Knowing that ConWorks is moving dredges up a more difficult question: Is ConWorks worth moving? It seems more like a glorified rental hall than an arts center these days—it lost something when Shiffler left and lost almost everything when Richter left and hasn’t made much of an artistic impression since. A few names have moved through the building, doing performances and art shows, during new artistic director Corey Pearlstein’s tenure—cult names (Negativland, Guillermo Gómez-Peña), local names (Joe Von Appen, Degenerate Art Ensemble), local big names (Trimpin), and local bigger names (Gary Hill)—but they’ve passed through like phantoms, leaving no sense of artistic cohesion or weight. The programming has felt more like a grab bag of phoned-in favors than a multidisciplinary mission. I don’t hear people talking about ConWorks anymore. It’s almost like it’s already gone.
TMZ has learned the FBI and Massachusetts authorities raided a Westfield, Mass. home Tuesday night and seized photos of a baby shower held by Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.
In the 17 years since Beckett's death, the representatives of his estate have gone to extreme lengths to make sure those instructions are followed to the letter. They close or threaten to close productions that ignore them.
The estate's representatives, headed by Mr. Beckett's nephew, Edward, contend such strict adherence maintains the integrity of the Nobel Prize-winner's more than two dozen plays. Some in the theater say that it deprives directors of so much leeway as to be absurd.
In 1994, the estate canceled the European tour rights of a production of the play "Footfalls" in London because actress Fiona Shaw walked around the stage in a pattern different from what Beckett instructed in the text: to pace "downstage, parallel with front, length nine steps, width one metre, a little off centre audience right." Ms. Shaw also wore a bright red dress instead of the "worn grey wrap hiding feet" that Beckett's stage directions called for. In an email, Edward Beckett confirmed that the production was "curtailed" because "the company had broken the terms of their contract." In 2003, Edward Beckett threatened to close a production of "Waiting for Godot" in Sydney, Australia, because director Neil Armfield added music to it. But the theater's contract with the estate didn't prohibit music, so the production carried on. "In coming here with its narrow prescription, its dead controlling hand, its list of 'not alloweds,' the Beckett estate seems to me to be the enemy of art," Mr. Armfield railed in a speech he gave the same year in Sydney to a symposium of Beckett scholars.
The Supreme Court today delivered a sweeping rebuke to the Bush administration, ruling that it exceeded its authority by creating tribunals for terror suspects that fell short of the legal protections that Congress has traditionally required in military courts.
As a result, the court said in a 5-to-3 ruling, the tribunals violated both American military law and the military's obligations under the Geneva Conventions.
An unwed Superman is a mobile Superman. Thus it has been alleged that those who chronicle the Man of Steel's adventures are responsible for his condition. But the cartoonists are not to blame.
Nor is Superman handicapped by psychological problems.
Granted that the poor oaf is not entirely sane. How could he be? He is an orphan, a refugee, and an alien. His homeland no longer exists in any form, save for gigatons upon gigatons of dangerous, prettily colored rocks.
As a child and young adult, Kal-El must have been hard put to find an adequate father-figure. What human could control his antisocial behavior? What human would dare try to punish him? His actual, highly social behavior during this period indicates an inhuman self-restraint.
What wonder if Superman drifted gradually into schizophrenia? Torn between his human and kryptonian identities, he chose to be both, keeping his split personalities rigidly separate. A psychotic desperation is evident in his defense of his "secret identity."
But Superman's sex problems are strictly physiological, and quite real.
The purpose of this article is to point out some medical drawbacks to being a kryptonian among human beings, and to suggest possible solutions. The kryptonian humanoid must not be allowed to go the way of the pterodactyl and the passenger pigeon.
I was waiting for a friend in the lobby of the Hilton down at Union Square. Near me was a middle-aged woman speaking loudly into a pay phone.
"Yes, yes, that's right. You've got it. Now, here's what I want you to type. 'are em' ... yes. The letter 'r' and the letter 'm', together. Now type a dash. Yes, like a hyphen. OK, and then another 'r'. Yes rm space hyphen r. OK, now another space and then a star. Shift 8. Yes. Now read it back to me. [pause] OK perfect. Hit return and tell me what happens. [pause] [pause] OK. Thank you. Goodbye."
And she hung up and walked away while the command-line geek inside of me stood paralyzed with fear.
