Just because I didn’t blog yesterday or today doesn’t mean I wasn’t thinking about what to blog about. So here are the things I thought about blogging about that I didn’t blog about:

1. That it now occurs to me that counting students, thesis students, workshop members, private dramaturgy clients, and me, I’m knee-deep in 19 different new plays — and exactly one of them is by me.
2. That I’m reading three books — and not at the moment writing either of the two I’m working on.
3. That “John Adams” on HBO leaves untouched the great question: How someone like Paul Giamatti gets someone like Laura Linney. And then leaves her behind for years at a time.
4. That yes, I can do a baked dijon flounder at home and have it come out well — but it will never be the baked dijon flounder at Smith’s Clam Bar in Somers Point, New Jersey.
5. That while Eliot Spitzer is a hypocrite who needed to go, I have to wonder again how many violent crimes could be prevented and how many roads and bridges and schools rebuilt and able-bodied productive non-violent people released from prison to help feed the economy if we legalized prostitution and decriminalized marijuana and taxed them both.
6. That Wizard World was in Los Angeles this weekend and I didn’t go because Comic-Con comes but once a year and Wizard World ain’t it.
7. That the Fed bailed out Bear Stearns, and it was those “free marketers” who cheered. In a free market, failing businesses fail. We had NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard); now we have NIMBA (Not In My Bank Account). By the way, the Fed funds that backed up Bear Stearns came from the Treasury — which means they were tax money. Which means you and I bailed out Bear Stearns. And yet we never got any of those windfall profits. This seems like something potentially more worthy of a federal investigation than call-girl rings.

I’m sure more will follow as I think about it.

Yes, I’m producing two readings, two nights in a row. (And I hope you can join me)

Despite her successful career, Katie is a bit lost. Half Caucasian and half Japanese, and cut off from both parents at an early age, she isn’t sure who she is. But a forced reconciliation with her crazy mother — and then a roadtrip to visit Grandmother — bring her face-to-face with the women she was eager to leave behind.

“Lies My Mother Told Me,” a dark comedy by Connie Yoshimura, receives a staged reading this Monday, March 10 at 7:30 p.m. at Studio/Stage in Hollywood.

Please join me for this free event, with catered reception afterward. I’m the dramaturge on this project and am eager to hear your input.

“Lies My Mother Told Me” by Connie Yoshimura

directed by Joe Ochman

with

Alice Ensor, Helen Slayton-Hughes, and Linde Gibb

Studio/Stage is located at:
520 North Western Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90004

Click here for directions.

What: rehearsed reading of “Lies My Mother Told Me” by Connie Yoshimura, with reception

When: Monday, March 10 at 7:30 p.m.

Where: Studio/Stage, 520 North Western Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90004

Please join us.

Above we see the bucolic bungalow once inhabited by Charles Bukowski. (And it looks more appropos than ever.)

This is just one of dozens of wonderful atmospheric photos of Los Angeles landmarks one may find on this site, where you’ll find everything from Walt Disney’s first studio (a garage), to the home of Zappa Records (which I’ve passed about a hundred thousand times), to our local stand-in for The Daily Planet.

Thanks to Mark Chaet for letting me know about this.

Tonight my son Lex and I went to screening and talkback on campus at USC. The guest was David Simon, executive producer and creator of “The Wire,” which we are sad is ending its five-season run next Sunday.

As LA Times television critic Howard Rosenberg noted in his introduction, “The Wire” is far too complicated to synopsize easily, but if you haven’t watched the show, let’s just say it’s about the long-ranging and wide-reaching implications of the war on drugs and all the institutions it touches. It is not a show that an optimist could embrace.

Admidst talk of the show’s themes, Simon recounted the latest statistics on our country’s prison industrial complex: 1 in 100 people in this country are in prison, 1 in 9 black men in this country are in prison, 1 in 4 black men are in some way under the aegis of the enforcement or corrections. We are the most imprisoned people in history.

It’s the war on drugs that has gotten us here.

“No politician in our lifetime will touch this,” he said, “Not Obama, not Clinton, not McCain. The only thing that will end it is massive civil disobedience.”

His plan is this: That if he ever winds up on a jury in a drug case where no one was harmed, he plans to vote not guilty. If asked, he’ll admit during voir dire that victimless drug crims shouldn’t be prosecuted. If everyone did this, he said, and the system couldn’t empanel a jury for possession cases, then the system would have to adapt.

