Just Wrought

Art Picks up Journalism’s Slack Again

I went on record a while ago saying that I will not be doing reviews here at Just Wrought.  However, in order to make a couple of larger points later, I will have to stipulate some things about Mike Daisey’s performance last night at the Seattle Rep’s production of his new one-man show, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.  Here’s why:  I was pressing my way out of the theatre after the show, doing my best to spare myself and Kurt Beattie the awkwardness that always ensues when we try to casually chit-chat, when I overheard an older and obviously well-off man say to his wife, “I’ll be interested to see how his [meaning Daisey’s] performance grows after a couple weeks.  I mean, this was only just opening night after all.”

Yeah. 

So let’s get something straight from the start: Mike Daisey’s performance was brilliant, alternatively hilarious and harrowing; funny and furious: one moment cannily manipulative and the next heartbreakingly earnest, and it only grew more compelling as the evening progressed.  Frankly, I expected no less.  Daisey is a brilliant performer.  Full stop.  What’s more, he’s a consummate professional, meaning that he will bring that brilliance to every performance he does of this piece or any other, night after night, week after week, venue after venue.  To engage in speculation about whether Daisey’s performance will improve or decline after a couple weeks is to indulge in the worst kind of aesthetic fetishism, and worse: it lets you off the hook of the message. 

Unfortunately, this hobbyist’s game has been getting played more and more here in Seattle.  “Hans Altwies’s performance was brilliant the other night,” says the canny theatre-goer, making plain that she not only knows Hans Altwies by name, but also understands the nuances of his work well enough to gauge when he’s brilliant and when he’s not.  Well, I got news for ya, knowing theatre-goer.  Hans Altwies is always brilliant.  Like Mike Daisey, Hans is a consummate theatre professional, and he’s going to give you the acting goods in great plays, okay plays and terrible plays alike.  What’s more, Hans is not the only brilliant actor in Seattle: we have at least a hundred world class actors in this town—way more than we can sustain with a living wage.  What we do not have in huge supply are shows that matter, right here and right now to our fellow citizens.  (Yes, I understand Of Mice and Men is moving.  But no, I do not agree that staging it yet again can make a wit’s worth of difference in most people’s lives.)   The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs is different.  In his show Mike is telling stories that you simply cannot and will not hear anywhere else—true stories about the lives of our fellow human beings who make, by hand, the “shit”—as Mike calls it-- that we consume.

If you are reading this on a digital device (and how could you not be?) Mike provides a journalistic investigation that is as intimately connected to your life as the technology you are using right now.  He did the risky leg work that no “professional reporter” was willing to do, and he got past the corporate obfuscation that no other journalist could breech.  If you want to hear these stories in the next few weeks, the only way you can do it is to show up at a specific place, the Seattle Rep, at a specific time and listen to Mike tell them to you.  If you say to me that the Rep’s tickets are too pricey, I will listen respectfully and sympathetically, but I will counter with a question of my own: how much did your phone cost?  Was it more or less than a ticket to Mike’s show?  And how can you really assess how much it really cost, unless you find out how it was made and by whom?

The New You Boat (Mini-Act II)

Continued from Mini- Act I

Mini-Act II
by
O.C.C.A.M.

 (The following countdown takes place in darkness.)

CAPTAIN:  Seven.

COMMANDER:  Seven.

LIEUTENANT:  Seven.

ENSIGN:  Seven.

BOSUN:  Seven.

HELMSMAN:  Seven.

SEAMAN:  Seven.

COMMANDER:  Six.

LIEUTENANT:  Six.

ENSIGN:  Six.

BOSUN:  Six.

HELMSMAN:  Six.

SEAMAN:  Six.

LIEUTENANT:  Five.

ENSIGN:  Five.

BOSUN:  Five.

HELMSMAN:  Five.

SEAMAN:  Five.

ENSIGN:  Four.

BOSUN:  Four.

HELMSMAN:  Four.

SEAMAN:  Four.

BOSUN:  Three.

HELMSMAN:  Three.

SEAMAN:  Three.

HELMSMAN:  Two.

SEAMAN:  Two. One.

(Lights up.)

ENSIGN:  ¡Ping!

COMMANDER:  What?

ENSIGN:  Something.

COMMANDER:  What?

CAPTAIN:  Ensign explicate.

ENSIGN:  I... I... scanning... scanning...

COMMANDER:  What?  Something?  What?

