what Twitter?

I still have a Twitter account, but I haven't tweeted since December 2011 and I don't miss it at all. I think Twitter is basically a fad. Most people will eventually stop using it because what's the point? You either have something to say of substance or why bother?

There are only two kinds of people who have a reason to use Twitter - celebrities who are promoting their work, and people who are incredibly, mind-bogglingly banal.

Andy Borowitz falls into the first category. I am much more likely to want to buy his book because he twits consistently witty things. Here are some of his best tweets in the past 24 hours alone:
 

Andy Borowitz ‏ @BorowitzReport

Just to be on the safe side, people should probably stop wearing hoodies, and also be white.

---

Bad news for Obama: he can't hire the best person to sabotage Mitt Romney's campaign, because that is Mitt Romney. 

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If someone shoots innocent civilians in Afghanistan, he's arrested a lot faster than he would be in Florida. 

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BREAKING: Prostitution Ring Embarrassed by Association with John Edwards

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I worry that Geraldo's hoodie comment will overshadow all the other comments he's made that are equally idiotic. 

I found these on Twitter just now, but you know where I saw them first? On Facebook because Borowitz feeds his tweets into his Facebook newsfeed. So who needs Twitter for reading tweets?

The second category of people, the mind-bogglingly banal, well they are truly dedicated to Twitter. I used to check in frequently with one individual's tweets because I just couldn't believe that she felt the need to tweet such utter banalities on a regular basis. I mean electron microscope-sized small talk. Things like (I'm paraphrasing) "my coffee is very hot this morning." Eventually I stopped reading her tweets because... well I guess I just forgot about her. But I suddenly thought to check in to see how it's going and yes, she is still the sworn enemy of significance - here are just some of her tweets from the past week or so:

• She has noticed an attractive man nearby
• She doesn't want to be annoyed today
• She is wearing a special nail polish color
• She found a musical item just now
• Some food in her refrigerator went bad
• There was water on the floor of the subway
• It's foggy this morning
• She noticed a room is chilly 
• She has eaten a delicious dessert

I don't claim to be the most scintillating of conversationalist but dear little 8 pound 6 ounce baby Jesus! Being so spectacularly boring must be some hard work! I mean, sure, not everything on my blog is going to be of interest to everybody, but at least I generally have something of substance to say even if it is noting the Vernal Equinox - I didn't just say, hey, it's the Vernal Equinox, I posted an informative diagram. And in any case, I rarely post more than one item a day. She churns out these precious nuggets of almost Zen-like nothingness many times during any given 24-hour period.

I just can't imagine that the effort to type out the present climate conditions in 140 characters or less is worth the bother.

I would feel sorry for her, for being so boring, but she seems to be a completely contented, spitting out little cuds of banality on a regular basis, with the occasion sharing of mutual approving moos with of one of her friends. No, I'm sure the banal either have no idea they are banal or if they do, they think that banal is exactly the thing to be.

I'll check back with her in another six months. I suspect when I do I will learn more about temporary weather conditions, subway car inconveniences and the state of her groceries. I can hardly wait.

Rutherford & Son

I got to see another play for free thanks to the NYCPlaywrights web site. This time it was Rutherford & Son at the Mint Theater.

I didn't hate the play, but I found it pretty boring especially towards the end. I appreciate that the Mint Theater's mission is to produce older plays and this one is about a hundred years old, but even more notably was written by Githa Sowerby, a woman. She was produced under her initials originally but once her identity was known, the New York Times critic Adolph Klauber expressed his concern:

Even with Miss Sowerby as a shining example, we do not feel that the playwriting instinct in young ladies calls for immediate or emphatic encouragement.

Ah yes, the good ole days.

The play had a solid narrative structure so it avoided the aimlessness of so many contemporary plays, but the concerns of the people in this play were the concerns of a completely different time period so it was hard to identify with, for example, the daughter who spent her first 36 years at home waiting on her father with no contact with men ever. I felt bad for her, of course, but mainly I felt more like "so glad things have improved in the past hundred years."

Also the two Rutherford sons were played with an incredibly whiny manner that was extremely irritating, and the one son's accent kept sliding around from North of England dialect to Received Pronunciation dialect to Indian accent.

The guy who played Rutherford was really good though. He totally was Rutherford.

Of course Shakespeare's time is even further away, (although extreme patriarchy changed very little from his time to Sowerby's time) but I feel more identification with his characters. I guess that's what makes him big bad Avon Bill.

Vernal Equinox

Technically, yesterday.

Excellent technical diagram from Wiki. As a professional technical writer, I adore graphics that are both informative and aesthetically pleasing.

things I learned from Mad Men

I spent the day sick on the sofa watching the first two seasons of Mad Men and learned quite alot about the way things were in the early 1960s:

• Everybody smoked all the time, especially doctors when they were seeing patients.
• Everybody drank all the time - especially pregnant women.
• Everybody cheated on everybody all the time.
• Everybody was anti-Semitic
• Women were sexually harassed in the office constantly.
• Friends let friends drive drunk all the time.
• Nobody tells anybody anything important unless they absolutely have to.
• All men are complete scum.

Now nobody has to tell me that the early 1960s was a bad time for Jews, Blacks and women but even I have a hard time believing that people engaged in such bad behavior so relentlessly. I will say though that I enjoyed Don Draper's scenes of marital infidelity because Jon Hamm is an extremely attractive man and you're much more likely to see lots of him during his adulteries than during his marital sex. So even though it makes me dislike his character, I do look forward to his endless cheating.

The biggest charm of Mad Men is the production values which take great care to get the period details right and gives you the impression of being a fly on the wall during that time period, and being aghast at the self-destructive and careless behaviors of people back then. One of the most shocking and effective moments is when one little girl is running around with the plastic that is used to cover dry cleaning over her head and her mother yells at her - and you think she's about to say "take that plastic bag off your head" but what she says is "if I find the dry cleaning that came with that bag on the floor..." But on the down side, that aspect grows old after a while and the surprise and let's face it, the smug superiority of being a Person From The Superior Future wears off. The story lines become repetitive and the charm of watching men in business meetings is pretty low to begin with.

Since it's an ad agency in the 1960s, Mad Men occasionally reminds of Bewitched - Samantha's husband Darren being an advertising copywriter. But then I miss all the magic stuff and of course the shamelessly self-serving Larry Tate. Although speaking of self-serving, the head of Don Draper's ad agency is a huge fan of Ayn Rand and at one point says he'll introduce Don Draper to Ayn Rand. I don't think they're actually going to portray that in the show which is such a shame - it would be so incredible. Now that I've seen some Mad Men, I can really appreciate this Sesame Street parody:

New Yorker Parity Report - March 26, 2012

Oh boy, it's the Style Issue, when the New Yorker tries to look more like Vanity Fair, but only for a week, thank goodness. I would have thought that, like the food issue, this issue would have a higher percentage of female writers than usual, but I would have thought wrong - although it's up a smidge from last week, 24% is a pretty standard parity rate score - half of actual parity.