That’s his proposal to end the war on drugs: not to play the game.

He says his fellow writer-producers on “The Wire” have already signed on, and tonight he was spreading the word to the 300 or so of us.

Now I’ve posted it here.

Thoughts?

Watch this trailer and tell me it doesn’t have everything one might want all wrapped up in one movie.

This video is well worth your five minutes.

Remember how I was saying that every day is a lesson in what I don’t know? Today’s lesson would be about octopi.

Thanks to Mark Chaet for alerting me to this.

Just now I was on Slate.com reading John Dickerson’s piece on why Obama swept the Potomac Primary — my own hunch being, “People prefer him” — but then a banner ad caught my eye. It was for Office 2008 for Mac. Hm, I thought:  productivity upgrades for the Mac. What are they?

Then I clicked. You can do so too, if you’re curious yourself.

What I got was an endless, uncute, and meaningless cartoon in the Thurber style, accompanied by a light bop bass line. A cartoon van pulls up, a stick figure guy is jugging three balls, letters roll back and forth… I still can’t figure out what it’s about. But it went on and on. I finally ditched the site figuring that improvements like this I didn’t need. Note to Microsoft:  People in general don’t wait this long on the internet to learn things, especially people who are seeking increases in productivity!

My good friend Trey asks about “There Might Be Blood,” which he and fellow friend Mark and I saw the evening of January 1st, “Have we exhausted this topic yet? This review from Salon really gets at the things we’ve been talking about quite eloquently. Thought you might enjoy….”

I’m not usually one to link to mainstream reviews (let alone to care what they say generally), but Stephanie Zacharek’s review on Salon.com gets right to the core of what’s frustrating and complete about what could have been an awe-inspiring film. The subhead: “This sprawling, ambitious film strives for boldness yet rings with false humility.”

The news when I was at the gym this afternoon was that Hillary Clinton had the bad grace to almost cry today in New Hampshire when asked about the stresses of campaigning. This news was on all four screens, each of them tuned to a different channel.

One wouldn’t know that there’s a war going on, or a few other important things.

I feel about this the way I did about Bill Clinton’s sexual proclivities: I’d rather have a president who was getting some than one who isn’t. Similarly, I’d rather have someone who actually has working human emotions than one who doesn’t. (Say, Dick Cheney.) Or, better yet, appropriate emotions — emotions that don’t register umbrage when one dares to ask a reasonable question. (It is that umbrage that had led to the persistent smirk we’ve seen at press conferences these endless seven years.) Imagine if one might actually, wait for it, feel something before deciding to bomb the Hell out of people. Something other than excited glee.

(On a much smaller scale, and in the interest of full disclosure, I should say that when I have given speeches the last year in particular about how wrong I think my country has gone, I too have found cause to almost-cry.)

After the news clips, the other two shoes fell immediately, and sadly I saw them both coming. The first shoe was a parade of talking heads wondering whether Hillary’s emotional almost-outburst was “genuine” or “the latest campaign strategy.” I’m not a Hillary supporter, but this made me wonder what she’d have to do to catch a break. I think her best bet in this regard is to have Bill pick up some transplanted trailer trash again, except this time she’d have to divorce him (which I don’t think she’d hesitate to do in order to get elected; but hey, it’s her toughmindedness I like).

The other shoe was her lame response on CNN. Interviewed a few nanoseconds after the almost-crying-jag that became national news, she blew the opportunity. Rather than state the obvious, the honesty of which would have indelibly separated her from her husband and his personal legacy of profligate lying — “I have emotions. Nobody likes to lose. It’s been a tough week on little sleep. But I’m a fighter and I won’t rest….” — she pulled a Gore 2000 and transformed an enormous opportunity into a scripted bit of dunderheadedness. My paraphrase: “Some people find it hard to believe, but I do have emotions. But what really makes me cry is when a grandmother in [insert name of town in New Hampshire here] can’t afford her medication, or the [insert blue-collar job here] from [insert name of city in New Hampshire here] is laid off because of [name evils of Republican government or Republican policy here], blah blah blah.” It was so badly scripted I’m sure Mitt Romney was taking notes.

Why do so many doubt that Hillary’s tears are genuine? Because her campaign is so bloodless. My friend Doug says Hillary is the candidate of the Borg. Perhaps. But let us never forget: The Borg are able to assimilate you, and by that, they conquer. And there’s the difference.