Dear Paul Ryan…

Posted on by Dale

Dear Speaker Ryan:

If I may, I’d like to offer a few thoughts on your recent selfie with Republican congressional interns.

As you probably are aware, the Intertubes — snarky bastards that they are — immediately noticed that one thing about the photo.  Was it all the smiling, happy faces of the hopeful young, proud to be interning on Capitol Hill?  Was it your charming face?  (You are handsome, although I’d loosen up the hair a bit or regrow your stubble.) Was it your natural ease with a selfie stick?

Alas, no one seems to have given you credit for any of that.  I will, though.  Kudos for providing these young people such a great opportunity to serve their nation and a start on their path to the corridors of power.  Kudos for giving them (and their proud parents) such a cool moment to remember.  Kudos for your wit in titling your Instagram shot: “I think this sets a record for the most number of #CapitolHill interns in a single selfie. #SpeakerSelfie.”

No, the one thing that everyone noticed about the photo was how white it was.1

Can we talk?

I don’t believe for a second that you or anyone on your staff have excluded people of color from your intern opportunities, although there are some of your fellow congresspersons about whom I am not sure I could say the same.  I’m sure you can very honestly say that the young men and women in the photo are exceptional and, while probably well-connected, the most qualified for the position.

Nor do I believe that anything about this selfie gave you pause.  It never dawned on you that the rest of America might think, “Hm, that group of people looks awfully… homogeneous…”  Nor did it dawn on you that the rest of America might think, “Mhm.  Republicans, amirite?”

Surely you can see what a problem this is for your party.  Even though you did not mean to send the message, the rest of the America got it loud and clear.  Remember Ballew’s Law of Theatre: The audience is always right, even when it’s wrong.2

You’re smart enough to fix this.  You know what you have to do.  In order not to have to second guess every photo op like this, you have to have a room full of people who more accurately represent the rest of America.  And for that to happen, you have to hire those people.

But what if they don’t apply?  That’s a very good question.  Here’s another very good question, which I hope has already occurred to you: if people of color, qualified people of color, are not applying to intern for Republican congresspersons, why not?  And how can you change that?

Can you change that?

Best wishes,

etc.

UPDATE: http://crooksandliars.com/2016/07/organizers-scrambling-replace-white

Merciful Cthulhu, eat me first.

—————

1 If you like, see if you can spot the one kid of color in the photo.  It’s like Where’s Waldo? only different.

2 Dr. Leighton Ballew, the genius director and founder/chair of the Department of Drama and Theatre at the University of Georgia back in the day.

Ah, past glories…

Posted on by Dale

Fellow Lichtenbergian Jeff Bishop asked me for a photo to include in his new history/compilation book on Coweta County, and I found to my chagrin that I had very few physical photos of my regime as artistic director of the Newnan Community Theatre Company (as it was then known), and the online photos I had were of low quality.

Sic transit gloria mundi, indeed.

However, I did find this photo:

Here I am, singing Count Almaviva in my own translation of Nozze di Figaro, titled Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. This was in the fall of 2002, fourteen years ago.

Mercy, what an accomplishment! I had decided two years before that I would leave the position of artistic director at the end of the 2002 season,1 and I wanted to go out with a bang.  Figaro had been on my bucket list for years, but actually producing it was always sort of out of the question.

But it was clearly a case of now or never—when else would I have the chance?  Who would ever give me a shot like this?  Me, that’s who.

So over the course of 18 months, I worked and worked on translating the thing.  It was actually fun, working out the punchlines — this opera has punchlines — and the rhyme schemes.

Then we had auditions, and wouldn’t you know it, no one suitable auditioned for the Count.  I was forced, forced I tell you, to take the role myself.

I found a reduced orchestration, from the National Opera of Wales, and hired a tiny orchestra.  Dave Dorrell designed a gorgeous set of fabric drops that made the set changes easy,2 the usual gang of angels and elves made the costumes (especially the Act IV masquerade, in which the four principals found themselves dressed in their 18th century parallels). We pulled together the missing chorus members and got to work.

And how did this ultimate vanity project, an 18th-century opera buffa masterpiece, fare with the audiences of Newnan?  Sold out, start to finish, standing room only, thunderous applause.  It was exhilarating.

In order to identify some of the performers in some of the photos I pulled up, I dug out the program and was struck by my Director’s Comments.  I will leave them here:

I always thought that someday I should like to direct opera.  Perhaps one day I shall, but in the meantime, what we’ve done with Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro will serve.

