I'm not one to make Polish jokes...

But this one pretty much writes itself.

Music Nerd's Burden...choice phrasing

Webcomic on "The music nerd's burden" + Sasha Frere-Jones = IMPERIALISM????!!!!

Hipster riots then and now

Next week will be the 40th anniversary of the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Right before that ignoble anniversary, we get word of another riot in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. On one level, the socioeconomic tensions of the Williamsburg riot are the same as forty years ago. In both cases, young, privileged leftists were acting weird and unpredictably, which prompted the brutality from a blue-collar, lower class police force of the same age who couldn't understand why anyone would act that way.

The difference, however, is the purpose behind the two events. In 1968, there was an unpopular, pointless war, and even the weirdest of the radicals were politically driven in their weirdness. Today, we're in the same kind of war, and the purpose of the event that spurned a riot was to dress like pandas and be crazy.

Now can you see why I hate irony?

The Football Professor

I think I have myself a new favorite football player. Meet Tennessee Titans kick returner/defensive specialist Chris Carr, lover of Woody Allen films, aspiring law student or professor, book nerd (predominantly sci-fi, history, and philosophy) and part-time magician. He had a 4.0 GPA at Boise State, which already makes him one of the best things to come out of Idaho this century (the Larry Craig scandal is #1, of course). Part of me actually wants him to fail at football so he can be surrounded by people who read things other than playbooks and porn mags, while part of me wants him to be the greatest football player ever. I never thought I could seriously ask a professional football player whether he thought Deconstructing Harry stood on the same level as classic Allen material. (via Deadspin).

HuffPo Chicago reporting on local sports

Are they going to start with the weather now too? [Huffington Post]

Good theater article, but embarassing error

There's been a long history in the annals of the new vs. mainstream media battles of monthly magazines already being out of date by the time they hit newsstands. I'm not sure if this is the same case with the error just made by the New York Times, or if its just a standard error meant for the corrections section. In an otherwise excellent article on the role of orchestrations in Broadway musicals, Susan Elliott says, "Michael Holland is revamping Mr. Schwartz’s original “Godspell” score for its run at the Ethel Barrymore (set to open Oct. 23)." The only problem: Godspell has been cancelled. My guess is that the article was written well before the Variety report on Wednesday, and that it's a fact checking error. But by today's standards, making an error based on a three day old article heavily buzzed in the theater press looks a lot worse than it did 10 years ago.

We don't need to save the planet

Because Jesus saved it already, says a Minnesota congresswoman. Make sense to me.

Theater Review (NYC/Fringe Festival): The Boy in the Basement and Kansas City Or Along The Way

For one reason or another, third-wave feminist sexuality has had an awkward transition to the stage. Perhaps that lack of relevant material is what makes The Boy in The Basement by Katherine Heller, a hilarious, smart play about liberal arts college nymphomania, seem so fresh and welcome. With the more traditional Feminazi being performed not too far away at the Players Theater, The Boy In The Basement addresses feminine sexuality in a manner that is always tasteful and often poignantly real. Anyone who’s shared a complicated living arrangement with oversexed early-twentysomethings knows the drill, and this is a play that can bring in young people and repulse the Greatest Generation types. In other words, it’s exactly the kind of theater we should be seeing more of.

The Boy in the Basement purports to be a live action romance novel, the format in which it was originally written. Indeed, the story conforms to all the conventions of the genre, including flowery sexual narration and an intentionally formulaic plot. While the trappings of such a structure may limit the play to Fringe-like venues, there’s a reason Boy was converted into a play. Enacting a story that would otherwise merely be described allows the play to constantly poke fun at romance novel conventions, ultimately giving it more authenticity. The format also lets the audience meet some particularly inspired and perfectly complementary characters that make up this Macalester College student house.

We have the dominant, aggressive Venezuelan Xandra (played by Heller), who uses her foreignness—complete with brilliant broken English dialogue—to her sexual advantage. We also have Aurora (Anna Stumpf), raised as a hippie, with more Eastern sexual leanings (at least in theory). And we have the tough and practical if still lascivious Clarissa (a standout Lynne Rosenberg), who defines her sexuality as “some old fashioned who’s -ya-momma.” All three vie to seduce Lance Speedworth, an extremely attractive and large-packaged intruder into their home (he was stealing to support his dying sister) whom they punish by making him their slave—and not the kind of slave who performs traditional labor, if you get my drift. Contrasting with all the other three is Anna (Meghan Powe), a virgin farm girl from northern Minnesota who, while staying completely oblivious to the intentions of her housemates, falls in mutual love with Lance.

