Friday, December 20, 2024
“The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life.” Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
“The theater’s rich intellectual inheritance serves as a buffer to society’s recrudescent stupidity.”
Charles McNulty, LA Times
I’m thinking about having a t-shirt made emblazoned with “A Buffer to Society’s Recrudescent Stupidity.” Perhaps with, in parenthesis: “look it up”
Friday, December 20, 2024
It seems to be an Alan Jacobs day! His post called “The Work Itself,” about the difference between being an influencer and doing a job, is excellent. For me, it is coinciding with my current reading of Matthew B Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft and The World Beyond Your Head, _as well as Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman. For the artist, the work as an end in itself ought to be your entire focus.
Friday, December 20, 2024
[T]he desire of doing what is honourable and noble, of rendering ourselves the proper objects of esteem and approbation, cannot, with any propriety, be called vanity. Even the love of well grounded fame and reputation, the desire of acquiring esteem by what is really estimable, does not deserve that name. The first is the love of virtue, the noblest and the best passion of human nature. The second is the love of true glory, a passion inferior, no doubt, to the former, but which in dignity appears to come immediately after it.
Friday, December 20, 2024
Alan Jacobs responds to Ross Douthat’s NYTimes question as to whether we can make pop culture great again with a blunt “Nope. Absolutely not.” His reason for this dour assessment is the “algorithmic culture,” which cannot be replaced by a more fragmented, individualized culture. Douthat sort of feels the same, bemoaning a film scene that is “completely fragmented, with forms of creativity that are all intensely niche, like the podcast-splintered marketplace of news consumption.
Thursday, December 19, 2024
I find that England, Ireland, and Scotland have a much greater amount of experimentation in how they make theater, whether it is where they perform, when they perform, how they perform, and how they relate to their audience. There also seems to be a certain cheekiness to British theater, perhaps thanks to Brecht and music hall, that didn’t quite make it to America (although the Actos of El Teatro Campesino). Hidden Track Theater seems to be an outgrowth of Augusto Boal’s ideas regarding Theatre of the Oppressed.
Wednesday, December 18, 2024 →
I hate the post-Fed-announcement hysteria that hits the stock market every time the Fed cuts interest rates.
There are few things better than a good rant, especially if it is about the internet. Well done!
Saturday, December 14, 2024
“Christ’s rebuke of the Pharisees eager to stone the sinful may feel of little help today, living in a culture where the act of hurling stones—in cyber and public space—is the spiritual discipline by which we are relieved of our moral impurities. In a cosmic reversal of grace and sacrifice, it is by scapegoating and ostracism that we once again publicly secure our salvation.” Robert L. Kehoe III “There Is Simply Too Much More to Think About” Hedgehog Review (Fall 2019)
Saturday, December 14, 2024
“Our media make crisis chatter out of news and fill our minds with anxious phantoms of the real thing—a summit in Helsinki, a treaty in Egypt, a constitutional crisis in India, a vote in the UN, the financial collapse of New York. We can’t avoid being politicized (to use a word as murky as the condition it describes) because it is necessary after all to know what is going on.
So here’s a question I’d be interested in hearing you talk about: if we just stopped with social media, would that be enough to maintain our mental health? If we wrote on micro.blog but didn’t broadcast it, is it different? Why don’t we just write a private journal instead of being online? Why does the possibility of being read help? Is it wrong to read ebooks instead of traditional books because it is a screen? What about news – what would happen if we just stopped paying attention?
Wednesday, December 11, 2024 →
If Rushton is really calling that “ingratitude,", it should serve as an illustration as to why artists should steer clear of nonprofit status–board members inevitably decide they know how to run things. Just because you have money doesn’t mean you have artistic sense.
Wednesday, December 11, 2024
When you’re stepping outside the well-trodden path and trying to create something new, you often have to find inspiration outside of the discipline itself. I have found inspiration in unlikely places: books on local economics, environmentalism, small business practices, where I’ve found ideas that make me think about theater differently. A while back, for instance, I read Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough and Michael Braungart.
“Adaptive problems are embedded in social complexity, require behavior change, and are rife with unintended consequences. By way of contrast, technical problems (such as the polio virus) can be solved with a technical solution (the Salk vaccine) without having to disturb the underlying social structure, cultural norms, or behavior.”
The Power of Positive Deviance Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin, Monique Sternin
“we have lost sight of any collective belief that society could be different. Instead of a better society, the only thing almost everyone strives for is to better their own position – as individuals – within the existing society.”
Richard Wilson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level
Friday, December 6, 2024
No, I’m not talking about the freebies we give to family and friends who come to our show. I’m talking about the way book proposals use the term: “comparables,” books that are similar to what you’re writing, books that yours could be compared to. Theater has been comping the wrong competition for over a century. At first, theater saw movies as the competition, which made total sense because once the Theatrical Syndicate abandoned most theater buildings on “the road,” theater owners began scheduling movies into their now-empty spaces.
”The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will. As they say in the United States: “to be different is to be indecent.” The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated."
Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt of the Masses
Wednesday, December 4, 2024
I recently stumbled up a thirteen-year-old blog post by the always-insightful arts thinker Diane Ragdale, who tragically passed away less than a year ago. (You could do a lot worse than to spend time working through her ArtsJournal blog Jumper from beginning to end.) The post I’m looking at here is entitled “How to avoid a strip-mall future for the arts sector: Lessons from the boutique label, Pi”, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that just about every paragraph provides an insight that could instantly make our theater system better.
“Murdoch believed we should cultivate a kind of ‘mindfulness’. By making a habit of focusing our attention on everyday things that are valuable or virtuous, we hone our ability to act well at decisive moments. ‘Anything that alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness will do,’ she wrote.”
John-Paul Flintoff, How to Change the World referring to philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch
“Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can and do go around making themselves and everyone else miserable.”
Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream
I feel seen.