CAPTAIN:  A ghost?  A glitch?

ENSIGN:  Gone.

SEAMAN:  Go then, Commander-Man, your switch.  Punch the button, bastard.

CAPTAIN:  Belay below.  Avast bastion blasts awhile awaiting a future--

ENSIGN: ¡¡Ping!!

COMMANDER:  Again?

CAPTAIN:  Ensign extrapolate.

ENSIGN:  Close.  Closing closer.

COMMANDER:  Captain?
CAPTAIN:  Aye.

COMMANDER:  Shall I?

SEAMAN:  Aye, knew you eyed three key live/kill.  Use or lose.

CAPTAIN:  Hold fire. Helmsman, do die for your New You depth invasion evasion.

HELMSMAN:  Aye, aye, I do die for declination dot mark dash dot dash mark dash.

CAPTAIN:  Seaman, a head engine's awful.

SEAMAN:  Rot sure negative, Captain.  Fear/desire drive died dry of new U launch lust lost and found foundering.

CAPTAIN:  Silence.  All hands and semenful silence.

(Silence.)

ENSIGN:  ¡¡¡¡¡¡¡Peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-eeeeeeeeyingyangyangyangyingyingyingyangyangyingyang!!!!!!!

CAPTAIN:  Lieutenant, tend the Ensign.  Bosun, man the scanner.

LIEUTENANT:  I eye, consummation containment crypt cracked.

BOSUN:  Breach leaking New U blue-black.

LIEUTENANT:  Imminent wave array decay.

COMMANDER:  Recommendation.

LIEUTENANT:  You knew New You's posited position predicates primary protocol.

SEAMAN:  I aye.  Kill/die.

ENSIGN:  Oh!

CAPTAIN:  Ensign, report.

ENSIGN:  Oh come!

CAPTAIN:  Ensign, repeat.

ENSIGN:  Oh come!  Oh come!

BOSUN:  Captain, I eye sounds bounding, but something--

COMMANDER:  Something else?

BOSUN:  Something other.  An indistinguishable, inextinguishable echo goes over the whole hollow hull.

ENSIGN:  Awe comes!

HELMSMAN:  Captain. I eye dying drift dive decline climbing to asymptote of total imp lotion. Shall I continue to die for

you? To dive, perchance to--

BOSUN:  Blow the whole hallowed held hull.

CAPTAIN:  Hold held course coordinates: invasion evasion.

SEAMAN:  Who knew you New You to fool?  Where do you New You to go?

CAPTAIN:  No one.  Nowhere.  Need to know only.  Nothing knows again new again now, all hands and semen, knew you of New

You to live/let live another daze of all days to fight another night of all lights.

SEAMAN:  Live/let live's long gone.  On or on or on and on.

LIEUTENANT:  Knew you New You, when nothing's something sees through Schrodinger's cat can, all's over and out with an

ever-rending boom through the Chinese Room.

ENSIGN:  Awk'em!  Chink the Chink Clink!  Awk'em!  Awk'em!

CAPTAIN:  Knew you, damn you, to extricate, Ensign, and excogitate escape from stated state.

ENSIGN:  Aye I one woe wallowing whale's wail waking mermen and maidens mating making oracling orcas cause calls across all

of us: "Awe comes occaming all ye fate-fools of faded faithfulishness.  Be not be afraid/brave I eye-tide in/out tidings of

great joyfoolish noise.”

BOSUN:  Behold low hell hellos!

ENSIGN:  Aye!

BOSUN:  Pain pang pings pound!

LIEUTENANT:  Chink the Chink Clink!

SEAMAN:  Blast a bastard button, pusher!  On or on or on and on!

COMMANDER:  I eye I catch as cat can can't!

HELMSMAN:  New You course closing on imminent infinite atmospheres asymptote!

CAPTAIN:  I eye from one breach breaking wave good-bye.

ENSIGN:  Occam's rays--

BOSUN:  Heard me.

ENSIGN:  Occam's rays--

LIEUTENANT:  Hurt me!

COMMANDER QUARK:  There's something--

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  --nothing but a little--

SEAMAN MESON:  --push would scuttle but a little--

COMMANDER QUARK:  --blasting bastion of--

BOSUN BOSON:  --sounds truly--

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  --human in--

HELMSMAN HADRON:  --and doubt of all--

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  --this--

SEAMAN MESON:  --that--

COMMANDER QUARK:  --never was--

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  --always will--

HELMSMAN HADRON:  --not stroke--

BOSUN BOSON:  --one when we're--

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  --Occam's razored!