Anna’s sexual awakening is the only part of the script where I feel the writing could have been better, but Heller’s done more than enough to prove herself with The Boy in the Basement. The play is at least partly autobiographical—in the playwright’s note, Heller contends that “her housemates wanted [her] to tell you that none of the stuff in this play actually happened even though it did." It is unclear whether Heller can go beyond an homage to the romance novel, and this may end up being the lone or rare play in a young romance novelist’s career. But with her sharp eye for social and sexual dynamics, there’s a lot of room for growth.

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Kansas City Or Along The Way has one quality that almost no other Fringe Festival shows has: it’s a revival, or at least a pseudo-revival. Rising playwright Robert Attenweiler’s Depression-era tale centering around a chance meeting on a southern Ohio train car was first produced as a workshop two years ago, before Attenweiler had much else on his résumé. Structurally, the play recalls Faith Healer and Homebody/Kabul in its use of combining multiple characters' monologues to form an unreliable narration and mask the true plot details until the play’s end.

But what Faith Healer and Homebody/Kabul’s structure had that Kansas City does not are distinct starting and ending points between each monologue. In those plays, as in most great monologue plays, we could spend enough time with a character to fully build relationships with all the characters in the picture. While the constant rotation between the monologues of Joseph (Adam Groves) and Louise (Rebecca Benhayon) certainly makes the situation more confusing, it also prevents the play from building any sort of momentum or sense of attachment. The narrative and chronological relationship between the two monologues is unclear until the climactic meeting scene at the end, which serves as the play’s only moment of dialogue. It’s not surprising that this is the most compelling portion of Kansas City Or Along The Way, as we can finally see Joseph and Louise as human beings, as opposed to intermittent performers.

Part of the blame for the choppy feeling has to go to director Joe Stipek, who fails to provide the show with the precise timing of cues that the script requires. Additionally, while Groves and Benhayon do a respectable job in their performances, they don’t project well, which really kills the show in an acoustically challenged space like the CSV Cultural Center’s Milagro Theater. Groves also plays some Woody Guthrie-inspired songs he co-wrote with Attenweiler, one of which opens the play. The awkwardness of this opening sets the tone for the rest of the awkward timing that follows. The plot itself is pretty interesting, but its redeeming qualities are mostly betrayed by Kansas City’s structure and execution.

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The Boy In The Basement by Katherine Heller. Directed by Neil Balaban; set design by Sean Tribble; lighting design by Grant Yeager; original music by Jon Quinn. Starring Hller (Xandra); Nick Fondulis (Catherine DuCheval); Tom Macy (Lance Speedworth); Meghan Powe (Anna); Lynne Rosenberg (Clarissa); Michael Solis (Randy, Felipe); and Anna Stumpf (Aurora) Photo by Luke Ratray. The remaining performances are 8/21 at 11:45 p.m. and 8/23 at 10 p.m. at the Soho Playhouse, 15 Vandam St.

Kansas City Or Along The Way by Robert Attenweiler. Directed by Joe Stipek; set design by Bret Haines; lighting design by Justin Sturges. Starring Rebecca Benhayon (Louise) and Adam Groves (Joseph). The remaining performances are 8/17 at 12:30 p.m., 8/18 at 7:45 p.m., 8/21 at 3:15 p.m. and 8/23 at 9:45 p.m at the Milagro Theater at the CSV Cultural Center, 107 Suffolk Street. Photo by Robert Attenweiler.

Tickets to both shows can be purchased at www.fringenyc.org

This review was originally published on blogcritics.

Is Taking Things off Google Censorship?

There's a brouhaha at the Seattle Pacific University student newspaper over a request to take an article from 1998 off their website. 33-year-old Ethiopian immigrant Shakespear Feyissa, now a lawyer, is pressuring the school and the paper, The Falcon, to remove an article which discussed a dropped sexual assault charge against him and his indefinite suspension from the school. At the time, Feyissa wanted his story to be heard. Years later, it became one of the top results on Google for his name.

I agree with the school paper on the matter. You can't force them to take the article off the web, as they have the rights to everything they publish. There's no way I would have agreed to this when I was an editor at my college newspaper. But is adding robots.txt censorship? It's an interesting question ask whether taking something off Google but not the web counts as censorship. I don't think it does, but it may constitute that in a few years. It raises some interesting legal questions about how important Google is to accessing information in today's world, and whether a governing body (or in this case, school administration) is prohibited from forcing the press to take something off Google but not the web.