What have we done?  We have taken the world’s most perfect comic musical work and approached it as if it were a brand new script intended for our audiences.  When I translated da Ponte’s libretto, I kept an ear out for natural sounding English and made sure that that the humor  was ratcheted up to the level where it would be funny to a modern audience, not just quaintly amusing. Likewise in our staging, we’ve applied all our experience as musical theatre performers to the score and text, pointing up the jokes and playing out the sheer humanness of the characters.

For they are human, splendidly and foolishly so, as the title of Beaumarchais’s original play suggests: The Follies of a Day.  Everyone sings in the Act IV finale, “Day of fools and night of madness,” and by that point, they all understand exactly what that means, about the others and about themselves as well.  And through them, we see ourselves.

Who hasn’t had to deal with the Count, convinced that everyone and everything is out to get him when he is the author of his own problems?  Who hasn’t been Cherubino, young and in love with love even as he is tormented by the sweet newness of it all? (And who hasn’t written really bad love poetry, like Cherubino’s Act II song, “Ladies, confide in me”?)

With any luck, we haven’t had to suffer like the Countess does, but if we have, she shows us how to get the courage to take charge of our own life.  Figaro and Susanna show us the value of humor in a relationship, even at the moments of highest stress in their lives.

And don’t we all hope that forgiveness and completeness are possible?  Don’t we all wish that our problems would resolve themselves in a shower of fireworks and joy in a moonlit garden?  There’s the ache in the brilliant comedy: despite what we think might happen after the curtain comes down and the sun comes up the next morning, for one moment there is redemption, summed up in Mozart’s perfect little world.

That’s our goal tonight, to bring you safely through all the lunacies of these wonderful characters to the final haven of the garden, and to send you out into our own night with that perfect joy now a part of your life as it is a part of ours.

Dang, I write good, don’t I?

—————

1 We ran Jan-Dec in those days; most of us were educators and opening a season along with school would have been stupidly stressful.

2 Fun story: I had in my head that I wanted the color palette to be a muted 50s kind of style, based on my favorite childhood book, The Color Kittens.  I didn’t have my original copy, so I ordered one from Amazon and was astonished to find that it was illustrated by Alice & Martin Provensen, the illustrators of William Blake’s Inn!

Not hard to see it that way, indeed

Posted on by Dale

Oh, Allen West, you adorable lunkhead! Here’s the deal, folks: people like Allen West got to be famous by stampeding the amygdalas, and they continue to rake in the old grift money by continuing to stampede the amygdalas.

What am I babbling about?  Here, from today’s FaceTubes: Illinois May Be The First To Do This For Muslims

Very scare. Much jihad.

Here’s the scary photo:

The writer wants you to connect that photo with Illinois.1

I think I’ve dissected a piece like this before, where the writer (in this case not actually the lunkhead Allen West himself) clickbaits with a horrific headline/cutline, then copy/pastes a straight news item without a trace of the panic that informs the headline.  You get a couple of breathless introductory paragraphs, the copy/paste stuff (boring!), and then you get a pivot to something completely irrelevant — in this case the Muslim Brotherhood, which is framed as a significant threat to the U.S.  Which it is not.

Then you get to the last paragraph:

Are councils like this part of the Muslim Brotherhood’s grand plan? Not difficult to see it that way. And once this starts happening in Illinois, how long before it spreads across the country?

Definitely something to think about, isn’t it?

Ooga — and, dare I say it? — Booga!

Allow me to summarize:

  • Here’s a thing we’re all scared of.2
  • It could be coming true!3
  • [copy/paste of completely un-scary news item]
  • Here’s another thing we’re even more scared of and which we’ve endowed with super powers of evil!
  • Are they related?  MAYBE!!4
  • You should now assimilate this into your brain-thoughts as proven fact! RELEASE THE AMYGDALAS!

If this were turned into me in a journalism class, the writer would fail.

—————

1 Spoiler alert: the photo is not from Illinois.  It is from Egypt, the super secret lair of the Muslim Brotherhood.  I forget whether they’re Marvel or DC.

2 For differing values of all.  And scared.

3 It is not coming true.

4 They are not related.

Gun free zones… if only…

Posted on by Dale

So, it seems that one of the favorite shibboleths of the gun fondlers is that these mass shootings often occur in a “gun free” zone, like a school or a church or some place where, I don’t know, reasonable people might reasonably assume they’re not going to get shot.1

“Sitting ducks” is how the gunhumping crowd describes the victims who apparently assumed incorrectly that they were safe.  If schools and churches and bars and other such places allowed guns, then those very sad deaths would not have occurred.