(Blackout.
End of “The New You Boat.”)

 

The New You Boat (Mini-Act I)

A note on the generation of the play...

The playwright Matthew Fielding died in 1984, having only completed the first act of his last play, “The New You Boat”.  Unfinished works are a fact of life-- or rather death-- in the world of literature, but there are those that believe that this was no accident.  Fielding mentioned no other work by name in his will, but the first act of the mini-two act play “The New You Boat” was specifically designated to be placed in the public domain where anyone who so chose could attempt to finish it.  Also, in eerie contrast to his habit, Fielding left no notes on the work, no outlines for the second act, no references to its conception or development in his journal-- nothing, but the perfectly formed first act.  Finally, the script is rife with digital and quantum imagery as well as linguistic conundrums and self-referential, anti-algorithmic riddles that could have only be intentionally designed for one purpose: to confound an artificially intelligent creative consciousness.

Writing the first act of “The New You Boat” was a consummate act of defiance on Fielding’s part: a reaching back from the finality of death itself to throw down one last gauntlet before his late-life intellectual adversaries-- the proponents of artificial intelligence.  Most artists have an inherent antipathy and distrust of the scientific method.  Matthew Fielding embraced it.  He welcomed contending viewpoints from those who challenged the anthropocentric idea that only human beings are capable of consciousness and creativity.  He was as willing to be proven wrong by them as he was eager to prove them wrong.

In fall of 1995, under the auspices of an unprecedented co-bequest of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Security Administration, an elite team of thinkers, scientists and artists called the Creative Cognition Development Group, was formed to meet the challenge of completing a master work of art solely using computer generated artificial consciousness.  A mega-program, made up of literally billions of complex, interconnected algorithms needed to be designed, tested and implemented.  It was.  On January 1, 1999, OCCAM (Omni-interfacial Creative Consciousness Algorithm Matrix) was born.  In a little over two years (roughly two-hundred times longer than experts believe it took Fielding to write the first half) OCCAM completed the “The New You Boat”.

We at the CCDG, on behalf of the late Matthew Fielding, and indeed, OCCAM itself, invite you to judge the results.

 

Mini-Act I
by
Matthew Fielding

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Accept no substitutes.  This is the New You Boat.  Rot your Roger.  We'll go wilco.  Seaman Meson, state your state us.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  Aye, aye, Commander.  Fear/desire drive alive and churning our screw through the New You blue bluer blue bluer than blue black-blue blacker than blue bluer than blacker than bluer than bluer than blacker than bluest blacker-blue-black back to you new boat.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Rot your that.  Helmsman Hadron.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Aye, aye, Commander.  New You of course bearing naught stroke one not one stroke one approaching asymptote of ascertaining our approach on points pertaining to why we lie below and die with always something shy of sky's the limit asymptotically speaking of course...  bearing...  naught stroke one not one—

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Helsman—

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Aye.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Cut your jib and maintain prescient course.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  I, Commander, will go--

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  We'll always go.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Wilco.  Aye.  Shall I dive for you?

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Aye, Helmsman, do.  Dive for depth perception zero nautical knots naught stroke one.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Rot your that.  Will do dive.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Bosun Boson.

 

BOSUN BOSON:  Aye the hull is sound the hull is true sounding truly true sounds sounding through function of faith further function of fear further function of falling facing turning churning our screw through the new you black and blue back to blue black to you new boat.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Wheel go.  And scuttle button?

 

BOSUN BOSON:  Check, set, wired, tested, all systems go for detonating preset charges blowing bright holes in the hull holes opening hell holds flooding all held hells blowing all holes whole crushing us blinder than we already are.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Rot sure.  Ensign Neutrino.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Aye, communications check.  All bands scanned reading random noise with single signal exception.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Explicate.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Explication: constantly variable incessant inbeaming binary beacon begins again new...  again now...  again...

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Transcribe.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  I eye transcript sans script:  all in code.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Crack it.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  We'll go.  Cracking...
      Standby....
      In crypt cracked.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Transcribe.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Sans script transcript crypt cracked:  “Begin in crypt:  Knew you u no u r Schrödinger's Cat in a Chinese Box garbage day in and garbage day out.  Only amplitudes abound, always anchors away angers awash encore's a wish awhile awaiting a future in crypt.  End in crypt."