The New Yorker Parity Report

A regular report on the gender parity - or lack thereof - of the current issue of The New Yorker based on table of contents by-lines
Includes fiction, non-fiction, poems. Does not include illustrations.

---

A score of 50% means that half of all writers in the issue are female.
A score of greater than 50% would mean more female than male writers. This never happens.

---

Parity change from previous week: +3%

March 26, 2012

Total writers: 21
male: 16
female: 5
gender parity score: 24%

Last week's score
Total writers: 23
male: 18
female: 5
gender parity score: 21%

Mistress Ilsa 2012 pix

Mike Daisey wants it both ways

The issue of This American Life's retraction of their broadcast of Mike Daisey's show The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs reminds me of an exchange I had with a playwright who wrote a play using prominent atheist Madelyn Murray O'Hair as the main character. I blogged about that in February 2006.

What David Foley, the author of The Last Days of Madalyn Murray O'Hair, In Exile and Mike Daisey have in common is that they want to have it both ways. They want to be able to use the notoriety of their subjects to get attention for their theatre production but they want the freedom to invent details as they see fit.

 There are differences though. In Daisey's case, the main thrust of the story is true - Foxconn does mistreat its workers. But Daisey made it seem much worse by claiming that its workers were being forced to use n-hexane; that he met under-aged workers at Foxconn; that he showed an iPhone to a worker who had never seen an iPhone and the worker said it was like magic; that the factory guards had guns.

In the case of David Foley, something that might have been true - O'Hair absconding with money - turned out to be completely false and not only that, but the truth itself was much more dramatic, sensational, even, than the speculation. I am at a loss to say which is worse. But in both cases, the misrepresentations were excused on the basis that it was theatre.

Well the theatre world is full of bullshit artists who have no concept of personal integrity, so none of this is really shocking. It's all about selling tickets, even if it means presenting fiction as fact.

sick of theatre

What is this, I'm sick for another theatre production. This is getting to be a regular thing. Seems like every time I do a production I come down with a cold. At least for the last MISTRESS ILSA, back in July, I waited until the last performance to get sick. This time I'm sick before the first performance. Argh. I guess it's because I always end up doing so much and the stress is too much. I need to get someone else to do all the production shit work next time.

My new Tawdry promo

Ilsa & Trixie

Mistress Ilsa rides again. This time she has a new Trixie - that's Larissa Adamczyk, who was last seen in a Mergatroyd Productions show playing the exact opposite of Trixie - Courtney, in The Good Women of Morningside was a brainy nerd while Trixie is... not brainy. However they both have one thing in common - each loves her cat.

I just realized I've had cats in many of the plays I've written in the last few years... I better tone down the cattage a little going forward.

New Yorker Parity Report - March 19, 2012

The New Yorker parity rate soars up from 8% to 21%, back to almost half of what would be parity.

The New Yorker Parity Report

A regular report on the gender parity - or lack thereof - of the current issue of The New Yorker based on table of contents by-lines
Includes fiction, non-fiction, poems. Does not include illustrations.

---

A score of 50% means that half of all writers in the issue are female.
A score of greater than 50% would mean more female than male writers. This never happens.

---

Parity change from previous week: +13%

March 19, 2012

Total writers: 23
male: 18
female: 5
gender parity score: 21%

Last week's score
Total writers: 23
male: 21
female: 2
gender parity score: 8%

the Forsman interview

I enjoyed this whole interview with Carl Forsman - we talked for 30 minutes and I edited it down to almost 8 minutes and unfortunately had to leave out our discussion of Mr. Rogers (Carl is a fan of Mr. Rogers too) among other things, but the best part is at the end. First because Carl says of Tina Howe "her plays are very much generated from a spirit place of truth." I'm guessing he casually floats phrases such as that as a result of having a minister for a father.

I expect it's saying things like that which made Tina Howe say of him "doves fly out of his jacket." Carl mentions that anecdote and I laughed loudly - much too loudly. I did what I could to edit the laughter down to a low roar in post-production, but I didn't want to lose what Carl was saying so it's still pretty loud.

But really, that is pretty funny.




I mention at the beginning of this interview that Carl is from Chatham NJ. I've actually been to Chatham - I had some root canals there several years ago - and in spite of that I recognized what an utterly charming town Chatham is. I mean old time quaint and pretty and like you've gone back into some mythical American small town that never really existed.

TAWDRY

Mistress Ilsa rides again in the evening of one-acts, TAWDRY.

Productions photos soon. I'm still missing a Snake but I'm auditioning tomorrow.

I love me some Carl Forsman pt 2

Back in January 2008 - can that really be four years ago? - I saw an interview with Keen Company founder and director Carl Forsman and I blogged about it under the title "I love me some Carl Forsman."

As I say in that blog post, I love the Keen Company's theatre philosophy. So I decided to finally do something to help promote it - I interviewed Carl yesterday about his philosophy and his currently running show Painting Churches and will be posting it onto the NYCPlaywrights web site - and here, of course. Carl was as nice as you might expect somebody who champions sincerity, generosity and kindness, gave a great interview AND gave me comps to his show. And as it happens, PAINTING CHURCHES is a good play - I haven't seen it yet but read it and was impressed by it as I said back in December. And I am impressed by very few plays.

the suit we call business

Well I finally found a business lady suit but I had to go to Bloomingdales to get it - no Steinway avenue for me.

Look, Grand Central Station.

Am I the only one who notices how hot Mercury is? I guess it's really part of his job, being a Greek Roman god* and all. But seriously... six pack of the gods!

* his Greek counterpart is Hermes

Calling all angels

Is this statue of an angel with a cell phone great or what? And it has numbers you can call:

...shortly after the statue was unveiled last April, a local couple, the parents of two children, set up a number so people could call the angel. Business cards soon appeared in pubs, restaurants and hotels with a picture of the angel and the number. So successful was the line that the couple opened a Twitter account, @ut_engelke, managed by the husband, which now has about 2,700 followers.

“The telephone is ringing all day,” said the wife, who like her husband agreed to meet a reporter on the condition that they not be identified. “It was a fairy tale,” she said over beer and snacks. “Now, it’s real.” To identify them, she said, would end it.

