MSM Tackles Theater

Thank God for Nick Clegg, if only for making the non-theater blogosphere talk about theater for a hot second. Here's Matt Yglesias on Clegg on Beckett:

I think people used to think that you couldn’t win a presidential election while being a black man named “Barack Hussein Obama” whose autobiography admits to cocaine use and who used to represent Hyde Park in the State Senate while attending a black nationalist church. It just turns out that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our narrow conventional wisdom. So I wish someone would say the person he admires most is an avant-garde writer, if only to break the taboo which might, in turn, help us build a less relentlessly anti-intellectual public culture.

As usual, liking theater is apparently on par with the worst opinions of bigots towards black community members. Here's Stephen Fry on the anti-elitism that was uncovered by criticisms of Clegg:

When I was growing up ‘elitism’ was a word sneered from the lips of the Left, now it is sneered from the lips of the Right. The sneering was ugly then and it is ugly now. Knowledge, science, understanding, literacy and curiosity are absolute goods and to hell with anyone who tries to follow that American habit here and attempts to construct a discourse in which only a despised liberal elite are interested in science, the arts, history and ideas. Such wickedness reminds one of those who opposed Education For All at the end of the nineteenth century. All knowledge should be free and available and all people should be encouraged to acquire it. It will not necessarily lead to liberalism, but it will lead to understanding and a desire for openness and decent, non-tribalist exchanges of the kind that can only enrich our democracy.

It's worthwhile to note that apparently that most uncouth of audiences, the Twitter mass, seemed fairly positive.

Terrorball Again!

Two comments on this failed bombing attempt:

1. I'm really glad we have a No Fly List so we can stop shit like this happening.
2. I am waiting to see the reaction when we try a terrorist in Manhattan, literally miles away from where he nearly perpetrated an attack. Since that tends to be pretty unpopular.

What. The.....

You only need to know one thing about: the singer is Chiwetel Ejiofuor. That's right, the assassin from Serenity and Children of Men.

Scott Walters: Here's Your Challenge

Hey Scott Walters, did you see this quote about the NEA that Playgoer brought to our attention?

“If it created jobs, you’d have 435 members of Congress saying, ‘Let’s put in more money to the N.E.A.’...The only shovel-ready aspect of it is that they need a shovel to clean up some of the bull they believe in over there.”

-Jack Kingston, Republican Congressman from Georgia and Tea Party-panderer.

Rep Kingston (R-GA) appears to be in the knee-jerk art-is-worthless crowd (remember Cash for Clowns?). Maybe he's the enemy, and we arts advocates need to make sure we pressure him to change his mind, or ignore him and fight to support people who don't think like him.

Or you, Scott, can take this as an opportunity.

See, from Kingston's perspective, the NEA doesn't create jobs. On a national level, that argument isn't worth all that much. And to the extent that it is true, the reason it doesn't create many jobs is because we don't fund it much.

But you see, Kingston is from Georgia 1st District. I wish I could find the NEA breakdown on money by district, but I haves me a feeling that it doesn't have much for Georgia's 1st District. And Rocco doesn't seem inclined to take rural theater very seriously, after the whole Peoria shennanigans. Georgia's 1st is home to Okefenokee Swamp. (Oh, and his website also says "The First District is a literary haven." Is he anti National Endowment of the Humanities?)

Kingston's stance right now is, the NEA is useless to my district, so it is way easy for me to rag on it. After all, how many people in my district have any connection to or value of the NEA? Why not kick it around? What would I lose?

And if you look at the political math, if the NEA's money is going mostly to large metropolises, then it will be undersupported in the House. And probably the Senate too.

So my challenge to you, Scott, is can you use CRADLEArts model to the political advantages of the arts? Can you go to Kingston and say, "If the NEA uses the current model, most of its money is going to go to big historic theaters in big cities. If you help reform the NEA's approach, you can bring some of that support to locals in your district. Don't scrap us, fix us."

