Flippant Observation of the Day

Syrian rebels smuggled a wounded British journalist out of the besieged central city of Homs Tuesday and whisked him to safety in neighboring Lebanon, activist groups said.

How utterly fucked has the region got it that "safety" is associated with Lebanon.

ART + CRITICISM: Defending Your Work pt. 2

Mike Daisey continues to fight for his work to make its proper impact -- in this case, by challenging NYTimes Tech Columnist David Pogue to come engage more deeply with his work.

LEGAL COMMENTARY/QUOTE OF THE DAY II

A little icing on the legal cake: buried in SCOTUSBlog's run-down on a ruling whether law requiring the losing party to pay for the cost of an interpreter applies to translation fees:

It’s fun to note here what Kan Pacific said in its brief opposing cert.: “the issue is not especially important, and certainly not exceptionally important."

LEGAL COMMENTARY/QUOTE OF THE DAY

Here's Garrett Epps, in The American Prospect, describing the broader legal implications in the Ninth Circuit Court's decision to uphold the invalidation of Proposition 8:

“It’s always been this way” is the essence of Edmund Burke-style conservatism. Reason, Burke argued, is fallible; we shouldn’t change traditional ways on such an uncertain basis. A wise society restricts even our best impulses: “the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights,” Burke wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France. 

American law doesn’t recognize “better to let everything alone” as “legitimate,” much less “compelling.”  The right to marry is a constitutional right, long recognized in history and caselaw. The government can’t deny constitutional rights on the grounds that “we just always did it that way.”  Government has to give a reason.  In historical terms, that’s a remarkable thing. It reminds us that, underneath its social inertia and conservative exterior, America and its Constitution are the products of a revolution.  

Put in a shorter form (which is the quote of the day):

My Con Law prof, Walter Dellinger, once said the course could be summed up in two sentences: “When government wants to do something to you, it has to give a reason. When it wants to do something really bad, it has to give a good reason.”

ART: Shrewd Financial Decision of the Day

A graf artist paid in Facebook stock.

LOCAL: The Non-Profit/Broadway Merger Watch

Even Ken Davenport has noticed it.

QUOTE OF THE DAY 2: Two Decoder Two Furious

There's another great installment of "The Decoder", where Howard Sherman breaks down awful PR speak into understandable tid-bits.

I just wanted to highlight this one:

7. Timely = addresses topic that is in the news a lot right now and boy, did we get lucky on the timing.

Really, I just wanted to smile and share how funny it is when these things happen... obviously in our line of work, being timely is just a massive accident.

Right now, we're running a huge interactive performance online (haven't been following? check it out here), and one of the tangential components was this dumb video uploaded by one of the characters:  

It posted the day before the massive internet blackouts that caused SOPA and PIPA to be withdrawn from consideration. Here's the thing, though -- and you'll have to believe me on this -- we recorded it in December, when really it was only the sort of thing TechCrunch or BoingBoing or Slashdot were following. 

We had absolutely no idea that the day we would post it, it would be so timely as to almost seem crass.

ART + CRITICISM: Defending Your Work

Two examples of defending your work from critics today.

First up, Mike Daisey:

Daisey played to small but appreciative crowds across the US, winning critical praise but stirring little trouble, not even with the target of his ire: Apple itself. 

I understand what the Guardian reporter is trying to do rhetorically, as the story I have been telling has definitely broken through to the mainstream in the last month, but this description makes it sound as though previously we were doing club dates in obscure locations, like the Beatles playing in Hamburg. 

Over the last year, Agony/Ecstasy has played sold-out runs at the Sydney Opera House, the Public Theater in the fall (where another run is happening now), and many more. It was seen by over 70,000 audience members over the last year, and the theaters average a respectable 500-600 seat size, with some, like the Byham Theatre in Pittsburgh, weighing in at 1,300 seats and selling out. If you followed American theater over the last year, you heard about the show.

Second up, Alison Croggon (whose blog you can find here):

I am the author of this book. I hasten to say that I respect anyone's right to dislike my work; that is not, and should not be, any of my business. But the previous review has, to say the least, nettled me, and I would like to defend my work from the charges of plagiarism which I think are being most unjustly levelled here. 