But our own hurricane history is more tumultuous than many New Yorkers might think. In 1821, when a major hurricane made a direct hit on Manhattan, stunned residents recorded sea levels rising as fast as thirteen feet in a single hour down where there’s now Battery Park City. Everything was flooded south of Canal Street. The storm struck at low tide, though, and, according to Queens College professor Nicholas Coch, a coastal geologist who calls himself a “forensic hurricanologist,” that’s “the only thing that saved the city.”
Then there’s Hog Island. The pig-shaped mile-long barrier island was off the southern coast of the Rockaways. After the Civil War, developers built saloons and bathhouses on it, and Hog Island became a Gilded Age version of the Hamptons. The city’s political bosses and business elite used the place as a kind of beachy annex of Tammany Hall. That all ended on the night of August 23, 1893, when a terrifying Category 2 hurricane made landfall on the swamp that is now JFK airport.
The hurricane was a major event. All six front-page columns of the August 25, 1893, New York Times were dedicated to the “unexampled fury” of the “West Indian monster.” The storm sunk dozens of boats and killed scores of sailors. In Central Park, hundreds of trees were uprooted, and gangs of Italian immigrant boys “roamed . . . in the early hours of the morning collecting the dead sparrows and plucking them of their feathers.” Apparently looting was not yet in vogue. The brand-new Metropolitan Life building on Madison Avenue was severely damaged. And a 30-foot storm surge swept across southern Brooklyn and Queens, destroying virtually every man-made structure in its path. These days, evacuation plans are in place, officials said last week. But “try to tell someone in Sheepshead Bay that they have to evacuate immediately because within the next 24 hours they’ll have 30 feet of storm surge,” says Mike Lee, director of Watch Command at the New York City Office of Emergency Management. “They’ll laugh at you. I mean, I barely even believe it.”
As for Hog Island, “it largely disappeared that night,” Coch says. “As far as I know, it is the only incidence of the removal of an entire island by a hurricane.”
Looking back from the 22nd century, future historians will marvel at the current era's obsession with extending intellectual property rights well past any reasonable limit. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the United States Patent and Trademark Office's determination to grant a patent to even the most absurd claims that cross its desk. Four years ago a patent attorney in Minnesota named Peter Olson demonstrated this by submitting the following patent in the name of his five year-old son, Steven. The patent was granted. Read it and weep.
But the movie's problem comes down to this: It's about the wrong girl. English actress Emily Blunt (the haughty seducer in My Summer of Love) plays Hathaway's rival, Emily, jealously guarding her status as Miranda's No. 1 assistant, scornful of the rube destined to replace her. Only Blunt seems to understand what Devil should've been—an enjoyable Bridget Jones knockoff. She sees, as we do, that Andy can't lose, and her panic only causes her to make a bigger mess of things. Which is why we rooted for Bridget, and her unlikely success raised a cheer. Starving herself for fashion, a young woman about to be replaced by this year's model, Emily moans at her desk, "I love my job, I love my job," like she's got a terminal disease. Viewers will know the feeling—it's called work, which Devil isn't prepared to do.
The town of Ann Arbour, Michigan is filled with tiny little fairy doors that have been built into the buildings. Some houses also have tiny staircases, tiny windows with tiny drapes...it's crazy wonderful. 11:33 AM
"The shoe is stitched together with multiple pieces of latex rubber cast out of moulds made from my own skin. The shoe's toe and heel raise and lower as it occasionally vibrates/pulsates, and twitches on the floor as if it were still alive. The movement is not constant, and usually causes people to jump back while they are in the middle of leaning in for a closer look." 11:18 AM
But by my 30s, those memories had started to fade. What I was left with was a memory of what my memory used to be like, a poignant awareness of my own deficit. I first noticed this about eight years ago: One day, rooting through a drawer in my mom’s house, I came across a photo of myself as a girl. In the photo, I’m about 5 years old, decked out in a swami robe, my eyes hidden behind enormous Jackie O sunglasses. But I could summon no memory of that day, no explanation, though I had the conviction that I used to know what that picture was all about, that there was some important story connected with it. It felt like I had lost a key that unlocked some inner door. I could still press my ear to it, could still run my hand against its grain and examine its hinges, but I would never get through that door again.
And so I began my novel about memory. I knew at the time that several companies, including one appropriately called Memory Pharmaceuticals, were working to develop real treatments for memory loss, but I didn’t pay them much mind. My drug would be different. It would be recreational-Proust’s madeleine reduced to tiny chemical specks. My drug would launch the user into the best moments of his life, allowing him to savor long ago joys, allowing him to meet his boyhood self....
[I]n the course of writing the novel, I saw just how dangerous this drug might be. The past is potently intoxicating, and if we could ever taste it purely, undiluted by forgetfulness, we would, I came to believe, disappear into ourselves.
