World premiere of JOURNALISM by Mike Daisey comes to Portland for one night on May 21 | portland theatre scene:

Portland was also one of the first cities to see THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY OF STEVE JOBS, a show which went on to cause an enormous media spin cycle (technical term: “shit storm”) when Ira Glass of This American Life revealed that some details of the expose were fabricated. This was after Glass did a full show on AGONY. He then devoted a second show to unmasking the tale. The two Daisey episodes remain the most popular in TAL history.

Subsequent to that speed bump, Daisey regrouped and has moved on at a heightened pace of urgency. And if his new show AMERICAN UTOPIAS (one of 10 new monologues to emerge from Daisey’s secret underground lair in Brooklyn in the last year) last weekend at Seattle Rep is any indicator, this sharp and unpredictable talent is at the peak of his powers. Here’s a review from Crosscut.

Living as he does at the intersection of theatre, politics, activism, and documentary, Daisey is an important American cultural critic. He is also a rare thing in the theatre world – an owner (though unlike the all-owning corporations often under the Daisey microscope, he sometimes gives his intellectual property away for free). As a sole proprietor and producer of his own work, Daisey has a unique ability to go direct to the audience, bypassing some of the creaky channels of the ossified mainstream theatre establishment detailed in his ferocious broadside, HOW THEATER FAILED AMERICA.

Daisey believes in the power of theatre to truly change and challenge. As he quips in AMERICAN UTOPIAS, the theatre is one of the last public spaces where large gatherings of citizens are still tolerated in America. Because nothing dangerous can happen there. Right?

Come put the danger back in theatre – where it belongs.

The Sunday Morning News | Slog:

I'm a little surprised there is so little mention of Mike Daisey's current shows on SLOG.

The "American Utopias" show was powerful. He weaves in some comedy and absurdist imagery about Disney, Burning Man, and Zucotti Park into a meditation on the nature of public/private spaces, the nature of corporations in modern America, the idea of assembly, and the ideas of genuine versus manufactured experiences.

The themes of the show are very relevant to what's going on now, including what happened on Capitol Hill last week. It seems bizarre to me that the entire SLOG staff apparently missed this show.

Looking forward to Fucking Fucking Fucking Ayn Rand next week.

Being Walt Disney: Lucas Hnath and the Theater of Celebrity - The Brooklyn Rail:

These experiments with language are in the tradition of writers who are dear to Hnath—Caryl Churchill, Gertrude Stein, and Maria Irene Fornes. He also once spent a road trip listening to Mike Daisey monologues, which “seeped in,” inspiring some of the repetition, the whirling back over key ideas to build a kind of incantatory poetry. These influences—with the added fodder of growing up in a charismatic church where congregants spoke in tongues—creates a unique Hnathian vocabulary that demands exceptional dexterity from his actors.
Fortunately, this play is in expert hands.

Times Square Blues | The Nation:

We enter the antiseptic, overlit warren (I say its “much smaller,” but the place is actually still pretty gigantic). Except for the clerk and one other customer, we are the only ones there. It is one of the most surreal things I’ve experienced in my life. Somehow, its survival feels like it says something about the simultaneous resilience and strangeness of the human spirit. Though I couldn’t have quite told you yet what that something was.

Once upon a time, Show World patrons visited enclosed booths where they pumped tokens into a slot to open up a partition, revealing a “LIVE NUDE GIRL,” behind glass, for precisely forty-four seconds, after which the partition closed. (This article recalls the gross old days. “You had to start out as a mop man…”) No longer. A sign, blunt, yellow, bold, reads: “To Our Patrons: Since July 26 1998 We have had NO LIVE GIRLS. Sorry for the Disappointment. Management.” In place of human beings are video screens; insert token, and the screens flash to life for that same forty-four seconds. A forty-four second YouTube video, for twenty-five cents. You can see why Show World’s commercial appeal was now limited. You can see my incredulity that this place still exists.