What began as a joke continues because the cellphone number has become something of a hot line, dialed by people of all ages, some in need of help, others just because they are lonely.

At the holidays, the calls became so frequent and so pressing that the couple was tempted to give up. “Between Christmas and New Year’s, that was an emotional time frame, it was so heartbreaking,” she said. A small girl called begging the angel to pray for a grandmother who had just died; a woman asked help to celebrate her first Christmas without her parents. A widow sought prayers for her dead children.

The statue of the Little Angel arose out of a 1997 competition, won by the Dutch sculptor Ton Mooy, to create 40 statues, including 14 angels, to replace those on the cathedral that time and pollution had ruined. The Little Angel was the only unconventional one.

“You can make a phony Gothic statue,” Mr. Mooy, 63, said in his studio in Amersfoort, about an hour north of here. “That’s not what I wanted. It had to fit in with what was always on the church, namely, refinement, emotion. Angels are there to guide, to protect people, they get messages from above. How do you show that? With a cellphone.”

More at the NYTimes 

cutie-wootie

It's a good thing Mr. Fuzz is as cute as he is because otherwise he would really get on my nerves. He has a range of schemes to get me to pay attention to him. I've already blogged about the one scheme, where he goes into a closet or another room and then makes piteous meows that I can't ignore - and when I say something in response he comes trotting into the room, or busts out of the closet.

This photo is another scheme, well-known to many cat owners I'm sure - the old stare-down. You can see he's practically on top of my laptop and his face is like inches away from my face as I try to ignore him and get some work done.

Right after I took this picture he went to Scheme 1.

Maybe the most cute/annoying scheme though is when he makes me hold him, under the theory, I suppose, that if I can't be playing mousie-time with him, the least I could do is hold him while typing on a laptop. If I'm slouched far enough down while working, he just sits right on my chest so I can rest my chin on his back while I work. Sheesh.

New Yorker Parity Report - March 12, 2012

Wow, the parity rate drops to 8% this week - two female by-lines out of 23. One of the bylines is my Facebook friend Dahlia Lithwick, the other is a poet, Maxine Kumin. It's almost as bad as a Republican panel on health insurance and birth control.

The New Yorker Parity Report

A regular report on the gender parity - or lack thereof - of the current issue of The New Yorker based on table of contents by-lines
Includes fiction, non-fiction, poems. Does not include illustrations.

---

A score of 50% means that half of all writers in the issue are female.
A score of greater than 50% would mean more female than male writers. This never happens.

---

Parity change from previous week: -19%

March 12, 2012

Total writers: 23
male: 21
female: 2
gender parity score: 8%

Last week's score
Total writers: 22
male: 16
female: 6
gender parity score: 27%

Supermarket playlist

I'm very business-like at the supermarket - I have my list of stuff to get and I tool around with my cart like nobody's business and then it's off to the self-checkout (faster than the staffed check-out) and I'm outta there.

But my local supermarket sometimes has an excellent selection of music playing and it slows me down a little so I can do a step or two from "The Hustle."

Some of the songs they played I'd heard before but for some reason have only now developed an appreciation for them - mostly funk and disco stuff - like "The Hustle."

Here is my supermarket's playlist (with links to the Youtube instance):

1. You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) by Sylvester - this reminds me of the documentary "The Times of Harvey Milk" because it's played over scenes of Castro-area partying. Your basic disco-repetition set-up, perfect for dancing, not listening to the lyrics.


2. This Guy's In Love with You by Herb Alpert - the crashing piano sections are what completely make this this song, contrasted with Herb's smooth delivery.


3. Downtown by Petula Clark - I already own this one but it's great to hear it almost anytime. Because things will be great when you're downtown. I don't have that many memories from before kindergarten but this is one of them. I distinctly remember hanging out on the Delp's hammock one summer morning with the twins (Anne Marie and Bernadette Matusek) and Johnny Thompson and maybe a couple more kids and singing this song's refrain. Actually I think we just sang "downtown" over and over again. So it made a big impression.


4. IGY by Donald Fagen -  this is from Fagen's post-Steely Dan I (1969 - 1981) phase, on his solo album "The Nightfly" and although I've owned this for years, there is almost nothing better to listen to while shopping, with its ironic take on the splendors and future of American consumer culture and technology from the point of view of the 1950s: "You'll be a witness to that game of chance in the sky - You know we've got to win  - Here at home we'll play in the city -  Powered by the sun - Perfect weather for a streamlined world - There'll be spandex jackets one for everyone." Just perfect.


5. My Ever-Changing Moods by the Style Council - oh man oh man I love this song. And I pretty much don't like The Style Council's output but there is something about this song... I actually loved it for the music alone for years - I first noticed this song in the supermarket - before I bought it, but the lyrics turn out to be extremely interesting. They're hard to hear so you can read them here. The last stanza is most-compelling: "Evil turns to statues - and masses form a line | But I know which way Id run to if the choice was mine | The past is knowledge - the present our mistake | And the future we always leave too late | I wish we'd come to our senses and see there is no truth | In those who promote the confusion for this ever changing mood" And yet for all that it is extremely danceable and who could resist the drum flourish with the bah-bah-BAHHHH!? Nobody with working ears, I say.


6. Gone at Last by Paul Simon - this is an amazing song but I never realized it until recently. The lyrics, the Phoebe Snow backing vocal - and the Jesse Dixon singers. The feelings generated by this song I imagine are very similar to what the devout feel at gospel-singing churches. Poor Phoebe Snow - her career was side-tracked when she cared for her disabled daughter for 30 years, and then she had a cerebral hemorrhage and died last year at age 60.


7. Stoned Love by the Supremes - this is the post-Diana Ross Supremes.  I've always been a Supremes fan but never knew much about this song, but it's great, as usual.


8. Didn't I Blow Your Mind This Time by the Delfonics - on the other hand I've never been a big fan of the Delfonics - their "smooth jazz" has always been a little too smooth in my opinion. I'm sure I've heard this song many times, since it was first released but I never noticed it until my last trip to the supermarket. Originally I thought he was saying he blew her mind with a great round of sex, but actually it's because he's finally leaving her.


9. The Hustle by Van McCoy and the Soul City - I was part of the teen anti-disco brigade back when, and have spent the last decade regretting it as I've come to appreciate so many disco songs. Although I will say in my defense, I've always been a fan of Turn the Beat Around even when I was 15. So I wasn't as bad as some. The Hustle is such a blast to hear, unexpectedly, in the middle of the supermarket.