But there's still a long way to go. Student-teacher ratios for the arts can be staggering. According to data provided by the department to the City Council this fall, there is 1 visual arts teacher for every 943 students and 1 music teacher for every 1,200. For dance and theater the numbers are even more extreme, with 1 dance teacher for every 8,088 students, and 1 theater teacher for every 8,871.
I have listened to Batman moan about how he will never fit in, and to countless mutants voice the same complaint, and, frankly, I don’t give a damn. The ethical duties of Superman leave me cold; I just want to watch him catch a falling car. 11:05 PM
The anonymous surrealist art/performance group The Residents is selling a double-CD package, titled River Of Crime, for $14.99. The two disks inside are blank. The recordings, inspired by old-timey radio serials, and other multimedia material will be released online every other week throughout the summer for download by those who have the digital subscription code inside the CD-R package. Once the whole collection of "Crimecasts" are downloaded, the owner is meant to complete the package by burning the disks. From the project description:
THE RESIDENTS’ RIVER OF CRIME is a character driven podcast series of 20 shows, based on the time honored concept of TRUE CRIME. Rooted in 1940’s style radio drama, THE RIVER OF CRIME not only updates the original form with modern production values, but also heavily leans on a distinctive soundtrack as one of its primary dramatic devices. A modern day DRAGNET, the series follows the reminisces of its unseen narrator as he discloses a lifelong obsession with wickedness and vice. But, as opposed to the ironic and terse Joe Friday, a classic crime solver, THE RIVER OF CRIME’S narrator is a crime collector.
"I like being part of a collective that completely subverts all my usual ways of approaching a play," said Ms. Schreck, who played the title role in "Major Barbara." "With 2HC I've found a sense of freedom in performing that I hadn't felt since I was a child. It's thrilling to be allowed to go so outrageously far — physically, vocally, interpretively — to test the boundaries of what the play can contain. Brendan and Brooke's shows are uniquely alive because of this, because everyone is putting so much on the line. We are aggressively risking making fools of ourselves. It's delicious. There's joy in it, and humility. It's fun."
The irony, of course, is that in Accidental Empires, Cringely was describing IBM, not Microsoft. The original definition of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, as described in the Jargon File, is:
“FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering [Amdahl] products.” The idea, of course, was to persuade them to go with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors’ equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally accomplished by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors’ equipment or software.
When my propane ran out when I was gone and the food thawed in the freezer I grieved over the five pounds of melted squid, but then a big gaunt bear arrived and feasted on the garbage, a few tentacles left in the grass, purplish white worms. O bear, now that you've tasted the ocean I hope your dreamlife contains the whales I've seen, that the one in the Humboldt current basking on the surface who seemed to watch the seabirds wheeling around her head.
The real reason to write fiction, after all, isn't to make money, nor to show the human heart in conflict with itself, nor to give a picture of one's time, nor to call attention to the plight of any oppressed classes, but to show off. You want to be able to say to visitors, "Sit down, let me clear that stuff off the couch, it's copies of my new novel." And to show off effectively, I want each book to be as close as I can get it to what I want it to be. It's like making six-foot-tall replicas of Gothic cathedrals out of toothpicks in your basement—you might as well get all the saints' faces right.
Disney threatened to sue a British stonemason for copyright infringement over a plan to carve Winnie the Pooh into the headstone of a stillborn infant. After negative publicity, they changed their mind.
June 23 (Bloomberg) -- Aaron Spelling, who produced such television programs as "Charlie's Angels,'' "Dynasty,'' and "Beverly Hills, 90210'' featuring beautiful people in glittering settings, has died, according to the Associated Press. He was 83. 6:03 PM
The success of these shows points to another part of the problem, which is that too many people think of regional theater as a place where promising plays are tried out, the worthiest of which eventually find their way to New York. Sometimes that's true -- but not often. Broadway, after all, only has room for a certain number of new productions each season, and the fearsomely high cost of presenting a show in New York means that most producers are inclined to play it safe. If you want to keep up with the latest and best in regional theater, you've got to go where the action is, not wait for it to come to you.
When a museum in Los Angeles or Philadelphia puts on a major exhibition, nobody in the world of art assumes it to be second-rate merely because it doesn't travel to the Metropolitan Museum. The same thing ought to be true of a theatrical production. That's why the time has come for American playgoers -- and, no less important, arts editors -- to start treating regional theater not as a minor-league branch of Broadway but as an artistically significant entity in and of itself. Take it from a critic who now spends much of his time living out of a suitcase: If you don't know what's hot in "the stix," you don't know the first thing about theater in 21st-century America.
