Just Wrought

Record Corrector

Saying that what Mike Daisey does isn’t theatre is not equivalent to saying that what Jackson Pollock painted isn’t art. Rather, it’s equivalent to saying what Jackson Pollock painted isn’t photography. I make this argument in greater detail in my essay, “The Solo Show: A Risk Averse Artistic Administrator’s Best Friend” which is, beyond a reasonable doubt, what Omar Willey refers to in his withering list of “nonsense” and “childish territorialism” nestled within his hot-off-the-virtual presses criticism of Culturebot’s recent evening  Everyone’s a Critic. Omar’s essay is worth the read despite the red herrings and half-thrown gauntlets. Just as— I like to think— my essay on one-person shows is also worth a glance, despite its putative shortcomings.

Easily one of the three smartest people I know, Omar Willey is a mensch’s mensch. His contributions as the founding publisher of The Seattle Star are profound, and his thinking on how criticism can make Seattle theatre better is vital to the conversation, no matter how proudly he praises his own prolixity and opacity. (Trust me: it’s quite not as bad as he hopes.) If, however, Omar were always right, I would be compelled to worship him as a fearsome god, instead of treasuring him, as I do, for the dear friend he is.

The Cartoon Physics of Art

 

“You haven't shown any sign at all of respecting what I have to say or even wanting to hear it. I'm not gonna go stand under that safe.”

This from a gun-loving former Facebook friend in response to my invitation to join an on-stage conversation about how to reduce gun violence in this country. I actually get this sort of response frequently from gun lovers, because whenever they come trolling at my virtual door with whatever twisted logic their addiction has tortured them into accepting, I always invite them to join a future evening of theatre that I am planning, so they can put their counterfeit rationalist money where their soon-to-be-no-longer-virtual mouth is. I think the reason for their reluctance is related to something I touch upon in an explanation I posted here on Just Wrought about why I delete cloaked commenters:

…I know it's considered the custom of internet country to post anonymously, but there is no tradition of it in the theatre. In the world of live performance, one says one's words in public and stands by them with [one’s] body. So as a rule I won't be accepting any more anonymous posts. Stand and deliver, people!

What’s particularly disappointing in the case of my gun loving former Facebook friend is that he’s an experienced— and damned talented— actor. Therefore he lacks the excuse offered by so many other trolls who claim that I have the advantage of them onstage, being show folk myself. (I suspect my friend may also belongs to that vast majority of performers who believe, sadly, that the world owes them their next show, instead of vice-versa.)

In the past few years I have produced or been a part of quite a bit of theatre that deals with the immediate and difficult issues of our times, especially involving gun violence. I’m deeply proud, for instance, that my short play “White Boy Can Take a Punch” was part of last May’s magnificently uplifting offering, Hoodies Up!: The Trayvon Martin Protest Plays. My Living Newspaper production company, NewsWrights United  also covered one of Puget Sound’s most egregious gun massacres in our second edition, The New New News, staging the manhunt for Maurice Clemmons after he murdered four cops in cold blood.

Here’s what I learned from the above experiences: theatre is one of the safest places to explore the implications of real life tragedy. As uncomfortable, challenging, frustrating, even humiliating, sometimes boring, often righteously indignant or unrelentingly Leftist as theatre can be, it is also uniquely illuminating, uplifting, life-affirming and much more respectful of our many differences as citizens than nearly any other communications framework I can think of.

So my friend who claims to be so worried about the Acme safe falling on his head also knows that according to the rules of his Looney Tunes metaphor, if such should befall him in a theatre, he would instantly be able to open his eyes, stand up, dust himself off and again join his battle against his wrong-headed road runner adversaries. So he’s bluffing, essentially.  My friend doesn’t really want to avoid danger, or even pain. No, he’s too much of a gun-toting tough guy to want to spare himself those risks. What he wants to avoid is humiliation. And no one who steps into the theatre for a conversation can be guaranteed to duck that. Audiences are can be harsh, and humiliation, along with its nobler twin, humility, are deeply woven into the fabric of what we offer, and what we receive in return.  If one seeks, at all costs, to avoid disgrace, then one is wise to always avoid the stage, and not just when it is serving in its noble capacity as a crucible for societal discourse. 

But here’s my ultimate question for my friend, and for anyone who holds the doomed gun advocate’s position: given that humiliation is an unavoidable risk of wider life, isn’t it wiser still to serve yourself an inoculation of it in the safe space that art offers? Otherwise, aren’t you running the risk, out in the big scary world beyond, of being more tempted to “protect” your point of view with that all-too-deadly, non-cartoon gun you’re clutching?

