One Year Later

TEDx

Last year, around this time in fact, I had my first exposure to an actual TEDx event (the x means that this is a licensed affiliate event - it's not officially TED, but it's inspired by it and a lot like it). It was . . . interesting. 

The fact of the matter is that participation in the production of an event robs the event of all mystique, of all the aura, that the event represents in people's minds. I loved many of the speakers, but seeing how it all came together . . . The overall level of impressiveness came down. As a lighting guy, I was stoked that thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people would see my lighting. The only problem was that theatre, live-streaming video, and mostly talented amateur presenters equals highly compromised lighting choices. The lights need to be bright enough for the video to be effective, but they can't be so bright that they overawe the presenters, most of whom have never been in the center of that much light in their entire lives. We tamped it down and tamped it down and the video guys adjusted and I was utterly unhappy because it all looked dim. Everyone assured me that it was fine and we moved on.

One year later, the video guys are telling me about something weird that happened when the video was transcoded for the web: it was too dim. *Sigh*

Let's see what happens now. Now that two thirds of the staff agree that it can be brighter. Will we dim it down for the presenters? Or will we make it bright enough for the web to truly enjoy it and let the presenters feel like actors? Tune in to the TEDx Mid-Atlantic feed this weekend to find out.

Cocktail of the Day:

The Golden Dream:

1. Galliano - 2 cl
2. Triple sec - 2 cl
3. Orange juice - 2 cl
4. Cream - 1 cl

It's a creamsicle. It's an alcoholic creamsicle. The proportions here are a great place to start, but I think I need to scale it up. A lot.

A Bridge Not Far Enough

The first episode of FX's The Bridge (which has a pretty epic amount of material online, btw) starts off with evocative promise. The El Paso PD and the Juarez police find a body on the bridge between Texas and Mexico, the most important and busiest land crossing between the two countries. They tussle over jurisdiction, in a very procedural way, and we think we understand how things are going to be. Then the crime scene techs move the body and it comes apart.

The set up seems so perfectly tailored to the fractious, fraught relationship between the United States and Mexico and all of the socio-economic issues that are bound up in it that it hardly seems believable the show is based on a Danish(!) show about the border between Denmark and Sweden. To be fair, that bridge is much more difficult to cross without being seen, in order to place two halves of different bodies in the middle of it. The idea of borders and crime is so potent that they are developing the idea in Britain, based on the Chunnel. As an American, I don't think I can identify the neuroses that these shows are meant to address, the difficult issues that investigating death lets the show interrogate within the context of these cultures. Whatever the difficulties between France and Britain, the Chunnel hardly seems like a contested boundary. The border between Texas and Mexico? That's a contested boundary.

I did not come into the Bridge unprepared though and this may have colored my expectations for the show. The background noise of the particular crime tale that the Bridge is telling is one of the great crime mysteries of all time: the lost girls of Juarez. My first exposure to this mystery was a novel called 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, a Chilean author who died while writing the novel. It is an epic, discursive tale that curls its way around to Mexico and to the legions of young women who disappear from the maquiladoras, the factories in the north of Mexico that create things cheaply and then get shipped into the U.S., a potent symbol of the economic gulf between the countries, if there ever was one. Over the last twenty years, young women, always between 16 and 24, have disappeared in disturbing numbers, hundreds have disappeared. The reality is probably complex and it's a mortal lock that, in reality, very few of these disappearances are actually related. But humans want narrative and the story of the lost, lonely, dispossessed, poor women who devote their lives to scraping together just enough to power the machinery of the largest economy in the world, which consumes them and their life's work without a thought, and tosses it aside just as easily practically writes itself. There is an evil that pervades the site of so much injustice. Corruption infects the place and it consumes the girls. That is certainly the mood that Bolaño works in and that is how I approached The Bridge.

That's not very fair to the show, of course. No matter how moody you make a murder mystery, you eventually solve mysteries. Rare is the crime show that is purely interested in the culture and the background and not the crimes. Even a show like Twin Peaks which was ALL mood, needed the hook of that dead body wrapped in plastic washing up on the river bank to get it going . . . And it collapsed when the story of that body was told. The fact that I'm comparing The Bridge to Twin Peaks at all, is probably bad for the FX show. Twin Peaks is incredible. I want to watch all of it again right now. I might rewatch the first four episodes of The Bridge, back when it was amazing, when it was all crime, when the detectives had no hope and they were up against what seemed like a supernatural force that was greater than all of them, aiming them, gruesomely, at the crimes of Juarez. That's the show I really really wanted to have. That's not the show I ended up with at the end of season 1. Maybe that's where they go in season 2 . . .

A Question of Etiquette

The title of this blog post is a fib, a polite one, as befits a discussion of etiquette. There is in fact, no question at all. If you attend an evening of theatricals, of whatever kind they may be, be it dance, or plays, or musicals, or opera, or whatever, the proper end of show etiquette is to clap as enthusiastically as you believe the performance deserved and then to leave the auditorium. There are no credits. The stage door is around the back. Nothing good will come of sticking around the auditorium. You don't have to leave the theater, but you do have to hit the lobbies. There are so many people, and so much work that must be done that you must be kind to them and leave the stage to their capable hands. For every performer you see, there are many more who make it possible for you to see that performer. Be kind to them, take your enthusiasm for the show into the night, into the public, and away from the house. It's the best possible thanks you can offer to the hard working people who made your night possible.

Crème de Violette

Crisis!

I finished it! Well, I completed a readable draft of my very first truly full length play. It's about the craziness of business. And other things. It's very adult. And I am really proud of it. The file name is Crisis Reboot II Fork 5, which tells you the level of effort that went into this play.

Cocktail of the Day:

Aviation: 

1. Gin - 4.5 cl
2. Maraschino Liqueur - 1.5 cl
3. Lemon juice - 1.5 cl

That's the IBA definition of the Aviation. However, Wikipedia states that an essential ingredient is 0.75 cl of crème de violette. The kicker is that it is very nearly impossible to find this liqueur. The maker of the classic version, Rothman and Winter, doesn't have a web presence. So it takes an incredible amount of effort to have this cocktail. And you thought collecting cocktails would be easy. Ok, I thought that. And I was wrong, wrong, wrong.

Keeping Up With The Cocktails

Political Thought of the Day:

The rumor mill going now suggests that Republicans will put a 6 week debt-limit extension on the table and vote on it so that negotiations can occur. Which seems pretty pointless, if you think that the same set of demands will be in play. Obama will have to agree to the negotiations, to neuter the talking point and then when the GOP reveals that it has simply repeated itself and that there is nothing substantive on offer, we can have the crisis again, only this time Obama gets an extra data point: "I told you that we couldn't function as a government this way and this is way. Partisan demands don't change and governing by crisis is awful."

Fantasy Football Move of the Day:

I looked for a defense in my Yahoo! league. I wasn't very busy most of the day and I was staring at my team. Picking up an extra defense because of a "bad matchup" is exactly the kind of time wasting that happens when you have to be at work, but you don't have anything to do.

Cocktail of the Day:

The Horse's Neck

1. 4 cl of brandy
2. 110 cl of ginger ale
3. Dash of angostura bitters

It's hard to believe this cocktail deserve a name or the word "cocktail" at all. Pretty much exactly what you would expect from the ingredients. Please don't waste good brandy on this. 

Something New

Three new regular sections (like daily! - like daily, now, not actually daily, that's too much). First, a pithy bon mot about political events. Because I am so very tired of vituperative falsehood that I must shout my corrections into the great void of social media. Second, an update on my fantasy football team. Because if I put it first, you wouldn't read the blog and if I left it until the end, you wouldn't read about my teams (that's right, plural). Duh. And finally, an update on my cocktail experience of the day. Right now, this blog is ugly and dull and this paragraph is also dull. I will fix all of these things. After my next drink . . .

Political Thought of the Day: 

If every issue has the same exaggerated moral weight, than all issues might as well have no moral weight at all. To steal from an outrageously good movie: If every issue is special, then no issue is special.

Fantasy Football Update: 

My bench outscored my starters in one league. I won the two matchups in leagues that I play in but don't really care about yet. Water is wet. Statistics soon to follow.

My quest to become the perfect mixologist in my own home on my own terms starts with the International Bartenders Association list of Official Cocktails.

Cocktail(s) of the Day:

A. The Stinger:

1. 5 cl cognac
2. 2 cl creme de menthe

This tastes about how you think it would: like somebody ruined the flavor of a fine liquor with mint. I don't even know how this constitutes a classic. I'm going to forget I ever made one.