Of course, now the point is moot. Because of the coverage of the controversy, the article is nowhere to be found on the Google results for "Shakespear Feyissa," But the stories on the controversy are all over the place. Not exactly the best SEO strategy if you're trying to remove a rape allegation from Google.

(via Romenesko)

Book Review: Pharmakon by Dirk Wittenborn

Normally, when we read a novel that ends without explaining the plot point, ambiguities, and portents, we usually think the writer has done something. Plot holes are the sign of a lazy, unskilled writer who likes to raise attention to certain themes, but doesn’t know how to follow through on it. With Pharmakon, however, Fierce People author Dirk Wittenborn has turned the plot hole into an aesthetic. In an interview posted online, Wittenborn makes the case that the ambiguities, insecurities, and missing information in our lives are what ultimately define us.

In Pharmakon, a chilling if maddeningly inconsistent novel, we get to the source of Yale psychologist William Friedrich’s research, the mental breakdown and consistent mad killing spree of his patient Casper Gedsic, and circumstances of Gedsic’s subsequent recapture years later after he escapes from a mental asylum. The true facts are never made clear in any of those cases. Yet, rather than leaving gaping holes in Pharmakon that leave us unsatisfied, those ambiguities are what draw us in to the novel, and turn what could have been a turgid academic psychobabble novel into a thrilling, psychologically compelling page-turner. Wittenborn’s innovation here is no small accomplishment.

What is more problematic, however, is Wittenborn’s more superficial methods of disorienting his reader in Pharmakon. The novel switches from first to third person multiple times, and the four books that make up Pharmakon may have been better served as independent or serialized novellas. The problem is not so much the disorienting effect of the change of narrator, but that some of the sections stand out far above the others.

Pharmakon is at its most infatuating in the first book, when we learn of Friedrich’s discovery of a wonder herb used by cannibals in the South Pacific that he hopes to make a fortune off of by turning it into a drug. He works with Dr. Bunny Winton, the lone woman in Yale’s psychology department, who discovered the herb while working as a nurse during World War II. Wittenborn’s grasp of the toils of academic life at Yale in the early '50s is remarkably adept, and the first section is as exciting for the details of the social lives of academics as it is for Friedrich and Winton’s secret project that has them as giddy as schoolchildren.

It is there we meet Casper, whose name is a not-to-subtle allusion to the way he will haunt Friedrich and his family for the rest of their lives. Casper is a mentally unstable loner, the son of a Lithuanian cranberry picker in New Jersey who got into Yale by winning a science competition with a design for an atom bomb. Through taking Friedrich and Winton’s wonder drug, Casper becomes the big shot at the Yacht club, a wizard gold investor and fiancée of the granddaughter of the Governor of Connecticut. As soon as he goes off the drug — or was he still on it? — Casper breaks down, and shows up at Friedrich’s house with a gun in his hand and a list of people to murder.

The tragedies of Book 1 naturally lead to the events of Book 2, where the Friedrichs, now living in New Jersey while William works for pharmaceuticals. The Friedrich child have to grow up with a traumatized mother and a father who shoots down their every action with brazenly honest but emotionally destructive psychoanalysis. We hear it all through the perspective of youngest son Zach, who is too young to remember New Haven, and whose life is inextricably tied to Casper. While the change from third to first person could be jarring, we can overlook it because Zach is so adept at analyzing his family, and has such a fascinating story to tell of family social dynamics, the insecurities and life-altering events of youth and maturation, and the irrevocable damage his father caused for all his children. The two sections seem tied together in ways a lesser writer could never accomplish.

In the final two books, however, Pharmakon truly goes off the deep end. In the third person, we meet up with the adult Zach, now called “Z,” who is a recovering cocaine addict (and not recovering very well) in the '80s. Z still can’t get over the problems of his childhood and his relation to the history of Casper Gedsic. It’s already a problem that Wittenborn’s grasp of tone and milieu of the late ‘80s/early ‘90s is not as strong as that of previous decades. What’s more problematic is his inclination to have Z become partially enlightened about the events of the Friedrichs’ Yale days and the experiments with Casper. It seems that Wittenborn did not have the faith in himself to leave those ambiguities completely unresolved, or to leave the dramatic irony to the reader alone. That inability to go the extra mile dilutes the true ingenuity of Pharmakon’s structure and narrative, and makes the book something much more typical.