And maybe Republicans aren't ready for this message. Maybe it's the 54 Congressmen of the Blue Dog Democrats. After all, maybe this is a winning moderate issue for them -- they get to go toe-to-toe with the "urban liberals" of the party (Take that, Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich) and brandish some populist, pro-local tendencies while still investing in a Democratic principle of supporting the arts.

Basically, can we end this manichean game of either pro-the-current-model or anti-the-arts?

Circle Rules Federation - The Slow (James K.) Polks Game 1

One of the things I do outside of the realm of theater and politics is that I play Circle Rules Football, a game invented by my friend Greg Manley as his Independent Project at the Experimental Theater Wing. Yes, he invented a sport instead of doing a play. And we're all happy that he did. The rules are on the website, and there's also a great explanatory video of what CRF is that was done by Good Magazine

Today was the first game of the Spring League. The Slow (James K.) Polks versus Dynamic Shock and Awe.

First, the obligatory smack-talk: our team, The Slow (James K.) Polks, draws its inspiration from the dynamic one-term President who did not seek re-election because 4 years was enough for him to make a drastic mark on the history of the United States through the annexation of Texas and other key policy victories. Dynamic Shock and Awe draws its inspiration from the tactic of overwhelming force and domination best known for its limitations in the Iraq War, where it turned out that staying power was very difficult.

The game was an hour: four 15 minute quarters.

QUARTER 1 - The elements were not on our side; there was a strong wind blowing against our scoring direction that made even medium distance shots pretty difficult. On top of that, our team had seven of its usual players show today, and their team had twenty. That meant that they could substitute a lot more rapidly, lowering the overall fatigue of their players over the course of the game.

That being said, the first quarter was a pretty close one. They scored a couple coming straight out of the gate as we found our footing, but from that point forward we remained a couple points behind them. We kept possession on the offensive a lot, but because of the wind and some admittedly good defense on their end, we had trouble sealing the deal with goals. At the end of the game, the score was 2-4 in favor of Dynamic Shock and Awe.

QUARTER 2 - We tried to shake up our offensive strategy, and we got a couple amazing goals in -- one involved a fantastic passing game that had our three offensives passing constantly over the heads of their players. At one point, we pulled into a tie game of 4-4. But Shock and Awe kept their lead steady, and by the end of the quarter the score was 4-6 in favor of Shock and Awe.

QUARTER 3 - We came out of the gate hitting as hard as we could, but they were surging in strength too. We kept possession very much on their side of the field -- we had switched sides of the field, but the wind was dying so it didn't help us out as much as we wanted. Their goalie for this quarter also had 30 pounds on our goalie, which in Circle Rules Football normally wouldn't be allowed but we didn't have anyone in the goalie's weight class. Our goalie Billy was playing a brave game, but he was getting pretty clobbered. Also, we started to really hit the fatigue wall from not having enough spare players. The Shock and Awe's lead intensified, and the quarter ended 6-10.

QUARTER 4 - Not the game's finest hour by any stretch. We picked goalie, so we put our smallest and scrappiest player in the goal. By the half, the two of them were getting pretty intensely physical. There were some questionable moves being put in, and a friendly argument broke out on the benches as to what violates the "no holds" rule of goal-keeping -- whether it is submission holds, or holds in general. The scrappiness of the goalies turned into a fairly rough game on the field we started to get down to the wire -- their captain, Scott Riehs, was carried off the field after a leg cramp the size of a golf-ball. But the fatigue had set in, and The Slow Polks really were getting slow on the field. The game ended at a fairly unpleasant 7-15.

Afterwards, the handshakes cleared, and our team had opened its season with a loss. The Dynamic Shock and Awe had lived up to their name, with a huge reserve of energetic players who fought hard and, well, maybe had a bit of advantage of not having to play as long. The debate around the holds continued, especially amongst the veterans who crafted the rules to begin with. They are currently at the bar hashing the rules out over beers, the way most of the games' rules were hashed out.