Help is what the Public Theater is looking for to carry off Suzan-Lori Parks' ambitious sui generis project 365 Days/365 Plays. The project is described thusly: "In November 2002, the Pulitzer prize-winning Suzan-Lori Parks sat down and committed to writing a play a day for the next 365 days. For the 2006-07 Season, The Public will produce the New York premiere of these works by gathering together a widely diverse cross-section of New York’s theatre companies to participate in this project. Over the course of one year, the selected theatres—curated by The Public, Suzan-Lori Parks and Producer Bonnie Metzger—will perform these brief, brilliant snapshots from the imagination of one of America's leading playwrights. This will be part of a yearlong national festival of the play cycle that will take place in major cities around the country including Atlanta, Los Angeles and Denver. Tickets at The Public will be free." 4:54 PM
In one of the few actual logs we have of a high-level interrogation, that of Mohammed al-Qhatani (first reported in TIME), doctors were present during the long process of constant sleep deprivation over 55 days, and they induced hypothermia and the use of threatening dogs, among other techniques. According to Miles, Medics had to administer three bags of medical saline to Qhatani — while he was strapped to a chair — and aggressively treat him for hypothermia in the hospital. They then returned him to his interrogators. Elsewhere in Guantánamo, one prisoner had a gunshot wound that was left to fester during three days of interrogation before treatment, and two others were denied antibiotics for wounds. In Iraq, according to the Army surgeon general as reported by Miles, "an anesthesiologist repeatedly dropped a 2-lb. bag of intravenous fluid on a patient; a nurse deliberately delayed giving pain medication, and medical staff fed pork to Muslim patients." Doctors were also tasked at Abu Ghraib with "Dietary Manip (monitored by med)," in other words, using someone's food intake to weaken or manipulate them. 12:59 PM
What in the hell is going on around here? This is a sad state of affairs for all the post grad English majors floating around this city. There were 200 of us applying for the same internship. This is not an internship at The New Yorker; it’s a 36X48 inch poster. So, someone asks what you do for a living. Oh. I work for a poster, for free. Consider your readership: Every week, your writing would appear in waiting rooms across the country, where phlegmatic hypochondriacs and Alzheimer patients would read your articles if only to be distracted by stale issues of Newsweek. (Need I insert the quip here about how the Alzheimer patients would only forget your writing after about twenty minutes?) And what these guys were telling me is that over 200 people wanted to work for them, for free. Really. 6:19 PM
Winterbottom's film dramatizes the experience of three young British men, known as "the Tipton Three" named for the part of England they call home, who on a wedding trip to Pakistan in 2001 end up in Afghanistan and subsequently rounded up by US forces to be sent to Guantanamo. At the camp, they're held for two years without any formal charges being brought against them and subjected to sleep deprivation, noise torture and host of other deplorable treatments in order to force a confession that they are affiliated with Al Qaeda. Winterbottom inter-cuts recreated footage with actors and documentary-style story telling from the real Tipton three for a powerful and important film experience.
So I'm trying to figure out how I feel about the fact that there seems to be an arranged marriage taking place within my family.
My uncle and his wife are hardcore Bible-belt Christians, by which I mean they believe in such concepts as "The man is the head of the household and it's the wife's duty to submit to his leadership." And that they order their entire lives around what they believe God wants for them (and consult him often on exactly what that is), rather than simply claiming Christianity based on a weekly or monthly trip to church. They have three biological kids and have adopted NINE more, going on ten — five of them from Russia, the rest each from different countries. They've adopted kids considered too old to be adopted; they've adopted deeply troubled children, they've adopted "reject" kids who were adopted, then kicked out, by other families who didn't realize what a commitment they were making. They've basically made their lives into a ministry, and they've done wonderful things with these unwanted kids. They currently live in Alabama, though they're originally from Oklahoma.
I found out over the weekend from my mother that my aunt's been corresponding with a similar family in Michigan — a couple that's taken in more than a dozen special-needs children, and currently have 15 kids in their care, though some of those are their biological children. My aunt and this family's matriarch have been corresponding online about the difficulties of raising such a large family of adoptees, and they get along really well. Somewhere along the line, they decided that the Michigan family's oldest boy, "James," and my aunt's oldest adopted girl, a 19-year-old Russian I'll call "Ellen," would be perfect for each other. So the families arranged a meeting. James liked Ellen; Ellen is painfully shy and reportedly barely spoke to James and was never alone with him. But they later corresponded online, and he decided she was perfect for him, so the mothers have set a wedding date in January.