A Harlem Tragedy by O. Henry

Most people know of the writer O. Henry through his short story The Gift of the Magi. But he wrote lots of short stories, and most of them will never catch on in the popular imagination - or at least dear baby Jesus I certainly hope not. Not in the case of his A Harlem Tragedy, which is the delightful tale of a woman, Mrs. Cassidy, who is frequently beaten by her husband:

Mrs. Cassidy laughed the contented laugh of the guarded and happy
matron. With the air of Cornelia exhibiting her jewels, she drew
down the collar of her kimono and revealed another treasured bruise,
maroon-colored, edged with olive and orange--a bruise now nearly
well, but still to memory dear.

Mrs. Fink capitulated. The formal light in her eye softened to
envious admiration. She and Mrs. Cassidy had been chums in the
downtown paper-box factory before they had married, one year before.
Now she and her man occupied the flat above Mame and her man.
Therefore she could not put on airs with Mame.

"Don't it hurt when he soaks you?" asked Mrs. Fink, curiously.

"Hurt!"--Mrs. Cassidy gave a soprano scream of delight. "Well,
say--did you ever have a brick house fall on you?--well, that's just
the way it feels--just like when they're digging you out of the
ruins. Jack's got a left that spells two matinees and a new pair of
Oxfords--and his right!--well, it takes a trip to Coney and six
pairs of openwork, silk lisle threads to make that good."

"But what does he beat you for?" inquired Mrs. Fink, with wide-open
eyes.

"Silly!" said Mrs. Cassidy, indulgently. "Why, because he's full.
It's generally on Saturday nights."

"But what cause do you give him?" persisted the seeker after
knowledge.

"Why, didn't I marry him? Jack comes in tanked up; and I'm here,
ain't I? Who else has he got a right to beat? I'd just like to catch
him once beating anybody else! Sometimes it's because supper ain't
ready; and sometimes it's because it is. Jack ain't particular about
causes. He just lushes till he remembers he's married, and then
he makes for home and does me up. Saturday nights I just move the
furniture with sharp corners out of the way, so I won't cut my
head when he gets his work in. He's got a left swing that jars you!
Sometimes I take the count in the first round; but when I feel like
having a good time during the week or want some new rags I come up
again for more punishment. That's what I done last night. Jack knows
I've been wanting a black silk waist for a month, and I didn't think
just one black eye would bring it. Tell you what, Mag, I'll bet you
the ice cream he brings it to-night."

It's one of the more grotesque things I've ever read. Mrs. Cassidy accepts the beatings because her husband buys her things after the beatings. Mrs. Fink becomes jealous because her husband doesn't beat her. So Mrs. Fink tries to provoke a round of domestic violence and instead her husband ends up doing her chores for her. And that is why the story is called A Harlem Tragedy. This particular O. Henry ending is intended, I gather from the tone of the piece, to inspire gales of laughter from you, dear reader.

Hardy har har.

Midnight Cowboy of Astoria

So I'm running up and down Steinway Street in Astoria in a frustrating and futile attempt to find a store with a decent selection of ladies business suit jackets when some guy blocks my way. He was Asian, maybe late 20s, fairly normal-looking and...

THE GUY

Excuse me, would you like some company right now?

ME

(???????!!!!)

Not right now. Thanks.

And I quickly walk past him. And it occurs to me: I was just propositioned by a male prostitute!

Because that was no pick-up line I ever heard of - "would you like some company right now."

The poor guy. He should watch the movie Midnight Cowboy before he tries to make a career out of hustling women on the street. Midnight Cowboy was made in 1969 but nothing has changed for men wanting to sell sex to women - there are too many men who are willing to give it away. Especially, from my personal experience, men in their 20s.

The Cowboy was played by the now extremist right-winger Jon Voight although he was liberal then. He is also more attractive than the guy I met on the street - after all, he is the father of Angelina Jolie - and even his character couldn't make it as a male prostitute for women. He thought he finally found a female customer, and they go back to her place, and when she realizes that he expects her to pay him for his attentions she flips out and yells: "I happen to be one hell of a gawgous chick!" And he feels so bad that gives her money instead.

The closest I ever came to that kind of thing was my sister's bachelorette party at a place in Philadelphia called The Cave. It was pretty wild and there were young well-muscled guys in little thong-like underpants running around and we were supposed to put money into their underpants, but when one guy came up to me, I couldn't do it. It felt so degrading to treat him like that, so I just handed him the money. Which was probably not what he wanted since the only place he could store his money was in the thong and he probably ended up putting the money in there himself - I don't know, I looked away in mortification.

I certainly appreciate masculine pulchritude and if women can make money by wearing little outfits in front of people then men should have the opportunity too. But I don't actually want to participate myself. It seems so depersonalized and heartless. If a guy needed money I'd rather just give him money than make him do something sexual in exchange. I really don't know how anybody could pay for sex - where's the fun in that?

MISTRESS ILSA rides again

MISTRESS ILSA will be part of a line-up of one-acts for Double-Down Productions at the end of March. More details to come - and more Wall Street fat cats to punish!

damn you ACLU!

Does that ACLU know how to work the liberal guilt or what? They sent me a pledge for money mailer but my finances have been tight lately so I was going to throw it away - but they sent me a tiny bound copy of the US Constitution - and you can see it right through the mailer window envelope.

And so I COULDN'T THROW THEIR MAILER AWAY!

Could you? Look at it!

And now of course I have to send them money, I can't just take their tiny constitution for free like a bum.

Oh they are good.

New Yorker Parity Report - March 5, 2012

Exact same parity score as last week. They're really settling into the 16:6 male-female ratio.

The New Yorker Parity Report

A regular report on the gender parity - or lack thereof - of the current issue of The New Yorker based on table of contents by-lines
Includes fiction, non-fiction, poems. Does not include illustrations.

---

A score of 50% means that half of all writers in the issue are female.
A score of greater than 50% would mean more female than male writers. This never happens.

---

Parity change from previous week: 0%

March 5, 2012

Total writers: 22
male: 16
female: 6
gender parity score: 27%

Last week's score
Total writers: 22
male: 16
female: 6
gender parity score: 27%

How I spent my Sunday morning

I spent my Sunday morning riding back and forth between Ditmars and Queensboro Plaza on the N training making a 10-minute video out of the NYCPlaywrights February Play of the Month. That's Valerie David playing Mike Ideglio's mother - although Mike's character doesn't know it.

I thought that the trains would be empty because we did this at 9AM and who the hell is awake at 9AM on a Sunday morning?

Lots of people, it turns out, it was almost weekday rush-hour levels of traffic. It took two and a half hours to record and there were actually fewer people on the subway at 11AM than at 9AM. I'll remember that next time.