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Rot sure.  Lieutenant Lepton.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Morale modems monitor multitudinous mutinies multifariously manifesting melanomic demonic mnemonic nominal monomaniacal numb mum hum.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Recommendation.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Punch scuttle.  Blow held hull holes.  Collapse wave function.  Annihilate boundlessly abounding anger-anchored amplitudes.  Commence consummation devoutly to be wished awhile a waiting future in crypt.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Duly noted, negated, belayed and belied.  Standing course and orders stand still.
      Fire control command commander, I, Commander Quark, report all fire control systems all systems go set to blow ballistic bastions blasting out of the new you up through the black blue into the true you who new nothing mirvs spurt from seven brahmaning bridegrooms for seven continental eggs benedicted to break fast break hard over easy.
      Your new you crew stasis state us stated and standing for inspection, Captain Quasar.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  All hands and seaman:  this is your captain.
      This night of all nights, eve of day of all days, it's apt and auspicious to remember this mission's vital import and portent.
      It's not unreasonable to reason that the surfaces served have unremembered never knew you.  In their seasonal celebration of crisp coming bright they overlook that new true black blue heavy water U light: salvo salvation of nations.  You, New You, alone blow the glow coals that flash the steam that churns the turning screw through this bluer blacker than blue.  New You knew alone the crypt code, held hull holes, and ballistic bastions basking below.
    Last day I asleeped from a recurring reality, an ornery ontogeny oven on conscious corrective: little legged spermed-eggs doing the Chinese roomboom.  "Never knew you, New You." Say they you away.  "Never knew you, New Nothing." But whenwhere nothing exists, nothing's something liable to litter little nothings and break brittle little somethings into anything new you want.  What's to be?  What's to become?  What's to be becomes becoming through what little little legged spermed-eggs beg they never knew of New You.
      Tonight, Eve of all eves, a decision must be come to: a becoming to be come and gone.  Always knew you that this point in space of time would come.  One switch to give two options, two of which to give four, only one of which can be, taking three to key.
      Bosun Boson, man your switch.

 

BOSUN BOSON:  I eye scuttle button, one push to blow held hull holes.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Commander Quark, man your switch.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  I eye fire control set to blast bastions ballistic.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Ensign Neutrino, appraise amplitude array.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  I eye amplitude array all appraised:  four singular states in play.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Pray, Ensign, state states arrayed.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Off and off.  On and off.  Off and on.  On and on.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Translate arrayed stated states.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Live/let live.  Die/let live.  Live/kill.  Die/kill.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Lieutenant Lepton, commence crew key conviction config query.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  I eye key config query commencing in sub conn descending rank order.
      Captain Quasar, select your suffrage.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Live/kill.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Commander Quark.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Die/kill.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Lieutenant Lepton:  die/let live.
      Ensign Neutrino.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Live/kill.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  I eye two to key live/kill.
      Bosun Boson.

 

BOSUN BOSON:  Die/let live.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  We'll go two to key die/let live.
      Helmsman Hadron.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Die/kill.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Rot sure two to key die/kill.  Three out of four suffrages be two to key.  What say thee, Seaman Meson?
SEAMAN MESON:  Suffrage me to live/let live.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Nothing cums, Seaman, of nothing.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  Rot sure, Captain.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Recast, Seaman.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  Rot your recasting, Captain.  Resuffrage me to live/let live.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Suffrage denied.  Switch or surrender.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  I switch off and off.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  No.  On or on or on and on.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  I eye but off and off.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Damn you.  You knew you damn new you to lose, never loose, the name of action.  You knew New You to live/let live is nothing but not nothing.  Switch one on.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  No on.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR (simultaneously):  On, on, on, on, on, on, on.

 

SEAMAN MESON (simultaneously):  No, no, no, no, no, no, no. 

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Captain.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  I.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Permission to break the stale Seaman mate.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Explicate.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  I to eye switch conviction recon fig. from die to live/kill.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Knew you to do this?

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Aye but only new newly now.  Night of all nights.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Eve of all ease of all griefs.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Three now to key live/kill.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Then commence live/kill key confiq sequence.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Eye, Ensign Neutrino, key in.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Keying.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Commander Quark.  ¿Quien?

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Keen.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Captain Quasar.  Kin?