But I have to take exception to their argument.  These zones are not “gun free,” are they?  That’s just what we’d like them to be: free of guns.  We tell people, “Hey, no guns here!” and that’s what reasonable people who reasonably assume they’re not going to be shot there will do.  They don’t bring guns.

But nothing ever prevents a person with a gun from bringing one there.  They are not “gun free” zones at all, are they?

So saying that gun free zones are useless and should be done away with so that gun fondlers can protect us from the bad guy with the gun is kind of dumb.  There are no gun free zones in this country.

Oh, wait.

There are gun free zones in this country.  Perhaps we could look at those spaces and see how many people die in them from being shot when they had reasonably assumed they wouldn’t be.

We have the U.S. Congress, for starters.  No guns are allowed there.  Yes, security has guns, but those guys are heavily trained and heavily licensed, and not even they would be allowed to bring their gun into the Capitol if they showed up with Aunt Sally for a tour, would they?  So there’s an actual, honest-to-Cthulhu gun free zone.

How many people have been shot and killed in the U.S. Congress?  Go google that.  (Spoiler alert: the only people who have been shot in the U.S. Congress are those who tried to bring a gun into the gun free zone.  It’s almost as if they intend to have no guns there.  Because of not wanting to be shot or something.)

Hey, here’s another gun free zone: The Republican National Convention in Cleveland!  (You will have noticed that both zones are stocked to the gills with employees of the National Rifle Association, i.e., congresscritters and Republickers.)

I rallied to the cause a couple of months ago and signed the petition to allow guns in the Republicker convention.  After all, don’t they want it to be safe?  How can it be safe if it’s a gun free zone?

However, we were soon informed that while the NRA employees who are convening there might be sympathetic to our freedomz because freedom, the Secret Service made the rules and they’re the ones who have made it gun free.

Huh.  It’s like the Secret Service thinks that guns are a safety issue and would somehow complicate their job of making sure that Donald Drumpf can reasonably assume he’s not going to be shot there.  Weird.

And have you noticed that the NRA has not called to overturn the Secret Service’s rules about the Republicker convention?  Why isn’t Wayne LaPierre ranting about the restriction of his employees’ precious Second Amendment rights to pack heat on the floor of the Quicken Loans Arena?  Why is he allowing their rights to be crushed by the tyrannical overreach of the federal government?

Here’s the point: when it comes right down to it, the only way to keep people from being shot is to guaran-damn-tee that there are no guns.  That’s the bottom line, and all the whinging about Second Amendment rights cannot change that.

The only argument that the gunhumpers can make is that if they’re allowed to play Good Guy with a Gun, then the number of shooting deaths at your child’s school might only be eight instead of 26.  They do not — because they can not — promise zero deaths.

Oh, and the Second Amendment?  About that.

—————

1 You will notice that the NRA has not made that an issue with the Dallas shootings.

What a maroon.

Posted on by Dale

“We’ll do plenty of stories,” Mr. Trump promised enigmatically. “O.K.?”  [NYT, 6/7/16]

With all due respect to reporters Jason Horowitz, Alexander Burns, and Maggie Haberman, enigmatically is not the word you’re looking for.  Enigmatically implies there is a secret reality that is being concealed.

There is no secret reality.  Trump has nothing in his head but the words that come out of his mouth. The word you’re looking for to describe Donald J. Trump’s response is cluelessly.

Oh, for…

Posted on by Dale

Here’s some stupid:

Fox News Asks Whether the Statue of Liberty is ‘Transgender’

For real.

Merciful Cthulhu, conservatives, that’s not how art works.  Here, let Wallace Stevens explain it to you:

I

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are 
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

It does not freaking matter if Bartholdi used his brother instead of his mother as the model for the statue.

Let me repeat that for the hard of thinking: It does not freaking matter if Bartholdi used his brother instead of his mother as the model for the statue.

He did his sketches, and he MADE THE THING THAT IS NOT.  Those of us who are sane, who know that art is newness, and that it is not in service to your ideology, know that it does not freaking matter if Bartholdi used his brother instead of his mother as the model for the statue.

How art works has nothing to do with your fear of other people’s dangly bits.

