GBS Hiatus

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Hello, dearest fellow travelers. I’ve been compiling a weekly The Good, The Bad, and The Silly for you since August 6 of last year, and most of the time I’ve enjoyed it. I read a lot of articles online each week anyway, so for a long time it was a good way to reflect on the information gleaned therein and write a short summary, then share that information with the world. But lately I’ve been feeling some bad news fatigue. It seems much harder to find good news to help balance out the bad, and the bad is so soul-crushingly bad. I’m still reading up on current events and smart people’s analyses of those events, but for now, I’m not going to compile them in a GBS anymore.

This may change sometime in the near or distant future, and please let me know if the GBS was a regular part of your reading. In the meantime, I will encourage you to add the links under “The Personal is Political” to the right here to your own RSS feed or bookmarks section, and delve into these issues that way.

Leave any links you’ve collected (especially something uplifting! freezing temperatures have returned and we sure need uplifting!) in the comments.

Have a great weekend! See you on Tuesday.

TWO New Centerstage Reviews Up

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Double feature comin’ at ya, dearest fellow travelers, and one of them is even a bona fide recommendation!

First up, God of Carnage at the Goodman. This is a smash hit show in Europe and New York, but it made my skin crawl. You can’t tear yourself away from it, sure, like the car crash other reviewers are comparing it to, but that doesn’t meant you don’t feel ill about it. Here’s an excerpt of the review:

Although American audiences view Yasmina Reza’s plays as non-stop comedies, Reza herself sees the plays as “tragedies that happen to be funny.” After seeing the Goodman Theatre production of her Tony Award-winning “God of Carnage,” I have to agree with her. This is no farce or comedy of manners; this is a tragedy of the human spirit, a cynical portrayal of people at their worst with the implication that they don’t even have a best to aspire to.

You can read the rest here.

I only get 300 words for my Centerstage reviews, so I didn’t get to flesh this out, but Sessily and I had a beer after the show and hashed over just why we found it so upsetting and unsatisfying. After we fumbled around with how to articulate what was so upsetting about the gender relations in the play, Sessily got to the heart of it: “The women were criticized for being a negative, while the men were criticized for not being a positive, which allowed the men to prove through their actions that they were, in fact, that positive.” That is, the men were allowed to be the neutral, from which they could prove they had characteristics that the women had suggested they didn’t have (like self-sufficiency), whereas the women were pre-defined as hysterical, controlling, flighty, flawed, etc., and so all they could do was operate within those limited definitions. This is true in the world at large, of course, as men are the default and women just get shoved into the well-known categories of whores, virgins, nags, seductresses, etc. But it was troubling to see Reza play into it, and it made the whole play harder to watch.

Next up, MilkMilkLemonade at Chicago Dramatists. I do recommend this play! So if you have a spare $20 and hour and a half, head on over. (It’s right off the Chicago blue line stop, which is convenient, and next to several low-key bars, which is also convenient.) The excerpt:

Pavement Group’s “MilkMilkLemonade” is all about bodies; whether our bodies define who we are, the secrets our bodies keep, the terrible way our bodies turn on us in illness. Fittingly, it’s a very physical production, with a grandma who walks like a sick chicken and a chicken who walks like The Fonz, and two boys punching, kissing and jumping their way through early adolescence.

You can read the rest of the review here.

It took me a few minutes to get into some of the wackier aspects of the show (the narrator translating the chicken’s quacks, the “ding” of the triangle when someone dropped a pun), but once I realized that this is how Emory sees the world, through a showbiz filter that makes the sadness of his life bearable, I dug it.

A Room With No View

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The lake wasn’t visible yesterday. It wasn’t even a cloudy day, but when I stood at the window of the 27th floor of my office building and looked out across Adams and past the Board of Trade, I saw no horizon. There was only a soft gray sky settling down beyond Michigan Ave. It didn’t bother me, because I have this view every work day, so I get to see the lake in all its changeability. But I thought about all the tourists at the Sears Tower and wondered how many of them were disappointed that they’d made it to the tallest building in the country, only to see the city slip into a gray haze instead of a blue expanse.