Et tu, Mr. Destructo?: Destructo Salon: Does Matthew Yglesias Enjoy Murder?:

Writing off the death of 161 people with 370 words of vacuous unconcern requires the machine-like efficiency we've come to expect from places where pre-teens assemble Air Jordans. Yglesias' thesis, what little exists, is that the Bangladeshis are a people squalid enough that death is an acceptable randomly applied career path, and that dead Bangladeshis are what keep flat-front chinos at $29.99 at the outlet store. Our pants are cheap because their lives are, and cheaper things are innately good. Just think how much Upton Sinclair saved on hamburger as a young man. What an ingrate.

At best, one could chalk Yglesias' attitude up to the neoliberal worship of free trade, but ascribing any ideology to Yglesias is like trying to pin a Bad Citizenship medal on fog. He differs sharply from his Slate colleague Dave Weigel, who takes pains to acknowledge his affiliation with Koch-owned Reason. While Weigel seems like an affable guy who delights in mocking the ridiculous—and, with the GOP the party that forgot math, science and history, he finds common cause with the left—it's clear that liberals probably would not enjoy handing the budget over to him. This is how honest compromises are struck.

Thank you. Over the last six months we premiered NINE new full-length monologues at the Public Theater.

AMERICAN UTOPIAS
MY BIG BREAK
WHERE WATER MEETS WITH WATER
FUCKING FUCKING FUCKING AYN RAND
FASTER BETTER SOCIAL
ON LYING AND THE NATURE OF MAGIC
ON SWEARING AND THE POWER OF CURSES
FIVE TECHNICAL REHEARSALS IN INDIA
BRADLEY MANNING’S WAR

It has been a life-changing season for me, and I'm immensely grateful to everyone at Joe's Pub and the Public Theater with whom we've made an artistic home, and to the fantastic audiences who made every single performance of every show completely sold out. Without you none of this would be possible.

This season has been transformative—I've learned more about my craft in six months than I have in the last six years. This fall we'll use everything we've learned this year to make ALL THE FACES OF THE MOON. That story would not be possible without this season and everything it has made possible. I would not have been able to imagine it.

Again: thank you. I will see you on the other side.

Life Without Economics: Part Two | Slog:

Scarcity, Abbott states, happens on two levels: one is the individual level and the other is the social. The reason why this distinction is so important is because it clearly explains the political/ideological function of promoting individualism in ACSs. It is not so much about generalizing the values of the rich, who do not need social supports, public assistance, and so on; instead, it's about enforcing scarcity on poor subjects. If a society has an abundance of wealth and does not want to distribute it fairly, then it desperately needs the category of the individual—a single person on whom scarcity can be imposed. Poor countries do not need or depend on the culturally fabricated category of the individual because scarcity is real on both the level of the subject and the state. But because scarcity is nonexistent in rich countries, those in power, those who refuse to distribute wealth in a meaningful way, have to invent it. The invention of scarcity is linked with the promotion of the individual. The society is rich but you yourself are poor.

Actor Grant O’Rourke reveals all about The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs | Bristol24-7:

And what of the political comment element, how much research went into the play? O’Rourke said: “The writer Mike Daisey went to China and spoke to the workers who made the products that he loved so much. This is Mike Daisey’s story and it’s an account of what happened to him. Although I’m not playing Daisey as such, the story is based on fact and real life events collated from a number of sources and is weaved together into a single story. It’s written in a style that Daisey calls ‘poetic journalism’: many, but not all of the events happened to him but everything in the story is absolutely true.”

Viewers can expect to come face to face with a surprising conclusion. O’Rourke says: “What seems to have startled audiences most frequently is the reality of how our electronic products are made. The factory that the character visits makes almost 50% of all the electronics in the world. This is a story that genuinely affects you and I and everyone we know. If you grab any random piece of electronic technology in your house and take it apart, there’s a strong chance that there will be a stamp with this factory’s name on it. We’re all complicit, even if it is unknowingly, in this gigantic, global issue and thats something that stays with you.”

The 8 Hottest Tech Start-Up Perks You Wish You Had: Gothamist:

Editors at SheeBloop, which is compiling a supercut of all the scenes in movies in which a crying person taking a shower punches the wall, need time to rest their weary eyes. So CEO Farg Donaldson installed a special weeping willow made to exacting Fern Gully specifications that emits dopamine instead of pollen. Mangoes are freshly cut with machetes in SheeBloop's lobby, but Donaldson encourages workers to use their feeding tubes. "Chewing just slows us down," one editor rasped behind his hermetic mask. "And it's bad for team building."

