We All Learn Eventually
In 2009 World Theatre Day changed my life.
I am a community minded sort. Often my reaction to any given event is: How could we have involved more people? How could more folks have been helped?
When Rebecca Coleman mentioned on Twitter that Vancouver had celebrated a city-wide World Theatre Day in 2008 and what if we made that happen across cities? I was or course interested. I had no idea what I could do locally. I had no money, no space and no standing company to help me with either. But I could help activate Austin and push other leaders to do something.
Dancing With Myself
I’m almost as busy as you are. In that rush of “on to the next thing” I currently get most of my news on the fly from my Twitter and Facebook feeds. On a quick scroll through Twitter I caught my friend Reina Hardy crowing about her pending crossing of the border for something called Monologues for Nobody. I chased it down through a few links, saw that this was a Toronto Fringe project curated/commissioned by longtime #2amt contributor Jordan Mechano, read just a little about it and got excited to share this project more broadly. I asked Mechano a batch of questions I had about Monologues for Nobody and I hope you enjoy his answers as much as I did.
Peel Out the Watchword
The Chicago Reader published as careful and deliberate a piece of investigative journalism covering the arts as I can ever remember reading. In the piece Aimee Levitt and Chris Piatt laid out a history of mental and physical abuse and cultish insularity at Chicago’s Profiles Theatre that mirrors much of that theatre’s intense production history. In an era of hot takes and sound bite reporting I want to thank the authors for doing the leg work, and taking the time and real estate that digital print offers to not cut corners. It seems that most of the theatre world has read it already, but if you haven’t I recommend you take the time. If you are sensitive to stories of abuse it’s going to be a tough read.
The Tyranny of Me and You
I’m fascinated by observing chefs interacting with food. Unlike most folks who create they can’t avoid their work outside their “studio”, they need to eat after all. They are cursed to combine all the creativity of a visual artist with the what-about-me demands of an IT person visiting their family… “you’re going to cook aren’t you?”
So it’s instructive to eat with them, to spy out the sorts of things a pro chooses. Speaking generally? They choose comfort food and simple food made well. They also find the seams in the menu, the places where another chef has obviously added something fresh or something they love mixed amongst the regular offerings, the “kitchen item”.
I don’t find culinary folks to be particularly evangelical. They may go on a prolonged brussels sprout kick or extol the joys of farm to table or tongue to tail but mostly they’re not going to deride your jalapeno bacon mac and cheese for not being authentic enough.
Is this Heaven? No, it’s Iowa
Less than. Incomplete. On your way up, or down, or out.
It has a uniquely negative connotation that sort of sums up how the City-States treat the provinces in just about every field now.
Branch Rickey broke it all.
Oh sure, blah blah blah Jackie Robinson, colour line, ripple effect on American race relations… Barack Obama. Mr. Rickey was, as Billy Beane would do generations later, simply leveraging undervalued markets, which is what he had been doing all his career.