Travelers want to see certain sights, take pictures of the main attraction and put those pictures up on their Facebook wall and in their Christmas cards. Even travelers who say they “don’t want to do the tourist-y thing” want to take good photos of whatever sights they do see. Despite being able to buy the main views on a postcard or in a souvenir book (with, let’s face it, a way nicer camera than most of us have), we keep snapping away to have our very own version. It matters, for some reason, that we have our own. How disappointing, then, when we can’t have it.

Helena Bonham Carter in "A Room with a View"

Lucky Lucy Honeychurch--she got the view AND the man to go with it.

I was going to turn this post into an upbeat piece on finding the beauty in every situation, and cherishing the memories of your travels more than their digitized representations, but the truth is, I really care about my photos. I’m the self-appointed photographer of most group outings with my high school friends. I have a wall in my dining room covered in snapshots of friends and family. I don’t travel through a lens, by any means; I know how to put the camera down and be in the moment. But I like to look at the picture later and think, “that was me, I took that, I was there, I remember what it felt like to be there and take that.” So when I can’t get a good shot of some view or monument on my travels, it bugs me. Especially when I’m visiting a place I’m likely to never visit again.

It’s not that the excitement of being at the Parthenon or atop Mount Kilimanjaro is any less when the view is obscured or it’s raining. It might be a bit more uncomfortable or look a little different than expected, but that basic traveler’s thrill I feel when I approach a monument or peer out over a vista is basic and deep, and utterly disconnected from peripherals like cameras or even other people. Arriving at a destination and finally viewing a sought-after view or work of art really is its own moment of joy. A photo can’t capture it.

Still, a photo can help me remember that original thrill. It can send me back to that place and time in a way a postcard or purchased photo can’t. I’m a bit of a nostalgia junkie, and although I’m trying to kick the habit so I can live in the now, etc., a little nostalgia is good for ya, and dwelling a bit on great travel moments is one of the best ways to experience it. I feel more connected to the place when I see a snapshot of it on my wall, and I feel a sense of accomplishment as I consider how I got there in the first place.

So when I’m at a scenic spot or famous destination and the view is obscured or the building covered in scaffolding, I know that the only thing to do is shrug my shoulders, take the best photo I can, and move on with my day. But I turn my head and look behind me as I go, always hoping the clouds will part and my photographic moment will return.

The Good, The Bad, and The Silly

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The Good

Did you all see how one of the Wisconsin Republican state senators up for recall has been outed by his wife as living with his mistress? Family values! And his wife is signing the recall petition.

Here’s a great, short video of young people standing up for Planned Parenthood. You can hide your head in the sand, America, but young folks have sex, so you might as well teach them to do it safely.

The Bad

Our thoughts are all with the earthquake and tsunami victims in Japan, and I do hope the nuclear power plants are out of crisis soon. If you’re looking for an organization to donate money to, Doctors Without Borders is doing important work.

There was a lot of coverage this week in the feminist blogs about the New York Times‘ reporting on the November 2010 gang rape of an 11-year-old girl in a small Texas town. The NYT eventually issued a sort-of apology. But I’m most interested in Akiba Solomon’s two pieces on the issue, which delve into the complexities of race and community involved.

Charlie Sheen’s public breakdown may be funny, but his frequent history of domestic violence is anything but. Anna Holmes suggests that maybe Sheen’s exes aren’t “nice” enough for the general public to care about their abuse.

Michigan! Cut it out. Allowing a governor to take over entire towns at his whim is not good policy.

Wondering where we’re supposed to get the money to keep NPR, Planned Parenthood, and the like? Here’s a great graphic representation of just how many tax breaks large corporations get that could be applied to essential public programs instead, and fix the budget in one fell swoop.

The battle in Wisconsin is still going strong, and Abe Sauer at The Awl is doing a terrific job reporting on not just the immediate events, but the full backstory of the main players and what’s at stake. I recommend these highly, but be warned, you will be upset after reading them, because damn people do some shady things.