Still it does not dismiss just how inventive the novel can be. While Pharmakon is by no means a perfect book, it may in fact be a very important book. In addition to the brilliant use of narrative ambiguities, it touches upon the contradictions of psychological study and analysis, the relationship between genius and insanity, and the role our childhood experiences, or even events that occurred before birth, never truly leave us. Ultimately, the problems of Wittenborn’s superficial devices are just that: superficial. There are a lot of vital, compelling elements at play in Pharmakon, and I suspect those will last longer than the immediate complaints.

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This review was originally published on Blogcritics

Theater Review (NYC/Fringe Festival): Cake and Plays...But Without the Cake and The Grecian Formula

I did not expect much from Cake and Plays…But Without the Cake. There were multiple technical mishaps throughout the first of the three cake-less plays by Jono Hustis. But more importantly, that first play, Cow and Shakespeare, had very few redeeming qualities. Featuring Michael Hartney as a Shakespeare in half-modern, half-Elizabethan dress stealing all of his plays from a mostly human, inconsistently depicted cow (Michael Micalizzi), Cow and Shakespeare is a cross between a half-assed spoof of the Shakespeare authorship debate and a marginal account of writer’s block. The play would have better served as merely an exercise for Hustis to break out of a creative slump than as something worth a full production.

In the final two plays, however, Hustis began to show his genuine talent and promise as a playwright. The first, Monsoons, is a stark, blackly comedic vignette about a failed first date that, despite being frequently hilarious, never lets its audience laugh too long. Monsoons succeeds exactly where Cow and Shakespeare fails. It takes a solitary theme—what should and should not be said when making a first impression—and distorts it in a manner wholly digestible for the playwright, cast, and audience alike. Monsoons is the kind of play you could teach classes with, and any teacher who uses this play would be a damn good one in my book.

The final and longest play, In the Name of Bob, is a finely executed one-act about a beleaguered woman who meets her guardian angel. The only play of the three to offer fully fleshed-out characters, it has two excellent ones in Alicia and Marvin, played with remarkable realism by Darcy Fowler and Andy Gershenzon even as their performances frequently touch the absurd. Gershenzon in particular stands out as the oddball, nearly spastic guardian angel Marvin. Marvin’s unpredictability is a constant toy for Gershenzon and director Daniel Horrigan to play with, until Hustis uses the characterization for a brilliant punch line ending. Fowler also shines as a woman disinclined to talk to any stranger, let alone one claiming to be her guardian angel, and who sinks into an aloof-but-needy persona rather gracefully.

In the Name of Bob doesn’t stray too far out of the ordinary for a fallen guardian angel story (the kind we see on film much more frequently than on the stage). It also has an extremely unfortunate title. But what In the Name of Bob lacks in ingenuity, it makes up in charm and execution.

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The Grecian Formula, by Carter Anne McGowan, is much more likely than most Fringe Festival shows to come out of the Fringe with a larger production waiting. It’s got theatrical in-jokes seeping out of its pores at every moment. It had the audience roaring, and played with theatrical themes quite poignantly. Just about every stage convention was lambasted, from the 11 o’clock number to the play-within-the-play (or even play-within-the-play-within-the-play). McGowan clearly has a deep knowledge of theatrical conventions and the absurdity of the producer’s side of the process, and knows which buttons to push to get the most laughs.

As the play progresses, however, the theatrical in-jokes become less and less novel and increasingly tiresome. McGowan tries to work in a plot through the jokes, a poorly fleshed-out story of a slave, Alidocious (Todd Lawson), seeking freedom for his daughter Iphigenia (Elena Dones) from the rhapsode Thespiotis (Kevin Carolan). In a lull in his career, and bemoaning how writing and papyrus has destroyed the young’s attention span (nice touch), Thespiotis is commissioned by the tyrant Peisistratus (Anthony Cochrane, frequently called “Pissistratus”). With no writing skill himself, Thespiotis assigns the task to his slave, who alternately writes too happy or too depressed, depending on Peisistratus’ mood.

What’s more upsetting than the uninspiring plot is the inconsistency and shallowness of McGowan’s use of satire. She obvious grasps the nuances of classical theater, modern dramatic theory, and theater’s contemporary realities. But rather than turning her knowledge into a whole work that really gets contemporary theater’s goat, she comes up with something more closely resembling Forbidden Broadway or, worse, a Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer-level shallow spoof. The Grecian Formula uses lazy, name-dropping references instead of going deeper for satire, and the result is something less fun, meaner, and more stupid and tasteless. It's what Epic Movie would be like as a play. McGowan clearly knows the theater like the back of her hand, but without a more disciplined satire, the play simply feels redundant rather than loving. Her frequent interjection of self-mockery is not an acceptable substitute.

