Someone over at the excellent Make magazine’s site posted this video of Sir Ken Robinson speaking at a TED conference in 2006. Entertaining, moving, and pointed, I thought it worth sharing here — we’re all interested in pursuing and supporting creativity.

This video’s home page can be found here.

[Saturday Night Saloon Series, 11/14/09 (remaining showings 12/12 and 1/9), Brooklyn, USA]

I’m seeing the Vampire Cowboys theatre company’s live movie-serials every other installment, and neither one of us wants to be the first to say shut up:

Dustin Chinn’s sentai pastiche “Let’s Ninja Science Ranger Team Get!” started over-the-top and is heading back up the sides for another plummet, with playground ultraviolence and potboiler overstatement in the capable hands of its frenzied ensemble overall and the post-stooges psychic mayhem of Jon Hoche, Temar Underwood and Paco Tolson in particular.

Crystal Skillman’s IT situation-farce “Hack” has continued to ramify like an unattended NORAD screensaver that’s been accidentally modeling Defcon 1. The storyline is a labyrinth down which characters keep wandering into random genres connected at some distant, divine remove to whatever-the-hell crisis they’re ostensibly averting (or causing and supposedly controlling) — a great metaphor for mass-media’s constant distractions from a semblance of purpose. Best among the roll-call is the newest character since I skipped an episode, the “It’s a Good Life”-style 10-year-old hacker who fixates on pantomiming Hannah Montana in-between bouts of real-life recreational mastery-of-the-universe. Everyone’s sliding into their avatar identities and wishing they’re someone they’re not, who’s nonetheless realer than they are — a splendid source of episodic tension with no existential season finale in sight.

As its overemphasized title telegraphs, Brent Cox’s “Jack O’Hanrahan and the Troubulation of Doom” remains a pure poetry-slam of vague anxiety and cogent malapropism — “An old war buddy whose death was almost tragic”; “The professor they call…The Professor” — too many to mention, but there’s two more to go. On the other hand, shortsightedly pronounced dead here last time, Mac Rogers’ exorcism soap-opera “Mother Sacramento” and James Comtois’ time-travel battlefield melodrama “Entrenched” convinced me of the value of holding on to that cliff; “Sacramento”’s sophisticated setup has swerved into some salutary hysteria and “Entrenched” has reprocessed its slow-build storytelling into genuinely creepy apprehension.

Anchored by an almost episode-length soliloquy from a transcendentally manic Hope Cartelli whose blind-drunk but temporarily cold-turkey character thinks she’s hallucinating the whole scenario, Jeff Lewonczyk’s labcoat-ripper “Lady Cryptozoologist: Season 2” delivered an entire segment-full of sexual Darwinism and Freudian vaudeville; not so much a comedy of errors as of doggedly intentional mis-happenstance, and what else is natural selection for?

I think I’ll miss December so the finales can come as much a surprise to me as to our heroes. There’s always enough mystery if you know where not to look.

[www.vampirecowboys.com/events.htm]

Kitsch (or, Two for the Price of One)
Theater for the New City, NYC
November 12-29, 2009 [www.theaterforthenewcity.net]

When last I saw playwright/songwriter/performer/best-boy-or-something Trav S.D. light up a stage he was putting the torch to establishment self-assurance and counterculture self-importance in the hit Charlie Manson musical Willy Nilly. In this Year of the Anniversary he only had to wait a few months to shift from the Tate/LaBianca murders to the toppling of the Berlin Wall.

But where Willy Nilly stuck a fork and several knives into the pedigree of feel-groovy trendsploitation revues from Hair to Rent, Kitsch reaches back to Trav’s oldest love, vaudeville, for a tapestry of lost threads.

It’s the night of communism’s collapse, with four sets of twins, distributed evenly in East and West in a Nazi social experiment gone wrong, setting out on a collision course of mistaken-identity slapstick. With the Stasi-wannabe set of brothers looking more like they walked through the last closet of Nazi costumes in central casting and a weird Weimar assortment of clowns on the Western side (where the capitalist set of brothers all run and staff a bar), we’re clued in early on the play’s unilateral surrender of historical relevance.

