Thursday, June 28, 2012
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Mike Daisey Analysis by Andrew Fuhrmann
I like Andrew's work. Along with Jana and Alison, they are the ones I
read. They are educated (partly by institutions but mostly, I think,
off their own steam), intuitive, they are developing as they write each
crit, they provoke your work and move it in different directions, they
are interested in writing first and theatre second, measured (but
sometimes delightfully biased), and most importantly I think,
independent and even democratic (probably as much as a writer could be).
Recently all of Neandellus' reviews were taken off the website, probably by him (including his dissection of my No-Show, which I have preserved in violation of his copyright). By and large, they can no longer be read.
Andrew interviewed me prior to the first performance of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, and his article, which was published today over at Artshub, is here.
Recently all of Neandellus' reviews were taken off the website, probably by him (including his dissection of my No-Show, which I have preserved in violation of his copyright). By and large, they can no longer be read.
Andrew interviewed me prior to the first performance of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, and his article, which was published today over at Artshub, is here.
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Why do you hate on the Media so bad, Richard?
Some more rigourous self-examination leads me to again consider the question of: why did I want to stage Mike's work?
Some revelation came in the family car when a rendition of "Pumped Up Kicks" slopped out from the radio and arrested me from my exit across the road to Benalla's fantastic second hand bookstore, which I visit every time I come home.
I love this song because it is the ultimate in ironies, a song from the perspective of a schoolyard killer that has somehow become a hipster anthem, now active in selling XXXX's new Summer Ale.
As I swim through the emo-painy ecstatic half-melody, entering the blissful state of moral and ethical collapse it demands, I think about how shit get appropriated so much nowadays. How those few bastions of resistence (against what? why?) are swallowed up by commercial interest, how those who champion something are so seldom rewarded unless their championing serves some "safe" cause, how those things which sit awkwardly or are only championed by a handful of people as far as I can see, and the world's survival seems dependant on those few individuals continuing their struggle, continuing to sacrifice the mobility, possibility, pleasures for the sake of a humanity they surely have become too cynical to believe in any longer. All of this is blindingly obvious, I knew its politic when I was 8 years old. We all know it.
But doesn't it seem unfair to you? That a handful of people, these "renegade" figures, should shoulder the burden for the rest of us, that they should be bastions of truth and justice while the rest of us simply comply with whatever it is we are told, or jump on a skeptical bandwagon when it presents itself?
It's a staged binary - but doesn't it sound familiar? A hero narrative - resonant, but so obviously flawed. It describes perfectly our existence. It is fed by the media, it is fed by individuals following its line, it is fed by this fame-drug we seem to all be on nowadays. As if surrogates can fulfill all of our fraught desires, and we can appreciate them from an armchair.
And it begs the question, if its resonance is any indication of its truth: Shouldn't the rest of us take some fucking responsibility as well?
Some revelation came in the family car when a rendition of "Pumped Up Kicks" slopped out from the radio and arrested me from my exit across the road to Benalla's fantastic second hand bookstore, which I visit every time I come home.
I love this song because it is the ultimate in ironies, a song from the perspective of a schoolyard killer that has somehow become a hipster anthem, now active in selling XXXX's new Summer Ale.
As I swim through the emo-painy ecstatic half-melody, entering the blissful state of moral and ethical collapse it demands, I think about how shit get appropriated so much nowadays. How those few bastions of resistence (against what? why?) are swallowed up by commercial interest, how those who champion something are so seldom rewarded unless their championing serves some "safe" cause, how those things which sit awkwardly or are only championed by a handful of people as far as I can see, and the world's survival seems dependant on those few individuals continuing their struggle, continuing to sacrifice the mobility, possibility, pleasures for the sake of a humanity they surely have become too cynical to believe in any longer. All of this is blindingly obvious, I knew its politic when I was 8 years old. We all know it.
But doesn't it seem unfair to you? That a handful of people, these "renegade" figures, should shoulder the burden for the rest of us, that they should be bastions of truth and justice while the rest of us simply comply with whatever it is we are told, or jump on a skeptical bandwagon when it presents itself?
It's a staged binary - but doesn't it sound familiar? A hero narrative - resonant, but so obviously flawed. It describes perfectly our existence. It is fed by the media, it is fed by individuals following its line, it is fed by this fame-drug we seem to all be on nowadays. As if surrogates can fulfill all of our fraught desires, and we can appreciate them from an armchair.
And it begs the question, if its resonance is any indication of its truth: Shouldn't the rest of us take some fucking responsibility as well?
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