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Cake and Plays...But Without the Cake by Jono Hustis. Directed by Daniel Horrigan. Starring Darcy Fowler (Alicia), Andy Gershenzon (Marvin), Michael Hartney (William), Michael Micalizzi (Cow/Doug), Craig Mungavin (Jack), and Morgan Lindsey Tachco (Theresa). Through August 24 at the Gene Frankel Theater (24 Bond Street). Tickets can be purchased at www.smarttix.com.

The Grecian Formula by Carter Anne McGowan. Directed by Mary Jo Lodge. Starring Jason Rosoff (The Narrator), Anthony Cochrane (Peisistratus), Brian Marino (Sock), Jason Pintar (Bushkin), Ramona Floyd (Phye), Nick Sullivan (Ikon), Kevin Caroan (Thespiotis), Rich Affannato (Tragelistis), Todd Lawson (Alidocious), Jolly Abraham (Caligone), Julie Tokarcik (Clytemnestra), Elena Dones (Iphigenia), Robert Hooghkirk (Oeddy), and Holly Sansom (Laura). Remaining performances occur on August 16 at 7:30 p.m. and August 17 at noon at 45 Bleecker Street. Tickets can be purchased at www.fringenyc.org

This review was originally published on Blogcritics.

The Food-Sex analogy gone horribly, horribly wrong

I haven't been following Dinosaur Comics that much as of late, by Ryan North's latest is pretty fooking genius.

Batman won't pass Titanic because of DVDs?

How quickly people forget just how popular VHS tapes were. Says Carl DiOrio of THR:

In any event, such an analysis soon could be rendered moot. For there's one simple reason the boxoffice party likely will end sooner rather than later for "Dark Knight," and it's spelled D-V-D.

Warners has yet to slot the Batman sequel's home video release, but well-placed sources said a December release is highly likely to tap into the lucrative holiday gift-giving season. So even if "Dark Knight" topliner Christian Bale, his late co-star Heath Ledger, director Christopher Nolan or the film itself attract awards hardware in the winter, any related theatrical promos would be of limited value at the boxoffice.

How many people are going to go see "Dark Knight" at the theater when it's also playing in their living room?

So I guess it's the fault of DVDs, and, not, you know, Mamma Mia!, The Mummy, The Pineapple Express, or Tropic Thunder. Titanic set home video sale records as well, but did that hurt it's box office?

I don't think that The Dark Knight will surpass Titanic, but I think saying it's because of DVDs is more than a little circumspect.

Is the Fringe good or bad for NYC?

Yesterday, within a span of about an hour, I heard two conflicting reports on how the NYC Fringe Festival affects the city's off-off-Broadway and experimental theater scene. NY1's On Stage program had multiple interviews of theater professionals talking about how the Fringe is the only time in NYC when theaters can really put on a show for the love of the theatrical process more than for profit. An hour later, I see a Time Out New York feature which, in dissecting the problems of Manhattan's downtown theater scene, puts the blame squarely on the Fringe:

“Off-Off Broadway is now Philadelphia,” semi-jokes Ron Lasko, the Fringe’s publicist. While he says gentrification has done a lot of the damage, he admits the festival itself is also to blame. “It’s such a great financial bargain that many indie companies are quite content to produce their new work the Fringe [for a $550 fee] instead of seeking out costlier venues at other times,” he says. “When a showcase costs $20,000 to $40,000 to mount, there’s little room for experimentation.”

In reality, I think there's truth to both these statements. While we see more innovation per minute of stage time now than any other time in the New York season, maybe we should be spreading out that innovation more. I know Mike Daisey and Scott Walters would certainly say so, as this is a microcosm of their problems with the larger national scene in their mind. But at the same time, that may not make financial sense, as Don Hall would argue.

I'm a bit conflicted over this, as I feel the products that come out of the Fringe aren't as good as they're made out to be. Yes, the Fringe is more innovative and smaller, but that doesn't always mean better. There hasn't been a real Urinetown-level success in a long time, and I think that's more of a product of talent than of economics. NYC's Fringe pales in comparison to what's going on in Edinburgh right now. But is that the product of a flawed, fixable system or some other factors (creativity gaps, larger cultural trends, the limits of the medium). I don't think I have a firm opinion here. What about you guys?