This could be any interchangeable kingdom in a Marx Brothers vehicle, however outwardly loaded the period and locale; the story is loosely taken from Shakespeare, who took it from Plautus, who took a lot from Menander et al. — all of which I took from the program notes — and the received nature of momentous events, the more remote the bigger they are, especially when packaged rather than pondered, is this production’s cruel and well-timed punchline.

You’re so primed to listen for the snark that it’s easy to overlook how tuneful a composer and nimble a lyricist Trav is, but the songs provide welcoming oases in the troupers’ long march of shtick, especially from Kate Valentine as a fatalistic prostitute-bard.

Trav himself plays the bar owner and the Eastern, erm, big brother (leading an oblivious last reconnaissance mission into the opened-anyway West), and is as always a force of unnaturalism, projecting with supreme authority while glancing nervously, like a ventriloquist without the deniability of a dummy, checking sideling for the angry horde he may at any moment incite.

Esther Silberstein, as a drag-king saloon chanteuse, delivers mournful interludes that stop the show literally, having little to do with the plot. She, like most of her cohort, has wandered in from some other story; her state-of-the-antique Brechtian numbers, like East and West, can’t really quite meet up, and before the rousing and knowingly forced happy finale, she’s sung the last words on an immortal passion and an unrequiteable love.

[http://travsd.wordpress.com]

My blog of 11/8/09 praised the steadfastness of our current president and the attitude this fosters among an activated citizenry. Congress, as has regularly been threatened since he took office, could be another matter.

At the moment, the Democratic Congress, so familiar as a rubber stamp for wars of choice and surrender of civil liberties in the recent Bush years, is, in the immortal words of John Glenn (though he used it in reference to Senator Lautenberg voting against Bill Clinton’s tax-hike on the wealthy), “leaning straight up” — the vote this past Saturday to pass Obama’s healthcare reform was an admirable, and these days rare, victory for constituents over corporations. But as has come closer to the surface of media attention since anything has made it far enough to scrutinize, the bill comes booby-trapped with an effective ban on abortion coverage for anyone using the “exchange” that lets citizens shop around and get the most affordable healthcare.

This erosion of an established right was passed because of Democratic votes. Undeniably, its an established right that’s been embattled since the moment it was won, but the Democrats are supposed to be the party that does the battling to keep it secure. In general, anyway — no few Republicans who remember the classic conservatism of personal rights and responsibilities prefer Big Brother out of our bedrooms too (at least when it comes to procreation if not same-sex rights to the unions and parenthood that straights are un-affirming in droves, but that’s another blog). Nonetheless, the Democrats’ typical instinct to preserve their elected position ahead of their people’s rights, health and safety may be re-emerging in the abortion vote.

In the referenda on gay marriage we’ve seen a reversal of the basic logic of freedom — that, even in a democracy, rights are the one thing that’s not subject to a vote. Rights can only be expanded; that’s the true trajectory of nature as the Founders conceived (if not thoroughly practiced) it. Specific rights are not to be vetoed by those who don’t happen to need them (talk about the “tyranny of the majority” that some GOP lawmakers are, cynically and with short memory, invoking in the close votes for Obama’s programs). Rights are also not to be traded off — though, as the first woman Speaker of the House has reminded us in bargaining a basic women’s healthcare right for a “general” healthcare bill, rights *can* be traded away.

This is not to say that the pro-life movement shouldn’t be admired, or at least emulated. Supreme Court rulings are second in weight only to the Constitution itself, and the fact that a movement has worked tirelessly against Roe v. Wade for its entire lifetime, and with material progress all along the way, shows commitment to a seemingly lost cause that all Americans could stand to take a lesson from. Capitulation earns you nothing when an example of tenaciousness like this shows such results — but a major reason Pelosi had to bow to the anti-abortion lobby was that it is now one-and-the-same with a broad swath of her party.

There has been a sweep of pro-life Democrats brought to office in recent years, and now Pelosi — and unfortunately, American women in particular and citizens overall — are seeing the consequences of conceding the opposition’s values in the name of “electability.” It’s nothing new to note that the revised and updated Democratic Party is often not very democratic at all. With luck and effort, the final tally of the Senate’s and the conference committee’s version of the healthcare bill will not include the abortion ban in its equation. And, given that the party is led by a president who achieved phenomenal success and enjoys still-high popularity having run as the least compromised Democrat in living memory, hopefully the party will calculate that, too.