More to come.

 

Related articles

Reach for your Culture

Putting the Fail back in “Experimental”

Artists love to talk about being “experimental”, and it rightfully drives scientists nuts.  We artists obnoxiously brandish that word whenever what we really mean is “avant garde” or “edgy”or “provocative” or “abstruse”.  Any actual scientist understands that true experiments have rules and consequences. Experiments are tests of hypotheses hoping to become theories; and theories, in order to prove useful, must be falsifiable.  In other words, true experiments by definition contain the possibility of failure.  However, all too often in the arts, especially theatre, work gets described as “experimental” that is, in fact, incapable of being “falsified”, because it never had a truthful purpose in the first place. Consequently, the worst kind of “experimental artist” will blame the audience for every failure of meaning or impact.

I promise I will not be doing that this coming Monday evening at the Bathhouse Theater on Green Lake. Instead, with the help of my truly gifted colleagues Susanna Burney, Amy Love, William Salyers and John Q. Smith I will be performing a bona fide artistic experiment by reading aloud my very latest play Philosophical Zombie Killers.  I attempt things in this script I have never seen tried before in the theatre, and thus the ominous likelihood looms that some of these things I am trying can, and most likely will, fail. 

I am not asking you to come see my greatest latest triumph, which I happen to have dubbed “experimental” cuz it sounds cool.  I am asking you to come see my latest experiment, and help me make it better, by watching where it fails, and letting me know.

Here are the details:

The graduate level seminar is about human conscious-ness. Or at least that’s what you thought when you signed up for it. Now someone’s telling you that you’re 45 years old and you’re dying. You certainly didn’t sign up for that. Now this alcoholic professor is asking you to explain consciousness to him. And this depressed ex-cop from Missouri is telling you about the epidemic of decapitations in Seattle. And this weird lady from Omnisoft just wants you to admit that there’s no such thing as consciousness and no such thing as you for that matter. Could she possibly be right? Might make dying easier. Who said you were dying?

Who:       Susanna Burney, Amy Love, William Salyers and John Q. Smith

What:     Philosophical Zombie Killers by Paul Mullin

Where:   The Bathhouse Theater in Green Lake

When:    October 15, 2012, 7pm

How:      Pay what-you-will, including nothing at all. You’re doing us a favor by giving it a listen.

Reserve seats at Brown Paper Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/278468

Theatre Requires Hope Beyond Logic

Nobody in the last fifty years has gone to live theatre to kill time like they would slip into a cineplex.  Nobody has sat and blankly watched theatre like they would TV because they don’t have anything better to do. There is always something better to do.  People go to the theatre because they hope—more often than not against their better judgment—that what they will experience there will change them, open them up, break down some poisoned part of them, help them live with some unbearable pain, give them more hope.  People who go to the theatre are frequently disappointed.

Tyrone Brown asked me to share with my colleague Sharon Williams the honor of giving the curtain speech at tonight’s sole performance of Hoodies Up!, a series of short plays inspired  by the Trayvon Martin tragedy.  Tyrone surely intends for us to keep our remarks exquisitely brief and practical tonight, but as I started thinking about it my brain, as it is sometimes wont to do, erupted in about five different directions.  These moments of mind spasm are, in part, why I created Just Wrought: that is, to spare everyone me blathering on at curtain speeches and the like.  Here’s what I won’t be saying tonight:

My reason for joining the Hoodies Up! writers team can be boiled down into one word: selfishness. I wanted to work with Tyrone Brown, a director whom most folks in the “Seattle theatre know” recognize as a coming powerhouse. I wanted to write for African American actors, a chance as rare as hen’s teeth in the Pacific Northwest and, sadly, in the nation at large. I wanted to tell a story I had never publically told before, from a time in my life that I cherish. All good selfish reasons. (When I start doing theatre for non-selfish reasons let’s all start worrying, okay?)