B. The Sidecar

1. 5 cl cognac
2. 2 cl Cointreau (or Orange liqueur)
3. 2 cl Lemon juice

Alton Brown believes the Sidecar is the precursor to the margarita (apologies for the ads). I believe that this is a fantastic drink, if you are craving something sweet, but not cloying or deadened by heavy handed mixers. Go easier on the lemon juice (or use fresh) and use high quality orange liqueurs for the best results, IMO.

Life for a Hot Second on the Appalachian Trail

I don't know much about the history of the Appalachian Trail. I could inform myself, but having been on it for four days, I am now an expert and further research is unnecessary. I can say, without hesitation or equivocation, that the Trail was designed by crazy men (no women would ever be this insane) and walked almost entirely by crazy people. The people who spend their lives on the Trail, they are not crazy. They have bent their lives to the shape of the trail. This means that they have retained their sanity vis a vis real life; it shows perspective. 

The first thing that you learn about the Trail is that you do not walk the trail for the view. In Shenandoah National Park, you will find a concrete pillar and a white rectangle (called a blaze) on a tree. It is a narrow entrance to the otherwise uniform randomness of the wall of woods facing you from the road, a tiny arbor. When you enter the arbor in mid-summer, you are entirely surrounded in forest and various shades of brown and green. It is often thickly carpeted with ground cover. The various informative posters around the park remind you that these are invasive species of plants and this is not what a normal deciduous forest looks like, a thought that you will have had many times over, particularly during the hottest and muggiest parts of the day: this doesn't feel like North American forest at all, it feels like the rainforest. It will be several hours from the time that you enter the canopy before there is even a side trail that offers anything like a view from the mountain ridge. 

When you are hiking like a normal middle class person with disposable income (both in terms of time and money), side trails are the main focus of a hike. The main trail is a spine that leads you from possible view to possible view and you have a series of views and side trails in mind when you set out on the hike, which might be planned for as long as six hours. In a long day, you might hike six miles and tackle one or two peaks. When you are moving from place to place on the trail, side trails cease to be of any interest at all. If you have to do ten miles that day (which is the minimum you have to do in order to move forward fast enough to get anywhere), you don't want three of those miles on side trails that don't get you further toward your destination. The view can wait. You can take the opportunities that the trail gives you, when it runs along a ridgeline for example, rather than when it hits the top of the peak.

Learning to hike in the Rocky Mountains is poor training for hiking in the Appalachians. Words like "peak" have a different meaning. A peak in the foothills of Colorado has a height of six thousand feet or more. It is well above the scrub line and is flirting with the tree line altogether. You are not ensconced in leafy greenness at the heart of the trail; the view is an inescapable part of the trail and side trails are unnecessary. A peak in the heart of the mountains means you better bring your rock-climbing gear and, in some cases, you snow gear. I crested many peaks in the Appalachians, the tallest topped out at 3700 feet. At the height, there are still plenty of trees around. There is no obvious sign that you have reached the top of the "mountain" except that the trail starts to go downward after a few hundred yards. There is no mistaking a peak in the Rockies. 

I think this is the sneaky attraction of the Appalachian Trail; none of the mountains are that high, it should be easy to hike this. It is easy to hike one mountain. But the Appalachian Trail laughs at you, it dares you to take one more peak, to go just two more miles. It's so easy. In Shenandoah, it isn't one or two or ten more miles. It's one thousand miles more of tall hills gussied up as mountains that you learn to hate because the trail never quite seems to be done going up. It tumbles down, zig-zagging back to the ridge, and the climbs forever, suddenly accelerates up, and then slows again, relentlessly up, until you feel like you are always climbing and your calves never knew such pain. If you are momentarily aware that you are going down, your calves still screaming and still working hard, this time to keep you from falling, it only fills you with dread because the inevitable slow death of the upward slope is coming, waiting, laughing. 

It is then that you come to dread the word "gap." You cross many of these passes in the mountains. They don't deserve the name pass because the mountains don't tower over them, just a few hundred feet. Cameron Pass in Colorado, for example, is 2,000 feet below the peaks of the mountains on either side of it. But those few hundred feet add up. Every three or four miles is a new gap, a couple hundred feet on either side. A thousand feet here, a thousand feet there, and suddenly you've got a mile. You walk the trail for long enough and the vertical distance traveled starts to hurt, far more than the horizontal distance. Twenty miles in New York City sounds like a lot, but it's a cakewalk - all one surface, basically level ground. Twenty miles in Shenandoah National Park? That's six peaks, over a mile of vertical distance, dirt, rocks, stones, roots, steep downs, stairs up, slopes, ridges and hollows. You can walk 20 miles in NYC without too much effort in six and a half hours. 20 miles in the SNP takes about eleven hours and only if you can muscle through because you have to get your miles in or it will be September in Maine before you know it. Shenandoah National Park is the easiest part of the Appalachian Trail.

When you start the more arduous than necessary climb from 2800 feet to 3500 feet for the twelfth time in two days and you stop cursing because this should be easier than it is, you realize just how insane the Appalachian Trail truly is. Think about the Oregon Trail. It begins in Missouri and seeks to cross the tallest mountains the continent can throw at it. The passes are high up and hard work to find, but you would rather go through a saddle at 10,000 than cross over a 14,000 foot mountain. A pass is an excuse to get away from the peaks, you follow the base of the mountain rather than go over the ridge. You make your life easier, mileage is cheap, elevation is expensive. But the Appalachian Trail was blazed by people who think differently. If you really wanted to walk from Georgia to Maine, the easiest way is to follow the coast. If you need the mountains, then you twist and turn at edges. The last thing on earth that you do is blaze a trail that takes you over as many mountains as possible in the range for the next two thousand miles. But that is exactly what the AT does. 

If that doesn't sound like it's for you, I can understand. I spent four days in the mountains and I went sixty miles. 16 miles the first day, 9, the next, 20 the next, and 14 on the final day (in 7 hours, I might add). I hated it. The last day was all about anger and escape. But I had violated the fundamental rule of the mountains, as I discovered, hips waggling into the friendly hostel a ridge runner had built in his home at the entrance to Shenandoah, just for fools such as myself. I listened to the hostelier and his friends banter about how far they were going to get into the trail over the next few days. Their concept of time was fluid, permanently vacation like. In the end, they couldn't settle on where they would be when, so they postponed the decision until a later date. They would phone him(!). Then he turned to me and asked me how far I had come. "I did the park from Swift Run Gap in four days." He let that sink in. "How come you did it so quickly?" My brain was finally able to process now that all of the glucose wasn't going to my legs and I pulled the correct answer out of thin air. I didn't know what I was going to say when I opened my mouth. "I didn't know any better." My generous host, a sage of the mountains, nodded, "That is the correct answer."

I had resolved never to set foot on another mile of the AT on purpose for the rest of my life when the arbor opened the other way onto this rural corner of Virginia (with it's 4G cell service and direct route to Washington, DC). In that moment, I began to change my mind. His friends left at four thirty, hitting the trail for an easy couple of miles before setting up camp for the night. We watched the Tour de France. I had set out on trail with a goal, a finish line, and a deadline. I needed to get somewhere and the trail was a means, though I thought I would enjoy the process. I had met some of the trail who had a goal, too. They need to hit that mountain in Maine, months from now. I drafted in his wake, pushing myself to match his pace, needing to get that twenty mile day in to meet my deadline. Everything was sacrificed to the great god Distance. But the men and women who live by the trail, they have no deadline, no finish line. The point is to be on the trail. Oh there are many who walk the trail, who punish themselves, who make their mileage goals every damn day. They are on the trail, they don't live by it. The ones who live by it, they just are. One day, they look up and they find themselves in Maine and think "Oh. How did I get here?"

What's Commercial Got to Do With It?

Diane Ragsdale has been on a tear. She wrote an e-book, In the Intersection, she runs an excellent blog, Jumper, and she has given a talk called Living in the Struggle. The talk is a full length academic talk, so it is a bit of a #longread, but it's absolutely worth it. In the talk, she discusses some of the trends among major regional theatres toward safer programming and more assured revenue streams, she calls this a move toward "commercialism." This concern is long standing in the not-for-profit arts community and Ragsdale is far from the only one concerned with the trends in American regional theatre. Todd London has also written a passionate article on the subject called, What Price Idealism, that pleas for regional theatres to return to their innovative roots and reject the creeping commercialism of partnering with for profit groups to take work to Broadway. Both London and Ragsdale have done great work here, but I have to take issue with the idea that what regional theatres are doing qualifies as commercialism and with the underlying assumption that the for-profit world has nothing to teach the regions.