It’s what effective storytellers and successful politicians alike depend on for us to go along with their ideas. In the politicians’ case, this is usually a matter of claims, not visions; it’s not often that we’re asked to believe that things as we’ve gotten used to them could ever be different. But last night’s weekend vote by the House of Representatives to stand up against industry interests and for the majority of Americans at risk by passing the president’s healthcare-reform plan was not the same-old anything, and what’s hard to imagine is this happening under any previous president.

During the primary campaign, Hilary Clinton infamously minimized the contribution of citizen activists like Martin Luther King Jr. by noting that it took actual officeholders like Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to seal the deal. That they never would’ve moved without King’s and other’s urgings, and that Barack Obama, the clear target of her remarks, was a community activist seeking to be president anyway, is old news and a settled argument. But there has been a perhaps-unprecedented power in Obama’s taking that activist spirit into high office.

For well over a hundred years, most of the greatest Americans have been outside of government — King, X, Nader, Steinem, many more — or at least, as in Nader’s case, done their best work outside of electoral politics. But the achilles’ heel of figures who take on messianic proportions like King is that people come to feel that he or she is there to do things for them (a status not sought by the leader and crippling to the followers if he or she is gone). Obama is an elected figure who has always put the greatest emphasis on his success being his supporters’ doing.

The sense of citizens’ investment in their own fortunes has not been this strong in several generations. In that context, a victory like the House’s (nonetheless very close) vote in favor of Obama’s health plan is best understood not as a reassurance of the good that can still happen to us but a demonstration of the good we can keep making happen.

What seemed like Obama’s curse — to be a tenaciously optimistic public servant elected in the most discouraging times — may be his advantage. We all know that power concedes nothing without a struggle; the scarier truth for our time is that comfort concedes nothing without a struggle either. But in the Great Recession we can’t count on our comfort anyway, so people are ready to pull together.

Participation is built into every step of Obama’s strategy and instinct in the tone he has set. Bill Clinton would typically signal that he was in complete agreement with his base, and then concede — even exceed — his opponents’ demands without notice. Obama regularly leaks that he’s about to cave — on the public option, on Olympia Snowe’s “trigger” to stall reform — which spurs his still very active citizen network to speak loudly, and he comes back stronger than before.

I don’t remember Democratic lawmakers holding nationwide town meetings on the PATRIOT Act or the Iraq War when the Dems were the minority party, even though PATRIOT was a sudden sea-change from everything the country had stood for and the Iraq invasion was opposed by a slim majority of the public. We have Republican legislators, as much as Democrats, to thank for affirming the idea that healthcare is an issue to consult the people on face-to-face, and we have President Obama to thank for setting this as the national example again.

So far under Obama all the reliable disappointments — business as usual, government by special interest — have been put on hold. He has suspended cynicism. And just maybe shown a new kind of leadership that calls us to believe in ourselves.

(Being an occasional digression from comics to songs I can’t get out of my head)

Melody Gardot, My One and Only Thrill (Verve)

Delicate brazilliant balladry, tragedies of orchestral jazz grandeur, haunted blues and weird nightspot exotica, all with superlatively inventive vocal instincts and unprecedented instrumental ingenuity. Twenty years of Stepford-lounge from yer Squirrel Nut Zippers, Peyrouxs and Norah Joneses was worth it if it carved a niche in the universe for this — the woman who’s reclined across time to find an unopened vein in the classic American songbook while evolving tweets into a haiku artform. This elegant, elevating set of string-sectioned and guitar-strummed singer-songwriterly sophistication and skewed insight is not “ironic,” or “arch,” or worse yet “elegiac”; throw out your post-retro phrasebook and just enjoy a supernatural talent that has tapped a timeless and un-oldable pulse of optimistic, individual harmony-of-the-spheres we used to think was linear nostalgia instead of cross-dimensional cool. The wellspring is there for each generation to make its way to if they think hard and take it easy enough, and Melody Gardot is this time’s diviner.

[www.melodygardot.com]
[www.vervemusicgroup.com]