The Silly

Jane Austen Drinking Game! The video is funny, too. Do I hear “Saturday night fun times”?

http://jackdean.posterous.com/must-see-chart-this-is-what-class-war-looks-lSo

Heckling the Hecklers

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When someone’s an asshole to you, what kind of asshole do you get to be back at them? Can you find enough in the situation to destroy their position without destroying their personhood? Such are the weighty questions I pondered after watching some videos on a comedy site. Like ya do.

The premise of Splitsider’s “Eight Types of Hecklers and the Comedians Who Shut Them Up” by Megh Wright is great–what are the different types of people who interrupt stand-up comedy routines and how do comedians respond? But too many of the comedians Wright chose as examples of great heckler shut-downs were unmitigated assholes. I don’t mean they were mean; most comedians have a scale of “a little to a lot” when it comes to being mean in their acts, and frankly that’s usually why we find them so funny. And especially if some jerk in the audience is going to interrupt your carefully crafted routine and your limited stage time with some inane comment or drunken insult, I say rip ’em to shreds. And then call security.

But there’s being mean and funny, and there’s being a bigoted asshole. I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that so many comedians choose the latter, since I don’t watch a lot of stand-up precisely because they include terrible jokes in their acts, but it still got to me. With few exceptions, if the heckler was male, the comedian joked about his supposed homosexuality and also about fucking his mother, and if the heckler was female, the comedian called her a bitch/slut/whore and usually crazy too. Ugh. I went from being on the comedian’s side to wishing the video would end sooner so I wouldn’t have to hear the audience laugh at the awful attacks.

Here’s a sample [TW, definitely]: Joe Rogan called his female heckler a “fucking crazy bitch.” George Carlin said his male heckler was “a cocksucker in disguise” and that he only had his mouth open “because he wants someone to come in it.”  Bill Hicks, whose profanity is a normal part of his routine, went way too far when he screamed at his female heckler, “you fucking cunt, get the fuck out of here right now, you’re everything that America should be flushed down the toilet, get out you fucking drunk bitch.” But definitely the worst was Ari Shaffir, whose response to his female heckler was, “I wish upon you the greatest success in 2008 and hopefully you will get raped many times before you leave here tonight. But I don’t wanna give the rapist any VD that you have… what did they do? all they wanted to do was get laid, they didn’t know.”

Whew. That was a whole lotta ugly.

And there’s no need! Other comedians in the list had great comeback lines without once employing homophobia or misogyny.

Jacqueline Novak rolls right with her male heckler’s comment and explains just how wrong he is, while remaining in the same joke she had been setting up before she was so rudely interrupted. Steve Hofstetter similarly riffs on his male heckler’s stupid interruption without once making reference to the heckler’s sexuality or his mother’s sexual proclivities. Amy Schumer shut her female heckler down quickly, and then told her to be like the losing chess player in “Searching for Bobby Fischer” and “take the draw” if she felt like talking again. My favorite was Patton Oswalt, who went on a lovely long rant about what a douchebag his male heckler was and how his future was filled with douchebaggery.

Being a stand-up is hard work, I know that, but once you have an audience on your side, it’s real easy to get laughs out of them by dealing low blows to a heckler. Why be satisfied with that? Presumably you actually want to be funny, so skip the bigotry and go straight for the withering put-down.

New Centerstage Review Up

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I had a marathon theater day a couple weeks ago, during which I saw three plays by three different theater companies, all at the Garage Theatre at Steppenwolf. The theater is literally a space carved out of the parking garage, and it’s a decent attempt by an established theater company to lay claim to some of the edginess of fringe theater groups and spaces. The plays themselves varied widely, though they were all meant to focus on “an inquiry into the divide between the public/private self,” according to the program. They succeed to varying degrees. My favorite by far was the first one I saw, “The Three Faces of Doctor Crippen,” with “Heddatron” coming in an uneven second and “Sonnets for an Old Century” a distant third. Here’s a snippet of the review:

The humorous rhythm of the play is badly interrupted by the Ibsen scenes, which play far too sitcom-ready (“Take my wife! Please!”). The best part is the surreal scene just before Jane’s kidnapping, when all three timelines bleed into one another and humans and robots dance across the stage to the undeniable “Total Eclipse of the Heart.”