For about three months, we settled into a comfortable routine. I would load my pockets full of raisins when I got home from work and release the rodents. They would attempt to bite me while I threw raisins at their faces. (Ferrets hate many things, but they love raisins.) Going barefoot inside the house was no longer an option. Or standing still for more than 15 seconds at a time. Or having guests over. My ferrets hated everyone, but especially gay men. I thought that was kind of funny. (Sorry Craig!)(And Joey!)(And Jared, Eric, etc!) When they weren’t attacking me or my roommate (sorry again, Craig!), they were sniffing out the most expensive place possible to take a shit.
One day, I bought them little ferret leashes, because I naively hoped I could take them for walks, like I would a dog. When I strapped them into their leashes, they lay down and refused to move. I dragged them in limp circles around the kitchen for a few minutes, waiting for our “walk” to get fun, before I gave up and released them. They immediately loped over to my most expensive pair of leather shoes and began shitting.
One of the points of my forthcoming novel is that once something’s put on the internet, it’s not “fringe” or “edge” anymore. By dint of being freely accessible on the world’s most massive information network, it is de facto The Mainstream. People talk of blogs as the alternative to Mainstream Media, but if a million people a day read the ad-supported Boing Boing, how is that not mainstream?
So don’t look at this as some weird fringy thing you can dismiss as the personal freak of a handful of people. Remember the old maxim — if you think your own fetish is so strange that only one in a million people would understand, then there’s eight people like you in New York City alone.
Combining that information gave the panel "a high level of confidence that the last few decades of the 20th century were warmer than any comparable period in the last 400 years," the academy said.
Overall, the panel agreed that the warming in the last few decades of the 20th century was unprecedented over the last 1,000 years, though relatively warm conditions persisted around the year 1000, followed by a "Little Ice Age" from about 1500 to 1850.
The scientists said they had less confidence in the evidence of temperatures before 1600. But they considered it reliable enough to conclude there were sharp spikes in carbon dioxide and methane, the two major "greenhouse" gases blamed for trapping heat in the atmosphere, beginning in the 20th century, after remaining fairly level for 12,000 years.
Midway in his allotted threescore years and ten, Skot comes to himself with a start and realizes that he has strayed from the True Way into the Dark Wood of Error (DMV). His way is blocked by three beasts of Afternoon: THE LEOPARD OF AUTOMATED QUEUING, THE LION OF UNCOMFORTABLE PLASTIC CHAIRS and THE SHE-WOLF OF DISCARDED USA TODAYS. These beasts, especially the She-Wolf, drive him back despairing into the darkness of sitting down and hopeless inertia. But just as all seems lost, a figure appears to him. It is the shade of VIRGIL, Skot's symbol of a half-remembered liberal arts education.
It's incomprehensible to me how slowly some people can stand to walk. Now, I'm not talking about the injured or elderly. I'm talking about normal, young, healthy people, that walk like they have all the time in the world. Don't they have somewhere to go? And if not, why are they out walking? Wouldn't they rather get where they are going quickly so that they have more time to do whatever it is they're going there to do? Can't they feel the grim reaper breathing down their neck? They're wasting their own lives. That's suicide.
In 1973, academic psychologist D.L. Rosenhan sent himself and seven friends and colleagues to the psychiatric emergency rooms of 12 different hospitals. Each told ER workers that for several weeks he or she had been distressed by voices saying "empty," "hollow," and "thud." The testers gave false names and occupations but otherwise accurately reported their histories, which did not include mental illness. In all 12 instances they were admitted to a psychiatric ward. At that point, they stopped pretending to have symptoms. Nonetheless, they were held for an average of 19 days (their stays ranged from seven to 52 days) and were all released with a diagnosis of "schizophrenia, in remission," or something like it. Rosenhan titled his study "On Being Sane in Insane Places" and argued that psychiatric diagnosis has more to do with the presumptions of clinicians, and their tendency to treat ordinary behavior as pathological when it occurs on a psych ward, than with a rational assessment of symptoms.
I'm not sure why I asked to review Defending the Caveman, Rob Becker's hacky, indestructible mid-'90s comedy of genders. Was it my perverse obsession with the world's worst jokes? Simple curiosity about why this play, of all plays, refuses to die? Whatever the reason, I knew I would hate it. I couldn't wait to hate it. Hating is my specialty, and hating Defending the Caveman would be my masterpiece.