Hermann Göring famously declared, “When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun.” Nazism at its nastiest, and most honest.  Fascists hate art and anything else they don’t understand, or that causes people to prick their ears up and say, “Whoa!  What’s going on?”  Of course, there’s a simple syllogistic trick that flips fat-headed Göring on his ear: “When I hear the world ‘gun’ I reach for my culture.”  That’s what Tyrone did when he began processing the Trayvon tragedy, and that’s what the writers he invited did in turn, and then in turn the actors and directors.  Tonight it’s your turn: the audience, the final hopeful piece of this hope-against-reason puzzle. Tonight, when you come watch Hoodies Up! you’ll be reaching for your culture, and countering the insidious icon of the gun that holds America mesmerized.  You will be taking the risk of being bored, confused, annoyed and generally disappointed, but you will have chosen hope over every empty and utterly logical reason why you shouldn’t have bothered.

Because theatre requires hope beyond logic. 

Just like living.

Bookmark THE SEATTLE STAR

Here’s the link.  Just go bookmark it.  Then come back and I’ll tell you why, okay?... Okay, go! . . .

 

 

. . . . There.  All bookmarked? 

Good.

Living up to the promise publisher Omar Willey made when he kicked it off at the beginning of this year, The Seattle Star has consistently provided cogent, in-depth criticism (no flip, self-regarding drive-bys here) of Seattle’s arts offerings, including but not limited to Cole Hornaday’s piece on Sandbox Radio IV: The Chase which details not only that most recent episode, but also how it fit into the on-going series.  Witness as well, José Amador’s latest critique of Annex Theatre’s Team of Heroes: Behind Closed Doors, offering a similarly thoughtful big-picture approach.

What’s more, like icing on an already yummy and healthy cake, The Star also provides unprecedented access to a variety of Seattle’s unsung poets, including some of my all-time favorites like Pamela Hobart Carter and David Penn.  (Full disclosure: they also published one of mine once.  Hey, nobody's perfect.)

So now that you’ve bookmarked The Seattle Star, you might also considering liking them on Facebook and following them on Twitter.  You won’t be sorry.  Of that I’m sure.

Make Me One with Everything

Luck is a sympathetic magic, to be coaxed with metaphor and token.  So I have decided to troll for a streak of it by posting a run of early essays that I wrote for Everything2, a quasi-prophetic mash-up of Face Book and Wikipedia, if the former only allowed text and the latter had a sense of humor. 

The following essay was written in 2003 during the build up to invasion of Iraq.

* * *

It's got to be the oldest Zen joke in the West . . .

There's a barbecue at the Zen Buddhist Temple, and the Zen Master's working the grill. A young monk reverently approaches. The Roshi looks up, smiles and says, "Wanna hotdog?"

The monk replies: "Please, Master, make me one with everything."

Besides being pretty darned cute, this joke, I've always suspected, has something deeper to say about Western attitudes, toward Zen in specific, Eastern thought more broadly, and most generally of all, our poorly perceived relationship to each other and the universe at large.

I've been a practicing Buddhist for twelve years now (ironically enough, ever since around the time of the last war brought to you by the Bush family.) For most of that time, I've kept my mouth shut about my practice, for a couple of simple reasons. First and foremost, it's just considered bad Zen form to prattle on about it. "Him who'll tell ya, don't know. Him who knows, won't tell ya" (my hillbilly stab at Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching). Secondly, upon hearing that I'm a Buddhist, most people tend to react to the novelty of it, rather than the substance. "That's wild!". . . "That's crazy!". . . "Only you, Paul!". . . "We'll see how long that lasts!" Since Buddhism is decidedly not a religion of conversion, I see little up side in telling people I follow it. But in these darkening days of terror and hatred and waste, I've begun to feel that it's incumbent on me to pipe up about a practice that has helped me face these things; and while it may not be everyone's cup of tea, it may just offer some unique and rarely considered perspectives on our world and our place in it.

So what's the problem with “make me one with everything?” In a nutshell: you can't make someone, even yourself "one", any more than you can make yourself obey the law of gravity. You are one with everything, whether you like it or not, and that oneness necessitates inevitabilities and responsibilities that all of us as human beings ignore at our peril and the greater suffering of everyone.

For instance, some examples of the inevitabilities: you will die, I will die, everyone who will ever read this will die. Death is inevitable. Pretty simple stuff so far, right?

Here's another inevitability, directly related to the first: you will suffer, I will suffer, everyone who reads this will suffer (though hopefully not because they read this).

And another: what you do, and don't do, reverberates throughout existence. You can't avoid this through hiding. You can't wall off your section of existence and hope that all the awful and inevitable things happening on the other side won't creep across. They will. Why? Because any wall you build is an illusion. Why? Because you are one with everything, whether you asked for it or not, whether you like it or not.