Read the rest of the review here. The shows run through April 24, so you have plenty of time to head on over and spend $20 on an hour or two of quality entertainment. Enjoy!

The Good, The Bad, and The Silly

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The Good

This moving, and sometimes funny, and very insightful piece by Dolores P., an abortion provider in training, is worth reading in its entirety. A great conversation starter for any of your more undecided or conservative friends, too.

It seems to be all too easy for the general public to forget that prisoners are people too, so it’s good to see these Georgia prison guards arrested for their vicious beating of an inmate in retaliation for the December prisoners’ strike.

Rinku Sen explains why it’s important to support Planned Parenthood despite founder Margaret Sanger’s disgusting views on eugenics (hint: it’s a vital health care source for millions of women and men).

I didn’t know where the phrase “women of color” or “people of color” came from, but here’s a wonderful explanation from Loretta Ross, a reproductive rights activist who was there at the term’s origination. Her reminder that this was people of color naming themselves, and not being categorized once again by white people, is a vital one.

Tuesday was International Women’s Day, and there were a lot of great pieces written all over the world from the occasion, some of which can be found here and here.

It’s funny because it’s true.

The Bad

Rep. Peter King is starting his own McCarthy hearings, this time focusing on blaming Muslims for all the terrorist acts in this country, providing no statistics to back him up, and ignoring completely other domestic terrorist groups like the KKK, Operation Rescue, and skinhead groups. Guess which groups are actually killing Americans year after year? Arturo Garcia has some great questions and answers about the hearings here.

As you probably read, Wisconsin (probably illegally) passed their bill denying collective bargaining rights to its public workers, when the Democrats who were supposed to be necessary to hold a vote at all were still hundreds of miles away. One Republican state senator did vote no because it went against his conscience and the will of his constituents. A site has already been set up to recall the state senators who rammed through the vote. Instead of doing anything to balance the budget or help the workers of the state, Walker and his friends have just ensured that Wisconsin will be mired in expensive and lengthy legal proceedings for possibly years to come, as the lawsuits come out in full force. Badly done, and shame on them.

JPMorgan is the largest processor of food stamps in the country. That’s right, the same company that contributed to our country’s economic disaster and thousands and thousands of layoffs, that’s the company that is making money by processing the food stamps of the previously employed.

The Republicans’ plan to save money by cutting the budget will likely increase unemployment and slow economic growth, according to studies done by, um, Republicans. Time to change plans, guys.

Ohio has passed its own anti-union bill, and also slipped in there, apropos of nothing, a clause stating that the state shall never acknowledge any kind of same-sex union. They banned gay marriage in 2004, but lest people try a workaround like civil unions or domestic partnerships, the Ohio legislature is heading them off at the pass.

Yesterday was National Abortion Provider Appreciation Day, and here are some numbers on just how dangerous it is to work in this field. Also, an interview with a doctor who has been providing abortions since they were legalized in the US.

The Silly

“James Franco’s dissertation is not a ‘contribution to the field.’ It *is* the field.” And other fun facts about James Franco’s foray into grad studies at Yale.

ACAM: Indonesia — Where to Go

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After consulting The Rough Guide to Indonesia and the Internet, here are some places I plan to visit when I’m in Indonesia. I also updated the map (interactive! add your own ideas!).

Jakarta, Java
The capital city’s name means “City of Victory,” which probably holds bittersweet meaning after the riots of 1998 and Suharto’s resignation. I’m interested in the colonial architecture, the puppet museum, and the wooden schooners at Sunda Kelapa.

Borobudur, Java
Borobudur is the largest Buddhist temple in all of Indonesia, and a major tourist attraction. It was built to represent Meru, the ordering of the cosmos, so that you start at the base–the real world–and end at the top–nirvana. Walking that literally spiritual path will be humbling, I’m sure, and all the more so because I hope to go on one of the few sunrise tours offered.

