
I dont care, I dont care
Driving in your car
I never never want to go home
Because I havent got one, da ...
Oh, I havent got one
And if a double-decker bus
Crashes into us
To die by your side
Is such a heavenly way to die
And if a ten-ton truck
Kills the both of us
To die by your side
Well, the pleasure - the privilege is mine
Oh, there is a light and it never goes out
There is a light and it never goes out
There is a light and it never goes out
There is a light and it never goes out
There is a light and it never goes out
There is a light and it never goes out
There is a light and it never goes out
There is a light and it never goes out
There is a light and it never goes out
What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.