That is all.  Go read about art: Lichtenbergianism.com

Lichtenbergianism: a new frontier

Posted on by Dale

No, I haven’t written any more on Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy, and no, I haven’t done any more work on the book proposal.  But I did establish a new front in my battle for world domination.

As I posted the other day, I bought the domain name for Lichtenbergianism.com and started a trial website at Squarespace.  Within 24 hours I had ponied up for a business website; within 48 I had a new email address and a MailChimp account.  Soon I shall have a new Twitter account.

(The MailChimp account means you can sign up to have a digest email of the week’s blog posts sent to you every Saturday, i.e., you can procrastinate about learning how to make procrastination work for you!)

Now if I only had actual content for the website.  Hey, I’m working on it—every day is a glorious flood of SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION as I figure out what it is I have to offer and how to put that before the public.

Maybe a Venn diagram would help

Posted on by Dale

Just kidding.  The people who make these things up are impermeable to any form of logic, even ones that involve simple pictures.

Today on the FaceTubes:

Oh, where to begin?  Let’s start with the easy stuff, the inevitable grammatical errors: State Department is capitalized, please, as is Muslims, and our sentences need a period at the end, don’t they, Johnny?

Okay.  Let’s untangle the presumptions first.

#1: The State Department had an opportunity to intervene in the events of Sep 11, 2012, at the American compound in Benghazi, Libya, and for some reason decided not to, resulting in the deaths of four Americans.  The implication is that this action was deliberate, callous, and probably criminal.

#2: The feckless—and yet omnipotent—Obama administration is preparing to bring over nearly a quarter of a million Muslim refugees (a word curiously missing from the poster) and saddle our taxpayers with the cost.  The implication is twofold: a) those people are terrorists; and b) “those people.”1

The point of the poster is to convince the reader that since the State Department weren’t competent enough to accomplish presumption #1, they are likewise clearly not competent enough to accomplish #2, which in any case they shouldn’t even be doing.

First, boys and girls, before we can address the legitimacy of the argument, we should examine the truth of each presumption.

Despite the fevered dreams of the right wing, the tragedy of Benghazi was not due to the criminal masterminds of the State Department.2 To date, there have been seven investigations of the event by the Republican-controlled Congress.  The results have been published, and not one of them found that the State Department failed to take action that could have prevented the loss of life.  The most popular shibboleth amongst the brethren is that orders were given to military air support/rescue missions to “stand down”; no such orders were given.

Currently Trey Gowdy and the House Select Committee have covered themselves with embarrassment by digging and digging and digging for two years to find something—anything—that would justify its $7 million cost so far, and yet they have not issued a report despite taking longer than the Watergate investigation.  Popular opinion is that they are waiting until the Democratic convention or the election to release something embarrassing to Hillary Clinton, but I’m beginning to believe they’re stalling because they have nothing and they know if they release a report it will knock the props out from under their favorite hobbyhorse.  As long as they keep mum, then they can continue to insinuate that Clinton is History’s Greatest Monster™ without having the media call them the liars they are.

update (6/27): Called it.

As for refugees: Nope. Nope.  And nope.  And benefits?  Here you go, straight from the horse’s mouth.  (As for Social Security benefits, nope.)

So, both presumptions are lies.3

Even if we believed that both presumptions were true, however, the argument is still specious. The events of presumption #1 were essentially an act of war, as in “fog of” and all that.  Events on the ground were fast, furious, unknowable, and unstoppable.  Much hay has been made of the fact that the first official statements on the attack said they were triggered by some YouTube video, but the only stone I would cast would be to advise government officials against saying anything definite while events are unfolding.  You know, like “Donald Trump is possibly bankrupt.  ALLEGEDLY.”

Meanwhile, even if we were preparing to flood our fair nation with 200,000 terrorists, the process there is an excruciatingly deliberate 2-year process.  Plenty of time to send in rescue helicopters.  Or something.  These people aren’t good at thinking their parallel situations through.

In other words, presuming the incompetence of the State Department in handling a terrorist attack does not lead to the same presumption about a process which is part of their daily job description and which has been for a very long time.

Come on, people, peek out from behind your amygdalas a little bit and see if you can find better, more logical reasons to overthrow the government.

(And of course, we would be remiss if we didn’t examine the little attribution in the lower right corner: “Outlaw Liberalism In America.”  Honey, please.  Grammar note: it’s usual not to capitalize prepositions.)