Ubud, Bali
I’m not terribly interested in the party scene on the tourist-heavy island of Bali, but Ubud, a series of linked villages removed from the main scene, does intrigue me. The villagers are known for producing arts and various local crafts, and for preserving and maintaining the ancient culture of Bali. Apparently Elizabeth Gilbert went here in Eat, Pray, Love, although I didn’t remember that from the book (oh yeah I read it, and that is for another post), so it’s getting a lot more traffic than it used to, but maybe I’ll be there in the off season. I can’t wait to see the dancing!

Gunung Leuser National Park, Sumatra
Bukit Lawang is the starting point for trips into the jungle in this World Heritage site. The small village was wiped out in a flood caused by illegal logging in 2002, and is only just now getting back on its feet. There’s a big conservation effort going on in the park and around this village in particular, seen especially in the rehabilitating of formerly captive orangutans and releasing them back into the wild. Other rare species are also found here, and it seems like a good place to visit on an “ecotourist” kind of trip, since it supports local businesses and encourages conservation efforts as a good alternative to logging. It also seems to be on the way from Jakarta to Singapore.

ACAM: Indonesia, or How a 19th Century Dutchman Helped Me Refine My Political Manifesto

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While the people of the Middle East and northern Africa are staging wonderful revolutions based on the people’s will, we in the States are fighting hard to serve the needs of the many, and I tell you what, it is a discouraging time. I don’t have the energy to argue with people anymore about why cutting Title X funding is immoral or how disbanding unions will only hurt the economy, not fix state budgets. Things seem to be getting worse and worse, with fewer and fewer victories to brighten the mood.

When I first read the selection from Max Havelaar in The Indonesian Reader, I just got even more depressed. Here’s a piece published in 1860 by a Dutch administrator in colonial Java, written anonymously because it was so damning about the colonial government, and it spells out many of the same problems of inequality, passing the buck, and exploitation that plague the modern world. The excerpt describes a system that exploited the native people of Java and surrounding islands (not united into the country of Indonesia until 1949) as a labor force for Dutch business interests. This same system employed civil servants, regional administrators, and others who were too worried about keeping their jobs to report horrific abuses and deaths, lest those reports draw unfavorable attention to their regions. Rather than look to the needs of the people they were charged with protecting, they looked only to the bottom line and worked people harder to turn a bigger profit and get more acclaim from those back in the Netherlands.

I’m not saying that the union workers in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio are in the same situation as the Javanese workers in the 19th century. But the same impulse to human greed and domination runs through both stories, and the government happens to play the role of villain in both. That same story is played out over and over again throughout history, and that’s what struck me as I read this piece for the ACAM project. George Santayana’s famous “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” has been trotted out far too many times for it to hold much meaning anymore, but it’s still true, and that’s what scares me. Are we just going to repeat the same stories of oppression and futile resistance over and over, in various horrible forms the world over? And if so, of course the question then becomes, what’s the point in fighting?

I think the answer lies in how we view history. The popular view, certainly the American view, is the linear one; we’re moving in a straight line from barbarism to civilization, and it’s just one grand march of progress and improvement. The other view sees history as a big circle, with highs and lows coming and going as the natural course of things, an inevitable turning of fortune’s wheel. The strictly linear view is clearly false; we can see people reverting to customs and laws from the bad old days all the time, so we can’t always be moving forward. The circle view is too depressing; the human experience becomes an exercise in literally spinning our wheels.

How about a Hegelian compromise? I wish I had artistic skills, because I would draw you this picture I see in my head: a series of circles, moving along a line. Those circles are various wheels of progress, regression, enlightenment, and repression, and we move through those circles as ideas are introduced, developed, and tested. We jump to new circles once those ideas have been accepted into the common understanding, and those wheels keep us spinning slowly forward through history.