Before we began I imagined we'd have the train to ourselves, but of course it didn't work that way, and at first I was bashful about doing video work in front of all the passengers. But pretty soon I forgot they were there, and when I noticed them, they were an unexpected annoyance. I asked one young man to move to the other side of the aisle so we could use his seat, and when some guy asked Valerie for directions while I was trying to shoot an important scene, I got really annoyed with him - and he was all apologetic for ruining our movie!

So now I'm in editing mode. Ironically I decided to shoot on the subway because the radiator in my apartment is so damn loud - the subway is louder and the sound quality is pretty crappy. Although at least the subway is supposed to be loud - unlike random hissing noises coming out of nowhere while shooting a script-in-hand reading in my apartment. Still, it would have helped if I'd had some kind of clip-on microphone set-up, but I didn't. I relied exclusively on the microphone in my crappy Panasonic camera and how we have to do some post-shooting audio work. Oh well, that's show biz.

time for tea

I was taken out for tea for my birthday today. But first I had to take a picture of Mr. Fuzz lounging on the Queens phone book.

F

And I also took a walk around Gramercy Park while waiting for reservation time. I took this photo through the fence bars.

Here's what it looks like with bars.

Near the park I noticed this adorable little house.

Finally... tea!

We were too posh to pour it ourselves so we had this guy do it.

Ellen discovers Damn You Autocorrect

Heidi Goennel

Since I've been perusing back issues of the New Yorker, I'm really taken by the cover work of illustrator Heidi Goennel, and I really don't know why they don't use her work now - they don't seem to have used her for covers since the early 1990s. She's still around - here is her web site.

I just love her flat color arrangements that are both beautifully abstract  yet completely figurative.  There's just something about that look that I really love. I'm going to have to buy some prints one of these days.

Some more of her New Yorker covers:


She does well with water.




She's not big on faces - too many small areas, but that's OK, it's a style choice. Anyway I love the composition here, especially the way the yellow is balanced.


This might be my favorite, with the giant foreground Easter eggs - for some reason this doesn't show up in searchs of the Conde-Nast store.

Silence Dogood speaks

I've been researching the American Revolution as part of my work on THE RIMSKY-KORSAKOV AFFAIR - the connection is that the British Ambassador to Russia, James Harris, tried and failed to convince Catherine the Great to hire out Russian soldiers to the British to fight against the American colonists, much like the Hessian troops.

And the info-trail being what it is, eventually I was reading up on Benjamin Franklin and discovered this absolutely fascinating bit of Franklin biography:

As a teenager, Franklin worked as an apprentice in his older brother James' printing shop in Boston, where The New-England Courant was printed.
Franklin never got anything he wrote published, so, at age 16, Franklin created the persona of a middle-aged widow named Silence Dogood. Once every two weeks, he would leave a letter under the door of his brother's printing shop. A total of 14 letters were sent. The first letter began:

“

Sir, It may not be improper in the first Place to inform your Readers, that I intend once a Fortnight to present them, by the Help of this Paper, with a short Epistle, which I presume will add somewhat to their Entertainment. And since it is observed, that the Generality of People, nowadays, are unwilling either to commend or dispraise what they read, until they are in some measure informed who or what the Author of it is, whether he be poor or rich, old or young, a Schollar or a Leather Apron Man, &c. and give their Opinion of the Performance, according to the Knowledge which they have of the Author's Circumstances, it may not be amiss to begin with a short Account of my past Life and present Condition, that the Reader may not be at a Loss to judge whether or no my Lucubrations are worth his reading.

 I find this fascinating and it's all I can do to prevent myself from immediately starting a play based on this. I dare not start it because I have two unfinished plays going on right now, not counting all the ones on the back-burner.

Silence Dogood has her own Wikipedia entry.

All the Dogood letters can be found here.

the best in its meme class...

New Yorker Parity Report - February 27, 2012

The parity level is down one percent. So the parity rate holds steady at just a little better than 50% - that is, the current rate is 25+% and parity would be 50% so the parity rate is half of where it should be. And that's looking at single issues. If you wanted to achieve parity over the New Yorker's entire run, you'd have to publish 2 - 3 female writers for every male writer in every issue for the next 87 years.

The New Yorker Parity Report

A regular report on the gender parity - or lack thereof - of the current issue of The New Yorker based on table of contents by-lines
Includes fiction, non-fiction, poems. Does not include illustrations.

---

A score of 50% means that half of all writers in the issue are female.
A score of greater than 50% would mean more female than male writers. This never happens.

---

Parity change from previous week: -1%

February 27, 2012

Total writers: 22
male: 16
female: 6
gender parity score: 27%

Last week's score
Total writers: 25
male: 18
female: 7
gender parity score: 28%

Adult men who like to watch My Little Pony

They are known as bronies (bro + pony)

My Little Pony originally started out as a plastic toy figure for girls almost 30 years ago, in 1983.



But the MLP that bronies like best is the animated series, especially "Friendship is Magic."

Here is a sample:



I find this entire concept confounding, but I do like that there are men who are able to break the strongest taboo in our culture - liking girl things.

David freakin' Garrett

How is it that I have never heard of this god of all studmuffins before? David freakin' Garrett:



I discovered who he is because I was researching the music of Rimsky-Korsakov and Garrett broke a world-record for violin speed by playing R-K's Flight of the Bumblebee.

He attended Julliard, helping to pay for it by working as a model! And looking at him, you can see why. If Catherine the Great was around today, she would certainly recruit this guy. He's like Ewan McGregor crossed with Kurt Cobain crossed with Paganini. If there was ever a candidate for cloning, it's this guy. If I could get him to play the Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov character in my play about Catherine the Great I could die happy.

Rimsky-Korsakov?

Well after half a year of research I've finally begun my Catherine the Great play, titled "The Rimsky-Korsakov Affair." The titular character, Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov was one of Catherine the Great's lovers (i.e. "favorites") but cheated on Catherine with her best friend Countess Praeskoja Bruce.

I keep reading that Ivan, an accomplished violinist, was an ancestor of the composer, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, but I'll be damned if I can find anything that explains exactly how they were related. It isn't a direct father-son connection, but that's all I know, so far.

With my culturally-impoverished Philistine upbringing, it's a safe bet that I first heard the name of the composer in the Beatles' Yellow Submarine - the head Blue Meanie's mini-me says the name at 0:33 -


Although I also discovered a fascinating ad campaign from the 1970s that uses the name as an exclamation in response to carbonated-beverage-induced euphoria:



I plan to use the composer's music during the play's production, which is obviously an anachronism, but as my friend Bruce observed: "nobody will know." And it's not unprecedented - I used the music of Gottschalk in my JANE EYRE production, even though that composer's work would not have been performed in the early 19th-century drawing room of Thornfield Hall - Gottschalk was born in 1829.