If you want to start a philosophical argument  about the nature of theatre, just utter the words "Theatres should act more like businesses." Many not-for-profit practitioners bristle at the very idea that our cultural enterprise has anything in common with pure profit maximizing institutions, many of which are rapacious and conscienceless. Truth be told, not-for-profit theatres are unique and they should not act completely like businesses, because that would be a betrayal of their fundamental mission. But many of these arguments cherry pick by highlighting the worst aspects of business and of poorly run businesses and conflate regional theatres' revenue maximization strategies with "acting like a business" or engaging in commerce.

As it happens, I agree that many regional theatres are making poor strategic decisions in favor of short-term revenue production, but this isn't because they are acting like businesses, it's because they are acting like bad businesses. The Economist has done a masterful job covering the stagnation in Japan over the past twenty years. This article, from 2011, has the same theme as this one, from 2004. Japan has not dealt with businesses that have no serious future, but they do not have the courage to let these businesses fail. They limp along, without innovating or producing much of value, or living up to their original promise, and they continue to exist because it would be painful for the national psyche to let them fail en masse. Corporate innovation is not a strong suit for Japanese businesses, which prefer the assiduous pursuit of goals, not dreaming up new ideas of how to achieve those goals or of new goals. Bad companies make bad assumptions about revenue projections. Companies go south by growing big too quickly. Bad companies limp along for years by nursing existing revenue streams and failing to innovate new products and new business models. This should all sound very familiar to those with experience in the land of not-for-profit theatres of a certain size (usually big). Human beings are notoriously bad at identifying sunk costs (I love this extract calling the sunk cost effect a "maladaptive economic practice" - scientists are the best).

To call this collective set of revenue maximizing behavior "commercialism" is to ignore the positive examples of great companies in the private sector that don't do any of that. Google enables its employees to have side projects (and Apple has toyed with the idea too). Can you imagine what would happen if every regional theatre started acting like that business? IBM is a technology firm that has existed from over one hundred years (this Economist piece is a good overview). It has reinvented itself several times over. How many theatres have the nerve to identify the changes necessary in what they consider their core product and to entirely reinvent themselves? How many theatres have the emphasis on design that Apple has? Or that can focus relentlessly on improving the process of production the way that Toyota has? Toyota has a ton of things to teach the theatre world (empowering every employee on the line to stop it and point out a flaw and requiring, REQUIRING, its employees to regularly suggest improvements to the process, to name just two awesome ideas).

In the end, I do not believe that theatres emphasizing safe shows over riskier material, theatres that seek the widest audience, that they know, are becoming too much like businesses, too commercial. They are making a huge mistake because they are becoming too much like bad businesses. How many theatres are truly laser focused on maximizing their resources to put on the best show possible, which is their product after all? How many of the have the courage to abandon any pretence of relying on fickle ticket revenue and shift budgets accordingly? How many theatres get smaller in a responsible and orderly fashion? How many theatres have given up specializing in their own marketing and let others with more experience handle that service? Inditex is a firm that does not spend a single dime on advertising and yet Zara has gone from being a Spanish brand to being a global one. What does that tell us about marketing?

I agree that not-for-profit theatres are not for-profit enterprises. They should not be as ruthless about maximizing profit or as focused on quarterly shareholder value. But there are a lot of best practices in the business world that could make a real difference in not-for-profit theatre and we owe it to our staffs, to our patrons, and to our communities to find them and apply them.

Of Coins, Bit and Culture

Update: @ddower and @Pollyckarl have made themselves available on Twitter recently, to answer questions about Culture Coin that have cleared up a few things. The first is that the Business Unusual contest specifically requested "half-baked" ideas, ideas that are unfinished, undoubtedly to prevent organizations from editing themselves out of a good idea. The second is that they are two incredibly smart, engaged, and approachable people who truly want the community to develop ideas together. This post has been edited to reflect all of that. 

Fair warning: I am not an economics blogger. But I read a bunch of them on the regular (Matt Yglesias, Joe Weisenthal, better known as @TheStalwart, Ezra Klein and Wonkblong in general, Ryan Avent and The Economist in general, and Free Exchange in particular - you get the picture). Caveat emptor.

If you are a theatrical bent and you are at all engaged with social media, then you may have noticed HowlRound on Twitter, talking up voting for Culture Coin, their Business Unusual contest entry (side note to ArtsFwd: this is 2013 - frames are dead, dead, dead, please stop using them). I encourage you to read the proposal, a heartfelt plea for new thinking on connecting resources with users and rewarding sweat with "sweat equity." I am wholly on board with the premise that there are underutilized resources in the arts sector, that there are dark resources, latent abilities, spaces, or resources that have not been tapped into, and that nearly everyone in the arts sector is underpaid. It's an open question what direction exactly Culture Coin is going to take on tackling these issues. However, all of this talk about creating a digital distributed transnational currency reminds me of that other digital transnational invented currency, Bitcoin, which can lead to some productive thinking about what Culture Coin should not be.

You may have heard of Bitcoin. It's been in the news recently because its value went nuts, which led to all kinds of snarky econoblogger fun. If you haven't heard, Bitcoin is a digital, anonymous, cryptographically secure, peer-to-peer currency based on hard money theories of value (which is influenced by a school of thought called monetarism), namely that scarcity and durability create value. If you have libertarian friends, ask them about gold. You will get a wonky earful about intrinsic value and you will understand what Bitcoin wants to be (it's all wrong, of course - theatre makers, of all people, should understand that value is a shared collective phenomenon that is not always stable). Bitcoin is, essentially, digital gold. Gold has desirable qualities in a physical currency: it doesn't rust; there's a limited supply of it; historically, everybody wants it. Bitcoin, like gold, is limited in its supply. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins in the world. Bitcoins must be mined in order to go into circulation (being "mined" involves your computer doing a complex set of number crunching, kind of like SETI@home or Folding@home, but with less societal value). And finally, Bitcoin can be converted to other currencies at a floating market value, in addition to being useful (that's a strong word, but let's be generous) for purchasing goods and services directly (for the record, despite all the techo-utopian enthusiasm behind Bitcoin, the bulk of the goods purchased with it at this point are drugs and guns - turns out libertarians aren't the only ones interested in a cryptographically secure anonymous transnational digital currency).

It's easy to see the similarities between Bitcoin and Culture Coin, which aims to be a peer-to-peer digital currency as well. However, those similarities end pretty quickly. For example, the value basis of the Culture Coin is the exact inversion of Bitcoin. The basis for "mining" Culture Coins is sweat, i.e. labor, which is essentially infinite, and the money supply is unconstrained. This begs the question: how does labor create capital? When you perform labor in the real economy,  you receive wages out of an existing stock of available money, you don't create that money out of thin air in that moment. Libertarians and Bitcoin enthusiasts don't like fiat money because governments can increase the money supply (i.e. print money) to change the value of that money, pretty much at will. Fiat money means that it is always possible for a sovereign to make more money with their magic "Because I said so!" (this is also why no sovereign nation with its own currency can go bankrupt - tell your Republican friends). But that doesn't mean the money created would be worth anything, just ask Zimbabwe (231,000,000% per day!). Culture Coin, if it were truly to be implemented as a currency, is the most extreme version of fiat money ever, where labor itself creates new money, rather than getting rewarded with existing money. There is no precedent for that whatsoever, it's essentially alchemy. If the user base grows and Culture Coin catches on in this scenario, value will disappear the instant it is "created" because the more successful Culture Coin is at convincing people to put in sweat and be paid in coin, the less each individual coin will be worth, undercutting the very purpose of the project: fair compensation.

Bitcoin is also meant to mimic gold in that it intends to be a resource that is left to the collective use of those who adopt it. In other words, there is no central bank of Bitcoin. As a form of specie, it simply is what it is and it doesn't need anyone standing behind it to have value (we've seen that this is not true, of course, but that's the theory). The Culture Coin project has an altruistic motive at heart, fair compensation for market participants, that requires active management of the currency to meet its philosophical goals. Some of these ideas can't be found in the contest entry, but they do show up on Twitter. One in particular catches the eye:

Culture Coin gets co-created & democratically run by—ALL—artists & culture makers. Read/Vote it up @artsfwd goo.gl/PGRCF #newplay
— HowlRound.com (@HowlRound) May 22, 2013

Culture Coin would again be the exact opposite of Bitcoin: instead of having no central bank, its central bank will be every user of the currency. Culture Coin plans to have all users collectively act together and democratically decide on conversion rates and fair compensation for your sweat. You can search for days on whatever search engine suits you and you will not find anyone who has ever attempted anything like that. Digital direct democracy, in and of itself, has yet to succeed or be effectively implemented by its own biggest proponents. No one has ever attempted direct democractic control of a central bank. Ever.We have seen what happens when amateurs help run major financial institutions, though and it looks a lot like the Great Depression. Setting aside major questions about standards of fairness and the workability of the currency, this is a giant governance headache. Huge amounts of resources and time will be needed to work out the theory on this, produce actionable ideas, run the experiments necessary to implement those ideas, learn from those experiments, and then finally convince someone to actually accept a Culture Coin as a form of payment from someone they don't know. Creating a currency is hard work.