The Chicago theater critic wars will just not end

I can't believe we have to go through this debate all over again. For the third summer in a row, the Chicago theater press is at odds with established companies over whether critics should be allowed to review summer workshop productions. In 2006, a negative review of the Stages Festival by Sun-Times critic Hedy Weiss prompted an enormously overblown controversy. Last summer, critics fought back by what they saw as an overly harsh response by refusing to let critics see a production of While the Messenger Was Hot, which was was weeks away from a New York run. Now, Weiss and Trib critic Chris Jones are under fire for reviewing a work at the Steppenwolf's First Look Rep—the same program at the Steppenwolf that eventually let critics see While the Messenger Was Hot after backlash last summer. If that wasn't ridiculous enough, the controversy is over completely benign critiques of the First Look shows by Jones and Weiss.

This debate goes back to my earliest blogging days, and the fact that it's still around is an incredible annoyance. But let's open up the can of worms again.

First off, let's consider the critic's perspective. If a show is significant enough to report on, it's the critic's responsibility to do so. He'd be a bad critic if he or someone at his paper didn't report on it. Whether that means a full blown review or more of a feature piece is up for debate—there's often a fine line between the two. No, critics should not be critiquing a workshop with the same standards of a full-fledged production. The onus is on the critics to be careful in that regard. I think we can all admit that the Weiss review of the Stages Fest in 2006 was not as careful as it should have been. But debating how critics address a workshop production is not as important as recognizing that it's the critic's job to report on a workshop if it is significant enough, even if it's not completely finished.

To that end, it's the theater company's job to make sure that the critics know what they're in for, to be honest with them and to respect their duties. In too many cases, Chicago companies have failed embarrassingly. It's exceedingly bad form to let critics into a workshop without complaint one year but complain the next year when they don't like a show (especially when you enticed them with PR releases and press comps). It's even worse form to ban them outright, or to deceive them about just how finished a product the show is. But all these problems stem from the fact that some of the less mature theater professionals don't understand and respect the fact that critics have to do their jobs.

Yes, artists are naturally inclined to hate critics, especially in a smaller world like theater where press coverage is already relatively rare (though not in Chicago). But people like Ed Sobel at the Steppenwolf blog completely miss the point when they try to box critics out of the discussion on theater:

First Look is a developmental process culminating in public performances, for which, yes, we charge admission. But we are trying to create a relationship with our audience that is not purely transactional, i.e. money in exchange for product. Instead, we are seeking to engage them in the process of making a play, an endeavor much more difficult to describe within the current model of “reviews”. First Look requires innovation and imagination from both the artists and audiences. How can we stimulate a similar sense in our critics?

Sobel then launches into a ridiculous explanation about how critics shouldn't be reviewers, and somehow blames Roger Ebert for giving Chicago a "thumbs up thumbs down" focus for the focus on "reviews" rather than "criticism."

This shouldn't warrant a response, but I'll give one anyway: Isn't it the job of critics to look for innovation and imagination? Haven't they seen more plays and know what to look for more than the average audience member? Would you trust a lawyer from Andersonville to be a better judge of theatrical innovation than someone who sees a play just about every night, whose paycheck depends on their ability to analyze a work? Have you ever read a theater review that didn't explain it's strengths and weaknesses? Also, isn't that part of the critic's job anyway? If you're charging $20 per ticket, who are you to tell someone to see your show even if they're not going to like it? Don't they have a right to an informed, external source of information?

Back in 2006, after Weiss' review was published, I leaned toward the side of the theaters. But the response by some Chicago theater professionals has been so childish, so irresponsible, and so inconsiderate of theater's impact in the Chicago cultural community, and, by extension, their own audiences, the balance has swung significantly.

P.S.: Chicago theater pros, if you still don't know what the theater critic's job is, do yourself a favor and listen to this podcast of critics explaining it for you. A lot of the podcast should be obvious to anyone who work at a theater company, but apparently some people didn't get the memo.

My Kindle Broke

This is after a week or two of it sitting in my bag while I was busy reading real books. Apparently this is not a new complaint. And while the replacement service seems rather easy, it's complicated by one factor: I received my Kindle as a gift. It was an extremely generous, unexpected graduation gift from a family friend, and now I have to pester her about calling customer service and receiving the replacement because they can't accept my account.

I have had nothing but good things to say about the Kindle until now, when it lets me down in a big way. Damn, these things are flimsy.

UPDATE: I didn't have to go through the gift giver. That's what I get for calling as Kindle customer service is closing, but I received an email today saying he was wrong.