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  King.  Of all kin a little less than kind, of all knights a little more than dazed; wrecks raineth omni-pittance in salve ocean.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Key confiq complete.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Fire control armed.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  Fire at will.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Request countdown.

 

CAPTAIN QUASAR:  I eye granite.  Seven.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Seven.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Seven.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Seven.

 

BOSUN BOSON:  Seven.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Seven.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  Seven.

 

COMMANDER QUARK:  Six.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Six.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Six.

 

BOSUN BOSON:  Six.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Six.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  Six.

 

LIEUTENANT LEPTON:  Five.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Five.

 

BOSUN BOSON:  Five.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Five.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  Five.

 

ENSIGN NEUTRINO:  Four.

 

BOSUN BOSON:  Four.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Four.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  Four.

 

BOSUN BOSON:  Three.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Three.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  Three.

 

HELMSMAN HADRON:  Two.

 

SEAMAN MESON:  Two.  One.

 

(Blackout. End Mini-Act I.)

 

 

Continue to Mini-Act II by O.C.C.A.M.

Attention Must be Paid — Guess Where?

… A man asked the Zen master Ikkyu  to write down some words of great wisdom.  Ikkyu wrote”attention”.  Not satisfied, the man asked for some more, so Ikkyu wrote “attention, attention”.  Still not satisfied, he demanded more, and Ikkyu wrote “attention, attention, attention”.

    From Ten Zen Questions, by Susan Blackmore.   

 

I just finished reading Nicholas Carr’s new book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, and while I cannot recommend it as an exquisite sample of sparkling prose, I was impressed by the arguments and research provided therein.  A counter to the glib digital cheerleaders from Google to Face Book, The Shallows essentially demonstrates how our addiction to computers and the internet is literally rewiring our brains.

I won’t regurgitate all of Carr’s evidence here.  After all, this is a blog and I have to keep it snappy or you’ll click on to something grabbier.  His conclusions, however, are stunning enough to keep even the most attention-deficited mouse-finger paralyzed for a moment.

Navigating the Web requires a particularly intensive form of mental multitasking.  In addition to flooding our working memory with information, the juggling imposes what brain scientists call “switching costs” on our cognition.  Every time we shift our attention , our brain has to reorient itself, further tasking our mental resources.  As Maggie Jackson explains … “the brain takes time to change goals, remember the new rules needed for the new task, and block out cognitive interference from the previous, still-vivid activity.  Many studies have shown that switching between just two tasks can add substantially to our cognitive load, impeding our thinking and increasing the likelihood that we’ll over look or misinterpret important information.

In short, Web-surfing is a hyperactive exercise in short-term memory.  Carr walks us through some fascinating research that shows our brains do not store memory at all like computers do.

Kobi Rosenblum, who heads the Department of Neurobiology and Ethology at the University of Haifa… has done extensive research on memory consolidation.  One of the salient lessons to emerge … is how different biological memory is from computer memory.  “… Long term memory creation in the human brain,” he says, “is one of the incredible processes which is so clearly different than ‘artificial brains’ like those in a computer.  While an artificial brain absorbs information and immediately saves it in its memory, the human brain continues to process information long after it is received, and the quality of memories depends on how the information is processed.”  Biological memory is alive.  Computer memory is not.

Those who celebrate the “outsourcing” of memory to the Web have been misled by a metaphor.  They overlook the fundamentally organic nature of biological memory.  What gives real memory its richness and its character, not to mention its mystery and fragility, is its contingency.  It exists in time, changing as the body changes.   Indeed, the very act of recalling a memory appears to restart the entire process of consolidation, including the generation of proteins to from new synaptic terminals.  Once we bring an explicit long-term memory back into working memory, it becomes a short-term memory again.  When we reconsolidate it, it gains a new set of connections—a new context.…   Biological memory is in a perpetual state of renewal.  The memory stored in a computer, by contrast, takes the form of distinct and static bits, you can move the bits from one storage drive to another as many times as you like, and they will always remain precisely as they were.

Human beings are compelled to impute some version of our own consciousness to nearly anything and everything we see, so long as it appears to change.  Even trees in a breeze can seem eerily aware to us.  One theory holds that on the evolutionary timeline the suspicion of consciousness in other beings actually proceeded full-blown consciousness in ourselves.  That is, we learned to think by first learning to predict what others might be thinking—even if they weren’t actually thinking.  “As if” gave birth to “as is.” (And now my Web-scrambbled brain suddenly retrieves one of The Onion’s most brilliant Point/Counterpoints: My Computer Totally Hates Me! vs. God, Do I Hate That Bitch.)