Ionescopade - not my cup of cafe au lait

I got to see Ionescopade this week thanks to the free tickets through an NYCPlaywrights web site promotion deal. I didn't have high expectations though so it wasn't a huge disappointment. This review at Back Stage pretty much covers the problems with the show. And also Time Out New York. The New York Times finishes it off. Although I find it objectionable that all the reviews give a shout-out to the "comic" song, a little girl mourning her dead cat. That got one of the biggest responses from the audience the night I was there. And I think there are two reasons why people would laugh at a song about a dead cat. First because there was so little in the show that made an emotional connection with the audience that they were all desperate for something human and familiar, and second because many people who aspire to being thought intellectual believe that the mark of an intellectual (not to mention hipster) is to laugh at cruelty and pain.

Also the show was very Frenchy (except for the British bit which was like Monty Python) and very 1950s-eque. Especially the mime part.

The production values were pretty good, and nice costume color co-ordination, but I could have done without all the images of Ionesco's old man face all over the stage facade. Nobody needs to look at grizzled ancient old man faces at twenty times life size.

But my pal Bruce rather liked the show and one of the cast members is an old colleague of his and they got to catch up a little, so that was OK. And hey, at least it was free.

You Me Bum Bum Train

My actor pal Amanda Thickpenny was performing in my THE SLASH this time last year. So what's she up to these days while attending the Royal Academy of the Dramatic Arts? Well for one thing performing in the best-titled show ever You Me Bum Bum Train - she writes about it on her blog.

But apparently it's like Fight Club and nobody's allowed to talk about what goes on during this show. Although Richard Mason of the web site Don't Panic seems to have broken the rules...

Entering the Train I found myself at the entrance to a night club. A bunch of gurning teenagers asked me for cigarettes before I was told to move on by a bouncer. I stumbled down a flight of stairs and found myself in a young girl's bedroom. We had a brief chat where I asked her if she had slept alright and she said she had. Then I was in an airport security check where I was searched by an officious German security guard who confiscated my bag and valuables. From there I stumbled into a dentist’s chair who tried to pull a perfectly healthy tooth. And so the Bum Bum Train continued. 

Well OK then. It sounds interesting, but nothing could live up to the title.

mistakes of the masters

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres is one of my favorite artists - or at least his drawings are among my favorite works of art. I don't care too much for his paintings - they are overly-slick and have a ceramic sheen that shellacks the life out of them. His drawings, because they are not fussed over nearly so much, retain a feeling of aliveness and spontenaity. You can see the difference between his final oil portrait of Vicomtesse d’Haussonville and his graphite study for the painting.



See? He just shellacked the shit out of that portrait.

I don't doubt that Ingres was a very accurate portraitist - although probably with a tendency to flatter his subjects the way all fashionable and successful artists of the period did.

But one thing he consistently had trouble drawing was limbs, especially for his female subjects. You can see it in these two images. In the graphite drawing he made the Vicomtesse's hand normal size but her index finger is freakishly long. But OK, that's a study, and you can make mistakes in a study that you can correct for the final painting. And he does correct it - her index finger in the painting is a natural size - but now the rest of her hand is freakishly large! In the drawing she's wearing a long-sleeved dress, but you can see that the sleeve on the figure in the drawing would not fit the gigantic wrist of the painting - her wrist is as big as her neck.

I should mention that I approve of this pose - a woman with her left index finger resting against her face is a classic look (ahem).

I won't even get into the freakish angle of the Vicomtess's right arm - exactly where is her right shoulder supposed to be? You can see the entire painting here.

In this  next portrait - not a study for an oil but a complete finished work of art in itself, graphite on paper -we see that Mlle Joséphine Nicaise-Lacroix has an upper arm that is almost as large as her entire waist. Granted she was probably wearing a corset, but still - that's one hell of a hefty bicep, especially for someone we can be fairly sure hasn't been pumping much iron lately. But at least her right hand looks a normal size. He liked that pensive lady look for his portraits.



I just discovered I missed a recent exhibition of Ingres's drawings at the Morgan Library. I'm kicking myself for missing it, but at least they still have interesting things on their web site like this widget, which allows you to zoom in on Ingres's work so you can see all the pencil strokes at larger-than-lifesize. The drawing of Mlle Nicaise-Lacroix is featured in the collection. Here's a close-up of her face from the widget:

note to dead guy - women are-too funny

The sweet irony of Christopher Hitchens writing a stupid pointless article like Women Aren't Funny in Vanity Fair in in 2007 is that we are living in a time when there are more women making a living as comedians than at any time in the history of the world.

And no, I'm still not sorry he's dead. Katha Pollitt had quite a few interesting things to say about the late Hitchens - she worked with him for 20 years.

While I was rifling through Youtube looking at Louis C. K. I was struck by the amazing variety of female comedians. From the Bob Newhart-esque Ellen Degeneres to the completely unique Sarah Silverman. Some samples:

Margaret Cho - she might be my favorite




The classic Ellen Degeneres



Kathy Griffin - I don't follow reality shows or pay attention much to celebrities - so the fact that I still find Kathy Griffin's work hysterically funny is a real tribute to her skill.



The immortal Roseanne



Silverman is just mind-blowingly random



Tina Fey, of course.



Judy Tenuta's not active too much these days, but her act was bizarre and funny.



And the precursor of them all - Lily Tomlin

Louis & Ewan

I had heard of Louis C. K. but never saw his work, or knew anything about him, other then he is supposed to be very funny. I happened to be looking at some clips of him on Youtube and I was absolutely amazed by this clip, where he confesses his desire for Ewan McGregor, although Louis is straight:



Normally I would think he was not serious - he's a stand-up comedian and they're supposed to say surprising things -  but I actually think he is serious and who could blame him? Ewan McGregor really is a beautiful man. And I am really impressed that Louis C. K. can stand there in front of an audience and admit this. How refreshing.

McGregor himself has no trouble playing gay:




And nobody can wear a kilt like Ewan McGregor.



It always amazes me how much kilts look like the skirts of the Catholic school uniforms I wore in grammar school. These schools had no pretensions of being Scottish but for some reason that pleated & plaid look was all the rage.

around Central Park...

This must be new - on the steps in front of Lincoln Center they have LCD display texts. It was hard to get a good picture but you can make out "of Lincoln Center" in the image above.