This is all pretty theoretical, so let me put it into more concrete terms. Let's say I volunteer with several local theatres in DC, doing lighting or whatever they had to hand, and let's say I did that for long enough, that I could use some of the Culture Coins I'd built up to rent a space in Germany (transnational!) for a week for a cross-cultural project I'd been kicking around (something like these examples came up in the Twitter conversation, which I should storify, but haven't yet). That's great! But . . . the people who own that space in Germany have to pay rent. In euro. How does giving them some Culture Coins help them make rent? It doesn't . . . unless you can turn a Culture Coin into euro. But there is already a way for me to labor for a certain amount of time, receive currency in return for that labor (from an already accepted store of value), and then use that wage to pay for goods and services to realize my dream idea; all without creating a parallel economy or a new currency.

What this all boils down to is that Culture Coin is actually still an inchoate nascent idea and it will take some time to develop. To me, it is pretty clear though that it shouldn't develop into a true currency and that even one second spent thinking of it that way is time better spent doing something. To me, there is something far more interesting lurking at the heart of the project than a digital currency. Remember that the impetus for Culture Coin, beyond the fair compensation thing, is the desire to uncover and connect resources, including latent resources, with those who are interested in using them. Fair compensation doesn't actually have anything to do with connecting users with resources. It would be nice to be fairly compensated, but that's a problem with not having enough capital, something that inventing a new currency won't solve. But this resource problem? That can be solved. Indeed, Fractured Atlas has already made a run at part of this problem with their Spaces project. In keeping with the commons ethos, I think the best thing HowlRound can do, would be to leverage that contest reward into a partnership with someone who is already working on part of their problem and extend the work of both.

I moved to Washington, DC in order to get plugged into a vibrant theatre community that was large enough to be doing interesting work and taking serious risks, but small enough to welcome in a complete stranger. I have a couple of projects that I would love to self-produce, but I'm still new to the community (and disconnected from it by my production gig - I think sometimes that I will get deeper into the theatre, only when I step away from running shows). I don't hang around with a coterie of actors. I don't know anyone with a blackbox theatre. I don't know where to go to get the kind of booth you might find in a diner for my set. If HowlRound can put together a web platform that helps me find all of these disparate parts and pieces and use them to put on a show, they will have done me and the entire theatre community a huge service, even if I have to spend my own money to do it. Culture Coin is worth supporting for that reason. I hope they just leave that currency thing to anonymous genius libertarians. And sovereign nations. Because even they can't figure it out.

Of Mechanics and Ferraris

This post is dedicated to the mechanics of theatre (as is this little ditty, in a way).

What you think of your mechanic depends almost entirely on what you think of your car. If you are a regular commuter, you probably think of your car as an instrument, essentially, a commodity, something completely fungible and interchangeable. You also probably don't know your mechanic. In all likelihood, you don't have a regular guy or gal at all. Jiffy Lube, or Mr. Tire, or whoever suits you fine for the regular stuff and for the other stuff? Whatever AAA or the insurance company (yours or theirs) recommends is fine. The fact that your car has to be repaired at times is annoying. The machine is just a machine, you are reluctant to spend any real money at all, and when you do spend any serious amount of money, it is with much grumbling and great regret.

But if you own a Ferrari (you're welcome), things are quite different. For one thing, you can't take it to just anybody anymore. There aren't millions of Ferraris in the world. Very few third party manufacturers make parts for such a high end automobile. The number of mechanics qualified to maintain a high performance vehicle in peak condition is way smaller than the number who can replace any old fifteen dollar oil filter (it sinks from thousands to tens). You also understand that a Ferrari is a fine piece of kit, expensive to purchase and to operate. You don't begrudge the running cost, because it is simply part of being a member of an exclusive club, the kind of club where you don't bother listing the prices of accessories. That means you know your mechanic, you probably know them by name, you visit them regularly, and you pay them extremely well for their specialized knowledge and ability. You acknowledge the importance of their work in making it possible for you to do ridiculous things (again, you're welcome) with your car.

But that is not the top end of what mechanics can do. For that, you have to look at pit crews, or well, you know, real pit crews. Drivers routinely thank their pit crews. They also routinely throw them under the bus, but that comes with the high stakes territory. The constructors and engineers involved with Formula 1, in particular, are extremely important. But they work with the best mechanics and crew members in the world. You could be the best engineer in the world, but if there isn't a machine shop in the world capable of doing what you want, it will not matter at all. Those crews are paid well, they are part of a world famous team. They didn't design the car. They don't race the car. But they sure do make it run.

"Yes, but when are you going to talk about theatre?" asks the impatient reader (but not too impatient, thanks for making it this far). I would love to be able to drop the mic right here. "I've been talking about theatre all along: technicians are mechanics!" Unfortunately, I can't and to see why, we have to take step back for a moment.

Theatre is experiencing the same wrenching transition from a hard-fought past into an unknown future that all creative content companies are right now. The business model of regional theatre is collapsing because there are fewer theatregoers and because of generational shift away from the culture of subscription toward a single-ticket world. As an added bonus, the rising cohort has now been scarred by years of economic hardship. All of this difficulty spawns a lot of discussion, some of it more practical than others. I read quite a lot of it. Almost none of it mentions technicians at all. The discourse of theatre and the arts is dominated by people who work in the artistic department, a group that is very often housed in a building entirely separate from the theatre. Whenever anyone talks about the future of theatre, it is always cast in terms of enabling the artists or changing our relationship with the artist. That is a problem.

Take HowlRound's CULTURE Coin proposal. It is a radical proposal to change the way that sweat equity is rewarded and recognized. They start with the presumption that theatre artists are underpaid and are therefore trying to create a community where the sweat equity of the artists is valued and becomes a medium of exchange (which is only slightly harder than re-inventing the wheel; it's just democratically inventing a currency from nothing, with no central bank - that should sound alarms). At certain levels of theatre, particularly small professional theatres, this makes sense. The lighting designer will, in fact, turn a wrench, the sound designer will install the speaker cluster, the scenic designer will take up a screw gun and get to work. The reason that happens is that the theatre company cannot afford to pay the designer a living wage (or a wage at all), let alone hire a crew to do the work the designer lays out. There must be a way to reward them for that sweat, right?

I invite you to think about what that proposal presumes about technicians. Thought about it? The answer is that it presumes those people don't exist. Nowhere in that proposal will you see mention of anything other than artists: no technicians, no administrators, just artists. In order for CULTURE Coin to work, you have to assume that the people who are doing the work want to be paid in a way that lets them transform sweat into cultural participation. There is no place in that model for somehow who paints sets, gets paid, and then goes home. In this model, it is presumed that the people putting in the sweat equity want to be regarded as artists. Some designers have to do that sweat work, but not all of the people doing that sweat work are designers, directors, actors, or any other type of artist. The worldview of so much of the thinkers of theatre is hermetically sealed - it contains only art and artists. Despite the generous assumption that the people putting in the sweat equity are artists, it doesn't quite cut both ways. It is nigh on impossible to cross the boundary between technician and artist. It is possible to conceive of an artist who has to do mechanic things, but a mechanic who wants to do artistic things? That's literally unthinkable within the current discourse.

We have now come full circle. The technicians who make theatre run are treated like commuter mechanics. We are considered interchangeable, utterly fungible, possibly unnecessary, and only begrudgingly considered part of the theatre landscape. Theatres across the country want to we could let that Check Engine light ride, just for awhile. It's not really important, right? They have no input into how the car is driven. But the reality is that technicians perform a highly specialized task that few people can do well: they are the Ferrari mechanics, not Mr. Tire wrench monkeys. Conceptually, this leaves us with two possible paths. One path leads to a future business model where theatre companies will stay resolutely focused on the artist and not-for-profit theatre companies will not own or operate their own theatre spaces. That money pit be dealt with by companies that are totally focused on that goal alone. There are a number of theatres who would benefit tremendously from divesting themselves of property and all the expensive problems that come with it. The other possible path is that the future of theatre will include the people who actually turn wrenches, mix sound, rig flying scenery, hot glue candlesticks from nothing, whipstitch hems (apologies to the costumes and wardrobe) in a new way. Philosophical decisions will be made in a way that respects them as artisans. Concentrated efforts will be made to cultivate them as a resource to be drawn on, not just in the moment when something needs to be done in tech RIGHT NOW. The barriers between production and artistic will come down making it easier for technicians to become artists and administrators. That would be revolutionary.