Carr quotes Jason Mitchell, head of Harvard’s Social Cognition and Affective Neuroscience Lab: 

The “chronic overactivity of those brain regions implicated in social thought” can, writes Mitchell, lead us to perceive minds where no minds exist, even in inanimate objects.”  There’s growing evidence, moreover, that our brains naturally mimic the states of the other minds we interact with, whether those minds are real or imagined.

By believing the internet is somehow “intelligent”, we are literally rewiring ourselves to be as stupid, scattered and shallow as it is.  One thing missing from The Shallows is an antidote to the neural degeneration that Carr so assiduously documents.  Can you guess the one I might suggest?

Theatre brooks no distraction. You are trapped in a dark room and forced to impute “intelligence” to the brains of actors.  In the theatre, four dimensions of time and space merge to a singular awareness, and the barrier between “within-you” and “without-you” blurs.  You can zero in on the action or zone out of it, but wherever your attention wanders it eventually has to come back, whether you like it or not, to where you sit and what you see and hear from there.  (This is why bad theatre is so stupendously more excruciating to sit through than bad film or television.)  The light your eyes receive is inextricably bound to the air that vibrates your eardrums, activated as it is by the breath of an actor and shared in the lungs of everyone present.  Shakespeare was wrong—or, more likely, purposefully lying—when he suggested that the stage is a place for illusion.  Theatre is nothing but concentrated actuality.  We should all go once in a while if only to pay ourselves some simple human attention.

Money isn’t Everything… or Anything

My friend Maria’s mom gave me one of those rare koan-ish gifts of wisdom that stick with you for a lifetime, poking you at odd times as you struggle on and off to get to the core of understanding it. I was in high school, over Maria’s house for dinner, and her mom and I must have been talking about my hopes and aspirations. I said something like, “It’ll all work out so long as I can find the money to afford all the things I want to do.” Smiling sweetly, Maria’s mom said, “Oh Paul, don’t worry about money.  Money is the easiest thing in the world to get.”

What?

Okay. Set that notion on the table a moment so that we can compare it with what a former friend and colleague once flatly told me. “Paul, theater is an art form for the Upper Middle Class. Period. End of argument. End of story.” I remember seeing in his eyes the pride of superior conviction as he went on to explain that fundraising, marketing and, by tacit implication, programming itself must be tailored to this essential truth. Furthermore, since theatre is for, by and of the moderately to handsomely wealthy, then raising money for theatre, which was his job at a large West Coast regional theatre, was the noblest and most essential duty one could perform for our art form. 

Now, honestly, that sounds more sensible than my friend Maria’s mom’s enigmatic epigram, right?  We are on much firmer territory with that kind of thinking, aren’t we?

Are we?

After all, what the hell did my sweet earlier friend’s sweet mom mean?  For the longest time I tended to interpret it prosaically. “Well, okay… everything else takes money to get.  Therefore money is easiest, since it requires one less step. Money is freeze-dried effort waiting to be reconstituted for a different circumstance… or something. Got it.”

I guess that makes a sort of sense but only the sort that isn’t really worth much digging for. However, as the years blurred by, and most especially as the struggles for the vitality of my art form have come to a head, especially in my adopted home town of Seattle, I am beginning to suspect something lies deeper in Maria’s mom’s words.  

All right. Let’s dig: if money’s easy and I shouldn’t worry about it, then what is it that is hard and that I should be worrying about? Maria’s mom did not elucidate. I realize now that this is because she knew I had to figure it out for myself. Happily I am beginning to believe that the alternative currency she was pointing me at is one that I, and so many of my true friends, have been blessed with to a richness. The “hard” currency Maria’s mom wanted me to find and treasure was the precious tender of ideas.

“Oh sure,”  I hear my former friend say, “That’s great. Wonderfully idealistic and all, but without money, theatre dies. Raising money is the essential task that makes it all possible.”

What do you think, gentle reader? If one wanted to destroy the essence of an art form, obliterate its fresh ideas and enchain it to defending at all costs the miserable back-ass-wards status quo of comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted, could one employ any more effective strategy than keeping its brightest people constantly courting the almighty upper middle-class dollar instead of trading and paying interest on ideas?