Our national pastime: Press criticism | Jack Shafer:

In early 1946, Albert Camus emptied into New Yorker press critic A.J. Liebling’s ear his plan for a new newspaper.

“It would be a critical newspaper, to be published one hour after the first editions of the other papers, twice a day, morning and evening,” said Camus, who knew a thing or two about journalism, having recently resigned his editorship of the Paris daily Combat.

“It would evaluate the probable element of truth in the other papers’ main stories, with due regard to editorial policies and the past performances of the correspondents. Once equipped with card-indexed dossiers on the correspondents, a critical newspaper could work very fast. After a few weeks the whole tone of the press would conform more closely to reality. An international service,” Camus told Liebling.

Camus never found a backer for his “critical newspaper” and eventually left journalism. But the idea stuck to Liebling like duct tape, and he cited the interview in his 1948 book, The Wayward Pressman, as well as his 1960 Camus obituary in the New Yorker. Camus spoke of compiling complete records of “the interests, policies, and idiosyncrasies of the [newspaper] owners” and “every journalist in the world.” Then, the contents of news stories could be gauged for credibility, he explained.

“But do people really want to know how much truth there is in what they read?” Camus asked. “Would they buy the control paper? That’s the most difficult problem.”

Jean Baudrillard - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

In his early books, such as The System of Objects, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, and The Consumer Society, Baudrillard's main focus is upon consumerism, and how different objects are consumed in different ways. At this time Baudrillard's political outlook was loosely associated with Marxism (and situationism), but in these books he differed from Marx in one significant way. For Baudrillard, it was consumption, rather than production, which was the main drive in capitalist society.

Baudrillard came to this conclusion by criticising Marx's concept of "use-value". Baudrillard thought that both Marx's and Adam Smith's economic thought accepted the idea of genuine needs relating to genuine uses too easily and too simply—despite the fact that Marx did not use the term 'genuine' in relation to needs or use-values. Baudrillard argued, drawing from Georges Bataille, that needs are constructed, rather than innate. He stressed that all purchases, because they always signify something socially, have their fetishistic side. Objects always, drawing from Roland Barthes, "say something" about their users. And this was, for him, why consumption was and remains more important than production: because the "ideological genesis of needs"[18] precedes the production of goods to meet those needs.

Honey, we’re praying for you - Salon.com:

That’s the tricky thing about bullies: They’re often telling the truth. It’s not what they’re saying — that you’re fat, or black, or feminine — it’s how they’re saying it; it’s the hate behind their words, the fact that they see the truth of the situation as a problem.

Lawmaker Testifies NYPD Commissioner Wanted to 'Instill Fear' in Black and Brown Men with Stop and Frisk:

Today, a New York legislator testifying in a class-action suit against stop and frisk confirmed that those suspicious of the program's racial motivations are correct. Doubling down on an accusation he made in 2011, New York State Senator Eric Adams said on the record that he heard Commissioner Kelly tell then-Governor David Paterson and a room of other lawmakers that stop and frisk targets minorities because "he wanted to instill fear in them that any time they leave their homes they could be targeted by police."

Adams said he was "amazed" and "shocked" by Kelly's alleged remarks, adding: "I told him that was illegal."

He said Kelly responded by asking: "How else are we going to get rid of guns?"

It should be noted that 88 percent of the the people stopped and frisked turn out to be totally innocent, and that many others are guilty only of possessing a small amount of marijuana. But tough talk about guns is how Bloomberg and Kelly have been able to sustain stop and frisk despite near constant protestations.