Criticism is Not a Four Letter Word

I’ve been eavesdropping on the online conversation about criticism in the arts for awhile now (thank you, HowlRound). Every year, there is a panel at the Humana Festival (like this one) dedicated to assessing the state of theatre criticism. I find the conversation both frustrating and fascinating. I find it fascinating because criticism was my jam as an academic (and all the real philosophers are critical theorists these days - I dare you to find philosophy seminars devoted to anyone born in the twentieth century). It's a frustrating conversation because I also happen to be a huge fan of the work being done at Grantland, a place where sports and popular culture meet. That’s a bad description. I’d say that the insight Bill Simmons had (perhaps unconsciously) is that sports culture is popular culture. And you should have a website devoted to the smartest people covering all of the narratives in popular culture and that this should include everything from NBA shot charts to the most interesting things happening in tabloids today to instigating some excellent gonzo journalism (if the only thing you get out of this blog is reading this Brian Phillips piece on the Iditarod, we are all winners). Everyone should take Derby day to read Hunter S. Thompson’s seminal work on Derby week to be reminded of what great cultural journalism looks like. With all of these Grantland contributors doing such outstanding work, it is bizarre to listen to theatre critics lamenting the death of reviews in print. So, if you want to know the state of criticism in the arts, Grantland is the state of the art and drama critics are the superannuated 18^th century model.

The basic challenge for theatre critics has always been how to get past the popular misconception that the primary work of the critic is to review shows. The problem with that is that the only thing people know of criticism are the reviews because that’s the pretty much all newspapers will print about a theatre show or a movie. This is bundled up with the fact that far too few people understand how awesome live theatre is in general, and not just in New York, or at your local roadhouse. In the modern world, newspapers are no longer sufficient for people who truly love something, even newspapers acknowledge that. The New York Times has ArtsBeat and the Washington Post has WonkBlog and Grantland exists. Conversations are moving more quickly now than ever and criticism is really about fostering and facilitating that conversation.

Only at its most basic level is criticism is about judging the quality of a work. This is much more important in theatre than in film reviewing, because there is so much more theatre being produced than film and with far less money. To truly appreciate cultural artifacts, it is often necessary to understand the components of the form, what its elements are, and how they work together, especially when dealing with challenging work. That’s an educational function and it is to a certain extent necessary, but it isn’t the soul of criticism and, even if it was, it is impossible to do this well in print in the context of a review. This function could and should be moved to a network of content about theatre making, very similar to HowlRound or 2AM Theatre, but with the theatregoing audience in mind, not theatre makers. 

Returning to my academic bread and butter, I am reminded constantly of Friedrich Schlegel. In the 18^th century, Friedrich Schlegel and his cohort attempted to craft a form of criticism that was also itself art and they did it in blurb/blog form, but when that form was printed as a literary journal (called the Athenaeum). This proved to be extremely difficult, but the insight rings more true today than it ever has because cultural criticism is so popular, thanks to the entertainment value of the way it is done. Grantland is all over this, Ain't It Cool is all over this, FilmSpotting is all over this. I think the impetus behind Grantland was the realization that some cultural criticism/observation is better than others and that the writing about the thing can be just as great as the thing (again, see Hunter S. Thompson). Magazines like Rolling Stone and Spin carried this torch for a long time (and still do). All of these great folks have fantastic conversations about cultural products and they do so in a way that is smart, challenging, interesting, and often hilarious. Criticism is doing fine in the 21st Century. The message for theatre criticism is pretty simple: It gets better.

The Latest in a Series of Experiments

Because precisely no one asked for it and I need some feedback here is the script, tentatively called Blackout, the latest P.I. film. It's a bit . . . different. Very Dame-centric. I'm looking to film it (haha, record it) this summer.

Comments welcome.

You Watch Television?!

You're right. This is a new thing. I didn't used to watch television. I occasionally enjoyed the extremely time shifted pleasures of seasons past (Doctor Who, Psych, Burn Notice, Top Gear, 30 Rock) when they finally hit Netflix. But it turns out, I had severely misunderstood the state of On Demand. In my defense, I haven't paid for cable in three or so years and three years ago "On Demand" meant straight to video crap, renting movies, and nothing else. If you wanted to timeshift a show, you had to know which one that was going to be and record it your own damn self. My sister, a proud homeowner now, inadvertently clued me in to the new world order. On Demand now means that ALL of the regular television shows have been DVRd already and you can pick and choose je nach Laune, as the Germans say (or might if they were translating an American expression into German, let's roll with it), which is awesome in its brilliance (and it took years for them to figure this out because . . . ).

Knowing of the existence of On Demand's in season vault is great and it will change my TV watching habits, but it will not help me with the cultural void that developed over the last couple of years (the lacking access to cable years). I have deliberately kept myself out of the conversations of Mad Men, Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, House of Lies and every HBO show worth watching, which is, frankly, all of them. (A note to HBO, if you are listening: Make HBO Go available to people who aren't subscribers. I don't buy cable in my household, but I would happily give you money to watch your amazing shows. Every month.) I consider that a good thing. If you are someone who cares about those shows, you don't need to listen to me.

But now that I have cracked the On Demand code, I feel like there are shows out there that I can get in on the ground floor on, shows like NBC's Hannibal. What I understand from those in the know is that NBC has no idea what to do with this show, it's in the Thursday night death slot (the one that used to belong to E.R. - oh, how the mighty have fallen), and it might get cancelled once the initial run has aired. It makes you feel bad for Bryan Fuller. Fuller is responsible for Wonderfalls, Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies, and Heroes. Not one of those shows lasted for even three full seasons. So, just be forewarned: Hannibal will be cancelled soon.

Which is a shame because Hannibal is AWESOME. I don't use those capital letters lightly. Thomas Harris is responsible for bringing us the character of Hannibal Lecter and the universe that grew up around it. His novels, Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal, inspired four movies, a musical (I wish I was kidding) and now a television show and, you could argue, created the serial killer/profiler as a genre. Silence of the Lambs is one of the greatest films of all time, a document so complete and authoritative that it is impossible to explore those characters any further. Hannibal, the movie and the novel, attempted it and failed. Even Ridley Scott directing Julianne Moore couldn't add anything substantial to the Lecter/Starling story. But then you have Red Dragon.

Red Dragon is the back story of Silence. It's primarily about Will Graham, a profiler who was so empathetic that he could solve murders from inside the murderer's head, that he could think the murderer's thoughts. That's a compelling character that you could explore forever, right? And then on top of that, we get Hannibal Lecter, the brilliant sadist serial killer who helps Graham catch these killers. That's a dynamic that has automatic tension to it, it's just too juicy. So juicy, that you've got two movies that try to deal with it, mostly unsuccessfully (Manhunter succeeds far more than the dull and obvious Red Dragon - I'll take Michael Mann over Brett Ratner any day of the week), and now, we have the medium necessary to explore the complete complexity of this dynamic: television.

Television allows David Slade (Hard Candy - do yourself a favor, watch) and Bryan Fuller to take their time, to let the dynamic unfold in front of us, with that delicious sense of inevitability, that wonderful suspense that Hitchcock talks about: watching the time bomb under the cafe table tick down inexorably to that final explosive moment. Hugh Dancy is great as Will Graham, who has been invited as a kind of idiot savant, who has little or no social skills, no use for social niceties, and who is clearly damaged by the use of his empathetic gifts. The show lets us into the Graham's world, to his torture, by re-enacting the crime scenes with Graham as the killer. It's highly stylized and totally immersive. But the real brilliance of the show is casting Mads Mikkelsen as Hannibal Lecter, an actor who is the polar opposite, in terms of technique, as Brian Cox and Anthony Hopkins. Mikkelsen is a master of the subtle, cold, and calculating. He is outstanding in Casino Royale, but he has some Danish language work that is also brilliant, particularly the Dogme-95-lite piece, After The Wedding. Mikkelsen is a total . . . er . . . pleasure to watch. He is understated but always masterfully present.

