Bloody Technology

Al Franken, Ever the Artist

Sen. Al Franken doodles (well) a picture of Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions during Kagan confirmation hearing.

Dog Days Decision

An interview in Salon with David Boies where he predicts when Judge Walker's ruling in the Prop 8 trial will come down. Sort of.

If I had to pick a date for a lottery, I’d probably pick a date in the second half of August. But it could be earlier or it could be later.

Political Ad of the Day

Hungry for the Human

Years ago, I wrote a one-man show. For the second performance, only one man showed up to see the show. We gave him the option of staying or returning for another performance. Surprisingly, he opted to say. So, a one-man show was performed for a one man audience. In the room, one actor, one playwright, one audience member. Fundamentally, that's all it takes.

From the London Times, a One-On-One Theater Festival in London:

...one-on-one theatre, theatre that’s so experimental, it isn’t sure if it’s theatre at all. In the coming weeks, the curious, the incautious and the increasingly confused will be able to sample an unprecedented number of one-on-ones, as some 34 companies descend on venues across the capital from the Gate to the Barbican, BAC to the National.

Dance to your choice of tune with an unknown partner, join a group-therapy session or speed-date a glamorous stranger, throw a left hook in a boxing ring or sing karaoke with a soldier currently serving in Afghanistan. In one-on-one, anything goes. You might find yourself in a coffin, a bath, or dangling from a window, four storeys up. This is front-line theatre with no rules.

Perhaps the most challenging show that BAC is hosting is Howells’s. His new piece will be available to only about 20 people, and no one will be allocated it without prior warning. Entitled The Pleasure of Being, it invites audiences to submit completely to Howells’s care, get naked, be washed, fed and held in a series of embraces. Where does he draw the line? “Sex,” he says. “I’d never have sex with someone.”

According to Howells, the intimacy and emotional connection that these shows foster is responsible for the wildfire popularity of one-on-one theatre. “When I started ten years ago, hardly anyone was doing it. Last year you couldn’t move in Edinburgh for one-on-ones. The more reliant we become on technology to communicate, the fewer flesh-on-flesh encounters we have. Human contact is being eroded. And nothing can substitute for that.”

BAC ONE-ON-ONE Festival trailer from BAC on Vimeo.

A Contrarian View to Kaiser

The New York Times piece on Michael Kaiser, president of the Kennedy Center and arts management guru and turn-around artist, contains some contrarian views:

Russell Willis Taylor, the president and chief executive of National Arts Strategies, which runs leadership seminars for arts executives, said that she respected Mr. Kaiser but found his approach somewhat one-dimensional.

“Just putting on shows and just putting money into marketing isn’t going to do it,” she said. “The biggest problem the arts face is not financial. It’s, ‘Why do they matter?’ ”

Having worked for a brief time for Mr. Kaiser at the Kansas City Ballet, one of his first turn-around "success" stories, I question selling people the idea that arts organizations can be turned around in short order, especially organizations that have been mired in mismanagement and substandard artistic practice for a long time. My experience with turnarounds is that they are painstakingly slow and require difficult decisions and artful negotiations. And since so much of an organization's success requires financial stabilization, it can be slow going to get folks to jump on the civic bandwagon in time to facilitate a turnaround.

Let's face it. All organizations want a quick fix, a white knight, a silver bullet, or a proven formula. All of these are mythologies governing boards buy into so they don't have to do the hard and thoughtful work of managing an organization in an operating environment where supply far outpaces demand.

BP Museum Sponsorship is Oily Business

A pretty hilarious account of arts activists at a BP and Tate Britain summer party.

And then at quarter past seven, eight people dressed in black with veils over their heads walk slowly towards the Manton Street entrance. They are carrying black buckets with the BP logo painted clearly on them. It's clear that something odd is about to happen, but everyone is peculiarly frozen to the spot. Only when the first protester throws the contents of his bucket forward down the steps of the entrance do the assembled crowd realise that what is happening is molasses. About five gallons of it.