You Didn’t Make the Harlem Shake Go Viral — Corporations Did:

Who wins? The "Harlem Shake" originated with a drunken man named Albert Boyce dancing at Harlem's Rucker Park basketball court in 1981. It was sobered up by children in the bleachers and became a popular dance in the hip-hop community. When Boyce died in 2006, the dance had found its way into some rap songs and videos. In 2012, Harry "Baauer" Rodrigues sampled one of these songs, Plastic Little's "Miller Time," and dropped it onto a piece of electronic dance music made in a style called "trap" that is only somewhat related to hip hop. The song was a commercial failure until student George Miller included it in his YouTube video. As the "Harlem Shake" moved from the Rucker to Al Roker, Alice Rivlin and beyond, money moved too: to Google, where more searches and more views mean more dollars, and its large investors like Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, Blackrock, and J.P. Morgan Chase; to Warner Bros, which owns global distribution rights for the recording; and to Time Warner, with its part ownership of Maker Studios.

Relatively little went to Philadelphia, where Thomas Wesley Pentz, the minor Svengali who signed Harry Rodrigues, collects royalties from Warner Bros., every time a recording is purchased, and from Google, every time the song sells an ad. Harry Rodrigues will benefit, although not as much as many may assume, and he will have to share what he gets with the people whose work he sampled. Boyce, the no-collar black man on the corner who gave world culture a twist, gets a little credit and no reward. George Miller, the originator of the whole thing, gets nothing.

The technology may have changed, but the money still flows the same way: to creators of contracts, not creators of content.

A few words in praise of gentlemen | Superfluities Redux:

It has been my privilege to meet personally several artists whose work I first encountered and admired from a distance. What has struck me most often is how gentlemanly, in all the respects I mentioned above, that the most admirable artists have been in my presence. However they may have conducted themselves in private, in public–or in meeting strangers like myself–they have been unswervingly considerate, amiable, and open-minded, even when their work, like William Gaddis’s, has been most scathingly critical and acidic.

I have also had the opposite experience. Meeting critics and artists whose work I’ve admired, then discovering them to be personally arrogant, dismissive, and discourteous, was something of a rude awakening in the exact sense of that term. Oddly, perhaps, when I return to their work after these personal interactions, I’ve found it to be more flawed, more uneven than before–testimony, perhaps, to the presence of the artist, or the person, in the art. (This, by the way, is quite different from my attitudes to the work of those more gentlemanly writers I describe above. I hold the work of these writers in the same high estimation that I originally did, of course, but no higher.)

The long, slow decline of alt-weeklies | Jack Shafer:

The advertising shift from newsprint to Web is mirrored by a cultural shift. In my mind, the alt-weekly remains the perfect boredom-alleviation device. Waiting for a subway train? Pull one from your bag and it will entertain you. Your girlfriend is late for your date? The paper will keep you occupied. That beer and bag of nuts not distracting from life’s troubles as you mope on a barstool? The alt-weekly saves the day again.

But even a human fossil must concede that the smartphone trumps the alt-weekly as a boredom killer. How does a wedge of newsprint compete with an affordable messaging device that ferries games, social media apps, calendars, news, feature films, scores, coupons and a library’s worth of music and reading material? Ask a young person his opinion and he’ll tell you that nothing says “geezer” like a newspaper, be it daily or alt-weekly.

Esquire Editor Explains: Women Are 'There to Be Beautiful Objects':

Here is what Alex Bilmes, the editor of Esquire UK, said at a panel discussion on feminism in the media (LOL) yesterday: "The women that we feature in the magazine are ornamental. That is how we see them."

"I could lie to you and say they're interested in their brains as well, but on the whole, we're not," he said. "They're there to be beautiful objects. They're objectified."

After yesterday's posting of my conversation with Bonnie Anderson about CNN's Steubenville coverage, this was inevitable:



I see this periodically about a variety of things I talk about, usually whether it directly applies or not. People love the Pot/Kettle trope, and mostly they love it because it's so fun to say on Twitter in one-word sentences. I get that. And as soundbites go, it's not too shabby.

I do think that it would work better if I had ever actually been a traditional journalist in any way, but I get it.

Her follow up tweet is what's interesting:



Good!

God save me from *ever* being "the appropriate champion of truthfulness". I can't imagine a shittier job title that I have never desired.

It ranks up there with other job titles that people have tried to give me over the last eighteen months: The Great White Savior of the Poor Beknighted Ignorant Chinese Peasantry. Or later, the Great Satan of Lying Whose Lying Lies Corrupt All Who Speak To Him.