—————

1 You know, “those people.”  The ones who get all the free stuff, and not just the pitiable amount given to our deserving (white) poor people. “Those people” get the good welfare that allows you to buy crab legs, iPhones, and new cars.

2 Where State Department = Hillary Clinton. Let’s be honest here.

3 I know, but pretend you’re shocked.

Lichtenbergianism: WHAT HAVE I DONE?

Posted on by Dale

I have done a thing.

Why have I done this thing?  Because if I am seeking world domination, I have to have a platform.  Yes, I already have this platform, but I want to keep my private thoughts on a separate plane from my benevolent despot thoughts.

Here is the problem, though: WHAT THE HECK AM I SUPPOSED TO PUT ON THIS NEW PLATFORM?  Talk about an ABORTIVE ATTEMPT.  Just jump in there, man, and don’t count the cost.

As has been often noted, it’s not the jump that kills you, it’s the SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION.

So let’s think this thing through.

  • If Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy were ever published, of course we would want to tie it in to Lichtenbergianism.com as a marketing ploy.
  • The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published [EGGYBP] encourages you to have an online presence before your book is published.
  • I can begin to promote the idea of the book and any auxiliary services such as speaking engagements, workshops, etc., as part of the book proposal.
  • Especially if I were able to begin doing workshops and such even without the book being published, Lichtenbergianism.com would be the appropriate base.
  • With the new domain, I can keep emails about Lichtenbergianism separate from my other personas, e.g., my personal life, my burner life, etc.
    • This would also give me a separate Twitter account with which to begin seeking my minions for world domination.
  • Filling the new domain with… what, exactly?… would force me to concentrate on exactly what: blogposts, linked articles, tweets, etc.
  • Arrrgh!

You should tell me what to put on the new site in comments.  We’ll call it focus group testing.

In other news, I have done some serious work on getting the book proposal done.  Next up: get serious about finding an agent/publisher.

Easy, fun, and SWANKY

Posted on by Dale

Now someday it may happen that a victim must found you will find yourself hosting a little soirée for a friend’s book launch, and you will think to yourself how nice it would be to have those little plastic plates with the event  printed on them.  But you don’t have them, because a) they’re expensive; b) you only need a couple dozen, not 500; and c) you waited too late to even try to get them.

So you make your own:

Here’s how.

Open your favorite program to make posters/brochures/labels/bookmarks.  I use Apple’s Pages because it has everything I need.

Create a rectangle the size of your label (clear mailing labels are what we’re looking at here.)  I got 2″x4″ labels.  To make it easier to select the rectangles later, make sure that the rectangle is filled with white.  (If you leave it just blank, then you have to click exactly on the border to select the rectangle, and that’s going to be very tedious indeed.)

Now fill it with your text blocks and images and whatever.

One reason I like Pages is that when you’re in “canvas” mode, little blue lines pop up to show you when objects are aligned/centered/etc.

Pro tip: once you get your one label made to your satisfaction, select everything and GROUP THEM so that nothing slides out of place.

Here’s the critical step: flip that sucker horizontally:

Think about it: you’re going to be peeling these off and putting them on the bottom of the clear plastic plate.  You’re going to be seeing the label from the other side.

Now:

  • Duplicate your label across.
  • Align the labels.
  • Group them.
  • Duplicate that row and position the new row.
  • Measure your label sheet and position everything to land on the labels.  My labels were edge-to-edge, but if there are spaces between yours you will have to ungroup the row of labels to position each one.
  • Print on a piece of paper, then hold it up to the light behind a label sheet to see if you got the positioning right.
  • Adjust if necessary.

Once you get all the labels where they need to be, here’s the tedious part:

  • UNGROUP everything down to the level where you can select each rectangle and turn off the border line.  In Pages, it’s called the stroke of the object.  Your mileage may vary.  You’re doing this because you don’t need or want the lines, just the contents of the rectangle.
  • I wouldn’t delete the rectangles themselves, because one day you’re going to want to do this again and will need those borders.  If you’re clever, you can LOCK the position of each rectangle so that they won’t slide around by accident and all you have to do is duplicate the contents.
  • Print the labels.
  • Apply them to the bottom of your plates.

Have your soirée.

your host, the author, some rando

And don’t forget to make your bar as hipster as you can:

And bookmarks.  Don’t forget the bookmarks:

Swanky!

(The book, by the way, is Another Farewell to the Theatre, by Marc Honea, pictured above.  It is published by The Lichtenbergian Press and was designed by me.)