Speaking of Lincoln Center, here is the David H. Koch Theatre for ballet. Yes, that David Koch.


I'd heard of the Wollman skating rink of course, but I've never actually seen it full of ice and skaters until now. I should try skating there one of these days - ice skating is one of the very few sports I can do reasonably well.


Wow this store was full of freaky antiques, like the masked centaur lady statue.


And here we have a bust of Richard Wagner - you can see me taking the photo in the mirror behind Wagner

I want Sarah Vowell's job

Not only does she get to write about things like the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but she gets invited to talk to Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow about it on television. That is what you call a goddam awesome career.

As if that isn't enough, she's a friend of They Might Be Giants.

Ooh They Might Be Giants videos...



They really pioneered do-it-yourself videos.

anti-groupmind

The most popular person I've ever known, my dear departed Earl Rich, used to always warn me against the "groupmind." This amused me because if there was ever anybody who was in a position to benefit from like-thinking and conformity, it was Earl. Although maybe I shouldn't say benefit - he used to complain that he never had any time to himself for all the people competing for his attention - his wife, his immediate family and his large group of friends.
Well, I never had much use for the groupmind myself - I've never been popular in part because I've always been more interested in expressing my opinions than in being liked. And for a woman, especially, this is a huge drawback - women don't get to be crusty curmudgeons, our first job is to be agreeable.

In any case, I was pleased to find some vindication in last week's New Yorker article Brainstorming Doesn't Really Work, which is not available in its entirety online alas, just the abstract, which says:

By analyzing 19.9 million peer-reviewed academic papers and 2.1 million patents from the past fifty years, he has shown that levels of teamwork have increased in more than ninety-five per cent of scientific subfields. Discusses the work of Charlan Nemeth, whose studies suggest that the ineffectiveness of brainstorming stems from the very thing that Osborn thought was most important. “Debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but, rather, stimulate them relative to every other condition,”

Later on, the article discusses the relevance for theatre:

Criticism allows people to dig below the surface of the imagination and come up with collective ideas that aren't predictable. And recognizing the importance of conflicting perspectives in a group raises the issue of what knds of people will work together best. Brian Uzzi, a sociologist at Northwestern, has spent his career trying to find what the ideal composition of a team would look like. Casting around for an industry to study that would most clearly show the effects of interaction, he hit on Broadway musicals. He'd grown up in New York City and attended his first musical at the age of nine. "I went to see 'Hair'," Uzzi recalls. "I remember absolutely nothing about the music, but I do remember the nude scene. That just about blew my mind. I've been a fan of Broadway ever since."

Uzzi sees musicals as a model of group creativity. "Nobody creates a Broadway musical by themselves," he said. ""The production requires too many different kinds of talent. " A composer has to write songs with a lyricist and a librettist; a choreographer has to work with a director, who is probably getting notes from the producers.

Uzzi wanted to understand how the relationships of these team members affected the product. Was it better to have a group composed of close friends who had worked together before? He undertook a study of every musical produced on Broadway between 1945 and 1989. To get a full list of collaborators, he sometimes had to track down dusty old Playbills in theatre basements. He spent years analyzing the teams behind four hundred and seventy-four productions, and charted the relationships of thousands of artists, from Cole Porter to Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Uzzi found that the people who worked on Broadway were part of a social network with lots of interconnections: it didn't take many links to get from the librettist of "Guys and Dolls" to the choreographer of "Cats." Uzzi devised a way to quantify the density of these connections, a figure he called Q. If musicals were being developed by teams of artists that had worked together several times before - a common practice because Broadway producers see "incumbent teams" as less risky - those musicals  would have an extremely high Q. So a musical created by a team of strangers would have a low Q.

Uzzi then tallied his Q readings with information about how successful the productions had been. "Frankly, I was surprised by how big the effect was," Uzzi told me. "I expected Q to matter, but I had no idea it would matter this much." According to the data, the relationships among collaborators emerged as a reliable predictor of Broadway success. When the Q was low - less than 1.7 on Uzzi's five-point scale - the musicals were likely to fail. Because the artists didn't know one another, they struggled to work together and exchange ideas. "This wasn't so surprising," Uzzi says. "It takes time to develop a successful collaboration." But, when the Q was too high (above 3.2), the work also suffered. The artists all thought in similar ways, which crushed innovation. According to Uzzi, this is what happened on Broadway during the ninteen-twenties, which he made the focus of a separate study. The decade is remembered for its glittering array of talent - Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein II, and so on - but Uzzi's data reveals that ninety per cent of musicals produced during the decade were flops, far about the historical norm. "Broadway had some of the biggest names ever," Uzzi explains. "But the shows were too full of repeated relationships, and that stifled creativity." 

The best Broadway shows were produced by networks with an intermediate level of social intimacy. The ideal level of Q - which Uzzi and his colleague Jarrett Spiro called the "bliss point" - emerged as being between 2.4 and 2.6. A show produced by a team whose Q was within this ranged was three times more likely to be a commercial success than a musical produced by a team with a  score below 1.4 or above 3.2. It was also three times more likely to be lauded by the critics. "The best Braodway teams, by far, were those with a mix of relationships," Uzzi says. "These teams had some old friends, but they also had newbies. This mixture meant that the artists could interact efficiently - they had a familiar structure to fall back on - but they also managed to incorporate some new ideas. They were comfortable with each other, but the weren't too comfortable."

Uzzi's favorite example of "intermediate Q" is "West Side Story," one of the most successful Broadway musicals ever. In 1957, the play was seen s a radical departure from Braodway conventions, both for its focus on social problems and for its extended dance scenes. The concept was dreamed up by Jerome Robbins, Leonard Berstein and Arthur Laurents. They were all Braodway legends, which might make "West Side Story" look like a show with high Q. But the project also benefitted from a crucial injection of unknown talent, as the established artists realized that they needed a fresh lyrical voice. After an extensive search, they chose a twenty-five-year-old lyricist who had never worked on a Broadway musical before. His name was Stephen Sondheim.

I've run NYCPlaywrights play readings with the idea that playwrights need to hear what people who aren't part of their in-group think about their plays. Far too often I've seen theatre groups completely dominated by insiders who are simply an echo-chamber for each other and no real criticism is allowed to be expressed - not fully, not completely. Now most people like it that way, but it doesn't make you a better writer. Quite the opposite. It's nice to have studies like these vindicate my approach.

We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives

There's all kinds of classic stuff available online for free, including the immortal Plan 9 From Outer Space.