I make no secret of the influence of Tolkien - of whom I too have been a longtime fan - in The Gift (readers who persist with The Riddle and The Crow will have a hard time finding such homages; I pays my dues in the first book). But I would like to point out some subtle differences between influence or allusion and outright plagiarism. Jessica points out some similarities between The Lord of the Rings and The Gift, all of which are deliberate - there is even a poem written in Tolkien's invented measure, ann-thennath, which in my book is credited to "the Bard Tulkan", which she fails to mention. But there are very significant differences in how I use the material, and these differences Jessica chooses to ignore entirely. 

Both of those are selections of larger responses. Both of them succeed for me as responses to criticism because they focus on specific, factual areas of incorrectness. Although they are by no means "nice", they stick entirely to the matter on hand. 

And in both cases, they involve the adding of new information to the discussion -- I did not know that Agony/Ecstacy has been in front of 70,000 people (I will take him at his word; I'm sure that doesn't count his This American Life audience), and Alison Croggon's response takes a quick look at the history of the elements we think of as "Tolkein" and "Lewis."

And here's a sample of the response Alison Croggon got:

I haven't read 'The Gift' (yet) but I have a lot of respect for the fact that you put your neck out in order to reply to people's criticisms. The book sounds great, I'm ordering it.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Tim Cook 0, Mike Daisey 1.

TECHNOLOGY: Things Which Are Weird

This morning I woke up to a comment on this post, which was an innocuous reposting of Joshua Chamberlain's speech in the movie Gettysburg. The commenter, who was the person who posted the video, attracted my attention to this:

Did you miss it? I mean this:

Yes, that's right, by posting a YouTube video on my blog, it now becomes "AS SEEN ON" my blog.

Clicking the link reveals something even creepier -- a playlist of YouTube videos that have been on my blog. I can't brag -- Ian Moss' Createquity has the same treatment. So does George Hunka. And Parabasis.

Anyways, it's just an odd phenomenon whose use I can only wildly guess at.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Mike Daisey Bait.

From a description of why an app was banned from the iPhone store:

They claim the app uses their location services in an unauthorised manner. A much more efficient manner than the one they recommend, but unauthorised nonetheless. No doubt it is but a mere pretext for the capitalist suppression of a post-marxist subversive use of their fetishistic technology. Does anyone know any good Android developers?

PRAGMATIC: Lost Edits

It's a big question for archivists what to do with the lost edits of a work, especially of that work was collaboratively made.

One of my favorite songs is Here Comes The Sun. Turns out, I've been missing a piece of it for a while:



Obviously the song, as released, is the "proper" song. But man, that lost guitar solo... it belongs.

PRAGMATIC: Opacity

From Isaac:

I was wrong.  It isn’t that he’s a bad actor, it’s that he’s an opaque one. Whether by choice or by specificity of talents, Brad Pitt is not going to reveal himself to you onscreen, ever. The movies of his that succeed are the ones that know this and use it to their advantage. 

Opacity in performance—an acting style in which the subtext of a character is present but kept secret—is made possible by film. Without the close-up, the reaction shot, the bit of closely observed business, keeping secrets from the audience is difficult. I know of only two actors who regularly pulled this off on stage (James Urbaniak and T. Ryder Smith). Film enables it, but our preference as audiences is always for revelation, to be embraced (or at least charmed) by a performance rather than held at a distance by a man presenting an unsolvable mystery.

The only thing that I can add to this is that when I saw Thom Pain (Based On Nothing), James Urbaniak towered over us. I don't think he's exceptionally tall... he just took that opacity and filled a room with it. It was unnerving.






... also, how did that play not get the Pulitzer. I think Doubt should have been disqualified just for its last sentence! Grumble grumble grumble.


Updated: I was so busy grumbling I forgot to link back to Isaac. Whoops!

PLUG: Puppet Slam in Chicago

Sea Beast Puppet Company is curating a puppet slam in Chicago -- the application should be up on their website soon.