Legal Commentary II: Mexico and the Arts

Again, via the Art Law Blog, USA Today has the scoop on Mexico allowing artists to pay their income tax with works of art:

That's the deal Mexico has offered to artists since 1957, quietly amassing a modern art collection that would make most museum curators swoon. As the 2009 tax deadline approaches, tax collectors are getting ready to receive a whole new crop of masterworks.

"It's really an amazing concept," says José San Cristóbal Larrea, director of the program. "We're helping out artists while building a cultural inheritance for the country."

There's a sliding scale: If you sell five artworks in a year, you must give the government one. Sell 21 pieces, the government gets six. A 10-member jury of artists ensures that no one tries to unload junk.

(...)

Under the program, the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit now owns 4,248 paintings, sculptures, engravings and photographs by Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, Leonora Carrington and other masters.

Incredible. Basically, the government of Mexico is saying "we value the arts enough to accept it as legal tender." That's what I call putting your money where your mouth is!

"There's no censorship here," says Julieta Ruiz, a curator at the museum.

If anything, the temptation to needle the taxman makes the art even edgier, she says.

Rafael Coronel's 1980 tax payment is a portrait called He Who Doesn't Pay Taxes. A painting that Fabian Ugalde contributed in 2002 declares in huge letters, "The authorities have still not determined whether it was an act of aggression or just another piece of art."

A 10-foot-high drawing by Demián Flores shows a man sexually assaulted by a rattlesnake, an apparent reference to the Mexican government because the rattlesnake appears on the Mexican flag.

The Mexican Government proves that if you have a sense of humor about yourselves, you can get along with artists much better. After all, if the Mexican government is unfazed by Coronel, Ugalde, or Flores' poking at their faces, the works lose all of their teeth instantly. If Mexico can smile and say "well at least they're paying their taxes," what are they going to do about it?

At any rate, I would like to pay my taxes in the form of a one-man show at the Kennedy Center, curated by Rocco Landesman. Any takers?

Legal Commentary: Pole Dancing is Not Art

Via the Art Law Blog comes news that NY State does not consider pole-dancing art:

The two-member Tax Appeals Tribunal held that the routines performed nude or nearly nude by dancers at the Nite Moves club near Albany were largely learned from other dancers or on YouTube and the Internet, and are not the kind of carefully arranged and practiced patterns of movement normally equated with the art of dance.

"We question how much planning goes into attempting a dance seen on YouTube," the tax appeals panel concluded in Matter of 677 New Loudon Corporation D/B/A Nite Moves, 821458. "The record also shows that some of the moves on the pole are very difficult, and one had best plan how to approach turning upside down on the pole to avoid injury. However, the degree of difficulty is as relevant to a ranking in gymnastics as it is dance."

I find this fascinating, because it shows what a bunch of lawyers and bureaucrats think about the arts. A few notes:

• The legal frame of reference is rather muddled in the ruling. It says that pole dancing is not art because it is not "carefully planned and practiced." That implies that they are using the idea of art as a craft (a series of technical skills) as a lens for judgment. But then they also state that "the degree of difficulty is as relevant to a ranking in gymnastics as it is dance," implying that technical difficulty is not a qualification of art.
  
  
• Also, check out this basic rejection of Postmodernism:

"The appeals tribunal held, however, that "[dance expert] Dr. Hanna's view of choreographed performance is so broad as to include almost any planned movements done while playing canned music."

"To accept Dr. Hanna's stunningly sweeping interpretation of what constitutes choreographed performance, all one needs to do is move in an aesthetically pleasing way to music, using unity, variety, repetition, contrast, transition," the panel concluded."

• Luckily, it seems like the ruling is not, as the article makes it seem, a unilateral assessment that all pole-dancing is not art. We are used to pole-dancing in the stripper context, but having met plenty of people who now do pole-dancing as a fun workout, I wouldn't be surprised to see pole-dancing become its own sort of art form, in the way that flair bartending is, in my opinion, a performing art.
  
  
• The ruling also makes it clear that there is a legal line between an arts organization and a "place of entertainment." I shudder to think what would happen if arts organization were legally barred from being entertaining...