It’s the development of ideas that really gets us moving into new wheels of progress and improvement. For example, right now Walker and other politicians are doing their damnedest to do away with collective bargaining in their states and eventually the country as a whole, and they very well may succeed for a period of time. But the idea of collective bargaining, which at one point in history wasn’t even a possibility, has settled firmly in the national consciousness, and what’s more, the practice of that idea has shown how easily it can be done. That’s going to make it harder to kill the idea completely, and if an idea is still alive, a movement can still survive. What’s more (and here I’m trying real hard to be positive about the current national situation), when the idea of collective bargaining survives, it should survive as a stronger idea. Right now, we see collective bargaining as a luxury afforded to certain professions, rather than a basic right of workers worldwide. As we spin about in this wheel of government bullying and corporate greed, those who fight for workers’ rights may be able to convince the general public of this difference between luxury and human right, and at that moment, we will jump into the next wheel. That will have its own ups and downs, as spinning wheels do, but it will be within this broadened national consciousness, and the discussion will grow ever more equitable.

Just as slavery was once a fact of life and is now a banned and abhorred practice, though we still fight to free trafficked persons; just as women were once the property of their husbands and now hold national office, though we still fight for their bodily autonomy; just as sodomy was once a crime and now gays and lesbians live openly, though we still fight for their right to marry and raise families — in these ways, will we continue to make strides for human rights in a world of greed and corruption.

I still feel my blood pressure rise every time I read a newspaper, and I still cry when election results are announced, but throwing up my hands in despair and deeming it all too big a problem to fix just puts me at the mercy of that spinning wheel; if I stick with it and join with others for our collective good, I can help push us over to the next one, the one with a better starting point than the one I was born into.

As Multatuli says in Max Havelaar:

After all, who would maintain that he had seen a country where no wrong was ever done? But Havelaar held that this was no reason for allowing abuses to continue where one found them, especially when one was explicitly called upon to resist them.

And we are all called. Decency calls us, history calls us, the future calls us.

The Good, The Bad, and The Silly

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The Good

Obama has finally removed most of the provisions of the infamous Bush-era “conscience clause,” so now pharmacists can’t say, “nope, sorry, no birth control for you, I don’t believe in it.” They’ll have to do their job instead, which is providing quality care to all their patients.

Some good news for LGBTs in Wyoming: a proposed constitutional amendment to bar the state from recognizing same-sex marriages performed out of state was dropped in the House because it was unlikely to pass. (However, the bill to amend the constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman is still pending.)

Read this heartwarming story about how the military is tentatively stepping out into this new post-DADT world and treating same-sex spouses of deceased servicemembers with respect.

Women are an integral part of the revolutions sweeping the Middle East and northern Africa, and it is quite inspiring.

A great piece from the former state treasurer of Michigan on why Walker’s destroying his state by not bargaining with unions.

The Bad

Walker is instituting layoffs, smuggling in ringers to his budget speech, falling prey to crank calls that reveal his dastardly motives quite clearly, hides the even scarier provisions of his budget bill, and just generally is the worst. Kudos to all the Wisconsinites who continue to stick it to him, including the protesters, the few media people reporting honestly on it (ahemnotFoxahem — how is that legal?), and the Democrats who brought their desks outside in the winter weather so they could meet with their constituents after they were locked out of the Capitol.

Gaddafi is doing his damnedest to destroy Libya, and staging an all-out attack on his own people. That’s the bad part. The good part is that Obama has called for him to step down, and the UN is imposing sanctions on him. Vive la revolution! And thoughts for those who have died and those who have lost loved ones in the battle.

Bahrain is also not handling its people’s peaceful protests well.

Military servicemembers have sued the Pentagon for ignoring, downplaying, and otherwise mishandling the thousands of cases of sexual assault reported in military ranks every year (and this doesn’t even take into account the unreported cases). Good luck to them.

In the popular understanding, women trick their men into getting them pregnant so they can keep them and have control over them. But the reality is that it works the opposite way; recent studies show that reproductive coercion is a big problem. One study reported that 1 in 4 women calling a domestic violence hotline said they did not want to be pregnant but their partner removed their access to contraceptives, pressured them to get pregnant, or forced unprotected sex on them. Amanda Marcotte takes a look at this issue and its connection to the shelved (for now) South Dakota law allowing people to murder those who provide abortions to their family members.

Okay let’s look at all the states doing horrific things in the name of “pro-life”:

The Silly

Happy National Grammar Day!