So that brings us to our responsibilities. And these are not Buddhist responsibilities, per se. Remember, one doesn't become one with everything because one is a Buddhist; you just are, and because you just are, and because as part of the unique blessing/curse of being a sentient human being, you know you are, you have to acknowledge that your responsibility is to everyone and everything.

Americans love being heroes. We're shocked when we hear that most of the world doesn't see us that way. "Don't these ungrateful bastards realize we saved their asses in WWII?" (I've said these very words myself on many beer-sodden occasions.) But from the one with everything perspective, storming Normandy and all the rest of it was less heroic than the Hollywood media machine would have us fool ourselves into believing. We saved ourselves by storming those beaches, just as much as anyone. And while there's nothing ignoble about self-preservation, it's not necessary to lord it over a bunch of people who happen to live in Europe, and who lost a lot more lives than we did.

Americans are very comfortable being powerful, because we are so convinced that we are right. And much of the time we are. Alas, the universe responds with an profound "So what?" For just as you can't make someone "one with everything", you cannot coerce someone to be free, and you cannot force someone to give up force. You can only force them to force you to use more force. The Buddha recognized such recursively misguided action as a trap. He compared it to trying to still the ripples of a pond by patting them down with your hand. (In the case of our recent actions in Iraq, I'd compare it to smacking an oar down on the water. These violent ripples we're currently creating won't go away in our lifetime.)

Regarding these actions, many Americans throw up their hands and say, "Better them than us." But the point is: there is no "them", only us. Some of our glibber war advocates say "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." I just wonder if enough thought and pause was given to the question, "Do we really need the omelet? Aren't our geopolitical love handles big enough?"

From the Buddhist perspective, every bullet fired, is fired at your own head, or, if you find it more terrifying, your own child's head. The upside of this is that every kind act—every bow, every smile—is an action done for—a bow made to—a smile smiled for—everyone. In our actions in the world, it is our responsibility to ask ourselves, very simply: are we adding to its suffering, or healing it? Every day we must ask the question, and every day, change the answer based on what the day gives us and what we give in return (though of course, we are the day, and it us.)

This is the Buddhist practice in a nutshell.

Call me crazy.

 

The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine

I decided at the beginning of this year to focus a little bit more than usual on luck: to court it a bit, if that makes sense. Luck is one of those wonderful inventions that cannot really exist— not in any empirical way— but that nevertheless human beings can still learn a lot by considering. For instance, I spent a lot of last week constructing an essay I felt compelled to write defending my chosen art form from prevarications that would weaken it. Contrary to what some assumed, it brought me no joy to make my arguments. It felt like duty. But then, as luck would have it, someone I did not know read that essay and reached out with an email to thank me for it.  We became Facebook friends and I noticed that this person had a professional relationship with one of my favorite places on earth, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. I flashed on a long forgotten essay I wrote nearly nine years ago for an on-line gathering site for weirdoes and writers and weirdo writers called Everything2.

I repost it here as a burnt offering to luck.

  

I don't believe in God.

I pretty much don't believe in God.

Okay... here's the deal:

I believe in God. . .

. . . but only in one place: the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Apparently, the universe is constructed in such a manner that the omnipotent, omniscient—though obviously not omni-present— deity known for the most part in these parts as "God", only exists-- as far as I can tell-- when I exist within the walls of this largest Gothic cathedral in the world.

I can vouch for this phenomenon going back to late 1999 when I first stepped inside the church, its cool echoing darkness enveloping me immediately. I was living up on the edge of Harlem at the time, and began going often. I'd walk in past the periodic light shafting down from the stained glass, sit on one of the chairs (the nave has no permanent pews) and strike up an ongoing conversation on hold since my earnest Catholic childhood.

Hello Old Man. It's me.

These were not supplications, but rather heartfelt chats between one very good old friend and another. I didn't have to genuflect or cross myself to gain access to this communication. It's certainly telling that I don't feel this presence at all at, say, St. Patrick's Cathedral down on 50th and Madison, shouldered up against Rockefeller Center and all those other much taller skyscrapers. If God lives there, he's the God of Pinstripes and Napoleon Complexes and Rudy Giuliani.

We moved to Queens in the late fall of '99 and my visits to St. John's became rarer but no less ardent-- in fact, maybe more so, since a two-train, 45-minute pilgrimage was involved.