All art is a conversation—theatre doubly so. If my former friend is telling me I can only hold a conversation with the upper middle class of the Western World circa early 21st century I am obliged to either politely ignore him, or firmly insist he go fuck himself. I want to talk with everyone everywhere and everywhen.  And I buy into this conversation with my ideas or I don’t join at all. I will not, nor will the colleagues I admire most, huddle acquiescently on the tiny postage stamp theatre artists are ceded when we are told that money is what defends us and what we must defend. 

Maria’s mom always had faith in me when others didn’t. She is no longer in this world and I have no way to repay her for her gifts so gracious. So in honor of that fine lady, you can have this idea, and everything you find here, for free:

Yours is the territory you refuse to surrender.

Why Omar Willey’s “Why Theater Matters” Matters

Let’s get the over-arching irony out of the way first thing: my friendship with Omar Willey blossomed on line, through Face Book and his responses to my blogging here at Just Wrought; and had that been the extent of our relationship, then certainly a cynical dismissal of my recommending his recent essay “Why Theater Matters” would be eminently fair.  After all, he argues herein for a theatre triumphant over the distance and disaffection with which our “on-line lives” infect us.  Fortunately, our friendship has also blossomed in “real life” and real-life’s cooler cousin, theatre.  Omar comes to my shows.  Omar comes to everyone’s shows.  If you are a Seattle theatre artist and you don’t know Omar, I can assure you that your ignorance is not reciprocated.  Omar knows you.   Omar knows your work.  What’s more, Omar Willey and his colleague José Amador (whom I also have the honor of calling friend) have begun to review your work, over at the Seattlest. 

In his essay, posted a few days ago, Omar offers an implicit explanation for his coming out of retirement (he  reviewed theatre for KCMU-FM back in the 1990’s) and again lowering his lance at our windmills.

Simulacra. Pseudonymity. The theater … erases them. Theater restores the primacy of the human body. It restores presence. It restores the potential, the fear and the promise of the present, and gives an immediate response in the present tense.

... Theater remains a communal experience of people, persons seeing themselves with, through and in other persons in a unique, irreproducible moment. A self, communing with other selves. Being here. Now. And never to be the same person, the same place, the same way again....  Bridging the gap between friends and strangers, the sense of a marvelous, wondrous love and beauty that restores joy to life, shared together. How easily we forget it when we do not seek it.

This reminds me so much of a favorite quote of mine from Carl Jung that I would not be at all surprised if Omar knows it intimately.  But just in case you don’t, here ‘tis:

...You go to the theatre: glance meets glance, everybody observes everybody else, so that all those who are present are caught up in an invisible web of mutual unconscious relationship....

Mankind has always formed groups which made collective experiences of transformation--often of an ecstatic nature--possible. The regressive identification with lower and more primitive states of consciousness is invariably accompanied by a heightened sense of life... .The inevitable psychosocial regression within the group is partially counteracted by ritual, that is to say through a cult ceremony which makes the solemn performance of sacred events the centre of group activity and prevents the crowd from relapsing into unconscious instinctuality... The ritual makes it possible for him to have a comparatively individual experience even within the group and so remain more or less conscious.

—Concerning Rebirth, circa, 1940

 As I understand it, Omar and José threw their hats in the Seattlest ring because they saw a dearth of earnest, careful theatre criticism, not just here in Seattle but across the country.  Of course others have noticed this drought as well, myself included.  My problem has been caring.  After over two decades of professional work as a playwright and actor, watching the importance of reviews plummet from marginal to minimal to finally negligible, I openly admit I have trouble seeing how criticism could help Seattle become a World Class theatre town.  In a recent semi-private exchange on Face Book, Omar called my hand: "... I do wonder, Paul, if you don't think criticism is key to helping us get somewhere, then what do you think will? Or do we simply understand criticism differently? Plays written about other plays or inspired by thematic ideas from other plays--these, too, are criticism, no?"

Let me respond now, weeks later:

Omar, in the context of your comprehensively inclusive understanding of what criticism can be, and what it can do, yes, indeed, I believe it can help us get somewhere.  Of course, such an approach—steeped in the art form’s history but somewhat foreign to Seattle’s cultural ethos— will require leadership.  It appears you and José are stepping forward to be those happy few to rally the critical flank of Seattle’s charge forward toward World Class.  So even though I have already said it privately, please allow me to state again publically here, loudly and proudly...

Omar, José?

Welcome to the fray.