But great actors and good style aren't enough to make this show work, though it helps tremendously. It's going to come down to the monsters these guys are hunting down on a weekly basis. Harris may have invented the the profiler/killer rules, but modern science has come to understand something about those early profilers: they were full of crap. Most serial killers are not loner white men who have trouble keeping a job. Many of them are dedicated family men and pillars of their community (which gibes with what we know of pure evil from . . . you know where, that place and the thing . . . do I really have to go there?). The first killer in the series is a family man killing girls like his daughter because she is about to leave the nest. Immediately, we know that we aren't going to be stuck with run of the mill psychos and loners. No Jame Gumb, no John Doe, no Dahmer. We are getting a great look at a very interesting dynamic and new look at what we think of evil.

So, yeah. I'm all in on Hannibal.

Shaking Off the Post-Oscar Blues

The Oscars are finally, mercifully, over. We can all stop thinking about 2012, the movie year that was, and get pumped about what is going to happen next, now that everyone has moved on. I don't care to predict what I will want to see in October or anything. The movie year has seasons, too, so I want share five movies that I can't wait to see in the Post-Oscar/Pre-Summer Tentpole season. Arbitrary cut-off date: May 3. Summer movie season used to start Memorial Day Weekendendend. But they are releasing Iron Man III on May 3. Clearly, the summer silly season starts then.

One caveat, I didn't want to waste anyone's time with movies that are all going to see anyway. I don't need to tell you about Oz the Great and Powerful. It's Disney, they've been pounding on your door for a while. Also, horror movie fans and Sam Raimi fans already know about Evil Dead, no one needs me for that (or for anything really, I'm just thinking about it, it's what the internet is for: shouting into the void when it all gets too pent up inside).  Anyway, I'm trying to look between the arthouse and the blockbuster here. Nothing too snobbish (I am a snob so some of it is going to be, you know . . .) and nothing too obvious.

Honorable Mentions: Pain and Gain (yay, trashy Michael Bay is back!), Place Beyond the Pines (Ryan Gosling is now required viewing.), From up on Poppy Hill (Studio Ghibli is back). Admission (because Tina Fey).

5. Like Someone in Love - Abbas Kiarostami was forced on me as part of World Film History course. Anyone who has been subjected to it, or it's bastard cousin, World Theatre, knows what a grind those experiences can be. But A Taste of Cherry is truly a classic, outstanding movie by an Iranian guy, which I never would have found on my own. Kiarostami is now working outside Iran (by some miracle). His latest takes place in Japan. I've heard it's beautiful and that no summary can possibly cover how intricate the film is. I'm in. Technically, it's available on demand already. I just hope an arthouse place picks it up so I can see it in the theater.

4. 42 - I'm a sports fan, a huge one, totally head over heels in love with baseball. Jackie Robinson's story is so epic, so important to the history of sport and society, that you really have to try to screw it up. It's just drama. It doesn't always make it to the screen, but I really want this movie to do justice Jackie Robinson and to one of the best sports stories in all of sports history. And Harrison Ford is in it. Not a guarantee of success or anything, but hey, Indy gets the benefit of the doubt.

3. Stoker - The English language debut of the outrageously good Chan-wook Park, the director of the insanely awesome (and by the end of it, just literally insane) Vengeance trilogy, capped off by the brilliant Oldboy. This one looks creepy and mindblowing. I'd watch because of Park, but it has the added benefit of Nicole Kidman and Mia Wasikowska (doing what looks like a Saorise Ronan impersonation. Poor Saorise, stuck making all that money in that terrible movie, The Host. #FreeSaorise).

2. John Dies at the End - I'm cheating on the release dates here. Technically John Dies at the End is already out, but you have to make a real effort to see it, so I'm going to let it stand. Basically, the gist of it is . . . Paul Giamatti's in it. And it was directed by Bubba Ho-tep's own Don Coscarelli (alright, there is a Phantasm or two in there). While we continue the wait for Bubba Nosferatu (along with the Arrested Development movie: both are JUST around the corner).

1. Before Midnight - The last film in the Before trilogy, Richard Linklater's fascinating character studies. Giving Linklater all the credit isn't right. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are incredibly important co-creators in these free form real time encounters between two people who only see each other every decade or so. Before Sunset is one of my favorite films of all time. It's so incredible, what essentially one long continuous shot (though if you don't want to, you don't have to notice how brilliant it is, much like Soderbergh's camera work) and one long meandering conversation can achieve. Really desperately looking forward to this one. Also, I cheated, this one is out in late May, well into silly season. I want to see that much, I broke my own temporary arbitrary rules to include it.

God Made a What?

I am a child of the late eighties (meaning I was born in the early eighties, natch). I lived in Nebraska during a critical time in my childhood development. Paul Harvey's voice meant a lot to me. It still means "radio." It was my "This American Life," when I was growing up. "And now you know . . . the rest of the story" is a phrase indelibly etched into the folds of my brain. So I thought glowing and pleasant thoughts about Paul Harvey's voice being part of a Dodge commercial. Until I heard it anyway.

You see, in the interim, between childhood and whatever the hell age I am now, which I'd rather not mention, thank you, very much, I've acquired a keen interest in economics. And in the economic world, there is not room for wistful nostalgia and Paul Harvey's 1978 speech was without question, even in 1978, indulging in the worst excesses of nostalgia. But that's not a message people want to hear. Economics has a well-earned reputation as the dismal science, and is anyway in disrepute with a number of people fond of this speech.

But then, I also happen to have read the Bible a time or two. And Genesis has some very interesting things to say on this subject (here's the whole of chapter 3 for you completionists):

¹⁷ To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’

“Cursed is the ground because of you;
    through painful toil you will eat food from it
    all the days of your life.
¹⁸ It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
    and you will eat the plants of the field.
¹⁹ By the sweat of your brow
    you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
    since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
    and to dust you will return.

Call me crazy, but I don't think God felt that way about farmers, pretty much at all.

The Best Picture Requires the Best Director

Yesterday, I did a quick whip around on my thoughts of the Best Picture nominees. To refresh your memory without playing a fascinating game of follow the hyperlink, they are as follows:

Amour, Argo, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, Les Misérables, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook, and Zero Dark Thirty

This is the intersection of that list with the Best Director nominees:

 Amour, Argo, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, Les Misérables, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook, and Zero Dark Thirty


Much has been made of the, ahem, snubs (DRINK!) in this category, but the Academy had the decency to put every Best Director nominee into the Best Picture discussion. Of course you don't step there with Best Picture, they add a few more flicks because . . . why the hell not? Like Wesley Morris, I don't think that snub is the right word. There is a size mismatch and that means some poor bastards, who made excellent movies, just won't make the cut. Let's ask ourselves why.

Tom Hooper lost out because, you know, Russell Crowe. Even if every other choice Hooper made was perfect (and it wasn't, thanks to his DP on amphetamines approach), Russell Crowe's casting torpedoed every shot at making this list. Horrible decision and that's all on one Tom Hooper, director.

It is clear to me that Kathryn Bigelow was not nominated for Zero Dark Thirty because she already won for this movie when it was called The Hurt Locker. A director gets the nod for their style and she did not change enough of her style to get a good streak going. No one has bucked this trend without seriously shifting gears. Eastwood's run comes to mind but, then again, he also made two completely different movies (Million Dollar Baby, still high in the running for worst movie title ever, and Mystic River). It's a shame because Zero Dark Thirty is better in a whole lot of ways, not the least dealing with weightier and much wider ranging subject matter.

Aside: if you are offended by the depictions of torture in this movie, then you have not seen Django Unchained and your opinion is worthless.

Of the four films whose directors did not get recognized, Django Unchained has the most going for it: a distinct voice, difficult issues, great performances, popular at the box office. The biggest problem is the violence and it kept Scorcese out forever as well. The bald fact is that the Academy is pretty mainstream and the extreme edges of cinema don't usually get recognized and that ain't changing. It's actually kind of a miracle that anyone is using "Quentin Tarantino" and "Oscar snub" in the same sentence. The Academy might not come all the way around until long after QT is done, but they have come mighty far in the last twenty years, I will give them that.

That brings us to Argo. I am reluctant to say this, so . . . if you love Argo, you should skip this paragraph and just keep on believing that Argo got jobbed and stupid Academy. I'll wait. I'll even give you a few sentences to make up your mind, because I value your opinion. Even if I don't agree with it. Because Argo is not a brilliant film. I compare it to the best suit you can buy at Macy's. It's a fine suit, cut looks good, good quality, name brand. There is nothing wrong with it as a suit . . . until you call it the best suit money can buy, which is flat out not true. Argo was wonderful to watch, I enjoyed the crap out of it. Affleck directed it well, it's well-crafted, and full of good decisions but . . . it's not a movie that is about anything other than the story of these hostages. I often found it predictable, well-executed, but . . . predictable. I think workman-like is a great comment and a huge compliment to Affleck and that no one should even be considering him for Best Director. I have zero problem with Affleck not being on this list given who else made this list. As much as I wish David O. Russell wasn't on it.