And then, less than two years later, the world changed for New Yorkers and for everyone. I found myself in Our meeting place almost every other day, two trains or not. The conversations grew ever more urgent, but also so private that I couldn't even bring myself to write about them in my personal journal:

9/25/01

St. John's again.
Talking with God.
Private stuff.
Wondering: Is faith a means or an end?
Or is the question nonsense? 

Sometimes I'd cry. Sometimes I'd feel God feeling me cry and letting me know that it was understood.

On December 7, 2001, while I watched TV in the living room, my wife took a home pregnancy test. From the bathroom I heard a calm but distinct, "Uh-oh." Back then I didn't know just how damned accurate those things have gotten, but still I had a gut inkling that this time it was for real. I had a whole new thing to talk to God about, a whole new way to be scared. 

Old Man, help me be a good old man.

 On December 18, 2001, I turned on the TV just to be dosed with a whole new horror. 

12/18/01

8:12
St. John's is burning; a five alarm fire.
God damn.
What a lousy, lousy year.  

In my head I drove a pathetic devil's bargain worthy of Winston Smith in room 101. "Take the goddamned Twin Towers", I practically prayed to Satan, "Just leave me my St. John's."

The firefighters, already crowned in glory, waded into the burning church which was home to, among so many other things, the largest memorial to fallen FDNY prior to 9/11. Commanders on the scene rapidly made the decision to use high-tech lasers to find their way through the smoke instead of following the common sense course of action: smashing through priceless, irreplaceable stained glass to vent it (adding a James Bond-esque/art connoisseur quality to their already enormous reputation for heroism). Within hours the fire was extinguished. But who knew how long the church would be closed to visitors?

In March of 2002 I got a short-term temp gig up at Columbia University. I walked by St. Johns on my lunch break, saw where soot still blackened the stones of the northern transept. My heart heavy and anxious, I climbed the front stairs and went in. It still smelled of burnt wood inside, and the gift shop, where the fire started, was still boarded up, but I knew instantly that the conflagration had done nothing to fumigate my Old Friend from the place. I sat down to chat.
In the end, you can only ask Him for a sample of his Grace, a slightly wider perspective than the one you're sitting in. It seems like a small thing writing about it now, but such an epiphany is really the only miracle there is. Art can offer it sometimes. Perhaps that's why I decided to become an artist.

And becoming one I am still.

Now I live in Seattle and have no place to talk to God. 

 

The Inalienable Happy Pursuit of the Living Wage

This image has been floating around Face Book lately, accumulating plenty of “likes” on its way. 

Well, I don’t like it.  I actually kind of hate it.  I believe that once an artist ties his or her work in a one-to-one, all-or-nothing relationship with making a buck off it, the game is done, and the moneyed powers-that-be have won it all over again.  Nothing new or good or game-changing can come out of saying you’re only going to do your art if someone pays you a living wage for it. Instead, what you are really saying is that your creativity is simply one more commodity to be bought and sold in a market-driven society owned by folks who know a lot more about money, and a lot less about creativity, than you do.

One the other hand, I also hate the idea artists should shun the marketplace altogether. We should get paid,  as much as we possibly can in any given market. (So long as we are aware and comfortable with knowing that some markets will only offer us compensation that is utterly untranslatable into coin.)

Up until now I have not written about the “living wage” crisis in Seattle Theatre because I did not have a good new idea on how to frame it. Then I attended the October Seattle Theatre: What’s Next? Forum, and listened with growing excitement as actor/producer Peggy Gannon kicked off a heated round-robin discussion of the issue that was finally and brilliantly summed up by Annex Theatre’s Meaghan Darling.  Jim Jewell’s notes from the night describe it best:

Making a living and making art should not be mutually exclusive.

This last point came out of our earlier discussion, but was most eloquently encapsulated by Meaghan Darling, fairly paraphrased as, “Nobody owes me a living, but I want them to not prevent me from making a living.” Big House rehearsal schedules were particularly discussed here, as the now-standard 10-6 rehearsal day precludes keeping a day job, while the economics of theatre (and of course there is much debate here) can’t offer a sustainable salary for that work (and we lamented how many amazing actors have had to leave town or the profession). We all rallied around this idea, because it is very much in the spirit of Seattle Theatre: What’s Next as a whole – it is a statement that holds within it hope and offers compromise, which seem to me essential components of productive dialogue.

“Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  Despite the Tea-Bagging idiots who have co-opted their ideas and headgear, our Founding Fathers were no fools. No one can or should guarantee anyone happiness or a living wage. But when your systems—and this goes for unions and Big House administrations alike—stand in the way of the pursuit of making a decent buck from doing theatre, well, then the truth becomes self-evident, and independence must be declared.  If this be treason, let’s make the most of it!