Others protesters from the art activist group Liberate Tate tip their buckets forward too, spilling the thick brown-black liquid across the pavement and down the steps to the party entrance (watch the video above). Then they pull feathers from their pockets and throw them on top of the molasses. The party guest beside me – a woman in turquoise separates - is beside herself with fury. As the protesters scatter through the dumbstruck crowd, she grabs at the veil on the head of one (moving a lot faster than any of the security guards, who seem to be processing events on dial-up rather than broadband) and pulls it off, shouting "How dare you! How dare you! Get him! Get him!"

An excerpt from a letter to the guardian.co.uk. signed by more than 170 artists including playwright, Caryl Churchill:

As crude oil continues to devastate coastlines and communities in the Gulf of Mexico, BP executives will be enjoying a cocktail reception with curators and artists at Tate Britain. These relationships enable big oil companies to mask the environmentally destructive nature of their activities with the social legitimacy that is associated with such high-profile cultural associations.

We represent a cross-section of people from the arts community that believe that the BP logo represents a stain on Tate's international reputation. Many artists are angry that Tate and other national cultural institutions continue to sidestep the issue of oil sponsorship. Little more than a decade ago, tobacco companies were seen as respectable partners for public institutions to gain support from – that is no longer the case. It is our hope that oil and gas will soon be seen in the same light. The public is rapidly coming to recognise that the sponsorship programmes of BP and Shell are means by which attention can be distracted from their impacts on human rights, the environment and the global climate.

Honoring Success with Money

Judith H. Dobrzynski questions whether the National Endowment for the Arts should be attaching cash to lifetime achievement awards:

Would the awards be just as prestigious without the money? I don't see why not. $25,000 probably means little to most of these awardees, but it means a lot to other NEA recipients -- in many programs. NEA is known for piddling out small amounts to many organizations, giving them a so-called stamp of approval that allows easier fundraising elsewhere.

Banned in Pakistan

The Confirmation of Bigotry

Given the lack of ammunition Republicans have to go after Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, their argument yesterday boiled down to: She worked for a black guy, and oh yeah, she's a Jew.

From yesterday's Supreme Court confirmation hearings Dana Milbank in the Washington Post nails the distasteful aruging about the legacy of Justice Thurgood Marshall:

Oppo researchers digging into Elena Kagan's past didn't get the goods on the Supreme Court nominee -- but they did get the Thurgood.

As confirmation hearings opened Monday afternoon, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee took the unusual approach of attacking Kagan because she admired the late justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom she clerked more than two decades ago.

"Justice Marshall's judicial philosophy," said Sen. Jon Kyl (Ariz.), the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, "is not what I would consider to be mainstream." Kyl -- the lone member of the panel in shirtsleeves for the big event -- was ready for a scrap. Marshall "might be the epitome of a results-oriented judge," he said.

And Joan Walsh in Salon digs into the senators' xenophobia:

Republicans on the Senate Judicial Committee are trying to make the case she's outside the mainstream of American jurisprudence, by attacking her clerking for (and admiring) legal giant Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court justice, while singling her out as a denizen of "Manhattan's Upper West Side" – you know, the neighborhood known for Zabar's and bagels and, well, Jews.

The Gun (and Money) Show

The NY Times editorial page on yesterday's Supreme Court decision on guns:

About 10,000 Americans died by handgun violence, according to federal statistics, in the four months that the Supreme Court debated which clause of the Constitution it would use to subvert Chicago’s entirely sensible ban on handgun ownership. The arguments that led to Monday’s decision undermining Chicago’s law were infuriatingly abstract, but the results will be all too real and bloody.

And on the other side, from the Orange County Register:

We also believe the nation's founders would find Justice Stevens wrong in his contention that the ruling creates "a new liberty right." Those former colonists had just come through a bloody Revolutionary War sparked when British troops were sent to Lexington and Concord, Mass., to confiscate Americans' firearms.

"The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government," Thomas Jefferson wrote. "The beauty of the Second Amendment," Mr. Jefferson also noted, "is that it will not be needed until they try to take it."

For some perspective, this from opensecrets.org:

The National Rifle Association itself spent $515,000 lobbying the federal government during the first three months of 2010.

Gun control groups generally give far less in campaign contributions than their pro-gun opponents. Since the beginning of the 2010 election cycle, gun rights groups have dominated the gun control groups in campaign contributions, giving 135 times more in contributions -- about $684,000.

And for some more perspective:
Watch CBS News Videos Online