I loved Silver Linings Playbook. It's extremely hard to handle a story about mental illness that doesn't veer into pat, cheap, and easy solutions about mental illness and Silver Linings manages to hold off on pat, cheap, and easy until the very very end. Right up until then there are all kinds of crazy people and there is very little normal. And a ton of sports fandom, non-ridiculed, legit sports love. Unfortunately, this movie just doesn't have anything at stake other than the Solitano family and Tiffany (also the ending is such gratuitous wish-fulfillment - I wanted it for the characters, but sometimes when you make a great movie, you have to make choices for your characters that the viewer will not want - see Amour). Fun film, challenging material, well executed. But not on the same level as Taratino, who in addition to all the revenge and the killing and the repartee, made a film that was really about representations of race and America's perception of itself. And also lots of bullets and blood.

There are three movies that have serious depth, deal with all kinds of complicated issues and are brilliantly executed. Beasts of the Southern Wild, Amour, and Lincoln. The most likely to win is Lincoln, thanks to that idea that the Best Picture was made by the Best Director and Lincoln is the big time favorite for Pic. Spielberg had a really difficult task in making routine political business seem interesting and consequential enough to deserve fiction film treatment and he dispatches it with flair. Every scene in Congress is riveting and loaded with subtext. Daniel Day Lewis inhabits the roles of Lincoln as if he could talk to the man himself (now that's Method). It's good, it's really good, and I wouldn't be mad if Spielberg won it, which is good because he probably will.

But I would much rather see Amour or Beasts of the Southern Wild win because they are on another level entirely. Michael Haneke made a pitiless and unsentimental movie about an age-old fear (see what I did there? Age-old fear about being old, get it? GET IT?!) and a contemporary societal theme (aging and the quality of life). Every single frame of this film matters. It is hewn out of stone, cold, cold stone. It's claustrophobic, unflinchingly realistic, unsparing, and absolutely relevant. It does not indulge in a single extravagant emotion. There is not one shot wasted. It's almost certainly not going to win because it is so completely foreign, so remote; I just don't think Academy voters will connect with it (the audience I saw it with were certainly unprepared for it) and I accept that. It will almost certainly take Best Foreign Film, which is consolation of sorts.

But my Best Director, and Best Picture, belong to Benh Zeitlin and Beasts of the Southern Wild. This movie is so vibrant, so pulsing with life. Benh Zeitlin took challenging source material and made it live on screen and he used completely amateur actors and he made them look brilliant. It's visually stunning, emotionally resonant, and it means more than what it shows. It tackles giant issues like modernity and romanticism versus utilitarianism. He looks fondly at life on the margins, not as a problem to be solved, but as a rich source of hope for humanity. It's so resolutely American, a dream of what could be, what can be done . . . these characters absorb profound assaults on their world, then they survive, and keep on surviving. I really love this movie and I really love what the director accomplished. Fact is, most people missed this in theaters, but it is now available for rent from your friendly neighborhood digital movie dispensary and you should just do yourself a favor and see it (at 93 minutes, it is by far the shortest of those nominated in this category). Just see it.

So yes, I understand the groundswell for #AffleckWasRobbed and I wish #Argo the best, and now they have a bunch of Golden Globes to console themselves. It has a shot, there is obvious affection for it and the serious movie vote might split several ways leaving Lincoln short, so keep it up. Don't let the bastards grind you down. Just don't be surprised when Lincoln trashes everyone and pulls a It Happened One Night on the major awards (minus Best Actress because politics is a sausage fest). 

What Exactly Do You Mean by Best?

The nominations are in. If you are feeling all Internety, the New York Times has the interactive graphic for you (which can double as your Oscar bracket, you know, if betting were legal). I have been personally invested in completing my Oscar collection for a long time, but time and money usually prevented me from getting all five. And then they went and did something rather rash: expanded the Best Picture slate to anything up to ten (because of this tiny movie, no one's ever heard of). My job had been made that much harder, especially considering the fact that there is always one movie that has long since faded from theaters. But this year, between the magic of the Internet distribution system and the consistent "What box office have I seen lately?" attitude of Academy members, I have managed to see all of the films nominated for Best Picture, and by some bizarre miracle, which I assume will never be repeated, all of the nominees for Best Director (which was a subset of the Best Picture nods, because you know, logic). I dodged a Weinstein sized bullet when The Master failed to garner either of those nominations. That film is utterly unavailable to nosy people like me, for rent or purchase until AFTER the Oscars, in what can only be seen as a spiteful choice to mess with amateur Oscarologists who damn well should have seen The Master in glorious 70MM but who had the temerity to have lives, jobs, responsibilities, and the desire to see the sunny side of life, so screw them.

Before we dive into the nominations proper, I'll admit to three lacunae in my Oscar Year: The Master, as I noted earlier, The Impossible, and The Sessions (hmm, pattern much?). These only impact my ability to assess the acting categories, but not really because Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role belongs to Daniel Day-Lewis and the Academy had "Anne Hathaway" etched into the statuette for Supporting Actress since the first trailer for Les Misérables was released. That just leaves Actress in a Leading Role and Naomi Watts. I will be able to see The Impossible before the ceremony, so I will hold off on that one for a week. I figure we can tackle all the acting nominations at once and all the rest of the nominations after that (with maybe a separate post on the writing awards).

Let's get down to brass tacks, handicapping the race Best Picture Style. Amour, Argo, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, Les Misérables, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook, and Zero Dark Thirty

Happy to Be Here
Argo, Silver Linings Playbook, Les Misérables

Sorry to be a hater. These films are here because people want to reward quality work from late in the year and if you can get up to ten, why not? These movies have no shot and would be the first to go, if we had to get back to five. Interesting to note here, this is why I have no problem with Affleck not getting a director nod (more detail on that later), and why I have a very real problem with Russell getting one. I enjoyed the crap of out of parts of Les Mis, but you can't like parts of a movie and not the whole and have a shot at Best Picture.

You Mean I've Got a Chance?!
Life of Pi, Django Unchained, Amour, Zero Dark Thirty

The big problem with the previous lot, the biggest, is that they aren't about anything else. Good stories, well-executed, but not a ton of depth. That's the background of these flicks; all of them have got a lot going on. Pi is the least interesting of these movies. I loved the movie, but at it's heart, it's a novel. Ang Lee made some very pretty pictures, too, but the framing of the story (and it's length) hurt it as Best Picture. Django is not as good as Inglorious Basterds, though it is dealing with some gnarly racial heritage problems. Love that it got nominated for this, but has anything this gleefully violent ever won or even deserved to win? Zero Dark Thirty is handicapped by the fact that it is based on a true story and resolutely refuses to judge anything that happens in the story. It's fascinating because Bigelow really only seems to be interested in Maya's story, that the movie isn't about America because of Bin Laden, it's about America because of Maya. And then there is Amour. I am impressed that it got nominated for Best Picture and it is a great movie, great movie, about aging and what happens when you approach death in this culture. It is also pitiless and unsentimental. It's a mortal lock for best Foreign Film, another knock against the Best Picture Odds

King Kong Ain't Got Nothing
Lincoln, Beasts of the Southern Wild

If I had a ballot, Beasts wins this in a landslide. It is by far the best movie on this lest, it is heartwarming and devastating and wonderfully imaginative and incredibly American (entrepreneurial, underdog-y). It's so good and so beautiful that it is possible that Best Picture goes to Beasts despite the indieness of it. But Lincoln is the gorilla in the room and it is everything the Academy wants: big ambition, great box office, great performances, and brand names (cf. Titanic). I think Lincoln is the heavy hitter, the giant ape, the prohibitive favorite.

Ok, that's enough Oscar for now. In a couple of days, we'll talk direction (and why I don't think that word means what you think it means).

That Movie with all the Dirty People Singing

The fundamental premise of all music based theatrical entertainment is that music is speech/dialogue. In operas, every word is sung, including all that boring plot related stuff. In musicals, all that boring plot related stuff is spoken because, really, why waste the effort writing music for lines that people don't really care about anyway (that's hard work!). This happens on stage all the time and no one has a problem with it, ever. It's understood. But movie musicals, now that's a different story. I cannot think of a single movie opera - a movie where all of the dialogue is sung. I'm not saying they don't exist, but they exist in obscure corners of movie history (yes I include this as obscure). Every major movie musical lets the dialogue take care of the plot and then kicks up the entertainment factor or the emotional stakes with some singing and dancing. Les Miserables is a movie operetta, a strikingly faithful page to stage to screen adaptation. I think quite a few critics and not a small number of moviegoers struggles with the film because they are not buying into, or have enough experience wtih, the music as speech/dialogue paradigm. All what Tom Hooper has done is to take this paradigm to its logical cinematic conclusion.