You Don’t Have to Hold On

I have maintained that we are better off trying to determine what art does rather than defining it.  I even went so far to make a list in an essay called “The Uses of Art”, in which I promised to flesh out each enumerated “use” with an essay of its own.  (Of course I miserably defaulted on that pledge.)  Further, I have always assumed— like a lot of folks, I suspect— that the best art always sticks with you: it goes into your library for reference and reuse, which is why I can still recite verbatim Puck’s “If-we-shadows-have-offended” Midsummer Night’s Dream show-closer three decades after playing the role.  And when I fail to hold on to a piece of art, I tend to feel a little guilty.  After all, is it not a little shameful to have forgotten easily a hundred times more poetry and painting, music and movies, than I have ever remembered?  Was all that art wasted on me?  

The 13th Century Sufi poet Jelaluddin Rumi and his modern American interpreter Coleman Barks have convinced me otherwise.  Just as art has a variety of uses, it also has many mechanisms.

“There is a South Indian story about soap.  Soap is the dirt we buy.  We introduce it to the dirt we have, and the two dirts are so glad to see each other they come out and mix!  They swim together in the warm pleasurable water and, at just the right moment, the washer lifts the cloth of our true being free of both soap and dirt.  Mystical poetry and other practices may function this way, as soap that dances with what disturbs our clarity.  Then at some moment they drop away and leave us clean, ready to be worn again.”

--From Coleman Barks introduction to a chapter in his collection
The Essential Rumi

Sometimes art doesn’t stay with you.  And sometimes that’s best.  How disgusting and useless would it be if the film from every bar of soap you’ve ever used still remained on your body?  Some art is meant to mix with parts of you and then rinse off, parts and art together.

So the next quiet night you read a poem, and then find you’ve forgotten the entire thing the next morning, don’t berate yourself.  Instead, give yourself a pat on the back for being spiritually hygienic. 

Rumi himself this time: 

“. . . Enjoy this being washed
with a secret we sometimes know,
and then not.”

The SunBreak Suggests Some New Strokes

Just because I have excused myself from the debate about the future of Seattle Theatre along with the broader crisis in American Arts doesn’t mean I can’t celebrate an insightful perspective, especially when it comes from someone who sees the problem from sides I can only barely glimpse.  Michael van Baker, Editor and Publisher of The SunBreak once worked for the Seattle Opera and other non-profit arts organizations around town; and in his recent post, “Arts Marketing for Dummies”.  He sneaks us a peak of some of the lessons he learned, with promises of perhaps more and deeper observations to follow:

Because self-preservation is the defining aspect of arts institutional life–ironically, the non-profit model virtually guarantees it–the business model warps in that direction. People begin to have trouble distinguishing between best business practices and those that have worked in the past to pay everyone’s salaries. Over time, the institution’s existence–its habits and proclivities–mediates the art presented. It’s not just a question of the popularity of one work versus another–it’s a question of box office receipts. That’s what’s being discussed when the directors meet: saleability.

It should be discussed! Don’t get me wrong. But, as before, is anything important being left out?

Van Baker sketches some bold fresh solutions, but with the sober understanding that they are not likely to be quickly adopted by a cadre of arts administrators who would rather sink with the ship than swim a new stroke.

Rule: We create art and outsource/outshare the rest….

…  As it happens, arts administrators are not the soulless quasi-corporate drones they are at times portrayed to be. So it’s already the case that most arts organizations collaborate and share a great deal, more than you might expect if you considered how competitive the marketplace is. The problem is, they collaborate inefficiently. … Every single organization reinvents the database, usually in their own way, and the results are sometimes anarchic.

The situation is unlikely to change because, at an institutional level, there’s no apparent incentive and the loss of control disturbs leadership. Thus, database management and mining remains a core function of organizations theoretically devoted to art production.

Van Baker also recognizes a fact which took over a year of me blogging here to sink into my thick skull:  a lot of folks, in this city particularly, would rather quibble and bitch behind backs than make any actual moves.  Says Van Baker, “Of course, the arts being what they are, there are many over-educated people willing to argue about minutiae rather than broader principle.”

Towards the end of the piece Van Baker hints that there might be a larger, more detailed opus forthcoming.  I encourage that effort and look forward to its fruition, especially since I’m shutting up.