Who am I?

I'm a working artist who has made a lot of work. Some of that work is well known—some of it is not. Some of it is topical. Some of it is lighthearted. Some of it numbers among the largest feats of narrative anyone has ever composed live. Some of it has been part of change. Some of it has been flawed, and was apologized for, and reformed.

So people can bring the snark if they wish—but what that snark says, more than anything, is that you don't know me and you never did.

When People Write for Free, Who Pays?:

Wealthy musician Amanda Palmer, who last year raised $1.2 million on Kickstarter to produce and release a record, recently used a TED talk to expand on the idea that artists should be willing to work for free. After relaying a story about how she used to be a street performer, Palmer, who is married to a very successful author named Neil Gaiman, told an audience of people who'd paid $7,500 apiece to be there that musicians shouldn't "make" people pay for their work, but rather "let" people pay for their work. She also explained that she found it virtuous when a family of undocumented immigrants huddled together on their couch for a night so that she and her band could have their beds, because her music and presence was a fair exchange for the family's comfort. After about 13 minutes of explaining why she is content with people giving her things, Palmer received a standing ovation.

My discussion with Bonnie Anderson regarding CNN's Steubenville coverage.

Newspapering Is a Business: The Death of the Legendary Boston Phoenix:

There was the rail-thin cop reporter who cursed like a sailor and left work daily with the janitor, a cartoon of a Boston sports fan who sold pot while he emptied trash cans. The prototypical vampiric music editor who was immeasurably aloof and, pretty much, proudly, a giant know-it-all raving asshole. The bitterly meticulous arts editor, a man who, it was widely reported by the males on staff, would mutter "motherfucker" violently to himself at the urinal, a man who once broke down into a high-pitched screeching fit because someone had absconded his veggie-burger sandwich from the communal fridge.

And there was Clif Garboden. Until 2009, Clif was the Phoenix's senior managing editor, and he had been on staff for more than 30 years. He sat in a corner of the Phoenix newsroom, hunched at his computer with the posture of a question mark. His face had no angles. He wore sweaters over collared shirts and khaki pants. He enjoyed smoking and grumbling. His 1989 Buick Park Avenue, which he bought for $6000 with 43,186 miles on the odometer, was named Jerome. (I know this because he devoted an entire essay to the car.) He once received a death threat from a mime.

The Deferential Spirit by Joan Didion | The New York Review of Books:

This quo vadis, or valedictory, mode is one in which Mr. Woodward has crashed repeatedly when faced with the question of what his books are about, as if his programming did not extend to this point. The “human story is the core” was his somewhat more perfunctory stab at explaining what he was up to in The Commanders. For Wired, his 1984 book about the life and death of the comic John Belushi, Mr. Woodward spoke to 217 people on the record and obtained access to “appointment calendars, diaries, telephone records, credit card receipts, medical records, handwritten notes, letters, photographs, newspaper and magazine articles, stacks of accountants’ records covering the last several years of Belushi’s life, daily movie production reports, contracts, hotel records, travel records, taxi receipts, limousine bills and Belushi’s monthly cash disbursement records,” only to arrive, not unlike HAL in 2001, at these questions: “Why? What happened? Who was responsible, if anyone? Could it have been different or better? Those were the questions raised by his family, friends and associates. Could success have been something other than a failure? The questions persist. Nonetheless, his best and most definitive legacy is his work. He made us laugh, and now he can make us think.”

In any real sense, these books are “about” nothing but the author’s own method, which is not, on the face of it, markedly different from other people’s. Mr. Woodward interviews people, he tapes or takes (“detailed”) notes on what they say. He takes “great care to compare and verify various sources’ accounts of the same events.” He obtains documents, he reads them, he files them: for The Brethren, the book he wrote with Scott Armstrong about the Supreme Court, the documents “filled eight file drawers.” He consults The Almanac of American Politics (“the bible, and I relied on it”), he reads what others have written on the subject: “In preparation for my own reporting,” he tells us about The Choice, “I and my assistant, Karen Alexander, read and often studied hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles.”