Movie musicals let spoken dialogue do the plot lifting and the small talk, but movies are also visual. So what ends up happening is that standard spoken dialogue is shot in the standard two shot shot/reverse shot paradigm we all unconsciously know and love. Movie musicals usually have a different gaze when they switch to "performance" mode. A great example of this, taken to the cinematic extreme, is Chicago. In that movie, most of the dialogue takes place in a recognizable Jazz-era Chicago, while the singing and dancing happens in a bizarre expressionist nether-world, totally separate from the real world. Tom Hooper obliterates the plot/performance distinctions in Les Miserables by keeping the spoken camera conventions throughout, including close-ups. People really aren't used to that, seeing the chins wavering, and the throats straining. It's disconcerting and it's a pure litmus test: if you can handle the idea that "music is speech" then you can handle the way Hooper uses his camera to show you his characters. If you don't buy that, don't buy a ticket. Many people don't know how to judge the acting in the scenes between Russell Crowe and Hugh Jackman where Inspector Javert introduces himself to Monsieur Le Maire née Valjean. In many a brain it goes like this: "They are singing at each other. I don't know what this means. This is weird. It sucks." I think your fundamental enjoyment or assessment of Les Miserable begins with whether or not you accept the idea that two people can talk about the weather and be singing at the same time. Hooper's decision to work up close goes hand in hand with his decision to have his actors sing live on set and not to muck about with dubbed over versions of the singing. As a theatre geek and a person who makes their living in theatre, all I can say is: Halle-freaking-lujah. When your actors buy into this project and sellout as hard as everyone in Les Mis does, it makes the truly harrowing emotional moments resonate with a power that voice-over is incapable of delivering.

I can has all the awards?

Ok, so I buy the fundamental approach that Hooper brings to the material, I love it, welcome it, and I am desperately in love with the source material. Now the question, THE question, the one question that everyone who loves the musical has to confront: How does the movie compare to the 10th Anniversary concert (that's an Amazon link - your welcome)? I am only slightly joking. Les Miserables, the movie, sits at the center of a dense web of associations for me, and I think for a lot of people. I listened to and sang the song of Les Mis, not only on my own (GET IT?!) but with several other people. It is a shared passion and obsession. There is just no way the movie gets a fair shake. But I did my damnedest and I have the tear stained napkins too prove it (actually, I don't - I threw them away, I promise). Before we get to the meat and potatoes I will say one more conceptual thing: making a faithful adaptation of a stage show into movie leaves the thorny question of pacing unanswered, specifically at the act break. Les Miserables is a long live theatre experience, but there is a fifteen minute intermission built into the run time. More importantly, it is built into the structure of the musical. "One Day More" is an incredible show-stopping number. It brings all the voices and all the characters onto the stage for a point/counterpoint triumph and it ends in stirring unison fashion ("tomorrow is the judgment day . . . One more dawn, one day more!" - Ed: Stop sniveling!). Then you get fifteen minutes to think about it. Then Act II starts off with a huge bang and a massive scene shift to the barricades.

Do you hear the people sing?

The emotional roller coaster between "One Day More" and "Do You Hear the People Sing" prices in the fifteen minute break. When you make a film that is faithful to the stage play, but without the intermission, you end up with pacing problems and an overwhelming emotional experience. At two hours and thirty seven minutes without a built-in break, you've got a length problem.

I can hear you complaining. You're saying: "Erin, you've got a length problem. Just tell me if you like the movie, damn it." Ok, enough technical/theoretical discussion. I loved it. It is not great. The pacing problems hurt it. Russell Crowe hurts it, though not for the reasons you think. Crowe is getting a lot of crap for not being up to the rest of the cast vocally and that's not quite accurate (though I won't go as far as Chuck Pierce in defending him). Crowe can sing. He is not awful, in the way that Pierce Brosnan is awful in Mamma Mia! (I have been accused of being a closet lesbian, so it should not surprise that I liked that movie, Brosnan's Mark Knopfler impersonation notwithstanding). Two huge things are disappointing about Crowe's contributions though, both of which I will blame on the director. Javert's part, as written, is a bass part. It makes a great counterpoint to Valjean's soaring roaring tenor and it makes Stars and Javert's Suicide much more emotional by expanding the range of the singer to express those ideas. It might be Crowe's limitations as a singer that prompted them to move away from the vocal depths of Javert's part, and there is no question, the role is reduced by this choice, but I'm not ready to blame that all on Crowe without knowing all the facts. The other problems come in the soliloquies. Crowe isn't given a lot to work with during his soliloquies (walk this parapet like a boss). He does well with others. He's great in disguise and when expressing disgust and he has one of my favorite emotional touches in the whole movie when he sees Gavroche's body (I won't spoil it).

But what hurts it the most, and what really keeps the movie from being truly a masterpiece, is that Tom Hooper is too in love with pointless camera movement (from Pierce's piece: "I'll never watch another Tom Hooper movie until I'm guaranteed by the producers that his damned camera has been riveted to the floor"). The movie blows you away when it settles in and rests in glorious close-up on emotional, gut-wrenching, world-changing heartbreak. The list of incredible scorching emotional moments is almost too long to recount, but let's hit the highlights: Valjean's agonized pacing in "What Have I Done?" which would have won Jackman an Oscar in any other season (sorry, sainted former Presidents trump fictional convicts), Fantine's entire life, but especially "I Dreamed a Dream" (which will win her an Oscar - as an aside: Anne Hathaway's Fantine so hovers over the movie, her presence emotionally overshadows Valjean's death when she welcomes him to the afterlife an hour after she died), Eponine collapsing against the wall in the rain during "On My Own," transforming herself from self-confident street urchin to unhappy unloved poor young girl in one stanza flat, Marius mourning the loss of his revolutionary comrades during "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables," and Cosette watching Valjean die. And in nearly all of these moments, the camera settles in and lets us experience this things without interruption, without flinching. But most of the rest of the time, dear Lord in heaven, it's like a master class in the modern attention span (what used to be called the MTV aesthetic, you know, if you're old). The first fifteen minutes of the film are a series of shots that last no more than two seconds. It's a huge problem.

And then we have the Thernadiers. Helena Bonham Carter and Sasha Baron Cohen have drawn decidedly mixed reactions. Half of the reviews that I have read excoriate the pair of them for . . . not being like the rest of the show. To me, this is like complaining about the Rude Mechanicals in Midsummer for not being in the same show as the rest of the cast: it's the entire point. They are purposefully different. You might not like the characters, which I don't understand, but they are executed perfectly. Most of the people who hate the Thernadiers have not seen the musical, so maybe there is something about them that needs context and explanation, but I thought they were great in the movie. I loved seeing them steal from people left and right. They are perfectly cast. The only mistake Hooper made was to cut Thernadier's song "Harvest Moon." It's a deeply cynical song about cleaning up the revolutionary pups and moving on long after their blood has dried on the streets. It really adds depth and sophistication to the character. They would have done better to cut the Javert chasing Valjean into Paris, which is basically not necessary (as you can easily tell from the 10th Anniversary concert).

One final quibble: in the rush to finish the movie, they forgot to explain that Marius has no idea who saved him from the barricade. That's kind of a major plot point. You need to know that when Marius and Valjean talk at the end, before the wedding. It helps set up the Thernardiers' gate crashing. I have no idea why that happened. Maybe that two minute chunk of singing will make the director's cut.

Ok, this is it, the final paragraph, I swear. The bottom line is that I loved the movie for the same reasons that I love the musical. Every emotional beat that I want is there and executed exquisitely. They even manage to overcome some of the things that I hate about the show, the biggest one being Cosette's singing, which is usually so high that the actress has to get extremely operatic to carry the notes. The intimacy of on-set singing removes the volume problem and it helps tremendously that Amanda Seyfried is a wonderfully expressive performer. I was not annoyed by Cosette at all, was moved deeply by her at one point, and that is a major achievement, in my book. The old rule of thumb for making a great film is to have three good scenes and no bad ones. Les Miserables lives up to that standard. But there are too many stylistic issues, too many pacing issues, and one glaring weak link (I wanna represent for my boy Russell, but Javert he is not) and these problems together mean it isn't a great movie, as much as I wanted it to be great.

At least we'll always have Albert Hall.