There's an excellent web site, The Public Domain Review, which has gathered the best of all the free stuff together. Some other fascinating stuff:

Biography and images of Phillis Wheatley a black female slave genius.

An article on, and links to the unique Flatland. I read this when I was 18. Because it's totally trippy.

An amazing Film collection including Battleship Potemkin!

Charming 19th century story books with illustrations including Old French Fairy Tales, from whence I got the illustration below. Good stuff!

New Yorker Parity Report - February 13 & 20, 2012

The parity level doubles from last week to 28% - which is near the average New Yorker parity rate. I do the count according to by-lines so Andrea K. Scott was counted twice.

The New Yorker Parity Report

A regular report on the gender parity - or lack thereof - of the current issue of The New Yorker based on table of contents by-lines
Includes fiction, non-fiction, poems. Does not include illustrations.

---

A score of 50% means that half of all writers in the issue are female.
A score of greater than 50% would mean more female than male writers. This never happens.

---

Parity change from previous week: +14%

February 13 & 20, 2012

Total writers: 25
male: 18
female: 7
gender parity score: 28%

Last week's score
Total writers: 21
male: 18
female: 3
gender parity score: 14%

January 2012 play of the month

Lorenzo Scott and Keona Welch are just awesome actors and this is probably the best play of the month we've done. It took me hours and hours to edit this together, and clearly I could have done better if I had alot more takes. Also I have no control over my damn radiator and so some of the sound is crap because I had to do some major audio work to get rid of that awful loud steam-heat hiss.

But considering we recorded this script-in-hand reading in a little over an hour, I think it came out pretty well. The stellar performances, of course, are key.

This is one of the best plays we've done, although it's not perfect. Since I've gone over the play many times while editing the video, several things jump out - the subjects raised come up sort of randomly - I think the plot could be re-organized to have a stronger impact.

And the woman portrayed, Jacqueline Smith, is still alive and kicking and has a web site now to protest the Civil Rights Museum. I didn't realize she was a real person - and that the author used her real name, until after we announced that this play was the winning selection. I don't want to get sued by Jacqueline Smith - she's obviously incredibly tenacious - hence the big disclaimer at the beginning of this video.

I am working on a play CELIA - I started writing it before I met Keona, but once I met her I realized how absolutely perfect she is for the role. I have to finish that play so I can get her to star in a production. I really don't understand why she isn't starring in movies now, she's so young and pretty and talented.

Football = socialism

Bill Maher - Irritable Bowl Syndrome from Fraser Davidson on Vimeo.

Extremely well-done animation sequence (the guy is a pro) for an extremely astute Bill Maher commentary. This almost makes me care about football.

But then I read this article from the New Yorker: Does Football Have a Future?

Throughout most of the Super Bowl era, football was understood to be an orthopedic, an arthroscopic, and, eventually, an arthritic risk. This was especially obvious as the first generation of Super Bowl heroes retired and began showing up at reunions and Hall of Fame induction ceremonies walking like “Maryland crabs,” as a players’-union representative once put it. But a couple of incidents early in Tagliabue’s tenure left him with a sense of foreboding. “In 1991, my second season, Mike Utley went down,” he said, alluding to the paralysis of a Detroit Lions offensive lineman. “A year later, Dennis Byrd went down. Once you see two injuries like Mike Utley’s and Dennis Byrd’s, you begin to see that there are long-term consequences to injuries on the football field.” He meant long-term consequences of a sort that you can’t joke about, while patting your fake knee or hip and complaining that you can no longer navigate stairs or play with your grandkids. Byrd, who was a defensive lineman for the Jets, gradually taught himself to walk again, after being given a prognosis of partial paralysis, and delivered a rousing pep talk to the Jets before their upset victory over the Patriots in the conference semifinals, earlier this month. Utley’s moral is a grimmer one. As he was being carried off the field on a stretcher, he didn’t yet know that he was paralyzed from the chest down. He stuck his thumb up, and the fans applauded.

Horrible. Boxing is no longer a big sport because of the horrific injuries - football can't be far behind.

The story of Jennifer, the naughty receptionist

My actor/dancer pal Carolyn Paine makes love to the camera - and a dirty cheatin' no-good two-timin' other-woman's man - in the Oprah Network's show "Unfaithful" - she gave us many of the background details about doing this show - apparently getting paid to lie around in bed with a cute guy all day isn't what it's cracked up to be.

No, I will not pay a fine for your 10-minute play

Well I guess I should have seen this coming. I put out a call for plays to take place on the subway for the NYCPlaywrights play of the month - to be videotaped in an actual subway car - and in addition to the usual crassness, monologues and plays that were way over 10 pages I had to deal with people who expected us to go through quite a bit of hassle - or break the law - for their 10-minute play.

One play called for a dog who just sat there for 10 minutes.  Dogs are illegal on the MTA unless you have a service dog (like a seeing-eye dog) and I am not about to track one down - or rent one - just for a 10-minute video sequence. I told the author we couldn't use her play, and she said she figured I could get permission to use a regular dog when I was asking for permission to videotape on the subway. I didn't bother to tell her that I wasn't planning to file a filming permit with the city of New York for this thing either.

I guess I should feel flattered - clearly NYCPlaywrights is coming off as a much more sophisticated outfit than it actually is.

Then there was the play that called for the actor to tag the subway door, you know, with permanent marker. Then there was the one that called for gunplay in a crowded subway car.

Get real people.

Letter from a Freedman to His Old Master

I can't believe I have never read the Letter from a Freedman to His Old Master before. Dictated to someone by the presumably illiterate Jourdan Anderson, it appears to be genuine and was published in a couple of contemporary newspapers - just months after the end of the Civil War and as such is an extremely important primary-source historical document.

I was especially interested, although naturally horrified, to read the last section, which touches on the issue of slave rape, an important component of my developing play CELIA:

In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown-up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve--and die, if it come to that--than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

Years later when Mark Twain wrote about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, he completely glossed over this aspect of slavery - although I guess he'll be forgiven because those books, even Huck Finn, are considered children's books.

The best part of the letter is when Anderson, in response to his old master asking him to come back and work for him, asks for back pay :

"...we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor's visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams' Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the Negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire. "

And the last sentence is good too:

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

Anderson was an absolute master of the passive-aggressive form.

This may well be the very apotheosis of Jon Stewart

If you can watch this interview Stewart did with Yale's Jonathan Macey without the deepest respect for Stewart, you are a fool. This is maybe the most amazing thing I've seen yet on television. I'm a long-time fan of Stewart and I think this is the best thing he's ever done. Paul Krugman himself could have done no better.

                       

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